Miscellaneous Round-Up

I realize, reading through some of my posts, that I might at times seem an awful grump; but there are things that make my soul merry, too, and I hope those are reflected here as well. "Clicking" with a book is definitely one of those, and I am happy to say that I feel it happening with George Eliot's Middlemarch, now that I am about a hundred pages in. Eliot is not a comically oriented novelist in the way that Dickens or Trollope can be, and I had wondered whether Middlemarch might yield any laugh-out-loud moments; but in Chapter 9, Mr. Brooke and Rev. Casaubon are discussing the prospects of Casaubon's nephew Will Ladislaw:

"He has a thirst for travelling; perhaps he may turn out a Bruce or a Mungo Park," said Mr Brooke. "I had a notion of that myself at one time."

"No, he has no bent towards exploration, or the enlargement of our geognosis: that would be a special purpose which I could recognize with some approbation, though without felicitating him on a career which so often ends in premature and violent death..."

That got me; and there have been more such moments since. ("Geognosis" is such a Casaubonian word!)...I discovered a dandy online resource for keeping all those versions and editions of the Bruckner symphonies straight:

http://www.abruckner.com/

This is very fun to browse to see which conductors recorded which versions...Through the ever-useful portal Arts & Letters Daily, I came across an interesting article by Roger Sandall on John Ruskin and Welby Pugin, both so prominently featured in Kenneth Clark's The Gothic Revival:

http://www.rogersandall.com/Spiked_Medieval-Spells.php

(Note that Sandall gets the order of Pugin's names wrong: It's "Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin," not "Augustus Northmore Welby Pugin" -- not that this is hard to scramble!)...The most recent Time Tunnel episode I watched, "Crack of Doom," is the Krakatoa episode, but despite the presence of a young Ellen Burstyn (then known as Ellen McRae), the hour falls into the rut of a number of these episodes: the writer plants our heroes on the crack of doom, but then has a hard time coming up with anything compelling for them to do. Should they try to change the course of history? Should they not try to change the course of history? Should they just save their own behinds? Should they try to save other people's? It's a limited series of dramatic options over which they usually spend a number of scenes dithering; but the viewer can't help but feel this as filler. Krakatoa is inherently interesting (I was reminded that I must read Simon Winchester's book about it), but the series frequently over-relies on that sort of automatic trigger. Pearl Harbor! Little Big Horn! Halley's Comet!

Even bubble gum must be well-made enough to be chewable.

UPDATE (5/4/2009): I've never been too sure about this sort of omnibus post: Should it be broken up into smaller units? Should I wait until I have more to say on any of the individual subjects? Should I add what are clearly "follow-up bits" to the earlier posts they relate to, as Updates? It's a puzzler, although the Updates solution is seeming meritorious to me at the moment.