The Illiterate

top ten update

Nothing new this week, so instead I’ve indulged in something in the way of a year end rap up, which I’ll post here, and then append to the top of the archive in case anyone should ever want to see it again.

What do you say about a pop year in which the nearest thing to a controversial record was a piece of loose satiric comedy that just about everyone in the critical establishment, except me, hated, and that everyone else bought hand over fist? For the furor it stirred up alone, I

sentiment

May winter’s quiet restore us and hope shine in 2006.

top ten update

Mariah Carey takes over number one this week, and now ties Elvis for the most number one records in what Billboard portentously refers to as the “rock era” (which apparently includes the present “hip-hop period”). Fifteen or so of them have been simpering ballads, but hell, in another 20 years she’ll be thought of as this generation’s Dinah Shore, so who cares? New this week: Beyonce, who I have particular reservations about; and Juelz Santana, who I have unparticular reservations about.

100 years of dance (sort of)

As loathe as I am to recommend anything appearing in The Weekly Standard, this piece by Christopher Caldwell on Anthony Powell’s A Dance To the Music of Time, in honor of the 100th anniversary of Powell’s birth (he died at 94) is very good indeed. I fear, though, that the reason it made the Standard is largely Powell’s good standing as a Tory (his father was a career army officer, his father-in-law an earl), and the fact that much of the book can be read as a lament on the death of the British upper class. Don’t hold that against Powell, though. As Caldwell says, he may have been a snob, but he was an intellectually curious snob, and a great writer. Also, it’s not as if the upper classes come off unscathed in the book, it’s more a matter that the lower classes barely appear at all.

Dance, by the way, was one of the first books I read out loud to JSM when we were first living together. We finished it in a hotel near Disneyland (after a day at the park) on her birthday in 2001. We, and the world, were both much younger then.

monumental tome #4

I finished reading the outstanding Moby Dick over the weekend. Anyone who believes this to be a boring, stodgy, lugubrious, unpleasant novel – I must tell you, you are entirely wrong. Someday, in the next phase of the Monumental Tomes project, I will write up reviews of these books. But not today, because I’m reading.

The next book on the list is Lanark by Alasdair Gray. Thanks FP, for mentioning it.

top ten update

Only new song this week is Nelly and his pals bragging about their teeth, which is at least different subject-wise, if in no other way.

more martyr than angel

My canine nephew, ever-beleaguered:

more wishful thinking

Since Jaq did it, I put up a wish list too. I’m a wishful sort of guy, so it’s a bit longer than hers. But keep checking them both, as I’m sure they’ll be growing all the time, exponentially and geometrically.

changeless

How is it possible to get your hair cut, saying to the scissor-wielder “Trim an inch off, all over”, yet have it look and behave exactly the same as before you paid them? And I swear, the woman was on some form of speed, shaking like a leaf and zooming around for the entire process.

wishing

Ooooh – Jaq’s Amazon wishlist!

That was fun!