Thursday, January 5, 2017
Recommendations
Somewhere a person at the library today held up a dvd and asked me "Have you seen this movie?"
The movie was from about 15 years ago. I recognized it vaguely. I had never considered watching it. "No." I replied.
"Well don't watch it. It's depressing."
Okay. Can do.
People often tell me about books I should read, movies I should watch, or, horror of horrors, TV shows I should see. A book can take eight or nine hours to read on average. A movie is a couple hours and tends to get me worked up. Five seasons of some TV show can run me up to and over 60 hours. Do you know how many blog posts I can write in sixty hours!?
Two really fantastic ones that will leave you weeping and about 22 roughly like this one.
Do you know how long it takes me to not watch a movie or read a book?
Not very long at all!
I'm going to ask this person for more suggestions. I don't have a lot of spare time to work with.
2 comments:
If you were wondering, yes, you should comment. Not only does it remind me that I must write in intelligible English because someone is actually reading what I write, but it is also a pleasure for me since I am interested in anything you have to say.
I respond to pretty much every comment. It's like a free personalized blog post!
One last detail: If you are commenting on a post more than two weeks old I have to go in and approve it. It's sort of a spam protection device. Also, rarely, a comment will go to spam on its own. Give either of those a day or two and your comment will show up on the blog.
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On a related note, I just finished "You Can't Go Home Again" by Thomas Wolfe. I had heard from many people that it's a seminal American piece, that there's genius in it; I also like the title. So I set out. It's around 750 pages. I liked the first 100 or so, but then it dissolves into a strange piece of writing. Not really a novel. Actually, the more I write about it, the more I can say I like it. Hmmm....I think it's important first to suspend the idea of it being a novel. I mean, he'll move along with a plot and then take 30 pages to write about one conversation with a minor character; another 35 to describe the family life of another. Then suddenly he's in pre-WWII Germany because, for some reason he never divulged, Germany has always had the first place in his heart! Anyway, I read later that it was published posthumously, and in fact his editor patched some of it together. That does not mean it would have been a different book, however. It is still, to a large degree, a book about writing, about the human spirit, about Brooklyn and his remote home town (he loves to say "America", but it's exclusively those two East Coast places) and about people. But my God, this is what I meant to say: I would read for a while and say, "well, I've invested quite a bit into this, might as well go on." Meanwhile, there are blog posts I haven't read, walks I haven't taken, other books left on the shelf. But I did finish it, and now that I reflect, I'm glad I did. Which just goes to show that ______________________________________________________________.
ReplyDeleteYes, it's a common struggle for most people in North America: "Do I read clerkmanifesto or do I read Thomas Wolfe?" I try earnestly to respect peoples' decisions. Curiously this dichotomy rarely comes up in Asia.
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