I Explain Victor Marilyn to an Uncaring World

You know I don't "blog" anymore, but watching ADVENTURE TIME last night I was reminded that the recent episode "Son of Rap Bear" contains possibly the most obscure allusion to Jerry Lewis possible, which I would not even mention, seeing as how I don't "blog" anymore, but I thought it was a poignant coincidence, Jerry Lewis having recently died. Now this allusion is so obscure that even I didn't know about it, Mr. Big Shot So-Called Jerry Lewis Expert. In the meeting during which we were writing the outline for the episode - and I forget how the subject came up - Kent Osborne happened to mention a phone prank that Jerry had played on an unsuspecting sycophant. So we all listened to it... and somewhere, deep inside there, Jerry invents a nonexistent character named "Victor Marilyn" with which to bedevil his hapless dupe. I mean, I guess you have to sit through four and a half minutes of that phone prank before you even reach "Victor Marilyn." And that's why the devious Toronto (the ADVENTURE TIME character, not the city!) uses the pseudonymous business card you see above. I am glad to get that off my chest.

Stop Smoking the Disney Way

After you write a book about something you immediately forget everything about the subject you were researching and never want to hear anything about it again. That's a tidbit about writing. Okay! But once I wrote a book about cigarette lighters and just for a month or two after it came out I would run across an item that I wished I had been able to include in the book. That stopped happening quickly and also I stopped "blogging" forever, as you can see. But now - after what I assumed would be an eternal hiatus - I just read something that I wish I would've heard about in time to put in my book. Okay, in this part of the Walt Disney biography that Megan Abbott and I are reading, Walt Disney has turned kind of scary to everybody: "layout artist Ken Anderson inadvertently singed Walt's mustache while lighting a cigarette with a new lighter during a storyboard session." Disney leaps from his chair and showers Ken Anderson with invective we shan't print here. "Anderson threw away the lighter and never smoked again." There are a couple of good places in my book for that anecdote, though based on my royalty statement I'm pretty sure there's not a clamor for an extended second edition. In a poignant aside, the author Neal Gabler adds, "Anderson admitted he cried."

Time Enough For Chicken

"The only way I survived winter in Iowa was glamour." So said Melissa Ginsburg last night. The occasion of this wonderful remark was our unseasonable drop in temperature. Just earlier in the day Kent Osborne had said that the weather gets a bad rap as a topic of conversation. "It's supposed to be boring to talk about the weather," Kent said. He disagrees! And Melissa is living proof. Kent and Seo Kim and I went to see Dr. Theresa introduce David Simon yesterday afternoon. He gave a talk! Just a few days ago he was hanging out with President Obama in the White House. And now here he is giving a talk. After the talk, there was just half an hour before an ADVENTURE TIME video conference Kent and I were required to attend. Time enough for chicken, thought Kent! "This will be my fourth chicken meal in a row," he said. "Oxford is a chicken town." It may be the highest form of compliment Kent can bestow. We went into Gus's. Kent ordered one chicken wing, which I found amusing. Kent had no qualms. It was just what he wanted. But it made me think of the scene in WAITING FOR GUFFMAN in which Parker Posey is poignantly turning over a single chicken wing on a grill. An image included in large part for its absurdity! Or so I have always assumed. Seo laughed unreservedly when the chicken wing came out. There it was, shining, in its own little basket. A funny sight. Pitiful! Exquisite with mortality. Kent consumed it without irony. He reviewed the most recent chicken dishes he had enjoyed. The wings at another place were different than on a previous trip, bigger, and of a lesser quality of chicken, Kent thought. He suspected that the establishment - which shan't be named here - had gone with a new, cheaper supplier, which started me thinking about THIEVES' HIGHWAY, the great old movie about the crime surrounding apple orchards (!). I jokingly suggested that we should create a TV show that starts out on a free-range chicken farm and follows the chicken to the shady gangsters who push out the good chicken farmers with their bad, poorly raised counterfeit chicken, which they force restaurants to buy... and as we had just seen David Simon, we suddenly knew: "We could call it THE CHICKEN WIRE!" We were very amused. VERY amused! But we both resisted the temptation to tell David Simon about it when we saw him later that day, as Kent consumed his fifth chicken meal in a row. At one point, far across the table, I heard David Simon say something about the Visigoths and I slammed the table and yelled, "I'll tell you something about Visigoths!" THIS WAS IT! Reading that book about the Middle Ages was finally going to pay off. "They killed the Romans but preserved their knowledge!" I screamed. That's all I had. Is the action over? It is not! Just a couple of hours ago Dr. Theresa called our friend Ron Shapiro, who is driving John Waters here from New Orleans. "They're on the road!" said Dr. Theresa.

Poignant and Gross

I made Kent Osborne watch that clip of Jerry Lewis and Kent didn't like the way Jerry was jumping all over Bob Hope. I liked that part! I think it is accurate to say that Kent disapproved in general of Jerry's attitude and behavior. I told Kent, "The young have to take down the old!" I think that's what I said. Something like that. Which is funny, because I'm old. I was thinking (I was wrong) that Bob Hope was born in the late nineteenth century in England (it was actually 1903) - practically a Victorian! - and here's Jerry, a child of the jazz age! A child of New Jersey! And that's why it's so poignant and gross when Bob and Jerry at a later date are commiserating about the supposed bad eggs among the hip youth of the late 1960s. By that point Bob and Jerry have bitterly merged into a single generation! It's sad. (Of course Bob would be the one who was actually a young rake during the jazz age. Anyway, what's the jazz age?) And then that made me realize that when I was a kid I knew at least three people (more than three, but three I remember well) who were born in the nineteenth century. That's weird! But it's not so weird. But it's weird. Anyway, I'm old. So I fell asleep and dreamed I had signed up for some seedy traveling act that got locals (like me) to compete in footraces against mangy old retired circus animals. The guy ahead of me raced a lion. He made it 1.9 seconds before the lion outran him, which everyone said was good. I fainted (in my dream!) before I found out what animal I was supposed to race, and people were trying unsuccessfully to pry open my eyes.

The Locked Book of Private Information

I was just sitting here thinking how boring and useless it would be if I "blogged" about what I read last night when another storm came up and we lost the satellite signal again, and then I thought, "I'll do it!" At first I was reading Jonathon Green's history of slang but it was too, uh, scholarly to read in a storm. Well, there was one good part where the French poet Villon was "implicated in a murder" and had to "henceforth scrape a living singing in taverns." But pretty soon we were back to statistics and the word "lexis" was in there a lot. So I switched over to THE EASTER PARADE by Richard Yates, which Megan Abbott gave me back when she lived in town and I knew it probably wouldn't be good for reading in a storm, I mean, I think Megan GUARANTEED it was going to make me cry, and the first words of the book are "Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life" - ha! And the part I was on involved one of the sisters having her braces adjusted by the orthodontist. Hardly storm material! And it was then that I recalled my trusty GAZETTEER OF BRITISH GHOSTS, barely picked through. I read about Borley Rectory, surely the most famously haunted house in England. "In the 1900s Borley Rectory, as a haunted house, had everything," the author assures us. Ha ha! And here's a mysterious and poignant fragment: "Marianne who has lived a strange and unhappy life now resides in Canada..." That's almost a Lydia Davis story, that fragment. Then we come upon "a typed manuscript with pasted-in photographs, cuttings, booklets, posters, tracings and plans that became known as 'The Locked Book of Private Information' after Price acquired it, had it bound in morocco and fitted it with a Bramah lock." Yes, yes, this was more like it. What else do you need to know? There is a giant striped spider I can see out our front window - a spider so large you can see it from the sidewalk in front of our house - and a torrent of rain off the roof was really bashing its web. The web held up! The spider ran up a slender thread for the safety of the front porch, and I mean ran, that spider was really booking it, as I think we used to say when I was a kid, is that what we said? Booking it? I have a used copy of Green's massive three-volume DICTIONARY OF SLANG coming, so I'll let you know.

The Majesty of Beer and Sponges

Poignant? Utopian? Mysterious? Poetic? Somehow by its placement as the very last sentence in the article about a New York grocery store robbery (from today's New York Times) it acquires a quality I can't quite put my finger on: "Without immediately attracting attention, a reporter was able to enter a back loading dock that was piled high with cases of beer and stocks of cosmetics and sea sponges." Maybe it's the beginning with guns and action and ending with mountains of silent sea sponges.

Kentucky Fried Desolation

Well I don't know what I've gotten into here. I keep looking at these "blogs" about malls. Who knew there were so many "blogs" about malls? And I notice that there's a distinct subculture of people who are interested in abandoned malls and stores, and who take lots of pictures of abandoned malls and stores. Furthermore, I notice that many of the "blogs" of people who are interested in abandoned malls have not been updated in years, so that they are abandoned "blogs" about abandoned malls. In one sad case, I was reading a curious "post" about a mall that burned down, on a "blog" that had not been updated since 2009, and when I checked the comments, I saw that the man who wrote it had died. McNeil has been looking at these things, too, and mentions an old, faded photo of "a dog gazing into a Bath and Tile Emporium," poignantly, I assume, but I haven't found that one yet. I did find several photos of an abandoned KFC covered in overgrown bushes ("click" here) and that's when I found myself considering that maybe there IS something kind of interesting about photos of an abandoned KFC covered in overgrown bushes. And these aren't even the sort of old, faded photos that make you feel especially weird. The great thing is that almost all of these abandoned mall "blogs" have sidebars that list OTHER abandoned mall "blogs" so now I have something to do with the rest of my life. Hey so one of these mall "blogs" mentioned Lenox Square (not abandoned), which Ace Atkins brought up to Dr. Theresa and me just the other night. Ace used to live in Atlanta, as we did, and he asked whether we remembered "when Lenox Square had monkeys." We replied that we did not. "If you gave them a penny, they'd stick their tongue out at you," Ace said. Hey, look, I just went from being a guy who "blogs" about guys who "blog" about malls to being a guy who "blogs" about malls, you saw it happen.

Frightful Music Gentlemen

In the book I was telling you about, Thomas Adès has some interesting things to say about Franck, a composer to whom I have never given a second thought, or a first thought. Adès calls Franck's only symphony "a very pregnant piece. It's wildly unfashionable now." Naturally I turned to the reliably stilted yet poignant schadenfreude of those kooky old volumes: MILTON CROSS' ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT COMPOSERS AND THEIR MUSIC. I was not disappointed! "Midway in his rehearsal [the conductor, Colonne] stopped the orchestra and turned to the composer to ask, 'Does it please you?' Franck replied that he was very pleased indeed. Colonne then turned back to the orchestra men and added, 'It's all frightful music, gentlemen, but we'll go on anyway.'" And: "Most of those who knew him regarded him as a quaint man who always wore an overcoat too large for him, over trousers that were invariably too short." The encyclopedia tells of how Franck worked on a piece for ten years then invited all the greatest members of the musical establishment of Paris to hear him play it and only two people showed up. "His first major public success as a composer did not come until he was sixty-eight years old (the last year of his life)." On the other hand, Debussy is quoted on the subject of Franck's soul, which he proclaimed "so good that neither contradictory circumstances nor the wickedness of others could ever make him feel bitter."

Cowboys and Novellas

Back when Michael Bible was my student, I gave him one great piece of advice: "Write novellas! The public craves novellas!" Here's your chance to prove me right! Come to Off Square Books tomorrow at 5 PM as Michael does a reading and signing of COWBOY MALONEY'S ELECTRIC CITY. And it's cheap! Like what you'd pay for one of your fancy electric books that exists in nonexistent electric form, except even though it has ELECTRIC in the title, Michael's book is FOR REAL and illustrated with illustrations and crafted as an object of art for you to hold and spill coffee on and enjoy. It's a wonderful book, full of booby traps and surprise parties in word form. (I think the only piece of advice I ever actually gave Michael was "Hey, you know that tiger at the end of that one story? Why not make it a zebra? It's more poignant!" And he did it. Sucker!) Speaking of cowboys, I was reading today in the New York Times that apoplectic radio talk show hosts are making fun of cowboy poetry...? That is a real thing for real, that they are doing that, yes, it is really something that gets under their skin for some reason, it is something worth blustering and spewing about apparently, though I would like to see them make fun of cowboy poetry to a cowboy's face. I really would like to see that, for real. For real, for real, I picked up a book of cowboy poetry on one of my raids of the free books in the library coffee shop. What's wrong with cowboy poetry? It's got two great things in it that every sane person loves: cowboys and poetry. And so does Michael Bible's new book!

Samuel Beckett's Banana Fun Time Jamboree

While I was locked out of the house today I was thinking about how great Jerry Lewis would be in the Samuel Beckett play KRAPP'S LAST TAPE. I am not trying to be funny, so shut up. Take a gander at these stage directions, among the first in the play: "takes out a large banana, peers at it... strokes banana, peels it, drops skin at his feet, puts end of banana in his mouth and remains motionless, staring vacuously before him." Come on! It's pure Jerry, you have to admit. And a few minutes later, Krapp slips on the banana peel! It's in the stage directions! Jerry's at the right age to play it. He may be a little old for the part, even, but it calls for an old man. To make it perfect, someone should have recorded Jerry's voice back in 1965 or so, doing young Krapp's monologue that old Krapp listens to on a tape. I'm fairly certain no one had the foresight. Oh well. It would have been poignant! Old Jerry listening to young Jerry and all. Maybe we could piece together young Krapp's monologue word by word from old Jerry movies!

I'll Spare You

I thought about "blogging" on Donald Barthelme today but I didn't. I had some poignant thoughts about a brittle little mass market paperback beginning to fall apart, which I'll spare you. I might at least have the common courtesy to "link" to something about this new book you should buy. That was the upshot.

Koan

Just going through my new copy of THE BEST AMERICAN COMICS 2007, edited by Chris Ware, purchased from the good people at Square Books. That's Square Books, for all your bookish needs. Anyway, I came across a caption that I quite enjoyed. It occurs in a piece by Aline and R. Crumb. I will quote it now: "A POIGNANT MOMENT FILLED WITH INTENSE EMOTION AND FREE PICKLES!" (Exclamation point theirs.) Why do I like that caption so much? Who knows? But I think I love it, even out of context. Especially out of context! "A POIGNANT MOMENT FILLED WITH INTENSE EMOTION AND FREE PICKLES!" Think about it and get back to me.

Dr. "M.'s" TV Korner: Jeopardy!

Welcome once again to Dr. "M.'s" TV Korner, where anonymous college professor and holder of a doctorate in *********, Dr. "M.," reports all of her thoughts about television. The recent uptick in "blog" talk about Alex Trebek has prompted Dr. "M" to write in with some surprising details about her family's TV past. Her mother, it turns out, was a contestant on JEOPARDY! (exclamation point theirs) in 1965 (though of course Mr. Trebek did not host the show at that time). We hope that this scant information will be the subject of much elaboration, possibly in the form of "Dr. 'M.'s' Mother's TV Korner." Please start mining your mother for tidbits, Dr. "M." Tidbits are the lifeblood of any "blog"! Note: this "post" takes on a certain poignance given the recent passing of JEOPARDY!'s creator, Merv Griffin.

Sammy Davis, Jr.

Hi, I just got my "contributor's copy" of the February "Believer" magazine. I have a very short piece in it, in which I seem to poke some fun at Sammy Davis, Jr., but not really. I thought I should mention here, as a supplement to that piece, that I enjoy Sammy Davis, Jr., quite a bit. In fact I got the idea for the piece while I was listening to the CD "Live at the Coconut Grove" and thinking, "Wow! I wish I could have been at this show!" The hip quaintness of the stage patter is part of the fun (see Joe Flaherty as Sammy Maudlin). But you know, Mr. Davis was talented, too. I particularly like some of his live work. On the Coconut Grove CD, his rendition of Cole Porter's "In the Still of the Night" is relaxed and fluid. I guess I often seem to poke fun at musicians and other artists for whom I have true affection. Gilbert & Sullivan & Bob Dylan I have mentioned here before. And there are certain things I appreciate about Mickey Rooney, even. Jim Jarmusch and Bill Murray are good examples of my problem. They have done nothing but good for the world, really! DEAD MAN and GROUNDHOG DAY are two of my favorite films, and that's just a small sample of their excellent work. Returning to Mr. Davis for a moment, "click" here for some poignance. (If you "click" here right now, you will see a reference to the Dec./Jan. issue of "The Believer," but I believe that after February 1st, you will see information about the February issue, and maybe they will "post" some or all of the Davis piece.)

I'm Just Like a Nurse from World War II, and Here's Why

Hey! Over at McSweeney's, a couple of guys named Mike Sacks and Ted Travelstead have starting putting "quotation marks" around the word "blog." Their "think piece" is very funny and a little poignant. I feel kind of like that nurse from World War II who wasn't offended at all by Ian McEwan's "shenanigans." I don't even assume that I inspired these fellows. Didn't some Italian dude invent the telephone at the same time as Bell? Look it up on the "internet" and you'll see I'm right. The more the merrier in the world of "blogging"!

A Poignant Recollection

Mr. Jamie Allen, one of the editors of the quarterly "Duck & Herring Co. Pocket Field Guide," chimes in with Chapter 14 of our series on childhood superhero freakouts and their effect on modern literature. It may be remarked upon with some interest that the autumnal gloom and mystery of Mr. Allen's tale is rivaled only by that of another editor, Mr. Eli Horowitz. What is up with editors? Only time will tell. For now, we turn to the words of Mr. Allen: "There was one [comic book] that stands out in my mind for two reasons. It was a large one, given to me when I was sick, with this magificent cover showing Superman and Shazam facing off - in a fight to the death! The drawing was colorful and the muscles were ripped and I just couldn't understand how Superman and Shazam could fight each other, let alone to the death. This is one reason it stands out; I really liked Superman and could never see him losing any sort of fight, of course, but I also really liked Shazam because he didn't get the respect he deserved in the shadow of Superman, I felt. And so I immediately had a lot at stake in the fight between Superman and Shazam. I think I was using my storytelling brain for one of the first times, because I had all kinds of scenarios worked up before I even opened the thing. And then I opened the thing and it was, you know, the ol' comic book trick where the pictures are not color or even as well drawn. And the storyline just didn't live up to the hype inside my head. This is the second reason I remember this so well. I remember I would allow myself to be fooled by it again and again - I'd see the awesome cover of the comic book, and I'd think, Maybe I missed something? Maybe I wasn't as advanced in my reading the first time I read it? And I would open it again and the same thing - anti-climax." POSTSCRIPT FROM THE "BLOGMASTER": Mr. Allen may be forgiven, considering the rather traumatic circumstances, for forgetting that the character's name is Captain Marvel and "Shazam" merely the magic word he uses to achieve his transformation.