From The Mess To The Masses

1.


(They're so French I can't even stand it.)  (Also, the sound quality is unfortunately poor.)

2.

I'm reading Lilian Pizzichini's biography of Jean Rhys, The Blue Hour, and am enjoying (mostly) that Pizzichini has decided to approach biography via fiction.  The book reads like a novel, which I think is perhaps more appropriate than a cut-and-dry account of someone's life--details are always invented or reimagined, no?  What I don't like is the melodramatic overtones of Pizzichini's psychologizing of Rhys--something Maud Newton also pointed out in her review of The Blue Hour.  This tendency is especially off-putting considering that Rhys managed to render terror, grief, depression, and jealousy without ever sounding dramatic--just terrified or grieving or despondent or envious.  She was a precise, careful writer, and I wish her life was more precisely written, as glad as I am to see her written about.

3.

                                   

The Met is exhibiting this weird collage art--Victorian family photographs cut and pasted by Victorian women.  I think they're fantastic.  This one was made by Georgina Berkeley and belongs to the Musée D'Orsay.  Some more of my favorite images in the exhibit:

4.

I can't get Peter Terrin's story "The Murderer," anthologized in Best European Fiction 2010, out of my head.  After a man murders his neighbor--a spoiled "artist" who consistently blares loud music night and day--he is haunted by other real--and possibly real--murders that he previously committed.  Luckily (or unluckily), the character lives in a society whose New Measures grant each person two get-off-scot-free murders.  What follows is not so much gruesome as mesmerizing, not so much terrifying as captivating.  And that accomplishment is both terrifying and captivating.  I'm looking forward to reading much much more out of this anthology and hope that at least some of Terrin's work is translated from the Dutch...

And on that note, I'm going to go drink more tea.