Reading

I've been trying to read more. Really. There was a reading challenge I joined at the beginning of the year, and made a good start. The cheat sheet for it is probably somewhere in the clutter on my desk. My thinking was that with the lockdown I'd have lots of time to read. Not. I dropped out somewhere along the way, what with other things seeming to take up my energy and time. (The person who organized it is really nice and dropped off a surprise gift for having participated, such as it was.)

You'd think reading would be easy. It used to be, at least for me. Now I seem to find it really hard to dive into a book and finish it. Often it's what I call a paint by numbers book. Do you remember those? There would be a drawing with little numbers in the spaces, and a key to tell you which number was what colour. I hated them. 

Too many books are following a formula. The Hero's Journey, or elements of it, is common. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. The meet-cute. Conversational conventions. Stupid decisions. False conflict. Teenage sulks. Unrealistic stakes. Impossible deadlines. Whatever. Boring.

Movies are even worse. The comic book superhero movies are all that and more. Or less, depending on how you look at it. Even the trailers are all the same. I don't watch many trailers any more. If the poster has a gun in it, I don't watch. If the blurb has the words revenge, justice, payback, mission, taut, and a bunch more, I don't watch.

However, I do like browsing IMDB to see what actors or writers I like have been up to lately. Or a long time ago. One of the recent books from the library was about Stanley Kubrick. It turned out to be way too much detail about other people's recollections of his work. TLDR. But on the same trip I saw Dr Strangelove in the dvd bin, and brought it home. I had not known it was the first movie role for Jame Earl Jones. It was released 1964. It was an odd look at a world that lots of people now still remember, and it seems so strange, yet we got here from there.

Which by an indirect route I won't detail here, got me watching the trailer for Plunkett and Macleane. We'd seen it when it first came out, and I remember it being fun. Holy doodle! It had that "ONE MAN" trailer voice, and it was so weird hearing that again. That came out in 1999, which wasn't all that long ago.

Which got me to a young Liv Tyler, and then to Lord of the Rings, which came out 2001. Even people that had never read Lord of the Rings wanted to see the movies, and the wait between releases was brutal. As for the wait between that and The Hobbit, they should have kept waiting. 

I still remember reading the books the first time. I was in high school, and finished The Two Towers. Boom, the iron gate closing. I was right there in the dark with Sam. It was late. Really late. I seriously thought of starting The Return of the King to see what happened, and decided I'd better not. I knew I wouldn't be able to put it down, and it was likely going to be dawn when I finished. I've read it any number of times since, but oddly enough I haven't read the books since the movies came out. I won't say they spoiled the books for me. The movies did a good job of translating the books to screen, and what works in one medium doesn't work in another. I'm told there are more movies coming out, based on the Silmarillion. My hopes are not high.

You might remember me mentioning Neil's book of Porchraits. I got a similar book, A New York - Paris Visual Diary The Human Face of Covid-19, by Peter Turnley. It turns out taking a photo of a highly reflective black cover is difficult. There's a bit of dust on it, and there's a bit of a selfie there.

This is a grittier book that Neil's, and tougher reading, but the photos in both books are fascinating. It took a couple goes to finish it, and I'll be revisiting it as well. 

The book I'm chewing on now, bogged down and struggling, is set in the Algonquin Hotel, in modern day, featuring Dorothy Parker as a ghost. That's a good start. Now it's dragging in a revenge plot by a writer and his ex-wife, and it ties to the book that is key to Dorothy showing up and cracking wise. It's  beginning to read like an in-joke for the New York publishing industry. I might not finish.

Then there was this one.

One of my English teachers in high school had drunk the Can Lit kool-aid big time. She was always talking about how it was the new thing, upsetting the old order by adding new stars to the pantheon. Or something. Much of what we were forced to read was dreck, or so I thought at the time. 

To tell you true, it was the portraits that interested me at first. I'm getting more interested in photographs of people. In most ways the book is a disappointment. I have to tell myself that most of these portraits are done by an amateur photographer with film and in natural light. I think in some cases it was publish a particular portrait, or have nothing. Much of the text of the book is about the connections in that Can Lit world. Who knows who, how they got introduced, who got what published. Kind of dull, unless you're into that sort of thing. Most of the people are poets, and the only one I'd heard of was Leonard Cohen. The only writer I'd heard of was Margaret Atwood. Call me a Philistine if you must.

Next? A photo series by an indigenous photographer, and something that looks like a remake of The Expanse.

Of the Day

Driftwood

Paperweight

This is one of the reasons why paperweight photos are difficult. Every faint scratch in the glass surface can catch the light.