As if by stealth it’s gone. Two days late we find ourselves here in the Baroque Annexe (south) assessing 2008 and looking bravely – very bravely – ahead at 2009. It’s the annual stocktaking any sensible person dreads, but it must be done.
Now, this is ostensibly a books – specifically a poetry-oriented – blog, but as you all know I take my sustenance from the whole cultural landscape. This has not been my biggest-ever reading year. If I look back over it, the things that really loom out of the fog are arts-related – Hammershøi, Hirst, Koons – cinema-related, or simply sleep-related. So my lists might be a little eccentric.
Unfortunately my stacks of books are not here in the Annexe, but from memory I will try to (I’m listening to Paradise Lost on Radio 4 as I type this) build the tower anew.
Books of 2008
Ted Hughes, Selected Letters
Anthony Hecht, Collected Later Poems
Anthony Hecht in Conversation with Philip Hoy
Anthony Hecht, Venetian Vespers
the script of Les Enfants du Paradis – but only in English, unfortunately~
Jill Forbes, Les Enfants du Paradis
WG Sebald, Campo Santo
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory!
Les Murray, Sub-Human Redneck Poems
Katia Kapovich, Cossacks and Bandits
Katia Kapovich, Gogol in Rome
Philip Nikolayev, Letters From Aldenderry
Isobel Dixon, The Fold in the Map
Jane Holland, On Warwick
Jane Holland, Camper Van Blues
Andy Croft, The Ghost Writer
Simon Barraclough, Los Alamos Mon Amour
Don Share, Squandermania
Otto Friedrich, City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the Forties
Charles Lambert, Little Monsters
Archie Markham, Lambchops With Sally Goodman
Archie Markham, A Rough Climate
Simon Gray, The Smoking Diaries
Simon Gray, The Last Cigarette
Alfred Hitchcock, Interviews
DA Powell, Cocktails
Jonathan Franzen, The Discomfort Zone
Stanley Plumly, Posthumous Keats (not yet finished)
Imran Ahmad, Unimagined
Joan Margarit, Tugs in the Fog
Tomas Venclova, The Junction: Selected Poems
Valzhyna Mort, Factory of Tears
Mark Doty, Theories and Apparitions
Simon Gray, Coda
Andrew Martin, How to Get Things Really Flat
George Szirtes, English Words
Agnes Lehoczky, Budapest to Babel
Wallace Stevens, Harmonium, as always
Movies
No Country For Old Men
There Will Be Blood
The Man Who Wasn’t There
Apocalypse Now
Happy-Go-Lucky (which generated this)
Le Boucher
Private Fears in Public Places
Les Enfants du Paradis
Capote
Infamous (aloso Capote)
On the Town
Le Doulos (Jean-Paul Belmondo)
The Servant (Pinter/Bogarde)
Butley (Simon Gray/Pinter/Alan Bates)
Man on Wire
You, the Living (Roy Andersson – SEE IT)
Laissez Passer
Miller’s Crossing
The Bed-Sitting Room (wonderful)
Vertigo
Heist
Gonzo (documentary on Hunter Thompson)
Scarface (the original, 1932) (amazing)
Of Human Bondage (Bette Davis, Leslie Howard, terrible)
and others too numerous to mention. But I have hardly been to the cinema in months. It is clear for one thing that whatever this has been, it has not been a year of keeping up-to-date with what’s new.
Oh, and let that be it for now. That’s where we’re up to, anyway, without being able to check the stacks. Listing them makes the year feel very short – there are things I want to add and then realise thye were in the year before – and I realise there are months I can barely account for. And it’s not even as if I’ve been writing that much.
2 Comments
January 3, 2009 at 11:02 am
I dreamt about snow!
January 6, 2009 at 9:21 pm
Okay, so I wasn’t going to leave any more of my pointless comments splattered on your lovely blog…but then you had to go and mention The Servant which is one of my all-time top-20 favourite films EVER, and I’ve never met anyone else who even knows it EXISTED! Except for Cintra Wilson. OMG Dirk Bogarde, OMG James FOX, omgomgomg fangirl squee of dark twisted delight!
That is all.