A few years ago I bought the 900 page book The Selected Short Stories of Mavis Gallant. I was struck by the last paragraph in the author’s preface to the collection. It’s advice I recall when ever I find myself struggling to get though a epic collection – like the collected Nabokov stories I started a while back…

“There is something I keep wanting to say about reading short stories. I am doing it now, because I may never have another occasion. Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.”

I enjoyed this book enormously! I’m not sure if the first part will resonate with everyone, but the semiotician are a rich source of humor.

I recalled this quote this morning, and was pleased to find it in it’s entirety on Google Books. From Waters’ 1987 book Crackpot – which I recommend picking up. I was telling someone about the scene is Pink Flamingos where a drive-in had a Marguerite Duras triple feature….

“The Films of Marguerite Duras. Miss Duras makes the kind of films that get you punched in the mouth for recommending them to even your closest friends. If there is such a thing as good avant garde cinema, this is it. Even though I believe pretension is the ultimate sin, Marguerite Duras has taken pretension one level ahead of itself and turned it into a style. She is the ultimate eccentric. Her films are maddeningly boring but really quite beautiful. After seeing her work, I think I know what it must feel like to be hypnotized.”

“Perhaps her most impossible opus to date is The Truck. The entire film consists of the director sitting in a nondescript room with Gérard Depardieu as they read the script of the film while every ten minutes or so the monotony is replaced by yet another monotonous shot of a blue truck, endlessly but serenely driving through the French countryside. If Warhol did it for the Empire State Building, why can’t Marguerite Duras do it for French trucks? All I know is that on my first trip to Cannes, in the cab from the Nice airport, I saw Marguerite’s “trucks” a hundred times on the highway and felt hypnotized all over again. That’s more than I can say for The Car or Car Wash.”

If you’d visited my site in the last few days you likely got a 500 Internal Server error.

With a bit of research I found that it was an easy fix:
Rename/delete the existing htaccess file.
Launch the wordpress admin area.
Go to settings > permalinks and click save.
A new htaccess file will be generated.

Simple as that.

An interested collection of related, though not interconnected stories. I enjoyed the stories, with their often terse conclusions. The book as a whole – I’d have to read it again… I will say – one of the ugliest book covers I’ve seen in years, which is strange coming from Knopf.

I read The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories on a whim a few years ago, enjoyed it and picked up Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Not my usual fare, but well written, and briskly paced.

Until recently the extent of my knowledge about Brian Eno was that he was a producer (David Bowie’s Low, and Talking Heads’ Fear of Music come to mind) and that he was the guy who made all of the great weird sounds on the first Roxy Music album.

About a year ago I started to listen to Ambient 2: Plateaux of Mirror, mostly due to the collaboration with composer Harold Budd. From there I tried Ambient 1: Music For Airports, which is heavily influenced by Satie’s Vexations. Both very impressive.

Even more recently I’ve been listening to Ambient 3: Day of Radience and Ambient 4: On Land. Strangely – I don’t like Ambient 3 at all – for one it really isn’t ambient… Ambient 4 on the other hand is really great, subtle electronic collage.

I haven’t actually ever tried to listen to these recordings on speakers – only in headphones, which I imagine would make a lot of difference.

65 stories by Nabokov in 750 pages. The stories are mostly quite short, and read as somewhat ambiguous moral tales. The book that this reminds me of most is Calvino’s folktales, so I’m using the same tactic of reading a few stories consecutively between reading other books. So far so good.

BTW – I love the covers that Vintage designed from this Nabokov series. I love the use of what appear to be shadow boxes, though are likely specimen cases – as Nabokov studied butterflies…

See them all here.

Click on the thumbnails for enlargements. Too bad that they didn’t do a version for Lolita as well…

This is not the sort of book I would typically read – for starters, I have no interest in Mormons or polygamy… I picked this book up because I’d read somewhere that David Ebershoff had worked as an editor with David Mitchell and I figured that was as good a recommendation as any. I was fortunate that my fuzzy reasoning panned out – Ebershoff’s blending of contemporary and historical first person narratives (a little like DM) kept the book dynamic and interesting. I wondered at one point whether reading the two narratives separately would have been as interesting. Likely not – or not in the same way.