From a Slate review of "Living Lohan," (E!, Mondays at 10:30 p.m. ET):

"Living Lohan, however, is not just a symptom of cultural decay but an active agent of it, commodifying the very youth and soul of Ali Lohan—younger sister of poor little Lindsay."


From a NYT article on the bad dialogue great plotting glossy "Emperor's Children" by Yale-educated Messud (and reviewed by Yalie Megan O'Rourke):


"Although none of her classmates appear as characters in the novel, Yale did provide inspiration. There she met peers who had grown up attending dinners and cocktail parties with their literary parents and friends, “worlds that were to me only mythical,” she said.

“The certainty that that gave people was novel and fascinating, and I think initially wholly enviable,” she continued. “And then over time it became clear that it involved struggles and burdens of a different kind.” Recognition of those burdens, she said, provided the seed of the complicated relationship between Marina and her father.
....
Ms. Messud does not shy away from portraying unappealing sides of her characters. Susan Taylor, a bookseller at Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza in Albany and Market Block Books in Troy, N.Y., said that although she enjoyed “The Emperor’s Children” and was intrigued by its characters, she “didn’t want to be any of them or go out and have a cup of coffee with any one of them.”

She added, “I thought, ‘You have every privilege in the world and you still can’t figure out how to make your life work.’ ”


HOW TO MAKE MY LIFE WORK
1. Why am I in China
2. Why am I in China
3. Why am I in China
It's economically feasible to be writing a novel here, sure, but there could not be a place more fucking distracting. My one hour of CHinese class per day is really more like four if you count transportation and study time, and then I've got my social life to live up to which is like, a silly seven hours per day of nothing, and then I've got my TV watching which, given the content of the novel, feels sometimes like homework. Oh my god, and then you've got Gossip Girl which is like, a solid four hours per day. So

I googled "writer's colony" for fifteen minutes today, switched to "fellowship" then googled people who had either broken my heart or whose heart I had broken, to make sure they weren't more successful than me yet. (Read: Hadn't published shit outside of their places of summer internment.) Penultimate thoughts: I'm more ambitious than I pretend to myself to be. Ultimate thoughts: I really think "The Emperor's Children" is problematic and I need to write about it. It's a novel that feels filled in. It's... Okay


When you go into an art gallery and you see an aesthetically beautiful painting of something which could have been captured in either
a. a photograph
b. a mutated digitized mucked up photograph
You're taught to ask why, specifically, is this a painting? Why is this story being told in this way? If it could have been made in ANY other way than painted on canvas, the day's criticism would have it that it should have been. The difficulty of answering this question is why so many, over the decades, have declared the form dead. Now it can be answered with the retort: "It could not have been conveyed in any other way." Obvious retorts are Richters that play on the form of the photograph or of the squeeged paint itself, Sol LeWitts that are staged, or even simple moody Tuymans and glooging glugging Neo Rauschs whose visual language anyway, evokes ad campaigns from the 50s and 60s.

Now lets jump to what Alice Adams said about writing fiction, I think it was her at least... Saying that a novel can never be summarized because... Because a "story" is precisely that which takes a "story" to tell; It simply unfolds as is without extra fabric.

The Emperor's Children is all extra fabric. It reads like a long outline, meticulously plotted which has been filled in with mushily readable writing. It's akin to a needlepoint. I could have seen the image in the needlepoint without all the thread, if I had simply looked at the pattern.

Clearly the same is not true in oh, on one end of the spectrum a Pynchon novel--the language is the plot, the images make the plot whirl--or on the other end of the spectrum, a William Maxwell short story--where the leaden language without hyper hijinks creates its own mood and where outline would read as story-less, without suspense. Messud has basically written the plot of a teledrama and filled it in with palatable writing. I kept thinking the whole time of what Ian Frazier said at some talk--when you have a "crazy" impulse in your writing, go with it. Messud NEVER went with it. Sure there are "crazy" descriptions but they're tempered tempered tempered and boring boring boring.

That was an insane rant.


I wish Bootie Tubb wasn't such an obvious Stevie stand-in (from Conrad's "Secret Agent") because that's the trick IIIIII WANTED TO STEAL, having Jareth's drawing at the opening of my novel (all of its tricky squares) stand in for Stevie's whorls:

"Mr Verloc, getting off the sofa with ponderous reluctance, opened
the door leading into the kitchen to get more air, and thus
disclosed the innocent Stevie, seated very good and quiet at a deal
table, drawing circles, circles, circles; innumerable circles,
concentric, eccentric; a coruscating whirl of circles that by their
tangled multitude of repeated curves, uniformity of form, and
confusion of intersecting lines suggested a rendering of cosmic
chaos, the symbolism of a mad art attempting the inconceivable.
The artist never turned his head; and in all his soul's application
to the task his back quivered, his thin neck, sunk into a deep
hollow at the base of the skull, seemed ready to snap."


I clearly need to have Gloria see that.