Pure Drivel

Rating:
Summary: Accurate Title
Review: Here's the quick and dirty on Steve Martin's Pure Drivel:

About 90% of the pieces are clever;
About 60% of the pieces are witty;
About 40% of the pieces are funny (funny enough to cause an audible chortle, guffaw or even a wry smile).

Steve Martin is a very crisp and smart writer. His mastery of the written word and imagination are on full display here and show why he often writes successful movie scripts.

Pure Drivel is a thin collection of short essays Martin wrote for The New Yorker (whose readership I've always thought feels it must support the clever even if it is not concurrently the witty). The topics are as wide ranging as you could imagine: a report on the shortage of an important article of punctuation; a Lucy and Desi script, Lolita (yes, that Lolita) at age fifty (this is a gem), a future report on the devastation caused by the Y3K bug, and assorted other topics not joined by any relation other than birth from the wellspring of Martin's mind.

I read this in three sittings, which I think was a mistake. Sometimes for me, humor collections fall off if taken in too large a bite. I usually laugh out loud at Dave Barry's weekly columns but found his essay collections repetitive. Same for Letterman Top Ten Lists. I would advise the reader to place this book at a convenient location in the bathroom when the five or ten minute literary piece is required for maximum enjoyment.

Rating:
Summary: Mostly forgettable but still fun
Review: Several of these short works - such as "Scrodinger's Cat" - did nothing for me and I wondered whether Martin's name, rather than literary merit, got them originally published in The New Yorker and other magazines. Yet I'd recommend "The 100 Greatest Books That I've Read," "Closure," "Lolita at 50" and "A Word from the Words," among others. There are enough laughs here for readers who appreciate Martin's creative antics to want to experience this book.

Rating:
Summary: Steve Martin is no friend of mine...
Review: Actually, this book, entitled "Pure Drivel" is in fact NOT pure drivel at all as the arther would have you believe. Nope. If you read it very very closely, maybe with a magnifying glass of some sort, you will find on page 47 some pure crap. Yes, it's true, and that makes this book "unpure" as far as drivel goes.

And the arther didn't know what he was talking about when it came to the facts about the period shortage. I lived through that particular time in history and I can assure you it wasn't all that bad. In fact, he tries to show his thrifyousness by using only one period in the whole story, but if you look closely at the backward period mentioned in the middle, it's simply a regular period turned backwards and NOT an actual backward period. So, he used two periods, not one and proves my point exactly.

The most enlightening aspect to this book is found in it's opening pages where you learn who the publisher is, the copyright year and the ISBN number. I have read this many times and have committed most of it to memory. What more can I say?

Steve did let a secret slip out. As we all know, the arther likes to cat juggle. In this book he mentions kittens on mars that never die. So, this leads the reader to understand that his cat juggling days are well over, now that we know that they are not just earthling cats. It's much easier to juggle cats that never die, as we all know.

Also, too, I just want to let Steve know that Karen is fine and we are living in a small chalet close to a casino somewhere in Minnesota. She has read your apologies over and over and one day found that she used it as a spaghetti sauce recipe by accident that actually turned out half decent.

Rating:
Summary: If he's a writer, I'm the queen of France.......
Review: Wha....wha....wha happened? I am a YOOOOGE Steve Martin fan and have been for years. This book was on the shelf at the dollar store and now I know why. Talk about a stinkeroo. I SO didn't get it, Steve. Too many trips in Anne Heche's spaceship, perhaps?
I want my dollar (and my "Jerk") back.....

Rating:
Summary: The First Is Always A Little Different.
Review: This writer is creativity personified. What can't he do?! The book itself is not new, but it was new to me -- just found it. And to say that he had to have friends in high places to get it published is putting it mildly.

It's not like he'd never been 'published' before. Twelve of these little anecedotes previously appeared (at intervals, I'm sure) in THE NEW YORKER Magazine. Of the 23 short 'bursts of at-random thinking', the piece in which he eschews 'celebrity', "The Nature of Matter and Its Antecedents," appeared in The New York Times Magazine. My goodness, he even had a crazy thing in the op-ed section of that same paper entitled 'Mars Probe Finds Kitten.'

This is a short book and it takes very little time to get all the way through to the end. The title tells it all, it's "pure drivel." After being off the screen for three years, busy in New York on other projects like 'several' plays, a 'handful' of sketches, two screenplays, and these thoughts of his. He calls it 'intense retrospection' as he sat in his rose garden with his computer enjoying the feel and pleasure of watching his fingers on the keys. It didn't matter whether everything came out as typo-gibberish or actual words -- all the same to him. He had editors. To him, he was being creative, reading a story in each rose. I'd say he was intensely depressed.

The good thing about writing is the knowledge of being able to change, fiddle with, re-think, and deny words. Who said that a picture is worth a thousand words? He says, "painters don't have that luxury." Actually, compiling these short vignettes was for material matters since he had a new wife and two young children at the time -- I'd say he needed money to pay his philosopher/lawyer.

He thinks 'writing is easy,' tell that to a real writer. One of my favorites has decided to take a year off from the grind and pressure in the publishing world (with all their deadlines and demands for more) to be with his young family and recoup. No. it's not 'writers' block,' just a respite and a determination to be with those he loves for the holidays this year. More power to him!

For Steve Martin, it turned into three years before he got his creative juices going again. He'd had successes in several films; my favorite was THREE AMIGOS! and PLANES, TRAINS & AUTOMOBILES. I will take this opportunity to apologize for the bad review I gave of CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN almost a year ago! I didn't know the pressure he'd been under. I'm sorry, Steve. It wasn't you -- it was the movie which I felt wasn't funny.

He wrote scripts for some of the movies he appeared in, like the famous BOWFINGER'S BIG THING with Eddie Murphy. He was in David Mamet's film THE SPANISH PRISONER and received a jacket blurb as a result. He certainly has friends with a strange sense of humor, like Mr. Mamet and Victoria Dailey. These are certainly unusual people.

He calls writer's block a 'myth.' Tell that to a real writer. I know one who moved to Middle Tennessee from Boston, Mass. after a successful career with two or three series (Fletch, Flynn, etc), write half a dozen at the most, and his life changed drastically. Now, if that's not 'writer's block' I'd like to know what it is -- he was in limbo.

One of my favorite writers for many years who taught me a lot of different things with his varied themes, had travel books, novels, screenplays' success after success for a long time. Then, nil -- only two or three after returning to Cape Cod from England. If you run out of story lines, or ideas, you can always go traveling (like Bill Bryson) and write about it.

One of his New Yorker pieces was heavy with characters named Socrates and Plato, and friends -- pure drivel. He played around with words at the end a little bit, so I think I'll call him a 'sedate' Alfie. What's it all about? He wrote SHOPGIRL, PICASSO...AND OTHER PLAYS, THE PLEASURE OF MY COMPANY, CRUEL SHOES, SOLD! (with Gary Colleran). It appears he has found a new career.


Rating:
Summary: Appropriately Named - I'll Give Ya That
Review: Oh how I love just about everything Steve Martin does. From The Jerk to Cheaper by the Dozen and just about everything in between, the man is a living legend.

This audio book his a letdown. Oh, I know, it's sophisticated humor; witty beyond understanding for the low IQ masses...yeah, whatever.

It's boring, slow, and just plain, NOT FUNNY. I can't believe all of the great reviews. I must assume that all of these people are either related to the comic-genius or hope that one day, when they run into him at the airport, they can brag about how they love all of his work - even the sad-excuse-for-a-book Pure Drivel. Well I'm not joining the suck-ups on this one. I'm glad I only checked this one out from the library. I would be extremely upset if I had wasted my hard-earned money on this Pure Drivel. At least he got the name right.





Rating:
Summary: An absolutely gorgeous book
Review: Annotation: In this ingeniously funny book of humorous skits, Martin shows he is master of the written word. The book is hilariously funny and intelligent in his skewering of the topic at hand. The book features Martin at his finest. The book is incredibly witty as Martin shows off his superb writing ability. This is the funniest book I have ever read.
Author Bio: Born in Waco, Texas and raised in Southern California, Martin became a television writer in the late 1960s, winning an Emmy Award for his work on the hit series "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour". By the end of the decade he was performing his material in clubs and on television and went on to host several episodes of "Saturday Night Live". Martin continued to use his stand-up skills as host of the 73rd and 75th Annual Academy Awards, for which he was nominated for Outstanding Individual Performance in a Variety or Music Program. Martin has stared in many movies which include The Jerk, The Man with Two Brains, and All of Me in which he was nominated for an academy award. His latest film was Cheaper by the Dozen.
Evaluation: This was one of the best books I have ever read. It was so funny I found myself being stared at by my parents. They must have thought "What Is he reading?". Anyway I was inspired by the book to try a hand at writing comedy. I hope I can use and master the English language the way Martin has. He is beyond description.