TEXAS: The sky in Texas is enormous. You can imagine everything being under water (as it was long, long ago) because you usually only see skies like this at sea. As we came into central Texas during the drive to Waco, I could see the line of entire storm fronts (often scarred by dozens of spectacular lightning flashes) stretching at a diagonal in front of me for scores of miles. Now, finally here, I have made a point of eating real Mexican food at least once every 72 hours. The tortillas alone should make anyone who can’t stay here weep in despair.
CRITICISM: Much that passes for criticism today (music, art, literature, movies) is bad. Almost nobody has any real training - or even a coherent philosophy about what it is that criticism is supposed to do. There’s very little education, recognition of past or current standards/criteria, and a diminished vocabulary for expressing the one thing to which people have reduced criticism: opinion. So, get ready for this transition…it will not be smooth…
…that brings us to “TRANSFORMERS” and a great review of it at National Review online by Peter Suderman. As I’ve already written in recommendations to several friends: Suderman has an unflinching critical awareness, but he judges the movie based on what it was trying to be..not what he wishes it had been OR (even more importantly) not what he thinks he’s supposed to say about a Michael Bay movie. For my opinion of the film, I will simply echo the best line in the review: “Giant robots! Wheee!” and add that I think that Shia Lebeouf is actually quite good, very funny, and, this is something for a Bay movie, seems very real.
PATRICK O’BRIAN: I have just started the 20th and final book of the “Aubrey/Maturin” series - Blue at the Mizzen. I’m not sure yet if my reaction to finishing this massive, profound, moving, hilarious, and brilliant series will be the same as my reaction when I finished Lord of the Rings back in June of 2001 (see, I know exactly when I finished it). Over the course of the last 300 pages or so, 3 central characters have died. O’Brian hits you with the news in the most matter-of-fact way, and leaves you to recover - often by waiting in tension for the main characters to talk about it, react to it…in some way process it for you.
In my experience, most used book stores have at least a copy of Master and Commander (I suspect due to the people who bought the book when the movie came out but who then couldn’t plow through those first highly idiosyncratic and somewhat difficult chapters). Again, read these books: make some new and infinitely interesting friends. Like me, you might not get hooked for a while.
I read M&C a few months before the film came out - then didn’t read anything for about 6 months…wasn’t sure I had really enjoyed the book. But after moments and lines and characters kept returning to my thoughts, I stopped in an airport used bookstore (a very good one at RDU) and bought H.M.S.Surprise (the 3rd book). The opening is brilliant and exciting, and the twists and turns (stranded on a deserted island!) are totally unexpected.
But then, about halfway through (?), O’Brian has a passage in which Steven (the Irish doctor, an early-19th century naturalist) encounters an unexpected consequence of his friendship with a poor, Indian girl in Bombay. It is the first of many, many narrative and character development “payoffs” that you realize, only after the fact, O’Brian has been building toward for hundreds of pages. Eventually, he accomplishes similar wonders over the span of several books. This section of Surprise is only a page or two, but I read it over 5 or 6 times. I was in - part of the club. I went out and bought book #2, Post Captain, but then decided to do everything in order. So I re-read #1, then #2, re-read #3 (Surprise), and then went on to #4 and so on. Since then, I’ve re-read large portions of M&C several times, and frequently look back at several of the books to find certain passages or chapters - sometimes to track-back a character or plot thread that resurfaces many books later, sometimes to study the language, sometimes just to re-experience a moment or joke or description.
I might try to quote or describe some of the great moments in this space at some point. As several reviewer/critics have claimed: Here is one of the great novelists of any era.
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