Chad Taylor

Modern readers

The sixth season of Lost will feature as a clue Shusako Endo's Deep River, and so presumably will do for that novel what it did for Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman: introduce it to many new readers and vex those who knew it already. I have only recently "found" Endo myself so cannot complain, and have never watched the series anyway. Still. More TV shows should have books in them.

The New York Times asks if Catcher in the Rye resonates with modern teenagers. Says Prozac Nation author Elizabeth Wurtzel:
I’m not sure the latter-day teenager would find comfort in Caulfield the way a few generations past have, because I suspect they are no longer exactly teenagers anymore. As a marketing concept, as a Twitter tribe, as girls who shop at Forever 21 and boys who skateboard, of course teenagers still exist. But as a true age of rebellion and confusion, adolescence went away with the 20th century.
Tangentially, Adam Sternbergh in New York magazine decides that there is still a mass culture:
By now, we were all supposed to be happily imprisoned in our niches. You know: the theory that we’re all wagged by the long tail, each of us a microtargeted consumer absorbed in our narrowcast information flow. So if I love Animal Collective, the Golden State Warriors, Ron Paul, and Nutella, I can track down the four other people exactly like me, find our little corner of the Internet, and obsess in peace. So why was it that, for one cacophonous week at least, everyone seemed to be talking about just one of two things?

He smokes and drinks and don't come home at all




We Can Remember It For You Wholesale

EW weighs the possibility of a movie version of Catcher in the Rye now that difficult old J.D. Salinger is out of the way. Their speculation is fuelled by the novelist's comment in a 1957 letter:

“Firstly, it is possible that one day the rights will be sold. Since there’s an ever-looming possibility that I won’t die rich, I toy very seriously with the idea of leaving the unsold rights to my wife and daughter as a kind of insurance policy. It pleasures me no end, though, I might quickly add, to know that I won’t have to see the results of the transaction.”
Time thinks Holden Caulfield's story has already been filmed more than once. Sight and Sound notes that Salinger's stories about the Glass family were a direct inspiration for The Royal Tenenbaums.

There's also talk of the documents in Salinger's safe. Jay McInerney thinks there's nothing there, but that's what George Martin said about the Beatles...

Meanwhile the latest Philip K. Dick novel to be filmed is an interesting-looking low budget version of Radio Free Albemuth. It depresses me that it didn't happen in Dick's lifetime - he could have done with the money - but the stream of posthumous PKD adaptations was as much to do with the mounting influence of Bladerunner as anything else.

On writing

Sam Anderson at New York Magazine on Don DeLillo's new novel Point Omega:
Over the last ten years, Don DeLillo has become determined to solve one of the great riddles of the ancient art of storytelling: What is the slowest speed at which a plot can move before it stops moving altogether, thereby ceasing to function as a plot?...You could even say it’s something of a breakthrough: It brings us, in just over 100 pages, as close to pure stasis as we’re ever likely to get.
And here's Pete Dexter, in a 2007 interview about writing true stories:
I think your instinct has to be to confront. If you're the kind of guy that comes to a peaceful lake and you know there's birds floating around on it and it's early morning or something and you're happy just standing there looking at that beautiful sight, then maybe you're a photographer.

N*vel finished

That will be all.

I got a stolen wife, and a rhinestone life

Charlotte Gainsbourg, who has that French thing of looking like a teenager and a 40 year old at the same time, interviewed on Time about her collaboration with Beck, among other things, ici.

How long can I stay away from this work I need to do? Quite a while, I think.

Up In The Air = All Over The Place. I'm calling this one busted: Jason Reitman couldn't direct traffic. The movie's unevenness (is it indie? Comedy? Fincheresque life lesson modern post-9/11 thingy? Let's ape the wedding sequence from The Deer Hunter and see what happens!) could be down to the script's bastard upbringing OR a second unit / assistant director shooting lots of pick ups OR studio meddling: I have no idea. But it's a fucking melange.

The actors are terrific. Vera Farmiga is amazing - almost steals it from Clooney, and Melanie Lynskey is the movie's moral center. But the female actors are also filmed like shit - who lit this movie? Did they have to go with second takes or what? Or were they just going for the Charlotte Gainsbourg thing? (They didn't get it.)

Still, no fighting robots. Are movies with stories in them still, y'know, worth making these days? I was watching an old episode of The X-Files on TV (season 2 maybe) and it was better written, better shot, more intelligent and in control of itself than this.

Revising