Re: documentary on salinger?

--- Jim Rovira <jrovira@drew.edu> wrote:
> Yep, you got it, good old Norah Barnacle.
>
> I guess I don't have the same reverence for Joyce
> (or other literary
> characters) that you do

it's not that i necessarily have a reverence for
joyce. i just want my mind's image of joyce to remain
the photographs and that one clip of him walking down
a parisian street in the '30s and those two instances
of *his* incomparable voice reading from 'ulysses' and
'finnegans wake'. i don't want some actor blurring my
mind's visual and aural image of joyce.

it's not that i revere holden; it's that each reader's
holden is their own holden. holden's face and body
movements and voice is exactly *right* for each
reader. once one starts mixing in x's or y's face and
voice, what do you have happen the next time you read
'the catcher'? (perhaps i lack the ability to factor
out/forget the intrusion once it's happened.)

> -- I tend to think every
> movie is, in a sense,
> turning a life into a movie. Joyce's art was about
> turning his life into a
> book, so why not turn his life into another
> medium...film?

because it's not *joyce* who is turning his life into
film.

 
> Are the potential visual representations of Nora
> giving Jimmy a hand job on
> their first date more disturbing to you than Richard
> Ellmann publishing ALL
> of Joyce's letters? Against the will of the family?
>

my paltry point was that the movies wouldn't leave out
 the hand job or the steamy letters because the movies
are the movies. granted, that walk with nora was a
crucial point in joyce's life, it's just that i don't
need to see *any* point of joyce's life portrayed on
our glorious cinematic screens.

yes, i was surprised to see ellmann, after those 3
(almost unreadable) volumes of the letters, to
include, in 1975, in the 'selected letters', that
handful (pun intended) of steamy letters.

it's rumoured that beckett was aghast at ellmann's
decision, and hence would never consent to ellmann's
desire to be beckett's biographer.

> I was pretty
> ambivalent about that myself...I felt like I was
> getting a lot of detail I
> just didn't really need or want, on the one hand,
> while on the other
> there's a part of me that wants everything available
> out there for study.
>

i agree.
 
> ugh. Decisions decisions :).
>
> Perhaps I'm just expecting too much, but I generally
> hope Hollywood
> versions of VW's life may introduce people to her
> books, get them reading,
> make them more of a cultural commodity, make their
> reading for pleasure and
> study for knowledge more widespread. At least a
> little bit.

i do agree that movie versions of books tend to whip
up some sales and, one hopes, a few more sensitive
readers will discover writers they might not have
known.

 kim
>NAFISH

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Received on Mon Nov 11 17:03:33 2002