Submitted For Your Perusal

“Writers are often house-obsessed, maybe because bookish children who spend lots of time at home alone are most apt to become writers, which naturally keeps them home alone tweaking not only their sentences but also their paint colors. And because novel writing demands a sensitivity to setting and atmosphere, the person who spins out great characters and plots is also often capable of creating great rooms.”—Pamela Redmond Satran

“Film is the only art in which the United States has made a real difference. Strike the American contribution from drama, painting, music, sculpture, dance, even possibly from poetry and the novel, and the world’s achievement is only marginally diminished. But film without the American contribution is unimaginable. The fact that film has been the most potent vehicle of the American imagination suggests all the more strongly that movies have something to tell us not just about the surfaces but about the mysteries of American life.” —Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

1. “He Was Nouveau When It Was New”

“The novel, Mr. Robbe-Grillet contended, was a 19th-century form, epitomized by the rich, naturalistic worlds of Balzac and Flaubert. The 20th century, though, was characterized by fragmentation and existential doubt, and the novel reached ‘a degree of stagnation,’ he argued in his essay ‘A Fresh Start for Fiction.’ He called for a radical departure: anti-realist, anti-naturalist, anti-descriptive, apolitical. ‘In this future universe of the novel, gestures and objects will be “there” before being “something,”’ he wrote. ‘They will still be there afterwards, hard, unalterable, eternally present, mocking their own meaning.’”

2. “Peeking Inside the Mind of the Boy Dating Your Daughter”

“A new report in The Journal of Adolescence this month suggests that when it comes to sex, girls and dating, boys are more complex than we typically give them credit for. While hormonal urges are no doubt an important part of a teenage boy’s life, they aren’t necessarily the defining trait influencing a boy’s relationships with girls.”

3. “A Growing Cloud Over the Planet”

“Nearly of the world’s 1.3 billion smokers live in China, India, and Indnesia, the three largest consumers of tobacco products.”

4. “The Ebb and Flow of Movies: Box Office Receipts 1986-2007”

“Summer blockbusters and holiday hits make up the bulk of box office revenue each year, while contenders for the top Oscar awards tend to attract smaller audiences that build over time. Here’s a look at how movies have fared at the box office, after adjusting for inflation.”

5. “Are Oscars Worth All This Fuss?”

“I’m only slightly ashamed to admit that I found myself hoping that the strike would shut the Academy Awards down; that for once, in a year of such cinematic bounty and variety, appreciation for the best movies could be liberated from the pomp and tedium of Hollywood spectacle.”

6. “Oh, Just Lighten Up and Enjoy the Show”

“As juicy a target as the Oscars are — the bacchanal is like the large-chested blonde in the horror movie who always gets mauled first — they continue to occupy an important and irreplaceable role in our culture. In an age in which all is niche, where in most households someone is checking a Facebook wall while someone else is customizing an iPod, the Oscars are where we meet in the glorious, frothy middle. As a people with less in common every day, it is a social good to have an event that is so large, so full of hype that it animates the broader conversation. So what if we are talking about the fashion faux pas or the freak who turned on the waterworks for no apparent reason?”

7. “He Shoots! He Scores! He Makes Movies!”

“‘Once I realized I was going to become a professional basketball player, I started immediately thinking about things I wanted to do when I retired and had a second career,’ said Mr. Davis, 28, who sports a full black beard and has a 40-inch vertical leap. ‘And films are something that I enjoy. I think it brings people together, sends messages, makes people laugh and shares information. And movies are something that as a kid growing up were the one thing that you could always look forward to.’”

8. “Profane Poet”

“In fact, the more you learn of the playwright’s life, the more seriously you have to consider the possibility that Mamet may himself be a Hemingway character. Here is a Nick Adams-ish tough-guy hunter/poet, who was once (and may still be) a member of both the National Rifle Association and the American Civil Liberties Union, with a crew cut and bluejeans that say ‘man’s man’ but accessories that say otherwise. (‘To still wear a beret in 2004,’ said Val Kilmer, ‘you have to have guts.’) It’s easy to imagine Mamet sitting down to work in his Vermont cabin, nudging aside his antique Colt revolver paperweight and chanting the Hemingway dictum: ‘Tell the story, take out the good lines and see if it still works.’”

Part I & Part II

(Via Kottke.)

“Voltaire said it: The best is the enemy of the good. Ralph Ellison, like Bernstein and Welles, learned that lesson all too well. In 1952 he published ‘Invisible Man’ and was acclaimed as a major novelist. The well-deserved praise that was heaped on him gave Ellison a fatal case of importantitis, and though he spent the rest of his life trying to finish a second novel, he piled up thousands of manuscript pages without ever bringing it to fruition. Why did he dry up? Because, as Arnold Rampersad’s 2007 biography of Ellison made agonizingly clear, he was trying to write a great book. That was his mistake. Strangled by self-consciousness, he never even managed to finish a good one.

“Contrast Ellison’s creative paralysis with the lifelong fecundity of the great choreographer George Balanchine, who went about his business efficiently and unpretentiously, turning out a ballet or two every season. Most were brilliant, a few were duds, but no matter what the one he’d just finished was like, and no matter what the critics thought of it, he moved on to the next one with the utmost dispatch, never looking back. ‘In making ballets, you cannot sit and wait for the Muse,’ he said. ‘Union time hardly allows it, anyhow. You must be able to be inventive at any time.’ That was the way Balanchine saw himself: as an artistic craftsman whose job was to make ballets. Yet the 20th century never saw a more important artist, or one less prone to importantitis.” —Terry Teachout

There’s a great scene in Definitely, Maybe in which the characters played by Ryan Reynolds and Isla Fisher bump into one another in a convenience store and flirtatiously debate the merits of Marlboro Reds versus American Spirits. Reynolds’s character can’t believe Fisher’s character pays a couple dollars more per pack for “natural” cigarettes. Fisher’s character counters that Marlboros contain additives to make them burn faster; thus, although she pays more per pack, each of her cigarettes lasts longer so she ends up paying less money in the long run. Skeptical, and more than a bit intrigued by her joie de vivre, Reynolds’s character agrees to an impromptu “smoke off” outside the store. Outside they light up at the same time and continue their flirting. Reynolds’s character loses the contest when his Marlboro Red burns down before her American Spirit, but he wins an opportunity to accompany Fisher’s character to a party that evening. It’s her birthday and her boyfriend has stood her up. She’s looking for a date and he quickly agrees to accompany her.

What’s noteworthy to me about the scene – other than the chemistry the two actors have – is the role cigarettes play in it. That is, cigarettes help bring the two of them together. They also lend the scene an erotic charge. It’s as if time has stopped and these are the only two people in the world. When Fisher’s character coolly blows smoke out of her mouth and seductively gestures with her cigarette, she’s arguably more appealing to Reynolds’s character (and to us as audience members) than she would be if she were sans a cigarette. As Richard Klein writes in Cigarettes Are Sublime, a wonderful, nearly 200-page apologia for the beauty and benefits of cigarettes,

For many women, at certain moments, lighting a cigarette is the socially countenanced mode of signaling hostile or aggressively sexual feelings aroused by the intrusion of another subjectivity. In circumstances when a man might display anger or come on to her, a woman will often light up, summoning fire and smoke, jabbing with the tip of her cigarette between nails or teeth. That explains why, among women, smoking began with those who got paid for staging their sexuality: the actress, the Gypsy, the whore. Such a woman violates traditional roles by defiantly, actively giving herself pleasure instead of passively receiving it. Lighting a cigarette is a demonstration of mastery that violates the assumptions of feminine pudeur, the delicate embarrassment women are expected to feel, or at least display, in the presence of what their innocence and dignity are supposed to prevent them from desiring. A woman smoking may be thought to be less “feminine” because more active, aggressive, masterful, but she is not therefore more “masculine” – in her own eyes or in those of many men; she may in fact be more desirable because she appears to be more free. (117)

Scenes such as this one, of course, can be found in lots of movies (e.g. The Big Sleep [1946]), but they seem less and less common. It’s significant that the scene is set in 1992, before the present anti-smoking campaign in the United States really took off. Though I don’t smoke, scenes like this one almost make me want to. No wonder some people bemoan Hollywood’s glamorization of smoking. Still, as Tom Chiarella’s recent and fascinating Esquire piece “Learning to Smoke” suggests, I am not alone in wanting to do something that movies make look so cool, if only for a short while.

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1. “Gatsby’s Green Light Beckons a New Set of Strivers”

“Some educators say the best way to engage racially and ethnically diverse students in reading is with books that mirror their lives and culture. But others say that while a variety of literary voices is important, ‘Gatsby’ — still required reading at half the high schools in the country — resonates powerfully among urban adolescents, many of them first- and second-generation immigrants, who are striving to ascend in 21st-century America.”

2. “As O’Neal’s Shadow Fades, Who Will Cast the Next One?”

“It is hard … to picture the N.B.A.’s spotlight event without O’Neal’s breakdancing, rattling basket stanchions, crashing gratuitously into courtside seats, dribbling coast to coast as a 7-foot-1 point-center (complete with crossover dribble), posing for television cameras, handing out nicknames to players, clowning around on the bench and cracking up the news media horde.”

3. “The Charisma Mandate”

“‘Today, attacks on the cult of personality seem really to mean attacks on the ability to make speeches that inspire,’ Mr. Caro said in an interview. “But you only have to look at crucial moments in the history of our time to see how crucial it was to have a leader who could inspire, who could rally a nation to a standard, who could infuse a country with confidence, to remind people of the justice of a cause.’”

4. “Boys Will Be Boys, Girls Will Be Hounded by the Media”

“Men who fall from grace are treated with gravity and distance, while women in similar circumstances are objects of derision, titillation and black comedy.”

5. “The New Black”

“Brown men’s shoes, popular with the aristocracy in the 1930s, when they were championed by the Prince of Wales and Hollywood movie royalty, are being revived in Manhattan. After World War II, the conventional black shoe returned, except among upper-class European men, who continued to wear brown suede wingtip styles with their business suits. The Italian industrialist Giovanni Agnelli popularized this Continental style of brown shoes in many shades, highly polished to achieve an aged patina. Today the shoes are worn with business suits and casual weekend blue jeans.”

6. “When There Is No ‘We’ in Marriage”

“In their marriage, Jennifer Belle, a novelist, and Andrew Krents, an entertainment lawyer, take the separation part to the extreme. It is almost as if they are afraid of spending too much time together. ‘Familiarity breeds contempt,’ Mr. Krents said.”

7. “Is PBS Still Necessary?”

“On the other side of the ledger the audience for public radio has been growing: there are more than 30 million listeners now, compared to just 2 million in 1980. ‘Morning Edition’ and ‘All Things Considered,’ NPR’s morning and evening news programs, are the second and fourth most listened to shows in the country. Go figure. Who would have guessed 40 years ago, when public broadcasting came into being, that the antique medium, the one supposedly on its way out, would prove to be the greater success and the one more technically nimble. You can even download NPR broadcasts onto your iPod.”

8. “When Mrs. Robinson Met Dr. Dolittle”

“The book’s design is to track all five movies from conception to release, a happy strategy that both illuminates American filmmaking during that period and demonstrates how little the world in which the movies surfaced resembled the one in which they had been conceived. Harris’s account, like John Gregory Dunne’s book The Studio or Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, provides us with what’s come to be the accepted narrative of aging and out-of-touch moguls panicked at their increasing inability to read the market, unable to comprehend the implications of their audience’s seismic demographic shift toward youth and overcommitting to big-ticket items.”

“Getting started is partly stalling, stalling by way of reading and of listening to music, which energizes me and also makes me restless. Feeling guilty about not writing…. But once something is really under way, I don’t want to do anything else. I don’t go out, much of the time I forget to eat, I sleep very little. It’s a very undisciplined way of working and makes me not very prolific. But I’m too interested in many other things. Writing requires huge amounts of solitude. What I’ve done to soften the harshness of that choice is that I don’t write all the time. I like to go out – which includes traveling; I can’t write when I travel. I like to talk. I like to listen. I like to look and to watch. Maybe I have an Attention Surplus Disorder. The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention.” —Susan Sontag

“His persona has always been this close to being absurd, and yet he’s been able to make use of it – the persona and its presumed proximity to absurdity, both – as a governor just as well as he was able to make use of it as a bodybuilder and as a movie star. Indeed, most people thought that he was using the governorship in order to rise above his persona, when in fact he was using his persona to rise above the governorship.” —Tom Junod on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger

“It would be profoundly disobliging to think that power and authority in academic life bear any resemblance to, say, the transactions taking place in a transnational corporation or a correctional facility. But suppose they do?” —Scott McLemee