What I Learned About Famous Authors From Watching "Midnight In Paris" (dir. Woody Allen, 2011)

(Spoilers.)

• It's okay to call T.S. Eliot "Tom" if that's how he introduces himself.
• F. Scott Fitzgerald is a nice dude but his hair is questionable. And his wife is 12, if not in real age than in behavior and stature.
• Alice B. Toklas doesn't talk and is practically invisible.
• Ernest Hemingway would not be that much fun to hang out with, in part because he has to work his man-credentials into every conversation. Also, he hates you. He'll still get a drink with you, but he hates you.
• That Djuna Barnes, man, she can dance.
• It's fun to hang out, but in the end Gertrude Stein is the only one who will actively help you get your shit together.

New rule

If you come out with the best album of the year, you are allowed one extremely obvious T.S. Eliot reference in your lyrics. Just ONE though, and if this album is dethroned, that judgment could be overturned as well.

Colson Whitehead on "...J. Alfred Prufrock"

From the reading I went to last week:



The event was called "Love: A Rebuke," so the emcee for the night insisted before every reading that we offer unironic love to each author up, as if it wouldn't have occurred to us otherwise. I especially liked Heidi Julavits' excerpt as well.