Unemployment

Here's a movie no one has thought of in many years: JACKNIFE (that's how they spell it - I've checked repeatedly, in denial and disbelief). I've never seen it. I have no idea what it's about. But it rushed into my mind. And I'll tell you why. You know what came on last night? THE DEER HUNTER. And there was Robert De Niro in a baseball cap. Okay. So. In the 1980s I was "laid off" (fired) from my job at an advertising agency, and my friend Tony and I decided to drive across the country once I had accumulated enough unemployment checks. I remember a few things about it. Washing the car in a scary, desolate, crudely slapped together facility in Gallup, New Mexico. Slipping and sliding on the concrete because it was freezing cold and the water turned to ice almost as soon as it left the hose. When we got to Los Angeles we went to a live taping of the sitcom DESIGNING WOMEN. Afterward, I asked Linda Bloodworth-Thomason (a creator of the show) if I could have a job and she said no. But I didn't care. Because I was on unemployment, I had to write down a certain number of people on my card each week, people I had asked for a job. That's how you got money in the old days! You wrote things down on a piece of cardboard with a pencil. As I recall, it had to be in pencil. All of this is likely wrong. So I wrote "Linda Bloodworth-Thomason" on my card. Mission accomplished! The suckers at the unemployment office bought it! What am I saying? It was legit. And Linda Bloodworth-Thomason was nice and patient and gave me a lot of writing advice... more than I wanted, really. I remember this: Tony and I drove up a mountain. These were the days when there were only paper maps. And I screwed up. I neglected to tell Tony to turn, so we drove all the way up a mountain. On a treacherous road. Nobody was going up the mountain. It got dark. There was occasionally some daredevil speeding DOWN the mountain (barely enough room for two cars) and giving us a nice heart attack. At some point we were like, "Uh... does it look like we're going up? It's really dark now. Should we be going up? We're going UP." We were running out of gas. Tony was mad at me. Understandably. Once we found a place to turn around (a nightmarishly difficult process) we started back down the mountain, hoping not to run out of gas, but thinking - praying - maybe we could coast if it came to that. We went around a curve and saw an elk in the road. We stopped the car and stared at the majestic elk. So it was kind of worth it. The radio static turned, at last, into a feed from a local TV station. Which seemed unusual. But THE GOLDEN GIRLS was on, which took us some time to fathom, because it should not have been on the radio and also we were in a general state of shock. I guess I have never been so happy as when that shining vestige of civilization THE GOLDEN GIRLS manifested itself. We were laughing in hysterical relief at the stale jokes of THE GOLDEN GIRLS. We made it to a cheap Chinese restaurant in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and I suppose no food has ever tasted so good. Just moments earlier we thought we were going to die on a mountaintop! But where was I? In Los Angeles, we went on a tour. As we bounced along on the Universal Studios tram I saw some dude with long, greasy hair in a baseball cap walking through the lot with a sense of purpose and wondered whether he might be an actor. Back in Mobile, I went to the movies and saw the preview for JACKNIFE and thought, "Hey! That's the same dude I saw in Los Angeles." Obviously, it wasn't. There are countless holes in that theory. "Look at that baseball cap and that greasy hair!" I exulted, however, as I enjoyed the no-doubt suspenseful preview for JACKNIFE, which I no longer recall. I do recall that on our trip Tony and I stopped at a restaurant in Beaumont, Texas, where everyone was cold and silent as the grave. That was the quietest restaurant I've ever been in, filled with the stoniest, least communicative families of Texas. Upon our return I went back to the ad agency that had fired me (I can't remember why - to pick up one last check?) and they had a new receptionist who was so cute I asked her on a date. And she turned out to be from Beaumont, Texas! Yeah, that went nowhere. Even though I was able to say, "I've just been to Beaumont, Texas!" As I recall, I drove her around the city of Mobile and environs with no destination in mind. I seemed to think that's what a "date" was. I want to say we ended up in a bleak, rusted-out industrial area. I was probably lost. And certainly broke. I wonder why she never took my calls after that. I was probably like, "I don't have any money but I can show you the world!" As I recall, Tony and I walked all the way down into Walnut Canyon (Arizona?) and for the first time in my life I realized how much harder it was to walk up out of a canyon than to walk down into a canyon. That hadn't occurred to me somehow. I was sheltered as a lad. Boy, it hurts walking up and out of a canyon.

My Nephew Is a Genius

Last time I went to Atlanta I forgot to bring my little jotting notebook in which to jot my little notes. You won't catch me making that tragic mistake twice. 1. On the drive to Atlanta this weekend, "Jokerman" by Bob Dylan played. Some particular lyric - I can't recall which; by necessity, one cannot jot while driving - made me think for a split second, "Maybe this song is about Jerry Lewis!" (You may "click" here to refresh your memory about the time Bob Dylan got obsessed with Jerry Lewis.) It did have a "sad clown" vibe. But it also has a bunch of mystical stuff about "kings dressed in scarlet" or something. So never mind. Or, wait! THE KING OF COMEDY. I believe he dressed in scarlet. I don't really think "Jokerman" is about Jerry Lewis. But I was driving alone and had time to think. 2. The occasion of the drive was Barry Mills's birthday party. Who should be there but Craig "Sven" Gordon. We reminisced without irony about the old band we used to be in together, just like a couple of living relics from the cliché museum. 3. Somehow the band Kansas came up, prompting Sven to reveal that the lead singer of Kansas moved into his neighborhood for a time and could often be spotted jogging! 4. Chris Lopez came to the party. An interesting beetle landed on his arm. It looked just like a piece of popcorn. 5. Last time I saw Barry's daughter she was two years old. Now she's nine. Barry told her how when she was two, she liked it when I made crazy trumpet noises, it would really make her laugh. So once I was doing that and Dr. Theresa encouraged me like so: "Work it, Jack!" And Barry's two-year-old daughter suddenly shouted, "Work it, Jack!" Ha ha ha! Barry's daughter bore the retelling of this story with good grace uncommon in one of her age. She was thoughtful and polite about the rambling of her elders. 6. Look!

Barry's birthday cake, of admirable fluffiness, was decorated in remembrance of that kids' show that Barry and I used to make. 7. I met a guy who is working on a feature film about the founding of McDonald's, starring Michael Keaton and Laura Dern. He showed me a picture of "the first McDonald's" building and set that he had helped construct in a town north of Atlanta. "It'll be there a few weeks and then it will be gone, like it was never there," he said. I probably said, "I just had a dream about Laura Dern!" I probably said, "Tell her!" 8. I met a woman named Jenny who I thought said she was "as culpable as any vicar." I asked her, "Did you just say you are as culpable as any vicar?" She replied, "No." She also wanted to know what Lopez and I were like when we had "velvet nubs for horns." Or did she say "fuzzy nubs"? My jotting is unclear on this point. Perhaps she said both. She meant to ask what we were like when we were young. Lopez said, anticlimactically, that one of us would generally walk into a bar and the other one would be there, and one of us would say, "Are you gonna finish eating that?" Jenny asked whether we would sit across from one another or on the same side of the booth on such occasions, and the conversation dwindled. 9. Hey! Remember when I was amazed to learn that there were chickens living on the roof of Manuel's Tavern? I finally got to eat some of those eggs, "rooftop eggs" they were called on the menu, when my sister and brother-in-law and nephew Jasper had brunch there. Jasper wanted a pancake and some French fries. My sister was hesitant! But I was a strong advocate for this hugely appealing and innovative idea. I couldn't believe I had never thought of it myself! French fries are a perfect breakfast food. Why doesn't everybody serve French fries with breakfast? They are not that much different than so-called "home fries." My sister finally said okay, and I like to think my relentless nagging had something to do with it. 10. On the drive home, I saw a coyote run across the highway! I don't think I've ever seen one in person before. I know Melissa and Chris have some living out near their place, but coyotes strike me as exotic in our region. I guess they're not. I have to remind myself about the time I was so excited to see some wild turkeys on the side of the highway, and every person I know told me it's no big deal to see wild turkeys and that I was a sucker for being excited. And now I suppose you're all going to tell me that everybody has French fries for breakfast where you come from. Liars!

All Day Suckers

Remember the time Dr. Theresa and I were eating steak and we saw Morgan Freeman? THE SAME THING JUST HAPPENED AGAIN. He was at the same table again, in the same seat, and - though this part may be my imagination - he was wearing the same clothes! The first time it happened, we were like "WOW!" This time we were like, "Oh." How jaded! On our walk home we saw a tyke with golden, curly hair standing in the bed of a (parked) pickup truck eating not one but TWO all-day suckers, as I believe those enormous lollipops are called. First he'd lick one, then the other. One, then the other. "That's the life," said Dr. Theresa.

The Existence of Robert Walden

Hey but I know you remember last year's Halloween Film Festival when a movie called THE VAMPIRE nearly destroyed us. It wasn't even about a legit vampire. It was about a guy who took pills made of bats! And it wasn't very good. And it was called THE VAMPIRE. So WHERE WAS THE VAMPIRE? It took the wind out of our sails. We didn't think we could go on! Why am I forcing myself to relive this? Well, this year's Halloween Film Festival, by contrast, has been going pretty great! BUT. Then there was this thing we watched called AUDREY ROSE. I guess it started out okay, with an eerily dreamy car crash. But then in the middle it turned into MIRACLE ON 34th STREET. Remember that? That's the movie where there's a trial that hinges on proving that Santa Claus exists. That's not a horror movie! And in the middle of AUDREY ROSE it suddenly turns into a courtroom drama about the existence of the immortal soul! HUH? And how it travels from body to body. And therefore you can't really be convicted of kidnapping somebody if she happens to have your dead kid's soul living inside her. WHAT! And everybody in the courtroom sits around nodding gravely like, "Hmm, makes a lot of sense when you think about it, I guess we should let this guy kidnap whoever he wants." MIRACLE ON 34th STREET handles this kind of implausible legal whimsy quietly and even believably. Here your jaw just drops. And you also realize that now you are watching a flimsy courtroom drama with a million holes in it instead of a horror movie. The defense lawyer arguing in favor of the human soul (!) is played by Robert Walden, the existence of whom the "blog" has proven before. And saintly soft-spoken spiritual weirdo kidnapper Anthony Hopkins sits there having long documentary-style flashbacks (I think) to religious rituals in India, where, throughout the movie, he has been sort of humbly yet obnoxiously bragging about living for a while and it made him so great and quietly humble and everything (it was at this point that Dr. Theresa realized we had been suckered into watching some kind of proselytizing religious movie for our Halloween Film Festival), and the movie suddenly cuts from the stock footage of India to the star of our movie, a little girl, inexplicably marching in a circle with some other little girls around a giant snowman in a schoolyard in New York or wherever the hell they are.

I mean a GIANT snowman! I'm not sure I can get across how big this snowman is, I mean, this is a towering snowman. (This "blog" "post" I found on the "internet" - "click" here - rightly compares it to THE WICKER MAN, which went through my mind too. [I should also include a "link" to this more appreciative though still skeptical analysis of the film.]) Then they put a crown on the giant snowman and set it on fire. Here you can see the girl being hypnotized by the flames because of her crazy soul and all. It made me think of the "burning the witch" segment in Fellini's AMARCORD (pictured), which I believe (if I recall correctly)

symbolizes the same thing the snowman seems to symbolize in AUDREY ROSE: the end of winter's tyranny. And then that made me think of the awesome beginning of Fellini's CASANOVA (below).

Which probably has something to do with fecundity, and so might be related to the coming of spring, I have no idea what I'm talking about, isn't that what's going on in THE WICKER MAN too, somebody help me, I just want to take my mind off of AUDREY ROSE. Then Fellini's CASANOVA made me think of THE LAST TYCOON, the movie version of THE LOVE OF THE LAST TYCOON, which kind of nicely captures the scene from the novel of the intoxicating vision of the girls floating on the big head through the backlot after an earthquake. That's an intoxicating vision it would be almost impossible to ruin.

But THE LAST TYCOON misses so much about the novel. Would you like me to tell you what? OKAY! For example, in the movie, whiz-kid studio exec Robert De Niro explains to a huffy "literary writer" exactly what a movie story is, and that's fine, but De Niro squirms and darts around and leaps about and gesticulates so much while he does it! Really laying it on thick. Whereas in the book, his character (Monroe Stahr) makes the exact same speech, but oh so still and simply... it's better. It's spellbinding! In the novel. A real centerpiece. And there's another big problem with THE LAST TYCOON, which I generally like. But let's not get into that. I do remember reading in Tony Curtis's autobiography about how handsome and fit he was in THE LAST TYCOON and it made Ray Milland and Robert Mitchum so jealous because Tony Curtis was walking around being such a fine hot specimen of manhood, according to Tony Curtis. I find it hard to imagine Mitchum giving a crap. BUT I'M GETTING OFF TRACK. Maybe I'm just avoiding AUDREY ROSE. A long time ago the "blog" used to tally up all the guys we saw in movies with cigarette holders, I can't remember why. Anyway we stopped that nonsense. But the prosecuting attorney in AUDREY ROSE, who hates reincarnation, is played by the stalwart John Hillerman (pictured), and he sits in judge's chambers puffing away on a cigarette through a cigarette holder. The man was born to use a cigarette holder.

I'll say that for him. The movie has a chance to redeem itself (maybe) at the end, when Anthony Hopkins tosses a chair through a two-way mirror (don't ask), a kind of neat effect that perfectly sets up (for reasons we shan't go into) a cathartic solution to all the troubled kid's terrible problems. (Robert Wise, who directed AUDREY ROSE, also co-directed CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE, a much superior horror movie that's not quite a horror movie about parents who don't understand what their child is going through. But he didn't luck out twice with the child actors, I'll tell you that! Though I hate to cast aspersions upon a child actor. So we won't get into that.) BUT! And here is a BIG SPOILER. Instead of fulfilling the perfectly set-up catharsis that was right there in the filmmakers' hands, the kid just flat-out lies down and dies. The kid dies! Boom. She's dead. They killed the kid. No more kid. The kid's just lying there dead. No catharsis for you! And then there's a long solemn epistolary voice-over from her mother (!) about how that all worked out pretty well because her kid's ashes were sent to India (with her creepily beatific stalker Anthony Hopkins!) so maybe the whole reincarnation thing will go better next time. That's looking on the old bright side, I guess.

Effie Klinker

Having read (I assume) my "posts" about Zeno Klinker and his wife Sugar Klinker, Phil (natch) wrote to remind me that Edgar Bergen had a dummy named Effie Klinker. Phil attached a 1944 TIME magazine article about Effie Klinker, but I couldn't read the whole thing because I don't subscribe. Phil quoted the article as saying that Effie Klinker has a "spry libido." By gritting my teeth and googling the phrases "effie klinker" + "spry libido" I was able to find a reprint of the entire article, which indeed contains the not-stellar sentence, "Inside her prim decor lurks a spry libido." A good subject for study might be "Why are ventriloquist's dummies always so interested in sex?" I think I know the answer! And it has to do with repressive desublimation. In other news, McNeil has now watched WAKE ME WHEN IT'S OVER, ha ha ha, sucker! He notes that Ernie Kovacs wears his tropical shirt at one point "tied up around his belly button like a pin-up girl might." Yes, that's true, I forgot to mention that.

Purple Punk

Here is some verse quoted in that book I'm reading: "Your Punke dancing in Purple,/ With Musick that would make a Hermit frisk..." All right, everything is great about that, especially the extra e, you know what a sucker I am for an extra e, and the k in music isn't too shabby either, and the frisking hermit is nothing to sneeze at, is he? Also the vivid smattering of capital letters. In the book, there's a bracketed explanation: "Your Punke [prostitute] dancing in Purple,/ With Musick that would make a Hermit frisk..."

Awful Monkey Lollipop Thoughts to Share

Reading one of these old comic books: a TALES TO ASTONISH from 1967. One of the ads is for a "Sensational COLOR-V screen" that "instantly changes dull, dreary black & white pictures to brilliant, eye-filling colors. Attach it yourself in a few seconds. You, your family, your friends will really enjoy the color effects which, while not to be confused with genuine color TV will afford a wonderful treat to the eyes!" As much as I like the formality of "will afford a wonderful treat" all I could really think about was a bunch of disappointed families. Like, just a crushing sense of doom, dead-end jobs, childhood innocence blighted, marriages torn apart, this cheap screen a symbol of some secret rot settling into the American dream... too much? (See also.) Next page - and as I recall, this one was still being run in the 1970s, when I started reading comic books - offered a pet monkey through the mail. Every thought about that made me feel horrible, but somehow worst of all was the ad's promise that your hypothetical monkey "even likes lollipops." Sad monkeys with lollipops and mange. I can't go on. Those are just the beginnings of the terrible thoughts that haunt my very soul. The Hulk story was pretty good, though. See, the Silver Surfer was about to cure the Hulk of being the Hulk, but the Hulk misunderstood and tried to punch him, so the Silver Surfer flew away in kind of a silver snit.

Who's Crazy Now?

So yesterday I sent a document to Los Angeles in which I used the phrase "those tall pointy hats with the gauzy material hanging down." I claimed during the subsequent video conference that I couldn't figure out how to look up the proper name for those hats, and then Kent (who was on the other end of the call) just hopped on the "google" and IMMEDIATELY "googled" it up by entering the search phrase "medieval pointy hat." It's a hennin! And here I am, a guy who prides himself on being one of the world's finest "googlers." You know, I didn't really make an effort. I'm so ashamed. I am trying to console myself with the idea that nobody would know what you meant if you dropped the word "hennin" in a conversation anyway. Like, if you said something about a hennin, they would be like, "What's a hennin?" And you'd have to be like, "Well, it's one of those those tall pointy hats with the gauzy material hanging down," so knowing that word really doesn't do you any good at all, because isn't that how the conversation would go? Learning is for suckers! Well, except for my awesome friend Mary in the English Department. I imagine her always staring into a huge dusty book with a picture of a lady in an elaborate hennin on one of the pages, because I'm pretty sure that's what she does all day and all night too, and if I walked into the cell-like room with a high window where I'm assuming she does this and said, "Hey, get a load of that hennin!" she'd know just what I meant, but she's the only one, right? Also in the video conference, the pronunciation of "conical" came up (in connection with hennins) and I was suddenly and irrationally terrified that I might have been pronouncing "conical" incorrectly all these years, culminating in a video conference where brilliant creative professionals could hear me mispronouncing "conical" clear across this great nation we call home! But later I looked it up in my WEBSTER'S NEW TWENTIETH CENTURY DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, UNABRIDGED, SECOND EDITION from 1974 and it turns out I've been doing just fine with "conical," pronouncing it quite perfectly, in fact, though a glance at the next column informs me I haven't been doing so well with "conifer." There was no animosity involved in the former case, of course, but I am reminded of the time a student - A STUDENT! - called me out rather smirkingly in front of the whole class for mispronouncing "whilst," but I WASN'T. I WASN'T MISPRONOUNCING WHILST. You know who was mispronouncing "whilst"? HE WAS. So who's crazy NOW? Who's crazy now, jerk from several years ago who doesn't read this "blog" and wouldn't even remember what I'm talking about if he did? WHO'S CRAZY NOW?

Hay Movie

Far too seldom do we get to enjoy hay-based entertainment. Last night's viewing of FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD on TCM had plenty of hay to go around. Twice Alan Bates expresses his love for Julie Christie by saving her hay - once from fire and once from flood. Meanwhile, in the second instance, her no-good husband is sleeping in some other hay like a jerk. Now I would like to move on to corn. Julie Christie goes to the grain exchange - I guess that is what you call it - to buy some corn to plant. Some dude tries to sell her some inferior corn, but she is no sucker. She takes a handful of his crummy corn and cheerfully tosses it in the air, causing quite a little ruckus down at the old grain exchange. Peter Finch sees her tossing the corn - in fact, he sees her toss the corn in slow motion, which means that he is in love! Scorsese quotes extensively from this scene in CASINO, when Sharon Stone tosses the chips in the air with the same carefree demeanor in slow motion as De Niro watches from another angle and falls in love. I know you don't care! Leave me alone. I have some other interesting thoughts but I'm going to keep them to myself and then you'll be sorry.

Football Aliens

I guess lightning struck near a football field the other day and the stadium was evacuated. And the TV cameras caught a UFO darting around over the field! So says a person named "Sheila Aliens" (!) in a youtube video sent to me by my brother-in-law David, in an email titled "Football Aliens." But I looked at it and it's a bird. Sheila Aliens! With a name like that, no wonder she became interested in UFOs. Do I need to "link" to this thing? Probably not. "It's a rod chasing another rod!" someone exclaims about the bird. This makes me think of good old John Aubrey. I took all my editions of BRIEF LIVES back to the library, but I recall a story in it about Sir Thomas More. He was hanging out with his buddies and suddenly he started pointing to the sky and saying, "Wow! Get a load of that dragon!" (I'm paraphrasing.) And everybody was like, "What dragon?" And he was like, "That big dragon right there, up in the sky there! What's the matter with you? I can't believe you're not seeing this incredible dragon!" And pretty soon everybody saw the dragon. And Sir Thomas More was like, "Suckers! I made it up." He was messing with their heads.

Gummy Humps

Remember when I used to write fiction? That was stupid! But terrible old habits die hard. I have a short story in the new Oxford American, that's right, along with my regular column. As I am sure you will be thrilled to hear, my column features a reference to character actor Vito Scotti (pictured). I hear the sounds of millions running to their local newsstands. My short story, on the other hand, is called "Ghost College." Does it live up to its title? Of course not! That's what "writers" do. We sucker you in with a title and at the end you're all, "What was THAT all about?" And we are like, "Too late, you already read it!" And we laugh and laugh. On the plus side, the issue features Michael Martone, Steve Almond, James Whorton, Jr., and lots of other people who are truly good at what they do. As always, it's action-packed! Daredevil John T. Edge eats a school lunch. But at least we are lucky enough to get this sentence out of his loathsome experience: "The rice arrived in gummy humps." I've been saying that out loud a lot. It sounds like part of an Edward Lear poem! For some reason (well, the reasons are probably obvious) it makes me think of a sentence from A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN: "And a fellow had once seen a big rat jump plop into the scum." (Hey, my new story has the word "plop" in it. I'm just like James Joyce!) Gee, speaking of ghosts, I have really been falling down on the job of telling you about what's in the New York Times every day. A couple of weeks ago (?) there was an op-ed with a misty blue ghost in it. Let me look that up to make sure I'm not crazy. Yes: "the mist came down the hall, paused to consider him, and then curled into the room where my mother lay dreaming." That's an op-ed! At a later date, the New York Times gossip columnist was hanging out with the cast of the reality show GHOST HUNTERS, which just seems sad and forlorn somehow, especially for the cast of GHOST HUNTERS. And, on a somewhat unrelated subject, there was an obituary for "a distinguished Abstract Expressionist artist who — after what he described as a chance sighting of something flat, silver, airborne and unfathomable — became the father of the alien-abduction movement."

UFOs For Every Mood

Okay. Let's compare a couple of the self-published UFO conspiracy books I keep checking out of the library for some reason: THE NIGHT HAS A THOUSAND SAUCERS vs. that weird document in a loose-leaf binder. In the former, the aliens are always happy and smiling widely and speaking words of comfort to the author (Calvin C. Girvin) when he is feeling low: "We Space Men have a way of 'getting around' as you would say and making friends in a great many different ways in different places." When the author is not hanging out with "Space Men," he is usually walking around enjoying the beauty of nature: "I encountered several rabbits and other wild animals frolicking around in the snow, as small animals like to do on such a night." The overall tone is cozy: "We found a secluded corner in the lobby of the hotel and talked about flying saucers till well past midnight." Though Mr. Girvin's heart is so full, a hint of gentle melancholy hangs over his self-published book: "I saw much of the girl Helen... She possessed a kind of beauty that is difficult to put into words... her big expressive eyes made me fall deeply in love with her at once. I spent many evenings with her and thought I wanted to be with her always, but strangely, in my silent moments when I pictured my future she did not seem to be in it." And sure enough, after he buys a diamond ring, his alien chums sadly inform him that marriage is not in their plans for him. And the book ends with him sobbing! So it is not all fun and games. Okay, now let's move on to the weird "book" in the white vinyl binder. It's like rummaging around in someone's brain, a feeling both unpleasant and compelling. Hey, remember that guy who wrote that manifesto about how fiction is for suckers? I think this is what he has in mind as a replacement, this sort of found object or mad collage. It's the work of a highly focused and very angry man, including news clippings he has scrawled his opinions on and photocopied. You're not going to get this experience with your "kindle," brothers and sisters! (By the way, speaking of the fiction manifesto guy - not the UFO guy - I recently found out that a story from my first book will be in an anthology he is co-editing, which just goes to show you how unlike fiction my fiction is.) But back to the UFO guy! He's not a UFO guy! He's just a really angry guy who wants to get back at some people who have wronged him, and he has put it all in an "affidavit" in a three-ring binder like a homework assignment that can somehow be checked out at the University of Mississippi library! He is not shy about naming his enemies, but I won't do that here. A sample sentence from page 1: "Despite ______'s cultivated image as a swashbuckling pilot and serious UFO researcher, he is, in my opinion, and others', an irresponsible, self-centered, loutish thrill-seeker who truly has no business in the latter field, and questionable competence in the former, given his record of hard-drinking and womanizing." Later the author fights back against the way his enemies are trying to discredit him: "For the record, it is true that I was arrested for 'soliciting a prostitute' in 1982 in Seattle in a police 'sting' operation - I have told the story many times to friends with gusto... For a huge percentage of international travelers and businessmen, journalists, and covert operators, it is not at all uncommon to purchase the services of a female escort to 'maintain appearances' when necessary... But I have been blessed with an appealing countenance and have never yet had to pay directly for the 'services' of a female." Soon, the UFO angle shunted aside, we're smack dab in the middle of the Kennedy assassination! And so on. Features a cameo by aging huckster and object of "blog" curiosity G. Gordon Liddy!

Frozen Treats

I see that my famous recommendation shelf at Square Books has sold A WHOPPING THIRTEEN BOOKS, including, most recently, DIE A LITTLE by Megan Abbott. Yes, I am the greatest person ever, but that is not the only important lesson to be learned here. For you see, Megan Abbott is COMING TO TOWN! She'll be reading from her new book THE END OF EVERYTHING at Off Square Books later this month so START GETTING READY TO HAVE YOUR MIND BLOWN NOW. I cannot emphasize this enough: start preparing NOW by reading all of Megan's previous books OR ELSE! Otherwise, Megan's uncanny powers, which culminate in the current volume, will freak out your mind TOO MUCH and the good people at Square Books cannot be held liable for your personal catastrophe! It will be your own fault and you will incur ALL MEDICAL EXPENSES. Most importantly, Megan already sent me a birthday present. She is making the rest of you suckers look bad! It's a French advertisement for Popsicle brand frozen treats, featuring Bob Hope and suitable for framing! Top that, suckers! And don't forget that Megan will be here on July 27 with her own brand of chilly treats... her words! Much like Popsicles, they FREEZE YOUR HEART WITH EXCITEMENT AND TERROR! (Note: That photo is not the Popsicle ad, of course! It just seems to combine the spirit of Bob with the spirit of Megan Abbott... it is Bob and Paulette Goddard in what I assume is a publicity still from THE CAT AND THE CANARY.)

Offhand Cat Remark Causes Outbreak of Euphoria

In the New York Times, there is an offhand remark from one of the Coen Brothers that their next movie will be "all about a cat." This could be one of their famous lies that they famously enjoy lying about all the time so famously. On the other hand, with my recently completed cat book "in the bag" (ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! But don't put cats in a bag, that's horrible) it might just be that I'm in tune with the zeitgeist in a big way and ready to ride this oncoming cat gravy train as it roars down the track all the way into big money town USA. Now to quit my job. So long, suckers!

Saps

Laura Lippman has written down some good, insightful thoughts for you to read about James M. Cain's MILDRED PIERCE (different than the earlier Slate magazine essay of hers on the same subject, which you can find after a few "clicks" here). Here's a sample sentence: "The not-so-secret dirty little secret of hard-boiled fiction is that it’s awash in sentiment; those tough guys, for all their intelligence, can be the biggest suckers of all." See, that is close to something I have been pointing out to my hardboiled fiction class... so often your hardboiled protagonist (especially in a traditional detective novel) NEEDS to be a sap for the story to work. How often does the detective with an ill-advised soft spot end up working for a client who has no money? How often does the client who starts the book betray the detective's tender trust? I will tell you: EVERY TIME! I mean, how often does our hero fall hopelessly in love with a photograph (Sughrue in THE LAST GOOD KISS) or painting (McPherson in LAURA) of an alluring young woman who is presumably deceased? Forget sentimentality! Half the time we're practically wallowing in gothic romance. Hardboiled fiction is as full of ghosts and castles and raging thunderstorms that reflect the wildness in the characters' hearts (see MILDRED PIERCE!) and vampires as anything. Isn't Veda a vampire? Doesn't she blossom as her once-vibrant host is reduced to a shapeless, worn-down shadow, "a panting, dumpy little thing in a black dress"? Lippman's point is about the comparative lack of sentimentality in Cain (as opposed to Chandler, for example), a true observation, but even tough, practical Mildred is a sap where Veda is concerned. (Bled dry! Fed upon! "Sapped"! Vampire!) And I guess Captain Ahab is a sap for Moby-Dick. Can't you see what literature is trying to tell us? We're all a bunch of saps!

Cowboys and Novellas

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

Treats Within Treats

Say, do you like MILDRED PIERCE? Well, Megan Abbott has written a nice "post" about MILDRED PIERCE, and within it are nestled some reflections on "blog" fave Jack Carson AND a "link" to another MILDRED PIERCE piece by Laura Lippman! It's like the delicious Tootsie Roll center hidden in your Tootsie Pop brand snack treat!

Let's Get Annotated!

Every year, as you well know, the "blog" advent calendar brings fun and enlightenment to young and old alike. The fuel it runs on is surprise, so it would ruin the "blog" advent calendar to explain anything about it until it is complete in its glory and has been enjoyed by one and all in the spirit of anticipation, wonder, and universal good cheer. But sometimes there are one or two items that might be enhanced with footnotes after the fact, and such is the case once again this year. Here are this year's "blog" advent calendar annotations, helpfully numbered according to their original placement on this year's "blog" advent calendar: 10. So Mary Worth was stalked in her eponymous comic strip and they made a coffee mug representing her encounter with her stalker. Okay! I found this one the night before I "posted" it, and here is the weird thing: when I found it, the mug cost $13.99. But THE VERY NEXT MORNING, when I "posted" it, the price had mysteriously gone up to $14.99! AND THAT'S NOT ALL! After I "posted" it, when I visited other "web" sites with advertising sidebars, OFTEN the Mary Worth stalker mug would be featured, probably thanks to "cookies" or some other innocent sounding, horrible "internet" thing I don't understand. Mary Worth's stalker was stalking me around the "internet"! In one case, the mug was advertised for the price of $19.99! I have no idea what this means, except that computers are spying on us, but we knew that. 11. This man has lots of ideas, including one I thought was mine! In my novel AWESOME, the title character - a giant who invents things - wants to construct a highway with grooves like LP grooves in it, and to have cars fitted with special tires that would play the music embedded in the highway, the way a phonograph needle plays a record. I thought I made it up! But I was shocked and sort of depressed to discover that this guy had already thought of it. He writes: "Carve computer-generated ripples in the surface of a main highway, and when vehicles pass over the surface, mysterious voices whisper, and distant music plays... Little sub-threshold voices which say 'Buy popcorn.'" His version requires no special tires. BUT GET THIS! He suffered a letdown too, because he in turn discovered that ROADS LIKE THIS ALREADY EXIST IN REAL LIFE! So I guess we are both suckers for thinking we are so great and everything. 21. You don't know who Charley Weaver is. Why should you? He was a folksy character created by the actor Clifford Arquette (grandfather to Patricia and Rosanna Arquette). Arquette (in character as Charley Weaver) was on HOLLYWOOD SQUARES with Paul Lynde. I want to say he sat on the bottom row, at the end, but I can't swear to it. The little automated Charley Weaver toy is great. In addition to making and drinking its little cocktail, and its nose turning red through special lighting effects, Mr. Ward says that smoke originally came out of its ears. Puzzling, though: the Charley Weaver persona did not involve Foster Brooks-like drunkenness as far as I can recall... certainly Charley Weaver would have never imbibed anything requiring the use of a cocktail shaker - more like a Mason jar. So the toy is weird in that regard. Let me also say that there is one of these behind the counter at the Ajax Diner, inert, and often have I stared at it and wondered about its function - a coin bank? - as I drank sweet tea and ate pot roast and butter beans at the bar. Now I know! 22. I didn't realize until my brother-in-law David sent me the video that the Lambton worm was such a big deal. I knew the song from the Ken Russell movie LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM, but if I thought about it at all, I stupidly and incuriously figured it was a fake folk song they made up to suit the needs of the plot. But man, there are so many versions on youtube! One guy sings it with his shirt off and possibly his pants off for all I know. The brother-in-law visited for Christmas. He walked into Square Books on Christmas Eve and by fate walked straight to a book about dragons containing a chapter on the Lambton worm. Have you ever noticed that whenever you start thinking about the Lambton worm he turns up everywhere? So I guess the Lambton worm is very popular and I never knew it. (I started this "post" last night but then I got too tired to explain who Charley Weaver was. It seemed soul crushing. Life is hard!) Pictured, Charley Weaver and LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM. See if you can figure out which is which!

Simeon and Simeon

What about this crazy character Simeon the Foolish? He was one of those holy fools such as you're always reading about in your Dostoevsky! Get a load of this guy! He "threw nuts at women during church services and gleefully rushed naked into the women's section of the city bathhouse ('as if for the glory of God,' his biographer optimistically commented)." Well, folks, that's right, this is a record: a second "post" in one day summarizing CHRISTIANITY: THE FIRST THREE THOUSAND YEARS by Diarmaid MacCulloch. There are just so many characters in this section I'm reading right now. What about poor old Arius, for example? He seemed like an okay guy. Sure, he had some views that were considered heretical, but he was pardoned by Constantine, so everything was copacetic, right? But guess what? Then he probably died of "an acute attack of dysentery in a latrine in Constantinople." And that's not even the worst part! His enemies made up a mocking hymn about him dying in a latrine and SANG IT IN CHURCH! That doesn't sound very nice at all! I can't even quote the hymn here! It is scatological beyond belief, like a teen comedy. But I also got to read about another Simeon, not the Simeon mentioned above, no, the other Simeon, one I always enjoy reading and thinking about, who sat on top of a sixty-foot pillar for forty years. He was the subject of that wild movie SIMON OF THE DESERT by Bunuel. As anticipated in the previous "post," I got to the first section of pictures in the book, and there is one of Simeon's actual pillar, or what's left of it. As MacCulloch puts it kind of wonderfully, it now looks like "a well-sucked lollipop." Speaking of the other Simeon, the first one, I forgot to tell you that when some women mocked him he supposedly cursed them and they all turned cross-eyed! Do you think maybe he had a problem with women? Go back and look at the evidence! And speaking of pictures, here are the characters Simon and Simon from the TV show SIMON AND SIMON to represent Simeon and Simeon. Just like their saintly predecessors, one Simon was uptight and stiff as if from sitting on a pole for forty years and the other was a rascal, or at least that's the way I remember it.

Closing Bookstores

The four Harry W. Schwartz bookstores in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, are going out of business. That's a family-owned chain of independent shops, down the drain. I found the news on the "blog" of Justin Riley, one of the bookstore workers, now unemployed. This is the time to reveal, I suppose, that Justin is the person sometimes referred to here as "Comic Book Villain." I can't properly express how nice the people at Harry W. Schwartz have been to me. I've been to Milwaukee only once, many years before any of my books came out. It was 1992, and I was with Kelly Hogan and our friend from Hubcap City, and if memory serves it was the night the stage fell down at the old theatre and people were rushed to the hospital. But Justin Riley and company didn't know that. Why would they? Justin was probably six years old at the time. But Harry W. Schwartz was there. I guess it has been there for over eighty years. The point is Justin and his fellow employees didn't know me from Adam, but they were always supportive, going out of their way to sell my books to unsuspecting suckers. Seriously, they always gave me the kind of personal support and encouragement that no mammoth retailer will ever give. Did you know, for example, that over on the unnamed behemoth, my recent novel is currently described as being about how the Emperor Justinian "failed to make peace with Persia in the east by not emphasizing a common interest of trade; he failed to establish good relations with the kings of the western Mediterranean and to develop his own homeland, the Balkans; finally, by banning certain Christian sects, he alienated some border regions and sowed the seeds of rebellion"? Guess what? That's not even close to what my novel is about. (The erroneous description has been up there for months.) And that's just one of the many laughable adventures I've had with the behemoth over the years. Harry W. Schwartz didn't make those kinds of mistakes. See, they read the books with their own eyes and sold them with their own hands. Justin Riley quotes the late owner on his "blog" entry: "The true profit in bookselling is the social profit; the bottom line, the measure of the impact of the bookshop on the community." (Pictured, the Emperor Justinian, as a symbol of what's wrong with, well, everything.)