Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...hard-drinking roustabout, Charles Bukowski. Says Martin: "He was the kind of guy that drank in sailors' bars, got into fights with everyone in the room and wound up drinking alone with everyone stretched out on the floor." Between bouts Bukowski wrote terse, explicit poetry and fiction in the self-advertising style of Henry Miller ("The young coeds came up with their hot young bodies and their pilot- light eyes . . ."). Martin offered to pay the author $100 a month if he would quit his postal worker's job and work full time on a novel: "He left on the last...
...stores dot several corners and fill at least three basements. For textbooks and general reading, your best bet is to start with the Harvard Coop. Most of the Square crowd lingers on the first floor with the bestsellers and picture books. But brave the escalator to check out the fiction and slightly scholarly tomes on the second level. Textbooks are on floor three. One reminder: return textbooks within three weeks of purchase, or you'll be stuck with them...
...Even in fiction, espionage is treated as the dirty little secret of modern international politics. James Bond is good escapist fun, but the world of John le Carre is recognized as the real thing. The bookish, perpetually cuckolded George Smiley is not a hero because he champions Western civilization; rather, he is the melancholy rationalist, penetrating the ingenuity of other people's deceit. He is more honest, and braver in his honesty, than his colleagues. Yes, he fights Karla, his Soviet counterpart, but Smiley also does battle against the corruption of his own organization and society...
...just a regular Joe, see, just a working stiff with a missus who likes her fiction cheap. She doesn't have her nose stuck in a thriller, she's not happy. So one day she sees an ad for a mystery weekend. You go to some dive and they fake a murder and you try to solve the case. A snap, she says to me, a downhill roll. She should live so long...
Sylvester Stallone has a shrewd mythmaker's instinct for that kind of metamorphosis. Stallone's formative influence was the Hercules movies of Steve Reeves, whose physique he energetically and wistfully labored to replicate. Stallone eventually took his splendidly muscled creation over into fiction. He became Rocky, the Philadelphia loser who beats up the heavyweight champion of the world. Now Stallone's pectorals and deltoids are in service again as Rambo. The name sounds like a good ole boy's rendering of Rimbaud. Rambo is a veteran who single-handed accomplishes what the U.S. Army and Marines never could...