Finished "The Blind Assassin" just now.

Atwood's writing is so good it leaves me breathless, shaking my head, muttering "Whoa... how good is THAT!" And it ain't a question. Atwood's mastery of voice is in the forefront here - she tells the story through various layers, from various directions, but by the time she's winding up, the voice of the story is consistent throughout, and the seemingly disparate narratives are welded into one, inevitably, predictably (you've figured it out with glimmers and flashes over the past couple hundred pages) and with ironclad certainty. This is a truly wonderful book, I couldn't recommend it more highly, and Atwood is a truly wonderful writer.

Speaking of musical things that NEVER fail to make me smile

The clip below was recorded something like 30 or more years ago. It is - in my opinion - a perfect performance of a nearly perfect song. It is also a demonstration of two very talented friends sharing their talent and having an absolute blast doing it. (It seems to me).

Check especially the little break Goodman does in this piece. I'm sure it wasn't improvisation, but it has that "just tossing some stuff off for my pals" feel to it that he did so well. It is hard to fathom that Goodman's been gone almost 30 years.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOTbg39-I5Q&feature=related

Sometimes my iPod surprises me

with a particularly interesting sequence of tunes on its shuffle. This is especially felicitous when it's the first few tunes on starting up the pod after pulling out of the driveway on the way to work. This morning I was greeted by John Prine's "Illegal Smile" (the live performance version from John Prine Live), which always makes me smile, followed by Scott Joplin's New Rag, though Max Morath does play a skosh too fast for my taste, it's still a piece that makes me grin & laugh out loud, then on to Tony Bennett and a near-perfect offering of "Who Can I Turn To" - I agree with Frank Sinatra about Bennett being just about the best pop singer ever. After that the shuffle broke down and I had to skip a track or two before I got to Django & Stephane's "Sweet Sue" and after that a track from "Not Your Same Old Blues Crap" and a little Norman Blake, and a very early Stan Rogers track. After that it got pretty normal (for my iPod).

Random blurts

I've been reading Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin; I'm about 80% through (metric courtesy of Kindle). It wasn't so long ago we'd have expected something like "I have about 100 pages to go" or the like. This is only the second of Atwood's that I've read – read The Handmaid's Tale ages ago, back when it was new. I highly recommend Assassin; for the prose, for the story, for the very intelligent and engaging postmodernism. Postmodernism is my current self-edification topic; revisited a little Vonnegut some time back (Player Piano) and introduced myself to Don DeLillo earlier this year (White Noise). Atwood is a master stylist and very engaging storyteller. More later – in this morning's treadmill installment, I think the denouement is beginning to unfold.

Watched The Big Sleep last night for the umpteenth time, for lack of anything more engaging on the scheduled channels. I don't think I ever noticed Marlowe's ear-tugging business before. It's a pity Elisha Cook Jr didn't have more to do in this film, he was always fun to watch. Sleep is one of my favorite Chandler movies and Bogie's certainly my favorite Marlowe. Bob Mitchum was too old when he did "Farewell" though he made a decent try of it, and Eliott Gould was never anything but a joke. The others are also-rans, IMO. As a Bogie film it's not quite up to The Maltese Falcon or The African Queen (though to be fair it's hard to say whether Queen is a Bogie film or a Kate film).

Have joined a local writers' group at the public library. What fun, not unlike the informal online groups but more effective to be in F2F contact and sharing thoughts in real time I think. Stay tuned as this unfolds.

"Upstairs, Downstairs" completed its 3-episode mini-revival on 'GBH last night.

I missed the second episode so will have to catch up. All-in-all it was fun to see Rose, of course, and fun to watch the uppings & downings, to-ings & fro-ings of a "great" house, though not so great as in the Bellamys' day. But the last 20 minutes or so of the final episode seemed like just a whirlwind of sub-plot resolutions coming in hectic rapid fire, as if the producers & writers had in fact originally plotted out a full season of episodes, with proper sub-plotting, minor story arcs and character building stuff to support 8 or 10 or even 12 or 13 episodes, and then got cut back but didn't know how to prune properly, so had to wind everything up in 20 minutes. It felt like Luke Skywalker blasting through an asteroid field with all the loose ends roaring at you to be tied up. As much as I'd like to see "more, please" of this new incarnation of 165 Eaton Place, I think what I'd really like is to see a fast rewind so we could watch these various story arcs, characters, and subplots unfold at a reasonable pace. And THEN move on; I think Pritchard has possibilities (obviously he's no Hudson, but I can't imagine Hudson delivering his employer's baby, either), Agnes is completely missable, actually, and Hallam isn't much more exciting. The Materfamilias, predictably, since played by Eileen Atkins has the potential to be a driving force, and the budding friendship between Rose and the cook also has potential. Persephone was well-packed-off to Berlin, though clearly - should there be more - we have not heard the last of her, knowing as we do what's in store for these folks in the upcoming years. It was a fun show, and well worth doing, and sign me up for more, should it come along.

So I watched "Get Low" last night

and I admired it much. Duvall and Murray of course; splendid. Worth watching just to see Duvall grunting and crotcheting; it might have been worth watching just for the hearse, which was classic.

I did think there was a bit more "old fart business" in Felix's noises and caperings than was absolutely called for, and I did get a sense that Duvall wasn't completely comfortable with his concept of the character. I'm not sure why I felt that, but the speech at the actual funeral seemed to me a little contrived, a little rushed-through. I didn't feel any conflict at all in Felix's getting up in front of all those people and blurting out his story; the ease with which it came forth was inconsistent with the reluctance that had been portrayed, (indeed the reluctance & shame that had driven him to spend 40 years in solitary).

But (in the words of so many critics) "these are quibbles." It was, after all, a fable, and not intended (I reckon) to be a true-to-life, realistic retelling of the facts. I enjoyed it immensely.

A small, early morning blues

There's way too much to do
And I've used up all my spare time
In advance, making big piles out of small ones
Picking up & putting down
Making short stacks out of tall ones
Doing time in my own home
Nuns may fret not
But it seems to me
that even they can choose and be
mistaken

I figure that I might have - at the outside - 25 years, though

the likelihood of more than 20 in which I might be really productive is scant. So say 20 years, in which to do 60 or 65 years' worth of work. Clearly I can't get it all done, so I have to pick and choose, and that means I'll have to cull some stuff before it even gets to the idea stage. I guess I'll try to cull the bad stuff, which means that 20 years should be plenty of time.

Finished "Townie"

Glad I read it. It isn't a book I'd recommend for the writing, but it's not a book one wishes to read for style. I'm envious of the younger Dubus that he had as much from his father as he did. It took him forty years to learn it but he was very lucky indeed.

Well I'm 80% of the way through "Townie" which translates to about

280 pages (the Kindle doesn't have page numbers only locations & percent complete odometer). DubusIII has managed to get himself out of the bar fighter mode and into the story writer mode, and has just reached the point where "Pop" is mangled up on route 495. Here's what amazes me about this memoir so far. Dubus Junior ("Pop" the highly respected fiction writer, the "Writer's writer") has figured more & more over the course of the narrative, and that's understandable since a big chunk of most men's coming of age is coming to terms with our fathers - their absence, or shortcoming, or the pain their presence caused, how their presence or absence, words or silences drive us to be or not be certain things or ways. But here's the puzzlement: Dubus Junior ("pere" that is) is VERY clearly a latter-day Hemingway knockoff, what with the outback hats and the guns and the womanizing and the drinking and the general "true balls" ethic. But Himself ("Papa") has not been mentioned a single time, not as an influence on "Pop" personally nor as a writer, but the omission is glaring and can't help but be anything other than purposeful and intentional. I will not believe that the parallels aren't there, and haven't been noted. Artistically, I wouldn't put either of them in the same pew as Hemingway (and that's not disparagement, believe me). I just find it odd that such a GLARING parallel hasn't found its way into the narrative or ruminations thereon. Maybe AD fils doesn't know from "Papa" or else doesn't see him in "Pop." I dunno. Doesn't ring true there, somehow.

Dream Journal 4/6/11 - a fragment

It was my mother's place, but of course she's been dead for 20 years (she wasn't dead in the dream, but she was played by someone else, some old woman I've never seen before). And of course though the house was hers in the dream context it had nothing to do with any house I ever knew about that she lived in. But the main thing was there were hornets and bees ALL OVER the place, and I kept asking if there was hornet spray (very specifically "hornet spray" not "bug spray" or "insecticide" or "Flit") and she kept saying "I'll get some tomorrow" and I remember the dreaming me thinking "Tomorrow hell, I'm not sleeping in this place with all these frickin' bugs flying around" and then a pipe that ran up alongside the stairs from down somewhere started leaking water UP. And I saw that and thought "Wait a minute, how can that pipe leak UP?" and I woke up.

A random thought tripped over while cleaning up old files

From 18 January 2010
We are tools and dupes of the chemicals with which nature floods our bodies between the ages of eleven and thirty or so. At these ages our purpose in the Grand Scheme of Things is nothing more than to propagate the species. Most of us do this, or at least strive mightily so to do. We then spend the remainder of our primes nurturing and protecting the propagands, which mostly exhausts us.

I bought Andre Dubus III's "Townie" for my Kindle

(and why does that phrase always morph itself into "mein kindle" in my head?) and have been reading it diligently. Perhaps more diligently that some other things I've read so far on "my book." My initial attraction to the DubusIII memoir was a geographical & temporal connection: I lived in the places he lived & memoirizes about around roughly the same time he's talking about. I was a bit older so probably one of the stuffy adults who surrounded his adolescence, and he was one of the damn teenagers getting underfoot of my young adulthood. But the geographical connection is startling; my stomping grounds in Haverhill and Newburyport, at about the same times, were literally around the corner from the places he lived and acted out. Yet the culture he was in was contiguous to but not touching the one I lived in, even though, at many times, we were literally within arm's length of each other.

I'm undecided about the quality of the writing; for one thing there's a lot of repetition, of sense if not of precise examples and phrases. For another, there are many, many examples of very awkward phrasing and infelicitous imagery. So I'm dubious about DubusIII's basic literary talents and will have to read some fiction to get a better sense of it, but in this piece he is most certainly not a stylist, and even more certainly in need of a good editor.

Why is it, I wonder

Why is it, I wonder, that lately I have had a spate of forgetting VERY specific things, over & over, even after renewing my memory of it. This is not old timers short-term memory loss, though there's a touch of that in the noggin from time to time, this is something different. For a period of several months I could NOT remember then name of the chairman of our board of selectmen, though he's a neighbor and we used to see him & ux on Saturday nights at the defunct Hampstead Station eatery. I'm now again fully in possession of his name (possibly as a result of trading emails with him over the state of a dangerous curve by our house as a result of snowbanks carelessly piled). I have it now, I doubt if I'll forget it again. But I couldn't keep hold of it for a while - I'd look it up, say "Oh yeah of course" and a few hours later it'd be gonzo.

Now it's The Radetzky March, which is one of my favorite marches, have known & loved it for years, but lately (few months) it keeps blanking out in the memory banks, and I got to YouTube and look it up at one of the Vienna new year concerts, and go "oh yeah..." and I have it for a while. Yadda-dum-yadda-dum-yaddaDUMDADA

I think I'm losing some little grey cells.

I sat down aimlessly in front of the tube last night

and there was Tommy Lee Jones, looking the tiniest bit skid-row, but speaking articulately. And there was a similarly aged black guy, speaking articulately but not in the same educated vein as was TLJ. After a beat or two it dawned on me that it was Samuel L. Jackson, whereupon it dawned on me that I had lucked into The Sunset Limited, about which I had heard on NPR the other day (interview with Jones). It's Jones's take on the two-character play by Cormac McCarthy. From the interview on the radio it had sounded interesting, I'm always up for TLJ (SLJ not quite as much but I respect his talent & much of his work), but since it was on HBO I hadn't figured I'd likely see it (I didn't even know we GET HBO). It took less than 90 seconds to lock me in place, and I did not move for the next 80 minutes or so (I had missed the first few minutes). And nothing happens - nothing in terms of what we'd call "action" - it's a jam-packed 90 minutes of dialogue between two very different characters, approaching The Big Question (What it Means To Be A Human Being) from diametrically opposed perspectives and points of view. It's a little like "My Dinner With Andre" only with real substance. There are a couple of places where Jones's directorial sense falters a little, he lets himself use a couple of sight gags that are cheap, IMO. But the words and the ideas they convey are riveting, and the delivery is stunning and superb. As I said, I did not move from my place for the duration. Marvelous, and if you have the opportunity to see it, do so.

Dream Journal 1/29/11

This was a story that - sadly - had deep roots in the software industry and what is referred to as the "life-cycle." It doesn't specifically refer to the life-cycle though, it just reflects it. In the dream, I am chatting with our CEO, who is a very bright, astute guy. He asked me what tool our IT group uses for data backups of our servers. Not an illogical question to ask me, but not really my bailiwick, I work with apps that live on the servers, and IT owns boxes, OSes and connectivity. (Also not terribly likely that the CEO would be chatting with me about anything, he knows me but we don't see each other much as we work in different buildings). So anyway I told him I had no idea about the backups but I'd be glad to find out for him. So I set off on that journey. As I went our corporate "campus" turned into a humongous, Gormenghastian factory complex, down at the heels, with Steampunk machinery, cavernous spaces filled with the detritus of a century of industry, oily rags, rats, and so on. I located the information I needed, but it had morphed into not info about data backup on servers, but about a recent software tool evaluation I conducted. Since I hadn't pulled the notes & stuff on the eval into final form, all I had was "notes and stuff" but I slogged back through the medieval mire of the Factory to present the stuff to the CEO. In the interim he had aged such that he looked about 70 (he's really about 55 or 57). So we sat down and he started asking me about what kinda flux Carl was going to use when he started welding. Allova sudden Carl (I know no Carl, he is apparently a plumber) is sitting in the room and I ask "Are we talking about data backup or plumbing." "Plumbing," said Carl. "Shit," I said, "this must be a dream." So I woke up.

So I finished the two selections that were chosen for me

to kick off my Kindle collection - "White Noise" and "Breakfast of Champions" (the latter a re-read from 40 years ago). These were chosen - mostly I think - by my English Major son, and well-chosen indeed, as they are very closely tied in many ways. So here I am off on a foray into Postmodern American fiction, which started, I suppose, when I read John Barth's "Sot-Weed Factor" back in 1968, but which has sputtered with stunted attempts at Pynchon and a few others here & there over the decades. So any recommendations? I'm thinking of Pynchon redux, I've read enough of Barth for him not to be a new experience, ditto Vonnegut. More DeLillo? If so which? Auster? Same query? What about Pamuk or Murakami?

Well I finished White Noise by Don DeLillo.

First novel read on the Kindle. A satisfying milestone in itself. The book is impressive, and makes a statement about literature in its time (mid-1980s), and as I've said elsewhere it's clearly a book by "a Major Talent writing in His Prime." It is certainly one of the texts that expounders and expositors will point to (or at) in their discussions of Postmodern fiction. It contains many of the themes and telling character details of PMF, to be sure – a family populated by variously related (and unrelated), precocious, mostly verbal kids, none of whom belong jointly to the protagonist and his current spouse. The exception to the verbal precocity is (of course) a kid who doesn't speak at all. It contains characters who verbalize a lot more than they actually DO anything, who are seemingly completely caught up in expounding on their inner lives. Well not entirely. They have occupations, these characters, but at times these occupations seem a little surreal – It is necessary, it seems, that the prot. can't just be a professor of Victorian poetry or some vanilla subject, he has to be head of the Hitler Studies department. It is necessary that a jester/chorus character talk like Woody Allen (a LOT like Woody Allen; he practically has "Smartass New York Jew" tattooed on his brow like a mezuzah). It is necessary that an adolescent male character deconstruct everything to the point where you wouldn't bother asking Heinrich (that's necessary too) "what time is it" even if it meant maybe missing an appointment. You'd miss it anyway as a result of his diatribe on "does anybody really know what time it is" or worse "what is time?"
I don't mean to sound as if I don't respect the book – it's extraordinarily well-written and powerful. Perhaps some of its predictability comes from the fact that so much of what constitutes it has – over the 25 or so years since its publication – found its way into much other literature (not that I think DeLillo invented this stuff, it was just less common in 1985 than it is now). It is a book in which ideas jostle to be taken seriously, but you're not sure which ones are being taken seriously by the author. Certainly most of the people in the book can't be taken terribly seriously, unlike some of Yates's or Carver's folks, who are a lot more like you & me than these wackos.

I'm impressed with Don DeLillo, though I admit

I may not be up to a competency in Post-Modern fiction (however it's capitalized and hyphenated). "White Noise" is a work clearly written by a Major Talent in his Prime, and I'm sure that the places where it leaves me in its dust are artifacts of the datedness of my own literacy.

However - what do you think of this? I'd really appreciate it if anyone browsing past who hasn't ordinarily commented would stick his or her oar in on this. I happen to think this little blurt is quite smart and well put. The speaker is an "early 30 something" brilliant lab chemist in a university. She's a caution unto herself, a minor character in the book but frankly worth reading it for on her own account.

She says to Jack (the protagonist & narrator)

"… I think it's a mistake to lose one's sense of death, even one's fear of death. Isn't death the boundary we need? Doesn't it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit."

Well I finished Bryson's "At Home" and found it thoroughly enjoyable, if not

100% reliable in its array of "Things you might not have known or perhaps hadn't thought of." I'm quite sure it won't be my last hardcopy book, but by golly this e-Reading thing has its charms. I'm about 1/3 of the way through "White Noise" by Don DeLillo, and - for next to no money - have stocked the Kindle with some "dipping" material (Wodehouse & Saki). Breakfast of Champions came for holidays too. Shopping for the thing is nearly as much fun as reading. So far, there is no doubt in my mind, e-Readers are an unmitigated boon to the distribution of text. What their effect on literature will be is going to be great fun to watch over the next few years, especially when combined with the capabilities for individual publishing opened up by the other features of our connected/electronic age.