Word: rimbaud
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...only a matter of time before McGuane looked through the bottom of a shot glass and glimpsed his own mortality. Observes longtime friend and fellow novelist Jim Harrison (Legends of the Fall): "Like a lot of writers, we started out reading Rimbaud and Dostoyevsky, and you think that in order to write you also have to be partly crazy. And later on it occurs to us that we're going to die unless we behave." Realizing that "my streak of self- destructiveness had to end," McGuane quit drinking and poured himself into writing. Two novels -- Nobody's Angel...
...started out as a boy's suicide note -- not that I was going to commit suicide, but I was very depressed. It was Jack London- type experiences in a Joycean style. Totally insane, with great passages of lyricism here and there. I thought it was the best thing since Rimbaud. And when Simon & Schuster rejected it, I gave up. I threw half the manuscript in the East River and said, 'My father is right. I'm a bum.' I felt the solution was total anonymity. I had to atone. So I joined the Army. They'd cut my hair...
...name. As the defiantly incompetent bass player for the Sex Pistols, Sid became the working-class hero and elitists' toy of pre-Thatcher Britain. To the romanticizers of punk anarchy, Sid's abuse of his body, his buddies and his music gave evidence of a rock Rimbaud. And squalid Nancy was plenty eager to share his psychopathy. Before long he was killing her loudly with his song: she died, apparently with his clumsy connivance, in 1978. He followed her a few months later...
...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 do. He defeats Viet Nam. Those bullies had better not kick sand in the American face again! The movie is a great...
Cesaire's poetry was clearly influenced by Rimbaud and Baudelaire, as well as by the works of the American primitivists from the Harlem Renaissance, particularly Claude MacKay. But it was the style of the French symbolists he most admired. The first line of "The Griffin" ("I am a memory that does not reach the threshold") is reminiscent of the opening of Nerval's "El Desdichado," and Cesaire's use of the Alexandrine meter recalls Baudelaire's poems. However, his exotic images were not correspondences to a higher world, but the very natural environment of Martinique and Africa (which...