Stuff I like.  Weighted toward things you're less likely to have encountered.  (How valuable would it be to know that I, too, enjoy Hamlet?)


Books

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The Wings of the Dove, Henry James

A book it’s somewhat difficult to read casually; this may not be the one to pick up at the airport (next to the trashy romance novels and blinking “Hawaii!” T-shirts) and read while sipping margaritas on the beach.  At any rate, James sometimes seems to take a bit of an adversarial approach to his readers, and not in the plodding, obvious manner of Joyce—littering conspicuously arcane references cribbed from encyclopedias—but by lulling you to sleep right when the important bits occur, by deviously whisking you away from the action right when it is all about to pull together, and most of all by presenting you with a near impenetrable thicket of prose that makes reading feel like cutting your way through a dense jungle.  (In part this is because James didn’t actually write this novel, he dictated it.)

So if it’s occasionally moderately difficult why read it?  Well, the thicket of  sentences happens to be the summit of English prose-style, for one thing.  No writing is as completely thought out, as perfectly crafted and as ideally suited to his purposes as is James’.  For another, he modulates through various points of view in a way that makes everything else you read look flimsy.  You get massive blocks of text that are narrated entirely through a single character’s consciousness (though not in the first person) and as you read more and more carefully you realize that what you are “seeing” is limited and informed by what the operative sphere of consciousness is him- or herself capable of seeing.  And then the plot, once you get beyond the thicket of prose and virtuosic point-of-view tricks, makes this a real page-turner.  The last twenty pages your heart will pound and audible gasps will escape your lips as you move from revelation to revelation.  In fact, with one final salto, the whole story crystallizes in the last sentence and takes on new meaning.  The Golden Bowl is equally good; The Ambassadors and most of the earlier novels are, unfortunately, worthless.


The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees, Karl von Frisch

This you can, more or less, read while sipping margaritas on the beach.  Most people doubt that they really want to know 500 pages worth about bee-dancing and orientation, but I assure you this is as exciting as it gets.  The experiments are arranged more or less in order of discovery, and are explained in great detail, so you can get a feel for the process of investigation and growing excitement of von Frisch and his army of graduate students.


Herodotus & Thucydides

An astounding proportion of everything worth knowing (the things that fill our encyclopedias) emerged from a narrow band in space and time, and much of that from a few short years in Athens and a few other Greek cities.  What could explain this?  (See: Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment.)  These histories are good points of departure for investigating that question.  The first chronicles the improbable achievements of the Greek city-states fighting the Persians; the second captures what amounts to the suicide of Greece in a series of disastrous internecine conflicts.  Also interesting are the contrasts between the two historians themselves, the one a playful pursuer of tangents and tall-tales, the other a self-proclaimed factualist, whose greatest achievements, however, are his made-up speeches.  Ktêma eis aei.


Collected Papers, Milman Parry

This material relates to Homer and his two long poems.  Parry succeeded, as a 20 year old punk from California, where literally thousands of years of scholars had failed: in figuring out how the Homeric poems were composed and what explains their distinctive language.  The answer turns out to be that they were composed within a formulaic system that allowed the poet easily to recombine set phrases and motifs, and thus put together substantial poems extemporaneously.  This means that many of the Homeric epithets ("stouthearted Odysseus") are a function of metrical requirements, not contextual meaning.  (Odysseus is only stouthearted when the rigors of dactylic hexamter so dictate.)  Two corollaries: the poems were composed in the context of an oral tradition, and that tradition was the product of generations, not one man.


The Waves, Virginia Woolf

My favorite book, though everyone else seems to hate it.  Don't settle for Mrs. Dalloway, which is just a warm-up novel.  Also astounding--quite breathtaking, in fact--are A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas.



Hummus

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The best hummus in the world is to be found in Princeton, New Jersey, at Olive's deli.  It's a decadent, creamy, intensely garlicy affair that can convert a lowly bagel into a three-star meal.  Among commerical offerings, the only thing tolerable is Tribe Hummus.  Originally, they were the Tribe of Two Sheiks.  Sometime after 9-11 they lost a sheik or two, and changed to Tribe Hummus.  Buy it now, before they're reduced to just Hummus hummus.


Movies

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Before you do anything else, read Pauline Kael's movie reviews, which are often much more interesting than the movies themselves.  Note, especially, the manifesto, "Trash, Art and the Movies."

The Great Westerns (try to watch them in sequence):
         1. Stagecoach (1939)
         2. The Searchers (1956)
         3. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
         4. The Wild Bunch (1969)
         5. Unforgiven (1992)

It’s all summed up in the opening and closing of The Searchers.  John Wayne, silhouetted in the doorway, alone preserving civilization from being annihilated, but unable to adopt the values or make the compromises necessary to enter into it.  The tragic American hero.  The Western is essentially an exploration of American values, especially the proposition that our problems should and must be solved with violence, not ideas or words, the UN, the ICC etc., and that those who feel otherwise are effeminate cowards.


Singin' in the Rain (1951)

The music is mostly drivel, but that's not the point.  It's about dancing, or more exactly, a kind of over-the-top, shameless zest.  ("Fit as a Fiddle" is as shameless and entertaining as it gets.)  Kelly pushes gaudy showmanship that's basically in bad taste so far that it becomes good.  There's a euphoric vigor to it all that has only been matched by Trainspotting since.


The Conformist (1970)

The most beautiful movie ever made.  The blinds, the leaves, the laundry, the cave, the dance, the trees.


Tampopo (1985)

A Japanese noodle-Western about a woman who sets out to become the greatest ramen chef in Tokyo.  To accomplish, this she enlists the help of some noodle-connoisseurs; an excellent spoof of the Seven Samurai hired-help theme.  ("Your noodles are beginning to acquire vigor, but they still lack profundity!") 


Wings of Desire (1987) & Faraway, So Close! (1993)

Despite occasional lapses into B.S., these are some of the few movies one might be tempted to think of as profound.  A stream-of-consciousness tour through Berlin after the wall came down, with West and East used to symbolize different aspects of the human experience from the point of view of two angels who are sick of eternity.


Music

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Bach - If you do nothing else in life, figure out the structure of a fugue, and listen to the cycle of preludes and fugues in the Well Tempered Clavier, especially the fugues in Book I in C minor, C-sharp minor, F minor, G-sharp minor, and, in Book II,  the prelude and fugure in F minor.  Also overwhelming are the opening sections to the Partitas in B-flat major and E-minor.  YouTube


Mariam et Amadou - Popular Malian music.  If you see them live, you get to watch Mariam rub Amadou's head throughout the show.  YouTube


Alina Simone - America's bitterest songwriter.  After growing up in a tractor factory in Siberia, Simone's family escaped in a hot air balloon to New Foundland, where she pioneered the Russian emigré post-punk genre.  MySpace


Philosophy

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Parfit, Reasons and Persons; Kagan, The Limits of Morality; Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia;  Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion; and Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism.  Read them if you can!