An Enthusiasm of Links

Christmas Day, 2010

You know what I haven't done in forever?  Posted an enthusiasm of links.

(You might also have answered "Reviewed a book or film," and right you'd be.  Mt. Grademore behind me and Mt. Courseprep looming, let's see whether I can't remedy that one as well in the near future.)


Via the Smart Bitches, a monkishly silent Hallelujah chorus:

It makes me think of the creepier seasons of Buffy.

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A piece of Onion brilliance reposted in honor of recent legislation: "Repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell Paves Way for Gay Sex Right on Battlefield, Opponents Fantasize."  And, just like that, a million romance novel plots are hatched in the fevered brains of gay rights opponents....

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Mere days after finishing the grading on my metatheatre course, the AV Club's annual TV awards supplied me with this piece of sublime oddity made possible by knowing that not a soul is watching your show: a metasitcom.

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An old link, but an intriguing one: nearly a year ago, the Believer reversed the blind review structure, asking the reviewer to evaluate a book about which he had no background information.  The cover was stripped, as was the title page, and the title and author's name were blacked out on the spine. Here's what happened.

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In the excellent Guardian Theatre Blog, Alexis Soloski ponders why America doesn't have a richer tradition of historical drama, and concludes that it is (at least in part) due to the lack of formative canonical precedents like Shakespeare's history plays.  I don't know.  America has always easily claimed the British literary tradition whenever it suited.  It seems more likely to me that this is a combination of 1) early religious antitheatricalism which slowed the development of new dramas in general and commercially risky theatre in particular, 2) a later dearth of the sort of established and extensive new theatre funding models that exist in Europe, with a particular emphasis on the lack of a central national theatre in this country that might take history as one of its natural subjects.  I'd love to hear more on this subject, as I'm certainly no Americanist in my dramatic scholarship.

But I wonder - are there really (proportional to the total theatrical output) fewer American history plays than other nations produce? How many history plays does Britain produce in an average year?  If the subject were political theatre, I would certainly agree - the American theatre system is considerably more profit-driven than its British counterpart, and its audience in general more conservative.  Moreover, there isn't as much of a sense that theatre (which is inevitably slow in its responses to current events, because of production costs and time) is the best forum for discussing politics, which change in the mercurial fashion of national obsession here.  We are unlike our great Athenian predecessors in democracy in this way; for them, the theatre was the perfect place to engage with the civic questions that each citizen would directly influence through votes, juries, and debates.  In fact, the theatrical model of conflict (the agon between two ethical forces equally convinced of their own rightness - think Creon and Antigone) is exactly the same model of debate that we have inherited from Athenian democratic and legal practices.

Please, all ye who know more about these topics, enter into this agon with me.  Educate me; I'm interested.

Hulk, hookahs, and curses: An Enthusiasm of Links

The Hulk is on Twitter, in many forms.  But did you know he is a feminist?

HULK FIND COMPLICITY BETWEEN ALL SYSTEMS OF OPPRESSION. RESULT: HULK HAVE VERY DIVERSE PORTFOLIO OF SMASH.

Not to mention a Buddhist?

HULK GRATEFUL FOR IMPERMANENCE. OTHERWISE IT SAME SMASH EVERY DAY.

You might think that a commitment to smash would be the antithesis of Buddhism, but in fact it is the ultimate expression of detachment from the material world.  Think on't.

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The only thing that tempers my enthusiasm for Benjamin Andrews's Bookah is the knowledge that it only confirms D's worst suspicions about the nature of my book addiction.

If there is a tangible gain from the physicality of a book, then Bookah surely benefits the reader to an unprecedented extent. By concentrating the scent of 31 old books into a confined space, the much-praised aspect of the physical book is exaggerated to embody consumer technology's tendency to fetishize simple pleasures. The fact that you can't already buy the Bookah is really quite surprising. Here knowledge is contained within the sterile white walls of a modern product and powerfully ingested by the user, albeit in a hopelessly ineffective way. 

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Got Medieval has been exploring how medieval bookmakers combated piracy.  With a good book curse.

 For a book curse is essentially the same as that little FBI warning that pops up whenever you try to watch a movie: a toothless text charm included by the media's maker meant to frighten the foolish. The charm only works if you believe that words are special, potent magic.

Here's how they went:

Should anyone by craft of any device whatever abstract this book from this place may his soul suffer, in retribution for what he has done, and may his name be erased from the book of the living and not recorded among the Blessed.

See what they did there? Steal a book, have your name removed from the book.

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My friend Lara (whom I have known since we were four and shared a kindergarten class, as well as birthdays a mere two days apart) is a brilliant photographer, most often of luminous botanical subjects.  She has just opened an Etsy shop: go check it out.  My favorite of her pieces is "Lotus Petal Curve."

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I've been telling everyone I can grab ahold of and mutter to about the Yojimbo influence on Avatar: The Last Airbender. So it seems that the least I can do is link to this recent AV Club overview of the work of the great Akira Kurosawa.

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My bibliophile nature may cause a terrible outbreak of hives every time I hear about unwanted remnants of library sales being left in a dumpster, but in general I am not a fetishizer of the intact book.  I write in my books (although almost always in pencil, ever since I came to rue the plentiful inked exclamations from my college years - "Irony!" was the most common), and I like a book that shows the wear of my ownership at least as well as one that is pristine.  I often buy books used, and although I usually try to buy them as unmarked as possible, I have been known to delight in reading the marginalia of my predecessors, as I did with Jim the Boy.  I recently bought a collection of academic essays at a very reasonable price, only to discover that it had been previously owned by a prominent scholar in my field (the binding falls open naturally to her essay in the volume, but that isn't the only way I identified the book as hers).  She has written hilarious (and intimidating) little judgments on all of the other essays ("Provocative, until the cutesie ending," reads one), and goes so far (post-publication, I have to add) as to copy-edit the phrasing of some of her colleagues' prose.

At any rate, the point is that I love the book as material object almost as much as I love it as a container of knowledge and narrative,  and (rare books aside) I am intrigued by the ways we as readers and users add to and alter the value of the volume as art object or cultural artifact.  So I always enjoy pieces like this one at the New York Times about unusual uses for books.

An Enthusiasm of Links

Jennifer Belle didn't want to market her book the same old way.  So  she took the Boalian, theatrical route and hired actors to read her book in public and laugh uproariously. (Do people ever do anything uproariously besides laughing?)

Many years ago, I read an article about professional funeral wailers in China. In China, and in many countries, when a loved one died, you hired people to sit in the back and cry—sob, weep, bellow, really, really grieve the way only a stranger or someone who is being paid can—or it just wasn’t considered a good funeral. And it didn’t mean you weren’t sad yourself, it was just for reinforcement. So for years I joked with my writer friends that one day, if I got desperate enough, I would hire people to read my book on the subway and laugh.

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After reading the 138 novels on this year's Booker longlist, one of the judges has come to the conclusion that British writers are afraid to write about sex.

Philip Larkin pinpointed the emergence of sexual intercourse to 1963. Is his biographer, Motion, right in dating its demise, in literary terms, to the emergence of the Bad Sex Award in 1993?

I have noticed a fair amount of discussion among romance readers of how terribly non-genre writers treat sex scenes in their prose.  Admittedly, there is a fair amount of bad (or cliched or silly) sex in romance as well, but the best authors make poetry out of it, defamiliarizing all the old conventions of talking about both desire and the human body.  It strikes me that there is something about sexuality that serves as a foil to pretension, setting off language's literariness for both good and ill.  Thoughts?

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"Writing a play," says Justin Tanner, " is like trying to fold a parachute so that it fits in an Altoids container."  

So, naturally, Matthew Freeman forges some similes of his own, by way of reply.

Some of my favorites:

• "Writing a play bruises people with that one weird condition that makes you bruise easily."
• "Writing a play is like discovering penmanship late in life."
• "Writing a play impresses your Dad and lets him down at the same time."
• "Writing a play is like texting with ghosts."
• "Writing a play is, it turns out, entirely unlike sports."