REVIEW: The Age of Movies, Selected Writings of Pauline Kael

The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael
Library of America
750 pp / $40

The sad implication in the title of this selection of writings by the late movie critic Pauline Kael is that the Age of Movies has passed, that movies matter less than they used to. The big screen, after all, has been supplanted by a variety of little screens (the television, the computer, the smartphone), screens that we use to watch grisly traffic accidents, celebrity bloopers, cute kitten videos, and occasionally even movies.

If one thing is certain, it’s that no movie critic will ever again matter as much as Pauline Kael, who reviewed movies (Kael dismissed the words ‘film’ and ‘cinema’ as stuffy and elitist) for The New Yorker from 1968 to 1991. She was read avidly or fearfully not just by moviegoers but by filmmakers and fellow film critics.  She was caricatured in movies and comedy shows; her spats with other critics were cultural front-page news.

CELEBRITY BOOK REVIEW: John Mayer on “The Marriage Plot”

Surface to air, motherfuckers. I’m back.

OK, yeah, I’ve been off the interwebs for a while. And by me being here today, it doesn’t mean that I’m back for good, it just means that I’m here, now, that I’m totally in this present, doing this present life thing, and I just love you all for sticking with me while I try on the different colors of myself.

I have been doing so much interpersonal thinking recently, it’s just fucking insane. Like, I’ve been living in a cabin and riding across the badlands of America on an honest to God horse in this amazing poncho I picked up in a health shop—like, it’s fucking blessed—and I’ve been thinking about some regrets I have about things I’ve said and really it all comes down to me not regretting anything I’ve said, because it was what I was truly thinking at the time, and you have to be yourself.

But I do have some regrets about not taking part in stuff. Like, parenthetically, yeah, it’s been all about me up until September 2010 where I was like, OK, fuck this, my life is not a movie, like maybe 3.5 million of you should stop finding out what my dick had for breakfast and get out there and like buy a stranger a latte. Just like, make a difference. Anyway, I was sort of into myself and my own play-by-play, but I wasn’t really into anyone else’s. So this past year, in order to enlarge my vision, I’ve been about intra-connectivity and reaching out to people and saying, OK, yeah, I’m definitely John Mayer, there’s that, but once you get past that, there is so much deepness. Let us dive.

REVIEW: The Angel Esmeralda by Don DeLillo

The Angel Esmeralda
Don DeLillo
Scribner
224 pp / $24

Don DeLillo has been a powerful presence on the American literary scene for the past four decades, and his latest short-fiction anthology, The Angel Esmeralda, encapsulates some of his lasting concerns and themes. In it, the readers will find the familiar landscape of psychological alienation, sardonic treatment of mass media and western consumerism that absorbs and savages any meager attempts at transcendence.

DeLillo has the rare gift for capturing the linguistic verve of advertizing (he had worked as a copy writer), while simultaneously sabotaging it. He achieves the muscular rhythm of his prose by often using punch lines and refrains, with sentences whose content sometimes sounds so truistic that it has led some critics to accuse him of hollow existentialism. His technique can perhaps be likened to that of the American post-pop artists, who appropriate the objects and the language of mass culture, to manipulate them.

His use of postmodern/new-agey zeitgeist can be seen in the story “The Starveling.” The narrator comments on his drifting apart from his wife:

DIRTY! DIRTY! DIRTY! A High Speed Book Tour (part IV)

The Greatest Honor Ever Bestowed on a Writer, Ever.

Editor’s Note: Mike Edison has been out on the road promoting his new book, Dirty! Dirty! Dirty! – Of Playboys, Pigs, and Penthouse Paupers, an American Tale of Sex and Wonder, on what has been a book tour like no other, perpetrating a mix of literary mayhem and music in bookstores, pizza parlors, dive bars, and art museums, and will be sharing his tour diary and road tales here in this exclusive blog. For more info on DDD and all things Edison, please visit www.mikeedison.com. Click here for the full tour diary.

Nov 5, Chicago
Return of the Fighting Cock, or, Hey Patti Smith, Eat My Shorts!
The World’s Greatest Piano Player’s relationship with The Car is beginning to worry me. It isn’t right. It is…. Well, unnatural. He has begun to fetishize its German engineering to the point of some man-meets-machine post-apocalyptic sexuality that I am not sure I am comfortable with. If we are parked outside of a bookstore, he feels he has to visit The Car. Not check on it, VISIT it. Late at night when it is parked for the evening and we are drinking, he gets wistful about it. He talks to his girlfriend in New York every day but I notice he is careful not to mention The Car. Then again, even the punters are impressed by our ride. How many times have we heard in the last three days, “Hey, whose BMW is this?” and of course no one believes us when we say it is ours. Writers do not tour in Beemers. For most of us a more appropriate vehicle would be a hearse.

REVIEW: Randy Bradley by Jake Bohstedt Morrill

Randy Bradley
Jake Bohstedt Morrill
Solid Objects
40 pp / $14

It would be easy to dismiss Jake Bohstedt Morrill’s Randy Bradley. A 40-page epistolary novella, Randy Bradley can be read in a single sitting, the reader arriving at the last page before even realizing it. Presented as a letter from a well-meaning but deranged woman named Lucy to her brother-in-law Richard, the text alternates between inspired mania and misguided vulnerability. It would seem that after years of strange behavior on her annual summer visits, Lucy has been summarily banned from her sister Miriam’s home. What follows in Lucy’s letter to Richard are a series of charmingly alarming evasions and justifications for what has truly been happening during stays as a houseguest. Seeing Lucy fall down this rabbit hole of her own making, the reader could be forgiven for mistaking this piece for a rambling character study. But underestimating either Lucy or Jake Bohstedt Morrill would be a grave error—Lucy’s cheerful dementia is merely the facade for the much larger questions that Morrill means to pose. As slight as it may seem on its surface, dig a little deeper and Randy Bradley reveals itself to be a philosophical treatise packaged so sweetly and deftly that one hardly notices when it slyly shifts towards becoming a case study in Wittgenstein’s private language argument. In the end, Lucy resembles no one so much as Charles Kinbote, part of that unique category of the mentally ill whose methods surpass their madness.

CRITICAL HIT AWARDS: December 2011

Welcome back to the Critical Hit Awards for book reviews. This is a round-up, a recommended reading list, and—why not?—a terribly prestigious and coveted prize. Nominate your favorite review of the month by tweeting it at @electriclit with the hashtag #criticalhit.

In an award-winning review this month, John Lanchester says: “It’s a sad story; Boomerang is a sad book, as well as a vivid and funny and enlightening one.” Sadness is probably not the first emotion we associate with the global financial crisis, which Boomerang is about. Instead we talk about anger, disgust, or dread. Lanchester’s remark is a reminder of how rarely we discuss current events in terms of personal sadness, and how a good book can speak to that sadness in a way that ultimately fortifies us. This month’s award winners are all fortifying in their own ways.

Thanks to @TradePaperbacks, @MattTanner, @jonathanscrowe and @CamTerwilliger for nominating book reviews this month!

 

Best Field Guide

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
Reviewed by Dennis Lim in Bookforum

A vast novel like 1Q84 requires more than a few inches of coverage and a perfunctory thumbs up or down. Dennis Lim maps out Murakami’s major themes, notes the arguments of his detractors, and patiently insists that 1Q84 is worth the hype. His review is an ideal warm-up for embarking on Murakami’s 900-page magnum opus.

REVIEW: 420 Characters by Lou Beach

420 Characters
Lou Beach
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
176 pp / $22

 

“Hello! I must be dying.”

In Lou Beach’s debut collection of minuscule flash fiction, 420 Characters, the title gives away the gimmick at a glance, and the Author’s Note follows up: “The stories you are about to encounter were written as status updates on a large social networking site.” A quick Google produces a 420 character limit for Facebook and in that instant the reader knows just exactly what they hold in their hands, a book full of Lou Beach’s Facebook updates; a dreary and somewhat frustrating realization, no matter how beautifully bound the pages are (and they are quite nicely packaged). But the most delightful conundrum of the entire project is the fact that they are not really updates at all, at least not in the “Hey world! Look at me, I’m lonely and depressed and sitting on the crapper bored!” sense and rather, surprising, perfectly crafted, delicious little fictional morsels of sadness, regret, life, self-doubt, drunkenness, murder, mystery, Wild West aesthetic, noir, rednecks, death and, though somewhat less apparent and sprinkled slightly in between all the rest, joy and happiness. It’s odd that the social networking site or the number of characters is even mentioned, because these flash fictions stand on their own and need no such scaffolding to gird their heights. Open to any page, and there is guaranteed a smile, or sigh, or at the very least, a thought.

REVIEW: Zone One by Colson Whitehead

Every age seems to get the monsters that reflect its deepest anxieties.

In the Late Victorian era, an age of sexual repression and widespread, often fatal sexual diseases, it was the vampire and the werewolf. In the Fifties , when our  two biggest fears were nuclear annihilation and Communist takeover there were body snatchers and a series of monsters created by atomic radiation. In the late Sixties and early Seventies, at a time when it seemed like our society was abandoning traditional religion and losing its moral compass, it was the devil (Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Omen).

In the new millennium, teenagers may be vampire-crazy, but the monster of choice seems to be the zombie. In the last ten years, we have had remakes of Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, 28 Days Later and its sequel, 28 Weeks Later, zombie comedies like Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland, even erotic zombie movies. The biggest hit on cable is The Walking Dead. And now Colson Whitehead, the author of rarefied novels like The Intuitionist and John Henry Days, tries his hand at the genre with the novel Zone One.

CRITICAL HIT AWARDS: November 2011

Welcome back to the Critical Hit Awards for book reviews. This is a round-up, a recommended reading list, and—why not?—a terribly prestigious and coveted prize. Nominate your favorite review of the month by tweeting it at @electriclit with the hashtag #criticalhit.

Fickle appraisers, take heart! Two critics, both known for their fiery opinions and mutable positions, have been vindicated (somewhat) in recent months. Kerry Howley’s review of Dwight MacDonald’s Masscult and Midcult won a Critical Hit Award in October, in part for explaining how MacDonald defended his “shifting set of beliefs.” And this month everyone is talking about Pauline Kael, who reviewed movies “with her nervous system as a guide.” Love something today, hate it tomorrow—we don’t mind, as long as you make it interesting.

Congratulations to @bookmarkwoman for nominating a review this month and winning a free audiobook of The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides from Macmillan Audio!

REVIEW: Ghost Lights by Lydia Millet

Ghost Lights
Lydia Millet
W.W. Norton & Co.
256 pp / $24.95

A question for the gentlemen – what would you do if your wife was cheating on you?  Would you confront her, raising a domestic scene worthy of COPS? Or, would you keep quiet, letting the betrayal turn into a lifetime of passive aggression?  If your name is Hal Lindley, and you’re the protagonist of Lydia Millet’s new novel Ghost Lights, your reaction would fall somewhere in between: a drunken offer to rescue your unfaithful partner’s obnoxious boss from a tropical jungle.

Let’s take a few steps back.  Hal works for the IRS and has settled into a complacent suburban life with Susan, his ex-hippie of a wife.  She works for Thomas Stern, or “T.” as he prefers to be called, who vanished during a trip to Belize.  Since T.’s disappearance, things start to fall apart for Hal, particularly after he catches Susan sleeping with the young sexy paralegal at her office.  Later, Hal gets a little too libation-happy at his daughter’s dinner party, and as the conversation moves to the subject of T., he blurts out that he will fly to Belize in search of the mercurial businessman.