Posted on: January 19, 2009
Edgar Allen Poe
It’s Edgar Allen Poe’s 200th birthday! The grandfather (by way of Baudelaire’s translations, among others) of Modern Poetry in English. What would Eliot, Pound and Yeats have been without the man whose ghost I once saw at UVA? Would there have been a Symbolist Movement without him?
His last poetic composition, written in 1849:
Annabel Lee
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea:
But we loved with a love that was more than love —
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.
…
[More...]
Posted on: January 17, 2009
Appaloosa
One of the great things about watching DVDs is the chance to see the film-making process in action, to hear the directors and stars, to go over again what they cut out and why. In several cases, the best perhaps being Blade Runner, additional scenes, deleted scenes, make the film stronger when included. Generally, the deletions occur because of time constraints, though directors often say they cut the scene because it hurt the flow. My guess is that in many cases they really don’t want to admit that they had to conform to theater guidelines and general population tastes, to our short-attention-span culture. In the case of Appaloosa, the theatrical release was nearly two hours, so they must have felt more scenes would have pushed the limits.
But the film itself would have been better with additional material.
It’s a story that harkens back to John Wayne’s Rio movies, and to Lonesome Dove, though it has its own flavor, mood and emotional core.…
[More...]
Posted on: January 16, 2009
Django Reinhardt and company. Photo by Dietrich Schulz-Koehn
While doing some research for a new novel, I stumbled on a fascinating story. WWII, Occupied France, and Django Reinhardt, one of the great Jazz guitarists of his era. Many elements make the story fascinating, but perhaps the most unusual aspect of the whole thing is that Reinhardt was a gypsy. The Nazis included the Roma in with other minority groups it sought to destroy, killing hundreds of thousands of them before their rein of terror ended. According to Michael Zwerin, who wrote Swing Under the Nazis, Reinhardt rose to prominence in occupied Paris despite being a gypsy. A German officer from the Luftwaffe, Dietrich Schulz-Koehn, protected him because he liked Django’s music so much. This obviously went against official Nazi policy, which was adamantly and dangerously opposed to that art form. Though the Nazis weren’t above using Jazz, “hot music” and Swing to advance their own propaganda, there is no indication that Django collaborated in any way with the Germans.…
[More...]
Posted on: January 13, 2009
The Crossroads, by Niccolò Ammaniti
Over on the World Literature Forum, a Question and Answer session is taking shape. The site is always worth a visit, but tomorrow brings us a chance to speak directly, in a virtual sense, with Italian author Niccolò Ammaniti. Click here to add your questions .…
Ian Thompson, had this to say about Ammaniti’s new novel in his Guardian UK review:
Ammaniti’s best-known novel, I’m Not Scared, was a fable of adult cruelty and lost childhood innocence that sold more than 200,000 copies in Italy, later becoming an equally successful film. The book drew you in like The Blair Witch Project; I could not put it down. The Crossroads, his latest novel, unfolds in a provincial backwater in northern Italy, where teenagers are adrift and isolated in a world of internet porn and Metallica worship.
…
[More...]
