Anthony Lee Collins

It’s been a while since I posted. I’ve been accumulating little notes here and there about things I could write about, but none of them were really strong enough for a whole blog post.

So, here is a selection:

1) “No Comfort” by Fintan O’Toole

I read O’Toole quite often, mostly about politics, but this (even though it starts about Elon Musk) is not about politics. It’s about the inescapable cliche that Shakespeare wrote about “heroes” who were brought down by “tragic flaws.”

To offer a brief quote:

The most obvious problem with all that is, even if it were true, it would be crushingly dull. Moral tales in which people do bad things because they have wicked instincts and then get their comeuppance are ten a penny. The clichés shrink Shakespeare to the level of Miss Prism in The Importance of Being Earnest, the author of a three-volume novel of “more than usually revolting sentimentality” who explains that in her book “the good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.”

Well worth reading.

 
2) Shelley Duvall (1949 – 2024)

Here are two good obituaries of Shelley Duvall:

• The Guardian
• The New York Times

This article is good, too: “The slim but powerful movie career of Shelley Duvall emerged from a Robert Altman crowd“

It’s really too bad that so many people these days know her, if they know her at all, from her (excellent) work in The Shining. She was consistently good, in a variety of roles, in all the movies she made with Robert Altman.

Speaking of Altman, this was interesting: “The 10 Best Robert Altman Movies, Ranked.” I don’t entirely agree with the ranking (if I made a Altman Top Ten list today, I would undoubtedly disagree with it by tomorrow), but it enough in sync with my own preferences that I’m tempted to re-watch 3 Women, which I haven’t seen in ages and which I’ve never reviewed (and which stars Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek).

 
Also:

I’ve still been dipping in and out of Across the River and into the Trees, from time to time, but my opinions haven’t changed. And now there are no more Hemingway novels for me to read for the first time (I have no interest in the posthumous ones). Oh, well, the short stories are generally better anyway.

I’ve also been re-reading parts of A. E. Hotchner’s book Papa Hemingway, which is about the years they were friends (and collaborators, since Hotchner adapted quite a few Hemingway stories for the screen). And during that time, they (and several other people) traveled around Spain following a season of bullfighting, partly because of a very intense rivalry between two great matadors, both of whom Hemingway was friends with.

Hemingway wrote a book about that summer, called The Dangerous Season. I’ve never read any of his non-fiction writing, but I decided to try this one.

(Weirdly, I do have to report that I felt a wisp of an obligation to insert a caveat explaining that I don’t approve of bullfighting. Looking at this objectively, this is odd, since I frequently read — and write — murder mysteries and I have never felt that I should clarify that I’m not in favor of murder.)

It is difficult to describe how much I enjoyed The Dangerous Season. Unlike Across the River, this is not Hemingway attempting “calculus” in prose (and did Hemingway even know what calculus was? — I doubt it) — this is Hemingway writing simply and well about people he knew and a sport he had studied for a lot of his life. It has humor, too, which the novel mostly doesn’t. (Orson Welles said that Hemingway could be really funny in life, but he obviously thought that humor had no place in serious fiction.) His humor can be rather dry and subtle, but it’s there.

In fiction, there are fairly predictable ways that this story could have ended (see the Lady Bracknell quote above), but these are real events and so they end as they ended.

One thing particularly amused me after reading this book and the Hotchner book referred to above. The two matadors whose rivalry is at the center of the book were Antonio Ordóñez and Luis Miguel Dominguín. Dominguin’s sister Carmen was married to Ordóñez. Hemingway clearly liked Carmen, and writes about her with admiration, but what he never mentions (and Hotchner does) is that she had been a matador herself, and a very good one. Hotchner makes it clear that no woman could succeed in the macho world of bullfighting unless she had undeniable skills.

Why is this book so much better than Across the River (apart from the “calculus” question referred to above)? Frankly, one reason is that it was edited, and heavily (I think partly by Hotchner). As far as I can tell, Across the River was never even proofread, let alone edited.

Just got back from vacation. Yay.

Sometimes people ask what I did on vacation (and, sometimes, did I take pictures of it).

The answer is usually, mostly, “no.” This year, however, I did Do Something (although I didn’t take pictures of it): I read Bleeding Edge, one of the two Thomas Pynchon novels that I had never read. Began it on the bus to Cape Cod, and finished it on the bus coming back.

I had started it before, at least once, but it usually takes me a few tries to get a good momentum going with Pynchon. First I get bogged down with all the characters and names and stuff, and then, finally, I decide to power through and I resign myself to the fact that I probably won’t have any idea what’s going on. To quote Publisher’s Weekly: “[R]eading Pynchon for plot is like reading Austen for sex.”

(What’s interesting is that, in Inherent Vice at least, the plot is very tightly constructed. It’s easy (and fine) to ignore that, but the structure is there if you look, and it’s solid.)

And, of course, as always, Bleeding Edge reads like Pynchon, which is always a pleasure. It has so many wonderful, wonderful sentences. I’ve said it before, but, still, despite my best efforts, every sentence Pynchon has ever written is better than any sentence I’ve ever written. To quote Publisher’s Weekly again: “Luckily, Pynchon and Austen have ample recourse to the oldest, hardest-to-invoke rule in the book — when in doubt, be a genius. It’s cheating, but it works. No one, but no one, rivals Pynchon’s range of language, his elasticity of syntax, his signature mix of dirty jokes, dread and shining decency.”

To quote the New York Times:

Thomas Pynchon is 76, and his refusal to develop a late style is practically infuriating. The man’s wildly consistent: the only reason Bleeding Edge couldn’t have been published in 1973 is that the Internet, the Giuliani/Disney version of Times Square and the war on terror hadn’t come along yet.

As my mother used to say about certain very old jazz musicians and painters, “He’s still doing his thing.”

And, obviously, one of the many things you can learn from Inherent Vice is that the Internet was already in motion several years before 1973. It didn’t look anything like the Internet of today, but that’s part of what this novel is about. Bleeding Edge, which takes place in 2001, is steeped in the end of the Internet (not that the Internet is done, obviously, but the early, optimistic days were long ago overtaken by massive engines of profit and surveillance).

And, yes, this is a September 11 novel, though it takes its time to get to the events of that morning, and what came after.

This is not a review, obviously. I’ve only read it once, which with Pynchon is barely a beginning.

One more quote from the Times:

In summary: Despite the lack of personal information supplied about the author, it’s plain, from the sweep and chortle of his sentences, from the irascible outbreaks of horniness, from the pinpoint rage at popular hypocrisy and cant, that young Pynchon is a writer of boundless promise, sure to give us a long shelf of entrancing and charismatic novels. I believe he has a masterpiece or three in him. I look forward to seeing what he’ll do next.

 
Later update: You want to know what it’s like to read a novel by Thomas Pynchon? At least for me? (Although I am definitely not the only one.)

In the Douglas Adams novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything is revealed to be the number 42. This novel, which does not propose any ultimate answers to anything, has 41 chapters. Is this intended to tell us…

Anyway, you can see how it goes.

I’ve been writing about James Joyce recently. Like many Joyce fans, I have my favorites between Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses, but I’ve never made a serious attempt to read Finnegan’s Wake. There are some people who admire it tremendously, and who perhaps even enjoy it, but most readers seem to find it impossible to get into.

Joyce apparently promised that, after Finnegan’s Wake, his next novel would be a simple novel.

David Lynch has not made a feature film since Inland Empire (2006). I hadn’t seen Inland Empire until recently, maybe because it was generally reported to be very difficult to follow, even by the standards of earlier Lynch films, or maybe because it’s three hours long, or both, but now that I have seen it I still prefer Mulholland Drive, which seems to be (this is not an original idea with me) a somewhat more traditional approach to the same general themes (specifically around Hollywood and its relationship to actresses).

William S. Burroughs started off with fairly conventional novels (Junkie, Queer), hit it (relatively) big when he went more “out there” in his style and techniques (Naked Lunch), proceeded to go way more “out there” (in The Nova Trilogy, for example), and then pulled back and integrated all of these into a final style (Cities of the Red Night).

I haven’t read Burroughs in a while, but Cities of the Red Night was always my favorite. It has the general structure and affect of a hard-boiled noir detective novel, and Burroughs builds on those conventional elements while going increasingly bonkers, much the same way David Lynch did in Twin Peaks and elsewhere.

The consistent thread here is not these artists, specifically, but my understanding of my own preferences, which are apparently very consistent.

This also makes me think of John Coltrane. I read an interview once with a jazz critic/enthusiast/musician (I don’t remember who, obviously) who said that it would have been interesting to see, if Coltrane had lived decades longer (he died at 40), if he would have continued to take his music further and further “outside” the traditional forms and modes, which was the trajectory he was on, or if he would have at some point moved back to more conventional forms, as Burroughs (who lived to be 83) did, and as Joyce (who lived to be 58) was apparently planning to.

The idea was that if you break things down beyond a certain point you just get complete chaos, and where could you go beyond that, in any art form? For a writer, would you start inventing your own alphabet?

All of this, of course, applies to me (this is my blog, after all 🙂 ).

I started out quite a bit more “outside” than I’ve ended up. (“Lee” in my name is for Burroughs, by the way.)

At one point, in writing the first version of Utown, I had one chapter (called “Eyes Wide Open,” if I remember correctly) which was quite “out there.” It was considered enjoyable (by some) and baffling & annoying (by others), and I realized that this was a dead end for me.

I do still have some of the “cut-ups” still available, and they make me laugh out loud (the highest praise possible, in my opinion).

Also, since I’ve been re-reading Across the River and into the Trees, it amused me to remember that I’d written this: Papa.

I’ve said before that I still enjoy renting DVDs from Netflix, and that my favorite way of reading newspapers is on my Kindle.

So,

1) “Netflix Will End Its DVD Service, 5.2 Billion Discs Later“

2) “Amazon will discontinue newspaper and magazine subscriptions in September“

Sigh.

Anyway, to make it clear, I’m definitely not looking forward to Season Three of The Witcher.

Nope, not me.

Geralt of Rivia, Princess Cirilla of Cintra, Yennefer of Vengerberg? Never heard of ’em.

(I thought I published this a couple of days ago, but apparently not. Whenever I write something, I like to save it and let it sit for a day or two. Sometimes I then forget about it until the next time I do something on the blog. Oh, well. Better that than publishing anything before I’m sure it’s ready.)

1) Happy Near Year!

2) Blogs are cool. They are not currently hip, but they are still cool. I liked this article: “Bring back personal blogging.”

I’ve had this blog since 2005 (August 21, to be precise — I never remember to celebrate the anniversary, but I don’t pay much attention to my birthday either). At that point, it was just a blog update of a regular website (hand-coded HTML) that I’d had since some time in the 1990s.

There were a few years, before social media took over, when I had a lot of comments and interactions with other bloggers. Those blogs are almost all gone now. (Well, except for Maggie over at Maggie Madly Writing. Hi, Maggie!).

Then that all ended, but that wasn’t why I’d started in the first place. I wanted to put my stories and my movie reviews and other stuff out there — I didn’t need (or even, at first, realize the possibility of) likes and responses and whatever.

I think I learned that from my parents. Creating things can be — in and of itself — rewarding.

This will be post #995. There are also 41 posts which are in Draft mode, I assume permanently. As I said, not all of the posts I write make it to being published. That’s fine.

Again, happy new year.

I thought this was a provocative headline: “How Hemingway Gradually—Then Suddenly—Defined the Zeitgeist.”

Well, the article was not about Hemingway, in toto, defining anything; it’s about how much the phrase “gradually and then suddenly” is being used these days.

The phrase is from The Sun Also Rises:

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

But then I worried that maybe I was one of the people turning this phrase into a cliche. I was definitely aware of the phrase (I’ve read the book several times), and I was fairly sure I’d used it somewhere.

But, fortunately, a couple of quick searches produced no relevant results. Whew.

Once again, I have my finger far from the pulse.