Ummagumma

I have been listening to Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here album a lot lately and, as always, one thing leads to another. I have ended up listening to a great deal more classic material and pondering the music in different ways. In this case, since Wish You Were Here (1975) was a fantastic follow-up to The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), it got me thinking about how many great consecutive albums there were in rock/pop history. The genre is packed with towering achievements, of course, but very few performers have ever actually managed back-to-back masterpieces that stand the test of time, with no “filler” tracks, no stumbles, just two sequential statements of greatness. By my reckoning, only five artists qualify, and Pink Floyd’s one-two punch is the greatest of them all. The Floyd’s pairing is distinctive in how different the two albums are while still standing shoulder-to-shoulder in the rock canon. Dark Side is sleek, polished, cohesive — a perfect conceptual arc on time, madness...

Long-time readers know I am trying to widen my exposure to fiction from this century (see here and here ). So, it was inevitable that, sooner or later, I would read Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. The novel kept popping up on lists of "essential 21st-century novels" that I came across. The Guardian , Time , a bunch of others had it ranked near the top, and I figured it was time to broaden my fiction intake beyond the classics and nonfiction I usually lean toward. But truth be told, the novel left me cold. I didn’t connect with it. I didn’t care what happened to anyone. I didn’t even feel much when the so-called revelations started unfolding. I was waiting for the novel to rise to the occasion, and it never did. The story follows a clone (although you don't know it in the beginning) named Kathy H. who grows up in a strange, cloistered boarding school called Hailsham, where students are encouraged to produce art and stay in line, all under a cloud of unspoken rules an...

Proof of purchase. Jane Smiley's  A Thousand Acres  came to me as a recommendation from Brian during  our  recent trip to St. George . When I learned it had won the Pulitzer Prize in the 1990s, I thought, "why not?" What followed was one of those reading experiences that sneaks up on you—a novel that draws you in through the mundane rhythms of rural life, then delivers its devastating truths with matter-of-fact precision. I was pleased with how Smiley managed to hold my interest during the first half of the novel, without much of anything happening except the goings on of a rural community and farming life. This is no small achievement. The author settles into the slow, steady rhythm of Midwestern farming life—machinery humming, chores repeating, conversations heavy with unspoken tensions. I found myself genuinely invested in this quiet world, even as I began to wonder, despite her having an affair, when something "big" was actually going to happen. Then Rose bl...

The situation on August 22, just before the fall of Kharkov in the game Ring of Fire .  Unfortunately, the 1994 game only plays through August 16 but you can sort of recreate the next week in this manner.  You can see the two Soviet Tank Corps encircled by the Germans with 10th Panzergrenadier linking up with Totenkopf as Grossdeutschland tries to push toward Kharkov.  Bogodukhov is in the center.  I played this game a lot back int he 1990's and still tinker with it now and then.  I played it again for the first time in years with my most recent interest in this situation as detailed in this series. [ Part One ] [ Part Two ]  [ Part Three ] [ Part Four ] [ Part Five ] [ Part Six ] [ Part Seven ] Most people have never heard of any of these places. Americans and Europeans are used to D-Day and the Battle of Bulge. But those operations, as fascinating and historic as they were, do not compare to war on the scale of the Eastern Front. In terms of large-sca...