Hey Maura -- Both of us born in '55 and neither one of us
looks a day over 25 -- that's pretty damned good!
If I had to play the game of choosing one book that I wished
that I'd written
(except, of course, for DIMM), I'd have to choose
EXECUTIONER'S SONG. I've read it three times now....it's just
amazing. Mikal Gilmore's memoir SHOT IN THE HEART is a pretty
remarkable work of true crime writing as well.
Later...Kip
Maura McMillan <
mmcm@azstarnet.com> on 01/05/2000 05:00:45 PM
Please respond to
rara-avis@icomm.ca
To:
rara-avis@icomm.ca cc: (bcc: Kip Stratton/AUS/NIC)
Subject: Re: RARA-AVIS: you're HOW old?
kip -
i read executioner's song whenever it was published -late 70s
- and found a nice tie-in in dreiser's american tragedy.
mailer certainly has opted for money as opposed to art, but
executioner's song is a well-written and insightful book.
sort of 'found art.' hey -i was born in 1955 too.
At 04:30 PM 1/5/2000 -0600, you wrote:
>Born in '55 (sheesh, Eisenhower's FIRST term in
office). Read Bobbsy (sp?)
>Twins and Hardy Boys as a young, young boy (ah, the
wonderful old Carnegie
>Library in Guthrie, Oklahoma), then progressed on to
all the Sherlock
Holmes in
>junior high. Also read all the James Bond books about
that time, plus some
>Spillane. Got really snooty in high school, only
reading Hemingway,
Fitzgerald,
>Faulkner etc. Got even snootier when I went off to
college to major in
English
>-- Updike, Bellow, Welty, Oates, Heller, and so
forth. A few things
happened at
>once: I read Walker Percy's LANCELOT, which is an
existential crime
novel. I
>read Norman Mailer's AN AMERICAN DREAM, another
existential crime novel
(and a
>great one, IMHO) that I think owes a great deal to
hard-boiled writers. I
saw
>the film version of THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON'T THEY? on
TV and shortly
thereafter
>found a paperback edition of the novel plus the
screenplay. Then my
mother gave
>me a copy of John D.'s THE DREADFUL LEMON SKY and I
read a good profile of
>MacDonald by Rust Hill in ESQUIRE. Then an amigo lent
me THE LONG GOODBYE
and
>said it might be the REAL great American novel (I'm
not sure I disagree).
Then
>I read Capote's and Mailer's "nonfiction" true crime
novels (IN COLD BLOOD
and
>EXECUTIONER'S SONG, respectively). Finally, one day I
had a moment of
epiphany
>and realized that Charles Willeford is a more
important writer than Saul
Bellow.
>Next the reprints of the novels of my Oklahoma
homeboy Jim Thompson began to
>appear (POP 1280 is the best depiction of small town
Oklahoma I've ever read)
>and I became a confirmed low-brow.
>
>
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>
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