Robert “U Can’t Touch Dis” Birnbaum, the hardest work literary interview in show business, is at it again, engaging in a second chat with Sarah Vowell. They talk about commercial viability, American history, reading in the sun, outdoors writers, and whether Ms. Vowell has considered writing fiction.
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After This, I Don’t Feel So Bad About Balding
Model vs. Photographer (NSFW): “[I]t was about the only truly creative idea I had ever had. While I’ve often seen photographers do nude self portraits, I had never seen a male photographer try to adopt the same poses as his female models.” (via MeFi)
Do the Legwork, THEN Cry Me a Frickin’ River
Michelle Richmond asks, “Where’s the love for Trance?” Trance is Christopher Sorrentino’s new novel. And from where I’m sitting, there seems to be some love making the rounds. I’ve had a few positive emails about the book this week.
Publishers Weekly editor Michael Scharf has been following Sorrentino on his book tour. So far, Scharf has two reports available online. But Michelle quotes from the latest installment (which isn’t yet available):
The store has done its legwork: ads for series have gone in every major weekly. They’ve even printed up little baseball-card like promos featuring the author photo on front, and a little synopsis of the book on back, with in-store visit date at the bottom. The cards are available weeks before the reading, and are kept on a rack front of store. There are cards for Jonathan Ames, who was here last week reading before an audience of about 50. Francesca Lia Block and Aimee Bender (like in L.A.) are due next month…
The question that I pose in Michelle’s comments thread is this: In the year 2005, do newspaper advertisements translate into book signing attendance? I suspect that one of the reasons that so many people attended the Ames signing is that Ames himself maintains an e-mailing list, reminding people every so often about what he’s doing. I have yet to receive a single email from Mr. Sorrentino and would have been happy to have noted the event (and possibly attended it), had someone bothered to remind me about it. (Even though the Booksmith is my neighborhood bookstore, this doesn’t mean that I commit every known reading to memory. I am, like most souls, all too forgetful.)
Further, I don’t feel it’s a fair criticism to complain about low attendance (and if you think ten people is low, you haven’t been to nearly as many book readings as you should go to) when there is no christophersorrentino.com in existence and when Farrar, Straus and Giroux‘s only apparent page for Sorrentino is a listing of his book tour dates. This page tells me (or any other prospective reader) absolutely nothing about Trance except a JavaScript catalog summary. And it offers neither author information nor an excerpt from Trance that encourages me to read the book or catch the guy in person. If I didn’t know who Sorrentino was, with such sketchy information provided, I’d think he was a performance artist prepared to set his penis on fire who just happens to show up at bookstores.
With such a saturated publishing environment, it is the responsibility of the author and the publisher to provide more than just “Booksmith, 7:00 PM” in their information page. We need details, folks. What will happen at the reading? Will there be a band? Will there be canapes? Will each person who buys the book get a personalized hug from Mr. Sorrentino? (And, hell, maybe a penile conflagration might be in order just to liven things ups.) I’m not suggesting that every author feed into the cult of personality, but I am suggesting that they accommodate the reading public instead of expecting them to feverishly scour the weeklies for the latest tours. Readers may be passionate when it comes to books, but they do have outside lives and they are not wolves.
Authors need to reach out to the literati by directing them with non-intrusive emails like Ames’ updates (which are often framed in a polite and non-intrusive personal story) rather than assuming that people will jump out of their seats to attend. In short, they need to do the legwork. And that means taking their heads out of the sand and understanding that the literary culture is solidifying: online and in other places. They just need to be realistic about where the hot pockets lie. I’ve got a few answers to this query, but if these folks are ten years behind the curve, then they really need to sweat it out a little.
[UPDATE: Sorrentino’s San Francisco stretch can be found here.]
Miguel Cohen on Film: “9 Songs”
[EDITOR’S NOTE: Miguel Cohen, who may or may not be the brother of Randy “The Ethicist” Cohen (he has yet to submit to a blood test), once appeared on these pages with a series of columns known as “The Un-Ethicist.” He returned months later and made two efforts to summarize James Joyce’s Ulysses. It’s been a year since we last heard from Miguel. Until last week, when Miguel confessed to me that after a night out that he can barely remember, he had accidentally signed up for the Peace Corps and had spent several months in Uganda trying to get out of his professional obligations and return to the United States. When we spoke on the phone, Miguel told me that consciously thinking about Joyce had pretty much decimated his ability to read any books, let alone make a measured life choice. I suggested that he take up movie reviewing, since I had purportedly given up on current films. When Miguel learned that an NC-17 film had been released featuring real actors performing real sex, Miguel jumped at the chance to weigh in. What follows is his review.]
9 Songs. That’s what they named this sucker. It should have been called 9 Mercy Fucks. Because the way these two went at it, you could see the glazed over expressions in their eyes. Was this an effort at Last Tango style lust? Perhaps. But if this was real sex, then these were real expressions. Either the two actors were tired of the director asking them to do take after take of cocksucking or this was the most fucking they were likely to have for the next two years. Frankly, it made this cat a bit uncomfortable. I was longing for one of those humble little romps where the chick is heinously objectified and the couple in question fucks in three separate positions over three minutes to a throway opus of synthesized music.
The guy who made this is Michael Winterbottom. I’m no professional psychiatrist, but certainly anyone with the name Winterbottom is bound to be ribbed a little over the years.
Bad enough that he’s British. But the real question on my mind was whether this guy was an ass man or not. I’m neither an ass man nor a breast man. I’m more of a vulva man. In this way, you might say I’m straightforward. Most of my friends are breast men. They’re so bad that when I hand them an orange, they start fondling it and looking for the nipple. When they find the stem, they’re generally disappointed.
But ass men. These guys are usually in confidence crises. What does it say about a person when the chief anatomical feature they worship is the housing for the execretory tract?
Anyway, he’s got the length right. 71 minutes is about the running time you’d expect from a porn film. He’s even thrown in a bedpost and a few scarves. But who the hell hooks up at a Black Rebel Motorcycle Club concert? Definitely not interesting people. Let’s face the facts. Those boys in the BRMC are utter pussies. They offer just enough edge to be “independent,” but their noise is carefully stifled so as not to scare off the thirtysomethings holding onto whatever vaguely “edgy” music they can process to remain hip. You want edge? Have these two getting turned on at a Pretty Girls Make Graves show.
So Mr. Geologist and Ms. Student go back to Geology Boy’s flat and fuck each others’ brains out. And then they go to another show and fuck afterwards. And then seven more times.
If you ask me, this was just an excuse for Winterbottom to shoot naked people. Perhaps he would have been more successful unleashing these “nine songs” one by one onto the Internet for the highbrow porn connoisseurs. I’m guessing that this movie was made not so much to push any envelopes, but for Winterbottom, whose films have never made much dinero, to cater to the niche market of frightened intellectual bastards scared of crossing the video store’s beaded threshold. Rent porn, you horny motherfuckers, or the terrorists have won!
In the end, Winterbottom didn’t strike me as an ass man. In fact, what disheartened me the most was that he had no particularly foci with the fucking. If he’s going to make films like that, he needs to understand that every director has their anatomical obsession — their personal stamp. You don’t see a Russ Meyer film for anything less than the breasts. Likewise, Kubrick is obsessed with long shots of nude women, often standing. And Guy Ritchie is a bit of an ass man and his camera seems to swing both ways.
But Winterbottom? Nothing. He’s fashioned a veritable potpourri (if that’s what you movie poster authors want to quote, go for it). But Miguel says this guy’s a poseur.
RSS Test
This is a quick test to see if the RSS feed is working.
[UPDATE: Even though the XML feeds have been validated and appear through every other aggregator, they are still not showing up at Bloglines. I’ve emailed WordPress and, if I do not hear back from them, I will keep contacting them until I elicit a response and a fix.]