Franco options The Adderall Diaries

It is all over the internets that Spiderman alum and James Dean-esque  Franco has optioned Stephen Elliott's ADHD driven book "The Adderall Diaries". /film is reporting that he may even write the adaptation, direct and star in the final product.

As fractured as the book is, the adaption is going to be a tough write. Not sure Franco is the man to do it, but his career has had touches of genius in between the tons of commercial plebeian crap he has decided to waste his time in. That being said, 127 Hours is getting tons of good press and may be worth the time.

127 Hours Trailer

For those of you that have not experienced the madness that is "The Adderall Diaries" Scott Indrisek seems to have captured the voice perfectly.

In a single rotund paragraph, Elliott can ping-pong between webcam sex, financial anxiety, hypothetical affairs with college students and murder confessions. Everything reminds the memoirist of something else, something to do with that irrepressible “I.”

And although not really mainstream fodder, an adaptation would do well in art houses across the country....either that or Franco will have to chop up the novel and turn it into something it is not.

James Franco at IMDB
Stephen Elliot at Wiki, Amazon, Home page

Jonathan Lethem bids farwell

As many of you have heard, author Jonathan Lethem is leaving Brooklyn to take his appointed position as the Roy Edward Disney Professor in Creative Writing at Pomona College in California.

Jonathan Lethem is a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the author of seven novels, including "The Fortress of Solitude"..... Which, by the way, is currently being adapted to film by director Joshua Marston, of Maria Full of Grace fame. Lethem's most recent book is "Chronic City".

This interview runs about 1.5 hours, but is filled with great stuff. Enjoy it on your next flight while everyone else is stuck watching a five year old Julia Roberts movie.








Jonathan Lethem at Wiki, NYTimes, Amazon

Gabriel Josipovici almost takes on Postmodernism

Eric Ormsby has a great piece in the WSJ on the new book by Gabriel Josipovici titled "What Ever Happened to Modernism?"

In Mr. Josipovici's view, Modernism is something at once vast and intimate, encompassing "nothing less than life itself." Modernism isn't a style, he says, but "the coming into awareness by art of its precarious status and responsibilities." Even more portentously, Modernism is a kind of anguished repudiation—"a response to the simplifications of the self and of life that Protestantism and the Enlightenment brought with them."

This book on its surface is a wonderful and painful plea to reclaim modernism from the rise of the postmodernist culture, but when you dig deeper the bite just isn't there. While it is eloquent and an insightful, it does not draw the blood many of us are looking for.

That said, in the years to come it will be hard to discuss postmodernist literature thumping of modernism without mentioning this book. So read it.

at Amazon