Smiley McGrouchpants Jr. Esq. III's Blog

He said he'd never seen anyone like me in twenty years of teaching. He said, on one of my papers, "Chris, you go from strength to strength." He had only a year left to go so it was awkward for me.

He tried to rope me into a writing tutorial, when Craig COLBERT wanted to do one, but I just couldn't do it. I need to do work and go home. It interferes with my classes.

Also, I was into what was happening in movies and music at the time. Nothing in writing was like 'Wild at Heart' for me, or 'Doolittle' or 'Nothing's Shocking.'

Plus, I had read my way around the horror genre growing up, and now I felt that moment was waning. Funnily enough, when Bret Easton ELLIS put out 'American PSYCHO,' I was like not interested, but I had just read that stuff all my life and left it behind.

I read Coupland, I read Leyner, I read Coover. But it wasn't enough. You need it by the metric ton.

What I realized was happening, though, was '2001' and 'Gravity's Rainbow' were saying: "You got a lotta nerve!" But I couldn't hear it at the time. Now I hear it: I've submitted to 'Gravity's Rainbow,' let it impose itself on me, and I've seen '2001' over and over again.

So now I've got these seven screenplays I have to finish:

'Leanna Gets to the Party'
'Death!'
'The Slenderest Thread.'
'The Unworried'
'Tornado'
'The Cavewoman'

and

'Shark on the Beach'

Hopefully I'll get to them soon. Hopefully.

"Always, with the parts he played, some of the characteristics of the figure he portrayed slipped half consciously into his behaviour in ordinary life. When acting a gloomy part, he did not always leave the gloom behind him when he passed out of the swing doors of the theatre, and when playing a gay, irresponsible ruffian he would bring his gaiety and his good nature home with him. He was exceptionally light-hearted during the run of Bulldog Drummond, because the irrepressible Hugh could never be depressed under any circumstances. He was sad and full of foreboding during Dear Brutus, because Harry Dearth had made a failure of his life in spite of worldly success. Lord Arthur Dilling shrugged his shoulders and lit his cigarette with blasé self-assurance, amused and tolerant of life and himself and Mrs. Cheney, and Gerald did the same when he came home to dinner. But poor Paolo Gheradidi in Fame became paralysed in the second act, and lived in rooms at the seaside, where it rained all day, and from Gerald's behaviour while the play lasted it was obvious that he still stood by the lodgings window and watched the surf beat upon the shore at Pegwell Bay."
—Daphne du Maurier, in Gerald: A Portrait (1934)

"Life was not all play-acting and singing songs at the piano and having little mild flirtations, as Gerald would discover, he said; and then he looked out of the studio window and up at the passing clouds, and reproached himself for being hard on his youngest, to whose mind and body he had given so much of himself when he begat him; and he prayed to whatever gods might be that Gerald would not know the little solitary demon that dwelt in his soul sometimes, who cried, and yearned, and knew no comfort."
—Daphne du Maurier, on the death of her grandfather, author of Trilby, and the much-preferred by them all Peter Ibbetson, in her honorarium for her father, Gerald, published shortly after his death, in 1935.

What's with this book? And the way her father's play-acting disputes amongst the girls (he had three daughters -- !!!), mirrored-or-matched the way the Rev. Patrick Brontë, when curious about their children, and believing honesty would be better revealed by them from behind masks, asked them questions as though they were playing a part . . . among other things, Emily said "Whip him!" about Branwell if he were bad. Sheesh.

But . . . what about, too, the parallels with Pére du Maurier and Richard Fariña, who was always showboating, playing practical jokes, keeping stories going, keeping the "working world" at bay ("sedentary nits," he called them, in a letter to Thomas Pynchon, his buddy and compadré).

And what about the use of the name Godolphin, as a significant father-and-son, in Pynchon's V. , which clearly comes from du Maurier's Frenchman's Creek ??

And how about the publication of The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë by Dame du Maurier in 1960, 3 years before Pynchon's novel, but by a "popular novelist," who never was going to be a canonized writer like Thackeray or Jane Austen (if those people had their way ... !), even if her father was friends with Alfred Hitchcock, a practical joker like himself and a producer on a film the senior du Maurier worked, leading him/and-or on the basis of their merits to adapt Jamaica Inn, Rebecca, and The Birds for the screen??

How about Daphne du Maurier living for 17 years after the publication of her last novel, Rule Britannia, and 16 years after Nicholas Roeg's film version of her Don't Look Now short story (her favorite of the film adaptations, incidentally ... right down to the changed ending, which she agreed with, for the film!!!), and an additional —

16 years —

After Gravity's RAINBOW —

Which reeks of England —

What could Pynchon say?? He knew he was Charlotte Brontë?? Or just not give interviews, and not lie.

Look at the legitimacy/credibility line there.

Huh.

Ledge- and margin-walkers.

So ...

#yeah

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