A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Friday, March 27, 2009

Signing Statements (and other stuff)

  • What would we do without Bill O'Reilly to be appalled by? Still, his bulldogging of supposedly "evil" left-wing enemies is getting out of hand. Viz., his harassment of Think Progress editor Amanda Terkel for daring to criticize him. There's a nice little campaign being mounted by Think Progress to contact O'Reilly's sponsors and express disapproval of his tactics. You can find it here.
Update: I just received a reply from UPS that said, among other things, "At this time, we have no plans to continue advertising during this show."


  • From the "Ya Think?" files: 'Washington Post' Publisher: Buyouts Could Deplete Talent. Meanwhile, the Houston Chronicle has just laid off a bunch of talented people, gutting its features department (of course), including its excellent books editor, Fritz Lanham. Sigh. One less place for me to publish book reviews.