We are having a lecture and a discussion about the play in a few days so I better read it again.
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I am so old I was there at the start. 70 years ago.
Beckett was brought to the literati’s attention by Grove Press outa San Francisco. Evergreen was the required reading for young beats.
Corso,Ferlinghetti,Ginsburg… ‘ I saw the best minds of my generation’ on and on. Never got to the City Lights Bookshop.
Don’t forget to take your dustbin.
And as I always say…. Remind me what I had for my dinner. I forget.
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Returning to Broadway in the fall a/k/a “Bill and Ted’s Day(s) by the Tree.”
(Starring Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter)
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Almost as old. I got into Grove Press through the Evergreen playscripts. Still have quite a few: Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter, Stoppard, Durrenmatt, and a bunch of lesser known playwrights.
If someone had presented this story as a work of fiction, it’d be mocked for being improbable. But it’s history. And it actually happened. These people existed!
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Stories, sketches and essays published in 1976. I borrowed the book to read a particular essay: The Truest Sport: Jousting with Sam and Charlie, a piece about US Naval carrier aviators during the Vietnam war in 1967 which was mentioned in another book by Geoff Dyer on a similar topic. As we say, one thing leads to another. I will read the whole book since Tom Wolfe was such a talented writer.
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Great book, really goes into the details of Macca’s immediate post-Beatles life and career.
I will definitely get the follow-up volume once finished:
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Sorry I’ve mentioned this before but I get a credit in this book. Fame at last.
Do tell Andy.
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A few years ago now I posted on the Hoffman forum about my day around my local town Hythe in Kent and passing by the youth club where Noel Redding played his first gig then a mile or so up the road Lympne Castle where Paul McCartney recorded Back to the Egg.
I also mentioned a couple miles away the village Dymchurch and driving past the road Henry McCullough lived on during the early to mid 70’s around the time of Wings
This guy Adrian got in touch saying he was writing a book about McCartney and was trying to locate where Henry had lived. Adrian said he had spoken to Wings drummer Denny Seiwell who had once visted Henry and mentioned it was near the sea.
I replied that a girlfriend was friendly with Henry’s wife at the time and I knew the exact cottage Henry had resided at - not only that I was going for a walk that way later in the day and would snap a pic of the cottage.
I got a nice thank you from Adrian then a few years went by and I see this book on McCartney by a guy called Adrian and it is getting great reviews. Being a McCartney fan my daughter bought it for me for Christmas and imagine my shock when leafing through the back pages - Page 674 to be precise and there I am - what a nice touch of course my girlfriend wants to know where her credit is!
Funny I was out at Winchelsea on Sunday (not far away) and walked up for a glass of white at the Charles Palmer Vineyard, walking up the hill just on the left is Hogg Hill Mill - McCartney’s recording studio. Of course you can’t go to Winchelsea without visiting Spike Milligan’s grave.
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Very cool…
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Found this on a wall in our road, left with a bunch of crime thrillers.
Not sure yet…seems a tad too obvious pisstake of the music industry of the time (90’s) and the main character is too blatantly and intentionally a d!ck, though I’m sure the stereotype existed…not sure yet if I’ll finish it. Couple of chuckle moments, but…
John Niven Kill Your Friends
Windmill Books
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Just finished the unabridged audio book. There’s an ironic point of view as the reader sees what Mr Stevens the butler doesn’t, that Miss Kenton the housekeeper shares a mutual attraction. Stevens represses his own emotions in pursuit of service to his employer, to the extent of being absent at his own father’s death. It becomes evident that Lord Darlington was a Nazi sympathiser, though Stevens is convinced that he was an honourable man. Well written and read here by Samuel West.
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Very disappointing. More like a soap opera than a thriller. Too much backstory on the characters that doesn’t move the plot along.
steve
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I have just finished Salinger’s The Catcher in The Rye.
(A quick check here on the forum shows that I started it in 2020 but fizzled out.)
We blithely romped through this book in the lower fifth at school. How quickly we can soak up stuff at fifteen.
This time I find the book’s theme far, far more troubling. At times throughout the novel, I have wondered if Holden, in his search for authenticity and not phoneyness, is Jesus, or possibly even a prototype for the unabomber. At the very least, he is seriously depressed.
It’s easy to see why this is considered such a great twentieth century American classic.
No doubt it is pompous and very Sunday Times-ish to say it, but I have the feeling that Travis Bickle would have loved it.
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