Interesting Bits

James Wood, called the “elegant assassin” of book critics by the Boston Globe has moved from The New Republic to… you guessed it, the beloved New Yorker. (I’d subscribe to the The New Republic too, but, I have space and budget issues, so I just scan it standing up in the bookstore.)

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I don’t know about the title, but this article, “A Dilettante’s Guide to Art,” discusses the book 1000 Paintings You Should See Before You Die, which, to my great relief, “acknowledges the question “What is Painting?” The answer: “Who cares?” It’s about time someone said it. Excerpt:

“Yet, mock her as we might, our woman in black from Brown is right, because the dilettantes are always right, because paintings are for looking at, and because every claim about what painting “should be” gets shriveled and old and academic even before the canvas does. The dilettante doesn’t care much about what painting “should be,” only about what it is and has been. And the thing that keeps this standpoint from being utterly trivial is the hint of melancholy in it. The dilettante is interested in all things equally because in the long eye of time all things are equally transient. Looking can become delightful again from that perspective, but it is tinged with the mark of death. The dilettante acknowledges this mark, and then goes about the business of living.”

Indeed. Paintings are to be looked at, not merely to induce academic shriveling.

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Speaking of academic shriveling, remember earlier this month when Stanley Fish’s unfortunate piece “Meanwhile: Getting Coffee Is Hard To Do” ran opposite the editorial in the New York Times? Everyone’s been shouting about it ever sense, probably because it’s bewildering why this ran in the first place. It’s not so bad- well, the tone is debatable- but more simply irrelevant, as if it’s been sitting in someone’s desk drawer for the past 10 years. Haven’t we already had the joke pounded into our heads several times over? Ron Rosenbaum rips it apart on the Slate, calling it “The Worst Op-Ed Ever Written?” Meanwhile, (sorry, should that be a colon?) Jakob Norberg of Princeton University asks “What is it about coffee- and coffeehouses- that makes it so agreeable to the bourgeoisie?” Further support for Rosenbaum’s postulation that Fish’s irrelevance was an attempt to “descend from the ivory tower” and show himself a man of the people?

So, does my gross habit of warming day old coffee in the microwave mitigate any bourgeoisie coffeehouse tendencies?

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For all of you conspiracy theorists, Da Vinci Code fans, and Masons out there, BibliOdyssey features some aesthetically fascinating, detailed images attributed to Johann August Starck, who was apparently “a significant player in German Freemasonry.” I just find them interesting from a symbology perspective. You may now remove your red fezzes and return them neatly to their customized carrying cases.

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I’ve always been fascinated by NaNoWriMo, although I’ve never successfully completed it myself. (Ladies and gentleman, begin your outlines! November rapidly approaches.) I’ve been reading the blog Plotastic, which is chronicling the progress of an aspiring novelist who is writing a book based on survey results from his readers.

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I recently watched the best of Christopher Walken’s Saturday Night Live appearances. My friend said, “The cowbell has got to be on here.” (It was.) Turns out there’s an entire website devoted to cowbell songs. She Dreams In Digital posts an inspirational cowbell poster. Cowbell. More.

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So, as those who read the old blog know, I’ve been saying for what seem like forever that Microsoft is over and Google has arrived, in much the same way as Microsoft rendered IBM irrelevant, though not obsolete, back in the day. Most people have at least stopped arguing Microsoft’s domination (welcome to the 21st century), and begun telling me that it’s all about Facebook, not Google. Either way, bring on the web-based OS, I say. Mashable.com put together a great list of web based operating systems.