Point to Point Navigation

Начало книги

“Point to Point Navigation”: In World War Two I served as first mate of an army freight-supply ship based in the Aleutian Islands, where the weather was so bad that we seldom saw the sun much less moon and stars; this made it nearly impossible to use the compass to chart a course. Instead, we relied on maps where we had memorized various points or landmarks as guides, a process known as “point to point navigation,” a process with obvious dangers (we had no radar). As I was writing this account of my life and times since Palimpsest, I felt as if I were again dealing with those capes and rocks in the Bering Sea that we had to navigate so often with a compass made inoperable by weather.

ONE

The Influence of the Movies on My Generation: The Backstory

As I now move, graciously, I hope, toward the door marked Exit, it occurs to me that the only thing I ever really liked to do was go to the movies. Naturally, Sex and Art always took precedence over cinema but neither ever proved to be as dependable as the filtering of present light through that moving strip of celluloid which projects past images and voices onto a screen. Thus, in a seemingly simple process, screening history. (My book of that name has been allowed to go out of print and so I now reprise its principal argument.)

Читать дальше →