Anthony Howard, who died on December 19 aged 76, was one of the outstanding political journalists of the past half-century.
His work appeared in most national newspapers and in magazines such as the New Statesman and The Listener, both of which he edited with some success. He appeared regularly on radio and television, where his donnish manner, precise diction, remarkable political recall and somewhat squashed facial features made him a memorable performer.
Many political writers of today probably do not realise the debt they owe to Howard, Henry Fairlie and Bernard Levin, whose pioneering columns in the New Statesman and The Spectator in the late 1950s and early 1960s blew away the cobwebs, clichés and fawning respect which then attached to much political discourse in the press.
Weekly magazines had a more prominent and influential place in journalism than they have today — so much so that a promising young journalist like Howard readily gave up a two-year attachment to The Manchester Guardian, where he shared an office with Michael Parkinson, in favour of joining the Statesman.
He had appeared in the magazine earlier, during his National Service as a second lieutenant in the Royal Fusiliers, when he wrote a series of anonymous columns, heavily critical of the Army, including an account of his reluctant involvement in the Suez campaign.
Their publication caused a minor sensation and almost led to a court martial. A socialist since his school days, he believed that National Service had reinforced Britain’s class divisions.
Tuesday, 21 December 2010
Monday, 20 December 2010
Scraping the Bottom
Yours for $1 million, maybe even less: J.D. Salinger's toiletBY JAY PRICE - STAFF WRITER
It's almost as if "The Catcher in the Rye" author J.D. Salinger saw this moment coming in 1953 when he retreated in growing distress about his own fame to small-town New Hampshire and became a notorious recluse.
Salinger's toilet, the ultimate symbol of privacy for a man notorious for defending his, is being auctioned on eBay.
A well-known memorabilia and collectibles dealer based in Kernersville who has stalked Salinger items for years is asking the standard eBay hey-look-at-this-bizarre-thing-I've-got price of $1 million but said he's open to reasonable offers.
"I bet it's worth $100,000," said Rick Kohl of www .webuytreasure .com , invoking the author's iconic tale of teen alienation. "Come on, it's J.D. Salinger's throne! We're talking 'Catcher in the Rye' here!"
Salinger died in January after more than half a century in Cornish, N.H., where the 1,700 or so other residents quietly shielded him from an endless stream of visiting fans.
The toilet came not from his final home there but from another nearby that he moved out of in the mid-1980s. James Littlefield, who along with his wife, Joan, bought the house from Salinger and still lives there, confirmed in an interview Monday that the toilet was Salinger's. It's being auctioned with a letter of authentication from Joan Littlefield.
A simple, white Crane Oxford model, the toilet is stamped with a manufacturing date of October 1962, so Salinger didn't actually enjoy its comforts until after writing nearly all of his published work.Kohl, though, noted that Salinger is believed to have left behind a substantial volume of unpublished writing, and that surely Salinger conceived some of it while sitting on the million-dollar thunder pot.
Determined fans
Even after Salinger stopped publishing his books and magazine stories, back in the mid-1960s, fans kept coming to Cornish, asking directions to his house.
Littlefield said that for years, a foreign tour company brought groups of Asian Salinger fans to the town, and the Littlefields allowed them to walk around.
"They'd walk through 'his' field and look down 'his' mountain and breathe the Salinger air," Littlefield said.
Seeing the power of the enthusiasm for all things Salinger, the Littlefields kept the toilet and various appliances after they remodeled, and even saved and put in storage long stretches of Salinger's privacy fence.
Kohl approached them several years ago, looking for anything interesting Salinger might have left behind. The Littlefields decided not long ago to see whether he wanted the toilet and a couple of sections of the fence.
James Littlefield said he knew Salinger mementos had unusual value.
Still, he was startled to hear Kohl's asking price.
"Where did he get that idea from?" he said.
Kohl said he hasn't read any of Salinger's work. But after decades buying and selling the likes of guitars owned by Elvis Presley and Kurt Cobain, and the overcoat that President Lyndon Johnson wore during his inauguration, Kohl said, he knows a few things about valuing unique celebrity memorabilia.
No seat or lid
Salinger is, in a way, partly responsible for this posthumous violation of his potty privacy.
Kohl said he hunted Salinger memorabilia for years, going so far as to approach his ex-wives asking for letters. The more Salinger stayed out of sight, the rarer things like his autographs became, and the more objects associated with him - even his toilet - became worth.
The auction has about two and a half weeks left to run, unless someone hits the "Buy It Now" option and pays the full price.
If you decide that you must have this vital part of Salinger's life, be forewarned: The toilet does not come with a seat or lid.
And it hasn't been cleaned.
But, hey, what do you want for a measly million bucks?
Or if you want to wait awhile, something a little more classy may eventually hit the market: The Littlefields still have one of Salinger's check registers, which, unlike the toilet, offers a bit of story.
"He gave very large sums to charities," Littlefield said. "He was a very, very generous man."
News researcher Brooke Cain contributed to this report.
http://www.newsobserver.com/2010/08/17/632566/yours-for-1-million-maybe-even.html
Saturday, 18 December 2010
Friday, 17 December 2010
Blake Edwards RIP
Blake Edwards obituaryFilm director best known for the Pink Panther, Breakfast at Tiffany's and 10
Brian Baxter
guardian.co.uk
Thursday 16 December 2010
The film-maker Blake Edwards, who has died aged 88, will be best remembered as the creator of the Pink Panther films, and as the husband of the entertainer Julie Andrews. But Edwards was a third-generation show-business figure whose complex and controversial career spanned more than 50 years, initially as an actor and writer and subsequently as one of America's most prolific producer-directors, primarily concerned with the popular genres of comedy and musicals and with creating television series.
Despite working in mainstream cinema, his maverick spirit and ego made him an uneasy partner with Hollywood studios. He famously savaged the hand that had fed him so well with S.O.B. (1981), a raucous, vitriolic attack on Tinseltown. His sophisticated work drew strongly on his love of early cinema (his stepgrandfather had directed silent films), and on his own life and psychological problems (he wrote two movies with his psychoanalyst, Milton Wexler). He also reworked his own films and remade those of other directors.
Edwards was born William Blake Crump in Tulsa, Oklahoma. His parents divorced when he was young and he moved to Los Angeles with his mother. He began work as an extra, partly thanks to his stepfather, Jack McEdward, a film production manager. During his early 20s he appeared in some decent movies, including A Guy Named Joe (1943), which gave him income and time to write.
He created a radio series, Richard Diamond: Private Detective, for Dick Powell in 1948, and that year also wrote and starred in a modest western, Panhandle. He followed this with the screenplay for another western, Stampede (1949), and then concentrated on screenplays for the actor-turned-director Richard Quine, including All Ashore (1953) and the racing drama Drive a Crooked Road (1954), which starred Mickey Rooney. Edwards then devised a sitcom for Rooney, called Hey, Mulligan (1955).
Also in 1955, he cleverly updated My Sister Eileen for Quine, who had starred in the 1942 version. This bright musical introduced him to Jack Lemmon, one of many actors to feature regularly in Edwards's later films. Edwards then wrote and directed two films for the popular singer Frankie Laine, Bring Your Smile Along (1955) and He Laughed Last (1956).
By the age of 35, Edwards had served a successful Hollywood apprenticeship. In 1957 he joined forces with Tony Curtis on their first movie together, Mister Cory, starring Curtis as a guy who uses the path of a crooked gambler to escape the Chicago slums.
Edwards enjoyed his first real commercial hit with the second world war comedy Operation Petticoat (1959), cleverly uniting Curtis with the actor's hero Cary Grant. This and two successful TV series, Peter Gunn (1958-61) and Mr Lucky (1959-60), led him into the most successful decade of his career. The 1960 Bing Crosby vehicle High Time (in which Crosby dresses as a woman – an early example of one of Edwards's fixations) was followed by the sparkling Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), an adaptation of Truman Capote's novel, starring Audrey Hepburn, George Peppard and Rooney. It compounded his longterm relationship with Henry Mancini, whose score and theme song, Moon River, both won Oscars. They collaborated from High Time onwards, not least in the Panther movies, on a total of more than 20 movies.
Until 1962, Edwards had mainly worked on comedies and musicals, so he seemed an unlikely choice to direct Days of Wine and Roses, in which Lee Remick and Lemmon played a married couple whose descent into alcoholism is depicted in harrowing detail. Often recalled as his best feature, it contains performances of great intensity and probes darker corners than any of his other films.
He hit the jackpot with The Pink Panther (1963) and its first sequel, A Shot in the Dark (1964), with Peter Sellers as the bungling Inspector Clouseau. As the writer, producer and director of such hits, he could subsequently do as he wanted. The result was Hollywood's most expensive comedy to that date, The Great Race (1965), starring Curtis and Lemmon. This sprawling homage to silent cinema was dedicated to Laurel and Hardy. Although popular, it was not the box-office success its cost demanded.
In 1967, Edwards revived the private eye character from his earlier TV series and directed the feature film Gunn (1967), a quirky thriller in which Craig Stevens reprised his role. The clever but protracted comedy The Party (1968) revealed Edwards's disillusionment with the movie world, and starred Sellers as a famous Indian actor who, when invited to a swish Hollywood soiree, totally wrecks it.
Apart from Edwards's marriage (after a divorce from the actor Patricia Walker) to Andrews in 1969, the decade had ended less auspiciously than it began. He devised an elaborate wedding present for Andrews in the form of a lyrical love/spy story, Darling Lili (1970), set during the first world war. Time has been kinder to it than contemporary critics and audiences. It was the first of his films to suffer studio interference. When both his western Wild Rovers (1971) and a thriller, The Carey Treatment (1972), were also re-edited, he and Andrews set up home in Switzerland and began to work in England.
Another romantic spy drama, The Tamarind Seed (1974), enjoyed only modest success, so Edwards revived the Clouseau series with The Return of the Pink Panther (1975), The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976) and Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978). The first was highly successful, but the last suffered from Sellers's increasingly mannered performance. Nevertheless, the director's rehabilitation seemed complete enough for the US to welcome him back, and he made the riotously successful 10 (1979), with Dudley Moore as a randy, middle-aged composer who grades his girlfriends numerically. Andrews co-starred, but it was Bo Derek who took the attention and the project was his greatest non-Panther hit.
It allowed him extraordinary licence resulting in S.O.B., in which a suicidal director, played by one of his stalwarts, Richard Mulligan, is so dismayed by the response to a film that he revamps it as a porn flick. Edwards surrounded himself with other regular collaborators, headed by Andrews, who famously appeared topless, bringing an end to her wholesome Mary Poppins image. S.O.B. was described as tasteless. It was also a virulent and comic attack on the idiocies of showbusiness and a complex referral to both Edwards's past work and Hollywood itself.
Edwards once more returned to movie history with Victor Victoria (1982), a triumphant revamping of a 1933 German film. Andrews played a destitute singer who, with the connivance of a gay friend, poses as a man, impersonating a female singer. The film challenged the audience's notions of sexuality, not least through the hero (James Garner), who finds himself attracted to the (supposedly) male singer. It was an archetypal Edwards film with a glittering, stylish surface and a dark undertone.
Trail of the Pink Panther (1982) and Curse of the Pink Panther (1983) enjoyed less acclaim, especially the former, which dredged up material from earlier films, after the death of Sellers in 1980, and constructed a movie around them. Edwards was now co-writing with his son Geoffrey, and they were joined by Wexler for The Man Who Loved Women, a reworking of a 1977 François Truffaut film. The project gave full rein to the director's concerns with death, psychoanalysis and sex.
He resorted to his writing pseudonym, Sam O Brown, after an extremely unhappy period of work on the crime comedy City Heat, starring Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds, which he had been slated to direct. He went on to direct Micki and Maude (1984) after the collapse of yet another project, then settled to reworking a Laurel and Hardy masterpiece, The Music Box (1932). The resulting film, A Fine Mess (1986), was to feature a version of the duo's great piano-moving sequence from the original film, but it was removed by the studio and the film stands as one indebted to silent cinema as a whole, not to a specific film.
For a modest $1.5m, Edwards made the apparently autobiographical That's Life (1986), again co-written with Wexler. He described it as a belated follow-up to 10, with Lemmon playing a 60-year-old character. The film was shot at Edwards's Malibu home and starred Andrews as well as his daughter Jennifer (a regular performer in his films) and many other friends and collaborators.
He enjoyed popular success by directing Blind Date (1987), in which Bruce Willis played an executive who arranges a business date, only to discover that she is dangerously incapable of holding her drink. He then returned to television, directing Justin Case (1988) and a remake of Peter Gunn (1989). Of his final features, among the best was Sunset (1988), in which Willis played the silent movies western star Tom Mix opposite Garner's ageing Wyatt Earp. A delightful portrait of a lost Hollywood, combined with a factually based thriller, the film failed commercially.
It was followed by the comedies Skin Deep (1989), infamous for its luminous condoms, and Switch (1991), starring Ellen Barkin, in which a chauvinist male is returned to earth as a woman. This complex, very funny movie showed that Edwards had retained his stylish, ironic and adult view of sexuality and relationships – a sophisticated attitude increasingly at odds with mainstream audiences.
Once again aiming at popular appeal, he returned to Clouseau, directing Son of the Pink Panther (1993), which starred Roberto Benigni as the illegitimate son of the legendary inspector. Aged 73, Edwards then directed Andrews in a Broadway production of Victor/Victoria, which opened in 1995 and ran for more than 700 performances.
He was awarded an honorary Oscar in 2004 and had been preparing a stage musical based on the Pink Panther films. Andrews survives him, along with their children Amy and Jo, his stepdaughter Emma, and the children from his first marriage, Jennifer and Geoffrey.
• Blake Edwards (William Blake Crump), film director, screenwriter and producer, born 26 July 1922; died 15 December 2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/dec/16/blake-edwards-obituary?INTCMP=SRCH
Thursday, 16 December 2010
Our Prayer
Switch off Nat for a minute and listen to this: Huntington Beach High School. A rehearsal. No autotune. No shit. Just voices.
Wednesday, 15 December 2010
Tonight's set list
At The Habit, York: -
The Old Laughing Lady (Unplugged version)
Through My Sails
Birds
Roll Another Number (for the Road)
A packed house and many players. One young rascal sang Two Little Boys. Crazy or what!
The Old Laughing Lady (Unplugged version)
Through My Sails
Birds
Roll Another Number (for the Road)
A packed house and many players. One young rascal sang Two Little Boys. Crazy or what!
The Mirror Gag
Max Linder in Seven Year's Bad Luck (1921)
Charley Chase in Sittin' Pretty (1924), directed by Leo McCarey
The Marx Brothers in Duck Soup (1933), directed by Leo McCarey
The Harpo Marx/Lucille Ball version from her television show, 1955
Charlie Chaplin's variation on it from The Floorwalker, 1916; it starts about seven to eight minutes in
Thanks to http://www.newsfromme.com/
Tuesday, 14 December 2010
Monday, 13 December 2010
Lillian Ross remembers Salinger
The JD Salinger I knew, by Lillian RossAmerican author JD Salinger died, aged 91, on 27 January 2010. Here, his long-standing friend Lillian Ross, a staff writer at the New Yorker since 1945, tells of the generous author who could keep her laughing for hours
Lillian Ross
The Observer
Sunday 12 December 2010
The two greatest American writers of my time are Ernest Hemingway and JD Salinger. Both have crossed from the 20th century into the 21st with their originality, substance and staying power intact. As a reporter and a friend – privileged to dabble in their area – it has been thrilling for me to watch, at first hand, the unique genius in both writers revealed more and more sharply over the years.
Both writers had a sense of humour all their own – surprising, inimitable, in conversation, in letters, as well as in their work. Salinger could keep me on the phone for hours, laughing into exhaustion, covering everything and everybody around us. He loved to read and he loved to write. Hemingway would say he loved the writing part, "but not what came afterwards". What came afterwards for him was years of inexplicable censure for his having the courage and genius to give us lasting reading pleasure and enlightenment.
I have never understood the "afterwards" part, regarding both Hemingway and Salinger. We have seen dismaying efforts to bring Salinger down, too. Salinger loved the people he created and was protective of them until the day he died. He gave us Holden Caulfield. He gave us the Glass family. So why would some "literary" critics take such a censorious tone about Salinger's personal life?
He was a delight to know, as a friend and a colleague since 1950, just before the publication of The Catcher in the Rye. He figured out his personal life, winding up with a nearly 30-year-long marriage, children, and grandchildren. He lived quietly in New Hampshire, enjoyed church suppers, never bothered anybody, and wanted to be left alone with his work. He was the smartest writer I had ever met and the most generous.
He shared with me a copy of the "Dear Jerry" letter Hemingway wrote to him when they were both serving in the second world war – a handwritten letter commenting on unpublished stories Salinger, who was then an unknown young beginner, sent him. "First you have a marvellous ear and you write tenderly and lovingly without getting wet," Hemingway wrote. He added that he hoped he "didn't sound like an easy praiser" and "how happy it makes me to read the stories and what a god damned fine writer I think you are".
In 1966, Salinger told me he had come across "the rotten Muggeridge article on Hemingway in the current Esquire" and said "I feel I'd like to do something about the Muggeridge piece in particular and all the Hemingway ghouls in general, and I'm pretty sure you would, too…" Four years before that, Salinger told me that the critic Leslie Fiedler "had a go at Hemingway in the last Partisan Review". He added: "What Fiedler needs more than anything else is to be wormed every six months or so. He's a wretch, and he'll never be happy till he thinks he's proved himself better and more talented than the people he criticises."
To me Salinger was always helpful. He told me early on, referring to my writing: "You're yourself whether you're writing fiction or fact. It's very moving. I mean more than that, but that's my first thought." I've never had a better comment. When Salinger first met my son Erik, who was then a few months old, he sent me a letter, starting out:
Notes on your son.
1) Is an incomparably fine and lovable person.
2) Has beautiful eyes.
3) Sleeps in a very good position.
4) Has courtly manners.
5) Is a very very sweet little boy.
He was always giving you something with love, and it outlasted his lifetime. He shared with me his huge range of interests, all the way from wonderful stories and sayings by the 6BC philosopher Lao Tse, to detailed instructions about selecting, cooking, and refrigerating bean sprouts.
So why would people, especially the self-appointed authorities on literature, always want him to be someone other than himself? It didn't take long, after the historic acclaim for The Catcher in the Rye and his stories, for a lot of negative psychoprattle about his creations to surface – along with unwelcome intrusions into his private life. He was being chided for loving the characters he had created too well, and readers were chided for loving them, too. Today, millions of readers all over the world continue to experience the joy of discovering and being charmed by his characters. They know, as Hemingway said, that JD Salinger wrote "tenderly and lovingly", and was "a god damned fine writer".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2010/dec/12/jd-salinger-obituary-by-lillian-ross?INTCMP=SRCH
Sunday, 12 December 2010
More Shithouse tapes
In Tapes, Nixon Rails About Jews and BlacksBy ADAM NAGOURNEY
YORBA LINDA, Calif. — Richard M. Nixon made disparaging remarks about Jews, blacks, Italian-Americans and Irish-Americans in a series of extended conversations with top aides and his personal secretary, recorded in the Oval Office 16 months before he resigned as president.
The remarks were contained in 265 hours of recordings, captured by the secret taping system Nixon had installed in the White House and released this week by the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum.
While previous recordings have detailed Nixon’s animosity toward Jews, including those who served in his administration like Henry A. Kissinger, his national security adviser, these tapes suggest an added layer of complexity to Nixon’s feeling. He and his aides seem to make a distinction between Israeli Jews, whom Nixon admired, and American Jews.
In a conversation Feb. 13, 1973, with Charles W. Colson, a senior adviser who had just told Nixon that he had always had “a little prejudice,” Nixon said he was not prejudiced but continued: “I’ve just recognized that, you know, all people have certain traits.”
“The Jews have certain traits,” he said. “The Irish have certain — for example, the Irish can’t drink. What you always have to remember with the Irish is they get mean. Virtually every Irish I’ve known gets mean when he drinks. Particularly the real Irish.”
Nixon continued: “The Italians, of course, those people course don’t have their heads screwed on tight. They are wonderful people, but,” and his voice trailed off.
A moment later, Nixon returned to Jews: “The Jews are just a very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious personality.”
At another point, in a long and wandering conversation with Rose Mary Woods, his personal secretary, that veered from whom to invite to a state dinner to whether Ms. Woods should get her hair done, Nixon offered sharp skepticism at the views of William P. Rogers, his secretary of state, about the future of black Africans.
“Bill Rogers has got — to his credit it’s a decent feeling — but somewhat sort of a blind spot on the black thing because he’s been in New York,” Nixon said. “He says well, ‘They are coming along, and that after all they are going to strengthen our country in the end because they are strong physically and some of them are smart.’ So forth and so on.
“My own view is I think he’s right if you’re talking in terms of 500 years,” he said. “I think it’s wrong if you’re talking in terms of 50 years. What has to happen is they have be, frankly, inbred. And, you just, that’s the only thing that’s going to do it, Rose.”
These tapes, made in February and March 1973, reflect a critical period in Nixon’s presidency — the final months before it was “devoured by Watergate,” said Timothy Naftali, the executive director of the Nixon Library.
Mr. Naftali said that there were now only 400 hours of tapes left to released, and that those would cover the final months before the tape system was shut down in July 1973 after Alexander Butterfield, who was a deputy assistant to Nixon, confirmed its existence to the Watergate committee.
Mr. Naftali said he intended to have those tapes — actually, given changing technologies since Nixon’s time, CDs, and available for listening online at the library’s Web site — released by 2012.
An indication of Nixon’s complex relationship with Jews came the afternoon Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister, came to visit on March 1, 1973. The tapes capture Meir offering warm and effusive thanks to Nixon for the way he had treated her and Israel.
But moments after she left, Nixon and Mr. Kissinger were brutally dismissive in response to requests that the United States press the Soviet Union to permit Jews to emigrate and escape persecution there.
“The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy,” Mr. Kissinger said. “And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”
“I know,” Nixon responded. “We can’t blow up the world because of it.”
In his discussion with Ms. Woods, Nixon laid down clear rules about who would be permitted to attend the state dinner for Meir — he called it “the Jewish dinner” — after learning that the White House was being besieged with requests to attend.
“I don’t want any Jew at that dinner who didn’t support us in that campaign,” he said. “Is that clear? No Jew who did not support us.”
Nixon listed many of his top Jewish advisers — among them, Mr. Kissinger and William Safire, who went on to become a columnist at The New York Times — and argued that they shared a common trait, of needing to compensate for an inferiority complex.
“What it is, is it’s the insecurity,” he said. “It’s the latent insecurity. Most Jewish people are insecure. And that’s why they have to prove things.”
Nixon also strongly hinted that his reluctance to even consider amnesty for young Americans who went to Canada to avoid being drafted during the Vietnam War was because, he told Mr. Colson, so many of them were Jewish.
“I didn’t notice many Jewish names coming back from Vietnam on any of those lists; I don’t know how the hell they avoid it,” he said, adding: “If you look at the Canadian-Swedish contingent, they were very disproportionately Jewish. The deserters.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/11/us/politics/11nixon.html?_r=1
Tom Pickard Interview
Q and A: Tom PickardCan you tell us what Basil Bunting’s work has meant to you?I served a kind of apprenticeship to Bunting, taking my poems to him when I was sixteen or seventeen. He made his library available and introduced me to the work of his contemporaries—Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, Lorine Niedecker, William Carlos Williams, and others associated with the Objectivists, as well as to the older poets whom he studied and delighted in. He also sought to put me in touch with younger poets that he’d met when in North America—August Kleinzahler and the young Andrew Wylie, in particular. He also urged me to study the work of Hugh MacDiarmid and David Jones. Sometimes I’d get a rendering of poems by pitmen poets from the region. And he didn’t stop with English-language poets either, often reading me Ferdowsi or Dante in the original even though I was ignorant of both Persian and Italian and was only barely paddling in the shallows of English. He believed that the music of the language would convey its own meaning. In a reverse experiment I believe he also tried out some of my early poems in Geordie dialect on the tender lugs of Kleinzahler and other of his students on North American campuses in the early seventies.
My tendency, after Bunting’s urging to cut down as soon and as often as possible, means that several baggy lines end up as a short phrase. My preference anyway is for a taut music. His critical voice is always in my ear. I mean, I don’t think I would publish a poem if I thought that Basil would have considered it crap. And if I’m tempted to be lazy and leave a line slack to more easily convey a “meaning,” I can hear his candid reproach—“It doesn’t matter what you meant to say.” Although he strove to help me find my own voice, it is inevitable that he still resonates very deeply, and I probably echo him unconsciously on occasion. While attempting to answer another of your questions just now, I came across just such an echo—referring to sphagnum and peat. It was quite a shock to me.
Bunting also introduced me to Northumbria, often taking me to Lindisfarne or to see the Bewcastle Cross with its Anglo-Saxon carving of the Tree of Life. When visitors, such as Creeley or Ginsberg, would come to do a reading at the Morden Tower, we would invariably drive out next day to show them the rolling hills of Northumberland or the Gothic glories of Durham Cathedral, as well as the dark welcoming pubs with their clear cool beers that oiled his repertoire of amusing and often bawdy anecdotes.
Bunting’s work strikingly combines historical with personal motifs. This poem leans more toward the latter. Given that he was an important influence, how would you say your work might be distinct from his?
Although Bunting had a plan or diagram for Briggflatts, I would argue that it was as much a walk in the dark for him as for anyone beginning to compose an original work. I’m sure that when he set off on his journey he wasn’t fully aware of what he’d find and had to leave much to chance. I mean, I don’t think that he lay down the blueprint and joined up the dots. There were key figures and emotions in mind, but they were distant mountains, and there was a lot of unknown territory between him and them.
Continued at:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poemcomment.html?id=240804
Saturday, 11 December 2010
The Central Bar in Women in Love
Now a popular haunt of the FNB, but once upon a time, you could pick up a saucy woman like Glenda Jackson with ease (and probably pick a fight with Oliver Reed)...
Friday, 10 December 2010
Salinger documentary on the way...
Salinger Like You’ve Never Seen HimFilmmaker has never-before-seen photo of the reclusive author
In April of 1968, the stamped date of the never-before-seen photograph above, J. D. Salinger would have been 49 years old. He was recently divorced, and three years into the seclusion that would span the last 45 years of his life. He has bags under his eyes and grooves in his face but, ever so faintly, he is smiling. The intimacy of his setting—the milky tangle of used blankets and sheets—is offset by the spare thrift of his Cornish, N.H., bedroom, with its humble furnishings: small wastebasket, austere dresser. Bare, blank walls. Pack of smokes. But the most telling detail is on the door, at the left edge: a flash-enhanced glint on the room’s steely lock. It’s a reminder of its tenant’s unflinching mantra: keep out.
But that lock didn’t just keep busybodies at bay. Reader, it guarded something else. Because in a small nook across that ascetic cell of a bedroom, Salinger kept a safe. A packed safe, a safe filled with piles and heaps of unpublished…
Call it a coming attraction, because to know any more, you’ll have to wait until Shane Salerno is good and ready to tell you. Salerno, a Hollywood screen-writer (Shaft), has spent six years and millions of dollars researching the author’s mysterious world—though the details, such as the story behind this photo, he won’t divulge just yet. Like Franny Glass, who clung to her copy of The Way of a Pilgrim as a kind of dog-eared talisman, Salerno has a spiritual relationship with Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. He also has rules. “Do not read J. D. Salinger on a Kindle,” he says, with a snort of disgust. “Grab that broken paperback.”
Salerno’s disdain for inauthenticity—if a Kindle counts as such—is more or less his mission statement for what he calls “the very definition of a passion project”: writing, funding, and directing a two-hour documentary, Salinger, and an 800-page biography, The Private War of J. D. Salinger, co-written with David Shields. The pair of forthcoming works are as shrouded as their subject, but Salerno hopes they will be the definitive word on the writer. “We’ve been sifting through all this new material to contextualize this giant of American literature,” he says of the 15,000 pages of interview transcripts and more than 100 personal photos he’s amassed. “You’re going to see a very different Salinger than you’ve read about for five decades.” The Private War is arranged nonchronologically to help fill in the author’s “missing” years, and Salerno says both projects boast a variety of first-evers in addition to the photo collection, including interviews with Salinger intimates and former New Yorker colleagues, some of whom had never spoken about “Jerry.” “When you’re sitting two feet from someone who hasn’t spoken in five or six decades about this, there is just an electricity that surges through the room,” Salerno says—though, of course, he won’t name names.
It’s hard not to feel a little guilty peeping into the world Salinger tried so fervently to shield, but the motive seems pure: The Private War “will substantially rewrite the record of J. D. Salinger’s life, and correct many inaccurate stories that have been told for decades,” Salerno says. As Holden himself might say, there’s nothing phony about wanting to set the record straight.
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/29/salinger-like-you-ve-never-seen-him.html?from=rss
Salinger letter for sale
J.D. Salinger: ‘I See My Novel as a Novel and Only as a Novel’By Maryann Yin
December 10, 2010 9:39 AM
University Archives will auction a note that J.D. Salinger wrote rejecting filmmaker Hubert Cornfield‘s request to adapt Catcher in the Rye.
Salinger wrote: “I appreciate and respect your ardor, but for the present I see my novel as a novel and only as a novel. Should I change my mind in the future–which is extremely doubtful–I very probably would take on any casting and directing chores myself. Thank you for your interest and please take this as absolutely final.”
Salinger, who passed away in January 2010, never made his directorial debut. He will be the subject of the two-hour Shane Salerno documentary, Salinger. Famous names involved with the project include journalist Tom Wolfe, biographer A. Scott Berg, and Oscar winner Philip Seymour Hoffman.
http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/j-d-salinger-i-see-my-novel-as-a-novel-and-only-as-a-novel_b18833
Letter: J.D. Salinger Rejects Film Adaptation of ‘Catcher in the Rye’ 1:01 pm Monday Dec 6 2010by Judy Berman
We’ve always known that J.D. Salinger didn’t want film adaptations made of his books. But now we (sort of) know why. In a 1953 letter to aspiring filmmaker Hubert Cornfield, in response to inquiry about Catcher in the Rye, Salinger wrote, ”I appreciate and respect your ardor, but for the present I see my novel as a novel and only as a novel.” The note is now up for sale at University Archives, for the low, low price of $22,500. We will say this: for a famously prickly and reclusive writer, it’s a very gracious rejection. Take a look after the jump.
http://flavorwire.com/134595/letter-j-d-salinger-rejects-film-adaptation-of-catcher-in-the-rye
Thursday, 9 December 2010
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