Hump of the Week Hodge Podge

Day 338 of the "What are you reading?" project, and today is a hodge-podge of book-related coincidii, some of it freaky, some of it sweet, some dramatic, some clickable.

Cyborgs & Robots: Recently I wrote about Susan Slaviero and her book Cyborgia, and so did Kristin in her blog! Nathan Ferree makes cool robots from clay, etc. at Cyborg Clayworks, and Steppenwolf Theatre is doing Heddatron in their Garage Rep series, Hedda Gabler for robots. Chicago area Susan, you should go see that!

Spektor Factor:  My daughter gave me some Regina Spektor CDs for Christmas, and I am in love with her voice and lyrics and want them as background to my imagination and incorporated into various soundtracks. Oh, wait! They are. Her music is already on tv commercials and shows and in movie soundtracks, but I definitely think of Cyborgia when I hear "Machine." "Blue Lips"--with blue as the most human color, and "the color of our planet from far, far away"--and "Genius Next Door" haunt me. Wikipedia tells me that Spektor is writing the music for Beauty, the Grimm fairy tale set to music for Broadway in 2011-2012. Julie, please go see that and report on it in A Follow Spot!

Double Feature:  Over the holidays, we had a family wamily movie marathon and happened to watch The Road, based on the book by Cormac McCarthy, and Where the Wild Things Are, based on the book by Maurice Sendak, on consecutive evenings.

"Oh," I said, after the second viewing. "Where the Wild Things are is The Road for kids."  If you do this as a double feature, you will see what I mean. But, of course, they are not the same at all. But you will see.

About The Road, my husband said, "The book was better" in a sort of humorous immediate way, so I pursued him on this the next morning, and he said he got the sense of desolation more purely from the book.  "You'd think a movie would do that better," he said, meaning the visual opportunities, and he thought the film did it well, but somehow the book's bleakness got to him more.

Both my son and my husband had pictured the scene in the woods, with the guy peeing, exactly as it happened in the film. Likewise, the ocean. The ocean scene was exactly as I had pictured it, too, in my reading. I must have blocked from my mind some blood and innards elsewhere in the book, because there they were, inescapable, in the movie.

Sweets for the Sweet:  After that appetizing image, I offer sweet coincidii:  I happened to listen to Regina Spektor's "Man of a Thousand Faces" which has the word "sweet" in it, after writing yesterday's "sweet" blog, and Sara Gazarek's "Blackbird/Bye Bye Blackbird" mashup on the radio on the way to work, which is also sweet. You can hear Sara's sweet voice if you click on her website, here, and have your speakers on. Of course, it is a little freaky to me that as soon as I put up the robot arm by Nathan Ferree as today's blog image, Sara Gazarek started singing, "Reach out your hand...."