UniBrow

Please excuse UniBrow’s bizarre appearance. The people who operate this blog service have made a round of changes, as they do from time to time. Since I didn’t especially like the effect the new changes had on my old design template, I thought I’d try out some new ones. But there’s nothing I like better and now I can’t seem to resurrect the old one. I hope this is temporary.

James Wood, with a lengthy and characteristically digressive review of Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation. What I was most surprised by in this piece is that Wood is himself an atheist. If he’s mentioned that before, I missed it–and wouldn’t have suspected it from his prior work. I guess I unconsciously assumed otherwise given his overt concern with belief in the pieces collected in The Broken Estate and his warm regard for novels like Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. 

This comment by Zadie Smith–made recently in an interview with Michael Silverblatt, the whole of which can be heard here–is worth a savor:

I think of reading as a skill and an art. … The problem with readers, the idea we’re given of reading, is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, watching television–so the greatest principle is, I should sit here and I should be entertained. And the more classical model, which has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician sits at the piano, has a piece of music which is the work made by somebody they don’t know, who they probably couldn’t comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That’s an incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading and you work at a text–it can only give you what you put into it. It’s an old moral, but it’s completely true.

Apropos of Pynchon, I can think of a few book critics who could stand to give this notion a whirl.

Well then: we’re back after a longish absence, and with nothing to say for ourselves. The last two-and-a-half weeks will just have to go down as an enigmatic silence. While we’re getting back into the swim and figuring out something to say that’s worthy of UniBrow’s intimidating standards of erudition, please enjoy the following.

We own ourselves fans of Ricky Gervais, and the next batch of episodes of his show Extras, which won’t start up in the U.S. until January, has evidently begun showing in the UK. YouTube has a clip from one of them in which Gervais’s character Andy Millman–in previous episodes a struggling bit-part actor, now the twitchy auteur behind a BBC sitcom–is humiliated at some sort of tony reception by David Bowie.