Category: uncategorized

Cormac McCarthy’s Vocabulary Is Better Than Yours: Blood Meridian {spoilers!}

~ Mark

sprent
anchorite
tailorwise
carbolic
chancel
halms
scantlin(g)
vernier
hasping
jacal
purlieus
bistre
sotol
kerfs
scoria
ratchel
porphyry
mare imbrium
apishamore
marl
ignis fatuus
cibolero
enfilade
acequias
spanceled
azoteas
debouched
topers
chert
eskers
escopeta
shakos
caparisoned
serried
devonian
charivari
catafalque
ciborium
guttapercha
shacto
vedette
suzerain
almagre
roweled
withy
criada
sutlers
billets
spalls
whinstones
scrog
chorines
alameda
vigas
guisado
sclera
baldric
lemniscate
tiswin
demiculverin
revetment
holothurians
morral
alcalde
skelps
baize
cabildo
lazarous
scow
thaumaturge
atavistic
scapular
fard
sprues
alparejas
mansuete
replevined
pampooties
skifts
burins
dosshouse
pitero
matracas
nickered
bagnios
scapegrace
peignoirs

Only God Forgives

~ Mark

Only God Forgives. Almost fell asleep. Veeerrry nice to look at, here and there, but it’s kinda boring. Even setting aside plot and taking everything as symbol or allegory or myth or archetype, the tension didn’t hold for me. None of the energy or electricity you see in Drive. Not quite as starkly focused as Valhalla Rising. No knockout performance like in Bronson. All that said, I did dig the ongoing hands/power/potency theme, and the use of an international setting without a ton of dumb exoticizing.

Is Amazon Art a doomed venture? Let’s hope so

~ Mark

One enduring feature of the art world is that a given piece will sell for much more in one context rather than another. The same painting that might sell for 5k from a lower tier dealer won’t command more than 2k on eBay, if that. Yet it could sell for 10k, as a bargain item, relatively speaking, if it ended up in the right NYC gallery (which it probably wouldn’t). Where does Amazon stand in this hierarchy? It doesn’t look promising.

Is Amazon Art a doomed venture? Let’s hope so

Sullivan’s Travels

~ Mark

Sullivan’s Travels. A good light comedy aimed at deflating Hollywood pretension and moral bluster. It took a minute in the first act to catch up with that rapid-fire dialogue. So good. And there’s an insane chase scene with delightfully escalating slapstick. The third act shift to high drama caught me off-guard, but it works. Bonus trivia: this film is the first appearance of the fake novel O Brother, Where Art Thou? This was another edition in an irregular series of road movies, loosely defined. I think Weekend is next.

Two New Books About Jorge Luis Borges : The New Yorker

~ Mark

Borges’s fictional universe is relentlessly, oppressively male. He wrote very few female characters, and there is a vision of masculinity—violent, fearless, austere—that exists in his work as a counterpoint to its obsessive bookishness, and neither ideal has much room for the presence of women, writers or otherwise. His abstraction meant, among other things, a removal from the heat and chaos of human relationships. There is very little love in his work, very little emotional intensity; its richness and complexity is that of philosophical problems, of theology and ontology, not of human relationships.

Two New Books About Jorge Luis Borges : The New Yorker

~ Mark

Each of us is born with a series of built-in confusions that are probably somehow Darwinian. These are: (1) we’re central to the universe (that is, our personal story is the main and most interesting story, the only story, really); (2) we’re separate from the universe (there’s US and then, out there, all that other junk – dogs and swing-sets, and the State of Nebraska and low-hanging clouds and, you know, other people), and (3) we’re permanent (death is real, o.k., sure – for you, but not for me).

George Saunders.

Borges and the Sharknado Problem

~ Mark

Borges:

The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a resume, a commentary … More reasonable, more inept, more indolent, I have preferred to write notes upon imaginary books.

Some books better left unwritten! Oh, but here again I will recommend Imaginary Magnitude, which I shortlisted last year:

A collection of introductions to fictional books covering, among other things, x-ray pornograms, computer-generated literature, and a biography of a sentient, moody super-computer. If you like the Borges above [Dreamtigers], or Borges in general, or strange science fiction, or strange conceptual writing in general, this is absolutely a book for you.

Borges and the Sharknado Problem

Emily Nussbaum: How “Sex and the City” Lost its Good Name : The New Yorker

~ Mark

High-feminine instead of fetishistically masculine, glittery rather than gritty, and daring in its conception of character, “Sex and the City” was a brilliant and, in certain ways, radical show. It also originated the unacknowledged first female anti-hero on television: ladies and gentlemen, Carrie Bradshaw.

Also:

Why is the show so often portrayed as a set of empty, static cartoons, an embarrassment to womankind? It’s a classic misunderstanding, I think, stemming from an unexamined hierarchy: the assumption that anything stylized (or formulaic, or pleasurable, or funny, or feminine, or explicit about sex rather than about violence, or made collaboratively) must be inferior.

Emily Nussbaum: How “Sex and the City” Lost its Good Name : The New Yorker

~ Mark

In Climbing Income Ladder, Location Matters – NYTimes.com.

All else being equal, upward mobility tended to be higher in metropolitan areas where poor families were more dispersed among mixed-income neighborhoods. Income mobility was also higher in areas with more two-parent households, better elementary schools and high schools, and more civic engagement, including membership in religious and community groups.

Hey wait that cuts across party lines what should I believe?! Cf. The Geography of Stuck.