RARA-AVIS: Pauline Kael and Pancake

From: Michael Robison ( miker_zspider@yahoo.com)
Date: 02 Oct 2003


Chris wrote:
> You might also want to read Pauline Kael's review of
> the Didion-scripted "Play It As It Lays" movie. The
> review is vicious, vicious, and *entirely* unfair
> ... but it does help to put the material's attitudes
> into perspective.

************** Thanks for the recommendation, Chris. I tried to locate the review online but no luck. I did get to read a review of Clockwork Orange, and a couple others that wouldn't be on-topic here.

I'd never heard of her before, so it was worthwhile seeing what a major influence she was. What does
"auteur" mean? Citzen Kane came up in reference to that term.

Started THE PARADISE EATER but put it down after too many pages of discussion of a venereal disease. Bill Denton mentioning that it was a thriller didn't help, either. I have problems with thrillers. I'm still stuck halfway through Cleary's PETER'S PENCE.

Picked up the Pancake stories instead. Jeez, no wonder he killed himself. I just finished the first story and it's depressing. Comparisons to Hemingway are not far off. The protagonist in Pancake's first story "Tribolites" reminded me of Hemingway's Nick Adams stories. There's that same sad sense of loss, but with confusion about what exactly was lost. Very fine work. Thanks for putting me onto them.

miker

__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search http://shopping.yahoo.com

--
# Plain ASCII text only, please.  Anything else won't show up.
# To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to
# majordomo@icomm.ca.  This will not work for the digest version.
# The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 02 Oct 2003 EDT