19 8 / 2011
You Are What You Read (And Listen To)
Personally, any day dedicated solely to reading and cooking dinner for your pops would be a good day, but I came across some engrossing, thought-stirring material that I very much want to share:
- In the first segment of this week’s Slate Culture Gabfest podcast, Slate critics and writers discuss the movie The Help. It is the most thorough treatment of the movie that I’ve come across thus far and brings a variety of issues to the table, like the generational differences in audience reaction, and the disproportionate scrutiny black actors receive for the roles they choose that, frankly, white actors do not experience.
- In Specter Magazine, Summer McDonald writes a critique of The Girl Who Fell From The Sky, one that makes me wish that more best selling novels were approached with the same precise, analytical eye that McDonald applies. This is a challenging read, and that’s a good thing.
- Finally, a few lines from Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, which I would recommend to anyone who has ever really, truly, loved a sentence (not a book, or a character, but a single, beautiful sentence).
“Who will teach me to write? a reader wanted to know.
The page, the page, that eternal blankness, the blankness of eternity which you cover slowly, affirming time’s scrawl as a right and your daring as necessity; the page, which you cover woodenly, ruining it, but asserting your freedom and power to act, acknowledging that you ruin everything you touch but touching it nevertheless, because acting is better than being here in mere opacity; the page, which you cover slowly with the crabbed thread of your gut; the page in the purity of its possibilities, the page of your death, against which you pit such flawed excellences as you can muster with all your life’s strength: that page will teach you to write.
