Category / Uncategorized
Is This What Happens to Actors Who Appear in Peter Greenaway Movies?
Tonight : “Ewan McGregor wanted to have an animated penis in his latest film….’They tried animating it: putting Peter Rabbit’s face on it and making it speak to Beatrix, but they didn’t think it was tasteful enough in the end.'”
In Washington, Every Generalization Under the Sun
Let us stipulate that rinky-dink columnists can be divided into three categories. At the top are Jimmy Breslin (not yet dead, but not currently writing a column) and Hunter S. Thompson (dead, but did he really write a column?) — who write well-crafted, uncompromising essays that the many hacks who now occupy cramped cubicles couldn’t come close to even if .41 Derringers were pointed at their cantaloupes — straight, no chaser. At the other extreme we have hacks — no names here, because I’m a spineless and dishonest turd and quite likely one of these unnamed hacks myself for being so goddam prolific and having an email address named mondaylosers@aol.com — who write what can be charitably called bullshit, deliberately dumb articles laced with generalizations and gimmicks (such as jejune taxonomies and dash-laden sentences) because if they turn in a column, they’ll lose their precious berth even if what they write has little to do with the real world. In between, we have writers of many types which I won’t identify, because it would be a little bit like showing a pornographic film to a small child.
And then there’s Patrick Anderson, a man who I suspect is quite humorless, who won’t comprehend the timbre of this clearly satirical post, and lost his ratiocination skills sometime in the late 1970s. It’s safe to say that this book reviewing savant can be classified in one of the three categories mentioned above. But since I’m a litblogger who doesn’t talk down to his readers, I’ll let you decide which tier Mr. Anderson belongs to.
Look At It This Way: It Was Only a Robot Facsimile of a Muppet
Roundup
- Dan Green offers a contrarian take on Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker.
- There can be no better barometer for how little literary figures matter than the Seattle Times year-end death list, which overlooks Octavia Butler and Gilbert Sorrentino. Butler’s exclusion is particularly egregious, given that she lived in Seattle. Way to go, team!
- A smörgåsbord of best of the year lists can be found in last Sunday’s Newsday, including editor Laurie Muchnick, Emily Gordon, and Maud Newton.
- The Toronto Star whips up an Alice Munro profile, which reads as if it was cobbled together from the obituaries file. Folks, Munro is still alive!
- If Hermione Eye were a man, Eye opines that he’d whack her on the back. Not at all, Ms. Eye. He’d probably plagiarize you first.
- Now open for Wikipedia-like catastrophes of the first order: The Internet Speculative Fiction Database. Remember kids, only you can decide history, only to find your careful ruminations reverted ten minutes later.
- Is Jakob Nielsen serious or satirical?
- Mariah Carey vs. Mary Carey
- Conservative blogs losing popularity? Who woulda thought? (via Maxine Clarke)
- Ship lit? Okay, I get it. We’re going to see twelve trend pieces in the Gray Lady on “____ lit” before the end of winter. But given certain realities, that promising essay on “tit lit” ain’t happening anytime soon. (via Brockman)
- Sorry, Derik, you’re my grumpy sage too.
- Preposterous revisionism going down in libraries. Sorry, Maud, but I can’t stay out of this either. Rabid, raccoon-eyed, baby carrot-chomping librarians scare the fuck out of me too. But, man, does righteous indignation about books get the job done sometimes.