1) I didn't "brag" about being ignorant, I simply insinuated that not everybody has heard of her - including myself and what I'd assume to be the vast majority of people on this very continent - the same majority who have never heard of Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky either.

2) I do know about a particular movie called "Interview with a Vampire" and until earlier today, I didn't have the slightest clue - nor interest - as to who wrote the story it's based on. The same applies to hundreds of other movies, while we're at it.

3) I have no opinion of her, since I don't care about her. The purpose of my ocmment was to mention the odd impression one might get while reading the summary of the respective WP article - since she was born "Howard Allen" and is an "author of gothic, erotic, and religious-themed books". That is no reflection on her, but on the information revealed about her by the author of said article.>> ^mizila:

What a useful and constructive post, I like the part where you brag about being ignorant. Yes, most people recognize the name Anne Rice because she wrote a few vampire books including one called Interview with a Vampire... a book which was made into a movie starring a couple of little known thespians from a little town called Hollywood named Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise. So yeah, most people over 20 have heard of Anne Rice.
Sorry, I'm not a fan of hers either, but what a stupid comment. "Oh somebody I've never heard of, why don't I look them up on wiki, scan the page for a couple seconds and tell everyone what opinions I've formed!!"

I'm from Latvia
Admittedly though, while Kafka in the curriculum was indeed a fact, our public education system is becoming a LOT less draconian these days (kids can actually choose NOT to have physics and chem in years 10-12 these days, which is very sad, actually), so I wouldn't be surprised if it had been substituted by local (lesser) authors by now. Then again, I was always a lit-nerd - all I did, age 3-10, was read, several hours' worth, every day. Then I discovered computers.

Also, one of the reasons I remember Kafka as "light reading" might be due to me taking on the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner and Ulysses around the same time

Btw, I didn't vote for the clip in question because of (I know, I'm always unpopular because of this-) Pink Floyd - I absolutely can't stand The Wall...

In reply to this comment by enoch:
In reply to this comment by EDD:
Why would there be any frustration, especially for a Lit major? Metamorphosis is short, interesting and easy reading with quite unambiguous allegory and metaphors. Where I'm from, its analysis is in the 9/10th grade curriculum.

you read kafka in 9th grade?i remember reading steinbeck,j.d salinger and shakespeare.where did you go to school?albania?
i like kafka's short works of poems but his narratives lose me.my roomie was english lit,he was always complaining about kafka.my sentence structure alone should reveal that I was not the english lit person in question...sighs.
i never got into any of his other work.
i was the same with tolstoy and doesteyevsky.they bored me.
"metamorphosis" is pretty good,mix that with floyd and it was a winner to me.
the song and animation actually make this short verse more vibrant in my opinion.

should i remove that line?a co-worker of mine has her masters in english,and she too says that kafka was a pain in the ass.
she is from albania btw..pre-algebra in first grade..yeesh.
figured that was two that thought kafka was a royal pain.
im not exactly a kafka expert,but i like his poetry.
not my fave mind you,but i like.

In reply to this comment by EDD:
Why would there be any frustration, especially for a Lit major? Metamorphosis is short, interesting and easy reading with quite unambiguous allegory and metaphors. Where I'm from, its analysis is in the 9/10th grade curriculum.

you read kafka in 9th grade?i remember reading steinbeck,j.d salinger and shakespeare.where did you go to school?albania?
i like kafka's short works of poems but his narratives lose me.my roomie was english lit,he was always complaining about kafka.my sentence structure alone should reveal that I was not the english lit person in question...sighs.
i never got into any of his other work.
i was the same with tolstoy and doesteyevsky.they bored me.
"metamorphosis" is pretty good,mix that with floyd and it was a winner to me.
the song and animation actually make this short verse more vibrant in my opinion.

should i remove that line?a co-worker of mine has her masters in english,and she too says that kafka was a pain in the ass.
she is from albania btw..pre-algebra in first grade..yeesh.
figured that was two that thought kafka was a royal pain.
im not exactly a kafka expert,but i like his poetry.
not my fave mind you,but i like.

According to Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucia_di_Lammermoor#Trivia, it's been used in;

The "Lucia Sextet" (Chi mi frena in tal momento?) was recorded in 1908 by Enrico Caruso, Marcella Sembrich, Antonio Scotti, Marcel Journet, Barbara Severina, and Francesco Daddi, (Victor single-sided 70036) and released at the price of $7.00, earning it the title of "The Seven-Dollar Sextet". The film The Great Caruso incorporates a scene featuring a performance of this sextet.

The "Lucia Sextet" melody is best known to some from its use by the American slapstick comedy team the Three Stooges in their short films Micro-Phonies and Squareheads of the Round Table, sung in the latter with the lyrics "Oh, Elaine, can you come out tonight...." But the melody is used most dramatically in Howard Hawks' gangster classic "Scarface": Tony Camonte (Paul Muni) whistles "Chi mi frena?" in the film's opening sequence, as he guns down a ganglord boss he has been assigned to protect.

It has also been used in Warner Brothers cartoons: Long-Haired Hare, sung by the opera singer (Bugs Bunny's antagonist); Book Revue, sung by the wolf antagonist; and in Back Alley Oproar, sung by a choir full of Sylvesters, the cat.

The "Lucia Sextet" melody also figures in two scenes from the 2006 film The Departed, directed by Martin Scorsese. In one scene, Jack Nicholson's character is shown at a performance of "Lucia di Lammermoor", and the music on the soundtrack is from the sextet. Later in the film, Nicholson's cell phone ringtone is the sextet melody.

The Sextet is also featured during a scene from the 1986 comedy film, The Money Pit.

In the children's book "The Cricket in Times Square," Chester Cricket chirps the tenor part to the "Lucia Sextet" as the encore to his farewell concert, literally stopping traffic in the process.

An aria from the "mad scene," "Il dolce suono" (from the 3rd Act), was re-popularized when it was featured in the film The Fifth Element in a performance by the alien diva Plavalaguna (voiced by Albanian soprano Inva Mula-Tchako and played onscreen by French actress Maïwenn Le Besco). A loose remake of this film version of the song was covered by Russian pop singer Vitas.

The "mad scene" was also used in the first episode of the anime series Gankutsuou (in place of L'Italiana in Algeri which was the opera used in that scene in The Count of Monte Cristo).

The "mad scene" aria, as sung by Inva Mula-Tchako, was used in an episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent involving the murder of a young violinist by her opera singer mother (who performs the song right after the murder).

The "mad scene" was released as a music video by Russian male soprano Vitas in 2006.

Among other selections from the opera, the "mad scene", "Verranno a te sull'aure", and "Che facesti?" feature prominently in the 1983 Paul Cox film Man of Flowers, especially "Verranno a te sull'aure," which accompanies a striptease in the film's opening scene.

The opera is mentioned in the novels The Count of Monte Cristo, Madame Bovary and Where Angels Fear to Tread and was reputedly one of Tolstoy's favorites.

"Regnava nel silenzio" accompanies the scene in Beetlejuice in which Lydia (Winona Ryder) composes a suicide note.

A portion of the opera is also used in a key scene of the film The Fifth Element, written and directed by Luc Besson.

1- 1984, Orwell
2- Animal Farm, orwell
3- War of the Worlds, Wells
4- The Stranger, Camus
5- Hamlet, Shakespeare

I've read most of these books in the past year or so, but they're the first batch of books in a while that i just haven't been able to put down.

also: the harry potter series, JK Rowling, the thief lord, inkheart and inkspell, all Cornelia funke, and lastly War and Peace, Tolstoy. yea, i went there.

CHEKOV!

TOLSTOY!

CHEKOV!

TOLSTOY!

CHEKOV!

TOLSTOY

It is amazing how complete is the illusion that beauty is goodness. --Leo Tolstoy

Would it have mattered, QM? Kerry was a skull and bonesman just like Bush at Yale.... Both were from the same cut. Both designated by Bilderberg conventioners. Both part of the same NWO objective. If your too blind to see it then you will continue to let our freedom be slowly chipped away by a shadow government that dictates from behind the scenes.

>>> This type of conspiracy stuff has been around forever, long before the country was even born. I refuse to play along with the logic that "No solid evidence equals proof of just how good these conspirators are!"

Go ahead and scoff at the notion. One day you will realize when the Constitution is gone. Then it will be too late. Then we will truly be slaves or worse. Al Queda was trained by the fucking CIA. We supplied them arms in Afganistan, trained them in the ways of terror. Now this tool is being used against us for many purposes. To instill fear, to further secure the arms contracts that supply the war, meanwhile those orchestrating the whole thing are getting wealthier from the manufacture of the weapons, the oil fields, the R&D contracts, the NWO's 5th objective that Bush Sr. stated (Sept. 11, 1991 - look up the video http://www.videosift.com/video/Bush-Sr-NWO-5th-Objective-Sept-11-1991) they were implementing is now moving into the 6th-10th objectives at once. NAFTA and PNAC, Euros, Dollars into Ameros into National ID with a cashless society, even implanted with a microchip.

It's "too late" already. FDR's threatening to pack the Supreme Court with cronies ushered in the modern welfare state. Up until then even the most liberal Supreme Court justices intepreted the Constitution to mean exactly what it read. Barring alien invasion, a warped, facetious interpretation of the "Commerce Clause" has made government's expansion permanent. I don't like it, you don't like it, but half the country wants everything handed to them for nothing while the other half would see the law manipulate markets to improve the bottom line, also not a new concept.

You don't need conspiracy theories, homey. Here's a crime in plain sight: there's nothing in the Constitution that says the gummint must provide anyone with an education. But since they do--a crappy one at rip-off prices--the teaching of American History, the greatest bulwark against rehashed political schemes--has all but vanished.

If it were up to me I'd scrap the whole public "education" machine, which is a grossly expensive, decades-long commercial for government dependency, and give people their money back.

Are you going to roll over for these elite neocon bastards? Have you already?

The System is the System. Tolstoy wrote, "Everyone thinks of changing the world but no one thinks of changing himself.” Stand up for what you think is right, but try to keep some perspective. None of this political BS or world news, most of it lies anyway, is worth your happiness.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9th_Company

he 9th Company (Russian: «9 рота») is a Russian / Finnish film by Fyodor Bondarchuk about the Soviet war in Afghanistan released in 2005. The film follows a band of young recruits from a farewell ceremony with friends and family back home, through their often brutal training in Uzbekistan's Fergana Valley, up to a bloody battle on a mountain top in Afghanistan against the mujahideen.

The film is based on events which took place in early 1988 during the last large-scale Soviet military operation "Magistral". In the movie, only one soldier from the company survives and the company is said to have been "forgotten" by the military command because of the Soviet withdrawal.

During the actual event, the 9th Company, 345th Guards Airborne Regiment was pinned down under heavy fire on "Hill 3234" between 7 and 8 January 1988. They managed to stop several attacks by an estimated 200-400 mujahideen and Pakistani mercenaries. The company lost 6 men. Another 28 out of the total 39 were wounded. Two of the killed soldiers were posthomously awarded the golden star of the Hero of the Soviet Union. The unit was in constant communication with headquarters and got everything the regimental commander, Colonel Valery Vostrotin, and 40th Army Commander, General Boris Gromov, had to offer in terms of artillery support.

The film received a mixed reaction from the veterans of that war, who pointed to a number of inaccuracies, but nevertheless, judging by ticket sales, was embraced by the general public, and even by Russian President Vladimir Putin. It was also given the Golden Eagle Award for the Best Feature Film by the Russian Academy of Cinema Arts.

It was directed by Fyodor Bondarchuk, the son of classic Soviet film director Sergei Bondarchuk, whose 1959 Destiny of a Man was a landmark in film treatments of World War II and who also shot an Oscar-winning epic, based on Leo Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace.

Although not the first movie to be made about the Soviet Army's experience in Afghanistan (others included the 1991 classic Afghan Breakdown by Vladimir Bortko), 9th Company was the first attempt by Russian filmmakers to create a big-screen, big-budget movie about that war, comparable to the American Vietnam War movies of the 1980s (Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Born on the Fourth of July). The film, made for $9 million with help from the United Kingdom's Shepperton Studios, was released in September, 2005 and became a Russian box office hit, generating $7.7 million in its first five days of release alone, a new domestic record.

In 2006, Russia selected the movie as its candidate for Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film nomination.