February 21, 2024
Zahra and Murray return for this month’s episode of Sunday Lunch, “Léa Seydoux’s Pout,” on asparagus, the Oscars, and Zahra’s latest album assignment to Murray: Joanna Newsom’s The Milk-Eyed Mender. In other listening: “In Focus: Judee Sill.” (Thank you, Cameron, for introducing me to the glories of NTS Radio.)
Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson in The Remains of the Day (James Ivory, 1993, 35mm, 134 mins)
Bruce Robbins on Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism for The Baffler:
Those who suffer from the stress that Kornbluh describes so well throughout the book may not be relieved to hear that, despite what everyone says about the effects of social media, relentless acceleration and overstimulation are old news. Complaint about modernity’s overwhelming of the sensorium goes back at least as far as the anti-urban diatribes of the Romantics. Wordsworth could find London good to look at only when it had not yet awakened, as in “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge”: “Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; / And all that mighty heart is lying still!”
Rosa Lyster on Janet Flanner for The Paris Review Daily:
It’s become a commonplace to praise a reporter’s “gift for the illuminating detail,” which, for conflict reporters in particular, usually means a paragraph of densely factual information with a sentence at the end describing a child’s discarded shoe—reminding us that war is not about statistics but human lives, et cetera. Flanner’s way with details is different: she had the confidence to allow them to speak for themselves, laying one fleeting image on top of another to show us that how people queue for the opera, or handle loose change, or tie their shoes, or speak to their children is as important, is more important, than what they look like after a bomb has been dropped on their house.
Jeffrey Wright in American Fiction (Cord Jefferson, 2023, 117 mins)
In the Spanish-language podcast Grandes Infelices, Javier Peña discusses the lives of George Perec and Roberto Bolaño. Perec, suspicious of any fiction that sold, resolutely held a day job as a medical archivist. At the age of 40, having won a literary award, he quit in order to write full-time. Three years later, he died of cancer.
As for Bolaño, I don’t think I had ever heard a recording of his voice. I was moved by this bit (around 42:20) from an interview he gave in 1998:
¿Qué es un escritor mayor y qué es un escritor menor? Dentro de cuatro millones de años o de diez millones de años va a desaparecer el escritor más miserable del momento en Santiago de Chile, pero también va a desaparecer Shakespeare, va a desaparecer Cervantes. Todos estamos condenados al olvido, a la desaparición no sólo física, sino a la desaparición total: no hay inmortalidad. Y ésta es una paradoja que los escritores conocen muy de cerca y sufren muy de cerca, porque hay escritores que se lo juegan todo, todo, por el reconocimiento, por la inmortalidad, palabras rimbombantes donde las haya y palabras inexistentes: no existe el reconocimiento, no existe la inmortalidad. Es decir, en el gran futuro, en la eternidad, Shakespeare y Menganito son lo mismo, son nada.1
Shashi Kapoor and Felicity Kendal in Shakespeare Wallah (James Ivory, 1965, 35mm, 120 mins)
William Cane on Balzac in a good craft book I stumbled across the other day:
He uses the same word to describe half of the emotional reactions of his characters. Pleasure! Pleasure! Pleasure!
Braithwaite, Andrés. Bolaño por sí mismo. Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales, 2006.