What are you reading now?

[Ando]

I recall thumbing through Sidney Lumet's "Making Movies" in a bookstore. I finally picked it up this morning. It's reportedly one of the better director-penned books. Has anyone here read it?

[David]

I have not read the Lumet book.  Should be interesting though.  I've been reading Larry McMurtry's book called Books, A Memoir.  It's more about his obsession on collecting books, than movies, but he mentions movies a bit here and there and Hollywood too as he used to live in the area when they had optioned his books to make into a movie:   Hud, The Last Picture Show, Lonesome Dove, etc.   Since I have a collector mentality, and like to collect books as well, I find it interesting.

[Ando]

I downloaded the McMurtry book soon as I read your post. It's actually turning out to be more interesting than the Lumet book, which is not at all what I expected. I suppose that after making my way through Tarkovsky's "Sculpting in Time" the Lumet book should not have been the next choice but there it is. It's (the Lumet book) a bit flat on inspiration but interesting in an anectodal way - especially with regard to the professional craft of filmmaking. So I'm mushing on. I'll probably finish the McMurtry first.

[David]

Ando, glad you are enjoying Books by McMurtry.  He has another one called Roads, which I've not read, but sounds interesting.  You might also enjoy the book by Peter Bagdanovich called Who The Hell's In it.  It's conversations with some of Hollywood's famous actors.

[Ando]

Bogdonovich's series of interviews with Alfred Hitcock are fascinating - sometimes more than the films discussed.

[David]

I like Hitchcock, so that would be something I'd be interested in, thanks.

[Ando]

"You always know after you're two. Two is the beginning of the end." So wrote JM Barrie at the end of the first paragraph of PETER AND WENDY (1911) or PETER PAN, the original text on which the Disney film and HOOK, among other adaptations were made. I've never read it, actually - only some bastardized version during childhood (a Disney tie-in orGolden Book, no doubt). At any rate, a co-worker invited me to join him in a revisit of this classic, and I must say, it's far more inventively creative and bizarre than the silly cartoon would have you believe.

[Nerves]

Glad to see you survived Sandy and even have power! For the past few years I've been making my way through Encyclopedia Britannica's Great Books of the Western World which begins with Homer and ends with Freud. I skimmed the two volumes of Aristotle and skipped the ancient math texts. I started reading Virgil but lost interest. Also skipped Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler, Augustine, Thomas Aquinus, and Dante. Currently I'm halfway through Montaigne's essays having just finished the book length Apology For Raimond De Sebonde, the gist of which is summed up by the line from Hamlet: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."  Speaking of Shakespeare, his entire oeuvre comprises the next two volumes in the set.

[Ando]

Thanks. Sandy didn't effect much of Washingting Heights (where I live) but I had a few friends who live in the village (which had no power for days) stay with me. My New Jersey relatives suffered some property damage but nothing devastating, thank goodness.

Encyclopedia Britannica, eh? Sounds intriguing from several angles. What's the copyright date on it? Stopping at Freud seems a bit abortive. I mean, between the two of us, we could spin off - at least - four or five "great Western classics" since then, right? Or are of they of that school which believes a hundred years must pass before a book can qualify for the list?

[Nerves]

I have the 1952 edition. The 1990 edition includes more recent literature: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World

[Sevorin]

I used to sell these motherfuckers. There was a prepared pitch that was to be used to sucker unsuspecting marks into buying this shit.

I call it "shit" because their format is particularly obnoxious to those who actually like to read. I can't stand double-column texts myself -- many of the volumes are tedious and uncomfortable to wade through. Plutarch, for example, was a drag. (In fact, I read it alongside the North translation in a much more enjoyable print layout.) Gibbon, Shakespeare, etc. are scrunched into too few volumes.

What keenly annoyed me was the Adler-Hutchinson pomposity -- the educational elitism that first decides what are the great books, then decides what are the key ideas contained in those books, indexing and -- for lack of a better word -- "concordat-ing" them into an additional volume dubbed, with intellectual relish, The Syntopicon, perhaps the most useless and least used device in the history of education.

The first set didn't include de Tocqville -- and I'm not even sure that Freud made the list -- and the absence of Guicciardini is a decided blow.

In short, there's value in reading the authors highlighted in The Great Books series, but you bettah awff reading them in more accessible publications.

[Nerves]

Yeah, well I happened to have them in my possession - part of my dad's library. I didn't waste any time on the introductory Great Ideas volumes. I rather enjoyed Plutarch though and Herodotus and Thucycdides as well.

[Sevorin]

-- and the translations are old. One would think that for the dough they charged for a set of those books they could pay for new ones.

I can't remember, but isn't the Herodotus translated by Rawlinson and Thucydides by Crawley (or Jowett)? You can get a better -- and far more readable -- Herodotus from Penguin, translated beautifully by de Selincourt.

And if you're hysterical to reprint a centuries old version of Thucydides, the Hobbes translation is the best I've ever read -- though I admit it's not the easiest to read. The University of Chicago press already publishes it in a paperback edition. And that's the same school where Adler and Hutchinson made their home.

I guess my biggest gripe is that their whole format seems designed less to disseminate great books and ideas than to seal them reverently under glass.