Mark Zero's Blog, page 6
February 15, 2010
Lust: What if Beauty is dumb and the Beast is just a beast?
Now that Valentine's Day is over and the best chocolates have long since disappeared from that heart-shaped box, let's talk about the real heart of the matter, the secret we hide inside all of our flowery phrases and champagne dreams: Lust. Cambridge Philosophy Professor Simon Blackburn contributes this volume on life's most guilty pleasure to [...:]
February 14, 2010
Romeo & Juliet Make an Omelet
The classical idea of romance is tragic—the lovers want something they really can't have in this lifetime, and so someone must ultimately be sacrificed to the idea of love. Romance survives as an ideal precisely because it can never quite be realized in this imperfect world, where a collicky baby keeps Juliet up half the [...:]
February 12, 2010
Should You Kill Yourself for Love? Panel Discussion with Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Juliet Capulet & Lucy Moderatz
During this Valentine's Week survey of Romances, we've noticed that a lot of characters in literary romances kill themselves for love. So we've invited some of the most notable lover-suicides here today to discuss their choices, along with Lucy Moderatz, the main character of the 1995 film While You Were Sleeping, who does not kill [...:]
February 11, 2010
Does Romance lead to Marriage? Turgenev's Spring Torrents
Several of you took issue with my Valentine's Week post about Pride and Prejudice, saying that I was unjustly dismissive of Austen only because the romances in P&P lead to happy marriages. Isn't that where romance is supposed to lead, to a happy marriage? What's wrong with a happy ending?
There's nothing wrong with happy endings. [...:]
There's nothing wrong with happy endings. [...:]
February 9, 2010
Valentine's Week Romances: Pride & Prejudice
Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice has been adapted for television, film and stage eleven times, and now a series of derivative novels adds vampires and zombies to the basic story. What fascinates us about this book?
The novel has endured because of its multiple layers of satire (largely downplayed in film adaptations); but the story [...:]
The novel has endured because of its multiple layers of satire (largely downplayed in film adaptations); but the story [...:]
February 8, 2010
Today in the Holocene: Valentine's Week
All this week, leading up to Valentine's Day, I'll be writing about romances, so I thought it best to kick off the series with a little background. By romance, I don't mean the quasi-pornographic bustier-busters you see at grocery store checkouts or the heroic medieval verse narratives of knights like Gawain and Orlando; instead, I [...:]
February 4, 2010
Belles-Lettres: Grunt
Illustrator Sandra Boynton's perverse love letter to Gregorian Chant, Grunt, is a multimedia satire of Medieval earnestness and the only classical recording I know that offers rigorously arranged, beautifully performed songs in Pig Latin. The package includes a lovely hardcover book, generously and humorously illustrated, detailing the history and mission of the fictitious monastic community [...:]
February 3, 2010
Library of Babel: My Friends
Emmanuel Bove's slender first novel My Friends follows World War One veteran Victor Baton down some of the the seediest alleys in Paris in a futile search for companionship. The novel's title is ironic because, in fact, Baton has no friends, and though his misery would love to find some company, Baton chooses potential friends [...:]
February 2, 2010
The Spoiler: Great Expectations
Magwitch is Pip's real benefactor. Pip and Estella end up together.
February 1, 2010
Shelf Life: The Elegance of the Hedgehog
For an ostensibly philosophical novel about class differences, The Elegance of the Hedgehog shows surprisingly little understanding of either the philosophies it cites or the politics it critiques, and its characters are mere fantasies, idealized notions of both the rich and the poor. Set in a posh apartment building in the upper-crusty 7th arrondissement of [...:]
