Enjoyed reading this and considering your thoughts on Anna Karenina. I carried a brick of a mass market paperback with me of this book back in 2003 when I spent two weeks in Russia traveling with a friend; it may have been a bit cliche but it was fitting and I just loved that book. I sometimes just listen to random sections of the Audible version I have and find it remains good company. Have you read and/or written about any other Tolstoy novels?
This paragraph of yours was especially interesting to me:
<<After I finish Anna Karenina and some other books, I’m going to read the Tolkien paperback I found and then will consider myself as caught up on the Tolkien/Jackson legendarium as I ever care to be. (I’ll see how I hold up when that new television series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power comes out, but in any case I don’t write about television in this newsletter.) >>
I am now beginning to appreciate how your constraints/framing of this newsletter really serve it well; the structure you have put in place about what to write about in this newsletter and what not to write about is refreshing and a useful example for me to see.
Also, I found your final sentence to be well, perfection; “misguided” is as precise and kind a way to sum up my experience with watching the three Hobbit films as well. I enjoyed bits of each of them, and while I know “bloated” is often overused to describe these films, well, it is fitting here, unfortunately. Nevertheless, the original LoTR trilogy of films remains a masterpiece, so you win some, you lose some.
Yeah, constraints are important in both art and life, I find. They channel and streamline one's creativity and take the mind off of itself and get it onto a task, as David Mamet wrote.
Hi d.w.,
Enjoyed reading this and considering your thoughts on Anna Karenina. I carried a brick of a mass market paperback with me of this book back in 2003 when I spent two weeks in Russia traveling with a friend; it may have been a bit cliche but it was fitting and I just loved that book. I sometimes just listen to random sections of the Audible version I have and find it remains good company. Have you read and/or written about any other Tolstoy novels?
This paragraph of yours was especially interesting to me:
<<After I finish Anna Karenina and some other books, I’m going to read the Tolkien paperback I found and then will consider myself as caught up on the Tolkien/Jackson legendarium as I ever care to be. (I’ll see how I hold up when that new television series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power comes out, but in any case I don’t write about television in this newsletter.) >>
I am now beginning to appreciate how your constraints/framing of this newsletter really serve it well; the structure you have put in place about what to write about in this newsletter and what not to write about is refreshing and a useful example for me to see.
Also, I found your final sentence to be well, perfection; “misguided” is as precise and kind a way to sum up my experience with watching the three Hobbit films as well. I enjoyed bits of each of them, and while I know “bloated” is often overused to describe these films, well, it is fitting here, unfortunately. Nevertheless, the original LoTR trilogy of films remains a masterpiece, so you win some, you lose some.
Yeah, constraints are important in both art and life, I find. They channel and streamline one's creativity and take the mind off of itself and get it onto a task, as David Mamet wrote.