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Compleet Molesworth (Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle)
Hilariously illustrated, the Molesworth series recounts the eponymous character's years at St. Custard's, a 1950s English boarding school. Half the fun is deciphering the slang; the anti-hero's misadventures prefigure Harry Potter and Burgess' Nadsat lingo. Also clears up any niggling questions you might have about parts of speech:
Social snobery. A gerund 'cuts' a gerundive:
Against Nature (Joris-Karl Huysmans)
For the budding aesthete and all levels of control freak (meaning, of course, all New Yorkers), Huysmans offers a solution for anyone who wants to escape the discomfort and ennui of seaside and summer. I took another look during a bad trip to Nettuno, which is the Italian twin city to Belmar, NJ.
This is anti-beach reading in the best sense. A wealthy Parisian retreats to a country house in order to devote himself to a life of aesthetic refinement and dies as a result of his excessive pleasure. The book's plot is said to have directed the behavior of Wilde's Dorian Gray, causing the main character to live an amoral life of sin and hedonism.
You Can Get There From Here, Shirley MacLaine
I love Hollywood memoirs and I love Shirley MacLaine. She can be the most scenery-chewing of actors and often writes the purplest prose; she is also candid, funny and connected—she knows everyone. In this volume (there are quite a number), she chronicles working for the McGovern campaign and traveling as a delegate to China.
Scandinavian authors who I'm going to read: IMPAC award-winning Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses; the Norwegian Norwegians read instead of Nazi-sympathizer Knut Hamsun, Tarjei Versaas (The Ice Palace); and Scandinavian crime writer Henning Mankell (The Man Who Smiled).
The Best of Myles (Flann O'Brien)
Collected works of the Irish humorist best known to Lost viewership as author of The Third Policeman.
I just spent a month rooming in an 100 degree, un-air conditioned apartment with three PhD students who felt compelled to quote Homer at the dinner table: "That would be Chapman's Homer—the Homer of Keats? The version used by Shakespeare?"
These vignettes kept me from triple homicide. O'Brien, writing as Myles na gCopaleen, composed the columns for the Irish Times. Keats and Chapman are depicted as Hope and Crosby-esque pals whose misadventures conclude in puns worthy of the Marx brothers.
Karina Wolf is the senior contributor to This Recording. She tumbles here. She twitters here.
The Third Reich is too large to be absorbed from any one angle. The Nazis were the darkest enemies of mankind, and it is hard to believe they even existed. The central Nazi in Inglorious Basterds is Col. Hans Landa, a captain in the SS who got the anecdotal slag of 'Jewhunter.' Young Jewish men everywhere, encouraged by the perpetual sneer on Col. Landa's mug, rumble with plans to destroy this villainous creature. Quentin Tarantino makes the other wet dream of every Jewish boy a reality.
Only the boy isn't really Jewish, he's a Gentile. Tarantino loves all sorts of people, all different types of directors. He's also not exactly subtle about showing off his allegiance to each of them. Tarantino's uncircumsized ex-Baptist Aldo (Brad Pitt) is Errol Flynn part seventeen, a hunkering lout of virtue and good will towards men. He joins the 800+ filmic references in Basterds, from Footloose to Godard to DePalma to Kiarostami to Kubrick and around the world entire.
Tarantino is suggesting that the culture of the Jew should be expanded to include the plight of people of color, the plight of his own Italians, and the plight of blonde-haired "Jews" with blue eyes who believe they also to have something to fear. Quentin isn't the first wannabe Jew, everyone quakes in delight at being 'chosen.' Like the formality of an SS uniform, it allows us our darker pleasures.
Because the Gentile shares the aims of the Jews, wishes to become a Jew, Aldo's mixed fighting force of Basterds is the result. Tarantino lets his horror f-buddy Eli Roth star in the film along with Jews like Samm Levine and B.J. Novak, and to no one's surprise they are all pretty terrible. The Gentile members of the crew aren't much better. Tarantino's method of shooting demands excited, if not particularly-inspired performances from his actors. Even Goebbels is more gigglish, immature fop than serious obstacle.
As Hans Landa, the villain around which ethnicities oscillate, Christoph Waltz is the exception. He carries Inglorious Basterds through the total embodiment of evil, throttling a woman if the situation demands it, or simply suggesting he'd prefer milk over wine. Each is equally sinister. It is an ongoing surprise to us all that Earth contains these creatures who ruled the Gestapo and were the hardest of the orc-like men.
In contrast, the film sets up a would-be hero and dismisses him savagely. No one is safe from Tarantino's characteristic bloodshed, and once again that's eternally the point. Looking at any part of the Third Reich can be confusing, as with the dark side of an object viewed from the front. Can we really believe that another part of it isn't there?
This movie drew a considerable Jewish audience at a theater in Manhattan, but there is much to recommend for the Gentile in Inglorious Basterds as well. Really this film is for him, for no moral query about this period could be asked of a Jew. We know his answer. The question is posed to the Gentile; he must respond to the intractable Jewish question. Should hatred and fear be countered with even larger levels of violence, or shouldn't they? Is it wrong to take pleasure in killing the men who end the world?
It isn't, and once you get that under your hat, you're halfway towards grasping the particular psychology of Shosanna Dreyfus, which to my ear is a rather Gentile-sounding name. Handed a star-making role, our Jewess heroine is no Barbra Streisand, she isn't Rita Hayworth. She is an icy blonde who confines her hirsute relationship with her French African employee to chaste kisses.
In the film's climactic moment she invites a movie star into her quarters and gives over to him more than she would a mere fling. We require the Nazis to remind Gentiles of what they can become upon giving in to such disturbing moments. Without them, how would we measure how to stretch ourselves, how much we treasure human decency and love?
War is harsh, Tarantino writes. He makes it flashy and he casts Diane Kruger for throaty Uma Thurman laughs, but there is no suitable reaction to the violence that surrounds such frivolity. At more than one point more than 20 men die in mere seconds. This is real sacrifice, Tarantino says, what war takes from its soldiers: everything.
Why did America defeat the Nazis after resolving to ignore them? Our later certainty over our moral role in the fate of Europe's Jews flattens the real debate that occurred over whether this was America's war to be involved in. Many resolved that the United States would ignore the fractious bickering of European powers.
Inglorious Basterds takes place mostly in France when it was occupied, one of the more polite occupations in human history. The French people weren't alone in being cowed by the Nazis, but surrender often looks better with victory behind you. Watching the Nazi vermin walk among the high places of France is a test run for how they might have lived with dominion over the larger world. "I'll get a few paintings from the Louvre to spruce this place up!" Goebbels laughs.
When it came to it, a Nazi in hiding in this country could look like other men, blend into the fabric of the land and renounce the evil he served. Therefore the Basterds mark those they leave alive by carving a swastika above the brow, for a permanence that no longer exists in our world, where mad ideologies comfort each other on the internet.
Tarantino puts women in the center of his action. (His part of the Grindhouse double feature Death Proof is perhaps the most feminist film of the 2007 period.) He loves women, loves to watch them press and push through the stolid workings of men. He adored Uma Thurman's earthy sexuality, and he's equally eager to worship at the altar of French actress Melanie Laurent. This is my favorite scene with Laurent, where she prepares for her life as a beautiful but deadly destroyer of Nazi-kind:
She and Kruger operate as scale models of themselves in miniature. They do what needs to be done to further the aims of the Republic. In this way, they are like Jedis, or at least highly eroticized llamas.
There is nothing else like the abandon Tarantino shows in these moments. He is a fearless filmmaker, marking the treads between people like hands on the clock of history. He may mix metaphors worse than that, but each "chapter" — as the sections of the films announce themselves — is a beginning worthy of the masters he first saw when he worked as a clerk in a video store.
Since video stores are going out of business and will soon be relegated to the place where horse-drawn carriages and telegraphs await us, it is appropriate to credit them for making Mr. Tarantino, who can foist such evil on us with a knowing delight.
Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here.
I guess by now The Secret is about as old as John McCain, but for those of you living in a cave with your fingers in your ears, The Secret is Oprah's favorite life affirmation consisting of 3 steps: ask, believe, receive. Basically if you ask for something and believe that you have it, you soon will. The Secretis further explained, but like not really, in a DVD and a book with "I swear to God this works" testimonies from "philosophers" and that dude who came up with Chicken Soup for the Soul (true story: my mom wrote a story about me, titled with my name, and it was published in Chicken Soup for the Soul: A 3rd Helping.)
A friend of mine claims that The Secret actually does work, but only if applied with tequila. As this sounds like any good excuse to get drunk alone on a Friday night, I decided to find the truth all in the name of science and faith, documenting my journey along the way.
8 PM: The only tequila I have is a leftover birthday gift from a few years ago and it's strawberry crème flavored. It tastes like evil strawberry Quik. I take my first shot. "Like attracts like", writes Rhonda Byrne, likely one of the many writers for The Secret book. "Thoughts become things." Visualization is key to The Secret so I visualize sitting on Jon Hamm's face.
8:15 PM: I wonder how long it will take my thoughts to come into fruition. The book makes it clear that it will not be instantaneous and no, it cannot give you a time frame. Assholes.
8:30 PM: A big deal in The Secret is to make a "visualization board" in which you cut out pictures or words of all of the things you want in life and glue it to a poster board and everything on there supposedly comes true. I don't have poster board so I use my bathroom door. I cut out pictures of actress' bodies that I wish I had and tape it to the board. I worry that this isn't specific enough; I don't want to become friends with Olivia Wilde, I just want her figure. I draw an arrow to her abs but this seems too confusing for the universe to understand. So I write, "a great body." Then I worry that this still is too vague; what if The Secret is like that Twilight Zone episode where that guy asks for things and gets them too literally? What if I wind up with "a great body" on my doorstep tomorrow? How can I make it clear that I don't want a dead body?
9:15 PM: I decided to forego the whole wishing for a better body thing, deciding instead to just keep exercising and eating less fast food. This seems easier.
Now I have to worry about what kind of boyfriend I want. If I put up a photo of Jacques Dutronc will that mean that I will wind up with the current old Jacques Dutronc? Or with a guy who only speaks French? Should I just go on match.com? Or move to France?
9:16 PM: Yeah it's time for my second shot.
10:00 PM: I finish my visualization door. There are way too many magazine cutouts of Jon Hamm's head. It looks like I've walked into a serial killer's apartment.
10:20 PM: The Secret advises that you write down everything you want as if you already have it. Example: "I am so happy now that I (have this/am this/am doing this/etc)." I try this. I quickly run out of things that I want. Number 14 on the list? "I am so happy now that I have hot pockets."
10:30 PM: I check my freezer. I have no hot pockets. Damn.
11:45 PM: I totally forgot what I was supposed to have been doing and somehow wound up on YouTube for over an hour watching deleted scenes from Titanic. I regroup and refocus but not after watching propeller guy hit the giant propeller a few more times.
Midnight: I realize that "Titanic" is about 12 years old and I panic.
12:30 AM: All of this late 90s talk makes me realize that I don't have Beck's Odelay album. I have some key tracks so I scour hypem.com trying to fill in the rest. I can't. This pisses me off, but not enough to buy Odelay on iTunes. I visualize Odelay. I think about adding it to my visualization door but am too lazy. So I just repeat "Odelay" over and over in my brain, sending the message out to the universe that I would like this album. I continue to search the internet.
1:01 AM: That’s getting boring so I decide to watch Californication. But all it does is make me think about The X-Files which makes me think about the late 90s which makes me panic all over again that I am old.
1:05 AM: I watch propeller guy again on YouTube. I just love the way he hits that propeller!
1:07 AM: Yeah I'm going to bed. I put The Secret DVD on my computer and let it lull me to sleep, hoping that somehow the words will just seep into my unconsciousness and do all of the work for me.
Almie Rose is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is the creator of Apocalypstick.
BOOKS 
Compleet Molesworth (Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle)
