Category: fiction

Pleasure reading

Ivan Kreilkamp5 Comments

A loyal Moonraking reader (thanks Judith) asked why it had been so long since I updated.  Oddly, I checked my stats and visits have been high lately despite no new updates.  Is it all random Google visits?  Who is out there?  To be honest, I think I crave more interactivity and lately have been more likely to take my random observations to Facebook.  But, I will see if I can get my blogging mojo back.

I’ll briefly mention some of the pleasure reading I’ve been doing lately.

My big recommendation is Lorrie Moore’s The Gate at the Stairs (I must say I dislike that title which seems very generic to me).  I’m a longtime fan of her short stories.  In preparation for reading the new one, while I waited to get my library copy, I read one of her two previous novels, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, which is excellent although not as memorable as the new one.  The Gate at the Stairs actually could easily be accused of being contrived in all kinds of way in terms of plot but the “voice” of the narrating protagonist is so funny and moving that I didn’t care so much.  Sentence by sentence it’s consistently sharp, resourceful & hilarious.  Very self-aware about language, fascinated by puns and wordplay and nuances of speech and idiolects.  A novel about race and adoption, about childcare in relation to class and power, a girl’s coming of age novel.  Also it all takes place in a Midwestern college town (Madison) so that was another plus.

In 1996 or 1997 I called up “the Connection” (Boston NPR talk show) and asked a question on-air to Lorrie Moore.  I had only read a few of her stories from Self-Help and asked some question about her uses of semi-experimental fictional form that kind of missed the point of her work, I think, and seemed mildly to annoy her.  Since that experience I’ve always thought of her as a bit imperious and intimidating, but I heard an interview with her last month that made her sound charming and almost kind of girlish.

Chess Story by Stefan Zweig.  New York Review of Books reissue of this novella, the last work Zweig wrote before his 1942 suicide.  Made me want to play chess again… just in case I’m put in solitary confinement by the Nazis.  I’ve never read Zweig and this made me want to read more.

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout won the Pulitzer last year, has been recommended highly by various family members I respect, and is about characters in Maine, but I didn’t like it quite as much as I hoped I would.  It’s definitely good and involving fiction, well-observed, it draws you in; the character of Olive K. herself is kind of great — she’s a really difficult and in some ways unpleasant lady — but somehow I found it all just a little… predictable, or trying too hard to do what “good fiction” is supposed to do.  And/or, I liked some of the stories much more than others (it’s a kind of Winesburg Ohio-esque story cycle, with the Kitteridges coming in and out of the stories).  Also I have to say that I think that aspects of this novel may be pitched especially to an over-60 or so readership (hey, we have Y.A. fiction, why not Older Adult fiction?)

Wobble to Death — this is Peter Lovesey’s 1970 Victorian mystery, the debut of Sergeant Cribb.  The plot revolves around a competitive race-walking event in London in 1879 at which contestants keep dropping off.  I spent the whole time I read this thinking, “am I really reading a mystery about Victorian competitive race-walking?”

Arnaldur Indriðason’s Arctic Chill.  I am in the middle of this moody Icelandic mystery, by the author of Jar City which I read a year or two ago.  Very Henning Mankell-esque, a bit derivative maybe (the detective’s relationship with his daughter seemed a little too close), but/and totally gripping and enjoyable.  A bit more stripped down and focused, more of a straight procedural maybe, not as ambitious in terms of depicting a whole society.  Very similar dynamics involving immigrants in the closed Nordic society — here a young Thai boy is found murdered and the detective is probing into the life he and his immigrant mother and brother have lived, the racism they’ve faced, and so on.

Asterios Polyp

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polyp-2

Strongly recommend this new graphic novel, David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp.  It’s being hailed as a landmark of the genre, and I agree — it strikes me as among the best graphic novels I’ve read, along with the likes of Maus, Charles Burns’ Black Hole, Ghost World, Persepolis, Jimmy Corrigan, and I’m not sure what else (I’ve never gotten too into the neo-superhero stuff like Watchmen).

Mazzucchelli got a BFA at RISD and became a successful comics artist at Marvel Comics in the 1980s, then started doing non-superhero stuff, like the graphic novel version of Paul Auster’s City of Glass.  He’s apparently being working on Asterios Polyp for a decade.  Here’s the NY Times review, which dubs the book “a big, proud, ambitious chunk of a graphic novel, with modernism on its mind and a perfectly geometrical chip on its shoulder” and “a dazzling, expertly constructed entertainment.”

It’s a novel of academia, in part; Asterios Polyp is a famous “paper architect” and professor at Cornell who’s become famous for designs that are never actually built.  The story is told in circular, recursive cycles with a bit of a film noir type set-up: we begin with the collapse of Asterios’ elite life and his fall into impoverished obscurity, and then re-trace the steps that led him there.  These include his marriage to a shy, talented sculptor who feels overwhelmed by him (until her own success begins to threaten him), his obsessive-compulsive behaviors and deeply ingrained intellectual snobbism.  As with any really successful graphic novel, the art is thoroughly embedded in the story and vice versa; in this case the art is quite spectacular and even show-offy — it definitely repays close scrutiny and multiple readings, with different characters, plots, and time frames all given their own distinct styles.  (It probably reminds me most of Chris Ware’s work in the brilliantly fussy/minute attention to graphic design and the interest in retro and recherche 40s-50s style; kind of amazing that Mazzucchelli worked for years on Daredevil, although in fact I’m sure doing comics for Marvel was ideal training for this).

Roberto Bolano’s 2666

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We’ve been in Maine in the little cabin on Long Pond for 9 days or so.  No DSL.  My cellphone stopped working in Ellsworth.  Landline went out for three days.  I finally got it together to make dial-up work.

I associate time here in Maine with reading long novels.  Last summer I read The Magic Mountain.  I just finished Roberto Bolano’s 2666 (having read Bolano’s The Savage Detectives last year).  Meanwhile Sarah has been reading Moby Dick.

2666 (which was a 40th bday gift, btw – thanks George!) is an amazing and very weird, obsessive novel that invites comparison with some of the great long novels like The Magic Mountain, Ulysses, etc.  Having just read it, my initial feeling is that its flaw is probably a certain degree of incoherence.  To be specific, I am not sure all of its five “parts,” each of which Bolano intended to publish separately (he died just after completing it), belong together.  Part one, “the Part about the Critics,” and part five, “the Part about Archimboldi,” could constitute one novel, possibly also including part three.  And then parts four and five, “the Part about Fate” (about an African-American journalist named Oscar Fate; not sure if the pun seems as obvious in Spanish) and “the Part about the Crimes” could form their own novel.  Bolano’s executors decided to disregard his instructions about publishing the work as five separate shorter novels.  There’s a logic to this decision, because in fact overlaps do connect the different parts, and the end of the novel in particular links part five with part four… But at some level, it feels to me that there’s something slightly gerrymandered about declaring this a single 900 page novel.

I regret this a little, too, because I think many people would love the thread of 2666 that revolves around literature, novel-writing, and criticism (as well as many other things too), but will not have the stomach for the parts of the novel that are obsessively, disturbingly, focused on sexual violence against women, specifically the unsolved rape-murder of up to 200 women in a city on the Mexican-U.S. border.  Part four, “the Part about the Crimes,” is a mesmerizing nightmare of a reading experience.  It’s a policier, sort of, about the attempt to solve these murders, but it’s intentionally unsatisfying as an example of that genre since loose threads, lost evidence, indifference (towards the victims, primarily poor Mexican teenagers) and ignorance dominate the search.  Much of it takes the form of a dossier describing the discovery of the bodies of the women, nearly all of whom have been, as we’re told over and over, “vaginally and anally raped” (the novel is bizarrely obsessed with anal rape), and many of which are tossed aside, buried in pauper’s graves with only minimal, incompetent efforts to investigate the crimes.  It’s hard to think what to compare this aspect of the novel to – I’ve read one of the so-called policiers noir of Georges Simenon, Dirty Snow, a very disturbing, nihilistic novel taking place in Nazi- occupied Belgium, and that’s the closest analogy that comes to mind.  (In his review Jonathan Lethem mentions H.P. Lovecraft, Denis Johnson, David Lynch, and James Ellroy, all of which make some sense to me.)

What I found most pleasurable about the novel were the sections about Archimboldi, the German novelist whose identity is a complete mystery and whose work and career become the focus of the four academic critics who are the primary subjects of the novel’s first section.  The mystery of Archimboldi, whose identity seems to be known by no one other than his aged publisher in Germany, is revealed in the final section, which narrates his strange and picturesque life as a young man, then as a soldier in the Nazi army, then in various demi-mondes of Europe.  (I haven’t read The Tin Drum but I wonder if there are references or resemblances).  Like The Savage Detectives, 2666 in these sections is a wildly imaginative riff on the writing, reading, & publishing of literature as activities that take in all the rest of the world.

The novel is just amazing, sometimes jaw-dropping in its sheer verbal creativity.  It’s filled with countless passages, paragraphs, riffs that are like little prose poems or Kafka parables, hilarious, weird, wild, obscene.

To invoke another great big novel, what Richard Pevear writes about The Brothers Karamazov could apply to 2666 as well:

The Brothers Karamazov is a joyful book.  Readers who know what it is ‘about’ may find this an intolerably whimsical statement.  It does have moments of joy, but they are only moments; the rest of greed, lust, squalor, unredeemed suffering, and a sometimes terrifying darkness.  But the book is joyful in another sense: in its energy and curiosity, in its formal inventiveness, in the mastery of its writing.  And therefore, finally, in its vision.

To me the big interpretive questions remains, how is the “authorship/writing” theme linked to the sexual violence topos?  There are some implications than an Author might be something like a serial killer, and at one point it’s said that for Achimboldi writing is a bit like being a detective on the track of a killer.  But in the end these connections didn’t really seem that deep to me.

Kenneth Branagh as Kurt Wallander

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Watched the first (of three, I believe) installment of PBS Mystery‘s versions of the Henning Mankell Kurt Wallander thrillers.  Last night was Sidetracked and I think in the next two Sundays they’re doing Firewall and One Step Behind.

It wasn’t bad at all, was a creditable version, but was still mildly disappointing.  I didn’t really buy Kenneth Branagh as Wallander.  Wallander is an exhausted mess who drinks too much coffee, can’t sleep, is overweight and eats badly, and Branagh is just too good-looking.  Sarah pointed out that a major aspect of the novels and of Wallander’s character has to do with the mundanity of his daily life: the sad meals he ekes out of his empty kitchen, his fussing about whether or not to wear his thick sweater to the crime scene, endless pots of coffee.  Most of that sense of slow dailiness is excised.  Also, much of the pleasure of the novels depends on the suspense that builds over time, and the plot felt compressed and rushed into the 85 minutes or whatever.

It was odd that everyone spoke in British accents of one sort or another.  My guess is that they actually worked to translate specific Swedish accents/dialect into British versions.  I know film-makers have to face this problem routinely: should they speak in Swedish-accented English?  What would the logic for that be?  But this seemed a bit disconcerting.

Sidetracked is a pretty typical/exemplary Mankell novel in the way it reveals a modern Sweden scarred by various forms of global suffering, abuses, and evil.  The novels are obsessed with Sweden as country that sees itself as “traditional,” tolerant and liberal, but that doesn’t know how to handle the transformations of a new global economy, with its immigration and novel forms of inequity and corruption.  The theme of the traditional confronting the modern plays out in a striking way in this novel where the criminal turns out to commit his murders (of corrupt politicians and financiers, chiefs of the new economic order) in a kind of regressive psychopathic trance in which he reimagines himself as a Native American warrior.

I liked the Southern Swedish settings, beautiful photography.

It was disappointing that Wallander’s father now paints rather attractive-looking landscapes.  In the novel he paints basically the same painting of a wood grouse over and over; I guess they decided it would just seem too strange.

I’ll keep watching.  I wouldn’t watch if you haven’t read the novels, though.

Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

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Why do I love Swedish police procedurals?

I’ve already written here about my addiction to Henning Mankell’s novels.  I’ve recently gone back a few decades to the series that I believe inspired him, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo’s Martin Beck novels (they were a married couple) from the late 1960s and 70s, which have been reissued in nice Vintage Crime/ Black Lizard editions.  In the last week or two I read the first two, Roseanna and The Man Who Went Up in Smoke.  I preferred the first but I’ll select this random passage towards the end of the second to evoke some of the appeal of these novels for me.  Martin Beck is back in Stockholm from an investigation in Hungary, talking with his partner Kollberg:

“A dreadful thought suddenly occurred to me,” said Kollberg.  “It’s five days since the opening of the crayfish season and you probably haven’t eaten a single one.  Or do they have crayfish in Hungary?

“Not so far as I know,” said Martin Beck.  “I didn’t see any.”

“Get yourself dressed.  I’ve ordered a table.”

The dining room was crowded, but a corner table had been reserved for them and laid for a crayfish dinner.  On each of their plates lay a paper hat and a bib, and each of the bibs had a verse printed in red across it.  They sat down and Martin Beck looked dismally at his hat, made of blue crepe paper, with a shiny blue visor and POLICE in gold letters above the visor.

Fatherhood in extremis: Laura Ingalls Wilder & Cormac McCarthy

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I finally read The Road — almost the whole thing in one sitting in bed and then finished it off the next day.  It’s pretty harrowing.  I’ve been haunted by that recent article in The New Yorker, “The Dystopians,” about ““back-to-the-land types,” “peak oilers,”… all-around Cassandras, or doomers,” and others who believe the U.S. and maybe the world economy are bankrupt and that we are headed for some more or less minimalist post-economic, post-oil future.  The Road jibes very well with with that ideology, on the more horrific, apocalyptic end of the spectrum (after all, few of the “dystopians” appear believe that we will descend into mass cannibalism).

I was struck by how much The Road has in common with Little House in the Big Woods.  Ingalls’ book looks back at nineteenth-century homesteaders with affectionate nostalgia; McCarthy looks ahead to a dystopian future; but in either case, the whole world focuses to a parent trying to provide for the family by eking out sustenance from the land.

So, Ingalls’ Pa kills bear and deer, harvests wheat, carves wood, builds the cabin and insulates it; McCormac’s father rigs up the cart, makes a tent out of a tarp, kills a threatening vagrant, scavenges food, makes a lantern out of a can of gasoline.  It’s all about survival skills and protecting and getting food and shelter for the kid(s).  (Admittedly, Ma is just as important in Little House as Pa. There is a wife in The Road, but she only appears in one retrospective memory: she tells the dad “They are going to rape us and kill us and eat us and you wont face it,” and then she goes off and apparently kills herself with a sharp flake of obsidian.  Of course nothing at all like this happens to Ma in Little House.)

Basically, for me the narcissistic takeaway of both books was this: If the apocalypse comes, your fatherhood-in-extremis skills are crap and you will not be able to take care of your family. We don’t even have a working flashlight (the girls always leave it on and run out the batteries) or jugs of water in the basement.  God help us if I’m called upon to do something like this on no sleep:

He unscrewed the bottom panel and he removed the burner assembly and disconnected the two burners with a small crescent wrench.  He tipped out the plastic jar of hardware and sorted out a bolt to thread into the fitting of the junction and then tightened it down.  He connected the hose from the tank and held the little potmetal burner up in his hand, small and light-weight.

And no way would I have been able to use that map ripped into little pieces to navigate past the cannibal compound all the way to the sea.

I did get one good tip from The Road: when you first hear the bombs or whatever, immediately turn the bathtub on since the water supply will run out momentarily.  I’m all over that one, am excellent at taking baths.

Another unrelated thought I had about The Road: it winds up with what struck me as a Robinson Crusoe reference, as the father swims out to an abandoned boat and strips it for useful supplies, very much like Crusoe at the beginning of Defoe’s novel; perhaps a little joke or conceit on McCarthy’s part about going back to origins of the novel form.

It could be fun to do a Little House on the Road mashup along the lines of that Pride and Prejudice and Zombies paperback that’s all the rage.

A really good read, for sure, but for 21st-century apocalyptic fiction I’d still give the nod to Jose Saramago’s amazing Blindness (1998, actually; don’t be put off by the movie version which is supposed to be lousy).

Reading Laura Ingalls Wilder

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I’ve been reading C&I The Little House in the Big Woods.  The Laura Ingalls Wilder books were a big deal in my family.  My cousin Laura was named after her; I read the books at least as much/often as I did the Lord of the Rings saga, in a somewhat similar pattern, too: probably read The Hobbit and The Little House in the Big Woods the most, those two classics of coziness, and trailed off towards the end of the two series as the scope widened to an increasingly larger and more adult world.   I think as a boy reader I found more to relate to in the earlier books with all the bears and hunting and boy-scoutish activities.  Sarah commented to me that Pa is a somewhat risky model of fatherhood for me to expose to the girls.  “I mean, he hunts, builds houses, smokes meat, carves wooden toys, rides horses…” “Yes, but does he blog cleverly???” I responded not at all defensively.  I don’t see Sarah churning butter or sewing all the family’s clothes, anyway (although admittedly she’d be much more likely to do that than I would be to build my own meat smoker in the backyard).

C&I love the book.  They’re especially interested in the Mary/Laura dynamic: Laura’s the younger one with brown hair who is jealous of her sister’s golden curls.  (This led to a discussion of hair color in which Iris declared that “mommy’s hair is brickish red.”)  And of course they’re fascinated by life in a cabin with nearly everything you use something you make yourself, and with bears and panthers prowling around.  It’s a very appealing depiction of an entirely self-sufficient, self-enclosed family life, although I keep thinking that one winter like that in the one-room cabin (with a baby and two young girls) would drive me screaming to the town (pop. 150 at most?) by the lake in Pepin, Michigan.

The other night we read one chapter, and also read Margaret Wise Brown’s The Little Fur Family, which we own in a tiny, faux-fur-covered edition.  As we read it I suddenly realized that the illustrations were by Garth Williams, who also illustrated The Little House in the Big Woods, and that they’re very similar stories, all about hunkering down in your cozy home for the winter, but from the bears’ point of view!  (Assuming the little fur people are bears, I guess it’s more ambiguous.)  Just look — Pa practically is a member of the Little Fur Family on a larger scale:

littlehousecoverfur

Henning Mankell’s The Pyramid: Novels about the Swedish Anxiety

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300h

Henning Mankell’s The Pyramid.  I’m a huge Henning Mankell fan, have probably read at least ten of his novels, all of the Kurt Wallender mysteries, I think, and even a Linda Wallender one (his daughter).  I discovered Mankell 6 or 7 years ago — I’d never gotten so into a thriller series, and I haven’t quite found anything else as addictive, although Mankell has opened me up to the genre generally.  A lot of what’s so distinctly great about the series has to do with the modern Swedish setting, social and natural.  I’m surprised no one has made a movie (perhaps starring Stellen Starsgard as Wallender), it would be great on film — the icy, cold, stark Swedish landscapes; the moody, mordant people; the eruptions of shocking violence.  Wallender is a really appealing detective, always brooding about his failed marriage, his difficult relationship with his daughter & father, sweating, drinking endless pots of coffee and too much booze too; he’s funny and has a real moral center, continually questioning the state of Swedish society which seems to him to be falling apart.  Many of the books are more or less explicitly about the changes Sweden has undergone in the the last decade or two — the fraying of the welfare net, the stresses of immigration, a shift to a more heterogeneous society and a new sense of embeddedness in a globally linked world.  Maybe that’s what makes the mysteries work so well, the sense of Sweden as this strangely homogenous, stable, harmonious society, filled with a lot of stalwart folks in isolated homes in the woods, that has finally started to transform in disruptive ways allegorized in crimes.  The series contains some starkly memorable images, like the young girl who sets herself on fire in the middle of a field (from Sidetracked).

Firewall, which takes place in 1990, is the first Wallender mystery, so would be a good place to start, but this volume would be as well: it’s a kind of prequel, written later but including several stories and one novella covering the earlier phases in Wallender’s career as a policeman in the 1970s and 80s. The five stories all have characteristic Mankell plots, all containing some epistemological mystery often hinting at a political/social subtext, but they get resolved much more quickly.  The longest story (a novella, really), “The Pyramid,” is excellent on Mankell’s eccentric father, who spends his days painting variations of the same landscape, sometimes featuring a single wood grouse.

In his introduction Mankell lays out the political/social subtext, explaining that after completing the series, he recognized the subtitle it should have had: “Novels about the Swedish Anxiety”:

The books have always been variations on a single theme: ‘What is happening to the Swedish welfare state in the 1990s?  How will democracy survive if the foundations of the welfare state is no longer intact?  Is the price of Swedish democracy today too high and no longer worth paying?”

I remember reading a Mankell novel off and on, can’t remember which one, sitting in the hospital room with Sarah during her 12-hour labor delivering Celie and Iris.

“We spent as much money as we could”

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Weird/ surprising Victorian lit reference of the day: a line from Great Expectations as epitaph for the American reconstruction effort in Iraq:

At the end of his narrative, Mr. Bowen chooses a line from “Great Expectations” by Dickens as the epitaph of the American-led attempt to rebuild Iraq: “We spent as much money as we could, and got as little for it as people could make up their minds to give us.”

This is really mind-bending: Pip and Herbert Pocket, living beyond their means at Bernard’s Inn, miserable but pretending they’re having a great time, as an analogy for the American occupation of Iraq.  Pip as a figure for the U.S. in its indebted, improvident ways.  So does this make “the Avenger” (Pip’s personal servant, whom he despises) the Iraqi resistence?  Or, I suppose a better analogy would be to the Iraqi forces working with the Americans.

New Moonraking Feature

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What I’m listening to/watching/reading

1/12/09

First episode of the new season of Damages on FX, with Glenn Close, Ted Danson and now William Hurt.  Wednesday nights.  We watched the first season on DVD — it’s great; very over the top with countless double-crosses, like some overheated old noir.  The NY Times review complained that the new season feels like a slight let-down, and maybe so, a bit, but it’s still fun.

Man on Wire.  Great documentary about French highwire-walker Philippe Petit’s attempt, with the help of a gang of co-conspirators, to cross the Twin Towers on a wire in August 1974.  It takes the form of a thriller or heist movie, moving forward, minute by minute, through the events of that day, and also stepping away to fill in the backstory.  The mood is often sweetly elegiac, which I think has a lot to do with a sense of lost innocence surrounding the World Trade Center in the 1970s, and a time when 5 guys with (almost literally) tons of equipment could sneak past the guards, shoot a string from one tower to the other with a bow and arrow, have one of them walk back and forth, and end up being celebrated as plucky heroes.  You have to figure today the police would shoot to kill…

1/4/09

Watched The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit with Gregory Peck.  It surprised me in several respects.  One was how much Mad Man seems to reference/rip it off.  There are so many parallels, so much so that I wonder if it was a bit of an in-joke among the Man Man people to slip in allusions (like the scene where he has to pick his wife up at the police station).  Was also surprised by how much it’s a war movie — there are these strangely extended flashback scenes from WW2 that go on and on.

Reading Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketo Mehta.   It’s been on my shelf for a year or two and then the Mumbai bombings (and an Op-Ed Mehta published in the Times) got me to pick it up finally.

1/1/09

Henning Mankell’s The Pyramid.

12/15/08

The new short film by Blu: an ambiguous animation painted on public walls in Buenos Aires and Baden.  Really amazing!

Attack (TNR article by Adam Kirsch) and counter-attack (comments section) on Slavoj Zizek.

12/13/08

Meaningful-core bands.

12/11/08

Battlestar Galactica first season.

12/10/08

Pingwings, Pogles’ Wood, Noggin the Nog, Ivor the Engine, The Clangers and Bagpuss on Youtube.

12/8/08

Erik Davis’s Led Zeppelin IV (33 1/3; Continuum).  Very smart and funny obsessive excavation of Led Zep’s occult roots.  For some reason the single historical detail that most surprised me here, though, amidst all the analysis of the band’s debt to Aleister Crowley, etc., was the revelation that “before forming Led Zeppelin and playing with the Yardbirds, [Jimmy] Page spent three years as a session player, playing on an estimated 50 to 90% of all the records made in England between 1963 and 1965, including early hits by the Who and the Kinks”(48).  WTF??   Very bizarre.  I had no idea.

12/7/08

The Mekons’ Fear and Whiskey (Sin Records, 1985).  An old favorite of mine that I’m thinking of trying to write something about, so have returned to.  British art-school punks fall into American roots music (Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb, etc) as a conceptual wormhole out of Thatcherite England.

This is the only really old Mekons video I dug up on Youtube: “Where Were You?” on New Year’s Eve 1980, opening for the Gang of Four. ”When I was waiting in a bar, where were you?/ When I was buying you a drink, where were you? When I was crying at home in bed, where were you?…/I want to talk to you all night, do you like me?/ I want to find out about your life, do you like me?/ Could you ever be my wife, do you love me?”

Taraf de Haidouks,   Musique Des Tziganes De Roumanie.  The live Band of Gypsies is also great.  Wild, sad, take-no-prisoners party music that I’m sure the Mekons would enjoy.  They’re Romanian Roma musicians — appear in the film Gypsy Caravan which I haven’t seen.  (You can get all of these on emusic.)

Art or Not? t.v. show on Ovation.  See my post.

Profile of Naomi Klein in The New Yorker.  Sarah is a big fan of The Shock Doctrine — I think I am going to read it over the holidays.

Anthony Trollope’s The Last Chronicle of Barset.

Care Bears dvd from public library.  Celie and Iris were SO excited about this DVD.  We spent the drive home discussing metaphysical puzzles raised by the show e.g. “I wonder how they get up on those rainbows?”  (I refrained from giving the correct answer: the poorly-paid animator in Thailand drew them up there.)  I could not bring myself to watch more than a couple minutes of this tripe.