<<Why do so many people have trouble with
this?>>
Virtually no exposure to real films, and overdoing on bad
movies and the
tube. Probably no exposure to challenging literature. I'm
just
conjecturing.
As an anecdote, over the years I noticed a very disturbing
thing in the
classroom. I like my lectures to start with some surprising
statement
and reach a closure only at the very end: the seed I plant at
the
beginning bears fruit at the end in a non-obvious way; I
found that my
"audiences" were finding it harder and harder to even
*remember* what I
had said five minutes before, let alone see the significance
of the
"seed" planted at the beginning. Thus, they had no idea of
the origin or
the process that led to a particular mathematical result. A
lot of
students nowadays seem to think in static images, often
linked to verbal
ditties (like sound bites). Very disturbing and quite likely
related to
people's difficulties with real cinematic technique (and I'm
not talking
about Tarkovsky).
I must make this a hardboiled post, so I will say that I was
very
disappointed with Michael Connelly's "Trunk Music", a tired
effort that
is not in the same class as his previous books in the Bosch
series. On
the other hand, Harold Adams's "A Perfectly Proper Murder", a
historical
small-town yarn set in South Dakota in the 30s is a little
gem, a
novella that would belong in the pulps if there were any such
thing.
Over the years I have become very fond of Adams, who is a
very enjoyable
(and incredibly concise and meticulous) author. This book and
the style
of its author may possibly appeal to the fedora-persons in
this list. It
was published by Walker.
Regards,
MT
#
# To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to
majordomo@icomm.ca.
# The web pages for the list are at http://www.vex.net/~buff/rara-avis/.