Enthusiasms
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Some lists of things I do like
A little while ago I convinced (i.e., dragged at gunpoint) a friend of mine to go to the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago and sit through The Conformist, which sounded to her like the Euro-art pretentious drag of all time. When we left the theater, she said I don’t understand why anybody bothered to go on making movies after this one.
Writing reviews, I’ve had to spend a lot of time writing about things I don’t like. So here are some collections of a different kind altogether.
>> More enthusiasms
A Desert Island List of Memoirs, Essays, Diaries, Sermons, and Belles-Lettres
- Devotions, John Donne
- Urn Burial, Thomas Browne
- Holy Dying, Jeremy Taylor
- Journals of Gilbert White
- The Fight and Other Writings, William Hazlitt
- Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Thomas De Quincey
- Diary, Francis Kilvert
- The Queen of the Air, John Ruskin
- Long Ago and Far Away, W.H. Hudson
- Genius Loci, Vernon Lee
- Lark Rise to Candleford, Flora Thompson
- In Praise of Shadows, Junichiro Tanizaki
- Skin for Skin, Llewellyn Powys
- The Anathemata, David Jones
- Soap, Francis Ponge
- A Cordiall Water, M.F.K. Fisher
- Up in the Old Hotel, Joseph Mitchell
- Still Life, Richard Cobb
- The Peregrine, J.A. Baker
Ten Novels That Not Enough People Have Read
- Armed With Madness, Mary Butts
- Lud-in-the-Mist, Hope Mirrlees
- Memoirs of a Midget, Walter de la Mare
- The Asiatics, Frederic Prokosch
- The Curlew’s Cry, Mildred Walker
- A Legacy, Sybille Bedford
- The Stone Book Quartet, Alan Garner
- The Dead of the House, Hannah Green
- Peace, Gene Wolfe
- The Fortunate Fall, Raphael Carter
- ... more on them at The Neglected Books Page
Books That Changed The Way I Thought About Certain Things
Books That, If I Had Not Read, I Would Be Another, Less Interesting Person
Several Movies That Do Not, In Any Way, Shape or Form, Suck
Old, Scratchy and Mostly Unintelligible Spirituals
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Songs of the Old Regular Baptists: Lined-Out Hymnody from Southeastern Kentucky
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How Can I Keep From Singing: Early American Religious Music and Song
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The Gospel Tradition: The Roots and the Branches
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Storefront and Streetcorner Gospel 1927-1929
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Glad I Found the Lord: Chicago Gospel 1937-1957
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The Abyssinian Baptist Gospel Choir, Shakin’ the Rafters
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Rev. Louis Overstreet and the St. Luke’s Powerhouse Church of God in Christ
- ♦ Fred McDowell/Hunter’s Chapel Singers,
Amazing Grace: Mississippi Delta Spirituals
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Harp of a Thousand Strings: All-Day Singing from the Sacred Harp
- ♦ Wiregrass Sacred Harp Singers,
The Colored Sacred Harp
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Religion Is a Fortune: Sacred Harp Singing of the Early 1900s
Avant-garde, Experimental or Just Vague and Odd
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Night Recordings from Bali
- ♦ Alvin Curran,
Songs and Views of the Magnetic Garden
- ♦ Pran,
Raga for the Rainy Season
- ♦ Stuart Dempster,
Underlays and Overlays from the Cistern Chapel
- ♦ Somei Satoh,
The Mandara Trilogy
- ♦ Alvin Lucier,
Music on a Long Thin Wire
- ♦ Michael Gordon,
Decasia
- ♦ Brian Eno,
Bell Studies for the Clock of the Long Now
And a Long, Long List of Classical
