A Personal Anthology

FICTION

"I wanted as little as possible to do in this world with those who wield power."
-- John Berger: And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

Julian Barnes: Flaubert's Parrot, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters
John Berger: And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions
Gesualdo Bufalino: The Keeper of Ruins and Other Inventions
Anthony Burgess: Earthly Powers
Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities, Mr. Palomar, Cosmicomics
Albert Camus: The Stranger
Truman Capote: A Tree of Night and other stories
John Cheever: Collected Stories
Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, Notes from Underground, The Idiot
Lawrence Durrell: The Alexandria Quartet
Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose
William Faulkner: Light in August, The Sound and the Fury
Gustav Flaubert: Madame Bovary
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude, Innocent Erendira
Gunter Grass: The Tin Drum
Graham Greene: The Heart of the Matter, The Comedians
Peter Handke: The Anxiety of the Goalie at the Penalty Kick
Michel Houellebecq: The Elementary Particles
James Joyce: Dubliners, Ulysses
Franz Kafka: Complete Stories
Laszlo Krasznahorkai: The Melancholy of Resistance
Jerzy Kosinski: The Painted Bird
Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Primo Levi: The Periodic Table
Thomas Mann: Magic Mountain
Javier Marias: A Heart So White
Carson McCullers: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Yukio Mishima: The Sea of Fertility
Vladimir Nabokov: Collected Stories
Dazai Osamu: No Longer Human, The Setting Sun
Fernando Pessoa: The Book of Disquiet
Marcel Proust: In Search of Lost Time
Jose Rizal: Noli Me Tangere

J.D. Salinger: Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters
Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina
Michel Tournier: The Meteors (Gemini)
Kurt Vonnegut: Breakfast of Champions
Marguerite Yourcenar: Hadrian's Memoirs

+ Tomasso Landolfi; Milorad Pavic; Bohumil Hrabal; Danilo Kis; Mikhail Bulghakov; Paul Auster. Books I haven't finished reading: Dictionary of the Khazars; Terra Nostra; The Death of Virgil; etc.

Carl Theodor Dreyer
Federico Fellini
Jean Luc Goddard
Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu
Michael Haneke
Mikhail Kalatozov
Abbas Kiarostami
Hirokazu Kore-Eda
Akira Kurosawa
Karoly Makk
Ermanno Olmi
Sergei Paradjanov
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Alain Resnais
Roberto Rossellini
Vittorio de Sica
Martin Scorsese
Aleksandr Sokurov
Eliseo Subiela
Andrey Tarkovsky
Bela Tarr
Francois Truffaut
Lars Von Trier
Luchino Visconti
Wong Kar Wai

Also: Per Fly's The Inheritance; Catherine Breillat's Fat Girl; Denys Arcand's Jesus of Montreal; Claire Denis' Beau Travail; Andrei Zvyagintsev's The Return; Carlos Reygada's Japon; Gus van Sant; Battle of Algiers; Jun Ichikawa's Tony Takitani; Vigo; Bunuel; Ozu; Dovchencko; etc. etc. etc. (list is endless...)

+ | + | +

MUSIC

"Imagine the strength this extraordinary, unique being must have needed to take his place amongst people, to defend the place for which he was destined by God and Providence. What hard, cramped lives people live! How cruel and merciless people can be... The more remarkable and outstanding a person is, the more difficult and contradictory their relationship with life -- this life on earth. These beings stand little chance of being reconciled to life. Little chance." -- Aleksandr Sokurov on Mozart and Beethoven: Spiritual Voices

Air
Toshiko Akiyoshi
Alarm Will Sound
Antony and the Johnsons
Aphex Twin
Archive (check out "Londinium")
Bach
Beck
Beethoven: Quartets, Symphonies 7 and 9
Eve Beglarian
Bjork
Brahms
Vinicio Caposella
Manu Chao
Jeff Buckley
Chopin
Citizen Cope
Miles Davis
Debussy
Faure
Beth Gibbons
Gotan Project
Leos Janacek
Keith Jarrett
Joy Division
M
Mendelson (check out "Quelque Part," www.lithiumrecords.com)
Charles Mingus
Joni Mitchell
Monteverdi: Vespers of 1610
Morrissey
Van Morrison
Mozart: the Piano Concertos, the Orchestral Symphonies
Noir Desir
Francisco Núñez
Arvo Part
Astor Piazzolla
Pink Floyd
Rachmaninoff
Radiohead
Terry Riley
Rodrigo: esp. Aranjuez
Sigur Ros
The Smiths
Tchaikovsky
Tindersticks
U2
Vaughan Williams
Verdi: Messa da Requiem
Villa-Lobos: Bachianas Braziliera
Paul Weller: The Style Council: The Jam
Yonderboi
Thom Yorke

POETRY

I saw the scattered elements unite,
bound all with love into one book of praise,
in the deep ocean of the infinite;

Substance and accident and all their ways
as if breathed into one, and, understand,
my words were a weak glimmer in the haze.

The universal Being of this band
I think I saw--because when that is said,
I feel the bliss within my heart expand.

One instant sees more of my memories fade
than two millennia fade the bravery
that made the sea god gape at Argo's shade.

And so my mind, suspended utterly,
held its gaze still immobile and intent,
and ever kindled was my wish to see.

Before that Light one's will to turn is spent;
one is so changed, it is impossible
to shift the glance, for one would not consent,

Because all good--the object of the will--
is summed in it, for it alone is best:
beyond, defective; there, whole, perfect, still.

Dante Alighieri, Paradiso 33/ 85-105, translation Anthony Esolen