The Ghost Writer (2010)

My only observation on the Roman Polanski controversy has always been, that he would have done far better to take the consequences of his actions early. Evading that has given the matter a ghastly forty-year life that is much longer than the sentence he might have served.

But I will say this: The man is one of our giant film-makers. I watched The Ghost Writer last night and thought it was one of the best films in the paranoid thriller line since the glory days of The Parallax View and The Conversation. The artistry is complete across the board: direction, writing, acting, art direction, cinematography, music (an amazing score by Alexandre Desplat). It is interesting to note that the film cleaned up at the European Film Awards (Best Film, Director, Screenplay, Score, and very welcomely, Actor for Ewan McGregor). It got no Oscar nods at all, but I think that is a function of its being an early 2010 release (and perhaps of having an inept publicist). If it had been released in December, I think that it would have been right in the mix; Pierce Brosnan and Olivia Williams would have deserved looks in the supporting acting categories.

The McGregor and Williams roles were originally slated for Nicholas Cage and Tilda Swinton. I think McGregor is more apt, more naive, than Cage would have been. Swinton would have been just as good as Williams; the role is in her wheelhouse. However, it is exciting for Williams's career that she got to play it; I'll bet she has received lots of calls from directors and casting specialists since the movie came out.

The twilight atmosphere of the film, with the bleak German North Sea island Sylt standing in for Martha's Vineyard, is perfectly matched to the unnerving aspects of the story (or in one word: Creepy!). Although, as with almost any movie thriller, I do have a few plot questions (which Robert Harris's source novel might answer), the story stays on target, culminating in a genuine surprise in the last scene, and one of the greatest final shots ever, an image that both Hitchcock and Antonioni might have admired.

Ebert Presents At the Movies

The first two episodes of the new Ebert Presents At the Movies are up at the show's website, but it is a real struggle for me to watch the streaming videos, because even though I again have a U.S. IP address, so it's not an international issue, the videos halt and stutter every couple of seconds. However, from what I can make out, I doubt this version of At the Movies is long for this world. Christy Lemire of the Associated Press is much better than I expected her to be; she is very sharp on the repetitive humdrum aspect of unambitious movies, maybe because she has been reviewing longer than her partner. Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, on the other hand, is overplaying his boyish quality and is coming across as an uncritical softie, despite his bona fides as a cineaste. Way too many thumbs-up! There is a disbelieving glint in Lemire's eye when she looks at Vishnevetsky that telegraphs to the audience, I can't believe they paired me with a high school student! -- and that may seem ungenerous, but now that I've seen the show, I can't say as I blame her. It reminds me of the scenes from In the Loop when the Brits are agape at the American boy wonder bureaucrats. There was a ton of discussion of Ebert's plucking a sharp young writer from the blogosphere and giving him this kind of platform -- Vishnevetsky was a last-minute replacement for the experienced Elvis Mitchell -- and it was indeed a fresh, gutsy move that might have worked, but unless the kid develops on camera awfully fast, the blogosphere is not going to come out of this looking good.

POSTSCRIPT: My cynical suspicion is that Vishnevetsky was told in no uncertain terms that if he was only going to champion Rivette films and the like, he couldn't have the gig; so he is over-compensating by defending Ashton Kutcher and Seth Rogen movies against an industry player who understands far better than he does why such films get made. His approach is naive and wide-eyed -- it strikes me as a little too wide-eyed. The enthusiasm is real, but there are perils to conducting your education in public. I know that I wince at most of what I wrote before the age of 30 -- at the tone, not so much the opinions themselves (my tastes haven't changed much).

Cold Weather (2010)

Dennis Lim has written a very nice background piece on Aaron Katz's Cold Weather for the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/movies/30katz.html

I still have to catch up with the whole mumblecore thing, but this sounds like a film I could like a lot. And a young film-maker who counts Robert Altman, P.G. Wodehouse, Carl Barks, and Preston Sturges among his influences has already made a beeline to my approval.

By the way, in February the Times is putting up a paywall and pieces like this will probably no longer be accessible. Most content at the Wall Street Journal and the Times (U.K.) is already blocked off in that way. It's too bad to lose the NYT, but I'm not paying; there are too many other sources of information on the Internet. I understand the difficulties of making money in the Internet era, but I don't think paywalls are a viable solution; you lose 95% of your eyeballs.

Pynchon, Gaddis, and Others

Whether or not you a reader of the great (and reclusive) novelists Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis, the tale spun in this timeline:

http://www.nyx.org/~awestrop/gaddis/whoswho.html

and this Wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanda_Tinasky

is completely mesmerizing. I think it would make an excellent movie if told in an appropriate style (Charlie Kaufman! The Fates are calling you!), but anyone who attempted to make such a movie while Pynchon is still alive would undoubtedly get sued by him. However, the courts generally protect dramatic representations of "public figures," which Tom is whether he likes it or not, so I say to any inspired party, have at it! This material is simply too splendid to resist.

Basically, what is involved here is a heap of mysterious people and personae. Pynchon is even more secretive than the late Gaddis (who loosened up) was, but neither has been an open book. From the get-go, some took the two to be the same person. "Jack Green," Gaddis's early champion, was also believed by some to be an alter-ego of Gaddis, although it would appear he was actually a new identity of a rebellious actuary. As time went on, a minor beat poet, Tom Hawkins, becomes fascinated by these identity questions, and in a series of letters published in Northern California newspapers in the Eighties under the pseudonym "Wanda Tinasky," purportedly a bag lady, he asserted that Pynchon, Gaddis, and Green were identical. Pynchon revealed an extensive familiarity with that part of Northern California in his 1990 novel Vineland, which led some to finger him as "Tinasky." Meanwhile, the increasingly destitute Tom Hawkins bludgeoned his wife Kathleen to death and then, after living with the body for a few days, set fire to their house and drove himself off a cliff. That would have meant the end of Wanda Tinasky, too, except that by now there were Tinasky copycats, a fact that should have pleased Gaddis, whose massive first novel The Recognitions is organized around the theme of forgery, and Pynchon, whose obsessive interest in paranoia is evident everywhere in his work.

It took a lot of effort by literary scholars Steven Moore and Don Foster to suss out all this bizarrerie, and of course they become fully-fledged characters in the story, which is the equal of a Gaddis or Pynchon novel.

Too Big to Fail

I just found out about this, an upcoming HBO movie about the financial crisis, with a killer cast directed by Curtis Hanson:

Paul Giamatti ... Ben Bernanke
Topher Grace ... Jim Wilkinson
Billy Crudup ... Timothy Geithner
James Woods ... Dick Fuld
William Hurt ... Henry Paulson
Matthew Modine ... John Thain
Bill Pullman ... Jamie Dimon
Tony Shalhoub ... John Mack
Cynthia Nixon ... Michele Davis
Dan Hedaya ... Barney Frank
Michael O'Keefe ... Chris Flowers
Kathy Baker ... Wendy Paulson

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1742683/

I love it when HBO makes these "contemporary issues" movies; it's a legitimate form, and they are very, very good at it. If you haven't seen Recount, about the 2000 Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision, do yourself a favor and rent it. It's got another rockin' cast: Kevin Spacey, Bob Balaban, Ed Begley Jr., Laura Dern (brilliant as Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris), John Hurt, Denis Leary, Bruce McGill, Tom Wilkinson.

As for Curtis Hanson, I've been hoping for a worthy follow-up to the great L.A. Confidential and Wonder Boys, and this new film could be it.

Women and Television

[Conversations developed at The Blackboard about actresses Donna Reed and Elizabeth Montgomery.]

Women migrated to television because the career opportunities were becoming greater, and the age discrimination was somewhat less. The era of female-headlined movies starring Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Barbara Stanwyck was passing, and the studios were not showing much interest in launching new stars of that type. So Donna Reed and Lucille Ball and Eve Arden and Elizabeth Montgomery were never the stars until they had their own TV shows, and all were over 30 when their shows began; Ball and Arden were over 40. Actresses' careers were ending at 30 in those days.

It's an interesting sociological question, why the Thirties (especially the pre-Code years) were more proto-feminist than the immediate postwar period. But they definitely were. Actresses carried films (and were expected to) in a way that became much less common after 1950. Television brought women back to the fore; Lucille Ball single-handedly had a lot to do with that.

Oscar Blogging

Me and my posse, we follow the film awards, the festivals, all of it. We discuss, we dig in, we have a good time. I say this up front because I don't want to be misunderstood when I say that many Oscar bloggers, such as Jeffrey Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere, have completely lost their minds. This truly is a matter of degree. An unreasonably intense concentration on awards puts the films themselves, and any merits they might have, totally in the shade. What matters to the over-committed is whether you are on the right side or the wrong side. This year, for Wells, that boils down to whether you are a supporter of The Social Network, in which case you are with the forces of light, or The King's Speech, in which case you have cast your lot with the forces of darkness. I mean, it is completely ridiculous; it is also, in a weirdly entertaining way, something to behold. The night before the nominations, Wells was in a funk:

I don't care about listing Oscar nomination predictions. I've been feeling Phase One fatigue for three or four weeks now.

To which one commenter sensibly replied:

"Phase One fatigue" might be partially due to the fact that you've been doing hour-long Oscar podcasts about this little awards show for some-teen odd weeks now....These things should never even be thought about until December 1st -- at the very earliest -- even by film critics/journalists. What's the upside? You start burning out on it right around (or long before) the race actually starts actually becoming relevant.

And another accurately noted that Wells has been covering "every fart of the awards season" (in hyperventilating fashion, to boot). The guy, and others like him, need to get a grip.

The truth is, almost no one cares about the Oscars one week after they have been given. The "pre-hash" has eaten up the event, which in any case is a perfect example of a pseudo-event as defined by Daniel Boorstin years ago in his classic study The Image ("an event or activity that exists for the sole purpose of the media publicity and serves little to no other function in real life"). Pseudo-events can be fun -- I don't want to get too superior about it -- but for a fair number of people (Oscar bloggers, MTV watchers, Green Bay Packers fans), they have come to supersede reality.

Stevie Wonder

I had to share this vintage clip of Stevie Wonder singing "You and I," a love ballad so instantly classic he might just as well have inscribed it directly in the Great American Songbook.

More LibraryThing Book Notes

David Grann, The Lost City of Z -- This makes for a decently absorbing read while you are going along, but is finally a weak effort, because there are no new revelations and the significance of the story is not clear. Percy Fawcett's 1925 expedition into the Amazon was an old-fashioned, underfunded, under-equipped fiasco with an unscientific goal. The "lost city" theory was unworthy of a man of intelligence, but fits in perfectly, as Grann does admit, with Fawcett's spurious spiritualism. So to me this came across more as a tale of stupidity than a tale of bravery.

There is a frisson of uneasiness to be had from the notion of the jungle swallowing so many explorers, both Fawcett's party and many of the subsequent expeditions that tried to find him. But as a functional modern magazine writer, Grann brings no sense of poetry or awe to the narrative. The chapters that describe his own adventures are especially blah and reveal him as an inadequate researcher. He gets all worked up over seeing a supposedly inaccessible document that was already available in English translation and that you or I could have found. He offers a very sketchy summary of some interesting modern scholarship concerning the Amazon region in the last chapter that seems meant to vindicate poor Fawcett, and to justify Grann's own superfluous trek into the jungle, but it does not accomplish either task convincingly, and so brings the book to a flat conclusion.

Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City -- This best-seller has a surefire double subject (a World's Fair and a serial killer!) and is quite absorbing; but I think that by historians' standards, Larson cheats (which is to say, makes stuff up, including dialogue and descriptions of people's observations and thought processes) in the interest of providing a novelistic narrative. So although I enjoyed the book reasonably well, I do not respect the author's journalistic integrity. He takes the easy way out time and again.

There is a kind of social capital to be had from reading this sort of non-fiction bestseller because others will have read them or at least heard of them. But there is an enormous variability in their quality, and this is at best one of the middling ones.

Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End -- I persisted to the end of this long novel despite wanting to give up every few pages. I can't say that I was rewarded for my efforts, although I will admit that Ferris's ending is graceful. Long before that, however, all the authorial tricks have worn out their welcome: the first person plural narration, the quirky-but-flat characters, the half-hearted nods at magical realism (such as the business with the totem pole, or the adult who sits in a McDonald's play pit), the sentimental mid-section about cancer. I wish I had been more ruthless and stopped reading.

Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker -- This is the first book in a long while that I have decided not to continue. I read through page 81 of the 349-page paperback edition, and nothing about the novel was commanding my interest. Since I am usually a very persistent reader and a fairly easy reader to please, I only abandon a book with reluctance. But I am also sensitive to my time being wasted, and there are books I persisted through that I wish I had ditched, such as Joshua Ferris's overrated Then We Came to the End. When you are always reading classic novels, as I am, sometimes the contemporary novels you pick up seem quite weak by comparison (whether that is fair or not). You would like to ask the author, Why are you trying to re-invent the wheel? What you are doing has been done much better already. As it happens, I started Hermann Hesse's bewitching Demian while I was struggling with Native Speaker. Both are first-person novels of reminiscence, and yet what a world of difference! Demian is electrifying, but Native Speaker is dull and aimless. Even the briefest portraits in Demian are sharp and memorable, while all the characters in Native Speaker are lifeless and unengaging.

The saddest part is, I am unlikely to try any other books by the acclaimed Chang-Rae Lee; there are just too many other writers I need to attend to.

Donald E. Westlake, Memory -- One of the finest existential novels in any language, and a truly great (albeit upsetting) reading experience. It is sobering to think that this manuscript couldn't find a publisher in the Sixties and that we only have it in front of us now because of the persistence of Westlake's friend Lawrence Block in bringing it to light after his death. This is the best book that Hard Case Crime will ever publish.

David J. Schow, Gun Work -- Despite a Mexican setting, which I generally like, I found this hyper-violent, rather unbelievable crime novel not very much to my taste, and I wish I hadn't wasted my time finishing it. I enjoy what one Amazon reviewer wrote, that the book is for "gun aficionados who enjoy tales of extreme violence unencumbered by character development or coherent plotting....One would really have to have an in depth knowledge of armaments in order to fully appreciate or even care about the detailed specs given each and every time a new weapon is introduced."

Suzanne Simons, Master of War: Blackwater USA's Erik Prince and the Business of War -- Erik Prince's conservative, militaristic, Navy SEAL man-of-action persona is so extremely remote from mine that he has a certain fascination for me, and this informative account of his life and dealings satisfied my curiosity. It does not sledgehammer him by any means, but it is still a skeptical take.

Brett Halliday, Murder Is My Business -- I have seen episodes of the Michael Shayne television show, but this is the first Shayne novel I have read. I greatly enjoyed it for its crispness and clever plotting, and will certainly want to read more books in the series. (The original "Brett Halliday," Davis Dresser, wrote the first 28 titles, including this one.) Shayne is a manly, blunt, red-headed detective, not given to irony or angst; and Halliday's prose style is similarly efficient and unfancy. This story is set in El Paso, and I liked the Texan and Mexican local color.

Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment -- A typical example of Modern Academic Style -- impotent, equivocal, non-committal; everything is "problematic." It has some potential although unpleasurable use as an indication of the current state of academic debates concerning the Enlightenment (although on that score, it will go out of date fast), and it can point one in the direction of some better books, such as Albion W. Small's The Cameralists, an interesting, confident 1909 study that can still be read with pleasure and profit one hundred years after publication -- because of that very confidence (as well as the depth of Small's research). The mousiness of Outram's text is, by contrast, extremely unattractive.

POSTSCRIPT: Bits of this material have appeared at PMD before, but there is no harm in the occasional re-run.

LibraryThing Book Notes

I try to keep these pithy -- not Twitterific, but punchy in the manner of the great rock critic Robert Christgau.

E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Devil's Elixirs -- This classic Gothic novel about a mad monk is completely deranged, and I mean that in a good way. Don't ask too many questions, just hang on for the ride. When you finally get to the lengthy explanation of who was really who, realize that you will need a PhD in genealogy to understand it. Sample dialogue: "You mad fools, will you tempt the providence that passes judgment on guilty sinners?"

Blaise Pascal, Pensees -- Pascal the wide-ranging thinker and crisp aphorist is, as another reviewer here has well put it, "electrifying"; Pascal the religious apologist is of a more historical interest, but still worth reading. I am very happy with A.J. Krailsheimer's Penguin edition, and strongly recommend it. This is a classic that no educated reader should miss.

John Lange (Michael Crichton), Zero Cool -- As described very well by other LibraryThing reviewers, this is a silly book -- a quick read, but even those few hours constitute a waste of time. I generally trust Hard Case Crime editor Charles Ardai's taste, but sometimes he does let me down. It is also curious that there is no indication given that this is a slightly updated version of the text, augmented by the contemporary "video interview" sections mentioned by another commenter. Were there any other changes made? The reprint is therefore suspect from a scholarly point of view, whereas in the past I have always felt I could trust Hard Case Crime's bibliographic integrity.

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales -- It will take me a long time to complete this project, since as usual I am juggling many books at once. But let me say this: Every educated reader with an interest in Chaucer should tackle the full original in Middle English. It has a flavorfulness that is unmatchable. I recommend the massive Penguin edition for its amazing introduction, vocabulary footnotes, explanatory endnotes, and complete Middle English glossary; it truly offers everything you need to make this journey with the Canterbury pilgrims.

Howard Pyle, The Wonder Clock -- Completely charming, both the stories and the illustrations. In some ways this is an early example of a "mash-up," because Pyle borrows and re-combines story elements from many sources. Bright young readers and adults should enjoy the book equally. The stories are good for reading aloud, too; the droll repetitive patterns (many groups of three!) are very effective orally.

Elif Batuman, The Possessed -- The subtitle sounds irresistible: "Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them." And the book starts engagingly, but by the time I reached the halfway point, I realized that it was simply a cobbling together of magazine pieces with no through-line. Batuman writes in a Bright Young Thing tone (unfortunately rather generic), and her humorous phrasings are occasionally reminiscent of Daniel Kalder, who also writes about Russia. But Kalder really something to say; Batuman does not, and her attitudinizing eventually becomes wearisome. When she states with mock rue that after her summer in Uzbekistan, she was done with poetry, "the Caucasus, the Russian East, and the literatures of the peripheries," all I could think was, who really cares what you are done with? To be fair, there are glimmers of interest scattered throughout the book that, although they don't amount to a lot, perhaps barely justify the time a Russophile might spend reading it: a clear account of Rene Girard's literary theory in relation to Dostoevsky's novel "Demons," for example. So at best, and not wanting to come down too hard on a young writer who could develop, I give this a borderline recommendation.

Dolores Hitchens, Sleep with Strangers -- As has been widely noted in the hardboiled community, this is an excellent classic P.I. novel. Detective Jim Sader of Long Beach, California, makes a sharp study in male mid-life crisis (probably a somewhat worse experience in the Fifties, when 40 was our 55). All that keeps this novel from five-star status is that the solution to the mystery is not strongly related thematically to the other concerns of the story.

Bram Stoker, Dracula -- Bram Stoker makes brilliant use of the technique of multiple perspectives perfected by Wilkie Collins in The Woman in White. Anyone with the slightest interest in horror or vampire fiction has got to read this seminal novel, of course, but they may be surprised by how little Count Dracula is "onstage": after the lengthy opening sequence in Transylvania, he barely appears again until the final pages. If a book that helps to define its genre is a classic, then this is definitely one.

Andrew Smith, Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth -- It has become all too common for non-fiction narratives to be written in the form of the author's "quest for the story" (and, coincidentally, for him/herself). Probably the whole format ought to be banished for anything but extremely occasional use; but I have to admit that Andrew Smith's Moondust offers an occasion where it works, because some of the surviving moonwalkers were quite hard for Smith to snare, and their elusiveness is actually central rather than incidental. (Where have you gone, Neil Armstrong?) The quest for the story here is fascinating, step by step, and the material that comes out of it is enthralling. A book justifies its structure by delivering the goods, and Moondust does just that.

Yann Martel, Life of Pi -- This novel is moderately entertaining for a while, but disintegrates badly toward the end and winds up being not much more than a fluently written time-waster with unrealized literary pretentions. The Man Booker Prize? Really? Who were the judges that year?

Thoughts on Writing

If the writing comes to me, I can wake up with a post in my head, and it is just a matter of setting it down, and disseminating it quickly (which seems to be necessary to me) in the appropriate venues -- depending on the case, this blog, my private web-group, and/or one of the public boards I participate in. Although I am pretty old-fashioned in many ways, the Internet seems tailor-made for my writing style for several reasons: I am primarily a writer of notes, not essays; I am a short-take guy; and I love to publish instantly (but also to tinker slightly with wordings and to add further thoughts after the initial publication). The conditions haven't been so propitious for a writer of that type since the days of the 17th and 18th century broadsides coming out of English and French coffee-houses.

However, I simply refuse to go on Twitter. Short is OK, but longer is good too, as the occasion demands, and I will not submit to a 140-character limit.

Joe Pyne

Speaking of broadcast hosts, the minor legend Joe Pyne (1924-1970) was cut from an entirely different cloth. Robert Kennedy shared his memories of Pyne with me:

I certainly remember Joe Pyne on the radio as a kid, who was a John Bircher and a right wing lunatic, but very erudite, so he didn't sound like a lunatic until he lost his temper and started calling everybody jerks. But he ventured in the likes of Morton Downey Jr. These guys just loved to argue and yell a lot, rudely calling people names, regularly inviting Nazi's or the Ku Klux Klan on his show during the height of the 60's Civil Rights movement, supposedly to offer equal time, all of which grows tiresome after awhile...

I caught up with Pyne much later, long after his death. I've watched a lot of clips of his television show on YouTube, and find him kind of mesmerizing, and certainly historically important, because he is so clearly one of the sources for every shock jock who followed him. Smoking killed him at 45, but I think maintaining that kind of projected anger day in and day out probably marked him as an early casualty as well. He often looked as if he was about to explode; no one can be that way for long without a cost to themselves.

This is part of a teaser reel about Pyne's "fascinating forum":



Here is Pyne debating a hippie and LSD fan. Frankly, this "totally aware" walking cliche makes for an easy target:



Pyne, in a more suave and relaxed mood, banters with the dithering Helen Gurley Brown:



Unlike a total blowhard such as Rush Limbaugh, Pyne has what seems to me a weirdly appealing side -- if you could imagine an intelligent, well-dressed, and carefully coiffed Archie Bunker, this might be him. Of course, the passage of time takes away the immediacy of a provocateur's affronts, and leaves a nostalgic residue instead. Limbaugh and Glenn Beck will be interesting historical artifacts, too.

POSTSCRIPT: I wondered about the hippie, and figured that with a distinctive name like Lars Kampmann, he might be researchable. It turns out that he is a minor historical figure (which is more of a historical figure than I will ever be). Here is an obituary:

Lars Kampmann, 45, of Redwing, died of AIDS Thursday, Mar. 16, 1989. Mr. Kampmann was a founder of the Anonymous Artists of America and maintained a residence at the AAA Ranch in Redwing. At the time of his death he was staying at the home of friends in San Diego, CA. Born in Denmark, Mr. Kampmann was a multi-talented actor, director and musician, as well as the author of the book "I have AIDS", which was recently published in Denmark. Many Huerfanos will remember his direction of the play "Huerfano", an oral history. Along with Adrienne Berkun he operated "Northern Lights Cafe" in La Veta. Before his illness he was an active volunteer for The Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York City. A friend wrote, "To those of us who were close to him, Lars was the Most steadfast and loyal friend. His dignity and courage was unswerving and inspiring. He was never boring, and to the end he was uncomplaining and more concerned for his loved ones than for himself. Integrity, compassion, gentleness, enthusiasm, humor, courage, selflessness and impeccable style were his in abundance. Lars lived fully and without hesitation, he had a tremendous love of life and made no compromises. We relied upon him for all of these things and much more. He will be greatly missed."

The Lively Art of Conversation

Sometimes the best way to employ a medium is not to particularly exploit its qualities, counter-intuitive as that seem. Television can thrive on pure talk, what Chicago Sun-Times columnist Irv Kupcinet called "the lively art of conversation," without any visual flourishes. Consider two Chicago classics, The Sportswriters on TV and Kup's Show itself (both of which were nationally syndicated). The former, which ran on cable from 1985 to 2000, consisted of nothing more than a bunch of Chicago-area sportswriters (including the great Rick Telander) sitting around a table jawing about sports. That was it. It was positively anti-visual, but it was also mesmerizing.

Kup's Show, hosted by Kupcinet from 1959 to 1986, was in a classic talk show format that, unless I am missing someone, only Bill Maher has cultivated recently: You invite interesting people on and encourage them to talk about all kinds of subjects, not just to you the host, but to each other. Dick Cavett and Merv Griffin also used to do this very well. But, unfortunately, it was the Johnny Carson Tonight Show model that "stuck" -- host-centric, and relentlessly promotional on the part of the guests. I admire Carson as a comedian and a skillful "driver" of his program, but he did the genre no favors by eliminating the free conversational aspect.

Matt Zoller Seitz just wrote a positive and insightful piece on Maher, but did not especially highlight this aspect of his hosting practice, which I think is important to notice:

http://www.salon.com/entertainment/tv/feature/2011/01/13/bill_maher_1_13/index.html

My friend Robert Kennedy and I agree that the endlessly amusing and original John Waters could host a "lively art of conversation"-type show brilliantly if he wanted to take that project on; naturally, Maher has had Waters as a panelist on Politically Incorrect and Real Time a number of times. If anyone wanted to try emulating Kup, Cavett, and Griffin, I would truly be up for it. (Charlie Rose has great people on, but not in an open group format, and although a smart, well-informed guy, he is a bit of a starry-eyed suck-up, really not all that different from the lowbrow Larry King.)

I find it interesting that one of the philosophical beliefs that Maher and John Waters share is that it is incumbent upon us all to become smarter people. Thus Maher's "Do you read?" comment quoted by MZS, and Waters' insistence, repeated again in his latest book, that we should all read the hardest books we can lay our hands on. Dick Cavett is an incredible reader, and although one may not think of Merv Griffin as an intellect, in fact he was a very smart guy, one of the best businessmen in Hollywood, and, worth noting, the creator of the game show Jeopardy!, one of the rare post-50s television shows that really celebrates intellect. Griffin actually brought philosopher Bertrand Russell on his show to discuss the Vietnam War, which is a Maher-like move even though Griffin's and Maher's hosting personalities couldn't be more different.

So it seems that a high level of self-education and the cultivation of the lively art of conversation go hand-in-hand.

Cubicles

I was checking out a fashionable businessman's photoblog, and one detail gave the lie to his carefully constructed "hot young executive" vibe. He works in a cubicle. Granted, it is a neatly arranged cubicle, but still -- a cubicle. The advent of the cubicle was the death of dignity in corporate life.

Journalism

Beware of news reports that seed their own backlash -- pseudo-stories, manufactured controversies, obvious hype. The backlash is just part of the loop. Even "Is this a story?" becomes a story. "Reporting the controversy" when the controversy was concocted is almost as reprehensible as creating it. And this is 75% of the news these days.

Not Finishing Books

Although I generally believe in persevering with books to the end, I have had some experiences lately that made me decide that I should allow myself the luxury of abandoning certain books if they have not engaged me after 75 pages or so. Almost all of my blah reads are contemporary novels (including crime novels). When you read a lot of classics as I do, the thin, unsatisfying quality of many current fictions -- even highly lauded ones --is glaringly apparent. If I am reading your book side-by-side with a novel by Dostoevsky or Dickens, yours had better be pretty good, or it is going to look very bad!

Joshua Ferris's intermittently clever Then We Came to the End, for example, became penitential as it went along, and I really had to force myself to finish it. I will admit that there was a mild pay-off to this effort in the form of a lovely ending, but long before that, all the authorial tricks wore out their welcome: the first person plural narration ("we" did this and "we" did that), the quirky-but-flat characters, the half-hearted nods at magical realism (such as some unbelievable business with a totem pole, and the story about an adult who sits in a McDonald's play pit), the sentimental mid-section about cancer. I could not reconcile the high praise the book received with my assessment of it as, at best, a middling effort.

Another painful book to get through was David Schow's violent, preposterous thriller Gun Work in the Hard Case Crime series. As a shrewd Amazon reviewer put it, "Unfortunately its appeal is limited to a very distinct niche audience. Specifically gun aficionados who enjoy tales of extreme violence unencumbered by character development or coherent plotting...One would really have to have an in depth knowledge of armaments in order to fully appreciate or even care about the detailed specs given each and every time a new weapon is introduced."

Yann Martel's Life of Pi was a quick and undemanding read that I wasn't tempted to abort, but it didn't add up to much in the end. (The Man Booker Prize? Really? Who were the judges that year?) Zero Cool by "John Lange" (Michael Crichton), also in Hard Case Crime, is an extremely silly book but also zipped by.

So, with those disappointments in mind, I dropped Chang-Rae Lee's acclaimed Native Speaker after 81 pages because I found it dull and aimless, and it was boring the pants off me -- no story to speak of, affectless narration, insubstantial "characters" (really just names on a page). Because I am living in Korea, it is not exactly news to me how rigid first-generation Korean immigrants in America might be, and also not difficult to guess what effect that might have on their offspring ("Am I Korean? Am I American?" and so on). As a novel of the immigrant experience, the portion of Native Speaker that I completed did not hit a single unsurprising note.

More recently I'm in the process of being unimpressed by Leighton Gage's Brazil-set crime novel Blood of the Wicked, which is mechanical and uninspired so far. I haven't been able to get on with this one because it's in a box in storage just now (along with some other books in progress that I wasn't able to bring on the plane to Korea). Probably I will finish it eventually because it is not too too bad, and the effectiveness of a crime novel does have a lot to do with how the author pulls off the denouement. I'll give Leighton Gage one chance to show me his endgame moves.