More Book Junk: Giggleswick Edition

I've been thinking about how one book always makes you read another book. I've been thinking about it for so long that I entered the "Who cares?" stage of my thinking, which consumes a large portion of my thinking process. I've been thinking of it (again) ever since that Lydia Davis book made me read a John Ashbery book. Another thing that happened... our most recent Million Dollar Book Club selection caused me to buy a 1923 edition of Lady Anne Clifford's diaries, with a long preface by Vita Sackville-West. Megan and I discussed whether the author made Vita Sackville-West's preface sound good or whether she tried to make it sound bad but it sounded good anyway. Or some variation on that. I can't explain the book club's intricacies! And anyway, the big news is that when I opened the 1923 edition of Lady Anne Clifford's diaries with a long preface by Vita Sackville-West, some old letters (1973-74) fell out! The letters were addressed to an E.M. Bottomley (familiarly known as Michael?) from a Cecil (I think) who lived at Huntsman's Cottage in Giggleswick. Giggleswick! It's a real place! And now I am imagining everyone from Giggleswick saying yes, so what, Giggleswick is an everyday name, why are you so bothered about Giggleswick, everybody knows about Giggleswick, why would you even think it is a funny name, or whatever it is that you think? Shut up about Giggleswick, these voices are saying in my head. Well, as I was about to "click" publish, I decided on a whim to see if I could find E.M. Bottomley, who obtained this very copy of Lady Anne Clifford's diaries on April 14 of 1946, according to his inscription on the flyleaf, and I am 100% sure, based on the content of the letters, that this ("click" here) is him. (See also.)

Big August Wrap-Up

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

The Mystery of Food

Now I am sure you all remember how Michael Kupperman told me in 2012 about a series of detective novels written by the actor George Kennedy (pictured, above), in which George Kennedy himself is the detective... or, as I discovered by reading this one that Ace gave me for my birthday, at least the Dr. Watson. Anyhow, I'm not going to tell you what George Kennedy, the author, compares to "Jell-O on a plate," but I will say that he describes the first dead body he comes across as looking like a baked ham. Later in the book we find this beauty: "The moon was now the color of fat on prime roast beef."

Accomplishing Something

So my friend from "She Blogged By Night" was tweeting about the seventies version of THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU, which she watched recently, and suddenly I was flooded by memories, just exactly like Marcel Proust! I remembered things that have been buried in my subconscious for forty years. Shameful secrets! Ha ha! They were not shameful. But I remembered THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU as maybe the first time I ever saw a movie trailer and thought, "That movie is going to be great! I can't wait!" And then, when I saw the movie, I believe it was my first experience of this feeling: "Hey! I've been tricked by advertising! I didn't know they could do that!" I was old enough to know better, but I guess I didn't. For some reason, though, I bought the comic book tie-in. I tell ya, the ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU people must've seen me coming. They got all my money. But here's the thing... at the end of the comic book, Michael York is in a rowboat, I think, waiting to be rescued with the woman he loves, and she TURNS INTO A CAT! Or she gets, you know, sharp teeth and cat eyes, anyway. It's a shocker! And I didn't remember that from the movie. So for forty years I guess it's been in the back of my mind: did that happen in the movie and I missed it somehow? Maybe it was subtle! I put this question to "She Blogged By Night," who reported that no, the movie does not end that way. Thus was a forty-year burden eased from my shoulders! BUT! She also told me that they apparently DID shoot that ending (see below), though it was scrapped, and that furthermore, there was another proposed ending in which that character, we'll call her the Cat Woman, gives birth to a kitten! You know, in all the years since the invention of the "internet," I could have looked this up for myself, but I forgot I ever wanted to know the answer until the "internet" reminded me. I feel like the "internet" has finally accomplished something. I don't "blog" anymore but this seemed necessary to report.

Witch Wigglers

FIRST OF ALL. Jake did NOT mention Jerry Lewis on ADVENTURE TIME tonight, but "alternative comics" icon Gilbert Hernandez had him doing just that in the original version of the outline that eventually became the episode "Mama Said." I was disappointed that Jerry didn't make the final board! And now, BEHIND THE SCENES IN THE WRITERS ROOM: We got stuck around Act Three, I mean, sitting there with serious looks on our faces saying things like, "What does the giant mushroom WANT?" And it was slowing work to something less than a crawl. As a way of getting ourselves over the hump, we started typing in some bellowing dialogue, all caps, just as a placeholder, to give ourselves permission to see how the rest of the story played out, and the mushroom was saying "Things a Mushroom Might Say" (as they would have put it on the $10,000 Pyramid): like, "I HAVE LOTS OF VITAMIN B!" Well, Kent and I saw that this was really cracking Pen up, so we just starting piling on more to make him laugh, and Pen got into it and pretty soon we were looking up mushrooms on the "internet" and typing big, bellowing statements about them in all caps. And it was making us laugh even harder because we imagined trying to convince Kelsey Grammer to do the richly bellowing mushroom voice (as far as I know, that was never seriously considered, and I have no idea who ended up doing such a fine job). Long story short, we never did figure out what the mushroom wanted. But that little exercise loosened us up and freed us to finish the story. That's either a valuable writing lesson or a cautionary tale. So the "placeholders" became the thing itself. So when someone listened to a mix of the episode and said, "That dialogue made me think of Michael Kupperman," I reacted with surprise and horror! Because as a writer you never want to accidentally step on the other guy's territory - especially so in this case, because I am Michael's friend AND biggest fan. I realized they were talking about Snake 'n' Bacon, a couple of Michael's characters. Bacon is a strip of bacon who can only speak in bacon facts. So you can see the connection, which escaped us at the time. So promise me something! Help me pay proper tribute to Michael by buying one of his books today. His books literally make me cry with laughter, as I have mentioned here many times before. If you enjoy crying, please do as I say. Oh yeah! One more thing I just realized as I was watching: I got to use my trusty copy of OZARK MAGIC AND FOLKLORE by Vance Randolph to research dowsing rods for this episode. A lot of that didn't make the final cut either, but it was still fun to research: another good (?) writing tip... research is fun even if you don't use all of it! "These characters are called water witches or witch wigglers, and the forked switches they carry are called witch sticks," writes Vance Randolph.

New Hit Song

Kelly Hogan sang a whole new song in my dream last night. And I still remember it! There's not much to it. It just goes, "I was born to break up with you," over and over, kind of to the tune of "You Send Me" by Sam Cooke. When it becomes a big hit just remember I wrote it in my sleep. Melissa Ginsburg and I (in my dream) were in a church where Hogan was singing this song, and Melissa was like, "Go talk to Michael Kupperman! He's by himself and he's CRYING." So I went to the pew where Michael was sitting, only it wasn't him. It was a tweedy old man! With a cane! And the old man wasn't crying. In fact, he was grinning intensely and seemed eager to chat. I was like, "Melissa, that's not Michael Kupperman!" And she was like, "Well, his hat fooled me." But he WASN'T WEARING A HAT.

My Nephew Is a Genius

Last time I went to Atlanta I forgot to bring my little jotting notebook in which to jot my little notes. You won't catch me making that tragic mistake twice. 1. On the drive to Atlanta this weekend, "Jokerman" by Bob Dylan played. Some particular lyric - I can't recall which; by necessity, one cannot jot while driving - made me think for a split second, "Maybe this song is about Jerry Lewis!" (You may "click" here to refresh your memory about the time Bob Dylan got obsessed with Jerry Lewis.) It did have a "sad clown" vibe. But it also has a bunch of mystical stuff about "kings dressed in scarlet" or something. So never mind. Or, wait! THE KING OF COMEDY. I believe he dressed in scarlet. I don't really think "Jokerman" is about Jerry Lewis. But I was driving alone and had time to think. 2. The occasion of the drive was Barry Mills's birthday party. Who should be there but Craig "Sven" Gordon. We reminisced without irony about the old band we used to be in together, just like a couple of living relics from the cliché museum. 3. Somehow the band Kansas came up, prompting Sven to reveal that the lead singer of Kansas moved into his neighborhood for a time and could often be spotted jogging! 4. Chris Lopez came to the party. An interesting beetle landed on his arm. It looked just like a piece of popcorn. 5. Last time I saw Barry's daughter she was two years old. Now she's nine. Barry told her how when she was two, she liked it when I made crazy trumpet noises, it would really make her laugh. So once I was doing that and Dr. Theresa encouraged me like so: "Work it, Jack!" And Barry's two-year-old daughter suddenly shouted, "Work it, Jack!" Ha ha ha! Barry's daughter bore the retelling of this story with good grace uncommon in one of her age. She was thoughtful and polite about the rambling of her elders. 6. Look!

Barry's birthday cake, of admirable fluffiness, was decorated in remembrance of that kids' show that Barry and I used to make. 7. I met a guy who is working on a feature film about the founding of McDonald's, starring Michael Keaton and Laura Dern. He showed me a picture of "the first McDonald's" building and set that he had helped construct in a town north of Atlanta. "It'll be there a few weeks and then it will be gone, like it was never there," he said. I probably said, "I just had a dream about Laura Dern!" I probably said, "Tell her!" 8. I met a woman named Jenny who I thought said she was "as culpable as any vicar." I asked her, "Did you just say you are as culpable as any vicar?" She replied, "No." She also wanted to know what Lopez and I were like when we had "velvet nubs for horns." Or did she say "fuzzy nubs"? My jotting is unclear on this point. Perhaps she said both. She meant to ask what we were like when we were young. Lopez said, anticlimactically, that one of us would generally walk into a bar and the other one would be there, and one of us would say, "Are you gonna finish eating that?" Jenny asked whether we would sit across from one another or on the same side of the booth on such occasions, and the conversation dwindled. 9. Hey! Remember when I was amazed to learn that there were chickens living on the roof of Manuel's Tavern? I finally got to eat some of those eggs, "rooftop eggs" they were called on the menu, when my sister and brother-in-law and nephew Jasper had brunch there. Jasper wanted a pancake and some French fries. My sister was hesitant! But I was a strong advocate for this hugely appealing and innovative idea. I couldn't believe I had never thought of it myself! French fries are a perfect breakfast food. Why doesn't everybody serve French fries with breakfast? They are not that much different than so-called "home fries." My sister finally said okay, and I like to think my relentless nagging had something to do with it. 10. On the drive home, I saw a coyote run across the highway! I don't think I've ever seen one in person before. I know Melissa and Chris have some living out near their place, but coyotes strike me as exotic in our region. I guess they're not. I have to remind myself about the time I was so excited to see some wild turkeys on the side of the highway, and every person I know told me it's no big deal to see wild turkeys and that I was a sucker for being excited. And now I suppose you're all going to tell me that everybody has French fries for breakfast where you come from. Liars!

Regular Normal Celebrity Autobiography Check

Went over to Square Books and poked around the new release tables for celebrity biographies and autobiographies. You know I always like to check the indices (plural of index!) for Jerry Lewis references. Yeah? Well, how do you spend YOUR time? Oh yeah? Well go to hell. John Cleese has an index. No Jerry Lewis. But I don't suppose any of us will ever forget when Cleese's colleague Michael Palin didn't have Jerry in his index, yet Jerry appeared in the book itself, as I serendipitously discovered. Martin Short does not have an index. But the book happened to fall open to a paragraph in which Mr. Short lovingly dissects the structure of a gag from THREE ON A COUCH.

The Jerry

Mark Childress and Bill Boyle were both kind enough to send me a really interesting article about the time the Beastie Boys almost started a dance craze called "The Jerry Lewis." The links between Beasties and Jerry have been noted on this "blog" before. But here we have the Holy Grail. Best of all, the "Do the Jerry Lewis" track is grounded in a sample from a Dino, Desi & Billy LP I bought at The End of All Music. You remember Dino, Desi & Billy! Jimmy once referred to Dino, Desi & Billy as "mopey superheroes." I cringed yet nodded when the author of the article stated of the man himself that "Jerry Lewis is mad funky" (see also). I enjoyed learning that "The Jerry Lewis" is based on Jerry's climactic dance (pictured) from THE NUTTY PROFESSOR. And I like the perceptive appreciation that shines through the disdain when a childhood friend of Mike D's says, "One aspect of Mike and his brother Stephen was that they liked these kinds of low-class things. They'd get off on stuff like Mr. T, you know? So maybe Jerry Lewis fit in, in a way. You can't tell if the guy's an idiot, or is he an idiot savant? He sort of makes you uncomfortable in some of those early movies. Is there something wrong with this guy, or was this an astonishing performance?"

Devil Eyes II: The Bedeviling

Megan sent me that "devil eyes" picture I told you about that nearly killed John Currence. Ha ha, look, there in the back, Liam is standing in front of a painting that makes him look like he has giant hair. Good times, good times. Speaking of hair, last night I watched a few minutes of X, Y & ZEE but I couldn't go on! You see, back when Megan was here and we were reading the Richard Burton diaries together, I noticed X, Y & ZEE coming on TCM and dvr'd it and we planned to watch it but we never did. So the associations are painful. But I watched enough to see that Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Caine in 1972 had hair that looked especially crazy when they were playing ping pong... and that the screenplay was written by Edna O'Brien. And that Elizabeth Taylor won at ping pong.

Writers

Much celebration last night because Jimmy (above, with yours truly) and McKay both "defended" themselves and earned their degrees so now "The Man" says they are "writers." And in this one case, "The Man" is really onto something! Because these two are the real deal, all right. And though I haven't taught in a good long while now, I couldn't be prouder. I felt pretty happy and proud seeing Michael Bible back in town for a visit last night, too, and went around the bar taking a lot of false credit for his achievements as well. These people are writers, man! They can't help it! I didn't have a thing to do with that. I just stood there yelling "Go for it!" Also out celebrating: Megan Abbott, who snapped the photo above. She told me that she read in that Shirley Temple autobiography there used to be Shirley Temple martini pitchers with Shirley's cherubic little face on them! And they came with a helpful slogan for mixing: "Gin to the chin/ Vermouth to the tooth." Speaking of which, you will never believe this, but I have not had even one single little drink in this photo (below) with McKay, though I look as if I just lurched dipsomaniacally into an alley and got rolled for my cash by the Easter bunny, and am still suffering from shock and, possibly, a concussion. McKay, it hardly needs noting, looks like her awesome self. (Regretful footnote: I misheard. It was a Shirley Temple milk pitcher, not a martini pitcher, though some devilish "wags" used it in that perverted way and came up with the handy gin/vermouth mnemonic.)

I'm Not Your Psychiatrist

"Click" here to read an interview I did with Megan Abbott for LENT. The online magazine, not the period of sacred deprivation! Maybe before you read it you will want to check out the following list I have helpfully compiled of people we mention by name in our interview, in order of appearance. That doesn't even include the people we mention, but NOT by name, such as our parents! Perhaps such a list will encourage you to read the interview. Or maybe you will become discouraged and lethargic! Maybe you will think this list is a good enough substitute for reading the interview. Or maybe your reaction will be one of blankness and disregard. I'm not your psychiatrist! 1. Jerry Lewis (Ha ha, I know! I can't help it. I literally cannot have a conversation without mentioning Jerry Lewis - usually right at the outset, like this.) 2. Beth Ann Fennelly 3. William Faulkner 4. Sigmund Freud (Ha ha! Just as I cannot have a conversation without mentioning Jerry Lewis, Megan is sure to bring up old Sigmund Freud. It just happens! Jerry Lewis is to me as Sigmund Freud is to Megan Abbott.) 5. David Lynch 6. Dashiell Hammett 7. James M. Cain 8. Eleanor Parker (pictured) 9. Arlene Dahl 10. Rhonda Fleming 11. Douglas Sirk 12. Georges Simenon 13. Anton Chekhov 14. Bill Griffith 15. Dorothy B. Hughes 16. Tom Franklin 17. Richard Dreyfuss 18. Rosemary Clooney 19. Nathaniel Hawthorne 20. Flannery O'Connor 21. Mickey Spillane 22. Raymond Chandler 23. John Banville 24. Humprhey Bogart 25. Ross MacDonald 26. Eudora Welty 27. Spencer Tracy 28. Katharine Hepburn 29. Margaret Millar 30. Barry Hannah 31. Harold Bloom 32. Hamlin Garland 33. Ernest Hemingway 34. Sherwood Anderson 35. Dean Martin Okay, I'm tired of making "links" now and nobody "clicks" on them anyway. 36. Marilyn Monroe 37. Stan Laurel 38. Oliver Hardy 39. Bud Abbott 40. Lou Costello 41. David Niven 42. Nick Tosches 43. Betty Hutton 44. Judy Garland 45. Danny Thomas 46. McNeil (I'll mention here, uselessly, that McNeil recently had a short story up at LENT... I told about it on twitter, which many more people read than this "blog.") 47. Preston Sturges 48. Billy Wilder 49. Dr. Theresa 50. Dave Kehr 51. Bob Hope 52. Andrew Sarris 53. Wallace Shawn 54. Fred MacMurray 55. Shirley MacLaine 56. Cameron Crowe 57. Gloria Swanson 58. Nancy Olsen 59. Audrey Wilder 60. Alfred Hitchcock 61. Pat Hitchcock 62. Alma Hitchcock 63. Vincent Minnelli 64. H.P. Lovecraft 65. Raymond Carver 66. Edith Wharton 67. Michael Chabon 68. Louisa May Alcott 69. Philip Roth (Reading PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT recently, I came upon a line that might serve as an epigraph for this interview: "The disproportionate and the melodramatic, this is my daily bread!") 70. Claudia Roth Pierpont 71. Scott Phillips - Be sure to use your newest computer while reading the interview. On my old one from 2004 the italics don't show up. But on Dr. Theresa's spiffy newer model, they do! And Megan and I EMPHASIZE lots of WORDS.

Hey Doris Day Is From Cincinnati

Michael Griffith just wrote me from the University of Cincinnati to tell me that Doris Day (pictured) is from Cincinnati. I had no idea. So you see how everything comes together!

The Man Behind the Palimpsest

Hey so back in 2007 when I taught at a university for the very first time there was this here advanced graduate fiction writing class and one dude in it was not an MFA student, he was just some guy, some OTHER KIND of student, so some of the sensitive and perpetually offended MFA students regarded him with suspicion, alarm, and the bitter, smirking hatred that only a so-called fiction writer can call forth from his or her wizened soul, speaking for myself of course, though Will McIntosh - for that was the cleancut and decent young fellow's name - does not recall it that way, as I found out the other night when I ran into him on McKay's back porch before Good Idea Club. Will is not the type to indulge in such small feelings. And it is a fact that Elizabeth and Michael were in that class and they were warm and welcoming indeed, and so was everybody else, except those few who really, really weren't. I have to say they didn't dig me too much either. So perhaps my intentions are muddied here! I did make them read some kind of book-length rhyming poem about a knight, maybe. I had no idea what I was doing, it is true, but don't worry about your children's rotten education, I'm not teaching anymore. Someone else is giving them their rotten education now, just kidding, education is great. Last time George Saunders was in town, I introduced him to Will up at the City Grocery Bar, and told him all about a story Will had written for the class, one I never forgot, unlike so many others in the intervening years, especially the part where the mother gets sick from ******* *** ******** **** and, in the story's vivid climactic moment, ****** ** ******* into the ******. (I don't want to spoil it for you!) And I badgered Will once again, as I often did, to publish that story somewhere so other people could get a big kick out of it. And George Saunders gave Will a pep talk too. Because he's just as nice as Will! Then we went somewhere else and George Saunders ate a corn dog (something I never weary of typing) and we speculated about why maybe Will kept putting his story on the backburner, which is because of Will's real job, which is SAVING INNOCENT PEOPLE FROM BEING KILLED. Will is a lawyer for the Innocence Project, perhaps a more important job than "writing," ha ha, it is funny to call writing a job. Will is the person that I took to calling "The Man Who Says 'Palimpsest'" here, though I can't for the life of me recall why I thought it was important to protect his identity from the people who read this "blog," who don't actually exist. And now you can read his story ("click" here) in the old Lent Magazine, your one-stop shop for fun. It's a Christmas story!

My Recent Adventures

1) I had a drink with Abby at Manuel's Tavern! She ordered a "snakebite" so I ordered one too because it sounded good and it was. 2) I think a grifter tried to grift me at the gas station in Lincoln, Alabama. Nice try, grifter! After I left the grifter, hours later, I started thinking, "Did he have a confederate steal my suitcase from the back of the car while he was distracting me?" But I was driving and couldn't turn around to look. Anyway, my suitcase was okay. I had that book about the English Civil War in it. Was I secretly hoping that the grifter had stolen it so I wouldn't have to read it anymore? I don't know. Who can plumb the depths of the human heart? Ha ha, the word "plumb" just reminded of me of when I was teaching and Michael turned in a story that had this sentence in it: "She was plum." And all the grad students were salivating mightily and saying what a great sentence it was but I was like, "Did you mean she was plump?" And Michael sadly said yes. He forgot to put the "p" on the end of the word. And the grad students were chastened, which hardly ever happens. And I was like "IN YOUR FACE!" But maybe they were right and Michael and I were wrong, yes, even Michael, who wrote it. "She was plum" is more interesting than "She was plump." That just goes to show you! Something.

Because I Like to Party

A nice note from Leslie! And I quote: "I recently went to a natural history museum and saw all kinds of owls in dioramas of their alleged natural habitats. The placards were very funny to me. I took bad pictures of them to send to you. I imagine you are like 'Andy' in Pretty in Pink in one of my favorite self-improvement montages in which she uses weird crappy old dresses to make one magic prom dress. I tried to find the video of the montage. It's not there. No one cares. Oh well. I do. Maybe these weird crappy owl photos can turn into to one magic owl dress." But I care, Leslie! Thanks! Yet there is something perverse about my choice of an example here; it's the owl arrangement I find most offensive and unsettling. Like, "Let's stuff these dead murdered owls full of sawdust and line them up on a branch like a cute little family, aren't they cute." Maybe the best thing about the plaques is that they give each owl its own dramatic subtitle. "Great Horned Owl: Ruler of the night." "Snowy Owl: Ghostly visitor from the north." The hapless short-eared owl just gets "An unusual owl." That smarts! Poor short-eared owl, just like Cyndi Lauper, she's so unusual, but in that case it was a compliment. (Was the "Andy" segment in PRETTY IN PINK inspired by Lauper at all, or has my shaky sense of the past reached its next level of muddy blur, just preceding the abyss?) Hey but I want to tell you, that great horned owl is one scary customer all right. His plaque lists all the things he loves to kill. I don't even want to tell you. "They will even usurp the active nests of eagles," is another terrifying thing from the plaque. Usurping the nests of mighty eagles! WHAT! A while back Leslie sent what I believe is her all-time favorite self-improvement montage, featuring Michael J. Fox as the TEEN WOLF. I didn't "post" it. It was around nine minutes long, like those youtube clips McNeil likes to send, and there was lots of padding around the montage. Plus whoever put it on the youtube did some editing of his or her own, flipping the images from black-and-white to color for some expressive personal reason, a touch Leslie really enjoyed. ("Why is it black and white and color?" asks one plaintive youtube commenter. "Because I like to party," answers the "poster.") None of this is any excuse. On her last visit Leslie had us in stitches quoting from memory the TEEN WOLF montage song ("You gotta go with the flow, Joe... way to go, way to go.") and told us about showing the TEEN WOLF montage to a bunch of students who said, "Why are you showing us this?" I can't remember the answer.

French Monkey Dog

Dr. Theresa and I are watching the 1973 version of THE THREE MUSKETEERS (starring her old buddy Michael York) RIGHT NOW and do you know what it has in it? That's right: a monkey riding a dog, one of the "blog's" primary concerns.

Bevy

I am happy to be guest-editing the June issue of GRAVY, the magazine of the Southern Foodways Alliance. The theme is "food and crime" and you can expect contributions from a bevy of "blog" "faves": Abigail Greenbaum! Bill Boyle! Ace Atkins! Laura Lippman! Chris Offutt! Natasha Allegri! Jason Polan! Michael Kupperman! Kelly Hogan! McNeil! Also in June, after a long dry spell, short stories I wrote will appear in two magazines: "An Oyster Named Dan" in LUCKY PEACH and "Pinkeye" in PLEIADES. June! June is going to be big and filled with gravy.

Of Beards and Dolphins

So when the satellite died we lost all our dvr'd movies. Am I sad? I don't know. I guess that depends on whether you think anything matters. Probably not. I lost SOME KIND OF A NUT, which had repressive desublimation written all over it. It's about Dick van Dyke REFUSING TO SHAVE HIS BEARD! It starts from a bee's point of view, sloppily... I mean, it's sometimes the bee's point of view, sometimes almost the bee's point of view, sometimes not at all the bee's point of view, but you get the distinct and troubling impression that the director THINKS he's in the bee's point of view. That's as far as I got. And now Dick van Dyke and his controversial beard are gone! Gone forever! I wanted to watch THE DAY OF THE DOLPHIN, to see if it matched up with my childhood memories. I recall being in a hotel, the first hotel I ever encountered that was running recent theatrical releases on a special channel, and they just showed THE DAY OF THE DOLPHIN over and over. MOVIE CHANNELS WERE A MIND-BLOWING NOVELTY, Y'ALL. Now they're just dirt to us. As I recall, I didn't want to go outside, wherever we were on vacation. I just wanted to sit in the room and watch THE DAY OF THE DOLPHIN as many times as possible, and I think I did. It's a talking dolphin movie from screenwriter Buck Henry and director Mike Nichols, that's right, the team behind THE GRADUATE, natch! Of course, I didn't know that at the time. I just knew my eyes were secretly welling up with tears when the dolphin, whose name, I think, was "Pha," said to George C. Scott: "Pha LOVE Pa!" The dolphin called George C. Scott "Pa" because George C. Scott had taught him to talk! So George C. Scott was the dolphin's father figure! I guess! Well, anyway, it's erased, zapped, along with 60 other movies. And I never got around to it. And really, who cares? Ward McCarthy also has fond memories of THE DAY OF THE DOLPHIN and mentioned he might try showing it to his kids. I had to remind him that - spoiler alert! - something horrible happens to the dolphins at the end, I am almost certain. As Dr. Theresa would say, and often does, "That's the 1970s for ya!"

His Tumultuous and Awkward Fondness

Hey did I tell y'all that Michael Bible is back in town, at least for a brief spell before he goes off on another of his adventures? I spied him in the coffee-drinking section of Square Books the other day, where he seemed to be working on some writing. He saw that I was carrying THE LIFE OF JOHNSON and began chatting knowledgeably and eagerly about it, which did not surprise me, though Michael is a "modern" writer and I have always thought of his tastes as "modern" (I oversimplify). I read him out loud the paragraph about how when Johnson was a schoolteacher his "oddities of manner, and uncouth gesticulations, could not but be the subject of merriment" to his students. "In particular, the young rogues used to listen at the door of his bed-chamber, and peep through the key-hole, that they might turn into ridicule his tumultuous and awkward fondness for Mrs. Johnson." He called her "Tetty or Tetsey... which to us seems ludicrous," Boswell writes, going on to describe Mrs. Johnson as "very fat, with a bosom of more than ordinary protuberance, with swelled cheeks of a florid red, produced by thick painting, and increased by the liberal use of cordials..." Okay, Boswell, lay off! Gee.