Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, a film adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s collection of stories, takes women for a subject, or it comes as close as a male author can come. (Which is not very, we learn.) Men are the literal subjects of the movie. Each scene is an encounter with one of the hideous men of the title, either in an interview room or out in the world. The interviewer is Sara, played by Julianne Nicholson, who looks just like a young Rebecca De Mornay with a pixie haircut. Events in her personal life have left her baffled by men; she uses her post-graduate research to get answers. So she asks men about women, and this is the sense that women are the movie’s subject – they are the subject of the subjects, which we can more briefly refer to as objects.

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s-

Just as you’ve got accounts and creative at Sterling Cooper, there’s a money/creative team behind the scenes of every TV show, Mad Men included. And accounts must love Christina Hendricks, who plays Joan Holloway. There’s obvious marketing value in having someone like her on a show otherwise filled with a lot of guys with parts and dark suits. Joan makes a major impression, a red-headed bombshell trussed up in sheath dresses, with a physique that frankly seems impractical but is absolutely striking. Ask someone who’s only barely aware of Mad Men what they know about it: “Is that the one with the redhead?”

Creatively, Joan’s function is less clear. She was, early on, something of a mascot, someone to stick front and center in all the marketing material. Battlestar Galactica did the same thing with Tricia Helfer. (Another show that knew the value of a woman in a red dress.) But as BSG continued, Helfer went from mascot to a major player. Same with Holloway, who was initially “intended only to be a guest role,” according to this interview. “Hendricks’ on-screen magnetism, however, soon changed that.” But what kind of role does she have now? Is she a lead?

Critical Consideration

I made it my business to annotate the hell out of Mrs. Dalloway. I filled margins with scrawled equations  and cross-referenced cfs. And as I was annotating, every note was further confirmation: this book is excellent. I am enjoying this book. But was I actually? Or was I just enjoying the idea of it, the game of fabricating enjoyment through clever annotations? And does it make a difference?

The subjectivity of art means all criticism is built atop a bog. Nothing can be said with certainty, and Newton’s third law applies to criticism: for every rave, there is an equal and opposite rant (usually written by Armond White). What compromises these discussions even further is that we aren’t even sold on our own position. Before I take my particular idea to market, I have to moderate a murky debate with myself. Aesthetic response, the most natural thing in the world according to one school of thought, turns out to be just as knotted as artistic creation.

Is this what we do, now?

Try not to let them see what you’re up to.

The Last Percentile

Lately, before I go to bed I think to myself: tomorrow you’ll be productive. And I always mean it. The thought gives me a warm sense of purpose, the kind of forward progress one likes to think about while drowsing under the covers.

But then I wake up and turn hypocrite. I am currently house-sitting for my college advisor while she’s in Europe. The house has 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, 2 cats, and not much else. There’s a flat screen, but it’s an afterthought in the room it occupies, tucked in a corner with no good sightlines from the couch. There is no one here but me, and none of my friends are around. I have a stack of books I’ve been meaning to read, and big ideas about projects I’ve been meaning to finish. But I also have an internet connection, an Xbox 360, and the game Red Dead Redemption. So far, Ernest Hemingway has been thoroughly outcompeted for my time by the open-world adventures of ex-outlaw John Marston, which features the kind of writing you’d expect from a videogame, and offers absolutely nothing new or interesting to say about the West. But you can steal horses and shoot the hats off people’s heads and duel and hunt cougars in the mountains and I’m just going to stop there because if I don’t I’ll go play rather than finish this essay.

I wondered aloud to my writing teacher whether or not it’d be better – from a production standpoint – if TV, internet, and videogames didn’t exist. He waved me off, said a friend had aired the same idea to him years ago. My teacher had countered: well then you’d be listening to the radio instead of writing. His friend had regressed the tech level further. “Say no radio, then.” My teacher still didn’t buy it. The idea that a writer, without modern distraction, would spend long hours of satisfying study in his library, reading his many leather-bound books, was an excuse fantasy, he said.

Maybe so. But I think I buy it.

May Recap

15373 to start off the year. That’s a sub-par month compared to my average (around 24k a month), but since I haven’t broken 16k since last November, it’s becoming par for the course. A full week of Zeroes (or at least close enough to). The numbers would be respectable if I could get rid of those. The excuse this month — and it’s more legitimate than most months — was graduation, which turned into a circus fast.

Work wise there was progress. I’m trying to finish and polish my senior capstone, and to that end I’m busy filling gaps in the Hillsdale collection of short stories.

Beat the ghost 8 times, but still ended up 7.7k in the red.

I’m paying more attention to my punch clock, and I’m simply not getting enough hours in. 12.5 isn’t good enough. Again, 0s hurt these numbers a lot, which shows how important forward progress (no matter how incremental) is.

June’s always a productive month for me, and I’m hoping I can come back here July 1st with serious numbers. Or I’ll just keep watching “Become Legendary” commercials on YouTube.

The Year in Graphs

My writing year starts on May 10, which means I recently wrapped up my second year of statkeeping.

April Recap

So, not a great month. April ’09 was 17k more productive than this April. I’m sure there’s a perfectly valid reason for this. It’s definitely not the fact that I’m watching almost every NBA playoff game.

Words in the Woods

James stops in front of a tree, takes his Swiss Army knife and carves their initials into the bark. KW + JB. Kelly likes it. She likes the sharp angles of the letters; she likes the crucifix shape of the plus; she likes the arithmetic of it and finds it to be true; she likes that her boyfriend carries a Swiss Army knife and stays outdoors and when he gets a tick he just clicks his tongue like he nicked himself shaving. The light comes through the leaves. The tree does not seem hurt at all. He brushes over the cuts and turns to her with a grin.

How much can a declaration of love carved into a tree mean? A great deal, of course.

March Recap

I like stats more than my major (English) would suggest. I like stats more than my AP Calculus test score of “N/A” would indicate. For someone clumsy as I am with numbers, I love them when they’re the right kind.

All kinds of stats, really. Basketball’s obvious — who’s a 20-10 guy this season? Also the more arcane stats: PER, adjusted +/-, TS%. I like the stats sabermetricians keep more than the sport of baseball.

I’ve got Nike+ tracking minutely my every run. The idea of having the statistic of that run is often more compelling than the thought of the run itself.

What’s so great about statistics? They let you predict the future. They uncover value missed by the naked eye. The numbers don’t lie.

GRAPHS AHOY