Two or Three Huge Controversies

The Million Dollar Book Club got into one of its famous debates! I was saying that Witold Gombrowicz reminded me of a Bob Hope character because he was distracted by a sexy ballerina and didn't realize that, in the background, so to speak, there was a fiery political debate raging in which he should have chosen a side. So he gets called on the carpet by the Polish Legation in Argentina and they don't care for his excuses about the sexy ballerina. Can't you just see Bob Hope getting into a fix like that? I know, I know, you've never heard of Bob Hope, well, why don't you just go to hell. Anyway, Megan contends that Witold Gombrowicz is "in his head a lot more than Bob Hope." That sums up the lively discussion in question. Wow! It was really something. Anyway, the next day, I was thinking, huh, Witold Gombrowicz could have gone to see a lot of Bob Hope movies! But I bet he didn't. He never writes about the movies in his diary. That's something Megan and I discussed. He does mention television: "We cultivate television and use electric blankets, but we die wild." Ha ha! Pure Gombrowicz. But it is a generic allusion as far as popular entertainment is concerned. I'm up to 1959 in the diary... even characters in THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN go to the movies, and when does that take place? Well, it spans the course of several years, but I think they're going to the movies in 1913 or so. That's an estimate! Don't base your MAGIC MOUNTAIN book reports on my "blog." Don't use A.I. either! Yesterday, A.I. told me that I wrote a novel called YOUR BODY IS CALLING ME... ha ha! I wish! It also said I wrote GRAVESEND, which is a novel by Bill Boyle. Again: I wish! All right. How many controversies does that make? Zero? Well! Puttering around on the "blog" not too long ago... here, I'll tell you what I found by quoting an email I sent to McNeil: "According to a 'blog' 'post' from April 18, 2008, based on your own sworn testimony, you never wear a belt, not even when you tuck in your shirt. How does that square with your claim on May 7, 2024, of having [a] belt you have worn every day for almost 20 years? We're asking for your comments before we run with the story." Here is McNeil's reply: "I was probably referring to wearing a belt only at work, because my pants were too big. Outside of work, everything was 'snug'. But now it's the opposite. I have to wear [a belt] with all my pants - except I just don't anymore at work because they make me take it off anyway to go through security - which is a drag, man." Do you know where McNeil was when he sent his response? The Grand Canyon! I subsequently accused him of visiting the Grand Canyon every other week. He replied that he's been just three times, most recently in 2016. Well, now that I'm old, 2016 seems like yesterday to me. You'll find out. (I have a lingering idea that someone in Gombrowicz's novel THE POSSESSED may go to the movies. I'm probably wrong.) Wait! While innocently searching for the proper "hyperlinks," I just blew the lid off of something else! According to the "blog," McNeil was at the Grand Canyon in 2015, NOT in 2016 as he claims above. WHAT IS MCNEIL COVERING UP?

A Very Long Dash

So Terence asks Rachel "didn't you wander about the hotel like an owl in the sun?"... only Virginia Woolf places a long dash - six times the length of an ordinary dash! - between the word "sun" and the question mark. I couldn't figure out how to replicate it and I'm so very tired. I mention all this because THE VOYAGE OUT has had four owls in it so far, a number of owls in a single work of fiction matched on the "blog" only by Willa Cather, I believe, though I have done zero research in the interest of confirming this... and, should you care to "click" on this "link," you will find that one of Cather's owls has a problem with the sunlight as well... a problem, it occurs to me, shared by the owl of Dr. Samuel Johnson, and probably some other owls, but I don't care, and neither do you. Why are we here?

Invisible Obelisk

I don't "blog" anymore, but by no means did I want you to think that McNeil has stopped looking for obelisks. He sent me the above photo (seemingly from a television show called UFO) and requested a glowing orb to put on his desk. He also told me to "note the obelisk." Friends, I looked all over and didn't see the obelisk! I communicated my alarm to McNeil! I concluded - too hastily - that the thing resembling a crystal ball was the "glowing orb," not the white circle, which, as I examined it, looked so flat and artificial that I decided McNeil has placed it there through computer wizardry, in order to mark the obelisk in question. I furthermore concluded, on the basis of zero evidence, that McNeil had meant to draw a red circle (or suchlike) around the obelisk but had, instead, made an opaque white circle by mistake. Confronted with my theory, McNeil was appalled. The flat white circle was indeed the object of McNeil's admiration, a supposed "glowing orb" original to the work as televised. The obelisk, he said, was on the left front corner of the desk (from the POV of someone sitting behind it). Then I saw it! And if you look, you can see it too. Maybe you have already seen it with your fresh young eyes that are not yet old and weak like mine. In conclusion, I mentioned to McNeil that the white dot looked like something that may have been placed there by censors to cover a large hole in the seat of the man's pants. Yes, McNeil replied facetiously, that would explain the slide whistle sound effect when the man turned around. And now you know why I don't "blog" anymore.

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 Lion's Den

I cannot say for certain that my 90th birthday tribute to Jerry Lewis was what prompted Megan Abbott to go see CRACKING UP at the Museum of Modern Art yesterday afternoon, but I like to think I had a little something to do with it. I'm going to lay out the sequence of events through our correspondence, kind of like Bram Stoker piecing together all those documents for DRACULA. I noticed an email from Megan in my inbox at around twenty minutes before three o'clock, Central Time, asking whether she should go see CRACKING UP at 4 PM. New York City, of course, abides by Eastern Time. If you will do your math, you will see that time was of the essence! My response was measured: "YES! My God, I hope you're not getting this too late. You only have 20 minutes to get there, hurry, hurry!" I also rushed over to twitter, in case Megan was not checking her email, and tweeted like so:

@meganeabbott Got your email. The answer to your Q is YES! But I'm looking at the clock and fear I'm too late. God help you! God help us all

— Jack Pendarvis (@JackPendarvis) March 8, 2016

I soon received a heartening "I'm here" via email. Trying to prepare her, as I thought was only my duty, I quoted P.B. Shelley on things "semi-real" and Megan responded that she was having a beer to open her "doors of perception." (Can it be a coincidence that the movie was scheduled to start at what is known affectionately in Oxford, Mississippi, as "Megan Abbott Time?") A photo of her ticket stub appeared on twitter. I immediately emailed that photo to McNeil, who responded "Wow!!! WOW!!!" - sentiments I subsequently conveyed to Megan. Thus spurred on, she responded, "I couldn't even finish my beer; I was too excited!" It was at this juncture that communications were severed for some hours, as I had a doctor's appointment. When I returned, I picked up THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY, which has been lying there untouched for some time, and discovered that my bookmark lay, by another coincidence, at the beginning of a chapter in which Robert Burton explains why doctors are the worst (though his thoughts do not apply to my friendly and helpful doctor): "according to that witty Epigram of Maximilianus Urentius, what's the difference? How (he asks) does the Surgeon differ from the Physician? One kills by hand, the other by drugs; and both differ from the hangman only in that they do slowly what he does quickly." Then I was like, why am I reading this? Surely Megan is out of CRACKING UP by now. And so it proved. I had an email from McNeil, asking "What's up with the $0.00?" I could see it was tearing him up inside!

I explained some of Megan's benefits as a paying member of MoMA, which seemed to calm him down. In the meantime, I had also received two emails from Megan, one seemingly sent just before the movie started and one after it had concluded. BEFORE: "You should see all the other lunatics here!" AFTER: "Watching it was akin to sinking into psychosexual quicksand!" Now! I must tell you that as I first read that response, and again as I cut-and-pasted it just now, I could not help but notice that were TWO extra, unnecessary spaces between "sinking into" and "psychosexual quicksand." Implying what? I'm no Freud! But one may imagine that had Megan written this on a postcard with a pencil, we might have a fascinating palimpsest to analyze. I left Megan a phone message to ask whether there had been any learned introduction or if they had just shown the film ("like BOOM!" is the way I believe I put it). Then I got to thinking about her "BEFORE" response, the one about the lunatics in the theater, and I was seized with an awful vision of Megan as the only woman in a Jerry Lewis audience, surrounded by, I don't know, creeps in Jerry Lewis outfits, each more eager than the last to pledge his troth! So I left a message about that. "I sent you into the lion's den!" I may have yelled into the receiver. This morning I had more emails from McNeil and Megan. One implied that my phone messages had arrived during a "book event" that Megan was attending with Laura Lippman. I can only hope they discussed Jerry a little over wine and cheese! If so, you may look forward to a postscript. "He had me at the slippery office!" Megan wrote later. McNeil's email also mentioned it: "Damn! I would have loved to have seen that on the big screen. That psychiatrist's office..." and of course he went on to mention the green carpet that he is convinced Jerry has reused fetishistically in his films for decades: "that green carpet in the motel room...ooh la la" being his exact words. Megan went on: "I have to say, I've never heard a MoMA audience (more male, yes, but not heavily so) laugh more at any movie and I was loud among them. I can't recall seeing many movies that made me quite so vividly uncomfortable either! In his movies, there's just no ground under our feet, is there?"

How I Met Your Manitou

So we watched THE MANITOU for our Halloween film festival and now I am going to tell you all about THE MANITOU so don't read this if you plan to watch THE MANITOU but I don't think you want to plan to watch THE MANITOU. Tony Curtis plays a guy kind of like Zero Mostel in THE PRODUCERS except he gives psychic readings to old women and for one of them he wears a false moustache for reasons that I am not sure I understand. There was one okay part where an old woman floated down a hallway, that was a surprise. Anyway, here comes the manitou! The manitou is a "medicine man" who reincarnates himself in the most inconvenient way possible for everyone. Couldn't he just reincarnate himself the regular way? I guess not! Then a hospital room turns into outer space and they defeat the manitou by harnessing the souls of computers, because computers have souls in this movie, THE MANITOU.

No Sun Partisan He

Our friend Mark Baker was in town to install some rare old photographs of Atlanta's Cabbagetown neighborhood over at the Powerhouse. Why did he do that? I am happy to tell you! The Isom Center, the Southern Foodways Alliance, and others are hosting a Cabbagetown retrospective at 7 PM on March 19. You should attend! Among the other treats will be live performances from Bill Taft and Caroline Young, who will read her poetry about that place. There will be a rare screening of BENJAMIN SMOKE, Jem Cohen's lauded documentary about Bill's old band. Also: food! We walked up with Mr. Baker last night to see Jonathan Richman perform in the intimate setting of Proud Larry's. Many familiar faces in the crowd: Dent May is visiting from his new home in Los Angeles. Jimmy came up from New Orleans for the show. Mary Miller! Bill Boyle! A respectable crowd, but small enough that you could get to know every face in it. Jonathan Richman just walked in off the street and through the front door with his guitar case, stepped onto the stage and started playing with zero fuss. His stone-faced drummer hopped up from the bar and joined him. He sang a song thanking the sun for allowing us to grow peas and corn. Then, as if to prove he's not strictly a sun worshipper, he reminded us that sometimes (I think I have this right) "we want to paddle our own canoe into the sinister darkness." He sang a song about it. "He's a mesmerist!" said Dr. Theresa, trying to describe Jonathan Richman's crazy dance moves after the show. "It's like he's looking THROUGH us!" Will McIntosh reportedly whispered to Dr. Theresa during the performance. Jonathan Richman bridged each song with fancy guitar licks so that there were no pauses, no places to clap. We clapped anyway, when we could.

Zero Laughing Matters

Had to email McNeil to tell him Anita Ekberg died. Her obituary was sad; let's not think about it. Let's think about a weird hour-long youtube clip McNeil sent me. A monotone diatribe from a conspiracy theorist with the unlikely (but real!) name of Dr. Peter Beter. Ha ha ha! And yet Dr. Peter Beter is no laughing matter. He starts off on how Russia is manufacturing blizzards in the United States. Then he calls Reagan our "alleged" president. That's by three minutes in and that's about as much as a person can take, especially as Dr. Peter Beter manages to sprinkle a little anti-Semitism in there at the same time. Peter Beter is really into "manmade earthquakes," which is why I think McNeil chose to foist him on me: to rib me about what I said about those mysterious earthquakes in Oklahoma (no laughing matter, either). On wikipedia I learned that Peter Beter thought Jimmy Carter had been replaced by a robot. So there you go. There are a lot of Peter Beters out there, and leave it to McNeil to find them. So I have given you two things not to think about today: the lonely death of Anita Ekberg (pictured here with Jerry in happier times... I guess) and the sick ravings of Dr. Peter Beter. I'm sorry.

Eating Chicken in the USA

Hey I should tell you about some chicken I ate this weekend when I was on a road trip - I felt like a regular Kent Osborne, ha ha! He loves chicken! I stopped at a buffet restaurant in or around a town called D'Lo, Mississippi. Isn't that an odd name? According to a section of wikipedia with zero footnotes, there are a few theories about the origin of the name, including this one: "old maps from 16th-century French explorers show that they labeled the D'Lo area around the Strong River with the words 'De l'eau sans potable.' This translates as 'bad drinking water.'" That's what it says on wikipedia! So I chose chicken and green beans and macaroni and cheese with peach cobbler for dessert, and I also threw in some fried chicken livers at some point, or so I thought, in honor of Dr. Theresa, who loves chicken livers but was not there, but I am not sure after all that those things I put in my mouth were chicken livers. I just don't know what they were. The consistency was mysterious. Everything else was great, though! Every table had a napkin holder on it, and to every napkin holder was affixed a homemade ad for stun guns you could buy out of somebody's house! All right, let us move on to this photo that McNeil sent me. Look, it is me being young in that dumb hat I told you about, of which I was so proud. And there's McNeil, proving his existence once again. "I'm actually rosy-cheeked here," McNeil notes wistfully.

Text Texting

I didn't mean to get your hopes up last night when I told you about the funniest book in the world! My twitter friend Phil McAndrew (oh gosh let's just call him my real friend!) told me that THE BLADE by Don Novello sells for something like 100 big ones on the "internet." It's out of print! And in fact, after he reminded me of that, I remembered my big plan to get a copy for John Brandon and how I was broke and sobbing and thinking oh well no BLADE for John Brandon because it costs so much. It is a terrible shame that THE BLADE is not more readily available to THE PEOPLE. It's FOR the people! Maybe I will use my power and influence at McSweeney's (ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! I have zero power and influence at McSweeney's... OR DO I? I don't) to try to get THE BLADE back where it belongs: RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOUR FACE. Now I am thinking McSweeney's is the place for it, because it really needs to be a book, not an electronic book that runs on electricity like they have out nowadays. My friend Ward McCarthy (not to be confused with Pendleton Ward) and I worked with Don Novello once and I got a copy of THE BLADE directly from Mr. Novello himself and I remember Ward driving in Los Angeles while I was reading THE BLADE and laughing until I was crying and I kept showing Ward stuff in THE BLADE while he was speeding down the highways and byways of that great sprawling metropolis of tender dreams (we were probably lost; we got lost a couple of times, once after our "hipster chimp shoot") and Ward would laugh until he had DEADLY TEARS in his eyes, but thank God we didn't crash. It was like we were "texting" and driving - with a real text! - before it was cool. It's not cool to text and drive. We could have been killed by the greatest power the world has ever known: the power of laughing at a high school yearbook that is all sheep instead of people. PS While I keep talking about books that make you laugh until you cry, please don't forget TALES DESIGNED TO THRIZZLE VOL. 1 by Michael Kupperman, and there is a VOL. 2 coming out soon! There will be so much happy weeping if I have my way. Just stay off the roads. Attention government: I get nothing out of this but the satisfying thought of everybody lying around clutching their stomachs and crying. In a good way!

Bird Trouble

My sister will be horrified to learn that pigeons can do math! They can do math at monkey levels! Which is more than I can say for myself. The other day I read on Maud Newton's "blog" that parrots understand the concept of zero. I'm telling you, something sinister is going on. In fact, looking back at that Maud Newton piece, not only do crows develop grudges against specific people, THEY TELL ALL THEIR CROW FRIENDS. Like, "This guy's a jerk. Let's get him!" Now put that together with pigeon math! This is science, people! For more on the pigeon monkey math story, "click" here. IF YOU DARE! PS I see that gawker has already reported on this (the pigeon part), using much the same tone and including the same "monkeys are better than I am at doing math" joke. But I wasn't copying them! As you know, my fear of birds taking over the world goes back for years.

Recommendation Shelf Action

Another book sold from my recommendation shelf, for a total of eight. Here's a fun recommendation shelf fact for all you recommendation shelf fans, of whom there are zero: I always replace a sold book with AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT VOLUME. So if you haven't visited the recommendation shelf for a while, that means you are in for up to 80% of DAZZLING BRAND NEW SELECTIONS! Perhaps this is the time to once again assure the government that I am not employed by Square Books, nor do I get a "piece of the action." I just have a lot of time on my hands. It's sad, really. On a happier note, Michael Bible witnessed the customer who picked up RAVEL by Jean Echenoz from the recommendation shelf. "The guy was excited," he reports. Back to sad things: today at Off Square Books, there will be a "farewell reading" by John Brandon. That's right, he's leaving Oxford, a fact which fills me with vomitous rage at the cosmos. So come say goodbye to John Brandon, and to happiness. Forever!

How Dedicated I Am

There is something wrong with stupid dumb old "Blogger," the "web" "host" of this site, so I cannot "blog" from my own "computer." I have to find someone else's! Which I have done. For you. I will tell you what else I did for you today. Remember that old man who writes a column in the local disposable circular? That's right! The one who opines about sad clown Emmett Kelly and the time his parents went to an Al Jolson concert. I promised to find out more about him. Well! His publication, "The LaFa Shopper," has almost zero "web" "presence," which I kind of respect, the way an FBI agent in a terrible movie develops a grudging respect for a clever serial killer. So, my friends, I WALKED TO THEIR OFFICE TODAY WITH MY ACTUAL FEET. It's off the square. And I found out the name of the columnist, which is John Arrechea. I won't lie to you: I was a little worried about him! He is obviously getting on in years, and his column has not appeared in the last several editions of "The LaFa Shopper." This week, for example, there is some horticulturist where John Arrechea should be, talking about "ornamental peppers," and who cares about that? Nobody! The friendly, white-haired receptionist told me not to worry, that Mr. Arrechea's column does not appear every week. I said I was relieved. "He's a good person," she said.

Zero Availability

Hey, I have suddenly figured out how to make some good money off of my novel SHUT UP, UGLY which was supposed to be published but never was. Are you a lawyer? Do you enjoy destroying behemoths? Then listen up! Over there at the behemoth, they have a page advertising my novel, which does not exist. The page proclaims that the novel is "out of print" and has "limited availability." I beg to differ! It has never been in print, so it cannot be "out of print." It has zero availability, I might add. To suggest otherwise is a slur upon me as a gentleman! It may also discourage any publisher foolhardy enough otherwise to grab up this priceless jewel which was so timely three years ago when I filled it with its masterful Zac Efron references. Through its sloppy and malicious practices, the behemoth has made it appear as though my novel has gone out of print in mere months (for some reason they list February 2010 as the publication date), thereby damaging my "standing" in the "literary world." They even assign me a sales ranking, which as of this "post" is 9,404,295. Certainly an affront to my dignity and an unfair stain upon my reputation as a professional, as there should be no sales ranking at all! HOW CAN PEOPLE BUY SOMETHING THAT NEVER EXISTED? As you are aware, no humans are employed by the behemoth and it is staffed entirely by robots who do not understand our human emotions. Sometimes one of them will feel strange stirrings in his or her circuitry and say, "Is this what it means... to love?" But that is as close as they get. So that is a challenge! But if you are a lawyer who is not afraid of robots, get in touch! (Pictured: Zac Efron or a soulless robot. You decide!)

Joe Was Becoming Witty

This book club book about Joe E. Lewis is super crazy. Like, Art Cohn (the author) keeps telling us what a comic genius Joe E. Lewis is (Scott Phillips zeroed in on this insane bit as the ultimate example: "Now he was a Socrates in cap and bells, a drunken Aesop revealing the wisdom of the ages in logical lunacy") but PROVIDES NO EVIDENCE to back it up. I'm not saying Joe E. Lewis wasn't funny. I have no idea. But if he was, there is something that's not coming across on the page, no matter how many times Cohn assures us of the hilarity we're missing ("He was ahead of them, whether they laughed or not, and they loved it"). Here's how Joe E. deals with a heckler. He makes a quip, and another quip, then HE THROWS A HOT CUP OF COFFEE IN THE GUY'S FACE. Another heckler: Joe E. directs a quip at him, and another quip, before walking over and BASHING OUT THE GUY'S TEETH WITH A MICROPHONE. Just a paragraph or two after that, Cohn writes with no apparent irony, "'You got to be wise before you're witty,' Josh Billings said. Joe was becoming witty." Huh? Let's leave it to Megan Abbott to make sense of everything as usual: "To me," she writes, "the fascination and kinda crazy brilliance of the book is the anxious desperation driving the need to make this portrait stick--this kinda antic accumulation of praise from others, this surrendering of the 'voice' to other megaphones who can help build the case, this enjambment or collapsing of time -- like the sense he can't even control his own narrative so desperate he is to show Joe E. (and himself, as a writer of value) as Someone Who Matters. When all you can think of is, My God, what do they have to hide? What is this manic shell game designed to conceal?"

A Red Diaper and Pirate Boots

"The most underrated Sean Connery movie ever?" my old buddy Stephen asks rhetorically about ZARDOZ over on the twitter. "He plays the entire role in a red diaper and pirate boots," Stephen elaborates. Twitter's "limitations" have allowed him to zero in on the essence! If I recall correctly, this is the same movie Dr. Theresa kept telling me I needed to see because "Sean Connery flies around in a giant head." Yep:

An Unhappy Character

Watching a little Battlestar Galactica... an episode that reemphasized what it - and other futuristic entertainment - has already taught me. I pass this advice on to you, children. If you are ever on a spaceship STAY OUT OF THE AIRLOCK! Something bad is bound to happen if you go in the airlock, I'm just saying. It is the most valuable thing I have learned from science fiction since how to put out a fire in zero gravity. (Pictured, from the very episode, an unhappy character in an airlock.)

Everybody Stop Saying This Now

As you know, I always give you a "heads up" whenever Jerry Lewis is mentioned in the New York Times. Today is such a day. It's an op-ed piece with an aside about the French: they "think Jerry Lewis is funny." I am not sure why this is a clever remark or why people make it over and over and over again. It reminds me of that part in THE PRODUCERS when the guy says, "Pardon the pun," and Gene Wilder says, "What pun?" and Zero Mostel says, "Shut up, he thinks he's witty."

Through the Rollers

Yesterday's Polaroid article spurred the "blog's" Polaroidologist "El" to send this "link" to a "web" site about the work of Jamie Livingston, who took one Polaroid a day for nearly two decades of his life. (Here is another interesting way to view some of the pictures.) "El" tells us that the filmmaker Tarkovsky (one of "Blog" Buddy Lynn Shelton's "faves") carried a Polaroid camera wherever he went. Writes "El," "I actually find the SX-70 to be the most convenient camera ever, and each little shot of Time-Zero contains a concentrated pack of poetry to be released when it goes through the rollers." "El" is a member of "Save Polaroid." "El" calls them "Polas." She doesn't like it when people call them "'roids." A schism in the Polaroid community? (Pictured, a Polaroid by Tarkovsky of his mother. Find his Polaroid work in a book called INSTANT LIGHT.)

Don't Read This

Welcome once again to one of those "posts" you shouldn't read, in this instance because a boring old "cinephile" "blogger" is going to tell you about his trouble sleeping and the movies he watched instead. You have been warned. Last night's double feature, brought to me almost at random by the dvr, was PHFFFT! (the exclamation point is theirs) followed by CONTEMPT. A profitable and instructive double feature! Watching PHFFFT! prepared me to view CONTEMPT in a whole new way. There are many similarities between the two films, aside from the big marital themes - little things like the use of books and scripts within scripts, and the particular sleaziness of the characters played by Jack Carson (in the former film) and Jack Palance (in the latter). See! I told you not to read this. And in each film, an apartment functions as an important supporting character. All I'm saying is that PHFFFT! allowed me to zero in on the extremely old-fashioned plot of CONTEMPT so that I was free to enjoy thoroughly and with fresh eyes the way Godard's cinematic language enhanced and commented on his film's own mechanics. Speaking of mechanics, I will conclude this thing that I hope you are not reading by mentioning that while PHFFFT! contains both a round bed and a motorized bed, it curiously does NOT contain a motorized round bed such as we often enjoy in the movies. And finally I will mention that Godard originally wanted to cast Kim Novak (who appears in PHFFFT!) as the female lead in CONTEMPT. This is the Most Boring Old Man in the Universe, bidding you adieu.