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Tolstoy's The Cossacks. I'm generally not enjoying Tolstoy's shorter novels/novellas. I find this one very boring and will start skimming it pretty soon. I remembered at the last minute that I had planned to read Zelazny's A Night in the Lonesome October (his last proper novel) in October. So I started on the 30th and finished up a bit after midnight. It has been reissued by Chicago Review Press: http://www.amazon.com/Night-Lonesome-October-Rediscovered-Classics/dp/1556525605/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1414770472&sr=1-1&keywords=zelazny+October This edition has illustrations by Gahan Wilson. It's certainly not a major novel, but almost a kind of fan fiction where he combined the Lovecraft universe with Dr. Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes. Oh and Dracula. The whole novel is told by the familiars, i.e. animal companions, of the humans who are playing a Game to determine whether the Elder Gods are released or not. I think if you like whimsy, it is worth reading. If you want a more serious fantasy novel, it is one to avoid. On the whole I enjoyed it.

Raining and getting colder. It might even snow a bit over night! Looks like a disappointing night for the kids, but we'll go out for a little while anyway.

I would question the need for a baseball player unless this is a US list only. I'm not sure it has the global reach and recognition beyond the playing countries. That's why I suggested Ali as he was recognised probably anywhere that mass media reached at the time - I'm not too sure many other sports people have had that reach since. Michael Jordan. Quite possibly even more recognized worldwide than Ali, even at the height of his fame, I think the list really has to be broken into 1900-1950 and 1950-2000. For someone in my generation, you might arguably still count Sinatra but not remotely Bing Crosby. He's just not even on the radar. Conversely for an older generation you might possibly concede Michael Jackson was huge but not even know who Madonna was (back to the original list).

Congratulations. I am not familiar with the book Chuck was referring to, but there are a handful of novels about real-life individuals where it is clear it is a work of fiction, i.e. somewhat metafiction. I've just started Leonid Tsypkin's Summer in Baden Baden which is a recreation of Dostoevsky's time in Germany (still in the thrall of his gambling addiction) and his last days, combined with Tsypkin's own visit to the Dostoevsky Museum. I'm sure it's not exactly the effect you were going for, but there might be parallels. Hopefully, someday I will be able to read both and compare the two.

I like it, but I haven't listened to it in a while. It is included on Mosaic's set: The Complete Mercury Art Farmer/Benny Golson/Jazztet Sessions.

This thread is like a rash. I know I shouldn't keep peeking in, but I can't seem to help myself. I guess that is the way with most things on the internet.

Larry: I seem to change ISPs every 2 or 3 years, which does help to keep a lot of unwanted spam away, though probably I've lost contact with some former email buddies. At any rate, I've had very good success with MailStore Home (which is freeware). It doesn't take too long to sync up with your existing accounts and download all your mail. I don't know about then relinking to a new account, but at least you would have the old email in a searchable archive. (I wish I had this for the two moves previous to my last move...) I guess I should say I don't know for sure it would work with AOL, but probably. They've probably had other people want to transfer their email over. Eric

Sounds fairly interesting, though I can guarantee I don't have time to read 44 novels! Maybe I'd have time for the best 5 or 6 read in conjunction with Barbara Pym, who mines a very similar vein. Holiday seems to be accepted as his best, so choose this one. The Barbara Pym connection didn't occur to me, but yes I see it, though my wife says she dislikes Middleton's masculine standpoint, which you certainly couldn't say of Pym I was thinking of going over the same territory in multiple novels, though I guess her characters are middle to upper middle class. Many are cultured. I think I'll try Holiday and perhaps Harris's Requiem, which also had pretty good reviews. That should tell me how much more time I'd want to invest.

Sounds fairly interesting, though I can guarantee I don't have time to read 44 novels! Maybe I'd have time for the best 5 or 6 read in conjunction with Barbara Pym, who mines a very similar vein.

I didn't mean that as a shot at you, just sick of the constant claims of plagiarism out there. If I am reading that passage correctly, Ligotti is criticising Tolstoy for not following through on a bleak worldview. I think Kreutzer Sonata doesn't wimp out to the same extent as A Confession. I guess the main difference is Ligotti gives attribution to Tolstoy and Pizzolatto did not.

What's funny is that if someone reports them, their listings will be pulled. When you sell on eBay, you can't refuse to accept PayPal. eBay put this rule in place years ago, shortly after they bought Paypal. Maybe they accept payment in cash only, small bills, plain envelope. Sounds like a good deal all the way around...

So I went to the site and looked through the examples and I saw a lot of loose paraphrasing, which to me does not rise to the level of plagiarism, given how transformative the rest of the work is, i.e. it is only one character who shares Ligotti's world view and it is embedded in a totally different context. But like everything, I guess it will be up to the courts to decide if Ligotti or more likely his publishers decide to sue. As I've already made clear I am in deep disagreement with the drift of today's courts which now use copyright to restrict creative endeavors (claiming that three notes or a trill and the like need to be licensed). I probably should read Neil Netanel's Copyright's Paradox, but it would just further enrage me. Very little of value from 19th Century or Modernist literature would exist under today's copyright rules, and that to me screams out that something is wrong. For instance, when I went and read the original excerpts from Ligotti's book, I said to myself -- Hmm, a lot of this just sounds rehashed from The Kreutzer Sonata. Maybe I should go through and see if Ligotti plagiarized Tolstoy, finding specific phrases that sound remarkably similar to the other work. It shouldn't be that hard. But I don't do such things, since I don't support today's copyright rules and because I don't believe in gotcha journalism. But mostly because I have a life...

Reading some of Tolstoy's short novels. Family Happiness wasn't bad. I really didn't like The Kruetzer Sonata at all. SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS It's a lot like reading American Psycho with all the oxygen in the novel taken up by this crazed, misogynistic man who got away with murder because of the backwards state of the law (it was quite legitimate to kill an unfaithful wife at the time). I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've read this, as I would have had an even stronger reaction 10-15 years ago and probably abandoned the tale in disgust. I should get around to The Cossacks and The Death of Ivan Ilyich a bit later in the week.

A much more self-contained exhibit at the McMichael Collection (in Kleinburg, just north of Toronto). It is called J.W. Morrice and John Lyman in the Company of Matisse, and it runs through Jan. 4. The focus really is heavily on Morrice and Lyman. There are perhaps 5 Matisse oil paintings and another 3 or 4 works in pencil. I wouldn't really consider either Morrice or Lyman particularly important artists, but they had a few nice pieces here and there. I was hoping to see a bit more Matisse honestly. One painting towards the end of the exhibit stood out (Rainy Day Paris - I believe this was by Morrice), but I just couldn't justify spending $40 on the catalog. The McMichael is always worth a visit if you like the Group of Seven, and this is a decent but hardly life-changing exhibit.

I'm thinking more along the lines of a KOB/John Cage 4'33" mash-up where you release an album with the exact same timings as KOB (the corrected version) but the only think you hear are some random rustlings in the studio -- and the members of MOPDTK trying not to giggle.

They have the "right" to do it, but it seems totally pointless (only slightly less so than the silly remake of Psycho) any why any record company would think it merits release (rather than just being a live affair) is beyond me. What I wouldn't have a problem with is if they remade it in a free-jazz way or changed the meter or anything that showed any originality at all.

75 tracks on 5 CDs. No real info (other than Cassandra Wilson and Norah Jones are on Disc 4) This is the puffery: Each of the five discs covers a specific era, from boogie to hard bop, soul jazz to the roots revival of the 90's, and the 21st century trailblazers like Robert Glasper and Gregory Porter. Not interested in this or the Monk. I'm so done with buying the same material over and over.

Well, one can ask the same question about many of the recordings of the jazz repertory movement of the past 25 years, in my opinion. Why should one ever listen to recreations of old music done not quite as well as the originals, by today's musicians? We can certainly ask that. I consider it a waste of time to go to something like that. This project strikes me as navel gazing of the absolute worst kind.

I saw the Rene Magritte exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago. Unfortunately, it closed this weekend (or perhaps technically today), so if you missed it, it's gone. Not surprisingly, it was quite crowded, though I was fortunate enough to slip in during a slight lull, so the wait to get in was only 15 minutes. Had we waited another half an hour, it looked like a 45+ minute wait and the lines kept stretching out all day. I had my children with me, and my daughter basically said she wasn't going in until I picked her up to see the paintings, so I had to do that, while dodging the crowds. I really think that they didn't think crowd control through or they decided it just didn't matter to have some really uncomfortable small rooms that would be nearly unbearable when it got crowded. From a pure layout perspective, the first half of the show is probably the worst I have experienced at the Art Institute. It got a little better by the midway point, and they did have a kind of nice layout where they had perhaps 6 or 7 dividers with a single painting on each and the crowds could flow past on both sides. It's a little hard to describe in words. After that point it wasn't bad. By far the most amusing moment was when I held my daughter up to the famous Cici n'est pas une pipe and told her it said This is not a pipe. "But it is a pipe" she piped up. And everyone in hearing distance laughed. It was a pretty solid show. Surprisingly, I think they actually left out one piece that is in their collection (The Banquet) and left it up in the Modern Wing. Not quite sure they would do that, although I guess this exhibit supposed to focus on his early career through 1938. I'm sure if they really wanted to, they could have justified including it (or at least reminded people to go off and look for it with a little informational plaque on the wall).

I ultimately didn't care for The Double and am finding The Gambler a little less compelling than I would like. While this worried me a bit (that my outlook on life has changed to the point that I don't care as much for Dostoevsky), I did like Demons a lot. I guess the acid test will be next year when I read Crime and Punishment in the new translation. On a recent trip, I finished Morley Callaghan's More Joy in Heaven, which is a fine but slight morality play about an ex-convict who struggles to reintegrate into society when his sponsors and the public lose interest in him. I also read Margaret Laurence's A Jest of God, which seems to have a number of parallels to Lessing's Briefing for a Descent into Hell, which I am now going to try to read pretty soon. But it is ultimately a bit more restrained, since Laurence is Canadian after all.

In the end, I found this really disappointing. Not so much due to the ending, which I found awfully obscure, but the main character (the "hero") seems so vacillating and really unappealing. Also, he had these same characteristics even before he encountered his double. Ultimately, I didn't really care whether he triumphed or not. I will press on with The Gambler, and then turn to some of Tolstoy's novellas.

Wrapped up Dostoevsky's Demons (The Possessed). I enjoyed it a lot. I may do a proper review or just link to the one on my blog. Currently in the middle of Dostoevsky's The Double. Entertaining, though I do agree with the critics who said it was shamelessly derivative of Gogol's short stories (at least the set-up).

Very sorry to hear. I too enjoyed his posts and his blog. RIP

And after 50 years or 75 years or 90 years you could go grab the architect's plans and build your own house, riffing off those plans. For most of time, the law has understood that "culture" is something that requires a great deal of cross-polinization and building off others' work in a way that today's corporations want to completely squelch, ignoring 500+ years of cultural history. If people perhaps had been more reasonable about licencing and sampling and keep things in print, maybe there wouldn't be such a backlash and resentment against those corporations that have eviscerated the public domain. People are going to have strong feelings about it no matter what, and I am on the side of those that thing today's copyright laws are unjust.

Same here. I think I would only be getting 2 CDs worth of material I don't already have.