Now Dig This: The Unspeakable Writings of Terry Southern, 1950–1995 by Terry Southern (PDF)

Description

An unforgettable chronicle of an era by one of America’s wildest—and most brilliant—comedic and literary minds Edited by Nile Southern and Josh Alan FriedmanStarting with his landing at the Battle of the Bulge, Terry Southern showed a knack for winding up in the world’s most interesting places. He spent the fifties on the Left Bank of Paris, the sixties in mod London, and the seventies touring with the Rolling Stones. When the Beatles rolled out their famous pantheon of movers and shakers for the cover of Sgt. Pepper, Terry was the only guy wearing shades. When police broke heads during the ’68 democratic convention in Chicago, Southern was there to bear witness. And when Stanley Kubrick needed someone to make Dr. Strangelove funny, there was only one man qualified for the job. As the golden age of rock ’n’ roll wound down, Southern never stopped writing, and his prose never lost its trademark intensity. Filthy, fierce, and relentlessly dazzling, these letters, essays, stories, and interviews are an electric testament to one of the keenest wits of the twentieth century. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Terry Southern including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Wow — here’s two hundred fifty pages of wildly unclassifiable, wholly entertaining (and, yes indeed, unspeakable) bits and pieces of Southern’s magazine writings, interviews, stories, and routines. A genuine literary anarchist with a wicked wit and an incredible eye for detail — his Esquire piece on the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968 is classic eyewitness journalism — Southern was also a screenwriter (Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove”), a satirist, and an agent provocateur who relished goading people into revealing their true personalities. Along the way, poor E.B. White of The New Yorker comes out the worse for Terry’s over-the-top interogration techniques, I’m afraid.Fueled by booze, pills and powders, Southern swings through the decades not just as an observer but a participant at the center of it all (writer for National Lampoon and SNL, pals with Lennon, the Stones and Burroughs, as well as Kubrick and George Plimpton). It seems there’s hardly a scene he doesn’t make, including an appearance on the cover of “Sgt. Pepper.” The book is filled with newly discovered bits of weirdness — a lost scene for Kubrick’s 1980 draft of “Eyes Wide Shut” then called “Rhapsody,” an outrageous SNL sketch idea taken from National Enquirer called “Worm Ball Man,” incendiary letters sent to the editors of Ms. Magazine, and a pitch to Lenny Bruce for a part in Southern’s adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s “The Loved One” in 1964.It’s easy to romanticize (and criticize) the alcohol and drug-taking frenzy of so much of Southern’s work, yet the sheer variety of it all (of which this book is just a part) is amazing, not to mention the amount of “quality lit” he produced. Thanks to Nile Southern and everyone involved in bringing this compilation to print.

⭐Southern was a WWII combat vet who became alienated from the traditional culture of his home and family after he returned. He set out on a journey that took him around the world . The quality of his writing varied from incoherent to pricelessly brilliant. Now Dig This contains samples of this variation. A great weekend read.

⭐Terry’s son, Nile, has honored his father (and done the rest of us a huge favor) by publishing this collection of the best of Terry’s shorter works.Terry concluded at one point that film had surpassed literature as the communication medium of choice, and devoted most of the rest of his life to that arena. His interview “On Screenwriting” describes both the benefits and the frustrations associated with that choice. His advice is just as relevant to the would-be screenwriter today as it was when he wrote it.His “Proposed Scene for Kubrick’s Rhapsody,” and “Plums and Prunes,” provide interesting examples of proposed movie scenes that will prove interesting to readers unfamiliar with that arcane art.As other reviewers have noted, “Grooving in Chi” is an excellent description of the Chicago riots during the Democratic National Convention in 1968.Finally, pieces like “The Beautiful-Ugly Art of Lotte Lenya,” “When Film Gets Good,” “Rolling Over Our Nerve-Endings [William Burroughs],” and “Writers at Work [Henry Green]” prove that he could write serious criticism.Through it all flows that wonderful, irreverent, sense of humor.Good stuff.

⭐”Why did I buy this?” I asked myself once in a while as I was reading it. I guess I was feeling a bit risque. Back when I was a wild college kid, Terry Southern seemed like a pioneer of some quirky, naughty sort. Reading some of his stuff now makes me feel like I did when I watched “Easy Rider” 40 years later. You still see some brilliance, but a lot of it is really dated and sounds pretty unhip, which is what happens to trendy things, I guess.I also think I have developed some taste and some standards over the years, and I perceive that Southern, while he may have had standards of some sort (to see how crass he can be may be one), the taste is — I, at least, am just not there any more.Best thing I can say is, you might like it, but you might feel kind of dirty afterwards.

⭐Ringo Starr was in movies called Candy and The Magic Christian based on the other books I have by Terry Southern. Candy is an outstanding comic look at a girl named Candy Christian. This might have some insight on the sociology of denial, but I can’t explain this clearly because it is betwixt the ideas in a song,Tomorrow Will Be My Dancing Day.

⭐Terry Southern is a great writer!!

⭐Unfortunately very dated and trapped in its time by the style, slang and the people he’s writing about. Much (all?) the humor was lost on me, but a style was there that played better at the time. I would say this is really for die-hards only and not a portal into his work….but it’s good for a few anecdotes about Kubrick and the Rolling Stones if you feel like skimming.

⭐The first banned book I ever read was Terry Southern’s “Red Dirt Marijuana” in 1967. Not only did that book forever set me against anyone who thinks banning books has any effect on thought, creativity, democracy, or intelligence, but it made me a Terry Southern fan for life. I bought “Now Did This” when it went on sale at Amazon and I am having flashbacks to when I scanned every month of Esquire Magazine, Rolling Stone, Playboy, and anything other likely source, religiously, in the wild hope that Mr. Southern’s brilliant work would be there. He, not Hunter Thompson, was the foundation of “gonzo journalism” and Terry fine-tuned that art to where no one will ever again come close to his brilliance at illuminating the insanity of our death-spiraling police-state, militarist, fascist culture while making the whole thing seem like a great party gone wild.

⭐A quirky miscellany of TS which contains both some absolute pearls such as the short story A Run of Dimes and The Straight Dope On The Private Dick and some other mono-gag material that’s a lot weaker.I’m a big admirer of TS’s joyous, practically Restoration comedy (over)use of language and the number of ‘heads’ he was able to hang out with is truly amazing, from bangers and mash with Beckett to the Stones’ tour jet and practical jokery with S Kubrick esq.The only bits that are really negative are the regular repetitions of accounts of witnessing riots at a Democratic convention in Chicago and of his visits to a particular Parisian whorehouse. These might have been justified if he treated them differently at different times but they are pretty much word-for-word repetitions of how the cops beat up the kids and what the top a la carte offering was at the house of renowned ill-repute. It suggests his material may have spread a bit too thinly. Both these incidents are repeated at some length four or five times.As a personality he certainly comes across as a more likable figure than, say, Hunter S Thompson.The most pleasant surprises are his remarkably perceptive critical pieces on Lotte Lenya, a remarkable interview with Henry Green and achieving the seemingly impossible in reviewing a bucketload of ‘Quality Lit. Game’ titles highly satisfactorily in about 3 pages. I’d willingly have sacrificed some of the Parisian paedo-shock and big bad cop reminiscences for more such pieces.Red Dirt Marijuana is a better read all told, plus of course Candy and The Magic Christian, but as the amount of Southern’s material actually available in print is still rather limited, this is certainly worth a read for anyone who digs TS’s monstro wordplay.

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