a financial event

With Oscar season imminent, David Milofsky looks at the relationship between literature and Hollywood.

Historically, Hollywood has done best with schlock epics like "Ben Hur," "Gone With the Wind," "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" and "Exodus." In cases like this, plot is all, and such literary tropes as characterization, description and tone hardly count at all. The films become screen vehicles for major stars and a cast of thousands is de rigueur.

More problematical are the occasional attempts to bring literary classics to the screen. Film versions of novels such as "Moby Dick," "Ulysses" and "War and Peace" are doomed from the start because of the filmmakers' excessive respect for the original text, which often gets in the way of producing an entertaining film.

It's worth pointing out that none of these adaptations won the Oscar the year they were produced. Part of the problem grows out of a reluctance to see fiction and film as disparate, if sometimes related, arts. Novels are all about characterization and language. What differentiates a good novel from a bad one often has virtually nothing to do with story. With film, however, an adage has it that, "if it's not in the dialogue, it's not in the play." Which means that what makes a novel great could very well make the film version of the same material tedious or, worse, pretentious. As a producer once commented in giving advice to a novelist who had turned screenwriter, "Whenever you start thinking film, Bube, think movie."

Via Rake's Progress

sunday short stack

"For most men life is a search for the proper manila envelope in which to get themselves filed." - Clifton Fadiman

• ArtScene Visual Radio is dedicated to visual art in Southern California.
• Will Oldham designed the upcoming spring issue of Zoetrope: All-Story.
• Unchain the women directors!
• Check out these cool products made from recycled chopsticks.
• America needs a hero to distract us from our woes. Thank you, brave/crazy astronaut lady.
• Create your own South Park character.
• Personal savings dropped to a 74-year low in 2006.
• I wholeheartedly support Tom Waits Tuesday.
• Genealogy of Influence is a "a visualization of the connections between the most influential writers, artists, philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians of Western culture."
• "Achievements: I was named Time Magazine's Person of the Year for 2006."
• LA Brain Terrain gives us the skinny on LA street names.
• Rake's Progress alerts us to the fact that Steve Erickson wrote the introduction to Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow and to the fact that Zak Smith does porn!
• But that's got nothin' on the sexy time that is Benicio del Toro as the Wolfman!
• More cats than you could ever need...

I'm just going to move to the internet

I don't know whether to love or hate Whitney Matheson of Pop Candy for turning me on to finetune. On an idea similar to Pandora, finetune lets you build playlists of 45 songs of your choice from a fairly impressive selection of albums. I think Pandora has a wider range and smarter suggestions, but finetune has play on demand and - of most interest to you - the option to embed your playlists. If you look to the right under the Music links, you'll find your choice of two playlists with many more to come: little girl blue (I can always think of heartbreak songs in a pinch - it's my gift) or old school girl groove. Just click on the little head in the upper left corner to switch back and forth in the user profile. If you register at finetune, you can search for 'escapegrace' and do whatever you're supposed to do when you find me.

Update: New playlists include americana the beautiful, I'm not indie, and ones & twos. Now I will stop and be productive. I swear.

the napkin project

I’m a latecomer to the Esquire Napkin Project, but I love it nonetheless. Writers, writers, and more writers have scribbled a story on a napkin. Luckily, their handwriting is transcribed beneath photos of the napkins because not everyone had two elementary school teachers for parents. Andrew Sean Greer actually has very nice penmanship and can tell a good story to boot:

The cold pressure you feel under the table is a gun. A real gun. I am a desperate man. I am a novelist. Don't look at me, just keep on drinking. Now what I want you to do — slowly, no sudden moves — is tell me a story. A true story, make it good. Maybe you woke up last week to a black sky and thought the world was ending. Maybe you called your girlfriend and said, I'm sorry about everything, and she said, Why? And you said, The world is ending, and she said, You idiot it's 3 in the morning. But thanks. I'm sorry too. And you know what? Let's get in my car and get out of here, I mean drive off and not look back. What about our friends, you ask. Screw them. I can't, you say, the world's not really ending. Well I am, she says, and that is how you lost her. Maybe a story like that. And when you're done, I want you to walk away. No funny stuff. Just walk away like nothing ever happened. Sit back and think. Order us both another Manhattan.

All right, begin....

I only wish there were more women represented. I remember when I spent a lot of time in bars scribbling on napkins, there weren’t too many women around.

cultural shorthand for being stupid

Jay Black takes on English majors too snobby to watch TV:

I was an English major in college. If you ever get the chance to be an English major, do it! It opens so many doors to your future: with your English degree you can teach English! Or, also, starve!

Being an English major, though, brought along with it one major annoyance: wannabe intellectual types who felt that since they read Keats or whatever, they were somehow better than the civilians who enjoyed Melrose Place or The X-Files.

seven deadly sins

My favorite Halloween costume ever was when I dressed up as Wrath in a group of the Seven Deadly Sins. I went the punk route – complete with dog collar and a ripped T-shirt that had F*ck Authority scrawled on it. Unfortunately, the way the T-shirt fell once it was on made it appear to say F*ck Authors. Either way…

This memory brought to you courtesy of the above calculation from Indexed.

thy name is vanity

People are way too concerned with what other people think about their choices in music. I registered my disgust sometime ago for iPod Wars and now – via we make money not art – we have the double-sided headphone. The inside plays whatever music you actually want to listen to, and the outside plays whatever music you think will make you appear cool. Tsk tsk, people.

(On the subject of vanity, I did not know that the Hammer was once called America's Vainest Museum.)

the living city

The Petersen Automotive Museum gets into the conservation game.

"Los Angeles: The Living City," a damaged 16-by-94-foot mural outside H&K Supermarket on Western Avenue, can be seen as it was with the installation of a one-third-scale, digital photographic reproduction in the Petersen's May Family Discovery Center. The Petersen installed a copy of the mural, created by Sandra Drinning in 1997, to highlight L.A.'s relationship with cars, culture and history.

But taggers have taken a toll on Drinning's quirky vista of L.A. freeways and landmarks. And at some point, graffiti artists covered large sections with foliage, buildings and people in an approximation of Drinning's style.

everything loose

I have decided - despite my better judgment - to start another blog. Everything Loose is a home for random photos and random words and you can visit anytime you like.

sunday short stack

"If you would be pungent, be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams - the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn."
- Robert Southey

• Beware the time-sucking potential of this celebrity face recognition tool at MyHeritage. Who knew I looked like Jessica Alba? (via Bad Advice)
• Is song recognition more your thing? Try Midomi. (via Pop Candy)
• Or maybe visual word association? Try Visuwords. (via Neatorama)
• You've seen the Japanese version of the Hodgman/Long Mac ads - now see the British version.
• So let me confess: We do meet regularly, usually at Cameron’s place, because it has plenty of room now that Justin’s moved out.
  
• Study a map of the Land of Oz.
• Or if you prefer: a map of Los Angeles bookstores.
• Jonathan Lethem has made a promiscuous list of stories available to anyone for adaptation at the cost of an agreement signature and a dollar.
• Submit your sad and lonely stories to the Rejected Fiction contest. You must provide at least five rejection slips. (via Maud Newton)
• Dear Mr. Amis: Why are you such a snob? (via The Literary Saloon)
• Considered but Discarded Names for the Indie Band Someone Still Loves You, Boris Yeltsin

she is gambling that he is good

Roe v. Wade v. David Foster Wallace in the New Yorker:

But neither did he ever open up and tell her straight out he did not love her. This might be his lie by omission. This might be the frozen resistance—were he to look right at her and tell her he didn’t, she would keep the appointment and go. He knew this. Something in him, though, some terrible weakness or lack of values, could not tell her. It felt like a muscle he did not have. He didn’t know why; he just could not do it, or even pray to do it. She believed he was good, serious in his values. Part of him seemed willing to more or less just about lie to someone with that kind of faith and trust, and what did that make him? How could such a type of individual even pray? What it really felt like was a taste of the reality of what might be meant by Hell.

there is no slander in an allowed fool

In The Nation, Terry Eagleton reviews Barbara Ehrenreich's Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy:

Dionysus is really an early version of the Freudian unconscious, a place of both hideous trauma and bounteous creativity. He is both Eros and Thanatos, ecstasy and the death drive in a single body. He has the lethally seductive appeal of what Jacques Lacan called jouissance, a concept that the late psychoanalyst's representative on Earth, Slavoj Zizek, translates as "obscene enjoyment." It is the fearful pleasure that springs from the dissolution of the ego. Abolishing the divisions between isolated individuals, which is what the Dionysian cult seeks to achieve, involves liberating a blissful force of libido. Yet since this means relaxing the ego's control over the obstreperous id, it also releases a terrifying violence. Dionysus is not only rock star but terrorist. In seeking to suppress Dionysus, however, the pigheaded ruler Pentheus, portrayed in Euripides's play The Bacchae, turns into a monstrous mirror image of his enemy. It is a suitable allegory of Bush and bin Laden.

Dancing in the Streets is really a Fall narrative. Once upon a time there was public ecstasy; then capitalism and Calvinism conspired to rout it. Charisma gave way, as it generally does, to bureaucracy. Ecstasy and Enlightenment failed to hit it off. In the eyes of an emergent middle-class order, popular festivity was that most scandalous and opaque of all activities, that which is done purely for its own sake. All over Europe, revelry was stamped on. The Catholic bishops of Ireland, Ehrenreich may be intrigued to hear, refrained from banning Irish dancing, but only because (1) it was patriotic, (2) the dancers keep their arms rigidly by their sides and (3) it is so physically taxing that it leaves you little energy for erotic activity.

Like most Fall fables, this one cuts a few conceptual corners; but it is full of fascinating vignettes all the same. We learn, for example, of the dance mania that gripped parts of Europe in the Middle Ages. In Utrecht 200 people danced on a bridge and refused to stop until it collapsed, drowning all the dancers. Dancing manias in Italy were often blamed on the bite of the tarantula; hence tarantella. As street dancing was censored, a great wave of melancholia--what we would now call depression--swept over Europe from the seventeenth century onward.

This is a perfect time to revisit Ehrenreich's 15 Steps to a Happier, Healthier American in 2007.

Via 3qd

the most mysterious human being of the century

In a New York Review of Books review of Mailer's latest, J.M. Coetzee goes deep:

The class photograph test—What will be the destinies of these children? Which of them will go the furthest?— has a particular pointedness in the cases of Stalin and Hitler. Is it possible that some of us are evil from the moment we leave our mother's womb? If not, when does evil enter us, and how? Or, to put the question in a less metaphysical form, how is it that some of us never develop a restraining moral conscience? In regard to Stalin and Hitler, did the fault lie in the way they were reared? With educational practices in Georgia and Austria of the late nineteenth century? Or did the boys in fact develop a conscience, and then at some later time lose it: were Iosif and Adolf, at the time they were photographed, still normal, sweet lads, and did they turn into monsters later, as a consequence perhaps of the books they read, or the company they kept, or the pressures of their times? Or was there nothing special about them after all, early or late: did the script of history simply demand two butchers, a Butcher of Germany and a Butcher of Russia; and had Iosif Dzhugashvili and Adolf Hitler not been in the right place at the right time, would history have found another pair of actors, just as good (that is, just as bad), to play the roles?

we gotta bring back drive-ins

Ethan Coen's latest project is called Drive-Away Dykes, a "lesbian road-trip action sex comedy" written with his wife Tricia Cooke and directed by Allison Anders.

When Marion, a skirt-chasing party girl, gets kicked out after her cop girlfriend finds her in bed with another woman, she convinces her buttoned-down friend Jamie to let her come along on a get-away-for-a-few-days drive-away car assignment from Philadelphia to Miami. Packed along for the ride are Jamie's crush on Marion, Marion's unrelenting desire to cruise every lesbian bar on the eastern seaboard, and — since this is Coen territory — a severed head in a hatbox, a mystery briefcase full of plaster phalluses, a mélange of angry pursuers, an evil senator, a bitter ex-girlfriend and loads of hot boyless sex.

Art from Norm Saunders Archive

our distant cousin

Escapegoat.