Another previously undiscovered Nemirovsky novel has been unearthed. A powerful tale of love, betrayal and death in a Burgundy village, "Chaleur du Sang" - provisionally titled "Fire in the Blood" in English - was published to warm reviews here in March.
In this novel - which her biographers believe was conceived as early as 1937 though it was written at the same time as "Suite Française" - there is no suggestion of war. Rather, in the spirit of a novel by, say, Jane Austen, it dwells on intense, often repressed emotional conflict set against bucolic country life.
Its story is told by Silvio, a 50-something bachelor who has settled in the village after many years abroad. An observant loner, he watches the goings-on of his extended family, including his comely cousin Hélène; her childhood sweetheart husband, François; and their lively daughter, Colette.
Then tragedy - self-inflicted, not accidental - strikes and, with the complicity of ever-watching and ever-whispering villagers who prefer not to become involved, a cover-up follows.
What "Chaleur du Sang" and new editions of her other books, notably "Le Bal: Autumn" and "David Golder," have demonstrated is that "Suite Française" was not a solitary jewel in an otherwise ordinary literary career. Belatedly, Némirovsky has now taken her place among the small but illustrious group of foreign-born writers who have enriched French literature.
The first complete book by J. R. R. Tolkien since the posthumous publication of “Silmarillion” in 1977 will be published next week by Houghton Mifflin. Tolkien, the author of “The Hobbit” and the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, began “The Children of Húrin” in 1918 but never finished it. Christopher Tolkien, 82, the author’s son, edited the book from several drafts. Mr. Tolkien has also added hand-drawn maps and genealogy tables to the tale, whose story takes place thousands of years before “The Lord of the Rings.” Houghton Mifflin plans an initial printing run of 250,000 copies.
Remarkably, considering that the earliest passages in The Children of Húrin are 90 years old, Christopher's reworking of the book works brilliantly. In a sense it is not a new book, for versions and pieces of the story will be familiar to some readers. For example, the whole tale was condensed down into a single chapter in The Silmarillion, as was the story of The Lord of the Rings at the end of that book, so what you have here is the reconstructed version, complete with familiar elements and also passages that have never appeared before. (It might be compared to a sort of literary Director's Cut, the long version of the story assembled from all the best footage available, though my father probably wouldn't welcome the filmmaking comparison!)
The award-winning NPR radio show, This American Life, is headed for the small screen next month on Showtime. Their six-episode run begins March 22.
In this week's The Phoenix, Boston's alternative newsweekly, seems disappointed at the demystification that comes with seeing:
Given Glass's obsessive standards, you might assume the television show is exactly what he promised us at the Opera House: a unique entity that "looks and feels like nothing else on TV." Not only does it fall short of delivering that, it lacks the magical quality that makes the radio program such a joy to listen to each week.
The Wizard of Oz knew what he was doing when he hid himself away in a tiny room with a big microphone. Some things are far grander when they're heard and never seen.
"This American Life" on TV achieves the same contemplative mood as the radio show. And it has a striking spareness of imagery, much as "Life" on radio has a spareness of sound.
And in New York? Well, a year ago, they were setting the bar low:
If Glass can lure even half of his radio show's 1.7 million weekly listeners to TV, Showtime will consider it a hit.
I've recommended the main trailer here; other videos are linked at the official site referenced above.
Flatland is a feature film adaptation of the 1884 novel by Edwin A. Abbott. Only 1,000 copies of this Special Collector's Limited Edition DVD, signed and numbered by the filmmaker with a special feedback email, will be sold.
Denby really gets into it here. I liked his discussion of "Pulp Fiction".
Some of the directors may be just playing with us or, perhaps, acting out their boredom with that Hollywood script-conference menace the conventional “story arc.” But others may be trying to jolt us into a new understanding of art, or even a new understanding of life. In the past, mainstream audiences notoriously resisted being jolted. Are moviegoers bringing some new sensibility to these riddling movies? What are we getting out of the overloading, the dislocations and disruptions?
I've been thinking about these questions frequently since I saw INLAND EMPIRE, which really has me waiting in anticipation of Douglas Hofstadter's new book, I Am a Strange Loop -- which should be out in another 11 days, I'm told by multiple sources. As it was written over a year ago now:
For each human being, this "I" seems to be the realest thing in the world. But how can such a mysterious abstraction be real--or is our "I" merely a convenient fiction? Does an "I" exert genuine power over the particles in our brain, or is it helplessly pushed around by the all-powerful laws of physics?
One day I will eventually sit down and write my thesis about INLAND EMPIRE. This may have to wait until the film is released on DVD, but for now I will just identify some of its themes.
"Traditional" film is like software that follows the code/data separation paradigm, whereas INLAND EMPIRE is more like self-modifying code. The thesis will also explore the computer science concept of reflection as applied to film, and Lynch's style/process will be related to programming "languages that do not make a distinction between runtime and compile-time." I might also draw comparisons between mainstream Hollywood and the comments of futurist programmers, who say that "We believe the result of the common academic approach is computer science graduates who make programs that are fat, slow, and incorrect. The present state of the art in programming discourages experimentation and formal analysis."
The Philadelphia Inquirer raves about "a verbal acuity so playful it could only be British."
What is Un Lun Dun?
It is London through the looking glass, an urban Wonderland of strange delights where all the lost and broken things of London end up . . . and some of its lost and broken people, too -- including Brokkenbroll, boss of the broken umbrellas; Obaday Fing, a tailor whose head is an enormous pin-cushion, and an empty milk carton called Curdle. Un Lun Dun is a place where words are alive, a jungle lurks behind the door of an ordinary house, carnivorous giraffes stalk the streets, and a dark cloud dreams of burning the world. It is a city awaiting its hero, whose coming was prophesied long ago, set down for all time in the pages of a talking book.
When twelve-year-old Zanna and her friend Deeba find a secret entrance leading out of London and into this strange city, it seems that the ancient prophecy is coming true at last. But then things begin to go shockingly wrong.
I like the universe that is invented in this world and the idea of the abcities [flipsides of places we already know] — you could write a different book for each abcity, these sort of twisted dreamland versions of our cities ...
"Un Lun Dun" begins as the story of two 12-year-old friends, Zanna and Deeba, who live in a London housing project. Zanna has lately become the object of strange tributes -- animals that study her worshipfully, graffiti that sings her praises, bus drivers who approach her in cafes saying, "Just very exciting to meet you!" So when the two girls spot what appears to be a broken but animated umbrella trying to climb up Zanna's window sill, they give chase. The umbrella leads them to an alternate London -- an "abcity," as the residents call it -- furnished by all the cast-off junk of the original London. (Other abcities include Lost Angeles, No York and Parisn't.) UnLondon isn't a benign junkyard -- the first thing the girls encounter is a roving gang of menacing garbage -- but it has its shabby consolations; Deeba acquires a pet milk carton (she names it Curdle) that proves to be as affectionate and devoted as any pooch.
Soft Cinema project mines the creative possibilities at the intersection of software culture, cinema, and architecture. Its manifestations include films, dynamic visualizations, computer-driven installations, architectural designs, print catalogs, and DVDs. In parallel, the project investigates how the new representational techniques of soft(ware) cinema can be deployed to address the new dimensions of our time, such as the rise of mega-cities, the "new" Europe, and the effects of information technologies on subjectivity.
At the heart of the project is custom software and media databases. The software edits movies in real time by choosing the elements from the database using the systems of rules defined by the authors.
It seems clear to a lot of us that there is a problem ...
What kind of art does the future deserve? How should we advance?
Much of the [current] work is repetitive and derivative in a way that starts to resemble planned cultural obsolescence.
A strange cycle has set in, whereby the most valuable attribute an artist can have is "promise." With a lot of big bets being placed, the artist has to be both young and verifiable. In other words, marketable. But almost none of our superstar artists have delivered on their promise.
This might be of interest to those who read these recent threads:
