the Richard Larson blog

Kakutani on Chronic City

From Michiko Kakutani's review of Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City:

“The Fortress of Solitude” demonstrated that the gifted Mr. Lethem did not need to rely on the postmodernist pyrotechnics and cutesy special effects that had animated much of his earlier work, and that when he dispensed with these framing techniques, he could write vividly and movingly about regular people — about fathers and sons, about friends who grow apart, about people trying to grapple with the thorny issues of race and class and social change.

Is this a jab at Lethem's earlier science fiction works? Is Kakutani saying that the use of genre is a "cutesy special effect" and the only fiction worth reading is literary realism about "regular people"? If so, she's missing out on some of Lethem's most interesting work, and indeed some of the most interesting work being produced by "literary" authors today. Lame, Michiko: lame. (Which, incidentally, is a word she uses herself to deliver one final blow to Lethem's novel at the end of her snide and unhelpful review.)

Precious?

Ed Gonzalez at Slant Magazine:

Precious might have been passable if not for these slick, fatuously filmed sequences—visions of its main character dancing, singing on stages, and walking down red carpets with a light-black-skinned hottie, even seeing herself in the mirror as a white girl—that only succeed at simplifying its young protagonist's feelings of insecurity and yearning for escape, as well as highlighting Daniels's contrived thoughts on cause and effect. At Each One Teach One, where Precious is sent after it's discovered that she's pregnant, images of African-African political chutzpah and attainment, including a speech by Malcolm X, are green-screened onto window blinds and chalkboards. This is after a trip to a museum and schoolwork that involves nothing deeper than writing letters of the alphabet on the chalkboard. So, between Precious and An Education, Lone Scherfig's horrid BBC Afterschool Special, we now have the official theme of the upcoming Oscar season: the uplift of the races and sexes through higher learning.

If this movie by the director of the insipid Shadowboxer, which I had the unfortunate opportunity to work publicity events for during its New York release a few years ago, is anything as arrogantly presumptuous and shameless as An Education, I have absolutely no interest. Which begs the question: which films identified early by general critical concensus as Oscar contenders for this year are actually any good?

Elsewhere:

Abigail Nussbaum reviews this year's Hugo-nominated short stories.

Paris Sketches!

Longlist for the Million Writers Award.

12 Steps to Better Book Publishing.

I will be seeing The House of the Devil at TriBeca, even if the producers think it's "slow."

"Notes on Conceptual Fiction" by Ted Gioia ... "Is it possible that the idea of 'realism' as a guiding principle for fiction is itself unrealistic?"

Elsewhere:

While I haven't really been saying anything, here's some people who have:

* Matt Cheney on Cory Doctorow's new novel, Little Brother.

* From an interview with James Morrow at SF Signal: "... Europeans think one hundred miles is a long distance, and Americans think one hundred years is a long time. In other words, the weight of history hangs probably more heavily on the European psyche than on the American. This fact influences both mainstream and genre literature. When a European SF writer tries to dramatize a totalitarian society, an empire modeled on ancient Rome, a Renaissance mercantile system, or a mechanized invasion of one's homeland, he is operating in a milieu where such phenomena have actually occurred. On the American shore, we know about these subjects only secondhand. So the political sensibility of European SF is perhaps darker and edgier than in the U.S. equivalent."

* David Bordwell on film criticism: "At a higher level, your tastes may make you weigh certain criteria more heavily than others. If you most enjoy movies that wrestle with philosophical problems, you may favor the thematic-significance criterion. So you’ll love Bergman and think he’s a great director. In other words, you can have tastes in films that you also consider excellent. Presumably this is what we teachers are trying to cultivate as well: to teach people, as Plato urged, to love the good."

...  Also: "Above all, the critical essay can develop new depth on the Web. Given more space, the Web can ask critics to lay out their assumptions and evidence more fully. After years of 'writing short,' of firing off invectives, put-downs, and passing paeans to great filmmakers unknown to most readers, critics now have an opportunity—not to rant at greater length but to go deeper. If you think a movie is interesting or important, please show us. Don’t simply assert your opinion with lots of hand-waving, but back it up with some analysis or interpretation. The Web allows analysis and interpretation, which take a lot of effort, to come into their own."  (emphasis mine) 

(In a throwaway comment, Bordwell also mentions last year's Cloverfield as a "symbolic replay of 9/11", a reading of the film that I have often defended.)

Vacation reading:

Off to Amsterdam in a few hours, and I'll be gone until late Sunday.  Meanwhile, here are a few interesting things to read:

A Curious Singularity is finishing up with Joyce's "Araby" right now; good stuff!

Rob Scheer liked Smart People more than I did.

Bibliophile Stalker interviews John Klima, editor of Electric Velocipede.

Tiptree Award winner and honor roll.  [See also: Gwenda Bond, juror]

Elsewhere:

A Hyperion movie!  [via Cinematical]

"As soon as you try to define what the essence of creativity is, some sort of context or comparison is required if you want any interesting discussion. Why did Picasso depict women in such ugly, distorted ways in his paintings? Because Picasso is Picasso? Or because he treated women like tissues…soiling and discarding them in his wake."

Hating Sloane Crosley: “I read two sentences that Sloane wrote in the Village Voice and I was so angry that it caused me to place my pet hamster in the microwave and watch it explode. This is not a common reaction that I get from writers. But Sloane’s words caused me to do this. I was depressed for weeks. And I blame her for running me over the edge.”

Squidpunk!

Kirkus with an all-SF issue, including a profile on Jeff and Ann VanderMeer (with regards to their New Weird anthology). (PDF)

"Pittsburgh," by Meghan Austin, in Failbetter.  Nearly perfect.

And, finally, Colm Toibin on Hart Crane:

As is clear from his early letters, Crane as a reader set about preparing himself with enormous zeal and moral seriousness to become that "potential factor." Despite his provincial background and his problems with his parents, and then partly because of them, he found a tone and a poetic diction that matched a sensibility which was both visionary and deeply rooted in the real. In his poems he worked a gnarled, edgy sound against the singing line; he played a language dense with metaphor and suggestion against images and rhythms of pure soaring beauty. His syntax had something hard and glittering in it, utterly surprising. In his best poems he managed to make the rhythms—the hidden nervous system in the words and between the words—so interesting, intense, and effortless that they command attention and emotional response despite their verbal density, basic difficulty, and what Crane himself called "tangential slants, inter-woven symbolisms."

More links, weekend edition:

Abigail Nussbaum on current television; National Magazine Award nominees; the schedule is available for this year's PEN World Voices Festival, and it is going to be a truly amazing event; the Litblog Co-op has ceased operation, and Dan Green assesses its lifespan; Borders and B&N may merge (uh-oh); The Novella Challenge; Top Ten Mind-Blowing Science Fiction Books [via SF Signal]; Hugo nominations! (notables for me: Chabon, Shepard, Chiang) ... Niall Harrison offers brief comments; J.C. Montgomery on "Horseman" by Richard Russo; filmmaker Anthony Minghella (The English Patient, which [I agree with Mark Sarvas] was a wonderful adaptation of Ondaatje's novel) died on Tuesday; William Boyd's Restless, an epistolary mystery novel; and Victoria Hoyle reviews the shortlist for this year's Crawford Award.

Elsewhere:

David Cronenberg, the novelist? [Via Sarah Weinman]; Tim Brown says goodbye to 'zines ("Indeed, the Internet has altogether replaced zines as a forum where young people may vent about (or flaunt) their alienation from mainstream society. Once a source of tremendous energy, zines are now ancient history, much like big hair and dollar gas."); Daniel Mendelsohn on fake memoirs; the Iowa Writers Workshop ruffles some feathers with its Open Access requirement for graduate theses; and Niall Harrison announces (and links to reviews of) this year's Arthur C. Clarke award nominees.

Elsewhere:

Colson Whitehead on writing in Brooklyn: "I have a hard time understanding all the hype. I dig it here and all, but it’s just a place. It does not have magical properties."

Graig on Julie Delpy's directorial debut, 2 Days in Paris, which we watched this weekend and I enjoyed (beaucoup).

Nominate stories for the Million Writers Award!  The only story I published online last year, "Night and Day" at Pindeldyboz, is too short to qualify, so go and nominate someone else's story.  But definitely nominate something if you read anything good online last year. 

A new issue of Clarkesworld Magazine has been posted.

The new issue of Strange Horizons contains a review by Abigail Nussbaum of Paolo Bacigalupi's short story collection, Pump Six And Other Stories (some free samples here), a book which I am looking forward to reading.  Will Ludwigsen's short story, "All Talk," is also very nice.  And also included in this week's issue is Matt Cheney's column, a wonderful piece wherein he speaks of parallels between the poetry and SF communities:

My own shallow reading of the works of younger poets confirms this magpie tendency, and it is a tendency I see also in many fiction writers whose careers are still young. Much has been written about these tendencies, but there is room—and need—for more, because the territory is not simply an aesthetic one, but one that influences and is influenced by techniques and traditions of publishing and reading. Literary cultures of all sorts are kept vigorous by tectonic shifts, but such shifts can be frightening to the citizens of the landmasses that get reconfigured by them, and particularly so for people who have devoted much of their lives and passions to erecting solid institutions on the land. The fright causes some of the screaming, but it would be better if fewer people stuck stakes into their little bits of land and instead joined in the joy of a new cartography.

Elsewhere:

Levi Asher on Charles Bock's Beautiful Children, newly available for free at Random House's website:  "Okay, so what about the book itself?  ...  Opening the new PDF, Bock's heavy, mannered narrative just doesn't pull me in:  They chatter and jibe, passing pitchers of soda, reaching for slices with favorite toppings. Chins shine with grease.  It's hard to say what makes us like or not like a book. I guess I don't enjoy reading about people who can't eat pizza without making a mess. "

Jim Shepard wins the Short Story Prize ($20,000!) for Like You'd Understand, Anyway, which was also nominated for the National Book Award this year.

I have been obsessively reading Seth Abramson's blog for MFA response times, anxiously awaiting the last two responses of my three applications so I can make my decision (or have it made for me, if I only get into the one school) and finally stop worrying about it.

And lastly, Clark Baise on the short story, as quoted by Kate S. at The Short Story Reading Challenge:

... I call the short story an expansive form, and the novel, contrary to most opinion, contractive. The story says the most that can be said about a restricted moment in time and space. The novel says the least about a great many more.