Interesting list of films - Introduction

If you haven't seen Morvern Caller I know that there may be a reason for that. But I recommend it hightly. It is certainly not mainstream cinema, but intriquing, delicate, edgy, and introspective.

And the best advice I can give for any film I recommend, is go to it without any expectations- and watch it alone, or with a friend who will silently absorb with you.

Let me know what you think, send me an email. victoriarlucas@gmail.com

Picture of a friend...

click here to read an article in the New York Times.

I mention it because I have a picture of a friend and this is not the exact position, but kindred to that image.

'My Lives,' by Edmund White - New York Times Review

SINCE Edmund White's new autobiography refrains from explaining itself, we can only guess at its intentions. "My Lives" is organized not chronologically but thematically, with chapters entitled "My Shrinks," "My Blonds," "My Hustlers" and so on, ranging loosely over categories of the author's experience. Perhaps White, who is celebrated for a series of autobiographical novels about middle-class gay life beginning with "A Boy's Own Story," feels that he's already related his life once in the usual sequence and the second time around merits a fresh approach. To cite "A Boy's Own Story" alone, the correspondence between White's life and his novels is quite close, down to the name of his father's dog and the brandy Alexanders one of his mother's boyfriends serves her in bed.

White doesn't keep a journal, and so he might have decided he was better off following the meandering currents of memory rather than trying to summon up a linear narrative. Still, the ordering he's chosen is peculiar, with the shrinks chapter coming first, then his father, his mother, the hustlers, "My Women," Europe and Europeans, and continuing until the final chapter about the relationships White considers his forte, "My Friends." He tells us about his first lover — whom he met in Michigan and lived with in New York — after describing 15 years in Paris as an established writer and libertine. The emphasis, too, is eccentric: one long, exhaustive chapter ("My Master") details a fairly recent, short-lived sadomasochistic affair with a much younger man. By contrast, the man with whom White has lived for 10 years in (nonmonogamous) "marital harmony" is mentioned mostly in passing.

to keep reading click here...

sasquatch!

I've bought my tickets for Saturday and Sunday


CLICK HERE FOR THE EVENT

Paris review

thanks to a tip from a friend, I have the link to a great tid bit from the Paris Review re: Truman Capote. & enjoy!

Requiem for a Poet

"I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time." -Orson Welles, US actor & director (1915 - 1985).

....Instead of subduing the poet, Sylvia Plath navigated The Bell Jar with the full throttle of her talent. The difference between writing poetry and stories is clear enough to see, but when entrenched in the process, it seems more foreboding and less clear...

Artists and writers are part of a heritage that pulses with insight, and shifts with complexities. All the while seeming to balance ones soul between lineage of kings, and bastard child.

Or as Rudyard Kipling wrote,
"If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same; "

The Bell Jar stands out to me because Sylvia the poet, became Sylvia the novelist. It was her memoir not of fact, but of emotion. Her strategic use of poetry transformed and elevated her novel. She cleared the road into a dark corner of heartbreak and retraced her steps with volume unmistakably magnified.

This is what we seek. The magnification of small words within us. But more than this, to know that small words hold weight.

"Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor."--Capote

Throughout his career, Truman Capote remained one of America's most controversial and colorful authors, combining literary genius with a penchant for the glittering world of high society. Though he wrote only a handful of books, his prose styling was impeccable, and his insight into the psychology of human desire was extraordinary. His flamboyant and well-documented lifestyle has often overshadowed his gifts as a writer, but over time Capote's work will outlive the celebrity.

Born in New Orleans in 1924, Capote was abandoned by his mother and raised by his elderly aunts and cousins in Monroeville, Alabama. As a child he lived a solitary and lonely existence, turning to writing for solace. Of his early days Capote related, "I began writing really sort of seriously when I was about eleven. I say seriously in the sense that like other kids go home and practice the violin or the piano or whatever, I used to go home from school every day and I would write for about three hours. I was obsessed by it."

for more on this and others, click here...

Anatomizing the Art and Life of an Omnivorous Beauty

By JANET MASLIN

Lee Miller (1907-1977) went through life as a serial dazzler, adopting and shedding a series of guises a chameleon might envy. She compiled a long list of admirers. The latest of these - in a lineup that included Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Edward Steichen, Charlie Chaplin, Max Ernst, Jean Cocteau and James Beard - is Carolyn Burke, a biographer intent on conveying the full range of Miller's adventures. Ms. Burke's approach is generous even when facts present Miller in a less than flattering light.

In her admiring but chilly "Lee Miller," Ms. Burke's attitude toward her subject is tested early. So was Elizabeth Miller, as Lee (who would deliberately choose an androgynous name later) was known during her girlhood in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. Elizabeth was the dutiful daughter of a man who obsessively photographed her in the nude well into her adulthood, at which point he coaxed her into posing nude with her female friends. However this process was understood by Elizabeth (who had apparently been raped by a stranger at the age of 7), Theodore Miller remained the best-loved and most trusted man in her busy life.

to continue reading click here...

mr. pentel

NYTIMES

Rejected by the Publishers

By LAWRENCE VAN GELDER

Submitted to 20 publishers and agents, the typed manuscripts of the opening chapters of two books were assumed to be the work of aspiring novelists. Of 21 replies, all but one were rejections. Sent by The Sunday Times of London, the manuscripts were the opening chapters of novels that won Booker Prizes in the 1970's. One was "Holiday," by Stanley Middleton; the other was "In a Free State," by Sir V. S. Naipaul, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature. Mr. Middleton said he wasn't surprised. "People don't seem to know what a good novel is nowadays," he said. Mr. Naipaul said: "To see something is well written and appetizingly written takes a lot of talent, and there is not a great deal of that around. With all the other forms of entertainment today, there are very few people around who would understand what a good paragraph is."