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At Frederick’s command, Henia (Sandra Samos) rolls up Karol’s torn pants legI continue with my erratic foreign movie posts for this year as well as posting on movies adapted from books (as usual, this post will look at the differences between the film adaptation and the novel). For more foreign movies, check out Caroline’s World […]
My last post while I’m taking a break… An article by David Mikics, “The Diplomat of Shoah History,” fits in well with much of my recent reading and I highly recommend it (even with some reservations). In the article Mikics looks at Timoth Snyder’s book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin and the question “Does […]
Another post while I’m away… “A gentleman does not kick a woman.” “Your lordship is right as far as that goes,” said Kazmer Rezeda. “If the occasion arises, strangling is far more appropriate.” Hungarian Literature Online had a recent excerpt from next year’s release of Gyula Krúdy’s 1931 novel The Knight of the Cordon Bleu. […]
While I’m away from wifi service I have a few miscellaneous posts lined up… Many thanks to Sheila O’Malley for the link to Kim Morgan’s interview with the four stars (Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox) of the movie Deliverance. She only had ten minutes for the interview. Ten minutes. As Sheila […]
I’ll be taking a few days off as my wife and I celebrate our anniversary. Since we’ll be in the area where we held the wedding, I’ll add a link to my post on The Art of Eating Well.
Witold Gombrowicz wrote A Kind of Testament, an autobiographical account of his life and work, in 1968, a year before he died. While anything that comes directly from Gombrowicz has to be taken with a grain of salt, the flow of information and insight that comes from the book feels as wonderful as his other […]
I plan on posting occasional entries from Diary by Witold Gombrowicz over the next few months (or however long it takes me to get through it). I’m reading the 2012 Yale University Press edition, translation by Lillian Vallee. There are several references to Pornografia in the Diary and I’ll post from two related entries. Before […]
I’ll tell you about yet another adventure of mine, probably one of the most disastrous. At the time—the year was 1943—I was living in what was once Poland and what was once Warsaw, at the rock-bottom of an accomplished fact. Silence. The thinned-out bunch of companions and friends from the former cafes—the Zodiac, the Ziemiańska, […]
I occasionally mention the audiobooks I listen to during my commute and this will be another such post. I’m listening to Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live, or A life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer at the moment and wanted to add to the generally positive remarks I’ve seen on […]
Freely adapted from “Job,” the novel by Joseph Roth, “Sins of Man” is a thoroughly sentimental, painstakingly somber and devastatingly complete portrait of a man in sorrow. While it is uncompromisingly tearful, it happens also to have been splendidly performed, honestly directed and handsomely produced. In sum, a well-planned conspiracy against the lachrymal duct which […]