![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
If Only the Cash Registers Did Clank...
Oct. 3rd, 2006 08:21 amHuh. So apparently Fox News sat on the Foley story for six months or more…
In other news, spent yesterday catching up on circus stuff while reading up on the historical Cannery Row. (The public library didn't have a copy of The Stress of Her Regard which I also wanted to reread as a kind of template for how to write fantasy while remaining true to historical evidence.)
Steinbeck comes across an unpleasant person with a deeply repressed homoerotic obsession with Ricketts. Sadly, he lived in an age before instant messaging! But consider: he was jealous whenever Ricketts paid attention to anyone else whenever they were in a room together, and in my mind that's prima facie for a LUV connection! Steinbeck was obsessed with naming things; Ricketts was comfortable letting things be part of a nameless whole. Steinbeck didn't like to kiss – this was one of the reasons Carol took up with Joseph Campbell: they spent long nights kissing though they never actually had sex.
Steinbeck sure could write though. And I guess that's all that's important.
Campbell, apparently, was an even more compulsive diarist than I am! Don't know whether the diaries are published in a comprehensive volume. They would be useful for working out some kind of timeline.
Love, love, love Eric Enno Tamm's Ricketts biography, Beyond the Outer Shores which starts out with a brilliant, mocking Steinbeck homage: Cannery Row in Monterey is a cliché, a light breeze, a clanking cash register, a sugary delight, an impulse buy, a novel, a trinket, a movie, a retailer's dream. Cannery Row is the tacky and tailored, tinsel and polish and Hollywood, cheap sentiment and parking lots and junk food, souvenir galleries of a literary icon, tank tops, restaurants and discount warehouses and little crowded giftshops…
Not so crowded, Mister Tamm. Plus, you know, a lot of us have upgraded to computerized point of sales systems so the cash registers don't clank!
In 1932, of course, just a hundred miles down the coast, William Randolph Hearst was turning San Simeon into Hollywood North. It might be interesting to have those two worlds clash somehow.
In other news, spent yesterday catching up on circus stuff while reading up on the historical Cannery Row. (The public library didn't have a copy of The Stress of Her Regard which I also wanted to reread as a kind of template for how to write fantasy while remaining true to historical evidence.)
Steinbeck comes across an unpleasant person with a deeply repressed homoerotic obsession with Ricketts. Sadly, he lived in an age before instant messaging! But consider: he was jealous whenever Ricketts paid attention to anyone else whenever they were in a room together, and in my mind that's prima facie for a LUV connection! Steinbeck was obsessed with naming things; Ricketts was comfortable letting things be part of a nameless whole. Steinbeck didn't like to kiss – this was one of the reasons Carol took up with Joseph Campbell: they spent long nights kissing though they never actually had sex.
Steinbeck sure could write though. And I guess that's all that's important.
Campbell, apparently, was an even more compulsive diarist than I am! Don't know whether the diaries are published in a comprehensive volume. They would be useful for working out some kind of timeline.
Love, love, love Eric Enno Tamm's Ricketts biography, Beyond the Outer Shores which starts out with a brilliant, mocking Steinbeck homage: Cannery Row in Monterey is a cliché, a light breeze, a clanking cash register, a sugary delight, an impulse buy, a novel, a trinket, a movie, a retailer's dream. Cannery Row is the tacky and tailored, tinsel and polish and Hollywood, cheap sentiment and parking lots and junk food, souvenir galleries of a literary icon, tank tops, restaurants and discount warehouses and little crowded giftshops…
Not so crowded, Mister Tamm. Plus, you know, a lot of us have upgraded to computerized point of sales systems so the cash registers don't clank!
In 1932, of course, just a hundred miles down the coast, William Randolph Hearst was turning San Simeon into Hollywood North. It might be interesting to have those two worlds clash somehow.
