E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

I read a Lee Child recently - he is the best-selling thriller author from the UK based in the US.  His hero is Jack Reacher, loner, ex-military cop, tough guy.  The plots are intricate and ludicrous, but satisfying in a Charles Bronson meets Tom Clancy sort of way.  When younger I enjoyed Alistair MacLean 's novels a great deal, published in Fontana editions.  One point though - Reacher is very very ruthless.  He kills, on average, ten to twelve people in each book, I'd reckon, by strangulation, throat-slitting, and brain smashing (usually using powerful guns).  He is usually "justified" because the killers are ultra-sadistic killers or terrorists threatening the American way of life, and people Reacher loves or cares for.  Of course, he takes the law way into his own hands, and squeezes it there until it looks all broken and funny.  Good clean fun?  No.  Red-blooded pulp for boys?  Maybe.  More Spillane than Chandler , Chil...

Strangeness alert: a paradox threshold, or is that irony watershed, or is that ambiguity tipping point, or is that satire level, or is that hypocrisy overload? - has been reached this week, with the unlikely, but nevertheless deserved news, as posted on Charles Bernstein's own worthwhile blog, that his latest, All The Whiskey In Heaven (a selected of 30 years poetry from FSG), has received an -A from Entertainment Weekly. This is rich odd good news for Eyewear - since Eyewear modelled itself, in some ways, on a possible-world EW where poetry was as well-observed and perkily and glossily treated, as movies and music - in short, as if poetry could and did entertain a mass audience - though Eyewear has always operated on the understanding such a thing, if at all desirable, is barely possible in a capitalist secular world where celebrity is king - the Adorno problematic that the Language poets did so much to bring to our notice these last 30 or so years. So how is it, then, that Be...

Adam Foulds was a poet. Now he is a Booker nominated novelist who writes about poets - and a poet. Foulds is on a meteoric trajectory. Good luck to him. I think all poets should write novels. They pay better and get more attention. Do more people read them? How many poetry books get optioned? What is writing for in the 21st century of celebrity? Poor Mr. S. Fry has begun to discover too much occasional tweeting is damaging his rep. A Sunday Times article lambasted him for being so obnoxiously omnipresent. Fry has the Welles status - media type with big brains - but sadly, looks more like Wilde than contains that man's genius. Good luck to him.

Sad news. The major popular, controversial novelist and entertainment writer Michael Crichton has died - at the young age of 66. He was astonishingly prolific and succesful in tapping in to the zeitgeist, creating the TV series ER , and the Jurassic Park franchise. This alone would make him a key cultural figure of the 90s. His greatest novels were The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man - icily-procedural and strangely prescient thrillers about the collision between humanity and science, or the unknown aspects connected to science (bacteria, brain surgery). I still think the original The Andromeda Strain one of the most disturbing films ever made, and can still recall the underground labs, monkey autopsies and the epileptic fit as if it was yesterday. Crichton lost many fans (including me) when he became a sort of Dawkins of the anti-global warming set, though. His finger usually on the pulse, this pro-Bush perspective was oddly out of step with the times, and his death, timed...

Eyewear would like to report that the war to colonise our imaginations has been won. Prince , as we have all heard in the last few days, has begun to disseminate (I select this term carefully), his songs for free, via newspapers and the Internet; meanwhile, reports stream in of a generation of "screen kids" raised on a steady diet of web-based, digi - tainment . Meanwhile, the Potter franchise - a mighty juggernaut - rolls forward. Students of media and culture might want to suggest a term for this landscape of ours - one with no foreseeable horizon - "Interminable Entertainment". Put bluntly, there is no end in sight, to TV episodes airing, music groups releasing songs, films being produced, books being published - and new works being created and distributed in media as yet unknown. Creators have a moral right to protect these works - but do we, the targeted audience, have a moral right to resist? To ever shut down, turn away, avoid the never-ending stories...