THEME FROM AN IMAGINARY FILM

Patrick Scherberger is kicking ass on the first installment of “Chance Meetings.” It’s kind of cute, he’s trying so hard. I suppose I need to get off my ass and write part 2. We’re sort of just playing it by ear as far as schedule. When it’s done—I've still got to decide who will letter and color it—we’ll post it at the Oni site. I figure if he has to do his work for The Path anytime soon, that should take precedence.

Riding the bus again and not driving has increased my reading time a lot. Instead of taking me a year to read books, I am actually moving rather swiftly through them. I tried Graham Greene for the first time this week, The Third Man. It took me all of three days, but given his direct prose style, I am not sure it’s a fair assessment of my new speed (whereas the book I started this morning, Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, is the chunkiest of my bus fare so far; it was a gift a Christmas or two back, and I am making books gifted to me a priority, since I’ve felt most guilty about their languishing on my shelves).

Anyway, in the context of this journal, The Third Man is a rather interesting curiosity. It’s a novel that, according to Greene’s intro, was never meant to be published as a novel. Rather, it’s one long film treatment, done so that Greene could work out some of the emotional background on his characters, something he finds lacking in screenplays. The story differs from Carol Reed’s film by quite a lot, and Greene says it was never the intention that the novel be set in stone as far as the movie was concerned. Given my fascination with the process of transferring stories from one medium to another, and the layers of story that creates, this was right up my alley. (Plus, I simply love the movie version, and my Criterion DVD of it will someday get the attention it deserves.)

Additionally, the narrator of The Third Man is a policeman who is relating a story that he has pieced together, largely using testimony from the character Joseph Cotten would play in the adaptation. (Though, is it really an adaptation?) This creates a multilayered narrative, working under the conceit that the officer is telling the story to us, and interweaving third person accounts of his subject’s activities with conversations between them—often switching without warning, yet never getting confusing.

I shall be checking out more Graham Greene.

Current Soundtrack: Tim Burgess, I Believe (it's better when you don't pay attention to it)

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