![]() ![]() (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works they propel you toward them.)įor me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets-reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. ![]() The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. My mind isn’t going-so far as I can tell-but it’s changing. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. ![]() Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. It feels at once overwritten and thematically thin, coasting on a cutesy concept before descending into relentless, and therefore meaningless, violence."Dave, stop. The plot is a mess, overstuffed with warring mobster brothers (James Ransone and Anson Mount) and a British assassin posing as a Southern-fried FBI agent (Tim Roth). Right” is the opposite of subtle - the lovers sport cat ears and clown noses as their signature look.Īs directed by Paco Cabezas, the weapons fly in slo-mo, the soundtrack cycles through the hits and the zingers keep on coming. Some subtlety could have gone a long way, but “Mr. Kendrick, usually a cool cucumber, is wildly overacting, though the nutty role essentially requires it. She blazes right past red flags in relationships, which is obvious when she’s swept off her feet by Francis. ![]() The object of his affection, Martha, is a neurotic, impulsive, whimsical mess reeling from a bad breakup. Rockwell does the rakish charm thing as the hit man with a heart of gold, offing the people who hire him, because “murder is bad.” He shucks and jives through his fight sequences with swagger, relying on the “current,” the energy of objects that allows him to see where things are going. ![]()
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