THE DIRTY DOZEN

"He was angry with himself for being young and the prey of restless foolish impulses, angry also with the change of fortune which was reshaping the world about him into a vision of squalor and insincerity.  Yet his anger lent nothing to the vision.  He chronicled with patience what he saw, detaching himself from it and testing its mortifying flavour in secret"--A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Sunday was the latest Reading Out Loud Meetup.  A Chinese girl called Lu came who wanted to improve her English.  She read a vivid chapter about giving birth from A.J. Cronin's medical novel The Citadel.

Last night I saw Robert Aldrich's unsubtle war movie The Dirty Dozen--for the second time--at the Classic Movie Meetup.  I saw it mostly for Lee Marvin, one of my favorite tough guys. (The New York Times capsule description says: "Entertaining as a blowtorch.") Did you know that this was the most popular movie in American cinemas during the summer of 1967 a.k.a. "the Summer of Love"?

I was just thinking about the early '70s British TV series The Adventures of Black Beauty.  I was thinking how I liked Dr. Gordon, Vicki's widowed father played by William Lucas.  He was always saying wise things like "Rome wasn't built in a day."

I'm pleased that Bernie Sanders is running for U.S. president again!  I have a feeling that this time he'll be unstoppable...