Book Club Newsletter

The Million Dollar Book Club (formerly the Doomed Book Club) has just embarked on its 125th selection, according to Megan's calculations. I'll let you know if it has an owl in it. That's all we can look forward to in this crazy world, I tell you. And at my back I always hear time's wingéd chariot hurrying near.

McNeil's Li'l Bogie Bits

It's Dr. Theresa's birthday! And you know what that means, of course: it's time for "McNeil's Li'l Bogie Bits," the regular "blog" feature where McNeil reads a 700-page biography of Humphrey Bogart and gives us the scoop straight from his brain into our eager eye holes. Those who enjoyed the story of how Bogart gave a bellhop a nickel tip will be excited to learn that he tips a masseur in this one. But I've already said too much! Here, I'm just going to cut and paste the email I got from McNeil and my job is done. "THE BIG SLEEP was completed in January 1945. In late January 1945, Bacall was scheduled to be in NY for a publicity tour for the opening of TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT. Because the divorce between Bogie and Mayo had not quite been finalized, the studio didn’t want Bogie anywhere near Bacall. That didn’t happen. Bogie took the Super Chief to NY before her and waited on Bacall to get there (as soon as I typed Super Chief a train flew by the window of the doctor’s office I happen to be sitting in). He checked into the Gotham Hotel. The studio found out and sent a man named Stevens from their NY office to be with him 24/7 – to watch him and 'give him whatever he wants.' One night Bogie was particularly stressed and he and Stevens went to '21', where Bogie had a sandwich and a couple of drinks. Back at the hotel Bogie had a few more drinks. He still felt tense and told Stevens he wanted a massage. Warners had a masseur on the payroll so Stevens rang him up. Twenty minutes later Bogart was getting his massage – along with a couple more drinks he had ordered from room service. When the massage was over, Bogie took, as Stevens recounts, 'The fastest shower I have ever seen a man take. Less than forty-five seconds. No soap, nothing.' Bogie grabbed a towel and finished another drink and wondered where the hell that guy was with his massage. When Stevens told him he had just had the massage, Bogie became irate and demanded he come back and give him a real massage. The masseur lived in Brooklyn, but got on the subway with his table and came back and gave Bogie an hour-long massage. In the meantime, he and Stevens had ordered a steak dinner, which Bogie did not touch, choosing instead to drink more. After the massage Bogie demanded Stevens make a reservation at El Morocco, then Bogie demanded he change the reservation to the Stork Club, then he changed his mind and had Stevens make a reservation at Toots Shor’s. Five minutes later, Bogie took a nap. Sometime around ten pm (it’s only 10!!!) Bogie wakes up and needs another massage…Stevens called the masseur again, in Brooklyn, and told him to take a cab this time and Warners would pay for it. The guy came from Brooklyn for a third time and gave Bogie a brutal massage, which Bogie cursed and drank through. When it was done, Bogie was finally happy, and gave the masseur a $60 tip." You know what? That's the end of McNeil's email, but I decided to come back after all. I wanted to say that I thought I would certainly have a "blog" "hyperlink" to provide about the Super Chief, as I recalled with 88% guaranteed mental accuracy that Vic, the hero of the Doomed Book Club classic THE HUCKSTERS, had a romantic encounter or two on the very same Super Chief. But after combing the "blog" to the fullest extent of my superhuman abilities, I uncovered no evidence that I am not just living in a beautiful dream.

An Attractive Spine

Well, I certainly have gotten myself into some kind of fix with all these books around here, each one carefully calibrated to fit a different portion of my complicated life. For further details, feel free to "click" the appropriate "hyperlinks" in the "body" of this "post." You know about the old comic books I read in bed at night, and the book I took on my recent visit to my parents, which should be distinguished from the sort of book I take on an airplane (determined mainly by size), although I haven't been on an airplane in some time. But the possibility is always lurking, and I do have a number of books around here that would work on airplane, THE MANUSCRIPT FOUND IN SARAGOSSA being my current top contender. No doubt you will remember how I, with unknown metaphysical ramifications, took my book for doctors' waiting rooms on my most recent parental jaunt. That was a mistake, and I'm going to have to think about it seriously, as I have an appointment with the doctor tomorrow. And most of all, you are thinking of JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS, what I would probably call my "main book." There's some trouble with that! You see, I started our new book club book today, so room for the last bit of JOSEPH will have to be made in some other portion of my packed schedule. By the way, in a book club meeting conducted according to Robert's Rules of Order this morning, we voted to rename ourselves the Million Dollar Book Club. My cofounder, I believe, was still calling it the Doomed Book Club, long after I had stopped. Let me check the minutes of today's meeting in order to quote myself accurately: "I stopped thinking of it as 'Doomed Book Club' years ago, after those slackers peeled off one by one, like dirty rats escaping our beautiful sinking ship!" I don't believe I've ever told you that I keep yet another book by my favorite chair, just in case the TV goes on the blink. Right now it's TECHNICIANS OF THE SACRED. But none of this is what I wanted to discuss. So! One kind of book I haven't mentioned yet (in this "post") is my "blood pressure book." This is the one I read for five minutes at a time as I sit up straight and breathe normally before taking my blood pressure. The latest of those is the new (?) one by James Ellroy. I'm not sure it's new. But it was still in hardcover at Square Books, where I was captivated by its attractive, glaring spine. You might be asking how James Ellroy could possibly soothe anyone's blood pressure. I'll tell you. It's something about these rat-a-tat, rhythmic sentence fragments, like a hateful, violent metronome lulling me into a peaceful trance. Just yesterday, I think, there were three short sentences or fragments in a row about owls. Night owls, of course. "Night owl this. Night owl that. Night owl the other." I paraphrase delightfully.

Bonus Content

As you know, Megan Abbott and I have read several dozen "show biz" books together, stretching back to the long-faded glory of the aptly named Doomed Book Club. Currently, we have landed on a volume of letters by the actor William Redfield, from when he was in Toronto, rehearsing the role of Guildenstern in HAMLET. Not even Rosencrantz! Yes, yes, we know how to have a good time. Another thing you know about me is that I keep a list of books I read that have owls in them, hoping to support my theory that every book has an owl in it. Authors cannot resist the power of the owl! And so, fairly early in the letters, we run across Redfield's description of a director watching an actor "with the eyes of an owl." [It is the director who has the eyes of an owl, not the actor. - ed.] As bonus content, I will tell you that in the VERY SAME LETTER, Redfield refers to Jerry Lewis as "stupendously talented," which it somewhat pains William Redfield to admit, because Jerry Lewis does not have what William Redfield thinks of as "taste." I'll tell you something else Jerry Lewis doesn't have... the need to rehearse Guildenstern in Toronto and write letters about it. Ha ha, I kid the late William Redfield, whose life, now that I look it up on wikipedia, was cut tragically short. :(

My Job

My job for the DUNE book club (not to be confused with the Doomed Book Club) is to count up to the epigraph where we're going to stop each week. You see, the author of DUNE did not see fit to number his chapters! Each chapter does start with an epigraph, so, for example, this week we're going to stop at the epigraph that begins "There is no escape." Let it be said that I've never once counted the correct number of epigraphs in all my tenure as the official epigraph counter of the DUNE book club. I flip a page too hastily and miss an epigraph, or something distracts me, or something. This time I forgot how many epigraphs I had counted because as I rapidly made my way, an owl caught my eye! You are by now well aware of my conviction that every book has an owl in it, and my compulsion to record the evidence. Not only did the owl in DUNE catch my eye, but in that split second as I raced past the page, the number of epigraphs I had already counted lost to me forever, I recognized that the owl in DUNE comes from a Biblical owl quotation we have discussed on this "blog" before!

An Old Carnival Term

It is a universally acknowledged fact that I don't "blog" anymore. But I was watching some of FULL METAL JACKET, a side effect of reading a biography of Stanley Kubrick with Megan Abbott, when what dialogue should chime in my ear but "Where's the wienie?" It's the question of an editor who has just glanced through an article submitted by reporter Matthew Modine. I was reminded at once of another celebrity biography recently read by Megan and myself in an offshoot of our aptly named Doomed Book Club: one about Walt Disney, in which Disney on more than one occasion refers to the "wienie" in much the same way. He is, according to his biographer Neal Gabler, "borrowing an old carnival term" for something that will entice your intended customer "presumably the way a wienie entices a dog." At one point, Walt Disney shouts "It doesn't have a wienie!" at some flustered GE executives, who have "no idea what Walt meant." Of course, we are all familiar with a more common phrase meaning much the same thing: "the hook." Now, why am I telling you this? I'll be honest: I DON'T KNOW! But just look. Lurking behind Matthew Modine - at the very moment when his editor is asking him "Where's the wienie?" - are two Mickey Mouse figurines and one Mickey Mouse head. Coincidence? Yes. It seems unlikely that Stanley Kubrick knew or cared that Walt Disney used to like to go around saying "wienie."

Crickets, Owls, Railway Trains

As you know I don't "blog" anymore unless I read a book with an owl in it and have to put it on my compulsively updated list of books with owls in them, or for some other reason. So remember when Megan Abbott and I were reading the third volume of Simon Callow's biography of Orson Welles? We've skipped back to the first volume now, in which Callow parenthetically lists some of the traditional gramophone-produced sound effects in theatrical productions; you can see them right there in the title of this "post." You know what else is in this book? H.V. Kaltenborn. I am sure you will recall that for a while there it seemed as if H.V. Kaltenborn - I've never heard of him either - would appear in every selection of the now defunct (?) Doomed Book Club. In conclusion, I am very happy that this book has an owl in it because it gives me an excuse to tell you, as long as I am required to be here, that within these covers Callow describes Bob Hope as "soigné." That is a fair description of Bob Hope! Why, we see Hope here (above) in his green velvet smoking jacket from I'LL TAKE SWEDEN, which I never got to "blog" about (the green velvet smoking jacket, that is) because the day I "blogged" about I'LL TAKE SWEDEN destroying our television set was the day I stopped "blogging." You'll note that the monogram is "BH." His character shared his initials, probably at his command, probably so he could keep the jacket. Bob Hope was a notorious cheapskate, as you know from your obsession with this "blog," which no longer exists, obviously.

Catfish of Ancient Egypt

Here's everything I didn't "blog" about this month. 1. "You should eat a lot of jelly: it oils up your joints." - Mom. 2. For reasons that need not concern you, Ace Atkins and I were discussing the availability of catfish in the Middle East. So when I started reading a book about ancient Egypt (THE RISE AND FALL OF ANCIENT EGYPT by Toby Wilkinson) I was delighted to find many allusions to catfish: "an ivory cylinder shows the king as a vicious Nile catfish, beating rows of prisoners with a long stick." At first I thought that was funny, even though it is not funny to beat people with a stick... I guess it was the vicious catfish that made me laugh, though the more I thought about it, the more convincingly Lovecraftian the image revealed itself to be - and besides, my grandfather taught me long ago to beware the dangerous "whiskers" of the catfish. 3. By coincidence I watched Kurosawa's RAN (based on KING LEAR) and a TV adaptation of THE DRESSER (about a production of KING LEAR) on the same day. So I went to my facsimile of Holinshed's Chronicles for the source, and was distressed to recall I have only volumes 3 and 6. See? This is the kind of crap you're missing out on now that I'm not "blogging" anymore. 4. Nor could I find my copy of KING LEAR, which made me feel like King Lear, ha ha ha, see what you're missing. (Later, by further coincidence, Lear would pop up all over this Orson Welles bio that Megan and I are reading together, though not - I think - as an official selection of the Doomed Book Club.) 5. ADVENTURE TIME meeting! We talked about Fonzie wearing glasses and Jan from THE BRADY BUNCH wearing glasses and that made Kent think of Piggy from LORD OF THE FLIES, and I said that using Piggy's glasses to start a fire was in my cigarette lighter book and Adam asked whether that counted. That got us onto the subject of "burning lenses" and Adam mentioned an "ancient death ray." I think he said, "Is that like the ancient death ray?" I said I remembered Francis Bacon advocating for the use of burning lenses as military weapons (it's in my book!) but Adam said he was talking about "Archimedes and the Siege of Syracuse." Adam knows everything! (See also.) Taking a quick glance at the "internet" I do see an unsubstantiated rumor that Archimedes built a giant mirror with which to set fire to the enemy's sails. On the same day the aforementioned discussion occurred, I read in a tweet by Chris Offutt, "I have a short story that includes a woman using a lighter to heat up a Pop Tart one bite at a time." Both of these tidbits (Archimedes, Pop Tarts) would have easily passed muster for my cigarette lighter book, had I only known about them in time. And you know, as long as we're here, the fascinating

movie WOMAN ON THE RUN has an important lighter in it... I think I can tell you this without spoiling anything (probably not): it neatly marks the beginning of each of the movie's three acts (possibly). 6. A ribald jest from McNeil about Jerry Lewis. A series of them, really. Or one long ribald jest that is carried out and elaborated upon over a number of emails. McNeil's final (?) message on the subject concludes, "Ahhhh. I'm making myself laugh in a parking lot, which makes this all the more wrong." 7. I don't remember much liking the movie HEARTBURN when it came out, but I saw a documentary about Nora Ephron not too long ago and thought if I ever came across HEARTBURN again I'd give it a try - what, 40 years later? Dear God! And I did. And Yakov Smirnoff is in it! Now, it's not Mike Nichols's fault that this one book I read stacked him up as the pinnacle of hip culture against the supposed rancid decadence of Bob Hope, but just remember: Mike Nichols put Yakov Smirnoff in a movie and Bob never did (though I wouldn't be surprised if he were on a Bob Hope TV special, to be fair [He was. - ed.]).

8. Jerry Lewis allusion in TREES LOUNGE. 9. Stopped by Square Books. Katelyn failed to sell me a book she likes, but utterly convinced me to give APOCALYPTO a chance. 10. Watched PINOCCHIO. a. Jiminy Cricket has human feet and toenails, human teeth! Disturbing. b. That fish wants to kiss everyone and everything. c. Jiminy Cricket is consistently sexually aroused by human representations (dolls) of his size. d. Even as a kid I didn't understand why being a wooden boy wasn't good enough. What's all this crap about being a "real boy"? 11. King Lear (see above) vows "to be a comrade with the wolf and owl" (just like Dracula! - though he doesn't say that, of course) and you know what that means!

The Prominence of Corn Flakes

In my friend Tom Bissell's book - the one in which he visits the graves of all twelve apostles - Eusebius does something "owlishly," according to Tom, and you know what that means: Tom's book goes on my big long list of books with owls in them. I happened to notice in Tom's index that Domino's Pizza gets four separate page citations. Curious! Tom and a friend have just spent an evening at a place called "The Disco Room" in Patras, and yet "The Disco Room" does not appear in the index. So I expect big things, in a religious or historical context, from Domino's Pizza. DOMINUS PIZZA? No, I'm not going to read ahead and spoil it for myself. It's a mystery akin to the prominence of corn flakes in the autobiography of Hal Needham.

We Break In Bob Hope's Coasters

Last night Dr. Theresa cooked chicken in Kent's honor. I showed Kent some of Bob Hope's coasters that I bought at an auction. In an impulsive and correct gesture, Kent used one of Bob Hope's coasters for his beer. Soon we were all using Bob Hope's coasters! We had never used them before, although Dr. Theresa has used one of Bob Hope's ashtrays and, as I am sure you will recall, one of Bob Hope's cocktail forks to check the consistency of her figgy pudding last Christmas.

Don't worry, Bob Hope! We are putting your stuff to good use. When Kent opened a couple of beers he humorously placed the bottle caps on Burt Reynolds's eyes, as seen here. Later, Kent and I walked up to the City Grocery Bar, where we happily ran into Lee Durkee and talked politics on the balcony.

Midnight Ink

Why did I pick up another Norman Mailer novel just after finishing a 1,200-page Norman Mailer novel? I have no idea. I thought I was going on a "Kennedy kick," but I guess my "Kennedy kick" has been delayed. Somehow I'm reading THE DEER PARK. And it has Jell-O in it. I guess this is the seventh book I have read with Jell-O in it since I have been keeping score. Jell-O! An American metaphor. I suppose it would be a good academic study to ponder which authors spell Jell-O the way the makers of Jell-O intended (Adrienne Barbeau, for example), and which get all loosey, goosey, artsy and fartsy with it (Kerouac, Mailer). Mailer writes of "colored lights changing the water into a lake of tomato aspic, lime jello, pale consommé, and midnight ink." And so it seems to me that Mailer is the third of our authors to find lime Jell-O especially "fruitful" - ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! We have good times, don't we?

Obviously They Weren't Snail Eggs

I read that Burt Reynolds autobiography in about a day and it left no impression on me, except for the faint memory of the extraordinary news that Burt Reynolds could not attend the Civil Rights march in Selma because SNAILS WERE LAYING EGGS IN HIS BLOOD. That can't be accurate! Let me look. He had "snail-parasite eggs in the bloodstream!" (Exclamation point Burt's.) "The problem was, the eggs were beginning to hatch," Burt writes. That does sound like a problem! So they were the eggs of parasites that live in snails, not the eggs of snails, I'm making myself sick.

She Uncurls Her Long, Hollow Tongue

What do Lynda Barry and Norman Mailer have in common? The aswang, that's what! Or as Norman Mailer spells it (I think) the asuang. I say "I think" because I am on page 1,017 and I can't remember where he mentions it. Four hundred pages ago? Could be! And somehow I forgot to tell you. The aswang or asuang is a vampiric creature of the Philippines and Mailer describes it in more or less traditional vampiric terms. Lynda Barry's description (in the voice of her grandmother) is much more exciting! "If you see a strange dog and it is watching you very hard and the back legs is more longer than the front legs and the tongue is sticking out - that is the aswang in the daytime! But at night she is a very beautiful woman who can cut herself in half and then she hides the bottom half. Then, look out! She can fly! The aswang crawls across the ceiling while you sleep and positions herself right over your bed. She uncurls her long, hollow tongue downward to your neck. It has a needle tip so sharp you can't feel it." That's from Barry's ONE HUNDRED DEMONS. You know how people just throw stuff in our yard, right? I blame it on drunken college students but I think all the drunken college students are home with their drunken families. (See also.) But someone threw an entire book about the Philippines in our yard this week! I haven't checked to see if the aswang is in it. The book was all rain soaked when I found it and it's probably still drying out on the porch. It's intact except that I guess the rain dissolved the glue on the paperback spine, so the cover is loose. Hmm, part of Lynda Barry's description (the creature cutting itself in half and the top half flying away) reminds me of a story from the book KWAIDAN about a creature called the Rokuro-Kubi. Its head detaches from its body and flies around: "He caught sight of the heads, - all five of them, - flitting about, and chatting as they flitted... 'Ah, that traveling priest who came to-night! - how fat all his body is! - When we have eaten him our bellies will be well filled...'" The difference is that while the aswang (according to Lynda Barry's grandmother) hides its own body, YOU have the find the Rokuro-Kubi's body and hide it: "its eyes opened monstrously; its hair stood up bristling; and its teeth gnashed... weeping tears of rage it exclaimed: 'Since my body has been moved, to rejoin it is not possible! Then I must die!'" I don't know, maybe that's true for the aswang, too; maybe that's why she hides her body. You'll have to ask an aswang next time you meet one. I'm not an aswang mindreader! All I know is that I have to finish this Norman Mailer book somehow, because the Doomed Book Club is all set to read Burt Reynolds's autobiography for the New Year. Huh, well, here's a Rokuro-Kubi with its head flying around, although most "internet" images show it stretching out its neck really long like Plastic Man!

My Cloak of Blue

Hey! This is real boring. But you know how I can't settle on anything to read right now. When I was cleaning my office recently - ha ha! I told you this was boring, and we're just getting started! - I found where I had hidden (and forgotten) the galley of a Frank Sinatra bio that came out a couple years ago, I guess. I hid it because my sister was visiting and I was giving her the hardcover for Christmas (I think)... hmm... and for some reason that doesn't make total sense, I guess I thought I needed to hide the galley from her... Well, I started reading it, and I'm not enjoying it very much... seems to me the author is trying to be Nick Tosches, but he comes off more like "a little boy lost in a big man's shirt," to quote Elvis Costello... lots of phony hepcat lingo and street talk in a loosey-goosey "novelistic" style, peppered with the occasional "classical allusion"... ugh. I mean, ugh unless you're Nick Tosches. (Hey, remember when I made that guy read a Nick Tosches book and he hated it? So I guess it serves me right.) BUT! Megan Abbott really liked this Frank Sinatra book, the one I can't get into, and she has never steered me wrong about anything, ever, and let's remember I am just in a bad mood all the time, for which I blame Errol Flynn and his depressing autobiography. I haven't recovered! Megan put her finger on the problem in an email this morning: "I think you've been reading too much chest-thumping male stuff in a row! You need to mix in something feminine, and sly!" So now that I have made excuses for the Frank bio, and introduced a reliable source who very much enjoyed it, I think it is okay to say it is bumming me out, and by bringing it out into the open I have allowed myself to tell you that it has an owl in it, well, young Frank is said to have a "night-owl disposition" and that's really all it takes for me, it totally counts, so this book can go on my obsessive list of books I happen to read that have owls in them and I don't feel bad about my mental health at all, thanks for asking. An owl is not a chicken, but they are both birds, so here is a Sinatra-based chicken from an old Warner Bros. cartoon. (Between typing that sentence and this one, I read some more of the Frank Sinatra bio. The author says that Tommy Dorsey had "a deliciously corny nickname, the Sentimental Gentleman of Swing." But I recalled that earlier in the book he refers to "a soupy, utterly forgettable Frank Loesser ballad," which he then quotes with snotty intent: "Here comes the night, my cloak of blue." I mean, what's wrong with that? What makes one of those things "deliciously corny" and the other "soupy" and "utterly forgettable" [you'll note I didn't forget it]? But of course I know that being a writer means making such blithely arbitrary distinctions hundreds of times per page. So you can see what kind of rotten mood I'm in.)

Rivet Hull Blah What

As I am sure you will recall I stopped reading that Errol Flynn autobiography but Megan told me to look at the ending and it was all about Errol Flynn staring at the sea and thinking about how the only thing he understands is the sea, I think, it's right over there but I don't feel like walking over there, but anyway, the sea is in there. So I switched over to WANDERER, which is all about Sterling Hayden strutting manfully around the deck of his schooner and he's very upset when somebody talks about the rivets in his hull because THERE ARE NO RIVETS IN HIS HULL, STUPID. And it's a lot better than the Errol Flynn book, probably, but maybe I just don't want to hear about boats and sailing and the sea for a while after all. So I picked up the book that Ace Atkins called "the most exciting Travis McGee adventure ever written about stamp collecting" and I looked on the back and read the promotional copy: "She was a six-foot knockout who knew a helluva lot about rare stamps..." Ha ha! So Ace wasn't kidding. So I opened to page one and right there in the first sentence it came back to me: Travis McGee is on a boat all the time. And by the second page we have such ominous sentence fragments as "Moonrise and hard rains. Swift fish and wide beaches." Uh-oh! And if there is one thing Travis McGee is sure to be doing besides fighting bad guys it is carefully polishing, by some minutely described method, some tiny wooden piece of nautical ornamentation on his precious boat. Sorry, boats! Sorry, the sea!

McNeil's Movie Korner

Welcome once more to McNeil's Movie Korner, your only place on the "internet" to the get the latest and greatest news about Hollywood's star-studded hits of the silver screen in Tinsel Town Land! "Watched DONT MAKE WAVES yesterday. Jim and Henny Backus played themselves," McNeil writes. Then he expresses regret that he never got his copy of the Jim and Henny Backus autobiography for the Doomed Book Club. I told him he wasn't missing much except for the obsessive chapter[s?] where Jim and Henny Backus try to figure out who is constantly pelting their roof with rocks. It goes on for years! Did I tell you about this before? I don't know, who cares. One day Jim Backus's pal Keenan Wynn has had enough of this crud and he hops on his motorbike and races around the Hollywood Hills, searching for the perpetrator with the intention of wreaking a terrible vengeance. But nothing comes of it and somebody just keeps throwing rocks, enormous ones, at Jim and Henny Backus, or at their roof, anyway. This story takes up a large percentage of the book, as I recall. I feel like at one point the police locate a guy several miles away with a giant slingshot (or am I dreaming this?) but he's cleared of all charges and anyway the mysterious rocks of endless torment never stop coming. But anyway who cares about Jim and Henny Backus so here is Claudia Cardinale from DON'T MAKE WAVES with those sunglasses I like.

Thickafog

I was thinking about the time Garrison Keillor wrote that snotty, harrumphing review of Mark Twain's autobiography, volume one, for the New York Times Book Review. Is that something that happened? My memory reports to me that it might be. I think he thought it was too big and crazy or something, too much stuff. Was that it? Who cares? I was sitting in the coffee section at Square Books today, waiting to give a former student some worthless advice. As I am sure you recall, the coffee section is right next to the "literary non-fiction" section, where my eye was captured by the bright green spine of the SECOND volume of Mark Twain's autobiography, which appeared - on the basis of the spine alone! - to be as large and crazy and stuffed with ramblings as Garrison Keillor accused the first of being. Well, I was a little early for my appointment, and sitting there all alone, so I hoisted the volume off the shelf and immediately opened it to some worthwhile and interesting things. And then I started thinking, maybe there is a lot of use a fella can get out of a big, crazy book with too much stuff in it if he approaches it the right way and doesn't just come at it harrumphing. One passage I happened to find was about Mark Twain's appreciation for a fan letter that a cowboy had written to Helen Keller. Twain found that the grammatical errors, misspellings, and other supposed infelicities were exactly what made the letter great. Twain writes: "when the heart speaks it has no use for the conventions; it can rise above them, and the result is LITERATURE, and not to be called by any less dignified name... the productions of the unschooled mind get even an added grace and power out of fresh and free and lawless grammar and orthography." I've thought about this a lot over the years, and how it applies to literary fiction. In one article (in an issue of a magazine I can't find in the usual teetering piles around here, but here's a short excerpt I located in the depths of the "internet"), I wrote: "Certainly a lot of aesthetic energy and meticulous handiwork has been expended by various literary geniuses trying to write convincingly the way a dumb person would write. I blame Mark Twain. 'Dumb person' isn't fair. The truth can be said, but only inelegantly: Great writers love to try to write the way a person who can't write writes." Oh, it's most often done badly. You can "click" here (though, God, why would you?) to read a New York Times Book review by me, in which I lambast a guy (so who am I to huff and puff at Garrison Keillor?) for putting the word "disingenuous" in his character's mouth in a way I considered (and still do) "cheating." Anita Loos and Peter De Vries, when they are doing this sort of thing, never cheat, which is why they are so great. But what's even better is just the real thing, as I was reminded repeatedly when I used to frequent the surprisingly vast self-published UFO book section of the university library. You know, Larry King's tweets are another example of something that could not be improved by a sly and knowing artiste, editor, or publishing executive. They are impervious to parody! (Please see this urgent caveat.) Remember when Jasper Johns said you should look at his paintings the same way you look at a radiator? Now I am going to change the subject. It pains me to tell you I could not finish reading Errol Flynn's autobiography for the Doomed Book Club, even though Megan Abbott promised me that the last line is "worthy of Cain": "The second half-century looms up, but I don't feel the night coming on." Pretty good! And in a series of polished tweets, Megan put forth a compelling Freudian analysis of Mr. Flynn. But there are so many parts of the book that seem cruel to me and are hard to enjoy, and I was getting depressed reading it, and I love his movies so much. Flynn writes about his love of the sea a lot, so I thought I'd pick up WANDERER by Sterling Hayden (pictured) as a kind of substitute. I remember it as being briny. I'm sure you'll recall many years ago when I read the first sentence: "The black pit of oblivion opens like a giant clamshell." Okay! Now I've read a few more of the sentences: "I mount the ladder and ease myself on deck. Thickafog. Horns louder all around. Gray-green morning world with topmasts indistinct and the long proud sweep of the maindeck jutting east... My back aches; sign of tension. Gulls stand inert atop stumps of wooden piling." I was like, "Thickafog! What is this, JAMES JOYCE?" In a good way. I remember McNeil read this a couple of years ago maybe, and liked it. The last memoirist I compared to James Joyce was Adrienne Barbeau. And I'll do it again.

Urruhh!

Well, let's see. Errol Flynn has stolen some diamonds and now he is on a ship with a hookworm expert named Dr. Gerrit H. Koets who looks "like a blond, amiable orangutan in a mink coat." Dr. Koets "fancie[s] himself a Lothario without equal" and likes to stand on deck baring his "entire torso" which is "covered with dense blond hair... Perhaps obeying some atavistic impulse, he started pounding his enormous chest with his hairy fists. He hollered, 'Gorillas do this before they mate! Urruhh!'" Oh yeah, and "His huge flabby belly undulated uneasily with each breath." We really get to know a lot about the body of Dr. Gerrit H. Koets, hookworm expert. But that's not the important part! See, what I'm trying to tell you is that Dr. Koets wears "big owl-like glasses," which makes MY WICKED, WICKED WAYS by Errol Flynn a book with an owl in it, like every other book, because every book has an owl in it and I'm the guy who tells you every time he reads a book with an owl in it, which is every time I read a book, because it always has an owl in it. Owl in it.

Please Don't Feed the Platypus

Just received the new Doomed Book Club selection, MY WICKED, WICKED WAYS by Errol Flynn. The epigraph is three Bible verses about being wicked! So right away you know you're in for a good time. Ace is way ahead of the rest of us on this one. Yesterday he tweeted that Errol Flynn is running a coconut farm - is that what he tweeted? - in the section Ace is reading now. As Ace said would happen, a young Errol Flynn accidentally kills two platypuses by feeding them tadpoles! They are supposed to only eat worms! That's what Errol Flynn says. And his dad is a famous biologist, so I believe him. Poor Flynn gets shipped off to boarding school. "The assistant headmaster was a wonderful old gentleman aged about sixty, with the picturesque name of Sir Worthbottom Smith, a down-at-heels English aristocrat, a man with a withered arm..." But Flynn gets shuffled from school to school, always stirring up a ruckus. Now he's in trouble for sneaking out of the window at night so he can canoodle with Elsie, the maid. Before such tales of youth there's a prologue that takes place during the ruination of Errol Flynn's career. It promises much getting drunk on yachts, like the Richard Burton diaries and the Johnny Carson biography before it. Flynn learns that he is completely broke: "I went to '21' that day for lunch... when you are down and out, go to the best spots." A friend shows up and Flynn insists on buying lunch: "When flat, put on the old front - you know." Yes, Errol Flynn! I do know! "I started with a couple of Jack Roses beforehand. I worked up in my usual style to grouse freshly flown from Scotland..." Errol Flynn!

McNeil's Movie Korner

Welcome once again to McNeil's Movie Korner, where McNeil provides you with all the latest from the fast-paced world of film entertainment. While I was out of town McNeil sent me this picture of a CANNONBALL RUN board game. What I like best is that someone in a meeting surely pounded his fist on the conference table and said, "We HAVE to make sure Jack Elam is on the front of the box!" Because there he is. As we learned from Adrienne Barbeau's autobiography, someone got killed making this movie. Life is terrible.