PRESS: What I Read
Powers, Thomas
I'm a slow reader by choice, conviction and temperament. In college I attended the first few classes of a speed-reading course of the sort which allegedly enabled President Kennedy to read...
...got it easy compared to the scientists...
...After the glue hardens the unit is sculpted with a chainsaw, then sanded for seven weeks by a squad of gnomes, and finished...
...My personal favorite is "How the Town of Omelet Got Its Name," which opens with Donald and his nephews at the city limits after the event, disguised in dark glasses and big bushy beards...
...I have confidence the folks who publish Commonweal: 213 and read Fine Woodworking are going to work it out...
...I am sure, in fact, that some of his targets have not been able to eat or leave the house for days...
...With some temerity I invite your suggestions of publications I've overlooked...
...Alan Abelson's column on the stock market which opens every issue of Barron's, a financial weekly...
...That difficulty I was just mentioning is that it's not easy to have a rich and influential mentor like Altman to help you with your career...
...There is just too much to read...
...The wife, played by Lily Tomlin before and by Ms...
...You may think the creative juices have dried up in America but if you do you're wrong...
...Even the characters are the same in Rudolph's film...
...It'll take your breath away (especially if you try to move it), but it will also make you wonder who's making furniture for the people...
...Bowker Co., 117 Church Street, Whitinsville, Mass...
...If.they survive there will be something of steel in them forever after...
...I would go a lot farther than People for anything about Joan Didion so I can't even cross off People...
...And from these humble origins came a career that was to be capped off directing The Sound o] Music...
...01588...
...It was the size of a small weather balloon and a minor factor in Scrooge's fortune of umpteen squintillion, sixteen impossibijillion dollars, but a time came when it was critical...
...For one thing, the major reviewers all tend to cover the same big books and neglect the rest...
...There are plenty of interesting articles in those magazines, too, but the ads are unique...
...So I dropped the speed-reading course and forever lost my chance of truly keeping up...
...The Journal's headline writers are geniuses at their craft, which is as demanding agenre as the haiku...
...He has an eye like Meneken's for the greed and gaudy euphoria which sends stocks up, and is always standing well to one side when they come down...
...It's a kind of son of Whole Earth Catalog with the addition of articles unique for their obsessive comprehension, Even the New Yorker is shortwinded by comparison...
...In effect his film is the road show of Nashville, moving to L.A...
...The Venezuelans were not enchanted...
...Altman's prot6g6 is a young man named Alan Rudolph who was Altman's assistant on The Long Goodbye, California Split and Nashville, and who is now making his directorial debut with Welcome to L.A., which Altman has produced...
...Federico Fellini, for example, got his start as a scriptwriter on Rosselini's Open City and went on to become one of cinema's great directors...
...Grand Rapids, that's who...
...This is what Mr...
...Recently I picked up one from August, 1973, with a 15-page interview with the Venezuelan Communist leader Teodoro Petkoff, who explained why the party had abandoned the armed struggle...
...Besides, we've...
...scholarly works from the university presses, special reports and even some foreign books are covered...
...But Browning is the most recent example I can think of...
...If that doesn't strike you as funny right there you probably won't like WDC & S or Uncle Scrooge, but if it does you'll be happy to know that both comics are republishing the old stories...
...Some years ago a new team of writers and artists took over to put out Donald Duck, Daisy Duck, the Beagle Boys and Huey, Dewey and Louie...
...He is never mellow with misguided sympathy for the author...
...Herewith a list, in the event somebody out there doesn't already have enough to read: Co-Evolution Quarterly is one of the great experiments in magazine publishing...
...Book reviews in general present something of a problem...
...The woodworkers' problem, of course, is where do you go after freeforms...
...Write to: Stan Windass, The Rookery, Adderbury, Near Banbury, Oxfordshire, England...
...The ads in Smithsonian and Natural History...
...Their idea is to let you know first of all what's in a book, with only a word or two, generally, about what it amounts to...
...Each has only a series of coincidences, chance encounters and overlaps in the lives of more characters than any 100-minute plot could contain...
...They reveal a passionate hunger across America for things which are intrinsically valuable or fine of their kind...
...that same pop music scene which Nashville exploited so successfully...
...I can't say for sure that I've ever read every word in an article in Foreign Affairs, but the reviews are a model of brevity and compression...
...how many electrical engineering articles are published each year anyway...
...Stewart Brand thinks 20,000 words on space colonies is not a word too many...
...The new team cannot begin to match this sort of thing so stick to WDC & S and Uncle Scrooge...
...Such a mentor is sometimes so influential, a preferred assistant may find himself wondering whether he'll be able to move out from under that influence...
...Both can write an article in 800 words, which is a feat, and both have pronounced tastes...
...They like things and they hate things and they always know why...
...The result will look something like a toadstool from Alice-inWonderland, but flat on top...
...Doubtless it's an acquired taste but these are very funny publications...
...is really very close--uncomfortably close--to Altman's Nashville...
...For neither film really has a plot...
...Business in this line has fallen off a bit since the Bicentennial market cooled, but it's still brisk...
...The short reviews in the back of Foreign Affairs...
...A way around this is to read Publisher's Weekly (by subscription only, a sobering $30 a year from R.R...
...THOMAS POWERS WELCOME TO HARD TIMES 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE SCREEN The problem of assistant directors is almost as knotty as the problem of assistant professors...
...He introduced Joan Crawford in Tragedy of the Circus, made the original version of Dracula, and did at least one truly classic film, Freaks...
...There isn't space here to explain in full why these are no good...
...Lina Wertmuller got her start as Fellini's assistant director on La Strada, and has gone on to become the Robert Wise of la dolce vita...
...For the most part the good directors begin as writers, or even, like Welles, as actors, rather than as apprentices in direction itself...
...That's $2,850 for a couple of yards of books, and they don't tell you which books...
...The annual production of articles on chemical engineering is now at 400,000 and still growing...
...Half the magazine is devoted to practical advice, but it's a far cry from plans for kitchen cabinets and magazine racks...
...When you find something you like you can be sure you never would have found it anywhere else...
...I'd like to make special mention here of two regular reviewers who have mastered their calling, Peter Prescott in Newsweek and Anatole Broyatd in the daily Times...
...Uncle Scrooge's ball of string leaps to mind...
...One recent four-page, fullcolor ad in Smithsonian offered leather-bound editions of the 100 greatest books ever written for $28.50 each from the Easton Press in Norwalk, Conn...
...A freeform table, for example, would be built up into a single unit by cutting out slabs of Philippines mahogany, say, with a bandsaw...
...The personnel is pretty much the same too, with Keith Carradine, Geraldine Chaplin, Allan Nichols and Richard Baskin all reappearing from the earlier film (Baskin again in the dual role of on-screen performer and offscreen musical director...
...Also very funny is "The Lower Case" on the inside back cover of Columbia Journalism Review...
...Of course, in the movie business there is no such thing as tenure, so there's not so much harm done if you promote an assistant director...
...That's interesting...
...A whole page of these builds up to hysterical intensity...
...In college I attended the first few classes of a speed-reading course of the sort which allegedly enabled President Kennedy to read Gone With the Wind over breakfast but I hated the sensation of running my eye down the page and scooping up the wordsline by line...
...And the man with whom the wife does this cheating in both films is a pop singer played by Keith Carradine...
...I could take my time if I chose...
...Chaplin now, is again cheating on her husband as well...
...Griffith on Intolerance, went on to make distinctive features in his own right...
...r'l I would like general information on the INSTITUTE...
...You can do your part by subscribing...
...No assistant professor has ever gone on to a more purely academic achievement than that...
...In academia, on the other hand, a promoted assistant professor becomes a power that be, and be and be and be to the last syllable of recorded time...
...I won't say I read them all, but they'rz filled with things which never get into the newspapers and they don't date as quickly as most of the periodicals one reads...
...Are we supposed to feel the system works, for instance, because it produces dubious success stories like Robert Wise...
...Among other things I learned that in 1965 or 1966 Oh6 Guevara seriously proposed that he come to Venezuela and lead the revolution...
...Things like silver, gold or even platinum medallions of the Founding Fathers, the 100 Greatest Moments in American History or Royal Flags of the World...
...Wise was editor on Citizen Kane and Welles's assistant on The Magnificent Ambersons, for which he supposedly directed a few scenes...
...The Fieldstaff Reports of the American Universities Field Staff consist of 10- to 20-page studies of things like the coup in Chile, cultural change in Afghanistan, the condition of the fellahin in Egypt, "Postwar Thailand: Indo-chinese Domino or Chinese Checker...
...Eighty-five thousand/Lt I think I staggered...
...There are three in each issue, starting right, left and center of the front page...
...Rudolph's first feature seems to leave him wondering at any rate...
...I'm not kidding...
...One recent article was devoted to the making of wooden planes, another to library steps...
...All this and catalog updates too...
...At least, I think Rudolph is pretty uncomfortable about it at times...
...The other half of the magazine centers on questions of design...
...That's nothing, he said...
...His remarks on politics are uniformly skeptical and amused...
...The authors know what they're talking about and the reports quickly build up into a compact library of background papers...
...The difficulty is that the only directors who ever seem to have prot6g6s are extremely powerful ones like Griffith, Welles, Fellini, or, now, Robert Altman...
...That's how dose they think we are...
...New books are categorized by subject--The United States...
...II--WORKSHOP ON DEATH, DYING, AND PUBLIC POMCY, June 19-26, 1977, at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York, an examination of policies affecting death and dying...
...Abelson is about as disenchanted as it's possible for a man to be...
...06470...
...Tod Browning, from being assistant to D.W...
...Trade books, FOUNDATION FOR ALTERNATIVES International Summer School, Swindon JULY 4-15, 1977 The School is concerned with the search for constructive alternatives to the present social order, and will ,be led by a distinguished team of people actively concerned in health, industry, technology...
...There is a clock in the upper left-hand corner of the front cover with the hands currently standing at nine minutes to midnight...
...Broyard is especially bracing on fiction which is pretentious, inflated or plain silly...
...I'm not sure if bears are born or made, but Abelson is a bear of the deepest hue, convinced that the law of gravity operates with especial force in the stock market...
...Walt Disney's Comics & Stories and Uncle Scrooge...
...They just aren't funny...
...Some are well-known, some not...
...The old team had a brilliant instinct for exaggeration with a straight face...
...Keeping up is a full-time job and with the best will in the world, honest, I still fall behind...
...N a ~ , Address City/State/Zip ~onwml:, 211 onies, you might be in acupuncture, the science of watersheds, eomposting, the mental life of whales, wind power, or what's left of the new left...
...It tells you the latest wrinkle in copyright law and the figures in big paperback contracts, in addition to reviewing 50 or 60 books a week in short, one-paragraph takes...
...This is a good way to keep track of things...
...If his picture is no good or, worse still, he can't handle success, the powers that be in the movie business can always topple him back to the cutting room floor again...
...So they set out on a straight line through darkest Africa...
...Feature articles in the Wall Street lournal...
...After a week or two of classes I reflected that no one was ever going to pile my desk with two feet of briefing papers every morning...
...There is something of a renaissance in woodworking going on in this country, although the woodworkers, like most other artists, are in the midst of a creative crisis...
...10706 [ ] I would like information on the WORKSHOPS...
...The most doubtful trend in woodworking now is toward freeform, sculpted pieces...
...piling them up with a gallon or two of hot glue between each slab, and then clamping them to create one single, solid, immovable block...
...94965...
...The people who buy those things all ought to subscribe to Fine Woodworking, I cannot speak too highly of this magazine, now in its second year...
...Some assistant directors have had worthwhile directorial careers of their own...
...education and agriculture...
...You can get the Reports from AUFS Inc., 4 West Wheelock Street, Hanover, N.H...
...They have been trying new things for some time now but it is increasingly clear that, good as some of them are, they aren't as good as the old things...
...The art work is bland and the stories are worse...
...I would like information on READINGS...
...I got the drift but not much of the detail...
...Yet it is not ultimately in some particular character or situation that Rudolph's film is most like Altman's, but rather in its manner of execution, its style...
...For Welcome to L.A...
...Keeping up is already a full day's work but I'd hate to miss anything...
...But there are some things so entertaining or useful I pick them up with a light heart...
...Eight dollars a year from The Taunton Press, Box 355, Newtown, Conn...
...The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists...
...Without even mentioning books there are the general magazines, the special interest magazines, two newspapers a day, newsletters, small political magazines, the literary quarterlies, the financial press, articles on pressing subjects in Foreign A~airs, Jack Anderson, slick paper magazines for smokers of controlled substances, picture captions in National Geographic, articles by friends on solar energy and politics in Telhiride, Colorado, articles about magazines in magazines about magazines, the business, travel and real estate sections of the Sunday Times, articles on pressing subjects in Ms., the newsweeklies, even People . . . . At least 94 percent of the people in People have got highly-paid press agents trying to get them in, which takes the urgency out of it somehow, but occasionally there are pictures of someone like Joan Didion...
...Not long ago a friend told me about his new job publishing abstracts of articles on electrical engineering...
...What to do with either of them, that's the problem...
...THE INSTITUTE offers articles in thirteen different areas: *Survey of ethics and the life sciences .Care of the dying--cultural and personal dimensions .Death and dying--definition of death ~ and dying--euthanasia, allowing to die and refusal of treatment .Death and dying survey packet -Experimentation and informed consent =Transplantation, hem.dialysis and allocation of scarce medical resources =Behavior control--clinical and philosophical overview .Behavior control--psychosurgew and electrical stimulation of the brain =Behavior control--drugs .Genetics--genetic counseling, prenatal diagnosis, sex selection, ethical issues -Genetics--genetic screening *Genetics--changing the gene code, therapy and engineering, cloning, in vitro fertilization and future questions For more information fill in this coupon and return to: Deparfmenf 2000 Institute of Society, Ethics and the Life Sciences Has,rigs Center 380 "Broadway Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y...
...Keep an eye on the deck, For the rest it's often useful, but as my friend Tim Ferris says, why can't the Bulletin be as good-looking as International Defense Review...
...The entire life-time earnings of the former, including grant awards and fringe benefits, seldom come to a fraction of what will be chanced on the latter in a first, modest feature...
...Military, Technical and Scientific, and so on...
...It will weigh 1,000 pounds and cost $2 a pound...
...Unfortunately you can no longer get them by subscription...
...If Co-Evolution Quarterly goes under there is no hope for Western Civilization...
...The handrubbed finish will soak in so deeply the piece will glow in the dark...
...But at the same time, making money in the movie business can't be given much more credence than losing it...
...The headlines alone will enrich your day...
...Picked up on the fly the language seemed stale, like beer gone fiat...
...Eight well-spent dollars a year from CQ, Box 428, Sausalito, Calif...
...03755...
...If you're not interested in space colThe Hastings Center I n s t i t u t e o f Society, Ethics and the Life Sciences in its continuing work in EDUCATION and" RESEARCH o f f e r s t o educators and others WORKSHOPS IN MEDICAL AND BIOLOGICAL ETHICS Three in the summer of 1977: I--WORKSHOP ON MEDICAL ETHICS, June 19-26, 1977, at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York, an introduction to the social and ethical issues of the biological revolution...
...The last step was to unravel their respective balls of string to see who was the winner...
...READINGS IN SOCIETY, ETHICS AND THE LIFE SCIENCES A series of reprints including clinical, legal, public policy and ethical analyses, as well as government documents vital for informed discussion suitable for use by undergraduate, graduate and professional school students...
...Here the music is rock instead of country and western, but the setting of recording studios and overly impressive offices is the same...
...I had the constant feeling I was missing or overlooking something...
...He answered: 85,000...
...There is some c6nsolation, I guess, in the fact that you don't stand to lose so much money by promoting an assistant professor as an assistant director...
...1 Killer," "Bill Would Permit Ads on Eyeglasses," "Marital Duties to Replace Borough Affairs for Harold Zipkin," "Police Kill Man with Axe" and the like...
...A rich miner from South Africa challenged Scrooge for the title of World's Richest Duck and amazingly matched him penny for penny...
...To give Rudolph his due, he has learned I April 1977:214...
...Western Europe...
...Ill--WORKSHOP ON ETHICAL THEORY IN A MEDICAL CONTEXT, June 26-July 2, 1977, at Stanford University, a systematic exposure to a structured ethical basis for confronting medical ethical problems...
...To paraphrase Ecclesiastes, I guess it is: Of the making of magazine articles there is no end...
...There is no end to it...
...This consists mostly of headlines which have slipped out of controlw"Self-Abuse is No...
...They're always in the same place so it's easy to check if there's something you're interested in while waiting in fine to pay for the Times...
...The one that Ned Beatty played in Nashville--the executive who's cheating on his wife - - i s played here by Harvey Keitel...
...Fine Woodworking, like CoEvolution Quarterly, is proof to the contrary...
...At a quarter they're a bargain, especially since the originals now sell for $5 I April 1977:212 and up...
...Philosophy, biography, naval tactics, the art of writing constitutions and cabinetry all flourished in the 18th century...
Vol. 104 • April 1977 • No. 7
