While I’m hung up writing something about Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, occasionally remembering that I have a couple of months of movies backlogged, including, now, Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, here’s a quote relevant to both of those titles, from Daniel Handler in the New York Times Book Review this past Sunday: “[C]alling a writer ‘Midwestern’ seems like a way to start up that familiar and imaginary battle between Plain Novels Full of People With Integrity and Dirty Fingernails versus Showoffy Books About People Having Martinis in Penthouses.” That’s obviously relevant to Franzen, and also to Eugenides, both of whom offer up contrasts between humble men of the Midwest and more sophisticated Easterners, but also to F. Scott Fitzgerald. (I’ve actually never read any Lemony Snicket. I guess I should remedy that.) Continue reading

Commenting on the Messud kerfuffle, Rohan Maitzen points to this article by Meredith Maran. Maran writes about women she knows, or has heard of, who’ve been asked to revise their novels to make characters more “likable.” She’s specifically talking about “literary” novels. This generally means the more sophisticated reaches of the “mainstream,” books that are reviewed in the ordinary books pages of papers like the New York Times, instead of being banished to the one paragraph per book “crime” or “mystery” section (unless they’re best sellers or by seriously big-name authors like Stephen King, in which case they’re promoted to the front page and get extra space). Some genre writers, notably China Miéville, an English writer of literary-tending science fiction, have argued against the “mainstream” definition itself, on the grounds that “mainstream” is just another kind of genre, like thrillers or “chick lit.” Be that as it may, in the US, at least, it seems to be the case both that “mainstream” is treated as the default (or “unmarked”) variety of fiction, and also that the dividing line between literary and mainstream is not clear and bright. Look at two “women’s” books that my mother lent me more than a year ago (neither of which I’ve yet been able to read more than a dozen pages of). The Help is billed as literary fiction, and clearly has literary aspirations, but I’d call it basically “mainstream.” The way it plays with point of view and with dialect is unusual for a... Continue reading

Claire Messud’s latest novel, The Woman Upstairs sounds interesting, certainly more so than her previous one, The Emperor’s Children (oh no, another novel about young people obsessed with David Foster Wallace!). The title makes me think of Hilary Mantel’s early novel, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, which is one of my favorites, an Orwellian gaslight mystery set behind the walls of purdah, but it could also fit well into my next “Boston-area novels” series, if there ever is one. But on the Internet, there’s been much brouhaha over the interview Messud did with Publisher’s Weekly, part of which, presumably edited down from something a bit longer, they published online. As the interview presented, the interviewer, a woman, asks Messud, “What are we to make of Nora Eldridge, [the protagonist]? Because she is angry, really angry.” Messud answers at length, talking about the kind of novel she intended to write. The follow-up question is, “I wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora, would you?” To this, Messud replies, in essence, that the question is a mistaken one. Writing a brief piece in Salon, David Daley characterizes Messud’s response as a statement that the interviewer’s question was sexist. Let’s leave aside the definition of “sexist.” Obviously what is meant is that the question wouldn’t have been asked of a male novelist, and that it’s wrong to have different standards for women and for men. Messud alludes to this question herself, earlier in the interview: she explicitly says that she had decided she... Continue reading

I’ve been in a bad mood for a little over a week. I think it’s because I’ve still got a copy of Backlash in the house. Every so often I feel compelled to give it another chance. I pick it up and flip through it. Oh, the Republican Party decided it wasn’t so much in favor of abortion rights, equal rights and equal pay for women, or NOW, after all. I can see how that would be disappointing, especially since it made future legislation more difficult. But is that evidence that US culture is now “backlash culture,” really? Or: Oh, in the late 1980s there were very few woman attorneys. But is that evidence that the number of woman attorneys was actually not increasing, or that by 2000 or 2010 we could still expect to see almost no more women working as attorneys than we saw in 1970? Or: Oh, here are a small handful of self-help books, summarized at length, that tell women how to attract men who want to marry them; and the writers think being a feminist or speaking your mind won’t do it. But are they so very different from the self-help books of any other decade? Are they even typical of the 1980s? Are they evidence that the feminist-inclined young woman of the 1980s is internally conflicted, demonstrating by her actions and beliefs that she’s under pressure to be less independent and more childlike than she feels is right? And what’s this “feminist psychotherapy” that... Continue reading

It’s a little hard for me to see, forty years after the fact, the importance of Mean Streets. It was Martin Scorsese’s first major outing as a writer and director, and marks his appearance as a major star—he was recognized as such almost immediately. From a film-historical point of view, Mean Streets illustrates several of what would become Scorsese’s hallmarks: the long tracking shots, the director’s cameos, the preoccupation with, well, mean streets. It’s a terrific opportunity to see a very, very young Robert De Niro, and an equally young and callow Harvey Keitel. But why has this movie been so loved, when an arguably “deeper” film like Papillon (released the same year) was so much less well received? Mean Streets is by no means a really arty film, and it doesn’t draw on European or avant-garde from preceding decades. I think I can detect, in the voiceover that accompanies the trailer for Mean Streets, a note of incredulity, almost asking whether this film really needed to be made, whether these kind of people really needed the validation of appearing in the place of heroes. It is a very ordinary story, about a couple of ordinary guys. They’re kind of doofuses, really, wandering around the streets at all hours of the night, drinking, overturning trash barrels, fistfighting, and generally acting as if they were twelve. Charlie would like to own a restaurant, but right now he works for his uncle as a collector, taking protection money from other restaurant owners.... Continue reading

In the comments section of Crooked Timber, in which I mentioned Susan Faludi’s Backlash (first published in 1991), Corey Robin (whose book I really liked) accuses me of talking about a book I’ve only skimmed. That isn’t true, but I’m not going to argue with him on his blog about the way he teaches the book (though I think it might be useful to raise the question why a partisan contribution to a political debate that’s still going on should be treated as canonical history). So I borrowed the book from the library for the third time and sat down with it. Why? Do I feel guilty for opining on a book I haven’t formed a proper opinion on yet? No. Am I going to finish it this time? Probably not. But I’m still too annoyed to put it down. On the one hand, there’s no way in heaven or hell I’m going to be able to read this book without whining in writing about how annoying it is. On the other hand, if it’s so easy to criticize that I have to ask myself why in the world it was published, why would I want to bother reading it at all? But having a blog means that whining in my private notes can be transformed into something that seems almost but not quite like useful activity. Even if nobody actually reads it. So: one thing, at least, even if the rest of it stays in my scratch files: (Okay,... Continue reading

Four times a year, Phi Beta Kappa puts out a newsletter, the Key Reporter, with capsule book reviews, an essay or two, maybe the text of a speech at a PBK event. For the past few years, the Key Reporter has been getting smaller, as the cost of postage rises, presumably, and it's now only printed and mailed two times a year, with all the issues available in PDF format online. As of this issue, though, the Key Reporter consists of a pamplet, about 5"x8". Instead of articles, it prints blurbs promoting the articles, and those square barcodes so you can read the whole thing on your device. Continue reading

I just saw Papillon (1973), and I have a lot to say, and it’s already written, so I’m going to post on it now. March movies, still coming up, will include From To Rome with Love, Mean Streets (also 1973), Rock of Ages, and Friends with Benefits. Papillon is a prison-break movie starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. (Cameos or small roles are taken by Vic Tayback, Bill Mumy, Victor Jory, Gregory Sierra, and Don Gordon.) McQueen plays “Papillon,” a thief who claims that he was framed for murder. Hoffman is Dega, the perpetrator of a counterfeit war bond scheme. Both have been sentenced to prison labor in the West Indies, after which sentence they’ll become indentured laborers, and after which time they’ll be free, to live in French Guiana though not to return to France. Papillon is a thug who promises to protect Dega in return for cash, to pay for bribes and boats, in what any filmgoer will recognize, way before the fact, are entirely futile attempts to escape. I realized while watching this movie that it’s an important movie. It’s aware of its place in the history of cinema and the history of its own times, and it moves both forward. In this film by a director of the pre-film school era, when this kind of intertextualism would really take off, there are allusions to Kubrick flicks like A Clockwork Orange and 2001 (even, it seemed, to The Shining, which didn’t appear until 1980!), to The Ten... Continue reading

Half of Framingham State’s new dorm sustained severe water damage after a fire that started when a student left a laptop on, sitting on top of a comforter. Continue reading

I’ve mentioned a few times that I was planning a blog post on women’s Templar novels. I’ve never got around to it; I have too much material to boil it down, and my feelings about these books are complex. But while poking around the Internet, trying to decide whether to start that post or not, I discovered first, that there’s a new one, available in the UK and Canada but not in a US edition as yet (Guardian review here), and second, that there’s a miniseries playing right now on the BBC’s Channel 4 of Kate Mosse’s novel, Labyrinth (Guardian review here, trailer here). Mosse’s first two novels in what’s now a trilogy, Labyrinth and The Winter Ghosts, and her other novel (of the three currently available in the US), Sepulchre, were the “women’s Templar novels” I was planning to write about. Labyrinth is a big book, and it will tell you a good deal about it to say that, though it appeared nearly simultaneously with The Da Vinci Code, it was accused of copying from it. Mosse’s books are much less ridiculous than Dan Brown’s are, however (though if you’re used to reading this kind of silly, conspiracy-oriented pseudo-historical romance, quite possibly you might not have seen Brown’s books as all that far from the normal). The historical plot concerns the Albigensian Crusade in the Languedoc region of France, in the Pyrenées, and the preservation of a mystical secret through the joint actions of two religious sects, a kind... Continue reading

If you’ve ever taught a small child to play “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on the piano, you may have discovered that the notes for “Mary” are the same notes the name is sung to in Nirvana’s “All Apologies” (sing, over and over again, and slowly, “Ma-ry,” and it becomes obvious). Also, “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” and “The Bear Went Over the Mountain” are the same melody, but you probably already knew that. Also “Simple Simon” and “Yankee Doodle.” If you’ve ever taught a small child to play “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on the piano, you may have discovered that the notes for “Mary” are the same notes the name is sung to in Nirvana’s “All Apologies” (sing, over and over again, and slowly, “Ma-ry,” and it becomes obvious). Also, For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow and The Bear Went Over the Mountain are the same melody. Continue reading

Well. In the two days since I put up that last post, traffic has been very significantly higher than usual. Is there a connection between the two events? Between 9:00 and 10:00 this morning, there were nine clicks on what’s by far my most popular post, the one on Ray Bradbury’s story, “All Summer in a Day.” Yesterday there were at least a dozen clicks on the same post (as well as several on other posts—thanks!). This story is apparently taught to middle school students in US-run schools all over the world, so that’s not so surprising, and based on TypePad stats (assuming these are accurate) I get references from search engines in a wide range of different countries. It’s also not unusual for the Bradbury post to get several extra clicks (statistically speaking) apparently through search engines, right after I put up a new post on a different topic, while the new post gets one or two or none—though I haven’t done a real analysis and this might be an observer effect. Eight downloads in less than five minutes, from the same Google search, is a little odd, though. What could I attribute it to? Who would click on the same old post several times, as a result of the appearance of a different post? Why? Is there a connection between my discussion about traffic and the generation of extra traffic? How could that be, when as far as I know, nobody read that discussion? It’s probably a coincidence. Continue reading

This blog gets an average of between five and 10 clicks a day. The number goes up occasionally, when someone clicks around the blog a while and looks at different pages or at the archive, or when I post a comment to a different and more popular blog on a broadly appealing topic like science fiction. It goes down during universities’ winter break and during the summer, and then eventually increases again throughout September and into October. Traffic seems to have increased slightly since I started the blog, nearly four and a half years ago. Those statistics come from TypePad’s basic statistics function, which tells me what pages people viewed, what other page linked to those pages (if any: usually this is Google Reader, a search engine, or a comment thread on a more popular blog), and at what time. It doesn’t tell me the IP addresses of the people who clicked, or how long they continued looking at the page. I could install Google Analytics and get some more information, but I’ve never gotten around to it. I’d have to set up an account with them, I think, and poke around to see how to use the tool, and from what I’ve seen, Google Analytics can slow web page loading. I also use FeedBurner. A couple of years ago, I switched the link at the side of the blog to allow the RSS feed to go through FeedBurner, instead of using the feed supplied by TypePad directly. FeedBurner has... Continue reading

UPDATED to fix actor information for Dinner for Schmucks. The Tempest: The Shakespeare play, with Helen Mirren playing the usually male role of Prospero, the magician-duke exiled with his daughter. Ben Whishaw plays Ariel (usually, though not completely, nude), Djimon Hounsou plays Caliban (made up as half albino, half mud-man). Russell Baker Brand, Alfred Molina, David Straithairn, Alan Cumming, and Chris Cooper are also in the cast. It seemed to me to be a reasonably good interpretation of Shakespeare. It was generally easy to tell what was going on and what was being said. Making Prospero a woman permitted a kind of intimacy between her and her supernatural servants (Ariel as air and light, Caliban as the earth), which might have been awkward otherwise, and also made her manipulation of her daughter a little less cringeworthy than it usually is. It also added a little extra awkwardness to her manipulation of Ferdinand, as her daughter’s suitor—she’s preparing him for entry into her very female world, not for entry into the world of adult men, as a male Prospero could have been claiming to do. The interpretation is very much that her magic, as much as her brother’s jealousy of her position, has alienated her from the social world, and that at the end she’s giving over attempts to exert power over other’s actions, not just Faustian attempts to peer into the unknown. I’ve never seen this play performed, so I don’t know how much of this is usual in productions... Continue reading

Somehow I had become convinced that I’d read lots of books by Ursula Le Guin, and only had to catch up on a few of them, like the young adult Earthsea trilogy. It looks, however, like I’ve read barely any of them: a lot of essays, a couple of non-SF young-adult novels, The Lathe of Heaven (just a few years ago), and something set in a Central European city that I now can’t find at all . More recently, I read the linked stories in Changing Planes (which I’m happy to see has apparently been moved back to the adult section, if only for the illustrations). I began catching up with The Dispossessed. Instead of writing one big post on The Dispossessed (I may write a big post or two about it later), I think I’ll post short pieces, from time to time, about various things in the novel that I think are interesting. The novel is about a two-planet system, one of the planets of which has been colonized by anarchists fleeing the other one. The story follows Shevek, a physicist from Anarres, the anarchist planet. He has chosen to be the first one from his home world to visit Urras, their ancestral home. Urras is much like earth, and the nation Shevek ends up visiting is a totalitarian version of a typical capitalist (or late-capitalist) society, much like North America or any country in Europe. There are two interleaved storylines. One begins at the moment Shevek leaves Anarres.... Continue reading

WGBH’s Boston Public Radio (a new program that’s been on the air for a few months, with a rotating cast of announcer/hosts, replacing Emily Rooney’s and Callie Crossley’s shows) did a segment yesterday on how horrible Internet commenters are, and it’s pretty interesting. Two points, though: First: This is a call-in show. That isn’t a dig: I have a running argument with my husband over whether a call-in show that’s on NPR, like On Point (which is on WGBH’s rival station, WBUR), and like most of the daytime newsmagazine programs, is somehow on a higher moral plain plane than something like Rush Limbaugh. He says it’s not. I disagree, but he does have a point. Second: Unless I heard this wrong, the hosts were suggesting that Yelp should get rid of user comments. Isn’t that just what Yelp is? Is there anything to it except user comments? But please don’t take this as a negative attack. Continue reading

I’d been putting off buying Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, D.T. Max’s biography of the recently late David Foster Wallace. But also I was nearly obsessively returning to the Amazon page to reconsider it. Eventually, needing something nonfiction to read, I gave in. At one point, I’d seek out and read anything Wallace wrote, but eventually gave that up—the nonfiction first, a lot of which I haven’t read (in this, I’m the opposite of many of Wallace’s fans, especially among journalists, who really adore the nonfiction, and especially the pieces I tend to like least), and eventually the fiction, too—Oblivion doesn’t fall into the category of books I’m going to borrow from the library enough times that I really ought to buy them[1], though actually there are only three stories in the collection that I don’t already have in magazine form. I’d gone through the same nearly obsessive process with The Pale King, which, similarly, I eventually broke down and read. It’s not too surprising that the biography itself raises the question whether it really needed to be published, and whether anyone really needs to read it. The book ends with what for many readers, most probably, will be the starting point from which they decided to pick it up: Wallace’s suicide and what led up to it; and what he had in mind for The Pale King, the unpublished and uncompleted manuscript that would be his final novel. Most of this material appeared already in Max’s 2009... Continue reading

Joan Wickersham op-ed in Globe last Saturday, on grammar: But before you go lie down, you’ll need to lay down your fork. “To lie,” means “to recline”; “to lay” means “to place or put.” That’s pretty straightforward, assuming that this is all happening right now. But suppose it happened yesterday? Suppose that yesterday you ate a lot, and then you got rid of your fork and then reclined? It would be correct to write, “Yesterday I laid down my fork and then I lay down.” So can we say that if you recline today it’s “lie,” and if you reclined yesterday it’s “lay”? Not exactly. Suppose you want to say that yesterday at your grandmother’s you ate a lot and then made a decision to go and recline? It happened in the past, and yet the correct way to say it is, “I decided to lie down.” Why? Because “lay” is the simple past tense of the verb “lie,” but in the sentence “I decided to lie down,” “to lie” is the infinitive form of the verb, which here functions as the object of the simple-past-tense verb “decided.” That’s why. She’s right, of course. On the other hand, I cannot actually bring myself to use the past tense of “to lie down,” in any situation where I feel required to use it correctly. In a blog post, I’ll instead write something like “decide to lie down,” rather than write “lay down,” which seems stilted and actually a little bizarre. In... Continue reading

I may or may not get around to seeing the new Die Hard movie—I saw the last one, but I think I missed the third—but I thought it was interesting that two different movie critics decided to write about it without actually really reviewing it. In Slate, Eric Lichtenfeld writes about the tag line, instead, and at the Tor blog, Ryan Britt publishes a predictive review he wrote before he actually saw the actual film, with notes interspersed showing what he’d gotten wrong. I had already thought about reviewing the trailer. (This is the version I saw in the movie theater. There are others, but it looks like they all use the same music, in one form or another.) Because it’s a really good trailer. And it’s good in part for the reasons Lichtenfeld gives, for why the tag line is so memorable. Or rather, if the tag line (you know, “Yippee-ki-yay, m-f-”—I think only the first part in fact appears in the trailer) weren’t so memorable, the trailer wouldn’t work as well as it does. The tag line, as it appears in the trailer, is the moment of recognition, the moment when the viewer realizes that this is a trailer for a new Die Hard. (Which is exciting, for reasons explored in the Lichtenfeld and Britt pieces, even though the viewer also knows it’s not likely a new Die Hard is necessary, or that it’s any good.) What I liked was the way the music parallels that moment of... Continue reading

In the past I’ve found it hard to follow the internal arguments about whether “faith in the Internet” has been somehow inflated. Besides reviews in magazines, there was Tom Slee’s three-part discussion of Evgeny Morozov’s attempted takedown of enthusiasts, The Net Delusion. More recently, Morozov wrote a scathing review of Steven Johnson’s book, Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age. Johnson replied, and Morozov replied to the reply: Johnson “doesn’t understand my critique.” I don’t think Morozov shows anything of the kind. What he shows is that Johnson doesn’t accept the assumptions that Evgeny Morozov claims underlie Johnson’s own argument. Johnson and others describe a more or less loose collection of progressive tendencies that can be enabled either by the Internet or by institutions that are like the Internet in certain relevant ways: he describes what those ways are. But that isn’t enough for Evgeny Morozov. He wants to push the idea that there’s a thing called “Internet-centrism,” a real thing, the nature and so on of which he thinks people ought to understand before they dare to talk about its effects publicly. Yet he himself can’t or won’t explain what he means by it. Equally, he can’t or won’t find any public, human representative of it who accepts the label for himself. He uses the word “Internet-centric” like the name of a disease; you wouldn’t expect a sociopath to accept the label for himself, either. Some questions about why Morozov comes down so hard on Johnson:... Continue reading

Moneyball: Manager of a baseball team, with limited budget, puts together a winning team by focusing not on a player’s ability to play the whole game, but on his ability to do one thing well—get results in a way that counts—all worked out by computers. Not bad, though I can’t say I cared about it much. It’s based on a book by Michael Lewis, but obviously had to be stripped down to a single story. It wasn’t so obvious that a “composite” character, a very young stats expert who’d been educated in Yale’s economics department, had to be made up for Jonah Hill. The human interest becomes aging . . . or maybe specifically aging in a very youth-oriented career like baseball, where everybody except the very best hits a point where he just can’t keep up, and the very best get old eventually . . . or maybe overcoming the bias in nature and society against aging (like other defects) through science and careful management . . . or something. At one point the script was in the hands of Aaron Sorkin, and it shows in the main character’s sense of victimhood, especially at the beginning, and in the way getting sports right is made to stand in for beating all the forces of economic injustice and stupidity. Sorkin really ought to be left to be an auteur, and to direct his own writing. I can’t say I loved Studio 60 or The Newsroom (the first episode, which I... Continue reading

At the academic anthropology blog, Savage Minds, this post, the first in a series, on Jared Diamond’s most recent book, is a nice example of how to write about complete books on the Internet, especially when you’ve got too much to say. A lot of times I end up abandoning a piece, especially about a nonfiction book, because I’m not sure how to approach it. In part, I worry about sounding too critical and writing a piece that ends up offputting. In part, I think, my model for what writing about books should be has become something like Andrew Seal’s Blographia Literaria. Seal, and the bloggers who wrote like him, always set each book in context with finality and authority, indicating its proper place in a larger discourse, apparently certain that they knew what was expected in the best literature-discussion circles. But even if I felt competent to do the same, which I don’t, it wouldn’t really get at what I wanted to say about my reading. Continue reading

(What’s antiprise? It’s the opposite of expertise.) If you’ve been on the Internet in the last couple of weeks, you’ve probably run across playwright David Mamet’s weird screed against gun control and Obama. Now Andrew Sullivan (late of England’s blessed shores) has weighed in (via LGM and Ta-Nahesi Coates). As Coates notes, Sullivan presents himself as the Voice of Reason as usual. He characterizes Mamet’s blather quite correctly: “This is a sentence only a teenage anarchist could write.” Harsh. And yet Andrew Sullivan goes on to write nearly 650 words, plus a graph that he apparently has spent the time to work out himself (though maybe he’s had his research assistant do it for him), explaining the actual data that would have to be used in order to support Mamet’s factual claims, and explaining how they actually show Mamet’s factual claims are false rather than true. So I guess Mamet’s essay wasn’t such a waste of dead trees after all. It’s served an educational function of its own. And maybe Sullivan’s attack on Mamet, accusing him of being as sheltered and ignorant as “a teenage anarchist,” isn’t as harsh as it seemed at my first, superficial glance. Maybe it wasn’t an “attack” at all. A more charitable reading, one that takes Mamet’s importance in the world of thought into account (and the fact that they're both largely on the same side, politically, and neither gains from making the other really look bad), is that Sullivan is recognizing the fact that... Continue reading