updating Orwell

Under the spreading chestnut tree,
I friended you,
and you friended me...

[updating Orwell's parody of a popular song/rhyme, which itself is echoing Longfellow]

The Conversation (1974)

The infamous Jack Tarr hotel, where the key confrontation occurred in this great film, is slated for demolition (if it's not gone already). It was renamed the Cathedral Hill hotel a number of years ago. Apparently not too many people are sad to see it go (a dead end of modernist architecture, someone wrote, actually they said, "the bad direction modernism went"). It's going to be replaced by a new hospital complex.

new books

New books, accumulated over the last few months. Some purchased, and some just appeared in the mail (thank you!!) In no particular order.

Goggin & Hjorth, Mobile Technologies: From Telecommunications to Media. Routledge

Paul Virilio, The University of Disaster. Polity.

Campanella Bracken and Skalski (eds) Immersed in Media: Telepresence in Everyday Life. Routledge.

Solove, Understanding Privacy. Harvard.

Vivian, Public Forgetting. Penn State.

Papacharissi (ed), A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture in Social Network Sites. Routledge.

Turner, Ordinary People in the Media.

Crow, Longford, & Sawchuk (eds), The Wireless Spectrum. University of Toronto Press.


Currently reading: Qui Xiaolong, Death of a Red Heroine, a mystery recommended by Jennifer (thanks!). Though I am also inching my way through both Against the Day (which is taking years, I realize, which is not necessarily the book's fault) and Vineland by Pynchon. Finished Inherent Vice, which was fun.