On Sun, 21 Jan 2018 14:09:24 -0800 (PST), True North wrote:

On Sunday, 21 January 2018 16:21:10 UTC-4, John H wrote:
On Sun, 21 Jan 2018 14:35:13 -0500, Keyser Soze wrote:

On 1/21/18 1:58 PM, Bill wrote:
Keyser Soze wrote:
On 1/21/18 1:11 PM, wrote:
On 21 Jan 2018 16:32:18 GMT, Keyser Soze wrote:

wrote:
On Sun, 21 Jan 2018 09:39:30 -0500, "Mr. Luddite"
wrote:


And what could be more important than football? ?


It's ok if you'd rather read Moby Dick for the 18th time instead. Most
of us got it the first time around.

Another of your weird personality quirks. If you don't like something,
nobody should, huh?

Moby Dick? Jesus what a boring ****ing book. Melville could have
trimmed off about 400 pages and had a gripping novel.
I got it right away. Life on a whaling ship was miserable. We didn't
need to share that misery for almost 800 pages to read the story.
Beside that, if you are already bored at sea, the last thing I want to
read is a book about being bored at sea. I thought the GM 3&2 book was
more interesting. ;-)


Ahhh...you thought the book was about life aboard a whaling ship, but that
is only the back page story, as it were. I’m not surprised you actually
didn’t get it.

No it was the "back 400 pages", unless you were just speed reading
over that like you skim the notes you respond to here.
Like I said at 250-300 pages it would have been a gripping story. The
man needed an editor.


My copy of Anna Karenina runs about 700 pages. You probably shouldn't
read Tolstoy.


As a statement I read onetime about Russian y would never read another one.
What is it about Russian novels that when you get to liking a character
they kill them off. Okay to kill a few but all of them? To depressing.



Russia and environs was and is a pretty dark, lousy place, where awful
things happened to people, and I don't mean because of the weather,
although that is pretty grim in much of the country, too. Russian
literature reflects Russian history, culture, class warfare, et cetera.
Life was pretty damned awful for ethnics living in Lithuania, Moldova,
Ukraine, Belarus, et cetera. My parents, some of my grandparents, and
various aunts and uncles and great aunts and uncles spoke Russian,
Polish, and German and so I learned Russian as a second language when I
was growing up. I forced myself to read Dr. Zhivago in Russian when I
was a young teenager, and it wasn't easy. I wouldn't attempt to read
Tolstoy in Russian. I remember with Zhivago I had to create a character
cheat sheet so I could try to recall who was who. Years later, I read
the novel in English and I enjoyed it. The movie romanticized the novel
and the times, but I liked it. The literary movie Russia House with Sean
Connery presents Russia in a more modern but still very dark light.

Decades ago, I helped promote a gallery show of contemporary Russian art
for Woodward & Lothrop, a DC department store chain now gone. The art
was so-so, but the story of many of the Soviet-era artists was grim,
something the Russian cultural attaches tried to conceal. It was a weird
time in the 1970s.



In case no one else says it, "Wow, Harry!"

'ell Johnny, is instigating and agitating your only purpose here?

Not at all, just extremely impressed. Aren't you?