Pictured: Excerpt from Kindle version of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road”

I’ve been reading an unending stream of tweets, emails and blog posts on screen for years. Making the leap to actual literature (no offense to your Twitter skills, dear reader) actually provides a welcome disconnect from the limitless distractions the iPhone offers.

I love paper and there will always be a place for it, but with three (e)books finished in rapid succession on iPhone I consider the experience of digesting strings of letters arranged into words, sentences, paragraphs and chapters to be more-or-less conquered.

1. My old stomping grounds at documentaries.about.com are up and running again. Stop by and say “hi” to to Jennifer Merin, your new guide to documentary film.
2. Good luck to Agnes Varnum, who is moving to Austin to work for the Austin Film Society.
3. I’ve been pondering A.J. Schnack’s About A Son Soundtrack Challenge for the past week or so. Perhaps I take these things too seriously. 14 songs to score a biopic about yourself? Maybe I’ll have the answers before Thanksgiving.

…The Nietzsche Family Circus, pairs random Family Circus cartoons with Nietzsche quotes.

If done right, the Expo could be a perfect subject for the big screen. It was itself a sort of fleeting fantasy that was (mostly) destroyed after its six-month run. It is unlikely that any other event did as much to craft the American cityscape of the 20th Century (for better or worse, I suppose). Most fascinating to me is the monumental scale of the Expo. Quoting Chris Ware in the Sun-Times:

“Ironically, to the modern mind, the whole fair seems a wondrous and practically inconceivable ‘folly,’ something I think people today unconsciously hunger for, though they might not be willing to admit it… The scale and expenditure that went into the 1893 Exposition is really only matched today by Hollywood blockbuster movies, and is just about as transitory, but there’s still something so much more reassuring, dignified and hopeful about it being a real place to visit and encounter rather than simply a brief flickering of colored shadows on a screen.”

It would be great if Hollywood could do a good job recreating the 1893 Expo, but it would be better if cities were inspired to take more risks with fantastic architecture. In these conservative times, would any city take on something like a Statue of Liberty or a Mount Rushmore? On that note, Mayor Street has still not commented on my proposal for 8th and Market.

Pictured: vintage playing cards from the World’s Columbian Exposition

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased Everything Is Illuminated: A Novel also purchased Everything Is Illuminated. For this reason, you might like to know that Everything Is Illuminated will be released on March 21, 2006. You can pre-order your copy at a savings of 29% by following the link below.

Is it me or does this “smart recommendation” from Amazon sound like something that might appear in a Jonathan Safran Foer book?

The column “Sometimes Snarkiness Is Preferable to Sincerity,” asserts that the magazine dotes too much on obvious indie-rock darlings at the expense of the wider weird world it generally portrays in its non-music issues. Critic Kelefa Sanneh pointed to The Shins Will Change Your Life, a blog that simply excerpts hyperbole from rock music criticism without any additional commentary, as his pro-snarkiness example.

I’ll admit that I laughed quite a bit at some of the entries in that blog. After all, rock music criticism is often absurd — particularly the 100-word blurbs written by interns whose only compensation is the very CD they chose to review. Still, as much as I like snarky, I’d like to take this opportunity to state my preference for sincerity over snarkiness in case there is any confusion among my readers. Note that when I contributed to the Soundmonger mix group last year, I attempted to explore this very topic.

Come to think of it, I have actually discovered quite a bit of decent music through those 100-word blurbs in the back pages of music mags and weeklies. Also, I’m not ashamed to admit that The Shins actually have changed my life. For the better.

Did that sound snarky? I meant it sincerely.