Bedside reading #2

Lots to write about this. One of the better author biographies I've read, but it's gloomy: his friends and family really did drop like flies. I had the good fortune to attend the recent Complicite production of Endgame which I had mixed feelings about -- I enjoyed it but began to wonder if the author's estate's control over the work was limiting its interpretation. Mostly however, watching Endgame I was struck not by the intellectual play but the human source of its deathly abstractions, in particular the death of his brother, Frank. Prior to that he was grieving for his father's early death and his Parisian comrades who died in the French resistance; after the war, first his mother passed and then the luminous Ethna MacCarthy. Once you take that into account along with his own health problems, the immobile creature in the chair with the kerchief draped over his face seems less of a stylisation. Beckett's was a rough life but it was brightened by his artistic contacts with James Joyce, Nancy Cunard, Marcel Duchamp and others. Knowlson's book includes mention of a time when Beckett and Duchamp whiled away their Occupation days playing chess - can you imagine? Such a scene seems incredible - a layered tableaux.

I'm the one on the left

From the 2010 Christian Bourgois catalogue. Writing is hard work but some days you get something nice in the mail and the wind at your back.

Meaningful stairs

Last time I was in Paris I walked around the corner and slap bang into a set of steps I had seen before. It took me a moment to spot where: I was standing in the square which became the final scene in Brian DePalma's Femme Fatale, one of those movies I shouldn't love but do. I snapped the photos on my Olympus XA 35mm and stitched the panorama together in Photoshop. Here is DePalma talking about noir and dreams:

I had this idea to do a noir movie, but I felt that noir only works in a surrealistic way. Which meant that I had to create a dream, and put the noir story in the dream. If you look at these old black and white movies, with their sort of fatalistic storylines and very stylized way of shooting, I thought the dream device would be the best way to re-imagine it in a contemporary setting. So I put the noir melodrama in the brackets of her dream sequence and I used a lot of things that sort of happen when you have a dream. Certain things you experience reappear in your dream in kind of strange juxtapositions, and that's why the noir story appears the way it does. It doesn't seem that many of the people who have written about it have quite seen that. Somehow they don't see where the brackets of the dream are, so they write about the movie like it's a straightforward, realistic noir melodrama, but in reality it's a kind of surrealistic rethinking of the noir form. There are things that don't make sense until you think about them later, much like in a dream. You have all of these images that you have to ponder later: "why was that there" but the driving sense of it is essentially pretty simple, you know, she steals the diamonds, these guys are after her, and they're going to kill her. All the things that happen, are more or less consistent with that very simplistic, fatalistic storyline.

The Morning After

My desk the day after finishing the ms. The breakfast items are new.

Ok: actually finished now.

Actually finished. Proofed, revised, revisions proofed, spelling checked, third party proof read and ready to go. Emailed to agents tomorrow AM. Off to see The Wolfman tonight.

Ask me anything

what's the best beverage you ever had at Celebre/Box?

The 84, which was a double 42, although the ginger wine during flu periods was also appreciated. Thinking about it now, the 84 was really just a third of a bottle of Stolichnaya. I was younger then, and everything I said was clever.

c/- Formspring

Sunday morning (The Green Parrot)