How 'Bout That? *Kiss You Down South* National Geographic

National Geographic music puts up an endorsement for Kiss You Down South and the performance at Roulette on Tuesday night.

It covers everything, including the cover art.  :)

Beastly Saturday

Not the weather, which is gorgeous, and promises to stay so through el V's performance on Tuesday at Roulette (and the CDs of Kiss You Down South have arrived already too!). Computers and the modem link. Or something. Troubles increasing throughout the week. El V poo-pooing until it hit him too today.
We messed and screwed around with it and called Time Warner, blahblahblah.
Finally we did what I'd been trying to get him to do all week -- reset the modem (I didn't do it myself because it involved a great deal of bending and it remains just out of my reach, since, tadah! Ned picked where to put it and it's convenient for his significantly longer reach ....). It's evidently true -- one's modem does need to be reset fairly frequently or else problems. Why can't I remember that until the problems actually manifest? We spent most of today on this. We had other things we need to do.Everything's fine now. But he got the blue screen of death. And recovered ....

Now there's Windows 8 -- which by all accounts is as much a merde as was Windows Vista, and probably even more so. Have I mentioned how much I HATE touchscreens?

One good thing came out this latest digital stall out. While I waited and waited for my back up to run I removed about the equivalent of two cotton balls of lint from inside my keyboard.

Maybe tomorrow we can some things accomplished. Next week's nights are mostly busy, including among other events, watching the last debate in Harlem with the Treme crew, el V's performance at Roulette, having dinner with the foremost linguist-scholar of Haitian Kreyole, a salsa night in the Bronx.

Nevertheless, all day in the background, niggling at my mind was a phrase which deals with music and improvisation I've read in a novel, which, in context of the paragraph and anything to do with music, is meaningless.  Why do fiction writers do that?

Hey Ho HahHah!

We Laugh At *Downton Abbey*

If any television program has earned being laughed at, it is Downton!



I saw some eps of Downton's third season while over there.  No doubt whatsoever that as season 2 was worse than season 1, so is season 3 even worse than than season 2 for silliness and plot holes, bad acting, bad writing and general bombiastic argy-bargy.

And Shirley Maclaine -- where did she go?????  I, for one, suspect Thomas the EviLe Footman - Valet.

Others also laugh at Downton:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFEabHQWntg

Laughing At Self Wakes Self

There is nothing more immediately tedious than reading accounts of dreams. Even dream sequences in books, films and television send me into a state of vexation. Lazy writing, vexed self screams! Lack of thinking, self screams.

This one is so very silly it might pass -- here I go, accounting one of my own dreams.

Location: Louisiana

Self: My own self, but different

Narrative: My poor self gets cruised by a corporate pooba to infiltrate a long-time established state corporation currently extending its pillaging, plundering, pollution and destruction of state's natural resources, including the wetlands and the Gulf waters. The recruiting corp isn't wanting to stop these activities by this particular local rival, it just wants to spy upon it in order to pillage, plunder, pollute and destroy more effectively and more quickly than its more established rival. I have been threatened with financial harrassment and punishment if I don't accept this corp's assignment.

I am dressed in contemporary highly effective female executive fashion. My skills in reading and writing financial statements, insurance policies, running an office and so on are tested and I come up aces (see, my own self, but different).

But there is one other thing. The recruiter asks: "How are your skills with progressive competitive swimming?"

I respond, "What the eff are you talking about? Never heard of such a thing."

Recruiter gets huffy and threatening: "It's the favorite sport of all poobas. You must be able to join in the sport during social occasions, and do it competitively."

I respond: "Maybe up north where you come from, where you have summer vacation homes in pristine wilderness, preserved by northern progressive politicians like Theodore Roosevelt and FDR, but down here the corps have done such a good job that our water sports are all performed on top of the water in boats, not in it. Just like you are used to having a social safety net and public education. But down here we have Bobby Jindal. This is why you will fail in your mission to own Louisiana."

This was so frackin' preposterous, and my delight in spouting so many unlikely multi-syllable words (The-o-dore Roo-se-velt; pro-gress-ive!) in succession, while dreaming, made me laugh so hard I woke myself up.

Playing Ruritania

Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe by Norman Davies.

This large book (830 pp) was published by Allan Lane last year, and reviewed in the December 15, 2011 LRB. (Alas, the the entire review isn't available for view except for subscribers.)

If one is fascinated by places that carry allure in their very names -- Tolosa, Burgundia -(whose Burgundy, where and when?)! -- and, many a time, Poland but, and still, "Poland isn't finished yet," which can not be said for Ruthenia, or Tolosa.

Further, the LRB piece is a meditation in detail and depth on imperiums' inability to imagine their transience, and small, weak realms, who even more than comprehending how easily they can be disappeared, understand that their very languages are more than likely to disappear within another generation and a half.

It was reviewed again this week in the UK Guardian. Did come out in a paper edition? There's nothing to indicate why it was chosen to be reviewed in that publication now.

Another book that will be of great interest to fantasy writers who like to play Ruritania with European geography is the biography of travel writer, Patrick Fermor: Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure by Artemis Cooper. Though the reviewer doesn't say this, Fermor's world has been as effectively disappeared by history as any invoked in Vanished Kingdoms. Fermor's time was a part of Merian C. Cooper's world, a world in which his explorations allowed him to imagine and create King Kong.

Historical Fiction - *The Dead Are Real* The New Yorker

The title brings up vividly an experience with the Tumba Francesa in Santiago de Cuba. After performing a variety of dance-drum-rhythm dances, the Director, an ancient woman, asked us how we liked it. El V, impressed even more than usual, said something on the order of how alive-O, how much vitality, how not dead and museum quality it was. Her response was, "And the dead, they too were dancing."

The dead are not dead: they are the ancestors. History never goes away.

"The Dead Are Real: Hilary Mantel’s Imagination," by Larissa MacFarquhar, Oct. 15, 2012  (The New Yorker) is an essay about historical fiction.

What is it? Who writes it?

There are so many pithy paragraphs in this essay that any of us who have an interest in historical fiction would be sorry not to have read it.

Here follows a comment which describes my personal vexations with so much that is marketed as historical fiction but is not;:

The reputation of historical fiction is unstable. In the thirties, the Marxist literary critic György Lukács argued that early historical novels like those by Scott, Balzac, and Tolstoy showed that man’s nature was not fixed but transformed over time; thus, they showed that revolution was possible and, in doing so, made it more likely. But these days the historical novel is not quite respectable. It has difficulty distinguishing itself from its easy sister the historical romance. It is thought to involve irritating ways of talking, or excessive descriptions of clothes. 

To often history is employed in fiction  by the sort of people who regard history as "a bathtub in which we all can splash around as we like" -- you can imagine how people for whom history is both profession and passion feel about that!

The past, in fiction, has more prestige than the future, but, as with the future, its prestige declines with its distance from the present. Novels about the past hundred years or so are all right, but once you go beyond the First World War, once you leave indoor plumbing and move into crinolines and wigs, your genre status deteriorates very quickly. A book jacket depicting Henry VIII, or a queen wearing pearls, is off-putting to a certain sort of reader. Why would a writer write about the distant past, that reader might wonder, if not to escape the realist discipline imposed by familiarity? If not to flee to a world blurry enough so that men can behave like Vikings and not seem ridiculous, and ladies can be ladies without being pathetic? And if a writer writes about historically significant people then she is forced into a respectful posture that depreciates her status still further, since it has become one of the hallmarks of literary fiction that its authors regard their characters with something between affectionate condescension and total contempt.