Dispatches from Zembla

Carol Reed's Odd Man Out wasn't really a discovery for me since I anyway expected it to be great (being a huge fan of The Third M...

One reviewer of 2666 has already called it "a love child of David Lynch and Borges." There is one reference to Lynch which I th...

[But] what are good times? Sergio Gonzalez asked himself. Maybe they're what separate certain people from the rest of us, who live in a...

It's been a really long period of silence here in Zembla. Sorry about disappearing for so long. Been busy, but nothing special. Just reg...

from the new york magazine, an excellent profile of the nutty film critic Armond White.

There is a very interesting discussion of moods in Being and Time . Interesting specially because it is quite different from what we general...

Another excerpt from The Savage Detectives. I think I am a cool-headed reader but I definitely prefer literature of desperation, books ...

A truly eye-popping phrase which cracked me up! A short extract from "The Savage Detectives", this is one of the narrators talking...

An extract from Don DeLillo's White Noise . I found it pretty boring but at least it is not as huge as Underworld which I had to abandon...

Long absence from the blogworld again! I used to always complain (to myself) that "nothing happens in life", like Charlie Kaufmann...

For a change something funny coming out of Pakistan.

An excerpt from The Book of Disquiet. A cautionary tale (or an ironic comment) about too much inwardness? ********* Whether I like it or not...

Ghajini I went to see a hindi movie in theatre after a really long time. The last time was "Mangal Pandey" a couple of years back ...

Nice article on the growing menace of self-help books. I liked this comment about the "law of attraction", a very common motif in...

Well, not really because the camera is still standing in for the male gaze but this is still a very interesting shot! Still is from the 1970...

This is another film on my to-see list - Nicholas Ray's Bigger than Life (or "Delirium of Madness" as the Spanish poster has i...

This site has a great collection of posters of classic films. Here is a selection of classic film noirs. Poster above via Dave Kehr's ...

I didn't read a lot of fiction this year. Nothing like last couple of years when I discovered Robert Musil, Thomas Bernhard, Laszlo Kras...

I have been reading Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates these days. Initially I thought it was quite conventional and straightforward in sty...

It's been longer than expected but I don't really feel like blogging anymore. Just waking up in the morning and getting on with norm...

Will be back in a few weeks. Or sooner. To keep you company here are David Lynch (words), Angelo Badalamenti (music) and Julee Cruise (voice...

I came across this website which collects the writings of Lev Shestov , a Russian religious-existentialist philosopher who also wrote books...

I really hope I get a chance to see "Synecdoche New York" before I leave but it seems unlikely. Most American reviewers are comp...

"A shard in your own eye is the best magnifying glass." -Adorno, Minima Moralia (full text here ) Nice thought even though in real...

The TLS has a review of a book by some right-wing nut who says that literary critics are unjustifiably hostile to market and commercialism ...

"[T]he desire to have one's own death is becoming more and more rare. Shortly it will be as rare as a life of one's own." ...

Weltflucht: nice word to know. Quite simple actually - it means flight from the world - but it is still nice to have it as one word. Somewha...