Return of the Book List: It’s Been a Month

Books self is interested in reading after perusing the Sept. 8, 2008 issue of The New Yorker (along with first lines of the short reviews):

From the “Briefly Noted” section

• David Ebershoff’s novel, The 19th Wife

This ambitious third novel tells two parallel stories of polygamy. The first recounts Brigham Young’s expulsion of one of his wives, Ann Eliza, from the Mormon Church; the second is a modern-day murder mystery set in a polygamous compound in Utah.

• Xiaolu Guo’s debut novel, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth:

Guo’s debut novel, first published eleven years ago in China and now reworked in English, distills the rush to modernization through the experience of Fenfang, a young peasant who leaves her village for Beijing.

• Sadia Shepard’s memoir, The Girl from Foreign:

In this elegantly crafted memoir, the author sets out to fulfill her grandmother’s dying wish that she learn about her heritage.

• John Mullan’s history, Anonymity:

In England, the use of the word “anonymous” to describe a literary work dates only from the sixteenth century, but by the end of the eighteenth seventy per cent of all novels were published “in secret.”

* * *

From the James Wood review of Marilynne Robinson’s third novel, Home:

• Marilynne Robinson’s second novel, Gilead
• Georges Bernanos’ novel, Diary of a Country Priest

Still Summer

After the Olympics are over, self can catch up on her sleep. But last night was another night of staying up until 2 a.m. and then waking (with noise of Gracie’s piteous whining) at 6:30 a.m.

This morning, hubby left for work two hours later than he normally does, self has no idea why. Mercifully, the conversation last night was all about the Olympics. For self’s thoughts were deep and dark and not fit to air.

Son is gone. Self tried with might and main to get him to see “Tell No One” with her, which is a movie so tense (according to the reviews) that self felt she needed a companion to view it with. “Come on!” she kept telling son. “It’s about Paris. Don’t you want to see a movie about Paris?”

She also tried to get him to see “Man on Wire,” with her, as she felt that son needed to have more “exposure” to really good documentaries.

Stories of Terrorists, Eccentrics and White Knights

Books self is interested in reading after perusing the “Briefly Noted” section of the July 7 & 14, 2008 issue of The New Yorker

André Dubus III’s The Garden of Last Days

In the fictional Puma Club, in Sarasota, Florida, a twenty-six-year-old named Bassam al-Jizani watches Spring, a stripper, undress, and finds his “hatred for these kurfa rising with the knowledge of his own weakness.”

Tim Winton’s Breath

Bruce Pike, a middle-aged paramedic, is adept at distinguishing a suicide from an error in judgement; his own turbulent adolescence accounts for this grim bit of wisdom.

Steven T. Wax’s Kafka Comes to America

Wax, the head of the Oregon Federal Public Defenders’ office, writes that when he volunteered to represent inmates at Guantanamo Bay he didn’t know if his clients “would be terrorists or innocents.” At least one, Adel Hamad, a Sudanese aid worker, seems patently innocent, and Wax also represented Brandon Mayfield, a lawyer whose story — he was falsely linked to a bombing through shoddy fingerprint evidence — illustrates the short path from depriving terrorists of their rights to depriving everyone else.

William Davies King’s Collections of Nothing

King, a professor at Santa Barbara, has spent decades collecting things that nobody else would want: food packages and labels (he has about eighteen thousand), illustrations snipped from old dictionaries (seven thousand), linings of “security” envelopes (eight hundred patterns), “the mute, meager, practically valueless object, like a sea-washed spigot, its mouth stoppered by stone.”

Eureka!

At last, self has found it! The New Yorker review of “Wanted” !

The review was written by Anthony Lane. Following, some choice quotes (The “him” in the first quote refers to the director, guy with the gorgeous name of Timur Bekmambetov):

“Wanted” begins with a flashback, but not for him the gentle glance over the past month, or the childhood cameo; instead, up comes the dauntless title “1000 years ago.” One day, presumably a wet Thursday, a secret society of medieval weavers suddenly decided to create an even more secret society of global assassins. This was done, apparently, to maintain “the balance of the world,” a principle reiterated later in the film, but the episode leaves you panting to know more. Why weavers? Why not potters, or pastry cooks? Until now, I never made the connection between haberdashery and homicide . . .

* * *

Bekmambetov was born in the Soviet Union, and this is his first film set in the United States, but “Wanted” never feels solidly American, and not just because James McAvoy keeps slipping into his native Scottish. He plays Wesley Gibson, who loathes his existence. Given that it involves both accountancy and cuckoldry, he may have a point, and the twitchy Gibson is the heir of a hundred other movie mice, headed by Jack Lemmon in “The Apartment.”

* * *

You don’t tell Angelina Jolie to go away; she tells you. In “Wanted,” she plays Fox, one of the fraternity of killers, who informs Gibson that his father was the doyen of the group, that he was wiped out only the day before by a rogue operator, and that he, weedy Wesley, must learn the ropes and avenge this foul, unnatural crime. Hamlet was under the same obligation, but, lacking access to high-powered rifles and exploding rats, he took longer to finish the job.

* * *

Self will leave the rest of the review to dear blog reader’s imagination. Stay tuned.

Some Thoughts Following the 2008 MTV Movie Awards

Self wants to know:

• How could Matt Damon and xxxx assassin not have won for Best Fight? (Instead there were two young dudes in a movie nobody saw — some boxing movie)
• And how, how could “Transformers” have won Best Movie– @#!??
• And what happened to the collage of movie spoofs that used to open previous award shows?

On the plus side:

• Self got to see Ed Norton (looking slightly stiff, slightly disconcerted, but still very dapper in a spiffy brown suit).
• Self got to see Johnny Depp accept an award — twice!
• Self got to thank her lucky stars that she was not Sarah Jessica Parker, who seems condemned to wearing ridiculous designer shoes (see: foot torture) for the rest of her life. Woman, would it really hurt your image so much to be seen in low-heeled shoes for a change?

Since Robert Downey, Jr.’s “Ironman” was honored with “Best Movie of the Summer So Far”, here’s a quote from The New Yorker review of said movie, which appeared in the May 5, 2008 issue:

In the past twenty years or so, Robert Downey, Jr. has gone through the following stages: a good young actor with a melancholy smile; a good young actor who was also a drug addict, jailbird, and insurance risk; and now, no longer young, an actor who may become the first genuine hipster star since Robert Mitchum and Marlon Brando.

— David Denby

Everything is Hilarious/ Alka/ The Chattahoochee Review

This morning, dear blog readers, self is in such a strange mood that she finds everything hilarious.

She’s looking at an old issue of The New Yorker, and every time she flips a page she finds a new cartoon that sets her off. Self intuits that dear blog readers will find the captions pretty funny, even without the accompanying illustrations. So here they are, the list of captions self finds self-splittingly hilarious, while perusing The New Yorker of 26 June 2006 (Did self ever mention that she was the mother of all pack rats? If you didn’t know this before, dear blog readers, you know it now):

“If you’re happy and you know it, stick with your dosage.”

“I’ll take care of it impersonally.”

“You’re the one who wanted a boyfriend — you play with him.”

“I’m sorry, have you been grimacing long?”

* * * *

In other news, good friend Alka Raghuram has just returned from the Tribeca Film Festival, where her screenplay “The Conqueror,” about a blood feud between two villages which brings tragedy to a young boy’s family, received the L’Oreal Paris Women of Worth award, which is given annually to a female writer/ director participating in the Emerging Narrative section of the Tribeca All Access Film Festival. Go, Alka, go!

* * *

And, in yet other other news, the spring issue of the The Chattahoochee Review is a special issue devoted to five Emerging Writers. These are the five:

Alethea Black
Anne Stameshkin
Yvonne A. Jackson
Murzban Shroff
Yours truly!!!

Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.

Eavesdropping

On TV: Law & Order: CI (not the Vincent D’Onofrio team, the other one)

Female Partner: Where is your husband?

Rich Woman in Evening Gown: He’s doing what he always does. Writing.

(Self: ha ha ha ha ha)

Chris Noth: We need to speak to him.

Rich Woman in Evening Gown: You can’t. He’s writing a series of short stories about the desolate and forlorn.

(Self again: ha ha ha ha ha)

* * * *

For your edification, dear blog readers: fascinating photo captions from the April 21, 2008 issue of The New Yorker:

On p. 110: Eleven billion elevator trips are made each year in New York. Otis Elevator estimates that it transports the equivalent of the world’s population every five days.

On p. 97: SHOWCASE “Family Tree” (2000) by Zhang Huan. The artist asked three calligraphers to write on his face for one day.

Stay tuned.

My Dead Chinese Professors: A Dream

My dead Chinese professors sit at the foot of my bed, crying.

What’s the matter? I ask.

Professor Liu says, You will never understand Li Po.

That may be, I say, but I have a son who loves Magic Cards and listening to Christian rock and Keith Urban.

While Chinese offered me nothing but books on 18th century market systems and tortuous lessons in calligraphy.

I never could tell if Professor Lyell thought I was good or not. He’d shrug at all my translations, the awkward marks of my pen on the yellow lined paper. Chicken scratch, he was probably thinking. But he never waved his arms and shouted, like some of the other professors did.

You are desecrating the temple of the holy, these others seemed to be saying.

You do not belong here. Begone, rank impostor!

So, why are you at the foot of my bed, I ask? Why don’t you leave? Stand up and walk out of the room?

Then I wake up. I realize I’ve spoken the words in my dream out loud. I feel the echo of my voice, reverberating in that stillness. The stillness of a white and empty room. I get up and descend the stairs. I’m still half-dressed. I go to the kitchen and make myself some coffee.

* * * *

Wherefrom the provenance of such a strange dream, dear blog reader? Self hasn’t a clue. As it turned out, both of self’s professors were rather diminutive in stature (though in person they looked nothing alike, for Prof. Lyell was Irish and had light hair and blue or grey eyes, and Prof. Liu was Chinese and had black hair and black or very dark brown eyes)

Both men did share a rather impish twinkle in their eyes when self visited them in their offices to discuss her papers.

And now self picks up a March issue of The New Yorker and learns that an enterprising Toronto novelist has created a website called

“IdreamofHillaryIdreamofBarack.com”

This is a site where anyone in the world can deposit their subliminal/ subconscious fantasies of the Democratic candidates. And, according to The New Yorker, the Hillary that emerges from the dreams (the collective unconscious, as it were) of people around the world is this:

Hillary “wears bad perfume but good lipstick, has great skin, is often hungry (she likes spare ribs) but has bad table manners, and, when doing the chores (say, cleaning the attic) is fun to be around. She is a dog-lover and an accomplished ice skater.”

Barack, on the other hand, emerges as “a teacher, eight feet tall, with a foul mouth, smoker.” He is “less active — a conduit.”

An example: “I started to write out the letter on the hamburger bun while Obama gave his speech, but with every few strokes the pen would break through the outer surface of the bread into the soft middle.”

A “Saudi woman imagined he was reading a bedtime story to her (classic father-figure role), and a lawyer from Zimbabwe dreamed of being chased by him (the pursuit of justice).”

And a Canadian film critic recalled the image of “Barack eating the votes that had been cast for Hillary like slices of smoked tofu.”

Fascinating, just fascinating.