Only listing the new ones.
The Uncle's Story - Witi Ihimaera - Have finished this, thought the Vietnam sections were generally the best. Some immensely moving passages and some jarringly awkward writing. A necessary book. Plz make a movie and cast Cliff Curtis as Sam Mahana.
Interstellar Pig - William Sleator - This one is completely new to me. I'd not even heard of him until recently. Very excited.
A Russian Beauty and Other Stories - Vladimir Nabokov - Snapped up this 2ndhand Penguin Classics edition. Have not read any of his short stories before. Excited!
Light - M. John Harrison - Guaranteed to be within the top three reads for 2010, for me. Terribly beautiful, indeed sublime. I haven't actually made a habit of reading space fiction, so I I was bewildered/overwhelmed on several occasions - but also Harrison's style demands that, and the patience paid off. I'll be thinking about the ideas in this novel for a long time. And dreaming about melting into fractals.
Mutants - Armand Marie Leroi - Wish I owned a copy. The pictures are amazing. Leroi has this hilarious droll tone throughout. There's the attention-grabbing title and a chapter about sexual attraction that I found boring, but he writes very lucidly - even compassionately - about genetic mutations and depictions/interpretations of them down the ages.
Sacred Games - Vikram Chandra - I am 189 pages into this. SO DAMN GOOD.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Everybody loves a high functioning sociopath
I seem to have lived - I was going to be dramatic and say 'functioned', but this is a blog and that would be a horrid cliche - for over a year, now, in a state of continuous transition. Doesn't everybody? one might ask, but this is my party and I'll cry if I want to. Today I was genuinely happy for a bit, because I sat down to watch the first episode of the BBC Sherlock series with my father. The fat battered Holmes paperbacks I grew up with belonged originally to him, and it's one of the things we can, well, geek out over together. He wasn't able to finish watching because sitting up for that long is painful for him, but it was lovely while it lasted.
So, Sherlock. Dear god what a fucking charming show. There are things about that disturb me on a fundamental level - or do I mean those things are themselves on a fundamental level - and those are also things I need to write about 'properly', later. More immediately the problems I can think of involve the first two episodes. I and several others I know called the identity of the killer in "A Study in Pink" at least twenty minutes before Holmes did, how is that a good thing? Plotting fail! "The Blind Banker" blights the surface perfection of this show's tiny 3-episode run with its bizarre defensive racism. Was that Sherlock hallucinating a fight with a bedouin in his flat? Then, too, I was discussing with a friend how the Asian person stereotypes were so old-school that they made the otherwise clever contemporaneisation of the entire thing feel really cheap. Pulpy throwbacky Orientalism is not cute at all.
Do I sound curmudgeonly? Do I sound like that dread beast, the constant gardener of unsatisfiable academic critique? In this case I feel positively antiheroic to be doing so. Especially after I watched the third episode. Let me just repeat: Dear god what a fucking charming show. It is very character-driven, and here is the cool thing Sherlock achieves: Watson is not a reader-friendly narrator figure, he's a character with his own personal enigma. And of course that makes it not the Sherlock show, but the Sherlock and John show! Cumberbatch inhabits and embodies this Sherlock (you just know he's the baby of the bunch, all raw and crackly round the edges) so perfectly that I will now find it difficult to imagine anyone else playing that character. Freeman as Watson is wonderful and I approve of the hint of darkness he shows in the very first episode, and the kind of chemistry the actors have on screen is all I ever wanted for these two.
I winced at the nicotine patches and Watson's blogging - clever but not convincing! - but I adore the floaty text thing they have, it saves a lot of useless staring-at-screen-ness and makes everything so much more hypertext-tastic.
This show almost-but-not-quite gets my Humourless Feminist Seal of Approval. Yes, I get it, bromance, blah blah, Sherlock comes with handy historical misogyny baggage, blabbidy. Still. I was so hoping Molly would turn out to be Moriarty! I may, however, be swayed by the introduction of Eva Green as Irene Idler - come on, this one is obvious.
As the series finale is still quite fresh in my memory, I want to note down something that may or may not mean very much. I was very curious to know exactly what Moriarty would be like, in this adaptation, and I did not at all expect the character we got. I assumed he'd be much like he was in ACD - cold, a sort of near-exact double of Holmes, only with those ~extraordinary mental faculties~ channelled towards Evil Purposes. Perhaps it's just as well, as Cumberbatch is able to play cold and aloof well enough to potentially trigger the shamed dissolution of polar ice overnight. But, and here is where I turn tentative, speculative - the scene where they finally meet felt slightly inflected by, well, the relationship between the Joker and the Batman in The Dark Knight. Scott surprised me with his histrionic take on Moriarty (I want to say 'unpleasantly', because it ruined the scene, but now I've grown to like it). His unpredictability, his love of BOMBING PEOPLE, his speech patterns and his facial mannerisms also reminded me of Ledger a little. More importantly, though, I thought of that conversation between Sherlock and John earlier in the episode, and my memory has gone to rot because I can't even properly paraphrase, but the one where John is upset because the lives of actual human beings are at stake and Sherlock is all giddy and flattered to have found someone to play games with. More or less. Sherlock warns him not to make the mistake of thinking of him as a hero. Because there aren't any, because he's certainly not one. This is not a character in the habit of making casual statements, so I am also going to hold onto that. Finally, Sherlock notes earlier that Moriarty is "something new".
The whole point of the Joker-Batman mess in The Dark Knight was, of course, that Batman's entry into the public life of Gotham is a destabilising force, and it directly invites a retaliatory escalation in the criminal world. The Joker can only begin to exist because Batman opens up that space for him and his ilk. That film also made much of the matching-opposites dynamic, with the Joker explicitly saying that the Batman completed him. Moriarty's Crazy Evil Mastermind speechifying at Sherloccertainly recalled those scenes!
So, Sherlock. Dear god what a fucking charming show. There are things about that disturb me on a fundamental level - or do I mean those things are themselves on a fundamental level - and those are also things I need to write about 'properly', later. More immediately the problems I can think of involve the first two episodes. I and several others I know called the identity of the killer in "A Study in Pink" at least twenty minutes before Holmes did, how is that a good thing? Plotting fail! "The Blind Banker" blights the surface perfection of this show's tiny 3-episode run with its bizarre defensive racism. Was that Sherlock hallucinating a fight with a bedouin in his flat? Then, too, I was discussing with a friend how the Asian person stereotypes were so old-school that they made the otherwise clever contemporaneisation of the entire thing feel really cheap. Pulpy throwbacky Orientalism is not cute at all.
Do I sound curmudgeonly? Do I sound like that dread beast, the constant gardener of unsatisfiable academic critique? In this case I feel positively antiheroic to be doing so. Especially after I watched the third episode. Let me just repeat: Dear god what a fucking charming show. It is very character-driven, and here is the cool thing Sherlock achieves: Watson is not a reader-friendly narrator figure, he's a character with his own personal enigma. And of course that makes it not the Sherlock show, but the Sherlock and John show! Cumberbatch inhabits and embodies this Sherlock (you just know he's the baby of the bunch, all raw and crackly round the edges) so perfectly that I will now find it difficult to imagine anyone else playing that character. Freeman as Watson is wonderful and I approve of the hint of darkness he shows in the very first episode, and the kind of chemistry the actors have on screen is all I ever wanted for these two.
I winced at the nicotine patches and Watson's blogging - clever but not convincing! - but I adore the floaty text thing they have, it saves a lot of useless staring-at-screen-ness and makes everything so much more hypertext-tastic.
This show almost-but-not-quite gets my Humourless Feminist Seal of Approval. Yes, I get it, bromance, blah blah, Sherlock comes with handy historical misogyny baggage, blabbidy. Still. I was so hoping Molly would turn out to be Moriarty! I may, however, be swayed by the introduction of Eva Green as Irene Idler - come on, this one is obvious.
As the series finale is still quite fresh in my memory, I want to note down something that may or may not mean very much. I was very curious to know exactly what Moriarty would be like, in this adaptation, and I did not at all expect the character we got. I assumed he'd be much like he was in ACD - cold, a sort of near-exact double of Holmes, only with those ~extraordinary mental faculties~ channelled towards Evil Purposes. Perhaps it's just as well, as Cumberbatch is able to play cold and aloof well enough to potentially trigger the shamed dissolution of polar ice overnight. But, and here is where I turn tentative, speculative - the scene where they finally meet felt slightly inflected by, well, the relationship between the Joker and the Batman in The Dark Knight. Scott surprised me with his histrionic take on Moriarty (I want to say 'unpleasantly', because it ruined the scene, but now I've grown to like it). His unpredictability, his love of BOMBING PEOPLE, his speech patterns and his facial mannerisms also reminded me of Ledger a little. More importantly, though, I thought of that conversation between Sherlock and John earlier in the episode, and my memory has gone to rot because I can't even properly paraphrase, but the one where John is upset because the lives of actual human beings are at stake and Sherlock is all giddy and flattered to have found someone to play games with. More or less. Sherlock warns him not to make the mistake of thinking of him as a hero. Because there aren't any, because he's certainly not one. This is not a character in the habit of making casual statements, so I am also going to hold onto that. Finally, Sherlock notes earlier that Moriarty is "something new".
The whole point of the Joker-Batman mess in The Dark Knight was, of course, that Batman's entry into the public life of Gotham is a destabilising force, and it directly invites a retaliatory escalation in the criminal world. The Joker can only begin to exist because Batman opens up that space for him and his ilk. That film also made much of the matching-opposites dynamic, with the Joker explicitly saying that the Batman completed him. Moriarty's Crazy Evil Mastermind speechifying at Sherloccertainly recalled those scenes!
Using quotes c&p'ed from Wikipedia is a poor way to construct an argument, but observe. Exhibit A: 'Piers Wenger, Head of Drama at BBC Wales, describes the eponymous character as "a dynamic superhero in a modern world [...]".' Exhibit B: 'Moffat says, "We knew what we wanted to do with Moriarty from the very beginning. Moriarty is usually a rather dull, rather posh villain so we thought someone who was genuinely properly frightening. Someone who's an absolute psycho."'
Sherlock as a "dynamic superhero" - LOL FOR DAYS. Okay, here's the thing. It's really fun to keep swivelling back and forth comparing canon Holmes and Beebverse Sherlock, and Moffatt and Gatiss litter the text with enough trinkets to keep those of us who've grown up on their ACD busy keeping track of the correspondences and changes. It's a validating fannish experience. But I think they could be doing much more amazing things. I would like the show to explore some of Holmes', shall we say, boundaries, and show how his growing fame/notoriety factors into this particular 'verse. Holmes has his own website; doubtless there is also a Facebook page devoted to him. Would being recognisable at sight hamper his investigative fieldwork? How much easier - or how much more difficult?
Most importantly, and this is where my fannish affinity for Sherlock sort of dies via sudden exposure to space vacuum, why the fuck is the very first thing we see on this show footage that is meant to represent the war in (or on!) Afghanistan? Why the fuck is there a joke about it later? At the end of the day, this is a fluffy, glossy fantasy detective show about a literary icon who's been appropriated and reimagined more times than you can scream murder and that is on the BBC. I sound like such a hater! But you'd honestly think for a second or two that updating Holmes to the 21st century would open up some very interestinc challenges and possibilities, develop a kind of awareness/engagement with the way the world is, the political realities of the world. Smushing this safe, lovable character and his world into the one we know. Maximum impact. Wouldn't you pay good money to watch that? "But hang on a minute," you'll say. "Why does a show like this even need to go into all that serious stuff? Why can't John just be back from the war without us having to delve into his politics?" I can't answer that because I'm not thinking in terms of obligation, I'm thinking that would just make a bloody amazing show, and it is that show that will always haunt this safer, prettier, perfectly-good-entertainment text for me, and that hypothetical show would also, yknow, begin with footage meant to represent the war on Afghanistan.
I will stop now with a sexy picture.
Sherlock Holmes: will LARP for great justice.
Friday, May 14, 2010
Well, that didn't quite... work out.
Continued adventures in blogging, eternally deferred...
Finals start in three days and I am wrecked by this godforsaken weather.
In no particular order, a partial list of books that I have finished between April and now or will have finished by the end of May, and which I am going to SOMEDAY post at least short, unwholesome reviews of:
Finals start in three days and I am wrecked by this godforsaken weather.
In no particular order, a partial list of books that I have finished between April and now or will have finished by the end of May, and which I am going to SOMEDAY post at least short, unwholesome reviews of:
- Cereus Blooms at Night - Shani Mootoo
- Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
- A Case of Exploding Mangoes - Mohammed Hanif
- The Temple of My Familiar - Alice Walker
- Breath, Eyes, Memory - Edwidge Danticat
- The Lost Steps - Alejo Carpentier
- Black Chin, White Chin - Ronnie Govender
- Cadenza - Ralph Cusack
- Crush - Richard Siken
- Skin Folk - Nalo Hopkinson
- 2666 - Roberto Bolaño (englished)
- A Question of Power - Bessie Head
So all but two are novels. Hopkinson's is a collection of short stories - definitely enjoyed this one. Ugh, only one book of poetry! But what an evisceratingly gorgeous book of poetry. Twelve books in two months is probably shoddy by the measure of some voracious readers I know, but I AM SLOW. At least I enjoyed every single of those twelve books. Mostly. The Alice Walker novel was almost unbearably irritating at times. More on this later. The Bessie Head book BROKE ME.
Plus, this is where 'partial list' comes in, I very conscientiously left out everything that was connected directly to my academic work*. Although I'm tempted to stick Danby's Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature or Erich Segal's Roman Laughter up there. There's an idea: frothy, chatty reviews of classics of scholarly study. It's been done, but so what?
* Lies; I ended up writing a soul-destroying term paper on the Hopkinson book that I feel like personally emailing the author an apology for.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Dig yourself, Lazarus.
Tomorrow I am going to listen to the writer of this excellent book:
I love how I wrote that, as if I am not horribly excited and nervous about it.
Over the weekend I'm going to start on two of my papers and also watch some movies at the Latin American film festival.
Maybe on Tuesday I will have an actual post. Containing reviews. Yes!
I love how I wrote that, as if I am not horribly excited and nervous about it.
Over the weekend I'm going to start on two of my papers and also watch some movies at the Latin American film festival.
Maybe on Tuesday I will have an actual post. Containing reviews. Yes!
Saturday, March 7, 2009
Favourite thing drawn last year.
It made me a little happier.
I'm going to print it out and pin it above my desk, maybe.
I'm going to print it out and pin it above my desk, maybe.
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Harder better faster stronger!
Whatever it is that is wrong with me, the doctors had better find out soon. I have plans to sketchcrawl, starve and soliloquise my way through unsuspecting foreign lands, I would really appreciate it if my mind and my body were on the same starting page.
Having written this, she sighed.
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Well.
Down on life again. Listening to Karen Dalton. A dead folk/blues singer. This album is called It's so hard to tell who's going to love you. She sounds a bit like Janis Joplin, a lot like Billie Holiday, but, above everything, like herself. Please listen to her. My favourite is this moody little corner of a song called "Ribbon bow".
A least tomorrow is Monday, back to paper-writing and lecture-attending and... and i think Nadine Gordimer's gonna be in town. Now i am ashamed to admit this, but i must. I have only read one book by her. The Conservationist. I can never type 'conservationist' without typing 'conversationist' first. Gordimer is by all accounts a fabulously cranky, no-nonsense woman, and i do want to listen to what she has to say. O, that's it. I'm going. I half-want to take a good picture of her, but she'd probably slap me for my cheap insolence. On the other hand, how many people can say 'i went to a talk by Nadine Gordimer and all i got was a resounding public slap!' It would make a fine anecdote for sure.
In other news i have watched this video at least ten times. That sound effect there, the one that sounds like a glass tabletop being aggressively wiped with a damp bit of cloth, is so annoying and wonderful! I have also overthought those lyrics. Beyonce insists that she does not actually intend to rule the world like the insane diva she is: 'what i prefer, what i deserve is a man that makes me and takes me and delivers me to a destiny, to infinity and beyond.' Do i detect the easy confidence of a woman who knows she can have both, despite her words, or do i sigh and go back to wanting to bite her amazing thighs? No prizes for guessing. Hey, and because i'm incapable of turning off my nerdiness, i really want to see Beyonce as Starfire in a live action movie someday.
A least tomorrow is Monday, back to paper-writing and lecture-attending and... and i think Nadine Gordimer's gonna be in town. Now i am ashamed to admit this, but i must. I have only read one book by her. The Conservationist. I can never type 'conservationist' without typing 'conversationist' first. Gordimer is by all accounts a fabulously cranky, no-nonsense woman, and i do want to listen to what she has to say. O, that's it. I'm going. I half-want to take a good picture of her, but she'd probably slap me for my cheap insolence. On the other hand, how many people can say 'i went to a talk by Nadine Gordimer and all i got was a resounding public slap!' It would make a fine anecdote for sure.
In other news i have watched this video at least ten times. That sound effect there, the one that sounds like a glass tabletop being aggressively wiped with a damp bit of cloth, is so annoying and wonderful! I have also overthought those lyrics. Beyonce insists that she does not actually intend to rule the world like the insane diva she is: 'what i prefer, what i deserve is a man that makes me and takes me and delivers me to a destiny, to infinity and beyond.' Do i detect the easy confidence of a woman who knows she can have both, despite her words, or do i sigh and go back to wanting to bite her amazing thighs? No prizes for guessing. Hey, and because i'm incapable of turning off my nerdiness, i really want to see Beyonce as Starfire in a live action movie someday.
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