Said Laurie Anderson: “She tells a story about asking Thomas Pynchon whether she could turn his novel Gravity’s Rainbow into an opera. He said yes, but only if it was played on one instrument: the banjo. ‘Some people have the nicest ways of saying no.'”

[RELATED NEWS: Holy cow! The new Bookforum will be a special issue on Pynchon. Hat tip: Rake and Derik.]

If you’re like me, you avoid CliffsNotes with a passion and go out of your way to remember pedantic book details that the slackers salivating over those by-chapter summaries in those hideous yellow pamphlets will never possibly account for. (For example, I still remember almost two decades after I read Animal Farm that Napoleon was a Berkshire boar.) If you’re also like me, you’re probably curious about who this Cliff character was, the man who opened Pandora’s box back in the day.

Fortunately, Ask Yahoo! has some of the details. It seems that the Cliff in question is one Cliff Hillegass. Mr. Hillegass, who died a few years ago at the age of 83, was a disciple of the “self-starter” school of thought. That’s all fine and dandy, until one considers that being a “self-starter” extends into the unfortunate realm of Dale Carnegie.

But no matter. Hillegass, it seems, was a grad student in geology and physics working as a college representative for Long’s College Bookstore. Cliff cultivated contacts, like many a successful businessman. But here’s the interesting thing: the CliffNotes summary idea was actually pilfered from Canadians!

In the golden days before 1958, when one could walk into an American bookstore without being tempted and when one was forced to discern meaning on text alone, it was a man named Jack Cole (not to be confused with the creator of Plastic Man) who had offered Cole’s Notes for Canadian consumption. And it was Cole who planted the seed during a fateful conversation with Cliff that provided the yellow-backed lifeblood, the idea that was unapologetically cribbed, for many an intellectual deviant during the next fifty years.

Hillegass tried to sell the Nebraska Book Company on the idea. They passed. So Cliff borrowed $4,000 from the bank and began unleashing the beasties from his basement in Lincoln. He started with 16 Shakespearian titles, made a bit of money, and the rest is history. Eventually, in 1998, Hillegass sold his enterprise to IDG for more than $14 million.

To be fair to the original Cliff, he did repeatedly point out that his notes “are not a substitute for the text itself…and students who attempt to use them in this way are denying themselves the very education that they are presumably giving their most vital years to achieve.” Cliff did genuinely love literature, gave $250,000 to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for an English chair and was really into rare lamps and sculpture gardens. But despite Cliff’s quirkiness and generosity, his statement is a bit like telling a pyromaniac with a lighter that he should probably use the disposable Bic in a judicious manner.

Of Jack Cole’s fate, I can find no trace. But I plan to find out what happened to the Cliff before the Cliff. For if he is the true originator and Cliff the mere opportunitist, then we now have another equitable reason to blame Canada.

It’s a sad time for San Francisco cinema. The Roxie is at death’s door. But unlike the bailout in 2002, this time, it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen, unless some enterprising person gives Bill Banning $140,000 in the next 45 days.

This comes not long after the Coronet, the finest single-screen theatre for blockbusters, died a few months ago.

So what’s left? Well, I’ve never given the Castro a dime ever since the owners fired programmer Anita Monga last year and replaced the calendar with safe repertory programming. If the Roxie goes, the only decent single-screen theatres left will be the Balboa and the Red Vic.

Three single-screen theatres compromised in one year alone speaks ill of the future.

• Paul Collins has unearthed a new scandal. It seems that author Misha Defonseca was denied royalties for her Holocaust memoir, Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years. A state appeals court upheld a $22.5 million award to Defonseca and her ghostwriter, Vera Lee of Newton. The specific publisher was Mount Ivy Press, founded by Jane Daniel. The court docket for the case can be found here. While Judge Kantrowitz’s opinion is not yet posted, it appears that the judgment amount may have been amended. The question here is whether $22.5 million was genuinely withheld from the two writers or whether the damages might be punitive. (via Moby Lives)
• Scott Esposito talks with Richard McCann.
• If Bill Clinton’s memoir wasn’t plodding enough, the paperback version will have additional pages. But get this: the extra pages are being added to acknowledge the criticisms about length. Isn’t that a bit like lighting up a cigarette in front of a cancer patient after you’ve been repeatedly asked to put it out?
• Apparently, David Cronenberg wasn’t even in the running for the Palme d’Or for his new film, A History of Violence. As a Cronenberg fan, I blame Toni Morrison.
• The University of Texas, now in the business of withholding books and volumes from undergraduates, will be getting Norman Mailer’s archives. The archives will be shipped with a full-scale reproduction of Mailer’s ego for articulate Third Wave feminists to whittle down in a nanosecond.
• The “dead white male” reading list debate has been revived on the East Coast. But it appears that some teachers may be playing the multicultural card because Great Expectations is too hard for some students to read and because dense books like Heart of Darkness can’t be taught by teachers, even after playing the film Apocalypse Now in class. One reading list replacement is John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. Irving is inarguably white and male and some might argue that he is dead on page.
• A $53,609 check was awarded to Claire Tomkin, a 21 year old fiction writer. The Sophie Kerr Award is the largest undergraduate literary award in the nation.

A new adaptation of Macbeth is in the works. But this one has some interesting casting. Jennifer Connelly, whose beauty and talent often causes me to curl up into a fetal position, will play Lady Macbeth and Philip Seymour Hoffmann will play the infamous murderer. Todd Luiso is attached to direct. The film promises to be “a different kind of Shakespeare”. But whether this means Baz Luhrmann bombast or West Side Story, it’s difficult to say. However, Luiso might be just the guy to do this, given that he previously directed a film adaptation of Tom Stoppard’s short play, The Fifteen Minute Hamlet. (via Romancing the Tome)