If you could create a bookstore, what would you put in it? What would you exclude? Would you specialize in any particular genre? Would your organizing principle be quantity or quality, or would you devise a way to have both?
Nearly all bibliophiles—that peculiar breed of people who feel more at home in bookstores than in their actual homes—have at some point posed such questions and daydreamed about the utopian store they would construct in answer to them, the store that would smoothly combine expertise and aesthetic preference with comfort and commercial viability.
Barnes & Noble announced on Wednesday that PIN pad devices in sixty-three of its stores had been hacked, compromising customers’ credit-card information.
In an effort to reduce children’s exposure to smoking, a Canadian publisher has removed references to Santa Claus’s pipe from a new version of “‘A Visit from St. Nicholas,” drawing criticism from anti-censorship groups.
The Whiting Foundation has announced the winners of its 2012 literary award.
“The content of the book—the nature of its characters, and the lethal cocktail of psychology, destiny, and coincidence that Emily Brontë has brewed to ensure her protagonists’ downfall—is exceedingly difficult to capture.” Francine Prose on the trouble with adapting “Wuthering Heights” for the screen.
At Popsci, Dan Nosowitz predicts that “the iPad Mini will be for literary snobs, and the Kindle Fire will be for dumb-dumbs who read airport garbage books.”
The current double issue of The New Yorker, the Politics Issue, closes the book on New Yorker cartoons of this election cycle. Which is too bad, because the election cycle is still furiously pedalling along.
What’s worse, the next issue arrives on November 5th, right before Election Day.
So that sort of puts the kibosh on there being any politically relevant cartoons in the magazine for yet another week.
Writing ecstatically about an ecstatic movie, it’s easy to get carried away—to see most clearly what sparks the most intense emotion—and one of those things in the viewing of Leos Carax’s “Holy Motors” is the impulsive vigor of the filming: the tone of spontaneous invention, creative urgency, documentary curiosity. In fact, that’s its very subject: it’s one of the deepest, truest, and wisest films ever made about the passions and perils of making films. It’s centered on an actor, Oscar (Denis Lavant), who prepares in a stretch limousine for performances that he delivers on-location in Paris. Of course, a movie that depends so crucially on makeup and costume—as well as on décor, live musical performance, choreography, simulations of violence, and, for that matter, digital effects—is also the work of meticulous preparation.
Though a number of big-time ballet figures—Frederick Ashton, Agnes de Mille—have said that Anna Pavlova was their inspiration, their thunderbolt, some people still regard her as a chocolate-box ballerina, a view that is probably, for the most part, the product of her extremely conservative repertory. At a time when the Diaghilev company was converting ballet to modernism, Pavlova showed works about poppies, dolls, fairies. And because she was the lead fairy, her self-presentation was notably twinkly. Or that’s the way she seems in the brief films that we have of her.
Yo, remember me? The beardy dude on page 39, waiting in line at the pretentious coffee bar where Amy and Gordo had their knockdown drag-on fight? The “scruffy Italian-American sweetie-pie who’s forever trying to pygmalion his stoner vacuity into depth”? Dude, I’m back!
I was at Amy’s yoga class in the first story, which is why I ended up standing behind her in line at Filtered Truth, even though I don’t know her or Gordo. Also, I work at the club where Gordo buys his drugs (pp. 112-133), and then later, on page 203, I’m on the bus when Gordo has his crise de coor. (I’m the guy who puts his hand on Gordo’s shoulder and tells him, “Chillax, bro.”)
Last May, a piece I wrote for the magazine about genre fiction’s new-found respectability caused the digital highway to buckle ever so slightly. Despite my professed admiration for many genre writers, I was blasted for thinking that literary fiction is superior to genre fiction, and for not noticing that the zeitgeist had come and gone while I was presumably immersed in “The Golden Bowl.” Apparently, the dichotomy between genre fiction and literary fiction isn’t just old news—it’s no news, it’s finis, or so the critics on Slate’s Culture Gabfest and the folks who run other literary Web sites informed me. The science-fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, for instance, announced that literature “is the extant body of written art. All novels belong to it.” Is that so? A novel by definition is “written art”? You know, I wrote a novel once, and I’m pretty sure that Le Guin would change her mind if she read it.
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1956 drama “The Wrong Man,” (which I discuss in this clip) is, in some ways, the Hitchcock film for people who don’t like Hitchcock films. That, at least, is what it was for me, decades ago, when I was more sensitive to his showmanship than to his artistry and more moved by surprise than suspense. The double documentary basis of this movie—its origins in a true story that Hitchcock follows meticulously, and its filming largely on location in New York—lent it (so I thought) an air of self-constraining sincerity and curiosity that, nonetheless, got to the very essence of the filmmaker’s moral universe (so I still believe). It’s not Hitchcock’s most symbolically rich film, nor his most visually extravagant, but it’s the one in which his severe religious worldview is most overtly expressed. (It also includes some remarkable performances by Henry Fonda and Vera Miles—whose moments of dissociation chilingly foreshadow Tippi Hedren’s in “The Birds” and “Marnie”).
“A language without umlauts sounds monotonous, harsh, and boring.” Arika Okrent on Johann Schleyer, a German priest who created Volapük, a heavily umlauted universal language, in response to a calling from God.
A Beijing newspaper reports that China plans to turn the Nobel winner Mo Yan’s hometown into the “Mo Yan Culture Experience Zone.”
Categories: American (New) Locations: various Noise Level: quiet, occasional laughter Wi-Fi: Yes Attire: Dressy Good for Kids: No
DENVER LOCATION:
★★☆☆☆
I came to hear the specifics of Romney’s tax plan, but when he brought it out I was pretty disappointed. Closing loopholes was a bizarre pairing with cutting off funding for PBS, and didn’t make sense over-all. Health care wasn’t bad, though. Wouldn’t recommend, but I didn’t hate it.
