Happy Birthday Mr Gaiman

Put The Graveyard Book on your list. Even if you don't have time for it right now, the next time you're in a bookstore pick it up for the illustrations.

More XKCD

Stitchpunk

I really like animation for two reasons: 1) the director has the ability to construct every frame, 2) it is really hard to tell a good children's story. Both of these things take an extraordinary imagination, which can make for really great film.

Shane Acker makes a good attempt in 9. He certainly has imagination. The post-apocalyptic world is stunning, and its few characters are compelling. The technology is interesting, the chases are thrilling, and the escapes are narrow enough to be satisfying. The film will inspire a host of young boys who have not yet given up make-believe games to new adventures in the backyard. But when I turn away from nostalgia, it is easy to see that the plot is not tight as it could be, and dialogue too often falls flat, primarily because the characters' motivations are a bit predictable. Still, none of this kept me from enjoying the movie.

You can find reviews at Metacritic, but the best one is at the Onion's A.V. Club, which has the wonderful word humunculus. The reviewer at Slate, who posted today, also thought so.

Even if you don't see the feature film, Acker's original short is pretty good.

On the Set

The upcoming Fantastic Mr. Fox makes five Wes Anderson films for the wonderfully deadpan Bill Murray. The workload is obviously taking its toll.

That lout Everett Reed, who has managed to totally disuade anyone else from posting on the blog, has also recently wormed his way into becoming an administrator on the blog. Kelly and I'll do a big post soon on the CSC at Lipscomb.
JKE

Happy Birthday Father Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things –

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.

O Frabjous Day!

Johnny Depp has taken up yet another top hat for director Tim Burton. Alice in Wonderland, their seventh collaboration, incorporates live action, motion capture, and stop animation. Vanity Fair and Wired have a few production pictures, and the first teaser trailer debuted just a few days ago at Comic Con. In addition to the standard format, it will be released in IMAX 3-D so Burton's imagination can be both ridiculously large and incredibly close.

Which reminds me -- Jonathan, Melody, and I saw Coraline in 3-D on a snowy day in Ann Arbor this past winter. It is now available on DVD. Put it in your Netflix cue.

Today at the Writers' Conference

This morning Melody and I drove up to Sewanee to hear a panel on publishing with editors Kathy Pories of Algonquin, Elizabeth Schmitz of Grove/Atlantic, and Gary Fisketjon of Knopf. They were all very gracious, but I was especially pleased to speak with Mr Fisketjon for a moment after the panel broke up. He has been McCarthy's editor since Albert Erskine retired from Random House, but I also learned that he fought for Suttree to be included in a little line of paperbacks he launched in the eighties called Vintage Contemporaries. He says that he treats a McCarthy manuscript just like all the others, estimating he reads approximately five pages an hour. What a job.

Also, I must say that my lady loves me. Today is her birthday. And what does she want to do? Go see people she has never heard of talk about books.

Afterwards, we went swimming at the reservoir just off campus. Then we came home for an amazing birthday cake Melody baked for herself yesterday because I was trying to finish a paper.

Happy 110 Papa

Today in 1899 Hemingway was born in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago. To commemorate the occasion, Scribner, now a division of Simon and Schuster, is reissuing his works with newly designed covers. Most notably, A Movable Feast is being in offered in what is billed as "the restored edition." NPR and NYT have articles. UPDATE: longer review in WSJ.

Happy Birthday Mr McCarthy

Today in 1933 Charles McCarthy Jr. was born in Providence, Rhode Island, but just a few years later the family moved to Knoxville where his father worked as a lawyer for TVA. Some sources say that Cormac (a legendary high king of Ireland, as found in the Annals of Clonmacnoise) was used as a nickname within the family, others indicate that his name was legally changed. He currently lives north of Sante Fe.

As of May of this year, the Cormac McCarthy Papers are open for research at the Alkek Library of Texas State University . Road trip, anyone?