One of my favorite art blogs, The Blue Lantern, has a wonderful post featuring palettes and paintboxes of Gustave Moreau,Edgar Degas, Vincent van Gogh,and Pierre Bonnard.

So, what has everyone been reading lately? Any recommendations?

I got a newsletter from AbeBooks that had an article that caught my eye on books that one is required to read in high school. Staff members from several different countries were asked about what they'd been assigned to read. Looking over the list, I feel a bit envious of some of these people--I was never assigned anything as interesting as Hopscotch or Pedro Paramo in school!

Aside from the obvious works by Shakespeare, some of the required books I remember from high school were Les Miserables, 1984,Lord of the Flies, Light in August and Billy Budd. I liked most of these, except for Billy Budd, which I hated so strongly that I still cringe whenever I see Melville's name.

What books were you all required to read in high school, and did you like or hate these books? Did your high school reading affect your later reading choices?

Those of you who like book lists might enjoy the 61 essential postmodern reads list put together by the Los Angeles Times blog. There's a good mixture of famous and obscure titles, and all the books are tagged by features that make them characteristic of postmodernism.(link via the millions)

Date:	2009-07-16 20:51
Subject:	livejournal glitch?
Security:	Public
Mood:	confused

It seems that today's updates to RSS feeds aren't being displayed on my friends page. Is anyone else having this problem?

Date:	2009-07-13 19:42
Subject:	Archetypes: The Pragmatist vs. the Idealist
Security:	Public
Mood:	hot

I'm not generally a huge fan of westerns, but since I'm hooked on Robert B Parker's Spenser mysteries, I thought I'd give Parker's new western series(Appaloosa and its sequels) a try. While the books have some
drawbacks (such as sexism), there's an interesting dynamic between heroes of the series--the pragmatic sidekick Everett Hitch, who narrates the stories, and Virgil Cole, a traditional, idealistic hero. Cole feels that his actions must be justified by either the law or at least some sort of inflexible code, whereas Hitch simply uses common sense and his instincts to decide what to do.

It seems to me that a lot of books and films tend to choose one type of hero as the one who is "right"--either the pragmatist or the idealist--and alternate points of view are either absent or depicted as less desirable than that of the hero's outlook. I've noticed before that many of my favorite books and films present both types of heroes without necessarily judging which is better--probably because I'm not sure myself which outlook I agree with more.

I think audiences often respond more favorably to practical heroes, since the idealists can come across as overly inflexible, humorless, or a goody-goody.( Han Solo, for instance is more entertaining than Luke Skywalker). On the other hand, the idealist is usually a more noble character, because he or she has a greater willingness to make sacrifices.

So, here are my questions for you all: a) which is your favorite type of heroic character--the pragmatist or the idealist? Or do you find it hard to choose?
b) which character do you usually agree with? c) What about villains? Do you think a villain is more interesting if he or she is pursuing some larger, misguided goal? Or do you prefer villains that act out of self interest?

Happy Birthday to newleaf31!! I hope you have a wonderful time today. :)

Here's a fun site for film buffs: Four Frames is a new blog consisting of photomontages that capture the mood and visual styles of various films using only four frames. (Most of the images avoid plot spoilers.)(link via kottke)

The Museo Thyssen has a great exhibit on the role of shadows in art history from before the Renaissance to modern times, including photography and cinema.

I have a fascination with recommendations engines; even when they don't work perfectly, they're fun to try. Nanocrowd is a new recommendations site that uses an interesting approach--you type in a movie you like and it suggests a set of different possible keywords associated with the movie. (link via lifehacker) It then suggests movies based on whichever keywords you select. I can see the advantage to this approach, because fans of the same movie might like it for different reasons--one might like the special effects, another the theme, a third,the plot twists. Thus, without knowing *why* two fans like the same movie, it's hard to predict if they'll agree about other movies.

The main disadvantage to the site so far is that the database is geared mostly towards relatively recent and popular movies. The first two movies I tried, Double Indemnity and Kiss Me Deadly, weren't in the database. But to be fair, the site is still in beta and presumably the older classics will eventually be included. When I tried more recent movies, the recommendations seemed reasonably good.

I hope everyone has been having a nice weekend. I just finished an excellent, melancholy novel by Patrick Modiano called Out of the Dark.(If anyone else has read his novels, I'd love any suggestions about which of his books I should read next.)

What has everyone else been reading lately, anything good?

In honor of Saint Patrick's Day tomorrow,I've made a new book community: irish_lit. Please feel free to join,if it's a subject that interests you, and if you have any suggestions of writers you think I should include in the keywords, feel free to let me know!

A book meme, courtesy of my friend dfordoom.
( book meme )

I spent a lot of time in the past few days exploring Poetry International Web. In addition to reading the monthly issues, one can use a drop down menu to find poets from several different countries. Poems are presented both in the original languages and English translations. This week's featured poem was "A Pebble" by Jūkichi Yagi.

Happy Martin Luther King Day!

King's Nobel Prize speech
King Online Encyclopedia
King's best known speeches
photo gallery
King Papers Project

I recently started reading another of Geoff Dyer's books--But Beautiful, which is a group of vignettes centering around various jazz legends. One of the stories mentioned this interesting portrait of Lester Young by Herman Leonard, which was created not by photographing the man, but rather by assembling a still life from his possessions. Leonard also made similar portraits of Duke Ellington and Stan Kenton.

The literary blog The Millions has links and mini-reviews for every short story published in The New Yorker last year.

Here's a list of the twenty books that I enjoyed most this year; I'd love to hear about everyone else's favorites.:) ( book list for 2008 )

Fantasy writer Jeff Vandermeer will be reading and reviewing a different short Penguin classic each day for sixty days on his blog. So far, he has covered works by Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, Edward Gibbon, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jonathan Swift,Michel de Montaigne, Niccolo Machiavelli,Thomas à Kempis,St. Augustine,Marcus Aurelius, and Lucius Seneca. It's a fascinating project that includes excerpts from these works and an examination of whether these historically influential works are still relevant in modern society.

I hope you've all been enjoying the holidays!

Date:	2008-10-19 00:19
Subject:	music recommendations
Security:	Public
Mood:	awake
Music:	Forever Changed -John Cale & Lou Reed

So, what music have you all been listening to lately? Do you have any recommendations?