Robert Durick's reading in 2012, third quarter

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Robert Durick's reading in 2012, third quarter

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1Mr.Durick
Redigeret: sep 12, 2012, 4:41 pm

This thread is a continuation of my second quarter thread.
They originate here.

This is a list of the books I have read in 2012. The titles are not touchstones; they are links to the message wherein I mention my reaction to the books. There I, so long as touchstones cooperate, touchstone the titles and authors.

1. January 2, The Novel by Steven Moore, literary history
2. January 4, The Psychology of the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo edited by Robin S. Rosenberg and Shannon O'Neill, literary analysis
3. January 5, Affairs of Steak by Julie Hyzy, mystery
4. January 6, The Book of Genesis illustrated by Robert Crumb, Bible
5. January 9, The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, novel
6. January 21, Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, novel, literary analysis
7. January 23, Bossypants by Tina Fey, memoir
8. January 24, Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell, history
9. January 25, Factotum by Charles Bukowski, novel
10. January 29, Kim by Rudyard Kipling, spy novel

11. February 2, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré, spy novel
12. February 3, Why Read Moby Dick? by Nathaniel Philbrick, literary analysis
13. February 9, The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, American history
14. February 12, About Time by Adam Frank, cosmology
15. February 14, In Search of Time by Dan Falk, cosmology
16. February 23, Paul Robeson by Martin Duberman, biography
17. February 24, The Snark Handbook by Lawrence Dorfman, reference
18. February 25, The Snark Handbook, Sex Edition, by Lawrence Dorfman, reference
19. February 26, Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman, collected fictional vignettes

20. March 4, The Snark Handbook, Insult Edition, by Lawrence Dorfman, reference
21. March 5, Voss by Patrick White, novel
22. March 6, Robert's Rules of Order Newly Revised In Brief, 2nd edition, by Henry M. Robert, III, reference
23. March 12, The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch, science (sort of)
24. March 20, The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse, novel
25. March 20, The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, inspiration
26. March 23, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents Earth (The Book): A Visitor's Guide to the Human Race by Jon Stewart and others, topical humor
27. March 28, Pogo: The Complete Daily & Sunday Comic Strips, Vol. 1: Through the Wild Blue Wonder by Walt Kelly, comics

28. April 7, One Book, The Whole Universe edited by Richard D. Mohr, philosophy
29. April 11, A History of Russia, Central Asia, and Mongolia by David Christian, history
30. April 15, The Honourable Schoolboy by John le Carré, spy novel
31. April 17, Smiley's People by John le Carré, spy novel
32. April 28, The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, novel

33. May 1, The Origins of the Slavic Nations by Serhii Plokhy, history
34. May 2, The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout, psychology, sociology
35. May 6, The Plot Thickens anthologized by Mary Higgins Clark, short stories
36. May 8, The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson, psychology, sociology
37. May 10, Proofiness by Charles Seife, psychology
38. May 11, True Enough by Farhad Manjoo, psychology
39. May 16, Without Conscience by Robert D. Hare, psychology, sociology
40. May 24, Paris to the Past by Ina Caro, travel, history
41. May 30, Doc by Mary Doria Russell, novel

42. June 4, Desolation Road by Ian McDonald, science fiction novel
43. June 12, Snakes in Suits by Paul Babiak and Robert D. Hare, psychology, sociology
44. June28, The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology edited by Jerry L. Walls, religion

45. July 1, Asterix Omnibus, volume 10, by Albert Uderzo, comics
46. July 3, 2052 by Jorgen Randers, apocalypse
47. July 5, Bloodmoney by David Ignatius, novel
48. July 18, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey, memoir
49. July 29, Juicy and Delicious, by Lucy Alibar, drama

50. August 3, A Universe from Nothing by Lawrence M. Krauss, cosmology
51. August 15, Why Does the World Exist by Jim Holt, cosmology
52. August 18, Physics On the Fringe by Margaret Wertheim, sociology of science
53. August 22, One, Two, Three: Absolutely Elementary Mathematics by David Berlinski
54. August 27, The Perpetual Orgy by Mario Varga Llosa, translated by Helen Lane
55. August 29, The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje
56. August 30, Secret Ingredients edited by David Remnick

57. September 1, Heart of Darkness, the Norton Critical Edition, by Joseph Conrad, edited by Paul B. Armstrong
58. September 9, To a Mountain in Tibet by Colin Thubron

Robert

2Mr.Durick
Redigeret: okt 1, 2012, 2:20 am

Stage, screen, and the like. The links are to the message wherein I mention my reaction to the performance.

A note for future reference.
Another such note for future reference.
August 2012 note for future reference.
A note from 2011 for future reference.
September 2012 note for future reference
What's good this year

1. The Adventures of Tintin, 3D, IMAX, mainstream
2. Mission Impossible - Ghost Protocol, IMAX, mainstream
3. Faust, Metropolitan Opera Live in HD, opera
4. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy, movie theater, mainstream
5. Carnage, movie theater, limited release
6. The Iron Lady, movie theater, mainstream
7. Contraband, movie theater, mainstream
8. Enchanted Island, Metropolitan Opera Live in HD, opera
9. Shame, movie theater, limited release
10. Three string quartets, live on stage
11. Goat Rodeo Sessions Live, High Definition screening
12. Big Miracle, movie theater, mainstream
13. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, movie theater, mainstream
14. Dangerous Method, movie theater, limited release
15. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, movie theater, fewer theaters now
16. The Namesake, DVD
17. Chronicle, IMAX equivalent, mainstream
18. The Princess Bride, IMAX equivalent, revival
19. Götterdämmerung, Metropolitan Opera Live in HD, opera
20. Oscar Nominated Shorts 2012, live action, movie theater, limited release
21. Oscar Nominated Shorts 2012, animated, movie theater, limited release
22. Dudamel Conducts Mahler, High Definition screening
23. Red Tails, movie theater, mainstream
24. Safe House, movie theater, mainstream
25. Ernani, Metropolitan Opera Live in HD, opera
26. The Pearl Fishers, opera live on stage
27, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, BBC DVD
28. Travelling Light, National Theatres Live screening, drama
29. Norwegian Wood, movie theater, limited release
30. A Separation, movie theater, limited release
31. Dr. Seuss' [sic] The Lorax, 3D, mainstream
32. John Carter, 3D, IMAX, mainstream
33. Let the Bullets Fly, movie theater, foreign (Chinese)
34. Jeff, Who Lives at Home, movie theater, limited release (in my area anyway)
35. 21 Jump Street, movie theater, mainstream
36. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, movie theater, limited release
37. Jiro Dreams of Sushi, movie theater, limited release
38. Dancing Queen, movie theater, foreign (Korean)
39. One Kine Day, movie theater, limited release
40. Titanic, 3D, IMAX, mainstream
41. In Darkness, movie theater, foreign (mostly Polish)
42. The Raid: Redemption, movie theater, foreign (Indonesian)
43. Being Flynn, movie theater, limited release
44. We Need to Talk About Kevin, movie theater, limited release
45. Chico & Rita, movie theater, foreign (Spanish, sort of) animated
46. Le Havre, movie theater, foreign (Finnish French)
47. She Stoops to Conquer, National Theatres Live screening, comedy
48. Manon, Metropolitan Opera Live in HD, opera
49. Chimpanzee, movie theater, mainstream
50. Think Like a Man, movie theater, mainstream
51. Casablanca, movie theater, special showing
52. Boy, movie theater, foreign (New Zealand)
53. Bully, movie theater, limited release documentary
54. Damsels in Distress, movie theater, limited release
55. The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, movie theater, limited release documentary
56. The Avengers, 3D, IMAX, mainstream
57. Wagner's Dream, Metropolitan Opera Live in HD, documentary
58. The Five-Year Engagement, movie theater, mainstream
59. Die Walküre, Metropolitan Opera Live in HD, opera
60. Yellow Submarine, movie theater, one night revival
61. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, movie theater, limited release
62. Dark Shadows, IMAX, mainstream
63. Die Walküre, Metropolitan Opera Live in HD, opera
64. Top Gun, movie theater, one night revival
65. The Cabin in the Woods, movie theater, mainstream
66. Götterdämmerung, Metropolitan Opera Live in HD, opera
67. The Dictator, movie theater, mainstream
68. Battleship, movie theater, mainstream
69. The Phantom of the Opera at Royal Albert Hall, movie theater, musical screening
70. Bernie, movie theater, limited release
71. Sound of My Voice, movie theater, limited release
72. Men in Black III, 3D IMAX, mainstream
73. The Road, movie theater, foreign (Philippines)
74. The Kid with a Bike, movie theater, foreign (France, Belgium)
75. Prometheus, 3D IMAX, mainstream
76. The Manzanar Fishing Club, movie theater, limited release documentary
77. Anna Bolena, Metropolitan Opera Live in HD, opera
78. The Tempest, movie theater, Stratford Shakespeare Festival film, drama
79. First Position, movie theater, limited release documentary
80. Hysteria, movie theater, limited release
81. Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding, movie theater, limited release
82. Safety Not Guaranteed, movie theater, limited release
83. Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, movie theater, mainstream
84. Moonrise Kingdom, movie theater, limited release
85. Lola Versus, movie theater, limited release
86. The Amazing Spider-Man, 3D IMAX, mainstream
87. To Rome with Love, movie theater, limited release
88. Savages, movie theater, mainstream
89. Your Sister's Sister, movie theater, limited release
90. Singin' in the Rain, movie theater, one night revival
91. Where Do We Go Now? movie theater, foreign (Lebanon maybe)
92. Ted, movie theater, mainstream
93. Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, movie theater, mainstream
94. The Deep Blue Sea, movie theater, limited release
95. Elles, movie theater, foreign (Poland, Germany, France)
96. Beasts of the Southern Wild, movie theater, limited release
97. Quadrophenia-can you see the real me?, movie theater, one night documentary
98. I Wish, movie theater, foreign (Japan)
99. Ingelore, private screening, documentary
100. The Intouchables, movie theater, limited release
101. Beasts of the Southern Wild, movie theater, limited release
102. Sacrifice, movie theater, foreign (China)
103. Monsieur Lazhar, movie theater, foreign (Canada)
104. Beasts of the Southern Wild, movie theater, limited release
105. Ruby Sparks, movie theater, limited release
106. The Campaign, movie theater, mainstream
107. John Jorgenson Quintet, live on stage
108. Nuit #1, movie theater, foreign (Canada)
109. 2016: Obama's America, movie theater, limited release documentary
110. Hope Springs, movie theater, mainstream
111. Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, movie theater, limited release documentary
112. Celeste & Jesse Forever, movie theater, limited release
113. Beasts of the Southern Wild, movie theater, limited release
114. The Expendables 2, movie theater, mainstream (or foreign (Bulgaria))
115. Robot & Frank, movie theater, limited release
116. To Kill a Mockingbird, museum theater, local historical series of law profession related films
117. Premium Rush, movie theater, mainstream
118. Lawless, movie theater, mainstream
119. Cosmopolis, movie theater, limited release
120. Apocalypse Now Redux, DVD
121. Madame Bovary (Claude Chabrol), DVD
122. Restrepo, museum theater, movie series in support of a display of war related art
123. Ancient Sounds of Greece, museum lecture and brief concert
124. Lioness, museum theater, movie series in support of a display of war related art
125. The Last Outpost, museum theater, movie series in support of a display of war related art
126. Arbitrage, movie theater, limited release
127. The Bourne Legacy, movie theater, mainstream
128. You May Not Kiss the Bride, movie theater
129. Finding Nemo, 3D, movie theater, mainstream
130. Killer Joe, movie theater, limited release
131. Sleepwalk with Me, movie theater, limited release
132. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, National Theatres Live screening, drama
133. The Master, movie theater, limited release
134. Dredd, 3D IMAX equivalent, mainstream
135. Chamber concert of Amy Beach compositions, live in chamber
136. Chicken with Plums, movie theater, limited release
137. Looper, IMAX equivalent, mainstream

Robert

3Mr.Durick
Redigeret: sep 28, 2012, 4:39 pm

Here are the books I've acquired in 2012. The links are usually not touchstones; they are links to the message below in which I give the circumstances of the acquisition and attempt to touchstone the titles and authors.

1. Affairs of Steak by Julie Hyzy
2. Seeing Together: Mind, Matter, and the Experimental Outlook of John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley by Frank X. Ryan
3. The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse
4. Bossy Pants by Tina Fey
5. Factotum by Charles Bukowski
6. France by Russell Lamb and Dan Harder
7. The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
8. Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
9. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John Le Carré
10. The Literary Guide to the Bible edited by Robert Alter and Frank Kermode
11. Why Read Moby-Dick? by Nathaniel Philbrick
12. A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel
13. Memories of the Future by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
14. Stoner by John Williams
15. Paul Robeson, a biography, by Martin Duberman
16. Happiness, a history, by Darrin M. McMahon
17. Beauty and Sadness by Yasunari Kawabata
18. Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
19. The Myth of the Eternal Return by Mircea Eliade
20. Pogo: Through the Wild Blue Yonder by Walt Kelly
21. Robert's Rules of Order Newly Revised in Brief, 2nd edition by Henry M. Robert, III, and many others
22. Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman
23. The Snark Handbook by Lawrence Dorfman
24. The Snark Handbook, Sex Edition, by Lawrence Dorfman
25. The Snark Handbook, Insult Edition, by Lawrence Dorfman
26. The Hemlock Cup by Bettany Hughes
27. Eifelheim by Michael Flynn
28. Freedom Flyers by J. Todd Moye
29. The Shift by Lynda Gratton
30. Doc by Mary Doria Russell
31. Selected Writings by Heinrich van Kleist, edited and translated by David Constantine
32. NOOK Book: An Unofficial Guide: Everything you need to know about the NOOK Tablet, NOOK Color, and the NOOK Simple Touch (3rd Edition) by Patrick Kanouse
33. The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
34. Dear Mr. Unabomber by Ray Cavanaugh
35. The Gift of Thanks by Margaret Visser
36. Island Fire edited by Cheryl A. Harstad and James R. Harstad
37. Voltaire by Theodore Besterman
38. Voltaire Essays and Another by Theodore Besterman
39. Wildfire Season by Andrew Pyper
40. Pepita by Vita Sackville-West
41. The Time of Light by Gunnar Kopperud
42. Young Adolf by Beryl Bainbridge
43. According to Queeney by Beryl Bainbridge
44. Dr. Thorne by Anthony Trollope
45. The Last Valley by A. B. Guthrie, Jr.
46. The Odyssey, a modern sequel, by Nikos Kazantzakis
47. Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About by Donald E. Knuth
48. The Routledge Atlas of Jewish History by Martin Gilbert
49. True Enough by Farhad Manjoo
50. How To Be Pope by Piers Marchant
51. Authentic Faith apparently edited by committee
52. Native Paths to Volunteer Trails by Stuart Ball
53. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
54. A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes
55. The Open Boat and Other Stories by Stephen Crane
56. The Symposium by Plato
57. War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges
58. The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister
59. How Pleasure Works by Paul Bloom
60. Making Our Democracy Work by Stephen Breyer
61. The Honor Code by Kwame Anthony Appiah
62. Ancient Greece by Thomas R. Martin
63. One With Others by C.D. Wright
64. The Plot Thickens anthologized by Mary Higgins Clark
65. The Oxford Handbook of Causation edited by Helen Beebee, Christopher Hitchcock, and Peter Mezies
66. Robert's Rules of Order QuickStudy
67. Robert's Rules of Order Newly Revised, 11th Edition, by Henry M. Robert, III, Daniel H. Honemann, and Thomas J. Balch
68. The Honourable Schoolboy by John le Carré
69. Smiley's People by John le Carré
70. The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything by James Martin, SJ
71. Whatever It Is, I Don't Like It by Howard Jacobson
72. The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics edited by Brad Inwood
73. The Origins of the Slavic Nations by Serhii Plokhy
74. Great Baseball Writing edited by Rob Fleder
75. Pound, poems and translations by Ezra Pound
76. Kaufman and Co. by George S. Kaufman and collaborators
77. The Cambridge Companion to Marx edited by Terrell Carver
78. Verbatim edited by Erin McKean
79. The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout
80. Wherever You Go There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn
81. Maphead by Ken Jennings
82. The Anatomy of Influence by Harold Bloom
83. Paris to the Past by Ina Caro
84. The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson
85. Stuff Parisians Like by Olivier Magny
86. To a Mountain in Tibet by Colin Thubron
87. The Appointment by Herta Müller
88. Gillespie and I by Jane Harris
89. A New Literary History of America edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors
90. Whores for Gloria by William T. Vollman
91. Meditations on the Soul, selected letters of Marsilio Ficino
92. Bierce: The Devil's Dictionary, Tales, & Memoirs by Ambrose Bierce, edited by S.T. Joshi
93. Without Conscience by Robert D. Hare
94. Snakes in Suits by Paul Babiak and Robert D. Hare
95. American Journal of Numismatics edited by Andrew R. Meadows
96. In My Time by Dick Cheney
97. Find Out Who's Normal and Who's Not by David J. Lieberman
98. When I Am Playing With My Cat How Do I know That She Is Not Playing With Me by Saul Frampton
99. Dead End Gene Pool by Wendy Burden
100. The Baseball Codes by Jason Turbow
101. The Broken Teaglass by Emily Arsenault
102. Desolation Road by Ian McDonald
103. Freefall by Joseph E. Stiglitz
104. Crisis Economics by Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm
105. The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology edited by Jerry Walls
106. La grammaire est une chanson douce by Erik Orsenna
107. The Path to Hope by Stéphane Hessel and Edgar Morin
108. 2052 by Jorgen Randers
109. The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje
110. The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity, edited by Robert Frodeman with associate editors Julie Thompson Klein and Carl Mitcham
111. Switching to the Mac by David Pogue
112. How Do You Kill 11 Million People? by Andy Andrews
113. Why Mahler? by Norman Lebrecht
114. The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
115. Blood Money by David Ignatious
116. Train Dreams by Denis Johnson
117. Asterix Omnibus, books 28 to 30, by Albert Uderzo
118. The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge edited by Frederick Burwick
119. The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters
120. Secret Ingredients edited by David Remnick
121. The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau edited by Joel Myerson
122. Why Does the World Exist? by Jim Holt
123. Harlem Renaissance Novels edited by Rafia Zafar
124. Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe edited by Cyrus Hamlin
125. Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe edited by David Scott Kastan
126. There but for the by Ali Smith
127. Uncle Tom's Cabin, Norton Critical Edition, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, edited by Elizabeth Ammons
128. The Castle of Otronto by Horace Walpole
129. Biographia Literaria by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
130. Juicy and Delicious by Lucy Alibar
131. Information and the Nature of Reality edited by Paul Davies and Niels Henrik Gregerson
132. Physics on the Fringe by Margaret Wertheim
133. Introduction to Mathematical Logic by Michal Walicki
134. Visit Sunny Chernobyl by Andrew Blackwell
135. The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Franklin edited by Carla Mulford
136. Memoirs of an Addicted Brain by Marc Lewis
137. Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
138. Cosmic Secrets by Wolfram Schommers
139. A Universe from Nothing by Lawrence M. Krauss
140. X-Events: The Collapse of Everything by John Casti
141. Drop Dead Healthy by A.J. Jacobs
142. The Smartest Animals on the Planet by Sally Boysen
143. The Eichmann Trial by Deborah E. Lipstadt
144. Once Before Time by Martin Bojowald
145. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert translated by Lydia Davis
146. A History of the World in 10½ Chapters by Julian Barnes
147. The Tao of Travel by Paul Theroux
148. The Icarus Syndrome by Peter Beinart
149. Grand Pursuit by Sylvia Nasar
150. The Dictator's Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith
151. Roget's International Thesaurus, seventh edition edited by Barbara Ann Kipfer
152. Modern Movements in European Philosophy by Richard Kearney
153. Madame Bovary, Norton Critical Edition by Gustave Flaubert edited by Margaret Cohen
154. The Perpetual Orgy by Mario Vargas Llosa
155. Earth Before the Dinosaurs by Sébastien Steyer
156. Weightlifting Olympic Style by Tommy Kono
157. Championship Weightlifting by Tommy Kono
158. The Dhammapada translated by Valerie J. Roebuck
159. Strange Maps by Frank Jacobs
160. You Are Here by Katharine Harmon
161. Utopia, Norton Critical Edition, by Sir Thomas More, translated and edited by Robert M. Adams
162. The Analects of Confucius translated by Arthur Waley
163. The Rise and Fall of Communism by Archie Brown
164. The Best Writing on Mathematics 2011 edited by Mircea Pitici
165. How to Write a Sentence by Stanley Fish
166. Churchill's Empire by Richard Toye
167. The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt
168. Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto and translated by David R. Slavitt
169. Why Not Socialism? by G.A. Cohen
170. Stoicism by John Sellars
171. Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann and translated by John E. Woods
172. The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing
173. Popular Hits of the Showa Era by Ryu Murakami
174. Blindness by José Saramago and translated by Giovanni Pontiero
175. American Nations by Colin Woodard
176. The Value of Hawaii edited by Craig Howes and Jon Osorio
177. That is All by John Hodgman
178. The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Linguistics edited by Shigeru Miyagawa and Mamoru Saito

Robert

4jdthloue
jul 1, 2012, 7:06 pm

Well after all the Lists, which make me dizzy..

I am here.....

Not much to say....pity

;-P

5Mr.Durick
jul 1, 2012, 7:09 pm

Pity.

Robert

6jdthloue
jul 1, 2012, 7:13 pm

Smart Ass, you..

7baswood
jul 2, 2012, 6:35 am

Great lists Robert.

8dchaikin
jul 2, 2012, 1:55 pm

checking in to Q3.

9Mr.Durick
jul 2, 2012, 6:08 pm

My thread is graced by your presence.

Robert

10Mr.Durick
Redigeret: jul 2, 2012, 11:25 pm

In Asterix Omnibus, volume 10, by Albert Uderzo we learn that one should be careful, as we learned in Gotterdammerung, of magic potions, especially those we haven't experienced before. We also have a hero dog, always a plus, whose life duty is to protest the destruction of trees; it is curious that his name is Dogmatix. The dismissive characterization of foreigners is sometimes indelicate, and the humor is weaker than in the few Asterix comics that I have read which René Goscinny helped produce, but seeing ancient Gauls confronting apparent Muslims is always fun. Women who can conquer barbarians but who are most at home shopping in the marketplace contribute to the feminist dialectic.

I will not often but almost certainly seek an evening's diversion with Asterix from time to time in the future.

Robert

11janemarieprice
jul 2, 2012, 8:21 pm

10 - Just the phrase 'hero dog' made me smile.

12Mr.Durick
Redigeret: jul 4, 2012, 4:20 pm

Jorgen Randers assisted in the writing of The Limits to Growth and its successors. That models various contingencies in the future of the world. He wanted to know what the world would actually be like in the rest of his life. It is forty years since the publication of the first book, so he chose to look forward forty years and wrote 2052 which coincidentally covers to a little beyond the rest of my life.

Climatic change is upon us, for sure. A couple of billion people are impoverished. The population is growing.

Climate change could be fixed at about where we are now (and not move beyond the 2° rise that roughly marks the boundary between survival and devastation) if the big players put money into the solution. They will not do it in time, so avoiding devastation may not be in the cards. With the slowing of population growth, however, warming will be slowed so that sometime after 2052 temperatures will peak at 2.7° higher than now, and it is iffy about whether tundra will melt releasing enough methane for a runaway heating effect in the second half of the century (when he an I will be dead). Nature will pretty much have had it, and parents should not teach children an appreciation of the wilderness because they will miss it as they grow.

The change will be survivable, but the standard of living will go down, especially for the currently privileged in all of the nations that are reasonably productive nowadays. The United States of America will lose its primacy in the world, and China will become the economic leader of the world. The poor will remain poor. There will be food. As the American prairie ceases to be a breadbasket, Siberia, Canada, and Scandinavia will open up new farmlands, and increased CO₂ will effectively fertilize plant crops.

Power will increasingly come from sources other than fossil fuels, although conversion of coal to petroleum like products may have advantages. He doesn't mention the killing of bats by giant windmills, and speaks favorably of the German movement toward alternative energy sources. Photovoltaic generation of electricity will decentralize power distribution and reduce pollution. He doesn't mention, that I noticed, the possibility of heating water to steam by sunlight to drive generators nor does he mention, much, storing electricity for nighttime and cloudy day use.

Most of us will live in apartments in cities as time passes and will have to tolerate atmospheric heat. In the developed countries incomes will be flat. Our standard of living will improve only in non-material ways (we may learn to look for entertainment beyond the bottom line).

I'm on a small, fixed income and may be in trouble.

Robert

13avidmom
jul 4, 2012, 9:11 pm

14Mr.Durick
jul 6, 2012, 3:07 am

The mail person was just starting to load our mailboxes as I was leaving, but she gave me my book from a BN.COM order inspired by a coupon.

The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge edited by Frederick Burwick. Of course a drug addicted poet of consequence drew the attention of us undergraduates, but I had no idea how much Coleridge contributed to English thinking until I began to look into the American transcendentalists who derived a lot from him. I once tried to read Biographia Literaria without getting very far, but I still want to know what he has to say and what can be derived from him.

Robert

15Mr.Durick
Redigeret: jul 6, 2012, 2:59 pm

I saw Greta Gerwig in the okay but not special Damsels in Distress and saw that she was coming up in Woody Allen's new film. To prepare myself for that I thought I ought to see her in the not very favorably reviewed Lola Versus, and today was the last day of the one week it survived in the sorta local theater. The movie is a demonstration why men and women should just give up on the business of romance with each other. The movie was not awful.

In a day full of errands I thought I could also, partly by being in the neighborhood, squeeze in the 3D IMAX version of The Amazing Spider-Man. The favorable review I read of the movie said that 3D was unnecessary for this film, but I really enjoyed both the depth from and fullness of form from 3D and the clarity and import of the huge IMAX screening. I think that enough superhero movies have been made that they've learned how to do them pretty well, and this movie is pretty good. Both the characterizations and the action hold the attention, and there isn't much that's very stupid about the movie except you have to accept the givens, like the spider bite and the lizard. (But here is an alternate opinion: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/akira-the-don/spiderman-five-reasons-i-dont-wann...

I also bought a ticket for a rerun of three Batman movies coming up in two weeks. I hope that's tolerable and that I as an old man won't fall asleep as they grind on.

Robert

16DieFledermaus
jul 6, 2012, 4:26 am

>12 Mr.Durick: sounds like a bit of a depressing read. I don't love the idea of having to tolerate atmospheric heat.

17dchaikin
jul 6, 2012, 2:36 pm

#12 Interesting. And he's right, nothing doing in the turnback global warming camp. Bush denied, Obama gave up easily and no one seems to care, and China, as far as I know, is silent.

18Mr.Durick
Redigeret: jul 6, 2012, 3:24 pm

I just read some other LibraryThing reviews of Bloodmoney by David Ignatius which I stayed up too late last night (second night in a row) to finish. I have nothing to add, and I don't want to correct the few mistakes I saw. The novel is very readable but is a bit too tidy in the ending. I may have a new feel about global espionage to take away from my reading, and there was a little more added to my picture of the tribal lands of Pakistan. The story telling, the development were the reasons to read the book.

Robert

19Mr.Durick
jul 8, 2012, 3:41 pm

Woody Allen's latest, To Rome with Love, was playing at the multiplex in the direction I was going at the time I was going. It got an adverse review in the local paper, but I decided to see it. Rome stars and is supported by the casting of some very attractive women of various ages. Unfortunately Rome was not given a very good role. There are some marvelous bits of humor and a few bits of thoughtfulness here, all strung together on a movie that sucks. Even the stupid stuff is not stupid funny (with some exceptions like a band playing Volare on the Spanish Steps) but just stupid. In the few places where drama is invoked it is done as a paste on.

This is not a good movie. Don't go to it.

Robert

20baswood
jul 8, 2012, 4:00 pm

Robert, I cannot possibly heed your advice, this is Woody Allen we are talking about.

21Mr.Durick
jul 8, 2012, 4:06 pm

Well, if you see it, review it. It got two out of four stars in my local paper (not, however, a local reviewer). I gave it two stars out of ten on IMDb.

Robert

22Mr.Durick
Redigeret: jul 10, 2012, 1:47 am

Oliver Stone didn't bring much substance into his new film Savages, but boy can he tell a story. Except for having to go to the bathroom I could have gone for the twelve hour version of this movie. That may partly be because the end was something of a mess, and if we could avoid going there the entertainment might be greater. Anyway, I liked this movie even if I didn't get anything out of it. It is very violent and there is some not entirely explicit sex; what's up with people copulating clothed in movies nowadays?

John Travolta is in the movie, and he is very good. A reviewer on IMDb says that Salma Hayek is also very good in this movie.

Robert

23Mr.Durick
Redigeret: jul 13, 2012, 3:49 pm

I think that I'm supposed to be embarrassed about my liking the movie Your Sister's Sister. It got a very tepid review in the local paper. I had liked the trailers, and they were moving the movie farther away today, so I went out to see it yesterday. The first few minutes were agonizingly slow. Then it was a so-so movie with some charm. And then the charm carried the movie. It is about affection and its complications; it is set among three people in the coastal woods of Washington. Hate this movie if you must (as the IMDb reviewer whom I read did), but I liked it.

I had never seen Singin' in the Rain, so when it was scheduled near here I put it on my calendar. As far as I'm concerned the story is too simple and too common a one to take away any substance from it, but it is a good way to string together some really pithy jokes and some marvelous dance numbers. The enjoyment is in the watching; reflection gets in the way. I missed this when it first came out in 1952 (copyright MCMLI), but I wouldn't have liked it then anyway.

Robert

24Mr.Durick
jul 13, 2012, 6:22 pm

As a recreational apocalyptician I was entranced by favorable mention of The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters here on LibraryThing. I placed an advance order for it, and it shipped early this week. As I returned today from my quasi-daily walk the mailwoman was getting out her truck and had it in her embrace. I meant to read it right away, but then I got diverted into The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating which should be finished by now, but isn't. How will we be when we know that the end has come?

Robert

25pamelad
jul 15, 2012, 5:19 am

I believe you will be stoical, Robert.

26Mr.Durick
jul 15, 2012, 6:07 pm

Three movies all of which were only medium on the interest scale were playing at the multiplex I wanted to be at yesterday afternoon. Where Do We Go Now? was the one that fit my schedule, and I watched it. In an isolated Lebanese village Muslims and Christians (the priest looked Orthodox) could live together peacefully unless outside influences were brought to bear. Then sectarianism could lead to violence. Some folk among them, mostly the women, protested the violence. When those silly men moved towards murder, the women conspired to use their foolishness against them. This is a pleasantly goofy movie which rewards the watching.

Robert

27Mr.Durick
jul 15, 2012, 6:12 pm

In my post-movie visit to Barny Noble's store I spotted Secret Ingredients falsely propped up on the new book table. The Modern Library Paperback dates from 2008, but I spend little time (too little time) in the cookbook section of the store, so it was new to me. As far as I'm concerned, food makes some of the best eating, and writing from the New Yorker often enough hits the spot, so I scooped up the book. I probably should have checked the price on-line; oh well.

Robert

28JDHomrighausen
jul 16, 2012, 12:21 am

> 26

Sounds like a very cross between Of Gods and Men and Lysistrata!

29Mr.Durick
Redigeret: jul 16, 2012, 2:28 am

I don't know Of Gods and Men, and I know Lysistrata more by reputation than familiarity. Lysistrata came to mind, but the movie carried itself, and I wasn't worried that they had ripped off mythology or classical drama.

Robert

30Mr.Durick
jul 17, 2012, 12:24 am

The movie Ted has a good fart joke. There is a good and ultimately effective curse. It lasts the better part of two hours.

Robert

31Mr.Durick
jul 17, 2012, 12:28 am

The used book store downstairs from the theaters had The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau edited by Joel Myerson available in excellent condition in its one dollar section, so I bought it. It fits one of my putative interests. I am buying too many books with more coming in the mail and by UPS from three different sources, but I don't like not buying books.

Robert

32JDHomrighausen
jul 17, 2012, 5:47 am

> 31

Funny, one of my Buddhist friends pointed at my book pile just an hour ago and told me I have a bad attachment.

My uncle had a nasty habit of buying lots of software programs (engineer geek type). As my aunt says, at least he's not doing drugs, cheating on her, or having sex. That's how I look at book buying.

33dmsteyn
jul 18, 2012, 12:49 pm

Coincidentally, I was debating about buying the new Portable Thoreau today. Maybe this is an indication that I should have.

34Mr.Durick
jul 18, 2012, 2:51 pm

I bought a few portables for my Nook last night and saw the Thoreau in passing. It tempted me, but I think I prefer him on paper. There are a couple of individual works by him put out by, I think, Yale which are annotated and pretty; they also have drawn my interest.

Robert

35Mr.Durick
jul 18, 2012, 2:58 pm

Like so many others I have now read The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey, a meditation on the comfort of a pet in recuperation. It is charming.

I bought it the other day for my Nook because it was cheap and because so many people liked it. I've owned my Nook for some time now but have pretty much used it for checking LibraryThing from my bed and to play Bejewelled. This was the first full book I've read. I would rather read a paper book, a paperback paper book. Nevertheless it was readable, and I have added a few things that I'd just as soon have with me while I am out and about, and I have added some things that are free in some e-book format that would be too expensive and unwieldy to print out. I will eventually put those things into my catalog here.

Robert

36Mr.Durick
Redigeret: jul 20, 2012, 5:25 pm

I love snark, and snark came to mind when I heard about the Colorado shootings and more when I read about them today. But it is sad, and as with the English retailer now I know that solemnity is called for. I am saddened that the shootings happened, and I am disturbed that people are trying to make religio-political hay out it. My first knowledge of the shootings came as I checked Facebook from the theater in which I was watching a Batman marathon.

I hadn't seen any of the films until last night.

Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises comprise a blockbuster superhero trilogy (which is open to extension) limning a well known fictional character in brilliant imagery. The darkness of the first film makes of it an artful film perhaps to the extent that it is an art film. It was the best of the series. I had read in the news about the death of Heath Ledger, but I had no idea who he was. It turns out that he was capable of a tour de force performance in his portrayal of The Joker. It was that portrayal that gave substance to the second film.

The movie of the day, The Dark Knight Rises, recapitulates, sums, and ends (unless there is demand for more) the series. It has its superhero movie spectacular explosions and a disturbing villain; it reaches for substance in the disturbed isolation of its hero. It is good enough. I was glad to see that Alfred's drink in Florence was Fernet Branca. It is long, but the length is not trying. I saw it on a pretty good screen and missed some of it largely because of my geriatric ears, but there isn't, to my mind now anyway, enough to it to go back and see it in IMAX.

Robert

37Mr.Durick
jul 20, 2012, 6:45 pm

I'm in good company when I say that I like the question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" despite that there is very likely no answer. Why Does the World Exist? by Jim Holt got good press, and I, in a rare move, ordered it from BN.COM without waiting for it to come out in paperback.

It was scheduled right from the start by the U.S. Postal Service for delivery yesterday; it was in today's mail. The same day in a separate order to the same vendor I ordered a couple of other books. They shipped the same day from the same place scheduled for delivery yesterday; the postal service web site doesn't show them anyplace since Reno. Oh, well.

Robert

38Mr.Durick
jul 21, 2012, 7:30 pm

I've actually read several Harlem Renaissance works but not nearly enough for the lush and luscious field that it is. I saw the individual volumes of this two book boxed set at my Barny Noble brick and mortar a few months back and thought that I would likely own them both one day. A timely coupon led to a recent order which arrived in today's mail:

Harlem Renaissance Novels edited by Rafia Zafar. There are nine works in the set, of which I have read one, Cane. As with so many books I acquire I would like to dive into this tonight, but I have books by my bed already that I want to dive into tonight. Meanwhile there's a movie to see.

Robert

39janeajones
jul 21, 2012, 8:13 pm

Ooh -- that looks delicious --Cane is also the only one I have read. My book budget is a bit slim at the moment, but this is one is on the wishlist.

40Mr.Durick
jul 22, 2012, 5:23 pm

I had seen no trailers from The Deep Blue Sea, but the local paper carried a rave review and four out of four stars. It is beautifully filmed. The performances are exquisite. The characterization is deep and important. The movie is boring.

A movie that got an adverse review and two out of four stars in the local paper was reduced to one screening a day at 9:30 pm, past my bedtime. I went back to the multiplex to see it anyway (partly because I had to pass by it on the way home). Elles is about sex as coping with existential loneliness. It is gratuitously pornographic, and the pornography is coy. Life goes on. It is not a movie to stay up for. (If the film had been in English I would have been really resentful about paying money to see it, but I get poseur credit for its being in French; there were cigarettes (fumer tue), but they were not Gauloises so points are deducted.)

There were security guards at the theater.

Robert

41avidmom
jul 22, 2012, 6:15 pm

but there isn't, to my mind now anyway, enough to it to go back and see it in IMAX.

#36 I have an eighteen-year-old son here who would be extremely envious that you got to see a Christopher Nolan Batman marathon. We (my two teenage sons and I) went to see it in IMAX yesterday; and while the movie was good and the sound quality in the theatre was great, I didn't see the point afterwards on shelling out all the money for that. But, it was a nice trip out of our little "small town" (relatively speaking) to go see life in the big city and an excuse for me to finally see a movie in IMAX. I had a hard time understanding everything Bain said in the movie, which is sad, since I think he probably had some of the best lines in the film. Oh well.

42DieFledermaus
jul 23, 2012, 12:33 am

An impressive list of movies as usual.

>35 Mr.Durick: - Does your library have Nook-compatible ebooks? I've been getting the majority of my recent nonfiction from the library as an ebook. The interest threshold is much lower and I'll be sure to read the book since it has to go back in three weeks. Library ebooks and Gutenberg free ebooks (also Google ebooks) make up the majority of my Nook reads.

43Mr.Durick
jul 23, 2012, 1:15 am

As much as I respect libraries and want my tax dollars to support them, I don't want to have much to do with them.

I have enough books on my Nook now, mostly free, to last me several years. With the addition of some references, I could master three languages foreign to me with what I have there. I still have to figure it out though. I've downloaded PDF's from which I can look up words and PDF's which seem to be pure images -- my Geneva Bible I can resize, but I can't select text. I wondering whether epubs would suit me better.

I don't mind paying a couple of bucks (I think the snail book was $2.99) for a book that I am likely to read. On the other hand I am not all that charmed by reading on the device.

Robert

44JDHomrighausen
jul 23, 2012, 4:21 am

I understand Robert. Adjusting to my kindle took some time and force. And I'm 22 - this is supposed to be my generation's thing!

I try to think about saving trees and space. I also take notes on paper while reading on kindle. I don't retain anything otherwise.

45Mr.Durick
Redigeret: jul 24, 2012, 2:09 am

A literate person should be informed about the Faust legend and have read the important works about Faust. I've read at least the first part of Goethe's work. Harold Bloom seems to think that the work is made great by the second part. Earlier this year I saw the high definition screening of the opera Faust and worried about the plot. I looked into getting the Norton Critical Edition of Goethe's take on it, but BN.COM kept coming up with a critical German edition although I found I could order it directly from the publisher.

Finally last week in a compulsive bout of book ordering (wait 'til you see my shipment from the Scientific American Book Club) I ordered from the publisher and had them throw in the Marlowe book too. The box came via UPS (always a challenge) today.

Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe edited by Cyrus Hamlin.
Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe edited by David Scott Kastan.

I hope it is not forever until I get to these.

Robert

46janeajones
jul 24, 2012, 10:35 am

The Progress Of Faust by Karl Shapiro

He was born in Deutschland, as you would suspect,
And graduated in magic from Cracow
In Fifteen Five. His portraits show a brow
Heightened by science. The eye is indirect,
As of bent light upon a crooked soul,
And that he bargained with the prince of Shame
For pleasures intellectually foul
Is known by every court that lists his name.

His frequent disappearances are put down
To visits in the regions of the damned
And to the periodic deaths he shammed,
But, unregenerate and in Doctor's gown,
He would turn up to lecture at the fair
And do a minor miracle for a fee.
Many a life he whispered up the stair
To teach the black art of anatomy.

He was as deaf to angels as an oak
When, in the fall of Fifteen Ninety-Four,
He went to London and crashed through the floor
In mock damnation of the play-going folk.
Weekending with the scientific crowd,
He met Sir Francis Bacon and helped draft
"Colours of Good and Evil" and read aloud
An obscene sermon at which nobody laughed.

He toured the Continent for a hundred years
And subsidized among the peasantry
The puppet play, his tragic history;
With a white glove he boxed the devil's ears
And with a black his own. Tired of this,
He published penny poems about his sins,
In which he placed the heavy emphasis
On the white glove which, for a penny, wins.

Sometime before the hemorrhage of the Kings
Of France, he turned respectable and taught;
Quite suddenly everything that he had thought
Seemed to grow scholars' beards and angels' wings.
It was the Overthrow. On Reason's throne
He sat with the fair Phrygian on his knees
And called all universities his own,|
As plausible a figure as you please.

Then back to Germany as the sage's sage
To preach comparative science to the young
Who came to every land in a great throng
And knew they heard the master of the age.
When for a secret formula he paid
The Devil another fragment of his soul,
His scholars wept, and several even prayed
That Satan would restore him to them whole.

Backwardly tolerant, Faustus was expelled
From the Third Reich in Nineteen Thirty-nine.
His exit caused the breaching of the Rhine,
Except for which the frontier might have held.
Five years unknown to enemy and friend
He hid, appearing on the sixth to pose
In an American desert at war's end
Where, at his back, a dome of atoms rose.
(1947)

47Mr.Durick
jul 24, 2012, 4:33 pm

My goodness, and where is he now?

Thank you,

Robert

48Mr.Durick
jul 25, 2012, 5:10 pm

With two movies scheduled to open Friday at that multiplex and not knowing what would carry over I upset my daily schedule and went across town yesterday knowing that I had a stop to make halfway back.

Oh what a glorious movie Beasts of the Southern Wild is! That The Tree of Life guy should study this for the lessons he needs. It is beautiful. It is telling. It has the best 7 year old actress I can remember watching. It is about the tree of life and how we apprehend it, climb it, take it in. I loved this movie and will go back to it if I can.

Then I rushed back from the far side of town to the near side of town for the musical documentary Quadrophenia-can you see the real me? (this is the best link I could readily find, not an IMDb page). I had hoped to be rocked and rolled. The music was steady throughout, but the emphasis was on documenting. I thought it did a weak job of that, and I was a little disappointed. Roger Daltrey can sing some things admirably. I kind of wish that I had instead spent my evening reflecting on The Beasts of the Southern Wild, but I would not likely have done that anyway.

Robert

49Mr.Durick
jul 25, 2012, 6:04 pm

Just out in paperback my copy of There but for the by Ali Smith was in today's mail from BN.COM. Lots of people have said that they like this book a lot. It will go in my bag of unread novels. I hope to take my bag of unread novels to my book group next Wednesday; the group will probably ignore them all. I have a huge number of unread novels not in my bag of unread novels, many of which I want to read just as much as I want to read the ones in it.

Robert

50janemarieprice
jul 25, 2012, 10:59 pm

48 - Wonderful news! I'm going to see Beasts of the Southern Wild tomorrow.

51Mr.Durick
jul 25, 2012, 11:52 pm

I hope that the movie gets lots of attention. Have fun and post the results.

Robert

52Linda92007
jul 26, 2012, 7:50 am

Why Does the World Exist? sounds fascinating, Robert, and I will be looking forward to your review, while feeling duly chastised for not having yet read Faust.

I heard an interview on NPR with the director(?) and the young actress for Beasts of the Southern Wild and thought it sounded wonderful. I see that Doris Betts wrote a short story by the same name, although they do not seem to be related.

53Mr.Durick
Redigeret: jul 27, 2012, 12:05 am

Linda, I suggest that you see the movie if you can (I went 15 miles, but partly because I knew my way; there is an art house cinema not far from there that I don't go to because I don't know about parking). I'll look for the NPR interview online. (the movie's official web site)

Meanwhile on the matter of 'nothing' there is this article from Slate which looks with favor on Holt's book and with disfavor on Krauss.

There is so much that we must read that we cannot. I have given up feeling guilty about not having read something that I must have even knowing that I must have.

Robert

54Mr.Durick
Redigeret: jul 26, 2012, 6:17 pm

Important photograph from facebook:



From these folks, whom I know only from this photograph.

Robert

PS I like bacon.

R

55LolaWalser
jul 26, 2012, 10:22 pm

Bacon tastes like people. I'm told.

56Mr.Durick
Redigeret: jul 27, 2012, 2:28 am

Denne meddelelse er blevet slettet af dens forfatter.

57Mr.Durick
Redigeret: jul 27, 2012, 12:38 am

I Wish is a likable little movie about Japanese innocence and the prettiness and magic in the quotidien. I worried that there were no pets in the film; then one of the kids tried to catch a dragonfly in a hat. In a few minutes three kids were waiting at a crossing for a train to pass as a woman waited on the other side. The train passed, and the woman wasn't there. I thought it was a continuity problem, but the boys commented on her absence. One of the boys, it was shown, was holding a dog. Later the boy's love of his dog is shown strongly.

I used to feel at home in Japan, in the seventies, despite that I was a raging gaijin. The homeliness of a film like this takes me back to a certain prospect of contentment.

Robert

58Mr.Durick
jul 27, 2012, 12:45 am

After the movie I dropped into the second hand bookstore right outside:

Uncle Tom's Cabin, Norton Critical Edition, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, edited by Elizabeth Ammons. I have The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin, but thought that for five dollars I could use the apparatus of the Norton volume as well.

The Castle of Otronto by Horace Walpole. For a dollar I could have one of the gothic novels I would want to read if ever I wanted to read gothic novels.

Biographia Literaria by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. For another dollar I could have a spare copy of Coleridge's philosophical magnum opus, good to have not knowing where my original copy is.

Robert

59Mr.Durick
jul 28, 2012, 4:01 pm

At a memorial service yesterday for Ingelore Herz Honigstein I saw the documentary Ingelore which apparently has played on HBO and at a score or so of film festivals. In it the deaf subject tells her story from childhood in between-the-wars Germany, through her discovery of and torment for being a Jew, to life in the United States and fulfillment as a family woman. It depends on the time for its givens but is about her not about the time. It is a very moving film.

Robert

60qebo
jul 28, 2012, 4:25 pm

Been awhile since I dropped in to your thread. I like the Nook. I can read without having to hold the pages open. However, I have rules about which books I will get for the Nook and which books must be paper. I get epub format.

61Mr.Durick
Redigeret: jul 28, 2012, 5:09 pm

I think that the next time that I have an option I will try epub. I wish that there were a nice page somewhere that gave all the caveats. Right now I would like to be able to read the epubs that we get free monthly from the University of Chicago on my Nook, but apparently that takes a special reader... or something.

I'd be interested in your rules. Really cheap is one of mine.

Robert

62Mr.Durick
jul 29, 2012, 2:43 pm

The Intouchables is a French quadriplegic comedy demonstrating the comforts of wealth in dealing with adversity. The review carried by the local paper seemed to think that several paragraphs asserting the movie's sweetness and its avoidance of becoming saccharine was sufficient commentary. The movie is sweet, and it is not saccharine. It is humorous and touching. And it is revealing, as the comment on IMDb says, of the value of participating in a world not one's own. It is also about the value of affection and the value of taking charge (albeit without philosophical analysis). I had been waiting for this film a long time; it was not disappointing.

Robert

63baswood
jul 29, 2012, 7:15 pm

Enjoying your film reviews as ever. The Intouchables is high on my list to see.

64Mr.Durick
Redigeret: jul 30, 2012, 12:52 am

I made the mistake of going to church this morning; I didn't want to stay for the afternoon workshop. I was more than halfway to the multiplex on the far side of town; I went there. The movie I hadn't seen, Sacrifice, wasn't on until an hour later and I was feeling sleep deprived, so I saw Beasts of the Southern Wild again, something I had promised myself I'd do. It remains glorious. I could watch it again, but may just get the DVD if and when it is available. I may be able to fit the Chinese movie into Wednesday's schedule.

Bas, The Intouchables is a French film. How is it that you haven't seen it yet? It felt like years that I saw the trailers for it before it finally got here; I thought maybe they were holding it in the can over there until it aged appropriately.

Robert

65baswood
jul 30, 2012, 5:27 am

Ah there's the rub Robert. The Intouchables is a French film and so not unsurprisingly it will be in the French language (no English subtitles). My poor old brain will not cope with more than one french film a week. Its me that needs to age appropriatly and not the film.

I note your love of "Beasts of the Southern Wild" and I will get to see this when I can.

66Mr.Durick
jul 30, 2012, 4:32 pm

Looking to see what was available around Beasts of the Southern Wild I found the play Juicy and Delicious by Lucy Alibar, on which the script for the movie is based, available as a Nook Book, bought it, and read it. There isn't much to it. It delivers a different story than the movie does, and it is not as good a story.

Robert

67Mr.Durick
Redigeret: jul 31, 2012, 10:25 pm

The Scientific American Book Club offered books in a given retail price range for $10 each, so I picked out enough bargains so that the one I got that I already had didn't hurt. I ordered a couple of others from their bargain book shelves for even less, and I ordered one outside the price range for about half price with bonus points I have accrued.

A box of eleven books was in the mail today. There should be another smaller box, but they haven't said that they have shipped it.

Cosmic Secrets, basic features of reality by Wolfram Schommers. This was the $50 book. It is about the nature of reality and what we can know about it. It claims, according to the back cover, that we cannot know it all. Looking briefly at the equations in it I see that I'm going to know considerably less than what can be known.

Drop Dead Healthy by A.J. Jacobs. I've gotten something from his other two books. I have taken at least some interest in my health. I had this on my waiting-for-the-paperback wishlist but thought that for $10 I should go ahead and get the hardcover.

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. The issue of what we do best automatically (like surgery, judge the authenticity of art, land airplanes) and how we think best reflectively is interesting to me. What has been said about this book makes me think it will feed that interest. Another hardcover that had been on the wishlist.

X-Events, the collapse of everything by John Casti. Apocalyptic fodder, this book dilates on eleven scenarios for the collapse of the modern world.

A Universe from Nothing by Lawrence M. Krauss. The author has been raked over the coals because he doesn't in fact start with nothing. I thought it still might be interesting to put it up against Jim Holt's book. Another hard cover that had been on the wishlist.

Memoirs of an Addicted Brain by Marc Lewis. This is a neuroscientist's take on his own drug addiction. I've had my struggles with caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol (especially nicotine) and hope to see myself in his image making.

The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Franklin edited by Carla Mulford. I think of Franklin as one of the founding fathers, not as a scientist, but he was. This was one of the bargain books.

Visit Sunny Chernobyl by Andrew Blackwell. I recently heard the author interviewed on, I think, Tech Nation on NPR. He sounded interesting about the places we have despoiled, so when I saw it available at this price I ordered it.

Introduction to Mathematical Logic by Michal Walicki. Someone on LibraryThing read this, and I put it on my wishlist. This was paperback but still a huge bargain at this price. Like most mathematical logic texts it looks sorta readable. (I'd like to know how to make the l with a slash that really ends the author's first name.)

Physics on the Fringe by Margaret Wertheim. People other than scientists, often reckoned to be oddballs, hypothesize about the structure of the universe. This book reports on some of them.

Information and the Nature of Reality edited by Paul Davies and Henrik Gregersen. LibraryThing tells me that I already have this. Can what we know about the universe be structured along the lines of information theory? This is a collection of articles about that.

Here at half the year and a month gone I have read 49 books and bought 141 books. There's something out of whack.

Robert

68Linda92007
aug 1, 2012, 8:07 am

Looking briefly at the equations in it I see that I'm going to know considerably less than what can be known. Love it, Robert! Such fascinating subjects that at least for me, will only ever be accessible in a seriously dumbed-down version.

69edwinbcn
aug 1, 2012, 8:21 am

read 49 books and bought 141 books. There's something out of whack.

Looks as if you are having a serious relapse. Go see Dr. kidzdoc, Dr. Nickelini or Dr. Cait86. Pay a quick visit to The TBR Theraphy Clinic.

70detailmuse
aug 1, 2012, 9:19 am

>67 Mr.Durick: what an interesting haul! I think you'll love Thinking, Fast and Slow.

71janemarieprice
aug 1, 2012, 10:18 am

Robert, I absolutely loved Beasts of the Southern Wild! There is something about certain movies and books that is able to capture the texture of a place (even if it's a somewhat fantastical place as in Beasts). The actress who played Hushpuppy was astounding (she's also from my hometown). Highly recommended.

My accent was in quite high gear after this though which was the delight of my friends I went with. :)

72Mr.Durick
Redigeret: aug 1, 2012, 3:35 pm

I want to see it again. I wish there were a DVD of it, and I wish there were a sound track album. In a million years scientists will know that there was a Hushpuppy, and she lived with her Daddy in the Bathtub.

I'm glad you liked it.

Robert

73Mr.Durick
aug 1, 2012, 3:38 pm

Edwin, I'm with Samuel Johnson. If you see a book you might want, buy it. You have no idea whether it will be available if you ever want to read it. My greater conundrum arises from my wanting to read dozens of books all right away.

Robert

74janemarieprice
aug 1, 2012, 5:45 pm

72 - Ah, yes, the music was fantastic. I'll have to revisit with my friend I went to see it with who is a musician.

75Mr.Durick
Redigeret: aug 2, 2012, 5:25 pm

To my happy surprise, when I returned from my quasi-daily walk the small package with the remaining three books from my Scientific American Book Club order was in my mailbox. These were more bargainy than the rest except the Ben Franklin above.

Once Before Time by Martin Bojowald. This is cosmology from a loop gravity standpoint. It is harder to get a job in a university in loop gravity than it is in string theory, I've been told, but the author has one.

The Eichmann Trial byy Deborah E. Lipstadt. A history I should read just because. I also want to see whether she gives any credit to Hannah Arendt.

The Smartest Animals on the Planet by Sally Boysen. I like smart. I like animals as much as, possibly more than, people. I like smart animals. I am frequently impressed by the intellect of even cats being stupid, and I have admired crows.

Robert

76baswood
aug 1, 2012, 6:01 pm

#73 At-a-boy Robert. You obviously don't need any therapy.

77SassyLassy
aug 2, 2012, 11:22 am

Looking forward to your thoughts on the Lipstadt book. I'm looking for more encouragement to read it.

78Mr.Durick
Redigeret: aug 2, 2012, 7:01 pm

From IMDb:
The play "Orphan of Zhao" from which this movie is adapted, was a feudal propaganda that exalts loyalty to the aristocracy.
So that's the import of the Chinese movie Sacrifice. My loyalty to the aristocracy is constrained. This movie was not a waste of time, exactly, but I didn't bring much away from it.

Robert

79Mr.Durick
aug 2, 2012, 7:04 pm

SassyLassy, I think I also need encouragement to read it. Maybe a copy of Eichmann in Jerusalem will show up on my doorstep, and I'll have a project to get enthusiastic about.

Robert

80Mr.Durick
Redigeret: aug 4, 2012, 3:55 pm

Scientists outside their own protocols embarrass themselves. Lawrence Krauss, who apparently has done important cosmology, thinks that he, as a physicist, can alter reality by assertion. Oh, those foolish philosophers, not to mention lexicographers, who would deny him the power to change, say, the meaning of a word. In A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing he decides for us that nothing isn't nothing but is something and thus he can answer Leibniz's question with the quantum theory at hand. He is a charlatan.

There are other books about the big bang, the structure of the universe, and its future. He does say a few interesting things about the importance of the mass of virtual particles. But I think this book can be skipped without much loss.

Robert

81qebo
aug 5, 2012, 2:59 pm

61: I'd be interested in your rules. Really cheap is one of mine.
Started as fiction only for the Nook, because I have relatively few dead tree fiction books, not so much because I don’t read them as because I don’t keep them. Also, Gutenberg Project. Then, inexpensive deals... But it’s aesthetically disturbing to have items in the same category in different manifestations. But physical shelf space is limited. Decisions must be made.

80: he decides for us that nothing isn't nothing but is something
Ah, nicely succinctly put. I've caught bits of his talk show rounds, and thought this claim suspect.

82Mr.Durick
aug 5, 2012, 3:09 pm

He will claim that because he is so sensible and because the claims of physics are so substantial that our differences with him on the meaning of 'nothing' are not so much suspect as risible. He is wrong.

Robert

83Mr.Durick
aug 5, 2012, 11:21 pm

The Intouchables was sweet without being saccharine. Monsieur Lazhar is sweet without being saccharine. It also plainly offers a moral without being moralistic. It also depicts the evil in innocence, the innocence in evil, and the innocence in innocence; I don't think it depicts the evil in evil. A man is tried by events; a school is tried by events. They come together and they serve one another. And then we have the rest of the story. The hug at the end is the perfect summation.

Lotsa alsos in this film.

Robert

84Mr.Durick
aug 5, 2012, 11:44 pm

After the movie yesterday I went upstairs to Barny Noble's with a list of three books from my wishlist as cheap or cheaper in the store than on line. I also found a couple of books there that I decided I needed and that were as cheap in the store as on line.

A History of the World in 10½ Chapters by Julian Barnes. I put this on my wishlist when the The Sense of an Ending won the Booker Prize but wasn't available in paperback. Since then I have acquired the latter but only now am getting around to the former. I may read them one day.

The Tao of Travel by Paul Theroux. I don't remember the circumstances of this getting on my wishlist, but I like the looks of it. It is a collection of short excerpts from travel writing that have been important to him.

The Icarus Syndrome by Peter Beinart. How has the United States become exceptional? How can the powers that be actually sustain their own hubris? Those are interesting questions, but there are other books on the subject; I think that this got on my wishlist because of favorable mention somewhere on LibraryThing, but I can't be sure.

Grand Pursuit, The Story of Economic Genius by Sylvia Nasar. This book was on the new paperbacks table. I like to be spoon fed economics from time to time. An on line price check made this reasonable, so I came away with it.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert translated by Lydia Davis. Before I went out yesterday I ordered, among other things, Madame Bovary in the Norton Critical Edition to support our discussion of the work in our book group in October. I settled down in the back of the store with my Nook to catch up on LibraryThing talk and found that Chatterbox over on the 75 Book Challenge was about to start the "new translation" of Madame Bovary. I dug around a little bit and found this edition to bring home. Today Chatterbox confirmed that this is the new translation of which she spoke.

Robert

85Mr.Durick
aug 6, 2012, 2:26 am

86Mr.Durick
Redigeret: aug 6, 2012, 6:18 pm

The book that USPS said would be here on Saturday although it hadn't yet been shown to arrive at my local post office was in today's mail from Barny Noble.

The Dictator's Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith. This book is subtitled 'Why bad behavior is almost always good politics' which is a curious issue. I don't know the reputation of this book, but it is yet another I want to read right away.

Robert

87janeajones
aug 6, 2012, 8:03 pm

Love that cat!

88Mr.Durick
Redigeret: aug 10, 2012, 7:59 pm

My internet connection is destructively intermittent. It has been since Monday night. A new cable modem did not fix it. The repairperson will not be here until Tuesday, unless he or she just happens to have a lot of free time.

A conspiracy of circumstances got me near the right multiplex yesterday, and I happily watched Beast of the Southern Wild a third time. I haven't looked at today's movie listings yet; it is possible that I will watch Beasts of the Southern Wild again.

When I got home I had one book from Barny in my mailbox:

The Perpetual Orgy by Mario Vargas Llosa. My church's book group will discuss Madame Bovary in October. This book about Flaubert and his book is to support that. It was mentioned on LibraryThing that this book has value; if someone deserved credit for that, that person is welcome to take a bow.

Three more books should have been in yesterday's mail (USPS had predicted it, but the local folks did not live up to that in performance). They were here today.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert edited by Margaret Cohen. This is the Norton Critical Edition. I have mentioned that I have a new translation. I also have a PDF of the text in French on my Nook. This is for the ancillary materials and notes; I don't know yet which one I will read, although I hope to get in at least several paragraphs of the French edition.

Modern Movements in European Philosophy by Richard Kearney. This is a well-regarded survey of some philosohy that I should have more coherently than I do -- phenomenology, critical theory (I recognize the names of the authors surveyed, but I don't have a clue as to what it is), and stucturalism (which I encountered without looking at its formalism when I was failing to get a master's degree in linguistics).

Roget's International Thesaurus, seventh edition edited by Barbara Ann Kipfer. Sometimes I just need mindless reading. Having seen this on the bookstore's shelf, I thought I might enjoy taking this a page at a time.

Robert

89auntbuntisadunce
aug 11, 2012, 1:03 pm

hey there mr blue sky

90Mr.Durick
aug 11, 2012, 4:20 pm

Hey there, auntbuntisadunce!

Robert

91Mr.Durick
Redigeret: aug 13, 2012, 1:30 am

Ruby Sparks has a magical premise that could be off putting, but I thought the movie to be worth the trip. We've seen in other movies, plays, myths the moral quandaries of creating one's own lover. This brings them up again with some very credible acting. It is not a great movie, but for someone who can't fathom Beasts of the Southern Wild (I spoke to a fellow at church this morning who said from hearing the title, "That sounds terrible") this is a pleasant way to spend two hours and look at what might be important to us in personal relations.

Robert

92Mr.Durick
aug 13, 2012, 6:54 pm

I hadn't sent the Scientific American Book Club as much money as they seemed to expect, so I reckoned there must be another book on its way to me. It was in today's mail.

Earth Before the Dinosaurs by Sébastien Steyer. This is a hefty but not too thick paperback which from a quick glance seems to concentrate on animals. Forests are mentioned but as habitat.

Robert

93Mr.Durick
Redigeret: aug 15, 2012, 3:56 pm

Time Warner Cable's refusal to provide me adequate internet access is keeping me from or slowing down my updating things. So Jim Holt's book may not be listed in my books read list above for awhile. But I did finish his Why Does the World Exist? last night. He proposes that the meta-selector for the universe selects selectors that require that we have an existing universe and that it be mediocre. I believe that recursion or something like it invalidates his proposition, but his getting there is a fine lightweight survey of the question. I think he underemphasizes, despite many mentions of it, that nothing is nothing, a little as disputants of free will say that without free will they would...

Robert

94zenomax
aug 15, 2012, 3:59 pm

Does Holt mention entropy at all Robert?

Have you read any Lovelock?

95Mr.Durick
aug 15, 2012, 4:12 pm

I've read The Vanishing of Gaia. Do you see a connection here?

Entropy gets mentioned several times but. except for a brief and weak explanation of its origins, only as part of another discussion. The universe will end in maximum entropy if it, as is likely, it continues to expand. The big crunch and rebound is prohibited by considerations of entropy. Information theory, a possible way to describe the cosmos, is derived from the equations of entropy. Things like that. He may mention that the big bang is a condition of high organization, but he doesn't, as I remember, make it part of his why or how.

Robert

96Mr.Durick
aug 16, 2012, 12:28 am

I misread Fandango and went to town with an expiring free pass at the wrong time. So instead of a potentially good movie I saw The Campaign. There were some really funny bits, but they were embedded in a really bad movie. Nobody needs to see this one.

Robert

97Mr.Durick
aug 18, 2012, 3:47 pm

A fellow I know is a principal in a local Gypsy jazz band. He organized some concerts this weekend, and I went to see his group and the visiting John Jorgenson Quintet last night.

A long time ago I knew some Gypsies, and I worked for awhile on eliciting vocabulary from one of them. I was also a member of the Gypsy Lore Society. And I had some appreciation of the music of Stéphane Grappelli who partially, at least, derived from Django Reihhardt. So I have some established sympathy for the musicians I heard on stage last night.

They were amplified except for the last piece by the John Jorgenson Quintet; I wish that it all had been acoustic.. I listen nowadays mostly to classical music. I found some good sounds from time to time from both groups, and I found myself tapping my toe from time to time. Still the patterns were hard to find (and I have been a big fan of new thing jazz, for example Albert Ayler). I found myself deliberating more and more on how the aging of my hearing was reducing my appreciation of music than actually listening to the music. I noticed that only two of the five players in the quintet wore watches.

Without feeling it for the most part, I could tell, though, that these people were very good at what they did. I can recommend them, but I won't be going back for a longer concert tonight.

Robert

98Mr.Durick
aug 18, 2012, 3:57 pm

I finished Physics on the Fringe by Margaret Wertheim last night. It is much more sociology of science than science per se, and it is less a survey than it is a rhapsody on the workings of Jim Carter. This is a very readable book, but it doesn't really look at how we can evaluate what people are saying about the structure of the universe and what's in it. It doesn't much show what problems any of the fringe thinkers are trying to solve that aren't addressed by academic science except that they seem mostly to be offended by mathematics.

Some of the pictures are really pretty.

Robert

99Mr.Durick
aug 19, 2012, 3:24 pm

I said at the ticket office, "One senior for Nwee." As the paperwork went back and forth, the ticket seller said, "We are treating this as NC-17." I was perplexed, but I responded, "I'm 67." He went on. Perhaps I was being warned that I was about to be offended.

From the opening I thought I was about to see a movie of young men and women jumping up and down while a female voice sang in French to an interesting melody. Nuit #1 turned out to be about degradation and self-degradation revealed through dialogue composed of long monologues. Now, I am degraded, but I know that that is not interesting; oh that the principals behind this film knew that of their story. I dozed off during one of the several cruxes; I don't think it mattered. This was an exercise in tedium. I gave it three stars on IMDb only because of the topless scenes.

Robert

100Mr.Durick
aug 20, 2012, 12:41 am

The movie 2016: Obama's America is claptrap.

Robert

101DieFledermaus
aug 20, 2012, 5:36 am

>99 Mr.Durick:, 100 - Those do sound like unfortunate viewing experiences. At least you got two entertaining reviews out of them. I hope you won't subject yourself to Atlas Shrugged II which I hear is coming out this year.

102baswood
Redigeret: aug 20, 2012, 12:16 pm

The movie 2016: Obama's America is claptrap.. Your movie reviews are getting better and better. Enjoying your thread.

103Mr.Durick
aug 20, 2012, 3:50 pm

If the Atlas Shrugged sequel plays here I will go to see it. I saw the first one. It was awful; I was awed.

Robert

104avidmom
aug 20, 2012, 4:22 pm

I love reading your pithy movie reviews - a good list of what's good and what to avoid.

105RidgewayGirl
aug 20, 2012, 8:23 pm

Yes, your movie reviews are much better than actually going to the movies. Please continue.

106Mr.Durick
aug 23, 2012, 5:40 pm

Here's about a book instead, namely One, Two, Three: Absolutely Elementary Mathematics by David Berlinski. It is not a necessary book, but it is a chatty introduction to numbers and the easy parts of arithmetic with excursions into rings and into the history of mathematical thought. It serves those of us who are curious about whether distribution of multiplication over addition can be proved and nifty matters like that. It serves in showing that an arcane idea like that there is always another fraction between two given fractions can be proved comprehensibly.

Robert

107Mr.Durick
Redigeret: aug 25, 2012, 3:20 pm

The complete picture of romantic love has never been assembled, but some pretty good stabs have been taken at it. One academic conjuror came up with three facets of love: passion, intimacy, and commitment. There is something critically incomplete about the movie Hope Springs which is a codger romance; I am almost certain never to be in their circumstances, but I am a codger so I thought the film might interest me. Here is a couple which has lost almost all of the relationship in their relationship. They have enough commitment, although they struggle for it, to attempt to fix it. All that the movie addresses is the repair of erotic passion. I take that to be an important, necessary, but seriously insufficient take on the passion a persistent relationship should have. And without intimacy it is pretty much just some sort of temporary excitement.

I don't know that that is all of the criticism that this movie deserves, but it is enough for me. I hope to see a better movie today.

Robert

PS There is more. Tommy Lee Jones does some creditable acting. From time to time I thought I caught Meryl Streep acting; because it was Meryl Streep it was exquisite, but still I shouldn't have caught her.

R

108Mr.Durick
aug 26, 2012, 5:00 pm

In the late 1950's I was a grossly overweight teenager (my waist size then was the same as it is now, and now I am six inches or more taller) with no athletic capacity. The butcher sent home a copy of Strength and Health Magazine with my mother. By high school I was slender and although still not skillful at sports I could get about quite dandily and qualified finally to become a Navy pilot. Bob Hoffman, the power behind the magazine, extolled a Japanese American named Tommy Kono who inspired me; he also, as it turns out, inspired Arnold Schwarzenegger (apparently considerably more than he inspired me). I have long wanted to meet Tommy Kono, and he was scheduled to speak in town yesterday morning. I am a cranky old man now who does not like to do things in the morning and who does not like to do new things that involve extraordinary expenses or difficult parking. But I woke up with plenty of time to do a couple of things and then get on the road. I found free parking on the street; I found I could have had validated parking in the facility's garage.

I bought his two books, Weightlifting Olympic Style and Tommy Kono's Championship Weightlifting. He won weightlifting medals in three different weight classes including two Olympic gold medals (which he says are actually gold plated but which look mighty splendid) and a silver medal. I may never find a need to read these books at my age, but I have one signed by him, now, and will put them where they will be preserved. I am very happy that I forced myself to do this. I wish I could have thanked him more.

I was already in town expecting to spend the evening far across town, so in the meantime I was at a mall on the far side of town for two movies and to drop into Barny Noble's.

From Barny I got the edition of The Dhammapada translated by Valerie J. Roebuck. The work is not new to me, and I may even have this edition, but while a discussion is going on around here somewhere about the work I thought I would like to have this, particularly this version, at hand.

Robert

109Mr.Durick
aug 26, 2012, 5:18 pm

The movies I saw were:

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry. This is documentary of the life, especially the recent politically motivated life, of the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. He has lots of cats in his compound in Beijing. I have mostly an art for art's sake take on art, but I am not limited to that. To see him take on the Chinese government monolith with his creativity is pretty inspiring and attractive. The movie is pretty straightforward representation of what he, supported by a big crew, does. It touches on a lot of important issues in society, politics, and art and is worth a trip across town all by itself just for the information.

Celested and Jesse Forever (they can't make up their minds about whether it is an ampersand or a word spelled out; I don't remember what it was on screen). This is a love story about the love between two friends who recently divorced each other. It works well enough and was more credible than Hope Springs. Rashida Jones looks pretty good made up so as to look like she's not wearing makeup. By the end the couple comes to terms with their situation and things seem to be resolving themselves.

It was a long day out of the house that confused my cat who insisted on telling me when I got home that he was having nothing to do with me.

Robert

110DieFledermaus
aug 26, 2012, 7:07 pm

>108 Mr.Durick: - Glad you got to meet one of your early inspirations! Didn't know that about Schwarzenegger.

111baswood
aug 26, 2012, 7:15 pm

Sounds like a great day out Robert and I bet you are glad you made the effort.

The documentary on Ai Weiwei sounds interesting, he gets a lot of coverage here in France and so the film might just appear in a cinema near me.

112Mr.Durick
Redigeret: aug 26, 2012, 7:17 pm

DieF, Well, Tommy Kono's picture was one of the many on Arnold's boyhood bedroom wall. Now I'm thinking that I heard yesterday that Arnold actually told Tommy about it, but I wouldn't bet on my memory.

Robert

113JDHomrighausen
aug 27, 2012, 9:34 am

Googling Kono shows that he was from my neckof the woods - born in Sacramento. I go there a lot since my girlfriend attends university in Sac. Sadly he was "relocated" with other Japanese-Americans in WWII.

114Mr.Durick
aug 27, 2012, 3:38 pm

He started weightlifting as an underweight asthmatic teenager in the camp. He was first of all a bodybuilder for health (back, I would add, when that was a radical and generally unaccepted idea) who accidentally or coincidentally got into competitive lifting. The military kept him in Northern California because he was an Olympic contender during the Korean conflict.

Robert

115Mr.Durick
aug 28, 2012, 2:35 pm

Yesterday afternoon an errand agreeably enough took me across town. I took advantage of it to see Beasts of the Southern Wild a fourth time. They had changed the auditorium, but they hadn't changed the movie; it was still glorious. I am anticipating lines now although imperfectly; I got, "Not my Daddy," a couple of lines too early. Once there was a Hushpuppy, and she lived with her Daddy in the Bathtub.

Robert

116Mr.Durick
aug 28, 2012, 2:44 pm

My church book group picked Madame Bovary for discussion in October. I am almost sure I read it in French in college but got very little out of it because I was faking it (not that I wanted to; I would have preferred to be competent). So I got a little excited about the project now. I bought the Norton Critical Edition, because I always do if one is available, and I can always use the help. And I heard of a recent translation held in high regard, so I bought it too. I downloaded a free copy of it in French and put it on my Nook. I read somewhere here at LibraryThing about Mario Vargas Llosa's deconstruction of the novel and construction of Flaubert's life vis a vis the novel and bought that. It is The Perpetual Orgy; I finished it last night. There is a lot of information in it. It was dry reading. I am no longer enthusiastic about reading the novel.

But I will.

Robert

117RidgewayGirl
aug 28, 2012, 3:34 pm

Watch the movie, the Claude Chabrol version. That'll rekindle your interest in the book.

118Mr.Durick
aug 28, 2012, 4:19 pm

Oh, that sounds like a good idea.

BN.COM has it, albeit at a pretty high price. They have made access to their wishlists more difficult, but I think I can remember it until the beginning of the billing period on that credit card.

Thanks,

Robert

119Mr.Durick
Redigeret: aug 30, 2012, 4:59 pm

I finished The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje last night. I read it because our church book group will discuss it on Wednesday. When I finished it I asked the air, "So what?" and determined to look at some of the reviews on LibraryThing. I have now looked at five of the reviews and take the book to be about power and class, besides being a literate mimesis of childhood and its consequences. I wonder whether I will ever recollect it when I am trying to think about those things.

Robert

120Mr.Durick
aug 30, 2012, 6:39 pm

I had a coupon from Barny Noble last week and had to place an order. One book popped out of my wishlist for the coupon, and another popped out to go with the first.

Strange Maps by Frank Jacobs. This is a book of maps that are out of the ordinary in things like their conception and their construal. I have a boyish appreciation of maps, and variations on what I appreciate I take likely to be entertaining.

You Are Here by Katharine Harmon. This is a book of maps of places where you might be with prejudices. I don't know how much I should trust an author who can't spell her first name right.

I believe I was referred to at least one of these by LibraryThing.

Robert

121avidmom
aug 30, 2012, 6:51 pm

>120 Mr.Durick: When I finished it I asked the air, "So what?"
I've read books like that, some of them pretty recently. Oh, well.

>115 Mr.Durick: Beasts of the Southern Wild must be a fantastic movie based on your quadruple viewing of it. I would love to see it with my kids but it's not playing anywhere near us. :(
I may have to wait for the DVD release. Shoot.

122Mr.Durick
Redigeret: aug 31, 2012, 12:09 am

Beasts of the Southern Wild is a fantastic movie. The work that you have linked to has nothing to do with the movie although I think it was around first.

*******

With things not going well and nothing for me to do to make them go well, I went to the local multiplex for escape. The movie playing soonest was The Expendables 2. This movie had gotten a derogatory review in the local paper; I believed it because I had seen the first one and had little respect for it. On the other hand this is a bunch of old guys with powerful handheld weapons which sort of appeals to my sense of justice. The acting was terrible. The script wasn't very good. There was lots and lots of gunfire, plenty of fighting, a number of explosions, knives, and all like that. Also there were a lot of action movie stars in roles of various length. It was fun for a couple of hours. There's no need to see it, and I would have watched The Bourne Identity instead if it had been on when I got there.

Saturday's movie is likely to be Robot and Frank. The trailers have been entertaining, so the reviews will have to be pretty convincingly adverse for me to skip it. I want to hear from somebody about Trishna opening here tomorrow.

Robert

123Mr.Durick
Redigeret: sep 1, 2012, 3:59 pm

I liked Secret Ingredients, edited from New Yorker pieces by David Remnick, so I'm surprised that I kept forgetting to mention it here. There are cartoons, stories, and essays, most of which hit the spot. They are about food and eating from the most elegant to the most wild. There are images of some of the big names in food that add to their reality in my mental images of them. None of it is great, and I may not be taking a whole lot away from the book, but it is very pleasant reading for somebody who eats pretty much daily.

Robert

124Mr.Durick
sep 2, 2012, 5:00 pm

It is a little more than a month that I have been reading Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad in the Norton Critical Edition edited by Paul B. Armstrong (there apparently is not a reliable page for the editor on LibraryThing). I finished the text of the novella and some of the roughly contemporary reports about King Leopold and the Congo before the first Wednesday of August when our church book group discussed it. I have taken a stab at the rest of it between other readings.

There is content to the novella even if it is not a pleasure to read it. Conrad was a sort of neutral racist of his time, an honorable one who wanted those people whom he saw as dark not to be abused. The staring into the abyss is fascinating after the fact. The book drew attention to the plight of the Congo and apparently moved nations and diplomats to protest King Leopold's plundering and murdering.

So people have a take on the book. Perhaps Chinua Achebe is most notable among them; he condemned the book for its racism. There are credible responses to that. There are many readings of the book; I happen to think that first one should read a book, and, if there is relevance in a special viewpoint (Marxist readings, queer readings, feminist readings) only then should it be applied. In this one the feminist reading was interesting; the vivacity of Kurtz's putative native lover contrasted with the vacuousness of the European women (excepting the power of Marlow's aunt and the knitting women who apparently are derived from the Fates and about whom I would have liked to have read more) bears on everything else in the work -- she is an individual, a person, alive, and dark at the same time.

But some of the essays towards the back from probably English department denizens with a limited but alternative vocabulary weighed down the book. I read some without remembering what I read or the point and so skimmed to the point of not reading about three of the pieces.

The articles on Apocalypse Now especially reporting the deep differences and how they came about interested me as much as a movie enthusiast as a reader. I will at least look at the price of a DVD of the film in hopes of watching it again as an older man.

I think one should read Heart of Darkness, but for me it was more an effort from duty than from attraction.

Robert

125Mr.Durick
Redigeret: sep 2, 2012, 5:09 pm

From the trailers and the four star (of four stars) review in the local paper I really wanted to see Robot & Frank. I was uncomfortable for a good bit of it as the main character, Frank, risked embarrassment. I thought that there was a plot fault that just shouldn't have been there (namely a private citizen's involvement in a criminal investigation, a fault I have seen in at least one other movie). The twist in relationships could have been made more interesting. The characters other than Frank were more instances than people. That was all during the movie; on reflection I am liking the movie even less.

Robert

126Mr.Durick
sep 3, 2012, 1:45 am

I read To Kill a Mockingbird for my first time in the last few years and wanted, then, to see the movie. The price is a little high, and I just put it off. Recently I saw it listed in a revival series at a Regal Theaters multiplex, and it suddenly showed up listed in a series of law related films put on at a local museum sponsored by the museum and one of the bigger law firms in town. I saw To Kill a Mockingbird at the museum today.

I'm glad I got to see it on a big (big enough) screen.

For a long time I was enjoying the film but with the idea in mind that the book was better. When the gallery in the courtroom stood as Atticus Finch made his way out of the room I became more appreciative of the movie. And the denouement, especially the portrayal of Boo Radley, by Robert Duvall of all people, was a marvelous wrap up of the theme of the movie. Gregory Peck is such an icon that it can be hard to see past him to the character, but he did well in this portrayal, entirely believable.

Robert

127avidmom
sep 3, 2012, 11:34 am

>126 Mr.Durick: It is a great movie. Atticus Finch topped the AFI's list of movie heroes and villains as #1 American movie hero in 2003. It's what made me want to see the movie (I had already read the book). Seeing Robert Duvall as Boo Radley is a bit of a shocker, isn't it?!

128Mr.Durick
sep 3, 2012, 4:01 pm

The lawyer who introduced the movie said that Atticus Finch was named in a poll of lawyers as the most admired attorney among all lawyers, real and fictional.

Robert

129Mr.Durick
sep 4, 2012, 7:23 pm

130Mr.Durick
sep 5, 2012, 12:22 am

I had to go to the bank in the same mall complex as the local multiplex. I circle the films I might want to see in the newspaper listings; the circled film playing within ten minutes of my getting to the theater was Premium Rush. This is an action movie wherein most of the action is hell for leather bicycle riding in workday Manhattan. There's enough of a story to justify the riding, and there are a few characters to make it interesting. The corrupt cop is the most interesting; he does not misplay his role once. There is a twist on Chinese martial arts that I found particularly likable in a murderous way. It is easy to line up good against bad in this movie, and so there are no moral subtleties to carry out to the parking lot. But there was some apparent moral ambiguity in the exotic cultures portrayed, namely the Chinese and the bicycle messengers; these particular ambiguities are of a kind seen often enough that we've already thought about them. Still the staging was not a common one so it didn't feel old -- more like believable.

Fun movie.

Robert

131Mr.Durick
sep 6, 2012, 5:58 pm

132avidmom
sep 6, 2012, 6:30 pm

> 131 That is awesome!!!

133deebee1
sep 7, 2012, 5:46 am

This is fun! Loved it!

134dchaikin
sep 7, 2012, 9:31 am

damn it! I can trace them, but I can't SEE them.

135Mr.Durick
Redigeret: sep 8, 2012, 6:29 pm

On the way to a movie at the local multiplex yesterday I stopped in the steep discount second hand book shop.

The Analects of Confucius translated and annotated by Arthur Waley. For a dollar who wouldn't want a copy of Chinese aphorisms from a well established translator? (I know there are such people.)

Utopia by Sir Thomas More, translated and edited by Robert M. Adams. This is the Norton Critical Edition. It has been talked about recently on LibraryThing, and I thought that for five dollars I could pretend to play along.

Robert

136Mr.Durick
sep 8, 2012, 4:57 pm

Lawless may be the sleeper of the season. Here's a movie with a story and characters, credibly filmed, and, despite the hipness of denigrating Shia LaBeouf, credibly acted. Who knew that moonshiners could be human? And we have here another exquisite corrupt cop.

The risk I will be taking today is Cosmopolis pretty commonly vilified but playing at the multiplex which is on my way to Saturday night.

Robert

137qebo
sep 8, 2012, 5:14 pm

131, 134: damn it! I can trace them, but I can't SEE them.
I can see them if I squint...

138Mr.Durick
sep 9, 2012, 4:25 pm

On the way to the movie I went into Barny Noble's with a list of books from my wishlist as cheap there as on line and found them all:

Churchill's Empire by Richard Toye. William Manchester gloriously made a hero of Winston Churchill without even getting to World War II. But Churchill was not universally beloved, and he was an imperialist. I'm hoping to learn more about his unheroic aspects.

How to Write a Sentence by Stanley Fish. I have seen a few really denigrating reviews of this book and none favorable. It must be magic.

The Best Writing on Mathematics 2011 edited by Mircea Pitici. This is almost all prose and picture; there are very few equations. If mathematics is about the manipulation of symbols, then what are the consequences of those manipulations?

The Rise and Fall of Communism by Archie Brown. So there was this idealistic economic political system proposed and then, it was claimed, tried. It, so far, hasn't worked out. What happened?

Robert

139Mr.Durick
Redigeret: sep 9, 2012, 4:47 pm

There is a well-regarded author whom I haven't read, namely Don DeLillo, and he has apparently written a book, namely Cosmopolis that I hadn't heard of until the movie came out. The movie opened on the other side of town Friday and was reviewed extremely negatively in the local paper. The number of IMDb stars is pretty low too.

So I went to see Cosmopolis yesterday. It is too facile, I think, to say that the movie is good or bad. It is strange. At least one of the things it is about is the necessity of being human to engage in human relationships, and a number of characters in the film fall somewhat short in their humanity although they try. The acting is sometimes like the giving of recitations; other times the recitations come across as bonafide speech acts. The filming is curious; a lot of it at the beginning looks to be shot against a blank screen to have the background put in later. The scenes outside the windows of the limousine, the main set, sometimes run as if the car is in reverse when there is no call for it. There is no resolution to the film even as it seems to progress. The movie did not lose my attention, so it certainly wasn't boring.

I have no immediate intention, still, of picking up a book by DeLillo.

Robert

140janeajones
sep 9, 2012, 7:34 pm

I highly recommend Falling Man by Don DeLillo -- it's the only book by him that I have read, but I thought it a brilliant take on 9/11 -- and it's short -- if you don't like it, it's not a huge investment of time. I'm not planning on seeing Cosmopolis -- pretty dreadful reviews all around.

141Mr.Durick
sep 9, 2012, 11:34 pm

edwinbcn didn't like it, and it isn't in either of my area Barny Noble's. I have put it on my wishlist, however, and will ponder the possibility. I think I have something by him around the house, possibly White Noise, but I have no idea where it is.

Robert

142detailmuse
sep 10, 2012, 9:44 am

>137 qebo: excellent tip!

LT’s rating statistics for DeLillo’s works don’t sing to Falling Man but I’m swayed by a shorter work and the calendar.

143JDHomrighausen
sep 10, 2012, 10:08 am

> 131

Nice illusion! What's funny is that if I look at it with my good eye the illusion works. But if I look at it with my bad eye, which is 3x more nearsighted and needs a new glasses prescription, it just looks like some blurry circles and the illusion doesn't work.

144dchaikin
sep 10, 2012, 1:35 pm

#142 MJ - I had never seen an authors stat page before - very cool. Do you whether there is a link, or if we need to always type in "/stats"?

145detailmuse
sep 10, 2012, 1:43 pm

>Dan go to an author page, and in the list under the author photo click "Rating statistics." Then you can sort the data by several of the columns at the top.

146Mr.Durick
Redigeret: sep 11, 2012, 1:45 am

Having read Heart of Darkness, I thought I should see the movie. Apocalypse Now Redux was in today's mail. After a couple of errands and a big enough lunch to get me through it all in one sitting, I put it on my little DVD player. It's sort of like pretending to watch a movie.

What's to say? It captures the berserkness of war. It tells us of "the horror, the horror" and makes it real for us. I earned combat pay there a couple of different months. I knew people who spent real time in country. It was wrong. I went to the Peace Memorial in Hiroshima once and came away thinking that war is wrong even as it may from time to time be necessary. This movie supports that wrongness. Colonel Kurtz is wrong about the strong soldiers who could commit atrocious acts in the name of martial victory; they are bad.

It was fun mapping the movie to the book. Sometimes it happened almost in a little gesture; there was an Asian woman looking in on things at Colonel Kurtz's death for example. Other times the match-up was wide open. Both have the same theme; both have been politically relevant.

Robert

147Mr.Durick
sep 11, 2012, 10:24 pm

When I soured on the prospect of reading Madame Bovary because of Mario Vargas LLosa's take on it, RidgewayGirl (I have lived in a townhouse complex named Ridgeway for nearly 40 years; I have to pay attention to her) suggested that I revive my interest by watching the movie by Claude Chabrol. That DVD was also a part of yesterday's mail, and I watched it today.

A good man is cuckolded and robbed by his wife before she finally makes good in a romantic escape. It is a chick flick. My interest in the book has not revived. I have to read it for our church's book group discussion in early October. As the proof of the pudding is in the eating, it may be that the book itself will revive my interest.

Robert

148Mr.Durick
sep 12, 2012, 4:08 pm

Restrepo played in at least one of the area theaters with some favorable attention. I planned to see it, but it was gone before I could get to it. I don't like to drive into town, spending almost a gallon of gasoline, without more than one mission, but I screwed up my psychic energy to get to this film.

From the Sundance Film Festival as cited on IMDb:
Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington's year dug in with the Second Platoon in one of Afghanistan's most strategically crucial valleys reveals extraordinary insight into the surreal combination of back breaking labor, deadly firefights, and camaraderie as the soldiers painfully push back the Taliban.
War is always wrong.

There is one more movie in the series that I may try to get to, Lioness, about women in ground combat.

Robert

149Mr.Durick
Redigeret: sep 12, 2012, 4:39 pm

I make my relations with the universe or with what is ultimate and important in part from what I have learned from Hindus, insofar as there are such things, and Buddhists. The notion of Mount Meru came up for me in my reading of the Mahabharata, through book five in the edition touchstoned, and about the Mahabharata. Several people at LibaryThing have admired Colin Thubron's reflective travel book To a Mountain in Tibet in which he attempts to describe his long hike in Nepal to the Tibetan border and then a trip up to and in clockwise circumnavigation of Mount Kailas, the Earthly instantiation of Mount Meru. I have now read it.



The longest walking days I have had have been twelve or so miles, and my longest time in the wilderness has been a week. I have walked to the top of Fujiyama, higher than I ever flew in a C117. That is enough for sympathy and admiration for long mountain treks but not enough for a full understanding of what it is like to do something like this author did. It may also be beyond his capacity to take us there, even if he had added photographs.

His description of the Nepalese trek failed to take me there in a way that I know writers can. The Man Who Walked Through Time took us seriously into the Grand Canyon. When he gets to Tibet his reflections on the bureaucracy bring some sparkle to his narrative. And when he finally sees the twin lakes that serve as something of a holy gateway to the mountain he gets to something inside which he will share with us as he gets to the point of his journey. Respectful of the three main religions associated with the territory, he seems to sense something magic about it even as an agnostic. That he does he conveys well, that is with a sure voice without being overwrought, even if he does not convey that magic itself.

There is enough that he succeeds at in this book to make it worth the reading, and I think that I will be able to discuss it when our book group takes it up in November.

Robert

150RidgewayGirl
sep 12, 2012, 5:40 pm

Your comments on Madame Bovary: the movie had me smiling. i'll counter with the suggestion that many 19th century novels are chick-lit, to some degree or another, if you want to read them that way. At least the ones with three-dimensional female characters.

151baswood
sep 12, 2012, 5:55 pm

Enjoyed your thoughts on To a Mountain in Tibet and a great photo.

152Linda92007
sep 12, 2012, 6:54 pm

Robert, I am one who loved To A Mountain In Tibet and I greatly enjoyed your thoughts on it.

153dchaikin
sep 12, 2012, 11:01 pm

Well, between your and Linda's review (and was there another here?) I finally added To A Mountain In Tibet to my wishlist. I also added The Man Who Walked Through Time, but wish I had heard of it sooner. Would have been the perfect book for me about 15 years ago...

154Mr.Durick
Redigeret: sep 14, 2012, 3:55 pm

With the support of the local chapter of the Archaeological Institute of America, the state university, and the local art museum, the local art museum had a lecture last night by Nikos Xanthoulis, a PhD and professional musician from Greece, on what is known about ancient Greek music. He then played some reconstructions of ancient Greek instruments, spending most of his time on the lyre, although he tooted a salpinx a little. The music, he says and illustrates, is pretty much all in support of song or dancing (although dancing to a 5/8 beat could be tricky), and of itself it is perhaps ordinary (in reconstruction). In support of a short excerpt from Homer, when Ulysses having come ashore talks with his tenant farmer (a pig keeper maybe), it becomes enchanting; listening to such a thing might be the way to read Homer.

Robert

155baswood
sep 14, 2012, 6:42 pm

Interesting stuff about the Ancient Greek music.

156Mr.Durick
sep 15, 2012, 2:25 pm

I was back at the museum theater last night to see Lioness, another film in the war series. Five women reflect on their experience in combat in Fallujah against a background of war footage shot in the same time and place. They were in country in support positions but called to go on patrol in order to have someone who could search female natives. One of them was especially compelling; she talked about a man shooting at her and having him in her sights and wondering whether she would go to Hell if she shot him.

The commanding officer, a Lioness herself, was at the screening and said that that woman was now doing well, off medications, in nursing school, and advocating for women's counseling from the Veterans Administration. There is specific training now, more in the Marines than in the Army, for the role these women ad libbed.

This was all against the law, but when congress looked into it, the Bush White House told them to stop.

There are two more war movies playing at the museum today, but as of right now I'm inclined to go across town for one or two limited release theatrical movies.

Robert

PS If I understand IMDb correctly this can be watched on line for free at Amazon, and that can be reached through the IMDb link.

R

157DieFledermaus
sep 15, 2012, 2:33 pm

The Ancient Greek music concert sounds pretty interesting - glad you got to see it.

158avidmom
sep 15, 2012, 3:16 pm

Your trip to the museum to learn about Greek music sounds like fun.

159JDHomrighausen
sep 16, 2012, 3:27 am

> 154

Sounds very interesting. I remember in seventh grade we had a storyteller come to our school who performed large sections of Homer from memory with his own guitar accompaniment. I was probably the only one who liked it, especially since he wouldn't let the staff turn A/C on for fear it would drown him out in the hot, crowded gym.

Was Homer performed with musical accompaniment?

Did he talk about Plato's views on music?

I always applaud ancient historians - so much we can never know.

160Mr.Durick
sep 16, 2012, 4:21 pm

It's funny. I think if I knew nothing beyond the fact that a lecture and performance on ancient Greek music and a film about American women coming into combat roles in the contemporary military were available I'd expect that the music event would be more interesting. Having been to both, and quite happy to have been at both, I am left with more to reckon from the film. There are moral, social, and psychological issues at both the personal and national level in it. I want to say that the consequences are greater in warfare, and certainly for the injured individual they are, but twenty five hundred years of music is a big deal.

The music was not some new form or special stretching of the boundaries that one might hope it to be. It was not music in a different mode that might stretch our understanding of what could be compelling or entertaining. It worked as an accompaniment to words, and there are things about it that characterize it as ancient Greek. But you wouldn't have been surprised to hear it from a modern day songwriter.

I don't know for sure that he said that Homer was accompanied by the lyre, but he certainly implied it. He only mentioned theorizing about music as among the sources that tell us about the subject; I don't remember whether Plato was mentioned. Regarding 'so much we can never know' he started by asking what if 2000 years after nuclear holocaust music historians of 4000 CE had potsherds, part of a song by Michael Jackson, a piece of a score by Beethoven, and a twentieth century text on theory tried to reconstruct our music? He said that the study of ancient Greek music was similar. Their pieces of pottery might be more informative musically than ours; they actually depict musical instruments with musical notation -- we know melodies from the pottery.

Robert

161Mr.Durick
sep 16, 2012, 4:35 pm

So I went back to that museum theater yesterday for the short documentary, The Last Outpost. Eight American soldiers are embedded as trainers on the Afghan border with Wijiristan to develop independent capabilities in the ANA in defense against the Taliban pending departure of the United States' forces. Besides gunfire there is dealing with the local villagers. It is futile. I don't know that this film is necessary, but it is adequate and something like it should be in the history of someone seriously opining on the matter.

I skipped White Platoon there a few hours later to get to the mall across town, among other things to see one of the movies, among three I wanted to see, playing there.

They all started about the same time, I arbitrarily picked Arbitrage. It has quite a few interesting elements, like what brand of business jet does he fly in or who made his limousine, that altogether are a boring movie. Add to that a few mis-connections in the plot, which I am already forgetting, and what's left is pretty skippable -- there are thirteen other movies in town that I want to see this week.

Robert

162Mr.Durick
Redigeret: sep 16, 2012, 4:53 pm

I have been waiting especially eager for two works of non-fiction in paperback. I have pre-ordered American Nations and hope for it in the mail later in the month.

After the movie I went into Barny Noble's with nothing but looking over the magazines in mind. It turns out that I had not been tracking The Swerve in my BN.COM wishlists and had no idea that it was up for paperback publication. There it was, though, on their new books table. I had my Nook with me and checked on line to find that it was discounted only 7% direct; with a card it was discounted 10% in the store so it left with me. I will read it someday.

Robert

163Mr.Durick
sep 17, 2012, 1:36 am

I caught The Bourne Something at the local multiplex. I was looking for exciting and simple, and that's what I got. Lots of bullets and fight, and there was a too long motorcycle chase. It was a lot of fun.

Robert

164Mr.Durick
Redigeret: sep 18, 2012, 3:43 pm

I placed an order with Barnes and Noble. They shipped the books part of it; when the post office started tracking it, they expected delivery on Saturday. Friday, however, it had been received by the delivering post office and was out for delivery. But it didn't show up in my mailbox. Meanwhile the DVD portion was shipped and delivery was expected today. The books weren't delivered Saturday either. I found another mailman, whom I know, on my hill, and he said my mailman would be at an apartment complex at that time. He was; they would let me on their property despite that they could watch over everything from the gate. I waited for awhile outside the gate but had to get on with things before he came out.

Today the DVD was out for delivery, and it was in my mailbox. The books were not; they were still shown as out for delivery with no further update. I put my laptop away and headed out to the next town to the delivering post office with the tracking number. I was told that the package might be in my local post office. The supervisor couldn't tell me why it had not been delivered. He could not tell me why there had been no notification left. And I remembered later that I probably should have asked why the web site didn't show where it was. My regular mailman, the one who didn't deliver it, wasn't working today.

I went to my local post office and picked up the package.

I went for a long walk to clear away the aggravation.

Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto and translated by David R. Slavitt. A long poem for someday when I feel Kultural.

Why Not Socialism? by G.A. Cohen. Why not indeed? This is a tiny book from Princeton University Press. I hope it gives me a smart answer.

Stoicism by John Sellars. This book is smaller than The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics which I am currently reading bit by bit. I am looking for something to tell me about the stoic life. The series that this book is in was generally recommended by somebody on LibraryThing a long time ago, and I am finally looking into it.

Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann and translated by John E. Woods. This was mentioned on LibraryThing. I didn't like The Magic Mountain, but I thought that this might go well with some other Faust reading I am intent on.

The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing. The author is one of my favorites, and this novel is apparently fundamentally hers. When it was mentioned recently on LibraryThing I thought it might be time to take it up.

Popular Hits of the Showa Era by Ryu Murakami. This Murakami was appealingly discussed recently, and this book of his seemed to be the one that would appeal to me.

Blindness by José Saramago and translated by Giovanni Pontiero (the touchstone is impossible). This book and the movie based on it got a flurry of attention at LibraryThing recently. I now have both in hand. I hope to read the novel then watch the DVD and be replete.

Robert

165baswood
sep 18, 2012, 3:24 pm

Great selection of books Robert

166JDHomrighausen
sep 18, 2012, 5:41 pm

I just finished a book by Saramago and am hoping to get to Thomas Mann's 1400-page, 4-volume series on Joseph and his brothers. Part of the Biblical fiction kick.

It's so cool you have a museum nearby. I recently went to the Rosicrucian Museum in San Jose, which might be the only museum of ancient Egypt in the country. It's small but very educational.

167Mr.Durick
Redigeret: sep 18, 2012, 6:55 pm

I joined the museum several years ago to see a display of Ansel Adams's photographs without paying an admission charge. I missed it, and I've been to only one exhibition; I think it was of some Blake prints. But I use the theater from time to time; I think I should use it more.

It is in town (10 or 11 miles) so I like to plan something else to do to justify the trip, and parking is a challenge.

Robert

168Mr.Durick
sep 18, 2012, 11:11 pm

Rather than take a nap I decided to go to a movie nearby, one that I thought had some potential for humor from the trailers. You May Not Kiss the Bride is pretty stupid although it has its charms. I found myself feeling a little guilty seeing something really stupid in the plot and then laughing at a really stupid but funny joke. There are some good chases through tropical island jungle. If this shows up in the mailbox it could be fun to watch while drinking............................

Robert

169Mr.Durick
Redigeret: sep 20, 2012, 3:32 pm

Finding Nemo has been released in 3D. I didn't see it in 2003 because it was a kids' movie, but I saw a trailer for the 3D version that hinted at beauty. If the importance of watching it was in the watching then I thought that the best screen it was on in town would be the place to watch it. I drove into town for it and paid a premium for a big screen, good sound, and high resolution.

It was beautiful and for that beauty worth watching. The story is infantile, befitting a movie made for kids, and I got only a little pleasure out of it. I would recommend the film only to those people who are interested in the possibilities that high definition 3D on a big screen offers; to them I recommend it highly.

Robert

170Mr.Durick
Redigeret: sep 21, 2012, 4:48 pm

Last night was one of two screenings of the National Theatre's production of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time locally so I decided I should also catch two films playing in the area only at that multiplex.

Killer Joe is a violent comedy set among the sleazy set. It probably offers no nutritional value, but it is tasty. The characters are done to a turn.

Sleepwalk with Me is ostensibly about a comedian's developing his career. It seems to me that it is much more about the frightening dangers of a sleepwalking disorder. And it is somewhat about the impingements of life on desire. Carol Kane is a delight as the comedian's mother.

So the play was a stage adaptation of the novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time; the author, Mark Haddon participated in the adaptation, and it was solid. The staging was expensive but not lavish; the movie audience got to see a lot of it from directly overhead unlike the studio audience and so had a special view of the geometry, relevantly enough, of the matter. The drama was played in the round, so the breaking of the fourth wall was metaphorical; it was also, I thought, distracting that the play commented on itself. Christopher, the character, was on stage for the whole three or so hours (I think without exception), and his performance was pitch perfect.

I am too lazy to repair my inconsistency in grammatical tense.

Robert

171Mr.Durick
sep 21, 2012, 6:30 pm

I've already talked our church book group into discussing American Nations by Colin Woodard in December. It came out few days early in paperback and was in the mail today. The United States of America is a federal system -- out of many one -- and there are different ways to look at that. A couple of decades ago I read The Nine Nations of North America; I wish it were still in print so that I could read it alongside this.

Robert

172avidmom
sep 21, 2012, 7:38 pm

>169 Mr.Durick: I agree with you, Finding Nemo is beautiful to watch. Fortunately, I had little kids of my own then & took them to see it at the theatre years ago. My littlest guy, when the terrifying little niece entered her uncle, the dentist's office (accompanied by the "Psycho" violins), covered his eyes and yelled out as loud as he could: "Oh, NO!!!!! I CAN'T WATCH!" It was funny. :)

> 170 Glad you got to see The Curious Incident play. From what kidzdoc said, it is wonderful.

173kidzdoc
sep 22, 2012, 7:53 am

Interesting comments about the NT performance of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Robert. I would assume that the version you saw was set in the Cottlesloe Theatre, the smallest of the three theatres at the NT, where the audience sat on all four sides of the rectangular stage. I was in the first row on one of the longer sides, in a seat that was covered with a white sheet that indicated its number (83, I think) and that it was a prime number. As you said, the actors did speak to the audience at times, most notably for me when a policeman walked in the space directly beneath the feet of the people seated in my row and asked us if we had seen Christopher on the train we were on. I didn't understand your comment about the distraction you experienced when the play "commented on itself", though.

174Mr.Durick
sep 22, 2012, 4:11 pm

It was in that theater. There were no audience shots; we didn't get to see people waiting for the show. Were you able to see all of the things that the floor of the stage did?

I tried to get what series he was uttering when he uttered series. I didn't get the cubes; I am seriously deficient in my knowledge of the cubes.

There were a couple of instances when the script reflected that they were in a play. The one that comes to mind is when the teacher said of Christopher's book that they had made a play from it. That was not the first, so I already knew that it could happen. The first instance isn't coming to mind now, however. Such comments take me out of the imaginary world I am in and into the meta world; that is what I mean by distracting.

Robert

175Mr.Durick
sep 23, 2012, 2:54 pm

The movie The Master has been praised widely and deeply. My reaction to it is too personal to post, but I suspect that the critics are right about it.

Robert

176kidzdoc
sep 23, 2012, 11:35 pm

Yes, I had an unobstructed view of the stage. I was seated in the first row, in a seat similar to the prime numbered ones seen at the top of the following photo:



Christopher recited the series of prime numbers or a similar series of numbers whenever he was stressed out or needed to concentrate.

I now understand what you meant about the play being distracting, although that wasn't the case for me.

177Mr.Durick
sep 26, 2012, 5:53 pm

A coupon sparked an order from Barny Noble, and it was in today's mail.

That is All by John Hodgman. I like that the author spells his name without an 'e,' very Websterian of him. But I got the book because the first two volumes in the series fascinated me in a happy way. I will likely read much of this tonight, straight through, something I have been unable to do with Madame Bovary.

The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Linguistics edited by Shigeru Miyagawa and Mamoru Saito (for whom there are no touchstone results). When I lived on Okinawa I learned a little bit of spoken Japanese and have kept a lightweight curiosity about it every since. I have Samuel Martin's heavy reference grammar. I also bought, back in Borders's early life in the area, a serious (you know, from a press that does academic and quasi-academic publishing) book about Japanese. The reference grammar is too heavy for me. The latter book turned out to be a disappointment on the excuse that general coverage of the language could be found in a reference grammar so his book should be about the specific and arcane question he was working on. Now I have this Oxford Handbook (a series I have found useful), and it says on the back cover, "What can Japanese say about universal grammar?"

So somebody like me who would like a concentrated lesson on Japanese adjectives, of which there is no such thing but which come in three kinds (at least), and which seems to me part of the linguistic description of the language is stuck once again without an explanation. There are other such issues. I am disappointed, but I will keep it.

Robert

178auntbuntisadunce
sep 27, 2012, 8:12 am

if you see a crocodile don't forget to scream

179Mr.Durick
sep 27, 2012, 2:54 pm

I've seen a crocodile, but it was a cute crocodile, so I chuckled.

Robert

180janeajones
sep 27, 2012, 7:22 pm

I saw a HUGE crocodile outside my car in the Everglades -- I stayed inside the car and slowly backed away.

181Mr.Durick
Redigeret: sep 28, 2012, 4:59 pm

I went to town yesterday, and when the luncheon lectures were over I stayed there.

First I saw the movie Dredd 3D on a huge screen. The 3D was mostly very good and made the buildings, one of which is a leading character, substantial. This is a movie that is pretty because it is dark; it is dark like The Raid: Redemption, a comparison others have seen too, but it is successful. The story is simple and has only a couple of disconnects; the glorification of the female lead is predictable but works. This is a movie for the watching of it, not for the taking away something from it. (Chief disconnect: jillions of bullets fly, multitudes die, the heroes don't)

After a couple of errands I homed in on a venue new to me, the local Musicians' union hall and took in a chamber concert of Amy Beach works. Everything was listenable, and the singer of her songs at the beginning was watchable. All the songs had piano accompaniment; one added a cello which sang with the diva. A violin sonata had a stirring last movement. After the intermission, five piano improvisations which were fully written out got my attention. Then a string quartet, published only 16 years ago, in one movement really captured my musical attention. I wondered, naively enough, how much Beach knew about Louis Moreau Gottschalk, and then I wondered whether she ever met Sarah Orne Jewett. I think maybe I should see whether the last two pieces are on CD.

Robert

182janeajones
sep 28, 2012, 5:44 pm

Sounds like a busy, cultured day.

183Linda92007
sep 29, 2012, 9:03 am

How interesting that you stumbled upon a chamber concert of Amy Beach works, Robert. She is not a very widely played composer and I have only heard her work performed once. I used to have a half-read copy of her biography by Adrienne Fried Block, but donated it to a book sale. Se was an interesting woman for her time and a prolific composer. I own a small volume of her piano music and have now pulled it out to revisit. I think I may have a CD also, but will have to really hunt for that.

184Mr.Durick
sep 29, 2012, 5:24 pm

You know it was announced repeatedly at the concert that we don't get to hear her works. But from my radio listening I knew her name and that I liked at least some of her stuff, and I knew that her husband had prohibited her public piano playing. I think maybe she does get some air time, but we might not always pay attention, and certainly Brahms gets more play.

Robert

185Mr.Durick
okt 1, 2012, 12:19 am

186avidmom
okt 1, 2012, 1:04 am

Is this the cute crocodile that made you chuckle?

187Mr.Durick
okt 1, 2012, 1:17 am

Across town on my way to Saturday night I saw:

From the trailers and the review in the local paper I expected to dislike Chicken with Plums but went to see it because it was in the right place at the right time. I turns out I liked it and came away with something from it. It seemed to be presented as a violin story, but the violin story rode atop a suffering from love story and could have been based in something else creative; the hero might have been a writer or painter. Suffering from unrequited love, the film says, can lead one to anger, even hatred, but also can lead one into the greatest, most feeling, creative acts. Suffering can also demean life itself. There was some laugh out loud humor in the movie besides lessons in the human lot.

In town coming away from church before going home I saw:

From the trailers and the review in the local paper I expected to like Looper, and I did. I saw it on an IMAX equivalent screen and enjoyed the big screen, but it wasn't necessary -- there were no landscapes or intricacies to indulge in. This is the kind of film that you'll know from the trailers and reviews whether it's your kind of film; if you know that it is you will enjoy it; if you think it likely that it won't be you needn't bother with it. The value of the movie is in the watching and simplicity of the story (time travel paradoxes not withstanding), but it is not as artful as Dredd 3D which has little story and which I saw on the same screen last week. The resolution of the plot is anti-Hollywood while still a triumph for the lead character.

Robert

188Mr.Durick
okt 1, 2012, 1:20 am

Avidmom, okay.

Robert

ps It is after all orange.

R

189Mr.Durick
Redigeret: okt 1, 2012, 2:48 am

This thread is continued in my fourth quarter thread.

Robert

190auntbuntisadunce
okt 11, 2012, 2:49 pm

interplanetary most extraordinary crafts

191Mr.Durick
okt 11, 2012, 6:03 pm

Ferries, lighters, and launches. The beauties are the intergalactic craft.

Robert

192jdthloue
okt 14, 2012, 9:55 pm

How does "Club Read" work?

I am sick of the 75ers Group...their Drama and "Fan Club" ethos...

I'm lucky to read 30 books per year...but I don't read Crap....and I quit Net Galley and will be reading from my Shelves

193janeajones
okt 14, 2012, 11:05 pm

Read what you want -- comment on your reading -- and if your comments are cogent and interesting, someone will respond.

194Mr.Durick
okt 14, 2012, 11:40 pm

Jude, Club Read is people talking about their reading and other kultur. There isn't much in the way of recipes here, but we get to hear about Baswood's saxophone lessons, for example, so there is room for chat. There is no challenge although people often pick up on suggestions and talk about their reactions to a book vis-à-vis other reactions. Genres run the gamut, at least pretty much. The community is small enough that you can keep up with everyone if that interests you -- I believe I have no unread threads in the group. I skipped out of the 75 Book Challenge after one year just because it was so big; the Austenathon there, however, was the high point of my reading in the past couple of years.

By the way, I have moved on to here even without having much to say recently.

Robert

195jdthloue
okt 15, 2012, 12:01 am

Thank You, Robert

I don't read many books.....have managed 30 per year in the 75ers...but, i have many books on my shelves, that I want to read..

Writing reviews, is Hell, for me...which is why I haven't requested any Net Galleys

I can talk about Readiing.....and Kultur...i save my recipes for FaceBook

Club Read...might be my new Home....

J

196JDHomrighausen
okt 17, 2012, 5:49 pm

jdthloue, I also prefer Club Read because there's more diverse readers here. The 75ers seemed to me mostly genre fiction readers. I appreciate the amount of nonfiction and classics that Club Readers write about. :) For example, Rebeccanyc's impressive romp through all those Zola novels...

197janemarieprice
okt 18, 2012, 10:50 am

And I would love to hear your recipes. I've been very neglectful of my thread this year, particularly with food.

198RidgewayGirl
okt 18, 2012, 4:25 pm

Well, there is occasional drama. And there are spasms of fan adoration for an author or a book. It's the nature of being involved readers. We're a lot smaller than the 75, and tend, on the whole, to talk about books to the exclusion of everything but brief personal anecdotes, food and Robert does go to the movies.