Pinky's Paperhaus

Hey, look over there!

I'm pulling up my typepad stakes and setting up shop with the fabulous Wordpress at the most convenient web address ever, http://www.pinkyspaperhaus.com.

Things at the new house are still getting organized, it's true. The library hasn't been built yet and I'm not sure if the archives are working properly. But the fact is that things here are packed and in the truck. Please come visit http://www.pinkyspaperhaus.com instead.

advance warning

So here's the thing. I've been working on moving this blog to another blogging platform. It was almost done, but something in the final step has gotten all mucky. If you're seeing this, you either come directly to my typepad blog (which will soon go away) or read rss (which may change). People who type in www.pinkyspaperhaus.com are getting here for now, but by the time 36 hours has passed they will wind up on another site that is currently a bit of a mess. Which I'm working on.

Litblogging to recomence very soon. Shiny happy new addresses will appear here once all the messiness is ironed out.

Have an excellent, readerly weekend.

Guess that book

From today's New York Times:

At its heart, “TITLE REDACTED” is a book about a marriage and the journey through grief that a widow [name redacted] makes after the death of her husband, [name redacted], also a rock star of the book world. 

You know this book, right? The title, author and link after the jump.

Miss Otis Regrets

Due to a combination of school responsibilities and some possibly ill-timed structural blog shenanigans, I am quiet. I will be, for a short while, quiet.

If you have something to say about You Remind Me of Me by Dan Chaon, by all means, leave your thoughts in the comments. Anything that appears before 1pm Eastern Time may make its way into my paper, due Tuesday night.

On the yellow brick MFA road

Last night was Readings in Contemporary Fiction. This is my favorite grad school class, because we get to read new(ish) books and then talk about them as writers. Our professor* treats us like we're smart people who are thoughtful about reading and writing, and it's kind of the idyll of grad school that I'd imagined.

One thing we have to do for the class is take careful notes about the structure of what we're reading and, for three books, write really short papers about that structure and how we might apply it to our own writing. I had no idea how hard this would be. I find myself thinking about theme and character and language when I'm supposed to be outlining flashbacks and plot and pacing. My trouble is I fall in love with this story thing. Is it that unpacking structure feels like pulling back the curtain and seeing that Oz is just a dumpy guy with a big machine? I don't think I'm afraid to figure out how things work, but I found it really hard to write 6 compelling pages about structure (6 pages! that's nothing!).

Maybe you could have the same structure for two completely different books and end up with one being wonderful and the other simply garbage. Maybe that's my problem.

Eh, whatever. Gotta get over it. Another paper is due next week. And anyway, I love the class to pieces. It really makes grad school worthwhile.

* The professor is novelist Cathy Day, author of The Circus in Winter.

Tuesday linkage

In honor of Banned Books Week, Tod Goldberg takes on book-banning Christians.

The Happy Booker rubs shoulders with Lisa Fugard, Elizabeth Kostova, Jim Lehrer and more as DC gears up for the PEN/Faulkner Gala.

In LA tonight, Beck will be playing a just-announced show at Element.

Tomorrow in Chicago, Bookslut's reading series will feature onetime Pinky guest Ned Vizzini, Brian Evensen and  Cristina Henriquez.

And here in Pittsburgh, homework marches on. Slowly.

When bookshelf means book shelf

I don't know if this will merit the uber-urban LuxLotus windowlicker, but the bookshelves-from-books do look kind of awesome to me.

To boldly go where no auction has gone before

On October 5-8, venerable auction house Christie's gets its hands dirty with Hollywood-style spacedust with 40 Years of Star Trek stuff. From a redshirt outfit from the original series to tables from Quark's bar, bad Kirk movie outfits (no hairpiece, thankfully) to Voyager ephemera, it's a treasure trove of Trek. There are 3-D chess sets and late-series tricorders; the Deanna Troi minidress at left is expected to go for $2,000-$3,000.

If you've got that kind of dough, you don't have to fly to New York to participate in the auction -- online bidding is available to people who pre-register before the Sept. 29 deadline.

PS There have been previous Trek auctions. I just couldn't resist the headline.

Mr. President - Mr. Roper

I swear, this is homework.

It's the 1964 version of The Killers, starring Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson and John Cassavetes... and these two guys as the villans. I had no idea it was only one small step from the White House to Three's Company.

Now, President Reagan to Captain Jack Sparrow:

Ronald Reagan to John Cassavetes (The Killers)
John Cassavetes to Gena Rowlands (Opening Night)
Gena Rowlands to Winona Ryder (Night on Earth)
Winona Ryder to Johnny Depp (Edward Scissorhands)

fun fun fun

The Black Dahlia

It makes sense that David Denby, who writes film reviews for The New Yorker, is himself a New Yorker. But a clichéd New Yorker? Really, with transcontinental flight and teevee and the internets, I thought stupefying idoicy about Los Angeles was something most New Yorkers had left behind. Yet consider this opening line of Denby's review of The Black Dahlia:

New York, rising high, eliminates its past with a wrecking ball; Los Angeles, spreading out, broods over its history until it rots.

Let's quickly acknowledge that leading with NY to review a movie (and book) that never treads east of Nevada is shaky at best. And now to the truth of the matter: Los Angeles knocks down its history with a vigor and frequency entirely beyond New York's wanna-be destructo dreams. As NY's Plaza Hotel went condo, Los Angeles' historic, defunct Ambassador Hotel was bulldozed to make way for a public school. Heck, we even tore down the cheap and boozy bowling alley that was the setting for The Big Lebowski. In LA, history is an embarassment; no building is sacred.

See, to shoot the 1940s-era exteriors for The Black Dahlia, the cast and crew had to fly all the way to Bulgaria.

I couldn't take Denby's review seriously. Instead I re-read the book and headed out for a bargain, hungover matinee. I don't recommend this -- the book re-reading, that is. Hangovers are fine in my book if you earn them in good fun.

Anyway, if you were thinking you might want to read The Black Dahlia before seeing the movie, don't bother. You'll spend the first half of the movie swimming in the narrative of the backstory: you go from glee of recognizing why they bust a guy to disappointment that his fate -- heading to the electric chair -- isn't big enough to make the film. And I honestly can't be sure if the film flows well for the first half, because it's so faithful to the book. At times I marvelled at how well it was sticking with Ellroy's story.

It looks beautiful. The costumes and makeup and interiors are almost perfect. The Bulgarian exteriors -- well, they didn't fool me, but I was happy to go along for the ride. Atmosphere, tone, story: it was all good. While I'd feared Josh Hartnett was too pretty to play one of Ellroy's ex-boxer cops, I thought he did just fine. Aaron Eckhart, too.

But the movie jumps its shark midway, as Hartnett trails his partner, Eckhart, to a meeting at a deserted building. This is where it diverges from the book; this is where De Palma gets really grisly (the first time). This is where the film sashays into camp, and if you think De Palma means the funniness that comes with camp, then you'll love it. Part of me would like to believe that De Palma was only kidding when he directed that, in a heated rush, Hartnett whip the tablecloth off an elaborately set dining table to make way for his coupling with Scarlett Johanssen. But the swooping music says it isn't a joke. The camera that pulls back discreetly from the window says it isn't wink-wink exploitation: it's drama. Award-aspiring drama. And as drama, it falters about halfway through.

Other than the melodramatic tone that sets in as the plot teeters like a drunk matriarch, the movie's greatest failure is Hilary Swank's accent. That is, unless she was trying to portray someone who invented a snobby accent but couldn't stick to it with any consistency.

The book The Black Dahlia didn't just revive an old, grisly LA murder; it blew out the walls of the detective genre. College kids, punkers, ironists and literati (a few) read it and liked it. With its freakish, iconic girl-cut-in-two as a lynchpin between crime, cops, the underbelly of Hollywood and one wealthy family, it had massive movie potential: Raymond Chandler but with modern gore, modern sex, modern brutality. But the book's ending was flawed, and it needed a brilliant hand to guide it into something grand on screen. Unfortunately, not De Palma's.