X. Trapnel
My blogs
Blogs I follow
| Gender | Male |
|---|---|
| Occupation | Painter (please see blog below for badly reproduced examples of my work; I will try again) |
| Interests | literature (English/Irish, Russian, French, German/Central European, Scandinavian, Israeli, Italian) classical music, art, film |
| Favorite Movies | Vertigo, N by NW, L'Atalante, C. Kane/M. Ambersons, The Awful Truth, The Big Heat, Scarlet Street, History is Made at Night, Swingtime/Top Hat, Out of the Past, Shop Around the Corner, Laura, White Heat, Roaring Twenties, The Sea Hawk, Adventures of R. Hood, 7th Victim, 39 Steps, Rear Window, Notorious, Big Sleep, Double Indemnity, Lost Weekend, Best Years of Our Lives, To Have and Have Not, His Girl Friday, Rules of the Game/Grand Illusion, High Sierra, In a Lonely Place, On Dangerous Ground, They Live (or Drive) by Night, Body and Soul, Man from Laramie, The Naked Spur, Roadhouse, Pick Up on South Street, Jules & Jim, Stolen Kisses, Henry V/Hamlet, Madame de, Letter from an Unknown Woman, La Ronde, Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol, The Third Man, so many others, oh so many others... |
| Favorite Music | Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, Mahler, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Sibelius, Faure, Franck, Chausson, Ravel, Roussel, Debussy, Bartok, Schoenberg, Korngold, R. Strauss, Janacek, Martinu, Dvorak, Delius, Vaughan Williams, Holst, Walton, Bax, Elgar, Busoni, Bloch, Honegger, too many more to list but must add special place for Bernard Herrmann. Also Gershwin, Berlin, Ellington, Rogers & Hart, Kern and all their glorious company, French and American girl singers of 30s/40s, Sinatra (until 1965 or so, but that's when everything began going bad), Astaire, Hoagy Carmichael, Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson, Artie Shaw, Bud Powell, Oscar Peterson./// Detest Britten (ugh), Stravinsky (ugh in italics), Cage (get out of my sight), bel canto opera, minimalism, rock--all of these musical analogs of potato blight or eating carpet dust between two slices of cardboard or sitting on a hard bench in a cold, damp hall listening to Castro deliver a five-hour speech. |
| Favorite Books | Impossible to list but here goes: fiction by Tolstoy, Chekhov, Bunin, Bulgakov, Nabokov, Stendhal, Mann, Hardy, R. Walser, Bruno Schulz, Alain-Fournier, R. Martin du Gard, Musil, Broch, Kafka, Kleist, C. Pavese, Dino Buzzati, Schnitzler, S. Zweig, Camus, Henry Green, K. Amis, Brian Moore, etc. Poetry by Ovid, Catullus, Horace, Virgil, Ronsard, du Bellay, Skelton, Wyatt, Herrick, Pope, Keats, Hardy, Yeats, Edward Thomas, Robert Graves, Louis MacNeice, Larkin, Pushkin, Pasternak, Blok, Mandelstam, Moshe-Leib Halpern, Montale, Valery, Baudelaire, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Walter de la Mare, Frost, W. Stevens. Contemporaries: Adam Zagajewski, Derek Mahon, Richard Wilbur, John Banville, Alice Munro, Amos Oz, William Trevor, Steven Millhauser, Andrei Makine; Unclassifiables: James Agee, Julian Maclaren-Ross, S. I. Witkiewicz, Leon-Paul Fargue, Chamfort, Pessoa, Daniil Kharms, Gaston Bachelard, E.M. Cioran, Vladimir Jankelevitch, Peter Altenberg, Gerard de Nerval; Don't get the fuss over W.C. Williams, R. Lowell, Ted Hughes, P. Roth; do get the fuss over Auden but don't like him anyway; loathe A. Ginsberg (all the Beets in fact), Old Ez, and Bloomsbury. Rather fond of T.S. Eliot in spite of myself and in spite of him. |
What shall I love if not the enigma?