Deuces wild

Phillip Dyess-Nugent on Django Unchained and David Bromwich on Spielberg's Lincoln.

Anomalies

Some interesting thoughts on style and anachronism in Alan Hollinghurst's review of Peter Carey's new novel at the NYRB:

In Henry Brandling’s narrative, unlike Olivier’s, Carey is claiming to present a historical document, a journal quite specifically written in 1854; here again a number of anachronisms may be mere fictional license, or reasonable guesses that for instance “potty” (meaning a bit mad) might have been idiomatic some time before its first recorded usage in 1920. But still, “you scared the pants off Hartmann,” an idiom first recorded in 1925, “ashtray” (1887), “guff” (US, 1888), “bumph” (1889, and then only as bumf, for bum-fodder), “programmer” and “programme” as a verb (1948 and 1945), are all more or less jarring. When Brandling uses terms like “celluloid” (a plastic invented in 1870) and “snookered” (when the game of snooker wasn’t named till 1889), you start to feel that Carey, a supreme virtuoso of language, who besides can look these things up as easily as I can, must be aiming at some deliberate alienation effect. To what end, though, it is rather hard to say.

The prithee-perchance problem

Hilary Mantel on the art of making the dead speak.  I think she may go slightly too far in the direction of flattening the language and making it undistinctive: I loved Wolf Hall and am very eager to read the sequel, but language is the least interesting part of the fictional world she creates.

Sent off the piece I had due today about twenty minutes ago; have a couple of school things I really should do this afternoon, but they are going to have to wait till tomorrow!  Struck with a slight cold or sinus infection of some sort, alas; it is the inevitable consequence, I fear, of a spell of working too hard and the struggle to get out of town without leaving too many loose threads.

Mescal and sympathy

Oliver Sacks has luxuriant eyelashes. (Courtesy of Dave Lull.)

My favorite bit of the exchange:

How often do you prepare your own meals?

Once or twice — in my lifetime. Usually I subsist on cereal, sardines, and tabouli. Sometimes I have food delivered by Tea & Sympathy, or my local sushi place.

Have been very busy this week. Insane amounts to get done in next 10 days or so. That said, have found time for minor extracurriculars: an odd play at the Flea (weirdly chronologically unanchored play about nuns and priests leaving their orders, with disconcerting moment in which a cellphone appears & thoroughly disrupts peculiarly timeless ambience - why weren't they talking about the molestation scandals and the difficulty of recruiting high-quality young nuns if it really is set in the present day as opposed to the 1960s?), a fun show by Titus Andronicus courtesy of my good friend and triathlon training partner Lauren whose sister Amy is in the band and was kind enough to put us on the guest list. Tomorrow I am going to see Nico's thing at St. Ann's Warehouse. New York life: very stimulating, very tiring....

Modern fiction

at the Guardian, Laura Miller on how novels deal with the internet.

Production of quota

c. 2,000 words, for a total of 40,188 words.

(Not quite as good as it sounds, since some of those were words I am at least for now (copyright issues may mean I need to go back later on to a nineteenth-century translation) borrowing from the Penguin Euripides, and also the Wikipedia definition of thyrsus!)

I have had my eye on 40,000 - it is ridiculously childish, but I cannot stop myself periodically from Googling the phrase "how many words in a novel" and it does seem that 40,000 is the top end of what is considered a novella, NOVEL starts around here. I think 65,000 words would be a good length for this particular novel - it's definitely at the short end but indisputably (?) at that point a novel rather than a neither-fish-nor-fowl - my draft may come in a bit shorter than that, but I think the opening stretch probably needs to have some scenes added, and I guess I will be able to make it to the low 60s without too much difficulty.

I need to finish this draft as soon as I can, there are a lot of other things I would really rather be doing! And unfortunately the supreme recipe for novel composition is to be a bit bored or under-occupied; once I start doing too many other things, the desire (or the will) to write every day is compromised...

Light reading around the edges: a bunch of very good best-of-2010 crime recommendations from Sarah Weinman (the whole list is here), including Jodi Compton's Hailey's War (a bike messenger thriller - I loved it!), Tom Franklin's beautifully titled Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter (probably the best out of these three, though they are all excellent - but this one's the most ambitious) and Alan Glynn's Winterland.

Also, Rosanne Cash's Composed (quite good, but marred for me by the strong presence of a sense of mystic patterning/correspondences that I cannot at all assent to!) and Anne Fortier's Juliet: A Novel, which I found a huge disappointment. I had misremembered the recommendation as having come from Jo Walton, but it was actually another Tor reviewer; the book certainly has some good qualities, but it is about three times as long as the substantive content would suggest suitable (leading to much skimming by this reader), and the heroine is the first one I've seen who could be plausibly considered even worse than Twilight's Bella in terms of passivity, rationalization and general uselessness! NB fourteenth-century Italian Catholic father does not charge rebellious teenage daughter with having possibly been challenging his authority by going so far as to read the Bible!

Saturday link miscellany

What's wrong with No. 10 (the underlying link is highly worthwhile!).

Neil Gaiman on seeing the Dresden Dolls.

Laura Amy Schlitz remembers Eva Ibbotson (link courtesy of Dave Lull).

Alcathoe's bat

Catch-up miscellany (I have been traveling, it throws me off!):

Thumbprint-sized bat discovered in England.

Ancient Roman ingots to provide lead shielding for neutrino detector (thanks to Wendy for the link!).

An edited transcript of my interview of Jonathan Safran Foer for the Literature and Terror series at Columbia.

At the LRB, Jenny Diski on delusionary parasitosis (something I hope I will never experience).

A recent conversation with a friend of my mother's who didn't much like Wolf Hall (which I liked very much indeed) led me to obtain and consume (I will not say devour, they are not quite so delightful to my tastes as that) four crime novels by C. J. Sansom, who seems to be better known in Britain than in the U.S.: Dissolution, Dark Fire, Sovereign and Revelation.

They are not at all bad, they are highly readable, but they caused me to think with considerable grumpiness about how much I dislike the genre of the historical mystery (as opposed to the straight historical novel), especially when it is set in medieval times.

It might just be after-the-fact rationalization of a more visceral dislike, I cannot really say, but the thing that irks me is that though of course crimes must always have been investigated (and Oedipus Rex would be a good example of an early literary work that develops an innovative form to foreground a narrative of investigation and discovery), the narrative protocols of crime fiction are very much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so that it makes a sort of nonsense of the whole business (at the very best a parlor game, at worst a deeply misguided effort in false sensibility) to write about fifteenth-century monks as though they could just be plugged into a P. D. James novel and function.

The first volume in particular gave me a desperate yearning to read some modern stabs at 'real' faux-medieval crime narratives - you would mine Boccaccio and Chaucer and whatever else you wanted for some ideas and then write some really genuinely formally peculiar things that would be (ideally) moving and intellectually gripping but that would look absolutely nothing like the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle. Medievalists out there? Any ideas? What would the reading list be for a fiction-writer researching such a project (I am not contemplating it myself, I am just curious), and what might the genre of medieval crime tale look like? Are there ones that are readable (in verse or prose), and what are their narrative as opposed to investigative protocols? What about law cases/trials and other forms of narrative of investigation? Adaptations of the story of Cane and Abel or other Biblical crimes? Hmmm, I realize I do not actually have a very clear idea about this, I must investigate - perhaps there is an abstruse but magically interesting academic book at the library that would satisfy my curiosity on these points...

Typographic errors

“I think sometimes that being overly type-sensitive is like an allergy.”