L.A. Noire

Rockstar Games, the publishers of the videogame Red Dead Redemption, a popular western saga, are turning to crime. The game L.A. Noire is a murder mystery set in 40's Los Angeles, in the style of movies like The Big Sleep and Chinatown. Because the real roots of this material is literary, bred from stories like those of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, Rockstar is going the extra mile and has commissioned a number of authors to write stories inspired by the game. An ebook of the stories will follow shortly after the game's launch, and includes writers like Lawrence Block, Andrew Vachss and Joyce Carol Oates. Seems like a great idea to me. The stories will stand on their own merits, and when your fingers are starting to fall off from playing the game, you can retire to your easy chair and give your digits—and your brain—a rest without leaving the noir milieu.

Read the whole story—and an excerpt—at EW.com's Shelf Life.

Celebrating the King James Bible

For a while now folks have been updating the Bible one way or another. Making the language accessible should make the ideas accessible, the thinking goes, and there's nothing wrong with that. But for sheer beauty of prose, nothing matches the four hundred year old King James Bible. Assembled over the space of seven years by a committee over four dozen, somehow it managed to become a cornerstone of our literature.

Charles McGrath of the NY Times writes,

"There must have been disputes — shouting; table pounding; high-ruffed, black-gowned clergymen folding their arms and stomping out of the room — but there is no record of them. And the finished text shows none of the PowerPoint insipidness we associate with committee-speak or with later group translations like the 1961 New English Bible, which T.S. Eliot said did not even rise to 'dignified mediocrity.' Far from bland, the King James Bible is one of the great masterpieces of English prose."

Read the full article at Why the King James Bible Endures.

Movies you say you've seen (but you haven't)

Maybe the English just don't get to the movies much, but 4 out of 5 of them admit to lying about seeing movies in order to impress people. I can sort of understand lying about reading someone like, perhaps, Nietzsche, who is impenetrable, self-contradicting and a little nuts. But movies? And for that matter, this particular list of movies? I've seen them all. Really. Trust me on this. Some of them I've seen more than once. The number one and number two on the list, The Godfather and Casablanca, I can recite most of the dialogue!

Have you seen them all? Should I believe you? Check out the list at FemaleFirst.

Peter and the Wolf

How many kids' first introduction to classical music is Peter and the Wolf? It seems as if everyone under the sun has recorded the narration for it, from Eleanor Roosevelt to Sharon Stone to Captain Kangaroo. My favorite version as a kid, narrated by Sterling Holloway, was Walt Disney's. I love this video of the maestro casually banging out all the themes:



The background story of the piece is fascinating. As Sara Fishko writes on NPR.org/music:

"Although the story sparkles with innocence, the times in which Prokofiev wrote it were far from cheerful. It was 1936, and the composer had just decided to move back to Moscow after spending years abroad in New York and Paris. Harlow Robinson, Prokofiev's biographer, says it was an uneasy time, as Stalin's purges and the show trials of the early Bolsheviks were about to begin. The atmosphere was already changing in 1936, and that was something obviously Prokofiev was not counting on or thinking about when he went back."

Read the whole story at 'Peter And The Wolf' Turns 75.

Cool stuff, plus

Some things are just cool. Other things are not only cool, but really cool.

First of all, you have to love the shirts and the iPhone covers at OutOfPrintClothing.com. They are definitely cool.

Then notice that, for every shirt sold, a book is donated to Books for Africa. That is really cool.

The Webby Awards

More awards? Yep. This time for websites. That's not a bad thing, though. It's easy to get caught in a rut with internet content, always going back to the same sites, while meanwhile lots (LOTS!) of new stuff is out there. The lists of nominees here provide plenty of new resources for just about anyone. I looked at quite a few new ones myself, including:

Metacritic, aggregated reviews of movies, tv and games, plus feature articles

National Geographic Kids, enough to keep any kid entertained for hours

The Smithsonian, which is more than just planning a visit, with plenty of great kid content (and, for that matter, adult content)

Speakeasy, a smart celebrity/entertainment blog from the Wall Street Journal

Letters of Note, a collection of very interesting correspondence worth reading

The whole list of winners and nominees is at WebbyAwards.com

Rex Stout

Stout is my favorite mystery writer. The best. Hands down. No hemming or hawing. I've read all the Nero Wolfe books multiple times, I've cooked from the Nero Wolfe cookbook, I've watched virtually every TV and movie adaptation. I just love them. One of the best things about them, and I wish more of today's authors could do this as well, is that it really doesn't matter where you start. Every one of them is a perfect introduction, and you don't have to have read some other one to figure out who's who and what's what.

The attraction, as with any great mystery series, is the characters. Of course there's Wolfe himself, all seventh of a ton of him, with Fritz and Theodore on the homefront, the legmen Saul, Fred and Orrie, the cigar chomping (but never smoking) Inspector Cramer, among others. But more than anything there is the magical voice of the narrator, Archie Goodwin. As Robert Hughes writes on CriminalElement.com:

"Archie Goodwin's deceptively airy tone often masks a serious treatment of subjects from treason and anti-Semitism to, of course, murder. It's Archie we want to read. It's Archie who describes Wolfe's eccentricities, his splendid repasts, his choleric outbursts, his obsessions with orchid-growing. Were these described in the third-person, we'd have an interesting, but perhaps somewhat two-dimensional character, an assemblage of tics. But from Archie's perspective, and through Stout’s prose, we have an unforgettable personage, a true original."

For the full story on the books, and the incredible career of their creator, go to Rex Stout: An American Wit and Propagandist.