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rushthatspeaksBecause I seem to be failing at writing up my life as it goes on, but I do occasionally manage snapshots of books and movies.
from sometime in June:
China Mieville's Railsea is utterly delightful. It is a big silly grin of a book. If he keeps writing in this vein he is going to turn into one of my favorite writers; I don't think this one was quite as good as Embassytown, but it was in that league and possibly more sheerly entertaining. A lot of people are going to describe it as Moby-Dick with trains. This is inaccurate. It is in fact a book in which Moby-Dick is sort of going on in a deconstructed fashion over somewhere slightly to the left, while this book is about something else, and occasionally the two intersect in ways that are hilarious and assist the development of the symbol layer of the Mieville. I approve of that as a way of interacting with Moby-Dick-- I had been worried.
Seriously, read this, it's awesome, they are hunting giant moles from trains. The train captain is hunting the giant yellow mouldiwarp what took her arm, and no sooner do you find this out than ten pages later you find out that every captain of any real cachet is also hunting some giant legendary beast which hurt them, that this is called their 'philosophy' because each animal symbolizes something its captain says it symbolizes, and that there's a Museum of Realized Philosophies which has a lot of photos of captains standing on dead legendary beasts. I cannot tell you how happy this makes me.
Also, giant moles! An allusion to David Macaulay's 'Great Moments in Architecture' from Motel of the Mysteries! Inventive verbal wittiness! It's just made of awesome, is what I'm trying to say. The symbolic layer is not as profound as Moby-Dick's, of course, but I wasn't expecting that; it's also not as profound as Embassytown's, which is why I say this one isn't quite as good, but honestly I basically don't care.
from sometime in July:
Spent several hours today throwing myself at the new Delany, which in addition to all its other qualities is very long. It is as I expected a book very, very firmly about things which are not in any way my kink, and the problem I have when reading about things that are not my kink is not squick but boredom-- like having every motion of a modern dance concert described to me without any notion of even the genre of music being played. That said, it's also Delany, so it's an intellectually complex, subtle, warm, humane, loving, interestingly worldbuilt novel with, and there are levels on which I could, like, hit him for this, recognizable symbolic continuity from the about fifteen pages I read of his other porn novels, which means that he is actually carrying out a long-running dialogue with the genre and himself and therefore I may have to read them. Seriously, I was like 'that symbol is from the six pages I read of The Mad Man, and I think that bit means this may actually be a sequel to Hogg but I DON'T KNOW BECAUSE I WENT AWAY FROM THOSE VERY QUICKLY AARGH'.
This one is an adorable love story! They are so in love! It is the most believable romance I have read in a prose work in at least the last several years! All three of them work really well as partners! Two of them are of course father and son. Also they all have sex with a lot of other people and various animals. So far I've got to the point where the book, having used the incest in the traditional porn manner, then uses it to show what it is like losing a partner who can never, ever be socially acknowledged as your partner outside a very small close-knit circle of friends-- and this loss in a social context in which gay marriage is legal. In short, Delany = A Great Novelist, this is not news. The sexual content is not news to me either, although I suspect it probably is to a lot of people? The odd thing is in seeing it in work at least nominally intended for a straight audience. /has read a whole bunch of stuff from the seventies leather scene, mostly to determine whatinhell Pat Califia was on about when he revolutionized lesbian porn; he was quite right, the leathermen had a totally different sexual culture and way better porn. (I vacillate between loving Pat Califia's stuff and finding some of it too Fluffy New-Age Neopagan for words.)
now, having finished the book:
So I think this is the best novel I have read this year, and my respect for it only grows and deepens the more I think about it. There are so many things Delany is doing with genre, and oddly enough the ones that interest me the most are the things he is doing to pornography as a genre, because I'm used to seeing people play with the boundaries of speculative literature, but I'm really not accustomed to seeing people treat pornography as a codified literary genre at all. When I heard Delany read from this at Readercon 2011, I knew nothing about the book except the title, and he started at the beginning. The beginning is fairly slow, character introduction, quiet setting establishment, realistic, gentle, not dropping too much information on you at once-- and I became aware after about ten minutes of the reading that I was waiting for him to get to the sex. Because it was porn and it was obviously going to be. Never mind that no one had mentioned anything of the kind and that in the program booklet it was described as his new SF novel (which it also is). Never mind that not one word about sex had been said in those first ten minutes. Something about the descriptions chosen, the way the narrative works, the way people think: the dog-whistles of genre, for those who can hear them, and I still don't actually know what they are in the book, but I knew before he got to the sex not just that it would be there but approximately what sort it would be. And I wish I knew how he did that. Because it was intentional, not just in the book but at the reading.
And the audacity of this novel, and the good humor of it, and also that it is almost subliminally hilarious and uses genre conventions to be so. I was not expecting to laugh out loud during some of it, and I was not expecting the big silly grin.
An example of the kind of joke I mean: so there are a couple of guys, who are friends of the protagonist, who serve as a continual source of safe-sex infodump. They have friendly advice, they have demonstrations, they have actual statistics. And whenever the protagonist looks like he might be about to do something unhealthy or damnfool stupid, they turn up and deploy infodump, and then pretty much go away again.
Now, the reason this is so hilarious dates back to the AIDS crisis, when there were a lot of people writing porn, and there were a lot of people Very Concerned that writers of pornography were depicting unsafe sexual behavior in a way that made it seem attractive. There was political debate over whether porn writers had a responsibility to the community to help normalize safe sex, whether porn should always depict unsafe sex as a bad thing or whether the mental safety-outlet of having somewhere for unrealizable fantasies was more important, all that sort of thing. A lot of magazines started only accepting safe-sex material. Or at any rate material which pointed out that other kinds of sex could be risky.
Therefore one got a lot of porn in which the characters would be going along doing whatever, and then the writer would have another character or a narratorial intrusion do a few sentences to a paragraph of OH AND THIS IS BAD YOU SHOULD NOT DO IT REALLY YOU SHOULD NOT STAY SAFE EVERYBODY, and then the characters would go back to doing whatever. I honestly believe writers would shoehorn these PSAs into stories after writing them-- Pat Califia describes doing so at editorial command.
These two guys in the Delany? Are getting off on being the shoehorned Public Safety Announcement. Because they find it hot to do that. And they never judge anyone else's sexual decisions, just tell people how to do things without hurting themselves. I find this honest-to-fuck heartwarming to read, I tell you what. And the whole book is full of stuff like that.
Which is why the cognitive dissonance of having this book be aimed at, and apparently reaching, an audience which is not composed entirely of queer kinky people who were looking for precisely this continues to hit me over the head. Because these specific kinks aren't mine, but I know pretty much how a book like this would spread around various communities I am aware of if they were, and it really does not involve going into a mainstream bookstore, let alone reviews in major places. But, given the quality of some of the pornography out there, there is really no reason it shouldn't. Bless Delany. He's always worked in Things You Couldn't Call Literature At The Time, and I am in awe of his ability to get people to go with him.
Also I cried at the end of the book. And expect that I will every time. Which about sums it up.
from late July:
I have been reading the Alinea cookbook, which is pretty much the centerpiece and manifesto of molecular gastronomy. On the one hand, a lot of it is interesting food, which sounds as though it would be fun to eat, pleasant to look at, and a different kind of challenge to make. On the other hand, a lot of it depends on exotic ingredients instead of on innovative combinations, and there's also a large amount of foaming things and making things into spheres, which can only go so far, and there are a lot of 'let me put seventy-three ingredients in this one teeny dish' dishes. They say they'd like the cookbook to be useful as a jumping-off point for home cooks in terms of thinking about food differently, but I guess this is already how I was thinking about food? That said, making tiny nearly-transparent sheets of raspberry-rose essence and hanging them from little binder clips over mounded spheres of sweetened Meyer lemon juice does actually sound like something I would do with my time. (So pretty!) So I don't know.
Discussing Pauline Kael's review of the film 'The Innocents', a brilliant film adaptation of The Turn of the Screw. From late July:
From Kael's review: "It is the evil in the governess's singlemindedness, her insistence, her determination; it is the destructive power of her innocence that makes the story so great. I don't see why Time and so many of the other reviews call this a 'psychiatric interpretation' as if it were a new-fangled modern way to read James-- invented presumably by Edmund Wilson."
I would argue that part of the frightfulness of the governess is that one can never be certain how much of it is, on some level, calculating, how much she is on some level aware of what she is doing-- surely she must know on some level, mustn't she? What if she really doesn't? Scary either way.
Kael again: "The evidence that the screenwriters haven't slanted it is that the critics who complain of slanting are all complaining of different slants. Some of the reviewers have made a good deal of fuss about the supposedly 'Freudian' perspective or slant imposed on the material by having the child Miles kiss the governess on the mouth-- I don't see how this slants the material in any direction. I once worked as a governess for six weeks and I've never been so mauled in my life: the ten-year-old would trap me in corners demanding kisses. I don't see that this proves that the child was corrupt or possessed by an adult spirit, or that I, who got almost as nervous about it as the governess in The Innocents, was hysterical. Both interpretations are possible."
My reaction to that is delighted laughter: I doubt any literary critic has ever thought of asking governesses what they think of The Turn of the Screw, and serves them right.
And she noticed the cinematography. The cinematographer, Freddie Francis, turns out to have worked on Tales of Hoffmann, Huston's Moby Dick, and the original Moulin Rouge, and to have photographed this, Room at the Top, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Lynch's Dune and The Elephant Man, and Return to Oz-- and to have directed Day of the Triffids. Why had I not heard of him?
The casting of the small boy turns out to be a beautiful joke as well as a great actor. He was the main kid the previous year in Village of the Damned.
from mid-August:
I highly recommend Huysmans' A Rebours, although I am only about halfway through it; so far it is both what Tanith Lee wants to be when she grows up and an ironic portrait of the Primordial Hipster. Every time something else happens I am convinced it is having me on, and it probably is, but I cannot tell how much or in which directions. It's so ironic it's earnest and so earnest it's ironic and I don't know whether to point and laugh, applaud, or just sit there quirking an eyebrow and saying 'REALLY?'
I mean the protagonist just fainted as the result of a perfumery accident. Having once been in a room with one thousand lit bayberry candles, I sympathize (and find this plausible), and yet HE FAINTED. Because of. A PERFUME-RELATED INCIDENT. IN HIS OWN HOUSE. Guess how much Edgar Allan Poe he owns in exquisitely hand-designed editions. JUST GUESS.
Said protagonist is also working very hard for the title of gayest man on earth; he tries harder. Just as I was starting to think it was all an ironic portrait of possibly unconscious homosexual repression, he went off and had gay sex for a while, only barely elided, which for a book from 1884 impresses me and which was specifically to inform the reader that of his many problems repression is not in some ways one of them-- that is to say, apparently having secret gay sex in, like, the Tuileries does not actually help you with existential ennui WHO KNEW. As is appropriate for a Primordial Hipster half the time I want to kick him and the other half I want to pat him on the hand and tell him consolingly that he should probably go get somebody to hit him very hard until he feels better (amazingly, as of this point he does not appear to have done that, although I was really impressed by his ingenuity when he dated the ventriloquist).
The astonishing thing is that his nightmares are genuinely frightening. Genuine dream logic and creepy as fuck.
Also that the whole book works, this obsessive catalogue of overdetermined detail piled upon overdetermined detail till it somehow crawls up its own tail and comes out the other side. Except for an unfortunate streak of even-worse-than-usual nineteenth-century misogyny, it's a bona fide Great Novel and you know how often those come around; I am pretty sure Aubrey Beardsley's entire career was based on thinking about this book a lot, and I mean it when I say that Tanith Lee has been trying for this all these years. And not quite getting there, though what she's got I often love. But I am starting to think all of her can be found in Huysmans, except possibly Black Unicorn.
now, having finished the book: So what he wanted the ventriloquist to do was, no joke, recite scenes from Flaubert's The Temptation of Saint Anthony, doing all the voices, while they were in bed together. I have nothing but boundless admiration for a brain which could come up with that. (The ventriloquist, sensibly, decided she wasn't getting paid enough for this. Which I am glad Huysmans knew, though the main character never quite figured it out.)
from Tuesday:
Went to My Neighbors the Yamadas tonight, which is not actually Miyazaki but which turns out to be, bar none, the worst of the Ghiblis because it is the most boring movie ever made. It felt like an ETERNITY of dull. There are a couple of nice visual effects but I actually preferred THE WAY THE TREES WERE DRAWN to ANYTHING AT ALL ABOUT THE CHARACTERS. Because the intention was to self-parody My Neighbor Totoro by having a movie about the extremely normal people next door, who secretly are just as Weird and Strange and Numinous and Whimsicall and All That Jazz.
But the problem was that they were adapting a manga, which appears to have been terrible, and also that somebody somewhere (I suspect the mangaka, the director self-evidently knows better having made Whispers of the Heart) forgot that in order to make people universally relevant you have to make them really really specific and individual and themselves, so these people have had all individuality stripped out of them and replaced by quirky stereotype, and not one single moment of the movie achieved any sort of real truth. It wasn't funny, it had no plot, it had not enough character to care about, there were about four nice drawings of trees and the English voice actor for the mother was very good, by which I mean I both recognized her technical excellence and wanted to strangle her. The quagmire of everyday sexism in the stereotypical Japanese household lurked and sogged and dribbled over the entire thing. I couldn't believe how bad it was. I went into hyperfocus mode on it in hopes that I was just missing something, and no, it was like that all the way through, and all I got was a headache.
I suppose I'm now in line to become an Official Ghibli Completist, if I can ever get hold of The Ocean Waves, but I can't recommend anyone else sit through this even for the sake of completism. You could not pay me to watch it again. (... The Ocean Waves can't possibly be this bad, can it? I mean I've never heard anything about its quality, but that's just because I never hear about it, and that was true of this too. I am now somewhat afraid.) I mean people kept walking out and I considered it but dammit the completist instinct is the only one I could satisfy with this film so I stuck. (Seriously. It lost at least a third of the audience. And there were not one but two very loud snorers.) It is not entertaining bad. It is the expense of pretty and unusual animation in a waste of shame.
So then I wanted to renew my faith, and I was like, I remember Miyazaki doing better than this with a frickin' music video, I should go look up 'On Your Mark' again, and then I was like, I can't remember whether I have recommended that.
Sure enough in less than seven minutes it is ten times the movie at least. Warning: brilliant, awesome, beautiful, will jump up and down on your emotions because I don't know which version is real but I know which one I'd like to be and which one I suspect of being. Also, I don't think it's just my headcanon that those guys are together.
On Your Mark. (Link may be perishable.)
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from sometime in June:
China Mieville's Railsea is utterly delightful. It is a big silly grin of a book. If he keeps writing in this vein he is going to turn into one of my favorite writers; I don't think this one was quite as good as Embassytown, but it was in that league and possibly more sheerly entertaining. A lot of people are going to describe it as Moby-Dick with trains. This is inaccurate. It is in fact a book in which Moby-Dick is sort of going on in a deconstructed fashion over somewhere slightly to the left, while this book is about something else, and occasionally the two intersect in ways that are hilarious and assist the development of the symbol layer of the Mieville. I approve of that as a way of interacting with Moby-Dick-- I had been worried.
Seriously, read this, it's awesome, they are hunting giant moles from trains. The train captain is hunting the giant yellow mouldiwarp what took her arm, and no sooner do you find this out than ten pages later you find out that every captain of any real cachet is also hunting some giant legendary beast which hurt them, that this is called their 'philosophy' because each animal symbolizes something its captain says it symbolizes, and that there's a Museum of Realized Philosophies which has a lot of photos of captains standing on dead legendary beasts. I cannot tell you how happy this makes me.
Also, giant moles! An allusion to David Macaulay's 'Great Moments in Architecture' from Motel of the Mysteries! Inventive verbal wittiness! It's just made of awesome, is what I'm trying to say. The symbolic layer is not as profound as Moby-Dick's, of course, but I wasn't expecting that; it's also not as profound as Embassytown's, which is why I say this one isn't quite as good, but honestly I basically don't care.
from sometime in July:
Spent several hours today throwing myself at the new Delany, which in addition to all its other qualities is very long. It is as I expected a book very, very firmly about things which are not in any way my kink, and the problem I have when reading about things that are not my kink is not squick but boredom-- like having every motion of a modern dance concert described to me without any notion of even the genre of music being played. That said, it's also Delany, so it's an intellectually complex, subtle, warm, humane, loving, interestingly worldbuilt novel with, and there are levels on which I could, like, hit him for this, recognizable symbolic continuity from the about fifteen pages I read of his other porn novels, which means that he is actually carrying out a long-running dialogue with the genre and himself and therefore I may have to read them. Seriously, I was like 'that symbol is from the six pages I read of The Mad Man, and I think that bit means this may actually be a sequel to Hogg but I DON'T KNOW BECAUSE I WENT AWAY FROM THOSE VERY QUICKLY AARGH'.
This one is an adorable love story! They are so in love! It is the most believable romance I have read in a prose work in at least the last several years! All three of them work really well as partners! Two of them are of course father and son. Also they all have sex with a lot of other people and various animals. So far I've got to the point where the book, having used the incest in the traditional porn manner, then uses it to show what it is like losing a partner who can never, ever be socially acknowledged as your partner outside a very small close-knit circle of friends-- and this loss in a social context in which gay marriage is legal. In short, Delany = A Great Novelist, this is not news. The sexual content is not news to me either, although I suspect it probably is to a lot of people? The odd thing is in seeing it in work at least nominally intended for a straight audience. /has read a whole bunch of stuff from the seventies leather scene, mostly to determine whatinhell Pat Califia was on about when he revolutionized lesbian porn; he was quite right, the leathermen had a totally different sexual culture and way better porn. (I vacillate between loving Pat Califia's stuff and finding some of it too Fluffy New-Age Neopagan for words.)
now, having finished the book:
So I think this is the best novel I have read this year, and my respect for it only grows and deepens the more I think about it. There are so many things Delany is doing with genre, and oddly enough the ones that interest me the most are the things he is doing to pornography as a genre, because I'm used to seeing people play with the boundaries of speculative literature, but I'm really not accustomed to seeing people treat pornography as a codified literary genre at all. When I heard Delany read from this at Readercon 2011, I knew nothing about the book except the title, and he started at the beginning. The beginning is fairly slow, character introduction, quiet setting establishment, realistic, gentle, not dropping too much information on you at once-- and I became aware after about ten minutes of the reading that I was waiting for him to get to the sex. Because it was porn and it was obviously going to be. Never mind that no one had mentioned anything of the kind and that in the program booklet it was described as his new SF novel (which it also is). Never mind that not one word about sex had been said in those first ten minutes. Something about the descriptions chosen, the way the narrative works, the way people think: the dog-whistles of genre, for those who can hear them, and I still don't actually know what they are in the book, but I knew before he got to the sex not just that it would be there but approximately what sort it would be. And I wish I knew how he did that. Because it was intentional, not just in the book but at the reading.
And the audacity of this novel, and the good humor of it, and also that it is almost subliminally hilarious and uses genre conventions to be so. I was not expecting to laugh out loud during some of it, and I was not expecting the big silly grin.
An example of the kind of joke I mean: so there are a couple of guys, who are friends of the protagonist, who serve as a continual source of safe-sex infodump. They have friendly advice, they have demonstrations, they have actual statistics. And whenever the protagonist looks like he might be about to do something unhealthy or damnfool stupid, they turn up and deploy infodump, and then pretty much go away again.
Now, the reason this is so hilarious dates back to the AIDS crisis, when there were a lot of people writing porn, and there were a lot of people Very Concerned that writers of pornography were depicting unsafe sexual behavior in a way that made it seem attractive. There was political debate over whether porn writers had a responsibility to the community to help normalize safe sex, whether porn should always depict unsafe sex as a bad thing or whether the mental safety-outlet of having somewhere for unrealizable fantasies was more important, all that sort of thing. A lot of magazines started only accepting safe-sex material. Or at any rate material which pointed out that other kinds of sex could be risky.
Therefore one got a lot of porn in which the characters would be going along doing whatever, and then the writer would have another character or a narratorial intrusion do a few sentences to a paragraph of OH AND THIS IS BAD YOU SHOULD NOT DO IT REALLY YOU SHOULD NOT STAY SAFE EVERYBODY, and then the characters would go back to doing whatever. I honestly believe writers would shoehorn these PSAs into stories after writing them-- Pat Califia describes doing so at editorial command.
These two guys in the Delany? Are getting off on being the shoehorned Public Safety Announcement. Because they find it hot to do that. And they never judge anyone else's sexual decisions, just tell people how to do things without hurting themselves. I find this honest-to-fuck heartwarming to read, I tell you what. And the whole book is full of stuff like that.
Which is why the cognitive dissonance of having this book be aimed at, and apparently reaching, an audience which is not composed entirely of queer kinky people who were looking for precisely this continues to hit me over the head. Because these specific kinks aren't mine, but I know pretty much how a book like this would spread around various communities I am aware of if they were, and it really does not involve going into a mainstream bookstore, let alone reviews in major places. But, given the quality of some of the pornography out there, there is really no reason it shouldn't. Bless Delany. He's always worked in Things You Couldn't Call Literature At The Time, and I am in awe of his ability to get people to go with him.
Also I cried at the end of the book. And expect that I will every time. Which about sums it up.
from late July:
I have been reading the Alinea cookbook, which is pretty much the centerpiece and manifesto of molecular gastronomy. On the one hand, a lot of it is interesting food, which sounds as though it would be fun to eat, pleasant to look at, and a different kind of challenge to make. On the other hand, a lot of it depends on exotic ingredients instead of on innovative combinations, and there's also a large amount of foaming things and making things into spheres, which can only go so far, and there are a lot of 'let me put seventy-three ingredients in this one teeny dish' dishes. They say they'd like the cookbook to be useful as a jumping-off point for home cooks in terms of thinking about food differently, but I guess this is already how I was thinking about food? That said, making tiny nearly-transparent sheets of raspberry-rose essence and hanging them from little binder clips over mounded spheres of sweetened Meyer lemon juice does actually sound like something I would do with my time. (So pretty!) So I don't know.
Discussing Pauline Kael's review of the film 'The Innocents', a brilliant film adaptation of The Turn of the Screw. From late July:
From Kael's review: "It is the evil in the governess's singlemindedness, her insistence, her determination; it is the destructive power of her innocence that makes the story so great. I don't see why Time and so many of the other reviews call this a 'psychiatric interpretation' as if it were a new-fangled modern way to read James-- invented presumably by Edmund Wilson."
I would argue that part of the frightfulness of the governess is that one can never be certain how much of it is, on some level, calculating, how much she is on some level aware of what she is doing-- surely she must know on some level, mustn't she? What if she really doesn't? Scary either way.
Kael again: "The evidence that the screenwriters haven't slanted it is that the critics who complain of slanting are all complaining of different slants. Some of the reviewers have made a good deal of fuss about the supposedly 'Freudian' perspective or slant imposed on the material by having the child Miles kiss the governess on the mouth-- I don't see how this slants the material in any direction. I once worked as a governess for six weeks and I've never been so mauled in my life: the ten-year-old would trap me in corners demanding kisses. I don't see that this proves that the child was corrupt or possessed by an adult spirit, or that I, who got almost as nervous about it as the governess in The Innocents, was hysterical. Both interpretations are possible."
My reaction to that is delighted laughter: I doubt any literary critic has ever thought of asking governesses what they think of The Turn of the Screw, and serves them right.
And she noticed the cinematography. The cinematographer, Freddie Francis, turns out to have worked on Tales of Hoffmann, Huston's Moby Dick, and the original Moulin Rouge, and to have photographed this, Room at the Top, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Lynch's Dune and The Elephant Man, and Return to Oz-- and to have directed Day of the Triffids. Why had I not heard of him?
The casting of the small boy turns out to be a beautiful joke as well as a great actor. He was the main kid the previous year in Village of the Damned.
from mid-August:
I highly recommend Huysmans' A Rebours, although I am only about halfway through it; so far it is both what Tanith Lee wants to be when she grows up and an ironic portrait of the Primordial Hipster. Every time something else happens I am convinced it is having me on, and it probably is, but I cannot tell how much or in which directions. It's so ironic it's earnest and so earnest it's ironic and I don't know whether to point and laugh, applaud, or just sit there quirking an eyebrow and saying 'REALLY?'
I mean the protagonist just fainted as the result of a perfumery accident. Having once been in a room with one thousand lit bayberry candles, I sympathize (and find this plausible), and yet HE FAINTED. Because of. A PERFUME-RELATED INCIDENT. IN HIS OWN HOUSE. Guess how much Edgar Allan Poe he owns in exquisitely hand-designed editions. JUST GUESS.
Said protagonist is also working very hard for the title of gayest man on earth; he tries harder. Just as I was starting to think it was all an ironic portrait of possibly unconscious homosexual repression, he went off and had gay sex for a while, only barely elided, which for a book from 1884 impresses me and which was specifically to inform the reader that of his many problems repression is not in some ways one of them-- that is to say, apparently having secret gay sex in, like, the Tuileries does not actually help you with existential ennui WHO KNEW. As is appropriate for a Primordial Hipster half the time I want to kick him and the other half I want to pat him on the hand and tell him consolingly that he should probably go get somebody to hit him very hard until he feels better (amazingly, as of this point he does not appear to have done that, although I was really impressed by his ingenuity when he dated the ventriloquist).
The astonishing thing is that his nightmares are genuinely frightening. Genuine dream logic and creepy as fuck.
Also that the whole book works, this obsessive catalogue of overdetermined detail piled upon overdetermined detail till it somehow crawls up its own tail and comes out the other side. Except for an unfortunate streak of even-worse-than-usual nineteenth-century misogyny, it's a bona fide Great Novel and you know how often those come around; I am pretty sure Aubrey Beardsley's entire career was based on thinking about this book a lot, and I mean it when I say that Tanith Lee has been trying for this all these years. And not quite getting there, though what she's got I often love. But I am starting to think all of her can be found in Huysmans, except possibly Black Unicorn.
now, having finished the book: So what he wanted the ventriloquist to do was, no joke, recite scenes from Flaubert's The Temptation of Saint Anthony, doing all the voices, while they were in bed together. I have nothing but boundless admiration for a brain which could come up with that. (The ventriloquist, sensibly, decided she wasn't getting paid enough for this. Which I am glad Huysmans knew, though the main character never quite figured it out.)
from Tuesday:
Went to My Neighbors the Yamadas tonight, which is not actually Miyazaki but which turns out to be, bar none, the worst of the Ghiblis because it is the most boring movie ever made. It felt like an ETERNITY of dull. There are a couple of nice visual effects but I actually preferred THE WAY THE TREES WERE DRAWN to ANYTHING AT ALL ABOUT THE CHARACTERS. Because the intention was to self-parody My Neighbor Totoro by having a movie about the extremely normal people next door, who secretly are just as Weird and Strange and Numinous and Whimsicall and All That Jazz.
But the problem was that they were adapting a manga, which appears to have been terrible, and also that somebody somewhere (I suspect the mangaka, the director self-evidently knows better having made Whispers of the Heart) forgot that in order to make people universally relevant you have to make them really really specific and individual and themselves, so these people have had all individuality stripped out of them and replaced by quirky stereotype, and not one single moment of the movie achieved any sort of real truth. It wasn't funny, it had no plot, it had not enough character to care about, there were about four nice drawings of trees and the English voice actor for the mother was very good, by which I mean I both recognized her technical excellence and wanted to strangle her. The quagmire of everyday sexism in the stereotypical Japanese household lurked and sogged and dribbled over the entire thing. I couldn't believe how bad it was. I went into hyperfocus mode on it in hopes that I was just missing something, and no, it was like that all the way through, and all I got was a headache.
I suppose I'm now in line to become an Official Ghibli Completist, if I can ever get hold of The Ocean Waves, but I can't recommend anyone else sit through this even for the sake of completism. You could not pay me to watch it again. (... The Ocean Waves can't possibly be this bad, can it? I mean I've never heard anything about its quality, but that's just because I never hear about it, and that was true of this too. I am now somewhat afraid.) I mean people kept walking out and I considered it but dammit the completist instinct is the only one I could satisfy with this film so I stuck. (Seriously. It lost at least a third of the audience. And there were not one but two very loud snorers.) It is not entertaining bad. It is the expense of pretty and unusual animation in a waste of shame.
So then I wanted to renew my faith, and I was like, I remember Miyazaki doing better than this with a frickin' music video, I should go look up 'On Your Mark' again, and then I was like, I can't remember whether I have recommended that.
Sure enough in less than seven minutes it is ten times the movie at least. Warning: brilliant, awesome, beautiful, will jump up and down on your emotions because I don't know which version is real but I know which one I'd like to be and which one I suspect of being. Also, I don't think it's just my headcanon that those guys are together.
On Your Mark. (Link may be perishable.)
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