Zoological Adjustments

Well, well, well. I guess you'd think I was pretty foolish if I went out and bought the first few books of Aristotle's METAPHYSICS just so I could fact-check Thomas Aquinas when he says there's an owl in it. But that's just what I did. And hold onto your hats! There's NOT an owl in it! Here's what it says in my brand spanking new (by which I mean 1933) translation of the METAPHYSICS: "just as it is with bats' eyes in respect to daylight, so it is with our mental intelligence..." That's right! It's bats! Not owls! NOW what are you saying? I bet you're saying "Money well spent!" I troubled myself to scrounge about halfheartedly on the "internet" to find out why Aquinas says owls instead of bats. And you know, I found out a couple of things, sort of. I skimmed over a scholarly article called "Power and Limits of the Human Mind: On the Arabic Reception of the Analogy of Bats and Daylight..." Look. There's more to the subtitle but I'm getting tired of typing. It's like an email I got from McNeil this morning. He was writing about the movie DOCTOR, YOU'VE GOT TO BE KIDDING! but had the energy to type only "Dr. ... kidding" (ellipses McNeil's). And I mocked him for it! But look at me now. Anyway, if I'm reading it correctly, this guy (his name is Amos Bertolacci) says that when translating from Greek to Latin, people began subsituting "owl" for "bat." And he explains why, but I don't think I understood it. Here, I'll quote it for you: "The interpretations of the bats’ analogy in Latin philosophy and theology have a different character from the ones considered here: Latin translators from Greek made Aristotle’s text less problematic by means of zoological adjustments, i.e. by identifying Aristotle’s bats with other night animals (night ravens or owls)." Then he goes on to say that some people even substituted eagles for bats! That's just crazy. (The latter being my conclusion, not Mr. Bertolacci's.) The article led me to another "web" site containing, in full, Thomas Aquinas's critique of Averroes's gloss on Aristotle's metaphysics, where I read with my own two eyes and my own pea-sized brain Aquinas taking Averroes to task for his bat observations... leading me to conclude (and bear in mind "I ain't no doctor with a degree" to quote Aretha Franklin) that Aquinas knew very well that they were bats in the original, not owls! All of this is to come to the shocking point: for the FIRST TIME EVER, I am going to REMOVE a book from my BIG LONG LIST OF BOOKS WITH OWLS IN THEM. So long, Aristotle. You had your chance! And you blew it. To quote Bill Boyle imitating Robert De Niro in COP LAND, "YOU BLEW IT!!!!!"

A Word of Diminutive Form

Y'all are going to go crazy from excitement when I tell you about this! So, remember the other day when I was remembering reading "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" at the University of South Alabama? I don't suppose any of us, if we existed, will ever forget the time I remembered that. So I started thinking to myself, "Jack," I started thinking, "wasn't 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came' some kind of creepy-ass junk and doesn't that mean it probably has an owl in it, which is something you supposedly love, Jack, you wily old bastard?" (I just shocked myself with my own profanity, but I see I have "blogged" the latter word twice before - "click" here and here for context. I know you won't, you bastard!) So I found my giant volume of Robert Browning and started reading "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came." And I read stanza after stanza, and I got to the part where it became clear... well, he's like, "a burr had been a treasure-trove." In other words, it's a bleak landscape! There's nothing there for an owl to perch on! So I was getting discouraged, all right. Then Dr. Theresa, who was preparing dinner, asked me to help out by seasoning the fish. Which I did gladly! And let me tell you: I know you're worried, but I left the book open flat on my TV tray, and it didn't snap shut and make me lose my place, and I'll tell you why: it has a broad, sturdy spine! Just the kind of book spine I go nuts for! So after I season the fish, I sit back down with the book and I'm not feeling too optimistic about any owls, you know, but here's old Childe Roland and he's getting pretty freaked out by this weirdo landscape, and he asks himself, "Will the night send a howlet or a bat?" And with my keen mind hard at work, I was like "A howlet? That's got to be an owlet!" And damned if I wasn't right for once in my sorry life. I looked at the etymology in the OED and here's where it gets super exciting!!! Remember how I like to beat myself up over the time in my second book when I tried to give a character a comical French accent like some kind of jerk? And I was like, "Why did I ever think a French person would say 'owl' like 'howl'?" Well, well, well. The OED says that howlet is "Apparently a borrowing from French... hulotte, in 16th century hulote, a word of diminutive form." So who's the jerk now? Is it still me?

Effort

I don't mean to brag, but I was walking on the beach on Christmas Eve, listening to an audiobook of FINNEGANS WAKE. I was listening to Chapter 10... wait! I must already interrupt this wonderful story that has you on the edge of your seat. It wasn't really Chapter 10. More to come on that in a moment. Anyway, I was listening to what I thought was Chapter 10, and, hey, do you remember the comical "French" accent I imposed on a character in my second book? Well, it sure sounded to me like James Joyce perpetrated the same offense, and in a remarkably similar style. So, suddenly, I was proud of myself instead of being so terribly ashamed. I decided that upon my return home, I would double check my physical copy of the book, which was given to me by a defrocked preacher when I worked in a bookstore in downtown Mobile, to see whether Joyce and I had indeed independently hit upon the same inaccurate and even potentially embarrassing method of presenting to the reader a comical "French" accent. And that is what I did, or tried to do. The first thing I noticed upon digging out the book was that there are no chapter headings. I have run into this problem before, notably when I was trying to teach BELOVED during my brief flirtation with doing that kind of thing. Authors! Please number your chapters. Don't be like James Joyce and Toni Morrison. Ha ha ha! What terrible advice. See also the travails of the Dune Book Club. As I leafed through FINNEGANS WAKE - and allow me to state, just to help you understand what I've been through, that the online index to FINNEGANS WAKE I found years ago is now nothing but a zombie "link"! - it seemed to me (as already hinted) that Joyce's chapters were longer than the "chapters" of the audiobook, which, though unabridged, had been broken into bite-sized chunks... bite-sized if you're a hippopotamus! But relatively bite-sized, making my search more of an effort, especially given the fact that I no longer care about anything. I did track it down, though: "you wish to ave some homelette... Your hegg he must break himself." Believe it or not, that's James Joyce, not me. From context, the speaker seems French, though there is some German sprinkled around the passage, too, just to drive me batty. BUT THAT'S NOT ALL! On Christmas Day I was walking along the beach again and the audiobook said to me, "it being Yuletide"... and it was! Dr. Theresa could not walk on the beach with me because she had twisted her ankle. I would not be listening to an audiobook of FINNEGANS WAKE were I pleasantly strolling hand-in-hand along a beach with Dr. Theresa. I am sure you will recall that the last time Dr. Theresa and I visited my parents, we saw a mink run across the road and a pig run across the road. This time, we saw nothing run across the road. While I was taking a bag of trash to a garbage chute, however, I saw a little bright pink lizard of a kind I have never seen before. I want to say it was a salamander, because I have always imagined salamanders - no doubt incorrectly - to be pink. I also saw this guy (above) on the day after Christmas. Oh! I forgot! So I also heard Joyce use "owl-wise," I thought, seeming to mean both "always" and "wise as an owl." And I checked! Like a hero! Just to satisfy myself. And neither my hearing nor my huffing and puffing brain had deceived me, though my brain had added a superfluous hyphen. I found "the eternals were owlwise on their side every time"... and let me state for the record that I do not believe James Joyce was referring to the Marvel superheroes The Eternals, created by Jack Kirby, though, of course, there are certain similarities (see also). I also thought (and still sort of think after consideration) that owlwise could have meant "as regards owls," as, for example, when somebody (is it Jack Lemmon?) in THE APARTMENT says, "That's the way it crumbles, cookie-wise."

Various Birds

I picked up a book called THE OBSCENE BIRD OF NIGHT by José Donoso, and I was like, hmm, can this obscene bird of night be an owl, perchance? But then I read the epigraph, which is by Henry James's dad, and he is giving his sons some life advice, including "The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters." Thanks, Dad! (I recall while typing this that some kind of weird monster bird of the psyche attacked Henry James's father in a novel by Colm Tóibín and also, presumably, in real life.) So last night I was in bed reading THE OBSCENE BIRD OF NIGHT and I came across "the ugly chonchón of ill omen." So I was like, "Hey, sweetie, look on your phone and tell me what a chonchón is." Dr. Theresa, who was also lying there reading, picked up her phone and looked up the chonchón. She said - and here I paraphrase freely - "It's a head that flies around by flapping its big ears like wings," which was pretty dang close to how it had been described in the book. I mean, exactly, really. "A horrible head would fly through the air, trailing a long mane of wheat-colored hair... flapping huge sinewy ears that were like bat wings." I flipped to the TRANSLATOR'S NOTE at the end of the book, in which Megan McDowell refers to the chonchón as an "owllike creature," and, as you know, that's good enough for me. Though maybe I should put an asterisk on it for now. Which reminds me! I finished that Julian Barnes novel and I didn't see any owls in it, but there were some luminous geese... I should say, "Luminous Geese," as he afforded them the dignity of proper nouns. As a person who plopped luminous owls into his second book, I took special note of the Luminous Geese. (See also.)

Butter Knife

Attention! My friend Sarah will appear in this "post." I happened to notice yesterday - Sarah would never mention it herself; she's too nice! - that I've been dropping the h from her name for how long? Months? Longer? I have decided to investigate no further. But I did want to record my shame here for all to see. Now we may move to happier matters. It's back! The precious little jotting book has been removed from its mothball-filled cedar chest. Now that I have stopped pretending to stop "blogging," I am allowed to take said jotting book with me to Los Angeles, California, and, upon my return, to transcribe my jotted experiences into the form of little numbered jottings. 1. Ace Atkins printed out my boarding passes for me! He said he had left them in his mailbox, and I was concerned, having noticed on our many walks around the neighborhood as we exchange wise thoughts, that the door had fallen off of Ace's mailbox. What if my boarding passes were to blow away in a gentle breeze? I discovered, however, upon my arrival, that Ace has a BRAND NEW MAILBOX! This is the biggest thing to happen in the neighborhood for years. And it reminded me that Dr. Theresa and I had driven past Tom Franklin's house not that long before, and I had admired their sleek, modernistic mailbox. I couldn't decide whether it was new or if I had simply never noticed it before. One day, I vowed, I'll get to the bottom of this! But such thoughts would have to wait, for I was on my way! To wherever I was going. 2. My chosen reading material for the airplane: NIGHTWOOD by Djuna Barnes. My friend Eugene recommended it. He's been dead for 26 years, but I finally got around to it! 3. The new jotting book has an interesting flap on it that it is not within my writerly powers to describe correctly. It also has a built-in ribbon bookmark, burnt orange in color. 4. So, we stayed at the Peabody in Memphis the night before my trip, because the plane left so damn early. Pardon my language! Anyway, I knew I would be rising before the Peabody started serving breakfast, so I ordered a pot of coffee the night before, thinking to down it cold in the morning. Guess what? When I poured a cup, 10 hours after having received it, the coffee was STILL WARM! Here's to the magic coffee pots of the Peabody Hotel. 5. I admit to eating half a Biscoff, my favorite airplane cookie, to help with my fear of flying... the first cookie or sweet of any kind in which I've indulged since the fun little medical incident I enjoyed in March. The king of cookies! The mighty Biscoff. 6. Should I boast that my old iPod is still working hard and well to provide my inflight entertainment? I seem to be listening to a version of "I Love How You Love Me" featuring bagpipes. I jotted as much during the flight. Only when the plane landed did a guy sitting behind me and across the aisle lean forward to ask if he had seen with his own eyes an actual iPod. I was proud to extol its existence, longevity, usefulness, and capacity. He was happy to hear it. 6. I found a Burbank hotel in which my accommodations included a full kitchen - you see, ever since my little medical hiccup, in which part of my human mind was zapped (despite my decision not to investigate further, I did investigate further, and, as I feared, I started dropping the h in Sarah around that point), it is much better if I cook for myself. But the full kitchen did not include any knives of a sufficent sharpness for the necessities of ordinary meal prep. Friends, that is how I ended up cutting up shallots with a butter knife! Let me tell you, it is no easy thing, attacking a shallot with a butter knife, even though a shallot presents itself as a small and tender thing. But don't we all? (See also.) 7. Stopped by the front desk in the morning to see where to get coffee. The "night auditor," as he called himself, was still on duty, a jovial man named Randy. When he asked if I had received my 10% off coupon to the restaurant, and I replied that I had not, he exclaimed, "What the devil!" which I found charming. The way he said "I'm Randy!" was reminiscent, without any of the unsettling atmospherics, of the way Steve Buscemi says "I'm Chet!" in BARTON FINK. 8. When I went to get coffee and asked about a kitchen knife, the server explained that they don't allow sharp things in the rooms. Hmm! She, like Randy, was very nice, and said they would cook anything I wanted, off the menu, to my specifications, so I wouldn't have to stand there brutally murdering a shallot with a butter knife like a chump. Her name was Lourdes, which I found to be a cool name, especially as I was sitting there reading a discussion of miracles in NIGHTWOOD. 9. Not until I returned to the room did I notice for the first time that it was decorated with a large photograph of Jayne Mansfield carrying Bob Hope down some steps (see above)! My powers of observation! They have never been great. 10. Saw a crow in a palm tree but failed to get a decent pic. 11. Elizabeth Ito brought me an illicit steak knife! Which I smuggled into the room, wrapped in a dishcloth (the steak knife was, not I). Elizabeth and I wound up in a photo booth. 12. In NIGHTWOOD: "He'll look as distressed as an owl tied up in a muffler." There! Unlike smiling or drunken owls, this is the type of owl comparison I can understand! Although I cannot approve of the owl treatment described.

13. I met Quinn's cat. He looked like a tiny human person! 14. Met Ashly Burch in Beverly Hills, where I was given a fork with a dramatically bent prong with which to eat my egg whites. No, it wasn't some sort of fancy Beverly Hills utensil for eating rarefied egg whites, it was just a peculiarly, even obscenely destroyed fork (see evidence below) and the egg place just didn't give a damn, presumably. I defiantly swallowed my eggs with the aid of the monstrous fork! You know, and this is true, the last time I ate with Ashly Burch, in January of 2022, as I sat on a wooden bench waiting for my "ride share" to arrive to take me to a fine sushi dinner, I glanced over and saw a fork lying there on the arm of the bench! I took a photo of it at the time, and no doubt shared it on "social media," but I see that it is no longer in my phone, so you'll just have to take my word for it, as I have quit "social media" to the acclaim of millions. What I am saying is that every time I eat with Ashly Burch, there is something weird about a fork. About the bent fork, I made a Uri Geller joke, prefacing it, or softening the blow, by saying, "Now, if I were Dennis Miller, I might say..." and also adding the caveat that Ashly Burch would have no idea what I was talking about when I presently mentioned Uri Geller, which turned out to be true, but she laughed anyway, because she is so nice. Later, I described the incident to Joe Wong, who said I had not really imitated Dennis Miller, because there were not enough allusions to obscure celebrities in my remark. So I gamely tried again, saying, "Looks like Uri Geller and the Amazing Kreskin had a brunch date, cha cha," which Joe kindly deemed passable, though I had added but one allusion. Or maybe "brunch" is an allusion of some kind to something or another. 15. That night, Kate was giving me a ride and I said, "I remember these seat covers!" She has these sheepskin (?) seat covers in her car. Kate laughed and said, "They're old!" She told me I was sitting on the same seat cover where Stan Lee had once parked his bony ass, though she didn't use such crude language, and neither would I, so I don't know what happened just now. Anyhow, it reminded me of the time ("click" here) that Kelly Hogan once touched William Faulkner's buttocks through the very fabric of time itself. I felt the power of Stan Lee's butt! 16. They have spectacular grocery-store brand frozen mango in California. Look, frozen fruits are part of my medically induced breakfast ritual now, okay? So Sarah with an h took me to the grocery store and I was walking around pouting and crying and knocking over huge pyramids of canned goods, as I believe happens in THE DISORDERLY ORDERLY and maybe BACHELOR IN PARADISE???? I am exaggerating my reaction to Sarah's favorite grocery store, but I really was going around saying, yeah, so what? We have these same eggs in Mississippi! And so on. But now I publicly admit that grocery-store brand frozen mango in California is plucked at the peak of flavor and texture. The stuff I'm getting here at home just doesn't measure up! 17. Going home, my inflight screen prominently announced BATMAN RETURNS as an entertainment choice and I felt it was a sign, because I had just been praising that film to Ashly AND Kate AND Adam on my exciting trip. Man, I was ready to watch it. It really struck me as the perfect airplane movie. But the screen was broken! The flight attendant, a very nice person named Davi, showed me that the kids' entertainment selection was working, anyway. "Wallace and Gromit are funny," she assured me, which might be true, I guess, but who cares? Wallace and Gromit can go to hell! I'll tell you what she did, though. I couldn't get my phone to connect to the wifi, so she entered her own password to give me special flight-attendant access to whatever the hell I was doing. I ended up watching Chaplin's A WOMAN OF PARIS, because my headphones didn't fit my phone, and a silent feature seemed to be a good option. 18. I had purposely arranged a 4-hour layover in Atlanta for reasons best left unexplored. 19. As the plane descended, the guy next to me asked if we were landing in Atlanta, which I thought was a funny question from a person on an airplane, but I said yes. 20. As I was leaving Cat Cora's airport restaurant, where the service was excellent - thank you, Ana and Winsome! (That's right, Winsome, another cool name... to Sarah, yes, Ana had but the one n in her name, I checked) - a guy stopped me and said he was a missionary. He said he could sense with his missionary powers (though he didn't put it that way) that I had had some health issues recently and he wanted to pray for me. He might have said "over" me. I said, "You can pray for me later, but I have a plane to catch now." He said it would take 10 seconds. I said all right. Wait! I should mention he was wearing a shirt that said "Fudgie Wudgie" on it. I asked him what "Fudgie Wudgie" meant. He said he was a chocolatier as well as a missionary. I said okay. He prayed over me as advertised. Then he said, "I can see the Holy Spirit all over you." I said thanks.

McNeil's Li'l Bogie Bits

Why, hello. I didn't see you standing there. You're just in time for "McNeil's Li'l Bogie Bits," your one place on the "internet" for McNeil and his bogie bits, so li'l, and extracted so lovingly from a 700-page biography of Humphrey Bogart that McNeil is reading. I'll hand it over to McNeil, who writes, "In 1951 Bogart and Bacall had a radio show called 'Bold Venture.' Thirty minutes once a week. It lasted about a year and made them $500k in 1951 dollars." In a subsequent email, McNeil includes a clarifying detail of the show's plot, adding just the sort of zesty zing for which his vaunted bits are so justifiably famous: "Bacall is his young charge...kinky!" McNeil's chosen adjective may be explained by the fact that Bogart and Bacall were, of course, husband and wife, whereas "young charge" is a phrase one hears more often in connection with, say, Batman and Robin, or maybe that's just me.

Speaking of Fox Mulder

I wanted to “post” this earlier, but the AT&T “internet” stopped working over and over. Anyway, here’s what you’ve been waiting for. I got one of those junk headlines that you get on your phone, something like “The Queen’s Favorite Sandwich That She Ate Every Day Since She Was Five – And It’s So Basic!” So I took a screen grab of it and sent it to Ace. That’s all we do all day every day, grab stupid things that appear on our phones and text them to each other. Then I texted the same screen grab, with its accompanying photo of Queen Elizabeth II, to Sara, along with my own humorous commentary: “The answer? A foot-long chili dog.” Sara’s reply was something like (a close paraphrase here): “OMG, really???” So I sadly had to reply that no, Queen Elizabeth II did not, as far as I know, eat a foot-long chili dog every day for 90 years. As Sara expressed it in a subsequent text, her tragedy – ha ha! she didn’t say tragedy – is that she “wants to believe.” Just like Fox Mulder from the X-Files! I added that part. Speaking of Fox Mulder, I was reading another old comic book about The Atom, and he was fighting these tiny guys who lived in a cave and rode around on the backs of bats. The editor interrupted the story to announce that tiny people of a proper size for riding small flying rodents into battle most likely really existed at some point! He insisted, in the capital letters typical of old comic books: “THE ELVES, THE BROWNIES, THE LEPRECHAUNS, THE FAIRIES, ALL MAY BE FANCIFUL RECOLLECTIONS OF A RACE OF TINY HUMANS! CHARLES FORT WRITES OF THEM.” Naturally, I was interested to run across this use of Charles Fort's captivating ramblings as evidence. I always thought Charles Fort would be a big deal on the “blog,” though he has never ended up in even 10 “posts” so far, after all the “blog’s” horrible countless years of thankless and unwanted existence. You remember Charles Fort, of whom it was once recorded on a book flap that he "collected and published reliable accounts of colored rains, living things falling to earth, unknown objects in space and in the oceans, people who have mysteriously appeared and disappeared." Charles Fort, to whom Tom Wolfe casually alluded: "Cassady began fibrillating the vocal cords, going faster and faster until by dawn if he had gone any faster, he would have vibrated off, as old Charles Fort said, and gone instantly into the positive absolute. It was a nice weird party." Charles Fort, whose glowing owls inspired the owls in my own second book. Charles Fort! That’s what I wanted to say. I wanted to say Charles Fort. Oh! In conclusion – and you will have to pardon me in advance for blue language on a level such as never, in my memory, has been attempted on the “blog” before – I watched THE DISORDERLY ORDERLY again, and as I was looking it up afterward in Fujiwara’s excellent monograph, I ran across Jerry Lewis’s defense of the puppet sequence from THE ERRAND BOY, which, having grown wise over the years, I now welcome with arms open wide. In fact, I’m ashamed of some of my earlier “posts” in which I seemingly apologize for Jerry. Back in those days, I just wanted everybody to like me! Now I don’t care anymore. So, Fujiwara interviews Jerry, who says of the part of the movie in which he, Jerry, cavorts tenderly with (if I recall correctly) a flirtatious, languorous ostrich puppet and enjoys maudlin interactions with a little finger-puppet clown… Jerry, who says of himself, actually, “We call that a director with steel balls.” And I was like, you know what? He’s right!

Hot Dog Island

I really should have finished reading the Huya and Tuya section of JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS before I filed my report yesterday. On the next page, Tuya refers to herself as a "she-owl"! She also calls herself "your little mouse... your green frog... your coney." She has more cute nicknames for Huya, too: "my little bat... A crafty corncrake... dearest toad... my penguin... my mole..." I had to look up coney, I'm sorry. I know you think less of me now. In this case, it's a rabbit. The OED tells me it can also refer to a hot dog, a meaning going back at least to 1902. When you think about it, Coney Island is Hot Dog Island! Endearingly, one of the citations in the OED is a newspaper article from 1959: "Jim enjoys eating coneys and fried chicken." I don't know who Jim is, but it was big news in 1959!

Wolves

I had nightmares about wolves the other night... and let's leave aside for a moment that the very first dreams I recall from childhood are nightmares of wolves... so naturally I was telling my ADVENTURE TIME: FIONNA AND CAKE coworkers about my nightmares of wolves, and believe me, they are always thrilled to hear my descriptions of my inner turmoil. Anyhow, Adam wisely asked whether I had read something about wolves before going to bed. I said yes! In fact, I had read an old comic book in which Dr. Doom plunges to certain death, having been attacked by a pack of wolves. Adam reacted to this news with surprise: "Dr. Doom was defeated by WOLVES? He fights the Fantastic Four!" If I paraphrase, it is only slightly. I did not get into this part, but Dr. Doom had removed his chest shield for reasons too dull to explain. I will (and did) say that he was fighting a character called the Shroud, of whom I had never heard, despite the fact that the comic book in question came out in 1976, possibly the peak of my comic-reading years. The Shroud, by the way, is a shockingly blatant Batman rip-off. Shockingly! However, that need not concern us here. It is much more important that I use the excuse of wolves to mention something loosely related. I was in Square Books the other day, poking around, and I opened up a book called THE SLAVIC MYTHS by Noah Charney and the delightfully named Svetlana Slapsak. In it, I read "Count Jan Potocki was one of Poland's most revered writers and Enlightenment intellectuals. His masterpiece, THE MANUSCRIPT FOUND IN SARAGOSSA..." blah, blah, blah. I knew that already. BUT! "On 23 December 1815, this brilliant, worldly man absconded with one of his mother's silver teapots, made out of it a bullet, had this silver bullet blessed by a priest and then shot himself in the head with it... because Jan Potocki believed he was a werewolf." That's something I didn't know! This revelation caused me to purchase the book. As you know, I consider standing in a bookstore and reading no better than being a sneak thief. As long as I have you here, let's tidy up some "blog" business. I see that this will be my ninth "post" in April. I have not "blogged" with such frequency since October 2020, troubled times during which, as you know, I was required to revive this most decisively defunct "blog" in order to cheer a grateful nation with my wry reflections on the foibles of humanity. I need to reemphasize here that the combo of quitting social media and forced recuperation have left me with little else to do. I told Tom Franklin, "Hey, I've been 'blogging' about those old comic books you gave me," and he was like, "I didn't know 'blogs' existed anymore." And they don't.

Twisted Dharma Stories

Stopped by Square Books yesterday and picked up a Penguin paperback called BUDDHIST MEDITATION: CLASSIC TEACHINGS FROM TIBET. If it's any of your business! This collection starts with a few old poems, and the second poem in the whole book introduces an image that readers of the "blog" are sure to go into a tizzy over, for reasons of which I need not remind my initiates: "Old Owl sits on the rock and hoots." Next comes a question to which I could only answer yes: "Do you sit upon your rock,/Spouting twisted dharma stories to others?" Speaking of which, I had lots of thoughts about those WORLD'S FINEST COMICS starring Batman and Superman that Tom Franklin brought me in the hospital. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to express them anywhere, except in texts to Tom, but the combination of being sickly and quitting social media is a potent one! Plus, discovering the owl in yet another book opened the door to a legitimate "blog" "post" and now my fingers may type as much as they like and no one can stop them! These comic books are from back when I used to read comic books, and Batman isn't cool and edgy, as I suppose he is now. Like, Superman will say (I paraphrase), "All right, Batman, I'm going to go to outer space and do some important stuff. All you have to do is watch this one guy, and he's literally asleep, can you handle it?" And Batman goes, "Sure thing, Superman!" (Again, I paraphrase.) And in the VERY NEXT PANEL, someone is bashing Batman in the back of the head with a big stick. Down he goes, out for the count! He had one job, as the hilarious meme from years gone by would have it. I have always pictured Batman as being very alert. On the anecdotal evidence of the two issues of WORLD'S FINEST that Tom brought me, I can also say that Batman and Superman are surprisingly testy with one another, bickering and petty, like some old couples. Often, they keep their bitter feelings deep down inside, and express them only in thought bubbles. Here I will cease paraphrasing and give you a couple of direct quotations. "WHERE IN BLAZES IS SUPERMAN? WE WERE SUPPOSED TO MEET HERE BY THIS OLD SUGAR MILL BY NOON!" Batman sulks with a petulant look on his face. From a separate story: "BLAST! IT'S ALL BATMAN'S FAULT... IT WAS HIS TIP I ACTED ON. SOME DETECTIVE!" Superman silently rages. "AND WHERE IS HE?" he adds, exposing the odd Beckett-adjacent sub-theme of these comics, which is that Batman and Superman wait around for each other a lot, demi-gods paralyzed to helplessness by a perceived dependency that perhaps does not exist. In the same story, Superman is so over Batman's crap that he demolishes an office desk with his fist in frustration, although it is not adequately explained why Superman is sitting behind an office desk like a chump. In conclusion, Dr. Theresa reports that there is a rabbit in the backyard RIGHT NOW. And it's Easter!

Unattributed Owl

I was convalescing this weekend in a MAGIC MOUNTAIN style medical facility when Tom Franklin dropped by with an armload of old comic books to help me pass the miserable hours. Now, one of these comics was a Gold Key publication about a superhero called THE OWL, and he seemed vaguely familiar. Soon enough, I remembered that I had run across a panel or two of the Owl subduing his foes with the use of his gun that shoots out rainbows. I had no context, and I passed it along to you without context, you're welcome. Somehow it never occurred to me - until now! - that a comic book called THE OWL should go on my long list of books with owls in them. After all, I have included other comic books on the list... off the top of my head, THE DEMON by Jack Kirby, DAREDEVIL, and Grant Morrison's THE INVISIBLES. Not trying very hard, I couldn't find details of authorship in my copy of THE OWL, save for a splash page signed by "Siegel & Gill." And you know what? That's all the effort I'm going to put into it. Old me would have scoured the "internet" for more information. But in case you can't tell, I've been sick. Get off my back! I will tell you that the Owl has a robot owl named Owlo. That seems important. In fact, he has an endless supply of robot owls named Owlo, in case something happens to one of them. During Tom's visit, we discussed many things, such as whether Deadman, a ghost superhero who shoves his soul into the bodies of other people, could inhabit Superman, who is, after all, not human, but some kind of freaky alien. Then Tom brought up the obscure cowboy superhero Vigilante... yes, I believe "superhero" is an accurate term. Vigilante (pictured above) doesn't have otherworldly powers, but neither does Batman. Case closed. Anyhow, imagine my delight when, after Tom had left, I found this on the cover of a WORLD'S FINEST comic: "VIGILANTE ROUTS THE 'REFORMED OWL-HOOT CLUB.'" Please note, that's owl-hoot, not hoot-owl, as I originally misread it. The story itself begins with this narration: "DYED-IN-THE-WOOL WESTERNERS WILL TELL YOU 'ONCE AN OWLHOOT, ALWAYS AN OWLHOOT!'" That's right, the cover used a hyphen but the actual comic did not. All this, perhaps, sheds some light on a phrase from TRUE GRIT that I seemingly found mysterious ("click" here for details. You usually ignore such exhortations, but I've been sick!). In conclusion, it seems that I have never mentioned on the "blog" - though it hardly seems possible (that I haven't mentioned it, I mean) - that I had a letter to the editor published in WORLD'S FINEST COMICS when I was a kid. It was a pretty sarcastic letter.

Sitting

I've been sitting on this for a while. Yes, yes, checking my records, I see that on August 2 of this year, I became fascinated by wombats for a couple of hours. As a result, I "tweeted" on the subject, to which someone responded with the fact that Dante Gabriel Rossetti (pictured) kept wombats as pets. Naturally, I scurried around the "internet," seeking corroboration, which I found immediately, via a scholarly article, which quoted a poem about wombats by Mr. Rossetti. In the poem, Mr. Rossetti compares wombats favorably with owls and bats (two creatures often linked in literature, as we have seen, though seldom in the company of wombats). As you well know, I no longer "blog," although I am required by state law to maintain my famous list of books with owls in them. However! The article had no footnotes, as I recall, and now I am much too tired to check. So I have no way of knowing if the wombat poem (which appeared in a letter) was ever published, either in a book of Rossetti's poetry or in a book of his correspondence, or whether the author of the article was just rummaging around in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's things, looking for wombat information, a quest to which his life is no doubt devoted.

Parisian Aesthete

Here's half a sentence from that book about Wagner: "The Parisian aesthete Robert de Montesquiou, in his book-length poem THE BATS..." Stop right there! That's all I need from a sentence. No need to continue. Although the end of the paragraph has another treat in store: "Montesquiou had a pet bat whom he considered the reincarnation of Ludwig." That's King Ludwig II of Bavaria to you!

Reading Comprehension

No owls so far in THE CELESTIAL HUNTER by Robert Calasso. Here's one part, though: "Strolling among blackberries, sunflowers, mulberries is already strolling among stories. And, when night falls, the stories continue, among bats and overhanging rocks." So I was like, "Oh boy! Here come the owls!" Because as we have seen, bats in literature are often accompanied by owls. But there were no owls forthcoming. In the same chapter, however, there was a lot of talk about Ovid. I thought, "You know, I'm getting old. I need to read Ovid. I need to read a complete version of the METAMORPHOSES. I have some selections scattered around but I need to read the whole thing, because I am an old man." So I ordered a complete translation with copious notes appended from Square Books. When I got my hands on it, I was like, oh, yeah, there are surely going to be some owls in this. I skipped around among the pages, my eyes peeled for owls, and it took almost no time to find one, with astonishing results! Now, I skimmed over it, but I seemed to be reading about somebody or another giving a box to these kids and saying, "Don't look in this box!" You know how that always goes. So two of the kids (if they were kids) didn't look in the box, but the third one did, and saw a human baby and a snake hanging out in the box. Don't worry! The baby and the snake were doing great! (I think.) So, a raven sees all of this going down, and he flies off to tattle to a goddess about it, but the goddess gets angry for reasons I did not bother to contemplate. She puts the whammy on the raven and turns him (this may not be an exact quotation) "lower than an owl." Well! To me, this implies that an owl is a bird of low rank, if it is such an insult to be turned "lower than an owl" (again, not an exact quotation). Where does Ovid (or the deities upon whom he is reporting) get the idea that an owl is some kind of half-assed bird? Pardon my salty language! We've seen this kind of thing before.

This Will Not Interest You

So, toward the end of this Philip Roth novel, to my surprise, he tells the exact same story about George Plimpton I once told on this very "blog" ("click" here for more information - I know you won't!). Furthermore, it would appear that he has the story from the same source. I guess this guy just goes around the country telling about the time he was hanging out with George Plimpton and George Plimpton took off his t-shirt and threw it in the air to attract bats. Wouldn't you? Tell the story, I mean. I didn't mean to imply that you would take off your t-shirt and use it to attract bats. Who would do such a thing? George Plimpton, apparently. In roughly the same passage, Philip Roth compares himself to Jerry Lewis, in that they are both "affronters" (his word), or really Roth's first-person narrator Nathan Zuckerman obliquely compares himself to Jerry Lewis, but come on! Hey! That reminds me. Last night I noticed for the first time a direct allusion to THE NUTTY PROFESSOR in MEAN STREETS. Both films contain scenes of people lined up like bowling pins, and there's a clattering bowling pin sound effect when the the people are knocked over en masse. I REST MY CASE.

Hoot Owls of East Tupelo

There are hoot owls in ELVIS AND GLADYS, Elaine Dundy's book about Elvis Presley and his mother, one of an endless series of celebrity biographies that Megan Abbott and I are reading together (see also), but I don't tell you about all of them because some of them don't have owls in them. In a footnote, Dundy finds it interesting that both Elvis and Marilyn Monroe had mothers named Gladys, which reminded me, although I've never seen it, of an infamous scene in BATMAN V SUPERMAN, and if you don't know what I'm talking about, that's fine. Okay, I guess Batman stops fighting Superman because he finds out they both have moms named Martha. Not that Elvis and Marilyn were ever engaged in some kind of cosmic battle (that I know of) but I would watch that movie.

You Didn't Let Me Down, Sam Shepard

Almost at the end of this short new book by Sam Shepard and I was like, are you kidding me? Are there not going to be any owls in this book? Why, Sam Shepard's the one who got me started in my lifelong career of counting the owls in the books I read. But now there's a section about the movie THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (though he doesn't name it), with a weirdly persistent refrain that the movie has "absolutely no sense of humor" (is that a bad thing? I can't tell what Sam Shepard thinks!) and Sam Shepard has bats and owls chasing the incredible shrinking man at the end of his movie, though I don't think that's accurate, and I should know, remember how I had a lot of big thoughts about the end of that movie on January 14, 2009 ("click" here)? Of course you do! But maybe I just forgot the bats and owls. Or maybe Sam Shepard is using "poetic license"! I guess we'll never know.

The Original Skeeky Kid

Megan Abbott and I have been reading lots of books about movie people together. We read some books about Orson Welles, then we read about Walt Disney, then Bunuel's autobiography (first recommended to me by Bill Taft), which, to my astonishment, did not have an owl in it, though there were rats and spiders and one or two bats and hair growing out of cracked-open tombs. And those were just his childhood memories! As you know, I don't "blog" anymore unless I read a book with an owl in it, and that brings us to MY SIDE by Ruth Gordon, which Megan and I are reading now, in which a certain Miss Jerome is described as a "five-foot, brown-haired, brown-eyed, parchment-skinned ninety-pound replica of a hoot owl." And that's Ruth Gordon just getting warmed up! I'll tell you one mysterious word she likes to employ: "skeeky." Even Megan, who loves to do research (remember when she found out all about "friendship clubs"?), had trouble tracking down examples. I looked in my GREEN'S DICTIONARY OF SLANG, VOL. 3, P-Z, and found only "skeek," with examples drawn from the early twenty-first century, which seems to be directly opposed to the way Ruth Gordon uses "skeeky." Skeekiness, in Ruth Gordon's usage, is a condition to be desired. The only helpful example Megan could find comes from a magazine short story from 1915: "he spilled a line of bunk about her being the only and original skeeky kid." This fits nicely within the time period that Ruth Gordon is writing about when she uses "skeeky." So! Now that I've got you here and I read a book with an owl in it, I can tell you about an unrelated matter that has been on my mind. I watched the Welles version of THE TRIAL, and it pretty much ended with - SPOILER! - Anthony Perkins alone on a desolate shore with a lit bundle of dynamite. And that reminded me of PIERROT LE FOU, which also ended with its isolated protagonist standing in a lonely spot with a lit bundle of dynamite. And then BANG! Is this a genre? I think I need to find a third example before I can say it's a genre. Oh! While I was watching THE TRIAL, Megan happened to tweet - not knowing that I was watching THE TRIAL - that it was Jeanne Moreau's birthday. And then there she was in THE TRIAL! Jeanne Moreau, I mean. And there I was not knowing it was her birthday. And just about the first line she has in THE TRIAL is, "If you're stuck for something to say, try happy birthday." Isn't that a weird coincidence? Well, I thought it was a weird coincidence. Okay, I'll see you next time I read a book with an owl in it!

George Plimpton's T-Shirt

You know two things about me. 1. I love John Aubrey. 2. Every book I read has an owl in it. So it will not alarm you to discover that I am reading JOHN AUBREY: MY OWN LIFE, the wonderful biographical reconstruction - mostly in his own words - by Ruth Scurr, and it has an owl in it. We have had owls from Aubrey before. But in this case he makes friends with Francis Potter, who is "haunted" by Ovid's "barbarous Medea, mixing her witch's brew: roots, juices, flowers, seeds, stones, the screech owl's flesh and its ill-boding wings. He sees her, hair all unbound and blown about as she dances round..." (See also.) All of which gives Potter the idea of inventing the blood transfusion with chickens. Naturally! Aubrey helps out. Hey, as long as I've got you here, I was at Off Square Books a few nights ago, listening to a guy talk about his memoir. Once he and George Plimpton were out looking for what I believe this fellow called "the elusive burrowing owls of New Mexico." George Plimpton whipped off his t-shirt and tossed it into the air, where it attracted a large gathering of curious bats. Plimpton conjectured that the bats believed his t-shirt to be a delicious giant moth. I assume all this is in the book, or why did he bring it up? So I am putting his book on my list of books with owls in them.

"Blog"trospective 18: The Anatomy of Melancholy

As promised, though I have "stopped 'blogging,'" I have returned to you just long enough to boast about finishing all 977 pages of THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY. That includes the first appendix, "The Conclusion of the Author to the Reader" (reworked by Burton for his introduction and left out of most subsequent editions), but not the second appendix, in which Burton's birthdate is deduced through astrological data. It only took me something like a year. I won't rehash my many excuses, no, I won't say how big and bulky the 1927 edition is and how I couldn't carry it on airplanes. I won't point out the good, long run I had of reading it before I was interrupted. But - before we get to the main body of this, the final "blog"trospective, I will tell you what I learned from THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY since the last time I saw you. 1. Compared to Blind Alfred Reed, Robert Burton is kind of progressive. He (Burton) gives us (as is his wont) several pages of quotations from ancient scholars enumerating what is supposedly wrong with women. But then he has to admit, "And that which I have said (to speak truth) no more concerns them than men, though women be more frequently named in this Tract; (to apologize once for all) I am neither partial against them, or therefore bitter... If any man take exception at my words, let him alter the name, read him for her, and 'tis all one in effect." 2. "Eating the egg of a night-owl causeth abstemiousness, according to Iarcha the Indian gymnosophist." Burton is speaking of sexual or romantic abstemiousness, though the idea that an owl's egg can cure alcoholism somehow made it to the United States, as reported previously on the "blog." Another of the "absurd remedies" for love mentioned by Burton is the wearing of "Characteristical Images," such as "the seal of a woman with disheveled hair." 3. "Gentle youths" are advised to "Let not the Doves outpass your murmurings... or oyster kissings," which would seem to imply that oysters are good kissers, as good at kissing as doves are at murmuring. I did very little research into the matter. We all know that oysters are supposed to be an aphrodisiac, so why shouldn't they be good kissers? I also recall that prostitutes were called "oysters" and "monkeys" in Burton's time, and though I doubt that's what is meant here, it does make me realize I took at least one of Burton's allusions to monkeys too literally. 4. After one victory, Caesar's soldiers sang a song that went, "Citizens, look to your wives, we bring you a bald adulterer." Gee, what a nice song. I learned of it in Burton's section on the sexual prowess of bald men (pictured). 5. Speaking of which, I learned the word "cornute," which, had I thought about it for a second, I would have known meant to put the horns on, or cuckold, but I didn't think at all, no, I just looked it up in my old dictionary. 6. Lots more owls in these final pages. At least half a dozen. In the passage urging young women not to marry old men, Burton tells how Sophocles, "a very old man, as cold as January, a bed-fellow of bones... doted yet upon Archippe a young Courtesan" and quotes an old poem: "Night-crows on tombs, owl sits on carcass dead,/ So lies a wench with Sophocles in bed." Ha ha, take that, Sophocles! 7. "As a dam of water stopped in one place breaks out into another, so doth superstition." This seems to anticipate Freud! Does it? I don't know. I think of Dr. Theresa's favorite phrase, "the return of the repressed." 8. He calls the goddess Venus "as common as a barber's chair." Was that a familiar insult at the time? Anyway, it's kind of snappy, if rude. 9. Burton says that people can be obsessive on one subject but otherwise fully functional: "they are like comets, round in all places but only where they blaze." A nice phrase! 10. Well, Burton has thought a lot about religious tolerance and I can't say he's for it. He does think burning people at the stake might be a little extreme, sometimes: "We have frequently such Prophets and dreamers amongst us, whom we persecute with fire... I think the most compendious cure for some of them at least, had been in Bedlam. But enough of this." 12. Yet at the same time he doesn't care for hellfire preachers, "nothing but gall and horror, and a mad noise, they make all their auditors desperate, many are wounded by this means, and they commonly that are most devout and precise." 13. "A Tuscan Sooth-sayer, as Paterculus tells the story, perceiving himself and Fulvius Flaccus his dear friend, now both carried to prison by Opimius, and in despair of pardon, seeing the young man weep, said, do as I do; and with that knockt out his brains against the door-cheek, as he was entering into Prison, and so desperately died." Well, that's a terrible story, sorry! But I can't help liking the phrase "knockt out his brains against the door-cheek." It's vivid! 14. Here's Burton's version of that Bible verse I like: "I am like a Pelican in the wilderness, an Owl because of thine indignation." Ha ha! No, I don't know why that's funny. 15. "... the more they search and read Scriptures, or divine Treatises, the more they puzzle themselves, as a bird in a net, the more they are intangled and precipitated into this preposterous gulf." I know how they feel! 16. I learned the word "Mormoluches," which seems to mean "hobgoblins." And now take my arm as we stroll through THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY as summarized previously on this "blog": against vainglory---aliens (two green children who fell from Heaven)---alkermes---Aquinas beats a talking brass man to pieces with a hammer (1927 footnote)---architectural talent of bees, the---Artemidorus the Grammarian loses his wits by the unexpected sight of a crocodile---bats and owls hover in melancholy darkness over a shady bower---Burton critical of, yet defiant about, his own work---company of young men and maids cursed to sing for a year without stopping---compares the profession of a physician unfavorably to that of a hangman---contains numerous owls---cucubuth---cultivating a taste for exquisite sauces is an impediment to happiness---Cupid and Death exchange arrows---delusion of live frogs in belly---dizzards---emperor who was bad at kissing, the---February a peak time for werewolves---fairies walk about in little coats---fairybabes of tombs and graves---fiery urine---glucupicron---invention of the ball---led (by a 1927 footnote to Burton) to Godwin's LIVES OF THE NECROMANCERS---man gets gas from a concoction meant to increase his libido, a---man with a fear of peeing cured by being told the town is on fire, a---mice sleeping under the snow, as fat as butter---parable of a mule and an ass---people cured of various ailments by falling on their heads---pickitivant---Pied Piper story presented as fact, the---possible roots of "willy-nilly"---trees fall in love. In closing I ask you to recall the previous seventeen "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 Osborne Eating Chicken. 13. What Happened When Megan Abbott Lived In Oxford, Mississippi. 14. Graveyards. 15. Feeding a Possum. 16. The Twentieth Century. 17. Stuff I Left Out of the Book I Wrote About Cigarette Lighters. If you "click" on them all, and then "click" on every "link" within them, and every "link" within every "link," you will have discovered my own anatomy of my own melancholy. "The world shall end like a Comedy, and we shall meet at last in Heaven, and live in bliss together; or else in conclusion, fade away into nothing." Okay, so long, see you on McNeil's birthday.