my first Studio Ghibli film - and I'm impressed. Fairy tales, Jonathan Swift, Terry Gilliam, Panamarenko all rolled into one.
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Today, boys and girls, we’re going to look at ‘Song of the Chinchilla’ by Lisa Jarnot*. I liked the poem immediately – and I’ve given it to ...
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Be warned though, there are some v. cheesy ones (Porco Rosso, etc). Spirited Away was the big critically acclaimed hit here & yes it's good, but my personal favourite is Princess Mononoke, which is truly brilliant.
W
Thanks for the tips - the guy at our local mediatheque raves about Studio Ghibli and the girls seem to know about all the films through school. I saw this one on DVD in French so I probably missed the full effect. What strikes me is the Gilliam-type clash of technologies.
I'm also at Chapter 5 of Sebald's 'Rings of Saturn' - a book I have started and stalled in several times. Martin Corless-Smith and Iain Sinclair are fans and it's the kind of text I think I should be getting more out of than I do ...
I keep having nagging doubts that it is simply an exercise in academic whimsy (sort of cooking up a novel out of your filing card trays). It lacks Sinclair's darkness and dazzle with language. The section on Casement and Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' shows the thinness of the material and method - basically a verbatim lifting from a television documentary I use with my 12th Grade interspersed with steals from 'Congo Diary' and 'Heart of Darkness' itself. The knowing refusal of quotation marks should achieve a ghostly blurring of selves. However, for me, it doesn't. Nor do I get any sense of artful or revelatory collaging. The returns of idea seem ... well ... just contrived, too planned, too neat. Am I missing something? Is it the fact that it's a translation? I keep thinking of Breton's 'Nadja' with its use of photos - and that text does produce a frisson of 'is it/isn't it?'.
What's your take on W.G.S.?
“One of the most striking developments in English-language publishing in the past five years has been the extraordinary success of the books of WG Sebald. The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn and Vertigo were received-pretty unanimously, as far as I could tell-with deference and superlatives. This is the more unlikely as I don't think such a success could have been predicted for them or their author. Sebald, a professor at the University of East Anglia for many years, and settled in England since 1970, nevertheless insisted on writing in his native German-and then taking a hand in the heavy, somewhat dated English presentation of his books. These books, furnished with, one presumed, the author's own photographs, hovered coquettishly on the verge of non-fiction; certainly, their elaboration of what appeared to be painstakingly researched historical narratives and circumstances contained much of their appeal. They called themselves novels, but they were more like introverted lectures, suites of digression, their form given them by the knowledge they contained; like water, finding its own levels everywhere, pooling and dribbling, with excurses on such things as silk, herrings, architecture, battles.”
-- Michael Hofmann, “Sebald’s fog” (Prospect, October 2001)
Hmmm. Sebald does seem to divide the literati. Some (Susan Sontag: “The magic of WG Sebald’s incandescent body of work . . .” etc.) hail him as a genius. Others (Michael Hofmann: “With his Gothic meanderings and limp mimicry of Kafka, this unlikely darling of high European style is merely lost in an English cul-de-sac”) think he’s a pasticheur and nothing more.
On a positive note, I like his use of the long line: baggy and capacious sentences stretched out through multiple clauses, as far as they will go. I’m not sure he’s an original, but I like the alternative, genre-busting line of writing (Breton’s Nadja, as you say, Kafka, etc.) of which his work is either a kind of homage or a continuation.
On an entirely unrelated note, yesterday evening I was musing upon Olson’s “Projective Verse” essay for the nth time when the name “Seami” leapt out at me, placed alongside Homer and Euripides; actually Olson compares Seami’s HAGOROMO with Homer’s epics and Euripides’ THE TROJAN WOMEN.
A quick Google search revealed HAGOROMO to be a Nō play – very short, available at
http://www.sacred-texts.com/shi/npj/npj31.htm
This Waley book (The Nō Plays of Japan) has been sitting on my shelves for years and I’ve always meant to crack it open one day. Now I have a reason. I shall find a quiet moment and see what I think. If you felt like reading it too that might be fun.
All the best,
Walrus
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