Last year at this time, we were listening to charming British songbirds and bisexual girls and about getting low, low, low, low. No such luck this summer. Nope. In fact, this summer has not yet produced the song that deserves to be playing on everyone’s car radio as they roll through my neighborhood. Pink and Kelly Clarkson were strong through the winter and spring but not pulling through yet this summer; Enimem’s too heavy for beach music; and Beyonce’s going all angel, Halo-ish instead of grinding dirty this year.
Let’s go through some possible candidates, though and we’ll engage in a wee bit of critiquing.
Two weeks worth of stuff is a lot of news to cover. But we soldier on, dear friends. We soldier on knowing that we might not have space to include the hot Mennonite. Which would be a shame.
I have been a bad, bad blogger. I have ignored you, my reading public for two (!) weeks. And for what excuse? Silly stuff like that paying job which has sucked the energy and oxygen out of my very being.
So, even though I’m on vacation, I am back in the blogging game. Look for Menno Roundup to return in a couple of days (it’s going to take me forever to wade through everything and find the good stuff) and then we’ll be back in business.
Why I picked it up: I’m a sucker for an award-winner. And I’ve been meaning to read him ever since his first book, The Swimming-Pool Library, got such great reviews for a first novel.
We don’t pay enough attention these days to how novels are structured. It’s a forgotten art, really, to make the actual shape of your novel — the chapters and sections, the events on which you hang your denouements and epiphanies — match the theme. But Hollinghurst does it beautifully. Writes it beautifully. Not only the structure but the wit and sly satire — so you don’t like The Line of Beauty just for what it’s about but for how it’s actually written.
The novel uses as its liefmotif (how’s that for some high school English coming back) the ogee. This is an architectural and design term referring to a particular kind of curve — a lazy S-curve really. Here are some examples in architecture and here’s another in design. Even though it appears to be structurally important to a building, it is merely decorative and not weight-bearing at all. There is a fascinating duality about curve with the concave and convex in tension with each other. It’s a very classic English look (borrowed from the Middle East) — elegant, old and surprisingly delicate for all that it’s been carved in stone. For Nick, Hollinghurst’s narrator — “[t]he double curve was Hogarth’s ‘line of beauty,’ the snakelike flicker of an instinct, of two compulsions held in one unfolding moment.”
I own these books. Some of them I have owned for over 15 years now and I just keep schlepping them from house to house. They sit in my “to be read someday” bookshelf taunting me as I pass them over to pick up the latest Anita Shreve instead. My guilt only lasts as long as it takes to pick them up, thumb through them and them put them right back on the shelf.
Two entries in the “using the Amish to make our tortured metaphors for the confusion of modern life” category this week: 1) if only the Amish ran golf courses and 2) somehow Disney and the Amish are to blame for the absymal lack of women in science and math. Like I said. Tortured.
This site has been making the rounds for the last couple weeks but I’m just now sharing it with you. Sorry!
Anyway, it’s a comfort to know that awkward family photos are as American as apple pie and torture. I actually know exactly which picture of my family I would submit to this site … as soon as I can go back home, retrieve it, scan it and submit it. Let’s just say it involved using encyclopedias as props. At least, there are no funny pants in that one.
DC has long been the playground for Congress to meddle and test out new social experiments. DC residents wanted a clean-needle exchange? No can do for you because some Senator from somewhere far away doesn’t like it [ban lifted in 2007]. Want to show some support for charter schools and school vouchers but don’t want to piss off the teacher’s union in your own state? Withhold operating money until they put those options in. Congress thinks this whole system great because it totally allows them to be on record as being against something or for somthing no matter how the issue might be playing out in their own home state.
DC residents don’t really like this. You don’t even have to be a member of the Statehood Green Party to be annoyed and wish that Home Rule would go the way of plantation overseers and the 3/5 rule.
DC politicians like this even less. No one becomes elected Mayor of DC without some talk of how DC residents should govern themselves. No self-respecting DC politician would willingly go to Congress and ask them to deliberately meddle in our affairs.
just for what it’s about but for how it’s actually written.
