White Tears

Hari Kunzru's White Tears is utter compelling. I've not read a novel as good as this one for a while. Gripping plot, complex characters, and beautiful writing combine with memorable set pieces to twist (or is it untwist) a yarn that is dyed in the history of blues in the USA. A novel that forces one to reconsider the deadly implications of cultural appropriation.

HA's recommended that I read the title story, so I bought the collection Nathan Englander's What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank to do so. The title story is as good as HA's warm recommendation. My sympathies kept shifting from one person to another as two couples drink, smoke weed, and play a parlor game that turns out to be devastating. The other stories in the collection never come close to the complexity and power of the first story, although "Peep Show" is an intriguing surrealistic turn and "The Reader" is an affecting tale, mostly because as a poet I sympathize deeply with the unfashionable author at the center of it. The final story "Free Fruit for Young Widows" has a moralistic tone, but its moral, if I read it correctly, is not to be moralistic about others' actions. Context is everything, and history, for this author, provides deep and needful context for all our present actions.

Finished watching Woody Allen's You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010) last night. Admired the skill with which he juggled with a complicated plot involving two married couples and the other people that they become infatuated with. The theme is the illusions that help us to live. The handling of the theme curves the mouth into a smile now and then but does not really move the heart.

Before Stranger, we watched the fluffy movie Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004). Why anyone finds Hugh Grant attractive mystifies me. Colin Firth is not much better either, in this film.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Goh Chok Tong's Visit to FCBC

Image
I am surprised by how much this incident is affecting me. I thought I have moved past my former religious life, left it behind in Singapore, but like tin cans tied to a dog it has followed me and is rattling me. I am posting the incident, and my response to it, here on this blog, because I want to remember that the past is not yet past. When Emeritus Senior Minister of Singapore Goh Chok Tong visited Faith Community Baptist Church on 13 January during a Sunday service, Senior Pastor Lawrence Khong took the opportunity to deliver a hateful anti-gay message . Among other things, he said: We affirm that the family unit comprises a man as Father, a woman as Mother, and Children. This is the basic building block of society, a value foundational for a secure future, a premise fundamental to nation-building. and warned ominously that We see a looming threat to this basic building block by homosexual activists seeking to repeal Section 377A of the Penal Code.   Example...
Read more

Wallace Stevens' "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"

Just read three essays from the "Poetics" section at the back of Volume One of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry : "The Poetry and the Present" by D.H. Lawrence (1919); "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" by Langston Hughes (1926); and "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words" by Wallace Stevens (1942). The first is an artful polemic for free verse in contact with the "insurgent naked throb of the instant moment." The second is a spirited rejoinder to a young Negro poet who wanted to "write like a poet--not a Negro poet." The third, my favorite, is a wide-ranging meditation on the nature of poetry and the role of the poet. So many grand things said but I will only quote a few passages: I am interested in the nature of poetry and I have stated its nature, from one of many points of view from which it is possible to state it. It is an interdependence of the imagination and reality as equals. This is...
Read more

Steven Cantor's "What Remains: the Life and Work of Sally Mann"

Image
Sally Mann, The Perfect Tomato , 199 0 Since it is moving pictures, a film necessarily captures--produces--a process. It turns photographs into the making of photographs. It joins moments ("spots of time") into a Life. This I expected watching Cantor's documentary on Sally Mann's creation of the exhibit "What Remains." So photographs of a long-dead beloved greyhound "lead" to photographs of the Civil War battlefield of Antietam, to photographs of Mann's Virginian farm bloodied by the police killing of a runaway convict, to photographs of decomposing bodies in a forensic study site, as if each group of pictures forms an independent yet preparatory stage in the creative process. What I did not expect to see is the influence of the film-making on the photography itself. Mann begins to think of her exhibit as a "narrative," and wants the narrative of death to end on a more uplifting note. With such an idea in mind, she takes close-up pic...
Read more