Our daughter decided we should watch Meet Me in St. Louis last night. Haven’t seen it for years. I’d forgotten how creepy and strange the Halloween scene is. And that long tracking shot when Tootie is walking away from the fire to play a prank on the old man. In my opinion, Tootie steals the show. Weird kid, with her death obsession and fondness for knives.
I posted two reviews on Onyx Reviews today: I Still Dream About You by Fannie Flagg and Against All Things Ending by Stephen R. Donaldson.
When I was digging around for details about Umberto Eco’s forthcoming novel, I discovered a tie-in book he published after The Name of the Rose in which he discusses how he came to write the book. Not what the book is about—he no longer feels entitled to speak to that (the text speaks for itself)—but his process. The idea started with a vague desire to murder a monk, but he originally planned a contemporary setting. He tracks his logic through to the medieval version and then what preparation he felt he had to do before he started writing. He had the settings so well mapped out that he knew how much dialog could be exchanged when characters walked from one place to another. He explains the origin of the labyrinth and the very concrete reasons why it is set in a particular month and in a particular year. The layers of abstraction between the narrator and the story and who is actually narrating: an older version of Adso who is trying to recreate his innocent impressions as a young man filtered through at least two other people. His alternate choices for the title and the Italian aversion to book titles that represent the main character’s name. Fascinating stuff. He also talks about how writing is a discussion between the author and the text, and reading is a discussion between the text and the reader. The author’s not part of that equation any more. Another interesting part is the bit about how his friends and editors wanted him to prune the first hundred pages because they were difficult going. Those pages created readers who were capable of handling the rest of the book, he argues. It’s a short volume—I read half of it while one eye was on the TV screen last night—but enlightening.
