Hear Me Mispronounce Things

You know, one podcast wasn't good enough for the likes of me, so I was on yet another podcast. I'm the Alexander the Great of podcasts, I won't stop until there are none left to feel my wrath. Now, I won't listen to them myself. Look! It's not because of the kind and gifted Jen Johans, who hosted the latest one. It's just that the things pouring out of my mouth are so embarrassing. I don't remember what I said on the podcast, except for when I mispronounced the title of the movie VOLVER. You'll have fun hearing me do that! As much fun as I did mispronouncing it! (I don't know how to have fun.)

Grits

Hey! Remember how I fretted that McNeil was never going to present us with any more of his special Bogie bits? I should have known that he had his reasons! The 700-page biography of Humphrey Bogart, from which the bits were extracted, got really sad toward the end, he tells me. Then he gives us what I assume are his last few bits, and they are grim ones indeed. Grim bits, or "grits" as I call them for short. You have been warned! Writes McNeil: "I pick it up every once in a while, but it's sad when he's old before his time, and his wife is probably running around with Frank behind his back - and there's nothing he can do, really...except die." I told you it was grim! And as I have discovered for myself, after reading probably hundreds of celebrity biographies under the auspices of the Million Dollar Book Club, they all get sad toward the end. But I never learn my lesson. Hardly any celebrities get taken up bodily into Heaven like Enoch in the Bible. We should move on to happier things! Like, Adam sent Dr. Theresa and me a package of treats when we were sick. And, a week or two later, when Dr. Theresa was breaking down some cardboard boxes for recycling, she found a package of cookies in one them. A package of cookies we had overlooked somehow when we unpacked Adam's thoughtful gift. A package of cookies! Like a miracle! Is that a happy story? Because I can imagine a peevish reader, you know, Elon Musk or his teen BFF Big Balls, saying, "So what? Where's MY cookie?" Well, let's see. Speaking of the Million Dollar Book Club, we're on Kafka's diaries. So yesterday I was reading about a dream Kafka had about "a greyhound-like donkey, which was very restrained in its movements... its narrow human feet were unappealing to me because of their length and uniformity." This here donkey Kafka dreamed about had a "silvery shining breast." You know what I thought of! The supernatural creature the Padfoot, of course, a description of which provided the epigraph to my story collection MOVIE STARS. I'll save you the trouble of "clicking" on the "hyperlink": "In the neighborhood of Leeds there is the Padfoot, a weird apparition about the size of a small donkey, 'with shaggy hair and large eyes like saucers'... to see it is a prognostication of death." So we're back to death again, you're welcome. Grits!

Divisive Concepts!

Well, Dr. Theresa tells me that the Mississippi legislature, which theoretically represents us and all the other people of Mississippi, has passed a bill banning the teaching of "divisive concepts." ("Click" here for a news article you can read about it.) Now what, you may ask, is a divisive concept? I'll tell you what the Mississippi legislature appears to think, with just a few examples, hardly comprehensive: Do you find it sobering that a Black person couldn't attend the University of Mississippi until 1962? And people got shot and died over it? Divisive! Do you think it was a bit excessive when Oscar Wilde was thrown into prison and sentenced to hard labor for being gay? Divisive! Did you ever say something like "Women should be paid the same as men for doing the same job"? Divisive! Do you like the Billie Holiday song that goes "Them that's got shall get, them that's not shall lose, so the Bible said and it still is news"? Divisive! Do you consider it none of your damn beeswax to sit in judgment over how someone else defines their own identity? Divisive! How about the inscription on the Statue of Liberty? Divisive! And, you know, keep going from there, it's all up to you! Because guess what? Part of the bill says that students can inform on their teachers like little squirmy cheese-eating rats for anything that makes them feel all confused inside like trembling fledglings, if such should be their unfortunate nature. I paraphrase slightly, while mixing animal metaphors, or similes. So, in short, I would say, based on contextual evidence, that the Mississippi legislature is afraid that Mississippi has become too "woke," a word they love to slop around for effect. They think, it seems, that "woke" is the first word that springs to people's minds about Mississippi, and by golly they're going to put a stop to it. Like, people around the world are saying, "I'd love to go to Mississippi, but it's just too 'woke' for me." Anyway, if the Mississippi legislature is reading this, I just want to let them know that no one has ever, ever, ever said that. Now let's move on to another divisive concept: art! I'm going to have a piece in an art show. Divisive? You bet your ass! Because I'm not an artist. OR AM I? Divisive! Sorry, I can't stop thinking about the Mississippi legislature. Maybe it's a mistake to combine these two subjects in a single "post," but I actually think it's okay because nobody reads this "blog." The gallery asked the artists to promote the show, which was all I intended to do in this "post," and then I got the text from Dr. Theresa and my brain exploded. To be precise, the gallery asked us to promote the show on "social media," when you know perfectly well I quit social media a while back and became the acknowledged hero of our crummy times. You may "click" here for details about the art show, which will also feature some nice people who have been mentioned on the "blog" in the past: Andy Ristaino, Lyle Partridge, Pendleton Ward, Pat McHale, and Rebecca Sugar. And many others. Fifty in all, I think, so maybe there are some others who have been mentioned on the "blog" as well, but my old eyes are tired of seeing and my heart is being squashed under the big uncaring butt of the Mississippi legislature. Ha ha, sorry, gallery, how's this for a promo? I love you!

McNeil's Li'l Bible Bits

I guess we're assuming that McNeil has abandoned that 700-hundred-page biography of Humphrey Bogart by which he erstwhile so enchantingly sprinkled our humble undertaking with gossamer fancies. As you know, he's reading the Bible now instead - specifically, the New Testament. His thoughts on the matter, while jaunty, are certainly not blasphemous! "The New Testament is a lot different after a library full of literature and UFO videos," he remarks, for example. "It's funny if you read it the right way," he goes on. Now, before you make an objection, cut McNeil some slack! You'll recall that the lofty scholar Diarmaid MacCulloch pointed out some good jokes and zingers from Jesus and friends in his massive history of Christianity. Certainly you'll recall that! And though I have nothing to back this up, because I don't care, I recall reading a Kurt Vonnegut essay, oh, about 40 years ago, in which Mr. Vonnegut praises what he considers a good joke made by Jesus. But let's get back to McNeil, according to whose observations, Jesus "barely puts up with these dumb-ass disciples he's saddled with." McNeil claims also that Jesus sighs a lot. This is my own extrapolation, but in McNeil's portrait of Jesus, the Savior comes off somewhat like Charlie Brown in the PEANUTS comics. And we all remember, don't we, that Charles Schulz was a famous Christian? I rest my case. In conclusion, I must admit that McNeil and I exchanged heated words - maybe even with some light cussing! - over my preference for the King James Version versus McNeil's special all-time fave the NIV. Who would have ever thought the Bible could cause people to fight with each other? Now I've heard everything! McNeil charmingly refers to the NIV as "The Hep Cat's Old Testament." Somehow I doubt this is the last we've heard from McNeil about the Good Book!

Thin, Lucent Clouds

Well, you know, we've given some attention recently to writers trying to get into the heads of dogs, literarily speaking. So it is only fair I should tell you that in THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES, translated by Sophie Wilkins, Robert Musil kind of skates around writing from the POV of some horses. He admits: "It was hard to comprehend what was going on inside the animals," though he ventures to suspect they "knew nothing of love as a tangible desire, but only as a breath and a haze that sometimes veiled their vision of the world with thin, lucent clouds." You know, this reminds me of some years ago when I watched the 7-hour Soviet movie version of WAR AND PEACE and I sort of perked up when a tree started talking. I was like, "Can this really be in Tolstoy?" And to my recollection, I looked it up somewhere, and yes, that tree had some things to say, and I wrote about it extensively somewhere, but I've searched my "blog" and my files and all my many unpublished novels and my emails to McNeil, and I can't find anything I wrote about the talking tree. We might even say I'm not convinced the talking tree exists, but I don't care about things anymore, so I'm not going to make an effort to find out.

Robot Children of the Future

Hey, remember when I quit social media and a mighty cheer went up throughout the land because I had become the definition of a true hero such as the world had never known? Well, Meta, which used to be Facebook, which was a kind of social medium I quit before quitting any of the others, has been using some of my worst books (without my permission or knowledge!) to teach their magical robot brain, who I imagine has a cute name like Burt, how to "write," in the hope, I assume, that fifth graders of the distant future will no longer have to think up their own patriotic essays for civics class, or whatever the hell AI is for. My greatest wish is that my work will cause the robot's head to explode, like on that one STAR TREK when Captain Kirk asked the robot tricky questions until its head exploded. In happier news, I saw that Andy Beckerman used my new author photo (see above) on his "web" site to promote his podcast. Now, when Quinn took this photo during her visit, I said I was going to use it as my new author photo, but maybe she didn't believe me. But maybe she did. And maybe she was the one who suggested it should be my new author photo. I can't remember; I was busy getting sick at the time. Speaking of which, now Dr. Theresa has Covid! And a tree fell on the house, which is presumably unrelated. Unless there is a witch at work.

Would've Could've Should've

I was reading a book of short stories by my man Mario Levrero, and there's a whole story about a cigarette lighter! Spoilers. This guy's lighter is broken so he starts taking it apart, and as he takes it apart, the pieces unfold and the lighter gets bigger and bigger until he's inside it. I'm not describing it well. But I'm not Mario Levrero. Anyway, you know I would have put this into my cigarette lighter book if I had read it in time. I would have laid a lot of scholarly junk on you about the sublimation of, I don't know, the man within the machine or whatever, and your eyes would have been bugging out of your head, like, this guy's on another level! This guy knows everything about cigarette lighters! But none of that happened and I suck.

The Old Garbage Hole

Remember how I told you I was on a podcast and forgot to promote the pilot that Pen and I made? Well, that's okay! The podcast is out but we just heard the pilot has been pushed down the old garbage hole into reject town. The axe has fallen. We got the old heave-ho. They're not making a show out of it is what I'm trying to say. For more information about how pilots work, see Uma Thurman's monologue on the subject in PULP FICTION. Anyhow! The host of the podcast, Andy Beckerman, is a fine young man. Fine young man! So don't disapppoint him. Don't you dare disappoint him! I won't see you harm a hair on his precious head with your cruel indifference! Don't listen to the podcast for me. No, just push me down the old garbage hole with all my hopes and dreams. It's where I belong! Listen to the podcast for him! Do it for Andy Beckerman! You know, this was my first real podcast appearance to my way of thinking, and I made some rookie mistakes, some of which have already been covered in previous "posts" for your convenience. Well, I should be clear. I've been on two other podcasts, but they don't count. One was about ADVENTURE TIME, and it was recorded back in the days when I would work on a story and then move on to the next story, and the next story, and lots of other stories, and I wouldn't see the episode or know how it had evolved until roughly nine months later, when it appeared on my actual television set, which is a thing people used to have in their homes. So these guys from the ADVENTURE TIME podcast had seen a screener of an upcoming episode ("Football," season 7 episode 5) and had a lot of great questions about it, but I had no idea what they were talking about. My brain was somewhere else by then! So they were a bit put out with me. I don't recall what I ended up muttering about instead. But you could barely call it a podcast. My fault, not theirs! Another podcast was the one I did with Ace Atkins when my book SWEET BANANAS came out. Now, that one, it was exactly the same sort of conversation Ace and I have when we walk around the neighborhood, so I don't count it. It was too easy! Anyway, with Mr. Beckerman, I got the idea that my main job was to talk, so I rushed to fill any microsecond of perceived silence with whatever wild notion pushed its way to the front. I was under the sway of what Edgar Alan Poe referred to as "The Imp of the Perverse."

Beside You All the Time

I'm back! You didn't know I was gone. And in fact, I was never gone. I've been right here beside you all the time, my darling. With Covid! That's right, I finally became part of the hottest trend from five years ago, the signature disease of our special rotten times. A hint of it flutters still about my weakened flesh as I type these heartfelt words. I am sorry it delayed me from telling you about my dream project. For years, I wanted to interview Ace Atkins about his rosy days of golden youth working on the Pauly Shore film JURY DUTY. As you may confirm by "clicking" here, the first installment is already in the can!

Geography

A visit from Quinn! Over dinner, she confessed to Dr. Theresa and me that she is not much on geography. In fact, she related a tale from her childhood, pinpointing the moment when she might have learned a thing or two about the land we call home, but chose a darker path... the path of geographical ignorance. So it was with some excitement that she snapped the photo above, commenting "Mississippi is the exact same shape as Bart Simpson!" I found it a delightful observation. Have others made a similar observation? Probably. But I'm not going to google it because I just don't care. Then Quinn had a biscuit in a place that keeps a Bible for you to read in the bathroom.

Fun

Checked in with McNeil, who says he is reading the Bible, which he described as "fun." Interesting (?) coincidence: when I recorded a podcast recently (it hasn't been released yet), ostensibly to promote the pilot that Pen and I made, I forgot to talk about the pilot at all, but I did manage to yammer incessantly about how much I enjoy the Bible, so everyone has that to look forward to.

The Cry of the Pork Vendor

Okay, Gadda keeps hitting me with sandwiches. It hurts. "A sandwich with a slice of pork. Big enough to last two days." Couple of pages later there's "a kind of hamburger swollen with papers more than a generous salami sandwich"... okay, that one... there's a lot to "unpack" as a scholar might say, or scholars used to say, or did they ever say that? The latter is not a real sandwich. It's a wallet as metaphorical sandwich. It is, per the translator William Weaver, a "rotten wallet." And look, I don't want to eat a wallet. I don't even want to eat a hamburger swollen with papers, or anything rotten at all. Now, I wouldn't turn up my nose at a generous salami sandwich, although I am no longer allowed to have generous salami sandwiches under the constant hectoring threats of a well-meaning physician. But Gadda includes the cry of the pork vendor, "Get you [sic] roast pork here! Nice roast pork... golden brown." Golden brown! Dear Lord, how much of this can I take?

Rich in Ideas

Okay, in THAT AWFUL MESS ON THE VIA MERULANA, Gadda also mentions a "decoy owl on a stick," by which he means, I think, the same object to which both Charles Portis and Sam Shepard referred as a "dummy owl" ("click" here and here for details) and Larry Brown called an "owl decoy" (subtle difference). I don't know exactly what Stephen King called it because I didn't directly quote him regarding that aspect when the occasion arose. Most of all, I feel sure you will want to know that while King, Portis, Shepard, and Brown are talking about literal, physical decoy owls, Gadda's decoy owl is figurative, a way of describing the actions of a certain kind of person. You must take all of these factors into consideration when contemplating owls and plastic owls! When you think about it, Gadda has used owls three different ways. That's what we like to call real old-fashioned owl versatility. But the main thing I am noticing is the sandwiches. As you may recall, Dr. Theresa and I get distracted lately - haunted, really - by the sandwiches presented to us in arts and entertainment. I am going to describe some of Gadda's sandwiches from memory now, because the book is downstairs and I'm extremely lazy. One sandwich has three slabs of prime rib on it as big as terra cotta roof tiles, on a roll of bread "like a carpet slipper" might be a quotation. Well, it's close, if not. Another sandwich has alternating slices of mortadella and roast beef. As I lay in bed reading, I offered the sandwich descriptions aloud to Dr. Theresa. I thought about the sandwiches a lot! I kept picturing a roast beef sandwich I could have sworn we used to get at Alon's Bakery in Atlanta, but I looked it up... that's just how sad I am! And I am not sure it's the same sandwich. Well! I had a doctor's appointment today, so I brought along QUINCAS BORBA, which I have taken out of regular rotation - just temporarily! - because of pressing Million Dollar Book Club business. Let me first say that I was correct! De Assis has attempted no further reflections from a dog's point of view. But! As I sat there in the waiting room, it so happened that the author started a couple of roses talking to each other. Talking roses! But he did it in a way that lets us know he's just pulling our legs... whereas William Maxwell's dog stuff groaned (howled?) with a pathos that would have made Charlie Chaplin himself die of embarrassment. Besides, de Assis once again provides a wonderful justification: "a stretch of wall, a bench, a carpet, an umbrella, are all rich in ideas and feelings, when, that is, we are, too, and this exchange of ideas between men and things is one of the most interesting phenomena on earth."

Knowing Topazes

You know I have to tell you every time I read a book with an owl in it. But did you know I DON'T have to tell you if a book I read has more than one owl in it? Look it up! But sometimes I tell you anyway, because I have really, really great reasons. Like, for example, yes, THAT AWFUL MESS ON THE VIA MERULANA has a "handsome priest" who looks like an owl, but - and I found this out the other night; I'm ashamed of not mentioning it sooner - it also has a real owl in it, well, a real stuffed owl. The reader will of course be reminded of the embalmed owl in ULYSSES. This owl here we're talking about now, though, the moths have really gotten to this here owl, I'm afraid, but its eyes are intact. In fact, they're "knowing topazes, motionless in the night, in time, surviving the ruins of time." You know how it is! I don't know about you, but the knowing topazes in my stuffed owl's head are always going around surviving the ruins of time every time I turn around. You can't make this stuff up! And surely you recall the "cheap glass eye" of a hypothetical stuffed owl, the color of which (eye color, that is) bestows the title upon a Travis McGee novel. At this point I would like to assure you that neither Elon Musk nor his impish teen pal "Big Balls" can put a stop to the important work of the "blog."

Marshmallow Cigar

We have a lot of exciting things to talk about. Not really. Let's see. Something was on my mind. Yes, I was reading QUINCAS BORBA yesterday and the author stepped out from behind the curtain of narrative, so to speak, to recommend that the reader "Pick up TOM JONES, Book IV, Chapter I." All right. So, later, I got in bed and picked up a different book, one called THAT AWFUL MESS ON THE VIA MERULANA, and no sooner had I opened it to the passage where I left off the night before than the author stepped out from behind the curtain of narrative, so to speak, to recommend that the reader "Reread the sad and atrocious tale in WAR AND PEACE, book three, part three, chapter twenty-five." Is any of this interesting? I don't think so. I do think it's funny that the author (Carlo Emilio Gadda, translated by William Weaver) assumes I have already read WAR AND PEACE at least once. And before we go on, I would like to make clear that de Assis and Gadda italicize the titles of the other novels they mention. I only use caps here because I've never learned how to italicize on the "blog," or to make paragraph breaks, either, for that matter, and I never will. Meanwhile, back in QUINCAS BORBA, the author pauses the narrative again to relate an anecdote about the distraught owner of a burning house, and a passing drunkard who asks permission to light his cigar with the flames. Now! This struck me for a couple of reasons. But first I will quote de Assis's bleak commentary: "you don't have to be drunk to light a cigar on another person's misery." Anyhow! I did think that if I had read it in time, I would have found a place for it in my book about cigarette lighters, even though, just for starters, I spent God knows how many sentences tediously and pedantically (and probably inaccurately) ennumerating for the uncaring reader the important differences between cigarettes and cigars. The other thing I thought about was the cartoon I've mentioned here before, in which beatniks use a burning house to roast their marshmallows. Beatniks! When will they ever learn? But I would have mentioned none of this here had not a "handsome priest" appeared in the pages of THAT AWFUL MESS "with a pair of owl's eyes very close to his nose: which, metaphorically, between such eyes, could be compared only to a beak." Now, does that sound "handsome," I ask you? Before you answer, don't forget the book I found in the park, the authors of which seemed to consider owls very handsome indeed. All the strands of the "blog" are coming together. Soon, we achieve the singularity. (I don't know what that is.)

New Favorite Fish

Everybody has been wondering what my new favorite fish is, and it's halibut.

Devil Fox Trombone Opera Summary Mayhem

Yesterday, while I was "blogging" about the fox and its relationship, if any, to the devil, I happened to be listening to an opera called DER FREISCHUTZ, forgive the missing umlaut. And I'll tell you why! Why I was listening to an opera, not why to forgive the missing umlaut. So, I had read an obituary in the New York Times about the singer Edith Mathis, and as I often say, without joking, I get all my ideas about what to read and listen to from the obituaries. If you're not dead, don't bother me! Well! This opera really snagged my attention and I started looking into it. I noticed that there was a fox in the summary! And also, the devil! But none of that is what I decided to tell you. So, while I was looking up more stuff about this opera, I found a "web" site called Interlude. I won't "link" to it, because I can just tell from sad experience it will be a wasteland of zombie "links" one day and then when I'm 78, Lord willing, I'll have to go back and replace the "link." So you can look it up for yourself or trust me when I tell you that it mentions "quiet string tremolos and low trombones, an instrument traditionally associated with devilish doings." So! That reminded me of my famous novel SOUR BLUEBERRIES, which used to be on the "internet" - that's just how good it was! "Internet" good! - until I read that the platform I was using had also decided it was okay to host actual, real-life Nazis. So I was like, "No thanks." Later, somebody told me that the platform had entertained sudden misgivings about hosting Nazis, which I hope is true. But who knows in our hilarious modern times? Anyway, I can quote SOUR BLUEBERRIES here because it doesn't exist anywhere else and never will. And here I go! "Anyway, in today’s meeting I kept talking about trombones for some reason. I saw everybody’s eyes glazing over but I couldn’t stop." Of course, SOUR BLUEBERRIES was a work of fiction (wink, wink!) but that detail came from an ADVENTURE TIME: FIONNA AND CAKE meeting I had. And one of the myriad boring things I was claiming to know was that trombones had been considered the devil's instrument! But I couldn't find any evidence to back that up at the time. I'm not saying I tried. But it seemed like something I might have "learned" in college, when I was a music major, which I'm not sure is a thing I have ever admitted here.

The Adversary

Well, Dr. Theresa gave me a sculpture of a fox (seen here with the cat who picks lottery numbers) for Valentine's Day! I found it bewitching, as did the cats, who first approached it with extreme caution as if it were a living thing. This is why I say animals can understand metaphors. Ha ha! Do I say that? Or symbols! Which is what Dr. Theresa and I started talking about... symbols, that is. Like, what is a fox, symbolically? So I rushed to Cirlot's handy DICTIONARY OF SYMBOLS, which had exactly one sentence about foxes in it. ONE SENTENCE! Come on! You're better than that, J.E. Cirlot! And it wasn't a very encouraging sentence: "A common symbol for the devil during the Middle Ages, expressive of base attitudes and of the wiles of the adversary." And honestly, that's a sentence fragment, with an implied subject and verb ("The fox is"), I guess. There's probably a word for that. Anyway, I was like, don't worry, I have a million dictionaries of symbols around here, I'll grab another one! So this other book of symbols, called THE BOOK OF SYMBOLS, had a much more expansive and satisfying view of foxes. But that's not what I want to talk about, and neither is this: as I was putting together this "post," I noticed that Hans Biedermann's dictionary of symbolism, called DICTIONARY OF SYMBOLISM, has been mistitled on my big long list of books with owls in them since the very first day I established it! Anyway, I'm going to fix that. So get off my back! I hate you! Now, what did I really want to say? Well, I'll tell you. When I got out THE BOOK OF SYMBOLS and turned to the animal section, I accidentally opened right to a page about owls. Now, listen. Nothing in this book tells us anything that you and I haven't already discussed about owls. But now that I know it has owls in it, I have to add it to my list. More work for me! What a life. What makes it all worth it is that no one cares.

Cat Money Update

I've already mentioned this to McNeil, Megan, Ace, Jimmy, and Bill, which is approximately four more people than read this "blog," so there is no need for this "post," except for my scrupulous honesty and shameless braggadocio. But anyway, the cat who picks lottery numbers successfully guessed three of them on last night's Match 5, bringing our total cat winnings so far to $34 + four free lottery tickets.

I Take It Back

Well, old Joaquim Maria de Assis really taught me a lesson. He has become one of my favorite writers, through the lens of his translators Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson. So, you remember how I was passive-aggressively griping like a little sniveling coward about William Maxwell writing a jewel-like novella that is 20% (at least!) from a dog's point of view? So what do you think? Last night I'm reading de Assis's QUINCAS BORBA, and I hit page 43, and I say, wait! Is some of this from a dog's point of view? But! In the next paragraph, de Assis addresses his readers' concerns and says he knows what we're thinking, that, to paraphrase, nobody wants to read something from a dog's point of view. Then he makes his beautiful justification! "Yet the truth is that this eye" (the dog's eye, that is), "which from time to time opens and stares so expressively into space, seems to speak of something that shines deep within, hidden behind something else I cannot put a name to, something that, while it is intrinsically canine, is neither tail nor ears. Oh, the poverty of human language!" I love it. It almost made me ashamed. But 20% is a lot! I'll be surprised if de Assis spends over 1% of his efforts on the dog's point of view. Anyway, it reminded me that I was on a podcast a few weeks ago (it hasn't been released yet) and said a lot of indefinsible things that just kept spewing out of my mouth, including (and I think I'm quoting myself correctly) that "writing is one of the least dangerous professions." Now, what I meant, though I didn't express it clearly, is that you're most likely not going to hurt anybody with your writing, bearing in mind what I used to tell students, when I had them, which was, roughly, "Use all the adverbs you want! It's not going to kill anybody!" In other words, be bold, do wrong things on the page, who cares? Nobody! As for professional writers, I habitually listed crossing guards and short order cooks in a diner as people whose excellence at their jobs was of more immediate and pressing concern to the public. I considered this freeing and inspiring... though, as I now recall, when I was giving a guest lecture in a small classroom on that very point at SCAD, I noted that one student live-tweeted he had never been so filled with murderous rage in his life. Of course, I should have seen that my own advice would extend to a jewel-like novella 20% from a dog's point of view. In case you can't tell, jewel-like novellas make me throw up. Anyhow! The host of the podcast, I believe, understood me to be saying that the writer is never in danger, when I meant, conversely, that the victims of the writer (that is, the readers) were in no danger from the pitiful literary gestures of the writer, however dramatic. But to the host's point, we know that writers of various kinds have been endangered by their words throughout history and in current times, too! Most of us, however, stick to harmlessly exquisite novellas about dogs or... I don't know what other people write about. A thirty-year-old in New York City? Or some other godawful thing. And it's all fine! It's all fine!

Frown on It

I finished that book and it is - this is a very conservative estimate! - 20% from a dog's point of view. I reckoned you literary types frowned on such a thing! To be fair, it's close third-person we're talking about, technically, assuming we grant the dog personhood, which I am inclined to do. Example: "When the man and the old man started bringing things out of the house, the dog couldn't imagine what had got into them."

Enviable Birds

Hey! Remember yesterday when I was reading a book with an owl in it? Well! What if I told you that last night I was reading another book and it had an owl in it too? Don't get overexcited! So, after I finished BUDDENBROOKS (which did not have an owl in it) - buckle up! This is going to be quite a tale! - I thought at first I might like to read Colm Tóibín's novel about Thomas Mann. I picked it up (off the floor! For real! It's chaos here!) and read a little bit and the tone was uncannily like BUDDENBROOKS, which I am sure Colm Tóibín intended, but, to me, it seemed a little bit like I would be reading BUDDENBROOKS all over again, immediately, and as much as I enjoyed BUDDENBROOKS, I thought maybe something else would be in order as I toddled off to slumberland every night with heavenly angels standing guard over the bed. This story gets better and better! Stay with me! So I dug out what looked to be the opposite of BUDDENBROOKS, one of those slender, elegant volumes I hate so much, ha ha! I kid the slender, elegant volumes. And yet it is true that I would often prefer plunging into a thousand-page saga to opening some jewel-like masterpiece by an exquisite miniaturist sure to make my head hurt with all its simple elegance. But I found a promising volume of that ilk, SO LONG, SEE YOU TOMORROW by William Maxwell, which was sent to me as a medicinal aid by my good friend Allyson during my recent convalescence. And it's good! And not quite halfway through it takes an audacious narrative turn that one does not expect in a volume of such elegant slimness! But that's not why we're here, is it? We are here to observe that "hoot owls" appear in the text, among a list of enviable birds that our narrator imagines populating the countryside, while, where he lives, in town, there are only some nice but sedate birds that, to continue paraphrasing, don't make such interesting noises as the hoot owls, mourning doves, whippoorwills, bob whites, and so on. Or maybe I've named them all! This slender volume of pristine elegance made an impression on me after all. And one more! Because I actually winced at a typo in it! Winced! Don't get me wrong, people. I don't mind a typo. I like them, even. I no doubt commit them frequently and don't even know it. Just the other day, I happened to find an old "post" in which I spelled Katharine Hepburn's name as, of all arbitrary choices, Kathryn! Did I fix it? Hell no. You know, I read some article that quoted Elon Musk - and I hate to mention his name, sorry! - a while back, and he said something like (I paraphrase quite roughly) "Robots will be writing good novels within three years." And I was like, "What's a good novel to this guy? One with no spelling errors?" Which made me throw up just thinking about the question. And so I was surprised at myself for physically, not just figuratively, wincing as I did at William Maxwell's typo. But look. If your book is a slender elegant volume of refined prose meant to be read through a jeweler's loupe, your typo stands out. In this case, we find a fairly large dog lying down in the grass and "resting her chin on her four paws." Now! Certainly our author meant to write "her forepaws." I am not the most imaginative person in the world, but I find it impossible to picture a dog resting her chin on four paws at once... whereas I have seen for myself with my own eyes a dog resting her chin on her forepaws. Would the dog not have to be a contortionist circus dog to do the former? And could such a position even be called "resting"? So either it's a typo or I am showing my ignorance about dogs, as I have shown it over the years about so much else. PS! Just as I expected, I was wrong. I should have known better than to accuse William Maxwell of incorrectly describing a dog at rest. That's a specialty of such writers! Anyway, McNeil, while unable to find an image of his own dog sleeping on her four paws, assured me that dogs do it all the time, and sent me the above photographic proof from the "internet." I guess I just couldn't picture a dog curling up. The commonplace things I cannot picture are without number.

Mann Crush

Finished BUDDENBROOKS. Didn't find an owl in it, crushing my previously stated hope - which really seemed possible! - that Thomas Mann would have owls in all his books. He was on a roll there! Oh well. Life just serves up one bitter disappointment after another. I did, however, stumble upon an owl in one of my secondary texts, the ratty, tattered paperback I found stuffed in a hole in the park. As you may recall, it's one of those books where Victoria is the queen and yet there are computers everywhere. You know. That kind of book. And two of the characters go to see a panto... you remember what a panto is! Remember when I used to help out with an annual Christmas panto in Chicago? What? You don't? Then why don't you just go to hell. So they go to a didactic panto featuring communist acrobats, you heard me. That kind of book. The name of the panto is "Mazulem the Night Owl." I think I spelled that right. I don't care, though.

Big Stuff Going On

Well, Dr. Theresa and I have finally done it. We found a way for one of our cats to pick lottery numbers. Result? We've won $18 so far. The cat correctly picked three numbers on a "Match 5" ticket and the "powerball" on another. I informed McNeil first, as it dovetailed so perfectly with his plans to teach a dog to win at blackjack. Let's see what else is in the news. This just over the wire! It seems the Million Dollar Book Club finished reading a biography of Lord Byron, then I grabbed up a mass-market paperback with 3/4 of the cover torn off and the pages all brown with age and sadness, something I found in the big barrel of orphaned books no one wants in the park. And okay! Here comes some of that sweet, sweet synchronicity McNeil loves so much: in a postscript to the Byron book, kind of like the end of AMERICAN GRAFFITI or ANIMAL HOUSE, they tell you what happened to some of the "characters" later in life. For example, Byron's daughter Ada, we are told, "is remembered as the world's first computer programmer." Well! For just that reason, she also turns out to be a character in this random book I happened to snatch from the garbage pile of life. The book is some kind of "steam punk" or "speculative fiction" or I don't know what the hell it is.

Snow

My brother sent me this photo today. I have the original right here in my home office. I asked if he had a copy, and he said he had this thing called an "ELECTRONIC" copy! What will they think of next? Anyhow, my mom and dad are supposed to get snow down there on the Gulf Coast today and this (the photo above) is the only time I can recall it happening. That's what we're pointing at in the picture. The snow! Falling from the sky! Or the snow has stopped and we're explaining where it came from. I'm going to guess it's 1973. No, I'm going to state it! I don't care if I'm wrong. It's the new me for the new times we live in. Fun fact: that house is just a mound of dirt now. That is, there is a pile of dirt where that house used to be. Let me tell you, it's a pretty funny thing to go see the house where you grew up and it's just some dirt. Somebody told me that it was put on a flatbed truck and hauled away? That it had been donated to a church? I don't know. That's what somebody told me.

Our Old Friend Regret

So, McNeil emailed me about a "post" from 2013, of course. I was speculating at the time on the syllabic emphasis due to the sitcom title THAT GIRL, as may be examined, McNeil-like, by "clicking" here. You may be sure that McNeil and I emailed back and forth several times on the subject. In the end, or near it, I should say, McNeil inquired whether anyone within the show, excluding the singers of the theme song, ever used the phrase "that girl," and... well, here. I'll quote my reply: "I seem to remember from being a kid (so take it for what it's worth: nothing) that every episode or almost every episode started with a cold open before the credits, where something wacky would happen then someone would say 'Who did it?' or some other leading question, and someone would point and say, 'THAT girl!'" Not taking me at my word (as I, of course, had advised, as seen above), McNeil watched the beginning of season one, episode two, and got back to me with the results, which I quote here for the remarkable poetry of their expression: "Exactly as you said, Pendarvis, exactly!!! By God, it's uncanny the way you maneuver the little twists and turns of memory and come up with the little nuggets, that....you know, you're like a little squirrel digging up an old acorn buried in childhood right next to Coke and cake, then covered over later in life by booze and bacon - and all tamped down nice and hard by our old friend regret."

The Mark Leyner Owl Problem

I'll tell you the truth. Despite all my big talk, I got tired of THE SOT-WEED FACTOR and switched over to E TU, BABE by Mark Leyner, which I immediately found more agreeable to my way of thinking. There was something I wanted to tell you about it, but I became discouraged because I couldn't think of a passage to quote to describe the narrator (Mark Leyner), at least not a passage I could quote without having to lie down from just thinking of how much typing it would entail. Somehow, this led me to wonder whether I had ever "blogged" about Mark Leyner before, so I did a search and found him in only one spot: my big list of books with owls in them. That's where the mystery began! Strap yourself in! You see, according to the "blog's" "design," it should be a mighty ouroboros, leading nowhere but back to itself. So, if you follow me, how could Mark Leyner's delightful GONE WITH THE MIND be on my list of books with owls in them AND YET not in some other "post" in which the owl was first catalogued properly? So I "clicked" and found that the Leyner allusion led only to a zombie "link" to my long-dead twitter account, a clear violation of "blog" policy (the reader will certainly recall when I departed social media like some kind of haughty titan, giving nary a thought to the destruction I left in my wake). Maybe I was reading GONE WITH THE MIND during the period when I claimed to have stopped "blogging." I have a lot of regrets. I'm ashamed to say Leyner's particular owl, which I have forgotten, is lost forever - at least for our purposes - if I don't suddenly get some unexpected energy and, for starters, walk across my home office, where my copy of GONE WITH THE MIND can be plainly seen from here, which isn't going to happen. Anyway! None of this is the point, because E TU, BABE doesn't have an owl in it... yet. Or maybe at all. BUT! I wanted to tell you, regarding E TU, BABE, that the narrator's favorite TV show is QUINCY, which is also Dr. Theresa's favorite TV show, which is why I wanted to tell you. Last night, I mentioned as much to her. Without context, the comment didn't really go anywhere. For you see, not only was I too lazy to type anything giving you a real idea of Leyner's narrator, Mark Leyner, I was too lazy to even describe the narrator to Dr. Theresa with the words of my mouth. Today, while I was considering all this, I flipped to the rear cover of the book and saw a "blurb" by Jay McInerney, who describes Leyner's protagonist as "a flashbulb-tanned, narcotic-nourished, steroid-swollen, priapic monster." Thanks, Jay McInerney! You did my work for me. Except for the typing. But you cut it way down! So anyway, the narrator's favorite TV show is QUINCY, and, as a result, to quote the book now, "whenever I run across a corpse, I try to take advantage of the opportunity to do a quick autopsy."

Blank

I have three gigantic books going, four if you count the audiobook of FINNEGANS WAKE. Rememeber when I fancied myself a one-book-at-a-time man? At night in bed, instead of old comic books, I now read old BUDDENBROOKS by "blog" favorite Thomas Mann. Then, of course, there's the Pessoa biography I read in bits and pieces as part of my blood pressure ritual... the doctor has me taking my blood pressure less often now, so I may never finish it. Just like Pessoa never finished his masterwork, THE BOOK OF DISQUIET. Ha ha, oh, Pessoa, you're something else. And I have a smaller book next to my favorite chair, but I don't want to talk about smaller books today. I want to talk about the 800-page monster THE SOT-WEED FACTOR by John Barth, which seems like a single joke stretched out to unimaginable lengths, something I can deeply respect. So, in THE SOT-WEED FACTOR, we find "a countenance blank as an owl's," which is fairly neutral as far as owl depictions go in figures of speech. As you know, an owl is "wise" if it's lucky, but more often it's drunk or stupid, etc., at least as far as the owl-hating literary giants of our times are concerned. "Blank," I'll take. It is at least more accurate than the "grinning" and "smiling" owls we have run across elsewhere. Please "click" on the "hyperlinks" for more owl information, or visit your local library.

The Music Critics

Last night as we were watching the John Wayne movie McQ, Dr. Theresa noted that the theme to McQ reminded her an awful lot of the theme to THE TAKING OF PELHAM 123. She conjectured that Elmer Bernstein "got lazy." I replied that while I agreed with Dr. Theresa's observation about the similarity of the themes, Elmer Bernstein didn't seem like the lazy type to me, and I wasn't even sure which movie came first. So I looked it up, and they both came out the same year! So I suppose there was just something in the air, something that went, "Ba-dum-dum-dum, Ba-dum-dum-dum," and composers Elmer Bernstein and David Shire heard it independently with their magical musical ears. (Dr. Theresa also noted, brilliantly, I thought, when watching McQ stride across a lobby, "They should have had John Wayne play Frankenstein." But that's a different subject!) Here's the thing! WHILE we were watching McQ, I received an email from McNeil, who said that sometimes the music of Hank Williams made him think that ol' Hank "went to too many luaus." I don't know about that, although a lot of his songs that aren't depressing are about fun parties. McNeil's remark rests, however, in my belief, or assumption, mostly on instrumentation. "It's not a criticism," insisted McNeil.

The Chicken Soup Occurrence

Here is something I don't care about. But I've been sitting here thinking about it so I'm going to write it down. There I was, minding my own business, slicing up some leeks to go into a big pot of chicken soup, and in my headphones rang the voice of Barry McGovern, who reads the bulk of the audiobook of FINNEGANS WAKE (Marcella Riordan had just finished pitching in with the famous "washerwomen" chapter at the time of the soup making in question), and Barry McGovern said to me, quoting James Joyce in FINNEGANS WAKE, the word "googling," lodged there in an otherwise indecipherable sentence. I double checked it with the physical text once the soup was simmering, and there it was, all right: "googling," right there in FINNEGANS WAKE. Big deal. As we know from previous "blog" adventures, Mark Twain used "googling" in 1884 (as I learned from Roy Blount Jr., or one of his books, though I do know him in person, don't you worry about that!) and Jack Kerouac used "google" in 1959 (after Joyce, of course), and though FINNEGANS WAKE was published in 1939, we know that James Joyce was working on it for 17 years, and still, with all that, he just can't beat Billy DeBeck, who created the comic strip character Barney Google in 1919. (It occurs to me that the oft-touted "invention" of the term "googol" by a nine-year-old in 1920 might not be such a gobsmacking tidbit after all. Maybe he just liked to read the funny papers! Take that, nine-year-old! DAMN! I see that wikipedia has beaten me to this speculation, which is fitting, given my apparent obsession with the prerogitives of chronology. Hoist with my own petard!) Oh! What the hell else? I know nothing about the game of cricket, or, really, about the insect the cricket, except for my possibly false knowledge that the latter makes music with its legs... please, entomology pedants, tell me where I'm wrong! I beg of you! Anyway, I vaguely recall that in the movie HOPE AND GLORY, a grandfather threatens his grandson with some sort of cricket move he calls a "googly." I looked it up just now, and the first googly was thrown, if that's the correct word, by Bernard Bosenquet in 1900 (the last year of the 19th century, I say, which is why the momentous event is not recorded in my famous history of the 20th), so he beats everybody except Mark Twain, assuming that Bosenquet named the googly as well as putting it into practice, and I just don't care enough to find out, which is funny, because I care enough to type all this, just barely.

Shrug

Hey, remember in 2012 when I told you some things that Thomas Adès said about Mahler? You do, huh? LIAR! Why must you always lie to me? Does it make you feel big and important? Anyway, that's okay, because I want to tell you something else Thomas Adès said about Mahler, specifically about two notes at the beginning of the 9th symphony: "It contains a fruitful paradox: it resolves onto a dissonance... If he'd planned, he'd never have started. That is why it's so moving when he does work through to a logical way of resolving the paradox. It's a very Viennese answer, a shrug which as if accidentally makes the problem disappear." Thomas Adès has so many mean, hateful things to say about Mahler all the time that when he throws him a backhanded compliment, the reader turns giddy, as if the big turkey just arrived at Bob Cratchit's with all the trimmings. But that's not the point. The point is that it's connected with what Dr. Theresa and I were talking about on New Year's Day. You remember that, don't you? LIAR! Are you trying to gaslight me? Allow me to quote one of my many, many unpublished novels: "Alternately, consider a novelist who is writing to kill time, and to distract himself, or herself, from the more unpleasant aspects of a long period of unemployment. Such a person would inadvertently produce a number of annoying little strings that needed to be knotted up, like the haunting interval in Mahler’s Ninth..." and from there I go on to work in a Thomas Adès quotation, which is what everyone wants in a novel. And, as you can see, it is also a novel about, in part, a novelist, and everybody goes absolutely 100% ape for that too! "Why can't there be more writing about writers?" people are always shouting in my face all the time. 2025 is the year I give up. Again.

Blank Spots

Well, you knew I would read GILGAMESH eventually, because you know just about everything, don't you? You're a real smart guy, huh? Looks like we got us a college fella. Yes, I was reading GILGAMESH and Enkidu was putting a curse on Shamhat... don't worry! He takes it all back a couple of pages later. Anyway, he's like "Owls will roost in your"... and that's it! What of hers will owls roost in? We just don't know! Much like Humpty Dumpty, GILGAMESH hasn't been put back together again. There are lots of missing pieces. In this translation, by Sophus Helle, there are blank spots on the page where the missing pieces would go. Later in the same stanza, for example, it's blank spot, blank spot, blank spot, "purple" blank spot, blank spot, blank spot, blank spot, blank spot, "sullied thighs" blank spot, blank spot, "thighs sullied" blank spot, blank spot. So what's going on there? We may never know how those thighs got sullied or what was purple. Luckily, as Sophus Helle mentions in his introduction (which also includes not one but TWO Star Trek allusions [see also]), they are finding new pieces of GILGAMESH all the time. There's even a "website" ("click" here) where all the latest bits and pieces of GILGAMESH can be tinkered with at your leisure. Speaking of poetry, I read a New York Times obituary of the French poet Jacques Roubaud, which quoted him as saying "an Oulipian author is a rat who himself builds the maze from which he sets out to escape." And it's really funny (is it, though?), because Dr. Theresa and I were talking about something similar yesterday as we drove back from Memphis, where we had celebrated the New Year. Dr. Theresa was saying that she sometimes saw the act of writing as consisting of nothing but problem-solving, and I was like, "Yeah, it's interesting, because you're solving the problems but you're also creating the problems." And we talked about that for a while. Look, it's a long drive! Not that long. Anyway, so I'd say Jacques Roubaud's aphorism applies to all writers. Or people! And no, I never heard of Jacques Roubaud before reading his obituary. I get most of my knowledge from obituaries. I'm not a big smart guy like you, smart guy.