Year: 2003

We spent the Christmas holiday eating Chinese, watching movies, and making the final few arrangements for the impending move. I’m drowning in lists: To-do list, contact list, shopping list, etc. Might be time for a list of lists.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. An assistant at a media company writes a thinly veiled critique of her former boss and gets a huge book deal. Yeah, yeah. The only twist in this story is that Rachel Pine’s novel, which is about a dysfunctional boutique studio oddly reminiscent of Miramax, was bought by Miramax Books.

In addition to the Weinsteins, there are a host of easily identifiable doppelgangers, including Steven Seagal, Billy Bob Thornton, Gwyneth Paltrow, Woody Allen, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, John Ritter, Larry Flynt, Woody Harrelson, Charlize Theron, David Schwimmer and Anna Wintour. Just as she has changed real people’s names ever so slightly (Thornton is called Jimmy-Joe Hawthorne), Pine also has altered several movie titles, but the ersatz replacements are hardly deceptive. “The English Patient” has become “The Foreign Pilot.” “Sling Blade” is known as “HackSaw.” “The Pallbearer” has been changed to “The Gravedigger,” “Scream” is now called “Shriek,” and “The Postman” is “The Milkman.”

The article quotes Harvey Weinstein as saying, “Contrary to popular belief, we do have a sense of humor about ourselves.” Hmmm. I’ll wait to see what he does with the movie.

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.

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