Archives for January 22, 2014

Books Do Furnish a Room and Temporary Kings, the tenth and eleventh novels in A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell’s great roman fleuve, portray the literary life in postwar England, and both volumes are accordingly full of non-existent novels and other books “written” or referred to by Powell’s fictional characters.

Two of these imaginary books, X. Trapnel’s Camel Ride to the Tomb and Profiles in String, are central to the plot, but the others are merely mentioned in passing, and Powell, who had an insufficiently appreciated knack for pastiche and parody, clearly had fun with the titles:

Athlete’s Footman

Bedsores

Bin Ends

Bronstein: Marxist or Mystagogue?

The Bitch Pack Meets on Wednesday

Borage and Hellebore: A Study

Descartes, Gasendi, and the Atomic Theory of Epicurus

Dogs Have No Uncles

Dust Thou Art

Fields of Amaranth

Garnered at Sunset: Leaves from an Edwardian Journal

Golden Grime

I Stopped at a Chemist

Kleist, Marx, Sartre, the Existentialist Equilibrium

Match Me Such Marvel

Miscellaneous Equities

Moss off a Rolling Stone

The Pistons of Our Locomotives Sing the Songs of Our Workers

Paper Wine

Purged Not in Lethe

Sad Majors

Secretions

Slow on the Feather

A Stockbroker in Sandals

Sweetskin

Unburnt Boats

I’d gladly read some of those–wouldn’t you?

Buddy Rich and his big band perform Allyn Ferguson’s “Away We Go” in 1967:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

“What I didn’t understand at the time was that there is nothing special whatsoever in the craft of acting. Acting can be anything one wants it to be, from the most crass, dead, ego-driven activity, used as a way of earning an easy living or finding women, on the one end, to something sublime, magical, and transforming on the other. And the difference, the only difference, is the investment made by the person who’s engaged in the process.”
Alan Arkin, An Improvised Life

Buddy Rich and his big band perform Allyn Ferguson’s “Away We Go” in 1967:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

“What I didn’t understand at the time was that there is nothing special whatsoever in the craft of acting. Acting can be anything one wants it to be, from the most crass, dead, ego-driven activity, used as a way of earning an easy living or finding women, on the one end, to something sublime, magical, and transforming on the other. And the difference, the only difference, is the investment made by the person who’s engaged in the process.”
Alan Arkin, An Improvised Life