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The variation on Dover Cliffs feels like an attempt to put Pocket in a scene he was not.

Regan finishes Cornwall, Moore’s variation based on Shakespeare’s characterization.

In tragedies is the hero’s pain of his or her “own making,” as the girl ghost tells pocket (248)

The chess motif continues with Pocket’s supposition of Albany hanging Edmund: “[Oswald’s] whole life he had carried messages and run errands for Goneril, but at last he could see reward in sight for being intrigue’s pawn“ (219). A pawn one space from promotion.

Kent asks Pocket if he knows “that there’s no fool piece on the chessboard,” and Pocket says, “the fool is the player, the mind above the moves” (215), which is to say the fool is an aspect of all the pieces or visa versa, yet the fool is inextricably connected to his responsibility to the king.

The Fool’s concern for Drool’s safety becomes a major motivator for the title character. The Fool and Drool make an interesting doppelgänger.

The fool’s question about Oswald, “Would he ever understand that he found favor with Goneril not because of his groveling or devotion, but because he was so easily humiliated?” is an insightful character analysis (130).

The desire to make love doesn’t correlate nearly with the act of conception (27). There’s something to be said about the preparation of practice and drafting before performance or publication.

The backstory of Pocket and Thalia The Anchoress of Dog Snogging seems to be more of a reason for Moore to write the book than anything left unsaid by Shakespeare.

Evidence for Lear being pagan, or for Gloucester and Edgar worshipping the Roman pantheon?

Moore passes monotheism in Lear’s polytheistic list: “For by the radiance of the sun, the dark of the night, all the Saints, the Holy Mother, the orbs of the sky, and nature herself, I disown you” (55).

The Fool strikes an alliance with Edmund….there’s backstory of a nunnery….is this take-off value added? If you value irreverence towards Shakespeare. But if my memory serves, The Fool has irreverence for Lear’s bad decisions, thus encouraging his recovery of his better nature.

Theme: there’s always a bloody ghost (15, 20).

Drool’s mimicry can unsettle even The Fool.

Opening chapter unites Cordelia, introduces Gloucester and establishes a ghost in the crow (crows are ghosts; that’s why they proliferate.

Embracing one’s non-existence. “God is silent… Now we can only get man to shut up” (6).

As a souvenir, John Waters took home a palm fraud from the Spahn Ranch, which perhaps once shaded Charles Manson, Shorty Shea or both (778).

Water says that Venice Beach is the only place that reminds him of the East Coast (777).

I like John Waters irreverence: “Think of the lucky schoolchildren who get let out of class for smog alerts instead of blizzards” (771). I was never one of those children, but I can imagine how they feel, having survived Youth Corp and a disastrous football tryout at CSUN.

What a curious excerpt from Robert Stone’s Children of Light: a son gets even with his father by attacking the older man’s beloved scenes.

Julia Phillips memoir about winning Best Picture is so coked and sad. Nowhere to go but down.

For laughs, I reread Groucho Marx letters to Warner Brothers re: the studio’s objection to the proposed “Night in Casablanca.” What a lovely work of writ & lit.

How strange that Oscar Levant’s prose has little continuity between paragraphs. Ebert praises Levant’s one liners, and I did smile, but some paragraphs were sans smile. What beyond syntax makes words cohere in a sentence? How can theme be divided & distributed across paragraphs? Ignore counterpoint at peril of the self.

“[The] dump grew continually…there wasn’t a dream afloat …which wouldn’t sooner or later turn up on it, having first been made photographic by plaster, canvas, plaster lath and paint. Many boats sink and never reached the Sargasso, but no dream ever entirely disappears…. it troubles, some unfortunate person, and someday, when that person has been sufficiently troubled, it will be reproduced on the lot.”

The Hollywood section is the most cynical as it tells again & again how the movies lie & how we know it & how we justify it. The Budd Schulberg excerpt appears beside the Howard Koch excerpt. What a plot.

“(Caroline) had learned from hurst the truth was only one criterion by which a story could be judged….” (720) Cinema is at best a fragment of a fact.

“”Caroline… was attracted to the idea of film, not as an art, or as light, or as whatever everyone wanted to call so collective and vulgar a storytelling form, but as a means of preserving time, netting the ephemeral, and the fugitive – there it is! now, it’s past, gone forever.” as Hearst’s sister-in-law, Caroline’s being tied to the tracks seems symbolic.

Timothy X. Farrell “ had worked as a carpenter and general handyman for Thomas Ince. Now he was a successful director, noted for his use of light (717). Vidal fires a shot across the bow.

Reading Gore Vidal’s excerpt about William Randolph Hearst producing (which is described as directing) a melodrama, the theme becomes clear: live by the movie, die by the movie.

Robert Bloch’s “The Movie People,” could be good without the magic. I’m thinking of the stuntmen and mugs in The Cauliflower Alley Club that met on Tuesdays at The Old Spaghetti Factory. What about the actual recipients of the Motion Picture Fund?