This made me laugh:

http://kenyonreview.org/blog/?p=7992#more-7992

posted by Elizabeth at 9:44 PM   2 Comments

I may be late to the party here, or maybe early, caught, as I am, between news of the movie and the publication of the book, which came out four years ago.

The film Winter’s Bone was last month screened at Sundance, where it won the Grand Jury prize, and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. Skimming the news from Sundance on the internet, I saw that Winter’s Bone is about an intrepid teenage girl who struggles to keep her family together after the disappearance of their father.

Odd, I thought. How did that happen? My script Wildflowers of the West is about an intrepid teenage girl who struggles to keep her family together after the death of her father. And there is no market for such a thing, no, none, none at all. What was I thinking?

During my trip to the Austin Film Festival, I barely could spit out the logline (which I felt I had really, really boiled down, boiled down to caramel) before something shiny apparently moved behind my head and my listener was gone. In one case, we were going around a table telling a producer about our projects, and I followed a guy who said, “My script is like ‘E.T. meets Toy Story.’” “My two favorite movies!” cried the producer. “Send it to me!” She then turned her perfect teeth on me, and I got as far as “an intrepid teenage girl …” before the light went out of her eyes.

“Who is your audience?” snapped another woman at the festival, when we casually exchanged loglines. She sounded quite irritated, as though “intrepid teenage girl” was the most repellent phrase she’d ever heard. We were standing in line to see “Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire.”

Based on the novel. Aye, there’s the rub. Winter’s Bone was indeed a novel first. I have spent the weekend reading it and it is one hell of a novel.

The heroine, Ree Dolly, is more than intrepid; she is one of the fiercest and bravest young women I’ve ever encountered in fiction. An Ozark teenager, she has been raising her two younger brothers single-handedly since her mother went crazy (“Mom’s morning pills turned her into a cat, a breathing thing that sat near heat and occasionally made a sound.”) and her father’s primary occupation is cooking meth, which is a kind of family tradition. Her father, gone missing yet again, has put up the house and land for his bail bond. Unless Ree finds him, she, her mother and brothers will be “livin’ in the fields like fuckin’ dogs, man.”

This was published as a Young Adult novel. Don’t ask me how, although that explains how I missed it. I never did understand the YA market, not when my novel was published as a YA, and not since. My own novel is indeed Anne of Green Gables compared to Winter’s Bone¸which our old high school librarian wouldn’t have gotten through three pages of before declaring it unsuitable. The language is filthy. Drugs are everywhere. Sex too is everywhere but far less pleasurable. Love is a slap in the face or a good hard pinch that at least shows you care. Ree's "grand hope" for her brothers is that "these boys would not be dead to wonder by age twelve, dulled to life, empty of kindness, boiling with mean." And then, there are the bad guys.

Apparently Daniel Woodrell, who lives in the Ozarks, coined the phrase, or perhaps invented the genre of “country noir.” He has written eight novels, another one of which,Woe to Live On was made into the film Ride with the Devil. In this, the lead character is an intrepid teenage … boy.

He writes about teenagers for the same reason I do. The stakes are high, the world is bleak.

I am now going to buy everything he has written. And so should you.

Here is his author's page on Amazon. And here is an interview with him in The Southeast Review.

Labels: Austin Film Festival, country noir, Daniel Woodrell, Wildflowers of the West, Winter's Bone

posted by Elizabeth at 4:21 PM   0 Comments

I have to admit, I used to like to watch the Winter Olympics, but now I can barely glance at a television screen without wincing. Speed skating, which was being broadcast in a restaurant where I had dinner Saturday night strikes me, as I remarked to my companion, as “a lot of fun to do, but dull as hell to watch.” Even before the awful luge death, I had planned to avoid the endless coverage, all the slipping and sliding and spills, never mind those overwrought, overproduced mini-documentaries on the gold contender, “Svetlana was born with the blood … of a champion.”

I never wanted to be a figure skater. I have weak ankles and no athletic traits. Also, I hate the cold and hate getting up early, and in those mini-documentaries, stories are always told about the mother of the figure skater getting up at 3:00 to drive Brianna to the skating rink four hours away. It is always the mother of the American women skaters who do this, by the way, partly because Europe is presumably more compact (that is, the rinks are closer and perhaps accessible by train?) but also because Brianna, as an American, has an indefatigable work ethic, while Svetlana was just born that way. (Someone needs to tell the sneering partisans in the broadcast booth that it’s okay to stop hating the Russians now.)

I’m enough of a fogey to state that I liked it better when it was figure skating, before it became a skate-jumping tournament. Also, I can no longer stand to watch some poor kid sacrifice a lifetime of training to the momentary slip in a triple triple lutz thirty seconds into the program. Every time I see them fall, I change the channel.

Labels: Olympics

posted by Elizabeth at 5:40 PM   0 Comments

My dear friend Linda, a/k/a “the hippest chick in Utah,” has annoyed me greatly. She is, as devoted followers of this blog will remember, a music critic for The Standard-Examiner, and the occasional weekend dj on KRCL (See The Nasty Gidgets, Part I). As I outlined in that earlier post, she also writes and produces a podcasty thing connected with the paper, called “The Beat Beat.” Those brief pensants on musical topics -- the music of Haiti (made me cry), a salute to the late, undersung Ellie Greenwich ("she put the words the to Wall of Sound") -- are knowledgeable, inviting and bite-sized.

These little 'casts hook you, indeed. And herein lies the annoyance. Her most recent Beat Beat outlines songs we would gladly never hear again, one of which, for her, is Led Zeppelin's “Stairway to Heaven.”

Well, it is for me, too. I mean, my God. If you had grown up, as Linda and I did, as the hippest chicks in Kirkwood, Missouri (in an underground, unacknowledged, downtrodden, beleagued, wise before our time, why are we here in the basement listening to records on a Saturday night sort of way) getting high on vinyl and despairing at the garden-variety musical taste of our classmates and neighbors, then you, too, would have hated “Stairway to Heaven.” It had all the ersatz, faux-Renaissance, “we come off as quite deep if you’re stoned” and “wot ya think, guys, a flute might be cool here” crappity-crap of 70’s British rock BUT WAS, TO BOOT, always voted #1 in the best songs round-ups of local FM radio stations. (To which Linda and I would listen, as touchingly anxious as an Oscar contender, as though we had some stake in it, hoping for recognition for our favorites).

So, yes, I agree that “Stairway to Heaven” should be included on my list of music I would gladly never hear again for the rest of my life (along with the entire oeuvre of Aaron Copland, Celine Dion and a certain New Yorker whose initials are BJ).

But did Linda, in her audio report, have to quote the lines:

"If there's a bustle in your hedgerow, don't be alarmed now, it's just a sprinkling for the May queen ..."

and then play them as sung by Robert Plant, and then question their meaning? Now I have an earworm (from the German Ohrwurm, meaning a goddamn musical phrase -- usually involving a flute -- that you can’t get out of your head)?

The meaning of these innocuous lyrics is not mystical, or Tolkien-like, or a reference to World War II, as some devotees (who need to move on with their lives) have avowed. The infamous “bustle in your hedgerow” mystery means only, “If the wind is rustling the bushes, it doesn't mean something scary is in there, like a possum or a really large possibly rabid raccoon, it just means spring is on the way.” I have this on the greatest authority. My own.

But what I also have is an earworm.

posted by Elizabeth at 11:37 AM   2 Comments