Survey Please: Lost On The Backshelves

[hecubot]

Idle thought on my mind

Comments

[datapanik]

Jack the Bear by Dan McCall. By turns a funny, sad, scary and delightful snapshot of growing up in the 70's with a father whose occupation is different than most (he dresses up in character to host old horror movies for a California television network). I'm not sure if the novel can be considered completely "lost" (it was made into a very mediocre film in the late 90's starring Danny Devito as the dad -- the movie doesn't come anywhere near the magic of the novel). But it is out of print, as far as I know, so it's lost enough, I suppose. McCall wrote another novel I enjoyed (unfilmed, as far as I know), Queen of Hearts.

[chicating]

Fanny: Being A True Account Of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones by Erica Jong(Written sometime in the early '80s)
This is like a Tom Jones for women, or a pirate Moll Flanders. Jong knows a lot about the eighteenth century and whorehouses and pirate ships, but this one doesn't have a hook like "zipless fuck" so it didn't get the attention of Fear of Flying, but it really is my favorite of hers anyway. I think it was the most ambitious, and the one least like writing down what was in her journal(Is that the same as "ambitious"? I think maybe. What do you think, Hec?)

[chicating]

And Gus van Sant owes cripple woman kind an apology of some sort for the hideous film of "Even Cowgirls Get The Blues" which may be another topic altogether as that is about as undiscovered as "Fear and Loathing" but it was my best book in the world when I was seventeen or so.
So much so that y'all on the internets might have met "Sissy Hankshaw" if that was not the most billy-sounding name ever, imo, and if I wasn't already sensitive about coming off provincial.

[not_vacillating]

Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Lost World". It's a good tale, and well written, but lost under the Holmes canon and the Jurassic Park movies.