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Time Travel Readers, Start Here
Andy’s Anachronisms: “Exploring the Themes of Time Travel and Alternate Universes in Literature and Entertainment.” However, the exclusion of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow and Norman Spinrad’s severely underrated The Iron Dream makes this a bit suspect.
Details on Gilbert Sorrentino’s Final Novel
Golden Handcuffs Review has an excerpt from Gilbert Sorrentino’s last novel, The Abyss of Human Illusion, completed a mere month after Sorrentino died. They’ve also been kind enough to include Christopher Sorrentino’s afterword, in which Sorrentino spills, “The title is taken from Henry James’ story, ‘The Middle Years,’ in which Dencombe, an ailing older writer ‘who had a reputation” — mostly for disappointing sales — sits at the edge of the sea, indifferently holding a copy of his newest book (also called The Middle Years), still in the envelope in which it has been forwarded by his publisher, considering his own incapacity for wonder, surprise, astonished joy.”
As of yet, there appears to be no publisher lined up for this book. I have emailed Coffee House Press, who has published many of Sorrentino’s last few novels, as well as Christopher Sorrentino himself to determine what the current situation is.
(via This Space)
[UPDATE: Christopher Sorrentino reports that there is “a handshake deal” with Coffee House Press and that he is now in the process of interpreting sections of his father’s manuscript, which includes having to guess what certain notations mean and reading near illegible handwritten script. Since Christopher is a talented novelist in his own right (see the NBA-nominated Trance), I can think of no better candidate for the job.]
[UPDATE 2: Coffee House likewise reports that this is the case. While there are no firm details as of yet, sometime after May 2008 looks to be the pub date.]
Of Course, This All Assumes That Humans Aren’t Animals
New York Times: “Dr. de Waal, who is director of the Living Links Center at Emory University, argues that all social animals have had to constrain or alter their behavior in various ways for group living to be worthwhile. These constraints, evident in monkeys and even more so in chimpanzees, are part of human inheritance, too, and in his view form the set of behaviors from which human morality has been shaped. Many philosophers find it hard to think of animals as moral beings, and indeed Dr. de Waal does not contend that even chimpanzees possess morality. But he argues that human morality would be impossible without certain emotional building blocks that are clearly at work in chimp and monkey societies.”
RIP Freddie Francis
Guardian: “The American film critic Pauline Kael wrote: ‘I don’t know where this cinematographer Freddie Francis sprang from. You may recall that in the last year just about every time a British movie is something to look at, it turns out to be his.'”
Variety: “Although he received his greatest acclaim as a lenser, with numerous nominations and prizes for his work on films such as ‘The Straight Story,’ ‘The Elephant Man,’ ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’ and ‘Cape Fear,’ he also had a successful career as a director of horror movies in the 1960s and ’70s for cult British studios Hammer and Amicus.”
Tim Lucas: “Francis was the absolute master of one of cinema’s most beautiful and seldom used palettes: black-and-white CinemaScope. He loved the scope ratio and delighted in experimenting with it, in the form of split-diopter shots (that would bring foregrounds and backgrounds in identical focus to jarring effect) and special filters that enabled him to manipulate the gray scale of black-and-white.”
(via Greencine Daily)