response 64 of 104:

Jul 23 17:59 UTC 2001

... and just what's WRONG with that movie, Finding Forrester? 'TWas a fine
fine movie.

What was the class exercise?

response 66 of 104:

Jul 23 19:43 UTC 2001

Well, that's fine, since it wasn't about E.M.... ;}

I actually thought Forrester was more inspired by Salinger.

response 68 of 104:

Jul 24 03:31 UTC 2001

I'll give it a try. Stephen King?

response 70 of 104:

Jul 24 10:11 UTC 2001

(Re #68:  Hmm.  S. King is a possibility.  Wish I'd thought of it.)

response 72 of 104:

Jul 24 20:17 UTC 2001

Arthur C. Clarke is another long shot, also probably wrong.

response 74 of 104:

Jul 27 01:34 UTC 2001

I hadn't intended to do this one, but here is another excerpt from earlier
in the same novel:

Little Mickey wakes up and goes to his window: it's Saturday
morning, no school today. And for him there's a still music in the
air like the faint sound of heraldry over the woods, like men,
horses and dogs gathering under the trees far across the field for
some joyous and adventurous foray. Everything is soft and musical,
and sweet, and full of longings, misty hints and unspeakable reve-
lations that float in the gentlest blue air. There, in the blue
shadows beneath the morning trees, in the cool speckled shade,
in the new green misty color of the woods far off, in the dark
ground still moist and all covered with little blossoms, there is
his hint of glorious spreading Summer, and the future. Mickey
dashes out. slamming the kitchen door behind him. goes rolling
his old rubber tire with a stick. He journeys down old Galloway
Road over the cool dewy tar, on each side of him the birds are
singing, he wonders when there'll be apples in old man Breton's
orchard there. He figures this year he will explore the river in
a boat. This year he will do everything, boy!

In the middle of the morning Mickey watches all the big guys
at the ballfield slamming their fists into their gloves, throwing a
brand new white baseball around. Someone has a bat, hitting
light bunts, the boys stoop to pick up the grounders and yell,
"Uff! I got them old kinks this year!"

Someone hoots under a high fly, punches his glove, pulls it
down, trots around awhile, lobs the ball back easily. It's Spring
training time, they've got to watch "the old arm." Mickey smells
the fragrant cigarette smoke in the morning air where the older
boys stand around talking. Big brother Joe Martin is winding up
leisurely, throwing to another boy who squats with a catcher's
mitt. Joe is a star pitcher, he knows how to take his time and get
the old kinks out in the Spring. Everybody watches as he lobs the
ball in easily, with a sure motion and a deadpan face. A minute
later he's whooping with laughter when someone gets a knock
on the shins from a hard grounder.

In his mother's cool shady kitchen, Mickey devours a bowl of
cereal and stares at the picture of Jimmy Foxx on the box cover.
His chums are coming up the road, he can hear them, they're
going off to play cowboys on the hill. He's Buck Jones all the
time. They're out in the yard now, calling:

"Mick-ee!"

Mickey comes storming out of the kitchen with both guns
blazing, "Kow! kow! kow!" and dodges behind a barrel; the
others take cover and return fire. Someone leaps up, twists, con-
torts, and falls slain to the grass.

In the Spring night, Joe tunes up the old Ford and roars off to
drink beer with his buddies. And on the first warm June night,
Mrs. Martin and Ruth dust off the old swing in the backyard,
put cushions on it, make a big bowl of popcorn, and go sit under
the moon, in the waving black shade of the high hedges.
A cousin sits with them in the breezy night, exclaiming: "Ooh!
ain't the moon grand!"

Old man Martin, banging around the kitchen making an egg
sandwich, mimics savagely: "Ain't the moon gry-and!"
The three women out in the yard, swinging rhythmically in the
creaking old swing, are telling each other about the best fortune-
tellers they have ever known.

"I tell you. Marge, she is uncannyl"

Mrs. Martin rocks in the swing, waiting patiently, with slitted
eyes, skeptical.

"She foretold almost everything that happened that year, detail
by detail, mind you!" And with this Cousin Leona looks up at
the moon and sighs, "The irony of this life. Marge, the irony of
life."

The father of the house stomps out of the kitchen with his
sandwich, mimicking again, savagely: "Oh, the irony of liaf!"
The women rock back and forth in the old creaking swing,
reaching mechanically into the popcorn bowl, musing, contented,
belonging to the wonderful darkness and the ripe June world,
owning it, as no barging man of the house could ever hope to
belong to any part of the earth or own an inch of it.

response 76 of 104:

Jul 27 17:31 UTC 2001

No, not Dylan Thomas. The author was born in New England.

response 78 of 104:

Jul 27 17:33 UTC 2001

(#76 slipped in, with an unsurprising response.)

response 80 of 104:

Jul 30 01:54 UTC 2001

Okay, hopefully this one will sound familiar to somebody:


As Peter stood there, he recognized three young men strolling
up the street. They were a strange trio: one was a hoodlum, one
was a dope addict, and the third was a poet.

The hoodlum---Jack---was a sleek, handsome youngster from
Tenth Avenue, who claimed that he was born "on a barge in the
East River" eighteen years before. He was well-dressed, seemingly
composed in his bearing and quiet, almost dignified, in his man-
ner. It was only that he could never concentrate; he was always
looking around as though anticipating something. His eyes were
hard and blank, almost elderly in their stony meaningless calm.
He talked in a swift, high-pitched, nervous voice, and kept look-
ing away stonily, twirling his key chain.

The dope addict, whose only known name was Junkey, was a
small, dark, Arabic-looking man with an oval face and huge blue
eyes that were lidded wearily always, with the huge lids of a mask.
He moved about with the noiseless glide of an Arab, his expres-
sion always weary, indifferent, yet somehow astonished too, aware
of everything. He had the look of a man who is sincerely miserable
in the world.

The poet---Leon Levinsky---had been a classmate of Peter's at
college, and was now a merchant seaman of sorts, sailing coastwise
on coalboats to Norfolk or New Orleans. He was wearing a
strapped raincoat, a Paisley scarf, and dark-rimmed glasses with
the air of an intellectual. He carried two slim volumes under his
arm, the works of Rimbaud and W. H. Auden, and he smoked
his cigarette stuck in a red holder.

They came along the sidewalk, Jack the hoodlum swaggering
slowly, Junkey padding along like an Arab in the Casbah, and
Leon Levinsky, lip-pursing, meditative, absorbed in thought, twin-
kling along beside them with his Charley Chaplin feet flapping
out, puffing absently on the cigarette-holder. They strolled in the
lights.

Peter walked up and greeted them.

"So you're back finally!" cried Levinsky, grinning eagerly. "I've
been thinking of you lately for some reason or other---actually I
guess it's because I've so much to tell you!"

"Why don't we go and sit down?" proposed Junkey wearily. "Let's
sit in the cafeteria window there and we can talk and keep an
eye on the street."

They went in the cafeteria, got coffee, and sat down by the
windows, where Junkey could resume his pale vigil of Forty-
Second Street---a vigil that went on a good eighteen hours
a day, and sometimes, when he had no place to sleep, twenty-
four hours around the clock. It was the same with Jack---the
same anxious vigil of the street, from which the watchers of
the Street could never turn their eyes without some piercing sense
of loss, some rankling anguish that they had "missed out" on
something. Junkey always sat facing the street, and when he
talked, sometimes with intense earnestness, his eyes kept never-
theless going back and forth as he combed the street sweep-
ingly  under  drooping eyelids.  Even  though  Peter and  Leon
Levinsky sat with their backs to the window, they could not help
turning now and then just to see.

Leon Levinsky was about nineteen years old. He was one of the
strangest, most curiously exalted youngsters Peter had ever known.
He was not unlike Alexander Panos, in a sense, and Peter had
been drawn to him for this reason. Levinsky was an eager, intense,
sharply intelligent boy of Russian-Jewish parentage who rushed
around New York in a perpetual sweat of emotional activity,
back and forth in the streets from friend to friend, room to room,
apartment to apartment. He "knew everybody" and "knew every-
thing," was always bearing tidings and messages from "the others,"
full of catastrophe. He brimmed and flooded over day and night
with a thousand different thoughts and conversations and small
horrors, delights, perplexities, deities, discoveries, ecstasies, fears.
He stared gog-eyed at the world and was full of musings, lip-
pursings, subway broodings---all of which rushed forth in torrents
of complex conversation whenever he confronted someone. He
knew almost everyone Peter knew, a few thousand others Peter
did not know. Like young Panos, Leon Levinsky was also likely
to show up suddenly morose and brooding, or simply disappear
from the "scene" for months and Peter liked that too. 

response 82 of 104:

Jul 31 15:05 UTC 2001

That *is* the correct answer! Don't feel bad if you didn't guess it; all
excerpts were taken from Kerouac's first novel, _The Town and the City_, and
it's not one of his more recognisable works. 

response 84 of 104:

Aug 2 06:53 UTC 2001

Yes, that would be the one... (You *know* it?  I wasn't just throwing wildly
obscure stuff out there?)

response 86 of 104:

Aug 2 13:52 UTC 2001

(I read _Girl Goddess #9_ years ago, and it actually made a pretty big
impression on me.  I couldn't for the life of me remember the author's name.)

response 88 of 104:

Aug 14 18:31 UTC 2001

Yoo hoo, anderyn.  New quote please?