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Dope. Screw the exordium. Alberto Manguel's latest book is entitled Reading Pictures . That title didn't seem right to us -- the verb, surely, should be seeing. Looking at. But Reading does hint at a more theory packed gaze than is usual among the realists, so we overlooked -- or didn't read -- the title. Perhaps the title should have been Overwriting Pictures, a more confrontational, but also more truthful, guide to the author's intention. But, but... just as we were getting into the book, we were stopped cold by two sentences set pretty close to one another in the introduction: 1. "With the development of perspective during the Renaissance, pictures froze into a simple instant: that of the moment of the viewing as perceived from the standpoint of the viewer." 2."Pictures, however, present themselves to our consciousness instantaneously, held by their frame..." LI tried to go on, but these sentences so clouded our pleasure that

Remora LI was going to write a post about Ann Coulter, but we didn't have the heart. Actually, this post was going to use Coulter's remark, in the New York Observer that "My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building ." I thought I'd use this remark to map the interlocking major political weblogs and how they operate to exclude or include agents in the blog discourse -- which has a form consonant with other closed clubs, cliques, and in-groups. And blah blah blah. But... but I didn't have the heart for any comments on Ann Coulter, beyond the fact that the more interesting part of the Coulter story was the writer's part in it -- George Gurley. One got a whiff of something I haven't thought about in years: that old 'Nancy Reagan's queens'" culture. Frankly, I thought that was good and dead. The explanation is probably that Gurley, on his own account, is from one of those tight assed hetero villes

Remora On the side of the angels. Dan Gilmour's column points to an issue LI has been clamoring about, like an alarm in the Sahara desert, since before Moses was a pup, or at least since, a year ago, we started doing this thing: breaking IP monopolies. We've been against the Big Pharma ones, and against the increasing use of patent law in blatantly silly or pernicious ways, to impede technology, and we've been arms akimbo, we've been a regular scourge. We are also totally without influence, but that's a minor thing. The Carolinas have elected a set of senators and legislators (like Hollings S.C. and Cobble N.C.) who collectively represent Disney first. We don't know why the Carolinas -- possibly because being bought by the entertainment industry in those two states has minimum down side. These states aren't known for nursing alt entertaiment tech. They are the high end slave labor states -- they suck in industry by using tax breaks and union b

Remora LI hasn't commented much about Bush's war fever because we find it so depressing. We find it depressing because the United States has no cause to go to war with Iraq. Or rather, its causes for going to war with Iraq would work just as well for going to war with Pakistan -- or even Israel, which, after all, is the nation with the greatest (illegal) nuclear arsenal in the Middle East, and the one nation that has shown, time and time again, that it will take any pre-emptive action it deems necessary to protect itself -- not necessarily a good thing from the point of view of U.S. interests. After all, no law says our interests are aligned with Israel in the Middle East. We find the peace side preferable, insofar as the argument is against the U.S. mounting an armed force to overthrow Saddam Hussein's government. On the other hand, we do think that government should be overthrown. It is unnecessary to rehearse the wickedness of the current government in this post -

Note: This is the second part of "Thirteen Ways of Looking at Celebrity Biography." The previous post contained the first part. 5. Novalis said that God was a problem whose solution was another problem. The same can be said for the celebrity - not the flash in the pan, but the super celebrity, the one who transcends her epoch, the one whose enigma is always fresh - the one who can be found listed in People Magazine�s 100 most intriguing people of the century (Special Fall 1997 edition). 6. "Buckalo did let Reselli back out of the Copa deal. The terms of the split were that Roselli would honor his obligation to play the Copacabana each year for seven years, but in all other ways he was no longer under Buckalo�s control." - David Evanier, The Jimmy Rosselli Story. An act of 1572, in England, proscribed "common players in interludes and minstrils." Players had to �belong� to a baron or an honorable personage - hence Shakespeare's member