My Faves for Thursday, November 29, 2007

When Jan and I were in Paris last week, she was quite enthralled by the “Le Chat Noir” posters. I wanted to look it up and see what they were ll about. Turns out that it was a late 19th-century cabaret and artist salon.

Hilarity ensues when impressionable college start tagging literary references in graffiti across their campus. The underground appeal is part of what makes Thomas Pynchon so powerful to students. There were “muted horns” all over over UCSC when I went to school there.

Quoted: Starting last weekend, police at the University of California at Santa Barbara began receiving reports from around campus of a particularly academic form of graffiti — red spray-painted allusions to the work of the postmodern author Thomas Pynchon, whose 1966 novel The Crying of Lot 49 is (in typical fashion) a sprawling admixture of paranoia, counterculture and obscure literary references.

I saw “Whistle Down the Wind” last night at the 5th Avenue Theatre and think it was probably the worst musical I have ever seen. It is contrived, strains credulity a bit too far, and is grossly heavy-handed. Boo!

Audio of “Under Milk Wood” by Dylan Thomas.

Top 10 Best Books of 2007 as selected by the New York Times Book Review.

Quoted: The Book Review picks the best works from the last year.