••can ye pass the acid test?••

ye who enter here be afraid, but do what ye must -- to defeat your fear ye must defy it.

& defeat it ye must, for only then can we begin to realize liberty & justice for all.

time bomb tick tock? nervous tic talk? war on war?

or just a blog crying in the wilderness, trying to make sense of it all, terror-fried by hate radio and FOX, the number of whose name is 666??? (coincidence?)

Sunday, July 29, 2007

on book tv

in case you're among the unfortunate folk who've never watched book tv on c-span2, i hope you check it out soon.

i've learned an awful lot from it about history (both recent and more distant), politics, religion, and even science, and sometimes i actually develop a desire to read one of the books i hear about.

it's billed as "48 hours of non-fiction" book events every weekend, tho it's 72 or even 96 hours on holiday weekends, and every once in a while a novelist gets featured.

most of the schedule consists of approximately hour-long talks in book stores, libraries, colleges, think tanks, or other venues, by authors on tour to promote their most recently published work. they generally start with a highly informative lecture-like speech followed by a q&a session with the audience.

there are also a few regular programs: in depth is a live monthly 3-hour interview that includes viewer phone calls; after words is a weekly one-hour interview by a guest host; encore booknotes is a weekly replay of programs from a long-running interview series discontinued a few years ago.

in addition, c-span camera crews go to book fairs around the country for live telecast (and later replay) of panel discussions as well as individual author presentations.

the book tv staff has also recorded a lot of short interviews—mostly in the 5 to 10 minute range but sometimes shorter or up to a half hour or, rarely, even longer—that get inserted as filler between the long shows, whose running times are far from uniform.

one of those prompted this write-up.

in early may congress held an event in the capitol building called get caught reading. book tv did a number of very short interviews, whose subjects—unlike nearly all those i've seen before—are not writers but readers talking about books they read recently, and those readers are members of congress!

what made me sit down and write was one that was on before and got run again this weekend featuring rep john shimkus (r-il). mr shimkus said the only [!] books he reads are the bible—which he reads every day, "devotionally"—and children's books he reads with his kids, such as the harry potter series and something he said so quickly i missed it.

on the upside, at least he's not one of those christ-crazed nutjobs terrified potter books will turn their kids into witches and warlocks.

on the other hand, he's a member of congress who only reads the bible and kiddie books!

No comments:

Post a Comment