Escrita por Dave Eggers y su esposa Vendela Vida, Away we go se gana dos pulgares arriba, sin clichés, original, logra contar una historia romántica llena de miedos, tragedias, aventruas y ¿por qué no? también felicidad… podría seguir escribiendo así, como si quisiera ser un reportero de pacotilla del Times, o podría escribir como si fuera una persona normal y decir que Away we go me gustó mucho.

No me pareció una película trillada, pues hicieron el esfuerzo de conseguir a dos protagonistas no guapos -lo que favorece la identificación con el espectador- y cuyo final no es para nada feliz pero tampoco atormentado. Muy parecido a la vida real.

Esta película narra la historia de una pareja que parirá a su primer hijo y buscan un lugar en dónde establecerse. En el fondo, me parece que no habla de otra cosa que de una pareja que parirá a su primer hijo y que busca un lugar dónde establecerse. Si bien narran la historia de una pareja que parirá a su primer hijo y que buscan un lugar dónde establecerse, me parece que en realidad no están hablando de otra cosa que de una pareja que parirá a su primer hijo y que busca un lugar en el cual establecerse… ¿?… ¿Es necesario hablar de más? ¿Es necesario que haya algo más de fondo? ¿Por qué siempre buscamos que todo sea una metáfora? Vvimos en una sociedad ‘nerudizada’, ‘poetizada’, idealista en el sentido fuerte: todo debe remitir a algún concepto, ¿por qué?

La maravilla de esta película radica en retratar de una manera bastante realista que toda vida es drama, que no hay matrimonio feliz sin sufrimiento, que el mundo es difícil, y al mismo tiempo que es posible amar. No hay nada como ver a dos personas, fracasadas ambas, que podrían darle asquito a cualquier winner o cualquier All-American, que tienen problemas comunes, alegría común, tristeza común, lágrimas comunes, diversión común y todo, además de común, corriente. ¿Qué más genial que ver cómo a otro estúpido le suceden los mismos problemas que a ti? Ése, a mi juicio, es un gran triunfo en la película: lograr no el estereotipo que todos quiséramos ser sino el que -triste pero también chistosamente- de hecho todos somos.

Dos momentos de la película me parecen memorables: a) aquel en el que una amiga de la protagonista le grita a su esposo -en frente de sus hijos y de medio mundo- que ahora que es cincuentona tiene las tetas tan feas que parecen testículos de viejito: flácidas, colgando y llenas de pelos, JAJAJAJAJAJAJA… lo siento. El segundo momento memorable es b) aquel en el que uno de los amigos de la pareja le confiesa a nuestro héroe que su mujer no puede tener hijos y que acaba de sufrir el quinto aborto. Esta escena, toda ella, ocurre dentro de un bar en Montréal mientras la mujer-hasta-ahora-estéril baila en un tubo encima de una tarima para aficionados. Nada más deprimente, y nada más estimulante. Nada más enternecedor.

La película muestra acertadamente el drama de la banalidad de la estupidez del burgués (caso ‘a’) y el drama del generoso que no puede serlo, el que quiere tener hijos y poblar el mundo pero la naturaleza se lo impide (caso ‘b’). Ambos casos son casos de esterilidad. El primero no da frutos ni queriendo: es el caso del imbécil realmente perdedor, del cínico que maleduca y jode, que joroba a la sociedad con su parasitismo, que grita a los cuatro vientos que ya no es apetitosa sexualmente para su esposo y que por ello está frusrada. El segundo caso no da frutos por maldición, que queriendo educar, que queriendo construir, que queriendo hacer que la vida se mantenga, que queriendo con sus hijos hacer de este mundo algo más habitable  y colaborar a que el planeta gire más siméricamente, es este mismo mundo y esta misma naturaleza la que le elimina de la lista de las personas que serán padres.  ¡Qué injusto es el mundo con nuestros corazones!

Sólo comprendiendo que hay realidades superiores a nosotros, que están fuera de nuestras manos y aceptándolas como lo dado, el corazón puede desarrugarse por fealdad y arrugarse por sonreir. Porque nuestors protagonistas, nuestros héroes al fin y al cabo, no están más que buscando un lugar dónde establecerse, y ese lugar no es sino aquel que les provea de un ambiente en el que su hijo pueda crecer como ellos lo desean. Y eso, eso, es lo que todos anhelamos.

No está de más decir que la estética de la película es como la de Juno, gráfica y sonoramente.

why do you want to share your suffering?
by sharing it i will dilute it.

but it seems like it might be the opposite – by sharing it you might be amplifying it.
that’s where the snowshoe comes in.

a snowshoe?
you wear snowshoes when the snow is deep and porous. the latticework within the snowshoe’s oval distributes the wearer’s weight over a wider area, in order to keep him or her from falling through the snow. so people, the connections between people, the people you know, become a sort of lattice, and the more people, good people, they must be good people, who know that they are here to help, the more of these people you know, and that know you, and know your situation and your story and your troubles or whatnot, the wider and stronger the lattice, and the less likely you are to…

fall through the snow.
right.

that is a mediocre metaphor.
yes. i’m working on it.

Note to all potential readers of Zeitoun: It is located in the Biography section at Barnes & Noble, not, as one who has read Dave Eggers’ other more-or-less-based-on-real-life-if-slightly-fictionalized works might suspect, in the Fiction/Literature section. Furthermore, remember that, in the Biography section, it is alphabetized by subject and not author; this is because people don’t really care who writes a biography.

This is the weird circumstance of Zeitoun, a biography about a man—and more accurately, a family—who is much less famous than the biographer. Eggers is one of a handful of writers universally included in any conversation about the “Voice of the Generation”—consideration earned largely off of his almost-living-up-to-the-title A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

Now, if you know anything about “VotG” discussion, you know that authors don’t stumble their way into such territory by keeping things simple and straightforward and understated. You have to do something pretty out-there, and you have to do it really, really well. That’s what Eggers pulled off in A Heartbreaking  Work, a memoir focused on how the deaths of the author’s parents and his subsequent raising of his much younger brother. It is a very personal book—obvs—detailing not only Eggers’ guilt-inducing desire to avoid walking through the room containing his dying mother, but also more mundane things like his unabashed appreciation for Journey* and his own masturbatory habits.**

*It was written in 2000, well before “Don’t Stop Believin’” was aired on Laguna Beach and became cool to like again. How do I know this? Because you couldn’t get away with writing something like “I worry about exposing him to bands like Journey, the appreciation of which will surely bring him nothing but the opprobrium of his peers” today.

**They were T.M.I. in his book; they’d be beyond that in this review.

A Heartbreaking Work also illustrates Eggers’ considerable playfulness. There are some very serious parts in the memoir, and yet its title page reads “This was uncalled for” and its copyright page includes Eggers’ self-placement on a sexual orientation scale (3, where 1 is perfectly straight and 10 perfectly gay).

What I’m trying to say so far is that Dave Eggers is something of a literary celebrity, and that having read a book about his own life that he titled A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, I pretty much thought that everything I read by Dave Eggers would be tinted by the fact that it is written by Dave Eggers, in the same way that within a paragraph you know you’re reading David Foster Wallace or Ernest Hemingway or William Faulkner.

And so this is the mindset I brought into reading Zeitoun, which I knew was serious and non-fictional and all, but which I suspected would still have Eggers’ fingerprints on it in some way, likely in an underlying smirking playfulness.

I was wrong, and the book is better for it.

The opening pages of Zeitoun are quite different from those of A Heartbreaking Work. There are no jokes on the title or copyright page, and the note about the book doesn’t make fun of the conventional “This is a work of fiction, etc.” template like Eggers does in his memoir. Instead, it states that the book is non-fiction but not meant to be “an all-encompassing book about New Orleans or Hurricane Katrina. It is only an account of one family’s experiences before and after the storm.”

The rest of Zeitoun is similarly understated. In that way, it’s kind of like a really long magazine piece, meant to be consumed in a sitting or two.* It’s basically broken into three parts: Before the Storm, During the Storm, and After the Storm, with the middle part constituting much of the story. The first part establishes the roots of the Zeitoun family, which includes the Syrian-born Abdulrahman, a painter; his native Louisianan wife Kathy, who helps him run his own business; and their four children—one of which is from Kathy’s previous marriage. Eggers does an excellent job characterizing Abdulrahman (more commonly known as Zeitoun) and his wife, giving us an early insight into the logic they’ll use to make their decisions during the storm.

*It is a short 335 pages, and I read it in under 24 hours.

With Katrina bearing down on them, Kathy evacuates with the family while Zeitoun stays behind—he always stays behind, during hurricanes or family vacations—to check on their various properties in the area. After the storm hits and the levees break, Zeitoun uses his second-hand canoe to travel through flooded streets, feed hungry dogs, and save residents trapped in their homes. An ardent Muslim, Zeitoun can’t help but feel that it was part of a divine plan to keep him in New Orleans, where he could be around to save others; it’s this feeling of purpose that keeps him in the city day after day as Kathy implores him to join her and the kids, first in Baton Rouge and later in Phoenix (the westward move resulting from a spending a bit too much time in a confined space with family). There are looters, she says, and the government keeps bringing in more and more military.

At this point, though, Zeitoun is swimming along: The conditions are less than ideal, but Zeitoun and Kathy are making the most of them. And then, with the waters receding and everything looking like it might get back to some semblance of normality, Zeitoun disappears. After hearing from her husband every day at noon since leaving (one of Zeitoun’s properties still had a working phone), Kathy doesn’t receive a call one day. And the next. And the one after that. As Eggers tells the story from Kathy’s perspective, we feel the same horror she does: the horror of uncertainty and the unknown. Is Zeitoun dead, or just lost? Does he need her help? How can she help? Can she get into New Orleans? Who’s running the city?

We then get the story from Zeitoun’s point-of-view, and it’s pretty much as bad as you imagine for a Syrian living in a state of emergency in the post-9/11 American South. What follows—no spoilers here—is nothing less than an indictment of the Bush administration and the work of FEMA in the wake of Katrina. Of course, it’s no secret that the two did a pretty poor job after Katrina; that doesn’t make it any easier to read about what happened to Zeitoun.

It’s all told in that understated style, full of Eggers’ declarative sentences describing Zeitoun’s living nightmare. In doing so, Eggers artfully employs the soft sell. Writing four years after the travesty that was Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, he isn’t screaming incredulously, “Why aren’t you outraged???” His point is not one made with italics and exclamation points, but with the tried-and-true journalistic principle of show, not tell.

And it works especially well because what Eggers shows us is strong enough to make its own case; it requires no imaginative pyrotechnics or authorial playfulness. It doesn’t need framing or footnotes or smirks at the reader. It is Exhibit: A in an argument against the United States government, and it doesn’t need a fancy cross-examination or closing statement from a big-city writer like Eggers.

It’s an account of one family’s experiences, but it’s one that’s absolutely called for.

We’re bummed that Michigan authors Bonnie Jo Campbell and David Small didn’t get the final nod, but we’re proud to have two Michigan authors as finalists for the 2009 National Book Awards!

They announced the winners last night as:

Fiction: Colum McCann Let the Great World Spin

Nonfiction: T. J. Stiles The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt

Poetry: Keith Waldrop Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy

Young People’s Literature: Phillip Hoose Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice

Distinguished Contribution to American Letters: Gore Vidal

Literarian Award: Dave Eggers

The Best of the National Book Awards Fiction: The Complete Stories By Flannery O’Connor

UPDATE! There’s been a slight change of plans for the benefit tonight. The start time has been pushed back to 9 and instead of local bands, you can come out for the Sky Lounge DJ. Canned food won’t get you in, but IFFS will still get proceeds from the cover charge. Thanks agains to Eric and his class for making this happen.

Last summer at the Mix 101.5 BackPack Buddies Food drive, I met Eric Fotheringham. Eric teaches Political Science at NC State and was interested including a service learning component in one of his courses.

We exchanged emails about it and came up with options his students could choose to work on over the semester. I went to speak to the class, to tell them more about what the Food Shuttle does. They were very engaged and asked some great questions. 

In the end, they decided to focus on two things. One was developing sort of a manual for us on how to get in touch with the elected officials for the counties we serve. This is huge for us. About 97% of all the money we raise goes back into our programs, so we’ve never had dedicated staff to stay on top of that kind of information.

The other project they wanted to take on was organizing a food drive for BackPack Buddies.That was exciting to hear, because we know how important it is to make sure children have nutritous meals over the weekend. And we were excited to see the energy and creativity a group of college students would bring to the process.

Energy and Creativity? They haven’t disappointed. As they thought about how to maximize how much food they could collect, the decided to go a step beyond a food drive. Working on their own, they lined up a venue, some local bands and have organized a concert to raise food and money for us. Check out the flyer below for details.

Thanks to Eric and PS201 for all their work to makes this happen. This is a great example of how anyone can join in the fight against hunger. Start with what you are and where you are. Engage your community. Amazing things can happen.

Come out Friday night to the Sky Lounge for a night of great music and to support the fight against hunger. What’s better than that?

*Apologies to Dave Eggers for borrowing the title of his best-selling memoir for this post, but it seemed to fit.

The Rumpus has a chat with writer/artist, Chelsea Martin.  Everything Was Fine Until Whatever is her book on Future Tense Publishing, and thanks to the interview, I’ve become obsessed with the above drawing.

• “Frankly we would have been offended if he wasn’t shortlisted.” Nick Cave’s publisher on his nomination for the best of bad sex writing.

• Colum McCann is the National Book Award winner. Yippie!

• Gore Vidal and Dave Eggers also won.

• Greil Marcus as editor of the The Paris Review?  That would be cool.

• Christians like that Jewish guy who didn’t write that book about “chasing homely girls”.  (Thanks HTML Giant)

• Lemony Snicket puts his books on the internet.

Let’s get political.

• Atheists in the UK are working harder than atheists in the US.

• Two sides of the Sarah Palin coin at The Daily Beast.

• In Texas, if the gays can’t get married, nobody can be married.

Food and booze.

• The Young and Hungry talk to some guys who made Italian-style Bellisima Enchiladas.  I will repeat, they made Italian-style Bellisima Enchiladas.

• Drink more to make your heart happy.

This is amazing!, MySpace users  around Australia will be treated to a special pre-release Black Curtain screening of ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ on November 30th for FREE (YES YOU READ CORRECTLY…FOR FREE!). All this 4 days before its official national release on December 3rd the ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ Black Curtain screening will give MySpace fans around the country the opportunity to be some of the first in Australia to see this iconic tale of childhood  and self discovery translated  to the screen.

How you can get the tickets?…IS VERY SIMPLE!:
The only way MySpace users can attend an exclusive preview screening of Where the Wild Things Are is by befriending the Black Curtain profile (www.myspace.com/blackcurtainau) where from 4pm on Tuesday November 24^th, they will find a code to SMS in order to be sent a unique ticket to their mobile. This preview screenings will taking place in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth.

Based on one of the most beloved books of all time, “Where the wild things are” tells the story of Max, a rambunctious and sensitive boy who feels misunderstood at home and escapes to where the Wild Things are.  Max lands on an island where he meets mysterious and strange creatures whose emotions are as wild and unpredictable as their actions.  The Wild Things desperately long for a leader to guide them, just as Max longs for a kingdom to rule.  When Max is crowned king, he promises to create a place where everyone will be happy. Max soon finds, though, that ruling his kingdom is not so easy and his relationships there prove to be more complicated than he originally thought.

Starring Max Records, Catherine Keener, Mark Ruffalo, Lauren Ambrose, Chris Cooper, James Gandolfini, Catherine O’Hara and Forest Whitaker, “Where the Wild Things Are” is directed by Spike Jonze from a screenplay by Spike Jonze & Dave Eggers, based on the book by Maurice Sendak.

So, what are you waiting for?…be ready for the final countdown on Black Curtain and be ready to msn the code. Be the first to watch this big blockbuster!.

If you are not a myspace member, just go to www.myspace.com and create an account, is really simple! and start to enjoy the benefits!, and of course become a friend of Black Curtain to have the chance of be part of this screenings and the future ones!

Wanna see more about this movie?…just watch the trailers here!

GOOD ONE MYSPACE!

Motoko Rich brings us the winners of the National Book Awards:

Colum McCann won the National Book Award for fiction on Wednesday night for “Let the Great World Spin,” a novel featuring a sprawling cast of characters in 1970s New York City whose lives are ineluctably touched by the mysterious tightrope walker who traverses a wire suspended between the Twin Towers one morning.

In accepting the award, the Irish-born Mr. McCann, now a teacher of creative writing at Hunter College, said, “As fiction writers and people who believe in the word, we have to enter the anonymous corners of human experience to make that little corner right.” The book was published by Random House.

In the nonfiction category, T. J. Stiles won for “The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt,” a biography of the man who fathered a dynasty, presided over a railroad empire and, in the words of the judging panel, “all but invented unbridled American capitalism” ….

…. Perhaps the most moving moment of the night came with the presentation of the award for Young People’s Literature, which went to Phillip Hoose for “Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice,” a biography of Ms. Colvin, who as an African-American teenager in 1950s Montgomery, Ala., refused to give up her seat on a bus nine months before Rosa Parks took the same stand.

Mr. Hoose brought Ms. Colvin onto the stage to accept the award. “My job was to pull someone who was about to disappear under history’s rug,” he said. The book was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Additionally, Keith Waldrop snagged the poetry award for Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy (Univ. of California Press); Dave Eggers took home the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community, which recognized his efforts for 826 National, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping young writers. Gore Vidal received the award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and apparently gave a cryptic acceptance speech.

-bd

The National Book Awards ceremony was held earlier this evening at Cipriani Downtown in New York City. Shortly after the dinner began, host Andy Borowitz took the stage. The Medal for Distinguished Contribution to Literature was presented to Gore Vidal (recently interviewed by John Meroney at The Atlantic). Dave Eggers was then awarded the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the Literary Community which was presented by Samatha Hunt, author of the novel, The Invention of Everything Else. The Best of the National Book Awards is an award given to one of the 77 books which have won the National Book Award for fiction over the past 60 years and was given to The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor.

Philip Hoose won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature for his book, Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice. The other finalists in this category were Deborah Heiligman for Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith, David Small for Stitches: A Memoir (reviewed here), Laini Taylor for Lips Touch: Three Times, and Rita Williams-Garcia for Jumped.

Keith Waldrop won the National Book Award for Poety for his poetry collection, Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy. The other poetry finalists were Rae Armantrout for Versed: Wesleyan Poetry, Ann Lauterbach for Or To Begin Again, Carl Phillips for Speak Low: Poems, and Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon for Open Interval.

 T. J. Styles won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt. Finalists in this category were David M. Carroll for Following the Water: A Hydromancer’s Notebook, Dr. Sean B. Carroll for Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species, Greg Grandin for Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City, and Adrienne Mayor for The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy.

Colum McCann won the National Book Award for Fiction for Let the Great World Spin. The other fiction finalists were Bonnie Jo Campbell for American Salvage, Daniyal Mueenuddin for In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, Jayne Anne Phillips for Lark and Termite, and Marcel Theroux for Far North.

Information about this year’s judges and links to author interviews can be found at The National Book Foundation’s website. The award dinner and ceremony will be shown on BookTV (C-span2) November 21, 2009 at 8:00 p.m. EST and November 22, 2009 at 9:00 a.m. EST.

I can’t find a book to read. I’m not saying that a book does not exist in the world to entertain me, or that every book in circulation-past or present- is a complete load of nonsense and not worth my time or effort to endure such a horrendous creation. I just cannot find one. Waterstones offer a magical book finder to suit my tastes, Borders tell me they can provide such a similar service that I will actually warm to their psychic finder and as a result have to seek therapy for my dysfunctional attachment to a computer generated system tool that ‘knows me better than any man can’. I cannot find a book that can hold my concentration for more than fifty pages. Now, I’m a literature graduate, I should be able to subject myself to pretty much anything; to read a book that isn’t to your literary taste is top skill numero uno for any budding english student. So either the books are getting worse or my patience as a result of years of reading drivel is now wearing thin. I scour the media for those all-important ‘must reads’ lists, I pick at random at the library, and then resort to the classics to guide me into a sure-fire way to sit through a story line that can hold its own. This drew me to 1, question my complete inability to sit in one place for more than two minutes as a result of my new role as entertainer/carer/cleaner/launderette attendent/cook (the umbrella term being ‘parent’), but 2, consider the concept of the perfect book. I appreciate that I could go all night about the various factors to entertaining us through the written word, but I don’t rate myself that highly that I truly believe I’m capable of that argument. The last time I checked I hadn’t read every book on the planet or entered the mind of not only every author but every reader to be able to dictate what every one should and shouldn’t be reading. I just find it bemusing that my favourite books are not essentially the books I cherish and adore for content or story in such a direct manner, but that instead I preach to people about the books that have managed to remain in my memory- there’s limited space in there- but that have gained my respect for getting me to sit down and read them. Beyond that, to want to pick them back up after putting them down the previous night. And so, while I appreciate to the strangers of you out there you may not agree with my point (be it gospel, and always correct might I add), I’d like to offer up my list of must-reads, for if they fail to captivate you and move you to tears or other suchlike frantic emotion that people get a kick out of when reading, then you’ll get to the end at least. I like a book with a bit of balls, and I think that these books stand out from the rest simply because they lack the ability to be pigeon holed into ‘boring’, ‘girly’, ‘manly’, ’science-y’ and other such intellectual categories that i create in my teeny weeny incy wincy mind. Enjoy. I have justified my choices with very, VERY good reasons.

Isabel Allende: The Infinite Plan

This is the longest book on the planet. Metaphorically, of course. I enjoy the teaching of diversity, and Allende doesn’t try to do what most authors insist upon, which is writing for the sake of writing. each word as a purpose, and as a result you don’t have to listen to any Dicken-esque around the houses story-telling, ’she looked up as the window sill as he spoke, where she noticed the bric-a-brac amongst a green vase her mother once owned, and a picture frame dating back to the renaissance period….’ shut up Charles, enough already. What the hell is he talking about, never mind the damn window sill.

Chocolat: Joanne Harris

The book exudes feelings, and not just emotions but the feeling of the situation; the atmosphere, the tension, the cheeky humour. If chocolate were a conscious stream of thought, it would be this book. Lush stuff. And not what I expected being a complete chick-flick-phobe. Urgh.

A Thousand Acres: Jane Smiley

Fantastic story about the ‘better left unsaid’ habit of the family unit. You’re not just a reader of events, you’re thrown into the character’s mind to read in between the lines time and time again as they try to ignore the elephant in the room. Oh, and it won the Pulitzer Prize and is a recreation of Willy’s King Lear so you can pass for learned if you’re on the bus.

Nathanael West: The Day of the Locust

The  most confusing book I ever read. I think I was stupider when I first picked it up, I get it now….. see it as a forecast of Britney Spears’ pap circus, but completely more intelligent than a media frenzy breaking driving laws in Los Angeles.  They saw it coming….

The Almost Moon: Alice Sebold

Forget Alive- fantastic but painful, and The Lovely Bones- fantastic but obvious. This is Sebold’s best piece yet, mainly due to the fact that she wrote The Lovely Bones to elevate her fame as a writer (when quite clearly every critic knew it was a run of the mill sentimental, let’s-involve-children-to-make-it-sad, overly emotional roadkill of a book) and that left her free to finally write something credible to her now ginormous audience. And let’s face it, every girl dreams of killing her mother at one point or another.

Daphne Du Maurier: Rebecca

Obvious but awesome. I don’t really give a monkeys if anyone dares to state that the spookily shivery ambience created in this novel exists in any other book, Du Maurier nails it and if this is the first eiry book you pick up, all others will fail to match up.

Sally Brampton: Shoot the Damn Dog

The last book I managed to sit through- I’m currently on page thirty four of Captain Correlli’s Mandolin and pissed off that I’m going to get a library fine for something that cannot hold my mental drive for more than eight minutes at a time. Brampton is the best female writer I have come accross in terms of integrity; she remains honest and raw but at the same time maintains a humour that i assume is essentially to being a crazy person. Kudos…

Dave Eggers: A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius

Now I know this has taken America by storm, and many critics either applaude Eggers or find him too obvious, but this qutobiography is the most amazing piece of writing I have ever picked up. Its not the content that I am particularly drawn to, but the technical writing style that Eggers adopts. It’s as though you are transported to a stand up comedy club, and Eggers is a hack in a worn down suit with a cigar in one hand, and scotch in the other. His capability to write as he thinks is quite possibly the most aspirational quality to his writing, and i would like to clap along with the nice critics and stamp on the mean ones’ heads. Nasty critics. Go learn to write like this.

Roma Ligocka: the Girl in the Red Coat

For someone interested in the effects of historical events, but doesn’t want to read an elaborate fabrication of the holocaust, this is a perfect read. Ligocka tells it as it was, with affection and brutal candour. If I’m going to have an insight into an event that hopefully I will never be able to witness first-hand, I want the depiction to be as accurate and sincere as possible.

Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights

Come on, I don’t even need to type here. If you can find me another crazy Heathcliff in literature, then game on.

Max, the hero of Where The Wild Things Are, is having fun early in the film in a snowball fight. It’s a freewheeling, wonderful action scene, where his sister’s friends attempt to pelt him back as hard as they can, and Max giggles with glee– this is what winter fun is about as a child. Then, one of his sister’s friends caves in his snowbase where he was hiding, and on a dime, Max is terrified, cold, and betrayed. What Spike Jonze gets about childhood throughout the film, and what makes Where The Wild Things Are such a beautiful, melancholy experience, is that while we remember it as this magical carefree time, the opposite is true– children care more strongly than we jaded adults do. We trust completely, we love completely, we give ourselves over to our feelings and our experiences with total abandon, and thus our strong emotions switch quickly.  My emotions weren’t switching while watching the film– I was enraptured the entire time.

The story, adapted from a book which contains only ten sentences, centers in on Max (Max Records), a kid who feels his sister and mom don’t pay him enough attention, and after a bratty confrontation with his mom where he bites her, he runs away, hops on a boat, and sails to the land of the Wild Things. He meets Carol (voiced by James Gandolfini), the leader of the pack, an impulsive frustrated monster. Along with him are his friends, Ira (Forest Whitaker), Judith (Catherine O’Hara), Alexander (Paul Dano), Douglas (Chris Cooper), and the silent Bull. Finally, there’s K.W. (Lauren Ambrose), a loner who takes long ventures out to meet other creatures, which angers Carol, who is focused on trying to keep the whole group together as best friends forever.

Roger Ebert said in his review of The Polar Express, “”The Polar Express” has the quality of a lot of lasting children’s entertainment: It’s a little creepy. Not creepy in an unpleasant way, but in that sneaky, teasing way that lets you know eerie things could happen. There’s a deeper, shivery tone…a world of its own, like “The Wizard of Oz” or “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” in which the wise child does not feel too complacent.” Spike Jonze achieves the exact same effect here. When Max first arrives, the monsters threaten to eat him. We as trained audience members feel this is an empty threat– after all, little boys don’t die in movies like this. A few minutes later, we see a pile of bones, unmistakably made up of their previous leaders who displeased them. Complacency is immediately tossed out the window. These monsters aren’t just nice friends, they’re real threats who could turn on Max if things go awry. The label of “wild thing” isn’t handled with kiddie gloves.

Yet the film never loses its realistic depiction of childishness. Max, like real children, can be a brat if he feels neglected or scorned. He bites his mother and stomps around– it’d be easy to judge this character at this point in the film if we totally lost the ability to look back at our own younger days, to the stories our parents told us about things we did as children that we would be horrified to see nowadays. When he encounters the monsters, all he wants to do with them are the same things he would do at home– run around, jump, dig holes, build makeshift “homes” outdoors. He wants everyone to sleep together in a real pile, because let’s be honest, if you saw a bunch of big fuzzy monsters like that, you’d darn sure want to hug them. The monsters exhibit this childishness as well. Carol is temperamental, Judith is pouty and doubtful, Ira is a pushover, Alexander seeks attention, and Douglas is trustworthy and reliable. When Carol introduces Max to Douglas and says, “I count on him for everything,” there was a simple beauty and childish honesty to the delivery that made my eyes well up.

Perhaps I’m the wrong person to review this, since I found the book so perfect as a kid, so there’s a sense of sentimentality that I immediately place on the material. However, I think this is the rare movie that should fully please fans of the book. Usually, fans of a book whine about things left out of the film adaptation, and I write a review insisting that we must remove our devotion to the core material’s particulars in order to see if the movie captured the essence of the book the best way that it could– simply put, is it a good movie, book be damned? Here is the exact opposite scenario: a book has had tons of material added to its ten-sentence story, and I think that every single bit added captures the essence flawlessly. The script, by Jonze and Dave Eggers, can also be interpreted to give the monsters various symbolic meanings and interpretations, though for me such additional scholarly endeavors are unnecessary; the characters stand on their own without any added symbolism.

Jonze’s effects work (a combination of real puppet bodies and some CGI face work) is a revelation in a time when CGI is thrown haphazardly around– here is a director who wanted the child actor to be able to touch, hug, and interact with real wild things, and the decision absolutely paid off. Max Records is a natural, lacking the put-on precociousness most child actors have. The production design and cinematography are easily among the best of the year. This is simply one of those films where every element is combined with such unity of vision that it does more than create a new world… it creates a new reality. There’s not a moment of the film that fails to ring true. And if when Max sets out to leave the Land of the Wild Things, you don’t tear up at his goodbyes with his magical wild friends, you need to thaw out your ice-cold heart. Instead of manipulating your emotions, this fantasy earns them. This is one of the best movies of the year.

…what to make of Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, but I know for sure that I’m thankful to have the addition with the appendix, Mistakes We Knew We Were Making, because if there was any doubt in my mind that Eggers was successful in what he was attempting, a passage in the appendix convinced me.

The book is, as we’ve discussed, G., uneven. And it reminds me–only in parts, which limitation is a good thing–of other things I’ve read that are created in so intensely personal a way that they become indecipherable to others. Confessional is fine with me…but how can there be art without an attempt to communicate to others? Can there be expression, of anything, at all, without an audience in mind? Would it still be “expression”, or would it be something else? Anyway, if it’s just for you, and not for others, it should stay in your sock drawer like everyone’s bad high school poetry.

But only in parts…other parts, I think, are glorious. And finally, in the appendix, Eggers writes:

“The book was seen by its author as a stupid risk, and an ugly thing, and a betrayal, and overall, as  a mistake he would regret for the rest of his life but a mistake which nevertheless he could not refrain from making, and worse, as a mistake he would encourage everyone to make, because everyone should make big, huge mistakes, because a) They don’t want you to; b) Because they haven’t the balls themselves and your doing it reminds them of their status as havers-of-no-balls; c) Because your life is worth documenting; d) because if you do not believe your life is worth documenting, or knowing about, then why are you wasting your time/our time? Our air? e) Because if you do it right and go straight toward them you like me will write to them, and will looking straight into their eyes when writing, will look straight into their fucking eyes, like a person sometimes can do with another person, and tell them something because even though you might not know them well, or at all, and even if you wrote in their books or hugged them or put your hand on their arm, you would still scarcely know them, but even so wrote a book that was really a letter to them, a messy fucking letter that you could barely keep a grip on, but a letter you meant, and a letter you sometimes wish you had not mailed, but a letter you are happy that made it from you to them.”

That last part again:

“…wrote a book that was really a letter to them, a messy fucking letter that you could barely keep a grip on, but a letter you meant, and a letter you sometimes wish you had not mailed, but a letter you are happy that made it from you to them.”

I think sums this glorious mess of a book up, exactly.

29/10/2009 – 15:01 – Atualizado em 30/10/2009 – 19:55

Atrás das pegadas dos monstros

Livia Deodato

REI DOS MONSTROS
O jovem ator Max Records interpreta Max no filme baseado no livro de Maurice Sendak

Com um livro de apenas 338 palavras, o americano Maurice Sendak revolucionou a literatura infantil. Quando tinha 35 anos, em 1963, ele foi capaz de se colocar dentro da cabeça de uma criança de 9 e expor fielmente seu pensamento, suas vontades e sua natural desobediência. A obra Onde vivem os monstros, muito bem ilustrada pelo próprio Sendak, começa com as estripulias do pequeno Max, segue com a malcriação para sua mãe e aparentemente termina no castigo no quarto, para onde é mandado sem jantar. Lá dentro, ele cria seu próprio mundo, povoado por monstros de dentes e garras afiadas. Em vez de ficar com medo, Max os enfrenta. E se diverte com eles, até cansar e se sentir sozinho.

A mensagem da obra escrita há 46 anos já conquistou pelo menos duas gerações. Elas podem ser representadas pelo diretor Spike Jonze, ao lado do roteirista Dave Eggers, e o ator Max Records. Fãs do livro, Jonze e Eggers marcaram um encontro com Sendak em 2003 para discutir a possibilidade de filmar a obra infantil americana de maior sucesso.

Eles não foram os primeiros em demonstrar interesse. Outros diretores já haviam se aproximado do escritor, hoje com 81 anos. Houve até o esboço de uma animação baseada no livro realizado pela Disney, em 1983 (disponível no YouTube), que foi abandonado logo depois e por isso foram perdidos os direitos para adaptação. A parafernália hollywoodiana, pronta para diluir o significado simples e verdadeiro da história, e frases como “Senhor Sendak, deixe-me explicar como se faz um filme para crianças” fizeram Sendak negar todos os pedidos. Até aparecer Spike Jonze, o diretor que “não cresceu” e, por isso, compreendia a arruaça e a doçura de ser Max.

O processo de adaptação, de cerca de um ano, teve como diretriz “não olhar Max de cima para baixo, e sim conseguir entrar dentro dele”. O desafio de transformar um livro composto de dez sentenças em um longa-metragem de uma hora e meia – e à altura da exigência de Sendak – não era fácil. Mas o esforço valeu a pena. Muitas ideias, muitos rascunhos e voltas de skate ao redor da casa de Spike Jonze, em São Francisco, renderam um dos mais belos filmes do ano, que custou US$ 100 milhões e só arrecadou US$ 55 milhões desde sua estreia, no dia 16, nos Estados Unidos. Onde vivem os monstros deverá ser lançado no Brasil em 1o de janeiro de 2010.

Jonze e Eggers expandiram uma simples ordem do pequeno rei Max na terra dos monstros, como “quietos!” (confira o quadro abaixo) . O único ponto em discordância entre os cineastas e Sendak foi a “viagem” de Max para a ilha onde moram os monstros: no livro, é o próprio quarto de Max que se enche de mato e cipós; no filme, ele sai correndo de casa e as ruas se transformam na selva. Jonze insistiu e Sendak confiou: “Bem, é seu filme, você tem de fazer o que acredita”, disse.

Agora, o longa-metragem volta à forma original. Desta vez, romanceado pelo roteirista do filme, Dave Eggers. Os monstros (Companhia das Letras, 264 páginas, R$ 30) é baseado no livro de Sendak e no filme, e traz coadjuvantes engraçados, como a mãe do melhor amigo de Max, Clay Mahoney (inexistentes no original e no filme). Com ele, chega também às livrarias a versão em português de Onde vivem os monstros (CosacNaify, 40 páginas, R$ 49). A tradução de Heloisa Jahn é fiel, mas pode soar agressiva quando a mãe chama Max de “monstro” (no original, “wild thing”). “O tom do texto e os desenhos fazem com que tudo o que acontece no livro seja carinhoso, divertido e poético. Sendak é assim”, afirma ela. Prova de que não inventaram nada melhor do que uma história bem contada, mesmo que ela tenha só 338 palavras.

Adaptações do conto ao romance baseado no filme

1º PASSO
O livro original Maurice Sendak, de 81 anos, escreveu Onde vivem os monstros quando tinha 35. Seu mérito foi se colocar na pele de uma criança de 9 anos capaz de enfrentar seu medo, representado pelos monstros.

2º PASSO
O roteiro O diretor Spike Jonze e o roteirista Dave Eggers levaram um ano para transformar as dez sentenças do livro em um filme de uma hora e meia de duração. O resultado é um belo longa, que deverá estrear em janeiro no Brasil.

3º PASSO
O storyboard A aventura de Max foi (re)desenhada pela equipe de Jonze e Eggers. Lá está o passo a passo da aventura que se estendeu para o filme.

4º PASSO
O novo livro O roteirista Dave Eggers criou uma obra com novos personagens baseada no livro original de Sendak e no filme de Jonze

http://revistaepoca.globo.com/Revista/Epoca/0,,EMI102027-15220,00-ATRAS+DAS+PEGADAS+DOS+MONSTROS.html

16/10/09 – 07h19 – Atualizado em 16/10/09 – 08h23

Spike Jonze desperta emoções em ‘Where the wild things are’

Filme é baseado no livro ‘Onde vivem os monstros’, de Maurice Sendak.
Max Records, de 12 anos, é o protagonista; trilha é de Karen O.

Da EFE

Spike Jonze, um dos cineastas mais inovadores da atualidade de Hollywood, retorna à direção sete anos depois do último trabalho com “Where the wild things are”, uma fantasia sobre a infância que aflora emoções.

Cena de ”Where the wild things are”, filme de Spinke Jonze que estreia nos Estados Unidos (Foto: Divulgação)

O filme, que estreia nesta sexta-feira (16) nos Estados Unidos, é baseado no livro “Onde vivem os monstros”, um clássico da literatura infantil criado por Maurice Sendak em 1963 sobre Max, um menino perspicaz que se sente incompreendido e que, após uma discussão com sua mãe, foge em busca de um lugar mágico criado em sua imaginação.

“Ali é onde vivem os monstros referidos no título, que na realidade são umas criaturas que representam as emoções, selvagens e imprevisíveis, que todos temos em nosso interior”, segundo explicou Jonze em um encontro com a imprensa em Los Angeles, na Califórnia.

As criaturas buscam um líder que os guie e proclamam Max seu rei, que promete criar um ambiente para que todos sejam felizes, embora em breve descubra que seu trabalho não será fácil e que as relações com os demais habitantes tornam-se mais complicadas do que imaginava.

“Maurice (Sendak) me disse que não me preocupasse porque cada um pode opinar sobre a adaptação, me encorajou para que fizesse o filme que eu queria, minha visão sobre a história, e para isso só me pediu que fosse honesto com o livro”, lembrou Jonze, de 40 anos, co-roteirista do filme junto com Dave Eggers.

O universo literário de “Onde vivem os monstros” encerra ao fim de 50 páginas, mas a imaginação que despertam os desenhos de Sendak são as grandes vertentes do livro, que integra a lista dos mais vendidos de todos os tempos.

“Não quis acrescentar nada que não estivesse no livro, mas tentei descobrir quem é Max e quem são as criaturas selvagens, para mim são as emoções e isso cedeu espaço para que começasse a escrever os personagens”, manifestou Jonze, autor de títulos como “Being John Malkovich” (Quero ser John Malkovich, 1999) e “Adaptation” (Adaptação, 2002), seu longa-metragem anterior.

Divulgação

Filme estreia nesta sexta-feira nos cinemas dos Estados Unidos (Foto: Divulgação)

Elenco

Na versão original do filme é possível escutar as vozes de James Gandolfini, Catherine O’Hara, Paul Dano e Forest Whitaker, que dublaram as criaturas, feitas artesanalmente -”ficou rude, real”, apontou Jonze – com a incorporação de efeitos digitais para dar expressão aos rostos.

O estúdio Warner Bros que esperava um produto final mais conciso acabou atrasando a estreia do filme em mais de um ano para polir os detalhes da produção, cujo orçamento foi de US$ 80 milhões.

“No princípio, o estúdio se surpreendeu com o material recebido. Eles esperavam algo mais mágico e fantasioso, mas este não é um conto tradicional”, afirmou o cineasta, quem considera ter realizado um filme sobre a infância contada de forma realista.

Segundo Jonze não foi preciso mudar nada – “fiz o que eu queria” – e Warner Bros deu o sinal verde ao trabalho do diretor de célebres vídeos musicais protagonizados por R.E.M. e Chemical Brothers.

Uma das decisões mais complicadas foi a escolha do protagonista, papel dado a Max Records, de 12 anos. “Ele é o grande trunfo do filme”, disse Jonze, quem se mostrou orgulhoso também com a trilha sonora, obra de Karen O, líder da banda Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

“Ela é uma de minhas artistas favoritas”, admitiu o diretor americano. “É como uma menina que luta pela liberdade e expressa seus sentimentos e considero que sua música é o coração do filme”, acrescentou Jonze, um apaixonado da música pop desde criança.

“Queria uma música que lembrasse a de Brian Wilson, John Lennon, Paul McCartney e David Bowie”, comentou o cineasta. “Quando criança conectava intuitivamente com meus amigos e sentia que podia identificar-me 100% com suas canções”, acrescentou.

Catherine Keener, a única atriz protagonista de carne e osso no filme, certificou o duro trabalho que teve que enfrentar Jonze para adaptar a obra literária e defendeu suas decisões.

“Tem muitíssimas ideias e uma criatividade inesgotável, portanto leva tempo articular todo isso”, elogiou a intérprete. “O que faz com que este filme vá muito além do que o estúdio esperava”, concluiu.

http://g1.globo.com/Noticias/PopArte/0,,MUL1343286-7084,00-SPIKE+JONZE+DESPERTA+EMOCOES+EM+WHERE+THE+WILD+THINGS+ARE.html

14/10/09 – 16h56 – Atualizado em 14/10/09 – 17h22

Filme ‘Onde vivem os monstros’ ganha bênção do autor do livro

Dirigido por Spike Jonze, longa estreia nos EUA na próxima sexta (16).
James Gandolfini e Forest Whitaker emprestam vozes a personagens.

Jil Sergeant Da Reuters

Cena de “Onde vivem os monstros”, dirigido por Spike Jonze (Foto: Divulgação)

Transpor para o cinema de Hollywood um livro que é um clássico da literatura infantil requer coragem. Quando o livro em questão é o sombrio mas amado “Onde vivem os monstros”, de Maurice Sendak, e quando o original ilustrado contém apenas nove sentenças escritas, ajuda se você conta com a bênção do autor.

O diretor Spike Jonze tinha as duas coisas quando começou a levar para a tela grande o livro premiado de 1963, em versão que é ao mesmo tempo diferente do original e uma homenagem a este, feita para agradar não apenas às crianças mas também aos adultos.

A versão de Jonze de “Onde vivem os monstros” (“Where the wild things are”) — que levou cinco anos para ser feita e funde ação ao vivo, fantoches e animação computadorizada — chega aos cinemas norte-americanos na próxima sexta-feira (16) em meio a resenhas altamente positivas, mas também muitas reservas.

O mundo visto por uma criança

O livro é uma história com pouquíssimo texto, mas muitas ilustrações, sobre um menino travesso que veste fantasia de lobo e sai em busca de aventuras, mas, ao ser mandado de volta a seu quarto, acaba recorrendo à sua imaginação. Desde os anos 1970, é um dos dez livros infantis mais vendidos nos Estados Unidos.

Mas Jonze, responsável pelo excêntrico “Quero ser John Malkovich”, de 1999, disse que não pretendeu fazer um filme tradicional para crianças.

“Eu me propus a fazer um filme sobre a infância”, disse Jonze, co-autor do roteiro, juntamente com o romancista Dave Eggers.

“O filme trata de como é ter 8 ou 9 anos de identidade e tentar entender o mundo, as pessoas à sua volta e as emoções, que às vezes são previsíveis ou causam perplexidade”.

“Ele (Sendak) sentiu orgulho do filme”, disse Jonze, que também fez um documentário com o escritor de 81 anos, que será exibido pelo canal a cabo americano HBO.

Dunas em vez de florestas

Na maior diferença em relação ao livro, o solitário mas brincalhão Max (o novato Max Records) foge de casa e veleja até um deserto habitado por monstros peludos e com presas, que procuram o tipo de líder que Max quer ser.

O filme foi rodado perto de Melbourne, na Austrália, e, em vez da floresta verde que cresce magicamente no quarto de Max, no original, tem dunas de areia, praias e bosques devastados por incêndios. Tem um clima de filme de arte, algo raramente visto nos filmes infantis de Hollywood.

Os monstros são dublados por atores, entre eles James Gandolfini (“The Sopranos”) e o premiado com o Oscar Forest Whitaker, e ganham substância física com a ajuda de outros atores usando figurinos criados pela Creature Shop, de Jim Henson.

http://g1.globo.com/Noticias/Cinema/0,,MUL1341124-7086,00-FILME+ONDE+VIVEM+OS+MONSTROS+GANHA+BENCAO+DO+AUTOR+DO+LIVRO.html

The English papers are full of lists today. Both The Times and The Telegraph have put out their top/defining books of the decade. President Obama makes both “best” lists, while Dan Brown makes both “best” and “worst” and Cormac McCarthy and JK Rowling share top spots on the “best” lists.

The Times’ Top 5:

5. Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky (2006)
Its astonishing rediscovery more than 40 years after Nemirovsky’s death in Auschwitz should not overshadow that the two novellas here are miniature masterpieces. In the first the veneer of civilisation is stripped from a group of Parisians fleeing the advancing Germans, while the second is a moving tale of forbidden love across the divide of war.

4. Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers trans Robert Bringhurst (2002) One hundred years ago Ghandl and Skaay, two great native poets of the northwest coast of Canada, spoke their stories aloud; Bringhurst’s translations and analysis bring a lost world brilliantly to life.

3. Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama (2004)
The book that revealed Barack Obama as not just an ambitious politician, but also as an eloquent writer and deep thinker. The fascinating story of his early life, first published in 1995, was reissued in 2004 and became a worldwide bestseller as momentum for the presidency built.

2. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (2003)
With its feisty, irresistible heroine and shapely, naive style, Satrapi’s comic-book account of her childhood during the Islamic Revolution in Iran is hugely enjoyable — and an essential, humanising eye-opener on a little-understood country. From an interview with Oprah Winfrey, 2007

1. The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006)
Cormac McCarthy’s gripping, shattering novel walks in a long line of tradition. Mary Shelley tried her hand at the literature of post-apocalypse with The Last Man, published in 1826; Russell Hoban’s 1980 novel, Riddley Walker, sets the aftermath of doom in Canterbury. The Road’s wilderness — coming to the cinema in January — is an American one: blasted, ruined, destroyed by an unnamed calamity that has scorched the Earth with biblical fury and lit McCarthy’s prose with holy fire. In this awful landscape walk a father and his young son, treading towards a future where it would seem there could be none.

McCarthy has always been a poet of extremity; his earlier novels stripped romance from the myth of the frontier. The Road is stripped back even farther, its father and son the near-sole survivors of what might be called humanity; the book’s narrative is simply that of their survival. There are respites from their suffering —- a cache or two of unspoilted tinned food —- but more often there is horror; this is existence pared to the bone. For this reason, it is McCarthy’s language that must carry the book, and so it does, triumphantly, its Hemingway-like concision shot through with cadences that sometimes recall the sprung rhythms of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

The Telegraph’s Top 5 of Books That Defined The Decade:

5. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins Bantam, 2006
Belief in God is not only totally irrational, but actively harmful to society, says Richard Dawkins. Whether you agree with him or not, his book was a popular demolition job of the world’s great faiths.

4. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers Picador, 2000
One of the first of the “creative” memoirs, this chronicled Eggers’s life with his younger siblings after the death of their parents from cancer. Bold, dazzling and fantastical, it launched a new style of writing.

3. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown Corgi, 2003
Dan Brown may not be able to write, but he sure can pull in the punters. A mad mishmash of conspiracy theories about Jesus built around the most basic elements of a thriller, this has sold almost as many copies as the Bible and has made the world’s pulse beat faster.

2. Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama Canongate, 2007
Originally published in 1995 in the US, this was launched in Britain to enormous acclaim before the first black president took to the world stage. Candid and sensitively written, the memoir is a search for his father (who left when Obama was two) and his racial identity. A touchstone for future politicians.

1. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling Bloomsbury, 2007
If you don’t know what a Muggle is by now, you’re either Rip van Winkle or enormously stubborn. This is the seventh and final instalment in Rowling’s record-breaking series about Harry Potter, the world’s most famous lightning-scarred boy wizard and his tribulations with Lord Voldemort. We’ve seen Harry grow from a spindly, messy-haired 11-year-old into a heroic young adult. Children have grown up with him, finding in his battles metaphors for their own. This volume alone sold 15 million copies in the first 24 hours after it was published. Whether wickedly skewering suburbia, or bringing Harry, Ron and Hermione into mortal danger, Rowling is never less than absorbing. Some may sneer at her books, but they are triumphant sagas about the defeat of evil that tap into our basic hunger for stories. Most importantly, she makes reading a 700-page book seem easy. This one even has a quotation from Aeschylus as its epigraph. It stands as a cornerstone of the decade, a melding of high and low culture that appeals to all ages and nations.

And, The Times’ worst books of the ’00s:

5. Dylan’s Visions of Sin by Christopher Ricks (2003)
It’s not that Dylan’s lyrics aren’t worth studying, or that Ricks lacks the intellect for the job. It’s just that this “love letter to Dylan” is as embarrassing to read as any adolescent epistle if you’re not in the relationship yourself.

4. Vernon God Little by D. B. C. Pierre (2003)
This ugly, lazy debut about a school massacre in Texas won the Man Booker Prize in 2003: the judges said that it was a “coruscating black comedy reflecting our alarm but also our fascination with America”; we beg to differ.

3. Being Jordan by Katie Price (2004)
The book that made possible not only her “literary” career, but also those of such figures as Jade Goody and Kerry Katona. Highly influential, but not in a good way.

2. The Secret by Rhonda Byrne (2006)
Telling us that we need to think positive thoughts, we could accept. But to dress up the advice with inadequately assimilated quantum theories, along with references to Jesus, Newton, Beethoven and Einstein: this was unbearable.

1. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (2003)
“Renowned curator Jacques Sauniere . . .” not the intro to a tabloid news story, but to the bestselling adult novel of the decade. The irrelevance of prose quality to sales has surely never been so starkly revealed.

Finally, The Independent has the 50 Best Winter Reads. Unfortunately, you have to click through 50 pictures.

The 100 Best Books Of The Decade
100 books that defined the noughties – Telegraph
The 5 Worst Books Of The Decade – Times Online
The 50 best winter reads – Arts & Books, IndyBest – The Independent

For years I attended the New Orleans Book Fair without ever selling books from my store, Get Lost. I would spend the day on the floor looking at the books of all the local presses and authors. Author readings were held in a yellow school bus with the author standing up by the driver’s seat. One year, Andrei Codrescu stood up front reading his poetry, while we all fanned ourselves in the stifling heat. By the end of each Fair, I would have purchased a substantial number of books. Two months after Hurricane Katrina, the Book Fair went on as scheduled. With bright yellow posters depicting flowers growing out of books, jazz and punk-zydeco bands, and a food truck, the Fair was celebratory and oddly fun.

On my fifth annual visit to the Fair,  I decided to rent a table and sell books from the bookstore. That Fair, in 2007, was the first to use all the bars along Frenchmen Street in the Marigny as the venue. With bourbon and soda in hand – there is no restriction on public drinking in New Orleans -  one could stroll from bar to bar, looking at the offerings of all the vendors.

This year the Fair was on November 7, a very sunny Saturday. I lucked out on a table outside the Blue Nile bar, next to the Neighborhood Storybook Project, G.K. Darby’s Garret County Press, and graphic artist Erik Kiesewetter, who does Constance, a literary publication.  In addition to programs, raffle tickets and t-shirts, the Bookfair’s table was selling a big orange drink cup. Each bar had a drink special available to patrons presenting the orange cup. This being New Orleans, by 10:15am, my fellow vendors were sipping bourbon and bloody marys. Up the street, in front of Faubourg Marigny Art & Books, someone was selling enormous slices of peach cobbler. Across the street were a succession of brass bands. Down the street, John Berendt read from his work at Snug Harbor.

What I found weird, as I do every year, is the non-participation of New Orleans’ Uptown and Garden District bookstores. I use the term ‘non-participation’ in the active sense. They are invited and choose not to be there. I heard from someone involved with the Fair that the downtown, tattooed crowd was not their market. I’m guessing their market might be the crowd at the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival, a major festival in the French Quarter, with major underwriters, where bigger names like John Guare and Richard Ford make appearances. The New Orleans Book Fair, on the other hand, is very DIY. No underwriters, an emphasis on local presses and authors, and a volunteer staff. It costs only $20.00 to sign up for a table. Not only is it fun, New Orleanians, at least the ones I saw at my table, were buying really interesting books.

A. Zeitoun, Kathy Zeitoun and Dave Eggers at NOCCA

The evening before the Fair, Dave Eggers spoke at NOCCA, in the company of the Zeitouns, the subject of one of his latest books, Zeitoun. I went to the sold out event in order to see Zeitoun, who I had read about two years ago in Billy Southern’s  Down in New Orleans. Zeitoun had a calm presence, while his wife Kathy, a Louisiana native, was witty, funny and charming. She described how she once dealt with the stares directed at her after 9-11while on line at a bank. She made people nervous by adjusting her shoulder pads under her clothing, as if she were reaching for something lethal.  I waited 40 minutes for the three of them to sign my copy of Zeitoun.  Zeitoun stood up from his chair and shook my hand when I told him I came to the event especially to hear him.

The day before the Fair, I drove over to the Lower Ninth Ward. Every year since 2006 I have been photographing the same pieces of property at Tennessee and Tonti Streets. Other than missing cardboard signs and ribbon, the area still looks like a country road, not the middle of the city.

On the other hand, many blocks down Tennessee Street, in a 3 block by 4 block area, The Make It Right organization, backed by Brad Pitt, has plans to construct almost 150 amazing new homes designed by leading architects. Thirty Four homes are completed or are currently being built. The homes are stylish, energy and water efficient and raised above flood levels. In 2007, there were just a few people in FEMA trailers in the neighborhood, like pioneers on the prairie. It’s good to see that area coming back.

But, it hasn’t spread. I saw a home built by the Mennonites. There are homes scattered throughout the Lower Ninth Ward, but not on the scale one would expect four years after the storm.

We definitely could use help sometimes as teachers. Here’s an excerpt from a recent article on Ed Beat.

Last week, GOOD magazine published “The GOOD 100″ a sort of Martha Stewart ‘good things’ for the non-profit world. One of the list’s education-related highlights is the Teacher Salary Project. The project is a collaboration between Dave Eggers and Nínive Calegari, co-founders of the national non-profit 826 (which provides tutoring and writing programs to youth) and filmmaker Vanessa Roth, whose documentary work has focused on foster care, gay rights, and other social issues. Eventually, the Project will include a feature-length documentary on the value of good teachers and their work.

The full article link, titled “Teachers: inspired, exhausted and poor” is here.