“The Death of E-Mail,” as this Slate article notes? No way! I still e-mail. I love e-mail. E-mail, don’t go away… (ok, yeah, I’m being facetious. Just a tad; darn teenagers think they rule the world with fads and dropping e-mail for Facebook and MySpace).
Readings: just finished reading former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins’ book – “‘The Trouble with Poetry’ and Other Poems” – and now reading another Collins book: “The Art of Drowning.” I had never read his poems, beyond what I’ve viewed of these very clever animated versions of his work on YouTube – so finally getting around to reading his work has been great. Accessible (but not low-brow), witty and funny, and visually stimulating; as noted in a previous post, I think Collins’ poems are reminiscent of Emily Dickinson’s (the American style of poetry, perhaps? I’m so not up on poetry) – but thankfully not as dreary or disjointed or just plain strange (I certainly feel that way of some of Emily Dickinson’s poetry).
Delayed response on-line on my part – tv critic David Bianculli left the Daily News on November 5, 2007, with his farewell column – just in time for the tv writers strike, and to have his own on-line magazine on the subject of tv, TV Worth Watching. Plug in Bianculli’s name in the search function of our blog here, and you can see how much I cite to him. I’ll miss him in the Daily News; I am now bookmarking his website, which looks pretty cool.
Query – am I really watching less tv, or is it because I’m too busy trying to write my so-called novel?
Late breaking news: could it be? The tv writers and the studios are going back to the negotiating table? Well, the tv writers’ strike continues, so far as anyone can tell…
NY Times with an article on how to spend a weekend on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn.
Procrastinating — it’s been going around by word of e-mail (umm, rather than by mouth, if you will), so try out Free Rice, a vocabulary game. For every word you get right, you get 10 grains of rice to help fight hunger. It doesn’t seem terribly much (those of us rice eaters can figure that 10 grains barely fill your spoon), but seems like a nice way to waste one’s time. Learn words (or at least improve your skills in the Process of Elimination or using those old SAT break-down-the-roots to get to a definition tactics) and get some rice for others.