I started my “…And Me” projects on June 10, 2009, when I read all of Hemingway’s novels, back to back, starting with the first.
Next up was every Oscar-winning movie, starting with Wings in 1927 and ending with Slumdog Millionaire in 2008. 81 films in all.
Then, in November, I tackled Aristotle’s Poetics for 30 days.
I capped off my project with listening to every piece of music Mozart composed, a 180-day journey that ended on June 8, 2010 – one day before a milestone birthday.
My year looked like this:
I explained my year-long project to a former high-school English/Journalism teacher with whom I had lunch one afternoon. “That makes me exhausted just hearing about it,” he said.
He was right. It was grueling. But I loved it.
A few years later, I started another project – one so big I couldn’t finish it.
I thought, “If one year was great, three years ought to be even greater.”
I was wrong. It was insurmountable.
Year One of 1095 Days With The Masters And Me was delightful, though. It looked like this:
October 1, 2013 – February 27, 2014
Haydn (complete works)…………………………………………………150 days
February 28, 2014 – April 14, 2014
Woody Allen films (complete directorial filmography)……………………46 days
1966 – What’s Up, Tiger Lily?
1969 – Take the Money and Run
1971 – Bananas
1972 – Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask)
1973 – Sleeper
1975 – Love and Death
1977 – Annie Hall
1978 – Interiors
1979 – Manhattan
1980 – Stardust Memories
1982 – A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy
1983 – Zelig
1984 – Broadway Danny Rose
1985 – The Purple Rose of Cairo
1986 – Hannah and Her Sisters
1987 – Radio Days
1987 – September
1988 – Another Woman
1989 – New York Stories
1989 – Crimes and Misdemeanors
1990 – Alice
1991 – Shadows and Fog
1992 – Husbands and Wives
1993 – Manhattan Murder Mystery
1994 – Bullets Over Broadway
1994 – Don’t Drink the Water
1995 – Mighty Aphrodite
1996 – Everyone Says I Love You
1997 – Deconstructing Harry
1998 – Celebrity
1999 – Sweet and Lowdown
2000 – Small Time Crooks
2001 – The Curse of the Jade Scorpion
2002 – Hollywood Ending
2003 – Anything Else
2004 – Melinda and Melinda
2005 – Match Point
2006 – Scoop
2007 – Cassandra’s Dream
2008 – Vicky Cristina Barcelona
2009 – Whatever Works
2010 – You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
2011 – Midnight in Paris
2012 – To Rome with Love
2013 – Blue Jasmine
April 15, 2014 – July 9, 2014
Beethoven (complete works)………………………………………………86 days
July 10, 2014 – August 3, 2014
The Great Gatsby (both novel versions + 4 movies)……………………24 days
August 4, 2014 – October 1, 2014
Brahms (complete works)…………………………………………………58 days
I completed that, rounded the corner, and tried to do Year Two.
That’s where I stalled, never to return.
I discovered something.
It’s one thing to listen to music or watch movies and blog. But it’s impossible to read and blog at the same time. So any project that required me to read and blog was asking me to spend hours reading and then hours blogging about what I read.
It got to be too much.
Still, I loved loved loved exploring Classical music and writing about it.
So I kept trying to put together more year-long projects in which I did just that. For example:
144 Days With Bruckner And Me (October 3, 2016 – February 24, 2017): “Evaluating Symphonies 1-9 From 16 CD Box Sets.”
63 More Days With Bruckner And Me (February 24, 2017 – May 5, 2017): “Evaluating Symphonies 1-9 from 8 Additional CD Box Sets.”
162 Days With Beethoven And Me (July 21, 2018 – December 28, 2018): “Evaluating Symphonies 1-9 From 18 CD Box Sets.”
63 Days With Fritz Reiner And Me (June 10, 2021 – August 11, 2021): “Exploring the Legendary Conductor’s Performances in the Complete RCA Album Collection CD Box Set.”
But I couldn’t complete a full year, even though I had planned to do so. I don’t know if it was because I was getting older and my priorities had changed, or if the workload was too daunting, or if my attention span had shriveled to that of a three-year-old child, or if my ‘tude changed from “Life is too short not to…” to “Life is too short to do this.”
I even devised what I thought was a brilliant project: asking “Who was Jesus?” as I read all Four Gospels from as many different Bible translations as possible, 12 +1 to be exact.
Check it out here.
I called this project 183 Days With Jesus And Me: “A Writer Explores The Character of Jesus As Revealed In Four Gospels In 12 Bible Translations (Plus One!), In Six Months.”
Brilliant.
Unfortunately, that project stalled on Day 15 (April 10, 2020) when I got more and more negative about what I was reading. It’s entirely possible that “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life” (2 Corinthians 3:6, KJV) proved literally true. The more I studied every jot and tittle, every word from every Gospel, the more questions I raised and the more cynical I got.
So I halted that project. The next one I undertook was the Fritz Reiner project I mentioned above.
That brings me to this project – 52 Days With Inspirational Films And Me – and what is supposed to be the start of another year-long project.