Say No to Chiromancy in 2026

Well, Kate Tsang sent me an amazing present - a tiny replica she fashioned of my novel SWEET BANANAS. I placed a penny beside it so you can see just how tiny a replica it is. In the foreground, that's Bob Hope's ashtray, but that's another story. I was going to photograph the tiny replica in the palm of my hand to emphasize its tininess, but then I decided I didn't want the palm readers of the "internet" to know everything about me and my future. Hey! You know what that makes me think of? The time Dr. Theresa and I went to a dinner party and the host had a few drinks (or maybe that was us) and told us that he had belonged to a secret society in Greece with 13 members, and each member specialized in a different occult art! And his was palmistry. I'm sure he read our palms that night but I don't remember what he said. All I remember is that his wife, who was from Italy, made a big pot of spaghetti with tomato sauce, which everyone ate except for the chiromancer, who sat at the head of the table nibbling on a lettuce leaf.

Big August Wrap-Up

Well, folks, it has been a busy August sure as you're born. For reasons related to employment and general health, we have experienced the highest volume of monthly "blogging" since April 2016, when the TV blew up and I decided to "quit" "blogging" forever. Just a couple of notes as we head into September, with all its "mellow fruitfulness" as Keats put it, I think, or at least that's what they told me at the University of South Alabama. I got out my Aquinas this morning - shut up! - and noticed for the first time a handwritten, carbon-copy receipt tucked inside, belonging to the original owner. Now, you know how much I love it when I have clues about who owned a book before I did. You remember when I read June Havoc's memoir in the Million Dollar Book Club, for example, and the previous owner turned out to live in the same house where Eleanor Roosevelt used to live! "Click" here for details. Oh, what a time that was to be alive. When I read June Havoc's memoir, I mean. Those were the days. My Aquinas, however, formerly belonged to someone named "Father Michael," a priest, I assume. The clerk must have known him on sight! Or did he ask the priest's name, and did the priest answer "Father Michael"? Like, "That's all you're getting out of me, chump." Or maybe that becomes your official name when you're a priest. No, I've known a couple of priests in my life, and they had last names. (One of them, Father Dorrill, was the person who taught me the Keats poem alluded to above, which is a coincidence I only thought about later. Then I came back and added this intrusive parenthetical information just for you!) Or maybe "Michael" is a last name. But I don't think so. I mean, I know Michael is a last name sometimes, but somehow I think this priest just went around calling himself "Father Michael." That's fairly routine, I think. Show your parishoners you're just one of the fellas! It's fine. You can read about similarly named priests in the works of Bill Boyle, whose birthday is today. Happy birthday, Bill! Anyway, Father Michael got a ten-percent discount! For being a priest, I assume. I was shocked at the price he paid, though. It was $76.21 with tax, even after the discount! And that was on July 16, 1990. We're talking 76 big ones in July 16, 1990 money! I got it for less than half that, used, at A Cappella Books in Atlanta, where I once saw Bruce Springsteen making his wallet-toting lackeys pay for some art books. What else? Well, I watched a bit of WHICH WAY TO THE FRONT? this morning, and do you remember how McNeil was always looking for obelisks in movies? That was his big thing for a while, and I guess I caught the obelisk bug! Speaking of health issues. Anyway, in WHICH WAY TO THE FRONT?, there's an obelisk in THE VERY FIRST SHOT! Not merely the first scene, THE FIRST SHOT. And let me state for the record, it is the largest decorative obelisk I've ever seen in a movie. It's bigger than Jerry!

Doom and So On

I was chatting with Megan this morning through the medium of email about a Mark Rothko book I picked up at Square Books the other day. Its subject is the paintings he did on paper rather than canvas, and it features many vivid color-plate reproductions. Rothko is quoted in the introductory essay, of course, often saying the kind of stuff that Megan and I are partial to, as I am sure you will recall ("click" here) from the time we got all in a tizzy over something Bellini said about opera. I'll give you a couple of examples! 1. "I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions - tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on." 2. "If a thing is worth doing once, it is worth doing over and over again." End of examples. Moving on to other artistic matters, a lot of these old comic books that Tom Franklin brought over are horror comics, a genre I read a little bit of as a kid, but not too much, after a story in either HOUSE OF MYSTERY or HOUSE OF SECRETS (I think) about a guy who turned out to have goat legs shook me up pretty bad. Which brings up something I've noticed... these old comic books, and not just the horror ones, either, really do have an awful lot of the devil in them, just like the Sunday school teachers used to say! I was wrong to scoff! But I'm sure you've guessed what I'm getting at. So, I was reading this one THE WITCHING HOUR last night, and there's a story in it about "coffin inspectors," which I didn't know was a job. You can learn a lot from the old comic books that Tom Franklin gives you! The coffin inspectors are marching along in the first panel, singing a song that goes like this (and, once again, I quote): "OOHOOHHOOO OH, HO! OH, HO! WHEN THE MOON IS GIBBOUS AND THE OWL CRIES FOUL... THEN WE'LL DIG AND SHARE THE WEALTH OF THOSE WHO NO LONGER DRINK... THE RED, RED WINE... OF LIIIIIIIIIFE!!!" I can't say that's much of a song, but it does have an owl in it. Yes, there are eight I's in LIIIIIIIIFE, I counted them several times in the interest of accuracy. Oh, and I get it now, they're graverobbers. Why, there's no such thing as a coffin inspector after all! In my defense, Ace and Angela came over last night for a special screening of Dr. Theresa's favorite TV show, QUINCY, M. E., and afterward, tuckered out from all the Quincy enjoyment, I did no more than glance at the first panel (after reading a previous story in the same issue, which I had trouble following, about the devil attacking a Swiss town - it ended as abruptly as SIMON OF THE DESERT! [which also featured the devil]) just enough to notice the owl before succumbing to slumber with a Quincy-like smile on my cherubic face. In conclusion, I don't mean to brag, but TECHNICIANS OF THE SACRED does have more owls in it, just as I predicted. If the numbers hold up, there should be an owl every 4.5 pages. One more thing. Goat legs (see above) make me think of a line that Dr. Theresa and I are always quoting to one another. It comes from one of those "true stories of the paranormal" shows. They were interviewing a couple of guys from Texas, I think, who saw a creature in the woods with "the head of a goat and the body of a jacked-up man." That's it. We say it a lot. Try it out at home! "The head of a goat and the body of a jacked-up man."

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.

Catfish of Ancient Egypt

Here's everything I didn't "blog" about this month. 1. "You should eat a lot of jelly: it oils up your joints." - Mom. 2. For reasons that need not concern you, Ace Atkins and I were discussing the availability of catfish in the Middle East. So when I started reading a book about ancient Egypt (THE RISE AND FALL OF ANCIENT EGYPT by Toby Wilkinson) I was delighted to find many allusions to catfish: "an ivory cylinder shows the king as a vicious Nile catfish, beating rows of prisoners with a long stick." At first I thought that was funny, even though it is not funny to beat people with a stick... I guess it was the vicious catfish that made me laugh, though the more I thought about it, the more convincingly Lovecraftian the image revealed itself to be - and besides, my grandfather taught me long ago to beware the dangerous "whiskers" of the catfish. 3. By coincidence I watched Kurosawa's RAN (based on KING LEAR) and a TV adaptation of THE DRESSER (about a production of KING LEAR) on the same day. So I went to my facsimile of Holinshed's Chronicles for the source, and was distressed to recall I have only volumes 3 and 6. See? This is the kind of crap you're missing out on now that I'm not "blogging" anymore. 4. Nor could I find my copy of KING LEAR, which made me feel like King Lear, ha ha ha, see what you're missing. (Later, by further coincidence, Lear would pop up all over this Orson Welles bio that Megan and I are reading together, though not - I think - as an official selection of the Doomed Book Club.) 5. ADVENTURE TIME meeting! We talked about Fonzie wearing glasses and Jan from THE BRADY BUNCH wearing glasses and that made Kent think of Piggy from LORD OF THE FLIES, and I said that using Piggy's glasses to start a fire was in my cigarette lighter book and Adam asked whether that counted. That got us onto the subject of "burning lenses" and Adam mentioned an "ancient death ray." I think he said, "Is that like the ancient death ray?" I said I remembered Francis Bacon advocating for the use of burning lenses as military weapons (it's in my book!) but Adam said he was talking about "Archimedes and the Siege of Syracuse." Adam knows everything! (See also.) Taking a quick glance at the "internet" I do see an unsubstantiated rumor that Archimedes built a giant mirror with which to set fire to the enemy's sails. On the same day the aforementioned discussion occurred, I read in a tweet by Chris Offutt, "I have a short story that includes a woman using a lighter to heat up a Pop Tart one bite at a time." Both of these tidbits (Archimedes, Pop Tarts) would have easily passed muster for my cigarette lighter book, had I only known about them in time. And you know, as long as we're here, the fascinating

movie WOMAN ON THE RUN has an important lighter in it... I think I can tell you this without spoiling anything (probably not): it neatly marks the beginning of each of the movie's three acts (possibly). 6. A ribald jest from McNeil about Jerry Lewis. A series of them, really. Or one long ribald jest that is carried out and elaborated upon over a number of emails. McNeil's final (?) message on the subject concludes, "Ahhhh. I'm making myself laugh in a parking lot, which makes this all the more wrong." 7. I don't remember much liking the movie HEARTBURN when it came out, but I saw a documentary about Nora Ephron not too long ago and thought if I ever came across HEARTBURN again I'd give it a try - what, 40 years later? Dear God! And I did. And Yakov Smirnoff is in it! Now, it's not Mike Nichols's fault that this one book I read stacked him up as the pinnacle of hip culture against the supposed rancid decadence of Bob Hope, but just remember: Mike Nichols put Yakov Smirnoff in a movie and Bob never did (though I wouldn't be surprised if he were on a Bob Hope TV special, to be fair [He was. - ed.]).

8. Jerry Lewis allusion in TREES LOUNGE. 9. Stopped by Square Books. Katelyn failed to sell me a book she likes, but utterly convinced me to give APOCALYPTO a chance. 10. Watched PINOCCHIO. a. Jiminy Cricket has human feet and toenails, human teeth! Disturbing. b. That fish wants to kiss everyone and everything. c. Jiminy Cricket is consistently sexually aroused by human representations (dolls) of his size. d. Even as a kid I didn't understand why being a wooden boy wasn't good enough. What's all this crap about being a "real boy"? 11. King Lear (see above) vows "to be a comrade with the wolf and owl" (just like Dracula! - though he doesn't say that, of course) and you know what that means!

17th-Century Booger

Speaking of Shakespeare, I went up to the campus and looked at the First Folio they have on display in a big, dark room. I was the only person there. Well, there was a young woman sitting in a chair against a far wall. I believe she was the guardian. They had the First Folio opened up to Hamlet's "To Be Or Not To Be" soliloquy, which I thought was a little on the nose. I asked the young woman if they ever turned the page. "I've been here two days and they haven't turned the page," she said. It was a foolish question: all the banners and posters and informational plaques were about that soliloquy. You can't really see the front cover or back cover. I bent myself into all kinds of positions trying to look. But you can see some fancy gold filigree along the inside of the covers. Here's what caught my eye (I'll use the spelling from the HAMLET facsimile that Lee Durkee gave me, so it might not be exactly the same): "the power of beautie will fooner transforme honeftie from what it is to a bawde, then the force of honeftie can tranflate beautie into his likenes, this was fometime a paradox, but now the time giues it proofe, I did loue you once." And then Ophelia says, "Indeed my Lord you made me belieue fo." I didn't really need to include her reply for my purposes but ouch! Poor Ophelia. The point is, there was something pale - a splotch, a lump - lying there over Hamlet's phrase "what it is" - maybe it was a 17th-century bug that accidentally got mashed when the book was shut! Or maybe some old dude from ancient days sneezed on the page. Or it could be a 19th-century piece of chicken for all I know.

Sixteen Cucumbers

Mom came to town for a visit. I brought her to the genealogy room at the public library - a strange, dark little room. I can't believe I never "blogged" about that room before. But now I remember: I thought it was good enough to put into one of my failed novels. So I jotted some notes about it in a special jotting book which is now at the bottom of a pile of some other special jotting books, never to be seen again. We poked around the genealogy room and found a thin volume of reminiscences from a man whose name I believe was Glover Moore (?). When Glover was a lad, he and his sister Alice had a pet pig who enjoyed rolling over to have its belly scratched with corncobs several times a day. The pig's tail had two curls in it but sometimes it would run and the curls would straighten out. As it ran, it would say, "U-r-r-gh! U-r-r-gh!" I believe that was the spelling. Anyway, they ate it. The family ate it. I am sorry to tell you. And I was sorry to read it. The pig was "loyal to the end," wrote Glover Moore. And I closed the book and said to my mother, "Glover Moore and his magic pig/ Scratched it with corncobs/ ... 'til it got big." And Mom replied, "I've seen pigs caught and heard them squeal/ Getting ready for the great big meal." And I looked at her across the table and she said with a touch of sadness, "It's true." We also found something called the SNIPES FAMILY COOKBOOK, which included a facsimile of a long letter dated 1899, from Pearl Snipes of Benevolence, Georgia, to her beau Oscar Morrison. Pearl tells Oscar how she received his previous letter while she was at dinner and couldn't eat another bite. Sister teased her about the contents of Oscar's letter, so Pearl ran and shut herself in the other room. The family stood at the door and tried to get her to tell what was in the letter, but she wouldn't reveal a word. She is relieved to have it confirmed that Oscar hasn't been sporting about with another woman. She asks Oscar to give everyone her love and "keep a double portion for yourself." Mom said, "She was forward, wasn't she?" I said, defending Pearl Snipes, "She was his intended!" The letter was signed, "Your devoted intended." I think I have most of that correct. You can't remove the books from the genealogy room, so you have to stuff all the details into your head. Neither Mom nor I had thought to bring pen or paper. I will add that Pearl Snipes placed charmingly arbitrary phrases in quotation marks, kind of like Mattie in TRUE GRIT. The cookbook had a recipe that called for sixteen cucumbers and water with "enough salt to float an egg." There was also a recipe for "Bohemian Coffee Cake," which Mom wanted to copy for Dr. Theresa, having determined with one of Mom's favored genealogy websites that Dr. Theresa is, in part, of Bohemian descent. I said that the coffee cake probably wasn't ACTUALLY Bohemian (there was a recipe for "Martha Washington Cake" with cherry Jell-O, and I don't think Martha Washington ate that) plus there were many stern warnings posted, as I have already noted, about removing materials from the room. As we were leaving the library, whom should we encounter but Carla, who used to work at Square Books, but has recently become a librarian, long a fond wish of hers. Carla showed us her "staff picks" selection, which included my first book. How nice! I know she had lost all hope of ever seeing me at the library. I ran into Carla at the City Grocery Bar and she upbraided me for not being the faithful library patron I had sworn myself to be. She had never seen me there. So it was a sincere "staff pick," I think, with no thought I would ever hear of it. She put me on the shelf with THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, one of my favorite books, and QUEEN OF EARTH, a good movie (pictured). So I felt all right. And I was like, "Hey, Mom, look at that!" Carla told us that the genealogy room is an entity entirely separate from the public library, though housed in the same building - hence the many prohibitions. It has always been empty, in my experience, and running on the honor system, I suppose. There are a number of butterscotch-colored molded plastic chairs stacked up high and teetering in there, and some boxy, dead-looking computers. And Dennis the Menace panels in acrylic stands on the tables, for reasons that elude me. The Snipes family is mightily represented in several thick binders, though as far as I can tell they have no connection whatsoever to Oxford. There is so much Snipes material scattered around that I briefly wondered (though knowing full well the contrary truth) whether the Snipeses were some undiscovered inspiration for the Snopeses.

If Your Secretary Could Check It Out

I picked up this glossy coffee-table book about Robert Altman at Square Books a while back. It includes a facsimile of a letter Altman received in 1983: "In talking with my daughter Julie recently, she told me that one of her all time favorite movies was your 'Nashville'. I did not get to see it and wondered if by chance it has been or will be released in a cassette. Don't go to too much trouble but if your secretary could check it out, I would appreciate it. With warm regards, Sincerely, Richard Nixon."

Give Me Some Undercurrents

Like I said, this Bob Hope bio really bogs down after World War II. Like, you might get a page or two of Bob grumbling about how much his fax machine cost. But I did find out that on one trip to Vietnam he took along "nearly a ton of thirty-by-forty-inch poster board" for cue cards. So that seemed like a lot of poster board. That was something to think about. And when Tony Coelho got kicked out of seminary for having epilepsy (!) and his parents thought he was possessed by the devil (!!) Bob and family took him in for several months and Bob advised him to go into politics (he became a six-term Democratic state congressman). And Bob sent Tony Coelho to the bank and told him to take as much money out of Bob's account as he needed to start a new life. Also, the playwright John Guare lived with Bob Hope and his family for ten months. These facts briefly struck me as interesting but I think it is wearing off. "It was not a house full of undercurrents," Guare says. "It was a genuinely pleasant house." Zzzzzz.

That Dang Vampire

Megan Abbott emailed this morning. She's thinking of rereading H.P. Lovecraft for the holidays (!) and wanted to know my favorite stories of his. By coincidence (OR WAS IT?) there was a Lovecraft allusion on last night's ADVENTURE TIME, when a little creature on a pilgrimage, hoping to see a god, saw Finn eating spaghetti instead. The poor little thing cried out, "I thought you'd be beautiful!" and started weeping and melted. And by coincidence (OR WAS IT?) yesterday's ADVENTURE TIME meeting was about a creepy episode idea from Seo Kim (who also storyboarded last night's episode along with Somvilay Xayaphone). It was also based on a night terror (OR WAS IT?) that a friend of Kent's had. And by coincidence (OR WAS IT?) I ran out of things to read on airplanes and at an LAX souvenir shop where by coincidence (OR WAS IT?) a large glowing poster of pal Mary Miller's novel THE LAST DAYS OF CALIFORNIA decorated the register I bought the new, Lovecraftian Stephen King novel. (Also in that souvenir shop: a lifesized cardboard cutout of Martin Short, for which I fantasized about buying a seat next to me on the airplane.) Also (OR WAS IT?) I have been tweeting little fragments of the ghost book I just finished reading to Megan and Jimmy, like so:

@kingfergus @meganeabbott "After she broke up with him, she returned his dead wife's clothes, twisted into 'doll-like shapes'"
— Jack Pendarvis (@JackPendarvis) November 21, 2014

And Bill Boyle, inspired by this, emailed Jimmy and Megan and me some scary "links" to recordings of poltergeist activity (little kids talking in SHINING voices, yaaaah! Dr. Theresa hates it when I say in a raspy voice, "Jack's not here, Mrs. Pendarvis" - as much as I hate and fear her creepy impression of Helena Bonham Carter in FRANKENSTEIN! - so I guess Bill Boyle has taught me a valuable lesson in empathy) and a medium named Leslie Flint channeling the Brontë sisters. I shan't include the "links" lest they drive you mad with fear (see Lovecraft). Hey did I ever tell you that one of my little sister's first words as a baby was "poltergeist"? True story! Plus I'm reading that dang vampire novel now, what is wrong with me. OR WAS IT

Watching a Guy Type

I was sitting here in my office at home, reading a Spenser novel by Robert B. Parker that Ace Atkins loaned me, when something in the book - I can't figure out what, though I went back and looked - reminded me with a start what I meant to do today: go over to Faulkner's house, where an artist named Tim Youd is retyping THE SOUND AND THE FURY. The sky was bright blue when I left, but on the very short walk it clouded up considerably and the birds were tweeting weirdly too, in my estimation. By the time I was making my way up Faulkner's walk, I felt like I was in a really different place. Then when I reached the porch steps I could hear typing coming from inside! It gave me a ghostly feeling. So I opened the door and there was the guy sitting at a replica of Faulkner's desk, retyping THE SOUND AND THE FURY on a replica of Faulkner's typewriter. I didn't want to interrupt him but he said talking to people was part of his thing. His plan is to type 100 American novels over five years. He's already done 25. He said he mostly does it in Los Angeles because that's where he lives. He got a good review, he said, for typing Bukowski's POST OFFICE in the parking lot of the post office where Bukowski sorted mail for 12 years. I almost mentioned Faulkner working in the post office here (which he quit because, if I am recalling correctly, he said he didn't like being "at the beck and call of every S.O.B. with 2 cents for a stamp") but I didn't. When he said he was working on the final two Chandler novels back home (having already typed the first five) I did mention that Faulkner co-wrote the screenplay of THE BIG SLEEP - no news to Mr. Youd, of course, who said that as a side project he is going to retype that screenplay at Musso & Frank's, where both Faulkner and Chandler used to drink. Which reminded Bill Griffith that they're going to have a mint julep party when Mr. Youd finishes retyping THE SOUND AND THE FURY. And that reminded Bill Griffith of a Faulkner detective story I have not read, in which the murderer is discovered because of his inability to make a decent mint julep. Mr. Youd talked about what he considered the disintegration of Philip Marlowe's code of honor throughout the Chandler novels. He also said that PLAYBACK, the final one, is a lot better than people say. It's the only one I haven't read yet, so that's good news. Of course, Mr. Youd also likes it, he says, because it's just 160 pages long. For easy typing! So go by and watch him type (he's there all week) and give him a friendly hello.

Bibles and Owls and Spelling and Footnotes and Madness

I should have mentioned that the quotation with all the pelicans and owls and sparrows was from the Bible, making the Bible another book with an owl in it. So I decided to get out my Bibles and check out this psalm! First I got out the old Geneva Bible, which said, "I am like a pelicane of the wildernes: I am like an owle of the deferts. I watche and am as a fparowe alone vpo the houfe toppe." I wonder why the "s"s in "wildernes" and "as" look like "s" and the rest look like fs. Is it because of their placement at the ends of words? Seemingly. But if so, why? It's a good thing I don't wonder enough to do anything about it. I will say that I read an earlier verse in the same psalm - "Mine heart is fmitten and withereth like graffe, becaufe I forgate to eat my bread" - as having something to do with a giraffe! I was puzzled and pleased, and sort of disappointed when I realized it had nothing to do with a giraffe. (There are all kinds of animals in the Bible!) A giraffe with a smitten heart! Aw! A footnote in the Geneva Bible says, "My forowes were fo great, that I paffed not for mine ordinarie fode." I don't know, I think the original is clearer than the footnote! Good times. Good times with the Geneva Bible. So then I got out my facsimile of the first King James Bible: "I am like a Pelican of the wildernes: I am like an owle of the desert. I watch, and am as a sparowe alone vpon the house top." Also, for comparison, "My heart is smitten, and withered like grasse: so that I forget to eate my bread." And I'll be honest with you: it wasn't until then that I said, "Oh! Grass." So then I was like, hey, wait a minute! Where is author John Stubbs getting all HIS weird spellings, like "oule"? Not from any of MY Bibles! So I checked HIS footnote, and found that the Bible verses were quoted from the diary of somebody named Wariston. So those were Wariston's crazy spellings! People used to just spell any way they wanted, and I dig it. And I was like, who is this Wariston anyway? I'm reading about the personal problems of somebody named Archibald Johnston! (Not to be confused with Archibald Scaldee. I guess there were a lot of guys named Archibald back then!) Why is poor afflicted Archibald Johnston ("A big crow frightened him... He dreamed of death") in Wariston's diary so much? So I checked the index and it said, "Wariston, Lord SEE Johnston, Archibald." So I saw "Johnston, (Sir) Archibald (later Lord Wariston)," and that explained everything, but I accidentally glanced down and gave myself a spoiler because on page 444 I am going to read about "his madness"! So I peeked at page 444 and there's somebody "raving and rolling in filth," but not him, curiously. Anyway, fun times.

A Piece of Mop Sitting on an Old Rag

Lee Durkee and I watched the 1969 version of HAMLET, with Marianne Faithfull as Ophelia, and when she came out to do her "mad scene" (pictured) she was all, "They say the owl was a baker's daughter" and I turned and gave Lee a big thumbs up and he laughed resignedly because you know what that means: HAMLET has an owl in it. I looked it up in the facsimile of the Second Quarto that Lee gave me for my birthday and they spell it my favorite way, "Owle," just like John Aubrey. Lee has been reading lots of Flannery O'Connor lately, and - good sport that he is - he sent me this passage from WISE BLOOD: "Over in one corner on the floor of the cage, there was an eye. The eye was in the middle of something that looked like a piece of mop sitting on an old rag. He squinted close to the wire and saw that the piece of mop was an owl with one eye open. It was looking directly at Hazel Motes. 'That ain't nothing but a ole hoot owl,' he moaned."

Big Arboreal Rice Rat

You know I have a book about weeds and a book about seahorses and an "ethnobotanical dictionary" and a waterlogged set of BUTLER'S LIVES OF THE SAINTS and elsewhere on the "internet" I have written about my love of reference books so it is no surprise to you that I picked up MAMMALS OF THE WORLD: A CHECKLIST and ALABAMA WILDLIFE VOLUME TWO: IMPERILED AQUATIC MOLLUSKS AND FISHES at Off Square Books the other day, but my purchase afforded much amusement for those gathered, including Lisa Howorth, who was moved to take a picture of it (above - see also). Only Melissa Ginsburg, who was there, truly "got" why these books are so interesting, although one other person said (unconvincingly), by way of compensatory sympathy, "I do want to know what's going on with that anteater and that skunk," referring to the cover of MAMMALS OF THE WORLD: A CHECKLIST. MAMMALS OF THE WORLD: A CHECKLIST is a checklist of the mammals of the world. That's all it is! Page after page. No illustrations. Font, font, font, closely packed. There are even little boxes next to the names of the mammals so you can check them off right there in the book when you see them! "And it tells you where to go," Melissa observed. Sure enough, I now know that I might have to go to Peru to see a "big arboreal rice rat." As for the book about imperiled mollusks, I am sorry the mollusks are imperiled but they have great names, presented in all caps and illustrated by beautiful color photographs. Just now I opened the book at random and found ORANGEFOOT PIMPLEBACK and DELICATE SPIKE and PINK MUCKET. (See also.) And oh yeah a while back I thought it would be a great idea if I had some unwieldy facsimile editions of HOLINSHED'S CHRONICLES - from which Shakespeare got a bunch of his ideas - but I could only get hold of volume three and volume six. Still, volume three has the reign of Henry VI in it, so recently, when I was reading about Henry VI elsewhere, I thought: "At last! A use for HOLINSHED'S CHRONICLES! I bet there's some hot stuff in there!" There is not. (See also.) But volume six says that Irish people are "religious, franke, amorous, irefull, sufferable of infinit paines, verie glorious, manie sorcerers, excellent horssemen... Their infants, they of meaner sort, are neither swadled nor lapped in linen, but folded vp starke naked in a blanket till they can go... otemeale and butter they cram togither... they let their cowes bloud, which growne to a gellie, they bake and ouerspread with butter, and so eate it in lumps." Whoa I got carried away typing there.

At Your Leisure

I was over there on that twitter today and saw that Mike Sacks had "linked" to a scene ("click" here) from what he called an "underrated Woody Allen movie," PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM. That reminded me of one of MY favorite scenes from the film ("click" here), which I tweeted back at Mr. Sacks. As I observed on twitter, it (the latter scene) is a strange combo of Jerry Lewis style slapstick and early Ricky Gervais fawning, squirming, preening awkwardness. Though come to think of it, Jerry himself specialized in fawning, squirming, preening awkwardness, so maybe it's just Jerry all the way and not a strange combo of anything and anyway Ricky Gervais probably hadn't been born yet. But here is the weird thing I JUST REMEMBERED. There used to be a guy named Richard J. Anobile who put out a series of books that were just FRAMES OF MOVIES with the dialogue printed beneath them. LOTS of frames of movies. CAN YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT I'M TELLING YOU? I don't think you can. I think you are too used to the glorious world you believe you are living in. WE DIDN'T EVEN HAVE VHS TAPES THEN. Sometimes, if we wanted to see a movie, WE WERE FORCED TO BUY A BOOK WITH LOTS OF SEQUENTIAL FRAMES FROM THE MOVIE IN IT. Do you understand how sad things used to be? We used to sit there and slowly flip through a book made of paper and glue and pretend to be watching a movie. That's what we did and we thought we were so great. And yet are we so different, you and I? I guess I don't care. You won't understand until it's too late. Old Richard J. Anobile was proud of his thoroughness. My edition of Richard J. Anobile's weirdo version of CASABLANCA has this printed on the front cover (caps theirs for a change): "THE MOST ACCURATE AND COMPLETE RECONSTRUCTION OF A FILM IN BOOK FORM: OVER 1,500 FRAME BLOW-UP PHOTOS SHOWN SEQUENTIALLY AND COUPLED WITH THE COMPLETE DIALOGUE FROM THE ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK, ALLOWS YOU TO RECAPTURE THIS FILM CLASSIC IN ITS ENTIRETY -- AT YOUR LEISURE." I also had (and have) Anobile's book versions of THE GENERAL and PSYCHO... and PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM. That one doesn't fit, does it? Nothing against PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM. But it was contemporary at the time, not "classic." Hey, remember when I told you that I went inside the actual PSYCHO house on the Universal lot? I peeled a little splinter off the front porch and put it in an envelope from the Sheraton Universal and stuck it in my copy of Richard J. Anobile's weird book version of the movie version of PSYCHO, and that is where it sits to this very day, my little splinter from the PSYCHO house, in case you're interested. You're not.

Shazam

I went over to Square Books and bought a copy of SUPERGODS by Grant Morrison because I read a kind of bad review of it, and you know me. Bad reviews make me buy things in defiance! Just skimming so far, but pleased to see that like Elaine Dundy before him, Morrison emphasizes the connection between Elvis Presley and Captain Marvel Jr.: "by the time his own physique was somewhat less than slender, he had his costumes designed to recall Captain Marvel Jr.'s boyish, cavalier spirit. Take a look at the short capes and high collars Presley wore in later years and note how Captain Marvel Jr.'s tousled, jet-blue cut was re-created on Elvis's troubled head." Speaking of Square Books, I haven't mentioned my famous recommendation shelf in a while because IT STOPPED SELLING. But a couple of days ago I rearranged it completely AND IT SOLD ANOTHER BOOK WITHIN MINUTES. Check it out! Buy a book! It won't kill you! I don't get paid for this! I am just trying to keep the publishing industry alive. You're welcome! (PS - Please note that while I titled this "post" "Shazam," that is what Billy Batson said to turn into Captain Marvel, NOT what Freddy the newsboy said to turn into Captain Marvel Jr. What Freddy said was "Captain Marvel"! Which is kind of confusing when you think about it. He could never introduce himself to anybody! Because when he said it again, he would change back! Anyway I'm so glad I cleared that up. I didn't want you to stay up tonight worrying.) Hey, while I've got you here... what? You have somewhere to be? While I've got you here, I was thinking about that hilarious time recounted in the 1909 John Dee bio when Edward Kelley was having a seance with Dr. Dee and asked the spirit to loan him a few bucks. Then I remembered I have the 1659 facsimile of all the recorded seances, so I thought I would look up that particular one to see whether there was any other hilarious hilarity. Nope. The rest of it was mostly like this: "Here appear 14 of divers evil-favoured shapes: some like Monkies, some like Dogs, some very hairy monstrous men, &c. They seemed to scratch each other by the face." Shazam!

They Were Serious About Titles

From Lee Durkee comes word that some people think this is John Dee's birthday and some other people don't. So happy approximate birthday, John Dee! You know, a few weeks ago I read about an "indie rocker" who has just written an opera about John Dee but I didn't tell you because the very idea of it depressed me for some reason. I'm a complicated man! To celebrate John Dee's birthday, I checked out a book from the library: a facsimile of the 1659 edition of A TRUE & FAITHFUL RELATION OF WHAT PASSED FOR MANY YEARS BETWEEN DR. JOHN DEE (A MATHEMATICIAN OF GREAT FAME IN Q. ELIZ. AND KING JAMES THEIR REIGNES) AND SOME SPIRITS: TENDING (HAD IT SUCCEEDED) TO A GENERAL ALTERATION OF MOST STATES AND KINGDOMES OF THE WORLD. HIS PRIVATE CONFERENCES WITH RODOLPHE EMPEROR OF GERMANY, STEPHEN K. OF POLAND, AND DIVERS OTHER PRINCES ABOUT IT. THE PARTICULARS OF HIS CAUSE, AS IT WAS AGITATED IN THE EMPERORS COURT; BY THE POPES INTERVENTION: HIS BANISHMENT, AND RESTORATION IN PART. AS ALSO THE LETTERS OF SUNDRY GREAT MEN AND PRINCES (SOME WHEREOF WERE PRESENT AT SOME OF THESE CONFERENCES AND APPARITIONS OF SPIRITS:) TO THE SAID DR. DEE. OUT OF THE ORIGINAL COPY, WRITTEN WITH DR. DEE'S OWN HAND: KEPT IN THE LIBRARY OF SIR THO. COTTON, KT. BARONET. WITH A PREFACE CONFIRMING THE REALITY (AS TO THE POINT OF SPIRITS) OF THIS RELATION: AND SHEWING THE SEVERAL GOOD USES THAT A SOBER CHRISTIAN MAY MAKE OF ALL. See, now, that's a title! I have already found out one thing. Remember that picture I showed you of "Dr. Dee" once? According to the caption in the 1659 edition, that was actually "EDW. KELLY Prophet or Seer to Dr. Dee." BUT! Don't forget, as I have mentioned here before, saucy Edward Kelly (or Kelley) often wore a cowl because (as the 1974 intro to this facsimile puts it) "he had been stood in the pillory and had his ears cut off for forgery." So you can understand my confusion! The intro goes on (and this I didn't know about Mr. Kelly), "He had also been in trouble with the authorities over digging up a corpse from a churchyard." Oh well! Everybody needs a hobby. Today there was a large flying ant in the house and a shiny black snake slithered from under the garbage can and into the kudzu as I was passing by, and I didn't think much of it, but now that I know it's John Dee's birthday it all makes sense.

Sweet Memories of the Rappin' Duke

McNeil and I were talking about John Wayne for some reason and it turned out to my amazement that he had never heard the novelty record "The Rappin' Duke," which was predicated on the questionable idea that John Wayne laughed like this: "Wah ha ha. Wah ha ha ha ha ha." [Note: Pendarvis stands corrected. After finding the video on the youtube, he discovered that the supposed Wayne laugh went like this: "Duh ha ha ha. Duh ha ha ha ha ha." - ed.] McNeil and I had quite a debate then on the way John Wayne actually laughed, if ever he did. McNeil attempted to produce a facsimile of the actual Wayne laugh. It didn't sound like much to me, somewhat like a hostile snicker, but was, I admit, more plausible than "Wah [or duh] ha ha ha." McNeil claimed that his recreation was "exact." The matter remains under consideration. You know what looks funny? The lyrics to the Rappin' Duke song soberly typed out. PS: My memory is nagging at me, and I want to say there WAS an impersonator, some variety-show staple, who popularized the "Wah ha ha" laugh (as opposed to the "Duh ha ha" laugh) BEFORE the Rappin' Duke song came out, an impersonator who was, possibly, its inspiration. But my googling is weak today. The old google did lead me to a CURRENT Wayne impersonator, however, one Dr. (!) Gene Howard, who will also (in addition to impersonating John Wayne for your event) do a digital watercolor painting (?) of your dog (!).

Flap a Day

As you know, I skim a different book flap every day for profound reasons that I no longer recall. Today's book flap is from the Oxford University Press series of Mark Twain first edition facsimiles. The volume in question: Twain's treatise CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. According to the flap, the book begins with "Twain's description of a man who falls off a cliff and finds his bones projecting from him like the arms of a hat rack." Awesome!

The Forgotten Tiepin Anecdote

I have been meaning to call Mr. Ward and get him to remind me about the time Andy Warhol noticed his tiepin. The details elude me, yet the story has been vaguely yet persistently called to mind ever since Bearden Coleman told me about Dick Cavett's wife giving his friend the evil eye. Not sure why. Not sure why the anecdote was called to mind, not sure why the friend got the evil eye. Hey, it's Friday the 13th! A good day, perhaps, to discuss the evil eye, come to think of it! So I will open at random my facsimile edition of THE EVIL EYE: AN ACCOUNT OF THIS ANCIENT & WIDESPREAD TRADITION by Frederick Thomas Elworthy (London: 1895) and type up the first sentence upon which my finger alights: "Whether looked at as the emblem of a hideous fable or simply as a mask, the Gorgoneion has in all ages been reputed as one of the most efficacious of amulets." Good to know! That's a "Friday the 13th good luck tip" courtesy of the "blog." You know, several years ago, some friends from Turkey gave Theresa and me a Turkish "anti-evil-eye" amulet (a nazar boncugu, to be exact) to hang on our front door and so far it has worked like gangbusters, knock wood! When you do your amulet shopping, tell 'em the "blog" sent you and receive a special discount. (Pictured, a Gorgoneion. For more information on Gorgoneions, or to find the Gorgoneion dealer nearest you, "click" here.)