Non-Best Picture winner still mad

The adaptation of Walter Kirn's UP IN THE AIR faced off against "The Hurt Locker" and lost. Now Kirn, Hollywood expert, breaks it down for us in New York magazine:

"'The Hurt Locker' won that year. It wasn't a film that was widely seen at the time, and I didn't think it was a terrific movie — it bored me a little bit — but what seemed to win was Hollywood's guilt over having not paid proper attention to the Iraq War, our long national agony. Plus, it was directed by a female director, Kathryn Bigelow. To me, the movies that win have social dimensions that are ultimately noncontroversial."

Well, maybe. But he makes a better point about why "Up in the Air" didn't get more credit for dealing with "real-world" issues:

[Interviewer Jennifer Vineyard]: But "Up in the Air" also had social relevance — it dealt with job loss in the recession.
The country didn't want to face it yet. This is how absurd it gets with "Up in the Air" — they wanted to hire a plane and fly all these unemployed people to Hollywood for a free vacation as a publicity stunt. That is the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard — the most patronizing, tone-deaf thing of all time. Everyone thought the recovery would end soon. Jason Reitman was even asking, "Do you think by the fall ... ?" No one thought the recession would still be operative years later.

Ha ha ha oh boy. For the record, Kirn thinks "Lincoln" will win because of its connection with the President (?). By this logic, Congress and the President will have a Constitutional showdown in the year 2017... sounds plausible. (DOMA repeal? We can only hope.)

Nobody trolls it better than the English

This book came up in a library search for one of the referenced works... okay, it was THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, which I've never actually read cover to cover. (Dinesh D'Souza: "But I thought you went to liberal arts college! KABOOM!") I am impressed by the ballsiness of this title, and really this concept (though none of these authors are going to be stopping by to give the author a piece of their minds). I guess the analogy to its title would be a restaurant review called "Great Meals That Made Me Sick To My Stomach Afterward"?

This is a great example of how academic publishing (Princeton U. Press in this case) doesn't have to be boring or use colons on its titles.

The author, a senior research fellow (?) at Cambridge, is a 3rd viscount of Doxford (not a typo, it's in Northumberland), his father's name was Leslie and previously their family were barons. And this is a picture of him, also known as my face when coworkers schedule 8:30am meetings and then don't start them on time:

My well spent youth

One of my favorite lit professors ever, Arnold Weinstein, is teaching a free class on Coursera this summer encompassing Melville, Woolf, Faulkner, Borges... just sign up right now. It's not the same as attempting to read ULYSSES in three weeks while taking a full course load, but close!

Filmbook: Oscars 2013: Doris Kearns Goodwin knows how to party

Expect stacks of TEAM OF RIVALS movie tie-ins to mysteriously appear at your local bookstore as "Lincoln" chugs along toward Best Picture with its 12 Oscar nominations, announced this morning. Other big winners: Yann Martel, with "Life of Pi" picking up 11 nominations despite its middling reviews*, Victor Hugo and playwright Lucy Alibar, whose adaptation "Beasts of the Southern Wild" (beginning life as "Juicy and Delicious") was a surprise Best Picture and Best Director nominee, along with the youngest Best Actress nominee ever.

Losers: Leo Tolstoy ("Anna Karenina" picked up 4 including production design, which it deserves, but no acting or directing nominations) and J.R.R. Tolkien with 3 for part one of "The Hobbit" (better luck in 2015, right?)

Now if you will excuse me, I have some movies to watch.

Rumpus: Have you come to know why you write, or what compels you to do it?

Zadie Smith: No. No I don’t feel compelled. It was a job. In more recent years, I’ve seen that’s not quite true because if I don’t write—I do apparently need to write. Maybe it’s true. The way for me to deal with writing is to deal with it as a daily task I set myself and then I carry on. I don’t look at the big picture very often, I don’t know why that is, but it suits me better that way.

--from The Rumpus Interview with Zadie Smith

Still in need of a readerly or writerly New Year's Resolution? (You have until the 31st to lock those in. I just made this rule up, but it is completely valid.) Courtney Maum of Tin House asked a bunch of writers what they're doing and got some really thought-provoking answers. I like Matthew Spektor's in particular, being myself "at once a slave to habit and at the mercy of my flabbiest whims."

Now that he's set to score part of the new adaptation: Line from the GREAT GATSBY, or Jay-Z lyric?

Internet and books attached

Caught this story on "the future of libraries" on WNYC this morning and I just have to say: It makes me sad to think of a bookless library, but all this reminds me of the furor over the New Main Library in San Francisco, which replaced a library with more book space and was criticized for its "public-serving" design necessitating the culling of its collection. (I haven't been to that library, so I can't say for myself what the design accomplished.) I believe this was in Nicholas Basbanes' PATIENCE AND FORTITUDE which is all about book collectors and archives. Here's an article about that book and Nicholson Baker's review of the library in the New Yorker, which is stinging. And that's your wild-goose chase for the day!

Spotted in the courthouse

Hey, are you a YA editor at a publisher rhyming with "Carper Hollins"? Did you send the person you live with to jury duty recently? He and I barely made it out of our required service yesterday. He did not laugh at my terrible joke but I won't hold that against him, for it was terrible. And this is the book he was reading.

(As part of questioning we were asked to list the occupations of the people we lived with, but his was not so thrilling when you have a TSA agent and an old-school gravedigger in the room. Again, no offense meant.)

I myself was reading snippets of Jess Walter's BEAUTIFUL RUINS when our breaks were too short to do work but too long to stare at the wall.

I won't say no - how could I?

More and more people in my workplace have begun using the word "ask" as a noun. (Example: I have a quick ask for you -- can you look up X and Y statistics for me?)

The only place I have run across this usage is in the title of Sam Lipsyte's latest novel, in which "the ask" is a request for a substantial donation made to a donor. I don't know whether this is relevant, but I don't work in development so the people I know who use it do not use it like this.

Anyway, it is ridiculous and needs to stop. Ask is a verb. It grates on me so, I'm about to start doing that first-grade-teacher thing where I say "You mean, you want to ask me to do something? I don't know, can you?"Potential substitutions include the accurate "request," the elegant "query," the utilitarian "question" or unfortunately "demand."

One-Star Revue: THE PASSAGE OF POWER

One-Star Revue returns with extra vigor in 2013. This month, we take a look at some of the best-reviewed books from last year.

The latest installment of Robert Caro's expansive biography of Lyndon B. Johnson made best-of-2012 lists all across the land. Caro is very old now, and researching the next installment in Vietnam (as he has said he will) will be a tough endeavor for him, but at least he can bask in the unqualified support and respect of readers everywhere. No one would dare to criticize the work of this nonfiction titan, right?

Ah, Internet, you never disappoint. Even removing reviews that address a potential cover-up in the matter of the JFK assassination, what riches abound:

• "This book contains the most ungrammatical writing I have ever encountered."
• "Are we reading serious history or merely fat Si Newhouse copy?"
• "He never even begins to explain why the early sixties was marked by so much hope and enthusiasm and excitement."
• "Once you read the book, and check the sources Caro uses, you can see what he is up to... Very unbalanced and selective in order to make LBJ somehow look good and presidential."
• "The one book that Caro does seem to have read is a good one." Actually, this is an excellent burn and I plan to save it for future use.
• "The frequent repetition of [Caro's] earlier points reads like an essay from a student lacking confidence in his own paper panties thesis."
• "When a man of Caro's unarguable caliber gives four decades of his life to do the definitive biography of a key figure in our time, we expect him to BE THE EQUAL of his subject."
•  "Well, without having read one word of this part, I must say, that I am disapppointed."
• "Actually this book is not as bad as my 1 star rating would suggest, but given the old wives tales that are in this book and who this is a 1 star rating is dead on."

Free novel idea

Composition-book heiress keeps a secret diary for most of her 88 years of life, chronicling her young widowhood, the changing face of New York City and the places that made her happiest. (Source.)

In the future, we will all be Thomas Pynchons

It may be impossible to get a current photograph of him, but the famously reclusive author will publish his first new book since 2009. To the woods, everyone! (Oh wait, he lives here in New York? Never mind.)

December Unbookening

Received for Christmas: 14 books
Checked out of the library: 4 books
Bought 4 books (2 Kindle, plus THE ROTTERS' CLUB and BREAKDOWN)
22 in

Returned to library: 9 books (none out as of the end of the year)
Gave away: 3
Donated: 18
30 out 

Meg Hourihan's Makeit.do blog, as featured in a January unbookening post, hasn't been updated since August, but in the meantime she made a dress out of a duvet, took advantage of the NY Public Library app (wait, I need this toy!) and stopped herself from buying a new computer just to post more often. I can relate. I could have used that magic computer this week as responsibility whumped me too hard to put coherent thoughts together.

Want to play the unbookening game? Two easy ways to get started that don't involve sacrifices (YET):

1. Decide that for January, whenever you get a book you will write it down. Buy, borrow, find... steal... This will give you a baseline into where all your books are coming from. 

2. Pick a bookshelf in your home -- just one shelf -- and go through each of the books on it to see if you want to keep it in your permanent collection. Did you love it when you read it, but have no desire to go back to it? Did you buy it because you wanted to read it someday, but the original reason for your wanting to read it has evaporated? These are prime candidates to be donated because they come with the weight of obligation. Obligating yourself to read things is a fine practice, but it shouldn't feel like a 100% drag.

New Year's Reading Resolutions 2013

1. Call an electrician to fix our power so I can blog because the handyperson my landlord sent over claimed he couldn't turn it back on till Friday, and my roommates refuse to pay for a real electrician, preferring to spend New Year's Eve in the dark

2. Read at least 12 books on the Modern Library list so I can finish it in the next 5 years.

3. Read THE POWER BROKER so the next time I rip on Robert Moses I will have concrete examples to cite besides "getting to LaGuardia Airport is terrible"...

4. In fact, read more biographies in general because they offer perspective that I badly need right now.

5. Read as many of the Tournament of Books picks as possible before the tourney. (One down!)

6. Keep reading the unread books I own and giving them away as appropriate.