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The bone spider splatteth.
Jun. 9th, 2007 11:48 amIrksome that an ace Live Gloom line-up should clash with the inaugural Black Plastic, and on a night with no Bank branch too; if for some reason you can't make it to Bethnal Green I would certainly recomment catching Private Lives and Paris Motel at Bar Academy. As for tomorrow - does anyone Local fancy a Stroud Green history walk? Saw a poster for it in a shop window, know nothing more except that it meets outside the Dairy at 2pm. Then later I may go down to Clitoris Park to catch Morton Valence, who are playing a free festival there. Oh, and I went to the pub last night after all. I'm sure I'll get a night off at some point. 2009, maybe.
Lampedusa's The Leopard is, quite simply, one of the best novels ever written. This posthumous masterpiece aside, Lampedusa only wrote a fragment, a couple of short stories - and some essays, in one of which he declared Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma to be the best novel ever written. Having just finished The Charterhouse, I'm puzzled. I don't fully recall Lampedusa's arguments - I didn't want to, or else I'd know too much of what was coming - and I'd love to go back and check his working, but Westminster Libraries no longer seem to have the relevant volume; clearly it was insufficiently 'accessible'. It's a disjointed, vaguely picaresque mix of satire, adventure and romance, not dissimilar to Byron's Don Juan - but where Byron harmonised his elements, picked each word perfectly, Stendhal hacked out ten pages a day for 50 days and boy, it shows. Nor does anyone seem to have edited it at any stage; half the footnotes are advising that he misattributed this painting, misquoted that writer - Hell, in one of the epigraphs The Charterhouse even misquotes *itself*. He'll repeat himself, leap back and forth, suddenly remember he's forgotten to mention a key detail. Outside the core cast, one is left with no real understanding of who many of the characters are as people, only of what roles they need to perform. It might be the translation which explains why, 'Stendhal Syndrome' notwithstanding, I was never overcome with the beauty of the art - but these other failings, they're not translator's errors. So what did Lampedusa so love? Presumably coming from the Italian aristocracy gives you more of a natural connection with a novel about them, but surely that can't have been it?
Found a copy of a novel by one Cassandra Clare, who first came to prominence through writing Harry Potter fanfic and the Lord of the Rings 'Very Secret Diaries. Obviously I've not read the Potter material, and though the Diaries were extremely funny, they never exactly made me think 'hey, someone get this person to write a modern dark fantasy trilogy, pronto!' Reading the first couple of pages of her 'original' work...well, in fairness, it's no worse than a lot of the books chasing the goth dollar these days. But this is more because those writers should have stuck to fanfic too than because Clare should be getting published.
Lampedusa's The Leopard is, quite simply, one of the best novels ever written. This posthumous masterpiece aside, Lampedusa only wrote a fragment, a couple of short stories - and some essays, in one of which he declared Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma to be the best novel ever written. Having just finished The Charterhouse, I'm puzzled. I don't fully recall Lampedusa's arguments - I didn't want to, or else I'd know too much of what was coming - and I'd love to go back and check his working, but Westminster Libraries no longer seem to have the relevant volume; clearly it was insufficiently 'accessible'. It's a disjointed, vaguely picaresque mix of satire, adventure and romance, not dissimilar to Byron's Don Juan - but where Byron harmonised his elements, picked each word perfectly, Stendhal hacked out ten pages a day for 50 days and boy, it shows. Nor does anyone seem to have edited it at any stage; half the footnotes are advising that he misattributed this painting, misquoted that writer - Hell, in one of the epigraphs The Charterhouse even misquotes *itself*. He'll repeat himself, leap back and forth, suddenly remember he's forgotten to mention a key detail. Outside the core cast, one is left with no real understanding of who many of the characters are as people, only of what roles they need to perform. It might be the translation which explains why, 'Stendhal Syndrome' notwithstanding, I was never overcome with the beauty of the art - but these other failings, they're not translator's errors. So what did Lampedusa so love? Presumably coming from the Italian aristocracy gives you more of a natural connection with a novel about them, but surely that can't have been it?
Found a copy of a novel by one Cassandra Clare, who first came to prominence through writing Harry Potter fanfic and the Lord of the Rings 'Very Secret Diaries. Obviously I've not read the Potter material, and though the Diaries were extremely funny, they never exactly made me think 'hey, someone get this person to write a modern dark fantasy trilogy, pronto!' Reading the first couple of pages of her 'original' work...well, in fairness, it's no worse than a lot of the books chasing the goth dollar these days. But this is more because those writers should have stuck to fanfic too than because Clare should be getting published.
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