Writers: A Room of Our Own

I’ll nominate “A Lone Pilgrim”, the only collection, I believe, of stories by Laurie Colwin:

http://www.amazon.com/Lone-Pilgrim-Laurie-Colwin/dp/0060958936/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1428397311&sr=8-8&keywords=laurie+colwin

Bet you can’t read just one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurie_Colwin

Nominations? I’m not a movie buff, but I’ve seen a few beautiful films.

The Big Chill – smooth, it flowed, a seamless whole.
The Grand Illusion
Night of the Hunter
The Ladykillers (the original, with Alec Guiness)
Blazing Saddles, I agree, was great fun. A great film? I dunno.

I know there are others. Just blanking at the moment. Film, for me, is problematic. It’s always a large-group effort, and so is, it seems to me, not really creative at all.

Taste is a funny thing. I downloaded the Kindle sample of Life after Life and didn’t care for it. Can’t say why, exactly. It was a quick rejection :o) What I look for is language and attitude that please. I think she seemed to walk a little too self-consciously for my liking. Different strokes.

Does a screenplay ever end up written by just one person?

It’s personal, of course, and it’s intuitive. I don’t define it. Defining is for overthinkers. A few adjectives off the top of the head will have to serve. Simple, spare, clean, rich, elegant, intelligent, balanced, colorful, harmonious, joyful or somber or sad or serene, and complete.

I’m a complainer. As a child riding a bicycle to an art gallery and a contemporary crafts store, I discovered that there was beauty in my world, intuitively recognizable, tangible, and obtainable at a price I could afford. A little older, riding a bus to a movie theater, I stumbled on “foreign films”, and found that a movie could connect with something inside me in much the same way. Once you’ve discovered beauty, you can’t go back. Whenever you come across something that falls short, as you do a thousand or a hundred thousand times a day, you’re deeply disappointed, and, if you were an only child, reared to expect the world to meet your expectations, you complain. Non-beauty is so unnecessary. Meeting it makes you sad, and not a little angry.

And reading a good novel in translation is probably something one should do only if one’s completely unable to tackle it in its own language. Translation is, in fact, of course, impossible. What you get is a rough approximation, the plot without the poetry.

That’s why, I think, it’s good to read Simenon in French, if you choose to read him at all. Before I could read French, I once read a Penguin translation of a Maigret and though I found it interesting enough to quote a snippet in a collection of quotes I was keeping, I know I was completely blind to what I now love.

If you’re interested in a quick look at a GS title, here’s a link:

http://www.simenonnumerique.com/

You won’t find Simenon ebooks in French on amazon.com, alas.

I just googled “bovary boring”. The first hit was a long, boring introduction by A. S. Byatt to a Norwegian edition of Madame Bovary:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/jul/27/classics.asbyatt

I confess I didn’t finish it. Almost – maybe mid-way down the second page – but not quite. Life is too short to be consumed in this sort of thing, especially when the reader has an abnormally short concentration span.

But Byatt does give an answer to your question, why is it such a bore?

It is not a nice story. So why is it one of the greatest novels of all time? To answer that, it is necessary to look at the history of its writing, and Flaubert’s ideas about what he was trying to achieve.

So, there. It’s <b>supposed</b> to be boring, and you, the reader, are supposed to like it because of that. Academics.

Oh, I think, looking at the passages Byatt quotes in French, that I probably did not read the novel in French. I doubt my French vocabulary would have been up to it.

Humans are all hypocrites, I suppose, at least if by “hypocrite” we mean someone who says one thing and does another. But I think what we usually mean by that derogation is someone who behaves that way egregiously, not just normally, the way we all can’t help behaving.

Many years ago, I subscribed to the New Yorker, then I didn’t, then we did, and now we don’t. It’s certainly a pretty publication, but so are many others. A few of the cartoons are very funny, but many are deliberately directed far over the heads of the little old lady in Iowa and me. I can live happily without succumbing to the temptation to pay for them.

Do we live in humorless times? Have we lost the gift of laughing at ourselves?

For me, no. Far too much media has become politicized. I liked the New Yorker that could be read comfortably by the little old lady in Iowa, for the pleasure of the prose and the poetry and the cartoons. The thing it’s become is cheap and snotty and nasty, like the city culture in which it swims.

Oh, I don’t know. I’m close to being willing to trash, say, graphic novels, at least in their present form. I’ve seen movies I like very much, but no one can honestly say that they were the production of any one person or, indeed, of any one small group. They just followed a formula, slavishly – it had to be slavishly or the thing would not have come together – and, miracle of miracles, a beautiful whole appeared on the screen. But if you leave out any of a hundred or five hundred people or substitute a few for the few who showed up, the whole thing begins to creak or crumble, and it simply doesn’t bear watching. Film, I think, is not art, at least in the sense of having been produced by an artist. The director gets her name in lights and in the cinema journals, but she really did not do much of it, let alone do it alone.

Film is, perhaps, socialist art: something produced by the commune for the masses. So, to a socialist, I suppose, it’s high art. To me, if it works, it’s just a pleasing bit of machinery, like an expensive sports car. Nobody made it; it made itself.

Beats me. I *think* I’ve read it in French, but all I remember is that I didn’t care much for it. Alas, I’m not a cultured, properly educated person. I just like what I like.

Is there still a literary canon? I though all that had been violently smashed on top of the trash heap of colonialism and imperialism.

French is a lovely language – or maybe I just have a vested interest it. Have you read Simenon in French? Wonderful stuff.

The New Yorker has changed. The name’s the same, but it’s now a political magazine, with poetry, as I recall, that’s trendy, not sweet.

Russo is wonderful. His novels read themselves. I met him once and asked him how he did it. He said he came from a family of bullshitters. Too glib. Sigh.

Thanks for the recommendation of Cholera. Have you read it in English or Spanish? Or both?

• This reply was modified 9 years, 8 months ago by  davidsmith. Reason: Thought I'd submitted it on the item above. Where it appeared, though, it didn't make sense without the addition of "of Cholera"