The list, care of the Art of Manliness.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
The Ten Most Badly Bungled Classic Book to Film Adaptations
The list, care of Flavorwire.
From the piece...
The Scarlet Letter
The gold standard of all bad adaptations — the reverse Godfather, if you will. Director Roland Joffé, who helmed acclaimed pictures like The Killing Fields and The Mission, would seem a logical choice to film Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 historical novel, a favorite of high school English teachers for decades. And he exhibited spot-on casting instincts when he placed Gary Oldman in the role of minister Arthur Dimmesdale. What we don’t know is who decided that Demi Moore was born to play Hester Prynne, but whoever made that call hopefully didn’t get a Christmas bonus. She was done no favors by Douglas Day Stewart’s screenplay adaptation, which threw out much of the novel’s complexity in favor of sexy bathtub scenes and a happy (or happier?) ending. The critics weren’t enthused (the film was nominated for seven Razzie awards), and audiences stayed far away. It took Hollywood a full 15 years to finally make a modern Scarlet Letter that worked: last year’s Easy A. (No, seriously, we love that movie.)
Bad Politics, Worse Prose
From suicidal astronauts to bestiality, you can learn a lot about what makes the world's worst tyrants tick from the terrible books they write.
From an article in Foreign Policy...
Dictator: Joseph Stalin
Oeuvre: Georgian pastoral odes
Before Joseph Stalin was known for murdering millions of his own people, the Soviet dictator was a locally famous Georgian poet who wrote flowery odes to nature and working-class heroes. Young Ioseb Dzhugashvili's work was considered good enough to be included in prestigious literary journals of the time and Georgian anthologies. According to Simon Sebag Montefiore's Young Stalin, the dictator's poems became minor Georgian classics even before he took power -- some were even unwittingly memorized by schoolchildren all the way up through the 1970s (Stalin typically published anonymously). His rhapsodic invocations of Georgia's rolling lush landscape, as in the poem "Morning," were beloved by nationalists and read as a rebuff to czarist repression:
The pinkish bud has opened,
Rushing to the pale-blue violet
And, stirred by a light breeze,
The lily of the valley has bent over the grass.
The lark has sung in the dark blue,
Flying higher than the clouds
And the sweet-sounding nightingale
Has sung a song to children from the bushes
Flower, oh my Georgia!
Let peace reign in my native land!
And may you, friends, make renowned
Our Motherland by study!
Stalin's poetry was fairly standard for early 19th century romantic poetry, as biographer Robert Service notes in Stalin: A Biography, if a little juvenile. "It wasn't very original," Service says. "I don't think it's very good, personally. It's very conventional, the imagery is very standardized and rather self-indulgent.… He's not one of the great poets."
Great Posthumous Novels
The New York Times runs them down.
From the piece...
Jane Austen – Sanditon (1817)
Jane Austen began Sanditon, her last novel, while succumbing to the final throes of the mystery illness that eventually took her life in 1817. As a consequence, only the first eleven chapters were completed. However, terminal illness had not affected her biting wit, shown here in her satire at the expense of the hypochondriac Parker sisters, residents of a small watering resort which is being commercially developed. Sanditon has since become a popular subject for 'continuators', with at least half a dozen versions completed by other writers after her death. Persuasion, her final completed novel, was also published posthumously.
Ten Ways Digital Books are Changing Our Literary Lives
The list, care of the Denver Post.
From the piece...
PRINT BOOKS: We find them in libraries, bookstores and bookmobiles.
DIGITAL BOOKS: For people who own personal computers, e-readers, smartphones, iPads and other tablets, there's 2 4/7 access to libraries and bookstores for purchasing, borrowing and downloading material.
However, people who don't own those devices are left behind. Underfunded schools, for example, barely have funds for printed books, much less e-books, e-readers or laptops, educators say.
"I hate to see our increasingly divided culture leave the poor further behind by making texts available mostly in unaffordable and impractical formats," says Denver School of the Arts literature teacher Gregg Painter.
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Staedtler vs. Faber-Castell
The oldest pencil war continues in Germany.
From a piece on the BBC...
Staedtler celebrated its 175th anniversary in 2010, while Faber-Castell will celebrate its 250th birthday in summer 2011.
But despite this, the two companies have argued about which company can rightfully claim to be the oldest, a "pencil war" that ended up in court in the 1990s.
Staedtler lost the legal case, but managing director Axel Marx still points out that Friedrich Staedtler, who was born in Nuremberg in 1636, was "the first person worldwide to be mentioned as a pencil manufacturer".
His sons had their own pencil-making businesses. But the city's strict guild rules meant that the Staedtler company was not set up until 1835.
By this point, 10km (6.2 miles) down the road in the small town of Stein, there was already a flourishing pencil company, Faber-Castell.
Outside the city limits, Kasper Faber had been able to incorporate a company in 1761.
The current head of the family firm, Count Anton-Wolfgang von Faber-Castell, is the eighth generation and a direct descendent of the founder.
"I do hope the company will still flourish with the ninth and tenth generations," he says.
That the disagreement over longevity continues to rankle is symptomatic of the keen rivalry that has helped to shape both companies.
Oil Stories
Climate change, peak oil and pollution dominate our everyday lives, but how have they affected our imagination? The Guardian's short fiction project Oil stories asks writers from around the world to drill down through layers of cliché and cant to explore the hidden reservoirs which fuel our dreams and power our nightmares.
Sidebar: The Los Angeles Times rounds up some books on the Gulf oil spill, here.
Monday, April 18, 2011
On the Road - The Movie
How do you turn the near sacred text of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" into a movie without pissing people off?
From an article in the New York Times...
Adapting any beloved book for film is perilous and apt to irk fans, especially when it’s a literary classic where the language itself played a starring role — something not easily translated onto the screen. “On the Road” is particularly daunting since the provocative ideas that defined the novel — casual sex and drug use and a rejection of materialism — are unlikely to raise eyebrows with today’s multiplex audience.
The creative team from another counterculture road movie is leading the project: the director Walter Salles and the screenwriter Jose Rivera from the award-winning Che Guevara biopic “The Motorcycle Diaries.”
The cast is peppered with actors with box-office appeal, including Kristen Stewart of “Twilight” fame, Kirsten Dunst, Amy Adams and Viggo Mortensen. The two male leads, characters based on Kerouac and his fellow flâneur Neal Cassady, are played by lesser-known actors, Sam Riley and Garrett Hedlund.
In July, before filming began near the primary sets in Montreal, the cast and crew went through Beat boot camp — three weeks of immersion with Kerouac experts.
Sidebar: Kerouac's Big Sur is heading to the silver screen as well. More, here.
Why Are Creative People Eccentric?
That's the question recently posed by Scientific American.
From the piece...
In Brief:
* People who are highly creative often have odd thoughts and behaviors—and vice versa.
* Both creativity and eccentricity may be the result of genetic variations that increase cognitive disinhibition—the brain’s failure to filter out extraneous information.
* When unfiltered information reaches conscious awareness in the brains of people who are highly intelligent and can process this information without being overwhelmed, it may lead to exceptional insights and sensations.
Female Mid-Life Crisis and the Memoir
The vogue for middle-aged women finding themselves – and then writing tell-all books about it – has become big business. But it makes their journeys of discovery as predictable as the daily commute, says Charlotte Raven for the Independent.
From the article...
Modern self-discovery narratives are "journeys" in the X Factor or Big Brother sense. Before she made it, Julie Powell was working as a secretary for the government agency responsible for 9/11. To evade mediocrity, she sets herself the "challenge" of cooking her way through the 524 recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 365 days.
The constructed jeopardy – "risking her marriage, her job and her cat's well-being" – will be familiar to fans of reality formats.
The highs and lows of the "experience" were recorded on a blog, The Julie and Julia Project, which became a book and a film.
Julie Powell namechecks her pets in her author profile at the front of the book. I'd expected the film version of The Julie and Julia Project to be twee. Watching the obligatory "couple wrestling with live lobster" scene, modelled on Annie Hall, I felt indignant the lobster's behalf. The scene would have been justified if it had served the protagonists' supposed goal of self-development. By her own admission, Powell learns nothing from the encounter. That wrestling wasn't an analogy. She wasn't wrestling with her conscience or with the meaning of love. When she's done with the wrestling, she giggles inanely, reminding us that we're watching a bathetic re-enactment of earlier self-discovery tropes.
The feminist self-discovery narratives of the Seventies were real journeys. The married heroine of Fear of Flying didn't conjure adversity from thin air. In the first chapter, Isabella dumps her analyst for peddling misogynist clichés like "the power behind the throne". She notes sadly that clever and stupid women were brainwashed "all the same" by the myth of romantic love. Her A-starred head is full of "soupy longing", but dumping her husband sets her on a path towards self-determination, not romantic optimisation.
The lobster scene in Julie and Julia made me think, oddly, of the murder scenes in Thelma and Louise. The protagonists of this feminist road movie are forced into some difficult corners. Their dilemmas are more weighty than whether to do mayonnaise in the Magimix. When they kill, they respond appropriately, acting as if something important has happened.
Their seriousness of purpose is evident, even when they're acting irresponsibly. Their modern counterparts are frivolous, even when they're acting responsibly.
Penguin Threads Deluxe Classics
Cool - Penguin book covers designed and embroidered by artist Jillian Tamaki. The mass-produced books won't be individually embroidered, but they will be produced and printed in a way that closely mimics the original stitched designs.
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Ancient Book Found in Utah
How ancient? It's one of the first ever printed on movable type. How ancient? It was a new book when Christopher Columbus discovered the New World. How ancient? The book was already a century old when Shakespeare started dabbling in playwriting.
From a piece in the Deseret News...
Since the book surfaced during a fundraising event for the Sandy Museum, its owner has bowed out of the media limelight and has put his treasure under wraps.
Sanders was attending the event as a volunteer, appraising books for museum visitors. A man pulled a book out of a garbage bag, telling Sanders he had something that was very, very old. According to Sanders, the man said, "Well this here, I got this, it's the Nuremberg Chronicles."
Sanders exclaimed, "What?" in astonishment because he knew of the book's lofty historical reputation. "And sure enough," Sanders said, "lo and behold, it was!"
Assuming the edition found in Utah is authentic, it was actually printed in 1493, in the same century that Gutenberg invented the movable-type printing press. The Nuremberg Chronicle was already 100 years old when Shakespeare put on his first stage play.
"Well it's very important," Sanders said. "It's considered to be one of the world's first illustrated books printed with movable type."
The book was that era's equivalent of a history and travel book. But for its day, it was exceptionally lavish in its illustrations. "It has some 1800 woodcut illustrations in it," Sanders said. "Every page has an illustration, which is highly unusual for a book of that antiquity."
The Final Testament of the Holy Bible
Vice is excerpting from literary bad boy's James Frey's newest work. The novel shows Jesus resurrected in New York City.
From the post...
Some people just ain’t made for the world. Can’t fucking take it. Can’t deal with Momma and Dadda and school teaching you nothing and a fucking job with some motherfucking boss going blah blah blah and bills and neighbors and some kind of bullshit church and having a good credit score and a mortgage and getting married with kids and some kind of mysterious motherfucking retirement plan that don’t ever let you do nothing but put more in and get none back. Lotta people ain’t made for it. They the people you see on the streets, in dirty clothes, talking to themselves, screaming on the corner like they demonized, mumbling and crying, they the ones in your family and your town you always scared of and feeling sorry for and making excuses about, the ones you don’t even thinks is fucking human. They is, they just ain’t made like the rest of you and they can’t deal with it so they go to drinking and getting fucking high and being criminal and getting locked-the-fuck-up and just saying who gives a fuck to all of it. People be thinking they’re crazy and be needing some kind of fucking help, but the help ain’t nothing ’cause a motherfucking soup kitchen or some kind of shelter that can’t hold enough or a nuthouse where we get beat or some charity that’s really about motherfuckers’ friends knowing how good they is and how much they care ain’t nothing but bullshit. And don’t even bring up that made-up motherfucker people be calling God, ’cause that motherfucker don’t even exist, and don’t be bringing up all these so-called houses of God, ’cause they more about killing and hating than they is about helping and loving. Sorry to break the motherfucking news if you ain’t heard it, but that’s it motherfucker, that’s the fucking news.
I been living underground for a long-ass motherfucking time. Living underneath New York fucking City, where there’s tunnels, and there’s tunnels underneath the tunnels, and there’s some more fucking tunnels under those tunnels. Some of ’em empty, some still got trains rolling through ’em, some of ’em gots the subways and some of ’em gots peoples. And then there’s some so dark, so goddamn dark, darker than the darkest night, and blacker than what you see when your eyes closed, that most peoples, even underground peoples, won’t go into ’em. And those are the tunnels where miracles happen, where people like Yahya and Ben go and come back something different, where motherfuckers who got the gift go and in the blackness they see. I know it be sounding crazy, but the ones with gifts got to go into blackness, ’cause that’s where they learn to see.
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