Grits

Hey! Remember how I fretted that McNeil was never going to present us with any more of his special Bogie bits? I should have known that he had his reasons! The 700-page biography of Humphrey Bogart, from which the bits were extracted, got really sad toward the end, he tells me. Then he gives us what I assume are his last few bits, and they are grim ones indeed. Grim bits, or "grits" as I call them for short. You have been warned! Writes McNeil: "I pick it up every once in a while, but it's sad when he's old before his time, and his wife is probably running around with Frank behind his back - and there's nothing he can do, really...except die." I told you it was grim! And as I have discovered for myself, after reading probably hundreds of celebrity biographies under the auspices of the Million Dollar Book Club, they all get sad toward the end. But I never learn my lesson. Hardly any celebrities get taken up bodily into Heaven like Enoch in the Bible. We should move on to happier things! Like, Adam sent Dr. Theresa and me a package of treats when we were sick. And, a week or two later, when Dr. Theresa was breaking down some cardboard boxes for recycling, she found a package of cookies in one them. A package of cookies we had overlooked somehow when we unpacked Adam's thoughtful gift. A package of cookies! Like a miracle! Is that a happy story? Because I can imagine a peevish reader, you know, Elon Musk or his teen BFF Big Balls, saying, "So what? Where's MY cookie?" Well, let's see. Speaking of the Million Dollar Book Club, we're on Kafka's diaries. So yesterday I was reading about a dream Kafka had about "a greyhound-like donkey, which was very restrained in its movements... its narrow human feet were unappealing to me because of their length and uniformity." This here donkey Kafka dreamed about had a "silvery shining breast." You know what I thought of! The supernatural creature the Padfoot, of course, a description of which provided the epigraph to my story collection MOVIE STARS. I'll save you the trouble of "clicking" on the "hyperlink": "In the neighborhood of Leeds there is the Padfoot, a weird apparition about the size of a small donkey, 'with shaggy hair and large eyes like saucers'... to see it is a prognostication of death." So we're back to death again, you're welcome. Grits!

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.)

Layers of Owl

You know that publisher nyrb. They threw a big sale with big, big savings on their "noir" titles, as they designated them: 40% off if you bought four! So one of the ones I got is called THE DAY OF THE OWL. It arrived in today's mail and I wondered whether it "really" had an owl in it, though an owl in the title is good enough for me. Anyway, I idly opened it up and saw an owl in the epigraph! Now, this particular epigraphical owl (I just looked it up in the OED to make sure, and epigraphical is a word, though I don't see evidence that many people have used it since around 1884) was borrowed from Shakespeare's HENRY VI. Now, I could have sworn I found a DIFFERENT owl in HENRY VI, but I poked around on the old "blog" and discovered that the owl of which I was thinking came from RICHARD II. That reminds me, though: I feel that I've been to Square Books a couple of times and wondered if they had a handy mass-market paperback of HENRY V or HENRY IV, but when I looked, all they had was a copy of HENRY VI! The HENRY nobody wants! This is anecdotal and not an accurate reflection of Square Books policy.

The Man Who Read a Book

So! The first two episodes of ADVENTURE TIME: FIONNA AND CAKE came out yesterday. They were good! In the first episode, this character (above) tells Fionna that any plant can be considered a weed, which was something I had read in my book about weeds, as you may recall, and repeated hundreds of times to the delight of the writers room. I don't know if it's true or not, but thanks to my reading, that "fact" made it into the show! One will no doubt be reminded of when my reading of Vance Randolph's OZARK MAGIC AND FOLKLORE contributed, or not, to the original series. Speaking of reading, Megan and I are reading THE MAN WHO SAW A GHOST, which is a biography of Henry Fonda, though nothing about the title would make you guess that. Megan and I have a pretty large bet going on whether the ghost is literal or not. I say it's a metaphor! Because I am always thinking I'm going to get a real ghost, based on the title of a newspaper article or such, and the ghost always turns out to be a metaphor. Now, many of you will fondly recall the time I idly thumbed through THE MAN WHO SAW A GHOST back in 2012, standing in Square Books, and all the excitement it caused at the time. I'll tell you one thing I noticed in this oddly titled biography: there's an epigraph taken from Charles Fort, also the source of an epigraph for MY second book! Megan pulled a fast one, trying to say that it (the epigraph connection) was a ghostly occurrence, but I think I am winning this bet.

I Don't Want to Be Here

Let's get this over with. So, Dr. Theresa and I were watching the horror movie THE FUNHOUSE as part of our yearly Halloween thing we do. I noticed that a cigarette lighter was used as a clue in an interesting way, which really pissed me off. That's right, I use coarse language now, and I use it freely. I knew that the vital cigarette lighter clue meant that I would have to laboriously append a new entry to my index of things I (sort of) regret leaving out of my cigarette lighter book, which no one cares about, except maybe Ace Atkins, who texted yesterday to inquire whether he might borrow a gruesome detail from it in the service of his new work. But let us travel back in time, to our viewing of THE FUNHOUSE, and how my shriveled heart gave a hint of shuddering back to life as I thought about my entire section on matchbooks as clues. So interesting, I smugly mused, to see a cigarette lighter used in a matchbook way here in this film THE FUNHOUSE. I could tell everyone a thing or two about how unusual that is. Then I remembered, hey! The epigraph of the book is about a cigarette lighter as a clue, big deal, Godard even says (in the epigraph) how damn famous it is, that billions of people will remember it. (It's the cigarette lighter from STRANGERS ON A TRAIN... a false, planted clue, which would be an interesting distinction if I cared about anything anymore. You could say, for one thing, that in both cases [THE FUNHOUSE and STRANGERS ON A TRAIN], the lighter benefits the villain, whereas the matchbook is usually valuable to the detective or "good guy"... how I hate myself!) What's so special about this damn cigarette lighter from THE FUNHOUSE? Well, it appeared to be a white Bic, which, as Megan Abbott pointed out to me during the research phase of my book, is thought by some to be bad luck, which superstition ended up in the book, and I guess this lighter would have made a good addition to that section, as it (as hinted parenthetically above) alerts the murderous monster to the presence of the hapless teens, but then again, maybe the lighter was pale yellow. This was weeks ago. Days ago? It was the 19th. I'm so tired of looking things up.

Spy Sandwich

Last night I watched some of THE QUILLER MEMORANDUM. Two of your immediate questions might be, "What's that?" and "Why?" As to the latter, who the hell knows why I do anything. For example, I used to "blog," but then I quit, but then I started up again to cheer the world during a time of tribulation, but now I don't know whether or not I have quit again because in my opinion the world has been cheered up enough. But! One time when I surely "blog" is whenever I see something I should have included in my nonfiction book about cigarette lighters, which no one remembers, including me. To make a long story short (ha ha!) George Segal approaches Alec Guinness to ask for a light, and Alec Guinness produces his cigarette lighter, and they engage in some seemingly innocent banter, but it is all a secret way of saying, "Are you the spy I am supposed to meet? Because I am a spy also." And the answer: "Yes, I am a spy. Would you like a sandwich?" (Alec Guinness offers fellow spy George Segal a sandwich.) Now, there was a whole section of my cigarette lighter book about spies using lighters in their spy business, not limited to, but including, as a way to start a secret spy conversation. I had a whole epigraph about it, if I'm not mistaken. Every chapter had an epigraph! That's the kind of book we're talking about. No wonder I can't remember it. The epigraph, I do recall, came courtesy of Ace Atkins, thanks to his extensive knowledge of the James Bond franchise.

My Job

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

Jennifer Lawrence Admires a Conch

I guess you think I "blogged" an awful lot in May for somebody who stopped "blogging" in April. Shows how much you know! There was so much stuff I didn't "blog" about in May! You wouldn't even believe it. Here is some of it. 1. Stopped by Square Books and bought a notebook. Katelyn said, "Don't you like ______?" (She named another brand.) I said I found the binding inferior. "You should write a letter to the company!" said Katelyn. "I love writing letters to companies." I asked her, "What are you, a ninety-year-old man at heart?" "She does it after she eats her liver and onions," said Slade. Katelyn guilelessly confirmed that she loves liver and onions and wishes she knew how to cook it for herself. 2. Ace wasn't in his office, where I was supposed to meet him, so I sat in the anteroom (?) and looked at a magazine with this caption on the cover: "With a team of wildlife experts, Uma Thurman moves a white rhino threatened by poachers to safety." But you don't see any wildlife experts; you just see Uma Thurman hugging a rhinoceros's head. I like how scrupulous they are not to give us the false impression that Uma Thurman was out there wrangling rhinos by herself. 3. I started reading the new Don DeLillo novel, which is about cryogenics, I guess. That made me recall all of a sudden that McNeil and I tried writing a screenplay called BLUE PERIOD back when we were in our twenties. The plot was that two guys (?) got trapped in an industrial walk-in freezer and told each other stories while they waited and hoped for help to arrive. One story was about a war with Antarctica, maybe? All the stories were about being cold. I remember that McNeil invented a weapon called the ICBM (Icy Cold Banana Malted instead of Intercontinental Ballistic Missile). Another story was about a scam artist with a cryogenics lab. He froze celebrities and thawed them out on a desert island, where they were forced to act in a movie he had written. That's all I remember about the screenplay. McNeil, confirming that such an attempted screenplay existed, said it featured a character named Dean running for office with the slogan "Dean Is Clean." 4. I met with Julia via computer monitor. I thought she said, "You look great!" She actually said, "You look gray!" 5. My doctor's waiting room suddenly has all of Richard Howorth's old NEW YORKER magazines in it - with his home address on the mailing labels and everything! 6. Dr. Theresa went to lunch at Handy Andy and I had pangs of jealousy, traces of which I allowed to cross my face. I had been craving Handy Andy, having recently written about it for publication (details forthcoming, surely, though I am not "blogging" anymore): I feared I had misremembered the condiments with which the Handy Andy double cheeseburger is dressed! Fact checking! Dr. Theresa even offered to bring me one home to examine and consume, but then we remembered that I had a doctor's appointment shortly (different doctor; never mind why I have so many doctors!) and a double cheeseburger might not sit well at a doctor's appointment. 7. This other doctor had more standard waiting room fare: in PEOPLE I read about how Tennille of The Captain and Tennille was embarrassed by a damaged finger she suffered in a wheelbarrow accident as a child. That's why she always turned down movie offers! Meanwhile, "The Captain" wore his famous captain's hat even to bed, humiliated by a failed hair transplant. They struck me as... tragic? "Jennifer Lawrence admires a conch" was a phrase I read in US magazine. 8. In an ADVENTURE TIME meeting I was trying to say the title of the TV show THE BIG BANG THEORY but I accidentally said "8 1/2 MEN." Sadly, I was not trying to be esoteric or funny. My brain had simply fizzled out and died. A good laugh was had by most. 9. We drove past Tom Franklin's place and there was a chicken pecking in his yard. I don't think he owns chickens! (See also.) This was a fluffy chicken with black feathers, salted with white. 10. I realized that I didn't give you a truly complete picture of everything I learned from THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY. I kept a bunch of it off the "blog" and crammed it instead into a novel that will probably never be published, but here's the epigraph, anyway: "Bees indeed make neat and curious works, and many other creatures besides; but when they have done, they cannot judge of them." 11. McNeil's apple tree (below) is producing again. 12. Megan Abbott and I emailed back and forth about what Lady MacBeth meant by "spirits that tend on mortal thoughts" and I sent her a chapter about demonology in Shakespeare from some old book. Only afterward did I realize that the old book was by T.F. Thistelton Dyer, who provided the epigraph for my new book of short stories MOVIE STARS! Yes, that is just one more example of the meaningless junk I didn't "blog" about this month. "Posting" this a week early I do hereby vanquish May's tyranny over my troubled and searching mind.

Cancel My Reservation

Now we're getting into the CANCEL MY RESERVATION era in this Bob Hope biography. And you know what that means: you're not qualified to read my "blog" "posts" about it anymore. I have to email this stuff directly to McNeil. It's too sad and obscure for you to grasp. I guess I'll mention that Bob Hope's son just lost all his money (the son's money, I mean; don't worry about Bob Hope's money!) investing in a movie called WHO FEARS THE DEVIL?, "based on a series of fanciful folktales... about an Appalachian balladeer who is transported back in time." But the weirdest part is that "Arlo Guthrie was originally cast in the lead but he didn't work out and had to be replaced by an unknown." I find it inexpressibly touching to think of Bob Hope's broke son sitting around thinking, "If only Arlo Guthrie were in this movie! Everything would be different." See, I knew you wouldn't understand. Say, did you know that one of the short stories in my supposedly forthcoming collection (2016!) is called "Cancel My Reservation"? No, why would you? And the book originally had an epigraph taken from the closing theme to CANCEL MY RESERVATION, a kind of ersatz Osmond Brothers number. But I replaced it. And for a while I considered using part of a Dwight Garner review for the epigraph: "Peter has left behind a wife, Bea, with whom he runs a small parish in an English village, and their cat, Joshua, about whom we learn way too much... This reader did not mourn Joshua’s freakish death." But then I was afraid that readers might think I was endorsing Mr. Garner's gross pronouncement rather than marveling at its chilling soullessness. (Hey, I had drinks with Dwight Garner at City Grocery Bar and he seems like an okay guy. I even made him a mix tape! Ha ha, what a suck-up.) So then I had to couch that Garner epigraph in some other epigraphs to give it context, like Mark Twain saying something good about cats, and then Garrison Keillor saying something dumb about Mark Twain in the New York Times Book Review, but it got too complicated, it spiraled out of control, it started to get like MOBY-DICK! So never mind. Forget I said anything. Oh, Bob and Shirley made up and liked each other despite their political differences, you'll be glad to know.

Creakish From Age

Did I tell you about the time I was going to write a book called THE ALABAMIAD? Ha ha, what a dope. About 100 pages of it got saved and ended up as the title novella of my second short story collection YOUR BODY IS CHANGING. Tom Franklin was working on SMONK at the time, and SMONK was going to come out first, and Tom had the idea - which didn't last long - that SMONK was going to be titled or subtitled THE ALABAMIAD: BOOK ONE and then my book would be THE ALABAMIAD: BOOK TWO. A dumb old idea I still like. James Whorton came up with the title. I think I asked him what he'd call a book about everything ever in the state of Alabama and I believe he said without even a second of hesitation, "THE ALABAMIAD." But that's not why I called you here! One of my ideas was to start THE ALABAMIAD with 88 epigraphs about Alabama... what Melville did with whales in MOBY-DICK. And I found them! (Though now I have lost them.) Let me say I got out my copy of MOBY-DICK and counted the epigraphs by hand, so I'm not sure there are exactly 88 epigraphs in MOBY-DICK, nor do I even remember if that's the figure I came up with back then, but it sounds right. I think I was reading a book about FINNEGANS WAKE at the time, in which I learned (I think) that James Joyce had hidden a mention of every river in the world somewhere in the text of FINNEGANS WAKE. Knowing there is an Alabama River, I thought, yeah, why not get an epigraph for THE ALABAMIAD from FINNEGANS WAKE? (I got one from MOBY-DICK, too, of course. I'm sure you recall that poor ill-fated Pip the cabin boy is from Alabama.) Anyhow, that's how I dug around and came across, "With her halfbend as proud as a peahen, allabalmy, and her troutbeck quiverlipe, ninyananya." But that's not why I called you here! Yesterday when I was at Lee Durkee's house, he was telling me how he'd like to get on some Shakespeare search engine and find every mention of owls in Shakespeare for me. Now, I've stumbled on the owls in HAMLET and MACBETH kind of naturally, and I was afraid a search engine would be cheating, but then I recalled the FINNEGANS WAKE search engine where I found Alabama all those years ago. And I thought, you know, I should use it to hunt up some owls in FINNEGANS WAKE. There are plenty! "Owlets' eegs (O stoop to please!) are here, creakish from age and all now quite epsilene..." Just one of many examples. I don't think this is cheating because I'm never going to read FINNEGANS WAKE.

Please Don't Feed the Platypus

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

I'm Not Your Psychiatrist

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

Yelling in a Hayfield

I hate to complain about anything in THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL but this character Fergus is a lot like the awful, precocious brats in some sitcoms, always coming up with thudding, smart-alecky one-liners. There's one scene where he's just yelling at a bunch of servants who are toiling in a hayfield, and the narrator (Fergus's older brother) is like, "Leaving him thus haranguing the people, more to their amusement than edification, I returned to the house..." And I was like, "Their amusement?" I imagine they wanted to wring his little neck. But I do love the narrator, who is always trying to convince us and himself that he is not a fop, or, as he just put it, "that I was not the empty-headed coxcomb she had first supposed me to be," and my sympathy for Anne Brontë is always restored by the weird, prim snottiness of the scholarly footnotes in this edition, which seem unnecessarily hard on her ("The author awakens intermittently to the memory of the epistolary device," sniffs one). Here's a sentence from our narrator that tickled me, though: "'Nonsense!' ejaculated I." I like everything about it: the noun, the verb, the pronoun, the exclamation point, the order in which they are placed. It made me think of Tom Franklin's epigraph for his great novel SMONK, taken from Edgar Rice Burroughs: "'Magnifique!' ejaculated the Countess de Coude, beneath her breath."

Bob, Birds, Brontë, O'Brien

I was standing in Square Books the other day thinking, "Should I read a book by Edna O'Brien? She had a fling with Robert Mitchum!" That is a terrible reason to read a book but maybe no worse than lots of others. I picked O'Brien's novel WILD DECEMBERS because they compare it to WUTHERING HEIGHTS, my personal fave, on the back. Of course you can't always trust the back of the book to give you the best information. But O'Brien's epigraph is from Emily Brontë, and the title of the book comes from it, so okay. And it's really good so far! The book, I mean, not the epigraph, although the epigraph is just dandy. As soon as the second paragraph of the first chapter I thought we were going to get an owl: "There were birds always," writes O'Brien, and then she lists some birds, but owls are not among them. Still, I'm only on page 22 and there have been tons of birds so far and much talk of birds. I believe there is a fair chance of owls.

Strongly Implied Owl

I just got out my paperback of BIG SUR and part of the cover shows some dark woods with the silhouette of a donkey, I guess, poking out of the trees, and from deep within these cartoon woods comes a quavery cartoon dialogue bubble with these words in it: "HOO... HOO... WHOOO..." (and there are lots more dots besides) and that's got to be an owl making those noises, right? An owl in the woods? I used to think SHADOW BOX by George Plimpton was the winner of the "earliest owl in a book" award because Plimpton put an owl in the epigraph. But here is a strongly implied owl on a cover. And you know, I really believe there will be an owl in this book. I believe it so much that I am going to go ahead and place BIG SUR on my big long list of books with owls in them that everybody loves so much. Somehow, I believe this book has an owl in it even more than I would if the cover just showed a big old owl staring at me straight up. But I'm taking an enormous gamble! This is the bravest thing I have ever done as a human person living a mortal life on this fragile planet we call earth. BECAUSE WHAT IF THERE IS NO OWL IN THIS BOOK? It will make a mockery of everything I hold dear and I will never "blog" again. Here do I swear it!

Famous Doors of History

Slade over at Square Books saw that I was reading THE FIGHT by Norman Mailer. It's Mailer's account of the Ali-Foreman bout in Zaire (as it was then called). Slade thought I might like SHADOW BOX, George Plimpton's book that covers the same fight. So he brought it up to the store and loaned it to me. Wasn't that nice of him? And here's what I noticed right away: SHADOW BOX has an owl in it, and therefore goes on our fascinating, comprehensive list of books with owls in them, of which you need to make a lifetime study. I noticed it right away because the owl is in the epigraph. That's just about as early as you can stick an owl in your book. George Plimpton doesn't waste any time making sure his book has an owl in it. "He was not born in the woods to be scared by an owl." I guess I understand what that epigraph means. Don't I? Hey, once I held a door open for George Plimpton. My friend Eugene, who was a friend of Plimpton's, had convinced him to come to an event at a bookstore where I worked in downtown Mobile, where nobody ever went. George Plimpton did not acknowledge me in any way, and why should he? You know for whom else I held a door (different door, different day) in downtown Mobile? Dizzy Gillespie (pictured). He said thanks.

A Shark Recites My Epigraph

Just look what these people in Canada have done! They have made an awesome painting of the epigraph to my novel AWESOME and hung it over their bed! And a shark is saying it! This represents a staggering responsibility! No doubt these words guide their every move from the time they wake in the morning until they return to bed at night, to slumber beneath the protective glow of the wisdom I have provided. "Click" here for their account of how my epigraph inspired the painting. I would like to remind everyone that I got the epigraph from an article about Las Vegas by "Blog" Buddy Mark Childress. He is the real hero of this story!

That Hippocratic Oath Jazz: Insert Your Learned Post-Colon Subtitle Here

But think about it. Why do so many Jerry Lewis movies feature doctors engaged in questionable shenanigans? Just off the top of my head, there are THE NUTTY PROFESSOR, THREE ON A COUCH, CRACKING UP, THE DISORDERLY ORDERLY, LIVING IT UP, and HOOK, LINE AND SINKER. I guess a better question is, "Why are these things on the top of my head?" And "Are they really 'off' it now?" I hope so! Someone could do me a favor and write up the subject in a medical/cinematic journal if such a thing exists. Then maybe I'd stop worrying about it. Like, maybe I'll no longer wake up thinking, "Why does THREE ON A COUCH take place in a nihilistic moral and ethical void where human relationships are meaningless?" Here, I'll get you started with a quotation from TOAC you can use in the epigraph of the article you're going to write for me. A male doctor says to a female doctor, "You can take that Hippocratic Oath jazz too far. You have to decide: are you a woman or a doctor? From here you look like a woman, doctor." Something akin to misogyny, but even more insidious perhaps. And yet Jerry is great when he pretends to be the shy zoologist (whose long stream of double talk, in which he never finishes a sentence, hints at the comedic influence of Lewis on Fred Armisen). Are we allowed to extract that scene and enjoy it out of context? I guess I'll find out when I read your article! No kidding, I just did a little "googling" and found something called "The Journal of Medicine and Movies" where you can submit. So get on it.

Regarding Dick Cavett

A new email from Bearden Coleman. We do not know Bearden Coleman except through the medium of email, which is just one of the great things about the modern computers we have today! I mean, communicating with like-minded persons from near and far. Let's take a look at what Mr. Coleman has to say: "I've been meaning to respond to some 'blog' items for a week or so," he writes, "but I'm just getting around to it. I'll be brief. First, it was nice to see respect paid to Bo Diddley. Coincidentally—or is it?— in my MFA thesis I too made reference to Diddley. I even use the exact same lyrics from 'Who Do You Love?' as you mentioned possibly using for your book's epigraph. The difference between our separate appropriations of Mr. Diddley's lyrics is that my use of WDYL? is not in the epigraph—well, that and the unlikelihood that publication of said thesis will ever leave the deep recesses of the library where it sits bound for all time. Man, that was wordy! Anyway, it does make you wonder how many other Diddley-borrowers there are out there? Next, regarding Dick Cavett: several years back a buddy and I attended a screening of a Vonnegut documentary with Vonnegut and Cavett in attendance. A situation occurred that ended with Dick Cavett's wife giving my buddy the 'evil eye.' There is no moral to this story."

Bo Diddley!

Bo Diddley died! I was just thinking of him this morning, no kidding! I was thinking how great he was and I played some of his songs while I was drinking coffee. This very morning, I said! I had no idea he died! He was on my mind. Yes, he was just making me feel fine earlier today with his music. A CD of his I particularly like is called RARE AND WELL DONE. There are some wild things on there, wild and exciting things. Acquaint or reacquaint yourself with Bo Diddley! The "blog" commands it. We feel you will be surprised and amazed and comforted. My friend Eugene used to call W. C. Fields "the great surrealist poet," and I might say the same about Bo Diddley. For a brief time I used part of his big hit "Who Do You Love?" as one of multiple epigraphs for AWESOME. Let me lay it on you and you will see what I mean: "I walk 47 miles of barbed wire, I wear a cobra snake for a necktie, I got a brand new house on the roadside, made out of rattlesnake hide."