I saw Inland Empire over the weekend and I’m still mulling it over. And I don’t know if I can offer an equitable assessment of the film until I’ve seen it again or at least thought more about it. I’ll only say that any film that leaves me almost totally stripped of brain and emotion is doing something right. And I’ll have more to say on this later. In the meantime, one of the more ruminative reviews I’ve read is Manohla Dargis’s. I agree with Dargis when she writes, “‘Inland Empire’ isn’t a film to love. It is a work to admire, to puzzle through, to wrestle with. Its pleasures are fugitive, even frustrating. The first time I saw it, I was repulsed by the shivers of Lynchian sadism, a feeling doubtless informed by my adoration of the far more approachable, humanistic ‘Mulholland Drive.’ On second viewing, though, ‘Inland Empire’ seemed funnier, more playful and somehow heartfelt.”
Month / January 2007
I Don’t Think the Monkeys on TV Really Went Away
Why Vox is Worthless to Any Thinking Blogger
Maxine Clarke: “I concluded that Vox must be going for the ‘young’ market — free (unlike Typepad), easy to use, high-level modules that don’t allow much personal variation on a basic theme, and don’t let the blogger remotely near the html code (total contrast with Blogger’s ‘let it all hang out’ approach). This impression is to some extent confirmed by the latest upgrades: you can now customise your banner design, and, with a complete straight face, Vox provides a question of the day for those inconvenient occasions when ‘you don’t know what to blog about’.”
Did Desai Win the Booker Too Young?
Daily Times: “Winning one of the world’s most prestigious literary awards put her in a pantheon of celebrated novelists, but Indian Booker prize-winner Kiran Desai worries she may not have another book in her….And for now, as she travels between literary festivals, she says has nothing left to tell.”
Reports of Mr. Sarvas’ Glamour Have Been Grossly Underreported
Adam Kirsch: “In the last decade, however, Los Angeles has fortified this reservoir of talent with a new sense of literary community, and a growing literary infrastructure. The two go hand in hand. If New York remains the literary capital of America, it is because writers here feel that they are a central part of what the city means and does. And they can feel that way because of the publishing houses and magazines and readings and parties that make literary life visible and even, at moments, glamorous.”
My Uncle is Thomas Pynchon, But I’m Waiting Until He’s Accused of Plagiarism Before I Go Public
BBC: “An adopted brick-layer who traced back his family history discovered his brother is the internationally celebrated author Ian McEwan.”
But No Calvino?
The Abbott and Costello Routine You Didn’t Know About
There is a place in Austria called Fucking. More here. (via The Millions)
Politics and the Culinary Language
New York Times: “And according to [food service industry research firm principal] Tom Miner, ‘The food has to be fast, it has to be handheld, and No. 1 across the board is egg and cheese on a bread carrier.'”
I don’t know if I find the phrase “bread carrier” as appealing as Jenny D, in large part because I think it’s silly to put “bread” and “carrier” in the same noun phrase. I can get behind “bread bowl” because the bread has been constructed as such. But to me, “bread carrier” sounds like a Samsonite innovation gone terribly wrong. It also suggests a strange cowardice on the part of Tom Miner. Why not just say bagel like the rest of us? Or did Miner, forced into the position of advocating food at large, feel the need to be non-exclusionary about bread in general? Did he fear an array of phone calls and emails from those restaurants and wholesalers using English muffins? Who knew that bread could be so political?
The Myths Behind Slow Writing
Justine Larbalestier: “I keep coming across two assumptions about writers who publish a lot of books per year. The first is that if a book takes less than a year to write then it can’t be any good. So if a writer can produce two or more books a year they are total hacks. It ain’t necessarily so. People write at different paces and in different circumstances. Some so-called slow writers are slow because they also have a full or part-time job, because they have a family, because they’re running the household, and their writing is snatched in the time between waking and going to work. Or before the kids come home from school. Or on their lunch hours.”
The Yiddish Side of Woody Guthrie
Washington Jewish Week: “But the Oklahoma-born son of a cowboy with political aspirations, all-American, inveterate wanderer and folk poet also created a collection of songs that speak directly to the Jewish soul, some of which even feature mamaloshen — Yiddish.” (via The Happy Booker)
Did Kirby Dick Make a Difference?
Variety: “Another key change: For the first time, a filmmaker will be able to cite another movie when waging an appeal. Along with specific rule revisions, the campaign to make the ratings process more user-friendly and transparent for parents and filmmakers includes an extensive outreach and education program.”
Who Smiles at the Smilers?
New Scientist: “Women found the men who were being smiled at suddenly more attractive, while men who apparently elicited no such smiling approval were pronounced less attractive. Men, meanwhile, behaved in a strikingly different manner. They rated men who had been smiled at as less attractive. ‘Within-sex competition promotes negative attitudes towards men who are the target of positive social interest from women,’ the researchers conclude.”
Throw Michiko Into the Waste Land
New York Times: “In his new book, ‘T. S. Eliot,’ the British poet Craig Raine gives us a new, more accessible Eliot, an Eliot he describes as a virtuosic fox in terms of style, and a single-minded hedgehog when it came to themes.”
Let me count the ways in which this sentence is stupid. For one thing, why the fuck should “The Waste Land” be “accessible?” It’s not as if Eliot’s masterpiece is a building that needs a fucking handicapped ramp. It’s an epic poem that requires you to take the damn thing apart and find out why it hits you in the gut. “After the torchlit red on sweaty faces?” Come on. It’s pretty fucking clear we’re not reading a Carl Hiassen thriller. It’s pretty fucking clear that we’re not talking about some bullshit dichotomy (Complex style! Simplistic themes! You see! No gray areas! Here’s a helpful bulleted list for you to bring to your book club after you bifurcate the fresh fruit!).
Single-minded hedgehog? Try looking at yourself in the mirror, Michiko.
“The Waste Land” is a poem that requires you to read other poems, that requires you to understand why so many other writers feel compelled to reference it. And poetry itself is a form that requires rereading and note taking and many other things that an active reader engages in (SURE AS FUCKING NOT MICHIKO, who has earned the Pulitzer Prize for the flaccid, worthless and, above, all abso-fucking-lutely bitter “reviews” she regularly files for that bulimic broadsheet).
Second, is Michiko such a reclusive and illiterate dunderhead that her review here is a matter of telling us what the fuck Craig Raine (who Michiko helpfully reminds us is “a poet himself”) is telling us? Are there absolutely no fucking brain cells she can access within her head? Nothing in all her years of reading that she can ruminate upon to give us some concept of what SHE MIGHT FUCKING THINK of T.S. Eliot? Can she not even offer one fucking sentence limning (to momentarily use that dreaded book review verb) Eliot’s prosody? Or is she hopelessly locked in this self-imposed literary menopause and just too damn absinthian to feel anything anymore?
If this is the case (and I suspect it is), then what we have here is a critic who approximates the living embodiment of Cliff’s Notes: dictatorial, synthesizing a process that has never been about a verbal heartbeat, and emitting generalizations in a way that discourages the next generation from literature. Because in this review, it’s not about the poetry, dammit. It’s about Eliot’s “buttoned-up banker’s mien.” It’s about personality. It’s about what Eliot had for breakfast or who he fucked or whether he ate a tuna fish sandwich before penning a canto. But it sure as fuck isn’t about “torchlit red on sweaty faces.” Because Michiko has no desire to sweat. She has no desire to feel. She has no desire to see what’s so fantastic about these five words. She has no desire to throw herself into anything approximating emotion. For Michiko, it’s all about how she can tear someone who’s struggled for years to produce something beautiful a new one in a matter of 1,000 words.
I’m sorry, but I’ve had enough. Why does the New York Fucking Times, the alleged vanguard newspaper that has the temerity to declare itself the cultural fucking gatekeeper, employ so many fucking people who could not give two solid shits about fiction? Who feel the need to stifle this fantastic art form with idiotic banter? Who feel the need to constantly shit upon it without expressing a glimmer of literary interest? And who treat the people who read these reviews like dark and dusty troglodytes who hole up under bridges with books rather than active thinkers who are part of our population?
Back in My Day, We Walked Uphill Both Ways While Trying to Decide to Go to Page 34 or 47!
Free Choose Your Own Adventure #1: iPod version! (via Rarely Likable)
Vollmann Transposed
Vollmann at Denny’s: “I hate to order food like this. I especially hate to disparage the work of someone who, like that short-order cook behind the counter, has put his life on the line for the ostensible purpose of serving patty melts, such as they are. In the hope of finding something more constructive to say, I decided to preface my Scram Slam with a meticulously cooked mushroom and Jarlsberg omelet.”
Vollmann at the bank: “I hate to stand in line like this. I especially hate to disparage the work of someone who, like that sexy but miserable-looking woman behind the counter, has had to cash endless checks for money that she will never get a cut of, save for the meager paychecks she collects, such as it is. In the hope of finding better use of my time, I decided to cash my check at the ATM machine.”
Vollmann on April 15: “I hate to file my taxes like this. I especially hate to cut into my writing time. I started a 900 page novel a month ago and am now almost finished with it. In the hope of finding more time to write about prostitutes in an obscure nation that you have likely never heard of, I have decided to commission the services of H&R Block this year.”
(Source)
Forget Vollmann
Allen Barra wins the award for this week’s smackdown.
Roundup
- On the AMS fallout front, five publishers have been selected for the AMS creditors committee: Random House, Penguin, Hachette, Grove/Atlantic and Wisdom Publications. The Delaware Bankruptcy Court declined to form a second committee consisting of the remaining PGW clients. Whether the creditors committee will take into account the precarious burdens of indie publishers remains to be seen, but with the second committee denied, this doesn’t look good. Galleycat has more.
- Over at the LBC, this quarter’s Read This! choice has been announced. Once again, The Bat Segundo Show will be teaming up with Pinky’s Paperhaus to bring you interviews with all the nominators and nominees. (And I’ll be back in business very soon on the Segundo front, as soon as I get things squared away on other fronts. There are some hot interviews coming up that you won’t want to miss.)
- Norman Mailer says that there’s very little interest in novels anymore. Perhaps he means to suggest that there’s very little interest in his novels anymore.
- Is knit lit a new genre? I hope not. It’s difficult to take any word that’s close to “nitwit” seriously.
- Normally, I’m all for awards that recognize both the novelist and the screenwriters behind a literary adaptation. But I must strenuously object to awarding P.D. James the Scripter. Children of Men went from potboiler to engaging cinema entirely because of Cuaron and his writers. And to award James any kind of merit for the way that these screenwriters turned a sow’s ear into a bleak purse is to reward mediocrity. What next? Giving a hack like John Grisham an award for the work done by Clyde Hayes and Francis Ford Coppola? If ever there was an honor awarded for a no talent assclown sitting on her ass, the Scripter may very well be it.
- UPI reports on the Decibel Penguin Prize controversy. The prize, established to award diversity, faced serious legal action because it discriminated against Caucasians. It probably wasn’t a wise idea to introduce an award in a country where affirmative action was about as common as food without mayonnaise. Perhaps this was a case of misunderstanding with our friends across the pond. But don’t worry, folks! The oppressed white male will get yet another shot at dominating yet another literary award. Remember, folks, there’s always room for Whitey!
- Paul Krassner is right. Where’s the mainstream media attention to Robert Anton Wilson’s death?
- Dana Spiotta appears as part of Largeheartedboy’s Book Notes series.
- Laila Lalami reports on the banning of Nichane.
- And I’m the walking dead today, folks: good for perhaps little more than a poorly translated (and poorly remembered) Swedish joke about a milkmaid in a brothel that I heard from a bleary-eyed pal in a beer hall. No putsches here, but certainly many putzes now parked on my medulla oblongata. But I’ll try and check in later.
Suffering Fools
Martin Amis answers questions from readers. Hilarious results ensue.
Writers with Drinks
I’m not one to plug my fictive endeavors (and frankly I’m still bemused that I’ve been invited to do this, perhaps because they associated the “drinks” part with me; who knows?), but this is a reminder to any and all interested parties that I will be making an appearance at Writers with Drinks on Saturday, January 20, 2007 at The Rickshaw Stop at 7 PM, along with writers who are much better at this fiction thing than I am. In fact, the hell with me. Check out this lineup: Michelle Tea! Andrew Sean Greer! Kim Stanley Robinson! Michael Blumlein! Justin Chin! I mean, how can you not swoon over that roster?
I will be reading the first chapter of my novel in progress. There was an impromptu test reading over the weekend, largely because Mr. Asher coaxed me to read it in front of a small group of literary types.
The Writers with Drinks performance will be considerably more high-octane, and it will also feature a live reprise of Part One of “The Neurotic Chronicles” (for those who haven’t heard it) and possibly some audience participation.
Check it out! There may also be another very special guest.
1981 Time Warp
Is Colson Whitehead Stuck on Novel #4?
From New York Magazine: “Colson Whitehead, author of John Henry Days, The Colossus of New York, and Apex Hides the Hurt, is currently holed up in the bistros of his neighborhood, Fort Greene, at work on his next novel, which is about a teenager who subsists on TV dinners and toils at an ice-cream parlor (the novelist’s traumatic summers in a Hamptons scoop shop are documented in his New York Times essay ‘Eat Memory, I Scream’).”
Now this seems a bit suspicious to me. First off, a novelist shouldn’t be in the business of describing an unfinished work. And when pressed by an interviewer, the novelist should probably just say, “Yeah, I’m working on something. Next question.”
But in this instance, Whitehead has offered an answer. And it isn’t “a teenager overcoming a personal obstacle” or “a teenager who comes of age.” No, the great human angle on this story is “a teenager who subsists on TV dinners and toils at an ice-cream parlor,” suggesting that cultural reference comes before character development or that Whitehead is riding the great food crutch that many writers dwell on during a gestation period.Of course, it’s probably unfair of me to read so closely into an answer like this. Nevertheless, after the lackluster Apex Hides the Hurt (a passable novel, but lackluster in comparison to his two previous books), I worry about Whitehead’s ability to deliver.
How to Write a Bad Review
William T. Vollmann: “It is only my admiration for ‘Jarhead’ that impels me to express my disappointment in ‘Exit A’ so bluntly.”
My Friends, Can Your Heart Stand the Shocking Facts About Grave Robbers from Outer Space?
You won’t get much from me today, but Plan 9 from Outer Space should put your Friday into perspective.
Sebald vs. Vollmann
Scott Esposito examines W.G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction* in the wake of this May 2003 Vollmann review of the same.
* — Apologies for the previous error. Been reading ’bout dat crazy Darwin guy.
“Killing Me Won’t Bring Back Your Goddam Honey!”
Robert Anton Wilson Dead
Aw man. No words other than this: I suspect it was a conspiracy.
Slim Jim Roundup
- The big stories from Publishers Weekly today, closely related to the AMS bankruptcy, is Perseus’s surprise purchase of Avalon. Avalon was PGW’s largest client and is headed by Charlie Winton, who was one of PGW’s co-founders. Perseus CEO David Steinberger claims that he’s developing a plan with Winton to assume distribution for the remainder of PGW clients. Well, “developing a plan” is all fine and dandy. But with PGW’s largest client moving to an entirely new distributor, this doesn’t bode well for the now limping PGW or the indie publishers left in the lurch. In fact, the cynical folks at Radio Free PGW have already penned a PGW obituary.
- Matthew Tiffany has the scoop on Twin Peaks, Season 2: April 10, 2007, six discs, twenty-two episodes. This will be of great comfort as I spend most of my spare time sobbing as I do my taxes at the last minute. In fact, what this DVD release needs is a marketing tie-in for April 15. What better way to put tax time in perspective than dancing midgets, deaf FBI bureau chiefs, and one-armed men?
- Brian Boyd on bioculture vs. literary theory.
- Richard Horne has been found dead of an apparent suicide. (via Brockman)
- Sobol may be dead, but these schmucks have started a new literary contest. First Chapters? It may as well have been called the Gorgon.
- A William S. Burroughs doc. (via Jeff)
Not What Daphne du Maurier Had In Mind
The Australian: “Thousands of birds have fallen from the skies over Esperance and no one knows why. Is it an illness, toxins or a natural phenomenon? A string of autopsies in Perth have shed no light on the mystery. All the residents of flood-devastated Esperance know is that their “dawn chorus” of singing birds is missing.”
RIP Yvonne De Carlo
