C.A. Hall's Blog, page 15

What to Risk

In reading Jonah Lehrer's Proust Was A Neuroscientist, I am struck by the section on Stravinsky. Stravinsky, feeling that music had become boring, decided to inject dissonance into his compositions. First, for theDiaghilev balletPetrushka, Stravinsky set two folk melodies against each other, creating an uncomfortable bitonality. But it wasn't until his Rites of Spring that Stravinsky fully realized his vision of dissonance. At the premier of Rites, as the story goes, there was a riot. Once th...

The Ghost of His Father

“Everything begins elsewhere, he knows that: dawn, Christmas, love, beauty, terror, the wind, the sky, the horizon, his own soul. It begins far in the woods, or out on some windy field by sea. He wants to be there, not here; he wants to be where things begin, and he is so close, he is so near. Only—for reasons he cannot explain—something stands in his way, something he didn’t ask for. Reason, terror, unworthiness, he can’t even name it, it takes different guises every time, but it is always...

Why She Read Romance

“After a while, however, I began to see that the pleasure came not from the stories or the characters so much as from the knowledge that somebody out there knew her daydreams—not just in the broader sense of plot and circumstance, but also in the finer details, in the perfumes and the colours and the late-night conversations. Knew them and, so, knew her finer self: the woman who could have walked on a moonlit beach with some beautiful, diflicult man, had things been different; the woman who...

Who Is More Wounded?

Reading John Burnside's A Lie About My Father. There is a scene where young John asks his mother why he doesn't have a twin. It's a scene which should be cute, but there is something in this scene; in the way she moves and all the things that she doesn't say, which is dreadfully sad. Here is a woman who is married to a useless and brutal man; a woman who has just had a stillbirth, and her six year old son is asking if the hospital wouldn't let them have two babies. She's laughs, almost in sp...

Brief Thoughts on Proust

I’ve been reading a lot about Proust lately as well as actually reading Proust. I’ve tried turning others on to him but I am starting to think that Proust is more of an acquired taste.

There are times when what we read seems to take on the feeling of cosmic design; a feeling that you have almost been guided to a book or series of books by something larger than yourself. I’m not a religious man. I don’t believe in any of that nonsense, but I do pay attention when events begin to seem fated. I...

Brief Thoughts on The King In Yellow by Robert William Chambers

I picked up The King In Yellow because of its connection to True Detective, hoping that it would shed some light on the mystery of the show. It did not.`

This book is kind of like three books. One is really good, one is shit and one is mediocre. The first several short stories in this book are suspenseful and eerie, almost on par with Edgar Allen Poe. They all refer to a fictional book “The King In Yellow” which drives whom ever reads it mad. Then, suddenly the book changes and there are s...