Chekhov’s Mistess

And if they could just spray a little jasmine around once in a while…

Well, I said I wasn’t going to write anything until September, but no one likes a dial-tone so I thought I might ramble out a few thoughts on the weekend as I work on beefing up the links page here with good literary journals and publishers and my TypePadTips blog where I’ve already dropped in a few thousand words.

The NY Times ran an entirely unexceptional article by Charles Taylor about the atmosphere in book stores these days – cell phones bad, aisle space good, that sort of thing:

All they need to do is keep music to a low volume and limited to appropriate choices. More important, they would have to stand up to their own customers, training clerks to kindly ask people not to block aisles or shelves, to conduct conversations in low tones and to keep cellphone use brief.

Thanks, Mr. Rooney. The guy needs a blog. Here are two opposite opinions on the article.

Otherwise, I couldn’t make it to the premier screening of “As Smart As They Are” about the band One Ring Zero the unofficial McSweeney’s house band, but a friend made it and enjoyed seeing the former storefront that has now been replaced, in a new location, by the Superhero supply store. He reported seeing a few members of the PSLM (Park Slope Literary Mafia) and by all appearances a good time was had by all. See the Peanut Butter No Jelly Productions Website for future screening dates.

I’m also hearing reports of overnight vigils to get David Thayer’s blog listed at the Complete Review’s updated list of litblogs. It’s a small consolation David, but you’re on my short list of blog-reading.

And thanks to everyone who left comments on my “Gone Readn’” post. I’m moody. One of those people was Stuart Greenhouse who just had a 7 lbs 6 oz baby girl and simultaneously, it would appear from the order of his blog posts, birthed a sestina at McSweeney’s. Must have been a long delivery.

Not that I’ve written one, but sestinas are technically very difficult poems. In short, it’s a 39 line poem in which the last words, or teleutons, of the 6 lines in the first stanza are repeated in a specific order throughout the other stanzas with one finally buried in the last line. The difficulty lies, according to Turco, in not being overly obtrusive with the end words. Stuart does a good job with his sestina though, creating balance by emphasizing earlier parts of the line with repetition or alliteration. Turco also says that the form’s origins were in numerology.

And number geeks will appreciate Google’s latest stock offering of 14,159,265 shares. “Add a leading 3 and the numbers are the same as 3.14159265, or Pi – the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle.”

So I can’t decide if Bill Murray is playing the same character in Broken Flowers as in Lost in Translation with early indications from Rushmore. Jarmusch’s film was great though and I’m not complaining about Murray so much as observing, because there’s no fault in his performance.

The backdrop of Broken Flowers is completely non-descript, the places and characters have no identity and Don Johnston’s (“with a t”)memory is vague and as bleak as his future seems to be. As he says in the film, there’s only the present. That present, however, is a study in frustrating ennui and it’s amazing how Jarmusch is not afraid to linger on a scene until you’re ready to cry uncle. It’s a great example of making your point with visual timing.

I don’t think people in general know what to make of it though. I’ve heard some mixed reviews and people in the theater were sometimes laughing at what seemed to me inappropriate times. But maybe it’s me.

As far as Murray goes though, I liked him better in Lost in Translation, although I liked him best guzzling coffee from the pot in Coffee and Cigarettes, but that was a small role. Jeffrey Wright was brilliant as Winston. We saw him as Lincoln in TopDog UnderDog off Broadway a few years back and you really wouldn’t know they were the same actor.

And, speaking of Lost In Translation, my wife took over the Netflix list so we watched In Good Company with Scarlett Johansson and Dennis Quaid. I don’t have anything to say about it.

That’s about it for now. I’m still not writing anything until September. With the Sun King striding nicely into his terrible twos, things are busy around here and even reading is tough.

The snapshot version is this: The photo of the Proust book from my previous post is not actually what I’m reading now, because that was taken while on vacation. I dropped it for the time being, by the way – all the things that I adore about Swann’s Way I either hate in Within a Budding Grove or are absent. Life’s short. I’ll settle into at some point if for only because I know that later volumes are supposed to be every bit as much a masterpiece as the first.

I’ve been reading LBC picks, but shush for now. On the bedstand is a 1933 copy of Young’s The Medici that I picked up used some time ago. The author revels in his subject but hundreds of years of history is daunting and this may end up being a lot more than I wanted to know about this dynasty. As a backup I have Schmidt’s The First Poets: Lives of the Ancient Greek Poets, which I’m looking forward to. I read his Lives of the Poets and although I didn’t universally love it, mostly because of his subjectivity in the later parts, I think it was a great undertaking and altogether interesting.

One last thing, since I started with a criticism, I’ll end with one (bookends of banality): Note to writers: Stop looking for meaning in Google searches! “Google records 368 million items under the word ‘family’, as against a mere 170 million under ‘war’.” That from the London Review of Books no less. Whatever point anyone wants to make with such an obvious piece of trivia they will first impress their reader with the idea that they probably didn’t think much about what they were saying. Should a discussion of the weather begin with the fact that the word has 269 million results in Google?

comments

Cosimo and Lorenzo were fun, but I guess you could skip Piero (Pierfrancesco?? can’t remember.)

Wow, Bud, you have been busy. The Typepad Tips blog and photoblog are also excellent. All this beautifully organised cyberspace is a great, organic advertisement for weblogging. Good to see you are documenting how it all works for others - not many people around who bother to do that.

    – genevieve (08/22  at  07:14 AM)

Google’s first stock offering was e * 10^7 shares, but no one seemed to notice.

    – anonymous (08/22  at  09:43 AM)

If you carea to read In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower along with the PRG (http://titoperez.typepad.com/proust), we’re having our first check-in after the ~100 pages this Wednesday in SF.

    – tito (08/22  at  12:04 PM)

Bud, You’re aces, my friend. It is of great consolation to me that you read my blog, however, the forty third earl remains aghast at my behavior.

David

    – David Thayer (08/22  at  02:31 PM)

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: August 21, 2005
• Filed Under:
  Wise Men Fish Here: Literature

• Comments:4
• Links to this Post: Technorati

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