EPIGONIC

Philip Roth on Religion

In this evangelical age, it was nice to hear Roth sounding the trumpet for a rational, secular life.

From Fresh Air a month or so ago:

Gross: "Is there any part of you that wishes you were a man of faith"

Roth: "I have no desire to be irrational."

Gross: "So there isn't any part of you that wished you could believe?"

Roth: "I have no taste for delusion."

And from Roth's new book, Everyman:

"Religion was a lie that he had recognized early in life, and he found all religions offensive, considered their superstitious folderol meaningless, childish, couldn't stand the complete unadultness -- the baby talk and the righteousness and the sheep, the avid believers. No hocus pocus about death and God or obsolete fantasies of heaven for him. There was only our bodies, born to live and die on terms decided by the bodies that had lived and died before us. If he could be said to have located a philosophical niche for himself, that was it -- he'd come upon it early and intuitively, and however elemental, that was the whole of it. Should he ever write an autobiography, he'd call it 'The Life and Death of the Male Body.'"

Old Media, New Media

Some of the digital media cheerleaders out there are so eager to dethrone "old media" and the MSM, but sometimes I worry their plans will neither cure the disease or save the patient, just replace it with something different and maybe worse in some regards.

In short, despite the fact I've made a living in digital media for over a dozen years and consider it my calling, I hope many traditional forms of "old media" won't go away anytime soon or be displaced by new media.

Books, for example. Love them. Not just the narrative form, the linear story, the artful prose, but the form factor of paper and pages and spines and the feel of them and the portability. They just work, have for hundreds of years, I'm not sure whether hyperlinks or digitization would add anything, and I know they might take away a lot. I can't imagine, ever, lying in bed and reading a book on an ereader.

Newspapers, as another example. That business, which employed and employs my father for nearly five decades now, put food on our table when I was a kid and helped put me through college. So there is that bias, yes. But also the depth, the lack of interruption, the form factor again -- whether spreading the paper over the table next to my coffee at breakfast, or reading a redtop, or the Independent, or the Guardian berliner format on the tube, or sitting in a cafe somewhere in the sun parsing through the International Herald Tribune (so snotty sounding, yes, but so pleasing). No distracting hyperlinks, or e-mail chimes, or other nonsense that results in twitching, not reading. I like the purity of the newspaper experience -- reading, thinking, reading some more. 

An aside at this point: I go to Ritual in San Francisco to meet friends now and again, and it's full of people with laptops open cranking on the free wifi. I joked to my friend the other day: "They should put some cubes in here." Sure, I like my wifi in a coffee house now and again. But at Ritual, it's always on: few folks, sometime none, have a newspaper or a book there. That makes me a bit sad, I think they're all missing something really.

Films, on the screen, in a movie theater. Don't care if it's digital or analog, but the traditional experience of seeing a movie with a hundred other people, the community of our common laughter or suppressed gasps. That is nice, it feels human and connected and vibrant in a way that sitting in front of a tv doesn't. I don't ever want that to go away.

I go back and forth on theater. Yes, when great, which is really just in New York or LA or London best of all. But elsewhere?

Most television and music I'm happy to consume in more digital forms, be it DVDs or just bits on an iPod or over IP.

Cinemas, books,  newspapers -- I like them analog, I hope they stay that way.

Sweet Love Remeber'd

Yesterday (April 23) was the birthday of William Shakespeare. It was also St. George's day.We chose to commemorate the former by going on the Globe Theatre's Shakespeare sonnet walk. What a brilliant event, and if you happen to be in London on the Bard's birthday, this is a must do. Even if you're not in London on that day, you should consider a special trip. Start planning now, hopefully the Globe will continue this tradition. The day embodied what I love most about London; the love of language, the appreciation of a well-wrought phrase.

We started at Westminster Abbey, with reasonably low expectations and the show was running late. We were to be in the last group to leave (the walk is organized of groups of 12 leaving roughly ever 10-15 minutes between 10am-12:45pm from both Westminster Abbey and Shoreditch), and our group was not ushered in to Poet's Corner until almost 1:30pm.

Any low or uneven expectations were immediately dashed when Mark Rylance, artistic director of the Globe, greeted us in Poet's Corner. What a treat. If you get to see Rylance act, in a play or on screen, don't pass up the chance. For those of you who aren't in London, and can't easily see him on the state, rent either Angels and Insects or Intimacy.

Now, here is how the walk works. You are given directions, which take you to places of significance for Shakespeare, his plays, Elizabethan london, or all three. At certain of these areas along the way, twelve in all, you are greeted by an actor who proceeds to recite a Shakespearean sonnet -- some famous, some you may have never read or heard before (I'll post the list tomorrow). But you never quite know when or where the sonneteer will appear, which makes for great suprises, good laughs and fun impromtu theatre along the way. Our walk was made all the better with Rylance and his crew joining us. After each sonneteer finished, Rylance would offer kind words or some story about their relationship, and then would invite the sonneteer to join our merry group. So by the time we got finally to the globe at 4pm, we were a crew of almost 30.

Our stops included the Banqueting House, Middle Temple Inn (where we were able to duck in quickly, between weddings -- what a glorious room), Samuel Johnson's house, and St. Pauls. All in all, so fitting and perfect an event for London, and a great reminder of the reverence for the spoken and written word here in this city.