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

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Nicety of the Day 9/30/09

Connie Casey recalls the early days of the National Book Critics Circle -- a time when the Mercury News had a (gulp) 12-page stand-alone book section.
“Is this your school paper, honey?” said the publicity director of a major publishing house somewhere in Manhattan’s East 50s. I’d been hired to start a book section for the San Jose Mercury News and given 12 pages to fill in a Sunday tabloid—Arts & Books. Different days. Needless to say, the Merc no longer has a book section. There barely is a Mercury News at all.
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