Category Archives: Lit

Recommended: Spring 23 Edition

Here are some of the films and books I consumed over the last months.

LIT

Name of the Rose (Umberto Eco)

Set in a 14th century monastery in Northern Italy, Eco’s claustrophobic mystery encompasses semiotics, apocryphal religious texts, and insights into the Church’s efforts to purge itself of heresy.

The Luminaries (Elizabeth Catton)

Despite its 800 page length, this historical novel reads quick. Set in 1860s New Zealand’s gold camps, it concerns a death, a disappearance, and a bequest.

I Celebrate Myself (Bill Morgan)

I learned more than I wanted to about Allen Ginsberg in this fine-tuned biography, though the insights about his poetry, particularly Howl, are invaluable.

Appointment in Samarra (John O’Hara)

A small town bourgeois’s complete self-destruction. Ernest Hemmingway and Dorothy Parker were fans.

Arthurian Romances (Chretien de Troyes)

The basis of Mallory’s Le Morte D’Arthur. Here are the roots of Romance.

The Horseman on the Roof (Jean Giono)

A young Piedmontese hussar navigates the post-Napoleonic South of France during a cholera outbreak. Existentialist!

The White Company (Arthur Conan Doyle)

Doyle considered this Late Medieval-set story his best novel.

The Passenger (Cormac McCarthy)

Probably McCarthy’s penultimate book. Not as scorching as Blood Meridian, yet fraught with greed, obsession, and schizophrenia.

FILM

Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool (Nelson 2019)

Miles was a genius, obviously. And a bit of a bastard.

In Fabric (Strickland 2018)

Stylized, Giallo-like art direction. Great pallette. Still images/ variable film speed. Retro score.

Cashback (Ellis 2006)

A winsome post-college rom-com.

Hyena (Johnson 2014)

The English Bad Lt.? No, that’s too glib. Even so, this crime drama is a lot of fun.

True History of the Kelly Gang (Kurzel 2019)

Based on Peter Carey’s stupendous, Booker-winning novel. Cross-dressing bushrangers punish the Brits Down Under.

The Mauritanian (McDonald 2021)

Ultimately far too forgiving. Guantanamo Bay is a necrotic sore, and those who administered it, including Ron DeSantis, deserve punishment.

The Wonder (Lelio 2022)

Florence Pugh dominates this story about faith and fraud set in 19th century rural Ireland.

That Man from Rio (de Broca 1964)

Jean-Paul Belmondo at perhaps his lithest and most nimble pinballs around Brutalist Rio during its dictatorship era, something no one in the film feels compelled to address.

That Touch of Mink (Mann 1962)

There’s an icy distance to Cary Grant in his later films, a quality not even Doris Day’s sunny enthusiasm can dispel in this 1962 romantic comedy.

Berberian Sound Studio (Strickland 2012)

This homage to Italian trash cinema includes Toby Jones as a meek audio engineer whose work on a bloody giallo begins to warp his sense of reality. One of the most interesting aspects of the film is the complete absence of screen violence. Instead of watching gore we witness foley artists hacking apart watermelons. Lacking any visual counterpart, the screams and squishes land that much harder. A great movie to use for Thought and Image.

Pilgrimage (Muldowney 2017)

A gratifying film for any fan of medievalist cinema. A 13th century Cistercian monk transports a holy relic through the bogs of Ireland, where Norman invaders and Gaelic warriors clash.

Blood on the Forge Covers (310/485)

The 1941 hardback:

The 1953 paperback:

Wild City (376)

“Nothing I had experienced in my life led me to expect what would happen to me in my loneliness. One day in the middle of the summer as I was walking down 125th Street, I suddenly stopped and stared around me in amazement. It was as if I had awakened from a long dream that I’d walked around in all my life. I threw over all my preoccupations with ideas and felt so free that I didn’t know who I was or where I was The whole appearance of the world changed in a minute when I realized what had happened, and I began to look at people walking past me. They all had incredible sleepy, bestial expressions on their faces, yet no different from what they usually looked like. I suddenly understood everything vague and troubled in my mind that had been caused by the expression of people around me. Everybody I saw had something wrong with them. The apparition of an evil, sick, unconscious wild city rose before me in visible semblance, and about the dead buildings in the barren air, the bodies of the soul that built the wonderland shuffled and stalked and lurched in attitudes of immemorial nightmare all around. When I saw people conversing around me, all their conversation, all their bodily movements, all their signs, the thoughts reflected on their faces were of fear of recognition and anguished fear that someone would take the initiative and discover their masks and lies. Therefore every tone of voice, movement of the hand, carried a negative overtone: this in the world is called coyness and shyness and politeness, or frigidity and hostility when the awareness becomes too overpowering. I felt that I would be crucified if I alluded with any insistence to the divine nature of ourselves and the physical universe. Therefore I did not speak but only stared in dumb silence.”

— Allen Ginsberg, quoted in I Celebrate Myself by Bill Morgan (102-03)

Apocalyptic Accumulation

While thir hearts were jocund and sublime,
Drunk with Idolatry, drunk with Wine,
And fat regorg’d of Bulls and Goats,
Chaunting thir Idol…
Among them he a spirit of phrenzy sent,
Who hurt thir minds,
And urg’d them on with mad desire
To call in hast for thir destroyer;

Regret

From The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy:

The Old Italians Dying (376)

I probably should’ve shared this poem by Lawrence Ferlenghetti before everyone went to North Beach.

The Old Italians Dying

For years the old Italians have been dying
all over America
For years the old Italians in faded felt hats
have been sunning themselves and dying
You have seen them on the benches
in the park in Washington Square
the old Italians in their black high button shoes
the old men in their old felt fedoras
with stained hatbands
have been dying and dying
day by day
You have seen them
every day in Washington Square San Francisco
the slow bell
tolls in the morning
in the Church of Peter & Paul
in the marzipan church on the plaza
toward ten in the morning the slow bell tolls
in the towers of Peter & Paul
and the old men who are still alive
sit sunning themselves in a row
on the wood benches in the park
and watch the processions in and out
funerals in the morning
weddings in the afternoon
slow bell in the morning Fast bell at noon
In one door out the other
the old men sit there in their hats
and watch the coming & going
You have seen them
the ones who feed the pigeons
cutting the stale bread
with their thumbs & penknives
the ones with old pocketwatches
the old ones with gnarled hands
and wild eyebrows
the ones with the baggy pants
with both belt & suspenders
the grappa drinkers with teeth like corn
the Piemontesi the Genovesi the Siciliani
smelling of garlic & pepperoni
the ones who loved Mussolini
the old fascists
the ones who loved Garibaldi
the old anarchists reading L’Umanita Nova
the ones who loved Sacco & Vanzetti
They are almost all gone now
They are sitting and waiting their turn
and sunning themselves in front of the church
over the doors of which is inscribed
a phrase which would seem to be unfinished
from Dante’s Paradiso
about the glory of the One
who moves everything…
The old men are waiting
for it to be finished
for their glorious sentence on earth
to be finished
the slow bell tolls & tolls
the pigeons strut about
not even thinking of flying
the air too heavy with heavy tolling
The black hired hearses draw up
the black limousines with black windowshades
shielding the widows
the widows with the black long veils
who will outlive them all
You have seen them
madre de terra, madre di mare
The widows climb out of the limousines
The family mourners step out in stiff suits
The widows walk so slowly
up the steps of the cathedral
fishnet veils drawn down
leaning hard on darkcloth arms
Their faces do not fall apart
They are merely drawn apart
They are still the matriarchs
outliving everyone
in Little Italys all over America
the old dead dagos
hauled out in the morning sun
that does not mourn for anyone
One by one Year by year
they are carried out
The bell
never stops tolling
The old Italians with lapstrake faces
are hauled out of the hearses
by the paid pallbearer
in mafioso mourning coats & dark glasses
The old dead men are hauled out
in their black coffins like small skiffs
They enter the true church
for the first time in many years
in these carved black boats
The priests scurry about
as if to cast off the lines
The other old men
still alive on the benches
watch it all with their hats on
You have seen them sitting there
waiting for the bocce ball to stop rolling
waiting for the bell
for the slow bell
to be finished tolling
telling the unfinished Paradiso story
as seen in an unfinished phrase
on the face of a church
in a black boat without sails
making his final haul

Summer Reading 22 (1)

Here’s what I’ve read so far:

Jane Austen, Emma

This may be the greatest English novel ever written because of its absolute formal control and incisively drawn storyworld. Every paragraph seems perfectly balanced. Bridgerton— which clearly draws from Austen’s masterwork– appears garish and jejune in comparison.

Christopher Priest, The Glamour

I wish I’d encountered Priest earlier in my life. In this psychological thriller he reaches to the roots of the concept of glamour as a form of magic– a hidden aspect of the term’s contemporary usage we would do well to understand.

Patrick Hoffman, The White Van

This is a cracking debut crime novel that exhibits a deep familiarity with San Francisco’s geography.