All the screwy, bitter black comedy of Catch-22 (I could fill up pages of this blog with a comedic greatest hits) crawls to a climax near the end of the book in The Eternal City episode. It is a classic night journey, a wandering among horrors, perhaps hallucinatory, perhaps not. Perceptive early critics called this […]
Archive for the ‘Catch 22’ Category
Chapters and episodes…
Thursday, July 24th, 2008Chapters. Everybody in Catch-22 gets, at least, their own chapter, or two. It’s one of the reason’s the book was mostly panned early on—“it’s not a novel,” and “it gasps for want of craft and sensibility” (how about sense?), “it’s a collection of anecdotes, a parade of scenes.” Heller is a “brilliant painter who decides […]
I shouldn’t have seen the movie…
Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008I first read Catch-22 back in 1970 or so after the Mike Nichols movie came out—Alan Arkin, Martin Balsam, Jon Voight—studded with stars of the day and a few fine actors to come, like Martin Sheen or Bob Balaban. Hell, even Art Garfunkel was in it. The movie mostly flopped. It was a hodge podge, […]
