For some reason, when our upstairs neighbors came home tonight, their footsteps sounded different – as if someone had come up a staircase I didn't know about, only to begin speaking inside a room I'd never known was there, located somehow behind the kitchen wall – which got me thinking.

Sounding Rooms

Anthony Lane:

The tactic here is basically pornographic—arouse the viewer with image upon image of what lies just beyond her reach—and the film makes feeble attempts to rein it in.

In short, to anyone facing the quandaries of being a working mother, the movie sends a vicious memo: Don’t be a mother. And don’t work. Is this really where we have ended up—with this superannuated fantasy posing as a slice of modern life?

The Wordcount rank of "superannuated"? 52417. That's three down from "purloined" and ten down from "uhm".

Carrie

WordCount™ is an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonness. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is.

WordCount was designed with a minimalist aesthetic, to let the information speak for itself. The interface is clean, basic and intuitive. The goal is for the user to feel embedded in the language, sifting through words like an archaeologist through sand, awaiting the unexpected find.

Observing closely ranked words tells us a great deal about our culture. For instance, “God” is one word from “began”, two words from “start”, and six words from “war”. Another sequence is "america ensure oil opportunity". Conspiracists unite! As ever, the more one explores, the more is revealed. Some of the best sequences people have sent me are here.

WORDCOUNT / Tracking the Way We Use Language /

Luc Sante:

Why it's so hard to let go of books in a language I can't read... or duplicate copies of 'True Tales from the Annals of Crime and Rascality'... or Tijuana sailors' pornography....

The Book Collection That Devoured My Life

Life is stranger than fiction for Leonardo DiCaprio. It is a familiar trend for Leo, he played Howard Hughes in The Aviator, Frank Abagnale in Catch Me If You Can, and Tobias Wolff in This Boy’s Life. And Leo’s also attached to films in development about Wall Street felon Jordan Belfort and James Bond creator Ian Fleming. Well, portraying real people on screen has continued, as the Oscar-nominated actor-producer has pressed the play button. Leo just become attached to star in “Atari,” a pitch that writers Brian Hecker and Craig Sherman sold to Paramount on Friday about the godfather of the video game industry, Nolan Bushnell.

Leo DiCaprio as the founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese?

On the stairs Natasha ran into her neighbor from across the hall, Baron Wolfe. He was somewhat laboriously ascending the bare wooden steps, caressing the bannister with his hand and whistling softly through his teeth.

“Where are you off to in such a hurry, Natasha?”

Natasha, by Vladimir Nabokov

In H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, the experience of travelling through the fourth dimension is cinematic: the Time Traveller sits like a film-goer, watching the accelerated passage of time, as the time machine’s dials spin ever faster. The effect is of rapid cutting and slow fade-out: “The night came like the turning out of a lamp, and in another moment came tomorrow. The laboratory grew faint and hazy, then fainter and ever fainter.” As Keith Williams says, time in the novel becomes a “movie reel, speeded forwards and backwards, or stopped at will”. Remarkably, The Time Machine was written before Wells had seen a film. It was published in 1895, the very year the cinematograph was invented by the Lumière brothers. As film historian Ian Christie has said, their invention “quite literally made time travel a spectator sport”.

Williams’s scholarly study argues convincingly that Wells’s early fiction anticipates the “cinematisation” of culture, both in his narrative technique and in his description of the technology. Wells – dubbed the “Realist of the Fantastic” by Conrad – is, says Williams, “the unjustly neglected precursor of High Modernist interest and influence on both avant garde and popular aspects of the new medium.” Wells’s prescience is, of course, legendary and today we live in a Wellsian world. He coined the phrase “atomic bomb” before World War I, anticipating the age of nuclear proliferation and terrorists armed with suitcase nukes.

Kafka’s mouse | Science and the cinema | PD Smith

Last month a controversial op-ed by Slavoj Žižek was published in Le Monde diplomatique. Around the same time, Žižek also wrote a similar letter to the London Review of Books. In the current issue, LRB has published some of its readers' responses.

As someone who was brought up in Tibet, I found Slavoj Žižek’s regurgitation of the Chinese Communist Party line mind-boggling.

This assessment is consistent with Jello's reaction that Žižek's argument "reads exactly like Chinese propaganda."

No Shangri-La | Letters to the LRB

John Cage was an American composer, Zen buddhist, and mushroom eater. He was also a writer: this site is about his paragraph-long stories – anecdotes, thoughts, and jokes. As a lecture, or as an accompaniment to a Merce Cunningham dance, he would read them aloud, speaking quickly or slowly as the stories required so that one story was read per minute.

This site archives 190 of those stories. Each story is spaced out, as if it were being read aloud, to fill a fixed area. If you like, you can also read them aloud at a rate of one a minute.

Indeterminacy

A free alternative to the ever-offensive Comic Sans.

HVD Comic Serif