Sharing the Secret Sharer

Apparently somebody decided to narrate Conrad's novella on Youtube, in a William Shatnery sort of way. You can read along while listening, if you've got an hour and 42 minutes. But don't do it at work! They'll catch you, and punish you, by making you read it out of a book. To your co-workers. Whether they want to hear it or not. While they're doing your work. Conrad comes to your cubicle? Not good. I would say doubleplusungood, but Conrad's ghost would start moaning, and we don't want that.

Brings new meaning to "I'll wait for the video." Watch it, listen to it, or read it? Why choose?

(Incidentally, I found this at YT while trying to find a snippet of a famous scene in Chinatown, the one where Huston talks to Nicholson about wanting to buy the future. I fail to see how this is connected, but what do I know.)

But to follow this theme, I might as well share this on Dead Horse.


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more from sxephil

"GINGERS SCIENTIFICALLY NOT LOVED except for Christina Hendricks"

As always with videos from Phillip DeFranco aka "sxephil", the NS4W caveat applies due to occasional cursing and cheesecake imagery. I appreciate DeFranco keeping up with pop culture goings on so I don't have to. Also, he's a lot more entertaining than shows like Extra! or Entertainment Tonight, and his videos take much less time.


According to Yahoo:

In Morocco, the native Tamri goats are so enticed by the berries of Argan trees that they have become adept at climbing the branches to reach their food. Even stranger still, the goats' droppings contain seed kernels which local farmers then grind into an oil that is used in cooking and cosmetics.

I'm skeptical. Maybe the Morocco Export Council is thinking, "Oh, those stupid Americans. Surely if we post some pictures of native Tamri goats in trees, we will be able to sell more berries. They will never for a moment suspect we know how to use the photoshop because they think we don't understand these things. Ha ha ha ha!"

14 September 2011: Agnes Moorehead and Tim Holt

via Elbert Ventura's article at Slate.

Michael S. Hart 1947-2011

from Yahoo News:

Michael S. Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg and a pioneer in formatting print material for online use, passed away Tuesday at his home in Urbana, Illinois. A self-described "unreasonable" thinker, according to his obituary at Project Gutenberg, Hart invented the ebook in 1971.

I've had a post sitting in the drafts folder for some time, tentatively titled "Lit Blogging", which included the following article link:

Elizabeth Weingarten, Slate:"Fantastic Typing Machines"
A gallery of old typewriters that look more like sewing machines, phonographs, and torture devices.



This was published September 7th, the same day Michael Hart's obit appeared in the LA Times, and I suppose you could construe that as an irony. However it wouldn't surprise me in the least if Hart also liked typewriters and maybe even missed them. As far as I can see e-books are no more a threat to books than automobiles were to horses, although I wonder if e-books and the digitization of text will render access to three dimensional books(that you can't imperceptibly edit after the fact, a la 1984) a luxury item, per market forces. Maybe access to an undiluted historical record will also become a luxury good, like horses are in some places.

Having said that, I also imagine Hart recognized this was a genie that had to be let out of the bottle, and that corporatism and corrupt government practices were the enemy, not technology per se. For example he was against the expansion of copyright laws and the increasing commercialization of the commons, which of course are interlinked.


see also
Wired, "What kind of man wants to put the 10,000 most important books online by 2002 and make them available for free?" (I'm not sure when this article was published, circa 1997. It refers to the pending Digital Millenium Copyright Act(DMCA), which of course became law the following year.)


via Maude Newton.


cross-posted at Dead Horse.

Gore Vidal n' Norman Mailer on Cavett

The original link is here.