William Stobb

I enjoy the work of Czech-born writer Milan Kundera.  I'm not a scholar, just a fan.  Over the years, I've read the two of his books that I own, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being , each a couple of times.  Lately, I followed an interest in the Czech composer Janacek, which was sparked by Murakami's 1Q84 , to Kundera's book of essays, Testaments Betrayed , and the novel Immortality .  Though one is fiction and one non-fiction, both books offer dramatic narratives and insightful interpretative exposition, delivered by a speaker whose imagination and wisdom are incredibly engaging to me.  There are so many stories and ideas in these books that I love--the story of Max Brod betraying (allegedly, possibly) Franz Kafka's last will which would've had many or all of his works destroyed.  The story of Rubens, a virile but aging man whose sex life is overtaken by his past and event...

Werner Herzog:  "My film school would allow young people who want to make films to experience a certain climate of excitement of the mind.  This is what ultimately creates films and nothing else." Werner Herzog is an amazing artist--he's made so many films of such a wide variety, that I admittedly have barely scratched the surface of his work, and probably have no business writing about him, but....  I have been most interested in Herzog's dramatic documentaries like Grizzly Man and  The Great Ecstasy of the Sculptor Steiner , in which Herzog's pursuit of "ecstatic truth" tests the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction.  Herzog seems not just willing to, but actually eager to  sacrifice journalistic truth to the more resonant truth of story .  Examples abound, but the one freshest in my mind occurs at the end of Herzog's most recent film, the truly spectacular 3-D masterpiece, Cave of Forgotten Dreams.   ...