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Wednesday Reading Meme
Nov. 15th, 2017 05:17 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
At last I have finished William Dean Howells’ Venetian Life! This experience was moderately spoiled by the fact that the free ebook I was reading cuts off in mid-sentence, evidently a few pages before the end, but it was free so I suppose I can’t complain too much, and anyway it’s a few pages before the end of the afterword written seven years after the book was first published so the book itself, I suppose, is still intact.
Howells can be very droll - he comments, with regard to a fight about to begin between gondoliers, “I looked on with that noble interest which the enlightened mind always feels in people about to punch each other’s heads” - but on the whole I would recommend his fiction instead.
I also read Mick LaSalle’s Dangerous Men: Pre-Code Hollywood and the Birth of the Modern Man, which is an interesting book, although fatally flawed in one sense: he rarely managed to interest me in watching any of the films he discussed, because he rushes through them all so briskly that there’s rarely much time to build up any investment. I suppose that is in the nature of things when you’re trying to write an overview.
I also disagree with some of his assertions about the nature of nineteenth-century masculinity - it wasn’t all respectability; there was a real rabble-rousing side - and about the underlying causes of certain differences between silent films and Pre-Codes. (Pre-Code means specifically sound films before the implementation of the Production Code in 1934.) I mean, sure, the decrease in smiling and flamboyant gestures as silent films give way to Pre-Codes may indeed reflect changing cultural mores - but on the other hand, it strikes me that there’s a clear technical reason for this. In a silent film, actors’ gestures have to do the talking for them - and this is especially true because silent films deployed far fewer close-ups than movies do today. So of course those gestures are going to be bigger.
However, his main point is that the Production Code did a lot of damage to American cinema, particular the social conscience thereof, and this he proves fairly handily. He presents such an interesting array of Pre-Code movies - often, from the point of view of someone largely familiar with post-Code 1930s films, startlingly frank in their approach to social injustice, sex, criminality, and various other things - that it’s hard to disagree with him.
What I’m Reading Now
Still working on The Black Count! It got shunted aside in favor of Dangerous Men so I haven’t made as much progress as I otherwise might have done.
I’m also reading The Lions of Little Rock. In 1958 Little Rock, Marlee makes friends with her new classmate Liz … only to lose her when Liz is kicked out of school because she’s not actually white. Naturally (for a book heroine), Marlee decides that this can’t be the end of their friendship.
I decided to read this book because the premise seemed to offer some crazy intense friendship, and there’s nothing I love like crazy intense friends who fight to keep each other despite the obstacles, whether the obstacles be family feuds or brainwashing or the bitter weight of societal prejudices. But I’m not feeling the intensity nearly as much as I want here.
What I Plan to Read Next
Sara Jeannette Duncan’s The Pool in the Desert is the next thing on my Kindle. I’ve forgotten what this one is about - in fact I may never have known; I may have just gotten it because it was a free ebook by Sara Jeannette Duncan. So it will be an adventure!
At last I have finished William Dean Howells’ Venetian Life! This experience was moderately spoiled by the fact that the free ebook I was reading cuts off in mid-sentence, evidently a few pages before the end, but it was free so I suppose I can’t complain too much, and anyway it’s a few pages before the end of the afterword written seven years after the book was first published so the book itself, I suppose, is still intact.
Howells can be very droll - he comments, with regard to a fight about to begin between gondoliers, “I looked on with that noble interest which the enlightened mind always feels in people about to punch each other’s heads” - but on the whole I would recommend his fiction instead.
I also read Mick LaSalle’s Dangerous Men: Pre-Code Hollywood and the Birth of the Modern Man, which is an interesting book, although fatally flawed in one sense: he rarely managed to interest me in watching any of the films he discussed, because he rushes through them all so briskly that there’s rarely much time to build up any investment. I suppose that is in the nature of things when you’re trying to write an overview.
I also disagree with some of his assertions about the nature of nineteenth-century masculinity - it wasn’t all respectability; there was a real rabble-rousing side - and about the underlying causes of certain differences between silent films and Pre-Codes. (Pre-Code means specifically sound films before the implementation of the Production Code in 1934.) I mean, sure, the decrease in smiling and flamboyant gestures as silent films give way to Pre-Codes may indeed reflect changing cultural mores - but on the other hand, it strikes me that there’s a clear technical reason for this. In a silent film, actors’ gestures have to do the talking for them - and this is especially true because silent films deployed far fewer close-ups than movies do today. So of course those gestures are going to be bigger.
However, his main point is that the Production Code did a lot of damage to American cinema, particular the social conscience thereof, and this he proves fairly handily. He presents such an interesting array of Pre-Code movies - often, from the point of view of someone largely familiar with post-Code 1930s films, startlingly frank in their approach to social injustice, sex, criminality, and various other things - that it’s hard to disagree with him.
What I’m Reading Now
Still working on The Black Count! It got shunted aside in favor of Dangerous Men so I haven’t made as much progress as I otherwise might have done.
I’m also reading The Lions of Little Rock. In 1958 Little Rock, Marlee makes friends with her new classmate Liz … only to lose her when Liz is kicked out of school because she’s not actually white. Naturally (for a book heroine), Marlee decides that this can’t be the end of their friendship.
I decided to read this book because the premise seemed to offer some crazy intense friendship, and there’s nothing I love like crazy intense friends who fight to keep each other despite the obstacles, whether the obstacles be family feuds or brainwashing or the bitter weight of societal prejudices. But I’m not feeling the intensity nearly as much as I want here.
What I Plan to Read Next
Sara Jeannette Duncan’s The Pool in the Desert is the next thing on my Kindle. I’ve forgotten what this one is about - in fact I may never have known; I may have just gotten it because it was a free ebook by Sara Jeannette Duncan. So it will be an adventure!
