Category Archives: Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009)

[Thursday 3pm #37] The Last Thursday 3pm Ever: A Serious Man

17 Thursday Dec 2009

Posted by in film review, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009)

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

A late addition to my list of favourite films of the noughties: the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man, still in cinemas. It’s a brilliant dark comedy about suffering, God and the meaning of life.

Set amongst a suburban mid-Western Jewish community in 1970, Larry Gopnik is a physics professor whose life suddenly unravels. His wife announces she is leaving him for a nauseating positive thinker, Sy, and forces him to move into a motel with his troubled brother. As things get worse and worse, he tries to make sense of it, consulting all three rabbis at his synagogue. Their answers to his questions suggest religion has no satisfactory answers to suffering.

Part of the genius is in the inventive, well observed interactions between characters, each of them a clever slightly cariactured distillation of human behaviour. The scenes with Larry’s redneck neighbour who is stealing a strip of Larry’s land are hilarious, as are those with the Korean student trying to bribe Larry. Perhaps best of all are the three rabbis, by turns a nervous and over-enthusiastic young rabbi; a middle-aged rabbi lacking conviction and satisfied living with ‘the mystery’ (‘Helping people? Well, that can’t hurt.’) and the ancient rabbi, lost in deep meditation, perhaps senile.

A Serious Man asks big questions without offering any answers, and that’s perhaps the strongest point of comparison to the Book of Job, which doesn’t offer too many answers either. (“I’m God and you’re not, so don’t complain,” is Job’s message; the message of A Serious Man is something like “suffering happens, you may find a pattern in it or you may not; depends on how you look at it.”)

There are few more serious or wittier films that I’ve ever seen. That said, a lot of people on the imdb.com board hated it, so you might be very disappointed. It’s one for fans of Synecdoche, New York and The Man Who Wasn’t There.

* I’m working on Thursdays next year, which means the end of Thursdays 3pm. Thanks for listening. It’s been a good project to keep these posts coming. Sometimes it’s felt like a chore, but other times it’s brought out new thoughts in me. I’m going to keep blogging and I may even start a Friday or Monday regular post.

[Thursday 3pm #36] By the orange trees

10 Thursday Dec 2009

Posted by in autobiographical, books, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009)

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

So I missed a week and no-one commented. That’s a relief, in one sense. Last Thursday I was camping in the bush, a long way from a computer.

It was a semi-cleared area near Jarrahdale, and I pitched my tent near a row of four old orange trees. Animals – kangaroos, is my guess – had stripped all the oranges on the lower branches, but there were plenty higher up, slightly sour with hard to peel skin. Further over was a tall oak tree. Near my tent were pieces of an old china plate and broken bottles.

I tried to picture the house which must have stood there. There should be monuments in places like this. To think people might have lived whole lives in that space, and no-one even knows today.  Our ancestors are strangers who leave some traces, a mystery to us.

While sitting under the shade of a gum tree on Thursday afternoon, I finished Anne Fadiman’s excellent collection of personal bibliographic essays, Ex-Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader.  These are the kind of essays I aspire to in this blog. She writes about the experience of ‘marrying’ her book collection with her husband’s and the challenges of agreeing on ways to arrange books. She explores the ins and outs of annotating – or not annotating – books. (I am a lead pencil annotater. I have sympathy with people who consider it desecration.)

[Thursday 3pm #35] Nathan’s Top 30 Films of the Noughties

26 Thursday Nov 2009

Posted by in film review, lists, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009)

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, ,

1. American Beauty (2000)
I need to watch this film again (I saw it four or five times early in the decade) and see if it still has the hold over me it had then. It is, by turns, a beautiful and savage look at suburban life.

2. The Science of Sleep (2007)
A film with the atmosphere of a dream in the best possible sense; Stephane pursues his neighbour Stephanie and his artistic ambition in a world with all the distortions and twists of dreams.

3. The Virgin Suicides (2000)
I love this film’s evocation of the 1970s and of adolescence. It is a film of rare beauty, humour and drama.

4. Synecdoche (2009)
A sad film about death and art, and a play which consumes the world.

4a. LATE ADDITION : A Serious Man (2009)
A comic film about suffering and the meaning of life, sharply witty.

5. I’m Not There (2007)
The lives of Bob Dylan told in myth; strange and wonderful.

6. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Would you erase all the memories of a failed romance if you could? Crazy and beautiful at the same time.

7. Me, you and everyone we know (2005)
A film about awkward people in love; quirky and warm with splendid dialogue.

8. Donnie Darko (2001)
I don’t pretend to understand it, but it’s a startling, inspiring journey with Donnie, an authentic and brave teenager.

9. Amazing Grace (2007)
The most mainstream of the films on this list, an inspiring biopic of William Wilberforce’s fight against slavery.

10. Amelie (2001)
Every second person’s favourite film is genuinely brilliant, a whimsical, exploration of the meaning of life.

11. Adaptation (2002)
Charlie Kaufman for the third time in this list; he was meant to adapt The Orchid Thief, a conventional non-fiction narrative, but instead he wrote a script about the whole idea of ‘adaptation’ and a writer battling to write the script for The Orchid Thief.

12. Atonement (2007)
A classy adaptation of one of my favourite books, retaining much of the tragedy and drama; also visually stunning.

13. 24 Hour Party People (2002)
Director Michael Winterbottom has crafted a brilliant postmodern biopic of Tony Wilson and his involvement with Joy Division, New Order, The Happy Mondays.

14. The Quiet American (2002)
An excellent adaptation of the Graham Greene novel; a sombre exploration of colonialism and personal ethics.

15. The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)
The Coen brothers’ film noir about a barber who gets himself in over his head. The first time I watched, it was an all time favourite, but it had less impact on repeat viewings.

16. Death at a Funeral (2007)
The funniest film I saw all decade.

17. Slumdog Millionaire (2008)
As good as the hype – an energetic, pulsing thriller-drama.

18. Y Tu Mama Tambien (2001)
Two teenage boys go on a holiday with a married woman.

19. Palindromes (2004)
An awkwardly funny and disturbing film about abortion and paedophilia; I don’t think I’m brave enough to watch it again.

20. Memento (2000)
A crime film about a man with no short term memory, with a very effective narrative innovation.

21. Storytelling (2001)
I love the creative writing class scenes early in this film; a shocking and funny film about ‘fiction’ and ‘nonfiction’ from Todd Solondz (Palindromes).

22. Pan’s Labrinyth (2006)
A violent fable set in wartime Italy.

23. Match Point (2005)
The only Woody Allen film of the decade I liked, and I speak as a fan; a kind of Dostoveskian drama.

24. As It Is In Heaven (2004)
A heartwarming Swedish film about a composer who goes back to his small home town; I saw it in a tiny seaside cinema in NZ on our honeymoon.

25. Team America (2004)
A puerile, hilarious satire on the international politics of the decade from the South Park creators.

26. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
A kind of J.D. Salingeresque look at a crazy family from Wes Anderson.

27. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007)
A nasty thriller/ family drama brilliantly executed by octogenarian director Sydney Lumet; you’d need to be in the right mood to enjoy this.

28. Mullholland Dr (2001)
I don’t know what to think of David Lynch’s nightmares; there was a time I lived by them.

29. He Died With A Felafel In His Hand (2001)
A funny Australian look at share houses.

30. The Dark Knight (2008)
Batman as he should be; epic filmmaking at its best.
A strong contender for the number one place – Fight Club – was released in November 1999, just outside the decade. It was still playing at cinemas well into 2000 when I finally saw it. American Beauty was released in 1999 in the USA, but not until January 2000 in Australia. Some arbitrary decisions, then.

[Thursday 3pm #34] Paul Auster’s Invisible : a review

19 Thursday Nov 2009

Posted by in book review, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009)

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

,

It’s been a prolific decade for my favourite author, Paul Auster –he has just published his sixth novel of the noughties. As prolific as he’s been, he’s also published some of his weakest works –I don’t care for the crowd-pleasing Brooklyn Follies nor Travels in the Scriptorium, although at least they’re better than Timbuktu, his late nineties novel told through the eyes of a dog. I rate his new novel, Invisible, the second best of the six of the decade, after The Book of Illusions. It is the most typical of his whole career, with many of his recurring elements appearing – a mysterious stranger, a change of fortune, a struggling poet translating French texts, a random act of violence, and a framed narrative.

As almost always happens in Auster’s novels, the protagonist is a male New Yorker born in 1947 and a student at Columbia. Adam Walker is a college student and aspiring poet and the novel is about the defining year of his life, 1967.

Adam meets a mysterious stranger at a party – Rudolf Born – who makes him an offer that will change his life; Born will pay Adam to edit a literary magazine. Born is called away on business, and Adam is seduced by Born’s girlfriend, Margot. Yet it isn’t this that causes a rift between them, but Born’s violent stabbing of a mugger. Adam spends much of the rest of the novel hoping to see justice served on Born for the murder.

In between, he has lots of sex with his sister, and even though there’s been hints of incest in Auster’s work before (In The Country of Last Things, The Red Notebook, from memory) it is the sexual explicitness of this novel that is its most atypical feature. Usually Auster summarizes sex without going into much detail at all, but this time he is more anatomical.

Complicating the story is a complicated framing device. The first part about Walker meeting Born and things going wrong, is revealed to be the first chapter of a manuscript Walker has written in the present day and sent to his friend Jim, a famous writer. Walker is terminally ill and is trying to finish the memoir before he dies. (A situation which recalls Thomas Effing telling Fogg his life story in Moon Palace for his obituary, and Hector Mann bringing Zimmer to his ranch to see his secret films before he dies in The Book of Illusions.)  After Jim’s framing, the second part of the novel is told in second person to overcome Walker’s writer’s block. The third part of the novel is filled out by Jim from Walker’s rough notes. As Walker’s narrative ends, Jim does some detective work, tracking down the people involved and trying to solve some of the mysteries.

It is a compulsively readable story, fascinating and littered with insights into the way we make meaning of life and how we decide what to do with ourselves. In her review, Lionel Shriver contended that there is nothing to take away from the book, that it’s like a glass of lemonade. I think part of what she is noticing and what disappoints her is an insistence by Auster that his narratives attempt to mimic some of the randomness of life, with both its coincidence and its failure to resolve. I read a reviewer once describe Auster’s work as a handful of smooth stones rubbing against each other, but not yielding anything as simple as meaning.

Perhaps Auster has had a bad influence on me over the last nine years that I’ve been reading him. Particularly in my first two novels and in an abandoned novel or two, I attempted to emulate his randomness, thinking I could just add it as one more element in a palimpsest of all my favourite writers – a bit of Auster’s randomness, a bit of Joyce’s stream of consciousness, a bit of Dick’s madness – in the one narrative. Not possible. The whole narrative world has to be driven by randomness, if one wants to write about the music of chance.

[Thursday 3pm #33] Extract from the Library of Babel III

12 Thursday Nov 2009

Posted by in libraries, reading, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009)

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

As he looked for books to reshelve, he would walk amongst the readers bent over their desks and imagine he could hear the murmur of their thoughts. All those words going through people’s heads, making some connection, some act of communication between writer and reader, sometimes across gaps of centuries. It was miraculous. With his thoughts on this, the reading area hummed and shouted with the glory of the silent communion.

All these people embarked on their own quests, their own projects, an aim, a question, a desire to read they kept inside their head. The library did not ask them why they came. They just came, walking in here to take certain books off the shelves and read.

Silent exterior, noisy interior. A beautiful place, the library.

[Thursday 3pm #31] The Towering Inferno

29 Thursday Oct 2009

Posted by in film review, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009)

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

,

towering_inferno

On the night of the opening of the world’s tallest skyscraper – San Francisco’s elite all on the top floor at the party – a fire breaks out because of the shortcuts taken in the wiring. The principled architect (Paul Newman) and the brave fire chief (Steve McQueen) fight to get everyone out alive. It’s an all star-cast blockbuster from 1974, and it runs a marathonic 160 minutes or so.

The first time I started watching The Towering Inferno, I was about eleven and staying at my grandparents’ house. I used to love sleeping in their spare room, with the foldout couch and the television. (It seemed the ultimate decadence, to have a television in one’s room.) The movie was on commerical television and I came in late; one of the first things I saw was a couple catching on fire and falling through a window sixty floors up. I was hooked. For the next couple of hours, I fought against tiredness as the increasing commercials bloated its length. I didn’t make it through. I had to sleep.

I got it out on video in 2003, when I was living in the decaying sharehouse with my brother. About halfway through, the dodgy VCR I had bought secondhand (what was I thinking?) snared the tape and actually somehow recorded SBS on about thirty seconds worth, even though the plugs weren’t covered. The videostore didn’t charge me, which was kind of them (already videos were on their way out) but I still didn’t get to see the rest of it.

Then, last weekend my wife really wanted to see it, because it was about buildings and she works these days with buildings. People at work told her it was the film every project manager had to see. This time – in two installments – I watched the entire film.

There is something comforting for me to enter the seventies, this world that existed just before I was born. The Towering Inferno has just about every star of its time in it; it’s sad to think of their fates 35 years later. Steve McQueen died in 1980 – what a shock that would have been, the action hero of his time; he seems indestructible as the fire chief in this film. The other lead, Paul Newman, died a reasonably old man this year. (How can the action star of a blockbuster turn into ‘a reasonably old man’?) Fred Astaire, dead of course; that woman who we thought was Elizabeth Taylor is actually Jennifer Jones, but she’s not dead, just 90 and not so remembered. Faye Dunaway – her beauty in this film looks like it will last forever, but she’s now in her sixties. Then there’s O.J. Simpson, who doesn’t appear in so many films these days. Richard Chamberlain? I remember him best as the Indiana Jones rip-off (or vice-versa, given how old the books are), Alan Quartermain, in the 1980s; his star doesn’t shine brightly these days either.

I love the blinking lights of the computer; the wood panelling of the walls; the curious manner men speak to women – always trying to come up with a fresh line, as if that was the way to a woman’s heart. I love the strange sort of indolence that hangs over the scenes early in the film, the spacious sets they made, which just don’t ring true with what the interior of houses or hotels look like, not even in films today; the massive headphone radio the kid has over his ears so that he can’t hear what his mum is saying – ‘kids and their gadgets these days!’. I love the painted film posters they used to do.

I imagined I was watching the film at the drive-in, taking it seriously (not that I’m taking it unseriously, but I’m not watching it as it was made, I’m not watching it as a blockbuster, as the latest, greatest thing, which is what it is always meant to be), I watched it like it was new, and in those moments I was time travelling.

[Thursday 3pm #30] Tom attempts to throw some books out

22 Thursday Oct 2009

Posted by in books, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009)

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Extract #2 from novel-in-progress The Library of Babel

Over a rainy spring week, they packed their belongings in boxes. They had too much stuff; they had to keep going back for more boxes. There were so many things Tom only looked at each time he moved. He wondered if he should accept this or whether he should throw them out. Maybe it was what made moving worthwhile – it forced him to revisit objects, to reconnect with his past and the things he’d decided were worth keeping.

Then, sorting through the computer leads, half dead batteries, assorted pencil tins given as gifts by his mum which had accumulated in drawers, he revised his thinking. There were many things he hadn’t decided were worth keeping; they had just clung on to him like prickles and he had failed to throw them out, or he had some sense that they might be needed.

He got to the books which had outgrown his shelves and were doublestacked in places. The Sinclair Morgan Library’s problem in miniature. He put six in a pile to take to the opshop, four of them which he’d failed to read in ten years of having them and two which he’d read and hadn’t loved. He couldn’t find a single other book amongst his thousand that he was prepared to part with.

He began packing his thousand books in cardboard boxes. He was thinking about what qualified a book for keeping. If it was a favourite book, that obviously needed keeping. But also if it had lots of annotations – ticks on favourite passages, underlinings, comments, dates he started different chapters – those books qualified for keeping too, even if they weren’t favourites. Those books retained a record of the hours spent on them. He liked to think that reading back over the annotations enabled him to recall the reading experience, reanimating the time he had put into the book.

And then there were books that he thought he’d be going back to, reference books, difficult books which needed re-reading, classic books he needed to check things in or to have on his shelf for appearance’s sake. Maybe he was being too harsh on himself; it wasn’t that many people ever inspected his shelves. It was more likely it was for his own self-esteem; it told him that he was capable of reading Finnegan’s Wake and Moby Dick – one day.

Anita caught him in the lounge spending too long on the books and said, ‘Do you want me to do this for you?’

‘No,’ he said. She used to like reading till she married him. But she told him that his obsession with books had put her off them. As a kind of conscientious objection to his preoccupation, she was reading very little these days. It wasn’t working; he read as much as ever, but he felt lonely that he couldn’t talk books with her as much as they had when they were dating.

When he finally finished packing the books, pin and needles ran through his legs from crouching down so long. He picked up the pile of six discards to put them in a plastic bag, only to reconsider three, which he added to the last box. It barely seemed worth taking the three other books to the opshop, but he needed to make some gesture toward deaccumulation.

[Thursday 3pm #29] Janet Hobhouse and The Furies

15 Thursday Oct 2009

Posted by in book review, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009)

≈ 1 Comment

Janet Hobhouse died of ovarian cancer in 1991 in her forties. She didn’t finish editing The Furies, but it’s seen as her greatest work.  It deserves to be read.

Reviewers invariably treat it as autobiography rather than the novel it was published as, and it certainly has the feel of autobiography. The trajectory of the narrative has all the repetitiousness and random intrusions of life itself. It starts before the narrator is born, with the tangle of family that led to her:

That my mother, who viewed herself as as related to very few other beings in the universe, should have descended in a mere three generations from this world of wealth and kindness, this reliable multiplicity of connected others, this cohabitation of cousins, aunts, servants etc., says something about the speed of American life in this century, which cannot only provide a solitary immigrant with the means to create, in a matter of decades, a secure and well-populated dynasty, but can also, and at the same rate, take all these steps in reverse, reducing, as in our case, a huge, prosperous, civically active and internationally connected clan to a mere handful of desperate solitaries, operating like ball-bearings in outer space.

The book follows the narrator through childhood and adulthood, to the horror of her mother’s suicide and the sudden plunge into cancer. A postscript of apparent recovery; we know this wasn’t to last. It’s a book and a life with many tragedies. I felt the same as one reviewer who said to read this book is to get to know Janet Hobhouse, only to lose her. She seems like someone who would have been worth knowing.

Her prose has an unusual quality: confessional, honest without a hint of apology. Her story is compelling, giving the feel of life without even zooming in on many scenes, but capturing the flow of it.

(PS: Couldn’t help being delighted by the similarity of title and name to my novel. Hobhouse/Hobby – The Furies/ The Fur.)

[Thursday 3pm #28] The Hoarding Recluses: A Review of E.L. Doctorow’s “Homer and Langley”

08 Thursday Oct 2009

Posted by in book review, books, history, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009)

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, ,

CollyerHomer and Langley Collyer were two hoarding recluses who suffered notorious celebrity, at least in New York City, in the 1940s as they fought against the power company, the bank, and the city council. They lived in a large house inherited from their parents and filled it with everything they could get their hands on. Homer was blind; Langley saved years of newspapers in massive piles (‘like cotton bales’ Doctorow imagines) in case Homer ever got his sight back and wanted to catch up on the news. By the end, the paranoid brothers had set traps around the house and could barely move through the narrow passageways between junk. They died within days of each other in 1947 and compulsive hoarding is named after them – Collyer Syndrome. According to Wikipedia, 103 tonnes of rubbish was removed from their house:

Items removed from the house included baby carriages, a doll carriage, rusted bicycles, old food, potato peelers, a collection of guns, glass chandeliers, bowling balls, camera equipment, the folding top of a horse-drawn carriage, a sawhorse, three dressmaking dummies, painted portraits, pinup girl photos, plaster busts, Mrs. Collyer’s hope chests, rusty bed springs, the kerosene stove, a child’s chair (the brothers were lifelong bachelors and childless), more than 25,000 books (including thousands about medicine and engineering and more than 2,500 on law), human organs pickled in jars, eight live cats, the chassis of the old Model T Langley had been tinkering with, tapestries, hundreds of yards of unused silks and fabric, clocks, fourteen pianos (both grand and upright), a clavichord, two organs, banjos, violins, bugles, accordions, a gramophone and records, and countless bundles of newspapers and magazines, some of them decades old.

From such promising source material in the hands of a masterful novelist, Homer & Langley disappointed me. It feels like a novel which never takes off. Narrated by Homer, it is an episodic account of his life from childhood to the late 1970s (Doctorow has the brothers live on several decades longer than they did in real life). A gangster and a group of hippies stay with the brothers at different times, and many others come into their lives for a little time only to leave again. Doctorow doesn’t stay with any of these characters long enough for their interactions with the Collyers to take on enough significance.

The other problem is the first person narration. It doesn’t suit the story Doctorow is telling. We need a narrator who can see the significance and full eccentricity of the Collyers, rather than one to whom their life is insignificant. We need fresh eyes – and Homer has no sight at all – to describe the wonders of the hoarded house.

Perhaps the conflict with the power company and banks would have been more compelling if there was a character representing one of them, an antagonist in ongoing conflict with the Collyers, instead of a couple of faceless stand-offs at the front door.

The charms of this novel are in Homer’s philosophy of the world and his mad projects.

He wanted to fix American life finally in one edition, what he called Collyer’s eternally current dateless newspaper, the only newspaper anyone would ever need. For five cents, Langley said, the reader will have a portrait in newsprint of our life on earth. The stories will not have overly particular details as you find in ordinary daily rags, because the real news here is of the Universal Forms of which any particular detail would be only an example. The reader will always be up to date, and au courant with what is going on. He will be assured that he reads the indispensable truths of the day including that of his own impending death, which will be dutifully recorded as a number in the blank box on the last page under the heading Obituaries. (p.49)

At moments like these, the novel brings to mind Paul Auster and the fascinating life projects of his characters.

I could find only one non-fiction book written about the Collyers; it’s called Ghosty men : the strange but true story of the Collyer brothers by Franz Lidz.

[Thursday 3pm #27] Quotes From The Library At Night

01 Thursday Oct 2009

Posted by in books, libraries, quotes, reading, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009)

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Library-at-NightAlberto Manguel’s The Library At Night examines books, reading and the library through a series of themes. It’s the sort of book where so much of it feels quotable that one is tempted to give up: the book resists being reduced, highlighted. Still, here’s some quotes I have pulled from it:

A library is an ever-growing entity; it multiplies seemingly unaided, it reproduces itself by purchase, theft, borrowings, gifts, by suggesting gaps through association, by demanding completion of sorts. (56)

During the day, I write, browse, rearrange books, put away my new acquisitions, reshuffle sections for the sake of space. Newcomers are made welcome after a period of inspection. If the book is second-hand, I leave all its markings intact, the spoor of previous readers, fellow-travellers who have recorded their passage by means of scribbled comments, a name on the fly-leaf, a bus ticket to mark a certain page. Old or new, the only sign I always try to rid my books of (usually with little success) is the price-sticker that malignant booksellers attach to the backs. These evil white scabs rip off with difficulty, leaving leprous wounds and traces of slime to which adhere the dust and fluff of ages, making me wish for a special gummy hell to which the inventor of these stickers would be condemned. (17)

And yet, however careful our reading, remembered texts often undergo curious changes; they fragment, shrivel up or grow unpredictably long. In my mental library, The Tempest is reduced to a few immortal lines, while a brief novel such as Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo occupies my entire Mexican imaginary landscape. A couple of sentences by George Orwell in the essay “Shooting an Elephant” expand in my memory to several pages of description and reflection that I think I can actually see in my mind, printed on the page; of the lengthy medieval romance The Devoured Heart, all I can remember is the title. (197)