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Reviews/
SHERPA directed by Jennifer Peedom
Written by Chris Fitch
Fly-on-the-wall style film-making vividly displays the daily life of Sherpas, and how a tragedy on Everest led to a dramatic series of events
RACING EXTINCTION directed by Louie Psihoyos
Following on from highly acclaimed documentary The Cove, Louie Psihoyos had an ambitious goal: to make a film about the Earth's human-induced 'sixth extinction'
THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING directed by Avi Lewis
The big-screen adaptation of Naomi Klein's popular book attempts to galvanise public support to demand changes to fight climate change
EVEREST (3D) directed by Baltasar Kormákur
An impressive big-budget blockbuster that brings the gritty reality of mountain-climbing to life
HOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD directed by Jerry Rothwell
Environmental activism is so commonplace nowadays as to be almost unremarkable. This film tells the story of the very first people to try to change the world in this way
ADDICTED TO SHEEP directed by Magali Pettier
Written by Laura Cole
Straight outta Teesdale, Addicted to Sheep is a farming documentary like you've never seen before
Seven must-see Netflix documentaries
Sick of selling your soul and your sofa to endless boxsets of drug-manufacturing chemistry teachers and urban Mafiosi? Try one of these life-enriching documentaries instead
SAN ANDREAS directed by Brad Peyton
It's cheesy, unrealistic, and predictable. But the plot's underlying geography means Hollywood's latest disaster blockbuster offers more than just fast-paced, adrenaline-fuelled excitement


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Blank Rome Welcomes New Labor & Employment Of Counsel in Princeton
June 23, 2017, 1:28 am 1.8k Views
Blank Rome LLP is pleased to announce that Suzette T. Rodriguez has joined the Firm as Of Counsel in the Labor and Employment group. She is based in the Firm's Princeton, New Jersey, office.
Ms. Rodriguez joins Blank Rome from Axiom where she worked as part of the in-house legal team for a large pharmaceutical company, advising and counseling internal partners on employment law matters. Prior to that role, she served as associate counsel for Jackson Hewitt Tax Service, Inc. Ms. Rodriguez advises her clients on complex employment and commercial matters, and has significant experience representing corporate clients in disputes and litigation in the areas of employment litigation, commercial litigation, franchise litigation, and enforcing intellectual property rights. She has defended investigations and claims by federal and state government agencies, regulatory authorities, and law enforcement agencies, such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Department of Labor, Internal Revenue Service, Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney's Office, and State Attorney General's Office.
Ms. Rodriguez has guided HR professionals on various employment issues, including hiring, background checks, employee relations, disciplinary matters, terminations, leave, wage and hour issues, and other sensitive situations. She has also managed investigations regarding employee complaints and/or reports of employee misconduct, discrimination, and sexual harassment. Additionally, Ms. Rodriguez has enforced and defended non-compete and non-solicitation agreements, including disputes regarding theft of trade secrets and proprietary information.
Admitted to practice in New Jersey, New York, and the U.S. District Court for New Jersey, Ms. Rodriguez received her J.D. from Rutgers University School of Law in Newark and her B.A., cum laude, in English Literature from CUNY Hunter College. Ms. Rodriguez is actively involved in her community and within the legal industry at large. She currently serves as a public board member and chair of the Finance Committee of the New Jersey Health Care Facilities Financing Authority, of which she also serves as secretary. She previously served as president of the Hispanic Bar Association of New Jersey and, prior to that role, served as deputy regional president of the Hispanic National Bar Association (Region III). She is also a former advisory board member of NJ LEEP, a college access and success program serving students and families in the greater Newark area. Ms. Rodriguez previously served as a judicial law clerk for the Honorable Travis L. Francis, J.S.C., New Brunswick, New Jersey, in the Chancery Division, General Equity.
Blank Rome
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Jumpscares. Really? Moviegoers are not children – we're looking for narrative and complex plotlines as well!
I'd honestly rather not talk about this. I mean really, I love movies, but after the past few years, I can't help it. Here are a few movie offenses that plague my mind ANY time I watch a movie – modern horror movies in particular.
First and often most noticeable is the famed stereotyped character(s); superhero movies are infamous for these mainly because they're are based on cheesy old comics. Here it is: some guy has a tragic event happen to him and doesn't fit into society very well, and then something miraculous happens and he obtains newfound abilities that help him be himself and gain the admiration of the people around him. Sound familiar? That's because it's virtually inescapable when you watch superhero movies, and most of the time (at least if you like movies as much as me) it just distracts you from the movie itself. You say to yourself, 'really this crap again? I swear I've seen this a thousand times.' Stereotype characters are not only limited to this trope – stereotypes in film are pervasive, and simply take you out of the viewing experience; minority dies first, muscled cocky jock is an antagonist, etc. You've seen it all before.
Next we have the Deus Ex Machina. Now I get most of you aren't avid movie goers or speak latin, so let me explain – the straight translation is "god from the machine." Yeah, I know that probably still doesn't help. Basically, when there is an unsolvable problem and out of nowhere it is resolved by some outside force or unexpected intervention, that's Deus Ex Machina. Now if used correctly, it can add an exciting layer of surprise to the audience, and make the movie going experience much more enjoyable, but it should be punishable by law if the movie uses it excessively or incorrectly.
In comedies it can make for an interesting twist, even acting as a comedic device. For example, in the movie Half Baked, the main characters are about to be killed by dastardly druglord Sampson. Then, they are saved by a magical guy in a pouch (no, seriously – if you haven't watched the movie, please do – Dave Chappelle is as funny as ever). In action movies however, it's trickier, because it makes the hero's quest pointless if they are just going to get saved by an outside force after all. Great example: Star Wars Episode II: Attack of The Clones when R2-D2 USES NEVER BEFORE MENTIONED JET FLIERS to save the other main characters from death in a factory. Another: Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers – when all seems lost at the Battle of Helm's Deep, wizard Gandalf appears in a flash of light on the horizon with a fresh army and instantly annihilates the evil Uruk-hai army.
Lastly (for now), we have the scary, the dreaded, and the fear-inducing – jumpscares. Jumpscares seem to be more and more common in modern horror movies, and frankly, in the wake of such phenomenal horror cinematography and storytelling of the 20th century (Hitchcock, notably), it's sickening. I would trace problem back in time to 2008, to Oren Peli's Paranormal Activity. Minimally substantive narrative and plot development were fronted by dozens and dozens of increasingly ineffectual jumpscares. Now don't get me wrong – jumpscares are okay, but they don't make a film. Studios shouldn't think that putting a bunch of jumpscares together on a bigscreen constitutes a film, because it doesn't.
Now that we got through that, we can actually review some movies or entertainment. I'll probably start with the new IT (2017), because the original scared me into hating horror – but now the new one wants to make me cry because it's committing just about every offense we covered in this article.
Any requests for movie, TV, or other entertainment coverage or reviews on the Charger Chant? Or, would you like to write some to be published here? Comment below or shoot us an email at [email protected]. In the meantime, here's to a future of genuinely interesting and well-made mainstream films.


You are flying outside the holding area.
Holding are partially available now. Of course, it should never be unsafe, you could simply fly the holding manually of course.
Partially available means you can press HOLD button ??
As this post is fully explained why not close it...??
Okay sir, if you rather close this post.


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By John Updike
Used Price: $2.13
Something Sinister on the North Shore
Jason Diamond | 5
Chicago gets two of its most famous nicknames from literature. Carl Sandburg deemed it the "city of broad shoulders," while lifelong New Yorker A.J. Liebling tagged it the "Second City" in a 1952 New Yorker article. It's a city that has given us or inspired novelists, poets, and journalists like Saul Bellow, Richard Wright, Nelson Algren, Studs Terkel, Sandra Cisneros, Mike Royko, Margo Jefferson, Aleksandar Hemon, and more than a few other great books. It's a shining example of a truly great, often terrible American city.
And then there are the Chicago suburbs. Everything around the city, all the way into Indiana and even up to Wisconsin, at some point or another has been labeled "Chicagoland." These suburbs, more specifically the suburbs to the north of the city, have come to define what we see as the all-American suburbs in popular culture, for better — bucolic, quiet, safe — or worse — insular, bland, blindingly white.
When you think of the suburbs in American literature, your mind probably wanders first to John Cheever or John Updike or Richard Yates or John O'Hara — drunk WASPs along the east coast. The Chicago suburbs tend to enter the conversation when talking of 1980s movies, e.g., Risky Business or John Hughes's famous "teen trilogy" of Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off. But it's the books about this collection of towns to the north of Chicago that set the stage for those movies.
"Glencoe is thirty miles up the lake from Chicago," Rich Cohen writes in his memoir, Lake Effect. "It is a perfect town for a certain kind of dreamy kid, with just enough history to get your arms around." Once you leave Chicago's city limits, Glencoe is the fifth suburb you hit on your way north if you're driving along the lake. Evanston, Wilmette, Kenilworth, Winnetka, Glencoe; followed by Highland Park, Fort Sheridan, Lake Forest, and then Lake Bluff. Keep driving fifteen minutes north from there, past the Great Lakes Naval Base, and you'll hit Waukegan, home of Ray Bradbury and the basis for Green Town, where he set Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and Farewell Summer. Although it's a few scant miles north of Lake Bluff, Waukegan traditionally isn't considered part of the North Shore. Lake Bluff's median income, like other neighborhoods in the North Shore, is well over $100,000 per household; Waukegan's is $42,335. Every town on the North Shore, save for Evanston and Wilmette, count over 90% of their populations as white. Near half of Waukegan's population is Hispanic, with almost 20% African-American, and 30% white. The towns considered part of the North Shore are consistently called "affluent," while 13.9% of Waukegan residents fall below the poverty line. You're either on one side of the tracks or the other.
In Bradbury's autobiographical fiction, the stand-in for early 20th century Waukegan was the all-American town; yet Bradbury didn't shy away from commenting on the sinister aspects of the suburbs. A serial killer called the Lonely One stalks the residents of Green Town in Dandelion Wine (the chilling chapter was originally published in 1950 as "The Whole Town's Sleeping"), while Something Wicked This Way Comes can be viewed as an allegory for growing up and realizing the world, the people you know, and the place where you live aren't as innocent as you believed when you were a child. Bradbury, who was born in 1920 and whose family relocated to Arizona before his tenth birthday, was too young to know that Waukegan's chief of police at the time was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and probably didn't notice the town's population grew nearly 75 percent between 1920 and 1930 as African-Americans moved to the area looking for manufacturing jobs. By the 1960s, those jobs started to dry up and the divisions between black and white, rich and poor became even larger — school and housing segregation pushed people into certain parts of town (the rich, mostly white citizens along the lake to the north; the poorer, black and Puerto Rican communities to the south). The "racial powder keg" exploded in the Waukegan riot of 1966. The things people tried to hide underneath Green Town finally came to the surface.
Hog Barbecuer for the World,
School Segregator. Mower of Lawns,
Player with Golf Clubs and the Nation's Wife Swapper;
Bigoted, snobbish, flaunting.
Suburb of the White Collars…
So wrote "Carl Sandbag" in his poem, "Chicago Suburb" for Mad magazine in 1974. Around the time of the publication of the satirical poem, Dave Eggers was growing up Lake Forest. He'd famously go on to write about the experience of living in the suburb in his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. According to Eggers, his family was "white-trashy" for the town; he was surprised, during an audition interview for MTV's The Real World, that anybody had heard of it. "I didn't know any rich people," Eggers claims in his book.
"Once I thought that Lake Forest was the most glamorous place in the world. Maybe it was," F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in a 1940 letter to his daughter a few decades before the Eggers would move there. Lake Forest, just like the rest of the area to the north of the city, slowly started to grow in the years after the Civil War. German farmers settled what would become Wilmette. Methodist ministers would buy the land that would become Lake Bluff in 1875. 24 years earlier in 1851, another group of Methodists bought land to the north and founded Northwestern University and Garrett Biblical Institute. As an alternative, in 1857, rich Presbyterians came together for the founding of Lake Forest College. Soon enough, with the post-Civil War boom we today call the Gilded Age, secluded Lake Forest became a playground for the rich who could do their business in the city, but needed an escape. It was just the kind of place that Fitzgerald, who had fallen for Ginevra King, one of the more prominent young women from the Chicagoland area in the days leading up to the First World War, could obsess over.
A lesser-known author looked at the darker side of the supposedly tranquil Chicago suburbs. Judith Guest's 1976 novel Ordinary People (the source text for the film directed by Robert Redford) serves as a perfect regional depiction of the things happening behind the closed doors of nice houses (think Updike's Couples and Judy Blume's "adult" novel, Wifey), Later, writers like Rick Moody (The Ice Storm), Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides), A.M. Homes (Music for Torching), and Karolina Waclawiak (The Invaders) would explore real suburban doom and gloom. Guest laid the groundwork for these later experiments.
Ordinary People describes a father who is trying to keep it all together after the death of his oldest son in a boating accident and the attempted suicide of his younger son. His suburban idyll was disrupted by "an unexpected July storm on Lake Michigan," she writes:
He had left off being a perfectionist then, when he discovered that not promptly kept appointments, not a house circumspectly kept clean, not membership in Onwentsia, or the Lake Forest Golf and Country Club, or the Lawyer's Club, not power, or knowledge, or goodness–not anything– cleared you through the terrifying office of chance; that it is chance and not perfection that rules the world.
Karen Hollander, the narrator in Kurt Anderson's True Believers, is from Wilmette. In one passage, she talks of a place along the shore of the lake known as No Man's Land, Illinois. An actual unincorporated area that "was the most urban, foreign-seeming place we could reach easily by bike," for a kid in the early sixties. Anderson, who grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, says he knew of the city because of its high school, New Trier, which his own suburban high school emulated. While the story eventually moves on from Wilmette, Anderson perfectly captures the bored kids in the suburbs looking for things to entertain them, making their own fun. Running around during the Cold War years, pretending they're spies and secret agents along the leafy streets of their hometown, getting their thrills from the part of town the narrator describes as the "sketchier" side of her little corner of the world — the underdeveloped area near the water. This part of Karen's town is where you'll find "the foundations of a couple of failed private clubs and casinos from the Depression and the charred remains of a Jazz Age roadhouse" dotting the landscape — cast away. Out of sight, out of mind is a major part of the suburban phenomenon. The suburbs were built on the idea of keeping people out, specifically poor, African-American, Jewish, and immigrant communities.
White flight away from cities is largely considered a post-war phenomenon, but the area where Anderson set his novel was shaping itself into an exclusive world for white and rich citizens even before the 20th century. Kenilworth's history is one of the best examples of this. Founded by businessman Joseph Sears in 1889, the village that today is considered by Forbes the fourth most affluent place to live in America, has an ordinance stating, "Large lots, high standards of construction, no alleys, and sales to Caucasians only." As of the 2010 census, there are only seven black residents living among Kenilworth's 2,153 residents. Jews weren't welcome either. In 1959, according to Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism, the Anti-Defamation League reported, "The North Shore suburbs…are almost completely closed to Jews," and that "Kenilworth's hostility is so well known that the community is bypassed by real estate agents when serving prospective Jewish purchasers." Jews weren't admitted into the town until the 1970s.
There were alternatives, however. The Middlesteins, Jami Attenberg's bestselling 2013 family epic, takes place a little off the lake, away from the WASPs of Guest and Anderson's novels, and peers into the life and times of Edie Middlestein. Her family made the move from the city to the suburbs sometime during the same post-war boom that saw countless American families leave behind the cramped apartments of the cities for the space, lawns, and backyards of the burbs. Attenberg's novel struck a chord with me instantly as a native of the suburb where Edie's family settled, Skokie, Illinois. Located just over the northwest shoulder of Chicago, Skokie isn't a North Shore community. It rubs up against Evanston to the east and Wilmette to the north. Skokie, during the second-half of the 20th century, was known as "The World's Largest Village." A place that welcomed a large Jewish population who made it out of Europe alive after the Second World War, as well as a number of other immigrant and ethnic communities, including a 25.3 percent of its present-day population made up of people of Asian heritage according to the most recent census. A diverse city, especially compared to its neighbors to the east that stretch towards the north, Attenberg paints a picture of the promises the suburbs held, and continue to hold, to the people that move there, from the wealthy and established to immigrants and their American-born children. Early on in the book we see Edie's family, a decade into their own suburban experience. There are some very minor cracks that, over time, grow into larger ones as Edie's life progresses.
It's film that has helped fix the area in the minds of most people as the quintessential suburbs. From Robert Altman's A Wedding in 1978 and the Ordinary People adaptation two years later, both set in Lake Forest, to the boring house in Highland Park that Tom Cruise's teenage character turns into a brothel in Risky Business, and John Hughes films like Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club, movies have helped solidify the Chicago suburbs as the American suburbs. Those films gave a very visual idea of what the suburbs are supposed to look like, the "rows of new "ranch-style houses either identical in design or with minor variations built into a basic plan, winding streets, neat lawns, two-car garages, infant trees, and bicycles and tricycles lining the sidewalks," as sociologist Bennett Berger observed in "The Myth of Suburbia" for the Journal of Social Issues. A few decades after the post-war buildup of the suburbs, when living outside of cities had become more commonplace in America, the promises that suburbia held, the new way of living, a safer and more peaceful place for the "upwardly mobile" and "well educated" who "have a promising place in some organizational hierarchy," as Bennett pointed out in the 1961 article, were starting to unravel. Books like Ordinary People and The Middlesteins show this; films often did not. In the cinematic version of the suburbs in the 1970s and 1980s, there are problems: teens can't get the boy or girl they like to notice them, bullies bully, college looms on the horizon, parents seem totally oblivious, bills have to get paid, but all in all nothing too bad. Movies are there to sell fantasy, that everything is ultimately fine in the suburbs; books tell a different story. They tell you that marriages fall apart and habits consume people (The Middlesteins), security is just a myth (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius), and that there's a whole fascinating world beyond the city limits for kids just willing to go out on a limb and explore it (Lake Effect). The suburbs are an idea that you have to be willing to buy into. Once cracks start showing, you're supposed to do your best to look away.
There's an order to things once you make it out of the city, out to the wider spaces where the houses and people all look alike, an inherent dishonesty in the suburbs that somebody convinced America to look past long ago. The suburbs were supposed to be the reward for working so hard, for making it through. It was supposed to be paradise, the last place you needed to go in life, "You've reached your top and you just can't get any higher," as Ray Davies of The Kinks sings in "Shangri-La," a song about his own country's middle class in the years after the war. But as Cohen writes in Lake Effect, "What mattered to our parents could never matter to us. What mattered to us — a sense of style, of experience-collecting — seemed so simple and pure we were afraid to talk about it." Things change; the facade slowly strips away and unveils the truth that no matter how well-kept or filled with smiling people, money, and good schools they may be, there's something sinister about the suburbs.
Pass the Rémy Red Berry Infusion: John Wray Interviews Matt Dojny
John Wray | 2
Wray and Dojny, 18 years ago in Texas.
Like another bold book that's just hitting the shelves, Sheila Heti's How Should A Person Be?, Matt Dojny's The Festival of Earthly Delights is a novel from life, though the life that it's from — to judge by the book that resulted — must be radically, grotesquely different. Dojny's novel is high entertainment: a wildly heightened and distorted assembly of painfully funny, jaw-dropping misadventures that resolve themselves, in almost classical style, into a big old-fashioned technicolor ending. No less a literary funnyman than Gary Shteyngart called The Festival of Earthly Delights "A glorious novel" — with exclamation marks! — and I can't help but agree. This is a quintessential summer book, but not the kind that you'd want to take to the beach, if only because it would turn you into the kind of snorting, cackling deviant that people tend to move their towels away from. Also, it has funny pictures.
Boyd Darrow, the novel's epically star-crossed hero, has just landed in the tiny Southeast Asian country of Puchai ("The Kingdom of Winks!") with his grouchy and distinctly less-than-faithful girlfriend, Ulla. In a series of letters to a mysterious figure from his past known only as "Hap," Darrow narrates a string of cultural gaffes and psychosexual misadventures as his relationship and professional life and understanding of the world in general are radically and permanently Puchafied. But the country of Puchai itself is the real star of the novel, from the atomically smelly garong fruit everyone finds so delicious to its national fondness for the music of the mid-career Eagles and the Festival of Taang Lôke Kwaam Banterng Sumitchanani, the "Festival of Earthly Delights" of the title, the absurd and improbable celebration of which also serves as the rococo end of the novel itself.
In tribute to the novel's theme of cultural dislocation, and to its author's storied past on the Asian subcontinent, this interview was held in a Malaysian karaoke parlor in midtown Manhattan. Dojny, for reasons unclear to this writer, had smuggled in a bottle of Rémy Red Berry Infusion.
John Wray: You worked for a while as an actor in karaoke videos in Singapore, if I'm remembering rightly. I know that you drew on many experiences from your time in Southeast Asia when you were plotting out Boyd Darrow's misadventures in The Festival of Earthly Delights — how come acting in karaoke videos didn't make it into the book?
Matt Dojny: I'd originally planned to have Boyd's journey more directly mirror my own — the first half of the book was going to be set in "Puchai" (my fictionalized stand-in for Thailand), and the second half was going to recount Boyd's travels around the continent, including a stint doing some karaoke-acting. However, if I'd stuck with that structure, the book would've been 1,000 pages long, which seemed kind of excessive for a first novel, so — hey, do you want to perform "Bullet with Butterfly Wings" [Smashing Pumpkins], or can I?
JW: Wow, this interview is heading south in a hurry. Go ahead.
MD: Here, try a sip of this of Remy Red. It tastes like a strawberry popsicle soaked in turpentine.
JW: Ugh. Okay.
Unlike a lot of novels that arise more or less directly out of the author's coming of age, yours seems unfettered by any particular desire to represent your own life accurately, or even fairly, which may be part of the reason it's so hilarious — you've given yourself the freedom to shape the material for maximum kick. Was transforming Thailand into the fictional (and very weird) country of Puchai an important step in that direction? Did it liberate you to get especially freaky?
That version of "Bullet" made me just a little uncomfortable, by the way. The lyrics really seemed to speak to you on a fundamental level. Do you consider yourself an angry person?
MD: No, I don't think I'm particularly angry. But, I will admit that the lyrics "Despite all my rage/I am still just a rat in a cage" speak to my innermost being. Is that so wrong?
In answer to your first question: I mainly set the novel in Puchai because I'm lazy, and didn't want to have to do a lot of research about Thailand. I loved living there, but it was more interesting for me to make up a new culture rather than having to interrogate an existing one. If that allowed for maximum freakiness, then, bully for me. Does that answer make sense? I feel like I've gotten drunk too early in this interview. This Remy Red might've been a mistake. I'm switching to beer. You pick a song.
JW: I'm going to vote for something classy this time. Do you do women's voices?
MD: Not in my daily life. But I'll do my best.
JW: Then I'm going to respectfully request "For The Good Times" by Al Green. Something tells me you have a soulful falsetto.
Did you have any particular models in mind when you were writing this novel? I've been trying to come up with some guesses, which hasn't been easy. Kingsley Amis keeps springing to mind for some reason — especially his masterpiece of institutional satire, Lucky Jim. But maybe that's just because Kingsley Amis was an angry writer too.
MD: I like to think that I'm not as much of a misanthrope — or a misogynist — as Amis was, but, that being said, Lucky Jim was absolutely a reference point — my book is basically half campus novel, and half epistolary novel. Oh, and half bildungsroman.
I'd like to reiterate that I do not think of myself as an angry writer — I feel like you're still picking up on the powerful reverberations of that Smashing Pumpkins song.
And, with all due respect to Mr. Green, I'm going to pass on that song request. I feel like for a karaoke performance to be truly successful, you have to know the song inside and out, and my kinship with that track isn't deep enough. Can I do some Otis Redding instead? Maybe "Try a Little Tenderness?"
JW: I'd never discourage anyone from performing that number. It also resonates with my next question, which touches on the sensual side of your writing. To wit: there's a lot of sex in this book — a lot more than one tends to encounter in contemporary fiction by polite and well-spoken young men. Katie Roiphe would never have had to write her polemic in the Atlantic Monthly (or wherever that was) if the culture had more novelists of your stripe. What purpose does sex play in the novel? Were you setting out to write our generation's version of Updike's Couples? And don't you worry what your mother will think?
MD: I absolutely worry what my mother might think; I'm even chagrined that she's likely reading this interview. Hopefully she doesn't know about the Internet.
My natural inclination is to be shy and retiring, and yet I also felt obligated to explore the more cringe-inducing corners of my psyche while writing the book. I'm guessing that inclination is somehow related to my Catholic upbringing? Anyway, I guess the purpose of my acknowledgment of the existence of human sexuality in the novel was to make myself and my family (and probably the reader) as uncomfortable as possible…Speaking of which, instead of Otis Redding, I'm going to sing "My Humps." Hold my beer, please.
JW: Jesus. That was actually really, really good. I feel as if I've never truly heard that song before. And now I'll never be able to erase it fully from my mind.
MD: That was the effect I'd intended.
JW: I wanted ask about the drawings in the book. There are so many of them, and they're so illustrative, that the experience of reading it comes close, at certain points, to that of a graphic novel. Did you ever consider going in that direction with the story?
MD: My background is as a visual artist, and, when I first conceived of working on a book, I originally thought it'd be mostly art, with a little bit of text. I didn't really think of myself as a writer back then, so this approach allowed me to ease myself into the concept of being a novelist. Once I started writing, the text took over, and the illustrations became secondary, or, at least, subservient to the story. I'd love to do a graphic novel someday, but it seems like so much work. It took me four or five years to write this book — if it had more art and fewer words, I'd probably still be working on it.
Can you do me a favor and do a rap song? I want to level the playing field after that Black Eyed Peas number. I feel unclean now.
JW: I'm not sure I have the sense of rhythm required for hip hop, but I'll do something in that general direction. How about "Work It" by Missy Elliott? That song has always spoken to me for some reason.
I'm now going to do something that I strongly disapprove of and get annoyed by in interviews, which is to bring up specific episodes from your novel and ask about the stories behind them, as though the whole point of writing fiction weren't the excitement and challenge of making things up. But I have to ask: did you, at any point in your time in Asia, have a job interview with an embittered Vietnam veteran gone native who asked you to smuggle a tiny bottle of his urine back to America, just so you could pour it out on to the ground when you arrived?
MD: The character of Sam is, in fact, based partially on the Vietnam vet who ran the language school where I taught English in Thailand. In reality, though, the man asked me to smuggle a bottle of urine into Vietnam and pour it onto the ground, not America. I'm sure he'd been through some terrible things there, and I fully understand why he might've had an adverse reaction to the young American backpackers such as myself who were now tourists in the country where he'd once fought. The image of the tiny vial of urine stuck with me, though, and seemed like it should be repurposed for the general reading public.
JW: How about the brothel in the novel — "Meowy X-mas?" Did it exist, and did you go there, and did a buxom and well-intentioned bar girl actually swallow your wedding ring? Feel free to pass on this question if answering it will ruin your life.
MD: First of all, I want to go on record as saying that your flow is formidable. Don't sell your rap-skills short.
Regarding Meowy X-mas: I actually didn't get around to visiting any brothels during my visit in Southeast Asia, and I have never had anyone eat my jewelry, so I had to rely on my fiction-making skills for that scene. I did, however, go to a bar in Singapore that was full of very ruddy and overweight middle-aged Englishmen and their incongruously beautiful 20-year-old Singaporean love interests. It had an unsavory vibe that makes me think that, in retrospect, it was basically a more evolved version of a brothel. I wasn't actually propositioned there, but maybe I was too obviously poverty-stricken. Or maybe it was my lack of ruddiness.
Okay, I'm going to sing a Lionel Richie song now. You have a problem with that?
JW: Depends on the number. May I suggest "All Night Long?" Not sure I'm ready for a ballad from The Lion King right now.
I was impressed to see an ecstatic blurb from Kristen Schaal on the back of the book — I've loved her ever since she played the stalker fan on Flight of the Conchords. How did you get a copy of the novel to her, and do you know if she's currently single?
MD: Kristen used to live upstairs from me and, back in the day, would walk my dog, before she went all Hollywood on me. She is very awesome, but I'm pretty sure she's in a committed relationship — maybe you could woo her with your rapping skills.
Now, what should we do next — maybe a duet? What would you say to a little "Islands in the Steam?"
JW: Dear lord. If that's not a sign that this interview's over, I don't know what is.
Image courtesy of the author.
Wanting it Bad: The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
I read Middlesex in 2002 as a college sophomore. I read it again in 2004, and probably two or three times after that. In early 2007, I went into a bookstore and, looking helplessly at the stacks of new releases, asked when there was going to be another one from Jeffrey Eugenides. It was the first time in my life I felt impatient for a book I wasn't sure had been written or was going to be.
Unlike childhood and adolescence, which are a sustained exercise in waiting — you count the hours till your TV show, the days till your sleepover, the years till you turn eleven — the adult self has a different relationship with anticipation. If you are not The Marriage Plot's Leonard, for whom there is no baseline of normalcy, if you are not in flux and falling in love or out of love or into some tragedy, the pangs of anticipation lose their childhood acuity and become muddled with complexities. So it is a rare pleasure to wait for something with that pure and uncomplicated eagerness. I carried this book around in my bag all day, waiting for the moment to open it. I went to a meeting and as I half-listened I moved my hands over the smooth pages with near-erotic pleasure. Perhaps I was just channeling a zeitgeisty fetishization of the endangered physical book. But I think it is more the relief born of nine years of waiting. "Waiting is an enchantment," writes Roland Barthes in The Lover's Discourse, to which Eugenides's heroine Madeleine transfers all of her anxieties about her aloof lover Leonard; "The Festivity is what is waited for."
I waited for this book, Madeleine waits for Leonard, Leonard waits for his side effects to dissipate, Mitchell waits for Madeleine, and also for a variety of religious experience. Madeleine is pretty, and smart, and rich, and "slightly anxious." Leonard is maybe smarter, definitely poorer, and worse, sick. The hangover of Madeleine and Leonard's great Festivity is the grim reality of Leonard's mental illness. Madeleine is with Leonard through his illness, ostensibly because she loves him, also because she didn't get into grad school and she's not sure what to do. Eugenides describes with convincing and heartrending detail a Leonard in thrall to his lithium, a prisoner whose act of liberation is the heroic and misguided recalibration of his meds leading to a spectacular crack-up. Meanwhile, Mitchell travels through Europe and India pining for Madeleine and the Lord.
In some respects, Madeleine is a surface upon which people project their respective wills. Everyone knows that Madeleine is bookish, but we only hear her discussing her actual books of interest with other young women at a conference. We don't know why Mitchell and Leonard love her exactly, except that she is beautiful, with clean sheets, full of (mostly unspoken) bookish thoughts. Mitchell spends years mesmerized by the memory of a glimpse of her "pale, quiet, Episcopalian breast."
Eugenides is kinder to Madeleine than I, out of envy, might be inclined. The year I read Middlesex was the year my boyfriend, a student at Brown University, broke up with me. During my weekend visits, Brown seemed to teem with beautiful women who exuded the possibility of "clean-sheet Wednesday," and who didn't bouy the spirit with intimations of their stupidity. This book could have been an act of vengeance on girls who are pretty and thin and rich and go to good schools and read novels and have sex, but not too much sex or too soon. But even I don't hate Madeleine. Leonard is most blameless and deserving of sympathy in the novel — his illness is a real and perpetual problem, a horse on his chest. And yet I guiltily celebrated when Madeleine met her intellectual compatriots for a few short days at the conference, or when she kissed Mitchell on a French leave to New York.
The novel invites us to like Madeleine; the novel, like Mitchell, loves Madeleine in spite of her being, and probably because she is, a "Fortnum & Mason's drinker, her favorite blend Earl Grey. She didn't just dump a bag in a cup, either, but brewed loose leaves, using a strainer and a tea cozy." Mitchell describes his problem of being subsumed in the Godhead thus: "it was hard to kill your self off when you liked so many things about it." We might say the same thing about Madeleine. The liberally-distributed acidity and self-loathing of Jonathan Franzen — and I cannot fail to compare the two after reading Evan Hughes's illuminating piece on the fraternity of contemporary heavy-hitters — is a contrast to the more benign treatment found here. (Of the primary characters, that is. The supporting cast — Larry, Claire, Thurston, Abby — are intensely unlikable).
The Marriage Plot is a nod to the humanity of sexy women who feel like lumpen embarrassments around the right kind of man. It's a nod only, though; we hear about Madeleine's bowel movements through their absence, revealed by the interrogation of Leonard. We do not see her sneak off to to take an anxious crap, the way we do Leonard. Madeleine's WASP mystique largely endures.
That Madeleine is a WASP is put forth ad nauseam. When Madeleine takes Mitchell home for a fateful Thanksgiving, she brings volume 1 of A Dance to the Music of Time, which, like The Marriage Plot, is a both a witty society novel and a work whose great depth belies its light touch. Like a Powell character, Madeleine lives in rarefied air, with rarefied people like Pookie Ames surfacing here and there at Brown and in New York. Unlike in a Powell novel, the class markers occasionally jangle. Madeleine's father, Alton, begins a graduation weekend hotel strategy session with "When your cousin graduated from Williams…" Alton's "voice was surprisingly good; he'd been in an a capella singing group at Yale." Madeleine comes to Mitchell's guest room "dressed in a Lawrenceville T-shirt and nothing else." Perhaps these last two are Mitchell's Detroiter observations more than the novel's, but they sometimes grate.
I can't know anything about the author's process, but The Marriage Plot must have been daunting to visualize and see through after Middlesex, which was built on the rock of historical adventure, unusual genitals, and the American dream. Eugenides has taken a risk with this novel, with his knowing tone and his aggressive syllabus. I found the first page repellent in its presentation of Madeleine's shelf list — the "Colette novels she read on the sly" and "the first edition of Couples, belonging to her mother, which Madeleine had surreptitiously dipped into back in sixth grade and which she was using now to provide textual support in her English honors thesis…" I was happy when we got to the good stuff, like a hangover.
But Eugenides knows what he is doing. At first, the heavy reading list and ponderous references are pompous, like a student who has done her homework and is trying to drop some pithy stuff into the class discussion. On its face, The Marriage Plot appears to be a novel that mentions a lot of novels without talking about any of them. These facile, knowing references disguise the sly ways that this novel engages with its predecessors.
Eugenides layers his allusions in an exciting and well-concealed way so that viewed from one angle, the novel is a relatively old-fashioned love-triangle cum young adult drama. But the novel is full of parallels and inversions, using its sources on a number of levels. As the novel opens, we look at Madeleine's shelves, upon which are arranged the novels of Wharton, Austen, Eliot, "and the redoubtable Brontë sisters." But, it's immediately clear, Madeleine is no Lily Bart, no Ellen Olenska. She's May Welland, Emma Woodhouse. As The Marriage Plot continues, she becomes Dorothea Brooke or Jane Eyre.
At the end of her own novel, saintly Jane Eyre tells us that "my time and cares were now required by another — my husband needed them all," a moment with clear echoes in Eugenides's book. Jane looks after her maimed husband, but her narrative closes with St. John Rivers, gone to India where he
…clears their painful way to improvement: he hews down like a giant the prejudices of creed and caste that encumber it…His is the ambition of the high master-spirit, which aims to fill a place in the first rank of those who are redeemed from the earth — who stand without fault before the throne of God; who share the last mighty victories of the Lamb; who are called, and chosen, and faithful.
Mitchell's Calcutta gross-outs, his religious yearnings, his bhang enthusiasms, are a new take on the monastic St. John.
This novel is a surface upon which we might project the other novels we have read; Eugenides invites us so to do. In Calcutta, all Mitchell sees of Mother Teresa are the yellow soles of her feet, and I thought of T.S. Eliot: "You curled the papers from your hair,/ Or clasped the yellow soles of feet/ In the palms of both soiled hands." Mitchell and Madeleine return from Thanksgiving, "walked together up College Hill, hugged, and parted," which conjures a vague jumble of 19th century and earlier works in my brain. Every fictional hangover past 1954 owes something to the ur-hangover of Jim Dixon in Lucky Jim. Like Jim, Madeleine has to perform a duty with a blinding hangover after a night of bad sexual decisions. Like Jim, she enlists a person whom she has wronged to help her. The echoes are so subtle I heard them only after I had finished the book. Maybe I'm reaching, but I think the novel encourages us to reach. Eugenides's characters appear to have read everything; we assume that he has read everything, and more.
I initially wondered if, with this book, Eugenides will alienate readers who are not readers like the readers in his novel. I doubt it, because I'm not a reader like the readers in his novel, not by a long shot, and even without having read Thomas Merton or Deleuze & Guattari I can follow and enjoy a story about a pretty girl, a crazy boy, and a pining best friend.
Madeleine's Semiotics 211 classmates like the theorists who "wanted a book, that hard-won, transcendent thing, to be a text, contingent, indeterminate, and open for suggestions. They wanted the reader to be the main thing. Because they were readers." Even though her classmates are silly, they have a point. Like Madeleine, I think of myself as a reading traditionalist, a person who wants "a book to take her places she couldn't go herself" and who additionally wants "something to happen" to its characters "in a place resembling the world." As a reader, I make tea with leaves and tea cozies, and as that kind of reader, this book satisfies me. I have to say that for adventure, pizzazz and magic carpet rides, The Marriage Plot doesn't do it for me like Middlesex. As a book snob, The Marriage Plot does more. I can guess at the references and congratulate myself on recognizing the novel's technical complexity.
But my opinion is like, problematized, as the Semiotics 211 kids might say. I waited for this book. I waited nine years and I wanted it bad. I rubbed my hands and its pages and fondled it and felt a physical stirring. Getting what you wait for makes the awaited thing both better and worse than it is. Was it good for me, this book? Yeah, it was good. It surprised me; it got me thinking about the things that Eugenides can do as a writer. The poor man doesn't even get to bask a moment in his achievement before his fans are impatient for the next thing. I begin the long wait anew.
Bonus Link: Jeffrey Eugenides explains "How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Write The Marriage Plot."
Image credit: Bill Morris/[email protected].
Exclusive: The First Lines of Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot
Jeffrey Eugenides became a household name among many readers thanks to Middlesex and The Virgin Suicides. Eight years after Middlesex, Eugenides has quietly become one of the most admired American novelists working today, and it's likely that many fans are looking ahead to October, when Eugenides's next novel, The Marriage Plot, is set to be released.
FSG's catalog copy describes a campus/coming-of-age/love-triangle novel (some may recall the protagonist Madeleine Hanna from an excerpt that was published in the New Yorker in 2010), but the The Marriage Plot's first paragraph sets the stage for what may be a very bookish novel, with some serious literary name dropping and a mention of John Updike's Couples.
To start with, look at all the books. There were her Edith Wharton novels, arranged not by title but date of publication; there was the complete Modern Library set of Henry James, a gift from her father on her twenty-first birthday; there were the dog-eared paperbacks assigned in her college courses, a lot of Dickens, a smidgen of Trollope, along with good helpings of Austen, George Eliot, and the redoubtable Bronte sisters. There were a whole lot of black-and-white New Directions paperbacks, mostly poetry by people like H.D. or Denise Levertov. There were the Colette novels she read on the sly. There was the first edition of Couples, belonging to her mother, which Madeleine had surreptitiously dipped into back in sixth grade and which she was using now to provide textual support in her English honors thesis on the marriage plot. There was, in short, this mid-sized but still portable library representing pretty much everything Madeleine had read in college, a collection of texts, seemingly chosen at random, whose focus slowly narrowed, like a personality test, a sophisticated one you couldn't trick by anticipating the implications of its questions and finally got so lost in that your only recourse was to answer the simple truth. And then you waited for the result, hoping for "Artistic," or "Passionate," thinking you could live with "Sensitive," secretly fearing "Narcissistic" and "Domestic," but finally being presented with an outcome that cut both ways and made you feel different depending on the day, the hour, or the guy you happened to be dating: "Incurably Romantic."
John Updike, and the Curious Business of Sustaining Literary Reputations
Bruce Cordingly
Toward the end of his life, John Updike was fond of musing about how little the world would note his passing. He suspected that "a shrug and tearless eyes / will greet my overdue demise; / The wide response will be, I know, / 'I thought he died a while ago.'"
The John Updike Society, which held its first conference last month, is dedicated to proving the author wrong. The event, held near Updike's hometown of Shillington, Pennsylvania, started the society's work of sustaining and growing a literary reputation. The weekend included academic readings, panels of friends and family, and tours of the author's two boyhood homes and the environs of Shillington and Reading where much of his fiction was set. The mission of the Society — along with creating opportunities to enjoy the fellowship of Updike devotees – is "awakening and sustaining reader interest in the literature and life of John Updike."
No detail was too small for discussion. Attendees wanted to know if Updike did the dishes at home, whether he liked Sinatra, if he was handy around the house. On bus tours, attendees pondered the department store where his mother worked, the restaurant where he'd lunched as teenager, the old movie theater featured in his non-fiction.
Much of the attendees' interest, understandably, focused on discovering if their idol was indeed the man they knew.
During the testimony of family and friends, Updike held up pretty well. He was described by classmates as bookish, popular and enduringly responsive; by his children as a present if occasionally distracted father; and by his first wife Mary Weatherall as an author who valued his spouse's opinion. There were a couple of surprises – he might not have written as many words each day as he claimed and according to his children, he inexplicably struggled to connect with his father, Wesley, a man Updike's children seemed to adore.
Then of course there were the conference papers, all intended to continue the critical discussion that will be so important to sustaining the Updike reputation long-term.
"Can an author survive without authorial champions?" Society President James Plath asked when I interviewed him after the conference. "I don't think so."
The evidence supports his claim. In one of his last interviews, in October 2008, Updike cited the curious case of Emily Dickinson, who was not well known upon her death and who required the help of critics decades down the road to lift her to her current place in the canon. "There is a whole raft of poets contemporary with Emily Dickinson," Updike said. "None of them would have imagined that she would have become one of the defining names of American letters."
The most famous of the exhumed luminaries — the example often cited to convey the cruelties of literary reputation — is Herman Melville, who died at age 72 in relative anonymity after several literary disappointments and 19 years working in a customs house. His obituary in 1891 in the New York Times looked, in its entirety, like this:
Herman Melville died yesterday at his residence, 104 East 26th Street, this city, or heart disease, aged seventy-two. He was the writer of Typee, Omoo, Mobie Dick, and other sea-faring tales, written in earlier years. He leaves a wife and two daughters, Mrs. M. B. Thomas and Miss Melville.
Bummer. Melville apparently was the deceased writer Updike worried he would become — dead before he'd died.
It took 30 years for what is now called the Melville Revival to commence and for Melville to ascend to his rightful place in the American canon. This was accomplished by the only people capable of doing it — scholars, historians, writers, publishers. In Melville's case, it was biographers Raymond Weaver and Carl Van Doren and author and critic D.H. Lawrence. Without them, Melville's historical significance might have diminished beyond even the four lines devoted to him in the Times obituary.
Updike seemed to understand as much. In that late 2008 interview, he said literary reputations are "strange things," left often to the whims and tastes of future generations. He noted that 19th century readers were often concerned with order, meter, and plots in which good triumphs over evil – qualities less important to today's modern and postmodern readers. He lauded Norman Mailer for not pushing too hard in his lifetime on behalf of his literary reputation, since it was an issue largely beyond his control.
Society President Plath, of course, likes Updike's odds. He suspects future scholars will be wondrous of Updike's capacity with metaphor, happy to find his descriptions of sex, thrilled at the number of other texts that Updike works off of in his oeuvre — including three novels written in homage to Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. "I think he's in pretty good shape," Plath says.
Updike's sometimes editor at the New Yorker, Charles McGrath, also liked Updike's odds of enduring. During that late interview with Updike, he said, "If those of us in this room had to bet who would last, you'd put your money on Bellow, Updike, and Roth."
And yet Updike knew even he could be forgotten. There was the fear, very real, Updike thought, that reading of any kind might wither away, as well as the possibility that future generations will not be concerned with the perspective of a white, middle-class male from the Mid-Atlantic region who wrote primarily in a realistic mode. He said:
These piles of books that all of us writer are piling up [could] become just as burdensome as Latin writing in the Renaissance. There was a lot of that, and who reads it now except a few scholars? So, yes, it's not something you should stay awake at night about, you should, my theory is, do your best, try to be honest, in your work, and amusing…. Beyond that it is out of your control
And, on a weekend devoted to John Updike, there were signs of the struggle to endure any author faces. His children, though admiring and laudatory of their father's work, admitted to not always getting through it – daughter Miranda has tried to read Couples a few times. Daughter Elizabeth Cobblah said her father had decades ago suggested she read his African novel, The Coup, in anticipation of her marrying a man from Ghana. She hasn't yet gotten around to it, but she plans to.
Trouble also lurked in the center of the Updike universe, the Shillington house where he grew up, and which he lovingly described in short stories, novels, and his memoirs, Self-Consciousness. The house is now occupied by the advertising agency Niemczyk/Hoffman, whose employees graciously allowed the Society members to tour their offices. In one room, formerly the guest bedroom where Updike watched his mother write fiction, the agency's principal, Tracy Hoffman, was asked by a Society member if he read Updike.
"I've tried, but the descriptions …" Hoffman said, his voice trailing off, suggesting the descriptions were … um … too much.
"Have you tried Pigeon Feathers?" the Society member asked.
"I did," Hoffman said, wincing.
In his memoirs, Updike said, that one of his great lifetime joys was watching the world going on without him, " the awareness of things going by, impinging on my consciousness, and then, all beyond my control, sliding away toward their own destination and destiny."
In that respect, too, Updike might have been gratified by this first weekend held in his honor – the world, as he suspected, will continue to roll on happily both with and without him.
My Favorites' Favorites
M. Rebekah Otto | 13
Many of my favorite books – Dracula, The Rings of Saturn, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – came to me as assigned reading. Even more than specific titles, I inherited my favorite authors from professors: Nicholson Baker, Harryette Mullen, Turgenev, George Saunders.
This literary bestowal carries on into adulthood as I seek my favorite authors' favorite authors. At HTMLGIANT, Blake Butler started a broad compendium of David Foster Wallace's favorite works, encompassing books he blurbed, books assigned on his syllabus, books mentioned in interviews and in passing. It is a nourishing list, a place to turn when I think about what I should read next.
But my road with the recommendations of my favorite authors has been unpaved and rocky.
I devoured U and I, Nicholson Baker's endearing, humorous volume on John Updike. I loved that he read the copyright page of each Updike book, tracing where essays or excerpts had been previously published. U and I is about Updike, yes, but it is more about Baker wrestling with Updike's impact on a personal level. Early in the book he lays it out: "I was not writing an obituary or a traditional critical study, I was trying to record how one increasingly famous writer and his books, read and unread, really functioned in the fifteen or so years of my life since I had first become aware of his existence…"
Because the book is about Baker not about Updike, I found it easy to like. Baker recounts the 125th anniversary party for The Atlantic where Tim O'Brien tells him that he and Updike golf together: "I was of course very hurt that out of all the youngish writers in the Boston area, Updike had chosen Tim O'Brien and not me as his golfing partner. It didn't matter that I hadn't written a book that had won a National Book Award, hadn't written a book of any kind, and didn't know how to golf."
And so, under Baker's tutelage, I read John Updike. More accurately, I tried to read Updike, tried and tried. Rabbit, Run. Pigeon Feathers. The Poorhouse Fair. I didn't finish any of them, I barely started them. I would have scoured Couples for the passage where Updike compares a vagina to a ballet slipper – which Baker mentions – if I could have gotten through the second chapter.
After quoting his own mother and Nabokov, Baker tells me, "There is no aphoristic consensus to deflect and distort the trembly idiosyncratic paths each of us may trace in the wake of the route that the idea of Updike takes through our consciousness." Updike is not an idea that is tracing its way – neither trembling nor idiosyncratic – through my consciousness. There is no Updike boat leaving a wake in the waves of my mind like a yacht leaving Cape Cod for the Vineyard.
Rather than accept that Baker and I – being of different eras and different genders – have different taste, I concluded that I must be intellectually and creatively deficient; I am a bad reader. I was disappointed in myself for disappointing the Nicholson Baker in my mind, shaking his bearded head, tut-tutting at me: Poor girl, she'll never understand.
A few months ago I picked up The Anthologist and started it, in the midst of other selections. (When the book came out last September, I actually drove twenty miles to Marin to see Baker read. I was the youngest member of the audience by thirty years. But I am afraid to buy a book at a reading, and petrified of the prospect of having an author sign the book. I could make a fool of myself as Baker did when asking Updike to sign a book in the early 80s.)
Then a couple weeks ago I received a mass email from a writer I know about how he was reading The Anthologist, and I felt the urge to pick it up again. He even said, "I'm really loving The Anthologist."
I haven't read everything by Baker, but I've read a bunch and enjoyed it on my own; yet, his authoritative praise weighs more than my own evaluation.
Recently in Maine in a used bookstore (that was also the bookseller's refurbished garage), I stumbled on three of Carson McCullers' books for $1 each. (In case you are wondering, and you should be wondering, I was not close to Nicholson Baker's home in Maine, but further up the coast near E.B. White's former home, near the county fair where Fern bought Wilbur.) The cover of the tattered McCullers paperback proclaimed "One of the finest writers of our time" from The New York Times. I couldn't recall exactly where I'd heard her name, but it was vaguely familiar. I bought all three.
I started The Ballad of the Sad Café and she drew me into her vivid, textured Southern world. Her descriptions are precise ideas: "The hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes."
She commands the reader and directs me what to do: "See the hunchback marching in Miss Amelia's footsteps when on a red winter morning they set out for the pinewoods to hunt… See them working on her properties… So compose from such flashes an image of these years as a whole. And for a moment let it rest." This second-person imperative jumped out of the smooth, poetic narrative, but it fit like a nest on a tree. McCullers is unafraid to acknowledge you and make you do what she thinks you should. Yet she maintains authorial distance and control by refraining from the first person while directing your attention like a gentle guide: "Now some explanation is due for all this behavior," she opens an aside on the nature of love. She then elides authority by saying, "It has been mentioned before that Miss Amelia was once married."
Even before I'd finished the novella, though, I dug around online to verify my delight. Didn't I read somewhere that David Foster Wallace liked her? Did I remember a retrospective on her in the TLS? No, I didn't, I was mistaken. Try as I may, the highest compliment I found was from Graham Greene who said, "Miss McCullers and perhaps Mr. Faulkner are the only writers since the death of D. H. Lawrence with an original poetic sensibility." Now, don't get me wrong. Graham Greene is fine, but I didn't even finish The End of the Affair, and he is nowhere near my top ten. From whom did I inherit McCullers?
My Internet searching revealed some critical acclaim (in the Modern Library Revue column on The Millions, for one) and she is mentioned in the same breath as Saul Bellow, Flannery O'Connor, W.H. Auden, and Tennessee Williams, each time with a different, equally flattering comparison.
But I was disappointed. In myself? In McCullers? In other authors who did not love her as I am growing to?
I suppose if I can find an author and grow to love them outside of a direct inheritance, maybe, too, I could reject select elements of my more obvious literary heritage. Hesitantly, I have begun to dismiss other favorites' favorites. When a former student of his published David Foster Wallace's syllabus, I promptly downloaded the PDF. As I read the list, I was very self-assured: I'd been meaning to read Waiting for the Barbarians! I loved the Flannery O'Connor story he assigned ("A Good Man is Hard to Find"). He boldly included young contemporary writers like Aimee Bender and Sam Lipsyte. But Silence of the Lambs. Really? I would not follow him there. Maybe I am only disadvantaging myself. Silence of the Lambs may be the literary masterwork that could forever change my outlook on literature and fiction, just like Updike was supposed to.
Where I formerly swallowed recommendations whole, I now cull through them – not exactly on my own but in a more independent fashion. I find books, I do not just receive them. Or, I try to.
I am not a bad reader nor am I intellectually and creatively deficient, or, if I am, it is not because I do not like John Updike but for entirely different reasons.
From the Newsstand, Lists, Notable Articles
The Franzen Cover and a Brief History of Time
Craig Fehrman | 17
Jonathan Franzen occupies the cover of this week's Time, and, as the magazine will happily point out, he's the first novelist to do so in "more than a decade." The Franzen cover—and the Franzen headline: "Great American Novelist"—is a pretty transparent bit of attention-mongering. After all, Franzen's predecessor, Stephen King, got only one paragraph in his cover story, and Time profiled Franzen only four years ago. (Both Franzen stories include lots of bird watching and Lev Grossman.)
Still, Time could use a boost as much as literature, and it's hard to fault the magazine. In fact, its choice of Franzen provides an opportunity to look back at Time's long history as literary arbiter and evangelist.
In The Powers That Be, David Halberstam writes that Time impresario Henry Luce
had a powerful sense of what people should read, what was good for them to read, and an essential belief worthy of the best journalist, that any subject of importance could be made interesting. Thus the cover story, the personalizing of issues so that a lay reader could become more interested and more involved in serious reading matter.
This same impulse seems to be at work in Time's Franzen cover. (Under the headline it reads: "His characters don't solve mysteries, have magical powers or live in the future.") Franzen himself has remarked on it. In his famous Harper's essay "Perchance to Dream," he writes that "my father, who was not a reader, nevertheless had some acquaintance with James Baldwin and John Cheever, because Time magazine put them on its cover."
Franzen ends up arguing that a shift in Time's cover choices—from James Joyce to Scott Turow—offers more proof of America's cultural decline. But just about every interaction between Time and a literary type has been characterized by a waffling between reaching out and selling out that, today, we'd describe as Franzean. Two favorite examples: When Bennett Cerf tried to convince William Faulkner to do a second Time cover, 15 years after his first, Faulkner asked for an estimate on how much it would add to Random House's bottom line so that he could simply reimburse the publisher. In The Prisoner of Sex, Norman Mailer—who seems to have married Jeanne Campbell, Luce's former mistress, for revenge as much as for love—recalls Time's offer of "a cover story on the author's reactions to the most prominent phenomenon of the summer season: the extraordinary surge of interest in Women's Liberation." Despite having a movie to promote, Mailer decides that "only a fool would throw serious remarks into the hopper at Time."
In 1923, Joseph Conrad appeared on Time's first bookish cover and its sixth overall. The story began:
Joseph Conrad, rover of the seven seas, has never set foot in the United States. Now he is coming. At about the end of this month the man who holds probably the most exalted position in contemporary English letters is to arrive here for a visit which it is hoped will last through May.
And that's about it. Conrad's entire cover story ran only 425 words, a standard length for early Time articles, and this first batch of literary covers were mostly linked to reviews. Thanks to the magazine's short and punchy house style, these reviews always managed to include some biographical information. (The section on "The Author" came right after the one on "The Significance.")
By the 1930s, though, you could see a formula beginning to set — a personalized opening, a capsule biography, some detailed description (Willa Cather "looks and talks like a kindly, sensible Middle-Western housewife, stout, low-heeled, good at marketing and mending"), and, above all, a few kind words about the author's latest. Given Time's practice of deploying multiple reporters, these profiles were often the most thorough or invasive of their time. (The J. D. Salinger cover story is a good example of this.) Given Time's goal of reaching the broadest possible audience, these profiles also turned their subjects into rather flat characters: Cather the housewife, Hemingway the hunter, and so on.
The other thing to say about Time's audience is that, from the beginning, the magazine has paid attention to lowbrow lit. Its cover story on E. Phillips Oppenheim praises his "light fiction" and opens with a mutually flattering comparison to Henry Ford, and this is one of many such examples. In fact, after surveying its literary history, I'm more surprised that Time hasn't put Dan Brown or Stephanie Meyer on its cover than that Jonathan Franzen made the cut. (Time did put Harry Potter on its cover for what was essentially a profile of J. K. Rowling.)
Below, you too can survey this history through links to the covers and cover stories for each of Time's literary stars. Read them to chuckle at the magazine's weakness for hype (Robinson Jeffers is someone "a considerable public now considers the most impressive poet the U. S. has yet produced"). Read them to get a contemporary perspective on some historical figures (though don't expect the best and the brightest: Lillian Ross's New Yorker profile of Hemingway, for example, is much better than Time's). Read them to marvel at Time's uncanny ability to feature the best writers' worst books. Most of all, read them to watch how this red-bordered cultural institution ferries between the high and the low. The Virginia Woolf cover story is especially good at this, but all of them do it to one degree or another. Even Jonathan Franzen's.
Time put 14 authors on its cover in the 1920s, 23 in the 1930s, seven in the 1940s, 11 in the 1950s, 10 in the 1960s, eight in the 1970s, four in the 1980s, four in the 1990s, one in the 2000s, and, now, Franzen in 2010. That adds up to an objective-sounding 83, but I should explain my principles in compiling this list. While Time also likes to revive dead authors—Faulkner, for example, submitted to that second cover in 1964, two years after his death—I included only living authors who wrote primarily imaginative work: novels, plays, or poetry. These criteria still left room for some judgment calls—William Allen White did not make the list because he's better known for his politics and his newspapering (and because White's cover story focuses on his Kansas gubernatorial campaign), but I kept Upton Sinclair and the cover story on his California gubernatorial campaign. Feel free to dispute my choices or to add anyone I missed in the comments.
Each entry includes the author's name and, where applicable, the name of the work that prompted the profile. There are also links to a print-friendly version of the cover story and to an image of the cover itself. In fact, thanks to Time's new paywall, the Franzen cover story is the only one you can't read online.
Joseph Conrad. "A Great Novelist to Visit the United States." April 7, 1923. Cover image.
Israel Zangwill. "Imaginary Interviews: Israel Zangwill, Englishman of Letters." September 17, 1923. Cover image.
George Bernard Shaw / Saint Joan. "Saint Joan." December 24, 1923. Cover image.
Eugene O'Neill / All God's Chillun Got Wings. "All God's Chillun." March 17, 1924. Cover image.
Amy Lowell / John Keats. "Miss Lowell Eulogizes, Analyzes, Forgives the Poet." March 2, 1925. Cover image.
Booth Tarkington / Women. "Mr. Tarkington's Ladies." December 21, 1925. Cover image.
H. G. Wells / The World of William Clissold. "Wells, Wells, Wells." September 20, 1926. Cover image.
Rudyard Kipling / Debits and Credits. "Loud Kipling." September 27, 1926. Cover image.
Sinclair Lewis / Elmer Gantry. "Bible Boar." March 14, 1927. Cover image.
Michael Arlen / Young Men in Love. "Mayfairian." May 2, 1927. Cover image.
E. Phillips Oppenheim / Miss Brown of X. Y. O.. "Number 100." September 12, 1927. Cover image.
Eugene O'Neill / Strange Interlude. "New Plays in Manhattan." February 13, 1928. Cover image.
Edgar Wallace / People. "Master of Mass." April 15, 1929. Cover image.
Robert Bridges / The Testament of Beauty. "Laureate Testifies." December 2, 1929. Cover image.
Willa Cather / Shadows on the Rock. "Amen, Sinner." August 3, 1931. Cover image.
Eugene O'Neill / Mourning Becomes Electra. "Greece in New England." November 2, 1931. Cover image.
Philip Barry / The Animal Kingdom. "Angel Like Lindbergh." January 25, 1932. Cover image.
Robinson Jeffers / Thurso's Landing and Other Poems. "Harrowed Marrow." April 4, 1932. Cover image.
T. E. Lawrence / The Odyssey [trans.]. "Scholar-Warrior." November 28, 1932. Cover image.
Noel Coward / Design for Living. "First Englishman." January 30, 1933. Cover image.
Gertrude Stein / The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. "Stem's Way." September 11, 1933. Cover image.
James Joyce / Ulysses. "Ulysses Lands." January 29, 1934. Cover image.
Thomas Mann / Joseph and his Brothers. "Great Mann." June 11, 1934. Cover image.
Upton Sinclair. "California Climax." October 24, 1934. Cover image.
Maxwell Anderson / Valley Forge. "Washington, by Anderson." December 10, 1934. Cover image.
Kathleen Norris / Woman in Love. "Golden Honeymoon." January 28, 1935. Cover image.
John Buchan. "Canada's New Governor General." October 21, 1935. Cover image.
George Santayana / The Last Puritan. "Philosophic Footballer." February 3, 1936. Cover image.
John Dos Passos / U.S.A. trilogy. "Private Historian." August 10, 1936. Cover image.
Virginia Woolf / The Years. "How Time Passes." April 12, 1937. Cover image.
Sidney Howard. "Meat Show Meeting." June 7, 1937. Cover image.
Ernest Hemingway / To Have and To Have Not. "All Stones End . . . ." October 18, 1937. Cover image.
Holger Cahill. "In the Business District." September 5, 1938. Cover image.
Andre Malraux / Man's Hope. "News From Spain." November 7, 1938. Cover image.
William Faulkner / The Wild Palms. "When the Dam Breaks." January 23, 1939. Cover image.
James Joyce / Finnegans Wake. "Night Thoughts." May 8, 1939. Cover image.
Carl Sandburg / Abraham Lincoln: The War Years. "Your Obt. Servt." December 4, 1939. Cover image.
Kenneth Roberts / Oliver Wiswell. "Angry Man's Romance." November 25, 1940. Cover image.
Sinclair Lewis / Cass Timberlane. "Laureate of the Booboisie." October 8, 1945. Cover image.
Craig Rice. "Mulled Murder, with Spice." January 28, 1946. Cover image.
Eugene O'Neill / The Iceman Cometh. "The Ordeal of Eugene O'Neill." October 21, 1946. Cover image.
C. S. Lewis / The Screwtape Letters. "Don v. Devil." September 8, 1947. Cover image.
Rebecca West / The Meaning of Treason. "Circles of Perdition." December 8, 1947. Cover image.
John P. Marquand / Point of No Return. "Spruce Street Boy." March 7, 1949. Cover image.
T. S. Eliot / The Cocktail Party. "Mr. Eliot." March 6, 1950. Cover image.
Robert Frost. "Pawky Poet." October 9, 1950. Cover image.
James Thurber. "Priceless Gift of Laughter." July 9, 1951. Cover image.
Graham Greene / The End of the Affair. "Shocker." October 29, 1951. Cover image.
Joyce Carey / Prisoner of Grace. "Cheerful Protestant." October 20, 1952. Cover image.
Thorton Wilder. "An Obliging Man." January 12, 1953. Cover image.
Ernest Hemingway. "An American Storyteller." December 13, 1954. Cover image.
Andre Malraux. "Man's Quest." July 18, 1955. Cover image.
Herman Wouk / Marjorie Morningstar. "The Wouk Mutiny." September 5, 1955. Cover image.
James Gould Cozzens / By Love Possessed. "The Hermit of Lambertville." September 2, 1957. Cover image.
Boris Pasternak / Doctor Zhivago. "The Passion of Yurii Zhivago." December 15, 1958. Cover image.
J. D. Salinger / Franny and Zooey. "Sonny." September 15, 1961. Cover image.
Tennessee Williams / The Night of the Iguana. "The Angel of the Odd." March 9, 1962. Cover image.
Evgeny Evtushenko. "A Longing for Truth." April 13, 1962. Cover image.
James Baldwin / The Fire Next Time. "The Root of the Negro Problem." May 7, 1963. Cover image.
John Cheever / The Wapshot Scandal. "Ovid in Ossining." March 27, 1964. Cover image.
Phyllis McGinley. "The Telltale Heart." June 18, 1965. Cover image.
Robert Lowell. "The Second Chance." June 2, 1967. Cover image.
John Updike / Couples. "View from the Catacombs." April 26, 1968. Cover image.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn / In The First Circle. "The Writer as Russia's Conscience
Headline." September 27, 1968. Cover image.
Vladimir Nabokov / Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. "Prospero's Progress." May 23, 1969. Cover image.
Gunter Grass / Local Anaesthetic. "The Dentist's Chair as an Allegory in Life." April 13, 1970. Cover image.
Richard Bach / Jonathan Livingston Seagull. "It's a Bird! It's a Dream! It's Supergull!" November 13, 1972. Cover image.
Norman Mailer / Marilyn. "Two Myths Converge: NM Discovers MM." July 16, 1973. Cover image.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn / The Gulag Archipelago. "An Artist Becomes an Exile." February 25, 1974. Cover image.
Gore Vidal / 1876. "Laughing Cassandra." March 1, 1976. Cover image.
Alex Haley / Roots. "Why 'Roots' Hit Home." February 14, 1977. Cover image.
John Le Carre / The Honourable Schoolboy. "The Spy Who Came in for the Gold." October 3, 1977. Cover image.
Mario Puzo / Fools Die. "Paperback Godfather." August 28, 1978. Cover image.
John Irving / The Hotel New Hampshire. "Life Into Art." August 31, 1981. Cover image.
John Updike / Bech is Back. "Perennial Promises Kept." October 18, 1982. Cover image.
Garrison Keillor / Lake Wobegon Days. "Lonesome Whistle Blowing." November 4, 1985. Cover image.
Stephen King / It. "King of Horror." October 6, 1986. Cover image.
Scott Turow / Burden of Proof. "Burden of Success." June 11, 1990. Cover image.
Michael Crichton / The Lost World. "Meet Mr. Wizard." September 25, 1995. Cover image.
Toni Morrison / Paradise. "Paradise Found." January 19, 1998. Cover image.
Tom Wolfe / A Man in Full. "Tom Wolfe Writes Again." November 2, 1998. Cover image.
Stephen King / "Riding the Bullet." "Everyone's A Star.com." March 27, 2000. Cover image.
Jonathan Franzen / Freedom. "Great American Novelist." August 23, 2010. Cover image.


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Celebrating Its 35th Anniversary Heroes Con Stays True to Its Roots by Honoring Comics, Creators and Community
While the Heroes Convention (held in Charlotte, NC) may have grown vastly in size over its 35 years of existence, it's resisted the temptation to expand into larger media or become broad "pop-culture" festival. Instead, it's maintained its focus on comics and pays tribute to the creators and the work that has gotten them where they are today.
And nothing epitomizes this idea more than the headlining book of the show, the Mike Wieringo Tellos Tribute. Ten years after the tragic loss of Mike, this 2-volume set features the art of over 200 creators paying tribute to the fantasy world he co-created with Todd Dezago. Heroes Con hosted both a panel and a signing with several of the artists in attendance and all proceeds were donated to the ASPCA (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals).
That wasn't the only charity involved with the convention. A Drink N' Draw event was held on Friday night with the proceeds going to Team Cul de Sac to benefit Parkinson's Research.
This led nicely into the larger annual Heroes Art Auction held on Saturday night with attending artists donating pieces of art from projects they've worked on or specialty pieces created just for this event.
This is one of my favorite parts of Heroes Con and my daughter's as well. We enjoy seeing some of the pieces being created live on the art stage during the show as the artists work on them. Anything that catches your eye can then be bid on later that night. Though good luck trying to afford some of the nicer ones.
I could only stare in envy at the Wonder Woman painting by Andrew Robinson. At least my daughter was lucky enough to hold David Petersen's Mouse Guard and the Skottie Young painting of Eleven (Stranger Things).
As for the show floor itself, it's a nice mixture of comics greats from the past, current big name creators, and indie artists trying to make it in the industry.
Convention variants included a Love & Rockets #1 you could get signed by both Jaime & Gilbert Hernandez and Motor Crush #1 by Cameron Stewart, Babs Tarr and Brandon Fletcher, all of whom were in attendance.
Also, Loose Ends #4 was finally available in the original series format. For those of you that don't know, this title by Jason Latour, Chris Brunner & Rico Renzi was originally published in a larger size format on thick paper stock by 12 Gauge Press. The fourth issue never came out until Image recently published the series in standard size comic form, but those of us who bought the original 3 issues, it was nice to finally complete the set. (Loose Ends team below).
Creators who were there promoting debut issues include Alison Sampson (below) with Winnebago Graveyard #1. She had several variants with her including some retailer exclusives, so anyone interested in those were smart to snatch them up.
Paul Maybury (below) was there promoting A New Terror, a Latinxploitation comic, due out through Buño Books early next year. He did have mini comics, prints and stickers for those who wanted something now.
One image that really seemed to get people's interest was this one of Wonder Woman and her Nubian sister by Marcus Williams.
And if you're looking to dig deep and find some quality indie comics, I would recommend checking out the boys at Stock Pile Comics (below). There had some interesting comic series going on with titles like Forever Winter, Man-Gull and Broken Legacy. These are good books that don't look like the comics you typically see on shelves.
There were way too many amazing creators and fascination projects to cover in just a short recap, so that will have to do for this year. You can bet I'll be back next year, and if you haven't had a chance to check out this convention in person yet, might I suggest year 36 as a good time to start. (Jason Latour and Jason Aaron below).
For more on HeroesCon visit the site here.
Tags: heroes conpaul mayburySkottie Young
— Tyler Chin-Tanner
Tyler Chin-Tanner is a writer, artist and publisher of comics & graphic novels. He founded the small press publishing company, A Wave Blue World, in 2006 with his wife Wendy.
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Home » News » Electric Picture House is among over two hundred independent cinemas supported through the culture r
Electric Picture House is among over two hundred independent cinemas supported through the culture r
● Support for independent cinemas this Christmas reaches £16 million, as Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden announces grant awards for 202 cinemas across England from Penrith to Penzance
● Cinemas can apply for a further £14 million in grants from the second round of the Culture Recovery Fund
● More support for screen supply chain as Film and TV Production Restart Scheme extended until April 2021 and cover now available for cast and crew over 70 years old
The Electric Picture House Cinema, Wotton-under-Edge's independent cinema, is among the 200 independent cinemas across England being supported this Christmas with £16 million in grants from the Government's £1.57 billion Culture Recovery Fund. 202 cinemas have received funding so far from a £30 million pot allocated by the British Film Institute (BFI), on behalf of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, as part of the biggest ever single investment in this country's cultural sectors. More grant applications from independent cinemas are also currently being assessed. Cinemas will be able to apply for another £14 million in grants in the new year as part of the second round of the Culture Recovery Fund. The new round of funding is in addition to the £30 million already being allocated by the BFI.
The BFI has been accepting applications and awarding grants to independent cinemas throughout the autumn. Eligible cinemas were able to apply for Safety Grants, to help venues meet the immediate costs of implementing Covid-secure measures to protect staff and audiences, and larger Business Sustainability grants to help stabilise sites financially. Recognising that cinemas need content, during this crisis, the Government's Film and TV Production Restart Scheme has helped keep the cameras rolling at the other end of the screen supply chain. The £500 million scheme, which opened for applications in October, has assured nearly 100 productions that they will be supported if future losses are incurred due to Covid-19 and provided the confidence they need to restart filming.
From today, the scope of the Restart Scheme has been extended so that cast and crew over the age of 70 can be included in the cover provided by the scheme. The changes to the scheme will enable productions to receive compensation for Covid-related delays affecting up to two cast or crew members over 70 years old. This extension will give productions that involve cast and crew over 70 the confidence to start or restart production, increasing employment opportunities for this group. The deadline for productions to register for the scheme has also been extended until April 2021, giving more film and high-end TV projects the security to start shooting in the spring.
Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden said: "The magic of film is such an important part of the festive period and this investment will help protect our independent cinemas so they're around for many Christmases to come. Alongside it, the extension of the Film and TV Production Restart Scheme means the UK will be producing even more great content as the cinema industry recovers, keeping us at the forefront of the creative industries."
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, said: "As a Star Wars fan, I know there's no better place to experience great films than in your local cinema and these grants will provide vital support for independent venues through Christmas and beyond. Our Restart Scheme has already helped to get nearly 100 film and TV productions back up and running as part of our Plan for Jobs, and it's right that we extend this to support even more jobs in the UK's creative industries, including for the over 70s."
The majority of the grant funding allocated by the BFI has been awarded to cinema sites in every corner of the country, from Penrith to Peckham and Penzance, with cinemas outside London benefitting from 78% of funding to date.
Gareth Negus, Director of the Electric Picture House Cinema, said, "After a tumultuous year, we are relieved and delighted to have been awarded this funding from the Cultural Recovery Fund. The stability this provides will allow us to continue offering our audience a diverse, exciting and entertaining range of films from across the world, while we explore the continued challenges - and possibly opportunities - created by the disruption to the cinema industry. We know the people in our region share our enthusiasm for the cinema experience, and we look forward to sharing more films with them."
Actor Michael Caine, who starred in Christopher Nolan's Tenet which drew audiences back to cinemas in the autumn, has welcomed the help for the industry and encouraged audiences to support cinemas with safe visits where possible.
Sir Michael Caine said: "The moving image has the power to change the way we think. The power to inspire; to delight; and to move. It happens to me all the time. Film is one of the most powerful and accessible art forms on earth – and for so many a local cinema is a place we know, love and have grown up with. A cinema is very often a vital part of any community and we need to support them in order to keep the art of film and the sense of community alive. Let's go to the pictures!"
The BFI worked closely with individual cinemas to provide detailed and bespoke support throughout the application process.
Ben Roberts, BFI Chief Executive, said: "Across the country, local independent cinemas are hubs and lifelines for communities and often the only form of culture and entertainment. From educational programmes and workshops for young people, to screenings for the elderly and audiences with specialised needs, these cinemas play such an important role in people's lives. The Culture Recovery Fund will mean that many of these cinemas survive the current crisis, and go on to play a vital role in the recovery of local economies and communities, bringing people together to offer joy, solace and the magic of the big screen."
More than £1 billion has now been allocated from the Culture Recovery Fund to support culture in all four nations during the Covid-19 pandemic. Northern Ireland has allocated £29 million to a Covid-19 Culture, Languages, Arts and Heritage Support Programme, and over £5 million to a Heritage Recovery Fund. Wales has established a £63.7 million Cultural Recovery Fund which includes £20 million to support music, dance, theatre, literature, and the arts allocated by Arts Council Wales. Scotland's £59 million funding package has also supported the arts, heritage, and grassroots music and established a £15 million Culture Organisations and Venues Recovery Fund.
£14 million in further support will be made available to cinemas through a second round of funding allocated by the BFI early next year from the remainder of the Culture Recovery Fund. Funding was held back to allow the Government to respond to the changing public health picture and will support cinemas at imminent risk of collapse before the end of this financial year. Cinemas which have not yet applied as well as those that have already received support will be able to apply for additional funding to help cover reopening costs from April to June next year. Guidance for applicants and eligibility criteria will be published by the BFI; Arts Council England and the National Lottery Heritage Fund have also published guidance for applications to the next round of grants. Cinemas are also able to apply to the repayable finance scheme for arts and cultural organisations.
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Spring is upon us and Easter is creeping right around the corner. For some, we are enjoying some 70 degree weather while others are still getting a dusting of snow. Wherever you may be, we hope that you are ready for Easter. This week Hella, our hostess has asked you to break out your well loved Stampotique stamps and create something with an Easter theme. Make sure you hop on over to Hella's blog for an extra special creation this week...you won't want to miss it!
We've enjoyed everyone's creations and appreciate everyone participating in our challenges. The creations are all great, each one so different from the next and of course we love to see you creating with the Stampotique Stamps!
So, head on into your craft room- or if you can't find it, just plop down anywhere and get started on that Easter themed creation using your Stampotique Stamps for a chance to win $15 gift certificate for the Stampotique Originals store.
If you need some inspiration, make sure to check out the bunny hoppin' design team creations below. You can click on their creation to take you to their blog to leave them some lovin'.
The Winner for this weeks Challenge is Paula Whittaker.
Paula, please contact vickig@kos.net for details on how to claim your prize!
This job is so difficult!
It's my turn to choose three faves from the entries so far from all the amazing artwork entered in the Spring has Sprung challenge. There are still a few days left to join in with the fun, so please still enter if you have something Springy to share.
I'm very excited this week as its my turn to host the third Stampotique Designer's Challenge.
Here in the UK the sun has started to shine and the daffodils are making an appearance so I've decided on 'Spring Has Sprung' for the theme. I hope that nature is springing back to life where you are and giving you that feel good factor...and if not (I know the snow is still hanging around for some of you) maybe joining in the fun here will help make up for it.
As its another 'first challenge of the month', we are back to using any stamp manufacturer, but if you have any Stampotique Originals stamps then it would of course be wonderful to see what you can come up with using those.
Below you can see a fabulously wide and varied collection of ideas submitted by the members of the Stampotique Design team. By clicking on to any of the images it will take you directly to their blog.
If you are uploading to SCS or another site please use SDC3 as your keyword. Upload your direct link to your card (or what ever it is you've created...it could be an altered something or a 3D item, anything you like) on Mr. Linky below. Links that do not directly link to your challenge item maybe deleted. Please leave your link by 6pm EST Tuesday March 23rd 2010.
One participant will be randomly selected to win a $15 gift certificate to spend on stamps of their choice at Stampotique Originals store.
Congratulations!! Happy shopping! Please contact Carol at Carol@Stampotique.com to claim your prize.
On behalf of the Stampotique Design Team, we want to thank you again for making the color challenge this week such a success. We have so much fun seeing the wonderful displays of creativity you all have, it's amazing to see the same stamp being used in two completely different ways.
Before each new challenge, the hostess will be choosing her favorite three favorite creations and this week was my choosing. This was soooooooooooooooooooo hard to do! I've gone through all the submissions so many times and each creation had elements I really liked.
I love the background of her card, and her pairing of the images with the sentiment she added reminded me of ZZ Top.
The colors on Alix' card really just POP out to me and how can you not love her hilarious "Get A Head" card?
I have to say this clean card, with just touches of the color really stood out for me. Really makes me Dream BIG!!!
Congratulations to our featured stampers this week, if you would like a Featured Stamper's Logo for your blog, please send me an e-mail at khowardga at gmail.com and I will be happy to send it to you.
Thanks to everyone for playing this week, and if you are still wanting to join us, you have until Tuesday evening to submit your entry.
Our new challenge will be posted at midnight on Wednesday, can't wait for you all to join us and see what you create! This next challenge will be using any stamps, but of course we *love* to you use your Stampotique Originals stamps.