JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

We have resolved to listen to more contemporary music and vary our usual playlist of bebop, Tom Waits and other singers who sound like escaped circus bears.

The St. Vincent is Mat the cat’s favorite song. His other favorite song is These Days by Nico. (How to tell which songs a cat really likes: If he lies down in front of the speakers when they’re on. When Koosi hated a song she would do parkour around the house while shrieking insanely.)

At Jackie’s door-warming party (Yes, to celebrate the new doors, which are worthy of celebration) last week, we had a long chat with Robin Rivera, whose name must be familiar to anyone who owns an Eraserheads album. He was their teacher at UP, and he produced the albums. Sir Robin (like Monty Python and the Holy Grail) scolded us for being unfamiliar with Dong Abay’s album Flipino, which he called the greatest Filipino album of the century so far. That’s what we’re listening to as soon as our copy arrives.

Photos: Cat and Hospital by Ricky Villabona

1. Finish second novel. (First one done, will never be published.)
2. Read Swann’s Way.

Tell. If you make them public, the possibility of embarrassment might make you stick to your resolutions.

127. The Theory of Everything. Eddie Redmayne is spectacular, the movie not so. Reviewed here.

128. Maratabat. Reviewed here.

129. Stolen Kisses 130. Bed and Board. Sequels to The 400 Blows. They don’t live up to The 400 Blows, but we like them all the same.

130. Starter for 10. While organizing our DVDs (we wish), we came upon this lighthearted British movie about a team representing their school in the University Challenge quiz show. The stars all went on to bigger things: James McAvoy, Dominic Cooper, Rebecca Hall, Alice Eve, and a hilarious Benedict Cumberbatch, who has always played nerds with poor social skills.

131. North by Northwest. Hitchcocks are our comfort movies, even the grisly ones.

132. Cutter’s Way. A criminally underrated masterpiece by the Czech director Ivan Passer starring Jeff Bridges, John Heard and Lisa Eichhorn as three people in California who drink too much and try to piece together the American Dream detonated by the Vietnam War. It was abandoned by its own studio and ignored by the audience, but genius finds a way to survive. The cast is magnificent. Read an appreciation.

In December we avoided the horrendous traffic by staying home and rewatching movies. 133. Magnolia. 134. Atonement. 135. That Uncertain Feeling (written by Preston Sturges). 136. Dressed to Kill.

137. Lifeboat. One of the last Hitchcocks we hadn’t seen. Survivors of a ship torpedoed by a Nazi submarine debate on whether to kill the Nazi on board, and end up letting him run things. One of many movies made when America was trying to sit out the war. Reminds us of a Monty Python sketch:

138. The Earrings of Madame de. One of our favorite movies of all time (FMAT). 139. (We got an Eric Rohmer 6 Moral Tales boxed set) The Baker Girl of Monceau (FMAT). 140. Suzanne’s Career. 141. La Collectionneuse.

142. The Devil’s Backbone. Guillermo del Toro’s heart-rendingly beautiful ghost story set in an orphanage towards the end of the Spanish Civil War. (Should be seen with Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth and Victor Erice’s Spirit of the Beehive.) As always, it’s not the dead who should be feared but the living, in this case the handsome handyman (star of Abre los ojos) who is ugly on the inside.

143. Sullivan’s Travels. FMAT.

144. The Guest. Cousin Matthew (Dan Stevens) shows off his newly-ripped torso in this action movie with a very 80s feel, down to the soundtrack.

145. The Palm Beach Story. FMAT.

146. The Riot Club. The film adaptation of the play Posh, about over-privileged young men at Oxford behaving very, very badly. A wasted opportunity, we remember it as a beauty contest between Sam Claflin, Douglas Booth, and Max Irons. Rising stars Natalie Dormer, Holliday Grainger and Jessica Findlay Brown are in the cast but have little to do.

147. The Interview. Reviewed here.

148. Letter From An Unknown Woman. FMAT. 149. Ninotchka. FMAT.

150. English Only, Please. Reviewed here.

151. The Apartment. A New Year’s Eve movie. 152. To Be Or Not To Be. Wonderful silliness.

Total number of movies seen in 2014: 152, of which 139 were seen for the first time.

Photo by Chris Buck for the New York Times

Jana Prikryl, a senior editor at the New York Review of Books, had a poem about Benedict Cumberbatch published in the London Review of Books.

Thinking of Benedict
Cumberbatch and his mind
(stay with me), I resolved
on the importance
of character, specifically
as a function of the celebrity
interview: that it’s not his face
propelled him into the skin
of a matinée idol but
his quips and winning
earnest wish to answer
every question,
and be very very nice.

Continue reading

Where is the ode to Tom Hiddleston in the Paris Review or the sonnet about Eddie Redmayne in the Times Literary Supplement? (And the lament on the recent wedding of Joseph Gordon-Levitt?)

Give science-fiction the respect it has long deserved and been flagrantly denied.

And give her books better covers.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s Speech in Acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters

To the givers of this beautiful reward, my thanks, from the heart. My family, my agents, my editors, know that my being here is their doing as well as my own, and that the beautiful reward is theirs as much as mine. And I rejoice in accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who’ve been excluded from literature for so long — my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction, writers of the imagination, who for fifty years have watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.

Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality.

Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.

Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book 6 or 7 times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this — letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.

Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

I’ve had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.

Thank you.

Copyright © 2014 Ursula K. Le Guin

Illustration from A Visit to William Blake’s Inn by Alice Provensen

The King of Cats Orders An Early Breakfast
by Nancy Willard

Roast me a wren to start with.
Then, Brisket of Basilisk Treat.
My breakfast is “on the house”?
What a curious place to eat!
Continue reading

Meriadoc Brandybuck eats his brunch, a grilled saba Whiskas pouch and Tripro kibble. Merry lives outside.

Brief Incident in Short a, Long a, and Schwa
by Lydia Davis

Cat, gray tabby, calm, watches large, black ant. Man, rapt, stands staring at cat and ant. Ant advances along path. Ant halts, baffled. Ant back-tracks fast—straight at cat. Cat, alarmed, backs away. Man, standing, staring, laughs. Ant changes path again. Cat, calm again, watches again.