howdy howdy howdy ~

it's february and i'm back. i discovered that the time i waste spend here really doesn't make much of a dent in my day all things considered. rethinking how i can use this medium in my working process, i'm hoping to spend less time kvetching in the abstract and more time actively working out style and/or language problems. which means, i guess, that my writing here will likely become more abstract to whoever's reading ~ if that makes sense.

anyway, i did a fair pile of reading while i was gone ~ for the 50bookchallenge:

Lying Awake by mark salzman ~ loved this book! devoured it in one sitting. extremely simple premise, beautiful images, spare and poetic writing. i’ll want to own a copy of this eventually. plot: an aging nun discovers her “visions” are the result of temporal-lobe epilepsy. she’s curable, but does she want to be cured? a nice little meditation on the grace of answering God’s will.

North of Hope by john hassler ~ i was so excited about the first short book i read by hassler (Underground Christmas), but this one proved overlong and disappointing (makes me cock a curious eyebrow at the Loyola Classics!). a priest who was once in love with a girl meets her again years later. i guess we’re supposed to feel for their lost love. i guess we’re supposed to feel like his vocation is threatened. i guess we’re not supposed to wish the woman got run over by a train. the characters in this simply don’t work. father healy is a nice guy who you just want to see left alone and libby (the girl he might have married) is a nuerotic bore who we’re told endlessly looks haggy and tired even though she’s the most beautiful girl in the world. fifty pages toward the end i was mostly irritated at how fascile it was ~ a particular scene in which a daughter reveals that she’s been having sexual a relationship with her stepfather was especially badly wrought. ah well. he’s still a good writer in general ~ just not sure about his storytelling chops.

Rape: a love story by joyce carol oates ~ i always want to like her work, she being so prolific, but i’m not thrilled with her style (ever) and this one was bogglingly all over the place. her arc with the cop following the rape case was really interesting, but her treatment of the woman victim and her daughter was just maddeningly and needlessly complicated ~ just style for the sake of style. especially the use of second-person pov for the daughter’s throughline ~ you think this. you hear that. you blow it out your retros, joyce ~ bleh! aside from liking the sort of morally ambiguous cop character, this book was mostly an exercise in annoyance.

currently i’ve got two books going next ~ Andersonville Violets by herbert c. collingwood (a strange victorian novel with some of the worst writing i’ve ever encountered ~ ha!) and Gunnar’s Daughter by sigrid undset. i've also managed to pick up doctorow's The March from the library. i still have his Waterworks and one or two others laying around as well. why is it i love doctorow’s writing, but never can seem to sit still through his books? i have the same problem with t. c. boyle. well ~ i hope to finish these for a change.

scorecard: 6/50 (definitely on schedule)

in movie news ~

been watching some lesser period dramas lately.

last night it was Mountains of the Moon, an adventure film about Burton & Speke's search for the source of the Nile in the mid-1850s. i thought Patrick Bergin was well-cast as Burton (and oh my he looked and behaved exactly like James! who knew there was a real-life model in Burton? it had never crossed my mind to link the two ~ i wish i had got a screen capture of him just for the fun of it because he really was perfect). the movie was overall okay. i was entertained. it had some needless homosexual undertones (well, the kissing was more of an overtone, i guess). all that (and gratuitous sex scenes with fiona shaw) was badly shoehorned into the film for no purpose at all. some nice period details (great costumes!), but otherwise, eh, there it was.

the other film worth noting that i watched was alfonso arau's remake of The Magnificent Ambersons (have had tarkington on the brain). this was an A & E movie that basically got panned and i can see why. i usually like arau's work, but this was all over the place. other reviewers said Jonathan Rhys-Meyers was miscast or simply "bad", but i think he was just badly directed. he does a great american accent for being irish, but outside of that i can't tell you what he was doing; it was a train wreck. i know he can act (he just won a Golden Globe!), but he was so weird in this as Georgie. i also think he was miscast in Gormenghast as Steerpike even though other people raved about him in that ~ i think he's just a hard actor to place in the right role and he needs the right kind of direction. anyway, the film was marginally okay, but a little bit of a chore to get through. arau purposely upped the ante on the incestuous nature of the relationship between Georgie and his mother and that was weird too.



extremely silly commentary on the above picture: i wanted to share this image from The Magnificent Ambersons because it struck me as amusing ~ Jonathan Rhys-Meyers and James Cromwell as Georgie and Major Amberson. if hollywood ever got their hands on Razi-el's Dream this would be their casting for Morse and Anselm (but put Rhys-Meyers's Gormenghast hair on him). see now, i originally cast it as Johnny Depp and Liam Neeson (a million years ago when both were young enough to actually play those characters). in a perfect world, it would be young Johnny Depp and young Vincent Price. truth be told, i've always had a hard time casting Morse. maybe Jonathan Rhys-Meyers would be a good choice. he's certainly "pretty" enough.

does anyone else play the: "who would hollywood cast" game?

: D