Question Time

Terry has some questions for his blogging partner, Our Girl in Chicago. But what the heck, I need a distraction from my current book-for-hire, so I'll take a crack at them, too.

What book have you owned longest—the actual copy, I mean?

I'm quite certain that back in the basement of the ancestral manor, I have plenty of books I've owned longer, but here in the Outer Boroughs it's a tossup between two books I brought back with me from my holiday trip home: a mass market PB of Tim Powers' Dinner at Deviant's Palace or Ballantine's mid-1980s PB reprint of Fantomas, which includes an introduction by John Ashbery.

If you could wish a famous painting out of existence, what would it be?

You know, I can't think of any paintings I dislike enough to wish undone, but I would be entertained by imagining the ways conspiracy theorists would have to rearrange their lives if, say, Poussin had never painted his Arcadian shepherds.

If you had to live in a film, what would it be?

Hmmm. I actually rather liked the conceptualization of the future in Sodebergh's Solaris, which I just caught on cable, so as long as I didn't actually have to pass through its narrative space, I suppose I could live there. And the small town of David Mamet's State and Main might be fun, as well, once the production crew left.

If you had to live in a song, what would it be?

Now, see, the very idea of living in a song forces the image of Dick Van Patten trapped in his car in High Anxiety into my mind, so I can't imagine very many attractive options here. And then the only things that come to mind are disasters and dystopias like "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" or "Rocket Man." Or murder ballads.

What’s the saddest work of art you know? And does experiencing it make you similarly sad?

I come quite close to crying at Truffaut's adaptation of Fahrenheit 451, which is why I rarely watch it anymore, although that's as much about the personal circumstances under which I saw it as the actual content. I also well up at the penultimate scene in The Iron Giant but, hell, you'd have to have a heart of stone not to, as far as I'm concerned, and I don't think the overall film is that sad; in fact, it's one of my favorite animated movies of all time.