Sleepy Hollow

It is hard to feel much more than ambiguity toward the new television program Sleepy Hollow.  It is a modern-day version of the Washington Irving story - except it bares no resemblance to the original tale other than some character names.  First of all,  Icabod Crane 1.0 was not a charming Brit  with flowing locks and a manly scruff of beard.  The Irving character was devoid of any charm whatsoever:

He was tall and exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, and feet that might have served for shovels. His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weathercock perched upon his spindle neck, to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield.

Okay, I guess 18th century protagonists needed less in the way of  chiseled good looks.  Icabod's character deficiencies go beyond the physical. He courts the local Bachelorette with an eye to greedily acquiring her considerable inheritance of property and turning it into cold cash.  Furthermore, he proves to be a coward, fleeing in fear from the apparition of the Headless Horseman,

The television series upgrades poor Icabod's looks and motivations while creating a mashup with Irving's other famous tale, Rip Van Winkle.  So, now dreamboat Crane is a Brit spying for George Washington who is mortally wounded after removing the Horseman's head, and his witch wife Katrina puts a spell on him that makes him sleep for 240 years.  Now awake, this Revolutionary War Mulder teams up with a modern Scully to go ghostbusting.

Story needs some clarity, but the narrative is interesting and the cinematography is properly creepy, so it may be worth watching someday.  But I pity those people who pick up the book hoping for a romantic stranger and who encounter "a scarecrow eloped from a cornfield."

San Antonio plans one of the nation's first bookless libraries

Good bye, serendipity.

Just this month I unpacked my late father-in-law's set of World Book Encyclopedias and put them on my home bookshelf, creating a row of slightly worn red and gold books.  I'm not sure the publication date of this set, but I guess they pre-date the moon landing.

That is fine; out of date doesn't mean inaccurate - I'm pretty sure "The Odyssey" is still attributed to Homer (whomever he or she might have been) and Micheangelo still gets credit for the statue of David.  It was these types of basic facts that made encyclopedias indispensable in every middle class home when I was growing up.

I know my own parents went on a payment plan to buy our own set of Colliers, and boy, was that money well-spent!  I and my three siblings spent countless hours pouring through the pages of the dozen or so volumes working on history, biology, and English reports.

But I also found them a source of entertainment as well.  As a young comic book fan, I soon made the link between superhero and the mythological heroes and monsters of old.  So while exporting the connection between the Flash and Hermes,I would also find myself stumbling across something else interesting in a nearby entry - maybe the Hermitage next to Hermes, and off I would go and soon find myself in the midst of the War of 1812.

Library shelves worked the same sort of serendipity, especially given the quirky (to the layman, at least) nature of the Dewey Decimal System. How many times I have plucked a volume from the shelf above or below mt intended book and thought, " hey, I've heard of this book - maybe I'll give ia a try."

It's that sort of exploration that will come to an end when the story linked below becomes common place,   and that will be a great loss indeed.


San Antonio plans one of the nation's first bookless libraries

Searching for the Magic Key

It comes as a surprise to no one that newspapers have long been in trouble. Some would say the format of printing yesterday's news on low quality paper as cheaply as possible began to fade with the advent of radio.  Newspapers began countering the immediacy of radio (how could they compete with Edward R. Murrow announcing "This is London..." as blitzkrieg bombs rained down?) with long, in-depth pieces and a claim to being a daily offering to the nation's historical record.

However, as a report in the Columbia Journalism Review points out, newspapers are having a hard time finding the magic key to the financial maze in which they find themselves.  It seems our Internet generation is disinterested in long-form journalism, and, other than a sprinkling of librarians and historians, not very interested in the historical record.  As the article states:

And it’s pretty to shocking to see what’s become of the time-honored form since the newspaper industry’s great unraveling started a decade ago. 

The Los Angeles Times, for instance, published 256 stories longer than 2,000 words last year, compared to 1,776 in 2003—a drop of 86 percent, according to searches of the Factiva database. The Washington Post published 1,378 stories over 2,000 words last year, about half as many as 2003 when it published 2,755. The Wall Street Journal, which pioneered the longform narrative in American newspapers, published 35 percent fewer stories over 2,000 words last year from a decade ago, 468 from 721.

Click here for the rest of the (relatively brief) article from CJR

Poetry and the Brain

What sort of reading actually stimulates brain activity, according to a recent study? Hint: Vampires are not involved...
This is your brain on verse (via Arts & Letters Daily)