This is a stunning movie. Based on a William Gay short story, the film is about an old guy (Hal Holbrook) who comes home from a nursing home and discovers his lawyer son has rented off his farm to rednecks. The dialogue alone is worth the price of admission, but the heart of the film really gets at the question of aging, property, and loss. Filmed around Knoxville, the actors seem of the South, so that the dialect rings true. Plus, the music is great, supplied mainly by Jimmie Rodgers and the Drive-by Truckers. Check out Patterson Hood’s “Depression Era” here, which has what might be the best line in a song ever (and which captures the soul of Halbrook’s character): “He’d never hit a lady, but he just might kill a man.”

Good story in the winter Appalachian Heritage, which can be read here.

I’m a bit late to the party, but my friend Laura Donnelly’s poetry chapbook, Nocturne: Schumann’s Letters, is coming out this June. You can pre-order your copy here, I think for the next week. And here’s a plug:

“Laura Donnelly’s strange and lovely Nocturne poems, half-dreamt, half set in real hours, bring sudden and back to us a Robert Schumann so poignant, in ways so delicate and steely that the years between our time and his dissolve completely. And what remains? The power of one life coming apart to remake us all.” Marianne Boruch 

What it is: 

McEwan’s new novel is about a physicist, Michael Beard, a short, fat, balding narcissist who, for lack of anything better to do, gets involved with clean energy research. Broken into three sections – 2000, 2005, 2009 – the novel also follows his various relationships. He’s a philanderer, and his fifth marriage is ending in part 1, accompanied by all sorts of drama and sporadic violence.

Why it’s interesting:

I didn’t care for this one, and am going to spoil the entire plot with this paragraph. In part 1, Beard’s wife is having a vengeful affair with a builder, then another affair with one of Beard’s post-doc researchers. The builder has a temper, and Beard doesn’t know about the second affair until he comes home and finds the kid in his house. They converse, and the kid slips on a rug, lands on a glass table, and dies. Beard frames the builder, who takes the fall for murder. Part 1 is actually kind of compelling, even though the protagonist is fairly miserable. Part 2 is boring. In Part 3, Beard has used some of that post-doc’s notes to create a new kind of solar cell, and he gets caught sued by the British government for fraud, and ends the book in debt for several million dollars and likely on his way to jail. I guess it’s a comeuppance, but though I didn’t care for Beard throughout I also didn’t feel any kind of justice for the comeuppance. In fact, I’m not sure when the last time I read such a well-written novel that left me so utterly cold.

Further Reading: 

McEwan seems to be hit or miss. If you were only going to read one book by him, it would have to be Atonement, though he has a few others that I enjoyed, though I’m beginning to wonder if he’s one of those authors I think I like more than I do.

Six:

• Burnett Maybank, 1939-41, left for the U.S. Senate
• Joseph Harley, 1941-42, died in office
• Richard Jefferies, 1942-43, finished Maybank’s term
• Olin Johnston, 1943-45, left for the U.S. Senate
• Ransom Williams, 1945-47, finished Johnston’s term
• Strom Thurmond, 1947-51

From Tyler Cowen, in a post about whether California needs a new Constitution:

Did you know that the operative constitution from 1879 is the third longest in the world, after Alabama and India?

The New Yorker has a good article about the electronic book business.  The whole thing is interesting, but this section near the end caught my eye:

Last year, according to several literary agents, a senior Amazon executive asked for suggestions about whom Amazon might hire as an acquisitions editor. Its Encore program has begun to publish books by self-published authors whose work attracts good reviews on Amazon.com. And in January it offered authors who sold electronic rights directly to Amazon a royalty of seventy per cent, provided they agreed to prices of between $2.99 and $9.99. The offer, one irate publisher said, was meant “to pit authors against publishers.”

[...]

“The publishers are afraid of a retailer that can replace them,” Friedman said. “An author needs a publisher for nurturing, editing, distributing, and marketing. If the publishers are cutting back on marketing, which is the biggest complaint authors have, and Amazon stays at eighty per cent of the e-book market, why do you need the publisher?”