In my review of Brick, I commented on the retro glamour that spreads a shimmery finish across a lot of film and fiction in the noir mode, obscuring the bleak vision underneath. Scraping away that finish can be a good thing, and so it is in Brick. But the style and scenery of classic hard-boiled [...]
Archive for April, 2007
Nota Bene
Posted in Quotation on 26 April 2007 | 1 Comment »
“Bingo” Was Its Name
Posted in Movies on 26 April 2007 | Leave a Comment »
For years now, I’ve been playing Scrabble with my wife, and usually losing to her, often because of her ability (which I lack) to deploy all seven of her letters in one move—a feat that carries a 50-point bonus and leaves lesser players (me, anyway) fumbling with their little wooden tiles and joking lamely about [...]
Karma Killer
Posted in Books, Crime Fiction on 25 April 2007 | Leave a Comment »
Season of the Monsoon, set in Bombay (or Mumbai, as Indians have called its since 1995), leaps forward from Bombay Mail both in time and in realism. I saw no serial killers—that I know of—on my visit to Mumbai. But I saw much else that Mann had noticed, and skillfully captured, before me.
PAUL MANN. Season [...]
Indian Winter
Posted in Books, Crime Fiction on 25 April 2007 | Leave a Comment »
In late January and early February of this year, I traveled to India. This was my first trip to the subcontinent, and it may well be my last—not because it failed to leave an impression on me, but because it left such a bewilderingly strong one. In fact, the title of this journal takes its [...]
A Fine Italian Murder
Posted in Books, Crime Fiction on 24 April 2007 | Leave a Comment »
The detective novelist Michael Dibdin, a Brit who lived in the United States and wrote about Italians crimes, died last month. Seeing his obituary spurred me to take down from my shelves a book by him that I bought years ago, on the strong recommendation of a friend, but had never read. So I read [...]
A Book by Any Other Name . . .
Posted in Crime Fiction on 24 April 2007 | Leave a Comment »
Today (I’m writing this post on April 23), the world celebrates the birthday of William Shakespeare—the “Stratford man,” born in 1554, who ostensibly wrote the 38 plays, 154 sonnets, and assorted other works in verse that make up the most lauded body of literature by a single hand in all of history. Shakespeare also died [...]
Nota Bene
Posted in Quotation on 23 April 2007 | Leave a Comment »
Adam Gopnik, in a piece about Kingsley Amis (“The Old Devil,” The New Yorker, April 23, 2007), adduces a transatlantic divide in favored types of satire:
The Larry David character [in "Curb Your Enthusiasm"] doesn’t mind keeping up the nice-guy act so long as he never actually has to do anything unselfish; the Amis men expect [...]
School of Hard Knocks
Posted in Crime Fiction, Movies on 23 April 2007 | 1 Comment »
High school, as everyone knows, is a sterile-fecund, thrilling-deadening, freedom-graced prison house, a place that we can’t wait to escape, right up to the point when we do escape it and then can’t wait to return. We struggle there to carve a path to adulthood, and then spend our adult lives pining for the warm, [...]
Gateway
Posted in Reflection on 23 April 2007 | Comments Off
The photo used in the header to this Web log, at least in the form in which I launch the site today—a scene of the Golden Gate Bridge as captured from the Marin Headlands, with the towers of San Francisco inscribing a dim palimpsest behind the inevitable fog of the Bay—is a visual cliché. Too [...]
