A person could spend the remainder of the year reading the author interviews — presented in a lovely, simple and streamlined page by name and by decade, from the 1950s to the 2010s — now free for the reading at The Paris Review online: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/.

Of the collection, The  New York Times’ “Critics Notebook” writes:

In the era of ‘Oprah’ and ‘Charlie Rose’ and YouTube and endlessly looping book tours, the glory days of The Paris Review interviews are probably in the rear-view mirror. We can get our fill of writerly talk — some of it quite good, much of it not — elsewhere. …

There is still something rather awesome about the gathering of yakking, coruscating ghosts — preening, complaining, dueling — that the talented Mr. [Lorin] Stein has released into the Internet’s ether. The Paris Review’s Web site feels, for now, like the best party in town.”

I just finished The Corrections, and, boy, are my arms tired. (A native Midwesterner, ever on the cultural front edge, I’m also in Season 1 of Mad Men, and I’m thinking about getting some of those thick black Ira Glass glasses. Also, I tell jokes that are dorky.)

Besides the workout, and a notion of the big deal, that fat book – described so often as being about a “Midwestern family” — gave me cause to consider the homeland as it relates to character. Read more »

A few critics lay out their selections for “summer reading,” whatever that is. Their interpretations vary, to include exotic settings, action and suspense, and poet Kay Ryan’s “well-carpentered, deeply intelligent, plain-spoken American voice.” Oh, and a 20-year-old who goes to Italy and gets surrounded by sex:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127918885

Nearly 90 actual years and a billion technology years after the original publication of Ulysses, people are still hung up on the sexy parts. Prompted by complaints about a masturbation scene, the novel’s original publishers were sued and found guilty of obscenity. This week, just in time for Bloomsday (the James Joyce version, not the Spokane one), Apple decided to allow the creators of a graphic novelization of Ulysses to keep in a drawing of some boobs.

After Ulysses Seen was presented to Apple as an iPad application, the company asked its creators to make a couple of changes, including removal of an image of a naked goddess. It was a clumsy move by Apple, whose representative, according to an NPR report, was attempting to block an alleged tide of people attempting to sidestep its decency guidelines by simply banning any and all nudity, no matter its role, artistic merit, etc. It’s heartening, though, that technology facilitated such a loud and quick protest of censorship, through blogs initially, that the company changed its mind and admitted its mistake. (It also could have looked to history for guidance; a judge ruled 75 years ago that Ulysses was not obscene.) Read more »

The New York Times does not shy away from big, fancy words, despite it being a newspaper, a medium that generally strives to be accessible to most. Luckily, what with the Internet, newspaper readers can look up the stumpers, from inchoate to démarche, with a click that takes them to definitions and synonyms from multiple sources.

A couple of Times staffers recently compiled a list of the “50 words that most often stumped the world’s most brilliant newspaper readers.” Could you rank among the world’s most brilliant? Check out the NYT blog post that analyzes the results and links to the list.

I don’t know what you’re doing for money right now, but you could be doing better. Here are just a few of the job opportunities available for writers, as posted on Craigslist. (True story: The daughter of a former co-worker landed a job writing for Ellen by answering a Craigslist ad seeking a writer.) Read more »

I will admit right here that I went to see Hot Tub Time Machine, paying full price at the theater. I chose Hot Tub Time Machine because of the title Hot Tub Time Machine. And I was satisfied with my movie-going experience, although when I tried to explain the reasons to someone who hadn’t seen it, all I could say was, “Well, one of the guys goes, ‘It must be some kind of … hot tub time machine!’” I like that the movie acknowledges how dumb it is, but really, especially, I like those four words together. In fact, when I started to think too hard about Hot Tub Time Machine, I discovered little good about it besides those four words together. Some parts are OK, but not good, and some parts are bad – cliché, predictable. In a movie about time travel, there’s much discussion about … the Butterfly Effect. But there are those four words. Hot Tub Time Machine.

This is where you might ask a question: Then why think too hard about it? Exactly. Isn’t some stuff just for fun?

For instance, why you gotta rain on our parade, Anthony Lane of The New Yorker? Here’s Lane on Kick-Ass, in which, among other apparently awesome fight scenes, an 11-year-old girl perpetrates a killing spree: “The standard defense of such material is that we are watching ‘cartoon violence,’ but, when filmmakers nudge a child into viewing savagery as slapstick, are we not allowing them to do what we condemn in the pornographer – that is, to coarsen and inflame?” Because that’s why you go to see a movie called Kick-Ass, you might say eye-rollingly– coming very close to dropping the magazine in favor of a snack – to think about such things. Read more »

Good writers, that is, by winning the bad writing contest. While the “official deadline” for the Bullwer-Lytton Fiction Contest has passed, founder Scott Rice says it will accept entries until early June.

The contest, named after Victorian author Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton of “dark and stormy night” fame, asks entrants to compose the opening sentence to a terrible novel.

The contest seems to favor long twisty sentences, with lots of adjectives and commas. Many of its entrants, Rice has said, find inspiration in “tar baby” metaphors, the kind you can pick up and you can’t put down. My favorites among the winning lines tend to be the ones that avoid such absurd literariness in favor of straight-up absurd situations: Read more »

In light of a Bark conversation on the point of it all, some recent comments by Stephen Sondheim jumped out at me. You know, Sondheim: Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods; one of the marvelous people who drift through Leonard “Lenny” Bernstein’s apartment as described by Tom Wolfe.

I’ve never been much of a musical theater fan, save, for sentimental and political reasons, Oklahoma. Sentimental: My dad – a huge musical theater fan and participant, via the pit – used the soundtrack to wake us kids up in the morning when we had to get moving extra early; I’d be humming “I Cain’t Say No” all the way to sixth grade. Political: I do believe the farmer and the cowman should be friends.

However, I thought some of the things Sondheim told Terry Gross might apply: Read more »

Why do I think this localization of some knock-on disruption is funny? It’s not funny, not one bit. Those poor book fair attendees.