Holy cats! Bat Segundo fiction over at Miss Snark’s!
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The “Too Soon” Mentality
It seems that every time a book or a film dealing with September 11th comes out, someone cries out the words, “Too soon!” It happened recently with Jay McInerney’s The Good Life, when Norman Mailer told McInerney that McInerney should wait ten years before attempting a novel about it. It happened with Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, where people declared it was “too soon” for a novelist to write about 9/11. And now it’s happening again with United 93. The trailer was released to theatres and people reacted negatively. The result? An AMC Loews theatre in the Upper West Side pulled the trailer.
It’s been more than five years since September 11th. And with all due respect to the victims, I’m wondering why today’s artists are so timid with respect to the subject. Is it standard operating procedure to take no chances for fear of offending? I hate to invoke Godwin, but the current silence reminds me of the situation chronicled in the 2004 documentary Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust, which I was lucky to see last year. The film offers a convincing argument that Hollywood adamantly refused to come to terms with the full reality of the Holocaust until years later and points out that later movies, such as the excellent film The Pawnbroker, were coping mechanisms that may have come too late.
This popular notion of repressing or, more accurately, self-censoring dramatizations of recent history hasn’t gone away. Talk of 9/11 and deal with its explicit details, and you are declared insensitive or tasteless. But what better way might our nation come to terms with that terrible day then to expose its explicit details through film, literature, music, painting, sculptures, theatre, opera, ballet or countless other forms of art? What do we gain when our culture reflects the notion that September 11th didn’t happen or shouldn’t be talked about? Piece of mind, perhaps. But limitations which might beget other limitations.
So people are crying and feeling uncomfortable when seeing this trailer. Well isn’t it art’s purpose to do this? And don’t such emotions allow a certain catharsis?
Too soon? If not now, then when?
Sam Tanenhaus: “More Chicks” to Write Book Reviews
New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus announced that “more chicks” will be contributing book reviws on a weekly basis. The decision came when Tanenhaus grew disgusted at Norman Mailer’s boorish behavior at a recent cocktail party.
Tanenhaus promised, “Women won’t just be reviewing poetry or women’s fiction. I’ll be assigning them science and history books too!” There’s no firm word yet on whether the NYTBR will cover fiction in any pertinent way in the future, much less translated fiction or obscure titles.
John Updike to Author Books About Regular People
John Updike, author of the Rabbit Angstrom books, has decided that writing about upper-class adulterers simply “isn’t fun” anymore and has decided that writing about impoverished characters will be “a welcome change.” The New Yorker doyen will be penning a new series of books featuring Joe Angstrom, a down-and-out man from the skids. “He’s the Angstrom the rest of the family doesn’t want to talk about,” said Updike. “And get this: he’s black!”
Literary critics remain skeptical. An early draft of It All Happened in East L.A. has made the rounds and some have felt Updike’s references to OutKast and the Notorious BIG to be sadly dated. Tom Wolfe, in particular, is watching from the sidelines. “Let’s see if the old boy who called my novels ‘entertainment, not literature’ has the stuff to do the kind of backbreaking research I did for Charlotte Simmons,” said Wolfe, whose own take on college life has been called into question.
Harlan Ellison’s Anger Lost
Writer Harlan Ellison woke up this morning and discovered that his anger had been lost. Mr. Ellison, riding high on cheerfulness, was seen driving around Pasadena and, later this afternoon, in a comic book store, where he began French-kissing a clerk who called him “a science fiction writer.” “Where have you been all my life?” said Ellison to the clerk.
The clerk, fearing that Mr. Ellison would punch him or track him down, after calling Ellison’s wife “an old tart” on an Internet message forum, was astonished at Ellison’s change in temperament. “He just isn’t the same,” said the clerk, who declined to give his name. “I mean, I’ve long had wet dreams of shaking the man’s hand and being publicly humiliated by him at a comic book convention. But I never thought he’d plant me a wet one.”