Bill O'Reilly: Is He a Demagogue?

The evidence.

'Must Be a Devil' Diplo

Sometimes It's Good to Be an (Honorary) American

Today's the birthday of two of my favourite Americans: John Crowley and Woody Allen. Crowley wrote the novel Little, Big, which showed me that genre writing can produce great literature (rarely, yes, but it's worth looking), and is also responsible (at least partly) for much of my present happiness. When Lesha and I began our epistolary romance we traded questions about favourite things, including book, mine, of course, being Little, Big. She then bought and read (eventually - but twice, and it's now one of her faves, too) this book. And so I was bitten with the smittenbug. I couldn't help but give my heart into the keeping of such a girl. And Woody made one of our favourite films. Annie Hall, yes. But also so many others: Manhattan, Sleeper, Love and Death, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Everyone Says I Love You, Sweet and Lowdown. So he's answerable for many of my misguided and neurotic notions about romantic love, I guess. He and scores of loveaddled English poets. Anyway, happy birthday guys, and thanks.

'Books Written for Girls' Camera Obscura

'Love Cliché' Bran Van 3000

'Woody' Hayden

Oishii!

Delicious new discovery: Muchuu (which means 'to be in an ecstatic, delirious trance or dream' in Japanese), a British brother-sister duo playing toothsome electro-pop. 

'Somebody Tell Me' Muchuu

Halloween Shenanigans

On a lighter note, this photo reminds me of the many misspent Halloweens of my youth.

'Pumpkin' Tricky

'Youth' Beat Happening

I Am Ezra

It's Ezra Pound's birthday, one of my three favourite American poets (the others being Ammons and Stevens). And despite some very unsavoury aspects to his character (anti-Semitism, treasonous activities), he remains endlessly fascinating. We were introduced not through his poetry (so much later) but a novel by Timothy Findley, 'Famous Last Words'. And I'm not sure where I first read the following poem, but it stunned the feeble brainmeat of my appallingly callow younger self, and left me in thrall to the Imagists for at least a summer of my youth. 

Doria (transliteration of the Greek)

Be in me as the eternal moods

      of the bleak wind, and not

As transient things are–

      gaiety of flowers.

Have in me the strong loneliness

      of sunless cliffs

And of grey waters.

      Let the gods speak softly of us

In days hereafter.

      The shadowy flowers of Orcus

Remember thee.

Bonus poem:

So I Said I Am Ezra

So I said I am Ezra

and the wind whipped my throat

gaming for the sounds of my voice

  I listened to the wind

go over my head and up into the night

Turning to the sea I said

I am Ezra

but there were no echoes from the waves

The words were swallowed up

   in the voice of the surf

or leaping over the swells

lost themselves oceanward

   Over the bleached and broken fields

I moved my feet and turning from the wind

   that ripped sheets of sand

   from the beach and threw them

   like seamists across the dunes

swayed as if the wind were taking me away

and said

I am Ezra

As a word too much repeated

falls out of being

so I Ezra went out into the night

like a drift of sand

and splashed among the windy oats

that clutch the dunes

of unremembered seas

A.R. Ammons

'The Eternal' Joy Division 

Greatness

The editors of This Recording recently took it upon themselves to rank the one hundred greatest writers (ever). I know that these lists, by their very nature, are highly subjective and informed by the compilers respective biases (nationality/ethnicity/language(s) spoken and read/gender/sexual preference/socio-economic background/etc.). So while it was no mean feat, and their chutzpah (hubris?) is commendable (and I'm a little tickled that Byron placed so highly - 25 - although even I think it's ridiculous) , their inclusion of some questionably great writers has to be challenged (but it should also be said that their list certainly made me think about what makes a writer, or a work of literature, great, and that I waited with bated breath to read each installment and to see if, and where, my favourite writers made the cut). Robert A. Heinlein? Mary Shelley? Henry Miller? Lorene Niedecker? These are some of the greatest writers to have lived? I can easily think of dozens of writers I'd have opted for before any of these. And of the hundred writers, seventy-two wrote in English, fifty-five are Twentieth-Century and thirty-nine are American (no Canadians, of course, unless Saul Bellow or Malcolm Lowry are guilty by association). Which is simply absurd. Which is why I'm posting my own list (I suppose I'm as defenceless as anyone against hubris or self-indulgence). Not exactly of the one hundred greatest writers (because how can anyone decide what and who is great - apart from Shakespeare, of course, who, by the way, came in third on This Recording's list, so, clearly, it's complete nonsense), it's a list of my favourite (i.e. what I've read) novels, poets, dramatists, non-fiction works, short fiction collections and works of speculative fiction (in no particular order). But I'll preface it with a dozen (thirteen, actually) writers I think are nonpareil, and didn't make the cut at This Recording. 

John Crowley

Robertson Davies

Jane Austen 

Lao Tzu

Edith Wharton

A.R. Ammons

C.P. Cavafy

Yehuda Amichai 

Pablo Neruda

Robert Browning

José Saramago

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Anne Carson

Fiction

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

The Deptford Trilogy - Robertson Davies

The Road - Cormac McCarthy

Light Years - James Salter

Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

Properties of Light - Rebecca Goldstein

Quarantine - Jim Crace

The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov

Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel García Márquez

One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez

Justine/Balthazar - Lawrence Durrell

Alice's Adventure in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll

The Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake

Little, Big - John Crowley

Tristram Shandy - Laurence Sterne

Cancer Ward - Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut

The Passion - Jeanette Winterson

The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera

Emma - Jane Austen

The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins

The Leopard - Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers

The Good Soldier - Ford Madox Ford

Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison

To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf

V. - Thomas Pynchon

Nostromo - Joseph Conrad

Ægypt sequence - John Crowley

The Conversations at Curlow Creek - David Malouf

Written on the Body - Jeanette Winterson

The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje

Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley

Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon

Still Life with Woodpecker - Tom Robbins

Put Out More Flags - Evelyn Waugh

Scoop -Evelyn Waugh

Vile Bodies - Evelyn Waugh

Persuasion - Jane Austen

The Brief History of the Dead - Kevin Brockmeier

A Scientific Romance - Ronald Wright

The Translator - John Crowley

The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Baron in the Trees - Italo Calvino

Narcissus and Goldmund - Hermann Hesse

Notes from the Underground - Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Charterhouse of Parma - Stendhal

Thousand Cranes - Yasunari Kawabata

Poets

Anne Carson

Charles Wright

Rita Dove

Seamus Heaney

Anthony Hecht

J.D. McClatchy

Anne Michaels

e.e. cummings

John Donne

Edward Thomas

Mark Strand

Wallace Stevens

A.R. Ammons

Andrew Marvell

John Keats

Yehuda Amichai

Pablo Neruda

Emily Brontë

Eugenio Montale

Yves Bonnefoy

Pedro Salinas

W.B. Yeats

Catullus

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Walt Whitman

C.P. Cavafy

Ezra Pound

Octavio Paz

Eugénio de Andrade

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Robert Browning

Elizabeth Bishop

Alexander Pope

Lord Byron

Lars Gustafsson

Robert Herrick

W.S. Merwin

Derek Walcott

Cesare Pavese

Galway Kinnell

George Seferis

Rafael Alberti

Czeslaw Milosz

Robert Penn Warren

Fernando Pessoa

Louise Bogan

Charles Baudelaire

Joseph Brodsky

Vicente Aleixandre

Jean Follain

Drama

King Lear - William Shakespeare

Long Day's Journey into Night - Eugene O'Neill

Hamlet - William Shakespeare

Othello- William Shakespeare

Angels in America - Tony Kushner

Iphegeneia at Aulis - Euripides

Antigone - Jean Anouilh

The Importance of Being Earnest - Oscar Wilde

She Stoops to Conquer - Oliver Goldsmith

The Recruiting Officer - George Farquhar

The Beaux' Stratagem - George Farquhar

Tartuffe/The Misanthrope - Molière

Ondine/The Madwoman of Chaillot - Jean Giraudoux

Uncle Vanya - Anton Chekhov

Galileo - Bertolt Brecht

Non-Fiction

Rubicon - Tom Holland

Melodies Unheard - Anthony Hecht

The Lives of a Cell - Lewis Thomas

The Island of the Colorblind - Oliver Sacks

Religio Medici/Hydriotaphia - Sir Thomas Browne

Patrimony - Philip Roth

The Oldest Dead White European Males and Other Reflections on the Classics - Bernard Knox

The Gutenberg Elegies - Sven Birkerts

The Mirror of Myth - Jasper Griffin

What Am I Doing Here - Bruce Chatwin

Speculative Fiction

Novelties and Souvenirs - John Crowley

The Earthsea Trilogy - Ursula K. Le Guin

Map of Desires - M. Rickert

Shadow of Ashland - Terence M. Green

Tigana - Guy Gavriel Kay

On Wings of Song - Thomas M. Disch

The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. Le Guin

Dragonsinger/Dragonsong - Anne McCaffrey

Davy - Edgar Pangborn

The Lions of Al-Rassan - Guy Gavriel Kay

Short Fiction

Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You - Alice Munro

A Fanatic Heart - Edna O'Brien

Collected Fictions - Jorge Luis Borges

Collected Stories - Katherine Mansfield

The Stories - John Cheever

'My Year in Lists' Los Campesinos!

Hate Kills

I learned this yesterday in The New Yorker. One of the results of the anti-Semitic furore during the Dreyfus affair was, in 1943, after her arrest by the Gestapo, Madeleine, granddaughter of Alfred Dreyfus, being deported by Vichy France (rife with anti-Dreyfusards) and ending her life at Auschwitz. It's awful how words are simply useless.

'Madeleine' Saint Etienne