Friday, December 15, 2006 posted by Jen at 12/15/2006 03:27:00 PM
Now that I’ve read Michael Crowley’s cri de wee in The New Republic (it was side-splittingly entitled "Michael Crichton: Jurassic Prick"), as well as the original piece Crowley wrote about Crichton, I can say with certainty what I only suspected last night: Anne Lamott got it right, and complaining you've been the victim of a fictional drive-by can only make you look small.
To review: Crowley, a reporter for TNR, trashed author Crichton in a 3,700 word cover story in The New Republic, a magazine with a tiny but influential subscription base best known, these days, for its plagiarism scandals.
Crowley’s piece derided Crichton as a “pulp novelist,” who is guilty of writing “for the coach-class set,” a “plot machine” with risible visions of being taken seriously, a Bush administration anti-intellectual lap dog and, worst of all, a man who turned his back on Harvard Medical School because he “couldn't resist cranking out sci-fi thrillers.” (Those sci-fi thrillers! They’re like crack with words!)
Crichton allegedly battled back with a character named “Mick Crowley," who shows up in his current novel. Mick has a small penis. Mick rapes a two-year-old. This doesn’t seem to trouble his alleged inspiration as much as the small-penis part, or that Mick is a pharmaceutical industry profiteer (insert your own aristocratic har-har-har here).
Amusing as it is to watch Crowley play the virgin at the key party, fluttering for his smelling salts, aghast at the way he’s been violated, he shouldn’t be surprised that he was attacked by an author with a reputation for salving his hurt feelings by savaging his opponents in print.
You can’t call a man a hack who writes for the masses while foolishly yearning “for intellectual stature beyond the realm of killer dinosaurs and talking monkeys,” and expect his next novel to be made up of mash notes. (In fact, I actually think Crowley got off easy. Crichton might have made his fictional doppelganger a poorly-endowed pedophile, but at least he didn’t send him to a state school).
And here’s the thing: would anyone have connected Mick Crowley, baby-buggerer, with Michael Crowley of The New Republic unless Crowley had gone tattling to Teacher? Doubtful. As Crowley himself would probably hasten to point out, there is little overlap between TNR’s erudite readers and those coach-class-flying boobs who put Crichton’s books on the best-seller lists.
“I confess to having mixed feelings about my sliver of literary immortality,” Crowley allows. “It's impossible not to be grossed out on some level--particularly by the creepy image of the smoldering Crichton, alone in his darkened study, imagining in pornographic detail the rape of a small child.”
True enough – but is it really that much creepier than the image of a smoldering Crowley, alone in his own darkened study, frantically Googling “small penis law?”
“And,” Crowley continues, “I'm looking forward to the choice Crichton will have to make, when asked about the basis for Mick Crowley, between a comically dishonest denial and a confession of his shocking depravity.”
I don’t think readers will Crichton’s depravity quite as shocking as Crowley does, given that his own article mentioned numerous instances of Crichton attacking fictional versions of his foes.
Nor do I think Crichton would have any trouble should the question come up. If it were me, I’d just smile and say, straight-faced, “The character has nothing to do with Michael Crowley. Michael Crowley is enormous. Why, after that piece he wrote about me, I could barely walk for a week.”
Meanwhile, Jennifer Hudson is earning raves all over the place for performance as Effie in “Dreamgirls.” The Times’ A.O. Scott writes it’s not often you go to the movies and see a big-boned, sexually assertive, self-confident black woman — not played for laughs or impersonated by a male comedian in drag — holding the middle of the screen. And when was the last time you saw a first-time film actress upstage an Oscar winner, a pop diva and a movie star of long standing? Ms. Hudson is not going anywhere. She has arrived.”
But here’s my question: now that she’s arrived, where does she go next? Where are the parts in Hollywood, or even on Broadway, for an actress like Hudson, in an era where Kate Winslet’s being cast as the mousy best friend?
I hope I get to see more of her. I worry that I won’t.
Update: I’m writing, and Lu is supposed to be napping, in preparation for our latke bash tonight, but I don’t think she’s asleep, given that she just called down the stairs, “Mommy? What are Cinderella’s sisters names?”
“Anastasia and Drizella!” I called back.
“Oh. Okay.”
Happy Hanukkah to everyone who's celebrating tonight.
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Thursday, December 14, 2006 posted by Jen at 12/14/2006 01:57:00 PM
Dreamgirls was fantastic, and Jennifer Hudson absolutely owned the role, and I’ll write more about it later, but meanwhile, more pressing news as the New York Times takes on Michael Crichton, literary feuds, and small penises.
Per the paper of record, novelist Crichton, infuriated at his treatment by a journalist named Michael Crowley, inserted a minor character into his new book. The character, “Mick Crowley” is a Yale graduate and political reporter whose small penis nevertheless manages to do significant damage when he rapes his sister-in-law's toddler son.
Oof.
Now the real Crowley, an actual Yale graduate and political reporter, has penned a piece for The New Republic that, alas, isn’t on line, complaining that he’s been the victim of a “literary hit and run,” and that Crichton is escaping public outrage by hiding behind “the small penis rule.”
What, you wonder, is “the small penis rule?”
The rule, Crowley writes, is described in a 1998 article in The New York Times in which the libel lawyer Leon Friedman said it is a trick used by authors who have defamed someone to discourage lawsuits. “No male is going to come forward and say, ‘That character with a very small penis — that’s me!’ ” Mr. Friedman explained.
I’ve read about the rule in Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, where it was presented as less of a law and more of a helpful suggestion for women who wished to write about ex-lovers (or women who were going to write fiction about male characters who’d perceived as their ex-lovers, whether or not it was true). Change a man’s name, change a man’s job, then give him a teeny tiny ground-down eraser nubbin of a penis, and he’ll never ever ever say it’s him.
So what we’re seeing here is the first-ever incident where a fellow actually has come forward to claim that the man with the very small penis was him.
I'm thinking that Lamott got it right, and that the affronted journalist would have been smart to ignore the whole mess.
By airing his grievance, Michael Crowley has put Crichton’s book back in the news, and will ultimately make people who’d never otherwise pick it up take a look (not to mention, it’ll make people who’d never had occasion to consider Crowley’s sexual proclivities and penis size spend a lot more time dwelling on same and wondering, as Galleycat delicately does, whether the gentleman doth protest too much).
Plus – and again, haven’t read his article,so I don't know whether the small penis emphasis is his, or the Times' -- but if it's his, then his ire is misplaced. A guy uses you as the basis for a character who rapes a baby, and you’ve got your dander up over the size of your fictional johnson?
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Tuesday, December 12, 2006 posted by Jen at 12/12/2006 10:31:00 PM
Busy, busy, doing lots of writing, lots of shopping (so much shopping that my credit card company actually called me to make sure someone else wasn’t going nuts on the Internet in my name).
I was part of Salon.com’s “ask our favorite writers about their favorite books of 2006.” Sadly, I didn’t realize that it wasn’t also an invitation for Salon's faves to say slightly snarky things about the highly praised books we didn’t like or understand. Thus, I will pass on my endorsements of Ken Kalfus’ A DISORDER PECULIAR TO THE COUNTRY and Stephen King’s LISEY’S STORY and not pass along my complaints about Cormac McCarthy’s punctuation.
I’m also reading with interest Sam Tanenhaus answering readers’ questions about how the Book Review choses what books to write about and who gets to write about them.
In non-book news, Adam and I got tickets to a preview of Dreamgirls tomorrow night because we are incredibly cool and well-connected (and by “incredibly cool and well-connected,” I mean “we subscribe to Entertainment Weekly and they sent us a pass”) I’m pretty excited, even though I saw Dreamgirls on Broadway when I was twelve, where Jennifer Holliday played Effie Melody White. I have never in my life seen a performance like her “And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going." I’m not sure I’m ready to see anyone else play the role. Very interesting story about Holliday's post-Dreamgirls career here.
Okay, I’m blogging while watching Barbara Walters interview Jay-Z. Barbara Walters should never, ever say the word “bootylicious.” It’s just wrong.
UPDATE: Now she’s talking to the crocodile hunter’s wife about her marriage, and she said, “It was instant animal attraction.” Argh!
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Welcome to A Moment of Jen, author Jennifer Weiner's constantly-updated take on books, baby, and news of the world. Email me at jen (a) jenniferweiner.com.
