Fitzcarraldo

Only books provide some measure of comfort.

- Werner Herzog, Conquest of the Useless

The lives of other writers

Or - Two friends record their recent experiences in the book 'business'.

William Brown, author of Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age



Howard Male, author of Etc Etc Amen

Frumious Bandersnatch, orator

Books I've actually finished lately: 36

James Sallis does Vernon God Little meets Lolita in post-Palahniuk Breaking Bad white-trash noir Napoleon Dynamite with guns. For girls.

I only found out recently

that Stanley Kubrick had done a film-script on Napoleon.

Which you can find liberally scattered about the internet.

Jackpot.

Four-letter words

I want you to dictate to me a memorandum of a couple of pages. Four letter words and short sentences on the situation in Vietnam, the 'Vietnam Picture'.

- Lyndon Johnson, in Errol Morris' The Fog of War

Circular vocabulary

TO:  Gen. Abizaid
CC:  Gen. Myers
FROM:  Donald Rumsfeld [and initialled] 

Attached are the definitions of "guerilla warfare", "insurgency" and "unconventional warfare". They come from the Pentagon dictionary. 

Thanks.

[via Errol Morris, The Unknown Known]

'Hashtag' oddness

Went, yesterday, to a screening of Frank which, unbeknownst to me, had the audio-impairment subtitles (which are, themselves, actually visually impairing; but no matter).

1) Frank, the character, an experimentalist musician/psychiatric patient, wears a big fibreglass head, and so has to narrate his real facial expressions so that folks have at least some sort of idea what he's feeling. This turns his utterances into kind of Twitter-speak: "I think that's a really great idea big enthusiastic grin", e.g.

2) Jon, the keyboardist/social media guru for the outfit, is forever updating his blog, posting messages to festival websites, or indeed Tweeting. But even though most of these ping up - in the correct format - on the big screen, whenever he is speaking-as-he-types the subtitles project the word 'hashtag', per se.

#itsthelittlethings

Books I've actually finished lately: 26

Second-worst movie credit in my entire experience of films

FROM A CO-WRITER OF

THE TRANSPORTER

Books I've actually finished lately: 4

Incorporating - amongst other things - the most inspired index ever published. [To wit:

Bang Bang

Chitty-Chitty, 1968
Kiss Kiss, 2005
(My Baby Shot Me Down), 1966

and

Curses

...
Fuck, 21, 23-25, 35-36, 40, 44, 47, 53, 62, 64, 66, 76, 84, 90, 93-94, 103, 107, 109-110, 114, 116, 119,120]

#BadSex

His mind... will never be able to think of an ear in the same way again.

- Hunting for Dirty Books, an entertaining short film from the team behind the Bad Sex Award.

Tragic reflection

No poet's biopic is ever going to be soundtracked by MUSE.