TV Guide channel is hosting a Dirty Dancing holiday marathon.  Why?  …Because it’s NOT It’s a Wonderful Life.

Film and the Holidays

• Slate’s piece on “The Best Vehicles for Pumpkin” is disappointing.  They forgot oatmeal.
• I just watched A Room with a View the other day, in which Daniel Day-Lewis plays Cecil, a pretentious “Edwardian prig.”  And then! Here’s More Intelligent Life‘s best-of Day-Lewis’ CV.
• Gawker wants your Thanksgiving horror stories.
• In Norway, though, someone has deliberately destroyed a 650-house gingerbread village.

Oprah, Opting Out

• Already on the lookout for the next Oprah?  Can’t we mourn, people?
• Also, Jezebel’s got a mashup of 25 yeras of the Goddess screaming celebrity names. It’s pretty funny.
• And the publishing industry now has someone to blame when they die.  I can hear it now: “If only Oprah had never selfishly quit….we’d all have jobs today.”

Lit., Print, and Protest

• Might the New York Times actually pull out ahead in this whole print-is-dying stumbling block?
• All literature is protest, but all protest is not literature.
• Paper Cuts excerpts Roberto Bolaño’s last interview.
• James Wood lampoons, mildly, the novels of Paul Auster.
• The problem of Jane Austen (and why all those pervasive parodies might not be all bad).
• “On Writing Too Well”: William Safire, William Buckley, Jr., and Evelyn Waugh.
• Finally, it’s settled.  Unhappy people make the best writers.