Breaking Bad. * amc.
Big Love. * hbo.
True Blood. hbo, summer.
Dexter. showtime, now (fall).
Weeds. showtime, summer.
US of Tara. showtime.
Jan ~ March 2010 returning, I think: Breaking Bad S3, Big LoveS4, USofTara S2. and! Lost S6, the final one.
oh: March mostly. Breaking Bad in March. Lost in March. and Tara "early in 2010." but Big Love, wkp:: According to imdb the fourth season will premiere on January 10, 2010.[15]
so, January: Big Love. March: Breaking Bad. Lost. it's mainly Lost that I will want to follow as it airs, reading responses. partake in it as a social Event.
just heard, also in March, a third season of In Treatment. had tht S2 was it. S3 will be fully original, BeTipul only had two seasons. In Treatment top notch, but in own category, more different from the others on this list than the rest from each other. therapy, one on one, the drama of the dyad -vs- suspenseful situation around one or more main character.
*Breaking Bad & Big Love the best, to me. wld watch again.
could watch those w mom, also maybe US of Tara which is lighter ~ fun.
True Blood, Dexter, Weeds. very entertaining, but after knowing wh happens, not that engaging to watch a second time. the minutiae, the direction & filming not as intriguing.
24 is the same, further down list in quality, wld be even more unpleasant to watch a second time. but did work for me for a while, 'the tick tick will get you long before the bomb.'
Dexter was totally compelling when had a lot of episodes to watch at once, bcs Michael C Hall mesmerizing to me, I like being in Dexter's head.
the best, to me?
Breaking Bad S1. I really like how little time it covers, how they only cook once. (much slower pace than Weeds, but with both I am on edge bcs looking for it to settle, at lst for a bit, into an organized set-up. but never does. no sooner get a plan in place for business, a deal that could possibly be repeated, sustained, than it blows up. also with The Riches, I kept wanting it to settle into a groove, have a while where the family lives as the Riches, goes to work, goes to school. never did ~ but there I think they could have, might have made it better. with that show only the pilot episode was great. but it was, that first episode was really good.)
Big Love S3. esp epsd 8 the road trip "Come all ye, Saints."
In Treatment S2. esp the Thursday sessions with Walter, fantastic.
write-ups of each episode of all three of those shows by Alan Sepinwall, with lots of blog commenters. and also nuanced writeups of Big Love and of Breaking Bad by Todd VanDerWerff at the House Next Door.
not as high quality but also favorites, first seasons of Lost, Life, Veronica Mars. and a bit below those, Nip/Tuck which did have that compellingly angsty first season.
Lost no longer as totally compelling viewing, but the discussion around it is exciting. occasions so much conversation, imagination. and S1 was really moving, I love the scenario of ppl together after a disaster, and I found every character's story involving.
Life: I really like Damian Lewis and his character Charlie Crews, how he approaches every encounter with that calm, watchful consideration. life after the end, again the hook for me.
Veronica Mars, also. life after all falls apart. and I like Veronica with her dad, and I really enjoy Jason Dohring as Logan.
been thinking of what if Dohring as Jesse in Breaking Bad, and Terry O'Quinn (Locke in Lost) as Walt. not that they could be better than Cranston & Aaron Paul, but they are similarly suited to the roles.
not esp my cup of tea? Mad Men. eh. depressing formal lives.
The Sopranos, just haven't cottoned to Tony & family.
The Wire, though I get it that is very good, still only just barely got to point of finding S1 compelling. not as psychologically intimate as I like? a wide view, the city, the institutions.
Carnivale seems haunting, but d n hook me in.
Deadwood seems haunting, grand, dark. have to get past all the dust, everything shades of brown, then, still expect it to be my favorite ever?
that's amc then hbo hbo hbo hbo.
The Shield (fx) maybe will get into this if start at the beginning. now, having liked Dean Norris as DEA agent Hank in Breaking Bad, somehow seems a way in.
so those two, The Shield and Deadwood, are my future immersion possibilities list.
Bad Guys on TV | Newsweek Entertainment | Newsweek.com :
Vic on The Shield. Jack Bauer, Dexter, Don Draper. 'These kinds of fully rendered characters—dark streaked with some light—have changed the television landscape to the point where what we see on the small screen is, pound for pound, superior to what we see at the movies.'
and over in another room, Always Sunny in Philadelphia makes me laugh with mean spirited bleak playful comedy.
and now, Modern Family, happy and funny.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
What's Alan Watching?: Breaking Bad: Vince Gilligan post-mortems season two:
The character continues to surprise us, the writers, in the writer's room. 'What would he do now?' 'I think he would do this.' 'Maybe he should do this instead.' It's a little hard to believe for folks who don't spend every waking moment in the writer's room plotting out a fictional character's life mm that sounds like a fun job, but they do kind of come to life for us. They become, in a sense, separate from us. They demand certain moments and bits of behavior that we, in a sense, don't want to give them. It sounds a little precious to put it that way, but they do. If we're going to be honest about a guy who sets out to be a criminal, we have to see where it takes itself.
he conceit that he's doing this all for his family, has gone by the wayside quite a long time ago. To me, that's what's interesting about the show, and makes me get out of bed every morning, enthused to be a part of it, is we're not leaving this character static. We're changing him in increments, sometimes small, sometimes large, and we don't know exactly where he's going to end up.
"Go big or go home." That was our ethos for last season: go big or go home. We figured in for a penny, in for a pound. We've come this far, let's be honest about it.
--In the finale, Skyler finally puts enough of what Walt is doing together to want him out of her life. But what's she telling Flynn about why his dad can't live at home anymore? yeah Flynn who's just made his "Save Walt White" website & been profiled in the newspaper talking about how his dad is so decent, always does the right thing, is his hero.
Good question, and that's been a big focus of conversation in the writers room here in season three. I can't tell you too much. It's stuff you'll see in the first episode, but I can give you this: I don't think she's telling folks too much. You're asking the right question, let me put it that way. When a woman is going to leave her husband, everybody needs to hear a reason. What reason do you give if the reason you're leaving is that you don't know what he's involved in, and you don't want to know.
-An absolutely riveting and visually stunning final episode that rivaled the best that TV has ever offered.
The character continues to surprise us, the writers, in the writer's room. 'What would he do now?' 'I think he would do this.' 'Maybe he should do this instead.' It's a little hard to believe for folks who don't spend every waking moment in the writer's room plotting out a fictional character's life mm that sounds like a fun job, but they do kind of come to life for us. They become, in a sense, separate from us. They demand certain moments and bits of behavior that we, in a sense, don't want to give them. It sounds a little precious to put it that way, but they do. If we're going to be honest about a guy who sets out to be a criminal, we have to see where it takes itself.
he conceit that he's doing this all for his family, has gone by the wayside quite a long time ago. To me, that's what's interesting about the show, and makes me get out of bed every morning, enthused to be a part of it, is we're not leaving this character static. We're changing him in increments, sometimes small, sometimes large, and we don't know exactly where he's going to end up.
"Go big or go home." That was our ethos for last season: go big or go home. We figured in for a penny, in for a pound. We've come this far, let's be honest about it.
--In the finale, Skyler finally puts enough of what Walt is doing together to want him out of her life. But what's she telling Flynn about why his dad can't live at home anymore? yeah Flynn who's just made his "Save Walt White" website & been profiled in the newspaper talking about how his dad is so decent, always does the right thing, is his hero.
Good question, and that's been a big focus of conversation in the writers room here in season three. I can't tell you too much. It's stuff you'll see in the first episode, but I can give you this: I don't think she's telling folks too much. You're asking the right question, let me put it that way. When a woman is going to leave her husband, everybody needs to hear a reason. What reason do you give if the reason you're leaving is that you don't know what he's involved in, and you don't want to know.
-An absolutely riveting and visually stunning final episode that rivaled the best that TV has ever offered.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
The publisher's description of this book, and most of the reviews and readers' reactions I've read (many of them regarding the UK publication this past summer of this same translation, under the title A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven), mostly prepare you for the opening pages: a story of a boy lost in the woods at night, who comes upon two men with wings. It is a lovely story, but only takes you a little ways into A Time For Everything. The story is told to us by a narrator who occasionally announces himself as an "I" or a "me" as he tells us of Antinous Bellori, the lost boy who in 1584 witnesses two angels and who then devotes his life to researching and writing a book called On the Nature of Angels.
The dominant storyline ofA Time For Everything is our narrator's consideration of Bellori's work on angels, including their appearances in the book of Genesis. But barely forty pages in, the narrator disappears for two long stretches (with just a few pages' reappearance in the transition between the two). For a hundred pages, we are immersed in the story of Cain and his complicated but fond love for his younger quicker brother Abel. Then for two hundred pages, we read a moving story of people at the time of the flood. We meet Noah's sister Anna and her family in the days when the rain keeps falling and falling and they eventually take to the mountains to try to keep above the rising sea. We only briefly read of Noah's instruction from God to build an Ark, and how he and his sons set to work building a huge boat in a field up in the mountains. The narrative spends more time falling back to tell us of Noah and Anna's childhood, their relationship with their father Lamech, the joy that their kid brother Barak brings, and a family tragedy. When we circle back around to the days of rain, it is again to tragedy, heightened when Anna's daughter Rachel gives birth to a baby boy, only to carry him up and up until they can go no further, and must huddle on the peak of a mountain that is now an island, looking out at the other mountain peaks turned islands, other people visible on the nearest one, also looking out across the vast waterscape. And the water is still rising.
Then, three hundred and some pages into the book, we are back with our narrator and Bellori. We stay with them, more or less, for the next one hundred and fifty pages (so, overall, the story of Anna and her family gets a little bit more page weight than Bellori and On the Nature of Angels). I'm talking about page counts because I think it is easy to be vague and even inaccurate in saying what this strange book contains, and I want to try to articulate what is actually found in these five hundred pages. This is hardest to do with regard to this main storyline, concerning Bellori's life and work. Other descriptions of A Time For Everything say, to my mind too vaguely, carelessly, that it tells us all about angels. But there are many stories, myths, ideas about angels that could figure in a catalog or investigation into the nature of angels, yet do not come into play here; we hear only in passing, for example, about the image of angels as guardians. Our narrator is concerned with angels as on a fault line between the human and the divine, and with fault lines generally: at the level of intellectual history, as changes between worldviews; and within that history, as momentous shifts from one situation to another. With regard to intellectual history, our narrator is able to use Bellori to muse on the shift to a modern worldview, since Knausgaard has positioned Bellori as one of those "obsessed young men who, in the first decades of the modern age, ensconced themselves in rooms in great cities all round Europe to think." At Bellori's time, angelology could still go hand in hand with geography, or numerology and alchemy be pursued alongside studies of motion and matter -- as they were, our narrator reminds us, by Newton -- but reason and observation were becoming ascendant over scriptural or traditional authority, and divisions being made: material vs immaterial, concrete vs abstract, physical vs spiritual, scientific vs historical, natural vs divine. "In reality it was just a matter of time before the situation would become what it's turned into today, where everything connected with the holy is regarded as abstract, so that we literally do not see the materiality of what is holy, whereas everything that concerns physical nature is exclusively seen as concrete, and we lose sight of physical nature's immaterial aspects, too." Along with such assessing of Bellori's own moment in history, our narrator follows Bellori's work in assessing major shifts in the relations between humanity and divinity, the fault lines appearing as the great flood, the incarnation, and the crucifixion. Bellori posits that the real reason for the flood was that angels had overstepped their proper bounds, as referenced by one line in Genesis, by taking up with human women who then bore their children, the giant Nephilim. How shocked, Bellori realizes, must the angels have been, when their Lord, after flooding and killing everything in reaction to their transgression, then himself so much more completely crossed that same boundary by becoming man? And how fallen must the angels be now, after watching their Lord die?
Thinking over this book, I find that I try to make it come together. I try to see how its concern over shifts in human worldview lines up with its concern over divine-human relations. The interrelation of concerns is obvious but unneat. Knausgaard puts a lot out there, but it does not seem finally to have been carefully designed. Is there a parallel between the human-divine relations, the proximity of God to his people, as Bellori finds manifested by the angels, and the changing proximity of our narrator to us? Until the final fifty page "coda", we might think the narrator is simply the author Karl Klausgaard; but in those final pages the "I" tells us a story of his own life, in our time, and we learn that he is a Norwegian man named Henrik Vankel, protagonist of Klausgaard's first book, Out of This World. Vankel's father tells him when he is young that seagulls used to be angels; this is the one link back to the previous four hundred and fifty pages. The coda does not mention Bellori, does not have Vankel reference all that thinking that I guess he's been doing about angels, the flood, the life of Christ. Vankel does give us in these final pages the reflection that provides the book title, thinking about how "not even the past is done with, even that continues to change, as if in reality there is only one time, for everything, one time for every purpose under heaven." I had thought perhaps the title was in keeping with how much this book contains, resonant but not specifically tied together: a time for everything, and here is some of that everything. Vankel's emphasis is on the "a" - one single time for everything, all at once. What to make of it?
The dominant storyline ofA Time For Everything is our narrator's consideration of Bellori's work on angels, including their appearances in the book of Genesis. But barely forty pages in, the narrator disappears for two long stretches (with just a few pages' reappearance in the transition between the two). For a hundred pages, we are immersed in the story of Cain and his complicated but fond love for his younger quicker brother Abel. Then for two hundred pages, we read a moving story of people at the time of the flood. We meet Noah's sister Anna and her family in the days when the rain keeps falling and falling and they eventually take to the mountains to try to keep above the rising sea. We only briefly read of Noah's instruction from God to build an Ark, and how he and his sons set to work building a huge boat in a field up in the mountains. The narrative spends more time falling back to tell us of Noah and Anna's childhood, their relationship with their father Lamech, the joy that their kid brother Barak brings, and a family tragedy. When we circle back around to the days of rain, it is again to tragedy, heightened when Anna's daughter Rachel gives birth to a baby boy, only to carry him up and up until they can go no further, and must huddle on the peak of a mountain that is now an island, looking out at the other mountain peaks turned islands, other people visible on the nearest one, also looking out across the vast waterscape. And the water is still rising.
Then, three hundred and some pages into the book, we are back with our narrator and Bellori. We stay with them, more or less, for the next one hundred and fifty pages (so, overall, the story of Anna and her family gets a little bit more page weight than Bellori and On the Nature of Angels). I'm talking about page counts because I think it is easy to be vague and even inaccurate in saying what this strange book contains, and I want to try to articulate what is actually found in these five hundred pages. This is hardest to do with regard to this main storyline, concerning Bellori's life and work. Other descriptions of A Time For Everything say, to my mind too vaguely, carelessly, that it tells us all about angels. But there are many stories, myths, ideas about angels that could figure in a catalog or investigation into the nature of angels, yet do not come into play here; we hear only in passing, for example, about the image of angels as guardians. Our narrator is concerned with angels as on a fault line between the human and the divine, and with fault lines generally: at the level of intellectual history, as changes between worldviews; and within that history, as momentous shifts from one situation to another. With regard to intellectual history, our narrator is able to use Bellori to muse on the shift to a modern worldview, since Knausgaard has positioned Bellori as one of those "obsessed young men who, in the first decades of the modern age, ensconced themselves in rooms in great cities all round Europe to think." At Bellori's time, angelology could still go hand in hand with geography, or numerology and alchemy be pursued alongside studies of motion and matter -- as they were, our narrator reminds us, by Newton -- but reason and observation were becoming ascendant over scriptural or traditional authority, and divisions being made: material vs immaterial, concrete vs abstract, physical vs spiritual, scientific vs historical, natural vs divine. "In reality it was just a matter of time before the situation would become what it's turned into today, where everything connected with the holy is regarded as abstract, so that we literally do not see the materiality of what is holy, whereas everything that concerns physical nature is exclusively seen as concrete, and we lose sight of physical nature's immaterial aspects, too." Along with such assessing of Bellori's own moment in history, our narrator follows Bellori's work in assessing major shifts in the relations between humanity and divinity, the fault lines appearing as the great flood, the incarnation, and the crucifixion. Bellori posits that the real reason for the flood was that angels had overstepped their proper bounds, as referenced by one line in Genesis, by taking up with human women who then bore their children, the giant Nephilim. How shocked, Bellori realizes, must the angels have been, when their Lord, after flooding and killing everything in reaction to their transgression, then himself so much more completely crossed that same boundary by becoming man? And how fallen must the angels be now, after watching their Lord die?
Thinking over this book, I find that I try to make it come together. I try to see how its concern over shifts in human worldview lines up with its concern over divine-human relations. The interrelation of concerns is obvious but unneat. Knausgaard puts a lot out there, but it does not seem finally to have been carefully designed. Is there a parallel between the human-divine relations, the proximity of God to his people, as Bellori finds manifested by the angels, and the changing proximity of our narrator to us? Until the final fifty page "coda", we might think the narrator is simply the author Karl Klausgaard; but in those final pages the "I" tells us a story of his own life, in our time, and we learn that he is a Norwegian man named Henrik Vankel, protagonist of Klausgaard's first book, Out of This World. Vankel's father tells him when he is young that seagulls used to be angels; this is the one link back to the previous four hundred and fifty pages. The coda does not mention Bellori, does not have Vankel reference all that thinking that I guess he's been doing about angels, the flood, the life of Christ. Vankel does give us in these final pages the reflection that provides the book title, thinking about how "not even the past is done with, even that continues to change, as if in reality there is only one time, for everything, one time for every purpose under heaven." I had thought perhaps the title was in keeping with how much this book contains, resonant but not specifically tied together: a time for everything, and here is some of that everything. Vankel's emphasis is on the "a" - one single time for everything, all at once. What to make of it?
The publisher's description of this book, and most of the reviews and readers' reactions I've read (many of them regarding UK publication this past summer of this same translation, under the title A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven), mostly prepare you for the opening pages: a story of a boy lost in the woods at night, who comes upon two men with wings. It is a lovely story, but only takes you a little ways into A Time For Everything. The story is told to us by a narrator who occasionally announces himself as an "I" or a "me" as he tells us of Antinous Bellori, the lost boy who in 1584 witnesses two angels and who then devotes his life to researching and writing a book called On the Nature of Angels.
The dominant storyline of A Time For Everything is our narrator's consideration of Bellori's work on angels, including their appearances in the book of Genesis. But barely forty pages in, the narrator disappears for two long streches (with just a few pages' reappearance in the transition between the two). For a hundred pages, we are immersed in the story of Cain and his complicated but fond love for his younger quicker brother Abel. Then for two hundred pages, we read a moving story of people at the time of the flood. We meet Noah's sister Anna and her family in the days when the rain keeps falling and falling and they eventually take to the mountains to try to keep above the rising sea. We only briefly read of Noah's instruction from God to build an Ark, and how he and his sons set to work building a huge boat in a field up in the mountains. The narrative spends more time falling back to tell us of Noah and Anna's childhood, their relationship with their father Lamech, the joy that their kid brother Barak brings, and a family tragedy. When we circle back around to the days of rain, it is again to tragedy, heightened when Anna's daughter Rachel gives birth to a baby boy, only to carry him up and up until they can go no further, and must huddle on the peak of a mountain that is now an island, looking out at the other mountain peaks turned islands, other people visible on the nearest one, also looking out across the vast waterscape. And the water is still rising.
Then, three hundred and some pages into the book, we are back with our narrator and Bellori. Other descriptions of A Time For Everything say, to my mind too vaguely, carelessly, that it tells us all about angels. But there are many stories, myths, ideas about angels that would figure in a catalog yet do not come into play here; we hear only in passing, for example, about the image of angels as guardians.
especially in the relations between humans and the divine, and he sees angels as inhabiting the intermediary between the two, and therefore as informants about the weather there.
What our narrator is interested in is fault lines in human history -- both at the level of intellectual history, fault lines between worldviews, and also within that history, changes from what situation to another.
At the meta-level in the history of ideas -- how we think about our world -- and Knausgaard has situated Bellori as one of those "obsessed young men who, in the first decades of the modern age, ensconced themselves in rooms in great cities all round Europe to think." And while at this time angelology could still go hand in hand with geography, or numerology and alchemy be pursued alongside studies of motion and matter -- as they were, we are reminded, by Newton -- a worldview was coming into being in which reason and observation were ascendant over scriptural or traditional authority, and strict divisions made: material vs immaterial, concrete vs abstract, physical vs spiritual, scientific vs historical, natural vs divine. "In reality it was just a matter of time before the situation would beome what it's turned into today, where everything connected with the holy is regarded as abstract, so that we literally do not see the materiality of what is holy, whereas everything that concerns physical nature is exclusively seen as concrete, and we lose sight of physical nature's immaterial aspects, too."
"Always ask yourself, what if it's the complete opposite?" Lamech
Our narrator is intrigued with this moment, where he sees alchemy and physics, numerology and logic, superstition and reason, scriptural authority and observation, still intermixed but beginning to be segregated. Newton, he reminds us, developed his scientific theories in trying to understand the divine presence in creation, but kept his less verifiable suppositions mostly concealed from the public.
Newton in Cambridge, Leibniz in Nuremberg, Descartes in Utrecht.
These two levels are not separate, not really, and maybe that is why Knausgaard has put the story of Anna et al (within history) in the same book as the story of Bellori (ideas about history).
And just as this book has both sections where we are immersed in a story and sections where we are regarding the story,
~ looking at fault lines within history and also regarding it.
I. At the level of experience, within the story, Within: the Flood: what was it like before. narrator ~ we can't know. it was different.
Before the flood, our narrator calculates, there must have been sixteen hundred years of human history.
human-divine relations as manifest by angels, in three periods:
1. before the Flood up until angels intercourse with humanity too far out of bounds out of balance the Nephilim.
-----this is the location of the story of Cain & Abel, near beginning, early, just a bit after the Garden.
----AND the story of Anna et al, marking the time just before the end of this period.
hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. here, our narrator is at a distance. just as the Lord ~ well, as narator discusses, actually quite close, walking in the cool of the evening in the Garden. calling out to Adam. making clothes for his people, after he tells them they are banished. and again, appears to Cain. and later to Noah.
but the boundary maintained? what does narrator conclude about this?
because through those stories, the boundary between author~Creator and Creation is maintained. we are simply in the story. the narrator does not announce himself.
2. from Flood until the Incarnation, when the Lord himself crosses bound ~ which means, annihilates? the boundary.
(in relation to hmmmmmmm above. here the narrator never fully disappears. continues to comment as relays story of Lot, and of Ezekiel. he is with us in the story, as we approach and then consider moment when the Lord joins His story, enters his creation. .....I don't know, I don't think Knausgaard thought this through, don't think he designed with care the interactions of the sections of his book, the levels of story, the levels of fault lines. Levels of story: narrator present. narrator gone, immersed in story. Levels of fault lines. Bellori & Newton & Descartes, modernity, science reason. dichotomies. Bellori sees through them. and sees the fault lines, the changes, in relation btw divine and humanity. )
-----story of Lot. Soddom & Gomorrah. that's after the Flood right?! not sure! (consult Genesis: the Garden, Adam & Eve, expelled, Cain & Abel, Seth, descendants thr generations .. begot who begot .. quick to Noah right?)
----story of Ezekiel, who eats God's scroll. Ezekiel becomes one with God's Word. *but also*: God's Word becomes one with flesh & blood man. first this, God's Word incarnated. then God himself.
[btw 2 & 3, period not covered: the life of Christ. angels not present. there at birth and at death but not imbetween. not during his life. narrator ~ Bellori imagines~understands that this is beause they are ~reeling. horrified, aghast, bewildered. the Lord himself has crossed the boundary that, when they approached it, prompted him to Flood everything.
3. after the Death of Christ, which the angels know is really the death of God. so from then on, this after, the third period, is Godlessness.
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Until the final 50 page coda, we might think the narrator is simply the author Karl Klausgaard speaking as himself; but in those final pages the "I" tells us a story of his own life, in our time, and we learn -- assuming that this "I" is the same as the one speaking throughout the book -- that he is a Norwegian man named Henrik Vankel.
Henrik Vankel is the protagonist of Klausgaard's first book, Out of This World.
A Time For Everything is the second book in a trilogy about Venkel. no. that LHild rvw seems to have been wrong about it being a trilogy. since now publishing 2500 page autobiogr novel ~Proustian~ in six installmnts. calling it Min Kamp = My Struggle = Mein Kampf (!). Bold.
So, this book is perhaps enigmatic because it is an installment in a very long work, an installment n which we mostly follow Venkel's study of On the Nature of Angels. The Genesis stories are beautiful portraits of characters and relationships, but what resonance do these stories have in this context? What meaning do they have for Venkel? What does the final coda have to do with anything that came before? ~ fathers, siblings ~. We could discuss possibilities -- and by asking these questions about how the parts of this book relate, we might go a ways toward understanding how this strange book is a 'novel' -- but I came away unsure that Klausgaard has intended a coherence. Maybe he spends two hundred pages on the story of Anna and her people, , because there *is* a time for everything. I kind of like that idea, but I also kind of find it too cutely clever, and anyway it seems unlikely that Klausgaard intended that by his title.
no it's not. just read in the coda where he considers how the past continues to be with you, and to change, and muses on this as *one* time for everything. 'one time to every purpose under heaven.'
emphasis on one. all at once. everything at once.
also, connectn btw coda & rest of book: dead seagull. father tells young Henrik "Did you know that seagulls were angels once?" shows him, under wing, a tiny little arm, pine-needle-thin fingers. vestigal.
so Henrik's father re seagulls were angels, Henrik narrates 200ish pages re Bellori on nature of angels.
~ what happens at end to Bellori? and to the angel he has captured, who we are given to understand did not die a final death but has been dying over and over and over, with Raphael tending to him, leaving him against the tree after he dies, returning to him .
a note about Klausgaard: the Guardian published a column in which he listed his 'ten favorite books about angels' and among these he includes Bellori's On the Nature of Angels. From all other indications, Bellori and his book are fictional. Klausgaard made up Bellori's book, and here he includes it on a list of favorite books. So maybe he is more consciously playful then was apparent to me in A Time For Everything?
I do not like that article, other comments found by Knausgaard in interviews (reading ggl transl after search 'Knausgard intervju'), too glib. I want author to speak re his book, closer to it. seriously, somewhat from within it.
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beautiful writing, moving, rich, imaginative, thoughtful. provocative: get lost in it, associations, reminded of so much. reminding.
in general reminded me of Calasso - not a novel, but a ruminative retelling. immersion in a subject (in Cadmus & Harmony, the subject is Greek mythology > the Greek mind. here, the subject is ~ the Bible~Genesis > the relations between humanity and the divine. and how humanity views their world.)
but here, two long stories separated out from the ruminations
Anna & Lamach & Noah & Barak I found moving, and reminded me of Per Peterson Out Stealing Horses. there the tragedy-memory was in the context of man reflecting on his early life and his father. which ~ the coda ~ maybe this is, also. but book here d n come tgthr as a whole like that.
re Anna et al, rather tightly structured within itself, sets up a frame:
the days of rain, the cherubs leaving.
moves back to Lamech at his brother's funeral, then back to the childhood of Anna and Noah, forward to Barak, then his death, then long part re Anna's meeting then life with Javan. finally return to Lamech at the funeral where he first cracks - reexperiencing the day of Barak's death "who was that man on the roof?" who he saw when arriving back in the morning from market. gets a ladder later, goes up there. then goes & rounds up the cows "Come along, girls!" he sang "Come along, girls!". Anna & Javan realize what is happening, Lamech's mental life deteriorates, now he is lying as an invalid when the rain is falling, the water rising.
back to narrator. Noah in the stark sandy world after the flood. everything is different.
~ complaints re Knausgaard setting his pre-flood human life in a Norwegian style landscape. fjords. farmhouse. advanced: guns. clothes: made professionally? some are 'homespun' but this is a distinguishing description of Abel's clothes, so generally their clothes are obtained through barter ~ ).
but to the complaints, I say Knausgard set up as ~ what if. (Lameh: Always ask yourself, What if it's the opposite?). we know little of those 1600 years of human history, human way of life must have advanced good bit, and the landscape would have been totally different than after the flood, the weight of water that so changed, demolished it. so imagine it this way.
stories with commentary, esp Ezekiel, and maybe all of the narrator's overt presence reminds of Saramago. which I like very much. irony ~ cool, dry, factual accounting.
book as a whole, left with sense that it does not add up.
writing a review not easy, because my impulse is to make it fit together. int in fault lines. antiquity /medieval/ modernity. ascendance of science. view: materiality vs divine. divine as immaterial and (so) as unchanging. Bellori saw angels, knew they were corporeal - they were eating, and knew they were a state different from how they were in the Bible. so, they had changed. so he, situated at this moment when division between material and immaterial was being reified, was specially suited to resist that view. ~ . how does that line up with his work, his finding? = the three periods of human-divine relations.
I don't know. maybe should back off the statement that int in fault lines. which seems to have gotten me all involved in trying to assess the various levels, how at work in the book. how the attention to worldview change, and human-dvine change, and narrator present or absent are parallel or meaningfully related in some way.
just review: not really a catalog of angels. ok if want can say these two: world view fault line, human-divine fault lines. seem might add up, but do not. final coda.
hard to write, because infinity of directions could go ~ is this my trouble with getting anything down, in general? not perfectionism in sense of wanting it to be perfect to be well received, but yestrying twoard some kind of perfection, saying what is the case, and with this book, so long, so much in it (and seems does not add up), could get head into it in any number of ways.
..I'm leaving out some that d n at lst yet attend to closely: anna w javan, that's what 70 pages? and the coda.
The dominant storyline of A Time For Everything is our narrator's consideration of Bellori's work on angels, including their appearances in the book of Genesis. But barely forty pages in, the narrator disappears for two long streches (with just a few pages' reappearance in the transition between the two). For a hundred pages, we are immersed in the story of Cain and his complicated but fond love for his younger quicker brother Abel. Then for two hundred pages, we read a moving story of people at the time of the flood. We meet Noah's sister Anna and her family in the days when the rain keeps falling and falling and they eventually take to the mountains to try to keep above the rising sea. We only briefly read of Noah's instruction from God to build an Ark, and how he and his sons set to work building a huge boat in a field up in the mountains. The narrative spends more time falling back to tell us of Noah and Anna's childhood, their relationship with their father Lamech, the joy that their kid brother Barak brings, and a family tragedy. When we circle back around to the days of rain, it is again to tragedy, heightened when Anna's daughter Rachel gives birth to a baby boy, only to carry him up and up until they can go no further, and must huddle on the peak of a mountain that is now an island, looking out at the other mountain peaks turned islands, other people visible on the nearest one, also looking out across the vast waterscape. And the water is still rising.
Then, three hundred and some pages into the book, we are back with our narrator and Bellori. Other descriptions of A Time For Everything say, to my mind too vaguely, carelessly, that it tells us all about angels. But there are many stories, myths, ideas about angels that would figure in a catalog yet do not come into play here; we hear only in passing, for example, about the image of angels as guardians.
especially in the relations between humans and the divine, and he sees angels as inhabiting the intermediary between the two, and therefore as informants about the weather there.
What our narrator is interested in is fault lines in human history -- both at the level of intellectual history, fault lines between worldviews, and also within that history, changes from what situation to another.
At the meta-level in the history of ideas -- how we think about our world -- and Knausgaard has situated Bellori as one of those "obsessed young men who, in the first decades of the modern age, ensconced themselves in rooms in great cities all round Europe to think." And while at this time angelology could still go hand in hand with geography, or numerology and alchemy be pursued alongside studies of motion and matter -- as they were, we are reminded, by Newton -- a worldview was coming into being in which reason and observation were ascendant over scriptural or traditional authority, and strict divisions made: material vs immaterial, concrete vs abstract, physical vs spiritual, scientific vs historical, natural vs divine. "In reality it was just a matter of time before the situation would beome what it's turned into today, where everything connected with the holy is regarded as abstract, so that we literally do not see the materiality of what is holy, whereas everything that concerns physical nature is exclusively seen as concrete, and we lose sight of physical nature's immaterial aspects, too."
"Always ask yourself, what if it's the complete opposite?" Lamech
Our narrator is intrigued with this moment, where he sees alchemy and physics, numerology and logic, superstition and reason, scriptural authority and observation, still intermixed but beginning to be segregated. Newton, he reminds us, developed his scientific theories in trying to understand the divine presence in creation, but kept his less verifiable suppositions mostly concealed from the public.
Newton in Cambridge, Leibniz in Nuremberg, Descartes in Utrecht.
These two levels are not separate, not really, and maybe that is why Knausgaard has put the story of Anna et al (within history) in the same book as the story of Bellori (ideas about history).
And just as this book has both sections where we are immersed in a story and sections where we are regarding the story,
~ looking at fault lines within history and also regarding it.
I. At the level of experience, within the story, Within: the Flood: what was it like before. narrator ~ we can't know. it was different.
Before the flood, our narrator calculates, there must have been sixteen hundred years of human history.
human-divine relations as manifest by angels, in three periods:
1. before the Flood up until angels intercourse with humanity too far out of bounds out of balance the Nephilim.
-----this is the location of the story of Cain & Abel, near beginning, early, just a bit after the Garden.
----AND the story of Anna et al, marking the time just before the end of this period.
hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. here, our narrator is at a distance. just as the Lord ~ well, as narator discusses, actually quite close, walking in the cool of the evening in the Garden. calling out to Adam. making clothes for his people, after he tells them they are banished. and again, appears to Cain. and later to Noah.
but the boundary maintained? what does narrator conclude about this?
because through those stories, the boundary between author~Creator and Creation is maintained. we are simply in the story. the narrator does not announce himself.
2. from Flood until the Incarnation, when the Lord himself crosses bound ~ which means, annihilates? the boundary.
(in relation to hmmmmmmm above. here the narrator never fully disappears. continues to comment as relays story of Lot, and of Ezekiel. he is with us in the story, as we approach and then consider moment when the Lord joins His story, enters his creation. .....I don't know, I don't think Knausgaard thought this through, don't think he designed with care the interactions of the sections of his book, the levels of story, the levels of fault lines. Levels of story: narrator present. narrator gone, immersed in story. Levels of fault lines. Bellori & Newton & Descartes, modernity, science reason. dichotomies. Bellori sees through them. and sees the fault lines, the changes, in relation btw divine and humanity. )
-----story of Lot. Soddom & Gomorrah. that's after the Flood right?! not sure! (consult Genesis: the Garden, Adam & Eve, expelled, Cain & Abel, Seth, descendants thr generations .. begot who begot .. quick to Noah right?)
----story of Ezekiel, who eats God's scroll. Ezekiel becomes one with God's Word. *but also*: God's Word becomes one with flesh & blood man. first this, God's Word incarnated. then God himself.
[btw 2 & 3, period not covered: the life of Christ. angels not present. there at birth and at death but not imbetween. not during his life. narrator ~ Bellori imagines~understands that this is beause they are ~reeling. horrified, aghast, bewildered. the Lord himself has crossed the boundary that, when they approached it, prompted him to Flood everything.
3. after the Death of Christ, which the angels know is really the death of God. so from then on, this after, the third period, is Godlessness.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Until the final 50 page coda, we might think the narrator is simply the author Karl Klausgaard speaking as himself; but in those final pages the "I" tells us a story of his own life, in our time, and we learn -- assuming that this "I" is the same as the one speaking throughout the book -- that he is a Norwegian man named Henrik Vankel.
Henrik Vankel is the protagonist of Klausgaard's first book, Out of This World.
A Time For Everything is the second book in a trilogy about Venkel. no. that LHild rvw seems to have been wrong about it being a trilogy. since now publishing 2500 page autobiogr novel ~Proustian~ in six installmnts. calling it Min Kamp = My Struggle = Mein Kampf (!). Bold.
So, this book is perhaps enigmatic because it is an installment in a very long work, an installment n which we mostly follow Venkel's study of On the Nature of Angels. The Genesis stories are beautiful portraits of characters and relationships, but what resonance do these stories have in this context? What meaning do they have for Venkel? What does the final coda have to do with anything that came before? ~ fathers, siblings ~. We could discuss possibilities -- and by asking these questions about how the parts of this book relate, we might go a ways toward understanding how this strange book is a 'novel' -- but I came away unsure that Klausgaard has intended a coherence. Maybe he spends two hundred pages on the story of Anna and her people, , because there *is* a time for everything. I kind of like that idea, but I also kind of find it too cutely clever, and anyway it seems unlikely that Klausgaard intended that by his title.
no it's not. just read in the coda where he considers how the past continues to be with you, and to change, and muses on this as *one* time for everything. 'one time to every purpose under heaven.'
emphasis on one. all at once. everything at once.
also, connectn btw coda & rest of book: dead seagull. father tells young Henrik "Did you know that seagulls were angels once?" shows him, under wing, a tiny little arm, pine-needle-thin fingers. vestigal.
so Henrik's father re seagulls were angels, Henrik narrates 200ish pages re Bellori on nature of angels.
~ what happens at end to Bellori? and to the angel he has captured, who we are given to understand did not die a final death but has been dying over and over and over, with Raphael tending to him, leaving him against the tree after he dies, returning to him .
a note about Klausgaard: the Guardian published a column in which he listed his 'ten favorite books about angels' and among these he includes Bellori's On the Nature of Angels. From all other indications, Bellori and his book are fictional. Klausgaard made up Bellori's book, and here he includes it on a list of favorite books. So maybe he is more consciously playful then was apparent to me in A Time For Everything?
I do not like that article, other comments found by Knausgaard in interviews (reading ggl transl after search 'Knausgard intervju'), too glib. I want author to speak re his book, closer to it. seriously, somewhat from within it.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
beautiful writing, moving, rich, imaginative, thoughtful. provocative: get lost in it, associations, reminded of so much. reminding.
in general reminded me of Calasso - not a novel, but a ruminative retelling. immersion in a subject (in Cadmus & Harmony, the subject is Greek mythology > the Greek mind. here, the subject is ~ the Bible~Genesis > the relations between humanity and the divine. and how humanity views their world.)
but here, two long stories separated out from the ruminations
Anna & Lamach & Noah & Barak I found moving, and reminded me of Per Peterson Out Stealing Horses. there the tragedy-memory was in the context of man reflecting on his early life and his father. which ~ the coda ~ maybe this is, also. but book here d n come tgthr as a whole like that.
re Anna et al, rather tightly structured within itself, sets up a frame:
the days of rain, the cherubs leaving.
moves back to Lamech at his brother's funeral, then back to the childhood of Anna and Noah, forward to Barak, then his death, then long part re Anna's meeting then life with Javan. finally return to Lamech at the funeral where he first cracks - reexperiencing the day of Barak's death "who was that man on the roof?" who he saw when arriving back in the morning from market. gets a ladder later, goes up there. then goes & rounds up the cows "Come along, girls!" he sang "Come along, girls!". Anna & Javan realize what is happening, Lamech's mental life deteriorates, now he is lying as an invalid when the rain is falling, the water rising.
back to narrator. Noah in the stark sandy world after the flood. everything is different.
~ complaints re Knausgaard setting his pre-flood human life in a Norwegian style landscape. fjords. farmhouse. advanced: guns. clothes: made professionally? some are 'homespun' but this is a distinguishing description of Abel's clothes, so generally their clothes are obtained through barter ~ ).
but to the complaints, I say Knausgard set up as ~ what if. (Lameh: Always ask yourself, What if it's the opposite?). we know little of those 1600 years of human history, human way of life must have advanced good bit, and the landscape would have been totally different than after the flood, the weight of water that so changed, demolished it. so imagine it this way.
stories with commentary, esp Ezekiel, and maybe all of the narrator's overt presence reminds of Saramago. which I like very much. irony ~ cool, dry, factual accounting.
book as a whole, left with sense that it does not add up.
writing a review not easy, because my impulse is to make it fit together. int in fault lines. antiquity /medieval/ modernity. ascendance of science. view: materiality vs divine. divine as immaterial and (so) as unchanging. Bellori saw angels, knew they were corporeal - they were eating, and knew they were a state different from how they were in the Bible. so, they had changed. so he, situated at this moment when division between material and immaterial was being reified, was specially suited to resist that view. ~ . how does that line up with his work, his finding? = the three periods of human-divine relations.
I don't know. maybe should back off the statement that int in fault lines. which seems to have gotten me all involved in trying to assess the various levels, how at work in the book. how the attention to worldview change, and human-dvine change, and narrator present or absent are parallel or meaningfully related in some way.
just review: not really a catalog of angels. ok if want can say these two: world view fault line, human-divine fault lines. seem might add up, but do not. final coda.
hard to write, because infinity of directions could go ~ is this my trouble with getting anything down, in general? not perfectionism in sense of wanting it to be perfect to be well received, but yestrying twoard some kind of perfection, saying what is the case, and with this book, so long, so much in it (and seems does not add up), could get head into it in any number of ways.
..I'm leaving out some that d n at lst yet attend to closely: anna w javan, that's what 70 pages? and the coda.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
az- A Time for Everything -by Karl Knausgaard
He had redeeming features, of course he had. Ezekiel could be tender and considerate; Ezekiel could suddenly realize that he'd done something unjust and hurry back to make amends or ask forgiveness, Ezekiel could also melt entirely and stare at someone with a look of innocence, open and vulnerable like a child's. Everyone could do that. (p349)
can they? can everyone do that? stare, open and vulnerable?
I like this passage very much. redeeming ~ endearing: the openness, thereness (dasein is a clearing, like a clearing in the woods, a space -- there), realness of someone who realizes. ~ who can change. come to understand. and, as here, esp shows when: come to understand that he was in the wrong, that the other was right -- and hurry back. "I'm so sorry." - "Look at me. This is what I look like when I believe in you."
He had redeeming features, of course he had. Ezekiel could be tender and considerate; Ezekiel could suddenly realize that he'd done something unjust and hurry back to make amends or ask forgiveness, Ezekiel could also melt entirely and stare at someone with a look of innocence, open and vulnerable like a child's. Everyone could do that. (p349)
can they? can everyone do that? stare, open and vulnerable?
I like this passage very much. redeeming ~ endearing: the openness, thereness (dasein is a clearing, like a clearing in the woods, a space -- there), realness of someone who realizes. ~ who can change. come to understand. and, as here, esp shows when: come to understand that he was in the wrong, that the other was right -- and hurry back. "I'm so sorry." - "Look at me. This is what I look like when I believe in you."
az- A Time for Everything -by Karl Knausgaard, trans James Anderson|Archipelago Books (November 1, 2009)
In reality, it was just a matter of time before the situation would become what it's turned into today, where everything connected with the holy is regarded as abstract, so that we literally do not see the materiality of what is holy; whereas everything that concerns physical nature is exclusively seen as concrete, and we lose sight of physical nature's immaterial aspects, too. (p346)
material / immaterial.
concrete / abstract. ~d n like usage of 'concrete' ~ too specifically connotes concrete. better? 'tangible'
physical / spiritual.
science / history (including revelation; all knowledge by authority).
nature / divinity.
matter / force.
my old argument: the divide is unreal. these are not even separate aspects.
defined in contrast to one another: the meaning is imaginary, it does not hold.
In reality, it was just a matter of time before the situation would become what it's turned into today, where everything connected with the holy is regarded as abstract, so that we literally do not see the materiality of what is holy; whereas everything that concerns physical nature is exclusively seen as concrete, and we lose sight of physical nature's immaterial aspects, too. (p346)
material / immaterial.
concrete / abstract. ~d n like usage of 'concrete' ~ too specifically connotes concrete. better? 'tangible'
physical / spiritual.
science / history (including revelation; all knowledge by authority).
nature / divinity.
matter / force.
my old argument: the divide is unreal. these are not even separate aspects.
defined in contrast to one another: the meaning is imaginary, it does not hold.
az- To Each His Own -by Leonardo Sciascia, trans Adrienne Foulke, intro W.S. Di Piero | New York Review Books Classics, (Oct 2000)
The first step -- since rain always falls on wet ground -- was to round up everyone with a prison record.
The dead are dead; help the living.
a mafia story.
mafia ~ an ethos of silence, reserve, deception.
The first step -- since rain always falls on wet ground -- was to round up everyone with a prison record.
The dead are dead; help the living.
a mafia story.
mafia ~ an ethos of silence, reserve, deception.
az-The House of Life (Common Reader Edition) - by Mario Praz, trans. Angus Davidson | David R Godine (October 15, 2009)
on display, bkcase w literary bio & cirticism & art, low shelves. attractive large paperbk, muted colors, little to tell wh it is: single quotatn ctr bkcvr.
confused ~ had just read that Common Reader closed: bankrupt 2006. maybe Godine bought some of their inventory? or no, listed here as the publisher & w a date = bought rights this one title? or to 'Cmmn Rdr Edtn' name?
concept of bk on first look reminds of another noticed recent yrs: Voyage Around My Room by Xavier De Maistre. writ during six week home arrest (for dueling!). appealing: someone's small world ~ "and over here we have my desk" ~ w all their personal associatns
"To your right is a young woman pretending to be a tour guide" (Nyr cartoon)
M Praz (1896 tse, H - 1982) among great scholar-critics .. studies of iconography, 17thC art. The House of Life as close to his autobiogr as anyth .. a quirky & magical book. A house tour, but Praz's Roman apt was a wunderkammer ..objets d'art, overflowing ephemera.. his erudition, curiosity, enthusiasm, amiability. .. disquistn on art & how objects we choose to surround us tell..
...km says reminds of book I gave her (& now ask to have again) SUNY press: Everyday Spirits 1993 cannot get it to come up on az by inputting title, even as advanced srch specifically for title (!); have to put author.
-Short essays dense with image and ideas explore such things as keys, ladders, hospitalilty, lullabies..
- Within two minutes of beginning the book, I knew I had acquired a jewel of literature.If this book were a typical example of the fruits of contemporary academic philosophy, I would hold great hope and respect for the field.
looking at now, this is very appealing:
are we most ourselves in sleep? not dream sleep. dreams tell us about waking life. y.
infant gaze takes in everything sees no thing. yes. infants "do not blink" ?!
Blink - wkp: Infants do not blink at the same rate of adults; in fact infants only blink at an average rate of one or two times in a minute.
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