Jump to content

Menu

Violet Crown

Members
  • Posts

    5,471
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    2

Everything posted by Violet Crown

  1. I looked this up, never having heard of a book of this name. It's a French film version of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr Ripley, which I've been intending to read. Turns out the book is based on Henry James's The Ambassadors. So now I have to re-read that, read the Highsmith, and then see the movie.
  2. Movie post! Get reading your classics, my friends, and get your subscription to the Criterion Channel, because in September they're releasing a boatload of great film adaptations, including adaptations of children's classics like The Phantom Tollbooth and Zazie Dans le Metro. The list: The Count of Monte Cristo (Rowland V. Lee, 1934) The 39 Steps (Alfred Hitchcock, 1935) La bête humaine (Jean Renoir, 1938) Of Mice and Men (Lewis Milestone, 1939) Great Expectations (David Lean, 1946) The Killers (Robert Siodmak, 1946) Anna Karenina (Julien Duvivier, 1948) Oliver Twist (David Lean, 1948) The Heiress (William Wyler, 1949) The Passionate Friends (David Lean, 1949) The Idiot (Akira Kurosawa, 1951) The Life of Oharu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1952) Robinson Crusoe (Luis Buñuel, 1954) Senso (Luchino Visconti, 1954) Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray, 1955) Aparajito (Satyajit Ray, 1956) The Burmese Harp (Kon Ichikawa, 1956) Apur Sansar (Satyajit Ray, 1959) The Cloud-Capped Star (Ritwik Ghatak, 1960) Purple Noon (René Clément, 1960) Zazie dans le métro (Louis Malle, 1960) Divorce Italian Style (Pietro Germi, 1961) Lord of the Flies (Peter Brook, 1963) Tom Jones (Tony Richardson, 1963) Charulata (Satyajit Ray, 1964) Woman in the Dunes (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964) Closely Watched Trains (Jirí Menzel, 1966) War and Peace (Sergei Bondarchuk, 1966) Memories of Underdevelopment (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1968) The Angel Levine (Ján Kadár, 1970) Dodes’ka-den (Akira Kurosawa, 1970) The Phantom Tollbooth (Chuck Jones, Abe Levitow, and Dave Monahan, 1970) The Little Prince (Stanley Donen, 1974) Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975) The American Friend (Wim Wenders, 1977) The Ascent (Larisa Shepitko, 1977) The Getting Of Wisdom (Bruce Beresford, 1977) Empire of Passion (Nagisa Oshima, 1978) Watership Down (Martin Rosen, 1978) My Brilliant Career (Gillian Armstrong, 1979) Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979) The Tin Drum (Volker Schlöndorff, 1979) Wise Blood (John Huston, 1979) You Are Not I (Sara Driver, 1981) Under the Volcano (John Huston, 1984) Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (Paul Schrader, 1985) My Life as a Dog (Lasse Hallström, 1985) Betty Blue (Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1986) An Angel at My Table (Jane Campion, 1990) The Comfort of Strangers (Paul Schrader, 1990) Europa Europa (Agnieszka Holland, 1990) The Handmaid’s Tale (Volker Schlöndorff, 1990) Wuthering Heights (Peter Kosminsky, 1992) The Castle (Michael Haneke, 1997) The Sweet Hereafter (Atom Egoyan, 1997) The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola, 1999) The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke, 2001) The Hours (Stephen Daldry, 2002) Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone, 2008) Almayer’s Folly (Chantal Akerman, 2011) 45 Years (Andrew Haigh, 2015) Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt, 2016) Zama (Lucrecia Martel, 2017) Excuse me, I have to go do a few hundred hours of preparatory reading now.
  3. You could be describing our house. We bought for location, and have an Undesirable House on an Undesirable Lot. My fridge was dying for a year before I found an LG fridge (as Laura suggests) that would fit in the spot. We use ice trays. Benefit: when your ice tray cracks, it's a 50-cent replacement. I kind of want to fully embrace the last-century milieu with metal trays. If we're re-living the Spanish Flu anyway, let's go! ETA: "Wired by squirrels." Can I steal that? Our plumbing was done by drunken possums, thus the Great Flooding Disaster of 2004. Fortunately the insurance co agreed that the possums were to blame.
  4. Oh man, I checked that out from our campus student church's library back in the day. How long it's been.
  5. I'm not even sure why he was on my radar. I keep a list of books or authors I'm interested in, so I can remember to check occasionally for availability/affordability, but I've got no memory of how Bloy made it on the list. Possibly through Arthur Symons.
  6. I'm really not sure, from what I've read so far, how much Bloy was in fact a Decadent, and how much he was just putting it on. Fun either way!
  7. Checking in mid-week because I actually finished Querelle of Brest. It seems influenced by Billy Budd. Particularly, the relationship between Querelle and Lieutenant Seblon seems parallel to Billy's relationship to Claggart, but not so much as to be clear that Genet read Melville (we only know that someone gave him a copy of the book). I should be reading more early 20th century US history textbook but instead I've started Léon Bloy's Disagreeable Tales (Histoires désobligeantes). Bloy was a Decadent (he hung out with J.-K. Huysmans) and something of a crazed Catholic, so good for two of last year's 10x10 categories. This 2015 translation seems to be the first time the Histoires désobligeantes have been translated into English, so I actually had to pay the cover price for a new book. 😱 So far it's like Lemony Snicket for adults.
  8. Dh starts classes tomorrow. He's all set, with his whiteboard-on-wheels, to hold his classes outdoors: sign on his door: "Prof. Crown's classes held on the west side of the building"; notifications sent to his students to bring masks and water bottles (since it's hot, and the univ admin put signs on all the water fountains saying not to use them) and make sure their laptops are well charged. He gives it three weeks max before it all shuts down.
  9. I was delighted to learn that Wharton was, in fact, an interior designer. I keep meaning to get hold of her book ("The Decoration of Houses").
  10. Happy Anniversary to Amy and Robin! No books finished this week. I'm so behind on my homeschooling prep; reading constantly but not getting any BaW credit for it, alas. I'm going to introduce the girls to Robert Herrick and Shirley Jackson this week.
  11. Good Housekeeping sewing classes. Middle Girl loves Gertie's Sewing Show, and went from zero to making herself some beautiful clothes in just a few covid-months. Not YouTube, but the late, lamented Schickele Mix radio show is available (pirated only, alas) in various places around the internet. It's great music education.
  12. Update: Wee Girl has AT LAST been defeated in the Crown Family Coronatide Reading Competition. We altered the rules so the rest of us are on one team and Wee Girl on a team by herself, the winner being the first team to get to ten books. It came down to Wee Girl and Middle Girl staying up late to finish Book Ten, and Middle Girl won by a mere half hour. Victory is sweet!
  13. My understanding is that some used booksellers add several hundred dollars to the price of a sold book they expect to have in stock again, to avoid the hassle of de-listing the book until they have another copy. So that seller may have just sold a copy for $2.81 and inflated the price to prevent anyone from trying to order it.
  14. My girls loved that series. They so much wanted me to send them to boarding school.
  15. 🙂 I love spending other people's money on good books.
  16. They do go out of print. Have you tried running the ISBN number of the one you want through Bookfinder.com ? I tried with a few LoA Faulkners and found good prices. ETA: Okay, I tried it with the 1926-1929 Novels and I see what you mean: one copy for $24 + shipping, and then $40+ for everything else. But I saw lower prices for other collections, so maybe that one was just less popular and so less available used. ETA2: Half Price has it for $17.50 plus shipping.
  17. We had a great teacher. The cancellation of various foreign language literature APs (and the dumbing-down of the one surviving Latin AP) had the natural effect of killing off advanced foreign literature courses in US high schools. My French teacher left teaching soon after I graduated, in part because it was clear our high school -- following the lead of the parents and the College Board -- was going all-in for STEM and no longer interested in teaching the humanities beyond the base level required for entrance into STEM programs of "good" universities.
  18. Reading in French could work! When I took the AP Lit, I realized that nothing we'd studied in English worked half so well as Sartre's Huis Clos, which we'd read in French class in preparation for the (now defunct) AP French Lit exam. So I used that.
  19. LOL -- I'm hopelessly confused. Never mind! Alas we don't make up a specific AP reading list; just whatever happens to have been read and analyzed by the time the AP rolls around. Middle Girl took two literature courses in the year before her AP, so she chose from the novels, dramas, and epics for those courses: The Battle of Maldon & The Dream of the Rood Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Henry IV Part 1 Paradise Lost The Conscious Lovers Frankenstein A Tale of Two Cities Happy Days --------------------------- Othello The Duchess of Malfi Oroonoko The Mutiny on the Bounty Wuthering Heights The Sign of Four She ended up using Frankenstein on the exam itself.
  20. @Dreamergal: Not sure why sad? ETA: This is how we prep for all the APs. Dh or I just teach the subject in the secondary years, then briefly teach how to take the exams. We don't do any special content teaching for them.
  21. I don't use a reading list to prep for the AP English Lit exam. When a child is ready to prepare for it, we look at exemplary exam questions together, and write down a list of novels that she's familiar with and could make work for various kinds of questions. Then I pay some English graduate student for a short tutorial on writing timed exam responses, since it's a skill in itself, and one I'm not good at teaching.
  22. This isn't quite Robin's challenge, but the cover for my Penguin Classics Billy Budd is pretty good: a sort of faux-scrimshaw decoration.
×
×
  • Create New...