Monday, December 10, 2007

In case Superbad and Arrested Development didn’t do it for you, and you’ve still got the taste, here’s your next fix. That’s the penultimate episode–my favorite episode–so narrative purists will want to forgo the ass-backwards approach and start real proper-like on the first episode. Best as I can recap, the series is a fictionalized paean to the Hollywood writing process, which these days apparently involves doing absolutely nothing.

The strike couldn’t have happened at a better time, though, because I’ve been making full use of my property tax dollars with repeated trips to the local library. Now, I’d say roughly half of these writers don’t care about new media residuals, some because such technologies weren’t mainstream at the time, but mainly because they’re, y’know, dead. The books they’ve produced, however, along with the whole reading thing, are the exact opposite of this–energizing, wholesome, fulfilling.

Consuming gobs of electronic media, all in one sitting, seldom leaves a pleasant aftertaste. When my evening is measured in DVD chapter stops, the post-mortem is easily described with a few key words. Sluggish. Dumber. A kind of greasiness of the soul. Maybe it’s from the all that LCD radiation, I don’t know. But books feel different, and after finishing The Catcher in the Rye and The Forgetting Room recently, with The Autobiography of Mark Twain lodged in my couch and A Confederacy of Dunces on the docket, I’m still running hot, and the will to read endures.