Rush & Molloy reports (via Darwin Porter’s upcoming bio) that Katharine slept with the following people: Claudette Colbert, Greta Garbo, Judy Holliday, Judy Garland, Laura Harding, Irene Selznick, the daughter of Louis B. Mayer, the wife of David O. Selznick, Ernest Hemingway, John Ford, George Stevens, John Barrymore, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Robert Ryan, Robert Mitchum, Burt Lancaster, Paul Henreid, and (of course) Spencer Tracy.

Maya Angelou is profiled by the Boston Globe. Several paragraphs focus upon Angelou’s effect on a crowd. There are comparisons made between Angelou and Lorraine Hansberry. In fact, the general gist is that if you haven’t read Angelou, you probably should, though without explaining why and without outlining an argument. It’s the kind of tepid summary that spells out what’s wrong with current book coverage. Instead, of inviting entree into the I’ve Read At Least Three Angelou Books And I Liked ‘Em club, the article admonishes why you should read it in a way that resembles an Atkins Diet manifesto, though without the immediate payoff.

The Age notes that spending ten minutes a day writing in a journal improves mental health. However, writing three hours a day and failing to publish a book after ten years will turn you into Laura Miller.

The new Paris Review is up. Michael Frayn offers some interesting advice: ” Let me say for a start that I don’t think it is a very good idea to write different sorts of things. If I were to give serious practical advice to a young writer about how to succeed I would say: Write the same book, or the same play, over and over again, just very slightly different, so that people get used to it. It takes some time, but if you do it often enough, finally people will get the hang of it, and get familiar with it, and they’ll like it. ”

Of course, Frayn notes that he hasn’t done this personally. I’d like to think that this revelation is a circumlocutory way of taking out the competition. But it bears striking similarities to recent quotes by Bill Keller.

Newsday interviews Ana Menendez, a Cuban exile turned novelist. She once believed that Fidel had supernatural powers. But she changed her mind after reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, realizing that just about everybody does. Millenialists are courting Ms. Menendez as a possible spokesperson.

The NYRoB has a Helen Keller pfoile up. It quotes heavily from the correspondence between Henry James and Keller and examines their relationship.

And the Post dwells upon confession, trying to find the line when a memoir or an essay becomes Too Much Information (or TMI, to use Post vernacular). Susan Shapiro notes that her memoir Five Men Who Broke My Heart has resulted in her husband writing a response, The Bitch Beside Me. And Dale Peck has responded to this memoir by writing The Bitch Inside Me.

The latest issue of Bookslut is up. There are two interviews, a thoughtful Dorothy Hughes profile by Sarah Weinman, and some disgraceful malarkey.

The Guardian asks Ursula K. Le Guin a few questions. She spends much time clarifying opias and isms, and, at one point, even impersonates the French.

A Canadian realtor made the find of a lifetime when she put the late Marian Engel’s house on the market. Hundreds of letters were thrown away in garbage bags, from such heavy-hitters as Robertson Davies, Alice Munro, and Margaret Atwood, many of them of a very private nature. “Dear Marian,” read one. “Robertson keeps speaking in naughty epigrams. Do you know anyone who can drown Robertson in paper and get him to shut up?”

Mark Evanier has a tribute up to the recently departed Julius Schwartz. Schwartz was a tremendous figure in comic book and science fiction circles.

Locus has a recommended reading list up for 2003’s books, along with a tally rundown, essays from Claude Lalumière and Cynthia Ward. One Locus editor has promised science fiction fans that this incredible coverage was intentional, and that “it will be impossible for any of you to keep up.”

Time, of all places, tackles the troubling new territory of dude-lit. Although in Kyle Smith’s case, perhaps monkey lit might be a better term.

Frances Partidge, the last of the Bloomsbury set and a lady who had the decency to avoid Danny Bonaduce, has passed on at 103.

Michiko compares Thoreaux’s new collection to “an embarrassing letter to Penthouse magazine.” But this may have something to do with the unrelated news that men wearing nothing but coats have been buying a lot of extra copies of Old School.

And Padma Lakshimi has been spotted with an engagement ring. Asked if Rushdie, still married to his third wife, plans to marry her, she replied, “I guess so.” However, another journalist was asking Lakshimi about her jeans. So nobody has a definitive answer.

It’s bad enough that Hollywood Reporter has announced a remake of Assault on Precinct 13, one of the goofiest and grittiest John Carpenter films to come out of the 1970s. It’s bad enough that Ethan “Whiny Caucasian is My Middle Name” Hawke is slated to star in it. But the true crime here is that Carpenter’s racial dyanamic has been drastically altered for a safer, reactionary age.

One of the beautiful things about Carpenter’s film is that, much like Night of the Living Dead‘s African-American protagonist (whose race was never addressed), Carpenter had the guts to cast Austin Stoker in the aw-shucks, do-goodin’ sheriff role and the white-bread Darwin Joston in the criminal role of Napoleon Wilson (whose unlikely first name was never explained, despite Joston’s repeated offers to “tell you sometime”). Beyond Assault‘s unapologetic shooting of a kid and its guns daringly prodding out of moving cars (in 1976, no less), the film improved upon what could have been just an entertaining low-budget ripoff of Rio Bravo by taking the sheriff-criminal buddy movie dynamic and casting against racial type. It was a nice way of acknowledging the camaraderie, while very subtly suggesting to an exploitation film audience that ultimately one’s skin color didn’t matter when up against a common evil. Who needed Walter Brennan for comedy relief when you had black man and white man trying to defend an abandoned outpost? (Laurie Zimmer’s presence is a side issue I won’t go into.)

Laurence Fishburne’s a great actor, but to cast him as the criminal in the remake and Hawke (any Caucasian for that matter, but especially Hawke, an actor who, let’s face it, we all needed to see bitch-slapped by Denzel in Training Day) reinforces the terrible precedent that Carpenter was working against. Did we learn nothing from the multicultural universe of The Matrix: Reloaded? Did we learn nothing from Lando Calrissian? I fear that Fishburne will come off not so much as a goofball asking for a smoke, but as a mean bastard who momentarily mends his ways, ultimately with his own interests at heart.

One other major change involves this: “As the sun sets and a long night begins, a motley crew of policemen and prisoners reluctantly captained by a cop (Hawke) must band together to fight off a rogue gang that wants to free the mobster.”

Anyone who saw the original knows that the gang simply came out of nowhere and that Napoleon Wilson wasn’t even one of their concerns. Napoleon was just the wrong guy in the wrong place.

But Hollywood, somehow believing that the audience needs explanation, has modified Carpenter’s agile balance to appease their suburban focus groups. Once again, we’ll see an African-American helping Whity, his benevolent protector, and then abdicating back to a state of serfdom.

Criminal, I say. Outright criminal.

His last name was unpronouncable. All that was known was that it had a glottal stop, six vowels in succession, and could only be uttered correctly by three living people (none of them friends or family).

This caused problems. Adopting a nom de plume was out of the question. Why betray identity? Why become a Smith or a Jones, when there were already too many of them to be found in the White Pages?

Setting up appointments and meetings was problematic. And he became known among his peers as “Chris,” which was, believe it or not, his first name. But because the receptionists couldn’t depart from surname protocol, because there were traditions and employee handbooks to live up to, thanks to the boys in corporate efficiency, he was often announced as “Mr. Chris” and, if a form field called for “Last Name” and a particular program refused to cooperate, he would often be entered as “Chris Chris.”

It is safe to say that publicity and impeccable reputation did not come to him as easily as happiness. America was a nation that prided itself on easy memory. There had been two Adamses, two Roosevelts and two Bushes as Presidents. Furthermore, it looked pretty likely that a second “JFK” would be running on this year’s Democratic ticket.

He delivered bouquets to anyone, male or female, who could spell his name correctly. This gestures were often mistaken for romantic overtures, when in fact he simply liked to reward attention to detail, something with which he was concerned about in the bedroom, both with himself and other parties.

Pay no attention to the loose slipknot or the wrinkled shirt. There’s more to Chris than appoints the retina.

In the event that the reader has failed to notice it, dementia can be found happily within these pages. And the author has faith in the reader to discern between honest convictions and outright prevarications. However, because the author happens to like most of his readers, and because at least three of them don’t believe in evolutionary theory, the author also notes that the origin can always be found at the URLs nestled within the tomfoolery.

The Nanny Diaries ladies don’t seem to be hacking it with Novel No. 2. Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, despite having a $3 million publishing deal, didn’t agree with Random House’s changes and have sought other opinions. Including Kurt Andersen’s.

Updike profiles Walter Abish.

Jessa Crispin covers graphic novels for the Post.

The Guardian dares to ask Paul Auster where he gets his ideas from.

Crackling latches reverbate down the hall. Doors opening, closing. Footfalls against hardwood aren’t the issue. Any movement you make will be upstaged by creaky hinges, the turn of a doorknob, or the slide of a lock.

In default position (doors closed), there’s no harm. Things remain relatively silent. And even a casual “motherfucker” shouted lovingly to a friend will escape without notice. But when this state is unrustled by a person’s need to move from one room to another, it’s a veritable snap crackle pop. Minus the cushy krispies.

The snap of the bathroom door is the worst. The john’s close to my room. So anytime my roommate or his girlfriend uses it, it’s a bit like an exploding firecracker cross-pollinated with the motions of a Victorian automaton. Or it could be a taut broom whacked against a jamb within millimeters of a microphone, then slowed down and amplified through a deafening home theater system. Or it’s one of those sounds nobody really knows about. A bag of popcorn crackling inside a microwave oven.

One thing is certain: It scares the bejesus out of me.

I tolerate this sound, even when it jars me from a book or something I’m revising. There’s an extant idea that somehow I can adjust to it. Get accustomed to its timbre. That hasn’t happened. I’ve been at this place for seven months and sometimes when I hear it, I jolt up half-awake from my futon ready to brawl bare-chested and bleary-eyed.

Certain sounds provoke me, some terrify me. And I know I’m not alone. My sister, for one, is frightened by the sound of broken glass. When I was a cruel teenager, I exploited this fear by blasting a recorded sound effect, howling and pretending that I had been injured by fallen shards, and then earning (rightfully) my sister’s silence for two weeks. This prank’s callousness can be further framed by the fact that, when I was nine, I collided into a sliding glass door. The idea was to jump into my grandmother’s backyard swimming pool. I thought the door was open. I bled upon the carpet, great gushing red rivulets streaming from my clavicle, howling in shock and feeling the pain later as the doctors stitched up my right shoulder in much the same way my grandmother mended loose buttons. A mere six years later, perhaps influenced by Andy Kaufman, I had no problems anesthetizing myself against this memory and exploiting the pain, the sling I donned for three months, the trauma and solicitude of my extended family, and of course my sister’s concerns. I paid a dear price.

And that’s why I tolerate these unexpected interruptions. It’s penance in a way. More than the faded scar on my shoulder. But it also keeps life around here exciting.

Li’l GN’R. (via Tom)

Other things tie me up. Cool, quasi-important things. Said things may tie me up further, depending upon what happens this week. And, no, it doesn’t involving that taffeta sun dress that I haven’t told you about or becoming a born again Christian. Sadly, sex isn’t involved at all. But it’s all good, I assure you.

What does this mean to you the reader? Well, instead of being deluged with 4,000 words a day, you’ll only be hit with 500 or so. At least for the next couple of days.

So Part 3 of The Huge Response to the Huge 2 Blowhards Post will have to wait. At least for now. Though I’ll still be here to offer the usual book links and smarmy asides. Thanks, as always, for reading.

The NYT has the first chapters for Apprentice to the Flower Poet Z and The Confessions of Max Tivoli online.

As if three mentions of American Sucker weren’t enough, Laura Miller devotes most of her column to it. If Anthony Lane were to write a memoir called I’m Funnier and Happily Married, would it get this kind of press?

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye faces school board censorship in Ohio. School administrators fear not so much the sexual description, but the sudden spike in jokes involving “one-eyed trouser snake.” Students responded by saying they were inspired more from Eric Idle’s “Penis Song” than from the book title. In one student’s words, “they had seen it all before.” The review committee, however, fears that referring to the penis in an educational setting is “dangerous for the mind.”

The Kenyon Review is sponsoring a Poetry Prize for Young Writers. Dirty limericks will not be accepted.

Germany is such a big-time lit importer that they’re determined to get it to you online. Loads of wurst, thankfully, are not involved. (via At Large)

It’s bad enough that Courtney Love is offering a tell-all memoir to the world. But apparently her proposal letter claims that her book “rivals David Foster Wallace at his best.” Love’s literary agent, David Vigilano, hoping to make this claim stick, has encouraged Ms. Love to include more footnotes and “maybe a chapter or two on game theory.”

In a recent survey by Harlequin Enterprises, Australian men were found to be low-rated lovers. It didn’t help that the men selected McDonald’s as their number one romantic restaurant. Sarah, for one, is not surprised. I’m not either, given Max Barry’s troubling photo.

Apparently, there’s a doc covering the infamous Norman Mailer-Germaine Greer debate. Laura Miller weighed in on the subject in less bitter days.

The Guardian has put up excerpts from Francis Wheen’s How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World.

And for those interested, my hope is to conclude my “The State of Books & the NYTBR” series tomorrow. Michael, in the meantime, has posted a followup.

If you’re a Cure fan (or even if you’re not), you probably remember the terrible day back in 1992 when Wish came out. Robert Smith had suddenly become cheery. The band had lost its edge, and the tunes shamelessly mined previous territory.

Well, I’m extremely saddened to report that the Cure Syndrome has befallen The Beautiful South. Paul Heaton is no longer dangerous. Gone is the subversiveness of “Don’t Marry Her,” “Alone,” or “Window Shopping for Blinds.” Gone is the bleak solitude masked within cheery melodies (“Rotterdam” or “Song for Whoever”). Gone is the fundamental thing that made The Beautiful South work.

Now understand that I have loved almost everything Paul Heaton has created. Everything from the Housemartins on. I was even willing to forgive the Painting It Red‘s weaknesses. But Gaze is downright criminal in its betrayal. A fey celebration of transvestites in “101% Man?” That’s so 1987. We waited three years for this?

Perhaps the most disappointing $30 an American music fan can spend this year is on the Gaze import. After listening to Gaze, I had to listen to old Beautiful South albums just to recall what the band was about. The new album is a surprise disappointment, given the baroque lyrics and experimentation Heaton was trying with his solo album, Biscuit Boy. The Beautiful South has jumped the shark. And we we are all the lesser for it.

Today: Not so literary.

B is ordered to cease and desist by UFS. His crime against humanity? A link and a screenshot of that goofy Charlie Brown video.

Spike interviews J.G. Ballard.

Al Martinez on Stephen Glass’s The Fabulist: “There are some books you can’t put down and other books you can’t wait to put down. Into the latter category falls ‘The Fabulist.’ Not only is it bad, it’s embarrassing.”

“Cinema Redux” by Brendan Dawes condenses all the cuts of a film in a single image. Samplings include The French Connection, The Man Who Wasn’t There, Vertigo and Taxi Driver. (via Radosh)

Wilde’s influence in Pynchon.

The Online Video Game Atlas (via The Map Room).

Low Culture sums up Dennis Miller’s demise with a single image.

The Severity of Offensive Language on UK Television (via LinkMachineGo). [Related: John Lydon calls viewers “fucking cunts.”]

Tower has filed for Chapter 11.

Vegan porn? (NSFW, via Menlo).

MGM v. Grokster, et al. turns into The People’s Court. (via Kottke)

Happy birthday, Terry!

2 Blowhards has chimed in on the NYTBR imbroglio. I started drafting a comment, but I feel that the points Michael raises within his monumental post need to be responded to at length:

First off, Michael’s hubris (nothing new for 2 Blowhards regulars like me) gets the better of him. Not only does he single out his “mature reaction,” as if the idea of expressing passion about books is a bad thing, but he even dares to place himself in the slot. In so doing, the question of what is good for the Times becomes what one particular individual would like to do. However, he may have inadvertently pinpointed why people have reacted with such vitriol. John Keller’s statement hangs on “literary fiction” and a new editor not covering this area nearly as much as Chip McGrath. Certainly, for any serious reader of “literary fiction,” this apparent ignorance on Keller’s part came as a shock. But what is literary fiction? Is it tracking the obscure? Is it focusing in on conscious literary efforts? Is it something that eventually makes the National Book Critics Circle Award shortlist or something written by one of Granta’s 20 Young Novelists? Or is it something, like Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections or Michael Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White, which splits the difference between pop and lit?

Mark tried to answer these questions in a post not too long ago. He posed a question that would, on its face, seem obvious: Why is the serious novel no longer relevant? He ended up taking a bold idealistic position that the novel could be both serious and accessible to a wide audience. But this brings us back to last year’s King-Bloom-NBA debacle: If a novel is understood by the masses, then does it willingly capitulate its literary roots? Can any reasonably literate person justify John Grisham or Tom Clancy as legitimate writers? It’s all well and good to applaud reading on any level, but it’s a no-win scenario. Promoting popular books downsizes the importance of the literary books. And finding the halfway point draws sneers from the literati. (Consider Pulitzer winner John P. Marquand, who went to his grave overlooked for his literary, though popular satires. Today, he is largely out of print.)

Dwelling upon genre ghettoization is a whole different ball of wax. Mysteries, comic books, and “sci-fi” continue to remain separate entities in and of themselves. And it’s something of a faux pas to refer to these authors among literary types, even when they write as clean as Donald Westlake/Richard Stark or as intricate and spellbinding as Gene Wolfe.

To offer some personal perspective on this, last year, I started a book club. The idea behind the book club was to unite the literary-minded with those who were simply wanting to read.

Now in this club, I’ve attempted to select books that fall somewhere within the literary but “readable for a person within a month” category. We’ve read and discussed Jose Saramago’s Blindness, Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex, Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy and Richard Russo’s Empire Falls — all of which probably wouldn’t have garnered a slot back in the Oprah days, because they were just one rung up the ladder from “pure readability,” or the state that Oprah recognized in East of Eden, when she said, “the pages won’t fly fast enough.”

I received all sorts of responses. Some from people who were just coming back into reading after a long absence, some who were aspiring novelists, some who were simply looking for leads on books. Above all, there was an urge to read. Hopefully something fun and important. Even those who have yet to attend a single meeting have written in thanking me for the choices, which they have taken up on their own time. As one lady wrote me, she was overwhelmed by the number of choices she saw on the bookstores — a fact of bookstore life that we bibliophiles know so well, but that’s probably overwhelming for someone just getting started or reacquainted. She didn’t entirely trust what was selected on the tables. And she felt there was no real way to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Unlike movies, which can be experienced in a mere two hours, and then reflected upon almost immediately, books take a larger investment of time. Talk movies with anyone and, if you’ve seen enough of them, you can easily suggest a few titles (based upon their choice) and in a week or so, the person may come running back for more. Beyond its art house/Hollywood, cult/mainstream dichotomies (which, as Peter Biskind suggests in his new book, Down and Dirty Pictures, may not be as Manichean as we all believe), there are film snobs, sure. But there’s also a spirit of swapping behind the medium, much like tape-trading was for music for anyone who grew up in the pre-digital age. Above all, there is a more democratic passion which extends from the insomniac video store clerk to the highfalutin Manhattan type looking for deeper meaning within a pop film like Terminator 3.

But the book is a harder sell. Not only are a great number of them published, but the book world is, if anything, snottier about their tastes. So we’re also dealing with a medium in which the book neophyte may be up against the wall from the get-go, due to choice, time investment to finish book, and insular pretentiousness. The literary book, regardless of how “accessible” it is, will mean something different to different people. At the same time, defering to a mentality that champions only Grisham and Clancy prevents people like the book club lady from finding that proper point on the pop/lit spectrum.

(And, oddly enough, this very topic also involved posts from 2 Blowhards and Mark. The problem, again, with attempting to find an all-encompassing answer is that it too boils down to individual sensibilities and generalizations, never something that any two people can agree upon. One book lover’s passion for Franzen may be DOA banter at a cocktail party.)

So the question now is what the NYTBR should become: Should it be a place that abdicates to the popular mass market paperbacks? Or should it recapture the magic of John Leonard’s reign?

I hope to address these points in Part 2, where I’ll finally get back to Michael’s post.

Jimmy Carter has a blog.

The Register (oddly enough) reports that Congress is trying to pass legislation that will force all U.S. residents to go to jail for seven years and pay a $150,000 fine if, when you register your domain name, you don’t tell the world your email, home address, and telephone number. H.R. 3754 (PDF) was introduced this morning on the House floor by Lamar Smith (R-TEX). Stalker lobbyists are reported to be stuffing Mr. Smith’s garter strap with twenties.

[UPDATE: I misreported the implications of this bill. The seven years is tacked onto a felony charge. As the bill itself states, “The maximum imprisonment otherwise provided by law for a felony offense shall be increased by 7 years if, in furtherance of that offense, the defendant knowingly provided material and misleading false contact information to a domain name registrar….” That’s what I get for falling prey to the Register’s paranoid copy.]

Lizzie (and her auxillary first person self) is not amused by the Believer‘s dismissal of any writer deigning to scribe Sweet Valley High novels. She notes that these writers have trivial concerns: such as, oh say, eating at least one meal a day. Isn’t this kind of snark contradictory to the Julavits manifesto? I guess it’s all right to play nice and snotty when you’re talking about someone as overrated as Salman Rushdie. But when it comes to the hard realities of being a working writer, for the Believer crew, they can be rolled off as easily as a LifeStyles from a parvenu’s knob.