A Momentary Taste of Being

Can You Forgive Her? is the first novel in the "Pallisers" series.  I'm not certain whether this series of novels was ever known in Trollope's time under this name; however, ever since the BBC production of the entire series, they have become known as such to us.  The Pallisers is a series of six novels that center around Platagenet and Glencora Palliser--although in this novel the couple is hardly at center stage.  Or, if at center stage they share it prominently with one other trio and are shadowed by yet a third trio. Indeed the novel is a novel of twos and threes.  There are three groups of three people--Glencora, Plantagenet, and Burgo Fitzgerald; Alice Vavasor, her cousin George Vavasor, and John Grey; and Mrs. Greenow (an Aunt to Alice Vavsor), Captain Bellfield, and Mr. Cheesacre.  The first two listed are the centerpieces of the novel, the last trio is present largely for broad comic relief--the poor Widow Greenow besieged by suitors on all sides whi...

Jim Thompson is king of the boozy, bleak, late noir.  I thought I had read this one before, but nothing about it seemed familiar even while all of the tropes of the noir genre and particularly of the provocative pulp noir raised their unholy heads in the course of the story.  Lou Ford is a deputy sheriff with a secret--a bunch of secrets.  And he spends the book accumulating more--a lot more.  He is the essence of the smiling sociopath blithely plotting his way to freedom even though he knows, as one of the characters says, "It's always lightest just before the dark."  His smiling persona has leaks--people see past the mask frequently.  As brilliant as he thinks he is, he can't keep what he does hidden and the story reaches exactly the type of noir climax you would expect. Taut, terse, in parts brilliant--written in a cool, clear voice that at once plays on one's nerves and shows the bumpkin leading the yokels.  In short, a powerful noir work fro...

A Dog's Tale

Minas Tirith in matchsticks

Thucydides hates realists

Norwegian Wood trailer

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/stratblog/2011/02/17/rapporteurs-report-the-peloponnesian-war-by-thucydides/

Wow, this MP3 is remarkable---Truffaut and Hitchcock together and talking cinema.

Thucydides on American Foreign Policy Wonderful reading.  A glance tells us why reading the classics is a good practice beyond the mere exercise for the mind.

"Home"-- Edward Thomas

More on Huckleberry What I wouldn't give now for some huckleberries, or even lingonberries.  May need a trip to Ikea.

Critique of Wells Tower

The End of the War and a summative post featuring Auden

"The Way We Read Now." I think I find myself on this blogger's side.  I carry with me books from the library--hefty volumes that I want the pleasure of marking up and conversing with.  And then, I have on my iPad thousands of other books.  Books to dip into during a moment of leisure time--books to look at, savor, and enjoy for their contents but not for their sheer reality as books--a hefty chunk of artificial reality. Books are wonderful, but what is more wonderful is the ability to read--anywhere, anytime, almost anything.

"Seeking the Sunny South"

The Peloponnesian War

Tarkovsky's Solaris revisited The King's Real Speech 1938 Forthcoming from Herzog--The Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Caroline Miniscule

Gloomier winter for Athens in The Peloponnesian War

In ancient Greece