vox alter

So I got the link from Greg's blog, and did this Celebrity Lookalike thing :

I think I prefer this version :

In either case, it's clearly all about the glasses.  I don't think I really look like Primo Levi or James Spader. But it pleases me to know Peter Sellers, Elton John, Larry King, Nana Mouskouri, Jack Osbourne and I all have something in common, even if that something is "big plastic frames."  Plus, I get to say I "look like" Wim Wenders.  That's pronounced "Vim," for those of us with an insistently labio-velar approximant.  And you know it means something to have Vim on your side.  That's almost as good as Vigor, which is just one step shy of Viggo, as in Mortensen (who was really only hot in Lord of the Rings, and does not wear strikingly bold-framed glasses, but hey, I'm not judging).

By the way, go ahead, call me a dork, I still think it rocks.  Did Richard Avedon show up on your celebrity lookalike thing?  Yeah, that's what I thought.

(No, you shut up.  Barry Levinson has fabulous taste in glasses)

Viggo

What modern book do you think will be read in high school by the next generation of kids? 
Submitted by Tom.

Tom, I applaud you.  I am rarely interested enough by the QOTD to bother reading it, much less answer.  Thank you for giving me a welcome change of pace (even if the failed medievalist within me balks at your use of the term "modern").

I think the next generation of kids will read Everything Is Illuminated, by Jonathan Safran Foer.  Some might venture into the cultural and historical web of Reading Lolita in Tehran, and some might maintain the tradition of To Kill A Mockingbird, or Romeo & Juliet, or A Separate Peace or The Great Gatsby.  And of course there is The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.

Honestly, Tom?  Honestly, Vox?  The next generation of readers will read what we tell them is worth their while.  What matters to them will be an amalgam of what matters to us, and what we tell them to let matter.  And frankly, the longer we spend on MySpace, and LiveJournal, and Vox, the less credible we become.  And so I will see you in the hard copy, in the non-virtual matter of telling stories on the page.  Doing something that makes me matter.