New (old) short stories on Kindle

Rusty Blades is a collection of five short stories from 1988-90 now available on Kindle: 'The Man at the Door', 'Two Friends', 'Geisha', 'Girl from Mars' and 'Rusty Blades.' This is part of an ongoing project to make my early and hard-to-find short fiction available in digital formats, as much as an archive as anything. (Special thanks:Rob O'Neill.) I have thoughts about this which I'll post later – I'm working on new stuff – but if you're interested Rusty Blades is available on Amazon here.

It feels good to be able to finally make these stories available again. Looking back over them I wanted to make some changes but resisted the temptation, apart from cleaning up some unintentional repetition here and there and, okay, changing three words. I can see what I got wrong with the stories as well as what I got right. And I feel a lot older now. 1988 – man...

Self-publishing is a chore so I look forward to going back to the other kind. But I do still have the Huxley stories which will come out as little one-off ebooks for 99 cents, like the pulp paperbacks I used to enjoy when I was a kid. (Do magazines and newspapers still do winter / summer fiction? Must ask someone about that.)

I'm still in two minds about ebooks. I'd be more excited if the platform was set up to supplement or alter reading behaviour, rather than replace the reading I already do. Ebooks are ideally suited for shorter fiction (i.e. novellas) and collected short stories, especially stories which are intended to be enjoyed as a series. The idea of readers subscribing to a character or series of narratives which are then pushed to their devices, like podcasts, actually sounds like fun. Tapping through Ulysses with an index finger does not.

We're all going on a Billie Holiday

No, no, no. Said Bill Bailey on Twitter:

what a terrible shame about Winehouse - she was great on Buzzcocks, even though there was Malibu in her mug.

I can't watch the video. Pete Doherty can fall over and it doesn't matter but Amy was great for music.

Farmville

William Gaddis interviewed by Zoltán Abádi-Nagy for The Art of Fiction:

INTERVIEWER

What moved you to write JR?

GADDIS

Even though I should have known from The Recognitions that the world was not waiting breathlessly for my message, that it already knew, and was quite happy to live with all these false values, I'd always been intrigued by the charade of the so-called free market, so-called free enterprise system, the stock market conceived of as what was called a "people's capitalism" where you "owned a part of the company" and so forth. All of which is true; you own shares in a company, so you literally do own part of the assets. But if you own a hundred shares out of six or sixty or six hundred million, you're not going to influence things very much. Also, the fact that people buy securities—the very word in this context is comic—not because they are excited by the product—often you don't know what the company makes—but simply for profit: The stock looks good and you buy it. The moment it looks bad you sell it. What had actually happened in the company is not your concern. In many ways I thought . . . the childishness of all this. Because JR himself, which is why he is eleven years old, is motivated only by good-natured greed. JR was, in other words, to be a commentary on this free enterprise system running out of control. Looking around us now with a two-trillion-dollar federal deficit and billions of private debt and the banks, the farms, basic industry all in serious trouble, it seems to have been rather prophetic.

Full interview here.

Work

Raymond Carver interviewed by Mona Simpson and Lewis Buzbee for The Art of Fiction:

INTERVIEWER

In an article you did for The New York Times Book Review you mentioned a story "too tedious to talk about here" — about why you choose to write short stories over novels. Do you want to go into that story now?

CARVER

The story that was "too tedious to talk about" has to do with a number of things that aren't very pleasant to talk about. I did finally talk about some of these things in the essay "Fires," which was published in Antaeus. In it I said that finally, a writer is judged by what he writes, and that's the way it should be. The circumstances surrounding the writing are something else, something extraliterary. Nobody ever asked me to be a writer. But it was tough to stay alive and pay bills and put food on the table and at the same time to think of myself as a writer and to learn to write. After years of working crap jobs and raising kids and trying to write, I realized I needed to write things I could finish and be done with in a hurry. There was no way I could undertake a novel, a two- or three-year stretch of work on a single project. I needed to write something I could get some kind of a payoff from immediately, not next year, or three years from now.

Full interview here.

Can it be that it was all so simple then

WIP. A page from one of my first published short stories ('Two Friends') Other Voices (Brick Row / Hallard Press, 1988), now scanned and OCR'd. I'm in the process of converting my back-catalogue to digital, particularly the early and hard-to-find short stories. I might also add some new short stories, just for fun.

Now playing

The week in pictures

Mama Cass, Michelle Phillips & Hendryx Hendrix; Blake Lively; Kubrick & Jack; Gorky Park.

I have a code

Send assistance. In the meantime: The Bible according to Google Earth. Steve Martin's art forgeries. Kraftwerk's Ralf Hutter talks about Twitter. The Tinnitus Research Initiative. Painting on the iPad. The I Ching online. A history of computer operating systems in the movies. John Carpenter talks about the fight scene in They Live. Author Nicholas Carr on the web and concentration.

Pic: Night Nurse (1931)

Vietnam

Courtesy of the Medi, Crystal Castle's 'Vietnam' remixed

I'm back

(Pic: The Color of Money)

Intolerable cruelty

The great John Carpenter:

How do you see the horror genre having changed over the years, especially as you're coming back into it at this point in time?
It's changed. It's like it always has been, in some ways. There are a few really good horror movies made each year, but mostly they're shit. Most all of them are bad. Most are derivative. Most don't try anything new. Now they pick up whatever style has just been popular and they just use it. People like to associate horror now with torture movies because of the popularity of Saw... I thought Saw was a good movie, I really enjoyed Saw. It was fun, it had a great twist ending...

What did you think of it by the time we got to Saw VII?
You know, I got a little bored with it. It's the same thing over and over, but it's OK. People want to see that. It's like Jackass. Let's see people — and in Jackass they're willing! They're willing to be tortured and made fun of and have cruel things done to them, and they think it's cool. People nowadays, I think because of the internet and the culture, have become more cruel than when I was young. Look at the bullying. Look at what it does to people. Look at cyberbullying.

Does that then make the way that horror movies are consumed vastly different?
Oh, yeah. They're consumed like a lot of entertainment, it's just disposable. What you try to do is fight through that somehow, try to get the audience's attention in a more direct way. The really good movies do it. The Social Network was a terrific movie — not a horror film, but boy, that did it. I don't care about what happened, but I started to care. Wow, look at this! Look at the issues we're dealing with in this!

Full interview here.

City life

Paris (Feb), London (NYE), Hampstead Heath (Dec).

I can't stand the rain against my window

Thanks to Mr Rob O'Neill I have finally acquired OCR scans of my first published short stories from Other Voices (1988). I've spent a wet Sunday morning correcting the text recognition errors and cleaning up the files to be converted into another ebook mini-collection. Reading the stories back I found I could recall nearly every word, and my life at the time of writing them: the sensation was as vivid as flicking through old photographs. Coding and design advice for my ebooks has come courtesy of Mr Chris Bell. It's not really self-publishing when so many other people help, is it? (One day I will get Russell Crowe to star in this.) Above: some blonde chick. That's one pretty foot.

Bedside reading

Couches of the World

The journey is the destination.

I'll never put on a life jacket again

Steven Spielberg talks to AICN's Harry Knowles about writing Quint's monologue for Jaws (1977).

Steven Spielberg: I owe three people a lot for this speech. You've heard all this, but you've probably never heard it from me. There's a lot of apocryphal reporting about who did what on Jaws and I've heard it for the last three decades, but the fact is the speech was conceived by Howard Sackler, who was an uncredited writer, didn't want a credit and didn't arbitrate for one, but he's the guy that broke the back of the script before we ever got to Martha's Vineyard to shoot the movie.

I hired later Carl Gottlieb to come onto the island, who was a friend of mine, to punch up the script, but Howard conceived of the Indianapolis speech. I had never heard of the Indianapolis before Howard, who wrote the script at the Bel Air Hotel and I was with him a couple times a week reading pages and discussing them.

Howard one day said, "Quint needs some motivation to show all of us what made him the way he is and I think it's this Indianapolis incident." I said, "Howard, what's that?" And he explained the whole incident of the Indianapolis and the Atomic Bomb being delivered and on its way back it was sunk by a submarine and sharks surrounded the helpless sailors who had been cast adrift and it was just a horrendous piece of World War II history. Howard didn't write a long speech, he probably wrote about three-quarters of a page.

But then, when I showed the script to my friend John Milius, John said "Can I take a crack at this speech?" and John wrote a 10 page monologue, that was absolutely brilliant, but out-sized for the Jaws I was making! (laughs) But it was brilliant and then Robert Shaw took the speech and Robert did the cut down. Robert himself was a fine writer, who had written the play The Man in the Glass Booth. Robert took a crack at the speech and he brought it down to five pages. So, that was sort of the evolution just of that speech.

If you haven't heard of Howard Sackler, he wrote the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick's Killer's Kiss (1955) and didn't take a credit for that, either.

Everything that walked or crawled at one time or another

Schickel: You had a long apprenticeship: all those years on Rawhide and then working in the spaghetti westerns. Think that was good for you?

Eastwood: Overnight stardom can be harmful to your mental health. Yeah. It has ruined a lot of people. Like Orson Welles. He comes right out of the box with a project that everybody's knocked out by, and then all of a sudden it's like... What do I do to follow that?

Schickel: There's a notion that Clint Eastwood, the great American icon, has somehow disappointed a significant portion of his constituency with this movie.

Eastwood: Well, I got a big laugh out of that. These people are always bitching about 'Hollyweird,' and then they start bitching about this film... Extremism is so easy. You've got your position, and that's it. It doesn't take much thought. And when you go far enough to the right you meet the same idiots coming around from the left.

Clint interviewed by Richard Shickel, Time, 2005.

Beyond reasonable doubt

INTERVIEWER: What about the more awkward question of writers standing in your way?

BARTHELME: I think deep admirations force you away from the work admired, as well as having the generating influence we've mentioned. Joyce may have done this for Beckett, Márquez may do this for young Latin American writers—force them to do something that is not Márquez.

INTERVIEWER: But hasn't everything been done?

BARTHELME: One can't believe that because it's not profitable. The situation of painting is instructive. Painters, especially American painters since the Second World War, have been much more troubled, beset by formal perplexity, than American writers. They've been a laboratory for everybody. Some new attitudes have emerged. What seems clear is that if you exacerbate a problem, make it worse, new solutions are generated.

The great Donald Barthelme interviewed by J.D. O'Hara, The Paris Review.

"I abandoned the album three times before I finished it. It really caused a lot of sweat - and heart-ache, I suppose. At one point I thought that I could never achieve anything more, musically. Not that I'd achieved everything, just that there was nowhere else for me to go, you know?

"It affected everything I did in the end. I found myself saying 'You're just a dilettante. You're not doing anything with the kind of intensity that it deserves'. It was a crisis of confidence that went very deep.

"I use processes - which we'll discuss later - to generate the structures of my music. With this new album, I found that I had to work very very hard to get the results I wanted - the process didn't automatically generate them any more, whereas it used to.

"I used to be led by the work. Something would happen and I'd just follow it. This time it wasn't as easy as that. Things seemed to be going in directions which weren't interesting to me any more - I found myself trying to use a technique which was bound to give a particular class of outputs to give a different class. So I was working against the technique, to some extent.

"I suspect that I've come to the end of a way of working with this record. It's a loss of confidence and I think that comes through - something more like humanity than whimsicality, you know? Not so much tentativeness as reasonable doubt. It's less brash than other things I've done."

Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno interviewed by Ian MacDonald, NME, 1977.

Now playing

Binding

Wired's John C Abell says ebooks are not there yet because they can't be used for interior design:

Before you roll your eyes at the shallowness of this gripe, consider this: When in your literate life you did not garnish your environment with books as a means of wordlessly introducing yourself to people in your circle?

It may be all about vanity, but books — how we arrange them, the ones we display in our public rooms, the ones we don't keep — say a lot about what we want the world to think about us. Probably more than any other object in our homes, books are our coats of arms, our ice breakers, our calling cards. Locked in the dungeon of your digital reader, nobody can hear them speak on your behalf.

Abell's comments reminded me of a 2010 study which aimed to gauge the effect of summer reading on students' academic performance. A philanthropist interviewed about the programme mentioned, albeit anecdotally, the importance of building a physical library:

For a study to be published in Reading Psychology, Richard Allington [a reading researcher at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville] and colleagues selected students in 17 high-poverty elementary schools in Florida and, for three consecutive years, gave each child 12 books, from a list the students provided, on the last day of school... Three years later, researchers found that those students who received books had "significantly higher" reading scores, experienced less of a summer slide and read more on their own each summer than the 478 who didn't get books.

Rebecca Constantino, [a researcher and instructor at the University of California-Irvine] who in 1999 founded Access Books, a group that has given away more than 1 million books, says the cause-and-effect is simple: "When kids own books, they get this sense, 'I'm a reader,' " she says. "It's very powerful when you go to a kid's home and ask him, 'Where is your library?'"

The full report of the study is here. (Pic: The Big Sleep. Based on the book.)

Depending how you see a thing

Movies may be the only art form whose core audience is widely believed to be actively hostile to ambition, difficulty or anything that seems to demand too much work on their part. In other words, there is, at every level of the culture — among studio executives, entertainment reporters, fans and quite a few critics — a lingering bias against the notion that movies should aspire to the highest levels of artistic accomplishment.

Some of this anti-art bias reflects the glorious fact that film has always been a popular art form, a great democratic amusement accessible to everyone and proud of its lack of aristocratic pedigree. But lately, I think, protests against the deep-dish and the highbrow — to use old-fashioned populist epithets of a kind you used to hear a lot in movies themselves — mask another agenda, which is a defense of the corporate status quo.

A. O. Scott on movies in the New York Times.

Now playing

Cults, 'Most wanted.' The Brunettes under The Knife, maybe.

Riot in a Jam Jar

Mr Jimmy Cauty: poster boy, pop star and spendthrift. Currently exhibiting at the Light Industrial Workshop.

All you've done is hide behind words

Marilyn by Michael Ochs, from Time magazine's 'birthday' portfolio of 85 Marilyn Monroe images.

It was not a short fight, but it was fast

I have a new short story out on Kindle. 'Huxley' is a detective story about an Auckland ex-cop turned debt collector. The story first appeared in The Mammoth Book of Best International Crime (Constable, 2009). The ebook version has been revised: the opening is different and a number of details have been changed. There are more stories in the Huxley series which I might put out as ebooks later on. You can get it here.

This is part of an ongoing project to digitally convert my back-catalogue, particularly the early and hard-to-find short stories. Special thanks: Messrs Bell & Stratford. (Their new LP coming soon.)

Now playing

Liaisons Dangereuses. (Not to be confused with Les Liaisons Dangereuses.) One of the best electronica albums ever: recognised, but so rare as to be practically mythical.

Here She Comes Now, now

My new ebook is out. Here She Comes Now is a collection of three short stories published on Amazon's Kindle. I will be publishing digital editions of my earlier novels and short stories as well as some new fiction, including a series of detective stories and at least one longer work. Here She Comes Now is the first step. You can get it here.

It's a shame about Ray

I have a three-by-five up there with this fragment of a sentence from a story by Chekhov: "... and suddenly everything became clear to him." I find these words filled with wonder and possibility. I love their simple clarity, and the hint of revelation that's implied. There is mystery, too. What has been unclear before? Why is it just now becoming clear? What's happened? Most of all - what now? There are consequences as a result of such sudden awakenings. I feel a sharp sense of relief - and anticipation.

I overheard the writer Geoffrey Wolff say "No cheap tricks" to a group of writing students. That should go on a three-by-five card. I'd amend it a little to "No tricks." Period. I hate tricks. At the first sign of a trick or a gimmick in a piece of fiction, a cheap trick or even an elaborate trick, I tend to look for cover. Tricks are ultimately boring, and I get bored easily which may go along with my not having much of an attention span. But extremely clever chi-chi writing, or just plain tomfoolery writing, puts me to sleep. Writers don't need tricks or gimmicks or even necessarily need to be the smartest fellows on the block. At the risk of appearing foolish, a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing – a sunset or an old shoe – in absolute and simple amazement.

Raymond Carver, On Writing (New York Times Book Review, 1981)

Strangers making the most of the dark

A lot of people lament how the publishing industry has changed over the years. Your career seems to very much bridge all that - from the small independent shops to the corporatization of it all.

I say to Bob Gottlieb, who's still a very close personal friend, "You couldn't stand to be in publishing today." And he says, "I know." It is very corporatized. We all began to think about that in those days. What was going to happen? These big conglomerates, synergy, all that. People began to worry about it.

Tell me about some more of the big characters.

We just don't have them anymore. Morgan [Entrekin] is as close as we have. And Sonny [Mehta]. There were so many: Henry Robbins, Ted Solotaroff, Joe Fox, Sam Lawrence, David Segal. Even Dick Synder is a lot more colorful than Jack Romanos, who is now gone. I mean, they had passion, they cared about literature. Even Dick, who's not an intellectual. He cared. He was a madman. I mean, we need a little bit more…. Who is a madman now in publishing? Peter Olson, but of a very strange type. I mean, Morgan's eccentric, Sonny's eccentric. Morgan's less eccentric than he used to be. He's getting very conventional now with the wife and the child. It was just different then.

So you miss the personalities.

Yes. I miss the fun. I tell Tina [Bennett] and Eric [Simonoff], "You missed the good days." When I worked for Sterling Lord, I had a loft, a sort of duplex loft apartment on Barrow Street. And Michael Sissons, who's now the head of Fraser & Dunlop, and Peter Matson, who's also an agent, used to give these parties at my house. They would make these drinks of half brandy and half champagne, and people got so drunk. One night Rosalyn Drexler, the lady wrestler and the novelist, picked up Walter Minton and just threw him against the wall. I'll never forget that. There was just more of a sense of fun.

So why was that lost?

It's the corporate thing. People are too scared.

Jofie Ferrari-Adler's 2008 interview with agent Lynn Nesbit.

There is a party, everyone is there

If you were physically incapacitated and could watch only one show for the rest of your life, what would it be?

Law & Order. I panic that there will be a time when it isn’t on TV. When I’m not in New York it makes me miss New York. I think about all the people angry that their streets are being closed off. And I feel like Jerry Orbach might be someone that I will get to meet in Heaven.

Amy Poehler's favourite TV shows. (Pic: Gothamist.)

Now playing

Mr Wilson and, below, with Christine Perfect McVie not setting fire to a gazebo. Tineye can't source the snapshot which looks too good to be real, and probably was. California.

More talk

Philip Temple interviewed by Bob Cornwall:

How did you arrive at that very distinctive style? I've tried hard to find equivalents. Only James Ellroy comes close.

Parts of Ellroy I like, the jarring impact of the language. But there are times when I want to relax. I'd like to see a proper sentence, just one proper sentence.

But generally I've come to it because I want to say things as briefly as possible, and I want to somehow capture how the words feel in my head. So if I leave off pronouns and all sorts of things... As I said to one woman, I've taught English grammar and I know what I am doing. And my dialogue, I've always wanted to truncate my dialogue. Ever since I read George V. Higgins's Friends of Eddie Coyle, I've really wanted to write a book in dialogue. (Now that I am writing film scripts, I don't want to write a book in dialogue!). I've tried to create a distinctive voice, so it's fairly self-conscious. And I don't write like that normally. You won't get an e-mail from me like that.

But mostly I'm interested in the way we share, although we may come from opposite sides of the world, we're part of a linguistic community. And the way we speak to each other, we leave things out, we don't have to say full sentences, or point everything out. And when you find people that work together intimately, or who spend a lot of time together (women are like this sometimes, domestically, whatever), particularly colleagues who do the kind of work that doesn't lend itself to exposition, like, we know what we are doing here, they don't spell things out to each other.

So what I am trying to do is to say, inside this community, this linguistic community that we share, when we speak to each other, what don't we have to say. That's what I've tried to do. I've tried to take all of the bits out that people would not say to each other. I want to come close to some sort of naturalistic language. If you try too hard, it's art. And there's another line you can fall over, into transcript, and it goes clunky on you.

Full interview here.

A little knowledge

Green:

A few streets away in Hackney, the area Gartside credits with reviving him a second time after another few lost years, there are hundreds of new Scritti Politti songs in unfinished digital form. Gartside admits he suffers from completion anxiety. "But I'm convinced that I have to keep making music," he says, "and that I haven't come close to making the best music that I can. Though I've had a very low opinion of myself, the fact that the best work I've yet done is sitting unfinished on a hard drive back home must be good."

Full interview here.

Hard boiled

Fran Lebowitz on reading:

I like hard boiled detectives. I really don't like the English. If I see the word Don and it's not someone's name, I'm out of there. Nero Wolfe is one of my favorites because I love to read about food... John [D.] McDonald is another one of my great favorites. When my first book was published in paperback it was with Fawcett and I guess I told the publisher how much I liked him. I guess she told him because he wrote me a letter and told me how much he liked my book. I was thrilled. They made me an honorary member of the John McDonald fan club, with the badge, certificate, and everything. The Travis McGee's are the best.

I liked Robert Parker before he became a social worker. Elmore Leonard. I even like his bad ones. I think Joseph Hansen's the best living detective writer. The Dave Brandstetter series. The detective is a guy whose father owns something like Metropolitan Life Insurance, a zillionaire. The son is gay and he's the detective. He's a death claims investigator.

Hansen stopped writing them about five years ago but I still think he's far and away the best.

Full interview here. Public Speaking, the Martin Scorsese-directed HBO documentary on Lebowitz, is here.

Billion Dollar Brain

Robert Gottlieb on the art of editing:

For a while I was editing the two best writers of quality who were writing spy novels, John le Carré and Len Deighton, and you couldn’t find a more perfect pair of opposites in the editorial process. Le Carré is unbelievably sensitive to editorial suggestion because his ear is so good and because his imagination is so fertile—he’ll take the slightest hint and come back with thirty extraordinary new pages. Deighton, on the other hand—who is totally willing, couldn’t be more eager for suggestions—is one of those writers for whom, once a sentence is down on paper, it takes on a reality that no amount of good will or effort can change. So you can say to him, Len, this is a terrific story but there is a serious problem. He’ll say, What is it? What is it? And you say, Well, on page thirty-seven this character is killed, but on page a hundred and eighteen he appears at a party. Oh my God, Len says, this is terrible, but I’ll fix it, don’t worry. Then you get the manuscript back, and you turn to page thirty-seven, and he’ll have changed it to, He was almost killed.

Full interview here in The Paris Review.
Hat tip: Quote Unquote.

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

Je vois la vie en rose

Q: I’ve been wondering, because of something Bruce said – he mentioned the Rockford Files in terms of some of the tone of the show – and I get the impression that Burn Notice is kind of a mash-up of the Rockford Files and It Takes a Thief. I was wondering how you get that balance?

Matt Nix: I’d say that there’s actually a lot of kind of classic television, and The Rockford Files, It Takes a Thief. People bring up Magnum, MacGyver, The A-Team, a lot of these shows, some of which I watched, and some of which I didn’t watch. But all of us, between the entire staff, we all watched all of those at one point or another. And I think that one of the things we kind of use as a touchstone that owes a lot to that kind of classic television is the idea that we’re really – like, Michael is a classic hero. We all like Michael. We all like Sam. We all like Fiona. We all like Madeline.

I think if you think about a lot of contemporary television, including a lot of my favorite shows, I should say, I mean I’m not slamming this at all. It is an important part of contemporary television, feeling ambivalent about the characters that you’re watching is, you know, it’s kind of something that people do now. And I think Burn Notice is not that. I think that when you look at Rockford, Rockford is just kind of a guy. At least my reaction to him was, you know, he’s a guy you want to know, you know, like Magnum is just cool, like, he’s a good dude.

And when we’re all writing Sam, you know, we’re thinking about what’s the brother we want. Who’s that guy? When we think about Michael, it’s whatever challenges or whatever darkness he may struggle with, ultimately he’s a hero. He’s a guy who’s going to put his ass on the line to save people, and so that kind of – you know, those are the kinds of touchstones we use, and I think that is a bit of a throwback to classic television.

It’s a world where people are really trying to do the right things for other people, and where the characters on the show, however they bicker, are a family and they stick together, and that’s what they do. And I think that’s sort of comforting, and it’s fun to write, and I think there are a lot of interesting and subtle things to explore within that. But, you know, that’s the kind of television that I really cared about growing up, and I think there’s a place for it, and that’s part of what we’re doing.

Full interview with Burn Notice creator Matt Nix here.

And no dream is ever just a dream

Above: Kubrick then (1949) and later (2001, i.e. 1968). Below: Kubrick then (1949) and later (The Shining, 1980) A portfolio of the director's work as a photographer here.

Your whole life is just a dream

A series of measurements with ground-penetrating radar mounted on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have revealed a massive deposit of frozen carbon dioxide (CO2) — a Lake Superior's worth of dry ice — buried under a layer of ordinary ice near the Martian south pole. "We knew there was some CO2 at the pole," says Roger Phillips of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., lead author of a report on the discovery in the current issue of Science, "but there's about 30 times more than we thought.

And there's evidence from a number of Mars probes that the planet's atmospheric pressure has increased, even over the short time that we've been visiting. It's barely at the detectable level, says Phillips, "but it could be that we're seeing this effect."

All signs, in other words, point to the fact that Mars' atmosphere could be bulking up even now. Within a few tens of thousands of years, space colonists could be drawing water from Martian ponds — even as they're choking on Martian dust.

Get your ass to Mars.

"People cannot put their finger anymore on what is real and what is not real," observes Paul Verhoeven, the one-time Dutch mathematician who directed Total Recall. "What we find in Dick is an absence of truth and an ambiguous interpretation of reality. Dreams that turn out to be reality, reality that turns out to be a dream. This can only sell when people recognize it, and they can only recognize it when they see it in their own lives."

(From Wired.) Total Recall was co-written by Ronald Shusett and Dan O'Bannon. O'Bannon, who passed away in 2009, suffered painfully from Crohn's disease: among his inventions were the Mars rebellion leader Kuato, who grows from a man's stomach, and the chest burster in Alien.

In 1997 O'Bannon discussed the development of the movie Alien to Martin Anderson of Den Of Geek:

... In the movie, the Earth men discover a wrecked, derelict spacecraft. Actually no, that's not correct. In the movie, the men discover a wrecked construction of non-human manufacture and inside of it they find eggs of the monster. In the original script the men find a crashed derelict spacecraft and they enter it; they discover that the alien crew are all dead. They return to their own ship to contemplate what may have killed the alien crew and then they discover a pyramid on the planet which appears to be indigenous and primitive. They enter the pyramid and there they find the eggs. They combined these two elements, they squeezes them together into one sort of uneasy entity.

FF: The idea behind that, I would assume that the dangerous aliens were coming back to spawn or something?

O' Bannon: No, they were two different races. In my script, it was a space going race that landed on the planet and had been wiped out by whatever was there. And now the Earth men come and they endanger themselves in the same way. In the new version it's just sort of a surrealist mystery.

FF: And what ever they find there in the alien construct is the alien menace?

O' Bannon: Yes. So they combined, and they did dome things...and there were some changes that were better. There were some improvements made.

FF: In what direction?

O' Bannon: I think they made some of the characters cuter than they were. Some of the dialogue is definitely snappier than it was in the original draft. I think a lot of the designs that Ridley supervised differed because his visual hand is very strong over the surface of the picture. I think may things like that changed. You asked if it was my film. And i said no. And you said, can you name one of the things that disturbs you, well not every way in which it is different disturbs me.

FF: A lot of them okay?

O' Bannon: Ridley has this lavish, sensual visual style; and I think that Ridley is one of the 'good guys.' I really think that he is – was the final pivot point responsible for the picture coming out good. And so a lot of the visual design and a lot of the mood elements inherent in the camerawork, while they're not what i planned, are great. They're just different. Also, it's not 100% Ridley either. It's Ridley superimposing his vision over the cumulative vision of others, you see. Now this could be such a strong director's picture because Ridley's directorial and visual hand is so strong. There will probably be tendency among critics to refer to it as Ridley Scott's vision of the future. And he did have a vision of the future. But it was everybody else that came before, that's what his vision is.

Ridley Scott's Alien prequel / remake is Prometheus.

Playing, now

Playing, now