Talk:William Monahan/Archive 2

A Wiki Letter to Journalists

As a thanks for all the work you journalists have done so far concerning Monahan's career, I offer you below--for free, it is the Wikipedia way--several questions I have been unable to answer and leave it up to you to ask them if you are fortunate enough to have the opportunity. I have found that there is still much of Monahan's past that remains undocumented and many mysteries that need to be solved. I go so far as to state some stuff below that you may want to state yourself and even throw out ideas that may help you get pensive if you are perhaps working on a piece of journalism. It is possible that you will be taunted by a manuscript during an interview with Monahan; this will be for his second novel. If you spot it lingering please grab it and make several copies available on the black market.

• Firstly, what kind of musician was Monahan? His camaraderie with The Unband will no doubt help him rewrite The Long Play, but he is also reportedly a musician in his own right, playing for the Slags in the early 90s and apparently playing for another band called Foam several years later, producing a demo tape. (See BostonBeanEater (2007-04-04). "The Last Gang: Are there any Clash II interviews with Nick - Pete - Vince". clashcity.com. Retrieved 2007-10-20.). Was he regarded as one of the best song-writers of the "Northampton Renaissance" (reference newspaper articles to prove this, please)? Apparently, one of Monahan's bands made it on the radio once, evidenced in this passage in his New York Press piece titled "Cymru" (7/1999):

When I was a musician I felt like a vaudeville fraud dying of cancer whenever I said what I did. We just got a new booking agent. I was on the radio once. We're opening for another band you've never heard of at Uncle Nasty's House of Pie.

• While Light House and Tripoli both achieved success for Monahan in the 21st century, they had prolonged gestation periods reaching back into the early 1990s. Were these two works his main focus up until then? Much is made of a second novel in book jacket biographies and the "Dining Late with Claude La Badarian" serial, but does it exist, shoved away in a drawer somewhere?
• Were Perkins Press and Old Crow Review the only Massachusetts-based publications which Monahan wrote in? How exactly did Monahan come to be connected with Old Crow Review?
• What truth is there in Monahan's statement in the Los Angeles Times on wanting to be a "man of letters"? Was he being ironic or was it a genuine desire of his as a youth? He most definitely is or was one. (So were Thomas Love Peacock and Robert Graves).
• Find out specifically about New York Press in the 90s, about John Strausbaugh's cultivation of a stable of writers, including Jim Knipfel, Jonathan Ames, Dawn Eden, Alexander Cockburn, and how Monahan fit into that.[1] He has been called the "bull-goose loony of the Old Guard" by his former colleague Alan Cabal.[2] If you could tabulate all his NYPress pieces from 1993 (I missed these, unfortunately) that would be great; so we know what was his first writing bit for NYPress and when, you know?
• What other magazines or papers did Monahan write for in New York City other than Maxim, Talk, Bookforum, and New York Press? He worked at Details magazine in the 2000s and one wonders if he was ever assigned to do an interview with Elizabeth Hurley after reading Claude La Badarian's satirical letter to Graydon Carter: Claude La Badarian. "Je Suis Un Genius, Baby", New York Press, 2001-09-05.
• What kind of education did Monahan earn at UMASS-Amherst? He was an undergrad in the 1980s and then apparently did a master's degree in the 1990s, possibly all the way up until 1998. More importantly what subject matter did he study in graduate school? Are there theses by him out there, maybe about Shakespeare, Thomas Love Peacock, Claude de Bourdeille, ...?
• There is an intriguing undercurrent in Monahan's works involving aristocrats. In his Tripoli script, or at least the short story adapted from it, a Frenchman named Joubert has a short exchange with a Bostonian about the nature of aristocracy. The Claude La Badarian narrative from New York Press is based on the French aristocrat Claude de Bourdeille, comte de Montrésor. Then there is the fictional Aristocrat magazine, recurrent in Monahan's works, mentioned off-handedly in 1997 in New York Press towards the end of the article "Tinytown: Mr. Rodriguez' Neighborhood", then twice mentioned off-handedly in 2000 in his novel Light House and in the innovative piece titled "The Virtual Career" from Old Crow Review; the magazine was fully explored as a fiction in the 2001 "Dining Late with Claude La Badarian" column.
• Monahan often includes thoughtful asides on being a writer and the craft of writing in his journalism. These insights pop up in a lot of his pieces and are characteristic of his journalism. An example in "The Replacement System" (11/1996):

Stylists like George Orwell--good man--fucking communist of course--only one who could write--thought extra adjectives were bourgeois (and he was right, but not perjoratively [sic])--believed that not one unnecessary word should be used in a sentence. This is 1930s horseshit. It is my feeling (deeply bourgeois, and based on privilege doubtless, God knows how much of that I've had--replace "privilege" with "agony") that you should use as many unnecessary words as possible. I strongly advocate that you should use at least two but preferably three unnecessary synonyms in every sentence.

• Has Monahan written under other pseudonyms, other than the hilarious Claude La Badarian?

• After reading the Claude La Badarian serial one thinks if one knew more about Monahan's missteps in New York City, one would perhaps be giving knowing winks to the prose telling the inside-jokes. It would be nice to know more about Monahan's literary career in NY. Fitzgerald's The Pat Hobby Stories are similar in vein to the Claude La Badarian serial, however, according to Matthew Joseph Bruccoli's Fitzgerald biography Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, The Pat Hobby Stories were only mistakenly thought of as self-satire by reviewers, and also that while Fitzgerald entertained the idea of writing under pseudonym at Esquire, it only ever happened once in his Esquire story "On an Ocean Wave", published shortly after he had died.[3] William Monahan's Claude La Badarian stories are different from The Pat Hobby Stories in that they actually are self-satire and were published under pseudonym. Interestingly, writer Bruno Maddox has said of his friend William Monahan, in an LATimes piece, without any elaboration, that "He's read everything and seems to approach writing as sort of filling in the gaps in the Western canon." The Claude La Badarian stories seem to be an instance of this, with respect to The Pat Hobby Stories. What other works by other writers out there compare to Claude La Badarian? This is an important but neglected work of Monahan's. Do the literary world a favor and review this enigma.

• When did Monahan's interest in Thomas Love Peacock begin? Light House is intentionally referential to his satirical novels and the full extent of these references will have to be figured out by Academia eventually. Did he study Peacock in undergrad, grad, or from way back in the youth? One wonders what his second novel was going to be modeled on, given that the La Badarian serial evidently was modeled on this Claude de Bourdeille character.

• Lastly, it's imperative that a count be made of how many times Monahan has used the word 'civilization' to give context to something in his writing. On Knipfel: "Most writers survive circumstances that would have killed a lesser person, but Knipfel's survived things that would have destroyed a civilization." In a blurb: "Greenman has a wicked, mercurial intellect and a light touch, and he’s the genuine article. ‘Marlon Brando’s Dreaming’ alone is equal to the entire artistic output of a respectable civilization." On heroin: "When opiates were available on the shelves, some people repeatedly narcotized themselves until they died, and some people were building the city and civilization you're sitting in now." I suspect the count is in the hundreds if all his works are included.

AND OF COURSE, if you could point out other themes or characteristics of Monahan's works that would be great. As well, the short story "The Virtual Career" and the Claude La Badarian stories are intriguingly critical of his literary career, and it would be interesting to have more background on them, particularly La Badarian's letter to Graydon Carter. Maybe you even have one of those deeper Charlie Rose kinda questions? The ones that pop into your head as you're feeling your way into your conversation buddy's soul? Seriously, help us, the audience, to know more. Best of luck, BillDeanCarter (talk) 15:50, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

The very latest

This be the very latest:

According to a source at Dutton, the September-slated memoir from former Montague Bookmill proprietor David Lovelace, Scattershot, has garnered interest from Departed screenwriter William Monahan. The book, subtitled My Bipolar Family—Lovelace’s mother, younger brother and father also suffer from bipolar disorder—is the author’s take on growing up with the disease, and in a family crippled by it. Monahan, a Massachusetts native like Lovelace, is supposedly attached to direct with Leonardo DiCaprio attached to star. No studio is on board yet. [4]

But whatever, you know, just whatever... continuous improvements are great and all but I think most importantly the text is now highly readable. Manhattan Samurai (talk) 15:28, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

Look, it's not like I'm an industrial spy or something so I can't keep on doing this but here are some of the latest news reports: NYT body of lies, Tribeca TV deal, deniro thingy, Falcone movie, Blood Meridian too scalpy, Scattershot, films take dark view of U.S.. Enjoy.Manhattan Samurai (talk) 06:42, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

Quote: "Hoffman is really an American archetype,” Mr. Monahan said. “He really is: Hoffman, the American bureaucrat who never does anything right and never gets punished for it. You can put him anywhere you like — executive, editor, your boss down at the sewer department. One of those guys who manages to rise and rise while never actually accomplishing anything. He doesn’t reflect the C.I.A. He’s not a C.I.A. archetype. I think he’s an American archetype. I quite like him."

And: Jurassic Park IV looking unlikely, which hardly matters. My take on Blood Meridian is: read the book. It's best that way. Tripoli has to be done though. Burp, Manhattan Samurai (talk) 05:23, 8 December 2008 (UTC)