Francesca Penchant
I loved Basinger's “The Star Machine,” but this book wasn't as gleeful a read.
The inevitable problem with a marriage-movie book is that it studies a pretty conventional subject. It doesn't have the verve of a book about B horror movies, say.
To make matters worse, the Hays code made it impossible for American movies to express anything irreverent or unconventional about marriage between 1934 to 1968. So a lot of the films that Basinger examines have a conservative and narrow worldview.
But with a subtitle like “A History of Marriage in the Movies,” why did she analyze TV shows? Couldn't she have cut 100 pages and eliminated the sections about “I Love Lucy” and “Friday Night Lights”? That would have pizazzed the book up a bit, and made me feel less like I was wading through a pool of easily digested mush.
Merged review:
I loved Basinger's “The Star Machine,” but this book wasn't as gleeful a read.
The inevitable problem with a marriage-movie book is that it studies a pretty conventional subject. It doesn't have the verve of a book about B horror movies, say.
To make matters worse, the Hays code made it impossible for American movies to express anything irreverent or unconventional about marriage between 1934 to 1968. So a lot of the films that Basinger examines have a conservative and narrow worldview.
But with a subtitle like “A History of Marriage in the Movies,” why did she analyze TV shows? Couldn't she have cut 100 pages and eliminated the sections about “I Love Lucy” and “Friday Night Lights”? That would have pizazzed the book up a bit, and made me feel less like I was wading through a pool of easily digested mush.
This book is like those self-help books written by bossy people touting new diets. The author has become a poly expert only because she has talked about it on TV. In the book, she makes rosy generalities about polyamory and sweeping criticisms about monogamy. I recommend the more informative and balanced book “Polyamory in the Twenty-First Century” by Deborah Anapol.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7773079
Here are some of the generalities Simpère makes:
“Polyamory sees sexuality as ... a joyful means of communication, unlike the guilt-provoking prudishness and constraints of standardized sexuality.... In addition, it creates perfect equality between men and women.”
“...when feelings get complicated, poly men and women don't make a scene, but go with the flow with a smile on their lips.”
“Poly men and women shy away from ... labeling, as life has taught them that relationships evolve in cycles, with high and low points....“
In The Lonely City, the author explores artists whose work and/or lives represent urban loneliness—Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Valerie Solanis, David Wojnarowicz—during a lonely time in her life.
The last paragraphs of the book are very moving:
“So much of the pain of loneliness is to do with concealment, with feeling compelled to hide vulnerability, to tuck ugliness away, to cover up scars.... But why hide? What's so shameful about wanting? About desire? ...About experiencing unhappiness? Why this need... to be comfortably sealed inside a unit of two, turning inward from the world at large?
“In her discussion about [her sewn fiber-art piece] ‘Strange Fruit,' Zoe Leonard made a statement about this business of imperfection, about the way life is made up of endless failures of intimacy, endless errors and separations that anyway culminate only with loss. ‘At first, the sewing was a way to think about David [Wojnarowicz]. I'd think about the things I'd like to repair and all the things I'd like to put back together.... After awhile, I began thinking about loss itself.... All the friends I'd lost. All the mistakes I've made. The inevitability of a scarred life.... The attempt to sew it back together. This mending... provided something for me. Maybe just time or the rhythm of sewing. I haven't been able to change anything in the past,... but I've been able to experience my love and loss in a measured and continuous way. To remember.'
“There are so many things that art can't do. It can't bring the dead back to life. It can't mend arguments between friends.... All the same, it does have some extraordinary functions.... It does have a capacity to create intimacy. It does have a way of healing wounds. And better yet, of making it apparent that not all wounds need healing, and not all scars are ugly. If I sound adamant, it's because I'm speaking from personal experience.... The way I recovered a sense of wholeness was not by meeting someone or by falling in love, but rather by handling the things that other people had made, slowly absorbing, by way of this contact, the fact that loneliness, longing does not mean one has failed, but simply that one is alive.
“There is a gentrification that is happening to cities. And there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions, too, with a similarly homogenizing, whitening, deadening effect.... We are fed the notion that all difficult feelings—depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage—are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment. Of doing time... in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails.
“I don't believe the cure for loneliness is meeting someone.... I think it's about two things: Learning how to befriend yourself, and understanding that many of the things that seem to afflict us as individuals are, in fact, a result of larger forces of stigma and exclusion which can and should be resisted. Loneliness is personal and it is also political. Loneliness is collective. It is a city. As to how to inhabit it, there are no rules. And nor is there any need to feel shame. Only to remember that the pursuit of individual happiness does not trump or excuse our obligations to each another. We are in this together, this accumulation of scars,... this physical and temporary heaven that so often takes on the countenance of hell. What matters is kindness. What matters is solidarity. What matters is staying alert, staying open. Because if we know anything from what has gone before us, it is that the time for feeling will not last.”
“I looked at her with love and almost with terror, as I contemplated what I was ready to suffer for her sake.”
This is a beautiful novel. It is a great solace to discover a new, vibrant book from the canon.
This book, published in 1848, makes a perfect companion piece to Émile Zola's Nana (1880). They both depict prostitutes, a popular subject of the French nineteenth-century Naturalists.
There are many similarities between the two novels, but Dumas's depiction of his character is more romantic than Zola's—because he is describing his own real experience of having been “l'amour du coeur” of courtesan Marie Duplessis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Duplessis).
On the other hand, Zolas's character, Nana Coupeau, is a composite of various nineteenth-century demi-mondaines, such as Blanche d'Antigny, Anna Deslions, Delphine de Lizy, and Hortense Schneider.
Zola also drew inspiration for Nana from a Parisian courtesan he met, Valtesse de La Bigne. For example, both Zola's character Nana and Valtesse de La Bigne had elaborately decorated beds. De La Bigne's bed is shown on her wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valtesse_de_La_Bigne.
Valtesse de La Bigne is also the inspiration for Valtesse, a Seattle burlesque troupe (https://www.valtesseproductions.com/), which shows our enduring interest in courtesans.
Pleasant and interesting
I liked Speedboat. I liked the humor and the author's ability to capture a mood, a place, a time. I liked its unique form. But after a while, the narrator felt glib. After a while, the anecdotes felt trivial. So, it was pleasant and likable, but stayed too much on the surface, and I like novels that make me feel more, or at least dazzle me with their authors' cerebrations.
“Great depravity leads to great piety.”
Such an entertaining read. How can you not like this book? Sure, its misogyny is over-the-top, but the male characters don't look so great, either.
Toward the end of the book are the inklings of the excess and “perversion” of the Decadent movement to come in France a few years later:
“Woman dominated him with the jealous tyranny of a God of wrath, terrifying him but granting him moments of joy as keen as spasms, in return for hours of hideous torments, visions of hell and eternal tortures. He stammered out the same despairing prayers as in church, and above all suffered the same fits of humility peculiar to an accursed creature crushed under the mud from which he has sprung.”
(Ugh, don't you hate it when that happens?!)
“Who died and made you yeshmani?”
This is an environmental science-fiction novel about people who travel from one place to the next, using up the resources before moving on. Most of the book is on the quest for their new place. I loved Peter Voeller's world-building ability—for example, he has thought through rituals, social customs, and characters' histories. It's interesting to see the concerns and themes that interest him: the environment, eros, spirituality, and Sanskrit. It's also interesting to see his construction of a world that accepts and assumes multiple kinds of sexuality.
Nathanael West is my new favorite author. He is bleak, deadpan, cynical, and tortured, all refuges of the hyper-sensitive artist. Miss Lonelyhearts isn't as well-crafted as Day of the Locust, but West gets big points in my book for referring to Krafft-Ebing and Huysmans. He also refers to Des Esseintes's memorial to his virility here: “Alas, after much good fun the day comes when you realise that soon you must die. You keep a stiff upper lip and decide to give a last party. You invite all your old mistresses, trainers, artists, and boon companions. The guests are dressed in black,... the table is a coffin carved for you by Eric Gill. You serve caviar and blackberries and liquorice candy and coffee without cream.”
“The imperishable mystery of the masque, attractive and repulsive at the same time, demonstrates the techniques and the key images—and, above all, the imperious need—according to which certain individuals, on appointed days, contrive to make themselves up, to disguise themselves, to change their identity and to cease to be that which they are: in a word, to escape themselves.
“What instincts, what appetites, what hopes, what lusts, what maladies of the soul underlie the gaudily coloured cardboard of false chins and false noses, the horsehair of false beards, the shimmering satin of black masks, the white cloth of hooded cloaks? What intoxication of hashish or morphine, what loss of self, what equivocal and evil adventure, precipitates that lamentable and grotesque procession of dominos and penitents on the days when masked balls are held?”
Decadent writers, such as Jean Lorrain, describe strange and obscure thoughts and feelings that I thought only I had.
This novel is about an escaped mental patient's search for happiness. I met Ballantine at his reading a couple days ago and picked up this book, so reading it felt like I was reading the novel of a friend. I like how his writing feels honest, like he's ripping off his skin for us. And I love the creativity and surprises in his writing, in the words and phrases he chooses. If you like Kesey, Vonnegut, Updike, Pynchon... mixing pop culture and name-brand consumer products with drugs, surreal experiences, and mental illness.... you'll probably like Whirlaway!
“... the next day, we lavished praise on Caligula as a sincere and pious ruler and voted annual sacrifices to his Clemency. What else could we do? He had the Army at his back, and power of life and death over us, and until someone was bold and clever enough to make a successful conspiracy against his life all that we could do was to humour him and hope for the best.”
Nothing changes.
“To have had the happiness of loving a place, and there to have known the joy of living and letting live; to have had such vertigo from a feeling that you could pass your shivers to others, and then dare to return, to hope to revive the dead without thinking for a minute that the irrevocable hour turns everything that we live into dust and nothingness, that the past is a mass grave, and that, outside of our heart, everything down here is a sepulcher!”
This novella is a great find: a perfect example of French Decadent prose. Make sure to read the afterword by translator Eva Richter, whose love and knowledge of Decadent literature revives the heart.
Recommended—Entertaining. Quick read. Really liked the character of Bertha Cool.
I'm craving a big slice of vanilla cake with lots of frosting now. And hotcakes with five pats of butter, and syrup. And coffee with cream—not that watered-down half-and-half, but thick, yellow, whipping cream. And cigarettes. Lots and lots of deep inhales of relaxing cigarettes.
It wasn't very memorable, but great entertainment. Loved this snapshot of 1939.
“Women need to become literary ‘criminals,' break the literary laws and reinvent their own, because the established laws prevent women from presenting the reality of their lives.”
Kathy Acker blows me away. She has influenced many writers, and is among the most important postmodernist authors. Her writing is a mix of obscenity, violence, and literariness.
“In Memoriam to Identity” (1990) is inspired by the writings and lives of Rimbaud and Faulkner; in one passage, she rewrites Faulkner's “The Story of Temple Drake;” in another, she retells the relationship between Rimbaud and Verlaine.
Her writing is challenging. She ignores rules of story, grammar, punctuation, and good manners. It is immediate, as if she wrote in an automatic way, spewing out thoughts, obscenities, ideas, scenes, memories, knowledge, nonsense. Here's a passage from “In Memoriam to Identity:”
**“R[imbaud] wrote Delahaye about all that had happened to him and what he, R, wanted:My friend, You're eating white flour and mud in your pigsty. I don't miss Charleville. I don't miss being a bored pig where the sun dries up all brains but sloth. Your brains or feelings're being dried up: dead pig Delahaye. Emotions are the movers of this world. Me: I'm thirsty. What I'm thirsty for—whom I'm thirsty for—I can't get so I drink poisons. I've got to free myself. From what? Pain? Oh—for more poisons. Maybe more poisons'll come and I'll go so far, I'll emerge. Something is trying to emerge from this mess. I don't know how.**
Acker used literature to rebel against everything. She wrote, “Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified.”
Entertaining, light, funny. Quick listen. Isherwood is a fine author capturing a moment in the English film industry of the 1930s.
As a classic film fan, I loved the inside jokes. Example: “...I've seen the Russian film. It is the classic sex triangle between a girl with thick legs, a boy, and a tractor.”
Sped through this Hollywood Babylonia about Barbara Payton, a talented actress whose need for self destruction was stronger than her need to act. Payton, through ghost writer Leo Guild, describes her tragic life with such campy relish that it becomes entertaining and funny. Formative moments in Payton's childhood, when she first learned to provide favors to boys, and later men, lead to her ultimate fall into prostitution. If you like this book, I recommend Hedy Lamarr's “Ecstacy and Me,” which Guild also ghost wrote.
I loved the thorough research and classic-film details of this meticulously crafted biography about Mary Astor's “mother-love sacrifice:” her embarking on a custody battle with her ex-husband, who threatened to expose her diary. Here's a quote from the book that explains the import of Astor's diary extracts that were published in the 1930s: “Although the writing ... was ... ‘an over-emotional account of a romantic interlude,' never had so frank a document concerning a Hollywood personality's amorous adventures been made public. Astor spoke offhandedly about open marriages and extramarital affairs, presenting a woman who lived far outside the social norms of American morality. Thus, those diary extracts made for extremely steamy reading.” Egan is evenhanded and understanding throughout. And at the end of the book, after Astor had been through many, many difficulties and her film career was played out, I was stunned to learn that she was only 46 years old. An extraordinary woman.
Helpful guide about learning to make your stories more accessible. But, I got exasperated with the conventional scenes that she uses as examples.
I would have liked more examples from classic literature, instead of popular movies. For example, if you're not a huge fan of action movies, when she says something like, “Die Hard is the perfect story,” it's going to be perplexing.
Also, she gives short shrift to avant-garde literature by saying that people only read it to feel smart. I get really excited when an author challenges literary conventions, so I would've liked it if she hadn't dismissed us like that.