Monday, May 18, 2009

The tamed shrew

So the Mad Men ferment begins with Vintage Verve's espousing synthetics and meekness.

Let's all fetishise typists, nylon stockings, girdles and being ancillary to an owerweening cad in a suit!

Now, which partisan bloggette will follow in tow?

My next post shall address the colourless bloggers and their 'thrifting' the palatable aspects of Grey Gardens as assisted by HBO, of course, that is, headscarves and charming kookiness not decrepitude, flea-ridden squalor and a pair of old shrews. It promises fun.

Saturday, May 9, 2009

A family romance


Ah, I believe I’ve found a kindred in the old dame A. S. Byatt. Somehow her deflating 2003 review of Harry Potter managed to pass me by. Here is a snatch:

“Auden and Tolkien wrote about the skills of inventing ‘secondary worlds’. Ms. Rowling's world is a secondary secondary world, made up of intelligently patchworked derivative motifs from all sorts of children's literature”.

Neatly wrapped contempt within lolly-pink foil. She goes on to say sans wrapping:

“Ms. Rowling's magic world has no place for the numinous. It is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip. Its values, and everything in it, are, as Gatsby said of his own world when the light had gone out of his dream, 'only personal' .”

I loathe J. K. Rowling and think she should be shearing her royalty cheques into strips to mete out to the likes of Susan Cooper and the estates of Roald Dahl and Tolkien.

Thanks, Antonia. I may now look upon your new novel beyond simply remarking that its jacket could be confused with one of Rushdie's chromatic muddlings.

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Off with her head!

I am simply crestfallen. I have just learned of Tim Burton’s nascent literary decreation: Alice in Wonderland. He has cast some twenty-year-old waif as Alice, as well as his stock duumvirate of Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter. High hopes I have none. Tim Burton’s ‘vision’ has been cockeyed and substandard for years.

Jesus, whatever happened to all those baseball cap-wearing, Coke swilling screenwriters?

Some other planned
Hollywood befoulements I’m not eagerly anticipating are:


Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are
Adiga’s The White Tiger
Nick McDonnell’s Twelve
Douglas Coupland’s Girlfriend in a Coma
Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
Yann Martel’s The Life of Pi
Colette’s Cheri

Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope! I think I could, if I only knew how to begin.