Sunday Morning! Bowles on Film
Wrapping up our Bowles-o-rama with three depictions of Paul and Jane Bowles on film, in somewhat mutated forms.
Author: Rufus F.
Sunday Morning! Paul Bowles’ “You Are Not I”
On Paul Bowles’ short story, an alleged murder he committed, and the rediscovery of Sara Driver’s 1981 no budget film adaptation.
Sunday Morning! “In the Summer House” by Jane Bowles
Jane Bowles only wrote one play. Like her one novel, In The Summer House is a strange tale of eccentric women and the ways their eccentricities set the course for the weaker-willed people around them.
Sunday Morning! “The Spider’s House” by Paul Bowles
The Bowles series continues with Paul’s 1955 novel about the Moroccan independence movement and the struggles of ordinary people to keep a corner of their souls free of political power struggles.
Sunday Morning! “Two Serious Ladies”
Exploring the Bowles cannon continues with Jane Bowles’s more comedic novel about people who also wander halfway around the world to hear their own voice.
Sunday Morning! “The Sheltering Sky” by Paul Bowles
A debut novel that feels a bit like a rupture, not quite like anything that came before it, but marking a great deal that came afterwards. In The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles left all sentiment to die in the desert.
Sunday Morning! “Not Dark Yet”
Berit Ellingsen’s beautiful and enigmatic debut novel details a modern day hermit seeking to avoid doing violence on an alien planet- ours.
Book Notes: “The Hermit in the Garden” by Gordon Campbell
In Georgian England, you could be hired to live as a hermit on a rich person’s land…Right about now, it sounds almost too good to be true.
Sunday Morning! “Some Of Us Are Very Hungry Now” by Andre Perry
“Perry is definitely a writer. His essays are meandering and misshapen, slippery and jagged, they wriggle and bite. But, read them for a bit, sit with them and get to know them, and you find they’re also gentle and wise. I mean, it’s a bit hard to get a bead on them, but that’s how identity is, right?”
Sunday Morning! “Vagabond” by Agnès Varda
This week, I finally got up the nerve to write about Agnès Varda’s masterpiece “Vagabond,” a sort of reverse murder mystery: instead of wondering who killed the main character and why, we wonder who failed to save her and how.
Sunday Morning! Two by Arthur Schnitzler
Remembering the masterful Viennese writer whose works depict a high society of childlike adults living in an unreal dream that would, soon enough, give birth to the great nightmares of the twentieth century.
Book Review: “You Talkin’ To Me?” E.J. White
In the case of America, the accepted standard for broadcasting and spoken English sounds more like a Midwestern vernacular
Sunday Morning! “Giovanni’s Room” by James Baldwin
On the end of grief, and James Baldwin’s classic story of grief at the beginning and end of first love.
Sunday Morning! “A Death in the Family” & “Whiteout Conditions”
Viewed from one perspective, a funeral is a unit of measurement marking the gap between our most important questions and the boundaries of our understanding
Sunday Morning! “Death in Venice”
The time felt right to reread Thomas Mann’s novella and watched Lucino Visconti’s 1971 film of desire and disease and our inability to quarantine either of them.
Returning to Abnormal
So how did I find myself on my city’s official “reopening” downtown giggling uncontrollably with my friend, both out of our minds on acid? Well…
Sunday Morning! “The Vine that Ate the South” by J. D. Wilkes
J.D. Wilkes’s debut novel packs every Southern myth and legend into one epic, rollicking fricasseed Odyssey. Let’s call it Southern Gothabilly.
Sunday Morning! “Stoner” by John Williams
The “rediscovered classic” of academic life does what great art is supposed to do: immerse us in the inner life of an individual without romanticizing him, It is ennobling.
Sunday Morning! “In the Dream House” by Carmen Maria Machado
By subverting her narrative multiple times and in many different ways, the memoirist gives a good idea of the disorientation and terror of an abusive relationship.
Me and Three Women in a Garden
All human plans are provisional and the rules change every day. I say we keep gardening.
