Unrequired Reading: Dec. 4, 2009

Geez! The year’s almost over! Have some Unrequired Reading, whydon’tcha? Just click “more”!

All that future. (It’s the title of a really obscure song by Lori Carson and Bernie Worrell.)

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Martin Amis has some problems with (late) Nabokov. And I just bought Pnin this week!

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Greatest newspaper lede ever?

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I read Up in the Air this week and, while I enjoyed the heck out of it, my expectations for the movie are now pretty diminished. (It sounds like the flick’s about women and how George Clooney’s character will learn to make an emotional connection, while the book is much more about deracination and the web of data that ties us down, even when we’re 7 miles high.) Until I get around to writing about it, here’s a well-thought-out post by City of Sound on another book about Airworld.

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Sorta NSFW: Doug Sneyd, instantly recognizable Playboy cartoonist. I was reading Playboy when I was around 2 years old, and it was around the house throughout my childhood. (And at my Dad’s swinging bachelor pad after he moved out when I was 10.) While I grooved on Gahan Wilson’s gag panels and Kurtzman & Elder’s Little Annie Fanny strips, I don’t think I realized till now how deeply Sneyd’s cartoons are ingrained in my brain. Seared, I tellsya!

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David Gelertner is blowing up. (Too soon?)

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As I mentioned a few weeks ago in this space, I make no apologies for liking me some Hall & Oates.

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Somewhere in Up in the Air (I think; I forgot to take a note), there’s a bit about how much privacy we lose, and how we give it up so willingly for convenience. So . . . here’s what Yahoo! and Verizon (and their competitors, surely) got from us in exchange for free searches and cheap cell plans.

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It turns out the Vincent Scully Prize is not for sportscasting, so I’m not sure if Christopher Alexander can call a baseball game with any aptitutde. Apparently, he’s a good architecture scholar, so he’s got that going for him.

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Ohboyohboyohboy! (But what happened to John Hurt?)

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Hey! Chanukkah’s in another week or so! You oughtta buy me something!