I was the guy in the breakfast nook of the hotel coffee shop who had survived two nights of intensive immersion into neo-outlaw performance art and appeared, if I say so myself, not too much the worse for wear. An apparent smugness, thicker than maple syrup, played across my face as I shuffled a deck of eggs, flapjacks, coffee, O.J. and newspaper.
The Mix section of the Sunday Salt Lake Tribune, already opened to “Books” and dealt seamlessly off the bottom, came first out of the chute. Then the juice got knocked back and swallowed whole. And with the tang of freshly-squeezed citrus, a sense of rebirth washed over my crankier lobes.
From there it was all about feeding the pleasure and interpretive centers of the brain with newsprint while, intermittently, breaking the food fast. Sitting alone Sunday mornings in a coffee shop with a two-inch-thick L.A. Times was a habit I acquired back before moving to Utah and an escape I enjoy to this day with a wide variety of reading matter.
The major breakfast reading rewards of this past Sunday were twofold: the first a book review reprinted from the Philadelphia Inquirer of a “mildly abridged,” nearly 1,200-page repackaging of “The Count of Monte Cristo” by Alexander Dumas and, the second, a New York Times look at the Coen Brothers soon-to-be-released “book version” of “True Grit.”
The reviewer’s take on the new edition of the classic and seemingly endless “Count” adventure tale captured my interest mainly because I had lugged it around Georgia and both the Carolinas during some early ’60s 2nd Infantry Division war games in a vain attempt to finish it prior to my discharge.
It didn’t happen. I even started and finished “Gone with the Wind” in the middle of it somewhere around when the hero, Edmond Dantès, dramatically escapes his unjust imprisonment and finds his way to the island of Monte Cristo. It wouldn’t be for another three years, while lugging its not insignificant heft around Mexico, that I would turn its final page.
Obviously, it wasn’t that I couldn’t put it down; it was that I couldn’t stop from picking it back up even after having unjustly imprisoned it in an army footlocker under a torn tonneau cover from a 1964½ MG Midget for months, nearly years, on end. At the time, I became convinced that it had escaped the footlocker in a manner not unlike the one employed by Dantès in the Dumas yarn.
It wasn’t that I had never gotten rid of a book that, for whatever reason, I was unable to finish. Many were the bound volumes for which I found new homes. A few I even left in favorite saloons. One, Günter Grass’ classic “The Tin Drum,” I left on a shelf in the visitor wing of L.A. County Jail.
But the most interesting aspect of the newspaper review of the new “handsome red volume, nice spine, fabulous paper and print” edition of “The Count of Monte Cristo” would have to be the under-the-radar research contribution that Dumas collaborator Auguste Maquet made to the original manuscript. Now that piece of info, while not as yummy as the flapjacks, proved tasty indeed!
And that brings our morning repast to the egg dish, another cup of joe, and the New York Times take on the about-to-be-released Coen Brothers cinematic interpretation of “True Grit.” As has been widely reported, this particular film will follow the Charles Portis novel, published in 1968, much more closely than did the 1969 release that won John Wayne that year’s Oscar.
To this day, I have never viewed that particular film. I wasn’t much of a “Duke” fan back then. Later I would become quite obsessed with his earlier films made with director John Ford, most especially “Stagecoach,” “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon,” “The Searchers,” “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” and my very favorite Ford-Wayne collaboration, “The Quiet Man.”
My good friend, favorite barkeep, and oftentimes mentor of all-things-western, Stan Taggart of Pete’s Roc N’ Rye saloon up on the outskirts of Evanston, Wyoming, attempted to get me to read the Charles Portis novel back in the early ’70s. I finally succumbed a few years back. Great book! Can’t wait for the Coen Brothers treatment to reach local screens, which I believe is sometime around Christmas.
I also can’t wait for my next Sunday hotel-coffee-shop breakfast, featuring, hopefully, more good grits and scrumptious wordsmithing.
Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and a free-lance writer with a background in commercial and community radio, among other pursuits. He has been a columnist and feature writer for various Park City publications going back to 1973.