"Staying awake: notes on the alleged decline of reading"

Ursula K. LeGuin's article "Staying awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading," in the February 2008 Harper's is a fun and provocative read, especially for those of us in the public hum-biz. It's at http://harpers.org/archive/2008/02/0081907, but you have to be a subscriber ($16.97 via credit card for a year's subscription gets you access to their whole archive). Or maybe I can find a spare copy.

Over the POTUS Day weekend (yes, Jamil, evenings during our snowmobile trek in Wyoming) I read Umberto Eco's How to Travel with a Salmon, a collection of short essays from the 80s and 90s. I earlier had read his novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, which I loved for a number of reasons (intertextuality mostly; it's a four-year old book that already has a wiki for annotations and elucidations; but also as a vehicle for a great literary mind; the period (mid-20th century Italy; contemporary Italy); its exploration of the functions/dysfunctions of memory; etc). Until reading Salmon, however, I had no idea the guy had a sense of humor. Imagine Woody Allen teaching literary theory or cultural studies, and you get the picture. The essay on "how to write an introduction" (to a collection of essays, monograph, whatever) was hilarious.