Those who subscribe know that often the Library of America books can land with a clonk. The recent Emerson and Thoreau and Twain volumes were of course good if not thrilling to receive; the Philip K. Dick one of last year was great and surprising, if a bit oddly curated for my tastes. So when the Shirley Jackson collection arrived last week, it was like a party had gone off in the mailbox! A party of words! LADY WORDS EVEN! Now joining an astoundingly slender list of women in the 204-book series, we have, inevitably, heard that Shirley Jackson's just not worthy. 1. You can suck eggs and 2. go read We Have Always Lived in the Castle and then 3. you can suck eggs some more, dumb boys.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
51
Choire, I LITERALLY also just tweeted about WHALITC. Her biography is strangely amazing; one of the few I've ever been able to read, because I am a girl and can't really do nonfiction.
The news that you subscribe to the LoA just broke my awesomeness yardstick.
'My Daemon Lover' has been creeping me out lately (her stories are a slow burn). Also, 'The Summer People'. I need to get this.
Thoreau is like Ralph Emerson...Ralph Emerson is what I read. (sung to Bon Jovi's Bad Medicine)
@dado: you are now tasked with coming up with a tune that gets that tune out of my head. My sanity depends on it.
Also, LOA just did "After You, My Dear Alphonse" in their story of the week, which I first encountered as child in that hippie anthology "Currents in Fiction." Can't find link unfortch.
Who the fuck doesn't like Shirley Jackson? Idiots, clearly.
"Charles? We don't have any Charles in the kindergarten."
I think "Charles" grew up to be Balk.
Oh now I get it. After all this time. Now so many things make sense ...
I will most definitely be naming something Merricat in honor: dead relative, rodent, sock puppet, signature sandwich, something. Mark my Jackson-loving words.
Spielberg has the film rights to 'We Have Always Lived in the Castle.' I tremble.
Oh, I couldn't find it because it WAS "Charles." Here's link. I can't believe they only do these in PDF; it drives me insane. http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Jackson_Charles.pdf
Love it!
I love Shirley Jackson so hard. "We don't have any Charles in the kindergarten" indeed!
She's the first lady who made me laugh. After my mother, of course.
FAVORITE AUTHOR EVER!!!
I have a first edition of 'The Sundial' it is a creature of beauty.
Wasn't 'The Lottery' one of two stories from the New Yorker to get an 'A' from Nabokov? The other being, I believe 'Bananafish.'
(also VT represent)
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2010/06/28/100628ta_talk_frazier
Almost!
Jackson had a hilarious bit about "The Lottery" in one of her essays; I hope it's included in the LOA book. It involves a fan letter (among the vastly more numerous outraged letters she received), her reply, and her later dawning realization both of who the fan was, and what she had replied.
Also: friend of Howard Nemerov, brother of Diane Arbus. Two of my favorite people connected by two degrees!
The Haunting of Hill House is one of those books you have to hide from yourself because it's so fucking terrifying, AND YET YOU GO BACK. The film version doesn't do it justice, but has an awesome campy queerness all its own.
The original version directed by Robert Wise (and starring the always wonderful Claire Bloom) is actually pretty decent and faithful to the book.
Yeah, that's the one I mean -- lord, not that CGI monstrosity with Catherine Zeta Jones and Lili Taylor (who was a great choice IF it had actually been a remake!). I love the Frau Blucher-y housekeeper: "Nobody lives any nearer than town. No one will come any nearer than that. In the night. In the dark." However, they set the film entirely in the house, whereas my favorite scene in the book is when they try to go on a picnic and get separated, and terrifying things happen ... that's always when I put it in the freezer.
My favorite is when they are in the parlour and she senses a presence meant only for her. But yes, the garden scene is lovely - also the scene in the diner.
The interior monologue passages from Eleanor are amazing writing, and really no film could do them justice; hearing them in Lili Taylor's whine made me want to jam QTips into my brain.
I think someone akin to Emily Mortimer would have been better than Lili Taylor. She just kind of annoys me, except as Valarie Solanis.
Ack, that's too bad. I didn't even see the later one because I was writing about Jackson at that point and couldn't stand to watch what they were going to do to her.
The interior monologues in The Haunting of Hill House are pretty much a master class in writing an unreliable narrator.
It was awful. Jan de Bont is the worst sort of hack imaginable.
As I mentioned above, Spielberg (who produced the latter 'Haunting') owns the rights to 'Castle.'
I'm hoping the option expires before they can do anything to it.
I remember hearing Rachel McAdams is being cast? And the girl from The Lonely Bones is Merricat?
HANDS OVER EARS, CAN'T HEAR YOU
I just read Hill House for the first time a couple weeks ago, and was completely blown away... Eleanor takes the book to another level. "Journeys end in lovers meeting." **shiver**
Has anybody read The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters? I didn't think it was as good as some of her earlier books, but still wonderfully creepy.
I would argue that Eleanor's flight through the halls of Hill House in the 1963 movie is the single most terrifying sequence ever put on film.
The breathing door is awesome, and subtle.
Great, now I'm not going to sleep tonight.
I didn't even know you could subscribe to these. No way I would have enough space on the floor for all of them.
But I do appreciate the J. Ashbery volume. Is he still alive?
And how.
That's good.
I have a feeling he could die and the news wouldn't make it out here.
The Poetry Section hasn't run any obituaries yet, but there was that Larkin listicle... although it is not a day I want to think about I do believe it will be solemnly memorialized here.
When it came out he read from it at the 92nd St Y and sat at a little desk afterwards and signed all the nice people's copies and he looked like that was about to kill him off but no, I don't think it did.
I can't wait for the LoA 'Dan Brown' edition.
Jackson is a pretty great inclusion for Great Female American Writers. Next, LOA needs to do right by Patricia Highsmith.
Have you read "The Talented Ms. Highsmith"? LOA ain't gonna touch ol' Patty with a ten-foot pole!
Actually, BL, they rather like the talented Ms. Highsmith.
Putting the first Ripley book in a collection of "American crime noir of the 1950s" (with Jim Thompson!). -- As the man said, that's like including Lot in an anthology of Sodomites. Technically correct but essentially inappropriate.
I just read We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Merricat is my new feral hero (/nightmare scenario of being a total shut in). Sidenote, the new Penguin Classics edition of that novel with the creepy cover art is the shit.
The bio of her - Private Demons - is amazing. Also, vastly underestimated are her two collections of Erma Bombeck-like (only with an edge) family stories. She understood human nature like nobody else.
Yes, few and far between are writers who portray children as psychologically complex beings.
She is a fucking inspiration.
Trip no further pretty sweeting
Journeys end in lovers meeting
Where present mirth hath present laughter
They come before and follow after...
Word(s)
I genuinely did not know that Shirley Jackson wrote WHALITC. I seriously just thought it was a cool blog name (http://wehavealwayslivedinthecastle.blogspot.com). God, I feel so young/stupid.