As pointed out by my colleague at the Literary Saloon, you’d never see a literary reassessment in Tanenhaus’s pages. The Times has taken a second look at Ian McEwan’s Saturday, trying to examine why it split so many people while pointing out the major risks that McEwan took as a novelist.
Month / January 2006
The Glasses, Alas, Cannot Improve the Poor Thespic Performances
Violet Blue reminds me why I love my neighborhood theatre so much. What other theatre in town would screen 1970s porn in 3-D?
The Sony Passive Reader
The new Sony Reader looks spiffy, but I have my doubts. You see, the Reader here is not paper, meaning that no pages can be flipped, folded over, ripped out of the book or written upon. Not that I’m in the habit of defacing books, but I often buy a copy of something specifically for this purpose.
So kudos to Sony for the electronic print clarity, but I’m suspicious of any product that’s attempting to supplant the reading experience, which, as human interfaces go, has been wholly successful for centuries. To me, reading involves stopping, perhaps writing key passages in a notebook, or rereading a particular paragraph or two, and sometimes skipping around. An academic or a student, for example, couldn’t compile information without this technique. Now that the sensation of flipping between, say, page 6 and page 125 has been lost, I’m wondering if the Sony Reader will cause the retention of information to dwindle. Assuming it succeeds, will the Sony Reader create a new generation of otiose readers?
From R-Rated Oliver Stone to Bona-Fide Snuff Film
Stabilized Zapruder Film (via MeFi, probably NSFW)
PM Roundup
- MIT asks why technology is so absent from the lists of great books.
- Vollmann has a great method of ensuring that his publishers keep publishing 800-page books. (via Scott)
- An early plot summary of Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy film adaptation.
- Jenny D hearts Heather Lewis and calls Lewis the most “cigarette-smoking-inducing writer” she’s read.
- It looks like San Ramon, CA is getting a poet laureate.
- Can you really be taught to turn out a novel in a year?
- Does Woody Allen’s Match Point have the worst sex scenes this year?
- There isn’t much money in interviewing writers on the radio. What’s even more revealing in the article is that Christian radio actually discourages smart literary programs like Conversations on the Coast.
- The Boats of Bond.