– Bookish Gardener has made what at first glance appears to be a very significant music-related discovery about Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady. Click on the link and see for yourself.
– Jeff Jarvis, who blogs at BuzzMachine, digests the findings of the important new Pew Internet and American Life study:
27% of internet users say they read blogs, a 58% jump from the 17% who told us they were blog readers in February. This means that by the end of 2004 32 million Americans were blog readers…. At the same time, for all the excitement about blogs and the media coverage of them, blogs have not yet become recognized by a majority of internet users. Only 38% of all internet users know what a blog is. The rest are not sure what the term “blog” means.
His comment:
Hell, at this stage in the birth of the web, I’ll bet just as many people didn’t know what the hell HTML was. The fact that almost 40 percent of online Americans know what blogs are is amazing.
I agree. Read the rest. This is no fad.
– The adorable Maccers spent Christmas in an ashram:
The temperature will go below freezing tonight and the electric heater that I have in the cabin doesn’t seem to be taking the edge off the chill. There are three electric bars which are trying to fight the icy winds coming through the two inch gaps under the door and around the windows. Two other things which have been filling me with a sense of foreboding are the large baskets filled with tambourines (tambourines!) I spied in the meditation hall and the hand holding Hare Krishna chanting we have to do before dinner. All of us in the kitchen. Singing over the vegetable curry. If I have to do that again, I very well might be fasting during my entire stay….
Eeuuww.
– Champion mystery writer Laura Lippman has trenchant things to say about her chosen line of work:
Crime fiction has its share of jerry-built and dilapidated stock, but the genre is sturdy, its possibilities endless. Come on in, but don’t think you’ll transform it via the literary equivalents of granite counter-tops and Viking stoves. Like the rowhouses of Baltimore, thrown up in the 19th century to house the working class, the only thing great crime fiction has transcended is those who would render it transitory….
Take that, Edmund Wilson!