Since I wrote about 90% of all posts from my former workplace (former, yes, indeed. But don't worry, they didn't fire me for blogging related reasons) there hasn't been much posting in the last couple months on my behalf. So I decided, like, today, that I at least give you little list-like impressions of what is, or rather was, going on in my literary, filmic, musical or otherwise musings once a month. This is less inspired than just kicked-off by Nick Hornby's monthly column "Stuff I've Been Reading" for The Believer, which I've been reading this month. Actually I just read it a couple minutes ago. Since I hadn't known at the beginning of the month that I would start such an endeavor at it's very end, I have to guess some of the stuff that made apparances this September of 2011 but failed to inscribe itself deeply into my memory. And since, quoting Bill Pullman in "Lost Highway", 'I like to remember things in my own way, not necessarily in the way they happened', don't blame me if any of the following, or preceding, for that matter, information is incorrect or fails to register with whatever fascist-mode of truth your brain is operating on. So, here it goes:
Stuff that I bought:
- Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds, BluRay
- Marcel Proust, Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Zeit, 13 Bd.
- Sigmund Freud, Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse & Psychologie des Unbewußten
- Ernest Hemingway, Tod am Nachmittag
- Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
- The Believer, September 2011 issue
- The Believer Book of Writers Talking To Writers (Revised & Expanded)
- A ticket for the upcoming BUSH concert in Cologne on Nov, 8th 2011
Stuff that I read and watched and listened to:
- Bush, The Sea of Memories
- Daily Bread; Well, You're not invited
- The Decemberists, Calamity Song
- Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds
- Lars Von Trier, The Element of Crime
- Lars Von Trier, Epidemic
- Lars Von Trier, Europa
- Lars Von Trier, Breaking The Waves
- Lars Von Trier, The Idiots
- Lars Von Trier, Dogville
- Lars Von Trier, Manderlay
- Jorgen Leth, The Perfect Human
- Lars Von Trier, The Five Obstructions
- Lars Von Trier, The Boss of it All
- Thomas Vinterberg, Dear Wendy
- Seth Gordon, Horrible Bosses
- John Michael McDonagh, The Guard
- Californication, Season 4
- some U.S. Open
- Bernhard Schlink, Der Vorleser
- Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close
- The Believer, September 2011 issue (unfinished yet, it's a bathroom read)
- The Believer Book of Writers Talking To Writers (same as above)
- David Foster Wallace, E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction (in ASFTINDA)
- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (not finished yet)
Well, what can I say? I was preparing for Lars Von Trier's
Melancholia by watching all, almost, the stuff that I hadn't watched before and by rewatching all the stuff that I had watched before. And although
Dancer In The Dark and
Antichrist and
Riget are not on that list, I pretty much got it all covered. I have to say that I was really surprised of the variety of his work. Especially his early
Europa-trilogy is quite distinct from his later works in visual as well as in narrative style. All of them,
The Element Of Crime,
Epidemic,
Europa, and
Dogville at the very forefront, distinguish him as a master storyteller. And apart from the gut-wrenching border-crossings of the human soul starting with
Breaking The Waves, he can just as easily pull off an extremely funny comedy like
The Boss Of It All. Alright, yes. The last 15 or so years have been a constant tumbling down the rabbit hole of depression and we will have to see if
Melancholia will be the end of that or just another apex in his CV. But even in this condition he is an extremely gifted filmmaker. I'm looking forward to everything he gets on the big screen.
Proust: I do not know when or if I will ever have the time to read him but this complete German edition of his
À la recherche du temps perdu smiled at me from an 'each book 1€' flea market box. I got the whole bunch for 9€! Also, since I once owned the complete Freud Studienausgabe and sold it on eBay several years ago and now it costs like 100€ up and I'm trying to get my hands back at those books, I got volumes I and III for a euro each at the flea-market. The Hemingway I bought for my brother since he loved The Old Man And The Sea and The Sun Also Rises so much, but doesn't read English so well, hence the German edition. Death In The Afternoon was the only Hemingway I could find there and since there was the very last bullfight in Barcelona this week I thought it would be a nice gift. I mailed the book to him and he didn't respond whatsoever to this niceness of mine. Hm...
Today I bought the Salinger and Lolita. And this is probably the very first time in my life that I bought something for myself of which I have a perfectly good copy at home already. The Catcher In The Rye, that is. Actually there had already been two copies on the bookshelf, the other one belongs to my girlfriend. But I just couldn't resist the wonderful book jacket. It looks so graceful and dignified. I had to buy it. And then I had to think of that Mel Gibson flick, Conspiracy Theory, in which he owns a couple dozen copies of this very novel but can't give a reason why. Or at least I didn't get to know the reason, I never watched the movie, but know just that one scene. Weird, isn't it?
And I stumbled upon The Believer magazine, which is a part of McSweeney's, which, respectively, is owned and published by Dave Eggers, sort of, because of an interview with Don DeLillo and Bret Easton Ellis, so naturally I had to get ahold of a copy. There is also an interview with Jason Schwartzman in it. But this darn Ellis DeLillo interview is ONE YEAR OLD!!! It took place in Paris in October 2010 when both of them promoted their latest novels, Imperial Bedrooms and Point Omega, respectively. And since I'm an avid reader of DeLillo and Ellis interviews, there was about nothing new in it, because they told all that stuff to dozens of other interviewers already. That sucked. The Believer Book of Writer's Talking To Writers arrived a couple days later and at least I do not know so much of the contents of those interviews beforehand, because, frankly, I know just about half a dozen of the (three and a half dozen) writers featured in it. And that is a good thing. I like interviews with writers and those are quite interesting. They nevertheless never reach the quality or length of those featured in The Paris Review.
And the really big thing after Lars Von Trier: I, as you already know, started reading Gravity's Rainbow. I'm about 130 pages deep now and don't really have any words that I would want to W.A.S.T.E. upon this. Therefore I will end this post with the video for The Decemberists's Calamity Song. And I have to make that clear: It is the video, not the song that I like and appreciate for obvious reasons.
