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[Kalo]

1001 Films You Must See Before You Die

Catchy title; got this out of the library. The capsule reviews are very hit and miss, often riddled with inaccuracies, and more often than not just plain lame. Oh well. Decent review of Ride Lonesome though.

Geez, with a title like that I would have expected it to be a thoughtful and scrupulously accurate book. I picture a bunch of nursing home denizens zealously rushing through a tangle of video-tapes just to get in under the wire!

For what it's worth, Ride Lonesome has the perhaps the best and most satisfying closing shot of any film I've ever seen.

Same here, but you knew that already.

I wasn't exactly expecting deathless prose, to say the least, but when you spot half a dozen inaccuracies in just a few minutes you realize it's a "bathroom book" in more than one sense.

Good for wiping at least?

[Kalo]

Or are there too many inaccuracies for comfort's sake?

[ghost of miles]

Light reading lately... all Xmas gifts.

iPod Therefore I Am - Dylan Jones ... Another personal, music memoir. Quick, uneventful read. Guess I'll have to wait for Hornby to do his iPod playlist / memoir, although Songbook probably qualifies.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius - Dave Eggers ... Note to Mr. Eggers: Edit, Edit, Edit. Seems more like an extreme exercise of style over content which is a shame since there are some poingant moments in this memoir.

Low ... Another volume in Continuum's 33 1/3 series. I received a handful of these which I'm saving for light travel reading.

The 33 1/3 series is pretty interesting. I've read only a couple of them, but want to read more... Colin Meloy of the Decemberists wrote the one about the Replacements' LET IT BE.

Re: Eggers, that's my feeling about much of the McSweeney's school. I like The Believer periodical quite a bit, but the McS kids seem a bit cloying to me a lot of the time.

[frank m]

ejp626------I just came across your comment about the Riverside Shakespeare. What in blazes does she find wrong with it?? Or did you just step into the middle of a pile of Academic doodoo there.? Any specific comments she made??

[ejp626]

ejp626------I just came across your comment about the Riverside Shakespeare. What in blazes does she find wrong with it?? Or did you just step into the middle of a pile of Academic doodoo there.? Any specific comments she made??

I can't really remember, though I think she was attached to the Pelican Shakespeare and might have worked on it. I suspect it was mostly issues over academic turf. I have no major problems with the Riverside edition. I'm not saying there aren't significant differences between the editions, but I think most of them are perfectly respectible and I personally don't have time to read multiple editions and choose between them.

[frank m]

I think pretty highly of the Riverside. I figured it was something like that. It smells of academic horseshit. I spent most of my life with them and I really preferred the folks i met in the service.

cheers.

[jlhoots]

Francine Prose: Caravaggio

[Harold_Z]

The JFK Assaination thread prompted me to start reading this - I've had it in the house for a couple of years.

It's the first DeLillo I'm reading and I'm about 8o pages in and so far so good. It's an interesting novel.

[jlhoots]

Michael McGarrity: Nothing But Trouble

[spinlps]

Cool, LET IT BE is one of the titles I received. The Smiths MEAT IS MURDER is written by Joe Pernice. He doesn't write about the album as much as he details his teen years when that album was released. Great approach... and is there nothing that guy can't do?

The 33 1/3 series is pretty interesting. I've read only a couple of them, but want to read more... Colin Meloy of the Decemberists wrote the one about the Replacements' LET IT BE.

Re: Eggers, that's my feeling about much of the McSweeney's school. I like The Believer periodical quite a bit, but the McS kids seem a bit cloying to me a lot of the time.

[jazzbo]

Now reading the A. J. Albany memoir "Low Down."

Scary. Dark. Excelent writing as others have pointed out.

[B. Goren.]

[brownie]

Been re-reading Isaac Babel's 'Red Cavalry'.

Had read this several years ago. Still a fascinating experience!

[ejp626]

Am now about 1/2 through At Lady Molly's, which is the 4th novel in Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time. I think this is where the series really picks up some momentum. That's not to say it is a chore reading the earlier books. I started to appreciate them about 25 pages into book 1. There is a detached wit in the observations of characters. What is interesting, and clearly part of the construction of the series, that friends fall away and return with the ebb and flow of time. This seems particularly true of this class of English (educated at Oxbridge) and living in London, so they do still run into each other from time to time. The interweaving of people through marriage and other alliances/dalliances seems almost suffocating at times.

I wonder a few things. Are there contemporary settings that have the same layeredness, either in the US or UK? The places that strike me the most likely are still London or New York, since people who have made it some scene in either place are extremely reluctant to leave. Also, academic communities have considerable continuity (among the professors at any rate) that one doesn't seem to find in other settings. Some of the old tropes of fiction (long-standing grudges in particular) just don't seem as relevant in contemporary US where there is still such mobility. I suppose I am a bit of an exception, but I've made 4 or 5 moves of over 500 miles, depending on how you count them, and make smaller moves almost every year. Almost none of my old friends are living where I originally met them. And yet virtually all sitcoms depend on the same crowd showing up and dealing with the same things, year in year out. Would it be possible to create a tv program that really reflected this unrootedness or would that just be emotionally unsatisfying? In some small way, Seinfeld approaches this, with George's many jobs and the transitory nature of all relationships outside the core four plus familiy (and Newmann). I suppose most of the non-sitcom shows have shake-ups among the staff. I suppose it comes down to television comedy requiring familiarity not required by comic or semi-comic novels. But maybe I am simply expecting an unreasonable amount of uprootedness -- most sitcoms that go past five years have some personnel changes (for spinoffs if nothing else) -- MASH, Taxi, All in the Family, LA Law, Barney Miller -- and that may be a much more representative example of how frequently most people move than expecting changes every few episodes.

Anyway, to get back to the book, there are a few really amusing characters, particularly this titled character who has adopted radical politics but still can't go the last step and turn his estate over to the masses. I'm still feeling that this is closest to a modernized version of Trollope's The Pallisers.

[jazzbo]

Fascinating! Great!

[birdanddizzy]

[BruceH]

Is this any good?

[frank m]

Just finished Faulkner's "Sound and the Fury" . Now into Ackroyd's brief bio of Chaucer. (My wofe tidied it up and now neither one of us have been able to find it, so I can finish it. Just started Freeman Dyson's "Infinite in All Directions" which has much merit. He's an interesting guy, or was.

[birdanddizzy]

Is this any good?

This is one to read.

This book is the base of the movie "'Round midnight" of Betrand Tavernier with Dexter Gordon.

'Round Midnight is a brilliant movie ! And, if you haven't already seen it, read Paudras' Dance of the Infidels first. It makes the movie that much better.

Francis Paudras makes the case that Bud was a co-inventor of what we call bebop. Paudras was close to Bud for several years and played a key part in his stay in France during the early 1960s, so this book is a kind of "work of love".

[7/4]

...guitar porn and great stories.

[ghost of miles]

Getting ready to start Thomas Merton's THE SIGN OF JONAS, and dipping into both Will Friedwald's JAZZ SINGING and Alec Wilder's AMERICAN POPULAR SONG.

[Alexander Hawkins]

Just finished Edith Grossman's new translation of Don Quixote. Quite simply the most beautiful book I've ever read.

Been re-reading bits of this lately (something in itself - I'm definitely not one for re-reading things in general) - and I stick by what I said earlier. It's amazing stuff

[BruceH]

Is this any good?

This is one to read.

This book is the base of the movie "'Round midnight" of Betrand Tavernier with Dexter Gordon.

'Round Midnight is a brilliant movie ! And, if you haven't already seen it, read Paudras' Dance of the Infidels first. It makes the movie that much better.

Francis Paudras makes the case that Bud was a co-inventor of what we call bebop. Paudras was close to Bud for several years and played a key part in his stay in France during the early 1960s, so this book is a kind of "work of love".

I saw 'Round Midnight when it came out, but without having read any bio of Powell first. Dexter Gordon was very good in it, though it struck me at the time that there was quite a bit of Lester Young in his character.

[Kalo]

Just finished Edith Grossman's new translation of Don Quixote. Quite simply the most beautiful book I've ever read.

Been re-reading bits of this lately (something in itself - I'm definitely not one for re-reading things in general) - and I stick by what I said earlier. It's amazing stuff

Maybe I need to try this translation. I ploughed through the Putnam version last year for my reading group, but bogged down halfway through Volume II.

Recent books read: Richard Stern's Other Men's Daughters(written in 1973). Set in Boston/Cambridge in the late 1960s early 1970s, it was sort of a time capsule for this Bostonian. Very well written and sensitively observed. One critic wrote that it was reminiscent of Lolita as re-imagined by Chekhov.

Tom Perrotta's Little Children, is also very good, though is set in the here and now and more of a standard comic novel than the above. I've read all of his books and this one was very good. He's a funny, observent writer who is exactly my age, so that might be part of why I respond to him. His best book is Election (also made into an excellent movie, by far Alexander "Sideways" Payne's best), and my second favorite is his short story collection Bad Haircut, but this one runs a close third. Give Joe College a skip, though.

I also just reread Janet Malcolm's The Silent Woman. It's about Sylvia Plath and Richard Hughes, but it's really more about the ethical and philosophical problems of biography in general. I'm a big fan of Malcolm's writing, whatever the subject. In the Freud Archives and The Journalist and the Murderer are her most amazing books, but they're all so provocatively good that you could start anywhere.

Edited February 12, 2006 by Kalo

[BruceH]

I just re-read some Peanuts strips.