I’m going to the Appalachian Writer’s workshop this week, so I won’t be blogging again until next weekend, when Circuit City is participating in a tax-free weekend for back to school, which means I’ll come back from vacation to slave away. I’ll be back to the blogging as soon as I can.

This movie’s okay, though it’s not great. The premise is that a midwestern Everyman’s diner gets held up, and the owner, Tom Stall, stops the would-be robbers, making himself a hero. Some mobsters see him on the news and think he’s Joey Cusack from Philadelphia. Stall’s world proceeds to fall apart, beginning with his family. The film is good character study, but the plot is a bit too much of a potboiler to really be that great. I was thinking of My Cousin Vinnie in places, for instance. The gangsters just don’t fit. And the opening spends too much time showing us Tom is ordinary.

What is great is Viggo Mortensen’s acting. I doubt I’ll ever watch The Lord of the Rings, but he’s consistently impressing me as an actor. He nails the small-town Indiana man, just like he nailed the Russian mobster in Eastern Promises. And I’m fascinated by his pseudo-method acting I’ve heard about. For Eastern Promises, he supposedly went to a bunch of backwoods bars in Siberia and hung out with seedy Russians to get his character down. For A History of Violence, he hung out with Maria Bello’s brother and uncle to get a Philadelphia scene right. He seems to be a get-in-there-and-experience-what-you’re-acting kind of actor, which makes me want to drive down to South Carolina, drink some moonshine, and spend a few days working in a cotton mill (if there are any left).

Last night over dinner, my girlfriend and I got in a discussion about feminism and either epistemology or phenomenology, a debate that left her reeling with a severe migraine. I was reminded of it today by Tombert’s post on my last blog entry, where he posed the question of the value of regionalist writing to those in the region versus to those outside the region.

My girlfriend is in graduate school for theater history, and got into a discussion in yesterday’s seminar about women directors, and whether they approach a project as a woman. Emily agreed with the idea, saying her status as a woman affects how she views the world more than as a southerner or as a Catholic or as anything else. I grumbled about artists bringing ideology to their art, arguing that writers with a chip on their shoulders aren’t as artful as artists who can let go of that chip–for instance the art of Richard Wright versus the art of James Baldwin. Emily came back with, No, no, she wasn’t talking about a chip on the shoulder, she was just referring to tiers of one’s identity, saying she felt like she could understand the point of view of a woman from Iran as easily or perhaps easier than she could understand the point of view of a white American man. Gender above race in her levels of identity. She was surprised when I said that as a novelist I would feel more comfortable writing from her point of view (as a 25-year-old southerner) than from her father’s point of view (who is fifty-something and originally from Michigan). In my levels of identity, I put class and regional background and even race above gender, meaning I feel like it’s more of an artistic leap for me to write from the point of view of another race than from the point of view of the other gender.

Going back to Tombert’s comment, I’m wondering how this tiering of identity affects us as readers. I’m inclined to like southern books with ruggedly masculine themes, and might be predisposed to enjoy a Larry Brown novel more than something by a northern writer like Jhumpa Lahiri. Or I might be more drawn to the issues of social class in William Trevor before the issues of gender in Alice Munro. I haven’t asked her, but I think Emo would be more drawn to Lahiri or Munro as women writers than either Brown or Trevor (and certainly Cormac McCarthy). I’m not even sure what my original question going into this post was. I guess I’m just interested in the idea of the writer putting the art above a chip on the shoulder (having a willingness to go places even if that means writing something that conflicts with what you think you believe about the world), whereas readers–or at least I as a reader–don’t have the same obligation. Or do we? Is that the meaning of being well-rounded, being able to appreciate works of art that speak for groups we don’t immediately identify with? That is, after all, one of the goals of a piece of fiction, to create empathy/sympathy in the reader.

This is a great read, even compared to the other Larry Brown books I’ve read (Joe and Big Bad Love). It’s about a guy who’s just gotten out of prison, and he’s a bad dude. He commits a double murder over his first weekend out, then goes around town getting drunk and doing other evil deeds. Meanwhile everyone once close to him–his father, his ex-girlfriend–tries to cope with the damage he’s doing. The writing definitely has a southern ring to it, though it’s much less ornate than William Gay.

I usually like to talk about books I’ve been reading, but out here in the cold cold world I don’t get to talk to anyone who’s reading the same books, so I’ve been reading reviews after I finish. What the hell, reviewers usually have something interesting to say, and a quick Google search of Father and Son led me to this blogger who recognizes Brown’s talent but didn’t like the novel because it felt “typical.” He’s got a point: there are a lot of things going on with Father and Son that shouldn’t lift it out of the slush of literary fiction. It’s straightforward realism, with a roaming close third point of view. The characters are ordinary, with some perhaps creaky connections between them (the sheriff and the main dude are competing over the same woman, and it turns out they might have the same father, unbeknownst to either of them).

There are plenty of ordinary books out there, so I’m wondering why one jumps out over another. A few things come to mind with Father and Son–it’s southern, which I’m inclined to like. The characters are all blue collar in a way some of my relatives are, so it’s a world I recognize. And I think because I was inclined to like the book from the beginning–because of the characters and the southern lilt to the prose–I approached the story with more humility than I might have otherwise, a willingness to go with the author. Maybe I’ll write an essay one day about humility (when I’ve learned more–I’m still a cocksure young buck, thanks). At least in theory, I know the importance of humility as a writer, but I’ve never heard anyone talking about humility as readers, except maybe Henry James when he spoke of granting a piece its donne.

Well Fark never ceases to let me down. I spat out water on my keyboard after reading this article about a girl placed in court custody because her parents named her Talula Does the Hula from Hawaii. And I thought Dweezil and Moon Unit were odd. Other strange names include Fish and Chips (twins), Cinderella Beauty Blossom, and, my favorite, Sex Fruit. I know it’s cruel, but I can’t help giggling at the thought of naming my kid Sex Fruit Sealy.

This movie starts strangely, so I was expecting it to get very bizarre, like a Hieronymus Bosch painting, but it never quite went that far. Nevertheless, it’s still an exciting movie. It’s about gangsters. Two hit men are sent to lay low in Bruges, and one is hired by their boss to kill the other. Tragedy unfolds. But over all this is a sheen of the unreal–the dialogue and the pacing and the setting make the film feel like a dream, or some kind of fable (with atrocious language). And it reminded me of movies like Snatch in the way it bounces between almost slapstick humor and black comedy and the deadly serious.

Fark pointed me to this series of pictures of a leopard taking down a crocodile.