February hit me like a truck. Work piled up at the office, and a nasty cold knocked me sideways. Result? Fewer books finished, fewer posts written, fewer outings. But I still managed to catch some shows. At the Comédie Française: Marivaux's La double inconstance. Silvia gets kidnapped by a prince who's fallen hard for her. Problem: she's already committed to someone else...
"...and when you think that at any moment we could all die from smallpox... or anthrax, you start asking yourself: 'Why? Why write? What a pointless occupation! One more book or one less, what's the difference?'... Then you realize..." Posy Simmonds gets the writer's life. This graphic novel cuts through the pretension and captures the absurdity of literary culture perfectly.
"We did what we knew how to do. We left." Kwaku Sai was born into crushing poverty in Ghana—a crumbling hut, a father who fled, a mother raising five kids alone. But he got lucky: missionary school. Brilliant student, full scholarship. He escapes to America, becomes a surgeon, builds a new life. Then everything falls apart...
Still recovering from whatever plague the universe threw at me (the microbes seem to be retreating, but I'm not saying it too loud). In the meantime, here's a Buddhist parable I pulled from Thomas Pynchon that made me laugh harder than it probably should have...
"The critic's life, with the kind of massive passivity it seemed to demand, resembled the life of a custard-cream rock star. Without the inherent pleasures, sure, but also without the drawbacks." I used to really like Arnaud Viviant's work. This one though? It's about the world of cultural criticism and all its absurdities...
"Was time a bag you could stuff anything into? And what if it moved in circles instead of straight lines, always bringing us back to where we started?" When two old friends run into each other by accident on a bridge, decades of history come flooding back. They were inseparable as kids. Then life happened...
"He's a spectator, a stowaway in his own life, an illegal immigrant. Because it finally happened: the void swallowed him whole." For once, I'm quoting the back cover because it's brilliant: "Who is Vernon Subutex? A legend of the Paris music scene from the 90s. Everyone came to his record store. Then the internet killed physical music, and Vernon became invisible..."