John Fante's *Ask the Dust* brought to film via the screenplay by
Robert Towne is airing on DirecTV PPV all this weekend. Salma Hayek is
Camilla Lopez, and Donald Sutherland plays the miserly "cow murderer"
down the hall. I leave it at that before I get all excited and start
abusing any denizens of the postmodern sensibility here gathered, with
exclamation points!!!
I still have a few pages of the novel to go, so I won't be ordering the
movie till tomorrow night; then we'll see if it manages to capture the
tone of the novel, especially the anti-hero qualities of really *all*
those characters, among whom there is not a one that could be called,
in the strictest sense, "sympathetic"--and yet, oddly, you can't help
pulling for them anyway, even that nasty ol' bugger "Sammy" out on the
desert dying of TB in his long-johns.
I had been slogging through a Texas desert waste with nothing but a
vast vista of endless run-on sentences stretching across the pages of a
book by Cormac McCarthy, when a visit to the library brought me home
with my first novel by John Fante. Poor Cormac! He bit the dust no
sooner than I picked up *Ask the Dust*.
--
Mackie
http://vignettes-mackie.blogspot.com/
http://doo-dads.blogspot.com/
http://whosenose.blogspot.com
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