Stuart Klawans reviews three new films, Gomorrah, The Class, and Coraline. Gomorrah, he assures us, is not merely a hyper-violent Italian gangster movie, but a critique of globalization, a portrait of “what the world looks like when it has been remade by gangsters.” As a teacher myself, I was intrigued by Klawans’ description of The Class. Evidently the film depicts two hours in the life of a grammar and composition class in a French public school, taught by a man with a daring, aggressive technique. ”François has no fear of sharp distinctions. His pedagogical method is to push his students and then to shove, so that he’s always on the verge of going too far with them–or finally steps over the line.” Coraline is evidently a reimagining of Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony.” While the story centers on a son’s obscure sense that his father has rejected him, the main action of the film begins with a girl openly rejecting her parents and leads her toward the same kind of destruction as Kafka’s character had witnessed.
Richard R. John explains how recent changes in rates and policies at the US Postal Service have rewarded mass-circulation magazines and penalized low-circulation magazines. A look at the subcategories under “Periodical Notes” will show that this is a matter of vital concern to your humble correspondent. Professor John points out that from its founding, America’s post office has always given favorable terms to low-circulation publications. He appeals to George Washington and James Madison in his plea to keep it that way.
Professor John mentions in passing that postal officials and corporate lobbyists have referred to the Internet in their attempts to defend the new policy. He might have quoted any number of observers who have predicted that the Web and other network technologies will eventually do away with print magazines. As a matter of fact, I’m sure that those predictions will sooner or later come true. But that is precisely why we must continue to back low-circulation magazines now. A magazine has a personality of a sort that does not exist anywhere else. Through the collaboration of its contributors and editors, a good magazine develops a voice, a character. This distinctive personality makes it possible for regular readers of that magazine to put the ideas presented in it into a much fuller context than they would be able to find anywhere else, and to do so essentially at a glance. Perhaps someday, perhaps someday soon, a new form of online publication will arise that will accommodate this sort of personality. For now, the closest approximations are publications like Slate and Salon that mimic the conventions of print media. Even they don’t quite get it; if I read Slate every day for a month, I become able to recognize a Slate article by its style. Still, because I read it online, I don’t read one article after another- I read one article, click on an external link to something quite different, check back here to see if anything’s going on, then do some work for an hour or two, then spend a few more minutes browsing that may involve looking at another article in Slate. That’s quite a different experience from sitting down with a magazine for an hour.
No comments:
Post a Comment