Ich lerne sehen.
The nytimes has a lot of information on Roth, including Michiko Kakutanim's review of 'Everyman'. I haven't read the review yet, as I want to read the book before the reviews, but the material on Roth's career is very well done: reviews of his latest books, full first chapters, him reading his first chapters, etc.
Ok, no more postings on Roth until I've finished my review.
As much as I wanted this blog to be a serious reflection on life, literature and the dolce vita, too much seriousness is definitely a bad thing. In that vein, I present Two Chinese Boy. Make sure you watch it all the way to the end, folks.
And because two is always better than one, especially this one, check out numa numa.
I have to give slate credit for these; the last video is better appreciated with Sam Anderson's analysis.
His performance of "Dragostea Din Tei," a formerly obscure Romanian pop song, is the Sistine Chapel of amateur syncing, where all the potential of the art comes together. Take a moment to revel in its glory. Brolsma compresses into the clip's 97 seconds a volcanic passion, Swiss-watch coordination, and the imagination of a character actor; he fluctuates between beat-propelled shoulder-pumping joy and suave face-rubbing Euro-seduction. He makes the song's catchy falsetto opening ("Maya-HEE! Maya-HOO! Maya-HA! Maya-HA HA!") look like the mating call of a lovably exotic bullfrog.
This is slightly old news (in terms of a couple of centuries), but Judas just published a tell-all account of his side of his spat with Jesus Christ. Turns out everyone's favorite pariah was just misunderstood. He was the one who actually understood JC, the world has been pillorying the wrong guy for almost two thousand years.
I'd been hearing a bit about the whole discovery for a while now, and finally went and picked up the National Geographic story on how the Gospel of Judas came to be found and published.
The article is well done, if a bit short. The NG website also includes a lot of perfunctory interactive material that appears to be more or less very boring. I need to find a good history of early Christianity. Any suggestions?
Our friends in the Institut National d’Audiovisuel (National Audiovisual Institute) have just put online a large part of their archives, which means, more television and radio than most people would ever want to watch or listen to.
And, of course, this site being French, it doesn’t work. I haven’t been able to get on the site yet, but it promises to be pretty cool:
Le site ina.fr propose 100 000 émissions de radio et de télévision à voir, revoir ou écouter, soit dix mille heures d’archives télévisuelles et radiophoniques présentées dans leur contexte historique : feuilletons, séries comme “Les Shadoks”, “Age tendre et tête de bois”, dramatiques, grands entretiens, discours politiques d’importance, trente ans de journaux télévisés, magazines culturels ou d’information comme “Thalassa”, événements sportifs, reportages, concerts, variétés… “Le volume d’archives accessible représente le programme de deux chaînes de télévision pendant un an”, indique le PDG de l’INA, Emmanuel Hoog.
I can imagine it might take some time to get it all up and running, I don’t want to imagine the amount of bandwidth a project like that would take. 150,000 simultaneous downloads of “Apostrophes” must be difficult to handle.
My friend Paul just introduced me to possibly a very wonderful person, Jane Jacobs. I have yet to read anything by her, though "Death and Life of Great American Cities" is now on my To Be Read More Or Less Next list. From the Nytimes obituary:
"In her book "Death and Life of Great American Cities," written in 1961, Ms. Jacobs's enormous achievement was to transcend her own withering critique of 20th-century urban planning and propose radically new principles for rebuilding cities. At a time when both common and inspired wisdom called for bulldozing slums and opening up city space, Ms. Jacobs's prescription was ever more diversity, density and dynamism — in effect, to crowd people and activities together in a jumping, joyous urban jumble."
Anyone proposing to turn city centers into "a jumping, joyous urban jumble" should read and reread. Bicycles, pedestrian areas, people walking around, yelling, buying, talking, smoking, making love and singing songs… think about it.
Anyway, it turns out that an essay by Ms. Jacobs has just been published by the Virginia Quarterly Review, entitled "Credentialing vs. Educating". Well worth the read.
Listen, I do like things other than books, but I just found out that Philip Roth has a new novel coming out, and I wanted to point it out. There is a review in the New Yorker already.
I'm trying to get my editor at AP to let me review it for them, I'll keep you posted if I do. Also, keep your eyes open for my review of Saramago's Seeing, which should be coming out in papers all over the place in a week or so. (Or I'll save you the trouble: two big thumbs up.)
UPDATE: It's on, the book is scheduled to be released on May 9th, my review will (hopefully) be out by the 7th.
The nytimes is currently discussing that most wonderful of Graham Greene novels, The Power and the Glory. Having perused some of the posts, I’ve found them to be interesting enough to warrant a second look, if only to get people to reread that singularly unhappy and uplifting book.
Afterwards, one should of course read The Quiet American. I managed to pick up the third volume of Greene’s biography for cheap cheap, if anyone knows where I can get the first two volumes (hardbound) for under 6 dollars, I’d be obliged.
James Wood (arguably the most important contemporary English critic) just reviewed Harold Bloom's newest book Jesus and Yahweh. And by reviewed, I mean more or less eviscerated. The title of his review is "The Misreader".
One little gem that gives an idea of the tone of the piece:
Vatic, repetitious, imprecisely reverential, though never without a peculiar charm of his own–a kind of campiness, in fact–Bloom as a literary critic in the last few years has been largely unimportant.
A touching example of one critic giving hard love to another, this time with sand. Otherwise a rather erudite (if not abstruse) discussion of why Jesus is generally preferred over Yahweh. On an unrelated note, Nietzsche once declared that it was a sign of a nobler spirit to prefer the Old testament to the New. I've just procured myself the Tanukh.
(Full disclosure: I own Bloom's Shakespeare book, his book of stories for intelligent children, How to Read and Why and possibly his Western Canon. I've always liked the old bastard after having seen him cry on C-SPAN because people don't read more books)
