(5 of 5)
The less serious-minded young man is the target of NBC. "Our approach," explains the network's Preston Beckman, "is to go for broad, funny, male guy kind of comedy. If guys want to watch comedy there'll be something there for them." And if guys want to watch other guys use old underwear as coffee filters, as Rob Schneider does in the new sitcom Men Behaving Badly, NBC will indeed be the only place for them.
JUST HOW GREAT ARE THE GREAT BOOKS?
What with the spread of the World Wide Web and the increasingly cluttered electronic sight-and soundscape, the act of reading and turning wood-pulp pages may strike some as hopelessly passe, the informational equivalent of the fondue party. Two of the fall's more interesting books argue, perhaps unsurprisingly but also quite persuasively, against this view; they are about books and the wealth of contemplative pleasures they afford.
In Great Books (Simon & Schuster; 492 pages; $30), David Denby, film critic for New York magazine, recounts a personal odyssey. Some 30 years after taking the two core-curriculum courses--Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization--at Columbia University, he takes them again, traveling with students several decades younger the long road from Homer to Woolf and Socrates to Nietzsche. Denby finds the so-called--and currently much maligned--great books more exhilarating the second time around: "They scrape away the media haze of second-handedness." The overarching impression left by his account is that education may be wasted on the young.
Translator Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading (Viking; 372 pages; $26.95) is an impressionistic, engrossing look at what books have meant to people since the first inscriptions of signs on stone nearly 6,000 years ago. No one who follows Manguel's narrative to its conclusion need ever again feel guilty about putting off errands, chores, the bills, the kids, sleep--whatever--and curling up with a good, or even a great, book.
OPERA: BEYOND CARMEN
For most audiences, Hispanic opera means Carmen (written, of course, by a Frenchman). Placido Domingo, in his new role as artistic director of the Washington Opera, means to broaden the definition. This season the company will present Manuel Penella's 1916 Spanish opera El Gato Montes as well as Antonio Carlos Gomes' 1870 Il Guarany, written, alas, in Italian but set in the Amazon. Meanwhile, the Houston Grand Opera offers the world premiere of Daniel Catan's Florencia en el Amazonas, based on stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.