I Put on a Cat Head

Lee Durkee and I took a leisurely, sociable walk around town last evening. I stopped to put on this mask I saw in the window of Off Square Books. It has my germs in it now. And I have its. (That reminds me of the old S.J. Perelman cartoon caption, "I have Bright's disease and he has mine.") I had neglected to bring my wallet, or I might have surprised Dr. Theresa by wearing the cat head in the door when I got home... in retrospect a prank that could have gone awry. The mask cost thirty-two dollars, which seemed like a lot to me, but Lee said it was a high-quality cat mask and the price seemed reasonable, considering. It was smothering and difficult to remove.

More True Stories From Real Life

Guess what Ace Atkins got me for Christmas. Why, that's right! An owl costume to sleep in. How did you know? Anyway, it's definitely not weird, at least we can all agree on that. Last night I put on my owl costume and tried to talk about something important with Dr. Theresa. She said, "It's hard to take you seriously when your owl eyebrows are askew." I said, "Oh!" and tried to fix my owl eyebrows. Dr. Theresa said, "Can I tell you something?" I said, "What?" She said, "You're not a real owl." It hurt! In other news, I was slicing some cherry tomatoes yesterday when from out of nowhere the song "Cheeseburger In Paradise" got stuck in my head. Now, this is not a song I find enjoyable or "good." It must have lain dormant in my brain for decades, like the ultimate evil. And there it was. The tomatoes triggered it. It was like when the Cylons got activated! I kept singing, "I like mine with lettuce and tomato, Heinz 57 and french fried potato." And today that song continued to be stuck in my head. And I am afraid I sang a snatch of it some moments ago and Dr. Theresa begged me to stop, announcing that she hates the word "taters." I thought I knew all the words Dr. Thersea hated. But this was a new one. In addition, I protested that the lyrics referred to "french fried potato," not "taters." Dr. Theresa apologized and said that she thought I had been singing "taters." I sat down and thought long and hard about things.

Awry

In STARDUST MEMORIES, Woody Allen talks about how his mother used to run "boiled chicken through the deflavorizing machine." Well, last night I watched I SAW WHAT YOU DID on TCM, and it was as if someone had run a couple of Megan Abbott's most recent books - no boiled chicken, they! More like succulent prime rib - through the deflavorizing machine. The result was not unpleasant! But if you want all the flavor, you have to go to Megan Abbott. At one point, one of the teen protagonists of I SAW WHAT YOU DID even bites her lip by the anticipatory (I guess!) method displayed on the cover of Megan's newest masterpiece DARE ME. By the way, Nick Hornby has high praise for DARE ME in the July BELIEVER magazine. "This is the third Megan Abbott novel I have read this year," he writes. "... she's really good, and is doing something nobody else I've read is attempting." In the same column he writes that "Blog" Buddy Tom Franklin's CROOKED LETTER, CROOKED LETTER is "every bit as ambitious, as thoroughly imagined, and as gripping as his earlier work." Here is what I remember: when I was a little kid, I SAW WHAT YOU DID must have been rerun on TV, because some other kids were talking about it in the schoolyard, and just hearing about the plot (prank phone call gone horribly awry) scared me. So I don't know whether I've seen it before or all my memories of it come from schoolyard chatter. The music in I SAW WHAT YOU DID is weirdly jaunty, like circus music, built around the "nyah nyah" taunt. The "nyah nyah" taunt is an easy temptation. When I was in a band with Jon Host, I slipped the "nyah nyah" taunt into every solo, much to his amusement and/or increasing rage. What else can one say of I SAW WHAT YOU DID? It was fascinating, especially using the Megan Abbott lens. Joan Crawford strides through it with her camp knob cranked up as far as it will go. She builds to a Lithgow-level freak-out that destroys the innocent dreaminess of the formerly winsome teen.

Some Blurb

So here's part of Cynthia Ozick's blurb for SABBATAI SEVI: THE MYSTICAL MESSIAH by Gershom Scholem: "There are certain magisterial works of the human mind that alter comprehension so unpredictably and on so prodigious a scale that culture itself is set awry... Obviously it is not possible to 'review' such a work, any more than one can review a mountain range." All right! That's all I want from a blurb. Is that too much to ask?

Recommendation Shelf Controversy!

I was over at Square Books picking up my Geneva Bible - yes I was! - when I noticed something awry on my recommendation shelf. Awry, I said! The Calvino had been sold... that part is cool! But SOMEONE had replaced it with a novel by some Nobel prizewinner of whom I have never heard. Nothing against Nobel prizewinners! But I shudder to think of false recommendations being issued in my name. "Must have been a weekend worker," theorized an incensed Michael Bible (I wish he had a sister named Geneva Bible). You will be happy to know that I replaced the phony recommendation with one of my old favorites, RAVEL by Jean Echenoz. That makes FIVE books sold by my recommendation shelf, which means that I am turning the economy around for our nation! While I was loitering in Square Books I noticed that Dick Cavett has come out with a new autobiographical volume. How sad I was as I paged through the index and found nary a Jerry Lewis reference. Nor were "Pascagoula" and "UFO" among the listings, leading me to conclude that there is nothing in the book about the time Mr. Cavett interviewed the Pascagoula UFO abductees of my tender youth. So don't waste your money on that one! (Pictured, a detail from Edward De Vere's Geneva Bible, which "Blog" Buddy Lee Durkee has examined in person.)

Crazy Stang

Our friend Joey loaned us a DVD of a documentary called CRAZY LOVE which, by coincidence, had also been recommended by Dr. "M." The packaging says it's a "disturbing true story of an obsessive relationship gone awry in 1950s New York." We watched it tonight and yes, "awry" is a nice word for it! As you know, we don't like to talk about "disturbing" things on the "blog" if we can at all help it, but I do feel obligated to mention a part of the film in which someone described her first impression of the male subject of CRAZY LOVE: "He looked like... should I say it...?" Then there was a long pause while the interviewee thought about whether or not she should drop the bombshell. Finally she decided to go ahead and throw caution to the wind and say who he looked like. "Arnold Stang." Remember, she was talking about someone who might be considered a monster of manipulation, a man of extraordinary callousness and brutality, but it took her a second to decide whether or not comparing his looks to Arnold Stang's might be going a little too far. There. I have dutifully logged another reference to Arnold Stang. NOW who's obsessive?