Dear Friedrich --

Just because I'm the kind of bore who can't let got of a topic ...

Here's a list of some of the culturethings I've been looking at/listening to/flipping through during the last few weeks.

* "A History of Classical Music" by Richard Fawke -- a Naxos four-CD package that's read by Robert Powell and that includes many musical examples. An excellent first spin through the Western art-music history, by the way. It's buyable here.
* "Money Money Money," a terrific police procedural novel by Ed McBain, which I listened to in an abridged version on audiotape.
* Several episodes of the A&E series "American Justice." The Wife loves Bill Kurtis, the show's host, and the episodes themselves are well-told, hour-long true-crime stories.
* Several Howard Goodall music-history shows on Ovation.
* A three-part IFC documentary about American movies in the '70s.
* An English documentary about Dizzy Gillespie.
* The usual huge number of websites.
* A talk by the wonderful Vedanta guru, Swami Prabhavananda, which I listened to on audio. (Tons of Vedanta-related books and tapes are buyable here.)

A few decades ago, all the above mediathings might well have been books. These days they aren't books -- they're mediathings instead. They were all, by the way, at the very least pretty good.

I think this list helps explain two things that are useful when thinking about the state of bookchat and book reviewing.

* It helps explain why so much vitality has gone out of the book world. There's been no loss of cultural vitality in a general sense, IMHO, but as media options have opened up, energy has dispersed. (I don't read as many books in the traditional way as I once did; but I don't watch network TV either anymore. Same phenomenon.) It slops around among many media possibilities. There used to be a small number of well-defined media categories: network TV; movies; books; classical, jazz or pop music; etc. These days, there are an almost uncountable number of media categories. What to call, for instance, a website that includes visuals, writing, biographies, and sound clips? That's certainly a project that a few decades ago might have been a book. Is it a tragedy that today it's a website instead? If so, what's the downside? It's free, it's accesssible, it's easy to use, and the blending of media works better on a website than it ever could in a book. So it's a plus as far as consumers are concerned. But the fact that it's a website rather than a book does mean that the world of books per se is a little less rich than it might have been.

* My list also helps illustrate the kinds of challenges book-review editors are up against. For a simple-and-obvious example: these days, where does the "books" field start and stop? Strictly with books? If so, does that include audiobooks? And if it includes audiobooks, how can you exclude recorded lecture series? If not, do you focus instead on "reading and writing"? Well, the web is full of reading and writing -- do you cover the web?

So a book-review editor is faced not just with the fact that the bookworld no longer has the same kind of vitality it once did, it's also much harder to pin down. Yet he's gotta turn out 28 provocative, rewarding and interesting pages of "book review" every week.

Tough job! The fact is that "books" per se (much as we may love 'em) are no longer central to the culture, or well-defined. They're one media option among many, all of which seem to blend in to each other, and all of which seem to be dissolving at their core. As I've noted in other postings, now that movies are being turned into pixels and monkeyed with in Photoshop-like ways, live-action movies have become a subcategory of computer animation.

As I type these words, I find myself musing about ebooks ... about how the video documentaries on my list above were just fine, and were just as good as many books, and also so much easier to get through ...

And I come up with a hunch: that a major innovation is with us, although problems apparently still need to be ironed out -- the portable video player. These are little devices kind of like Ipods or Gameboys, but with color LCD screens and big-capacity hard drives that store tens of hours of decent-quality video. Imagine being able to suck what's on your Tivo or DVR onto such a portable device. You could put all that material in your backpack or purse; you could take it with you vacation. In many ways, it'd beat an e-book reader, which is a device that has been over-talked-about, and that no one has been able to manufacture a convincing example of anyway. With a portable video player, you'd be able to watch your choice of program on the bus or subway or in an airplane. It might well be an amazing new development. And it's certainly hard to believe that people won't make widespread use of it -- which of course would be another blow to book-reading per se. But is that a bad thing? Given how good and satisfying the products on my list at the top of this posting were, I can't see why it would be.

A posting where I argue that the e-book revolution is not just with us but is already over (hint: it's the web) is here. A posting where I muse a bit about what the impact of small video screens might be is here. You can read about portable video players here, here and here.

Best,

Michael