Category Archive: WRITING & LITERATURE
Eighteen Books You Should Read After You Die
Hell is other people's libraries
We are all familiar with the lists of ten, fifty, one hundred, one thousand and one “Books You Should Read Before You Die”. We at The Varnished Culture had not realised that it has been definitively proven that there is reading in the afterlife but, as it obviously has, we have compiled a list of books which absolutely must be read after death – i.e. not in this lifetime.:- The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt The Magicians by Lev Grossman Anything by Milan Kundera Wired by Bob Woodward Zeitoun by Dave Eggers The Kite Runner by…
Continue Reading →Memento Mori
(Giovanni Martinelli c. 1635)
(by Muriel Spark) Don’t let the question of who is making the famous “Remember you must die” phone calls distract you, o gentle reader, from the more important reflections on memory, sanity, guilt, narcissism and avarice raised in this searing novelette. Although under threat, a phalanx of elderly people simply up the ante and behave even more badly than they did in their (adulterous, manipulative, black-mailing) youth. There are amusing characters – a bellicose poet who gets into fisticuffs with a crippled but no less fearsome critic over the reputation of a dead poet – a would-be Margaret Mead of the geriatric who studies the elderly;…
Continue Reading →Lucky Jim
From the not-so-merrie film
(by Kingsley Amis) (1954) Grand-daddy of English campus novels, a funny yet serious tale of angry young man Jim Dixon who rebels yet wants in; despises and embraces the bourgeois groves of academe and despite some hilariously bad behaviour, flourishes. Sex and alcohol are pursued with as much fervour as learning: it was ever thus, we suppose. But you haven’t lived till you follow the account of Jim’s keynote lecture on “Merrie England”
Continue Reading →Macbeth
"Out, damned spot!" (Polanski version)
(by William Shakespeare) (1606) (Dir. Justin Kurzel) (2015) (Advance screening, Adelaide 29/9/15) [Films noted in passing: (Dir. Roman Polanski) (1971), (Dir. Orson Welles) (1948)] The Scottish Play is the Bard’s tightest, tautest, most nightmarish work, It contains his best poetry – in fact, almost every line is superb and has no waste. It’s personae encapsulate all of Freud and his successors, but says it better. Macbeth lays bare for us the fatal links whereby valour and honour, under the strains of chance, imagination and “vaulting ambition”, lead to evil acts, and ultimately, overweening psychopathy – a manual showing us how one good, or bad, step downwards leads to the next, and…
Continue Reading →The Lost Landscape
(by Joyce Carol Oates). Joyce Oates wrote this:- “‘My sweet little blue-eyed girl,’ he said in a half-sung sigh that had nothing to do with [Connie’s] brown eyes but was taken up just the same by the vast sunlit reaches of the land behind him and on all sides of him – so much land that Connie had never seen before and did not recognize except to know that she was going to it.”* Surely one of the most chilling and sublime sentences in American fiction. So I pre-ordered the first volume of her memoirs (excluding “A Widow’s Story’) with alacrity and…
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