Pioneers of Not Caring

By now you know the time-worn old story - nay, legend! - of how Ace Atkins drove up one fine day to Memphis, Tennessee, and I rode along with my handy digital recorder and interviewed him about the time he went to Hollywood to work on a Pauly Shore movie. Well, sir, I promised not to bother you about it very much, and I do think I have lived up to my word. But! Just the other day, right here on the old "blog," I was lamenting our relative lack of monkeys as of late. And that is why I feel obliged to tell you that baby chimpanzees figure prominently in the latest installment of ACE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD on the "web" site FLAMING HYDRA. Sure, I've told you about MY baby chimpanzee encounter before ("click" here - you won't! Ugh! Why are you so awful? Have you ever asked yourself?) but did you know about ACE'S encounter with a baby chimpanzee? I'll wager you did not. Who are you? And why do I hate you so much? In conclusion, I know that chimpanzees are not monkeys, and I don't care. I'm famous now for not caring about anything - it's my brand! - but not caring that chimpanzees are not monkeys is something I was doing years ago. I cut my not-caring teeth on the difference between monkeys and chimpanzees! I also don't care that I said "in conclusion" but now I'm going to talk about something else. I also don't care that I'm writing, not "talking." Anyway, speaking of Hollywood, USA, a (formerly) secret project I've been working on got written up in VARIETY. I just wanted to make a correction. Kent and I are referred to in the article as "game masters," when everyone on the show, including ourselves, calls us "gamekeepers," a humbler and more fitting title. Do I seem to care about this one thing? I don't care if I do!

Two Knights and a Non-Knight

I am pretty far into THE MANUSCRIPT FOUND IN SARAGOSSA and there have been no owls, even though there are owls on the cover. But there are plenty of other things! Like, these two knights are talking and this one knight is like, "Alas, we all must die. Only the hour of our death is not certain." And the other knight is like, "Wait, who has told you all these pleasant novelties? It must be a mortal with an extraordinarily witty turn of conversation. Is he often invited out to supper?" And when I read that, I thought, "Hey! 'Is he often invited out to supper?' must be the 'He must be fun at parties' of the 18th century!" And then I thought, is that something people even say: "He must be fun at parties"? I think I've said it. I think, for example, when I went to see Dr. Theresa get an award - before she was a doctor! - and the speaker at the ceremony, for some reason, was a guy whose whole life was spent studying the sense of smell in lobsters... on that occasion, I do believe that as he went on for some time about the sense of smell in lobsters, I turned to our friend Chuck, who was seated next to me, and said, "He must be fun at parties." So I did a "google search" for the phrase "must be fun at parties" and turned up 145,000 matches, so I guess it is something that people say. More and more often, since my little medical hiccup, I wonder whether I know certain things or only think I know certain things. On the other hand, maybe I was never sure. As I type this long series of thoughts, I am in unbearable suspense about whether the "internet" will stop working, as it often does now, thanks to the good folks at AT&T, ties with whom I am assiduously working to sever forever as we speak. (As further evidence of my mental state, I just looked up "assiduous" to see if it means what I think it means, and it does, almost.) Oh! So a few pages later in THE MANUSCRIPT FOUND IN SARAGOSSA, someone (not a knight) is playing a cithara, which took me straight back to the "blog's" big cither/citer/cithern/cittern/kithara/zither craze of 2010. (Citterns were poised to make a comeback in 2011, but it didn't take. Though I will say that as I continue to examine the "blog" for zombie "links," I am astonished to find that the "Frequently Asked Questions about the Renaissance Cittern" webpage not only survives, it was updated - ! - as recently as April 2023. I guess they found out something new about renaissance citterns.) Now, did I immediately assume that the cithara I read about in THE MANUSCRIPT FOUND IN SARAGOSSA was identical with a kithara? Good God, no! I learned my lesson back when I stupidly assumed that a cither and a cithern were the same thing ("click" on "link" after "link" for the incredible details). I'm so glad we had this talk. Postscript: Yes, as predicted above, the godawful AT&T "internet" ceased to work at a vital juncture in the composition of this delightsome bagatelle. (Continuing a theme: I second-guessed myself about the existence of "delightsome" as a word and did not find it in the dictionary that came with this laptop. When the "internet" began to work again, however briefly, I checked out the OED online, which cites numerous uses of the word - well, maybe "numerous" is going a bit too far - beginning in the 15th century and ending only a few years ago, in what seems to be an advertising brochure: "our Sheraton Lagos Hotel teams have come up with a line-up of delightsome and inspiring culinary options." Ugh! Now I see why my computer doesn't want me to use "delightsome.")

Drumstick Adventure

You know, just about every Monday, my coworker Ashly Burch asks me "How was your weekend?" and it's a very pleasant and considerate query but I sit there in silence with a dumb look on my face because I can't think of anything to say because nothing happened that weekend. Well, today is gonna be different, says I! Went out to Faulkner's house to play accordion on the Thacker Mountain Radio Show. They never had a radio show there before, and hardly even a radio. Faulkner hated the radio. There's a story about that but you'll have to go to Faulkner's house and ask Bill Griffith. He runs the place! I don't know how Faulkner felt about accordions. Kelly Hogan got in trouble for sitting - with no malice aforethought - on Faulkner's freezer. Because guess what? It's not just a freezer, it's a museum exhibit! Anyway, they had made Faulkner's kitchen into a green room for musicians, which I'm sure stressed out even the chill Bill Griffith. And I was thinking, yeah, but Hogan is probably the first person to sit on the lid of that freezer since Faulkner! It's like their very butts touched through the fabric of time!

Here's a picture that Megan Abbott took of Dr. Theresa (waving her hands in the air like she just doesn't care... but she does!) and Thacker producer Kathryn McGaw York grooving out on the sight of all their crazy hard work coming to fruition. Note Lopez's fetching hat, clearly visible in two photos thus far. Saw David Swider of The End of All Music. He said I should bring my Emmy to the record store for "Touch the Emmy Day," and people will come by and touch my Emmy while I spin records under the name "DJ Emmy." It seemed like a hilarious idea while we drank whiskey in Faulkner's yard and swooned companionably in the blazing hot sun! I feel like everybody sang about ghosts. Is that an exaggeration? I'm not sure! Must have been the unconscious pull of the setting. Or maybe songwriters just happen to like ghosts. I remember once many years ago a friend of mine claimed that she didn't like any song with the word "ghost" in it, which I found stunningly arbitrary. Okay, I'm leaving a lot of stuff out. But later that night, there was another show (not on Faulkner's lawn), and I was happy to hear great musicians like Amy Ray and Laurie Stirratt literally singing Dr. Theresa's praises (well, not literally! They were speaking, not singing, at those moments) from the stage. But before that late-night show, Dr. Theresa, who was in charge, was faced with some emergencies! Like: an amp that shocked a famous session guitarist with its electricity! Or: a drum kit but NO DRUMSTICKS! Jennifer and I were sent out into the night to scour the town for drumsticks. We went to a bar called Proud Larry's, where there is usually a band playing, to see whether the drummer might have an extra pair of sticks. But as we approached the door I noticed that the band's name had been ominously rubbed from the chalkboard outside! And sure enough, the band had been canceled because everybody wanted to watch the University of Mississippi play at Alabama, a big game. BUT! A thoughtful waiter told us that one of the bartenders was a drummer. And the bartender kindly went to check his car and found a drumstick. A single drumstick! It felt like a kind of triumph. A useless triumph! But I encouraged Jennifer to hold the pointless drumstick aloft in a victorious gesture as we returned. By the time we got back they had already found two more drumsticks. So we actually had one more drumstick than was absolutely necessary! Chris Lopez played first, under his solo guise "Tenement Halls." ("Click" here to listen to my favorite Tenement Halls song: you won't be sorry!) He kept taunting us with the first few bars of "Black Ice" (a Rock*A*Teens song which I have written about in the New York Times! or their "web" site anyway) but couldn't remember the lyrics. Finally he called out from the stage, "Theresa, what's the first line?" And we yelled back at him from the back table, but we didn't quite have them right either. Turns out the first line is "In a town up north of Nashville, where the Crackers go to learn how to play..." (I think) But (though we had the second half right) I had always heard it as something like, "In a town outta nada of Naughahooga" or something like that. Anyway, it got Chris rolling! After Chris's set, Rock*A*Teens fan Bill Boyle and I discussed the lyrics of "Black Ice" and how many different, incorrect ways we had heard them over the years. One thing I enjoyed was the fluid spirit of the proceedings. It didn't seem like five or six different bands playing, but more like one larger band that kept undulating and changing its shape in a lovely way. Lopez played drums for Amy Ray and Jon Langford and Hogan... Langford played guitar for Hogan... Hogan sang harmonies for Langford and Ray... like that. I really enjoyed hearing the Amy Ray/Rock*A*Teens collaboration "Black Heart Today." I found an older, milder, more "acoustic" performance of it on the "internet," which is good, but if you "click" here you will miss Lopez's rabid drum fills, for one thing, which had grown in majestic stature as the night drew to a close. I hope somebody recorded it! And all its mystical punk rock vibrations of glory.

I played accordion on three songs for Hogan, I think, including one I wrote a couple of decades ago (ugh! what a thought! decades! "click" here if you'd like to hear it, false starts and all). I played on Hogan's cover of the Magnetic Fields song "Papa Was a Rodeo" (really, I just noodled along) and I got so concerned with my noodling that I didn't even notice that Amy Ray had come up to join in, and I happened to glance out of the corner of my eye to see Amy Ray and Kelly Hogan gracefully two-stepping together.

Here's a still photo of that moment (post-dancing, I think). I stole it from somebody's twitter, sorry! There was a giant in a cowboy hat who was VERY enthusiastic about Langford's set. He whooped with such frightening intensity that Langford had to stop the show and calm him down with vinegary Welsh quips. Later I went to the men's room and found that giant cowboy in there with his girlfriend! They were just hanging out, no funny business, don't get me wrong. But then as he stood at the urinal he was going "OOOHHHHH! OUCH! ARRGHHHHH! AAAAAHHHWWWWWW!" like a person in the greatest human agony, which perhaps he was. Why did I mention that when there were so many nicer things to mention instead? Like breakfast the next day with Julie and Barry and Langford? John Currence surprised us by coming up behind us stomping on the floor, shaking the very building with his mighty tread! What the hell, it's his building, he can do what he wants! Then he bought champagne for the table as you can plainly see from this photo of the occasion.

Currence (not pictured) was pumped up and celebrating the University's triumph over its rival, to which I have already alluded. Sorry, Ashly, a lot of other stuff happened but my mind is going.

My Cloak of Blue

Hey! This is real boring. But you know how I can't settle on anything to read right now. When I was cleaning my office recently - ha ha! I told you this was boring, and we're just getting started! - I found where I had hidden (and forgotten) the galley of a Frank Sinatra bio that came out a couple years ago, I guess. I hid it because my sister was visiting and I was giving her the hardcover for Christmas (I think)... hmm... and for some reason that doesn't make total sense, I guess I thought I needed to hide the galley from her... Well, I started reading it, and I'm not enjoying it very much... seems to me the author is trying to be Nick Tosches, but he comes off more like "a little boy lost in a big man's shirt," to quote Elvis Costello... lots of phony hepcat lingo and street talk in a loosey-goosey "novelistic" style, peppered with the occasional "classical allusion"... ugh. I mean, ugh unless you're Nick Tosches. (Hey, remember when I made that guy read a Nick Tosches book and he hated it? So I guess it serves me right.) BUT! Megan Abbott really liked this Frank Sinatra book, the one I can't get into, and she has never steered me wrong about anything, ever, and let's remember I am just in a bad mood all the time, for which I blame Errol Flynn and his depressing autobiography. I haven't recovered! Megan put her finger on the problem in an email this morning: "I think you've been reading too much chest-thumping male stuff in a row! You need to mix in something feminine, and sly!" So now that I have made excuses for the Frank bio, and introduced a reliable source who very much enjoyed it, I think it is okay to say it is bumming me out, and by bringing it out into the open I have allowed myself to tell you that it has an owl in it, well, young Frank is said to have a "night-owl disposition" and that's really all it takes for me, it totally counts, so this book can go on my obsessive list of books I happen to read that have owls in them and I don't feel bad about my mental health at all, thanks for asking. An owl is not a chicken, but they are both birds, so here is a Sinatra-based chicken from an old Warner Bros. cartoon. (Between typing that sentence and this one, I read some more of the Frank Sinatra bio. The author says that Tommy Dorsey had "a deliciously corny nickname, the Sentimental Gentleman of Swing." But I recalled that earlier in the book he refers to "a soupy, utterly forgettable Frank Loesser ballad," which he then quotes with snotty intent: "Here comes the night, my cloak of blue." I mean, what's wrong with that? What makes one of those things "deliciously corny" and the other "soupy" and "utterly forgettable" [you'll note I didn't forget it]? But of course I know that being a writer means making such blithely arbitrary distinctions hundreds of times per page. So you can see what kind of rotten mood I'm in.)

What's John Lyly Got Against Owls

Noticing that this John Lyly play (CAMPASPE) has TWO entirely different prologues, one for us normal jerks (which I quoted yesterday) and one for the fancy royal people at their fancy royal court with all their fancy royal ways. But in both cases, he's really sticking it to the owls. This is from the prologue at court: "We are ashamed that our bird, which fluttered by twilight seeming a swan, should be proved a bat set against the sun. But as Jupiter placed Silenus' ass among the stars, and Alcibiades covered his pictures, being owls and apes, with a curtain embroidered with lions and eagles..." Ugh, first of all, why did that dude have all these pictures of owls and apes if he was just going to cover them up with a dumb curtain? Here's a idea, stop buying pictures of owls and apes if you hate them so much. If you ask me, owls and apes have got it all over lions and eagles when it comes to good party times. Lots of people who appreciate owls and apes would be happy to get their mitts on those pictures, and you're just like, "Come on in, oh, wait a second, I need to throw something over these awful pictures of owls and apes I have lying around everywhere, sorry." Also, yeah, yeah, we get it, John Lyly. You're fishing for a compliment! Okay, okay, your play is great, it's not a bat or whatever, it's a beautiful swan, shut up, gee whiz. But I really do like his turns of phrase "a bat set against the sun" and the "ass among the stars."

Catarrh

"Pray go back and recollect one of the conclusions to which I sought to lead you in my very first lecture," William James implores us in Lecture #10 of his VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE: "You may remember how I there argued against the notion that the worth of a thing can be decided by its origin." So that told me that Bill Taft was right, or very close to right, in his fine guess about what William James meant! Plus it was a clue about where to find that thing about St. Paul that has been bugging my memory... because the index was no help. The index of this musty old paperback is inadequate. INADEQUATE! And the print is so tiny and the lines so close together... but I went back to the very first lecture, as William James begged me to do, and found the passage I was thinking of, which begins, "Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex... It snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate. George Fox's discontent with the shams of his age, and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as the symptom of a disordered colon. Carlyle's organ-tones of misery it accounts for by a gastro-duodenal catarrh." I have to stop typing now, or else I'm going to find myself typing a lot of stuff like, "To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite illogical and arbitrary, unless one has already worked out in advance some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with determinate sorts of physiological change." Ugh, my head hurts now, does that count?

Look at Me I'm Wearing a Hat

Walked Megan Abbott home from our place last night because look! She had to go through at least one dark alley. Which I'm sure she could have handled alone but for God's sake! I'm a gentleman! And like most gentlemen I am wearing a derby. Because we were watching THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JUDGE ROY BEAN and I was like, "Hey! I have a hat just like one of Paul Newman's hats in this movie! Same color (brown) and everything!" So I broke out the hat. ("Click" here for another incredible story about someone exclaiming something about a hat in a movie.) Let me tell you about my hat. This tale will be sure to bore you! I was up at the City Grocery Bar and a doctor who frequents that place surprised me by giving me a hat he had ordered for me! In a hat box! This was some years ago. One year ago? At least a year ago. I once wrote a novel about a 30-foot-tall giant who wears just such a hat, and this was the doctor's way of saying he enjoyed the novel. I guess the giant is 30 feet tall. I don't believe I'm very specific about it. Once in a Q&A session after a reading someone asked me how tall the giant was, and that's what I came up with. "How much does he weigh?" a smart aleck followed up. "A hundred and ten pounds," I replied sarcastically. It occurs to me that in the first draft I had the giant switch sizes when he felt like it. Tom Franklin read that draft and said, "You know, if he changes size he's not really a giant." I had to admit Tom had a point! Ugh, so then I had go back and rewrite the whole thing. So thanks for nothing. Now, the novel was inspired by a guy I saw in the Little Five Points section of Atlanta wearing a derby, rather ridiculously, I thought, and I imagined his inner monologue, which resulted in the first sentence of the novel: "Man, I look fantastic in this derby." Isn't that the first sentence of the novel? Was that comma in there? So I guess I was making fun of people who wear derbies. But remember what Mel Brooks said! (You really need to "click" on that "hyperlink.") The hat was far too small for my melon-like head, so I borrowed a hat stretcher. Guess who had a hat stretcher. That's right, Chris Offutt! He is the kind of man who has a hat stretcher lying around just in case. So anyway now I have worn a derby in public, sort of. I have slunk through back alleys wearing a derby.

A Vial of Deadly Germs

"The series failed, but at least the plot for this episode is so tried and true you have to wonder why," writes McNeil. He encloses an eight-second video clip ("click" here) but I know you won't "click," you are too lazy to even "click" on an eight-second video clip, jerk, so now I have to spoil it for everybody by revealing that it says, "A vial of deadly germs imperils an entire city on MY FRIEND TONY, tonight." But now you will never know how funny it is because of the professional cigarette voice of the announcer and the little, almost comic lift he gives to the title of the show, incongruously (but somehow inevitably), considering what has gone before, or maybe I'm just imagining that, but I guess you'll never know. "And here are some of the worst opening credits I've seen. Not THE worst, but the hands to the face at the end....whew," McNeil concludes, but hell, you won't "click" on that either, will you? How I hate you. As consolation, I turn to my copy of THE COMPLETE DIRECTORY TO PRIME TIME NETWORK TV SHOWS 1946-PRESENT by Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh, which is almost without exception totally useless in our modern world. Yet now I may with glee type up the entire entry on MY FRIEND TONY: "When he was in Italy shortly after the end of World War II, John Woodruff almost had his wallet stolen by a street urchin named Tony. Years later, a fully grown Tony arrived in America to join John as half of a private-investigation team. Professor Woodruff, whose academic career in criminology had given him the ability to analyze the most obscure clues..." ugh, never mind, I can't type anymore, okay, I'll type this one phrase that comes toward the end, "Tony's carefree romanticism," anyway, ha ha ha, "street urchin."

Exultant Radio Quotation

Yesterday we were driving to Chris and Melissa's for some trad collard greens and black-eyed peas and the radio was tuned to the NPR show ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, which promised an upcoming news story about "how a two-year-old overcame his fear of Frankenstein," which didn't sound like much of a story to me, sounded like a Halloween story at best, certainly not a New Year's Day story, but who am I to judge, and there followed an anticipatory soundbite from the story, an exultant woman (the mother?) quoting the child like so: "He said, 'I pooped on the Frankenstein!'" - something I never expected to hear, least of all on NPR, but you can't be mad at me for telling you, because it was on NPR. ALL THINGS CONSIDERED is a good title for that show, yes, they have really considered everything now, I wish they would stop, I'm sorry, lady, I don't care very much about your two-year-old pooping on a Frankenstein, though your connections in the radio business are seemingly extraordinary. Hey! I actually found a transcript of the entire radio story (scroll to the bottom of this "link" - ha ha, who am I kidding? I know you won't!). Anyway, because it's NPR they have a "peer reviewed psychologist" commenting on the whole thing and he says, "My main thought is your nephew is a brilliant story editor. What a nice turn of narrative." Ugh.

Oh Dear

Okay, ugh, I have read enough in this book about William Davenant's syphilis treatments. "He had spent an unspecified period of time with his head sewn into a medicated hood..." That's one of the milder ones. Lee Durkee told me that Davenant used to hint to everyone that Shakespeare was his real dad. The book mentions as much, and says that he usually let that slip while drunk.

Tweaking Twerking

I keep tweaking my "post" about twerking, ha ha ha, ugh, oh boy, is it too early to start drinking?

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.

Dean Martin Epiphany

I was just watching this Richard Pryor documentary on one of these movie channels and it said that when Richard Pryor was first working in Las Vegas he was doing his act and he looked down and saw Dean Martin in the audience and suddenly he saw himself through Dean Martin's eyes, and saw that Dean Martin knew he was a phony, and from then on he stopped doing his regular everyday stand-up act and started doing his Richard Pryor act, the act that let us know he was a genius. And that made me remember that I once taught a "humor" class at the university - ugh! what could be more useless and horrible? - and I divided the students into groups and made them research and write one-act plays about various comic geniuses, such as Richard Pryor and Dorothy Parker. And the class was two little dudes and 12 young women. So a young woman was obligated to portray Richard Pryor, and she was thoroughly committed and did a great job! And as I recall, the play that group came up with was Garrison Keillor interviewing Richard Pryor in heaven. So now I need to tell you that one of the young women was utterly obsessed with Garrison Keillor. She was a goodnatured and brilliant young person who was sometimes late for class because of her piano lessons. And then it turned out that she was trying to be Miss America! She was Miss Mississippi, and her piano lessons were aimed toward the national contest. She was awesome! And she played Garrison Keillor (in the Richard Pryor skit) with aplomb, which is more than Garrison Keillor ever did, ha ha. (Garrison Keillor came to speak to the class but that's another story. I didn't plan or ask for it! The "Honors College" made it happen. In fact, they asked me to design a class around the fact that Garrison Keillor was coming. Garrison Keillor was coming!) I guess that class had the most cross-dressing of any class I ever taught. In the Dorothy Parker skit, a young woman portrayed Parker's BFF Robert Benchley with such incredible verve that I had to ask whether she had ever acted before. She said, "I was in one movie. Have you ever heard of O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU?" (That wasn't a rhetorical question; she was just extremely modest.) Turns out she was the middle-sized "Li'l Wharvey Gal" (see below). She gets to tell George Clooney he "ain't bona fide!" You remember that part.

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.

Jazz Ghost

You know what Frank Kermode said about Shakespeare: "To be able to devote one’s life to art without forgetting that art is frivolous is a tremendous achievement of personal character." And what about when John Ashbery said that poetry is good because of its impracticality? Plus how can we forget the Maine antiques dealer who said, "I think I’m more and more attracted to things that aren’t worth anything"? Let me add a composer I really like, Thomas Adès, who says in a book of interviews, "I have to make gratuitous things... which the philosophers can't explain." He says a lot of other aphoristic things, too! He's very aphoristic. I'd tell you more except I am teaching this book to my grad students next semester and I want to leave some surprises for them. Well, he says some things about Mahler I don't agree with at all, but he does praise Mahler when Mahler "embraces and celebrates the futility of his life and his music." I can get behind that! And then he says (still about Mahler) "good for him. Grand failures are preferable to sneaky successes, aren't they?" And that makes me think of something I have said on the "blog." I can't tell you more! We're reading DRACULA and WUTHERING HEIGHTS in my grad class too. And GLINDA OF OZ, which I haven't yet read, but I'm getting behind Laura Lippman's interpretation, so I am sure it will be a success. I was going to make them read THE PATCHWORK GIRL OF OZ but the ending depressed me too much. (Spoilers here, nearly a century old, but still.) The Glass Cat with awesome brains like pink marbles is forced to exchange them for transparent brains. She becomes "humble" - ugh! - and boring, which in the world of the book is supposed to be a good thing. We all know it's not so. Well, I mean it's good to be humble, of course, but you don't have to be boring about it, and DO try to stop people from switching out your brains on a whim if at all possible. I am quite disturbed, also, by the political system of Oz. Magic is outlawed! You might think my ideas to be conservative. Am I against government regulation? Well, I guess so in this case! Only a certain few government-licensed employees of the state are allowed to practice magic in Oz. If magic spells are the guns of Oz, then Ozma has repealed the second amendment. On the other hand, if you think of magic as free speech (that's probably more like it - I guess!), then I am a true liberal, and Ozma is a censor. The Patchwork Girl never did become "terrifyingly amoral" in my opinion, as Lippman promised. The closest she came was saying that she would gladly "kill a dozen useless butterflies" to help her friend. That was scary! But I guess "punk rock" is the best definition of her in my book. Finally, I should tell you that our annual Halloween film festival ended with a movie called TORMENTED, all about a jazz pianist practicing for Carnegie Hall (!) who accidentally (sort of, not really) lets his girlfriend ("Wow! Look at that brassiere!" exclaimed Dr. Theresa) fall off a lighthouse and then she's dead and a ghost! I particularly loved the scheming beatnik in TORMENTED and kept wondering where I had seen him before. Turns out that many years later he was the bartender ghost in THE SHINING! I learned that from imdb.

Unknown Land Pirate and the Feathered Mimes

"No government inquiry, official or otherwise, was made into Lewis's death. Incredibly, no official even so much as visited the scene." Yeah guess what I checked out of the library today, yes, that's right, a biography of Meriwether Lewis. In it I found another account of how Lewis's friend Alexander Wilson did a little investigation at the site of Lewis's death. "Once out of sight of the cabins," writes the author (Richard Dillon), "he broke down and wept for his dead friend." Wilson also wrote a poem about it: "The dark despair that round him blew,/ No eye, save that of Heaven, beheld,/ None but unfeeling strangers knew." And "Pale Pity consecrate the spot/ Where poor lost Lewis now lies low!" And so on. "On his ride, Wilson encountered a mockingbird which was singing its own sweet song, not the borrowed melodies of other birds which the feathered mimes adopted so easily. He wondered if perhaps the bird had sung for Lewis." That line, plus some hints that Wilson began to suspect foul play, made me check out another book - THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF ALEXANDER WILSON - because I wanted to see the source materials for myself. I found Wilson's account of the trip, and he does tell a mockingbird story, but it's nothing like the one Dillon reports. On the plus side there's this from the same letter: "I then sought out a place to encamp, kindled a large fire, stript the canes from my horse, eat a bit of supper, and lay down to sleep, listening to the owls... but for the gnats, would have slept tolerably well." So that makes THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF ALEXANDER WILSON a book with an owl in it, so I've got that going for me, you know how I feel about that, I feel like I'm not wasting my life, that's how I feel. Dillon writes near the end of the bio, "Was Meriwether Lewis murdered? Yes. Is there proof of his murder? No." And: "His assassin, I am convinced, was either an unknown land pirate of the ilk of the Harpe brothers of bloody Natchez notoriety, or the mysterious Runnion... because his moccasin tracks and the impression of the butt of his unusual rifle were found in the dirt near Lewis's cabin." But you know, I lost interest at some point because while I was googling around I saw that somebody wrote a "historical mystery novel" about the whole thing and ugh I don't know, I found that dispiriting for some reason, don't try to figure me out! YOU CAN'T! PS I was going to illustrate this "post" with a picture of the Harpe brothers of bloody Natchez notoriety but I just read about them and THEY'RE AWFUL! I don't want to tell you what they used to do to people but it has something to do with the way Henry Fonda sang, I can say no more. So here is Alexander Wilson instead, he seems nice, let's think of nice things from now on, promise?

If You Know Me At All

You know I have been spending all of my spare time looking up Walter Tetley and the guy who did the voice of the Lucky Charms leprechaun on the "internet." And why wouldn't I? That's how I found "The Walter Tetley Web Page." "Click" here for "Chamber of My Mind," the section that details, in part, a camping trip the author of "The Walter Tetley Web Page" enjoyed. "Click" here for details of a six-page letter the author of "The Walter Tetley Web Page" received from Chris Allen, the woman who did the voice of the cartoon character Hoppity Hooper. "I started writing when I was about nine years old," she says, adding this charming detail: "I wrote cowboy stories and mad love stories which I knew nothing about..........I kept writing away.........just for my own fulfillment..........until much later I started receiving payment for some of these things. I did comedy material........" (These startlingly extended ellipses may be Allen's, though the author of "The Walter Tetley Web Page" deploys them elsewhere, so I kind of think they're his.) She goes on to tell about writing for Bob Hope. "This first job was.........with four other MEN COMEDY WRITERS who were tops in the field, who looked at me like I had rocks in my head........I mean.........how dare this girl.......still in school..........try to compete with four top MALE writers?" The "internet" has everything! I checked the Behemoth Who Will Never Be Named Here for its usual fascinatingly inane customer comments, this time on the biography of Walter Tetley. I liked this one for some reason: "I purchased this book to find out more about Walter who is my 2nd cousin, once removed, ie we share the same great great grandfather." The "internet" has lots of ideas about why Walter Tetley was an adult who never achieved puberty, some more horrific than others. Check out his wikipedia page and see how quickly you can spot the most horrible rumor, or don't. Don't. To take your mind off it, here's an ecstatic review of the autobiography of the guy who did the voice of the Lucky Charms leprechaun. Headline? "A MAGICALLY DELICIOUS AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ACTOR." And wait! Here is a news story about him conceived and written in an incredibly annoying way. Sample: "The Lucky Charms leprechaun is not Irish. Someone get my shillelagh!" Ugh. The leprechaun is quoted as saying, "I never got free cereal. But they gave me lots of green money." Also: "I had the luck of the Irish to get that part." I'm confused. Speaking of things that are on the "internet," a student in my scary story class was looking for a particular work of H.P. Lovecraft and came across the homepage of a guy who bills himself as "vampire, poet, fire breather." I mentioned as much in class. "And sword swallower," the student reminded me. Megan Abbott (who is reading at Off Square Books tomorrow!) sent me the imdb bio page for a model named Jinx Falkenberg (pictured), which, according to Megan, "somehow seems to encompass the change in the culture in the last 75 years," up to and including HOARDERS! McNeil wrote to tell me that there's a lunch box museum in Columbus, Georgia, the "web" site of which - as I discovered - is crushingly disappointing. "Click" on the history of The Lunch Box Museum and you will see that there is no history of The Lunch Box Museum. Okay, I think that's everything on the "internet."

Two Things I Didn't Google

Late last night I saw a little bit of a movie called AMERICAN KICKBOXER 1 - a charmingly confident title! I didn't "google" it because I am sure a lot of other people on the "internet" have already made wry observations about naming your movie with the built-in presumption of a sequel. Is that the only time a filmmaker has done that? Well, I don't know. I didn't "google" it. I don't even know if that's the correct title. That's just what the TV told me when I "clicked" on the channel. When I came in, a wisecracking reporter was arguing with his no-nonsense editor, and the two actors were really trying to give it something, you know? They were scrappy, I guess that's how I would put it. Then I flipped away to a quirky independent movie about a quirky middle-aged man having a quirky midlife crisis. He rode a bicycle that was too small for him, for example! And he identified with an extinct bird, how quirky! And a melancholy, beautiful teen, wise beyond her years, gave him some life lessons, natch! So they curled up together chastely under a hand-knitted blanket and fell into a cozy slumber and uptight people who weren't quirky enough misunderstood their quirky relationship. So everybody gazed out over the cold ocean and thought about their quirks. Ugh. I flipped back to AMERICAN KICKBOXER 1 and two kickboxers were sparring in the ring and one said, "You can't take the heat!" And the other one said, "I can take the heat, I just can't take your ATTITUDE!" He seemed like he was about to cry. So the first kickboxer left the ring in a huff and the second kickboxer cried out, "That's right! WALK AWAY!" I have to say that between the two films, the emotions seemed more genuine in AMERICAN KICKBOXER 1. The other thing I didn't "google" was the "Chocolate Wonderfall," which is something else in the steak and cotton candy commercial Dr. Theresa told me about. I started to "google" "Chocolate Wonderfall" but you know how when you start to "google" now the "google" will try to fill in the rest of the term for you before you finish typing it? So I was in the process of "googling" "Chocolate Wonderfall" and "google" filled this in for me: chocolate wonderfall gross - so I became disheartened and stopped "googling." But now I'm going to do a "Google Image Search" for it. You win, Chocolate Wonderfall!

Shut Up Old Man

I saw over on the facebook there that A Cappella Books is moving out of our old neighborhood and to a new location. Citizens of Atlanta! Go support it. I used to walk up there almost every day and get my cup of coffee from Aurora and poke around the bookstore and maybe Criminal Records (which isn't there anymore either). Ugh! I know you're bored! I'm boring myself. I'm going to be the kind of old man who visits the old neighborhood and looks around all disappointed in the world and says, "That's where such-and-such used to be." Like, "I remember one day I was walking here and I saw a white rat with no head." Like, "That's where I saw Bruce Springsteen stocking up on pricey art books. Why, I was close enough to touch his bald spot!" And whatever young punk I'm with will say, "Who's Bruce Springsteen?" It's no more than I deserve.

The Ichthyologist: Modern-Day Undercover Procopius?

As you will recall from reading the New York Times with me every day, their gossip columnist ONLY writes about celebrities eating fish. They should make up a new name for her. Like, right now they call her "The Nocturnalist" but they should change it to "The Ichthyologist!" Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Because of the fish. Sure, Martha Stewart feeds her a Jordan almond in today's installment. BUT! She also sees John McEnroe eating "Alaskan black cod" in a parking garage. For real! "Click" here if you don't believe me. But don't "click"! Because then you will have to read about a fancy gala where rich people dress up like rich hoboes or something, with "motorcycle evening gloves," whatever those are, and someone walks by and exclaims, "Glam in the gutter!" to The Ichthyologist. Ugh! Somebody really says that! They are hanging around in a parking garage for irony! They're having fun pretending to be partially poor! Like, only their gloves are poor. I don't know, part of me thinks that The Ichthyologist is secretly thinking "ugh" along with me like some modern-day Procopius but it's all just too subtle for me I guess.