tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8011557877105021955.post3955299933626598510..comments2024-03-25T22:59:30.053+00:00Comments on Desperate Reader: The Dark of Summer - Erik Linklater Desperate Readerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708411387912078122noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8011557877105021955.post-77033072845917172522016-11-16T23:05:21.753+00:002016-11-16T23:05:21.753+00:00The YouTube documentary is titled, 'Gore Vidal...The YouTube documentary is titled, 'Gore Vidal The United States of Amnesia', and is well worth watching.<br />There is also a documentary on Vidal first shown on BBC Omnibus as well as a Vidal two-part interview fronted by Melvyn Bragg.<br />There is a YouTube documentary on James Jones while his friend William Styron is interviewed by Charlie Rose, also on YouTube.<br />The old William F Buckley TV interviews with such luminaries as Vidal, Noam Chomsky, Jack Kerouac and Paul Goodman still make compelling viewing. Again YouTube.<br />On YouTube can see an excerpt from a terrific film about Nelson Algren, a writer who identified with the poor and socially marginalised.<br />Jack HaggertyAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8011557877105021955.post-64908412357364323532016-11-16T21:02:51.019+00:002016-11-16T21:02:51.019+00:00Andro Linklater said his father's 'primiti...Andro Linklater said his father's 'primitivism co-existed with a highly cultivated intelligence' and that after the war 'he took an excellent First and every English prize in sight at Aberdeen University'.<br />I don't mean to identify Eric Linklater with his fictional characters.<br />Virginia Woolf said that the imagination is hermaphrodite.<br />War is a subject about which you might expect to see some deep division between men and women.<br />Yet the American novelist James Jones wrote as sensitively on war as the campaigning journalist Martha Gelhorn.<br />Jones told his friend William Styron that men in combat zone never speak about courage or the lack of it.<br />Words such as 'courage' and 'heroic' are what civilians and politicians like to imagine about war, Jones said, but the awful reality is quite different.<br />While visiting Washington, Jones said that the men who fell in the American Civil War died for nothing. He had a huge Civil War library at his home in Paris.<br />The remarks of Jones are quoted in an essay by Styron that prefaces a book entitled 'To Reach Eternity - The Collected Letters of James Jones'.<br />In an hour-long YouTube documentary Gore Vidal speaks of the death of his best friend at Iwo Jima. His friend's mother asked Vidal if he wanted to read her son's letters.<br />'I have never read such bitter letters,' Vidal said. 'And this was a sunny boy, a football player.'<br />Linklater saw that war twisted everything.<br />But I am sure he was also tongue in cheek as you say.<br />My 98 year old uncle, an ex-regimental sergeant major and a veteran of the battle of Monte Cassino, once said to me, 'Don't take life too seriously.'<br />My uncle is the most life-affirming man I know, and lives in rural Devon, a place he loves.<br />Jack HaggertyAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8011557877105021955.post-7687030109096147202016-11-14T18:31:41.148+00:002016-11-14T18:31:41.148+00:00I didn't read it as offensive, though it may b...I didn't read it as offensive, though it may be my fault if it comes across as particularly lewd, I could have quoted a bit more context. I think it's a very tongue in cheek passage, and that Linklater is having fun with it, but that he's making a point about what he feels it is that women writers do which maybe male ones don't. Desperate Readerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15708411387912078122noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8011557877105021955.post-54163838017020417572016-11-11T12:32:18.519+00:002016-11-11T12:32:18.519+00:00Chisolm's remark is offensive and lewd. But Li...Chisolm's remark is offensive and lewd. But Linklater is letting his character reveal his loneliness through reported speech. Remember, this is war. War conditions twist and deform the thoughts and actions of certain men. <br />Chisolm is at sea, aboard a converted trawler. He is thinking about the possibility of death at sea, and he is thinking about women in the most obvious way. A sensible man would tell Chisolm to shut up and stop making a fool of himself.<br />Eric Linklater's son, Andro, said his father was pagan in the best sense of the term. 'There was his choice of gravestone, for instance, a massive stone which, surely not by coincidence, was the same shape, and almost the same size, as the standing stones raised by Orkney's Pictish inhabitants.'<br />The Picts, who raised those standing stones to their unknown gods, have left us nothing else about who they were. A haunting thought.<br />Eric Linklater was born in Wales but considered himself Orcadian.<br />Andro Linklater writes about his father in the foreword to The Goose Girl and Other Stories by Eric Linklater, published by Canongate in 199l<br />Jack HaggertyAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8011557877105021955.post-87039773366151227382016-10-31T19:55:51.541+00:002016-10-31T19:55:51.541+00:00Shamefully it's the only one I've read. I&...Shamefully it's the only one I've read. I'm not quite sure where to go next with him, part of the appeal of this one is that some of the places are familiar, and I like the way he went off on odd tangents (the ballet and feminine middlebrow loving Captain Silver was a total bonus). I have Poets Pub which I think I ought to read nextDesperate Readerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15708411387912078122noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8011557877105021955.post-18988256996668052172016-10-30T20:56:41.346+00:002016-10-30T20:56:41.346+00:00I thought I'd read this but had to check my bl...I thought I'd read this but had to check my blog to be sure. I had read it & you left a comment about having read it a few years before (this was 2013). Still haven't read any more Linklater although I enjoyed this. What would you recommend?lynhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04509400868331534237noreply@blogger.com