“The Book Was Better.” Or Was It?

Curiosities
May 19, 2013 | 2

Did Baz Lurhmann’s Great Gatsby adaptation leave you feeling a little disappointed? Then consider Kate Kelsall’s short list of “utterly compelling cinematic adaptations” to be just what the doctor ordered.

works on special projects for The Millions. He lives in Baltimore and he frequents dive bars. His interests can be followed on his Tumblr, Nick Recommends and Twitter, @nemoran3.

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Curiosities

Code-Switching Patchworks

Curiosities
May 11, 2016
Over at Ploughshares, Daniel Peña traces a parallel between Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and Gloria Anzaldúa’s hybrid text Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. As he puts it, “To separate Anzaldúa from the larger canon (and subsequently from those books she influenced) is to ignore her contribution to American literature. It’s to say she doesn’t belong in that kind of highbrow conversation, which she so obviously does—even Nelson acknowledges that she does.”
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2 comments:

  2. It’s tempting to make comparisons between a novel and its movie adaptation, but print and film are two disparate media. Each can do what the other cannot. Each has to be taken on its own terms, with its strengths and limitations. More on that here, with examples from Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘The Remains of the Day,’ Yann Martel’s ‘Life of Pi’ and others: http://www.praguerevue.com/#!stirring-words-moving-images-when-novels-become-movies/cug1

    Speaking of ‘The Great Gatsby,’ here is Robert Towne, one of Hollywood’s most revered script writers (Chinatown, Shampoo etc) on why he steered clear of screen adaptations of Gatsby: https://twitter.com/ScottFeinberg/status/316836677664534528/photo/1

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Curiosities

“Then suddenly, a bicycle”

Curiosities
November 12, 2013
"Since I often biked to my therapist’s, he took note of my helmet and asked how my new exercise regimen was going. It’s going great! I said. I love it! I wish I’d known earlier that I ought to bike. Now I hated going underground. It was like the death instinct to go underground, into the subway. I never realized I hated it so utterly until I didn’t have to do it anymore." On riding a bike in New York.
Curiosities
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