Books

• Raymond Chandler, Trouble Is My Business

Passing time.

• Liu Xia, Empty Chairs: Selected Poems, translated by Ming Di & Jennifer Stern

A friend’s project: nice to see Chinese poetry given a decent presentation in English translation. Liu Xia’s photographs are astonishing, and one wishes there were more.

• Anthony Burgess, Abba Abba

A dying John Keats meets the Roman dialect poet G. G. Belli and changes his poetic approach. Half of the book is a translation of seventy of Belli’s sonnets, ostensibly done by a fictional character. Maybe I’d be more interested in historical fiction if more of it were this strange?

• Benjamin Lytal, A Map of Tulsa

Reminiscent of those Edgar Allan Poe stories where the narrator is utterly fixated on a dying woman, all the more strange for having been written a century and a half later.

• Mark Dion, Katherine McLeod, Madeleine Thompson, editors, Exploratory Works: Drawings from the Department of Tropical Research Field Expeditions

The catalogue to the show at the Drawing Center, which nicely contextualizes the work. Also full of unexpectedly beautiful imagery: oil painting, it turns out, works just fine under water.

• Ronald Firbank, Vainglory
• Ronald Firbank, Inclinations
• Ronald Firbank, Caprice

Finally getting around to Firbank’s first three novels, which are rather minor but still enjoyable. The best of them is Inclinations, which I’d be surprised if Gaddis hadn’t read before writing The Recognitions.

Films

• Tokyo Fiancée, directed by Stefan Liberski
• Wild, dir. Nicolette Krebitz
• Toni Erdmann, dir. Maren Ade
• Cleopatra, dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz
• Le Mépris, dir. Jean-Luc Godard