According to the analysis, Aaron’s overall face shape is almost perfect (Picture: Julian De Silva/ Cavendish Press)
Did I look a little bit like Aaron when I was younger? Give me a percentage. I’ve thought about using the younger me as a model for my James Bond.
John
Actor tipped to play James Bond is officially the world’s most handsome man according to science
Lillie RohanPublished Oct 10, 2024, 4:44pmComment
The test, is a mathematical equation created to measure physical perfection, with the doctor explaining that Aaron is a ‘clear winner’.
‘What makes Aaron so exceptional is the overall shape of his face, which, with a score of 99.2 percent, is only 0.8 percent off being perfect,’ he said.
‘The width and length of his nose is almost perfect, too, at 98.8 percent. He also has a beautifully sculpted chin which scored well at 95 percent.’
Julian continued to say all of Aaron’s scores were ‘really strong’, but there was one category where he lacked, which was his eye spacing. Euqaliting to 89 percent, the only thing lower was his lips which earned a 86 percent score.
Despite this, if Aaron were cast as Bond, it would mean he is by far the most handsome star to be cast in the role.
According to Julian’s findings, Sean Connery, who played the fictional secret agent in 1983 for the film Never Say Never Again, was the closest to Aaron on the list with an 89.2 percent rating.
Coming in as a close second is Emily In Paris star Lucien Laviscount, 32, who was found to have a slightly lower but still impressive score of 92.41 percent, while Irish actor, Paul Mescal, 28, was found to have a score of 92.38 percent.
Robert Pattinson, 38, was also named on the list. Taking out fourth place, The Batman actor, who actually topped the list in 2020, was given a 92.15 percent rating and Jack Lowden, 34, known for his role in Slow Horses was found to have a 90.33 percent score.
Aaron has yet to comment on the report’s findings.
Eastwood, Pynchon & Bond
Posted on April 19, 2022 by Royal Rosamond Press
The Oaks Motel – A Play
Posted on May 15, 2018 by Royal Rosamond Press
The Oaks Motel
Did Broccoli use legal writing to transfer the Literary Legacy of Ian Fleming – to anyone? Did the Broccoli family ever claimed they owned this Legacy – that I claim – and move to the Oaks Motel, where I install Fleming, London, and Serling. If Clint Eastwood had starred in a Bond movie, then, all that mystique and movie prattle would move to the area where Clint grew up. In my sister’s biography, she and my niece encounter Mayor Eastwood in a restaurant. Then there is the Liz Taylor connection. But the most literary connection is to Thomas Pynchon, who my ex-wife lived with in Mexico.
Never before in the history of literature has a nation lost the franchise of a popular series of novels. With the killing-off of James Bond, and the subsequent attempts to – bring him back to life – one has to consider the posthumous wishes of Ian Fleming. What would he do? Ian Fleming would enjoy being put in the same literary circle and Thomas Pynchon, and vise versa.
How about a series where diseased Cold War Authors and Warriors gather at the Oak Motel, and are consulted by John John and his wife via a Ouija Board? I install Norbert’ Davis and Ludwig Wittgenstein, to make the greatest Cold War Think Tank – ever!
With this international literary move, I am more inspired with my Black Pynchon. I see a Black Columbo. Was Pynchon addicted to this T.V. series?
SYNOPSIS: Tom Witherspoon opens a Private Detective office in the Dimond District of Oakland that soon becomes a hangout for all his friends. He is – The King Fish! His wife and daughter think he is having a mental breakdown. But, when he starts solving cases, and acquires a reputation, they give up their judgmental ways. Tom – is extremely happy! He gets a barber chair an starts cutting his friends hair. Oakland is a Hard-boiled Detective City, home of the Black Panthers, Hell’s Angels, The Raiders, and Bohemian-leftists.
John Presco
Black Pynchon Meets Demi Moore | Rosamond Press
Abstract
In his introduction to Slow Learner Thomas Pynchon suggests that an influence in his short story ‘Under the Rose’ was the spy fiction he had read as a child. What he takes from the form, he says, is an enjoyment of “lurking, spying, false identities, psychological games.” I hope to show that this youthful reading has interesting things to tell us about Pynchon’s writing beyond ‘Under the Rose’ and in more complex ways than his quote suggests. To do this I want to focus on that perennial issue of spy fiction – the maintenance and manipulation of identity. Negotiating ideas of subjectivity is a core concern in Pynchon’s work and to consider it I want to use the four spy novelists he mentions in the Slow Learner introduction – John Buchan, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Helen MacInnes and Geoffrey Household. This is a more disparate quartet of authors than Pynchon’s grouping suggests and I want to employ them to consider a variety of strategies used to ‘build character’ and the way Pynchon’s work approaches these strategies. This allows a reflection on questions of disguise, doubles, animals and the nomad within the context of a variety of postcolonial theories and aspects of Deleuze and Guattari’s “nomadology”. V would appear an obvious place to see connections to spy fiction, but, though I touch on some aspects of this novel, my focus will be very much on Gravity’s Rainbow because it has a much more concerted focus on the subject of Empire. Some intriguing echoes are to be found in the work of Pynchon in these authors and I hope to show how Pynchon’s attempts to formulate US “superimperialism” (Aijaz Ahmad) are reflected in the imperial concerns of what I would term the pre-Cold War British Spy fiction that engaged Pynchon in his youth.
That Which Has Seemingly Influenced Thomas Pynchon (pomona.edu)
The MLA Bibliography lists citations for studies addressing Pynchon and his sources in such authors, personalities, and genres as: Richard Farina, James Bond, William S. Burroughs, James Joyce, William Faulkner, T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, Hobbes, Hogarth, science fiction, Vladimir Nabokov, Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland), classic spy novels, Ernest Hemingway, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Franz Kafka, Karl Baedeker’s guidebooks, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller (Catch-22), Beat poets/novelists, and Samuel Beckett
‘Knives Out’ director Rian Johnson explains Daniel Craig’s ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ joke (sfgate.com)
In the whodunnit mystery film “Knives Out,” Daniel Craig’s verbose detective character Benoit Blanc has a habit of pontificating. While interrogating Ana de Armas about a potential murder, he makes an offhand reference to the notoriously pretentious 780-page novel “Gravity’s Rainbow” by reclusive author Thomas Pynchon.
Armas knows the book, but admits to not having read it. Craig quips back that no one has.
No one except writer/director Rian Johnson.
“I’ve read it twice now all the way through,” Johnson told SFGATE in an exclusive interview Thursday. “I also just keep it around and will flip open to random spots and start reading. But I’ve kind of stopped recommending it to people. It’s hard to recommend it without feeling like an a—hole, because you’re handing them a mountain to climb.”
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The length of “Gravity’s Rainbow” makes it an arduous read, plus it spans the entire globe and features literally hundreds of characters. The book was a contender for the Pulitzer Prize in 1973, but was so divisive amongst judges that they opted not to give out an award that year.
“It seems like this big challenging thing, but it’s actually the most entertaining book that’s ever been written. And it’s a book where you will experience literally every possible emotion.”
Although not a traditional mystery writer, Pynchon himself would make a great topic for a detective novel. Over his 55-year writing career, he hasn’t given an interview or allowed himself to be photographed. His 2009 novel “Inherent Vice” was adapted for a film by Paul Thomas Anderson, but none of his other works have crossed into other mediums.
Pynchon’s thinnest novel and best entry into his work is “The Crying of Lot 49,” a paranoid novel set partially in the Bay Area that actually has more connections to “Knives Out” than “Gravity’s Rainbow.” Like the film, it revolves around the mysterious intentions of a deceased eccentric.
“It’s funny, I didn’t think about it while writing ‘Knives Out,’ but [The Crying of Lot 49] does have some similarities. There is definitely a similarity in there, with the executing of the will. And it just has the greatest ending.”
Johnson also took loose inspiration from the 1990 Pynchon novel “Vineland,” which revolves around a hippie informant and her family.
“The way that family is portrayed in that book. Talking about the soup of stuff that’s in your head, the way that ‘Vineland’ pulls no punches in terms of the way family can really f— you up — that gets to the heart of what’s important about it.”
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For Pynchon obsessives, Johnson did leave a couple Easter eggs. “Gravity’s Rainbow” opens with a V-2 rocket falling through the sky of WWII-era London. The shelves of Harlan Thrombey’s office in “Knives Out” look like they’re filled with literary awards, but the statues are actually rocket models.
Despite the fact that Johnson loves the book enough to include such abstruse references to it, he’s hesitant to discuss the book with those who haven’t read it.
“In what context can you talk about having read ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ without sounding like you’re just trying to be pretentious? I think that’s something that everyone who’s a fan of the book struggles with.”
That was a sentiment shared by Daniel Craig, who actually had his own theory about the “Gravity’s Rainbow” joke. A detective as skilled as Benoit Blanc wouldn’t name-drop a novel he hasn’t read, but also wouldn’t want to alienate a source by coming off as too elitist.
“Daniel had a very interesting take on it,” says Johnson. “which was, ‘I think [Blanc] has read ‘Gravity’s Rainbow.’’
Oakland Tommy
Posted on March 4, 2016 by Royal Rosamond Press
I just found out my ex-wife lived on College Avenue – IN OAKLAND – with Thomas Pynchon. They lived in a big apartment building located next to ‘Ye Olde Hut’ where I did a lot of drinking with my friends, including Paul Drake who Mary Ann encouraged to take up acting. Paul claims he based his tough-guy persona on watching me drink, but I believe he is speaking of Richard Swartz who was a bodyguard for Dederich of Synanon. Richard held the world’s record to the fifty yard dash – on his hands!
Pynchon Wittgenstein and Cornell Grouping
Posted on March 20, 2021 by Royal Rosamond Press
Today is the most momentous day in my life. All my hard work has paid off. Ludwig traveled to Ithaca and hung with Cornell philosophers. My cup runneth over. I am so overjoyed that my grandparents can be put in a group of writers and thinkers – forever! I can remove my sister Christine from the literary hell she was thrown in hours after she died. My relationship with the woman I married, is redeemed. We believed in each other.
John Presco
Wittgenstein’sVisittoIthaca.pdf (cornell.edu)
Pynchon and Philosophy radically reworks our readings of Thomas Pynchon alongside the theoretical perspectives of Wittgenstein, Foucault and Adorno. Rigorous yet readable, Pynchon and Philosophy seeks to recover philosophical readings of Pynchon that work harmoniously, rather than antagonistically, resulting in a wholly fresh approach.
Martin Paul Eve
Chapter in Profils Américains: Thomas Pynchon
Edited by Bénédicte Chorier-Fryd and Gilles Chamerois
Pynchon and Wittgenstein: Ethics, Relativism and Philosophical Methodology
Perhaps the strongest rationale for a philosophico-literary study intersecting Thomas Pynchon
with Ludwig Wittgenstein is that, in the writings of this philosopher, the very nature of philosophy is
reflexively questioned. Within his lifetime Wittgenstein published a single text, Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus, influenced by the logical atomists in which he claimed, initially, to have “solved
all the problems of philosophy” (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus x). However, in 1929 he resumed
lecturing and, following his death in 1951, the world was presented with the unfinished product of
these intervening years: the Philosophical Investigations. While many early studies, and indeed this
biographical overview, present a seemingly bi-polar, bi-tonal Wittgenstein, who enacts a retraction of
the Tractatus in the Philosophical Investigations, a closer examination of Wittgenstein’s notebooks and
intermediate remarks reveals that the latter owes its genesis to a critique of the former and was
developed through an accumulation of thought and a gradual transition.
This piece presents a tripartite analysis of the relationship between the philosophical works of
Ludwig Wittgenstein and the novels of Thomas Pynchon. This is broadly structured around three
schools of Wittgenstein scholarship identified by Guy Kahane et al. as the Orthodox Tractatus, the New
Wittgenstein, and several strands of the Orthodox Investigations (Kahane et al. 4-14). Moving from the
earliest affiliation that Pynchon stages between Wittgenstein and Weissman, the underlying theme lies
in Pynchon’s relationship to ethical relativism as it pertains to Nazism. From this it will become clear
that neither relativism of experience and representation, nor an unbounded relativism of non-committal
John Presco Married Mary Ann Tharaldsen
Posted on December 8, 2020 by Royal Rosamond Press
I married Mary Ann Tharaldsen, the ex-wife of Academy Award Winner, David Seidler, who is also in my family tree, along with Rick Partlow who marred my sister, Christine Rosamond Benton, who was married to the muralist, Garth Benton. Partlow won a Grammy. A Cornell paper says Mary Ann was married to Thomas Pynchon and they lived in the Rockridge on College Avenue near where the Hippie Movement began. The Loading Zone played at the Open Theatre. Lead guitarist, Peter Shapiro, played at our wedding reception. A close friend lived nearby and he was asked to contribute to Oliver Stone’s movie. He was a good friend of Jim Morrison and Michael MacLure who taught poetry across the street from the Art College.
The Oakland Bohemian Class
Posted on March 7, 2021 by Royal Rosamond Press
Oakland California may have been the Capitol of World Bohemianism. Ken Babbs read from oneof his small books about partying with Sonny Barger.
The Bad Peanut of Temescal
Posted on August 13, 2015 by Royal Rosamond Press
William Carter Spann was the manager of the building I lived in on Shafter with Gloria Ehlers. Bill may be the foremost celebrity of the Bohemian enclave gathering momentum in Temescal, an area in Oakland next to Rockridge. There is a Friday Art Walk and neighborhood fair. I love the Temescal Alley.
The news tonight said President Carter has cancer. His nephew died of exposure. He was a homeless person suffering from AIDS. He called himself ‘The Bad Peanut’. The first time I paid my rent I asked him why he had peanut bags hanging on the wall with the name CARTER.
“My uncle is the Governor of Georgia, and we own peanut farms.”
Bill was not the first rebel of Temescal. Thelma Reid got caught up in a Love Cult. If she lived on 47th. she was in Temescal, where thanks to her, the birth of the Hippies can be traced.
“In 1927, 17-year-old Thelma Reid had just begun her first year of college at UC Berkeley. She was living on 45th street in Oakland’s Rockridge district with her family and did many of the typical things a college coed did—went to class, helped around the house and did her homework. She never expected her studies would spawn one of the biggest scandals in Rockridge history. But then again, it wasn’t ordinary homework.”
Here is the house that was raided by Oakland Cops led by Earl Warren who authored a report of the assassination of President Kennedy. It is right on the cusp of Temsecal and Rockridge at 460 Forest. This is where it all began. Before there were Beats and Hippies in San Francisco, there was the Great White Brotherhood, and their Love Cult. Consider Mel Lyman and Charlie Manson. Then there is that Cornell crowd, Richard Farina and Thomas Pynchon. Let’s no leave out the ‘Last Bohemian’ Jiryl Zorthian and his daughters.
The building we lived in was torn down and replaced with these modern rentals. Carter got fired and moved across the street into a cottage in back of the old house on the left.
I met Gloria in SF and moved into her apartment on 51st. Street. (right) Michael Harkins has a speaker shop on 51st. (left)
I lived with Amber in a apartment in the building on the lower right. I caught her in bed with my friend Paul Drake, who played the Bad Peanut, Mick, in Sudden Impact. About twenty Oakland Cops showed up for that Love Scene. There was a big storm that night that blew over a big redwood that was in the driveway and came to rest on the building by Amber’s window who was going to the California College of Arts and Crafts. She took me to her poetry class. She wanted me to meet Michael McClure who I had already met thru Michael Harkins who took me to see his good friends play ‘The Beard’. Harkins was a good friend of Jim Morrison. Oliver Stone wanted my friend’s take.
I was a original Hippie and Amber was showing me off, she not wanting to be seen as a wanna-be and McLure groupie. Did she know McClure was the wanna-be? I went and saw him at the first Be In. Ginsberg was on stage. His poem ‘Howl’ was ruled obscene, and when Ferlenghetti published it, he got arrested.
In 1965 I lived on 51st and Miles with Sherry Souza who had Bill Arnold’s baby that Christine came by to see. Sherry was a friend and neighbor of Nancy Hamren who works at the Kesey Creamery. Nancy got me on the bus with Ken Kesey. She had been Bill’s lover. Two blocks up Miles I lived with my wife, Mary Ann Tharaldsen , who was married to Thomas Pymchon. Harkins lived on Shafter. My friend Bryan MacLean, who was in the rock group ‘Love’, played at our wedding. Mary Ann went to Cornell and was good friends of Richard and Mimi.
This is the scene that Bill Carter considered himself a part of. There is a good chance President Carter funded his nephew’s Bohemian lifestyle that Ronald Reagan and Ed Meese exploited in his rise to the White House. It was Reagan’s promise to right-wing voters to destroy the Pagan Cult of the Hippie Love Generation that led him to defeat Carter. Reagan was also aided by Radical Iranian Terrorists who took hostages. The Great Culture Wars, rage on!
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