Monthly Archives: April 2009

dressed as Frida Kahlo

Posted on April 27, 2009 by bob | Leave a comment

Virginia works on her talk on Frida which she gave today in Dick Hunnewell’s MesoAmerican Art history class.

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Posted in Books, Current Affairs, history, Painting, Photos

Tagged Frida Kahlo

Dyer, Death, Life, Light

Posted on April 24, 2009 by bob | Leave a comment

Friday afternoon—gorgeous warm day, bright as possible.

Medieval Forum—lunch with Dick and Manny and Herb—and the 90 or so pilgrims here for the ritual gathering—today celebrating 30 years. They have flown by. Those years. We looked at photos of ourselves.

Just finished Dyer’s Jeff. . . Varanasi. Also wonderful. As shallow and profound, as sumptuous and shimmering, pungent and savory, dirty and delicious as any book on Venice, Death and India could ever hope to be, should ever hope to be. The ending of a favored book always brings that particular joy-sadness unique to the experience of reading favorite books and Dyer gives us the end-song perfect for continuing the dream in the wake and tranquility produced after we have closed the book.

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Posted in Books, Current Affairs, Fiction, history, music

Tagged art, coke, Dyer, Enlightenment, Ganges, illness, India, Jeff, music, sex, Venice, Veranasi, vision

caption this photo—win a trip to Sri Lanka, or somewhere

Posted on April 23, 2009 by bob | Leave a comment

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Posted in history, Travel

Terrible thing to confess

Posted on April 22, 2009 by bob | Leave a comment

but I am allowing Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian to allow me to not watch “Doubt”. I showed the opening ten minutes of it to a class today for a competition among three movies. Bradshaw confirms my gut feeling—

” … and from the way it’s shot, Doubt looks like some sort of upscale horror film, complete with crows and swirling leaves like The Omen. It’s actually a terminally muddled piece of star-studded Oscar-bait. Doubt looks like a chuckle-headed, 21st-century PC fantasy about how conservative Catholic authority behaved in the early 1960s, anachronistically recasting its severity in such a way as to be sympathetic to modern taste. If a young nun really had informed on a priest, then ferocious elders like Sister Aloysius would surely have sided with that priest – and it would be the young nun who would have suffered, probably packed off to some institution as a delusional hysteric. Streep’s stagey final speech is beyond absurdity. “

And RottenTomatoes gives it a 78. It gives 101 Rekjavik an 89 and Rachel Getting Married (my other choice for the evening) a generous 87 (say my students who didn’t like it so much).

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Posted in Movies

Tagged 101 Rekjavik, Doubt, Guardian, Rachel Getting Married

Dyer on Martin Amis

Posted on April 20, 2009 by bob | Leave a comment

“

dyer said this about him in 2000:

Geoff Dyer Something about Amis invites competitive disparagement as the most appropriate register of admiration. So I think, looking back, I was never more admiring than when I was most disparaging. As a stylist his influence has been so strong that he’s subtly infiltrated the language, animated it, so that anyone writing now is aware of a greater current or charge pulsing through it than there was in the heyday of Graham Greene, say. He domesticated or transformed a voltage that originated in America. This is felt most powerfully in magazine writing. I suspect, in fact, that Amis, more than anyone else, has facilitated the stylistic traffic between magazine- and book-writing. This is not surprising since much of his best writing is found in his journalism. As Lowell said of Mailer, he’s the best journalist in the land.

I’ve never been that impressed by him as a thinker. On the one hand I admire the way he works so hard, but this work all seems to take place at his desk. I don’t get a sense of writing as part of a larger project of developing his inner life, I sense no yearning for enlightenment (he’d probably take that as a compliment), only a drive to keep improving as a writer – and this, for me, inhibits his capacity for doing so. As a result I simply read him; I might have been influenced by him but I’ve not been formed by him the way I have by the writers I love: Auden, Berger, Camus, Rebecca West, Kapuscinksi, people like that.

“

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Posted in Books, Current Affairs, Fiction, history

Tagged Amis, competitive disparagement, Dyer

so much fun—Geoff Dyer

Posted on April 20, 2009 by bob | Leave a comment

Midway into the new book, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. No way to convey how many delicious chuckles the book spreads out before you as you read along. But here is an attempt to excerpt and spread the fun:

Jeff, our slacker, mid-40s, hero is high on bellinis and coke at the Venice Biennale art fair & now that he’s gotten onto a party on a yacht he is in true heaven of cool dudeness I guess—not Dyer’s words those last—

“

The night was thick with heat. Unlike grass, cocaine did not enhance–or even lend itself to–the lyricism of the moment. Still, he was thinking to himself over and over, if this is not my idea of a good time I don’t know what is. I am having an unbelievably fantastic time, he said to himself. I am having the time of my fucking life! The last six or however many hours it was were like a concentrated version of everything he had ever wanted from life. What more could you want? The thing about life is that you just don’t know what’s going to turn up, what’s going to come your way. Christ, he had arrived at the Tom Hanks philosophy of life, part Forrest Gump and part Cast Away. It was exciting, coke, but it didn’t give you much in the way of profound thoughts, he thought. The thing about Tom Hanks was that all his films, not all of them but the quintessential ones, were about wanting to get back home. Saving Private Ryan, Cast Away and–this was the one that elevated the point to the level of universal truth–Apollo 13. And that was their shortcoming, because life, at its best, was about wanting never to go home, even if that meant spinning off into outer space.

“

(127)

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Posted in Books, Current Affairs, Fiction, Movies, Travel

Tagged Apollo 13, bellinis, Biennale, Cast Away, coke, Forrest Gump, Geoff Dyer, laughter, slackers, Tom Hanks, Venice, yacht party

Nicole Krauss

Posted on April 18, 2009 by bob | Leave a comment

The History of Love

One of those books I put into the category “Not As Good As All the Raves Would Have It But Really Pretty Good & Better

Than You Thought It Would Be but Not As Good As It Wanted to Be and Should Have Been.” An earlier example was that Spanish novel of a few years back—The Shadow of the Wind.

Another category both books fit–maybe even create–is I did end of really liking it but not exactly for all the reasons everyone else gives. Or not for most of them. But what for is not that clear either, not as clear as why the popular reasons so disappoint.

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Posted in Books, Fiction

Bolaño

Posted on April 18, 2009 by bob | Leave a comment

Just finished his short novel, Amulet. Perhaps it was originally meant to be part of The Savage Detectives, but then as many have suggested, perhaps all of his works fit together loosely as one giant book, apparently as yet completely published in either Spanish or English. I liked Savage when I read it last summer—-and yet not quite enough to tell anyone that Had to read it. I would come closer to doing so with Amulet. I guess because it is short and you get a sense of Bolaño from it and from there you can decide if you want to look further into him. But also because as a complete short vision it works. Poetic, sad, joyful, contradictory, historically resonant, attempting the prophetic or at least attempting to ponder the fate of writing and reading against all the forces out to destroy them, it creates a living person in the voice of Auxilio and in the tales she tells in somewhat hallucinatory fashion (Lacouture) it weaves a tapestry as vibrant and earthy as all the native fabrics of Latin America, from Mexico City to Ushaida.

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Posted in Books, Fiction, history

Easter

Posted on April 12, 2009 by bob | Leave a comment

Today we went up to Mountain View Grand for the buffet. Nothing exceptional about the meal but nice to take the drive and see the great inn again. I had a premonition all yesterday and this morning that we would see someone from Plymouth and sure enough just as we walked into the ballroom there was Scott Coykendall and his family going out. We shook hello and happy easter but didn’t have a chance to talk with Tab and the girls. Our waiter was Sebastian Fuentes from Lima, Peru. We told him we were there ten years ago and he said that’s when he left. He was a student leader at the catholic university and they were protesting policies. Ten of them were arrested after a demonstration and five of his friends he never saw again. His father is military so he was able to get him out of prison pretty soon. But they saw the handwriting on the wall and he left. He loves working up north, had bounced around various cities before that. Has a boy named Kyle. The son and wife are visiting Peru right now–the grandparents. Sebastian is twenty-seven. His wife is from northern NH. He had worked at the Mt Washington for a few years before moving over to the Mountain View. He has never been as far north as the Balsalms up in Colebrook. He thinks it is good that Fujimori is being tried but says the problem is that all of his former administrations are still in power in Peru. And he says the word is now that Venezuela is in terrible shape. Chavez driving it further and further toward the way Cuba went. Cold and windy most of the day—the mountains still beautiful in the light and clouds, even sort of Asian looking at times—snow squalls when we went through the Notch.