Events Spiral Out of Control

What's a typical day like for me, you ask? What? You didn't ask? Who are you? Where am I? Most days I sit around looking up stuff like how many calories in an apple. Yesterday was different. I went out to see Beth Ann Fennelly onstage at the launch event for her latest book THE IRISH GOODBYE. I got into town a little bit early because the tradition is to have a quick drink at City Grocery Bar before the reading, at least that has always been my personal understanding. And look, I don't make it out to the bar as much since the famous unpleasantness of almost two years ago. So I was disinclined to miss out on my special treat. But get this! City Grocery Bar was closed for a private party! That happens from time to time, enraging me. It can strike at any moment! The private party, not the rage. Although that can also strike at any moment. There is no warning for either one. Anyway, Bill Boyle arrived early as well, so, with a little more than half an hour to go, we departed the venue (Off Square Books) and walked around the corner to Proud Larry's, which even the bartender there referred to as the "backup" for literary whatever the hell it is. Life? Bill didn't want a drink. He was just keeping me company and keeping tradition alive. So important! That's what I said to the golden-brown liquid in my glass so it would know it was not being consumed in vain. Anyway, we had a nice talk (Bill and I, that is, not the glass and I, though we got along great too) and then we moseyed back over at 5:31 PM, just one minute after the event's official start time. And let me tell you something: we couldn't even get in! Not only was every chair occupied, the rear of the store was packed with a standing-room-only crowd AND there were people kind of smushed up in the doorway and spilling out onto the sidewalk. Well! I wasn't really surprised by the turnout, especially for Beth Ann, though I have long assumed that literature is dead. An unsuspecting Dr. Theresa, meanwhile, was on her way, having just finished teaching a class, and I had to tell her to come pick me up at Proud Larry's instead. Please be assured I had already purchased my copy of THE IRISH GOODBYE upon my arrival. Anyway, back around the corner we went and I sat at the bar with Bill again and ordered some to-go food for Dr. Theresa and myself... our go-to order at Proud Larry's, yes, our to-go go-to, that's right, or our go-to to-go would probably be a more proper way to put it, two grilled chicken salads with the lemon-red wine vinaigrette. And, if we're really feeling daring, we cheat and split a quesadilla. And boy were we feeling daring last night! And look, you're not going to believe this incredible tale, but I had already ordered the quesadilla before looking at my phone to discover that Dr. Theresa had texted her request for a quesadilla. Yes, you read that right! That's the kind of magic that thirty years of marriage will get for you. What a night. What a world. What times we live in.

A Weird Creature of the Night

Here's one of the many, many narrators of THE MANUSCRIPT FOUND IN SARAGOSSA: "Pliny says that elephants have been taught to dance, and that once they were found rehearsing in the moonlight." When I read that, I decided to find out more! I scurried downstairs like a disgusting little rat and nosed around in the bookcase where I knew I had seen my books by Pliny the Elder when I was looking for something else. I had just two volumes out of the huge, sloppy pile of books that make up his NATURAL HISTORY, and I was pretty sure I didn't have the one with elephants in it, and I was right. Noticing that one of my Pliny (the Elder!) books did not have a dust jacket, I recalled that I had bought it used in San Francisco, and as I strolled down the sidewalk with my purchase in hand, that's when (as recorded previously on the "blog" - "click" here, you uncaring monster!) I either spoke to Francis Ford Coppola or some guy with a beard. Then I remembered that after I walked away, I thought, "I should have gotten him to sign this Pliny the Elder book. They're both Italian!" Well, now, in what we call "the present," I'm glad I didn't, because then I would have known for sure whether or not this guy was Francis Ford Coppola, and I might have been disappointed. And humiliated! As it is, we all dwelled in what may have been a pleasant illusion, and what could be nicer? I can keep you in suspense no longer! I got hold of the Pliny volume with the elephants in it, and the reality of the anecdote was much sadder than the light tone of Potocki's narrator would have one believe. That's what I get for wanting to know things. As you can imagine, once I had book eight of the NATURAL HISTORY, in which Pliny promises to tell us all about animals - and delivers! - I skipped greedily ahead to the bird section, hoping to find some owls, which were, indeed, forthcoming. "The eagle-owl is a funereal bird, and is regarded as an extremely bad omen... it inhabits deserts and places that are not merely unfrequented, but terrifying and inaccessible; a weird creature of the night, its cry is not a musical note but a scream." Scarily put! But old Pliny gives the eagle-owl (not to be confused with an eagle) a fair shake: "I know several cases of its having perched on the houses of private persons without fatal consequences." That's a relief! Now let's get back to THE MANUSCRIPT FOUND IN SARAGOSSA, which, although it hasn't had a single owl in it yet (except on the cover), does have monkeys riding vicuñas, which I only mention because my list of monkeys riding dogs has so few entries, whereas I am adding to this list of books with owls in them, upon which you never "click" anymore, all the time. Look, put down your quill, I know that a vicuña is not a dog. Which reminds me. I was reading that Lord Byron poem, and there's a character called the Chamois Hunter. And I was like, hey! This guy can't find his chamois, a small, soft cloth for polishing things! That's not really what I thought. What I really thought, given my capability for contextualizing, was, huh, a chamois must be an animal. I'm 61 now and I went my whole life thinking a chamois was just a kind of rag or cloth! I never gave a thought for the poor chamois who gave up its life, I assume, so I could polish up the trophy we won for the battle of the bands in 1989, largely because my brother was one of the judges. Which reminds me. Jon Host and I once rhymed "chamois" and "clammy" in a song.

Famous Tootsie Pop

Given recent events, I have different books going at the same time now, and given those same recent events, one of the categories is "books I read in a doctor's waiting room." It's not the same as either book in the other two categories, if you are making a chart. There can never be an overlap. Each of the three (so far) books needs to be of a different size, and to have different qualities. The one I read while taking my blood pressure, for example, requires a sturdy spine, like me, so it can lie flat on a table, like me. I don't lie flat on a table. But we all lie flat on a table one day. That's not the point. What was I talking about? Oh yeah. So I was sitting there reading this one novel in the waiting room when, by a big coincidence, the narrator mentioned the problem for which I was about to see the doctor! Not only that, he cited a probable cause for the problem. And this cause was something in the proximity of which I had recently loitered! Now, this is the kind of coincidence that McNeil and I talk about all the time, all giddy from delight. So when I saw the doctor, I said, "Hey, could this thing be caused by this other thing?" And he said "No." So that was a bust. And the coincidence wasn't so great after all. So why are we here? I don't know. It does give me the liberty to mention that Megan and I have been discussing the devil a pretty good bit lately, and then she asked me a question about the Tarot (an entirely separate discussion, although there is, of course, a card with the devil on it. But that's not what we were talking about for a change). Anyhow, I looked up what Jesse Moynihan has to say about another card, the one under discussion, and I was like, "Huh! Okay!" Then I opened JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS to the passage I had been reading... and the devil, in that passage, talks about the VERY SAME IDEAS I had just been reading in Jesse's pamphlet! I'm not saying Jesse is the devil. Far from it! So that was another coincidence. This great tale of life as it is lived in our lively times isn't over yet. Because I had TWO doctor appointments today! I had enough time in between them to stop by Square Books. I was happy to see that Richard Howorth was not just trying to protect my fragile feelings when he said that my books aren't 100% out of print... just 99.999999%! I added that part. They had a big old fresh stack of MOVIE STARS, my troubling masterpiece of short fiction. Lauren Graham raves: "Funny, poetic, vivid, unique. Jack Pendarvis has crafted a collection of gems." I'm not lying! It's on the cover! Go see for yourself. Pick up a few copies for the family. While supplies last! I signed the whole batch, and wrote secret messages in a couple of them. It's like Willy Wonka all over again! Ran into Tom Franklin, who was walking down from the second floor of the bookstore with a young woman to whom he introduced me as "Via Bleidner, Kim Kardashian just bought her book for Netflix." Oh! On the way out of the store, I saw a big poster for the novel I said I couldn't tell you about yet. But I can now, because there's a big poster right there at the front door of Square Books. It's DON'T LET THE DEVIL RIDE (the devil again!), the latest from Ace Atkins! The owl I have been sitting on since January 22, 2023, is... I can now reveal... the owl in the famous Tootsie Pop commercial. Well, I haven't seen the published book yet, just the manuscript, but Ace says he "thinks" the owl is still in there. And I guess you think the story is over. WRONG! Because as I waited for the second doctor, once again reading my "waiting room book" in a different waiting room... well, first I should tell you that I saw a raccoon using a walkway last night. A walkway that a person would use. Like, a narrow sidewalk of sorts. So, anyway, I'm reading this novel again and the narrator is astonished to see "a raccoon using a sidewalk." All right, that's the end.

Hole to Hole

Based on contextual evidence from my precious, precious diary, I must have gone back to Square Books on January 4th. I know this because I had lunch with Tom Franklin that day, and I never go to the square without making some time for the bookstore. I also have noted in my diary that a young person stopped me to take my photograph that day because he liked the hat that Katie made for me. And I remember being on the sidewalk at that moment, headed for Square Books. But that is not what I want to tell you about. But it is a pretty nice hat. Anyway, it must have been on January 4th - though the diary does not explicitly state as much - that I picked up RAMAYANA, the adaptation by William Buck. I did so because when I saw it, I recalled the high esteem in which Lee Durkee holds William Buck. My diary goes on to tell me that I finally began reading the book early in our week of being snowed in. But what I've been saving just for you is that last night I read the part where Rama is (spoiler alert!) exiled from the city, and his chariot driver predicts that as a result "these broad ways will be the paths where wild cats and owls roam. Rats will crawl and cunning snakes will slither from hole to hole." If you ask me, the cats and owls should take care of the rats and snakes, but what do I know? In conclusion, I was once again given to wonder why every book has an owl in it, as you can see for yourself by "clicking" here. In further conclusion, allow me to share a fascinating detail not included in the diary: the young person took my photo not with his phone, but with a clunky old-time camera such as Jimmy Olsen might have used.

Yesterday

Square Books called yesterday to let me know that my Peter Falk memoir had come in: it's the next selection in the Megan book club! Well, I had a doctor's appointment later that afternoon, so I moseyed to town a little early and ran into Shadan on the sidwalk... she's one of the excellent booksellers at Square Books, and let me emphasize that she wasn't even at work. She was just on the sidewalk in the middle of town, and she stopped to remind me that she and I like a lot of the same books, to which I replied that indeed we do. So she told me about a book she thought I would really enjoy: THE BLIND OWL by Sadegh Hedayat, and she even described in detail where I would find it in the shop, like a human GPS! This was just a friendly gesture on her part, I had caught her outside of work - now, that's what I call a bookseller! And she didn't even know about my owl problem. So I went to the bookstore, and the book was just where she had said it would be, and I read on the back cover that it is "a haunting tale of loss and spiritual degradation," or, as I call it, "The Bill Boyle Seal of Approval." In fact, if I knew anything about Venn diagrams, or what they are, I could show you how a certain subset of books perfectly overlaps in the preferences of Bill, Shadan, and myself. But the adventures of the day were just beginning! Off I went to the doctor. The nurse who took my blood pressure recorded the results on a piece of paper, and as she did so, she said, "Wow, this pen is great. I wonder where I stole it from." That's an exact quotation! So I said, "What kind of pen is it? I'm always on the lookout for a good pen!" And she looked at the side of the pen and read from it the brand name "EnerGel." And that is what is so damn weird, I tell you! Just ONE DAY EARLIER, I had "posted" a chapter of my serialzed novel SOUR BLUEBERRIES, in which one of the protagonists similarly uses a pen that does not belong to him, is amazed by its high quality, and discovers that it goes by the brand name EnerGel! WHAT! I conclude by assuring you that I am no paid shill for the EnerGel corporation, it is just a weird thing that happened.

Hot News From Providence

I'm sure you remember my friend Judge. She used to tell me how surprisingly big softballs are in Chicago! Maybe she moved to Rhode Island! I'm basing that on the title of her email. You know, back when I used to "blog," she would send me snapshots that captured the very vibrancy of life itself. And she's back at it! Just take a look. Here is an image, intriguing even in ordinary circumstances, that can be read in a number ways in our strange modern times, about which I offer no further comment at this juncture.

Door Trouble!

Well, you know I don't "blog" anymore, but I usually tell you if I go to Los Angeles and all the wonderful things that happen there in the magical city of broken dreams. I went to Los Angeles recently, but much of the "material I gathered" is going straight into a secret project I'm working on with McNeil for actual publication. And the rest, well, I thought about using the "interesting details" in a novel, but then I thought, oh, that sounds hard, writing a novel, maybe I won't do that. 1. Scallops at an Elvis-themed hotel. Does that sound like a good idea? Ordering scallops at an Elvis-themed hotel? As you know, I often stay in Memphis the night before a flight, for easy access to the airport. And sometimes I stay in an Elvis-themed hotel. And this time I ordered scallops, which, even as I was doing it, seemed like the last thing a person should order at an Elvis-themed hotel. Well! I'm still here. The scallops had an aggressively candied flavor. 2. At the Elvis-themed hotel, my hotel door wouldn't shut all the way! Well, I put on that latch thing they have at the top of many hotel doors and hoped for the best. 3. I lost my favorite pen somewhere in Los Angeles. Almost immediately! Why bring your favorite pen on a trip? On the other hand, why settle for a less-loved pen? Don't you want to feel happy? A grown man ought to be able to keep track of a pen. Should a person of a certain age, however, have outgrown notions like "favorite pen"? 4. By a weird coincidence, I was in town on a national holiday, just as it occurred in 2015 (please do yourself a favor and "click" here for corroboration), so the office was closed on Monday, and I found myself in the EXACT same bistro in which Kent and I had a green chartreuse before going to see 50 SHADES OF GREY together at the movie theater next door, so I had a green chartreuse in Kent's honor, though Kent lives in Vermont now, and I was all alone, it was a desperate sight, let me tell you, drinking a green chartreuse all alone and thinking of Kent. 5. "My twin will hug me... sometimes." - Hilary Florido. 6. Dan Tana's, just the place for dinner with my brother! I got there a little early, so I sat at the bar waiting. I listened to a guy who seemed to be on a first date telling a woman that he was directly descended from William Bradford. He was telling her all about what kind of wine to order after her martini. A Malbec will be velvety and heavy, but without the tannins of a cabernet, he yammered. Whereas a "pinot" will be "fluffy." See? This could have all gone in a novel. Anyway, it wasn't a first date, because he suddenly asked, "What's your name?" She said her name was Lurleen, a name I know because it was the name of the wife of the awful governor of Alabama, George Wallace, who briefly became governor herself, and I was born in Alabama, so we know the name Lurleen. But this guy was enraptured. "WHAT A BEAUTIFUL NAME!" he rhapsodized. Ha ha! If this were a novel I couldn't use the word "rhapsodized." I'd be kicked out of the novelist club. Then he said something that surprised me: "My wife's name is Melody." I didn't see that coming! But he was still trying to pick up Lurleen, I'm pretty sure. "WHAT ARE YOUR PASSIONS?" he oozed. Ha ha, I hate my verbs today. I hate them so much that I sort of love them! She said she liked to paint and what do you know, this guy's brother is a famous artist! "I could do you a lot of favors in the art world," said the putative descendent of William Bradford. "And do you know why? Because my brother loves me! HE LOVES ME!" How the rest of the story went, I just don't know, because my own brother showed up, speaking of brothers, and we were escorted to our table. 7. As my brother and I were eating I glanced up and thought I saw Thomas Middleditch, star of TV's SILICON VALLEY, sitting at the bar. I asked my brother, "Hey! Is that that guy?" My brother said I had to be less obvious so he could find a reason to stare inconspicuously. So I looked in the opposite direction, which frustrated my brother! "No, you have to look in sort of the SAME direction!" he said. So I looked at the TV over the bar, where there was a car race going on, which seemed like something a person would look at, and my brother was able to stare properly at the person whom he indeed confirmed to be Thomas Middleditch. 8. But then, later, out on the sidewalk, after dinner, we seemed to be walking behind that same guy, and I humorously remarked that he would think we were stalking him. "That's not the same guy!" my brother said. I insisted it was the same guy who had been sitting at the bar. "He's wearing the same suit!" I said. "Yes, he's wearing a black JACKET!" my brother replied dismissively. Trouble in the family! So I thought the guy had never been Thomas Middleditch, and my brother thought the guy sitting at the bar had been Thomas Middleditch and this was a different guy we were looking at now. I suppose we'll never know, unless Thomas Middleditch gets in touch. I will just say that the guy at the bar, whom we both took to be Thomas Middleditch at the time, was really making a meal out of his knuckle. He was gnawing ravenously on the knuckle of his right forefinger like there was no tomorrow! 9. Reading a book in translation and the translator uses "trooper" when he means "trouper." How can I trust him now? 10. Back at the hotel in Burbank, I returned to find my hotel room door cracked partly open! If you will glance up at #2, above, you will see that a theme for the trip had formed! I gently and suspiciously pushed the door the rest of the way open, like a person in a movie would do. Nothing was amiss. 11. Cole Sanchez taught me the word "subluxation," meaning a hyperextension of the joint, and I asked him what a hyperextension of the joint was and he said it was when he, Cole, made someone's elbow or knee go in the direction it doesn't want to go. Ouch! It's all part of of what I believe he called "Brazilian jiujitsu," which he practices. He also told me about choking people until they pass out. Don't get me wrong, it is another move in the same sport! "They can submit," he explained, meaning that the person can tap out before they become unconscious. I asked whether there were people who refuse to submit and Cole said that yes, some people are so annoyed that you got past their defenses they would rather just let you choke them unconscious than undergo the humiliation of submitting. 12. I went to see Dianne Wiest performing her magnificent and inexhaustible heart out in Samuel Beckett's great play HAPPY DAYS. I made up a funny blurb for it: "It's a different kind of 'Cheers' for THIS Sam and Dianne!" I eavesdropped on the people sitting in front of me. They have stopped eating octopus because they met a really smart octopus. The guy had a long gray ponytail and was wearing a bracelet that said "RESIST!" Anyway, it's funny because Julia Pott had just been talking at dinner the night before about not ordering the octopus for similar reasons, though to my knowledge she has never met an octopus in person. I'm skipping over most of the dinner with Julia because it's going undiluted into my project with McNeil, alluded to in the introductory paragraph above. 13. During the Beckett play, a certain segment of the audience would go HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! whenever Dianne Wiest, as the character Winnie, said something like, "One forgets one's classics." HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! "One forgets one's classics." HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! They were laughing like it was the farting scene in BLAZING SADDLES. Naturally it made me think of what Kierkegaard said about farce, which makes me no better than them. 14. There was a guy in the hotel bar two nights in a row who also laughed HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA, but I don't know what about. His laugh suggested he was either an opera singer or Paul Bunyan. Booming, highly articulated and distinct HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HAs. He really pronounced each HA. "Boy, that guy really enjoys life," I said out loud to myself, bitterly, alone at the hotel bar.

Scarlet Fever Isn't All That

I took a very quick stroll around the square - less than half an hour - but what an adventure! First I heard someone yelling at me from a car across the street: "Dirty Grandpa! Hey, Dirty Grandpa!" I stopped and looked around, confirming to one and all that I indeed thought of myself as the dirty grandpa. The source of the catcalling was Ace Atkins, who, I may mention, refused to go see DIRTY GRANDPA with us last night. Then I passed by a young woman on the sidewalk. She was telling her friend about a case of scarlet fever she had contracted. "That's very rare!" her friend said with what sounded like delight and congratulations. "Oh, I don't think it's all that anymore," the young woman replied dismissively (modestly?). And so I continued on my way to Square Books, where I filled two empty spots on my recommendation shelf. For you see, Kent Osborne himself had purchased DIE A LITTLE by Megan Abbott and THE PINE BARRENS by John McPhee. Kent's reading habits are none of your business, but I just told you anyway. Kent almost choked on some Gus's fried chicken the other day and he said that as he thought he was dying his foremost consideration was how great such a death would be for my "blog" and I said I would never "blog" about his death so lightly! But now I just don't know what kind of person I am.

This Is Fine

I walked through the town square this morning, just behind a man who was skipping down the street. Not the sidewalk, the street. When a car would narrowly miss grazing him he'd point at it like "Hey, I see you," and then his arms would do some graceful flapping... bird motions, like, good ones, like ballet. Meanwhile, he continued to skip. I vaguely recall reading somewhere, maybe years ago, that skipping is good exercise. But I have never before seen a grown man skipping down the street while flapping his arms gracefully like a bird. I could see that his hair was beginning to gray beneath his cap. He was wearing a green velour jacket and bright red headphones and blue pants like Homer Simpson's. And he was skipping down the street in defiance of oncoming traffic while gently and gracefully flapping his arms like maybe he thought he was a seagull.

I Am Plastic Man

I guess I forgot to tell you about when I tripped and fell on the sidewalk in front of our house some months ago. I was carrying two Sonic hot dogs at the time, but that's another story. Anyway, I went to the doctor about this bump on my arm and he said it was nothing, that I had just "rearranged" some of my "soft tissue." "Like Plastic Man!" I shouted excitedly. The doctor was like, whatever.

Sad Love Drops

You know, I almost didn't "blog" about Bobby Van, because I was like, "Nobody will know what I am talking about." But then I remembered that nobody reads this and I don't care anyway. So! I was watching TCM yesterday and there was Bobby Van doing some dance number where he just hops. He just hops all around town. Hop, hop, hop. I was like, "Boy! Bobby Van is getting on my nerves!" Dr. Theresa came in the room and I remarked to her sourly, "They were probably like, 'Bobby Van is gonna be the new Donald O'Connor!' Well, HE'S NOT!" I believe I was in a rage over the indignity of it all. Why was I getting so worked up about Bobby Van? And then Bobby Van hopped around the corner and there was a dog sleeping on the sidewalk and suddenly the dog jumps up on its hind legs and starts hopping in PERFECT TIME with Bobby Van! And they go hopping down the street together, Bobby Van and the dog. And I was like, "Did you see that? IT WAS AMAZING!" And Dr. Theresa agreed. I was like, "THAT WAS SOME MOVIE MAGIC!" And I felt bad for all my bad thoughts about Bobby Van. But then I realized it wasn't Bobby Van I liked, it was this incredibly well-trained dog who could hop on its hind legs with such seeming effortlessness. And then there was a shot of Bobby Van where he kind of looked like Ray Bolger, and I said to myself, "Oh, they probably thought, 'We got a goldmine here, this kid is the new Ray Bolger.'" And I was bitter again. You know what I just thought of? This wasn't even on my agenda! Once Ward McCarthy and I were shooting something and we needed a dog who could walk on its hind legs. The animal wrangler with whom we were working called them "hind walkers" - ha ha! "Hind walkers" is probably not a very funny phrase to you but it makes me laugh because Ward and I used it so much in the days after our experience with the inept animal wrangler. All this guy did was hold some bacon up so the dogs would go after it! He didn't have any real "hind walkers," or such was our conclusion. We got taken! "My neighbor's dog would do that," Ward remarked, watching the dog trying to get some bacon. Well! As long as I've got you here (I haven't), there are three more things on my mind. 1. Came across this in Chretien de Troyes: "The vavasour called his wife and his daughter, who was very beautiful; they were working in a workshop, but I do not know what work they were doing there." Now that's some refreshing honesty from a writer! Chretien de Troyes is my new role model. 2. Email from McNeil. He described the last shot in CAREER as "a tableau that groped at my heart for sad love drops but there were none because, just because, baby." McNeil is a poet! Here's one last "screen grab" from CAREER. I was a "screen grabbing" maniac!

3. Hey! Remember the other day when I had a possibly false memory of reading in a magazine when I was a youngster that Red Skelton was illiterate? Good times. Well, that memory gave me another memory. I remember some magazine that my mom or one of my grandmothers had when I was about 11 - it was probably Redbook or McCall's or Good Housekeeping - and it had an article in it where a couple of people (I think) drove all over the country eating fast food hamburgers and deciding which one was best. I read it over and over, obsessively! I don't know why. It really appealed to me. Did it make me who I am today? I kind of think it did! It had adventure and hamburgers and took a "bad" thing seriously. I wish I could remember the magazine or the authors or the exact year so I could find it and read it again. I remember how the magazine smelled. What is wrong with me?

NYC Glam

I wish I could remember all the funny stuff Megan Abbott was saying on the telephone the other night. She was talking about winter in New York. I believe she referred to "ten feet of dirty, crunchy ice." Is that how she put it? She said, "At night it looks like a gem and in the daylight it's trash." I think I have that one right. She said people are throwing out their old porcelain toilets because of plumbing problems. She said the sidewalks of New York are lined with broken toilets. "It's a wonderland," she said. I know I have that right. Anyway, here's a photo she "posted" to twitter, entitled "NYC Glam."

The Pills Kick In

1. There is no bar at the Tupelo Airport. There is a War Museum, which I skipped. The flight was delayed: some outfit called Silver Airways. They discontinue service to Atlanta in a few days, so I was crossing my fingers that their heart was still in it a little. It wasn't, I think. 2. Lots of posters about history on the walls of the Tupelo Airport. One poster recounted a Chickasaw legend about the naming of Alabama. It involved some Native Americans strolling around tossing a stick in the air. I'd only ever heard it from my dad before. It's a pretty good story! I had recently incorporated it into a short story in my supposedly forthcoming collection MOVIE STARS (2016). And there it is on a poster at the Tupelo airport. And so begins my traditional jotting in my precious little notebook, recording my eventful travels for grateful future generations. 3. Dr. Theresa had flown Silver Airways before and assured me that John T. Edge - a world traveler! - uses it all the time. I saw him at a party and when I brought it up, seeking comfort, he didn't seem quite so sure about Dr. Theresa's characterization of his travel habits. Was he bemused, even? Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls flew Silver Airways when she came to Oxford recently. Only upon my return did Dr. Theresa happen to mention that Ms. Ray compared her experience to the John Lithgow section of TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE. 4. Well, what with the delayed flight, these pills are kicking in too early. I feel like Elaine Dundy somehow. 5. I must give props to the old-fashioned office-style water cooler in the Silver Airways waiting room, with its exceptionally cold and bracing water. 6. I can tell you what I plan to read on the plane if it ever gets here: THE DRINKING DEN by Zola. Expectation of owls in it is low. It's a gritty human drama of the streets of Paris... laundresses, blacksmiths, roofers. When will they have the chance to hear an owl? Some bird imagery when two blacksmiths are showing off their skills for a laundress: "they were like two great red cockerels strutting around in front of a little white hen. What would they think of next? Sometimes, the heart really does have a strange way of declaring its feelings." The shy blacksmith shows the laundress some rivet-making machines. He's ashamed at the precision of the machine-made rivets compared to his own. The laundress objects: "'See what I mean?' she yelled passionately. 'They are TOO well made. I prefer yours. There, at least, you can feel the hand of an artist.'" I liked that part. 7. I resisted THE DRINKING DEN at first - squalid in the name of so-called "realism" and a little prurient it seemed to me, but I really got caught up in the story. Zola lets something nice happen just for the pleasure of pulling the rug from under these poor so-and-sos. It's cruel, but it keeps you turning pages with sickly, burning hope. 8. The loudspeakers of Silver Airways - why isn't their logo the Silver Surfer? - made a cryptic announcement that our pilot was "in the air" and headed our way. But from where? Across the street? Pills wearing off. The iPod is on shuffle. Harry Partch is singing about monkeys. I have various superstitions and rituals involving the iPod I shan't go into here. 9. A young woman is taking up an entire row of these vinyl waiting room seats. She's sprawled out on her stomach. Her face is pressed flat against the very spot where strangers' butts go. Ah, youth! Impervious youth. 10. The tiny plane landed and it had a slogan printed on the side: "BUILDING BLOCKS." I don't know what that meant, but it didn't strike me as a reassuring thing to stencil on the side of an airplane; I felt the airplane should demonstrate a surer sense of already having been put together properly. The engines were painted fuchsia, a bold choice! I decided to ignore that Blackalicious was performing "It's Going Down" on my iPod as I settled into my seat. 11. Late! A missed connection in Atlanta. Sitting at an airport piano bar reading THE DRINKING DEN (among other things, a catalogue of downfalls instigated by demon liquor) while drinking rye and listening to a lookalike of actor Mike Starr (pictured, the real Mike Starr, I mean) tinkling out a syrupy version of my favorite Chi-Lites song.

I was just happy to be on the ground for a few minutes and about how nice the Delta guy had been about getting me a good seat on the next plane out, so when the bridge came up I belted, "Whhhyyyyyyy Oh Why! Did she leave and go away?" as everyone pretended to ignore me. 12. (One day I'll go back and fill in all the jottings I left out from our punk rock trip to NYC. Like the great steaks Dr. Theresa and I had at LaGuardia! You have to cut them with a plastic knife for security reasons. "But you could kill somebody with this fork," said Dr. Theresa, jabbing to demonstrate. "Shh!" I said. But it was a real fork and she had a point.) 13. Savannah at last! Elizabeth picked me up at the hotel and treated me to a fancy dinner. When we left the restaurant, her car had been towed! She refused to take the cab with me, insisting that she lived "a couple of blocks away." So I couldn't get her on the phone for the rest of the night and spent a troubled evening fearing unspeakable calamity. 14. I finally talked to Elizabeth at eight the next morning as I ate my $36 room-service oatmeal, and she was alive! 15. I spoke to a "humor class" and then the writer Lee Griffith drove me to lunch. Quite unexpectedly we spotted Elizabeth walking down a sidewalk like a glamorous spy in sunglasses. OR WAS IT HER? We turned around and drove back to find out. But she HAD VANISHED! We spotted her headed down a different street. We circled the block to catch up with her. GONE AGAIN! This went on for a while until I insisted she was driving the car behind us. By this time Lee was convinced I had been hallucinating everything. But it was Elizabeth! Her car had not even been towed. She had parked it a block away from her house and forgotten. 16. At one point I needed a tissue and Lee gave me A REAL CLOTH HANDKERCHIEF. TO KEEP! 17. Yes, I got up in front of a packed auditorium of hundreds of young innocent college students and rambled about Jerry Lewis. I remember some of what I said. 18. I praised Jerry's DIY and punk spirit in making THE BELLBOY, though I think I forgot to tell them the title of the movie. 18. When demonstrating Dean Martin's approach to art, the opposite of Jerry's, yet equally valid (no matter what that one guy whom I'll never ever forgive said in that one grad class that time), I eased into a brief, unplanned Dean Martin impersonation. It was really more like Perry Como, but they'll never know that. 19. I drew a line from Jerry to John Waters to Andy Kaufman to Tim and Eric to argue against the importance of "laughing" at comedy. 20. I argued for the influence of THE LADIES MAN on MOONRISE KINGDOM. They applauded at the mention of the latter title because (I think) I had finally mentioned something they had heard of. 21. I encouraged them to emulate Jerry Lewis, who cut his education short when he smashed his high school principal in the face for making an anti-Semitic remark. 22. The Q&A session. Nearly all the Qs were about ADVENTURE TIME. I managed to finesse some of the answers so that they came back to Jerry. I summoned the hubris, for example, to compare Kent Osborne and myself to Dean and Jerry while pontificating on the importance of serendipitous friendships to the development of unanticipated new forms of artistic expression. 23. One kid asked about the influence of Charlie Chaplin on Jerry Lewis, God bless him! God bless that wonderful little bastard. 24. I was very pleased to stay for an hour after the lecture as a long line of young people wanted to talk about ADVENTURE TIME some more. 25. Dinner at a lovely restaurant with a view of riverboats chugging by. The waiter said something about "assorted heirloom carrots" but it sounded like "sordid heirloom carrots" ha ha! Good times. 26. HERE IS SOMETHING THAT HAPPENED! It turned out that Beth Concepcion, the Dean of Liberal Arts, with whom we were having dinner, USED TO DATE BARRY MILLS! That's right, "Barry B." of "blog" "fame"! "The only ghost story I was ever a part of involved Barry Mills," she said. To which I replied, "Was it the old sea captain?" To which she cried, "Yes!" I knew all about the ghost in Barry's old house. But SHE had heard the relentless footsteps of the mysterious old salt himself! 27. It must have been about this time that I splashed seafood broth all over the lapels of my purplish jacket, and that's okay. Like the "magic jacket" before it, it may be up for retirement. Oh, purplish jacket, you are too much for this sad world! 28. Elizabeth and I had a nightcap at the hotel bar, where they were trying to sell an oil painting of a lion for $30,500.

Here I am pretending to kiss it for reasons that seemed amusing and even sensible at the time. 29. Let's skip straight to the tiny airplane that would take me from Atlanta to Tupelo. "For weight and balance purposes, we need all of you to sit in rows 9-12, no matter what your ticket says," announced the flight attendant. Weight and balance purposes! I don't want to hear about your weight and balance purposes when the airplane is about to take off. One guy just kept sitting there in row 7 and he was really freaking me out! Didn't he care about the weight and balance purposes? 30. A fellow passenger - she in awesome zebra-print pants and elaborately tooled boots - volunteered that she liked my jacket! Broth-spattered as it was. 31. I fell asleep on the runway and was awakened by the distinct feeling of someone vigorously shaking my shoulder. No one was there, of course. "Well, this is a good sign," I reckoned. 32. I have to get on just seven more freaking airplanes in the next few weeks. 33. We got off the ground. The airplane started pitching around and making ghost noises, like, Woooooo! Wooooooo! Zebra Pants moved up next to a nice guy she had met. She was across the aisle from me now. This guy was a trucker who was set to haul a load to Kansas when he landed. I said to Z.P., "This plane is making ghost noises!" She said, "I'M SCARED!" And then she said, "You can reach over and grab my hand if you want." I declined. 34. But I noticed that by the end of the flight she was holding hands with the trucker. Aw! Their names were Veronica and Ray. Safe travels! 35. I don't want to be too hard on Silver Airways. Back on the ground in Tupelo a worker raced across the tarmac toward me, clutching the paperback of THE DRINKING DEN I had accidentally left behind on the plane.

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.

Virgil

A young woman walking behind me on the sidewalk just said into her phone, "Isn't a cool name for a dog Virgil?" Part of me thinks she should have been normal and said, "Isn't Virgil a cool name for a dog?" Another part of me thinks it's none of my business. Maybe her way has more personality. Let's think about it for the rest of the day.

Gonna Prove to You That Love Is Groovy

Man, I couldn't sleep at all last night! Was it because I watched a scary ghost movie yesterday afternoon? Well, that's really none of your beeswax. And anyway, I also had a huge iced tea at Taylor Grocery, so shut up. So anyway I got up in the dead of night and turned on the TV and there was cynical city slicker Sarah Jessica Parker forced into wholesome country living by contrived circumstances, learning a little something about life by milking a cow. Ugh! I watched the whole thing, of course. At the end, Hugh Grant is saved from an assassin by Mary Steenburgen, Sam Elliott and Wilford Brimley. Wow! So I was sitting there thinking, "Wow." I thought, "Wow, everybody's schedule worked out perfectly to make that happen." Then I looked out the window and saw a fox in our front yard! (See also.) It was cleverly negotiating a white paper bag - one of several dropped nightly after the bars close by young, starry-eyed drunkards whose well-to-do mommies and daddies have sent them off to college without enough God-given sense to use a trash can - to retrieve the leftover chicken-on-a-stick nestled within. Have I told you about chicken-on-a-stick here before? It's a disgusting "local delicacy." I once wrote a whole long article about my complex love-hate relationship with chicken-on-a-stick and even discussed it in an intellectual "panel" format, to the delight of none. But that need not concern you! All you need to think about right now is the fox I saw last night, trotting happily down the sidewalk with his hard-won chicken-on-a-stick in his mouth. So really I should thank the li'l drunkards, who unknowingly arranged such an unexpected treat for my weary eyes and mind! Then it was 3 AM and WAY... WAY OUT was coming on! I can't tell you how many hours I spent on the "internet" this morning looking for stills of Connie Stevens's apartment in WAY... WAY OUT. I found nothing truly suitable, despite all my expert "googling." Above you can see Jerry Lewis and Connie Stevens on her couch, in front of what I first took to be a mural of some kind: please note the strange bubbling texture of the purplish material... at least we are afforded a good look at that. But, you know, I think it is supposed to be a window. In a wider shot, a huge orange-red moon is visible, and at the end of the scene, Connie Stevens, who is an astronaut, shouts to the moon, "Well, what do you know? I'm coming!" or something like that, indicating to me (along with a nearby telescope) that it is supposed to be a window, some kind of futuristic window (the movie, from 1966, takes place in "the future"), and she is addressing the actual moon. In another "screen grab," which you will find at the end of this "post," you can see more of the crazy couch and pillows and yellow-and-orange striped carpet and other furnishings - dig that lamp! - of the type McNeil loves so well, but the image is blurry and faded, and not in the good way, so you're missing the odd vibrancy of the scene. I had more to say about WAY... WAY OUT, lots more (the title of this "post," for example, comes from the theme song to WAY... WAY OUT, about which I planned to wax rhapsodic; would it interest you to know that only moments ago Dr. Theresa, driven past the breaking point, finally said, "Okay, you're going to have to start humming something else now"?), so much more, and it seemed like a great idea, like something about how Dennis Weaver's turn in WAY... WAY OUT is a gloss on his twitching, weeping, writhing weirdo from TOUCH OF EVIL, but who cares? Honestly.

Thinking About Boom Boom

Strolling past a new (I think) restaurant on the square, I saw that their sidewalk sandwich board advertised, on one side, a "BOOM BOOM CHICKEN SANDWICH" and on the other a "STEAK SCRAP SANDWICH," and that is all, just the names, no descriptions, black magic marker, stark. I am not certain these sound like delicious sandwiches! A "scrap" is something you feed to a dog, for example, and has the word "crap" contained conspicuously within it, pardon my French. Nor do you want your chicken associated with explosions of whatever kind. Speaking of boom boom, I have been watching reruns of THE SOPRANOS for some months now, weeknights on one of the HBO channels. When that show was on the air, I was sure that the theme song talked about waking up with a "boom boom in your eye." Just the other day, several years late, I realized that the character to which the song is addressed in fact has a "blue moon" in his or her eye.

In the Land of Richard Dix

Let me tell you about my Tuesday. First, I saw Cher. Then I walked into a room and immediately started acting in a scene with Anne Heche. Finally I sang a song with Joey Lauren Adams and Mr. Belding from SAVED BY THE BELL. Tuesday! Yes, I went on a little trip and believe or not I didn't jot anything at first. I was like, "I am going to be too busy to jot down anything for the folks back home!" Such was my hubris! I did not jot for more than 24 hours! Twenty-four jot-free hours! But then I was sitting in the Starbucks where I once saw the guy from Tenacious D who is not Jack Black, and I was reading the New York Times, and I came across this first sentence of an article: "Forty five minutes of monkey impersonations?" A rhetorical question, I suppose, but one requiring a single answer: a resounding, Joycean YES! And that made me recall something I read in my new book about kings before I left on my little trip: "every chariot had a fierce great mastiff on a leash standing in a cart or walking behind it, and every sumpter beast had a long-tailed monkey on its back..." That's about a procession in 1158, and when I first read it I thought it was about monkeys riding dogs, a subject we have contemplated at some length on the "blog," but rereading it just now, never mind. Then (back to the New York Times) I read an article containing Robert Mitchum's pick-up line to Edna O'Brien (which totally worked): "I bet you wish I was Robert Taylor, and I bet you never tasted white peaches." Mitchum! What a smoothie! And that's when I started feeling bad for not jotting anything. I remembered something from the day before which I had not jotted, for example: we were driving down the street and Kent yelled, "It's the diner where Larry Crowne worked in LARRY CROWNE!" And so it was. We drove by it again a day or two later and Kent suggested that we stop and get a picture of me in front of it and at first I resisted, and Kent said "WHAT!!!!!" and stopped the car and took the photo anyway (below) and right he was to do so. I saw Kent eat a lot of chicken, as usual. He loves chicken! But I also saw him eat a pork chop and a steak. We ate big steaks at a restaurant where Bob Hope used to eat! Taking a stroll after one chicken luncheon, Kent and I observed a young woman communing with two tame rats, which were sitting on top of a Los Angeles Times vending machine. "Don't freak out," she was saying calmly and sweetly to the rats. As this actually very charming person put forth to us the argument that rats are among the most misunderstood of God's creatures, she was engaged in some sort of handiwork - she seemed to be, possibly, knitting some clothes for the rats. Let's see what else I jotted. I ate at a restaurant where they give you a coconut with a straw in it to drink! I guess this is a pretty common thing, but somehow this was my first time. I had previously seen such a way of drinking a coconut only on GILLIGAN'S ISLAND. (Coincidence: upon my return home, I found an email from McNeil about the fact that Ida Lupino directed several episodes of GILLIGAN'S ISLAND. McNeil seemed ashamed for not knowing this before!) One of the people at lunch was Ako Castuera, who used to sell coconuts for a living, and she regaled me with lots of amazing coconut lore, including something about coconut water and its use in blood transfusions during World War II, which led to a discussion somehow of the immortal jellyfish (or maybe that came up when we were debating the preferable place to visit: outer space or the bottom of the sea), and Ako - entirely different subject - told about a vacation she took on a cruise ship when she was a little kid and she spent all her time in the library. There was a library! Ako first discovered Edgar Allan Poe on that cruise ship, which put the endearing image in my mind of little Ako in the dark ship's library reading Poe while everybody else was up on the deck playing shuffleboard in the sun. Jottings! I saw my old friend Tom Bissell. He lives directly over the Hollywood Walk of Fame! In fact, he lives almost directly over Richard Dix's star. Oh, Richard Dix! Can I not get away from you? Your inexplicable stardom continues to haunt me. (Pictured, above, Richard Dix.) Tom and I talked about CHRISTIANITY: THE FIRST THREE THOUSAND YEARS and walked down the block to get a Mexican dinner and on the way back we witnessed a car crash! Everybody was okay, but the cars were smashed up. Okay! Now we are back to the fateful Tuesday. I was sitting in my hotel lobby when Cher walked through! I mostly saw the back of her head. Then my ride came and I went off to act with Anne Heche. FOR REAL! In what project, I am not at liberty to say. YOU'LL FIND OUT SOON ENOUGH. Anne Heche was more beautiful in person than you can possibly imagine! She was not "done up" in any fancy Hollywood makeup and finery. You got the feeling she just walks down the sidewalk being all radiant. After we acted in a couple of scenes together she gave me a big hug and discovered, I am certain, that I was covered in flop sweat like Albert Brooks in BROADCAST NEWS. Like Harrison Ford and Johnny Depp before me (a phrase I type with astonishing regularity) I played Anne Heche's love interest. Okay, and then a bunch of us went out to sing karaoke (including Natasha Allegri, the nicest person in the world!) and Mr. Belding showed up and everybody was like, "Oh my God! It's Mr. Belding!" and somehow the last thing I did was sing "Jolene" with Mr. Belding and Joey Lauren Adams. Before that, I saw Joey Lauren Adams and Pendleton Ward do Elvis's "American Trilogy" together, and I thought to myself, well, that is probably the most surreal thing I will see tonight, but I was wrong.

My Much Anticipated George Hamilton Considerations

Just turned on TCM and saw George Hamilton playing Moss Hart. And I thought, "Huh, George Hamilton starred in biopics as Moss Hart and Hank Williams. That's weird." And then I kept thinking. I thought, "To whom will this be of interest? No one! Therefore, I will put it on my 'blog.'" And then, dear reader, I kept thinking about George Hamilton. I thought about all the brand-name top-shelf directors he has worked with, such as Vincent Minnelli, Woody Allen, and Francis Ford Coppola. In the latter case, I have always wondered whether there might have been a touch of vengefulness in the casting. Like, Francis Ford Coppola was thinking, "Oh yeah, Robert Duvall? You're not coming back for GODFATHER III? I'll get GEORGE HAMILTON to replace you and see how you like that!" Nor did my thinking about George Hamilton end there. I recalled a time that Mr. Ward and I were in Los Angeles, and for some reason the rental place had issued us a creepy van instead of a normal car. We were driving down Sunset Boulevard when we spied George Hamilton eating at a sidewalk café. So we turned the van around and parked on the street right in front of him and started yelling out the window: "George Hamilton! Hey! George Hamilton!" When he looked up, Mr. Ward took a picture of him and sped away. George Hamilton was mad! I wonder if Mr. Ward still has that picture; after all, he still has the picture of the Foster Brooks robot.

The President's Challenge

This is part three of our continuing coverage of SKIN MAG, the human literary magazine. If you need to catch up, please "click" here for part one or here for part two. Pictured: SKIN MAG scampering away down the sidewalk from the City Grocery Bar (not pictured). That extra set of legs? Why, they belong to none other than poet Beth Ann Fennelly, who accompanied SKIN MAG to the preordained spot for a series of President's Challenge push-ups. Reports say that Fennelly did 20 President's Challenge push-ups in a grand show of moral support. It is assumed that SKIN MAG went on to complete the promised number of 55.