Reading requires an act of empathy, really. What you're doing when you're reading a book is saying, I'm going to turn off who I am for a little bit, and I'm going to enter the personality of another human being. Reading is a very generous act, but it's a very helpful act if you really want to understand what another person is like. [Gary Shteyngart]
Just some stuff--
1. Why is the notorious Michiko Kakutani writing Family Guy fanfic? I didn't get a goddamn thing out of this review (check out this one instead) except that it's narrated by a dog. Plus, I don't even like Family Guy. (Is this controversial?: I think American Dad is a lot better.)
2. Vulture has 7 steps on how to on hate the Beatles, who are now available on iTunes. I don't quite get the point but it is kinda amusing in that you could apply it to not liking anything that is generally popular.
Anyway, I have a one-point rebuttal on why you should love the Beatles: this. Oh yeah.5. Don’t have some big overarching narrative about baby boomers or technology or anything. The point here is that you’re amazing people by not enjoying the Beatles’ music, not Western history. Don’t start trotting out complex arguments about the cultural influence of baby boomers or the role of legendary bands in a “narrowcast” culture — you’re disliking a band, not writing a trend article for Wired [. . .]
7. Remain calm and amused. Hey, you just happen to not enjoy the Beatles — it’s everyone else who’s getting weirdly worked up about that. Maintain a sense of bafflement, as if you’ve been immersed in a glorious world of music way better than the Beatles, and are slightly confused that all this is happening[. . .]
We’d be remiss not to note, though, that any environment in which these tricks really work is probably not a fun one for you to be around in the first place.
if you don’t read, I don’t want to be your friend…I don’t even want you to serve me a drink at a bar. If a stranger came over to our apartment, and there weren’t books, or–oh no!–not enough books, what would that say about me and Patrick? If my copy of Handmaid’s Tale or his copy of The Power Broker weren’t on display, how would anyone understand us? Some people have a cross in their home, or a mezuzah on their doorjamb. I’ve got nine books by Vladimir Nabokov.
I got THIRTY books by Valerie Tripp, bitch. Suck it. I'm kidding. But anyway, ew, not cool. People like this make me want to put all my, like, Dragonlance books in the foyer and make 'em stand next to them at a cocktail party while I talk about how I would never be friends with someone who doesn't read, like all those kids our school system is churning out, those people with empty, empty lives. Minorities, too, mostly the brown ones, though. African orphans. Blind people. "They're not really reading, you know? They're turning a purely intellectually pursuit into a physical activity. Another PBR, you down to earth American original, you?"
I'm also quoting a big chunk of it because I'm becoming an old lady who views all this new technology with deep suspicion and says things like "the rise of the machines" and "corporate creation of instant gratification addiction, just like they gave crack to the ghetto" and "kids on my lawn." Okay, here's the quote. Emph mine.
Of the bookshelves I’ve inspected in my life, two stand out as particularly consequential. The first was my mother’s, which was built into the wall of the bedroom where she grew up. When I would visit my grandparents in the summer I would spend hours inspecting that bookshelf. The books were yellowed and jammed tightly together, as though my mother had known it was time to leave home once she no longer had any room left on her shelves. In the 1960s novels, the Victorian classics, and the freshman year sociology textbooks fossilized on the bookshelf, I got the clearest glimpse I ever had of my mother as a person who existed before me and apart from me, and whose inner life was as bottomless as I knew my own to be.
And then there was my wife, whose bookshelves I first inspected in a humid DC summer, while her parents were away at work. The shelves were stuffed full of novels—Little House on the Prairie, The Andromeda Strain, One Hundred Years of Solitude—that described an arc of discovery I had followed too. At the time we met, her books still quivered from recent use and still radiated traces of the adolescent wonder they’d prompted. In the years since, on visits home for the holidays and to celebrate engagements and births, I’ve watched her bookshelves dim and settle. Lately they’ve begun to resemble a type of monument I recognize from my mother’s room. They sit there waiting for the day when our son will be old enough to spend his own afternoons puzzling out a picture of his mother in the books she left behind.
It remains to be seen how many more generations will have the adventure of getting to know their parents in just this way. One for sure, and maybe two, but not much beyond that I wouldn’t think. To the extent that bookshelves persist, it will be in self-conscious form, as display cases filled with only the books we valued enough to acquire and preserve in hard copy. The more interesting story, however, the open-ended, undirected progression of a life defined by books will surely be lost to a digital world in which there is no such thing as time at all.
This also might explain it. We have 3 more similar shelves in a very small apartment. I like touching books. My parents' house has about a bazillion more. I used to find books that I later had to read at school, the same school by father went to. It was cool.
THE POOL PLAYERS.
SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
Read more of Gwendolyn Brooks' poems here. I also really like "A Penitent Considers Another Coming of Mary." Hear her read it at Poets.org, via. She explains how the poem had been banned because it contained the word "Jazz." hahaha, those old timey people.
No one should feel guilty for being born in the right place at the right time. We in the West were a lucky generation. We did not change the world; rather, the world changed obligingly for us. Everything seemed possible: unlike young people today we never doubted that there would be an interesting job for us, and thus felt no need to fritter away our time on anything as degrading as “business school.” Most of us went on to useful employment in education or public service. We devoted energy to discussing what was wrong with the world and how to change it. We protested the things we didn’t like, and we were right to do so. In our own eyes at least, we were a revolutionary generation. Pity we missed the revolution.
And in other news, some people suck.
Warren Ellis: just shot six pages of FELL 10 over to you
Ben Templesmith: Oh you tease me sir.
Warren Ellis: rub it on your fucking nipples son
Ben Templesmith: My gods, he actually did. Warren Ellis sent me some FELL pages. Printing out & rubbing them on my nipples right away.
please be real. i think it is!
EA will be releasing it in February following a massive marketing campaign that I completely missed-- though I will probably not miss the crowning glory of it, at least, during the Super Bowl. I don't really know, and I'm not clear on how good the game is being said to be. Detailed info is available at Wikipedia, which stresses that the game is loosely based on the poem.
So basically Dante isn't a whiny little bitch who keeps fainting when he can't figure out how to get across a river. Okay. Is Virgil in it?
“The story line is not Dante’s, period,” said Teodolinda Barolini, the Lorenzo Da Ponte Professor of Italian at Columbia University and a former president of the Dante Society of America. “It’s kind of a mishmash of current popular ideas, projected back into the Middle Ages [...]
“I’m not in the least bit turned off,” she said. “I’m very intrigued and I want to see it” [nytimes].
It's an interesting idea and since it is so clearly departed from the original work, I don't think anyone is complaining. Dante's Inferno has become a defining architecture for people writing about hell, so it's not like this hasn't been done before. If it gets kids to try to read the poem, that would be great. The game's website has what appears to be a fairly well put together section about Mr Alighieri and the poem. Though this brings us to the real problem-- the marketing of the actual book using the video game's art, which is ludicrous. Now that I think of it, I'm not sure which edition we have in the house, but it definitely doesn't have a picture of an extra that showed up to the 300 filming thinking it was a movie about the Albigensian crusade. (That doesn't quite work, but whatever. People massacred, wrong period costume. You so funny.)
Came across this via the LA Times lit blog, Jacket Copy. Hey Oscar Wilde! It's Clobberin' Time combines 2 of the most awesome things in the world-- literary figures (characters and authors) and badass illustrators.
