Thanks for this comment. I read Chronic City, and I've been very confused about the "Jonathan Lethem = Good Writer" rumour ever since.

Team Saunders! Ben Stiller optioned CivilWarLand in Bad Decline years ago, and he's skipping that to make something with the literary world's douchiest douchebag? NOOOO!

Dear @avclub-b9a8f4af85454f7c56c06f0a39e7ec23:disqus ,

I know you're joking about my being an "old man" (at 25, I'm just longing for a past that probably never existed, etc.), but I think that the turn-of-century musicians who feared the phonograph weren't wrong to do so. John Phillip Sousa, for instance, whose concert-band shows were the perfect public spectacle for his…

I have a bad opinion on this, probably because I'm a semi-pro musician who works doing very, very uncool music (read: wedding gigs). It's not that I don't have modern popular musicians who I like—I do—but something seems to have happened c. 1950 that makes me profoundly uninterested in going to rock concerts. It's…

This is so true. It was a huge, huge disappointment when I was able to start watching R-rated movies and found out that most of them were completely un-terrifying (religious upbringing had suggested otherwise, okay?).

Although it's tough to out-douche you on this one (at least when you had the ftnote embedded in your comment), I'll try by noting that DFW was being a dick, in that case. His comment was the opposite of what your paraphrase implies: he was saying that Lynch cares about people, while all Tarantino cares about is the…

So I guess we should talk about democracy, now, huh.

Notably, Louis CK wrote all his lines. He is not playing Dane Cook, there, really.

I saw this at the Globe Theatre a few years ago, on a collegiate "literary tour" thingy. I hadn't read the play before, and all I really remember is that at the end all the actors gathered around some dude and someone came up with this big sopping red thing which I guess was ostensibly supposed to look like said…

Hafta admit, improbably enough, that that was my hopeful click's desire, too.

Fuck cromulence, bitch—namasayin?

LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a coked-out bitch lying on my table

I meant the "naturalism" thing like as in the movement that Frank Norris (of McTeague fame) gets categorised in by some lit scholars: the background environment has the main causal role in the story, and the characters play out their pre-determined roles on that set canvas.

Bloke did a fair bit more than that.

"Well," the bearded scientist said as he headed toward his strangely homogeneous media collection, "I guess an entomologist can always use another copy of The Hellstrom Chronicle, now can't he?"

Man, I liked Contagion. Sure, it had some mis-steps (I thought the kute kiddies at an improvised prom were a bit much), but it was a film for which Soderbergh's chilly style was perfectly suited. Millions died, but the stars barely blinked. It seemed to acknowledge the superfluous nature of its characters: this was…

This is turning into a regular Meyers-Briggs-type categorical bonanza!

There's a deleted scene from Pulp Fiction in which Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) takes out a videocamera to ask Vincent Vega (John Travolta) the question she asks all her guests: Are you a Beatles man or an Elvis man? The question, she contends, gets straight to the heart of the person's character more quickly than any…

I don't get it. Please explain.