LIFE ON DIGITAL GRUB STREET
Oh hell — Tom Waits won’t be coming anywhere near New Jersey during his “Glitter and Doom” tour. Considering that the royalties from Springsteen’s cover of “Jersey Girl” will probably keep him in gongs and hubcaps for the rest of his days, it would be an act of noblesse oblige for Waits to venture a little bit north, but noooo. We’ll just have to satisfy ourselves with this video of his press conference announcing the tour dates.
Maybe someday I’ll get to go to a rilly big book festival, like the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. James Marcus went there, and he got to see Gore Vidal live in concert:
Vidal, in a wheelchair, was at the top of his game, whether he was taking Exxon to task for its mendacious, nature-loving commercials (”I sit there and pound the floor with my stick”) or putting George W. Bush through the wringer. His comic timing is better than ever–he works those pregnant pauses like a patrician Jack Benny. And as always, there’s a sense that the dramatis personae of American history are Vidal’s intimates, his playmates, his significant others. “I’ve been lying for a years about having read all of Aristotle,” he mused at one point. “Now I see what I’ve been missing.” For most writers, this would be an incidental mea culpa. But for Vidal, it’s merely a means of contact with the most pragmatic of our founding fathers, as if they belonged to the same book club: “Now, Benjamin Franklin was also reading Aristotle at one point….” Egged on by Smiley, Vidal gave Thomas Jefferson high marks for his prose: “He was the poet of democracy–until Whitman, who wrote a bit better.” He had less use for Ayn Rand: “Preaching greed? You don’t do that to Americans. It was in our first Christmas stocking.” Perhaps some of these zingers have been recycled from previous interviews, and as another friend (and Vidal zealot) later pointed out, he has “an entire herd of hobby horses tethered nearby.” Still, I felt very fortunate to be in the same room with this phenomenal man, who saved some of his best lines for the Q-and-A. Did he have any final thoughts on the late William Buckley? Long pause. And then: “I hope it’s not too hot.”
Marcus had some harsh words for Point to Point Navigation, Vidal’s followup to his wonderful memoir Palimpsest, and I had to agree — it’s an unworthy successor to Palimpsest.
How a musical version of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle, conducted by an 8-year-old, led Maureen Johnson to write a novel called Suite Scarlett. An interesting trip, all told.
Turns out that I missed a trick when I was promoting my book The Last Three Miles. Instead of just focusing on readings, public talks and trying not to grunt too many times during radio appearances, I should have been doing like Sloane Crosley, who not only constructed dioramas illustrating each of the essays in her book I Was Told There’d Be Cake, she also recorded a video tour for each diorama.
Since the paperback edition of The Last Three Miles probably won’t be out until the fall, I have some time to contemplate building a diorama of the Pulaski Skyway, with profiles of Frank Hague and Teddy Brandle looming in the background while little bursts of gunfire flash in the phragmites below. Since interest in the book was significantly goosed along by the bridge collapse in Minneapolis, I should consider building it in a way that would allow me to demonstrate what a Skyway collpase would look like.
I.F. Stone and a right-wing lie that won’t die, books about Muslims that Muslims aren’t allowed to review, and a Spice Girl abandons music for literature. Read all about it.
Site traffic must be falling off at Salon. That was my first thought when columnist Andrew O’Hehir boldly ventured forth to declare that he didn’t think it such a hot idea to have Guillermo del Toro direct a film version of The Hobbit. And if O’Hehir thought that riling the rubes — or, in this case, goading the geeks — would bring hordes of fans storming in to defend the honor of del Toro and Peter Jackson, who is producing the thing, he must be disappointed. As of this morning, I saw a mere 62 comments in response to his article after a week online. For a man who wanted to strike a mortal blow to the very heart of geekdom on earth, that’s pretty small potatoes. Why, the Tolkien fan sites do better than that in the first five minutes after posting such questions as: “Ian McKellen, Boxers or Briefs?”
The problem, I guess, is that O’Hehir’s argument is rather lame:
First of all, hasn’t anybody noticed that del Toro has repeatedly said he doesn’t like Tolkien, and that he never finished reading “The Lord of the Rings”? Here’s what he told me in Cannes in 2006, when I asked him about the influence of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis on his own work: “I was never into heroic fantasy. At all. I don’t like little guys and dragons, hairy feet, hobbits — I’ve never been into that at all. I don’t like sword and sorcery, I hate all that stuff.”
Let’s see, he doesn’t like “little guys and dragons” or hairy-footed hobbits, and “The Hobbit” would be a movie about what, exactly? Seriously, I think del Toro was speaking from the heart, and I think he’s right. His aesthetic is darker, more Gothic and more grotesque than the Tolkien-via-Jackson universe; it derives more from the medieval mire of middle-European fairy tale than from the high-toned, pre-modern northern European epics Tolkien was channeling. And I’m riding a major bummer if del Toro is shelving “3993″ (the third of his Spanish history-fantasy trilogy, after “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “The Devil’s Backbone”), his adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness” or his “Doctor Strange” blockbuster. All three of those projects are vastly better fits than the hairy-footed little guys and dragons.
Oddly enough, the news that del Toro isn’t much of a Tolkien fan convinces me he’s the perfect director for The Hobbit. If love for the source material was all it took, then Richard Linklater’s adaptation of A Scanner Darkly would be the masterpiece too many Philip K. Dick think it is. Give me a filmmaker who combines respect for the material with clear-eyed understanding of the structural and narrative demands imposed by film. Del Toro’s movies may be closer in spirit to the Brothers Grimm than the Icelandic sagas, but his understanding and appreciation of fantasy will carry him over that gap.
Lest we forget, Peter Jackson and his screenwriting partners were pretty ruthless when it came to reshaping Tolkien’s baggy epic, and the three films of The Lord of the Rings came out all the better for it. I never much liked the books either — they had great scenes and characters in them, buried in great stretches of dreariness and inert plotting — but I’m a complete fool for the movies. Getting rid of Tom Bombadil, amping up the fear-factor for the Ringwraiths and turning Aragorn into a self-doubting hero rather than a confident king-in-waiting brought The Fellowship of the Ring to life, and while The Hobbit is a more focused work than its elephantine sequel, I’m sure Jackson’s team will do it the same service. And the skill with which they rescued the Arwen love story from the appendices and made it a significant part of the main story bodes well for the planned follow-up film, which will troll through Tolkien’s Middle-earth writings.
So, bring on The Hobbit and its hairy-footed sequel. I’m pumped. And this time, I’ll be able to take my kids to the theater with me. Bring it on.
I never heard of James Bond jokes, and I’m old enough to remember the days when a new Bond movie was something that people actually got excited about. But here’s an example, via Eric Alterman:
007 walks into a bar and takes a seat next to a very attractive woman. He gives her a quick glance, then casually looks at his watch for a moment.
The woman notices this and asks, “Is your date running late?”
“No”, he replies, “I am here alone. Q has just given me this state-of-the-art watch and I was just testing it.”
The intrigued woman says, “A state-of-the-art watch? What’s so special about it?”
“It uses alpha waves to telepathically talk to me,” he explains.
“What’s it telling you now?”
“Well, it says you’re not wearing any panties …”
The woman giggles and replies, “Well, it must be broken because I am wearing panties!”
007 taps, taps his watch …
and says “Damn thing must be an hour fast.”
Cue sassy, John Barry-orchestrated saxophone.
Apparently the only way to get attention for your “literary” novel (apart from offering sacrifices to the gods and hoping Oprah will bring you into her club) is to write what people take to be a roman a clef about literary novelists, and therefore get columnists and journalists speculating about which literary authors you’re writing about. In other words, you make like Keith Gessen and write All the Sad Young Literary Men, and get the likes of Gawker wondering about the true identities of Keith, Mark and Sam. Hey, I subscribe to the NYRB and visit GalleyCat regularly, so I took a crack at the guessing game, but it turns out I’m still a piker at lit-gossip. And now Joyce Carol Oates and Scott McLemee point out that simply reading the book for its own literary sake would be a far better use of my time.
My pal Nick DiGiovanni, the world’s greatest unpublished writer, hopes to land himself a stay at the Yaddo artists colony in upstate New York. In fact, he asked me to write him a letter of recommendation — not because I have any juice with the Yaddo judges, but because I have a book out and I’ve read just about all his manuscripts, enabling me to comment on his steady, intriguing development as a writer long overdue for wide recognition.
I’d always been aware of Yaddo as a Big Deal, but only now do I appreciate just how Big a Deal it is. That’s because for a bit of relief from research reading I’ve been dipping into Beautiful Shadow, Andrew Wilson’s great biography of Patricia Highsmith, where I just learned that Highsmith spent the summer of 1948 at Yaddo, working on her first novel, Strangers on a Train. According to Wilson, Highsmith won her spot with the very helpful help of Truman Capote, who agreed to pull strings for her at Yaddo if she in turn allowed him to sublet her apartment on East 56th Street, where he would finish his story collection A Tree of Night.
Highsmith liked her liquor, as did many of her fellow artists that summer, and when work was done they would often hoof it to Saratoga Springs for cocktails. And what a crowd! Gawd, I love to think of Flannery O’Connor, probably working on Wise Blood, down the hall from Chester Himes, the father of Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones, while just across the way, Patricia Highsmith worked on a mean little novel about two men who exchange murders.
Highsmith loved Yaddo so much that she willed to it the bulk of her estate, including future book royalties. So if you pick up a copy of The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Price of Salt or Edith’s Diary, rest assured you are helping support future writers — including, I hope, a certain Nick DiGiovanni.
I’ll bet the writers on The Wire wish they’d heard about this before the show ended its run. I could see Avon Barksdale opening a pet store with a bunch of these in the back.
