Rich Mintz

If your musical training (like mine) has left you with the ability to pick out “The Entertainer” and “Love Is Here to Stay” on the piano, and not much else, you’ve probably wondered, as I have, exactly what the point is of having a conductor up in front of an orchestra. The players all know the music, and know their instruments; everyone can keep a beat; why do you need that guy, anyway?

This long LA Times story about the purpose of orchestra conductors explains that the conductor is what overlays the music with an interpretation. Apparently orchestras can play without a conductor, but they usually aren’t very good; even if they’re technically proficient, which important orchestras always are, the music often sounds mechanical and soulless without the interpretive overlay of the conductor’s vision.

The article also confirms something that I sort of suspected, which is that most of the baton flourishes that mean anything to the orchestra are referring to points of musical interpretation that have already been discussed and rehearsed in regard to this particular performance. So a particular wave of the baton doesn’t mean, say, “tremolo” to every orchestra across all time, like a sign in ASL; rather, it means something like “ok, now! — do that thing we did in rehearsal at this point,” or “ok, the thing that’s called for in the score around this point starts… now.”

I’ll try to think of something pithy to say about this, but in the meantime I just thought it was interesting.

Symposium Books delivered my order in five days, so now I have a ton of new graphic novels and plain-old reproduced comic books to enjoy. I’m starting with Julie Doucet, because I like the stuff of hers I already own….

…but I had no idea she was so … you know, graphic. Doucet’s subject matter in this book is more freewheeling with regard to sex, sexuality, gender, fear, and the unconscious than you normally see even among “experimental” cartoonists. In virtually every panel (indeed, in everything of hers I’ve ever seen), she draws herself, or some alternate version of herself, and in very few of them do things seem to be going well for her.

Below I’ve provided links to three panels which, believe it or not, are among the three least edgy panels in the book. Don’t click if you’re not a fan of the names of body parts, anthropomorphized plucked chickens, or the F word. (I was careful! Because I’m a nice guy, Julie is fully clothed in all these, and I spared you “male Julie copulating with female Julie,” “body part, yes the one you’re thinking of, severed by a jackknife,” and so forth.)

Julie in the kitchen after a long night (warning: contains expletives you can’t say on TV)

Julie and her woodland friends (warning: contains creepy-looking beaver-type creature with a coffee pot)

Julie concerned about her anatomy (warning: refers to a body part that rhymes with “Regina”)

All duplicated without permission, and deliberately (yeah, right) blurry so that you’ll run out and buy buy buy and make Julie Doucet a rich woman. Here’s a link to all the Julie Doucet you can possibly want to see in one place.

So I’m done with Martin Amis’s London Fields.

I think everything I said before still holds. In fact, I found myself tumbling through it faster and faster as I got deeper and deeper into it, taking more for granted about the fictional universe and thus able (eager) to eat my way through it and bigger and bigger bites.

This is what happens when you get far enough into a book with a plot that is rolling forward of its own momentum toward a foreshadowed end state, even (especially) if that foreshadowing is ominous and grave: you can’t wait to get there and see how it turns out.

I wasn’t quite satisfied by the ending, but I enjoyed the experience so much — and felt the characterizations of the four major personalities in the book were so richly fleshed out — that Amis can be forgiven that.

Buy, read, enjoy.

I saw this guy reading what I infer was Batwoman: Elegy in the subway, and I thought it was cool to see someone reading a graphic novel OPENLY AND WITHOUT SHAME in the subway. And so I took a picture. And then I talked to him, and he was really nice, and he found out I hadn’t read The Sandman or Watchmen and he said, “Dude, I read Watchmen every month.” And I was ashamed.

I was chatting briefly online with my friend “Dionysus” and the subject of graphic novels happened to come up (I think I brought up Paul). He suggested that I check out the authors Joe Matt and Seth, and I found their books remaindered at Symposium (and remembered seeing them in the store when I was in Providence). The upshot: I spent $70 on seven books, including theirs and a couple of Julie Doucet’s and this interesting-looking thing which is remaindered at $2.98. So thanks, Dionysus!

After coming across Paul Moves Out in the massive graphic novels section at Symposium Books in Providence — populated largely by remainders, so the prices are right — I’ve fallen in love with Michel Rabagliati’s gentle drawing style, and I’m in the process of ordering everything else he has that’s in print (which appears to be at least three more “Paul” novels of like size).

This one is the story of a young graphic designer from Montreal in the early 1980s, a time of promise and hope (remember the early 1980s, when I was only a few years younger than Paul) — going to school, first love, first apartment. It’s more than a little arch (despite the deceptively simple happy-face panels), encompassing Adult Themes (or at least Young Adult Themes) as well as lots of detail-filled daily life in Montreal, a city I’ve visited half a dozen times. (There were a few locations in this story that even I recognized.) In many ways it reminds me of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, but with a measure of darkness leached out of it.

I’ve mostly avoided graphic novels in the past because they’ve typically either seemed intolerably preachy or schmaltzy (remember Maus?) or required a concordance to keep the backstory straight (remember, you know, anything ever published with a superhero or an orc in it?). The Boon Companion’s been pushing me to read The Sandman for about three years, and it’s sitting right here behind me. Maybe if I start with something gentle and visually rich like this, I can graduate to the harder stuff.

This, and a lot more like it, is published by Montreal-based Drawn & Quarterly Books.

I read a lot of nonfiction, especially history and cultural studies, which won’t surprise anyone who knows me; I’ve been teased (accurately) as one of the few people who’d buy pay actual money for a book about the history of the Postal Service. But for any of you who think I read only nonfiction (are you listening, Boon Companion?) — well, it’s just not true. About every fifth book or so, I need to dig into a really meaty novel and not let go until I’ve eaten the whole thing.

The last meaty novel I read, back in the spring, was Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War, really six novels, comprising her Balkan Trilogy and her Levant Trilogy. Spanning the years from just before the Second World War through roughly the end of it, these books are the thinly fictionalized account of what she and her husband lived through as British citizens in Romania, Athens, and Egypt as the war coursed through the region. But the war came to an end, and so did the books, and I went back to my regular diet.

I tried a couple of novels in the intervening months, but nothing seemed to stick.

But last week in Providence, at Myopic Books in Wayland Square — along with a biography of Alexander the Great and a book on Southern culture — I picked up a copy of Martin Amis’s London Fields, which I’ve been meaning to read for the better part of a decade. I started it and quickly got drawn in, and am finding myself carving out a little extra reading time every day. Now I’m 200 pages in, and well immersed.

The experience of a long-form novel is something you don’t get on the Internet (although, of course, you do get other things from the Internet), and it’s only in the most immersive nonfiction (like Piers Brendon’s The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, which I loved) that you get anything that approaches it. You build around you a personal perspective on the venues and trajectories in the novel, come to inhabit the characters’ motivations and to see them from all sides, to anticipate and fear their interactions. You live for a time in someone else’s world. And if (as I did with Manning’s six novels) you come to be comfortable there, it’s a moment of great sadness when you come to the end, especially if you’re reading a dead author who’s not going to be producing any more.

Until I finish, I won’t say any more about London Fields itself, except to say that it takes place in London and it’s more substantive than I expected from the playful Amis (son of Kingsley Amis, whom I can’t endure).

According to today’s Times, Allegra Goodman has a new novel, The Cookbook Collector — which I’ve now ordered. (Disclosure: Allegra Goodman and I were in college together, and we know people in common, although I haven’t spoken to her in 20 years.)

I’ve enjoyed every published word of Goodman’s, from her stories in the New Yorker to the most recent Intuition — she is one on that short list of authors whose books I’ll order in hardcover the moment I hear about them. If I had to pick one novel to take to a desert island, it might well be Goodman’s Paradise Park, the raucously funny yet serious and thoughtful story of a young woman hungry for spiritual meaning. I liked that one so much I gave it as a gift to a dozen people that year. Aside from the stories themselves, I always learn about something new from Allegra’s books — about the Jewish communities in Hawaii and Brooklyn and the Catskills and Miami, for example. (This is something Goodman has in common with Philip Roth, an author you wouldn’t otherwise associate her with — I learned more about the glove industry in Newark, New Jersey from reading Roth than probably everyone who will ever read this blog post put together has ever known about it.) So go buy her new book right now!

All the paraphernalia. I’m still getting emailed by these people, six years later, and it still makes me miss the biz.

Yes, Kerri, I am an Amazon addict. I can’t stop! It’s too easy to see a book that looks interesting and, you know, just CLICK and wait 36 hours and have it land in my lap. So sue me.

In theory I get around to reading all these; in practice, I read the ones that look interesting and accumulate the others until the next winnowing. But at least I got to touch them and look at them. That’s something, isn’t it?

Today’s arrival, which someone from one of the many urbanism lists I’m on recommended: My Kind of Transit: Rethinking Public Transportation in America, by Darrin Nordahl.