Hello, readers.
Welcome to Tuesday. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Here are some things of note.
Thing one.
The Paris Review, that redoubtable publication neither based in Paris nor particularly known for their reviews, has launched a podcast.
It does not seem to be a podcast, in the way of the New Yorker Radio Hour, that is all that interested in contextualizing its stories, so much as it seems interested in letting, as editor Loren Stein says, “the writing speak for itself.”
Its first episode includes, among other things, bits of an interview they did with Maya Angelou and a reading by Wallace Shawn of the Denis Johnson story “Car Crash While Hitchhiking”.
I loved it.
Thing two.
Michael Palin has been writing a diary, on and off, since 1969. Here is something he wrote on July 21st, 1969.
At 3.00 this morning I woke Helen, and we both watched as the first live television pictures from the moon showed us a rather indistinct piece of ladder, then a large book, and finally, at 3.56, Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the lunar surface. He said the ground beneath his feet (I almost wrote ‘the earth beneath his feet’) was composed mainly of dust—for a moment one felt he was in danger of falling into a kind of quicksand—but soon he was reassuringly prancing about and telling us that the one-sixth gravity conditions were less hazardous than in simulation.
To bed at 5.00, with the image in my mind of men in spacesuits doing kangaroo hops and long, loping walks on the moon, in front of a strange spidery object, just like the images in my mind after reading Dan Dare in the old Eagle comics—only this time it’s true. A lot of science fiction is suddenly science fact.
I received Michael Palin’s diaries from 1969 to 1979 as a gift. I think it’s going to be an amazing gift.
Thing three.
Manohla Dargis wrote an article in the New York Times called “Louis C.K. and Hollywood’s Canon of Creeps.” It is an article of great clarity and rage in which, among other things, she points us back to her earlier review of Louis C.K.’s film I Love You, Daddy, and then reviews her review of that film, and then, in the end, reviews the act of reviewing films. It’s brilliant.
I was 18 when I saw “Manhattan” and I despised it because I knew that its reveries were built on a lie that few adults, including film critics, seemed willing to acknowledge. Perhaps that’s partly why I appreciated “I Love You, Daddy” the first time I saw it. Louis C.K. seemed to be pointing at Mr. Allen with a queasy homage that was getting at the truth of “Manhattan” even as “I Love You, Daddy” circled — and circled — its own creator’s complicity in female exploitation.
When I watched “I Love You, Daddy” a second time, the jokes no longer landed; its shocks felt uglier, cruder. But for once a filmmaker seemed to be admitting to the misogyny that we know is always there and has often been denied or simply waved off, at times in the name of art.
Thing four
In our latest episode, LANTERNY FILM TYPE MACHINES, we talk about stories by Jean Rhys and Camilla Grudova. You might know Jean Rhys from her novel, Wide Sargasso Sea. You might know Camilla Grudova from her recent win at the Shirley Jackson Awards.
In either case, I hope you enjoy this episode.
Happy listening, readers.
ttfn.
the magnelephant review 