Radcliffe/Stahl/Wallace/NRBQ

Sorry if this gets sparse on cinema-related stuff, which will remain in bold.

The Mysteries of Udolpho (Ann Radcliffe, 1794) [DNF; got to ~200 pages]

Of interest because, on the basis of Northanger Abbey, we can assume Jane Austen was a fan—why, Jane? Radcliffe is surely coming from somewhere faintly intelligent, but the extent to which she wants you to know that is weird and hypocritical: she celebrates Modesty with a capital M (not unlike Jason Sudeikis’s Joe Biden impression), negating her own values in the process of assaulting the reader with descriptions of Beauty, never failing to remind us that Emily St. Aubert is Sensitive. I suspect I'm having more of a clash with Radcliffe in particular than sentimentalism in general.

Holy Matrimony (John M. Stahl, 1943)

I’d started thinking of Stahl as a precise visual stylist to rival Rohmer after seeing Leave Her to Heaven, but I didn’t get that vibe from this lively, nuanced farce. Gracie Fields gives my fave performance, a reliable, adoring wife who’s still at odds with her husband underneath the winks and smiles. Monty Woolley is louder and harder to enjoy, but props to Stahl for making his hero such a vehement prick.

“The Depressed Person” (David Foster Wallace, 1998)

Marginally liked it. Spot-on about the subjective particulars of depression (e.g. combo of need and anticipation of boredom in trying to explain away indescribable torture to contented friends, or the patient-therapist relationship being both ideal and patently false in its one-sidedness), although reading it is a bit like watching someone scrape away at quicksand. (Mimicking tact in the midst of severe depression takes heroic willpower, but I’ve seen it done.) Parts are perhaps unconsciously revealing, like the recurrent phrase “abstract guilt,” [of a non-depressed person] which can only imply opposition to the depressed person’s bottomless, visceral guilt.

“That’s Alright” (NRBQ, All Hopped Up, 1977)

From the NRBQ stuff I’ve sampled, I’m rather baffled—the vast majority of it is pretty by-the-numbers. And yet “That’s Alright,” a serene needle in their bloated haystack of a discography, is as perfectly constructed a song as I’ve heard, an ode to the ambivalence of rejection as propulsive as the Raspberries’ “Go All the Way” and as meticulous as Richard Thompson’s better work. (I also like “It Feels Good” from the same album and “It’s Not So Hard” from Scraps.)