Conspicuous Consumption

  Katherine Mansfield wrote to Virginia Woolf, “We have got the same job, Virginia, & it is really very curious & thrilling that we should both, quite apart from each other, be after so very nearly the same thing. We are you know; there’s no denying it.”  Woolf, as far as I know, didn't deny it. In fact, she wrote: “I was jealous of [Mansfield's] writing – the only writing I have ever been jealous of.” Woolf, it should be noted, was not known for praising her contemporaries. One can see why she felt this way about Mansfield whose stories are each little gems, made more gem-like by the author's fastidiousness in avoiding crude effects. Unremarkable people are observed, and things and animals almost as much as people. The people do their best. There is never a big bang or clanking epiphany at the end. Rather, there is a hint that things probably won't change, life, for better or worse, will go on. (Pictured above is the edition I read. The cover is a detail fro...

  This is the third book in Conrad's "Lingard Trilogy," coming after his first and second novels,   Almayer's Folly and An Outcast of the Islands . Though Conrad began The Rescue  not long after finishing  Outcast , it was not published until twenty years later, twenty years during which Conrad published masterpieces like  Heart of Darkness ,  Lord Jim , and Nostromo . The Conrad who composed the final version of The Rescue was, therefore, a much more mature and confident writer than the neophyte of Almayer's Folly . The novel is gripping from start to finish. Conrad wrote of the novel, "I want to make it a kind of glorified book for boys – you know. No analysis. No damned mouthing. Pictures – pictures – pictures. That's what I want to do," and he succeeds in exactly what he set out to do. The novel pulls one along just as boy's adventures should, and the atmosphere he creates of the tropical archipelago where the novel is set sucks us in. R...

  I began the project of going through my CD library alphabetically by composers' last names with Alkan. Now I moved into the Bs with Alban Berg and his violin concerto. This concerto is often used to demonstrate that 12-tone music doesn't have to be coldly cerebral, and, with one of its dedications being "To the Memory of an Angel," it does so effectively. This is a tremendously moving piece, and I'm happy to have returned to it. The version I listened to featured violinist Leonid Kogan with the USSR State Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra conducted by Gennady Rozhdestvensky in 1966, the premiere Russian performance. It's on one of those cheap and wonderful Yedang Classics CDs that Tower Records still sells, though I bought mine years ago.

  Every time I think I'm done with contemporary "literary fiction," I break down and read a contemporary novel that turns out, against all expectations, to be good. Colored Television , by Danzy Senna, is one of them. It is an account of a mixed-race—or to use the term that is very much at the center of the novel, "mulatto"—novelist, Jane Gibson, whose magnum opus, "a mulatto War and Peace ," at which she's labored for ten years, is rejected by her agent and her editor. To make matters worse, if she can't publish the novel she will not get tenure at her teaching job. Her husband, an uncompromisingly unsuccessful painter, is no help. Because Jane is living with her family in Los Angeles—house-sitting, actually, in the architecturally important home of a screenwriter friend—opportunities to sell out present themselves, and she comes very close to doing so. The novel is, among other things, a satire of bourgeois bohemian life, and the satire works...

    A while ago I've decided to do an alphabetical journey through my CD collection by composers' last names. When I get through the alphabet once I'll start over again. I've been posting the way stations on that journey on Facebook, but thought I would put them up here as well.   I began the project with Marc André Hamelin's Alkan CD. Listening to the "Grande Sonata: Les quatre âges," I was reminded that I was lucky enough to attend a concert in Tokyo at which Hamelin played that work. At the time, I was convinced he had started too fast. There was no way he was going to be able to keep up that pace.   Of course he did. I had forgotten that he is one of the great virtuosos of our time. The remaining tracks on the CD, "Sonatine," "Baracolle" and "Le Festin d'Esope" are also delightful.   I'll slowly continue to move posts over from Facebook (I'm currently on L and am listening to Lully.) 

  Oppression. Repression. Depression.  The first certainly contributes to the second, and both contribute to the third in the character of the protagonist of Villette , Lucy Snowe. This is a meticulous account of a woman who is depressed and introverted (both terms that were probably not current when Brontë was writing this novel). Perhaps traumatized (another word probably not much used in this way until Freud's time ) by her parents' deaths, Lucy builds walls around herself, denies even to herself the passionate and very human desire she feels. She stays behind the walls she has constructed as the man who has engendered this passion first develops an attraction to an air-headed society girl, and then to a more admirable young woman with whom he is happy. She finally finds happiness herself with a man who, not least because of his misogyny and ardent Catholicism (Lucy is an ardent Protestant), is often unpleasant and with whom Lucy is often at odds. The novel ends, though, wi...

 Eighteen years ago, some friends and I started a blog. Back in the day I used to post there about a variety of things. Then the energy to do those kinds of posts got sucked onto Facebook, and I pretty much stopped writing on the blog. The one thing I did continue to do was to use it as a place to write short squibs about the books I'd read. Now Typepad, the host of that blog, Only a Blockhead , has announced that they're closing up shop. Those squibs will vanish into air (and the link to Blockhead will die soon). I've decided, though, to continue writing squibs about the culture I consume—mostly books, perhaps movies (if I ever watch another movie) music, etc. I don't plan to do any other sort of writing here (but who knows?). I suppose the blog will be little read by anyone other than me, but with my memory being rather random access, it's good to have a record of what I've consumed. The blog is ugly now, but I will try to make it prettier by and bye. —David