Here’s an interesting chart from The Atlantic Magazine showing the amount of people reading over the past 60-plus years. There will always be that group of people who think of yesteryear as an idyllic time when everything was wholesome and the present is eating away our brains. Attention spans are probably getting shorter for one segment of society and failing to read in the process, but if this chart is to be believed, the assumption that reading is on the decline could very well be wrong.
Not much to say here except that Christopher Walken reading “Where the Wild Things Are” is not someone I’d first think of reading this book out loud. But it works.
I just finished reading The Great Gatsby for the first time by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I know most people probably read this book in high school or college, but somehow this book passed me by until I finally picked it up now. I couldn’t put it down, and it’s a book I could read over and over again. The WNYC radio program Studio 360 with Kurt Anderson has a wonderful program on the book and its influence on pop culture as part of its American Icons series.
One of my favorite quotes from the book, Nick Carraway on New York City life:
I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others–poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for the solitary restaurant dinner– young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.
Again at eight o’clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were five deep with throbbing taxi cabs, bound for the theatre district, I felt a sinking in my heart. Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited, and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted cigarettes outlined unintelligible gestures inside. Imagining that I, too, was hurrying toward gaiety and sharing their intimate excitement, I wished them well.
This week I learned just how big Newt Gingrich’s ego can be and perhaps it better to plan for a permanent manned base on his ego. It must be easy to say what you want in front of people who want to hear it and not giving much thought to how disappointed those people will be when you don’t do what you say you want. Newt should probably read Ryan Lizza’s article on just how constrained a president can be when they occupy the Oval Office and not be the transformational president they want to be. The easy part is coming up with the dream. The difficult part is knowing how to make it a reality. And speaking of the moon, how timely it was for Scientific American to release an article on the fire that destroyed the Apollo 1 test capsule and what NASA and the country learned from that tragic disaster. I also learned that German astronauts (Weltraumnaut?) had a penchant for cowl-neck sweaters, at least on screen anyway. And the price of Stradivarius instruments continue to rise and rise, making it more and more impossible for a performer to own one of these instruments on their own without the help of a wealthy patron. And you might want to remember those that died and suffered in producing that electronic device you’re using, not just those made by Apple, but by every other company.
