Blogman's Holiday

I'll be blogging at the Poetry Foundation's web site for the next three months and for money! So I may be here less. This is probably a disappointment to no one but me. I'd be grateful if you'd post comments regarding the genius of my posts over there, to trick my new employers into thinking that I'm earning my pay.

Ketchup

Getting ready to teach course on terrorism and torture in June. Cheery summer reading/viewing:

Hany Abu-Hassad, Paradise Now
Albert Camus, The Just Assassins
J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale
Don DeLillo, Falling Man
Ariel Dorfman, Death and the Maiden
Paul Haggis, In the Valley of Elah
Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony
Gillo Pontecorvo, The Battle of Algiers
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

Here's hoping my students have strong stomachs.

Ketchup

Wanted, Timur Bekmambetov. The Da Vinci Code meets The Matrix meets La Femme Nikita. Is AJ all that? Yes, she is.

The Question, Henri Alleg. More bravery in a month than I'll muster in my life.

Shaun of the Dead, Edgar Wright. Documentary about contemporary English culture.

The Namesake, Mira Nair. Hackneyed narrative transposed onto inscrutable culture attempts to pass as original.

Strategic Air Command, Anthony Mann. Weird one from the great Mann. Made just two years before the Beckettesque desolation of Men in War, this film's a hymn to the constant nuclear vigilance of the SAC. Some of Mann's usual darkness definitely creeps in around the edges, but on the whole it's pretty sleepy.

Operation Crossbow, Michael Anderson. I heart cable WWII flick. George Peppard infiltrates buzz bomb factory. Double crossing and Sophia Loren.

The Thin Man, W. S. Van Dyke. A marriage to aspire to. Makes your liver hurt just to watch.

White Heat, Brenda Wineapple. Delightful account of the correspondence between Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. My review is here.

Bush's War. Brilliant, comprehensive documentary from Frontline covering the Bush administration's machinations from 9/11 to now. Watch it online. Costs only your time and your lunch, which you'll lose.

Film History 101

My consort never had occasion to take a film history class in school, and has wearied of not being able to make pretentious references to Godard like the rest of us pedants. So she's requested a short course, and I've spent the weekend putting together a syllabus for us. Posted here for reference, and also so that I'll stop fussing with it. Comments as we go along! Should be a summer's worth of fun. With thanks to Gilberto Perez, whose "Art of Film" course, which I took exactly twenty years ago, changed my life forever for the better. The list below uses Perez's syllabus as its spine.




Joel’s History of Film to 1980 or So


In the Beginning
Lumière et compagnie – Poulet (1995)
La Voyage dans la Lune – Méliès (1902)
The Birth of a Nation – Griffith (1915)

The Clowns
The Kid – Chaplin (1921)
Sherlock Jr. – Keaton (1924)
The Gold Rush – Chaplin (1925)
The General – Keaton (1927)
Duck Soup – McCarey (1933)

Europe Between the Wars: Expressionism, Revolution, Surrealism, Decadence, Anxiety
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari – Wiene (1920)
The Battleship Potemkin – Eisenstein (1925)
Un Chien Andalou – Buñuel / Dalí (1928)
The Blue Angel – von Sternberg (1930)
M – Lang (1931)

The Last European
The Grand Illusion – Renoir (1937)
The Rules of the Game – Renoir (1939)

Hollywood: The Golden Melting Pot

Film Noir
Fury – Lang (1936)
High Sierra – Walsh (1941)
Double Indemnity – Wilder (1944)
Out of the Past – Tourneur (1947)

Oaters
Stagecoach – Ford (1939)
Winchester ’73 – Mann (1950)
The Searchers – Ford (1956)
The Wild Bunch – Peckinpah (1969)

The Greatest Generation
It Happened One Night – Capra (1934)
Bringing Up Baby – Hawks (1938)
His Girl Friday – Hawks (1940)
The Shop Around the Corner – Lubitsch (1940)
Sullivan’s Travels – Sturges (1941)
Citizen Kane – Welles (1941)
Casablanca – Curtis (1942)
Shadow of a Doubt – Hitchcock (1943)
To Have and Have Not – Hawks (1944)
Letter from an Unknown Woman – Ophüls (1948)
All About Eve - Mankiewicz (1950)
The African Queen – Huston (1951)
Singin’ in the Rain – Kelly/Donen (1952)
Roman Holiday – Wyler (1953)
Vertigo – Hitchcock (1958)
Some Like It Hot – Wilder (1959)

Hollywood Becomes Sentient
Sunset Boulevard – Wilder (1950)

Freud in the Suburbs: The Tranquilized Fifties and Beyond
Rebel Without a Cause – Ray (1955)
All That Heaven Allows – Sirk (1955)
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul – Fassbinder (1974)
Far From Heaven – Haynes (2002)

La politique des auteurs: International Cinemas

Italian Neorealism
Rome, Open City - Rossellini (1945)
Bicycle Thieves – De Sica (1948)

India
Pather Panchali – Ray (1955)
Aparajito – Ray (1956)
Apur Sansar – Ray (1959)

Japan
Tokyo Story – Ozu (1953)
Ugetsu – Mizoguchi (1953)
Throne of Blood – Kurosawa (1957)

France
Hiroshima mon amour – Resnais (1959)
The 400 Blows – Truffaut (1959)
Breathless – Godard (1960)
Jules and Jim – Truffaut (1962)
Masculin féminin: 15 faits précis – Godard (1966)

Italy
L’Avventura – Antonioni (1960)
La Dolce Vita – Fellini (1960)
8 ½ - Fellini (1963)
The Conformist – Bertolucci (1970)

Sweden
Persona – Bergman (1966)

Poland
Knife in the Water – Polanski (1962)
The Decalogue – Kieslowski (1989)

The 70’s: America Gets Interesting Again
The Godfather – Coppola (1972)
Pink Flamingos – Waters (1972)
Paper Moon – Bogdanovich (1973)
Chinatown – Polanski (1974)
Nashville – Altman (1975)
Taxi Driver – Scorsese (1976)
All the President’s Men – Pakula (1976)
Apocalypse Now – Coppola (1979)

Women (Sometimes) Get to Direct Movies Too
Meshes of the Afternoon – Deren (1943)
The Bigamist – Lupino (1953)
Fast Times at Ridgemont High – Heckerling (1982)
Born in Flames – Borden (1983)
Vagabond – Varda (1985)
Chocolat – Denis (1988)
Salaam Bombay! – Nair (1988)
Daughters of the Dust – Dash (1991)
The Piano – Campion (1993)
The Apple – Makhmalbaf (1998)
Boys Don’t Cry – Pierce (1999)
Frida – Taymor (2002)
Lost in Translation – Coppola (2003)
Yes – Potter (2004)
Letter from an Unknown Woman - Xu Jinglei (2004)
You and Me and Everyone We Know – July (2005)

Ketchup

Autumn. Reading to write reviews, teach, research, keep my head above water, but no time to blog.

Adrienne Rich
Natasha Trethewey
Graham Swift
Michael Ondaatje
Sigrid Nunez
Hayden Carruth
Alice Notley
W. G. Sebald
Srikanth Reddy
Christian Wiman
Wendy Rawlings
D. M. Thomas
W. D. Snodgrass
Lots of books about torture

Haven't been to the movies in more than a month.

Fin

Is it possible that Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman have died on the same day? It's going to be a long week of sleepless nights for film critics expected to generate posthumous appreciation essays.

I can't begin to express my admiration for either of these two titans. When I was in college and beginning to discover movies as an art form, I wrote earnest, rapturous, and no doubt ridiculous term papers on them both. These years later I still need to watch L'Avventura or The Seventh Seal from time to time, particularly when my head gets too full of all the wonderful kandy-kolored klaptrap that passes for culture these days and I need the big black and white broom of an austere auteur to sweep me clean. And if you say that makes me pretentious, I say that makes you a sucker.

A Note to My Readership

Hi Heather,

In case you care: lately I've had the idea of transposing selected entries from my old pen-and-paper culture-consumption journals to the blog. Something about having the entire history of my paltry mental life in digital format excites me. Not sure why. So. Blog entries that end with a date were originally written down in a notebook on that date, and have since been typed into the blog.

I guess those who can't knit, type.

Ketchup

Halflife, Meghan O'Rourke
A Form of Optimism, Roy Jacobstein
Lions Don't Eat Us, Constance Quarterman Bridges
Ruin, Cynthia Cruz
Ooga-Booga, Frederick Seidel
Logorrhea, Adrian C. Louis
Iliad
Odyssey
Aeneid
Metamorphoses
Rediscovering Homer, Andrew Dalby
Homeric Moments, Eva Brann
Controvertibles, Quan Barry
Blue Front, Martha Collins
Selected Poems, Medbh McGuckian
Vacationland, Ander Monson
Other Electricities, Ander Monson
Poeta en San Francisco, Barbara Jane Reyes
The Cradle of the Real Life, Jean Valentine
Rain, Jon Woodward

Plus other things I'm sure I've forgotten . . .

Ketchup

A. R. Ammons, Sphere
John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
Quan Barry, Controvertibles
Ted Berrigan, The Sonnets
Kamau Brathwaite, Born to Slow Horses
Olena Kalytiak Davis, shattered sonnets love cards and other off and back handed importunities
Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings
Thylias Moss, Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler
Frank O’Hara, Lunch Poems
Kay Ryan, The Niagara River
Jean Valentine, The Cradle of the Real Life
Martin Campbell, Casino Royale
Barbara Jane Reyes, Poeta en San Francisco
Evelyn Waugh, Black Mischief
Evelyn Waugh, Scoop
Matthew Zapruder, The Pajamaist

And a bunch of other things, but these are the ones I've remembered not to forget.

What my drunk friend said goes double for me

I've been keeping a journal of reactions to books, movies, and albums for years, and have decided to move that enterprise onto this blog, for two reasons. First, it's my standing policy to investigate phenomena I find both attractive and repellent, e.g. twelve-tone music, crawfish, and blogging. Second, I imagine I'll press myself to think through my reactions a bit more thoroughly if I'm aware there's a possibility, however remote, that others might read them. That last said, I pivot to caveat: these entries are not careful critiques but knee-jerk reactions, written in the immediate aftermath of reading, watching, or listening, and so are certain to contain dumbnesses, solecisms, and regrettables. They are what they are; I stand by them only inasmuch as I would by a drunk friend.