An evening with David Mitchell and Lana Wachowski

A lovely evening. Mitchell read from the first passage of Slade House (which I read a week or so ago, I’ll try to tell you about it soon!) and then he and Wachowski had a lovely conversation about art and immortality and writing between genres (as it were).

There were quite a number of moments I wish I could have recorded, but here are the two I wrote down.

On writing between genres, or being told your book should/shouldn’t have something because you’re not in X genre:
“If a book needs a dragon, it should have a dragon.”

On reading reviews: he said he certainly never reads the bad ones, because they’re so demoralizing and haunt you for months, but then he said he doesn’t read the good ones either:
“…even the good ones are wasps at the picnic of a calm mind.”

WOW what an image.

I’ve been a huge fan of his books for a long time now (the other book I took with me to have signed was Black Swan Green, which is one of my all-time favorite books) and it was wonderful to hear Nathan (the first character in Slade House) read in his voice. He doesn’t have a straight-up English accent, there’s a bit of a lisping quality around his Rs that I wondered if originates from his time in Japan/Asia…

I can’t wait to see what he writes next.

Big Screen: Truth

Really well done. But also really, deeply depressing. The world will just go as far as it can to beat a woman down, won’t it?

There was one scene near the very beginning where I thought Blanchett seemed odd, maybe a little over-actor-y, but the story swept me up and that feeling went away. I find it shocking how much more severely Redford seems to have aged particularly in comparison to how Newman looked toward the end.

I love the dude that plays her husband. He needs to be in more stuff.

NaBloPoMo 8: tunage

Enjoy this lovely Beatles-esque ditty by a band called Quilt. Hello.
Or how about this lovely sepia-toned video of Adele’s new single. I probably like the visuals more than the song–her hair blowing in the wind, OMG yes–but, hey.
You may know I am a huge fan of covers. I have this ongoing theory about why covers are always awesome whereas movie remakes often suck: a good song is a good song. It’s harder to ruin a good song even with bad singing than it is to ruin a good story with bad acting, bad directing, etc. Do ya see what I’m sayin’? No? Here’s this James Blake cover of Sounds of Silence for you. Not wildly different than the original. Loooooove the rustling sound underneath. Rain? Leaves? Dunno, but it’s lovely.
I bought it a little while ago but I finally spent some serious time listening to the Hamilton soundtrack. It’s just gorgeous. SO many different styles, so many awesome lyrics, beats, melodies. It’s magical.
And this, this song, Low’s “What Part of Me”, I have been OBSESSED with this song since the first time I heard it, sometime this summer. Here they sound awesome playing it and here is a more visually pleasing video (yet slightly less awesome sounding). I canNOT stop with this one. The lyrics! The beat! The yearning! Oh my.
In other news, 1) tonight I’m going to see David Mitchell read and apparently he and Lana Wachowski (formerly a Wachowski brother, I think?) are doing a Q&A afterward and 2) I get to introduce my students to the mystery of Roanoke on Wednesday. Busy finding spooky videos to show them. Heh.
Sorry I have no photo for you today. Smooches.