Form, Craft, and Influence

Hey! Remember when I was reading a translation of THE ODYSSEY by Emily Wilson? Well, I liked it so much that I thought I'd see what else she had done. And she had written a biography of Seneca! So I'm reading it. All right. You have remembered one thing. Now I need you to remember another thing. Ready? Okay! So, remember when, for some reason, I was "teaching" some graduate students in a course called "Form, Craft, and Influence," ha ha!? (Ha ha was not part of the title of the class.) Naturally, we were reading the Nick Tosches biography of Dean Martin. (Dean was the influence, not Nick Tosches, God love him anyway. But I think Nick Tosches is a bad influence unless you are actually Nick Tosches. I could say the same for Cormac McCarthy now that I am beginning to recall some of the gore-drenched prolixity I was forced to run through my eyeballs when I "taught" a couple of his excitable young imitators.) But remember how one of the students said, regarding Dean Martin, something like, "Why are we reading about this guy? He's just a jerk!" And remember how I just sat there with a dopey look on my face because... I mean... who entrusted me with a classroom, anyway? (I think it was Barry Hannah!) Well, I was thinking about that guy (the student, not Barry) as I read Emily Wilson's biography of Seneca. I was like, gee, I wonder what that guy would think about Seneca! Because Seneca has done a couple of things so far that would make Dean Martin blush. Like helping an emperor murder his mother. Yes, I think that would make Dean Martin blush.

The Latest St. John Chrysostom News

Now, I am sure you recall 2016 as the year when I was reading a book with St. John Chrysostom in it, but it was too big to take on the airplane, so I brought a smaller book on the airplane, and to my surprise, it ALSO had St. John Chrysostom in it! Okay, stay with me. Now cast your mind back to mere days ago, when I took NIGHTWOOD on an airplane, but didn't finish reading it, even though it is short, because of all the things to distract me on the airplane. Well, yesterday, I continued NIGHTWOOD, and a character asks, "Am I the golden-mouthed St. John Chrysostom, the Greek who said it with the other cheek?" He goes on to answer himself, and bear in mind, these are not my words, but those of Djuna Barnes, writing in 1936: "No, I'm a fart in a gale of wind, an humble violet under a cow pad." Take it up with Djuna Barnes! She died in 1982 and is beyond caring whether or not you like fart jokes. You know, as I continued to read, and got deeper, I began to realize - again to my surprise! I get surprised so much! - of whom the rhythm and flow of the words in this book remind me... Barry Hannah! I almost didn't "post" any of this because I knew no one would care but then I decided to "post" it because I knew no one would care.

Big Times

Oxford! Come on! Bill Boyle ("William Boyle" for book cover purposes) is reading from his new book at Off Square Books on Wednesday, the usual time. His book is called DEATH DON'T HAVE NO MERCY, which is easy to remember because it really don't. I'm on the last story, and they've all been great. Kent Osborne bought a copy when he was in town. I think he read the first couple of stories while he was waiting at the counter for some Gus's Fried Chicken, and he was blown away, as the vernacular would have it. In yesterday's ADVENTURE TIME meeting Kent started describing one of Bill's stories to everybody and I was like, "Stop! I haven't read that one yet." But later I realized (while reading it with THE BIRDS on in the background) it's one I had the privilege and honor of hearing Bill work over at Good Idea Club. "He's like Bukowski," Kent said of Bill's work yesterday, "but with more..." "Stabbing?" I suggested. We agreed, too, that there were moments of the highest, darkest humor in Bill's grim world. AND THEN! On Saturday, head over to The End of All Music for Record Store Day. They've made

a vinyl LP (pictured) of our late pal Barry Hannah talking up a storm. Please muster the energy to "click" here for some fascinating details. I know it's hard! It's hard for you to "click" on things, you poor little baby. But there are only 500 of these precious gems so get there early. I really don't ask much of you.

For McNeil Only

This one is just for McNeil. The rest of you (there are two of you, I think) can skip it. But I happened to find out by accident that Jerry Lewis and Public Enemy were going to be on THE TONIGHT SHOW last night. I contacted McNeil right away. He loves Jerry Lewis and Public Enemy. But I found that McNeil was going to be unable to watch the show. So he asked me to file a report. Here is that report. Jerry entered, looking frail but game, as the Roots played him on with the Beastie Boys hit "Hey Ladies" - the significance of which to Jerry we have remarked upon before. When he arrived at his seat he noticed to his apparent consternation that his necktie was hanging out of his jacket. "WAAAAAH! I thought it was my tongue," said Jerry, which got a big laugh. Then he appeared to tuck his necktie into his pants... on purpose? I couldn't tell. Of course, the great thing about Jerry is that so often YOU JUST CAN'T TELL. Maybe tucking your necktie into your pants is an old show biz trick. Jimmy Fallon started reciting scenes from THE NUTTY PROFESSOR to Jerry Lewis, which was nicely intended, but odd. I will paraphrase from memory. Jimmy Fallon was like, "And you go to the gym and lift weights but then you drop the weights without letting go of them and they stretch out your arms like six feet long. But it's not over. Because then you're in bed that night and your feet are itching and a hand comes out and scratches your foot, and it's your hand because your arms were stretched out really long." It reminded me of that old SNL sketch with Chris Farley interviewing Paul McCartney. Jerry took it well. Well, no, at some point he cut off Jimmy Fallon's rambling by handing him what was apparently a shocking and obscene note. I don't know what happened there. It was mysterious. Then Jimmy Fallon started describing a scene from THE ERRAND BOY, the famous pantomime to music behind the executive's desk. They showed a clip of it and Jerry said, "When I write, I think in terms of music," which is something Barry Hannah used to say, more or less. Then Jimmy Fallon tried to get him to do a bit in which he and Jerry Lewis would "talk" to each other by lip-syncing to the instrumental music of the Roots. Jerry was confused at first. I suppose he was thinking about how dumb the idea was, how many weeks it had taken him to conceive, design, rehearse, shoot and edit that ERRAND BOY set piece, but he went ahead and tried. You could see the wheels turning and it was nice. The Roots played some music and Jimmy Fallon flapped his gums but Jerry introduced some hand gestures to good effect and really tried to engage with Jimmy Fallon... to push the bit into going somewhere. It didn't. Then Jerry told a dirty joke about a parrot. Public Enemy came out and did their song "Public Enemy #1." I half expected Flavor Flav to give a shout-out to Jerry Lewis in his introductory verse. He didn't, but I see some similarities there, especially in verbal mannerisms, but some of the physicality too. I'm not suggesting direct influence, of course, just expressionistic instincts in common. Think of Flavor Flav's "Cold Lamping": "We got Magnum Brown, Shooshki Palooshki/ Supercalafragahestikalagoothki/ You could put that in your don't know what you said book/ Took-look-yuk-duk-wuk." More Jerryish lyrics would be tough to find. Especially "Shooshki Palooshki." Or "You're eating dirt because you like eating dirt from the graveyard/ You put gravy on it." Can't you just hear Jerry yelling "You put GRAVY on it!"? And when Flavor raps about "chocolate, strawberry, sarsaparilla" who can help but recall Jerry's rhapsody on strawberry milkshakes from THE COLGATE COMEDY HOUR? What? Everybody? Okay.

"Blog"trospective 14: Graveyards

If there's one thing everybody loves it's a graveyard! So let's make a list of "links" to all our graveyard-related "posts" (and don't forget to "enjoy" our previous "blog"trospectives: 1. Tom Franklin 2. Phil Oppenheim 3. Movies 4. The Moon 5. Sandwiches 6. The United States 7. The Beach Boys 8. Arnold Stang 9. Books With Owls in Them 10. Gelatin 11. Monkeys Riding Dogs 12. Kent Eating Chicken 13. When Megan Lived Here)... GRAVEYARDS! APOSTLE by Tom Bissell features visits to the graves of all twelve apostles---artsy project includes grave desecration---bad idea for McNeil's tombstone, a---barbecue next to a graveyard---bats at Faulkner's grave---being funny after a funeral---"The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed's Church"---Bissell, Tom; plays Marvel Ultimate Alliance while he should be searching for the apostles' graves---Bissell, Tom; searches for the graves of all 12 apostles---block of wood psychologically represents a coffin---"blogs" are like tombs---Bohemond's gravestone---Britton, Connie; sighted when we were staying at a motel with a graveyard attached to it---character in DRACULA wakes unclad in a churchyard at night---churchyard haunter---churchyard with gravestones in THE COMPANY OF WOLVES---circus performers' graveyard---coffin inspectors---coffinmaker who yells about his craft, a---confounded from beyond the grave---corpse preserved in a bog; Freud allegedly likened to---cowherd lies in open graves---Dee, Dr. John; grave of used as touchstone in children's game---discussion of appropriate things to carve on gravestones---doll cemetery---dream of---eating dirt from the graveyard---engraving of Dr. Dee and Edward Kelly hanging out with a spirit in a churchyard---Evans, Linda; slaps a man with a leather strap at her father's grave---exhumation of Tycho Brahe---fairybabes hang around in---famed ventriloquist confronts his mother's ghost at her grave---few loose rails thrown over Meriwether Lewis's grave, a---flea climbs into the grave of the flea who loved him---frogs as quiet as grave-rocks---funeral bell---ghosts break up their graves---Gigot peeks through some graveyard shrubbery at his own funeral---grave gone to without its occupant being aware of the entire catalog of celebrity memoirs I have read---graves of the Scribner family---graveside service for Thomas Paine poorly attended---graveyard right there in the parking lot of a Ramada Inn---guy dug up from his grave and mocked on a throne---hair growing out of cracked-open tombs---Hayden, Sterling; attends the funeral of Marshal Tito---I am reminded of something Bill Taft said to me in a graveyard---Johnson, Robert; disputed gravesites of---Lee, Sir Henry; has an effigy of Mistress Vavasour placed on his grave---listening to "Brick House" by the Commodores on the way to Meriwether Lewis's grave---man buried under the flagstones of a kitchen---man who collects coffins, a---mansion where the arrangements for Jayne Mansfield's funeral were made, the---Mature, Victor; consults the caretaker of a cemetery---McNeil ponders a career as a graverobber---men run howling about graves---monkey ghost described outside of tomb---monks rob a grave!---mortuary makeup man---Murray, Bill; attends the funeral of Elvis Presley---my brother attends Michael Jackson's memorial service (there's no graveyard here but you can "click" back on several interesting "posts" about the day, so why not?)---Naked-Rumped Tomb Bat---night-crows on tombs---old tombs break open, releasing hordes of wandering dead---ominous crow cawing in a graveyard's barren tree---"Pale Pity" asked to consecrate Meriwether Lewis's final resting place---parrot screams curse words at Andrew Jackson's funeral---passing the resting place of Meriwether Lewis without stopping---pasta recipes inscribed on tomb---PET SEMATARY---pigs get skinny after drinking from a trough made from a coffin---pinball machines as coffins---"Policeman at Cemetery"---purported King Arthur and Guinevere dug up from their graves and wrapped in silk---resting place of the Biblical Jacob---Roman vampire burial site---Saunders, George; writes book set in a graveyard---shirtless man reads at grave---shrugging disrespectfully at graveside---Shubuta cemetery---STRIKING DISTANCE (film) concludes at cemetery---supposed gravestone of Till Eulenspiegel---toad dressed as Elvis suggested as candidate for formal burial in a grave---tomb of Talbot, the terror of the French---tombs of the prophets, the---"Tombstone Blues"---trip to Poe's grave postponed in favor of GILMORE GIRLS finale---UFO lands behind a cemetery---Van, Bobby; grave of---where all biographies end---witches dance on Berlioz's grave---Yorick skull (from gravedigger's scene in HAMLET)---York, Joe; makes a complex and satisfying visual pun using a gravestone---youthful graveyard encounters of Megan Abbott and Barry Hannah---Zola heroine lives next door to a drunken undertaker.

Alarming Woman in a Cemetery

Megan Abbott came back to town - for just one night, alas! - to talk about her excellent new novel THE FEVER. I did a little Q&A thing with her at Square Books and encouraged her to tell the story about when she, as a child, saw two drunken old salts perched together on a New England gravestone, yelling imprecations at those who would disturb the dead, and one of them had a big, vivid, and fresh wound on his neck. After the event, Jimmy, who was present, said the story reminded him of the time Barry Hannah "saw a naked woman on a gravestone and it scared him." I told Jimmy I was unfamiliar with the story. He said it was in an essay he had sent me. I remembered the essay, but I did not remember the naked woman on the gravestone, a strange thing not to remember. I remembered some things about writing from the essay. Here's a slice I have cut and pasted for you with little skill:

Later, on the same subject, Barry observes, "The well-groomed square will often outwrite the professional hippie, and I have witnessed the unsettling fact that fine novels come from men and women with so little personality they are not even annoying." There is a Roger Miller song called "Squares Make the World Go 'Round" that is concerned with a similar subject, in which Miller posits that "Government things can't be made do/ By hipsters wearing rope-soled shoes." But what of the naked woman on the old tombstone? Jimmy sent me the essay after a Good Idea Club that had gone especially late, and I was probably asleep and/or intoxicated when I read it. My poor eyes must have missed the section that began "That summer I met an alarming woman in a cemetery..." Rereading it, or reading it for the first time, I see that she is sitting on a grave, but she does have her clothes on. Later there is some partial disrobing. The cemetery is next to a reservoir where UFOs are said, by a neighbor, to land to "take on water."

I'm Not Your Psychiatrist

"Click" here to read an interview I did with Megan Abbott for LENT. The online magazine, not the period of sacred deprivation! Maybe before you read it you will want to check out the following list I have helpfully compiled of people we mention by name in our interview, in order of appearance. That doesn't even include the people we mention, but NOT by name, such as our parents! Perhaps such a list will encourage you to read the interview. Or maybe you will become discouraged and lethargic! Maybe you will think this list is a good enough substitute for reading the interview. Or maybe your reaction will be one of blankness and disregard. I'm not your psychiatrist! 1. Jerry Lewis (Ha ha, I know! I can't help it. I literally cannot have a conversation without mentioning Jerry Lewis - usually right at the outset, like this.) 2. Beth Ann Fennelly 3. William Faulkner 4. Sigmund Freud (Ha ha! Just as I cannot have a conversation without mentioning Jerry Lewis, Megan is sure to bring up old Sigmund Freud. It just happens! Jerry Lewis is to me as Sigmund Freud is to Megan Abbott.) 5. David Lynch 6. Dashiell Hammett 7. James M. Cain 8. Eleanor Parker (pictured) 9. Arlene Dahl 10. Rhonda Fleming 11. Douglas Sirk 12. Georges Simenon 13. Anton Chekhov 14. Bill Griffith 15. Dorothy B. Hughes 16. Tom Franklin 17. Richard Dreyfuss 18. Rosemary Clooney 19. Nathaniel Hawthorne 20. Flannery O'Connor 21. Mickey Spillane 22. Raymond Chandler 23. John Banville 24. Humprhey Bogart 25. Ross MacDonald 26. Eudora Welty 27. Spencer Tracy 28. Katharine Hepburn 29. Margaret Millar 30. Barry Hannah 31. Harold Bloom 32. Hamlin Garland 33. Ernest Hemingway 34. Sherwood Anderson 35. Dean Martin Okay, I'm tired of making "links" now and nobody "clicks" on them anyway. 36. Marilyn Monroe 37. Stan Laurel 38. Oliver Hardy 39. Bud Abbott 40. Lou Costello 41. David Niven 42. Nick Tosches 43. Betty Hutton 44. Judy Garland 45. Danny Thomas 46. McNeil (I'll mention here, uselessly, that McNeil recently had a short story up at LENT... I told about it on twitter, which many more people read than this "blog.") 47. Preston Sturges 48. Billy Wilder 49. Dr. Theresa 50. Dave Kehr 51. Bob Hope 52. Andrew Sarris 53. Wallace Shawn 54. Fred MacMurray 55. Shirley MacLaine 56. Cameron Crowe 57. Gloria Swanson 58. Nancy Olsen 59. Audrey Wilder 60. Alfred Hitchcock 61. Pat Hitchcock 62. Alma Hitchcock 63. Vincent Minnelli 64. H.P. Lovecraft 65. Raymond Carver 66. Edith Wharton 67. Michael Chabon 68. Louisa May Alcott 69. Philip Roth (Reading PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT recently, I came upon a line that might serve as an epigraph for this interview: "The disproportionate and the melodramatic, this is my daily bread!") 70. Claudia Roth Pierpont 71. Scott Phillips - Be sure to use your newest computer while reading the interview. On my old one from 2004 the italics don't show up. But on Dr. Theresa's spiffy newer model, they do! And Megan and I EMPHASIZE lots of WORDS.

Remember to Have the Marble Scratched

Something Natasha Allegri just tweeted ("SILKY CHICKENS" read the entirety of her tweet) made me think of some phrases from ABSALOM, ABSALOM!: "a cloud of chickens" and many pages later "a cloudy swirl of chickens." I had an actual vision of William Faulkner standing in his yard watching somebody (Estelle? Would she feed the chickens?) feeding the chickens, and thinking, "Wow! Those chickens are like a cloud. That is like a cloud of chickens." Old Faulkner! He is Shakespeare one minute and Beckett the next. "... all of a sudden it's all over and all you have left is a block of stone with scratches on it provided there was someone to remember to have the marble scratched and set up or had time to, and it rains on it and the sun shines on it and after a while they dont even remember the name and what the scratches were trying to tell, and it doesn't matter." Just twenty or so pages later here he is on the same subject (mortality) describing a man's whole life in a succinct deadpan that anticipates Beckett's later innovations: "Yes. One day he was not. Then he was. Then he was not." You know, I almost thought this book had an owl in it, like every other book, but it was "huge fowl," my eyes tricked me, "the trees along the road not rising soaring as trees should but squatting like huge fowl." I have high hopes for an owl, though: there has already been a metaphorical bat ("He was the light-blinded bat-like image of his own torment" - ouch!) and as we have seen in DRACULA and as we have seen in JANE EYRE, bats and owls are cheeks by jowls - ha ha! that's a little rhyme I just made up - in your fancier literature. In conclusion, I am glad Faulkner did not have to bring ABSALOM, ABSALOM! to a fiction-writing workshop nor attend much college at all. "Hey, so this guy's dad is talking to him on the porch for like 25 pages? And then out of nowhere the dad goes into the voice of this other dude he never met? And like gives a whole long complicated monologue from the point of view of GOD in this other guy's voice he never even met?" And Faulkner would have been like, "Yeah?" That part made me think of Barry Hannah's story "Nicodemus Bluff" when the narrator's father "when he played chess, became the personality of a woman, a lady of the court born in the eighteenth century... The woman would 'invest' Dad and he would win at chess with her character, not his own man's person at all... The chess game, as it went on, changed him more and more into a woman, a crafty woman."

Faulkner's Grave II

I shouldn't even mention this here because I already mentioned it on twitter and lots more people read twitter than read this "blog" because nobody reads this "blog," but I had dinner with Jimmy Cajoleas and Bill Boyle a while back and Jimmy interviewed me for Lent Magazine with Bill piping in occasionally and you can read the interview now. It features TRUE FACTS about lots of your pals from the "blog." In order of appearance: Kelly Hogan, Bill Taft, Caroline Young, Dr. Theresa, Brian Halloran, Kent Osborne, Mark Osborne, Barry Mills, Tom Haney, Gus Jordan, Barry Hannah, Adam Muto, Pendleton Ward, Tom Franklin, my dad, and Chris Offutt. Don't you wonder what sartorial effect ON THE ROAD had on Chris Offutt? Well, now I am telling his beeswax in a public interview! Here is a picture Kent took of me at Faulkner's grave. I didn't like it because when I shrug disrespectfully at Faulkner's grave my fat cheeks puff out grotesquely but Pen said "it looks like an album cover" so everybody look at my fat cheeks. McNeil wrote me about that previous picture from Faulkner's grave: "Did Tom put his hair in curlers for that trip to Faulkner's grave?" No! Maybe a ghost was making it stand up. Speaking of which, I started to read ABSALOM, ABSALOM! and it's pretty great. (Ha ha, I just realized that the Bible story of Absalom has fateful hair in it though that is not what I meant. I meant ghosts. And Faulkner I guess.) I have been terrified of ABSALOM, ABSALOM! for years, so I'm surprised to find myself breezing through it - or, if that is an exaggeration, so thoroughly engaged. There's lots of stuff like this: "his very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth. He was a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts..." So that's pretty all right, huh? And I'd like to remind all the exclamation point haters that there is an exclamation point in the title! But Square Books just called to tell me that the new reprint of ANCIENT EVENINGS is out, so now if I wanted I could read about the hero eating bat poop. But I think I've made a commitment. I'm only on page 17 of ABSALOM, ABSALOM! but it feels like page 50. Hey, speaking of Bill Taft (see above; ha ha! I know you don't exist, so why am I telling you to "see above"?) I got my print quarterly from the Los Angeles Review of Books in the mail yesterday. It's the first issue and I have three very short stories in there and one of them which lasts for two sentences MIGHT be a SOMEWHAT TRUE STORY of Bill Taft in which the character's name is "Bill" but it's fiction so forget what I just said.

Narcotic Effluvium Christmas

I was reading KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL by Anthony Bourdain and NAKED LUNCH by William S. Burroughs at the same time. I picked up the latter and read, "Like a vampire bat he gives off a narcotic effluvium, a dank green mist that anesthetizes his victims and renders them helpless in his enveloping presence." And for a minute my brain sincerely tried to figure out which of Anthony Bourdain's friends he was writing about, because that's kind of how Anthony Bourdain writes about his friends! But of course it is a monster from NAKED LUNCH. I briefly thought I was reading the other book, you see. Grand times! Grand times here on Christmas Day in the morning. Interestingly (ha ha ha! I know you are not interested - you don't even exist!) Bourdain and Burroughs both enjoyed childhoods of wealth and privilege (about which both have written; Burroughs: "I remember the lamplighter lighting the gas streetlights and the huge, black, shiny Lincoln... I could put down one of those nostalgic routines about the old German doctor who lived next door and the rats running around in the back yard and my aunt's electric car and my pet toad that lived by the fish pond") and went on to shoot up in grim alleyways, is that interesting? (Do note: as I was typing this, Bourdain appeared on twitter, assembling a Barbie Dream House.) I leave you with the final words of "A Christmas Thought" by Barry Hannah, which I recently read aloud (from Jimmy's copy) at the holiday meeting of Good Idea Club (seen here; photo by Bill Boyle, featuring a portion of Lizzie): "When you read and wonder, for six seconds, about the random, pointless violence of these days, then are blissful it was not you, having, really, a better day, stop and think: Could not these felons be, really, God's children, loose, adept, so hungry and correct in our world?"

Tragic Hair

Finished BIG SUR and started VANITY OF DULUOZ, which was given to me by Bill Boyle, and which starts out in a cranky-old-man-these-no-good-kids-these-days kind of tone. Kerouac pouts in the first paragraph of VANITY OF DULUOZ, "Insofar as nobody loves my dashes anyway, I'll use regular punctuation for the new illiterate generation." But it wasn't the punctuation that got me down about BIG SUR, or not only, though there were dashes aplenty. Yeah, that one went over my head, I guess, though it pepped up near the end with an elaborately gross nightmare or hallucination about Vulture People that was good and horrible to read on a stormy night, which I did. Duluoz spent most of BIG SUR wondering whether he was crazy or everyone else was crazy, a predicament not dissimilar to Oliver's in GREEN ACRES. Hey! It suddenly occurs to me that one of the narrator's central preoccupations in BIG SUR was country living vs. city life, a dialectic perhaps most eloquently explored in the GREEN ACRES theme song. I don't know, maybe it IS the punctuation, but VANITY OF DULUOZ is putting me in a better humor. Kerouac either pathetically or hilariously (or both) broods on tender grudges from when he was playing high school football: "I had to sit there and watch some of those bums prance and dance, one little leg sprain and there's heroic Pietryka making sure to remove his helmet when he was helped limping off the field so everybody could see his tragic hair waving in the autumn breeze." That seemed like a Barry Hannah sentence to me, with some of the same immediate, wounded poetry of sarcasm, not to mention the subject matter, and I remember talking to somebody a while back about whether or not Barry was influenced by Kerouac, but I don't remember the person or the answer.

Gargoyle Hugs

When we were walking up the dark path to Faulkner's house the other night, something made a noise behind a tree and then it popped out to scare us and it was none other than Bill Griffith, the man who runs Faulkner's house. He's a big horror movie fan - he used to watch them regularly with Barry Hannah, the gorier the better - and he told us he had just seen EQUINOX and liked it. So naturally it shot right to the top of our Halloween film festival list. We watched it, and I don't want to tell you anything about it! I want you to watch it for yourself. Even the dvd menu screen had too many spoilers for my taste. So just close your eyes and get a friend or loved one to select "Play Movie" for you! We also watched DREAMS IN THE WITCH HOUSE and a 1972 made-for-TV movie called GARGOYLES, all about a young woman in various halter tops and her sometimes shirtless dad, who fight reptilian winged demons. In one scene, two of the "gargoyles" hug! And then, as they break their embrace (pictured) and one gargoyle moves away, the other gargoyle swats the first gargoyle affectionately on the rump! Dr. Theresa and I had to rewind that scene to make sure we really saw it and yes we really did, we really truly did. I realize that we started the whole festival this year with two other made-for-TV movies from 1972. Why were TV movies so weird in 1972? I am going to blame Nixon. Nothing we have seen so far during the annual Halloween film festival is nearly as scary as this creature named Jack Pumpkinhead I came across while reading THE PATCHWORK GIRL OF OZ. First of all, he lives in a giant pumpkin, even though his own head is a pumpkin, which would be like us living in a giant human head (see also)! He serves pumpkin pie to his guests, so that's horrific. And his head is constantly rotting! So he is always out in the pumpkin patch, carving a new head for himself. Oh dear Lord.

Illinois Cat Salute

A while back these nice kids from Illinois came through town with a microphone to "record writers." It was when John Brandon was still here, as I know because they recorded us together. BRANDON! Why did you have to go? Well, these kids went all over the place and have their "web" site up now and it is called "The Knox Writers' House." You can have fun "clicking" around on it and please do. One neat thing is that the writers were asked to read from other people's work as well as their own, so it's interesting to see what they picked. I read a chapter of RAY by Barry Hannah and Christopher Smart's salute to his cat. Each writer is represented by a crazy caricature. Mine is wearing a bow tie and holding a glass of wine. I have really walked around in a costume like that once, and I know just the photo they scrounged up off the "internet" as raw material. It was a party at a mansion! All night long as I sipped my wine something kept bobbing against my lip and I thought it was a little piece of cork. But as the evening came to a close, I learned the truth. It was a DEAD FLY! Think about it.

Anybody Home?

Still waiting to hear whether I am allowed to show poet Ann Fisher-Wirth printing the contents of SKIN MAG in lipstick directly onto the medium. It may violate SKIN MAG's strict rule about reproduction! Reportedly, when SKIN MAG was read at Faulkner's grave (the culmination of its "publication"), latecomers asked if the poem could be repeated, and SKIN MAG replied, "No. It will never be uttered again." (To that end, Ann's husband Peter was not allowed to view the printing. Known for his prodigious memory, he once performed the entirety of KRAPP'S LAST TAPE for one of Barry Hannah's classes. The utter obliteration required by SKIN MAG could not be complete had the poem been allowed to live on in the amazing brain of Peter Wirth.) In the meantime, here is SKIN MAG discovering that Faulkner's house was closed to visitors by the time SKIN MAG arrived. So the planned shirtless tour did not happen! The next part of the plan did, though: SKIN MAG perpetrated a classic "ding-dong ditch" prank at the home of famed novelist Richard Ford. As the house did not appear to have a doorbell, SKIN MAG was required to bang frantically with a knocker before running away. Witnesses stated that a tall figure could be seen moving behind a window, and suddenly the front porch blazed with light. What happened next, nobody knows. SKIN MAG had vanished mysteriously into the gathering gloom.

Road Movies

More comedians in ON THE ROAD: at least four mentions of W.C. Fields so far and two of Groucho Marx. The character Dean Moriarty is compared to both Fields and Marx. As we have seen, McNeil thinks of him more as Dean Martin ("Their names are almost the same," he remarked on the phone last night.) My friend Eugene referred to Fields as "the great surrealist poet" (Kerouac similarly - I guess - emphasizes his "saintly" qualities). Does somebody want to write a scholarly article about the influence of movie comedians on "literary" writers? George Saunders once told me about how Steve Martin had inspired some of his work. Barry Hannah felt the same way about Jonathan Winters and Richard Pryor. Movies are all over ON THE ROAD. I found it interesting that when the narrator talks about OF MICE AND MEN, it's the movie he means, not the Steinbeck novel as you might expect. Nature is described in terms of film: "the gray, dirty dawn, like the dawn when Joel McCrea met Veronica Lake in a diner..." I'm sure everybody knows this already, but I just now got around to reading ON THE ROAD for some reason, so I beg your pardon.

Perhaps

I've been thoroughly enjoying Grant Morrison's SUPERGODS, a swift, personal, and very funny history of comic book superheroes (well, that's what it seems like at first), including perceptive and hilarious asides on such old "blog" "faves" as Jimmy Olsen and The Red Bee: "for Rick Raleigh, only one thing guaranteed his crucial edge over the violent underbelly of society: the hive of trained crime-fighting bees he kept confined in the buckle of his belt... the lead bee and chief offensive weapon in Raleigh's apian arsenal was somewhat endearingly named Michael." But Morrison isn't content merely to poke fun at The Red Bee. He finds it sweet how the Golden Age of comics rediscovered that "Bees could be special, just as they were in medieval illuminated texts and mysteries." There was an early passing reference to George Adamski in the book and I thought, "Hmm, where did I just hear that name?" And then I remembered: JIM MOSELEY'S BOOK OF SAUCER NEWS! Uh-oh! I put the coincidence out of my mind. But about 250 pages in, Morrison suddenly starts going all John Dee on me, laying out autobiographical details about "the darker magical operations I was undertaking" (!) and throwing around sentences worthy of HOW TO CONTACT SPACE PEOPLE, like "Now there were what I can describe only as 'presences' emerging from the walls and furniture. Perhaps someone else would call these rippling, dribbling blobs of pure holographic meta-material angels or extraterrestrials." Perhaps! Can't I get away from this stuff? Remember, he's not talking about comic books anymore. THIS IS HIS REGULAR LIFE. He meets some aliens who seem to be made of neon tubes, then his "silvery blob" friends show him "the secret of the universe," which I don't feel is my place to spoil for you here. Later - in an episode very similar to one that Barry Hannah wrote and talked about a great deal - Morrison gets very sick and goes to the hospital and has a mystical vision of Christ! Anyway, I didn't see that coming. Did you?

Literary Matters

Time again for "Literary Matters"! And I am so sorry to tell you this, but there are lots and lots of them. I'm not even going to tell you how many, because you'll certainly stop reading. As well you should! Cursed literary matters! 1) TODAY ONLY! Roy Blount Jr. will be at Off Square Books (5 PM, the usual time) to read from his new book ALPHABETTER JUICE, some of the mighty pleasures of which have already been outlined here. Don't miss a chance to see Roy Blount Jr.! Note to the government: I bought my own copy of ALPHABETTER JUICE, so shut up! I am no publisher's shill! In fact, as far as I can tell, publishers hate me! 2) After Mr. Blount's reading, why not head over to the Kitty Snacks party conveniently located at Southside Gallery? The decent fellows at Kitty Snacks have a brand new issue out, featuring work by John Brandon and many other notables. And the gray cover screams, "Buy me! I'm entirely gray!" But I think that's one of those tricks that only the hippest of the hip can pull off, you know, like that billboard for bail bondsmen I saw once, or a club with no sign on the door. But when you get in, it's lots of wholesome fun! Kitty Snacks! 3) You know who is also reading at Off Square soon (June 9)? That's right, Ace Atkins. He has a brand new novel out called THE RANGER. I'm halfway through it and loving every minute. Yes, government, Ace gave me a free advance reading copy, so what? Though THE RANGER is set in the here and now, Ace wanted it to have the feel of those great Burt Reynolds (or Joe Don Baker, pictured) revenge pics from the 1970s, popularly known as "hixploitation." And boy did he succeed, spectacularly! Now that I have given you the code, you can read the book on dual levels, because I know how much you enjoy doing that, experiencing things on dual levels. You love that! 4) Ace also loaned me an advance copy of THE END OF EVERYTHING by Megan Abbott. I read it and think it might be her best book yet, though it is so hard to pick just one! Were I to blurb it, I would say, "Do you like great writing and being really nervous and creeped out all the time? Even when you sleep? Do you want to be pulled down into a terrible and beautiful and inexorable nightmare, no, dream, no, nightmare, no, dream, no, nightmare? Then this is the book for you!" Also, SHE is coming here to read at the end of July so we have that to look forward to. 5) Megan's book just got a starred review from my sworn enemy Publishers Weekly! So this is the one thing we can agree on, PW and I, like characters making an unholy secret alliance on GAME OF THRONES. PS: My blurb might also say, "Abbott's beloved Freud glimmers darkly from every riveting page!" Ugh, that's awful. Just read the book! I keep blurbing Megan's books in retrospect. 6) Speaking of blurbs that will never happen, Kevin Brockmeier says something really, really nice about me in the new issue of the Oxford American, something too nice for me to repeat here, something that would make a perfect blurb, but as we have seen, no book of mine is ever going to come out ever again, not even the cat book that is alarming, confounding, and distressing publishers' flunkies the world over even as we speak, but I have the blurb ready to go, thanks to the generous and gracious Kevin Brockmeier, and I will always have it, and the book will never come out, no book will ever come out, so maybe they can just carve it on my gravestone, that thing that Kevin Brockmeier said. 7) The real attraction of the new OA (well, I haven't read the whole issue yet, it's usually all good!) is a sparkling new short story by Elizabeth Kaiser, also known as "Elizabeth" of "blog" fame. 8) And another former "student," John Oliver Hodges, has a really good and bold and moving article in there, too! It's a follow-up to his piece in the previous issue, also about his (and Elizabeth's) great mentor Barry Hannah. Speaking of which, the new Kitty Snacks (see #2 above) features several never-before-published full-color photographs that John took of Barry. He is not only a fine writer, John Oliver Hodges, but an accomplished photographer, yes, where do these people get all this talent? It makes me sick. I didn't teach John or Elizabeth a thing. 9) Check out John's novella WAR OF THE CRAZIES, just out from Main Street Rag press! Now that one, I really did blurb. Blurbs! Is there anything less useful? (Note to the government: yes, I read WAR OF THE CRAZIES in manuscript, but I won my actual copy in a raffle, I really did, so that doesn't count!) 10) Yes, John Brandon and I are in the new Kitty Snacks together AND we are in the new Oxford American together, just as we were in the previous issue of McSweeney's together. In fact, we are going to get an enormous shirt with two neckholes and just walk around like that from now on. 11) Are you still reading this? Don't lie to me! 12) McNeil has found what seems to be a series of mysteries featuring members of "the Rat Pack." It is not for me to say whether on the surface they appear to be the worst books ever written. After all, haven't we been told time and time again not to judge a book by its cover? Like, didn't I tell you that earlier in this "post"? I did! But it was so long ago you have probably forgotten. Look again. Still, the titles do not inspire confidence! There is one called EVERYBODY KILLS SOMEBODY SOMETIME - this dubious assertion a "play on words" inspired by the Dean Martin hit "Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime." While I was checking to make sure this is a real mystery series (and it is, but those covers, they just don't LOOK real somehow... in fact they seem vaguely illegal to me) I ran across one not listed on McNeil's "link," one called LUCK BE A LADY, DON'T DIE. What does that EVEN MEAN? I "get" that it is supposed to be a "play on words" based on the song "Luck Be a Lady Tonight" from GUYS AND DOLLS, but it's just barely that, isn't it? And does it MEAN something? Isn't it just a string of words, I mean, isn't it? Well maybe these will turn out to be the greatest books ever written and I'm just a jerk. 13) The new "LaFa Shopper" got shoved into our mailbox yesterday, but once again John Arrechea IS MISSING! We do hear from Faylene Bryant with the breaking story "Vacation Bible School Approaching Fast," plus there's a column called "The Playhouse" in which one Camille Anding lists "Things I'd Like To Find" (dozens and dozens of them!) including "My keychain that remains hidden since last January" and "More movies as charming as 'The Sound of Music.'"

Literary Matters

Ugh! Literary matters! Everybody hates them because they are so horrible. That's why we are always so reluctant to put forward our reviled regular feature "Literary Matters." But this one literary matter is okay: "Blog" Buddy Mark Childress is coming to town! Everybody is coming to town! Literary matters are everywhere! They threaten to destroy us. There are so many of them! Soon the very earth will be swallowed by literary matters. The magazines alone are overwhelming and deadly! Suddenly I have so many magazines. My friend Michael J. Bible who works at Square Books and co-edits Kitty Snacks magazine (another magazine!) is in TWO of them! He is in the new Oxford American (with Barry Hannah on the cover) AND the fiction issue of the ESPN magazine. He won a contest! Also in that issue are Wells Tower, Dave Eggers, and John Brandon, to name a stellar few. I wouldn't be surprised if Wright Thompson was in there somewhere. I haven't looked yet. Literature! I hate you so much! Can't you leave us alone, literature? Can't you let us read our ESPN magazine in peace? (Actually, Wright, who is a "sportswriter" by trade, is a very literary writer, in a good way, so the ESPN magazine has always been full of literature when you think about it... just not the fictional variety so much.) Then I got my copy of the Knee-Jerk magazine, which is usually an online thing but now they have done an offline thing which is made of paper and I have a short story in it. It features some material I reworked like crazy from my famous and unlamented lost novel SHUT UP, UGLY, which is apparently never going to come out, but if it does, I will finally get to have one of those "appeared in a significantly different form in..." notices on my copyright page. Something to look forward to! Lots of good fiction writers in the issue, plus me, ha ha! Yeah, but you got your Kim Chinquee, Michael Czyzniejewski (Hey! Both of them once had stories in the magazine Quick Fiction, issue #7, the "Love and Marriage" issue, which also contains a story by McNeil!), Dan Kennedy, Roy Kesey, Joe Meno, an interview with Harold Ramis, and it even has something by that guy who wrote that crazy manifesto that I couldn't handle that time. So check out Knee-Jerk magazine, won't you? You can see why I have been in a "blogging" torpor for the past few days, right? So many literary matters crushing the life out of me. And so many preparations to make! So many literary events! Ace Atkins! Tom Franklin! Lee Durkee! Wright Thompson! and others (including me) will be on hand to read passages from our friend and neighbor Dean Faulkner Wells's new memoir at the Lyric Theater on March 19. She is Faulkner's niece and William Faulkner raised her but there is so much more to it than that! Find out for yourself! She will be there, too, of course, so come by and say hello and get your copy signed! (Speaking of Ace Atkins, I am not saying he is addicted to ebay, but he just bought a photograph of Burt Reynolds pulling a gun on Flipper, who was a famous dolphin at the time, trust me, kids.) Then, on the 23rd, at Off Square Books, Mark Childress strides triumphantly into Oxford with his spanking new novel GEORGIA BOTTOMS! Ha ha! I said "spanking" and "bottoms." I'm bringing my whole graduate class to see him and everyone else in the world will be there too, naturally, so why not you? Mark is always loads of fun! He entertains as well as informs! He's not one of those blah blah blah monotone readers that make literary matters so excruciating for all of us. Come see what I mean! Then - just one day later - it's the book conference! I've told you about my panel with Michael Kupperman, Joe Matt, and (more recently added) SPECIAL EXITS author Joyce Farmer... but what if I told you that Kent Osborne is coming to town for the book conference just because he loves learning? Maybe you'll see him! But who else will be on "panels"? Let me limit myself to people we have mentioned on the "blog" before, because my typing finger is getting tired: Kevin Brockmeier (who also has a piece in the new OA... oh, and Elizabeth does too!), Natasha Trethewey, Beth Ann Fennelly (also in OA!), Wright Thompson (again! Maybe he is to blame for all these literary matters), and lots of wonderful writers like Mark Richard and Karen Russell (both recently extremely well reviewed in the New York Times) I have never gotten around to mentioning on the "blog" for some reason, and we will be celebrating the birthday of Tennessee Williams at the book conference, so maybe I will put on a soiled undershirt and scream a lot, and I am forgetting so many people, and so many other literary matters to which I meant to call your attention just so you can suffer like I do, but this is it for me, I'm stopping now, I will never "blog" again, no one will ever "blog" again, I have used up all the "blogging," it is over now, everything is over now, there is no more "internet," go home.

Don't Forget

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Stocking Stuffer

I hate to brag on Christmas Day but that's the kind of person I am. You know who Anthony Bourdain is! He is this guy. And I am on his "end of the year" "fave" list. The joke is on him, because I haven't done anything this year, or for the past several years. I just sit around feeling sorry for myself! It's fun! But I guess Anthony Bourdain likes it! I assume that reading me is like eating some secret and horrible part of a strange goat. Chef Bourdain kindly writes, "It’s never too late to catch up with anything and everything by Jack Pendarvis, Barry Hannah..." then he goes on to name several other people, including "blog" "faves" Charles Portis, Joan Didion, Charles Willeford, and so many more, luscious delicacies to my musky goat part. "Click" here to read the whole article for yourself. Thanks, Anthony Bourdain! You are nice! I'm just sitting here stuffing my own stocking.