A mere twenty months after Joan Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, died of a heart attack, Didion’s only child, Quintana Roo Dunne, contracted pneumonia, lapsed into septic shock and passed away. She was only 39 years old. Didion grappled with the first death in her 2005 bestseller, The Year of Magical Thinking. Now, with her new memoir Blue Nights, she turns to her child’s passing, to a parent’s worst fear realized. In this short film shot by her nephew, director Griffin Dunne, Didion reads from Blue Nights. The scene opens with memories from her daughter’s wedding and ends with some big existential questions and the refrain, “When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.”
This “audiobook for the eyes,” as Griffin Dunne calls it, runs six plus minutes. The actual Blue Nights audio book is now available on Audible.
A big thanks goes to @opedr for sending the Didion clip our way…
James Franco gave The Paris Review a hand when he jumped into bed and started reading “William Wei,” a short story published in a recent edition of the storied literary journal. Find a cleaned up audio file here, or in our collection of Free Audio Books.
Warner Brothers’ animation department did several cartoons based on this concept over 50 years ago that packed much more energy and humor into a very few minutes worth of dazzling animation.
The reader was also good enough to point us to one such early cartoon, which we’re featuring today. (See above.)
Released in 1946, the Looney Tunes cartoon Book Revuestarts with a scene that may look familiar if you watched Jonze’s film: It’s midnight. The bookstore is closed. The lights are off. No creatures are stirring, not even … Scratch that, the books are stirring. They’re coming to life. And the hormones are running high, a little too high. You can watch the rest, but we’ll leave you with this tidbit. In 1994, Book Revue was voted one of the 50 greatest cartoons of all time by a group of 1,000 animation professionals. We thank Mike for sending this our way.
For good measure, let’s also rewind the clock to 1938, when Merrie Melodies released Have You Got Any Castles?It may well be the original books-come-to-life cartoon. We start again at midnight, and the book covers do their thing. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Fu Manchu, The Phantom of the Opera, and Frankenstein make an appearance, along with other famous literary characters. When TBS re-released this cartoon decades later, several characters from this original film (Bill “Bojangles” Robinson from The 39 Steps, and Cab Calloway singing “I’ve Got Swing For Sale”) were edited out because of the indelicate way that African-Americans were caricatured here. Talent these 1930s animators had. But also their blindspots too.…
This month marks the 50th anniversary of Catch-22, Joseph Heller’s exuberantly surreal comedy about the insanity of war. The novel grew out of Heller’s experiences as an Air Force bombardier in Europe during World War II. Surprisingly, the author’s own attitude toward the war bore little resemblance to the views of his immortal protagonist, John Yossarian.
“I have no complaints about my service at all,” Heller told Allan Gregg of Canadian public broadcasting in an interview (see above) recorded not long before the author’s death in 1999. “If anything, it was beneficial to me in a number of ways.” Catch-22, he says, was a response to what transpired during the novel’s 15-year gestation: the cold war, the McCarthy hearings–“the hypocrisy, the bullying that was going on in America.”
As E.L. Doctorow told a reporter the day after Heller’s death, “When ‘Catch-22’ came out, people were saying, ‘Well, World War II wasn’t like this.’ But when we got tangled up in Vietnam, it became a sort of text for the consciousness of that time.” The novel went on to sell more than 10 million copies, and its title, as The New York Times wrote in Heller’s obituary, “became a universal metaphor not only for the insanity of war but also for the madness of life itself.”
In the story, Yossarian strives to get himself grounded from future missions, only to come up against the genius of bureaucratic logic:
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he were sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
Heller went on to write six more novels, three plays, two memoirs and a collection of short stories, but none were as successful as his debut novel. In later years when Heller was asked why he hadn’t written another book like Catch-22, his stock response was: “Who has?”
Just a few short weeks after the death of Steve Jobs comes a 627 page biography by Walter Isaacson, the former Managing Editor of TIME and CEO of CNN. Isaacson first discussed writing the book with Jobs seven years ago and has since interviewed the Apple CEO more than 40 times. Now, appearing on 60 Minutes, he talks publicly about the new book simply called Steve Jobs. It hit bookshelves yesterday and already stands atop the Amazon Bestseller list.
The 29 minute interview (Part 1 here, Part 2 here) gives you a feel for the book that’s willing to tell the good, the bad and the sometimes ugly of Jobs’ life. If you’re looking to get your hands on the biography, give this some thought: If you sign up for a 14-day free trial with Audible.com, you can download pretty much any audio book in Audible’s catalogue for free. And that catalogue now includes Isaacson’s unabridged biography. Once the trial is over, you can continue your Audible subscription (as I did), or cancel it, and still keep the free book. The choice is yours.
Note: CBS didn’t allow the 60 Minutes interview to appear on external sites like ours. Hence you will need to watch the interview on YouTube itself. We provide the links above.
It all started when filmmaker Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Where the Wild Things Are) met handbag designer Olympia Le-Tan and asked her to create a Catcher in the Rye embroidery for his wall. She asked him to collaborate on a film in return. And so Jonze and Le-Tan, together with French director Simon Cahn, spent six months writing a script, then animating 3,000 pieces of felt cut by Le-Tan herself. The result is Mourir Auprès de Toi (To Die By Your Side), a short stop motion film set inside the famous Parisian bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, and it features a skeleton, his lover, and some famous book covers that spring to life.
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Novels — they’re in inevitable decline. They can’t compete with the movie screen, the TV screen and now the computer screen. Give things 25 years, and there will be just a small cult of readers left. That’s the prediction of American author, Philip Roth, who has 27 novels to his credit. And apparently, Roth is personally hastening the process. Earlier this year, he told a reporter for the Financial Times: “I’ve stopped reading fiction. I don’t read it at all. I read other things: history, biography. I don’t have the same interest in fiction that I once did.” When asked why, he quipped: “I don’t know. I wised up … ”
For Paul Auster, another productive novelist, the reports of the novel’s death are greatly exaggerated. Humans hunger for stories. They always will. And, the novel, it knows how to adapt and survive. Will it survive with the help of technology? Auster might not be the best person to ask. He owns neither a computer nor a mobile phone. Lucky man.
Bonus: You can listen to Paul Auster read The Red Notebook, a collection of short stories published in 2002, right here. (He starts reading at around the 8:30 mark.) We have it listed in our collection of Free Audio Books.
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