Recs and anti-rec
Apr. 20th, 2012 02:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
icepixieThe Nashville Film Festival has a free mixtape available through the 26th. It has 26 tracks, mostly from Nashville-based singer/songwriters, with a few from other places whose music is featured in some of the films being shown at the festival. It's really good! Like, surprisingly good! Also free!
I stumbled upon it because I was visiting Katie Herzig's website. She's on the sampler, and I have two other songs to recommend:
Lost and Found - Veers into sort of...epic pop? territory. Very cool. Also catchy. I very much want to make a vid to this--something with a lot of sharp angles and quick cuts.
Best Day of Your Life - Super-catchy and fun.
*
After several months on the library's waiting list, during which time I forgot why I even requested the book, I received Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot this week. I really liked Middlesex, which had a unique premise that was well-executed, and I expected to like this one. Alas, it did not rise to expectations. So much literary fiction written lately seems to have the same effect on me: it's interesting enough to keep reading to the end, but when I finish it I'm always disappointed that nothing really happened. I spent some time with generally unlikeable characters, and in the end all that happened was I wasted a few hours and despair of humanity even more than I already did. Why has this become such a trend in the past twenty or thirty years?
(...It occurs to me this might be the point of the book, because one of the central ideas--albeit one that gets about two sentences of writing on it--is the theory that the novel was exquisitely suited for the Austenesque "marriage plot" and has been in decline ever since women stopped having to pin their entire futures on marrying well. Thus, presumably, the lack of "plot" in this and other modern novels, as the only plot available is a "marriage plot." Somehow I don't think we needed 400+ pages of circling aimlessly to get the point.)
In addition to the lack of development, the whole thing felt very...expected. I feel like I've read this book a dozen times before, like any creative writing workshop in the country could put out ten variants on it every year. It follows three central characters through the obligatory Ivy League college and the first couple years afterward during the late seventies and early eighties. There was theauthor insert guy who stumbled onto Religious Studies and after school went to India, where he backed out of his burgeoning religious awakening because he was grossed out while ministering to the sick. There was the manic depressive biology/philosophy/all around genius student, who drags his girlfriend/wife down with him and then disappears after a last psychotic break. And there was the girlfriend, who got about six pages of story to herself (she wanted to be a Victorianist scholar focusing on "the marriage plot"), but otherwise bounced between the manic depressive and the religious studies fellow, who of course has a crush on her. In the end, nothing--absolutely nothing--changes. Literally, everyone winds up living back at home with their parents, jobless, divorced, and with the same ambitions they had in freshman year. (Okay, wait, the girl is going to head to grad school after the book ends. I guess that counts as change, even though we don't see it.)
Just...argh. I do actually like some literary fiction (though I detest the label), but it's so hard to find the good ones sometimes.
I stumbled upon it because I was visiting Katie Herzig's website. She's on the sampler, and I have two other songs to recommend:
Lost and Found - Veers into sort of...epic pop? territory. Very cool. Also catchy. I very much want to make a vid to this--something with a lot of sharp angles and quick cuts.
Best Day of Your Life - Super-catchy and fun.
*
After several months on the library's waiting list, during which time I forgot why I even requested the book, I received Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot this week. I really liked Middlesex, which had a unique premise that was well-executed, and I expected to like this one. Alas, it did not rise to expectations. So much literary fiction written lately seems to have the same effect on me: it's interesting enough to keep reading to the end, but when I finish it I'm always disappointed that nothing really happened. I spent some time with generally unlikeable characters, and in the end all that happened was I wasted a few hours and despair of humanity even more than I already did. Why has this become such a trend in the past twenty or thirty years?
(...It occurs to me this might be the point of the book, because one of the central ideas--albeit one that gets about two sentences of writing on it--is the theory that the novel was exquisitely suited for the Austenesque "marriage plot" and has been in decline ever since women stopped having to pin their entire futures on marrying well. Thus, presumably, the lack of "plot" in this and other modern novels, as the only plot available is a "marriage plot." Somehow I don't think we needed 400+ pages of circling aimlessly to get the point.)
In addition to the lack of development, the whole thing felt very...expected. I feel like I've read this book a dozen times before, like any creative writing workshop in the country could put out ten variants on it every year. It follows three central characters through the obligatory Ivy League college and the first couple years afterward during the late seventies and early eighties. There was the
Just...argh. I do actually like some literary fiction (though I detest the label), but it's so hard to find the good ones sometimes.