Laila Lalami

The Christian Science Monitor’s David Sterritt lists his favorite movies this year. I’m embarrassed to say I’ve only seen three of them.

Are biographies of women associated with great writers starting to overshadow those of the writers themselves? Katie Roiphe seems to think so. In this Slate article, she takes a new biography of Lucia Joyce by Carol Loeb Schloss to task.

These biographies interest themselves not with women who wrote great books, but with women who happened to be there as they were being written, women like Zelda Fitzgerald, Vera Nabokov, Georgie Yeats, Valerie Eliot, and Nora Joyce. The latest engrossing contribution to the genre is Carol Shloss’ Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake. Once the genre served as an original, quirky feminist corrective, but now, as it becomes more prevalent, it panders to a culture more enamored of family dysfunction and prurient gossip than art itself.

Roiphe complains that there is no evidence that Lucia Joyce had any talent, that she was nothing more than a dilettante with a taste for dancing, painting, and writing. I can’t speak to the other bios that Roiphe puts in the same bag as Lucia Joyce, but I did read Stacy Schiff’s Vera: Mrs Vladimir Nabokov, and I just don’t think you can come to understand Vladimir Nabokov without reading that book. Vera didn’t just “happen” to be there. She researched, corrected and typed his manuscripts, did all his submissions, translated his work, fought with his detractors, even made corrections on word choice when he was writing Lolita. I can’t imagine anyone telling Nabokov that he doesn’t have le mot juste. She sometimes wrote his lectures for him at Cornell, and on a few occasions lectured when he was unable to. Roiphe may have a point about Lucia Joyce, but I think she gets carried away and smears everyone else.

I was looking forward to Bookworm’s re-airing of an Edward Said interview by Michael Silverblatt, but it looks like the show won’t air on KCRW tomorrow. Other NPR stations will carry it though.

AlterNet has a fun quiz about the year in politics. Here’s a sample:

12. Walden O’Dell, the chief executive of Diebold Inc., one of the largest manufacturers of computerized voting machines, raised eyebrows when he said he was committed to what?
a) Rigging voting machines to ensure Democratic victories in 2004
b) Helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to President Bush in 2004
c) Utilizing an electronic version of the butterfly ballot to confuse Florida voters again
d) Installing software enabling voting machines to make helpful suggestions

And to my three Republican readers, before you start complaining about left-wing tendencies, take a look, the quiz takes a shot at Dean as well.

I’ve just about had it with PagePanopticon. It’s just too unreliable. If you’re happy with the aggregator you use, email me.

If you’re going to spend millions directing a movie in which you have to watch someone who makes Kevin Costner seem like Robert DeNiro, really, you ought to at least read the story before you get started.

With Paycheck, we have a Philip K. Dick movie made by people who similarly don’t seem to have time for the author’s prose. In an interview with the online news service SCI FI Wire, Paycheck producer Terence Chang said John Woo didn’t read the story that inspired the film.

I like John Woo, so to find out something like this is mildly irritating.

A Penn State professor says that passages from The Scarlet Letter bear a striking resemblance to portions of a poem by James Russell Lowell. I get a sense that if one could Google the classics, there’d be more discoveries of this nature. Then again, with Amazon’s Search Inside The Book and Google Print, this may soon be possible.

This is a pleasant surprise. Harper’s has finally revamped its site, and among the changes is the (long overdue) availability of archives of all the Weekly Reviews for the last few years. See Roger Dodge’s selections for this week’s review here.

In contrast to the usual gloom and doom articles about the prospects of book sales, this one is refreshing. It talks about the fact that one in three parents would rather buy a book than a toy for their kids for Christmas! It mentions a projected seven percent raise in book sales for next year! It uses the phrase literary renaissance! Well, okay, so the article is actually about the British book market, not the American. And then it evolves into an idiotic discussion of star authors and other overnight sensations. But anyway, it cheered me up for a couple of seconds there.

Maud was on a year end panel with Jessa of Bookslut, Michael Orthofer of the Complete Review, Alex Good of Goodreports and Robert Birnbaum of Identity Theory. The panel was given five topics to discuss: Feel-Good Story of the Year; Enough Already!; Under-Reported Story of the Year; The Apocalypse is Upon Us; Books of the Year; and Predictions. Their responses are here.