What it was addressing was not our promising future but our dark and anxious past. It was simplistically suggesting that the inflationary 1920s had so overheated our economy and our expectations that we had stupidly “bought” the inevitable retribution of the Depression. In other words, the parade, like film noir, was directing our attention backward, not forward. After the war, we were not so much disillusioned by our prospects as giddily illusioned by them, and the message of film noir was curiously at odds with the national mood.
Ira Glass: "Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap."
Thank you!
Also noteworthy advice:
"If you're not failing all the time, you're not creating a situation where you can get super-lucky."
This excellent video interview is available in several parts on YouTube, or as a single video on current.tv, alongside other interviews with Robert Redford, Dave Eggers, Sarah Vowell, Elvis Mitchell, Catherine Hardwicke, Xeni Jardin, and others.
In the past few years, as revenue flees from print on paper, newspapers have worried their declining circulation figures and have had to make cutbacks.
A flashpoint of sorts was reached this spring when The Atlanta Journal-Constitution announced that it would eliminate its book-reviews editor and rely on wire-service reviews exclusively. The decision prompted swift response from the National Book Critics Circle, which spearheaded a picket protest of the paper. The ensuing crossfire (mainly online, as it happens) between bloggers and print critics was intense and acrimonious enough to suggest that more than the disposition of a few column inches is at stake.
The controversy has to do with the fact that people in various quarters, literary bloggers prominently among them, are proposing that old-style print reviewing -- the word-count-driven evaluation of select titles by credentialed reviewers -- is outmoded, and that the deficit will be more than made up by the now-flourishing blog commentary. The blogosphere's boosters pitch its virtues of variety, grass-roots initiative, linkage, and freedom from perceived marketing influence (books by major trade publishers, which advertise more, sometimes appear to get premium treatment in the print book review sections).
I'm hard put to repudiate these virtues of the blogosphere. But can it really compensate for losses in the more clearly bounded print sector? The bigger question, if we accept that these are the early symptoms of a far-reaching transformation, is what does this transformation mean for books, for reviewing, for the literary life?
First books, then magazines, then movies, then what?
Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, an iconoclastic filmmaker widely regarded as one of the great masters of modern cinema, died Monday, local media reported. He was 89 years old.
He was "probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera," Woody Allen said in a 70th birthday tribute in 1988.
In a press interview for her film "Away From Her", director Sarah Polley laments:
"It's sad to think there was a time when people lined up around the block to see Bergman movies ... and how unimaginable that is now."
One pleasure of art comes from how accurately it can convey ambivalence. In a poem, form can have things both ways at once, emotionally: understated and bold, dark and bright, somber and funny, painful and cool, angry and sympathetic.
He cites "Oil & Steel", from Henri Cole's new book, Blackbird and Wolf, which earns a starred review from Publishers Weekly. Here's the poem:
My father lived in a dirty-dish mausoleum, watching a portable black-and-white television, reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which he preferred to Modern Fiction.
One by one, his schnauzers died of liver disease, except the one that guarded his corpse found holding a tumbler of Bushmills. "Dead is dead," he would say, an anti-preacher.
I took a plaid shirt from the bedroom closet and some motor oil -- my inheritance.
Once, I saw him weep in a courtroom -- neglected, needing nursing -- this man who never showed me much affection but gave me a knack for solitude, which has been mostly useful.
I used to wonder how it would have been to be a reader in the era of serialized fiction, when Dickens could keep an entire culture hanging on for the next installment, and ships arriving in America might be hailed, before anything else, with questions about how things fared with Little Nell.
This brings a whole new meaning to the concept of paparazzi.
... This territory thick with mobbed-up construction sites and toxicwastedumps turned out, unaccountably, to be a wonderland.
What began as the story of a potential healing became the description of the last stages of an incurable sickness. The images themselves darkened, as if the sun were removing itself permanently from northern New Jersey.
A career officer (Tommy Lee Jones) and his wife (Susan Sarandon) work with a police detective (Charlize Theron) to uncover the truth behind their son's disappearance following his return from a tour of duty in Iraq.
From Paul Haggis ("Million Dollar Baby", "Letters from Iwo Jima").
