You Care What I'm Reading, Watching and Listening To (V)

















(Have any of you ever read this? After completing Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education I was not prepared for so many beheadings, flaming elephants with arrows in their eyes, naked dances with snakes, catapulted human excrement, eyebrow-less eunuchs, dead apes in trees falling into gardens with ponds full of gem-encrusted fish. Either way, the book is amazing. I plan to read his Three Tales and Temptation of Saint-Anthony next. Anyone ever read those? Anyone? No? Yes? Well answer me!)
















(I like books with naked laides on the covers. This is the book cover of my Horace but I think the translator is different in my edition for some reason. Both ways, Horace is Horace.)

















(It is measure of your genius Montaigne, that a dopey 20 year old from Minneapolis plans to forsake this selection of your Essais for the complete collection so that I may read your essay "On Thumbs" from Book One and other such pearls of wisdom.)

















(Frank Rich is the least irritating of the New York Times editorial team and this book is very good. Although I cringed when Rich, a former theater critic, spent a page comparing a typically clumsy sleight of hand Bush press conference with a scene from the abdominable Oscar winning musical Chicago. Mr. Rich, if Ari Fleischer is like Richard Gere's Billy Flynn and Bush is like Catherine Zeta-Jones' Roxie Hart, is Dick Cheney 'Capn' Andy' Hawks from Show Boat?
























(I've been listening to more than these but these are the ones I can think of at the moment. Bernstein conducting Mahler's Second also is around me, as is Tortoise's new boxset of rare material which has some nice stuff on it. "Salammbo" seems to make me want to hear Strauss' operas. As for movies, I haven't the time. Too much reading and studying to stare at things on screens. I'll find some time this week perhaps with the lady.)