Word of the day : boulevardier
: a man about town ; specifically, a frequenter of the Parisian
boulevards
Thoughts this Wednesday:
- Rutgers head basketball coach Mike Rice (and AD Tim Pernetti) should be fired immediately. Immediately. Throwing basketballs at players heads? Calling them 'f----ing f---ots?" Unreal. The president of Rutgers should be fired immediately.
Here is the short video of the footage (condensed from a half-hour):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbaYqcMMZ6A
- Book review:
Justin Evans' The White Devil (2011) is set at Harrow, a real-life English boarding school that Evans himself went to - along with other famous men: Winston Churchill, Robert Peel, and Anthony Trollope. It's a literary ghost story that follows 17-year old American Andrew Taylor, a troubled kid who has bounced around various schools, who arrives at Harrow and immediately finds himself an outcast. It doesn't help that before long Andrew begins seeing a white-haired spirit who appears to be the ghost of alumnus Lord Byron's lover. Andrew, you see, physically resembles Byron, who he is playing in the school play. The ghost, John Harness, was a poor town kid who attended Harrow and fell in love with Byron and was later spurned by him. Now it seems he is back and willing to knock off any one who is close to Andrew. An elegant thriller, nicely written, not scary so much as stately in its moodiness. A good throwaway read with an increasing tension, which succeeds in making you want to read more of Evans' work.
- Book review #2
Julia Alvarez' acclaimed In the Time of the Butterflies was a huge disappointment for me. If you're interested in the real-life characters that Alvarez follows here, the Mirabal sisters, you would be best served reading a non-fiction book or even a Wikipedia article about them. It's set during the period of Trujillo's dictatorship of the Dominican Republic, a time that would be interesting to read about. Alvarez does succeed in giving us enchanting yet terrifying glimpses of Trujillo's country: opulence, the silencing of enemies, paranoia, job creation.... One of my problems with the book is that Alvarez, in her telling of the story through the four sisters' point of view, doesn't make it particularly easy to chart what exactly is going on. It's very easy to lose track of characters, forget names, remember which kid is which or which is the husband of which wife. I often found myself not remembering events (or whom they happened to) a few pages before. More importantly, I never found the women - extraordinarily brave in real-life - to be that courageous or inspiring; they never seemed that revolutionary or daring. They came across more as pests to Trujillo.
- Looking forward to seeing Sarah Chalke and Elizabeth Perkins in the appealing-looking sitcom How to Live With Your Parents, which ABC has given a plum post-Modern Family slot.
- Animal photo of the day:
(from the Cincinnati zoo)
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/photo-of-the-day/?c=y&date=04/03/2013
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