There's a bunch of people I want to e-mail and several more whom I need to, but I can't login into to Yahoo at the moment, so you should be hearing from me in the next day or two.
First I'll respond to Alice's meme:
1. ABBA - "The Name of the Game" - (There's nothing like ABBA to take my troubles away and I only partly jest)
2. The Roots - "Don't Say Nuthin" - (I still can't figure out what the fuck is going on with the mumbly part of the chorus, but it's catchy)
3. The Foundations - "Build Me Up Buttercup" - (Remember when they start singing this at a restaurant during My Best Friend's Wedding. Now that's a fine scene)
4. Stevie Wonder - "Sir Duke" - (It took me a while to figure out that this was the name of the song, but I always knew I liked it.)
5. Debarge - "Rhythm of the Night" - (Is that a xylophone in the song's opening. Whatever it is, this song brings me back to my adolescence and the goddess that was Vanity. There was this role in The Last Dragon and her turn in Action Jackson. I hear she's a born again Christian. That's just way too bad.)
6. Eric B. and Rakim - "I Know You Got Soul" (I've been listening to this song for months on end now, but I can't get over the opening beat and the bit when the base kicks in just as the rap starts. Maybe my favorite beginning to any song, and the rhymes and baseline are great all the way through).
Um, I'm not even sure I know six other people with livejournal accounts, but I'll tag these three:
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) rynomatic (Remember, English food is only surpassed by English dentistry in its incompetence)
buridan (It's about time you start updating, otherwise how am I going to find out exactly when you lose our bet)
tmhopscotch (I know one of your six songs is Yaz's "Only You" and it's also time you update)
There's so much more to say, but I'm limited in time. Let's see, when I left off I was on my Cather kick, which I've gotten over temporarily. I finished Death Comes for the Archbishop, which is a good novel. Its narrative structure, just a series of episodes in Latour's (and a few from Vaillant's) life, holds the novel back. Cather herself characterized the work as a "narrative" not a novel. As a result of the chosen format, I think the work fails to find any momentum and reads as a bunch of often pleasant and occasionally impressive vignettes. Should that actually be an objection? I don't know, but I do know that it didn't quite work for me. Regardless, the work is genuinely powerful in moments, including the scene of Vaillant's death and Latour's final moments in the closing pages. I think this is the first novel I've read that effectively portrays the Church as an institution for good on a large scale, which is kind of a shame.
Before moving onto the other novels in the second Library of America volume, I polished off My Antonia in a few hours. What a fantastic novel. It's beautifully written with simple passages of description and characterization that envelop you so effortlessly as to make the reading of the novel an exercise that one regrets finishing. As an early example consider this passage of Jim's impression upon first arriving on the prairie as an 11-year-old:
If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made. . . . I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man's jurisdiction. . . . If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.
Part of the pleasure in reading this Cather novel in particular was in seeing a mythology of frontier settlement and living depicted in a manner in which I could so readily visualize the scenes. Rarely do I find myself picturing along with a novel as I read, but I found myself able to imagine all of the novel's happenings as if recalling my own memories. What a bittersweet feeling it was when I came to the end.
I found Jim to be a much more complete narrator than the young boy/man in A Lost Lady (I can't remember his name). Much like Godfrey St. Peter he has some depth. This fleshing out of an added dimension makes those scenes of recollection (St. Peter's memories of Tom and Tom's diary in The Professor's House and the entirety of My Antonia, as it is supposedly a manuscript written by a middle-aged Jim Burden) so much more realistic. Perhaps that's why I found My Antonia so superlative.
All of this crap about Cather reframing frontier stereotypes about women was secondary to me. I enjoyed the novel most for its evocativeness - of the innocence and timelessness of youth, the hardship of poverty and immigration, the simplicity of basic living (by which I mean when one's focus is on providing food to eat every day and surviving the winter), and a key time in our nation's history. Perhaps this all sounds prosaic, but it's not. If you haven't read the novel, give it a try, it'll only take you a few hours.
I finished the first five pages of Shadows on the Rock before I moved onto a full translation of the Mahabaratha. I can see why they only give children abridged versions. The story is a fascinating one, but the literal translation from Sanskrit is taxing on the eyes and just nonsensical in spots (when you sound out some of the phrasing in your head). I was told this was one of the authoritative translations, but maybe I was misinformed. So if you ever want to read the epic, don't read the translation by Kamala Subramaniam.
I then reread Jeffrey Archer's Kane and Abel, one of my favorite novels as a teenager. There was a great television miniseries adaptation made with Peter Strauss and Sam Neill, which I need to acquire. Anyway, the story is still fantastic, but Archer's pedestrian writing skills are much more evident to me in my twenties than they were in my teens. As I read on it became somewhat of a chore to finish, but finish I did because, strictly from a plot standpoint, the climax is worthwhile.
I then reread another novel, though this one I'd read just two months ago. The novel, Richard Russo's Straight Man, is hands down the single funniest novel I've read. I hesitate to call it a work of genius because that phrasing, combined with my praise of My Antonia, might lead some of you to devalue my opinion for excessive ebullience. But, it's a work of genius. The novel is narrated by a middle-aged English professor (currently serving as department head) at a small state school in western Pennsylvania. Over the course of a couple of weeks we meet the family members of William Devereaux Jr. and his colleagues and their interactions provide the basis for the novel's comedy.
The satire is much more superficial than David Lodge's work but it's brilliant in its endless nature and ability to amuse on more than one level. Devereaux teaches writing at the school and tries to communicate the basic skills required in good short fiction to his hapless students:
I pick up and begin to read Leo's latest effort, with which I have to be at least marginally conversant by this afternoon's workshop. His new story appears to be cinematically inspired--that is, uninspired. It's about the ghost of a long dead murderer who returns at twenty-year intervals to terrorize the same small town, graphically executing the descendants of the original townsfolk who hanged him in the previous century. The final scene of the story is climactic merely in the sense that after slaughtering a young woman character whose only crime seems to have been cockteasing, the ghost murderer rapes her corpse. The murder itself is accomplished in a single well-developed paragraph, the rape in the following single-spaced page and a half. In a handwritten note appended to the story and addressed to me, Leo expresses on or two slight misgivings. He wonders if the rape scene is overdone. And he wants to assure me that the narrative is not finished. Originally, he'd thought of it as a short story, but not he suspects it may be a novel. Next to his query concerning the rape scene, I write: "Always understate necrophilia." Then at the bottom of the final page, "Let's talk."
"Always understate necrophilia," - I think I have a new response whenever someone starts to annoy me. Much of the humor, like that in the passage above, is built up over a few lines or longer. Sometimes Russo delivers by revisiting a joke thought laid bare earlier, but he is also able to write the quick hit bits. In addition to the buzzing dialogue, his scenes of physical comedy are almost always effective. Take one scene in which Devereaux finds himself eavesdropping in a crawl space above a room in which a department meeting called to impeach him is taking place. All this because he peed in his pants and was trying to hide it from his colleagues.
For those who know nothing about the workings of an English department, they'll still find this funny. Like I said, the humor works more on the level of poking fun at human flaws and frailties. Also I'm not convinced that the egotism and insecurity that William finds in his colleagues is exclusive to humanities professors, but their resultant comeuppances are all the funnier as a result.
One bit that I found slightly out of place despite it being the most literary of all references in the work (well the key one anyway) was Russo's apology for Dickens via the character of Devereaux Sr. Senior hates Dickens and Senior is a deplorable fellow (the typical successful egomaniacal English prof actually) who left his young son and his wife, therefore Dickens must be good. It's an all too obvious advocacy for the author, which becomes all the more obvious as Russo has written a modern Dickensian novel. It's peopled by a cast of two dozen whose paths intersect in several ways and whose intersections give rise to basic social comedy and tragedy. I didn't really understand the need for Russo to tell us that Dickens is good. Clearly we would have been able to gather Russo is a fan after having read Straight Man. Well maybe he was doing it for those who've not read Dickens, but the type of person who is likely to read this novel is likely to have read a Dickens novel or two along the way
I'm now reading Frank Kermode's The Age of Shakespeare. Well reading in the sense that I've started it and should finish in a couple of hours as it's fairly short. I realized that I knew nothing about the era of Shakespeare other than some basic history and seeing this volume in a local bookstore and recognizing Kermode's name, I decided to edify myself. Particularly since I plan on digesting the Bard's oeuvre over the next few years. There's been a few other books, but nothing that I feel the need to comment on.
The reading has been my break from what has been a busy last several days and what promises to be an even busier time in a week or two.
I've watched a little bit of TV and have been struck by the fact that Indian television for some reason carries reruns of American sitcoms that sucked, and I mean sucked. So far I've seen bits of Caroline in the City (that awful sitcom with Lea Thompson), Zoe (an even worse show with Selma Blair), and that one that had Jason Bateman (Hogan's Family or something like that). Other than that, the only things I've seen are a couple of episodes from season three of The Apprentice, three of the episodes from the first season of Desperate Housewives, and some episodes from The Gilmore Girls (I'm not sure what season but Alexis Bledel looks quite young). I'd have to that Desperate Housewives does have its moments and from now on if it's on when I'm flipping channels I'd probably stop. Also, it seems that season three of The Apprentice was filled with morons. I started watching from when there were 8 people left, all of whom were idiots. As for The Gilmore Girls, the dialogue seems to be aiming for pretentiously cute, but it's just pretentious. Though, Lauren Graham is just plain likeable.
Heh, one last thing before I have to go. I've been staying with one of my uncles until my place is fully set up. While at his place, he's shown me a few of his film scripts. Two of them immediately stood out. As I was reading the first one, I was thinking that the story was oddly familiar. No wonder - it was an adaptation of Amado's War of the Saints. The second one was his adaptation of Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth. Both are intended for Telugu film, which means several song and dance numbers. The Amado one, I have to admit, was a fantastic idea. Amado's run-of-the-mill communist love story translates well to the Indian film market. Besides the novel is set during a religious festival replete with singing and dancing. As for the Reade, I haven't looked at it yet, but it can't be that promising. What a strange occurrence.
Anyway, I'll be in touch with some of you over the next couple of days. | 
