The latest issue of Bookslut is up. There are two interviews, a thoughtful Dorothy Hughes profile by Sarah Weinman, and some disgraceful malarkey.
Author / DrMabuse
Roddy Doyle Damns Geisel
Ireland’s best-known writer, Roddy Doyle, has shocked the world. Just before realizing that his books weren’t selling as well as they used to, and looking for a desperate ploy, anything really, to get in the press, he decided that hate was in his best interest. “Green Eggs and Ham is a piece of crap,” he said. “Who the hell does that Seuss bloke think he is? He’s no doctor, that’s for sure.”
Roddy Doyle, a writer with a very ridiculous nose and the winner of some scrappy Booker thing that they also gave to Vernon God Little, announced that he would burn all of his Dr. Seuss books in a bonfire. “Who’s with me? I’m finished with him,” Doyle told a stunned audience in New York. “If he weren’t dead, I’d beat the shit out of him. You can dig up his coffin and I’d still beat the shit out of him. His bones aren’t so tough. I don’t care how short his books were. It’s clear to me that he needed an editor.”
Shortly after this statement, Doyle pulled out a small postcard. On one side was a photograph of his ass, his trousers draped around his legs. The words “Seuss Schmoose” were printed just underneath this terrifying image. On the other was Green Eggs and Ham, condensed to a mere twenty words.
“See? Too bloody long. I did my best to abridge it. And why did he nick Irish green?”
The timing of Doyle’s outburst could hardly have been worse, what with the recent release of The Cat in the Hat, the worst movie of 2003.
The Irish government — still guilty for the way that Doyle fulminates in public — are trying to prevent Doyle from ever addressing an audience again. Unfortunately, they allowed Doyle to slip past customs. Doyle, shortly before getting on board the airplane, offered a series of raspberries to perplexed security officers.
Actors Abandon Oscars; Winners to Be Determined by Staring Contest and Ro-Sham-Bo; Penn Reported to Introduce Shirtless Brawl Involving Photographers
I Guess So
The Guardian asks Ursula K. Le Guin a few questions. She spends much time clarifying opias and isms, and, at one point, even impersonates the French.
A Canadian realtor made the find of a lifetime when she put the late Marian Engel’s house on the market. Hundreds of letters were thrown away in garbage bags, from such heavy-hitters as Robertson Davies, Alice Munro, and Margaret Atwood, many of them of a very private nature. “Dear Marian,” read one. “Robertson keeps speaking in naughty epigrams. Do you know anyone who can drown Robertson in paper and get him to shut up?”
Mark Evanier has a tribute up to the recently departed Julius Schwartz. Schwartz was a tremendous figure in comic book and science fiction circles.
Locus has a recommended reading list up for 2003’s books, along with a tally rundown, essays from Claude Lalumière and Cynthia Ward. One Locus editor has promised science fiction fans that this incredible coverage was intentional, and that “it will be impossible for any of you to keep up.”
Time, of all places, tackles the troubling new territory of dude-lit. Although in Kyle Smith’s case, perhaps monkey lit might be a better term.
Frances Partidge, the last of the Bloomsbury set and a lady who had the decency to avoid Danny Bonaduce, has passed on at 103.
Michiko compares Thoreaux’s new collection to “an embarrassing letter to Penthouse magazine.” But this may have something to do with the unrelated news that men wearing nothing but coats have been buying a lot of extra copies of Old School.
And Padma Lakshimi has been spotted with an engagement ring. Asked if Rushdie, still married to his third wife, plans to marry her, she replied, “I guess so.” However, another journalist was asking Lakshimi about her jeans. So nobody has a definitive answer.
Assault on Carpenter’s 13
It’s bad enough that Hollywood Reporter has announced a remake of Assault on Precinct 13, one of the goofiest and grittiest John Carpenter films to come out of the 1970s. It’s bad enough that Ethan “Whiny Caucasian is My Middle Name” Hawke is slated to star in it. But the true crime here is that Carpenter’s racial dyanamic has been drastically altered for a safer, reactionary age.
One of the beautiful things about Carpenter’s film is that, much like Night of the Living Dead‘s African-American protagonist (whose race was never addressed), Carpenter had the guts to cast Austin Stoker in the aw-shucks, do-goodin’ sheriff role and the white-bread Darwin Joston in the criminal role of Napoleon Wilson (whose unlikely first name was never explained, despite Joston’s repeated offers to “tell you sometime”). Beyond Assault‘s unapologetic shooting of a kid and its guns daringly prodding out of moving cars (in 1976, no less), the film improved upon what could have been just an entertaining low-budget ripoff of Rio Bravo by taking the sheriff-criminal buddy movie dynamic and casting against racial type. It was a nice way of acknowledging the camaraderie, while very subtly suggesting to an exploitation film audience that ultimately one’s skin color didn’t matter when up against a common evil. Who needed Walter Brennan for comedy relief when you had black man and white man trying to defend an abandoned outpost? (Laurie Zimmer’s presence is a side issue I won’t go into.)
Laurence Fishburne’s a great actor, but to cast him as the criminal in the remake and Hawke (any Caucasian for that matter, but especially Hawke, an actor who, let’s face it, we all needed to see bitch-slapped by Denzel in Training Day) reinforces the terrible precedent that Carpenter was working against. Did we learn nothing from the multicultural universe of The Matrix: Reloaded? Did we learn nothing from Lando Calrissian? I fear that Fishburne will come off not so much as a goofball asking for a smoke, but as a mean bastard who momentarily mends his ways, ultimately with his own interests at heart.
One other major change involves this: “As the sun sets and a long night begins, a motley crew of policemen and prisoners reluctantly captained by a cop (Hawke) must band together to fight off a rogue gang that wants to free the mobster.”
Anyone who saw the original knows that the gang simply came out of nowhere and that Napoleon Wilson wasn’t even one of their concerns. Napoleon was just the wrong guy in the wrong place.
But Hollywood, somehow believing that the audience needs explanation, has modified Carpenter’s agile balance to appease their suburban focus groups. Once again, we’ll see an African-American helping Whity, his benevolent protector, and then abdicating back to a state of serfdom.
Criminal, I say. Outright criminal.