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It might constantly be getting easier for newspapers to doctor photos, but it’s also getting easier for blgogers to call them on it. Latest victim, [Al-Ahram](http://ahram.org.eg/), found [photoshopping a picture of Middle-East negotiations in Washington](http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?hl=en&u=http://waelk.net/node/25&rurl=translate.google.com&twu=1&usg=ALkJrhj9v4K7pAKH1jk53WiZke3_auTJJw) to place Egyptian president Mubarak more prominently. And since the only thing the internet loves more than a picture is an established institution getting egg on its face, news of the photoshop has reached corners of the internet which would otherwise have had not the faintest interest in Egypt.

[via [drugoi](http://drugoi.livejournal.com/3363794.html)]

Have been looking at various highly-regarded book reviewers, trying to figure out which I can trust. First up, Ted Giola.

This is the review that makes me distrust Ted: a positive review of a book I loved, but one that

totally misses the point

. Compare him to Sheila O’Malley. Ted:

But the most masterful aspect of the plot is the superimposition of

the two love stories, the 20th century one involving Mitchell and his

accomplice Dr. Maud Bailey, a famous LaMotte scholar, and the

19th century romance between Ash and LaMotte. The contrast is

not just one of couples, but also social mores, etiquette and gender

roles. Byatt is in complete control as she juxtaposes the pacing and

complications of these side-by-side stories.

Sheila:

Byatt doesn’t write about people who live in their subjective experience of life. She writes about academics and writers and research assistants – whose “love” for life is expressed through their driving obsession for whatever topic – people who spend their whole lives researching one minor female Victorian poet … and any real love that comes into the life of a person like that will either have to take a back seat, OR somehow inform and deepen that other obsession.

…

A.S. Byatt writes in this realm like no one’s business. She is the heir of George Eliot (someone she openly emulates). Life is BIG, and important – and it is not just our personal lives that give it resonance – but our passions, obsessions, intellectual pursuits and the wider culture and how it informs how we live.

Which one has managed to get inside the novel, and give you a reason to pick it up? No question, is there?

The most depressing thing about the Sarrazin affair? The amazon.de reviews — almost all positive. What a hideous collection of knuckle-draggers.

And even in Berlin, there’s are apparently still venues willing to give Sarrazin a platform. Among them Urania, to its shame.

Der Spiegel recently had a 2-page spread on the Russian blogosphere. Nothing especially insightful, I must admit, but there’s no harm in having a little introduction.

Indeed, these days, it’s usually bloggers — rather than members of the traditional media — who expose scandals and give voice to grievances. Blog reports by a student on conditions at a nursing home near Moscow, for example, led to the firing of its corrupt director. And, this spring, when a Mercedes belonging to a high-level manager at the oil giant Lukoil sped into a car in the opposite lane and killed two women, crime scene photographs published online exposed police attempts at a cover-up.

Drugoi got picked out as exemplar; his readers’ reactions here

Splintering Bone Ashes on Badiou:

This was precisely what I had been looking for, motivated in a political sense not by a desire to prevent the suffering of the poor, but to unblock the lock on the new, this impassable impasse, THAT was to be the imperative of thought.

Random googling has just confronted me with Sheila O’Malley, and she’s won herself an instant position as my second-favourite source of book reviews. On a slight tangent, here’s something that should be ingested by any blogger:

My ideal reader is someone who shares my sense of humor, who “gets it”, someone who doesn’t roll their eyes at excitement or enthusiasm, someone who loves to get fired up about this or that, who isn’t put off by a grown woman blithering like a 13 year old. My ideal reader is someone who likes to go deep. Who isn’t afraid to go deep. My ideal reader is not the kind of person who needs to make a joke, nervously, when the mood gets serious.

I stumbled onto Sheila O’Malley’s blog this afternoon, and instantly knew I need to read everything she’s ever written. Especially the book reviews — e.g. on Harriet the Spy, Brideshead Revisited, Notes from Underground, and above all this essay on love and AS Byatt.

Talking of Byatt, The Guardian have a wonderful video interview with her; I assume they’ll eventually turn in into an article, but they’re taking their time about it. What’s particularly delightful is how it works as a conversation rather than a potted Q&A. She covers several topics — social realist novels, facebook, religion, big brother — but keeps returning to a central theme of the limitations of culture concerned entirely with reality and people, where

interest in life as it is has supplanted religion

. Also, as one of the comments points out, it’s somewhat intriguing that she has a roll of tape balanced on her knee throughout.

More superficially:

• The Spectator on Michael Moorcock: “
  
  He is generally sound on religion and politics
  
  “. Yes, really.
• A plea for intergenerational peace from Rhian
• Remember the park benches in
  
  Transmetropolitan
  
  ? A park in China tries doing it with spikes [NB:
  
  Quirky news from China, hence probably exaggerated or downright false
  
  ]

The Guardian has a wonderful interview with AS Byatt, in which she takes a decent shot at a combined critique of social realism in novels, the narcissism of facebook and big brother, and the death of God. There doesn’t seem yet to be any transcript or article published, alas. Some (possibly inaccurate) quotes:

• on realism: “My life as it really is consists of reading Shakespeare in bed at one in the morning” (i.e. this and other shared, commonplace activities are at least as real as the grittier horrors)
• 
  “I don’t believe in God. I believe in Wallace Stevens”
  
  — partly for the thoughtful way she comes out with it, partly because (when she explains what she means) it’s not just a throwaway line
• 
  /”interest in life as it is has supplanted religion”
  

And all this with a roll of sellotape balanced on her knee. I can’t figure out if this is a carefully-placed detail, in either the style of Old Masters portraiture or ARGs, or just One Of Those Things that happens when you’re focussed on sharing ideas.

Ah, nostalgia. The internet currently seems to function as an enormous engine for encouraging and amplifying nostalgia, providing endless information with which to peer into every crevice of our upbringing.

Music, today. Grooveshark and some light googling helped me recover Buck Rogers, which was ubiquitous around my school in 2001*. The kind of thing that was once ubiquitous and I now hardly ever hear. G has said that trance is her Volksmusic, having been all over Israel as she grew up (and still, I suppose). Certain kinds of rock are in a similar position for me: not actually very

good

, but psychologically imprinted at a particular moment.

Now, looking back at it, I get to puzzle over the details you don’t notice until you stop and look from afar. Why is it called ‘Buck Rogers’? What is with the lyrics? Even songmeanings can’t make much out of it.

* actually, I’d imagined it being a few years earlier than that, but I trust wikipedia more than i trust my memory.

Chroniques de la rentrée littéraire are again trying to crowdsource reviews of all* the French novels published this autumn.

* ‘all’ being understandably somewhat limited. No space here, for instance, for Dmitri Bortnikov’s novel of the Territory.