- “Your money is now our money and we will spend it on drugs!”
- Simon Owens has written an extensive piece on Harriet Klausner, who is truly a menace to coherent sentences and taking a stand — two things that one would expect from a critic. If Harriet Klausner is a critic, I am a turtle chronically nibbling on Tetra Ropotmin who copulates four times a day with an even-toed ungulate.
- Warren Ellis: “Note: cigarette breaks are built into all signing times.”
- Christ, I can’t take this anymore. Fuck Raincoast. Get your Potter torrents here.* I do not endorse downloading the book, but someone has to offer a contrarian response to the insistent demands, protocols, and other wretched assumptions that the Harry Potter publishers have been dictating to the media, and which the media in turn has been willingly kowtowing too. Christ, folks, you’re literary journalists. Show some spine from time to time. Must you devote every column inch to this “phenomenon?” Any newspaper mention of the Deathly Hallows without the journalist actually reading the book is, as far as I’m concerned, nothing less than an ignoble junket. Nicholas Lezard has more reasons why you must take a stand. Look, if you want a damn good children’s series, seek out Lemony Snicket, which has more brains, imagination, and wit per book than J.K. Rowling has in her whole oeuvre.
- You and me both, Brockman. I underwent a six-hour interview today in an effort to obtain my “cultural credentials.” At the end of the interview, the interlocutor took one of those little hammers out of his suitcase — the kind that doctors have. I thought he had intended to test my reflexes, but he decided to repeatedly hammer upon my molars while two guys in expensive suits were holding me down. This was, they said, “the final stage of the interview.” After half of my teeth were pulled out with a rusty set of pliers and I was left on the floor, paralyzed with pain, my gums bleeding onto the concrete, these three guys laughed and me. “You want your cultural credentials? There’s your cultural credentials!” Then they kicked me in the stomach and the nads, dislocated both of my shoulders, and shaved off my eyebrows. If anybody knows of a better way to earn “cultural credentials” (and, incidentally, if you know of a good dentist who works cheap), please drop me a line.
- It appears that John Steinbeck’s granddaughter is going into the film industry as a scribe. Her first offering, I Travel With Charley in the Biblical Sense, should be uploaded to YouTube next week.
- The independent publisher Night Shade Books is having a sale to clear out their warehouses. 50% off all titles, four book minimum. That means M. John Harrison, Iain Banks, Tricia Sullivan, the remarkably underrated Paolo Bacigalupi, and Joe Haldemann. Do help support Jeremy Lassen, one of the craziest motherfuckers in the science fiction industry.
* — And it appears that the Harry Potter snapper made a serious mistake.
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (
This mentioned Potter movie is great.
I like it and how the actors have masterd to overcome their teenage acting handycaps. The movie is very entertaing, I find.
Boy is NY ever making you cranky.
Re: “Look, if you want a damn good children’s series, seek out Lemony Snicket, which has more brains, imagination, and wit per book than J.K. Rowling has in her left pinkie.”
Um, don’t you mean the reverse then? i.e. Snicket’s has more brains etc. in his left pinkie than Rowling does in her whole etc. etc.
Thanks, Blue.
Snicket’s books are better than Rowling’s? How contrarian! Not in any way accurate, of course, but very contrarian. Kudos all!
Lemony Snicket?! REALLY! Yes, sometimes you’re TOO contrarian, dear Ed.