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Chp. 10: Tony leaves Maria. Is the decision sufficiently motivated? What was the Rita Formisano interlude about? I get that the baroness turns him on to cocaine, but other than that, they are no reason to sing. They aren’t Beatrice.

I have to say Hand of God revises Chp. 9 admirably where Tony’s beloved is concerned. It’s good to see a writer working through his or her obsessions (225).

Chp. 9 begins with a lot of philosophical musings. Do I take them as Sorrentino’s through the prism of Tony’s unreliable persona? Baroness Eleonora Fonseca “was lazy as a band of Mexicans” appears as its own paragraph. I’m searching for clues in nearby paragraphs to let me say the racism is limited to the character and not his author. No luck.

Chp. 8 follows Tony’s sermon on education with a scene of reconciliation in Rituccia’s kitchen where she feeds him zucchine alla scapece and arouses him with a confession of infidelity with two traveling salesmen. When she ruins his fantasy by approaching him, he ruins hers by saying she reminds him of his mother and by holding her to become a “truly good man” (189).

Chp. 8 begins with Tony at his most philosophical: “ what is fabulous about adulthood, is precisely the scholar, the humiliation, the heart, Scrabble, and the grimness…. We wanted poetry, what we got was a bag, full of aches and pains…. A university professor is always a coward” (163-6)

Chp. 7: Disappointed at the soccer game, Tony visits Rita Fomisano, who disappoints him again, so he throws her around, flees to his lawyer cousin’s office, en route tells story about his brother in law shooting the cousin in the leg for shitting in his hallway. At the law office Mr. Heavy shoots an employee for calling Tony a “minstrel” (161).

Chp. 6: Tony breaks a bedside table (103);Maria wants a divorce because Tony’s “superficial” (104); Tony gives his parking attendant Attilio Colella 200,000 lire to meet a prostitute in Barcelona where Attilio plans to become a bullfighter (107); snorts cocaine on Mimmo’s doorstep (118); and gives Samanta a ride to school and a kiss (121).

Using a New Year’s Eve trying to seduce Antonella as a case study, Tony delivers a lecture that ends with him crying, not unlike Jep’s lecture about how NOT crying at a funeral ends with Jep crying (94).

Somewhere between between skewering academics and celebrating his own skill at seduction, Tony Pagoda lost me. I read at least two pages on autopilot. Who’s at fault, my eyes or his words? (83)

Chp. 4 begins the Beatrice saga of why Tony really sings. Yet his sex-at-first sight feels like satire (70).

Chp. 4: Sings honest pain (57). Beatrice disappears. Peppino ruin his voice (61).

Chp. 3: The murder of Maurizietto (50), the boat chase, 20 grams of cocaine from Mr. Heavy (55).

Chp. 2: Titta Palumbo debates calzone and Margherita pizza with Gino Matire. Guitarist v. bassist shuts down lead vocalist (40).

Point about chp. 1’s structure: reversals both within & across scenes.

Further structure of chapter 1 plot includes what seems to be Italian lyrics:
“Un treno per Il mare”
“Una cometa nel cuore”
“Quel che resta di mi”
“Un giorno lei mi penserà”
“Non c’ero amavo”
“Lunghe notti di bar”
“Gondolier, carry me back to Napoli”

Chp. 1 structures contrasts: Tony’s 13-million lire ring v. Sinatra’s $122,000 dollar (1979 prices) v. guitarist Titta’s wedding ring. After big hall concert during which Tony’s balls feel “cubic” and “hexagonal,” (25) they are “pulverized” by the theft of Tony’s ring by three hookers while he was on the phone to his wife and daughter….

The foreword is a list poem — disguise this paragraphs —of things Maestro Mimmo Repetto cannot stand.

Final line: “Redford well knows it, and to recognize a frontier, as Heidegger says, is to have gone beyond it” (485).

“Bill Bryson’s sunny memoir, A Walk in the Woods, about the author’s trek with an ornery old buddy along the Appalachian Trail” was to reunite RR with Newman (480).

RR matures: “I had a skepticism about American expressionist art since CU,” says Redford. “But Bylle’s experiments changed my perspective. It reminds me how not all problems respond to linearity. The abstract viewpoint, the lateral thought, the poetry, is often the way to resolution” (479).

Pollock continues, “…It’s an impossible conundrum because that kind of stardom has invested the actor with the audience’s preconceived needs….It’s a deal with the devil. He will always be thirty, blond, perfection….They want the continuance, because no one wants the death of fantasy, no one can stand too much reality.”

After RR fails to connect with The Clearing, Last Castle and Unfinished Life, Pollack says of the difficulty of separating “acting” from “megastardom”: ….

Sundance Contradiction: Although Sundance labs develop new voices, success of independent movies is measured by acquisition by major studios. Sterling Van Wagenen notes transformation of Sundance, Utah, to Beverly Hills, CA, from board members Moctesuma Esparza to Michael Ovitz (443).

Redford: paraphrases Quiz Show audience: “‘We accept venality; we are not too interested in honesty or decency, only in rhetoric.’ ”

“When a population is distracted by trivia,” wrote Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death, “when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk. Culture death is a real possibility.”(423-4)

Jaime Redford worked on abandoned sci-fi version of The Odyssey for Universal (420).

RRTI was underwritten: “I saw the dichotomies between the book and the reality. The thing was, Norman left out a lot. It was in those gaps I found the invisible story Bob wanted” (Friedenberg 407).

In adaptation, screenwriters “find” and “invent”: “I accept, as the screenwriter, my responsibility is to find the story line. So that is how we progressed…. I would go off, meet Maclean, research and invent some film story line that reflected the book” (Friedenberg 406).

Redford found himself debating the authenticity of the concept of the western. “We were discussing the essence of the western experience—living it, as opposed to loving it,” re: A River Runs Through It.

RR’s liabilities ultimately turn out to be his attributes: “Redford’s personal control [of Sundance] was positive and vital but, at the same time, his distractions with projects like Milagro and the unending political activism weighed against a stable future” (392).