Chicken of the Sea

I'm telling you for the last time! Just because I keep a list of books I read with owls in them doesn't mean I have to tell you every time an owl appears in a single volume. One owl per volume. My obligation begins and ends there! BUT! I came across more owls in THE ODYSSEY and they really gave me something to think about. See, these owls are on Calypso's island and... well, here, I'll let Emily Wilson's translation do the talking: "Birds nested there but hunted out at sea: the owls, the hawks, the gulls with gaping beaks." So, the way I'm reading that, the owls are out there with everybody else, grabbing up a healthy diet of crabs and fish or what-have-you. Now, if you're anything like me (you're not), you're thinking about the time I just couldn't picture owls hanging out on a beach. Such an image was beyond my mental capacity, save for a fancifully scornful "owls on surfboards" motif. Looks like I'm wrong again! OR AM I? I am. Although I often say I don't care about looking things up, or anything else, anymore, and it is 100% true, I did get out of bed and consult my Robert Fagles translation of THE ODYSSEY, which I had sworn I was too tired to ever do again. I guess I have a few tricks left in me after all. Just like wily old Odysseus himself! Anyhoo! Here's Fagles: "birds roosted, folding their long wings, owls and hawks and the spread-beaked ravens of the sea, black skimmers who make their living off the waves." So, if I'm reading that correctly, which I'm certainly not, Fagles has only the "ravens of the sea" (sounds like a worse version of Chicken of the Sea brand tuna, ha ha! What if you ate some canned tuna and said, "Wow, this tastes just like raven"? Oh my goodness, what a world that would be, we're having some fun now), what Emily Wilson more sensibly calls "gulls," eating out of the water, not the owls and hawks. Which of them translated more accurately? Well, I'll never know. I don't know ancient Greek and something tells me I'm not going to start learning it now. But! According to things I glanced at on my phone, there are several kinds of owls known under the umbrella term "fish owls" or "fishing owls," and you'll never guess what they eat! That's right, fish. It's all part of the theme of the "blog," which is that I'm wrong about everything. For example, when I sit around thinking ha ha, owls on the beach, what a gas, that's rich, ho ho ho, what a time to be alive.

Utter Chaos

Few of us will ever forget where we were when I saw Dianne Wiest perform in the Samuel Beckett play HAPPY DAYS. But did you know that I was tempted to stand up at the end and shout “I loved you in COOKIE!”? As I recall, I was wearing my pink jacket, which, at the time, I thought might catch Dianne Wiest’s eye as I yelled incoherently about COOKIE during the standing ovation with spittle flying out of my mouth. Please be assured that in the end, I simply clapped like a normal person and kept my fat mouth shut. I’m just listing these details to avoid the inevitable... the inevitable being something about owls. Look. We all remember The Great Owl Drought of 2023, which lasted over three months. But other times, owls just come at a person too fast. There are too many owls! And yes, I get tired of telling you about every time I read a book with an owl in it, a habit that I began for reasons long forgotten or, more accurately, repressed. Before we go on (see how I’m still putting it off?) I should explain that the illustration for this “post,” of Peter Falk and Jerry Lewis walking on the beach, was taken from my TV in 2016, if I am supposed to trust the date stamped there by my computer. And indeed I can say with certainty that it was after April of that year, at which time our former TV blew up, because this is obviously a normal widescreen TV like everyone has now, whereas our old TV that blew up was one of those square boxes so heavy that even Ace Atkins had trouble lifting it when he came over to carry it out of our house, due to our begging and pleading. But the date stamped on this photo without my knowledge or consent... why does the government want to know the last time I watched COOKIE (2016 was not the last time I watched COOKIE)? And why am I talking about COOKIE? Because the Million Dollar Book Club is reading the memoir of Susan Seidelman, who directed that movie, along with DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN and at least two other really good ones of which I am too tired to type the titles. Anyhow! When Susan Seidelman is a kid, she and her siblings huddle up and watch late, late monster movies on TV, because they are “night owls.” As you will recall, the last night owls we mentioned were from Shakespeare, and he meant owls that literally fly around at night, which is... most owls? Right? You know what? Despite your many assumptions, I am not an owl expert. But Susan Seidelman is referring to the famous metaphorical night owls, people who thrive in the wee hours. The latter, I would say, is the most common kind of owl to run across in the Million Dollar Book Club. Previous examples of this kind of night owl (hardly a comprehensive list!) include Andy Warhol, Anna Magnini, and Yoko Ono. As I bring this interesting whatever it is to a close, I will say, look! If somebody else tells me a book has an owl in it, I usually don’t include it here. If I included every owl book that people told me about secondhand, featuring owls I didn’t witness in context with my own elderly mist-filled peepers, it would be utter chaos. Utter chaos! One time this guy Brian told me about the owl in a John Le Carré novel and it was a good (if upsetting) one, so I put it on the list. But don’t let that give you any ideas! However! McNeil read a book horribly called THE RAT ON FIRE, in which someone is as “drunk as a hoot owl,” which, fine. I’ve often wondered about where the phrase or concept comes from. I’ve seen it used in a work dating back to 1177! Which is quite a while ago. I don't think I was even born yet! But no one has ever explained to me why owls are supposed to be drunk (despite at least one owl who drank schnapps in real life). So I mentioned my puzzlement to McNeil, who immediately zapped me with an answer that struck me as satisfying. As you will recall, McNeil also explained to me why the wind blows in 2008. (I feel sure he once laid out the purpose of lightning for me as well, though I can find no textual evidence of when that happened. I do believe I wrote about it in my precious diary like the sweet little thing I am. I even recall that my mom found some tragic aesthetic or philosophical fault with McNeil's electrical reasoning. Sorry, McNeil!) Anyway, here’s what old McNeil had to say, and I quote: “Maybe because owls kind of bob their heads, and when they move on a branch they do it kind of awkwardly - one step to the right, then the other leg (or claw?) follows so it looks like their whole body is bobbing up and down. This is how they move in my imagination when I am asked by the authorities to describe the movements of owls.” PS! Embarrassingly, as I compulsively looked back over the "blog" for pointless "hyperlinks" that no one will ever "click" to add to this "post," I found one in which I had already been gently guided to a similar conclusion about drunken owls... over ten years ago! Like a jerk! Similar but not identical, I hasten to stipulate! McNeil's version holds more water... or booze! Ha ha! We're having fun now! We're finally having some fun, aren't we?

I Guess So

Well, am I going to start telling you every time I run across a book with the phrase "night birds" in it? I guess so! Last night, I thought otherwise. I lay there reading in this book, "They sat and listened to the night birds and the surf." And I was like, well, those are definitely not owls, so there is no need to wonder whether or not I should put this excellent crime novel I am reading on my big long list of books with owls in them. Allow me to explain my thinking! The book takes place in Hawaii. Now, are there owls in Hawaii? I am happy to say yes. But I couldn't imagine owls hanging out at the beach (see the part of the sentence about "the surf"). But maybe they do! Maybe that's my next pitch for an animated TV show: OWL BEACH. Owls on surfboards! Oh boy! Yeah, but this morning, my curiosity got the better of me and I wanted to know what kind of owls they have in Hawaii. Now, I usually don't care about anything, especially looking up facts, and just look at the kind of trouble looking up facts gets you into. You discover things that seem interesting. It's a real pain. Like, I found this article about the owls of Hawaii ("click" here). And look. I know that one day it will become a zombie "link." That's one of the reasons why I don't "link" to outside sources anymore. But come on! There is a lot of prime owl material there. For example, "In a legend from Maui, Pueonuiakea, an owl god, guides lost souls safely back to their homes." This is nice to hear! Especially because owls are called upon to be scary death symbols so often. It's a pleasant change of pace for the owls, guiding lost souls safely back to their homes. Although, when you think about it, could this be applied to heaven above? Oh, let's not think about it, nor all the hymns I heard as a child that would back me up on this questionable theory. It's too much! I've gone too far! Now, let me tell you, I'm really enjoying this book, FIVE DECEMBERS by James Kestrel. I even sent McNeil a copy! And I don't even know the ending yet. I emphasize my admiration because there was one meaningless little detail that nagged at me. See? This is what you get for caring about things! Caring about things is useless. But, so, these characters go to a movie in 1945. They leave at the end, after "the credits rolled." Did credits roll in 1945? I feel that they did not. Most movies, I believe... almost all! Not all, but almost all. Most movies, as I was saying, did not even have closing credits in 1945. And if they did, I don't think those credits "rolled" very much. They just sat there. Maybe, in a very few instances, they rolled a tiny little bit. But by any stretch, I don't believe a case could be made that it was a period-appropriate thought in 1945 for closing credits, if a character was even aware of the existence of closing credits (and our protagonist has never heard of Ingrid Bergman or Gregory Peck! So his knowledge of credits may be assumed to be... ha ha, I'm boring myself so much), to be "rolling." Who cares? I don't! Why is this stuck in my head? I just feel like... I guess James Kestrel doesn't have any friends who watch TCM. A friend who could have told him about the history of closing credits! A friend like... ME??? Is this the kind of pedantic little thing I'm going to worry about now? I guess so! Is this the kind of close examination of an unimportant fragment that I would wish to be applied to my own work? Never! As I have remarked repeatedly in my long life, "It's okay when I do it." Now, the movie is SPELLBOUND, and for all I know, maybe SPELLBOUND ends with one of those rare little credit rolls. I guess I don't care enough to watch it again and find out. But maybe that's the case and this is just like the time I couldn't imagine a dog "resting her chin on her four paws." We see where that got me! Nowhere. Which is where I like to be. POSTSCRIPT! I was asleep, and sprang awake thinking that of course to "roll the credits" just means to roll that part of the film through the projector, justifying my knee-jerk four-paw dog-fear presumption. Maybe? If so, it does not mean, as I implied, that the credits can be seen to roll or scroll from the bottom of the screen to the top. Sorry I doubted you, James Kestrel! However! Most of what I said still makes sense. In 1945, no one would expect a movie to "roll credits" at the end, no matter the meaning of the phrase. I leave you to your thoughts and trust that you all will kindly go to hell.

Effort

I don't mean to brag, but I was walking on the beach on Christmas Eve, listening to an audiobook of FINNEGANS WAKE. I was listening to Chapter 10... wait! I must already interrupt this wonderful story that has you on the edge of your seat. It wasn't really Chapter 10. More to come on that in a moment. Anyway, I was listening to what I thought was Chapter 10, and, hey, do you remember the comical "French" accent I imposed on a character in my second book? Well, it sure sounded to me like James Joyce perpetrated the same offense, and in a remarkably similar style. So, suddenly, I was proud of myself instead of being so terribly ashamed. I decided that upon my return home, I would double check my physical copy of the book, which was given to me by a defrocked preacher when I worked in a bookstore in downtown Mobile, to see whether Joyce and I had indeed independently hit upon the same inaccurate and even potentially embarrassing method of presenting to the reader a comical "French" accent. And that is what I did, or tried to do. The first thing I noticed upon digging out the book was that there are no chapter headings. I have run into this problem before, notably when I was trying to teach BELOVED during my brief flirtation with doing that kind of thing. Authors! Please number your chapters. Don't be like James Joyce and Toni Morrison. Ha ha ha! What terrible advice. See also the travails of the Dune Book Club. As I leafed through FINNEGANS WAKE - and allow me to state, just to help you understand what I've been through, that the online index to FINNEGANS WAKE I found years ago is now nothing but a zombie "link"! - it seemed to me (as already hinted) that Joyce's chapters were longer than the "chapters" of the audiobook, which, though unabridged, had been broken into bite-sized chunks... bite-sized if you're a hippopotamus! But relatively bite-sized, making my search more of an effort, especially given the fact that I no longer care about anything. I did track it down, though: "you wish to ave some homelette... Your hegg he must break himself." Believe it or not, that's James Joyce, not me. From context, the speaker seems French, though there is some German sprinkled around the passage, too, just to drive me batty. BUT THAT'S NOT ALL! On Christmas Day I was walking along the beach again and the audiobook said to me, "it being Yuletide"... and it was! Dr. Theresa could not walk on the beach with me because she had twisted her ankle. I would not be listening to an audiobook of FINNEGANS WAKE were I pleasantly strolling hand-in-hand along a beach with Dr. Theresa. I am sure you will recall that the last time Dr. Theresa and I visited my parents, we saw a mink run across the road and a pig run across the road. This time, we saw nothing run across the road. While I was taking a bag of trash to a garbage chute, however, I saw a little bright pink lizard of a kind I have never seen before. I want to say it was a salamander, because I have always imagined salamanders - no doubt incorrectly - to be pink. I also saw this guy (above) on the day after Christmas. Oh! I forgot! So I also heard Joyce use "owl-wise," I thought, seeming to mean both "always" and "wise as an owl." And I checked! Like a hero! Just to satisfy myself. And neither my hearing nor my huffing and puffing brain had deceived me, though my brain had added a superfluous hyphen. I found "the eternals were owlwise on their side every time"... and let me state for the record that I do not believe James Joyce was referring to the Marvel superheroes The Eternals, created by Jack Kirby, though, of course, there are certain similarities (see also). I also thought (and still sort of think after consideration) that owlwise could have meant "as regards owls," as, for example, when somebody (is it Jack Lemmon?) in THE APARTMENT says, "That's the way it crumbles, cookie-wise."

A Realist

I came here to tell you one thing, but two other things intervened, so now I have to tell you three things. I will save the thing I originally wanted to tell you for last. I don't know why. First, here are the other two things. 1. Last night Dr. Theresa and I watched another mediocre movie, this one about the devil. To compensate for its mediocrity, it starred Vera Farmiga. "I know I always say this, but I think she's really pretty," said Dr. Theresa, to which I replied, "I know I always say THIS, but I saw her in my hotel lobby in Burbank once. She was wearing a hat!" Then we chuckled knowingly, for what is marriage but saying things to one another that you know you've said before, and enjoying it? Well! We are not even to the first thing I am going to tell you yet. Later in the movie, some other dude came along, some old dude, I was like, "Who is this old dude? He looks familiar." Dr. Theresa was like, "He was in some TV show? I can't remember." So we sat there a while and I suddenly remembered: "Oh yeah! He played a mad scientist on a TV show called FRINGE. And once, on an entirely different trip, I saw HIM in the lobby of that SAME HOTEL!" As you can imagine, the coincidence made at least one of us giddy with excitement. 2. Saw a tiny bit of BLUE HAWAII this morning. You may be asking yourself (you aren't), "Why are you watching so many Elvis movies lately?" Why, he is nothing less than the "star of the month" on TCM. Anyhow, for Elvis's first onscreen number, as he zooms toward the beach with his girlfriend in a convertible sports car, he sings a swingin' version of the old French (Canadian?) ditty "Alouette." What? They couldn't come up with an original melody for the first number in BLUE HAWAII? So they do a nursery song? (See also, the time he was forced to sing "Old MacDonald Had a Farm" in a movie.) But that's not what I wanted to tell you either! What I wanted to tell you is that the wikipedia article on "Alouette" somehow skips over this usage entirely (as of this writing), meaning that I know something wikipedia doesn't know. It makes me feel like a god! I would fix it (would I?) but I don't know how. To be fair, the lyrics bear no relation to "Alouette," relying thematically, rather, on Cole Porter's "Always True to You in my Fashion," although (as perhaps goes without saying) employing none of the wit. 3. Finally! All I meant to do is quote a letter from Katherine Anne Porter to Tennessee Williams: "I am a realist in that sense that everything is real to me, nightmares, daydreams, the world visible and invisible."

The Year In Review: A Special Report

Well, you know, it was a pretty big year in a lot of ways. Back on March 7, I was happy as a clam, just counting up how many wienies they were roasting in BEACH BLANKET BINGO without a care in the world. By April 3, I was forced to admit we were living in what I called, in my own colorful phrase, "strange modern times." Nothing else happened until May 11, when I learned that "Idaho" doesn't mean anything, it's just a word some weirdo made up out of nothing so everyone would like him. In somewhat related news, I wondered what the actual definition of a weed was for two months before making any effort to find out. So that took up a good portion of the year. I enjoyed all the time I spent sitting in a chair, idly wondering what a weed was. My friend McNeil had a dream about Dean Martin and fishing poles and "long fluorescent light bulbs" being put into his mouth so make of that what you will. Maybe the drugstore pulled a fast one on us, but we still love them. What choice do we have? That's life for you in this wonderful, blunderful, thrill-a-minute year with a surprise around every corner.

How Phil Spends the Pandemic

Phil wrote to say that in a recent viewing of the Chuck Norris vehicle INVASION USA, he noticed several Atlanta filming locations we might recognize. I wrote back that I retained but a single vague memory of INVASION USA, which was that Phyllis Diller was on TV in the background in one scene, the details of which I could not recall. I wasn't even certain the so-called memory was accurate. But Phil wrote again, to assure me that I was correct! His entire reply bears contemplation: "A couple has sex on the beach while [Phyllis Diller is] on tv. A terrorist kills the lovers, laughs at the tv, then shoots it too."

Somebody Did It

The other morning at 4:18 AM I had - and recorded here - the big idea that someone should cast the same actor as both Claudius and the ghost of Hamlet's father. So last night I was watching the 2009 version of HAMLET starring David Tennant, and guess what? It's been done. So I felt the need to tell you I'm not the big brain I thought I was. That seems like too short, and too obvious, of a message, so I'll change the subject and tell you that though I'm just 20 pages into the book that Megan and I are reading about the making of THE WILD BUNCH, the author has already found time and space to call beach movies "stupid," the work of Lucille Ball's production company "idiot-box pablum" and Jim Hutton "annoyingly goofball" in "most of his films." Most of them! So I'm starting to get the feeling he doesn't think very highly of comedy, humor, jokes, general happiness, and the laughter of innocent children. I'm no stranger to the opinion. Someone expresses it to me nearly every day. But comedy - particularly its relative importance in art - has nothing to do with this dude's book as far as I can see, so the fact that he feels the need to trash it once every seven pages is fascinatingly perverse.

Dreamy

McNeil sends word of a dream he had about Dean Martin (and it's not the first time!): "The family and I were on a trip to the mountains and staying in a cabin, and Dino was there, complaining that he had to do all the fishing. He was throwing a rod and reel in the trunk complaining to me about it. And I was like, you know, I don't want to stand in a cold stream all morning. And there was a long fluorescent light bulb in the trunk and I was afraid he was going to make me eat it." Hey! As long as I have you here, I should tell you something that happened to me yesterday, though I hesitate, as the details are too crass to relate. I resorted to my GREEN'S DICTIONARY OF SLANG, for research, and, although it was not what I was seeking, I happened to find an owl in a volume where I would have never expected to find an owl: Volume 3, P-Z. The phrase in question was "shoot the owl," and I will never tell you the meaning, as it exceeds the prudish bailiwick of the "blog." In conclusion, if you keep up with all the exciting developments happening at the "blog," you are going to go crazy about this last item! Remember the obelisks that McNeil saw in the 60s beach movie DON'T MAKE WAVES? Of course you do. Well, Dr. Theresa and I have been watching the TV show AGENTS OF SHIELD, and yesterday, I had to stop everything! Stop everything! And take a photo of the TV screen (see below), because there, in the background, accompanied by the usual green reflection on our TV screen, which cannot be remedied, I detected, however fleetingly, what appeared to be THE EXACT SAME OBELISKS FROM DON'T MAKE WAVES. I'm having the evidence sent to the lab for analysis.

It Only Hurts When I Cry

Well, I happened to scroll past TCM last night, where the film BEACH BLANKET BINGO was playing... there was this woman (pictured) singing "It Only Hurts When I Cry" while she was roasting some wienies in the fireplace, and I stood there and counted the wienies (lying on a napkin on the bricks, bottom right). I am pretty sure there were at least 20 wienies in the scene, including a couple you can't see because I grabbed this screenshot from a faded pan-and-scan version on youtube this morning, giving you little idea of the garish vitality of the original wienies as presented in Technicolor, or whatever process they used on BEACH BLANKET BINGO. It really did look like an awful lot of wienies, but it was a big party and, honestly, there may not have been enough wienies to go around.

This Pair of Binoculars

I thought for sure this book would have an owl in it. I read SPY OF THE FIRST PERSON, the final book by Sam Shepard. Man, there was every kind of bird. This is from memory but SPY OF THE FIRST PERSON had wrens in it, I think, and swallows, and blackbirds and robins and blue jays and towhees and crows. I think there was a pelican. Anyway, they were at the beach. With pelicans, I think. I haven't even gotten warmed up on all the kinds of birds in this book. There are birds on the cover. Well, there is no actual owl inside, but there is "this pair of binoculars that looked like owls' eyes," and as everyone knows, that's good enough for me.

A Movie With a Book In It With an Owl In It

So I was watching DOCUMENTEUR by Agnes Varda and the mother and son start talking about a book they read about an owl who makes tea out of his own tears, and he has a list of sad things he thinks about to make himself cry enough to make a pot of tea. Despite some halfhearted "googling" I have not determined whether this is a real book or an invention of Agnes Varda, so I regret to inform you that I cannot at this time put it on my big long list of books with owls in them... however, I can say that - while being charming in its own right - this owl crying into his teapot business puts me in mind of one of the least pleasant subplots of the Thomas Harris novel HANNIBAL, which I bought at the Atlanta airport and read on an airplane back in 1999, yet to this day I remain astonished by the number of typos I recall. Never, to my recollection, have I run across a professionally published novel containing so many typos. You know I like everything! Yet somehow that book made me feel so bad - some flaw within myself, no doubt! - that I purposely left it behind in a San Francisco hotel room, an act for which I still feel remorse, what a horrible surprise for somebody. (I left some Bukowski novel - was it POST OFFICE? - in a New Orleans hotel room for similar reasons but I guess I don't feel so evil about that.) As long as you are here I should tell you that Ace Atkins and I finally went back to Costco yesterday. I saw "a fourteen-pound tub of violet decorative cake icing," as I put it on twitter. Although! In reality I saw several fourteen-pound tubs of cake icing, some orange, some green, some pink. I don't know why "violet" struck me so particularly. I did wonder - as I remarked to Ace on the way back - why there is only one color per tub. That seems like a rip-off! I think they should go in there and arrange it in three stripes, like Neapolitan ice cream. Though no doubt you get a good price on a fourteen-pound tub of cake icing, so who am I to argue?

You Eschew Froufrou Poo Poo

I was thinking about Richard Strauss's tone poem "Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche" and realized I don't really know much about Till Eulenspiegel himself. So I started poking around and was delighted to learn that Eulenspiegel means "owl mirror." So any collection of the Till Eulenspiegel tales might be said to have an owl in it, mightn't it? Sure it might. Why, look. Here's Till Eulenspiegel's supposed gravestone and he's holding an owl and a mirror over his head in case you don't get the point. During my idle research I stumbled on the website for that certain corporate behemoth, the name of which I never utter here. And someone had reviewed a collection of Till Eulenspiegel stories like so: "It seems like the punchline of every single story has to do with Euelenspiegel defecating on or in something or someone. That's it. That's the book's running joke. I suppose if you were an illiterate German peasant sitting around a hearth fire in the 1500s, you'd find these tales of feces and bad puns hilarious, but I didn't." I was fascinated to discover this living person who is so worked up about Till Eulenspiegel. And as you can imagine, he had inadvertently composed one of those "bad reviews" that made me want to read the book more than ever. For good measure, the reviewer rubs this salt in the wounds, though I hate to repeat it so close to our nation's birthday: "Of course, since a good majority of modern Americans are probably less sophisticated than an illiterate German peasant from 400 years ago, perhaps Till Eulenspiegel is due for a comeback. Hollywood could cast Johnny Knoxville... and he could crap all over American audiences, who will double over with laughter at every fart noise." Sold! I was naturally drawn to this reviewer's other reviews, which form a kind of epistolary novel or Robert Browning poem, in which you get to know the narrator by filling in the gaps. It's like that famous intellectual essayist said in his manifesto that time, we don't need novels anymore. Did he say that? It sounds like something somebody with a manifesto would say! Before getting into his one-star judgment of Folgers Classic Medium Roast Coffee Singles Serve Bags, our reviewer indulges in this bit of throat clearing: "I am no coffee elitist. I eschew status-conscious coffee drinkers and the frou frou coffee houses they frequent in order to be seen carrying green fringed cups emblazoned with quotes from left-wing icons." I've spent some part of my life trying to make up narrators who talk just this way, but I see once again that I am unnecessary. Also recommended: the same reviewer on the moral depravity of the Frankie Avalon movie BEACH PARTY.

From a Sparrow's Nest

Waiting for an ADVENTURE TIME meeting to start, still looking at this magic book. I just read an excerpt from the Book of Tobit: "warm droppings fell from a sparrow's nest on his eyes and blinded him while he slept." I haven't reached the magic part yet. But it reminded me of when that bird pooped on McNeil's face at the beach in 2009.

Mayonnaise Bildungsroman

You know who likes condiments? Dr. Theresa! So I got her about 25 condiments from around the world for her birthday. I gave them to her a month early or so, because I was tired of hiding condiments all around the house and also I was like, we should use these before they expire! Maybe under a bed is not the best spot for mayonnaise! Here, pictured, are just a few of the condiments. Maybe you don't think olives are condiments. Maybe I agree! But even if you subtract the olives, there were still about 25 condiments in the birthday package. Just yesterday we realized how many of the condiments we haven't even tried yet... lots! (And that's why I put some yuzu mayonnaise on a ham sandwich yesterday... not the best combo, though going in having no idea what a "yuzu" was - I just took a chance and squirted it on there - I was pleasantly surprised by the bright orange flavor. But not on a ham sandwich. But I ate it. Maybe it would be good in chicken salad...? Don't listen to me! I'm an idiot!) Of the condiments we have tried, I feel comfortable telling you the top four. I'm not sure I have the order right. Nor am I sure Dr. Theresa would agree. 4. Farmer's Daughter Salty Dog Marmalade. That is a fine marmalade! Let me tell you something about April McGreger, maker of the Farmer's Daughter Salty Dog Marmalade. I met her at a Southern Foodways Symposium several years ago, when they were handing out biscuits with her fig preserves on them. Ladies and gentlemen, not since my childhood had I tasted fig preserves SO EXACTLY LIKE my grandmother's fig preserves! I ordered jars for everyone in my family for Christmas, that's how good they were, and how close to home. I'm not sure Ms. McGreger has ever made exactly those fig preserves again. The last batch I saw for sale had bourbon in them, I think. My grandmother wouldn't have done that! The point is, April McGreger and her staff make different stuff every season, based on whatever is fresh and available in abundance. I NEVER (never?) advertise places to buy things on this "blog" but I am going to "link" to Farmer's Daughter. Get one of everything! The Salty Dog Marmalade has grapefruit and juniper and sea salt in it, and I rank it only at "4" because I guess - like ordinary marmalade - there are just a few truly proper things to smear it on. But I could be wrong! Maybe my imagination is insufficient. Anyway, it's amazing marmalade. We also use the Farmer's Daughter Sweet Potato/Habanero hot sauce a lot. 3. "Cereal Terra" (that's the brand) "ketchup piccante." I am afraid it has ruined us for other ketchups. Like, yesterday we broke out an "artisanal ketchup" (I guess) from the birthday batch to try on our hash browns and Dr. Theresa remarked "This is like tomato paste" when compared with the spicy flavor of Cereal Terra Ketchup Piccante (and yes, there are two c's in piccante, because it's Italian, I guess). So Dr. Theresa had to drown the inferior ketchup with a layer of ketchup piccante. I told you she likes condiments! She might rank the Cereal Terra Ketchup Piccante higher on this list. 2. Edmond Fallot Walnut Dijon Mustard. It's from, you know, France! And it has walnuts in it. And it goes on and in everything, which contributes to its high ranking. And it tastes so good you can eat a spoonful of it out of the jar. 1. Duke's Mayonnaise. For much of my life I "hated" mayonnaise. Let's analyze me! Was it because my mom would never put mayonnaise in our school lunches? She was afraid it would spoil before lunchtime! Nor, if we were going to the beach or on a picnic or anything like that (did we ever go on a picnic?), would anything with mayonnaise be included, for similar reasons. So perhaps from a young age I associated mayonnaise with danger. Ha ha ha! Or is it that I thought it was a food for "country people" (of which I was one)? My grandparents liked a spoonful of mayonnaise on a slice of fresh tomato or (as Tom Franklin and I, with our nearly identical backgrounds, have reminisced) a soft canned pear-half, with some cheese grated over it. Maybe I aspired to be too sophisticated for such rustic fare! Or maybe I didn't like mayonnaise. Maybe I wanted to be a big shot! But all through life I had to admit that mayonnaise was the only thing for a classic BLT, and maybe that is where I allowed my secret (even to me) craving for mayonnaise to express itself! Maybe I started to crack some time in the 90s. Is that when every restaurant started serving supposed "aioli"? And I was like, "Hey, this is mayonnaise!" I have heard many "food people" talk about Duke's mayonnaise. I have heard John Currence wax rhapsodically about the "old Duke's mayonnaise factory." And when I ate dinner at the James Beard House in New York City, they gave out packets of Duke's mayonnaise in the gift baskets we received upon departure. Still I resisted mayonnaise. Not anymore! We have already used a whole big jar of Duke's mayonnaise and started another. That's right, I bought it in bulk. In bulk!

Cargo Ship Full of Hot Pants

I saw that SIMPSONS episode yesterday where a ship crashes, scattering its cargo of "hot pants" all over the beach, much to the delight of the citizens of Springfield. As the episode comes to a close, the 1950s novelty song "Short Shorts" begins to play. I thought, "What a weird song! And yet it is also undeniably catchy, what with the hand claps and the full-bodied, pleasantly galumphing saxophone solo." So today I decided to look up the history of the song on the "internet." Not to be an old codger, but it does give me the chance to remind you that wikipedia is not always objective, accurate, or helpful: "On that musically fateful afternoon, Gaudio and Austin were driving up Washington Avenue in Bergenfield, New Jersey in Tom Austin's red and white 1957 Ford Fairlane 500, trying to figure out what to call the latest song they had written for their rock and roll band... Just then, two girls came strutting out of Luhmann's (the local teenage sweet shop) wearing cutoff jeans that were cut so short they were almost illegal. At that point, the song 'Short Shorts' was born." I draw your attention to "musically fateful" and the gross description of the shorts themselves, and the judgmental quality of the word "strutting." These are a few of the problems.

To and Fro

Hey remember in the Geneva Bible when God asks the devil, "Where commeft thou?" and the devil says, "From copafsing the earth to and fro, and from walking in it"? You're probably wondering about my recent travels in the same way! Okay, you twisted my arm. But to understand my wandering properly we have to go way back to when my glasses fell off my head in the lobby of a swank New York City hotel some months ago. I lost a very nice silver pen in that same lobby! And Megan Abbott gave me a pen to replace it. Was the replacement a fancy silver pen? No! It was one Megan picked up in a hotel during her own travels. This pen was a gift from the heart! And cheap though it may have been, it was of an unusual and pleasing shade of blue, its body made of a sturdy, semi-opaque plastic, I believe. It advertised a company called Kimpton, which owns hotels and restaurants, apparently. So on my recent trip to Birmingham to do a reading, I thought I had left the pen Megan gave me behind in a bank! But when I came home it was just sitting there on the TV tray. While in my Birmingham hotel room, I distractedly watched the shoe factory show. Hey remember on GILMORE GIRLS when Luke had a daughter with another woman and that woman was angry when Lorelai (who was dating Luke at the time) hung out with the daughter and it caused problems in Lorelai's relationship? Well, now they are making Lauren Graham go through that plot line again on the shoe factory show, just like the other time they stole a plot from GILMORE GIRLS and marched Lorelai, I mean, Lauren Graham, through it. Lauren Graham is like some doomed soul, forced always to reenact the same torments! What a bummer. While I was watching the shoe factory show, Dr. Theresa was back in Oxford, having an elegant dinner with Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls and T. Cooper, whom she had introduced on the Thacker Mountain radio program earlier in the evening. THEN! It was on to New Orleans, where I saw many of my fave former students from back when I used to teach: Abby, Elizabeth (wearing her mother's prom dress from 1968!), Burke, Rachel and SKIN MAG, Ryan, and Anya (wearing a wedding dress because IT WAS HER WEDDING DAY, a happy occasion I wouldn't have missed for the world). It was a lovely ceremony on the porch of an old house, the kind of house where I kept looking up at the attic windows expecting to see a gently approving ghost but I didn't. Burke gave me a book with this great first sentence: "Art has a way of undermining all aesthetic theories." Just like Jerry Lewis! I added the part about Jerry Lewis. On the drive back to Oxford, "Good Vibrations" by the Beach Boys came on the radio and I suddenly remembered going to see a feature-length documentary about the theremin back in Atlanta with Dr. Theresa - I think it was just called THEREMIN - and Brian Wilson was interviewed in it about the memorable theremin part in "Good Vibrations." You know how Brian Wilson thinks and talks. He's a genius! And he comes off very open and vulnerable and eccentric sometimes. And I think he said the theremin was scary and made him think of sex. Is that what he said? So, the director of THEREMIN was there for this screening (and as I recall, so was Robert Moog, inventor of the Moog synthesizer!) and in the Q&A session afterward, some fool in the audience asked the director if it was "hard not to laugh" when interviewing Brian Wilson and the director shot back with shocked sincerity, "No, it's hard not to cry." And that came back to me so vividly while I was driving that I was completely absorbed in experiencing that memory and sort of forgot I was driving. Has that ever happened to you? Don't do that! It's not safe! Dr. Theresa snapped me out of it. And then I started thinking that Brian Wilson's genius might be profitably compared to Jerry Lewis's in its directness. When Kelly Hogan was just visiting us, she was trying to learn a Brian Wilson song for an upcoming performance. Hogan expounded thoughtfully on the lyrics "I wrote a number down but I lost it/ So I searched through my pocket book, I couldn't find it/ So I sat and concentrated on the number and/ Slowly it came to me so I dialed it/ And I let it ring a few times, there was no answer/ So I let it ring a little more, still no answer" and their relationship to the complex transparency of Brian Wilson (which is different than Jerry's complex transparency). Complex transparency! (It comes to me just now that the theremin documentary featured a clip of Jerry's encounter with a theremin in THE DELICATE DELINQUENT.)

Already Some Pigeons

Last night I saw Lee Durkee and he said, "Nobody can get to nirvana without looking a little silly." I think that's what he said. I wanted to write it down but I didn't have a pen. Then I meant to tell Mary Miller, who was all dressed up, that she looked like somebody Gene Kelly would be dancing with in a movie but it came out, "You look like Gene Kelly." So that was unfortunate! And somehow I walked away without correcting myself. But anyway, Lee was really talking up REBECCA by Daphne Du Maurier. So I stopped by Square Books and picked up a copy. I was a little dismayed that they stuck it in the "Beach" section for books you're supposed to read at the beach. Hey, they just opened up a Gus's fried chicken place up the street! So on my way back from Square Books I walked in and ordered some chicken to take home. It was crazy in there! Packed! Total chaos. So the chicken (which was delicious) took a while. And so I read the first three chapters of REBECCA while I sat waiting at the counter, which I think means I am reading three books at once. That's not my style, baby! REBECCA looks like a sure thing as far as owls are concerned, all that roaming around a ruined country estate in a misty dream and all, and the narrator has already been nostalgic for some pigeons.

Rivet Hull Blah What

As I am sure you will recall I stopped reading that Errol Flynn autobiography but Megan told me to look at the ending and it was all about Errol Flynn staring at the sea and thinking about how the only thing he understands is the sea, I think, it's right over there but I don't feel like walking over there, but anyway, the sea is in there. So I switched over to WANDERER, which is all about Sterling Hayden strutting manfully around the deck of his schooner and he's very upset when somebody talks about the rivets in his hull because THERE ARE NO RIVETS IN HIS HULL, STUPID. And it's a lot better than the Errol Flynn book, probably, but maybe I just don't want to hear about boats and sailing and the sea for a while after all. So I picked up the book that Ace Atkins called "the most exciting Travis McGee adventure ever written about stamp collecting" and I looked on the back and read the promotional copy: "She was a six-foot knockout who knew a helluva lot about rare stamps..." Ha ha! So Ace wasn't kidding. So I opened to page one and right there in the first sentence it came back to me: Travis McGee is on a boat all the time. And by the second page we have such ominous sentence fragments as "Moonrise and hard rains. Swift fish and wide beaches." Uh-oh! And if there is one thing Travis McGee is sure to be doing besides fighting bad guys it is carefully polishing, by some minutely described method, some tiny wooden piece of nautical ornamentation on his precious boat. Sorry, boats! Sorry, the sea!

Sexy Vacation

Ha ha, the Banana Guards sure were dumb on last night's ADVENTURE TIME episode! During the meeting when we were talking about that outline I believe I said something like, "Why aren't these guys more on the ball thanks to Root Beer Guy?" (As you may recall, he was promoted to the position of their captain, and maybe because I did his voice I was especially upset that he wasn't apparently too good at his job.) Someone - was it me? - suggested that Root Beer Guy was on a "sexy vacation with his wife"... a line that actually made it into the episode for a little while before being cut somewhere along the way. But it remains in one form: this delightful promotional poster that storyboard artist Seo Kim did for the episode. Look, she even has his little cell phone vibrating with emergency on the table next to him, and he's (I choose to believe) drinking from a coconut with a straw - something I once did in Los Angeles for an ADVENTURE TIME meeting, though that's just a happy coincidence.