Tuesday's Literary Briefing

Getting Ready To Use Our Kindle

Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: Reading on a Kindle is like masturbating with a condom on. So reading on a Vook must be like settling down with a Thai ladyboy, right? Is this the end of reading as we know it? Has this ongoing debate over print and digital grown cliché? We seem to be the British Expeditionary Force of our beloved print media, leading the way into certain death. But it’s tragically real, positively Yeatsian. Europe might not save us, but that doesn’t mean we’re ready to start calling our fries Freedom Fries. Whatever happens, don’t forget your prophylactics. — Andrew Geer

– Technology changes at a dizzying rate, yet somehow our ways of writing about it don’t. Take that hoary chestnut, the “future of the book” piece, which first appeared with the introduction of CD-ROM encyclopedias (remember Encarta?) in the late 1980s and achieved its nth iteration on Thursday, when a front-page story in the New York Times announced the debut of the “vook,” a video-book hybrid, four of which have just been released by Atria Books. — Vooks in Salon

Who Knows A Good Marching Song?

– Many years ago, I went to the Central Lobby of the Houses of Parliament in London to keep an appointment with the almost picturesquely reactionary Conservative politician Alan Clark. He was the son of Kenneth (later Lord) Clark—the art historian and author of the Civilisationseries—and the heir to Saltwood Castle, in Kent. — The Somme in The Atlantic

– Who will say a good word for the cliché? Its sins are so numerous. Exhausted tropes, numb descriptors, zombie proverbs, hackneyed sentiments, rhetorical rip-offs, metaphorical flat tires, ideas purged of thought and symbols drained of power – the cliché traffics in them all. A lie can be inventive; an insult can be novel. Even plagiarism implies a kind of larcenous good taste. But a cliché is intellectual disgrace. The word itself seems to shape the mouth into a Gallic sneer. — Clichés in The Boston Globe

Our Mom Loves Yeats

– William Butler Yeats has been called the twentieth century’s greatest poet. He may even deserve the title. As Richard Ellmann wrote in his classic study Yeats: The Man and the Masks, “it is not easy to assign him a lower place.” Others may have attempted more; none achieved it. Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and all the other contenders of Yeats’s illustrious generation—none stakes quite the same claim on the imagination, or on the idiom, of our time. — W. B. Yeats in The Boston Review

– Unsurprisingly, the twentieth anniversary of 1989 has added to an already groaning shelf of books on the year that ended the short twentieth century. If we extend “1989″ to include the unification of Germany and disunification of the Soviet Union in 1990–1991, we should more accurately say the three years that ended the century. — 1989 in The New York Review of Books

Video: A Year of Change in the Soviet Union