"Call Me by Your name" -- our review -- reposted

So, here is our review of Call Me by Your Name---André Aciman's book (from 2007), not the new movie made from it in 2017.

Title & author

Most reviews of the book are fawning, and the few critical ones typically censure it for its not-so-happy ending---Aciman having apparently listened to his agent who told him that "the American public is not ready for a gay relationship that doesn't end in tears." Or he listened to his inner voice, which is Proustian by vocation (he's the director of the Proust Project at CUNY). Anyhow, this is not one of the books that "get stronger towards the ending" (as a judge of the Booker Price once put it). But its finale is not the only issue here, so let's do a little bean-counting and separate our critical pluses ("+") and minuses ("-") accordingly.

(+) There's something unique about the combination of high fiction and graphic expressions of longing and desire in this book. Ignorami that we are---we do believe this combination hasn't occurred in world literature before. THIS MAKES THE BOOK STAND OUT.

No? Well, here, Elio, the narrator (on p. 8), just warming up: 

"I know desire when I see it---and yet, this time, it slipped by completely. I was going for the devious smile that would suddenly light up in Oliver's face each time he'd read my mind, when all I really wanted was skin, just skin."

Okay, you say, that's just an example of erotic writing done well (more examples on our Handsheet for the Erotic Writer). Ampersant could have done it if were a better writer. But...but little Elio (aged 17), is really a paragon of high fiction; he's inconceivable in any other kind of literature. Here (p. 29 now, Elio conversing with Oliver):

"And yet here he was in his third week with us, asking me if I'd ever heard of Athanasius Kirchner, Giuseppe Belli, and Paul Celan.
'I have.' [Elio replies]."

A paragon of high fiction

(These are all writers, we suppose, because Paul Celan was one). Okay, let's try to find a better example. Next page:

"I was Glaucus and he [Oliver] was Diomedes."

Not good enough? Here, Elio daydreaming (p. 39):

"Did you [Oliver] know that I came in your mouth last night?"

(+) Elio is blessed to grow up in an intellectual Acadia of the 1980's. Father's a renowned professor of something, there's money, an understanding mother, Jewish heritage, and an understanding house keeper (who inspects the bed sheets each morning for stains). There's also a villa on the Italian Riviera with a tree-lined driveway, a pool, and a tennis court (one wonders, given the hilly, seaside topology of the place). And there's TALENT. E.g., Elio is a serious musical prodigy who improvises Busoni improvising Brahms improvising Mozart on the piano, much to Oliver's delight. And this Oliver (aged 24) has already finished his Ph.D. on Heraclitus and come over to supervise the Italian translation of his thesis (among other things).

And there's TALENT

"Call Me by Your name"

We're (again) working on a review of "Call Me by Your Name," --- the novel of André Aciman from 2007, which was made ten years later into a film of the same name that provided the breakout platform for Timotée Chamalet. And, in so doing, we're discovering all sort of things, like this clip, for example, which gathered 600m (sixhunded million) views:

 Keep posted. We'll try our best (which is not much).

Didn't we promised more sex on the moon (2)...

...meaning another fragment from Michael new novella "Sex on the Moon"? Here it is...hold on...reset...

...the first fragment was from the opening of the story, with Michel Ardan, one of the passengers of Jules Verne's Voyage to the Moon  relating how he met a certain Joseph Glanning, an engineer from the newly organized Stanford College in Alta California, and how they get into bed together...

...and, so, here's the second fragment, in which our Michel meets Sigmund Freud, who, at the time (more than 150 years ago), was supposedly an intern with the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore...so...here goes:

I walked back to the hotel, mildly intoxicated, passing by the Baltimore Public Library where I beheld a small bill pinned to the announcement board there, a sheet advertising a public lecture on SEXUAL AMNESTY. It was to be given by a certain Dr. Sigmund Freud, an “esteemed resident” with the medical school of Johns Hopkins college. The lecture would be next day, at noon. 

That’s what I need imminently, I bethought myself, amnesty from my sexuality, and so I spent the rest of the walk thinking up excuses regarding the lunch engagement at the club.

Eventually I sent a wordy telegram that cost me a fortune to 3 Republican Street, Barbicane’s residence—-we had exchanged calling cards, of course—-detailing unspecified misfortunes that I had encountered on my way back to the hotel STOP which inconvenienced me absolutely past noon STOP whether he would agree to a postponement of our pleasant luncheon plans STOP until the next day STOP I’m not even lying, strictly speaking, STOP.  

Sigmund Freud with the rabbit from Alice in
Wonderland and a quote from our novella

I arrived early in the humungous auditorium of the School of Medicine. I was the first and—-to make a long story short—-the last person to arrive, except for a young bespectacled man of scholarly appearance who was already in attendance, rectangular-faced, square-chinned, poorly dressed in a black suit of European cut, holding on to a pointer, walking up and down the dais, staring at the humongous wall clock above the entrance. The stare appeared to be his most conspicuous feature, the jaw, beard, horn-rimmed glasses, pupils all conspiring to emit signals of tele-pathetic, nay, tele-portational force. Indeed, the long hand of the aforementioned clock hesitated under his stare to pass the XII-mark on the dial, as if it didn’t dare to go further. Around 12:05 the gentleman began to hit his open left palm with the pointer in his right hand—-an intensifying gesticulation that reached its climax at exactly 12:15, whence he said, in an accent so heavy that even I recognized it as German: “Non mihi solum, non nobus solum.”  He then collected a stack of papers from the rostrum and un-dertook to depart through a door off stage. 

“Herr Doctor Freud,” I cried—-it had to be the lecturer himself—-“Herr Doctor Freud!” 

He turned around and bellowed: “What is it that you desire?”

‘Good question,’ I thought. “I…,” I managed to say, “I desire sexual amnesty.”

“You will not get it, my Mister, for there is no such thing as sexual amnesty. Sexuality is too squarely rooted in the human psyche to be forgiven or forgotten. This fucking darn a-m-n-e-s-t-y is a mistake on the announcement bills, a misprint that by necessity must be responsible for the poor attendance. The lecture was to be about sexual ambivalence.” 

“It was perhaps more a question of scheduling,” I said. “People are out to lunch.”

“Bah,” he said, raising his stare to the clock on the wall. I tracked his eyes—-well, eyes—-and I swear, the long hand on the clock appeared to retreat under his gaze. He ignored the feat however, instead looking himself up and down. A funny sound filled the hall, apparently coming from his stomach. Disarmingly he said: “I scheduled the lecture at noon so I can forgo lunch. A pecuniary question, you understand. The residents are paid a pittance.” Forthcomingness, I learned soon, was one of his many strong points.

“If that’s it,” I said, and proceeded to invite him to Haussner’s Restaurant, indeed my favorite haunt of repast in Baltimore (Barbicane would be ensconced at his club, I reckoned). 

We walked the twenty minutes to the restaurant, Freud still holding on to the pointer, and when we arrived thither he knew everything about my mother, father, penis, gardener Hérault, Hérault’s penis, and (my) refractory period (the minimal lapse time between two male ejaculations—Freud made appreciative noises). 

Are you still there? Are you hooked? 

Here's the link to the e-book:

Are you still there, but not yet hooked? Relax. There will be one more posts with a fragment from the novella.

Famous for 15 minutes--Sex on the Moon

 Cool, folks, cool. We're now #8 on the Amazon Charts for "Erotic Fiction":

It won't last, sadly, but anyhow. Imagine where we would be on the charts for "unerotic fiction".

Sex on the Moon--a new novella by Michael Ampersant (1)

Cool, folks, cool. After two years of literary silence, we finally have a new novella out. It carries the audience-friendly title Sex on the Moon (the original title was Lunar Engineering, but we changed that after consulting with the omnipresent and all-knowing Elon Musk). 
The whole thing is fan fiction, since it's a rewrite of Jules Verne's sci-fi novel From the Earth to the Moon. Michael wrote the piece in 2016 for a sci-fi anthology, but the publisher in question folded prematurely; the piece has lingered on his shelf for homeless literature ever since.
It took Michael so long to get it out because of his real-estate complications (selling the house on the Cote d'Azur, buying one in Portugal, then fixing it up), compounded by health issues (Covid, Long Covid, Post Covid). Anyhow, here's the story--so far as e-book, the printed version will soon follow.

So, Jules Verne fan fiction. Michael still remembers fondly the day that he sat on a nice beach in Brittany back in 1989 where he read the Verne book (in French). He finished the tome in one afternoon because the French is easy, and there were several things really wrong with the plot--a fact which kept him going.
For his novella, Michael invented a knowledgeable engineer to explain what’s wrong exactly  with the plot to our narrator, Michel Ardan, one of the three passengers of Verne’s lunar expedition. The fragment is a bit scabrous, hopefully you can handle that:

I feel obliged to warn the indulgent reader that my knowledge of the darker side of lunar engineering dates back only a few days—-three days to be precise—-when I met a certain Joseph Glanning in the bar of the Franklin Hotel in Tampa Town, Florida, where I had taken a room in anticipation of my impending departure for Stones Hill. A most irresistible man, he invited me to a drink and inquired as to the reasons for my stay. Learning of my intention to join Impey Barbicane, the illustrious president of the Baltimore Gun Club, for the much-heralded voyage to the moon, he introduced himself as an engineer from the newly-organized Stanford College in Alta California. Mister Stanford himself—-curious of all the lunar commotion on the distant eastern coast—-had dispatched him across the continent to take pulse of the events and report back at his earliest convenience. Glanning would be most grateful if I could enlighten him further, for he had hitherto been preoccupied by other projects, unable to avail himself of the particulars. He then asked questions. Yet, while I answered to the best of my ability, his countenance, so engaging at the onset of our barroom chat, darkened precariously. “Really,” he finally uttered. 

From the trenches -- Wole Soyinka

Yes, we are still bedridden -- did we fail to mention that Michael and his partner Chang caught Covid (?) -- so we are cutting our way through the verbal jungle of a book by Wole Soyinka, titled "Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth" about Soyinka's home country, Nigeria -- Soyinka, world's first black Nobel Award of Literature -- Soyinka (who's compared in rave reviews to Vladimir Nabokov's).  

And so, while we are still wielding our verbal machete in Soyinka's verbal  jungle (well-written, somehow, but much too redundant, and confusing, and repetitive...), we swear this holy pledge: in the future, we'll only read books by the man himself: Vladimir Nabokov.

Portugal (5) -- Don Quixote

We're on our way to Portugal again, and Chang had the brilliant idea to put in a stop at Campo de Criptana in the La Mancha region south of Madrid, where Don Quixote fought the windmills. Here they are (the windmills):

Yes, folks, really, at least in the sense that one local tourist guide blandly assert that the Don fought the mills, while a second tourist guide suggests that these windmills must have "inspired" Cervantes in writing the pertaining episode. You say. We may have another post about this soon; there is something funny about these mills.

"That's not enough!" (French for beginners)

Please read this...it's only one paragraph  from the London Review of Books connecting our recent Foucault post (by Mr. E.) with our own faux-French background with our quest for happy endings (just so that you know, Alain Robbe-Grillet was the inventor of the nouveau roman)...please read this:

Alain Robbe-Grillet

"By now, most readers in France had ceased to care [about Robbe-Grillet]; even his intellectual champions lost interest, although  [Roland] Barthes stood by him. ‘Transgression’ had come to mean l’écriture féminine and gay erotica; Robbe-Grillet’s hetero-sadist fixations looked decidedly démodé, quite possibly reactionary. (Fredric Jameson wondered whether his books had become ‘unreadable since feminism’.) At the party for  Barthes’s 1977 inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Foucault confronted Robbe-Grillet: ‘I have told you this already and I will say it again, Alain: when it comes to sex, you are, and always have been misguided!’ Barthes rose to his defence, reminding Foucault that Robbe-Grillet was, at the very least, a pervert. Foucault replied: ‘Ça ne suffit pas!’"

Feel it? (Sacha)

Can you read this? (2) (Jacki)

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(Yes, we actually mean it, can you read this?)

(Only 55 out of 100 people can!)

If the shoe fits

What's the angle?

The Anna Karenina movie is out, folks, with Keira Knightley as Anna,
Joe Wrigth as director, and Tom Stoppard as script author.

"It's an advantage of shredded relationships that you no longer have to care about conventions. Happy families are all alike and will answer the buzzer either immediately, or not at all (if they are too happy right this moment). Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and answers the buzzer as they see fit. I've gotten up now, I've put another kiss on John's forehead to maintain the bond, closed the bedroom door, standing in the kitchen den, and the doorbell has died. Father always rings three times." (Green Eyes, Chapter 27: I charge 100 dollars but am willing to negotiate)

And while we are at it:

"I’m trying," he replies, interrupting himself: "You know," he says, "there's something about casual artistic activity, if that's the word, I'm not talking Shakespeare here but, you know, a Westend play, or off-Broadway, you know, or Spielberg, a lot of it is just context, changing context. A dialogue that worked 50 years ago does not work any longer because people have changed, they talk differently, they're smarter."

"You know that the dialogue in the first Indiana Jones movie was written by Tom Stoppard, even though he is not credited?" I say.

"Yes, he says, "I know."

Souls meet for a split second, but Charles isn't done with his story yet. (Green Eyes, Chapter 7: Tom of Finland)

"Call me by your name" --- André Aciman (part 1) (Handsheets for the erotic writer (2))

(Click to enlarge)

(We should post a review, yes, but we're still thinking: we simply can't get over the fact that Oliver dumps Elio in the end)

You write like Shakespeare (reposted)

The IHT had a column by Alex Beam about the new website I Write Like, which uses a Bayesian classifier algorithm to compare anyone's prose to that of  famous writers. Thought up by the Russian programmer Dmitry Chestnykh, the site has already generated serious mischief. Somebody submitted transcriptions of Mel Gibson's phone rants, and I Write Like concluded that he "writes" like Margaret Atwood. Atwood own prose was classified as "Stephen King." A former president of Harvard writes like the sci-fi writer Cory Doctorov, and novelist Claire Messud writes like David Foster Wallace (not true, by the way).

You see it coming. We have to find out about ourself. so we first submit Huck Finn's father's rant against the government, which we posted because of its prophetic anticipation of the Tea Party, and, yes, I Write Like returned the answer: "You write like Mark Twain." Cool.

OK, so now a text of our own. Let's take the Donna Pérignon post from March 2010, one of the countless contributions on this blog so heartlessly ignored by pundits and mainstream media. Donna pays us a visit and rekindles our interest in the Giant Wave. Have you read it now? Donna is actually our neighbor Michelle de la Sala, and she really looks like Michelle Pfeiffer.

We now submit this post (its text) to I write like, and the answer is:

I write like
William Shakespeare

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

What can we say? Buy our new book, GREEN EYES, and find out yourself:

Touring Phuket

So we finally rent a car, and the next morning it is cloudy, rainy, but we don't care, and travel south.  A view from the first viewpoint informs about the western coast of Phuket south of Patong, the hedonistic center of the island:

The bay of Patong is to the north (next to the high-rise), south of it the bay of Kolon, and finally Kata. As we continue south, we reach a small, nameless beach almost on the tip of the island (Chang in the lower right corner)...

Ronald Searle died

Circus cat, secretly rehearsing Hamlet

Update: He lived nearby, actually, in Draguignan (north of St. Tropez), where the headquarters of the French Artillery are located, the final stop of the local choochoo-train that also stops in Le Trayas

History of the world: Apple Computers (5)

(Go  here for earlier acts)

Act V. Now comes the part that is omitted in all the obituaries. A few weeks later, still 1985. The Apple laser printer appears on the market. And it prints like a professional printer, plug and play, 50 different fonts, some very convincing ones. Your manuscript looks just great, your letters look just great, your writs, opinions, protestations, tables of content, graphics (Graphics), indexes, they all look great. You look great. A picture values a thousand words, a laser-printed graphic is invaluable; (in the PC-world of MS-DOS of 1985, you might, just might have been able to connect to some third party laser printer and print something in Courier font until the next software glitch put an end to your pretentiousness, but graphics where an entirely different animal and would have had to be printed separately anyhow).

My research grant applications are looking so much better than those of the competition, I'm collecting one grant after the other, until I get a Pioneer Grant from the Dutch government that allows me to start my own research institute, the Applied Logic Laboratory. I'm still convinced that my success in those years hinged on the flawless Macintosh laser print of my submissions, and in particular on the flawless laser-printed  tables of content. For example, the committee for the Pioneer grant met only once, with forty longish applications to evaluate, and only one grant to award. You can bet that the committee members, all busy, distinguished scholars, didn't start reading the stuff until they stepped on the train for their meeting in The Hague (much Dutch work gets done on trains, ask Paul Krugman), and they had barely time to read the tables of content during the journey. Mine was the best.

First Apple laser printer (plug & play)

Anyhow, the laser printer constituted a quantum leap, and many people understood, got their Macintosh laser act together, bought it together with the Macintosh, and saved the company.

Go here for the next act.

News from Kazakhstan

The washed-up scriptwriter sends this picture...

...and writes: "Found this picture while searching for images of operating rooms that I need as mental models for the next scene in the Freedom Fries novel, where Brüno (you haven't met Brüno, but anyhow) is going to be brainwashed in a serious way with novel equipment invented by Alberrt."

And he continues:

"I've always found writing difficult, and remember my dear father, who tended to complain: 'I'd be a great poet if mother would only let me and stop clanging with the pots in the kitchen.' In fact, I remember him vividly right now, my father, as the students outside in the street are trying to storm the palace of President Breftzerk. Breftzerk called me this morning (remember, I have been appointed court poet), via the secret telephone line that still works, and urgently requested new hymns on his presidency that are to be read from the palace balcony to sway the revolting masses, but I have a writers block.

À la recherche du temps perdue

We post comments to New York Times articles on their web edition fairly frequently ("follow me, follow me"), and today we posted a brief comment (no. 64) to Krugman's blog post on relative employment figures comparing the US and France. And so we invoked Marcel Proust, since Proust must have been an expert on unemployment. You've read Proust, right? À la recherche du temps perdue? Do you remember anybody ever holding down a daytime job there, except for the occasional domestique? That's what we were trying to get across to Krugman, although we doubt he will ever read our comment.

Now, this brings to mind a short episode at the FNAC, the leading French bookstore with outlets all over France, including Cannes. Our collection of À la recherche du temps perdue is incomplete, and so we travel to Cannes to buy more Proust, and we enter the book store, and climb to the third floor (all other floors have been taken over by flatscreens (the largest on offer: 99,999 EUR (I'm not making this up)) cell-phones, blue-rays [sic], blue-rays disks [sic], I-tunes, I-pads, I-phones, A-gizmo's, C-gizmo's, etc.. Sokrates, who opposed the newfangled fashion of literacy in his day ("κακή για τη μνήμη κάποιου"), would have been disoriented, Sokrates.

We make it to the third floor and ask a salesperson about Proust. We say "bonjour" first (we've learned our lesson: you don't say "bonjour" first, they will say "bonjour" to you in a way you won't forget), and then inquire about Proust. Marcel Proust. Sure, the salesperson replies, and takes us to the comic book counter. All thirteen volumes. Here's Volume Two:

Good Night and Good Luck (Olberman got fired or something). Bye now.

Bye.

The washed-up scriptwriter and more: novel novel material (Jacki)

Jacki (Jacki and Jacky are not the same person, don't get confused) sends this fragment. Enjoy:

He Grasped me firmly but gently just above my elbow and guided me into a room, his room. Then he quietly shut the door and we were alone.

He approached me soundlessly, from behind, and spoke in a low, reassuring voice close to my ear. "Just relax."

Without warning, he reached down and I felt his strong, calloused hands start at my ankles, gently probing, and moving upward along my calves slowly but steadily. My breath caught in my throat. I knew I should be afraid, but somehow I didn't care. His touch was so experienced, so sure.

When his hands moved up onto my thighs, I gave a slight shudder, and partly closed my eyes. My pulse was pounding. I felt his knowing fingers caress my abdomen, my ribcage.. And then, as he cupped my firm, full breasts in his hands, I inhaled sharply. Probing, searching, knowing what he wanted, he brought his hands to my shoulders, slid them down my tingling spine and into my panties.

Although I knew nothing about this man, I felt oddly trusting and expectant. This is a man, I thought. A man used to taking charge. A man not used to taking "No" for an answer. A man who would tell me what he wanted. A man who would look into my soul and say ... "Okay Mam," said a voice, "All done."

My eyes snapped open and he was standing in front of me, smiling, holding out my purse. "You can board your flight now."