Memory Tricks

So, a little while ago, I was at Square Books and they had different books by Susan Minot stacked everywhere. I asked Richard, who owns the joint, what gives! Richard says to me, he says, Susan Minot is coming to town. Now, I did a little research, which I'm generally against, and this must have happened way back in October, though my guess would have been sooner, like March. Bear in mind for the remainder of the "post" how bad my memory is. Anyway, I picked up a book of Minot's called MONKEYS, a title I have always liked. There used to be a lot more monkey content on the "blog." What happened? When did monkeys lose their magic? Answer: they didn't. Maybe it was you! What was I saying? Oh! So I had been meaning to read a Susan Minot book for about 40 years. The way I remembered it... and I texted Tom Franklin to make sure... to make sure he was there, first of all. I was wondering if his presence in my memory was hallucinatory, as I recalled him playing an advisory role much like Elvis does in the film TRUE ROMANCE. Anyway! It was some time in the 1980s, and Tom Franklin and I were looking at Susan Minot's author photo in a magazine. Newspaper? Magazine. And we - aspiring writers at the time, to put it mildly - got in our heads that her book looked interesting and she looked nice and we could very probably be best friends with her if we drove several hours to wherever the article said she was reading. Jackson? New Orleans? I'm going to guess Jackson, Mississippi, because New Orleans would have been too easy, as I picture us standing in downtown Mobile at the time. Jackson would have been more of a quest. Jackson, Mississippi! The mere name sparks the imagination. No it doesn't. The end of the story is that we didn't go. And forty years later, here I am, finally reading a Susan Minot book. And I'm only on page 60, and there have already been, I would say, 10-14 owls in it. That sounds like a lot, doesn't it? It sure sounds like Susan Minot must have beaten the previous owl record, a tie between Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather. But not so fast! Hold it right there, chum! So, there is an "owl room" in this book. And some kids go in there and play an owl game of their own creation, which counts as one owl. A couple of pages later, there is a cake of brown soap shaped as an owl. That's two. Here's where it gets complicated! Are you getting excited? So, in this "owl room" are various kinds of owls. Some are described as being singular: "a hollow brass owl," for example. Other owls are multiple: "two china owls with flowers" or... and here's where you have to pay attention... "owl engravings." But how many owl engravings? And how many owls are represented in each owl engraving? Nobody knows! Possibly, not even Susan Minot herself knows! In any case, the owl room contains, at a bare mininum, eight owls. Oh boy, this is just the kind of "post" I love! However! By my usual method of counting "how many owls there are in a book," I would say there are 1. The owl figures in the owl room. 2. The owl game. 3. The soap shaped like an owl. That brings Susan Minot in at three owls! Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather remain undefeated! Wow, I'm just thinking of all the controversy this "post" is going to generate among people who enjoy counting owls as much as I do!

Alien Corpuscles

Hi, Sara! (I think Sara is reading the "blog" now. And just the other day I received a thoughtful note from the very nice fellow who used to book me for readings at the Metairie Library, which [the email] indicated in passing that he has been keeping up with the "blog." For a long time, McNeil and I have assumed that he [McNeil] was the only one still reading it, but if Sara is really onboard, that instantly triples my numbers.) ANYHOW! Sara, you will be interested to learn that I once wondered here whether Deadman, a superhero who can cram his soul into other people's bodies, would be able to possess Superman, who is not in essence a human person, but rather a freaky alien from a distant world. Well! One of these old comic books that Tom gave me answers the question, as Deadman does slip, without seeming difficulty, into Superman's skin. It also addresses my biggest concern - in life! - in a satisfyingly direct manner, as something turns out to be a little off with the possession, leading Deadman to conclude that Superman's "alien corpuscles" (his phrase, not mine) are to blame. This is off the subject, if there is one, but on the next page, someone engages in the hopeless task of trying to take out Superman with a wrecking ball. Superman says (and please note, Sara, dialogue in comic books is written in all caps, or was, when I was but a youthful, towheaded imp) "YOU'RE A REAL 'SWINGER,' WHOEVER YOU ARE... SO HAVE A 'BALL!'" Then he smashes the guy with his own wrecking ball, the ultimate insult. Who does he think he is with a crack like that, Arnold Schwarzenegger? Ha ha ha! Oh, Superman! (Almost the title of a Laurie Anderson song.) All right. Also in this issue, Deadman is addressed by three giant owls, who say things like "EVEN IN THE COLD HOUSE OF DEATH, YOU ARE STILL A BOILING CAULDRON!" But this is a WORLD'S FINEST comic, and I have already catalogued that publication according to its owl usage, so further cataloguing in the form of this "post" is just a little icing on the cake, and not strictly necessary. Familiarize yourself with these rules, Sara! (I close by adding that the gigantic nature of the owls is nothing more than a trick of forced perspective. When carefully considered, they appear to be regular owls, excepting their ability to talk to ghosts.)

A Movie With a Book In It With an Owl In It

So I was watching DOCUMENTEUR by Agnes Varda and the mother and son start talking about a book they read about an owl who makes tea out of his own tears, and he has a list of sad things he thinks about to make himself cry enough to make a pot of tea. Despite some halfhearted "googling" I have not determined whether this is a real book or an invention of Agnes Varda, so I regret to inform you that I cannot at this time put it on my big long list of books with owls in them... however, I can say that - while being charming in its own right - this owl crying into his teapot business puts me in mind of one of the least pleasant subplots of the Thomas Harris novel HANNIBAL, which I bought at the Atlanta airport and read on an airplane back in 1999, yet to this day I remain astonished by the number of typos I recall. Never, to my recollection, have I run across a professionally published novel containing so many typos. You know I like everything! Yet somehow that book made me feel so bad - some flaw within myself, no doubt! - that I purposely left it behind in a San Francisco hotel room, an act for which I still feel remorse, what a horrible surprise for somebody. (I left some Bukowski novel - was it POST OFFICE? - in a New Orleans hotel room for similar reasons but I guess I don't feel so evil about that.) As long as you are here I should tell you that Ace Atkins and I finally went back to Costco yesterday. I saw "a fourteen-pound tub of violet decorative cake icing," as I put it on twitter. Although! In reality I saw several fourteen-pound tubs of cake icing, some orange, some green, some pink. I don't know why "violet" struck me so particularly. I did wonder - as I remarked to Ace on the way back - why there is only one color per tub. That seems like a rip-off! I think they should go in there and arrange it in three stripes, like Neapolitan ice cream. Though no doubt you get a good price on a fourteen-pound tub of cake icing, so who am I to argue?

Corn

"When I think of sour corn, I think of Dean Martin." What a cryptic sentence! Well, there's a paragraph that explains it but I like it better by itself. That's from yesterday's menu at the Southern Foodways Symposium, an indescribable annual summit concerned with global politics, economics, history, art, activism, race, space, place, family, gender, science, agriculture, industry, philosophy, and so many other subjects, and I know I'm leaving out food, but as one of the organization's oral historians described her mission yesterday, "It's about the people, not the food." That being said, superstar chef Sean Brock and his mother made us a 20-course lunch. A 20-course lunch! That will really make you take a nap. Sean Brock and his mother made this 20-course lunch for more than 400 people (as seen above). He said the most people his mom had cooked for until yesterday was about ten. Earlier that morning I gave an unnecessarily blistering talk about the TV chef and humorist Justin Wilson, a relatively harmless entertainer who is long dead. I put on some sunglasses and just went full "insult comic" mode. I'm not even sure why! The talk as given wildly diverged from what I had so carefully researched and printed out. Maybe I was possessed! Actually, Gustavo Arellano spoke right before me and he was ON FIRE and I was like, "Uh-oh, I'm gonna have to DO something to follow that." And nature took its course.

As you can see, I wielded my Emmy as a comedy prop and the whole thing went very well despite my inexplicable viciousness, which I believe worried JoAnn Clevenger, the astonishing doyenne of New Orleans's iconic Upperline restaurant (at the Symposium to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award), who stood up in the Q&A section to nobly defend Mr. Wilson, a frequent customer of hers. I saw her later in the evening and she told me some complicated things from Justin Wilson's personal life. "I always like the underdog," she said. We had a nice talk about it. I also saw Sean Brock and he said the 20-course lunch was "the most important meal" he had ever made and "the meal I was born to make." He was referring to its transcendent emotional content for one thing. All I could think with extreme gratitude was, "We got to eat the meal Sean Brock was born to make!" I also told him that his mother's statement - "When I think of sour corn, I think of Dean Martin" - could be the first sentence of a novel. It's my favorite sentence right now.

I guess the other thing I need to tell you is that John Currence got dressed up in a shrimp costume and was positioned above a dunk tank filled with grits. He told me he studied Gary Busey in the movie CARNY (pictured) to perfect his aggressive dunk-tank patter. "Were those really grits in there?" I asked Blair Hobbs about the dunk tank. "It looked like brown water," said Blair, which for whatever reason sounded like the worst thing to get dunked into. I honestly doubt that the Southern Foodways Symposium, with its deeply concerned soul,

would waste grits, or anything else that could help someone. For example, another lunch, this one made for us by Mashama Bailey (pictured here with Joe York, whose pinpoint accuracy as a pitcher dropped shrimp-Currence in the tank; "Your Emmy won't save you now!" yelled Joe as I walked into the danger zone between him and his target), was ingenuously based on ingredients that usually get thrown away: Chef Bailey's salad was made with the stems of the collard.

Occasional Small Consignments of Bananas

When I was in Atlanta this weekend, my sister and brother-in-law and I kept seeing a headline that had a funny yet mournful ring to it: "Chiquita Banana Dies." They really meant the woman who did the voice of the Chiquita Banana in a popular animated commercial, to which I "link" you here. Please watch it. It's the best commercial ever, a mini-opera and PSA all in one. Plus it sells bananas! You will note that the banana arrives in an ocean liner with a singular purpose: she has "come to say [that] bananas have to ripen in a certain way." All that distance! Just to say that! What a journey! What an idealist this banana is! The commercial first appeared in 1947, and the citizens of the United States - or so the executives at Chiquita Banana seemed to think - required a lot of banana education, which made me wonder when bananas first became popular in the U.S. There was some talk of googling, but I insisted I'd look it up properly in my OXFORD COMPANION TO FOOD when I got home. And I did! "During the 19th century occasional small consignments of bananas were sent by fast ships... Early varieties had not been bred for keeping qualities, so the fruit had to arrive in little more than a fortnight and was an expensive luxury. But all this began to change in the 1870s, when two American entrepreneurs began to ship bananas from the Caribbean to New Orleans, Boston, and New York." But here's the most amazing thing! "As bananas ripen they give off ethylene gas. Most fruits do this during ripening, but bananas produce an exceptionally large amount... A banana put in a lidded box with green tomatoes turns them red. It also helps a hard avocado to ripen overnight." Bananas are magic!

Time Enough For Chicken

"The only way I survived winter in Iowa was glamour." So said Melissa Ginsburg last night. The occasion of this wonderful remark was our unseasonable drop in temperature. Just earlier in the day Kent Osborne had said that the weather gets a bad rap as a topic of conversation. "It's supposed to be boring to talk about the weather," Kent said. He disagrees! And Melissa is living proof. Kent and Seo Kim and I went to see Dr. Theresa introduce David Simon yesterday afternoon. He gave a talk! Just a few days ago he was hanging out with President Obama in the White House. And now here he is giving a talk. After the talk, there was just half an hour before an ADVENTURE TIME video conference Kent and I were required to attend. Time enough for chicken, thought Kent! "This will be my fourth chicken meal in a row," he said. "Oxford is a chicken town." It may be the highest form of compliment Kent can bestow. We went into Gus's. Kent ordered one chicken wing, which I found amusing. Kent had no qualms. It was just what he wanted. But it made me think of the scene in WAITING FOR GUFFMAN in which Parker Posey is poignantly turning over a single chicken wing on a grill. An image included in large part for its absurdity! Or so I have always assumed. Seo laughed unreservedly when the chicken wing came out. There it was, shining, in its own little basket. A funny sight. Pitiful! Exquisite with mortality. Kent consumed it without irony. He reviewed the most recent chicken dishes he had enjoyed. The wings at another place were different than on a previous trip, bigger, and of a lesser quality of chicken, Kent thought. He suspected that the establishment - which shan't be named here - had gone with a new, cheaper supplier, which started me thinking about THIEVES' HIGHWAY, the great old movie about the crime surrounding apple orchards (!). I jokingly suggested that we should create a TV show that starts out on a free-range chicken farm and follows the chicken to the shady gangsters who push out the good chicken farmers with their bad, poorly raised counterfeit chicken, which they force restaurants to buy... and as we had just seen David Simon, we suddenly knew: "We could call it THE CHICKEN WIRE!" We were very amused. VERY amused! But we both resisted the temptation to tell David Simon about it when we saw him later that day, as Kent consumed his fifth chicken meal in a row. At one point, far across the table, I heard David Simon say something about the Visigoths and I slammed the table and yelled, "I'll tell you something about Visigoths!" THIS WAS IT! Reading that book about the Middle Ages was finally going to pay off. "They killed the Romans but preserved their knowledge!" I screamed. That's all I had. Is the action over? It is not! Just a couple of hours ago Dr. Theresa called our friend Ron Shapiro, who is driving John Waters here from New Orleans. "They're on the road!" said Dr. Theresa.

No Sun Partisan He

Our friend Mark Baker was in town to install some rare old photographs of Atlanta's Cabbagetown neighborhood over at the Powerhouse. Why did he do that? I am happy to tell you! The Isom Center, the Southern Foodways Alliance, and others are hosting a Cabbagetown retrospective at 7 PM on March 19. You should attend! Among the other treats will be live performances from Bill Taft and Caroline Young, who will read her poetry about that place. There will be a rare screening of BENJAMIN SMOKE, Jem Cohen's lauded documentary about Bill's old band. Also: food! We walked up with Mr. Baker last night to see Jonathan Richman perform in the intimate setting of Proud Larry's. Many familiar faces in the crowd: Dent May is visiting from his new home in Los Angeles. Jimmy came up from New Orleans for the show. Mary Miller! Bill Boyle! A respectable crowd, but small enough that you could get to know every face in it. Jonathan Richman just walked in off the street and through the front door with his guitar case, stepped onto the stage and started playing with zero fuss. His stone-faced drummer hopped up from the bar and joined him. He sang a song thanking the sun for allowing us to grow peas and corn. Then, as if to prove he's not strictly a sun worshipper, he reminded us that sometimes (I think I have this right) "we want to paddle our own canoe into the sinister darkness." He sang a song about it. "He's a mesmerist!" said Dr. Theresa, trying to describe Jonathan Richman's crazy dance moves after the show. "It's like he's looking THROUGH us!" Will McIntosh reportedly whispered to Dr. Theresa during the performance. Jonathan Richman bridged each song with fancy guitar licks so that there were no pauses, no places to clap. We clapped anyway, when we could.

Weird Bags Are Amazing

Saw Jimmy at City Grocery Bar last night. He was visiting from his new home in New Orleans! We were talking about the first sentence of my cigarette lighter book and it caused Jimmy to say, "Weird bags are amazing!" - none of your beeswax why! I guess you'll just have to buy the book, ha ha ha, don't lie to me. Jimmy went on to talk about a "witch bag" he had seen in Oxford, England. He said it was a bag you catch witches in! "Like, their souls?" I asked. Jimmy was vague. But he did say, "That was the first time I saw a human skull." He said the skull was next to the witch bag. "I was glad it was behind glass!" he exclaimed of the witch bag. I expressed my doubt that a pane of glass could save you from the evil contents of a witch bag. "But there was a cork in it," Jimmy explained, referring to the witch bag in question.

To and Fro

Hey remember in the Geneva Bible when God asks the devil, "Where commeft thou?" and the devil says, "From copafsing the earth to and fro, and from walking in it"? You're probably wondering about my recent travels in the same way! Okay, you twisted my arm. But to understand my wandering properly we have to go way back to when my glasses fell off my head in the lobby of a swank New York City hotel some months ago. I lost a very nice silver pen in that same lobby! And Megan Abbott gave me a pen to replace it. Was the replacement a fancy silver pen? No! It was one Megan picked up in a hotel during her own travels. This pen was a gift from the heart! And cheap though it may have been, it was of an unusual and pleasing shade of blue, its body made of a sturdy, semi-opaque plastic, I believe. It advertised a company called Kimpton, which owns hotels and restaurants, apparently. So on my recent trip to Birmingham to do a reading, I thought I had left the pen Megan gave me behind in a bank! But when I came home it was just sitting there on the TV tray. While in my Birmingham hotel room, I distractedly watched the shoe factory show. Hey remember on GILMORE GIRLS when Luke had a daughter with another woman and that woman was angry when Lorelai (who was dating Luke at the time) hung out with the daughter and it caused problems in Lorelai's relationship? Well, now they are making Lauren Graham go through that plot line again on the shoe factory show, just like the other time they stole a plot from GILMORE GIRLS and marched Lorelai, I mean, Lauren Graham, through it. Lauren Graham is like some doomed soul, forced always to reenact the same torments! What a bummer. While I was watching the shoe factory show, Dr. Theresa was back in Oxford, having an elegant dinner with Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls and T. Cooper, whom she had introduced on the Thacker Mountain radio program earlier in the evening. THEN! It was on to New Orleans, where I saw many of my fave former students from back when I used to teach: Abby, Elizabeth (wearing her mother's prom dress from 1968!), Burke, Rachel and SKIN MAG, Ryan, and Anya (wearing a wedding dress because IT WAS HER WEDDING DAY, a happy occasion I wouldn't have missed for the world). It was a lovely ceremony on the porch of an old house, the kind of house where I kept looking up at the attic windows expecting to see a gently approving ghost but I didn't. Burke gave me a book with this great first sentence: "Art has a way of undermining all aesthetic theories." Just like Jerry Lewis! I added the part about Jerry Lewis. On the drive back to Oxford, "Good Vibrations" by the Beach Boys came on the radio and I suddenly remembered going to see a feature-length documentary about the theremin back in Atlanta with Dr. Theresa - I think it was just called THEREMIN - and Brian Wilson was interviewed in it about the memorable theremin part in "Good Vibrations." You know how Brian Wilson thinks and talks. He's a genius! And he comes off very open and vulnerable and eccentric sometimes. And I think he said the theremin was scary and made him think of sex. Is that what he said? So, the director of THEREMIN was there for this screening (and as I recall, so was Robert Moog, inventor of the Moog synthesizer!) and in the Q&A session afterward, some fool in the audience asked the director if it was "hard not to laugh" when interviewing Brian Wilson and the director shot back with shocked sincerity, "No, it's hard not to cry." And that came back to me so vividly while I was driving that I was completely absorbed in experiencing that memory and sort of forgot I was driving. Has that ever happened to you? Don't do that! It's not safe! Dr. Theresa snapped me out of it. And then I started thinking that Brian Wilson's genius might be profitably compared to Jerry Lewis's in its directness. When Kelly Hogan was just visiting us, she was trying to learn a Brian Wilson song for an upcoming performance. Hogan expounded thoughtfully on the lyrics "I wrote a number down but I lost it/ So I searched through my pocket book, I couldn't find it/ So I sat and concentrated on the number and/ Slowly it came to me so I dialed it/ And I let it ring a few times, there was no answer/ So I let it ring a little more, still no answer" and their relationship to the complex transparency of Brian Wilson (which is different than Jerry's complex transparency). Complex transparency! (It comes to me just now that the theremin documentary featured a clip of Jerry's encounter with a theremin in THE DELICATE DELINQUENT.)

Hyperlinks From a Marriage

As of today, Dr. Theresa and I have been married for 19 years. WHAT! For the first 11 years I didn't even have a "blog." WHAT! So anything that happened during that period is none of your beeswax. But everything after that is up for grabs! So here are some highlights: We saw Morgan Freeman get out of his car. We watched SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT and HOOPER. We investigated wild animal noises. We celebrated Dr. Theresa becoming Dr. Theresa. We went to the optometrist together. We were nearly struck by lightning! We watched a raccoon and a possum hang out on our back porch. We hung out with Kent Osborne a lot. We kept track for some months of a neighboring groundhog. We walked through a weird abandoned tunnel. We recalled a schoolyard legend of Grizzly Adams's beard catching on fire. We went to Elvis's house. We went to hear a Frank Sinatra impersonator. We saw a bunch of dragonflies at Robert Johnson's grave. We tried to get a kitten off the roof. We drank champagne out of martini glasses.

Dr. Theresa solved a mystery in my office. Dr. Theresa bought me pants. Dr. Theresa scared me several times with her Helena Bonham Carter impersonation. Dr. Theresa brought a goldfish back to life. Dr. Theresa saved my favorite fork when it was stuck in the drain. Dr. Theresa noted my strange susceptibility to Lady Grey tea. Dr. Theresa proved the existence of the giant turtle movie that haunted her. Dr. Theresa has uttered many memorable phrases. Dr. Theresa warned me not to be torn apart by coyotes in Beverly Hills. Dr. Theresa made coffee and eggs and tortillas at 3 in the morning. Dr. Theresa bought a $5 umbrella. Dr. Theresa made a new notch in my belt for me. Dr. Theresa ordered extra tartar sauce. Dr. Theresa danced with balls of fire. We used to go get a whole karaoke room to ourselves with our friend Caroline. We took a pregnant woman to see PINK FLAMINGOS. We saw a strange woman pushing a face-down doll in a baby stroller. We supported literacy. We had loud upstairs neighbors. We attended a rock and roll show in New York City. We roamed around the restaurants and bars of New Orleans with John Currence and John T. Edge. We ate in a terrible restaurant in Nashville. We had our picture hung up in a restaurant. We had some low-key New Year's Eves. We accidentally took a tap-dancing lesson together. We saw three huge woodpeckers. We bought a drink for D-Day from ANIMAL HOUSE. We went to a midnight screening of BLAZING SADDLES right after Princess Diana died. We stayed in a Ramada Inn that literally had an old graveyard in its parking lot. We domesticated at least one feral cat. We consumed many iceberg lettuce wedges. We watched countless horror movies. Countless! And many episodes of Lawrence Welk. We forced young people to dance. We drove to Booger Bottom on a whim. We observed a robin's nest. We discussed our paper clip preferences. We stood in a roaring wind.

Whilst!

I have a lot of books about ghosts and most of them are fantastic! But that last ghost book I tried to read, set in Mississippi, was a big dud. So as you may expect it was with some combination of dread and expectation that I stumbled across a volume entitled PARANORMAL MISSISSIPPI RIVER: AN ILLUSTRATED ENCYCLOPEDIA in Square Books yesterday. I like things that are arranged encyclopedically! And the busy cover illustration featured the devil perched on the roof of a house, rubbing his chin thoughtfully, like, "Hmm." But the bookmark enclosed by the publisher scared me a little. It's an advertisement practically begging for authors, and carries a whiff of self-publishing about it. But as you know I have had some great enjoyment thanks to self-published material, crudely illustrated ("click" here for just one example that leaps to mind). In fact, it was just such an illustration that sealed the deal for me. I present it above. The caption was also magnificent: "No peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich was safe whilst the BIGFOOT-type monster dubbed MOMO stalked southeastern Missouri." As you can perhaps make out, the facing page contained phrases such as "like sulfur and feces, only worse" and "unprotected peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches." Flipping through, I ran across an allusion to THE GODFATHER of all things ("It seems likely Marie Laveau became the classic 'fixer,' in the sense familiar to many who have read Mario Puzo's THE GODFATHER"), a frequent touchstone of the Frank Sinatra bio I just finished, so that seemed like a good omen. One person who works at Square Books, whose identity I shall protect, saw me looking at PARANORMAL MISSISSIPPI RIVER: AN ILLUSTRATED ENCYCLOPEDIA and asked whether I had ever heard of the Bell Witch. Had I! I won't tell you about it because it's too scary. But anyway, this person told me that the daughter from all the Bell Witch trouble had moved into a house "a softball's throw away" from his or her own childhood home, and that, according to legend, a ghost had followed her there. By the time my informant was born, the haunted house was a storage space for "farm implements" where no ghostly occurrences were reported.

Jimmy's Soul Is an Enchanted Boat

Was it only yesterday that I was poking through that Hugh Kenner book, so pleasantly reminded of the ending of Samuel Beckett's novel MOLLOY, which was quoted therein? "Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining." WHAT! That is the way to end a book. Then I grabbed up at random, through an obvious and clumsy process of association with the Kenner book, focused as it was on three authors, some of them Irish, some scholarly whatsit called BARBAROUS KNOWLEDGE: MYTH IN THE POETRY OF YEATS, GRAVES, AND MUIR, and I don't even know who Muir is, well, now I do a little, anyway, what's this thing doing in my house? Saw two lines of Shelley quoted: "My soul is an enchanted boat/ Which like a sleeping swan doth float..." And once again, as was sadly recalled and recorded for posterity in 2006, I thought about how all the other college freshmen and I were encouraged to laugh and scoff at P.B. Shelley like we were a bunch of big shots. Shame, shame, shame. Somehow "My soul is an enchanted boat," etc., made me think of Jimmy, who is moving to New Orleans. Maybe because his soul is an enchanted boat! I mean, maybe that's why I thought of him, not that maybe that's why he's moving to New Orleans, though come to think of it, maybe that's why he's moving to New Orleans.

Out to Lunch

Let me tell you about my thrilling day. I turned on THE TARNISHED ANGELS, which I had dvr'd from TCM. I think before Megan Abbott left town, she and Bill Boyle and I were talking about watching it, but it was impossible to get hold of. After Megan left, I noticed it coming on TV. So I watched some of it this morning but then I started feeling guilty because I shouldn't watch it without Bill Boyle! I watched enough to see that it contained a goodly percentage of the cast of WRITTEN ON THE WIND, which, like THE TARNISHED ANGELS, was directed by Douglas Sirk. Those angels were so tarnished! As you can see from the above frame. Plus Mardi Gras! I mean, it takes place during Mardi Gras. But I turned it off. I was trying to decide what to read next and I recalled that maybe Megan and I were going to read this book of Mississippi ghost stories I got for her by way of apology after rudely scoffing at a ghost story she told me in a public forum. The Rowan Oak ghost story in the book supports BOTH sides of our argument and even quotes our pal Bill Griffith. So I called Megan but she never answers her phone and maybe she called back but I never answer my phone, so you can see the difficulty. So I didn't know whether to start the ghost story book or not. Then I remembered that last night Tim Youd told me he was on the last 17 pages of THE SOUND AND THE FURY, which he is typing as part of an art project at Rowan Oak. So I walked down there hoping I could watch him type the last few sentences ("They endure" and all that, isn't that it?) but the kid sitting by the door told me that Tim was at lunch and Bill Griffith was at lunch and everybody was at lunch. So I went to Square Books instead and bought PYLON, the Faulkner novel on which THE TARNISHED ANGELS is based, and I sat there in the store and read that mint julep murder mystery that Bill told me about, which included a kind of shabby carnival magician (attention Megan Abbott!) and which I must have read years ago, because it's in the book KNIGHT'S GAMBIT, but most of my life is just a blur to me now, which is why I type up these little pieces of crap.

Philip Roth's Kangaroo

Now that Megan Abbott has moved to town (temporarily) it is a pleasant thing to occasionally sneak off to the City Grocery Bar to have a drink with her and our mutual buddy Ace Atkins. Such was my plan yesterday, and so begins my thrilling tale. It was a rainy day, so I dug a sturdy jacket from the closet, one I have not worn in a year or more. Friends, there was a $20 bill in the pocket! I arrived at the town square an hour before the bar opened, so I poked around in Square Books. "Hey, why don't you have that new biography of Norman Mailer?" I asked Richard, the owner. He said he believed it was hidden away upstairs. Then he sprang up there like a gazelle and got it for me! What could I do but buy it, friends, after such a helpful display? Just holding it made me recall a book I had leafed through on the new release table recently, about Philip Roth and his writings. I thought I should buy it too. As I recalled, it had contained an amusing anecdote in which Roth and the author of the book were reading Cormac McCarthy together for some reason, and the author blanched at Mr. McCarthy's fulsome descriptions of the slaughter of both man and beast. The next time she came over to Roth's apartment, she rang the bell and he was delayed in answering the door. She heard him call to her from within, "Just a minute, I'm skinning a kangaroo." That made me laugh. I may be paraphrasing, because when I looked for the book IT WAS NO LONGER THERE. Someone else had beaten me to it, friends. But the bar was still not open, so I went up to the poetry section. (I was thinking of Herrick. I just read in this other book that he lived "with a trusty housekeeper named Prudence and a pet pig." Everything I read about him makes me like him more.) There I saw, misplaced, a book of Stella Adler's lectures on American playwrights. Curious! I had sort of wanted to read it when it came out and had never seen it in the theater section. Here it was! In the wrong section! In paperback! I bought it too. So let that be a lesson, kids. Wait until the bar is open before leaving the house or you will end up buying two books. I might have bought three had I not been spared the Roth! I met Ace and Megan at the bar. Ace saw my Stella Adler book and said, "There's a good Stella Adler story in Adrienne Barbeau's memoir." To which I responded "!" Hey wait did I never tell you about Ace and Adrienne Barbeau? Adrienne Barbeau appears in Ace's most recent novel in his "Ranger" series, THE BROKEN PLACES. Anyhow, Adrienne Barbeau read it and contacted Ace, delighted! So there was some talk of reading Adrienne Barbeau's memoir in the Doomed Book Club. Ace has already finished it. I just ordered my copy. And Megan... is GOING TO BE ON A PANEL WITH ADRIENNE BARBEAU in New Orleans next year...? And so I ended up buying three books after all. Life sure is something. And it revolves around Adrienne Barbeau.

BLERK!

Hey Joey Lauren Adams is in town! I saw her at the City Grocery Bar tonight and she told us all about the monster movie she just wrapped, the first monster movie in which she has ever starred. So, based on Joey's description of the mayhem, Lisa Howorth (who was there) invented the portmanteau word "blerking," based on blood and twerking, and decided the movie should be called BLERK! It is not called that. Joey Lauren Adams had never heard of twerking, by her own account. We were stunned and amazed! We had heard of twerking. Lee Durkee, who was on hand, had heard of twerking. My grad student Lizzie, who comes from New Orleans, where twerking originated, provided additional scholarly twerking details. A doubtful Joey Lauren Adams looked it up on her iPhone and was unimpressed. "I saw this in Clarksdale ten years ago," she said, stifling a yawn at the twerking. Later, though, she organized a party to "go twerking," though some of us declined. We were also drinking with an FBI agent who, when some freshman girls asked about his occupation, drily claimed to be "a soybean farmer." So it was some night. The freshman girls (who I suppose were not freshmen, as they were legally drinking alcohol, though they had a freshman aura) were from Houston and kept apologizing for harassing Joey because, as they repeatedly explained, "there are a lot of lookalikes in Houston." So they pretended - with real, continuous commitment! - that they thought Joey might just be someone who looked like herself professionally.

Tiny and Cutely

Elizabeth spent Thanksgiving at the racetrack, natch. Her horse came in second and Elizabeth got interviewed by the local news. She files this report: "lots of horrible hats made with hot glue guns and old gum... the jockeys were so tiny and cutely dressed."

I Ate It

You know I'm a "teacher" and I have "office hours" at Square Books but today Richard Howorth spotted me and forcibly moved my "office hours" to City Grocery Bar for martinis. Well first we asked for gibsons but it turns out I ate all the cocktail onions last night. Who should show up but Chris Offutt, who wrote this week's episode of TREME? We talked about unicorns. Then John Currence came by and put a small cast-iron skillet in front of me and in that skillet was something to eat on a bed of collards and I ate it and it was good and John said, "That's fried cockscomb." (See also.)

Update Update

IOU so many updates! HALLOWEEN FILM FESTIVAL UPDATE: Halloween Film Festival continued with DEMENTIA 13, ISLAND OF LOST SOULS, and THE OTHER (pictured - yikes!). JERRY LEWIS UPDATE: As you know, I like to tell you as a public service whenever the New York Times mentions Jerry Lewis. It used to happen all the time. Lately, I've had to scavenge. They did it the other day, but it was just one of those dumb "the French love Jerry Lewis" throwaways that is supposed to make some kind of point but never does. Yesterday, in an article about that director Ratner, there was a passing mention of Richard Belzer calling Jerry Lewis on his cell phone. Another throwaway, but tantalizing. Imagine having Jerry available at the touch of a button. Imagine it, I said! RECOMMENDATION SHELF UPDATE: You may recall that my recommendation shelf had hit hard times. I spruced it up and it immediately sold three more books. Immediately! You're welcome, Gogol. Total books sold: 27. The Lynda Barry did not sell yet, but one of my spies at Square Books reports that an eight-year-old girl leafed through it with great interest. A good sign for the future of the world! FOOD EATING UPDATE: Yesterday, with the conclusion of the Southern Foodways Symposium, I ate what was easily one of the greatest (and hugest) breakfasts of my life, including a garnish of the lightest, fluffiest, most flavorful fried pork skins that have ever happened. The incredible chef Alon Shaya was in town with his crew from the restaurant Domenica in New Orleans. As an extra surprise, Chef Shaya walked from table to table hoisting an Alabama wild boar haunch, aged in his cellar for two years and turned into wild boar prosciutto. In the serving line, they cracked a raw egg over your squid ink gnocchi and it poached itself.

Oatmeal Tips

Today's "Oatmeal Tip" comes from Elizabeth: "I got 'Crystal Wedding Oats' b/c the container was pretty and there was a tumbler inside! like a pink (faux depression glass) plastic tumbler. adult cereal has prizes in new orleans! it's magic." So if that's what you want in your oatmeal, that is the brand of oatmeal to get. Thanks for the tip, Elizabeth! And good night from all of us here at "Oatmeal Tips."

Oh Yeah!

Oh yeah, John Currence was on TREME last night. He said (I think I'm getting this right), "Come back in six months for the best fried chicken you'll ever eat." That was him! I was surprised to hear about Ashton Kutcher taking over for Charlie Sheen on TWO AND A HALF MEN. Currence is on so many TV shows lately I just sort of assumed it would be him.