January 15

The Independent has the low-down on the new ten-volumes-in-one (and extraordinarily expensive) Stanley Kubrick film book, Napoleon: The Greatest Film Never Made:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/stanley-kubrick--a-dream-movie-revisited-1868267.html

The narrowest house in New York City, with quite a cultural pedigree, recently sold for $2.1 million. It looks terribly cute in photographs, but I'm not sure about actually living there:

http://mhpbooks.com/mobylives/?p=11772

Albert Mobilio in Bookforum has a consideration of Umberto Eco's The Infinity of Lists, an appreciation of list-making that seems the most incredibly timely book for December 2009-January 2010:

http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/016_04/4670

Speaking of lists, here are the Comics of the Decade from Omnivoracious. Lots to follow up on:

http://www.omnivoracious.com/2010/01/graphic-novel-friday-comics-of-the-decade.html

Among notables born on this date, the Ides of January, are quite a number of creative writers: poets Nazim Hikmet (Turkey), Odip Mandelstam (Russia), Xu Zhimo (China), Ivor Cutler (Scotland), Mihai Eminescu (Rumania); fiction writers Ernest J. Gaines, Arsen Kotsoyev (Ossetia), Mazo de la Roche (Canada), William Heinemann (Faroe Islands); and playwrights Moliere and Prosper Crebillon (France), Franz Grillparzer (Austria), and Stanislaw Wyspianski (Poland). Also born on this date are actors Margaret O'Brien and Lloyd Bridges, SCTV alumna Andrea Martin, rocker Captain Beefheart, French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, civil rights activist Rev. Martin Luther King Jr, Welsh singer Ivor Novello, jazz drummer Gene Krupa, and historian Hugh Trevor-Roper. Trevor-Roper's Hermit of Peking, on the life of the Orientalist, forger, and scoundrel Sir Edmund Backhouse, is as absorbing and entertaining a historical biography as one could ever hope to read.