Friday Random Ten CLX

August 15th, 2008 / 1 comment

The “Fall? Already?” edition

  1. Virgin Black - [Sombre Romantic #09] I Sleep With The Emperor
  2. Solefald - [Red For Fire: An Icelandic Odyssey Part 1 #03] Where Birds Have Never Been
  3. Nick Cave & Warren Ellis - [The Assassination of Jesse James #07] What Must Be Done
  4. Fiona Apple - [Extraordinary Machine #08] Oh Well
  5. Edward Elgar - [Cello Concerto, Enigma Variations #06] V. R.P.A.
  6. My Dying Bride - [Like Gods Of The Sun #09] For My Fallen Angel
  7. Chicago - [The Box #12] To Be Free-Now More Than Ever
  8. George Gerswin - [Rhapsody in Blue, An American in Paris, Concerto in F #05] III. Allegro agitato
  9. Joy Wants Eternity - [Must You Smash Your Ears Before You Learn To Listen With Your Eyes #05] What Fell Down From The Moon Last Night
  10. Maudlin of the Well - [My Fruit Psychobells... a Seed Combustible #01] Ferocious Weights

The Bellmaker

August 11th, 2008 / 1 comment

See the rest of this year’s listings • What is 52 Books in 52 Weeks?

№55

Title: The Bellmaker [$]
Author: Brian Jacques
Publisher: Philomel
Year: 1995
Pages: 352

It may behoove you to read the previous book in this series, Martin the Warrior

The next book in my continuing re-reading of the Redwall series is The Bellmaker. It’s one of the rarer Redwall books that reuses almost an entire cast of characters from a particular snapshot in the history of Redwall Abbey. In this case, it’s Mariel and Dandin, as well as Joseph the Bellmaker, who originally appeared in Mariel of Redwall.

Brian Jacques • The Bellmaker

The Bellmaker, to me, feels a bit too fragmented: too many underdeveloped storylines and intersecting narratives that don’t meet in any particular interesting ways. I will note that Jacques appeared to experiment with character types much more in this book than he ever did before. For instance, he introduces Blaggut, the first (and possibly only?) sympathetic searat you’ll find in the series. Jacques, criticized for so heavily tying innate character to species, appears to have been so taken with this concept that he devoted a whole book to it1.

Continue reading »

  1. the next book in the series, to be precise: The Outcast of Redwall.[↩]

Friday Random Ten CLIX

August 8th, 2008 / 2 comments

The “Moving my mother back home” edition.

  1. Liquid Tension Experiment - [Liquid Tension Experiment 2 #02] Biaxident
  2. Stars - [In Our Bedroom After The War #08] Barricade
  3. Ihsahn - [The Adversary #02] Called by the fire
  4. Sergei Rachmaninov - [24 Preludes, Sonata No. 2 CD1 #07] Prelude, op.23 no.6 in E flat major
  5. Mojave 3 - [Puzzles Like You #05] Most Days
  6. Jellyfish - [Bellybutton #08] Bedspring Kiss
  7. Van der Graaf Generator - [Vital #01] Ship of Fools
  8. Magyar Posse - [Random Avenger #03] Black Procession
  9. World’s End Girlfriend - [farewell kingdom #01] Yes
  10. Nine Inch Nails - [Purest Feeling #07] Purest Feeling

Guess I have to go to grad school now

August 6th, 2008 / 2 comments

My admissions checklist

I Want to Buy a Vowel

August 5th, 2008 / 1 comment

See the rest of this year’s listings • What is 52 Books in 52 Weeks?

№54

Title: I Want to Buy a Vowel [$]
Author: John Welter
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Year: 1996
Pages: 322

If you’ll recall, I recently reviewed Welter’s Night of the Avenging Blowfish, which was itself a re-review of my original reading in 2006. Welter is a report by trade, or at least he was, since I have no idea what became of him since 1996: he stopped writing books and I can find no information about his whereabouts or fate. He wrote three comic novels, usually a blend of more subtle satire about Life, the Universe and Everything along with witty reparteé that forms the hallmark of a Welter novel.

John Welter • I Want to Buy a Vowel

Though it came out in 1996, the novel seems prescient in its points of thematic intersection: thetl politics of illegal immigration, and the sociology (and politics) of religion. If this hasn’t aged well, nothing has.

The novel’s major plot point (but not protagonist) is Alfredo Santayana, an illegal immigrant from Guatemala who memorizes English phrases from television show, and who tells most Anglos that he meets that he would like to buy a vowel. The plot’s protagonist is Eva Galt, a precocious young girl with a similarly precocious younger sister named Eva, who discovers Alfredo and wants to help him.

Continue reading »

All the Sad Young Literary Men

August 3rd, 2008 / No comments

See the rest of this year’s listings • What is 52 Books in 52 Weeks?

№53

Title: All the Sad Young Literary Men [$]
Author: Keith Gessen
Publisher: Viking Adult
Year: 2008
Pages: 256

Stuff White People Like is the latest satirical meme sweeping the internet (well, the white people, anyway). I say this in part because I hope to make the new book part of my 52-in-52 meme, but also because it ties ever-so-neatly into my review of Keith Gessen’s All the Sad Young Literary Men. Because if you take the basic premise of SWPL—that is, upper-middle class intellectual whites form an incestuous subculture in which we all partake to some degree—and you turn it into a semi-serious pomo book by an upper-middle class intellectual white literary editor, you have All the Sad Literary Young Men.

Keith Gessen • All the Sad Young Literary Men

Here’s my dilemma with the book: I’ll be the first one to delight in pomo literature, and self-referential jokes; I like books that bend the parallel threads of fiction and reality in until their curves finally touch. I get the inherent funniness of Gessen drawing these characters/caricatures which are simultaneously these brutally smart, educated men and also total disasters, personally and professionally. It’s a retooling of the “authenticity” argument of social conservatives—that is, painting pictures of theorists and ivory-tower academicians who are grossly out of step with the rest of the high-functioning planet.

What starts to bug me is that one of Gessen’s characters is Keith Gessen, and is likely about 98% based on the author, and 2% based on whimsy and plot expediency. Of the book’s three “overeducated” characters, Gessen is the one who actually succeeds, even if he doesn’t view it that way. Struggling Romantics, wannabe Zionists, thinly disguised versions of real-life persons (you can draw unequivocal lines to Noam Chomsky, among others): the book is pathetic to read.

Continue reading »

Friday Random Ten CLVIII

August 1st, 2008 / No comments

The “Banshee 1.2!” edition

  1. Efterklang - [Under Giant Trees #03] Hands Playing Butterfly
  2. Neutral Milk Hotel - [Everything Is #04] Tuesday Moon
  3. Mogwai - [Young Team #03] Katrien
  4. Sia - [Some People Have Real Problems #04] You Have Been Loved
  5. Minsk - [The Ritual Fires of Abandonment #02] White wings
  6. Jeff Buckley - [Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk CD2 #08] Demon John
  7. Dälek - [From Filthy Tongue Of Gods And Groits #08] Trampled Brethren
  8. Oasis - [(What's the Story) Morning Glory? #05] Hey Now!
  9. Mouth Of The Architect - [The Ties That Blind #05] At Arms Length
  10. Ben Folds Five - [Ben Folds Five #09] Best Imitation Of Myself

Breaking news: China censors

July 31st, 2008 / No comments

Even when they lied to your face about having clean air and unfettered internet access for journalists, did you really think they were being forthright with you?

The International Olympic Committee failed to press China to allow fully unfettered access to the Internet for the thousands of journalists arriving here to cover the Olympics, despite promising repeatedly that the foreign news media could “report freely” during the Games, Olympic officials acknowledged Wednesday.

Since the Olympic Village press center opened Friday, reporters have been unable to access scores of Web pages — among them those that discuss Tibetan issues, Taiwanese independence, the violent crackdown on the protests in Tiananmen Square and the Web sites of Amnesty International, the BBC’s Chinese-language news, Radio Free Asia and several Hong Kong newspapers known for their freewheeling political discourse.

The restrictions, which closely resemble the blocks that China places on the Internet for its citizens, undermine sweeping claims by Jacques Rogge, the International Olympic Committee president, that China had agreed to provide full Web access for foreign news media during the Games. Mr. Rogge has long argued that one of the main benefits of awarding the Games to Beijing was that the event would make China more open.

Everybody put on your shocked expressions: a country with a well-documented history of human rights abuses and draconian censorship has not ceded those habits at the wishes of the international community. Well, kiss my grits!

Wednesday’s Word XLIX

July 30th, 2008 / 5 comments

dialog / dialogue
n. A conversation or other form of discourse between two or more individuals.

Conor brought this up, and when I looked into it I was too entranced to leave it as a mere comment. His post was to a great degree about the rebirth of dialog[ue] as a verb, which hearkens back to Shakespeare but hasn’t seen any real use in that way until politicians and businessmen, with their penchant for superfluity1, occasional fatuity2, resurrected it. My initial twinge of anal-retentive horror at misuse aside, I am genuinely glad for the reintroduction of the form, though I balk at the fact that we’re left to context from which to derive its part of speech.

But all this is neither here nor there. What inspired my curiosity was the various incarnations of the -log[ue] suffix in the English language, and why it’s inconsistently used.

As Conor so deftly points out, dialog[ue] has nothing to do with the prefix di- meaning two; it’s dia-, which means “across,” and legein, meaning “to speak” (Etymology Dictionary). The confusion here comes on multiple levels: as near as I can tell given my limited understanding of Greek, legein (or perhaps lego) is the infinitive “to speak,” but its present progressive (or whatever Greek equivalent) is -logos (λόγος), which is also the root for the many nouns related to words: speech, oration, discourse, quote, story, study, ratio, word, calculation, and reason.

Continue reading »

  1. from the Latin super and fluere, “to flow”[↩]
  2. from the Latin fatuus, meaning stupid[↩]
« Previous Entries