This week, Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values, died after a period of failing health. Two years ago, my friend, Darryl, died in a motorcycle accident, leaving behind his wife and four kids. At the funeral, I couldn’t find a connection between his still body and the vibrant, wonderful person I knew. That wasn’t Darryl, lying there. Intellectually, I knew, but emotionally, I couldn’t understand. He’s buried in Austin, wearing his mechanic’s work shirt and baseball cap, laid to rest as he lived. I’d like to think Pirsig will be sent off in similar fashion.
A recent study concluded that college students prefer paper to e-books at an alarming rate, almost nine to one. Does our preference for paper sound the death knell of e-books? Or have e-books simply failed to live up to their potential? In this writer’s opinion, we may interpret the successes, and shortcomings, of e-books by understanding simply that the way which we consume literature, its method of delivery, can be as important as the words themselves.
When David Bowie once commented on a mime piece he did early in his career, in which his character struggles to remove a false face, he noted “The papers made a big thing out of it . . . funny though, they didn’t mention anything about a mask.”
Wong Kar-Wai creates art for one medium: film. His are not the kind of movies that could be adapted to any other format, be it book, television, or theater. He paints with the lens, flashes of color slashing across the celluloid. He extracts the best from his actors, beckoning feelings of incredible depth and meaning in a single look. Wong is, to put it simply, a filmic genius crafting masterworks of mood and light for an audience that’s just now coming to appreciate the extent of his oeuvre.
In July, Charles Dee Mitchell wrote an excellent article on this blog entitled “Enough with the Tomes: 4 Authors to Read in an Afternoon.” However, despite its excellent recommendations, the reverse position deserves an ardent defense.
On August 4, Haruki Murakami’s first two novels were released for the first time with a proper English translation. The novels, “Hear the Wind Sing” and “Pinball, 1973,” collected together under the title “Wind/Pinball”, were previously only available through roughly translated epub torrents. The books serve as a fantastic starting point for Murakami’s bibliography of weird, ephemeral fiction.
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