Slate film critic James Parker on the Fantastic Mr. Fox movie:
That Wes Anderson, with his glockenspiels and drolleries and minutely faceted interiors, has travestied the raucous spirit of Dahl?
Month: November 2009
Why I hate Don Delillo…
And he isn’t the only male American novelist I hate. Not to be a feminazi or anything. There are just too many goddamn self-important-I-think-I’m-so-brilliant American writers… and nine times out of ten they’re men. The list goes on and on: Roth, Updike, Delillo, Bellows, Pynchon etc., etc.
James Woods (not the actor) wrote a pretty incredible article in 2001 about the need for American novels to “abandon social and theoretical glitter”.
The Great American Social Novel, which strives to capture the times, to document American history, has been revivified by Don DeLillo’s Underworld, a novel of epic social power. Lately, any young American writer of any ambition has been imitating DeLillo – imitating his tentacular ambition, the effort to pin down an entire writhing culture, to be a great analyst of systems, crowds, paranoia, politics; to work on the biggest level possible.
The DeLilloan idea of the novelist as a kind of Frankfurt School entertainer – a cultural theorist, fighting the culture with dialectical devilry – has been woefully influential, and will take some time to die. Nowadays anyone in possession of a laptop is thought to be a brilliance on the move, filling his or her novel with essaylets and great displays of knowledge. Indeed, “knowing about things” has become one of the qualifications of the contemporary novelist. Time and again novelists are praised for their wealth of obscure and far-flung social knowledge.
Richard Powers is the best example, but Tom Wolfe also gets an easy ride simply for “knowing things”.) The reviewer, mistaking bright lights for evidence of habitation, praises the novelist who knows about, say, the sonics of volcanoes. Who also knows how to make a fish curry in Fiji! Who also knows about terrorist cults in Kilburn! And about the New Physics! And so on. The result – in America at least – is novels of immense self-consciousness with no selves in them at all, curiously arrested and very “brilliant” books that know a thousand things but do not know a single human being.
Great Canadian Song Quest
Say what you will about the new Radio 2, love it or hate it, today was amazing. They commissioned 13 artists to write songs about each province and territory and all of them were good, several of them were downright fucking phenomenal. I loved every second of it. I heard of several new artists I’ve never heard of, and some of them just knocked my socks off, especially the women representing Nunavut and the Yukon, Lucie Idlout and Kim Barlow. Where the fuck have they been all my life? And Saskatchewan? Deep Dark Woods? Amazing.
Check out the songs, maybe even buy a few if you’re feeling saucy. This just seems to me to be a win win situation. It’s the best possible way to spend taxpayer’s money – supporting independent artist, creating beautiful beautiful music and memorializing some lesser known Canadian places like Singing Sands in P.E.I. and Good Time Charlie’s bar in Saskatoon. Good job CBC!
Yes I’m a perv…
But the boy fills out a t-shirt. And it gives me a girl boner.
Summing up my shameful Twilight love…
The Washington Post has a good article about smart literate folks who can’t help loving Twilight. I confess.
The people who have not read “Twilight” think they are astoundingly brilliant when they point out the misogynist strains of the series, like how Bella bypasses college in favor of love, like how Edward’s “romantic” tendencies include creepily sneaking into Bella’s house to watch her sleep, like how Bella’s only “flaw” is that she is clumsy, thereby necessitating frequent rescues by the men in her life, who swoop in with dazzling chisleyness and throw her over their shoulders.
In response: We know. We know.
The women who have succumbed to “Twilight” have heard all of these arguments before. They wrote those arguments. This self-awareness is what makes the experience of loving “Twilight” a conflicting one, as if they had all been taught proper skin-care routines but chose instead to rub their faces with a big pizza every night.
Pretty much. Props for inventing the word “chisleyness”.
This guy…
He might be a dope, but he’s MY dope. I have no idea why I love this man.
The man is a genius…
Ta-nehisi says stuff I hate to acknowledge, and says it just oh-so elegantly. Fuck I’m jealous:
One more thing–I think if you’re really concerned about equality, be that gender, ethnic, religious whatever, you have to come terms with the fact that this means equality even for individuals you don’t much like. It means equality for people who you feel consciously exploit inequality for their own individual gain.
You don’t get to infer that Juan Williams is a porch monkey because you disagree with him. You don’t get to objectify Sarah Palin because you think she’s an awful person. Not if you expect people to take your concerns seriously. I said this already, but it bears repeating–a principle applied only to people you like, mocks that principal. We don’t raise these questions about gender for Sarah Palin’s benefit–we do it for our own.
Update Number 2
Did you notice that her voice gets shriller and higher and weirder when she’s asked a question she doesn’t like? Like right now on Oprah, and like the newspaper question with Katie Couric?
PS: Wow, Oprah was totally wonderfully awkward. She pretty much thought the whole thing was bullshit, ESPECIALLY when Sarah tried to kiss her ass at the end. Still, I hate that she didn’t ask a few tougher questions.
Update
At least Oprah has the good sense to look fairly uncomfortable. And no one in the audience is cheering when Palin expects them to. Small victories, I suppose.
About to watch Oprah…
and my eye has already started twitching.
Here’s my first question: Ann Coulter wrote an entire book about how liberals want to turn everyone in to victims, including themselves. Obviously, Coulter thinks that those on the right are made of much stronger stuff.
Who’s made herself into a bigger victim than Sarah Palin? I’m pretty sure she’d blame a rainy day in Vancouver on the “liberal-biased-mainstream-gotcha” media. I’ll eat my shirt if she takes ANY responsibility for her disastrous showing in the campaign on Oprah.
And you know what? It doesn’t matter one lick how much proof you show of intellectual inconsistency and hypocrisy (ie. Coulter hates self-victimization but loves Palin and thinks she’s a victim of the vile liberals) from right-wing pundits, they just don’t care. AND NOBODY ELSE DOES EITHER. Why doesn’t it matter anymore?
Oh, Oprah…
I’m not an Oprah fan, but I did think that she had a tiny little itty bitty slice of integrity. Not much, mind you, but a little bit. I am no longer harboring any disillusions. Stephenie Meyer is on Oprah today and Sarah Palin will be on the show on Monday.
Oprah’s ratings have been suffering over the last two years, what with the ascent of Ellen’s show not to mention that her endorsement of Obama has alienated women on both ends of the spectrum, but especially those middle America-hockey-Sarah-Palin-loving moms. So now the pandering has begun HARDCORE. I’ve seen the previews of the Palin interview and it’s just about making me sick. Oprah’s lobbing her softballs and Sarah just winks and ‘you betchas’ her way out of all the important questions.
Now you would think being a billionaire a couple times over would be enough for Oprah, and you would think that she could continue her quasi-progressive agenda without worrying too much about ratings. But no, here she is pandering to “real” American women, quite insincerely, I might add.
I guess I’m really waiting for a powerful, successful so-called feminist woman with a wide-reaching platform to take Palin to task for being A) a moron, B) a drama queen, C) grossly incompetent D) a lying sack of shit and E) a total hypocrite. I’m banking on Barbara Walter’s doing it next week, but I’m not holding my breath. I tell ya, if I was 80-some years old and/or rich as balls, I’d be doing it. What the hell kind of consequences could either Barbara or Oprah have to face that they haven’t already dealt with?
Snazzy Picture of the Day
What my brain looks like when I’m trying to write.
Levi Johnston, why are you so dreamy?
Here’s everyone’s favorite dreamboat discussing posing for Playgirl with his “advisor”, a guy named Tank Jones. Watch the whole video, it’s quite fascinating: in my mind, it’s what makes America so wacky and wonderful, unlike Sarah Palin, which just make America wacky and scary.
Plus, he just so much reminds me of the hockey players on PEI, it’s hilarious.
11%
Went for a 6k walk yesterday, going to do the same today. Atticus is coming with me too.
UPDATE: Forget 6k. I climbed the escarpment and got totally lost and got back home two hours later. More like 10k. Man, I’m exhausted.
The only worthwhile story I’ve seen on CNN in about three years…
A special forces dog that was separated from her owner in Afghanistan during a roadside bomb attack has been found a year later.
Wow.
Two more takes at mid-twenties malaise…
I hate to admit this, but ‘Drinking in LA’ by Bran Van 3000 is a) awesome and b) so right.
Gertrude Stein:
It was not long after that everyone was twenty-six. It became the period of being twenty-six. During the next two or three years all the young men were twenty-six years old. It was the right age apparently for that time and place.
I like you, Kate Harding
“Democrats,” Shiner and Thrush write, “have long maintained that the Republican Party is hostile to all but the most conservative women” — and since I take that to be not a partisan opinion but a verifiable fact, I guess I just don’t get how anyone could be confused about why the GOP alienates women who are neither ultra-right-wing nor self-loathing. But apparently, many Republicans are befuddled.They just can’t understand what’s gone wrong, apparently, when they even try extra hard to “emphasize the contributions of their female members” — like Virgina Foxx, whose remarks about the healthcare reform bill began, “I believe we have more to fear from the potential of that bill passing than we do from any terrorist right now in any country.” And Michele Bachmann who, in a characteristically paranoid and nonsensical statement, recently called a teabagger protest against that bill “the Super Bowl of our freedom.” And Sarah Palin, who… you get the picture.
But what about the more moderate Republican women, the ones less likely to favor “folksy” ignorance and tinfoil millinery? Well naturally, they get punished! Maine representative Olympia Snowe has been warned that she’d better bow to the hardcore conservative base instead of continuing to take a more balanced approach to serving her constituents. And Dede Scozzafava was shoved out of the race in New York’s 23rd district last week because, unlike her more conservative opponent, Doug Hoffman, she believes in gay rights and reproductive freedom.
There really is something ugly going on in that country. I mean, it’s usually pretty ugly everywhere, but is it just me or is it getting worse?
Even two years ago on Fox it wasn’t completely taken as a given that all gays are bad/pedophiles, all Muslims are terrorists, all women are evil and or sluts unless they’re Christian warrior moms.
I know all politicians in all countries are pretty nasty: what I want to know is why everyday Republican Americans are LETTING their party peddle in such nastiness? It’s a serious impediment to almost anything. Don’t they follow demographics? America is not getting any whiter or any richer or any more male: Republicans have to start taking women and minorities seriously. I can’t think of anything more obvious and yet they don’t seem to get it. Why? Is there even a logical explanation that anyone can give me?
We started today!
Atticus and I took an hour long 6km walk around Dundas. No more of those sissy twenty minute walks around the neighborhood. He’s passed out on the ground, and I’m about to do some squats. Guh.
The 11% Challenge
Atticus (my big fat beagle) and I are both slightly overweight. The vet told us Atticus has to lose a few pounds and I figured I could stand to do the same.
So Atticus and I are going to lose 11% of our body weight to put us in a normal-ish range. I suppose we could lose 10%, but 11% is just a snazzier number. I’ll track my progress here, because I figure it’ll keep me honest.
Snazzy Picture of the Day
Alix Reads Too Much 