July 19, 2009
Hollywood plans in the works to adapt the eco-classic The Monkey Wrench Gang, starring Matthew McConaughey and directed by the person who helmed “Twilight?”
Ugh. I’m with Will Potter:
Monkeywrenching can be sexy and fun when it’s “just a story” produced by Hollywood. When the same narratives are connected to political struggles, it’s “terrorism.”
July 18, 2009
61 essential reads. (Why 61?)
Among the Pynchon, Delillo, Coover, et al, we find … Hawthorne? Kafka? Shakespeare? Fun stuff. (via my apparently only source for content)
July 14, 2009
Well, goddamn, if it isn’t bookslut day over here. Like I just said a few posts below, you should probably skip me entirely and just go read their site.
But whatever, I can’t help this one. Here’s a pretty personal, brisk, and enjoyable review of The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships, and Other Adventures, a book, by coincidence, that I just devoured and have been re-reading in fragments recently:
I was looking forward to reading The Ethical Slut from a luxurious distance, making fun of its self-help exercises and probably turning up my prudish nose at its sex-positive sensibility. So, imagine my surprise when I found out that it is entirely inclusive of people who choose monogamy (as I did in the past), people who aren’t getting laid because they can’t find a willing partner they are attracted to (me now!), people who don’t want to get laid, and, well, basically everyone. And, imagine my even greater surprise when I started loving the book in all its thoughtful sluttiness, enough that I wanted to talk about it.
Me too. A non-cloying self-help book that’s actually helpful? Weird stuff.
July 14, 2009
Rather cool Web site The Second Pass wants to save us some trouble by firing 10 literary classics from the canon. Get out your righteous indignation hats, nerds! [via bookslut, which I guess you should really just go read]
July 14, 2009
[via bookslut, which also provides a link to a recent Times Online piece with this ludditerobot-bait of a title: "Why do Pynchon, Ballard and Wallace provoke such online loyalty?"]
June 19, 2009
One of which sold and one of which didn’t:
According to an article by Leon Neyfakh in this week’s Observer, [D.T.] Max’s proposal was scooped up by Viking Press at auction last week for a low–six-figure sum and will arrive in bookstores sometime in 2011. Meanwhile, [David] Lipsky’s treatment still hasn’t found an interested party willing to publish his “memoiristic sketch” about DFW; according to Neyfakh, even Lipsky’s current publisher, Random House, has passed on the project. The sticking point for publishers seems to be the fact that Lipsky’s project is based on a series of audiotaped conversations between Lipsky and DFW that took place while the two were on the road for the Infinite Jest book tour in 1996. One anonymous editor who saw both proposals said that “whoever [purchases Lipsky's proposal] is going to have quite a task turning it into a proper book,” but also admits that it “will satisfy a different itch, and that is to kind of hear that incredible music again: the sound of David Foster Wallace at full tilt.”
Like NY Mag’s Mark Graham, I’m hoping that someone picks up Lipsky’s book, which sounds pretty fucking rad (his “The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace,” published in Rolling Stone last October, is a must-read). [via bookslut]
May 22, 2009
Infinite Summer. [via kottke]
July 17, 2008
Via BoingBoing.
April 13, 2007
So, Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday at the age of 84.
There are plenty of lovely obituaries to be found. Here’s one I liked.
And here’s a great interview from 1992, published in Playboy, with his friend Joseph Heller in tow.
Truth be told, I’ve never been the biggest Vonnegut fan in the world. I loved Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle when I was younger, and for some reason I was really enthusiastic about Galapogos at one point. I can’t remember why. But his euphemism-rich prose always struck me as “too easy.” Which makes it ironic that he references Nietzsche several times in the Playboy interview — it was Nietzsche who wrote that “poets only muddy their waters to make them appear deep.”
I don’t think anyone would say that about Vonnegut.
In his essay “Cold Turkey”, Vonnegut wrote:
I put my big question about life to my biological son Mark. Mark is a pediatrician, and author of a memoir, The Eden Express. It is about his crackup, straightjacket and padded cell stuff, from which he recovered sufficiently to graduate from Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: “Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” So I pass that on to you. Write it down, and put it in your computer, so you can forget it.
Maybe it’s time to go read some of that “too easy” stuff over again.
