Here’s a nifty fan-made tribute to the late Mr. Westlake.
Via Jesse Willis at SFFAudio.
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Donald Westlake Memorium |
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Donald Westlake MemoriumHere’s a nifty fan-made tribute to the late Mr. Westlake. Via Jesse Willis at SFFAudio. |
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Really nice! Kudos to the creator of that video. I hope some of the interviews are referenced over on the actual site, as I’d like to hunt them down. What a sweet pad Westlake had up there in upstate New York.
Well, yes, I am a fan, of course, but I’m also his son, which is why I had access to all this footage. It’s not really a “fan video.” It’s a memorial tribute.
Enjoy your site and appreciate your love for all things Parker.
Walkerp, thanks! I haven’t posted any of the original interviews but I think I can skirt copyright on one or two. I’ll post links if I can track them down and upload at some point. Don was interviewed on the Leonard Lopate show a couple times and I think the audio is still available on Lopate’s site.
Regards,
Paul Westlake
Thanks, Paul, for that great compilation! Had not seen this post previously! I, too, would very much like to see or hear the original interviews. Your Dad was one of a kind and perhaps my all around favorite author. My condolences and if you have any DEW stories you want to share with us I hope you will in some form or another.
I uploaded the TV interview used in the Memorium: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xVtzOCf_YM
It’s from 1994 but I don’t have any more info. The only thing I remember that was written on the VHS tape was “WB Interview,” which could mean practically anything. If I can dig up the original tape sometime, I’ll try to find more info. Perhaps an intrepid DEW fan out there knows more about this.
Thanks for the kind words, Jeff. I’ll tell you one thing off the top of my head that most DEW fans kinda sorta know but not to the full extent. Most people know that Don wrote all his work on a manual Smith-Corona typewriter. (Those typewriters were so ubiquitous in our lives at one point that I took one to my first semester of college in ’86.) What most don’t know is how quickly and accurately he typed. I don’t know if he was ever properly tested (after the Air Force) but his WPM had to be somewhere hovering around 170 or 180 at close to 98% accuracy. When he typed, it sounded like bursts from a machine gun. Try typing anything really fast on a manual typewriter and watch the keys jam in the middle. Almost never happened to him. He got a computer mainly for the internet and once started writing a story on it, but he told me he needed something that “fights back.” Plus, the machine he had was actually too slow to keep up with him (it wasn’t a very fast machine for the time and machines were pretty slow to begin with). Today’s computers would have no problem but back then, he would type a paragraph and wait for the characters to fill the screen. Took him about two minutes to abandon the notion of typing stories on a computer.
Hope that was worth the two minutes out of your life.
Regards,
PW
Absolutely, Paul, but no worries…I’m a fast reader and that only took about a minute!! Thanks for the biographical ‘detail’!!