Two Tuesday Tidbits

L-R: Rod Taylor, James Garner, Eva Marie Saint

My new DVD.

1. Okay, I know I said I wouldn't post anything more about that film 36 Hours (1965), which had suddenly popped into my memory about a month ago--the WW II thriller about the Nazi drugging and kidnapping of US officer Jim Rock--uh, James Garner--whom the Nazis hope to convince--when he wakens--that WW II is over--all of this an elaborate deception to find out the details of D-Day, which is imminent. It was a film I saw and loved in college--and I'd completely forgotten it until--I don't know--something--brought it back ...

The photo shows Garner, awakened from his druggy state, confused, restrained by Rod Taylor (a Nazi pretending to be an American officer) and Eva Marie Saint (pretending to be a nurse). I bought it on eBay. Didn't cost much. I'm nuts.

Okay--I'll confess something else: I bought the DVD, too. Deal with it.

2. As I wrote on Sunday, I recently finished reading !Click Song, the 1982 novel by the late John A. Williams (d. in 2015), whose complete novels I've been reading the past few months (nearly done!). Anyway, in the novel is a long paragraph about where inspiration comes from--for a novelist (his protagonist is one). Thought you'd like to read it--long, rambling, amazing:

The ideas, at first, benign as butterflies, monarchs perhaps, having come such a long way, such delicate things that their migratory patterns are disbelieved, and then they become as insistent as gnats, but they are only that, and in the solitudes the ideas come like anopheles [mosquitoes--I had to look it up], singing through darkness, yet solitude often equals vulnerability and the ideas become little nudgings, small impacts, meteorites on an uncharted spatial body, but the impacts leave craters, shape, form, dimension, out of which some clumsy thing evolves and then becomes a myriad of furiously growing fetuses, demanding, within their term, form, voice, and they force themselves through the head, that enclosure wherein reside a trillion neurons, and there they swell, bloat, kick against the sacs of confining time and form of expression; they surge, insist that they must be set free, must be let out, and some, of course, surge more powerfully than others and their language can almost be heard, their color can almost be seen, their histories almost documented, as they clamor and clamor, like children wishing to help; here comes one bearing plot, another returning because motivation has been found wanting, where one rushes with characterization well-honed, while still another shouts, "Why not have me do this? Why not have her do that?" And others cry, "Yes, but first she must do this or say that ..." And they keep coming without regard for time, sometimes early in the morning, masquerading as an urgent need to urinate, but they simply wish to test the purity of their being and at the most unconscionable moments they send the mass of protoplasm in which they reside reeling through gazetteers, biographical dictionaries, atlases, all kinds of books, novels, even, having cunningly and finally triggered-- (309). Someone interrupts his reverie here.

I also liked an exchange with a college student (he was a creative-writing professor at the time; she's showing him some of her work), an exchange that reveals some of his thoughts about the teaching of writing:

I shrugged. "Help? I don't really teach writing, you know."
"No?"
"No. I try to teach the habit."
She laughed merrily, flashing neat rows of white teeth. "They why is it offered?"
"Because people think it can be taught."
"But why do you teach it if you think it can't be taught?"
"To find the people who can write, I guess. To help them. To meet them. Kindred spirits and all that. ...'  (266).

Probably pretty apparent that he ends up having a brief fling with this student ...