Here at Flavorpill, we’ve learned (and continue to be reminded, on an almost daily basis) the pros and cons of making a good list. On the plus side, people love to see pop culture artifacts piled up and stacked against each other; it starts conversations and stirs passions. On the minus side, selecting and ranking beloved films, television shows, albums, books, musicians, etc. is just asking for trouble — what begins as starting conversations and stirring passions can become a melee of second-guessing, judgment, and sometimes even name-calling. So our sympathies and admiration go out to the fine folks at Popmatters, who have spent the past several weeks compiling a list of “the 100 essential directors,” and thus opened themselves up to the inevitable Monday-morning quarterbacking of film fans, a notoriously hard-to-please bunch.
The site’s editors wisely avoided the most bitter arguments by running the list alphabetically rather than in a ranked order; it’s a move that also spread out the angry “What about…” comments throughout the series’ run, rather than all at the end. But now that we’ve had a chance to look at the whole thing, as you have, there are some, well, puzzling choices.
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It happens all the time — subways, buses, trains, parks, coffee shops. It could be happening right next to you. People are reading. You can’t stop them, but you can judge them. What others enjoy reading is a window into their mind. After the jump, we’ll take you through some helpful tips on what your oh-so-literate neighbor’s book actually says about them. Feel free to add to our sweeping generalizations in the comments.
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It may not be the Nobel Prize, but the competition for this year’s “Bad Sex in Fiction” award is just as stiff (cringe — pun intended). Philip Roth is on the Literary Review’s shortlist, and he’s in good company — current nominees include Amos Oz, Nick Cave, and John Banville, while past candidates include such literary giants as Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Salman Rushdie, and Tom Wolfe. Now in its 17th year, fiction’s most notorious honor was dreamed up by Auberon Waugh (Evelyn’s son) “with the aim of gently dissuading authors and publishers from including unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing, or redundant passages of a sexual nature in otherwise sound literary novels.”
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Today, Nerve published a list of the 20 Sexiest Ugly People, a group whose homeliness in no way precludes their hotness. Huh? You know, like Woody Allen. Ooooh. They promised to follow up with the other side of the contrarian coin, but we thought we’d get a jump on things with the following list of people that are technically good-looking, but for various reasons, completely repulsive. Read More »
