Daft Posted July 20, 2010 Posted July 20, 2010 My theory with a lot of things, one I hypothasised working at Square, is that at a certain point when you spend long enough with something you will eventually love it (in some measure). Basically you get Stockholm Syndrome. I had it with Dragon Quest IV. I might have had it with Jane Austin's Persuasion but I'm pretty sure I just enjoyed it more as it went on. === Another book for the book list Dazz, Michael Herr's Dispatches. It's about Herr's experiences as a journalist covering the Vietnam War - it's just wonderful. There are some absolutely sublime prose in there and it's broken into fairly small segments - a few pages at most. He's in with that new wave of non-fiction writers (Wolfe, Capote, Mailer - Hunter S Thompson to some degree). He is a great lead to take if you want to be a writer, he co-wrote the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket and contributed to Apocalypse Now. He probably wrote my favourite passage ever (From Dispatches); “He had one of those faces, I saw that face at least a thousand times at a hundred bases and camps, all the youth sucked out of the eyes, the color drawn from the skin, cold white lips, you knew he wouldn’t wait for any of it to come back. Life had made him old, he’d live it out old. All those faces, sometimes it was like looking into the faces at a rock concert, locked in, the event had them; or like students who were very heavily advance, serious beyond what you’d call their years if you didn’t know for yourself what the minutes and hours of those years were made up of. Not just like all the ones who looked like they couldn’t drag their asses through another day of it. (How do you feel when a nineteen-year-old kid tells you from the bottom of his heart that he’s gotten too old for this kind of shit?) Not like the faces of the dead or wounded either, they could look more released than overtaken. These were the faces of boys whose whole lives seemed to have backed up on them, they’d be a few feet away but they’d be looking back at you over a distance you knew you’d never really cross.â€
Daft Posted July 28, 2010 Posted July 28, 2010 Just remembered, Martin Amis' Visiting Mrs Nabokov: And Other Excursions might be good for you to read. Entertaining stuff.
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