GIVING UP THINGS WE LOVE

STANLEY FISH May 27, 2013, 9:00 pm 414 Comments

Moving On

By STANLEY FISH

Stanley Fish on education, law and society.

I have sold my books. Not all of them, but most of them. I held on to the books I might need while putting the finishing touches on a manuscript that is now with my publisher. I also kept the books I will likely need when I begin my next project in the fall. But the books that sustained my professional life for 50 years — books by and about Milton, Spenser, Shakespeare, Skelton, Sidney, Herbert, Marvell, Herrick, Donne, Jonson, Burton, Browne, Bacon, Dryden, Hobbes — are gone (I watched them being literally wheeled out the door), and now I look around and see acres of empty white bookshelves.

BAZ

The thrill of pure visual cinema, giving much deeper, long-lasting aesthetic echoes than Disneyland. Nothing much to do with the book as great written literature, but who cares (except suffering English teachers, who shouldn't watch screen adaptations of anything written). Not useful for subtle people. But thrilling for introverted depressed viewers who still feel the magic of cinema, without CGI sadism. DiCaprio can act, even though he was too pretty as a boy. Rap music slaps Fitzgerald in the face, but he may enjoy being slapped. If you hated "Moulin Rouge," don't see this. If you loved "Moulin Rouge," see it. There's only 2 kinds

ART & ILLUSTRATIONS

Artists, illustrators, filmmakers, children's book designers, advertisers, and art students: This might be interesting and useful....effective and not effective examples of book covers,
art, and film posters for "Life of Pi".

FILM DIRECTOR FRED TAN

Personal antagonism by certain key Western Taiwanologist film writers have made Fred Tan Han-chang semi-disappear from film history....It is time for Taiwanese and International cinema lovers to rediscover this unique director, who was as important in the 1980s as Ho Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang Teh-chang.

1st ENGLISH TAIWAN FILM DICTIONARY-ENCYCLOPEDIA

A GOOD WOMAN

February 3, 2013

Sotomayor, a Star on the Book-Tour Circuit, Sees a New Niche for a Justice

By JODI KANTOR

CHICAGO — At her Wednesday night book talk here, Justice Sonia Sotomayor glided through her audience of 700, dispensing homespun wisdom through a cordless microphone, interrupted by impromptu applause.

When the moderator read a question from Tabbie Major, age 7, about which books Justice Sotomayor loved as a child, she found the girl, locked her in an embrace, held on while reminiscing about Nancy Drew mysteries and then called out for a photographer to capture the moment. No need: a good portion of the crowd was already snapping pictures.

Welcome to another night in the life of Sonia Sotomayor, Supreme Court justice, current queen of the best-seller list and suddenly the nation’s most high-profile Hispanic figure.

MY CHINA

New York Times Book Review, by Jonathan Mirsky

TOMBSTONE

The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962

by Yang Jisheng  (translated by Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian), 629 pp., Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $35.

In the summer of 1962, China’s president, Liu Shaoqi, warned Mao Zedong that “history will record the role you and I played in the starvation of so many people, and the cannibalism will also be memorialized!” Liu had visited Hunan, his home province as well as Mao’s, where almost a million people died of hunger. Some of the survivors had eaten dead bodies or had killed and eaten their comrades. In “Tombstone,” an eye-­opening study of the worst famine in history, Yang Jisheng concludes that 36 million Chinese starved to death in the years between 1958 and 1962, while 40 million others failed to be born, which means that “China’s total population loss during the Great Famine then comes to 76 million.”