From the mail department

I received an email, of which the following is a tidbit, from one of my oldest BFFs to whom I had sent Alleghany Uprising (1939) for Christmas.

Allegheny Uprising was GREAT!!  You would think after reading your blog for years that I would have seen more John Wayne movies, but we had only seen a few classics (Stagecoach, The Quiet Man). That is definitely going to change and “watch more John Wayne movies” may actually qualify as one of my resolutions this year!!

I ask, what could be a better new year’s resolution than that?

As the poet Fernando Pessoa lamented, “One of my life’s tragedies is to have already read Pickwick Papers–I can’t go back and read it for the first time.”  Alas, there are practically no John Wayne movies I can watch for the first time, but, readers, you can!

My son-in-law (DN) is woefully behind in his old movie watching, so I gave him The Great Escape (1963), The Magnificent Seven (1960) and The Thomas Crown Affair (1967) for Christmas–all of which he has not seen. Think of watching them for the first time!

[I must say there are some real spoilers in this trailer!]

Also from the mailbag: One of the books I bought at an estate sale last Saturday was a copy of Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, a favorite of mine. In it he recommends two books that “are always among my things…

…the Bible and the books of the great Danish writer, Jens Peter Jacobsen. I wonder whether you know his works…Get yourself the little volume of Six Stories of J.P. Jacobsen and his novel Niels Lyhne…A world will open up to you, the happiness, the abundance, the incomprehensible immensity of a world. Live a while in these books, learn from them what seems to you worth learning, but above all love them. This love will be repaid to you a thousand and a thousand times…

Sold!

I had never heard of J.P. Jacobsen before, but I will “live a while in these books.”

It’s January–try something new!