The utter concision of the dialog, and the grace with which the boiled-down version of the novel is conveyed in her script (Brackett notes that to truly film the novel as written, it would take at least five hours...perhaps a project someone should attempt), and the adeptness with which Brackett makes the story believable as a contemporary story in 1972 is all very much worth experiencing firsthand, even, again, given that the PDF document is missing a few pages. Having read the novel or particularly seen the film will help over those elisions...and I have to wonder if the PDF document is missing the later ages through a slip-up on the part of the blogger. There are apparently a few other script drafts floating about from Brackett's career, but a formal, complete collection is more than overdue, given the importance of most of the films she scripted or wrote treatments for.
Stuart Dybek's Brass Knuckles is another oddball choice, I suppose, even for the heavily crime-fiction-oriented FFB roundelay, as it's his first collection, from 1979, of poetry and prose-poetical vignettes. Divided into four sections, "Exile at 7", "The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street", "Grand Entrance" and "My Neighborhood", it's largely a set of evocations of the tougher parts of Chicago, in and around his Polish-American neighborhood, where Dybek was raised. A lot of the ground tread here falls somewhere between the abuse of children and its consequences in Joyce Carol Oates's similar work and the self abuse of Charles Bukowski's, though the writer I'm most reminded of is Ed Gorman...even if Dybek is more a Romantic than Ed was, in several ways, and has some manic asides and foregrounded metaphors, such as the suggestion of a not completely bad marriage that has the diminutive groom standing for a while on his wedding cake, holding hands with the wax bride figurine, while his actual bride cavorts with the wedding party, that fit in well with the mythical allusions, gritty details and explorations of lust and frustration throughout the lives of the characters. And much of it is very funny, only some of it tragic.
Perhaps almost as sad as some of the more sober bits is the fate of even some of the colleges, much less their little magazines, that this work first appeared in, in the 1970s, though looking again I suppose it's just the Goddard Journal that would be utterly vanished now. Though perhaps it's telling in a small way that the book has seen its more recent edition from not the state-owned University of Pittsburgh Press, but Carnegie-Mellon's...
For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
