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The Real Thing was staged in Los Angeles about a year ago, and from that production, this audio disk has been created and published. According to a review I read in Publishers Weekly, the only downfall of the production is that it's sometimes hard to tell who's who in the swirl of the dialog. --I can see that. I've ordered a copy and will let you know what I think of it.
The teasing went both ways. In 1991, an American librarian published a literary critical essay, apparently by a Swiss professor, entitled "A first look at Nabokov's last novel", which was quickly exposed as a brilliant spoof. Others became entangled in the debate. "It's perfectly straightforward," said Tom Stoppard. "Nabokov wanted it burnt, so burn it." Novelist Edmund White, whose early work had been championed by Nabokov, was equally blunt. "If a writer really wants something destroyed," he told the Times, "he burns it." John Banville said that this situation was "a difficult and painful one". Conceding that The Original of Laura may turn out to be inferior, Banville decided that it should be saved from the flames. "A great writer is always worth reading," he said, "even at his worst."
Not long ago, I started an experiment in self-binding: intentionally creating an obstacle to behavior I was helpless to control, much the way Ulysses lashed himself to his ship’s mast to avoid succumbing to the Sirens’ song. In my case, though, the irresistible temptation was the Internet. But before I began, I wondered about the genesis of the term “self-binding.” So I hopped online and found Jon Elster, a professor of political science at Columbia University, whose book “Ulysses Unbound” explores whether voluntarily restricting your choices enhances or curtails freedom.
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Book Review - 'Chronic City,' by Jonathan Lethem
By now, Jonathan Lethem is so identified with his native Brooklyn that when he chose Los Angeles as the setting for his last novel — the modest “You Don’t Love Me Yet,” in 2007 — it felt like a vacation or a willful act of misdirection. In fact, though, Lethem’s reputation as a hometown booster rests on the strength of just two books, “Motherless Brooklyn” and “The Fortress of Solitude,” each of which applied a cartographer’s loving attention to the borough. But in four earlier novels and two story collections, Lethem has traipsed all over creation, from Wyoming to the San Francisco Bay Area to the distant Planet of the Archbuilders. Now, in his bravura eighth novel, “Chronic City,” he visits what may be his strangest destination yet: the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
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Slow Down, Sign Off, Tune Out
On a recent weekday, 126 messages made it to my e-mail in-box. Twenty-five were directed to me and me alone: 14 from friends or family, nine business-related and the other two conveying timely information about commercial accounts of mine. The rest were mass mailings or “cc’s,” including 17 messages from a Listserv, eight dispatches from news media I subscribe to, seven “Google alerts” on a subject I’m interested in, four political rants and five pieces of spam, four of them in Cyrillic characters. I had been getting this odd Cyrillic e-mail for some time, and 25 of my incoming messages on this particular day were responses to a query I had sent to my colleagues asking if Russians had been spamming them, too.
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Are They Laughing? Are They Moved?
NEIL SIMON is nervous. For all the success of his 82 years — a Pulitzer Prize for drama, three Tony Awards, many commercial hits on Broadway — a part of him still judges his self-worth by how much audiences laugh during his plays. Now the most personal of his works, the autobiographical “Brighton Beach Memoirs” and “Broadway Bound,” are being revived in repertory on Broadway for the first time since the original productions ran for a total of five years during the 1980s. And they are being directed by David Cromer, whose minimalist Off Broadway mounting of “Our Town” makes clear that he is not in this business for the yuks.
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The New World on the Two Coasts
WHEN a music director takes the helm of a major American orchestra, the inaugural concert should be not just a musical celebration but a statement of artistic mission. The recent debuts of Alan Gilbert at the New York Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel at the Los Angeles Philharmonic both showed how this can be done.
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Man's World at White House? No Harm, No Foul, Aides Say
The suspicion flared in recent weeks — and not for the first time — after President Obama was criticized by women’s advocates and liberal bloggers for hosting a high-level basketball game with no female players.
The president, after all, is an unabashed First Guy’s Guy. Since being elected, he has demonstrated an encyclopedic knowledge of college hoops on ESPN, indulged a craving for weekend golf, expressed a preference for adopting a “big rambunctious dog” over a “girlie dog” and hoisted beer in a peacemaking effort.
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Historians Reassess Battle of Agincourt
The heavy clay-laced mud behind the cattle pen on Antoine Renault’s farm looks as treacherous as it must have been nearly 600 years ago, when King Henry V rode from a spot near here to lead a sodden and exhausted English Army against a French force that was said to outnumber his by as much as five to one.
No one can ever take away the shocking victory by Henry and his “band of brothers,” as Shakespeare would famously call them, on St. Crispin’s Day, Oct. 25, 1415. They devastated a force of heavily armored French nobles who had gotten bogged down in the region’s sucking mud, riddled by thousands of arrows from English longbowmen and outmaneuvered by common soldiers with much lighter gear. It would become known as the Battle of Agincourt.
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How High Will Real-Time Search Fly?
WHEN a US Airways plane landed in the Hudson River in January, the first picture appeared on Twitter. In June, Twitter users were mourning Michael Jackson before major news outlets reported his death. And, this month, as much of the nation was riveted by images of a balloon believed to be carrying a 6-year-old boy, every twist and turn was tweeted and retweeted instantaneously, drowning out just about everything else on the site.
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The Wiseguy, the Spy and the Ponzi Prince
What do they have in common, these notorious jailbirds?
Something, apparently. Legal papers filed by a lawyer representing victims of Bernard L. Madoff’s vast Ponzi scheme single out two inmates of the Butner Federal Correctional Complex near Raleigh, N.C., whom Mr. Madoff spends quality hard time with: Carmine Persico, boss of the Colombo crime family, and Jonathan Pollard, intelligence analyst turned spy for Israel.
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The Nuns’ Story
Once, in the first grade, I was late for class. I started crying in the schoolyard, terrified to go in and face the formidable Sister Hiltruda.
Father Montgomery, who looked like a handsome young priest out of a 1930s movie, found me cowering and took my hand, leading me into the classroom.
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Slaughterhouse Live
TO celebrate their 30th birthdays, Christian Rusby, a sustainability consultant in Seattle, and his twin brother, Jake, a college student, decided to get blood on their hands.
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I've never been proud about what I do for a living, pushing public opinion this way and that at the whim of my master. I was amazed the first time I learned that one could earn a degree in public relations, and despite the nurturing efforts of Ketchum Public Relations, I cast a sideways glance at something like a professional association. The work suits me because it isn't necessarily hard and people's lives rarely hang in the balance so I can go about my work in a relaxed fashion.
Be that as it may, I do keep an eye peeled for news about this line of work in an interest to stay abreast of the art and craft. And that leads me to a posting I came across today from the PRSA, the professional association I referred to above.
The name of the PRSA blog is...
...which is ok.
The headline that got my attention today is this:
Dr. Brad Carroll, a physics profession at Weber State University (Utah), has created an entire course in physics based on a reading of three plays by Tom Stoppard:
Bless his heart.
Here's an extract from the story:
What kinds of students usually take the class?
It's
usually not the physics students who are in there, which I'm happy
about. They're going to be showing off that they already know this
stuff. We've had English majors, theater majors, philosophy,
manufacturing technology, just every part of the spectrum as far as
disciplines.
Dear readers, you might remember that last year, I posted about Mary Meeker's annual report on the internet. Well, just as summer inevitably turns to Autumn, Ms. Meeker reports again from the frontier of the internet and shows us where the gold is buried. You can read her presentation below. In it, Ms. Meeker reveals something that those of us laboring in the technology sector already knew: The rain hasn't been that heavy for us. Economically speaking, technology has been relatively stable compared to other segments of the economy. Technology IPOs are still way off from 2000, but that's a good thing, right? Afterall, I'd rather not take that balloon ride again. Ms. Meeker identifies mobile access to the internet to be the guiding trend and, for the record, let's look at her track record for calling trends:
2004 - China internet
2005 - Broadband
2006 - Online video
2007 - Social networks
2008 - Economic recession
2009 - Mobile internet
I'd say that in 2004, her eyes were dazzled by China the same way Western eyes have been dazzled since even before Marco Polo.
In 2005, Broadband was a pretty good call as we did see enormous take up of home broadband.
For 2006, online video was a pretty good call and certainly foreshadowed some very significant developments such as consumer-priced cameras and YouTube and all that.
Social networks in 2007. Sure. That was a good call.
2008 was an economic recession and when she made her prediction in November of that year, the abyss was yawning, dark and deep. It was hard to see anything past that.
2009: Mobile. I'll buy that. Anyone with a modern cellphone these days knows what she's talking about. I remember when the iPhone first reached market, some people were complaining about the battery life. What those people didn't factor in to their complaints was that they had never had a device that was so amazingly useful that they always had it on, working hard on some sort of problem. Of course the battery life is short is you're going to constantly hit a 3G or WiFi connection to pull down webpages, email and other flotsam and jetsam from the internet.
On the whole, I'll repeat my recommendation to spend some time with Ms. Meeker's work and incorporate it in your perspective. Well worth it.
For reasons unclear, I received a Google Wave invitation and, as I'm fascinated by collaborative technologies, I jumped in. Thankfully, I know how to swim.
Please let me relate to you three impressions I have about Google Wave:
1. You wake up in what you think is a bed and you are surrounded by darkness. Very carefully, you ease yourself out of the bed, find a wall and grope your way around the room until you find a doorknob.
In other words, there isn't much about Google Wave that's instantly obvious. One must spend some time with it, get to know it, and find the way.
2. For those with short attention spans, Google Wave may be completely useless or doesn't offer enough differentiation from a chatroom with cool tools and all singing dancing bears. Let me illustrate:
The first picture is what Google Wave looks like for those of us married to ASCII. As I wrote before, it's very much like suddenly appearing in the middle of a strange narrative.
And then there's always the very smart, very cool kid in class who knows how to turn the bunsen burner into a gas-activated handgun. This video illustrates that:
But if we imagine using Google Wave over Time, then the benefits start to shine. Time is very difficult to demo. There are few substitutes for the real thing. Steve Wright once remarked, "Everywhere is within walking distance if yo have the time," and such is the truth. I can see how a problem statement could kick off a wave. I can see a marketing or engineering program kicking off a wave. But this becomes very tricky and many very bright people have tried to find a way through this problem, Ray Ozzie being chief among them.
We know the following:
1. Collaborative technologies are on the verge of something momentous.
2. We've been in this position for the past twenty years.
3. Capitalistic economics is a stumbliung block on the path.
4. When the solution arrives, it will not look like Usenet on acid.
That is all for now. If you want to wave at me, you can find me find me treading water @ briandjohnson at googlewave dot com
... not to notice the debut of Gustavo Dudamel's debut as conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. This Saturday, both the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal published reviews of the debut and both were unalloyed raves. Yesterday, on Performance Today, as aired by the newly reconstituted WQXR, highlights of the debut were aired and I got to hear the the performance of Mahler's First Symphony. I don't have the ear that many people do, and heaven only knows what happens to the sound after it's been recorded, shipped around the world on satellite, broadcast over FM radio and then picked up by the internet, but... from what I could tell, it was a crystal clean performance. Entire sections almost sounded like soloists. --Regarding this, the commentators on Performance Today said the an orchestra usually tries their hardest for the debut of a new conductor. Here's a link to the Performance Today page where you can hear the highlights for yourself.
I'm very happy for the LA Philharmonic and wish them all the best. LA has an outstanding number of great musicians and it rarely receives the notices it deserves. The number of great musicians in LA has to do with the amount of work is available for them there. As KUSC is so fond of reminding listeners, LA is the entertainment capital of the world. And the lack of recognition has to do with the East Cost snobbery hard at work and probably some envy too because LA has had much better luck at building new concert halls than New York. (Alice Tully Hall has been rebuilt how many times? Four? And they still haven't gotten it quite right?)
I hope Dudamel and LA have many happy years together.
I've noticed that most users of the Brushes application tend to trace out their brushstrokes with their pointer finger. (The screen measures changes in electrical charge, and can be operated only with a conductive object—like a finger—rather than a pen-like stylus.) As I discovered on a recent visit, Hockney limits his contact with the screen exclusively to the pad of his thumb. "The thing is," Hockney explains, "if you are using your pointer or other fingers, you actually have to be working from your elbow. Only the thumb has the opposable joint which allows you to move over the screen with maximum speed and agility, and the screen is exactly the right size, you can easily reach every corner with your thumb." He goes on to note how people used to worry that computers would one day render us "all thumbs," but it's incredible the dexterity, the expressive range, lodged in "these not-so-simple thumbs of ours."
It's always there in my pocket, there's no thrashing about, scrambling for the right color. One can set to work immediately, there's this wonderful impromptu quality, this freshness, to the activity; and when it's over, best of all, there's no mess, no clean-up. You just turn off the machine. Or, even better, you hit Send, and your little cohort of friends around the world gets to experience a similar immediacy. There's something, finally, very intimate about the whole process.
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Will Books Be Napsterized?, By RANDALL STROSS
On Comedy’s Flying Trapeze, By CHARLES McGRATH
Advantage Google, By LEWIS HYDE
Just Outside San Francisco, a Wild Coastline, By ANNE LAWRENCE GUYON
Jewish History, Popcorn Included, By A. O. SCOTT
