News from the San Diego Becks

my Rushdie collection

“I was born in the city of Bombay . . . once upon a time.”

Midnight’s Children (p. 3)

I had never heard of Salman Rushdie before February of 1989.  I heard of him for the first time when many people heard of him for the first time: the announcement of the fatwa upon him over the publication of The Satanic Verses.  I, like so many other people, was appalled.  It drove me and my two best friends to walk into the B. Dalton at the Mall of Orange to see if they were carrying the book that weekend.  They were, but it didn’t look as if anyone was interested in buying it. (more…)

Salman Rushdie's brilliant The Moor's Last Sigh (1995)

The Moor’s Last Sigh

• Author:  Salman Rushdie  (b. 1947)
• Rank:  #66
• Published:  1995
• Publisher:  Jonathan Cape (U.K.), Pantheon (U.S.)
• Pages:  435
• First Line:  “I have lost count of the days that have passed since I fled the horrors of Vasco Miranda’s mad fortress in the Andalusian mountain-village of Benengeli; ran from death under cover of darkness and left a message nailed to the door.”
• Last Line:  “I’ll drink some wine; and then, like a latter-day Van Winkle, I’ll lay me down upon this graven stone, lay my head beneath these letters R I P, and close my eyes, according to our family’s old practice of falling asleep in times of trouble, and hope to awaken, renewed and joyful, into a better time.“
• ML Edition:  none
• Acclaim:  Whitbread Prize; Time Magazine’s Book of the Year; shortlisted for Booker Prize
• Film:  none
• First Read:  Summer, 2001 (more…)

Hi, I'm James Joyce, possibly the greatest writer who ever lived and I never won the Nobel Prize.

Sometime in early October, the Swedish Academy will present this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature.  By now, they should have already reduced their list of candidates for this year down to five.  But, nonetheless, I will throw up this list now in the hopes of getting their attention (yeah, right).

I had intended to combine this list with a retrospective on the complete works of Philip Roth, but I was also planning on tying that in to one of his novels in my top 100 and that’ll be a while, so I’m tying it in with a Rushdie novel.

It seems that at times the Nobel Prize Committee could use a list.  To be fair, the Nobel Prize has gone to many worthy recipients, including Knut Hamsun, William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Eugene O’Neill, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camus, Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Toni Morrison.  And, because, with rare exceptions, the award doesn’t mention a particular work, it is hard to criticize the exclusion of any particular author in any particular year. (more…)

Rex Harrison, Audrey Hepburn and Wilfrid Hyde-White dressed to the nines in My Fair Lady (1964)

The 37th annual Academy Awards, for the film year 1964.  The nominations were announced on February 23, 1965 and the awards were held on April 5, 1965.

Best Picture:  My Fair Lady

• Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
• Mary Poppins
• Becket
• Zorba the Greek

Most Surprising Omission:  Night of the Iguana

Best Eligible Film Not Nominated:  A Hard Day’s Night

Rank (out of 82) Among Best Picture Years:  #43 (more…)

"But Mr. President, he'll see everything! He'll see the Big Board!"

My Top 20:

1. Dr. Strangelove
2. Mary Poppins
3. A Hard Day’s Night
4. Harakiri
5. My Fair Lady
6. Night of the Iguana
7. The Americanization of Emily
8. Goldfinger
9. The Best Man
10. From Russia with Love
11. The Chalk Garden
12. The Pumpkin Eater
13. The Crime of Monsieur Lange
14. A Shot in the Dark
15. Seven Days in May
16. Fail-Safe
17. The Guns at Batasi
18. That Man from Rio
19. The Pink Panther
20. Diary of a Chambermaid (more…)