I've been enjoying some bits of cinematic history plucked from the library shelves. "Discovering Cinema: Learning to Talk & Movies Dream in Color" is a two-disc pair of 50-minute documentaries with an excellent assortment of supplementary original materials. The shows are very well produced and the extras are educational at least, and often wonderful. Any of the Treasures from American Film Archives sets is worth digging around in, and I have been mining the first of the series for a week or so, having already been through a couple of other ones. I enjoyed the surreal 1916 silent western Hell's Hinges, starring William S. Hart the other day.

I am at present making my way through Permanence, the 2002 SF novel by Karl Schroeder, who has become a favorite. An impressive array of subjects are considered; political, social, economic and philosophical, jammed into a headlong Hard SF techno-adventure. 9 times out of 10 when I give a recent SF novel the first sentence test and find the protagonist is female, I put it back on the shelf. Not because I am a Male Chauvinist Pig, but because the gal is handed to you on a plate as a display of gender/ethnic equity, a fake Politically Correct mask to pep up a flat crime or adventure novel arbitrarily stuck in the future. Schroeder's books are full of ideas, not a lot of juvenile back-patting for having come up with a mulatto princess/private eye.

For over a month now I have been reading David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. I only pick it up every three days or so, and then try to read only one chapter, for the simple reason that I just want to keep enjoying it. I have read half a dozen of Dickens' novels, and made a point of reading lesser-known ones like Dombey and Son and Our Mutual Friend. I agree with Dickens' assessment that David Copperfield is his finest work and will go even farther. First please understand that I think people who talk about things as the "greatest ever" or "world's best" of "best of all time" are IDIOTS. It is just a stupid thing to do, and only exposes their ignorance when they are going ga-ga over some dumbass piece of crap like a halfwit chump. That said, it is my opinion, based on my four decades of reading literally thousands of novels, that Charles Dickens is the greatest writer in the English language, the king of all languages; that David Copperfield is simply and clearly the best novel ever written, and very probably will remain unchallenged for the remainder of human history.