The 11-Day Blunder

Just when I thought I would have nothing to "blog" about today, McNeil reports having a dream about Bob AND Dolores Hope! Now, am I going to tell you the dream? No. It having been previously established that you don't know who Bob Hope is, how much less, given the scummy world in which we live, would you have cared to learn of Dolores Hope? And shame on you for that. You're what's wrong with America! Why, if you tried to even think of the concept of Dolores Hope, you would be instantly confronted by and sucked into the greedy abyss of your own soul. And maybe that's what you want. How am I supposed to know? Good for you! So... why am I telling you this, then? I'm glad you asked, imaginary voice in my head! Well, today will be the eleventh day in a row I have "blogged." I haven't double checked, because I just don't care that much, especially since A.I. informed me that I wrote Bill Boyle's novel GRAVESEND and I witnessed what the future holds as far as meticulous accuracy goes, but I'm very certain that today, whatever day it is, marks the most days I have "blogged" in a row since I got demoralized on April 27, 2016, when our TV blew up. I had a little fit and claimed to have stopped "blogging." I was all sad inside like a weepily smiling clown because I had "blogged" for "almost 10 years"... ha ha! What a chump. It's been nearly 20 now! And yes, I'm throwing up as I type these words. It's not as easy as it sounds, throwing up while you type. What was I just talking about?

McNeil's Li'l Sausage Bits

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

Missing Gods

As you know, I used to say I had stopped "blogging" but now I have stopped saying I have stopped "blogging," for reasons I have listed repeatedly for no one. Anyway, there are so many interesting things happening every day that it is almost impossible not to "blog," don't you agree? For example, I know I bought a book at Square Books... let me check my private records... yes, yes, it seems that in May of this year - almost certainly on the same day I received a new belt that caused quite a stir - I bought a book that caught my eye, a book purporting to contain a complete list of the gods and goddesses of ancient Egypt. This is not to be confused, of course, with my DICTIONARY OF ANCIENT DEITIES, a work of a broader scope. For a while, as I can recall by way of the images that dance so merrily inside my brain, the book I bought about the gods and goddesses of ancient Egypt - "COMPLETE" the cover boasted! - sat on the low-slung marble-topped side table where I keep a few books for browsing as I loll about in my favorite chair like a dissolute dandy of yore. I eventually moved the book because it was taking up too much space. I think it interfered with the old cat when he tried to use the table as a means of access to my lap. BUT WHERE DID I PUT IT? The book, I mean, not my lap. That is what I have been trying to figure out for three or four days now. The good thing is that if I ever find the book, it will give me something else to "blog" about, thereby staving off (or helping me embrace?) the abyss. Now you get it!

McNeil's Li'l Bogie Bits

Welcome to the newest recurring "blog" feature since... I don't know when. Since before the TV blew up and I quit "blogging" because I was so dispirited by the blowing up of the TV set? That's right, you're just in time for "McNeil's Li'l Bogie Bits"! Was McNeilileaks our last recurring feature? It was very topical whenever that was... you know, the leaks era of history. When we'd cram "leaks" together with some word to make some other word. Most recurring "blog" features justly wither on the vine, like "Bookmarkin'! with Jack Pendarvis" and the unlamented "Today's Weather." But we here at the "blog" believe that "McNeil's Li'l Bogie Bits" has a dandy future indeed. In part, that's because McNeil, "inspired," I guess we'll call it, by the Million Dollar Book Club, is reading a 700-page celebrity bio of his own choosing. Because I am all tied up with all the various books to which I have committed myself, some of which I haven't even told you about, and find myself unable to join him in the endeavor (in fact, the bio is one I never read, and finally sold to Off Square Books during a long period of unemployment) McNeil has promised to pass along juicy morsels about the life of Humphrey Bogart as he absorbs them into his mighty brain. And he has given me permission to pass them on to you! Before we get started, I should say that I'm nervous about starting a recurring feature right now. It could be a lot of typing for nothing! Let me explain. The other day, a big old water pipe exploded - much like the TV of yore - under our house (the TV was not under our house) and some guys from the water company came by and dug up our yard. One of them took his shovel and severed a cable "linking" us to the "internet," much like the plow cuts the worm in William Blake's famous aphorism. Anyway, this same guy with the wayward shovel "fixed" the problem, but now the "internet" quits working at random times and AT&T, the worst company in the world, makes it nearly impossible to ask a human to come out to the house and look at what's going on. They just don't care! So all these carefully chosen words may vanish as I type them into the abyss. All right! That being said, we're already three bogie bits behind. Let's get started! BOGIE BIT 1: McNeil summarizes Bogart in his prep school days: "perennially bored, few friends, never cracked a book, oddly naive and vulnerable." BOGIE BIT 2: "During the depression, Bogart and his then wife had to move to some shabby apartment along the East River. One of their neighbors was a comedy writer who used to place his meal in a bag, shake it up, and then dump it out on a plate before eating it. No reason given why." As you may well imagine, the latter detail provided some grist for the usual hilarious email antics of McNeil and myself, as I fancifully pictured the comedy writer placing bread, ham, and cheese in the bag and shaking it up and presto, out comes a ham sandwich! Oh, what fun. McNeil replied that he was imagining mashed potatoes and gravy in a bag. Then he remarked, memorably, "Everything was a salad to this guy." I think that's a direct McNeil quotation, though I admit I am not double-checking. BOGIE BIT 3: Young Bogart used to sit in an arcade and play chess against all comers for a dollar a game! I might be forgetting something, but I believe those are all your bogie bits for the moment. Goodbye for now from all of us at "McNeil's Li'l Bogie Bits."

Farm Living

In today's New York Times, a movie review suggested that a certain documentary might discourage the viewer, had that viewer ever "entertained Green Acres-inspired reveries on the joys of farm living." Each time the New York Times displays such an abysmal fundamental ignorance of the themes of GREEN ACRES, I hasten to twitter, where I inform Laura Lippman. I also used to keep a record of such grievous infractions on this very "blog," but as you know, I don't "blog" anymore. It occurred to me today with a sense of some regret that my tweets on the subject may be but chaff in the wind, whereas this "blog," while entirely defunct and universally ignored, might provide a sturdier repository for a list of New York Times misrepresentations of Green Acres. How many priceless examples have been lost? Who can say? But at least I'm preserving this one. Now! One may argue that the reviewer DOES understand Green Acres, and that he is referring in his analogy to Oliver's own "reveries on the joys of farm living," which he (Oliver) indeed most explicitly expresses in the theme song to the series. BUT! Even a passing familiarity with the source material would come with the knowledge that "farm living" gave Oliver, in actuality, nothing but grief, disillusionment, surreal and even psychotic bafflement, and a constant state of frustration bordering on unbridled rage. The reviewer should have stated more clearly that the documentary under consideration might discourage those who, "like Oliver Douglas of Green Acres, once entertained reveries on the joys of farm living." But even that doesn't make sense, because the body of the text itself (GREEN ACRES) has already accomplished the purpose on which the reviewer so wantonly hypothesizes.

Barkley Absconditus

I'm four episodes into THE BIG VALLEY and it's interesting because the whole drama centers around an empty place where a person used to be... not until Laura Palmer in TWIN PEAKS was there another absent character so important to a show. He's the dead patriarch, Thomas Barkley, and I just saw an episode where the town is unveiling a statue of him, but there's a shadow over the face and we can't really see it, can anyone? Yes, yes, THE BIG VALLEY swirls around a terrifying abyss of meaningless where "the father" is supposed to be. Where is the supposed pillar of society? I don't suppose it's a coincidence [yes, of course it is! - ed.] that two bridges have fallen down in four episodes. I'm sure there is some theological approach to THE BIG VALLEY, something from Nicolas of Cusa, something about the deus absconditus.

An Unforgettable Adventure

Once in a great while I like to astound you with one of my spine-tingling adventures from real life. So! The other day I went to the dry cleaners with a jacket and also the white shirt upon which a friendly jostle from Pat McHale had caused me to spill a quantity of red wine. As I was about to get out of the car, I reached into the pocket of the jacket and pulled out a coaster from The Temple Bar in NYC, upon the reverse side of which Pen (or Kent? - something in the curve and thickness of that forefinger makes me think Pen) had drawn a happy little "thumbs-up" character. Now, it was raining! You must understand the meteorological aspect of the situation to thoroughly enjoy the ins and outs of my rousing tale. I sat in the car figuring out where to put the coaster so I wouldn't forget it and it wouldn't get rained on, made of paper as it was. I was so preoccupied with the matter that - "as in uffish thought [I] stood" (Lewis Carroll) - I locked my keys in the car! Not having a cellphone, I had to use the dry cleaners' phone to leave a message for Dr. Theresa. A message I prayed she would receive! After transacting the business for which I had embarked upon this ill-omened journey I stood in front of the dry cleaners, a conveniently extended portion of the roof sparing me from the weather. Every time someone pulled into the parking lot I made eye contact. Who knew what vehicular form my salvation might take? Many unspoken - indeed, telepathic! - communications, conveying human feeling in all its glorious and abysmal range, blossomed in these numerous though brief encounters. At last the dapper manager of the dry cleaners himself stepped forth and offered me a ride somewhere far away from the dry cleaners. Perhaps I was too scruffy and emotionally confrontational to be standing outside a respectable dry cleaning establishment! But I think he was just being nice. My faith in Dr. Theresa and her network of generous acquaintances being what it was, I declined his offer. And at last, here came Blair Hobbs, graciously transporting Dr. Theresa, who had brought her own set of car keys. "I'll drive," said Dr. Theresa. We stopped to get some cat food since we were near the place where we get cat food.

Reading Too Much Into It

I'm lucky enough to have an advance reading copy of Megan Abbott's next book, YOU WILL KNOW ME. I see that a LeRoy Neiman tiger poster appears in it. Megan told me about that poster, which is why it also coincidentally appears in MY next book, MOVIE STARS, in which, as I now see thanks to Megan, I consistently misspell LeRoy Neiman's name with a small "r." But the important thing is that the LeRoy Neiman tiger poster is literature's next big trend. I also came across a subtle allusion to Brian Keith's "Uncle Bill" (pictured) from the TV show FAMILY AFFAIR... a touchstone that is pure Megan, as I know from many a conversation. Last night I was trying to piece together what makes something a "Megan Abbott" novel, other than the fact that Megan Abbott wrote it. Is it that you feel you're on sure footing and then things start to slip away from under you? Characters' nightmares seem truer than their daily lives. I'm grasping here. I know that Megan likes David Lynch, and often cites him as an influence, but it's not precisely Lynchian. Lynch can show you a ceiling fan and fill you with dread. Megan achieves something of the same effect with words. Ordinary things aren't ordinary for her. Uneasiness, I decided. That's what you feel. Megan Abbott is our great author of unease. I already had that phrase in my mind - "our great author of unease" - when I came on this sentence in YOU WILL KNOW ME: "It was upsetting, like the seam of something had been torn, ever so slightly." Yes, it's the "ever so slightly" that marks this perception as Megan's, maybe, and separates her from everyone else. Also, the evocative vagueness of "the seam of something." It's not that Megan "peels back layers" the way people say David Lynch does... it's that the world itself is already hallucinatory and gothic. There's no need to peel back any layers! Megan and I discuss this, or something related to this, in an old interview I hope you will "click" on: see pp. 14-16 (MEGAN: "It’s like the thing that students sometimes say: 'You’re reading too much into it.' And of course that’s what students always say when they’re frightened about what they’re reading"). I'm not saying Megan Abbott and Emily Brontë share a worldview, necessarily, but there's a scene in WUTHERING HEIGHTS that I wrote about for the Rumpus once, "when the housekeeper goes back to visit a sweet little boy she used to take care of, and in the short intervening time something has happened to him. He throws a stone at her head and curses. She tempts him with an orange: '"Who has taught you those fine words, my barn," I inquired. "The curate?" "Damn the curate, and thee! Give me that," he replied. "Tell us where you got your lessons, and you shall have it," said I. "Who’s your master?" "Devil daddy," was his answer.'" Very uneasy, queasy, skating around the edge of normal life. Hmm, maybe it's the orange that seems like a Megan Abbott touch, an otherworldly fruit or shining spot on those bleak moors. In conclusion, there's a significant doodle in YOU WILL KNOW ME that looks "like a cartoon owl." So I can put YOU WILL KNOW ME on my stupid list of all the books I read with owls in them, trying to pin it down and categorize it with my sickening brand of whimsy. Yes, yes, that's it, Pendarvis, laugh your unease away. IF YOU CAN! The last book I read featuring a "cartoon owl" was by Ace Atkins, a close friend of Megan's and mine. Surely this is an area for further investigation, he quipped, narrowly avoiding the abyss.

I Didn't Do That Thing I Do

Hey remember when I "live-blogged" the movie STRIKING DISTANCE (1993) and then I "live-blogged" another movie from 1993? Don't worry, I'm not going to do that again! First of all, MIXED NUTS is from 1994. Also, my heart's just not in it anymore. I perked up when I saw it coming on. Not with delight. I saw it at the theater when it came out, which is something you say a lot as you get older and older, and nobody cares, but you keep saying it: "I saw this in the theater when it came out!" It starts with Steve Martin riding a bicycle. He has brown hair. Does that spell trouble? Sometimes Steve Martin has brown hair in movies. I can't nail down what it portends, exactly, unlike Dr. Theresa and her observation about Burt Reynolds's vanishing moustache. But I can say that I prefer prematurely white-haired Steve Martin. So as Steve Martin was bicycling around, I said, "I am NOT going to 'live-blog' this." The cast list is crazy, as befitting a movie called MIXED NUTS. But I only really got electrified when I saw Jon Stewart's name pop up. "Weird! I AM going to 'live-blog' this!" I briefly lied to myself. But then I got bored again. A pregnant Juliette Lewis chases a guy dressed like Santa into the street. He tumbles into a couple of roller skaters who are carrying a Christmas tree between them. Whilst succumbing to a deadly lethargy I recognized one of the skaters as Parker Posey. Then Garry Shandling showed up in his second unbilled role as a sleazeball in a movie I thought about "live-blogging"! "It's an omen!" I shouted into the abyss of my being. "I guess I better 'live-blog' this after all... no, I'm going to bed."

You Can't Beat Burrata

I went to Atlanta! But I forgot my precious jotting book. So I jotted nothing. I'll try to remember what happened anyway. See, I noticed that Kelly Hogan was playing there, in a band called the Decembrists. And I knew that my sister and brother-in-law love that band (as an old, out-of-touch person, I know the name but had never heard their music somehow - except I think they once used a Decembrists song on MAD MEN! That's something an old person can really get behind), so I thought it would be fun to go to Atlanta and see Hogan onstage with the Decembrists and maybe my sister and brother-in-law could go backstage after the show, and so could I, and that's what we did. Oh yeah, and Abby was there! Abby took this picture of Hogan and her friend Nora singing. Abby knows the Decembrists' road manager (I think) so she went backstage too. Yeah, Abby used to live in Chicago and go to the Hideout back when Hogan was tending bar there, and they never even knew it... it's a small world I tell ya! So guess who I saw backstage. That's right, Andy Hopkins, the greatest "blogger" ever on the subject of canned food, who hasn't updated his blog since 2011. So I upbraided him for depriving the world of pleasure, but I thanked him for all the pleasure he has given us already. HASN'T HE DONE ENOUGH? And I met this one guy who said (I thought), "I'm in a band with Kelly," and I said, "Oh! Which one?" And he said, "Uh, the one that just played." Ha ha ha! See how old I am? I had already forgotten him from mere moments earlier. He was very nice about it. We gave Hogan a ride to Manuel's. My sister went home (they live across the street) but my brother-in-law stayed out, and I would say a majority of the Decembrists came over and everybody had a good time at Manuel's. Kelly and I particularly wanted to go because neither of us lives in Atlanta anymore and as you know they are probably going to ruin Manuel's soon. Then everybody went to the Clermont Lounge, another old stomping ground. (I must say that my brother-in-law went home instead! He did not set foot in that disreputable spot.) The Clermont was packed to the gills! Is that an expression? You couldn't even move around in there. I said to Hogan, "I don't remember it being like this." And she said, "I blame Anthony Bourdain." It is true that Mr. Bourdain did a televised segment on the Clermont, although I have never seen it. BUT HERE IS A TRIVIA FACT! Remember when I was on the Anthony Bourdain television program? There is some "B-roll" footage on the show of Anthony Bourdain and Bill Griffith and me standing around in the front hall of William Faulkner's house. And you can't hear us talking, but what we are talking about is the Clermont Lounge! It was what gave rise to Bill's memorable aphorism, "Dirty places are getting harder and harder to find." Speaking of which! I had lunch with Shana the day after the show, and she said that at the same time Manuel's is going to be shut down for nefarious "improvements" the Clermont will be shut down for the same reason! So for some period of time Atlanta will be without the Clermont Lounge and Manuel's. WHAT WILL HAPPEN? I assume the city will sink into an abyss. Oh, Atlanta! How you love to shoot yourself in the foot. One new thing was hot dogs for sale in the Clermont Lounge parking lot. A PREVIOUSLY UNTHINKABLE OCCURRENCE. Abby had one and so did I. Mustard and sauerkraut! The following evening, Bill Taft wanted to meet up for a drink at La Tavola for old times' sake. I went back and checked the wall of photographs of "regulars," which had been neatened and straightened and purged of dead weight. Dr. Theresa and I were among the casualties! Our picture is gone from the wall. Sic transit gloria mundi! All the old faces are gone. I didn't see anybody I knew at La Tavola. Except Bill! He wanted an appetizer and I saw burrata on the menu. I told him the story of the time everyone knew what burrata was except me. Bill ordered it, and I am happy to say that he was just as thrilled with the burrata as I was when I first had it. You can't beat burrata! Bill said that he had once entertained fantasies of making La Tavola his "family spot." His intention was to be "the cool dad who drinks grappa." But then he brought his family there and his three-year-old son threw up. So that didn't work out! Anyway, his son is about ready to go off to college now. I AM JUST TELLING YOU HOW LIFE WORKS.

Thickafog

I was thinking about the time Garrison Keillor wrote that snotty, harrumphing review of Mark Twain's autobiography, volume one, for the New York Times Book Review. Is that something that happened? My memory reports to me that it might be. I think he thought it was too big and crazy or something, too much stuff. Was that it? Who cares? I was sitting in the coffee section at Square Books today, waiting to give a former student some worthless advice. As I am sure you recall, the coffee section is right next to the "literary non-fiction" section, where my eye was captured by the bright green spine of the SECOND volume of Mark Twain's autobiography, which appeared - on the basis of the spine alone! - to be as large and crazy and stuffed with ramblings as Garrison Keillor accused the first of being. Well, I was a little early for my appointment, and sitting there all alone, so I hoisted the volume off the shelf and immediately opened it to some worthwhile and interesting things. And then I started thinking, maybe there is a lot of use a fella can get out of a big, crazy book with too much stuff in it if he approaches it the right way and doesn't just come at it harrumphing. One passage I happened to find was about Mark Twain's appreciation for a fan letter that a cowboy had written to Helen Keller. Twain found that the grammatical errors, misspellings, and other supposed infelicities were exactly what made the letter great. Twain writes: "when the heart speaks it has no use for the conventions; it can rise above them, and the result is LITERATURE, and not to be called by any less dignified name... the productions of the unschooled mind get even an added grace and power out of fresh and free and lawless grammar and orthography." I've thought about this a lot over the years, and how it applies to literary fiction. In one article (in an issue of a magazine I can't find in the usual teetering piles around here, but here's a short excerpt I located in the depths of the "internet"), I wrote: "Certainly a lot of aesthetic energy and meticulous handiwork has been expended by various literary geniuses trying to write convincingly the way a dumb person would write. I blame Mark Twain. 'Dumb person' isn't fair. The truth can be said, but only inelegantly: Great writers love to try to write the way a person who can't write writes." Oh, it's most often done badly. You can "click" here (though, God, why would you?) to read a New York Times Book review by me, in which I lambast a guy (so who am I to huff and puff at Garrison Keillor?) for putting the word "disingenuous" in his character's mouth in a way I considered (and still do) "cheating." Anita Loos and Peter De Vries, when they are doing this sort of thing, never cheat, which is why they are so great. But what's even better is just the real thing, as I was reminded repeatedly when I used to frequent the surprisingly vast self-published UFO book section of the university library. You know, Larry King's tweets are another example of something that could not be improved by a sly and knowing artiste, editor, or publishing executive. They are impervious to parody! (Please see this urgent caveat.) Remember when Jasper Johns said you should look at his paintings the same way you look at a radiator? Now I am going to change the subject. It pains me to tell you I could not finish reading Errol Flynn's autobiography for the Doomed Book Club, even though Megan Abbott promised me that the last line is "worthy of Cain": "The second half-century looms up, but I don't feel the night coming on." Pretty good! And in a series of polished tweets, Megan put forth a compelling Freudian analysis of Mr. Flynn. But there are so many parts of the book that seem cruel to me and are hard to enjoy, and I was getting depressed reading it, and I love his movies so much. Flynn writes about his love of the sea a lot, so I thought I'd pick up WANDERER by Sterling Hayden (pictured) as a kind of substitute. I remember it as being briny. I'm sure you'll recall many years ago when I read the first sentence: "The black pit of oblivion opens like a giant clamshell." Okay! Now I've read a few more of the sentences: "I mount the ladder and ease myself on deck. Thickafog. Horns louder all around. Gray-green morning world with topmasts indistinct and the long proud sweep of the maindeck jutting east... My back aches; sign of tension. Gulls stand inert atop stumps of wooden piling." I was like, "Thickafog! What is this, JAMES JOYCE?" In a good way. I remember McNeil read this a couple of years ago maybe, and liked it. The last memoirist I compared to James Joyce was Adrienne Barbeau. And I'll do it again.

Anyone

Can't seem to get anyone interested in the fact that Vera Caspary - author of LAURA - wrote the story on which the Bob Hope movie BACHELOR IN PARADISE was based... but trust me, that's weird! And so very interesting! TRUST ME! Also noticed as I was idly rewatching the beginning of that film last night that the assistant director was Erich von Stroheim. "Not THE Erich von Stroheim (pictured)!" I screamed in the abyss of my solitude. I seemed to recall that von Stroheim had a son who also did a little directing. And sure enough, a quick check confirmed that the real Erich von Stroheim had been dead for a few years by the time BACHELOR IN PARADISE came out, so at least he had that going for him.

Cultural Studies

Welcome, young friends, to "Cultural Studies," your place on the "internet" for "cultural studies." Reminded by this Norman Mailer bio that THE NAKED AND THE DEAD has an owl in it. A gruff army cook refers to the stew he is serving as "owl poop," only this saucy fellow uses much saltier language! Yesterday, on a very different note, Dr. Theresa and I enjoyed a most delicious breakfast at the Honey Bee Bakery. The Jackson 5 seemed to be on the old CD shuffler there, and nothing wrong with that! I love the Jackson 5. But then little Michael started singing "Rockin' Robin" and I went into a most unpleasant trance, suddenly eye to eye with the soulless abyss of cynicism (not Michael, who was a pawn in this scheme!) that had manufactured the object called "Rockin' Robin," and I involuntarily did a ten-minute monologue from the point of view of its composer. Luckily, Dr. Theresa found it amusing and entertaining! That kind of thing can go either way. Today I was justly chastened when I read an interview with the music producer Dev Hynes in the New York Times. He said something I want to put on my list of great things that people have said: "So we make a bad song. That’s like the worst thing that can happen. Which, in the scheme of bad things in the world, is not that bad." He goes on to say that a bad song has never killed anybody, or words to that effect, and this is the kind of thing I used to like to say in my fiction writing classes all the time, which may be one reason I am no longer teaching fiction writing classes. But it's true! I can't help it. Go ahead and be awful was often my sincere advice. So, you know, on second thought, maybe I wasn't chastened, because if you want to hear something that has been "carefully crafted" in a "workshop" environment in which a bunch of knowledgeable "colleagues" sat around a table and "improved" the "final product" with "heated critiques" that were only in "your best interest," you should listen to a "well-produced" and "thoughtfully arranged" recording of "Rockin' Robin," because so much "attention" was paid to "detail," but be warned that you will fall into an endless coma that can only be broken by true love's kiss. (Though see also.) A final cultural item! Yesterday, Dr. Theresa went to the used-book section at the back of the antique mall next to Big Bad Breakfast, which is wonderfully curated (the used-book section is) by a woman named Carolyn Ellis Seaton. Chris Offutt and I have whiled away some fun hours there. Dr. Theresa came home with a "Red Badge" mystery published by Dodd, Mead & Co. in 1946. Apparently, this "Red Badge" imprint hosted a yearly $1000 mystery-writing contest that smells like kind of a racket, but maybe it was legit. Anyway, some of the previous contest winners were listed in the front of the book, including TOO MANY BONES, THE MAN WITH THE LUMPY NOSE, and THE AFFAIR OF THE SCARLET CRAB and I was like ha ha ha that sure sounds like one sexy crab and thus conclude our cultural studies.

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.

Shut Up, Gandalf

There's a Laurie Anderson lyric that goes, "You know, I think we should put some mountains here. Otherwise, what are the characters going to fall off of?" I thought of that last night when I couldn't sleep and the newish HOBBIT movie was on and the characters were just constantly falling off of mountains, at least in the little bit of the movie I saw, they just kept going from mountain to mountain, falling and falling, falling off the edge, falling into crevasses and abysses and whatnot, sometimes just tumbling all the way down the mountain, and I learned an important lesson: you will never, ever get even the tiniest injury from falling off a mountain. When they tumbled to the bottom of one particular mountain a bunch of giant wolves started chasing them and this one dude was like, "Out of the frying pan..." and Gandalf bellowed theatrically in response, "And into the fire!" Ha ha! That was pretty unnecessary, Gandalf.

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.

Earth Squirrel Wins

"Look, I'm busy," you say. "I don't have all day to sit around reading every 'post' you ever wrote about corn. I'm no purist! I'm just a guy or gal on the go and the pressures of my job are enormous. If I could read just one thing you 'blogged' about corn, what would it be?" First of all, let me say that is the trouble with this modern world! But okay. I suppose the third runner-up would be my discovery of the curious predominance of corn flakes in the index of Hal Needham's autobiography. And then of course no one can deny the excitement of reading about the corn they eat on Venus and Mars! What could possibly top that? No, not the erotic celebrity kernel-flinging of the glamorous Julie Christie. Sure, that is a good guess, but not everything is about action and thrills and eating corn in outer space with big Hollywood movie stars all the time! It may surprise you to learn that we have to "come back down to earth" - ha ha! - to enjoy the simple pleasures of the time Dr. "M." saw a squirrel eating corn on the cob. No sir, it just doesn't get any better than that. Now there's something to ponder while you sit in your skyscrapers worrying about your briefcases at your big business meetings: that adorable little squirrel just nibbling away without a care in the world! I wonder about the last time that cheeky little fellow had to put on a fancy "necktie" and meet someone in a conference room. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Oh my. Although the other day a particularly wiry and patchy squirrel came right up the front walk and onto the porch with disquieting urgency of purpose and leapt onto the screen door and glared at me malevolently with a large, black acorn jammed into its mouth and that wasn't adorable. It was ominous and terrifying. I looked into its eyes and the abyss stared back.

A Piece of Glass, a Redwood Tree

So Kelly Hogan put the funky theme song to the kids show VEGETABLE SOUP on her twitter the other day ("click" here to hear it). And that made me think of this other show I used to watch as a kid. It was called MAKE A WISH, and as you can discover by "clicking" here, the host, constantly checking his guitar frets, advises in the opening theme, "a piece of glass, a redwood tree, anything you wanna be, that's what you're gonna be!" That's really the way we thought then. And just to prove his point, he flies away! (See also.) And now I am remembering how another calm, psychedelic kids show theme ("click" here) freaked me out a little bit with its insistence that "the world's a big blue marble when you see it from out there." OUT WHERE? WHERE AM I? THE ENDLESS ABYSS? And then kids are knocking a marble around. Hey, that's the EARTH! It's NOTHING! It could just disappear at any moment! Or some smaller planet could crash into it and knock it out of the solar system! Like a marble! Which was not the point at all. Speaking of no point, I know you are not "clicking" on these "links" and I forgive you. "Blogspot" has now given me the capability to see how many times people have "clicked" on any particular "link" and NO ONE HAS EVER LOOKED AT THIS "POST" about how President William McKinley used to throw a napkin over his wife's face whenever she had a seizure at a state dinner! For shame!

It Wasn't a Dream

Don't you wish there were a movie called THE NAKED FACE? And what if it starred your favorite acting team? That's right: Roger Moore, Rod Steiger, and Art Carney! And like any movie starring Roger Moore, Rod Steiger, and Art Carney, our theoretical movie should have come out in 1985 - often known as "The Year of Roger Moore, Rod Steiger, and Art Carney." Dear friends, it's not a dream. It's real! I watched it last night when I couldn't sleep. Well, some of it. I should state right away that the title is misleading: Roger Moore's face is not naked at all. In fact, in many scenes he wears glasses as large as Louis Jordan's in SWAMP THING. Maybe they're the same glasses! And maybe my brain was a little hazy in the wee hours when I flipped on THE NAKED FACE, but I could swear it features an assassin who turns his wheelchair into a motorcycle, just like those Transformers all you kids love! Next there was a scene of Rod Steiger ranting and screaming the way he does sometimes. He was ACTING. He was a ranting, screaming police detective with his eyes popping out of his head, and his partner was Elliott Gould, which was a surprise. Elliott Gould just stood there against a wall in that laid-back, slightly slack-jawed way of his while Rod Steiger stomped around looking for any remaining bits of scenery to devour. I'll tell you one thing I learned last night: Roger Moore, Elliott Gould, and Rod Steiger went to very different acting schools. You should see them together. It's like watching three entirely different movies at once! What a bargain. So some other dudes are trying to kill Roger Moore and he runs into his little bedroom and props a chair under the doorknob! It seemed so quaint, and not at all like James Bond. The killers were thwarted by the doorknob, which they kept rattling in vain. Next Rod Steiger comes back to investigate and this time he decides to whisper. He's still very tense, but he just whispers everything for a change of pace. Like, "I really think my character would whisper everything in this scene." And the director was like, "Whatever you say, Rod Steiger." Then Rod Steiger goes to a diner with Elliott Gould and whispers some more but Elliott Gould gets on his nerves and all of a sudden he's screaming again. What a roller coaster ride! And all this time I'm thinking, "Must make it to Art Carney... Must make it to Art Carney..." He was third-billed in the capsule description after all. But friends, I didn't make it to Art Carney. It gradually seemed preferable to lie in bed staring at the ceiling and contemplating the terrible abyss, which is exactly what I did. The end.

Literary Matters

Time once again for "Literary Matters." Who needs them? Nobody! But here they are. 1) Though Burke has moved away he is still able to communicate through the medium of "email." He says that maybe his favorite line of dialogue in ON THE ROAD comes when a character is showing off his freshly amputated toe - or rather the spot where his toe used to be. He has left the hospital immediately after the operation, over the objections of the staff, of course, which he shrugs off: "What's a toe?" he says. 2) Here are a few lines from ANGELA SLOAN by James Whorton, Jr., which I started reading yesterday: "'Somebody left that chicken sitting out!' He said it in language that was spotted with profanities. I've omitted those." Pure Whorton! I am reminded of a passage from his novel FRANKLAND: "I drew close again to Dweena Price and smelled her hair. I will say no more about what happened next. I draw the curtain." 3) This is sort of the opposite of Scott Phillips's approach in THE ADJUSTMENT, which I just finished reading. Anything goes! Profane is a good word for that book. Depraved is another. It's a thrill ride with a maniac. Our protagonist thinks of doing certain things, tries to do other things, and actually does a bunch of things - each wilder and viler than the last. But he's so good at it! Phillips stays in his head and never winks or blinks. THE ADJUSTMENT has been - as Michael Kupperman once said of another book (THE NAME OF THE GAME IS DEATH by Dan J. Marlowe) - "boiled to a level that is hard." Phillips isn't kidding around. He tried to give his book the pulpy drugstore spinner title SUPPLY SARGE, but "The Man" wasn't having it, sadly. Reading THE ADJUSTMENT feels like a reckless pursuit. Sometimes you put it down for a second - but only a second, because you have to find out what happens next - and think, "Thank goodness reading a book can't kill me. OR CAN IT?" 4) Whorton and Phillips - one explicit, one implicit! Both approaches are valid and chock full of strange rewards. (Here is where the government would like me to remind you that Phillips and Whorton are my pals... but I bought their books with my own money and was in no way bribed or coddled by their presumably sleazy representatives.)

5) And I should mention Whorton's tender and somewhat melancholy style never lets you forget that his book is actually an adventure story with spies, featuring in a bit part (so far) that object of the "blog's" morbid curiosity G. Gordon Liddy! And the narrator is a plucky young girl, which will make some reviewer somewhere call it "HARRIET THE SPY with actual spies," hey, that's not bad. 6) Also, both books are funny. Getting back to Phillips for a second, he's a master of the bleak - maybe nihilistic! - humor that characterizes the hardboiled style. Sometimes people forget that part! 7) Dr. Theresa and I were staying in a hotel a couple of years ago when we heard, coming from somewhere we couldn't exactly place, the eerie tap-tap-tap of typewriter keys, a sound you just don't hear that much anymore. "Barton Fink must be staying here," Dr. Theresa joked. Later we told Jim Whorton about it - he was staying in the same hotel. "That was me," he said. With needless abashment, as I recall it! So maybe he is "hardboiled" in his own way, sitting in a lonesome hotel room typing away on a typewriter like a man out of time. And the book he was working on was ANGELA SLOAN. And now you know... THE REST OF THE STORY. This is Paul Harvey.......... GOOD DAY! 8) That would have made a good ending. But here's another thing: I have nothing against electronic readers, really, oh, I have sentimental things against them, and then there was all that trouble with the kindle and the soulless behemoth that time... but I was reading an article in the New York Times today where the reporter was trying out all sorts of e-readers plus an old-fashioned paperback to see what works best. He writes, "Both iPads offer an immersive reading experience. I found myself jumping back and forth between my book and the Web, looking up old facts and pictures of New York City. I also found myself being sucked into the wormhole of the Internet and a few games of Angry Birds." I know what he means by "immersive," but in a truer way he is describing an experience that is the opposite of immersive, isn't he? Then he tells us about his struggles with a paperback: "It took barely a paragraph for me to feel frustrated. I kept looking up things on my iPhone, and forgetting to earmark my page." And I thought: "Poor thing!" 9) Oh wait. While I've got you here. I've been trying to talk the Doomed Book Club into reading WANDERER, the autobiography of Sterling Hayden. So you can't have this first line for your autobiography because Sterling Hayden beat you to it: "The black pit of oblivion opens like a giant clamshell."