Kill Fee

A review of Tobias Wolff’s collection Our Story Begins in Newsday: link.

Here’s a link to my write-up in the Los Angeles Times of the Norman Mailer memorial last week at Carnegie Hall. I got to run on a bit about D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus’s Town Bloody Hall, a documentary of a 1971 debate about Women’s Liberation, which features a slew of literary celebrities as well as Cynthia Ozick’s unprintable query to Mailer about his writing practice.

And, as I have little sense of propriety, I include the exchange below:

Cynthia Ozick confessed to the room, “This is my moment to live out a fantasy.” And then to Mailer, her voice sweet and curious, she spoke: “You said quote ‘a good novelist can do without everything but the remnants of his balls.’ For years, I’ve been wondering, when you dip your balls in ink, what color ink is it?”

Mailer, laughing, responded: “I don’t pretend I’ve never written an idiotical or stupid sentence in my life and that is one of them.”

A review of Richard Schickel’s Film on Paper: The Inner Life of Movies in the Los Angeles Times: link.

Alison Bechdel calls Ariel Schrag’s comic chronicles of high school, “a scathing and meticulously documented autobiographical triumph.” Ariel will be at Rocketship tomorrow for the release party of Awkward and Definition. With a slideshow, too! More here.

Reporting from Slaughter Beach, Delaware, Ian Urbina has an article in today’s New York Times about the offshoring of the MTA’s Redbird trains to create artificial reefs, a combination of the subway and the natural world that I find fascinating.

In the last several years, the reefs have drawn swift open-ocean fish, like tuna and mackerel, that use the reefs as hunting grounds for smaller prey. Sea bass like to live inside the cars, while large flounder lie in the silt that settles on top of the cars, said Mr. Tinsman, the Delaware official.

According to the article, though, there have been problems with
overcrowding.

The New Jersey Scuba Diver website has an in-depth look at the artificial reef program, with diagrams, video, and amazing photos of the cars being dumped from a barge on to the Shark River Reef.

And from YouTube, here’s a short video of the last Redbird to be in service:

I guess it just brings out the “foamer” in me, or, as Wikipedia gently corrects me when I search for the term, the “railfan.”

My friend Luis Jaramillo is starting a new reading series at the Montauk Club, a Venetian Gothic palazzo in Brooklyn, complete with stained glass and mahogany—not to mention grandeur and decay. The first reading, with Alex Prud’homme and Kim Sunée, will be Wednesday, April 23.

Over at Newsday, I have a list of great Hollywood novels–one of my favorite literary genres. The painful part was choosing only five. Here they are.

Other contenders include:

Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann
The Last Tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald (also the Pat Hobby stories)
The Goodbye People, Gavin Lambert
What Makes Sammy Run, Budd Schulberg
After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, Aldous Huxley
I’m Still Holding, I’m Losing You, and I’ll Let You Go, Bruce Wagner
Prater Violet, Christopher Isherwood
The Loved One, Evelyn Waugh

A review of Geoffrey Nowell-Smith’s Making Waves: New Cinemas of the 1960s and Vanessa R. Schwartz’s It’s So French! Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture in The Los Angeles Times: link.

A recent interview with Susan Choi about her new novel in Time Out New York: link.

Installation view of Chris Larson’s Pause (The Dukes of Hazzard ‘69 Charger and Ted Kaczynski’s Montana Refuge), 2004

Here’s a link to my review of Caryl Flinn’s biography of Ethel Merman in Newsday. [pdf version here]

Ethel Merman on “The Love Boat,” with Ann Miller, Carol Channing, and Della Reese. Click through for Merman and the Muppets.