But first they read. Danticat picked an excerpt from her story "Ghosts," in which an aspiring radio journalist dreams of starting a program on his violence-wracked Haiti neighborhood. She read,

He would open with a discussion of how many people in Bel Air had lost limbs. Then he would go from limbs to souls, to the number of people who had lost family-siblings, parents, children-and friends. These were the real ghosts, he would say, the phantom limbs, phantom minds, phantom loves that haunt us, because they were used, then abandoned, because they were desolate, because they were violent, because they were merciless, because they were out of choices, because they did not want to be driven away, because they were poor.

Diaz (author of Drown and The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) read from a personal essay about his dad, and it's a testament to his command of both humor and pain that his father's favorite insult — "when you grow up, I am going to find you in an alley somewhere, and I am going to shoot you" — got a huge laugh. After they finished reading, and after a discussion of their long-standing friendship (which Danticat said was about "more life things than writing things"), a listener asked Diaz about the science fiction references in Oscar Wao. Diaz said he'd been pilloried in the mainstream nerd press (only sort of an oxymoron) in a way that smacked of racism. He then made a point about scifi that doesn't get made often enough:

If it wasn't for people of color's experiences and women's experiences, the genre wouldn't exist.

Scifi frequently gets portrayed as a refuge for socially awkward white boys, but everything from Isaac Asimov to Battlestar Galactica is permeated with issues of otherness, or, as Diaz puts it, "questions of alien contact." Stories of new worlds and interspecies warfare can be a way of representing the experiences of immigrants — or of people whose bodies, for reasons of race or gender or size or shape or ability — don't conform to the established norm. People who write about scifi are starting to accept this — female science fiction and fantasy writers are getting more attention, and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay brought the related issue of sexual orientation in superhero comics to the fore. But the nerd backlash against Oscar Wao shows how eager some marginalized groups are to marginalize others, especially in the literary world, and how jealously (and dumbly) geeks sometimes guard their geek fiefdoms against those who could be allies.

Despite his experience with the nerd police, Diaz also advanced the somewhat debatable point that reading teaches compassion. He said reading a book was "one of the clearest ways to come into communion with another subjectivity," and that, moreover, the process of writing forced him to be a better person. "When I come up short as a writer," he added, "there's always a shortcoming in my character." Danticat responded that becoming a mother (that's her and her daughter above) had changed her as a writer — "when your life is layered in a certain way," she said, "you have more in your soul to go to." She got in a little dig at the Hemingway school of "life experience," in which the way to broaden yourself as a writer is to "go shoot animals," and her words were a powerful response to the idea that women can't both have families and make great art. But does making great art really require you to be a good person? And does it make good people of those who consume it?

Later in the conversation, Diaz said, "this life makes it so difficult to engage in civic- and justice-minded projects." By "this life," I assumed he meant American life, with its relative comfort and its myriad distractions, but it's also true that a life spent writing fiction — or reading it — invites escape into fictional worlds. I'm not a fan of the notion, popular when I was in grad school, that the best writers are assholes and the best fiction speaks to what is most evil in the reader's soul — both because I think it's a limiting view of literature and because, as a writer, I like having friends. And I believe that reading and writing do teach a willingness to explore other kinds of lives. But they also teach absorption in the mind and not in the world, and while this isn't always a bad thing, it doesn't necessarily lead to social change. Of the racist new Dominican Constitution and of injustice the world over, Diaz said, "everybody in every place in every way they can has to find a way to resist." And while reading fiction is many things, it's not (at least in America) active resistance.

New Yorker Festival [Official Site]
Ghosts [New Yorker]

Wasn't that a really annoying, condescending way to start an article? Imagine an entire article written the entire way, with the idea that every woman attending Comic Con this year will be there simply to stake out the likes of Jake Gyllenhaal and Johnny Depp. Can't imagine it? That's OK! The Los Angeles Times has already written it for you!

Is it so hard, in 2009, to accept the fact that women enjoy comic books/sci-fi novels/television programs/films/video games/etc. not because of the "studs" who appear on the screen or on the page but because of the actual content? I know it may be hard for some people to believe, but women do have interests that go beyond shoes and eating poop-inducing yogurt. "The Girls Guide To Comic Con" isn't a guide at all, but a rundown of the "hotties" who will be appearing in some form or another at the convention. Because, as the tipster who sent this article in notes (sarcastically, of course) "Oh, us GIRLZ, all we want are to look at those handsome menfolk and vampires!"

Come on, LA Times. If you really want to write a Girl's Guide To Comic Con (and I'm not sure it's necessary to split Comic Con into gender specific guides, but that's another story altogether) you could have at least had women who know what they're talking about write the piece. Like, say, the awesome ladies of io9, for example, who would probably have much more to say about the convention than "Women will be rushing the stage, offering to do star Jake Gyllenhaal's laundry on those washboard abs that he acquired for the film, since he spends much of it fighting, shirtless or both." Blargh.

The Girls' Guide To Comic Con [LATimes]

The Washington Post:

Viewed without skepticism, "The X-Files: I Want to Believe" is a taut, well-acted, thoughtfully organized, not very scary, not very hard to figure out serial-killer mystery revolving around two 40-something adults with trust issues. They still drive a Taurus, and their adventure takes place over a few gray, snowy days in NoVa and WeVa. (British Columbia, once again, reprises its "X-Files" role as a wet, overcast Anywhere.) Described thusly, the movie sounds like a low-budget yawner from an off night at Sundance.

People will complain (and already have) that "I Want to Believe" looks cheap and easy, barely rising to the level of a usual episode back when. Doubter that I am, I actually took it as a sweet bit of epilogue, made by and for adults. Even the show's "shippers" . . . may be surprised by how grown-up our paranormal sleuths have become. With simple sanity and lack of flash, Mulder and Scully make it clear: Our summer movies are part of a big conspiracy plot to trash our minds. I want to believe Mulder and Scully are correct.

Time:

A subtler anachronism is the seriousness with which Mulder and Scully take their work and themselves. On TV, Duchovny settled quickly into his role as an obsessive plodder; Anderson's gravity served as a rebuke to all the actresses her age who spoke in baby talk and aspired to nothing higher than Baywatch. The movie continues that dark, quiet tone, which means that today's moviegoers will have to forgo expectations of wisecracking heroes and snarling psychopaths, and to take seriously a couple of anguished folks who look and behave with the tired tenseness of anchors on C-SPAN.

USA Today:

For one thing, the Mulder-Scully chemistry seems to have evaporated. David Duchovny is still engagingly low-key as the truth-seeking Fox Mulder, while Gillian Anderson as Dana Scully seems to have become even more dour. Grounded in science, her doctor character was always serious, but she has lost some of what made her more human: passionate emotions and flashes of dry humor. There's a discernible lack of sparks during a bedroom scene. Sure, it's meant to be cozy rather than sexy, but it feels forced.

The Los AngelesTimes:

Scully, who now works as a surgeon at a Catholic hospital (Our Lady of Sorrows, nudge nudge), was always a wrestling act for Anderson, who had to fight against the character's morose, doubting-Thomas side, not to mention prosaic literary tendencies. Anderson loses the match here: Scully has ossified into one of the most humorless characters to suck the life out of a summer movie.

The New York Times:

That relationship still simmers, though at a reduced temperature. There’s nothing stirring the air between Mulder and Scully, who, having left the bureau, come across as unmoored and unfocused, even when they’re working on the outlandish criminal case that drags them back into the twilight zone. A similar lack of urgency characterizes the movie, which despite its yowling dogs, barking Russians, screaming women, swelling choral voices and moody cinematography by Bill Roe — which turns even dark blue a deeper shade of black — never finds a sustainable pulse. Mr. Carter knows how to grab your attention visually, but the amalgam of trashy thriller clichés that he has compiled with Frank Spotnitz, another series regular, creates its own deadening effect. It’s no wonder Mulder and Scully seem so diffident.

ReelViews:

The film's central "mystery" is painfully underdeveloped. The pedophile priest, in addition to being a walking cliché, adds little to the proceedings, and the revelation about what lies behind the kidnappings and murders is B-grade bad. The film musters a little tension toward the end, with Mulder in peril, but that's in stark contrast to the dull and tedious 90 minutes to precede it. One keeps waiting for I Want to Believe to shift into high gear, and it never does. Do we ever believe that the characters are in danger or that their "mission" means anything? No. The film feels like an excuse for nostalgia.

The actors don't seem to care, either. Duchovny is okay, and the film was apparently made largely because he made himself available for it, but the Mulder in this film is a lot more laid-back than his TV series counterpart. Gillian Anderson claims that it was difficult for her to re-discover the character after such a long layoff, and it shows. Scully is a shadow of what she once was. Most distressingly, where these two used to play brilliantly off one another, here they never mesh, even on those occasions when the screenplay allows them to share the screen. What's the point of a reunion if the characters are going to be kept apart so much? Amanda Peet has more scenes with Duchovny than Anderson does.

Slate:

The nefarious plot behind the agent's abduction is so far-fetched I'm itching to spoil it. But I'll limit myself to observing that, if ever I'm dying of a rare brain disease, I hope my surgeon won't go home and frantically Google treatment options, as Scully does at one key moment. (Couldn't she at least log on to Medscape?) The problem with the movie's semisupernatural crime plot, though, isn't that the resolution is completely outlandish; it's that the outlandishness is insufficiently grounded in pseudoscience. If you're going to posit stuff this crazy, you'd better have some solid-sounding bullshit to back it up.

The New Republic:

The story unspools adequately from this premise, but rarely feels like more than a middling episode of the series extended to twice its usual length. In part this is thanks to series creator (and first-time feature director) Chris Carter, who repeatedly gets failing marks in How to Make a Movie 101. It's difficult, for instance, to follow even the basic geography of the film, which jumps back and forth between the rural West Virginia crime scene and Scully's hospital (are she and Mulder commuting?), and features a climactic chase in a city I assume was Richmond but may have been somewhere else. Worse, the coy are-they-or-aren't-they relationship between Mulder and Scully that was emphasized in the latter years of the series has progressed into something revealed so opaquely that it takes a good while to recognize what it is.

The X-Files: I Want to Believe is in no conventional sense a good movie. And yet, for fans of the series, it may be just good enough. There are moments of penetrating moodiness and horror; stabs at mystical profundity that don't miss too badly; some nice performances (especially by Connolly); and even an all-too-brief appearance by Mitch Pileggi's Walter Skinner. Most important, the chemistry between Duchovny and Anderson has lost little of its fizz, and it's nice to spend more time in their company, even as it's hard not to wish they could have found a better way to occupy themselves than wandering through such a shaggy retread. This latest, and presumably last, X-Files installment is not an unpleasant way to pass a couple of hours, provided you, too, want to believe. But you have to want it pretty badly.