Texts Without Context
Michiko Kakutani has written an amazing summary of how the internet has changed culture. Highly recommended.
It’s not just a question of how these “content producers” are supposed to make a living or finance their endeavors, however, or why they ought to allow other people to pick apart their work and filch choice excerpts. Nor is it simply a question of experts and professionals being challenged by an increasingly democratized marketplace. It’s also a question, as Mr. Lanier, 49, astutely points out in his new book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” of how online collectivism, social networking and popular software designs are changing the way people think and process information, a question of what becomes of originality and imagination in a world that prizes “metaness” and regards the mash-up as “more important than the sources who were mashed.” [more]
W. Eugene Smith and the Jazz Loft Project
As the Book Review’s photography editor, I often choose pictures for the brief art feature that appears on the page with our Fiction or Nonfiction Chronicle. Usually it’s a pleasurable undertaking. As we prepared the issue of March 21, however, the necessity of choosing only one lone photograph to illustrate “The Jazz Loft Project” — Sam Stephenson’s account of the amazingly rich and original body of work accumulated by the photographer W. Eugene Smith between 1957 and 1965 — was somewhat difficult. [more]
And I can also recommend the radio series produced by the fabulous Sara Fishko and accompanies the book. [more]
Just Give Him 5 Sentences, Not ‘War and Peace’
When I finally got a management position, I found out how hard it is to lead and manage people. The warm, fuzzy stuff is hard. The quantitative stuff is easy — you either don’t do much of this as a manager or you have people working for you to do it. [more]
Acid Test
Lattin’s book can be viewed partly as a prequel to Wolfe’s. By the time the Merry Pranksters took their show on the road, the West Coast’s anarchic aggression had pretty much rolled over what the relatively disciplined East Coasters had tried to bottle, label and dispense with care. After Harvard, Leary and Alpert had decamped to an estate in Millbrook, N.Y., continuing their efforts to tap into higher consciousness in a controlled setting. When Ken Kesey’s Pranksters showed up, as Wolfe tells it, they encountered “one big piece of uptight constipation.” [more]
' The Whore’s Secret
Some stories need to be told in a whisper. “Blooms of Darkness,” the Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld’s majestic and humane new novel, takes place in an unnamed Ukrainian city during World War II. As the Germans begin liquidating the city’s Jewish population, Julia, a pharmacist whose husband has already been sent to a labor camp, smuggles her 11-year-old son, Hugo, out of the ghetto. Their journey through the sewer pipes leads them to a house on the outskirts of town, where Julia entrusts Hugo to the care of an old friend, Mariana, before taking flight herself. Mariana, as Hugo will discover, is a prostitute, while the house — known simply as “the Residence” — is a brothel catering to the Nazi occupiers. [more] A million years ago, when I worked for the fabulous Lois Shapiro, זיכרונה לברכה I did some work on Appelfeld's book, Tzili: The Story of a Life. 
Dostoyevsky and Me
At the conference, they all meet up with Babel’s disgruntled 74-year-old daughter from his first marriage, Nathalie, whose voice is “fathomless, sepulchral, with heavy French r’s.” “I cannot hear, I cannot see, I cannot walk,” Nathalie complains, adding darkly, “Everyone thinks I am always drunk.” Later, taking the microphone at a panel on biography, Nathalie announces, “I am confused.” And again: “I am confused.” At the panel’s concluding dinner, she rails, “Is it true that you despise me?” Sotto voce (one hopes), a dinner guest remarks to the conference’s organizer, “I hear that Slavic department enrollments are declining in the United States.” “Oh, do you?” the organizer responds. “Well, you’re probably right.” [more]
