Buckatunna Inventory

We went to visit my parents and Dr. Theresa was eating oysters, because that's what people do down there, and in an oyster she found a little, round, perfectly formed pearl! I have been eating oysters as long as I can remember, and I can't recall myself or anyone else finding a pearl in one. I have a strong feeling, however, that this is another "wild turkey incident." That is to say it's like the time I was excited to see wild turkeys standing by the side of the road and everyone told me that they see wild turkeys standing by the side of the road nonstop, every roadside is just lined end to end with wild turkeys. So I guess you can't eat a bowl of gumbo without finding a whole strand of immaculate pearls, good for you. Anyway, on our way back we stopped at a gas station in Buckatunna, Mississippi, to stretch our legs. In the course of leg-stretching, I wandered past the chips and gum and such, past what I would call "road snacks," to a corner of the store containing a couple of shelves of what I would call "pantry items." And I got so interested for some reason that I took out my stupid-ass jotting book and started jotting down what groceries were available at the gas station in Buckatunna, Mississippi: 1 squeeze bottle of Hershey's strawberry (!) syrup, 2 small containers of Thousand Island dressing, 1 small packet of brown gravy mix (generic), 1 small jar of maraschino cherries, 1 jar of bread-and-butter pickles, 3 bottles of breakfast syrup (one of them in the distinctive form of Mrs. Butterworth), 4 boxes of pancake mix, 10 large cans of fruit cocktail, 2 cans of barbecue-flavored Vienna sausages, 8 cans of Vienna sausages with jalapeno. There was more. But just as I was registering my surprise that there were zero cans of plain Vienna sausages, it was time to go.

A Swarm of Bees

I was reading THE ILIAD last night and here come Diomedes and Odysseus, sneaking off to spy on the Trojans. As encouragement, Athena sends along a "dark night heron." And I was like what? No! It should have been an owl! I don't mean to tell Homer how to do his job. And now I'm going to tell you something else, but wait. What about this Diomedes? I had no memory of him from however much I made it through THE ILIAD last time. This guy! I don't know. His self-confidence gets on my nerves. He just goes around spearing everybody like they were Vienna sausages. And when you get him out of bed, he puts something on: a whole lion he happens to have "lyin'" around, ha ha. That's my own clever wordplay, not Emily Wilson's. When I typed it, I thought, "I must be exaggerating!" So I double checked. And (now I will quote Emily Wilson's translation) "Diomedes wrapped around his shoulders a massive golden full-length lion skin." Okay! Gross! Later on, he's tormenting a poor Trojan who's wearing a polecat on his head. What a contrast! You can see why Diomedes irritates me. You strut around in your lion suit running your spear through everybody you meet and this other guy's wearing a polecat for a hat, give him a break! Now, "polecat" is Emily Wilson's word, and it's what my grandfather in Alabama called a skunk. I was like... is this guy wearing a skunk on his head like Davy Crockett? (I know Davy Crockett didn't wear a skunk on his head. But if you ever really study the TV show, he is wearing an ENTIRE raccoon on his head. Freeze a frame and you can see its poor exed-out eyes. But don't do it! It's very troubling.) So I looked it up, even though I long ago vowed never to look anything up, and I assume she means... well, I don't know. I didn't look up much after all. I did see that the European polecat has anal scent glands, so good for him. And I don't think Emily Wilson implies the guy is wearing a whole polecat. But really what I want to mention is that I finished Gombrowicz and returned to Tacitus as promised. So you can breathe a sigh of relief! Over here in Tacitus, Rome is having some bad times, accompanied by the usual signs and portents. You know how that is! "The Capitol was occupied by ominous birds." I know what you're thinking! You're thinking I wish or assume that these ominous birds were owls. But I don't care. You don't know me at all! I just like the phrase: "The Capitol was occupied by ominous birds." A little later, some more bad times come up and "on the pinnacle of the Capitol a swarm of bees took up occupation."

Book Junk

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

McNeil's Li'l Sausage Bits

Welcome once more to "McNeil's Li'l Bogie Bits," where McNeil reads a 700-page Humphrey Bogart bio and I pass the savings on to you! As you may recall, we were on the fence about whether the casting of Dooley Wilson in CASABLANCA was a legitimate bogie bit. As McNeil put it, Wilson "was not their first or even second choice, but....that's how sausage is made. I'm not sure that's how sausage is made." Which reminds me of a whimsical quotation from a whimsical narrator in my beloved bestseller (it's neither beloved nor a bestseller) MOVIE STARS: "There is a reason no one wants to know 'how the sausage is made.' How the sausage is made is terrible." And here you may note the most significant difference between my "blog" writing and my "real" writing: on the "blog," that second sentence would have ended in an exclamation point. And, honestly, in most of my "real" writing too. I wonder why I didn't do it! But we are getting far away from McNeil's li'l bits. McNeil says that Lena Horne was considered for the role of Sam! He also contends, rather boldly, that CASABLANCA would have been "twice as good" if Lena Horne had played the role. And I do say that such an observation indeed qualifies as a bogie bit. Another bogie bit is of a sad nature, as it depicts Mayo Methot, in a drunken rage, getting herself wedged tightly behind a sofa somehow. But let's get back to sausage. By a weird coincidence, I was listening to an opera when I received the first bogie bit alluded to above. That's not the coincidence. So, in a while, I was like, "What the hell is this opera about? I don't speak whatever language this is!" And I looked up the plot on the "internet," and this guy in the opera gets in trouble for eating a sausage on the moon! I guess you think I am making that up. But I will tell you the name of the opera - THE EXCURSIONS OF MR. BROUCEK - so you can look it up for your damn self. So I was like, "Sausage!" And, believe it or not, it was, by another coincidence, the second opera I had listened to THAT WEEK about somebody going to the moon. (The other one was Il mondo della luna by Baldassare Galuppi... and I can almost swear that Haydn wrote an opera with a similar title and subject matter, but now I am just showing off my knowledge of moon operas.) This is getting long, but I have more to tell. I just hope the lousy AT&T "internet" doesn't stop working before I'm done. We're getting something better installed on Monday! Leslie came over to watch INLAND EMPIRE the other night and we couldn't finish because the AT&T "internet" crapped out. So we turned off the lights and put on these plastic toy rings that have colored lights shooting out of them and Dr. Theresa requested Kraftwerk, so we danced around to that for a while, and then switched to a playlist by Kate Tsang. But the main point is that... you know all those books I am reading all the time in various circumstances? Now I've had to add a book that I put next to my laptop in my home office for whenever the "internet" goes kerplunk and I'm just sitting there with a stupid look on my face and nothing to distract me from the terrible abyss. There are books littered all over the place around here, it's a sad mess. Oh! So... one of the most recent books I had downstairs, on the side table near my favorite chair, was DAISY MILLER by Henry James, which somehow I had never read before. And in it, a character quotes from MANFRED, the poetic drama by Lord Byron, and I liked the quotation, so I dug out the old SELECTED POEMS of Byron and started reading MANFRED. And I hadn't made it too far, just to lines 196 and 197 of the first scene of the first act, and what did I see but "When the falling stars are shooting,/And the answer'd owls are hooting"? And you know what that means. Well, as long as I'm here, I'll mention a message I received yesterday from DJ Gnosis, who said he had gotten a news alert about his own old "blog," and when he checked it out, he saw that a "web" site called - I think - casino.org had discovered a 2008 "post" of mine, and a contemporaneous "post" by DJ Gnosis commenting on it, about the time I "posted" the first-ever photographic evidence on the "internet" of the existence of the Foster Brooks robot that used to live in Las Vegas until it was dismantled and sold for scrap metal, as we all must be eventually. Quoted in the article? Foster Brooks's own daughter! I would "link" to the article, but, being in the midst of a nightmarish effort to scrub old zombie "links" from the "blog," I am no longer much inclined to "link" to outside sources. Nothing against casino.org! Anyway, this on the heels of my 45-year-old letter inspiring McNeil to watch HARRY AND WALTER GO TO NEW YORK. Given enough time and patience, such meaningless things can happen.

Encounter

I don't "blog" anymore. You may think I do but I assure you that I do not. Sometimes you need an update, though, don't you? I know how you worry! So the other evening I was at Ace Atkins's office and I thought I'd see if he had a copy of THE GREEN RIPPER. He said he probably had several. THE GREEN RIPPER is a novel by John D. MacDonald. You will recall that I gave up on John D. MacDonald. I don't get the appeal of John D. MacDonald. If you "click" here you can read some of the reasons why. But I know you won't. What is wrong with you? You beg me to "blog" but you can't take the time to "click" on the "links." Well! It is really none of my business. But John Hodgman was saying all these nice things about John D. MacDonald in the New York Times some weeks ago, and in particular THE GREEN RIPPER, and although this did not change my feelings about John D. MacDonald I was made sufficiently curious for the actions related above to be the result. Anyhow, Ace contacted me yesterday to say he had located THE GREEN RIPPER and I could come by to fetch it. So I did. Now I took Ace's copy of THE GREEN RIPPER with me across the street from his office to Square Books. As I made a purchase there, I remarked to the cashier that this was Ace's copy of THE GREEN RIPPER and not part of my haul. We got into a little discussion (Bill C. wondered whether it might be a first edition of THE GREEN RIPPER) and it was at this time that I opened the book and discovered it to be, if not a first edition, at least an edition signed by the author. I couldn't imagine that Ace wanted me to drag this copy around town with me! You may recall, though I doubt you will "click" on it to refresh your memory, the time I spilled rye all over Ace's copy of LA BRAVA. So I went back over to Ace's office and returned the signed copy of THE GREEN RIPPER. He was surprised! He had no idea it had been signed, but he looked at the signature and confirmed it - thanks to his expertise - as John D. MacDonald's very own. Ace quickly produced yet another copy of THE GREEN RIPPER to replace the one I had brought back. Copies of THE GREEN RIPPER are just scattered around Ace's office like so many throw pillows in a film by Nancy Meyers. Okay! Now it was time for me to go back to Square Books and meet my pal McKay McFadden, whom I had not seen in the flesh in some years. Before McKay arrived I had time to note that Travis McGee (hero of the John D. MacDonald novels) refers to fat people as "fatties" on the second page of THE GREEN RIPPER, not raising my hopes. (A few pages later, though I did not make it this far at the time, McGee's girlfriend boards his famous houseboat and announces, "Today I jogged with four sets of fatties." There are shady goings-on at her place of employment, which makes me think she will be dead shortly. As Ace once revealed the key to the Travis McGee novels: "The woman always dies." [Further along: "Last week I had a batch of fatties down by the barns" - ed.]) I also read (in another book entirely) about the time U. S. Grant wanted to give his coach driver a Christmas present, so he hurried back down the steps and fell and experienced the debilitating leg injury that was just the start of all the troubles and misfortunes shortly to snowball on him, culminating in his death. Then McKay appeared on the stairs! We greeted one another warmly and McKay said, "I'm sorry I'm late. I just had an encounter with a pig in the woods." I can quote her accurately because I immediately leapt up to borrow a napkin and a pen from the Square Books coffee counter, as seen here:

She went on to describe the "encounter," which was much more horrific, grisly, tragic, and bloody than anything I would call an "encounter," and I shan't disturb you with it on this festive occasion. Conversation moved on to pleasanter subjects and we found before we knew it that we had spent some number of hours catching up, a sufficient number of hours for me to happily inform McKay that it was just about time for John T. Edge's yearly ritualistic dispersal of sausage balls at the City Grocery Bar on the occasion of his birthday. McKay and I, having arrived perhaps five minutes before the party officially began, were, I believe, the first to retrieve sausage balls from the traditional brown paper bag, pellucid as it was with delicious grease. (It occurs to me that I have used the phrase "pellucid with grease" in my "professional" writing at some point - perhaps on more than one occasion; I know it has assaulted my brain repeatedly, in any case - and I apologize for the lazy repetition. I must think it's quite the literary turn of phrase! How I sicken myself.) "I miss my Oxford life," said McKay. I replied with some observation about the many charms of San Francisco, where McKay now finds herself most days. "Oh, it's DAZZLING," she replied, employing a theatrical hand gesture to indicate bedazzlement. And yet her tone belied her adjective! I have never heard the word "dazzling" to drip with such venom, nor seen it accompanied by such bitterly flashing eyes! Not long thereafter, Dr. Theresa arrived, arrayed in silver.

We were able to boast to Tom Franklin (another recent arrival) that we had taken his picture off the TV screen. You see, he was once an extra in DEADWOOD, a show that Dr. Theresa and I are currently watching for the very first time. We proudly described the scene in which Dr. Theresa spotted Tom with her eagle eye and the pains we took to catch his fleeting image, and it was his sad duty to inform us that - although he indeed appears as an extra on the show - the person we thought was him was not him. Later at home we realized that the extra we thought was Tom had long hair and a graying beard, both of which Tom has at the present moment, but neither of which he would have had during the physical production of DEADWOOD. This is not Tom Franklin.

The Powerfully Spiced Sausage Meat

Bill Boyle got me reading these stark novels of Osamu Dazai. I read two of them and neither one had an owl in it, as far as I could tell. But as you know, I also like books with gelatin in them, especially Jell-O. (See also.) But I'm not "blogging" anymore, so I can't just "blog" about any old thing anymore, especially seeing as how I don't "blog" anymore. But there was this interesting jelly sequence in this one Osamu Dazai novel: "Oh, I'm sorry. Have you made jelly? That's terrific. You shouldn't have bothered... it would be wicked not to eat your wonderful jelly... It tasted watery, and when I came to the piece of fruit at the bottom, it was not fruit after all, but a substance I could not identify... as I manipulated the peeling lacquer chopsticks to eat my jelly, I felt unbearably lonely." It really made wonder about the particular kind of jelly being discussed, but not enough to look anything up. And I couldn't just "blog" about that! But what if there were TWO books with gelatin in them? Suddenly we would have a theme going! Such a possibility did not even occur to me, frankly, but then there I was in Square Books all of a sudden, and hey! Do you know about this "Constant Reader" program they have? Well, it's not my job to explain it to you. But sometimes you get a free book. And I had this little slip of paper in my wallet entitling me to a free book. And that's when I saw what I didn't even know I needed, inconspicuous on a back table: the recently discovered novel by Walt Whitman. So I got it for free. And I meant to open it to the beginning but somehow it fell open to page 10, which catches Whitman mid-phrase: "preferable to some, is the powerfully spiced sausage meat, or the jelly-like head-cheese." Now we're getting somewhere! PS: Prayer works! After composing the bulk of the above, but leaving a few gaps to fill on my return, I went off to visit my mom and dad for a few days. I took with me a biography of Howard Hughes that Megan and I are reading. In my few free moments, I read some of it, which is how I came upon "Charles W. Perrelle, the able vice-president of production for the Consolidated-Vultee Aircraft Company," who was, somehow, in the eyes of the authors, both a "boy wonder" and an "owlish-looking man." PPS! Not to put a cherry on top, but when I came home I watched the most recent episode of Pete Holmes's show CRASHING, which I had set to record in my absence for just that purpose. The song over the closing credits was "Sometimes I'm Happy," as performed by Jerry Lewis. Life seems to be at its peak.

Fact Checkering

Oh! This is probably very important. I was hesitant, as you may recall, to describe the tablecloths at The Crawdad Hole as "checkered." But I have just received compelling photographic evidence confirming my memory of the setting. In addition, Bill Boyle has confirmed that he did indeed express his willingness to lick his grandmother's armpit in the manner indicated, though I had run out of room on the cocktail napkin and was unable to accurately record in print that part of his quotation. I therefore stand by my original account.

Melted Fezzes

Well! Megan and Dan came to town and we went out and had a ball. Bill Boyle appeared on the scene and we drove out to Water Valley to a place called the Crawdad Hole. Somehow Megan knew about it. Dr. Theresa and I had never heard of it. As Dan pointed out, a restaurant has to have a well-placed sense of confidence to put "Hole" in its name. It was great! Great enough for "hole." I'm kind of sorry to tell you about it, because they only serve food until they run out of whatever is fresh that day, and I don't want you to eat it before I get there next time. We had so much stuff spread over the checkered oilcloth (was it checkered? It should have been!) - crab legs and sausages and corn on the cob and Mississippi tamales - that's a famous thing, if you didn't know! - and oysters, both sweetly raw and succulently grilled, all superb, and all washed down with a pitcher of ice-cold beer that went perfectly with the food. No crawfish because they were out. Megan said they told her it wasn't crawfish season. But we didn't even miss the crawfish. Then we were supposed to meet Ace at a "secret bar" but we went to the "secret bar" and it wasn't a "secret bar," it was the shabby back room you have to walk through to use the toilet at a local pizza restaurant of small repute. So we were like, "THIS IS ACE'S SECRET BAR?" But the story hasn't ended. MORE LATER. Because we had made a basic mistake about the "secret bar" and it wasn't Ace's fault! Now I'm going to start looking at whatever I jotted down last night on scraps of paper in my wallet and on bar napkins. As I recall, some of it might be bawdy and shocking! You know I don't like to "go there." Blame the liquor and high spirits of rekindled camaraderie. The first note I see just says, "Remember the Night." I'm like, hmm, this isn't as scintillating as I recalled. Was I just telling myself to remember the night? Then it occurred to me. It's the name of a Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck movie that Megan thinks Dr. Theresa and I would like. A nice sentiment, but a disappointment in the realm of fevered inspirations scrawled on tattered scraps from bars. Muttering, we left the (temporary) debacle of "secret bar" and went up to City Grocery. There we encountered Randy Yates, owner of Ajax, who was talking about his former fez collection. That seemed bar-napkin worthy. I wrote down what happened to Randy's fez collection: "I lived in such a [crappy] house all my fezzes melted." That didn't seem like a sentence I had heard before. Oh yes, I have noted here on the back of a postal receipt that Bill Boyle claimed, "If you were stranded on a desert island, all you'd need was Guinness and breast milk." I told you you'd be scandalized! Ace came to CG and took us back to the secret bar. We had lost Megan and Dan by now, but Angela had appeared, a delightful and special treat! And the bar really was different all of a sudden. It was darker and there was a fancy man to make Bill Boyle take off his baseball cap! When we sat down, the server asked if we'd like a complimentary shot, and unless I am crazy, the shots were being offered in empty shotgun shell casings. You know, the way they do in a secret bar. Bill was the only one who drank one and - still miffed about his forcefully doffed baseball cap - said, "That was terrible!" But he said it in a gruffly charming way that made even the server laugh. And when they brought out ice water, they offered to put drops of rosewater in it. Which we accepted! Now, rosewater was popular in Cairo, Egypt, when Dr. Theresa was growing up there, but I believe in the U.S. I have witnessed only her little brother Hesham (he's a full grown man, not a "little brother"!) spiking anything with it. Bill had gotten himself into a rare mood I enjoy seeing him in on those spare occasions when it happens - a touch of lovable surliness that comes over him with just the right amount of fluid help. Surliness isn't the right word. Sweet irascibility? Acting the wiseacre? I don't know any good words. Anyway, he didn't seem to care much for the rosewater. He said - and I was afraid this didn't even show up on the napkin! It was so dark and the server gave me a pen that wrote in PALE ORANGE INK, and I couldn't tell whether words were falling upon the napkin at all - "They're serving us old lady sweat and we're drinking it like we got nothing better to do." Then he said, "It's like you're licking your grandmother's armpit." And then I THINK he said (I didn't write it down) "Don't get me wrong, I'd lick my grandmother's armpit, she's a great lady!" But I may have made that part up. I'm afraid I haven't done justice to the secret bar, which was very pleasant and conducive to much convivial talk and served excellent grilled cheese sandwiches.

Kazoo

October is crazy! I'm giving a reading in Birmingham and a talk in Savannah. Hmm, that doesn't sound so crazy. Well, there's also a wedding to attend. My point is that Dr. Theresa and I - in the wake of a similarly foreshortened McNeil's Movie Korner Film Festival - may not be able to cram as many movies as usual into our Halloween film festival, that month-long, yearly event that I always tell you about even though (because?) you don't care. We've already watched four Halloween movies in a kind of panic: AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, RARE EXPORTS: A CHRISTMAS TALE, the slasher movie (sort of) APRIL FOOL'S DAY, and the Francis Ford Coppola horror movie that came out just a couple of years ago (!) TWIXT. "Did you say TWIX?" Dr. Theresa asked. "Yes, it's based on the candy bar," I cleverly replied. Oh gee what fun we have. The closing theme of APRIL FOOL'S DAY features a lengthy kazoo solo! And then the closing theme of TWIXT goes like this: "Nosferatu! Nosferatu! Nosferatu! Nosferatu! Nosferatu! Nosferatu! Nosferatu! Nosferatu!" That's the chorus. TWIXT was recommended by Bill Boyle. While we watched it we ate sausage and peppers, which is a Bill Boyle specialty. But that was a coincidence! Nor was it an intentional tribute to Coppola, though I got part of the recipe from watching Clemenza in THE GODFATHER. It just happens to be one of the few dishes I make with confidence. It was our anniversary, as you know (?), and I cooked. I remarked how Brando-like the bearing of Val Kilmer was, and Dr. Theresa remarked with justification that he has been like that ever since he made THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU with Brando. At one point in TWIXT, Kilmer just starts doing a straight-up Marlon Brando impersonation (as he also did in MOREAU). Then he does James Mason! (That scene [above], in which Val Kilmer - playing a frustrated novelist - keeps retyping variations on the same sentence, bore a distinct resemblance to a pivotal scene in the ADVENTURE TIME episode "Root Beer Guy.") Val Kilmer walks down a lonely woodland path at night. "It looks like CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE," said Dr. Theresa. And it did! A minute later something reminded me of PORTRAIT OF JENNIE, and I said so, and Dr. Theresa said, "I was just thinking that but I didn't say it." It was our anniversary and we were thinking the same thoughts. Awww! We're adorable.

The Costco Experience

Here's a picture Ace took when we went to Memphis today. He called out of the blue and off we went. On the way we talked about John D. MacDonald some. I thought I had detected a single similarity between MacDonald and Charles Willeford, two extremely different writers. But I noticed that they are both willing to stop their plots in what I find to be a really pleasant way, and just dally over some other subject for a whole chapter or two, say: not what you expect necessarily from a "crime novel." I asked Ace - who was a newspaperman in Florida, you know - whether he thought it had anything to do with the fact that MacDonald and Willeford are both considered "Florida writers," as stylistically different as they are. Ace gave me a good history lesson on Florida crime writing and the particular idiosyncrasies of John D. MacDonald, and the ride to Memphis whizzed by. Ace was going there to speak at a branch of the Memphis Public Library. When we pulled in I could not help but notice that people were selling barbecue from a tent in the library parking lot. Because we were in Memphis! So I let Ace go in to "speak" and had some barbecue instead. I was drawn to the welcome sight of baloney. Not your thin Oscar Mayer-style slices. Nice thick honest rounds of real baloney, my friends. And they put two on a sandwich, as I now know from experience. I finished my sandwich - a real bargain at $3! - and was about to walk into the library when I overheard the library security guard say to a bystander, "The slaw is exceptional." I asked if he were referring to the slaw they put on the barbecue sandwiches in the library parking lot and he said yes and I quite agreed with him. So I said that I was almost tempted to go back and try the smoked sausage. He revealed that he had first had a smoked sausage and then gone back for the baloney! So we bonded over that. So did I go back and have a smoked sausage sandwich? It is really none of your beeswax. THAT KIND OF PERSONAL DECISION IS BETWEEN ME AND THE LIBRARY SECURITY GUARD. I saw no signage, so I asked the barbecue guys whether they had a restaurant and the main guy said, "No, we ride around." Then he said that his regular spot is on the corner of Winchester and Elvis Presley Boulevard. Go visit! And tell 'em "Bloggy" the "Blog" Mascot sent you. Finally I went in the library and was very pleasantly surprised to find that Ace's fellow speakers included Scott Phillips and Jedidiah Ayres. We were able to catch up a little bit. Then Ace and I had some Gus's Fried Chicken (SIDE NOTE! When Kent sent me the photo to use in my "Kent Eating Chicken" "post" I promised in return to take him to Gus's next time he visits... and he told me he has already been, of course! He has even been to a second secret Tennessee chicken location that John T. Edge told him about! You can't get ahead of Kent Osborne when it comes to chicken). Over chicken, thinking back on the speaking engagement I had just enjoyed, I speculated that our friend Scott was the first person to use the phrase "a pile of genitals" in the Memphis Public Library and Ace responded, "I THINK NOT." Then Ace said, "Have you ever had the Costco experience?" I had to answer in the negative. Turned out, Ace had to go to Costco and renew his membership and buy one million items from Costco. It also turns out the "Costco experience" is pretty much the same as the "grocery store experience." BUT! Then I passed a whole stack of kayaks in the Costco. Kayaks stacked to the skies! And Ace said, "You know they also sell coffins at Costco." He wasn't kidding! They really do. But the final part of the Costco experience is that when you leave they kind of frisk you! Well, they go through your stuff like you're smuggling uranium. There's your Costco experience. We drove back to town and dropped off the frozen stuff and one of Ace's kids hit me with a light saber. (PS Ace's kids are the best! I am recalling the incident with fondness and good humor!) "Chicken, kayaks and coffins," Dr. Theresa said, summing up my own summary of my day. It sounded like the title of a memoir! Maybe of the founder of Costco! When Ace brought me home we found Dr. Theresa and Megan there. They had just finished watching the old live-action Disney chiller THE WATCHER IN THE WOODS, inspired by Jimmy's thesis defense, in which he cited it, and they were still a little freaked out by the apparently traumatic alternate endings with which the DVD had come supplied. So I gave Megan her first ever belt of rye. A 13-year-old rye! Oh, this day has been coming.

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!"

We Disagree on One Point

Hey there's a new interview with George Singleton over at the Lent Magazine. To enjoy it, "click" here. George always gives the best interviews and a new one is big news. He is hilarious and insightful. He always makes me laugh. He says stuff in here like, "Hell, I spend half my time just trying to think up names. I’m just going, 'God, I’ve used that name – Frank! Frank has shown up in a hundred short stories.'" See, that is the real scoop about writing. He says, "Well I’m not a big fan of anything I’ve written in the past because it’s kind of dead meat... I bet if I got hit in the head and forgot who I was and read those stories I’d go, 'All right, maybe they deserve to be published in a magazine.' But I’m not sure I would... There are these people out there who talk about these meals they’ve eaten years in the past, and they go, 'That was the best meal I’ve ever eaten twenty years ago in Paris.' Okay, good for you. I just say it was food, and what's the next meal?" Heed this gnomic master, young geniuses! He does come out as strongly pro-Vienna sausage, and down that one dark path to madness I cannot follow.

Return of Pale Death

This Norman Mailer book about the moon landing continues to be concerned, in part, about the vending-machine food available at various NASA facilities. In the Project Engineering Facility Building in Houston, "A choice was presented of preheated cans of Vienna sausage, corned beef..." Wait! I'm going to pause for a second. "Preheated cans of Vienna sausage!" There are two things wrong with that: "preheated cans" and "Vienna sausage." I am sure you will recall that my friend Andy referred to Vienna sausage as "tubes of pale death." Now imagine them in a preheated can! I dare you! I am truly saddened to note that Andy has not "blogged" about anything since a can of cling peaches more than two years ago. Okay, back to Mailer: "A choice was presented of preheated cans of Vienna sausage, corned beef, beef and macaroni, Dagwood sandwiches, pastry, chili, chiliburgers." Chiliburgers again! I remain fascinated by the predominance of chiliburgers in the space program. As usual, I am focusing on the wrong things in the books I read. That's the problem with books!

True Lettuce Story

Want to hear about my most recent trip to Los Angeles? No? Great! Let's get right to it. Pen took me to lunch at Musso & Frank's, the oldest dining spot in Hollywood, I guess. He said he used to go there and work on the very beginnings of ADVENTURE TIME. We both ordered the "romaine salad" to start with and received a head of lettuce that someone had chopped in two to split between us. Nothing on it or anything. A saucer of dressing on the side. And a pepper grinder on the table. And that's all you need, man, although it looked kind of funny just lying there by itself on the plate. I know what a classic wedge is, but this was stark. Starkly delicious! Then we went to a writer's meeting and Tom Herpich, one of the great storyboard artists and writers on ADVENTURE TIME, doodled a picture of my head and gave it to me. I looked at it and thought, "Wow, I'm fat!" Hey if you are a skinny, scrawny person like I used to be for the first half of my life, it will be a constant astonishment to yourself when you get fat. Every time you suddenly remember you are fat, you will be surprised! At the meeting, Kent and I had a big argument about the original meaning of the phrase "A rolling stone gathers no moss." I just couldn't believe some wise man in ancient times was going around telling people, "You should get some moss growing on you! It's fantastic!" But Kent's argument was forceful and compelling, filled with verbal footnotes. He cited Philip K. Dick, for example. And later it dawned on me that the Bob Dylan song "Like a Rolling Stone" is on Kent's side, too. So I admitted I was wrong. The writers ordered pizza. Somebody wanted a pizza with just basil and nothing else. Somebody wanted a pizza with just garlic and nothing else. Inside, I was like, What other kinds of pizzas will they order with a single herb or spice on it and nothing else? Somvilay seemed to think it was funny, too. He tried to get Pen to order a pizza with just mint on it and nothing else. Kent and I ate at that same restaurant I told you about some months ago, the one where Bob Hope used to eat. This time we were utterly forgotten by the staff for an incredible length of time. Kent drily pretended it was part of the historic ambience. "You know," he said, "Dean Martin used to be ignored in this very booth." He said, "Bob Hope used to put his elbows on this table and find out it hadn't been wiped down." The next morning I had breakfast at a diner with Verdell. That was the best, because I hadn't seen Verdell for five years then there she was, same as ever. We laughed constantly. The diner was called The Tallyrand. It was also called The Tally Rand and the The TallyRand. If you walk around the restaurant you can see the name spelled at least three different ways. Above please enjoy the photo Verdell took of "Sid and Sandy Sausage," who adorn the window. They are a couple of sausage links who are deeply in love. Verdell and I agreed that The Tallyrand reminded us in some ways of Mary Mac's Tea Room in Atlanta, the city where we met. There was a lime tree in the parking lot of The Tally Rand, bursting with healthful limes. Verdell parked right next to it and I was stabbed and scratched by vicious lime branches as I struggled out of the car through the sliver of door I was able to open. After breakfast, Verdell dropped me off at the auction of Bob Hope's personal items. I can't tell you about that because I'm writing an article about it for a magazine. I called Dr. Theresa and told her I was on my way to Beverly Hills and she said "Be careful," and I said "Oh no, what do you think is going to happen to me in Beverly Hills?" and she said "You could be torn apart by a pack of coyotes in front of the closed gates of a mansion," and I said, "All right sweetie." But Dr. Theresa was onto something because Verdell almost killed me twice - once swooping around Mulholland Drive and again when a tour bus nearly backed into us. As I say, we were laughing the whole time, an okay way to get killed.

Combo

"Dean makes everything sound like peanut butter and jelly," Dr. Theresa said this morning. Then she did a little dance move. We had a Dean Martin album playing. What Dr. Theresa was expressing, much more vividly, is the point about Dean's style I made at the very end of yesterday's interminable "post." In other news, Kelly Hogan writes in to say that the sandwich we all enjoyed together was more specifically an "Italian beef combo." The combo has beef AND sausage! BEEF AND SAUSAGE. Likewise this "post" is a "combo" of various "subjects" for your "enjoyment."

Sweet and Savory and Psychotic

Some years ago Dr. Theresa and John Currence discussed the creation of a hot dog bread pudding, combining two of Dr. Theresa's favorite things, hot dogs and bread pudding. Why this plan never came to pass is a subject shrouded in mystery. But today Dr. Theresa stopped by John's office for a chat and she came home with two delicious and insane sausage cinnamon buns, fresh from the oven - perhaps the closest thing this troubled world has seen to the hot dog bread pudding it so desperately needs. (Pictured, Cinnamon Bun, one of my favorite ADVENTURE TIME characters. I tried to find a shot of him from last night's episode, which seemed fitting because Cinnamon Bun was possessed by a demon in it. But I failed.)

Latest News From Oz

Today Ace Atkins and I were talking about William Bendix and Ace said, "What happened to William Bendix? Did he come to a tragic end?" We didn't know. But we parted agreeing that he seemed like the kind of guy who might have come to a tragic end. Here he is in an illustration for the American Meat Institute (not to be confused with the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council), proclaiming William Bendix "on the air for MEAT." What else happened today? Heard from Megan Abbott. She has been keeping an eye on all this Oz stuff on the "blog." Turns out she and her brother read all the OZ books "100 times." Megan elaborates: "my dad bought us an enormous roll of paper from the hardware (?) store and we drew a map of Oz, based on all the books, that covered the whole floor of my bedroom and included illustrations made with those fat markers that smelled like fruit. I'd kill for that map now! I wanted to walk right into it. Then we wrote the publisher and asked for more written by L. Frank Baum and not the 'other authors.' My parents, who helped us mail the letter, apparently didn't feel obliged to tell us he'd been dead for 60 years."

Beneficial Scientific Hot Dog Research

Mentioned in today's New York Times: The National Hot Dog and Sausage Council. According to its "web" site, the Council "conducts scientific research to benefit hot dog and sausage manufacturers."

Famous Sausage & Peppers

Thanks to our friend Joey who supplied certain exotic ingredients from a faraway land (Memphis) I was able to make my famous sausage and peppers tonight, as famously seen on Maud Newton's "blog." Looking back, I notice some mistakes in the recipe as originally recorded for posterity. 1) Don't let the garlic get brown and bitter! Are you crazy? Add it AFTER the peppers and onions, and let it get a deep golden color, but not brown. 2) Yes, ALWAYS add dried basil after you add the tomatoes. 3) Put some sugar in there, too! People like sugar. 4) Kelly Hogan is the one who told me to scrape the brown bits off the inside of the pot into the sauce. Why didn't I give her credit?

Apt!

Today on the "blog" of Andy Hopkins, he refers to Vienna sausage as "tubes of pale death in a can."