It Bleeped

Reading Tacitus, I get to a part where this guy dreams there's gold buried under his field. So he runs up to Nero like Chicken Little and says "There's gold in my field!" You can see where this is going. There's no gold. And Nero... well, you know how Nero is. Anyway! So! The translator, A.J. Woodman, is crazy in love with footnotes. There's hardly a page without multiple footnotes at the bottom... or "foot." And are his footnotes dry? I don't know. Is the Sahara dry? I'm assuming the answer is yes, although I can easily imagine a big smart nerd who would tell me otherwise. Anyway, A.J. Woodman's footnotes are so dry they make the Sahara look like the grotto at the Playboy Mansion, as Dennis Miller would put it, causing us all to throw up. But in this singular case, A.J. Woodman's footnote is... whimsical? I don't know what it is. Here, I'll quote it: "'Dream guided treasure hunter to Roman coins' (headline in The Times [London], 11 December 1998)." So that footnote gives us nothing, really. That's not like A.J. Woodman! And really, the Roman coins found in 1998 could not be more different than the gold dreamed of by Caesellius Bassus, which was "not in the form of money but in a raw and ancient mass." (Also, unlike the Roman coins found in 1998, it didn't exist.) I guess A.J. Woodman just thought it was a fun story. It's still a mystery, if so, why he suddenly and very uncharacteristically wanted to be "fun." And certainly it would be going too far to postulate that he put forth the headline from the Times of London as a counternarrative... as if to say, "Hey, sometimes a dream CAN lead you to buried gold! Never give up, kids!" I couldn't find the article (I didn't try too hard), but I found the same story reported in the Irish Independent a full day before the Times of London picked it up. Here's a paragraph: "'In my dream I could see myself in the middle of the field pulling up a haul of coins,' Mr Roberts (46), a plumber, told a treasure trove inquest in Newport, south Wales, yesterday. 'When I had the same dream again a few nights later I took a few hours off and went to the field. I took just two paces and my metal detector bleeped.'" A treasure trove inquest! I didn't know about those. You know what this puts me in mind of? The other day, McNeil told me he had dreamed of salmon patties. And that was weird, because the day before - that is, the day leading to the night of McNeil's dream - I had been thinking about salmon patties! AND... later that night (the night AFTER McNeil's dream), Dr. Theresa - having been privy to neither my salmon patty thoughts nor McNeil's salmon patty dreams - suddenly announced, "I'd like to make salmon patties!"

Witold Gombrowicz Is Like Jim Gaffigan

Time and time again we have established that I am wrong about everything. Here, let me give you a recent example! So, remember when I said I remembered going to Square Books and... wait. Please remind yourself that my brain was zapped by mysterious forces just a couple of years ago. But remember when I said I had seen a version of THE ILIAD blurbed by Emily Wilson but not translated by her? That can't be the case. Because I went to Square Books yesterday and saw with my own eyes Emily Wilson's translation of THE ILIAD, which I had convinced myself did not exist. And why would she blurb an ILIAD when she had a fresh new ILIAD of her own? I said to Mevelyn... wait! Let me tell you about Mevelyn. Mevelyn is from Cuba. She is a great bookseller. Case in point, she has forced me to buy a lot of Alejo Carpentier with her hypnotic powers. She tells a good ghost story. She knows everything about books! You can ask her about the different translations of DON QUIXOTE, for example, and she'll point out all their strengths and weaknesses. I always hope that Mevelyn will be working when I visit Square Books so I can hear a good ghost story or a nightmare she had about Karl Marx. Anyway, I grasped Emily Wilson's translation of THE ILIAD in my wizened paws and I says to Mevelyn, I says, "Hey! Mevelyn! Wasn't there a recent version of THE ILIAD with a blurb by Emily Wilson, but she didn't translate it? I feel like I'm going crazy!" So it sounds familiar to Mevelyn, too! She feels like she saw it recently. So we stand there a long time trying to figure out what the hell we are talking about. We are having one of those folies à deux that people enjoy so much. Anyway! When I got home, I realized what I had seen was a new translation of THE AENEID for which Emily Wilson wrote the introduction. Not a blurb! An introduction! Not THE ILIAD! THE AENEID! The important thing is that I had a coupon, so I was able to get Emily Wilson's translation of THE ILIAD for free, just about. That's the thing! Get yourself a "Constant Reader Number" at Square Books! Then you too will be able to grab an almost-free book once in a while. And so it came to pass that THE ILIAD is my current "nighttime book" and the DIARY of Witold Gombrowicz is my current "daytime book." I have reached the point in the diary where Gombrowicz has begun to attack himself, sotto voce, the way Jim Gaffigan does in his standup act. You know, Jim Gaffigan will tell a joke and then he'll switch to a soft, high-pitched, almost strangled voice, pretending to be an audience member, questioning his own premise. Is that a good description of what Jim Gaffigan does? No? How the hell would you know? Anyway, now Witold Gombrowicz is doing what Jim Gaffigan does... in diary form! It's like when Milhouse said that ALF was back in pog form. Everything is like when Milhouse said ALF was back in pog form.

No One Is Talking

Well, it was back in December when my enormously popular yet mysteriously obscure feature ACE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD, on the "web" site Flaming Hydra, came to its gently burbling conclusion. I can't say that I was inundated with cards and letters asking me what might come next. In fact, the query was raised by no one, nor was the finale itself a source of rueful celebration. The subject of the column in question, of course, was my friend and neighbor Ace Atkins, in particular his work on the Pauly Shore film JURY DUTY. And something did come next! That something was, and is, KENT GOES TO CHELMSFORD, the thrilling story of how Kent Osborne got cast in the starmaking Brendan Fraser vehicle SCHOOL TIES, which I believe came out within a year of Pauly Shore's JURY DUTY. We're already on Episode 3 of KENT GOES TO CHELMSFORD! Which I only mention because Kent talks about eating chicken in Episode 3 and, as you know, I have kept a careful tally here on the "blog" of Kent's chicken-eating activities, insofar as they relate to me personally... it would not be within the scope of even our mightiest computer systems to maintain a record of every time Kent eats chicken, which he does with neither remorse nor surcease. He's probably eating a chicken right now! If one were to "click" on the proper "hyperlink" shortly to come, one would find that the chicken in Episode 3 of KENT GOES TO CHELMSFORD is Chicken Française... a spoiler in which I do not mind indulging as I thought you might like to know that Chicken Française is the same thing as Chicken French, to which I was introduced by James Whorton in Brockport, NY, a stone's throw from Chicken French's place of origin, Rochester. If I recall correctly, Jim told me that he had originally (and wrongly) assumed the name "Chicken French" had something to do with French's brand mustard, the French's Mustard company, it may shock and delight you to learn, having historical ties to Rochester! What a world. On that same trip, Jim fed me something called a "garbage plate," an incident fictionalized in a story of which I could not remember the title as I tossed and turned last night, contemplating "blogging" about it upon awakening, which, as you can see, I have done. Anyhow, the story about the garbage plate appeared in the Hingston & Olsen SHORT STORY ADVENT CALENDAR for 2019 and it was titled, as I just confirmed, "The Wild Man of Mississippi." Who cares? Nobody! Which was my original point. For example, I have also heard literally nothing about Frowny 'n' Smiley, my big hit characters who made their debut on Adult Swim around the same time that ACE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD came to its sputtering halt. I was told recently - without asking! - that Frowny 'n' Smiley are "in rotation," but the only true evidence I have for their existence is in the commercial breaks for the BEHIND THE ELEPHANT special that I recorded off the TV one morning some hours before sunrise. I have had no verification of a Frowny 'n' Smiley sighting from any independent source, and the chances are good everything is a delusion. Yes, everything.

Ham-Fisted Doofus

After I finished reading the Apocryphal Gospels during the 11-day blackout, I turned to BLACKWATER by Michael McDowell, which seemed like a good, creepy thing to read in the dark. I had been previously impressed with the author's deep geographical and metereological understanding of the Gulf Coast of Alabama as displayed in his novel THE ELEMENTALS, so it was extra sad that in BLACKWATER, he misspelled the name of my hometown Bayou La Batre. One character suggests moving there as part of a scheme of vengeance, to which her husband replies, "What would you and I do in Bayou le Batre, that old place?" Which, if I am being honest, is something we used to ask ourselves, if only from time to time. The answer was to go down to Schambeau's or Red's Drugs and look at the new comic books! And to wander around in Schambeau's and wonder why Mr. Schambeau (his first name was Crum!) regularly stocked Purina Monkey Chow. Did someone in town own a monkey? If so, who? An unsolved mystery to this day! Truly, Schambeau's was a wonderful grocery store to stir the imagination. Well, when I first opened BLACKWATER, the title page popped right out in my hand! It simply removed itself from the book in what seemed, given the circumstances, an ominous sign. I was reminded of when McNeil called me a "ham-fisted doofus" because I once broke an egg in my hand in an attempt to remove it from its carton. This led McNeil to come up with the idea of chickens who lay eggs with edible shells. I could have sworn I "blogged" about both the thing he called me and his egg idea, but it turns out I put those two tantalizing pieces of the McNeil puzzle into two separate unpublished novels. Well, the hell with it. Here I am giving away these remarkable tidbits for free! I give up. Note for historians of the future: an email search indicates that McNeil called me a "ham-fisted doofus" on May 6, 2019.

"Blog"trospective 19: Adventure Time

Remember how I kept bragging about quitting social media? I guess it was a damn lie, because I briefly got on "Tumblr," as I call it, to answer questions about ADVENTURE TIME: FIONNA AND CAKE Season 2 and the Adult Swim special THE ELEPHANT. But not MYSTERY CUDDLERS, which, as you may recall, they chucked down the gaping garbage hole to trash town. Well, all of that is over, by which I mean that everything I have worked on for the past number of years has been released and consumed and here I sit in the cold ashes. So! I thought I would make a catalog (below) of every time (?) I have mentioned ADVENTURE TIME or its various spin-offs on the "blog." That way, the hordes of acolytes I gathered on "Tumblr" can visit this "post" the way they might walk around a famous tomb or other, slightly more interactive landmark. I also encourage them to check out my previous "blog"trospective on THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY, thought by many to be the ADVENTURE TIME of the 17th century. And now I give you a series of "hyperlinks" filled with ADVENTURE TIME tidbits and gristly byproduct. Eat up! actual cat sneeze inspires FIONNA AND CAKE---ADVENTURE TIME art show---ADVENTURE TIME artists Natasha Allegri, Kent Osborne, and Seo Kim appear on a panel in Oxford, Mississippi---ADVENTURE TIME clip sponsored by cream to get rid of your age spots---ADVENTURE TIME compared to Balzac---ADVENTURE TIME comic books sold out in New York---ADVENTURE TIME episode named after cat---ADVENTURE TIME features a line that is "classic Frasier"---ADVENTURE TIME joke (in "The More You Moe") based on when my sister visited my brother and me in Atlanta and I made her sit in my apartment and play hangman but my brother took her out to meet David Byrne---ADVENTURE TIME; Lovecraftian influence on---ADVENTURE TIME party at Kent Osborne's house!---ADVENTURE TIME podcast, poor performance on---ADVENTURE TIME wrap party---Allegri, Natasha; gets caviar out of a vending machine---allusion to THE SEARCHERS in ADVENTURE TIME---alternate, worse ending to "Time Sandwich"---Archimedes, Fonzie, Piggy, and Jan discussed in ADVENTURE TIME meeting---art students ask questions about ADVENTURE TIME---at a French restaurant with Pendleton Ward and Megan Abbott---Atkins, Ace; watches "The Box Prince"---before an ADVENTURE TIME meeting, Kent eats his fourth meal of chicken in a row---behind the scenes of writing fan favorite "The Box Prince"---belt worn to Peabody Awards---bent fork in Beverly Hills---Bergman, Ingmar; influence of on ADVENTURE TIME---big panel at Wondercon with Prismo, Flame Princess and more---birthday balloons from the office---book about weeds useful for writing FIONNA AND CAKE---"Bukowski with more stabbing" (assessment of a William Boyle short story during an ADVENTURE TIME meeting)---Burch, Ashly; inspired by PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET when writing the character of Martin Mertens---Burch, Ashly; photo of surrounded by Emmys---cat jumps in lap during ADVENTURE TIME meeting---CAT PERSON by Seo Kim on my recommendation shelf---cat refuses to do tricks during ADVENTURE TIME meeting---cat who looks exactly like Kent Osborne's cat shows up in ADVENTURE TIME meeting---Chuck E. Cheese a proud sponsor of ADVENTURE TIME---cheered up by Pen and Kent during an ADVENTURE TIME meeting---coincidental resemblence between Coppola film TWIXT and "Root Beer Guy"---commenters have no idea how damn old I am---Cosmic Owl in context of ancient owl deities---Cosmic Owl spotted in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY---cross-cultural discussion of syrup in the writers' room---dancing to a playlist by Kate Tsang---dangerous ride on ice and snow undertaken during FIONNA AND CAKE meeting---Did Norman Mailer invent the Ice King?---DIRTY GRANDPA (film) brought up during ADVENTURE TIME meeting---DJ Slime is not the same as DJ Plop Drops---DON'T LOOK NOW allusion---during an ADVENTURE TIME meeting, Pen comments on my messy hair---earliest "blog" mention of ADVENTURE TIME---eating at the Smoke House with Adam and Kate---emailing Adam about DC comics character the Spectre---executives won't let Martin eat those little creatures who are helping him out---fate of my favorite bar revealed during ADVENTURE TIME meeting---feeding a fish during an ADVENTURE TIME meeting---final visit to the old Cartoon Network building---Finn sounds like a student of Pythagoras---flaunting an Emmy---Ford, Harrison and Martin Sheen; heights of discussed in ADVENTURE TIME meeting---Franzen, Jonathan; knows about my Emmy---Hanuman of Hindu lore somewhat reminiscent of Jake---going to the races with Pen---Grammer, Kelsey; sadly does not voice a giant mushroom---Hanna and I argue over Rory's best boyfriend---HEAVEN'S GATE allusion in ADVENTURE TIME explained---Hernandez, Gilbert; writes a Jerry Lewis reference into an episode, but it does not make it into the final cut---Herpich, Tom and Steve Wolfhard on oatmeal and Twitter---Herpich, Tom; drawing by evocative of Machen---Herpich, Tom; portrait of the author by---hiccups disappear during an ADVENTURE TIME meeting---holding a Peabody---home office tidied before Kent arrives for an ADVENTURE TIME meeting---Horton, Edward Everett; discussed in FIONNA AND CAKE meeting---I am presented with a machete in honor of my work on ADVENTURE TIME---I forget the title of THE BIG BANG THEORY during an ADVENTURE TIME meeting---I get all excited by the first CHEERS reference on ADVENTURE TIME---I see Cher at the hotel where I stay for ADVENTURE TIME meetings---I see Garry Marshall at the hotel where I stay for ADVENTURE TIME meetings---I see Vera Farmiga in the hotel where I stay for ADVENTURE TIME meetings---I try to draw Lady Rainicorn on an apron---idea for an unusual bread pudding prompts thoughts of Cinnamon Bun---I unsuccessfully suggest "Glucupricon" as an ADVENTURE TIME episode title---idea to have Jake punch a mountain vetoed---in the recording booth with Anne Heche---influence of Shmoo on ADVENTURE TIME---INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1978 version) influences ADVENTURE TIME---Jake-shaped cheese ball---Jansson, Tove; works of often came up in writers' meetings---Kay Lenz, whose film BREEZY inspired the name of an ADVENTURE TIME character, comes onboard to play another ADVENTURE TIME character!---Kent eats a chicken sandwich during a meeting---Kent's role in a local stageplay inspires an Ooo-style cuss word in ADVENTURE TIME: ELEMENTS---Kid President (?) visits the ADVENTURE TIME writers' room---Kim, Seo; thinks up a snake---King of Ooo hunts his subjects for sport---lack of toilets at Versailles discussed during ADVENTURE TIME meeting---Lawless, Lucy; role on ADVENTURE TIME---Lizard Princess---local record store owner wants me to bring my ADVENTURE TIME Emmy to the store and perform as "DJ Emmy"---maudlin reflections upon the cancellation of ADVENTURE TIME---McHale, Patrick; spills red wine on my nice white shirt---McNeil watches ADVENTURE TIME on Christmas Eve---McNeil's advice on what to do after ADVENTURE TIME cancellation---meeting T-Bone Burnett at the Emmys---memorable summary of "The Great Birdman"---Moynihan, Jesse and Cole Sanchez give me a BREEZY poster---obscurest pop culture reference in ADVENTURE TIME---Muto, Adam; recommends a hat shop---Muto, Adam; uses the Jack Kirby comic OMAC as an example in a meeting---my father, a lifelong machinist, contributes to "We Fixed a Truck"---my job in the ADVENTURE TIME writers' room DUNE book club---office is closed for President's Day, so Kent and I go to see 50 SHADES OF GREY---Olson, Olivia; has to scream a lot for work even though she has a cold---on Twitter before an ADVENTURE TIME meeting---Osborne, Kent; caught in a photo with Taylor Swift!---Osborne, Kent; dresses up as Finn---Osborne, Kent; eats from the SAME BAG of Utz cheese balls during writers' meetings FOR YEARS!---Osborne, Kent; gets out his lightsaber---owl wears shirt that says "OWL" on it---OZARK MAGIC AND FOLKLORE (book by Vance Randolph) useful in writing an ADVENTURE TIME episode---pants falling down at the Emmys---passing mention of Spirit Dream Warrior---Pen and I are asked to envision a prequel to Willy Wonka---Pen and Kent visit Faulkner's house---Plastic Man as spiritual forefather of Jake the Dog---Pott, Julia; reveals during a meeting that she was in a Burt Reynolds movie!---practicing saying "Wow" as Root Beer Guy---President's Day means nothing to Hanna K. Nystrom---Princess Bubblegum reads James Joyce to Finn and Jake (failed suggestion)---pyrographical portrait of Marceline by Emily Quinn---quoting Lady Rainicorn's mom---quoting Root Beer Guy---reading a book about magic before an ADVENTURE TIME meeting---rewatch of THE WIRE influences ADVENTURE TIME---Root Beer Guy goes on a sexy vacation---Sanchez, Cole; teaches me the word "subluxation"---Shawn, Wallace; farts on ADVENTURE TIME---signing posters at Wondercon---some background on "Root Beer Guy"---talking about trombones too much in a writers' meeting---tiny beatnik---trying and failing to get LADYHAWKE allusions into ADVENTURE TIME---trying to explain a comic book in a meeting---Tsang, Kate; makes two single cheeseburgers into one double cheeseburger---twice-as-long season is twice as much work---visiting GILMORE GIRLS set with Julia Pott after an ADVENTURE TIME meeting---Walch, Hynden; acting abilities of---Ward, Pendleton; draws Kent as "Galactus - Destroyer of Chickens"---Ward, Pendleton; rents a house with Cyclopes (yes, that's the plural of Cyclops) on the wallpaper---Ward, Pendleton; runs over a bottle---Ward, Pendleton; wants us all to dress as English peas to accept Peabody Award---watching ADVENTURE TIME with nephews---watching BARRY LYNDON with Pen---while locked out of my car, I find an ADVENTURE TIME-related coaster in my pocket---William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County mistaken for Ooo---winning an Emmy!---WINTER'S TALE (film) brought up in meeting---WIRE creator David Simon mocks Kent Osborne's difficulty with eating an egg---wolf dream and Dr. Doom discussed in meeting---Wolfhard, Steve and I sit next to Squidward in a bar---Wolfhard, Steve; creates hair apes---Wolfhard, Steve; inspired by Jamie Farr---working on STAKES---working on the Minecraft tie-in---writers' meeting sidetracked by David Lynch clips---writers' room produces DUNE book club---writing a poem in iambic pentameter for "Thanks for the Crabapples, Giuseppe"---writing lessons gleaned from ADVENTURE TIME meetings---Wynn, Ed; voice of inspires Choose Goose---Xayophone, Somvilay; plays Theremin during an ADVENTURE TIME meeting---Xayophone, Somvilay; wants a pizza with just mint on it. (JAKE THE DOG CHEESE BALL CREDIT: BLAIR HOBBS)

Book Junk

In the New York Times they are always grilling people like "What books are on your bedside table?" I have a stack of books on the bedside table but I don't think the New York Times could figure out anything about me by inventorying them. I mainly use them as a kind of pedestal. And then there's a book on top, which is whatever book I currently read in bed. But the ones underneath it have been sitting there for so long that as far as I know they may have fused into a single volume. But! Something interesting happened the other day when I started reading the giant big huge enormous big large big dragon book by Joe Hill. I found that THE PENGUIN BOOK OF SPIRITUAL VERSE, which has long capped the mighty pedestal of books, was too small and flimsy to serve as proper direct support for the hulking dragon book. "Where the hell am I going to put this book of spiritual verse?" I said to myself blasphemously. This story just gets better and better. Well, I moved it to the little table that sits alongside my favorite chair. And that provoked me to do something I haven't done in years, I guess: open it up. And what do you think I saw? An owl? You're right! And it was in a poem I've read before... haven't I? "Auguries of Innocence" by William Blake. And yes, of course, I've read it before. But I guess I haven't read it in at least 14 years, as William Blake has not until now featured in my long list of books with owls in them, begun all that time ago. Or... could it be I just never finished reading this poem before? It's longer than I remembered! My memory of it gives out pretty early, with "A Horse misusd upon the Road/ Calls to Heaven for Human blood"... I feel like every time I get to that part, I kind of sit there and nod thoughtfully for a while... and then do I shut the book? Anyhow, it turns out that a little later on we have "The Owl that calls upon the Night/ Speaks the Unbelievers fright"... a line that does not sound familiar to me at all. I'll tell you something else strange! Are you excited? And have I actually told you anything strange? Well, I noticed for the first time that this Penguin paperback is signed by its editor, Kaveh Akbar. Maybe that's not strange. I don't know why, but I never thought of a Penguin paperback being signed... maybe because the author is almost always dead. Also, I bought it new at Square Books, on an ordinary shelf, not specially marked... and I do always think of Penguin paperbacks as something like... cans of Vienna sausage? I don't expect the person who shepherded those Vienna sausages through the process to sign the can! Although, if someone personally selected each sausage, and nudged them all perfectly and snugly together, which would be analagous to Kaveh Akbar's fine work here... I am too tired to follow this line of thought. In a final bit of book news, the City of Oxford, Mississippi, has, for mysterious reasons, suddenly rescheduled its Christmas parade! The Christmas parade will now occur at roughly the same location and time as my event with Ace tomorrow night! I guess we'll finally find out who's more popular: Ace Atkins or Santa Claus.

Winning

The other evening I went to City Grocery Bar to knock one back with Tom Franklin, but I stopped by Square Books on the way and got the new edition of CHOCTAW TALES, compiled by Tom Mould and Rae Nell Vaughn. There was a reading scheduled for the very same time that I was supposed to knock one back with Tom Franklin. So, to be clear, though I did not attend the reading, I did get the book, and that’s something, right? It’s not nothing! Get off my back! Anyway, the book was lying there on the kitchen counter a day or two later and Dr. Theresa said, “This looks interesting,” and I thought she was right! It did look interesting! Who was so smart as to pick up such an interesting book? Me? Wow, I’m great! Such were a few of my amazing thoughts. So a little later I opened the book at random and I think you know where this is going. Have I become too predictable? Has the spark gone out of our relationship, dear reader? In any case, I opened right to a story about an owl and a buzzard arguing over which of them was going to have the most children, which struck me as a pretty funny argument, but I’m not an owl or a buzzard or J.D. Vance. So the owl sits in a cherry tree and the buzzard knocks the owl on its ass with a dead branch... forgive me, the book is downstairs, I’m paraphrasing from memory. Also, I feel I’ve been saying “ass” on the “blog” a lot more frequently. Sorry about that, but not too long ago my brain went a little bit sideways. (See also.) Anyway, the buzzard wins and gets to have more children, if you call that winning. I left the “Animal Tales” section but kept finding owls anyway, including one really good one in the story of a mysterious old woman who chopped off a man’s head and fooled a bear and a couple of wildcats but anyway she turned out to be an owl and nobody saw that coming! I do care about things other than noticing which books have owls in them, but I can’t remember what those things are anymore, can you? Please help me.

The Mark Leyner Owl Problem

I'll tell you the truth. Despite all my big talk, I got tired of THE SOT-WEED FACTOR and switched over to E TU, BABE by Mark Leyner, which I immediately found more agreeable to my way of thinking. There was something I wanted to tell you about it, but I became discouraged because I couldn't think of a passage to quote to describe the narrator (Mark Leyner), at least not a passage I could quote without having to lie down from just thinking of how much typing it would entail. Somehow, this led me to wonder whether I had ever "blogged" about Mark Leyner before, so I did a search and found him in only one spot: my big list of books with owls in them. That's where the mystery began! Strap yourself in! You see, according to the "blog's" "design," it should be a mighty ouroboros, leading nowhere but back to itself. So, if you follow me, how could Mark Leyner's delightful GONE WITH THE MIND be on my list of books with owls in them AND YET not in some other "post" in which the owl was first catalogued properly? So I "clicked" and found that the Leyner allusion led only to a zombie "link" to my long-dead twitter account, a clear violation of "blog" policy (the reader will certainly recall when I departed social media like some kind of haughty titan, giving nary a thought to the destruction I left in my wake). Maybe I was reading GONE WITH THE MIND during the period when I claimed to have stopped "blogging." I have a lot of regrets. I'm ashamed to say Leyner's particular owl, which I have forgotten, is lost forever - at least for our purposes - if I don't suddenly get some unexpected energy and, for starters, walk across my home office, where my copy of GONE WITH THE MIND can be plainly seen from here, which isn't going to happen. Anyway! None of this is the point, because E TU, BABE doesn't have an owl in it... yet. Or maybe at all. BUT! I wanted to tell you, regarding E TU, BABE, that the narrator's favorite TV show is QUINCY, which is also Dr. Theresa's favorite TV show, which is why I wanted to tell you. Last night, I mentioned as much to her. Without context, the comment didn't really go anywhere. For you see, not only was I too lazy to type anything giving you a real idea of Leyner's narrator, Mark Leyner, I was too lazy to even describe the narrator to Dr. Theresa with the words of my mouth. Today, while I was considering all this, I flipped to the rear cover of the book and saw a "blurb" by Jay McInerney, who describes Leyner's protagonist as "a flashbulb-tanned, narcotic-nourished, steroid-swollen, priapic monster." Thanks, Jay McInerney! You did my work for me. Except for the typing. But you cut it way down! So anyway, the narrator's favorite TV show is QUINCY, and, as a result, to quote the book now, "whenever I run across a corpse, I try to take advantage of the opportunity to do a quick autopsy."

The Arts

For our own personal and individual reasons, neither Dr. Theresa nor I eats sandwiches anymore. And I do believe that is correct subject/verb agreement if you think about it for two seconds. So anyway, we were watching a "limited series" (those are terrible!) via "streaming" and it was a mystery thriller suspense drama of action! At one point the guy stops in a diner and orders up three sandwiches to go. And they look amazing, and I believe I will categorize them as "cheesesteaks," though I don't pretend to be an expert. But the scene does take place in Philadelphia. Even so, Dr. Theresa and I were taken by a simultaneous Proustian pang for some Italian beef combo sandwiches we enjoyed in Chicago in 2002. So then the guy gets in his car and starts having action-packed adventures filled with mystery and suspense, not to mention thrills, but we just don't care. All we can think of, and we say it out loud, is that "He's driving around with those sandwiches in his car!" In our distracted state we can't be sure, but it seems like it takes him several hours to get home with those sandwiches, and we're just thinking about how they've been sitting in the car all day. In other arts news, THE OBSCENE BIRD OF NIGHT started to seem too grotesque and disturbing to read in bed at night in the hopes of a peaceful slumber, so I switched over to DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP by Willa Cather... and it - unlike THE OBSCENE BIRD OF NIGHT - gave me nightmares! And death isn't even close to coming for this guy yet! Although... never mind. No spoilers! In a final arts thought, was it really a "Proustian pang" (above)? Didn't Proust actually get to bite into his memory cookie? If I may be allowed to stray off topic, the holidays are upon us, and I should mention a funny Christmas wish I received from McNeil, who asked, "Are you doing anything for Christmas? Besides take your blood pressure and hope Santa brings you one more day - JUST ONE MORE, SANTA!" An artful construction by McNeil, in fact, who goes on to recall imperfectly my alleged love, when we knew each other as children, of the snack cakes known as Sno Balls. To be fair, McNeil couched his assertion in the always reliable "if I remember correctly" context. He was, however, thinking of, or misremembering, Strawberry Zingers, a product I ate 5 days of the week for some matter of years without the knowledge of my parents, and it truly is a wonder I'm alive today. I don't know if they still make them. Anyway, my metabolism must have bordered on the miraculous at the time. I was like Matter Eater Lad from DC comics! McNeil, it must be said, was on the right track, as both items in question (Sno Balls and Strawberry Zingers) were sprinkled with poisonously dyed coconut. [The coconut slivers on the Strawberry Zingers may have been unpigmented, actually, but they were surrounded by a spongy cake-like substance soaked in a deep, alarming, and, indeed, unnatural shade of crimson. - ed.] If I, like McNeil, "recall correctly," Strawberry Zingers came three to a pack, which, to my way of thinking at the time, meant that I should eat all three at once. And I was a skinny kid! If I am doing the math correctly, and it is a very simple equation, I was ingesting 15 Strawberry Zingers a week. This brings us back to Proust, doesn't it? But that's not the point. The point is that McNeil says he's spending Christmas in "a neighborhood that boasts a three-legged alligator."

The Meatballs of Yesterday

To my recollection, four things happened yesterday. 1. I got a text from Laraine Newman! She told me that the New York Times (or a newsletter thereof, to be precise) had some nice things to say about MYSTERY CUDDLERS, the pilot I co-created with Pendleton Ward. They say it has a "bright, appealing oddness," if that's the sort of thing you enjoy. 2. A package arrived from my brother! It contained a giant cookie jar in the shape of an owl. The owl is wearing a straw boater and a bow tie, of course. And the hat cleverly serves as the lid of the cookie jar. Thanks, Will! I stare at this cookie jar a lot! I would put a photo of it here, but I feel my masterful description could not be improved upon. Oh, you know what? Screw it! Pardon my rough he-man language of the dirty streets! 3. A cat sneezed all over me. If you have a cat, one day it will sneeze all over you, a fact taken from real life that we worked into episode one of season one of ADVENTURE TIME: FIONNA AND CAKE. I felt the need to change my shirt, which bore tangible evidence of the cat sneeze. So I broke in a shirt that Ace Atkins brought me as a souvenir of his recent trip to New York City. It says "Daddy's Little Meatball" on it. Ace didn't know this, but I once read a New York Times article about such a shirt, which I recall because I put it into one of my many unpublished novels (and subsequently deleted - the detail, not the novel, though I should probably delete the novel). 4. After I "blogged" about Julian Barnes yesterday, I thought of my childhood friend Henry Barnes (no relation, I assume), who dove into the bayou to retrieve a softball once. That was his excuse, anyway. Boy, did Sister Lois chew him out about that! It was 7th grade, the year I went to Catholic school, because Mom had a job there. The school was right there on the bayou. What was Henry supposed to do? NOT dive into the bayou, which was right there? My brother attended the same school and became an altar boy, even though we were Southern Baptists. How did that happen? That has to be against the rules. I hope the Pope doesn't read this! How many masses did my little brother invalidate with his non-Catholic subterfuge? I hate to say it, but there may be any number of souls sitting around in Purgatory to this day, all thanks to my brother. But the point is, Henry grew up to be the mayor of Bayou La Batre, which I believe he still is! I'll have to ask Mom. I haven't seen him in about half a century (see also).

Who?

Hey! Do you want to watch MYSTERY CUDDLERS but you couldn't stay up until 3 AM Central Time like I did? I have good news for you. You can see the whole pilot by "clicking" this "link" to the Adult Swim youtube channel. I watched it on TV just the way people did in olden times. I was sitting through a Dawn dishwashing liquid commercial that came on before it and thinking unironically, "This is nourishing my anticipation!" That is the kind of thing I sit around thinking. Then the middle of the show was interrupted by an ad for generic Viagra. Really, nothing could have made me happier. They (some people at the network) asked us just last week, "Uh, where is the commercial break supposed to go?" and Pen and I were like, "Uh-oh! Hmm! Whoops!" Then Pen thought of a funny place where it could go, which made me laugh when it happened at roughly 3:11 AM Central Time, but now that commercial break is lost forever in the history of broadcast television. Before you "click," I should tell you I play an owl on the show, which I only mention because the casual "blog" observer will think I am obsessed with owls. "And now at last," you will be thinking, "he has become one." But is that guy, the one who seems so interested in owls, the "real" me? This is like when I tried to explain my unicorn pin to Hendrik Hertzberg. It really doesn't matter! What I'm saying is that the owl was 100% Pen's idea, and so was me playing the owl, and by "playing the owl," I mean I sat in our bedroom closet saying "Whooooo?" over and over into a microphone I had borrowed from Ace Atkins. In conclusion, MYSTERY CUDDLERS was inspired in very small part by my novel SWEET BANANAS, which I can say without fear of crass self-promotion because that novel existed only in a limited edition of 365 copies with 365 different covers, which are all off the street, and can only be purchased in alleyways, like in GOODFELLAS, when Robert De Niro is telling Lorraine Bracco, "That's right, keep going, yes, that's it, that dark alleyway just to right, go in there," I paraphrase.

The Last Patty Melt

I see that word has gotten out about MYSTERY CUDDLERS, a pilot created and written by Pen - that's Pendleton Ward! - and me for Adult Swim. They're going to be airing it in the wee small hours of the 19th, as Frank Sinatra would have said, probably, had he been informed of the matter. As I know from reading a biography of Dean Martin, he (Frank's friend Dean) was up at that hour, watching cowboy movies. Dino couldn't sleep! I would be afraid I had just alienated the potential audience if I didn't know for sure that the people who read this "blog" don't exist. So it's going to be on at 3 AM ET, according to the Adult Swim schedule, or 4 AM, according to other places on the "internet," so you'd best cover your bets. Just like Dean Martin would do, I'm assuming, though I'm not even sure what "cover your bets" means. But here I am sitting on all the most important parts! MYSTERY CUDDLERS has an amazing cast we were lucky to get, including Pam Grier and Randall Park as the eponymous cuddlers. Elsewhere in the cast, Maria Bamford! Michael Winslow of POLICE ACADEMY fame! (We wrote a part especially for him. Then we were like, "What if he can't do it???" but he could.) Brian Posehn! "Weird Al" Yankovic! A little kid named Maverick! That's his real name! I consider Maverick my personal discovery. And the boarders! I didn't discover them. They have already been discovered. Another crew of your dreams! Charmaine Verhagen! Graham Falk! Evan Borja! And Pen himself. Yes, yes, now it can be revealed, it was Pen with whom I went to Bob's Big Boy in May of 2023, after a meeting kicking it all off. There I consumed perhaps my final patty melt, given recent... events. It was good! Oh yeah, and the music is by Joe Wong! To the show, not to the patty melt. Though if Joe wanted to, he could write a good tone poem evoking a patty melt. Looking over my ancient emails I see that interest in MYSTERY CUDDLERS was proclaimed by the network in July 2022, and you know what? From what I've noticed about this business - ha ha! I have noticed almost nothing about this business - this all seems like really fast work (I was just in Los Angeles a few weeks ago for the final sound mix!) and I'm really happy you'll get to see it soon. Everybody who worked on it is great and nice and easy to work with and I hope you will scrutinize the credits frame by frame and appreciate everyone you find there and I'm very sorry that I'm far too lazy to type a complete list here. Wait! Maybe I meant "hedge your bets." POSTSCRIPT! It's definitely 4 AM Eastern/3 AM Central. You see, Adult Swim's "web" site was sneakily, if efficiently, pitying me as a pathetic inhabitant of the Central Time Zone, and automatically updating my "browsing" experience to reflect my location... which I guess it is tracking, and no doubt handing over to the proper authortities.

My Five Skeletons

I'm sure you obsess about it all the time: how, at least once a decade and a half, I open some book of symbols or another and a mysterious card falls into my lap. Well, the last time that happened ("click" previous "hyperlink"), I went to the "website" of the mysterious organization who had placed their mysterious card in my mysterious book of mysterious symbols and interacted mysteriously with it. Are you still with me? Okay! Hang on! Remember yesterday? Remember how I "blogged" about a singing skeleton who is also a plastic toy filled up with air like a balloon? So, I "posted" that, and then I checked my electronic or "e" mail, and I had received, at exactly the same time, a promotional communication from the mysterious organization! And its subject line was "Archetype in Focus: Skeleton." WHAT! Then I calmed down and thought about it. Of course, the mysterious organization associated skeletons with October, just as I had. It was no warning from beyond! However! Let me draw your attention to the fact that my previous four "posts" - five, including this one - bear the label "skeleton." (And here I have to parenthetically state that if you exist, which you do not, and you access the "blog" by means of your phone rather than your home computing system, you don't get all the enticing extras, like skeleton labels.) I know what you're going to say now, but cool your jets, David Hume! Sure, maybe I've got skeletons on the brain! Or do I? For as a little investigation will prove, I use the label "skeleton" pretty dang loosely. Why, it could refer to the spine of a book, or to Chili's famed baby back ribs, dripping in their succulent juices. CASE CLOSED. Oh, wait! I wanted to quote this from that Colm Tóibín novel about Henry James: "a huge, obscure shape in the night, an angry, broken, pecking bird of prey, squatting in the corner, ready to take him, all black spirit, yet palpable, visibly there, hissing, come for him alone." But I don't think I can fairly pretend that this hissing bird of prey was an owl. The person suffering the unfortunate vision, which is certainly in tune with our Halloween season, is Henry James's father, whom "blog" readers may fondly recall as the man who wouldn't let tiny Henry James read a sexy book about hot corn. Wow! That made me think of something else: the book HOT CORN, with its depiction of hapless "hot corn girls" - with whose travails tiny Henry James was never allowed to familiarize himself - inspired me whilst happily I toiled on Julia Pott's show SUMMER CAMP ISLAND. I include above, at the risk of exploding the "blog," a title card from the show, manifesting that inspiration. I'm not sure who drew it. I'll ask Julia, and credit the artist in the near future! PS Julia already responded! She had plenty of time, because I finished watching von Stroheim's GREED, ha ha, before finishing this "post." I say "ha ha" yet my statement is true. The artist is Yoriyuki Ikegami.

Speaking of Fox Mulder

I wanted to “post” this earlier, but the AT&T “internet” stopped working over and over. Anyway, here’s what you’ve been waiting for. I got one of those junk headlines that you get on your phone, something like “The Queen’s Favorite Sandwich That She Ate Every Day Since She Was Five – And It’s So Basic!” So I took a screen grab of it and sent it to Ace. That’s all we do all day every day, grab stupid things that appear on our phones and text them to each other. Then I texted the same screen grab, with its accompanying photo of Queen Elizabeth II, to Sara, along with my own humorous commentary: “The answer? A foot-long chili dog.” Sara’s reply was something like (a close paraphrase here): “OMG, really???” So I sadly had to reply that no, Queen Elizabeth II did not, as far as I know, eat a foot-long chili dog every day for 90 years. As Sara expressed it in a subsequent text, her tragedy – ha ha! she didn’t say tragedy – is that she “wants to believe.” Just like Fox Mulder from the X-Files! I added that part. Speaking of Fox Mulder, I was reading another old comic book about The Atom, and he was fighting these tiny guys who lived in a cave and rode around on the backs of bats. The editor interrupted the story to announce that tiny people of a proper size for riding small flying rodents into battle most likely really existed at some point! He insisted, in the capital letters typical of old comic books: “THE ELVES, THE BROWNIES, THE LEPRECHAUNS, THE FAIRIES, ALL MAY BE FANCIFUL RECOLLECTIONS OF A RACE OF TINY HUMANS! CHARLES FORT WRITES OF THEM.” Naturally, I was interested to run across this use of Charles Fort's captivating ramblings as evidence. I always thought Charles Fort would be a big deal on the “blog,” though he has never ended up in even 10 “posts” so far, after all the “blog’s” horrible countless years of thankless and unwanted existence. You remember Charles Fort, of whom it was once recorded on a book flap that he "collected and published reliable accounts of colored rains, living things falling to earth, unknown objects in space and in the oceans, people who have mysteriously appeared and disappeared." Charles Fort, to whom Tom Wolfe casually alluded: "Cassady began fibrillating the vocal cords, going faster and faster until by dawn if he had gone any faster, he would have vibrated off, as old Charles Fort said, and gone instantly into the positive absolute. It was a nice weird party." Charles Fort, whose glowing owls inspired the owls in my own second book. Charles Fort! That’s what I wanted to say. I wanted to say Charles Fort. Oh! In conclusion – and you will have to pardon me in advance for blue language on a level such as never, in my memory, has been attempted on the “blog” before – I watched THE DISORDERLY ORDERLY again, and as I was looking it up afterward in Fujiwara’s excellent monograph, I ran across Jerry Lewis’s defense of the puppet sequence from THE ERRAND BOY, which, having grown wise over the years, I now welcome with arms open wide. In fact, I’m ashamed of some of my earlier “posts” in which I seemingly apologize for Jerry. Back in those days, I just wanted everybody to like me! Now I don’t care anymore. So, Fujiwara interviews Jerry, who says of the part of the movie in which he, Jerry, cavorts tenderly with (if I recall correctly) a flirtatious, languorous ostrich puppet and enjoys maudlin interactions with a little finger-puppet clown… Jerry, who says of himself, actually, “We call that a director with steel balls.” And I was like, you know what? He’s right!

McNeil's Li'l Bogie Bit #7

I can hardly believe it's already time for another Li'l Bogie Bit! But I'll tell you: I just ended a job, and I've already gone over all the other reasons that I no longer say I've quit "blogging," even though most people don't even know what "blogging" is or was, including me. What was I saying? Oh, yes, McNeil sent another of his li'l bogie bits. I'll quote it directly from his virtual mouth! "Bogie had trouble crying on demand for a director, and his second wife, Mary, thought that odd because offscreen he cried at card tricks." One thing I love about our popular (with McNeil) recurring feature "McNeil's Li'l Bogie Bits" is the mystery. The things unsaid! But that's why they are bits and not... boulders. Like... what kind of card trick could make Humphrey Bogart cry? Sure, I can see you crying if someone pulled a coin out of your ear. "How'd that get in there? Waaah!" Or if you're worried about the welfare of a magician's pigeon as it is being stuffed into a lacquered box. But to weep at the sight of the three or clubs or whatever, even if you find it unexpectedly in your own pocket, well, I frankly find it excessive. Pull yourself together, Bogie! In conclusion, I hear some of you griping that I have given you TWO li'l bogie bits, one about Bogart not being able to cry on demand and another about him crying in his spare time. You are wrong. Those are interlocking parts of a single bogie bit. If you don't like it, go somewhere else for your bogie bits! I'm getting sick and tired of your constant complaining.

Pelicans Are Not Owls

Undoubtedly you recall with a complex admixture of emotions the uncanny raccoon coincidence I personally shared with the narrator of a book I was reading in the waiting room of a doctor. Well, hold onto your hat(s)! We happened to be driving across the bridge to Dauphin Island the other day, a bridge I had not crossed in at least 45 years - though, when we reached a certain part of it, I recalled a recurring nightmare the bridge had given me in my youth... and that night, after we had crossed the bridge in the "present day," I had the terrible dream again! For the first time in many decades. But that is not what I meant to tell you. Don't trouble yourself about my tortured mind! What I meant to say is that as we crossed the bridge I took note of several pelicans, marveling at how weird they were, and remarking upon said weirdness to my beloved helpmeet, and then! Then, when we got where we were going, I opened up the book I had last cracked in the doctor's office and immediately came to this sentence: "Li looked at pelicans on the pier and remembered how weird they were, with their handbag-like beaks." Now I should name the book, because I have quoted a sentence. It's LEAVE SOCIETY by Tao Lin. I know what you are thinking. You are thinking two things. One of them is "Does Jack Pendarvis, chiefly known for his interest in the owls of literature, realize that pelicans are not owls?" Well, now I do! Thanks! The other question you have is whether or not I considered that taking my book clearly designated for medical emergencies, and deciding willy-nilly that it could serve double duty as the book I take along when I am visiting my parents, might bring down an avalanche of bad luck to crush my body and soul. Once again, now I have. Too late! In a possibly related matter, Dad told us that Dauphin Island was originally called Massacre Island by the French explorers who landed there, because they found a big pile of mysterious bones. My brother confirmed as much on his phone. He didn't trust our father, I guess! Dr. Theresa and I described a weird animal we had seen doing an eerie, serpentine lope across the road in Coden, Alabama, and Dad told us we had seen a mink. Following my brother's bad example, I looked up a mink on my phone and confirmed its minkiness. Later, at a separate gathering, after we had told our mink story afresh, my brother-in-law and I had a discussion about the plural of mink, and HE looked up the answer on HIS phone! What a weekend. I said I had never seen a mink before and Dr. Theresa boasted that she had seen plenty of mink (an acceptable plural) being cruelly mistreated in the film GORKY PARK. (Note that Dr. Theresa, with her tender heart, ceased her viewing at that juncture.) I said it didn't count, that I meant seeing mink in person. Everybody ran out of the room as we got in a big screaming match about it, ha ha, not really! I just wanted to make sure you were still riveted by the tale, because a very important part is coming up. A few days after the mink, Dr. Theresa and I saw a pig run across the road just about 2 miles away from my parents' house! Now, this was an adorable little brown farm pig, not a hairy, scary wild pig with giant-ass teeth for goring and chomping. Reading back over the "post," I changed "giant" to "giant-ass" for extra emphasis. To anyone I have offended with my cavalier use of dirty language, I apologize. A bittersweet coda indeed: I looked it up on the "internet" in the course of "researching" this "post," and am now debating whether or not to tell Dr. Theresa that the animal in GORKY PARK is a sable.

A Whisper in the Night

"I heard something like a hoarse whisper behind me while walking the dog the other night, and when I turned around...THIS..." So goes McNeil's caption for the above photo. Now, if this "post" were more artfully presented, I would have moved McNeil's photo of the owl down below the text alluding to it, so that the owl might work as an astonishing revelation, worthy of the drama of McNeil's caption. The fact remains, however, that though I no longer claim to have "stopped 'blogging,'" I am still very, awfully lazy. Just to let you know, in a possibly related matter, I continue to read old comic books every night in bed as a perhaps superstitious ritual tied to my recuperation. I've been reading a few issues of one with the poorly punctuated - not to mention misleading - title KID COLT OUTLAW. Mostly, this "outlaw" seems to go around helping cops, based on the little I've seen of him in action. Can't say I care much for Kid Colt. He's no El Diablo! In fact, as I was texting to Tom Franklin a while back, though DC had the milquetoast reputation and Marvel was theoretically what the cool kids enjoyed in the 1970s, the DC western comic books feel meaner and grittier than the Marvel ones. Yes, yes, I'm as shocked as you are. Let's all calm down. The main takeaway is that one Kid Colt character blurts out, "Well, I'll be a double-dyed hoot-owl!" Why anyone would dye a hoot-owl once, much less twice, is a mystery I intend to leave unexplored. In conclusion, between typing this sentence and the one before it, I happened to find a typo on page 1,256 of JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS: "world" where "word" is clearly meant. Ironically (?), a fitting typo for a translation of Mann. (See also.)

Doom and So On

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

Important

By now you are intimately familiar with my new habit of reading old comic books at the close of each busy day. Among the most recent delivery from Tom Franklin was nestled one about Zatanna, the superhero who is also a magician. As you can see in the illustration above, there was an allusion to Phyllis Diller in the old Zatanna comic book. This is important information that I need to relay to McNeil right away. As he is, for all practical purposes, the only person still reading the "blog," I believe that my mission has already been accomplished. But I am going to check in with him privately as well, because I also need to tell him about a double entendre accidentally (?) made by the Flash in the same comic. It is too saucy to be printed here on the "blog." Now, I am sure you will never forget the time I found an owl in an Alan Moore Swamp Thing comic book. And I know you feel as strongly as I do about the time I found out Jan Potocki thought he was a werewolf. (You know, you can "click" on all these "links" to refresh your memory of these matters.) The latter incident caused me, somewhat indirectly, to purchase a copy of Potocki's novel THE MANUSCRIPT FOUND IN SARAGOSSA from Square Books. I could almost swear I already had a copy of it at some remote time in the past, but that mystery is forever shrouded in the mists of my mellow golden yesterdays. Anyhow! This paperback of THE MANUSCRIPT FOUND IN SARAGOSSA features as its cover the very same Goya etching lovingly reproduced in Swamp Thing, bestowing the presence of its own scary owl upon the later work. Whether there is an owl in the text of Potocki's novel, I have not yet had an opportunity to ascertain. However, my happiness remains unmuted, as the coincidence allows me to inform you that one of the old comic books I read last night in bed happened to be a pre-Moore Swamp Thing, in which some punk-rock vampires used hollowed-out pinball machines as coffins. One punk-rock vampire explained the uncanny similarities between being in a mosh pit and his existence as one of the bloodthirsty undead, a monologue that put me in mind of the fear of beatniks exhibited in pop art of an even earlier era.