You probably already know this, but FilmComment is dedicating an entire issue to The Canyons: http://www.filmcomment.com/….

I'm not sure I like the idea that one person's work should be valued more highly than another's just by default of past success, but in this case, yeah, it seems like they could have given Schrader/Ellis the benefit of the doubt, inasmuch as both have shown that they know what they're doing a zillion times over.

That's a good point. I suppose I should take into account that IV was the first of his books I read, and even though I skipped quite a few of the pieces, it did make me come back for more.

I'm sure I'm the minority voice on this, but I think that Eating the Dinosaur is easily his best book. It's the only one I've read that seems able to use the strengths of his writing voice and also make arguments that are not transparently bullshit.

I'm confused by this comment. In Eating the Dinosaur, Klosterman actually did seem to show "growth" as a writer—i.e., instead of simply putting together riffs for cleverness, he seemed to be genuinely engaging with the topics he was discussing on a serious level as well as making jokes about them. But observe: the…

Reading this has also convinced me that Reposted IMDb Comments is ripe for gimmick-poster exploitation (har, har):

Any judge worth his salt will know this, right? I hope this is strictly a "stupid people are stupid" story, or I might have to start going back to church.

That book was an author's worst nightmare. It's like: I'm not particularly ashamed of the stuff I write intermittently online, but I sure as hell don't want it bound between covers. He had chances to collect most of those pieces (Federer excluded), and he decided they were lacking. Mostly, I agree.

In addition to this, don't new stories happen at, say, people's jobs? I don't work with my spouse, so I have ~12 hrs. of experiences each day that have nothing to do with her. This seems like quite a bit of new story material for each day.

Then watch YouTube videos together. GoT would only feed the temptation.

Pro tip: just find media you both like. Doesn't that solve at least some of the "what to talk about" problem? I've been married for five years; tonight, I watched four hours of Game of Thrones.

In the Company of Men has a sort of awful greatness. Ditto Your Friends & Neighbours. Shape I could take or leave…but once I saw The Wicker Man, LaBute migrated from my list of "must see" directors to the "avoid" category. The review makes this movie sound like the sort of dish I would like, though. Apparently I…

Um, you might want to check out the name on the spine of Infinite Jest again.

I worked in a juvenile prison for a while as a student teacher, and there were many times that this idea drummed itself in my head. The people I was living with at the time decided that one weekend they wanted to have a pot party, and they told me that I should probably find somewhere else to go that evening in case…

I used to live in an apartment complex across the street from the University of Kansas film studio where it was supposedly cut. It's been on my Netflix queue for a long time, but I can never get past the description to actually watch it.

The two books you talk about in your first paragraph are two books I read significant percentages of and then abandoned. Of the things in your second paragraph, I abandoned V., but found both the Franzen and Percy books to be enjoyable and worth reading.

That's funny—I'm reading The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood, which looks at how the flood story shaped the history of geology as a science.

I have to agree with these reading vacationers. I never would have finished Anna Karenena had I not spent three weeks in Japan, with some layovers.

I found Auschwitz to be an amazing series, too. The documentary I thought was most enlightening on the subject of the Nazi ideology, on the other hand, was The Architecture of Doom, which used to be on Netflix, but (I just checked) isn't anymore. It discusses how the Nazi ideology grew out of a perverse aestheticism,…

@avclub-a1967e6de4ca99fb2635d94b99453928:disqus And now you know how Reality is created from the bouncing echoes that endlessly repeat themselves in the mind of God.