I find out, via Maud Newton, that the Coen brothers have cast the role of Mattie Ross for their upcoming version of True Grit, which is scheduled to be released this Christmas. This is important because the Coens will restore the tale to Mattie’s perspective, the way it was told in Charles Portis’ 1968 novel. In an appreciation of Portis for The Believer (worth reading in full), Ed Park wrote of True Grit:

The novel . . . could hardly seem more out of step with the countercultural spirit of ’68. Writing in 1928 (i.e., on the eve of the Great Depression), a spinster banker named Mattie Ross revisits the central chapter in her life: the winter of 1873, when, as a fourteen-year-old from Yell County, Arkansas, she hunted down her father’s killer, Tom Chaney, with the help of a tough U.S. marshal that she hires (the “old one-eyed jasper” Rooster Cogburn) and a young Texas Ranger (the cowlicked LaBoeuf). [. . .]

Henry Hathaway’s enjoyable if foreshortened film version (1969) firmly yokes the story to John Wayne, who at sixty-two won his only Oscar for his portrayal of Rooster. Alas, the movie (which also stars Kim Darby as Mattie and Glen Campbell as LaBoeuf) doesn’t capture the retrospective quality of Mattie’s voice, as she fixes on the events over the widening gulf of years (“Time just gets away from us,” she writes, in the book’s penultimate and heartbreaking line). Wayne, in a full-bodied performance, draws the focus away from his employer/charge, so that the title refers far more to Rooster than Mattie.

If you haven’t read True Grit, it, and the rest of Portis’ work, is worth your time.

The Rumpus has a lengthy interview with Paula Fox. A piece:

Fox: I was assaulted in Jerusalem. I’m trying to write about that. It’s taken me twelve years to get around to it, but it did stop me from smoking. I saw a story in the Times that scientists had discovered the addiction center, which is a prune shaped little thing in the right side of the brain. That was hit during the attack. I was struck to the ground and spent a month in the hospital. Apparently it’s the addiction center for tobacco and well as other things. And I’d been to smoking groups. The neurologist told me that was a hell of a way to quit. [. . .]

Rumpus: It’s been hard to write about till now?

Fox: Yes. I haven’t avoided consciously but I didn’t want to confront certain things. It certainly changed me a lot.

Rumpus: Will it be part of a new memoir?

Fox: Oh no, I think I’ve written all the memoirs I’m going to write.

Michael Schaub, managing editor of Bookslut, was interviewed by the Williamette Week. The session ended with a bout of word association, and his thoughts about some prominent authors made me laugh:

Stephenie Meyer: hot teenagers in trees
Jonathan Safran Foer: veal piccata
John Updike: Episcopalians having anal sex
Pat Conroy: incest and cornbread

The smart general interest site 3 Quarks Daily is offering a prize for the best blog writing about arts and literature. You can read more about it here. They’re accepting nominations in the comments section of the post, and if you feel moved to nominate any review you’ve read on The Second Pass, that would be much appreciated.

Slate recently hosted a nearly one-hour conversation between Meghan O’Rourke, Stephen Metcalf, and Troy Patterson about Don DeLillo’s White Noise, one of my all-time least favorite novels. Patterson dislikes it as vehemently as I do. Metcalf, whose criticism I’ve often enjoyed, loves it, and says he “laughed out loud constantly” while reading it. This is unimaginable to me. He also says that in reading it, he doesn’t get a sense “at all” of “a smug sense of superiority over the suburban droid.” That’s one of the most potent things I took from the book, a condescending (and uncomprehending) caricature of suburban living. O’Rourke is technically the “moderator,” but really functions as a full third participant, and she seems torn between the claims of the other two.

What I like most is that Patterson makes his case, briefly, and then sits back and lets his fellow panelists read from and defend the book in a way that makes it sound as bad as it is. In fact, by the end Metcalf seems to have talked himself into a lesser enthusiasm, saying that the book succeeds as satire even if that satire is driven home “somewhat tiresomely and excessively.”

Fridays normally bring The Beat, the weekly roundup of reviews from other sources. But I’ve been meaning to switch the feature to Mondays for a while now (makes more sense there for several reasons), so this is the week that will happen. Thus, no Beat today. Seventy-two hours from now (give or take), a Beat.

The New Yorker’s Book Bench interviews Julie Klausner, whose new book is “a dating memoir that manages to avoid excessive self-deprecation, self-pity, or self-flagellation.” Among other issues, Klausner discusses whether an entire generation of young men are “a bunch of wimpy little Kermits.” Here she is on the importance of shared taste in pop culture:

In the book, you repeatedly assume a guy with the right taste in books, movies, and music will automatically be a romantic fit for you. Your assumptions are proved wrong, to hilarious effect, but as someone who obviously cares about culture, where do you draw the line? For instance, could you love someone who though “Crash” was totally awesome?

Do you mean Crash the Oscar-winning movie about race, or Crash the David Cronenberg movie about people who get turned on by car crashes? Neither movie is an acceptable choice, but don’t get a ride from the guy who likes the second one. As for the question, I think that since the nineteen-fifties, when the counter culture was created, it’s been important for creative and critical people to connect about what they do and don’t love, and I think it’s a tribute to the influence of social networking and its association with youth culture that we can finally develop contempt for teen-agers who define themselves by a hyperlinked list of bands or book titles. The “you are what you like” thing is just suddenly immature, and when I saw the preview for 500 Days of Summer, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt fell in love with Zooey Deschanel as soon as she recognized a Smiths song on his iPod, I reacted really virulently. Because it should have been enough for a guy his character’s age to go for a girl who looks like a pinup, with eyes like swimming pools—it wasn’t until she tipped him off that she and he were the same on the taste-o-meter when he felt safe enough to fall.

Over at The Rumpus, Eric Puchner shares some thoughts about coming up with titles for stories. He offers a list of Titles to Avoid, like The Faux Poetic but Authentically Meaningless (“Hunt the Mist Slowly”). And he says the difficulty in the craft is not limited to amateurs:

I’ve seen some jaw-droppingly awful titles, often from very gifted writers. And I’m not just talking about my students: The Great Gatsby is an inspired title, one for the ages, but it wasn’t Fitzgerald’s idea. He wanted to call the novel Trimalchio in West Egg, which sounds like something Dr. Seuss might have dreamed up for The Playboy Channel. An early version of Portnoy’s Complaint was called A Jewish Patient Begins His Analysis. At various times, Catch-22 was called Catch-18, Catch-11, Catch-14, and Catch-17. And some classic novels have stood the test of time, despite having terrible titles. (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, for example, never fails to make me giggle.)

The shortlist of ten finalists for this year’s Best Translated Book Award has been announced. The winner will be revealed on March 10.

A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.

Will Blythe reviews Roberto Bolaño’s Monsieur Pain, “a surrealist’s attic of unlikely juxtapositions” in which “[t]he expectations of a conventional mystery are thwarted at every turn.” . . . Alan Wolfe is very clear: “Let’s get my judgment of Thomas Sowell’s new book out of the way first. There is not a single interesting idea in its more than three-hundred pages.” But that judgment doesn’t get out of the way so much as it gets repeated in different varieties throughout the review: “The flatness of [Sowell’s] sentences is matched by the flatness of his trajectory. Whatever darkness exists in the world does not reside in his soul. He undertakes no bildung and experiences no crises. He learns nothing that does not confirm what he already knew. If he were a character in a novel, it would end on page one.” . . . I recently mentioned David Peace on the blog. Richard Rayner reviews his latest, based on a real-life 1948 crime in which a Tokyo bank robber poisoned a dozen people. (Rayner: “Expect to be enthralled and maybe amazed, although not cheered up or even necessarily entertained.”) . . . Graeme Wood says that the stories in Ted Conover’s The Routes of Man, about global roadways (in China, Peru, Israel, etc.), are “compelling,” and that: “The book’s faults mostly follow from its broad theme and structure. Indeed, so loose is the organizing principle that two of the chapters, including the best, have little to do with roads.” . . . The New Republic’s new review site, The Book, joins The Second Pass (and others, of course) in appreciating more obscure titles. This week, acclaimed Dostoevsky biographer Joseph Frank writes about a memoir by someone who grew up in Mussolini’s Italy before moving to Palestine. . . . A review to print out and read over the weekend: William Deresiewicz on the stories Tolstoy wrote in old age, a time in the author’s life “marked by a turn toward ideological radicalism and spiritual extremity.”

If you’re on Twitter, I recommend following Alain de Botton. (And hey, while you’re at it, why not follow The Second Pass.) De Botton isn’t always uplifting, but he’s good at the form. Three of his recent posts:

The book will be killed not directly by new technology but by the monkey mind it breeds. The issue is concentration, not royalties.

Writing opens up the otherwise unusual prospect of being violently disliked by strangers & training oneself not to mind.

Embarking on another book, writers seldom dare note that few of their favourite authors ever wrote more than 2 or 3 works they really loved.

The Diagram Prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year (which I’ve written about before, here) has named a “very longlist” of finalists for the first time. It turns out that Twitter led to a huge increase in nominations this year, though Horace Bent, who oversees the prize, is not feeling very happy about technology in general:

The adage that everyone has a book in them may well be true, but that doesn’t mean every Tom, Dick and Harry out there can bash a few words out on a keyboard and then upload it to Scribd with a humorous title like: The Historic Adventures of the Purple Waffle Iron on His Horse Made of Asparagus, and then think they have a chance at winning my prestigious award. I refuse to acknowledge such submissions.

The shortlist will be announced on Feb. 19, and then the public gets to vote for the winner. For my money, these five should be the early favorites for the award:

A Tortilla is Like Life

The Master Cheesemakers of Wisconsin

(Via)

Thank you to anyone who’s ever commented on this blog. The vast majority of comments are from spambots, and I delete them in bulk. Frequently. I have to say, though most spambots leave crazy links or very brief, generic sentiments (”Very interesting post. I’ve bookmarked you!”), some rise to the level of demented poetry:

Hi, nice post. You will date when you are easy and that is not unusual or funny. You take the outside friends if they are stimulating fun of you. It will be serious, but maybe you should make new admirers. Ones that will aid almost you and not make fun of you for being moral and mature about geological dating. I have to say that being 18 and never in a kinship is fairly normal. Soon you will go to college and believably date there but until then, commend that you are special and no one specially your “friends” should be making fun of you for that.

So true.

In college, a good friend of mine used to bemoan news of his favorite rock stars being in happy relationships, because he figured that meant the ensuing records would be no good. The idea that artists in any medium create sharper work when they’re unhappy—and that unhappiness is a more fertile subject than happiness—is a potent, long-standing one, and there’s plenty of evidence to support it. As Amy Bloom puts it in a recent essay in the New York Times: “Smart people often talk trash about happiness, and worse than trash about books on happiness, and they have been doing so for centuries.”

Terry Teachout recently shared this excerpt from The Watch That Ends the Night by Hugh MacLennan:

Happiness is one of the hardest things to write about, and the difficulty of doing so makes me long to be a musician or a painter, for painters and musicians are at ease with the supreme emotion, which is not grief but joy abounding. To be able to make a joyful noise unto the Lord or a praise of colors and forms would seem to me to equate any man with gods or little children. Happiness annihilates time. We measure history by its catastrophes, we recall the weather by its storms, but the periods of peace and joy—who can describe them?

It does seem that painting and classical music are two of the only art forms that can safely approach the subjects of contentment and joy. Which is to say that abstraction can approach it. Much rarer is the book or film that does the same—Mike Leigh’s brilliant Happy-Go-Lucky comes to mind. But what about books? Ingrid Norton says that J. L. Carr’s A Month in the Country accomplishes the feat:

Carr tells a tale of happiness which burnishes such a strong and subtle impression in the mind of the reader that it seems you yourself have passed through the season of contentment Carr describes.

A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.

Mary Gaitskill reviews the “strange and wonderful” Baba Yaga Laid an Egg by Dubravka Ugresic: “Baba Yaga’s hut is a place of chaos, riddles, slippage, and between-ness, where life lives in death, beauty nests inside pestilence, and mothers suck their daughter’s breasts. In this place, kitsch and cuteness are on speaking terms with the highest refinement, the deepest sufferings and joys; Ugresic can move from one state to the other with earthy grace.” . . . William Deresiewicz doesn’t mince words about Nabokov’s The Original of Laura, calling it “a handful of crumbs, a bit of lint, a few coins . . . a sham, a scam.” . . . A “warm, fair” biography of Paul McCartney “offers a reconsideration of the dynamics of the band and McCartney’s role in it, arguing that Paul was as much a leader as John.” . . . Claire Dederer reviews the lovable “grouchy academics, pissed-off orphans, and melancholy middle-aged lawyers” in Amy Bloom’s latest collection of stories. . . . Charles Peterson reviews new books about Facebook and MySpace. . . . Alan Light reads new memoirs by two rockers who are used to being in the background, behind Sting and Springsteen, respectively. The results “aren’t satisfying as either literary efforts or historical documents.”

In one of those odd cultural clusters that sometimes come along, I went from never having heard of David Peace (that I could remember) to hearing only of David Peace. Or so it seems.

At a friend’s place for dinner the other night, the friend raved about Peace’s Nineteen Seventy-Four, the first book in a series of four known as the Red Riding Quartet. In Nineteen Seventy-Four, a Yorkshire crime correspondent investigates a series of child murders. The books have been compared to James Ellroy, and they sound extra-grim. (The series’ striking covers were designed by the brilliant Gregg Kulick.) Then another friend mentioned that she recently assigned a review of Peace’s new novel, Occupied City. And then I came across Whitney Matheson’s post about a series of films produced by IFC based on the Red Riding quartet, though it’s been truncated into a cinematic trilogy. A trailer for all three movies here.

Writer Rodrigo Fresán recalls a time in his life when he was a book thief:

And one perfect winter morning, I challenged someone who at the time was a good friend and rival, another consummate book thief, to the ultimate test.

He and I stationed ourselves at one end of Avenida Corrientes, in Buenos Aires, famous for the number of bookstores located along it, bookstores that are still there, I think, though I’m writing this from so far away. And we set ourselves the goal — each of us on one side of the street, previously selected by the flip of a coin — to steal the seven volumes of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. In the order of publication.

I ought to say that I succeeded and he didn’t, and that our friendship was never the same again.

In writing the piece about Joe Palmer that went up today, I was tempted to include a lot more of his writing. As it is, the review is imbalanced in his favor, but the way I figure it, it’s better to read him than me. But I wanted to share just two other brief excerpts (of many) that didn’t make it into the final version:

“In Australia practically everybody goes to the races,” said the visitor to our shores. “And they drink. Those are the two principal pastimes.”

Well, it seemed that the Australians were well grounded in the fundamentals. With an encyclopedia to guide them they could not have picked amusements on which time had bestowed a greater accolade. The Greeks did both around the funeral pyre of Achilles. There had been instances since.

And this about someone whose job at Saratoga was to keep ducks out of a pool in front of a steeplechase jump:

Don’t know if you ever tried to shoo a duck out of water, but unless you wade, the duck has all the best of it. . . . The man who handled this has probably been snatched to glory by this time and is betting now on which constellations smash first, and the ducks were no doubt eaten by stable hands, since this was in the ’30s, when times were not so good and any fowl within three miles of a race track held its life by no very certain tenure.

David Shields’ Reality Hunger: A Manifesto has generated mucho buzz, including enough A-list blurbs to sink an aircraft carrier. I’m going to dig in soon, but I can’t say I’m optimistic. For one thing, there’s this interview in the just-published February issue of Bookslut, in which Shields offers up several possible nuggets for Andrew Sullivan’s Poseur Alert. Including this one:

I swear to God, I can’t read a book unless it has miniature numbered sections. I exaggerate, but only slightly. I think of so many books that I love and so many of them are numbered: Pascal’s Pensées, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Wittgenstein, The Pharmacist’s Mate, 8, Wenderoth, Lindqvist, Pessoa, Daudet, Cheever’s Journals, Rochefoucauld, James Richardson, Donald Patterson, Cyril Connolly. I’m not 100% sure that all of these books are numbered, but they have at minimum some kind of numerological structure, and the key thing for me is that the numbers pretend to be a rational order, and the work blows that apart. The tension between the order of the numbers and the chaos of life I find, I’ll say it, erotic.

A friend recently introduced me to Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, an addictive song-by-song analysis of the Beatles’ career. In its obituary for MacDonald (who committed suicide in 2003 at the age of 54), the Guardian wrote:

MacDonald carefully anatomised every record the Beatles made, drawing attention to broad themes, particular examples of inspiration and moments of human frailty alike.

What could have been a dry task instead produced a volume so engagingly readable, so fresh in its perceptions and so enjoyable to argue with that, in an already overcrowded field, it became an immediate hit.

The book was originally published in 1994, and has been revised a couple of times since. MacDonald’s voice here is conversational and deeply intelligent. He was obviously a fan—he was given access to the band’s master recordings for this project, and going through them as carefully as he did would require fandom—but he’s not overly reverent. In fact, he’s often most entertaining when tearing a song down, as he does here:

If any single recording shows why The Beatles broke up, it is “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” Compulsively fertile in melody and fascinated by music’s formal beauties, McCartney could, when unrestrained by Lennon’s cynicism, fatally neglect meaning and expression. This ghastly miscalculation—of which there are countless equivalents on his garrulous sequence of solo albums—represents by far his worst lapse of taste under the auspices of The Beatles.

Or this, about “Across the Universe”:

Sadly, its vague pretensions and listless melody are rather too obviously the products of acid grandiosity rendered gentle by sheer exhaustion. [. . .] [I]t gradually dissolved into a morass of out-of-tune wahwah guitar and squeaky backing vocals by two of the band’s teenage girl fans who stood sentinel all day outside Abbey Road and who were asked in on the spur of the moment.

In a recent review of the book, John Carvill wrote, “It’s a sign of how persuasive a critic [MacDonald] is that the impulse is not to scoff at his harsh assessment[s], but to feel impelled to at least think twice before moving on.” The perfect example of that, to this reader, is MacDonald’s conclusion about “Here Comes the Sun”: “Prettily atmospheric, the result is a little too faux-naïf to appeal to those lacking the requisite sweet tooth.” My instinct should be to argue against this, since “Here Comes the Sun” is one of my favorite Beatles song. But if I’m honest, MacDonald is right; I just have that sweet tooth.

Even when MacDonald started with a truism (as when he wrote that “We Can Work It Out” is “a classic instance of Lennon and McCartney collaborating as equals”), he quickly moved on to more complicated thoughts:

McCartney wrote the words and music to the eight-bar verse/chorus, Lennon the words and music to the sixteen-bar middle. . . . The usual critical line, derived from Lennon’s remark to this effect to Playboy in 1980, is that his section is impatiently realistic beside the cajoling optimism of McCartney’s part. This, though, misreads the song, which is not only tersely forthright throughout, but tough in passages which Lennon had no hand in.

Carvill again: “Scholarly yet irreverent, highly serious but always richly entertaining, the book not only sends the reader back to the music it describes, but also repays repeated readings.” All true. If you’re a fan of the band, I highly recommend MacDonald’s Revolution.

Nevin Martell’s Looking for Calvin and Hobbes details (as best it can) the life of reclusive cartoonist Bill Watterson. The book allegedly suffers from the very problem that drives it—Martell can’t find, much less speak to, Watterson.

Watterson isn’t as maniacal about his invisibility as Salinger was, and he’s even emerged to give a rare interview (over e-mail) to Cleveland.com. Yet another scoop for Cleveland.com! The results are what you might expect from someone so intensely private. He doesn’t seem eager to discuss much, and Martell may be lucky to have not found him. Watterson certainly doesn’t sound conflicted about his beloved strip’s relatively short life:

It’s always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip’s popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now “grieving” for “Calvin and Hobbes” would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I’d be agreeing with them. I think some of the reason “Calvin and Hobbes” still finds an audience today is because I chose not to run the wheels off it. I’ve never regretted stopping when I did.

(Via Galleycat)

Eric Dexheimer has a piece worth reading in the Austin American-Statesman (found via Books, Inq.) about the process of banning certain books and periodicals in Texas prisons:

In the past five years, volumes on massage, home health care, circumcision, vintage aircraft nose art, gardening, Dungeons & Dragons and a pictorial history of restaurant menus were rejected for displaying too much explicit material.

Inmates enrolled in sex offender treatment programs, often for pedophilia, cannot receive any reading material except newspapers, religious material, and legal or educational publications. But a ban on images of nude children applies to everyone, Smith said. [. . .]

Art has proved especially tricky to regulate. Shelby said she tries to educate mailroom workers to keep their hands off books of paintings featuring naked adults. Yet many great works also display naked children, and books featuring the work of some of the world’s best-known artists, including Caravaggio and Rembrandt, have been blocked. [. . .]

In an effort to separate art from child porn, reviewers have come up with a test, Shelby said: If a naked child has clearly visible wings, it is a legitimate cherub and the book can stay. No wings? It must go.

“If he is naked, the Baby Jesus would be denied,” she said.