“A recent spate of old-fashioned low-tech printed books have all abandoned traditional narrative for Internet terminology, using e-mails, chat-room dialogues and instant messaging instead of regular prose, chapters and verses. Authors say the use of e-mails is not simply a gimmick, but a way of reflecting the world they see.”
Blog
Challenging Chabon On His Story
Did Michael Chabon invent a personal Holocasut history to “fashion his previously banal suburban persona into a more complex Jewish identity?” After stories on a book website and in the The New York Times, the charges get nasty…
Italy Returns Ancient Stele To Ethiopia
“The funeral stone, or stele, is one of a group of six obelisks erected at Axum when Ethiopia adopted Christianity in the 4th century A.D. It was stolen by the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in 1937 and turned into a symbol of fascist power during his short-lived efforts to revive the grandeur of imperial Rome.”
Rip van Winkel Wakes Up, Watches A Week Of TV
Mary Jacobs stopped watching TV 15 years ago. As Turn-Off-Your-TV Week began she spent a solid week watching again. “My conclusion? Bad TV is much worse. It’s uglier, meaner and more inane. But good TV has actually gotten better. Characters have real depth; there’s more ambiguity and nuance; plots take unpredictable and interesting turns. Maybe, when the baby boomers’ hair turned gray, television became more adept at dealing with gray areas. So, will I keep on watching? Probably not.”
Is Our Entertainment Becoming More Exhibitionist?
So now we have “movieoke” where people can go up and lip sync to their favorite movie scenes. “What’s interesting about movieoke from a cultural perspective is that it seems to be another example of how entertainment — and, by extension, our culture — is becoming more and more about exhibitionism and voyeurism.”
Queues For Quixote
Venezuelans are lining up in the country’s capital to get free copies of Don Quixote. The Venezuelan government is handing out a million copies to mark the 400th anniversary of its publication.
Against Good Books
“Today’s corporate weather-makers hate “book-lovers”, as they sneeringly refer to them. They despise curious readers committed to the range and quality of what they buy, such as those who bother with books coverage in intelligent magazines or newspapers. Instead, extra resources will now go into snaring the fitful attention of affluent but apathetic semi-readers who, deep down, believe that, in the deathless words of Philip Larkin’s “A Study of Reading Habits”, “Books are a load of crap.” Ah, but those non-readers made an exception for The Da Vinci Code. So let’s have much more of the same brain-shrinking junk.”
Morgan Library Works On Makeover
The Pierpont Morgan Library is undergoing an image makeover to match its $102 million building makeover. “Although the library has long had a vigorous program of exhibitions, organizing shows like “Master Drawings From the Hermitage and Pushkin Museums” that have attracted tens of thousands of visitors, its very name has long been misleading. Even some New Yorkers assume that it is a run-of-the-mill library, rather than the repository of a world-class collection of old master drawings and prints, medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts, and literary, historical and music manuscripts, in addition to rare books. Many believe that it is a private institution closed to the uninvited.”
Why You Have To Be Smart To Watch Today’s TV
“For decades, we’ve worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a path declining steadily toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the ”masses” want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies try to give the masses what they want. But the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more cognitively demanding, not less. You have to integrate far more information than you would have a few decades ago watching a comparable show. Beneath the violence and the ethnic stereotypes, another trend appears: to keep up with entertainment like ”24,” you have to pay attention, make inferences, track shifting social relationships. This is what I call the Sleeper Curve: the most debased forms of mass diversion — video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms — turn out to be nutritional after all.”
Libeskind Takes His Tower West
It doesn’t look like Daniel Libeskind’s tower for the World Trade Center site will get built. So he’s traveled the plans across the country to California. “The architect’s plans for a 37-story condo tower named “Aura” in Sacramento, California, bear a remarkable resemblance to his original design for the second-tallest building at the ground-zero site. The 430-foot tower, to rise later this year, has the same geometric design at its pinnacle, with a sharply sloping downward angle on one corner. With the exception of its balconies, the tower is strikingly familiar.”