Amy's Robot

A few articles from yesterday's Times Fashion & Style section that seem to provide some meta-commentary on the world we live in.

First there's a piece on socialite Tinsley Mortimer's husband. His name is Topper, he's an investment advisor and a fan of Caddyshack, and he offered many spectacularly clumsy quotes that I am very grateful to the Times for choosing not to clean up at all:

As awkward as his criticism is, Topper is clearly unhappy about his wife's pointless fame. Sure, he could have married someone who wasn't such a calculating publicity-hog, but he didn't know he would end up connected to the empty, self-serving elite social scene. He later compares Tinsley unfavorably to LeAnn Rimes, who also attended an event, because at least LeAnn "didn’t make her bones going to charity parties. She did something else." Preach it, Topper!

Next we've got a "What's Next for Lance Bass?" piece about his memoir, Out of Sync (a title I bet celebrity biographers have been dying to use for most of the last decade.) He says "it was very, I don’t know, like, therapeutic" to write the book, but as much as he hopes his former bandmates will read it (especially JT, who he slams for going solo) he's not sure they will. "It’ll take them a while because none of them like to read," he said.

It must have been hard for the Times to publish so many gems in one section, but later they indulge their editorial superiority with "Your Modifier Is Dangling", a tribute to hopeless cause supporters who rage against grammatical abuse. These people have started Facebook clubs like I Judge You When You Use Poor Grammar and Grammar Freaks United in which they can vent their outrage at the world.

OK, I hate it when shampoo ads say their product "structurizes" your hair as much as the next girl, but check out this advice from business writing consultant Lynne Agress about what to do when somebody you're talking to makes a grammatical error:

Yuck! Gee, I think they might pick up on your totally unsubtle correction, there. I know, "their" is wrong. But many people who have a robust appreciation of grammar use "their" as a replacement for the clunkier "his or her" when speaking, knowing it's incorrect, to avoid using sexist language. The fact is, there is no polite or non-prickish way to correct someone's grammar unless you are a teacher, or unless someone specifically asks you to edit their writing. You're just going to have to bitch to your grammar vigilante Facebook group.

Last year, the UN came out with a report on climate change that said that the livestock industry generates more greenhouse gases than all forms of transportation all over the world. It sounds pretty unbelievable, but it's true: methane is 21 times worse, climate-wise, than carbon dioxide, so all those cow farts are screwing up the environment a lot worse than SUVs are.

Thing is, a lot of environmental groups and figures like Al Gore aren't saying anything about the livestock industry, at least not the same way they're talking about cars and coal-burning power plants and fluorescent lightbulbs. But today, the NY Times speaks up about it: an article about meat as a cause of global warming is right there in the Business section. The big environmental groups aren't targeting meat in their campaigns, but, not surprisingly, animal rights groups are.

PETA has this ad directed at Al Gore, who didn't include anything about the meat industry in An Inconvenient Truth:

It's funny in that blunt, mean PETA way, and it's good to let people know that not eating a lot of meat will help the environment. But when groups like PETA or The Humane Society (who made the car key/fork ad above) talk about the environment only in terms of saving animals, it probably won't convince people to change their behavior. PETA is good at stopping KFC from chopping the beaks off chickens and sometimes getting attractive people to pose naked, but we need more mainstream environmental groups to start talking about the meat thing.

And why shouldn't they? The head of the Sierra Club says "we do not find lecturing people about personal consumption choices to be effective." But they have no problem telling people to take public transportation more often and to buy different air conditioners and those damn ugly fluorescent bulbs.

Is reducing meat consumption just too radical for environmentalists to mention? Even ELECTRIC COMPANIES are telling consumers to buy appliances that use less electricity to help reduce global warming.

It reminds me of the dust-up over top selling diet book Skinny Bitch that women are buying like crazy, then becoming outraged by one of the central messages of the book: a good way to lose weight is to be a vegan. In another Times article, we learn about readers such as Laura McGlinchey, 41-year-old computer network manager:

Aww, poor little offended baby. As Skinny Bitch author Rory Freedman said, "They’re mad that they spent $14 on a book that was not what they thought, but they’re not mad that chickens are having beaks chopped off their faces? How is that possible? I can’t even wrap my mind around that."

It seems like the best way to get people to actually change their behavior is to create a product that they can buy to feel like they're helping to save the environment. Toyota and Honda have done a great job letting drivers know how their hybrid cars are good things to buy if you want to reduce emissions, and Panasonic will happily tell you all about their energy-saving flat screen TVs.

The corporations that would benefit from more consumers adopting vegetarian diets need to get on the ball with marketing some celebrity-endorsed tofu. Forget those Sierra Club wimps--Vitasoy and Morningstar, you guys get on the phone with Pamela Anderson and Forest Whitaker and make some good ads, OK?

There are already thousands of Beatles biographies out there, and all of them recount how George Harrison's wife Pattie Boyd left him for Eric Clapton after he hounded her for years, and they both wrote all kinds of songs about her, including the beautiful and tender "Something", the classic rock standby "Layla", and maybe the worst song ever written "Wonderful Tonight".

So now Pattie Boyd has a new autobiography. She decided to go with Wonderful Tonight for the title, so that the world would never forget that this treacly piece of prom theme garbage that Eric Clapton insists on singing with his eyes closed is about her. Poor lady.

Janet Maslin reviewed it for the Times. She exhibits some kind restraint, but still notes some of Boyd and her collaborator Penny Junor's more vapid observations: "This book includes perhaps the least useful account of the much-described 1968 all-star idyll in India: 'If it was anyone’s birthday, and there was a surprising number while we were there, including George’s 25th and my 24th, there would be cake and a party.' "

But what makes my heart go out to Boyd is her account of Eric Clapton stalking her for 7 years until she finally divorced George Harrison and married him. The guy sent her anonymous letters like this--"for nothing more than the pleasures past i would sacrifice my family, my god, and my own existence, and still you will not move", started dating her 17 year-old sister, then wrote "Layla" for Pattie in 1970 and played it for everybody telling them it was about her, and then actually threatened to start using heroin if she didn't leave George for him.

She didn't, but the determined Eric Clapton started doing heroin anyway. By the time Pattie finally left George for him in 1977 he had become a big junkie, then in kicking that, transitioned seamlessly into raging alcoholism. "It was as though the excitement had been in the chase," Boyd realizes, and she eventually ended what sounded like a completely awful marriage in which he drank two bottles of brandy a day and impregnated other women all over the place and wrote songs like "Wonderful Tonight".

She sounds like she's doing OK now.

Tonight at 10 is the premiere of ESPN's original miniseries The Bronx is Burning, based on the book of the same name by Jonathan Mahler. It runs for 8 weeks, and will air on Tuesdays at 10 after this week.

It's going to be awesome. The book, whose subtitle is "1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City" is an incredibly thorough portrait of the nadir of New York City's troubled history. 1977 represented the culmination of poverty, poor governance, racial tensions, and general urban dysfunction; there were the Son of Sam murders, a nasty mayoral election, the blackout, and ongoing, slow recovery from the 1975 fiscal crisis. Outside the city, New York was seen as a national embarrassment: as the book says of the looting and mayhem that went on during the blackout, "America had expected the worst, and New York had not let it down."

But the real narrative of the book, and the focus of the miniseries, is the rise of the Yankees and Reggie Jackson, culminating in his famous 3 consecutive home runs in the 1977 World Series against the Dodgers. Not surprising that ESPN chose to devote the most time to the sports story, and as Mahler says in an interview in this week's Time Out, "Reggie's three home runs is as much a symbol of New York's resilience as its rebirth," though he says identifying it as the point at which the city's fortunes started to change would be an oversimplification.

But this is ESPN: the reviews suggest that the TV show has no problem with oversimplification. It emphasizes the Yankees story and maybe doesn't deal as much with all the other stuff going on in the city (Daily News review says they've "taken on several major, meaty stories at once, reducing them to their essences and intertwining them.") But it looks like we'll at least get to see Jimmy Breslin covering the Son of Sam murders. He's played by Michael Rispoli, who played Jackie Aprile on The Sopranos, and was also in Spike Lee's Summer of Sam, which covers the same historical territory as this miniseries. No mention of hat-loving agitator and mayoral candidate Bella Abzug in the cast list, though, which is too bad, since she is at least as larger-than-life a character as Billy Martin.

Which brings us to the fantastic Yankees cast: John Turturro as Billy Martin, the Yankees' legendarily hot-tempered manager (Daily News reported he maybe got a little too Method during the shoot,) Oliver Platt as George Steinbrenner, and Daniel Sunjata as Reggie Jackson. Sunjata is also on Rescue Me, where he plays firefighter Franco Rivera. On Rescue Me, his character typically has a lot of lady troubles, and he plays his dramatic scenes with intensity as well as restraint, which is especially impressive considering how outrageously tragic the storylines of the show often are.

Now's his chance to lose the restraint and cut loose as the preening, egomaniacal Jackson, who always seemed at least as concerned about his image off the field as he was about his baseball games. I hope they recreate the interview he did for Sport magazine where he dropped the "I'm the straw that stirs the drink" bomb. In the Bronx is Burning book, Mahler writes that Jackson later said that interview was "the worst screwing he ever got from the press."

Anyway, Sunjata looks like he's heading into casting territory currently occupied by John Turturro and Tony Shalhoub, where he can convincingly play any number of ethnicities. Also interesting is that in 2002 John Turturro played Howard Cosell, whose quote inspired the title, in TNT's Monday Night Mayhem.

The Daily News has a good special section on the summer of 1977, and the Post has a great article on the chaos of the blackout, part of a five-day series of articles leading up to the 30th anniversary this Friday.

Bad news: the review is by Dan Quayle.

Sports writer John Feinstein's latest book, Tales from the Q School about the qualifying tournament for the PGA tour, is sure to be popular among Journal readers. Feinstein, who describes himself as "very liberal and obviously not a big fan of Dan Quayle politically" didn't know who was going to review his book until he picked up the weekend edition of the Journal and saw the byline. "Oy vey," he said.

Quayle is quite an accomplished golfer, so his review isn't that much of a surprise. Given history's assessment of his political career, it's also not so surprising that the review identified him only as "a seven-handicap golfer and the chairman of Cerberus Global Investment." It also just so happens that the parent company of his investment firm is in the process of gaining control of Chrysler even as we speak, as the Times helpfully points out.

Here's a picture from 2005 of Dan Quayle with his golfing buddy Alice Cooper at a celebrity golf tournament.

Which does not imply that Dan Quayle is a rockin' kind of guy: Alice Cooper is a self-described golf monster and also supported Bush.

If you're like me, you probably think the Catholic church and Catholic-affiliated organizations are making way too big a deal out of The Da Vinci Code and the ways its story deviates from Biblical assumptions about Jesus. I mean, come on. Nobody really thinks that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had children together, or that Opus Dei are a bunch of power-hungry murderers, just because that stuff is part of the plot of some popular airport novel.

But the chuch has gone so far as to appoint an archbishop to counter all the non-factual elements of the book, produce a documentary called The Da Vinci Code: A Masterful Deception, and Opus Dei wants a disclaimer about the fictional nature of the story to be shown at screenings everywhere. Which is ridiculous--doesn't the Vatican have bigger issues to worry about than a movie? Don't they know that people can tell the difference between a novel and a history book? How stupid do they think the general public is?

Well, pretty stupid, as it turns out. A group of Catholic leaders in the UK recently sponsored a survey to compare the beliefs of people who have read The Da Vinci Code and those who haven't. It turns out that the book does appear to influence what people believe about Jesus and Catholic institutions.

A Reuters piece on the survey says, "They interviewed more than 1,000 adults last weekend, finding that 60 percent believed Jesus had children by Mary Magdalene -- a possibility raised by the book -- compared with just 30 percent of those who had not read the book.

"The novel, which has sold over 40 million copies, also depicts Opus Dei as a ruthless Machiavellian organization whose members resort to murder to keep the Church's secrets. In the survey, readers were asked if Opus Dei had ever carried out a murder. Seventeen percent of readers believe it had, compared with just four percent of non-readers."

Considering that over 20% of the adult UK population has read The Da Vinci Code, maybe the Catholic church has some basis for concern. We all know that surveys can be biased and skew results in favor of a particular position. And I don't believe that writers and movie producers should be held responsible for some viewers' beliefs being overly influenced by their work. But if that many people out there don't understand that movies and novels aren't real, maybe Dan Brown is actually a frighteningly powerful figure in modern theology.

Not sure if anyone else has documented this yet, but apparently some spammers are big fans of Sherwood Anderson.

We received the following email from someone using the nom de spam "Nysse Sterne":

--- Nyssa Sterne  wrote:

> Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 17:12:05 -0800 (PST)
> From: Nyssa Sterne 
> Subject: Re: Your wife.
> To: [redacted]
> 
> Multiple orgasms - Cum again and again!
> Have you ever wanted to impress your girl with a
> huge cumshot?
> Its easy, just follow here
> 
> stock, the respect of Colonel Tom Rainey and the
> directors, the fear of
> for days stayed in Sam's mind as a kind of
> realisation of the part he
> mother and boy had stayed with the girl, out of
> sight in the house, sick

Can you guess which part the spammers wrote, and which part is mangled Sherwood Anderson? I wish I could say I immediately recognized the Anderson passages, but instead I had to rely on my old literary assistant Google (just like when I was teaching and had to show disappointed mothers that their 14-year-olds didn't really write that precocious analysis of Waiting for the Rain). Turns out these literary fragments are taken from various chapters of Anderson's first novel, Windy McPherson's Son.

This makes sense: the erotic promise of multiple orgasms followed by a quick taste of one of America's finest short story writers is the perfect combination of the hard and soft sell. If the spammers keep this up and vary the authors a little bit, I might be able to make it through Light in August after all.

And that might be even more impressive than a huge cum shot.

Michael Winterbottom's new movie Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story might be the first interesting movie of 2006. It's an adaptation of Laurence Sterne's novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, which was written in the mid-18th century but reads like an absurdist 20th century experiment in postmodernism. The book is introduced as an autobiography, but has no narrative structure at all, never gets very far beyond Shandy's conception and birth, and is full of stories-within-stories, anecdotes that go nowhere, and endless ruminations about how Shandy can't be sure about anything about himself or the world. If James Joyce had tried to write this book, it would probably be much more popular than Tristram Shandy is (it's allegedly rarely read) but it wouldn't be half as funny. Even so, 700 pages of digressions and drawings of sqiggly lines are hard to get through.

Anyway, Michael Winterbottom is great at making self-referential movies that tell the exaggerated stories of larger-than-life figures--2002's 24 Hour Party People was a sort of biopic of Ian Curtis, Shaun Ryder, and Tony Wilson, but was open about much of it being fictional. In that movie, Steve Coogan hilariously played Tony Wilson, and Coogan is back as Tristram Shandy in this new movie.

Michael Winterbottom is probably the best person around to take on a project like this. In an NPR interview that aired earlier today, he was asked what obligation he felt to be faithful to the book, and answered "None whatsoever."

From the sound of it, the movie Tristram Shandy makes use of all the diversions and self-consciousness that make the book so weird and hard to adapt. Actors drop out of character; there are a lot of references to the making of the movie and the DVD release; at one point Steve Coogan is interviewed by what I think is the real Tony Wilson.

The movie opens on Friday in New York; I don't know when the hell it opens anywhere else.

Note: Steve Coogan and Alfred Molina did a great short movie with Jim Jarmusch that was included in 2004's Coffee and Cigarettes, and it was one of the best comedy moments of the past few years. Steve Coogan is the master of being self-important and simultaneously making fun of his own self-importance.

Three makes a trend--Michiko Kakutani, books editor for the NY Times, has continued to indulge her weird penchant for writing satirical reviews in the voice of a related fictional character.

Two years ago she wrote that insane review of Candace Bushnell's Trading Up in the form of a memo from Elle Woods (you know, Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde) to the book's main character. She doesn't always hit the nail on the head with this concept, but there are some great moments that suggest that she did really love that movie: "But I have to say, and I hope you won't think I'm being impertinent here, I really think you need to have a little more faith in people. You come across in ''Trading Up'' as this really cold, hard, cynical, manipulative -- you know, rhymes with witch. Maybe you just had it with all the creeps hitting on you and got depressed and jaded. Haven't you ever heard of Zoloft? Or maybe this is just a P.R. problem -- like did you authorize this biography or what?"

Then a few months back she reviewed Benjamin Kunkel's Indecision in the voice of as Holden Caufield. She loves good old HC, too, but she gets a little clumsy: "But hey, Dwight and his friends have spent the better part of their lives getting these chemical assists, and I've gotta say that Dwight (or this Mr. Kunkel, who turns out to be pretty great at channeling old Dwight's thoughts) does a swell job of describing what it's like to be high -- on weed or Ecstasy or this South American hallucinogen that makes everyone puke their guts out before transporting them to nirvana or whatever you want to call Drug Heaven. This drug Dwight takes in Ecuador gives a new meaning to stream-of-consciousness narration that old James Joyce certainly never, ever envisioned."

So today, she writes a review of Summer Crossing, Truman Capote's newly released first novel, in the voice of Holly Golightly: "Tru, Dear, There's Only One Holly. Moi." Not as creative a choice as her other wacky reviews, but she has a good time with it. Though perhaps Kakutani has trouble making those subtle character distinctions between Holly and Elle Woods: "As for her choice of men: well, darling, there's simply no accounting for taste. I've had my share of rats, certainly, even more superrats than I can count, but none of them were supersize, King Kong-type rats like Grady's. Her first love was this über-married preppie rat, who hotfoots it after the poor girl while his wife's pregnant, then the minute the child's born, can't wait to proclaim what a happy family man he is. I mean, yikes and double yikes!"

I can't stand Breakfast At Tiffany's, and this little game might start getting old soon. But hey, Michiko, whatever gets you through the day.

Probably the most irresponsible series of children's books ever made, H.A. Rey's Curious George, is being adapted for 30 half-hour animated shows for PBS. William H. Macy will narrate.

No word yet on how they're planning to handle the infamous Curious George Sniffs Ether episode from the book Curious George Takes a Job, (now a popular subject of t-shirts for stoner college students,) the stories that conclude with Curious George and the Man in the Yellow Hat smoking their pipes, or the lesser known Curious George Falls Into a Wicked K-Hole storyline.

Dave Eggers appeared on Conan O'Brien last night. Not much new information for those who follow him much, but still either entertaining or annoying or maybe both, depending on your pre-existing feelings about him.

So here's an MP3 of the entire interview. [~7.5 mins, 3.5 mb]

Don't forget he has that new Future Dictionary thing out, and a McSweeney's anthology.

Interesting NYT piece about Jerry Stahl's new book I, Fatty (the best title for a book I've heard since Cintra Wilson's) a fictionalized memoir of Fatty Arbuckle. Arbuckle was a very popular and successful silent film star--the first actor to get a million-dollar contract--who was at the center of a major Hollywood scandal when he was accused of raping and murdering a starlet during an orgy at a San Francisco hotel. Although Fatty was acquitted at three separate trials, he was forever tarnished by the case, and his image was destroyed through a deluge of defamatory articles in the Hearst tabloids.

And: Fatty was a heroin addict. You may recall that Jerry Stahl, TV writer for ALF, Moonlighting, and Twin Peaks, also wrote his own memoir called Permanent Midnight (made into a movie starring Ben Stiller) about his $6,000/week heroin addiction. In discussing his own drug problems in the article, Stahl makes a lot of vague metaphors about addicts creating themselves as alienated beings via their addictions, but, as usual, the anecdotes are more interesting. He says he still buys a car with a consideration of what it would be like to live in it.

His book is doing well, and Johnny Depp's film company has optioned it. So let's think about who could play Fatty Arbuckle, if the film ever gets produced. Johnny Depp says he wouldn't play the title role, but suggests that Philip Seymour Hoffman could do it. How about Dave Attell? Or maybe Kiefer in a fat suit? He did a great job almost shooting up during 24's season this past year.

Stahl says about modern celebrity scandals, "self-destruction is a wing of show business... It has almost become a station of the celebrity cross to have that rehab moment, when you do something, you're caught, then you come clean and everybody loves you again and you're back in." It's the Bill Clinton model of the glorious return after shame. Robert Downey, Jr. aspires to follow this path, but somewhere around The Singing Detective I started doubting. And, of course, there is an ocean of celebrities who have blown it and never quite regained their previous stature (OJ, Christian Slater, Nick Nolte, Bobby Brown, Courtney Love) all of whom could likely relate to the plight of Fatty.

The New York Times offers some helpful advice today on what is probably one of the easiest things one can do in modern America: being a college student. Chuck Klosterman, our patron saint of metal fandom, reviews a new book entitled Real College: The Essential Guide to Student Life [tx Rungu]. He points out that the most difficult part of college for many students is paying for it--an area of advice that the book's writers mysteriously omit in favor of trickier topics such as "social life" and "studying". Klosterman notes that if your biggest worry about attending college is how to get your roommate to vacuum more, you probably don't really need an advice book: "For those who actually paid for college themselves, the repayment of student loans was the only 'real challenge' higher education ever presented; everything else was just sort of fun and exciting and amazingly drunken."

The breezy assumption that college students' parents pay the bills is one flaw of the book; as far as I can tell, the other major problem is the usage of the name "Rollo" as one of the "real-life freshmen" characters who write in questions about college life to the writers. I mean, is "Rollo" attending clown school? Will his (her?) concerns be relevant to a student who is not taking classses like The Anthropology of Dance or Television and the Nation at UC Santa Cruz?

Anyway, Klosterman comes up with his own bits of practical advice for the kid entering college which strike me as important platitudes for adults to hold onto as well: "if something makes you vomit, don't worry about it; everybody vomits sometimes" and "your parents will never, ever understand anything about you (and it is unreasonable for you to expect otherwise)" are especially relevant.

But perhaps college students really do need book-length advice from authoritarian figures to guide them through higher education. At least, maybe the kids who study a semester abroad need it. It appears that our ambassadors of the American education system have been promoting the ugly American stereotype to our foreign friends: dropping beer bottles onto passing cars from their dorm windows, getting into knife fights, skipping their classes for weeks at a time, getting caught with drugs, and, of course, getting drunk and puking all over everything. The host universities are complaining, and some U.S. colleges are requiring their students to meet some strict academic standards before they are accepted into study-abroad programs, or even take a class before they go on how to be an exchange student without getting arrested.

Kids: if all you want to do in college is drink, you can do plenty of that right here in America--just join a fraternity or sorority. If you want to have a European vacation, just get your parents to pay for one during the summer--hey, they're already paying for college, right? (see above.) What's another couple thousand bucks? OK, some full disclosure: I was one of those college students who studied abroad, and I was even one of the ones who went to a university in an English-speaking country, which college administrators say are "more likely to attract students who have no language expertise or interest in foreign culture." Sometimes I opted to spend an evening in the bar that was in my dorm rather than do my reading for Gothic Literature. But I did manage to vomit exclusively into appropriate receptacles, and never once wore a Hard Rock Cafe t-shirt while actually in a Hard Rock Cafe.

Today痴 print edition of the New York Times carried a very exciting full-page advertisement for the 敵reat Summer Read� Program. Starting July 12, the Times will serialize a book a week for four weeks as an in-paper giveaway: The Great Gatsby, Breakfast at Tiffany痴, Like Water for Chocolate, and The Color of Water.

展hat better way to bring our diverse city together than by offering readers the opportunity to 'gather' around a great book," said Alyse Myers, Times vice president of marketing services. "As a newspaper, we are a natural advocate for fostering literacy and a passion for reading. To advance these causes, we decided to revive the old tradition of serializing books and to offer them free, with the daily newspaper -- for the whole city to enjoy."

Free books! It sounds too good to be true! Well, that's kind of because it is. Only the first chapter of each novel will be available online; otherwise the insert is available only to those who buy the print edition. And, since the serial runs seven consecutive days, folks who may perhaps have a weekday-only subscription (ahem) will need to shell out for both weekend papers to find out who comes to Gatsby痴 funeral.

Altruism? Community service? It seems more to me like the circulation department finally realized that people are reading the Sunday magazine on their monitors instead of curled up on the couch. Now, I love reading my hard copy during the week, but a girl on a budget can稚 be expected to pay those Sunday prices week after week. By the time you buy seven issues, you致e spent around $10 on a book you could pick up used for $1 on any street corner.

While I知 at it, let me get my two cents in about these book selections. Overall, I applaud the idea of serializing classics both old and new, but�

People. I'm with you on three out of four, but if you wanted a novel by a Latina, why didn稚 you just ask me? Like Water for Chocolate is a lovely book, but the other three all deal with different lives in different periods of New York's history. How about How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents? Or When I was Puerto Rican? Or Dreaming in Cuban? Or if you just needed a woman of color, what about Breath, Eyes, Memory? New York's literary community is as rich and diverse as the city itself, and although I would never argue the appeal and greatness of a Gatsby or a Tiffany痴, why not use this opportunity to showcase some more diverse talents?

Now, I don't want to sound entirely down on this project, because I'm all for getting people to read more. And the Times will also be sponsoring readings and panels through the summer as part of a larger initiative. But seriously, New York Times Community Affairs Department, give me a call next time you're going to plan something like this. I知 right around the corner and my consulting fees are very reasonable.

A lot of big name book readings scheduled today in New York:

1) Calvin Trillin, who seems to be so in tune with the interests of the writers of this blog that we can only assume that he is a fan. He's reading tonight at the Lincoln Center Barnes & Noble for his new book Obliviously On He Sails. Trillin's last book, a novel about parking in NYC, seemed to be written expressly with ADM in mind, and this latest book about Bush and his administration, written in verse, includes Gilbert and Sullivan-inspired lines such as “I am, when all is said and done, a Robertson Republican.” We love you, Calvin, and we know you love us too.

2) Alex Garland. Remember him? The hot young pomo English guy who wrote The Beach and encouraged a generation of backpackers to feel really alienated and smoke a lot of dope? Well remember, he also wrote the screenplay for 28 Days Later, the pomo zombie movie from last year. Now he's written a new novel called The Coma. In case you missed him last night at Housing Works, you can see him tonight at the Borders in the Time Warner Center (scroll down past David Foster Wallace.) The new book is about a guy who wakes up from a coma after being attacked, but starts to wonder if he might still be unconscious. Then suddenly lots of REALLY! FAST! ZOMBIES! show up and EAT HIS BRAIN! [note: this plot point is speculative.]

In case you want to actually read the book before going to either of these two readings, you could ditch the rest of your day and probably get through both of them: Trillin's book is 128 pages, and The Coma is a mere 144.

3) Clinton. In midtown and Harlem. The entire city is currently standing in line to get into these signings. Forget it.

Here are your options:

June 22, 2004 - 12:30 p.m.
Barnes & Noble
600 Fifth Avenue [at 48th Street]
New York, NY 10020
212-765-0590

June 22, 2004 - 6:30 p.m.
Hue-Man Bookstore
2319 Frederick Douglass Blvd. [at 125th]
New York, NY 10017
212-665-7400

June 23, 2004 - 12:30 p.m.
Borders Books
100 Broadway [at Pine Street]
New York, NY 10005
212-964-1988

Hue-Man would probably be the best choice, but that 6.30 pm in Harlem sure seems unrealistically optimistic. You know how he is -- you can pretty much bet your paycheck that Bill will be at least 90 minutes late, after he's done gabbing with the throngs in Midtown.

If you can't make the appearances, catch him on TV: it appears he will be on every single talk show on every single channel next week. Except Fox, of course.

[via Knopf's site and Babak.]

At the risk of sounding like a total nerd, I spent the weekend glued to C-SPAN 2痴 coverage of the L.A. Times Festival of Books. There were many interesting panels this year, but Manufacturing Fear: American Culture Today was a real standout.

The panel was moderated by sociologist Barry Glassner, author of the terrific book The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things. Glassner (who you may remember from Bowling for Columbine) asks why Americans fear crime and violence rather than societal problems such as poverty and ignorance that cause them. The Culture of Fear was published shortly before 9/11, and I was interested to see if Glassner痴 views had changed. As it turns out, the heightened hysteria of our media and government since then has only proven his previous ideas correct.

Other panelists included:
Michael Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror
Michael Shermer, The Science of Good & Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and Follow the Golden Rule
Paul Campos, The Obesity Myth: Why America's Obsession with Weight Is Hazardous to Your Health*

If you're feeling guilty about that unfinished manuscript in your desk drawer - well, you should. It seems like every time you turn around, another teenager is publishing a novel. Last fall 17-year-old Zoe Trope had success with Please Don't Kill the Freshmen, and now Paris-based Flavia Bujor is promoting the American release of Prophecy of the Stones, already a bestseller in Europe. Don't worry though - it wasn't an easy road. Even though Bujor started writing the book at 12, she didn't find a publisher until she was almost 15.

Are young novelists a new trend? As a youngster one of my very favorite books, She was Nice to Mice, was written by a precocious Alexandra Elizabeth Sheedy, Age 12. Yes, before she was shooting up and having lesbian sex in High Art, or even eating popcorn sandwiches in detention, Ally Sheedy was writing was a tale of intrigue and betrayal in the court of Queen Elizabeth I. Still not sold? It's also written from the perspective of a palace mouse.

What a thought for a Monday morning. I'm past my novelist prime, and considering the treatment that two mice in my own court received this weekend, no youngster will be writing about my love of animals anytime soon.

The authors of a new book, Overcoming Night Eating Syndrome, say that getting up in the middle of the night and eating uncontrollably is not a new problem, but an old problem that is getting new attention. Night eaters seem to mostly be women, and they are characterized by lack of hunger during the day, insomnia, and inability to fall asleep unless they get up and eat. A lot. Which makes them feel horribly depressed, and sometimes suicidal. It's not related to dieting or anorexia, but rather to stress and insomnia. The authors say, "Eating becomes a conditioned response to waking, working better than any sleeping pill."

If night eating is really a result of insomnia and life stressors, why does it just so happen than these women are turning to food as their source of relief? The many different ways that people can have weirdly secretive and dependent relationships with food ("I sometimes fall asleep with food in my mouth") that have been problems for decades points to a larger problem that our culture still has with food. Therapy for night eating mostly consists of eating three regular meals a day, instead of addressing the underlying stress and depression that is causing the behavior in the first place. Even the experts on this issue are identifying food and overeating as the problem. Eating three meals a day might make night eaters lose weight, but will their lives and self-images improve? This kind of treatment sounds to me like prescribing Pepto-Bismol for bulimics, or suggesting that alcoholics stop going to happy hour so much.

NY Times has a great article on Franz Wright, one of my favorite poets, who won the Pulitzer Prize recently. His father, James Wright, also won it about 30 years ago, also for poetry. Franz grew up almost entirely without his father around, but their lives have followed very similar paths involving a lot of drug and alcohol abuse, and general misery and self-destruction.

James Wright's life as a poet involved a lot of famous people: Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton, John Berryman. Says Franz about his childhood with his father and his friends: "I thought that all adults were insane drunks and chain smokers." That's poets for you.

A typically all-encompassing column from Maureen Dowd today, in which she takes on a little more than one Op-Ed piece can handle (it's only 700 words, Maureen!) Still, a lot of good points.

The current administration is reacting to the recent Spanish elections with a lot of "By voting the current party out of office, the Spanish are letting the terrorists win!" Of course, what they mean is, "If you American pissants all vote the current party out of office, you'll let the terrorists win!" The thing is, the Spanish people never seemed to support the war, and they certainly don't like it now that we know about the global wool-over-the-eyes deceptions that led to it in the first place. The latest reason we're hearing for why the war happened was that we want to promote democracy and political freedom in all nations. Not, however, in renegade countries like Spain, where the people democratically stated their preferences in the victory of the Socialist, anti-war party.

Then she goes into some Pride and Prejudice metaphor in which Kerry is "Pride", as the snotty-nosed, condescending rich boy (who she says is Mr. Collins in the book, but isn't Mr. Darcy supposed to be the "pride" character?) and further promotes one of the more irritating co-opted catchphrases in international politics, unfairly stolen from The Simpsons. She characterizes Bush as Elizabeth "Prejudice" Bennet, the dogmatic, inflexible one, incapable of recognizing facts that differ from his assumptions. Not the most carefully thought out literary parallel, but maybe she can come back to it in another column in which she hasn't also taken on the political developments of many European countries.

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The only difference, I think, is that Depp's lips have been Photoshopped.

Page Six has a few tidbits from the forthcoming Hollywood expose Hollywood Interrupted today. Courtney Love, super-producer Robert Evans (of The Kid Stays in the Picture), and Michael Ovitz are among many excoriated in its pages. The book has Evans ordering up a 17-year-old prostitute from Heidi Fleiss, and goes into the tribulations of Ovitz's nanny. (The item is accompanied by a great pic of Robert Evans looking sort of demented and girlish.)

The book will join Joe Eszterhas's Hollywood Animal on the shelf of recent Hollywood tell-alls, a genre that people (including us) seem never to be able to get enough of. In case you've fallen behind in your reading in the last few years, check out You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again by Julia Phillips, the producer who revivifed the genre a while back, and Hollywood Babylon which spills all the secrets of old Hollywood, right up to the 1970s.

Random Family is one of the the most powerful non-fiction books I've ever read, and in my opinion, is akin James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in its efforts to accurately portray the difficult lives of a forgotten underclass. LeBlanc's book follows an extended family's travails over the course of about 10 years with a non-judgmental objectivity that preserves the story's believability despite its seemingly incredible nature. LeBlanc's rigorous narrative style also offers a dispassionate, but never cold, look at the individuals in the family, without either condemning, pitying, or glorifying them. Her book depicts the reality of this family in a way that a reader completely removed from that reality can understand, but it's not an easy book. You have to struggle to remain as nonjudgmental as LeBlanc, and struggle to open your mind and heart to the pain and love she portrays.

Despite growing up in a Massachussetts suburb, LeBlanc went on to feel the distinctive pull of the South Bronx and describes how the neighborhood has redefined her. Her time there changed her on many levels, and showed her that her true identity is now neither entirely in the Bronx or in Massachussetts, but somewhere in between. Her identification with this middle-ground is symbolized by an unexpected development in her own life: her family life eventually became intertwined with her subjects, when they became involved in her father's battle with cancer. Her experiences have shown her that "home" is not merely a physical space, but an approach to life that transcends geography:

To be where I am is to accept where I came from, to be both a visitor and an escapee. Maybe always-leaving is my closest kinship, but I've learned to claim the life I live here, wherever that may be. The open invitation is what I cherish most about my work in this city - the righteousness of my ignorance, the job of getting lost again and again.

The book was written by Gavin Lambert, who apparently was asked by Robert Wagner to write such a book years ago. It seems that Wagner got the author access to people who otherwise might not have agreed to interviews, so some new information will probably surface that wasn't included in all the other books out there about her.

Today's revelation that Michael Jackson drinks wine (which he calls "Jesus juice") from Coke cans so no one will know he's drinking reminds me of Dolphus Raymond, a character in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, except with a twist.

Just like Michael, Dolphus Raymond is regarded as an eccentric figure in his community, and like Michael, he has more money than most. Also like Michael, Dolphus has an ambiguous relationship with his race: he's white, but he had an affair with, and then married, a black woman, with whom he had a handful of bi-racial children. Similarly, Michael has married a couple of white women, with whom he has had some bi-racial kids. Dolphus spends most of his time hanging out with the black people of Maycomb in the town square, where is he derided by judgmental passers-by, just as Michael spends a lot of time in the public eye, and is similarly derided because of his eccentricities and indefinite relationship to his race.

But what makes the latest revelation about Michael really reminiscent of Dolphus is this: Everybody in town thought Dolphus was an alcoholic, because they always saw him in public drinking from a bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag. But one day, Scout and Dill learn the truth: Dolphus was drinking Coke, not alcohol, out of that brown paper bag. By contrast, Michael Jackson appears to be drinking Coke, but is really drinking alcohol. Both Dolphus and Michael (reportedly) allowed children to taste their respective beverages to learn the truth.

When asked why he acts so strangely all the time and lets everyone think he is an alcoholic, Dolphus says he wanted to give people an excuse for his behavior, so they would leave him alone. Without his alcoholic persona, the people of Maycomb would persecute him because of his relationship with the black woman. But because they could say, "Oh, that's just old Dolphus the alcoholic," they gave him a free pass to act oddly. Unfortunately for him, the "oh, that's just how Michael is" excuse has worn thin for MJ, and his eccentricity doesn't seem to be much protection any more. Maybe he should have followed the lead of his literary complement and laid off the sauce.

• Thomas Pynchon (and Tom Clancy) on The Simpsons [726 kb, 45 secs]
• Screen captures of Pynchon on The Simpsons

He's speaking as he's standing in front of a house with a flashing sign reading "Thomas Pynchon's House -- Come On In." The paper bag has a question mark painted on the forehead. He says, "Here's your quote: Thomas Pynchon loved this book...almost as much as he loves cameras." As a car drives by he yells, "Hey, over here! Have your picture taken with a reclusive author! Today only, we'll throw in a free autograph! But wait! There's more!" The voice after his is Tom Clancy's.

ps. In case you were wondering, Pynchon says his own name "Pinch-On," not "Pinch-un." That settles that. Maybe John Le Carre will show up on The Simpsons next week, so we can solve that mystery, too.

It's been talked about for what feels like forever, and on Sunday it will finally happen: Thomas Pynchon will appear on The Simpsons. [Update: Here's our post containing screen caps and audio from the episode.] The famously reclusive author will not show even his animated face, though: he'll be wearing a paper bag over it. But at least we'll get to hear what he sounds like. The episode involves Marge writing a novel and is called "Diatribe of a Mad Housewife."

Pynchon's association with the Simpsons began in an episode called "Little Girl in the Big Ten," in which Lisa heads off to college, and is in awe of those around her. She asks a girl holding a copy of Gravity's Rainbow whether the girl is reading it. "Rereading it," she replies.

But there are many other intersections of Pynchon and television.

• Those who follow Pynchon's occasional transgressions of his own wall of secrecy will remember his relationship with The John Larroquette Show. Larroquette considers himself a pretty literate guy, and is a big fan of Pynchon, so he started slipping references to Pynchon into the show. Eventually, the writers sent a script mentioning TP off to the man himself. The script called for TP to be represented on camera by an extra with his back turned, but Pynchon vetoed that idea. Nonetheless, the plot of the episode revolves around a character who claimed he knows Pynchon. Before the show was cancelled, the writers managed to squeeze in a few more TP references, including one in which the the girl from Blossom assumes the name of a character from V.. If you're really that interested in Larroquette's literary tastes, here's a long interview with him about that very topic.
• In 1998, CNN attempted to track down Pynchon in New York and videotape him. The film crew quickly accomplished its mission, and a seemingly panicked Pynchon contacted CNN and offered an interview in exchange for the tape's never airing. CNN agreed, and the interview is here. After the segment ran, an announcer revealed that TP could be spotted among the pedestrians in the street scenes it had just shown. Shortly thereafter, Salon featured an article about Pynchon's appearance on the tape, written by someone who saw an enhanced version of it. If you still have access to the old video streaming software VXtreme (remember those heady days?), you may be able to view the video.
• On the sitcom Pearl, which starred Rhea Pearlman and lasted only one season, a character named Professor Pynchon (Malcolm McDowell) played a prominent role, and several TP references were made. There's even an episode called "Pynchon's Pynchon."
• The worlds of TP and Star Trek collide in an episode of Deep Space Nine called "In the Cards," in which the plot bears a resemblance to Pynchon's short novel The Crying of Lot 49 [synopsis | full text(!)].
• You can catch some Pynchon references on Mystery Science Theater 3000 in their 1993 treatment of "The Rebel Set" and a couple of other movies.
• Finally, it's not from TV, but the movie The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension is in its entirety a pretty big reference to Crying of Lot 49.

Here's another page that covers some of the same ground as this post, sometimes in more detail, sometimes in less.

Tomorrow we learn the winners of the National Book Awards for fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and children's literature. There were free readings all over the city this afternoon, and you can see all the finalists read tonight at the New School. My own Serbian hometown poet, Charles Simic, showed up late at the Astor Place Barnes & Noble today, after he encountered some wicked traffic on the Henry Hudson, but still read. His stage banter is also better than most rock stars' and celebrities': anecdotes about Chinese restaurants in the Village he frequented in the 1950's, his cat, and some improvisation about the self-help books surrounding the podium. Maybe he'll be asked to host Punk'd next season after the Ashton backlash hits.

So an Oxford Dictionary of phrases that just came out in the UK includes the term "sex up", an acknowledgement of the accusations that the British government embellished reports of Iraq's weapons to encourage the war. What kinds of phrases would be in a new US version of this dictionary? How about:

The Governator: (noun) The newly elected governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who replaced the existing governor due to winning a lot of votes from idiot Californian douchebags who use democracy the same way you would drop that statistics class two weeks into the semester because you're not sure you'll pass. (tx Whiskas)

Late in the novel, in a scene set in the late 1970s inside CBGB's, a minor character presents his theory that almost all group dynamics can be understood in terms of the relationship between The Beatles: every group has its own John, Paul, George and Ringo. The other characters challenge the limits of this theory:

Dylan's friend Linus Millberg appears out of the crowd with a cup of beer and shouts, "Dorothy is John Lennon, the Scarecrow is Paul McCartney, the Tin Woodman is George Harrison, the Lion's Ringo."

"Star Trek," commands Dylan over the lousy twangy country CB's is playing between sets.

"Easy," Linus shouts back. "Kirk's John, Spock's Paul, Bones is George, Scotty is Ringo. Or Chekov, after the first season. Doesn't matter, it's like a Scotty-Chekov-combination Ringo. Spare parts are always surplus Georges or Ringos."

"But isn't Spock-lacks-a-heart and McCoy-lacks-a-brain like Woodman and Scarecrow? So Dorothy's Kirk?"

"You don't get it. That's just a superficial coincidence. The Beatle thing is an archetype, it's like the basic human formation. Everything naturally forms into a Beatles, people can't help it."

"Say the types again."

"Responsible-parent genius-parent genius-child clown-child."

"Okay, do Star Wars."

"Luke Paul, Han Solo John, Chewbacca George, the robots Ringo."

"Tonight Show."

"Uh, Johnny Carson Paul, the guest John, Ed McMahon Ringo, whatisname George."

"Doc Severinson."

"Yeah, right. See, everything revolves around John, even Paul. That's why John's the guest."

"And Severinson's quiet but talented, like a Wookie."

"You begin to understand."

Here's our earlier excerpt.

Here's a little something from Fortress of Solitude, the new novel by Jonathan Lethem. A woman writes to her son Dylan on a postcard that shows a shirtless Henry Miller and a woman at Big Sur:

don't let hank fool you d
a brooklyn street kid never quits
dreaming of stickball triples
egg creams and the funnies
in his mind he's dick tracy
she's brenda starr
not venus on the half shell
love beachcomber crab

Coming soon: page 261.