“The film’s central concept is the aversion most right thinking people have to the actor Nicolas Cage. And he accepts this mantle so honorably and humbly in this film that I think maybe now I quite like him. It’s an honest and comic performance and seems filled with all the genuine humiliations that one imagines Cage himself has suffered in the past ten years…One recommendation, though: Nicholas Hoult is almost grown and is possibly on the cusp of becoming better looking than the original teenage Leo DiCaprio.”
—
Zadie Smith is a surprisingly engaging and astute film reviewer. (From “At the Multiplex, 2006” in her book Changing My Mind.)

hannahstaton:

Modest Mouse- Bankrupt on Selling

The people they loved their old friends 

and I’ve seen through them all 

 Seen through them all and seen through most everything 

All the people you knew were the actors

All the people you knew were the actors


Well, I’ll go to college and i’ll learn some big words

and I’ll talk real loud

Goddamn right I’ll be heard

One of my favorite songs. I stole a line from Isaac Brock once for a college poetry class - of course, my teacher noted that particular line of the poem.

On writing


So I just finished a book that drove me nuts. It’s a blog-to-book book [I’d rather not specify it, but just to be clear, the author does NOT have a tumblr and it isn’t particularly new], and I believe it’s sold decently.

The author’s blog - and book - certainly stands out because she has an ability to write effusively, prettily, and in a way that sort of feels like a hug, or your like best girlfriend prone to speaking poetically telling you about her life. It is, for all extents and purposes, the wordy equivalent of “pretty porn.” For the book, she kept the conversational tone so that it felt like the author was talking to you - you! - over afternoon tea.

It got so exhausting. There was a tendency to slip into the second person - you would love this, I swear, you would be so happy - and it was charming at first but grew thin. All that effusiveness, the faux congeniality, just masked the real problem: there was nothing to say. The book falls into a Liz Gilbert Eat Pray Love-esque trap where it’s just running towards a happy ending straight out of many, many books that you’ve read before. It was ultimately hollow.

There was no need for the book to exist. Some chapters had blood, guts, passion - and if the book stayed at that level, it would’ve been amazing. Instead it was just tiring, and a prime example of why making blogs-to-books fit inside chick lit parameters is a losing game. It’s funny when pretty-on-the-surface writer tricks mask uninteresting writing.

There’s certain aspects of blogging that are good for writers. It’s fun as a writing exercise. It gives you discipline (really the most necessary part of writing). You can develop your voice and thoughts - but the instant demands of it certainly kill the effect of writing. I feel like there’s a trend with some blogs that have fun writing-for-blogs-level-writing that are going for flowery transcendence. They tend to be the type of blog that you love on first glance - oh, it’s all so meaningful! - and then you stop reading it and you don’t miss it. Lord knows that my tumblr isn’t a space for transcendence for me. It’s more like a space to have a conversation about culture and writing, mostly. Dinner party topics.

I just don’t want a generation of writers weaned on the internet to confuse voice with truly great writing. There’s something to be said for learning about the human condition and other people’s lives through messy, dirty, makes-you-feel-so-much prose. To reading a piece of great writing for the first time, the kind that makes you put the book (or whatever) down and go “Oh shit.” The Oh Shit moment is why I love reading.

I think there’s some poet out there who has a publishing company called “Write Bloody.” It’s a maxim that I completely agree with. Without the blood and guts, the evidence of existence, there’s no soul; it’s simply entertainment to pass the time and leave you closer to death.

the voice you choose is an argument, is what i'm saying here

agrammar:

I hate to continue being all meta about the internet, but I was just yesterday suggesting it’s less silly than it sounds. So can I continue, for a moment?

Yesterday I was talking about the different voices and personas writers (or institutions) can use. “Persona” is a tricky word, though, because I think a lot of people read it as referring to something inauthentic — a character that’s being played, something that’s not really you. This isn’t what I have in mind, obviously. What I’m thinking of is the fact that we all have countless tones available to us for reacting to things — and while writers may be slightly more conscious of the process of selecting one, we all choose. Constantly. Even if it’s as small as the difference between making a joke in a witheringly dry way or making the same joke in jolly tone. This isn’t play-acting, it’s just filtering a million authentic ways of behaving down to the one you feel like going with.

Read More

I have a post in my queue that’s also about this, give or take. To jump on this particular post a smidge, however - the thing that I find abhorrent about Stuff White People Like is the voice. The dry “anthropological” tone isn’t particularly funny or cutting to me. It’s just boring, rote, and bland. I guess the humor comes from the recognition/horror that “I’m just like that entry!” It’s a “comedian” doing “d'ja ever notice?” comedy in the 1990s. There’s more about that site that doesn’t work for me, but that’s a big part of it.

“Well, and why does anyone become a writer in the first place?” he asked, stressing the first syllable of “writer,” as if the word itself could only ever be uttered with implied air quotes. “The same reason they start playing guitar in high school and try forming bands. To draw attention to themselves.”
—
This is from Maureen Tkacik’s piece for the Columbia Journalism Review, “Look at Me!” This quote from Nick Denton - absolutely chilling and I disagree with it so much - is the nihilistic heart of the piece, which could be summed up as Why I Can’t Do Service Journalism and Pay Rent in the Age of the Internet. I thought it was pretty fascinating and relatable. It’s interesting how it’s working on a certain number of levels, too - particularly as a mea culpa - but that’s another story. The other big piece from that month’s issue, on music writer Christopher Weingarten, is also pretty chilling.

“There’s also a wonderful bit in which Dave’s discussing writerly craft, and he tells Lipsky, “One of the things about being a writer is you’re able to give the impression—both in lines and between the lines—that you know an enormous amount. That you know and have lived intimately all this stuff. Because you want it to have that kind of effect on the nerve endings. And it’s like—it’s something that I’m fairly good at. Is I think I can seem, I think I can seem like I know a whole lot about stuff that in fact pretty much everything that I know is right there.””
—
Former Premiere editor Glenn Kenny (who oversaw David Foster Wallace’s wonderful pieces on David Lynch and the AVN awards for said magazine), grappling with David Lipsky’s book on DFW.

Breaking Bad, "Fly"



I found this week’s episode of Breaking Bad to be frustrating. I do think that it would play well within a DVD set, but self-contained, as the episode for the week, I had to admit that I was kind of left sputtering Comic Book Guy-style.

Even though it wasn’t completely awful, there were some things in there - truly sloppy, metaphor-laden writing for one, the type of self-contained episode that had no real stakes and was just based on irrationality, for another - that just didn’t work and I really hope that they don’t go with that in future episodes. (Kind of like how The Royal Tenenbaums is a decent movie, but you could see Wes Anderson going further into his dollhouse until he actually makes a stop-motion film, you know? Another story entirely, though.)

The fact that the episode was centered around killing a fly in the lab and the slapstick of that, well, that was simply tiring. “4 Days Out” was self-contained as well, but also interesting, because they thought that they were going to die. There were stakes. This was just metaphor spinning in circles.

Walt’s speech about the “perfect time to die” was wonderful. Went with the character. (I buy Cranston’s speeches a little bit more than Aaron Paul’s. Cranston makes them sound more natural. You forget about the writing.) The speech from Walt - doped up on Jesse sneaking Truth Serum Sleeping Pills in his coffee - summarizing most of the series up to that point? It didn’t seem natural. The showy direction by the guy who did Brick and the Brothers Bloom didn’t really add anything significant, and it was terribly paced, even boring.

Whatever plot I got out of the episode, as they were leaving the lab, that was well-done. But this episode was pretty much Breaking Bad doing Mad Men - heavy and slow, laden with metaphor that something may happen but probably won’t - and that’s not where the show’s strengths lie, I think. Let that symbolism serve life and death and plot.