Just heard an interview with Annie Proulx on NPR this morning about the movie just released of her Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award winning novel The Shipping News. She seemed fairly pleased with the overall result, but, "Film will never engage the imagination the way a novel does . . . in film, the imagining is done for you."

I couldn't help but think of some of the radio programs I used to listen to as a kid (you remember radio . . . like TV, but the pictures are do-it-yourself) and compare them with some of the TV shows that that were made later of those same radio shows, e.g., The Lone Ranger. The pictures I made in my head were much better, much more vivid than the ones that TV set presented. Same thing with a novel. It's really hard for a movie to measure up, because it's someone else's vision rather than your own. Also, in a novel, you can get inside a character's head in a way that's impossible in a movie.

Don Firth