- While I must confess that there was a minor impulse to satirize the sad, icky, and delusional article that is currently making the rounds and sullying the New York Times‘s credibility, I think I’ll simply stay silent on the matter. I urge all parties to do the same. This was a calculated and desperate effort from the Gray Lady to get you to link to the piece, comment upon the piece, eviscerate the author’s reputation, and otherwise drive traffic their way. If there’s one thing New York media welcomes, it’s this sort of hapless gossip. And rather than give this individual the attention she clearly pined for, I think I’ll take the high road here (or perhaps the middle road, since I am not quite obliquely referencing it). There are larger issues to think about: war, poverty, class and race division, rising food prices, the election — just to name a few. These are all more deserving of your attention than a young woman’s failure to understand just how hopelessly unaware she is of her own self-sabotaging impulses. (I read the article twice just to be sure. And these impulses became apparent the second time around when I realized just what was unintentionally revealed within this disastrous confessional. Some writers, I suppose, are content to pillage every inch of personal territory in order to “matter.” Not me, I assure you.)
- Wyatt Mason has been giving good blog of late. The man has been tantalizing us with a striptease summation of the Wood-Franzen event that went down at Harvard not long ago. Part One and Part Two are now available. There are indeed considerable shortcomings in Franzen’s argument, particularly with the quotes presented in Part Two. But rather than offering my own thoughts, let’s see indeed how Mason rejoins. Tomorrow, he says, with a chance of scattered showers and G-men knocking on our doors to ask us how we spent our stimulus packages.
- I have found myself of late RSVPing to parties and not attending. This is not a common practice of mine. And yet it has occurred. Therefore, I apologize to all those who have sent me invites and who have received such treatment from me. When one moves many books, one finds one’s self (one!) in something of a time-crunched pickle. 70% of the books have been shifted. I believe there’s now somewhere in the area of 4,000 volumes. Pickles will indeed be served on the other side. They will not be time-crunched, I think, but they will be tasty.
- I don’t know if it’s entirely fair to use a photo as a book blurb, but it occurs to me that more folks should be photographed with shades, a wind-swept blazer, and a book in one’s left hand. Will GQ follow suit? I think not. But I’m looking at this photo and I’m thinking to myself that even I might adjust certain proclivities, if it will make such developments happen on a more regular basis. Is this Obamamania on my part? Perhaps. But you’ll never see a Hollywood actor look quite this badass. It’s all in the wrist action. It’s all in the book. (This, by contrast, is appalling.)
- Sometimes, it takes a kilt-wearing journalist to point out that Scrabble has turned sixty. And with this, we see that even addictive board games become septuagenarians with little fanfare. There is no justice.
- Will B&N buy Borders? (via Bookninja)
- “Golden age of storytelling,” my ass. Not when you stick to squeaky-clean stories. Not when podcasters abstain from decent radio dramas (this one included). Not when Sam Tanenhaus continues to host the most soporific literary podcast known to humankind. (via Booksquare)
- Speaking of which, Dan Green incites some controversy about authors as marketeers. Personally, I don’t necessarily oppose an author as a marketer, provided the marketing is predicated upon some justifiable creative component. A few days ago, while revisiting John P. Marquand’s work, I discovered that Marquand had written an additional piece for a magazine featuring Horatio Willing (the narrator of the Pulitzer-winning The Late George Apley) complaining about how Marquand took all the accolades without credit. It was a fun piece, and you’ll find it collected in the out-of-print Thirty Years. I imagine it was written with promotion in mind. But it had the same spirit of subtle hilarity that you’ll find in Apley.
- Only a man as deranged as Dave White would live blog the How I Met Your Mother season finale.
- The Nation unveils its Spring Books issue. (via The Complete Review)
- BBC4 interviews Terry Pratchett. (via Locus)
- Ways of Seeing: YouTubed. I’ve loved this program for many years and for many reasons. But I was always intrigued by the way in which John Berger used his show as a pretext to talk with women about female nudes while wearing one of those groovy and unbuttoned 1972 shirts. Draw your own conclusions. But you can’t get away with this in 2008, I’m afraid. (via Mark)
Author / Edward Champion
Hillary Introduces Last Minute Ventriloquist Act to Woo Voters; Not Enough Dinero in Campaign Funds for Dummy
Nine New Segundo Shows
This week, nine new installments of The Bat Segundo Show were released from the factory. I’ll be cross-posting the full capsules here at Reluctant Habits (the new preposterous name of this place) as soon as I find some time to complete them. (Books are now migrating their way to the new location, and this has been keeping me busy.) But for those who wish to plunge into the conversations right now, here’s a list of recent shows:
206. Sarah Hall. Hall, the recent winner of the James Tiptree Award, is an extraordinary writer. I’ve written a piece on all three of her books that will be appearing at another place. But in the meantime, you can listen to the nearly 70 minute conversation we conducted on her work as a whole. We carried out despite fire alarms and some lively debate.
207. David Hajdu. Hajdu is the author of The Ten-Cent Plague, but this conversation touches largely upon much of the journalistic methods he used in tracking down some of his subjects.
208. Tobias Wolff. This conversation has been excerpted elsewhere. Wolff was guarded, but he gradually warmed up as the conversation progressed, offering some interesting insights into how he puts together a short story.
209. Sloane Crosley. Ms. Crosley is regrettably known more for her shiny hair than her essays. Hopefully, this discussion will rectify this impression.
210. Cynthia Ozick. I was greatly honored to talk with the wonderful Ms. Ozick, winner of two recent lifetime achievement awards, a few days before her eightieth birthday.
211. Ed Park! Ed Park has written a very good debut novel. I had so many observations about his book that I had to cram into our conversation that we ended up talking for more than an hour.
212. Fiona Maazel. Despite the intrusive presence of a coffee grinder, Fiona and I managed to talk more or less intelligibly about Last, Last Chance.
213. Steven Greenhouse. I reviewed Greenhouse’s The Big Squeeze for the B&N Review last week. This conversation reflects some of my observations and delves into very important labor issues.
214. Ralph Bakshi. One of my most anarchic interviews, but in a very good way. If you aren’t aware of Bakshi’s accomplishments in underground animation (Fritz the Cat, Heavy Traffic, Coonskin), you’ll want to give this a listen.
215. Christian Bauman. We were ejected from a Midtown diner midway through our conversation, but this didn’t stop Mr. Bauman and I from discussing In Hoboken, which Mr. Bauman assures me is a “folk novel” and not a “rock ‘n’ roll novel.”
216. Mort Walker. The creator of Beetle Bailey reveals a number of unexpected attitudes about war and women.
Roundup
- James Wood vs. Steven Augustine. I hope to have more to say on Wood’s review of O’Neill later, once I have thought more about why it rubs me the wrong way. It is not, in this case, Wood’s customary championing of realism above everything else, but rather the manner in which he articulates his position. Some of the generalizations that Wood has unearthed from O’Neill’s book (“This is attentive, rich prose about New York in crisis that, refreshingly, is not also prose in crisis”) are as troubled as the assumptions frequently attached to litbloggers: that they generalize and make obvious points about literature. In the paragraph I am citing, there is the illusion here of careful dissection that comes with the strained voice of sophistication (“one lovely swipe of a sentence”), rather than a passionate and more specific dissection. I suspect this is a case where what Wood writes is different from how Wood thinks. But some hard editor should have demanded more clarity. I wouldn’t go as far as Augustine to declare Wood “a middlebrow theorist using highbrow language to communicate his theories.” But I can certainly see why Augustine can come away with this conclusion.
- Funny Farm is a disconcerting but enjoyable distraction for those fond of association that will easily take away hours from your life. You have been warned. (via Waxy)
- Bob Hoover is quite right to point out that memoirs show no sign of slowing down, despite recent controversies. The one regrettable side effect about the whole “memoir” rap is that good old-fashioned autobiographies have fallen by the wayside. Which is a pity, because this means that books like Anthony Burgess’s two volume “Confessions” or Kinski: All I Need is Love couldn’t possibly be published in this environment. Can there not be more fluidity to the form? (via Slunch)
- We shouldn’t be asking ourselves the question of “Who killed the literary critic?” A far more intriguing line of inquiry would have involved the question, “Who killed the human?” Has the role of the human become obsolete in an age of boilerplate “intellectualism,” belabored points, and predictable sentences? Is passion still possible within such a stifling climate? A new book, The Death of the Human, says no, and argues that there are still reasons to believe that there are, in fact, humans who do populate this planet. There are some humans who still partake of rollercoasters, ice cream, and occasionally let loose a raspberry in Carnegie Hall.
- And there’s a lot more from Mr. Sarvas that should keep you busy.
[UPDATE: I have emailed James Wood and he has confirmed with me that he sent Nigel the email.]
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
The fourth Indiana Jones movie is a piece of shit. Gone is the sense of wonder. Gone is the great love of Republic serials. This is a movie made by two men who have misplaced their ability to have fun. Lucas and Spielberg’s collective contempt for their audience is evident from the opening shot, where the Paramount mountain dissolves not into a bona-fide peak, but a gopher hill. That’s right, a gopher hill with a bunch of bad CG gophers running around. (And if you think that’s bad, there are also bad CG monkeys in this movie too.) What the fuck is this? Caddyshack 3?
Typically, the opening Indiana Jones scene features an exciting set piece that sets up Jones as an ass-kicking protagonist and establishes a breakneck pace that the film must live up to. But not Indy 4. Instead, we get a bullshit cruising race between some Russians and some smarmy teens. Where the fuck is Indy? And then these Russians go to Area Fucking 51, shoot the men at the gate (with one of the big baddies leaning down to tie his shoe, a ridiculous visual) and are somehow able to walk through the entire base and into a warehouse containing some of the biggest secrets collected by the government without a single security guard around. (They can’t all be positioned at the gate.)
But where the fuck is Indy? Oh yeah. He’s in the trunk. He gets out, mutters “I like Ike” to prove that he’s American and all, condemns the Reds (in case we missed the “New Mexico 1957” title) and then there’s a ho-hum shooting scene before we venture into an hour of relentless chatter about geoglyphs and the like (although you’ll see the plot coming a mile away) and Shia LaBeouf as sidekick Mutt Williams, a character so bland that I actually longed for Kate Capshaw’s screams, which is something I’d never thought I’d do.
Should I tell you about how they turned Marion from a spunky, self-sufficient sidekick into a more or less helpless chick who drives the truck? Appalling. I’m sure the idea to put the hussy in her place (domesticated no less!) came from Lucas, and I want to punch him for it.
Should I convey to you the constant mimesis as marketing? At one point, Indy tells Mutt about an adventure with Pancho Villa he had “when I was your age.” And it’s nothing less than a plot summary for a Young Indiana Jones Chronicles episode. Something that has nothing to do with the plot. Someone knocks over a crate in the warehouse and oh ho ho, it’s the Ark of the Covenant! Harrison Ford pushes his hat down while traveling in the plane. The same way he did in Raiders! And it is this constant repetition of moments from previous films in which we are expected to be charmed. Harrison Ford even says, “I have a bad feeling about this,” the dreaded line from Star Wars. The constant recycling suggests to us that nobody really wants to create anything original, that Han Solo and Indiana Jones and Harrison Ford are all the same. So why care really?
Harrison Ford looks good, but seems considerably irritated to be in this picture.
Cate Blanchett gives the worst performance of her life, unable to sustain a convincing Ukranian accent. (Her Australian seeps through in every sentence. Didn’t they have a dialogue coach on this?) She juts her chin forward, wears a preposterous black wig in a bob, and spends most of her time pacing with her hands folded behind her back. This is what is considered a convincing villain. I longed for Honey Ryder.
The plot is preposterously pedestrian. Lucas wasted nearly twenty years and several screenwriters on this. And what is the end result? An embarrassing Chariots of the Gods premise that will surely earn David Koepp’s screenplay a spot on the Razzie longlist.
It’s not all bad. There’s one very fun jungle chase scene in which Mutt and Cate Blanchett get into a sword fight, each of them on a separate vehicle. I liked some over-the-top red ants that munched upon victims. This is largely due to Spielberg’s half-hearted attempts to make something of this crappy material. But none of this comes close to the tank scene in The Last Crusade, the wondrous mine chase in The Temple of Doom, or any moment of Raiders.
This was the first Indiana Jones picture in which I didn’t have much fun. Not content to simply ruin the Star Wars franchise with the last execrable trilogy, George Lucas has made a mockery of the Indiana Jones universe, and will be rewarded with millions of dollars for insulting his audience and cheapening his creations. He doesn’t care. He is Hollywood’s answer to Kenneth Lay, defrauding his audience of the pleasures he is now incapable of generating.