#ron charles

In a recent Washington Post newsletter, he (Ron Charles) marveled at the actress Judi Dench’s astonishing ability to recite most of the lines from her long-ago parts in Shakespeare plays. He wrote:

"Such memorization is a lost art, and much substance was lost with it. In high school and college, I used to memorize hours of stage dialogue and long passages from the Bible, which were a great comfort to me in times of stress. These days, only the stress remains. Most nights, staring at the ceiling for hours, my mind is a tangle of bits of string, and all I can come up with is something like: 'The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. Won’t you lay me down in the tall grass and let me do my stuff?'”

For those of you not fluent in Fleetwood Mac, that last sentence is a lyric from the song “Second Hand News.”

A few weeks ago, four psychologists published an academic paper about how people react to stories. By closely observing groups of students watching Alfred Hitchcock’s “Bang! You’re Dead,” the researchers were able to draw conclusions about how attention is affected by spoilers....

...One of those other studies goes even further and suggests that “when spoilers focused on the outcome of a story, it did not impact enjoyment.” Knowing what’s coming might even heighten enjoyment.

There must be some truth to this. After all, consider how much we love to reread a classic novel or see a favorite play. The familiarity, the anticipation, the foreknowledge: delicious.  

Ron Charles on Lily King- worth a read.

Ron Charles on How to Be Safe, by Tom McAllister: “Like nothing else I’ve read, ‘How to Be Safe’ contains within its slim length the rubbed-raw anxieties, the slips of madness, the gallows humor and the inconsolable sorrow of this national pathology that we have nursed to monstrous dimensions. Who doesn’t feel the unbearable futility and hope in Anna’s voice when she rages against her town’s plan to build yet another memorial?”

Ron Charles reviews 'City of Mirrors'