Nevets has a comparison between real and fictional character motivations.
All posts by Phil
There Should Be a Book About That
Author Thabiti Anyabwile from the Grand Cayman Islands asks what book have you looked for or wondered about but cannot find. What is the topic that needs a good book on?
National Book Awards for 2010
The National Book Foundation has announced this year’s National Book Award winners.
Friday Fight: The Axeman Cometh
The swordsman here doesn’t appear to be eager enough to fight. He’s playing half-hearted defense. I wonder if he had charged the axeman early, would the whole fight be changed by that burst of passion?
Approaching Stranger than Fiction
WASHINGTON TIMES–‘Toughest sheriff’ recruits big names for border ‘posse’
“America’s toughest sheriff,” Phoenix’s Joe Arpaio, is creating an armed “Immigration Posse” to combat illegal immigration, and Hollywood actors Steven Seagal and Lou Ferrigno, along with Dick Tracy and Wyatt Earp, have signed up.
This is real, even those last two names, who are a Chicago cop and the nephew of the real Wyatt Earp. The sheriff says he and his state are the new whipping boys of Washington bureaucrats.
I like this idea. It’s a little scary, but I don’t know how it else the problem can be contained. I want immigrants, whom I assume have the best intentions, to be treated with mercy, but I think the traffickers should be shot. They are no better than the slave traders who dehumanized and profited from unwilling immigrants to the American colonies and the southern states.
Turn Back! Dreadful Tales of Agony and Despair
Michael Drout has written the foreword to new anthology called, The Last Man Anthology: Tales of Catastrophe, Disaster and Woe. The name is drawn from Mary Shelley’s The Last Man
National Gaming Day at the Library
In this photo, Jennifer Love Hewitt is performing at the L.A. Public Library in 2003 for Sony’s announcement ceremony for the Playstation 2 game “Karaoke Revolution.” It fits with Daniel Flynn’s article on libraries drifting toward amusement centers, such as renting video games and hosting noisy National Gaming Day events. Flynn writes:
Allen Kesinger, organizer of Newport Beach Public Library’s National Gaming Day, concedes that video games are entertainment but defends their intellectual merit. “Video games have evolved and instead of being endurance tests designed to eat up quarters, they have become a medium to deliver sophisticated, emotionally charged stories. BioShock is the story of an underwater city torn apart by civil war. Heavy Rain is an intense character drama surrounding a father’s loss of his child. Silent Hill 2 is a deep, psychological thriller about a man searching for his deceased wife. Because of this strong focus on narrative, we can use video games . . . [to] attract hesitant readers.” His library’s “celebration of video games” will host a birthday party for the iconic Mario (of Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros. fame); feature a rotation of games, including Katamari Damacy and Lego Star Wars; and participate in the nationwide Super Smash Bros. tournament.
Flynn worries that libraries have rejected a vision of cultivating the life of the mind. What is the mind, after all, but a spacesaver between your ears? I mean, if you have the right opinions, who cares if you can really think about them, right? Dude, where’s my game? (via First Thoughts)
Taste Will Not Make You Superior
Your cultural taste may, in fact, be conditioned by your education, profession, father’s profession, and aspirations to a certain social class. Mark Greif writes about unmasking hipsters and what taste really says about us.
“Bourdieu set out to show the social logic of taste: how admiration for art, appreciation of music, even taste in food, came about for different groups, and how ‘superior’ taste was not the result of an enchanted superiority in scattered individuals,” states Greif.
This is a tough subject. How do we define ourselves? How can we live content with our place in life while aspiring to something better? What does an authentic, unpretentious person look like? Or to put it another way, does anything really matter? (Thanks to Mark Bertrand for linking to this.)
Christopher Hitchens Winding Down
The Guardian has the most recent interview with the great writer and speaker Christopher Hitchens, who is suffering from cancer. In talking about his atheist efforts and others doing the same cuddly work:
Nonetheless, Hitchens mentions a “narrow but quite deep difference” between himself and Dawkins. Unlike the evangelical biologist, he has no wish to convert everyone in the world to his point of view, even if it were possible. In other words, he savours the counterargument. Like John Stuart Mill, he is aware of the empty end of achieved objectives. The true satisfaction lies in the means. Although Hitchens is often seen as a provocateur or a contrarian, and both are indeed aspects of his character, at heart he’s incurably in love with the dialectic.
(via The Daily Caller)
Paul Auster on His Latest Book and Book Tours
The Wall Street Journal has a good interview with Brooklyn’s finest author Paul Auster. His latest novel, Sunset Park
WSJ: How do you think Americans are dealing with the financial crisis?PA: Compare it to what’s going on in France. They’re rioting in the streets every day. Over what? Raising the retirement age from 60 to 62. The French go into the streets when they’re angry. But Americans, when they suffer, when they lose their jobs, when they lose their houses, they feel guilty. So it’s everyone’s private failure and there’s a feeling of shame rather than anger.
In a post on WSJ’s Speakeasy blog, Auster is quoted saying he does not read his reviews. They do him wrong. “I’ve learned not to look,” he says.