2008-03-11

adiva_calandia: (iBook)
2008-03-11 10:31 pm

Literary roundup

Spring Break is when I stop having anything to talk about. Man.

Well. So far, since Thursday, I've read (in no particular order) Hannibal, Peter Weiss' Marat/Sade, Still Life With Woodpecker, and Othello, and started T. S. Eliot's Murder at the Cathedral (Batya, I may have instantly started looking for lines Charles and Zillah could use. A bit. >.>), Strindberg's The Father (Misogynyyyyy!), and Defoe's Captain Singleton.

Hannibal . . . well, the ending bears very little relation to the end of the movie. O.o I'm not sure which I like better. And that is all I'll say to that.

Marat/Sade is quite good; for those of you unfamiliar with it, the full title is The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat As Performed By the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis De Sade, which is how you can tell it's a 1960s play. Plays with titles that long and pretentious are either from the 1700s or the 1960s. But it's a great play, and my copy has been written in through the whole thing, which is even better. Marginalia! :D!

Still Life remains a wonderful, silly, glorious book, and this time the mention of smokers as Promethean worshippers made me twitch. Othello was oddly less compelling than I remember it being.

Murder at the Cathedral is . . . very Eliot. I can't quite tell if he's responding to Greek drama or religious drama or both -- probably religious drama. The poetry is great; the plot is, ah, dense.

I'm not far enough into The Father to have a real opinion of that, but trust me, you'll be hearing way more than you want to about it in the coming year, anyway. Ditto for Captain Singleton.

I owe a review of Rent, I know, and I will do that! People should nag me about it.

And, to wrap up, a photo from New York:

Rockefeller Center )