A missive from Hiatusville

Hey there folks. You may have noticed that I haven’t posted anything in the last month or so. Rest assured that I’m doing fine. I’m just really, really busy. I’ll write more about it when I’ve gotten it under control, but for now I’ll just leave it at that.

What’s more, I simply haven’t felt very inspired lately. Normally, I would have posted a Criterion Watch just to have some new content on the blog. However, seeing as how last month’s announcement was a massive box set of Akira Kurosawa movies, I didn’t see much of a point. Being a quality-over-quantity kind of guy, I can’t get too worked up about the notion of spending several hundred dollars on a box of bare-bones editions of Kurosawa movies, most of which Criterion has already done up right. Then again, I sort of felt the same way about the Essential Art House box a few years back, but that didn’t stop others from declaring it, well, “Essential”.

Finally, an update on my progress with the Nobel Project. Or more precisely, the lack thereof. My original goal being to start with the then-most-recent winner and work back in time backfired when I couldn’t make it through the first thirty pages or so of J.M.G. le Clézio’s The Interrogation. Maybe it was a bad translation, but I found the style of it really alienating, full of endless paragraphs and the like. Perhaps I’ll re-evaluate my plan of attack on the Nobel laureates- start with a few that really interest me (Lewis, Coetzee, Garcia Marquez, etc.)- before progressing to the others. I’ll even try le Clézio again when I’m in a better frame of mind. And sometime in the near future, I’ll find time to work in next year’s (co-)winner(s), the staff of the Onion AV Club, and their new Inventory book.

Anyway, look for new content here later today. And thanks for sticking around.