Weekend books.

It's a terrific weekend for readers, for cinephiles who are also readers or simply for people who enjoy book reviews. "Bad Boys, Mean Girls, Outlaws, Revolutionaries and Beautiful Losers" - maybe in that order, I'm not sure - is the theme of this week's New York Times Book Review, and it could just as easily be the title of a month-long film series, a Hollywood exposé or a study of underground filmmaking in just about any country in any given decade.

But there are more immediate cinematic tie-ins here, starting with John Waters introducing a new edition of Tennessee Williams's Memoirs. Related online listening tip: Dwight Garner calls up Waters to ask what he means by the very first sentence: "Tennessee Williams saved my life."

Other connections to the movies aren't as direct, but what the hell:

Updated through 11/22.

• From Meghan O'Rourke's on Brandon Stosuy's Up is Up But So is Down: New York's Downtown Literary Scene, 1974 - 1992: "The collective portrait here is of a startlingly visceral New York, where physical squalor contributes to a pervasive sense of strangeness, captured in Laurie Anderson's 'Words in Reverse': 'I went to the movies and I saw a dog 30 feet high. And this dog was made entirely of light. And he filled up the whole screen. And his eyes were long hallways. He had those long, echoing, hallway eyes.'"

• Bill Morgan's I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg and Ginsberg's own Collected Poems, 1947 - 1997 get Walter Kirn riffing: "Ginsberg, the hang-loose anti-Ike. Ginsberg, the Organization Man unzipped. The vulnerable obverse of the Bomb. He had the belly of a Buddha, the facial hair of a Walt Whitman and — except for the ever-present black glasses that hinted at a conformist path not taken — he was easier to imagine naked than any Homo sapiens since Adam." Related: "In 1948, Allen Ginsberg's father wrote him a two-word letter: 'Exorcise Neal.'" James Campbell reviews David Sandison and Graham Vickers's Neal Cassady: The Fast Life of a Beat Hero.

• Stacey D'Erasmo on Sleeping With Bad Boys: A Juicy Tell-All of Literary New York in the Fifties and Sixties by Alice Denham, who was "an occasional lover" of James Dean's.

• Emily Nussbaum on Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love (first chapter): "[H]ere it is: all that cathartic keening, curated for your coffee table... The slotCourtney Love filled nearly 20 years ago — the big-mouth punk lunatic feminist rocker, the bad girl as role model — is still open. But it's nice to know the original candidate hasn't stopped auditioning."

• Reviewing Ralph Steadman's The Joke's Over: Bruised Memories: Gonzo, Hunter S Thompson and Me, Will Blythe prefers to concentrate on the illustrations rather than the writing: "Splattery explosions of ink, detonated in the presence of politicians and stolid middle-class citizens, they stand as the mangling visions of a 20th-century Hogarth."

• Gary Kamiya appreciates Jean-François Bizot's Free Press: Underground & Alternative Publications, 1965 - 1975, "a perfect companion to Abe Peck's Uncovering the Sixties (1985), the definitive history of the underground press. It reminds us that the alternative press could be juvenile, didactic and impossibly heavy-handed — but also hilarious, Swiftian and brilliantly creative."

• Former Book Review art director Steven Heller explains why he was initially reluctant to review I, Goldstein: My Screwed Life, by Al Goldstein and Josh Alan Friedman. First chapter.

• Ron Powers on Barry Miles's Charles Bukowski: "Was this life worth living? Perhaps only if one reckons with what Bukowski's examinations of it produced: the brutal, profane and darkly hilarious art that held redemptive power for legions of his readers." Related: Campbell Robertson on Tom Sykes's What Did I Do Last Night? A Drunkard's Tale.

• Jonathan Miles on Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast (that would be Edward Abbey; first chapter)

• Three novels. Andrey Slivka on a "peculiar stunt of a detective novel," The Uncomfortable Dead, "a collaboration between the Spanish-born Mexican writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II and, of all people, the Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos"; Nathalie Moore on Ian Rankin's Bleeding Hearts (more from him in a moment); and Michael Agger on Mark Winegardner's The Godfather's Revenge (see also: David Faraci at CHUD.com, via ScreenGrab's Bilge Ebiri).

• And finally, whatever happened to literary feuds? Rachel Donadio asks around.

Roger Ebert, in his new book, Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert tells us," notes Tara Ison in the Los Angeles Times: "'Writing daily film criticism is a balancing act between the bottom line and the higher reaches, between the answers to the questions (1) Is this movie worth my money? and (2) Does this movie expand or devalue my information about human nature?' So this reviewer will heed his good advice and report: (1) Yes; this is a meaty and comprehensive collection of 40 years' worth of impassioned film writing — not merely reviews but profiles and essays as well; and (2) Yes; Ebert indeed expands our knowledge of human nature through his incisive analysis of the 20th century's (arguably) primary form of artistic expression, of its evolution and its lure."

Further down the page comes praise for Kenneth Turan's Now in Theaters Everywhere: A Celebration of a Certain Kind of Blockbuster.

The London Times has a Stephen King special going on, podcast and all.

Then, as if the appearance of a new novel from Thomas Pynchon weren't enough of an event, I can also point to the Modern Word's "Pynchon in Film & TV" page to justify a few notes here. Against the Day is due on Tuesday, and you'll want to keep an eye on Ed Champion's site, where he'll soon be staging an extravaganza along the lines of the roundtable he ring-led to greet Richard Powers's The Echo Maker.

Reviews and general hoopla are already underway:

• Christopher Sorrentino in the LAT: "'[N]ews travels at queer velocities and not usually even in straight lines,' one character observes, and that seems a fitting rubric for the Byzantine workings of this book."

• Also, Emily Barton: "Zak Smith, with uninhibited bravado and exactly the right kind of insanity, has done something remarkable in Gravity's Rainbow Illustrated: created a series of images that approach the richness of their source. He draws a lurid and intoxicating netherworld, complete in its own right and, at the same time, an illuminating companion to the novel. Since all editions of Gravity's Rainbow seem to be printed from the same plates, each one of Smith's illustrations will correspond to one page of the foxed copy you've been trucking around since college." You can browse this project and read much more about it at the Modern Word.

• In the Guardian, Ian Rankin tells the long tale of his immersion in the world of "Thomas Pynchon, the greatest, wildest and most infuriating author of his generation."

By the way, "A less 'thinky' Voice." has been updated with a few notes on The Village Voice Film Guide: 50 Years of Movies from Classics to Cult Hits.

Update, 11/20: Uh-oh. Against the Day reviews: Louis Menand in the New Yorker and Michiko Kakutani in the NYT.

Updates, 11/21: John Carvill in PopMatters on Pynchon; Laura Miller in Salon and Ron Jacobs at Counterpunch on the new novel.

Update, 11/22: Tom LeClair in Bookforum:

Gravity's Rainbow is the most important novel I've ever read. I've taught nearly all of Pynchon's novels to unwilling undergrads and grads. And I once wrote, "Nothing succeeds like excess." That is to say, I'm not James Wood, waiting to gouge anything by Pynchon (or DeLillo or just about any postmodern writer). But Against the Day lacks the ferocity and fear of Gravity's Rainbow, the long-developed characters and the comedy of Mason & Dixon (1997). The only readers (besides responsible reviewers) I can imagine finishing Against the Day are the Pynchonists, the fetishizing collectors of P-trivia. I hope I'm wrong.

Posted by dwhudson at November 18, 2006 2:56 PM