A podcast about books, art & life — not necessarily in that order
After the World Cup, Bill “Sports Guy” Simmons (as opposed to Don “No Soul” Simmons) decided he would start supporting an English Premier League soccer team, and asked his fans for advice on which team to support. The massive article that resulted makes for some fun reading.
My buddy Mitch once praised the Grateful Dead, not for their music–which he detested–but for their ability to get money out of hippies. He considered that one of the strongest legacies of the 60’s.
Conversely, this writer at the Herald (UK) contends that Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh, who recently “came out” as a Tory, is a traitor to the cause.
Of course, people’s views change over time, and there’s no shame in that. There’s nothing more common than for a youthful socialist to evolve into a middle-aged Tory. What is distasteful about Welsh’s apparent volte-face, however, is that he has made his fortune from exploiting a grotesquely picaresque community whose brutal existence has provided the most colourful, horrifying, virulently anti-establishment material for fiction since Balzac’s backstreet Paris.
While with one hand Welsh was guddling a hungry readership, many of whom had scarcely seen a book since school, with the other he was holding a champagne flute at Edinburgh’s New Town soirees.
Moreover, despite the “guddling,” she (sorta) knew it all along:
From the start of Welsh’s career doubts have been raised about just how closely his widely reported wild behaviour matched reality. Former colleagues at Edinburgh City Council remember a dapper, punctual employee who, they said admiringly, “could have gone right to the top of local government”. Even as his novels were being devoured by the poverty-stricken, the addicted and the terminally unemployed, he is believed to have been dabbling in the property market, and we’re not talking council houses.
Needless to say, I think she’s an idiot, even when she concludes that drug dealers are the “most successful capitalists of our time.” After all, Renton doesn’t really want to deal; he just wants to get away to Amsterdam, be a DJ, and live with a model. Is that so wrong?
NYTimes movie critic A.O. Scott wonders why people go to bad movies, and why the hell he gets up in the morning:
For the second time this summer, then, my colleagues and I must face a frequently  and not always politely  asked question: What is wrong with you people? I will, for now, suppress the impulse to turn the question on the moviegoing public, which persists in paying good money to see bad movies that I see free. I don’t for a minute believe that financial success contradicts negative critical judgment; $500 million from now, “Dead Man’s Chest” will still be, in my estimation, occasionally amusing, frequently tedious and entirely too long. But the discrepancy between what critics think and how the public behaves is of perennial interest because it throws into relief some basic questions about taste, economics and the nature of popular entertainment, as well as the more vexing issue of what, exactly, critics are for.
I haven’t written about the war that broke out between Israel and Lebanon this weekend because I don’t know what to say.
I feel like I did in the months after 9/11: tracking all the wheels-within-wheels, trying to understand who stands the most to gain from which actions, whose decisions may backfire, which groups will break from their traditional responses.
As you can guess, I’m paralyzed. All I can do is hope for the safety of my family and friends (including my buddy Mitch, who’s reporting from Beirut), and for a quick, decisive end to hostilities.
I don’t think that’s going to happen, but the status quo hasn’t been around for years.
With all the heaviness out of the way, I offer you proof that I’m still a retard who goes for cheap laughs.
The Agitator gives us strange statues from around the world.
When I was a wee paranoiac, I heard that Vineland was soon to be released. At that point, I’d only read V., and Lot 49, but I’d made a stab at The Big One (it took 4 attempts before I finally made it through).
I read the notice in Pynchon Notes that the long-awaited new book from was soon to be released. As it turns out, the book wasn’t very good, and I’m convinced he put it out to keep his publisher off his back while he completed Mason & Dixon. But at the time, it felt like a bit of literary history was going to occur.
In fact, I actually had a dream about Vineland before it came out. I was in a bookstore, and there was a large “dump” of the new hardcover, several months early! I picked up a copy and thumbed through it. When I woke, all I could remember of that dream-book was the back cover flap. It had an author bio that read, “Thomas Pynchon is the author of V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity’s Rainbow. He lives in New York City.”
Below the text was a beautiful black-and-white photograph of an empty loft. Even as a teenager, my subconscious liked to mess with me.
All of which gets me to the following question: Wouldn’t it be great if the book actually kept this title?
(Update: Slate contends that Pynchon may have spammed his own book’s Amazon page)
I got my breakfast (black coffee and a blueberry muffin) at a truck-stop Dunkin Donuts on the way to my office. As I was walking out, I passed a woman. She was in her early 40s, not quite haggardly thin, with dark hair and a face pockmarked like Sadie Burke. She carried a canvas purse and a pack of cigarettes.
She stepped past me to a man sitting at a table and asked in a thin voice, “Are you going west?”
“No,” he said. “Where you headed?”
“California.”
George Will’s mother died at 98, after a long period of dementia. He wrote a very touching tribute to her, while exploring the ravages of the long process (alliteration notwithstanding):
Dementia, that stealthy thief of identity, had bleached her vibrant self almost to indistinctness, like a photograph long exposed to sunlight.
It is said that God gave us memory so we could have roses in winter. Dementia is an ever-deepening advance of wintry whiteness, a protracted paring away of personality. It inflicts on victims the terror of attenuated personhood, challenging philosophic and theological attempts to make death a clean, intelligible and bearable demarcation.
(I know, I know: two Will links in two days? Sue me.)