Hagen

I finally (!) finished Underworld by Don Delillo. It seems like it took forever, I was completely exhausted by it about half-way through and had to put it down and read a couple of other books, but I picked it up again and finally finished it. There is no doubt that Delillo is a very talented writer and the book is so ambitious in the fact that he tries to create a panoramic view of the American landscape from the 50's to the 90's. But with 100+ characters and subplots it becomes confusing and tries way too hard. Honestly he could have cut 300 pages out and it wouldn't have hurt it. What keeps you reading while Delillo breaks of into various subplots is the tension and "unsolved mysteries" in the main plot, which in the end get resolved in a fairly anti-climatic way. Way too long, way to self-involving and really not worth the effort. I wouldn't recommend it.

There Will be Blood The best actor award should be renamed in honor of Daniel Day-Lewis

I finished On the Road by Jack Kerouac and while the open references to sex and drugs, what the book originally became famous for, aren't nearly as shocking today as they were in the 50's, it's still a really good book. Kerouac's stream-of-consciousness writing style is really easy to follow and the underlying themes of friendship and struggeling with your place in the world are still as relevant today as they were back then. Kerouac's exploration of the world through his friendship with Neal Cassady (or Dean Moriarty if you will) is really well done and ends on a pretty cool morale. Now that I've read all three "major works" of the Beat Generation, I can say that On the Road is easily the best. I've now started the rather ambitious project of reading Underworld by Don DeLillo. I just finished the prolouge to the book "The Triumph of Death" and if the rest of the book is anything like that then I'll be absolutely hooked. Searching around the internet though, it seems people generally agree that the prologue is the best part, so I guess I'll have to wait and see.

I finally finished London Fields by Martin Amis, it was a real struggle to get through and I was close to putting it down a bunch of times. There is no real plot in the novel, merely a cast of characters who get thrown into a scenario and then you watch them develop. There is no doubt that Amis has a strong command of the english language and really interresting characters but this was way to dull and way too long.

Since I started working again I haven't watched much as I've only been able to get home to watch the last 25 km or so, of the stages, but it seems I didn't miss much other than more crashes and Gilbert almost beating up a spectator. I do however love how the danish commentators are going crazy about "dissention in the ranks of team sky" and whether or not Froome will be able to beat Wiggins today, but I suppose they're just trying to add tension to an otherwise uneventful tour. Also Chris Anker Sørensen is the fucking man for finishing the stage with that injury the other day.

Impressive showing from Wiggins today, not so much for Evans though (to say the least). With two Sky guys now in top, I think we can expect to see some big attacks in the coming days. What will be interresting though, with Evans being almost 2 minutes behind, is whether or not we will see any sort of Evans/Nibali/Menchov alliance.

I really feel the season has been quite dull so far. I agree with everything said above. The only interresting things going atm is Sam's storyline and the cliffhanger at the end of the episode

It seems Samuel Sanchez is out. If it is as bad as it looks he probably won't be able to defend his gold at the Olympics either.

I think the first category 1 climb is what, Saturday? I reckon Cancellara will do what he can to keep the yellow jersey until then. At the same time Mørkøv will probably have to kiss the polka dot Jersey goodbye the same day.

Lolita is a great book. I remember it as being kinda heavy at times too, but what I loved most about it is really the way Nabokov uses Humbert Humbert as an unrealible narrator who costantly tries to make himself seem sympathetic/justify his actions to the reader. Very well done indeed. I finihsed Hitch-22: A Memoir By Christopher Hitchens. The last 50 pages or so was really a struggle. The book had some really interresting stories like going to Argentina to look for a famous political prisoner (I forgot who) and Hitchens hanging out with Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie and Martin and Kingsley Amis in 1970's London. That being said though, you just really get fed up with the pretentiousness and level of detail Hitchens puts into his writing. A lot of people would probably enjoy it, but for me it could have been cut down quite a bit. I found myself almost constantly checking wikipedia because he just writes in a way where he expects you to understand all the names he mentions. Finally today I finished Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk. Palahniuk does have a flair for quirky self-obssesed characters and interresting dialouge, but the story just seemed too scrambled. There were constantly twists and turns that kept taking the story in different directions, not that it's bad, but the main problem was that I pretty much guessed all of them before they happened and as such there was nothing really extraordinary about the book.

It did. Fantastic final sprint from Sagan though. I'm pretty sure they will envoke the 3 km rule, so Wiggins won't lose time after all.

Nasty nasty crash. José Rojas is out after going into the barbwire. It seems Cavendish, Gilbert and Voeckler have all been dropped after the crash. In good news Mørkøv continues to prove he is awesome. I'm really really hoping he takes the stage today right now.

LL Sanchez, Tony Martin and Marcel Kittel were all completely done about 15 km before the finish line, probably because of injuries, I don't know if Kittel went down today, but it could seem like it. I guess this leaves out some of the previous favourites for the sprinting stages/green jersey. It was great that Mørkøv took another point on the polka dot jersey and is proving himself to be quite the rider, i don't expect him to keep it once they hit the mountains though. It wasn't the most eventfull stage today, but then again I wasn't really expecting it to be.

That photographer was pretty damn stupid. They haven't said yet which Rabobank rider went down here, but it looks like he's out now. Also my dream prediction for today was for Mørkov to take the stage, but that's looking more and more unlikely now. But at least he got the polka dot jersey.

With the tour staying in Belgium today I'm kinda expecting Gilbert to go on the attack for the yellow jersey allthough he's not in the best position. Also with one category 4 climb Cancellara will have to work to keep the yellow jersey, I'm halfly expecting him to drop it.

Watched The King of Comedy the other night. Probably the least hyped De Niro/Scorsese collaboration but it was pretty good. Not only is it quite funny it's also pretty clever, really underrated movie.

Wow bad luck for Tony Martin. Even though it was a quick change, it might have just cost him the stage.

So the prolouge kicks of in about an hour and it seems that the favourite (at least for the announcers here) is Bradley Wiggins, with Fabian Cancellara and Tony Martin rounding out the top three of potential winners. I don't really know since I haven't watched any cycling this year whatsoever and everybody seems to basing it on the fact that Wiggins has apparently done fantastically earlier this year.

On the notion of odd casting choices I remember that Edward Norton was almost Andy Kaufman in Man on the Moon, Beverly Hills Cop was originally written for Sylvester Stallone and Kirk Douglas was the main choice to potray McMurphy in One Flew over the Cukoo's Nest untill the producers vetoe'd him out

Marlon Brando's epic monologue at the end of Apocalypse Now was pretty much improvised. It was also shot in the dark because Brando, at the time, was too fat to realistically potray a US Army Colonel. In the opening of the movie where Martin Sheen is drunk in his room and doing martial arts he actually was blackout drunk. He accidentally punched a mirror and started bleeding heavily, but Coppola decided to keep shooting and leave it in because he thought it looked good.

Bukowski is my favourite writer. That being said, I find that his poetry is hit and miss most of the time. I'd much rather read Ginsberg or even Kerouac for that matter. It's hard to pin-point what exactly the appeal of Bukowski is. He's really one of those writers where you really like him or not at all.

I agreee completely. Burroughs makes way more sense to me when I hear his readings, whereas just reading his prose does nothing for me. Bukowski is exactly the opposite, I love his prose. But I've never really been a fan of his readings. I guess it's ironic in some way since Bukowski is often lumped in with the beat writers but he himself hated Ginsberg and Burroughs.

I just finished Women by Charles Bukowski. I think I just got a new favourite book. I'm about half-way through Naked Lunch and I agree with what's been said previously in this thread. Burroughs is, in my opinion, way way too descriptive and crass for the sake of being crass. I know it's meant that way to be provocative, but still. Naked Lunch seems like a book you either hate or love, no middle ground. And I'm not a fan. Usually I really like beat litterature, but Naked Lunch is just too much. The last time I really had to force myself to read a book was when I was reading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, but that was primarily because of the writing style. Once I finally got through it, it really paid off at the end. Naked Lunch just doesn't seem to have the same "pay-off" At the same time I'm currently reading through Hitch-22 a memoir by Christopher Hitchens. The language is, at times, really really pretentious and it seems that Hitchens could say things in a simpler manner by just chooses to write it in a fancier language. Nonetheless it's a really interresting book and I'm having a hard time putting it down

I echo the love for the Cheers opening credits, mainly because of nostalgia. X-Files was great too, I used to have nightmares about that opening theme when I was a kid. However this is by far my favourite opening credits of all time:

So I finished Money: A Suicide Note by Martin Amis. Amis' characters are seriously fantastic stuff and the high point of the novel by miles. At times it could feel rather long because the characters are constantly linking past events with the events that take place in the book, and that paired with the post-modernist style of Amis' writing can make it rather confusing at times and make it seem like the novel isn't really moving forward. Really good book nonetheless. Even though I was kinda expecting a bigger blow-off, I think the ending fit the John Self character quite well. I am currently in the process of reading through everything prose by Bukowski. Allthough I usually spread it out between other authors so I won't get burned out reading the same thing all the time. I finished Notes of a Dirty Old Man which was great. Classic Bukowski. I finally pulled myself together and read The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger which I have been meaning to do for a long time. I get the whole thing about teenage rebellion and alienation and I see how it could have been very shocking in the 50's. But with all the hype that still surrounds the book to this day I really didn't think it lived up to the expectations and I was rather disappointed. Finally, today I finished Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Really great book. It started of rather slow, but once I really got into the story I almost couldn't put it down again. I think Vonnegut did a great job of weaving the science-fiction plot into the war-theme of the book. All in all really well done.