Books, 4/7.

"So far, Rebecca Miller has written and directed Personal Velocity (originally her collection of short stories) and The Ballad of Jack and Rose," writes Olivia Laing. "The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is already in pre-production, with Robin Wright Penn signed up for the title role. Like The Ballad of Jack and Rose, this delicate, dreamy novel tells the story of an outsider for whom the ties of blood and marriage are both trap and salvation. As the wife of Daniel Day-Lewis and the daughter of Arthur Miller, it's no doubt a paradox with which Miller is exquisitely familiar."

Also in the Observer: Rachel Cooke tells the story of Virago Modern Classics and Andrew Anthony profiles Salman Rushdie.

"What constitutes live cinema?" Michael Fox asks Thomas Beard at SF360. Beard is a programmer and critic who's edited Cinematograph 7: Live Cinema: A Contemporary Reader. A book launch party is set for Thursday at Artists' Television Access in San Francisco. Among those on hand performing live screenings, you might say, will be Sue Costabile, Animal Charm and members of Wet Gate.

The cinetrix points to Anthony Miller's fantastic interview with Zeroville author Steve Erickson for litpark.

"It was in sometime in the 80s when I heard someone on the radio talking about Clint Eastwood's 1980 movie Bronco Billy," recalls Stanley Fish, blogging for the New York Times. "It is, he said, a 'nice little film in which Eastwood deconstructs his Dirty Harry image.' That was probably not the first time the verb 'deconstruct' was used casually to describe a piece of pop culture, but it was the first time I had encountered it, and I remember thinking that the age of theory was surely over now that one of its key terms had been appropriated, domesticated and commodified." He then discusses French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, in which François Cusset "sets himself the tasks of explaining, first, what all the fuss was about, second, why the specter of French theory made strong men tremble, and third, why there was never really anything to worry about."

"Reynold Humphries is a writer on cinema and author, among other works, of Fritz Lang: Genre and Representation in His American Films, 1988, and The American Horror Film: An Introduction, 2002," notes the WSWS's David Walsh. "His forthcoming book, Hollywood's Blacklists: A Political and Cultural History, will be published in September by Edinburgh University Press. I asked Humphries if he would reply to a number of questions via email about [Jules] Dassin and the blacklists. He was kind enough to consent."

For Newsweek, Cathleen McGuigan talks with Julie Andrews about her memoir, Home: A Memoir of My Early Years. Andrews is also a guest on Fresh Air.

Posted by dwhudson at April 7, 2008 2:58 PM