Considerations...: Africa

Word of the day : corrade : to wear or crumble away through abrasion

Well, the tornado warning passed. All we got is a load of rain, for Pete's sake.

Gabriel had a ball yesterday at the pool and swam (or what he thought was swimming) his heart out. Today, he's messing around the house. Julia is back at school and I'm... well, working on my blog.

You want a soul track for today? I'll hook you up. As long as you're willing to get a bit more obscure.

"She Shot a Hole in My Soul," by Clifford Curry. It was a minor R&B chart hit for Curry in 1967. Curry, born in Knoxville, Tennessee, is known as the King of Beach Music. He was in a few bands before going solo in the late 1960s. He still lives in Tennessee and still tours throughout the southeast.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0k8fepmmBOY

*

I'm determined to get through the list of 100 Influential Photographers (courtesy of Professional Photographer).

Erwin Blumenfeld (#44)

Blumenfeld was born in Berlin in 1897 and gained renown publishing Dadaist collages making fun of Hitler in the 1930s. In the late 1930s, he turned his talents to photography, working for Vogue and Cosmopolitan. He broke major ground, doing major things that had never been done before - print solarization and superimposition, the use of mirrors and gauzy fabrics to divide photographic space. His nude photography was acclaimed, too. By the early 1940s, Blumenfeld had fled Europe for America, where, working for Harper's Bazaar and Look (among others), he was the highest-paid photographer in the world. His screens and wet silk and contrived angles and shadows gave his images an intoxicating artificiality.

*

Book Review

There are some books out there that you can't really find anything wrong with, that are well-written and generally easy to get through, but, for whatever reason, you don't particularly like them very much.

Paul Theroux's The Lower River (2012) is one of them. After college, Theroux himself spent four years teaching English in Malwai in the Peace Corps. In the novel, a retired Massachusetts businessman, separated from his wife, adrift, heads back to the African country, to the small village that provided the most defining, most rewarding moments of his life. These early scenes, with its smells and richness invoking the strong, sensual whiffs of memory and autobiography, are the book's best. Theroux's sense of place is so visually strong and complete that it immerses us immediately.

The plot nose-dives and grinds to a halt about a 100 pages in. Ellis Hock, the main character, finds the village from forty years ago still there, but now dirt-poor, eventless, the school he helped construct, a waste land, a squatter's hut. The villagers are suspicious, greedy, apathetic. We get Theroux's points, his satire - Africa doesn't need White Man's help, its people need little more from us than money and have become as callous, close-minded, cliched and calculating as the white do-gooders who think they can make a one-day difference there. The characters aren't one-dimensional, but they don't really move much - they're all liars.

Basically, Hock is held captive by the villagers who continually demand money from him for food and shelter, rob him, prevent his escape. The hype surrounding the book continually refers to the heart-of-darkness Africa seen in the great fiction and nonfiction of Conrad and Graham Greene and others. I suppose that's not surprising, but I don't think the novel is by any means a classic. I was a little bored at times, not particularly moved by any of the proceedings. I like Theroux's often-bitter, disenchanted, seen-it-all (or is it know-it-all?), snide voice - which could grate - but The Lower River never really built up to anything, at least for me. I thought the ending was rushed too. This is a tough one for me. I liked it, but not really. I'm not sure why I didn't like it more - I just didn't.

A good read for the most part, but I doubt if it will even be in my mind a few weeks from now. And I also sense that I'll stick to Theroux's illuminating travel nonfiction instead of his fiction.

(***)

*

USA Today had an article today on 12 new (or returning) summer shows? Any of them sound good to you?

http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/news/story/2012-05-28/summer-tv/55251202/1

The third season of Covert Affairs is a given, I think I'll give Longmire a chance. The jovial, manly, very Western author of the books is Craig Johnson, who was at the Savannah Book Festival this past February. I'll try out one episode, at least. Maybe.

*

Finally, let's do our Things for the week...

The 10 TV Shows Currently In Production That I Never Miss