Whew. One thing you can say about this Fellowship: They don’t mess around. If Charles wants us to hear about a subject, he doesn’t settle for some flack. Guess who our seminar speaker is tonight? Robert Lutz. Yes, the chairman of General Motors.

Seminars are officially off the record, so if he says anything about a hybrid Suburban on the drawing board for next model year, you’ll have to wait for the press conference.

No one really cares about this, but the editor of the Detroit Free Press wrote a column about her decision to kill the pan of Mitch Albom’s new novel. Wrote Carole Leigh Hutton:

… A negative review feels wrong, if not hypocritical. After all, we put this guy’s writing in the paper all the time, often on the front page. We obviously think he’s talented. And we heavily promote our association with him because we know how popular he is with so many of our readers. Somehow, using him to sell newspapers one day and publishing something hurtful about him the next felt dishonest and hypocritical.

Uh, no. Is this so hard? A bad review of a book does not say the writer is a bad person. It says he wrote a lousy book. Further, writers may enjoy great success and accomplishment in one area and fail in the next. How many lousy newspaper columns by great novelists have you read? I’m an OK columnist, but, I’m learning, a pretty poor screenwriter. Just because the Freep treasures Albom as a sportswriter does not mean he’s automatically a great novelist. Albom’s novel, currently being savaged by braver souls on Amazon, will stand or fall on its own merits, and is pretty review-proof anyway. It’s chicken soup for the easily pleased reader’s soul.

Where I fell short as the executive editor of this newspaper was in failing to get out in front of the question before it became a problem. I knew the book was coming out, and I failed to ask editors what our coverage plans were.

I guess that puff piece that appeared a week or so ahead of publication, detailing how eager booksellers were to get their hands on it, must have come as a surprise, then.

An e-mail acquaintance of mine is at Harvard this year, on a Nieman Fellowship (Ivy League school, not as much food, I’d wager), studying the evolving moral code of how we deal with animals. Fate handed her a big fat case study with the mauling of Roy (of Siegfried and, etc.) by his own white tiger.

You know, I’m a person who’s kept a horse, who has a dog, who eats meat and doesn’t get bent ouf of shape over hunting, and yet…I hate circuses. I mean, I hate them. A lot. Zoos? No problem. But making a tiger jump through a hoop, or a bear dance on its hind legs? I always root for the animal to take a swipe at the trainer. I just hate seeing this. It seems entirely unnatural. A horse is a domestic animal, and running and jumping is part of its nature, so asking it to jump a fence seems like part of its job. But a tiger is a wild animal, and asking it to leap around a series of stools while some sequined putz cracks a whip strikes me as, oh, real unnecessary.

Not that what happened to Roy is a blow for animal rights. Nothing good is going to happen to that tiger. I only hope that in my lifetime, we’ll come to a more humane place in our dealings with animals. Especially wild ones.

Even in this year of years, dedicated to vision-broadening and mind-opening, I’m falling behind on my moviegoing. It cannot be helped when you have a small child — when you add the babysitting surcharge to most movies, they become indefensible. Perhaps “Thirteen” is worth $16 or so for two people to see, but is it worth $35, the cost when you throw in three hours of babysitting? No. And so, when my screenwriting prof opens class, as he usually does, by asking, “What did everyone see this week?” I have to answer, in a small voice, “Something on video.”

I’m dedicated to changing this, but it’s only October and already I’m behind on “American Splendor” and “Lost in Translation,” and holy Toledo, but “Kill Bill” opens this weekend, too. But I’m fortunate to have the resources of the many U of M libraries as close as my M-Card, so today I took advantage of a long lunch break to take in “Series 7,” an indie production from 2001 so obscure it didn’t even play the art-house circuit.

It’s a ultra-low-budget, ultra-high-satire take on reality TV, and had the good fortune of debuting a few weeks ahead of the first “Survivor,” so somehow the idea of a show where real people have to kill one another on camera didn’t seem quite so outrageous. It was a pretty thin joke, though, and I have to say, it was probably lost in the crowd for a reason. Mike Myers can make one joke last 90 minutes, but he’s a professional.

This weekend, up north, we watched “American Beauty,” which we’re using in my screenwriting class. That one I did see in theatrical release, and liked it less this time. Why is satirizing American suburbia considered this huge, insightful accomplishment? The Marine is a secret queer? You don’t say?!? I mean, talk about a fish, a barrel and a smoking gun, you know? But it’s a lovely movie, and Kevin Spacey rocks the llama’s ass.

The point of all this is, former Fellow Ron and I want to write a screenplay together from the ultra-high-satire perspective, so I thought “Series 7” might be useful. And it is. In its own way.

A creepy but fascinating story in the New Yorker about the magnetic lure of the Golden Gate bridge to the suicidal. I’ve always heard the Golden Gate outranks similar bridges in this area by a huge margin — someone goes over at a rate of one every two weeks — but it’s actually the world’s leading suicide attraction. A few, but not many, survive the plunge:

Survivors often regret their decision in midair, if not before. Ken Baldwin and Kevin Hines both say they hurdled over the railing, afraid that if they stood on the chord they might lose their courage. Baldwin was twenty-eight and severely depressed on the August day in 1985 when he told his wife not to expect him home till late. “I wanted to disappear,” he said. “So the Golden Gate was the spot. I’d heard that the water just sweeps you under.” On the bridge, Baldwin counted to ten and stayed frozen. He counted to ten again, then vaulted over. “I still see my hands coming off the railing,” he said. As he crossed the chord in flight, Baldwin recalls, “I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable — except for having just jumped.”

Or is the Time/Newsweek “in memoriam” section this year going to be particularly big? The great ones are going at an alarming clip. Today’s departure was William Steig. While most of the obits will mention him as the creator of “Shrek,” my fondest memory is of “Doctor Desoto,” which, according to Amazon, is out of print. I guess that’s why we have libraries.

If you’re having difficulty viewing this page, try making your browser window larger. And we’ll see what we can do about it.

Alan on his bull’s-eye shot. I was so proud.

Another weekend, another million calories. I think I know what our staff member Birgit is talking about when she speaks of “the Fellowship 20.” I don’t have room for 20 more pounds, but I think they’re going to try to make me take ’em just the same.

This weekend was our Fall Color Extravaganza, in which the Fellows trekked north for a weekend of fellowship in and around the Charlevoix area, where our director has a summer home. It’s a cherry farm, actually, with orchards and a lakeshore and land galore. Which was good, because one of the activities was skeet shooting, and all but two of us missed. (Vahe winged one and Alan hit a bull’s eye). Pictures to come, once I figure things out.

Yes, figure things out. It’s a new blog! It’s Movable Type! What do you think? Many kudos, props and huzzahs to J.C. Burns, who waded into the world of cascading style sheets and gave me this very cool look. As I said last week, I’m hoping this new format will fit my life a little better. Pluses for both of us include a comments section; you are encouraged to leave as many as you wish. For now, I’m not requiring names and e-mail addresses, but, as always, they’re encouraged. I will warn you that I saw my spam soar when I started leaving blog comments, so if you want to leave a phony one — “not@yet.com” is a popular choice — feel free.

Back to the weekend: Our Friday stop was Black Star Farm, a winery on the Leelanau peninsula that’s trying to establish itself as both a tourist destination, retail operation and oenophile’s landmark. Based on the vintages we sampled, they have a shot. (It’s mostly whites, but some very nice chardonnay and riesling.) The owner tells a great story about the local farmer who was going broke with his pear orchard; the only buyer he had was a baby-food company, which was paying him about a penny a pear. So they worked out a deal where the winery affixes bottles to the budding pears, rigging them to the trees so that they grow inside the bottle. At harvest time, the bottle/pear is picked, the detritus shaken out, the bottle cleaned and sterilized and filled with pear eau de vie, an 80-proof spirit. It’s sold with this lovely Bartlett pear bobbing around in the bottom. It really sells the package.

And the farmer clears $5 per pear. There’s gold in them-there yuppies!

There’s nothing like a local agribusiness lesson accompanied by fine wine and followed by a lavish dinner in Sutton’s Bay. It’s times like this I really feel bad for my colleagues back in the Fort. Really, you guys. It’s like a knife in my heart.