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An earlier McEwan, the part where they cut up a corpse.

For a serious man of letters, Ian McEwan does love a shocker. This is the author who gave us kids stashing their dead mother in a trunk in the basement, a man carrying a dismembered corpse in a suitcase (Kinatay has nothing on it), and detailed descriptions of brains being cut up. Not to mention newlyweds going off on their honeymoon and not having sex. And the ultimate shocker: It was fiction! I made it up!

So it should not surprise us that in his new novel, Solar, a man’s penis freezes off.

Of course we can count on Page Six for the squirm-inducing excerpt:

“As the polar wind raged . . . he watched in horror as his penis shrank even smaller, and curled tighter against the zip. And not only was it diminishing before his eyes, but it was turning white. Not the white of a blank page, but the sparkling silver of a Christmas bauble…

“He let himself be guided back to [his guide’s] Ski-Doo and it was there that the calamity finally happened. As he raised a leg to hoist himself onto his place behind the guide, he felt, and even thought he heard, a terrible rending pain in his groin, a cracking and a parting, like a birth, like a glacier calving. He gave a shout . . .”

Like a glacier calving! Yikes.

Ayala Avenue

Manila

Roxas Boulevard

Oh right, it actually existed. In the 60s. Photos from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Digital Collections. Ay, progress.

In Green Zone, set in 2003, Matt Damon plays Chief Warrant Officer Miller, an American soldier who goes to Iraq to make the world safe for democracy, then starts wondering out loud why they cannot find the weapons of mass destruction that were used to justify the war. Every site they inspect turns out to be WMD-free; how could their supposedly reliable intelligence be so wrong?

Two men hear him: veteran CIA man Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson), and slick Pentagon bureaucrat Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear). Brown believes terrible mistakes are being made, Poundstone insists everything is going well. Then there’s the Wall Street Journal reporter played by Amy Ryan, whose eagerness has been exploited by American politicians to make the case for war; and Khalid Abdalla as Freddie, a former Iraqi soldier who wants to help the Americans and gets a mouthful of sand for his trouble.

It’s anarchy and chaos in “free” Iraq, and director Paul Greengrass (the last two Bourne movies) won’t let us forget. Imagine being in a huge traffic jam on Edsa at 1pm on a sizzling day with your airconditioner dead and everyone on the street yelling and going Jason Ivler on each other. That’s the setting of Green Zone: a situation so screwed up you can’t tell the bad guys from the worse guys, or even hear yourself think. Greengrass is a fine action director, the chase scene is his metier, and much of Green Zone is taut and thrilling even if we know how that situation turned out.

Matt Damon really is the most reliable big star working today: he can play smart, stupid, fat, fit, nerd, jock, loser, hotshot, and he doesn’t even have to say much. (Fabia tells me American audiences are staying away from the Green Zone. Iraq movies never rake it in, no? Head in the sand?)

Green Zone is a movie that makes me want to court-martial Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their gang for leading their country and the world on a wild goat chase.

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Speaking of action directors, it has been noted that Kathryn Bigelow won the Oscar for Best Director because she made the kind of movie male directors would do, while Nancy Meyers and Nora Ephron are overlooked for their work because they make chick flicks. That’s a good point, but the simple reason is that The Hurt Locker is just better than anything Meyers and Ephron have ever done. It’s Jane Campion and Penny Marshall who have reason to gripe. Also, I don’t buy the assumption that female viewers don’t enjoy mayhem and violence at the movies. Not only are combat movies fun but you get to grab your date in feigned surprise.

Are. lady q (the Dostoevsky) and milkolate (The Last Station). Please post your full names in Comments so I can arrange for you to pick up your prizes at National Bookstore in Power Plant, Rockwell, Makati.

Thanks to everyone who joined the contest, it’s always heartening to find intelligent readers. Now write me some warped histories for Barbie in LitWit Challenge 2.3.

P.S. Just checked with Customer Service at NBS Power Plant and Glorietta 5. The following books are still unclaimed: Fahrenheit 451, Revolting Recipes, The Chess Machine, Cory, and Oscar Wao. Winners, please claim your prizes before April 15. The prizes are waiting under your names. Unclaimed books will be given away again.

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Update, 18.03. lady q and milkolate, you can pick up your prizes any time at the Customer Service Counter at National Bookstore, 2/F Power Plant Mall, Rockwell, Makati.

Barbie by James Reyes.

Barbie’s been around for decades, in many incarnations: Ballerina Barbie, Malibu Barbie, and so on. The problem is, they’re all good girls, and good girls get boring. It is up to us, dear reader, to make Barbie more human. Barbie needs to be bad.

This week’s LitWit Challenge: Send in a short biography of Bad Barbie. It should be 500 words or less, the more outrageous the better. Post your entries in Comments; the deadline is 11.59pm on March 20, 2010. The winner gets a hardcover copy of Wesley Stace’s novel By George, the autobiography of a ventriloquist’s dummy.

Here’s a sample entry. (Your entry does not have to reference the 80s.)

She was working as a waitress at a cocktail bar when he met her. She was still Victor then, a fey 18-year-old who was saving money for his sex change so he could move on to the lucrative field of ping-pong ball propulsion. Still Akihiro picked her up, shook her up, and turned her around, and financed the operations that turned her into Varvie Aramvulo-Vriones, the toast of high society, high meaning mass consumption of uppers and downers.

Now five years later on she’s got the world at her feet, success has been so easy for her, and Akihiro’s beginning to bore her. She thinks it’s time she lived her life on her own. But Akihiro will only let her go over his dead body, so I guess that’s just what she must do.

The prize:

The Weekly LitWit Challenge is brought to you by our friends at National Bookstore. Thanks to James Reyes for permission to use his Barbie designs.

What else can you do with a beautiful, buxom 50+ year old icon who has inspired generations of little girls while being coveted by collectors like Montgomery Burns’ assistant Smithers, and getting blamed for the spread of anorexia?

Fashion designer James Reyes says, “Villainess!”

For Wednesday’s Ballet Barbie auction for the benefit of Ballet Philippines, James has created ten fabulous new incarnations of Barbie.

“I was inspired by Odile, the Black Swan in Swan Lake,” James says. “In the ballet, the Black Swan is also performed by the same dancer doing the white swan, Odette. Odile is feisty and uninhibited compared to Odette’s.

“I was intrigued by this dark side, so I decided to create a fantasy collection based on the dark side of Barbie. I made her in to a glamorous seductress, almost old Hollywood-like. I also used feathers, bustles, voluminous skirts and feather-like embellishments to refer to the elegant shape of the Black Swan.

“This is a celebration of every woman’s dark side. An enchantress of the night. A captivating creature clothed in darkness. This collection is a homage to beautiful villains.”

Brava!