Month / November 2004

by DrMabuse

Literaryland

LOS ANGELES (AP): In an effort to reach out to a new demographic, the Walt Disney Company announces the introduction of Literaryland, a new section that will be added to Disneyland and Walt Disney World in 2006.

keith_mickey.jpgMagic Space Mountain: An exciting new ride that takes seven years to complete! Riders will be pummeled with ideas and then treated at a hospital, where they will rhapsodize with Mickey Mouse and philosophers.

It’s a Small World’s End: Passengers will be able to witness scenes from various T.C. Boyle’s novel (sexual communes, Victorian prudery), as an insufferable song (composed and sung by T.C. Boyle himself!) is played at top volume.

Greymatterhorn: A new cafe reproducing Teutonic existential splendor which will serve up such dishes as the Croissant of Pure Reason, Beyond Food and Evil and a special omelet called Beating and Fluffiness. Customers will be encouraged to eat their meals in angst.

Pirates of the Fabian: Visitors will be attacked by overly idealistic turn-of-the-century writers dressed up in pirate garb, taunted by various passages from George Bernard Shaw and E. Nesbitt. Our marketing experts report that 95% have exited the ride with their capitalistic philosophy intact.

Literaryland hopes to continue Disney’s long legacy of understanding the tastes of the American public. Several books will be offered with their morbid endings changed for happy consumption. Disney plans to tie in Literaryland with its upcoming animated musical (set for release in 2006), Walt Disney’s Crime and Punishment, which will feature a tap-dancing Raskolnikov smiling in the face of poverty, with a talking bowl of Top Ramen for company.

This is an exciting time for Disney. We hope that you can join the fun!

by DrMabuse

A Case for Minor Larceny?

Malcolm Gladwell’s latest article chronicles how artists across several mediums are prone to sampling. While the obvious examples such as George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” (taken subconsciously from “She’s So Fine”) and Tarantino’s wholesale lift of the magic marker anecdote from Scorsese’s American Boy are left out, Gladwell does make a strong case for greater sensitivity in how artists “steal.”

If Gene Wolfe hadn’t been inspired by Jack Vance, we wouldn’t have his fantastic Sun books. Nor would we have Eric Kraft without Proust, or David Foster Wallace without Borges, Coover and Gaddis. Lindsay Anderson’s cinematic masterpiece, O Lucky Man!, couldn’t have come into being, had Malcolm McDowell and Anderson not been inspired by Voltaire’s Candide. Should we damn David Mitchell from the blatant Haruki Murakami inspiration in Number9Dream?

I once interviewed Guy Ritchie and pointed out that his subtitles in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels reminded me of the jive talking from Airplane. Apparently, nobody else had pointed this out to him and the stylistic similarity had never occurred to him until that moment. But the scene in question helps to give Lock its lived-in feel.

Months after writing Wrestling an Alligator, while there were a few conscious nods (and revisions) to other influences (the argument clinic sketch from Monty Python, Daffy Duck running around like a loon in his early Warner Brothers appearances), I was shocked to learn that I had unexpectedly included a line from Superman II (a film I had watched too many times as a child): “I’ve seen a lot of sleazy moves in my time.” When Mark finishes his novel, I have no doubt that John Banville will work his way in there somewhere.

I’d hate to see a world where “stealing” becomes so rigid that it fails to account for an artist’s subconscious inspirations. The simple fact is that we are just as inspired from what we read as we are from what we experience. There’s an idea in this somewhere about the pros and cons of novelists as cultural and literary stenographers.

by DrMabuse

The Author Who Fled

It’s not available online, but the latest NYRoB has a fantastic essay on the underrated writer Frederick Prokosch. I’ve praised Prokosch before on these pages and expressed sorrow that everything he’s written is out of print, but it was nice to learn that The Asiatics is being reissued early next year. The Asiatics, if you haven’t read it, serves as a gloomier-than-usual take on the American expatriate traveling through exotic land formula. The difference is that Prokosch’s fantastic descriptions, to say nothing of his riffs on consciousness and identity, transform it into a kind of honed, yet primitive poetry that’s sui generis.

by DrMabuse

An Open Letter to the FCC

Dear FCC:

Since three people decide the fate over what is indecent on American television, I figured that my viewpoint counted for just as much. Plus, since this nation has spiraled into a financial abyss (and could use some cash), I thought you might want to investigate the following indecent things that I see on television every day. I am, to put it bluntly, quite mortified by what passes for “entertainment” these days. I will need therapy for years. Perhaps you may want to send me a finder’s fee to cover this.

Regardless, what follows are some of the many indecent things I have unearthed for your beautifully authoritarian eyes:

  • There are commercials that try to convince me to give them money! They use scantily clad models and people who offer false smiles to convince me that their goods (which are usually bad for me) are fun and harmless. They set down good rock songs to commercials and take away the value of great music I grew up listening. INDECENT!
  • There is a boorish man named Bill O’Reilly who tells other people to shut up! He is the rudest person I have ever seen on television. And what’s more, I understand that he actually gropes people who work on his show. INDECENT!
  • There is a purported “news” network called FOX News. Have you seen it? They spin stories based off of half-truths and cater to spiteful impulses. They never get all sides of the story and scare the bejesus out of me with their martial theme music and extremely frightening news graphics. INDECENT!
  • There is a network called WB that shows African-American people in stereotypical roles. I have met and befriended many African-Americans, but I have never seen them eat nearly as much fried chicken as they do the WB Network. Furthermore, on all networks, African-Americans are only cast as the Lovable Sidekick or the Badass Cop. Where are the African-American lawyers and professors? This is clearly racist and INDECENT!
  • There is clearly not enough sex on television. Where are the shows devoted to hours of bobbing breasts and naked people thrusting in slow motion? Don’t people on television jerk off? To deny such basic human impulses while simultaneously perpetuating the employment of such anti-actors as James Spader and Mark Harmon is INDECENT!

I trust that you will fine each and every network that carries out these indecent practices. The future of this clean nation depends upon it!

Very truly yours,

Edward Champion

by DrMabuse

The NBA Horror! The NBA Horror!

Dennis Loy Johnson: “When I got there I found the place crawling with security, a bunch of heavy set guys with ear pieces and Uzis slung over their shoulders. It was a big place, dark, creepy, with a moat and a drawbridge. Moody was inside surrounded by toadies peeling grapes for him. He leapt up and grabbed me by the lapels and said, ‘You gotta help me! You gotta get me out of this! Those women at the Times?Caryn James, Laura Miller, Deborah Solomon?they’re trying to kill me! I mean, when Michiko Kakutani gets out of her court?mandated anger management classes, I’m a dead man!'”