The Old Wood Owl Trick

Upon the recommendation of Lee Durkee, I read the new novel by Ethan Hawke. In it, a narrator who is definitely NOT Ethan Hawke (wink, wink) tells about being in a Shakespeare play, and how he has to really make himself THINK he's in the barn where his character is supposed to be. He has to FEEL it, he has to SMELL the hay, he has to HEAR the wood owl. Please understand, the overly dramatic caps are mine, not Ethan Hawke's, but the "wood owl" is accurate, Ethan Hawke really said "wood owl," making his novel a "book with an owl in it," which is something I keep track of due to a sad old habit, the origins of which no living person can tell. A couple of pages later, after most (not I) would have forgotten the wood owl, he's like (I'll paraphrase), "At this point in the speech, I might pretend to hear something. Oh, it's just the wood owl!" He's really making that imaginary wood owl work for its money. (See also.)

Why Music Boxes Are Creepy

A strangely frequent reason that people visit this "blog" is to search for an answer to that (apparently) eternal question "Why Are Music Boxes Creepy?" I feel bad - guilt-ridden, truthfully - because that old "post" to which they are so often directed (you'd be surprised how many times a day people want to know why music boxes are creepy) is misleading. Some kid had written in to me with the idea that "Maybe music boxes are creepy because they are a purposeless vestige of Europe's aristo-centric period." And I quoted him in that "post" much too approvingly. Of course that's NOT why music boxes are creepy. Nor is this kid's highfalutin statement true in almost any way. Music boxes, for example, aren't any more "purposeless" than anything else. I gave that kid too much of a pass! I was trying to be nice. But now, all these years later, sad people who want to know why music boxes are creepy look to me for answers (several times a day, bewilderingly) and get nothing! And that kid is six years older now, so I suppose he can handle the truth that his big theories are full of beans. People aren't watching a movie about a dark house where a music box starts to play in the dead of night and the hair rises on their arms because they are suddenly reminded of "Europe's aristo-centric period"! Sorry to be so harsh! But you, theorizing kid, are probably at least 28, I'm going to guess, whoever you were, a full-grown adult by now who can accept the facts! I suppose music boxes are creepy because they are light and tinkly, for one thing. Scary noises in literature often start out soft... the rats scratching in Lovecraft, the beating of the telltale heart in Poe ("such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton")... soft music is scary at night... whistling, like in M or THE STEPFATHER... some awful killer is always humming softy to himself as he sharpens his instruments... also, music boxes are meant to be activated by the human hand (might be thought of, in fact, as an "alarm" of sorts... did people place diamonds and gold in them for this reason? Someone else may feel free to research the matter), so if you suddenly hear one in the middle of the night, when everyone is supposed to be asleep, something is wrong... like the record player and the wind-up toys and such in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND... music is a human endeavor, and maybe the mechanism IS an unwelcome (creepy?) reminder that our works can go on without us. And of course the kid from the old "post" WAS sort of onto something... in that a music box is a form of entertainment that a ghost might find comforting. Like, "I remember these!" Yes, just the sort of sentimental object to which a poor dead ghost might be attracted... a private, lonely entertainment even in life... so personal, maybe you shouldn't be overhearing it... a box to receive a particular soul... like a coffin... and yes, it IS a voice from the past, with a limited vocabulary. It can play only one thing... over and over... like a ghost... like the obsessive thoughts of a madman... like me... like that dude in MOBY-DICK... and slowing down, little by little... I was having drinks with Lee Durkee and he mentioned how music boxes are always slowing down... Sometimes they wind down unresolved, like life. There's nothing tenser in music than the "suspended fourth"... that's where the power of the music box's creepy cousin the jack-in-the-box comes in... the relationship between suspended chords and suspense. Bach could really leave you hanging, except he always had the luxury of resolving, except when played on a music box, I guess. Lee Durkee also contended that musical selections have something to do with it. "Music boxes don't play 'Turkey in the Straw,'" he said, emphasizing the jauntiness of that hoedown. I'll have to think about that. Is it true? And in any case I suspect "Turkey in the Straw" could be creepy enough on the right music box... Is the similarly bouncy "Pop Goes the Weasel" creepy just because we've heard it on so many dilapidated jack-in-the-boxes? Or is it the disturbing foreknowledge that the weasel is bound to "pop"?... Melodies are messages... pianos play by themselves in movies... half-forgotten snatches... they're trying to tell you something... they can't quite tell it to you straight... what's creepier than an oracle? And when you open a music box, a little ballerina figurine or such often begins to twirl stiffly... we think at once of what Freud said about dolls in his essay on "The Uncanny," but I think that book is in Dr. Theresa's office at the other end of the house and I don't feel like getting up. In conclusion, I apologize to all the people who have read that lazy and erroneous previous "blog" "post" lo these many years. My intellectual cowardice is beyond appalling! Another possible answer is: music boxes aren't creepy. (Illustration: Vera Farmiga looking at a creepy music box in a scary ghost movie we went to see with Chris Offutt. I saw Vera Farmiga checking into my hotel last time I was in Burbank! Sorry I forgot to tell you. I pestered her with fawning and she was real nice about it. She was wearing a stylish hat!) PS One Kris Simmons, whom I know via twitter, has chimed in to say, ha ha! - wait, is that even a pun? Do music boxes "chime"? - "I think it's because they sound out of tune." And she's onto something I hadn't considered! What could be more ghostly than these rusty gears and teeth and coils and knobby spools... still striving, but bent and warped by senescence? I ask you! Remember Edmund Spenser's ghosts with iron teeth... An out-of-tune music box is an echo, touchingly faded and changed... like a ghost... or a reflection... am I too suggestible? But this picture of Ms. Farmiga hints at a mirror in the lid... wasn't that common in music boxes? And aren't mirrors doorways into other worlds...? We just did a whole ADVENTURE TIME episode about that! Do I need to get all GOLDEN BOUGH on you...? So music boxes have little versions of ourselves inside... or else who's looking at what in that little mirror when the music box is playing by itself...? Okay! I'll keep adding more reasons music boxes are creepy. Send your suggestions to CREEPY MUSIC BOX c/o "Writer" Oxford, MS 38655. If you don't think music boxes are creepy be sure to include NOT CREEPY MUSIC BOX on your postcard.

Malone!

There was a Burt Reynolds movie from 1987 coming on late last night so naturally I had to sit there and watch it, if only in memory of Burt Reynolds watching parties gone by. It was MALONE, and I saw right away that it was a straight-up (if unofficial) contemporary remake of SHANE. Instead of a little boy, they made the hero-worshipper a teenage girl (Cynthia Gibb, pictured, worshipping Malone). They also removed the mother from the story, resulting in the truly uncomfortable consequence of the hero-worshipping child taking on some aspects of the lonely prairie wife (I am sure you recall Jean Arthur making eyes at Alan Ladd in SHANE). That ain't right, I tell ya! Malone was like Shane with a really extraordinarily puffy hairpiece. But I guess SHANE wasn't good enough. Remember the guy who wants all the townspeople to clear off their land in SHANE? In this version, he still wants the townspeople to clear off their land but I'm pretty sure he wants to take over America too! It wasn't exactly clear what the bad guy wanted, but he had a big map of the USA in his office and babbled about patriotism a lot and had an army of assassins to do his bidding, so I think I'm right. Plus he had a henchman who was the spitting image of Leonard from NORTH BY NORTHWEST. Anyhow, they end the SHANE part of the movie twenty minutes early and Burt Reynolds spends the final twenty minutes just killing people. One guy he kills with a bale of hay.

Maybe Kangaroos

Reading that biography of John Wayne, I was particularly mesmerized by the allusions to a movie produced by John Wayne, a brainchild of his boozy sidekick Jimmy Grant, a circus movie starring Mickey Spillane as himself - RING OF FEAR! It says something about me that I also watched ISLAND IN THE SKY, a very interesting John Wayne movie that starts out interesting and just gets more and more interesting as it goes along, a really fine movie, and yet I have no desire to "blog" about it. I'd much rather "blog" about RING OF FEAR, which is, as I just informed you, a circus movie starring Mickey Spillane. As himself! Many spoilers follow, ha ha. RING OF FEAR begins with thudding timpani and roaring lions. The theme song goes, "Here comes the circus/ Marching down the street/ Hear that thrilling beat/ The band... the band... the band is playing, Yay!" and that's the whole song. (See also.) The narrator lists all the animals in the circus, ending his litany with "maybe kangaroos." Maybe! Sounds ominous. Then we cut to a big, scary sign: STATE MENTAL INSTITUTION, and a guy saying, "I tell you I'm not crazy, gentlemen." We're less than 5 minutes in! Oh boy! Then the guy says something I didn't quite catch about "building a fence around the universe." He's in trouble for talking to a picture of a "circus girl." Then he escapes! I thought they were setting him up to be sympathetic but then he tossed a random guy under an oncoming train, so I guess not. He meets up with his pal, a guy named Twitchy. I thought I had that wrong until a surly clown said, "Twitchy must be hitting the bottle again," thereby confirming the name Twitchy. Twenty-five minutes in, here's Mickey Spillane for some reason. Somebody says, "Say, ain't you Mickey Spillane?" Spillane mumbles, "Yeah, that's right." Poor Mickey! As an actor he doesn't even seem convinced of his own name. He does walk around with copies of his new paperback in his jacket pocket and hand them out to strangers. Lots of circus acts in this movie. I hate to see them taunting the tigers with the whip and the chair, though, so I fast forwarded through that stuff, I must admit (though to come clean I enjoyed it - very guiltily - when some elephants danced to "Turkey in the Straw" - God have mercy!). Twitchy is a drunk clown, like so many sad clowns before him, but I wasn't sure I could safely categorize him as a sad clown until I saw that he was being blackmailed for murder. That would make anybody sad! Now we meet, for a few sparkling moments, an acrobat named Tiny. Boy, I liked her. Her "bum" of a husband works part-time as a department-store Santa. Golly, I would have watched a whole movie about them! But that's all we get of Tiny. Mickey Spillane calls somebody "a windy character" and Pat O'Brien responds, "Yeah, he's windy and he's a character." I am not sure what that exchange of dialogue got us! The sword swallower wants peppermint polish for her swords because her swords taste so terrible. (Hey, I've got eight pages of notes here.) She has a weird way of introducing herself: "Hello, Mr. Spillane, are you married?" Mickey says, "It slips my mind at the moment," a pretty good Mickey Spillane line, but the incongruous set-up is unforgivable. I have here in my notes that Mickey Spillane chews gum and squints. Half an hour in or so I find out that the crazy madman is named "Dublin O'Malley." He's Irish, by the way. Meanwhile, back at the circus! A clown comes out holding an umbrella. Cut to the crowd laughing hysterically. Cut back to the clown holding his umbrella. A clown holding an umbrella really seems to get to everybody. (See also.) By an hour in, Dublin O'Malley seems kind of like an interesting, complicated psychopath, or am I going soft? (Also about an hour in, a kangaroo actually appears - a kangaroo with, forgive me for saying so, surprisingly prominent testicles.) I did enjoy watching Mickey Spillane eat an ice cream cone. It seemed authentic. Was he getting more comfortable onscreen? Or was I getting more full of rye? Around this time, for example, I started thinking of the actor who played Dublin O'Malley as a poor man's Orson Welles, which is funny, because Dr. Theresa, who was in the next room and not even paying attention, later told me that she thought he sounded just like Orson Welles in LADY FROM SHANGHAI. Suddenly Mickey Spillane is wearing a Hawaiian shirt. Later, he will put on a tight sweater, too, before suddenly reverting to the usual baggy jacket, loose tie, and fedora. Turns out Twitchy used to be an aerialist, which reminded me of something that Bill Taft once said to me in a circus performers' graveyard. Dublin has a long, intricate monologue describing death by cyanide to Twitchy and yes, this scene clinches it, Twitchy is a super sad clown. Dublin O'Malley drowns that clown! Reaction shots of disapproving circus animals! Pat O'Brien gives a deadpan read of the immortal line, "Valerie, I'm sorry. We just got news that Dublin is a kill-happy maniac." Dublin is eaten by a tiger, cutting immediately to a song about the circus being "a magic wonderland" of "angels and clowns." THE END

Yelling in a Hayfield

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

Greatest Airplane Cookie

Hey I have not "blogged" at you for a few days and you are probably crying about it. All it usually means is that I have gone on a little trip and that's what it means this time too. I went to Los Angeles to do some of my ADVENTURE TIME work. As usual, I thought about you the whole time and jotted down some little jottings in my precious little notebook for your pleasure and entertainment upon my return, and as a way of making amends for all the wrongs I have done you. I would now like to present you with those very jottings. 1) It has been a long time since I flew Delta Airlines and I had almost forgotten the Biscoff - the world's greatest airplane cookie, which is handed out on Delta flights. I love it so much that I wrote a paean to it on the McSweeney's "web" site many years ago. I guess if you dig around very hard you might be able to find my paean to the Biscoff buried somewhere in those archives, but I won't blame you if you decide there are more important things to do with your life. 2) Reading JANE EYRE on the airplane. Or should I say Eyreplane? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Mr. Rochester threatens to send Jane to work for "Mrs. Dionysius O'Gall of Bitternut Lodge." That sounds like a terrible place to work! Turns out Mr. Rochester is just goofing around anyway. 3) At Cartoon Network I met two nice people named Natasha and Patrick who had just bought a little package of caviar from "the caviar vending machine in the mall"! 4) Joey Lauren Adams and I accidentally stumbled upon the best bar in Los Angeles! I am not going to tell you the name because it is going to be our secret! But I brought a book of matches home with me so if you ever come over you can snoop around for clues, I guess. It was a very dark bar and one of the murals on the walls featured a unicorn - nor was this the final unicorn I encountered in Los Angeles, as you will soon discover. But that's for later! Right now I will tell you that when I ordered a Manhattan with rye, the bartender took a little slice of orange peel and alchemically passed a lit match over it and under it before dropping it in the drink as a final touch. And then I will tell you that as we sipped our drinks in the atmospheric dimness, Joey told me about the time she almost went hunting ghosts with Dan Aykroyd and Dan Aykroyd's brother! They really believe in ghosts and invited her along on one of their missions. Joey jumped at the opportunity! But as the brothers started gathering their equipment and giving her a terrifying list of rules NOT TO VIOLATE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, she started freaking out even though she did not believe in ghosts and therefore, to quote the words of Ray Parker, Jr., was under most circumstances not "afraid of no ghost." So anyway Joey missed her one chance to go ghostbusting with an actual ghostbuster from GHOSTBUSTERS. 5) Talked to my mom on the phone. She had taken my aunt to a movie for her birthday. I was surprised. Mom never goes to the movies! I asked what movie they went to see. "RED DAWN," said Mom, by which she meant the recent remake, of course. "It was awful," said Mom. I guess for this to be really funny or interesting you would have to know my mom and aunt, but you know what? I just don't care about your problems. 6) It was in a Burbank hotel room that I confirmed JANE EYRE does have owls in it, just as I always suspected! "I dreamt another dream, sir: that Thornfield Hall was a dreary ruin, the retreat of bats and owls." 7) Speaking of owls, the great M. Emmett Walsh does the voice of The Cosmic Owl, a deity on ADVENTURE TIME. Kent told me that when M. Emmett Walsh came in to record his lines, he handed everybody pictures of himself, along with two-dollar bills! Kent gave me his photo of M. Emmett Walsh, which unfortunately is not quite - though frustratingly close to - wallet-sized. I would love to have a photo of M. Emmett Walsh in my wallet. 8) Speaking of Kent Osborne, his brother Mark - like Kent, a beloved old friend - was in town for one night only and I got to see him! Mark had coincidentally flown in from Paris, where he is living now. Mark is directing a feature film based on THE LITTLE PRINCE, and he was in town to meet with a CERTAIN FAMED ACTOR about being in his movie. No hints! I think it would be okay to hint, but I don't want to take any chances. 9) Party at the home of Pendleton Ward, creator of ADVENTURE TIME. The wallpaper in his kitchen had unicorns and cyclopes on it, and yes, that is the correct spelling of the plural of cyclops. So you would think Pendleton Ward might have unicorns and cyclopes on his kitchen wallpaper but get this! There were already unicorns and cyclopes on the wallpaper WHEN HE MOVED IN. At the bottom of this "post" I will place a photograph taken by Kent Osborne, in which I seem to be gesturing with consternation at the kitchen wallpaper of Pendleton Ward. 10) Saturday morning I went across the street to Starbucks to get coffee and noticed the guy from Tenacious D in line in front of me - not Jack Black, the other guy. Part of me was thinking I could blow his mind by saying, "You were great in CRADLE WILL ROCK." But I said nothing! And that was the best decision of all. Really I was just cracking myself up inside, kind of pretending to believe I could blow his mind by doing that. I could not blow his mind by doing that. 11) When I went to the counter to get my refill, I was staring at the back of a guy in an extremely nice WEIRD SCIENCE jacket, like a crew jacket, with leather and everything. I thought, "I bet he was on the crew of WEIRD SCIENCE!" The barista asked his name so she could tell him when his order was ready and he said, "Todd." So I made a secret vow that when I got home I would look up on imdb what Todds, if any, worked on WEIRD SCIENCE. As I left the Starbucks, I noted that the name "Todd" was fancily stitched on the breast of his WEIRD SCIENCE jacket. Okay, I just looked it up and the only Todd I see is Todd Hoffman, who played one of "The Weenies" in WEIRD SCIENCE but I have not seen WEIRD SCIENCE since it came out and I don't remember what "The Weenies" might be, so I can neither confirm nor deny that I have found the correct Todd. 12) There was a pet store next to the place where I ate breakfast with my brother and my nephews. On the window of the pet store was a poster for a book called HARRIET'S JOURNAL. The cover of the book was a photo of a possum apparently drinking a cup of coffee. I don't know what this book is, but I assume it is the amazing true story of one woman and her unlikely encounter with a possum that changed her life, but I don't know. I went in the pet store and looked around and didn't see the book and left quickly because pet stores bum me out, although the staff of this one seemed particularly attentive and kind to the animals. Photo of the photo of a possum drinking coffee (above) by my brother. 13) I think I met the nicest bank teller in the world, or maybe that's just the way the bank tellers of California are, maybe that's their thing, maybe they're trained for it. I was in the middle of performing a very simple transaction (depositing a check) and he said, "May I offer you a bottle of water?" He is the first - and I am sure, only - bank teller to ever offer me a bottle of water. 14) My brother and nephews and I went to a car wash. It looked like the car wash from the movie CAR WASH. But my brother, who was paying from his spot in the driver's seat and was thus in the perfect position, REFUSED TO ASK! 15) We went to a cool vintage toy shop to which one of my nephews had been wanting to go for a long time. Turned out to be next to The Scarlet Lady Saloon and The Tattle Tale Room. I met a man who was wearing sleigh bells around his neck. He said he had fallen off a roof onto his head at the age of three. He seemed like a nice person who had had some bad luck. 16) I saw Josie from the movie version of JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS doing some holiday shopping (not near The Scarlet Lady Saloon! Somewhere else entirely). I don't think Ace Atkins would mind me telling you that he likes that movie. I have heard him say so in public. We were at dinner once with a large group. And down the table he said, "Jack likes that movie, too. Hey, Jack, didn't you tell me you like that movie, too?" Yet like St. Peter I denied him thrice. 17) It was at this point in my jottings that I realized (and jotted) that if I "posted" everything I had jotted so far, the "post," if "labeled" "correctly," would require more than the maximum amount of "allowed" labels. 18) Dinner with Laraine Newman! She looked like a kid! (And her husband, by his own - accurate! - assessment, looked like Anthony Michael Hall.) But she really looked like a kid. Laraine Newman and I have been pen pals for a while but it was my first time meeting her. When I called Mom to let her know I had made it back to Mississippi okay, I told her about dinner with Laraine Newman and Mom said, "Don't you wish you could go back in time and tell your 12-year-old self that story?" And Mom was right! It is impossible to overstate the impact - the salvation! - of that original season of Saturday Night Live on a 12-year-old boy in rural Alabama. 19) As I sat at the bar waiting for Laraine Newman (!) and drinking a Manhattan, I thought, "Here I am waiting for Laraine Newman! And this time tomorrow I will be grading finals." And then I sighed like Charlie Brown. 20) Speaking of which, I need to thank Dr. Theresa and Bill Boyle for proctoring my finals while I was strutting around Hollywood acting like a big shot. 21) The restaurant, which Laraine had described to me beforehand as a "genuine Rat Pack hangout," had a photo of Frank Sinatra on the men's room door. Over the urinal: a photo of Sinatra and Tony Curtis peeing against a wall. I felt I had to check who was on the door of the women's room. Marilyn Monroe. I love Marilyn, but I was hoping for Shirley MacLaine. 22) The owner of the restaurant came over and told us we were sitting at Dean Martin's old table! He also told us that Dean Martin had driven him to his high school prom. (You can read more about that in an article Laraine Newman wrote. "Click" here. She sent it to me this morning. Laraine's article also contains - spoiler alert! - the unforgettable image of Frank Sinatra shooting bullets into stacks of money.) 23) JANE EYRE: "The crisis was perilous; but not without its charm." 24) "... the moon was setting in the waves, broad and red, like a hot cannon-ball..." That's more JANE EYRE. By the way, a glance at the stats tells me our "blog"trospective on the moon is by far the least popular "blog"trospective. What's the matter with you people? Don't you like the moon? 25) I just realized I skipped an entire page of jottings from much earlier. It starts with another JANE EYRE passage, of course, describing an emotional (not literal) landscape: "A Christmas frost had come at midsummer; a white December storm had whirled over June; ice glazed the ripe apples, drifts crushed the blowing roses; on hay-field and corn-field lay a frozen shroud." 26) First sentence of an L.A. Times article: "Donny and Marie Osmond hit the stage at the Pantages Theater in a cloud of nearly palpable pizazz." I tried to figure out what I found so troubling yet compelling: was it that "nearly palpable" pizazz is no pizazz at all? Was it the idea that pizazz comes in cloud form? 27) Waiting in the lobby for my brother and the boys. The hotel lobby is decorated with actual books, all different books, but in identical, blank white covers. The effect is disorienting for a lover of books. You just have to take them off the shelves and see what they are. I opened one at random to page 329 and read about "a penumbra of unfamiliar shapes obscured in the dim owl-light," whatever that is, and that's how I know THE FINAL CLUB by Geoffrey Wolff is a book with an owl in it. 28) I see on another page that I forgot to tell you about something else! Between The Scarlet Lady Saloon and The Tattle Tale Room (see above) was an aquarium supply store, where my brother and nephews and I saw something called a "glass catfish." It was a real fish, a real transparent fish, and it looked like a fish skeleton swimming around. Goodness, what else important have I neglected to tell you? 29) I read in a magazine at the airport that Dan Aykroyd has webbed toes and I thought, "Did I already know that?" 30) Flying back, I was seated next to the SAME GUY who had been sitting next to me on the way to L.A.! Weird! He flies a lot and says it has never happened to him before. He said he lived in Oxford and I said, "Me too!" He said he teaches at the university and I said, "Me too!" He said he had flown out for business but stayed an extra day so he could visit his brother. ME TOO ON ALL COUNTS! It was starting to feel like the beginning of that Ionesco play, I think it's THE BALD SOPRANO, I might be wrong. Both of us are bad fliers! Both of our wives love Hong Kong action movies! And so on. 31) A dog got on the plane! A German shepherd. He or she (no, he, I heard a guy with him say, "Good boy") just got on the plane and trotted down the aisle like anybody else. Maybe he sat in a seat! I lost track. 32) In the magazine, Albert Brooks talked about Steven Spielberg directing from a young age: "He put his dog in a certain position and made him eat at four o'clock." Why did that simple sentence make me laugh so hard on the airplane? It shares a quality with certain sentences I like by Jerry Lewis. Why do I keep calling it "the magazine"? So irritatingly vague on my part. It's the VANITY FAIR comedy issue and there are tons of good stuff in it. 32) A guy in one of the seats in front of me on the airplane had a particular kind of bald spot that made it look as if the FRONT of someone's head was sticking up just a bit over the headrest, like maybe his head was on backwards. 33) VANITY FAIR: Elaine May used to be a private eye. 34) "Tombstone Blues" came on the iPod and it reminded me of something I haven't thought about in decades: an itinerant evangelist I saw in a church service as a kid. He theorized in great detail that the lyrics to "Tombstone Blues" (of all songs to pick as the centerpiece of your sermon!) formed an elaborate anti-Christian parable. I had never heard of "Tombstone Blues" and in fact it is almost a certainty I had never heard of Bob Dylan. But the lyrics the preacher quoted struck me as awesome and I guess that's when I got interested in Bob Dylan for the first time. Missionary fail!

Hay Opera

I was listening to Purcell's KING ARTHUR and there came this part where the chorus seemed to be chuckling bawdily I suppose and it sounded like the kind of song where there should be some tankards clanking together though I didn't hear any, but I thought it deserved further investigation and the name of the air turns out to be "Your hay it is mow'd" so there's an opera song about hay for you, I thought you'd want to know. Another in our investigative series on cultural representations of hay. Libretto by Dryden! "For prating so long like a book-learn'd sot,/ Till pudding and dumplin burn to pot." Ha ha, take that book-learn'd sots, I guess. Gets 5.8 out of 10 on something called "poem hunter.com." That strikes me as hilarious for some reason - the idea of angry people on their computers voting against it. Like, "I give this seventeenth-century opera hay song two stars!" Also contains corn.

Hay Movie

Far too seldom do we get to enjoy hay-based entertainment. Last night's viewing of FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD on TCM had plenty of hay to go around. Twice Alan Bates expresses his love for Julie Christie by saving her hay - once from fire and once from flood. Meanwhile, in the second instance, her no-good husband is sleeping in some other hay like a jerk. Now I would like to move on to corn. Julie Christie goes to the grain exchange - I guess that is what you call it - to buy some corn to plant. Some dude tries to sell her some inferior corn, but she is no sucker. She takes a handful of his crummy corn and cheerfully tosses it in the air, causing quite a little ruckus down at the old grain exchange. Peter Finch sees her tossing the corn - in fact, he sees her toss the corn in slow motion, which means that he is in love! Scorsese quotes extensively from this scene in CASINO, when Sharon Stone tosses the chips in the air with the same carefree demeanor in slow motion as De Niro watches from another angle and falls in love. I know you don't care! Leave me alone. I have some other interesting thoughts but I'm going to keep them to myself and then you'll be sorry.

Hay U.

... is what I should have called that last "post." Because we were learning about hay! And it's an all-around better pun. You remember my friend from "She Blogged By Night." Turns out she also made hay by night, contrary to the popular hay expression, or at least she knows a lot about hay. She informed me that the name of the machine I misheard as "hay tanner" is actually "hay tedder." If I had that "post" to do over again (bearing in mind its reference to "crooners"), I would have finished it off with a youtube video of someone singing "Hey There." How witty that would have been.

Hay You

Concerned that there aren't enough good shows about hay on TV? Just get up at 3 AM unable to sleep the Jack Pendarvis way! Hay shows await you. On the channel that airs the Porter Wagoner reruns, I came across a show called MACHINERY OF THE PAST, which made me think of BROADWAY DANNY ROSE, when the lounge singer is encouraged to perform his tribute to "Great Crooners of the Past Who Are Deceased." So when I tuned in to the most recent episode of MACHINERY OF THE PAST, they were visiting a hay museum. A hay museum! It was a long, long visit to the old hay museum. This fellow had every kind of hay machine you can imagine, and if you are like me, you can't imagine any. I swear he had something called a "hay tanner," though when I looked it up on the "internet" this morning, I found little evidence of such a thing. I found people NAMED Tanner Hay and Hay Tanning, and people who didn't know any better greeting a person named Tanner like so: "Hay, Tanner!" Also I found a tanning salon in the city of Hay, Washington. But as for the actual device, whatever it is called, the docent of the hay museum explained that it "fluffs up your hay" when your hay is wet. There was a machine called the "hay conditioner" as well, and a marvelously gigantic contraption entitled "The Haybuster loose haystacker." The only other thing I remember is that the guy REALLY WANTS YOU TO UNDERSTAND that he DOES NOT TAKE GOVERNMENT MONEY for his hay museum.

The Scrapbook of a Detective

Remember I told you how they give out free books in the coffee shop at the library? There's a new batch, and I picked up a few today... no, COURAGE IS A THREE LETTER WORD was not among them. BUT! There were some other self-help books, such as DEVOTIONS FOR JOGGERS. I left that one alone. Likewise, SINBAD'S GUIDE TO LIFE, which is not about the legendary Sinbad who battled giant birds and such (or so I recall) - though his guide to life would be helpful, especially when facing problems with giant birds! - but the standup comedian Sinbad (pictured). The first few sentences of Sinbad's book (I'm paraphrasing) were something like "I know what you are thinking. What could I possibly teach you about life?" And I was like, "Good point, Sinbad." And I put the book back on the shelf. BUT! There was a book called THE SCRAPBOOK OF A DETECTIVE, VOLUME I, by B.E. Doughty, which I found significant as I had just left my hardboiled fiction class. I am not familiar with the Carlton Press of New York, New York, but THE SCRAPBOOK OF A DETECTIVE, VOLUME I has all the earmarks of a vanity press book, including the "about the author" section, which emphasizes Mr. Doughty's church and AARP memberships and tells us "he has recorded these memoirs at the request of his family and friends... they have been related in after-dinner speeches and other talks to church groups, high school groups, Kiwanis, Rotary, and other organizations." Some of the chapter titles are exciting! "I Become a Secret Agent" - "The Big Fire" - "Bruises, Bites, and Scratches" - "A Foolhardy Stunt" - "I Become a Hobo" - "An Attempt to Wreck a Train!" (exclamation point Mr. Doughty's) - "A Hayseed Clue" (to name just a few). But here's how one chapter starts, to give you some flavor: "On a hot summer day I received a wire message that someone had stolen about fifty new cresoled crossties valued at $3.08 each." The book is inscribed! Mr. Doughty has written, "I appreciate you as a writer and fine guy and I value your friendship." But he did not preface his remark with the person's name! It is inscribed... but to no one! So that's a mystery!

Pass the Sauce

Hey! Did you know that one of Mack Sennett's earliest Broadway roles was in a play called "Wang"? Everybody likes some sauce on Thanksgiving, but I am not trying to ruin your holiday with "sauciness"! I am just telling you the plain facts as expressed in this Mack Sennett autobiography I am reading for the Doomed Book Club. It was near the turn of the twentieth century, and I believe the aforementioned play must have been an attempt at the same kind of would-be exoticism put forth by "A Chinese Honeymoon," another of Sennett's early stage credits. He was also in a play called "Piff! Paff!! Pouf!!!" - note the escalating exclamation points. Finally, Mr. Ward will be glad to know there has already been a Fred Ott reference in the book (in Chapter Two!), and mention of an early motion picture entitled HORSE EATING HAY.

What Have You Got Against Champagne and Diamonds?

Yesterday in class I read some Samuel Beckett out loud and then I read some Anita Loos out loud. The Samuel Beckett was like this: "I see then I had attributed to myself certain objects no longer in my possession, as far as I can see. But might they not have rolled behind a piece of furniture? That would surprise me. A boot, for example, can a boot roll behind a piece of furniture? And yet I see only one boot. And behind what piece of furniture?" The Anita Loos: "So now we are on an oriental express and everything seems to be quite unusual. I mean Dorothy and I got up this morning and we looked out the window of our compartment and it was really quite unusual. Because it was farms, and we saw quite a lot of girls who seemed to be putting small size hay stacks onto large size hay stacks while their husbands seemed to sit under quite a shady tree and drink beer. Or else their husbands seemed to sit on a fence and smoke their pipe and watch them." That's just a taste of each. And it turns out that the more Samuel Beckett you read out loud and the more Anita Loos you read out loud, the more Samuel Beckett starts to sound like Anita Loos and the more Anita Loos starts to sound like Samuel Beckett. Their rhythms, their repetitions, are similar. Their provisionality is similar, their unwillingness to state outright, not Beckett's and Loos's, I guess, but Malone's and Lorelei Lee's. But Lorelei Lee enjoys champagne and diamonds and was played in a movie by Marilyn Monroe (unlike Malone, but that would have been awesome), so we ignore the ambitious modernist stylization of the language. But wouldn't that make a nice long academic paper for somebody to write: Malone vs. Lorelei Lee? And the roles that gender and genre preconceptions play in the relative seriousness of critical energy expended and blah blah blah?

Bunting Galore

I had the good fortune of spending yesterday with Kelly Hogan, Neko Case, the great pedal steel guitarist Jon Rauhouse, the artist enigmatically known as "Judge" (well, it's her surname, which is not really enigmatic) and Howe Gelb, the genius of Giant Sand (a Barry B. "fave" band) and OP8. But I'm not going to tell you about it! The events of the day will most likely be related in an article in the upcoming Oxford American music issue. I CAN tell you this: at Neko's show last night, I ran into good neighbor John T. Edge, who is in charge of the food around tonight's presidential debate. John T., who used to live, as I did, in Atlanta, clued me in that he had invited the fine folks from Atlanta's Taqueria del Sol (a personal "fave" spot of Mr. Edge and myself) to bring some of their fried chicken tacos and beef brisket tacos to the people of Oxford, MS. I swore a pact upon the spot to meet John T. on campus, in front of the taco tent! And so I did, for I often crave the delicious tacos of Tacqueria del Sol but now I live so very far away. I was the first in line, twenty minutes before they started serving. And because of security surrounding the debate, I LITERALLY had to walk MILES for my tacos! But there was trouble. A petty bureaucrat appeared and tried to tell the taco makers that they could not serve their tacos because of some miniscule paperwork error. Next thing you know, I heard some local guy on the phone with the GOVERNOR'S office! Like (I'm paraphrasing), "Get me the Governor! There's taco trouble!" So the Governor of Mississippi stepped in (saying something like, I suppose, "I am suspending this debate until we solve this taco crisis!") and allowed me to have my tacos. Later, by coincidence, I was strolling along eating a fried chicken taco about two feet from where the governor emerged from his car. And I held up my taco and yelled, "Thanks for the taco, Governor!" Then I ran and hid because I was afraid of being tasered. I ate another taco while seated on a hay bale, like I was at some kind of old-timey political gathering. Which I was! I mean, the old man seated on the next hay bale over was wearing a straw boater with a red-white-and-blue band! A gospel choir was singing and the national networks walked among us. There was bunting galore. Walking around Oxford yesterday, Jon Rauhouse observed, "It looks like they're filming INHERIT THE WIND here." (He also delighted in repeating the word "bunting" at every appropriate moment.) At today's festivities, I was also obliged to enjoy a sausage dog, because Chef Dan Latham (erstwhile owner of the late, great L&M) was cooking them. When you see Dan Latham and pork in the same spot, you don't walk away! I was a little perturbed because a guy held a McCain sign directly over my head the entire time I was standing in line for my sausage dog. It is a free country, I guess! I am not trying to get "political." But it is rude to hold a sign over someone else's head. Consider, sir, how it reflects on your candidate! I did not say this at the time. I am afraid I just made funny faces at the cashier, as if to say, "Get a load of this guy!" I'm pretty sure I'm passive-aggressive. (Above, straw boaters. Below, flags and stuff.)

Holiday Unicorn Series

I may not be able to "blog" very early on Labor Day, as I'll be traveling. So I decided to go ahead and do my traditional holiday unicorn "Google Image" search. When I typed in BASTILLE DAY UNICORN, you may recall, I found the best image EVER, though it bore scant relation to Bastille Day, as far as I could see. Our Labor Day Unicorn does seem labor-intensive at least. It is made of hay (a previous "blog" preoccupation). If you would like to read more about hay, I suggest "clicking" on this "link" to the "web" site about hay where I found our Labor Day unicorn. It contains this memorable snippet: "Every year Montana hosts What the Hay, a festival that features creative hay bale sculptures."

What I Jotted

I have a brief break in my long trip - just enough time to get down to the grim business of "blogging." I feel guilty, being away from you for so long! So while I was gone I jotted a few humble musings with my humble jotter. Here are the full, chronological transcriptions for your delectation: 1) It is not unusual to see someone driving with his or her arm out the window. On the way to the Memphis airport, however, Theresa and I witnessed a gentleman driving with his arm AND his leg out his window! There was something yogic about it. He was wearing a tube sock on the foot that he had strenuously managed to stick out of his window while driving. It made us think of when we saw that woman smoking a cigarette and eating a strawberry ice cream cone at the same time. 2) On the flight from Memphis to Phoenix, reading DIE A LITTLE by Megan Abbott (pictured) I came across this nice phrase: "rain pail eyes." The same hungry character steals from a candy store where she works: "a waxy cream, a brittle honeyed toffee, a dissolving coconut spume." 3) In a bar in Phoenix, listening to some locals complain about the heat. I'm GLAD! I didn't want to be the whiny tourist. I was relieved to find through eavesdropping that the locals were as distraught as I was. I took a short walk and got a SUNBURN! At some point in the walk I called Theresa on the cell phone to - only half in jest - put my affairs in order. I genuinely felt that I was going to swoon or do some other manly thing. When I got back to the room, the TV was reporting that the current temperature was 107. I'm no geographer and I hate generalizations about various regions but I am going to go ahead and state for the record that there is NO SHADE IN ARIZONA, which makes matters worse. On a non-heat-related note, I heard one of the customers at the bar say, "I have to move 5,000 pounds of rubber today." I don't know precisely what he meant but I was sitting there thinking, "That sounds like a hard job!" The bartender, with whom I had a friendly conversation, had lived in Oxford, Alabama, at one time, so I was able to converse knowledgeably with her on the pristine restrooms at that particular interstate exit. "Do you find it a different kind of heat here?" someone asked me later. "Yes," I replied. "A hotter kind." We shared a chuckle, you may be sure! 4) In Abbott (on the flight to San Francisco) we find an orange with a "glaring rind." 5) MY WORST FEARS WERE CONFIRMED. I met a bookstore events coordinator who, in his introductory notes, referred to me as a "YA writer," having been misled by a certain poorly vetted review. In the bookstore's newsletter, a jaunty red balloon appeared beside my picture, along with a notation that my event was a "Special for Young Adults!" (Exclamation point theirs.) Luckily, no young adults showed up. But my audience was nice. Their names were Pamela and Frances. Hi, Pamela and Frances! 6) California really is "cold and damp." Before, I had always pooh-poohed those particular Rodgers & Hart lyrics. California always seemed nice and warm to me. I thought, "What are y'all talking about, Rodgers & Hart?" But yes, I got up one morning to general coldness and dampness. 7) Looking for a new part of the book to use for a public reading, I glanced at the "hay information" chapter with which "The Farmer" had so graciously helped me. I was mortified to discover that the hay information is in Chapter 23, whereas in my elaborate and affectionate inscription in the Farmer's personal copy of the book, I had mistakenly thanked him for inspiring Chapter 25. That chapter is about foot odor. 8) I ate a large burrito in the presence of Eli Horowitz, whom I had not met before. I dropped many parts of the burrito on my shirt over the moments we spent together, confirming, I feared, his assumptions (as I supposed) about persons of my particular age, regional origin, and body type. Of course, Eli is nicer than that and appeared to bear the revolting spectacle with gracious good humor. 9) I met a San Franciscan who has seen a UFO in San Francisco "from fifteen feet away"! 10) Went to a wonderful party at which a magnificent accordionist was perhaps insufficiently appreciated (though not by me; I DID appreciate him sufficiently, which is to say, a bunch) because there was a lot of other stuff going on. Here's the "web" site of the magnificent accordionist, Rob Reich. 11) A satisfying conversation with a cab driver. He said the thing that made him decide to drive a cab was a Bob Denver (pictured) movie called THE SWEET RIDE. It changed his life, he said. It's unavailable on video, he said. In the cab with me was an editor (not my editor, but a nice one indeed) from MacAdam/Cage, my publisher. This editor hails from Bakersfield. I tried to explain to her how awesome Buck Owens (also from Bakersfield) is. She wasn't buying it, entirely. She kept saying, "The Buckaroos? The BUCKAROOS?" as if naming his band the Buckaroos made him a bad person. The cab driver expressed some profane opinions about Bakersfield. Then he explained that THE SWEET RIDE was about men with "low" or no jobs who managed to effortlessly "get" beautiful women. 12) Never thought I'd hear my editor sing "Tiny Dancer" at a karaoke bar. But I did. 13) Make that two consecutive mornings confirming the accuracy of Rodgers & Hart. 14) At a great little bookstore called Dog Eared Books I picked up a first edition of Bob Hope's first stab at an autobiography, 1941's THEY GOT ME COVERED (not to be confused with the Hope film of the same name). It's a weird little book, paperback, very plainly put together... a blank back cover with no promotional copy or anything. Lots of pictures inside and an intro by Bing, but still weighing in at a skimpy 95 pages. Like my first edition of THE TOTAL FILMMAKER by Jerry Lewis, it set me back just six bucks. Naturally, I had to call McNeil and brag about my find. McNeil almost immediately found a first edition of THEY GOT ME COVERED on the "internet" for 99 cents. But with shipping and handling it'll be $4.98, so I don't feel too bad. And mine's in perfect condition, looks brand new. 15) In a coffee shop, still reading Megan Abbott. Here is the kind of sentence I love. It's like the sentence by Jesse James, Jr., but artful and purposeful, which is what makes it special: the art of no (apparent) artifice. It's my favorite kind of sentence in the world: "The music is so beautiful I think I'll never hear such beautiful music again." 16) Bad news: the erroneous "YA" designation (see above) goes up as my book's official description on the unnamed behemoth and arbiter of all received opinion. Good news: PW agrees to fix it by taking out the two offending letters "YA." The rest of the reviewer's obviously close reading remains untouched. 17) Jason Headley's wife, it turns out, resembles "blog" fave Paula Prentiss. 18) Trouble on the flight to L.A.: When the time comes for electronic devices to be turned off, one passenger refuses, loudly and angrily explaining that an iPod can never be turned off. "You have to wait an hour, then it goes to sleep," he says. Five or six passengers and crew gather to help him turn off his iPod. "It's not really off," he says. 19) Oh, I forgot to mention: I had an early flight to L.A. so I was up before dawn in San Francisco, looking for coffee. On the street, it was just me and the "Space Age Jesus" (as he introduced himself). He said, "Don't be afraid. I bring the light to the darkness." 20) Just a few blocks from my Los Angeles hotel, a theater was showing "blog" fave THE APARTMENT on the big screen. So I got to see that. I was reminded how early the big secret is revealed (to us, not to Jack Lemmon), and how the power of the story derives from that tactic. 21) Ran into an old acquaintance in LAX. I believe the odds are remarkable. In any case, it has never happened to me before. This very nice man, Mike by name, is a rock drummer of no small repute. I believe it is not too bold or personal for me to assert that he was once linked on the gossip pages with "Blog" Buddy Kelly Hogan. The last time I saw Mike was in 2005, in Chicago, during my first ever book tour, where we went to his apartment, ate enormous, locally grown pickled mushrooms from a big Mason jar, ordered authentic Chicago pizza, listened to music, and watched a FRASIER rerun with Kelly. Three years later, that is, yesterday, it turned out that we had both "performed" on the same weekend and in the same vicinity, missing one another entirely until our paths crossed at the airport. On parting, I received a hug! I did not anticipate it! It was unexpected yet not unwelcome. Mike is big and bearish and therefore prone to hugging.

Hay Is For Novels

I just sent an email to a certain farmer of our acquaintance, because I have a farmer character in this new thing I'm trying to write and I had a few farming questions, the answers of which will help make my farmer "realistic." Anyway, it occurred to me how much our friend The Farmer helped me with AWESOME. He told me everything I needed to know about the subject of hay - what hay is, for example. You don't realize that you don't know what hay is until you sit down and ask yourself, "What's hay?" I should have thanked him for his thorough and extremely helpful answer in print, on the dedication page or something! But I did not. A terrible oversight on my part. And it is too late now. Sorry, Farmer! You will get a GIGANTIC mention (by your REAL NAME!) in the next one. Well, not the next one. The one after that. If I finish it. And I will. Thanks to YOU, Farmer! Thanks to YOU!