(no subject)

Authors I don't think I've read twenty pages of:

Musil
Camoens
Manzoni
Ekelof
Amichai
Pasternak
Gaskell
Dreiser
James Jones
Anne Bronte
Doeblin
Bachmann
Zola
Pindar
Ted Hughes

Billions of others of course. All of these I just didn't like the sound of, or the sound of the translations of. Either that or they seemed like they might be too much of a time commitment. Or whatever one thinks when one puts a book down so soon. I'm worst with this with novels. I think having read too many beginnings might be why I think of the novel as being so formless, when presumably it's almost never that.

I'm craving something totally new, among all the rereading I'm doing this term--Homer, Stevens, Tennyson and Whitman this weekend--is why I make this list. Maybe Musil's short stuff?

(no subject)

Movie version...never did finish an Ozu. I think the only Wenders I got through may have been Paris, Texas, which was quite moving but did flirt with absolute tedium. Never saw anything by the Saddest Music in the World guy, nothing by that German lesbian director despite my powerful solidarity with German lesbians, nothing by any black African filmmaker I can put a name too, nothing non-English by John Woo, nothing by Miike and it sounds like it'll stay that way, nothing from Iranian cinema, none of those four elements movies by that guy who directed Elizabeth. Nothing by the silent film director, what, Stroheim? who was in Sunset Blvd. I don't think I've sat through a D.W. Griffith come to think of it. I'm unclear on whether I've seen any Roberto Rosselini movies.

(no subject)

Apparently I am extremely impatient.

(no subject)

May explain the trouble I've been having with The Odyssey, which I found quite interesting in my early 20s for its foreign qualities. The few really good parts are just as good, but all the repetitive stuff, the poetic anthropology basically, is putting me but right to sleep. Fast as Ruth Hall last year, or Uncle Tom's Cabin before I got into it. I'm fearing the same problem with the looming Aurora Leigh, which I hope there's no mandatory paper on. I've come to expect far too much from books; I break the hearts of all book-givers.

(no subject)

Might as well copy out my current dates post-it while I'm message-flurrying:

Sept 17 Amphigorey Again paperback
Sept 23 The War starts
Sept 25 As You Like It DVD (I have this thing about keeping up with Shakespeare movies)
Oct 2 The Solitudes paperback
Oct 7-ish Little Big 25 edition
Oct 28 Fallen Angels, Bloom
Oct 30 Twin Peaks Complete DVD set
Nov 16 Love in the Time of Cholera movie (i.e. date to have read book by before pop culture backwash ruins the plot for me)
Nov 21 No Country for Old Men movie (date to have had Julie read it by; though this we'll want to see)
Nov 27 Bender's Big Score DVD (astonishing return of Futurama!)
Dec 11 Lost Season 3 DVD set
Dec 18 Love & Sleep paperback
2008? Anatomy of Influence, Bloom