Existential Garfield

It's probably as much an indicator of how much "existential" has been absorbed into pop culture that the Garfield Minus Garfield site has chosen to label itself as such. Or more precisely it's "a site dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle." In one sense it's an inspired goof along the lines of Nancy Poker (described here as 5-Card Nancy and with far more elaborate rules than when I played years ago) or the Dysfunctional Family Circus (the archives have diluted the idea so much that I'm not linking to it). And if you're so inclined you could reference more conventional "existential" sources--Beckett, Kierkegaard--but that's really stretching it. After all, Jon has yet to commit an unmotivated murder on the beach.

A new favorite blog: A Journey Around My Skull

http://ajourneyroundmyskull.blogspot.com/

Thanks to Kevin for pointing this out even though he assumed I already knew about it, which maybe I should. He'd forgotten the name and when he was describing the book it's titled after I thought he was talking about Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness but instead it was something I'd never heard about before: Frigyes Karinthy's A Journey Around My Skull. Oddly (or maybe editorially) both have been reprinted by NYRB.

A Journey the blog is one of those with a "narrow" focus that just expands outwards, the world in a grain of sand and all that. In this case, it's a kind of edgy, psychologically dense, quasi-fantasy literature that doesn't attract the avantgardists (not as outwardly flashy) or The Academy (mostly non-canonical even for people who don't believe in a canon). It's work by writers who go in and mostly out of print, who form an almost subterranean literature that doesn't go in set directions but can emerge anywhere.

As an example check the reprint of Marcel Schwob's "imaginary life" of Cyril Tourneur. Now Tourneur can probably have little but imaginary lives since not much in the way of biography has come down and even his best-known play, The Revenger's Tragedy, is increasingly attributed to Thomas Middleton. Schwob's "To him both parents handed down their taste for nocturnal things, for a red glare in the night, and for blood" is altogether apt for The Revenger's Tragedy though Schwob is approaching Tourneur more as a poet than a critic, with more imagination than scholarship. I'd love to read more of this book (published by Avon of all companies) but while my library has a dozen of Schwob's books not a one is in English and the few copies of this book available go for wild money.

Summer Reading

The Telegraph released a list called 50 best ever summer holiday books but the exception to the usual stuff is that this is pretty solid. Or at least seems that way since I've only read about six and a half of the entries: Possession, Northern Lights, King Solomon's Mines, The Code of the Woosters, The Secret Agent, Tom Jones and three of the six Barchester novels. But the rest are pretty interesting (I already own almost a dozen) though as Greg points out who would consider Gibbon summer reading? I'd never heard of A Place of Greater Safety before this but started it this morning. Not a good sign that it has a six-page character list at the front but maybe that's just to scare away the unwary. Blood River also sounds promising but the US edition doesn't come out until October and I haven't bothered to check the British edition out of the library yet.

Favorite Opening Sentence

''Take my camel, dear,'' said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.

Maybe it's just the company I keep but favorite opening sentences come up every now and then but this has to be my all-time favorite. It's from Rose Macaulay's 1956 Towers of Trebizond and the rest of the book--one of those quasi-satirical, quasi-despairing looks at eccentric Brits on the edge of a crumbling empire--is nearly as good. It's the only thing of hers that I've read but have sometimes been tempted by a historical novel set in the 17th century that uses only a vocabulary positively known to have existed at the time. I believe this is They Were Defeated but can't confirm it right now and hope that I didn't imagine this whole thing.

And while on the topic I don't know where else I will ever get a chance to mention that when I wrote a piece on Godzilla for Joe Bob Briggs' long-gone Monstervision website I used the opening sentence for Remembrance of Things Past though completely unacknowledged of course.

There's a variation on openings to SF novels at http://io9.com/5027128/great-opening-sentences-from-science-fiction though it seems a bit narrow to me. Still, the opening to Neuromancer is certainly a great one and almost entirely because of one omitted word: "the color of television" with no definite article for "television".

Leaving Hollywood

There’s always somebody willing to claim that movies are worse than ever before, usually because that somebody personally doesn’t have as much interest as they did, uh, before. So I’m going to assume that it’s really not the Hollywood movies but the fact that 30 years of steady film viewing has laid a pretty solid groundwork, that I don’t have as much spare time and that $8 matinees reduces the impulse to check out marginal films (and by “marginal” for me that includes anything from Adam Sandler to No Country for Old Men).

Then again I’ll go ahead and argue that two of the big hits from early summer are good evidence that in fact Hollywood movies aren’t what they used to be. Yeah, blockbusters may not be good measure but Iron Man and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull are sloppy, narrow-minded blockbusters and not much fun either.

Iron Man actually opens with an energetic sequence that promises this won’t be any stodgy film but then the missiles hit and the stodge arrives. After this the only way to get through it is imagining how it could be rewritten. So when Tony comes back after his kidnapping he pauses for a brief product placement (what, none of the hospital or military base cooks could make him a cheeseburger?) and then has immediately and somberly decided that SI (or whatever it’s called in the movie) will no longer make weapons. Now imagine instead that on his return Tony lives up the high life as Mr Hedonism. Then we get to the scene that’s already in the film where the journalist points out that Tony’s kidnapping buddy’s home town was destroyed and then that’s when Tony makes his decision. Actually could it have hurt to make the journalist something other than a bimbo? Or for that matter Rhodes and Pepper have nothing to do except let Tony explain things to them. And if any film ever needed Towne/Tarrantino scriptdoctoring this would be it. How could an entire stream of adults have OKed the line where the buddy tells Tony that he has everything but nothing? So easy to fix: Buddy starts with “You have everything….” and Tony finishes “but nothing. Yeah, people tell me that all the time.” Hey, What Would Hecht Do isn’t a bad motto. Plus there are times when the Iron Man armor is portrayed so lovingly that you’d think the sequence was directed by Goebbels or at least Marinetti. The whole thing drags to a conclusion over some corporate infighting that’s at best a poor choice – nothing much is at stake. Considering the scene where Iron Man does a little gunboat diplomacy in the Middle East that completely ignores any concept of due process or rule of law then maybe we’re better off that the filmmakers didn’t decide to tackle Bigger Issues.

Indiana Jones isn’t as dull but it’s not any more substantial. Considering the series’ track record probably few people expected this to be any good and, well, it’s not. The opening sequence shows how little Lucas & Spielberg understood what they did in the past. Indy gets out of being captured by the Russians because a dropped gun just happens to go off. There’s nothing clever, nothing heroic, no swashbuckling derring do, just plain blind luck. And then the whole refrigerator thing should embarrass everybody involved and the aliens are just an enormous mistake. After a while you start wondering about stuff that there’s no point wondering about: If the artifact in the warehouse was that strongly magnetic shouldn’t it have been affecting other objects for years? Where was that recovered alien corpse supposed to have come from anyway? How again did all those skulls go back and forth? It’s almost like they were making an Indiana Jones ripoff. It’s pretty clear from the start that the kid is Indy’s son so why not play that up? Have some fun in the film with something the characters haven’t yet figured out. The kid looks so silly as Marlon Brando when he first appears that I still have no idea whether that was meant to be taken seriously, as an indication of his badassishness. Still, the tip to Land of the Pharaohs (the knocked-out ornaments that unleash flowing sand) is nice.

3 months & counting

Well, three months since the last post (which was a bit abrupt because I was on somebody else's computer & expecting to get booted at any time). In a bit over six years of blogging I've probably done about six months of posts. And proud of it.

Greenblatt on Cardenio

Went to a Stephen Greenblatt lecture recently that was titled something like The Strange Case of Cardenio. I was expecting a lecture about Shakespeare & Fletcher's lost play but it was actually an account of Greenblatt's collaboration with Charles Mee to create a modern version of what Cardenio with some reference back to what the Elizabetheans might have thought about it. The most interesting part is Greenblatt commissioning productions in other countries and giving them license to adapt the play to that culture. He discussed versions in India and Japan though according to another source there were also Russian and Croatian productions.