Recent Consumption of Note
- The Clientele, Strange Geometry. The fact of the matter is that I can't stop listening to this. I loved the collection of singlage that was Suburban Light, but found The Violet Hour uncompelling. On this record from last year that I've only recently picked up, everything I loved about the singles is more completely and stunningly worked out; shimmering guitar-and-organ crafted textures that beguile yet surge forward, quiet mood-work that builds (repeatedly) into surprisingly heated crescendos, and an ability to carry off repeated quotations from a modernist chestnut (in this case, Ol' Possum's sophmore-year favorite The Waste Land) that remind you what moved you about the damn thing in the first place. And all in a sequence of pop songs that sacrifice nothing of the joy of the form. Check out "When K Got Over Me" -- if you're not hooked, this isn't for you; but you will be.
- David B., Epileptic. I know this got a ton of praise when it was first published, but I wasn't paying attention. Considering that when I finished reading it a couple of nights ago, my eyes actually and physically swimming with tears -- and that at the same time I wanted nothing more than to have a co-reader present with whom to discuss and thus relive the visual pleasures offered on about fifty different pages -- I only wish I had been. Paying attention, I mean. (Sorry, that sentence got away from me). This is about growing up in an eccentric family, with a brother whose serious seizure disorder winds up defining their lives.
Only it's about much more than that -- about the use of occultism and Eastern traditions by Westerners to attempt to make sense of the world. About the place of violence in the making of an artist. About the still-nearly-absolute mystery of the brain-mind relationship. About dreams and stories as two sides of the same coin. I have a good, solid record of denigrating the modern trend toward undercooked memoir by thirty- (not to mention twenty-) somethings for a number of years now, James Frey or no James Frey. This counts as an enormous exception, the type that truly proves the rule -- that is to say tests it, and makes clear that the challenge before any writer (or in this case, writer and artist) to create compelling memoir is perhaps greater than that which faces the novelist. The memoirist is in service, however subjectively, to something beyond invention or storytelling; illumination. Epileptic is an illuminated and illuminating work, and we should be paying attention.
- Philippe Claudel, By a Slow River. Saying much of anything to you about this slender and gripping/horrifying story set in a sleepy town near the front in the Great War -- saying anything is almost too much. I'll say a little: there's a murder, more deaths, the unspeakable trauma of war, a Nabokovian puzzle of a narrator, and a dark sentimentality rescued and uplifted by Claudel's almost unbearably tight focus. It's like having a burning ember held to your forearm, but in a good way.
- Albert Camus, Camus at "Combat": Writing 1944-1947. I'm only a little way through this collection of Camus' work as a journalist -- here, mostly as an editorialist -- following the liberation of Paris and into the postwar years. It's both an education in what faced Europeans in the wake of the nightmare, and an experience of sheer electric reading -- his prose is, for lack of a better word, really galvanizing. Though our current political situation is vastly different than the one Camus faced, the voice of resolute insistence on both justice with freedom is still inspiring. It forces one to confront the dreadful state of our current political culture, and the responsiibility we can't escape -- to do something about it. These essays make me want to go back and reread the fraction of his work I've already read, and to dig in deeply to his larger body of work.
Comments
Now this is why it was worth doing battle with MT to get you up and running again!
Really must get reading again myself. Stuff that isn't riddled with tags, that is. David B.'s looks fascinating. (On a similar note, have you read Persopolis?)
Posted by: Rory![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.wombatfile.com/nav-commenters.gif)
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March 3, 2006 07:42 AM
I have Persopolis on my wish list. A Persian friend recommended it. I read through a bunch of sample pages and enjoyed it. Some of these heady comics I just don't get, though. I read Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, and I ask--like Tom Hanks says in Big--"What's so fun about that?" I guess I prefer ones that try harder to draw (pardon the pun) you in, like Maus--which I found very hard to put down.
Posted by: james![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.wombatfile.com/nav-commenters.gif)
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March 3, 2006 09:31 AM
Persepolis was quite good, and certainly gave a welcome view of life in Iran over the last couple of decades; but Epileptic is, I think, a significantly greater achievement both as comics art and as literature. The only other recent memoir of childhood that impressed me quite so much was Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight.
Posted by: BT![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.wombatfile.com/nav-commenters.gif)
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March 3, 2006 10:33 AM