Bob McC...v2

~250 posts seems enough to bog down loading. So, wtf. Several books finished or nearly so.
1. Robertson Davies the rebel angels. I very much enjoyed this academic novel w/ enough humorous/ironic twists to keep matters percolating along. Set in a Toronto uni, told from the POV of several of the protagonists, the stories gently mock the obsessive importance researchers place upon their quests. There's the fair and brilliant grad student, Maria, on one level denying her familial gypsy roots and on the other, w/ the aid of her academic mentor and hero, Hollier, digging ever deeper into them as they dig into the medieval pasts illumined by Rabelais and Paracelsus.

There's also a well meaning and not-altogether foolish academic prelate; an altogether sleazy but intermittantly brilliant skeptical philosopher, Parlabane, who, unfit for academia, proves more or less unfit for life in any other setting as well. The overload on the humanities is balanced by the researches of Prof. Ozy Froats, into the revelatory nature of human shit. And then the mundane world of business and commerce intrudes as a wealthy alumnus asks 3 of the Uni's professors to act of executors of his extensive, albeit uncatalogued collection of art, incunabula, music scores and the like along with his seemingly banal banker son, Arthur.

Through no fault of her own, Maria casts her spell on all the males who fall into her orbit. Parlabane, making an art out of parasitism, leaves his magnum opus, a terribly crappy tell all roman a clef, in the hands of the "decent" executors. Maria's gypsy uncle and mom (among other things, restorers of classic string instruments) add their bits to the mysterious goings on. The obsessions become themes in themselves. This IS a very talky novel (but universities are talky institutions). While there are odd incongruities of voice (the brilliant and beautiful Maria seems oddly middle aged in much of her tellings), all in all, very enjoyable and i'll be getting hold of the sequels to the Cornish trilogy.

2. Also enjoying Tamil Pulp Fiction - as the back cover enthuses: "mad scientists! hard boiled detectives!. vengeful goddesses! murderous robots! scandalous starlets! drug fueled love affairs." Stories from a variety of Tamil pop fiction writers that, despite their garish and dramatic plot lines, are (not unlike Bollywood movies, from what little i know) are really quite demure and generally highly moral in their telling. The added benefit of including cover art from the pulp magazines in which the writers publish - prolifically.

One bummer: umm....I think i've found a candidate for the SNOBBIEST book of music criticism ever- August Kleinzahler, poet and music critic, has just published a collection of brief essays: Music I-LXXIV. He knows a good bit about music - but not, i think, nearly as much as he thinks he does. I kindof enjoy some of his essays, but his tone of voice is..pretty insufferable. He affects THE look down yr nose persona; snippy, dismissive of any and all he doesn't happen to like (whether a model of harpsichord, or an early rock and roller). I don't have the book here - i'll have to put in a few quotes later - but he is the ne plus ultra of a type of musical snobbishness that seems far more prevalent among jazz critics than among writers who focus on either classical or pop. William Buckley as a jazz/Chicago blues buff.

For a far more positive take on the book: http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/0...

I've been wanting to read The Rebel Angels. Now that school's back in, I'll be jonesing for academic satire. But I haven't yet finished Davies' Deptford Trilogy, so first things first...

Edit: I look forward to quotes from the Kleinzahler. Don't get me started on snippiness in the music world, my head will explode.

I love the whole Cornish trilogy of which The Rebel Angels is a part. My favorite book in the trilogy is the last one, The Lyre of Orpheus.

P.S. Bob you're a "person of interest" over at the dacha.

Several decent quick light books. A mystery/thriller Londongrad by a writer i didn't know (and checking ownership of Nadelson's books, neither do many others on LT). Set among the Russian emigre and expat communities of New York and London a NYC detective, whose dad was once a prominent KGB agent, finds himself tossed into the sea of Russian mafia and newly rich oligarchs. Artie Cohen tries to piece together the murders of two young Russian women, one of whom is the daughter of his best friend in NYC, former Russian rocker, now a wheeler-dealer club owner, businessman w/ few compunctions about making shady deals.

Quite a bit of interesting background on the Russian urban communities and their internal conflicts that have spilled well beyond the bounds of the old USSR as well as the confusing post 9/11 mixing of "traditional crime," spying and terrorism. 4 stars - i'll be curious if i enjoy the earlier novels in this series - i hope our library has a few, at least!.

Finished In the country of last things early this morning. It is a surprisingly hopeful book set in an urban hell, as it traces Anna Blume's journey through an anarchic, decaying blighted city and she journeys from despair to a kind of will to live and to love. The book reads to me as if it was written AS a translation into English from some European language - NOTHING besides word choice and sentence structure implies this - but the other Auster I've read, while equally austere, lacks the "formality?" of "last things." I know people here have read a lot more Auster than I and would be curious about my reaction. And, of course, choosing "Blume" as a protagonists name can never be accidental post Joyce.

(I've never come close to finishing Ulysses but a friend just gave me the unabridged audible version - if i can get the format switched to "burning cds" - i've not tried audible before)

Bob,

Do you want me to hit you? I'm sending a virtual thwack your way. I love Auster and I am a sucker for dystopian fiction and I have so many unread books right now that I am am slapping myself and saying "bad Mary" everytime my fingers wander over to a book supplier website. Alas, it is also not through Kindle. Whatever was the Baron thinking? No more temptation please!!!!!!

i'd just bought ~35 books, including the Auster, for $22.00 at the library book sale a couple of weekends ago - (the Auster jacked up my total, as it was a hardback 1st ed, for $5.50)

And you that's an excuse???!!!!!!!!

Bob - Anna Blume is also a poem by Kurt Schwitters. Not sure if Auster references this at all.

Anyway, like Urania I have a liking for dystopian fiction, and with the additional referencing of a Schwitter's heroine this may well be a book for me too!

Very much an aside, Bob, and probably not that relevant or wanted, but I loved and read a lot of Robertson Davies in the seventies when I lived in Toronto (and his university settings are always thinly veiled U of T settings.) I then had the misfortune to meet him and get to know people who had to work with and under him in his academic role as Master of Massey College, the university's graduate college. Never was there a more pompous, arrogant, insufferable man alive. He walked around the campus wearing a cape and walking stick for effect, lorded it over all, no one was quite worthy of his attention. I have totally soured on the books as a result.

In some cases it is best to know nothing about authors.

sigh - Andrew i suspect you're right. Many/most? authors are better read than met. I wonder how directly proportional to "serious" reputation authorial pomposity is? Or how "serious" their work purports to be? I've only known a couple of authors, and that very marginally indeed. But Clyde Edgerton seemed to be a good sort - he was a pretty big guy and he'd always let half the little kids in our local Episcopal church use him as a camel in the Christmas pageant. And he totally annoyed the arrogant fundamentalist prck who ended up as the current chancellor at the NC School of Science and Math when he gave a wonderful commencement address, complete w/ the NCSS&M blues with blues harp. A pleasure to see Borman grimacing through the whole performance.

Lee Smith is a really wonderful person. Of course, I don't suppose she counts as one of the really greats except in the field of Southern literature. As her assigned student escort, I got to have coffee with Tillie Olson. She was quite nice as well.

Now I am jealous, Urania, I would love to have met Tillie Olson. "As I Stand Here Ironing" is still one of my favorite stories.

solla,

I, too, love "As I Stand Here Ironing."

Read an enjoyable novel about going ons in the art museums/curating world the bowl is already broken. While the book is not particularly WELL written, neither is it badly written. The subplots and sundry goings on whilst the interim director of the Freer (well, the Museum of Asian Art) tries to handle the Smithsonian's directive that the museum be turned into a food court (like the Freer, iirc, it IS the first outpost of the Smithsonian on the mall when on exits the metro); the former director's traumatic post retirement trek into S. Asia; a curator's covetous lusting after the titular Chinese bowl; family lives of the obsessed and little known all seem haplessly plausible. I think i may have learned a bit about middle eastern art (before the injunction against the portrayal of human images became a defacto standard) into the bargain.

the rebel angels sounds really rather fun. How disjointed are the character jumps though? Sometimes I get completely thrown by these which can make it hard work reading.

the Rebel Angels is pretty straight forward. While there are two main POVs and a fair number of important characters, they're not designed to undermine the reader's sense of what is going on. Rather, though there IS a mystery of sorts, that's not the real game, which is the setting up an anthropology of university types in their native habitat.

Just finished Sanctuary by the Irish mystery writer Ken Bruen. Enjoyable noirish detective wonders why on earth an ex-Irish nun wants to see him (along w/ other worthies dead). He survives; worthies die. Modern Galway setting. The second in a longish sequence that i've enjoyed.

Also finished Robt Charles Wilson's Spin a decent, hardly great, 2006 Hugo winner. A bit different from most "big theme" SF in that the best feature was the excellent characterization of both major and minor players. The SFictional conundrum that motivates the book (err, the end of the world being postponed by a mysterious alien time dilation "membrane" is sort of silly, despite being discussed at great length). All the same, i'll be inclined to see if our library has the sequels.

I liked Spin a lot, myself -- I thought it fully deserved the Hugo -- but I have to say that I found Axis incredibly disappointing, enough so that if there is another sequel, I really don't think I'm going to bother with it.

a couple of books worth mentioning:train by Pete Dexter, and The Dylan Dog casefiles. "Train" is a spare, noir-ish take in Los Angeles just after World War II. The book interweaves the point of views of three protagonists: Lionel Walk aka Train, a black teenage golf prodigy at a time when there is no place for a black golfer to play; Norah, widowed and brutalized in a horrific crime; and the prime mover, Packard, a detached gambler-cop who enters their disparate worlds. Train, alert to appearances and nuances, catches Packard's essence early on, caddying for him @ an exclusive country club, calling him the "mile away man." While there are a multitude of subplots and characters that fit neatly into a relatively short book - the nub is Train becoming Packard's player/protege in high stakes golf matches. Of course an undercurrent of foreboding haunts the book - but it's as much a depiction of the intersection of the different social worlds that comprise LA circa 1953 as it is an effective noir novel.

more later - off to see "Bright Star".

Mariette in Ecstasy.
To do justice to "Mariette" and Ron Hansen's prose, i SHOULD take the time to write a short essay and paste it into a message. But - tempus fugit, and I'm not a writer, so impressions, jotted down in brief, after finishing will have to do.

The story follows the trails and trials of a 17 yr Catholic girl in upstate NY, the younger daughter of a doctor, who ~ 1906 enters a convent of the Sisters of the Crucifixion. The order is small, moved from France to the US in the late 19th C. in the face of legal persecution in their homeland. Mariette's much older sister, Annie, is Mother Celine, the convent's prioress.

Beautiful, pious and Jesus obsessed, Mariette becomes a disconcerting touchstone among the sisters. Many are taken with her humility, quiet, self-possession and, yes, physical beauty; others see her as prideful and dangerous - spiritually and morally. But as much as anything else, Mariette is a mirror in which the sisters see themselves - graced or distanced from their hopes and desires for holiness.

Whether by grace of god or hand of fraud, Mariette's fervor becomes manifest by stigmata. And the bulk of this short, elegant, novel is concerned with the social consequences of possible appearance of the holy where it's sought - but not expected. The factions, believers and skeptics, divide the order. The convent's priest as well as the prioress who replaces Mariette's sister after Annie's death from cancer, try to work through the heart of the matter in every regard.

While a decision as to what to DO w/ Mariette is reached - by the hand of her doctor father, who utterly resisted losing a second daughter to Christ - the truth of the matter remains problematic and untouched, I think. Now i must pick up Hansen's novelization of G.M. Hopkins' acceptance of his poetic vocation Exiles which Patty gave me for Christmas and which i left undone. Umm, reading a little about Hansen - Jesuit education, currently the Gerard Manley Hopkins Prof of Arts & Humanities at Santa Clara U. I read Atticus a few weeks ago and while it was decent, i wasn't prepared for this as my followup Hansen book.

A verse by Lou Reed - from the VU's first lp kept playing (duh...in my head) as i read Mariette.

"'ll be your mirror,
Reflect what you are
In case you don't know.
I'll be the wind,
The rain and the sunset,
The light on your door
To show that you're home.

When you think the night has seen your mind,
That inside you're twisted and unkind,
Let me stand to show that you are blind.
Please put down your hands 'cause I see you."

ed to correct his position at S.C.U., story date, effing touchstone
i should have written this out - i've spent more time fixing grammar etc. than i would have thinking more clearly the first and second time through.

Bob,

I have only recently fallen in love with G.M. Hopkins for his lushness. I keep saying to people you don't even have to speak English to get carried away by his sound. I drool all the time listening to him. I have a CD and sometimes it is just in the background as I am driving, and I am not conscious of meaning at all, just sound, like waves. It transports me.

So, please do pass on your judgment of the Hansen Exiles book. I know nothing about it, but if it is good, it will go on my Christmas list.

Hopkins has been and remains one of my absolute favorite English language poets. I am constantly surprised at how taken I (lurking between agnostic and atheist) am
with poetry and poets who emphasize their faith. Whether John Donne, Wm Blake or GM Hopkins (though Donne was defn. earthy in his earlier works).

"Exiles" is the twined story of the wreck of the Deutschland (?) and 5 nuns who perished and Hopkin's leaping into the verse filled sea to rescue them in poetry.

Bob - Just stopping in to say nice review of Mariette in Ecstasy.

Love Hopkins. So Bob, do you recommend Mariette in Ectasy? It sounds interesting.

I defn. recommend "Mariette" - the book took me by surprise as i noted, i'd read "Atticus" and thought it decent, but not a book i'd suggest to others. Hansen IS a seriously Catholic writer and there's no question that his own faith shines through "Mariette" but the writing is gorgeous. At first i thought it overwritten and maybe precious, but 30 pages in I was caught. And, again surprisingly, the book is remarkably suspenseful in a subdued sort of way. A friend on another reading board said he'd "read Mariette after mystery writer Michael Connolly recently named "Mariette In Ecstasy as one of his favorite mystery novels. Having read the book, I thought, mystery? So I reread it." And, really, there are multiple layers of mystery interwoven through the book. And it's short - if you don't like it you haven't lost much time. I AM amazed it was a best seller.

Another huge Hopkins fan here eagerly awaits your review of exiles. I didn't know that a novelisation of his life even existed! The things you learn while lurking, eh?

Poor Gerard, so fucked up by the Brothers...

In stolen moments between trying to figure out how on earth a physical location in NC could get a GPS reading in....NW Iowa and other lovely data disasters, i did get the bell at sealey head by one of my favorite fantasy authors, Patricia McKillip read. A good book, set in a time frame somewhere between her usual medieval or current milieu. But by no means close to her best, although her treatment of the "story as magic" meta-theme IS worked out well.
3.5 virtual stars. (Several of her books get 5 stars from me, so this is something of a comedown).

Currently in the middle of Tamar, an excellent YA novel of family, love, and memory. A teenage daughter in mid 90s England slowly recovers the story of her Dutch/English grandfather who was an Brit agent in the Dutch underground @ the end of WWII. Carnegie medal winner, which, for me, is the most consistent guide to a book that I'll like of any of the major prizes, whether for kids, YA or adult fiction.

Finished Tamar - which stayed intense and surprising through to the end. In the realm of the uber-silly with Pride and prejudice and Zombies.

Thanks to Kizdoc's review of Running, went looking for Echenoz - Running was cheaper, new @ Amazon than used @ Abe, so ordered it new (along with vol. 1 of barefoot gen,thanks Dan! to get their free shipping (order total $25.13! - though you do have to be careful to reset the shipping to free as the default has been set to UPS ground(?) for a while now).

But as I was also looking for the sadly outofprint 1066 and all that as a small present for a retired US highschool history teacher/friend/neighbor who hadn't read it, I was VERY pleased with a small haul from Abe: 1066 & Paper cities for very reasonable prices and free shipping! and from another seller, took a flyer on Echenoz' I'm gone and a second book by Ekaterina Sedia the secret history of moscow. Sedia's latest book, the alchemy of stone is probably the best steampunk SF/fantasy book i've read and while "the secret history" hasn't been as well liked - i've wanted to read it for a while now. So much thanks both to Kizdoc and to Abebooks!

*fixing spacing and typos.

Hi Bob - I've been a little slow to make it around lately, hope you enjoy Barefoot Gen.

not as slow as I! However Barefoot Gen arrived today, along w/ several other books i'm eager to read - starting w/ Jean Echenoz' Running.

Bob,

lack of time has dictated that I give up on reading ClubRead threads, but I came to visit yours anyway. Have you read the Hansen novelization of Hopkins's life yet? Recommended?

I do like it - I'm about half way through it and this time round I'm appreciating it a good deal more than the first time I tried, last January. Not as good as Mariette, but a lot better than Atticus. Maybe one to check out of the library? Hopkins is a lot to live up to - in my usual unbiased fashion, i think he's the only really great British poet of the 2nd half of the 19th C.

I've been more or less overwhelmed w/ sudden requirements by various levels of the govt to prove that I am me, in order to keep the job I've had for 24 yrs. I guess i'm more officially me today than I was Monday, now that i've received a certified copy of my birth certificate from MN today.

Once a country starts defending its "homeland, motherland, fatherland" i defn. start to get concerned.

Read Echenoz's brief but fascinating biopic of Czech distance runner Emil Zatopek. Follows his career from a teen working in a shoe factory during the Nazi occupation; his meteoric rise to the top of the distance running, culminating with the Helsinki Olympic triumphs; his status as a caged pet of the communist party through to his state imposed sham shame for supporting the Prague Spring movt. of Dubcek. The outline is well known to fans of running, but the details, fictional or not, make the book so intriguing. Whether a reader uninterested in sport/running in particular is debatable..but for anyone who's spent hours, days, years slogging through self-imposed workouts, a defn. bonus. The quirky use of the present tense was intrusive initially, but soon seemed as inevitable as Zatopek's inimitably awkward but devastatingly effective "style."

His dramatic finish in the Helsinki 5k is available here:http://www.runningpast.com/vintage_media.htm

Growing up in Czechoslovakia in the 60s, I loved Zatopek. He was a legend, a star in a bleak heaven. Stories about him were known to all boys, athletic or not. THREE Olympic gold medals, including in an Olympic marathon when he was running in a marathon for the first time!

Quite amazing whom the authorities allowed to be idolized. In addition to Zatopek (and some soccer and hockey stars, of course), there was Smolik, who was a bicycle racer and Ludek Pachman, a chess grandmaster.

I don't know about Smolik's political convictions, but ironically Pachman, too, was a courageous man, strongly supportive of Dubcek and the Prague Spring, and he, too, fell into enormous disfavor after the Soviet occupation.

I will of course get the Zatopek book.

A Zatopek quote:

"It's at the borders of pain and suffering that the men are separated from the boys."

Holds true not just in long-distance running. :-)

actually Zatopek had 3 distance running gold medals just in the Helsinki Olympics alone. He won a gold in the '48 Olympics well in the 10k. But it's the 5k, 10k and marathon golds in 52 that was (and still is) astonishing. Sending Zatopek to work in the uranium mines as punishment for supporting Dubcek, likeways, remains astonishing, in an appalling sense. Then, in a minor concession to his continued popularity in Czechoslovakia he was made a garbage man*..but his workmates refused to let him pick up garbage so he got to work out, running along with the trash trucks, often to applause from those living along the routes.

The similarities between totalitarian regimes, regardless of professed ideologies, seem far more "real" than the supposed philosophical differences.

*certainly the hardest job I ever had was a garbage man in Fairfax county Va ~ 1973. Steel cans in the backyards of suburban subdivisions which we had to go bring to the front and then toss up to the 2 guys on the back of the truck which they'd dump in to be compressed. 4 full cans at a time was the rule. I've been a great fan of curbside collection ever since! And I was the ONLY person who wasn't working 2 jobs - everyone else went from humping trashcans from ~ 5:00am- 1-3pm to a late afternoon to midnight job. But we were union and, for the time, were pretty well paid. But never cheered.

"Then, in a minor concession to his continued popularity in Czechoslovakia he was made a garbage man*..but his workmates refused to let him pick up garbage so he got to work out, running along with the trash trucks, often to applause from those living along the routes."

That's a great story by itself...

"But never cheered."

Well, perhaps not by the adults, but when my son was young he spent many Monday mornings admiring the trucks and techniques of our local trash collectors and the Tonka trash truck was one of his favorite Christmas presents.

Finished a beautifully quiet novella yesterday, the professor and the housekeeper by Yoko Ogawa. A brilliant mathematician, victim of a serious auto accident has retained his knowledge and sense of who he was but post accident can only keep 80 minutes of short term memory on hand. A single mom w/ a 10 yr old son becomes the latest in a long line of post accident housekeeper/assistants.

The professor keeps track of current "life" via sticky notes stuck to his clothing, so that, say, when the housekeeper and her son come the next day, he can look down and relearn their names and roles. The son and professor share a love for the same baseball team - but the prof's encyclopedic knowledge of the team's stats ends in 1985 and he's bemused as to why his favorite player, long since retired, never shows up in the lineup when they listen or (an event rather more fraught w/ potential hazards) take in a live game.

A lovely, gentle novel of creating a family of sorts out of nothing. (0 - zero is defn. a non-trivial entity in the book).

Just to keep track:
1.the eye of the leopard: Mankell excoriates European colonialism in Africa as a well meaning Swede becomes the accidental exploiter despite himself. Guilt and violence ensue. Prefer his police novels. 3 stars.
2. finished the secret history of Moscow - the fantastic infiltrates the streets of the robber barons witnessed by a trio of outsiders who happen to be Moscow natives, too. 4 stars (but only for fans of urban fantasy and not as breathtakingly original as the alchemy of stone.
3. Dog Soldiers - Robert Stone takes apart the moral detritus of the US' Vietnam debacle as corruption and drugs drive decency into the ground up wreckage of peace and love in the early seventies. 5 bleeding hearts and 5 stars.
4. July, July - tim o'brien visits vietnam and macalester again. 3.5 stars - i liked it, but by no means his best.
5. ten cents a dance - Not esp. well written, but a fascinating social history. YA novel detailing the taxi dance subculture in Chicago just before WWII. 3.5 stars

6. UNC >> MSU stream on the net. One half of great play - the frosh come on like gangbusters - followed by just enough oomph to pull it out at the end. 4.5 stars. A pleasant surprise by a young, young team.

Stopping by and noticing Dog Soldiers, which is at the top of my wishlist. Nice review of the professor and the housekeeper. And, as for UNC - congrats. There's been premature talk of a KU-UNC final four match-up - just sayin'.

oh...and i read and enjoyed v1 of Barefoot Gen.
i can see KU - much as i'd love to see the heels - that seems less likely, though not totally out of left field.

The similarities between totalitarian regimes, regardless of professed ideologies, seem far more "real" than the supposed philosophical differences.

Indeed. They are all united by their hypocrisy.

and, perhaps, the least "hypocritical" are among the most murderous.
though i'd hate to weigh up the crimes of the uber hypocrites Hitler/Stalin against, say Mao and the devastatingly uncorrupt, Robespierre. The effective merger of state supported capitalism w/ single party govt in modern China is not unlike Fascist Italy.

Sorry - this is off track and onto one of my hobbyhorses..any belief system that excludes all others out of hand is inherently prone to dictatorial devo/evo lution. And any monotheism (marxism, market capitalism, Christianity, Islam) has the seeds of totalitarian terror set deep @ its core. Rhetorical excess, but the basic point remains true to my belief that "monotheism is an idea whose time has come and gone a LONG time ago." Apologies to all the wonderful, moral individuals who sacrificed themselves for the benefit of others at the behest of their faith, and acknowledging that much of my favorite writing, esp. poetry, is "faith based."

I saw a little bit of the UNC-MSU game on ESPN last night. The Baby Heels looked pretty good...but MSU did not play well, considering their edge in experience. Who are the favorites to do well in the ACC this year? I've heard that Georgia Tech is supposed to be pretty good; the campus is not far from where I live, and a friend & I might go to a game at Alexander Coliseum next year if we can get tickets. As long as Duke doesn't win, it doesn't matter too much to me.

My group had a meeting at work this morning, and our practice manager and the pediatrician in chief for the hospital system, both UNC grads, were talking about the game.

I keep waiting for the wicked but seductive Baron von Kindle to add The Alchemy of Stone to his library. Alas these days, my desires exceed what he is willing to "put out" ;-)

i kind of have a bleak feeling that this might be a very good year for dook. dook happens. If you turn on a tv set and see 4 or 5 white dudes running around the court and dick vitale in ecstasy, that's this year's depressingly good dook team.

I imagine UNC will be up and down for at least the first half of the season. I wouldn't be surprised to see VaTech do very well this year.

Ick. Rooting for Duke is like rooting for the Dallas Cowboys. Or Notre Dame. Ick.

I'm LOL of your characterization of the Duke team, with Dickie V going bananas amongst the Cameron Crazies. I can't dislike him too much though, as he graduated from my brother's alma mater (Seton Hall) and was an assistant coach at one of my alma maters (Rutgers) for awhile.

It's about time that VT had a decent team.

Pitt is young but talented, and they should make the NCAA tournament, barring injuries to key players. As I probably mentioned last year, we don't discuss Rutgers basketball in polite company. The current team sports close wins over Marist, Drexel and UMass (none exactly comparable to Syracuse, Georgetown or West Virginia), and losses to Vermont (ick) and Florida. Yep, looks like RU will be in a season long battle with DePaul to stay out of the Big East Conference basement. Again.

Go Badgers! and onwards deeper into Holbrook Jackson's the anatomy of bibliomania modeled after Burton's illustrious anatomy of melancholy. Really an organized miscellany (oxymoron?) of all things bibliophilic.

On an unrelated note...Rushdie's protagonist's gfather in midnight's children. Dr Aziz, retires to the same region of India that EM Forster's Dr Aziz retreats at towards the end of his career in passage to india. Forster and Rushdie's time @ Kings College overlapped. And Midnight's children's "Aziz" is responsible, in some sense, for there being a new India. Coincidence? homage? (My knowledge of both authors is VERY spotty)

I'm not surprised that Duke lost to UW in Madison. Pitt played one or two games at the Kohl Center against the Badgers, came into both games undefeated and ranked in the top 10, and lost both times. Pitt returned the favor when UW played them at the Petersen Events Center, though.

Interesting comment about Rushdie's and Forster's works. I read Midnight's Children years ago, but I haven't read A Passage to India.

50 - You forgot the Lakers and the Yankees.

#53: Right. Especially the Yankees, since they beat my Phillies in this year's World Series.

Hmm . . . I must have tumbled into the sports section of my local newspaper ;-)

i think you did too! ...i figured that - at least during college bball season - anyone w/ a vague interest in same could post here. Esp. as at the moment i'm recovering from some fairly bleak reading w/ silly stuff - Concrete - Ky. senator's speechwriter becomes a rock of a man..or man of rock and a not esp. super hero, although lovable in his stony fashion. And the swashbuckling adventures of Cerebus the aardvark from hell and gone. And the anatomy of bibliomania - Holbrook Jackson's dead on takeoff of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy that is incredibly informative in re thoughts about books and reading through the ages. Actually it's not really a takeoff - it's more that Jackson appropriately appropriates Burton's style - homage and history.

The Anatomy of Bibliomania looks fantastic. I have to have that book!

i think it really is one of a kind - taking an literate, but antiquated style - and reusing it with humor, appreciation and an absurd amount of information to recreate the form of a particular classic.

It's not a satire - that would have been a lot easier to do (and a lot shorter).

Finished Cory Doctorow's overly didactic and prescriptive makers - not nearly as good as his YA book, little brother in which he remembered to have a compelling plot to power its message. Distributed micro-capitalism will be the wave of the future, made possible by Web 4.0 or so. Smart bloggers are better than mean spirited reporters (major subplot)

Just starting inherent vice.

2/3 thru Inherent Vice - it's fun, but little more than a humorous picaresque journey through sectors of HS Thompson's "Bat Country." A lot of good one lines and jokes about the death knell of hippy, torqued up as possible murder and cop/hippie conflict, jokes, etc in the general greater LA area immediately post Manson. amongst the cast - but not a lot of new "light" is cast. I found myself wondering if this had been an automatic writing experiment that Pynchon had decided to play.
We'll see 3.5 stars at the moment.

ditched Inherent Vice too trivial to finish.
2/3 of the way through world war z - the book to read about zombies, if you're only going to read one. Seriously. This is really a book about individual, social and global reaction to an alien threat - not about the alien. And, as such, put together from hundreds of interviews w/ survivors, exploiters, otaku, soldier, politicians, provides a brilliant portrayal of a pan-continental zombie pandemic.
The piling up of viewpoint after viewpoint proves very powerful: from military commanders describing high-tech weaponry totally unsuited to the shambling threat and the grunts who suffered the consequences; to the calculated risks and losses by the South African plan - resurrected from the depths of apartheid that becomes the model for controlling the pandemic; to a girl describing the falling apart of the small group of refugees from the warmer lower 48 who thought to escape by camping out in the Canadian tundra (these zombies go inanimate in freezing temperatures - can't say if this is a general zombie trope or specific to this particular invasion).

I'm about halfway through World War Z - my first of the zombies, and I'm glad it's the one I picked. I've been surprised right from the start at how effective it is - I had serious doubts when I first picked it up. The pandemic aspects render it all the more so now, in the wake of H1N1, than when I started it. (I'm moving slowly more through lack of time than interest!)

bob, IV too trivial to finish? oh please say more. Has pynchon lost his spark?

well..it's more that it's just a long, shaggy, vaguely noirish doggy's tail. and the tail is wagging the tale. I can't decide if it makes me want to reread Lot 49 and V or stay well away and let fond impressions lie.