1 February see worldswideweb.com 2 February The only place online where I've found the latest Katzenjammer Kids strips is Oregon Live, the web site accompaniment to the Oregonian newspaper. 3 February see worldswideweb.com 4 February Article on Wayne Shorter in yesterday's New York Times (Major Jazz Eminence, Little Grise) suggests that the traditionalist assault of the 1980's is finally done and gone. Consider the signposts. If you believe those critics who can stand to listen to his albums in their entirety, Wynton Marsalis's Black Codes (From the Underground), featuring a quintet (with Brandford Marsalis, Kenny Kirkland, Charnet Moffett, and Jeff Tain Watts) justly criticized for emulating the second Miles Davis Quintet of 1965-1968 (with Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams), ranks among his best. His debut album had even featured Hancock, Carter, and Williams as the rhythm section on a few tracks. At the same time, Shorter's post-Fusion work was being pilloried. Twentysome years later, though, Shorter returned to acoustic Jazz, not as a traditionalist (though he has performed some of his older, well-known pieces), but with a quartet that accepts the non-constraints of Free Jazz to a greater extent than the Davis quintet. Marsalis, meanwhile, dropped by Columbia Records, continues to play retreads, paeans to past greats that fail to pay proper respect precisely because of his traditionalism--and because his work is supported by the same sort of social groups and cultural institutions that have always kept, and still keep, Jazz in a second-rate position. 5 February A brilliant short essay at Counterpunch by Diana Johnstone (The Good Inventions That Pave the Road to War: R 2 P and Genocide Prevention) rebukes the disingenuous rationale behind so much of the rhetorical, public-relations side of our foreign policy, if not the broader set of policies or deep-seated ideologies actually motivating U S leadership. What came to mind immediately when reading this piece: the gradual recognition that the common understanding Americans have of the events in Rwanda, 1994, is incomplete at best. In other words, Neal Ascherson's How Millions Have Been Dying in the Congo, published in the center-left New York Review of Books, would not have been published before David Peterson and Edward S Herman's Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo in the Propaganda System, published in the Marxist magazine Monthly Review. Nonetheless, Ascherson's article certainly does not suggest any major shift in thought among elite Americans, especially not the foreign-policy establishment. The New York Review also published Robert Malley and Hussein Agha's article about Bill Clinton's failed Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative of 2000-1 (Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors); that piece completely deflated right-wing propaganda proclaiming Yasir Arafat's unfortunate decision to reject what Ehud Barak had offered, which was not in any way an independent state, and did not address the problem of the Palestinian diaspora. Yet the Israelis continue to rely upon blindly-loyal support from the U S Congress and our mainstream news media. And you can still hear Bill Maher telling H B O viewers, whenever the topic arises, that Arafat's choice was irresponsible. Similarly, the likes of Samantha Power, author of '"The Problem From Hell": America and the Age of Genocide', rise to positions of influence in our government, finding whatever good suggestions they've made based upon years of research (not to mention the bad suggestions) turned into justification for more illegal wars against the latest evil dictator (whom we've also worked with, of course, whenever we needed a place to send "terrorist" suspects to be tortured). 6 February Modern popular/ mass art has rarely respected boundaries among disciplines and media. As soon as a music artist is commercially successful, film projects arise, as with The Beatles. Individual performers are even more likely to launch careers as actors, as with Frank Sinatra. Movies have their "tie-in" projects: toys, magazines, posters, television programs; Star Wars provided the template for this kind of maneuver, though plenty of films had been subject to such treatment prior to the late-1970's onset of the summer "blockbuster" era. This diversifying approach to an art project need not be entirely the result of commercial pressure. The television series Twin Peaks had numerous side projects, of which only one--a fake tour guide to the fictional city that is the show's namesake--seems to lack serious artistic purpose. Thus, the project Twin Peaks--not just a T V show--consists at least of: the Julee Cruise album Floating Into the Night (1989) that features most, but not all, of the songs she sings as a character in the series; all thirty episodes of the television series (1990-1991); "Diane...": The Twin Peaks Tapes of Agent Cooper (1990) audio book [unfortunately only released as an audio cassette, now quite rare; some of the material comes straight from episodes, the rest is original]; Soundtrack From Twin Peaks: Music Composed by Angelo Badalamenti (1990); The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer (1990) by Jennifer Lynch; My Life, My Tapes: The Autobiography of F.B.I. Special Agent Dale Cooper (1991) by Scott Frost; Twin Peaks: An Access Guide to the Town (1991); and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992). Furthermore, any archival collection of the series would preferably have the scripts of each episode and Fire Walk With Me; these plays, if you will, have an independent identity, however limited. Other tie-in products might have appeared as well. [Spoiler Alert] As Greil Marcus has discussed in a fine essay on Twin Peaks in the otherwise-dreadful (by far his worst writing) The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice, the film Fire Walk With Me is quite distinct from the series in its presentation of Leland Palmer's guilt in raping and murdering his daughter, as compared to the spirit Bob that possessed him. The film lacks the series's humor, almost entirely; even the early portion of the film, which features Dale Cooper, has only a few comedic aspects. So does Jennifer Lynch's novel. These two works stand apart from the rest of the project in this regard (not to mention certain, more-obvious differences between the film and the series, such as a different actress playing Donna Hayward and changes in the sets and filming locations). 7 February see worldswidweb.com 8 February see worldswideweb.com 9 February see worldswideweb.com 10 February Rare example of online journalism resulting in more than a few paragraphs, about the late Aaron Schwartz. A few observations after reading the piece in full.... Few individuals, if any, of his age have had a significant effect on politics, computing, and society generally--which is not to exaggerate his influence, but rather to note his position of a sort of programming/ activist prodigy. And, like many his age, so much of his life is easily accessible, both by his own choice (especially being a prolific writer online) and not (being a guinea pig for lawyers and politicians trying to figure out the law on complicated new matters). Do we see here a sign of what's to come? Wherein an individual, showing the arrogance, if not narcissism, typical of a generation falsely pronounced by many to be more collectivist-oriented than its predecessors, finds himself to be the victim of the privacy-deficient world created by the internet and our "war on terror." As we've learned from previous protest movements, those who assume that the United States is a just society that will treat them kindly when they challenge it often end up getting more attention when they suffer from the ensuing government and broader societal repression than most of our other victims, especially those foreign-born. The Idealist: Aaron Schwartz Wanted to Save the World. Why Couldn't He Save Himself? 11 February The Norwegian Book Club initiated one of the best "great books" projects in 2002. One-hundred writers were polled, and the results—apropos the discussion here of the differences between music-album lists and "great books" lists—are only arranged chronologically, with the caveat that Don Quixote is the best. The Wikipedia article linked-to below helpfully provides the names of the 100 scholars and writers on the same page as the list. As with the Kanigel and Farrar selections already transcribed at this site, I've replicated how the entries were originally presented; in this case the closest I can get to any original document is at the Norwegian Book Club's web site: Dette er Verdensbiblioteket. I've excluded the Norwegian-language versions of the titles found on that page, translated the nation names to English, and changed some of the Romanized titles. Also, that page excludes Anton Chekhov, whose "Stories" is included at a French-language page for the project at Le Figaro. Based on their own numbering of the items, the Chekhov entry does seem to belong, presumably only accidentally let off the Norwegian site. My own numbering is added (based, as before, on whether the entry was originally published as a book), and additional information is placed in brackets. Chinua Achebe (b. 1930) Things Fall Apart Nigeria Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) Fairy tales and stories Denmark Jane Austen (1775-1817) Pride and Prejudice [1813] England Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) Le Père Goriot France Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) Molloy , Malone Muert, L'Innommable Ireland Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) Il Decameron Italy Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) Ficciones Argentina Emily Brontë (1818-1848) Wuthering Heights England Albert Camus (1913-1960) L'Étranger France Paul Celan (1920-1970) Poems Romania, France Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961) Voyage au Bout de la Nuit France Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha Spain Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400) Canterbury Tales England Anton Chekhov Stories Russia Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) Nostromo England Dante Alighieri (1265?1321) Divina Commedia Italy Charles Dickens (1812-1870) Great Expectations England Denis Diderot (1713-1784) Jacques le Fataliste et son Maître France Alfred Döblin (1878-1957) Berlin Alexanderplatz Germany Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821 - 1881) Prestupleniye i Nakazaniyne Idiot Bésy Brat'ya Karamazovy Russia George Eliot (1819-1880) Middlemarch England Ralph Ellison (1914-1994) Invisible Man U S A Euripides (ca. 480-406 f.Kr.) Medeia Greece William Faulkner (1897-1962) Absalom, Absalom! The Sound and the Fury U S A Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) Madame Bovary L'Éducation Sentimentale France Federico GarcÌa Lorca (1898-1936) Romancero Gitano Spain Gabriel García M·rquez (b. 1928) Cien Anıs de Soledad El Amor en los Tiempos del Cólera Colombia Gilgamesh (ca. 1800 f.Kr.) Mesopotamia Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1842) Faust I & II Germany Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) Myortvyje Dushi Russia Günter Grass (b. 1927) Die Blechtrommel Germany João Guimarães Rosa Grande Sertão: Veredas Brazil Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) Sult Norway Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) The Old Man and the Sea U S A Homer (ca. 700 f.Kr.) Iliad Odyssey Greece Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) A Doll's House Norway Book of Job (ca. 400 f.Kr.) Israel James Joyce (1882-1941) Ulysses Ireland Franz Kafka (1883-1924) Die Verwandlung und Andere Erz‰hlungen Der Process Das Schloss Austria Kalidasa Abhijñanashakuntala Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972) Yama no Oto Japan Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957) Zorba the Greek Greece D H Lawrence (1885-1930) Sons and Lovers [1913] England Halldór Laxness (1902-1998) Sjálfstaett Fólk Iceland Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) Poems Italy Doris Lessing (b. 1919) The Golden Notebook England Astrid Lindgren (1907-2002) Pippi Långstrump Sweden Lu Xun (1881-1936) K'uang-jen Jih-chi China Mahabharata (ca. 500 f.Kr.) India Naguib Mahfouz (b. 1911) Awlad Haretna Egypt Thomas Mann (1875-1955) Buddenbrooks Der Zauberberg Germany Herman Melville (1819-1891) Moby-Dick U S A Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) Les Essais France Elsa Morante (1918-1985) La Storia Italy Toni Morrison (b. 1931) Beloved U S A Murasaki Shikibu (ca. 978- ca. 1014) Genji Monogatari Japan Robert Musil (1880-1942) Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften Austria Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) Lolita Russia/ U S A Njáls Saga (ca. 1300) Iceland George Orwell (1903-1950) Nineteen Eighty-Four England Ovid (43 f.Kr. - 17 e.Kr.) Metamorphoses Italy Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) Livro do Desassossego: Composto por Bernardo Soares, Ajudante de Guarda-Livros na Cidade de Lisboa Portugal Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) The Complete Tales U S A Marcel Proust (1871-1922) À la Recherche du Temps Perdu France François Rabelais (1495-1553) La Vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel France Juan Rulfo (1918-1986) Pedro P·ramo Mexico Rumi (1207-1273) Masnavi-I Ma'navi Iran Salman Rushdie (b. 1947) Midnight's Children India/ England Abu-Muhammad Muslih al-Din bin Abdallah Shirazi (ca. 1200 - 1292) Bostan Iran Tayeb Salih (b. 1929) Mawsim al-Higra ila ash-Shamal Sudan José Saramago (b. 1922) Ensaio Sobre a Cegueira Portugal William Shakespeare (1564-1616) Hamlet King Lear Othello England Sophocles (496 - 406 f.Kr.) Oidipous Tyrannos Greece Stendhal (1783-1842) Le Rouge et le Noir France Laurence Sterne (1713-1768) The Life and Opinions Tristam Shandy England Italo Svevo (1861-1928) La Coscienza di Zeno Italy Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) Gulliver's Travels Ireland Lev Tolstoj (1828-1910) Voina i Mir Anna Karenina Smert' Ivana Ilyicha Russia Kitab Alf Laylah Wa-Laylah (700?1500) India/ Iran/ Iraq/ Egypt Mark Twain (1835-1910) Adventures of Huckleberry Finn U S A Valmiki (ca. 300 f.Kr.) Rāmāyana India Virgil (70-19 f.Kr.) Aeneid Italy Walt Whitman (1819-1892) Leaves of Grass U S A Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) Mrs. Dalloway To the Lighthouse England Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987) Les MÈmoires d'Hadrien France http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokklubben_World_Library 12 February Went to see The Wedding Present tonight at the Caledonia Lounge in Athens, Georgia, performing half each of the compilation albums Hit Parade 1 and Hit Parade 2 (more on that half later). Those albums exemplify what a singles compilation should be: both the A-side and B-side tracks of a set of singles, the choice of singles to be included clearly defined conceptually or temporally. In this case, the project and the ensuing compilation albums were simple enough. One seven-inch 45 per month during 1992, each with an original song on the A side, a cover on the B side. The singles are also tracked perfectly on the two compilations. Hit Parade 1 features singles one through six, the six A-side tracks followed by the six B-side tracks; Hit Parade 2 features singles seven through twelve, the six A-side tracks followed by the six B-side tracks. If the listener has the L P version of the album he doesn't have an exact replica of the experience of listening to one single after another, but instead a slightly-different experience. This approach is superior, because it gives the buyer of the original singles the minor gift of letting him hear the tracks as they were initially released (ideally those individuals will also be rewarded by the item becoming a rare commodity). Meanwhile, the album assumes a distinct identity, however slightly, especially in this case because of the basic distinction of the A-side tracks being originals, the B-sides covers. If only most singles compilations would be so neatly put together. Granted, more buyers of the Hit Parade albums got the C D's, allowing them to program the discs to play track 1, then track 7, and so on; thus more easily replicating the experience of listening to the singles in order. Still, the albums deserve their own identity. And, despite that many artists would insist otherwise, the A side of L P's often plays the same role as the A side of single, due to the temptation, so hard to resist, of putting the best tracks first. This all brings to mind yet another database project I've wanted to do, and which I'll launch via this blog like I'm doing with the "great books" project. The "bonus" tracks nearly always featured on "deluxe," "expanded," "legacy," "anniversary," and other special editions of albums come from sources far more diverse than just the B sides of singles: unreleased live recordings, studio out-takes, radio sessions, side projects. But serious fans are rarely pleased with the selection; an obvious example to point to are the two-disc Cure reissues which, despite their length, excluded obvious choices (some of which had been released on an earlier boxed set). So, beginning with discs I personally own copies of, I will list the source of what's on those discs (not always given in the liner notes) and, more importantly, list other tracks that would have been included if the compilers were as thorough as those of the Hit Parades. 13 February The Deluxe Edition of Pulp's His 'n' Hers, a double disc with the relevant B-side tracks, and having improved sound quality over the original C D, ranks as "good enough" in my informal system of assessing reissues. The three tracks unique to an E P single entitled Sisters ('Your Sister's Clothes', 'Seconds', and 'His 'n' Hers') are included; 'Seconds' is one of the band's finest moments, distilling, via a simple play on words, one of Jarvis Cocker's major themes, that of the emotional desperation of young persons who feel their opportunities quickly fading, into a wrenching tale of a boy and girl letting a single night ruin their lives. The two B-side tracks of the single 'Do You Remember the First Time?' are included: 'Street Lites' and 'The Babysitter'. Confusion has arisen over 'You're a Nightmare', a B side of 'Lipgloss': a studio recording has never been released; the Peel-session version was used. The back cover of the Deluxe Edition, though, states that this version was "previously unavailable." These kinds of errors are not surprising given that the labels responsible for these releases often only have a nominal connection to the labels that originally released the material--few of the same personnel, changed corporate structure, and so on. Advertising for these reissues claim Cocker was involved; unfortunately those at Island Records, or Universal Music, might as well have been computers. The other 'Lipgloss' B side, 'Deep Fried in Kelvin', is included. Four new tracks, in demo form, leave me wondering if demo versions of the songs that made the album's final cut are still awaiting release. More annoying, the inclusion of 'You're a Nightmare', though appropriate because it was a B side for a single from the album, is also redundant since the same year this deluxe edition was released, 2006, saw the release of a double disc of all of Pulp's Peel sessions. More annoying still, why didn't that compilation include other B B C sessions, like the Mark Goodier that gives us one track on the Deluxe Edition ('Live On') and the Hit the North that gives us a version of 'Space'? The inclusion of that track doesn't quite work either, because Space, originally released on the Gift label, was thus included on the Intro: The Gift Recordings album. Of course, the album track included on Sisters ('Babies'--the title Sisters refers to that song's lyric) was originally released on Gift--but was remixed to make the slightly-different version found on His 'n' Hers and Sisters; and generally speaking we're not talking about two distinct periods. Indeed, this alternate version of Space would work better on a rarities compilation covering the years 1992-1996. Also, it was recorded during a soundcheck for the Mark Radcliffe program Hit the North. So what about the program itself? Unfortunately information about music programs on the B B C not hosted by John Peel is hard to come by. 14 February Inconstant Sol, a great "sharity" blog focusing more on previously-unreleased live recordings than the average "sharity" blog run by thieves congratulating themselves as if they created the music they're giving away--mostly in the Jazz/ Improvised realm, broadly defined. 15 February J Peder Zane's The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books [2007] compiles lists from 125 writers naming "the ten greatest works of fiction of all time." The cumulative top ten that emerged from the project, presented at the beginning of the book, does not reveal any surprises. It suggests that many of these lists were uninspired; some of the contributors definitely saw this project as an opportunity to promote obscure works, many of them did not, producing lists no more idiosyncratic than most of the "great books" lists created by critics and scholars. One needs to browse through the individual authors' entries to find new books to read. Given that the top ten does not include any poetry or non-fiction, I've drawn out a longer list from this book. Zane provides a master list with all 544 works found in the 125 individual lists, and places them in order of the number of points they received (a first-place ranking from one of the 125 gets the work 10 points, a second-place ranking nine points, and so on). I've included all the works that received at least 10 points; therefore, all works that an author listed no. 1 are included. Thankfully, at least a few contributors ignored the "fiction" requirement, so we at least have one quasi-historical work, the Bible, plus a little poetry. I could include all 544 titles--nothing in this project's guidelines demands otherwise; I might do so eventually. For now, you'll have to read the book to see the works that received less than 10 points, or to see which authors listed each of these works. (Again, I'm only numbering works that were originally monographs; granted, a short story could be published on its own, or an anthology of short stories could consist entirely or mostly of previously-unpublished works, but if an entry does not specify which stories, such as those found here, it stays as is). You can also learn more about the book from the Time article linked-to at the end of the post. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1877) Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1857) War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (1869) Lolita by Vladimir Nabakov (1955) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884) Hamlet by William Shakespeare (1600) The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925) In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (1913-27) The stories of Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-72) Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (1605, 1615) Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851) Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (1860-61) Ulysses by James Joyce (1922) The Odyssey by Homer (ninth century B C E?) Dubliners by James Joyce (1916) Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866) King Lear by William Shakespeare (1605) Emma by Jane Austen (1816) One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (1967) The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1929) To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927) The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1880) The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (1321) The stories of Flannery O'Connor (1925-64) Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne (1759-67) Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813) Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847) The Bible Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov (1962) Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner (1936) The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (1881) To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960) The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (1380s?) Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899) Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925) Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952) Bleak House by Charles Dickens (1853) The Trial by Franz Kafka (1925) Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987) Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (1847) The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942) The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939) All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946) The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915) The Catcher in the Rye by J D Salinger (1951) Persuasion by Jane Austen (1817) Macbeth by William Shakespeare (1606) The Oresteia by Aeschylus (458 B C E) The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850) Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865) The Red and the Black by Stendhal (1830) Rabbit Angstrom--Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), Rabbit at Rest (1990)--by John Updike The stories of Isaac Babel (1894-1940) Tender Is the Night by F Scott Fitzgerald (1934) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (1916) Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1962) Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969) The stories of John Cheever (1912-82) Paradise Lost by John Milton (1667) The Aeneid by Virgil (19 B C E) Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy (1985) Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (1855-91) Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol (1842) The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (1924) The stories of Eudora Welty (1909-2001) The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1966) Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens (1864-65) As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (1930) The Hamlet by William Faulkner (1940) The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926) The Iliad by Homer (ninth century B C E?) The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (1351-53) The Possessed by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1872) The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead (1940) The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal (1839) The stories of Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) Independent People by Halldór Laxness The Arabian Nights: Tales From a Thousand and One Nights (c. 1450) Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1864) Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (1937) The Stand by Stephen King (1978) The Tempest by William Shakespeare (1610) Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson (1919) Don Juan by Lord Byron (1819) Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (1719) Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (1749) A Passage to India by E M Forster (1924) Clarissa by Samuel Richardson (1747-48) Candide by Voltaire (1759) Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges (1964) The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler (1953) Mrs. Bridge (1959) and Mr. Bridge (1969) by Evan S Connell Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (1891) The stories of Franz Kafka (1883-1924) 1984 by George Orwell (1948) Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726, 1735) The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West (1956) A Death in the Family by James Agee (1957) Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino (1972) The poems of Emily Dickinson (1830-86) Howards End by E M Forster (1921) The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene (1940) The stories of Alice Munro (1931- ) A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell (1951-75) The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark (1961) Stones for Ibarra by Harriet Doerr (1984) The Tin Drum by Günter Grass (1959) Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare (1595) David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1849-50) Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900) The Bear by William Faulkner (1942) For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (1940) Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson (1992) The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1958) Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter (1962) The Oedipus trilogy by Sophocles (496-406 B C E) East of Eden by John Steinbeck (1952) The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886) Daniel Deronda by George Eliot (1874-76) Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez (1985) The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard (1980) So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell (1979) Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977) Germinal by …mile Zola (1884) Ask the Dust by John Fante (1939) Parade's End by Ford Madox Ford (1928) The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (1989) The Ambassadors by Henry James (1903) Nine Stories by J D Salinger (1953) Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray (1847-48) Native Son by Richard Wright Bhagavadgita (fifth century B C E) The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe (1962) Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1958) The Untouchable by John Banville (1997) Ill Seen, Ill Said by Samuel Beckett (1981) The Book of Leviathan by Peter Blegvad (2001) The Outward Room by Millen Brand (1937) Casa Guidi Windows by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1851) Answered Prayers by Truman Capote (1987) The Golden Argosy edited by Van H Cartmell and Charles Grayson The Professor's House by Willa Cather (1925) The Awakening by Kate Chopin (1899) Disgrace by J M Coetzee (1999) Waiting for the Barbarians by J M Coetzee (1980) Geek Love by Katherine Dunn (1989) Love Medicine by Louise Eldrich (1984) J R by William Gaddis (1975) I, Claudius by Robert Graves (1934) The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904) The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T E Lawrence (1925) The Screwtape Letters by C S Lewis (1942) Embers by Sándor Márai (1942) The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade by Herman Melville (1857) The Birthday Party (1958) and The Homecoming (1965) by Harold Pinter The Time of the Doves by Mercè Rodoreda (1962) Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare (1606) The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki (1943-48) L'Assommoir (The Dram Shap) by Emile Zola (1877) Nana by Emile Zola (1880) The 10 Greatest Books of All Time 16 February A couple other sites have collected "great books" lists. The Greatest Books splits the aggregated list into fiction and non-fiction. More unfortunate still, it does not confine itself to lists of books from all human history. The creator of the site uses an algorithm, without telling us any details about it, to determine a ranking of the books, claiming to weigh all-time lists more than lists of books from the twentieth century or other periods. But he's missing many of the all-time lists, and moreover includes winners of several of the major literary awards: the National Book Award, the Costa Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/ Faulkner Award, the Man Booker Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. These winners could be said to constitute an informal list of the best books of the period from which they were first awarded. But obviously those giving the awards were only voting for works published in a given year. We cannot conceivably say that one year's winner has been ranked higher than another year's. But if you go to the lists for each award, you'll see that those prize winners that are not on any of the other lists aggregated at the site nonetheless are ranked. That is, two books that are only included in The Greatest Books list because they each one an award (say, the Man Booker Prize) are ranked. So how does this site's author decide which winner of the Man Booker Prize gets a higher position? Alphabetically, by the title of the book! The author of the site also notes that for "the lists that are actually ranked, the book that is 1st counts a lot more than the book that's 100th." Without knowing what exactly he's doing mathematically, we can only surmise that this approach gives undue weight to the books ranked highly in the few lists (very few lists) that rank the entries. Now we've reached the point where the desire to rank the books, especially a large number of books, gets ridiculous; and why I prefer to avoid mathematical stunts. Another site, A List of Books, features only two all-time lists, the Guardian's Books You Can't Live Without [2007] and Newsweek's Top 100 Books, the latter being what its creators call a meta-list that aggregates several others. An article about that list is available at the Newsweek site (Building a Better List), but not the list itself; a subsequent search through some academic databases still has me stumped as to when and where that list was published. The author of A List of Books does not explain how he has aggregated the lists to get the number of points awarded each book. 17 February The company Cyn Industries has made high-quality scans of 12 of the 14 issues of Synapse magazine. This periodical featured Robert Moog and Brian Eno among others on its covers, album and book reviews, and information about electronic instruments via articles such as 'How Computers Store Numbers' and 'Expanding Realtime Capability'. I wish there was a higher demand for old issues of periodicals, so I could read digital copies of the Berkeley Barb, the Co-Evolution Quarterly, or Op (the music magazine that would morph into Option). Let's welcome the future's past. 18 February The deluxe edition of Pulp's Different Class, though again necessary in order to hear the album at its best-available sound quality (especially important compared to His 'n' Hers because Different Class features denser instrumentation and production), is worse in its selection of bonus tracks. Although two of the three original tracks released as B sides are included ('P T A (Parent Teacher Association)' and 'Mile End'--the latter of course would also appear on the Trainspotting soundtrack), a demo version of the third, 'Ansaphone', is included instead of its original released version (as well as a few other demos of songs that, as with the demos included on the deluxe edition of His 'n' Hers, didn't make the final album). At first listen, the demo version seems like it could be the same backing track as that used for the final version; but slight differences suggest a different recording. Only the 'Vocoda Mix' and the live (Glastonbury 1995) version of 'Common People' are included, excluding the 7-inch edit and the 'Motiv 8 Club Mix'. The 7-inch edit, as well as the the 'Motiv 8 Discoid Mix and the 'Motiv 8 Gimp Dub' versions, of 'Disco 2000' are excluded, as is the Extended Version of 'Live Bed Show' (all from the 'Disco 2000' singles). Finally, a live version and the 'Moloko Mix' of F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E. (both from the 'Something Changed' singles) are not to be found either. Though the relevant Peel-session tracks are left to the aforementioned double disc, we still are left wondering about other B B C recordings; and, as before, about more demo versions. 19 February see worldswideweb.com 20 February see worldswideweb.com 21 see worldswideweb.com 22 February For a few excellent (personal) lists, check these out at the site Listology by an individual--alias AfterHours. The funny thing about obsessive listmaking is that it turns organized people into the messiest of all. http://www.listology.com/user/102334/content http://www.listology.com/list/greatest-albums-all-time-reviewed 23 February see worldswideweb.com 24 February Rate Your Music provides an all-time albums list aggregating only users' rankings (on a numerical scale up to five), unlike the combination of critics' and users' lists at Album of the Year and Best Ever Albums. Users can also write reviews. Whereas Best Ever Albums wants users to submit lists, Album of the Year allows users to rate an album but just doesn't seem very popular, Rate Your Music both gets a lot of traffic and allows users to rate an album. http://rateyourmusic.com/customchart 25 February Another list to consider in making a cumulative best-albums list is that of the entries in the 33 1/3 series. In a different time and place, these kinds of histories would have been serialized in music publications. They are rarely more than longer versions of the kind of retrospective articles found in Mojo or Uncut. The decision to name the books after the albums themselves, when combined with the uniformity of the books' design, has been quite effective in promoting the series. It would also suggest a compelling boldness, as if the books and their subjects were equals--that is if more of them ranked as serious literature. But they don't: the latest, Jonathan Lethem's Fear of Music, is an exception, as are Drew Daniels's 20 Jazz Funk Greats, Erik Davis's Led Zeppelin IV, and Miles Marshall Lewis's There's a Riot Goin' On. Many of the musicians who have written books in the series are not especially innovative, their decision to approach their predecessors as critics and historians being a sort of resignation to mediocrity; Daniels, of the electronic-music group Matmos, again is an exception. We have a list of more than 150 albums so far; this series would at least add another fifty. However, it is growing; the Wikipedia article linked-to below lists future titles. It's also not in any way meant to be a list of the best albums of any era or genre of music. Still, if we're interested in compiling critics' list and best-seller charts for the sake of constructing a sort of canon of Rock, or at least a list of basic titles for use by retailers, librarians, etc., these books can't be ignored. Instead of merely adding the albums that have been the subject of a book in this series to the list of "all-time" albums, I'd prefer to find out which albums have been the subject of other books, or if certain books about a particular scene or artist use an album as a case study. Such a project would be a massive undertaking. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33%E2%85%93 26 February The David Foster Wallace syllabus linked-to below, though obviously not an addition to the "great books" canon, reminds me of a few informal lists of great books that I'm not including in my project: those read by students across the four years of their undergraduate education at St. John's College (and its famed "great books program"); and a few lists from Columbia University courses as documented in David Denby's book Great Books. Links to transcriptions of Denby's lists are available at Teeter's Great Books Lists. St. John's Academic Programs page provides information about their methods and links to the current reading lists. These lists are excluded not so much because of the context of their creation, but because in principle they change annually, or every semester or quarter. In fact, extensive primary research would be necessary to discover the extent to which they have changed; even then, their inclusion with other "great books" lists would be a difficult to justify. First, we would have to ask what similar courses--that is, covering the entirety of mankind's known literary history--have been taught at other universities. Second, only a few of the "great books" lists have come in multiple editions, and even then rarely more than two. Unlike with music-album lists, where every list a publication makes is included, despite two or more of them being very similar (such as the 2012 and 2003 Rolling Stone lists), I'm only including the final editions of "great books" lists. Again, the general differences between these lists are important. Roughly half of the "great books" lists I'll be compiling, and especially the largest ones (and the largest by far, Harold Bloom's) are the work of a single individual or two individuals. Many of those composed by a group of people (at least implicitly so, as in some cases we do not know exactly who made the choices) have been published recently, since 2007, as an inordinate number of lists have come about in these years. Thus, with most of the lists for which multiple versions exist, a single author or two has revised his own work, in some cases a large book itself of literary value. As with the work of artists, the final version of a work is considered primary, no matter how much interest we might have in earlier versions. Many of the syllabi for "great books" courses undoubtedly are the work of an individual, but the limitations imposed by the context in which those lists were created detract from their value (these limitations include the brevity of particular courses, or the four-year schedule of undergraduate education, thus making the lists shorter and less likely to include unique entries; and the difficulty of deciding which version to use--the last in these cases is not necessarily the final, or preferred, version). David Foster Wallace's 1994 Syllabus: How to Teach Serious Literature With Lightweight Books 27 February see worldswideweb.com 28 February Another site warranting mention in any discussion of music lists is a true curio, Digital Dream Door. Its name, 1990's-style design, and neglected features need not distract us too much from its music lists. We know nothing about how they were compiled other than vague, grammatically-challenged notes like the following at the list of the 100 Greatest Rock Albums (actually 200): "These Albums were chosen for their Popularity, Influence, and Musical Impact." So, I suppose these guys are trying to give Barack "Espionage Act" Obama a run for his money at being transparent. However, looking at the list closely, especially as one gets down near 200, you can tell they're doing some research of sales charts and critics' lists. You'll also want to peruse the rest of their Music Lists.