ironSoap – Complete

thecomposites:

Humbert Humbert, Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

Gloomy good looks…Clean-cut jaw, muscular hand, deep sonorous voice…broad shoulder…I was, and still am, despite mes malheurs, an exceptionally handsome male; slow-moving, tall, with soft dark hair and a gloomy but all the more seductive cast of demeanor. Exceptional virility often reflects in the subject’s displayable features a sullen and congested something that pertains to what he has to conceal. And this was my case…But instead I am lanky, big-boned, wooly-chested Humbert Humbert, with thick black eyebrows…A cesspoolful of rotting monsters behind his slow boyish smile…aging ape eyes…Humbert’s face might twitch with neuralgia.

Trippy, fascinating blog using police composite sketch software on literary characters.

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from Like a Detuned Radio — February 13, 2012 at 10:00AM

Batman illustrations by Mike Henry. Great stuff; love what he did with Poison Ivy, Phantasm and Scarecrow especially.

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from Like a Detuned Radio — February 13, 2012 at 09:43AM

Read to Me on Flickr.

#photography, books, reading, kids

from Like a Detuned Radio — February 12, 2012 at 03:30PM

Heavy Metal Hero by Rodney Matthews

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from Like a Detuned Radio — February 11, 2012 at 09:04AM

@ironsoap — February 11, 2012 at 06:04AM

@ironsoap — February 10, 2012 at 03:36PM

author: Michael Lewis
name: Paul
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 2012/02/09
date added: 2012/02/10
shelves: non-fiction, sports
review:
The principal thing that stands out to me now, having finished The Blind Side and read Moneyball, is that Michael Lewis really knows how to tell a story. In Moneyball he takes a story that is ostensibly about the Oakland Athletics and their general manager but is really about economics, valuation, conventional wisdom and applied analytics and somehow manages to make it riveting. Likewise in The Blind Side he takes a story about a poor black kid who gets adopted by a rich white family, who just happens to be a genetic specimen ideally suited to being a left tackle in American football and makes it resonate.

Admittedly, as much as I loved Moneyball, I first heard about The Blind Side through the film, only realizing the book it originated in was written by the same guy later on. But the story in The Blind Side didn’t really have much draw to me: It looked schmaltzy and smacked of revisionist history at best or some kind of white salvation-bringing at worst. Still, I felt I owed it to the author to give the book a try, even if the Sandra Bullock vehicle didn’t have much appeal. And even with that, I still procrastinated on reading it because my expectations and assumptions kept saying to me, “Ick.”

The funny thing is, I wasn’t entirely wrong about The Blind Side, I don’t think. Michael Oher, the central figure in the book, is a poor black kid with specific characteristics that make him valuable on an offensive line. He is adopted by a rich white family who accept him and provide for him to try and give him a better life. It gets kind of schmaltzy sometimes. One occasionally gets the impression that some harsh edges to the story have been sanded down. Now and then the great white saviors, lifting the otherwise doomed minority into the transformative glory of sports, make their self-congratulatory appearances.

However, none of that makes The Blind Side any less in terms of story and intrigue. The one thing that is a bit of a problem is that within the construct of the rags-to-riches story there isn’t really all that much naturally occurring tension and drama, in part because while the initial challenges are riveting at some point about halfway through Michael begins to accept the help he’s being given and from then on it’s less a matter of if he will succeed as to what margin. Lewis does a good job of framing certain events late in the narrative such that they provide enough dramatic heft to propel through to the end.

My favorite parts of the book were those that were most similar to Moneyball, those that discuss the factors that led to left tackles being among the highest paid players in the NFL, including dissections of Bill Walsh’s west coast offense and Lawrence Taylor’s earnest approach to rushing the quarterback. They serve really only to give context to the marvel that is Michael Oher, but I found them to be anything but disposable. Whenever I started to slide ever so slightly into apathy about the Tuhoys and Oher there would be a new chapter about the mechanics and art form that is being a professional left tackle to rekindle my interest.

Overall, I liked The Blind Side. Lewis is a gifted reporter and writer and the story is compelling, especially as Lewis presents it. I didn’t find it as indispensable as Moneyball but it was certainly worth the read and convinced me to go ahead and put the rest of Lewis’s books on my to-read list.

from Paul's bookshelf: read — February 10, 2012 at 03:06PM

A look over a book.

#books, disney, illustration

from Like a Detuned Radio — February 10, 2012 at 10:35AM