Dude:
It’s just a review. Take a chill pill.
Yours,
Ed
Month / August 2007
Roundup
- I’ve just learned that the Terre Haute bloggers are now planning a six-week symposium entitled How to Discourage Reading Through Soporific Lectures. They are currently lining up speakers. If you are a bland individual who has not laughed once in the past six years or you think jellybeans are extraneous or you think people should read their books in the same manner in which they are prescribed Brussels sprouts for dinner, please let them know. They are hoping to find the most boring and ponderous people for their lecture series. Bonus points if you ain’t gettin’ any. (And it also appears that a symposium on nose picking is also in the works. These are exciting times!)
- I’m going to try to confirm this myself, but Levi reports the sad news that Philomene Long has passed away.
- John Holbo notes that a Jack Kirby biopic is greatly overdue.
- Well, why would you audition Elizabeth Crane anyway?
- Apparently, books strike fear in the prison system. Or maybe thye’re afraid that the convicts will become too smart. Never mind that the prison-industrial complex is allegedly supposed to rehabilitate. (Why else refer to them as penitentiaries or correctional institutions?) It’s worth observing that a little known piece of California progressivism, put into action by San Quentin librarian Herman Sopector, called bibliotherapy enabled Eldridge Cleaver to write Soul on Ice. I first learned about all this when reading Joseph T. Hallinan’s excellent book, Going Up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation. For furtherreading on the subject, check out Eric Cummins’ The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement. (Recent news via Quill & Quire)
- Carolyn Kellogg is now a teacher! I hope we get some long-form teaching narratives soon.
- RIP Edward Seidensticker.
- Three words, Adam: FedEx Home Delivery. There’s no way you can purge them all — as I sadly learned — and this is the cheapest option.
- The economics of pop music. (via Kevin)
- Jeff VanderMeer on choosing an agent.
- Ethan Persoff talks about his dirty comics collection.
- Jane Austen’s latter years will be the subject of a new BBC drama. In fact, there are now so many dramas covering so many years of Jane Austen’s life that the producers of Teletubbies are also contemplating a drama. The new project, It is a Perambulator Universally Acknowledged, will cover Austen’s existence between one and three years old.
- And slap me on the wrist and call me an apple turnover! I completely missed this Jose Saramago profile.
Please Get In Touch Off-Blog
If there are any NY-based blog readers fluent in Japanese, please get in touch with Sarah off-blog. If there are any Japan-based blog readers fluent in New York, please get in touch with me off-blog. If there are any NY-based blog readers fluent in Esperanto, please record your words and send me a link to an MP3 file. If there are San Francisco-based bloggers who want to tell me what I’m missing right now, please get in touch with me off-blog and send cruel JPEGs of gigantic burritos. If there are any experienced New Yorkers who want to try and put me in my place, please get in touch with me off-blog and use a cat o’ nines if you must. If you are a deviant longshoreman, I can think of several places you can get in touch with me off-blog, although I won’t tell you what to do or where I am, but I’ll set you up with someone who will probably be interested in what you’re looking for. If you are a deviant longshorewoman, you can’t get in touch with me off-blog because I’m dating someone right now, but see the previous sentence. If you are neither deviant nor a longshoreperson, then please get in touch with someone off-blog as soon as possible because you’re missing out on some of the fun things in life. If you don’t get in touch with someone off-blog, then please find a way to touch someone who doesn’t have a blog without any sexual harassment. If you speak a language that no blogger has heard of, please get in touch with someone who knows how to start a blog because it’s probably an exciting tongue. If you are a wearing a toque to cover a bald spot, please have someone off-blog touch the top of your head because it’s probably not as bad as you think it is.
When Johnny Mnemonic and the Matrix Stood Still
Variety: “Twentieth Century Fox has set Keanu Reeves to star in ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still,’ its re-imagining of the 1951 Robert Wise-directed sci-fi classic. Reeves committed over the weekend to play Klaatu, a humanoid alien who arrives on Earth accompanied by an indestructible, heavily armed robot and a warning to world leaders that their continued aggression will lead to annihilation by species watching from afar.”
To consider why this is such a blasphemy against the great 1951 film, watch the film in its entirety here. Reeves is clearly no Michael Rennie.
In the meantime, Return of the Reluctant has intercepted an excerpt from the revised script.
HILDA: How dare you write on that blackboard! Do you realize the Professor has been working on that problem for weeks?
KLAATU: Dude, chill. I am Klaatu. Suddenly, I’m responsible for the entire fucking world, if…if my head doesn’t blow up first.
HILDA: I am not a dude! How did you get in here? And what do you want?
KLAATU: We came to see Professor Barnhardt. There is no spoon.
HILDA: He’s not here. I think you better leave now.
KLAATU: Whoa! Here’s like something the prof could use.
HILDA: A guitar pick?
KLAATU: Mick Jagger gave it to me. I want him to have it.
HILDA: What does a guitar pick have to do with the professor’s formula?
KLAATU: Had a summer job breaking and entering. I think the professor will want to get in touch with me.
HILDA: What business does an intellect like Professor Barnhardt have with a surfer mentality like yours?
KLAATU: There’s a piece of silicon in the back of my brain. I want a full restoration! I want it all back! Whoa!
Roundup
- It’s now an ungodly hour in the early morning and I’m currently more inclined to Lindy hop than sleep. Guess it’s time for a roundup!
- Not a single word? Uh, not quite. These folks appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #46!
- Two paragraphs of a review devoted to acknowledgments? Sorry, Mr. Ames, this is not really a review. And it isn’t because Mr. Ames and I disagreed on the book in question.
- In the current Believer: Nick Hornby and David Simon. Next up: Garrison Keillor and David Mamet, where the latter will ask the former why he can’t say “fuck,” much less any word, with anything approaching cheerful conviction. (via Pinky’s Paperhaus)
- After the Quake will be produced for BBC radio. (via Matthew Tiffany)
- TONY‘s James Hannaham ponders publishing’s troubling racial disparity. (via Tayari)
- Laila on NPR.
- Take it from this Gibson reader, Mr. Asher. It was certainly a terrible job. “Inhabitants?” Uh, there was only one character in Pattern Recognition allergic to trademarks. The Times regrets the error.
- You can see just about anything — however illusory — when banging out a generalization-laden essay.
- James Wood is the most feared man in American letters? Get real. He’s a mere nitpicking titmouse. To be afraid of Wood is like having minor chest pains while passing the Grey Poupon from one Rolls Royce to another. If such a perception is even half-true, then the time has come for the literary world to get the wind knocked out of its too comfy constituency.
- Emdashes has collected a helpful list of stories that first appeared in The New Yorker. My vote: John Cheever’s “The Swimmer.” I doubt very highly that anything as remarkably inventive as that story will ever appear in Remnick’s pages.
- Believe it or not, there was a time in Dwight Garner’s career when he wasn’t a corporate tool. Case in point: this highly entertaining John Updike interview from 1996 that even has Updike revealing his feelings about Nicholson Baker, even if Garner can barely contain his antipathy for John Barth.
- What happened to Ellison’s post-Invisible Man work? The WaPo goes fishing. (via Out of the Woods Now)
- The Guardian reveals the longlist for this year’s First Book Award.
- BODY: You are getting very sleepy. ME: Okay, I will try to sleep now. But where were you a few hours ago? BODY: Waiting for you to stop thinking. Was it necessary to look at all those YouTube clips of things resembling amateur cooking shows? ME: I can’t help it if the brain keeps going! I’m just naturally curious. BODY: We’re a service industry, you know. ME: A service industry of one! I have to get up in a few hours! BODY: Oh, you can hack it. Jesus, you’re neurotic about all this. You shouldn’t have taken a nap. ME: You were the one who hijacked ontological operations! BODY: You are getting very sleepy! ME: Thanks, body. Thanks a lot.