tag:typepad.com,2003:weblog-1775624 2013-05-20T17:56:47-04:00 TypePad tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0105361967de970c0192aa22c2b4970d 2013-05-20T17:56:47-04:00 2013-05-20T17:56:47-04:00

While I’m hung up writing something about Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, occasionally remembering that I have a couple of months of movies backlogged, including, now, Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, here’s a quote relevant to both of those titles, from Daniel Handler in the New York Times Book Review this past Sunday: “[C]alling a writer ‘Midwestern’ seems like a way to start up that familiar and imaginary battle between Plain Novels Full of People With Integrity and Dirty Fingernails versus Showoffy Books About People Having Martinis in Penthouses.” That’s obviously relevant to Franzen, and also to Eugenides, both of whom offer up contrasts between humble men of the Midwest and more sophisticated Easterners, but also to F. Scott Fitzgerald. (I’ve actually never read any Lemony Snicket. I guess I should remedy that.)

bianca steele tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0105361967de970c019101cb194b970c 2013-05-04T19:58:55-04:00 2013-05-04T20:32:44-04:00

Commenting on the Messud kerfuffle, Rohan Maitzen points to this article by Meredith Maran. Maran writes about women she knows, or has heard of, who’ve been asked to revise their novels to make characters more “likable.” She’s specifically talking about “literary” novels. This generally means the more sophisticated reaches of the “mainstream,” books that are reviewed in the ordinary books pages of papers like the New York Times, instead of being banished to the one paragraph per book “crime” or “mystery” section (unless they’re best sellers or by seriously big-name authors like Stephen King, in which case they’re promoted to the front page and get extra space). Some genre writers, notably China Miéville, an English writer of literary-tending science fiction, have argued against the “mainstream” definition itself, on the grounds that “mainstream” is just another kind of genre, like thrillers or “chick lit.” Be that as it may, in the US, at least, it seems to be the case both that “mainstream” is treated as the default (or “unmarked”) variety of fiction, and also that the dividing line between literary and mainstream is not clear and bright. Look at two “women’s” books that my mother lent me more than a year ago (neither of which I’ve yet been able to read more than a dozen pages of). The Help is billed as literary fiction, and clearly has literary aspirations, but I’d call it basically “mainstream.” The way it plays with point of view and with dialect is unusual for a...

bianca steele tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0105361967de970c01901bcf4e09970b 2013-05-03T20:05:03-04:00 2013-05-03T20:05:03-04:00

Claire Messud’s latest novel, The Woman Upstairs sounds interesting, certainly more so than her previous one, The Emperor’s Children (oh no, another novel about young people obsessed with David Foster Wallace!). The title makes me think of Hilary Mantel’s early novel, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, which is one of my favorites, an Orwellian gaslight mystery set behind the walls of purdah, but it could also fit well into my next “Boston-area novels” series, if there ever is one. But on the Internet, there’s been much brouhaha over the interview Messud did with Publisher’s Weekly, part of which, presumably edited down from something a bit longer, they published online. As the interview presented, the interviewer, a woman, asks Messud, “What are we to make of Nora Eldridge, [the protagonist]? Because she is angry, really angry.” Messud answers at length, talking about the kind of novel she intended to write. The follow-up question is, “I wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora, would you?” To this, Messud replies, in essence, that the question is a mistaken one. Writing a brief piece in Salon, David Daley characterizes Messud’s response as a statement that the interviewer’s question was sexist. Let’s leave aside the definition of “sexist.” Obviously what is meant is that the question wouldn’t have been asked of a male novelist, and that it’s wrong to have different standards for women and for men. Messud alludes to this question herself, earlier in the interview: she explicitly says that she had decided she...

bianca steele tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0105361967de970c017d431eb351970c 2013-04-25T20:11:03-04:00 2013-04-25T20:11:04-04:00

I’ve been in a bad mood for a little over a week. I think it’s because I’ve still got a copy of Backlash in the house. Every so often I feel compelled to give it another chance. I pick it up and flip through it. Oh, the Republican Party decided it wasn’t so much in favor of abortion rights, equal rights and equal pay for women, or NOW, after all. I can see how that would be disappointing, especially since it made future legislation more difficult. But is that evidence that US culture is now “backlash culture,” really? Or: Oh, in the late 1980s there were very few woman attorneys. But is that evidence that the number of woman attorneys was actually not increasing, or that by 2000 or 2010 we could still expect to see almost no more women working as attorneys than we saw in 1970? Or: Oh, here are a small handful of self-help books, summarized at length, that tell women how to attract men who want to marry them; and the writers think being a feminist or speaking your mind won’t do it. But are they so very different from the self-help books of any other decade? Are they even typical of the 1980s? Are they evidence that the feminist-inclined young woman of the 1980s is internally conflicted, demonstrating by her actions and beliefs that she’s under pressure to be less independent and more childlike than she feels is right? And what’s this “feminist psychotherapy” that...

bianca steele tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0105361967de970c017d4306e026970c 2013-04-22T16:16:24-04:00 2013-04-22T17:30:16-04:00

It’s a little hard for me to see, forty years after the fact, the importance of Mean Streets. It was Martin Scorsese’s first major outing as a writer and director, and marks his appearance as a major star—he was recognized as such almost immediately. From a film-historical point of view, Mean Streets illustrates several of what would become Scorsese’s hallmarks: the long tracking shots, the director’s cameos, the preoccupation with, well, mean streets. It’s a terrific opportunity to see a very, very young Robert De Niro, and an equally young and callow Harvey Keitel. But why has this movie been so loved, when an arguably “deeper” film like Papillon (released the same year) was so much less well received? Mean Streets is by no means a really arty film, and it doesn’t draw on European or avant-garde from preceding decades. I think I can detect, in the voiceover that accompanies the trailer for Mean Streets, a note of incredulity, almost asking whether this film really needed to be made, whether these kind of people really needed the validation of appearing in the place of heroes. It is a very ordinary story, about a couple of ordinary guys. They’re kind of doofuses, really, wandering around the streets at all hours of the night, drinking, overturning trash barrels, fistfighting, and generally acting as if they were twelve. Charlie would like to own a restaurant, but right now he works for his uncle as a collector, taking protection money from other restaurant owners....

bianca steele tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0105361967de970c017d42e937b2970c 2013-04-18T11:52:04-04:00 2013-04-18T12:18:24-04:00

In the comments section of Crooked Timber, in which I mentioned Susan Faludi’s Backlash (first published in 1991), Corey Robin (whose book I really liked) accuses me of talking about a book I’ve only skimmed. That isn’t true, but I’m not going to argue with him on his blog about the way he teaches the book (though I think it might be useful to raise the question why a partisan contribution to a political debate that’s still going on should be treated as canonical history). So I borrowed the book from the library for the third time and sat down with it. Why? Do I feel guilty for opining on a book I haven’t formed a proper opinion on yet? No. Am I going to finish it this time? Probably not. But I’m still too annoyed to put it down. On the one hand, there’s no way in heaven or hell I’m going to be able to read this book without whining in writing about how annoying it is. On the other hand, if it’s so easy to criticize that I have to ask myself why in the world it was published, why would I want to bother reading it at all? But having a blog means that whining in my private notes can be transformed into something that seems almost but not quite like useful activity. Even if nobody actually reads it. So: one thing, at least, even if the rest of it stays in my scratch files: (Okay,...

bianca steele tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0105361967de970c017c38b136fc970b 2013-04-18T11:36:26-04:00 2013-04-18T11:36:26-04:00

Four times a year, Phi Beta Kappa puts out a newsletter, the Key Reporter, with capsule book reviews, an essay or two, maybe the text of a speech at a PBK event. For the past few years, the Key Reporter has been getting smaller, as the cost of postage rises, presumably, and it's now only printed and mailed two times a year, with all the issues available in PDF format online. As of this issue, though, the Key Reporter consists of a pamplet, about 5"x8". Instead of articles, it prints blurbs promoting the articles, and those square barcodes so you can read the whole thing on your device.

bianca steele tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0105361967de970c017eea3d3d4f970d 2013-04-14T13:05:30-04:00 2013-04-14T15:41:35-04:00

I just saw Papillon (1973), and I have a lot to say, and it’s already written, so I’m going to post on it now. March movies, still coming up, will include From To Rome with Love, Mean Streets (also 1973), Rock of Ages, and Friends with Benefits. Papillon is a prison-break movie starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. (Cameos or small roles are taken by Vic Tayback, Bill Mumy, Victor Jory, Gregory Sierra, and Don Gordon.) McQueen plays “Papillon,” a thief who claims that he was framed for murder. Hoffman is Dega, the perpetrator of a counterfeit war bond scheme. Both have been sentenced to prison labor in the West Indies, after which sentence they’ll become indentured laborers, and after which time they’ll be free, to live in French Guiana though not to return to France. Papillon is a thug who promises to protect Dega in return for cash, to pay for bribes and boats, in what any filmgoer will recognize, way before the fact, are entirely futile attempts to escape. I realized while watching this movie that it’s an important movie. It’s aware of its place in the history of cinema and the history of its own times, and it moves both forward. In this film by a director of the pre-film school era, when this kind of intertextualism would really take off, there are allusions to Kubrick flicks like A Clockwork Orange and 2001 (even, it seemed, to The Shining, which didn’t appear until 1980!), to The Ten...

bianca steele tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0105361967de970c017eea09051c970d 2013-04-06T14:47:14-04:00 2013-04-06T14:47:14-04:00

Half of Framingham State’s new dorm sustained severe water damage after a fire that started when a student left a laptop on, sitting on top of a comforter.

bianca steele tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0105361967de970c017eea01af1c970d 2013-04-05T11:35:39-04:00 2013-04-05T11:47:02-04:00

I’ve mentioned a few times that I was planning a blog post on women’s Templar novels. I’ve never got around to it; I have too much material to boil it down, and my feelings about these books are complex. But while poking around the Internet, trying to decide whether to start that post or not, I discovered first, that there’s a new one, available in the UK and Canada but not in a US edition as yet (Guardian review here), and second, that there’s a miniseries playing right now on the BBC’s Channel 4 of Kate Mosse’s novel, Labyrinth (Guardian review here, trailer here). Mosse’s first two novels in what’s now a trilogy, Labyrinth and The Winter Ghosts, and her other novel (of the three currently available in the US), Sepulchre, were the “women’s Templar novels” I was planning to write about. Labyrinth is a big book, and it will tell you a good deal about it to say that, though it appeared nearly simultaneously with The Da Vinci Code, it was accused of copying from it. Mosse’s books are much less ridiculous than Dan Brown’s are, however (though if you’re used to reading this kind of silly, conspiracy-oriented pseudo-historical romance, quite possibly you might not have seen Brown’s books as all that far from the normal). The historical plot concerns the Albigensian Crusade in the Languedoc region of France, in the Pyrenées, and the preservation of a mystical secret through the joint actions of two religious sects, a kind...

bianca steele tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0105361967de970c017d42860370970c 2013-04-04T09:34:25-04:00 2013-04-04T09:34:25-04:00

If you’ve ever taught a small child to play “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on the piano, you may have discovered that the notes for “Mary” are the same notes the name is sung to in Nirvana’s “All Apologies” (sing, over and over again, and slowly, “Ma-ry,” and it becomes obvious). Also, “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” and “The Bear Went Over the Mountain” are the same melody, but you probably already knew that. Also “Simple Simon” and “Yankee Doodle.” If you’ve ever taught a small child to play “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on the piano, you may have discovered that the notes for “Mary” are the same notes the name is sung to in Nirvana’s “All Apologies” (sing, over and over again, and slowly, “Ma-ry,” and it becomes obvious). Also, For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow and The Bear Went Over the Mountain are the same melody.

bianca steele tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0105361967de970c017ee9c1ef14970d 2013-03-26T11:11:05-04:00 2013-03-26T11:11:05-04:00

Well. In the two days since I put up that last post, traffic has been very significantly higher than usual. Is there a connection between the two events? Between 9:00 and 10:00 this morning, there were nine clicks on what’s by far my most popular post, the one on Ray Bradbury’s story, “All Summer in a Day.” Yesterday there were at least a dozen clicks on the same post (as well as several on other posts—thanks!). This story is apparently taught to middle school students in US-run schools all over the world, so that’s not so surprising, and based on TypePad stats (assuming these are accurate) I get references from search engines in a wide range of different countries. It’s also not unusual for the Bradbury post to get several extra clicks (statistically speaking) apparently through search engines, right after I put up a new post on a different topic, while the new post gets one or two or none—though I haven’t done a real analysis and this might be an observer effect. Eight downloads in less than five minutes, from the same Google search, is a little odd, though. What could I attribute it to? Who would click on the same old post several times, as a result of the appearance of a different post? Why? Is there a connection between my discussion about traffic and the generation of extra traffic? How could that be, when as far as I know, nobody read that discussion? It’s probably a coincidence.

bianca steele tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0105361967de970c017ee9b5cb3a970d 2013-03-24T15:48:52-04:00 2013-03-24T15:48:52-04:00

This blog gets an average of between five and 10 clicks a day. The number goes up occasionally, when someone clicks around the blog a while and looks at different pages or at the archive, or when I post a comment to a different and more popular blog on a broadly appealing topic like science fiction. It goes down during universities’ winter break and during the summer, and then eventually increases again throughout September and into October. Traffic seems to have increased slightly since I started the blog, nearly four and a half years ago. Those statistics come from TypePad’s basic statistics function, which tells me what pages people viewed, what other page linked to those pages (if any: usually this is Google Reader, a search engine, or a comment thread on a more popular blog), and at what time. It doesn’t tell me the IP addresses of the people who clicked, or how long they continued looking at the page. I could install Google Analytics and get some more information, but I’ve never gotten around to it. I’d have to set up an account with them, I think, and poke around to see how to use the tool, and from what I’ve seen, Google Analytics can slow web page loading. I also use FeedBurner. A couple of years ago, I switched the link at the side of the blog to allow the RSS feed to go through FeedBurner, instead of using the feed supplied by TypePad directly. FeedBurner has...

bianca steele tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0105361967de970c017d41a88213970c 2013-03-09T15:50:24-05:00 2013-03-11T21:23:05-04:00

UPDATED to fix actor information for Dinner for Schmucks. The Tempest: The Shakespeare play, with Helen Mirren playing the usually male role of Prospero, the magician-duke exiled with his daughter. Ben Whishaw plays Ariel (usually, though not completely, nude), Djimon Hounsou plays Caliban (made up as half albino, half mud-man). Russell Baker Brand, Alfred Molina, David Straithairn, Alan Cumming, and Chris Cooper are also in the cast. It seemed to me to be a reasonably good interpretation of Shakespeare. It was generally easy to tell what was going on and what was being said. Making Prospero a woman permitted a kind of intimacy between her and her supernatural servants (Ariel as air and light, Caliban as the earth), which might have been awkward otherwise, and also made her manipulation of her daughter a little less cringeworthy than it usually is. It also added a little extra awkwardness to her manipulation of Ferdinand, as her daughter’s suitor—she’s preparing him for entry into her very female world, not for entry into the world of adult men, as a male Prospero could have been claiming to do. The interpretation is very much that her magic, as much as her brother’s jealousy of her position, has alienated her from the social world, and that at the end she’s giving over attempts to exert power over other’s actions, not just Faustian attempts to peer into the unknown. I’ve never seen this play performed, so I don’t know how much of this is usual in productions...

bianca steele tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0105361967de970c017d418a58e5970c 2013-03-06T09:07:50-05:00 2013-03-06T09:07:50-05:00

Somehow I had become convinced that I’d read lots of books by Ursula Le Guin, and only had to catch up on a few of them, like the young adult Earthsea trilogy. It looks, however, like I’ve read barely any of them: a lot of essays, a couple of non-SF young-adult novels, The Lathe of Heaven (just a few years ago), and something set in a Central European city that I now can’t find at all . More recently, I read the linked stories in Changing Planes (which I’m happy to see has apparently been moved back to the adult section, if only for the illustrations). I began catching up with The Dispossessed. Instead of writing one big post on The Dispossessed (I may write a big post or two about it later), I think I’ll post short pieces, from time to time, about various things in the novel that I think are interesting. The novel is about a two-planet system, one of the planets of which has been colonized by anarchists fleeing the other one. The story follows Shevek, a physicist from Anarres, the anarchist planet. He has chosen to be the first one from his home world to visit Urras, their ancestral home. Urras is much like earth, and the nation Shevek ends up visiting is a totalitarian version of a typical capitalist (or late-capitalist) society, much like North America or any country in Europe. There are two interleaved storylines. One begins at the moment Shevek leaves Anarres....

bianca steele