His letter includes the line: “While I was not at Hampshire during the 1980s, colleagues and alumni who were have questioned the “composite” characters created by Rushfield. In reality, most students then pursued their education with serious intent and maturity, as they do now”
Now I guess I’ve tip-toed around this question, by just saying the book is about me, and I want to focus on my experience. And some people may have been hard working students, while some were not, i have no idea… I was just writing about my own experience,…not meaning to cast general aspersions beyond the scope of my own experience…etc.
And all that is true, that is my meaning.
However, when the criticism begins to suggest that i am more or less creating a fantasy world of deadbeats out of a land of dilligent, nose to grindstone, highly motivated pHd’s in the making, I must respond.
There may have been many in that above category. It many have even been in the majority. And Hampshire since for all i know may have become a veritable sweat shop of academic labor. But the stereotype of Frisbee U did not come from nothing. My friends, my extended circle may or may not have been the typical Hampshire student, but if they were a minority, they were an extremely sizable one. (more…)
Here’s a link to a round table discussion I did with the BBC on the decade in celebrity along with a British publicist and author, and an Indian reporter. The discussion comes at about 50 minutes into this clip.
This is the first book review I’ve written in nearly three years, since I hung up my reviewing socks following a stint at Publishers Weekly’s online division, where I was paid handsomely in American currency to review books about sports and music. Those books were assigned to me based on a rough affinity for the subject matter. I liked baseball and Phil Spector music and funny writing, so I was assigned books about baseball, Phil Spector and the music industry, naturally.
Despite my purported interest in the subject matter, however, I often disliked the books assigned to me. Perhaps this was a residual effect of years of assigned reading at school. These books, looming over my reading list like a colonoscopy, found me angry and tired. Still, I gave them a fair shake. A few rose above to really impress me. Others offered diversion or momentary entertainment before lapsing into unrelenting mediocrity. Several were nearly too dreadful to finish.
And on the blog of the great Pasadena book mecca Vrommans, a completely different Patrick was also very kind.
There are also a handful of not-friendly reviews out there, which strangely I don’t have the links to handy, but having written plenty of not-friendly things in my life about others’ work, I say all the better; slams are very welcome.
Overall, if you look at the Goodreads ratings for instance, seems my little memoir either gets zero to one stars or four-to-five stars; readers either love it or throw it down in disgust. Which is the most one can ask for. The most common question from the critics seems to be, why should I care about these inert, cretinous characters? My first reaction to that is, if you don’t, then you shouldn’t. I can’t convince to care about something that didn’t evoke empathy on the page.
But I think I need a better answer than that. My first new year’s resolution is to come up with one. Watch this space.
And as ever, complete info and ordering links right here.
The Awl asked a bunch of media deadbeats like myself to remember a critical moment of the past decade. I stunned the world and myself by not making mine about Idol, but writing instead about my prior triumph, the hunt for lonelygirl.
It begins:
In 2006, as a reporter for a major metropolitan newspaper, I joined in what was at that time the largest manhunt in human history: the search for lonelygirl15.
At the time, all the world knew about this shadowy underworld figure was that she claimed to be a teenage girl shooting videos herself on a webcam from her teenage bedroom somewhere in the great sprawl of America. As the world became entranced by the beguiling and wise innocence of her two-minute films, the demand grew to a ferocious roar for the young star to step forward and accept all the honors that a celebrity-driven society could bestow on an instant sensation. And when Bree, aka lonelygirl, failed to materialize, the suspicion arose that perhaps this was some sort of fraud—that the world was being put on.
This week I returned to Hampshire College to read from my memoirs of the my long-forgotten time there, Don’t Follow Me, I’m Lost. All in all a delightful visit and I especially enjoyed hearing from the current students their thoughts on the book. The crowd seemed about evenly divided between boos and applause, as it should be.
Below are video excerpts from the Q and A session. The audio is pretty rough in spots unfortunately.
Many thanks to current Hampshire student Christopher Blyler for putting the event together; truly an inquiring young man in the classic Hampshire mold who ended up asking me the toughest question of the night.
First video is below. The rest are after the jump.
It has often been said that I don’t like anything and in particular that I don’t like any movies. To refute that, I have combed the past ten years and found 72 movies that I like enough to call them my top films of of the 00′s. Here they are roughly in order of how much I didn’t dislike them:
1. Best of Youth
2.There Will be Blood
3. The Baader Meinhoff Complex
4. Together
5. The Lives of Others
6. Wall-E
7. In the Mood For Love
8. Mullholland Drive
9. Bad Education
10. Casino Royale
11. Children Of Men
12. The Queen
13. Up!
14. Spirited Away
15. A Serious Man
16.The Dark Knight
17. Battle Royale
18. Team America
19. Letters from Iwo Jima
20. The Hurt Locker
21. Head On
22. Volver
23. Slumdog Millionaire
24. The Pianist
25. The Ring
26. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
27. Moulin Rouge
28. Ratatouille
29. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
30. Donnie Darko
31. City of God
32. Movern Callar
33. Spider Man
34. Chicken Run
35. Man on Wire
36. Shaun of the Dead
37. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days
38. Lilya 4-ever
39. Michael Clayton
40. Munich
41. The Class
42, Capturing the Friedmans
43. Let the Right One In
44. The Wrestler
45. The Others
46. Gosford Park
47. Pans Labyrinth
48. Frost/Nixon
49. The Incredibles
50. Reprise
51. 49 Up
52. Requiem For a Dream
53. You Can Count on Me
54. Y Tu Mama Tambien
55. Almost Famous
56. Amores Perros
57. Nobody Knows
58. The Piano Teacher
59. The Bourne Supremcy
60. Anchorman
61. The Devils Backbone
62. Hotel Rwanda
63. Changeling
64. Good Night and Good Luck
65. Brick
66. In America
67. Sideways
68. Chicago
69. Ghost World
70. Brokeback Mountain
71.The Grudge
72. Gangs of New York
I’ve got a piece up on The Daily Beast about the pressures of trying to write a memoir in this new social networking age when the past is online ready to chat all day and won’t stand back far enough to let you form detached theories about it. It begins:
Around 2004, I began writing the memoirs of my wayward college years in the mid-1980s. My writing was initially inspired by news of the death of one of my old classmates. It had been more than a decade since I had last seen my friend, whom I call Frank in the book—and his death from a drug overdose came after years spent adrift, floating through life; a road that many of my peers had taken. On learning of Frank’s death, my thoughts drifted back to those chaotic times 20 years ago, when the party of the ’70s and ’80s had given way to the earnestness of the ’90s, and many of my generation, caught between the two eras, had made their stand by checking out in a nihilistic wave that would become known as grunge.
Looking back in time, I saw that in that brief moment, something had been permanently knocked loose for many of my peers, and I began writing my book to figure out what it had been. When I started writing, I was only in contact with a handful of college acquaintances, and reflecting back on my wayward youth, reading through old papers and journals, became a pleasantly wistful bit of therapy.
Some nice notices for and about the book around the internet for all your Don’t Follow Me, I’m Lost, a Memoir of Hampshire College in the Twilight of the 80′s needs.
• My former LA Times colleague Scott Timberg did a very nice interview with me for his blog, which you can read right here.
Richard Rushfield is a Contributing Editor of Vanity Fair and formerly the Entertainment Editor of latimes.com and West Coast Editor of Gawker, His book "Don't Follow Me, I'm Lost: A Memoir of Hampshire College in the Twilight of the 80's" was published in 2009. He is currently at work on a history of American Idol, due out January 2011 from Hyperion Books.
Hampshire President Ralph Hexter wrote a letter about DFMIL. Doesn’t appear to be a fan.
