Month / December 2003

by DrMabuse

Quickies

The Guardian has an excerpt of Carol Shield’s unfinished novel, Segue, which she was working on at the time of her death.

Terry Gross interviews Stephen King. Hearing Terry Gross describe the beginning of Gerald’s Game in such clinical intellectual terms (apparently, without irony) is pretty hilarious, as are the additional queries that jump from third-person to first-person (“Let’s get Stephen King to the kind of gore and terror and suspense that you create.”). But the second interview has King talking about his accident.

The Globe and Mail features a New Year’s-themed article on the description of drinking in literature that’s also unintentioanlly funny. Really, I couldn’t make this stuff up: “You can, with a little licence, trace an arc in 20th-century drinking literature that follows the act of drinking itself. In Hemingway’s work, the drinking was never-ending, and often celebratory when it wasn’t the weary duty of the lost generation. Hangovers were left largely undescribed, something that could be walked off in the clear air of the Pyrenees, or washed off in a fine and true Michigan trout stream.”

More fun from J.M. Coetzee in the latest NYRoB.

Speculation in the Age on 2004’s Australian heavy-hitters.

Tony Kushner gushes over Eugene O’Neill.

Biggest surprise: USA Today names both Living History and The Five People You Meet in Heaven as worst books of 2003.

Stavros has a translation of the Lost in Translation commercial scene that reveals (no surprise) remarkable caricatures.

And about 70 books on Mao were published in China this year. Perhaps because the 110th anniversary of Mao’s birth was yesterday.

by DrMabuse

Report

The streets remain quiet, even after Xmas has come and gone. Those who remain hide behind locked doors. But some can be found on buses or in bars, reclining in cafes, quietly socializing on public steps, or catching up on movies, alone or with companions. The sun peaks above three-story Victorian edifices, but it gets very cold, California cold, at night. It is a San Francisco that resembles 1970s cinematic imagery: Bullitt, Dirty Harry, The Conversation. Before it was impossible to find a parking spot. Back in the days when an apartment was affordable. Before major events brought points of convergance and people flooded through the makeshift turnstiles when the cornets and drum machines let loose. Those who remain are silent about their private quests, but are congenial. They volunteer for worthy causes. They wish total strangers, “Happy holidays.” They look out for each other. They commit time without burdens, fueled by a laconic spirit of giving, unencumbered by familial artifices, their smiles resisting bourgeois falsehoods against Pottery Barn splendor. They are the true souls of the City.

There was a reason why so many buildings eschewed Xmas lights, even in the affluent pockets of Lake Street. The residents within didn’t expect to stick around.

But when the remaining two-thirds of the population return from their holiday getaways, replete with booty and fruitcakes, the streets will flood with people again. The mad rush, the pitter-patter of cell phones, the trundling streetcars snailing beneath Market Street at rush hour, the chaotic dichotomy of whether to stick around or extirpate roots to head to another town that will advance a career. All will return. Ineluctable regularities. The anguished groupings.

For now, peace on earth truly rules in the air. But perhaps it’s just me.

by DrMabuse

Can They Sink Any Lower?

Melissa Panarello’s One Hundred Strokes of the Hairbrush Before Going to Sleep, the latest “sexually frank memoir,” is different from the usual memoirs, but only in the sense that Larry Clark’s Kids is an artier, more teen-centric approach to the oeuvre of Zalman King. As the Times reports (user: dr_mabuse, pw: mabuse), “The title of the book refers to a kind of purging ritual that the book’s narrator, also named Melissa, performs after she is prodded by one of her sexual partners into having sex with him and four other men at the same time. That happens on her 16th birthday.”

Indeed. Personally, I’m waiting for Three Thousand Ice Cream Cones Against His Left Testicle Before the Horse Sodomized My Sister, the frank memoir written by an eight year old incest survivor who, like Panarello, smokes cigars, but only Cubans.

Meanwhile, the real criminals can be found in Iowa, where a woman has pled not guilty to stealing 450 library books. If she’s guilty, the funny thing here is the lack of subtlety. 117 hardcover cookbooks disappeared gradually over a short period. If you’re going to do something as ignoble as steal from the library, shouldn’t you broaden your interests just a tad?