Let's take a look at this Sunday Book Review, shall we? Frankly, when I first looked it over, I decided it looked a little boring so I read the whole thing while listening, over and over, to the whistle intro to "Patience" by Guns n Roses. So, uh, bear that in mind.
The big ticket reviews are a new novel about a guy who wishes he were a bird, a "no really, he wasn't that bad" book about William Randolph Hearst, and a bunch of letters from Allen Ginsberg. The latter made me wonder how much I will have to be interested in a writer to want to read his or her letters. I think someone should make a Best of Letters book. I would read that, and then know whose letters were worth pursuing. Same with journals. Get on this, Penguin.
Then we had the Roundups, which I read this week: a crime writing roundup, and a children's books roundup. The angle on the children's books were that they had to be about math. Here's what I thought about the crime roundup: everyone's worried about slim pickings available for long form journalism, and afraid that the Atlantic and the New Yorker are not bulky enough anymore. They should make the cover of PW next week look like US Weekly and have, I dunno, Harper's looking cadaverous in a bikini: LONG FORM JOURNALISM: HOW THIN IS TOO THIN? Anyway, what about really really short form journalism? Not like twitter, but like this crime roundup, which I thought was great because it just sat down and got the job done. It has abrupt little new paragraph ledes that reminded me of Groucho's time in the announcer's booth in Horse feathers. "When did publishers get so smart about re-issuing out-of-print mysteries?" she writes, after having written about something else. That's a great cold segue. I found this tremendous. Anyway, the kids' one was good too, it did what anything about childrens' fiction in the times should do, which is made me think "I should get that for my cousins so that when they're seventeen I can remind them about what a Hip Positive Influence I was." The other thing that jumped out about the kids' roundup was this: the reviewer, Jim Holt, who wrote a book about jokes I really liked, commends one author for her bold palette, then adds in a suspiciously offhand way: "those who experience numbers coloristically (in my case, four is blue, seven is green and eight is orange) know how important this can be in making friends with them." Wait, what? Do other people experience numbers coloristically? (Komorowski, I'm looking at you for help on this one.) This was definitely the hidden highlight of my week's reading of the book review.
The essay is about kids' books too, or rather a particular new kid's book that compiles old and out of print radically leftist stories for littluns. It is a good little essay, or rather a good longish review, but not one to set the world on fire, like that glorious old one about books that were turnoffs to teh ladies. Anyway, that's all for today, a bunch more on Bolano tomorrow, PAX.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
It all started a few years ago when Tom Cruise was inspiring the gag reflex in millions of people with his homophobic Scientology shtick. There was some amount of nostalgia about his good old days playing relatable characters like horny Joel Goodsen in Risky Business and greedy Charlie Babbitt in Rainman. The latter triggered the money centers in everyone's brain as they collectively said, "Hey, I'd happily take care of a long lost brother if he could help me win at black jack."
Enter the glut of shows about real live people with savant abilities.
The American TV audience was amazed by these people who could tell you what the weather was like on your birthday in 1954. or how many home runs your favorite Yankee hit in his first season. Or, you know, the first 10,000 digits of pi.
And, of course, you could rely on the Discovery channel to give a tertiary explanation about how such feats were possible. As it turns out, some of these people have brains that are wired to tie numbers and dates to visual stimuli like colors. So a combination of numbers yields a picture, which is a more reliable key to some part of their memory than the number itself. This all sounds pretty cool, so it wasn't very long before it became trendy to have strange recall mechanisms for numbers (having unique brain function means being different!).
How common this phenomenon actually is, I don't know. But I know it's likelihood is increased by taking psychotropic drugs. LSD, for instance, might make your 37s taste like cherry pie.
Post a Comment