Isegoria

Before going “home” for Christmas, I picked up a few magazines, including Creative Screenwriting Magazine — which had more than a few interesting articles:

By Crom, Conan Lives Again!

Word is, John Milius’s King Conan script is exactly what you’d expect from Milius: lots of battles, loppings, and meditations on the ways of the aging warrior. But while Warner Bros waits for the Wachowski brothers to shout “Action!” on that epic, Swordplay Entertainment, Inc. has scooped up the rights to create three feature-length animated Conan direct-to-video films, all to be written and produced by Swordplay’s Steve Gold. “This is the project I’ve always wanted,” Gold enthused to Buzz. “Conan is the James Bond of fantasy, only better.” Gold started his writing life as Hal Ashby’s writing assistant, adapting properties by William Gibson and Michael Moorcock before becoming the sworn protector of novelist Robert E. Howard’s vision of the barbarian. “This is going to be the real Conan, very faithful to the source material,” said Gold. “We’re going to give the audience the Conan they’ve been waiting for, a Conan most people have never had a chance to see.”

Milus’s script sounds excellent, of course — even though the first Conan script, also by Milius, wasn’t true to Howard’s Conan stories, it was true to Howard’s Conan ethos — but I don’t know if I would have chosen the Wachowski brothers to direct. Greg’s Previews points out that Arnold is no longer free to play the role, now that he’s the Governator. Milius has suggested Paul Michael Levesque (aka Triple H).

As for the direct-to-video animated movies — by Crom, Steve Gold is saying all the things I want to hear: Conan is the James Bond of fantasy, only better. This is going to be the real Conan, very faithful to the source material. Of course, there’s something a bit contradictory — in a Yogi Berra kind of way — about his last statement: We’re going to give the audience the Conan they’ve been waiting for, a Conan most people have never had a chance to see.

In Fear of Book Assassination Haunts Bibliophile’s Musings, André Bernard reviews Nicholas Basbanes’ A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World, a book that “examines the bonfires that have consumed entire centuries of man’s musings on matters great and small”:

In 1562, a Franciscan friar who had accompanied Spanish troops to Mexico ordered the burning of thousands of Mayan hieroglyphic books, in an attempt to eradicate the repository of local spiritual beliefs and to pave the way for Christianity. In one afternoon, practically the entire record of a civilization had been turned to ashes; only four codices are known to have survived. In 1914, the German Army invaded the Belgian city of Louvain, a treasure house of Gothic and Renaissance architecture. In an act of no military significance whatsoever, Louvain’s magnificent library of 300,000 volumes, which included nearly a thousand irreplaceable illuminated manuscripts, was burned to the ground. (“At Louvain,” said a man who watched it happen, “Germany disqualified itself as a nation of thinkers.”) More recently, during its psychopathic reign in Cambodia in the mid-1970′s, Pol Pot’s regime destroyed nearly all of ancient Cambodia’s manuscripts and monuments. In its rage against modernity and civilization, the Khmer Rouge went so far as to examine ordinary citizens for marks on the bridge of the nose, the telltale sign of reading glasses — which was enough to bring down a death sentence.

I’m surprised there are extant references to damnatio memoriae…

If books are not the most perishable products of human civilization, they have, throughout recorded history, attracted the homicidal attentions of every conquering army. In large-scale versions of the penalty the Romans called damnatio memoriae, a punishment for individuals found guilty of committing crimes against the state which involved erasing every reference — whether on stone, in a monument or on parchment — to the person in question, invaders have settled not just for mass murder of the local citizenry, but have indulged in the wholesale disappearance of every written trace of a culture (as the Taliban did to non-fundamentalist Afghans), a language (as the Normans did to the Saxons), a people (as the Romans did to the Etruscans). Early Christian and medieval monks attacked the memory of non-Christian culture with zealous efficiency.

Ooh, “bibliophilic tidbits”:

And, of course, there’s time for many bibliophilic tidbits. Here’s a quick sample. The great English politician William Gladstone read an average of 250 books a year as an adult, and wrote an essay on how to design and arrange a home library. The Lindisfarne Gospels, the 10th-century Beowulf codex, the sole surviving copy of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the unique copy of William Langland’s The Vision of Piers Plowman were all saved from destruction by the same man, 17th-century antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton. Not one literary or historical document of Etruscan origin has survived, not even in Greek or Roman translation. There is no known original manuscript of any work by Molière, nor have any poetry manuscripts by Edmund Spenser or Andrew Marvell ever been found. Charles Lamb included in his catalog of “books which are not books” — and therefore not readable — scientific treatises and almanacs. Norway has established a book repository in a series of tunnels hollowed deep into a mountainside in the Arctic Circle, where every book written in Norwegian is frigidly preserved, secure from the predations of the outside world.

Paul Barker discusses Albert Camus‘s life:

Camus’s first and best-known novel, L’Étranger, written in his twenties, is a short moral tale, in the tradition of Voltairean contes, about a meaningless (‘absurd’) murder. Its flat short sentences have a permanent appeal to adolescent angst.

L’Étranger is one of the few novels I’ve read in French. “Its flat short sentences” didn’t appeal so much to my adolescence as to my limited French comprehension.

I wouldn’t expect these conditions to spawn a famous writer:

Camus was himself an outsider. Like the philosopher Jacques Derrida, he was Algerian-born. But Derrida was middle-class Jewish; Camus’s background was humbler: the white working class of Algiers. His father was a wine company foreman, killed on the Marne in 1914, eight months after his son’s birth. His mother, Spanish by origin, was illiterate and partly deaf. With her husband dead, she worked as a cleaner. Camus took his baths in a zinc tub, in a home without books.
[...]
For the settlers, in a province which was then administratively part of metropolitan France, Algeria was a Mediterranean California. Camus’s early writings are suffused with the charms of sun, sea and sand. The Algerians — meaning the settlers — were, he wrote in his early twenties, “a race without a past, without tradition and yet not without poetry.” The poetry largely consisted in “the cult of an admiration of the body.” Algiers was then a colonists’ city, with only 50,000 Arabs out of 220,000 inhabitants. Camus wrote dreamily about “the flowers and sports stadiums, the cool-legged girls.” When he began to write seriously he worried about keeping a “fragile” balance between work and sun-worship.

It’s hard to imagine Algeria as a Mediterranean California these days.

In 1957, Camus was offered and accepted the Nobel prize. He retained the frugality of his youth, never travelling first class on trains. For the Stockholm ceremony, he borrowed a dinner jacket; Francine borrowed a mink stole. At a question and answer session with students, he was asked about Algeria. He saiid, “I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice.” From the left, Le Monde was delighted to give prominence to the quote.
[...]
Camus spent some of his Nobel money on a farmhouse in Provence, where he began a new novel, Le Premier Homme (The First Man). In 1959, after Christmas in the farmhouse with his family, he wrote fond letters to his current mistresses — two actresses and a Balmain model — saying he’d soon be back. On 3rd January 1960, he accepted a lift in his publisher Michel Gallimard’s high-performance Facel Vega. The next day, after lunch, the car hit a roadside tree on the N5. Camus was killed instantly. In his briefcase were 144 pages of his draft novel, which was eventually published as he’d left it. It is about growing up as a poor white in Algeria.

I guess it’s ironic that an obsessively frugal, consumptive, existentialist writer died in flashy car crash.

Enjoyment examines a number of writers and the drugs they used — and concludes with this:

Drugs provided a marvellously adaptable and popular subject matter for authors — as sexy, sensational or sordid as they wanted. It has been a more mixed story for literary drug users. Although authors who took drugs for pure pleasure were the most criticised, they usually did the least harm to themselves. Druggy authors trying to turn themselves into transcendental voyagers virtually always made fools of themselves. And some writers who used substances both to cope and to unwind, found they couldn’t handle the stuff, and did themselves harm. Others took the pills and went on working fine. Overall, then, authors were pretty much like everyone else.

I’ll stick to caffeine. In small doses.

Secrets and Thighs, by Ed Halter, offers “A history of celebrity sex tapes, real and fake, from Joan Crawford to Paris Hilton” — all in a very serious journalistic tone:

The distant seeds of celebrity porn took root in 19th-century literary erotica attributed to famous authors, such as the mock-epic Don Leon, claimed to have been penned by Lord Byron as a record of his notorious exploits, or the explicitly homosexual Victorian novel Teleny, long said to have been written by Oscar Wilde. After Hollywood invented the movie star in the early 20th century, Tijuana Bibles satisfied a new desire to see screen deities stripped bare. These crudely drawn comic-book leaflets depicted stars like Jean Harlow, Greta Garbo, and Clark Gable in various farcical trysts.

Hardcore porn films have existed at least since the teens, circulated through private clubs and wealthy collectors. Ancient Hollywood gossip has it that Joan Crawford acted in several early stag films, including some with lesbian scenes. But one of the earliest star-attributed films to circulate widely was a nameless one-reel nudie loop purporting to depict a young Marilyn Monroe, who would have shot it around 1948, prior to her posing nude for the inaugural issue of Playboy. In the film, a lone young woman does a striptease, rolls an apple across her chest, and then sips a soda. Later dubbed The Apple Knockers and the Coke, it was distributed to colleges and cinemas in the early ’70s by Grove Films, packaged in a collection of vintage erotic shorts and experimental works like Carolee Schneemann’s Fuses. Today, it’s recognized that Apple Knockers and several other so-called Monroe porn films depict another early Playboy model named Arline Hunter.

One Monroe stag film remains in dispute, however. Also dated from 1948, this unnamed 16mm hardcore short shows a Monroe-ringer screwing a mustached man on a couch. According to a 1980 Penthouse cover story, a print was discovered that year by a Swedish photographer and subsequently publicized in adult magazines and tabloids worldwide. “Here, in grainy celluloid,” Penthouse wrote next to copious frame-enlargements, “may well be the still unglamorized sex goddess the public never knew, before plastic surgeons, stylists, and designers transformed her into the mythical Marilyn Monroe. It’s a thought to fire the imagination of every man who ever dreamed of her, a fantasy come to fruition.” Another print of probably the same film garnered headlines in industry trades when it surfaced at a Spanish festival for film collectors in 1997. Those who argue the actress is Monroe point to declassified FBI files from 1965 detailing that Joe DiMaggio offered $25,000 for a print of a “French-type” movie depicting Monroe “in unnatural acts with an unknown male.” Its authenticity seemed likely enough for Hollywood’s Erotic Museum to purchase a print, now kept in its collection alongside artwork by Picasso and Tom of Finland.

I can’t imagine he’ll have any trouble getting the money. ‘Rings’ Director Wants to Bring ‘Hobbit’ to Screen:

Despite his exhaustion, Jackson is not resting on his laurels and said if complex rights issues can be resolved he would like to direct ‘The Hobbit,’ J.R.R. Tolkien’s prequel to the ‘Rings’ trilogy set some 50 years earlier.

On his blog, Wormtalk and Slugspeak, an “English professor, medievalist, Anglo-Saxonist and J.R.R. Tolkien scholar natters on about” the upcoming Return of the King movie that he managed to see before its wide release:

[L]et me say that as a movie this one manage[s] easily to top the other two. I could come up with all kind of picky criticisms (and I have some larger ones, as well), but on the whole this just blew me away — and I actually quite disliked Two Towers. The sheer spectacle, the visuals, the landscape, the special effects (seamlessly integrated)…

The audience was made up of jaded film critics and theater owners, and had only about 50 people in attendance. But spontaneous applause and cheering broke out three times and I myself got misty in more than one place.

On the down side…

Ok, you probably want me to wear my Tolkien-critic hat: the treatment of Denethor is even worse than that of Faramir and shows that the critique of Tolkien for having ‘black and white’ characters is incredibly off the mark. Tolkien treats Denethor with great subtlety; Jackson does not — it’s over the top, in fact. The editing of the movie is odd: some things are very rushed, while we get image after image of catapults firing, many slow motion scenes, etc.

I expect to agree with him.

On the good side…

I said that I didn’t think the scale of the battle of the Pelennor Fields being ten times larger than Helm’s Deep would really make that much of a difference. I was really wrong.

Gimli’s comic relief wasn’t heavy-handed and worked in this film.

You’ve never seen such an amazing volcanic eruption.

And, finally, and most importantly to my students, I think: EOWYN RULES!