Category: Books

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Deliverance turns 40

Nice piece in the New York Times about Deliverance’s 40th anniversary. I had the pleasure of interviewing James Dickey in the late ’80s when I was reviewing his novel Alnilam. Fascinating guy.

Deliverance is one of the few movies I’ve seen that rivals the intensity of the book, though I still vastly prefer the novel. Might be because Dickey wrote the screenplay for the movie. I remember talking to Dickey about the music in Deliverance. At the time, he was having major health problems, and we talked about his stubborn insistence on not going “gentle into that good night,” which now seems odd given his dislike of Dylan Thomas. I’m also a major fan of his poetry.

Do yourself a favor. Pick up a copy of Deliverance and re-read it. Or discover it new. And then pick up a copy of Buckdancer’s Choice to sample his poetry. Despite his many flaws, Dickey was a literary giant in my eyes.

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Assorted Bob Books Transcendental Bob

An inverted NPR moment, thanks to Hank Stuever

NPR likes to define its “moments” as those times you sit in your driveway with the car running, waiting for a particularly enthralling story to end before going into your house.

Thanks to Hank Stuever and his marvelous book “Tinsel,” Lara and I had an inverse NPR moment recently. Our friend Barb loaned us an audio copy of Hank’s book, which we spent much of a 16-hour roundtrip drive to Pittsburgh listening to.

As we hit Abingdon, VA, I started wondering if we had enough book left to last the rest of the drive home. When we entered Knoxville, I started worrying that we wouldn’t have enough time to finish it and we’d be sitting in the driveway, waiting for it to end.

But as we pulled in our driveway, the last line of the book was read. It had lasted exactly long enough to get us home. Lara and I looked at each other, grinned and thanked Hank for a delightful drive.

If you haven’t read “Tinsel,” add it to your “must read” list. Wonderful book. Hank’s observational tale is perfect for this examination of Christmas and what it means to us, as seen through the folks in the Dallas exurb of Frisco, Texas. Some of it’s pretty strange, but Hank doesn’t judge. He just observes and lets the people speak for themselves. It’s clear that he developed a true affinity for many of the book’s subjects, and it’s uncanny how the holiday events offer a macroeconomic tale of a society consumed with debt, spending and materialism. But the Christmas spirit is in there, too. Buy a bunch of them and give them as gifts next Christmas.

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Books Media Bob

An elegy for Peter Orlovsky

Steve Silberman offers this wonderful tribute to Peter Orlovsky, who died Sunday. Orlovsky was a poet and, more prominently, Allen Ginsberg’s lover for decades. I heard Orlovsky had died but couldn’t find anything Sunday to confirm it with the exception of changes to his Wikipedia entry.

Silberman was no stranger to Ginsberg and Orlovsky, to be sure. He was an apprentice to Ginsberg at the Naropa Institute and offers this wonderful passage in his Orlovsky tribute to put it all in perspective:

“It was Allen’s belief that the best education came not from niggling over line breaks and metaphors in airless workshops, but from living with poets and seeing how their minds worked in ordinary situations. (In an old Hasidic folktale, a young man says he is making a pilgrimage to a renowned rabbi not to discuss Torah, but to watch him tie his bootlaces.)

“One virtue of this approach was that seeing a world-famous poet in his underwear in the morning, turning the pages of The New York Times, tended to strip one of exalted illusions. These Beat Generation icons sweated, gossiped, got crabby about the littlest things, schlepped to the supermarket (except when they had me do it), made clumsy passes at sexy young poets, and had enormous and very fragile egos. In short, they were a mess, but as my Buddhist poet friend Marc Olmsted puts it in his best Burroughsian drawl, ‘It’s Samsara, my dear, we’re all a mess.’”

While Orlovsky wasn’t a critical figure in the Beat movement, I expected a little more attention from the mainstream press. Perhaps the New York Times will run something this week. I guess it’s tough to compete with Gary Coleman and Dennis Hopper …