Because we all know that I like to populate my blog with award nomination and winners lists, here is the recently released National Book Critics Circle Award Nominees.

Autobiography
Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone by Joshua Clark
Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat
The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973–1982 by Joyce Carol Oates
Writing in an Age of Silence by Sara Paretsky
A Russian Diary: A Journalist’s Final Account of Life, Corruption, and Death in Putin’s Russia by Anna Politkovskaya

Nonfiction
American Transcendentalism by Philip Gura
What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815-1848 by Daniel Walker Howe
Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet Washington
Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA by Tim Weiner
The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

Fiction
Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra
The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
In The Country of Men by Hisham Matar
The Gravedigger’s Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates
The Shadow Catcher by Marianne Wiggins

Biography
Stanley: The Impossible Life Of Africa’s Greatest Explorer by Tim Jeal
Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee
Ralph Ellison by Arnold Rampersad
The Life Of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 by John Richardson
Thomas Hardy by Claire Tomalin

Poetry
Elegy by Mary Jo Bang
Modern Life by Matthea Harvey
Sleeping and Waking by Michael O’Brien
The Ballad of Jamie Allan by Tom Pickard
New Poems by Tadeusz Rozewicz

Criticism
Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints by Joan Acocella
Once Upon a Quniceanera by Julia Alvarez
The Terror Dream by Susan Faludi
Coltrane: The Story of a Sound by Ben Ratliff
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross

Chandra or Diaz could both easily take in the award (Junot Diaz’s debut is incredible by the way) but I have a feeling that Joyce Carol Oates will probably take it home. Anyone banking on her to pull in that Nobel sometime in the next few years too?

It’s been a few weeks now since the writer’s strike kicked into full effect and everyone started anguishing about the loss of their favorite TV shows to the eventually clogged machinery of Hollywood. I was rather upset myself that Scrubs did not get a proper farewell and that The Office was off the air in mid November. I missed The Daily Show something fierce and eventually started popping DVDs in before I even turned the TV on.

But, fast forward a few weeks, and do I really care all that much that I don’t have much to watch on television - not really. It’s just not that interactive of a medium. The thing that I have realized before and that dozens of other people before me have tried to insist to the legions of young fans who have nothing better to do than glaze over and stare at their television sets is that there is nothing essentially about what you see on the TV every day.

It came to me about 9 months ago really. I had been working at home for about three months and kept the television on every day. I usually put it on Fuse or something and zoned out as the music played, but I was still incredibly non-productive as a result. I would flip channels, watch videos, and be distracted by annoying commercials.

When the work started pouring in, I started muting or turning the TV off until my “paid” work was out of the way. It was my way of creating an office environment in which to be productive. Push forward to the summer and I was actually leaving the room when my girlfriend flipped the television on because it was so distracting. Today, I will quite literally go almost until 9 or 10pm every night without even touching the remote, and I’m not always working that late - I just don’t care what’s on, and it’s not just me.

So, when someone asks me, as a writer, if I care about the Writer’s Strike, I have two answers. First, I say I am supportive of the writers and their demands. Everyone deserves to get paid for their work. Second though, I make sure to say I really don’t mind that there’s nothing on to watch. It’s just television and besides, these Late Night talk shows have actually gotten pretty interesting without writers for the hosts to lean on as a crutch. Conan’s singing folk songs and Colbert’s reading the New York Times - It’s good old fashioned awkward fun.

It seems like every few months, something gets the Catholic League or some other self-aggrandizing Christian group all lathered up and spitting foam into the air in hopes that someone might step in their way. It’s a familiar cycle - the same thing we’ve seen with “anti-christian” elements in half a dozen movies or the attempts by the Harry Potter series to “indoctrinate” our children with the idea that witchcraft is okay.

I can’t say I fully understand what has them so angry, other than that they don’t understand the basic tenets of entertainment. First, the story. The Golden Compass, the incredible first book in a three novel series of children’s books written by Philip Pullman, a noted agnostic (see where this is going) is being released on Friday in theaters everywhere.

Now, here’s a quote from the Catholic League about the “sinister purpose” of the film:

“The Catholic League wants Christians to stay away from this movie precisely because it knows that the film is bait for the books,” said president William Donohue.

“Unsuspecting parents who take their children to see the movie may be impelled to buy the three books as a Christmas present. And no parent who wants to bring their children up in the faith will want any part of these books,” he added.

Of course! Hollywood is pursuing the agenda of the agnostic-middle, those bastards who have been raised in a religious world and feel that it has gone slightly askew. How could the Agnostics possibly have gotten such an idea. Doesn’t everyone know that a good Christian’s sole purpose is to protest children’s films for presenting an alternate perspective of organized religion? How dare Pullman try to teach children they have a right to be individuals in an increasingly high-pressured, demanding world. That bastard.

Here I was thinking all Hollywood cared about was the money…how misguided I’ve been.

Unfortunately, just like the last film that the Catholic League stood up and whined about - The DaVinci Code - it appears that the Golden Compass isn’t that good of a movie to start with. It’s a shame really, because as long as the films with “blasphemous” messages fail to find good directors and actors (seriously, if 50 million people read a book, make a better movie), the Catholic League of Downers will continue to think they’re actually having an effect on the entertainment industry…

Makes me feel as though we should start an agnostic strike against the next Narnia movie. Who’s in?

Everyone Run! It’s a Jesus hunting Polar Bear!!

I found this article on Salon.com, an excerpt from the new book, “The Fall of the House of Bush” by Craig Unger. Basically, it’s a look into the life and times of George W. Bush and how he managed to go from ambling drunk to president in 20 years and then back into the margins of near-obscurity again. I’m not saying I dislike George Bush….wait, yes I am. Here’s my favorite part of the article:

When the younger Bush got to Alabama, however, he continued drinking, according to Allison, often ambling into work at midday, boasting about how much he’d drunk the night before. One night at a party, she saw George W. urinating on a car in the parking lot. He reportedly shouted obscenities at police officers, and trashed a home he rented, leaving behind broken furniture he refused to pay for. “He was just a rich kid who had no respect for other people’s possessions,” a member of the family who rented the house told the Birmingham News.

The National Book Award Winners were announced yesterday. I have not read any of these quite yet, but Tree of Smoke has been sitting on my bookshelf waiting to be read for a few weeks now and I’ve been a long time fan of Sherman Alexie (I attended the University of Washington where he frequently teaches). I’ll have to pick his latest up, even if it is a children’s book.

• Fiction: Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
• Nonfiction: Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner
• Poetry: Time and Materials by Robert Hass
• Young People’s Literature: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

A recent Forbes feature, asking some of the top science and science fiction writers of today to postulate on the same basic idea graced my inbox this morning, so I thought I would share it with you. The article starts with this premise:

What happened to the future? Weren’t things supposed to be cooler by now, smarter, safer? Raised on a steady diet of science fiction, overzealous politicians and corporate hype, Americans expected to be living in The Jetsons — but instead find themselves stuck in a scarier version of The Waltons.

The truth is that people simply aren’t very good at predicting the future. It was only two centuries ago that we began to think we could do it at all, and we’re still learning. Hindsight may be 20/20, but foresight remains largely blind.

The feature then goes on to include a collection of great, creative non-fiction, including a few articles by the likes of Arthur C. Clarke and Quentin Hardy, along with five short stories by writers like Cory Doctorow, Max Barry, and Warren Ellis - all impressive fiction writers in their own right. You can find the whole feature here.

I was a huge fan of Kelly’s first film, Donnie Darko and it has been a long time in coming for his second. Unfortunately, it’s looking more and more like it might be a monumental flop. I’ll have to wait and see though - I seem to remember the original theatrical Donnie Darko release being a bit of a mess too, and it didn’t matter. Here’s an excerpt of the review from SpoutBlog:

“Could any film ever hope to overcome a festival drubbing like the one that greeted Southland Tales at Cannes 2006? Screened in competition, in an early incarnation clocking in at 2 hours 40 minutes (director Richard Kelly later claimed it had been a rough cut all along, but that’s apparently not how it was billed to the press at the time), Kelly’s follow-up to the slow-burning cult hit Donnie Darko was roundly, emphatically, infamously booed. Sometime after the first shockwave of bad buzz hit the States, a handful of critics rose to defend Kelly’s vision. The rest of us sat back and waited a year and a half to get a look for ourselves…

“In the film’s press notes, Kelly says he set Southland Tales in Southern California’s cultural sewers in an attempt to live up to the film noir’s seedy tradition, and oddly, if there’s one high-ish cultural mode that his characters are familiar with, it’s noir–judging by how many times it pops up on TV screens here, Kiss Me Deadly is the only film that survived the bomb. But with Kelly taking so many shots at various facets of rancid counter-culture, I wonder if he’s not aiming to shatter the post-Darko cultural suppositions foisted on him against his will. Kelly, a former frat boy, has always seemed a bit bewildered that Darko became a sensation amongst hipsters, goths, and countless youth cults. Southland Tales may fail on a lot of levels, but it’s fairly successful as an epic satire on the very notion of “alternative” culture. In practice, the Darko faithful may be the only viewers who will have patience enough to deconstruct Kelly’s vision, but I suspect that he’s not playing to his base so much as trying to shake it.”

Right now the flick is sitting at 41% and the more respected critics actually seem to be sticking up for it. I suppose I’ll sit back and wait for now and see what comes of the whole spectacle, but I’m hoping it’s not as bad as they seem to think it is.

I haven’t commented on the writer’s strike yet this week (mainly because I haven’t really posted anything), but as it starts to carry on, the landscape begins to look bleaker. I am a fan of only a few select television programs, all of them scripted and all of them either off the air already or within an arm’s length of being so.

First, today was supposed to be the day on which John Bolton, the mustachioed former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations visited the Daily Show. I don’t know about you, but I live for the combative interviews Stewart has with former administration officials and right wing hacks. He always lets them say just enough to draw the trap before dropping the cage and pouncing. It’s good fun.

Second, it looks like Scrubs will not be getting a series finale. The show has been in limbo for a long time now, just barely eeking out the contract for a final year and now it looks like there will not only not be a full season, we won’t get a full goodbye. That’s just wrong.

Third, I hate reality TV, and as a matter of course reality TV is not only cheap to produce but does not require the services of union writers. In fact, part of the demands by the WGA is that reality TV writers be in the union (although, it is admittedly the lowest thing on their list and likely a throw away). Regardless, January is going to be a gluttonous mess of reality TV that I don’t want to go near with a ten foot pole, while shows that I like such as The Office, Heroes, or Lost will wallow in their own well written early season graves. Oh, the humanity.

I understand fully why the writers are on strike and I support them 100%. It’s a shame that the other side isn’t willing to sit and nogotiate so we can enjoy our favorite programs. It’s a bigger shame that the writers have been stuck with a 19 year old contract that promises limited to no returns on media that did not even exist when the last contract was written. So, good luck with the strike and here’s hoping for an early resolution so that the entire winter is not host to endless and equally mindless reality TV one shots. I can’t handle any more.

Okay, I know I said I would write more about my work of late, but I thought I’d throw this article in to talk about the recent wave of decent films that followed a previous wave of awful films. Gotta love summer movie season:

I’ve been incredibly surprised thus far this summer with the rampant success of films like Transformers and Live Free or Die Hard. Honestly, I like everyone else, assumed that the super huge sequels of May would be the highlight of the summer movie season. Three trilogy ending mega-blockbusters to critically acclaimed franchises (Spiderman, Shrek and Pirates of the Carribbean) couldn’t possible fail, right?

Well, they didn’t fail at the box office, but they surely failed in the reviews. They were bad films, plainly stated. By Memorial Day weekend, I was bent on keeping my cash firmly planted in my pocket to ensure I didn’t spend any more of my hard earned money on another clunker. The $30 that I squandered in May was enough for me. It’s a sad experience to look at a site like Rotten Tomatoes and find the top 5 movies all have rotten ratings and yet people are willing to shell out hundreds of millions to see them.

Which is why, going into June, I didn’t expect to the blindsiding of films like Ratatouille, Ocean’s Thirteen and the final Die Hard. To be honest, I wasn’t disappointed once with a film I saw in the last month and a half. After the dredge and muck of May, June and July have been good to us and I’m intrigued as to why this is the case. With the exception of Ratatouille and Knocked Up, the rest of the summer is adaptation and sequel heavy. However, these ones have managed to do something the earlier failures did not, succeed.

Genre Film Success

It doesn’t take that much to succeed in genre film. I’m sure many of you are sneering, wondering how I would know anything about the film making process and what works and what doesn’t work. Honestly, I don’t. However, what I do know is what makes a good film, and in genre films it doesn’t take much. Live Free or Die Hard is probably my best example of how this works. Instead of imbuing the film with subplots, romances, unnecessary tertiary characters and maniacal super villains with twisted back stories, the quintessential action film franchise did what it always did best 15 years ago – it blew things up.

For the most part, the reason so many films are considered failures is because they fail the expectations of their viewers. For a genre film, expectations are markedly low. An action film is not meant to tug on heart strings or offer a pointed political debate. It can do both and a few films have managed to tie everything together into a beautiful menagerie of brilliantly written film. However, for the summer film series, people want something entertaining and fun to sit and watch under the cool fans of air conditioning while it’s 100 degrees outside.

And the basic formula for a film like Live Free or Die Hard is so brilliantly simple that it’s hard to believe that other films don’t get it right more often. A loose yet believable plot, a couple of smart-ass main characters, one of them very angry and a whole lot of kicks to the face and exploding cars. The film makers know the stunts are outrageous. In fact, even the characters in the film know how ridiculous their actions are. It’s a big joke and we’re all in on it. By recognizing and making light of the over-the-top nature of the action genre, the director can quickly move beyond it and get to the matter of simply enjoying it.

Where films like Spiderman 3 and Pirates failed was getting too carried away with their own premises. The first Pirates film was the perfect balance of camp and clever winks to the audience. It was funny, entertaining and easily made light of its own premise. The second and third film started to take it all too seriously and exploit the smarminess of Captain Jack and the embattled relationship of Elizabeth and Will. Thus they began to fail. Genre films are built on shaky premises. It’s the films that are willing to recognize that shaky premise and embrace it as fully as possible that ultimately succeed.

Originality Also Works

And then there are those films with original plots, written as films from the start. They are incredibly rare in the summer movie season. An original comedy or action film is as hard to come by as a brilliant video game adaptation but when they squeeze through the cracks and find a home in the June and July movie season, they have the potential to clean up at the box office. Both Knocked Up and Ratatouille are prime examples of the strength of an original script and brilliant writing/directing, in this case by Judd Apatow and Brad Bird.

What makes these films work though is not just that they are original. There are plenty of “original” comedies released in February and March every year that just plain stink. Ironically, it is in comedy more than any other genre that embracing the genre and diving headfirst can actually fail. It’s not that the formula doesn’t work. It’s that a bad writer and poor jokes written into this formula create a horrendous film.

Apatow and Bird have both proven in their previous films an immense ability to both understand write about the humanity present in all comedic situations and vice versa. They do not craft outrageous settings and relationships full of gags. They create meaningful characters with purposeful relationships and definite growth. Their casual observations about things like growing up, accepting who you are and becoming responsible are themes that transcend genre. In their hands though, these themes also become open fodder for brilliantly observant comedy, something very few other writers or directors can manage.

When everything is said and done, the summer movie season tends to be a hit and miss affair, full of iffy films, major disappointments and a few rare gems. However, this year, it appears that the disappointments were top heavy and the rest of the summer has produced mostly gems. With The Simpsons Movie still on the way and a small handful of more sequels and comedies en route, there is a chance that this could become one of the better summer movies seasons in recent years.

This day and age, the world of Epic Fantasy has lost a bit of the punch that it once had. Falling victim to one of two categories – either the Tolkien imitators or the Rowling imitators – it doesn’t do anything new or interesting anymore. It’s all the same tired clichés, medieval double speak, and shallow stories of intrigue and secrecy. It’s almost as bad as the cloud of DaVinci Code clones that hit the stores a few years back and are just now (finally) starting to subside. But, with Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind, there is finally a somewhat new and different approach to the tired old formula.

Essentially, Rothfuss has a very organized approach to his epic. Instead of a drawn out, open ended debut that eventually leads to a dozen less and less interesting volumes in an epic storyline that should have been told in three books, he started out with a closed, simple story idea. His character, Kvothe is the center of everything. A very simple tale of revenge starts everything and it builds out from there. There is no universal calling to greatness or special powers bestowed from a long dead warrior in rebirth. The magic is simple and scientific and the other characters see him as human, no matter how impressive he might be.

The novel starts in a small village with Kvothe as the anonymous owner of a small inn with the assistance of his Fae-born assistant, Bast. When a villager arrives to the inn with a wound, a dead horse, and a small spider-like demon, the story begins and Kvothe takes matters into his own hands. While he is dealing with the spider-demons, Chronicler arrives, looking for the man who was once known as Kingkiller and asks for his story.

Kvothe’s story itself is where the actual narrative arrives. Despite more than 80 pages having passed, the actual narrative of the story is in the recollections of Kvothe. Starting with his youth and following him as he learns from a traveling Arcanist in his family’s troupe and his years in the streets of Tarbean and later his first year in the University, the novel is about the younger days of our future hero and the bits and pieces that make him who he is.

Without ever giving over to the details the reader surely wants (those big battles and epic nicknames he’s acquired) the novel is a pure character analysis, giving 650 pages of exposition and history told in a familiar, first person narrative. It rarely feels like a standard fantasy novel and the sheer detail and attention given to Kvothe’s childhood and experiences make it all the more intriguing.

Instead of those quick two chapter overviews of amazing feats and skills learned in youth, Rothfuss gives us a full novel of youthful experience and motivation, introducing dozens of characters, numerous settings and scenario specific motivation and a perfect character with just the right amount of innate ability to make sense, without a third person narrative making him the next messiah. As a reader of all genres, a good solid character driven novel makes me that much happier to read fantasy.

There are no outlandish scenarios or cookie cutter characters who I’ll forget in a few weeks. This is a character to truly love and stick with throughout the years. And when, in two years or so, when the new novel is released, I will be more than happy to continue the adventures of Kvothe. A splendidly unique debut fantasy novel that catapults him immediately to the pinnacle of today’s young fantasy writers and reminds everyone why some of yesterday’s big writers are just not that great anymore.