Plug ugly

FILM critics are accustomed to having their nuanced prose sliced, diced and affixed with exclamation points in advertisements. The alchemy of marketing often transforms more reserved praise into something like “bone-chilling!” But this is trickier for books, particularly for the vaguely lofty kind that need grander recommendations than “thrilling!” to appeal to readers.

But still, it’s possible to tweak an unenthusiastic review into an endorsement, as Scott McLemee has learned.

At this point I’m left trying to figure out just how negative a review of “Freakonomics” would have to be before the authors couldn’t dub it “largely positive.”

He is right to be perplexed.

“Moby Dick”, without all those fishy bits

HAVE you always wanted to read “Anna Karenina”, if only there weren’t so many pages about agriculture? Orion Books hears your plea:

The first six Compact Editions, billed as great reads “in half the time”, will go on sale next month, with plans for 50 to 100 more to follow.

Whither the book review? Part II

ART Winslow at Huffington Post offers more wistful words about the demise of the book review. “How did we arrive at what seems to be a cultural sinkhole?”

In the new book burning we don’t burn books, we burn discussion of them instead. I am referring to the ongoing collapse of book review sections at American newspapers, which has accelerated in recent months, an intellectual brownout in progress that is beginning to look like a rolling blackout instead.

What about the vast expanse of space online?

Hopeless Confucian

THE Times Literary Supplement enthuses over “Who’s Whose”, a guide to “easily confused words” published by A&C Black.

Some of the pairings, it says, “are likely to be confused only by orthographic half-wits”: such as aural/oral; cannon/canon; grisly/grizzly. (Count me among the half-wits).

The tougher ones will keep most of us awake at night. Distinguish, if you will, between complacent and complaisant; junction and juncture; luxuriant and luxurious; restive and restless; rebound and redound.

Wordless blogging

A BLOG without words? Very nearly. At Good Vibrato the only text is in the links. The substance of the blog is a series of lovely, calm pieces of music and art. The effect is terrific. It’s open for comments; there aren’t many, but they are heartfelt. Here’s one:

This is the best website/music blog ever to have been created. We are blessed for having such a remarkable source of music and art at our fingertips each and every day. Thank you for what you do. Will you make love to me?

This wordless blog is run by the Wordless Music team, whose main vocation is to promote pairings of eletronic and classical musicians in “intimate concert settings”.

The next Wordless Music concert, by the way, is tonight at 7.30, with The Books and Real Quiet, at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, 2 West 64th Street, New York City. The New York Times says that The Books are

a duo of New Yorkers-turned-New Englanders [who] make quiet bricolage folk songs that sound as if they’d crumple if you touched them.

See you there.

And they say she’s a great cook

TOO much to bear! Megan O’Rourke is a great poet as well? According to Joel Brouwer in today’s New York Times she has

a bemused, detached tone reminiscent of the famously reticent Elizabeth Bishop … [S]he narrows her eyes and strains to distinguish intelligence from chatter, to discern a path to the authentic

Some day I shall be telling my grandchildren that I glimpsed her once across a crowded room.

Being a Hungarian writer was even worse

THE New York Times Book Review reports back on its write-in contest for literary quotations from writers too young to have been noticed by the new “Yale Book of Quotations”. The winner by a popular landslide is Jonathan Safran Foer (right), with three favourites from “Everything is Illuminated”:

Censorious, cheap and disapproving

KINGSLEY AMIS was born eight years after Ralph Ellison; he died one year later. Moreover is aware of no evidence that the two ever met.

But if they had done, and if they could have gotten past the vast differences in class, nationality, race and experience that separated them (neither could: little-Englander Kingsley probably would have found the idea of a Black author amusing at best; Ellison, a censorious mandarin, would have found Amis’s predilections—science-fiction, spy novels, drink: good; intellectualism, foreigners, and pretty much everything else: bad—crass and downmarket), would they have liked each other?

Rockefeller’s Centre

ECONOMIST.COM says in its Art.view column that the prize item in a Sotheby’s New York sale of contemporary art on May 15th is a major painting by Mark Rothko, a Latvian-born, American abstract expressionist.

David Rockefeller picked up the painting, titled “White Centre”, for around $10,000 in 1960, and it hung in his outer office when he was chairman of the Chase Manhattan bank. The painting is described by Oliver Barker of Sotheby’s, with barely a trace of exaggeration, as “a masterpiece”.

Vlogging a dead horse

Julian Sanchez argues (plausibly) that vlogging is a waste of time. Click on “keep reading” for his vlog: