TV Guide channel is hosting a Dirty Dancing holiday marathon. Why? …Because it’s NOT It’s a Wonderful Life.
Film and the Holidays
- Slate’s piece on “The Best Vehicles for Pumpkin” is disappointing. They forgot oatmeal.
- I just watched A Room with a View the other day, in which Daniel Day-Lewis plays Cecil, a pretentious “Edwardian prig.” And then! Here’s More Intelligent Life‘s best-of Day-Lewis’ CV.
- Gawker wants your Thanksgiving horror stories.
- In Norway, though, someone has deliberately destroyed a 650-house gingerbread village.
Oprah, Opting Out
- Already on the lookout for the next Oprah? Can’t we mourn, people?
- Also, Jezebel’s got a mashup of 25 yeras of the Goddess screaming celebrity names. It’s pretty funny.
- And the publishing industry now has someone to blame when they die. I can hear it now: “If only Oprah had never selfishly quit….we’d all have jobs today.”
Lit., Print, and Protest
- Might the New York Times actually pull out ahead in this whole print-is-dying stumbling block?
- All literature is protest, but all protest is not literature.
- Paper Cuts excerpts Roberto Bolaño’s last interview.
- James Wood lampoons, mildly, the novels of Paul Auster.
- The problem of Jane Austen (and why all those pervasive parodies might not be all bad).
- “On Writing Too Well”: William Safire, William Buckley, Jr., and Evelyn Waugh.
- Finally, it’s settled. Unhappy people make the best writers.
