We have this great little library around the corner, which is very convenient. In London, there are lots of libraries, but it’s such big city geographically that it’s not always the case that there’s a library just around the corner. It’s a nice library—it’s right next to The Keats House, where John Keats lived next door to Fanny Brawne before heading off to Italy and an untimely death. The trees at the edge of the Keats House grounds hang over the path that leads to the library doors, and in Spring there are lovely blossoms dropping petals on the path. The building itself is that curious medley that one often encounters in England, a combination of a bit of old grandeur with some 1960s crap thrown in to make the interior more “functional.” But it’s comfortable, it has a good collection of books and newspapers, an attractive children’s room, and a bunch of PCs that people use for internet access, and it used to have a neighbor’s cat, Moggy, who would wander in and sleep all day before she died last Spring, much to the dismay of the regulars. Full Story »

Steve Alten is waiting for some big news. In Alten’s case, “big” involves a seventy-six-foot-long man-eater that lives in the world’s deepest oceans and has been trying, for twelve years, to rise out of the depths and into cineplexes.

Alten is the author of Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror, arguably one of the best summer potboilers in the last decade and a half. In the book, a team of deep-sea explorers accidentally bring to the surface a Carcharodon megalodon—a species of giant prehistoric shark thought to have died out about 50,000 years ago.

“I have been enthralled with this entire species,” Alten said in a phone interview from his South Florida home.

In Alten’s world, as the prehistoric seas cooled, the giant sharks gradually retreated to the deepest parts of the ocean, where geothermal vents kept the water much warmer than the water at the surface. A layer of near-freezing deep-sea water just above the geothermal zone kept the sharks from surfacing.

When in came out in 1997, Meg rocketed onto the New York Times bestseller list. The Los Angles Times called it “Jurassic Shark!” A Time magazine cover story touted it as a “cool summer read.” Disney’s Hollywood Pictures optioned the movie rights. Three sequels hit bookshelves in the twelve years since, including the most recent, Meg: Hell’s Aquarium, this past summer.

But moviegoers are still waiting for their first Meg sighting. Full Story »

“Take a walk with me,” I said.

My students, some twenty-one freshmen, followed me into the hallway. “We’re going to take a walk around the building,” I told them. “I want you to just notice things.”

With my cowboy boots clicking on the tile floors, I moseyed down the hall with the pack of students behind me.

Some of them chit-chatted with each other. Almost all of them wondered what the heck we were doing: If this class was Composition and Critical Thinking, why were we going for a stroll? Full Story »

Meld the slipperiness of memory with the manic power of pop culture and you’ll get an idea of the lens Rebecca Brown uses to look at the world these days.

Brown’s newest book, American Romances, a collection of eight essays, mixes and matches in surprising ways: Oreo cookies and Gertrude Stein. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Beach Boy Brian Wilson. The Invisible Woman, John Wayne, Felix Mendelssohn, and the God Squad. They’re all in there—along with a lot of Brown herself.

“I’m trying to understand my individual life in the context of other things,” she explains in a phone interview from her Seattle-area home. “Clearly, some of the pieces are very personal. The autobiographical stuff is really autobiographical.”

Brown, who’s taught writing for twenty years, is best known for her novels: The Haunted House, The Last Time I Saw You, The Gifts of the Body, The Dogs: A Modern Bestiary—eleven in all. Her 2003 book Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary, a powerful retelling of her mother’s battle with terminal cancer, provided her the opportunity to explore memoir.

But nothing quite compares to the essay style Brown creates in American Romances. Full Story »

When baseball resumes in Moundville this year, it will do so after a 22-year rain delay.

In the intervening years, the town has reinvented itself around the rain. Homeowners have rigged giant sheets of plastic, like umbrellas, over their homes. Officials have constructed a series of canals around the town to siphon off water. Townsfolk have to go to the giant gymnasium if they want a rain-free place to exercise.

And the town itself has even earned a new nickname: Mudville.

The world is a whole lot cozier for Mudville’s creator, author Kurtis Scaletta. Full Story »

Verily, we have arrived at the end of all culture. Perhaps predictably, the culprit is technology. Or, to be a bit more specific, the culprit is Microsoft, which has now infused the art of songwriting with the same kind of magic and warmth you’ve come to expect from Excel.

Microsoft is pitching software designed for you, no musical training required. You sing the words as best you can, and its Songsmith software supplies computer-matched musical accompaniment.

Words … fail. Full Story »

The new season of PBS’s long running series Masterpiece Theatre, now known simply as Masterpiece, kicked   off last Sunday with a new adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s brilliant examination of gender relations and cultural  mores, Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

The production is first rate. The actors, young and earnest as they are, seem to have a clear grasp of the key issues of the novel, quaint as they may seem to sophisticated Post-Sexual Revolution viewers. I can recommend it without reservation, something I couldn’t do for last year’s Complete Jane Austen.

In fact, a useful question for us to consider is whether it makes sense for Masterpiece to offer such a production of Tess.  Who would get an exploration of the double standard in these times? Full Story »

Orcs by Stan Nicholls is too much of a good thing. Perhaps because the book is a promotional tool as much as a literary experience.

Orcs contains three of Nicholls’ novels, Bodyguard of Lightning, Legion of Thunder, and Warriors of the Tempest, packaged together into a handsome bundle that’s currently being pushed at the major book chains in advance of the 2009 release of Nicholls’ next round of Orc books. Orcs also contains a short story that serves as a prequel to the novels, plus a lengthy author interview.

My plan was to read one of the three novels in the omnibus, go on to something else, then come back to the other pieces at some undetermined point in the future.

The Orcs had other ideas.

Full Story »

I am a sucker for a snappy book cover, and the cover for Paul Auster’s new novella, Man in the Dark, is about as snappy as I’ve seen in a long time.

But, as you may recall, there’s a well-worn adage about books and covers.

Man in the Dark, a thin volume only eight-and-a-half inches tall and not quite six inches wide, caught my eye with its leafy, mulchy , concretey artwork, beautifully embossed and glossed and splashed with just the right dash of stars-and-stripes color.

It’s hard to capture an impression. But the book made one. The text on the inside flap drew me in even more. This cover had me, book, first line, and sinker.

I should really, really know better by now.

Man in the Dark hardly delivers on anything its cover promises.

That said, the novella is a quiet, elegant exploration of the loneliness that comes from physical and emotional isolation. It’s a beautiful little book (its cover notwithstanding). Full Story »

Here’s how the blurb at CD Baby puts it:

Cinematic ethereal, spaghetti western flavored retro-futuristic music with powerful female vocals. // A sweeping, cinematic, wide-screen journey that combines ethereal sound scapes with surf-tinged guitar. Perfect for those late night rides across the desert with the top down.
…
Uniquely original retro-futurism.

Yeah, that’s fair. But there’s a lot more to say about The Lost Patrol and their new CD, Midnight Matinee, which has quickly vaulted onto my list of likely 2008 platinum awards. Full Story »

“I’m interested in what motivates you, and how you understand the world.” He glanced sideways at her. “Rausch tells me you’ve written about music.”

“Sixties garage bands. I started writing about them when I was still in the Curfew.”"Were they an inspiration?”

She was watching a fourteen-inch display on the Maybach’s dash, the red cursor that was the car proceeding along the green line that was Sunset. She looked up at him. “Not in any linear way, musically. They were my favorite bands. Are,” she corrected herself.

He nodded.

- William Gibson, Spook Country

I’ve always been intrigued by the curious dynamic of influence. Full Story »

When David Foster Wallace climbed aboard John McCain’s “Straight Talk Express” media caravan in the early days of the 2000 presidential primary season, he hoped to understand why McCain generated so much excitement, so much attention, so much hope. In fact, Wallace was amazed by “the enormous hopes and enthusiasm [McCain’s] generating in press and voters alike.”

Much has changed in the past eight years. McCain, the maverick “anticandidate” who peddled change and hope, who raged against the Washington establishment, now is the Washington establishment. As the 2008 republican nominees, his current campaign lacks the spontaneity and access of his first bid for the White House, and “Straight Talk” has been replaced by on-message scripts written by political marketers. The hope is gone.

And Wallace is dead, victim of an apparent suicide earlier this month. Full Story »

Last night we watched the Final Cut of Blade Runner again, and if you don’t have this package I can’t recommend it highly enough. 25 years on, Ridley Scott was able to finally re-craft the film as he wanted it originally, and the result is a stunning achievement. Scott has been one of our greatest directors for a very long time, but this may be his finest moment to date.

This viewing (probably my 35th or 40th – I lost count a long time ago) got me to thinking, all over again, about how little the film was acknowledged at the time of its release. Full Story »

by Earl Brandt

When it comes to films by great filmmakers, especially those by living filmmakers, I try not to read reviews, criticism, or even summaries prior to seeing the films for myself.  One of life’s great pleasures, for me, is the anticipation and ultimate enjoyment of the work of an artist I have come to know as a great – someone interesting, vital, who’s work is both timeless and immediate in its relevance, and who is in control of a craft and powers of creation.  Best, I reason, if I can encounter the work free of bias other than what is mostly my own.  (I do enjoy trailers – good ones are a pleasant tease.  While constructed, they are composed mostly of the work itself.) Full Story »

When it comes to art, part of me has never fully grokked the photorealists. I mean, in an age before photography, sure, but these days if you want photorealism wouldn’t you prefer, you know, photos?

Then there’s the other part of me, the part that’s always cognizant of Keats:

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

The truth is that what some of these artists are capable of is nothing short of remarkable. Their technique is necessarily flawless and the best of them can infuse a subject, by design, with a greater degree of character, gravity, even intent than a photographer, who is more or less constrained by what’s in front of the camera. Full Story »

A few weeks ago we showed you a painting by Miro and posed the question: is this art? The consensus opinion seemed to be that sure, I guess it’s art, although I wouldn’t pay a penny for it.

Today we look at digitally generated images and ask the same question. Specifically, have a look at Electric Sheep, my cool new screen saver program. According to the Web site:

Electric Sheep is a free, open source screen saver created by Scott Draves. It’s run by thousands of people all over the world, and can be installed on any ordinary PC or Mac. When these computers “sleep”, the screen saver comes on and the computers communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as “sheep”. The result is a collective “android dream”, an homage to Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Full Story »

One Life, by Johnny Clegg, first released 2006, 16 tracks, ASIN B000I5YROM

We’re on our way home to find our freedom
and I’m on my way home to find you my friend
where we can stand in the light of the people
and breathe life into the land again.

“When the System Has Fallen,” Johnny Clegg

“If you have a patch of ground the size of a door, you can feed a family of four,” rhymes my friend, John Broom. John is well over 80 and has been involved in teaching gardening and feeding schemes in Africa for the Quaker Peace Foundation for decades. I believe him.

Africa itself is a vast and fertile land. Full Story »

Artist Michael James Hawk mines our collective unconscious for imagery that’s not only primitive, but alien.

Occasionally a visual artist who’s little known, but who seems to draw from an inexhaustible supply of creativity, comes to our attention. Whatever vein he or she has tapped — or opened — its yield is not only as malleable as gold but just as beguiling.

Why, we wonder, isn’t this artist more honored and rewarded? The question, of course, applies to many artists in America. But what if an artist’s work boasts of qualities that should appeal to not only the discerning eye, but the public? That’s the case with Seattle resident Michael James Hawk.

On one hand Hawk’s work bears evidence of his influences: Praxiteles, Moore, Brancusi, Picasso, Miro, Giacometti, and Calder. Current artists whose work speaks to him include Botero, the startling Magdalena Abakanowicz, and international architect Santiago Calatrava. On the other hand, Hawk’s work exhibits an element of — for want of a better word — the fantastic. Full Story »

Periodically, it seems, to those who now have bought back into the concept of history, humans begin to think that their great works of literature are insufficient. This is not necessarily a bad thing. New literary movements grow out of this perceived insufficiency, and new masterpieces appear that eventually become, for some insufficient – and so new literary movements….

Unfortunately, we humans also seem to have a propensity to look on the great works of art we have and see their “flaws.” This has caused us to make some interesting and even laughable “improvements” to our masterpieces – Moby Dick has had the entire whaling section expurgated for “easier” reading for American students; 18th century stagings of Macbeth had the Thane of Glamis survive and repent his evil ways.

Now it seems that Jane Austen, our most brilliant analyst and most insightful critic of women’s roles in society and the institution of marriage, has been deemed too unromantic.

Full Story »

Jean Luc Godard’s 1968 epic WeekEnd closes with the following end title:

END OF CINEMA

Leonard Lopate of WNYC has a terrific interview with Richard Brody, film critic for The New Yorker and author of a new book on the cinema icon – Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean Luc Godard. You can hear the interview below.

As Lopate archly notes and Brody diplomatically tries to refute, for the vast majority of cinema aficionados, Godard’s end title was prophetic.

Full Story »