Reading/recently read:
Black Hole by Charles Burns / This is the guy who draws the cover of The Believer every month. This is an awesome book, part teen horror comedy, part sci-fi thriller, part Daniel Clowes.
The Areas of My Expertise by John Hodgman / Former Professional Literary Agent and renowned smoking-jacket/Tolkien/attack-ad expert Hodgman takes us on a tour of Complete World Knowledge. For example:
WERE YOU AWARE OF IT?
Jorge Luis Borges was editor-in-chief of Games magazine from 1980-81.
WERE YOU EVEN AWARE OF THIS FACT??!!?!?
There is the famous list of 700 hobo names and a study of the Lycanthropic cycles and their antidotes.
Warlock by Oakley Hall
This is a New York Review of Books reissue of a classic western about a Tombstone-like town called Warlock. It's supposed to be this end-all, be-all Western myth, and I am so far very impressed with the writing style and plot.
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood by Mary McCarthy
I'm re-reading "To Kill a Mockingbird" and my favorite detail I'd forgotten is the way the country kid Walter Cunningham answers in the affirmative: "Yeb'm."
Also, we just subscribed to Netflix and our first two movies were "Broken Flowers" and the Johnny Depp "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory." I really didn't want to like the Tim Burton "redoing" of a classic, but I have to admit that I really liked it. I thought "Broken Flowers" was OK--a lot of Jim Jarmusch trying to be unpredictable (which I like) and Bill Murray as his own sad clown (which was good the first couple of times, but felt kind of half-hearted here, like Murray was getting tired of it. I'd like to see Bill Murray team up with Harold Ramis and do "Stripes 2" or something like that. Any suggestions for the queue?
3 comments:
Country Boys if a) it's out and b) you didn't watch it.
I'll add it to the saved section so that I'll get it when it arrives on DVD. Thanks.
I watched recently with pleasure and profit Mike Leigh's "Naked," his "Secrets and Lies," and Mike Nichol's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf," all of which you may have already et cet but there ya go...
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