Putting on the Wednesday
Dec. 18th, 2019 01:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evelyn_bWhat I've Finished Reading
Be Frank With Me was a "blind-date book" from the new bookstore (wrapped in brown paper with a description on the front) and a mild disappointment - sadly, the title is the best part. A reclusive novelist who lost all her money in a Ponzi scheme has to write a new book for the first time in twenty years, so the publisher sends an incompletely-characterized personal assistant to help out. "Helping out" turns out to mean looking after Frank, the reclusive author's nine-year-old son, who loves old movies, facts, and dressing up in an improbably wide range of vintage menswear styles. He also has some serious emotional difficulties, including a tendency to whack his head against various walls and poles. His school is weirdly blase about and unprepared for these tendencies for a posh elementary school in 2009, and his mysterious psychaitrist is apparently just there to assure the reader that Frank isn't being totally neglected. Frank is somewhat less loveable than advertised but far more so than the author or the assistant, both annoying nonentities. The reclusive author bought a giant glass house for her recluse cave, refuses to work with computers OR surrender any pages to the assistant (all but guaranteeing that there will be a spectacular housefire just when needed) and is apparently incapable of inventing anything, even the names of characters, so when the assistant and the long-suffering editor finally read the draft of the second novel, it's just the novel you've already read but with one name changed. The assistant, who is also the narrator, has a degree in accounting but can't bring herself to give up the wacky romcom jobs she loves so well. I spent most of this short book wondering if I should just stop reading, but in the end inertia won the day and I made it all the way to the groaner of an ending, feeling like my heart had been half-heartedly pelted with HotHands hand warmers to absolutely no avail.
I wasn't sure for a long time how I felt about Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, but I think I finally figured it out: it's got some beautiful individual essays but is shapeless as a whole. The shapelessness might be deliberate, because cluttered with gritty lyricism and hard to follow is how life is sometimes, but it was a drawback for me, one of those promising debuts that has 500 amazing opening paragraphs and no bones. I'm still not sure how much my opinion is being unduly influenced by my perennial issue with contemporary memoirs, which is that if I meet an author and her girlfriend at a reading, I don't like to have already read the heartbreaking details of their sad coping sex. I realize this is a me problem, but it's still distracting.
What I'm Reading Now
Outdoor Portraiture, (1940), by William Mortensen, is just what it says it is, a book about taking portraits outdoors. Why did I buy this book? I've had it for at least five years. I hardly ever take pictures and I'm not writing a novel about a slightly pedantic amateur photographer in the 1940s - I guess I just wanted to read it. From the examples of his own work, Mortensen appears to be an arty portraitist, but not a very "high-brow" one, to use the parlance of the times - he likes winsome female models gathering cockles and mussels in wispy light. He can be very hard on the millions of schlubs who just want to snap some pictures that look roughly like their friends and family. I am sorry to say that I can't even tell what is supposed to be so bad about half the "bad" pictures he puts forth as examples.
And Ancient Evenings, of course! Norman Mailer has embarked on an epic id-safari into the ripe heart of Mailerity, and I could not be happier to be his long-suffering boatman.
What I Plan to Read Next
Everything's coming up Mailer for the foreseeable future, but I might also be reading Leaving Atlanta by Tayari Jones and/or a book of true spy stories courtesy of my spy-story-loving father-in-law.
Be Frank With Me was a "blind-date book" from the new bookstore (wrapped in brown paper with a description on the front) and a mild disappointment - sadly, the title is the best part. A reclusive novelist who lost all her money in a Ponzi scheme has to write a new book for the first time in twenty years, so the publisher sends an incompletely-characterized personal assistant to help out. "Helping out" turns out to mean looking after Frank, the reclusive author's nine-year-old son, who loves old movies, facts, and dressing up in an improbably wide range of vintage menswear styles. He also has some serious emotional difficulties, including a tendency to whack his head against various walls and poles. His school is weirdly blase about and unprepared for these tendencies for a posh elementary school in 2009, and his mysterious psychaitrist is apparently just there to assure the reader that Frank isn't being totally neglected. Frank is somewhat less loveable than advertised but far more so than the author or the assistant, both annoying nonentities. The reclusive author bought a giant glass house for her recluse cave, refuses to work with computers OR surrender any pages to the assistant (all but guaranteeing that there will be a spectacular housefire just when needed) and is apparently incapable of inventing anything, even the names of characters, so when the assistant and the long-suffering editor finally read the draft of the second novel, it's just the novel you've already read but with one name changed. The assistant, who is also the narrator, has a degree in accounting but can't bring herself to give up the wacky romcom jobs she loves so well. I spent most of this short book wondering if I should just stop reading, but in the end inertia won the day and I made it all the way to the groaner of an ending, feeling like my heart had been half-heartedly pelted with HotHands hand warmers to absolutely no avail.
I wasn't sure for a long time how I felt about Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, but I think I finally figured it out: it's got some beautiful individual essays but is shapeless as a whole. The shapelessness might be deliberate, because cluttered with gritty lyricism and hard to follow is how life is sometimes, but it was a drawback for me, one of those promising debuts that has 500 amazing opening paragraphs and no bones. I'm still not sure how much my opinion is being unduly influenced by my perennial issue with contemporary memoirs, which is that if I meet an author and her girlfriend at a reading, I don't like to have already read the heartbreaking details of their sad coping sex. I realize this is a me problem, but it's still distracting.
What I'm Reading Now
This lazy toleration of things that we (in our honest moments) realize should not be in the picture, is a very prevalent photographic philosophy, and is the principal reason that there are so many bad pictures in the world.
Outdoor Portraiture, (1940), by William Mortensen, is just what it says it is, a book about taking portraits outdoors. Why did I buy this book? I've had it for at least five years. I hardly ever take pictures and I'm not writing a novel about a slightly pedantic amateur photographer in the 1940s - I guess I just wanted to read it. From the examples of his own work, Mortensen appears to be an arty portraitist, but not a very "high-brow" one, to use the parlance of the times - he likes winsome female models gathering cockles and mussels in wispy light. He can be very hard on the millions of schlubs who just want to snap some pictures that look roughly like their friends and family. I am sorry to say that I can't even tell what is supposed to be so bad about half the "bad" pictures he puts forth as examples.
Unfortunately, this very sentimental interest in the subject is apt to keep him from appreciating how bad his results really are. Tillie is a wonderful girl, and anything that reminds him of her, even remotely, is wonderful also.
Eventually the time comes, however, when he tumbles to the fact that he has not been doing right by Tillie. And when that horrifying moment of self-appraisal comes, he stands in great need of some systematic basis of self-criticism to straighten him out. And that basis of self-criticism is precisely what this book endeavors to supply, in order that the amateur may be enabled to give a worthy pictoral rendering of the persons and things that he cares most about.
And Ancient Evenings, of course! Norman Mailer has embarked on an epic id-safari into the ripe heart of Mailerity, and I could not be happier to be his long-suffering boatman.
What I Plan to Read Next
Everything's coming up Mailer for the foreseeable future, but I might also be reading Leaving Atlanta by Tayari Jones and/or a book of true spy stories courtesy of my spy-story-loving father-in-law.
