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May 10, 2005

BRANDO WAS ESPECIALLY DOWN WITH THE "FEEDING" PART

The L.A. Times' book reporter Scott Martelle writes about a letter written by Jack Kerouac to Marlon Brando, seeking the latter's participation in a film version of On The Road.  The letter goes on the auction block next month.

Kerouac could taste the riches he thought would surely come. And getting Hollywood's hottest actor, Marlon Brando, to star opposite him in a movie version of his novel would have sealed it. Or so he wrote in a one-page letter to Brando to be auctioned off next month in which Kerouac suggested he play narrator-alter ego Sal Paradise opposite Brando's Dean Moriarty, based on Kerouac's real-life pal Neal Cassady.

"I'm praying that you'll buy ON THE ROAD and make a movie of it," Kerouac wrote, admitting he hoped to rake in enough money to "establish myself and my mother a trust fund for life, so I can really go roaming round the world" and "be free to write what comes out of my head & free to feed my buddies when they're hungry & not worry about my mother."

We've complained ad nauseum about the Times' draconian registration policy, hence the Concord link.  You can also check out another of Scott's pieces - which we missed the first time out - about walking through San Francisco in Sam Spade's footsteps.

Part of the fun of "The Maltese Falcon" (which later became an enduringly popular noir film) is Hammett's emphasis on place as much as character, moving Spade among hotels, restaurants and apartment buildings selected from the writer's haunts in the 1920s.

Don Herron, a cabby, part-time writer and Hammett fanatic, has been leading walking tours through the heart of San Francisco since the 1970s, pointing out the past, both real and fictional. On a spring day, , my 14-year-old son, Michael, and I caught a short afternoon tour. (The long version covers three miles in four hours.) Fog would have added to the fun — Spade awakened one night to the lonely echo of the Alcatraz foghorn — but we got rain.

Posted at 12:18 AM |

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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