The odd couple? The Denver Post on books and Hollywood: “Hollywood has occasionally done well with films about writers, however, which are often based on novels by the writers being depicted, if that doesn’t seem too incestuous. A personal favorite is “Wonder Boys,” based on the terrific novel by Michael Chabon and starring Michael Douglas as the blocked novelist and Tobey Maguire as his brilliant prot ég é. There’s also “The Player,” directed by Robert Altman, maybe the most literary director of the past quarter-century and based on Michael Tolkin’s novel about the travails of screenwriters in Tinsel Town. Finally, there’s “Short Cuts,” again directed by Altman and based on Raymond Carver’s short stories, amazingly sewn together in an inter-linked film that allows fiction and film to comment back and forth on one another while still being enormously entertaining.” (via Rake’s Progress) * Fiction Vs Non-fiction, Ward Six’s Rhian Ellis on David Foster Wallace: “I decided I didn’t like DFW, the guy, because I didn’t like what I thought he was doing with fiction. Which was showing off…The impression I have when reading DFW’s fiction is that it tangles you up and leaves you hanging in a sterile, literary space, while his non-fiction takes you to a real place.” * Some good stuff in the current Bookslut. Interviewed: Edmund White (“I think when I first started writing I was very uptight, very eager to show that I could really write the hell out of every sentence. That’s a young person’s thing, too, probably to do with the marketplace — trying to establish that you’re a real writer.”); Nick Antosca (“Nabokov is my favorite novelist and literary personage, but Calvin and Hobbes and the Marquis de Sade are my strongest influences.”). Reviewed: Tom McCarthy’s Remainder; Niven Govinden’s Graffiti My Soul; Patrick Suskind’s On Love and Death; Etgar Keret and Asaf Hanuka’s Pizzeria Kamikaze. (I’m half-way through Keret’s new collection of shorts, Missing Kissinger and due out in the UK in March, and it’s a blast.) * Neal Pollack meets Bat Segundo * Claire Zulkey on “some less-than-proud moments from world of publishing.” (via Bookninja) * Peter Blake recreates Marcel Duchamp’s chess game with a nude model. * The Virtual Philosopher, Nigel Warburton’s blog. * The First Post review Simone Lia’s Fluffy and excerpt 6 pages from the book. * Gilbert Hernandez talks a Chance in Hell. * The Arthur interview with Grant Morrison has been posted on their blog: “We3 is pretty simple, this is like your classic Disney film but with A Clockwork Orange-style ultraviolence. It’s based on some experiments I read about, where the military announced they were using rats as kind of remote controlled bombs. So I applied the notion to higher lifeforms.” (from Comics Reporter) * Alcon, the UK anime convention (from Plastic Bamboo, and thanks to A. Stevens for the tip) * Nerve presents The Comics Issue.
