Zoological Adjustments

Well, well, well. I guess you'd think I was pretty foolish if I went out and bought the first few books of Aristotle's METAPHYSICS just so I could fact-check Thomas Aquinas when he says there's an owl in it. But that's just what I did. And hold onto your hats! There's NOT an owl in it! Here's what it says in my brand spanking new (by which I mean 1933) translation of the METAPHYSICS: "just as it is with bats' eyes in respect to daylight, so it is with our mental intelligence..." That's right! It's bats! Not owls! NOW what are you saying? I bet you're saying "Money well spent!" I troubled myself to scrounge about halfheartedly on the "internet" to find out why Aquinas says owls instead of bats. And you know, I found out a couple of things, sort of. I skimmed over a scholarly article called "Power and Limits of the Human Mind: On the Arabic Reception of the Analogy of Bats and Daylight..." Look. There's more to the subtitle but I'm getting tired of typing. It's like an email I got from McNeil this morning. He was writing about the movie DOCTOR, YOU'VE GOT TO BE KIDDING! but had the energy to type only "Dr. ... kidding" (ellipses McNeil's). And I mocked him for it! But look at me now. Anyway, if I'm reading it correctly, this guy (his name is Amos Bertolacci) says that when translating from Greek to Latin, people began subsituting "owl" for "bat." And he explains why, but I don't think I understood it. Here, I'll quote it for you: "The interpretations of the bats’ analogy in Latin philosophy and theology have a different character from the ones considered here: Latin translators from Greek made Aristotle’s text less problematic by means of zoological adjustments, i.e. by identifying Aristotle’s bats with other night animals (night ravens or owls)." Then he goes on to say that some people even substituted eagles for bats! That's just crazy. (The latter being my conclusion, not Mr. Bertolacci's.) The article led me to another "web" site containing, in full, Thomas Aquinas's critique of Averroes's gloss on Aristotle's metaphysics, where I read with my own two eyes and my own pea-sized brain Aquinas taking Averroes to task for his bat observations... leading me to conclude (and bear in mind "I ain't no doctor with a degree" to quote Aretha Franklin) that Aquinas knew very well that they were bats in the original, not owls! All of this is to come to the shocking point: for the FIRST TIME EVER, I am going to REMOVE a book from my BIG LONG LIST OF BOOKS WITH OWLS IN THEM. So long, Aristotle. You had your chance! And you blew it. To quote Bill Boyle imitating Robert De Niro in COP LAND, "YOU BLEW IT!!!!!"

Sandwich and Alexander

As you know, I have given up "blogging" entirely. However, something has occurred which requires immediate comment. You no doubt recall with a bittersweet admixture of reverence and nostalgia the time I noticed the importance of sandwiches to Bergman's SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE. Having recently rewatched the same director's FANNY AND ALEXANDER, I was stunned to discover that it features even more sandwiches than SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE. The exciting prospect of studying the entire Bergman oeuvre from the perspective of sandwiches presents itself. In FANNY AND ALEXANDER, an unusually lenient wife orders up "two cheese sandwiches" for herself and her happy, adulterous husband. Soon, the eponymous children are offered "a molasses sandwich," which the subtitles have in the singular. I will have to learn Swedish for a more complete examination. Moments later, for example, the children are asked to put down the "sandwiches," plural. One may imagine that half of a molasses sandwich is enough for any child. Perhaps the single molasses sandwich was divided in two, becoming, for all practical purposes, two sandwiches. While "half a sandwich" is a traditional unit of sandwich measurement, it is not difficult to picture two halves of the same sandwich, being consumed by two separate people, as "sandwiches." A mystery! I am put in mind of the J.J. Special, a favorite order from Manuel's Tavern in Atlanta. It was a patty melt of sorts, divided into four sections, each held together by a fancy toothpick. At some point, the J.J. Special was changed, and it came to the table cut in half, appallingly like any ordinary sandwich. It took a long time to get used to the new configuration. I should also mention that the J.J. Special might have been the name of the entire order (which came with onion rings AND fries), and not merely the name of the sandwich (see Dr. Frankenstein and his monster). We may further examine two sandwiches of unspecified ingredients in FANNY AND ALEXANDER. The cruel and austere bishop asks for "a sandwich and a glass of milk," while the happy adulterer is promised "a beer and a sandwich" to be served in bed by his indulgent wife. Can it be that a sandwich is the one food that pairs well with either milk or beer? I have put no thought into the question. But surely we may draw many conclusions from the beverage choices of these two very different characters. In conclusion, sandwiches for the happy adulterous Swedish man form somewhat of a framing device in FANNY AND ALEXANDER, as they appear near the beginning and near the end of the film. One might say, then, that the film itself is a sandwich.

Ghosts Are Dancing In Space

"Eugenia smiled, her eyes sparkling, as if a small butterfly with golden wings and diamond eyes were flying around inside her head..." That's my kind of writing! It's from POSTHUMOUS MEMOIRS OF BRAS CUBAS, by Machado de Assis, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson. I have no other place to note it, so I note it here. As long as I'm here, I could tell you about a little email exchange that McNeil and I had recently. I told McNeil about BLESSED EVENT, a movie from 1932, which, I noticed while watching it recently, contains a passing allusion to television. A character ponders whether Dick Powell's sex appeal will translate to television, and another character makes a joke, which I paraphrase here: "Sex over the televison? It'll never catch on!" And I was filled with astonishment, as I often am, for no good reason. I was astonished, specifically, that the audience for BLESSED EVENT in 1932 would have been expected to know what television was. Well, right away, McNeil found a wikipedia page for a 1932 televison series called THE TELEVISION GHOST, which was just a guy dressed as a ghost for 15 minutes a week, telling you a story about how he got murdered. It seems to be legit, and of course I trust McNeil, but I could find scant secondary sources supporting its existence. When I checked the New York Times archives for "Television Ghost," I found that the august institution never saw fit to report on it. The combo of words did bring up articles with interesting headlines from the appropriate time period: WIZARD SCIENCE IS ANNIHILATING SPACE (that one had the subhead "Airplane, Televisor, and Radiophone are Signs of Wonders Yet to Come") and HOW TO EXPLAIN THE UNIVERSE? SCIENCE IN A QUANDARY and RADIO IMAGES AND 'GHOSTS' ARE DANCING IN SPACE. When I looked up the broadcaster of THE TELEVISION GHOST (the station W2XAB) I did find reviews for some of their contemporaneous programming, such as when Mayor Jimmy Walker (pictured, above) literally (I think) lifted a curtain from the "sensitive photoelectric cells, or radio 'eyes,'" to reveal George Gershwin playing the piano, among other entertainments. Anyway, then McNeil sent me an article about a machine they have over there in China that heats itself up to ten times hotter than the sun. What could go wrong? The next day or so, McNeil and I ended up in a lenghty, discursive disagreement (?) about Bogart and Bacall's house keys, and what hidden meaning we could draw from a photo we saw of them. When asked whether it was our most pointless discussion to date, McNeil announced his intention to "crunch the numbers" on that.

From Pen

Pen sent me an email that was just this screen cap and it really cheered me up.

Li'l Henry James

I read in the New York Times the other day about some autobiographical writings by Henry James, in which James (I'll paraphrase and misremember freely now) recalled being a kid, tossing and turning in bed at night, wondering what secrets might be found in HOT CORN, a scandalous book his father wouldn't let him read. So I ordered a first edition of HOT CORN. There were print-on-demand versions available, but I've had very bad luck with those. I've read the first 49 pages of HOT CORN and maybe Henry James wasn't missing much. There's a good deal of padding. In fact, Chapter Two seems strangely similar to Chapter One. But what about the hot corn, you ask? There's plenty! "Katy, the Hot Corn girl... Hot corn! here's your nice hot corn - smoking hot... 'Hot corn, hot corn!' now pealing in the midnight air... what shall be my title? What better could I have than HOT CORN... the poor little girl that sits shivering by the path, crying hot corn... Take care, little hot corn girl, or you will be run over... She is nothing but a hot corn girl... And a pale-faced little girl sits upon the steps of the Bank of the Republic, adding to that constant cry, 'Hot corn! Hot corn!'... 'Hot corn, here's your nice hot corn!'... Do you think when I get a little bigger, the old woman is going to keep me in the street all day and half the night, peddling peanuts and selling hot corn?... Her children are in the street, filling the night air with an appealing cry, 'Hot corn, hot corn, who'll buy my nice hot corn?'... it is the hot corn girl... Julia is no older, and but little bigger, and she has often stopped in her walk to eat hot corn... they had begged, and stole, and peddled hot corn and pea-nuts together... Here's your nice Hot Corn, smoking hot, smoking hot, just from the pot!... This chapter was published under the simple title 'Hot Corn'... Here they live - barely live - in holes almost as hot as the hot corn... Hot corn! Hot corn! here's your nice hot corn... I discovered the owner of the hot corn cry... 'Some corn, sir,' lisped the little sufferer... 'give me some corn, you little wolf's whelp'... 'please buy some corn, sir'... Oh dear! now there goes a man, and I did not cry hot corn, what shall I do?... I dashed the corn in the gutter... I almost involuntarily cried, 'hot corn,' as I saw the hot spirit of that grain, under the guises of 'pure gin' - 'old rum' - 'pale brandy' - 'pure port'... crying 'Hot corn' to gain a penny for the purchase of a drink of the fiery dragon... from some side street, came up the cry of 'Hot corn! - hot corn!'... like a lost spirit on the midnight air - 'Hot corn, hot corn! - here's your nice hot corn - smoking hot - hot - hot - hot corn.'... send delicate little girls at midnight through the streets, crying 'Hot corn'... 'Hot corn,' then, be the watchword... the little girl whose wailing cry has been the inciting cause of this present dish of 'Hot Corn - smoking hot!'" That's just the first two chapters and I'm sure I've missed some of the hot corn. Retyping it I do fall under the spell... it's not subtle ("Hot corn, hot corn! - here's your nice hot corn - smoking hot - hot - hot - hot corn" stands out). One does begin to worry about the hot corn girls. I wonder whether HOT CORN influenced my friend Eugene's book JENNIE THE WATERCRESS GIRL, for which I'm searching around the house now (Eugene a "pure port" lover, coincidentally), though I'm sure Eugene was tapping into a whole subgenre with which I'm unfamiliar... there's Stephen Crane's MAGGIE (a favorite of Bill Taft's), which must be related, maybe even (wild speculation) inspired by the subtitle characters of HOT CORN ("Little Katy, Madalina the Rag-Picker's Daughter, Wild Maggie, &c")... and of course Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Match Girl" (which appears in my cigarette lighter book). Now I also have the urge to finally read Upton Sinclair's book-length anti-alcohol sermon THE CUP OF FURY, which Hogan testified made her crave a cold martini.

The Opprobrium of Hans Christian Andersen

I haven't told you about this ghost book I'm reading and I think it's because I don't like the way they punctuated the title. It's GHOSTS A NATURAL HISTORY: 500 YEARS OF SEARCHING FOR PROOF by Roger Clarke. If you're going to call it that, I guess you need two colons, but two colons would look weird, so don't call it that! I see in the fine print that the original British title was A NATURAL HISTORY OF GHOSTS. That's so much better. I can just imagine some jerk American publishing executive saying, "No, Roger, we have to LEAD with the GHOSTS or PEOPLE won't GET IT!" But that's not my point. I think it might be the best ghost book I've ever read, and I've read lots of ghost books. That's my point! Let me just quote three or four brief fragments to give you some flavor. 1) "In 1821, syphilitic, mercury-poisoned and deranged, he had his bed removed to a gardener's cottage and called in the dilapidators, watching with satisfaction as they knocked the house down." 2) "Mrs Crowe... possibly had a drug habit, which drew the opprobrium of Hans Christian Andersen on a visit to Scotland. On 17 August 1847, he describes her inhaling ether with another woman at a party, and with a frisson of misogynistic horror he describes 'the feeling of being with two mad creatures - they smiled with open dead eyes...'" 3) "Manning said of the man she had murdered and buried under the flagstones of her kitchen, 'I never liked him and I beat his skull with a ripping chisel.'" 4) "From around the time of the Hammersmith ghost, people's attitude toward ghosts was becoming confrontational. Young men sought to conquer their fears. Every evening, groups of them would be seen prowling the area, looking for the ghost, and anyone wearing light clothing could become a target." Clarke goes on to describe the sad story of a bricklayer named Thomas Milward who "wore the apparel traditional to his trade - white linen trousers, a white flannel waistcoat and a white apron." Some dummy mistook him for a ghost and he "threatened to punch the man's head." His mother-in-law told him to stop wearing white linen for his own safety but he was like, "No way!" (I paraphrase.) Then: "As he walked down Black Lion Lane, he was shot dead with a fowling gun by a frightened excise officer named Francis Smith, egged on after a drinking session with local watchman William Girder in the nearby White Hart pub. They had been exchanging tales about the ghost that had frightened the wife of a locksmith to death." Long story short, the king pardoned Francis Smith on the grounds of (and here I paraphrase again), "Hey, he thought he was shooting a ghost!" This is the same illustration of the Hammersmith Ghost that appears in the book.

About My Solar Plexus Area

Despite the humorous titles of its chapters, I find that I cannot recommend the book with the paranormal jelly bags in it. What a letdown! I won't name it or its author because why hurt someone's feelings? But it's just a sloppy grab-bag, really - one minute the author is helping some people get a ghost out of their attic, next minute he's talking about a UFO case he has nothing to do with... there's just no point of view, and I don't believe his dialogue for a minute. ("There's no way in h..., ah, heaven that I would go up there when those crying noises begin.") It's all hooey. When I used to teach a scary story class, I think I made the observation that no kind of story benefits more from realism than a ghost story. I suppose that's doubly the case when the story is supposed to be "true." So let's move on to what seems to be a much better ghost book: A GALLERY OF GHOSTS by Andrew MacKenzie. It's the first one that Dr. Theresa held up in the shop for me to consider, and I am afraid I rudely and instantly dismissed it. I didn't like the generic title and I didn't like the cornball cover with the full yellow moon and the crooked black tree. Luckily, Dr. Theresa was persistent. Always respect Dr. Theresa's instincts! First of all, A GALLERY OF GHOSTS has an academic-sounding subtitle: AN ANTHOLOGY OF REPORTED EXPERIENCE. Classy! And I like the introduction, in which MacKenzie makes an interesting distinction: "Unlike the ghost stories of fiction, which have a beginning, a middle and an end and deal with dramatic happenings involving revenge or remorse... the true ghost story is fragmentary and often apparently meaningless." Well, now he is talking my language! I am sick of things with beginnings, middles and ends, truth be told. I do like a nice shiny fragment. I like that the book flap says with exquisite formality, "Mr. MacKenzie presents many hitherto unpublished supernatural stories from his own collection." I like that he drops allusions to weighty-sounding tomes such as "G.N.M. Tyrrell's masterly work SIX THEORIES ABOUT APPARITIONS." I like that the very first thing he does in the very first chapter is admit to his interviewee, "I have never seen a ghost, possibly because I am a poor visualizer." She - the Vice President of the Society for Psychical Research - has reportedly seen two ghosts (the modesty of the number, especially for one in her position, is something else I like). I like that she says, "I wasn't in the least frightened, but afterwards I did notice that I felt cold about my solar plexus area." And I like that MacKenzie responds drily, "That is most interesting." None of this flailing around and trying to be "colorful" like that other book with the flying jelly bags, which shall remain nameless, and which, as you may recall, had something sticky on the cover anyway. (The image above popped up for reasons unknown as a search result for a photo of Rosalind Hedley Heywood, the Vice President of the SPR at the time of MacKenzie's writing. I didn't find a photo of her but this one is all right too.)

Creakish From Age

Did I tell you about the time I was going to write a book called THE ALABAMIAD? Ha ha, what a dope. About 100 pages of it got saved and ended up as the title novella of my second short story collection YOUR BODY IS CHANGING. Tom Franklin was working on SMONK at the time, and SMONK was going to come out first, and Tom had the idea - which didn't last long - that SMONK was going to be titled or subtitled THE ALABAMIAD: BOOK ONE and then my book would be THE ALABAMIAD: BOOK TWO. A dumb old idea I still like. James Whorton came up with the title. I think I asked him what he'd call a book about everything ever in the state of Alabama and I believe he said without even a second of hesitation, "THE ALABAMIAD." But that's not why I called you here! One of my ideas was to start THE ALABAMIAD with 88 epigraphs about Alabama... what Melville did with whales in MOBY-DICK. And I found them! (Though now I have lost them.) Let me say I got out my copy of MOBY-DICK and counted the epigraphs by hand, so I'm not sure there are exactly 88 epigraphs in MOBY-DICK, nor do I even remember if that's the figure I came up with back then, but it sounds right. I think I was reading a book about FINNEGANS WAKE at the time, in which I learned (I think) that James Joyce had hidden a mention of every river in the world somewhere in the text of FINNEGANS WAKE. Knowing there is an Alabama River, I thought, yeah, why not get an epigraph for THE ALABAMIAD from FINNEGANS WAKE? (I got one from MOBY-DICK, too, of course. I'm sure you recall that poor ill-fated Pip the cabin boy is from Alabama.) Anyhow, that's how I dug around and came across, "With her halfbend as proud as a peahen, allabalmy, and her troutbeck quiverlipe, ninyananya." But that's not why I called you here! Yesterday when I was at Lee Durkee's house, he was telling me how he'd like to get on some Shakespeare search engine and find every mention of owls in Shakespeare for me. Now, I've stumbled on the owls in HAMLET and MACBETH kind of naturally, and I was afraid a search engine would be cheating, but then I recalled the FINNEGANS WAKE search engine where I found Alabama all those years ago. And I thought, you know, I should use it to hunt up some owls in FINNEGANS WAKE. There are plenty! "Owlets' eegs (O stoop to please!) are here, creakish from age and all now quite epsilene..." Just one of many examples. I don't think this is cheating because I'm never going to read FINNEGANS WAKE.

Bilbo Baggins

Hello! Here is a picture of Norman Mailer in a top hat, leather vest, and denim shorts, snapped by Bill Boyle off of Megan Abbott's TV screen. We were watching Mailer's film MAIDSTONE. Ace was there too, and he thought it was pretty good revenge for the time he made Dr. Theresa and me watch THE TRIAL OF BILLY JACK (which I would like to state for the record here is, I think, about twice as long as MAIDSTONE). "He looks like a hobbit," Ace said of Norman Mailer, and other disparaging remarks. To be fair, when I was in a video conference once, I held up the cover of the Norman Mailer bio to the camera, so that Mailer's face filled the screen instead of mine, and Pen cried out "It's Bilbo Baggins!" - not trying to be funny, more in simple recognition. Megan and I argued that Mailer was a good-looking man. Ace remained unconvinced. Megan Abbott owned up that she saw him once and "he was just a little taller than me." (She's tiny!) I found a number of things to enjoy in MAIDSTONE, but we all agreed that by far the best part of the movie is the famous bloody scene at the very end when the actor Rip Torn goes a little bit crazy and hits Norman Mailer in the head with a hammer FOR REAL and then Norman Mailer tries very hard to bite and rip off Rip Torn's ear. "Click" here to see a demonically grinning Rip Torn on Bill Boyle's twitter feed, in the electrically tense aftermath, gracing Mailer with a startling scatological encomium, unsuitable for printing on the "blog." You will note that Megan Abbott had at that point in the film turned on the subtitles for extra musing and study. Below, another example, from the climactic fight, sent to me by Ace this morning. Ace did admit that MAIDSTONE shares a certain sensibility ("group therapy" he called it) with the original BILLY JACK (which we watched and enjoyed very much, as distinct from its sequel, though, as Ace reminded me last night, THE TRIAL OF BILLY JACK had some good parts, such as when there is an all-red Billy Jack and an all-blue Billy Jack and they battle for his soul in a cave, encountering a spiritually significant cobra in a scene that made me wonder if Scorsese hadn't lifted from it for THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST. I guess I would say that the main problem with THE TRIAL OF BILLY JACK is that they gave Billy Jack too much money and he loved helicopter shots so much.) Another common thread between the Billy Jack movies and MAIDSTONE is the dominating personality of the filmmaker, and the film's existence as a stubborn extension of that personality. Ace said that MAIDSTONE was like BILLY JACK "without the karate." And you know, when he said that, I had to admit that Billy Jack knew what he was doing, putting the karate in there and driving the original film with a good, old-fashioned revenge plot.

Deep Monkey Background

Lee Durkee has really gone down the old rabbit hole, or should I say monkey hole (no, no one should ever say monkey hole), researching the monkey riding a dog he saw during the Cincinnati Bengals half-time show. He went back and reviewed the footage, and found that the monkey was herding sheep, to Lee's consternation. Now, at the Christmas party the other night, much debate was had over whether dogs are generally saddled when monkeys ride them. So of course Lee found a whole "web" site dedicated to selling dog-sized saddles, presumably for monkeys, or, I suppose, for any creature small and wily enough to ride a dog (note: further inspection of the source material reveals that "Cowdog Saddles" disappointingly just sells regular saddles, you know, for horses - though their logo is a dog wearing a saddle - so the mystery remains). Most impressive was Lee's thorough background check, relayed in several emails, of the actual monkey from the half-time show, whose name is Whiplash the Cowboy Monkey. I suppose my favorite story about Whiplash is the time he got fired as a taco mascot and replaced with some dude (pictured). Personal highlights from the news release: "'He really brought people together, and he was somewhat iconic. When people saw Whiplash, they really did think Taco John’s, and that's everything you want your icons to do... There were limitations,' she says of working with an animal. 'TJ DJ can be more interactive with our food, whereas with Whiplash, he couldn't touch the food.'... The TJ DJ concept will also lend a synergy to the chain's advertising that wasn't possible with Whiplash, Middleton says. New television commercials will feature TJ DJ traveling the country in his van." I'm not doing justice to Lee's extensive investigation, which permeated his mind to such a degree that he came up with a maniacal plan to put on an all-monkey production of MacBeth. He doesn't think Whiplash has the chops for the lead role, though. "I think Whiplash, due to the years of chronic neck pain [long story - ed.], would make a great and emphatic MacDuff ('All my pretty chickens dead, in one fell swoop?')," Lee writes. At first Lee wanted to let the monkeys chatter and provide the Shakespeare in subtitles, but I think I talked him into feeding them peanut butter to get their mouths really going and then dubbing in the dialog later. Lee concludes his Whiplash studies with a sad "post" from 2008 he found on a Buddhist "blog," in which the Buddhist is upset because other Buddhists have been criticizing him ("bullying" is the word he uses!) for his love of Whiplash the Cowboy Monkey.

Histriomastix!

Wow! Reading in REPROBATES: THE CAVALIERS OF THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR about a thousand-page denunciation of the theatre called HISTRIOMASTIX, THE PLAYERS SCOURGE OR ACTORS TRAGEDIE by William Prynne, "a monumental work of cultural abrasion... insane in its reasoning, astonishing in its stamina, hurling verbiage and citation from an abyss of loathing." That's some blurb! You could do worse. "Prynne's insult to the queen could not be left unpunished. He was tried and, as if in the very masochistic climax his book was calling for all along, had his ears clipped at the pillory." I wonder whether Hawthorne gave Hester Prynne his surname on purpose, she who - as Dr. Theresa has pointed out - turned her scaffold to a stage and her audience into a spectacle.

Likely Doublet Bonanza

Started reading something "serious" for a change - REPROBATES: THE CAVALIERS OF THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR by John Stubbs. So I guess it's back to kings for me! After that one book about kings I gave up on that other book about kings, so we'll see. Right away, in the introduction, there's this: "Since we cannot cancel the term 'cavalier' in the record altogether, we should try to comprehend the depth and variety of qualities it actually denoted." And I was like, "Oh no! Should we?" But I'm going to keep going! After all, it promises doublets aplenty ("Everyone can picture him, the cavalier, with his lovelocks, his broad hat, his mantle and bucket-topped boots, the basket-handled rapier at his side, a buskin covering his satin doublet") and I hardly ever get to use my "doublet" label at the bottom of these "posts." Nothing against author John Stubbs, but his name makes me think about Stubbe Peeter, a man whose 1590 trial records I have read in the LYCANTHROPY READER... "A True Discourse Declaring the Damnable Life and Death of One Stubbe Peeter, A Most Wicked Sorcerer, Who in the Likeness of a Wolf..." well, the title is awful and bloody and goes on and on. (See also.) I thought Stubbe Peeter was also known as "Peter Stubbs" but I see my memory has failed me. According to the index, he was also known as Peter Stump, which seems worse somehow. Wait! Have I never told you about the LYCANTHROPY READER before? My "blog search function" says no. Here's the full subtitle: "Werewolves in Western Culture - Medical Cases, Diagnoses, Descriptions; Trial Records, Historical Accounts, Sightings; Philosophical and Theological Approaches to Metamorphosis; Critical Essays on Lycanthropy; Myths and Legends; Allegory." My friend's wife gave it to him for Christmas! And it scared him so much he gave it to me to get it out of his house.

Mildred Pie

Dr. Theresa made a peach pie in honor of Mildred Pierce last night and Megan Abbott came over and we all ate some peach pie in honor of Mildred Pierce and Dr. Theresa and Megan Abbott talked about Mildred Pierce and I was a lucky kind of preview audience of one because DR. THERESA AND MEGAN ABBOTT ARE GOING TO TALK TO EACH OTHER ABOUT MILDRED PIERCE IN PUBLIC ON FRIDAY AND YOU CAN COME SEE IT HAPPEN. Their talk is compellingly called "Fine, Wet and Beautifully Made: Mildred Pierce's Pies and James M. Cain's Working Woman." It's all part of the "Women, Work and Food" Symposium put on by the Sarah Isom Center (of which Dr. Theresa is the assistant director) and the Southern Foodways Alliance. You know those guys! You can read the whole schedule by "clicking" here. You know, it occurs to me I have been mentioning Megan here lately like it's just a normal thing to hang out with her, which I guess it is now, but maybe it's confusing, as I have never given you proper notice that she is the new John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence, so she has come down from NYC to live here for a year or so and we're happy to have her. Walking Megan home late last night through the dark and empty Sunday streets, we spied a melancholy pom-pom lying in a vacant lot with some kind of David Lynch spotlight on it.

A Dramatically Titled Brochure

Today while I was standing in line at the drugstore I was staring at a brochure called SHINGLES: THE INSIDE STORY.

Because I Like to Party

A nice note from Leslie! And I quote: "I recently went to a natural history museum and saw all kinds of owls in dioramas of their alleged natural habitats. The placards were very funny to me. I took bad pictures of them to send to you. I imagine you are like 'Andy' in Pretty in Pink in one of my favorite self-improvement montages in which she uses weird crappy old dresses to make one magic prom dress. I tried to find the video of the montage. It's not there. No one cares. Oh well. I do. Maybe these weird crappy owl photos can turn into to one magic owl dress." But I care, Leslie! Thanks! Yet there is something perverse about my choice of an example here; it's the owl arrangement I find most offensive and unsettling. Like, "Let's stuff these dead murdered owls full of sawdust and line them up on a branch like a cute little family, aren't they cute." Maybe the best thing about the plaques is that they give each owl its own dramatic subtitle. "Great Horned Owl: Ruler of the night." "Snowy Owl: Ghostly visitor from the north." The hapless short-eared owl just gets "An unusual owl." That smarts! Poor short-eared owl, just like Cyndi Lauper, she's so unusual, but in that case it was a compliment. (Was the "Andy" segment in PRETTY IN PINK inspired by Lauper at all, or has my shaky sense of the past reached its next level of muddy blur, just preceding the abyss?) Hey but I want to tell you, that great horned owl is one scary customer all right. His plaque lists all the things he loves to kill. I don't even want to tell you. "They will even usurp the active nests of eagles," is another terrifying thing from the plaque. Usurping the nests of mighty eagles! WHAT! A while back Leslie sent what I believe is her all-time favorite self-improvement montage, featuring Michael J. Fox as the TEEN WOLF. I didn't "post" it. It was around nine minutes long, like those youtube clips McNeil likes to send, and there was lots of padding around the montage. Plus whoever put it on the youtube did some editing of his or her own, flipping the images from black-and-white to color for some expressive personal reason, a touch Leslie really enjoyed. ("Why is it black and white and color?" asks one plaintive youtube commenter. "Because I like to party," answers the "poster.") None of this is any excuse. On her last visit Leslie had us in stitches quoting from memory the TEEN WOLF montage song ("You gotta go with the flow, Joe... way to go, way to go.") and told us about showing the TEEN WOLF montage to a bunch of students who said, "Why are you showing us this?" I can't remember the answer.

Let Us Concentrate on the Monkeys

Ha ha, I just finished chapter nine of this big book about Hinduism. You didn't think I could make it, did you? You don't believe in me! You've never believed in me! This chapter was about THE RAMAYANA, a work that Lee Durkee happened to recommend just the other night. And I have coincidentally noticed that there is a big stack of THE RAMAYANA at Square Books, so many copies! Like, maybe a book club was going to read it, then forgot? I have no idea. But my purchase of it seems fated. I read about a "marvelous golden deer, thickly encrusted with precious jewels," which was really "the ogre Maricha in disguise," and that was pretty good, but imagine my excitement when I came to the segment subtitled "MONKEYS," which contained this sentence: "Let us concentrate on the monkeys, as the bears play only a minor role." When someone suggests "Let us concentrate on the monkeys," I always answer, "Okay!" Doniger goes on to rank monkeys in Hindu symbolism as "Neither so glamorous as horses nor so despised as dogs," and I dared to hope for a moment that a monkey might ride a dog like a horse, but no, not in this chapter. I did read this: "Hanuman, the great general of the monkey army, forgets that he has magic powers (to fly, to be become very big and very small, etc.)" and that made me think a little bit of Jake from ADVENTURE TIME.

More Owls For Lee

So when Ben Greenman was in town Lisa Howorth was bragging on me, telling Ben how "well-read" I am for some reason, and then Jimmy started saying something about the treasure in TREASURE ISLAND and I asked him not to spoil it because I'm not done yet, and Ben said, "Yeah, but you know there's treasure, right?" Ha ha! Well-read. I just got to this part: "'Clumsy fellows,' said I; 'they must still be drunk as owls.'" So TREASURE ISLAND is a book with an owl in it, and more than that, a book with a drunken owl in it, though I am no closer to understanding why owls are the supposedly drunken birds in the whole world of birds. This reminds me! Lee Durkee is sick of me "blogging" about owls all the time. He claims I only "blog" about owls and Jerry Lewis, whereas the subhead of my "blog" vainly promises "JERRY LEWIS - MONKEYS - UFOS - OATMEAL - OWLS." Where are the monkeys, UFOs, and oatmeal? That is Lee's reasonable question. In answer, I tried to suggest that the subhead of the "blog," is, I don't know, Platonic or something...? Lee wasn't buying it. Then I mentioned that I had gone the ENTIRE MONTH OF MARCH 2013 WITHOUT "BLOGGING" ABOUT JERRY LEWIS but Lee wasn't buying that either. He's a tough customer! I just "blogged" about monkeys the other day, but Lee is right, it had been too long between monkeys. And this much is true: I never "blog" about UFOs, really. But Dr. Theresa just listened to a phone message from my mom, and Mom's phone was breaking up, and Dr. Theresa said it sounded like Mom was saying, "I'm just calling my children about the aliens." But she wasn't. But we could easily believe that she was! (See also.) That's a true story, and it just happened! Also true: We just got back from lunch at Ajax to find in the mail a copy of Lauren Graham's new novel personally signed to me! I detect the handiwork of Ace Atkins, who shares an agent with Ms. Graham. I may also advance with some modesty that I have very nearly talked the entire Doomed Book Club into reading Ms. Graham's novel next. I trust and hope her book has an owl in it! You'll hear it here first.

Dear Stinkpot

Ace Atkins and I went to Memphis yesterday to have adventures such as eating chicken. Ace had a peculiar book catalog in his truck. He got it in the mail. The publisher's specialty is "Books only you would like," as Ace put it to me. There is, for example, a biography of Bob Hope's sidekick Jerry Colonna. The catalog description is brief: "Written by Jerry Colonna's son!" it exclaims, and that's all. Here's another catalog description in its entirety: "Acting exercises from the voice of Yogi Bear!" For an autobiography of some guy: "He was more than the voice of Lucky Charms cereal!" Lots of exclamation points in the copy, but none for THE DAY THE STARS STOOD STILL. It's the "memoir of Logan Fleming, top wax artist" from the Movieland Wax Museum. The cover shows Mr. Fleming, I guess, in a kind of Ingmar Bergman shot, half of his face obscured by what I believe to be an eyeless wax figure of Richard Widmark. EYELESS! Is that supposed to be Richard Widmark? I don't know. But he sure is eyeless. So that's a book cover. THE FAMILY AFFAIR COOKBOOK is by the woman who played Cissy on the sitcom FAMILY AFFAIR. Didn't she perish under tragic circumstances? That was the schoolyard rumor! I see in microscopic print on the cover, "Foreword by Dawn Wells." She was Mary Ann on GILLIGAN'S ISLAND, you idiots. I'm sorry I called you an idiot, because here's a bio of someone of whom not even I have heard: WALTER TETLEY: FOR CORN'S SAKE. Ha ha! That's some subtitle! The subtitle of Gary Burghoff's autobiography promises an unusual format: MY LIFE IN POEMS AND SONGS. A volume of letters from vivacious silent screen beauty Louise Brooks is called DEAR STINKPOT. "See, that's where an editor could have stepped in," Ace suggested. You really do not want to call any book DEAR STINKPOT, but especially a book of letters from Louise Brooks, even if she liked to call people stinkpot, I really have no idea. Titles are iffy. Eddie Cantor's daughter wrote two books: DON'T WEAR SILVER IN WINTER and STOP THE WORLD! I WANT TO TELL SOMEONE OFF! Walter R. Deasy, "owner of the carousel in Los Angeles's Griffith Park" calls his memoir THE MERRY-GO-ROUND IS WORN. I know how it feels. The subtitle is AN ANTIQUE MAN FINDS LOVE ON AN ANTIQUE CAROUSEL. Here, I really should "link" to the publisher. The least I could do is try to sell a few books for them. I deactivated my facebook account so I am going to have to "post" pix of me eating chicken here from now on, and I apologize in advance. Hey, I went over to John T. Edge's last night and he measured my head, never you mind why, and there is a picture of that floating around, too, and sure, it will show up here sooner or later, I'm so sorry, I'm sorry for everything forever.

Li'l Falco Is Right!

I approve of the philosophy expressed in this frame snatched by the Man Who Likes KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS from a biopic of Falco (!).

I Like Trees

I was just over at Square Books looking at all the books. And I saw one with the subtitle "One Man's Serendipitous Journey to Find the Trees That Inspired Famous American Writers." Look, don't get me wrong, I like trees. In fact, you might just say I love trees. If you don't believe me, check out this dumb old interview I did in which the last thing I mention (with horrific sentimentality) is a tree. But there are still lots of reasons why "One Man's Serendipitous Journey to Find the Trees That Inspired Famous American Writers" is the least exciting subtitle ever, including the desperation of the word "famous," which seems to sense, like the host of a terrible party, how dull the rest of the subtitle is. By way of contrast, let us examine the subtitle of STUNTMAN! by Hal Needham, our current Doomed Book Club selection: "My Car-Crashing, Plane-Jumping, Bone-Breaking, Death-Defying Hollywood Life." That's a subtitle that tells you Hal Needham might just narrowly avoid being murdered by a serial killer in his book! Which is something that happens in STUNTMAN! for real! I doubt it happens on one man's serendipitous journey to find trees. The only thing that saves Hal Needham is drinking booze instead of milk. Let that be a lesson, kids! The milk has been drugged by the serial killer! I should add that in STUNTMAN!, Hal Needham begins his professional life as a tree climber: "As Lenny and I watched, I commented a little too loud that those guys didn't know how to climb a tree. A voice from behind said, 'And I suppose you do.' I shot back, 'You can bet your house on that, son.'" Then Hal Needham climbs the tree and everybody is stunned at his prodigious tree-climbing skills. Now THAT'S how you handle a tree! As my friend the Hollywood producer pointed out, it (Hal Needham blurts out something inappropriate; people laugh at Hal Needham; Hal Needham makes them look like idiots; everybody suddenly loves Hal Needham and gives him lots of money) is the template for just about everything that happens in STUNTMAN!