There is a certain difficulty to modernism: Djuna Barnes and "Nightwood"

I think it started as a response to the impressionists. New technologies made the way stories could be told replicable by other media. Art had to move on.  I have liked a lot of modernism. I followed Joyce from the moocow to Stately, Plump through Yes. I tried to follow him all along the riverrun, but I failed multiple times. It was where he went from storytelling with a stylistic verve to just style – period. It didn’t work for me, but maybe since it has been years since my last effort I should try again.

All that is preface to build whatever ethos about what comes next: I did not like Nightwood.  It is short, and beautifully written, but the whole thing is written around the main character. She has no agency of her own and seems to exist as a character in the stories of other characters. And there’s the eternal student’s lament -- nothing happens. Even the Sapphic element, something of a angle for certain readers, feels downplayed. The lovers the main characters take on just happen to have multiple genders. Not hot at all. Maybe it was for the time, what do I know?

Basically, it was good enough that I wanted to keep reading to see if anything happened, but not good enough so that I wasn’t thumbing through the pages as I approached the end with anticipation of having finished the book. What I think it needs is one of those Cambridge Companion to Literature versions, where the text is just part of the whole and you have various academics writing around the text to help shape the context in which you read the book. There is introductory material, but it is too laudatory to really help the reader. At least it was for me. I’m just glad I’m not writing a paper on this book , because that would mean that I would have to flip right back to the start to see if I missed anything. It wasn’t good enough for that.

Sophomore Slump: Patton Oswalt's "Silver Screen Fiend"

I like the idea of Patton Oswalt.

He can be funny and snide and smart.

It is just that sometimes he may try too hard. I think that is the case here. He like movies and he went and watched a lot of movies. But the book tries to put a narrative arc and significance to some of the movies just where it doesn’t fit. I liked his previous book, but that seemed to have more form and structure in an organic manner.

Not to say that this book does not have its good parts that made me laugh. It does. It just felt less necessary than his other book and his stand up.

He is self-aware though, and I can respect that. He writes of a time he was opening for Louie CK, when he was younger and “My ideas were simpler and less startling than I cared to admit, so I masked that with a lot of unnecessarily ornate vocabulary an dense cultural references” (134). Maybe he’s still there. Heck, this book isn’t all about movies then, I guess.

And then, after all that, it’s too short! It is only 220 pages with larger font and margin, and that’s padded out with 40 pages of the movies he saw during the time period he’s talking about.  I was let down in the end, but only because it didn’t meet my high expectations.

Sick of It All: Yours Truly Ten Years On

There was another album released recently, with this title. They are very different works.

For my money, though, this is the best Sick of It All Album,

It has nothing to do with the fact that this was the album that they were out touring to support when I first saw them live. They were touring with the Dropkick Murphys, at the time one of my favorite bands. They stole the show from Dropkick. I was in the pit and did the wall of death and was too worn out to really pay attention to the Murphy’s set.

I bought the shirt at the merch table and went and bough the album and listened to it a bunch. I started buying the other albums, but this was the best one. It was more melodic, and better produced than some of the earlier records – a black mark for some fans, but it worked for me.

                I don’t know what happened, but music slipped out of my life for a while, until I started learning how to play bass and guitar a couple of years ago. It was even later when I heard that Sick of It All was back on tour with a new album. The new album is good, but I wanted to relive my past. Sadly, I have no idea what happened with my old version of this album, so I had to buy it again. It had been ten years or so, and I remembered the words and the breakdowns. From start to finish, it still holds up, with some great songs that make you want to punch the floor. Except for that last track, it just doesn’t fit.