'No Country for Old Men' Cleans Up

I enjoy seeing a movie as dark and interesting as 'No Country for Old Men' earn this sort of adulation. Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay. Not bad. Oh, and add Javier Bardem for Best Supporting Actor.

'No Country for Old Men' Wins Big at Oscars - NPR
On a night when the acting awards had a distinctly international flavor, a quintessentially American story of violence — No Country for Old Men — made the deepest impression on Oscar voters at the 80th annual Academy Awards.
A ceremony once threatened by the recently concluded writers' strike was the setting for multiple triumphs by No Country, a film adapted from the work of the unflinching novelist Cormac McCarthy and the wide-ranging writing-directing team of brothers Joel and Ethan Coen.
The bleak tale of the bloody aftermath of a botched West Texas drug deal won Best Picture and the Coens were jointly honored for Best Achievement in Directing and for Adapted Screenplay. Javier Bardem, who played the sociopath at the center of the action, topped a deep field for Best Actor in a Supporting Role.

Richard Ford Leaving Knopf is News?

The Novelist Richard Ford Leaves Knopf for HarperCollins - Books - New York Times: "In a surprise move, Richard Ford, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Independence Day” and “The Lay of the Land,” has switched publishers for his next three books."

I love Richard Ford, but can someone tell me why this is news? Do the other authors' changing relationships make it the New York Times?

I may not think it qualifies as "news" it probably does signify a coup for Ecco. If anything it may also mean that Ford's next book will get a more "literary" treatment.

Book Review: Ward No. 6 and Other Stories

Ward No. 6 and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov


I was amazed by this wide ranging collection. These are psychological stories, with nothing held back. The mode in contemporary fiction, indeed fiction of the last thirty years, is to keep strong emotion hidden. The feeling has been that it is better to show, to express it with action, as opposed to with words. But the truth is that we feel these things, we say these things to ourselves, things that are more dramatic that anything we see in modern fiction.


"Kill me! Kill me!" the protagonist of "The Grasshopper" proclaims.


I often wonder if I have my characters over-think things, putting too much into words. I've been accused on more than one occasion of as much. But I do not write distant stores. My stories tend to take place within the minds of the characters, and it would be false to deny them from expressing what they feel.


What do we miss in today's fiction by not connecting deeply with the characters?


Some of the stories in this collection were so good that I could hardly put the book down. They were strong psychological stories, were sometimes nothing at all happened, or where some decision turned out fruitless. Other stories were long, meandering and devoid of meaning. I will never understand why anyone would the longest and most boring story at the end. There were stories that read like fables full of magic. They were philosophical stories, riddled with ponderances that left me wondering for some time afterward. Yet, as much as I was stirred by some of the stories, I was grateful to get to the end. I may not have been enjoying the collection near the end, but there are stories here that make "The Lady with the Dog" seem just mediocre.

Yes, We Can

I've tried to keep my mouth shut on the whole political issue, but after seeing Obama last week and thinking about the importance of what we do tomorrow, I thought that the least I could do was leave you with this little video to inspire you.

LSD, television westerns, and literary "sex and sadism"

From The Marketing Mode by Theodore Levitt, copyright 1969.

In such a world, combined with generic-product standardization and far-above-subsistence living, it is not surprising that man responds eagerly to the fascinating shock of the unexpected. The enormous attractions of marijuana, LSD, television westerns, and literary "sex and sadism" are understandable. They provide man with escape--not escape from reality but escape back to reality. He wants to escape from the artificiality that the machine has imposed on his life and return to a more primitive involvement of his senses with nature in the raw. The only reason teen-agers and college students are greater consumers of LSD and marijuana than adults is simply that adults have greater obligations to the machine. They cannot "drop out" because they are too deeply in. They are prisoners of the world they made.



This accounts for the intensity of the adult furor over LSD. It represents less adults' concern about the health and happiness of their children than the fact that they are envious of their children's freedom. The young people who take LSD trips or smoke pot need it least because they are already so much less thoroughly bound to society's rigid routines. The people who need most to escape, who are most firmly imprisoned by the world from which LSD is an escape and who have the greatest need to drop out, are the adults. They are understandably unhappy about the liberated behaviour of their children.