Film reads

Two great blogs to read for film lovers are:

MUBI Notepad: The well known site for film lovers has a great, really fun and varied blog, with tons of articles. For example, there's a great early Christopher Nolan and Batman film discussion here, which is really quite interesting despite the fact that it's, in a nominal sense, critical. If you step away from the sense of 'enjoying' a film and try to enjoy a discussion of it's dissection, this is for you. Critical verbosity is so fun to read, if you're in the mood.

Rouge: The great online journal has tons of interesting pieces, like a mysterious, appropriately post-modern one about the famous, classic 1961 French film Marienbad. Here's a great article about how many disparate films have the same rooms and locations, creating a strange shared universe.

Recs for children's books

If you need to give small children gifts, consider giving books and sweets. They make a great combo!

Here are some ideas: a definite must is the old world style of Winnie the Pooh’s original illustrations and Alice in Wonderland, and Through the Looking glass. 

A great picture book is the wordless, but very moving The Angel and the Soldier Boy. Besides Spot the dog, there are the great little picture books of Clifford the Big Red Dog, and Jillian Jiggs [a girl with a hilariously messy room and great illlustrations], the sweet little mouse Frederick the poet, the big, adorable, neat picture book The Golden Egg and the little picture book about Little Black Sambo, who outsmarts tigers and has pancakes with his mom and dad [he's from India in my version/copy of the book].

Also try the illustrated 'choose your adventure-style' picture book The Maze, which you can even ‘read’ online. It’s an actual maze, each page is a door. The pictures are really incredible, and it just draws you in. It's a great early book to get you ready to look at art in museums and notice details, so that you can enjoy the work even more. And most of all, it's crazy fun! 

Masquerade was another puzzle type picture book that sucked me in. It’s very difficult to solve. It has neat art.

This illustrated, large picture book of the Wizard of Oz with the best illustrations ever done by Charles Santore is a great one. Also look into the great fairy tales with medieval-like illustrations like Beauty and the Beast & Sleeping Beauty & St. George and the Dragon. 

Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are was amazing classic with great art, as was sad, more serious chapter book The Secret of the Andes, a book that still makes me nervous [it is similar in tone and style to the very terrifying and tragic story of The Island of the Blue Dolphin. 

For the A-Z alphabet learning, try Animalia by Gaeme Base, it has such gorgeous images that it should still be bought simply as a coffee table book. It's really amazing and detailed, like Bosch level thought was involved.

Mercer Mayer’s little critter books were so cute and sweet,  My Cousin Katie is on a farm for old fashioned memories, Arthur the aardvark for fun stories. Also look into the excellent, incomparable and top illustrated books [and later cartoon tv show] of The Busy World of Richard Scarry [with the fun, Austrian dressed character 'Lowly the talking/walking [on one foot!] worm' and his flying apple car] and the famous, lovely book about Maine, Blueberries for Sal.

I also loved The Water Babies gorgeous, real art picture book, where a young boy goes to a magical land of sea creatures; the illustrations are amazing. 

Halloween themed books were great too, like Nightmares: Poems to Trouble Your Sleep. Little Witch’s Big Night by Deborah Hautzig was great–the illustrations were so adorable. The best book of all was a book of interesting scary stories called Now you see them now you don’t–it has fascinating, subtle stories that are more strange and ghostly than horror.

As a kid my only cookbook was a cookie one, the Alpha-Bakery Gold Medal Children’s Cookbook. Each letter has a recipe and it has very cute illustrations. I still love it.

For young people: From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. What an introduction to the Renaissance, museums, the ancient world, sculpting, art and life, I loved it once I realized where it was going--and even then it always surprised me. Also look into Redwall for mystery and adventure lovers, Nancy Drew, and The Egypt Game [which for lovers of history, art, mystery and Egypt is more loved than the more famous The Westing Game].

Short Reads

If you're looking for some short reads online, try two blogs: the intellectual content aggregator blog Arts&LettersDaily -- if you want to read about France, try the great MimiThorisson, which has amazing photos and is a great read about life in the French rural world. Truly lovely photos and interesting reads.

If you want mostly photos, try MyFrenchKitchen, which has huge amounts of neat ones of the countryside. Or try HiP Paris. A great blog about elegant, gourmet Japanese/tiny European-style desserts is BossaCafez.

If you would like to have a gourmet's life in Paris, read DavidLebovitz. A cool French lifestyle blog [which is in both Fr. and Eng. I believe] is GaranceDoré.

Matt Donovan

We need to feature the incredible piece "Villa of the Mysteries, Pompeii" by Matt Donovan from the ThreepennyReview, 2012. If you love Borges or Pound, be sure to try it--and of course if you're interested in Dionysus, Bacchic cults, ancient religion and Pompeii's art, read it too. It's got quite the poetic edge to it, really, and a bit of a memoir feel, but it's also interesting in the purely historical way; it's just got something for everyone.

It's both eerie and fascinating, here's an excerpt:
[...]
Over a century of guesses have been flung at the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii. This here, many have written, look just here, this.

That woman being whipped, the pinecone-tipped staff, bodies mid-spin, heads mid-turn, cymbals, and that peculiar peaked shape about to be unveiled from beneath a velvet-like tasseled cover (most in-the-know folks insist “phallus”). Among the twenty-one almost life-size figures occupying the room, there are women delivering loaves and laurel, pouring water and brushing hair.
[...]
So what kind of red was it?

One with a luster the ancients were desperate to preserve. Never allow, Vitruvius advised, either the moon’s splendor or the sun’s harsh rays to steal or lap up its brightness. [...]

Beneath Mount Bermois, in a garden where branches sagged with blossoms, Midas laced a stream with wine, knowing that the chubby follower of Bacchus couldn’t resist. [...]

Bernardo Atxaga

I want to focus on Basque writer Bernardo Atxaga's "Mystery of Four Birds" in ThreePennyReview, it's a very interesting piece that defines boundaries. Usually modern types of hard to classify writing are shock-value focused and outré, and tasteless, but this is incredible. It is translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa. I love how it all ends, suddenly veering into Hammett and Nero Wolfe in a sense. It makes you suddenly re-evaluate the piece in a little, different, interesting way.

Here's an excerpt:

It was a very short song, and the birds that were mentioned, four in number, were only small; but the secret the song concealed, the clear meaning it contained for anyone able to see beyond its absurd surface, had a great deal to do with what we term the “major themes.” The song was a traditional song and widely known, sung over and over by generations of Basque children, and it went like this:


Txantxangorria txantxate,
Birigarroa alkate,
Xoxoa dela meriante,
Txepetxa preso sartu dute.

Which means:


The robin sings his song,
The song thrush is the jailer,
And, with the blackbird’s help,
They’ve put the poor wren in prison.

It obviously wasn’t pure nonsense, nor was it a folk version of some English limerick, since, albeit obscure, it did make some kind of sense. But the idea that a bird—the poor wren—should have ended up in prison on the orders of the authorities—the song thrush—and to the great delight of Robin Redbreast, was not much help in gaining an overall understanding of the story, nor did it answer the fundamental question: what had gone on between the robin and the wren?
[...]

Little reads

There's an interesting, wild article on the origin of confetti from ancient Greece at CABINET here. There's also a neat little glimpse at pastry invention in Europe and its history. There's a longer look at Carnival in Trinidad here.

There's an interesting look at the history of colors and dyes like cyan blue and indigo. There's also a little history of the three-legged wheel, the three bent legs connected together, called the triskelion--it's a symbol of the island of Sicily off Italy and of the Isle of Man by England and Ireland. It's sometimes depicted with spirals instead of clearly defined human legs.

There's a neat look at festivals that include oranges and throwing them here, covering rituals in France, Belgium and Italy. There is also a look at the very eerie secret tunnels and rainbow hued rooms of the Italian new age 1970s commune Damanhur community in Piedmont near Turin--un-relatedly there is a real city called Damanhur in Egypt.

There is an complex, almost Derridean look at mazes and labyrinths as well.