Coma

Claridge's Hotel in London is famous for catering to the idiosyncrasies of its guests. If you like mineral water at your bedside every night, the staff of Claridge's will notice this, and each night you'll find the bottle of mineral water by your bed. If you like it half empty, you will find it half empty. And since the staff is English, no eccentricity is too bizarre to indulge.

I lived at Claridge's for several weeks in 1978, rewriting a screenplay. I was typing and cutting and pasting the pages together. But I couldn't get an ordinary tape dispenser; I just had a plain roll of Scotch tape and a pair of scissors. Of course, every time I cut a piece of tape, the edge would fall back onto the roll, and I'd have a terrible time prying it free with my fingernails to cut another piece. Eventually I hit on the expedient of cutting long strips of tape, and running them lightly down the knobs of my desk drawers on both sides of the desk. This allowed me simply to cut between the knobs to get a piece of tape. I followed this procedure of taping the drawers for several weeks.

A year later I returned to Claridge's and checked into a room. It was a nice room, but it had a peculiarity: someone had stretched rows of Scotch tape down all the drawers of the desk in the corner.

-- Michael Crichton, Travels (2002)

Bedside reading

Liquidamber by Chris Bell, available in print and ebook.

Colder than the coldest winter was cold

RIP Dana Wynter AKA Becky, Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

Talk

Christopher Hitchens on writers and their voice:

The most satisfying compliment a reader can pay is to tell me that he or she feels personally addressed. Think of your own favorite authors and see if that isn’t precisely one of the things that engage you, often at first without your noticing it. A good conversation is the only human equivalent: the realizing that decent points are being made and understood, that irony is in play, and elaboration, and that a dull or obvious remark would be almost physically hurtful. This is how philosophy evolved in the symposium, before philosophy was written down. And poetry began with the voice as its only player and the ear as its only recorder. Indeed, I don’t know of any really good writer who was deaf, either. How could one ever come, even with the clever signage of the good Abbé de l’Épée, to appreciate the miniscule twinges and ecstasies of nuance that the well-tuned voice imparts? Henry James and Joseph Conrad actually dictated their later novels—which must count as one of the greatest vocal achievements of all time, even though they might have benefited from hearing some passages read back to them—and Saul Bellow dictated much of Humboldt’s Gift. Without our corresponding feeling for the idiolect, the stamp on the way an individual actually talks, and therefore writes, we would be deprived of a whole continent of human sympathy, and of its minor-key pleasures such as mimicry and parody.

The full Vanity Fair article is here.

I hurt somebody's feelings once

As a young man you were influenced by the music and writing coming from America, rather than Japanese culture. What were these influences?

I think this is like asking an Englishman like Eric Clapton why he’s so drawn to the blues. If you asked Clapton the same question, I have a feeling he’d shrug his shoulders and say he isn’t sure why.

Haruki Murakami interviewed in 2004, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel. Full interview here.

Pictured: Ronin (1998). That third car chase here.

Is it just –

David Mamet interviewed by Fred Topol in 2004:

Do you see your career in any kind of continuum? There’s a sense, like with Soderbergh, when he did FULL FRONTAL and he did SOLARIS, and SOLARIS didn’t happen and FULL FRONTAL was kind of mixed. Now, he’s back to OCEAN’S TWELVE because he’s looking at the mountain-scape of his career and the effect of money on it. Do you ever consider that in your career, or are you writing from your soul and working from there?

I don’t know. I’m just making it up as I go along.

Well, is it just—

Well, it’s always there. I think no matter what anyone says, you always make it up as you go along. It’s like they say when you have babies, you know, nobody gave you a how-to book. Nobody gave you a manual. The important things in life, whether it’s your career, whether it’s your marriage or whether it’s child rearing – you make it up as you go along. You try to have certain precepts and hold to them, but sometimes they even change.

Full interview here.

Took up drinking to stop myself from thinking