Yesterday instead of blogging I went and saw the new Batman movie. It is not nearly as bad as the contrarian New York Magazine critic David Edelstein claims or nearly as good as all the fanboys and girls on IMDB insist (I mean, seriously, better than “The Godfather”?) Its definitely better than the movie I just finished watching today when I should have been blogging, “I’m Not There,” the Todd Haynes movie about Bob Dylan. But thats another story. (The soundtrack is pretty rad however; especially the version of “Maggie’s Farm” contained therein. I’m totally in agreement with Rebecca about Stephen Malkmus on the strength of this cover alone).

As the book I am working on right now just so happens to concern itself with crime and with blackmail specifically, I have been thinking a lot about genre and when genre is undertaken in a literary fashion. While there have been many notable instances of the high and low melding in literature, movies have been consistently doing this very well for a long time. For what I like to think of as research I watch a lot of movies–American and French gangster, heist and noir cinema being my favorite. So it was nice to see a short piece by A.O. Scott in the Times today about superhero movies (another subgenre-genre that has, at least of late, aspired to something more) and what he believes is the beginning of the end of their prominence in the marketplace. Scott draws a parallel to the western and the limits of that genre, but then, disappointingly, the article just ends. His point seems to be that while the superhero movie and the western are wholly capable of stating the very things about good and evil and the like that, in a sense, go without saying in non-genre-based drama, of the two, only the western truly explores these ideas. Which got me thinking: in this kind of work, what does it really mean “to explore?”

But I digress…And probably for good reason. Compared with Philadelphia, my reading in Providence the following weekend was a breeze. I took a bus this time and arrived hours ahead of the start time of the reading. I brought books with me, a precaution that was totally unnecessary as the bookstore had already ordered a bunch. My co-reader, Laura Jaramillo was brilliant as ever. My friend and former roommate Gabriel Mendes and his lovely wife, Liz, hosted an afterparty that was fun as hell, if without incident. Then I gave stout handshakes and hugs to everyone and went home.