Nick Fraser, the editor at Storyville, is just one of the Brits sizing up the overrated and underrated for 2007: OverratedIan McEwan’s On Chesil Beach (and for that matter the overrated film based on another overrated book Atonement). McEwan’s work is in the image of contemporary British genteel culture; underpowered, negligible in impact and yet… Continue reading

I just finished reading Brother Guy Consolmagno’s new book, God’s Mechanics. Brother Guy is a Vatican astronomer who specializes in the study of meteorites and dwarf planets. He’s also a regular at various science fiction conventions (and I’m hoping to catch up with him at this coming February Boskone), and the thing I liked most… Continue reading God’s Mechanics

This is a little snippet of my father, the late David J. Farrell, from a new documentary I’m working on over the next several months, in cooperation with other Boston media and political figures, which I hope will give a nice sense of how the city and its media landscape have changed over the last… Continue reading It Never Snows on Summer Street

This is pretty funny: Wilson’s real obsession here is not Céline but the thorny philosophical problem on which her reputation has been impaled: the nature of taste itself. What motivates aesthetic judgment? Is our love or hatred of “My Heart Will Go On” the result of a universal, disinterested instinct for beauty-assessment, as Kant would… Continue reading Hating Celine…

After some prodding by friendly readers, I’m enabling comments. I haven’t in the past, mainly because I’ve found glitches…but it seems that hand-coding the feature on my old template has allowed the proper functioning with Blogger…so we’ll see.