Short and fun, tonight.
In 1938, actor Gary Cooper starred in a movie very loosely based on Marco Polo’s Il Milione.
The movie, The Adventures of Marco Polo, also featured Basil Rathbone as the weasely Ahmed, and a young Lana Turner in a small role.
It was an average adventure movie, with a great poster.
BUT… Continue reading
Today (well, ok, yesterday) the postman delivered a second-hand copy of Robert Byron‘s The Road to Oxiana, the 1980s Picador paperback edition, the one with the Bruce Chatwin intro.
I paid it about one euro.
It goes to replace my old Picador Edition, bought in a fancy Turin bookstore in the late 80s, and later… ehm, misplaced, by a friend who borrowed it.
It also replaces my rather expensive Italian translation, Adelphi edition, which a former girlfriend decided to keep when we parted company (together with a lot of other stuff, now that I think about it).
And the used Oxiana book goes to re-form the pair with Byron’s other book – First Russia, Then Tibet – the Penguin books edition which I bought all those years ago together with the misplaced book. Continue reading
Everybody knows about it.
But in case you Missed it, here’s the Lester Dent Pulp Paper Master Fiction Plot.
Does it work?
We’ll talk about it, one of these nights.
Here’s the second part of Ferruccio Gianola‘s top ten article about killer snakes.
The first part was marred by my horrid translation mistake – using poison/poisonous for the italian veleno/velenoso, instead of the correct expression, venom/venomous.
My apologies.
The mistakes have been corrected, and I thank again the surfers for their prompt correction, and their patience.
My apologies also to Ferruccio – who was not responsible for my mistake.
And now, the second part. Continue reading
They say writers have rituals.
Small quirks connected with the act of writing.
Some people leave the first page of the notebook blank.
Some write only by night.
Or in the morning.
Some need to break a new pen, or a new keyboard. Continue reading
I’ll admit it – I’m a sucker for a good book about writing.
I find writing manuals and books about the craft hugely entertaining.
There’s always something good to be learned, always some bit that can spark a whole new line of thought.
In this sense, my latest catch is exactly the sort of book about writing I love.
The Art of Character, by David Corbett (Penguin, 2013), is both an entertaining read, and the sort of book I’ll go back to in the future, and which will have me thinking as I read, write, watch movies.
This book hits deep.
Continue reading
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