BillF

Fully agree - passionate, exciting player. It's Roy in the 50s that I particularly like - the stuff with Krupa is a bit early for my taste and as we head into the 70s Roy is past his best. You mention Mingus and Dolphy - Roy is fantastic on the Newport Rebels session. Again, there's Herb Ellis's Only the Blues and Roy and Diz is another that comes to mind, as well as Hodges-led sessions like Kinda Dukish. Then there's his influence - Howard McGhee takes Roy and makes it a bop style. I even hear a hint of Roy in Kenny Dorham's "wheeze".

I feel I approached her with an open mind and seriously disliked the two books I read. I'll probably still give Middlemarch a shot. Middlemarch" is superb, and I expect that "Daniel Deronda" is in the same class. Other George Eliot novels I've tried (e.g. "Romola") were absorbing up to a point but eventually off-putting in their stern and IMO somewhat external, finger-wagging moralism. My favorite 19th Century English novelist is Trollope, though I came to him fairly late in life and almost certainly would have had no taste for him before that. Well, she was a Victorian, for better and worse, and "high seriousness" was part of her cultural milieu, but I love the scope of her intellect and her generosity of spirit. I had my Trollope period and still enjoy dipping into his work occasionally, but mostly the Palliser novels. A lot of the rest of it was the product of a pen that wrote too much too fast, and who seemed to want to bank his intellect and his sympathy against the peril of going too deep. He's never really bad, but he's never really great. But I do enjoy him nervertheless. Just finished: THE UNICORN - Iris Murdoch -1963 One of Iris' stranger novels, although it has many of the usual Murdochian elements. Marion (Maid Marion as one character calls her significantly ) responds to an advertisement to serve as a tutor or lady's companion to Hannah (a Murdoch grace name, same forwards or backwards). Hannah is either a prisoner in remote Gaze Castle, held there against her will by her absent husband's unscrupulous retainers, or La Belle Dame Sans Merci, a potent force who keeps the other occupants of Gaze in her thrall. The novel shifts between these two perspectives until the final drastic resolution. I think this is less a novel than an intricate, often murky, but nevertheless deep allegory of the spiritual life, where the forces of Good and Evil struggle in the depths of the spiritual life. The occupants of Gaze Castle are caught outside the everyday life, in some mad or magnificent effort to come to terms with the Good or Sublime, or the Bad and Profane. Or something like that.... The novel is also highly sexualized (has there been a more sexual writer than Murdoch since D.H. Lawrence?) and at times I felt it was Murdoch's attempt to create a framework for her own sexual proclivities and perspectives. To put it another way, Hannah and Marian struggle to find a way to explore their sexual desires in a world that wants to keep them contained (look, or Gaze, but don't touch). Read this last year. What has stuck in my mind is the western Irish landscape of cliffs and bog. After reading your comment, I don't think I'm on Murdoch's wavelength where character and plot are concerned.

Lord Copper Elsie Tanner Hans Schilling

Ecaroh Alocis Pepraluger Red Niwedis

Looks like serious literature. Does it come with a pack of razor blades? I really enjoyed that one. Lots of Spark's sly humor, some good social satire, and enough weirdness to keep it interesting. No razor blades. (Just some razor-carrying Teddy Boys.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teddy_Boys

Penn and Teller His Nibs The Ink Spots

Pal Joey Roo Albert Roux

Reminds me of something ...

Winalot Munch Grant Shapes Pedigree Chum

Ford Maddox Brown Brown Windsor Barbara Castle

Nat Peck Peck Morrison Morrisey

Big Brother The Enemy of the People The Dear Leader

Murder Inc Lemmy Kilmister Cliff Slaughter

Nice used copy for £3.19!

Pixie Lott Lott's Wife Art Salt

Here are three tracks to be going on with! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1lpVguArUQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9ILMmDB0kI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=059cD0TqT7E

QUOTE OF THE YEAR!

Re Moby Dick, I never understood why Woody Herman called a tune "Captain Ahab", until I came across Maynard Ferguson's "The Wailing Boat".

I don't know about Middlemarch, but I will give it a shot. I've read Moby Dick and wouldn't say I was blown away by it (I found the "Extracts" section with all the quotes about whales to be kind of deadly), but after it settles in, there are a lot of interesting parts. I might give it a another go, though I would be a lot more likely if either of my kids has to read it in high school. I would recommend Melville's The Confidence Man as a real under-rated delight. It's probably my favorite Melville. Anyway, yes I think Man in the High Castle is great and do plan on re-reading that within the next 12 months. I haven't come across The Confidence Man, but the haunting Melville short story "Bartleby", read on my course, has never left me.

By the way, Bev, you'll notice that British university English departments in my day were quite happy to include American literature in their syllabuses. As well as Melville and James already mentioned, I had the privilege of studying Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Whitman and Twain. What is more, on the grounds that English drama and novels could not be properly understood without studying their European forebears, I was also required to read Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Plautus, Cervantes, Laclos, Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov. Chacun à son Gove.

Both of those Dicks get my vote!

Chacun à son goût.

Best of luck with Middlemarch. That, and Walter Scott's The Heart of Midlothian, were the only books that defeated me in my three-year degree course in English Literature in my youth. I had no trouble with other alleged stinkers such as Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Henry James's The Ambassadors and Melville's Moby Dick - in fact, I positively relished them!