Best. Anchor Bay DVD Release. Ever.
And Tom “My time in Vietnam had a big influence on me” Savini is the most insane man in the film makeup business. If you check out the extras, watch his eyes light up when he contemplates pig intestines and exploding heads. That’s what movie magic is all about.
Oscar Villalon asks whether the Nobel’s really worth it: “Even the most erudite among us will have a hard time naming a single book by a great chunk of past laureates. How about that Sigrid Undset (1928)? Who could ever forget her, right? Or how about Par Lagerkvist (1951)? Or Jaroslav Seifert (1984)? Got those names tattooed on the brain, don’t you? And if you do, it’s because you’ve boned up on all the past winners for trivia night at the pub.”
Salon talks with Toni Bentley: “‘You could eat off my asshole,’ you write, describing your ritual ablutions. Can it be true that you did not see, touch or smell shit during the 298 anal penetrations you describe? Is that a realistic expectation for most people?”
Ah, nothing like the unfettered freedom of the Internet to encourage the seminal questions of our time. How long before Philip Roth is finally cornered by Rebecca Traister’s unequivocally eloquent mind on Portnoy? (via Ron)
You’re a moribund NYT journalist who can’t even treat Pulitzer Prize winners with anything close to respect. Do you smile much?
Only if you tell me how brilliant I am at making your life a living hell in fifty words or less.
That seems to me a silly way of making a living.
So long as the expense request forms keep clearing for my Prada purchases, I can’t complain.
That strikes me as unethical. Do your columns really matter?
Keller keeps me chained to this gig. I’ve tried pitching him on more feature stories, but he wants me to stay a jaded bitch. Plus, circulation says my shit goes down well right before that Ethicist guy.
Shouldn’t you be celebrating your interview subject’s achievements?
This isn’t People Magazine. This is the New York Times. It’s high-profile journalism for short attention spans.
Yes, but when your interviews can be read over a few sips of coffee, how can people enjoy the paper?
They read me again. And again. They see the photo against the white backdrop and they get the illusion of pith.
That sounds more like the Post.
Get with the program, kiddo. Tanenhaus has dumbed down the Book Review. Why stop with that section?
It’s difficult to find a first novel that conveys a mature and understated voice while daring to tackle as seminal a topic as imagination’s connection to the human soul, but Ben Rice’s Pobby and Dingan (opening excerpt here) is that novel. Pobby tells the tale of two imaginary friends of Kellyanne, a young girl in an Australian Outback mining town. The two friends are “lost” one day by Kellyanne’s alcoholic father and this sets into motion a remarkable series of events that demonstrate how important fantasy is when juxtaposed against the daily upheavals of life. Rice adeptly captures the nuances of rowdy Down Under vernacular (Mello Yello and all) and pommy prejudices while showing how Ashmol, Kellyanne’s brother who narrates the tale, gradually comes to understand his sister’s mentality. But more importantly, Rice has achieved a pitch-perfect balance between Balzacian reality and the plausible hyperreality that the novel is almost intended to get away with. While my colleagues at the Complete Review may quibble over the abstract nature of Kellyanne’s condition, I think they’ve failed to fully appreciate how Rice has created a self-sufficient fable for our times.
I will confess that recent personal events probably had my heart more ready to be scattered into a thousand shards. But with pomo dismissed in some circles as intellectual flummery and a literary climate encouraging mammoth “event” novels that are essentially trumped up popular fiction (now worse than ever, given that the most egregious cases are now taken seriously by the NYTBR), Rice has done the unthinkable. He’s written a thin novel that contrasts the human heart with its own sustaining requirements. Which is more than a dozen highly regarded authors could do with a single humorless sentence, much less a concept purlonied and distilled from Donald Barthelme.
A film adaptation of Pobby is in the works, but, even with Full Monty director Peter Cattaneo behind it, Rice’s story demands to be experienced on the page.