Anatomies

From two books picked up and dipped into over the weekend:

I.

It needed an effort to obey his signal, but she did it. He closed the French window, drew down the blind again, and–

"Oh, don't let's," said Elfrida.

"Nonsense," said Edred; "there's nothing to be frightened of. It's just like our rooms at home."

It was. They went all over the house, and it certainly was. Some of the upper rooms were very bare, but all the furniture was of the same kind as Aunt Edith's, and there were the same kind of pictures. Only the library was different. It was a very large room, and there were no pictures at all. Nothing but books and books and books, bound in yellowy leather. Books from ceiling to floor, shelves of books between the windows and over the mantelpiece–hundreds and thousands of books. Even Edred's spirits sank. "It's no go. It will take us years to look in them all," he said.

"We may as well look at some of them," said Elfrida, always less daring, but more persevering than her brother. She sat down on the worn carpet. and began to read the names on the backs of the books nearest to her. "Burton's Atomy of Melon something," she read, and "Locke on Understanding," and many other dull and wearying titles. But none of the books seemed at all likely to contain a spell for finding treasure. "Burgess on the Precious Metals" beguiled her for a moment, but she saw at once that there was no room in its closely-printed, brown-spotted pages for anything so interesting as a spell. Time passed by. The sunlight that came through the blinds had quite changed its place on the carpet, and still Elfrida persevered. Edred grew more and more restless. —E. Nesbit, The House of Arden

II.

"After I talked to him, what's his name, Mott, I went down to the Malibu Library and checked out that book of yours, Anatomy of Terrorism."

"Anatomy of Terror," Stallings said, unable to resist the correction.

"Yeah. Right. Well, I read it. Most of it, in fact, but then I quit about three-quarters through. Want to know why?"

"Not really."

"Because I couldn't figure out whose side you were on."

"Good," said Stallings.

—Ross Thomas, Out on the Rim

Unexpected Allusions™

I.

Johnnie walked down Iberville Street toward the river. He was eager to get back to his hotel room and read more of Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy. Burton's book, the first treatise on the subject written by a layman, had been published originally in 1621 and was still relevant today. As Johnnie turned the corner and headed north on Decatur, he repeated to himself Burton's definition of melancholy: "A kind of dotage without a fever, having for his ordinary companions fear and sadness, without any apparent occasion.

—from Barry Gifford's Wild at Heart (from Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels—it's great)

II.

"It's called Playworld," she said. It's loosely based on this Piers Anthony book I read as a kid called Split Infinity. In this world, all anybody does all day long is play games. [...]" —from Adam Ross's Mr. Peanut

Meta-coverage

Omnivoracious reviews the remix of the notes on A Monster's Notes, after first reviewing the original review.

Nice!

We're not done yet.

OR ARE WE.

(Stitching in this side note: Tom tantalizingly suggests the upcoming Vollmann, Imperial, is the contemporary Anatomy of Melancholy.)

The Anatomy of Squandermania

I. "The Oblivion Arms"—one of the long, long-lost tales in my longer, longer-loster novel Dementia Americana—comes to a conclusion over at Five Chapters. I've enjoyed seeing it out there, and hope to publish more of DA soon...

II. Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy plays a big role in the "Arms"...and I'm not the only one obsessed! My sage and deeply hilarious Poetry Foundation colleague Don Share's recent book of poems, Squandermania, is also Burtonized to the max. Check out Erin Belieu's take in Boston Review:

Much like its ancestor, Squandermania springs from a gigantic, nearly overwhelming frame of reference, moving relentlessly from arcane economic and scientific theories (“ontogeny // recapitulates phylogeny,” or Gary Becker’s Rotten Kid Theorem) to Greek colloquialisms (“ardzi, bourdzi, and loulas”) to lesser-known Latin phrases and popular films. Dr. Evil’s “Boo-fricking-hoo,” from the Austin Powers movies, shares a property line with a reference to signum prefixum. No borough of thought or culture is off the map in Share’s verse; the imagistically goofy, grand, and obscure are all put to his poems’ service.

III.
The other inspiration I can recall for "The Oblivion Arms" was Maurice Maeterlinck's Life of the White Ant.

Chapter Three...

...of "The Oblivion Arms," my circa 1998 novella (let's call it a novella!), is up at Five Chapters! Excerpt:

There was a lot to watch that night. There was a special on Do Insects Sleep? There were, separately, specials on the coral snake, the narwhal, the bedbug, the ibex, the Siberian tiger, the narwhal again, the chameleon, a llama-like creature that shat heaps of perfectly round pellets, the tree frog, the stegosaurus, the hantavirus, the Bactrian camel, and the other kind of camel. There was a special on Micronesia, Japan, Turkey, Tierra del Fuego; there was a special on Windsor, Ontario....

UPDATE: I blog about "The Oblivion Arms"—and the Mountain Goats, Carl Wilson's Celine book, and more—at Powell's.

"A Dance to the Music of Time" on DVD

1.
Thanks to Netflix, I recently finished watching the 1997 British miniseries based on Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. I've been wanting to see these for a while, despite some less-than-glowing notices, so when the American DVDs became available this year, I clicked "Add." (I probably began reading Dance around ’97 or ’98.)

The 12-book sequence has been boiled down to four films (one per disc), and thus a lot of the characters are barely there, their presence so brief as to mystify anyone without some familiarity with the books. But overall it's hard to stop watching this series, and each disc is broken up into four or five parts, allowing for compulsive viewing (Oh, well then I'll just watch one more before bed...). The acting is mostly solid, sometimes excellent: Simon Russell Beale (as Kenneth Widmerpoole) and Miranda Richardson (as Pamela Flitton) are necessarily strong in complicated roles.

Otherwise, Dance isn't a roll call of Famous British Actors—John Gielgud, Alan Bennett, and Emily Mortimer are here in small parts, but mostly the faces are unfamiliar to me (a plus). I was especially impressed by James Purefoy, who plays Nicholas Jenkins (the book's narrator) through most of the series. How to be there, yet not there? In the book, Jenkins is a personable narrator, connected to everyone, the spider at the center of the web, yet he's not always forthcoming about details of his personal life—most alarmingly when he writes about his wife for the first time: Wait—when did he get married? (Wife Isobel Tolland is well played by Emma Fielding—a character who sometimes seems barely there in the books.)

2.
The third disc is the strongest; the last one, the weakest, though not necessarily because the final books in the sequence are (considered by some, like Christopher Hitchens) the weakest. No, the reason that disc four suffers is...bad makeup! How do you cast a film with a timespan of decades? Early scenes of Jenkins as a schoolboy are played by a different actor (James D'Arcy); then Purefoy is in the role till the end of disc three (growing a mustache during the war years). Disc four opens with Jenkins doing research for his book on The Anatomy of Melancholy—but it's startling to see him played by John Standing, 30 years Purefoy's senior.

Once you get used to Standing, you have to deal with the discrepancy of other characters who are now played by older actors (Nick's wife, Isobel; Jean Duport) and others (Quiggin, Odo Stevens, Members, and alas Widmerpoole) played by the same actors...but with distracting, comically bad makeup! But maybe it's interesting that Pamela Flitton (Richardson) looks exactly the same?

3.
Remarkably, Beale plays Widmerpoole throughout—from school days to the Age of Aquarius.

4.
Is anybody reading this post anymore?

5.
In any case, I didn't mean to write a long post today—I just wanted to jot down in cyber-ink the titles of Jenkins's own (fictitious) books, which we glimpse at the end of the series, the only time we see them:

The Silent Summer
Mornings in Wiltshire
Fellow Members — a memoir
Knowing the Right People
Paying the Rent — Collected Reviews
Borage and Hellebore

6.
Q: Are the books, save the last one (the study of Burton) mentioned in Dance at all? (X. Trapnel's are.)

7.
That's all for now. (I was trying to get to 12 points, but I'll leave that for another time.) I'm convinced this post is full of errors.

8.
Well, maybe a few more things.

9.
The story of the decline of Nick's friend, Charles Stringham (Paul Rhys), is heartbreaking.

10.
There was one performance that seemed markedly weaker than the rest: James Callis as Russell Gwinnett, the American academic working on a book about X. Trapnel. (Actually: Trapnel's one of my favorite characters in the books, and I wasn't crazy about his portrayal here.) He seems at first to be speaking in a watered down accent (Scottish?) that you realize is supposed to be American! My tip is just to get an American actor to play this sort of role! (This would always bother me in the otherwise enjoyable Jeeves & Wooster series...though I do think Hugh Laurie is good as "House.")

11.
Callis is better known now as the sweaty-palmed, oppurtunistic scientist in the new Battlestar Galactica series. (Imagine Gwinnett getting frozen at the end of the ’60s and defrosted in the far, Cylon-populated future! How's that for a dance to the music of time?)

12.
The very ending of the miniseries is very good.

(Image from here.)

The Joie of Guy, or To the Lighthouse

"I would love to be a poet, but it’s not in me, so I’m this other thing, whatever that is." —Guy Maddin

On the spur of the moment I caught Guy Maddin's epic Brand Upon the Brain! last night, as narrated by Joie Lee. It was great! She did an amazing job! Maddin uses as many exclamation points as Keeler!

I would write down some choice quotes but I had only two-thirds of one side of one sheet of paper and a small dull golf pencil = I can't read anything!

It's set on an island where "Guy Maddin"'s very strange parents run a mom-and-pop orphanage...in a lighthouse...and their charges have mysterious marks on the backs of their heads...and the harp-playing Wendy Hale, part of a brother-sister detective team, is investigating...all of this done with hysterical (often three exclamation points) title cards...and live sound effects: a heap of unspooled cassette tape simulated the wind through long grass, egg cartons and celery were put to creative use, the doors were done with a door...

Poetry nuts will want to hear John Ashbery's narration tomorrow at 7, though something tells me tickets will be scarce. (Last night's later show, with Crispin Glover, was sold out.) Next best thing is to read "Plenty of Sublimated Rin Tin Tin," the Jdawg's excellent interview with Guy about Ashbery, over at the Poetry Foundation site.

If we're talking Ashbery, I found the texture of much of the Brand! text sort of Nest of Ninnies/Girls on the Run–ish. And if we're talking other things, there's a dollop of Feuillade (one of the detectives always "goes formal!" when s/he's doing undercover work) and a bit of eXistenZ (weird orifice stuff). But first and foremost it's...Guy Maddin!

(For further reading/links, here's an earlier Maddining post.)

UPDATE: From the PTSNBN...back in the glory days of D. Lim's editorship...here's GM's "production diary" from The Saddest Music in the World:

For years, I've been meaning to put into practice my Anatomy of Melancholy approach to directing. And now I finally get to! Having already copied out on index cards various descriptions of depression gleaned from Burton's ancient tomes, as well as some 40 synonyms for sadness culled from a thesaurus, I now start each day by dealing out all 52 cards, face down, on the breakfast table full of actors who are to work that day. Each performer has a different, sometimes fuzzy idea of a word's meaning—for instance, lugubrious or throboxyc, which is sadder? Actors love restrictions, and why not restrict them in the only fair way possible: with a lottery windfall of commands drawn randomly from a reference book?

Under the Sign of Sontag (4-6)

4.
"Thinking, writing are ultimately questions of stamina. The melancholic, who feels he lacks will, may feel that he needs all the destructive energies he can muster." —Susan Sontag, "Under the Sign of Saturn"

5.
"The compulsive nature of his character shows plainly in his style and method, wholly apart from the violence of his diatribes and the fury of his onslaughts. He seems compelled by some irresistible urge to pile up adjectives, to accumulate synonyms, to follow every theory and describe every cure, even those he despises. He cannot let any idea go until he, it, the reader, and the language are exhausted." —B. Evans, THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ROBERT BURTON

6. "...I will adventure through the midst of these perplexities, and, led by the clue or thread of the best writers, extricate myself out of a labyrinth of doubts and errors..." —Burton, THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY, pt 1, sec 1, mem 3, subs 4