The Missing "Link"

As is his God-given right, nay, his responsibility, McNeil was "clicking" around on his birthday tribute the other day, when he came upon a "post" in which I reported some of his research into the subject of the Pitcairn Islands, including a "link" that McNeil had provided as a source for more information. McNeil took time from his natal celebrations to alert me that the "link" no longer works. Or, to be more precise, it works, but it leads to no information about the Pitcairn Islands. Instead, curious readers will be led to an article about "Pixie Haircuts for Older Women." As I sat there thinking about it, the realization occurred to me, with a growing sense of dread and regret, that the "blog" has been going for more than 15 years. And yes, I had noticed from time to time that some of the old "links" have become quite, quite deceased, and some of those that are not deceased have long been taken over by other entities. Zombie "links," perhaps we may call them. Then I thought to myself, "Jack," I thought, "you need to go back and check every 'link,' and if it has been compromised, you need to redirect it to the very explanation of which you are contemplating the composition," in other words, dear "blog" reader, the paragraph you are enjoying right now. "That should occupy your mind and distract you from encroaching despair," I told myself.

A Chicken Coop

Last time I was in Atlanta I saw what looked like a little house on top of Manuel's Tavern. Like a place where pixies might live! I put it out of my mind, I guess, as a possible hallucination. But today my brother-in-law writes to tell me it is a chicken coop. A chicken coop on top of Manuel's Tavern! He sent a corroborative "link" but you're just going to have to take my word for it. Just wait until Kent hears about this! Kent tried to spread the word about "The Oatmeal Selfie Initiative" and was shocked! - shocked! - that I have not yet been drowned in photos of people eating oatmeal. "It takes time to make the oatmeal," Steve Wolfhard said consolingly in yesterday's ADVENTURE TIME meeting. Tom Herpich and I talked briefly about twitter as a tool of repressive desublimation. McNeil sent me an email about a guy he saw picking his nose. The rest of the day is a blur.

Certain Musty Old Letters

You know whenever I go on a little plane trip I like to jot down some things about it to tell you when I get back and then you don't read it and I don't really care. Sometimes I get lazy and don't jot until the trip is practically half over. But this time I STARTED JOTTING BEFORE THE TRIP EVEN BEGAN. I was sitting on the couch, waiting for time to go to the airport, and the Fox Movie Channel was on and I took out my special jotting notebook and start jotting down some things about this scene in this Doris Day movie that was on. Doris Day wore a backless, sparkling orange dress. A fat German guy was swatting grapes into the air for some reason. One grape fell into the butt section of Doris Day's dress and she inadvertently started a "dance craze" by trying to shake the grape out of her butt. I was thinking about how smutty everything used to be. I couldn't think of what to read on the airplane. I was really hoping for ANCIENT EVENINGS, but Bill Boyle isn't back from his trip home yet, and anyway he writes me that he has lost the tattered old copy of ANCIENT EVENINGS he had when he was a teenager, and which he had planned to bequeath to me. So I impulsively grabbed THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL - this despite my reservations about VILLETTE as good airplane material, and VILLETTE was by Charlotte Brontë; THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL is by Anne, the Brontë nobody likes! Ha ha, just kidding, Anne Brontë. But one of the first things I read at the airport was this: "It is a soaking, rainy day, the family are absent on a visit, I am alone in my library, and have been looking over certain musty old letters and papers, and musing on past times... having withdrawn my well-roasted feet from the hobs, wheeled round to the table, and indicted the above lines to my crusty old friend..." Well, that is just the kind of thing I want to read on an airplane. Something about the hobs really got to me, and I don't even know what hobs are! My mellow mood was abetted by gin, my go-to remedy for fear of flying. I eavesdropped on a woman who was ordering crab cakes at the "Sun Studios" themed bar at the airport (!) and the book made me think of how Kelly Hogan and I used to write letters all the time, back when people wrote letters all the time, and how Hogan recently told me she keeps mine in a waterlogged suitcase in her once-flooded garage and sometimes she takes them out. Oh no, I said, don't remind yourself needlessly of the inanities of that callow twerp, and Hogan clarified: "I don't read them - I smell them." An intoxicating brew of moldy sentiments! I was met at the airport by some grad students from the University of Cincinnati, where I was set to speak. I should thank them all, and especially the ones who drove me around while I was there and tended to my every need, and who, in fact, were responsible for my invitation: Luke, Steph, Justine, and Woody - and there were so many more, all nice. Luke and Woody were waiting by baggage claim with a huge poster with my name on it - decorated as well with several startling portraits of me, drawn by Luke's undergrads. They had been reading my short stories in Luke's class and he asked them to draw what they thought I looked like. One had given me a neck tattoo! Another, according to Luke (I haven't yet had a chance to examine the poster in detail, though Luke says he is mailing it to me) wrote her phone number on the poster, and "Call me" - ha ha ha! Woody and Luke drove me into the city, remarking cheerfully as we went over a bridge, "Obama cited this as a dangerous bridge that needs work." I shouted repeatedly to Woody and Luke that I wanted to go "somewhere fancy" for dinner. They said they'd take me to "the fancy hot dog place." Maybe they were kidding, but it WAS a fancy hot dog place, though not pretentious like some other fancy hot dog places I have heard about. It was called Mayday, very welcoming and comfortable, with excellent beer, friendly service and a pleasant, dark atmosphere. My hot dog contained lamb sausage made with cherries! So you will have to admit that was fancy. Somehow people already knew when I walked in the door of the fancy hot dog place about my work with ADVENTURE TIME. Someone wanted me to sign an apron for the kitchen. "My favorite is Lady Rainicorn," she said. She kind of went "Ah!" when I started drawing something at the bottom of my inscription, but it was just a stupid heart with an arrow through it. I'm the only person associated with ADVENTURE TIME who can't draw, reliably disappointing all I meet. It's understandable and even delightful to me that the students at "literary events" now are more interested in ADVENTURE TIME than in my books, which are but dubiously in print - in fact, I have a lawyer working right now to discover who is getting that tiny kickback on the rare occasion when a copy is sold. It's not me! I stayed in a nice bed and breakfast near the campus. My vivid and relentless dreams that first night took place - as if I were awake - in the actual room where I was sleeping, and were populated by humorous, cherubic ghosts or pixies who wanted to remind me whenever I became too relaxed that THEY were in charge. The room and bed were very comfortable, let me stress. But I was tormented all night by mirthful pixies - a first for me - and was tired for the reading. I didn't really want to read from any of my old, dead books, so I read from my cat book that no one wants to publish. As I was preparing my selections - the introduction, part of Chapter One, and the conclusion - I realized that most of the book has been published in bits and pieces, as I've cut it up and used it in lots of different stories and articles and the like. I'm sorry, sort of, that it's never going to appear whole, as "my cat book," though I see in retrospect it is perhaps unwise to write a 10-chapter novel in which nothing happens until the last half of Chapter Eight - a little wholesome advice I was able to impart to the young writers who attended the reading! In the Q&A and in her poetry, my fellow reader Marisa Crawford made some good points in favor of the use of pop culture in literature. One of her poems had Joan Crawford in it (and another made telling use of NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET PART FIVE!) so I was glad that by coincidence I was reading the Joan Crawford section of my "cat book." After the reading, a bar. I sat with two other grown men - the head of the English department and the poetry editor of the Cincinnati Review - and we all talked about our kitties. I noticed that the openly sentimental discussion halted when Chris Bachelder came back to the table! Or maybe I imagined that. Did he exude the air of a man who would not tolerate such weakness? He was friendly and funny. But the cat talk did cease with his approach. Mr. Bachelder is a writer whose fiction I have always enjoyed and admired. I was meeting him for the first time, and we had fun trashing various McSweeney's editors. Ha ha! Not trashing. Affectionately ruminating upon their individual styles and methods. The conclusion of my cat book was published in McSweeney's, and I mentioned how the editor had made me change "solar plexus" to "abdomen." The poet at the table (Don Bogen) kindly took up for "solar plexus." Then we talked about why I had cravenly reverted to "abdomen" during the reading that day even though I had brought an old manuscript with "solar plexus" typed on the page. The strange tyranny of the absent editor! The next morning at the bed and breakfast I sat there reading this in THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL: "I thought it but reasonable to make some slight exertion to render my company agreeable." And I thought, yes, THAT is the kind of sentence I want to write all the time, and no other, editors can go to hell. And then Anne Brontë introduced some complicated plot business about trying to fetch a ball of cotton that had rolled under a table without disturbing a cat. WHY CAN'T ALL WRITING BE THAT? But that was the next day. The night before, as the students were about to leave the bar, I had the sudden urge to inquire, "Where do you go to sing karaoke in Cincinnati?" Luke knew. So a group of us walked some blocks to a gritty, narrow, cash-only joint called, with refreshing lack of irony, Junker's Tavern. Here is a picture of some of us getting ready to go to Junker's Tavern. That's Justine and Luke.

I'm in the middle, doing my thing where I think it's hilarious to look surly in a photo, but it never is. It was a good evening, though I got tired and made Steph and Luke leave before they could do "Mambo #5." Back at the bed and breakfast, the ghosts returned only once in a dream, as parody ghosts with greenish faces and CARNIVAL OF SOULS style dark rings under their eyes, but dressed in colorful rags, shouting, "God bless us, every one!" with Cockney accents and well-meaning but gruesome smiles.

On the plane back, the narrator of THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL was saying, "I was by no means a fop - of that I am fully convinced" and I was like, "Right, pal, keep telling yourself that!"

Woolly Momentum and Mohair Scarves

Say, did you know that "Blog" Buddy Megan Abbott OWNS a copy of SEMI-TOUGH? Writes she: "Oh, it's one of my favorite, favorites--one of those 70s comedies that just seems to run on its own woolly momentum, like Jules and Jim as directed by Blake Edwards. All that fun it has with EST is great, of course, but it's a movie sort of in love with itself and its own louche-ness, like Slap Shot or Willie and Phil, but it's a generous love. It's a love that's patient, and kind. Remember when characters in movies could be called free-spirited and that wasn't code for annoying pixie types with fabulous tans, cascading hair and mohair scarves? (what am I talking about?)" I have no idea, Megan! But I'm with you!

Oblique Frozen Mammoth Recollection

Theresa and I were watching a movie called SO LONG AT THE FAIR, the plot of which reminded me of something I had read in that touchstone of my tender youth, the Reader's Digest publication STRANGE STORIES, AMAZING FACTS. But never mind about SO LONG AT THE FAIR. While I was looking for the particular article, I stumbled across a section entitled "Ten-Thousand-Year-Old-Steaks," which is about some woolly mammoths found frozen in Siberia, and how delicious they are! Yes, says Reader's Digest, "In spite of the thousands of years that have passed, the meat is still good enough to eat - according to those who have tried." But those few passing words are all you hear about the people who supposedly ate millennia-old woolly mammoth meat! Not another hint about it in the article, nor anything at all about steaks, save for the title. Why am I telling you this? Well, no good reason. But remember my novel that I first turned in to my publisher over a year and half ago and it was coming out in August and got reviewed and everything, and maybe someone will bring it out someday when they're feeling better, but I don't know because nobody will tell me? Remember that? Well, I believe I refer obliquely to these frozen mammoth steaks in that novel. You'll never know because 1) it's oblique and 2) you'll never read the novel because it only exists in a mysterious land somewhere far away with coconut moonbeams and butterscotch lakes and ever so many pixies as far as the eye can see. But I thought it was funny that those frozen mammoth steaks must have been stuck in my head since childhood, and I had no idea where that image came from when I put it - or something like it - in the semi-nonexistent novel. How about that! Thanks for everything, Reader's Digest! The idea probably wouldn't have stuck in my head for so long had it been more concrete than "those who have tried," and I guess there's a lesson in there somewhere for somebody. Oh, here's the section from my book. Who cares? Maybe I should just publish it here on the "blog" one random paragraph at a time: "He thought he remembered a newspaper story about a Viking ship that had been frozen in the ice. Scientists found steaks on board, steaks from Viking times, and Burns believed that the scientists had cooked and eaten one of the steaks just for fun, although that didn’t sound like scientists, who were usually a******s."