Sunday, May 8, 2011

The City Dark

This thoughtful and playful film by Ian Cheney adds to the admiration I have for him (and Curt Ellis) based on King Corn. It treats the direct observation of a cloudless and not too polluted night sky as a core experience of the natural world. It contemplates the ways in which most people alive today are impeded in any attempt they may happen to make at obtaining such an experience. The film includes images of night skies from Maine to Brooklyn and beyond and also has funny and impassioned interviews with Neal Tyson and other students and lovers of the stars. It's lovely work.

unfair and misleading reviews of a great book

Kenji Yoshino's A Thousand Times More Fair: What Shakespeare's Plays Teach Us About Justice is, for anyone who cares about Shakespeare's plays, a great read, a source of insight, and a shared celebration. People who have not yet seen the book but have read Garry Wills' perverse and misleading review in the NYTBR (4/17/2011)or have seen only Andrea Campana's dismissive and misleading letter (5/8/2011) will have no idea of Yoshino's strengths or of his purposes. Here then is a simple challenge: read either the Introduction to Yoshino's book or, say, his chapter on King Lear. Then either ignore Wills and Campana (and read the rest of A Thousand Times More Fair) or test what you have read of Yoshino against their complaints. In my opinion Wills--and the Times--should be embarrassed. It's one thing to disparage a book if you describe it accurately in doing so. It's another to build your thesis on a misrepresentation.