He’s baaaaaaack. Setting aside the noise of Cannes wrapping up (Kanye West: “I don’t answer questions.”) comes the verdict on Michael Haneke’s Amour, which should open in the U.S. late this year, under the Oscar wire. It sounds great!

Star Wars came out 35 years ago today. Everything’s different now!

Chris Rovzar, editor of Vanity Fair’s website, just found this delightful item in the VF archives, from February of 1997. (Ancient history? Or yesterday? YOU DECIDE. Either way, it was before irony died.) That year was the publication of the excellent collection of New York Observer columns, called Sex and the City. Some notable things about this picture:

1. The photo caption: “Candace Bushnell enjoys posing seductively to promote herself.”

2. The photo itself: Man. There is a lot to talk about regarding how women memoirists are presented/allow themselves to be presented/are coerced into being presented in the book and magazine industry but this one really takes some kind of gluten-free cake. All told, if the Internet as we know it existed in 1997, basically it would be aflame with people calling her a slut.

2.5 Opposite our heroine Candy, in the Hilfiger ad: Jason Lewis, who would go on to star as Samantha’s love interest in the TV show “Sex and the City.”

Let’s play a little game. Think about the First World War for a minute. Good. Now think about the Renaissance. Okay: Which one did you think of in black and white? Did I just BLOW YOUR MIND? Anyway, yes, the reasons are obvious, but it’s still kind a neat trick. I got it from here.

“The three directors who oversee risk at JPMorgan Chase & Co. include a museum head who sat on American International Group Inc.’s governance committee in 2008, the grandson of a billionaire and the chief executive officer of a company that makes flight controls and work boots. What the risk committee of the biggest U.S. lender lacks, and what the five next largest competitors have, are directors who worked at a bank or as financial risk managers.”
 — Good stuff!

‘Gone With The Wind’: Devil In A Black Bombazine Dress

And here we come, at last, to the selection closest to my dark and twisty heart, Margaret Mitchell’s hideous bitch-goddess of a novel, Gone With the Wind. It’s awful! It’s wonderful! It’s Marlboro Reds. Apparently, in a 2008 poll, it clocked in at second place (behind The Bible) as the favorite book of the American people. If that doesn’t explain your local news reports, what will?

I’d love to be able to say, as one does about C.S. Lewis, “oh, I didn’t get the super-offensive subtext about how Muslims inadvertently worship a flaming devil-beast, even though Jesus will still consider taking them to heaven so long as they don’t also have normal teenage yearnings for boys and lipstick.” This is not that. The things that are horribly, terribly wrong with Gone With the Wind are not even given a thin patina of lion-based allegory. It’s all right there to see. Mitchell just plain doesn’t like black people. Or, well, doesn’t like black people who might have their own desires and wants and needs and agendas and inner lives and historical memories and dreams and green-sprigged muslin dresses with stains you could probably cover up with a brooch, but what if Melanie has sharp eyes?

At this point, it would be fun to segue into THAT BEING SAID, THE DRESSES! THE PARTIES! THE LUSSSST! Obviously. It’s a tremendously entertaining book, and it’s beautifully written. I’m certainly never going to write a book as good as Gone With The Wind. And we’re absolutely going to get to the dresses! parties! lust! stuff, but let’s just take another minute first to say: this is kind of a fucked-up thing, this book. And it’s perfect for young teenage girls, because it could have been called: Gone With the Wind: The Triumph of the Self. This is a book of pure and perfect ego. I’m always saying that Scarlett is a sociopath, and she probably is, but I think that draws an artificial distinction between mental illness and the expression of unbridled self-will. Everyone likes survivors, as Scarlett so assuredly is, and likes to think of themselves as survivors, as though there was a real… alternative… to surviving. I mean, you can kill yourself, but apart from that, everyone just sort of muddles through as best they can, right? And let’s not do the SCARLETT WAS ENSLAVED TOO… BY SOCIETY bit. I mean, sign me up, you know? The South was not full of Scarletts, whatever the weird plantation-wedding-industry would like us to believe. For every Scarlett there were a couple hundred Emmie Slatteries getting fed the same line of nonsense by the powers that be.

Okay. Dresses! Parties! Lust! Weren’t those dresses fabulous? The black bombazine, too matronly, perhaps? The parties, even the lousy charitable parties to raise money for the pointless Cause (I guess we can give Mitchell some credit for making The Cause seem particularly pointless) were pretty boss. The lust: GOD, that scene when they’re out by the pigpen and Ashley finally slips Scarlett some tongue is… pretty great. As is, um, the sort-of-rape, sort-of-not-rape night of ecstasy with Rhett. The characters pop, I’ll give her that. When you think about alternative narrators, a la The Wind Done Gone, it’s a long list. I’d happily read a Gone With the Wind from India Wilkes’ perspective, or Melanie’s, or Dilcey’s, or Mammy’s, or Carreen’s…

Which leads us into this: are we supposed to like Scarlett? I always liked Scarlett, and I always wanted her to get the things she desired (and then, right, to be happy with those things once she had them, which seemed to be a bigger hurdle.) What’s to like, when you think about it? She’s a terrible friend, she’s borderline illiterate, she’s racist, she’s violent, she’s ungrateful, she wallows in minor bouts of regret for being such a shitty person once she’s achieved her next aim, and she accepts expensive gifts from gentlemen without thinking of the consequences. (Just candy and flowers, darlings! Keep your virtue with you at all times!)

And, not to be all “I have a chiiiiiild now” about the whole thing, but WHAT ABOUT WADE AND ELLA? CHRIST ON A FUCKING CROSS. We all remember Bonnie, because she broke her neck, and had a bit of a personality (Margaret Mitchell did not seem like a kid-friendly individual, no?), but those sad, bland, dull children with dead fathers, dragged along behind her curtain-dresses and treated slightly less well than her ill-treated friends and acquaintances are far more tragic figures than smokin’ hot twenty-eight year olds who went from being rich to very briefly poor to substantially richer over the course of a thousand pages. (I know, I know, her parents kicked it, which was very sad, and she had to wear black, which was uncomfortably hot, etc.)

If we weren’t supposed to like Scarlett (duly punished at the end of the novel, as the proprieties insist), I have to imagine we wouldn’t have Scarlett, the yeeeeeeesh authorized sequel, based entirely on the idea that no one wants to live in a world where Scarlett doesn’t get Rhett back. Everyone knows she’s going to get Rhett back in the end. She is, right? She has to. Come on.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

• No, seriously, why didn’t she just pick one of the damn Tartleton twins? Pleasant, devoted, rich, handsome, horsey… like upscale Weasley twins. TEAM STU.

• What’s the uncanny valley on waist size like? At what point do you start looking “freakish” instead of “Jessica Rabbit”? I’m pretty sure it kicks in long before Scarlett’s seventeen inches.

• Did/do you like Scarlett? Safe space. PLEASE, if you don’t like her, let it all hang out. She’s the worst!

• Will she get Rhett back? Or will she decide to just eat Ashley Wilkes for dinner, yet again?

• Ashley, Ashley, Ashley! GET IT TOGETHER, guy. Seriously. Right?

• Never having been south of the Mason-Dixon line, everything I know about the South comes from several college courses, this book, and Justified. What am I missing?

• Oh, the war! A war happens in this book. It’s not the best part. Dresses! Which was your favourite dress?

• Did you like The Wind Done Gone? I have not heard great things.

• Melanie, guys. Was she for real, or what?

• Ellen O’Hara, guys. Was she for real, or what?

• Did anyone else picture Gerald as Ted Kennedy? I swear to God, I saw Ted Kennedy taking that fence on his horse every. single. time.

And for next time, let’s pay tribute to the late Mike McGrady and do Naked Came the Stranger.

Previously: Wideacre and The Autobiography Of Henry VIII

Nicole Cliffe is the books editor of The Hairpin and the proprietress of Lazy Self-Indulgent Book Reviews.

Russia wants to build a permanent base on the moon, which is mostly indicative of what a terrible hellhole Russia is.

Man, if Sleigh Bells had been around back in 1982, when I was taking guitar lessons from Chaz at Red Bank Music but never actually learning how to play guitar because it was too hard to memorize scales and twist my fingers into the uncomfortable positions required to make actual chords, so I just learned how to make power chords because you could do it with two fingers laying flat across the fretboard, and learned the riffs to just the hooks of only the biggest, dumbest Black Sabbath and Deep Purple songs, and how to get crazy distortion feedback sounds by hooking my guitar up through my stereo speakers instead of my amp, I would have played the shit out of this!

“Fish that can survive out of water for 7 hours jumps down boy’s throat, gets stuck there for 14”
 — I’m gonna pass on this one, but if it’s that kind of thing that interests you, by all means.

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

The Fool

I

Preceding memory traipsing this single
track, — each step a flat greenish note
released in payment to relentless rent — 
green path bisecting greener landscape.

II

Everywhere millimeters wound & wound
through those greenest degrees, beckoned
with promise of home. Autonomy cleft me
 — by mind, a man & by heart, a hound.

III

Pathetic obedience to searching, searching
the indeterminate sentence (here follow
there pace) (bright pedestrian, red left hand)
(rootless) (impatient) (exact) (adamant).

IV

I dreamt the voyage I (waking) dreaded,
& waking, waited — wanted — & waited without
rest for some counterpart, he who’d match
my cadence — , loyal to a fault, I entered

V

the city of electricity, narrowed the field
where a stranger emerged (unreachable
magnetic tempter) — his hands free his mind
free his movement precisely the shape

VI

of his freedom, his heartbeat insisting I am I am
 — the fool in me carried on in false calm
in false hope & — enamored — led him to this ledge
beyond which he can’t be coaxed to leap.

Zachary Pace lives in Brooklyn.

There’s a bunch more poems to read in the archives of The Poetry Section. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.