The Guardian: “But Campion’s recent New York crime thriller, In the Cut, incurred the wrath of US censors for the inclusion of what appeared to be an explicit (and narratively pivotal) blowjob. Campion protested that the scene was not hard-core (which is defined as ‘real’ rather than ‘simulated’ sex) because the phallus in question was a prosthetic; as Campion told me, she would never ask an actress to perform oral sex. Not so the makers of the Anglo-French film, Intimacy, in which Kerry Fox gets famously close to Mark Rylance in a manner which boldly straddles the divide between fact and fiction, reminding us of John Waters’s prophetic predictions about name actors breaking the last taboo.” (via Reverse Cowgirl)
Category / Uncategorized
Sacrilegious
Chicago Tribune: “Move over Bud. College life isn’t just about drinking beer. In a rare instance, Apple Computer Inc.’s iconic iPod music player surpassed beer drinking as the most “in” thing among undergraduate college students, according to the latest biannual market research study by Ridgewood, N.J.-based Student Monitor.” (via Large Hearted Boy)
A Tanenhaus Alternative
Book of the Day has issued an alternative to Best Contemporary Fiction Since 1980. The winner? Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy.
Alan Greenspan Not Into Solo Kayaking
In a shocking development, Alan Greenspan has revealed that he is incapable of writing his memoir on his own! Where other writers (even Bill Clinton!) might honor their end of a multimillion dollar publishing deal, it seems that Greenspan has hit a rough patch after Chapter 18 and requires the services of one Peter Petre (whose ghostly pallor has granted succor to the likes of Norman Schwarzkopf and Thomas Watson, Jr.) to help him commit his lurid life on paper. One hopes that Petre’s “collaborations” will involve applying a Chinese fan to Greenspan’s parched form as he hunkers over a typewriter in the New York summer heat, but it’s a fair bet that foot massages and sweet bedtime stories (to say nothing of the salver of milk and cookies) will likely be upstaged by the inevitable act of covering, if not outright kissing, Greenspan’s ass.
Best Books Since 1990
I too can vouch for Scott and state with absolute certianty that he cooked up this idea well before Tanenhaus did. He was kind enough to ask me to offer my ten and, since Max has shared his, here’s a list of the ten I submitted. Of course, being a moron, I somehow misconstrued Scott’s request and thought that he was asking me for the best books written between 1990 and 2000. (Had I known it extended to the present day, I would have definitely selected Ian McEwan’s Atonement, one of the finest novels of the past twenty years, or a David Markson book.) So my list was a tad off and typed at a feverish clip with the first ten titles that popped into my head. If I had to do it again, it would likely be different. But here are my picks in alphabetical order:
Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
Don DeLillo, Underworld
William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own
Richard Powers, The Gold Bug Variations
Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries
Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
William T. Vollmann, The Royal Family
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan
Colson Whitehead, John Henry Days
[UPDATE: Scott has a nice list of links to other people’s lists.]