Does the photo of this cake mesmerize you, too? I saw this on the lovely food blog Smitten Kitchen yesterday, and was, indeed, smitten. Thank you Deb, for creating what looks to be a go-to recipe.
I showed it to 5yo Drake, who will be 6 in August. He said he would like it for his birthday cake. Which is good, because I was going to make it anyway.
From Infinite Jest, which I’m reading as part of the Infinite Summer challenge, an example of the late David Foster Wallace’s weird, esoteric humor, ongoing sentences, vocabulary gymnastics and unique phrasing:
Wednesday is the U.S.A. weekday on which fresh Toblerone hits Boston, Massachusetts U.S.A.’s Newbury Street’s import-confectioners’ shelves, and the Saudi Minister of Home Entertainment’s inability to control his appetites for Wednesday Toblerone often requires the medical attache to remain in personal attendance all evening on the bulk-rented fourteenth floor of the Back Bay Hilton, juggling tongue-depressors and cotton swabs, nystatin and ibuprofen and stiptics and antibiotic thrush salves, rehabilitating the mucous membranes of the dyspeptic and distressed and often (but not always) penitent and appreciative Saudi Prince Q—. So on 1 April, Y.D.A.U., when the medical attache is (it is alleged) insufficiently deft with a Q-Tip on an ulcerated sinal necrosis and is subjected at just 1800h. to a fit of febrile thrushive pique from the florally imbalanced Minister of Home Entertainment, and is by high-volume fiat replaced at the royal beside by the Prince’s personal physician, who’s summoned by beeper from the Hilton’s sauna, and when the damp personal physician pats the medical attache on the shoulder and tells him to pay the pique no mind, that it’s just the yeast talking, but to just head on home and unwind and for once make a well-deserved early Wednesday evening of it, and but so when the attache does get home, at like 1840h., his spacious Boston apartments are empty… (34-5)
This sentence was preceded and followed by five lines apiece that I haven’t included, and followed by one other sentence in its large paragraph. I’m not sure which part I find most amusing: the Prince’s Wednesday Toblerone binges, the phrase “febrile thrushive pique”, or “it’s just the yeast talking.”
After reading, and being transported by, Michael Chabon’s Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, I added David Hajdu’s Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, to my reading list. Even though it was the last of my K & C related reading (and thus a likely candidate to be pushed off the TBR list), I not only read it, but enjoyed it immensely.
Churches and community groups raged and organized campaigns against comic books. Young people acted out mock trials of comics characters. Schools held public burnings of comics, and students threw thousands of the books into the bonfires; at more than one conflagration, children marched around the flames reciting incantations denouncing comics. Headlines in newspapers and magazines around the country warned readers: “Depravity for Children–Ten Cents a Copy!”…The offices of one of the most adventurous and scandalous publishers, EC Comics, were raided by the New York City police. More than a hundred acts of legislation were introduced on the state and municipal levels to ban or limit the sale of comic books…Soon, Congress took action with a set of sensational, televised hearings that nearly destroyed the comic-book business…
Page-one news as it occurred, the story of the comics controversy is a largely forgotten chapter in the history of the culture wars (7)
Hajdu’s coverage of comic-book fear and censorship to the 1940 and 1950’s is well-researched, filled with compelling personal accounts and anecdotes, and eminently readable. For readers who want to explore the history embedded in Chabon’s Pulitzer-Prize winning book, for pop-culture history buffs, for those interested in youth culture and censorship, or just anyone who likes a well-written account of a little-known phenomenon, I highly recommend this book.
I have hit all the page counts thus far reading Infinite Jest for Infinite Summer, and am paused at page 169. I’m flat out loving this book, even while knowing that tons of stuff is sailing over my head. I’m so boggled by all the little things that match up , e.g. Hal’s uncle’s modified tennis academy motto, “The Man Who Knows His Limitations Has None” (81) with the section on Schtitt’s take on tennis play a few pages later (83-4). I’m curious but not (yet) obsessively so about the seemingly (though I seriously doubt it) random divisions marked by an icon of what looks to be a crescent soon after a new moon.
What do I think it’s about, at 169 pages in? Getting out of one’s head and relating to people in person, among other things. And the irony, deliberate I’m sure, of that theme ensconced in a huge book that requires concentration and shutting out of distractions, is not lost on me.
This week’s vocabulary search was much helped by the Infinite Jest glossary, though I did have to use other sources as well. Note to self: looking up words later in a clump? Not helpful. And yet, jumping on the computer each time I don’t recognize a word? Unhelpful in a different way. Reading and ignoring the words I don’t know? Ooh. Crazy.
incunabular, annular, raster, synclinal, uremic, leptosomatic, quincunx, bradykinetic, varicoceles, tympana, aleatory, somatic, pedalferrous, fulvous, halation, ephebes, agnate, erumpent, vade mecum, rutilant
Here’s how we came to watch The Third Man again. First, my husband G. Grod re-read The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler. Then we watched the film adaptation of that book by Robert Altman. Then I insisted on watching The Third Man, because I suspected the endings were similar.
Narrator: Oh, I was going to tell you, wait, I was going to tell you about Holly Martins, an American. Came all the way here to visit a friend of his. The name was Lime, Harry Lime. Now Martins was broke and Lime had offered him, some sort, I don’t know, some sort of job. Anyway, there he was, poor chap. Happy as a lark and without a cent.
The pleasures of The Third Man are myriad. There’s Joseph Cotton as the ugly American, Trevor Howard as the constabulary, Alida Valli as the femme fatale, and Orson Welles as the dead friend of Cotton, Harry Lime. Add to those amazing black and white shadowed images, evocative zither music, the cuckoo clock speech, the sewer chase and a bitter coda that is indeed referenced not only in Long Goodbye but in many more films, including one of G. Grod’s favorites, Miller’s Crossing. (Aliens? We just watched that, and I can’t think of the reference. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?)
We own the 50th anniversary Criterion Collection edition; it has a lovingly restored print as well as great extras. But in 2007 those double-dipping rat bastages at Criterion put out a two-disc Criterion edition that features a commentary by Steven Soderbergh and Tony Gilroy, screenwriter of the Bourne movies. I think I’m going to need that one, too. Hey, I own six editions of Bronte’s Jane Eyre, why not two of The Third Man?
I’m the potentially gifted ten-year-old tennis and lexical prodigy whose mom’s a continental mover and shaker in the prescriptive-grammar academic world and whose dad’s a towering figure in optical and avant-garde film circles and single-handedly founded the Enfield Tennis Academy but drinks Wild Turkey at like 5:00 a.m. and pitches over sideways during dawn drills, on the courts, some days, and some days presents with delusions about people’s mouths moving but nothing coming out. (p. 30, Infinite Jest)
I’ve made it to page 63, the first goal for Infinite Summer, and I hope to go all the way. Infinite Jest is challenging, funny, and too heavy to cart around with me, so I may have to get a supplemental book to read when I’m on the go. I was please but unsurprised to find the word “nauseous” used correctly. I’m keeping a list of characters, of year names, and of words to look up. This week, it was “apocope” and “fantods.” Neither, of course, was included in my MMPB dictionary.
Apocope: the loss of one or more sounds from the end of a word, and especially the loss of an unstressed vowel.
Fantods: A state of extreme nervousness or restlessness.
Infinite Summer, here I come, fueled by a blueberry toaster pastry and a double cappuccino.
The Escapists by Brian K. Vaughan is one of several comics inspired by Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Like that prose novel, this graphic novel plays with the boundary of reality and fiction. In it, a young man from Cleveland, Max Roth, buys the rights to a defunct comic-book character, the Escapist. He finds two friends to help create a new version of the comic book, then tries to publicize it in the manner of the character’s creators, Sam Clay and Joe Kavalier. It tells the story in real time, with flashback and pages of the fictional comic the team creates, all with different artists to distinguish the changes in story. Like the novel it’s inspired by, The Escapists is clever with sympathetic characters, a layered narrative, and a story both tragic and hopeful. A fitting, post-modern complement to Chabon’s excellent novel.
I first read Michael Chabon’s Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay in the sleep-deprived, surreal days following the birth of my son Drake, now almost 6yo. He was hungry around the clock, so I nursed him lying down so I could read at the same time. I even got a book light so I could read during the night feedings. I remembered the book itself only vaguely, yet the physical act of reading it–nursing, switching sides, wrestling with the book light and an unwieldy hardcover–is still very clear.
I was surprised, then, on this re-reading, to find this book not only extremely well-written and crafted, but also so enjoyable. How could I not remember how flat-out GOOD this book was? Well, I remember it about as well as I remember Drake’s earliest infancy. THAT I don’t need or want to go through again, but this book was a delight to rediscover.
The book details the friendship and collaboration between Josef Kavalier, a WWII Jewish refugee from Prague, and Sam Clay (ne Klayman). The cousins are in their late teens, and break into the burgeoning business of comics by creating a character called The Escapist.
The long run of Kavalier & Clay–and the true history of the Escapist’s birth–began in 1939, toward the end of October, on the night that Sammy’s mother burst into his bedroom, applied the ring and iron knuckles of her left hand to the side of his cranium, and told him to move over and make room in his bed for his cousin from Prague.
The book is a wild mixture of history, fabrication, Jewish lore, metaphor, comic books, romance, and adventure, all told through a fascinating panoply of complex, engaging characters. I’m a comic book geek, so the lengthy sections on comics history were interesting to me. The book likely would be a tougher read for someone with no interest or experience with comics. Even so, there’s so much going on in this book, I’d be very surprised if a reader didn’t find something to like, even love, in this sprawling epic.
James Cameron, fresh from Terminator, directed Aliens, the sequel to Ridley Scott’s Alien. Scott’s movie was dark, brooding, psychological horror. Cameron wisely takes the sequel in a different direction, adding many more monsters (though only six suits were used, he claims in an interview on the special edition), many more characters, and a lot more action. Ripley’s character still gets room to develop, though the others around her tend to be caricatures, albeit entertaining ones, like Bill Paxton’s Hudson, who talks tough till he meets the aliens:
We’re all gonna die man!
or Michael Biehn’s good guy, who has the good sense to value Ripley right away:
Ripley: [pointing to part of gun Hicks is showing her] What’s this?
Hicks: That’s the grenade launcher. I don’t think you want to mess with that.
Ripley: You started this. Show me everything. I can handle myself.
Hicks: [chuckles] Yeah, I noticed.
With the aliens, as with the humans, the mother figure is in charge. The men around her support and protect her, but she’s the one not to mess with, especially if her offspring, literal or metaphorical, are threatened.
Seventeen minutes of deleted scenes were added back in to the theatrical release to make the Special Edition DVD we watched. They were fine scenes, adding detail and character, but not necessary. Given the amount of action and horror, I’d have preferred a shorter edition. Action, or movement, was key to Cameron’s take on the characters. He put less detail into the alien suits, but made them more mobile. He hired gymnasts and athletes and instructed them to move quickly, and inhumanly. This, along with the editing, gives the impression of a legion of aliens, not just a paltry half dozen.
The character of Ripley recently topped Sci Fi Online’s list of “Women Who Shook Sci Fi.” (Entertainment Weekly has a geekish, though valid, quibble with the list.) Also, there’s an Alien prequel in the works. Even with all the kerfuffle, I think I’m going to skip installments 3 and 4. I saw them when they came out, and prefer keep the memories of the very good 1 and 2 unsullied.
I do so love a good arbitrary deadline. Some of the folks from The Morning News propose reading poor, dead David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest this summer. Four writers who’ve never read it are guides, with other guest experts joining them along the way. They start 6/21 at summer solstice, and ends 9/22 at the autumn equinox. It works out to about 75 pages a week. Totally do-able, no?
Speaking of chunky classics, David Copperfield is the selection for the next book club (real and virtual) at Semicolon. Sherry does the online book world a great service every week by hosting a Saturday Review of Books, where readers can share links to what they’ve written, and find other blogs by other readers.
My husband and I bought the Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 2 dvd set when it came out, watched a few episodes, then put it away. We had no idea where we’d ended, so we went back to the beginning, starting with Season 1, episode 1. Buffy is a fun show with a dark sense of humor and a way with theme and metaphor. Season 1 was Buffy finding her bearings in Sunnydale and battling the Master, an ancient vampire bent on, what else, releasing hell on earth.
Season 2, though, digs deeper and even darker. The series moves away from some of the sillier “monster of the week” episodes, and spends more of its time on the bad guys: Spike, Drusilla, and a friend turned foe. It still finds time for the funny, though.
Oz: Yeah. Hey, did everybody see that guy just turn to dust?
Willow: Uh, well, uh… sort of.
Xander: Yep. Vampires are real. A lot of them live in Sunnydale. Willow will fill you in.
Willow: I know it’s hard to accept at first.
Oz: Actually, it explains a *lot*.
Nasty stuff happens to characters we’ve come to love, and we get to see how it affects them over time. I found the two-parter in the middle, “Surprise” and “Innocence”, along with the season finale, wrenching stuff. The Amazon reviewer sums it up well, I think: “This is some of the best TV ever made, period.”
While the media is abuzz over a silly rumor about Buffy that will likely never come to pass, do yourself a favor: ignore the gossip and revisit the original series. It’s a perfect show for the summer season of reruns.
From Top 10: Season Two issue 4, by Zander Cannon and Gene Ha. Top 10 is a comic book set in a world in which everyone has superpowers. The book has often been described as a mash up of NYPD Blue and superheroes.
In a scene from issue four, therapist Dr. M. Gautama to police officer Irma Wornow, aka Irma Geddon:
1. Life sucks
2. It sucks because you want everything to LAST, and it never DOES.
3. And the one thing that would make you a lot HAPPIER about this world…is if you just stopped caring.
Tough talk from a therapist, but amusing because the police therapist is a pipe-smoking buddha. He’s trying to teach Irma the first three of the Four Noble Truths, which were phrased differently when I learned them at school:
1. All of life is dukkha (which reductively translates as suffering).
2. Dukkha is caused by desire.
3. To cut the cord of dukkha, cut the cord of desire.
This scene is a perfect example of the state of the art of comics today: smart, funny, and multi-layered. Top Ten is one of my favorite comics; check it out if you haven’t yet.
Were you wondering what the fourth noble truth is?
4. Follow the Noble Eightfold Path
Sticky Burr: Adventures in Burrwood Forest by John Lechner, published by Candlewick Press, is another gem of a graphic novel-ish book for kids. I discovered it in the increasingly well-stocked shelves in the kids section at my comic store.
Sticky is an iconoclast in the burr community. He doesn’t like to prickle, he prefers music and problem-solving, to the annoyance of his nemesis, Scurvy Burr. Scurvy tries to get Sticky kicked out of the village and wacky adventures ensue. Danger! Romance! Music! Heroics! Plus really cute art and laugh-out-loud moments. The art, humor and style reminded me pleasantly of the Doreen Cronin and Harry Bliss “Diary of” picture books: Worm, Spider and Fly. This was a joy to read, and was requested repeatedly by my sons 5yo Drake and 3yo Guppy.
Good news! There are more Sticky Burr adventures online. Sticky has his own website, as does the author, John Lechner. Also, a sequel is due this September!
This week’s selection in Take Up Production’s “First, You Need a Crime” series was Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, which I’d never seen. It’s one of his earlier films, in black and white, and before his penchant for tormenting icy blonds turned into a fetish. Farley Granger is Guy Haines, a handsome, famous young tennis player approached by the garrulous Bruno on a train. Haines has marriage trouble; Bruno has some deep and abiding father issues and tells Haines he’d like to swap murders with him. Haines is understandably put off, and politely hurries away. Bruno, though, won’t be dissuaded.
The movie is full of fascinating, funny, creepy and disturbing stuff. Raymond Chandler worked on the screenplay, based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith. Hitchcock’s daughter Patricia is Barbara, who has some of the best lines and takes on the role of girl detective.
Senator Morton: Poor unfortunate girl.
Barbara Morton: She was a tramp.
Senator Morton: She was a human being. Let me remind you that even the most unworthy of us has a right to life and the pursuit of happiness.
Barbara Morton: From what I hear she pursued it in all directions.
Girls who wear glasses don’t have a good time of it, though. There are several iconic images, such as one of the crowd at a tennis match, a reflection in eyeglasses, and a merry-go-round scene that makes my eyes widen and jaw drop even in memory. There’s subtext on social and political power, and of homosexuality. This is a great Hitchcock film, and one I’m glad I got to see on film in a theater.
IMDB lists a remake slated for 2011, but a Google search turned up paltry evidence, so let’s hope it just goes away.
I agree with many viewers that Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse is getting better as it goes, and hope Fox has the sense to renew both it and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. I think they make a great Friday double feature, especially now that Battlestar Galactica is over (sniff) and when they’re on, they’re on.
In general, I think the best Dollhouse eps have been the ones that focus on the mythology, and not just Echo.
I have some questions about last night’s episode “Briar Rose”, and since Sepinwall hasn’t posted yet, I’m squirming with impatience to wonder online about them. Don’t read on if you haven’t yet seen it, though I’ll try to be vague.
After weeks of drowning in unread posts at other sites and blogs, I am DONE! Caught up! Whew!
I had fun doing it. I have whittled down the sites I follow to those that entertain, inform and/or educate me. The volume of unread material was daunting, but reading it was still a joy.
I didn’t get the Google Reader magic message, “You have no unread items,” though, since I still have some Sepinwall reviews of episodes I haven’t watched of Parks and Recreation, 30 Rock, Dollhouse and Breaking Bad.
But watching those shows, and reading their reviews, and trying to keep up and not get so weeded again with my online reading? Those are all to be done some other day.
At Wired, Neil Gaiman, who does not actually live in Minneapolis, is interviewed about his “love letter” to Batman, while the monthly books go on hiatus and DC “reboots” the character and comics. He’s also got interesting stuff to say about comics made into movies. (Link from The Morning News)
Alan Moore and Frank Miller have done laudable things for the comics world, but I suspect that their dark work in the 80’s (Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, The Killing Joke) helped scuttle comics as reading material for kids. Darker and with adult themes, comics of the 80’s and beyond earned a wider audience and widespread critical acclaim. But comics also seemed to lose their roots as the coveted items from the grocery store bought with allowance money. Yes, Archie and the Ducks were still out there, but the plethora of superhero comics and popular adaptations that I remember as a kid all but disappeared.
I’ve been pleased to see more young reader and all ages books on the shelves of the comic shop. Yesterday I was happily surprised to see three titles from imprint Boom! Kids comics, all for young children. My two sons, 3yo Guppy and 5yo Drake, were thrilled, and have been carrying them around ever since. We got Cars, The Incredibles, and The Muppet Show. More titles are coming and all with be ongoing. And clearly demand is out there; the titles sold out immediately to retailers, though they can still be found in stores.
Additionally, Toon Books has put out some wonderful hardcover comic books for kids. By request, I read Luke on the Loose, by kid favorite Harry Bliss (of Diary of a Spider, Worm and Fly) and Stinky by Eleanor Davis, umpteen times last week.
If you and your child are looking to expand horizons, check out some of these new titles and books. The mainstream media spent much of the last three decades being shocked that comics aren’t just for kids anymore; they missed that comics often weren’t for kids anymore. Perhaps a true all-ages revolution has begun.
Me, that’s who. I’m a comics geek. I read Watchmen in 1990 and have been an avid comic reader ever since. That’s why I won’t be seeing Watchmen (2009).
Watchmen the book is brilliant. It exploded the boundary, then and perhaps forever, on superhero entertainment and the comics medium. So a faithful adaptation, as director Zack Snyder said he tried to do, misses the point, IMO. It offers superheroes and violence up as entertainment, without the irony.
Instead of investing almost 3 hours and $10 in the movie, read this interview at Salon with creator Alan Moore. (Can’t find the source of the link; sorry. It was probably Morning News or Bookslut) Read the graphic novel. Or go here for a hilarious imagining of what Watchmen might have been like as an 80’s kids cartoon, or to Slate for a parody of what other directors might have done. (Last two links from ALoTT5MA)
My husband G. Grod went to see it last night.
“How was it?” I asked.
“Exactly what I expected,” he replied. “That bad. Now I know.”
Rober Ebert liked it, but it’s clear from his review that he hasn’t read the source material. Part of what worked about recent comic-book movies like Spiderman 2, Iron Man, Hellboy II and The Dark Knight is that they were based on the larger legend, but eschewed existing stories in favor of ones crafted specifically for the movie.
TV critic Alan Sepinwall’s review confirmed my suspicions about the movie. I’ve not yet gone to see any adaptation of an Alan Moore project, though all the graphic novels–League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Swamp Thing, From Hell, V for Vendetta–are among my favorites. Movies and comics are different mediums. Sometimes one can bring something to the other than deepens the story. But with such rich source material as Watchmen, I don’t much see the point.