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A Critical Guide to Contemporary North American Directors
The new line of books about film and filmmaking from Wallflower Press in London (available from Columbia University Press here) is a real achievement. A Critical Guide to Contemporary North American Directors, with a whopping 535 beautifully designed
A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906
Any author who can attract a crowd to listen to explanations of changes in plate tectonics theory over several decades deserves applause, and the best-selling author Simon Winchester did just that, in a conversation with Hal Wake at the 18th Annual V
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Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer
Steve Mann, a professor at the University of Toronto, is the subject of Cyberman (2001), a fascinating film by Peter Lynch. He is also a cyborg, a concept he explains in Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Compute
Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning, and the First World War
Only now, eighty years after the war, are we given the explanation of that process of transformation, in the pages of Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning, and the First World War, by Jonathan F. Vance (UBC Press). Vance tells the story of a tiny country
Diamonds Are Forever: Artists and Writers on Baseball
For the uninitiated, the poetic mysteries of baseball can seem elusive if not downright silly. Diamonds Are Forever: Artists and Writers on Baseball (Chronicle), a print version of the Smithsonian Institution exhibition of the same name, doesn’t set
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The Main
Last summer, during a visit to Vancouver, my nine-year-old son climbed the pediment of a cast-iron traffic-light standard and put his palm on the glowing hand that warns pedestrians to stay put. My mother pointed out afterwards that my photograph of the event contained its own French caption, in the word visible over his shoulder: main.
A Few Essential Words
I met Alejandra Pizarnik in Buenos Aires, in 1967, five years before her death. I had asked her to contribute to an anthology of texts that purported to continue an interrupted story begun in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale: “There was a man dwelt by a churchyard.” She agreed and wrote a haunting piece called “Los muertos y la lluvia,” “The dead and the rain.” The book was never published, but we became friends.
Dog Show Dancing
The next performer, Coco, a six-year-old Belgian shepherd, stood on his back legs and hopped alongside a woman wearing white go-go boots who jiggled her hips in time to “ymca.” Coco weaved between her legs, rolled across her feet, lay on his back and kicked his legs in the air. The woman’s brow was furrowed and sweat ran down her face. Coco bounded in front of her, then backed through her legs and sneezed twice. The judges looked at each other and one of them wrote somethingdown.
