==pla|\|ing lakes==

Friday, October 17, 2003

Sean Penn on American action movies

"'You're the good guy, and the good guy not only shoots the bad guy, but he shoots him through the head, and 20 lbs. of gray matter fly out the back, and hurrah hurrah.' Then the lights come up. And the repercussions of these actions aren't dramatized. There's something emotionally corrupt about films that celebrate the worst in us."

1:42 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Thursday, October 16, 2003

The Observer's 100 greatest novels of all time

I've read 22 of them, not much for an English major. But I long ago stopped caring whether I read the "important" works. Too many, and I can only read what clicks with me, no matter how important.

Have to say the omission of Naked Lunch -- while unsurprising particularly on a British paper's list -- glares.

Also Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and there are many I could switch with some of the titles chosen, given time.

Fun though, and always nice to be reminded of books I've wanted to read.

Phil Dick's Ubik or The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (A Scanner Darkly?) would be on my list, as well as Ballard's High Rise (if I had to choose among his oeuvre).

Hammett's Red Harvest (the only one of his I've gotten through so far) is pretty damn good too. So is Joyce Cary's The Horse's Mouth and Samuel Delany's dhalgren. And Neuromancer? . . .

So many I've probably forgotten. . .

1:15 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Wednesday, October 15, 2003

Swarthmore computing freedom group getting attention, though their site (and this article) is suspiciously offline now, a couple weeks after this item was originally posted [Undernews]

The group, founded by Nelson Pavlovsky '06 and Luke Smith '06, is dedicated to a multitude of issues pertaining to the prevention of the limiting of open culture. This translates into resisting the efforts of the Recording Industry Association of America to sue those who share music files, opposing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and similar expansion of intellectual property law, spreading the use of Linux and other freeware programs and fighting the plan of Microsoft and the "Trusted Computing Platform Alliance" to put monitoring chips in personal computers.

2:47 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

New translation of Stendahl's The Red and the Black might make it readable

The new translation by Burton Raffel rocks. Or, more precisely, it's a blast, which is exactly how Raffel (a distinguished professor of humanities at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette who has also dragged Balzac's old warhorse, Père Goriot, kicking and screaming into the 21st century) has Julien describe his own life: "'If you give me twenty francs,' he says to a visitor while awaiting his trip to the guillotine, 'I'll tell you, in detail, the story of my life. It's a blast.'" Raffel restores to Stendhal the quality that, in the words of V.S. Pritchett, makes "each sentence of his plain prose" read like "a separate shock." [link]

Heard endlessly of Stendahl but never read him. Maybe now I will.

7:25 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Monday, October 13, 2003

The art assistant [Arts Journal]

Working in Tyson's studio situation caused Titchner to make a significant departure from Tyson's practice. 'It's led me to be more emollient to individual works. Work flying in and out of the studio without being resolved is depressing. I've become more clingy to my practice.'

Mary Horlock, curator of Titchner's Art Now show and author of a forthcoming publication on Julian Opie, says: 'You can see a creative dialogue between Keith Tyson's work and that of Mark Titchner, but you never know whether that's why they were drawn to work together in the first place - like Julian Opie and Michael Craig-Martin - or whether there's a slight tendency to adapt from each other and that comes out afterwards in the work. It's part of the hidden network that goes on.'

2:07 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Kazaa inventors are back with Skype: free P2P-based PC-to-PC phone service with headset & broadband

PC-to-phone to follow.

1:42 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Sunday, October 12, 2003

Philip Pullman on how schools are killing reading and exsanguinating writing [Undernews]

My second point concerns the brutal, unceasing emphasis on testing and marking. It leads to a superficial way of working and a very limited way of responding to it. I recently judged a short story competition run by a charity, and what dismayed me about the entries was they were all superficially bright and competent, correctly spelled and punctuated, and all absolutely lifeless.

They all bore the marks of having been drilled into the children: this is how you open a story; here you need some dialogue; you must have a punchy final paragraph. They would all have scored highly on a test. They were all empty, conventional and worthless.

The things you can test are not actually the most important things. When teachers are under pressure to get so many pupils to such-and-such a point, in order to meet an externally imposed target, they have to do things - for the sake of the school - that might not be things they'd do for the sake of the children.

My last point concerns reading. I recently read through the sections on reading in key stages 1 to 3 of the national literacy strategy, and I was very struck by something about the verbs. I wrote them all down. They included "reinforce", "predict", "check", "discuss", "identify", "categorise", "evaluate", "distinguish", "summarise", "infer", "analyse", "locate"... and so on: 71 different verbs, by my count, for the activities that come under the heading of "reading". And the word "enjoy" didn't appear once.

12:01 AM - [Link] - Comments ()