The following link
to essays which may broadly be described as literary (I include both cinematic
and televisual criticism under that head).
It was natural that Sherlock Holmes
and Father Brown should eventually meet…
Though a widely-traveled man of
eclectic culture, he was very, very American. Henry James, T.S. Elliot -- Europe can have ‘em. Langston we keep.
The book began as a schlock
paperback, but is one of the pulps which got taken seriously by the French, and
get reissued in pretigious editions
-- this one from Vintage, with its signature generous trim-size, impeccable
font and layout, and paper so creamy you could spread it on a croissant. It’s a crime novel, seemingly of
the subtype Evil Texas Lawman Takes the Law into his Own Horny Hands -- but
turns out to be a genre-bender.
The greatly overrated Appalachian
poet J. Francis Shade cribbed
extensively, shamelessly, from St. Augustine’s unpublished works. We won’t detail his many “borrowings” (larcenies, would be more like it); we merely wish to set the record
straight.
And so we rest, le miel sur le lèvres, in an eternal
posture of disappointment, as the story freezes to a close. It is, at the end, a chat, an
elegant but empty exercise; a
jack-in-the-box with no jack in it.
*
For a mini-movie
of madness and
salvation,
click here:
*
Il y avait déjà bien des
années que, de Kronstadt, tout ce qui n’étaît pas le théâtre et
le drame de l’abbattage, n’existait plus pour moi …
Dachdecker stürzen ab und gehn entzwei,
Und an den Küsten -- liest man --
steigt die Flut. http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/07/take-shelter-newly-re-updated.html
Par définition, le private eye (détective privé) est un
homme solitaire. It vit, il
poursuit sa solitude. Tant mariage que progéniture lui est interdit.
الشعب يريد اسقاط النظام
*
For a cool dude
and a hot dame,
check this out:
*
Our purpose here is broadly to defend the very idea of using symbols, and indeed the intellectual integrity of an admittedly threadbare image, simply by pointing out that such reduction to the palpable is no mental vice unique to religion, but may be found even within -- nay, not science merely, to show that would be child's-play: but even within that most abstract and impalpable exercise in mental extension, mathematics.
~
For a selection of
individual detective stories,
available for your
Nook or Kindle,
visit this site:
~
Hör zu, Maria, zärtliche Vorschläge … (On Supplication)
Repetition alone does not
suffice. Witness Pamela, who over and over (and over (and
over)) again and again, vents forth the same sentiments in much the same
terms. Yet her we never sense as much more than a wisp amid petticoats.
The “Lorne” here, a.k.a. “The Host”, is a denizen of the Buffyverse
-- specifically the Angel Archipelago thereof. He is an Empathy Demon by trade, and he is green. Very, very green. (As someone well observed, it’s not
easy being green.)
The technical term for such
displaced stress metri causâ is “wrenched accent”.
It is a stylistic characteristic of
the philosophic genre, that its reported combatants are generally abstract and
shadowy, unnamed figures. Not
Gould vs Dawkins, or Quine vs Chomsky, but: the Realist; the
Representationalist; the Phenomenalist, each with his separate agenda;
curiously dispassionate partisans, like players in a masque.
I finally forced myself all the way
through Ulysses. Its
reputation among the exquisite literati stands much higher than that of its
youthful slender cousin, but I am
here to tell you that anyone who tells you it is a breeze to read, is talking
through his hat. Beyond that
lies only the cold northern slope of that nec
plus ultra of ultima Thule --
Finnegan.
I was alone with Holmes in his
upstairs lodgings, one dreary February late-afternoon, which in shading into evening, turned but
from a wan to a gloomier grey …
©God, 3000 BC. All Rights Reserved for the movie
version,
y compris en URSS
A brainy novel is not necessarily
any good …
To understand the Rootabaga
Poems, it helps to know a
considerable number of hoboes; but
sometimes a knowledge of basic QED comes in handy as well.
Es war eben nur kurz nach meiner
Habilitation, als ich noch mich als Privatdozent an der Universität Wien tätig
machte, da kam es zu mir im Labor
eine mir bisher unbekannte junge Dame …
Our Mutual Friend, the last
finished novel of Charles Dickens, does not lie at the center of most readers’
affections; yet connoisseurs there
are, who wóuld award the palm to that late work. And one of the most memorable minor characters therein
-- as minor as might be, since (if memory serves) he utters not a word at any
time -- is the discreetly appearing and vanishing figure of the Analytical Chemist.
The departure from normal dramatic
narrative conventions goes
deeper. As with Gibson’s “The
Passion”, “Zero Dark Thirty” is
less a movie in the conventional sense, than a ritual re-enactment, like a medieval Mystery Play.
“Mr Pinch opened his eyes wider,
and looked at the fire harder than he had done yet.”
Whatever can this mean?
Dickens deftly sketches
eye-service, and two-facedness of character, via subtle shifts in the narrative
point of view, particularly in the depiction of physical gestures. By leaving the interpretation to
the reader, he skewers his character with a very thin blade.
From time to time I am seized by a
hankering for a whodunit, or (in a different mood) a thriller. Such a yen is as elemental and
sensuous as that for a milkshake or hamburger.
When he was good,
he was very very good …
I am a man of sixty winters;
she, when she put the final pen-nib upon paper, was a lass of barely
fifty. Yet I attend to her lessons, intently; as who should sit at
the foot of Socrates.
In a lengthy novel, more admired
than read, Robert Musil depicts the initially spring-fevered, ultimately
autumnal society of Vienna under the Hapsburgs …
Mister Pecksniff and Ted Cruz
-- separated at birth?
Importance of the corpus delicti: If the body is missing, the
alleged victim is alive, either kidnapped, or participating in some scam.
Apparently he was assigned a
discontinued number previously used by a high-priced call-girl. Instead of simply asking the phone
company for a new number stat, he is
intrigued, and is drawn in deeper, and deeper, beyond his depth …
There is a natural affinity between
the figures of Sigmund Freud and Sherlock Holmes. The movie “The Seven Percent Solution” had the good idea of
bringing them together to work on a case.
In the default view of the series,
in which The Village is evil, that is because, far from any therapeutic intent,
those that run The Village have an evil axe to grind. Only -- bear in mind the Alternate Ending of “The Cabinet of
Dr Caligari”, reproduced in “Shutter (Shelter) Island”, and experimentally
apply it. This could
actually work, at quite an abstract level
barely comprehensible in the week-to-week views that we see through the
eyes of The Prisoner -- or should we call him, The Patient …
While our colleagues have been
frittering away their energies on the vagaries of this and that contingent
development in the visible world, we ourselves have, pursuant to a billion-euro
grant from the IMF (Office of Unexplained Anomalies) undertaken to found an entirely new field: Ekapsychic
Adaptationism, or Supernatural Selection.
My brother and I have each reached
our 60s: a threshold that our father never glimpsed, as he died swiftly
upon reaching 55. And so it is the time to reminisce -- the moreso as,
just offstage, the Reaper sits, meditatively whetting his scythe.
The reading (or staging) that I
suggest, confronts this question in a way that has nothing whatever to do with
political correctness: that of not
playing down, but playing up Shylock’s Jewish faith and ancestry,
playing it up to its full and mighty stature, whose long shadow has ever lain
across the world.
It is my personal view that both
Freud and Holmes are semi-fictional characters.
Der Detektiv -- Private Eye,
versteht sich -- ist ein Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Das Ziel seiner Forschungen bestimmt er nicht selbst: das ist ihm eben von aussen gegeben.
Thus Henry James has no doubt rendered many lessons about human behavior, but only
about such humans as have long suffered from constipation ….
Subsequently, the evil
pet-store-owner tracks him down (unclear how) and confronts him; but Herr
Doktor Dolittle counter-confronts him,
in a variation of P.G.Wodehouse's line for Bertie Wooster, "I know all
about Eulalie." The intel being of course supplied by his
animal-friends ...
I am at present engaged in gnawing
away at a novel that everyone praises but few actually read, at least not all
the way through. It is Der Mann
ohne Eigenschaften (vol. I: 1930; vol. II: 1932) by Robert Musil, better
known to algolagniacs as the author of Die Verwirrungen des
Zöglings Törleß
Some little-known and
rarely-anthologized Elizabethan gems
are on loan to us from a seldom-frequented underground chamber of the
Vatican library, and are published here for the first time …
 |
| O mistress mine... |
By dipping into the considerable
funds that have been slowly accumulated in the Dr J Retirement Yacht Fund (and
which we intend to spend as ever
we d*mn well please, yaught or naught),
we were enabled to acquire, at considerable expense, a scrap of foolscap
…
Goldstein followed up this
beautiful debut with something
less good, and with a dreadful title, The
Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind; then with something very much less good, The Dark Sister; and then a collection of short stories,
Strange Attractors, that in places
descends to the level of a Harlequin romance: "His eyes were large and liquid and luminous – too
luminous. His nose is of an
exquisite Hebrew model, but with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar
formations” …
No-one ever accused Italian of
being unsuitable for singing, and the song sounds fine; only if you have
heard the French original, do you notice what has been sacrificed: the
stark irreducible enten/eller
contrast of the Oui and the Non.
I have just finished reading the
prolific master’s comparatively little-known but quite wonderful comic novel,
Money for Nothing (1928).
Someday I may have something intelligent to say about this wordsmith
magician who pulls rabbit after rabbit out of his fathomless hat,
but for now, the following
observation must suffice ….
Japanese, which is syllable-timed,
lends itself gracefully to the haiku form.
English, by contrast, is
stress-timed, the syllable-count being not even wholly determinate ….
In the ideal Mobystich Acquisition
Device, there exists but a single monostich; yet by Symmetry Breaking,
this gets framed differently on different days. These are, you
might say, contextually conditioned mobyphones
deriving from a single basic monosticheme.
The strength of the American
television series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (whose fluff-headed-sounding title
was largely ironic) was the esprit de corps of the “Scoobie gang”, the band of
oddly-assorted intrepid defenders that grouped itself around the titular
heroine. The weakness was the lack of anything comparable on the
opposing side ….
I first met Waugh’s work in
college, reading several of his early novels. “Wickedly funny”, as the
jacket-copy accurately described them. Emphasis on the “wicked”; it
was by no means apparent, from these japes, that the fellow might be
“religious” -- whatever that might mean. (I was myself, at the time,
wholly unchurched.)
Of desirelessness (technically: anhedonia), I almost dare not speak …
Like the haiku, the monostich is
Minimalist in inspiration; but whereas a haiku practically has to be about water-lilies or
something, given the restrictions of form, a monostich is more
wide-ranging. (Also, haikus are essentially syllable-timed, and don’t
make sense in a stress-timed language like English.)
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