I’m reading Woody Allen’s autobiography Apropos Of Nothing.
His writing voice is kind of charming, like his movies. I’m still in the first half, and it reminds me of Radio Days, him talking about his childhood and his early career.
He was athletic but had bad teachers so he started reading wisely and indiscriminately to keep up with the smart girls he tried to ask out on dates.
[quote] I still am taken aback at the cruel spacing of The Magic Mountain.
Likewise!
[quote]I so-so about Fitzgerald but loved Thomas Mann and Turgenev. I loved The Red and the Black, especially where the young hero keeps wondering if he should make his move and hit on the married woman.
[italic]Mais ouis.[/italic]
[quote]I know Edith Wharton and Henry James and Fitzgerald all wrote about New York, but the town I recognized best was described by that sentimental Irish librettist on the sports beat, Jimmy Cannon. You would be shocked to know what I don’t know and haven’t read or seen. After all, I am a director, a writer. I’ve never seen a live production of Hamlet. I’ve never seen Our Town, in any version. I never read Ulysses, Don Quixote, Lolita,…
Convenient 👀
[quote]…Catch-22, 1984, no Virginia Woolf, no E. M. Forster, no D. H. Lawrence. Nothing by the Brontës or Dickens. On the other hand, I’m one of the few guys in my peer group who read Joseph Goebbels’s novel. Yes, Goebbels, the gimpy little suppository who flacked for the Fuhrer tried his hand at a novel called Michael, and don’t you think the main character had all the anxiety of the nervous lover anxious for the girl to like him.
[italic]Je répète, mais oui[/italic]
Apparently there is relatively little about his film career and most of the second half is about the Soon Yi and Dylan’s debacle , soI’ll enjoy the portion while it lasts.