Eugene David<br>...The One-Minute Pundit

Posted 4:39 PM by Gene

The further THUMBS® is from his rave movee reviews, the better he is. ROMY (who is still hung over) says the guy's won some sort of best blog competition, and though we dismiss such awards -- they judge the same six professional writers, who already have enough unearned honors -- this guy deserves it. We'd written some time ago about his electric portrayal of his early days in newspapering. A few months back he wrote on a TNR piece (why must it put so much behind its stupid wall?) about all the once-famous authors in oblivion. Ah, Saul Bellow -- a Nobel-winning egghead from the University of Chicago. We haven't read a novel in ages but we like to read plays: they save all the trouble of slogging through exposition and get right to the point. But even the best writing doesn't have the visceral impact of music. The opening of Roses from the South stirs more yearning than ten novels. Especially in this hectic age reading fiction involves what must prosaically be called time management, a calculation of effort versus gain, and most of the time it isn't worth it.