The Democrats unveil their secret weapon and it’s…George Lucas? Huh? Is there a lightsaber-swinging voting bloc which might counter the Christian right? I thought that only mattered in Australia. (via Ghost in the Machine)
Year / 2006
Yippie Kayee, Mother Oprah
In an utterly baffling development, James Frey has found an unexpected supporter in Bruce Willis: “Look at what happened to James Frey in the last two weeks,” says Willis. “That’s a great book and so is the follow up book. And just because his publisher chose to say that these were memoirs, it took it out of being a work of fiction, a great work of fiction and very well written to this guy having to go be sucker punched on OPRAH by one of the most powerful women in television just to grind her own axe about it. ‘Hey, Oprah. You had President Clinton on your show and if this prick didn’t lie about a couple of things I’m going to set myself on fire right now.'” (via Defamer)
“Why Don’t You Write a Book, Ed?”
Oh boy, is this spot on.
The Impatient Insist on the Dust Heap
Dan Green on John Barth: “These days Barth is most often criticized for failing to “move past” the metafictional game-playing for which he has become perhaps the emblematic figure. But where, exactly, is he to go? Toward some more conventional kind of narrative strategy? Presumably he determined long ago that this was not the direction in which his talents would take him or he would never have abandoned conventional techniques iin the first place.”
The Powers of Celebrity
A fun thread over at I Love Books about coming face-to-face with authors. The most interesting one:
Richard Powers was at the University of Illinois when I was there (he might still be down there, not sure) and he subbed in for a couple of my creative writing classes one year, and came to speak to a film class I was taking that dealt with artificial intelligence- talked about Galatea 2.1, and kept grinning about being a character in his own book. Completely normal, down to earth guy, friendly, etc., but obviously smarter than anyone you’ve ever met. I had to read one of my stories for the creative class at one point, and the thing was just horrible. I couldn’t even read the story out loud for the class, it was so bad; I had a friend read it for me. And Powers was great- very generous, and somehow acknowledged the fact that the story “needed work” without being condescending or making me feel bad about it.