Look how they're advertising single malt whisky these days.

I'm finding that photograph so funny, because I like to take a bath and read a book, and I could be lured into bringing a glass of whisky into that scenario and to put it on a spindly table right by the tub. And I could see getting out of the tub, wrapping my head in a towel and putting on a satin robe and then picking up the book again, but under no circumstances can there suddenly be a big dog in that recently vacated bath... a dog with halfway shampooed hair, no less. That dog and all that glass... not just the whisky on the spindly table but all that extra glass on the ledge behind the dog. The message becomes: Whisky is a disaster waiting to happen. 

Also, I want my legs to remain attached to my pelvis. The faceless model has a leg that comes out of nowhere.

Speaking of reading — is that model really reading? it seems to be a travel guide — I wanted to quote something else from that 2000 article about Philip Roth that I talked about yesterday. This is something I was thinking about during my sunrise run today (as I realized I didn't finish reading "The Human Stain" by getting to the end of reading all the words on all the pages but that I'd only gotten into the position where I can begin to read it):

“Every year, seventy readers die and only two are replaced. That’s a very easy way to visualize it,” Roth said. By “readers,” he said, he means people who read serious books seriously and consistently. The evidence “is everywhere that the literary era has come to an end,” he said. “The evidence is the culture, the evidence is the society, the evidence is the screen, the progression from the movie screen to the television screen to the computer. There’s only so much time, so much room, and there are only so many habits of mind that can determine how people use the free time they have. Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing. It is difficult to come to grips with a mature, intelligent, adult novel. It is difficult to know what to make of literature. That’s why I say stupid things are said about it, because unless people are well trained they don’t know quite what to make of it...

"I think that the whole effort of certainly the first half of the twentieth century, the whole intellectual and artistic effort, was to see behind things, and that is no longer of interest. To explore consciousness was the great mission of the first half of the century—whether we’re talking about Freud or Joyce, whether we’re talking about the Surrealists or Kafka or Marx, or Frazer or Proust or whoever. The whole effort was to expand our sense of what consciousness is and what lies behind it. It’s no longer of interest. I think that what we’re seeing is the narrowing of consciousness. I read the other day in a newspaper that I occasionally see that Freud was a kind of charlatan or something worse. This great, tragic poet, our Sophocles! The writer is just not of interest to the public as somebody who may have an inroad into consciousness. The writer is only interesting in terms of how much money did he get and what’s the scandal. That’s all they’re interested in. Why? Because the other stuff is useless, they don’t want it. There has always been a debate over what literature is and what’s it for, because it is a mysterious thing, and the mysterious side of existence, certainly for secular people, is not an urgent problem.

“I’m not a good enough student of whatever you have to be a student of to figure this out, but one gets the sense—and not just on the basis of the death of reading—that the American branch of the species is being retooled. I see the death of reading as just an aspect of this. I have to see it that way, otherwise it’s just cultural whining, and cultural whining is boring. It’s an aspect of some great shift that’s occurred—been going on for a while—in that which interests the most intelligent members of American society.”

In this period of Roth’s maturity, his book sales have been modest, ranging between thirty and forty-five thousand in hardcover.... “It doesn’t make any difference really if a hundred thousand read the book or ten thousand or five thousand, frankly. Five thousand people is a lot of people. And, as a friend of mine said about five thousand readers, ‘If they came through your living room one at a time they’d leave you in tears.’

“So when I talk of the death of reading, I’m not saying, ‘Poor me, or poor the other guy, we don’t have the readership.’ I just mean that this great human endeavor has come to an end..."

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