January 14

A.O. Scott pens a lovely tribute to the late Eric Rohmer:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/movies/13rohmer.html

Scott always comes across as a very appealing guy, unlike his self-important New York Times-mate Dave Kehr (whose blog post on Rohmer's death was ungenerous, although the official obituary he wrote was better).

For those who are not completely "listed out," the Guardian offers an interesting ranking of the top 50 television dramas of all time, equally weighted toward the US and UK. Some of the British series are not that familiar to me and undoubtedly worth following up on. (But how, I wonder, could they leave out Upstairs, Downstairs? It would be in my top five.)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2010/jan/12/guardian-50-television-dramas

The blog Victorian Geek has an interesting piece on the popular Victorian novelist Ouida, who sounds pretty wacky:

http://blog.catherinepope.co.uk/2010/01/13/ouida-the-passionate-victorian-by-eileen-bigland/

Here is a good reading list of novels set in the Arab world and available in English, courtesy of crime novelist Matt Rees:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jan/13/matt-rees-novels-arab-world

Among notables born on this date are French painters Berthe Morisot and Henri Fantin-Latour, humanitarian Albert Schweitzer, children's writers Hendrik Willem Van Loon and Hugh Lofting (creator of Doctor Dolittle), film directors Joseph Losey, Stan Brakhage, Steven Soderbergh, and Lawrence Kasdan, short story writer Tillie Olsen, early pop singer Russ Columbo, novelists John Dos Passos, Yukio Mishima, Anatoly Rybakov, and Pierre Loti, actors Faye Dunaway and Jason Bateman, theater director Trevor Nunn, photographers Cecil Beaton and Garry Winogrand, operatic tenor Ben Heppner, broadcaster Shepard Smith, and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. I remember seeing bon vivant Cecil Beaton interviewed on a PBS show in the early Seventies -- it must have been before his stroke in 1974 -- and being impressed and inspired by how he seemed to have known everyone in mid-20th century culture and society. He had much to say about them in his diaries, which were published carefully edited in his lifetime, unexpurgated after his death.

It amuses me to think of myself at 14 or 15, enthralled by Cecil Beaton and by Kenneth Clark in Civilisation, reading everything in sight, borrowing Mahler symphony LPs by the armful from my local public library. My interests were close to fully formed by that point, I'd say.