Although I haven’t received my copy, George Snyder was kind enough to pass along the link to Sarah Boxer’s survey, “Blogs,” in the current issue of The New York Review of Books.

George wrote,

I will be very interested to know what you make of Miss Sarah Boxer’s piece on Blogs and books on blogs in the 14 February issue of the NYRB, for one can say she covers some ground, it was my opinion she leaves out an important element —

Us.

Or people like us.

Indeed. The curious thing about these surveys is that, even when they acknowledge Chris Anderson’s Long Tail (Ms Boxer does not), they don’t seem to understand how it underlies what is really remarkable about the Blogosphere. It allows the handful of “people like us” to gather in a way that was never before possible in the history of mankind. There are never enough of us in any one place to begin to form a group, and our affinities don’t bring us together geographically. Web logs have changed that.

Unlike other small bands of agglutinated aficionados, however, “people like us,” George, are very, very articulate. We would not be fired by The New York Review of Books for writing as we do — although there are several editors of other periodicals whom we should certainly fire!

I hope to have more to say about this on Friday.

It’s a bit like Christmas. A pile of new toys. Trying to figure out how they work without breaking them. Wanting to play with all of them at the same time, even though that’s impossible. For a few hours, feeling quite carried away, amazed that the cornucopia has dumped so many treats in one’s lap. Very slowly, getting used to them — and finding out the little things that are wrong with them (always so heartbreaking).

I have two new toys.  The first is my second RoomGroove. the RoomGroove is a speaker system from Klipsch — the superior competitors of Bose — for the iPod.  For as long as there have been iPods, I have been telling friends that I have outgrown personal stereo systems — the sort of thing that you walk around with, looking vaguely spaced out.  The second person on my block to own a Walkman, I used to be quite excessive about having my own music on my person at all times, but I really did outgrow that.  There came a time when I no longer wish to escape the world around me, and the insulation of a private wall of sound went from chic to annoying. And perhaps my hearing wasn’t so good, and I needed it — all of it — for ambient input.

A couple of occasions since I got my Nano, I’ve wondered outside and enjoyed what was playing, but for the most part I listen to this device at home where it serves as an unexpectedly agreeable update on the table radio of yore.  The curious thing is that how completely different a table radio is from stereo system — I’ve known that since I was in my teens — but rather how nice it is to have a table radio again, after forty years. The difference is that this table radio plays only music that I really love, because, of course, I put it there. And now, it plays it in the two rooms where I spend most of my time.

I am using my other new toy to write this.  It is called Dragon Naturally Speaking, and it seems to work pretty well, although I’m still slow at it. The Dragon, as I can’t help thinking of it, gets all the big words right, but it mixes up the everyday pronouns and prepositions, which all seem to sound alike.  Such small words are hard to proof.  Of course, I could type all of this much faster than I’ve dictated it, but I’m curious to see the different things that will come out of my mouth, things that would never come out of my fingers.  My fingers are critical snobs incapable of saying, for example, “I read Blackwater Lightship this weekend and I really loved it!” At some point during the third week of prep school, I learned that it would be better to chop off my fingers than type such an insipid sentence.  But I can still say it — as you can see.

The point of the dictation software is to capture for transcription the off-the-cuff remarks with which I intend to replace my not very competent readings of pages from Portico.  (You see?  I really do speak and write pretty much the same.) these new podcasts will require two computers for production, the desktop for recording my voice in the lap top for transcribing it.  It is probably not beyond the capacity of either computer to do both jobs at the same time, but it is certainly beyond me to imagine how on earth did tell it how to do it.  So: two computers.  Two mikes, too.

Good heavens, I could go on and on.  I already have!

James Collins’s new book is not perfect, but it is very good and, even more, very promising. The novel is extremely well-written and its wit most welcome. Its failing is the most forgivable fault that an author can have: Mr Collins is a little too easy on his hero, Peter Russell. Peter is a great guy, and deserves only the best that life as to offer even if he is an investment banker. If you don’t like Peter, you need a pill of some kind. As the protagonist of a novel, however, it is Peter’s job to be tried and tested a bit more rigorously than the author — a softie? — seems to have the stomach for. Assuming that Peter is something of an alter ego, we may assume that Mr Collins has got his tender-hearted anxieties out of his system, and will be appropriately merciless (up to a point!) to his next bunch of characters.

¶ Beginner’s Greek.

¶ On why it is inappropriate for thinking people to talk about Stephen King — unless perchance they have something good to say.

¶ Boccaccio’s word, translated by McWilliam as “adolescent,” is fanciullesco. “Girlish” would have been better. I wish that we could simply import “fanciullesco” into English. McWilliam notes that III, x — the story of Alibech and Rustico — used to be too hot to handle (translate). And no wonder! “La rissurezion della carne”! How’s that for a euphemism (for an erection). Putting the “devil” back into “hell.” Stelle!…. ¶ In the Aeneid, an archery context. Footnotes might explain what Acestes’s arrow, bursting into flames, portends (not that I’m keen to know)….¶ C K Williams: “rising perhaps out of the fearful demands consciousness makes for linkage, coherence, congruence” — I hope that Steve Laico will have some tips for improving wi-fi service to the bedroom this afternoon…. ¶ Clive James, nominally on Grigory Ordzhonokidze:

The great mystery of the socialist totalitarian regimes has not been how they grew into killing machines — in retrospect, nothing seems more logical — but how the machines were put into reverse.

And he solves the mystery by taking Ordzhonokidze literally: the true victims of totalitarian oppression are the executioners. (A theme of Jonathan Littell’s Les bienveillantes)…. ¶ Debo to Decca, February 1978 (winding up the Peace Talks after the Great Scrapbook War):

I couldn’t sleep that night nor for many a night after; it made me miserable and still haunts after 9 months. I LOATHE a row of any sort, probably much more than you do because I note whenever you give an interview it ends with “I love a scrap” or something like, but I know those scraps are matters of principle or theory or political something and not inter-family — still you are more of a row-er than me I guess.

[…]

I wrotre to you once before to say something of this sort, as we are all getting OLD & will soon be quietly dead so I guess it’s better not to delve into row-making subjects.

How wrong, Your Grace; how wrong!….¶ Today’s Blogging Hero: David Rothman, of TeleRead. Like all the others, I’ve never heard of him, but for once you’d think that I might have done. I thought about getting a Kindle, but on the day when that impulse ran at its hightest, Amazon was so behind in production that sales were halted. Cooler reflection inclines me to watch and wait, as the instrument’s performance will improve as its price drops. (God bless the early adopters.)…. ¶ Is Stendhal making musical jokes?: “Il essaya de la cacher avec le verre vert, mais il lui fut absolument impossible de faire honneur au vin du Rhin.” Verre vert, vin du Rhin? Do admit.

Upstairs at Caffè Grazie, a very agreeable destination for after-concert repasts, right around the corner from the Metropolitan Museum.

As the picture suggests, my life has hardly been an unmitigated misery for the past couple of days. But I haven’t had much time for sitting down, or any at all for thinking. I’ve been on the go since first thing Thursday morning. On Friday, I had to be at Ruptured & Crippled at noon, to see the rheumatologist; a Remicade infusion followed at one. The good news on the infusion front was that I’d gone a full three months since the last one. I hadn’t meant to push the interval so far past ten weeks, but twelve is how it worked out, and as I was none the worse for the delay, Dr Magid and I could congratulate ourselves (and the makers of Remicade) upon having gone from six to five to four infusions per year within the space of twelve months. The only thing better than a wonder drug is being able to get by on less of it.

On Friday night, I went to the museum for the first of this season’s Met Artists concerts. A very bad boy, I left at the interval. The music was wonderful, as always, but I was tempted away by the prospect of dinner with Kathleen, which I’d have missed if I’d stayed. She was still at the office at nine, and about to leave. Instead of going home, she met me at Caffè Grazie, where we had a lovely dinner, although the “personal” pizza that she ordered was as big as a regular from Ottomanelli’s.

After the usual tidying-up on Saturday afternoon (during which I listened to Don Carlo and thought how much I’d have enjoyed being a censor during the anciem régime), I attacked the kitchen. The kitchen didn’t really need attacking, but that just made the task more effective. Instead of being demoralized by carrying loads of decayed leftovers to the garbage chute, I had plenty of energy for taking inventory — and then for running across the street to stock up on shortfalls.

Satisfying as all of that domestic accomplishment was, I was stalling and I knew it. Sitting in a large box in the blue room was the second RoomGroove, purchased expressly to act as a receiver for transmissions from the first unit, in the bedroom.*  Would I figure out how to make this work? At first, it didn’t. But then it did!

Tomorrow afternoon, I’m meeting with Steve Laico, technical adviser to The Daily Blague. Among other things, we’re going to look at voice recognition software. Having recorded a thick wad of PodCasts through the fall and early winter, I’ve decided that reading scripts is not for me, and I’d like to experiment with ex tempore speaking from bullet points. Text obsessive that I am, however, I’ll have to have transcripts!  I also hope to learn a few thing about a more sophisticated handling of images.

It’s all phew.

* In other words, music playing on the Nano in the bedroom should be able to be heard in the blue room, even with the bedroom unit muted. If the new RoomGroove didn’t pick up a signal from the old one (or vice versa), I’d have simply made an expensive and unnecessary upgrade from the Logitech portable that I bought for the Thanksgiving trip to St Croix.

Union Square at the worst time of the year.

This week, I shall be very brief. I went to see There Will Be Blood because I hoped that it would disprove my discomfort with this year’s Academy Awards nominations. Three of the five best-picture nominees are intensely violent, male-centered dramas. (I say this without having seen No Country For Old Men.) A fourth, Atonement, offers a distinctly unsympathetic critique of the male hierarchy of class background, but it is not without its cataclysms. Only Juno resists this rampant guyism.

There Will Be Blood turns out to be about nothing more than how awful a man can be — and how symphonically that awfulness can be represented on the screen. Potential background stories about such things as the imaginative poverty of the American frontier, cavalier attitudes toward workplace safety, or the anaerobic deadweight of extractive economies are muddled by the protagonist’s bewilderingly inconsistent sociopathy. What this film boils down to is the virtuosity of Daniel Day-Lewis’s acting — and of the men and women of the film’s Makeup Department.

What was the Academy thinking?

It will take a while, I expect, for a clear narrative to explain Jérôme Kerviel’s disastrous trades at SocGen. All we know now is that nobody can figure out how the young man contrived to hide his balloon of unauthorized bets. Well, we do know one other thing. It is mentioned in almost every news story, even though it has nothing to do with the wrongdoing. Mr Kerviel did not attend one of the Grandes Écoles — those redoubtable institutions that the Times this morning compared to Harvard and MIT. No; he attended a “business college in Lyon.” We all know that.

Isn’t it interesting that we all know that — that Mr Kerviel’s education (or lack of it) has been established as an integral part of his story? I wouldn’t want to be a French outsider trying to follow in the Breton clerk’s footsteps anytime soon, not while the portcullis of privilege, clattering shut even as we speak, bars entry to the Elysian fields of French advanced placement. It would be interesting to know the identity of the gatekeeper who made sure that early reports of SocGen’s losses gleamed with a detail that, however irrelevant, no journalist would be able to resist.

Who wouldn’t be a bleeding-heart liberal, writing in such cushy surroundings?

As a rule, I agree with the articles that inspire my Friday Fronts. This week’s ticked me off.

¶ George Packer on Hillary Clinton and “inspiration.”

Big Daddy’s, the newest neighborhood eatery, on Second at 83rd. It is almost as retro as the diner in Pleasantville — clientele included! The sound system, however, played “Love Shack,” by the B-52s. It’s really a very B-52s kind of place.

Yesterday, I just jumped in and filed the first “Morning Read” entry, without any explanations. I relied, somewhat lazily, on the snapshot of the stack of books to provide an idea of what the text referred to. It might not be readily evident that I have been reading bits of these books every morning for several months now. Well, most weekday mornings. The rubric is: a story from the  Decameron; one hundred lines of the Aeneid; two poems by C K Williams, from the recent Collected Poems; one essay from Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia; a year’s worth of letters from The Mitfords; and one chapter each from Stendhal’s’ Le rouge et le noir and from Blogging Heroes. I would never make it through most of these books without a plan.

During the holidays, I neglected the morning read routine — but not The Mitfords. With less than twenty years to read through, I’ll be done with the collection of the six sisters’ letters in a week or two. (I’m down to four sisters. It’s quite noticeable that, no sooner did Nancy die, in 1973, than all sorts of skirmishes broke out between Decca (Jessica) on the others. The infamous scrapbook war, launched when Pamela “asked” Decca if she had “borrowed” a massive album from Chatsworth — Decca saw right away that she was being charged with theft — got fairly acrimonious. Amusingly… but enough of this.)

There will be no Morning Read this morning, because I have to go to the movies. I have to go to the movies today because I can’t go tomorrow. I can’t go tomorrow because I’m scheduled for a Remicade infusion early in the afternoon. “Then what have I?”

¶ Today’s Decameron story (III, ix), about Gillette de Narbonne and Bertrand de Roussillon, is an original — although not the original, which is in Sanskrit — of the plot of My Geisha, the bittersweet Shirley MacLaine comedy of 1962, with Yves Montand….¶ O wearying Book Five of the Aeneid! Today’s reading: the boxing match between Dares and Entellus, which would be bad enough; but then Aeneas interrupts the fight, apparently because Entellus, enraged by having fallen into his own missed “roundhouse right,” pummels Dares too gruesomely. An odd reason to break off a boxing match! I am only now old enough to tolerate the tedium of these stretches….¶ “Shells” and “Room” from A Dream of Mind: for me, very nearly impenetrable. Of all the Williams that I have read, these dream poems are the only ones not to engage me at all. Nice turn of phrase, though: “A dubious plasma”….¶ Clive James on Sir Lewis Namier (like Conrad, a Pole):

The war having been decided by the New World’s gargantuan production efforts, the United States should logically have become the centre of the Western mind as well as of its muscle. Men such as Namier ensured that the Old World would still have a say. With their help, it was English English, and not American English, that continued to be the appropriate medium for the summation and analysis of complex historical experience.

Still quite true; we have learned to speak better English in America….¶ Wonderful letter from Decca, written from Yale, where she was teaching a course in journalism, in the spring of 1976.

Am loving the students. The first few days were pure torture as I had to choose 18 students (max size of class) out of 200 applicants, goodness it was difficult. They’d all had to write on a card why they wanted to take the course. Mostly I rather followed instructions of higher-ups (deans etc) & chose illustrious-sounding people with Rhodes Scholarships. But one boy aged 17 wrote on his card “I believe I have the qualifications for a journalist as I am tall enough to look over walls & thin enough to hide behind trees,” so I could see I would worship him, & let him in. A girl wrote “There comes a time in every person’s life when he or she must burst into some new form of action.” She’s an athlete, so I let her in mainly because I long to see her burst into some new form of action.

Evidently, however, Decca’s policy of letting in the illustrious was not a complete success. (Do see Decca, two letters of January 1976 to her husband. Wonder who the snotty newspaper heir might have been!)….¶ Chapter XXII of Le rouge et le noir too long for one sitting. Without Mme de Rênal on hand, the novel is tough going….¶ Today’s Blogging Hero: Mary Jo Foley, of All About Microsoft. Why am I reading this business book? To know the territory? Arguable but dubious plasma. More to the point: why did McNally Robinson stack it among all the legitimate general-interest nonfiction titles at the front of the shop?

The pile has been edited a bit: I’ve removed all the unopened books. The week’s big read, Beginner’s Greek, spent a night or two in the pile — no more — but never made it into a group picture. The bad thing about a treat like Beginner’s Greek is that it spoils both one’s taste and one’s appetite. It’s a good thing, I suppose, that such books don’t come along very often, because I should never get anything done if they did.

It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that neither the Prexy nor the Veep reads for pleasure, but — Condoleezza Rice? According to Jacob Heilbrunn’s review of Elisabeth Bumiller’s new biography, the Secretary of State was so excessively force-fed books as a child that — but I can’t bring myself to excuse or explain such an appalling failing. To give up reading for pleasure is to set one’s imagination out to pasture. It is a form of self-mutilation. Better never to have been a reader in the first place.

As for this week’s Book Review:

¶ Living with Ghosts.

The list of things that went wrong yesterday would go on and on, if I could bring myself to compile it. At one point, both iPod speaker systems (different makes, different rooms) took to stopping spontaneously. At another, the freight elevator went inexplicably on the blink. The elevators go on the blink all the time, but this time no one knew why. Then it fixed itself, just like the iPod speakers.

Then there was my long phone call with Miss G, who — it’s official now — is planning to get married in November. Yesterday, we learned that she and her fiancé have found a ring. This was good news, because it meant that Kathleen wouldn’t be checking out estate jewelry on the Internet anymore — not, at least, on my daughter’s behalf. Every once in a while, I’d be summoned to the computer, to give my opinion about a ring or two. Now that the ring issue has been dealt with, Kathleen has moved on, to mother-of-the-bride dresses.

This afternoon, Miss G — who is going to change her name, dropping the “G” part — and I were talking about family members who might or might not be invited. She rather reasonably wants to stick to people whom she knows, or has at least met more than once. It wasn’t hard to imagine how unreasonable I should have been about this ten years ago. Even though I have learned, the hard way, how unacceptable unreasonable behavior is, I was pretty dopy on the phone, assuring Megan that she was absolutely right but immediately contradicting myself with vague remarks about how “funny” people can be about weddings. It was like talking on flypaper. I finally had the sense to put Kathleen on the phone. Kathleen also assured Megan that she was absolutely right, but she sounded completely convinced of what she was saying.

I long to watch Father of the Bride — the first one, of course, with Spencer Tracy — but I know that that way only madness lies. No movie that’s as old as I am is going to help me figure out how to  cope with the concept of a cheerful and comfortable wedding that also makes sense at every turn, and every symbol chimes.

Fossil Darling is cleaning his attic, and he wanted to know if I’d seen this clip. No, I hadn’t, but I found it quite exquisitely appalling.

Construction of the building to be known as The Lucida, 86th & Lex. Where have I seen that orange before?

After a hard day of reading for pleasure, I slept in this morning. When I crawled back into bed for what turned out to be the last time, at about a quarter to nine, I concentrated on the one or two tiny suggestions that I would have made to James Collins if I had had a chance to read the MS of Beginner’s Greek. I was so impressed by the power of my improvements that I woke myself up completely. Beginner’s Greek remains one of the warmest and most generous social comedies that I have ever read. I only wish that the author were more willing to put his hero, Peter Russell, through a passage as dark as the ones that make reading Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope so hair-raising. Beginner’s Greek is loaded with sympathetic characters. It just needs a tad more villainy.

Then I read the Times. The Monday morning Times, so different — so much thinner! — from the two weekend bundles. I’ll deal with those later today. Also, I’ve got to make good on my bogus rule about Christmas cards and Martin Luther King Day. I have to take a stab at it, anyway. Right now, I’m off to the barber, for a trim; and then to Agata & Valentina, for sandwich fixings. How much will you pay me not to post my shopping list?

Last year, it was Call Me By Your Name. James Collins’s novel is different in most but not all ways, yet it is just as intensely pleasurable to read. Thanks to Kathleen, whom I tore away from what she was doing, for taking the snapshot with an unfamiliar camera.

This picture might have been taken at any hour today — aside from the time it took to take Kathleen to see Atonement, across the street, and to make a couple of grilled cheese sandwiches afterward. I didn’t even look at the Times.

Since I will undoubtedly finish reading the novel tonight, no matter how long it takes, I won’t have any excuses for staying away tomorrow. Except, of course, for getting a haircut, if the barber’s open. Looking a little woolly!

View from the lobby of the Kip’s Bay AMC Theatre.

Once upon a time, there was a simplicity about Woody Allen movies. People from the “coasts” got his jokes, and everybody else said “huh?” Those days are over. Ever since his wooing and wedding the third Mrs Allen, the audience has been further divided over the incest issue. (I said “issue”!) By this time, of course, the jokes in Woody Allen movies were few and far between.

Which may be why his latest film is such a triumph. There is not a funny line in the script, really, but, rather like Charlie Chaplin, Mr Allen shows that he can do funny without laugh lines.

¶ Cassandra’s Dream.

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A few weeks ago, Kathleen flew down to West Palm for a conference. On the flight, she overheard a lady in the row behind her tell another passenger about her visit to New York. She had come up from Palm Beach, where she lived, to hear her son give a book reading. His new novel, which she said was “light” and “fun,” was called, as best Kathleen could make out, Beginner’s Grief, or maybe Beginner’s Brief.

When the plane landed, Kathleen had a chance to take a look at the lady, whose voice had sounded not unfamiliar. Indeed, it was Mrs Collins, the mother of one of Kathleen’s schoolmates from the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Carol Collins. Ordinarily, I would not be telling you any of these details, but as you can already guess — because you’ve seen the generous ads in Condé Nast publications and perhaps even read the brief review in The New Yorker, the novel that Mrs Collins had flown to New York to hear read by her son was James Collins’s Beginniner’s Greek.

I’m not sure that I’d have ordered a copy of Beginner’s Greek if it hadn’t been for this extenuated connection — I have no business indulging in “light” and “fun” books at the moment, especially with the holidays just over — but I must say that I’m enjoying it very much, and not as a guilty pleasure, either. The writing is very good: I want to interrupt Kathleen by reading almost every paragraph aloud.

Why was Peter marrying Charlotte? Why was Charlotte marrying Peter? Charlotte worked in the New York office of L’Alliance Générale et Spécifique des Pays Francophones. The AGSPF fostered economic and cultural exchange among the French-speaking peoples of the world and tried to promote the French language and Francophone civilization in all places sadly suffering from their lack. Dogged and intelligent, Charlotte had mastered the politics of Chad (Djamous, the finance minister, was on the rise, though not supported by the Quay d’Orsay) and the diplomacy of Laos. She was, it seemed, always writing a report on intra-Francophone trade. There were lot of tables. In addition to this intellectual work, Charlotte also participated in the AGSPF’s busy social life: no minor Algerian poet could pass through New York without a reception. That’s what was happening tonight. Charlotte had to attend a dinner for a Belgian economist, who had appeared in town unexpectedly.

For a time, Charlotte’s father had worked in the Paris office of a New York law firm and the family had moved there when Charlotte was seven. With this credential, she could legitimately make France her thing, which she proceeded to do. After her parents divorced, when she was sixteen, Charlotte’s father and her stepmother bought a small property in the countryside, where they went every summer and where Charlotte would visit. Charlotte majored in French and she spent two years in Paris after college.

There she had had the requisite love affair with a Frenchman, with lots of tears. Maximilien-François-Marie-Isidore had been thirty-seven, an incredibly ancient and sophisticated age for Charlotte, then twenty-two. He was always lurking in the background, supposedly poised to swoop in and carry Charlotte back to Paris forever. That never seemed to happen, but on a regular basis, heavy-smoking, black-whiskered French friends — Héli, Valéry, Claude, Hilaire-Germain, Alexandre-César-Léopold, Gilles — would pass through New York. They would take Charlotte and Peter to obscure rock clubs and talk endlessly about American bands and films and writers whom Peter had never heard of. Of course, they all spoke English perfectly, and from time to time one or the other would engage Peter in conversation, while making it evident that he was merely doing so out of politeness.

Without wishing to be in any way reductive, I’ll nevertheless venture that Beginner’s Greek is the acerbically romping Knickerbocker comedy that Louis Auchincloss has declined to give us.

As Kathleen and Mrs Collins were parting, after their effusive greetings at the airport, the author’s mother — who hadn’t seen Kathleen in decades — asked Kathleen to be sure to “give my best to Kathy!” Oh, well.

Books that I am probably never going to read again (alas!) make up a great deal of what’s filling up the shelves at Westphalia, our expensive storage unit (see below). Reading Susan Dominus’s column in today’s Times set me to wondering if there’s some way that I can hook up with Tommy Books and Leprechaun.

Perhaps it’s the thought of lugging all those books somewhere that’s making me so lazy that I’m actually considering 27 Dresses as my Friday movie. Why? It’s showing across the street. If you’ll all think positive for a minute, maybe I’ll find the oomph to get myself to Kip’s Bay for Cassandra’s Dream. (But didn’t I just see that? And didn’t it star Philip Seymour Hoffman?)

In this month’s Harper’s, Ursula K LeGuin asks a very good question: why are big corporations interested in literary publishing? Why don’t they leave it alone? Click through to Portico, below, to read more.

Midway through her essay, Ms LeGuin discusses the “alternatives” to reading.

Of course books are now only one of the “entertainment media,” but when it comes to delivering actual pleasure, they’re not a minor one. Look at the competition. Governmental hostility was emasculating public radio while Congress allowed a few corporations to buy out and debase private radio stations. Television has steadily lowered its standards of what is entertaining until most programs are either brain-numbing or actively nasty. Hollywood remakes remakes and tries to gross out, with an occasional breakthrough that reminds us what a movie can be when undertaken as art. And the Internet offers everything to everybody: but perhaps because of that all-inclusiveness there is curiously little aesthetic satisfaction to be got from Web-surfing. You can look at pictures or listen to music or read a poem or a book on your computer, but these artifacts are made accessible by the Web, not created by it and not intrinsic to it. Perhaps blogging is an effort to bring creativity to networking, and perhaps blogs will develop aesthetic form, but they certainly haven’t done it yet.

Ahem. I make no claim to creativity here at The Daily Blague. But I daresay I’m as literate and reflective as the run of good, published books. Ms LeGuin, you need to get out more!

¶ Ursula K LeGuin on Books and Publishing, in Harper’s.

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