Of Donkeys and Robots

So I'm reading ANCIENT JEWISH MAGIC and Gideon Bohak, the author, is telling of an "erotic spell" in which a charm is written on a piece of tin, to which he adds the parenthetical statement "it's a tin line between love and hate!" Let me explain. This is nothing like the Gideon Bohak I know. Well, there is a footnote in which he makes a fond, gently humorous allusion to his hometown. But the violent whimsy of "it's a tin line between love and hate!" is present nowhere else in this academic... some might say dry as burnt toast... work. Well! Gideon Bohak does favor a jaunty exclamation point in his parenthetical statements (as seen in the example already given), which might count as whimsy if you are a scholar of ancient esoterica. Before I continue exploring this thought, I want to say that I wonder what Gideon Bohak's editor thought of "it's a tin line between love and hate!" Did Gideon Bohak have to fight for it? I am developing an enhanced sense of respect for Gideon Bohak. Anyway, so, yes! In the very next paragraph we have an example of Bohak's penchant for parenthetical exclamation points. He has moved on to a spell which requires the magician (or is it the client?) to "take meat of a donkey in your mouth." I'm sorry I told you that. But I had to! Because Gideon Bohak presently adds the parenthetical statement that putting donkey meat in your mouth is "not very kosher!" Exclamation point his, I reemphasize. He goes on to examine cultural depictions of donkeys as "stupid, stubborn, and lazy," which reminded me, by way of contrast, of the other book I am reading right now, THE ILIAD, in which mules have been put forth more than once as some of the greatest animals you'd ever want to meet. They're always plowing fields faster than an ox, or pulling a big tree trunk down the side of a mountain. Those are the two things I can remember mules (in both cases, metaphorical mules) doing in THE ILIAD. Which brings me to another subject! Last night in bed, as I read THE ILIAD and Dr. Theresa worked a crossword puzzle, I suddenly shouted, "Hey! There are robots in this book!" Let's let that hang in the air for a while. Because I also want to say that I ran into Kelly Kornegay in Jackson, Mississippi, a couple of weeks ago, at the 50th anniversary party for Lemuria Books, which I didn't even tell you about, because why should you know every single thing that goes on in my life? Anyway, Kelly and I were talking about THE ILIAD, and she mentioned living in a new place where she can look out the window and see a donkey, and I got to tell her about the heroic mules of THE ILIAD. Pretty soon it got dark and Ace Atkins and I were standing in front of a stage watching 92-year-old bluesman Bobby Rush, of whom I took a photo with my very own phone and perhaps I will "post" it below. Also, there was a guy dressed as a cowboy who did some of the greatest dancing I've ever seen. He was up there all by himself dancing in his cowboy suit while opening acts played, and finally I thought, I should go dance with this guy! Let's get this party started! And Ace took a video of it, which I texted to Dr. Theresa (who had stayed home) so she could see my moves, and she immediately texted back "Have you been drinking?" And that's an interesting question but I bet you want to get back to the robots I read about in THE ILIAD last night. "They were made all of gold, but looked like living women." So you know I immediately thought of the DC comics characters the Metal Men, just as Homer intended. Furthermore, I checked Emily Wilson's endnote, and she calls them "robot women," so I'm not just coming to crazy conclusions. In fact, I think somebody installed A.I., because "They had a consciousness inside their hearts." And as I was lying there marveling about the golden robot women with consciousness in their hearts, I remembered thinking that I had noticed robots in the RAMAYANA as well. And I didn't just lie there and think about it for a change. I hauled my sorry carcass out of bed and went upstairs and found the RAMAYANA and refreshed my memory about these hydraulically powered automatons: "mechanical men, silently driven by falling water in some hidden way." And much like them, I am now running out of steam.

Bowling Alleys

In the same passage from her diary of the year 1616, Anne Clifford reflects on how her husband is hanging out in bowling alleys while she is at home with a "sorrowful and heavy heart" trying to take care of serious financial matters. Bowling alleys! That's a direct quotation. Except for the exclamation point. Did you know they had bowling alleys in 1616? I'm not going to look into it. Yes, all right, you already knew they had bowling alleys in 1616, it's something they taught you in kindergarten, you think about it all the time. You're so great. You make me want to puke.

Grievously Bedaubed

I don't come around here much anymore, because I'm so very, very tired of telling you every time I read a book with an owl in it. No more of that! What else is there to talk about? Nothing, that's what. Well, McNeil lobbed a couple of softballs at me, and I could have "blogged" about them... like, let's see... he found, on this very site, a zombie "link" which, before its zombification, had been about Jack Palance. I neglected to check it out, on account of being so tired and weary and filled with bitterness and ennui and so on. Then he said that by going down a rabbit hole, not his phrase, or more like a Palance hole, also not his phrase, he found a clip of Jack Palance reading from a novel he had written (!)... all right, does the inclusion of that parenthetical exclamation point mean that the spirit of "blogging" is beginning to surge afresh in my congealing veins? I doubt it! But to quote McNeil, "I stopped when he's about to read an excerpt from his novel. I just can't bring myself to listen. I don't know why. It's probably fantastic. Maybe that's what I'm afraid of? Who knows? You watch and let me know." Lacking the energy, I did not follow up on McNeil's request. In a separate communiqué, he mentioned a TV show called DIRTY SALLY, which, to his surprise (I think), I remembered quite well. I remembered how much it bothered me as a child, or whatever I was. "Dirty Sally" was no figurative nickname! This character was a spiteful old woman quite literally covered in dirt. This is what we thought was a normal TV show in whatever year that was! She was "grievously bedaubed," as John Bunyan put it in THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS, though he wasn't talking about Dirty Sally. Let me give you more of the quotation: "Here therefore they wallowed for a time, being grievously bedaubed with the dirt." Now, I say that John Bunyan wasn't talking about Dirty Sally, but "Dirty Sally" sounds like one of his characters, doesn't it? He's all about Mr. Clumsy and Johnny Sewermouth and such. Those examples come from my own fertile imagination. Ha ha, we're having a lot of fun talking about THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS, aren't we? Yet I'm still filled with a curious mixture of numbness and rage. I didn't even let you know when Megan Abbott was coming to town! Usually, I am like, hey, everybody, there is an event! Pretending that putting such an announcement on the "blog" serves any real purpose. As you can see from the tragically rain-spattered chalkboard above, the gods themselves wept as Megan and I brought our public conversation to a conclusion. As Megan is the other member of the Million Dollar Book Club, we did get to discuss our latest selection in person for a change. It's called WILD MINDS and it's about the early history of animation. And thus I learned of a Warner Brothers character doomed to failure, yes, "a bespectacled owl named Oliver." DAMN IT!

McNeil's Heart

Another email from McNeil. This time he wanted me to know that Trump has "gone full Peter Beter!!!" (punctuation McNeil's), a phrase ("full Peter Beter") that will mean nothing to those of you who have not studied the "blog" for at least a decade, unless you have the stamina or intellectual energy to "click" on one or two "links," which statistics show is unlikely. Anyway, I found it hard to swallow McNeil's claim that the aforementioned elected official believes President Biden to have been replaced during some part of his administration by a robot or clone, so McNeil forwarded a news report showing that indeed Trump had retweeted (or whatever they call it in our strange new times; bleep blorp?) something to that effect. To quote McNeil more extensively: "my heart leaps up! He has gone full Peter Beter!!!" McNeil's heart, it should be noted, is leaping up ironically, if I may interpret, assuming I understand irony correctly, which I don't. So I replied to McNeil's email something clever like "We're living the dream." Maybe the word I'm looking for is sarcasm. I believe McNeil is alluding to Wordsworth, by the way, whose heart famously leapt all over the damn place when he beheld a rainbow in the sky. Good for Wordsworth! It must be nice.

Per Se

So anyway you know I quit social media because I never stop yammering about it. Quitting social media means that a lot of times I don't know what anyone is doing, not that it's any of my beeswax. Like, I text Megan something about Kafka's diaries, and she texts back that she's behind on her reading because she and Bill and Jimmy are at the movie theater where Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested, watching BLOOD SIMPLE. (To be clear, they're watching BLOOD SIMPLE in the current day, it wasn't on the bill when Oswald was arrested, as it came out many years later.) And I am like, mentally, "!!!" Because I didn't see that coming, "that" being Megan and Bill and Jimmy watching BLOOD SIMPLE in the theater where Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested. Oddly, I was thinking about Lee Harvey Oswald yesterday, before getting that text, because I searched the "blog" to see if I had ever before mentioned Harvey comics, which, to my astonishment, I had not. I kept turning up allusions to Oswald as I searched. I've mentioned several Harvey comics characters here, but not, apparently, the Harvey comics brand per se, before yesterday. Isn't that something? And that reminded me of the time I went to the Dreamworks offices - they own the Harvey characters, or did at the time - and pitched my idea for a show, a show that both embraced and mocked the concept of the "gritty reboot." It had all your favorite Harvey characters, and all your least favorites, every Harvey character I could think of, even such misbegotten creatures as Baby Huey and Sad Sack! Except each and every one of them had been aged up into their 20s (of course, Sad Sack was a soldier and looked fairly haggard; I may have aged him down!) and they were all brooding and sulking and hot and tormented. The hook, which I still think is pretty good, was that Casper starts out the show as a regular guy, but midway through the first season, he's murdered! And that's how he becomes the friendly ghost. Who was I telling about this recently? It must have been Quinn. And I was saying that Richie Rich is in a coma, that's the big reveal at the end of Season 1. Everyone thinks he's running the town as a notorious recluse, but his evil butler Cadbury (not evil in the Harvey comics!) is keeping him incapacitated and... oh, who cares? But Quinn was like, "His spirit could be roaming around like in the movie JUST LIKE HEAVEN!" (I paraphrase. Also, that's a big spoiler for JUST LIKE HEAVEN, sorry. I really am sorry, because it works better if you don't know.) And I was like (responding to Quinn's idea), "No way! That doesn't correspond with my artistic vision!" But now that I've thought of it some more, it's fine. It's a good idea, Quinn! But I guess we wouldn't find out until Season 2. None of it matters, because the meeting was all "Ha ha ha! Wonderful idea! We'll talk soon! You're going to be a big man in this town! You're going to be running this dump one day! We love you! Let's get married! Hooray! Hooray!" and then... nothing. (Hey, that was only eight years ago, maybe they're still thinking about it.) Well, we're getting off the subject, which is that I googled it and found out that Bill and Jimmy and Megan were in Dallas for a festival put on by the Southwest Review. So when I "clicked" on the "web" site of that fine publication, I found an awesome interview that Mary Miller did with hero Lynda Barry! (You can read it, and you should, by "clicking" here.) I didn't know Mary Miller loved Lynda Barry so much! Or it's equally possible that I knew and forgot. But you know what? None of this is why I thought I was obliged to "blog" today. See, I accidentally read a New York Times op-ed that had one of those awful, cloying titles that usually warns me to skip it. But I read it for some reason, and it reminded me that THE GREAT GATSBY has a character in it to whom our narrator Nick refers at one point as "Owl Eyes." So THE GREAT GATSBY has an owl in it. I was like, "So what? My 'blog' readers will never know if I just fail to mention it." But my conscience overwhelmed me! And I knew that even though I read THE GREAT GATSBY many, many, many, many, many years ago, long before I cared (and eventually stopped caring) that every book has an owl in it, I was bound by honor to tell you that THE GREAT GATSBY has an owl in it. My life is a prison I've built for myself!

The Last of the Old Comic Books

You know the story. How Tom Franklin brought me a stack of old comic books in the hospital, and even more stacks of even more old comic books when I got home. And how I began to purchase old comic books for my very own self until I amassed quite a pile. How I found it so soothing to read myself to sleep with old comic books... then... something changed in our interesting modern times, or perhaps something cracked in my warped little soul, and I found that I was permanently out of the mood to read old comic books. I've been slowly finishing the few remaining old comic books in my possession. There are two left. One of them, coincidentally, is about Deathlok, the first superhero I ever mentioned on this "blog"... in the "blog's" very first "post"! That exclamation point was forced rather than felt. I just don't care anymore. Anyway, in the old comic book I was grudgingly reading last night out of a sense of duty, there was a guy named Jack O'Lantern, but get this. He was wearing, like, a purple sack on his head. What does that have to do with jack-o'-lanterns? I don't know and now I never will, having given up old comic books forever. But that's not the point. The point is that Jack O'Lantern goes "GOOD WORK, OWL WOMAN." And then you see this character who I guess is Owl Woman standing over there. I don't know who she is, either. She didn't look too much like an owl from the little I saw of her. Now I'm going to ask you to open your mind to some groovy concepts. So, as you will recall, when I really read comic books, back when I was a kid... that is, when I went and bought what were then NEW comic books from Schambeau's grocery store or Red's Drugs in Bayou La Batre, Alabama, I would have thought of this Jack O'Lantern (with a purple sack on his head!) thing as being a weird, amazing COMIC BOOK FROM THE FUTURE! Because it came out in 1988, when I hadn't seen a comic book in at least 12 years. Yes, I stupidly thought those days were behind me. So it's an "old comic book" now but in another way it was... oh, hell, who cares? You get it. I would say I have wasted enough of your time but we both know I haven't wasted nearly enough of it.

Le Bits de Boyer

Don't worry, your mind isn't freaking out on you! We're preempting "McNeil's Li'l Bogie Bits" for some bits about ginchy French heartthrob Charles Boyer. Our tale begins with some of McNeil's li'l bogie bits. He was telling me how after the Boyer/Bacall movie CONFIDENTIAL AGENT turned out to be a dud, they went back and... well, let's see. I need to consult McNeil's email. They "had Hawks/Bogart/Bacall and a few others get together and film several new scenes to punch up The Big Sleep even more to give Bacall more 'ooompf.'" McNeil goes on to explain that "ooompf" is his own paraphrasing of whatever they were giving Bacall more of, not that she needed it. So he was telling me this and I was like, WHAT! I just recorded CONFIDENTIAL AGENT from a TCM showing, because Dr. Theresa and I had enjoyed Charles Boyer so much in a recent viewing of CLUNY BROWN, which I had also recorded off of TCM. And then McNeil came back at me saying THAT was weird because he had recently conducted a small, informal poll about the handsomeness of Charles Boyer. I don't wish to venture into McNeil's private life, but suffice to say, in McNeil's words, "a man has to know where he stands!!!" (Triple exclamation points are McNeil's.) One will no doubt be reminded of the time that Dr. Theresa blew my mind by saying that she might well prefer the charms of Fredric March over those of Gary Cooper. That was eight years ago and I still don't believe it. I think about it every night as I toss and turn in bed!

McNeil's Li'l Sausage Bits

Welcome once more to "McNeil's Li'l Bogie Bits," where McNeil reads a 700-page Humphrey Bogart bio and I pass the savings on to you! As you may recall, we were on the fence about whether the casting of Dooley Wilson in CASABLANCA was a legitimate bogie bit. As McNeil put it, Wilson "was not their first or even second choice, but....that's how sausage is made. I'm not sure that's how sausage is made." Which reminds me of a whimsical quotation from a whimsical narrator in my beloved bestseller (it's neither beloved nor a bestseller) MOVIE STARS: "There is a reason no one wants to know 'how the sausage is made.' How the sausage is made is terrible." And here you may note the most significant difference between my "blog" writing and my "real" writing: on the "blog," that second sentence would have ended in an exclamation point. And, honestly, in most of my "real" writing too. I wonder why I didn't do it! But we are getting far away from McNeil's li'l bits. McNeil says that Lena Horne was considered for the role of Sam! He also contends, rather boldly, that CASABLANCA would have been "twice as good" if Lena Horne had played the role. And I do say that such an observation indeed qualifies as a bogie bit. Another bogie bit is of a sad nature, as it depicts Mayo Methot, in a drunken rage, getting herself wedged tightly behind a sofa somehow. But let's get back to sausage. By a weird coincidence, I was listening to an opera when I received the first bogie bit alluded to above. That's not the coincidence. So, in a while, I was like, "What the hell is this opera about? I don't speak whatever language this is!" And I looked up the plot on the "internet," and this guy in the opera gets in trouble for eating a sausage on the moon! I guess you think I am making that up. But I will tell you the name of the opera - THE EXCURSIONS OF MR. BROUCEK - so you can look it up for your damn self. So I was like, "Sausage!" And, believe it or not, it was, by another coincidence, the second opera I had listened to THAT WEEK about somebody going to the moon. (The other one was Il mondo della luna by Baldassare Galuppi... and I can almost swear that Haydn wrote an opera with a similar title and subject matter, but now I am just showing off my knowledge of moon operas.) This is getting long, but I have more to tell. I just hope the lousy AT&T "internet" doesn't stop working before I'm done. We're getting something better installed on Monday! Leslie came over to watch INLAND EMPIRE the other night and we couldn't finish because the AT&T "internet" crapped out. So we turned off the lights and put on these plastic toy rings that have colored lights shooting out of them and Dr. Theresa requested Kraftwerk, so we danced around to that for a while, and then switched to a playlist by Kate Tsang. But the main point is that... you know all those books I am reading all the time in various circumstances? Now I've had to add a book that I put next to my laptop in my home office for whenever the "internet" goes kerplunk and I'm just sitting there with a stupid look on my face and nothing to distract me from the terrible abyss. There are books littered all over the place around here, it's a sad mess. Oh! So... one of the most recent books I had downstairs, on the side table near my favorite chair, was DAISY MILLER by Henry James, which somehow I had never read before. And in it, a character quotes from MANFRED, the poetic drama by Lord Byron, and I liked the quotation, so I dug out the old SELECTED POEMS of Byron and started reading MANFRED. And I hadn't made it too far, just to lines 196 and 197 of the first scene of the first act, and what did I see but "When the falling stars are shooting,/And the answer'd owls are hooting"? And you know what that means. Well, as long as I'm here, I'll mention a message I received yesterday from DJ Gnosis, who said he had gotten a news alert about his own old "blog," and when he checked it out, he saw that a "web" site called - I think - casino.org had discovered a 2008 "post" of mine, and a contemporaneous "post" by DJ Gnosis commenting on it, about the time I "posted" the first-ever photographic evidence on the "internet" of the existence of the Foster Brooks robot that used to live in Las Vegas until it was dismantled and sold for scrap metal, as we all must be eventually. Quoted in the article? Foster Brooks's own daughter! I would "link" to the article, but, being in the midst of a nightmarish effort to scrub old zombie "links" from the "blog," I am no longer much inclined to "link" to outside sources. Nothing against casino.org! Anyway, this on the heels of my 45-year-old letter inspiring McNeil to watch HARRY AND WALTER GO TO NEW YORK. Given enough time and patience, such meaningless things can happen.

Star

I keep forgetting to mention that McNeil saw an obelisk in WHERE THE SPIES ARE (1966). "This one has a star on top," he reported soberly. I would have put an exclamation point on that! McNeil provided no photographic evidence of this unusual star-topped obelisk, but he is my oldest friend and his word is solid gold in my book.

This Other General

You will be happy to hear that Owl Creek has made an appearance in Grant's memoirs, yes, the very same Owl Creek that appears in that other notable set of memoirs, the dual one by Ron and Clint Howard. Here I paraphrase freely. This other general shows up late for a battle! A whole day late! He is like, "Well, I can't help it, Grant told me to go a weird way, by Owl Creek." And Grant is like, "I never said that! How funny that you think I said that!" sounding like the Martin Short character Nathan Thurm (pictured above), only I believe him (Grant, not Thurm), his persona in this book coming across (as I believe Megan Abbott put it to me the other day) "solid as an oak!" (Exclamation point hers, probably.) Grant says this other general probably went a sneaky way thinking it would enable him to do some heroics and be a big shot, but it didn't. Still paraphrasing, possibly incorrectly.

Resonance

I read a really interesting book review in the New York Times today. The author, an anthropologist, was attacked by a bear. The indigenous people with whom she was working at the time had already nicknamed her "She-Bear." The anthropologist, I mean, not the bear! So, as the reviewer notes, the terrible and harrowing encounter might seem like a coincidence. Here I quote the review: "But 'absurdity' and 'coincidence' are categories that cease to be useful to her. 'There is only resonance,' she writes." Well! You know how I like to collect phrases that make me feel a certain way, whatever that is. To dismiss absurdity and coincidence as useless concepts I find delightful. And "There is only resonance!" Come on! (Exclamation point mine, obviously.) You know, as I look back, it is apparent that I find a lot of these quotations in the New York Times. I should probably diversify my reading. No offense to the New York Times, but who wants their soul shaped by it exclusively?

Helpful Thoughts

Back before I stopped "blogging," I would use this space, among other things, to collect many quotations that felt creatively helpful to me... a commonplace book, of sorts... once I even printed them all out and handed them to a classroom full of bewildered students, back when I had students. A few examples spring to mind, like Sun Ra's advice (I'll paraphrase) to eat peach pie every day, and one day you'll discover that it tastes like something other than peach pie. Or the Maine antiques dealer who said, "I think I'm becoming more and more attracted to things that aren't worth anything." There were many, many more, now scattered to the winds. Well, I still run across helpful thoughts, but I have no place to put them. Like, there was a New York Times article about a plant that lives for a thousand years, and a scientist was quoted as saying, "From weird things, you discover weird things that help you understand things that you didn’t know you didn’t understand." I jotted that in a manuscript I had started in which the protagonist tells the stories of the knights of the round table to his cats. Yeah, I got about two paragraphs into that one before stopping. And just yesterday, I was reading another celebrity biography, as part of my continuing program of adult education with Megan Abbott. It's a Lee Grant memoir, which came highly recommended by Bill Boyle. Anyway, Martha Graham just told Lee Grant, "Ugly is better than pretty!" Exclamation point original to the text.

Family Newspaper

I wrote a book about cigarette lighters and then I forgot about it. For a while, though, after it was too late, I would come across this or that detail that I knew in my heart I should have included in my cigarette lighter book, and that my cigarette lighter book, truth be told, was incomplete without it. That hardly ever happens anymore. But! Last night I watched PHFFFT for the first time since 2008, and Kim Novak says to Jack Lemmon - I believe this is an exact quotation - "Put your hot one up against my cold one and make my cold one hot." She is asking him to light her cigarette with his cigarette, the latter of which has already been lit. Now, there is quite a long passage in my cigarette lighter book about this manner of lighting cigarettes, for which manner of lighting said cigarettes there exists a shocking slang term unprintable in a family newspaper. I know this is not a family newspaper! It is sort of a family newspaper. In any case, Ms. Novak's request would have been a perfect complement to the slang term, lending the dubious weight of anecdotal evidence to my questionable conclusions. When she said it, it seemed so familiar to me that I could have sworn I wrote about it somewhere, if not, pathetically, in my cigarette lighter book, but I can't find evidence to support that insistent feeling, not even in an old email to McNeil. In conclusion, the title PHFFFT is given an exclamation point by many internet sources (an error duplicated in my original "post" on the subject), but the title card of the actual movie does not include an exclamation point, at least in the print I watched. Maybe I will devote the rest of my life to exploring the discrepancy.

Ha Comma Ha Comma Ha

One of the things I've been doing during the pandemic is finally reading a nonfiction book about the CIA that Lee Durkee loaned me, oh, five or six years ago. Yesterday I came across a quotation that fascinated me. "'The general was in fine form this morning, wasn't he? Ha, ha, ha!' Dulles would chuckle." Was Dulles laughing? Or was he speaking the word "ha" three times in succession? The dialogue tag "Dulles would chuckle" seems to indicate actual laughter... or at least chuckling. But encasing the "Ha, ha, ha!" in quotation marks, and carefully separating them by commas, as if indicating their individual distinction... hmm. It seemed to me (and a check of the endnotes proved me right) that this "Ha, ha, ha!" business was lifted from a secondary source. So another author had originally recorded Allen Dulles going around saying, "The general was in fine form this morning, wasn't he? Ha, ha, ha!" Then, I suppose, the author of the current volume, the one I am reading, had to make a decision. But if he really thought that Dulles was chuckling, why didn't he write "'The general was in fine form this morning, wasn't he?' Dulles would say with a chuckle"? That would not have violated the original author's "Ha, ha, ha!" (which, honestly, when standing alone like that, looks - thanks, in part, to the exclamation point - much more like forceful barking than a chuckle). Maybe he was hedging his bets. All right, I am done with this subject. I mean, I have other thoughts about the typographical representation of laughter as it has stylistically evolved, and what part that plays in my perception of the... eh... but... forget it. [Postscript, added after some hours of brooding consideration: I neglected to touch on the "would," that is, the fact, as reported, that Dulles "would" chuckle, implying numerous instances of the general being in "fine form," and so, perhaps, the accompanying chuckle became habitual, insincere, formal, rote, in which case, spelling it out as "Ha, ha, ha!" seems perfectly reasonable.]

Sparkle

Madcap, dizzying whirlwind of a day, by which I mean I received an email from McNeil, who inquired therein, "Did you once have an idea that put Shakespeare and Bob Hope on an island? Does that ring a bell?" It did not ring a bell! In fact, I had no idea what McNeil was talking about, and replied as much. McNeil responded: "I think they were on an island talking about each other's plays/films. I remember you sent it to me - this is when we were unemployed - and I can't remember what I suggested...putting them on separate islands? But that doesn't make any sense." Nor did it make sense to me, the recipient of the email and supposed author of this demented notion. I asked, searching my mind and finding nothing, was it a play? Were Bob Hope and Shakespeare in heaven? McNeil replied, "I'm pretty sure it was a short story and they were trying to make each other's stuff 'better'. Hahaha. That sounds funny now that I'm all jacked up on caffeine." When I again insisted I had never written such a thing, McNeil agreed that perhaps I had not. I began to think he was gaslighting me! "I could have dreamed it," he wrote. But he couldn't leave it there. He tracked down emails from a long-defunct account of mine, and produced documentary evidence that in 2005, I declared that he and I should watch every Bob Hope movie and read every Shakespeare play and have phone conversations about the process, which we would transcribe and publish. I think I was trying to invent the podcast, though I believe the podcast had, without my knowledge, already been invented at the time. Anyway, it depressed me to hear how little my ideas have changed... I have a column running right NOW for which I just talk into a digital recorder and transcribe my own words. When I noted as much with some chagrin, McNeil wrote back, "A diamond will always sparkle!!!!" with the four encouraging exclamation points you see before you. In actual fact, as it turned out, it was MCNEIL who wrote, "I've got it!" He then described, in that 2005 exchange, an elaborate framing device for an epistolary novel in which we both crash-landed in the South Pacific on adjacent islands, too treacherous to travel between, but with currents that made it possible for us to write each other messages in bottles about Shakespeare and Bob Hope. Thus was one mystery solved, while other mysteries, perhaps, presented themselves.

Fcritching Loud

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM got in my head last night and I swear I can't remember why. But I lugged out a big old facsimile of Shakespeare's first folio, which I bought so Lee Durkee and I could compare our folio facsimiles - we know how to have a good time! And I looked at Puck's last speech... "If we shadows have offended"... or "fhadowes," ha ha! You know how that old-timey printing makes some s's look like f's. Good times! And then I saw that previous speech of Puck's, which I didn't quite remember, even though I remember tons of lines from A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM because I was in it when I was a teenager! That didn't deserve an exclamation point. I played the pivotal role of Snug the Joiner. Anyway, I saw the line, "And the Wolfe beholds the Moone," and thought, "Oh no! There is going to be an owl in this speech!" And there was: "the fcritch-owle, fcritching loud." And then I was like, I want to hear someone saying these lines. So I found a free streaming video of an old BBC (?) production and boy could you tell why it was free! It was copied from a terrible print. There were scratches and slashes and blotches all over the film, and the color was grotesquely faded. It was so washed-out that you couldn't read the white credits over the white sky. And I thought, "I'm not going to watch this!" But then came along the young David Warner, the young Diana Rigg, and the young Helen Mirren as three of the young lovers, all so captivating! And then some lump playing Demetrius. It's not his fault! I'm sure the actor is fine. Demetrius is just a big dud. He's no Snug the Joiner! Everyone knows if you ranked all the lovers Demetrius would come in last in every poll. But everyone else was so good that the blotches and slashes and missing frames and washed-out atmosphere started to seem like plusses... like... in fact... a line that was quoted to me from A MIDSUMMER'S DREAM one night in City Grocery Bar: "Trust me, sweet, out of this silence yet I pick'd a welcome." I couldn't stop watching it! It's a truly bewitching play! And then here was young Judi Dench, telling her fairies about "the clamorous Owle that nightly hoots," and I was like, okay, I definitely have to "blog" again, just this once, and you know why.

Forget Everything You Thought You Knew About Croutons

I emailed John Currence about a great new idea for croutons I had yesterday. Sorry I can't be more specific! Do you know what certain highly placed food professionals would give to hear my crouton idea? Anyway, John emailed me back all the way from INDIA to say, "Let's make this happen!!!" That's how good my crouton idea is. Three exclamation points. I won't lie to you: these croutons are going to be labor-intensive and wasteful.

Obviously They Weren't Snail Eggs

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

Cultural Studies

Welcome once more to "Cultural Studies" - gee, it's been two years since we studied any. Culture. Well! Ashly Burch has been bringing up PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET in ADVENTURE TIME meetings for some time now, for mysterious reasons that need not concern you here! But we've talked about that movie a lot, and some of us have watched it again, and it made me want to see NIGHT AND THE CITY again, which features Richard Widmark in somewhat the same mode. With important differences! That you don't care about. But anyway, I was watching NIGHT AND THE CITY last night and was particularly captivated by this shot (above): a bad man in a suit standing calmly on a bridge. It made me think ("click" here; I know you won't!) of this shot from OUT OF THE PAST. Oh! Here's a fascinating coincidence (it's not). When I was looking for a pic of Marlon Brando that reminded me of Princess Bubblegum (WHY? Well, you could find out if you'd trouble yourself to "click" on this "link" - but you won't), the woman in the photo I found turned out to be Jean Peters, who plays Candy in PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET, and whose performance Ashly admires a lot. That publicity still was from VIVA ZAPATA! (exclamation point theirs) which I believe I once rented on VHS from the Phar-Mor drugstore in Mobile, Alabama. Oh! I just got that they had a "pharmacy" and "more"... far (phar) more! In another coincidence sure to amaze you, Eve Babitz goes on and on (and on) about VIVA ZAPATA! in EVE'S HOLLYWOOD, which I just read. So! Another thing coming up a lot in ADVENTURE TIME meetings is this thing where presidential candidates are being asked (this is really happening!) whether or not they would "kill baby Hitler" if given the chance. Kent Osborne asked, "Haven't any of them read 11/22/63 by Stephen King?" And I was like, "Don't tell me what happens!" And I was like, "It looks long, is it any good?" And Kent said it was long but good and he said it's so long because the guy travels to 1955 and has to wait - what is that? - eight years before trying to stop the Kennedy assassination and I was like, "Stop telling me!" So I went up to Square Books and bought 11/22/63 and I guess I'll read it sometime. Goodbye for now from "Cultural Studies."

A Thick Envenomed Froth

I was reading in LIVES OF THE NECROMANCERS about Apollonius of Tyana, who once defeated some guy who turned into "an enormous black dog, of the size of a lion, and whose mouth and jaws were covered with a thick envenomed froth." And the footnote told me that this story comes down to us by way of Philostratus, and no, I had no idea who that was. But I was like, "I'm gonna walk up to Square Books, and if they have any Philostratus I'm gonna buy it! I want to read more about magic evil dogs!" But part of me was like, "They won't have any Philostratus, ha ha ha, I'll save some money." But then they HAD IT. So I had to buy it. Godwin writes that Apollonius was born "nearly at the same time as Jesus Christ... The publicity of Apollonius and his miracles has become considerably greater, from the circumstance of the early enemies of the Christian religion having instituted a comparison between the miracles of Christ and of this celebrated philosopher." My new Philostratus book flap confirms his life story to be "a pagan counterstroke against the New Testament." It's not Apollonius's fault! He also confronted a mysterious bride (pictured) who "at length owned that she was an empuse (a sort of vampire)," writes Godwin, "and that she had determined to cherish and pamper Menippus, that she might in the conclusion eat his flesh, and lap up his blood." (!)