Death masks — they have been around since the days of King Tut in Ancient Egypt, and (perhaps) Agamemnon and Cassandra in Ancient Greece. A way to remember the character and expressions of the dead, this memorial practice continued right down through the Middle Ages when wax and plaster became the materials of choice.
In early 1960, Hunter S. Thompson was just 22 years old and his journalism career was already on the skids. His last two jobs had ended badly. At one place he was fired for insubordination; at the other, for smashing the office candy machine in a fit of rage after it swallowed his money. So he drifted down to San Juan, Puerto Rico, and took a job at a newspaper called El Sportivo. His beat: bowling.
The newspaper went out of business a few months later, but Thompson transformed his experiences into a novel, The Rum Diary. In the prologue he describes the atmosphere of a San Juan newsroom peopled with shiftless expatriates:
They ran the whole gamut from genuine talents and honest men, to degenerates and hopeless losers who could barely write a post card–loons and fugitives and dangerous drunks, a shoplifting Cuban who carried a gun in his armpit, a half-wit Mexican who molested small children, pimps and pederasts and human chancres of every description, most of them working just long enough to make the price of a few drinks and a plane ticket.
Thompson finished the novel in 1961, but his career as a fiction writer was soon eclipsed by a growing recognition of his gift for narrative journalism, and The Rum Diary wasn’t published until 1998. As soon as it came out there was talk of a film adaptation. “Hunter’s dream,” said historian Douglas Brinkley, “was to have The Rum Diary as a movie, because I think he always saw it as a kind of warped Casablanca.”
Thompson killed himself before that dream ever came to fruition. After more than a decade of delays, a film version of The Rum Diaryfinally opened last weekend to mixed reviews and small audiences. Johnny Depp plays the alcoholic newpaperman Paul Kemp as if he were a young Thompson: more laid back than the gonzo journalist of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but with the same peculiar alienation and low, muttering voice. Director Bruce Robinson creates the vivid atmosphere of a Caribbean boomtown inhabited by shady businessmen, clueless tourists, drunken journalists and resentful natives. But the story is like its protagonist: adrift, irresolute.
To learn about Thompson’s early efforts to get the story made into a movie, you can watch The Rum Diary Back Story, filmed from 1998 through 2002 by Wayne Ewing. It documents the author’s initial pride at the long-overdue publication of the novel, followed by his growing frustration with the glacial progress in turning it into a movie. Ewing filmed Thompson at his home in Colorado and in a fireside meeting at Depp’s home in California. In one comical scene (episode eight) Warren Zevon reads aloud an insulting letter Thompson had sent to a producer.
Perhaps you know the backstory; perhaps you don’t. This week, socialite and reality “star” Kim Kardashian announced that her 72-day marriage to Kris Humphries will end in divorce. In response, the tabloids buzzed … and famed author Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses and The Moor’s Last Sigh) took to Twitter and offered up a nice little limerick. It starts with the blue section and moves up the page…
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…
Back by popular demand, and certainly the right video for today’s holiday — the 1953 animated film version of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” narrated by James Mason. Upon its release, the film was given a bizarre reception. In the UK, the British Board of Film Censors gave the film an “x” rating, deeming it unsuitable for adult audiences. Meanwhile, “The Tell-Tale Heart” was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in the US, though it ultimately lost to a Disney production. The film runs a short 7:24, and now appears in our collection of Free Movies Online.
And then we have another small Halloween treat — your favorite actor, Christopher Walken, reading another classic Poe story, The Raven. It’s now added to our collection of Free Audio Books, and don’t miss other readings by Walken right below.
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?”
Close the doors. Shut the blinds. Turn out the lights. Make that room dark. Get ready for Alfred Hitchcock Presents Ghost Stories for Young People. Originally recorded in 1962, the album features 11 ghost stories introduced by Hitchcock himself and then read by actor John Allen. If you were a kid during the early 60s, this may bring back some very good memories. The recording is available on YouTube and Spotify, embedded below. (Download Spotify’s software for free here.)
Here’s a playlist of the tracks:
The Haunted And The Haunters (The Pirate’s Curse)
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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