I’m with Jeff on this one. I liked Neal Pollack’s Alternadad, but comparing it to Howl is like calling The O.C. the finest drama since I, Claudius. I can only chalk this bizarre comparison to the precarious employment scenario now going down at Time.
Responding to the Reason fanfic imbroglio, Tod Goldberg observes that “all uses of the term ‘raging fucktard’ be noted as originating from me.” One would think that this point would be self-evident, but it seems that the Cathy Youngs of the universe require clarification.
I think the question of whether an author has set foot in the place he’s writing in is moot. Shouldn’t it be about the work? One can look on further than Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. Crane never set foot into battle and yet composed chilling imagery.
Meghan O’Rourke on John Leonard: “It would be fine to leave it at that, if it weren’t that the word ‘enthusiast’ sounds dilettantish, somehow not quite serious. So let us try this: John Leonard is our primary progressive, catholic literary critic; he is also, with the exception of Susan Sontag, the best American literary critic to come of age in the 1960s, when the destabilizing forces of rock ’n’ roll and popular culture ransacked Axel’s Castle, that modernist symbol of aesthetic detachment, and began throwing parties in the inner keep. Like Sontag and Camille Paglia, Leonard has been one of the few literary essayists who can make sense of the erosion of highbrow culture, ruing elements of its loss while embracing the forces of popular culture. He is a man who loves The Beatles and Arthur Koestler, Joan Baez and William Wordsworth; and whom we can trust, now, when he worries that our intellectual culture is being, if not ‘dumbed down,’ then coarsened. He may be an ‘old fart,’ as he describes himself. But in outlook he is still a young progressive — the word-drunk man who has done for literary criticism what Lester Bangs did for rock journalism.” Sam Tanenhaus, take note. (via Complete Review)
2007 seems to be the year of vampire novels. Or at least I seem to be reading more of them lately (three so far and we’re barely into February). But Bookburger informs us that John Marks’ Fangland is the one to read.
You know, Ed, if you’re into vampire novels, a certain author whose name rhymes with “Mack Shutler” wrote one in about 1989…
Re: We don’t know the Beatles, etc.
Which world does that professor live in? His senior-aged students haven’t heard anything from The Beatles? I know people my age (23) who are OBSESSED with the Beatles, myself included. “Love” is selling extremely well, and albums like “Revolver” and “Rubber Soul” still top Amazon’s list regularly. That simply isn’t possible.
Recently, a poster sale came to my college in which the posters were divided into books that you could flip through. An entire book was devoted to Beatles posters—the covers of Abbey Road, of Let it Be. I bought one of John Lennon that’s looking down on me as I write this.
Enough about the Beatles. Who cares about Norman Mailer? I read the first hundred pages of his new novel and found its writing dead. I’ve tried his other books as well, and it seems he was all bluster, e.g. Advertisements for Myself. Maybe his students didn’t know N.M. because he’s irrelevant.
If OP thinks we don’t know Jack Kerouac, he should browse randomly through Facebook, or Livejournal, and see how many of us have quotes from On the Road in our profiles/entries. That would’ve required some research, I suppose.
Re: Orson Welles, anyone who’s taken any sort of cultural studies course is well-versed in his work, Citizen Kate especially. Shit, I took a Cinema class at my small town’s community college and Citizen Kane was the first film we discussed. This guy is a moron.
Stories like those are in the same vein as those “listening to an iPod makes you deaf/anti-social” stories. I’m inclined to believe similar curmudgeonly things sometimes, but then I leave my cloister and see the world as it is.
You know, Ed, if you’re into vampire novels, a certain author whose name rhymes with “Mack Shutler” wrote one in about 1989…
Re: We don’t know the Beatles, etc.
Which world does that professor live in? His senior-aged students haven’t heard anything from The Beatles? I know people my age (23) who are OBSESSED with the Beatles, myself included. “Love” is selling extremely well, and albums like “Revolver” and “Rubber Soul” still top Amazon’s list regularly. That simply isn’t possible.
Recently, a poster sale came to my college in which the posters were divided into books that you could flip through. An entire book was devoted to Beatles posters—the covers of Abbey Road, of Let it Be. I bought one of John Lennon that’s looking down on me as I write this.
Enough about the Beatles. Who cares about Norman Mailer? I read the first hundred pages of his new novel and found its writing dead. I’ve tried his other books as well, and it seems he was all bluster, e.g. Advertisements for Myself. Maybe his students didn’t know N.M. because he’s irrelevant.
If OP thinks we don’t know Jack Kerouac, he should browse randomly through Facebook, or Livejournal, and see how many of us have quotes from On the Road in our profiles/entries. That would’ve required some research, I suppose.
Re: Orson Welles, anyone who’s taken any sort of cultural studies course is well-versed in his work, Citizen Kate especially. Shit, I took a Cinema class at my small town’s community college and Citizen Kane was the first film we discussed. This guy is a moron.
Stories like those are in the same vein as those “listening to an iPod makes you deaf/anti-social” stories. I’m inclined to believe similar curmudgeonly things sometimes, but then I leave my cloister and see the world as it is.
Does this mean it’s OK to hate “24” now?