Fall Reading

Book club:

• Richard Ford – Canada
• W. G. Sebald – The Emigrants

My own:

• DeLillo – Underworld
• J.K. Rowling writing as Robert Galbraith –  The Silkworm

 

Proust’s family

We’re reading Swann’s Way, in celebration of Proust’s 100 anniversary. Here’s a link to video and more information from France’s Bibliotheque Nationale

Advertisement

A Short History of Detective Fiction

An interesting site, replete with fascinating tidbits on literary history.

Interesting Literature

An introduction to the history of the detective story

Since this is a short history of the detective story, it will, inevitably, make some pretty glaring omissions. We’d love to hear from detective fiction aficionados in the comments section below, for any other interesting takes on mystery and detective tales.

The first detective story is a hard thing to call. ‘The Three Apples’ in Arabian Nights is sometimes given the honour, but whether this is a detective story even in the loosest sense is questionable, since the protagonist fails to make any effort to solve the crime and find the murderer of the woman. Many say the mantle should go to another tale with a title beginning ‘The Three …’, namely ‘The Three Princes of Serendip’, a medieval Persian fairy tale set on Sri Lanka (Serendip being a Persian name for the island) – the princes are the…

View original post 771 more words

The Way We Live Now

An insightful comparison between Trollope’s London in The Way We Live Now and America’s New Gilded Age, from George Packer in the New Yorker.

Greed is eternal, but when the money flows as plentifully upward as in London circa 1873 or New York circa 2013, and is as unequally distributed, it becomes a moral toxin, saturates the world of culture, makes relationships more competitive, turns desire into the pursuit of status, replaces solid things with mirages.

We read this in our book club a few years ago. It seems to be even more relevant today.

A Brief Encounter

Next up for the book club is Bonsia by Alejandro Zambra.

Winner of the Chilean Critics’ Award for the Best Novel of the Year in 2006

To the Academy: Consider the Women

In honor of my daughter, the film editor. Right now her work is mainly for the small screen, but I’m confident she’ll move on to the big ones.

Round House

I’ve been remiss and not posted in a long time. So here are a few updates.

The reading group

Currently reading –  The Round House by Louise Erdrich

Recent reads

• The Hare with the Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal
• Beyond the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo
• The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
• State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

 Book blogs and web sites recently discovered

• Goodreads
• You can follow my reviews and recommendations at my Goodreads page
• The Passive Voice

Writing

• The new Zoe Szabo mystery should be done by summer
• An e-book of short stories about women artists. I’ll put up a link when it is available.

Fame and Endurance

Interesting post from the New Yorker on literature that lasts.

Moments of Ecstatic Passion

Just last week I was able to hear Werner Herzog in conversation with film students at UMass.

What was so cool was Herzog’s advice to film students to read, read, read the world’s great literature. Here’s his “Rogue Film School” reading list.

•    Virgil: Georgics
•    J.A. Baker: The Peregrine
•    Hemingway: The Short, Happy Life of Frances Macumber
•    Diaz del Castillo: The Conquest of the New Spain
•    Warren Commission Report on the assassination of JFK

Interesting assortment, no?

Someone asked why his films featured only, or nearly only, male characters. He spoke about screenplays he’s written with female leads that he hasn’t found funding for yet. I noted to myself that the film industry is still predominately a “white guys rule” world. Though women are up and coming, especially in documentary.

Discussing his Antarctic film Encounters at the End of the World, he described the impossibility of explaining the enormity of the continent. Making that film, he realized you don’t explain the world in film, you name the glory. He showed a clip where that seemed to happen. Here’s the trailer, which opens with a Russian song that “names the glory.”

The books on his reading list are all about naming the glory.

His remarks on editing struck a chord with me, as I spend most of my writing time selecting what works, cutting what doesn’t. Most of what I write ends up on the cutting room floor.

Here’s his process. He goes through all footage with editor in a sitting or two, and keeps a log with rough time indicator. He notes what’s there and puts ! or !! or !!! by footage times that he thinks are really good. Three exclamation points for footage that he feels life wouldn’t be worth living if he left them out.

Then he selects only the footage with the exclamation points and makes that into a film. He says the best footage will fit together. You don’t have to worry about preparing an arc before hand, or outlining. What is most important is the tone of a film, and using only the footage that “names the glory” keeps the tone consistent.

The most important thing for a filmmaker is to know “the heart of man.” Life experience tells you where to look, what to ask your subjects, how to find “moments of ecstatic passion,” “moments of illumination.”

He doesn’t think of himself as an artist, he thinks of himself as a soldier.

True enough. To be a filmmaker–or a writer–one does have to combat all the obstacles the world imposes, including critics and the demands of an overly commercialized market place. In the process one suffers wounds the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” At times one must make tactical retreats. And then again one “takes arms against the sea of troubles” and moves forward.

Yeah, Shakespeare had that “moments of ecstatic passion” thing down pat.

Memories of Empire

Amherst is great. A couple of weeks ago Paul & I saw John Sayles introduce his film Amigo at Amherst Cinema and answer questions after viewing.  It took him a long time to find the funding. He had to focus on a village to encapsulate a very large experience, which he wrote about in a sprawling 900-page novel A Moment in the Sun . He eventually found a portion that told a story he could fit into a space small and intimate enough to make a low budget film.

Here is Sayles on modern parallels with Amigo at Amherst Cinema.

And here is a link to his own blog post on the trip to Amherst.