DrWeb's Domain

Remembering Gene - Roger Ebert's Journal

Remembering Gene - Roger Ebert's Journal
By Roger Ebert on February 17, 2009 8:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (277) | TrackBacks (0)

Gene Siskel and I were like tuning forks. Strike one, and the other would pick up the same frequency. When we were in a group together, we were always intensely aware of one another. Sometimes this took the form of camaraderie, sometimes shared opinions, sometimes hostility. But we were aware. If something happened that we both thought was funny but weren't supposed to, God help us if one caught the other's eye. We almost always thought the same things were funny. That may be the best sign of intellectual communion.

Gene died ten years ago on February 20, 1999. He is in my mind almost every day. I don't want to rehearse the old stories about how we had a love/hate relationship, and how we dealt with television, and how we were both so scared the first time we went on Johnny Carson that, backstage, we couldn't think of the name of a single movie, although that story is absolutely true. Those stories have been told. I want to write about our friendship. The public image was that we were in a state of permanent feud, but nothing we felt had anything to do with image. We both knew the buttons to push on the other one, and we both made little effort to hide our feelings, warm or cold. In 1977 we were on a talk show with Buddy Rogers, once Mary Pickford's husband, and he said, "You guys have a sibling rivalry, but you both think you're the older brother."

Great retrospective tribute to Gene from his long-time partner, friend, and colleague…

In Reading, Pa., Memories and Monuments of Updike - washingtonpost.com

In Reading, Pa., Memories and Monuments of Updike - washingtonpost.com.

In Reading, Pa., Memories and Monuments of Updike
By Ben Chapman
Sunday, February 22, 2009; Page P06
Special to The Washington Post

Reading is required for any John Updike pilgrimage. That's not "reading," as in books, but Reading, as in Pennsylvania. It seems you can't go a block in this city of about 83,000 without running into one of the author's old stomping grounds or a scene from one of his books, where often the city is named Alton or Brewer.

"He would typically take his experiences and give them a little spin so they weren't so recognizable," said Jack De Bellis, author of the John Updike Encyclopedia. But without looking too hard, you can easily spot scenes from the recently deceased writer's stories all over Berks County (Brewer County in his books).
...

Just a few blocks away, Updike spent hours as a young man scouring the stacks at the Reading Public Library, at South Fifth and Franklin streets. The library's archival Updike collection is a must-see for any fan. It's a set of 136 noteworthy books donated by the author, including 58 titles from his mother's collection, many inscribed to her by her son, who personally delivered them to the library when she passed away in 1989.

Ruth Harrison, Reference Librarian: A Prairie Home Companion from American Public Media

Ruth Harrison, Reference Librarian: A Prairie Home Companion from American Public Media.

Listen to this fine audio clip from Prairie Home Companion,

Ruth Harrison, Reference Librarian...

Or, video clip..
Ruth Harrison, Reference Librarian

What will the library of the future look like? | Jacket Copy | Los Angeles Times

What will the library of the future look like? | Jacket Copy | Los Angeles Times.

What will the library of the future look like?

Matthew Fisher, an assistant professor of English at UCLA, knew that libraries all over the world had been digitizing their holdings. But he was frustrated by the difficulty finding what he was looking for -- in particular, Medieval manuscripts. A Google search for "Edward the Confessor" might turn up 20 pages of results before the book, the oldest surviving Anglo-Norman history of the king, appears; it's at Cambridge University, and they've put it online.

Rather than telling Cambridge it was time they hired an SEO expert, Fisher decided to collect links to these works himself. Launched late last year, the Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts is functional, if not pretty. But it does link to almost 1,000 manuscripts, including "Topographia Hibernia," above, which seems to be having a 12th to 13th century-style "Law and Order" moment (if you can read the Latin, translations are welcome in the comments). The Medieval manuscripts catalog links to manuscripts by 193 authors in 20 languages collected by 59 libraries and describes them with the information scholars look for.