Books Don't Help

I got out my TRAVELS OF WILLIAM BARTRAM, which maybe I’ve never opened before, to do some research on swamps for an unpublished novel, which will remain unpublished if I know my unpublished novels, and if I don’t, nobody does. I was reminded by a sticker on the back that I bought TRAVELS OF WILLIAM BARTRAM at A Cappella Books in Atlanta during the time I was working on my second book, which, in its initial stages, was supposed to be a novel called THE ALABAMIAD. See, old William Bartram had tromped around Mobile in the 18th century, so I thought it might be helpful, but it wasn’t. Anyway, I opened it up yesterday and I was thumbing through it and I thought, boy, old William Bartram surely knows about every kind of squirrel and every kind of frog. I wonder if he knows about owls! The answer turned out to be yes. He knows about the great white owl, and the great horned owl, and the great horned white owl, which was the order in which he mentioned them, and I could imagine Cliff Clavin saying it on CHEERS: “You see, Sammy, you’ve got your great white owl, and your great horned owl, and then you’ve got your great horned white owl.” And then Carla would push him off his stool. Best of all, Bartram mentions “the whooting owl,” which is, I believe, our first sighting of that variation upon the hoot-owl. Whooting! The whooting owl! I love you, whooting owl! Hey! Do you know what happened after I had written all of the above? I picked up an Elmore Leonard novel I’ve been reading and one character immediately asked a cowboy, "What do you call it when you're on the dodge? Riding the owl hoot trail?" Now, you’ll certainly recall my puzzlement over the owl-hoot versus the hoot-owl, and, of course, “the hoot-owl trail,” which I seem to have first encountered in TRUE GRIT. By the way, the cowboy in question is impressed by his friend's knowledge of the term "owl hoot trail," which he apparently considers the correct rendering. I close fondly as always by saying go to hell.

The Man Who Read a Book

So! The first two episodes of ADVENTURE TIME: FIONNA AND CAKE came out yesterday. They were good! In the first episode, this character (above) tells Fionna that any plant can be considered a weed, which was something I had read in my book about weeds, as you may recall, and repeated hundreds of times to the delight of the writers room. I don't know if it's true or not, but thanks to my reading, that "fact" made it into the show! One will no doubt be reminded of when my reading of Vance Randolph's OZARK MAGIC AND FOLKLORE contributed, or not, to the original series. Speaking of reading, Megan and I are reading THE MAN WHO SAW A GHOST, which is a biography of Henry Fonda, though nothing about the title would make you guess that. Megan and I have a pretty large bet going on whether the ghost is literal or not. I say it's a metaphor! Because I am always thinking I'm going to get a real ghost, based on the title of a newspaper article or such, and the ghost always turns out to be a metaphor. Now, many of you will fondly recall the time I idly thumbed through THE MAN WHO SAW A GHOST back in 2012, standing in Square Books, and all the excitement it caused at the time. I'll tell you one thing I noticed in this oddly titled biography: there's an epigraph taken from Charles Fort, also the source of an epigraph for MY second book! Megan pulled a fast one, trying to say that it (the epigraph connection) was a ghostly occurrence, but I think I am winning this bet.

Bangers

I was reading the Thomas Mann novel DOCTOR FAUSTUS (though it seems to be on pause now) and there were a lot of allusions to LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST, so I did what anyone would do and picked up a copy of that Shakespeare play at good old Square Books. Thumbing through the introduction, I read about a 1978 production in which a "genuine owl" from outside the performance area, in the trees somewhere, joined in on the final song. Now! I thought to myself, will I have to put this on my big list with an asterisk, as I did once before for a volume with an owl in its scholarly introduction, hedging my bets as to whether that really counts? But it seemed to me that I knew just where to peek to find out whether the play itself contained the necessary owl. Knowing that LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST concludes with two absolute bangers ("click" here for more information about how I started using the term "bangers"), and reading closely the commentator's verb choice in observing that the owl in question "reinforced" the songs, I concluded that there might be an owl at the very end of LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST. And there is! "When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl/ Then nightly sings the staring owl." You know how it is!

Brian and the Birthday Boy and Me

Here are my friend Brian and me at that birthday party I was telling you about. Sure, the birthday party guy was supposed to be anonymous, and that's his picture my thumb is poking at, but it would take some kind of internet genius to figure it all out, and nobody cares, plus he looks like a magnificent sad prince, so I feel okay about everything.

Superstructure vs. The Loved Brown Owl

Thumbing through Schoenbaum's "compact documentary life" of Shakespeare I come upon a description quoted from another book: "Because of its associations, the house has not wanted fanciful appreciation. 'Shadows and weird noises are in the rafters, the wind is in the chimneys, crickets are on the hearth, fairies glisten in the light of the dying fire, through leaded windows shines the moon, without is the to-wit to-whoo of the loved brown owl.'" Schoenbaum makes me laugh by drily adding "However this may be" - ha ha ha! - "the dwelling consists of a stone groundsill, or low foundation wall, upon which rests a sturdy oak superstructure." Though I have ceased "blogging" I still have to tell you every time I read a book with an owl in it, and every book I read has an owl in it so we'll be seeing each other a lot, I guess.

Experiments in Intercourse

First of all, relax! There is nothing at all wrong with the "blog." The culprit that drove me mad was just a curious virus that only I could see, infecting a particular browser in the hotel's business center... the very business center immortalized (in a tastefully fictionalized version, of course) in my almost-new book MOVIE STARS, suddenly the toast of New York town! I, however, was out in Los Angeles, and I brought my jotting book of precious jottings, but in my new anti-"blogging" spirit, I jotted nearly nothing on my trip. And yes, I made that decision out of pure spite! Okay, I will tell you one thing. Julia and I walked up to Ako and I said, "Ako, tell Julia what you told me about the miraculous powers of coconuts!" And Ako shouted with hilarious urgency, "IT'S NOT TRUE!" It turns out that I have been going around telling lies that Ako accidentally told me about the miraculous powers of coconuts. One day, as she related to us ruefully, she was telling the same story when it dawned on her with the force of epiphany how suspicious it sounded. So she looked it up and was mortified at the extent to which she had been misleading an innocent coconut-buying public for so many years. Then she explained to Julia and me what the powers of coconuts REALLY are, and to be honest, the coconuts still sounded pretty miraculous. Okay, I feel bad for you, so I am going to tell you two funny things from the airplane ride home. There was a peperoncino garnishing the plate of food they gave me. So I bit into it. It was just a small, ordinary peperoncino but it seemed to contain an abundance of juice. The amazing quantity of juice expelled even by my rather timid bite squirted all over my personal airplane video screen. It even squirted onto the ceiling over the passengers in front of me! So it dripped down on them and they urgently pressed the button to summon the harried flight attendant. "The airplane is leaking bright green fluid!" they told her. "We're doomed!" Or words to that effect. So I had to confess that I had squirted the peperoncino juice that had rained down on them like the stinging hot portent of a deadly malfunction. Then I was enjoying THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON by H.G. Wells, my chosen airplane reading, and I suddenly came to a chapter called - in embarrassingly big letters - "Experiments in Intercourse"! Ha ha! So I put my thumb over the word "intercourse" so the guy in the next seat wouldn't think I was reading something too sexy for an airplane. Wells just meant that his heroes were trying to find a way to communicate with the moon men. He didn't mean anything dirty! He meant "intercourse" in the sense of "communication." That's how people talked back in crazy times! But I hid it with my thumb anyway. Okay, I'll tell you two more things. Look at this picture. Adam says it's okay to show it now. I was going to wait until season seven of our show had concluded. There are still two more wildly surprising episodes to come but Adam says the titles are out there in the public now and everybody knows them so it doesn't matter. Well, some quite literal spy took this spy picture with her sneaky spy camera very early in the season and spread it around the "internet" without compunction, our most personal and private business, including some very revealing episode titles, though I don't believe I've given a large enough representation for you to see them. But the funny part is the map of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County that's on the wall. Look and you will see it! You may furthermore recall when it was presented to Kent and Pen. Scores of young detectives taken in by this remorseless charlatan and thief thought it was some kind of map of a previously unknown territory of Ooo, the land where ADVENTURE TIME occurs - as did, no doubt, the budding Mata Hari herself. Well, there are probably tons of 13-year-olds all inspired and debating ABSALOM, ABSALOM! now, propelled forward by their initially misguided researches - so everything turned out all right; aren't you as sure of it as I am? In my preferred version of these events, the emotionless miscreant helped everybody learn and grow even though she was trying to hurt and spoil! I'll finish up with something I've been sitting on for a month or so because I don't care about you anymore. I started reading a book called THE YEAR OF LEAR, about KING LEAR, sort of, and it has owls in it, but not even the same owls that KING LEAR has in it! Some other owls. Thomas Dekker is describing a miserable denizen of a plague house: "And to keep such a poor wretch waking, he should hear no noise but of toads croaking, screech-owls howling, mandrakes shrieking."

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.

The Hedgehog of Emptiness

I was a little early for lunch with Tom Franklin yesterday, so I stopped by Square Books, not intending to buy. But they had a big anthology of writings about magic, dating from ancient times to the Enlightenment, just sitting there propped up by the register. So I bought two copies, one for Tom and one for myself. An impulse purchase! Very clever, Square Books. At lunch, people would come up to our table to say hello and there we were, each with a large, black book next to his plate, the word MAGIC engraved on the rough, jacketless cover in huge gold letters. So we looked like a couple of evil old wizards in a book club, as we realized too late. (As you will notice, I have represented the overall tone with a picture of Paul Lynde as "Uncle Arthur," making his head appear in a silver serving dish.) No sooner had I brought the book home and thumbed through the first few entries (skipping some Bible stories I knew too well) than I found "Nightjar and screech owl shall take it,/ night owl and raven nesting there." And so it was without much surprise that it went on my big long list of books with owls in them that nobody cares about (the list, I mean). The passage was taken from Isaiah, but the translation looked funny to me so I checked in the old-timey goodness of my Geneva Bible: "But the pelicane & the hedgehog fhal poffeffe it, and the great owle, & the raue fhal dwell in it, & he fhal ftretch out vpon it the line of vanitie, and the ftones of emptines." I wonder why the last "s" in stones and emptiness looks like an s while all the other s's look like f's! Obviously it has to do with placement. But I don't care enough to think about it too much. (By the way, the magic anthology boringly translates "stones of emptiness" as "weight of ruin." Boo!) I wonder how pelican and hedgehog became nightjar and screech owl! (I won't lie to you, I had to look up "nightjar." I figured it was a bird. It was a bird.) I cared just enough to check my facsimile of the original King James Bible about this hedgehog business. "The cormorant and the bitterne shall possesse it, the owle also and the rauen shall dwell in it, and he shall stretch out vpon it the line of confusion, and the stones of emptinesse." I'll tweet this to Jimmy. He'll care.

I Went to the Restroom

Dr. Theresa and I went to see the new STAR WARS movie today. There was one part where this kid gives a STAR WARS robot a thumbs up and the STAR WARS robot extends its built-in lighter and lights it in a cute imitation of a thumbs up, and I thought, yes, I would've crammed that into my cigarette lighter book, right after the part where Stan Laurel uses his thumb as a cigarette lighter, it's a section about the machine in comedy, doesn't that sound thrilling? Pre-order today! Anyway, I went to the restroom during part of the movie and when I came back I asked Dr. Theresa if I had missed anything and she was like, "Yeah! That guy was talking to Darth Vader's skull!" And I was like, "Was it... alive?" And Dr. Theresa was like, "No!" Like that was a silly question.

"Blog"trospective 17: Cigarette Lighter Appendix

My previous "blog"trospective, which covered the 20th century, wore me out. But last night I was watching an old episode of THE SIMPSONS, a flashback to the birth of Bart, and Bart's first act on the earth was to set fire to Homer's necktie with a lighter. And that's when I knew I needed, at long last, to manufacture a new "blog"trospective, a storehouse for everything I would have put somewhere in my cigarette lighter book if only it weren't too late to add anything to my cigarette lighter book. Here is that short but growing list: amazing, but who cares---ancient death ray of Archimedes---Aniston, Jennifer; burns a leprechaun's nose with a car cigarette lighter---Aykroyd, Dan; lights a whole pack of smokes with a blowtorch---Brown, Larry; spends four pages on the lighting of a cigarette---Chevalier, Maurice; fails to light a cigarette lighter---cigarettes and monocles in the early work of Lubitsch---Columbo borrows a lighter; a comically long flame shoots out---COUPLE OF COMEDIANS, A (novel by Don Carpenter)---Cummings, Robert; sets off a sprinkler system by holding a match under it---Dahl, Arlene; burns John Payne's hand with a lighter---Disney, Walt; makes a grown man cry and throw away his new lighter---Eastwood, Clint; mangles his cigarette in his lighter, a la Jerry Lewis---Eastwood, Clint; needs a light---Felix from THE ODD COUPLE mangles a cigarette---Fitzgerald, Barry; uses a small, unidentified cigarette-making (?) machine---Fitzhugh, Louise; lights Janet Gaynor's cigarette---five-foot-tall cigarette lighter---flint and steel of circumstances---Ghost Rider himself sets off a sprinkler system the way a lighter often does in popular entertainment---"Gotta Light" Guy from TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN, The---Grant, U. S.; witnesses tobacco smuggling, corn husk cigarettes---guy gets lost inside his own cigarette lighter, a---guy shoots the ends off two cigarettes with a single bullet, a---heating Pop Tarts one bite at a time---Hope, Bob; cracks wise about lighters---Lewis, Jerry; can't find his lighter---lighter as clue---lighting a cigar with a burning house---lighting of cigarette as an accommodation to power---Mailer, Norman; narrator of overcome by the solemnity of a cigarette lighter---man scares panther with cigarette lighter---Martin, Dean; tosses his gold cigarette lighter out the window---musical cigarette lighter in FIREWORKS WEDNESDAY---newborn Bart Simpson sets fire to his father's necktie with a lighter (see above)---Northam, Jeremy; lighter of won't work at crucial moment---Novak, Kim; requests a light by means of Jack Lemmon's already-lit cigarette---O'Brien, Edmond; flirts using cigarette lighter---Powell, William; offered numerous lights simultaneously---Pryor, Richard; yells "Flick my Bic!" (was that the advertising slogan for the Bic pen or the Bic lighter? In any case, see "link" for rationale)---Quaid, Dennis; uses lighter to set off fire alarm---Russell, Kurt; blows an alien's mind with his lighter---STAR WARS robot gives a "thumbs up" with its built-in lighter---Stritch, Elaine; fills a cigarette lighter with secret booze---structurally significant lighter---Tati, Jacques; tosses lighter out of car window---undetermined pun based on the name of fire historian Stephen J. Pyne---use of lighter as spy communication---use of lighter to impress cavemen---Wallach, Eli; uses an imaginary cigarette lighter---what not to do with a lighter on the deck of a warship---woman asks for a cigarette; men come skittering from every direction, a---woman dressed as a cigarette lighter frolics behind Miley Cyrus, a. I'm forgetting something.

Literary Matters

Welcome once again to "Literary Matters," the worst thing on the "internet." Today's entry will exclusively concern literary drama of the fanciest pedigree! So brace yourself. 1. Email from McNeil, titled "keepin' ya fresh," which I quote here in full: "As I was thumbing through AS YOU LIKE IT (which sounds exactly like a line from your blog), I ran across the title of a text in a footnote that sounds right up your alley: PAGAN MYSTERIES IN THE RENAISSANCE by Edgar Wind." McNeil is right, of course, and he certainly knew that I'd have a lot of fun imagining all the witty quips Edgar Wind's friends must have made about his name all the time. I haven't even looked up the actual Edgar Wind yet, but I do hope so very much that he was a contemporary and confidante of Granville Squiers, author of SECRET HIDING PLACES. 2. Here's a great story! I was trying to read a Chekhov play and I said out loud, "I need a scorecard to keep up with these people!" And of course there IS a scorecard at the beginning of every play, a list of all the characters and just who they are. Ha ha, that wasn't a great story.

I Regret to Inform You

... that though they should be rightfully included, I will not have room for the following labels on my next "post":

Literary Matters

I guess it has been almost exactly three years since we have had any "Literary Matters" and do you know why? Because everybody hates them! Literary matters are the worst. But somehow I have two. 1) I am still getting a lot of enjoyment from this book THE LORE AND LANGUAGE OF SCHOOLCHILDREN: "At present rude gestures seem to be in a state of flux, the following being currently regarded as the most offensive: 1. The first and second fingers, extended and slightly parted, are jerked upwards, the back of the hand facing outwards. 2. The nose is pressed upward with the thumb, and the tongue put out. 3. Ears are twisted, or thumbs placed in ear-holes and fingers fluttered, a gesticulation known as 'elephant ears'. 4. The nose is held while an imaginary lavatory chain is pulled. 5. Air is forced through the pursed lips to make a juicy noise known as a 'raspberry'." (Pictured, friend of the "blog" Sally Timms making rude gesture #1, accompanied by smirking friend of the "blog" Jon Langford.) 2) Remember when Ace Atkins revealed a spoiler that ruined EVERY SINGLE TRAVIS MCGEE NOVEL FOR ME? I am going to tell it to you now, so BEWARE! (Oh, wait, I already told you this.) Ace told me, "The woman always dies." So anyhow I was going to go eat a cheeseburger down at Handy Andy's and I didn't have anything to read so I stopped by Square Books and got a Travis McGee paperback called A PURPLE PLACE FOR DYING. That sounds like a weird place for dying! So this woman wants to hire Travis McGee and he's thinking about it and she gets killed a few pages into Chapter One, while he's still standing there thinking about whether or not he's going to take the job! That must be some kind of a record, even for Travis McGee.

Mashed Thumb

As promised, I looked up "sore as a boiled owl" in my GREEN'S DICTIONARY OF SLANG. Under "sore as..." we have "very angry, annoyed, in various comparative phrs., incl. sore as a boil, ...boiled owl, ...gum boil, ...pup, ...sore as sox, ...sorer than a mashed thumb." We find that "sore as a boil" predates by some time "sore as a boiled owl," so I like to think that the person who first said "sore as a boiled owl" was getting the older phrase "drunk as a boiled owl" mixed up with "sore as a boil." Maybe he or she started to say "sore as a boil" and "sore as a boiled owl" just came rolling out of his or her mouth! And everyone found it charming and apt. Apt! That's what I like to think! I'm just making up stories in my head. Email from McNeil: "There was a story on CNN.com about Malawi executing owls and I thought about you." Perverse! McNeil's phrasing (misleading in every way, as we shall see) made me curious, and with some trepidation I researched what promised to be an unpleasant tale. Turns out the owls were "nearly shot" for being bad luck but then the guy with the gun changed his mind and nothing bad happened to the owls. You know, I don't even care that much about owls.

Diablo

Well, Megan Abbott is getting ready to hightail it back to New York City, from whence she came. During her brief time here as writer-in-residence, there have been several "movie nights," not all of them chronicled by your humble chronicler - indeed, not all of them attended by him. The first featured Hal Needham's HOOPER, starring Burt Reynolds and Sally Field. For our very last "movie night" we decided to do something different: Hal Needham's SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT, starring Burt Reynolds and Sally Field. "I'm trying to see whose pants are tighter," Megan remarked of our two leads. When Jerry Reed's character said, "I got to get some go-go juice and put some groceries down my neck," it reminded me of something Dean Moriarty might say, leading me to a brief and instantly concluded reflection on the relationship between beatnik and CB radio culture. Ace brought over Coors beer (an important factor in the plot, as I am sure you recall) and "diablo sandwiches," one of which Jackie Gleason orders at a pivotal point in the movie. Now, according to Ace, no one knows what a diablo sandwich really is. Ace has scoured the "internet" and found it to be full of lies, grandiose claims, and errors on the subject. He even telephoned the original restaurant from the movie - the "Old Hickory House" (as Dr. Theresa recalled last night, she used to go there for biscuits and gravy with her dad) - and confirmed that they had never sold anything called a "diablo sandwich." Ace therefore reconstructed the diablo sandwich through a careful study of the frames in which Jackie Gleason terrifyingly devours his "diablo sandwich." There is a picture that Megan took of Dr. Theresa and Ace and Bill and me standing in her kitchen over the fixings for our diablo sandwiches but I can't use it here... it is too depressing, emphasizing as it does Megan's absence from the frame (there's another one of Ace and Megan toasting with cans of Coors, but that hasn't hit my inbox yet). So instead I will find a photo of Hank Worden, whom I noticed in a SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT cameo for the first time last night. Cameo! It was a blip. Less than two seconds, I'd guess. I want to say it was a tribute to a certain scene in RED RIVER, substituting horn-blasting semis for rearing horses, though I don't know whether I'm making up that scene in my head, and now that I think of it, I don't know that Hank Worden was in RED RIVER. I do know that he was in everything from THE SEARCHERS to TWIN PEAKS (which is why he is talking to David Lynch in that photo). Interestingly (?) - how I abuse that word! - his appearance in TWIN PEAKS combines his dialogue from THE SEARCHERS with the thumbs-up gesture he flashes in SMOKEY IN THE BANDIT (doesn't he?). I have given you so much to think about.

It's Working

Hogan is trying to get me to read this book (pictured - I think that's Hogan's thumb!) for Doomed Book Club, and it's working. "you'll love it!" she raves via twitter. "so far, there's a LOT of exclamation points & PHYLLIS DILLER wrote the preface!" Is that a birthday cake shaped like a record player on the cover? I guess I'll have to wait till my copy comes to find out.

Smorgasbord of Swedenborg

Thumbed through another Swedenborg book - his dream journal this time! - and read in the scholarly introduction that dreaming "appears to occur in animals too, though we can't ask them to confirm this." Ha ha ha! I love introductions.

Saloon Gong

Sitting in Square Books today, waiting to meet someone, I was staring at the LITERARY NON-FICTION section, which is just across from where you sit and drink a Coke and think about where it all went wrong. And I saw staring back at me a book about Oscar Wilde's travels through the United States. I've always wanted to know more about the time he spent in Mobile, which is near where I grew up. So I picked up the book and thumbed through it while I was waiting - WHICH MAKES ME NO BETTER THAN A COMMON THIEF. (See also.) I didn't learn anything new about Oscar Wilde in Mobile (except that an "enterprising" kid sold sunflowers before Wilde's outdoor reading, and Wilde was like, "Way to go, kid!" except significantly wittier) but I did find out that Oscar Wilde visited Jefferson Davis at his home in Biloxi, so that's weird. And I found out there was a professional Oscar Wilde impersonator in Atlanta at the time! He billed himself as "Wild Oscar" (!) and recited an Oscar Wilde-style version of the history of Atlanta (!) before ending things with a "sunflower dance." I also learned that Wilde's reading in Houston was "continually interrupted by the ringing of a large gong in the saloon downstairs." And that is the majority of the information I stole for you today.

Ouch!

FOR REAL WARNING! The following "blog" "post" contains excruciating violence! In my big book about Hinduism I read a legend about this guy who got impaled on a stake. An angry king jabs this guy onto a stake, but then the king is like, "Sorry! I changed my mind." But the guy can't pull out the stake. He's really jabbed good! So he decides to make the best of the stake he has poking out of him, "thinking it might be useful for carrying things like flower baskets." Talk about a positive mental attitude! "And so he went about with the stake still inside him, in his neck, ribs, and entrails, and people used to call him 'Tip-of-the-Stake' Mandavya." Some nickname! I bet he kind of got sick of people calling him that, but then again, I don't know, this guy seems pretty cool about everything. And then about 20 pages later I read a couple of different stories about some dude shooting seven arrows into a dog's mouth. Not cool! Though nobody in the stories seems to think it's a big deal, nobody but the dog. Well, I take that back, people find the marksmanship notable but nobody gives a dang about the dog. And now all I can think about is Phineas Gage, the real-life historical figure who got an iron bar through his head and was all, "Whatevs." I first heard about Mr. Gage from my friend Bill from Hubcap City, who wanted to write a rock opera about him as I recall, or maybe a normal opera. Of course, Phineas Gage was not really all, "Whatevs." I think he became sort of a jerk. Yes, I just looked it up on the University of Akron "web" site, which says that Gage became "fitful, irreverent, and grossly profane, showing little deference for his fellows. He was also impatient and obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, unable to settle on any of the plans he devised for future action. His friends said he was 'No longer Gage.'" Yeah, but I mean, come on! Give him a break. A THREE-FOOT, THIRTEEN-POUND IRON BAR WENT THROUGH HIS HEAD. You'd be capricious too. (PS In one of those stories a guy cuts off his own thumb and we didn't even get to that.)

A Piece of Mop Sitting on an Old Rag

Lee Durkee and I watched the 1969 version of HAMLET, with Marianne Faithfull as Ophelia, and when she came out to do her "mad scene" (pictured) she was all, "They say the owl was a baker's daughter" and I turned and gave Lee a big thumbs up and he laughed resignedly because you know what that means: HAMLET has an owl in it. I looked it up in the facsimile of the Second Quarto that Lee gave me for my birthday and they spell it my favorite way, "Owle," just like John Aubrey. Lee has been reading lots of Flannery O'Connor lately, and - good sport that he is - he sent me this passage from WISE BLOOD: "Over in one corner on the floor of the cage, there was an eye. The eye was in the middle of something that looked like a piece of mop sitting on an old rag. He squinted close to the wire and saw that the piece of mop was an owl with one eye open. It was looking directly at Hazel Motes. 'That ain't nothing but a ole hoot owl,' he moaned."