Wait a minute. DBC Pierre has fans?
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All Mitchell, All the Time
The last time David Mitchell came out with a novel, we were mentioning something about almost every breath. Well, let it be known that we’re going to be doing the same damn thing with Black Swan Green. To get you folks started, here is some coverage of Black Swan Green.
- The Santa Cruz Sentinel: Chris Watson talks with him weeks before Santa Cruz.
- The Scotsman: Interview.
- Hilariously, Bloomberg calls BSG “far more accessible” than the “cryptic” (and thus bad?) books.
- Los Angeles Times: A brief look into the BSG book-on-tape.
- Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s Bookforum review.
- Fantastic Fiction review.
- Black Swan Green discussion between Megan and me: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4. (WARNING: Some spoilers.)
- A contrarian opinion from Dixitique Andreus.
- More from the Laboratorium.
- Granta, “The January Man”: An early version of part of what became BSG.
- Interview with The Bookseller.
- Rick Kleffel on BSG.
- Review from Marcus Gipps.
- Review from Laura Miller.
- Odds on negative review as of April 3, 2006.
Also, keep your ears out for a future Bat Segundo Show (among many) with a brand new interview with David Mitchell himself. Yes, the man who inspired the podcast will be returning. And this time, we’ll be chatting with him in person. (Plus, we’ll be less nervous this time.) More news to follow.
Who Knew That Segundo Was An Old Woman?
Holy cats! Bat Segundo fiction over at Miss Snark’s!
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.