A Widget We Love

BombayTV is an online widget which allows users to add their own subtitles to clips from classic Bollywood films. The possibilities are endless.

Take a look at this movie made by Rob Koelling for his English classes:

Ian Fleming Centenary

Today marks the centenary of Ian Fleming, writer and creator of James Bond (28 May 1908).

If your travels take you to London in the coming year, we recommend the first-ever exhibition dedicated to the life and work of Ian Fleming--For Your Eyes Only, at the Imperial War Museum.

Our Department of Dubious Honors notes that Devil May Care, a new James Bond book has been commissioned by Ian Fleming Publications Ltd., written by Sebastian Faulks, and will be released today.

We recommend you return to the originals by Ian Fleming. As John Cawelti and Bruce Rosenberg say, "no other writer so simply and forcefully expresses the basic formulaic structure of the heroic spy romance."

Recommended links:

• Ian Fleming Centre
• Ian Fleming Centenary
  

Dashiell Hammett

Today marks the anniversary of Dashiell Hammett's birth, 27 May 1894. Author of enduring American classics such as The Maltese Falcon, Hammett was a master of American style.

Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley; it doesn’t have to stay there forever, but it was a good idea to begin by getting as far as possible from Emily Post’s idea of how a well-bred debutante gnaws a chicken wing. He wrote at first (and almost to the end) for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street.

Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish. He put these people down on paper as they are, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes. He had style, but his audience didn’t know it, because it was in a language not supposed to be capable of such refinements. They thought they were getting a good meaty melodrama written in the kind of lingo they imagined they spoke themselves. It was, in a sense, but it was much more. All language begins with speech, and the speech of common men at that, but when it develops to the point of becoming a literary medium it only looks like speech. Hammett’s style at its worst was almost as formalized as a page of Marius the Epicurean; at its best it could say almost anything. I believe this style, which does not belong to Hammett or to anybody, but is the American language (and not even exclusively that any more), can say things he did not know how to say or feel the need of saying. In his hands it had no overtones, left no echo, evoked no image beyond a distant hill. He is said to have lacked heart, yet the story he thought most of himself is the record of a man’s devotion to a friend. He was spare, frugal, hardboiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before. --Raymond Chandler, "The Simple Art of Murder," (1944, our emphasis)

Recommended links:

• PBS's American Masters page for Hammett
• Video of Richard Layman's lecture at the Library of Congress to mark the 75th anniversary of the publication of The Maltese Falcon (57 mins.)
  

Brilliant Bookcases

At nHumanities, we love books. We know we're supposed to use the library, but we can't help ourselves: we want to buy and keep books, to surround ourselves with their solid presence and papery smell.

Apparently, we're not alone. The WebUrbanist has a post on "20 Unusually Brilliant Bookcase and Bookshelf Designs." These designs make clever use of limited space, such as the stairs bookcase pictured above.

Virtual Games | Virtual Iraq

Virtual reality games appear increasingly in educational settings, and now Sue Halpern reports in The New Yorker that one of them may be used to treat soldiers suffering from chronic post-traumatic stress disorder--P.T.S.D.

The game is "an experimental treatment option called Virtual Iraq, in which patients [work] through their combat trauma in a computer-simulated environment." The article says,

According to a recent study by the RAND Corporation, nearly twenty per cent of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans are suffering from P.T.S.D. or major depression. Almost half won’t seek treatment. If virtual-reality exposure therapy proves to be clinically validated—only preliminary results are available so far—it may be more than another tool in the therapists’ kit; it may encourage those in need to seek help.

. . . Virtual Iraq is a tool for doing what’s known as prolonged-exposure therapy, which is sometimes called immersion therapy. It is a kind of cognitive-behavioral therapy, derived from Pavlov’s classic work with dogs. Prolonged-exposure therapy, which falls under the rubric of C.B.T., is at once intuitively obvious and counterintuitive: it requires the patient to revisit and retell the story of the trauma over and over again and, through a psychological process called “habituation,” rid it of its overwhelming power. The idea is to disconnect the memory from the reactions to the memory, so that although the memory of the traumatic event remains, the everyday things that can trigger fear and panic, such as trash blowing across the interstate or a car backfiring—what psychologists refer to as cues—are restored to insignificance. The trauma thus becomes a discrete event, not a constant, self-replicating, encompassing condition.

Although in its experimental phase, Virtual Iraq seems promising. You can read the entire article online at The New Yorker.

Ballyhoo! at the Smithsonian

The National Portrait Gallery's new exhibition “Ballyhoo! Posters as Portraiture” examines the themes present in poster art over the years.

The show's curator, Wendy Wick Reaves, says this of the exhibit on the National Portrait Gallery's blog:

"Sometimes a pictorial poster is a decorative masterpiece—something I can’t walk by without a jolt of aesthetic pleasure. Another might strike me as extremely clever advertising: you can feel the persuasive tug of words and image working in tandem. Occasionally, a poster is more like a punch in the stomach that takes you aback and makes you think. Posters can also be collectible icons for your wall, promoting your favorite cause or rock band. Indeed, there is no one tidy category for these pieces. But collectively, these 'pictures of persuasion,' as we might call them, offer a wealth of art, history, design, and popular culture for us to understand."

Indy and Archaeology

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull opens in U.S. theaters today, and cable TV has been clogged with specials claiming to reveal the true story of the crystal skull.

Forget those TV specials, which tend to focus on the reverent murmurs of true believers. Instead, go to Archaeology Magazine's delightful compendium all things Indiana, including the feature article "Legend of the Crystal Skulls."