Monday with the Sunday Times

Kind of like Tuesdays With Morrie?

There is no delivery on my road (mail, newspaper, etc.), so the acquisition of print media requires a 3-mile excursion to the general store. During the summer months, we are advised to call ahead on Saturday (weekenders buy 'em up fast) and reserve one. Rocky kindly obliges.

It's the quintessential city-people ritual out here, no one else is buying it (no City section, however; we get the Westchester Edition up here). What can I say. I have pangs about it, especially as it takes me a good 2-3 days to get through it, and it's my primary source of news; surely I am missing something, missing everything, in terms of the gamut of valid media perspectives. I have the sort of brain that has a small hard-drive, i.e. I cannot, like some I know, accumulate mounds upon tons of information (J. reads a million different newspapers and periodicals, plus TV news and morning shows and news blogs and Charlie Rose and...). I just can't. Media stresses me out, frankly, the sheer volume. I used to read 3-4 different print sources (plus a couple online sources), but it all just piled up and I couldn't keep up. So now: the Sunday Times it is (and radio; radio I can do).

Anyway, here's a gem from the Book Review: Jim Lewis reviewed Denis Johnson's new novel, Tree of Smoke. I will be reading Tree of Smoke, without a doubt, as I have been a DJ fan since his early books of poetry. But read the review: it's one of the most compelling, invested book reviews I've read in a long time. It tells us as much about the reviewer as the reviewed, but not in a solipsistic way, not in that I'm-writing-about-someone-else-but-really-I-want-to-point-the- attention-on-myself kind of way. Lewis's enthusiasm is an enthusiasm for the deep pleasure, the wonder, of strange, original, "inescapable" writing - major works that matter.