Fluttering Back To The 20s

I’ve been running Youtube clips sourced from whatever is playing on the stereo as the background to my hallway weather monitor  for quite some time now, and I kinda like it.  Except when having guests over being slightly er puzzled about what’s running on the screen when the band Sex Worker is playing, for instance.  It can be kinda random playing stuff at random.  And sometimes a bit embarrassing.

So when I got the new Walt and Skeezix book the other month, another solution occurred to me.

(Walt and Skeezix is a collection of the Gasoline Alley dayilies published by Drawn & Quarterly.  The books are just beautiful, and the series itself is really funny and engrossing.  You know, some of these collections of comic strips from the 20s and 30s are more “interesting” in a historic context than actually entertaining, but I’m just loving these strips by Frank King.)

Anyway!  There’s a DVD included in the latest book compiled from home movies Frank King filmed in the 20s and 30s.  So I ripped the DVD and pointed mplayer at that in an infinite loop.

It’s been running for a few days, and I like it.  I catch a few seconds of Oldee Timeyness whenever I go out or come in.



See?

(The line at the bottom is how much it’s gonna rain the next 24 hours.  So much rain!)

1995: New Writing 4

This is an anthology of (mainly) British writing (edited by A. S. Byatt and Alan Hollinghurst) that I bought at a sale in 1995, and didn’t read.  For obvious reasons.  I mean, it’s an anthology of (mainly) British writing.  Give me a break!

This isn’t a “best of” anthology, or anything.  Apparently the editors just invited a bunch of people to submit stories, poems and excerpts from their upcoming novels, and then they sent it off to the printers.  That’s certainly what it reads like.

It’s not that there isn’t good stuff in here.  It’s just that there’s enough mediocre stuff in here that I started approaching every new text with suspicion.  “Is this going to suck?  I’ve read two pages now, and it’s not any good yet.  Should I ditch it?  Carry on?”

Losing faith in an anthology makes for a very unsatisfactory reading experience.

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Which reminds me of an anthology I have the utmost confidence in: The Paris Review.  I started picking it up on a whim like a decade ago.  I was intrigued by its “silence”.  There’s no introduction from an editor at the start.  Each contributor has a note in the back, but these are so short as to be more mystifying than enlightening (i.e., “*** has published several novels”, “*** was born in 1953”, and that’s it, sometimes).

There’s just the texts, and they range from pretty good to absofuckinglutely wonderful.  Ok, sometimes they’re a bit on the pretentious side, but I don’t mind that.  I don’t want everything to be a flippant McSweeney’s thing, although I like that, too.

The mixture of short stories, poetry, art “folios”, the occational reportage and the always-enlightening author interviews (“What kind of pencil do you usually write with?  Do you write mostly in the morning or the evening?”) creates a perfect alchemical mixture that’s very satisfying.  I mostly read The Paris Review while travelling, which may also have something to do with my appreciation of the publication.

Anyway, back to New Writing 4.  Like I said, there is good stuff in here.  The hilarious Labels by Louis de Bernières.  The ambiguously optimistic A Geographer by Philip Hensher.  The heartbreaking A Day by William Trevor.

But there’s way too much meh here.

You know that old question about what an editor does for a living?  The answer is: Not work here.

Rating: Unevenicious

1995: Bingo!

Ketil Bjørnstad is a musician and an author, and this book is about a musician who’s also an author.  And then there’s a Hardy Boys plot about terrorism and the Steiner School.

The bits about being a musician are better than the terrorism bit.  There’s a sort of vigorous charm in the writing, and there are funny bits.  But it all feels so unnecessary. 

It’s written in 1980, and I apparently bought this in 1995 at a sale, dirt cheap.  Which explains why I hadn’t read it until now.

But it’s difficult to imagine anybody wanting to read this now, at all.  It was probably a much more entertaining read in 1980, but now it’s mostly just annoying.  Not actually bad or anything, but “eh”.

Rating: Superfluoicious