Finally got William Gaddis – The Recognitions off the shelf. After 8 days my head felt like this – but as a good thing

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vO31...

Warren Miller – Looking for the General. A picaresque of post-war American institutional paranoias and homespun crankery under the space age and nuclear holocaust, tinted by Melville and Gogol.

NYRB, Daunt or McNally should reprint it - I suspect it resides in estate limbo.

Recommend Elizabeth Jenkins – The Tortoise and the Hare as the most perfectly formed novel for breaking your heart. Oddly, Barbara Pym – A Glass of Blessings offers an almost identical protag - but no longer isolated, in a community of Emma-like surprises.

Oddly, Cambridge University Press has posted the editorial-critical apparatus surrounding their edition of the Hobby and all the other Esquire stories. Some good history, editorial cruxes, and holographs

assets.cambridge.org/97811076/430...

Also applies to problems with British industry 60s-70s.
My parents and their friends have so many stories of executives and managers who only had a small window of competence each day between hangovers and getting smashed by (late) lunch.It's just strikers are much more obvious in books/docs.

It made me question my regard for Almodovar's last 15-20 years of art-house films. It opened up the possibility that the dialog of his Spanish films was just as inept but disguised by being in another language. Maybe others of his films were actually bad too.

Wally Wood's Disneyland Memorial for Paul Krassner's "The Realist", May 1967 already delivered:

The Wilder-mother quote is probably translated from Wilder's article about SCHINDLER'S LIST, “Man sah überall nur Taschentücher” in the Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, 18 Feb 1994, and then most likely spread via Anthony Lane's New Yorker article

The nurse vomiting-if-she-tells-a-lie gimmick of KNIVES OUT felt like an escapee from this kind of 90s nonsense thriller. For all its other mystery clockworks and social comment, it might as well have had a plot point where anyone dressed in purple was invisible to one brain-injured witness.

Thomas M. Disch used to be very good (and fun) on the rightward techno-libertarian sf wing back in the 80s and 90s and how their books and ideas were incorporated by prominent Republicans:

press.umich.edu/pdf/97804720...

press.umich.edu/pdf/97804720...

from The Book of Sequels, 1990

Force 10 from Casablanca

- And like the original, it was packed with memorable lines, including "Shoot 'em again, Sam," "Here's taking another look at you, kid," and "This could be the continuation of a beautiful friendship."

One area where this falls short compared to Scrooged is a failure to satirically depict the worst of commercialised, pandering television.

However, this last page is much more acute about Scrooge’s redemption and hopes of improving television.

The 1970s British comedy-horror film "Theare of Blood" has a credit for "choreography of meths drinkers", meaning methylated spirits

Wow! That's a great article. I did not know about the real life Bank Farm case and the Christie connection.

In the early 50s my grandmother got into a screaming row with her husband's sister who had adopted a girl and was basically using her as cheap farm labour.

Another Freda Jackson fan!!!

I hold that her performance in "Room At The Inn" (unlike almost any other mid-20th C British actress's performance) 20 years later in the 60s-70s in a popular soap opera or long-running drama wold have made her the idol of generations of gay men

Having done high school history in 1980/90s New York I was shocked to discover I knew more about the general flow of UK and European 18th -20th history than the students in my Eng Lit course at Manchester University. A-Levels just did not provide this.

Did you have access to Edward Gorey in the 70s?

Or is this just a case of parallel evolution

They collaborated with Tom Disch, the gay sf writer - now probably best known posthumously for (a) writing The Brave Little Toaster, (b) an interactive text game Amnesia, or (c) gettting ripped off by Disney over The Lion King.

I remember enjoying some of the stories and acting in the largely forgotten Maugham anthology films:

Quartet (1948), Trio (1950) and Encore (1951)

with Maugham hosting ala Dahl in Tales of the Unexpected and a similar wide range of British character actors.