Jai Paul -- BTSTU

The Bear Came Over the Mountain by Alice Munro

When I first started reading (or in this case, not reading) Alice Munro, I would read the first two pages and stop. I just didn't care about adolescent girls and nature, especially when the stories were more about the latter. But a few months ago, Ms. Munro published a story called "Corrie" in The New Yorker and it was absolutely fantastic -- especially great because it was four pages long, compared to her usual fifty page plus stories. I would post that one here on the J-List, but unfortunately super new stories are exclusive to New Yorker subscribers (ahem). The next best thing I've read by her is this: The Bear Came Over the Mountain. Unfortunately, this story is a big one, but I absolutely guarantee that it will stick with you for a long time. Johnathan Franzen wrote in a review for Munro's newest book, citing this exact story as an example of her excellence, her ability to craft true drama (and trust me, it's one big drop after another in this story.) Anyways, without further ado, here is the story:

Fiona lived in her parents’ house, in the town where she and Grant went to university. It was a big, bay-windowed house that seemed to Grant both luxurious and disorderly, with rugs crooked on the floors and cup rings bitten into the table varnish. Her mother was Icelandic—a powerful woman with a froth of white hair and indignant far-left politics. The father was an important cardiologist, revered around the hospital but happily subservient at home, where he would listen to his wife’s strange tirades with an absent-minded smile. Fiona had her own little car and a pile of cashmere sweaters, but she wasn’t in a sorority, and her mother’s political activity was probably the reason. Not that she cared. Sororities were a joke to her, and so was politics—though she liked to play “The Four Insurgent Generals” on the phonograph, and sometimes also the “Internationale,” very loud, if there was a guest she thought she could make nervous. A curly-haired gloomy-looking foreigner was courting her—she said he was a Visigoth—and so were two or three quite respectable and uneasy young interns. She made fun of them all and of Grant as well. She would drolly repeat some of his small-town phrases. He thought maybe she was joking when she proposed to him, on a cold bright day on the beach at Port Stanley. Sand was stinging their faces and the waves delivered crashing loads of gravel at their feet.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1999/12/27/1999_12_27_110_TNY_LIBRY_000019900#ixzz1Bgd7F5I5

Dazed and Confused: No Longer Confusing and also, Why Criticism Matters

Just recently New York Times Book Review published a set of articles titled: "Why Criticism Matters," and while, I didn't read any of these articles, the very answer to that question seems to be answered in this video below. A.O. Scott, the New York Times head movie critic, does a video review of 'Dazed and Confused' -- an old favorite of mine, that I used to watch in my cloudy, dingy basement. I liked the movie for the same reasons I liked American Pie and Superbad: it offered comfort and empathy to the world of high school I so desperately wished to escape. Here in this video though, the critic says exactly that but in so many ways, offering clarity and understanding to a movie that I didn't think needed any. In essence, that's why I think criticism matters, to illuminate a work to a new level of understanding, just how a professor does when he takes a poem that seems like a crowd of nonsensical meaningless words, and shows how they are so much more. 

"WTF man you don't post often enough!"

...says no one. Anyways, here is a cool song, that I'm stealing from pitchfork's top 100 songs. But I don't know, it's tickling my fancy right now.

The J-List and New Years

No new posts in two weeks, no BS happy new year's post like every other blog -- not the case! (Well, belated happy new years.) And to start off the J-List on a great new year of excellent music and quality music videos and any other things appropriately called "excellent stuff," I have this video that  fulfills all of those requirements. Once again, happy new years, and enjoy: