Say No to Chiromancy in 2026

Well, Kate Tsang sent me an amazing present - a tiny replica she fashioned of my novel SWEET BANANAS. I placed a penny beside it so you can see just how tiny a replica it is. In the foreground, that's Bob Hope's ashtray, but that's another story. I was going to photograph the tiny replica in the palm of my hand to emphasize its tininess, but then I decided I didn't want the palm readers of the "internet" to know everything about me and my future. Hey! You know what that makes me think of? The time Dr. Theresa and I went to a dinner party and the host had a few drinks (or maybe that was us) and told us that he had belonged to a secret society in Greece with 13 members, and each member specialized in a different occult art! And his was palmistry. I'm sure he read our palms that night but I don't remember what he said. All I remember is that his wife, who was from Italy, made a big pot of spaghetti with tomato sauce, which everyone ate except for the chiromancer, who sat at the head of the table nibbling on a lettuce leaf.

Marvelous McNeil's Mad Martian Movie Musings

Anyway, McNeil wrote to say he recently watched the brand new UFO documentary that, I assume, has the very nation abuzz. I said oh, should I watch it, and McNeil said no. His favorite part was how the interviewees were placed in settings that, to quote McNeil, "were all different, but they were all very Dino-ish. Cozy. Sophisticated." With the characteristic adjective "Dino-ish," McNeil alludes to 20th-century entertainment icon Dean Martin. McNeil went on to note that one interview subject was not afforded the same luxury as the others. He, to again quote McNeil, "was in a black t-shirt in front of a chalkboard. Walking around a lake, alone, cold, hands in pockets. Sitting at the foot of some national monument - alone. Hahaha."

Frivolity When the Earth Is Swallowed Up

This is where I tell you about my trip to Burbank. 1. On the flight out, my seatmate had a sweet dog companion seemingly smuggled under his hoodie. I don't know about dogs. I believe this one was a boxer. But I just don't know. I can't swear to it in a court of law! The dog had one blue eye and one brown eye. It would arise from the neck hole of the hoodie and look at me with a nice expression. Sometimes, due to the angle of its owner, it looked like a human with a dog's head! When the guy got up to go to the restroom, he stuffed the dog into a duffel bag. The dog was fine. 2. Layover at the Salt Lake City airport! This story just gets better and better, doesn't it? So, a booming voice on the public address system repeatedly gave out the first, middle, and last name of a guy who had walked out on his check at an airport restaurant. It was an old-school public shaming... Cotton Mather style! I realize that by mentioning Cotton Mather, I may have confused you geographically. I don't know enough about Brigham Young to know whether he would have made an appropriate replacement in my already shaky allusion. 3. Okay, on the next airplane, a guy across the aisle was scrolling through pictures on his phone and narrating to his friend: "This is a salad bar... that's another salad bar..." Ha ha, anyway, I thought that was funny. They were looking at photos of salad bars! It's a crazy world! 4. BURBANK! Kent was in town, too, and we were both staying in the same hotel. As we rode back to the hotel from Dan Tana's, Kent spied a DeLorean pulling into traffic behind us. He was pretty stoked, I don't mind telling you! He kept saying, "It's a DeLorean! Look, it's a DeLorean! It's right behind us. The DeLorean is right behind us!" But I don't know why, I never turned around to look at the DeLorean. It was just like when Kent begged me to watch Mark McGwire break a home run record and I coldly refused. We'll never know what's wrong with me. 5. On one menu, I briefly misread "scallion" as "sea lion." 6. Kate Tsang and I spent a good part of one afternoon just wandering around in the impossibly vast Warner Brothers prop department. People were working, loading props on carts to be taken to various sets. We just stayed out of their way. No one hassled us. In fact, one man cheerfully asked if we needed anything. We said we were just looking. Then we ended up in some odd corners, such as a section containing many kinds of animals who had been subjected to taxidermy. I have never enjoyed the thought of taxidermy. But here's Kate. She notices that some of the animals are falling apart. She dates them for me to the time "when Theodore Roosevelt was shooting animals" because they were stuffed with straw... a discontinued practice, Kate gave me to understand. I was standing there thinking, like, "Wow, Kate sure knows a lot about taxidermy!" Which reminds me of something: 7. I ran into Steve Wolfhard completely unexpectedly! Somehow we got to talking about the movie THE SEA HAWK and I mentioned how much I enjoyed the monkey's performance in that film. Steve said the monkey made him sad. I got it! I feel the same way about taxidermy. I said, "Were you thinking about the monkey's home life?" And Steve said... I think I have this right... "I was thinking, 'That could have been me!'" Trying to show Steve that I was on his side about being sad concerning monkeys, I said I didn't like it when monkeys were made to ride dogs. Steve said, "Maybe the monkey likes it. Maybe he likes going fast." 8. Oh! Before I get back to the prop department, I should say that when I arrived at the gate into Warner Brothers, I was greeted by a young, groovy guard, not an irascible old guard of the type the movies have trained me to expect. So, when Kate and I entered the parking garage over near the prop department, an irascible old guard really didn't want to let us in. At last, he asked us for identification, and that's when I discovered MY DRIVER'S LICENSE WAS MISSING! I bet you didn't know you were in for thrills like this. Anyhow, it turned out the groovy young guard forgot to include it when he handed me back everything I had taken out of my pockets for him. And I didn't notice! So I'm not blaming the hipsters of today for falling down on the job! BUT! If that hardboiled old-school guard hadn't been so stereotypically irascible, I might never have been allowed to leave Burbank! I might be sitting in a small room at the Burbank airport right now! So, thank you, hateful old guard. 9. Well, I can't really describe how satisfying it was to wander around the prop department with Kate. I don't know - though I suspect there's a Warholian element - why it is so wonderful to look at, just for example, a wall full of rotary phones arranged by color, or a shelf of hundreds of miniature Statues of Liberty, or boxes and boxes of beauty products from the 40s and 50s, or the long row of toilets, of which (the toilets) I sent a photo to just one person: Ace Atkins. Kate and I stayed in the prop department so long that they were closing up. We didn't know it. We just kept trying to get out and finding nothing but locked doors. We could have been trapped forever! Who was going to help us? Not the irascible guard! He would probably think we were getting what we deserved. Then we found a different kind of door: a door that was not locked. 10. Kate and I walked a few short steps from the Warner Brothers lot to the Smoke House, where we dined with one Adam Muto. Now that I can't eat steak anymore because of wanting to stay alive, I was excited to order the chicken pot pie. You know the one! The one that Pen and I saw once! The one as big around as a manhole cover! But friends, I am here to inform you they have taken it off the menu. The server told me that one time... just one time... they had put it back on the menu for a special occasion. But that time is gone forever. We live in new times now. He was very nice, and couldn't have known he was breaking my heart. 11. Reading Seneca's NATURAL QUESTIONS while taking my blood pressure in my hotel room, I laughed when he observed, "Frivolity when the earth is swallowed up shows a lack of serious-mindedness." He was angry at Ovid for beautifully describing an apocalyptic flood but then adding the image of wolves and sheep and lions swimming around in it. "Come on, Ovid! Get real! As if!" Such seemed to be the contents of Seneca's objections. 12. Quinn took me to a place that featured on its menu something called a "Good Ass Salad." Such language! Is that how you get your kicks? Forcing someone's great-grandmother to say the words "good ass salad"? This great-grandmother I'm imagining can't silently point at the item on the menu with her quaking, palsied finger! Thoughts along these lines led me to confess to Quinn that I have been saying "ass" on the "blog" a lot lately. Quinn said, "Oh, Jack, Bart Simpson could say 'ass' in the 90s." She might not have said "Oh, Jack." 13. It was raining the morning I left for home. Kate had said just a day or two before, "It never rains here." But there it was, falling from the sky, the tears of the gods as I like to call it. At a stoplight on the way to the airport, I saw a driver sticking his hand out the window, eager to discover for himself what this thing they call a raindrop must feel like. His beaming grin indicated that he was pleased with the result!

Divisive Concepts!

Well, Dr. Theresa tells me that the Mississippi legislature, which theoretically represents us and all the other people of Mississippi, has passed a bill banning the teaching of "divisive concepts." ("Click" here for a news article you can read about it.) Now what, you may ask, is a divisive concept? I'll tell you what the Mississippi legislature appears to think, with just a few examples, hardly comprehensive: Do you find it sobering that a Black person couldn't attend the University of Mississippi until 1962? And people got shot and died over it? Divisive! Do you think it was a bit excessive when Oscar Wilde was thrown into prison and sentenced to hard labor for being gay? Divisive! Did you ever say something like "Women should be paid the same as men for doing the same job"? Divisive! Do you like the Billie Holiday song that goes "Them that's got shall get, them that's not shall lose, so the Bible said and it still is news"? Divisive! Do you consider it none of your damn beeswax to sit in judgment over how someone else defines their own identity? Divisive! How about the inscription on the Statue of Liberty? Divisive! And, you know, keep going from there, it's all up to you! Because guess what? Part of the bill says that students can inform on their teachers like little squirmy cheese-eating rats for anything that makes them feel all confused inside like trembling fledglings, if such should be their unfortunate nature. I paraphrase slightly, while mixing animal metaphors, or similes. So, in short, I would say, based on contextual evidence, that the Mississippi legislature is afraid that Mississippi has become too "woke," a word they love to slop around for effect. They think, it seems, that "woke" is the first word that springs to people's minds about Mississippi, and by golly they're going to put a stop to it. Like, people around the world are saying, "I'd love to go to Mississippi, but it's just too 'woke' for me." Anyway, if the Mississippi legislature is reading this, I just want to let them know that no one has ever, ever, ever said that. Now let's move on to another divisive concept: art! I'm going to have a piece in an art show. Divisive? You bet your ass! Because I'm not an artist. OR AM I? Divisive! Sorry, I can't stop thinking about the Mississippi legislature. Maybe it's a mistake to combine these two subjects in a single "post," but I actually think it's okay because nobody reads this "blog." The gallery asked the artists to promote the show, which was all I intended to do in this "post," and then I got the text from Dr. Theresa and my brain exploded. To be precise, the gallery asked us to promote the show on "social media," when you know perfectly well I quit social media a while back and became the acknowledged hero of our crummy times. You may "click" here for details about the art show, which will also feature some nice people who have been mentioned on the "blog" in the past: Andy Ristaino, Lyle Partridge, Pendleton Ward, Pat McHale, and Rebecca Sugar. And many others. Fifty in all, I think, so maybe there are some others who have been mentioned on the "blog" as well, but my old eyes are tired of seeing and my heart is being squashed under the big uncaring butt of the Mississippi legislature. Ha ha, sorry, gallery, how's this for a promo? I love you!

The Adversary

Well, Dr. Theresa gave me a sculpture of a fox (seen here with the cat who picks lottery numbers) for Valentine's Day! I found it bewitching, as did the cats, who first approached it with extreme caution as if it were a living thing. This is why I say animals can understand metaphors. Ha ha! Do I say that? Or symbols! Which is what Dr. Theresa and I started talking about... symbols, that is. Like, what is a fox, symbolically? So I rushed to Cirlot's handy DICTIONARY OF SYMBOLS, which had exactly one sentence about foxes in it. ONE SENTENCE! Come on! You're better than that, J.E. Cirlot! And it wasn't a very encouraging sentence: "A common symbol for the devil during the Middle Ages, expressive of base attitudes and of the wiles of the adversary." And honestly, that's a sentence fragment, with an implied subject and verb ("The fox is"), I guess. There's probably a word for that. Anyway, I was like, don't worry, I have a million dictionaries of symbols around here, I'll grab another one! So this other book of symbols, called THE BOOK OF SYMBOLS, had a much more expansive and satisfying view of foxes. But that's not what I want to talk about, and neither is this: as I was putting together this "post," I noticed that Hans Biedermann's dictionary of symbolism, called DICTIONARY OF SYMBOLISM, has been mistitled on my big long list of books with owls in them since the very first day I established it! Anyway, I'm going to fix that. So get off my back! I hate you! Now, what did I really want to say? Well, I'll tell you. When I got out THE BOOK OF SYMBOLS and turned to the animal section, I accidentally opened right to a page about owls. Now, listen. Nothing in this book tells us anything that you and I haven't already discussed about owls. But now that I know it has owls in it, I have to add it to my list. More work for me! What a life. What makes it all worth it is that no one cares.

Domes

Last night, Dr. Theresa and I watched FORBIDDEN PLANET - her idea, not that it matters. And now she wants to watch PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES! I ventured that that one would pair well with ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS, which I kept suggesting during the Halloween season, but she never quite came around on it. Looks like the winds of change are shifting, though! Just like Bob Dylan said. Sort of. But that's not why I'm here! I just wanted to say that, having been thoroughly conditioned by McNeil's obsession with decorative obelisks in movies, I could not help but note that Dr. Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) has a groovy space obelisk in his funky alien living room. You can see it in the image above, which I captured from our TV screen. The obelisk in question sits roughly at his left elbow (his left, your right!). As I cleverly remarked to Dr. Theresa, the exterior of his home resembles Devo's headquarters on Sunset Blvd. As proof, I took out my phone and showed her a photo of the latter building, because that's what we do now as a people, we see things that look like other things and then we take out our phones and find pictures to show people who maybe care and maybe don't. AND! Although you can't tell it from the image above, Dr. Morbius seems to share an interior decorator with Jerry Lewis. Oh! The appearance of Robby the Robot here reminds me of a chapter of SOUR BLUEBERRIES, the novel I deleted from the "internet" when I guess I was "going through some things." A "fictional character" (me?) brings up FORBIDDEN PLANET and another character says "It's boring. I hate it." Then he says that Robby the Robot is no B-9 from LOST IN SPACE. I, I mean, "Chet" naively asks if they aren't exactly the same, at which point, to quote the novel, "'No. Their domes are completely different,' said Jay. He started drawing their domes so Chet could compare B-9’s acceptable dome to Robby the Robot’s dome worthy only of hate." You know what, "Jay"? Last night I really enjoyed watching Robby's robot brains kind of whirling around in his head like he was the Glass Cat from the Oz series of novels. Oh, wait, that reminds me, I also wanted to tell Oz fan Laura Lippman (no monkey fan) that FORBIDDEN PLANET has a monkey in it!

Passing Through

As you know (?), I take my blood pressure twice a day. Before doing so, I sit silently for five minutes, for a ten-minute total per day. And as I sit so silently and still, waiting to take my blood pressure with all the suspense of someone slowly scratching off a lottery ticket, or Charlie Bucket peeling off the wrapper of a chocolate bar, I read a book. To qualify as my "blood pressure book," the book must be a sturdy hardcover with a mighty spine that allows the volume to lie open flat on the table. That is the only requirement. All this you know. But I don't think you knew that my current blood pressure book is a biography of Fernando Pessoa, which is about as long as THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY. Anyhow! And forgive me for going over some of my other reading habits but it's so obviously important. Anyhow! I have also been reading old comic books at night, ever since Tom Franklin brought me some old comic books in the hospital. But I have to say I'm getting tired of the old comic books. Something has... changed. Something in the... I want to say... no I don't... national mood??? I didn't say it! Let's not talk about it! Once I finish the current pile, which is swiftly dwindling, that may be it for old comic books, at least for a while. Old comic books can't soothe me anymore. Anyhow! ANYHOW! I was very surprised, as Pessoa's biographer, Richard Zenith, which sounds like a name young Fernando Pessoa would have made up, analyzed a specific sort of Pessoa poem by saying, and here I quote my blood pressure book, "And the scenes and moods are not only juxtaposed, they also interpenetrate, passing through each other the way Superman passes through walls, without him or the walls losing their structural integrity." Talk about juxtaposing and interpenetrating: at last my blood pressure book and my old comic books had met! BUT WHY? The comparison is striking for a number of reasons, several of which I am about to tell you until you can take no more. First! The allusion does not seem particularly Pessoa-friendly, especially since Pessoa died in 1935, well before the creation of Superman. Now! We must of course admit that the biographer has an advantage, in this case, over his subject... that of still being alive (as far as I know). Therefore, he can draw from any range of examples he likes, including those from a future unimaginable even to his very imaginative subject. BUT! Pessoa is conducting seances just a couple of pages later. Isn't a ghost something that passes through walls? Might not a ghost be a more universally recognizable figure for the average reader, if the average reader pictures something that passes through walls without losing its structural integrity or altering the wall? I hope it is not blasphemous to suggest that one also thinks of Jesus, in his appearance to St. Thomas. But I'm not done! The biographer's Superman example is interesting to me because... do people know Superman can do that? I mean, I do. But I have made a serious study of all his oddest powers. A superhero who is more famous for vibrating through a wall is the Flash, if you know about the Flash, but, of course, more people know about Superman than know about the Flash... yet the question remains! Does the reader with a rudimentary knowledge of Superman realize that he can vibrate through a wall? I have no evidence to back up what I'm about to say, but I suspect that the average reader, if asked to imagine Superman going through a wall, would picture the "Man of Steel" busting right through it with his super fists, like the Kool-Aid man or the Schlitz malt liquor bull, not that my latter two examples were known for using their fists. The Schlitz malt liquor bull, being a hooved quadruped, was not even capable of making a fist! While the Kool-Aid man may or may not have been able to make a fist, I doubt whether he had the arm extension necessary for pounding down a wall with it, especially as he, if I recall correctly, grasped in one hand a pitcher of the same sweet liquid with which his living body was filled. Nevertheless, it can be easily proven with video evidence that both the Kool-Aid man and the Schlitz malt liquor bull BODILY knocked down their walls, as, I put forth, most people would credit Superman with doing as well. (I am including the "beer label" on this "post," even though the Schlitz malt liquor ads issued, according to my hazy memories, the specific command "Don't say beer, say bull!" May the Schlitz malt liquor bull forgive me and not crash through my wall. Amen. Not that I am worshipping a golden calf! Not even a hypothetical one made, unlike the all-too-fleshly Schlitz malt liquor bull, of golden malt liquor, however tempted I might be at this moment to drink a calf-sized container of such a brew.)

Monocles, Bullets, and Cigarettes

Like the world at large, I have completely forgotten about the book I wrote about cigarette lighters. But yesterday I was watching Erich von Stroheim's version of THE MERRY WIDOW, that's right, a silent operetta, what could be more fun? Lots of things. And let's say Erich von Stroheim doesn't exactly have the Lubitsch touch, as I wittily texted to Megan Abbott, and oh how she must have chuckled at my waggish observation. For example, it takes Stroheim an hour and a half to get to the point where Lubitsch's movie STARTS! To be fair, the stories are pretty different. But why should I be fair? Who is reading this? You? You don't exist! Anyhow, I guess you, if you did exist, would be wondering what this has to do with my cigarette lighter book. Fine! I'll tell you. In THE MERRY WIDOW, as undertaken by Stroheim, there are a man and woman with cigarettes in their mouths, and they are standing so that the tips of their cigarettes touch. It might be that one is giving a light to the other, a process described in my book, in which I thoroughly explore the obscene slang term for such an action. I tried to search the "blog" to see if I had mentioned it here before, but I don't see how I could have, except by such euphemistic means as I have employed above. If you want to read dirty talk like that, you'll just have to buy the book! Anyway, so these two are standing there with the tips of their cigarettes touching and the bad guy, who is across the room, and in a hilarious mood, takes out his little gun and shoots off the ends of both of their cigarettes with a single bullet. Then he shoots the eyes out of a statue, which has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. He is, however, wearing a monocle, and monocles figure heavily in my cigarette lighter book for reasons I would tell you if we weren't both asleep by now. But! The relationship of guns to cigarettes and lighters is another theme of the book, so you can see clearly that when you tabulate all the various themes and subthemes and so on of my book you've never heard of and will have forgotten by the end of this "post," I am obliged to add THE MERRY WIDOW (1925) to my appendix of stuff that really should have gone into my cigarette lighter book but didn't. You know what else has a lot of monocle action? NIGHTWOOD! What pie and ice cream were to Kerouac, monocles are to Djuna Barnes. There's one chapter where a guy fiddles with his monocle in every conceivable way. You should take a drink every time Djuna Barnes uses the word "monocle"! (The surgeon general advises against it.) In a movie, the actor playing Felix, the guy with the monocle, would be like one of the pipe-smokers I have observed in at at least three movies "letting the pipe do most of the acting," except with a monocle instead of a pipe. And in an earlier chapter, Felix's monocle pops out, I believe, the way your monocle is always popping out when you're shocked. You may recall that I also found a person whose monocle pops out emotionally in Fitzgerald's TENDER IS THE NIGHT. You know what else had lots of monocles? That Erich von Stroheim bio we read in the Million Dollar Book Club! (Did you know Anita Loos affectionately called him "Von"?)

Big August Wrap-Up

Well, folks, it has been a busy August sure as you're born. For reasons related to employment and general health, we have experienced the highest volume of monthly "blogging" since April 2016, when the TV blew up and I decided to "quit" "blogging" forever. Just a couple of notes as we head into September, with all its "mellow fruitfulness" as Keats put it, I think, or at least that's what they told me at the University of South Alabama. I got out my Aquinas this morning - shut up! - and noticed for the first time a handwritten, carbon-copy receipt tucked inside, belonging to the original owner. Now, you know how much I love it when I have clues about who owned a book before I did. You remember when I read June Havoc's memoir in the Million Dollar Book Club, for example, and the previous owner turned out to live in the same house where Eleanor Roosevelt used to live! "Click" here for details. Oh, what a time that was to be alive. When I read June Havoc's memoir, I mean. Those were the days. My Aquinas, however, formerly belonged to someone named "Father Michael," a priest, I assume. The clerk must have known him on sight! Or did he ask the priest's name, and did the priest answer "Father Michael"? Like, "That's all you're getting out of me, chump." Or maybe that becomes your official name when you're a priest. No, I've known a couple of priests in my life, and they had last names. (One of them, Father Dorrill, was the person who taught me the Keats poem alluded to above, which is a coincidence I only thought about later. Then I came back and added this intrusive parenthetical information just for you!) Or maybe "Michael" is a last name. But I don't think so. I mean, I know Michael is a last name sometimes, but somehow I think this priest just went around calling himself "Father Michael." That's fairly routine, I think. Show your parishoners you're just one of the fellas! It's fine. You can read about similarly named priests in the works of Bill Boyle, whose birthday is today. Happy birthday, Bill! Anyway, Father Michael got a ten-percent discount! For being a priest, I assume. I was shocked at the price he paid, though. It was $76.21 with tax, even after the discount! And that was on July 16, 1990. We're talking 76 big ones in July 16, 1990 money! I got it for less than half that, used, at A Cappella Books in Atlanta, where I once saw Bruce Springsteen making his wallet-toting lackeys pay for some art books. What else? Well, I watched a bit of WHICH WAY TO THE FRONT? this morning, and do you remember how McNeil was always looking for obelisks in movies? That was his big thing for a while, and I guess I caught the obelisk bug! Speaking of health issues. Anyway, in WHICH WAY TO THE FRONT?, there's an obelisk in THE VERY FIRST SHOT! Not merely the first scene, THE FIRST SHOT. And let me state for the record, it is the largest decorative obelisk I've ever seen in a movie. It's bigger than Jerry!

Kitty... I Love You!

It happened. The other night I finally came across, indisputably, the greatest old comic book among all the old comic books that Tom Franklin has recently given me. As you have already guessed (you haven't), it is about Fly Man. That's right, he has all the powers of a housefly. In addition, he has powers of a couple of other insects thrown in there as a bonus, as well as powers that, while unrelated to insects in any direct way, I chiefly associate with Ant-Man. Now, this Fly Man comic book I've got here came out in 1966, and I really don't know who came first, Ant-Man or Fly Man, but I'm too damn tired all the time to find out. Pardon my strong language. Oh, yeah, he shamelessly rips off Green Lantern, too. But not the way you think! So, Dr. Theresa was trying to sleep, and I was lying there next to her, unable to control maniacal bursts of laughter as I lay there next to her, reading Fly Man dialogue, the sincerity of which I could not measure one way or another. It was beyond definition and reason! With your kind permission, I will quote a few examples here: "IF THERE'S ANYTHING I LOATHE, IT'S A DEDICATION CEREMONIES POOPER!"... "HA, HA, HAA-AAA! HAVE A TON OF BRICKS, ONLOOKERS!"... For context, Fly Man's head appears on a Mt. Rushmore style monument with some other superheroes you've never heard of. The bad guy blows it up, which leads Fly Man to exclaim, "UH-OH! THE BROKEN CHUNKS OF MY OWN STONE FACE... WHIZZING DESTRUCTIVELY TOWARD ME!"... "IN THIS TEENSY SIZE, I CAN SPEEDILY WHIZ IN AND OUT AMONGST THE HURTLING FRAGMENTS"... If you haven't caught on yet, the writers of Fly Man are masters of the adverb, as seen in Fly Man's next word balloon: "BLOCKBUSTER STREAKED OFF, WHILE I WAS BUSILY PROTECTING MYSELF!" Here's Blockbuster, the bad guy, spraying some junk into Fly Man's face, followed by Fly Man's response: "HAVE SOME ESSENCE OF TEMPORARY PARALYSIS!"... "THAT FIENDISH FRAGRANCE HAS PURLOINED MY MOBILITY!" Just a couple more. "WAIT! THAT PUSSYCAT! ORDINARILY, I'M ANNOYED WHENEVER IT KEEPS CONTINUALLY BRUSHING AGAINST ME!" And on the next page, Fly Man says my favorite thing of all, "KITTY... I LOVE YOU!" The backup story in the issue, sadly, does not feature Fly Man. But it does reward us with this bit of dialogue: "OWWWWW! HOW DARE YOU USE CRAB-MAN'S HEAD FOR A TRAMPOLINE?!" The last thing I'll mention is that the publishers run a contest for the readers of Fly Man, including this caveat: "BUY THIS MAGAZINE FOR THE NEXT THOUSAND YEARS TO SEE IF WE PRINT YOUR MASTERPIECE!"

My Dear, Suspicious Friends

Not to brag, but I did successfully predict the hottest new trend of 2024: Rachel and the teraphim! Marilynne Robinson covers it in her new book READING GENESIS. Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking I picked up that book just because I knew Rachel and the teraphim would be in it. Oh, my dear, suspicious friends. Nothing could be further from the truth. I guess a few things could be further from the truth. After all, I know about the contents of Genesis from my many mornings in Sunday school. And the story of Jacob, which includes Rachel and the teraphim, also contains my favorite Bible character (as this important document ["click" here] from fifteen years ago will confirm), Esau. I was a bit put off by the very rough treatment given to Esau by Thomas Mann. Marilynne Robinson goes easier on him in the end, though she does call him a "boor," ha ha! I seem to be forgetting the task at hand, which is to show you why you're all wrong about me, all the time. See, I happened to find READING GENESIS at Square Books, and I remembered seeing something nice in the New York Times about it, and I've always meant to get into Marilynne Robinson somehow or another, and that's all there is to it. Though I did text Megan that I thought it was going to be a good companion piece to JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS. Yes, that's the kind of thing we text about! Sometimes! And I was right. I dip into READING GENESIS for just five minutes at a time, and that just twice a day, right before I take my blood pressure. I probably read somewhere on the "internet" that you should relax for five minutes before taking your blood pressure. And what could be more relaxing than the Old Testament? Even though I am going through READING GENESIS at such a modest rate, I'm getting near the point where it's going to present spoilers to me as I continue with JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS, which I am reading at a much faster clip. I mean to say that Robinson covers in a paragraph what it takes Mann tens of thousands of words to get across. You would think I would be immune to spoilers, given my supposed familiarity with the narrative, but lots of times Mann will tell of an outlandish incident and I'll think, "Well! No way that's in the Bible!" and then I'll look, and there it is in the Bible. Oh! Remember how I said that I loved THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN, but it took me about 100 pages before I really got into it? The same goes for JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS, except it takes 200-400 pages to get going.

Teraphim For Real

Almost exactly two years ago, I made my famous prediction that 2022 would be the year of Rachel and the teraphim. Maybe I was off by a couple of years! Because guess what I just read in JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS by Thomas Mann? That's right: a chapter about Rachel and the teraphim. It took me a while to get there, because the book is so big and heavy that I wasn't allowed to lift it during a recent medical adventure (not the most recent medical adventure).

That's Right

I'm under no legal obligation to tell you this, but I picked up Ovid again. I was like, where was I in this? And I opened it at random, and what do you think I read? That's right: "above the bridal chamber brooded the evil hoot-owl." So another owl in Ovid, big shock. Similarly absent of shock: the other night I couldn't sleep, so I got up and turned on TCM and there sat Robert Redford with an obelisk, and I wasn't even going to tell you about it.

Star

I keep forgetting to mention that McNeil saw an obelisk in WHERE THE SPIES ARE (1966). "This one has a star on top," he reported soberly. I would have put an exclamation point on that! McNeil provided no photographic evidence of this unusual star-topped obelisk, but he is my oldest friend and his word is solid gold in my book.

The Golden Obelisk

You know me! Sometimes I have a large book and a small book going simultaneously. As I mentioned yesterday, I'm reading CIGARETTES by Harry Mathews. But I am also reading THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN, a towering, big, giant, huge, monumental masterwork by Thomas Mann. Now, is it going to knock Wuthering Heights off of my list? Never! But it's got to be a Top 5 novel. Now! I was ruminating yesterday about whether I could even say I have been reading it, given the fact that I am not reading it in German. How could I read it in German? I don't know German. And now I am old and will never know German. That's part of why I'm reading THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN, if I am: the oldness. Like, "I'm old, and I have never read THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN." Such were the thoughts that came to me before I began reading THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN. Of course, another part of me was and is like, you are old, why bother? Oldness goes both ways! I'm glad I'm reading it (in the translation by John E. Woods). It has everything! Including an owl. But! Before we get to the owl, it's so funny, I was thinking about not being able to read German yesterday, and then I read this in Harry Mathews's obituary: "His novel 'The Conversions,' otherwise in English, concluded with nine pages in German." But! That's not why we're here. I just wanted to say how weird it is that I'm reading two books, then one book has a hallucination talking about an owl and the next day the other book (THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN) has a ghost reciting a poem with a line about an owl in it! I didn't mention this yesterday, but the hallucination in CIGARETTES has a ghostly quality... it first appears in the form of the character's late grandmother. So you might say I was reading one book in which a ghost talks about an owl then I pick up another book and happen to come to a passage in which a ghost talks about an owl. So: 2 days, 2 ghosts talking about 2 owls. Now! Ordinarily, I wouldn't mash this all together. Back in the days before I stopped "blogging," I would have separated the following into its own "post." But those days are behind us forever! I went to bed early last night but couldn't sleep, so I arose at midnight and turned on TCM, where I saw Lana Turner as a powerful executive. And in her boardroom stood the golden obelisk glimpsed above! I used to keep tabs on obelisks in movies because McNeil cared about them. Now I don't know why I'm doing it. In conclusion, I had another thought about THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN, which I shared in emails with some friends (in this case, Ace, Bill, Jimmy, Megan, and Ashly). Feedback has been scarce, because what are they going to say? And I am certain the observation has been made by someone before me, though I am much too tired to google it. So! The TB sanitorium in THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN obtains a record player for its residents. Our protagonist, Hans Castorp, takes it over. He puts together little programs of music, with much thought (and many pages) spent on consideration of how one seemingly unrelated selection will flow into another. Only he has the key to the cabinet! Only he touches the records and decides what to play when! And thus he entertains his audience, becoming, in my limited knowledge, LITERATURE'S FIRST DJ.

Mr. McNeilo

Well, I dreamed that I was pushing my own coffin down the road over a bridge to the graveyard, where a hole had been dug already, so I got up and watched MR. RICCO, which I had recorded off of TCM. Now, yes, it is true, I can't deny it, McNeil had emailed to tell me that MR. RICCO was coming on, but I had already set it to record by the time the email arrived. As you know, if there is one thing McNeil likes more than Dean Martin, it is obelisks. As pictured above, MR. RICCO has both. Moreover, it is the SAME obelisk from BOYS' NIGHT OUT, DON'T MAKE WAVES, and AGENTS OF SHIELD ("click" for more information).

Solar Toilet Freakout Redux

To quote TWIN PEAKS, "It is happening again." The last time it happened was 2015. Today, I started hearing a maddening Poe-like tapping noise, the source of which eluded me, until I finally figured out it was the solar-powered frog sitting on a toilet, a cursed figurine first presented to our household by Ace Atkins in 2013. God, it seems so much longer! When will I finally learn that when something is freaking me out it is probably just this frog sitting on a toilet? Over the years, I have moved it farther and farther away from my workspace, so... is the tapping getting... louder? That is a terrifying question for another time. Ironically, the mysterious cadence of the toilet frog's bobbing head distracted me from reading Ace's latest manuscript.

I Have a Simile to Report

There appears in the memoirs of Mary Rodgers an unconvincing similie claiming that something or other is "like getting a carved owl for your birthday."

Good Book

There's a point to this story, maybe, if it's a story. Chelsea Hogue interviewed me about my new poetry chapbook WEIRD SKY. She brought up owls, because, as it so happens, she was a student in the very undergraduate workshop in which I started forcing students to put owls in their work. In one of my answers to Chelsea's probing questions, I mentioned that owls are considered to be bad luck in some cultures, which I had been thinking about a lot lately, because (I didn't mention this in the interview) RESERVATION DOGS is my favorite TV show in a very long time, and I had noticed that the eyes of an owl figurine were blurred out in post-production, and that some of the young Indigenous characters were obviously freaked out by the owl. And it occurred to me that I had never really looked into any negative beliefs regarding owls. Sam Shepard mentions similar Tibetan associations with the owl on the very page where I keep my big long list of books with owls in them, but I hadn't thought about that until just now. I believe my first indication that owls could be considered bad luck, I guess you'd call it, was from my friend Sarah Marine, who informed me privately that some particular of her Indigenous friends would hate to know how many owls I had collected, and would be worried for me. Is there a story coming? I don't think so anymore, if I ever really did. But after mulling over the interview with Chelsea, I decided to finally do some internet research into the matter, which is how I came upon a website that looks as if it has not been updated since the mid-90s. There, a few various Indigenous beliefs and stories about owls were listed, along with some suggested resources, such as a book called OWLS IN FOLKLORE AND NATURAL HISTORY, which was referred to encouragingly if somewhat vaguely as a "good book." So I got hold of that book, to see if I could find out more... of the dark side of owls! I have to say, it's a pretty skinny book to be so damn supposedly good, but okay. I haven't really looked at it yet. I did open it at random, to a passage by Alexander Wilson, who, if you recall from "blog" history, shared my obsession with the mysterious circumstances of his friend Meriwether Lewis's death. Sadly, Wilson's passage was all about (I paraphrase) how nutty we all are to think that owls are some kind of magical death birds. They're just birds, people! Such are Alexander Wilson's conclusions on the matter. But the main thing I meant to say is that it is sort of cheating to buy a book called OWLS IN FOLKLORE AND NATURAL HISTORY and then put it on a list of books with owls in them. It's a fait accompli! Yet here we are.

I Accidentally Saw an Obelisk

I don't "blog" anymore, but I accidentally saw an obelisk, which I am morally and contractually obliged to report. This came about as I dawdled around on youtube, traipsing hither and yon in a digital sense. Youtube itself boldly recommended a clip of CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM. I was like, "Okay, youtube, I'll bite!" A freewheeling scene between Larry and a divorce lawyer unspooled. To conclude, and I shall keep you in suspense no longer, the divorce lawyer had an obelisk.