Chris Bohjalian's Blog - Posts Tagged "king"
In honor of the Oscars, can writers on the red carpet really go glam?
The Academy Awards tonight could be a monumental evening for Oscar-nominated actresses Rooney Mara, Michelle Williams, and Jessica Chastain. Tomorrow, however, will be even better. Win or lose, Monday morning they all get to eat, probably for the first time since January. Make no mistake, a woman gives up a lot to win an Academy Award, of which flour in February and underwear on the big night are but two of the sacrifices.
Men have it much easier. I’ve never attended the Academy Awards, but once I gave a presentation about the movie, “Midwives,” to a group of TV executives and producers at the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. I ate plenty beforehand and was indeed wearing underwear.
A female friend of mine, an aspiring actress, thinks Hollywood’s sexism – the reality that beauty goes a long way for women – is unbelievably unfair. “How is it that Steve Buscemi and Paul Giamatti keep getting parts? Yes, they’re talented. I get it! But if a woman looked like that? Unemployable!” she once railed around me.
In any case, I would love someday to set foot inside the Kodak Theater – or what was called the Kodak Theater before the film pioneer went into bankruptcy. Now, I believe, the theater is just called Blockbuster. Or, if you’re there for a screenplay adaptation, Borders.
The truth is, I love the Academy Awards and I really look forward to this evening – and not merely because there is always the chance that Dame Judi Dench will have a wardrobe malfunction or James Franco will wake up. Some years, I actually play the whole Oscar ballot game. To make it really challenging, I don’t waste my time on the actors and actresses and directors. I focus on the technical achievement awards, because the toughest races are always between the folks behind the NAC Servo Winch System and the women and men who invented the volumetric suspended cable camera technologies.
Year after year, however, what fascinates me most is this: The reality that people – including me – spend so much more energy fixating on the Academy Awards than we do on the equivalent celebration of literary accomplishment, the National Book Awards. There are a lot of pretty obvious reasons for this. The movies are a much bigger business. Many more people see movies than read novels and memoirs or even crack the spine of poetry collections. And – there is no polite way to say this – actors and actresses are way better eye candy than poets, historians, and novelists. I’ve been to the National Book Awards a couple of times, and, trust me, it could be a convention of cloggers (the poets) and software designers with bad haircuts (everyone else). Sure, in the novelist camp we have Andre Dubus III and Ann Patchett – who just this week left Stephen Colbert speechless and pulled off some pretty awesome shoes on national television – but we also have a lot of serious writers who look like a Nick Nolte mug shot.
And yet there are just enough writerly rock stars to make for great TV. Dubus and Patchett are only two. Others? J. K. Rowling and Stephen King, for starters. Maya Angelou. Jodi Picoult. Joyce Carol Oates. One of the years I was at the National Book Awards, Steve Martin hosted, and he was every bit as funny as when he hosted the Oscars.
In all honesty, the National Book Awards are probably not ready to migrate over from BookTV (C-Span 2) to ABC. To begin with, we need a lot more awards. And an orchestra. And a nipple slip.
But someday, I hope, we will celebrate books with the same glamour we do movies, and my female peers can have the privilege of not eating, too.
* * *
This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on February 26, 2012. Chris’s next novel, “The Sandcastle Girls,” arrives on July 17. You can add it to your shelves by following this link:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13...
.
Men have it much easier. I’ve never attended the Academy Awards, but once I gave a presentation about the movie, “Midwives,” to a group of TV executives and producers at the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. I ate plenty beforehand and was indeed wearing underwear.
A female friend of mine, an aspiring actress, thinks Hollywood’s sexism – the reality that beauty goes a long way for women – is unbelievably unfair. “How is it that Steve Buscemi and Paul Giamatti keep getting parts? Yes, they’re talented. I get it! But if a woman looked like that? Unemployable!” she once railed around me.
In any case, I would love someday to set foot inside the Kodak Theater – or what was called the Kodak Theater before the film pioneer went into bankruptcy. Now, I believe, the theater is just called Blockbuster. Or, if you’re there for a screenplay adaptation, Borders.
The truth is, I love the Academy Awards and I really look forward to this evening – and not merely because there is always the chance that Dame Judi Dench will have a wardrobe malfunction or James Franco will wake up. Some years, I actually play the whole Oscar ballot game. To make it really challenging, I don’t waste my time on the actors and actresses and directors. I focus on the technical achievement awards, because the toughest races are always between the folks behind the NAC Servo Winch System and the women and men who invented the volumetric suspended cable camera technologies.
Year after year, however, what fascinates me most is this: The reality that people – including me – spend so much more energy fixating on the Academy Awards than we do on the equivalent celebration of literary accomplishment, the National Book Awards. There are a lot of pretty obvious reasons for this. The movies are a much bigger business. Many more people see movies than read novels and memoirs or even crack the spine of poetry collections. And – there is no polite way to say this – actors and actresses are way better eye candy than poets, historians, and novelists. I’ve been to the National Book Awards a couple of times, and, trust me, it could be a convention of cloggers (the poets) and software designers with bad haircuts (everyone else). Sure, in the novelist camp we have Andre Dubus III and Ann Patchett – who just this week left Stephen Colbert speechless and pulled off some pretty awesome shoes on national television – but we also have a lot of serious writers who look like a Nick Nolte mug shot.
And yet there are just enough writerly rock stars to make for great TV. Dubus and Patchett are only two. Others? J. K. Rowling and Stephen King, for starters. Maya Angelou. Jodi Picoult. Joyce Carol Oates. One of the years I was at the National Book Awards, Steve Martin hosted, and he was every bit as funny as when he hosted the Oscars.
In all honesty, the National Book Awards are probably not ready to migrate over from BookTV (C-Span 2) to ABC. To begin with, we need a lot more awards. And an orchestra. And a nipple slip.
But someday, I hope, we will celebrate books with the same glamour we do movies, and my female peers can have the privilege of not eating, too.
* * *
This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on February 26, 2012. Chris’s next novel, “The Sandcastle Girls,” arrives on July 17. You can add it to your shelves by following this link:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13...
.
After 821,000 words, it's time to get up from the chair
Neil Gaiman says, "This is how you do it; you sit down at the keyboard and put one word after another until it's done." Dorothy Parker caustically (but accurately) observed that "writing is the art of applying the ass to the seat." And Stephen King recommends "butt glue" — or "gluing your butt to the chair in front of the computer and not getting up until you've written something."
I spend a lot of my life with my seat in the seat. Most writers do.
In theory, that means I am at an elevated risk for obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, despite the reality that I also get a lot of exercise. A recent study suggests that I can dial down the risks to my health — this occupational hazard called sitting — if I get up and walk around for a few minutes each hour.
In any case, the result of all that time with my seat in the seat has been 17 published novels, two unpublished ones, a great many magazine articles, lots of book reviews, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,210 weekly columns for this newspaper. (And that doesn't count the monthly business column I wrote from 1988 through 1993.) I wrote my first column for what at the time was the living section of the Burlington Free Press in February 1992. It would officially become Idyll Banter a few years later, a title I gave the column because I liked the pun: I loved Vermont and the idyllic life I had found in a rural corner of Addison County. Since then, I have written the column every single Sunday but three.
How many words is 1,210 columns? Roughly 821,000. That's the equivalent of eight novels. Some of those columns have been better than others. A lot better. But it was always a privilege and a blessing to try and find the universal relevancy in the idiosyncrasies of my family and my community and the Green Mountains we share.
Has it gotten harder lately? Yes. Not because I love my world any less, but because I don't want to cover the same material over and over. Twenty-three years has meant, for instance, 23 Mother's Days. Twenty-three Thanksgivings. Twenty-three Christmas mornings. Moreover, some of my best material has died: my father. My mother. My mother-in-law. Seven cats. Our hermit crabs. Close friends. Eccentric neighbors.
How long is 23-plus years? As I noted the other day, my daughter grew up as I wrote Idyll Banter. She was born after I started. She can now legally order a mojito.
And so while I have loved all of those moments with my seat in the seat, it's time to get up and walk around. Spend a little less time in my chair. Give someone else a chance to — and here I am paraphrasing Ernest Hemingway — open that vein and share something meaningful.
My last column will be Labor Day weekend. I want to end on the word "labor," because this has always been a labor of love. It really has.
Moreover, as I wind down, expect to see a few reruns this summer. (Two of the three times I did not have a new column in this space, my editor called it a "Best of." I won't be so presumptuous.) My hope after Labor Day is that I will still file a column now and then.
In any case, I thought I would let you know. You are the reason I do this, and so I didn't want it to be a surprise. In the meantime? Still here. See you around our beloved 802.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on June 7, 2015. The paperback of Chris's most recent novel, "Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands," is on sale now.)
I spend a lot of my life with my seat in the seat. Most writers do.
In theory, that means I am at an elevated risk for obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, despite the reality that I also get a lot of exercise. A recent study suggests that I can dial down the risks to my health — this occupational hazard called sitting — if I get up and walk around for a few minutes each hour.
In any case, the result of all that time with my seat in the seat has been 17 published novels, two unpublished ones, a great many magazine articles, lots of book reviews, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,210 weekly columns for this newspaper. (And that doesn't count the monthly business column I wrote from 1988 through 1993.) I wrote my first column for what at the time was the living section of the Burlington Free Press in February 1992. It would officially become Idyll Banter a few years later, a title I gave the column because I liked the pun: I loved Vermont and the idyllic life I had found in a rural corner of Addison County. Since then, I have written the column every single Sunday but three.
How many words is 1,210 columns? Roughly 821,000. That's the equivalent of eight novels. Some of those columns have been better than others. A lot better. But it was always a privilege and a blessing to try and find the universal relevancy in the idiosyncrasies of my family and my community and the Green Mountains we share.
Has it gotten harder lately? Yes. Not because I love my world any less, but because I don't want to cover the same material over and over. Twenty-three years has meant, for instance, 23 Mother's Days. Twenty-three Thanksgivings. Twenty-three Christmas mornings. Moreover, some of my best material has died: my father. My mother. My mother-in-law. Seven cats. Our hermit crabs. Close friends. Eccentric neighbors.
How long is 23-plus years? As I noted the other day, my daughter grew up as I wrote Idyll Banter. She was born after I started. She can now legally order a mojito.
And so while I have loved all of those moments with my seat in the seat, it's time to get up and walk around. Spend a little less time in my chair. Give someone else a chance to — and here I am paraphrasing Ernest Hemingway — open that vein and share something meaningful.
My last column will be Labor Day weekend. I want to end on the word "labor," because this has always been a labor of love. It really has.
Moreover, as I wind down, expect to see a few reruns this summer. (Two of the three times I did not have a new column in this space, my editor called it a "Best of." I won't be so presumptuous.) My hope after Labor Day is that I will still file a column now and then.
In any case, I thought I would let you know. You are the reason I do this, and so I didn't want it to be a surprise. In the meantime? Still here. See you around our beloved 802.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on June 7, 2015. The paperback of Chris's most recent novel, "Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands," is on sale now.)
