Philip's comments (member since Oct 17, 2007)

Philip's comments from the Constant Reader group.

I bought the Dylan Christmas CD, at my wife's insistence, oddly, but she thought it too odd a notion to pass up given my Dylan fandom. We haven't played it yet. I actually like listening to Christmas music a lot more than I used to, but not until we're a bit closer to December 25th.

Just sneaking a peek at the CR threads while away from home in New Orleans!

I enjoyed reading this book very much for its mixture of critical biography, art history, and cultural commentary. I agree about our human fascination with hucksters, or what Jonathan Lopez describes in the books as our will to believe, an emotional or psychic state that can blind us to the "objective" facts staring us right in the face.

One aspect of the story that I found particularly strong was how Jonathan set van Meegeren's paintings so well within their intellectual and political context, how the forger spoke to the desires of his own time via the medium of a "new" Old Master, as for example in The Supper at Emmaus.

This website referred to in the earlier CR thread (http://www.themanwhomadevermeers.com/gal...) has a slideshow of all the book's illustrations, many in color. I only looked at the site after finishing the book, but the qualities of the Vermeers and would-be Vermeers are more fully evident in color I think. This would no doubt be even more the case if one could manage an in-person viewing, another theme of the book.

Mina, all best wishes for a better year ahead. I've been missing you too!

Great list, Sherry! Wow did I get lucky this time.

In answer to your question, Newengland, message 6 - I believe I've been guilty of nearly all those redundancies at one time or another, sometimes for emphasis.

Wow, Beej, that website looks great, thanks!

Oh, my thoughts are with you with the big storm!

I'll be visiting New Orleans for a conference the weekend of Nov. 20-24 and wonder if there are any local CR members who would recommend a likely bookstore or art museum for me to visit, either by myself or with them? None of my official CR friends lives in NOLA, though I know a couple of y'all are 'merely' a state or two away in Alabama. :O)

A literary blog that I follow by the author and critic Mark Sarvas, The Elegant Variation (http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/) recently posted a link to a story with this title in the online WSJ, with fun anecdotes about how some current novelists approach the practical side of their writing.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424...

Authors mentioned include some we've recently read or discussed here: Junot Díaz, Orhan Pamuk, Kazuo Isihiguro, Margaret Atwood, ...

Good news, Ruth, you're on quite a roll these days!

Thanks to whoever nominated this, and nice choice, Ruth, for the last week of October!

For those new to him, here's another by Simic with some possibly overlapping themes and an even more staccoto style:

EMPIRE OF DREAMS

On the first page of my dreambook
It's always evening
In an occupied country.
Hour before the curfew.
A small provincial city.
The houses all dark.
The storefronts gutted.

I am on a street corner
Where I shouldn't be.
Alone and coatless
I have gone out to look
For a black dog who answers to my whistle.
I have a kind of Halloween mask
Which I am afraid to put on.

Jane, I've heard some people compare the travails of the lead character in A Serious Man to an Americanized version of the biblical story of Job, which added an interesting layer of meaning.

Happy Birthday, Sara!

One thing I like about Harold Bloom's list linked by Whitaker above at #69 (especially the most recent grouping) is his attention to poetry and drama, categories we haven't been considering here.

Jane, we just saw A Serious Man today and enjoyed it very much. We had heard that is wasn't so much a comedy as a drama with comedic elements. The film is the kind of deep meditation on American Jewishness that we more often find from Philip Roth or (in a different way) Woody Allen. That meant that my wife and I missed some of the references (either funny or not), but it was fascinating none the less. Also, there were quite a few in-joke allusions to things here in the Twin Cities (where the Coens grew up), including some of the names of characters.

Last week we saw the Matt Damon flick The Informant!, which was also quite successful. It made us wonder how much was based on "fact" (if I may, given all our group's discussions of fiction and meta-fiction). My wife's web sleuthing suggested that the "facts" in "real life" were as controverted as in the movie.

I love those observations, Yulia, thank you.

Bridge of Sighs is the only Russo I've read, and I liked it a lot, without exactly loving it. Empire Falls is the one I want to read (I think it was on the CR Reading List before I found the group).

Here's an interesting discussion of Roth's Portnoy's Complaint being considered for a "retrospective Booker prize" for 1969. The author is the English Classicist Mary Beard.

http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life...

Portnoy is in my personal category of 'good, not great' Roth, that is, an interesting conceit, not up to the caliber of his great works.

Like that one, Windfall Apple, thank you. And here I go falling off the edge ....

Newengland, I read Mitchell's Black Swan Green this past summer and I thought it was great.

Al, I read Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth recently and was amazed.

In fact I've been thinking about nominating one or both of those books for the next Reading List.

I'm guessing classic works aren't necessarily many people's favorite reads, either on first publication or sometimes even when made 'canonical,' but somehow manage to continue to speak powerfully to the general human condition beyond their original context.

Amongst the American authors mentioned I would agree about the chances of Updike, Irving and Roth, or at least specific examples of their work. I might suggest Gabriel Garcia Marquez as a future classic well on his way. Is Nabokov already there?

I would add Joseph Heller, especially Catch-22, even though I know many people have trouble getting into it (as with several other 'classics,' of course). More controversially perhaps I might mention McMurtry's Lonesome Dove.

Michael, I think that Yulia makes a good point here. Since you say you're not interested in reading Russo, rather than derail the thread further from discussing his new book, why not start up a new thread where you and others can discuss the relative merits of current fiction?

Michael said:

How a death and a broken marriage become funny and uplifting I can only learn from reading the book, which I am probably not going to do. To tell you the truth, modern fiction stops for me at Updike; I read occasional current things, but have grown so tired of the trivial, the juvenile, and the narcissistic