I first read "Ask the Dust" in 1971 when I was doing research for "Chinatown". I was concerned about the way people really sounded when they talked, and I was dissatisfied with everything else I had read that was written during the '30s. I wanted the real thing, as Henry James would say. When I picked up Fante's "Ask the Dust," I just knew that was the way those kids talked to each other—the rhythms, cadences, racism.
Robert Towne on
adapting John Fante's novel
for the big screen. More inside.
posted by matteo
on Mar 4, 2006 -
17 comments
Flaubert on Structural Unity. "I’ve just read 'Pickwick' by Dickens. Do you know it? Some bits are magnificent; but what a defective structure! All English writers are like that. Walter Scott apart, they lack composition. This is intolerable for us Latins". Extracts from the letters of Flaubert
(via the very awesome book coolie)
posted by matteo
on Jul 29, 2005 -
12 comments
Mythmaker of the Machine Age. In the statue erected above his grave in Amiens, in Picardy,
Jules Verne, who died exactly 100 years ago, resembles God. He is, after all, the second-
most-translated author on earth, after Agatha Christie.
To celebrate the anniversary, there's a Verne exhibition at the
Maritime Museum in Paris, one of a series of events from Paris to the western city of
Nantes, where Verne was born on Feb. 8, 1828, to the northern town of
Amiens, where he died on March 24, 1905. His many fans,
some of them quite famous, will be treated to exhibits, concerts, films and shows in Verne's honor. “
Underground City”, a lost classic written by Verne and never before published unabridged in English,
emerges this month in not one but two new unique editions.
100 years later, questions remain about his life: Why did he have two homes in Amiens? Why did he burn all his private papers? Why was he shot in the foot by his nephew, Gaston, in 1886? Gaston was locked in an asylum for 54 years after his attack on L'Oncle Jules. Was Gaston, in fact, Verne's natural son? More inside.
posted by matteo
on Mar 23, 2005 -
8 comments
The Ladder is a website devoted to the writer
Henry James (1843-1916). It comprises
electronic editions of a selection of James’s works and also
* a textual note
on the source and any amendments required during editing
* annotations of the text explaining such things as references to real persons and places, references to other fiction by James, or in
in his notebboks
* a summary and a detailed (chapter by chapter) synopsis of the plot, so you can easily find passages you remember, by what happens
* a bibliography including original publications, subsequent reprints
Interestingly enough, lately more than a few writers seem to have
a bit of James-mania: in June,
Colm Tóibín published "
The Master", a portrait of James recovering from his humiliating failure as a playwright. Now comes "
Author, Author", by
David Lodge, which is about James' humiliating failure as a playwright as well. These in turn arrive on the heels of
Emma Tennant's "
Felony", a novel about James' near-romance with
Constance Fenimore
Woolson, and
Alan Hollinghurst's "
The Line of Beauty", a
BookerPrize-winning novel in which James plays an important off-the-stage role.
posted by matteo
on Nov 1, 2004 -
12 comments
Forever Greene. One hundred years after
Graham Greene’s birth, the literary mosaic of books like
Our Man in Havana and
Brighton Rock is still riveting. But the author "carried anguish” with him: a moralist and, therefore, controversial, Greene’s clearly-worded works of suspenseful, or ethical ambivalence, border on a delicate balance — of both gloom and salvation. His novels are
replete with a sense of foreboding, and scrutinise self-deception, sin, failure. George Orwell sneered that Greene thinks "there is something rather distingué in being damned;
Hell is a sort of high-class nightclub, entry to which is reserved for Catholics only".
And what remains is also, of course, the --
de riguer --
problem of the
biographies:
caring father,
fervent brothelgoer,
helluva guy?
Anyway, among the institutions celebrating Greene's centenary: the
British Library, the
Barbican Centre (scroll down the page).
And the Guardian just re-printed "
The funeral of Graham Greene", reported in the Guardian, April 9 1991.
(more inside, with Shirley Temple)
posted by matteo
on Oct 3, 2004 -
15 comments
Her name was Courage & is written Olga "Olga"
(.pdf file in main link) is
Olga Rudge,
violinist, first promoter of the
Vivaldi Renaissance, and longtime companion of the
poet Ezra Pound.
Pound maintained a complicated and
delicate balance between the two most significant women in his life, Olga and his wife
Dorothy Shakespear (who, among other things, was
the daughter of Yeats's mistress).
‘‘Paris is where EP and OR met, and everything in my life happened,’’ Olga (listen to her voice
here) said later of the chance encounter with
Ezra at
20, rue Jacob, in the salon of
Natalie Barney. They were together for
fifty years, through the
dark-night years of
Pound's madness (arrested in 1945 for
treason, deemed unable to stand trial and sent to an American mental institution, he once suggested to the UPI bureau chief in Rome
that the United States trade Guam for some sound films of Japanese Noh plays, asked Truman many times to make him Ambadassor to Japan or Moscow;
Guy Davenport reports dining with him one evening and all Ez said was "gnocchi"), until
the poet's death in 1972.
She lived on for another quarter century, turning up at conferences of
Pound scholars --as far afield as Hailey,
Idaho, Pound's birthplace, where she gave a
lecture in the local movie theater. "Write about Pound", she told publishers who asked her to write her autobiography.
(more inside, with Cantos)
posted by matteo
on Jul 8, 2004 -
15 comments
"Jesus?" he murmured, "Jesus -- of Nazareth?..." Pontius Pilate,
prefect of
Judea, is
the only historical figure named in the
Nicene Creed -- Coptic
saint or
eternally damned, his role in the
greatest story ever told has been debated by many of history's greatest minds:
St Augustine,
Dante Alighieri,
Tintoretto,
John Ruskin,
Mikhail Bulgakov,
Monty Python. Unfortunately,
there is very little historical evidence about him. His role in the
death of a
certain charismatic
Galilean healer and
apocalyptic preacher
is still being debated today by
theologians and historians
alike. He is also, of course, the main character of
The Procurator of
Judea, the classic short story (complete text in main link) by
Anatole France. (France's magnificent story has lately been tragically neglected by publishers, even if the author was one of his era's most acclaimed writers in the world -- he won the Nobel Prize in 1921 over Shaw, Yeats, Joyce, Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, and Proust, and when he died in 1924,
hundreds of thousands of people followed his funeral procession through Paris). These last 2,000 years of fascination with
Pilatus can be explained, some argue...
(more inside, for those unwilling to wash their hands of this post)
posted by matteo
on Jun 24, 2004 -
37 comments
