The incomparable Ms. Breslin, who has been posting portions of her novel, Porn Happy, over the past few months, has channeled her inner Gerard Jones and chronicled the history of getting this puppy published. Among some of the changes:
Last weekend, I reorganized the first fifty pages–again. I reorchestrated it such that the gangbang scene is now the, shall we say, climax of the first fifty pages, and, frankly, that seems, well, far more fitting.
We’re waiting to see what’s on page 69.
While Gil Cates is a terrible director (prima facie: Oh God, Book II) and a spotty producer of televised awards ceremonies, and while we wish to make it clear in almost every way that we are not, by and large, Gil Cates fans, we must applaud his efforts to cater to the basest audience impulses by publicly shaming Oscar nominees. Apparently, Cates’ plans involve having some of the nominees schlep on stage, whereby the winners will step forward while the runner-ups will be forced to stand in darkness.
Walter Murch is the strongest opponent of the plan: “To apply some kind of PMI (People magzine index) to the nominees and make this the criterion for whether they get to go onstage or not and speak to the Academy is disgraceful to the Academy.”
Murchie, love your work on Coppola’s films and your Touch of Evil restoration, but I got news for you, pal: The Oscars are all about PMI.
We applaud this in the most strenuous manner. Catfights, bad fashion decisions, crudely uttered stump speeches and televised spats are, after all, what the Oscars is all about. Affluent, well-coiffed and vacant-brained starlets pulling hissy fits when they aren’t LUVED by the Academy (a term, we might add, which has absolutely no educational or platonic value) are what we watch this silly ceremony for. Between this and Chris Rock hosting, Cates seems to be gearing us for a fantastic televised shitstorm.
The Morning News Tournament of Books is alive and kicking. The truly strangest choice, however, was Danny Gregory’s endorsement of I Am Charlotte Simmons over Wake Up, Sir! “Slither slither” over a playful Wodehouse homage?
Well, nobody said this was perfect.
But since people seem to be betting on the results and we’ve recently been applying “thin-slicing” to nearly every aspect of our lives (to say nothing of our ignoble yet inconclusive efforts to get the inside dirt from the honorably recalcitant Mark Sarvas), if we were betting men, we expect Susanna Clarke to get deservedly flogged. We also believe that Jessa Crispin will say no to Cloud Atlas. Because heaven forfend that a damn fine novel get widespread recognition. We also predict that Maud will side with The Plot Against America.
So if our educated guesses make you a small fortune, you know where to send the 10%. And that concludes our Meyer Lansky moment of the year.
I’d like to take the opportunity to personally apologize for the “Fuck you, crack open David’s skull and chug some blood” message that had appeared here for a few weeks. To be perfectly candid, I don’t know who David is, nor do I have any desire to crack open anybody’s skull, much less imbibe blood at a kegger.
Like other authors, the original plan was to leave a mysterious, yet profane message in reaction to all the angry Indians who had crashed this site. I was feeling morose that the usual publicity I got for this site had backfired. And I had briefly considered a one week experimental period as a vampire.
Unfortunately, to my great surprise, I discovered that I did actually enjoy the sunshine and that I did not burst into flames when I left my apartment. I was so pissed off at my failure that I decided to leave the message.
I still don’t exactly know what to do with this site. I’ve thought of donating it to the orphans. Perhaps they can come over and apply their box of Crayolas to my monitor.