Writers I Still Can't Appreciate...

Some writers that I'm still trying... and failing... to appreciate...my apologies in advance... include the following: Vladimir Nabokov (a compelling figure to be sure; people say he's such a great prose stylist and I suppose he is, but so many of his novels seem so inaccessible or off-putting or both; perhaps I should give him another try in another ten years or so); Saul Bellow (tried by could not make my way through Herzog or Henderson the Rain King or The Dean's December or Humboldt's Gift or Seize the Day;  Ravelstein was better, but has anyone noticed how practically the only subject in all these works is Saul Bellow himself disguised as various protagonists???); Ernest Hemingway (I'll give him The Sun Also Rises and a few short stories just for the existential attitude, but other than that I can't say that I really enjoy or understand the adulation that accompanies his pedestrian prose style); John Steinbeck (used to like him more, but now I find his narratives rather thin and one-dimensional; Of Mice and Men is great the first time around, but try reading it seven times and see it you don't notice the diminishing returns...The Grapes of Wrath is known as a movie first and a book second; ditto for East of Eden); John Irving (haven't really tried to read him ... might give A Prayer for Owen Meany another try, but he's sort of overtly political sometimes in a way that a good novelist doesn't really need to be); Phillip Roth (could not stand Portnoy's Complaint...how in heck is that book supposed to be funny???... The Plot Against America was an exercise in far-fetched hypotheticals and paranoia...It's usually all about you know you or a character who bears a striking resemblance to who know who and has all of the baggage associated with you know who....So should I try Goodbye, Columbus just to be fair?)... James Fennimore Cooper (don't think I could make it past the first page of one of his novels); Lawrence Sterne (Tristan Shandy sounds great in theory but it's kind of tedious waiting 400 pages for a plot to materialize...)

More Summer Reading Suggestions

#1 - The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (story of a magical missing diamond)

#2 - Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (torrid love affair on the Heath)

#3 - Bleak House by Charles Dickens (legal system in Britain)

#4 - Black Boy by Richard Wright (coming of age of a rebellious writer)
#5 - The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope  (financial system in Britain)

#6-  The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte (a mysterious woman tells her story)

#7 - Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (the looking-glass logic of life-during-wartime)

#8 - Dance of the Happy Shades by Alice Munro (vintage Canadian coming-of-age stories)

#9 - The Castle by Franz Kafka (the ultimate spiritual-quest novel)

#10 - Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust (Proust being Proust)

#11 - The Ambassadors by Henry James (James being James)

#12 - The Power Broker by Robert Caro (a bio-history of New York City)

The World in Black and White

Some people see the world in "black and white." An either/or proposition, one might surmise, or, perhaps, a window on a whole other universe - parallel to ours yet more luminous, textured, definite and expansive... Well - I'll let you be the judge my fellow binary thinkers and amateur photographers... 

Why Does the World Exist? by Jim Holt

Can't resist a book with a title like this!

“A guided tour of ideas, theories and arguments about the origins of the universe…. Through discussions with philosophers of religion and science, humanists, biologists, string theorists, as well as research into the scholarship of days past—from Heidegger, Parmenides, Pythagoras and others—and an interview with John Updike, Holt provides a master's-level course on the theories and their detractors. The interludes find the author positioning himself as an existential gumshoe, but also working through the sudden loss of a pet and, later, the death of his mother. Holt may not answer the question of his title, but his book deepens the appreciation of the mystery.” (Kirkus Reviews )

It's Tuesday...time for...Weight-Training

It's that time again to get fit, grow some muscles and learn to feel comfortable inhabiting a mesomorphic body. Ah - sounds great in theory, but then you have to actually do the sets with all those reps! 

Immortal Songs of the 1970s - Woo! Yeah!

Ah, the 1970s. Breathe in, breathe out. I know. I know. It seems like every middle-aged person these days has some remote area of nostalgia/expertise that no one else on the planet really cares about or regards as anything but the most irrelevant minutiae...BUT... for better or worse...that was my decade.... the 1970s....Breathe in, breathe out. That wacky, wondrous, frizzy, outrageous, cheesy, gritty, sadly depressing, shockingly freakish time when all of the fallout from the 1960s suddenly started coming home to roost (for many of us who, at the time, were too young to know that we were the "guinea pigs" of a new age ...) Granted, the food was processed and unhealthy (we didn't know, we just didn't know), the air-quality (where I grew up) toxic and asthma-inducing, the hair-styles feathered and relentlessly blow-dried, the furniture inexpensive and amazingly drab, the carpet thick, plush and foot-friendly, the sporting events inspiring and quasi-religious, the schools regimented yet experimental (and filled to the brim with bullies, preps, jocks, smokers, stoners, rejects, social climbers, rebels and "sarcastic future bloggers"), the radio stations mesmerizing and oracular, the tv shows monolithic and insipid, the relationships (or should I say gender roles): fleeting and peripatetic, the drugs (or should I say "medications") sadly ubiquitous and entirely unoriginal (fie! fie! la bourgeoisie!), the clothing (or should I say "threads") loud and somewhat dysfunctional, the family units loud and somewhat dysfunctional, the political and economic trends dismal and not worth mentioning. But hey....we'll always have the MUSIC! Right? That was OUR DECADE - folks. Hello? Anyone? This may sound pathetic, but please understand. I'm not trying to win any converts here - you're either with us or agin' us as far as that goes. I mean, I could rattle off some obscure titles that time keeps on pushing into the fog: "Jive Talkin'... "Rainy Days and Mondays"..."I Saw the Light" ... "Sister Golden Hair"...."Babe"..."Funeral for a Friend"... "(I Never Promised You a) Rose Garden"... "Disco Inferno"..."Cruel to be Kind"... "Bad Time"... "Ain't No Sunshine"... "So Far Away"... "You're So Vain"..."Time in a Bottle"..."Fire and Rain"... "Oh Very Young"... "Heart of Gold"... "American Pie"... "Vincent"... "Seasons in the Sun"... "Let's Stay Together"... "I Love Music"..."Saturday in the Park"..."Peace Train"... "Love Train"... "Jet"... "#9 Dream"..."This Masquerade"... "Another Star"... "Don't Let Nothing Get You Down"... "Low Rider"..."Superstition"..."Bad Sneakers"... "Oh What a Lonely Boy"... "Meeting Across the River"..."Could It Be I'm Falling in Love?"... "999 Arguments"... "It Never Rains in (Southern) California"... "Dust in the Wind"..."Love Will Keep Us Together"... "Let It Rain"... "Stairway to..." (what is the name of that song?) and you'd either nod your head in the affirmative or you wouldn't. It's that simple. So just for starters, I'm going to ask you to think of a song that you have probably heard at least on a subliminal level (in a store, an elevator, a car, a dental office, a rock-n-roll museum)... It's a song by ELO from back in the day.  ELO - for those of you who don't listen to oldies stations or classic rock outlets - stands for Electric Light Orchestra. A fact that none of our parents would have known or ever cared to know. But you remember. Or else you have an older sibling who remembers, or you have parents who remember, or a guidance counselor who remembers, or the old guy on the park bench who remembers! Good grief. I feel old. Now just follow me here. I want you to just start humming this tune gently to yourself. "Sun is shining in the sky/There ain't a cloud in sight/ It's stopped rainin' /Everybody's in a play and don't you know/ it's a beautiful new day/ hey-eh-yay." Great poetry, I know. But just keep going until you get to the chorus: "Mr Blue Sky/Please tell us why/You had to stay away for so long..." and see if IT (the song, the feeling, the decade) doesn't stay with you (refusing to leave your thoughts) for the next month or so. I myself can't get it out of my head!  (Another of ELO's big hits. Look it up.)

So This is Summer?

The guy who makes the weather nice!