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comment by ThurberMingus
ThurberMingus  ·  280 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: February 21, 2024

I'm going to write down each week what I read/listen/watch. Mostly so I can look back look back and see what I was interested in thru time, but a little bit as motivation to keep notes, and a little because I miss this place.

1. Claiming past credit for reading Moby-Dick in January. Really enjoyed it this time. A decade ago I listened to it without paying close attention and thought it was meh, with some funny parts. This time I paid a lot better attention, and it came across as a madman telling a story of madness.

2. Read a few chapters of The Phantom Tollbooth last week - read aloud book w/ my wife. Aimed at middle school age but holds up well.

3. Saw a production of the Bonnie and Clyde musical last weekend. It did an excellent job portraying them as real people in a tragedy, who were also monsters. Idealism, passion, despair, fatalism, and refusal to give up.

I didn't know Bonnie wrote poetry, and some of it got published in newspapers. For a while they were popular but it wore off as it became clear they'd try shooting their way out of anything. The musical uses her original poetry. The last verses of her most famous poem:

    They don't think they're too smart or desperate

they know that the law always wins.

They've been shot at before;

but they do not ignore,

that death is the wages of sin.

Some day they'll go down together

they'll bury them side by side.

To few it'll be grief,

to the law a relief

but it's death for Bonnie and Clyde.

4) A Wizard of Earthsea. Finished it this week. I had never read any of Le Guin before. It's refreshing to have a YA book that's not about a "chosen one". I guess A instead of The should have been a tip.

Also I haven't read Jung or about Jung but isn't the shadow plotline in the second half straight out of Jung?