Still Here

Word of the day: prolix: drawn out, too long; marked by an excess of words

Forget most of what I wrote yesterday. I have decided to finish my first novel. I want to do it in short story-as-novel form, ala Olive Kitteridge. No rush to get it done, but I will finish it. The second novel, I'll reshape that as a long short story too.

So, soon I'll start re-shaping, re-configurating the first novel as a short story and I'll begin a new short story soon too. Then I'll work on the second novel, start to re-shape that too.

It would be nice, satisfying, to have several short story collections by the time I'm thirty-three. So no more gloom there.

It is the time of the year when film critics start handing out their awards. There is a surplus, an onslaught of these things, almost every city or region in the country with its own prizes. The only ones that really matter, in my mind, are the New York critics (a circle composed of critics I read - NY Times, Salon, USA Today, Entertainment Weekly, among others) and L.A., along, of course, with the SAGs and the Oscars. The New York critics, getting a head start on their colleagues, announced their winners today:
Film - The Artist, its director, Michel Hazanavicius, also winning
Actor - Brad Pitt, for Moneyball and Tree of Life
Actress - the indomitable Meryl Streep for her portrayal, of course, of Margaret Thatcher in the upcoming The Iron Lady
Supporting Actor - Albert Brooks, atypically cast against type as a terrifying villain in the cool, well-received Drive, with Ryan Gosling, Christina Hendricks, and Carey Mulligan
Supporting Actress - Jessica Chantain, the out-of-nowhere actress who came on like a torrid, insanely-talented storm this year, for her turns in Take Shelter, The Debt, The Help, and Tree of Life
Maybe we have some legitimate Oscar contenders here.

- Today has been the Winter-iest day in Georgia so far this season, with temperatures in the high-forties, overcast. But I can live with this.
- Hart of Dixie, which Julia and I watch every week on the C-Dubs, may not be the most original show but it is extremely easy to watch, light as a souffle, and Rachel Bilson's stuffed-nose, yeah-huh gurgly voice has its appeal.
- Speaking of voices, I heard Alan Rickman interviewed on NPR today. That voice! Haughty and erudite, crisp and phlegmy. Favorite Rickman performance: Hmmm... Galaxy Quest?

- I read the teensiest of articles about artist Blinky Palermo in Smithsonian magazine and I wanted to learn a little more about him because he seemed to be on the cusp of being a well-known name in the art world until his death at the age of 33 in 1977. A modern abstractionist who painted on canvas, wood, and metal, Palermo was inspired by Abstract Expressionism, Malevich, and the Beats. Born in Leipzig, fleeing Germany with his family, he studied in Dusseldorf under Joseph Beuys, but eventually made his way to New York. He is arguably most famous for his Cloth Pictures, in which he took sewn, horizontal strips of department store-bought dyed monochrome cloth. He would then stitch several of the cloths together and then mount them on stretchers. The works, hung low on gallery walls, brought to mind consumer culture (notwithstanding the fact that the fabric itself was readily available in consumer stores) in the sense that they had a decorative aspect, with simple shapes and clean, clear demarcation resembling ads. (I don't want to get too over-my-head here, so I'll let this be). Suffice to say, from what I've read, Palermo recognized that feeling, the universal act of it, was hard, if not impossible, to portray objectively in terms of visual representation. Above is 1964's Composition with 8 Red Rectangles (oil and graphite on canvas). Late in life he worked extensively with metal

- Is it time to start thinking back on the seventy-plus books I've read this year? Why not? I've delved deep into the ouevres of Patricia Highsmith and Anne Tyler, but I don't know if I found an author I like more, I appreciate more, than the late, great Richard Yates. Of the five works of his I've read, I haven't been disappointed by any of them. Clean, pinpoint insights, dialogue hard to improve upon, characters so accessible and relatable, great swaths of earned, raw sadness, and that hovering, encroaching, fatalistic, choking doom - Hell as Modern Life.

- Fantasy Football for the week? Huge games last night by Drew Bress, Jimmy Graham, and Victor Cruz carried me to a 3-3 finish. 46-26 for the year.

- I'm off to start a new Tom Perrotta book. Until tomorrow.