Link to A Better Queue

Almost a year ago, I posted a link to a website called Streaming Criterions (http://streamingcriterions.com/), which uses Netflix APIs and the Criterion website to display all the Criterion titles that are available for Watch Instantly.

A Rails programmer in Cambridge, MA just posted a site called A Better Queue (http://abetterqueue.com/), which links Netflix and Rotten Tomatoes APIs to filter for (ostensibly) better movies.

Check it out—it's pretty neat. The browsing on Netflix is limited to their short, sideways lists. From this site, I just found out that Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion and D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers were turned into films—which you can stream now.

Readers of Life

James Wood, How Fiction Works, pp. 65-66:

Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life. And so on and on. You have only to teach literature to realize that most young readers are poor noticers. I know from my own old books, wantonly annotated twenty years ago when I was a student, that I routinely underlined for approval details and images and metaphors that strike me now as commonplace, while serenely missing things that now seem wonderful. We grow, as readers, and twenty-year-olds are relative virgins. They have not yet read enough literature to be taught by it how to read it.