Kazhes pierakstu burtnīca

Quite good, but no total breakthrough. Some quotes may be coming up later. I really liked the idea but at some times the story got over the top.

Our excursion in the German literature continues. We enter one of the weird rooms. Its entitled `Thomas Bernhard` - and provides us enough material to break our heads. Four plays can be found in this collection of works. "A party for Boris" is the most unpredictable one - out of the 16 characters 15 have no legs. Most of the time one of them - The Good One talks a strange monologue which is directed towards Boris - her husband and her servant that has legs unlike everybody else. "The ignorant and the lunatic" is the most boring of those plays - there`s absolutely nothing going on but a doctor telling lots of stuff about diseases. "The hunting society" is about a wife of a dying general and a writer playing cards and discussing the life. Last but not least there`s "The power of the habit" is about a circus director named Caribaldi who forces four of his artists to practise a musical quintent for two decades, never achieving a perfect performance, and always complaining. What`s weird about these plays - it`s the language. I`m not really sure even - is it poetry or prose. It`s something in the style of Samuel Beckett, only less intriguing. On the other hand, maybe it`s elss intriguinging because I already have read Beckett - I`m not really sure for how much time absurd plays can attract ones interest.

Now that is a surprise even for myself - once again I`ve read a book by a Japanese writer. This one - Mr. Oe - is a Nobel prize winner (in Literature if you really didn`t expect that). If you know me you probably also know that authority isn`t authority to me. So he is a Nobel prize winner. Why would I think that Mr. Oe is better than the beggar I saw two hours ago eating cookies at the local supermarket? Probably because Mr Oe is a good writer. He created the story of Mitsu and Takasi - two brothers living in the Seventies Japan. Mitsu is the person from whose point of view we see the way story develops. He and his wife are dragged by Takasi to the village where the brothers spent their childhood. They come back to relive in some way the lives of their ancestors - Mitsu is the renewed his great-grandfather, a rich landowner, while Takasi is great-grandpas younger brother who lead a revolution in the First year of Mannen (1860). Nowadays Takasi starts training the local football team and makes out of his youth people that run over the local Korean supermarket. Still it ain`t 1860 and you can`t possibly win, and you don`t win at all. I read that this book is similar to the "Karamazov Brothers" by Dostojevski but I haven`t read that (I`m an ignorant punk) therefore it`s all I can say on the subject. The book i good, but not great. I wouldn`t give a Nobel prize for that but I wouldn`t say: "Shut your freakin` face uncle freaker!" either.

Sometimes it just happens that you watch a film like this one. This was a very crappy comedy about cheerleaders, boring and silly. Lots of shabby humour, useless sacharine and everything else one can expect from a comedy that went straight to video. By the way, this was a sequel to another crappy film - "Bring it On", that had at least Kirsten Dunst in it; and it also has a sequel "Bring it on: all or nothing" which seems to be even worse than the one I watched.

This was my second meeting with Mr. Werber`s writing and I must admit that after "The Empire of the Angels" I was expecting a litte more from this book. The main question of the book seems to be - who killed a famous doctor of medicine after he just has won a battle of chess agains the best computer in the world? A certain Miss Anderson who he had an affair with claims herself as the one responsible - after all he died at the moment of having an orgasm. Yet a couple of journalists don`t believe that everything is that simple. Only with time they discover that this fellow (I`m terrible at remembering names) had come into posession of the "ultimate secret". The nature of the secret isn`t such that various groups of very serious persons (VSPs) would want to take hold of it (actually they would, but it`s not the question here), it`s the secret itself that can make one die. The book contains a list of motives that drive peoples actions: 1. stopping the pain; 2. getting rid of fears; 3. primary needs of survival; 4. secondary needs of comfort; 5. duty; 6. anger; 7. sex; 8. drugs; 9. personal interest; 10. religion; 11. adventure; 12. promise of the ultimate secret; 13. the ultimate secret itself. What is the ultimate secret? It`s pleasure beyond imagination, it`s something that can make you climb the highest wall, forget about your fears, forget about all the first 11 motives on the list, and it`s something you`re ready to die for. Yet it`s so strong that you get addicted from it and there`s no cure for you in this world. That`s why it is the ultimate secret. And it is hidden in your brain.

I don`t mean to be rude but I`m just too lazy to say much about this book. It is a somewhat creepy story about 5 people being put inside a building which hasn`t been used in decades. They have to find the sun or something like that inside. One of the fellows dies very quickly and the job they have to do suddenly turns into a nightmare. Still there`s a problem worse than one of your fellow dying under bizarre circumstances. It`s your book being boring. And that is just the case of Georg Klein. I got so bored with the book that I really read it just to read it till the end, not caring about what was going on. So if you`d ask me what the moral of this story is or what happened to each of the characters I`d tell you - I don`t know. I only know that 3 of them stayed alive, one of the three - partly alive. So did I.

Iain Banks is a strange bird I hadn`t heard about until I bought this book of his. As I just read in Wikipedia he writes under two different names - as Iain Banks he`s a regulary literary fiction writer while when he takes the name of Iain M. Banks his books are pure science fiction. Still I guess that "Walking on glass", even if it isn`t science fiction per se owes rather much to this genre. The novel as three separate plots - one about a young wannabe painter named Graeme who has fallen in love with Sarah ffinch who`s dating a stupid biker (a perfect place to quote "Fountains of Wayne" with "Leave the Biker": "I wonder if that guy’s read one word that wasn’t in a porno mag") and who also has a very explosive homosexual friend named Slater who only talks about gay sex and gays all the time. Then there`s a story about Steven who has been building roads until now but he had to leave the job because of an accident where he got angry and slaughtered a cat and attacked a colleague of his. Steven believes his being on Earth is some sort of punishment for doing something bad in the intergalactic wars and now he only wants to come back, meanwhile he`s paranoid about everyone being out to get him (he`s surely more than one card short of a full deck, he`s not quite the shilling). The third story takes place in a strange castle where an elderly man and a woman are playing games and trying to solve a riddle: "What would happen if an unstoppable force encountered an unmovable object?" In the end everything doesn`t exactly come together as a piece of puzzle but everything becomes at least rather clear. A very entertaining book, although I`m not sure what the author meant to tell.

It`s hard to imagine a band more disgusting than "A.C." I mean, can one get more offensive than this band? First - the title of the band itself is ugly enough. Then come the song titles including "All our fans are gay", "Limp Bizkit think they`re black but they`re just fucking gay", "You were too ugly to rape so I just beat the shit out of you", "Even though your culture opresses women you still suck, you fucking towelheads", "You converted to judaism so a guy would touch your dick" etc. Actually I`m not sure that they`re singing anything that can be found on the lyric sheets - since the band prefers evil screaming set to a fast and furious metal music it would come to me as no surprise were they in fact spreading a second message with their music. The best thing about this record is its length - 8.5 minutes. Were it longer, it would have sucked. At this length it was rather refreshing. I`ll never listen to it in my life again though.

Sean William Scott is so cute! Don`t you know him? His mom rocks! You still don`t know him? Why, it`s Stiffler from American Pie, of course. At the beginning of this film it seemed somewhat unexpected - mr. Scott doesn`t usually participate in serious action movies, he`s more of a silly character, and my theory wasn`t proved wrong. Of course, Scott`s character acted kinda silly. Beck (played by The Rock) is a cool guy for the most difficult missions, he`s sent by Billy on his last mission to find Billie`s son Travis who keeps looking for some artifact in the jungle of Brazil. To do what he`s supposed to do Beck must overcome a villain named Hatcher who runs a gold mine in Brazil, and Travis himself, who is a real dork most of the time. There`s also a sexy chick, who`s name I`ve already forgotten. Was it Michelle? No, but close to it, I guess. She`s the leader of local guerillas, who fight Hatcher. And there`s also a cool scotsman, who plays bagpipes. There are pretty good action scenes, the humor is mostly silly, but not offensive. Overall this is a nice film for relaxation when you don`t need to follow the plot or anything.

I only read it because Bergengruen was born in Riga. I never thought that this book would be good. But it amazingly is. Some parts of Bergengruens biography aren`t particulary interesting but the way he describes some episodes is just brilliant. For example, his family left Riga for Germany in early 1900s, so when Werner was to go to WW1 his father said to him: "You see how good it is that you are not in there anymore, in that case you`d fight against your own people." So Werner says that he sees no big difference on which side to die, and his relationship with his father is never really good again. Then there was one interesting thing about Knut Hamsun (the Norwegian writer) - when during WW2 he expressed his support for the Nazis it became a good style for the people of his hometown to throw books written by Hamsun into his garden, and even pilgrims from other towns came to do the same thing. I have to admit that the book isn`t really evenly written but the good things in this case make up for the bad ones and I really can`t say that this book is no good.