Shreds of a bizarre world
Here you won't find the pages of a pedantic journal, praises to fantastic places or accounts of memorable encounters. This is a collection of stories, thoughts, images, and most of all odd stuff, even though to someone else it might actually look ordinary. To discern its bizarre side, in fact, special filters are needed: cynicism, fussiness, stubbornness, isolation, impudence, nosiness and nerdiness. All flaws that, in different measure, this semi-nomadic being has got embedded in his genes.
Friday, September 13, 2024
I'm calling the police - Irvin D. Yalom
This is a very short autobiographical story about a Jewish friend of the author who managed to escape the Nazis and flee from Budapest to the USA when he was only 17 years old, by himself, with basically no money, no contacts and no knowledge of the English language. And who then went on to become a top-skilled, world-famous heart surgeon.
Labels:
american,
autobiographies,
books,
english,
holocaust,
hungary,
jews,
judaism,
literature,
nazism
Monday, September 9, 2024
Thursday, September 5, 2024
Spoon River Anthology - Edgar Lee Masters
This is one of the most famous books of 20th century American poetry.
Unlike the previously reviewed Poet in New York by Garcia Lorca and Let us compare mythologies by Leonard Cohen, most of Masters' poems can be easily paraphrased. The text always tends to "mean" something easily understandable by the reader.
Wednesday, September 4, 2024
Three illusions and a truth
What looks like a Lego brick is a walkway tile,
What looks like a holy shrine is a wooden hall,
What looks like red paint is a filtered light,
What looks like a child is indeed a child.
Tuesday, September 3, 2024
Cinema speculation - Quentin Tarantino
We all like to watch movies. And most of us, those I know at least, love Quentin Tarantino. Quentin Tarantino the film director, I mean. We've also had plenty of opportunities to enjoy his skills as a screenplay author, as basically all the movies he directed are based on his own scripts.
Few of us might actually know him as a full-fledged writer though. I mean fiction and non-fiction writer. However, he has already published at least two books. One is a novelization of his big hit "Once upon a time in Hollywood", which I haven't read yet. And the other is the subject of this post: a collection of "free-style" movie reviews, which might be better termed as essays.
Few of us might actually know him as a full-fledged writer though. I mean fiction and non-fiction writer. However, he has already published at least two books. One is a novelization of his big hit "Once upon a time in Hollywood", which I haven't read yet. And the other is the subject of this post: a collection of "free-style" movie reviews, which might be better termed as essays.
Labels:
1970s,
american,
books,
cinema,
english,
literature,
movies,
nonfiction,
reviews
Monday, September 2, 2024
Let us compare mythologies - Leonard Cohen
Most people, including myself until recently, know Leonard Cohen as the deep&warm-voiced singer and songwriter of beautiful folk songs, the most famous one being "Hallelujah".
Before switching to music, though, he began his artistic career as a novel writer and poet (even after he started singing he remained horrified of performing in public for a long time).
Labels:
books,
canada,
canadian,
english,
folk,
Immigration,
judaism,
leonard cohen,
literature,
montreal,
music,
new york,
poetry
Tuesday, August 27, 2024
Poet in New York - Federico García Lorca
Federico García Lorca died young, at the beginning of the Spanish civil war, probably killed by the falangists, either for being homosexual or socialist or both, or else for more private reasons. Nobody knows for sure.
A few years earlier, between 1929 and 1930, he traveled to the American continent, spending time in New York, Vermont and finally in Cuba, before returning to Europe. He managed to witness the '29 Wall Street crisis, therefore experiencing both the excesses that predated it and the desperate times that followed it. He wrote this collection of poems during those months.
Labels:
books,
civil war,
crisis,
cuba,
federico garcia lorca,
finance,
Immigration,
literature,
new york,
poetry,
poverty,
Salvador Dalí,
spain,
spanish,
usa,
vermont,
wall street
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)