Jeremy Blachman's Weblog: 2012

Easy and Stupid New Years Resolution #1

** Get rid of all of my open browser windows so I can restart my computer to an empty Firefox **

To do so means I have to read the handful of articles I keep meaning to read but haven't actually read.  Here's the last week or so of articles I'm trying to make myself read:

1. Jeff Bezos interview on Slate, about the Kindle, and e-reading more generally.  [OK, I read it.  It's not that long, and it's really interesting.  And makes me wish I worked for Amazon.]

2. A long article about how technology has killed friendship.  Or at least that's what I think it's about, but I haven't read it yet.  

[OK, before reading the article, something I've been annoyed at myself about lately -- I'm usually really good about e-mailing people and staying in touch, but for the past few months I just haven't been.  Partly because I have nothing to say.  Partly because I'm torturing myself with this Anonymous Lawyer screenplay I'm trying to write well enough that I feel like I can e-mail it to people for notes and at the same time justify my existence -- as in, hey, this is what I've been up to, and to actually have something to report in an e-mail instead of, yeah, married life is good, everything's pretty much the same as the last time I e-mailed you -- and so with the script (which is really getting there -- 76 pages as of this morning, and I even like most of them) as this artificial milestone in my head that's going to let me e-mail people after it's done, I haven't been e-mailing people in the meantime.  Partly because I have a handful of friends -- and these are people I really like, people who came to my wedding, people I really want to be in better touch with -- where historically I'm just better at keeping in touch than they are, and so I e-mail and they respond, and if I don't e-mail for a while... well, I'm just not going to hear from them.  And there's part of me that wishes that I didn't always have to be the initiator, and if I'm never going to hear from someone if I don't make the effort, then why am I making the effort? But the truth is that I don't actually feel that way-- some people just don't have the time or grand inclination to keep in better touch, and are probably happy to be in better touch and wish they were more proactive about it, but the fact that they don't e-mail isn't a reflection on me or on how they feel about me, and so I should just e-mail them instead of trying to convince myself I shouldn't-- because the result of that will be losing touch, which I don't really want, and I hope they don't want either.  (And, yeah, I should absolutely pick up the phone sometimes and call people, but I'm so much better on e-mail, so I have a few friends that I do have a regular phone relationship with, and in theory wish I had more, and would love a phone call from people I'm not in great touch with -- but while I will almost always gladly initiate an e-mail back and forth, I'm almost never going to call someone out of the blue unless we've corresponded about it and the call is pretty much expected.)  The funny thing is, I think I was in better touch with a lot of my friends in New York when I was living in L.A.  And I think part of it is about being married too-- it does make the need for a large circle of friends feel less pressing, absolutely-- that fear of being alone fades into the background, the fear that you have to keep in touch with everyone or you end up with no one in your life fades into the background, the need to reach out because you want to share something fades into the background, because you always have at least one person to share with, and so once you get whatever it is out of your head, to repeat the story isn't as exciting as telling it the first time.]

[And now I'm going to read the article.]

[Wow, what an excellent article.  Dovetails well with stuff I've written about being frustrated with communication between people getting shorter and shorter -- I miss knowing what people are thinking and feeling instead of just knowing what they're doing, basically.  Worth reading.  Here's a paragraph I'm plucking from the piece that should give you a sense:

But that is precisely what the Facebook page does not leave room for, or 500 friends, time for. Literally does not leave room for. E-mail, with its rapid-fire etiquette and scrolling format, already trimmed the letter down to a certain acceptable maximum, perhaps a thousand words. Now, with Facebook, the box is shrinking even more, leaving perhaps a third of that length as the conventional limit for a message, far less for a comment. (And we all know the deal on Twitter.) The 10-page missive has gone the way of the buggy whip, soon to be followed, it seems, by the three-hour conversation. Each evolved as a space for telling stories, an act that cannot usefully be accomplished in much less. Posting information is like pornography, a slick, impersonal exhibition. Exchanging stories is like making love: probing, questing, questioning, caressing. It is mutual. It is intimate. It takes patience, devotion, sensitivity, subtlety, skill—and it teaches them all, too.

Link again.]

[And reading that article has caused another window opening in my browser-- the author's previous piece, called "The End of Solitude."  Also a terrific read.  And so now I've opened windows with three or four more of his pieces, and nothing gets closed... hence the browser problem I started with.]

3. A piece from the Future of the Book blog about electronic reading.  Jeff Bezos would disagree with this line: "any device will be obsolete in a year or so, when Apple rolls out its long-delayed tablet and a barrage of Google-powered devices follow in its wake."

[Go read the whole piece, but here's where it starts to get really interesting: "I'm interested in this sensation of immediate gratification: it's one of the hallmarks of the present. ... We don't think about this very much, but this newfound ability to instantly satisfy our desires is actually a very strange development. So much of human development is a process of learning to deal with desires that are delayed or vexed; so much of the history of the book is a narrative of scarceness."]

4. A post about e-book pricing (Can you see a pattern to the stuff I've been reading about lately?  Or at least the stuff I've been opening and promising myself I'd read later) by the very smart Mike Shatzkin, who I saw give a talk about the future of publishing a couple of weeks ago.  [Excerpt -- "What is the new scarce item that will attract the dollars if IP is so common that it becomes hard to sell? The answer is the attention of people: eyeballs. And the winning trick for publishers will be to use the content they control — which today does have value — as “bait” to attract the attention of people and then to keep that attention and build a business around it."]

5. The ten worst Mets moments of the decade.  From the Daily News.

6. Finally, three YouTube videos I've been meaning to link to, each involving a different friend-- one doing some stand-up comedy, one singing a Christmas song, and one who wrote this song that was on the FOX show Lie To Me last week.

Merry Christmas / Happy Almost New Year

Books 2009

The past few years, I read about a hundred books and it made for a nice round number to post about.  This year I didn't quite get to 100 -- I'd blame being married, but the data doesn't support it -- it's the first half of the year, before I got married, that I read relatively little.  I got to 80 books, but even the 80 involves a fair bit of cheating because a couple of handfuls are cookbooks, and do cookbooks really count as reading?  And as I browse the list, I realize there's another five or ten that I remember so little about that I'm questioning whether I actually read them, or I took them out of the library, read a few pages, brought them back, and threw them on the list anyway, just to count them for numbers' sake.  If I'm "reading" for the purpose of saying I've read a hundred books in a year instead of reading because I actually want to be reading, then I'm really just fooling myself.

So I'm not going to list all 80 books I "read," because it's meaningless for me to do so.  Instead, let me try it this way:

Best Novel I Read In 2009:
How I Became a Famous Novelist, by Steve Hely.  This is also the only novel I read in 2009, although that's not by design.  The book got great press when it came out, Hely's a funny writer, and I think it's a really solid piece of work.  The book is the fake memoir of a guy who's a couple of years out of college, has a job ghostwriting college essays for rich kids, and decides he wants to become a bestselling novelist (in order to impress a girl).  So he tries to write the most by-the-numbers bestseller he can, and he succeeds. And then the book decides it needs a plot, and, hey, plot sucks and that's why I don't read novels.  I'm half-serious.  For me, what worked about this book is when he's satirizing the publishing world-- his fake New York Times bestseller list is very funny, the whole first half of the book is filled with observations and situations that are very funny and that resonated with my own experiences with Anonymous Lawyer.  What worked less well for me was what works less well for me in my own writing-- at some point, the book becomes more about the misadventures of the main character than about the satire.  It has to, to be a novel, I know.  As a reader, I was just less interested in whether the guy ends up impressing the girl than what Steve Hely the smart and funny writer had to say about publishing.  But that's why I don't read novels.  I will say, though-- this book justifiably did well, I expect in part because there's enough in there to satisfy a reader like me, and there's also enough to satisfy people who go into it wanting to read an actual novel.  I absolutely recommend the book.

Best Book-Turned-Movie I Read:
No Impact Man, by Colin Beavan.  I blogged about it here.  The book was much better than the movie.  And I didn't hate the movie.

Best Memoir, Baseball Division:
Odd Man Out, by Matt McCarthy.  A minor league baseball player (who's now a doctor) wrote a memoir of his time in the Angels' minor league system.  A nice read, spoiled by my after-the-fact Googling that brought me to a ton of articles saying he exaggerated quite a bit of it.  If you're into baseball books, you will probably enjoy it.

Best Memoir, Non-Baseball Division:
American Parent, by Sam Apple.  Apple's journey as he becomes a first-time parent.  It's somewhere between a memoir, a piece of long-form journalism, and a satire of the modern baby industry.  He explores midwifery and birth coaches and doulas and all sorts of things I know little about.  He's a funny writer, and he keeps everything very personal-- by the end of the book, you feel like you know him-- which is what kept me reading, more than the stories about stroller purchasing.  I am surprised the book seems to have basically gone ignored, at least if Amazon reviews are a measure of anything.  It deserves better.

Best Books About Things People Do With The Internet:
Say Everything, by Scott Rosenberg.  And Then There's This by Bill Wasik.  I wrote about Wasik's book here and Rosenberg's book here.  Wasik's is about how ideas spread virally.  Rosenberg's is about the history of blogging.  These were two of my favorite books of the year, which might mean I am too interested in reading about things people do with the Internet.  If you are interested in reading about things people do with the Internet, you will enjoy these books.

Runner-Up in the Books About Things People Do With The Internet category:
The Accidental Billionaires, by Ben Mezrich, about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg and everyone who's suing him-- which I don't so much recommend, but here's a link to what I wrote after I read it.

Best Book About A Subject I Thought Would Be Too Boring To Read A Book About:
The Book of William, by Paul Collins.  I wrote nice things about it here.  Crazy enough, when looking back through the 80 books I read this year, this one ends up #1.  There is not a book I enjoyed more than this book.  So check it out.

Best Food Book:
Momofuku by David Chang and Peter Meehan.  I like David Chang's restaurants.  A friend took me to the original Momofuku not long after it opened, said the ramen was awesome.  I went back three or four times that summer.  I've been to Momofuku Ssam Bar a few times.  I haven't been to Momofuku Ko (out of my price range) and haven't yet tried the new Momofuku spin-off in midtown.  The cookbook is terrific-- more stories and history and text than most cookbooks (which I like), very compelling, very well-written (Meehan's a New York Times food writer).  And the recipes I've tried all work-- did a bunch of quick-pickling, which I never realized was so easy.  Made his ginger-scallion sauce.  Made fish sauce vinaigrette.  Will make more things from the book eventually.  Nice pictures too.

Some other food books I read, with brief notes (I'm calling the category food books instead of cookbooks, because it's a mixed bag-- I read some books about food with no recipes, and some books that were just regular cookbooks-- even though "food books" makes me sound illiterate):
The Sweet Life in Paris by David Lebovitz-- it's a nice narrative about living (and eating) in Paris, peppered with interesting recipes, none of which I made before giving the book back to the library (but most of them made me hungry).  Born Round by Frank Bruni-- much anticipated, but I thought it was too much about Bruni's struggle with his weight and not enough about his time as restaurant critic.  The Face on Your Plate by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, which makes a case for vegetarianism, good read but I still eat meat.

Best Doctor Book I Read:
Hospital by Julie Salomon -- Match Day by Brian Eule -- Blue Collar, Blue Scrubs by Michael J. Collins -- Patient by Patient by Emily Transue.  The doctor books I read this year all blurred together a bit.  These were all fine books.  I probably exhausted the category in 2008, when I read 12 medical books.  I find this stuff really interesting (and more and more so as I hear my wife's stories from residency).  There is a great book yet to be written about residency (and it's not House of God, which is 30 years old and wasn't my cup of tea).

Best Social Science Book:
How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer.  I blogged about it here.  I've written too many posts where I say I've read too many books in this category.  I know all the social science research anyone needs to know.  I should stop reading these books.  This one's good though.

Movies 2009

For the past few years I've been blogging at the end of each year about the movies I've seen and books I've read.  In 2007, I saw 33 movies.  In 2008, I saw 22 movies.  In 2009, I've seen 16.  I'm not sure this is a bad trend, given most of what's out there.  A number of the movies I saw this year, I saw for free because of either Writers Guild screenings, or the free DVDs I've been getting this month because I can vote for the Writers Guild Awards (all members can, it's nothing special), which no one (including me) has ever heard of.  Even a free DVD can't get me to watch most movies.  Gave Bruno a chance, but my wife and I got about 30 minutes in before deciding we'd had enough.

As far as movies I paid to see in 2009, it's a pretty short list -- No Impact Man, Food Inc., I Love You Man, Funny People, and He's Just Not That Into You, along with two movies I saw at the Tribeca Film Festival (TiMER and The Good Guy) and a screening of Clear Blue Tuesday, a musical about the lives of New Yorkers in the aftermath of 9/11 directed by a friend of mine.

Putting aside the two Tribeca films and the Clear Blue Tuesday screening, I'm left with 13 movies to rank.

Best film I saw this year was Up In The Air, which I liked but didn't love.  I mean, I liked a lot of it, and I thought it was a very well-constructed film.  But in the end, I felt like it was trying to be too many things, and didn't quite hang together as both a romantic comedy about George Clooney and a much darker film about the recession.  I think the film was both helped and hurt by the timing -- two years ago, it's a comedy, albeit a comedy with some satirical notes about corporate life and the pace of the world in which we live, but no one's writing articles about any bigger-picture relevance to the economy.  Coming out now, it's impossible not to take it as a movie about the recession, but then the character pieces of it get a little lost and feel out of place.  In any case, it's a bleak movie, and the trailer doesn't pitch it quite nearly as bleak as it is.  George Clooney's character in the film is sad.  Everyone in the film is sad.  By the end, I was sad too.  But I can still respect the craft, and am certainly glad I saw the movie (and think Jason Reitman is pretty darn talented).

After that, it's a mixed bag.

Second-best film I saw was probably No Impact Man, which I wrote about here.  Followed by Michael Moore's Capitalism movie, which I wrote briefly about here.  I have mixed feelings about both of them, which basically boil down to entertaining movie / skeptical about what it's trying to say.  I have written previously about being a sucker for documentaries.  There is hardly anything I couldn't be convinced to go see a documentary about.

4. I Love You Man

5. Funny People

Neither as funny as I wished, but both certainly watchable.  I Love You Man frustrating because I didn't feel like it had enough to say, and Funny People perhaps because it had too much to say.  The good parts of Funny People are quite good.  The stand-up comedy pieces were hit-or-miss for me (mostly miss), and the last hour, where it turns into a romantic comedy, was pretty slow.

6. Food, Inc. -- which would have been more interesting had I not read Michael Pollan's past few books.

7. 500 Days of Summer -- which I wrote about here, and on second watching on DVD with my wife, I would say that my opinion didn't much change.  I somehow loved it when I read the script, but it didn't quite translate.

8. Extract, which disappointed me because Idiocracy is brilliant.

9. A Serious Man, which I could appreciate as a worthwhile film but didn't quite understand while I was watching it.

10. It's Complicated

11. Taking Woodstock

12. The Invention of Lying

13. He's Just Not That Into You

Bostonian of the Year

The Boston Globe named Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren Bostonian of the Year -- there's a lovely article and worth-watching 4-minute video here.

Copyright

This is a quite excellent piece by Cory Doctorow about copyright law and e-books and how preventing people from owning sharing their e-books is a stupid thing for publishers to be doing.  An excerpt:

Anyone who claims that readers can’t and won’t and shouldn’t own their books are bent on the destruction of the book, the destruction of publishing, and the destruction of authorship itself. We must stop them from being allowed to do it. The library of tomorrow should be better than the library of today. The ability to loan our books to more than one person at once is a feature, not a bug. We all know this. It’s time we stop pretending that the pirates of copyright are right. These people were readers before they were publishers before they were writers before they worked in the legal department before they were agents before they were salespeople and marketers. We are the people of the book, and we need to start acting like it.

It's Complicated

Over the weekend I had the chance to see the new Meryl Streep / Alec Baldwin / Steve Martin comedy, It's Complicated, which comes out in a couple of weeks.  There's a long article in this weekend's New York Times Magazine about Nancy Meyers, who wrote and directed the film.

It's a glowing article.  And Meyers's movies have indeed done very, very well at the box office.

And the article certainly hits on a lot of what's truly lovely about the movie -- the details are wonderful.  The locations, the furniture, the bakery where Streep's character works.

-- Wait, this isn't really the post I want to write.  Let me try this again. --

On Friday, the 2009 Black List was released, which is a list of the best unproduced screenplays, as voted on by executives in the industry.  I've been able to get my hands on a bunch of the scripts and I've read 8 or 9 of them over the past few days, cherry-picking the ones that sounded most interesting to me.

And for the most part, I've enjoyed the ones I've read.

Trying to crank through draft number [who cares] of an Anonymous Lawyer screenplay, I appreciate that it's hard to get these things right.  It's really hard to balance character and plot.  It's really hard to create secondary characters that feel like real people when a screenplay is really pretty darn short.  Think about the non-leads in most movies and how many lines they really have.  To establish any sort of real character in the very limited space on the page is not that easy.

And to map out plot that works, and to populate that plot with characters that feel real and are funny and say and do what they need to say and do to most effectively tell the story you're trying to tell -- it's hard. 

And if you want to add a layer on top of that -- if you want to create something that says something, that is more than just characters and a story but has some meaning behind it, has some connection to reality, has something it's actually trying to say -- that's even harder.

I've written about this before when it comes to books and the authors I want to read -- I wrote about it in my recent post about Paul Collins and his Shakespeare book -- but what excites me isn't really plot and isn't really character.  It's point of view, it's some sort of human connection.  If I feel like I'm getting inside someone's head, inside the head of the writer, understanding the kinds of things someone is thinking about, their anxieties, their take on what it means to live a life, I don't know -- that's what makes me turn pages.

It's hard enough to find that in a book -- but in a screenplay, it's really, really hard.  I read a screenplay that the comedian Demetri Martin wrote a few years ago, called Will.  The draft I read of the Ricky Gervais movie The Invention of Lying (although not really the movie that ultimately resulted from it).  A lot of Albert Brooks's movies.  Parts of Judd Apatow's Funny People, although not as much as I hoped for.  The list is not that long. 

And the stuff I've read so far off The Black List, while readable and funny and for the most part well-plotted and nicely-crafted, hasn't excited me as much as I would have hoped.

-- Which gets me back to It's Complicated. --

Reading the New York Times Magazine piece, I can't help but like Nancy Meyers.  She's clearly terrific at what she does, she clearly has a point of view, she's clearly passionate about the work she does.

She seems much more interesting than the characters that ended up in the movie.  Which is disappointing.

The Book of William

Paul Collins wrote a book a few years ago called Not Even Wrong.  It's about autism, but that magnificently undersells the book.  It's about chasing a diagnosis for his son, it's about the history of autism, it's about how all of communicate and how we understand the brain, and it's a personal narrative of a father and a son... and it's just an amazing book.  I picked it up off the library shelf, I had no specific interest in autism, I was just looking for some books to read and something about it grabbed me.

Loved the book, thought Collins was a terrific writer, and sought out the books he'd written previously, Banvard's Folly and Sixpence House, which I enjoyed as well.  Collins joined Bill Bryson and David Shields on the short list of writers who I've decided I trust enough to read whatever they write, even if I think I'll hate it.

Collins has been testing that faith.  His previous book, The Trouble With Tom, is about Thomas Paine's remains, and where they are.  This did not sound like an interesting book.  I read it anyway.  And while I wished it was more personal, that it was more like Not Even Wrong in that respect, I still enjoyed it.

His latest book is The Book of William: How Shakespeare's First Folio Conquered The World.  Amazon link here.  And maybe it's just me and the Cliffs Notes I used to get through a bunch of Shakespeare plays I had to read in high school (shameful to admit), but there are very few subjects I am less interested in reading about than Shakespeare.  I don't know why.  I wish I had the patience and the desire to really read Shakespeare.  To wade through, to appreciate, to digest.

Bill Bryson wrote a book about Shakespeare a couple of years ago.  A short biography, focused on how little we know about Shakespeare's life.  Was not excited to read it, but since Bill Bryson wrote it, I gave it a chance.  Did not regret it.  It's an enjoyable read.

But I was not that excited to see that Collins was taking on Shakespeare as well.  Especially this particular angle -- the actual first printing of a collection of Shakespeare's plays.  The printing itself, and then what happened to all the copies.  I tried to tell my wife what this book is about, and she fell asleep mid-sentence.  This does not sound like an interesting subject to read about.

And yet it's a marvelous book.  It's about the history of printing, it's about the history of books, about libraries and book collecting and the world in which Shakespeare lived.  It's about Shakespeare himself, a little bit, but it's more about the ancillary players surrounding him and the journeys that books take over the course of centuries.

It's a marvelously interesting book about what I expected would be a very dull topic.  Collins is a terrific writer-- a terrific storyteller and traveler into the bowels of history.  What his books sort of have in common is books themselves-- he digs deep, he chases things no one else is all that interested to chase, he goes to a lot of research libraries.  And makes the stories more fascinating than they ought to be.

In a couple of weeks, I'll write a post like I've written for the past few Decembers, listing all the books I've read this year (it'll be about 85, I think) and finding some way to rank them.  I haven't gone back and looked at my list yet, but I have to imagine this book will be in the top 5, if not even higher than that.

Thoroughly recommended.

Friday Night Lights

I just watched Wednesday night's episode of Friday Night Lights.  That was probably the most powerful, most affecting 45 minutes of television I've ever seen.  Ever.

Brilliant.