Author Archives: Duff

À la Super Eggplant, currently, I am…

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Eating: Way too much. Every day. I can’t be stopped. I WILL be the fattest girl in the universe, just give me a couple more days.

Making: Started a pair of dad socks. That’ll only take me 10,000 years. Have one quilt basted and another just about to be but won’t be have time to work on either of them for a week or so at least.

Reading: At home I’m reading the Ford-edited short stories from our July / October challenge. On the train I’m reading “The Conversations at Curlow Creek” by David Malouf which is very slow and measured but weighty in its own way.

Watching: A crapload of movies at the Chicago International Film Festival. You can follow the updates on the 2008 movie page. Or you can wait for me to post about them here.

Listening to: Not a damn thing. Dad was here for a few days so all the times I’d normally be listening, I was busy talking to him. And just a few hours after he left, the Film Festival started and now all the times I’d normally be listening, I’m in a dark movie theater mostly watching totally intense, brutal movies where people’s hopes and dreams are crushed to pieces and/or ripped to shreds, which may sound like the same thing but isn’t necessarily so.

Big Screen: Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist

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Sweet but cheesy. I enjoyed it more for the NYC settings (oh nostalgia to my early NYC days…Ludlow Street, I miss you!) than for the plot which I thought was sadly more juvenile than I expected. Unlike Juno, which was very much a movie about growing up, Nick and Norah was just about “being that age.” Also found the title a bit of a misnomer. Like buying a sign that says “we really want to hype our soundtrack.”

But Michael Cera did give a wonderfully tender, nuanced performance. So there’s that.

Big Screen: Burn After Reading

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On the surface, a very funny, often abruptly violent movie that you could easily just laugh through and enjoy “for what it is.” Dig a little deeper and there’s some very prescient criticism of the (practically defunct? hello 9/11) US spy system.

Hilarious and very twitchy performances by Clooney, Pitt and McDormand. Over the top and really hilarious belligerence by Malkovich.

People and Things Other People Hate* that I Love

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  • Philip Roth / and his books
  • Madonna
  • Films of Keanu Reeves, in general.
  • “Point Break” in particular.
  • “Ishtar”

People and Things I Hate* that Other People Love
  • Cormac McCarthy / and his books
  • Renee Zellweger or, interchangeably, Gwyneth Paltrow
  • Films of Mel Gibson, in general.
  • “Braveheart” in particular.
  • “Knocked Up”

*Hate merely as opposite to Love, when it could technically just be “don’t particularly care for” or “like to criticize” and is not necessarily of the “hatred running through my veins at all times” variety. Although in some cases…
I’m sure this will be added to. Intermittently.

Fiction: Iodine, by Haven Kimmel

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If there is one author I would want to be, if I were an author, it would be Haven Kimmel. I’ve read and loved her previous novels (here and posts from June 26, 2004 and April 13, 2004 on this page) AND her nonfiction/memoirs (here and the post from April 24, 2005 on this page). When I saw a new Kimmel in the window of the bookstore on the way home, there was no question I was stopping to buy it, regardless of my many grocery bags.

This one is a bit darker than you may be expecting. While her lead characters are often girls in crisis…generally they are girls finding a way out of it. This book is about a girl who may not even know she’s in it. But we the reader certainly do.

While Trace and her haphazard life sucked me in just as powerfully as Kimmel’s other characters have in the past, this was a more distressing read and a very intense one. Academically somewhat dense, with rampant literary “nods”, and mentally unsettling.
If you liked Sharp Objects or My Sister’s Continent (April 16, 2006 on this page), I think you will find a way in to this book. But it may be a tough read for the faint of heart.

Fiction: Sway, by Zachary Lazar

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A fictionalized account of a number of non-fiction events. There’s a) the Rolling Stones in their drug heydays, with Brian Jones falling off the deep end, a fan getting murdered at Altmont, and a trip to Marrakech; b) Charles Manson and his groupies beginning their swath of murders; and c) Kenneth Anger, whose psychedelic filmmaking forces the groups to intersect and ties the two stories together.

Really creative premise. Very effective blend of fact and fiction. I didn’t love all of it. I liked the Stones-centric chapters a lot better than the others. And I particularly enjoyed Lazar’s handling of Anita and Keith’s “characters”, and the vivid candlelit interactions as the group circles ’round each other during the trip to Morocco.

A very interesting read.

Short Stories: Dead Boys, by Richard Lange

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This was our September challenge book and it was so nice to be reading short stories again after slogging through the Musil in August.

These are not happy times stories. Someone in every story is lost (physically, mentally or emotionally), or lonely, or angry, or … or they’ve come to the end of what they can handle or find their way around.

For some characters, their searching leaves them in a better place than where they began, but never the perfect place. But for some, the story’s end is further down a road they never should have been on in the first place.

Really engaging. Unexpected. True and original. Unlike stories you’ve read before. In a very gritty down to earth way.

Fiction: The Man Without Qualities, Volume I, by Robert Musil

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Tthis was our August challenge book. And we did not enjoy it.

The reason it made our list was Dad had bought it years ago and always meant to read it, particularly after the Wilkins/Pike translation came out and it was lauded everywhere as “the third member of the trinity in 20th-century literature, complementing Ulysses and Remembrance of Things Past” (Wall Street Journal).

In the beginning, I found it sardonic and was open to it. As it went on, it dragged and felt very pedantic and, as I put it, “kinda prissy.” Dad’s more adult reaction was “It’s very arch.”

We can sort of understand the reaction, originally. A big book trying to touch on a million different European themes right as the War is sneaking up on everyone…

But to compare it to Joyce? or Proust? No. Not in the same league. Not experimental, not groundbreaking, not even truly entertaining. And not worth our time to read Volume II so we’ve scratched that from our plan.

Challenge ’08 Update.

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We are tweaking our challenge slightly.

In July, we both only got through the first half (it was THICK). And in August, we finished (eventually. Or I did, a few days into September, can’t remember if Dad actually did or not) but we did NOT enjoy the book and have no interest in reading part II (which was the book for October).

So we are scratching October’s choice and reading the second half of the July book this month.

In case you were wondering.
October: “The Man Without Qualities, Vol 2” by Robert MusilSecond half of “The New Granta Book of the American Short Story” edited by Richard Ford
November: “The Oxford Book of Short Stories” edited by V.S. Pritchett
December: “The Trial” by Kafka