So, looks like James Frey’s paint-by-numbers fiction factory‘s produced at least one Hollywood movie that’s actually going to make it to release:

I don’t think there’s any chance I’ll see this except perhaps in support of Diana Agron’s awesomeness—she’s one of the few things about Glee that doesn’t feel super-tainted for me. But I think it’s fascinating that there is a difference between how we feel about engineered entertainment depending on whether it’s on paper or film. When shops construct fiction according to formulas of what they think will be successful in books, it occasions a fair bit of disapprobation. Companies like Alloy Entertainment get criticized for producing trash—and worse, for degrading the idea of authenticity and authorship through the writing teams they sometimes use, for producing plagiarists like Kaavya Viswanathan.

I think it’s notable that critics are, or have been, obsessed with Gossip Girl as a television show, when many of them might have dismissed the book series as cynically constructed chick-lit junk. We expect television and movies to be lab-produced to the extent that we can enjoy particularly successful executions of genres and cliches without feeling that we’re debasing ourselves and an art form by enjoying them. We expect to be manipulated so we don’t have to feel guilty about it. But literature is supposed to be special, and we treat anyone, like Frey, or Alloy, who understands that a lot of what we like is simple and formulaic and that there’s money to be made in hitting our sweet spots, as if they’re debasing something. Literature’s supposed to stay pure. Television and the movies were born fallen.

Both “>before I went to Alaska and while I was there, I read and re-read a ton of Jon Krakauer this summer, and this weekend, I stumbled on an old copy of Under the Banner of Heaven, and started re-reading it. It’s got a lot of the reporting that Krakauer’s good at, but it strikes me as a substantially worse book than any of his adventure or wilderness writing. I think he wants to make the argument that Mormonism has violent tendencies, which is both theologically and historically unsubtle as an argument, and ignores a lot of religious scholarship and context about religious evolution. But more than that, I think it’s a book that doesn’t work because Krakauer doesn’t have personal experience he can draw on in a useful way.

Michael Bay is an absurd human being and director, but if he uses his cozy relationship with the U.S. military-industrial complex to get the country thinking about space exploration again with Transformers: Dark of the Moon, I would be prepared to forgive him a multitude of Isabel Lucas- and Megan Fox-shaped sins (though not the Racist Robot Twins—some things are beyond the pale):

Seriously, though, it’s always been my stupid, sad policy bugbear to wish that we were really serious about space exploration and colonization. I suppose if we’re going to find new arsenic-based life forms here on earth, we probably don’t have to go to Mars, and there are things that are bigger, more urgent priorities. But goddamn do I want to be the crazy journalist picked to settle Mars with a bunch of other nutty Americans and Russians, and hang out with Sufis, and see my kids grow up into slightly snotty-but-sweet-semi-immortals.