Roundup
Written by Edward ChampionPosted on June 2, 2008
Filed Under Roundup
- While real gamers blow shit up in a first-person shooter that taps serious system resources or carjack hapless NPCs in Grand Theft Auto 4, Steven Spielberg has decided to offer the world a bunch of cutesy goddam animals for a video game he has “created,” which also appears to be something of a Jenga ripoff. If you ask me, this ridiculous game looks as fun as watching a Care Bears DVD through the shaky fog of a Saturday morning hangover. I’d beseech a dentist to perform a root canal on me rather than play a cowardly and ridiculous video game called Boom Blox.
- I have not yet seen the Lost season finale because I cannot stream the damn episode through the ABC website through a wi-fi connection. Now this is something that I can do with NBC’s The Office website, which doesn’t have a ridiculous interface that loads within your browser window. And I can’t download a torrent until I have DSL. The moral of the story? Learn to design a website right. Also, don’t move while a “major television event” has aired and everybody and his mother wants to ask you what you thought about it.
- Wendy Cope would like to take your poet laureate plaudit and stick it where the sun don’t shine. Never mind that this would make Cope the first female poet laureate in the UK. She don’t want it! Here is a list of honors that Wendy Cope does desire: professional dominatrix, leader of a world empire, short-order cook, and five-star general. But don’t make her a poet laureate! Just don’t! Cope will kick your ass if you even dare let loose the “luh” from your lips!
- Here’s a helpful hint to publishing executives: if you say you’re “at the tipping point,” a term that very few outside of burnouts in the marketing department take seriously, then chances are that you don’t know what you’re talking about. What is a tipping point these days but a confession that you don’t really have a business plan and you never really had one to begin with?
- So McSweeney’s is now applying its twee bullshit to poetry. I’m with Shane. I don’t give a damn either. But this stunt just makes them look silly.
- Jeff VanderMeer has uncovered a science fiction tribute to the infamous game that comes with Windows. Or he has something of possible substance to say.
- Now wait a minute. It’s Bill Clinton who’s calling other people “sleazy,” “dishonest,” “slimy” and a “scumbag?”
- Paul DiFilippo on J.G. Ballard.
- Another reason to love Peter Greenaway: the man wants to project genitalia onto “The Last Supper” in an effort to link “8,000 years of art and 112 years of cinema.” Greenaway also has plans to have cows take a dump upon the Mona Lisa in an effort to unite “8,000 years of art and two years of agriculture.”
- Ian McEwan unveiled an excerpt of his unfinished novel at the Hay literary festival, only to discover that he had unintentionally taken a bit from Douglas Adams.
- Who the hell do you think you are, Julie Buff? Waiting around for an editor? Yeah, it sucks. But you keep writing material and you keep sending things in. Do you know how many emails I’ve sent in the last month to editors that have gone unanswered? Probably around twenty. Do you think I let this stop me? So I feel your pain. But if you want to be a writer, you sit on your ass and write. You produce and you keep sending things out. If you don’t want to wait six months, then you send a note to the editor that you’re submitting the piece elsewhere. And you keep on doing this until you get published on a regular basis, or on some level that you feel is acceptable. And you don’t let anybody stop you. (via Slushpile)
- And, sweet Jesus, Sissy Spacek recorded a song protesting John and Yoko’s Two Virgins cover. Really, celebrities, if you’re going to record any protest songs along these lines, direct your energies to vapid musicians like Sting and Michael Bolton. These are the people you should sing about. These are the people who should be banned from every known recording studio in the world. (via Hey Dullblog)
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Beyond Heaving Bosoms by Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan. The famed writers behind
Alice Fantastic by Maggie Estep. This wild and highly enjoyable narrative involves two sisters (presumably, the third one was still being rented out by Chekhov), a hippie ex-junkie mother who lives with seventeen dogs, a murder, gambling, and libidinous Hollywood actresses who live in Woodstock. But this is the wonderful Maggie Estep we're talking here. And what seems at first like a quirky yarn becomes something unexpectedly moving about connectivity. What I love about Estep's work is the way that she'll juxtapose an extremely astute observation (now that you mention it, why do cab drivers always have somebody to talk with on the phone past midnight?) with an often outrageous story development.
Generosity by Richard Powers. It doesn't come out until September 29th, but Richard Powers's latest will have anyone committed to books reconsidering their literary fervor. I foresee some animosity from the vanilla critics hostile to idea-driven novels, but book bloggers, YouTube chroniclers, and MFAs would do well to plunge into this chance-taking narrative, which introduces vital questions about what the reader's relationship is with media, scientific dissection, and "creative nonfiction." Are we rats fleeing to happy cities? Or can we find the humanism within the purported plague?
Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon. Lennon is one of the most underrated fiction writers working today. Much as On the Night Plain proved that Lennon had a lot more in the toolbox than heartfelt (and often very funny) suburban satire, this slim but fascinating volume juxtaposes 100 small-town anecdotes -- arranged by category -- in a manner that reads, at times, like Nicholson Baker's passions for minutiae and, at other times, Stewart O'Nan's concern for psychological detail. The result is fiction that makes us wonder about whether one person's subjective view of particulars can entirely be trusted. This book never found a publisher in 2005. But thankfully, Graywolf has released it in the United States, along with Lennon's latest novel, The Castle.
Wonderful World by Javier Calvo. This wonderfully raucous volume has been completely ignored by the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. But it's probably one of the most delightful reading experiences I've had this year. Calvo cavalierly mashes up multiple genres and manages to mix up familial subtext with larger-than-life, almost cartoonish characters. (Indeed, one might argue that one mobster's penis is a character of its own in this sprawling novel.). This is not an easy thing to pull off, but Calvo makes it work. And it's helped immeasurably by Mara Faye Lethem's idiom-specific translation. (
The Means of Reproduction, Michelle Goldberg This thoughtful book tackles the complicated (and little discussed) subject of reproductive rights from numerous angles, which includes a number of unpleasant but necessary ones. The upshot is that there isn't a quick fix solution for declining birth rates and fundamentalist abuses. Just about every political faction has contributed to the friction. But you'll want to read this book anyway to refamiliarize yourself with the topic, but also to understand just what's occurred during the past several decades to get us where we are today. (
“…direct your energies to vapid musicians like Sting and Michael Bolton. These are the people you should sing about.”
Sting was actually pretty cool (between Quadrophenia and Every Breath), and who knows how *uncool* Lennon would have become, had he lived? “Starting Over” was surely an ominous indication of possible things to come.
Carjacking? GTA IV is all about the cabs, yo. They cut hours off the leveling.
Alas, Kevin, not having a console, I’m waiting for the PC version!
Boom Blox actually is ridiculously fun. I’ll vouch for it.