Favorite Readable Works of Post-Classical Philosophy

1. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, by David Hume

(This book is amazing. I've read it three times while never making a dent in the more famous Treatise Concerning Human Nature.)

2. On Liberty, by John Stuart Mill

(Also wonderful is Mill's autobiography, although I've never been able to get through Utilitarianism or any of his other books.)

3. The Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James

(Again, much more approachable than either Pragmatism or Principles of Philosophy. I also recommend the Talks to Teachers and Students.)

4. The World as Will and Idea, by Schopenhauer

(I've actually only read the abridged edition from Will Durant. So there goes my credibility.)

5. Unto This Last, by John Ruskin

(Beloved of Gandhi, Tolstoy, and Proust! Now famous largely for being terrified of his wife's naked body and refusing to have sex with her. Bizarre proclivities aside, I like Ruskin a lot. I think people will start reading him again one of these days.)

6. The Captive Mind, by Czeslaw Milosz

(So good, especially the central chapters about individual artists.)

7. The Need for Roots, by Simone Weil

(Like Ruskin, her books are -- to modern eyes -- equal parts silly and profound, but they stay with you more than any number of works by more reasonable people.)

8. Walden, by Thoreau

(Low on the list because Thoreau is an infuriating writer. It is impossible to pin him down to any position at all. But he succeeds beautifully on the sentence level while failing, continually, as a communicator of ideas.)

9. Freedom and Beyond, by John Holt

(Out of print for decades, but easy to find in good libraries and very worthwhile.)

10. Four Essays on Liberty, by Isaiah Berlin

(I find his least philosophically "important" essays the most interesting, cf. the biographical sketch of Mill and the one on the birth of Greek individualism, collected in the big volume called Liberty.

Desert Island Movies

These aren't the best movies I've ever seen, exactly, just the ones that I feel like I could go on watching for a very long time. In no particular order:

1. Punch-Drunk Love, by P.T. Anderson
2. McCabe & Mrs. Miller, by Robert Altman
3. Afterlife, by Hirozaku Kore-eda
4. The Diary of a Country Priest, by Robert Bresson
5. Bottle Rocket, by Wes Anderson
6. You Can Count on Me, by Kenneth Lonergan
7. City Lights, by Charlie Chaplin
8. The Big Lebowski, by Joel & Ethan Coen
9. Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, by Tim Burton
10. The Jungle Book, by Wolfgang Reitherman

10 Worst Movie Gerund Titles

As I hinted in a previous post, I hate titles that begin with gerunds. They're slick but inelegant, 'contemporary' but banal, and they force a kind of spurious intimacy on their audience -- hey, you, just glancing at this movie poster, you don't know it but you're already involved in this vapid plot -- you're already "Saving Silverman" or "Walking Tall." Ugh.

Of course, there are gerund titles for all different kinds of art, from classic literature ("Loving") to crap music ("Throwing Copper"). The gerund phenomenon is only an epidemic, however, in Hollywood. Here are the 10 worst titles, largely (but not entirely) irrespective of the quality of film:

10. Wrestling Ernest Hemingway. This 1993 old-person movie -- which, strangely enough, I've actually seen -- is the most egregious of the 'Gerund + Famous Person' genre, which also includes Searching For Bobby Fischer and Being John Malkovich.

9. Waking Ned Devine. Old-people movies are apparently gerund-friendly. The worst of the 'Gerund + Random Full Name' genre. Beats out Kissing Jessica Stein and the projected 2008 Judd Apatow release, Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Who the fuck is Ned Devine, and why should I care?

8. Saving Private Ryan. Say a word for perhaps the biggest-ever of the Hollywood gerund titles. Both the overblown praise and the unfair criticism of this film tends to neglect its awful title. I actually think its banality taints the overall work of art (which I respect) in a small but still meaningful way.

7. Pushing Tin. Surely the first and last time air-traffic controller jargon makes it into the title of a major studio picture.

6. Leaving Normal. OK, OK, so it didn't make much of an impact at the box office, or anywhere in pop culture, really. But it was still a studio pic made by Edward Zwick, and you tell me if it doesn't manage to pack about six Hollywood cliches into those four syllables. (Yeah, you guessed right -- "Normal" is also "Normal, Wyoming.")

5. Riding In Cars With Boys. Such ghastliness should speak for itself. The first of these clunkers not released in the '90s -- truly the Age of the Gerund.

4. Finding Forrester. Hollywood really likes to help filmgoers "find" things: Graceland, Neverland, Nemo. It's hard to imagine a more disappointing find than Sean Connery doing a preposterous J.D. Salinger impression in this painful Good Will Hunting reprise.

3. Being Human. The grandaddy of gerunds. We've been forced to be There, Julia, John Malkovich, and countless other people, places, and states of mind. But the tie goes to a movie whose central premise has Robin Williams playing a single human soul over the course of all human history, including stints as a caveman, an ancient Roman slave, and a 16th C Portuguese nobleman.

2. Feeling Minnesota. 1996. Keanu Reeves. Cameron Diaz. Courtney Love. Ugliest 'Gerund + Random Place' title. I might have to see this.

1. Regarding Henry. I guess you could quibble with the purity of the gerund use here; I think "regarding" functions more as a preposition than as a verb-noun. But I'd say that just shows the flexibility of gerund awfulness. Maybe you have to know that the movie is about Harrison Ford's brain-injury-induced transformation from obnoxious lawyer to deep-souled human innocent. But is there a more sickly smug, more emptily mawkish film title in the universe than "Regarding Henry"? I hope not. It fits the movie perfectly.

Top Ten Movies of the 1990s

I think these folks had the last word on this topic.

Top Ten Victorian Novel Titles

My prejudices have always lined up with the curmodgeonly conventional wisdom that the 19th century was truly the greatest age of the novel. What's less debatable, though, is that the 19th century was the greatest age of the novel title. Sure, there are 20th century gems like The Postman Always Rings Twice and Lolita, but I'll take a Victorian title over a contemporary one any day of the week.

10. Can You Forgive Her? (Anthony Trollope). Obviously, my bias is for wordiness, and sentences-as-titles are often favorites. But this one is memorable not just as a sentence, but as an interrogative. What's the best 20th century book with a question in its title? Who Moved My Cheese? Trollope's is the second best interrogative title of all time, topped only by...

9. What Will He Do With It? (Edward Bulwer-Lytton). How Awesome Is This? Points for ambiguity, long-windedness without pomposity, and comically obvious (to modern eyes) sexual double entendre. Deductions for Bulwer-Lytton being an unread and probably unreadable goliath, a kind of dorky caricature of a Victorian author.

8. The Egoist (George Meredith). Maybe it's just me, but who doesn't want to read a book about an egoist? (I haven't yet, but will soon). Meredith's title shows off the kind of terse directness that alternated with the more famous volubility of classic Victorian titles. I don't think the straightforward "The X" format is quite so popular now, but it had a terrific heyday in the 19th century.

7. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte). The best place-name title in 19th century British fiction, edging out Mansfield Park and flat-out slaughtering Middlemarch. Of course Middlemarch is probably a better novel than anything on this list, but the title has a kind of dense, ungainly obscurity that surely drives away far more readers than it entices.

6. The Odd Women (George Gissing). I haven't read this, either, but I want to. "Odd" is just a great word no matter how you look at it, and this simple title allows it to take rare full billing.

5. Jude The Obscure (Thomas Hardy). Wins the character-name title award. This has such a nice ring to it that my freshman-year hallmates took to calling a preppy douchebag named Jude on the third floor "Jude The Obscure," which eventually got whittled down to just "The Obscure." The book is, of course, great as well, but actually my least favorite of the major Hardys -- not so the title.

4. Our Mutual Friend (Charles Dickens). Beats out Bleak House and Great Expectations for the best Dickens title. Not flashy or immediately evocative, but subtly intriguing... An interrogative without the question mark. Whose mutual friend? Mine? Dickens's? What's going on?

3. Dracula (Bram Stoker). According to Wikipedia, Stoker probably didn't get the word from the historical Vlad the Impaler. He just stumbled across the Romanian word dracul and decided it was pretty badass. It was: this is a very good read, but half the reason Dracula continues to occupy so much cultural space, even in the 21st century, is because Stoker didn't call the book "Count Vampyre."

2. Far From The Madding Crowd (Thomas Hardy). Before the cliche, there was the book. Normally I hate gerunds (more on that, perhaps, later), but this one transcends that bias.

1. He Knew He Was Right (Anthony Trollope). Some of the greats had title-writing in their blood (or at their publisher's office); some didn't. Hardy had it; George Eliot didn't (besides Middlemarch, there is the archaically boring Mill on the Floss, the laconically boring Adam Bede, and the, uh, boringly boring Silas Marner, which, in fact, is probably the comic archetype for dull-sounding Victorian titles assigned in school).
Trollope was an absolute master of the art. Besides the two represented here, there are The Way We Live Now, Ralph The Heir, Is He Popinjoy?, and An Old Man's Love. But this one takes the cake--not only is it a full sentence, it's a brilliantly ambiguous one, a sentence that already takes place within (and yet also without) the main character's brain. It's a title that could be an opening line. This may be a completely obscure Trollope novel, number 28 of 45, or whatever it is, but I will read it just because of the title.

The Top Five Full-Length Suspense/Horror Films On The Web

This actually started as just a list of cool movies that are online, but then I realized that they were all pretty ghoulish, as many of my favorites are. Also, while many movies show up on YouTube and get taken down, these are all fully legal and should be available for a long time. Enjoy!

5. Night of the Living Dead (1968).
"They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back From The Dead!! Ahhhh!!" Bring it on, George Romero, bring it on.

4. Nosferatu (1922).
The F.W. Murnau classic. Moody, engrossing, and actually scary at a couple points. (And campy in many other parts.) If you find it hard to get into silent film, perhaps you should check this out after renting "The Shadow of the Vampire," which gives you all sorts of fun context and shot-for-shot recreations of the original.

3. The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934). In eight parts.
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Peter Lorre. That's right. Peter Lorre. The man who perfected being creepy, strange, and awesome before Christopher Walken was a spermatoza. Also, while Hitch claimed otherwise, most agree that it's superior to his 1950s remake with J-J-Jimmy Stewart.

2. Fritz Lang's "M" (1931).
Of course, now that I've confessed my deep love for Peter Lorre, you don't think I'd forget this one, do you? The only reason it isn't number one is that I think it's kind of sacrilege to watch such a textured black-and-white film on a YouTube screen (even though the quality's pretty good for YouTube). But if you've never seen it, just five minutes should convince you to run out and get the Criterion Collection DVD.

1. Mr Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr (1999).
Talk about creepy, strange, and awesome. It's not technically suspense or horror; it's a documentary. But it's pretty chilling all the same. Definitely one of Errol Morris's best, perhaps second only to "The Thin Blue Line." And it's on Google Video, so it has higher resolution than the others on this list.

The Top 10 Bruce Springsteen Songs About Automobiles

10. “Cadillac Ranch.” El Dorado fins, whitewalls and skirts/ Rides just like a little bit of heaven here on earth… A lighthearted love song, dedicated to the ultimate Detroit chromeboat.

9. “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight).” My tires were slashed and I almost crashed but the Lord had mercy/ My machine she's a dud, I'm stuck in the mud somewhere in the swamps of Jersey… Seven minutes of gimmicky lyrics that come dangerously close to Billy Joel territory. But it’s a toetapper, and it’s hard not to like.

8. “Used Cars.” My little sister’s in the front seat with an ice cream cone… A wistful lament for all those poor folks who have to buy their cars second hand. A little overwrought, perhaps, but moving in spite of itself.

7. “Stolen Car.” Each night I wait to get caught/ But I never do… Stealing hearts and stealing cars. It’s the same thing, really, when you get down to it.

6. “Racing in the Streets.” For all the shut down strangers and hot rod angels/ Rumbling through this promised land… The gentle piano arrangement gives this song a contemplative distance from its noisy, roaring subject matter.

5. “My Hometown.” Two cars at a light, on a Saturday night/ In the backseat there was a gun… A chilling survey of the ravages of deindustrialization. The narrator grows from son to father with his hands on the wheel, deciding whether to keep circling around Main Street or to pull out of town.

4. “Born to Run.” At night we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machines… I’ll be honest. While it is admittedly brilliant, I think this song is a little overrated, and that it overshadows its superior album companion “Thunder Road” (below). The fact that the track has been played and quoted for thirty years doesn’t help. It just never seems fresh to me like it must have seemed when it was new.

3. and 2. (Tie) “State Trooper” and “Open All Night.” Two parts of the same song. A man drives down the Jersey Turnpike in the dead of night. In one version, he’s an outlaw: License, registration: I ain't got none/ But I got a clear conscience 'bout the things that I done… In the other he’s a working man on the night shift, remembering taking the same drive with his girl: Fried chicken on the front seat, she’s sittin’ in my lap/ We’re wipin’ our fingers on a Texaco road map… Whether or not they are the same man, they curse their radios for being jammed up with talk and gospel and offer this prayer to the relay towers: Hey ho rock and roll deliver me from nowhere.

1. “Thunder Road.” All the redemption I can offer girl is beneath this dirty hood…. It really isn’t the Boss’s most articulate comment on American car culture (see Nos. 10, 8, and 6, above). But it's certainly the best of his many hey-girl-get-in-my-car songs. It offers rich Catholic imagery and stark visions of life passing by, framed by the dashboard and seen through the windshield.