More Winnowed Fragments

What a wonderful way to spend the early afternoon! I just read Simon Pettet's More Winnowed Fragments. It is lovely and inspired. Truly inspired. I love this slender volume.


An excerpt:


Freed from the drive-in prison of single-mindedness
He turns effortlessly to the highway drama
Of the heart's debate with the so-called "verifiable" world...

Ratatouille

I did not expect to like this at all. The newer animated Disney things have not appealed to me. They seem cloying, overly-clever and maybe too cinematic. The computerized visual style seems off-putting and ugly to me.

But, I am pleased to say that I was very pleasantly surprised by Ratatouille -- the story of a rat who wants more out of life, more out of food in particular. He loves food, as a gourmet and gourmand. I don't feel like detailing the plot, but I didn't feel like it was predictable at all. I was genuinely engaged. I thought it was terrific and bet it will inspire a lot of children to become bourgeois foodies in the best and worst sense of the term.

One thing I really liked: it was not too cute. At certain points when they showed swarms of rats I was appalled and chilled. I liked that they didn't cutify ratness to the point of unrecognizability (a la Mickey Mouse).

Card and Pettet at the Poetry Project

I heard Macgreggor Card and Simon Pettet read at the Poetry Project last night (I know I just spelled Card's name wrong). They were both terrific. Both read with the wonderful, unique-to-themselves quality that makes hearing poetry worthwhile. Rather than tedious and depressing. Card was so interesting and charismatic; I'm going to keep an eye out for his work.

Simon Pettet was fabulous as well. His work reminds be of Brenda Coultas' in one particular way: both poets give me the impression that each word comes at great cost; is written through something; chosen with difficult deliberation. Simon read a number of his poems twice, which created a weird, haunting effect and allowed you to really hear them. Often when I am at readings, words wash over me, a few sticking here and there, a few lingering. But Simon's technique let me hold his poems in a way I never had before.

I bought both his books: More Winnowed Fragments and Selected Poems

Mapping the Social Landscape; Readings in Sociology; Constructions of Deviance

I've been reading a bunch of selections from three readers that I will be drawing from in my Winter Intercession class. So far I've read a number of interactionist essays on the production of masculinity and femininity; tattoos; and the sex industry. Good stuff. I just thought I'd mention it in case my vast reading public was under the impression that I've been slacking off.

Museum shops and nouveau butchery

This week I read two New Yorker pieces during my subway ride: "Red, White, and Bleu" by Bil Buford -- a review of three books flamboyantly and viscerally (pun intended) celebrating meat; and "Art and Commerce" by Patricia Marx, ironically and bemusedly celebrating the phenomenon of museum gift shops.

The museum piece was fun and light-hearted. It both rejoinced in and mocked the uneasy but perhaps unavoidable merger of art and consumerism. It reviewed many of the large number of museum shops in the city, and included a range descriptions of interesting pieces in a range of prices (from a limited-edition facsimile of the Book of Hours: $5,300 to a vitrine holding "clever trompe-l'oeil adhesive tape that is made to look like a rococo gold frame" for $15). The whole piece just made me want to go out and spend, spend, spend. And it made me wish I had a super nice apartment to hold all these museum gifts.

The reviews of the butchery, meat, cooking books was a bit less gentile. It featured these three intense meat promoters and their ideology, which I am sympathetic too. But it also included descriptions of slaughter as well as a critique of the way our lives distance us from the reality of our predatory and carnivorous natures.

"Why is it considered entertainment when a predator kills another animal in a wild-life film... 'whereas the final moments of human predation of our farmed livestock are considered too disturbing and shameful to be made available even for information'... If you fear the sight of a carcass, you shouldn't be eating from it."

Scarface

I couldn't finish Scarface last night. I thought the accents were atrocious. Apparently they couldn't find one Cuban actor. It is very violent and I could tell where it was going. Michele Pfiefer, who I like a lot, was terrible. Her acting was stiff and her voice robotic. She's come a long way.

Amelie

I LOVE this movie. It is a beautiful, charming, literary fairy tale. I love the rich colors. I love the narration that connects everything internal into a big mysterious scheme. I love Amelie's idiosyncratic mind and her imaginative loneliness and generous shyness. I love all the secondary and tertiary characters. I love the photo booth, I love Montemarte, I love the Polaroids of the gnome all over the world, I love Amelie's apartment, I love when Amelie is so mortified and sad that she turns to water. I love all the visual effects.

It is the perfect holiday movie. Et il est en francaise!