Archive for February 2012
“Great Expectations”: Month 1
Posted by: danhartland on: February 27, 2012
- In: Books
- 2 Comments
One of the most famous opening scenes in English literature – the graveyard, the prison ship, the convict – boils down to the provenance of a pie. What strikes the episodic reader of Great Expectations, as opposed perhaps to the one barrelling through the volume in one go, is the sustained low comedy – almost the satire [...]
What The Dickens? Franzen and Wharton
Posted by: danhartland on: February 21, 2012
- In: Books
- 6 Comments
Others have already had at Jonathan Franzen’s recent swivel-eyed New Yorker piece on Edith Wharton so that I don’t have to. Here’s Sarah Todd, who says what needs to be said very well: Ostensibly he’s talking about Wharton’s appearance because it’s her “one potentially redeeming disadvantage.” But he doesn’t sound sympathetic when he talks about [...]
“Hating Smart and Hating Dumb”: James Ellroy’s “The Cold Six Thousand”
Posted by: danhartland on: February 11, 2012
- In: Books
- 2 Comments
I read The Cold Six Thousand. I thought about The Cold Six Thousand. I figured The Cold Six Thousand was fucked up. It was rough. James Ellroy wrote a novel. He’s written a bunch. The Cold Six Thousand is the sequel to American Tabloid but it isn’t a repeat. It sometimes reads like one. But it [...]
“It’s Just A Pulp Novel”: Lavie Tidhar’s “Osama”
Posted by: danhartland on: February 9, 2012
- In: Books | science fiction
- 3 Comments
Manflu did it for Osama. I speak not of an alternative history in which the mastermind of 9/11 was struck low by fatigue and fever, but of the post I had intended to write about Lavie Tidhar’s BSFA-shortlisted novel: a fug of the last few days has led not just to an inability to write [...]
More On The Novel
Posted by: danhartland on: February 1, 2012
- In: Books
- 2 Comments
Despite my thoughts on Dickens-as-novelist yesterday, I try to avoid deciding what a novel should be – its singular benefit over other forms is, after all, surely its expansiveness. But my sense that Dickens’s didacticism is somehow at odds with what I understand to be the open-heartedness of the novel form was in part inspired [...]
71 is the number of an apartment we return to regularly in Whinfell Forest, Cumbria. We like it there.
‘We’ are Anna French and Dan Hartland. The Story and the Truth is a sort of inadequate catch-all term for what goes on here: we tend to talk about novels, history, food and fashion, politics and music, but there may also be photographs of soft toys and musicians. Stick around and see.
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Words We Like
The Weird, ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
An astounding work of collecting-as-art, this compendium of 800,000 weird words is easily one of the most consistent genre anthologies I have read. Heterodox yet focused, it is fated to be the canonical text of weird fiction studies for some time to come - and deservedly so. The first-rank stories here - and there are many, not a few - are not excellent weird fiction. They are simply some of the best 20th century writing available in any mode. Not without its faults - but that is, ahem, the nature of the beast. Essential.
Sounds We Like
Sonik Kicks, by Paul Weller
I haven't paid much attention to Weller - an artist who hangs heavy in my musical tutelage - since 2000's Heliocentric, an album of diverse interests which felt like a shot of crisp elegance in that year of Steps and 'N Sync. The records that followed it - particularly Illumination - were enough, however, to make those achievements a distant memory. There have been rumblings of a renaissance - 22 Dreams got great reviews - but only the sounds of Sonik Kicks have brought me back. Energetic, fierce and, best of all, creative, this sounds like a record from a much younger man. Weller has a lesson or two in him yet.
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