The Rose/Wexler Ratio

I just finished reading JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS. What, you thought I wouldn't crow and bellow about it in a boastful manner? Just think back on how I strutted around after THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY. And there are 1.5 Anatomies in 1 Joseph, or as we call it around here, "The Rose/Wexler Ratio." (The studious and scholarly may "click" here for more information about the origins of that useful term. You non-"clicking" bastards!) My first thought, of course, is that JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS ends exactly like WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING, an allusion that Kent Osborne will get if he ever stumbles across this "post." The rest of you will have to read all 1492 pages of JOSEPH and then watch the Sandra Bullock vehicle in question before enlightenment may occur. Next I'll say that it is almost impossible to believe that one person could be responsible for two such towering works of imagination as the novel under consideration and THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN. I'll put it mildly, as I am not exactly allowed, living in the unnamed town where I do, to express the secret thought rattling in my brain, but... let's just say Thomas Mann gives William Faulkner a run for his money. I've already said too much. All my blabbing about Thomas Mann during the course of this journey, as I guess I'm calling it - sorry! -, has had unintended consequences. For example, Tom Franklin dug out his old, presumably yellowed, copy of THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN, read a few pages, and said (I think this is an exact quotation), "Jack likes THIS?" I'm glad it happened! And I'll tell you why. It allows me to reiterate a couple of interesting points. 1. You can't just dig out your old paperback! You have to spring for the John E. Woods translations (assuming you are reading either book in English). 2. You have to give THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN 100 pages of grace. Just trust it for 100 pages! Do I have to remind you of what Keats said? I'd insist that you "click" here to find out, but who are we kidding? How I hate you! End of interesting points. For the moment! Bill Boyle told me that Annie Baker, a playwright we both admire, in turn admires Thomas Mann, particularly in the Woods translations, I believe. An inside source, drawing from the private content of an encounter at a party, revealed to me that a certain famous author (we'll call them "Famous Author") personally confided in my source that they (Famous Author) enjoyed every Thomas Mann novel EXCEPT for JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS!!! One may only assume that Famous Author did not heed my variation on point #2 above, which is that the latter novel requires anywhere from 200-400 warm-up pages before really kicking in. Let me also state that Famous Author famously and authorially ragged on the state of Mississippi (where I dwell) as containing not even one single inhabitant capable of reading a book. Before I left social media like a true hero of our age, I responded indignantly to Famous Author's assertion, having perused an old comic book starring the giant, dimwitted duck Baby Huey on the very day of Famous Author's proclamation. Though my brave social media statement regarding Baby Huey has been lost in the bog of dead and dying tweets, as they were formerly called, it gives me no small pleasure to know that as an illiterate Mississippian with drool rolling down my face, I was yet capable of gleaning more than Famous Author from the inestimable trove of JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS. In a final incident worthy of consideration, Mary Miller informed me with some excitement that Lee Durkee was reading and enjoying THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN. I was so thrilled to have someone with whom to talk about it! So I hopped on my phone like a happy teen and texted Lee at once, whereupon he issued, just as swiftly, a strongly worded denial. It turns out that Mary was confusing Lee with... me. I was the one who had told her about THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN. With this charming anecdote I lay the entire matter to rest, just like the Biblical patriach Jacob at the end of JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS. Spoiler alert!

I Don't Want to Be Here

Let's get this over with. So, Dr. Theresa and I were watching the horror movie THE FUNHOUSE as part of our yearly Halloween thing we do. I noticed that a cigarette lighter was used as a clue in an interesting way, which really pissed me off. That's right, I use coarse language now, and I use it freely. I knew that the vital cigarette lighter clue meant that I would have to laboriously append a new entry to my index of things I (sort of) regret leaving out of my cigarette lighter book, which no one cares about, except maybe Ace Atkins, who texted yesterday to inquire whether he might borrow a gruesome detail from it in the service of his new work. But let us travel back in time, to our viewing of THE FUNHOUSE, and how my shriveled heart gave a hint of shuddering back to life as I thought about my entire section on matchbooks as clues. So interesting, I smugly mused, to see a cigarette lighter used in a matchbook way here in this film THE FUNHOUSE. I could tell everyone a thing or two about how unusual that is. Then I remembered, hey! The epigraph of the book is about a cigarette lighter as a clue, big deal, Godard even says (in the epigraph) how damn famous it is, that billions of people will remember it. (It's the cigarette lighter from STRANGERS ON A TRAIN... a false, planted clue, which would be an interesting distinction if I cared about anything anymore. You could say, for one thing, that in both cases [THE FUNHOUSE and STRANGERS ON A TRAIN], the lighter benefits the villain, whereas the matchbook is usually valuable to the detective or "good guy"... how I hate myself!) What's so special about this damn cigarette lighter from THE FUNHOUSE? Well, it appeared to be a white Bic, which, as Megan Abbott pointed out to me during the research phase of my book, is thought by some to be bad luck, which superstition ended up in the book, and I guess this lighter would have made a good addition to that section, as it (as hinted parenthetically above) alerts the murderous monster to the presence of the hapless teens, but then again, maybe the lighter was pale yellow. This was weeks ago. Days ago? It was the 19th. I'm so tired of looking things up.

Adult Education

As part of my ongoing program of adult education, I am reading Bricktop's autobiography along with Megan Abbott. Bricktop (left) reminisces about "the type of place where gin was poured out of milk pitchers." And I wondered why it mattered out of what the gin was poured. And I still wonder! It did put me in mind of a fact relayed long ago by Megan Abbott, namely, that some people would use cream pitchers decorated with Shirley Temple's face to make martinis, using a handy mnemonic for the perfect recipe: "Gin to the chin, vermouth to the tooth." There, the motivation for using the pitcher is clear. And while I was typing all this, I recalled the lyrics to Screamin' Jay Hawkins's "Yellow Coat," in which the eponymous coat, as part (I believe) of its manufacture, is "laid out in milk and gin." As I prepare to hit the "publish" button, it occurs to me that I have no idea why I have always heard that lyric as explicitly referring to the yellow coat's origin, although the garment's magical and legendary properties are certainly extolled by the narrator. It might just as well be that the coat, with, perhaps, its owner still inside, are supposed to be lying in some milk and gin after (during?) a celebration of some kind.

A Satisfying Ululation

I was meeting Ace Atkins, Bill Boyle, and Tom Franklin at the City Grocery Bar at 4:02 PM, or as it is known around here, "Megan Abbott Time." But I was early so I stopped in Square Books and killed some time by taking the Flann O'Brien novel AT SWIM-TWO-BIRDS off the shelf and idly leafing through it in a comfortable chair like a common thief of ideas. Now, you must remember that I read AT SWIM-TWO-BIRDS back in that hazy time before I noticed that every book I read has an owl in it and must therefore be catalogued for the people of the future. So! Someone asks the legendary Irish hero Finn MacCool about what might be the sweetest music he has ever heard, and he rattles off a list of dozens of answers, many of which made me laugh, like "the whining of small otters in nettle-beds at evening... A satisfying ululation is the contending of a river with the sea." And somewhere in there was "the low warble of water-owls in Loch Barra." And I sat there for some time muttering it aloud so I wouldn't forget: "the low warble of water-owls, the low warble of water-owls." I don't know why I didn't ask for a pen and a scrap of paper. But when I got home I wanted to recall some of the other phrases too, so I got out my yellowed, falling-apart paperback of AT SWIM-TWO-BIRDS and it was then that I also noticed, for the first time, Finn's tribute to "the long-eared bush-owl," which had somehow escaped me in the afternoon. At the end of his long list of pleasant sounds, Finn's friend says, "Relate further for us," and Finn replies, "It is true that I will not." Ha ha! (Pictured, the fanciful Ziphius, or water-owl, with a friend.)

Literary Matters

It's time once again for "Literary Matters"! No one enjoys those. They're not enjoyable. 1. I covered this one on twitter yesterday, but it's sticking in my mind. I read in the New York Times about Jimmy Buffett "grinning and splashing Tabasco on a modified Cobb salad." The editorial machinery of the New York Times saw fit - for the sake of accuracy, one supposes - to make sure the reader did not receive the false impression that Jimmy Buffett was eating a completely traditional Cobb salad. BUT! They did not care to let that same reader know in what way the Cobb salad had been modified. That's really all I have to say about that, except that I can't stop thinking about it. 2. EVERYBODY has been telling me to read BLACK WINGS HAS MY ANGEL. Why, Randy Yates stopped me on the corner outside his own restaurant just to ask whether I had read it. And he was only one of many to make that query. And I needed something to read after MEASURE FOR MEASURE. (Ha ha, don't worry, I haven't given up on THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY; I just read this in it: "Cupid and Death met both in an Inn, and being merrily disposed, they did exchange some arrows from either quiver; ever since young men die, and oftentimes old men dote"... but I need a new "carry-around" book.) BLACK WINGS HAS MY ANGEL is done up at least partway in that poetic style that Chandler made permissible for crime stories (instead of bubbles in the bathwater there are "little zeroes of suds"), and I'm more than fine with that! Okay! But then I had to stop on page 12 when he referred to the "trashy tune and words" of a Hank Williams song. The idea of someone sitting around proclaiming something "trashy" has never set well with me. And I know I should not confuse the author with the narrator! But here's a guy working in a genre that has been (unfairly) called "trashy" and he is going to have his narrator refer to the towering melodic and lyric achievements of Hank Williams as "trashy"? He should be on Hank's side! The irony (?) is compounded by the fact that this is a slick nyrb paperback, which has "rehabilitated," I guess, his "pulpy" novel. 3. Have you ever noticed in those books how your tough-guy narrator always wants to tell you when he takes a hot shower and eats some steak and eggs? It's a tendency I noticed in Spillane a lot. Maybe it's realism! I always thought it would be interesting to write a detective novel where there's no crime to solve and the detective just tells you about all the eggs he eats and hot showers he takes. The narrator of BLACK WINGS HAS MY ANGEL "had no more idea of falling in love with her than I had of making a meal of the big yellow cake of soap in the Victorian bathroom," curiously combining both tendencies. 4. So I put down BLACK WINGS HAS MY ANGEL. I'm gonna come back to it! I just have to shake off that unnecessary sideswipe at Hank Williams, though it's really got its claws in me. But in the meantime I thought I'd see what some of these here Shakespeare experts had to say about MEASURE FOR MEASURE. Out of three scholarly tomes I opened, two fell open EXACTLY and AT ONCE to the part about MEASURE FOR MEASURE, as if guided by the ghostly hand of Shakespeare himself! 5. Okay, I told you I'd read some more of this novel. Just three pages later the narrator is complaining that descriptions of women's legs in books are "trash." I don't know whether he's obsessed with trash or I am. But he's used the term twice in three pages. And now he's washing down seconds of potato salad with ice cold beer. Don't get mad at me, kind recommenders! I'm going to give this guy more of a chance than he gave Hank Williams. 6. I WAS WRONG! It's more like Cain than Chandler, but that's not what I mean. See, he's using the Hank Williams song ("If You've Got the Money, Honey") in a much more complex way than I expected... as a kind of shifting leitmotif. "Before it had sounded frank and functional. Before it had sounded gay and uncomplicated. Now the tune had a nasty taste to it." So, see, he was going somewhere with that, and I'm the sap. 7. I'm "not 'blogging' anymore, but I thought a late addendum to an old "post" would be okay. I'll probably come back to brag when I finish THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY too. But in the meantime, from BLACK WINGS HAS MY ANGEL, "She split some canned wieners and fried them with the eggs." See? I told you this kind of narrator always tells you when he eats eggs. 8. "... his hand busy as a tarantula in a fly cage." Gross! And I don't even know what a fly cage is. I assume it is a cage full of flies. And then you put a tarantula in it. But with its obvious debt to Chandler's "tarantula on a slice of angel food," the pendulum of influence swings back. I said I'm not "blogging" anymore but I keep sneakily adding to this list. Pitiful.

The Wrong Mistakes

Finished that Bob Hope bio (which had an owl in it, like every book: Bob Hope described as a "night owl") and now I've moved on to a Thelonious Monk bio written by Robin D.G. Kelley, which I picked up in hardcover at Square Books back in 2009, and it's just been patiently sitting there on the shelf ever since. It starts out with something pretty surprising: the subject of the biography coming to the author in a dream! This was 30 years before the writing of the book, when the author was an aspiring pianist: "he came to me in a dream. Decked out in divine alligator shoes, a dark green silk suit, yellow tie, bamboo sunglasses, and a cold straw hat, he snuck up behind me as I sat hunched over my stepfather's Steinway upright, looked over my shoulder, and simply mumbled, 'You're making the wrong mistakes.'" I also read this about Monk: "One of his favorite pranks was to stare intensely at a spot on the ceiling or in the sky... Invariably, several people would look up with him." That reminds me of the gag Saint Thomas More used to pull!

Bad Dreams

THE EASTER PARADE was good. It didn't make me cry despite Megan Abbott's prediction but I finished most of it in one sitting that ended late last night and afterwards it gave me a long series of nightmares in which I was sorting shoeboxes full of yellowed papers in a dingy apartment under tragic circumstances.

Aaoogah!

Hey yeah so last night I watched ESCAPE PLAN, a Sylvester Stallone movie featuring a jaunty spotlight turn from Arnold Schwarzenegger. I swear that Schwarzenegger ended most of his conversations with Stallone with a pretty good wisecrack that sounded like a natural button - like, okay, that was a good wisecrack, we're moving on to another scene now - but then Stallone would have to tack on an extra wisecrack that was just gilding the lily, an inferior wisecrack, like Stallone had it in his contract that he always had to make the last wisecrack, like he had a guy on set to write toppers for him on the spur of the moment, like Bob Hope would have had, only this guy wasn't up to it. I feel sure my analysis would not stand up to the most basic level of scrutiny, but that's how it felt. One thing I enjoyed was when Stallone punched a guy in the gut a couple of times and the guy said "Aaoogah!" each time, like an old-time car horn: "Aaoogah! Aaoogah!" Or it may have been Stallone saying "Aaoogah! Aaoogah!" with the exertion of his punching. One of them was saying "Aaoogah! Aaoogah!" Once again, I am not sure my fleeting impressions of the moment would stand up in a court of law. Arnold Schwarzenegger had a "mad scene" more or less like Ophelia's! And I have to say he did a good job of it. He played that whole section in German. He sold it, man, and I was buying it all the way! Genius and madness glimmered in his eyes! In equal measure! And now I would like to warn you about the very major spoiler that is going to take up almost all the rest of this "post." It's about the ending. Okay. So, Stallone is about to wreak a mighty vengeance on evil warden Jim Caviezel by blowing him up. In the split second before the explosion, Jim Caviezel, realizing what is about to happen, just cocks his head to the side very slightly, like a curious little dog, and squeaks. He squeaks! An anticlimactic and fascinating choice. I could not find an "internet" image of Jim Caviezel squeaking like an interested puppy, but here is Sylvester Stallone about to set off the explosion with his gun, and someone has gone to the trouble of labeling it in yellow letters. While I am not sure I agree with his or her assessment, I admire the effort. (A late postscript! It strikes me that Schwarzenegger's "madness" - an act designed to confound an authority figure - has more to do with Hamlet's than Ophelia's.)

Reed Richards

GIANT came on TV late last night and I watched the whole thing. It's long! But you can't stop watching it. Everybody remembers James Dean from the first part of the movie when he's dressed up like a cowboy, all those iconic poses. But you can't beat James Dean in the second part of the movie, with the old-age makeup! They give him exaggeratedly white temples like Reed Richards in the Fantastic Four. He sits inside a dark restaurant at night during a thunderstorm and wears his sunglasses (pictured)! This is the James Dean I would like to emulate, fashion-wise. Check out the flower in his lapel. Later he stands outside during the storm with the rain coming down on him still wearing his sunglasses and miraculously smoking a drenched cigarette in his rumpled brown suit with the yellow flower in the lapel (a yellow rose of Texas?) and John Waters moustache and old-age makeup and Reed Richards hair. This frame from the movie doesn't give you a real good sense of what I'm talking about but I don't care, that's your problem. A few minutes later (the same night in movie time) his hair is completely white, by the way. Was it turned white by romantic disappointment? Did the rain supposedly wash out the dye? Was that supposed to be dye? I can't believe it was a continuity mistake. It's too... GIANT. Maybe I missed something. I usually miss something. Anyway, his hair turns white.

Abating the Transmission

Sitting at the bar at the Lamar Lounge with Derrick Harriell yesterday, talking about Joe Louis because Derrick wrote a whole series of poems about the man, and I suddenly remembered that we studied Joe Louis in 4th grade Alabama history. Here is what I remember about 4th grade Alabama history. We studied the notable people of Alabama, who apparently were Helen Keller, Joe Louis, George Washington Carver and William Crawford Gorgas. Yesterday, talking to Derrick, I couldn't definitively remember anything about William Crawford Gorgas except his name, or so I thought. I told Derrick "I think he did something with yellow fever or malaria." Well, I looked him up on wikipedia today and it turns out he is known for "abating the transmission of yellow fever and malaria" at the Panama Canal. So I guess 4th grade history really stuck! Way to go, Ms. Matthews! The main thing I remember about my 4th grade teacher Ms. Matthews (I think we were still saying "Miss Matthews" not "Ms." then, but in Alabama it sounds like "Miz" either way) is that she loved the Miami Dolphins and talked about them all the time. All she did was talk about how much she loved Larry Csonka. And William Crawford Gorgas, I guess. Also, I guess she was the first teacher I had a crush on. The previous ones (except Polly Cherry, my happily named kindergarten teacher) were comforting and grandmotherly, but hardly crush material. Wow, this is self-indulgent. Well, you're reading a "blog" so I don't feel sorry for you. This "post" is really only for Hogan, who loves all 4th grade memories of everyone thanks in part to the noble influence of Lynda Barry. The other thing I recall (I'm pretty sure) from 4th grade Alabama history is these lyrics - and almost no others - of the Alabama state song: "Fair thy Coosa, Tallapoosa." Ha ha! Sounds dirty (though I never would have thought that at the time). But it is a paean to rivers, like FINNEGANS WAKE. I believe the state song also has a line about orange trees, which always confused me. Does Alabama have a lot of orange trees? I loved singing "Fair thy Coosa, Tallapoosa," but always felt ambivalent at best when I got to the part about orange trees (if that part actually exists). There's an Alabama town named Satsuma, which is also a kind of citrus fruit.

Don't Punch a Mountain

I think I suggested that Jake should punch a mountain? In yesterday's ADVENTURE TIME meeting? And Pen said, "If you're looking at a mountain, you're not going to punch it." That struck me as wise, so I jotted it down. It was also a writing lesson, not as revelatory as the first writing lesson Pen taught me, which also involved punching ("click" here to learn), but a helpful one. What else about writing? Megan Abbott and I have been talking a lot about Philip Roth lately. I remembered that when I was still but a lad I found a sort of curdled and corroded yellow paperback of PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT for ten cents at one of the library book sales I loved so much. But I was too ashamed to take it out and read it publicly (the poorly treated paperback was even physically repulsive!), so I stuck it in a drawer and forgot it forever. So I have never read PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT of all things! So yesterday, on the way to meet Tom Franklin for one of our lunches, I stopped by Square Books for a fresh copy. Then I sat reading the first few pages while waiting for Tom to show up, and I was laughing so much! What really got me was the narrator describing his father's almost mystical case of constipation. Roth brings constipation into the realm of legend and myth! (For contrast see Mailer's approach in ANCIENT EVENINGS.) Finally, Lisa Howorth writes in to suggest that maybe they said something about eating "a banana whole" in DOCTOR FAUSTUS, not "banana hole," as we were certain we had heard. "They def ate a banana," Lisa wrote. I replied that maybe I should not watch Elizabethan plays drunk, though I'm sure the Elizabethans did.

Why the Unsatisfied Tiger

Hey the zipper got stuck on one of Dr. Theresa's Christmas boots, caught in some fabric. So I walked that boot up to the old town square today to see whether the folks at the boot store had a trick for getting a boot zipper unstuck. They didn't. But I was out and about, so I stopped by Square Books, natch, and good thing I did, because some evil-doer had been messing with my recommendation shelf! My recommendation shelf had been desecrated - again! - in the very center of its top shelf, by the unsanctioned placement of a dumb picture book where a dumb guy had taken pictures of his dumb dog standing on different dumb things, like a tire and a fence and a dumb trash can, I think, I didn't give it much of a look. Maybe I am overreacting! But this dog picture book was blocking a volume of Dorothy Parker! Imagine how irritated she would have been. Although she did love dogs. I placed the dog picture book back in its proper spot on the dog shelf. Then I got some coffee and settled in with some Tennessee Williams because we had seen say the first two minutes of SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH on TCM today. The title swooped at a weird angle across the screen in shrieking yellow, one hysterically large word after another, "SWEET......... BIRD......... OF.......... YOUTH." Seemed like a sci-fi bird might descend in a fury and start killing everybody! I thought it was going to snatch Paul Newman right out of his convertible! I sat there at Square Books and read the first part of the play. Ordinarily I'd say that reading a book in a bookstore is just like stealing! But I have two copies of SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH around the house here somewhere, so I think it's okay, plus, they put all those comfortable chairs all over the store, what do they expect? I got to the lines "Why the unsatisfied tiger? In the nerves jungle?" and I put down the book, thinking nostalgically that it sounded like something Elizabeth would write. I was made doubly nostalgic sitting there recalling that "Sweet Bird of Youth" was also the title of an album by the Atlanta band The Rock*A*Teens, one of my favorite bands of all time. I was also made nostalgic by being an old person, that's what we do, we think about how great everything used to be when we hung out with bands, before you were born. Yes, there is a sci-fi bird that kills everybody after all, and they call it SWEET........... BIRD.......... OF........... YOUTH

Gonna Prove to You That Love Is Groovy

Man, I couldn't sleep at all last night! Was it because I watched a scary ghost movie yesterday afternoon? Well, that's really none of your beeswax. And anyway, I also had a huge iced tea at Taylor Grocery, so shut up. So anyway I got up in the dead of night and turned on the TV and there was cynical city slicker Sarah Jessica Parker forced into wholesome country living by contrived circumstances, learning a little something about life by milking a cow. Ugh! I watched the whole thing, of course. At the end, Hugh Grant is saved from an assassin by Mary Steenburgen, Sam Elliott and Wilford Brimley. Wow! So I was sitting there thinking, "Wow." I thought, "Wow, everybody's schedule worked out perfectly to make that happen." Then I looked out the window and saw a fox in our front yard! (See also.) It was cleverly negotiating a white paper bag - one of several dropped nightly after the bars close by young, starry-eyed drunkards whose well-to-do mommies and daddies have sent them off to college without enough God-given sense to use a trash can - to retrieve the leftover chicken-on-a-stick nestled within. Have I told you about chicken-on-a-stick here before? It's a disgusting "local delicacy." I once wrote a whole long article about my complex love-hate relationship with chicken-on-a-stick and even discussed it in an intellectual "panel" format, to the delight of none. But that need not concern you! All you need to think about right now is the fox I saw last night, trotting happily down the sidewalk with his hard-won chicken-on-a-stick in his mouth. So really I should thank the li'l drunkards, who unknowingly arranged such an unexpected treat for my weary eyes and mind! Then it was 3 AM and WAY... WAY OUT was coming on! I can't tell you how many hours I spent on the "internet" this morning looking for stills of Connie Stevens's apartment in WAY... WAY OUT. I found nothing truly suitable, despite all my expert "googling." Above you can see Jerry Lewis and Connie Stevens on her couch, in front of what I first took to be a mural of some kind: please note the strange bubbling texture of the purplish material... at least we are afforded a good look at that. But, you know, I think it is supposed to be a window. In a wider shot, a huge orange-red moon is visible, and at the end of the scene, Connie Stevens, who is an astronaut, shouts to the moon, "Well, what do you know? I'm coming!" or something like that, indicating to me (along with a nearby telescope) that it is supposed to be a window, some kind of futuristic window (the movie, from 1966, takes place in "the future"), and she is addressing the actual moon. In another "screen grab," which you will find at the end of this "post," you can see more of the crazy couch and pillows and yellow-and-orange striped carpet and other furnishings - dig that lamp! - of the type McNeil loves so well, but the image is blurry and faded, and not in the good way, so you're missing the odd vibrancy of the scene. I had more to say about WAY... WAY OUT, lots more (the title of this "post," for example, comes from the theme song to WAY... WAY OUT, about which I planned to wax rhapsodic; would it interest you to know that only moments ago Dr. Theresa, driven past the breaking point, finally said, "Okay, you're going to have to start humming something else now"?), so much more, and it seemed like a great idea, like something about how Dennis Weaver's turn in WAY... WAY OUT is a gloss on his twitching, weeping, writhing weirdo from TOUCH OF EVIL, but who cares? Honestly.

The Tough Figure Inside

Hey so yeah I have something really important to tell you so you know how I keep a long and faithful list of every book I read that has an owl in it? And you know how I have been buying old, yellowed comic books through the mail in an embarrassing and public attempt to reconnect with my lost youth? Well here is something that combines both of those fantastic hobbies! In the first issue of Jack Kirby's THE DEMON, a beat cop discovers Jason Blood (the Demon's alter-ego) conked-out on the ground in front of some mysterious ruins. Theorizes the cop, "YOU POKED AROUND THE OLD 'WARLY RUINS'... HEARD A HOOT OWL... AND RAN 'TIL YOU HIT A TREE." My friend Brian said this owl thing of mine "turns all of human literature into 'Where's Waldo.'" He meant it in a good way! But I just don't know anymore. Now, this has nothing to do with anything, but Jason Blood has a wacky pal named Harry Mathews, one t, just like the famed Oulipo writer (see also). And when Harry Mathews goes to a party at Jason Blood's house, he puts on a musketeer hat with a big plume and starts dancing to some rock-and-roll records, saying, "LET'S GET OFF THE WEIRDIE JIVE, GANG! LET'S ROCK IT! AND SOCK IT! --- AND SEND IT FIRST CLASS MAIL!!" I just wanted to tell you that. I also got the first issue of the comic book KA-ZAR by mistake. I had it confused with something else. What a vomitous example of purposeless consumerism I am. But in the first issue of KA-ZAR, Marvel Girl compares Iceman to Jerry Lewis. So for a moment I felt whole again. And finally let me draw your attention to the portion of an advertisement reproduced above. I saw it in another one of these DEMON comics and I suddenly remembered seeing it all the time when I was kid. It's for some weird toy where you pretend to sculpt a statue but you're not really doing anything. The statue has already been sculpted for you! And there's some gunk around it that you lackadaisically chip off to make you feel you're accomplishing something with your life. Boy, that really makes you think, doesn't it? Furthermore, the ad portrays its protagonist wallowing in the self-delusion his pointless new toy explicitly encourages, to the mockery and derision of his friends... a strange selling point. "BILLY USES THE SAFE CHISEL TO SCULPT AWAY THE SOFT OUTSIDE," says the ad copy. "EVEN HIS HARDEST BLOWS WON'T HURT THE TOUGH FIGURE INSIDE!" Just like my heart.

Leonard Grew Philosophical

I dreamed I was writing a novel last night. With a pencil! Here was the first sentence: "After his brother died in World War II, Leonard grew philosophical." Terrible! What a terrible sentence, and what an especially terrible first sentence for a novel. Why can't I dream something cool like the woman who wrote TWILIGHT? Remember how I told you it all came to her in a dream? I will quote again from the newspaper: "she had a dream about the characters, who then inhabited her mind and dictated the novels to her." Where's MY big dream payoff? When I woke up this morning my thoughts were muddled and I thought for half a second, "Hey! Maybe I dreamed a great novel!" I was wrong. My dreams have tricked me as usual. The novel I was writing in my dream also had this sentence in it: "Mary was a pretty girl." Ugh! Come on, dream brain! The next sentence: "She was as beautiful as margarine." WHAT? I think that came from the MAD MEN margarine subplot the other night. Why else would I be dreaming about margarine? In my dream I was working on a scene where Leonard goes back (?) to his job at the gas station. They don't have a uniform that fits him, exactly, and he's embarrassed. He's gained weight since he last worked there. Mary comes to the gas station and he fills up the tank and checks the engine. And here's his line of dialogue as she drives away: "Your hair is so yellow!" Dear God. I will let you know if I continue to write this awful historical novel in my dreams. Thanks for nothing, dreams.

A Few Bats

Common Sword-nosed Bat, Sooty Moustached Bat, Naked-rumped Tomb Bat, Hammer-headed Fruit Bat, Greater Ghost Bat, Hairy Slit-faced Bat, Little Japanese Horseshoe Bat, Hairy Little Fruit Bat, Velvety Fruit-eating Bat, Golden Bat, Visored Bat, Wrinkle-faced Bat, Smoky Thumbless Bat, Little Goblin Bat, Cinnamon Dog-faced Bat, Painted Bat, Pallid Bat, Great Evening Bat, Hoary Bat, Shaggy Bat, Sombre Bat, Mourning Bat, Slender Yellow Bat, Tiny Yellow Bat, Greenish Yellow Bat, Little Yellow Bat, Least Yellow Bat - these are just a few of the hundreds of bats from MAMMALS OF THE WORLD: A CHECKLIST.

Ornithologist Love Interest

Last night I watched that movie where John Belushi learns to care about bald eagles: CONTINENTAL DIVIDE. I saw it in the theater when it came out in 1981 and boy was I disappointed. A restrained Belushi is required to say things like this to Blair Brown as his ornithologist love interest: "Why ornithology?" That is a line that John Belushi has to say. There are lots of scenes of him wearing a plaid shirt and a hat and jotting down his musings on a yellow legal pad, and that image, at least, must have been appealing to the teenage me, because I felt some sort of unidentifiable pang when I saw it last night. Is that when I started wearing hats? If so, then CONTINENTAL DIVIDE has that atrocity to answer for as well! (Flipping through an old photo album I see McNeil and myself in the mountains of North Carolina probably in the early 80s and I am wearing a fishing hat - "Just like the one Jack Lemmon wore in THE ODD COUPLE!" I certainly exclaimed at the time, and I almost got Dr. Theresa to take the photo to her office and "scan" it so I could "post" it here but the thought of all that effort was just so depressing, everything was so depressing.) The humor in CONTINENTAL DIVIDE, when it occasionally happens, is along the lines of the Hope and Crosby ROAD movies: city-dweller Belushi confronted by bears or a mountain lion. But then the mountain lion mauls him a little! Which would not have happened to Hope or Crosby. In fact, the mountain lion would have talked. That would have been funny. Even the one-liners were more Hope-like than anything else. After a mishap, Blair Brown says, "Are you all right?" and Belushi replies (I think), "Yeah, it's just my body." It was amazingly old-fashioned. Once, just once, Belushi deploys his eyebrows in the manner we all desired in 1981. But that wasn't enough for us! Written by Lawrence Kasdan and directed by Michael Apted and does that deserve one of these: (!)? I don't know. Does anything deserve a (!)? Doesn't everything just deserve a "..."? The structure of the film is very weird, with a bafflingly truncated second act and why am I typing this?

Tell the World!

Dr. Theresa accidentally happened to catch a few moments of the apparently awful NBC remake of THE MUNSTERS that came on tonight, and boy was she sorry. She called me into the room to rewind it and show me a few minutes that particularly offended her. A little boy irrevocably zipped up in a bright yellow sleeping bag was trying to hop away from a beast who swatted him against a tree in a magnificent explosion of feathers. This, of course, is the most memorable moment in John Frankenheimer's mutant bear movie PROPHECY. It wasn't a homage, argued Dr. Theresa, because it was so obscure. It was a rip-off. "It wasn't THEIR brilliance," she said. She also said, "Tell the world!" Then we watched RED LIGHTS, our second Halloween film festival movie this year to feature Sigourney Weaver. "Hey," I said, "she was in GHOSTBUSTERS [not part of the Halloween film festival - ed.] and now she's PLAYING a ghost-buster. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Get it?" That's what I said. To which Dr. Theresa responded something like, "Yeah." It also starred the creepy guy from RED EYE. And, purely objectively, it was the movie in our festival that (so far) made us say "Aaaaah!" out loud the most, though it wasn't really an "Aaaaah!" kind of movie.

Dazzling Kimono of Doom

I know you want to be kept informed about our annual Halloween film festival so I will tell you a few things about X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES. 1) Before the credits even start there is an eye attached to a stalk kind of wiggling around in a jar of pink fluid, and you will think of Samuel Beckett's novel THE UNNAMABLE. 2) Then the credits appear over a black-and-purple swirling hypno-wheel. Dr. Theresa approved. 3) Suddenly, about halfway through, I guess, it takes an unexpected turn in the general direction of NIGHTMARE ALLEY, with Don Rickles doing a good job as a shady carny seeking to exploit THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES! Don Rickles removes Ray Milland from his carnival-appropriate kimono of dazzling yellow silk and sets him up as a phony "healer." Matters of faith and determinism are addressed! 4) Speaking of which, it all ends on a mystical note, not unlike THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (if nowhere near that level), following its premise through to its cosmic conclusion. THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES sees through everything, he SEES INTO THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE, but I won't spoil it for you. 5) I forgot to mention a RAIN MAN-like side trip to Las Vegas. "This movie is all over the place," Dr. Theresa remarked at that point, but she didn't mean it in a bad way.

Everybody Torments Raymond

Hey remember that TV show that used to be about Lauren Graham inventing shoes at the shoe factory? She is no longer inventing shoes! Now she is a photographer's assistant, which seems like a demotion, nothing against photographers' assistants! I can't explain her change in fortune, probably because I missed an episode, or maybe she is like the Hulk as he was portrayed on TV, the way he would go from town to town helping people in need, one week at a shoe factory, the next at a photographer's studio, for example. That (THE INCREDIBLE HULK, I mean) was my sister's favorite TV show before she could really talk. She would cry out in delight at the sound of the opening theme, "Huck! Huck!" I told you she couldn't really talk. Then she would sit there in a terrified trance when the Hulk appeared - a bewitchment from which nothing could stir or distract her! I guess she had mixed emotions! (She also pronounced "root beer" like this: "rt br." WERE WE GIVING HER ROOT BEER BEFORE SHE COULD TALK?) Anyway, Lauren Graham's gruff and sullen photographer boss is portrayed by Ray Romano. Lauren Graham sure does complain about him a lot. Maybe TOO much! Or so her (current) betrothed seemed to think as he sat there ineffectually eating ice cream and contemplating the complex series of facial expressions she exhibited, all unknowing! In this show, Ray Romano has a brooding, wounded quality. Like Heathcliff in WUTHERING HEIGHTS! So I think Lorelai Gilmore and Raymond from EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND are going to make out. I guess everybody really does love Raymond! Because he is so tormented! I have to say, though it is a gratuitous swipe, that Jerry Seinfeld could never pull this off. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, I guess! And if the dream of your life is to see Lorelai Gilmore make out with Raymond from EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND, not that it should be, not by any means, it definitely should not be, unless it is, well, I guess your favorite day in the world will be here soon, you mark my words, it will. (See also.)