ARTS

COUNTRY MUSIC BEING SHUT OUT OF BIG CITY RADIO

MARC FISHER, WASHINGTON POST - With last month's format switch in Los
Angeles, the nation's two largest markets now have no country on the
radio. New York lost its last country station in 2002, a year after San
Francisco fell into the same status. Country's decline on the radio
seems paradoxical at first, because the genre is doing better than much
of the rest of the music industry these days. . .

Country attracts an almost all-white audience, and in some big cities,
including Los Angeles and New York, whites are in the minority.
Increasingly, radio companies believe they can fine-tune other music
formats to create the largest possible audience of black, Latino and
white listeners. . .
Country fans in some big urban centers eventually might find themselves
with nowhere to go but satellite radio. . .

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/22/
AR2006092200252.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns

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HOW TO READ WHEN THERE'S TOO MUCH TO READ

WILLIAM GRIMES, NY TIMES - John Sutherland, the chairman of last year's
Man Booker Prize Committee, offers an arresting statistic: Today more
novels are published in one week than Samuel Johnson had to deal with in
a decade. As he calculates it in "How to Read a Novel," it would take
approximately 163 lifetimes to read the fiction currently available, at
the click of a mouse, from Amazon.com.

So what to read? That's the question. But as Mr. Sutherland's title
suggests, there's a second question entangled with the first, addressed
in several new books devoted to the lost art of reading. It's a
Malthusian problem. . .

In "Reading Like a Writer" the novelist Francine Prose shows how to do
it. She forces the act of slow reading by singling out excerpts from her
favorite writers and zeroing in on single words, then sentences, then
paragraphs, teasing out the specifics that transmute raw language into
style and an artistically meaningful form. She has a notion, quite
correct in my experience, that all readers start out slow, savoring
individual syllables and words. Gradually, under pressure, they speed
up, consuming more but enjoying and absorbing less.

Reading becomes information processing. The sheer bliss of the childhood
reading experience comes to seem like a lost Eden, recaptured only in
thrilling fits and starts or when time, mercifully, stands still. Prison
and vacation make good readers. . .

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/22/books/22read.html?_r=1&ref=arts&oref=slogin

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