I did OK on the Bout of Books readathon this time, though as I thought it would, prepping for a new semester took up more and more of my time by the weekend.
I finished The Lincoln Highway in time for my Wednesday night book club, and since I had only started it on Jan 1 and it's almost 600 pages long, I count that as a win. I really enjoyed that book, and now plan to read the two other books by Amor Towles that have been on my TBR for a while. We had a long and involved conversation about this book, especially trying to understand the meaning of the ending. If the ambition was to write "the Great American Novel," and throw in a lot of literary references, perhaps it's an allusion to the ending of the Great Gatsby with a particularly cruel twist:
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly back into the past."
I started Alan Wald's Exiles from a Future Time, though I did not get very far into it, because I was prioritizing a book related to my teaching preparation, There Goes My Everything which, despite the bad review in the New York Times, is very good and has been helpful for my class prep in a number of ways - alerting me to collections of documents and oral histories that I can share with my students, for example. At night, as I was falling asleep, I read about 80 pages in Peter Swanson's The Girl With a Clock for a Heart, which I'd bought ages ago when it was featured in a $1.99 ebook sale. It's off to a good start, though I keep reading it after such long days that I fall asleep after a few pages. I've been listening to podcasts while I work out, so I didn't make that much progress in S.A. Cosby's Blacktop Wasteland, but I will get back to it in my next bout of house cleaning.
In honor of the freight-hopping section of the Lincoln Highway, here's Jimmy Forrest doing "Night Train" in 1951
The Bout of Books readathon is organized by Amanda Shofner and Kelly Rubidoux Apple. It’s a weeklong readathon that begins 12:01am Monday, January 3rd and runs through Sunday, January 9th in YOUR time zone. Bout of Books is low-pressure. There are reading sprints, Twitter chats, and exclusive Instagram challenges, but they’re all completely optional. For all Bout of Books 33 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog. - From the Bout of Books team.
I've signed up for this challenge multiple times. Sometimes I read some books and blog about them, but it often falls during the very first week of classes for me, a time when I'm usually too busy to read - much less blog about reading. This time, it falls in the last week of my winter break, just before classes start. That means I'll probably have some time to read, though a lot of the reading will be work-related. I've been planning to read a book about how to do family history, since the main assignment in my one of my classes is a family history, and I feel like the students need more support and structure than what the textbook materials I've been using provide. I also want to read at least some of the book There Goes My Everything by Jason Sokal, though I see it was panned by James Goodman in the NYT when it first came out. Mostly, though, I'll be reading The Lincoln Highway which is the next book for my book club, which meets during the week of the readatahon, so I'll be reading as much as I can per day before then, in between bouts of syllabus revision.
Hello, readers and friends, like everything else this year, it took me a little longer than usual to get the next year's challenge set-up. However, I tabulated the votes from loyal regulars, and got this together before the end of the year. I've been running this reading challenge since 2014, and every year a few more people join. If you're not already part of the reading challenge, I hope that you will consider joining us in collective counter-intuitive motivation for work-related and un-work-related academic reading in 2022. Since this is my reading and listening blog, here's a little musical accompaniment for this year's categories. I'll suspend my general dislike of Stephin Merritt in favor of my general appreciation of Peter Gabriel, with a nod to the categories this year that relate to reading about things you love or have loved in the past.
Who and What the Academic Reading Challenge is for:
This is a challenge for academics who feel that their reading has become over-specialized and possibly joyless, who want to read more literature for pleasure, who want to broaden the way they approach their own research and teaching, who like to talk about reading with each other, who are interested in interdisciplinary reading, and who want to support their friends and colleagues by reading their books. You don’t have to be a professor to do the challenge. Maybe you graduated from school but you miss reading academic books. The challenge runs for a year and emphasizes reading across academic disciplines. If you are a professional academic or public intellectual outside the university, this challenge is meant to give you a structure for reading outside your area of specialization - including reading literature - and to provide a space to talk with others about the experience. If you are a general reader who likes reading serious works of non-fiction, this challenge is also for you. It's a structure that you can use to read works of the type that you might not have encountered since you were a student.
In this group we talk about the challenge categories for the year and occasionally discuss what we've read and plan to read. There is also an academic article about this challenge that I wrote for a collection on the "slow movement" in academia.
Rules
The challenge starts on January 1, 2022 at midnight and goes till Dec. 31, 2022.
There are a total of 15 regular categories in the challenge, and three “extra credit” categories for over-achievers.
The academic books must be at least 175 pages long .
Novels must be at least 200 pages long
Books of poetry or special issues of journals must be at least 100 pp. long
One book can be a children's or YA book.
To decide whether a book is academic, look for something published by a university press, or check the acknowledgments for references to scholarly mentors and anonymous readers.
Any book on the list, except where specified otherwise, can be a novel or a complete journal issue as long as it fits the general category
Books can only count for one category, but you can switch them from one category to the other before you’re done if you like. (In other words, you cannot count a book by your friend who wrote a book on genre fiction for both the "academic book about genre fiction" and the "by a friend" categories.)
Only one book can be something you’ve read before
Audiobooks are fine as long as they are unabridged and the print edition is at least 175 pages long.
Books must be started no earlier than midnight 1/1/22 and finished no later midnight 12/31/2022
Points: This isn't a competition, but if you're counting…
Total possible points for 1-15 without any extra points: 200
Total possible points for all extra-credit: 250
This Year's Categories with points:
1. Book by a friend, colleague, former teacher or former student 10
2. Book recommended by a friend 10
3. Reread a book or writer you loved earlier in your life 10
4. Academic book on genre fiction 20
5. Book related to a subject that you research, but in a discipline you don't normally read 20
6. Book about a hobby or activity that you already do or would like to try 10
7. Book about a craft or trade (carpentry, plumbing, etc.) 20
8. Book by an author from the Middle-East or North Africa 10
9. Practical book on political organizing (an organizing how-to book) 20
10. Book about a forgotten scandal or "crime of the century" 20
11. Classic in revolutionary political literature 10
12. Book about unions or labor organizing 10
13. Mystery novel where the detective is not a cop (extra points if also not a PI) 10,20
14. Book about or set in any country in the Southern hemisphere 10
15. Book about something or someone you love 10
EXTRA CREDIT:
16: Book about something or someone you hate 10
17. Extra-Extra-Credit: Book on which a movie or TV series that you love is based 20
I'm joining Bout of Books again, though since this is the one that happens during the first week of fall classes, I feel pretty pessimistic about the possibility that I'll read much of anything beyond what I've assigned for my students, along with the many emails and memos that will probably be coming my way. It's going to be a busy week, and a possibly even busier weekend. Still, I'll see what I can do. This week, my main fun reading goal is to get started on catching up with the Murderbot series so that I can read the Hugo-nominated Network Effect. I also have a conference presentation in October, and am reading some stuff about libertarianism and the alt-right for that. I have no idea how much I can get done this week, but BoB will be a good way to find out.
What is bout of books? Here's the official word from the organizers:
The Bout of Books readathon is organized by Amanda Shofner and Kelly Rubidoux Apple. It’s a weeklong readathon that begins 12:01am Monday, August 16th and runs through Sunday, August 22nd in YOUR time zone. Bout of Books is low-pressure. There are reading sprints, Twitter chats, and exclusive Instagram challenges, but they’re all completely optional. For all Bout of Books 32 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog. - From the Bout of Books team
Since the festival is almost over, I'm trying to watch everything I want to see before it's gone. There's no connecting themes for this group of films that I can think of.
We Need To Do Something
Of course I watched We Need to Do Something late at night as a thunderstorm was rolling in. That may not have been the best idea, since it's a horror movie about a family who gets trapped in their bathroom for several days after a tornado causes a tree to fall across the door. Most of the real horror is generated by the simple fact of being locked in a small space with a hostile and unpredictable alcoholic father, played brilliantly by Pat Healy. However, the supernatural elements simultaneously increase the experiences of terror and shock, and reduce the more depressing family drama. The result is a campy and scary film with a darker undertone. All that unrealistic spurting blood and the flashbacks to creepy witchcraft rituals saved this movie from being so dark as to be unpleasant. The resulting "over the top" experience reminded me of the vibe of Drag me to Hell, which manages to be psychologically scary and visually absurd at the same time. I watched the Q&A for this one as well, and the story of how the movie came to be was almost as weird and funny as the movie itself. It's the first time Max Booth III has written a script; because as he said in the Q&A he's a "book guy." The story is based on a novella he'd written, and he claims to have written the sreenplay to make some money after he lost his regular gig in a hotel to the Corona virus shutdown. The horror of a family trapped together with an unknown horror outside obviously speaks to the real terror of the covid-19 pandemic as well, so this movie is a product of the last horrific year of human history on several levels. While it's gotten mixed reviews at the outset, I think there's a lot going on under the surface of this movie that makes it worth watching - if you can take fairly fake looking 'gross out' horror.
Like a Rolling Stone: The Life and Times of Ben Fong-Torres
If you ever wondered why Rolling Stone magazine went down hill as a music magazine in the 1980s, it's probably because they lost reporter, Ben Fong-Torres, the magazine's original music editor, and author of major profiles based on long interviews with Jim Morrison, Ray Charles, Marvin Gaye,and other great musicians of the 1960s and 1970s. As the title says, Suzanne Joe Kai's The Life and Times of Ben Fong-Torres tells Fong-Torres' life story, starting with parents, who were Chinese immigrants in the 1940s. The story of his name alone is a history lesson about U.S. immigration policy. Because of the Chinese exclusion act, which was in place until 1943, Fong-Torres's father, Fong Kwok Seung, entered the country with a Fillipino passport using the name "Ricardo Torres." From that beginning to the end, the movie is fascinating because Fong-Torres has a fascinating life story. The film doesn't just focus on his time at Rolling Stone, but shows his connection to the Bay Area Chinese American community, his education in journalism on his high school newspaper and at San Francisco State, and his activities outside the rock scene. For example, even when he was one of three editors of Rolling Stone at is peak, Fong-Torres also volunteered his time as a writer and editor to the East-West, a Chinatown neighborhood newspaper. After leaving Rolling Stone, shortly after it moved its headquarters to New York in the 1980s, Fong-Torres continued to work as a journalist and community activist, and the film follows him to the present day. The final edit on the film must have been recent, because at one point, you see him working on this column, The Year of the Rat which was published in April 2021. Fong-Torres seems to have been able to do great interviews with legendary people because he's just a cool, unassuming guy who's interested in all kinds of people. The movie isn't formally innovative -there's some very familiar 60s-signifying footage unconnected to Fong-Torres's direct comments and a lot of talking heads - but Kai made a good choice to play the audio recordings of some of Fong-Torres's most famous interviews over archival footage from the 1960s as well.
Souad
I was a bit disappointed by the film Souad whose two lead actresses, playing Souad and her sister, Rabab, won the international best actress jury award at the festival this year. The film is fairly simple, but its climactic moment comes too soon and the second half of the film feels drawn out and meandering. The scenes with Souad and her friends were fascinating, and there could have been more of them to really explore the tension between the religious expectations of Souad's parents and the dynamic life of her peers, which isn't just about social media, but sexuality and attraction to a more secular life.
Wild Men
Wild Men surprised me in the opposite direction, surpassing my expectations. I was a bit dubious about another film in the festival that was "exploring masculinity," but this one's sometimes comic and sometimes wise representations of men trying to figure out how to survive contemporary life - and mostly getting things wrong - really worked. It wound up as one of my favorite films of the festival. I love a tightly-plotted story, and I saw no loose-threads and heard no wrong notes in this Danish comedy / thriller that pokes fun at the current pop-culture craze for Vikings. Between direction and editing, the timing was perfect, and the acting spot-on. I wasn't familiar with the actors playing the lead characters Martin (Rasmus Bjerg) and Musa (Zaki Youssef), two men who improbably find themselves trying to survive in the wilderness together, but I was happy to see Sofie Grabol, (of the Killing) as Martin's wife. It makes sense that this is not film-maker Thomas Daneskov's first film - that was his 2015 feature, The Elite for which he won a "new talent" award. He also had one run of a TV series called Joe Tech that appears to explore similar themes, but it's not available to stream in the U.S. I hope that American audiences will get a chance to see more of his work, and that this movie will be distributed in the U.S., whether in theaters or on a streaming platform. It seems to me to have all the requirements for a "sleeper" and "surprise hit" - if U.S. audiences are willing to read subtitles. From the reviews I've seen so far, it seems like some of the barbed wit of this film missed a lot of the critics, so I'm not feeling optimistic, which is too bad. At least this might mean we won't have to suffer from a hamfisted American remake.
The critical raves about Essie Davis's performance in The Justice of Bunny King are well deserved. This was an amazing performance in a challenging role. The movie follows the character Bunny King, who has lost her children to New Zealand's child protective services for reasons that aren't clear until the vey end of the film. On the way to that point, we see Bunny, who spends her days washing windshields for spare change, trying everything she can to get her children back. The pace becomes frenetic as Bunny tries to keep the promise she makes to her daughter, that they will be together for her fifth birthday - a promise that her older son knows that she can't keep. The film's title is an interesting choice, as it generally shows the injustice of child protective services in New Zealand. As Bunny says at one point, mimicking the social workers who interview her periodically during the film, "sorry, we won't let you see your kids because you're too poor!" While the specificities of the law may be about New Zealand's policies around housing and family law, the larger story of how the capitalist state fails to adequately address sexism within the family and punishes women for things beyond their control will sadly be familiar to people across the globe.
Roaring 20's stands out for the technical prowess of the filmmaker. The film goes from one conversation to another on the street in Paris in the summer of 2020 and was shot in only 6 takes. This makes for an interesting film to watch, though part of what you wind up thinking about is the timing that must have been involved in getting the people in place to pick up the next conversation. Beyond the gimmick of the shooting, the substance was pretty light. The individual vignettes were uneven, and the lack of connection or theme across the stories made it less interesting than the film it's been compared to the most, Richard Linklater's Slacker. Unlike that film, I thought that this movie about Paris mostly lacked a real sense of place, with the exception of one pair discussing the Belleville neighborhood, and even that is mostly done through the exposition rather than the visual narrative. Much of what happens and the people we encounter could be in any city - what is so Parisian about this, after all? And if there is nothing unique about the city in this moment, why bother to make such a film to capture its utterly bland character? I also found this movie disappointing because while it could make a comment about a moment in time, if not a specificity of place, it doesn't really do that either. Despite the occasional acknowledgment of the Covid-19 pandemic through the wearing of masks, there was almost no conversation about the virus itself, or about what people did to make it through the recently ended lockdown. Not even one character remarks on what a relief it is to be out and about again! No one mentions a dead or sick friend or relative. If the filmmaker wanted the conversations to be normal and not about Covid, that makes sense as a choice, I guess, but if the whole film is shot so that the only thing uniting the characters is the fact of their being in a specific place at a specific time, it seemed like the choice was a mistake. If a fiction film makes reality less rather than more interesting and meaningful, tant pis.
Creation Stories is about Glaswegian record mogul, Alan McGee, loosely based on his autobiography, Creation Stories describing his life of being inspired by music, making great records and partying. I didn't know anything about McGee when I chose the movie, but I did know a lot of the bands he produced (Jesus and Marychain, My Bloody Valentine, Teenage Fanclub, Primal Scream, Oasis) and was curious to see what kind of screenplay Irvine Welsh would write. The film is a well-paced rock and roll experience that takes considerable liberties with the source material. I liked it a lot, despite the absence of closed-captions on the Tribeca app, which left me and my husband to make our best guesses at some of the dialog. There were a lot of wonderful scenes in this movie. We see McGee lose his teenaged mind over the Sex Pistols' first TV appearance, the night of his near death from a cocaine overdose (which actually happened during an Oasis tour, and not as depicted in the movie), a more pleasant experience taking ecstasy at his first night of acid house that migrates to a small breakfast joint. This clip from when the bailiffs come to the studio to collect the rent captures the energy of the film. I hope this one comes out in theaters - all that sound and color is worth a big screen.
Day 9: Primera and God's Waiting Room
The "Primera" in the title of Vee Bravo's documentary about the 2019-2020 Chilean protest movement refers to the "Primera Linea" the front line of militant protestors who march in front to defend the larger mass demonstrations from the aggressive police. This documentary is a great exploration of movement strategy and police repression, as it follows the lives of a handful of members of the Primera Linea who explain how they first got involved in the movement and how it affected their lives afterward. It contextualizes and shows the evolution of a movement from an initial protest against a metro fare-hike to a broad movement to re-write the Chilean constitution. The film may be a bit too long; it has some slow sections, but it is very informative, showing many different types of protest within the larger movement, including a memorable feminist demo when women chant (in Spanish, but according to subtitles) "Bitch! Whore! But I'll Never Be a Cop!" I'd recommend it to activist groups and for classrooms and university screenings. It reminds me a bit of the Oscar-nominated short documentary, Do Not Split in its structure, but it is longer, creating space for more detailed representation of individual people's daily lives, aside from their participation in street demonstrations. The film includes one character who lost his eye during the protests, and through him we learn about this police tactic in Chile - a tactic that became common in Hong Kong in 2019 and in the United States during the summer 2020 uprising.
For whatever reason, I departed from my plan and decided to watch the movie God's Waiting Room which did achieve the director's goal of showing both the beauty and "grime" of Florida; I felt sweaty just watching. The film features strong performances from Nisalda Gonzalez, well-chosen for the role of Rosie, the young singer-songwriter, since she is a singer-songwriter herself, and from the winner of Tribeca's best-actor award, Matthew Leone, who plays the charming drug-dealer, Jules. (Romeo and Juliet, anyone?) I agree with other reviewers who thought that the movie could have worked well if it had stuck to the story of the couple, Rosie's two girlfriends, and her father, rather than adding the element of the recently paroled murderer. Instead, the writer/director literally inserts himself into his own composition like a wrecking ball, playing the parolee and taking the expression "Kill your darlings" far too literally. Until the ending, this was a nice, hazy story of adolescent boredom, burgeoning sexuality and confusion, and I wish Riggs had figured out a different way to provide closure that would have done justice to the characters.
The film was pleasantly and effortlessly bilingual and multicultural, as in almost every scene, we see white working class, African American and Caribbean, and Latinx characters from a variety of backgrounds living, partying and working together, flowing from English to Spanish and back. There were many narrative threads left hanging that he could have picked up and taken to a more meaningful conclusion driven by the conflicts among the central characters, even if it wound up just as (SPOILER ALERT!) tragic for the star-crossed lovers. What happens after you find out that one of your best friends is sleeping with the guy you're dating after she tells you he is a "gross little pizza rat from New York" that you should avoid? What if the attractive bad boy could learn something from Rosie's tough, but caring father? What about the random dude that Rosie wakes up next to after a party? What about Jules' relationship with his mother, who we see in one scene, working in a bar and getting hassled? Beyond just showing a mix of people of different ethnicities, the movie could have said something deeper about the tensions that might be part of that cultural mix. We learn that Jules is Puerto Rican and Italian-American, I would guess that Rosie is meant to be Cuban or Mexican, though that wasn't made explicit. Her friends are white and African-American or Afro-Caribbean (not specified). Jules's friends are also white and Black. The girls party with some white skateboarders. There was more than enough drama with the existing mix of characters and events to take this movie somewhere more interesting. Instead, as Andrew Bundy puts in his review at the Playlist,the ending was unbelievably unsatisfying.
