Kassel

I just recently finished The Illogic of Kassel, the most recent book by Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas, or at least the most recent to be translated into English. The narrator of the book is an author who was invited to Documenta 13 to perform as an installation in a Chinese restaurant. Speaking neither Chinese nor German he makes up interpretations of the discussions he hears.

Vila-Matas is actually an author, obviously, and he did attend Documenta 13, so it may be tempting to treat this as a memoir. But I'm pretty sure it truly is a novel, even if it doesn't always look like one. Whether Vila-Matas suffers nighttime panic attacks like his hero does - he wouldn't be the first writer or artist to do so - the special medicine he takes sounds made up. The relationship he has with the curators seems fictional as well. I kind of doubt they'd invite a fairly famous writer into their art project and subject him to the sometimes sadistic head games that transpire here, although I could be wrong.

Whatever the balance of real and fictional, it's an interesting read. I think Bartleby & Co. is still my favorite of his, though.

Starr quality

This morning I had breakfast at this place downtown called NicoBella's. It's a nice joint with jazz on the stereo and fauvist-looking paintings on the wall. Another thing I noticed on the wall was a signed poster of Ringo from one of the All-Starr band tours.

As the owner refilled my coffee I told him I liked the poster. There turned out to be a story behind it. He was in the middle of getting the restaurant ready to open, a massive amount of work including construction, licenses, etc. His friend called him up and said he was with Ringo. He goes, "Ringo who?" His buddy says, "Ringo, one of the few surviving Beatles." He figures this for ballbusting and says, "Eddie I don't have time for this." His friend's got Ringo talking in the background but it still doesn't sink in. The friend goes, "Well, do you want anything?" "If it's Ringo, get an autograph for me."

He got it, obviously. Later his friend told him that Ringo said he was one of the few people who ever hung up on him. I said, "You and John Lennon." On reflection, he had some friction with Paul, too, around the time of the breakup.

Really, for someone who comes from humble beginnings, it must be oddly gratifying to become such a big deal people won't believe you are who you are.

Queen Watch: "The Adventure of the Blunt Instrument"

Writers, as distinguished from actors or musicians, are in a solitary field. Many are introverts by nature, but even those who aren't basically work on their own, wrestling with their own hangups in order to get something on the page. So there are fewer blowups and confrontations just because so often there's no one to confront.

Still, there are such things as literary feuds. If an author has any success, that can bump up against someone else's success, and then you get into personal clashes. See Mary McCarthy vs. Lillian Hellman, or Gore Vidal vs. anyone.

Dodgy upper lip

A few decades ago, it seems like actors weren't traveling across the Atlantic as much. There were, yes, a number of Britons who had relocated to Hollywood, where they'd heard the money was. The inverse, American actors staying long-term in Britain, was rarer by far. And the cost of getting someone to make a special trip was expensive, Like, major motion picture expensive.

The upshot is that if you saw an American character on a British show, the accents were very faux. I've noticed this in, among other things, reruns of Danger Man. This show, Patrick McGoohan's pre-Prisoner outlet, was eventually marketed as Secret Agent in the US, with Johnny Rivers's "Secret Agent Man" tacked onto the credits in place of the original spritely instrumental. It was a mostly high quality program, making good use of McGoohan's moody anti-charisma, but it wasn't a big budget affair by any means.

The tell isn't the accent itself. In terms of phrasing, these players could often pass for people from the larger Midwestern cities, say. But sometimes the scenarist doesn't know the right word to use, so someone says "rubbish" when they'd really say "garbage." Or the stress is on the wrong syllable. Hearing a Yank soldier say la-BORE-a-tree instead of LAB-ra-tore-e is enough to break the illusion.

It need hardly be said that this era saw a lot of painful British accents on American TV as well.

So *blargh* that happened

Last night I was not in much condition to blog. Or do much of anything else. After dinner a sluggish feeling descended on me. Then nausea and stomach trouble. And I got a headache that was still there when I woke up this morning, which it was certainly a relief to get rid of later in the day.

From now on I'll hesitate to buy pork unless I can trust it and can trust myself to cook it properly. I cooked this cut for dinner the day after I bought it and it looked and tasted like it was done, but good meat doesn't give you flu-like symptons.

On another note, this is a nice look at the great Minnesota poet and guitarist who is still with us. "Visions of Johanna" truly is an immortal song.

Queen Watch: "The Adventure of the Pharaoh's Curse"

The idea of the tombs of Pharaoh's being cursed is a fairly modern one. The tombs themselves bear no hieroglyphic markings to this effect. Desecrating a pharaoh's resting place would have been an incredible blasphemy, of course, but soldiers would have executed anyone who even tried. Supernatural curses really became part of the folklore during the Egyptology craze of the Victorian Era, and were widely publicized after the discovery of Tutankhamun's final resting place in 1922. While it's a relatively modern idea it's also a fairly short-lived one in terms of people taking it seriously, and by Ellery Queen's late 1940's setting it would be considered a joke.

And while detective fiction does have a certain basis in fantasy, detective fiction with supernatural events is a more specialized field. Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, Chesterton's Father Brown, and John Dickson Carr's Gideon Fell (a Chesterton tribute) all came across crimes that seemed like they might be spectral but generally had a naturalistic explanation. William Hope Hodgson frequently found evidence of actual supernatural involvement. But Ellery Queen's mysteries in all media had little to do with the first kind of story, and never went near the second.

This way and that

The Big Wiggle from Erin Zona on Vimeo.

Okay, this is adorable and absolutely grotesque in about equal measure. I can't make any guarantees about what your reaction will be, especially watching it right before bedtime. Use your own best judgment.