Movies and Theater, Muncie & Anderson; Books Worth Noting; Kit Marlowe Dies, Again

Ball State's Emens Theater calendar: Upcoming Events at Emens Auditorium.

 Anderson's Paramount Theater is showing movies again! A wondrous place to see movies. I wish more of the films rose to the ocassion.

Movies, movies, movies! Anderson's Paramount Theatre offers slate of free famous films (heraldbulletin.com)

I have a beein in my bonnet about Hollywood remaking movies - instead of recycling well-done material into second-rate reboots, why not plunder older IP? 

Other than Warren Williams, Barbara Stanwyck & Joan Blondell being dead?

 

 Books: The Curse of Queen Kelly (Film Comment)

 Bruce Dern ruined Robert Redford's The Great Gatsby for when I read someone saying Bern should have played Gatsby. Yes, that would've been so much more interesting.

‘I turned down Gandhi because I’m terrified of snakes’: the amazing movie memories of Bruce Dern  (The Guardian) 

I have a fondness for Llosa & Irvine Welsh & Téa Obreh & Kit Marlowe: 

I Give You My Silence by Mario Vargas Llosa review – Nobel laureate’s final novel is a love letter to Peru (The Guardian)

When I Give You My Silence was published in Spanish in 2023 its author, the Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, rightly predicted that it would be his final novel. He died last year at the age of 89. I Give You My Silence may have been completed with the spectre of death approaching, but there is nothing morbid about this book, which is an eccentric love letter to Vargas Llosa’s native country and, in particular, its music.

Can Nothing Save Us? by Irvine Welsh review – US family saga is a late-career triumph  (The Guardian)

Irvine Welsh’s 16th novel Can Nothing Save Us? comes as something of a surprise. An epic American family saga, it explores a collective emotional malaise at the heart of a great power in decline. This is a bold and ambitious work, in which Welsh deftly shifts point of view with confidence and conviction: his ability to jump generations and to capture the voices and feelings of his disparate cast of characters is at times quite astonishing.  

A History of the Novel in Britain by Philip Hensher review – a masterpiece of criticism (The Guardian)

In his opening paragraph, Philip Hensher declares that a novel not only “tells a good story” but is a good story in itself. We could extend that neat formula to include this book, which is not only a masterful account of fiction since 1719, when Daniel Defoe set Robinson Crusoe down on his desert island, but is itself a wonderful read. There is nothing dreary here; no sense of being back in the seminar room taking notes. Instead it is 600 pages of deep pleasure, an excuse to revisit old literary loves and be reminded of ones that have slipped from view.

***

Hensher never falls into crankiness, but he is unafraid to point out home truths. Such as the fact that so much of the pleased-with-itself “experimentalism” of the 1960 to 1980 period was merely a retread of things that had been done better before. Tickled by the clever wheeze of having central characters with no name? Fanny Burney was already doing that in 1814. Keen on using fragmentary collage to signal modernity? That blustery old fogey Evelyn Waugh got there first with Vile Bodies (1930). As for self-reflexivity, that device by which the novelist comments on the process of writing a novel, you should go back to Fielding.

Téa Obreht on Writing a Layered, Intertextual Tale of the American West (Literary Hub) - a delightful writer.

From Marquis de Sade to Grand Theft Auto, a Brief History of Depravity (Literary Hub). I have understood the French fascination with Sade. It seems to fall in line with their admiration of Jerry Lewis. The essay is in good company, Camus started with Sade in The Rebel. I think he was  faker, living in his head, but that might be the point of the essay. He let out all the demons.

Interview with Stephen Greenblatt on the Death of Christopher Marlowe in 1593:

 

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Another Story Published!

 No church. My ride is sick, my stomach is uncomfortable in a way that I want to stay close to home, and it started raining again. Just what Indiana needs.

I had some good news this morning, another story published: Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1861-1984 (Seven Story Publishing).

 It is a consolidation of some of my Indiana factory town stories into one. The ones inspired by Anderson and Muncie; the smokestack is the old Andaconda smokestack repurposed (btw, Anderson knocked that down). KH dislikes the format. He calls it the Our Town version. I would like to hear your opinion, if you feel like reading it.

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Muincie: End of June and Beginning of July

 

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JCO Answers How She Writes a Book a Year

[Moving stuff back from my abandoned WordPress blog.] 

Is it possible Harper's Bazaar asked the one important question of Joyce Carol Oates and no one had before? Check out This Is How Joyce Carol Oates Writes a Book a Year.

Stephen King in his On Writing (a book I recommend, albeit for an odd reason: King publishes how he revises a story) recommends having in mind an audience. Oates offered a similar and different idea:

Who do you write for and why?

I started writing really when I was in high school, and I think I’m sort of writing for an ideal audience. It’s more like telling stories and trying to express the experience of a story as if it was a little movie. I think our lives are one story after another and we’re trying to give voice to that experience. I’m not sure if there’s necessarily a specific audience. I mean, if you had no audience at all, you might still want to take photographs, and you might commemorate something. I don’t have a specific audience, but I would hope to have a literary community.

Do you mean a community of readers or writers or both?

Just that we have a common vocabulary and respect for literature, because there are so many people who don’t. It’s like that community of people who care about good films: more of a community of people who care about our culture.

How she describes a novel may explain one of the many reasons the short story form is difficult for me.

What do you usually start with when you are starting a novel? Is it an image or a character, or is it a sentence or a word?

A novel is a river, with a number of tributaries flowing into it. I don’t think you could write a real novel, a substantial novel, on just one little idea. For me, it’s like a number of ideas that come together, and I kind of conjoin them like characters. You have to have a little family of people. For me, it can begin with a place. All of my writing is set in a real place in my recollection. In The Frenzy, for instance, the first story is very much in New Jersey, down the New Jersey Turnpike, and then it’s on the Garden State Parkway, and then it’s in Cape May with a view of the ocean at a certain time of year, off-season. Very New Jersey.

SCH 3/26

 

 

Thinking Bourgeois

[Moving stuff back from my abandoned WordPress blog.] 

Somerset Maugham said that it was the middle class that created English literature. I think that was in The Summing Up. I was a teenager with ambitions to be a writer, so it has been in my head for a very long time. What was meant by middle class might have been a bit muddled by me. Or circumstances in my case and time left me too little time left to write after trying to keep a law practice afloat.

But I think, on the whole Maugham was right. The rich are too comfortable in their economic status to use their education to create art. The poor are too desperate to create art, that does not help pay the bills.

Reading Hidden in the Bourgeois by Morten Høi Jensen brought all of this to mind. He is writing about Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain.

...And indeed, what could be more bourgeois — as Thomas Mann understands the term — than Hans Castorp’s celebrated epiphany in the famous “Snow” subchapter, that “man is the master of contradictions.” The coexistence of apparent opposites is characteristic of the bourgeois. Werner Sombart, in his The Quintessence of Capitalism, makes the Faustian claim that “two souls dwell in the breast of every complete bourgeois: the soul of the adventurer and the soul of the respectable middle-class man.” A claim that sounds quite a bit like Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger, who, in the eponymous novella, cries out: “As an artist I’m already enough of an adventurer in my inner life. So far as outward appearances are concerned one should dress decently, damn it, and behave like a respectable citizen…” Thomas Mann offers the image of the writer as someone who keeps his office hours and dresses appropriately, whose writing is characterized not by the heat and flame of inspiration but by the cold comfort of thoroughness and industry. “There is much to be said for a wife and children,” Thomas Mann wrote in his diary in 1919, “but given my nature, the decisive consideration for me is that it allows me to hide in the bourgeois realm without actually becoming bourgeois.” As the French writer Bernard Groethuysen observed in 1927, “the bourgeois likes to keep his incognito.” It was Flaubert who originally formulated the contradictory character of the bourgeois when he observed, in a letter, that “one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demi-god.” But it was Thomas Mann in whom this dialectic, the yes and the no of bourgeois culture, found its most prophetic repository. “I have become what I am,” Thomas Buddenbrook, the good bourgeois, tells his brother, Christian, the failed artist, “because I did not want to become like you.” Many years after writing those words, Mann described his enemy Adolf Hitler as “a brother, a rather unpleasant and mortifying brother,” by which he meant that Hitler, like himself, was an artist, only he was an artist gone astray, a good-for-nothing who believed himself “reserved for something else — as yet quite indefinite, but something which, if it could be named, would be greeted with roars of laughter.” Significantly, Mann titled his essay “A Brother,” as though aware that he and Hitler represented two paths for Germany. I have become what I am, because I did not want to become like you. A few weeks after the war, Mann, ever the conscientious artist, confessed: “it is all within me, I have been through it all.”

We have denigrated the middle class for not being cool. Is that not the heart of The Graduate? But it is the middle that has enough education to grasp the world around them. It is the middle class that has enough stability and enough uncertainty to see the wrinkles and twists of reality to have a reason to act. If memory serves, Lenin and Joe Strummer came from the middle class.

And so let us encourage the middle class to create. Preferably in the arts and not in politics.

SCH 3/26

 

 

Worshipping Artistic Greatness

[Moving stuff back from my abandoned WordPress blog.] 

Much has been lately about cancel culture and writers not being morally up to snuff. I wrote about this on my old blog several times. Until I read What Went Wrong When Susan Sontag Met Thomas Mann? (The New Yorker), did it occur to me the problem may be more in the worshipper than the worshipped. I do not think I ever worshipped an artist. As much as I admire Kurt Vonnegut, I would not worship him. It is not so hard for me to like The Rolling Stones without worshipping them; if Altamont does explain why, then Dirty Work should. Why should I expect an artist to be a better person than me? No, the real question should be if the work is better than the person, better than what I could do myself?

This is the paragraph that crystallized the idea for this post:

It is not impossible to imagine what Mann might have said if the dilemma of Sontag’s shame had been presented to him. He had long been brooding over the problem of the charismatic artist, over the hidden dangers of aesthetic cults. The topic floats through Sontag’s then favorite novel, “The Magic Mountain,” and it engulfs “Doctor Faustus,” the tale of a genius and a nation gone mad. Mann might have argued that there is not only a moral but also an artistic virtue in being outwardly boring and banal. It is a hedge against mania. The worship of greatness leads, at best, to disillusionment and, at worst, to the insanity unleashed by the Wagnerian Hitler. Every pilgrimage is suspect: Mann scorned the Wagner shrine in Bayreuth on those grounds. “Only for very young people,” he wrote, “are admiration and adoration the same thing.” 

As much as The Magic Mountain awes me, my feelings towards Thomas Mann are more mundane: how did you come to write such a novel?

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Friday and The Aftermath

 I worked on blog posts this morning before heading over to the group thing.

This is what Muncie looked like a little before 11 AM.

 My stomach has not been so steady, so I got the vegetable dumplings at The Sumpling House. The waiter whose child died was not; what grief for a young couple.

Before starting the session, I had time to walk over to White River west of Tillotson. 

 I did my grocery shopping, missed the #14 at 2:30, and did not get home until after 3 pm. I was tired, napped for a bit over an hour.

This is what we have now:

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