If this MySpace page is to be believed, Wal-Mart is now asking mothers to check in their babies. Presumably, Wal-Mart has found a legitimate way to sell random babies on the open market?
I’m no fan of Kathy Griffin, but I don’t see why these remarks needed to be censored. Indeed, the joke’s more tepid than John Lennon claiming that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. Will we see Kathy Griffin product burnings? And are we in 2007 or 1966?
Where are the men on TV? Anglling for your job, Rebecca, in a new reality TV show called Who Wants to Be a 3,000 Word Columnist? Stag club only, I’m afraid.
“Ask Yahoo! is teaming up with Yahoo! Answers to bring you Ask Mike.” No, this is not what anyone asked for. When I sent in my question to Ask Yahoo!, I damn well expected Yahoo! to answer it! And now you’re telling me that some lesser being named “Mike” is the guy responsible? Who the hell is Mike? And what can Mike offer that Yahoo cannot? Are you now outsourcing?
And it appears that the Tron followup is not dead. Joseph Kosinski is in “final negotiations” to develop and direct “the next chapter,” which will involve Flynn asking a group of nihilist hackers not to pee on his rug and a manual typewriter that reveals Flynn’s complicity in a Chuck E. Cheese venture called “Star Man’s” that never quite got off the ground.
You see, that’s the problem with trying to sum up the history of the American short story in a blog post. Invariably, you leave a lot of things out, while others fill in the details more succinctly.
USA Today runs the obligatory 9/11 fiction article. I don’t buy the claim that there are only 30 novels about 9/11. I’ve read far more “9/11 novels” in the past six years. Then again, I suppose it depends on what one explicitly styles a “9/11 novel.” Is not a novel some reflection of our times? And, as such, are not all novels dealing with contemporary issues “9/11 novels” to some degree?
So is Inspector Rebus finished? Or is he? Ian Rankin has announced his book for 2016: Inspector Rebus and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
Look, I don’t like Britney Spears any more than the next guy. But I must confess that I’m stunned by all the attacks on her figure. Is the media now in the habit of attacking any major female entertainment figure who does not fit the “Auschwitz diet” archetype? And why aren’t more people asking this question?
Prison chaplains are now removing religious books and materials from prison libraries. The idea here — known as the Standardized Chapel Library Project — was inspired from a 2004 report by the Department of Justice, in which it was suggested that religious books should be banned because prisons could then become a recruiting center for militant Islamic groups. I’m not a religious man, but I do honor the First Amendment. If the effort here is to curtail terrorism (which, incidentally, is not always Islamic), banning books of any sort doesn’t mean that you’re going to stop people, inside or outside, from being recruited, corrupted, or otherwise influenced into doing bad things. If anything, might not restricting books demonstrate to any potential terrorist just how inflexible the United States is on this subject?
Sure, Knopf turned down a number of authors. But one must likewise ask how many important fiction writers the NYTBR has ignored under Tanenhaus’s tenure.
It looks like a Harvey Milk biopic is happening. Directed by Gus Van Sant. Sean Penn as Milk, Matt Damon as Dan White. We’ll see.
So has For Better or For Worse now transmuted into an endless series of flashback episodes? Come on, Ms. Johnston, surely you can continue to defy the “comic book characters don’t age” stereotype! I cry foul!
Apparently, Rick Kleffel is now podcasting five days a week. For how long, I don’t know. But I hope he keeps up his stamina. It’s arduous enough doing two or three of these a week.
Alex Ross on Pavarotti. Speaking for my uncouth self, the Three Tenors certainly did considerable damage towards any developing appreciation I might have of opera. Several kind and intelligent people — and certainly James Cain’s great interest in the subject didn’t hurt — have attempted to get me hooked on opera over the years, and I have tried to remain open-minded about this antipathy. I have responded ecstatically to Bizet’s Carmen (which I have never tired of listening, a performance of which I was once greatly delighted by in San Francisco), Rossini (which I used in many of the films I made as a student), and Mozart’s more playful operas (I’m more of a Magic Flute kind of guy than a Marriage of Figaro kind of guy). So on some of the basics, I’m doing quite all right. Opera has, as Ross very keenly observes in considering the Three Tenors’ reception, always worked for me in the form of theater, and I responded rather poorly to the “big man hitting high notes with a smile.” Understand that I have no problem dealing with more abstract and recital approaches to art. But the kind of ego often celebrated in lieu of the human spirit has caused opera to often rub me the wrong way. So I openly confess that I am a cultural thug on this point. While Pavarotti was certainly a great singer in his early years, I didn’t particularly care for the way his grandstanding got in the way of his talent. (And apparently Bryan Appleyard is on the lookout for an interview he conducted with Pavarotti. Let us hope he finds it.) (via James Tata)
James Rother: “The problem with most asseverations seeking to sever poetry from prose is that they are so finely granulated that they preclude the posing of certain basic ontogenetic questions without whose input the problem of just what (rather than where) poetry proceeds from, or how its operating system accommodates itself to the passing phenomenological scene as something parsable rather than a mere eidolon which meaning courts with little but flirtation on its mind dissolves into a plethora of survey-course evasions.” Indeed. Does anybody know what the fuck he’s talking about? I ask in all seriousness. I may be a long-winded bastard sometimes, but this takes the cake. (via Sharp Sand)
If you’re tracking magazines about to die, some guy named The Reaper seems to think that Tango, Hollywood Life, Radar, TV Guide, Sound & Vision, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance and Portfolio are close to the death knell.
Jeff VanderMeer on LongPen: “Upon reflection, this Frankenstein invention from Margaret Atwood strikes me as a kind of lunacy, the deranged dream of a person who just doesn’t have the fortitude for the litanies of the book tour: long, cramped plane flights, endless hotels, too much crap food, not enough sleep. It sounds, in fact, like a Bad SF idea, the kind of gimmick that might satisfy the techno-geek in some but that would hardly nourish more tactile readers. After all, if people just wanted the signature, they wouldn’t need the author’s presence at all, just the signed copy. Or they could write in for a personalized signature.”
By the way, sorry for the intermittent server over the past few days. I’ve talked with my hosting provider. It was fixed. And now it’s acting up again. So hopefully this will be cleared up soon.
You can always count on the NYT corrections page for some unusual syntax. Today: “A film review in Weekend on Aug. 17 about ‘Marigold’ misstated its rating status.” The review is not ofMarigold. It is aboutMarigold. It is not a film rating, but a “rating status.” Which makes me wonder whether social strata can now be applied to a film rating. (Is a PG-13 movie now considered middle-class? Or is it some benign out-of-towner entering a cocktail party at a Fifth Avenue apartment?) The Times regrets the vernacular, but this is the Times, after all.