“Oscar Wilde Cock-Cockery And Other Media Fictions - Anorak” plus 2 more

Oscar Wilde Cock-Cockery And Other Media Fictions - Anorak
Columbia Professor's E-mail to Students Was Pure Fiction - Huffingtonpost.com
'Lebanon' brings director Samuel Maoz's war memories to screen - Cleveland Plain Dealer

Oscar Wilde Cock-Cockery And Other Media Fictions - Anorak

Posted: 24 Sep 2010 01:49 PM PDT

SO it's autumn now and I'm back. Haven't you heard of people taking summer off? I can highly recommend the Carmel Mountain Health Spa (prison close by), Israel, where luxury twin-suites can be shared by same-sexers and other-sexers without a tabloid or loser blogger (hi, Guido Fawkes!) getting wind.

I'll drop William Hague, 49, a line about it after this. (Btw, I do wish The Sun's Kelvin MacKenzie would desist in his weekly persecution of Chris Myers, 25, Mr Hague's former room-mate driver and £30k pa SpAd. In a just world he'd be sharing a room with George Michael)

Anyway, it appears I've returned in the nick of time. For today some letters Oscar Wilde wrote to a sexy young male magazine editor in the century before last have been flogged at auction for £33,900 - or nearly £24k more than expected. What spiced them up was the claim that in them Oscar, then about 33, propositioned the Court & Society Review editor – one Alsager Vian, 22 (never heard of him: his ghost must be relishing the posthumous fame).

Alas the text of the five missives scarcely lives up to the billing. All of Oscar's letters these days read like Stephen Fry on Twitter – even an illiterate chimney sweep could expect a 'dearest'. 'Will be at home tomorrow afternoon – so glad if you come down for tea,' writes Oscar in one letter – not quite up there with: 'Come over and I'll lick your scrote'. Oscar was passive, incidentally. Oh, didn't you know?

Most compromising is Oscar's, 'Come and dine at Pagani's in Portland Street on Friday – 7.30. No dress – just ourselves and a flask of Italian wine – afterwards we will smoke cigarettes and Talk over the Journalistic article – could we go to your rooms, I am so far off, and clubs are difficult to Talk in.'

The 'No dress' injunction is not an invitation to turn up nude but merely a sartorial guide; and the preference for Alsager's rooms nothing more than a desire not to be overheard by other possibly commision-hungry hacks.

'I think your number [edition] is excellent, but as usual had to go to S. James' Street to get a copy. Even Grosvenor Place does not get the C&S. Till Thursday night! This is all wrong, isn't it … ' The playful last line is not some coded reference to an illegal sexual proposition but plainly to the unavailability of the magazine.

This distinct lack of any sexual content whatsoever has not dissuaded the likes of the Independent and other serious publications from repeating the seller's PR line. I particularly like the Indy's Sept 16 headline: 'For sale: letters from a love-sick Wilde to the object of his affection.' Purest Sylvie Krin.

The media too readily interpolates cock-cockery in otherwise bromantic relationships, as the Hague/Myers hotel sleepovers demonstrate. Why, as I write, rumours abound of a roaring musky affair between a famous footballer and a famous male TV personality. And as ever, as the unlikely trustee of cock-cunting integrity, I find myself saying, 'I don't believe it!'

Madame Arcati

Posted: 24th, September 2010 | In: Key Posts, Madame Arcati Comments (11) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink

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Columbia Professor's E-mail to Students Was Pure Fiction - Huffingtonpost.com

Posted: 01 Oct 2010 12:22 PM PDT

If you're an avid follower of either MFA programs or Gawker, you've probably already read novelist and Columbia professor Janette Turner Hospital's now-infamous e-mail to former students at the University of South Carolina. If Gawker's comment-fields are any indication, most of the ire over the e-mail takes one of the following forms: upset over its pomposity; bewilderment over its shoddy composition; or disgust over the sort of culture -- in the Academy generally and in New York City specifically -- that could give rise to a new stratum of tone-deafness.

Those who've traced the decline of Professor Hospital's employer in the national MFA rankings since 2006 are likely to have other concerns as well. For instance, is Columbia really the literary powerhouse Professor Hospital contends? In 2007, Columbia's MFA ranked fourteenth nationally; in 2010, twenty-second; in 2011, twenty-fifth; in polling now being done for next year's rankings, the program has yet to crack the top fifty. But rankings never tell the whole story, and they certainly don't here, either. The larger concern over Professor Hospital's missive to her former students is that most of it is not true.

Columbia is not a three-year program, as Professor Hospital asserts, but a two-year program. There are not 300 students in the program, as alleged, but slightly more than half that. Columbia does not matriculate a hundred students a year but eighty--the number reported by the University in its 2007 graduate school admissions summary. Columbia is not the largest MFA in the country (that "honor" goes to the largely-unfunded MFA at The New School) nor does it enjoy 100% yield -- rather, it suffers from one of the lowest yields of any top 50 MFA. ("Yield" is the percentage of applicants offered admission to a program who accept their offer.) Columbia's own website last reported an annual yield ranging from 60% to 80% between 2002 and 2007, and analysis of application trends since this last reporting of yield data suggests this figure has almost certainly dropped. It's more likely, now, that between one in four and one in two Columbia admittees are sufficiently unimpressed by the largely-unfunded program to decline to attend. How these data trouble Professor Hospital's claim that Columbia students are the "cream of the cream [sic]" is a subject for further debate. One starting point for any such discussion would be this: this past summer, Poets & Writers reported that Columbia isn't even ranked among the top 50 most selective MFA programs in the United States.

But the fictions spun by this Ivy League fiction professor don't stop there. Those reading Professor Hospital's e-mail might wrongly think that Columbia has more than thirty full-time professors, giving the MFA program a pleasant if not resplendent student-to-faculty ratio of 8:3. In fact, most of those professors -- like, apparently, Adjunct Associate Professor Hospital herself -- are something other than full-time, and indeed Columbia has one of the worst student-to-full-time-faculty ratios of any program nationally for which such ratios are known.

The biggest whopper in Professor Hospital's e-mail is also the most eye-popping: her claim that "about half the graduating class [at Columbia] has a book published or a publishing contract in hand by graduation." There are no conventions of etiquette or civil discourse known to this writer which require him to describe this claim as anything other than a falsehood. Professor Hospital's submission that thirty of Columbia's "sixty [sic]" annual graduates have either already published a book or signed a publishing contract by the time they graduate is so inarguably an erratum that there need be no further refutation of it except to dare Professor Hospital or any other professor at Columbia to prove the claim. Likewise, Professor Hospital's boast that Columbia students -- who pay over $100,000 for a twenty-one-month, unmarketable art-school degree -- are disallowed from choosing their own thesis committees and regularly see their theses failed by these committees is bizarre. How are these selling points for the program?

The program to which Professor Hospital was writing -- the creative writing MFA at the University of South Carolina -- is a fully-funded, three-year program whose acceptance rate in 2012 is projected to be only slightly higher than Columbia's. Its MFA student body, said to be upset by Hospital's e-mail, can take comfort in the fact that USC is headed in an entirely different direction than the New York City Ivy. Even as Columbia plummets in the national rankings, South Carolina ascends: in the nine months between the 2010 and 2011 editions of the Poets & Writers rankings, USC gained eleven spots and Columbia dropped three. Early returns from polling for the 2012 MFA rankings show USC gaining forty-three spots over its 2011 placement, with Columbia dropping from twenty-fifth to a fifty-way tie for last nationally. While those numbers will undoubtedly change over time, the only possible conclusion to be drawn from them is that Columbia University and Professor Hospital should be looking to their own house rather than sending dodgy communiqués to a smaller, much-better-funded program currently enjoying a meteoric rise in popularity and reputation.

'Lebanon' brings director Samuel Maoz's war memories to screen - Cleveland Plain Dealer

Posted: 30 Sep 2010 08:59 PM PDT

Published: Thursday, September 30, 2010, 11:59 PM Updated: Friday, October 01, 2010, 6:59 AM

By Stephen Whitty/Newark Star-Ledger

If you want to see a fun, two-fisted, entertaining-as-all-hell war film, do not ask a veteran to make it.

John Huston shot documentaries under fire in Italy. Sam Fuller marched through North Africa and most of Europe. Oliver Stone went to Vietnam. And when they came home, the war films they made were brutal, complex, surprising.

That's because they knew real war is, too.

Real war has cowards and heroes, but not always the ones you'd suspect. And it has wounded soldiers who cry out for their mothers, and officers who don't know what they're doing, and guys who will not sacrifice themselves for "the mission" but will die for their buddies.

And this is the kind of movie that "Lebanon" is.

It's made by Samuel Maoz, who has served, like most Israelis, in the armed forces. He served in the 1982 war as a tank gunner, and has felt those memories, like shrapnel, working their way out of him ever since.

This film puts those memories on the screen. In its fictionalized story, Shmulik is a terrified gunner in a tank manned by soldiers barely out of school and on their first mission. But even before they cross the border, there's a battle going on. Their commander commands no respect. Simple orders become opportunities for arguments and debate.

And then the men come under attack.

Because Maoz is a veteran, he steers clear of the useful fictions other filmmakers often employ. Sometimes some of his soldiers freeze under fire; sometimes some of them panic. They don't act like Hollywood heroes. They do act like human beings.

But because Maoz is also a filmmaker, it's not enough for him to simply tell a story. Style is important, too, at least if it serves the content, so his movie traps us in the tank with its crew. We only see and hear what they do -- a confused, cacophonous riot of flashes and explosions.

It's a bold choice, but it doesn't always work to the film's advantage. "Das Boot" trapped us with men under fire, too, but that U-boat was positively spacious compared to this steel shoebox. The men are so grimy, the quarters so cramped, that the visual details are sometimes lost.

The story, too. Maoz's determination to just drop us into this war, the way these young soldiers were, robs us of some context and some character. Yoav Donat is very good as the fearful gunner, and Ashraf Barhom is a terrifying Phalangist ally, but who are these men, really? We barely get to know them.

But then perhaps that is partly Maoz's point, and another level of reality to this story. Unlike Hollywood movies, real wars aren't made up out of colorful caricatures and perfectly scripted "moments."

Fiction

Jumat, 01 Oktober 2010