Mount Snowdon, Diaz, Enchanted, Gawande

My study at home is like the Alps. I have so many white mountains of essays to look at that I might start needing a pair of skis. Still, the weather is so gloomy I don't mind being cosy inside sipping chamomile tea.
At least I cleared one mountain range in the living room. I had a Mount Snowdon of Sunday NYTimes newspapers and New Yorkers which I managed to munch through this week, procrastinating from marking. Articles of interest from the Sunday NYTimes were:
a) Movie Deals, an essay in the book review by Rachel Donadio highlighting how some publishers are partnering with film companies eg HarperCollins with Sharp Independent, Random House with Focus Features: "Now, Random House and HarperCollins will get a cut of the box office sales, as well as revenue from DVDs, cable TV and other media. And the authors involved will get more say in choosing screenwriters, actors and directors."
b) A Good Mystery: Why We Read, by Motoko Rich. I like the last paragraph: "But books have outlived many death knells, and are likely to keep doing so. 'I'm much more optimistic than I think most people are,' Mr [Junot] Diaz said. Reading suffers, he says, because it has to compete unfairly with movies, television shows and electronic gadgets whose marketing budgets far outstrip those of publishers. 'Books don't have billion-dollar publicity behind them,' Mr. Diaz said. 'Given the fact that books don't have that, they're not doing a bad job.'"
c) Friending, Ancient or Otherwise by Alex Wright describing how some academic researchers are "exploring the parallels between online social networks and tribal societies. In the collective patter of profile-surfing, messaging and 'friending', they see the resurgence of ancient patters of oral communication.... 'If you examine the Web through the lens of orality, you can't help but see it everywhere,' says Irwin Chen, a design instructor at Parsons..., 'Orality is participatory, interactive, communal and focused on the present. The Web is all of these things.'"
d) The Line Between Homage and Parody by Brooks Barnes, about the Walt Disney Musical Comedy 'Enchanted' - which I look forward to seeing: "Projects like 'Enchanted' indicate that Mr. Iger's [chief executive of Disney] team is trying to take a route down the middle: resisting adding modern touches but referencing them in fresh settings and winking at their old-fashioned charismas. 'It's a very smart approach,' said Robert K. Passikoff, a.. brand consultant in New York. 'Losing a bit of the preciousness keeps these franchises relevant and alive.'"
The Dec 10 edition of The New Yorker had an exceptional array of essays. I particularly enjoyed Alexandra Styron's Reading My Father and Atul Gawande's The Checklist: Intensive care can harm as well as heal, but there's a simple way of improving the odds. My eyes always light up when I see that Gawande has a new article. A surgeon and professor at Harvard Med, he's an exceptional, insightful, compassionate writer. Also, I really enjoyed Louis Menand's essay Woke Up This Morning: Why do we read diaries? There were some very well-articulated observations here eg "The memorializing of the mundane is part of the flattening of foreground-background contrast that makes diaries different from memoirs and other forms of historical narrative. It's also a sign of the diary's absolute fidelity to the present...The just-the-facts elimination of perspective, discrimination, and reflection, and the sense of bathos and non sequitur that sometimes results, fits certain personality types beautifully...", "...And the superego theory [about why people write diaries], of course, is the theory that diaries are really written for the eyes of others. They are exercises in self-justification." This article got me thinking about why I keep a blog. For me, it is a means not only of recording all the wonderful articles I have come across, but also to impose a [however illusory] sense of organization on my life. My life seems more organized if I can write about it, however occasionally and cursorily, if I can put some of my thoughts into neat sentences.
Well, the Alps are staring at me. Better tuck into those portfolios of student essays. I've also got my last class tomorrow for Creative Non Fiction, and we're going to be discussing The Beat Generation.
Happily holidays.