... gorgeous ... mesmerizing ... important, disquieting ... absorbing, if unsettling ...

Make time to see this film. (Don't forget about Iraq in Fragments.)

Edward Burtynsky is internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of nature transformed by industry. Manufactured Landscapes – a stunning documentary by award winning director Jennifer Baichwal – follows Burtynsky to China, as he captures the effects of the country’s massive industrial revolution. This remarkable film leads us to meditate on human endeavour and its impact on the planet.

Wired offers photographs, along with an interview with the photographer Ed Burtynsky:

"I started to think: where is all this natural material going, where does it get formed into the products that we buy?"

Manufactured Landscapes

Perhaps the most radical element of Ellen Dissanayake’s evolutionary framework is her idea about how art got its start. She suggests that many of the basic phonemes of art, the stylistic conventions and tonal patterns, the mental clay, staples and pauses with which even the loftiest creative works are constructed, can be traced back to the most primal of collusions — the intimate interplay between mother and child.

The book is Art and Intimacy.

The Dance of Evolution, or How Art Got Its Start

"An American classic to stand with the finest literary achievements of the century."

"It's gripping, frightening and, ultimately, beautiful."

"Vivid, eloquent, ... consistently brilliant."

"Simple yet mysterious, simultaneously cryptic and crystal clear."

"Easily one of the most harrowing books you'll ever encounter."

"Magnificent."

"Devastating ... Extraordinarily lovely and sad. . . . [A] masterpiece."

"Few books can do more; few have done better. Read this book."

This gets my gold star for November.

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

Have you seen the Cronenberg film with the rampaging gang of mallet-wielding dwarves?

This is not a horror movie but a slick and atmospheric thriller, a sort of cross between Goodfellas and The Godfather only set in London and with Russians as the gangsters. But then I realised that this movie too ... is all about a violence and horror that come from somewhere else, invading the ordinary world from a zone as strange as the individual angry mind. Not Russia, I think, and not even ‘Russia’, but some place in our imagination where the secret kindnesses, family values and occasional lovable gestures of the American mob are all banished, and only a mixture of power and pathology remain.

... the [bath] scene is beautifully choreographed. But what does he want? Does he want us to laugh, as most people were doing in the cinema where I saw the film? Does he want nervous laughter perhaps?

Previous mentions of Eastern Promises:

Today’s Hidden Slave Trade

Women and Children for Sale

Previous mentions of Cronenberg:

Cache (Hidden) Movie Review
The 10 most controversial films of all time

'Eastern Promises' Reviewed | LRB

A selection of fiction:

THE ABSTINENCE TEACHER. By Tom Perrotta
A FREE LIFE. By Ha Jin
THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST. By Mohsin Hamid
THROW LIKE A GIRL: Stories. By Jean Thompson
TREE OF SMOKE. By Denis Johnson.
THE VIEW FROM CASTLE ROCK: Stories. By Alice Munro

And some non-fiction:

ARSENALS OF FOLLY: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race. By Richard Rhodes
DUE CONSIDERATIONS: Essays and Criticism. By John Updike
HOW TO TALK ABOUT BOOKS YOU HAVEN’T READ. By Pierre Bayard
LEGACY OF ASHES: The History of the CIA. By Tim Weiner
THE REST IS NOISE: Listening to the Twentieth Century. By Alex Ross

100 Notable Books of the Year

The Coen Brothers talk to Charlie Rose about their new movie, No Country for Old Men.

Joel and Ethan Coen, on the Charlie Rose Show

Major hack! It's a TAZ in the city of light!

It is one of Paris's most celebrated monuments, a neoclassical masterpiece that has cast its shadow across the city for more than two centuries.

But it is unlikely that the Pantheon, or any other building in France's capital, will have played host to a more bizarre sequence of events than those revealed in a court last week.

Four members of an underground "cultural guerrilla" movement known as the Untergunther, whose purpose is to restore France's cultural heritage, were cleared on Friday of breaking into the 18th-century monument in a plot worthy of Dan Brown or Umberto Eco.

More from The Independent:

Members of UX, including students, but also lawyers, nurses and even a public prosecutor, have turned instead to nocturnal invasions of public buildings and Métro stations. "Lazar", a spokesman for the Untergunther group, told the French national newspaper, Le Monde: "We are not squatters. These are urban no-go zones. We use them for non-political, creative gatherings, such as film festivals and renovating the country's architectural heritage."

Undercover restorers fix Paris landmark's clock

John Updike reviews Free Life, the new novel from Ha Jin, which earned a starred review from Booklist.

Ha Jin’s description of American life—laborious, money-mad, philistine, and cheesy (there is apparently no cheese in China)—is not apt to trigger a wave of immigration. Asked the difference between China and America, Nan says, “In China every day I wanted to jump up and fight wiz someone. . . . Zere you have to fight to survive, but here I don’t want to fight wiz anyone, as eef I lost my spirit.” To himself, he thinks, “The louder I shout, the bigger a fool I’ll make of myself. I feel like a crippled man here.” Nevertheless, he elects to stay, in this “lonesome, unfathomable, overwhelming land.” The Wus strive less to let America in than to squeeze China out—“squeeze every bit of it out of themselves!” Nan tells Danning, “I spit at China, because it treats its citizens like gullible children and always prevents them from growing up into real individuals. It demands nothing but obedience.”

I wonder how SAP is doing in China. Well, just ask:

The world's largest enterprise software developer SAP's revenue in China is to rise 30% up annually by 2010 and it would also expand its research staff in the country, said Lee Boon Lee, SAP China’s CEO and president. The Germany-based firm hopes its output revenue in China will be quadrupled by the end of 2010, compared with the revenue generated in 2005.

Also:

German software giant SAP brings its toughest jobs to this port city in China's rustbelt northeast.

In a sunny, spacious office at a leafy business park, 200 technicians help run software that manages bank transactions in Switzerland and auto manufacturing in Michigan.

"Nighttime support for a Swiss bank is one of the most difficult things you can do, and we do it in China," said Andreas Reuther, SAP's vice president for global support.

After reading ubernoir's recent observation that "Asian in UK English usually means of Indian or Pakistani descent", I wondered whether the British Asians, like Jin and his characters, are trying to "squeeze the Pakistan out" of themselves.

Nan, American Man

Publishers Weekly:

This impressive anthology of pulp-era crime stories from veteran editor and publisher Penzler reveals not only tales with surprising staying power but also some of high literary quality. To be sure, there are some selections sure to offend modern sensibilities and others whose extravagant prose now comes across as laughable or ludicrous. But aside from questions of quality and taste, these tales laid the foundation for most branches of the crime fiction genre as we know it today. Raymond Chandler's Red Wind is as effective now as it was when published in 1938. An unexpected treat is Faith, a previously unpublished Dashiell Hammett story. Multiple offerings from Erle Stanley Gardner, Hammett, Chandler and Cornell Woolrich add luster. Divided into three sections—the Crimefighters, the Villains, the Dames—with cogent intros by Penzler to each entry, this comprehensive volume allows the reader to revisit that exciting time when the pulp magazines flourished and writers pounded out fiction for a penny a word or less.

Of course, those times have gone ...

Journalism is edging out fiction at The Atlantic Monthly magazine, which during its nearly 150-year history has published short stories by Henry James, Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway.

In a note to readers in the May issue, The Atlantic's editors said they will no longer run a short story in every issue but will produce an annual fiction issue in August that will be available in print form on newsstands and online to subscribers.

Back to the Pulp. Here's Booklist:

Pulp fiction's comeback is so complete that it's hard to call it a guilty pleasure. Publishers are busily reprinting old favorites and issuing new stuff written in the manner of the old ones. And, as always, the covers are surely half of the appeal. Black Lizard has been in this business longer than most; this mammoth compilation of reprints is, paradoxically, a Vintage Books Original. And Penzler's credentials as both editor and fan can't be questioned—although genre loyalists will have fun debating his choices. Using a stringent definition of pulp, he selects mostly works that first appeared in the immortal Black Mask. Divided into three parts—Crimefighters, Villains, and Dames—the Big Book features names both beloved (Chandler, Hammett, Cain) and barely remembered (Booth, Reeves, White). There are firsts of one kind (a claimed first-ever publication of Dashiell Hammett's short story Faith) and another (a novel, The Third Murderer, by Carroll John Daly, the inventor of the hard-boiled private-eye story). It's a little less fun reading these slim things in a groaning compendium, but at least it's a paperback. And good luck finding them all on your own.

See also:

Actress Jessica Biel options the film rights to Edgar-nominated writer Megan Abbott's "Die a Little," a Los Angeles noir novel set in the 1950s with an intriguing character twist.

The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps

“There is more than one way not to read, the most radical of which is not to open a book at all.” Thus begins Pierre Bayard's witty and provocative meditation on the nature, scale and necessity of non-reading.

Economist reviews How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read. People seem to like it. Here's the NYT review:

He wants to show us how much we lie about the way we read, to ourselves as well as to others, and to assuage our guilt about the way we actually read and talk about books.

I seriously doubt that pretending to have read this book will boost your creativity. On the other hand, reading it may remind you why you love reading.

The importance of not reading