If The Cosmos Wears A Beard

I went to the Wake County Library Booksale Saturday before last, and I got a shipment from Edward R. Hamilton this past Tuesday.

(This is only a partial list, but even so, it's going to be looooong. Skipping doing any pics this time.)


( Wake County Library Booksale haul: )

God, I'm tired just typing all that in.

Can The Daily Show survive the Barack Obama Presidency?

I've been thinking about this for several years now, wondering where the show could go post-Bush. There was a telling incident in 2007: Stewart tried to make a joke about Hillary Clinton (this was when she was still the presumptive nominee and liberals hadn't gone hardcore for Obama yet). The audience resisted, and IIRC even booed and hissed a little. Stewart said, "Oh, when it's your guy you don't like it!" I bet that's a taste of what's to come.

The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton

Another book I read a while ago but am just now getting around to writing up . . .

In her introduction Wharton offhandedly claims for herself a Celtic sensibility, which brought me up a little short; but after all, her maiden name was Jones.

Wharton was a disciple of Henry James, but unlike James it appears she didn't bring her A-game to the ghost story genre (with one major exception). Many of these stories start off very Jamesian, but a few paragraphs in the prose rapidly simplifies, making the stories more readable but also less substantial. I consulted the dates on the copyright page, and the later stories are noticeably more pedestrian, which is a common critical complaint about her work in general.

So, a few quick comments on some of the stories. "The Eyes" is about a wasted life - a (much) slighter version of "The Jolly Corner". "Kerfol" is about the sinister history of a Breton country house and is reminiscent of M.R., not Henry, James. "All Souls'" begins very promisingly, with a sick old rich woman awakening and wandering around her mysteriously deserted mansion hunting for her vanished servants, but the ultimate explanation is a letdown. "Bewitched" is in Ethan Frome territory but is otherwise undistinguished. "The Triumph of the Night" is about a bystander who unknowingly witnesses the exploitation of a sick youth by his uncle, a ruthless robber baron, but the narrator misses his chance to intervene. "Miss Mary Pask" is a total fakeout and a rather clumsy attempt at humor. And so on. You get the picture.

The one major exception? "Afterward", the only story that has substance and actual genuine feeling backing it up. I read it as an expression of the frustrations of being an upper class wife at the turn of the twentieth century, and these women's incredible vulnerability: they are so dependent on their husbands but are totally ignorant of their spouses' actual business affairs. (And also, not so incidentally, of their husbands' probity, or lack thereof.) Oddly enough, "Afterward" is the one Wharton that's in just about every ghost story anthology. It almost makes you think anthologists might actually know what they're doing, shifting the wheat from the chaff . . .

In the most recent issue of The New Yorker there's a profile of Marlon Brando which mentions in passing that the actor flunked kindergarden. Wow. I didn't even know that was possible.

(And to make this post a little more substantial, I was very taken with a new-to-me bit where Stella Adler was asked if Brando was a great actor and she responded, "We'll never know." That ranks right up there with Zhou Enlai's "It's too soon to tell" when he was queried on the significance of the French Revolution.)