I suspect that when many people think of T. S. Eliot - if they think of him at all - they may remember him mostly as the author of "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats," the book of poems on which the musical "Cats" is based. Those of us who were English majors in school (and a fair number of our more literate and/or scholoarly friends) will know him as the author of really fine, but difficult, first-half-of-the-twentieth-century poetry, such as "The Waste Land." Eliot used all kinds of quotations and cultural allusions within his work, and some of it can be pretty daunting to the average reader.
So along comes Eliot's publisher, Faber and Faber with an iPad app that features a video of Eliot's "The Waste Land" that - according to Steve Smith at MediaPost's VidBlog - actually helps make sense out of that extremely difficult poem. The video, featuring actress Fiona Shaw, is interactive, allowing access to all kinds of extras and features, as Smith describes it.
It sounds fascinating, and, again speaking as a former English major, I'd really like to see it. Smith makes some fascinating points about the kind of thinking that went into this project - and draws some interesting conclusions about lessons here that marketers might want to consider.
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