In lieu of me:
– By way of Bookish Gardener (new in “Sites to See,” and very highly recommended) comes this link to a Dutch Web site devoted to paintings of women reading. I’m not quite sure why I think this is so cool, but I do.
– You’re going to hear Luciana Souza tonight
at Joe’s Pub, right? No? Well, at least pay a visit to the Web site of WNYC-FM and check out her guest shot on John Schaefer’s Soundcheck, which aired yesterday and has now been archived. Go here to listen.
– In case you haven’t read enough about The Triplets of Belleville, animation expert Michael Barrier reviews it on his Web site, which isn’t quite a blog but nevertheless contains lots of interesting stuff, updated semi-regularly. Everything Barrier writes is worth reading.
– This one’s purely for fun: Elsa has written a sort of found poem (I can’t explain it any better) based on Mr. TMFTML‘s blogroll. Most amusing.
– My Stupid Dog tells us what Tony Kushner and Tim LaHaye have in common:
Kushner’s entire oeuvre prior to Homebody/Kabul could be considered an extended exercise in red-diaper fundamentalism. His wilder moments, like the physical manifestation of the Devil in Bright Room Called Day, the character of Thomas Browne’s Soul in Hydrotaphia, or the postmortem appearance of the Rosenbergs in Angels in America: Perestroika, aren’t crass attempts to perk up an otherwise dull evening by invoking the supernatural. In these scenes, Kushner concretizes his belief system, and tries to will its obvious falsehoods into the realm of objective, unquestioned truth.
Usually we notice such desperate rhetorical strategies only when they come from the Far Right: Take, for example, the much-discredited system of dispensationalist eschatology espoused throughout Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind books. Kushner’s drama offers occasional glimpses into the mind of its fundamentalist author, much as the Left Behind books do, though in Kushner’s case that fundamentalism is Marxist-Leninist rather than Christian-traditionalist….
– Everybody’s posting to and commenting on Camille Paglia’s essay on “The Magic of Images: Word and Picture in a Media Age,” which I liked but found more than a little self-consciously showy, as is her wont. The best take I’ve seen so far is from The Reading Experience (readability: 100%).
– Finally, start your weekend off right by going here and scrolling down approximately seven screens to the listing for James P. Johnson’s 1927 recording of “Snowy Morning Blues” (the 1944 remake is almost as good). Click on the link and RealAudio will pour something into your computer that’s guaranteed to make you smile.
See you tomorrow, unless I check back in today. Meanwhile, keep an eye peeled for Our Girl, whose return to the blogosphere, she claims, is fairly imminent.