Saturday morning Lull Report …

… courtesy of Dave Lull:



… Sentence patterns: Paris Review – Look at These Colorful Diagrams of Famous First Sentences from Literature, Dan Piepenbring.



… Conserving information: The man who proved Stephen Hawking wrong.

… two great theories of physics – general relativity, which describes gravity, and quantum mechanics, which describes everything else – began a heated tussle. In the end Susskind managed to prove the information sucked into a black hole is indeed conserved.

… No holds barred: Austen vs. Brontë.



… Asking the big questions: Are tentacles a guy thing? Gender bias in Lovecraftian horror fiction.



… Er, no: Are the New ‘Golden Age’ TV Shows the New Novels?

… comparing even the best TV shows with Dickens, or Henry James, also suggests how much the novel can achieve that TV doesn’t even attempt. Televised evil, for instance, almost always takes melodramatic form: Our anti-heroes are mobsters, meth dealers or terrorists. But this has nothing to do with the way we encounter evil in real life, which is why a character like Gilbert Osmond, in “The Portrait of a Lady,” is more chilling in his bullying egotism than Tony Soprano with all his stranglings and shootings.

I don't quite get the first sentence of this: "Television was so bad for so long, it’s no surprise that the arrival of good television has caused the culture to lose its head a bit." When might that have been? Newton Minnow thought it was the 1950s, which now seem a genuine golden age. TV has always had a crap, but a lot of the stuff that was originally dismissed as such is now regarded as classic. One of the worst things ever, I thought, was An American Family, and that was on PBS.



… The original super tramp: Coming Up Tramps.