I read a great book of linked short stories, kind of a novel, Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women. Made me want to write a memoir. She gets so deep into her characters' minds, its amazing.
Saw the new movie Sideways this weekend, it was really funny, much better than I'd expected from the previews — a couple of guys visiting wineries? Hilarious, and all about love and growth.
Then saw one of the Ten Worst Movies ever, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. Now I'm a big Renee Zellweger fan, I think she's cute, une jolie laide (a beautiful ugly), and for me Down With Love was the wonderful apotheosis of those Doris Day comedies I enjoyed in the early Sixties. And the first BJ [hmmm] movie was an unexpected pleasure. But this one … well, I can't do better than the SJ Merc reviewer who said something like, “there's a fine line between being an attractively plump bumbler and being a fat idiot.” But at the end, yes, BJ gets her man.
Reviewing…gosh, I fall instantly into the patois, the standard words of commendation or castigation.
Has there ever been a movie that Peter Travers of the Rolling Stone didn't like? One thing about coining blurbs, it gets your name out tehre.
Speaking of reviewers, my old friend Kenneth Turan of the L. A. Times is giving a reading from his colllection of movie reviews,Never Coming To A Theatre Near You at Capitola Book Cafe tonight; I may well be there. Kenny was my roommate in college for three years at Swarthmore. Nobody could retell the story of a movie like him.
A new edition of my book Infinity and the Mind just came out.
This has been my best-selling book over the years, it must be into two or three hundred thousand copies by now. I still get email about it all the time. If you want to know about infinity, my book's still the one to read.
About a year ago, David Foster Wallace tried to write his own book on infinity called Everything and More. I like Wallace's fiction a lot, but I thought his pop science effort was very weak, in part due to poor editing, in fact I wrote a perhaps overly harsh review of it for Science magazine. It was kind of fun being a sternly disapproving member of the establishment for once — normally I'm on the other side of that fence, like when I'm in the fiction-writing world. I also feel a bit of remorse, as Wallace is, after all, such a great writer, and deserves encouragement. But he especially should have done Cantor's continuum problem justice, and he should have mentioned Cantor's interest in the Absolute Infinity of theology. As an outsider who's been thinking about infinity forever, when I saw the establishment-cosseted Wallace show up and flub the topic, I kind of flipped into the mode of a hard-bitten old surfer hollering at a barney who invades the old guy's fave break.