Word: herr
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WALTER WINCHELL by Michael Herr; Knopf; 158 pages...
...didn't, though. Michael Herr, whose 1977 Dispatches was one of the seminal books about Vietnam, first wrote this semifictional portrait of the man who turned gossip into a heavy industry as a film script. Herr recalls in a preface that he thought of the piece as "something 'more' than a screenplay," while the prospective producers regarded it as "something less." Salvaging his unproduced work, he has kept much of the shape, hard rhythm and clipped language of the film format, as well as the occasional camera direction...
...credits come up") underscores not only its artificiality but also Winchell's own purblind flair for self- dramatization. As a literary form, the screenplay generally rates as much respect as restaurant menu prose, and a novel molded like this slips past any easy characterization. "Maybe it's a mongrel," Herr suggests. "Maybe it's just a novel with a camera...
Winchell would have cooked up his own word -- cinetome? flickfic? -- something that catches the brash fluency and gritty romanticism of his own life. He would never have dared, though, to convert himself, as Herr so elegantly does, into a pint-size paradigm of scrambled patriotism and American success gone crazy. Herr's Winchell is an ex-vaudevillian who dances as he writes and lives: with little grace but an overabundance of berserk energy. He starts by posting sheets of trade tattle and pillow talk backstage at the crummy vaudeville theaters he plays. Within a decade he moves center stage, prowling...
STORIES by Oleg Yermakov (Znamya, No. 3, 1989). Two short stories by a 28- year-old veteran of the Afghan conflict sketch a vivid and unromanticized picture of war that is reminiscent of Michael Herr's Dispatches, a book about American G.I.s in Viet...