November 14, 2020

                                         New one by Don DeLillo. Short, but makes you think. All I need.

May 26, 2018

Don DeLillo from his Paris Review interview.

April 30, 2016

15% coupon, just ordered a signed copy.



I have to pick up my youngest at Newark Airport tomorrow, Five-Boro bike tour will give me fits.

April 27, 2016

They brought back the fast-pass. Lines weren't bad last year but I just ordered the fast-pass.



DeLillo's newest: Zero K. On the list of things to read.



Amsterdam.

November 16, 2013

50th Anniversary of JFK assassination coming up soon. I was in the Eighth Grade, by 3:00 P.M. my class was in a church praying for him. My old college roommate was a huge conspiracy buff and still is. He was always interested in the Organized Crime connections, which were many. He always railed against the Warren Commission report.

The Warren Commission , above, was also a great source for Don DeLillo's Libra :

"Then there was The Warren Report, which is the Oxford English Dictionary of the assassination and also the Joycean novel. This is the one document that captures the full richness and madness and meaning of the event, despite the fact that it omits about a ton and a half of material. I’m not an obsessive researcher, and I think I read maybe half of The Warren Report, which totals twenty-six volumes. There are acres of FBI reports I barely touched. But for me the boring and meaningless stretches are part of the experience. This is what a life resembles in its starkest form—school records, lists of possessions, photographs of knotted string found in a kitchen drawer. It took seven seconds to kill the president, and we’re still collecting evidence and sifting documents and finding people to talk to and working through the trivia. The trivia is exceptional. When I came across the dental records of Jack Ruby’s mother I felt a surge of admiration. Did they really put this in? The testimony of witnesses was a great resource— period language, regional slang, the twisted syntax of Marguerite Oswald and others as a kind of improvised genius and the lives of trainmen and stripteasers and telephone clerks. I had to be practical about this, and so I resisted the urge to read everything."

Don DeLillo, The Art of Fiction No. 135



The Sunday NYT Book Review gives a thumbs up to The Bully Pulpit Thanks to Jury Duty, I am half-finished with this over 700 page book. TR dominates but it is interesting to see what an accomplished individual Taft was in all that he did.



Holiday Market getting ready.



Cayenne Peppers.

November 17, 2011

New collection of short stories, The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories by Don Delillo just released. NYT Review , Sunday NYT Book Review and New Yorker Review.

"Who knows? If writing is a concentrated form of thinking, then the most concentrated writing probably ends in some kind of reflection on dying. This is what we eventually confront if we think long enough and hard enough."

October 24, 2010

"Shatneresque" as an answer in yesterday's NYT crossword led me to my personal library which has the above book. The original script for "The City on the Edge of Forever" by Harlan Ellison.



Here's Harlan Ellison explaining why his version and especially his ending was best.



Keith Richards autobiography Life comes out this week. CBS Sunday Morning did a nice piece on the roll-out of the book. Here is Keith Richards on Snorting Dad's Ashes. Book is on the must-read list.



The The Paris Review’s author interview series is now on-line. I always loved the one they did with Don DeLillo.
"Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don’t know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them. Maybe I wanted to find more rigorous ways of thinking."



A re-boot of Holmes in modern times will debut tonight: Sherlock. Opening episode is A Study in Pink, in contrast to A Study in Scarlet. Wonder if Mormons and RACHE come into play.



Today’s quote of the day in The Big Picture Blog is too good not to share:
"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks], will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered." -Thomas Jefferson

Here's another:
"Yes, we did produce a near-perfect republic. But will they keep it? Or will they, in the enjoyment of plenty, lose the memory of freedom? Material abundance without character is the path of destruction."

August 30, 2010

Breaking into my library, time to re-read some old classics. My paperback cost me 95¢ back in the seventies.



DeLillo's first.



Yunte Huang's "Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective" is getting reviews all over the place. Next on the reading list.

February 3, 2010

Now on PBS, a masterpiece. The original
has been digitally remastered.



Picked it up. The following is worth the price
of admission:
"I never asked the old woman what the reason was, I'd see her coming down the stairs backwards, clutching the handrail. I'd pause and watch, I'd offer to help, but never asked, never inquired into the problem, an injury, a matter of balance, a condition of mind. Just stood on the landing abd watched her come down, step by step, a Latvian, this is all I knew , and New York City, this too, where people do not ask."

February 1, 2010

Ordered from Queens Library. It includes the
Paris Review interview: "Writing is concentrated thinking."

Tomorrow's NYT review of Point Omega.

Interview from 2007.

January 31, 2010

New Book by one of the best, Don DeLillo.
Have to get it.



Great Interview in WSJ.



Alice by Pogo. Here is a great Remix site.

Pogo is an emerging electronic music artist in Perth, Western Australia. He is known for his work recording small sounds from a single film or scene and sequencing them to form a new piece of music.

His most notable track, Alice, a composition of sounds from the Disney film ‘Alice In Wonderland’, was received with much success gaining over 4 million views on YouTube as of December 2009. Pogo has since produced tracks utilizing sounds from films like ‘Mary Poppins’, ‘Harry Potter’, ‘The Sword In The Stone’, ‘Hook’, ‘Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory’, and ‘Up’.



Bought Tax software at Best Buy, and with it you get a free DVD
up to $20. Saw Casino Royale and liked it, so follow-up
is in order.