For my money, there isn’t a more fascinating entertainment writer working at the moment.  Roger Ebert, he of movie review fame and near death experiences, has focused his efforts.  Approaching the precipice, Ebert has become something greater in these last few years. 

His review of Stephen Daldry’s The Reader was something of a wonder – combining theology, friendship, ethics, dinner parties with Gene Siskel, conservatism and Rush Limbaugh, the worst sin of his life, science, and the human condition – all to say that The Reader is not really about the Holocaust, it is about so much more. 

His latest essay, because it’s not really a movie review of any kind, tackles Shakespeare, SETI, death, legacies, Warner Herzog, Studs Terkel, writing, existentialism, Prospero, fractals and Google, oh my!

So why then did he write? Why am I writing? Why do you write? Why are you reading? Why do we read Shakespeare? Not for a moment would I compare us to him; it simply occurs to me that we are all in the same boat.

“A person has to participate,” Studs Terkel liked to say. That’s how I feel. Meditating on futility–that’s no way to live. One of the most useful pieces of advice ever given me, at a time when I despaired, was: Act as if. Act as if you make a difference. If infinity is too big for you, live in the day. Shakespeare as usual expressed this better than anyone else, and it took him six words: To be, or not to be. That wasn’t simply an expression of the Existentialist choice between choosing to live or die. It was the choice to act, or not to act. To participate.

“Martin Luther said if he knew the world ended tomorrow, he would plant a tree,” Werner Herzog told me. “I would start a film.” What would I do? Plan to review it, and ask my editor to save some space in the paper. If you admire Herzog, you might want to pre-order your tickets. In the cartoons, there are always those wild-eyed guys with a placard saying, The End is Now. We are saved by a loophole: It is never Now yet.

My writer’s crush on Roger Ebert came on unexpectedly and without remorse.  He always seemed like a great film reviewer once upon a time not too long ago when paired with Gene Siskel and later Richard Roeper.  But nothing special.  

However, over the past year he has developed into something worth remembering.  He has become a special writer, a fine thinker, essential reading.  I wonder if all this means he knows he’s approaching the final landing soon.

Obviously, having never met the man, the best way to remember him is through his monumental body fo work.  It would be daunting to start anywhere, as so much of Updike’s work is considered essential at worst, canonical at best.

“His body of work is so large and thoroughly lauded, his achievements by now so familiar — the casual erudition, the inhuman rate of production, the pioneering application of top-flight, literary-descriptive prose to vaginas, breasts, penises, and bodily excretions — that it’s hard to see any of it fresh,” writes Sam Anderson of Vulture.  “It can be intimidating. Dipping into his work sometimes feels like going for a day hike on Mt. Everest. What’s the point?”

The point, as Anderson notes, is that your life will be enriched.  Tom Mallon has a lovely grace-note here. You can read online archives of Updike’s work at The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Review Of Books, and The New Republic.

The books are part of the “Penguin On Design” series, and include Bruno Munari’s 1965 book, Design As Art (a futurist artist’s exploration of modern high tech absurdities); Marshall McLuhan’s 1967 classic, The Medium is the Massage (an analysis of how mass media shape consciousness); John Berger’s Ways Of Seeing from 1972 (about the hidden political meanings in Western art) ; and Susan Sontag’s 1977 essay, On Photography (which explores how “realistic” photography manipulates rather than reflects reality).

“All these books are also packed with art, and many contain long sections of photo and design illustrations that were intended to be essays in themselves. So each of these books is not only about looking at the world, but is also full of images for you to look at,” writes Annalee Newitz at io9.  “These books are a terrific way to learn more about what’s going on beneath the surface of things – and to celebrate the ambivalent power of design and media.”

To be honest, I’ve managed to escape my entire life without having read any of these books.  I know, I know, right?  It’s almost crazy in a way.  But now that Penguin is reissuing these books, complete with the typo title of Marshall McLuhan’s book restored, now is as good as time as any to delve into these titles.

Penguin Press art director Jim Stoddart explains the thinking behind the re-releases: “Part of Penguin’s creative publishing direction includes refreshing some classic creative texts that still sell many thousands of copies each year, despite their tired covers and designs that haven’t been touched for decades.

“I approached Yes Design to work on unifying these four books into a timeless and dignified series, while also taking much care to complement the integrity of the original texts.”

YES studio from the UK did the design work and it is scrumptious.  More can be found on these reissues at CR Blog and Design Sojourn.

The New Yorker’s David Denby will publish a book about snark this January.  Predictably the internet will rage against his short essay on the matter because the internets traffic in snark.  In his new book, Snark, Denby has fun snarking on the snarkers.  According to Kottke, the reaction to the book has been, well, snarky.  Unfortunately, we can’t find any of those early reviews that Kottke mentions casually.  Still, it sounds like an interesting read.

“What is snark? You recognize it when you see it — a tone of teasing, snide, undermining abuse, nasty and knowing, that is spreading like pinkeye through the media and threatening to take over how Americans converse with each other and what they can count on as true. Snark attempts to steal someone’s mojo, erase her cool, annihilate her effectiveness. In this sharp and witty polemic, New Yorker critic and bestselling author David Denby takes on the snarkers, naming the nine principles of snark — the standard techniques its practitioners use to poison their arrows. Snarkers like to think they are deploying wit, but mostly they are exposing the seethe and snarl of an unhappy country, releasing bad feeling but little laughter.

“In this highly entertaining essay, Denby traces the history of snark through the ages, starting with its invention as personal insult in the drinking clubs of ancient Athens, tracking its development all the way to the age of the Internet, where it has become the sole purpose and style of many media, political, and celebrity Web sites. Snark releases the anguish of the dispossessed, envious, and frightened; it flows when a dying class of the powerful struggles to keep the barbarians outside the gates, or, alternately, when those outsiders want to take over the halls of the powerful and expel the office-holders. Snark was behind the London-based magazine Private Eye, launched amid the dying embers of the British empire in 1961; it was also central to the career-hungry, New York-based magazine Spy. It has flourished over the years in the works of everyone from the startling Roman poet Juvenal to Alexander Pope to Tom Wolfe to a million commenters snarling at other people behind handles. Thanks to the grand dame of snark, it has a prominent place twice a week on the opinion page of the New York Times.

“Denby has fun snarking the snarkers, expelling the bums and promoting the true wits, but he is also making a serious point: the Internet has put snark on steroids. In politics, snark means the lowest, most insinuating and insulting side can win. For the young, a savage piece of gossip could ruin a reputation and possibly a future career. And for all of us, snark just sucks the humor out of life. Denby defends the right of any of us to be cruel, but shows us how the real pros pull it off. Snark, he says, is for the amateurs.”

I have nothing against snark, I use it all the time.  It’s an effective way for some of us to gain the upperhand against borish loudmouth obnoxious people.  “Erase her cool,” as the blurb puts it.  I’m not cool, but I do enjoy taking those that think they are down a peg or three.

But rather than use snark, I use smarm.  Smarm is like snark, but it’s much more loving.  It’s snark in the form of a smile and a hug.  Seriously.  Have you ever trafficked in smarm?  People love to get made fun of as long as it’s witty and done with a bit of elan.

Malcolm Gladwell has a good piece in the current New Yorker about how hard it is to figure out what makes great teachers great.

This will always be an important factor for education systems, until, of course, there is enough money to pay teachers a highly compensated professional salary on par with their required training and certifications to perform their job.  It’s not just recognizing who are the great effective teachers, part of it is getting people to want to be teachers.  To make the profession a desirable one.

Until you begin to pay them like the best and the brightest you won’t necessarily attract the best and brightest to teach in public schools.  That’s of course not to say teachers aren’t the best and brightest.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with some great teachers and as a student there are a handful that have shaped my intellectual curiosity – my mom being one of them.  Like many fields, great teachers have “it.”  They’re engaging and guiding.  Patient and rock solid.  Unflappable.  Loving, caring, and full of heart.  They are a strange combination of loving parent, guiding muse, and confidence booster.

Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.

Hanushek recently did a back-of-the-envelope calculation about what even a rudimentary focus on teacher quality could mean for the United States. If you rank the countries of the world in terms of the academic performance of their schoolchildren, the U.S. is just below average, half a standard deviation below a clump of relatively high-performing countries like Canada and Belgium. According to Hanushek, the U.S. could close that gap simply by replacing the bottom six per cent to ten per cent of public-school teachers with teachers of average quality. After years of worrying about issues like school funding levels, class size, and curriculum design, many reformers have come to the conclusion that nothing matters more than finding people with the potential to be great teachers. But there’s a hitch: no one knows what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like.

So there you go.  Interesting read.

It should have been historic.  It should have been life changing.  It should have defined a team and brought the players closer together for the rest of their lives.  It should have made all the difference.

It didn’t.

Imagine if heartbreak and tragedy were bestowed upon the undefeated 1972 Miami Dolphins football team.  Imagine if fate had a different plan for you – as if you were to pay penance for an eternity because of a single glorious night.

Now imagine you are the basketball players for the North Jackson Cheifs, from the tiny rural town of Stevensen, AL.

Stevenson lies between two ridges in north Alabama, by the Tennessee River, a dark blue vein on the earth. There, on Valentine’s Day 1992, the North Jackson Chiefs hosted the Fort Payne Wildcats in high school basketball. It was not a playoff game, not even a conference game, and neither team was especially good. But in the 117-year history of organized basketball, it was one of the few times a team with only two remaining players beat a team that still had five.

If this were a movie, the story would end at the final buzzer. The winners would always be winners, fists in the air and black jerseys glistening, and the losers would always hang their heads. This is not a movie. Morning came and they all woke up.

This is the bifurcated story of exhileration and heartbreak; the story of a team who beat the odds, who won a basketball game in overtime when all but two of their players fouled out; the story of a poor community that had nothing except each other and then this basketball win that is still talked about in the bars and restaurants.  The real story, though, is the heartbreak that would occur in the ensuing decade with players being shot, going to jail, ending up fighting with each other. Tearing the community asunder.

It is at once profoundly sad and breathtakingly exciting.  This is the single best piece of sports writing I’ve read this year.  Kudos to Sports Illustrated and Thomas Lake.  [2 on 5]

Esquire used to be one of my favorite magazine subscriptions, but then out of sheer laziness I let it run out and haven’t bothered to send a new subscription card in.  That was like five years ago.  Can’t say I’ve really missed it, but I do remembered enjoying it greatly.

Anyway, the magazine has selected it’s Seven Greatest Stories and have been nice enough to supply full text!  Woot!  Woot!

Among the stories you’ll find are: Tom Junod’s “Falling Man” (2003), Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” (1966), C.J. River’s “The School” (2006), Richard Ben Cramer’s “What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?” (1986), Tom Wolfe’s “The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson.  Yes!” (1965), John Sack’s “M” (1965) and Norman Mailer’s “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” (1960).

Maybe it’s time to renew that subscription.  I’ve read all of these pieces at one time or another and can’t recommend them highly enough.

“Write in My Journal” was created by a man named David. Similar in concept to “Before I Die I Want To,” he approaches people who look like they may have an interesting story and he persuades them to write in his journal.  Then he publishes it online, with a photo and a bit of backstory.

Everybody has a story and I can’t stop reading them.

There are so many people out there with such diverse backgrounds and perspectives! It’s absolutely fascinating to me. Have you ever looked at a person and thought, “I wonder what their story is? How did they get to where they are? What are their dreams?” I do. All the time. (Is that weird?) This is my chance to get to know some of them, even if it’s just a glimpse, and share their stories that would otherwise go untold.

In a recent mailbag, ESPN’s Bill Simmons provided a long list of the best sports writing he could think of.  At the time of reading it, I thought, geez, wouldn’t it be great if I could compile those together for readers.  This being the internet, if you have the thought and wait a day someone has already beaten you to the punch.  Max from The Millions took Simmons’ list and found many of the articles were available online for your complementary reading pleasure. Authors include Gay Talese, Roger Angell, John Updike, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, George Plimton, and David Foster Wallace.  [via Kottke]

If you’re in the Portland area and looking for something cool to do Thursday (8.14) night, let me suggest swinging down to Powell’s on Hawthorne (3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd.) around 7:30ish to listen to Mickey Hess read from his new book Big Wheel at the Cracker Factory. [Buy]

Hess is a professor at Rider University, but he’s published two tomes on hip-hop and several short pieces at McSweeney’s and other places.� Anyhow, the question is why should you go see him read.� Well, I haven’t the foggiest and though that’s not the best sales pitch a person can offer, call it a hunch.

I’m about 80 pages (228 total) into Big Wheel and I’m loving every minute of it.� The book is technically creative non-ficiton, which means it’s mostly true in the conventional sense (non of that James Frey shit), but Hess probably changed enough to not get sued or make his family and friends hate him.

Big Wheel is a rollicking adventure of Hess’s early years trying to stay afloat in the world of college teaching.� To do so he takes a bunch of shit jobs like driving an ice cream truck, being a haunted house character and other fringe jobs that offer the benefits of money, flexibility and not caring about the stupid job in the first place.

It’s a light-hearted look dealing with that period in life when you have to go from being a reckless youth to an adult, without sacrificing anything.� That’s hard to do and for some people it just paralyzes them.

Wow, that sounds almost like an intentional blurb for the book?� Yeah, yeah what are you gonna do.� I suppose in a way what I like most about Hess’s writing is that he’s funny and self-aware enough to make great observations about himself and others, but mostly he’s enthusiastic. Punches are not pulled, but there’s very little angst.� We don’t like angsty white men around these parts.� Especially because being a white, angsty male is so 1915-1998.� Humor and enthusiasm counts for a lot, especially when so many people go for the detached irony aesthetic starting around 2001.

It’s hard not to feel like Hess is one of us, just someone doing what they have to do to get by so that he can do what he loves, which is write and consume hip-hop.

If that’s not enough he promises free stuff if you ask him nicely.� I’m going to ask him for a copy of his first book, El Cumpleanos de Paco, which he self-published and gave away to people.� It was a limited run, so hopefully he has one or two left.

When I actually finish the book in it’s entirety, I promise a more thorough review/examination of it.� For now though, it comes highly recommended.� And if you ask nicely, I’ll gladly pass it along once I’m done with it.� I’m sure Mickey wouldn’t have it any other way.

George Orwell will always be remembered for writing 1984 and Animal Farm, but if that’s all you’ve read by him let my suggest you pick up his travelogue of essays Down and Out in Paris and London. It was his first book, published when he was 30.

I suggest that to offer that Orwell was more than just his two most famous novels.� He was a superb writer of the highest order.� One need to look no further than his intimate diaries to ascertain his brilliance.� Lucky for us they are available to read.

The Orwell Prize has decided to publish Orwell’s diary – one entry per day 70 years to the day after they were originally written.

What impression of Orwell will emerge? From his domestic diaries (which start on 9^th August), it may be a largely unknown Orwell, whose great curiosity is focused on plants, animals, woodwork, and � above all � how many eggs his chickens have laid. From his political diaries (from 7^th September), it may be the Orwell whose political observations and critical thinking have enthralled and inspired generations since his death in 1950. Whether writing about the Spanish Civil War or sloe gin, geraniums or Germany, Orwell�s perceptive eye and rebellion against the �gramophone mind� he so despised are obvious.

Orwell wrote of what he saw in Dickens: �He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry � in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.�

What will you see in the Orwell diaries?

That’s a great question.� I like that the diaries, only a few entries in, are diverse.� Some are no longer than a single line, while others read like an ethereal haiku.� This is going to be a wonderful project to follow.

David Carr is the real deal New York Times media/culture critic and he’s coming out with a book about his days in Minnesota battling substance abuse and trying to get his life together, who only did so when his twin daughters came into his life. The early buzz is tantamount to a tsunami.

Books about substance abuse are often the most talked about books because they take place in a world that many people begin to travel down at 18-25, but most people make an abrupt U-turn when the realize the stakes involved with continuing down the darkened alley. And let’s be honest, to a certain extent for those who have never been habitual drug users, it’s a fascinating world. One that 80% of people are not privy to.

He’s the rub for The Night of the Gun. David Carr doesn’t trust his memory of those events, so rather than embellish them and become embroiled in some James Frey-type of shit (would you want Oprah bitch-slapping you?) he went out and thoroughly investigated his own life. Pouring over court documents and arrest records and interviewing over sixty people connected to his life at that time. It sounds like heady stuff. Stuff that I can’t wait to dig into.

The New York Times Magazine ran an excerpt this morning of the book titled “Me and My Girls.” It’s breathtaking, simply one of the most outstanding things I’ve read in quite some time. MORE »

As compiled by the UK’s Telegraph. They’re not too clear on what they consider a “cult book.” Often times it’s hard to differentiate these types of books from say, bestsellers or classics. Also, cult books vary significantly from cult movies. Cult movies tend to be trashy or bad in a way that makes them pleasurably good. But that isn’t the case with cult books. Cult books tend to change our lives in one way or another. They’re the type of books you go clamoring on to your friends about that they have to read it.

“In compiling our list, we were looking for the sort of book that people wear like a leather jacket or carry around like a totem. The book that rewires your head: that turns you on to psychedelics; makes you want to move to Greece; makes you a pacifist; gives you a way of thinking about yourself as a woman, or a voice in your head that makes it feel okay to be a teenager; conjures into being a character who becomes a permanent inhabitant of your mental flophouse.

We were able to agree, finally, on one thing: you know a cult book when you see one. And people have passionate feelings on both sides: our appeal for suggestions yielded enough for a list at least three times as long as this one,” they wrote.

Among the books they’ve included are: Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut, Baby and Child Care by Doctor Spock, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, The Beaty Myth by Naomi Wolf, A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole and many more.

It reads like a who’s who of important literature, so much so that many of these novels are considered classics and I would be hesitant to call them cult books. I guess, I wish there were more books on here that were unknowns instead of some obvious choices. Still, you could do worse than reading the books on this list, which works as a fantastic literary primer.

Full list after the jump. We’ve left the original authors’s notes because they indicate a personal attachment to the books, which is sometimes the best endorsement. MORE »