Books
- John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos
- John Wyndham, The Kraken Wakes
I’ve been reading John Wyndham’s books since I noticed that New York Review Books reprinted Chocky; I read Day of the Triffids long, long ago, but I’d never read the others and I wondered if I was missing anything. I won’t say much because I don’t think these are really books for me. The Kraken Wakes seems like the most interesting of these, in part because of the way it’s narrated – the narrator and his wife are basically Nick and Nora from the Thin Man movies if after a lot of cocktails they got a job narrating the end of the world for an ersatz BBC in an imagined 1950s Britain. (I’m not sure it’s actually as entertaining as that makes it sound.) But I found myself stopped in reading by a breackneck paragraph early in the book:
In the course of the next three years we ourselves lost interest almost to vanishing point. Other matters occupied us. There was the birth of our son, William—and his death, eighteen months later. To help Phyllis to get over that I wangled myself a traveling-correspondent series, sold up the house, and for a time we roved.
After this paragraph, the death of their child goes entirely unmentioned, until two hundred pages later just after they’ve witnessed the atrocities attendant upon an alien invasion of Earth:
She stopped suddenly. Her expression changed. “Sorry, Mike. I shouldn’t have gone off the handle like that. I must be tired, or something.” And she took herself off with a decisive air of not wanting to be followed.
The outburst disturbed me badly. I hadn’t seen her in a state anything like that for years. Not since the baby died.
And that’s it! That’s all we hear about this baby, though the narrator and his wife are front and center for the entire novel. (They have no other children; their happy-go-lucky demeanor before and after this is entirely unchanged.) Someone who’s more interested in science fiction than I am should think about this more deeply – why does this baby appear and die so casually? There’s an ongoing macro-catastrophe – rising sea levels threaten humanity – but I find myself caught up in how this personal tragedy appears and then utterly disappears. It’s a gratuitous writerly act – there’s something about this that feels of the present moment.
- Ardengo Soffici, Simultaneities and Lyric Chemisms, translated by Olivia E. Sears
- Jeff VanderMeer, Absolution
- Milo De Angelis, Finite Intuition: Selected Poetry and Prose, trans. Lawrence Venuti
- Via Roma 398. Palermo, including Documents Relating to the Death of Raymond Roussel by Leonardo Sciascia, edited by Luca Trevisani
- Giorgio de Chirico, Geometry of Shadows, trans. Stefania Heim
Films
- Die Austernprinzessin (The Oyster Princess), directed by Ernst Lubitsch
- Ich möchte kein Mann sein (I Don’t Want to Be a Man), dir. Ernst Lubitsch
- The Masque of the Red Death, dir. Roger Corman
- The Fog, dir. John Carpenter
- Steak, dir. Quentin Dupieux
- Wrong, dir. Quentin Dupieux
- Parthenope, dir. Paolo Sorrentino
- Hello Dankness, dir. Soda Jerk
- Passione, dir. John Turturro
- Napoli velata, dir. Ferzan Özpetek
Exhibits
- Museo Marino Marini, Firenze
- “Carlo Maria Mariani. Arte oltre il tempo,” Palazzo Pitti, Firenze
- “Sette opere per la misericordia,” Pio Monte della Misericordia, Napoli
- Cappello Sansevero, Napoli
- Museo Darwin-Dohrn, Napoli
- “Da Caravaggio a Gemito,” Gallerie d’Italia, Napoli
- “Dan Flavin dalla Collezione Luigi e Peppino Agrati,” Gallerie d’Italia, Napoli