May 24

Cannes 2011: Hey, it's not too early to start thinking about next year, is it?

http://www.ioncinema.com/news/id/5171

So I can add 20 titles to my "Cannes 2011 Speculation" list already. And you all thought we'd get a day off! Ha!

If films that play at Cannes are matter, then films like Zaat (1975), about a man-catfish terrorizing a Florida town, are anti-matter. May they never make contact and destroy the universe!

http://ludicdespair.blogspot.com/2010/05/zaat-and-poetics-of-despondent.html

On an altogether more serious note, Robert Gottlieb at The New York Review of Books assesses the history of Charles Dickens biographies:

There are a few writers whose lives and personalities are so large, so fascinating, that there’s no such thing as a boring biography of them—you can read every new one that comes along, good or bad, and be caught up in the story all over again. I’ve never encountered a life of the Brontës, of Dr. Johnson, of Byron that didn’t grip me. Another such character is Charles Dickens.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jun/10/who-was-charles-dickens/

A novelist who can claim to be the Dickens or Balzac of Estonia is A. H. Tammsaare (1878-1940). His mammoth five-novel series Truth and Justice is not yet available in English (though the art of translation tends to catch up to such books). But The Misadventures of the New Satan, his last novel, was published in an English translation in Moscow in 1978, and that edition has been revised and put back into print:

http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=2704

http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=2703

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_H_Tammsaare

"Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of literature," we move next to Bhutan, which just hosted the first Mountain Echoes Literary Festival:

http://jaiarjun.blogspot.com/2010/05/notes-from-bhutan-haiku-readings.html

http://www.siyahi.in/mountain-echoes-programme.html

Teddy Jamieson at The Herald (Scotland) surveys several graphic novels, including Justin Green's somewhat legendary and now reprinted Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary:

Look, there’s no delicate way to put this. When he was a teenager back in 1950s America, struggling to reconcile a Catholic upbringing with his hormonal urges, Justin Green came to believe that every time he felt even the slightest stirring of sexual excitement, Satanic rays of light would shoot out of his penis.

http://www.heraldscotland.com/arts-ents/fiction-reviews/cartoon-cavalcade-1.1030143

If you had shown me John Buckland Wright's 1932 woodcut illustrations for Poe short stories without a name attached, I would have thought immediately, "Lynd Ward." Wright, however, was a New Zealander who worked in various styles, and this just happens to be one of his most Ward-ian projects.

http://ajourneyroundmyskull.blogspot.com/2010/05/man-in-crowd.html

http://www.library.otago.ac.nz/exhibitions/jbw/

Among notables born on this date are Queen Victoria, novelists William Trevor and Michael Chabon, poet Joseph Brodsky (Russia) and Henri Michaux (France), dramatists Arthur Wing Pinero, Arnold Wesker, and Eduardo De Filippo (Italy), literary critic Declan Kiberd, jazz saxophonist Archie Shepp, singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, pop singer Patti LaBelle, conductor Paul Paray, painter Emanuel Leutze, jurist Benjamin Cardozo, and actors Siobhan McKenna, Stanley Baxter, Jim Broadbent, Alfred Molina, Mai Zetterling, John C. Reilly, Michael Lonsdale, and Kristin Scott Thomas. I do wish sometimes that those who post archival footage of musicians to YouTube would include just a little information on the provenance of the footage. This marvelous film of Archie Shepp and his musicians recording his blistering composition "U-Jaama" is, I figured out, from Ron Mann's 1981 documentary Imagine the Sound, available as a Canadian DVD: