Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for January 6, 2008

I. Dzyd Dennis on David Fincher:

There is also the matter of his technical virtuosity, which tends to inspire both admiration and suspicion. A teenage apprentice at George Lucas’s effects house, Industrial Light and Magic, and then a hotshot director of commercials and music videos (including a brace of enormously influential ones for Madonna, at the height of her image-making powers), Mr. Fincher has always been in the business of expensive illusion and manufactured beauty. To call him a superficial stylist misses the point; in many of his films the surface is the substance. It is easy to get lost in — and perhaps as a result, to underestimate — the sheer sensory pleasures of his movies: their dynamic compositions and kinetic rhythms, sinuous camera movements and seamless digital wizardry. —NYT

II. The NYT's Education Life features pieces by PTSNBN EdSupp mainstays Rachel and Christine...niiiice....

III. My sources tell me that new New-York Ghosts have been sighted...

IV. The smell is back! (Via Jane)

V. Forthcoming from Knopf—what if it had been about the drink?

APR 1: Three Hundred Tang Poems.
A new translation of a beloved anthology of poems
from the golden age of of Chinese culture.
Edited and translated by Peter Harris.
An Everyman's Library title.
256 pages. $13.50 ISBN 978-0-307-26973-7