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Stay Home, Stay Stoned

Andrea Brady: Diane di Prima, 10 March 2022

Revolutionary Letters: Fiftieth Anniversary Edition 
by Diane di Prima.
City Lights, 213 pp., £13.99, September 2021, 978 0 9957162 6 1
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... emotional complex in an instant of time’. She was also influenced by jazz musicians – Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk: ‘The cadence and line and syncopation that they use, and the places where they would break up a phrase in the middle,’ she wrote, ‘is all part of the American poetic.’ Bird includes poems like this:So here I am the coolest in New ...

Save it for HBO

Jenny Diski: Stanley Fish and ‘The Fugitive’, 17 March 2011

The Fugitive in Flight: Faith, Liberalism and Law in a Classic TV Show 
by Stanley Fish.
Pennsylvania, 152 pp., £16.50, November 2010, 978 0 8122 4277 5
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... interested in visual excitement and going for the biggest blockbuster thrills of its time. Andrew Davis, the director, said that one of his aims was to produce ‘the best train crash ever seen on film’: a description with which it’s easy to agree on so many levels. Harrison Ford There’s no mention in the film, as there is in the Fish essay, of St ...

Zeitgeist Man

Jenny Diski: Dennis Hopper, 22 March 2012

Dennis Hopper: The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Rebel 
by Peter Winkler.
Robson, 376 pp., £18.99, November 2011, 978 1 84954 165 7
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... Hopper missed mixing it with the hard-drinking rabble-rousers, Flynn, Bogart and Sinatra, while John Wayne, with whom he acted in The Sons of Katie Elder and True Grit, called him a Communist and offered to explain why he, Wayne, ‘was worth a million per picture’. Hopper was, however, perfectly on time for the upcoming group of heroes, mumbling geniuses ...

In Fiery Letters

Mark Ford: F.T. Prince, 8 February 2018

Reading F.T. Prince 
by Will May.
Liverpool, 256 pp., £75, December 2016, 978 1 78138 333 9
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... a number of illustrious admirers – including those poetic polar opposites, Geoffrey Hill and John Ashbery – his poetry is still not widely known. ‘Soldiers Bathing’, it’s true, is likely to feature in any anthology or critical account of the poetry of the Second World War, and assiduous scholars of both Hill and Ashbery have explored Prince’s ...

Aviators and Movie Stars

Patricia Lockwood: Carson McCullers, 19 October 2017

Stories, Plays and Other Writings 
by Carson McCullers.
Library of America, 672 pp., £33.99, January 2017, 978 1 59853 511 2
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... World War it functioned as a sort of filthy, alcohol-soaked salon. It was the brainchild of George Davis, the loose cannon former fiction editor of Harper’s Bazaar, and for a while housed such diverse inhabitants as McCullers, W.H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Gypsy Rose Lee, Paul and Jane Bowles and Richard Wright. (Auden seems to have been an especially ...

Do I like it?

Terry Castle: Outsider Art, 28 July 2011

... be considered a discovery of the 1990s. The first big show of his work I saw was in 1996; in 1999, John Ashbery published a book-length poem entitled Girls on the Run, the cover of which bore an arresting Darger watercolour showing some of the Vivian Girls in panic-stricken flight. The ‘literariness’ and epic ‘virtual world’ quality of Darger’s work ...

Neutered Valentines

David Bromwich: James Agee, 7 September 2006

‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’, ‘A Death in the Family’, Shorter Fiction 
by James Agee.
Library of America, 818 pp., $35, October 2005, 1 931082 81 2
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Film Writing and Selected Journalism 
by James Agee.
Library of America, 748 pp., $40, October 2005, 1 931082 82 0
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Brooklyn Is 
by James Agee.
Fordham, 64 pp., $16.95, October 2005, 0 8232 2492 9
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... the Sierra Madre, and a friendly profile of its director in Life, led to an invitation to work for John Huston. He wrote an adaptation of Stephen Crane’s story ‘The Blue Hotel’, which Huston did not use but liked enough to give him another project, The African Queen. Later Agee collaborated with Charles Laughton on the screenplay of ...

Natural Learning

John Murray, 20 September 1984

... on display. ‘Electric jazz,’ whispered Logan, in a sort of trance. ‘Look, there’s Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew! In Calcutta ...’ Gokhale, who clearly didn’t understand this astonishment of Logan’s, asked politely about this Mr Miles Davis. He stared in great surprise at the bright and startling psychedelic ...

Après Brexit

Ferdinand Mount, 20 February 2020

... involvement in Britain’s 5G network, and the bombardiers of Brexit – Iain Duncan Smith, David Davis, Liam Fox et al – are furious too. The industry points out that Huawei kit has already been installed in dozens of cities across the UK and to a more sophisticated standard than the US can currently provide. Ripping it all out would cost billions and ...

Diary

Thomas Jones: My Life as a Geek, 22 June 2006

... with proper games. In Stryker’s Run, for example, you controlled a character called Commander John Stryker, who had to convey an urgent top-secret message from one futuristic army base to another. What this meant, in practice, was running along past a monotonous scrolling backdrop of uniform mountains, shooting any enemy soldiers you encountered along the ...

Another Tribe

Andy Beckett: PiL, Wire et al, 1 September 2005

Rip It Up and Start Again: Post-Punk 1978-84 
by Simon Reynolds.
Faber, 577 pp., £16.99, April 2005, 0 571 21569 6
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... film-maker and accountant were members, along with Rotten – now using his more sober real name, John Lydon – and three other musicians. In October, PiL released their first product, a single called, with corporate thoroughness, ‘Public Image’. It was a streamlined, surging noise that hadn’t been heard before, and reached number nine in the ...

Stifled Truth

Wyatt Mason: Tobias Wolff and fictions of the self, 5 February 2004

Old School 
by Tobias Wolff.
Bloomsbury, 195 pp., £12.99, February 2004, 0 7475 6948 7
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... American writing that have flourished and endured. Wolff sidestepped Postmodern elders such as John Barth, Robert Coover, Guy Davenport, William Gass, Harry Mathews, Paul Metcalf, Gilbert Sorrentino, Ronald Sukenick and Paul West, as well as their heirs, such as T. Coraghessan Boyle, Lydia Davis, Rick Moody, William ...

True Bromance

Philip Clark: Ravi Shankar’s Ragas, 15 July 2021

Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar 
by Oliver Craske.
Faber, 672 pp., £12.99, June, 978 0 571 35086 5
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... of popular music, spinning the Beatles in a new direction. Meeting Shankar changed things for John Coltrane, too, helping him shake his dependence on drugs, while opening his ears to Eastern scales. Before Philip Glass worked with Shankar on a film score in 1965, he had been churning out unremarkable pastiches of French neoclassicism fused with folksy ...

He had fun

Anthony Grafton: Athanasius Kircher, 7 November 2013

Egyptian Oedipus: Athanasius Kircher and the Secrets of Antiquity 
by Daniel Stolzenberg.
Chicago, 307 pp., £35, April 2013, 978 0 226 92414 4
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Exploring the Kingdom of Saturn: Kircher’s Latium and Its Legacy 
by Harry Evans.
Michigan, 236 pp., £63.50, July 2012, 978 0 472 11815 1
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... classed his enormous erudite books among the many that he refused on principle to read. John Evelyn, visiting Rome in 1644, was impressed when ‘with Dutch patience, he showed us his perpetual motions, catoptrics, magnetical experiments, models, and a thousand other crotchets and devices.’ He predicted that in a forthcoming book on obelisks ...

‘You think our country’s so innocent?’

Adam Shatz: Polarised States of America, 1 December 2022

... conservatives.In the swing state of Pennsylvania (the fifth most populous in the country), John Fetterman, a left-leaning Democrat and a strong supporter of marijuana legalisation and criminal justice reform, defeated a Trump-backed candidate, Mehmet Oz, by 4.6 percentage points, outperforming Biden’s result in the state in 2020; the Democratic ...

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