Crying Horses

Last night in THE ILIAD, these horses started crying. These were some upset horses, I tell you! "Hot tears flowed from their weeping eyelids to the earth." And such. I thought "Surely Emily Wilson will give us a footnote - or an endnote, to be precise! - about these weeping horses." But why did I want to be precise in the middle of that sentence? That's the real question. Precision is always a mistake. Anyway, I did check and she provides a note about how the horses' heads are bending so low in grief that their glorious manes get dirty dragging the ground, but nothing about their red hot tears of woe. Now, bear in mind, these are magic, immortal horses, so they have different standards than the common horse you rode to work today. I'm kind of slow with THE ILIAD because I get in bed at night and everyone immediately starts stabbing each other. In the book, I mean. I'm like, "Wow, these guys never stop stabbing. They love it!" And pretty soon I'd rather be asleep. Poor me! I'm as sad as a horse sometimes.

The Chicken Soup Occurrence

Here is something I don't care about. But I've been sitting here thinking about it so I'm going to write it down. There I was, minding my own business, slicing up some leeks to go into a big pot of chicken soup, and in my headphones rang the voice of Barry McGovern, who reads the bulk of the audiobook of FINNEGANS WAKE (Marcella Riordan had just finished pitching in with the famous "washerwomen" chapter at the time of the soup making in question), and Barry McGovern said to me, quoting James Joyce in FINNEGANS WAKE, the word "googling," lodged there in an otherwise indecipherable sentence. I double checked it with the physical text once the soup was simmering, and there it was, all right: "googling," right there in FINNEGANS WAKE. Big deal. As we know from previous "blog" adventures, Mark Twain used "googling" in 1884 (as I learned from Roy Blount Jr., or one of his books, though I do know him in person, don't you worry about that!) and Jack Kerouac used "google" in 1959 (after Joyce, of course), and though FINNEGANS WAKE was published in 1939, we know that James Joyce was working on it for 17 years, and still, with all that, he just can't beat Billy DeBeck, who created the comic strip character Barney Google in 1919. (It occurs to me that the oft-touted "invention" of the term "googol" by a nine-year-old in 1920 might not be such a gobsmacking tidbit after all. Maybe he just liked to read the funny papers! Take that, nine-year-old! DAMN! I see that wikipedia has beaten me to this speculation, which is fitting, given my apparent obsession with the prerogitives of chronology. Hoist with my own petard!) Oh! What the hell else? I know nothing about the game of cricket, or, really, about the insect the cricket, except for my possibly false knowledge that the latter makes music with its legs... please, entomology pedants, tell me where I'm wrong! I beg of you! Anyway, I vaguely recall that in the movie HOPE AND GLORY, a grandfather threatens his grandson with some sort of cricket move he calls a "googly." I looked it up just now, and the first googly was thrown, if that's the correct word, by Bernard Bosenquet in 1900 (the last year of the 19th century, I say, which is why the momentous event is not recorded in my famous history of the 20th), so he beats everybody except Mark Twain, assuming that Bosenquet named the googly as well as putting it into practice, and I just don't care enough to find out, which is funny, because I care enough to type all this, just barely.

The Waiter's Secret

Well, there was a piece in the online version of today's New York Times where the fancy big shots who work there extolled in hushed, reverent awe the incomparable virtues of Skippy brand peanut butter, and that reminded me of a time when Dr. Theresa (before she was a Dr.) and I used to go to this restaurant in Atlanta, where we really enjoyed the peanut butter pie. One night, the waiter asked us if we knew why it was so good, and we said no, and he leaned in close, over the table, and said, behind his hand, from the side of his mouth, in a funny, conspiratorial voice, which we have imitated for all these years since, a single word: "Skippy." Just think of all the time we have spent, Dr. Theresa and I, saying "Skippy" to each other in a funny voice, never knowing that the waiter who said "Skippy" would one day be validated by the wonderful Gray Lady in all her glory. Anyway, Dr. Theresa is downstairs trying to work as I type these words, and I went down and asked her what the name of the restaurant was, but neither of us could remember. It didn't last too long. It was behind the post office.

Bonus Content

As you know, Megan Abbott and I have read several dozen "show biz" books together, stretching back to the long-faded glory of the aptly named Doomed Book Club. Currently, we have landed on a volume of letters by the actor William Redfield, from when he was in Toronto, rehearsing the role of Guildenstern in HAMLET. Not even Rosencrantz! Yes, yes, we know how to have a good time. Another thing you know about me is that I keep a list of books I read that have owls in them, hoping to support my theory that every book has an owl in it. Authors cannot resist the power of the owl! And so, fairly early in the letters, we run across Redfield's description of a director watching an actor "with the eyes of an owl." [It is the director who has the eyes of an owl, not the actor. - ed.] As bonus content, I will tell you that in the VERY SAME LETTER, Redfield refers to Jerry Lewis as "stupendously talented," which it somewhat pains William Redfield to admit, because Jerry Lewis does not have what William Redfield thinks of as "taste." I'll tell you something else Jerry Lewis doesn't have... the need to rehearse Guildenstern in Toronto and write letters about it. Ha ha, I kid the late William Redfield, whose life, now that I look it up on wikipedia, was cut tragically short. :(

Wise

A memory came to me. I was sitting in an almost empty lounge at an Elvis-themed hotel mainly known, perhaps, for its onetime outbreak of Legionnaire's Disease, drinking Maker's Mark or Buffalo Trace and waiting for a catfish sandwich to arrive. When it did arrive I could tell at once - and I say this with little fear of committing libel - that it bore only the slightest familial relation to catfish, if any. Meanwhile, on the television over the bar, one of the STAR WARS prequels blared on a basic cable station, complete with commercial breaks. At the time, I had such thoughts as "Why am I here? What have I done with my life? What is the point of everything? How did I get into such a fix? Why do bad things happen to good people? Is there a different way to live? If I could do it all over again, would I? Where could I be instead of here? Am I a bad person? If there is a God, why did he allow this to happen?" Now, however, in our current circumstance - and the following observation will hardly be unique - I think back on it in every detail with tender fondness as a glimpse of heavenly glory to which I wish I could return. Also! As long as I have you here, I am in the process of blurbing a novel, which contains a character "wise as an owl," in the protagonist's words. I do not think the future existence of the book has yet been publicly acknowledged, so it is not my place to provide the details. I do stick this reminder here just for myself, like a Post-It note, so that I will not forget to add the book to my list of books with owls in them, when the time is right. Maybe those will be better days!

Familiar Barn Fight

As you know, I never, ever "blog" anymore unless I read a book with an owl in it or for some other reason. But now I have decided I can "blog" about the TV show THE BIG VALLEY whenever I want. Spurred by Laura Lippman's description of it as "gloriously weird," I decided to revisit THE BIG VALLEY, or maybe just to visit it, because I really couldn't remember anything about it. I remembered a promo in which they put a lot of reverb on the announcer when he said the title: "THE BIG VALLEY-ALLEY-ALLEY-alley-alley-alley!" And I remembered, from the same promo, the description of Barbara Stanwyck's character as "Victoria, a woman of backbone and bite!" All I can say is that was a pretty good promo if I still remember it from when I was a kid. So I watched some of THE BIG VALLEY. When a fistfight started raging in the barn, I thought, you know, maybe I did watch this show when I was a kid, because I felt secure in the knowledge that this was a staple of the show, it was all coming back to me, regular fistfights in the barn. But I can't be sure! I think there was something on the other channel I liked better. But here are some things I observed: 1. It all starts with one of the brothers on a bridge and here comes Lee Majors from the other direction and neither fellow will back up his horse to let the other one pass. So they literally just sit there looking at each other until the bridge falls down! I can't say much for the infrastructure. 2. The introduction of Barbara Stanwyck's character. She swoops into the room where her sons are standing and says (I paraphrase, but only slightly), "You're putting on weight, must you shout, here comes a visitor, I'll see you at dinner." And then she's gone. Like she was never there! She spits it all out like a machine gun and disappears in a flash. I thought maybe she was like Fred MacMurray, who supposedly used to come in and sit in a chair for one day and say all his lines for an entire season of his sitcom MY THREE SONS then get up and put on his hat and leave and they had to shoot around him for the rest of the year. My friend Ward McCarthy told me that about Fred MacMurray and if it's not true it's my own fault, because maybe I'm remembering the details wrong and I'm just too lazy to look it up. 3. Lee Majors kneels down at a lonesome grave (the patriarch has been plopped into the ground in the middle of nowhere, right where he was killed, not unlike the sad case of Meriwether Lewis) and then a young woman rides up on a horse and just casually leans down and starts striking Lee Majors wildly and repeatedly in the face with a leather strap, and she doesn't even know him! That's his half-sister, I guess, as they discover later, but there's an extremely weird vibe they've got going on (pictured). In fact they started making me think of Heathcliff and Cathy a little bit, and Lee Majors's name on the show is Heath, so I wondered whether that was on purpose, but my research methods (as noted above) are far too lazy to confirm or deny. Still, Heath is the brash, mysterious outsider who disrupts family life... for instance when he steals some apples! He's just walking around, trespassing, going through their stuff and finally taking an apple and Victoria catches him. So he takes off his hat. And I thought, oh, this brash, mysterious outsider is going to be respectful for a change! We're about to see the tender, gentlemanly side of this brash, mysterious outsider! But no, he was just taking off his hat to cram it full of all the sweet, sweet apples he could carry. And I was like, gee, Lee Majors sure has a hatful of apples now! He's going to have quite a night eating apples. Meanwhile, Audra (Linda Evans) gets a lot of use out of her leather strap, often with good reason, because they seem to live in a nightmarish hellscape. Right now everyone is shooting each other and I haven't even made it to the end of the first episode yet.

I Forgot to Add

I forgot to add that as we sat on a banquette in my hotel lobby (this one) at maybe 2 AM, Julia and Jimmy and I gazed at a person with a giant pink rabbit head and a woman whose twisted black devil horns reached perhaps five or six feet into the air, and two or three others whose elaborate costumes I cannot recall, plus a man of whom we said, "Is he supposed to be Jay Leno?" but it turned out he was not in a costume, he was just some guy with a minor resemblance to Jay Leno. And, because I had been traveling and had not seen the GILMORE GIRLS trailer, Julia described it to me in much detail, like a bard of yore, steeped in the oral tradition, relating the ancient and immortal glories, and now I don't even WANT to see the trailer, how could it compare?

Bakery Heiress

Remember in Feb. 2007 when Dr. Theresa took a hammer and a nail and made me a new notch in my belt? Well I am about to lay on you a story just as captivating! First, let us go back (forward?) to 2008. Our fascinating prologue commences when I was staying in a motel in Los Angeles. I walked up several blocks to see THE APARTMENT on the big screen. And I saw Shirley MacLaine's face in this very scene (above) race through dozens of emotional transmutations in mere seconds. Every emotion, she had! But subtly. It was different on film, and at its intended size and scope, though I had seen THE APARTMENT many, many times before, on a tiny television screen with a tiny televised picture. The difference was like... when I used to see Rothko paintings in a library book and think, bleh! But then in the 1980s my ex (?) girlfriend (?) and I flew to Washington, D.C. together and I don't know where she went... but I met, by some obscure prearrangement, a bakery heiress on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Her roommate, possessing the magical name Cornelia, was a Roosevelt. Like... A ROOSEVELT. We drank concoctions of rum and orange juice on the balcony of a hotel across from the White House. An upstairs light was on over there! As dusk descended! The bedroom, we reckoned. George and Barbara, en déshabillé! After we parted, though, the kind-hearted bakery heiress and I (it was on plain white sliced bread that her cunning people founded their considerable fortune!), I was forced to stay with a different, less hospitable bunch, some [redacted] who - however noble their purposes, and I think them quite noble in intent! - were unpracticed as hosts. They lectured me vitriolically on the subject of cheese for hours at a time, for example, and hung gory, unavoidable posters of vivisection in every cranny, and fed me on naught but that which made my stomach hurt, and always made me pay for the cab. EXCEPT for that one glorious evening when [redacted] a raging fire in a big fireplace though it was June and boiling hot outside, and then [redacted]! [redacted]. The Indigo Girls were climbing the charts for an eager young nation with their hit [redacted], which, coming through the radio, burrowed into my mind as the theme song for that [redacted]. But I mean, I saw some Rothko paintings in person at the National Gallery back then, in the aforementioned 1980s, in Washington, D.C., and their majesty was all-consuming, like Shirley MacLaine's. Even though, prior to the screening (keep up! we've moved forward to 2008 again), I had considered her movie "my favorite," it was like I had never seen it before. So that seems like a shame. It seems, in fact, like I have wasted my life! But the point is that in 2008 I forgot to turn in my motel key when I checked out. Nothing else I just mentioned had anything to do with anything. I just wanted to explain why I still have this motel key.

It's an old fashioned key. A key key. Like, a metal key. A key. The kind of key Norman Bates would give you, or possibly Dennis Weaver from TOUCH OF EVIL. A motel key dangling from a flat blue slab of plastic, Room 109. So! Now we are coming closer to the point. Dr. Theresa and I have this spare house key we like. It just stays by itself. It's not entangled or associated with a bunch of car keys and office keys and random keys that open we don't know what. It's just on a ring all alone. Or used to be. Very light and convenient! Like, to have in our pocket if we want to take a casual stroll. But its key ring just fell apart! Suddenly there was nothing to anchor that favored key, to give it heft, to shield it from loss. So I thought maybe we could put it on this old motel key ring I have. Ha ha! These kinds of stories are my favorites. The motel key was designed diabolically. Bulky and twisted and nigh impossible to pull apart. Probably for some motel owner's good reason. So Dr. Theresa got some pliers out of the kitchen drawer and went to town on that implacable key ring like a champ. Finally she was able to separate the parts of the ring just enough so that we could slide the vital house key into place. Then I took a hammer and banged the whole thing back together like Thor himself descended from the heavens. That key ain't slipping off now! I'd like to see it try. It was real teamwork, though Dr. Theresa had already restored everything more than adequately with her pliers by the time I managed to dig out the hammer, and my hammering, while it made me feel like a great big man, was likely just for show.

Ye Olde Pink Trick

Ah, well. Yes! I guess tonight is my only "event" for my new book of short stories entitled MOVIE STARS. Megan Abbott has flown down from NYC to rake me over the coals "in conversation" at Square Books this evening. The primary question is which jacket to wear. What? You're reading a "blog," dimwit. This is what you get. Now, Chris Offutt has upped the ante - again and again! - on "event jackets" around here, which is why I am leaning toward the pink. BUT! I've worn it a lot. True, true, it was mostly in Los Angeles, as seen here with my friend and coworker Julia Pott and our outdated novelty pillow. But in our crazy digital age does geography matter? Besides, I've even worn it on airplanes! Look at that face. That (above) is the deadened visage of a man who has just crawled off an airplane, in fact. Has my pink jacket been overexposed? The airplane wear, in addition, has left it somewhat creased. There may be an unsightly spot or two of indefinite origin, I won't deny it. I tried that old trick of hanging it in the bathroom while the water steams and rages, in the hopes of smoothing it out, to not much avail. I did the same with my "John T. Edge" brand shirt. That's right, he has a shirt brand named after him! He's John T. Edge, damn it. And if you want to know, this particular "John T. Edge" shirt has dots on it that are cleverly made with intricate knots of thread, unseen to the casual observer, lining the inside of the shirt, giving the wearer a cozy sense of... holy God I'm even boring myself talking about this shirt now. You know what? Maybe I'll hit 'em with the old steam again. I MUST wear the pink! I must! Otherwise Chris Offutt is going to be there in who knows what manner of glory, like a wedding guest who dares to arrive in white, I just know it. Hey, I just went to BBB and ate a Pylon with lots of onions, precisely the thing before an event with people. I stopped by Square Books on my walk home and Katelyn said I should "get a puppet buddy," a suggestion I brooded over the rest of the way back, and indeed over which I continue to brood. You can take it lots of ways.

An Unforgettable Adventure

Once in a great while I like to astound you with one of my spine-tingling adventures from real life. So! The other day I went to the dry cleaners with a jacket and also the white shirt upon which a friendly jostle from Pat McHale had caused me to spill a quantity of red wine. As I was about to get out of the car, I reached into the pocket of the jacket and pulled out a coaster from The Temple Bar in NYC, upon the reverse side of which Pen (or Kent? - something in the curve and thickness of that forefinger makes me think Pen) had drawn a happy little "thumbs-up" character. Now, it was raining! You must understand the meteorological aspect of the situation to thoroughly enjoy the ins and outs of my rousing tale. I sat in the car figuring out where to put the coaster so I wouldn't forget it and it wouldn't get rained on, made of paper as it was. I was so preoccupied with the matter that - "as in uffish thought [I] stood" (Lewis Carroll) - I locked my keys in the car! Not having a cellphone, I had to use the dry cleaners' phone to leave a message for Dr. Theresa. A message I prayed she would receive! After transacting the business for which I had embarked upon this ill-omened journey I stood in front of the dry cleaners, a conveniently extended portion of the roof sparing me from the weather. Every time someone pulled into the parking lot I made eye contact. Who knew what vehicular form my salvation might take? Many unspoken - indeed, telepathic! - communications, conveying human feeling in all its glorious and abysmal range, blossomed in these numerous though brief encounters. At last the dapper manager of the dry cleaners himself stepped forth and offered me a ride somewhere far away from the dry cleaners. Perhaps I was too scruffy and emotionally confrontational to be standing outside a respectable dry cleaning establishment! But I think he was just being nice. My faith in Dr. Theresa and her network of generous acquaintances being what it was, I declined his offer. And at last, here came Blair Hobbs, graciously transporting Dr. Theresa, who had brought her own set of car keys. "I'll drive," said Dr. Theresa. We stopped to get some cat food since we were near the place where we get cat food.

Drumstick Adventure

You know, just about every Monday, my coworker Ashly Burch asks me "How was your weekend?" and it's a very pleasant and considerate query but I sit there in silence with a dumb look on my face because I can't think of anything to say because nothing happened that weekend. Well, today is gonna be different, says I! Went out to Faulkner's house to play accordion on the Thacker Mountain Radio Show. They never had a radio show there before, and hardly even a radio. Faulkner hated the radio. There's a story about that but you'll have to go to Faulkner's house and ask Bill Griffith. He runs the place! I don't know how Faulkner felt about accordions. Kelly Hogan got in trouble for sitting - with no malice aforethought - on Faulkner's freezer. Because guess what? It's not just a freezer, it's a museum exhibit! Anyway, they had made Faulkner's kitchen into a green room for musicians, which I'm sure stressed out even the chill Bill Griffith. And I was thinking, yeah, but Hogan is probably the first person to sit on the lid of that freezer since Faulkner! It's like their very butts touched through the fabric of time!

Here's a picture that Megan Abbott took of Dr. Theresa (waving her hands in the air like she just doesn't care... but she does!) and Thacker producer Kathryn McGaw York grooving out on the sight of all their crazy hard work coming to fruition. Note Lopez's fetching hat, clearly visible in two photos thus far. Saw David Swider of The End of All Music. He said I should bring my Emmy to the record store for "Touch the Emmy Day," and people will come by and touch my Emmy while I spin records under the name "DJ Emmy." It seemed like a hilarious idea while we drank whiskey in Faulkner's yard and swooned companionably in the blazing hot sun! I feel like everybody sang about ghosts. Is that an exaggeration? I'm not sure! Must have been the unconscious pull of the setting. Or maybe songwriters just happen to like ghosts. I remember once many years ago a friend of mine claimed that she didn't like any song with the word "ghost" in it, which I found stunningly arbitrary. Okay, I'm leaving a lot of stuff out. But later that night, there was another show (not on Faulkner's lawn), and I was happy to hear great musicians like Amy Ray and Laurie Stirratt literally singing Dr. Theresa's praises (well, not literally! They were speaking, not singing, at those moments) from the stage. But before that late-night show, Dr. Theresa, who was in charge, was faced with some emergencies! Like: an amp that shocked a famous session guitarist with its electricity! Or: a drum kit but NO DRUMSTICKS! Jennifer and I were sent out into the night to scour the town for drumsticks. We went to a bar called Proud Larry's, where there is usually a band playing, to see whether the drummer might have an extra pair of sticks. But as we approached the door I noticed that the band's name had been ominously rubbed from the chalkboard outside! And sure enough, the band had been canceled because everybody wanted to watch the University of Mississippi play at Alabama, a big game. BUT! A thoughtful waiter told us that one of the bartenders was a drummer. And the bartender kindly went to check his car and found a drumstick. A single drumstick! It felt like a kind of triumph. A useless triumph! But I encouraged Jennifer to hold the pointless drumstick aloft in a victorious gesture as we returned. By the time we got back they had already found two more drumsticks. So we actually had one more drumstick than was absolutely necessary! Chris Lopez played first, under his solo guise "Tenement Halls." ("Click" here to listen to my favorite Tenement Halls song: you won't be sorry!) He kept taunting us with the first few bars of "Black Ice" (a Rock*A*Teens song which I have written about in the New York Times! or their "web" site anyway) but couldn't remember the lyrics. Finally he called out from the stage, "Theresa, what's the first line?" And we yelled back at him from the back table, but we didn't quite have them right either. Turns out the first line is "In a town up north of Nashville, where the Crackers go to learn how to play..." (I think) But (though we had the second half right) I had always heard it as something like, "In a town outta nada of Naughahooga" or something like that. Anyway, it got Chris rolling! After Chris's set, Rock*A*Teens fan Bill Boyle and I discussed the lyrics of "Black Ice" and how many different, incorrect ways we had heard them over the years. One thing I enjoyed was the fluid spirit of the proceedings. It didn't seem like five or six different bands playing, but more like one larger band that kept undulating and changing its shape in a lovely way. Lopez played drums for Amy Ray and Jon Langford and Hogan... Langford played guitar for Hogan... Hogan sang harmonies for Langford and Ray... like that. I really enjoyed hearing the Amy Ray/Rock*A*Teens collaboration "Black Heart Today." I found an older, milder, more "acoustic" performance of it on the "internet," which is good, but if you "click" here you will miss Lopez's rabid drum fills, for one thing, which had grown in majestic stature as the night drew to a close. I hope somebody recorded it! And all its mystical punk rock vibrations of glory.

I played accordion on three songs for Hogan, I think, including one I wrote a couple of decades ago (ugh! what a thought! decades! "click" here if you'd like to hear it, false starts and all). I played on Hogan's cover of the Magnetic Fields song "Papa Was a Rodeo" (really, I just noodled along) and I got so concerned with my noodling that I didn't even notice that Amy Ray had come up to join in, and I happened to glance out of the corner of my eye to see Amy Ray and Kelly Hogan gracefully two-stepping together.

Here's a still photo of that moment (post-dancing, I think). I stole it from somebody's twitter, sorry! There was a giant in a cowboy hat who was VERY enthusiastic about Langford's set. He whooped with such frightening intensity that Langford had to stop the show and calm him down with vinegary Welsh quips. Later I went to the men's room and found that giant cowboy in there with his girlfriend! They were just hanging out, no funny business, don't get me wrong. But then as he stood at the urinal he was going "OOOHHHHH! OUCH! ARRGHHHHH! AAAAAHHHWWWWWW!" like a person in the greatest human agony, which perhaps he was. Why did I mention that when there were so many nicer things to mention instead? Like breakfast the next day with Julie and Barry and Langford? John Currence surprised us by coming up behind us stomping on the floor, shaking the very building with his mighty tread! What the hell, it's his building, he can do what he wants! Then he bought champagne for the table as you can plainly see from this photo of the occasion.

Currence (not pictured) was pumped up and celebrating the University's triumph over its rival, to which I have already alluded. Sorry, Ashly, a lot of other stuff happened but my mind is going.

He Makes Coffins

Look, it's Mary Miller and me at Tom Franklin's big annual birthday party. Mary kept saying how nice my hair looked so Lizzie took this picture. I don't know. Does my hair look that nice here? I am doubtful. Doesn't it look like a hairpiece? I kept explaining to Mary that whatever had happened to my hair that she was so taken with was just because I was sweating so much. It was hot! We live in Mississippi. Moments after this photo was taken, Tom Franklin shaved my head entirely... AGAIN. That's becoming a birthday tradition too, I guess. I was just complaining to Dr. Theresa that Tom left too much hair on my neck. "He did a better job than last time," she said. I don't think she cares! As my friend Brian pointed out on twitter, I now look "like the lifer in the yard [he'd] go to for advice as a new inmate." But I deleted my bald "selfie"

because I wanted to pretend not to be a vainglorious fool. I was just reading about vainglory in THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY. He's against it. Okay, here. HERE'S A TRUE HISTORY FACT. Last time Tom shaved my head, JFK's granddaughter was present! I saw her the next day in the town square and she tried to engage me in conversation but I couldn't recall who she was. I thought maybe she was a former student who wanted to talk about grades or something! Gross! So I dismissed her curtly! Later I realized my mistake but nothing could be done. Well that's what I get for being a huge jerk all the time. I tweeted that last night and deleted it too. I also tweeted about the guy who, right after Tom shaved my head, handed me his business card and yelled, "I MAKE COFFINS!" Well, let's see, I saw Semmes at the party and he said he was recently sitting with Bob Rafelson (!) on Rafelson's balcony and telling him about how I forced Dr. Theresa to watch the movie HEAD while we were dating and it didn't go over too well and then they tried to call me, but the number Semmes had for me was out of service. So that's the story about the time I didn't get a phone call from Bob Rafelson.

And I had a funny talk with Cynthia Joyce about how movie sex scenes were edited in the 70s. She said she was watching Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway going at it in THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR and couldn't figure out what anything was. "Is that a hairy knee?" she found herself asking during one shot.

The Astonishing Tale of the Lost Pens

When Megan and Dan and I were having drinks at the 21 Club - or "21" as I call it - I wanted to jot down one of Megan's heartbreaking anecdotes about the troubled life of Frances Farmer, but I had lost my pen earlier in the day. Just as Megan was going to loan me a pen, the waiter silently swooped out of nowhere, pen at the ready! A "21 Club" pen. Later, as our party was thinking about leaving, the waiter told me to keep the pen. A gracious and unnecessary gesture! A thoughtful remembrance! The pen that I had lost earlier that day was the pen I once told you about that had an owl by Alexander Wilson on it. I belittled the pen at the time, and mocked myself for having so many things with owls on them. But you know what? It was a really nice pen. High quality! I have to say my feelings of loss were soothed by the kind waiter at the 21 Club - or "21" as I call it. AND the mother of my friend Pen - no relation to the writing utensil - gave me a beautiful fountain pen on the same trip. So I came home much richer in pens than when I left. BUT HERE IS THE BIG MYSTERY YOU HAVE BEEN DYING TO HEAR ABOUT. On my PREVIOUS visit to New York City I ALSO LOST A FINE PEN. I don't think I mentioned it at the time. That one was silver and had a certain heft. Two visits to New York City, two lost pens... and not just any pens. Two of the nicest pens I have ever carried around. Don't worry, I'll never take the pen that Pen's mom gave me out of the house. It's way too nice. It's by far the nicest pen I've ever had, the kind of pen with which you should only write deeply personal letters by a roaring fire, and we don't have a fireplace. But then you should throw those letters into the fire, that's how nice this pen is. HERE'S THE THING! I fly all over the place, constantly jotting this and that, AND YET I HAVE NEVER LOST A PEN EXCEPT IN NEW YORK CITY. New York City: the city that swallows pens. Well, the Peabody Awards ceremony was in New York City one week ago today, so I guess I better milk it with this final picture of me holding a Peabody Award in New York City one week ago today. There must be a statute of limitations, even for a shameless glory hog such as myself. I didn't carry a pen that night because I was afraid that the ink might leak all over my new pants. TRUE STORY.

Kingdom of the Grackles

I keep hinting around about some project like it's some big secret, but it's not a secret and it's not a secret project, it's just a project, I guess it's a project. Hey! Remember when I went to an auction of Bob Hope's personal effects and then I wrote an essay about Bob Hope's ice buckets, and ice buckets in general, for THE ATLANTIC, and this was before the "Ice Bucket Challenge" became popular (remember the "Ice Bucket Challenge"?) so now my article is totally obsolete? Well, that essay series is related to a series of books that Bloomsbury is putting out and they asked me if I could think of an object I wanted to write about - another object - and I scratched my head and said "Cigarette lighters?" And looking back, I think I only said that because I had a lot of leftover notes about Bob Hope's cigarette lighters. But anyway, now I am writing a book about cigarette lighters and that is my so-called "secret project." So I flew to Oklahoma City to view a large private collection of cigarette lighters. (The lighters are actually in nearby Guthrie.) But I'm not going to tell you about that or it would spoil the book! Ha ha, you're not going to read that book, are you? TELL ME THE TRUTH! But here, let me look at my famous little notebook of famous jottings I always famously jot when I travel and see how many jottings are useless for the book and thus safe for me to share. Well! As always the question was what to read on the airplane. I looked around the shelves here at home and I just wasn't feeling anything. So I went to Square Books and leafed through Martin Short's autobiography again. I would never buy Martin Short's autobiography! I don't know why! Sorry, Martin Short! I like Martin Short. And I'd sit in a bookstore and read his autobiography for free - no better than a thief! - but I just can't make myself buy it. On the cover of his autobiography his head forms the "O" in "SHORT." But! His mouth is wide open, so maybe his mouth is the "O" in "SHORT." Or maybe his head is the solid part of the "O" and his mouth is the emptiness in the middle of the "O." I read some stuff about how he met Danny Thomas and Danny Thomas always carried a pistol in a holster on his hip! And then I put Martin Short's autobiography back in its proper place and went upstairs and started looking for a small paperback suitable for airplane reading. As I described some of my likings to the booksellers Kate and Kaitlyn, Kate exclaimed, "Do you like vampires?" Now, there is no way that Kate could have known I am currently working on a Marceline story for ADVENTURE TIME - a meeting about which story was to take place later that very afternoon! - so vampires and all their peculiar habits had been particularly on my mind.

(That's not a spoiler, is it? You know Marceline the Vampire Queen is a character on the show, right? Besides, Adam Muto himself recently tweeted these drawings of Marceline from the thing we've been working on - sketches by Hanna K.) So Kate and Kaitlyn tried to get me to buy a book called THE QUICK by Lauren Owen. "I'm a hundred pages in and there are no vampires yet," said Kaitlyn. I replied that that was fine. I reminded Kaitlyn of a book I had recommended to her, THE LITTLE STRANGER by Sarah Waters, and how you had to wait a long time for the ghost, and Kaitlyn said, "There ARE NO GHOSTS in THE LITTLE STRANGER!" (This is an argument I've had before with other people.) So Kaitlyn and I argued about that in a friendly fashion while Kate thrust the vampire book into my hand. A big clunky hardback! Too big and heavy to carry through airports with my fragile arms. But I opened it up to page one just to be nice and the first sentence is this: "There were owls in the nursery when James was a boy." AND YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS! So I said, "Sold!" And I left Square Books fully convinced that I would grit my teeth and lug this monster of a novel (523 pages, that's not so terrible) onto all the airplanes. BUT! I stopped by Ace Atkins's office and he had a nice, light paperback copy of LABRAVA by Elmore Leonard on his desk because he had been wanting me to read it. Ah, that's more like it. Sorry, Kaitlyn and Kate! But you almost had me. The vampires will be here for me when I get back. Ace urged me to stay at the Skirvin in Oklahoma City (he was there a lot when he was researching his Machine Gun Kelly book). Ace said the Skirvin was famous for being haunted and he sent me a New York Times article (!) about how professional basketball players who stay at the Skirvin get most especially haunted (!!). But I had already made reservations somewhere else. Ace also told me about a good steak place, but I had already - on Wright Thompson's recommendation - made reservations at Junior's, which Wright described in a tweet as an "old school 80s oil money cocaine rich dark red leather whiskey and T-bone joint."

And yes, that was a recommendation! So I guess my unintended message to Ace was "Screw your thoughtful suggestions!" Though I did bring that book he loaned me. I looked up the Oklahoma City weather on the "internet" and asked Dr. Theresa if she thought I should bring my overcoat. I wanted her to say no! We had an overcoat debate. Then it was time for my ADVENTURE TIME meeting. Kent popped up on my computer screen and started agreeing with Dr. Theresa! They were ganging up on me. But I didn't want to drag my bulky overcoat through the airport. Finally, Pen joined the meeting. "How many degrees should it be before I wear an overcoat?" I asked him. "Overcoats are fun, so I say any degrees," Pen replied. I explained that I prefer to travel light. One carry-on messenger bag, one book, and the clothes on my back! That's it! Pen suggested turning the overcoat into a hobo bindle and putting all my stuff in it. I said, "Yes, that's what they like to see at airports." When Pen found out I would ALSO be wearing my blue smoking jacket (under the OVERcoat) he had second thoughts and came around to my side! "I've seen Pen walking around with no jacket when it's FREEZING!" Kent objected, hinting that Pen was no judge of when to wear an overcoat. Now let's get to the jottings you've been craving. I'm skipping some good stuff because I'm tired. Too bad for you. 1. Went to Junior's on my first night in town, just as Wright had suggested. The cab driver, Cecil, took me past a strange building. I couldn't get a really good look - it was a pale, imposing lump in the dark - but I was intrigued enough to ask him what it was. Cecil said it was the "Gold Dome," a vestige of the glory days of Route 66. Cecil also mentioned the "Milk Bottle Building," but I didn't see that and don't know what it is.

I was reminded of the only other time I've been through Oklahoma City. It must have been 1988 or so. I got fired from my job and my friend Tony and I decided to drive across the country, often sticking to the old Route 66. When we drove through Oklahoma City it was literally covered in a white fog, the whole city. We didn't see a single thing. I later turned that incident into a short story for the fine Oklahoma literary magazine THIS LAND. We pulled up at Junior's. It appeared to be an office building! I walked into a sterile corridor with many doors and wasn't even sure I had the right place: it looked like the door to a dentist office waiting room. But as soon as I opened it up I was in Narnia! I literally walked into a different world. (I may as well mention here that Junior's was the second Oklahoma City restaurant I had walked into with "NO WEAPONS" etched in frosted glass at the entrance.) 2. That publicity picture earlier in this "post" can't do Junior's justice. I felt like I was in VERTIGO, TWIN PEAKS, THE SHINING and a Megan Abbott novel,

all in the best way, and I ate a princely meal that James Garner would have eaten in THE WHEELER DEALERS. 3. My table! They put me at a weird table, which felt like the best table in the house to me. It was a two-top nudged right up against a plate glass window, and on the other side of that window, inches from my left, was the blackness, flecked with gold and red, of a dark bar, with people wearing bolo ties and fur stoles and laughing and SMOKING! It was like a membrane through which I could see another time, and because it was soundproofed it really had the effect of a dream, a thin membrane providing a tempting glimpse of a whole other existence I could almost reach out and touch. 4. After dinner I had to go through that looking glass. It smelled like smoke! I never wanted to leave. 5. I spilled rye all over Ace's copy of LABRAVA. 6. I met three nice women who were out for a night on the town together. One was a realtor, one was an aspiring poet and one was drinking expensive cabernet and studying from an enormous textbook entitled HUMAN ANATOMY at the end of the bar! 7. The next day I went out to Guthrie to visit my contact with the lighter collection. I hired a driver named David to take me. He was born in Ethiopia. He said he works at the Skirvin a lot and Ace will be pleased to hear that he brought up the ghosts. Many of David's passengers have told him about being haunted at the Skirvin. David thinks it's a bunch of baloney. He doesn't believe in ghosts. He is a believer in science and evidence. He had a lot of very interesting psychological theories to explain why and how people fool themselves into thinking they see ghosts at the Skirvin. David's a big reader so we talked about books a lot and he told me interesting stories of his mother and father back in Ethiopia. 8. I can't tell you anything about the lighters because I'm saving it for my book. But I just stared at one of my notes ("Frankenstein nose" is all it said) for several minutes in total panic, thinking, "Oh my God! My notes are useless! I can't write this book!" But then I realized it was "Frankenstein noise." One of the lighters made a noise like the machines that brought Frankenstein's monster to life in the old movie. That's what that note meant. And that's all you're getting out of me! 9. My friends Sarah Marine and her husband Bayard Godsave live in a small town an hour away from Oklahoma City and they were nice enough to come all that way to meet me for dinner. As I stood outside the hotel waiting for them I saw a large group of young women approaching from a nearby park. Their leader was wearing a tiara and a satiny black sash! But they turned the corner before they got to me and I could not read the sash. It was not a parade of any kind, just an informal gathering or stroll with a tiara and sash. 10. Like Dr. Theresa and myself, Sarah Marine and Bayard are early diners. So early, in fact, that the restaurant wasn't open when we got there. We had some minutes to wait. Sarah Marine suddenly realized that we were very close to the memorial for the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing. So we walked over there and it was a very moving and deeply solemn place to be. I heard a solitary bird make a an eerie and prehistoric but, I thought, weirdly beautiful sound. 11. Sarah Marine pointed out the bird in its tree and told me it was a grackle. 12. Boy, let me tell you, Sarah Marine is down on grackles. "They don't fly, they run," she said disdainfully. "But that one is in a tree," I said. Sarah Marine said, "I'm talking about the REAL grackles, the parking lot grackles." She said no two grackles look alike, they're all ragged and mangy in different ways, missing different feathers, slovenly, and she seemed to resent the grackle in the tree as a poser, I guess, a pretentious grackle that thought he was too damn good to represent his squalid kind. And yet I detected no affection for the punk grackles she apparently considered more authentic. She talked about a grackle standing on a corner gnawing on a chicken bone. She saw this same grackle eating discarded chicken wings in an ugly way in the same spot on two separate occasions!

Bayard kind of tried to take up for the grackles a little bit, but had to admit that they stand around chewing on cigarette butts. Bayard and Sarah Marine quoted an ornithologist who hates grackles. An ornithologist! (More on this later.) I could not help but recall the poor cormorant, and that book I have about how everybody hates cormorants. 13. Bayard, on grackles: "Our friend says they look like gasoline." Sarah Marine: "They're shimmery." Bayard: "They're the color of gasoline in a puddle." I must say all of this sounded kind of exotic and tantalizing to me, but Sarah Marine would have none of my sympathetic grackle talk. Sarah Marine: "They sound like something broken." Bayard: "A broken toy." Sarah Marine: "A broken toy of nightmares." I remarked that I kind of liked the way that one grackle sounded. "You haven't heard them when they start grinding," said Sarah Marine. 14. It's a cliché, but the walk back to the restaurant in the gathering darkness took on a Hitchcockian feeling as grackles gathered all around us - I guess I should call them a "flock" but they seemed more like a swarm or a horde - numberless grackles! - and they did make an uncanny racket, and it may have been terrible, but it struck me as unearthly, and for that reason kind of thrilling. INTERESTING SIDE NOTE! Just before I hit the button to publish this "post" I received an email from Sarah Marine: "I'd been thinking that as we stood at the edge of the glimmering reflecting pool at the Oklahoma City Federal Building Memorial, I may have been unfair to the grackle in my musings. Then, I pulled Fifty Common Birds of Oklahoma by the ornithologist George Miksch Sutton off the bookshelf & again feel mostly disgust and pity for the Common Grackle. I've attached a section from the entry on the Common Grackle. Sorry, not sorry, grackles!"

15. At dinner, Sarah Marine told me there's a statue of James Garner in Norman, Oklahoma, and the waitress said, "It's all covered in flowers now," referring to Mr. Garner's fairly recent passing. 16. The restaurant music (before it shifted to "Tears For Fears" mode a bit later in the evening) consisted of popular tunes with a "surf guitar" twist. The theme from GOLDFINGER was one. I mentioned that it was Dr. Theresa's go-to karaoke number. Bayard asked whether I had ever seen the FRASIER episode when Frasier and Niles sing "Goldfinger." I had to say no! Bayard said that the old piano player in the episode can only play "Goldfinger." With Martin's encouragement, Frasier and Niles sing along - reluctantly at first, but with growing enthusiasm. That sounded like a good one! I was sorry not to recall it. I mentioned an episode of FRASIER that had recently disturbed and troubled me and Sarah Marine said, "I have a problem with an entire era of FRASIER." We discussed it. "Why did they give Daphne bangs?" is one thing that Sarah Marine asked plaintively. 17. Sarah Marine said their hometown consisted of "a grain elevator and an intersection." Bayard added, "We have a liquor store that sells Samurai swords." 18. The bottled water in my hotel room had a Bible verse printed next to the expiration date! Not the whole verse, just a citation: "John 5:15." I made a note to myself to look it up in my Geneva Bible when I got home and see what it's all about. "The man departed, and told the Jewes that it was Jesus, which had made him whole." Hmm. Gee. That's what it said on my bottled water! 19. David drove me to the airport the next day and proved himself once again a delightfully wide-ranging conversationalist. He had much of interest to say on the subjects of Christopher Hitchens, Agatha Christie, Karl Marx, Field Marshal Rommel, asceticism, tribalism, and democracy. He was proud that Ethiopia (which he called "the second oldest Christian country in the world," and gave me some history on that) had never been colonized. He told about having to kill goats and oxen as a young man and how his people hardly ever eat a female animal - they eat the rooster, for example, instead of the chicken. "Meat is for rich people," he said. He described being a poor child and - as a kind of entertainment - watching strangers eat meat. "That was our window shopping," he said. 20. I forgot to tell you about the earthquakes! I wasn't in one. But when I was looking at the lighter collection, the collector showed me where several of his lighters had fallen and some had been damaged, and he said, "That's what happens with the earthquakes. We had five earthquakes last week." I think that's what he said. It was something like that. I haven't transcribed the recordings yet. But he is 82, and I thought maybe it was just a strange hyperbolic thing that an 82-year-old man might say. On the drive back to the city, I asked David whether Oklahoma City has a lot of earthquakes and he said, "We had 4,000 earthquakes last year." WHAT! I haven't looked up anything to corroborate that, but Megan sent me an article from THE ATLANTIC detailing a large number of earthquakes in Oklahoma. I didn't see a number so mind-boggling as 4,000 (I haven't looked into it very carefully) but the article did mention a single recent weekend in which Oklahoma had SEVEN EARTHQUAKES! Seven earthquakes in one weekend, I said! David says that the oil men try to tell everybody it's just nature at work, but David knows it's the fracking. 21. Announcement at the Oklahoma airport: "Will the passenger who left the big bag of money at the eastern checkpoint please come get it." 22. "He told Cundo, watching him pick at his cole slaw, he ate like a ******** owl." - LABRAVA

Jerry Epiphany #2

Just before an ADVENTURE TIME meeting the other day I was conversing with my twitter friend Brian about a talk show Jerry Lewis had in the 80s, cashing in on his role from THE KING OF COMEDY. He told Suzanne Somers (pictured) she had "pizzazz," or so I remembered.

I thought Kent Osborne's brother Mark had introduced that clip to me on a privately circulated VHS tape of oddities, but Kent didn't remember that. During the meeting he found Jerry's talk show on youtube and watched it and started cringing. Meanwhile, although (because?) from my end of the video conference I could only hear the audio and see the reactive cringing, I was cringing FOR Kent, or for Jerry, I couldn't tell which, they were inseparable. And I had an epiphany. All of my epiphanies are about Jerry Lewis. Yes, as I've observed, Jerry anticipated Andy Kaufman, and now that I think about it, Jerry's first act, when he was little more than a kid, was lip-syncing to records, mirroring exactly the first performance by Andy Kaufman on the first episode of Saturday Night Live. (Tony Clifton = Buddy Love?) As J. Hoberman observed, Jerry "both depicts and manifests inadvertent disclosure." So he can razor in on the phoniness of show biz satirically while living without qualms the actual life of a show biz phony. That old Fitzgerald thing about the rare ability to hold two opposed ideas in your mind at the same time, blah blah blah. Or as Megan Abbott said in an interview I did with her, "the unconscious and conscious are always this close... I’m putting my fingers together very closely... just this close always and always brushing up against each other constantly. And so we often are thrown into ourselves in ways that are alarming and we often have to see things about ourselves because we can’t completely hide from the unconscious." Jerry's 80s talk show was not art (was it?) but it crystalizes what Manohla Dargis said about Jerry disturbing "all those nice people in all their fancy clothes." Meaning us! So why, for me, Jerry is more powerful an artist than, say, the comedy team (how they'd probably chafe at that old-fashioned term) Tim and Eric, or any other contemporary practitioner of "anti-comedy" (I guess we call it) is that Jerry is doing what they do, but HONESTLY and not ironically. At heart it's helpless and noble. That was the epiphany.

I watched a documentary about Divine, who on some basic level was as non-ironic as Jerry Lewis. For Jerry Lewis and Divine, show biz is a joyous religion in the service of a dark god, ha ha, how dramatic. Jerry Lewis is the father of Divine. There are minor similarities too: each, while young, created an overwhelming and brilliant persona that became a kind of consuming trap. Patterns of paternal fracture and rapprochement. I don't know. Maybe Jerry (who cross-dresses kind of touchingly - like late-period Divine - in THREE ON A COUCH) has a drag queen's instinct (lip-syncing!) for novelty, exaggeration, nostalgia, luxury, disguise and self-creation. And like Divine maybe he's suspicious of (guilty about?) revering some of those things and so turns them on their head. It occurs to me that Jerry has spent most of his life in a form of drag - like Pee Wee Herman! why can't I stop typing? - and maybe like Paul Reubens's some of Jerry's "bad" behavior can be attributed to the emotional violence required to break out of its strictures. Drag as freedom, drag as constraint. Can we call Suzanne Somers hunched over on roller skates a kind of enforced "drag"? Maybe I should think this out. But I don't think I shall. Somebody else on twitter was complaining that he can't watch Jerry because Jerry is "needy." All performers are needy. The glorious thing about Jerry and Divine is that they don't cover it up. They revel in it and they make us face it. Now we're all super smart and in on the big joke. Only when we watch them are our reactions are visceral and true.

Properly Crammed

I would like to apologize to the labels ADVENTURE, BLOOD, DREAMS, DRUNK, EMPTY, FAVES, FISH, FURNITURE, GLORY, HAPPINESS, HEADS, HEAVEN, PROUD, RICE, SHINY, SILENCE, SLEEP, SPIRIT, and STATUES, which should have been appended to a recent "post" but could not be crammed properly into place.

Please Never Do This

So we went over to Ace's and watched CITY STREETS and Sylvia Sidney reminded Ace of old photos of his grandmother, so Ace got out his grandmother's pearl-handled revolver and we passed it around. Megan Abbott wanted me to take her picture holding the gun and so I did and imagine my surprise when she pointed it at me, violating one of the primary rules of gun safety, perhaps THE primary rule. I want to remind you to NEVER POINT A GUN AT SOMEBODY, EVEN IF THE GUN IS SUPPOSEDLY NOT LOADED. That is practically the first thing you should know about guns. Guns are not toys. Remember William S. Burroughs. That being said, here is the photo and it is pretty neat considering that I happened not to get killed this time and anyway here I am glorifying it and after all it is "classic Megan Abbott." Note Bill Boyle texting blithely in the background.

Miracle Helium of Love

Kent and Adam and Pen sent me these balloons for my birthday. That was July 8, like six weeks ago, and they're still floating! They sent me a dozen red roses too. Those guys! The roses died. Flowers die! Flowers must fade and die, the poets tell us. Yet the balloons just keep going. "Tight seals," mused Adam, ever the pragmatist. "Did you tape them to the wall?" asked a suspicious Pen during a recent writers' meeting, during which, as always, the balloons were visible behind me thanks to the miracle of skype. No such chicanery! All natural, this floating. These balloons are the wonder of the age. But I don't know, maybe it is no big deal, maybe our modern balloons are built by cold, pedantic experts to float forever, maybe all of you have some balloons that have been floating in your house for six weeks, maybe six years, maybe you are laughing at me, that's right, go on, laugh at the old fool with his misty eyeballs and feeble dreams. Full disclosure: one of them stopped floating almost immediately (see photo below). Still tethered to its luckier brothers as a reminder that glory is fleeting!

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.

Glorious Haunch

Got an email from good old Burke telling me I should read Boswell's LIFE OF JOHNSON, which is something I have been meaning to do for, you know, decades. And it's funny, because I was thinking of Samuel Johnson anyway. I recently read (in FOUNDATION by Peter Ackroyd, the same place where I learned about Harold Harefoot) that Queen Anne touched Samuel Johnson when he was a tiny tot and cured him of the scrofula (see also) and he "remained a staunch royalist for the rest of his life." But I have always been bewildered by the array of available editions of the Boswell, and weirdly guilty at the thought of reading an abridgment. In his email, Burke recommended an "abridged Penguin Classics edition that [is] a nice length" and when I stopped by Square Books today, that's just what they had in stock and I took it as a sign. (Burke also said that the LIFE OF JOHNSON reminds him of MASTERS OF ATLANTIS [!].) Just thumbing through the introduction I came across a list of things that Boswell left out. For example, "an occasion when Johnson ate so much of 'a glorious haunch of venison' that it was feared 'he would have died of downright eating, and had not a surgeon been got to administer to him without delay a glister he must have died.'" So I was all like, "What's a glister?" But my WEBSTER'S NEW TWENTIETH CENTURY DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, UNABRIDGED, SECOND EDITION from 1974, usually so good with archaic terms, had only the definition I already knew, the sparkly one. With a little of my expert "googling," however, I found that it must be an alternate spelling of "clyster"... an old word for enema. I'm sorry! I didn't know the "blog" was going to go in that direction (again!) when I started this "post"! I didn't even know what a clyster was when I started this "post"! Well now I've ruined everything.