I Gave Up

I thought I should tell you I stopped reading that giant hardcover "omnibus" of comics I mentioned yesterday. Why? Why did I give it up, I mean, not why did I think I should tell you. I don't have an answer for that one. Maybe because I'm unemployed and don't have anything else to do? As to the former question, however, it's not because I had shamed myself by mentioning it. It's because this "omnibus" is no damn good! The comics are too goofy. Yes, yes, I know I have often boasted perversely of loving the uncool, goofy comic book characters (not to be confused with the Disney character Goofy) the best... your Captain Marvel (the version often called "Shazam" by dimwits, for reasons I could get into here if I felt like it), your Metal Men, your Plastic Man, and so forth. But this glossy pile of junk I was reading was goofy in the wrong way. The goofiness it poured forth seemed born of bitterness and irony. The bitterness and irony of persons who have placed themselves high above goofiness. That's 1989 for you! There's a reason I originally stopped reading comic books when the price went up to 30 cents. Well, the reason was it became too expensive. Thirty cents is a lot of money! But the point is that the goofiness I like, the goofiness of your Plastic Man, your Metal Men, your Captain Marvel, is sincere and joyful... an embracing mechanism, not a distancing one. Anyway, I'd put this volume in the big overflowing garbage box of books they have for urchins to pick through in the park, but it's too damn big.

Cookie Man

If I'm reading the "blog" correctly - and really, who cares? - the last time I enjoyed a TV commercial was 2011 ("click" here for all the details you're craving). TV commercials! As I have mentioned many times, Dr. Theresa and I are the last two people who will watch "broadcast television" from time to time, like we're living in Colonial Williamsburg! The advertisers have a very special set of people in mind. All the commercials are about being afraid you'll fall down in the bathtub... or medicine to take if yet another medicine you take makes your mouth twitch almost imperceptibly, causing your loved ones to scorn and abuse you... or, as McNeil has correctly observed, deodorant you can proudly and openly spray on your butt... or... and here we reach the topic under consideration... life insurance. So, in the commercial I'm thinking about, there's a guy who picks up a cookie. He almost bites it, but then his wife tells him someone died, causing him to take the cookie away from his mouth. Then, every time he almost bites the cookie, she says something else that makes him take the cookie away from his mouth. This happens four or five times. He never puts the cookie in his mouth! I won't say I enjoy the commercial, but I have to admit that I'm riveted every time I watch it. I'm like, "Let the man eat his damn cookie!" I also wonder whose idea it was. Like was the actor all, "I don't think my character would ever eat the cookie"? Or was it in the script? Unless I'm hallucinating, the commercial starts with a closeup on the plate of cookies, which might argue for the latter. You know what this reminds me of? When I was a kid, you could send in a boxtop to vote on whether or not the Trix cereal rabbit finally got to eat some Trix. I seem to recall that I perversely voted to deny the rabbit such enjoyment. My reasoning, as I recall it, was that of course they were going to let the rabbit eat the cereal (which they did). But if I voted no, and then the rabbit was not allowed to eat the cereal, I could believe in the power of a single vote. Sobering thoughts for us to mull over in our times of contemporary life we currently experience in our daily existence as it is lived among us, the living, breathing people of the times we have today.

The Old Garbage Hole

Remember how I told you I was on a podcast and forgot to promote the pilot that Pen and I made? Well, that's okay! The podcast is out but we just heard the pilot has been pushed down the old garbage hole into reject town. The axe has fallen. We got the old heave-ho. They're not making a show out of it is what I'm trying to say. For more information about how pilots work, see Uma Thurman's monologue on the subject in PULP FICTION. Anyhow! The host of the podcast, Andy Beckerman, is a fine young man. Fine young man! So don't disapppoint him. Don't you dare disappoint him! I won't see you harm a hair on his precious head with your cruel indifference! Don't listen to the podcast for me. No, just push me down the old garbage hole with all my hopes and dreams. It's where I belong! Listen to the podcast for him! Do it for Andy Beckerman! You know, this was my first real podcast appearance to my way of thinking, and I made some rookie mistakes, some of which have already been covered in previous "posts" for your convenience. Well, I should be clear. I've been on two other podcasts, but they don't count. One was about ADVENTURE TIME, and it was recorded back in the days when I would work on a story and then move on to the next story, and the next story, and lots of other stories, and I wouldn't see the episode or know how it had evolved until roughly nine months later, when it appeared on my actual television set, which is a thing people used to have in their homes. So these guys from the ADVENTURE TIME podcast had seen a screener of an upcoming episode ("Football," season 7 episode 5) and had a lot of great questions about it, but I had no idea what they were talking about. My brain was somewhere else by then! So they were a bit put out with me. I don't recall what I ended up muttering about instead. But you could barely call it a podcast. My fault, not theirs! Another podcast was the one I did with Ace Atkins when my book SWEET BANANAS came out. Now, that one, it was exactly the same sort of conversation Ace and I have when we walk around the neighborhood, so I don't count it. It was too easy! Anyway, with Mr. Beckerman, I got the idea that my main job was to talk, so I rushed to fill any microsecond of perceived silence with whatever wild notion pushed its way to the front. I was under the sway of what Edgar Alan Poe referred to as "The Imp of the Perverse."

McNeil's Li'l Bogie Bits

Why, hello. I didn't see you standing there. You're just in time for "McNeil's Li'l Bogie Bits," your one place on the "internet" for McNeil and his bogie bits, so li'l, and extracted so lovingly from a 700-page biography of Humphrey Bogart that McNeil is reading. I'll hand it over to McNeil, who writes, "In 1951 Bogart and Bacall had a radio show called 'Bold Venture.' Thirty minutes once a week. It lasted about a year and made them $500k in 1951 dollars." In a subsequent email, McNeil includes a clarifying detail of the show's plot, adding just the sort of zesty zing for which his vaunted bits are so justifiably famous: "Bacall is his young charge...kinky!" McNeil's chosen adjective may be explained by the fact that Bogart and Bacall were, of course, husband and wife, whereas "young charge" is a phrase one hears more often in connection with, say, Batman and Robin, or maybe that's just me.

Pancake Research

I found reason to recall a long-ago exchange in the "writers' room," when someone mentioned putting syrup on pancakes, whereupon Hanna, calling in from Sweden, said, with a degree of alarm, something like, "What kind of syrup would you put on pancakes?" Adam replied, "Breakfast syrup." Hanna said, and this may be a direct quote, "Breakfast syrup? You guys are crazy." We asked what goes on pancakes in Sweden and Hanna said, "Jam." Now, we all had to admit that sounded great! But it was clear that syrup in Sweden is different than what we call syrup in the USA. All of this came back to me as I contemplated the molasses sandwiches in Ingmar Bergman's film FANNY AND ALEXANDER. After recording my thoughts on the film below, I dispatched an urgent query to Hanna, asking what the translator might have been getting at. Hanna concluded that the children were most likely enjoying some treacle (AKA golden syrup) on bread, a cheaper substitute for honey on bread. Now, the grandmother in FANNY AND ALEXANDER seemed as if she would be able to afford all the honey a child could ever eat, but that is none of my beeswax. Ha ha. Hanna told me there is nothing like molasses in Sweden, although both she and I may have been conflating molasses and syrup, as I know from visiting dozens of websites that are all too eager to explain in excruciating detail the myriad important differences between molasses and syrup, which I perversely refuse to commit to memory, despite all my feigned interest in the subject.

Somebody Did It

The other morning at 4:18 AM I had - and recorded here - the big idea that someone should cast the same actor as both Claudius and the ghost of Hamlet's father. So last night I was watching the 2009 version of HAMLET starring David Tennant, and guess what? It's been done. So I felt the need to tell you I'm not the big brain I thought I was. That seems like too short, and too obvious, of a message, so I'll change the subject and tell you that though I'm just 20 pages into the book that Megan and I are reading about the making of THE WILD BUNCH, the author has already found time and space to call beach movies "stupid," the work of Lucille Ball's production company "idiot-box pablum" and Jim Hutton "annoyingly goofball" in "most of his films." Most of them! So I'm starting to get the feeling he doesn't think very highly of comedy, humor, jokes, general happiness, and the laughter of innocent children. I'm no stranger to the opinion. Someone expresses it to me nearly every day. But comedy - particularly its relative importance in art - has nothing to do with this dude's book as far as I can see, so the fact that he feels the need to trash it once every seven pages is fascinatingly perverse.

Karl Malden Wouldn't Sit Anywhere Else

When I go on a trip I still take my famous jotting book but I hardly jot in it anymore because I don't "blog" anymore, rendering the very act of jotting questionable. And besides, as Adam Muto rightly admonished me last time I won an Emmy (this is my subtle way of telling you that I just came back from Los Angeles with another one!) I should look up and experience the world directly rather than jotting about it while it's right there in my face. In fact, if you "click" on that previous "link" you will see a photo of me with my jotting book open and ready for jotting backstage in the immediate aftermath of the awards presentation two years ago. I'm the problem with America! But you know, I'm glad I brought the jotting book because I AM required to "blog" whenever I read a book with an owl in it, and on this trip there appeared in my path THREE books with owls in them. I couldn't believe it. It was a bonanza! Let's get right to them! Well, first I stopped by Square Books for something to read on the airplane, as I like to do. And I was drawn again to the Travis McGee novels of John D. MacDonald, though I never enjoy them the way I'm supposed to. But now I guess they say "airplane" to me because of some sick compulsion. I picked up this one called DARKER THAN AMBER and I was like, "This seems familiar." Because they all seem familiar. And the titles are interchangeable. So I put it back on the shelf and went home empty-handed. And I sat there and thought, why do I know that title? And I poked around on the "blog" and saw that my friend McNeil had mentioned DARKER THAN AMBER as being particularly sexist. But as far as I could tell from my own "blog" I hadn't read it, and perversely I decided to get it and see if McNeil was right. And McNeil was right! In fact, I would argue that Travis McGee goes beyond (?) mere misogyny into a psychotic fear of sex. Now, of course, we can't confuse the author with his creation, but I would argue that McGee is presented as an aspirational character. "Jake leaned back on his heels and stared up at me, like a man admiring a tall building," is a typically modest self-description by our narrator. And now please forgive me but I'm going to quote just a smidgen of the misogyny so you won't think I'm exaggerating. You have been warned. Here we find catalogued McGee's disapproval of women who have had too many boyfriends: "she suffers a sea change wherein her juices alter from honey to acid, her eyes change to glass, her heart becomes a stone, and her mouth a windy cave from whence, with each moisturous gasping, comes a tiny stink of death." What! What kind of writing do you call that? Moisturous! Moisturous? It has a certain purple tone that KNOWS it has a tone (A CERTAIN PURPLE TONE sounds like the title of a Travis McGee novel)... hmm... a tone approaching parody, but wanting it both ways... what is called in the business "kidding on the square," as I was once informed by Rob Schneider. Ha ha! But "tiny stink of death"? That's one of the grossest phrases I've come across. And later McGee refers to a woman's mouth as a "round horror-hole," okay? A ROUND HORROR-HOLE. Wow, I'm forgetting the owl. Weren't we talking about owls? McGee says that the eye of a corpse is "like a cheap glass eye in a stuffed owl." And you know what color that eye is? "Darker than amber," that's what color. So I was lying in bed reading this in the hotel room and Dr. Theresa was lying there too reading her own book - what a picture of contentment I am sure we made! - and she said, "Hey! This has an owl in it!" The owl in her book, she said, flew right into an inn and caused much consternation and dialogue. So! I finished Travis McGee and started a book of Sam Shepard short stories I had picked up at Skylight during one of our jaunts across the city. And in the very first story, some owls settle into a eucalyptus tree. So anyway that is a lot of owls in a lot of books for one trip. Speaking of Skylight Books! I ran into the actor Steve Little there, forced a copy of my most recent story collection on him (they had a couple of copies) and kind of harassed him until he fled the store. This is an accurate depiction of events. And speaking of Sam Shepard! So, T-Bone Burnett was one of the presenters at the Creative Arts Emmys, and I was determined to meet him at the ball following the show. And I did! Megan Abbott and I had been reading Sam Shepard's ROLLING THUNDER LOGBOOK, in which T-Bone Burnett appears, leading me to make the following brilliant remark to the distinguished musical icon of whom I have been a lifelong fan: "I saw a picture of you dressed up like a wizard!" (See above.) I'm getting everything out of order.

Let me check my jotting book and see which of my sparse jottings I've left out. Oh, went back to Dan Tana's and got the same booth. I was like, "Hey, I liked that booth when I was here before, can we have it?" And the maître d' was like, sure! "Karl Malden wouldn't sit anywhere else," he informed us. So here we are sitting where Karl Malden would be sitting were he still among the living. But he can't do a thing about it now! Photo by my brother. Well, I'm flipping through these pages and I hardly jotted anything, it turns out. I'm not sorry. On the plane ride to Los Angeles I was sufficiently convinced that my Biscoff cookie bore the face of a holy saint to request that Dr. Theresa take a photo of it, which she gamely did.

McNeil Log

In what may be a perverse secret campaign to keep me "blogging" against my wishes, McNeil sends the following email: "If you die before me, and if there is a viewing, I'm going to act like your tie needs straightening. When I pull my hands out I'll snap a ten dollar bill by the ends, hold it up to the light, then fold it up, put it in the pocket of my swimming trunks, put my hand against my side in a defining gesture and exit." I like how he saves the swimming trunks detail, and the casual way in which it is revealed. He adds, "You know who else does that gesture a lot? Major Healey!" And as soon as I read it, I could picture Roger Healey with his hand in just that position. But does that make it true? I have always intended to keep a log of McNeil's activities, even in the absence of the "blog."

Final note: McNeil and I have spent our whole lives spelling it "Healy," but according to imdb it's "Healey." Also: I just remembered something else from THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY. Burton talks about something you're compelled to do "will or nill," meaning whether you want to or not. And I wondered whether the roots of the adverb "willy-nilly" lie in that phrase. It makes a kind of sense! But I don't care enough to look it up.

Julian the Apostate Emperor's Big Kissing Speech

My traveling threw up another roadblock up for my ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY reading. But now I'm dawdling over its pages again. Can't seem to make it out of the love section. Now I'm reading about what a typical guy does when he's in love, according to Burton: "to turn up his Mushatos, and curl his head, prune his pickitivant [or peaked beard]... he may be scoffed at otherwise, as Julian that Apostate Emperor was for wearing a long hirsute goatish beard, fit to make ropes with." Of course, I am only telling you this for the sake of "pickitivant." It's like when I was so taken with Burton's insistence that life is but a glucupicron (I may be paraphrasing slightly). Hmm, I can't find that anywhere on the "blog." I must have only jabbered about glucupicron on twitter. And repeatedly, I feel sure. I'm sure I overdid it. I'm sure I rubbed it in. Ah, yes, yes, I see I had the temerity to explain life being nothing but a glucupicron to Neko Case:

@NekoCase "a bitter sweet passion, honey and gall mixt together" says Robert Burton in THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY

— Jack Pendarvis (@JackPendarvis) August 17, 2015

And I think I tried to convince everyone for a while that GLUCUPICRON would be a good ADVENTURE TIME episode title. I don't think my heart was in it, I mostly liked pretending it was a good idea, but I grew perversely insistent for a short while. Now to set the scene! MR. MOM was on briefly while I read THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY last night, just the section where Michael Keaton goes to the grocery store and can't figure out how to buy ham. I don't mean to brag but I think would have been able to buy ham the first time I ever even saw a grocery store. As an infant, given a little prodding, I could have bought some ham. You know, put a couple of dollars in my sticky fat little fist and encourage me to try to say "ham," or to flap my arms in that general direction. I could have gotten some ham. It's a big, big crisis for Michael Keaton, though, buying ham. It breaks him! How to buy ham? Insurmountable! I can't remember for sure, but I think Bob Hope is overwhelmed by the bounty of the modern grocery store in BACHELOR IN PARADISE, but I bet he could have bought some ham - and with a cool, collected demeanor, too. Nonchalantly! Even stunned by capitalism at its shiniest, Bob Hope could have suavely negotiated the purchase of some ham. And of course Joe Namath had no trouble with ham in HIS movie grocery store. Joe Namath knows who's boss! And it's not the ham. I recall that McNeil and I saw MR. MOM in the theater in Charlotte, North Carolina, when it came out, and no doubt we considered it a masterpiece of realism at the time, though we had both been capable of buying ham with little trouble for many years by that point. As you will recall, we prided ourselves on tucking in our t-shirts at the time. Burton goes on to relate how "Julian that Apostate Emperor" had to make a political speech apologizing for the unfashionable style of his beard. Julian opened with a self-deprecating joke about how he hated to kiss anybody anyway! ("I do not exert myself much, said he, in the giving and taking of kisses.") Because the people - the twitter mob of their time! - were saying that the emperor's kind of beard was inconvenient for kissing and made him look like an unkissable dummy. See, politics were always crazy, ha ha, what times. Truly Julian that Apostate Emperor was the Donald Trump of his day; I can't back that up.

Pythagoras Was Not a Vampire

I was reading LIVES OF THE NECROMANCERS... did I tell you about it? I found it because of a footnote by the 1927 editors of THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY. Anyway, LIVES OF THE NECROMANCERS is by William Godwin, the father of Frankenstein creator Mary Shelley. In the section on Pythagoras, Godwin writes that he "hid himself during the day at least from the great body of his pupils, and was only seen by them at night." So then I thought, I bet there are lots of crackpot theories about Pythagoras being a vampire on the "internet"! But when I googled the phrase "was pythagoras a vampire" here's what I got:

Godwin says Pythagoras "taught temperance in all its branches." And didn't Dracula famously say, "I never drink... wine"? Pythagoras was a vegetarian, but ISN'T THAT JUST WHAT A VAMPIRE WOULD SAY to explain why you never saw him joining in at meals? "What, however, seems to be agreed by all his biographers" (writes Godwin) "is that he professed to have already in different ages appeared in the likeness of man." Aha! Pythagoras claimed to be talking about reincarnation, but I think we can all guess the truth. "He tamed a Daunian bear by whispering in its ear... By the same means he induced an ox not to eat beans, which was a diet specially prohibited by Pythagoras." OH YEAH? Well, I just happened to learn on the "internet" that beans can be used to trick vampires ("click" here for details - you might need them!).

Then I read about Epimenides and Empedocles, both supposedly students of Pythagoras, but Godwin says that's impossible because one was born too soon and one was born too late... but I think Godwin is forgetting the possibility that PYTHAGORAS WAS A VAMPIRE. When Epimenides was young "he was sent by his father in search of a stray sheep, when, being overcome by the heat of the weather, he retired into a cave, and slept fifty-seven years." Some nap! Empedocles said, "I well remember the time before I was Empedocles, that I once was a boy, then a girl, a plant, a glittering fish, a bird that cut the air." Has nothing to do with vampires, but sounds like something Finn has said on ADVENTURE TIME. One thing I like about old Empedocles is that he wanted to disappear dramatically from mankind without a trace, so he threw himself into an active volcano: "in the result of this perverse ambition he was baffled, the volcano having thrown up one of his brazen sandals." When you loosen up the search terms a little bit (removing the quotation marks, for example), you get this ("click" here) - not sure what it is, exactly... some notes for Pythagoras fan fiction in which he's a vampire? And check out footnote #13 to this scholarly article ("click" here) titled "Explaining Pythagorean Abstinence From Beans." Ha ha, like you are going to "click" on that. Or anything! To quote the footnote in part, "Lawson also reports that in Rhodes an ostrakon marked with a pentacle, sacred emblem of the Pythagoreans, is placed on the lips of a corpse to prevent its becoming a vrykolakas." That means vampire! Wait, maybe Pythagoras was a vampire hunter. Or maybe he was one of those vampire hunters who is also a vampire.

Break Room

"I was listening to one of the more entertaining conspiracy theorists in the break room the other night and he mentioned The Bohemian Grove," writes McNeil. "You may already know about it. But the most important thing about it is there is a giant owl, whose voice was once a recording of Walter Cronkite." I checked into this and found a SPY magazine article by a guy who sneaked into the Bohemian Grove in 1989. The article says, "The big improvement this year was to project a sort of hologram onto the owl's face so that its beak seemed to move. Also, it was Walter Cronkite talking... Cronkite, as the owl, said that the only way Care could be cremated was to use fire from the Lamp of Fellowship before him, an 'eternal' gas flame that burns day and night." Speaking of 1989, I am struggling to find some things to say about PHYSICAL EVIDENCE, a Burt Reynolds movie from that year, viewed last night by members of the reconvened and reconstituted movie club: Ace Atkins, Bill Boyle, with Lee Durkee (who was actually the first person to tell me about the owl in the Bohemian Grove, though I don't think he mentioned that it was voiced by Walter Cronkite), stepping up to replace Megan Abbott, who moved back to New York City for some reason. Dr. Theresa and I thought Popeye's fried chicken would be a good accompaniment. We were amazed to discover that neither Ace Atkins nor Bill Boyle had ever eaten Popeye's. Lee told us about the sickly cat restored to good health by a diet of Popeye's biscuits. I am avoiding talking about PHYSICAL EVIDENCE. Hmm. It was nobody's finest moment. Well, it may have been one woman's finest moment. She played the flirtatious receptionist at a fish processing plant. As Bill Boyle observed, she gave the movie its one spark of life. We paid attention for two minutes. (Bill dug around and found out the actor's name [Laurie Paton] as well as an online critique - "click" here - that agrees with our assessment of her performance.) Bill also liked it when, in a bit of eccentric "stage business," Ted McGinley threw a Chinese-takeout spare rib at Theresa Russell as she ran up a flight of stairs. Are we grasping at straws here? Lee, I think, would vote Ted McGinley as most valuable supporting player.

We all agreed that he had a real AMERICAN PSYCHO thing going on. (If you examine this frame carefully you will see the takeout box from which Mr. McGinley will momentarily extract the rib for throwing.) There are other parts I could talk about. The perversely constructed ending. Eh. I'm too tired. The score. It sounded, I said last night, as if Henry Mancini wrote it on his portable keyboard in the back of the car on the way to the studio (another point of agreement with that online critique). Dr. Theresa, who dozed off early in her chair ("Like somebody who took Dramamine before getting on an airplane," said Ace of the film's effect on Dr. Theresa) woke up while the credits were rolling and said, "Who was the murderer?" I told her, "The guy from TWIN PEAKS." She went back to sleep.

Street Jeers

Remember when buildings used to be shaped like things? I was out in California for ADVENTURE TIME work and Verdell suggested several places for dinner, including somewhere "shaped like a barrel." I needed to hear no more! So we went to the barrel. Verdell said, and I believe I'm paraphrasing okay, that there used to be lots of buildings shaped like funny things in Hollywood, and this barrel is one of the last ones - maybe the last one - still standing. So now it has been taken over and reopened by some enterprising youths or something. Standing outside the barrel, as you can maybe see from the photo Verdell took, was a bearded guy in suspenders, whose sole job was to tell entering customers that the kitchen was closed because it was a "soft opening." But the kitchen was not completely closed! They gave us four deviled eggs in a cast-iron skillet. I have to say I was offended on some philosophical level! Why would deviled eggs be associated with a cast-iron skillet? Perverse! Jay - a new character in our story! - speculated that the bacon crumbled on top of the deviled eggs was the link to the cast-iron skillet. Not good enough! So for actual dinner, Verdell and Jay and I went to the reliable Tam O'Shanter, where we ordered MORE DEVILED EGGS. Hey! I did all that part from memory. Now I must consult my famed book of famed jottings. 1. Before dinner I was down in the hotel lobby and I heard a guy telling his life story at the hotel bar (he almost had a love scene with Bo Derek once) and he turned out to be the guy who plays Squidward. AND he was reading a storyboard based on one of my SpongeBob scripts! Right there at the bar. That was a coincidence! 2. The next day I went to Skylight Books to meet Kent. There was supposed to be an ADVENTURE TIME writers meeting but we had all forgotten that it was President's Day and the office was closed. So I bought some stuff at Skylight while I was waiting for Kent and had it shipped to myself. I can't remember the title of this one book I got, but it was written in 1959 and collected and analyzed the rhymes, jokes, songs and stories that schoolchildren make up and circulate among themselves (I think that's right) and anyway I opened to a section called "Street Jeers" and for some reason I thought, "'Street Jeers'! Megan Abbott would love this book!" 3. Kent and I ate in a French restaurant next door to Skylight. We decided it would be real cute if we went to see 50 SHADES OF GREY, which was playing in the movie theater on the other side of Skylight Books. "It would be 'blog-ready,'" I proclaimed of the potential experience! And in truth there's a lot I could say about 50 SHADES OF GREY, but I just don't feel like it right now, sorry. 4. At the end of 50 SHADES OF GREY, when it cut to black, Kent turned to me and said, "Wanna go get some chicken wings?" Ha ha ha ha! Classic Osborne. We walked a block or two to a place called "Ye Olde Rustic Inn" on the sign, but which I believe Kent referred to colloquially as "The Rustic." It was 3 in the afternoon and pitch-dark inside and everybody in the joint was already sloshed out of their minds. Kent said they had the best chicken wings in Los Angeles and told me about a Christmas Eve he spent there eating chicken wings. Michael Jackson came on the jukebox and Kent and I discussed how sad we had been when Michael Jackson died. 5. We were walking everywhere, well, Kent was pushing his bike.

So as we were walking down Sunset Boulevard we came upon a big bus-stop poster of 50 SHADES OF GREY and Kent wanted to take my picture in front of it. He was disappointed that there was a glare on the slogan "CURIOUS?"... 6. The next day I went to work and had lunch with ADVENTURE TIME coworkers Tom Herpich and Adam Muto and Jesse Moynihan and of course Kent. Jesse said he liked my outfit! He didn't use the word "outfit." Also, we discussed society. Tom had some thoughts about the future of transportation. 7. Back to work! This time with some actors from ADVENTURE TIME: Hynden "Princess Bubblegum" Walch (who was telling Jeremy "Finn" Shada about the meaning of Lent) and Steve Little. You'll probably recognize him from EASTBOUND AND DOWN. Look, here's his picture. He does the voice of Peppermint Butler. You know just the other day I was at Square Books and a young woman who works there (her name is Miracle!) was telling me how Peppermint Butler is her favorite character... AND last time I saw Jimmy he was saying that he identified with Peppermint Butler.

Is there something going on in the zeitgeist with Peppermint Butler? Probably not. 8. Marceline came in. By which I mean Olivia Olson, who plays Marceline. Of all these folks, she was the one I'd never met. Kent forgot to introduce me! So she just breezed into the booth thinking I was probably some old weirdo who was hanging around. 9. A break in the recording session! I walked out and beheld a strange sight. Now, the recording studio is on the first floor of the building, but the windows are high up, and I saw a row of people standing on chairs and other objects in order to peek out the window. Pendleton Ward took this photo of the phenomenon:

There was a big police standoff happening! "Every cop in Burbank is out there," as Kent said. There were SWAT vans and helicopters and everything, massed against some poor soul who had stolen a car, I think. This went on for some hours. 10. But work must continue! Back to the recording booth. Marceline had some more lines. Standing there waiting, Elizabeth Ito (a director on ADVENTURE TIME) mentioned Kent's tweets about 50 SHADES OF GREY, and as I was answering her I realized, oh good, this is my introduction to Marceline, because it was just Elizabeth and Marceline and me hanging out, and Marceline was intently listening as the old weirdo stranger who was standing around earlier talked at great length about 50 SHADES OF GREY. "Uh, I'm Jack," I said, after describing 50 SHADES OF GREY to Marceline for a while. 11. After all the work was done for the day I wanted to go back to the hotel but the standoff was still happening. I couldn't find Kent. I called his cell. "I'm on the roof!" he said. Cole Sanchez offered to take me out the back way and get me an Uber. While we waited for the Uber, Cole told me about a special backpack he carries his dog around in! 12. I went on a terrifying Uber ride with an extremely old man - who knows? maybe he was a terrible driver when he was young, too. But he swerved all over the road and generally behaved like a maniac. And the first thing he asked me was, "How do we get to Burbank?" to which I replied, "Uh, we're in Burbank." It was all downhill from there. 13. Sitting at the bar at Musso & Frank, waiting for some more people show up. I saw a bottle of Plymouth gin, which I've never had, but it's in all the Travis McGee books, so I thought I'd have a Plymouth gin gibson in honor of my pal Ace's hero Travis McGee. Pen showed up and had one too! He told me about the outcome of the police standoff: "They shot him with a beanbag and his pants fell down," said Pen. But when I showed him that I had jotted his sentence in my little jotting book, he added, "Not in that order." 14. While I was having dinner at Musso & Frank, Dr. Theresa was back in Mississippi having dinner with independent producer and actor Maggie Renzi. Maggie Renzi told Dr. Theresa about the movie she and John Sayles want to make next - which I would never reveal, in case it's a secret -

BUT LISTEN TO THIS! In an email on Feb. 3, my brother said he had an idea for a movie: "it's amazing... sad... triumphant... interesting" he wrote about this idea. AND IT'S EXACTLY THE SAME IDEA THAT MAGGIE RENZI TOLD DR. THERESA THE OTHER NIGHT. (Here's a photo of Maggie Renzi speaking to Dr. Theresa's Gender Studies class just hours ago!)

15. Speaking of my brother, he was among the party at Musso & Frank and revealed a fascinating piece of information I can't tell you... YET. 16. Pen took me to his house after dinner and strapped a thing on my head (pictured). It was like 50 SHADES OF GREY, ha ha, not really! It was the latest in virtual reality technology! I seemed to be flying, superhero style, over an old city. When I first started flying, I accidentally swooped toward the ground and shouted "Aaaaaaaaaaah!" exactly like the audiences in 1903 who went to see THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY and got scared that the train was going to run over them. (Did that really happen? I am going to say yes.) There was also a virtual reality where you throw a ball to some kitty cats. That was more my speed. 17. McKay mailed me a copy of THE LEOPARD by Giuseppe di Lampedusa. She was thanking me for my recommendation letter because she got accepted into a swank artist colony in Italy. I hate to tell her, but she got in on her own merit. I write the most glowing recommendation letters imaginable but they're just the kiss of death. Nobody gets into anything that I recommend them for! I'm glad McKay proved to be the exception. So I was reading THE LEOPARD on the plane and it is a book with an owl in it: "from the overhanging bell tower came an elfin hoot of owls."

18. On the flight back I had a layover in Minneapolis, and I am almost 100% sure that Lou Ferrigno (who plays Billy on ADVENTURE TIME) was on it! In fact, he broke in front of me in line to get on the plane and even jostled me! I am almost 100% sure I was jostled by Lou Ferrigno! It wasn't on purpose, I am sure. I am no more to Lou Ferrigno than an ant! Nor should I be. When the plane landed, and he stood to retrieve something from the overhead bin, I noticed that the man I took to be Lou Ferrigno had a high-tech looking black gizmo behind his ear. This is anecdotal and rude to boot, but I recalled that Mr. Ferrigno has a hearing impediment, so that small gadget, whatever it was, helped confirm my assumption. Now I am going to look for a current photo of him. Well, yes, by God, it was him!

New Lows, New Owls

"However, this was the family's last day of happiness." Not a surprising sentence from Zola! But he lays it on you when there are more than a hundred more pages to go, his personal guarantee that nothing else happy will occur. A perverse way to try to keep the reader going. By now the laundress lives on the other side of a thin wall from a drunken undertaker... of course! She hears everything he does through the wall: "the black leather hat giving a dull sound as it hit the chest of drawers, like a shovelful of earth; the black coat, hung up and brushing against the wall with the noise of a night-bird's wings..." I'm afraid that's as close as we're going to get to owls in this book. Speaking of which, I bought a pen with an owl on it. That's a new low. But I noticed it (the owl) was painted by Alexander Wilson. Who cares? It's probably a piece of junk. That may be the Zola talking.

Mashed Thumb

As promised, I looked up "sore as a boiled owl" in my GREEN'S DICTIONARY OF SLANG. Under "sore as..." we have "very angry, annoyed, in various comparative phrs., incl. sore as a boil, ...boiled owl, ...gum boil, ...pup, ...sore as sox, ...sorer than a mashed thumb." We find that "sore as a boil" predates by some time "sore as a boiled owl," so I like to think that the person who first said "sore as a boiled owl" was getting the older phrase "drunk as a boiled owl" mixed up with "sore as a boil." Maybe he or she started to say "sore as a boil" and "sore as a boiled owl" just came rolling out of his or her mouth! And everyone found it charming and apt. Apt! That's what I like to think! I'm just making up stories in my head. Email from McNeil: "There was a story on CNN.com about Malawi executing owls and I thought about you." Perverse! McNeil's phrasing (misleading in every way, as we shall see) made me curious, and with some trepidation I researched what promised to be an unpleasant tale. Turns out the owls were "nearly shot" for being bad luck but then the guy with the gun changed his mind and nothing bad happened to the owls. You know, I don't even care that much about owls.

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.)

All Bets Are Off

Lee Durkee heard about McNeil's trouble with the misprinted book, and McNeil's feelings of being all alone in the matter, so Lee wrote me with a message of encouragement to pass along to McNeil, a little story of something that happened to Lee, which I quote for you now: "I once, on a flight to Sri Lanka, was reading a book by Tobias Wolff, IN THE PHARAOH'S ARMY, and midway through the memoir due to a publishing error the book switched into a novel by a different author and kinda blew my mind. I thought Wolff had gone all experimental on me. Later I noticed it was a slightly different typeset. I left the book at a hostel where perhaps it is still bewildering people. It was really odd. I kept reading and reading trying to figure out how Wolff was gonna wrap this all together." Last night I saw Lee at a party, and he told me that what further confounded him was how the change happened between the end of one chapter and the beginning of another. I forwarded the email on to McNeil, who responded: "Well, obviously, what happened to Lee isn't at all the fault of the publisher, but rather a result of longitudinal chicanery by that longitudinal laugh riot of the universe - the globe. You see, in order to get to Sri Lanka, you have to cross the 'International Date Line,' which of course means 'all bets are off!' I forget who said that. Once you cross that imaginary (not so imaginary in my book!) line, ships often sink, standardized language melts away, gold flies out of your teeth, and typeface often changes type. I wouldn't be surprised if my Jerry Lewis book had been shipped from Hong Kong. It's a nice touch the way Lee left the novel in a hostel. Now someone we know needs to accidentally buy it used online and the circle will be complete." Cutting-and-pasting these messages for "blog" "publication," I note that both Lee and McNeil adhere to the elegant and traditional practice of following each period they type with two spaces. Classy! I gave up on that years ago. Think of all the energy I've saved. BUT AT WHAT PRICE? (I removed their "extra" spaces so that the "post" would "adhere" to "blog" "standards." Think of all the work I did to reduce the quality here. Is that "ironic"?) Hey, I'm just going to keep typing. "All bets are off!" as McNeil once observed. Nobody reads these long "posts," or the short ones either, but perversely that's what keeps me typing. Like, yesterday I wrote a long "post" containing the words and phrases "Joycean technique" and "Faulkner" and "palimpsest" and "portent" and "unspoken emotion" but then I deleted it. WHY? For all practical purposes, a deleted "post" is the same as a "posted" "post." It was about this sentence in Adrienne Barbeau's autobiography: "We were married four months later, on New Years Day 1979, in Bowling Green, Kentucky, by a one-armed judge who years earlier had lost his hand in the mixer at the bakery where we'd gotten our wedding cake." I'm way past that now. The marriage is over. Adrienne Barbeau has just met a man who has "the ability to alter bacteria with his hands." She says of him, "I wonder who gave him the huge pearl ring he's wearing. I wonder why the nails on his pinkie fingers are so long." In other book news, I was lurching around Square Books yesterday and found myself strangely drawn to a paperback of JUNKY by William S. Burroughs. I found myself wondering why I've never read it. I read the first couple of pages and thought they were pretty good. So I bought it. It was only afterward, going through the introduction as I sat at the counter at Ajax, that I put it together: Old Bull Lee from ON THE ROAD is Burroughs, as I well knew. What I didn't know is that this edition of JUNKY has, as an appendix, a whole deleted chapter about William Reich, fave theorist of Adrienne Barbeau and Norman Mailer! Who cares? Randy, the owner of Ajax, saw me eating a hamburger and asked, "Why aren't you eating a Pendarvis sandwich? I can't remember the right name." I reminded him that he was thinking of "The Osborne Sandwich." Don't worry! I still think it's going to catch on. Books! As you know, I always like to have a little pocket-sized book to carry around in my little pocket-sized pocket as I promenade about the town like Blazes Boylan. And the other day when I was at Off Square Books I found just such an item, filled with poems using the great old spelling I love: "YEE dainty Nimphs that in this blessed Brooke/ Doo bath your brest;/ Forsake your watry Bowers, and hether looke/ At my request." There are a lot of "hey ho's," so that even the most dire subject matter takes on a jaunty hue: "But whether in painfull love I pine,/ hey hoe pinching pain:/ Or thrive in wealth, she shall be mine,/ but if thou can her obtaine./ And if for gracelesse greefe I dye/ hey hoe gracelesse greefe:/ Witnesse, she slew me with her eye,/ let thy folly be the preefe." He's talking to his sheep. All the narrators in this book are talking to sheep. Pretty early in that poem, the narrator sees "the bouncing Bellybone/ hey hoe Bonny-bell:/ Tripping over the Dale alone,/ shee can trip it very well." Bellybone! I have no idea. Bonnibel (sp?) is Princess Bubblegum's first name, FYI.

Say Something Funny

Megan Abbott and I happened to stop by The End of All Music yesterday just as one of the owners, David, was standing on his tiptoes in the back of his pick-up truck hanging a snazzy new sign for the store on a pole. We went in and bought some records. So I guess the sign worked! I picked up a Patty Duke album. Are you bored yet? I also got a double album; do you kids remember double albums? I know you don't - don't lie to me. Anyway, this album is by Jimmy Clanton and has a red cover that says "Jimmy's Happy." But if you flip it over it has a blue cover and says "Jimmy's Blue." Jimmy looks happy on the happy cover and pensive on the blue cover. So it's one LP of happy songs and one LP of sad songs and when you open the leaves or double sleeve of the double album there's a Jimmy Clanton poster folded up in the middle! But you can't see it until you "cut along the dotted line" to get it out, and friends... THIS DOTTED LINE HAS NEVER BEEN CUT ALONG. Or, to be more grammatical, THIS IS A DOTTED LINE ALONG WHICH NO ONE HAS EVER CUT. So I can't see the poster. But the edges are blue, so maybe it's Sad Jimmy. Don't know when I'll cut along the dotted line and take out the poster and hang it up, though I feel I should. I have never been one of those "keep the toy in mint condition in the original box" sort of guys. Maybe we'll have some kind of ceremony. You know, I have another Jimmy Clanton story, but I'm truly boring myself, so let's move on to other things equally boring. I put the Patty Duke on the turntable today and it immediately evoked David Lynch: minor chords plus a chirpy, doubled vocal, punctuated by ominous timpani. (Come to think of it, Patty Duke played identical cousins on her TV show - so Lynchian! And one of the major subplots of TWIN PEAKS, of course.) "Don't Just Stand There," the song is called, and it is all about Patty Duke telling a guy not to just stand there. There is a quiet, forthright spoken-word section, always a wellspring of unintended eeriness. The song was written by "B. Ross - L. Crane" and with the tiniest bit of research I could find out who B. Ross and L. Crane were, but I'm just so tired of life. I will say, based on a few other tracks they wrote for the album, that B. Ross and L. Crane were masterminds of the perverse. One of their Patty Duke songs is called "Say Something Funny" and in it the narrator asks her boyfriend, who is in the process of dumping her in public, to "say something funny" that will make her laugh so the other people around won't know her heart is breaking! HER HEART IS BREAKING

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.

Product of Belgium

Last night we dropped by the home of John Currence and Bess Reed-Currence and John whipped up a delicious dinner on the spot. He can do that! Afterward, as we sat around talking, John magically produced a Biscoff. That's right: THE GREATEST COOKIE EVER SERVED ON AN AIRPLANE. When he saw how my little eyes lit up and heard my rhapsodic odes to the Biscoff, John said, mysteriously, "Then I have something you're going to love." And he did! Friends, he had a jar of something called BISCOFF SPREAD. It had the appearance and consistency of peanut butter, but PEANUT BUTTER IT WAS NOT. It was as if someone had smashed together thousands of Biscoffs into a single tablespoon of creamy goodness, the way Superman used to squeeze a lump of coal until it became a diamond. (See also.) And bear in mind, dear reader, the Biscoff is no lump of coal. The Biscoff is THE GREATEST COOKIE EVER SERVED ON AN AIRPLANE. And yet my analogy stands and the Biscoff is to Biscoff Spread as the lump of coal is to the diamond. So you can imagine. I checked the ingredients of the Biscoff Spread and I am not kidding, here is the primary ingredient listed: "Biscoffs, 57%." Also on the label: "PRODUCT OF BELGIUM." And that is all I remember. Perversely we spread the Biscoff Spread on the Biscoffs themselves, which I think should have caused the universe to fold up, but we're still here, I guess. (Image from the Silver Age Comics "Blog," natch.)

Bookmarkin'! with Jack Pendarvis

Welcome once more to "Bookmarkin'! with Jack Pendarvis." It has been almost four years. Sorry! Before we get to bookmarks I want to say that THE DOG OF THE SOUTH by Charles Portis has green Jell-O in it, just like GIDGET: "lime jello - transparent, no bits of fruit in suspension - and peanut-butter cookies with corrugations on top where a fork had been lightly pressed into them. That was our lunch." And I might add that VISIONS OF GERARD by Jack Kerouac, which I am reading for fun, uses "jello" as a VERB. A big coincidence! So Portis and Kerouac make a common noun (or verb) out of it, while only Frederick Kohner, author of GIDGET, bothers to correctly pay tribute to the brand name. Who cares? THE DOG OF THE SOUTH makes me laugh on every single page, instances of which I have been keeping selfishly from you. But perversely I WILL tell you that it has an owl in it - a metaphorical owl again. The narrator describes himself: "my small pointed teeth and my small owl beak and my small gray eyes, mere slits but prodigies of light-gathering and resolving power." And finally, the bookmark: I grabbed by coincidence my glossy photo of M. Emmet Walsh, who not only has a name like that of a Portis character - he LOOKS like a Portis character: specifically Dr. Reo Symes from THE DOG OF THE SOUTH, who, speaking of things that make me laugh, says this in the passage I just read, "The kind of people I know don't have barbecues, Mama. They stand up alone at night in small rooms and eat cold weenies." But I noticed for the first time there is something confrontational about the glare of M. Emmet Walsh, which I see each time I open the book. So a glossy picture of M. Emmett Walsh makes a weird bookmark! That's my advice. This has been "Bookmarkin'! with Jack Pendarvis."