Shortlists, Retrospectives, Appreciations, and Bug Porn

Have you heard? Missing footage from the film classic Metropolis has been discovered. Cool!

"Give us back our shortlists" - in a nutshell, this columnist chides the current Frank O'Connor award jurors for skipping the shortlist stage and simply announcing the winner, Jhumpa Lahiri. I agree. I'm not a big Lahiri fan, but that's beside the point. I don't begrudge her winning (though does the only short story writer to top the bestseller list in ages really need this little award?), but I do think a shortlist should have been announced, and I don't want to see this become a trend. I'm the kind of reader who looks at shortlists and finds them useful in deciding what to read. The top 5 in any literary finals are generally strong, and there's usually something on any such list that I just needed a bit of encouragement to try. Somehow, I think the odds are much lower that a list of one will inspire me to read. OR. TO. BUY.

Two articles On the films of Hal Ashby: there's a retrospective of his work going on out West. Wow, that's a series I'd love to see. I'd never heard of The Landlord in particular, and it looks fantastic. The rest are on dvd, and I just may screen my own series at home if the series doesn't come to town.

I agree with NY Magazine: that was one delicious takedown in the Times a few weeks back. I usually resist reviews that are so nasty, but it just so happens that I recently picked up another book (Choke) by the target, erm, author in question, Chuck Palahniuk, hoping for an enjoyable if pulpy bit of subversiveness (in other words, exactly what the book's advertised to deliver) and found it so mediocre, so contrived and strained that I had to put it down, which I rarely do. So I was fairly cheering Lucy Ellman on, even though I still kind of wish Palahniuk well in his mission. Oh, man. She included Alice Sebold in her list of overrated hacks. Joy! I'm not the only one, hallelujah! This is one mean review to savor.

On his blog, continuing to clear out his drawers, Jonathan Rosenbaum posts an appreciation of Susan Sontag from 2005. (Hmm, small coincidence: Sontag also wrote the intro for the novella I just finished, Pedro Paramo.) So far, what I've found most interesting here is a glancing reference to the debates which went on in the 60s about whether film could be considered an art form: "What impressed me most in her writing was ... and the fact that all four articles treated film as part of art and thought without any sort of self-consciousness or special pleading—-an approach that seemed virtually unprecedented at the time." I came across references to this moment in film history a few times last year while reading coverage of the deaths of Bergman and Antonioni, but this time it registered more consciously, made me stop and wonder: how strange that film should ever have been discriminated against in this way. I've taken it for granted at least since I was a teenager that film was as valid an art form as literature or theater. Then it occurred to me that perhaps a similar debate has been going on in the last ten years towards comics/ "graphic novels," whatever we're calling them. Perhaps a symptom of these cultural growing pains has been the struggle to name the art form. (The title of JR's piece, btw, alludes to Goodbye, South, Goodbye, directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien, championed by Sontag.) [More Rosenbaum: on Marcel L'Herbier? Who? And on Tati's Trafic, coming soon from Criterion.]

"Three gay and lesbian fiction gems" by Michael Upchurch (who also recently wrote an enjoyable appreciation of Guy Maddin's latest). Enjoyed the McCartney, and I kind of want to read the Maguire.

Are movie critics out-of-touch elitists? And, besides, don't bad movies dominate at the box office, anyway? Apparently not.

The stupid newspapers may be chopping book coverage (right, because you can't make money selling books to the freaks who read newspapers in print), but NPR apparently understands what its audience wants. (I'm not really a big fan of Jessa Crispin, though, I must admit.) Hey, Chicago Tribune, take a lesson as you redesign your paper - don't cut your book coverage, expand it, improve it.

"The Fate of The Sentence: Is the Writing On the Wall?" Or is this a case of silly alarmism?

Looking for something good to read? Check out the Telegraph's "50 best ever summer holiday books" or the Guardian's travel-themed selection, "Friends for faraway places," featuring Dave Eggers on Chicago books, David Mitchell on Japanese books, etc.

"10 Ways to Become a Better Film Critic" - Who is Evan Derrick? This is brilliant.

A little Wikipedia observation. So I was looking up playwright Brian Friel a couple weeks ago and came across startling evidence of a battle among its contributors over the content. This is what it said in the subsection on the play "Molly Sweeney," capitalization exactly as it was:

Molly Sweeney (1993) enjoyed considerable success on the stage, but it attracted little critical interest, perhaps because of its superficial similarities to Faith Healer (1979), another play comprised of a series of monologues. This play is about a blind woman in Ballybeg who constructed for herself an independent life rich in friendships and sensual fulfillment and her ill-fated encounter with two men who destroy her life--Frank, the man she marries who becomes convinced that she can only be complete when her vision is restored, and Dr. Rice, a once-renowned eye surgeon who uses Molly to restore his career. Richard Pine has written in depth on the relationship of his play to Oliver Sacks' work and the controversy that forced Friel to recognize Sacks' work as an inspiration for the play. THIS IS COMPLETELY ERRONEOUS - I HAVE NOT WRITTEN ANYTHING ABOUT 'THE CONTROVERSY THAT FORCED FRIEL TO RECOGNIZE SACKS' WORK' - NOT LEAST BECAUSE I AM NOT AWARE OF ANY SUCH CONTROVERSY. WHO IS THE AUTHOR OF THIS ERRONEOUS STATEMENT?

And this is how it reads today:

Molly Sweeney (1993) enjoyed considerable success on the stage, but it attracted little critical interest, perhaps because of its superficial similarities to Faith Healer (1979), another play comprised of a series of monologues. This play is about a blind woman in Ballybeg who constructed for herself an independent life rich in friendships and sensual fulfillment and her ill-fated encounter with two men who destroy her life--Frank, the man she marries who becomes convinced that she can only be complete when her vision is restored, and Dr. Rice, a once-renowned eye surgeon who uses Molly to restore his career. In a note in the programme of the 1996 Broadway production Friel says that the story was inspired in part by Oliver Sacks's To See and Not See.

You hear about these things, but I'd never really come across such a good example before of how the site is constantly in flux. I read a good point the other day about how WP (the people's Encyclopedia) is not appropriate for citation, not because the information is bad or can't be trusted (that's the route the argument usually takes into heated territory) but simply because it probably won't be the same when you check back. That does kind of turn the whole exercise of citation into an absurdity, doesn't it? You may as well just write in the footnote of your paper, "Well, this is what someone on the internet said on such-and-such a date and time.)

I know it's made the rounds already, but if you haven't seen Isabella Rossellini's funny "Green Porno" series, you should take a peek. Isabella, you are a goddess.

Finally, the movie "Ben & Arthur" is currently at #8 on the imdb bottom 100, and you really have to watch the trailer to appreciate just what's gone wrong with gay independent filmmaking - or perhaps independent filmmaking in general. (Or wait: maybe it's an intentional satire, and it's actually wickedly brilliant and...and...)