Exclamation Mark

If there is anything to be said for extreme cold in Orlando, it is this: This is the only time of the year that you can walk around in a peacoat in Florida. Which I am doing.

Also, I've been watching less TV than usual, but have not have been having (have not have been having?) too much time to read non-required stuff. Been reading (and rereading) some stories for my fiction and nonfiction workshops, along with assorted articles for the satire class, plus the last two New Yorkers. My fiction bit is up for discussion this Tuesday. The nonfiction bit is due for next Monday, and I was having a hard time deciding what to write about, but will probably do a piece on hobbledehoydom and Bogota. The trick, which shouldn't be too hard to pull off, is to do almost a kind of essay on Trollope and his take on awkward maleness, along with illustrated examples of this awkwardness in action from life. Along of course with parts where the hobbledeyhoydom is overcome or come to grips with or when it is accepted. I am trying to find a way to do it all w/o resorting to the Hunter S Thompson-ish bits, the booze and the substances, but they do seem integral to the fabric of the awkwardness. And also trying to find a way to avoid an Oh-I-learned-so-much kind of bullshit little memoir, but also want to keep away from an I-regret-nothing type narrative. I learned little. I regret a few moments, moments where the hobbledeydom turned to assholishness. So right now the only problem is how much weight to give to each discrete part. We'll see.

There should also be at least a little bit on two exemplary hobbledehoys: Charlie Brown (ur-hob.) and Kermit (the hob. every awk. male should aspire to, the ideal hob.).

Anyway, I hope you're well. I hope you're wearing a peacoat. I hope you're happy.

I am almost unutterably so, and have no good excuse for it.

Also, visit Nicholas Laughlin! Say hi! His blog kicks ass.

Back!

Hello! Happy New Year!

There have been some updates to the Nabokov site.

Life is pretty good.

Plenty of coffee, and I'm working 15 hours at the writing center (they offered me more hours and I figured why not) and 5 at the labs (I'd have worked more, but with the assistantship (which covers a significant portion of the hefty out-of-state tuition fee) I'm only allowed to work 20 hours, so pennyless, yes, but also more or less secured school-wise). And I'm taking two workshops this semester, fiction and non-, plus a seminar on satire (there's Dryden! and Pope! and Swift! and even David Lodge and Kingsley Amis!).

Off!

Off to Boca Raton. See you in 2003. Have a terrific time.

!

The first week of break has been fantastic, and not at all hectic. UCF has been justifiably abuzz about getting its first Rhodes Scholar. He seems vaguely familiar but I can't quite recall why. I don't think I had a class with him. But I was on my way somewhere today and ran across the vaguely familiar R.S. -- he waved and said Hi and I waved and smiled, thinking, This person, he looks vaguely familiar, and then realizing, Ah, R.S.!, and turning and saying "Congratulations!" To which he very graciously said Thank you.

Here's the thing: he looked vaguely familiar but not because of the R.S. thing. And now I'm not sure if we are somehow acquainted from before, hence his waving at me, or maybe he's been getting a lot of people looking at him, thinking, That person looks familiar, hence the preemptive smile-and-wave. I don't know. Anyway, he seems like someone who totally deserves this and will go very far. And he's an English major! And he speaks Spanish!

In other news, I received an e-mail from someone who was convinced that I was a hoax -- some fictive Colombian fellow concocted by someone else. Not so. I'm here, and I am who I am, and while I have no conclusive evidence I can offer this documentary proof from the new job at the writing center. I'm the blurry person in white on the bottom left hand corner of the group photo. You'll also find me under "The Consultants" -- Juan Martinez.

Oh, also: Updates to the Nabokov page!.

And: my friend Keith's life has been very interesting. I was given a heads up on the big news a few months ago, but you should visit and say hi and be nice.

Overwhelmed by indifference and the promise of an early bed

Via RobotWisdom, a link on gauging how much radio sucks. Very mathematical. Very true. And I was looking and laughing and thinking, Yes, but there's always New Jersey's WFMU, and then I look at the URL of the link.

So yes. Of course. Today's shaping up to be a glorious Sunday.

Also: I have not shaved in like three days. The break doesn't really start until Tuesday, but I'm getting my break beard in early. I have no clue why. All I know is it's time for reading and drinking way more coffee than is good for me and for wandering around the arboretum for lunch, trying to figure out if there really are different kinds of cypresses or if the person who wrote the little labels with the descriptions is pulling my chain, because I can't tell them apart, though I'm doing better with the ferns, and of course it's been a great couple of days for running on the treadmill and for lifting weights and for doing some writing. But every day is a great day for that. But now it's being done while temporarily furry.

Anyway. More coffee.

This Must Be the Place

So for a while I had been in a funk, and the most surprising thing about it is how everything pretty much proceeded as normal -- continued to get up early in the morning to work out, continued to do well in school and at work. What's also surprising is that there was no real gradual funk-tapering. I went to bed one night whilst still sad and woke up not. Another surprising thing: I had not felt this low in ages, and for the weeks that it lasted it seemed almost welcome, this shift, this change from muffled tranquility to raw heart-on-one's-sleeve condition. And then back to tranquility, with newfound awareness and appreciation of the unscripted nature of living. So the temporary shift was welcome, and yet all the same there was a certain envy for other creatures that don't seem to have this kind of problem. Like stoats. Stoats don't shuffle around all angsty.

But a stoat could not read up on the Ministry of Defense of his mother-country: "It associates the act of desertion with something completely not real." Nor could a stoat have watched the remarkable remake of Solaris, and think that Soderbergh improved on Tarkovsky.

I Know Perfectly Well I'm Not Where I Should Be

Admit failure. Accept defeat. Embrace loss. Be sweet. Be brave. Be yourself. Be someone else. Be elsewhere. Be right here. Be aware. Be oblivious. Understand every chamber of your heart. Understand that you are, in fact, holding said organ in your hands. Understand that it's okay to drop it or to misplace it once in a while. Be attuned. Listen. Don't. Talk. Don't talk. Be very very small. Read. Smile. Give in. Surrender. Be obvious. Be inscrutable. Write. Write about all the obvious things. Expect. Don't expect. Be fit. Be faint of heart. Be temperate. Believe in the randomness of the universe. Be open to every small good thing that comes your way. Understand that everything passes. Be very old. Be very young. Trust everyone. Throw your hands in the air. Say nothing. Need nothing. Ask for nothing. Keep nothing from anyone. Give everything away. Keep every bridge burning at the same steady rate.

Lines (Cut, Paste, Sink, Swim)

The perspective is like a shadow moving across a lawn.

My brain is the cliff and my heart is the bitter buffalo.

You could've been a genius if you had an axe to grind.

Instead we're on earth unrolling bolts of cloth made from time, using trust for thread -- trust slowly coming off the spindle...

These things happen to other people. They don't happen at all, in fact.

Such observations, however, as I have been enabled to make in this matter have led me to believe that the hobbledehoy is by no means the least valuable species of the human race.

For the Birds

The third print issue of Pindeldyboz is out. You should get it because

• It features a lovely introduction by New Yorker Shouts & Murmurs editor Ben Greenman, said introduction having a glorious, poignant bit involving women and the novelist Thomas Hardy.
• It has a lovely cover involving a dart injuring, drawn by Ledbetter, plus there is a strong chance you will also get a poster of birds on a branch, drawn by the same artist.
• It has wonderful stories written by talented people, including
  • A broken-hearts travelogue by Jason Wilson, the series editor for The Best American Travel Writing (yes, the same people responsible for Best American Short Stories.)
  • A great rumbler of a tale by Mike Magnuson, author of the wonderful sort-of-novel Lummox.
  • The rest of the stories, including the last one. Read on for more on the last one.
• It has a story by yours truly that is better than average (for yours truly: this is an actual tale, a kind of fairy tale, with things happening in it), about a little girl in love with her two neighbors. Her two neighbors are women. The little girl is very sweet, but a little strange. You can say the same thing about the story. It is called "Errands."

Get it! Get it now!

The Sweaty Bits! The Wilderness of Monkeying-Around!

"Quiet," to quote the front cover of the book I'm currently re-reading for class, "has its own set of problems."

There was this girl I was monkeying around with for a little bit, this after not monkeying around for a long, long time, partly because I am pretty quiet, don't drive, and am not, no matter how hard you squint, Antonio Banderas. Also, I was kind of a heavy drinker for a long time -- a heavy drinker and a bit of a sloth, which resulted in getting really fat and the almost total cessation of monkeying around in parties (and when there was monkeying around it was the really drunken type, where the girl or I or both would walk away sour and hungover and full of horrible thoughts about how low, how incredibly low we must have sunk). So after I stopped drinking and started working out the thought of hooking up did not enter my mind. I was mostly just working out, reading, writing, watching knotty foreign movies (more Goddard than you can shake a stick at), and getting my act together. Which it pretty much is all together, the act.

But it was a pretty quiet act. And an act that, in all honesty, didn't really even conceive of the remote possibility of monkey-business, let alone monkey-business with a cutie. Or, if we are to be accurate and boastful about this, (and we should be): a hottie.

Anyway, it pretty much faded off after two weeks, but they were pretty damn wonderful, these two weeks, and evidence that the universe is skewed enough to dispense rewards where none are deserved, not really. The other thing about the monkey-business is that it reminded me of how everything else we do is really just a stand-in for monkeying around, for connecting with people (which yes, I know, is more than just surface, skin-deep, whatever: there's a lot to be said for plain objective beauty), and that most of what we do or write o read or paint or whatever works as stand-ins for this very simple thing, this very basic thing. That these stand-ins are wonderful. That they can move us. But that in the end they're just stand-ins. Literature is a great way to relate to the world -- the experiencing of experience, as Barth puts it. But the experiencing of experience in print is a poor substitute for actual experience.

There were of course a few flaky moments. Moments of total flipping out. Moments where certain CDs were put in the boombox and played -- CDs containing songs of total dejection and melancholy, which are actually fun unless you're actually a little dejected and melancholy, in which, for God's sake, man, play some Monkees or something. Jesus. But flaky moments nonwithstanding, this whole monkeying-around after not monkeying-around for so long was pretty damn wonderful. And the aftereffects, whether it's because I no longer drink (hence maybe less histrionics?) or have grown a bit or whatever, are not as bad as remembered: there's no bitterness, no anger, no regret. There might have been a day or two where I might have felt like a safe fell on me. But it was a cartoon safe -- you shuffled out from underneath, accordioned out ala Wile E. Coyote. At worst there's a bit of fatigue, and not much of that.

Mostly it's just this deep afterglow of contentment, this little warm core of gratitude.

If you're kind of skimming this and have gotten to the end and missed out on the point, here it is: Monkey around! It's good for you! (As to how to achieve monkeying-around, I am pretty much in the dark. There's the Vonnegut advice, which I have followed, and which may be actually helpful: Smile a lot and wear nice clothes. Also, work out. Also, don't try too hard (don't try to impress, don't try to be someone you're not, don't be all smarmy and sleazy about it). Also, don't worry too much about monkeying-around or not monkeying-around. Just enjoy it when it happens.)

Fight Music for High School Kids

Here's a nonstory by yours truly: Treatment.

Henry Darger is real, a great artist and also disturbing. Also real is Jandek, who is disturbing if nothing else.

In sort of related news, I found a copy of the Marshall Mathers LP on my way to work. It's scratched up but plays fine, and it's damn good.

Who knew?

OK. Everybody knew. I'm two years behind.

Also: Beck's Seachange is a bruiser of an album about the emotional after-effects of monkeying around. Anyone who has ever monkeyed around will dig it. I can imagine Boswell listening to it while recovering from the delights of London.

Time Out

I've spent the better part of today typing revisions to a short novel I wrote four months ago. I like it for not other reason than it is the first time I've consciously drawn on film. It's a really messed up take on Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, with the narrator in a kind of timeless limbo, as a kind of Beast shackled to computer from whence he recounts his experiences.

I had not realized while composing it how much of it hinged on solitude -- much of the narrator's complications stem from his conviction that everything he has will be taken away (it is, else where's the fun? he loses the girl and has to find her in a forest, and there is a rose involved, and ala Cocteau there are sentient limbs everywhere, but you also have mechanical birds, and a Hyundai Excel floating on a river, and a few scenes filched from Lynch), but also on how this fear both magnifies and dampens his enjoying the present or the past. The novel takes place in an eternal present. Time has stopped. No one goes anywhere. What the narrator recalls took place before the end of time, and much of the melancholy of the narrative comes from knowing that the mutable's no longer there. That there's no then anymore. So all I'm saying is I'm happy with this twisted little fable, and happier still that I avoided writing, "Once upon a time," which I don't see how I managed not to.

Here's one motto for the novel that was briefly considered when writing it, reconsidered when revising, and finally dismissed:

Time is like a river made up of the events which happen, and a violent stream; for as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away, and another comes in its place, and this will be carried away too.

Not in the running but actually apropos would have been this snippet from a Nabokov-L discussion:

He was perpetually stricken by the ineluctable passage of time, the evanescence of which so often thwarted his enjoyment of any given moment.

In the end, I went with something that had nothing to do with time.

Sad Professor

Most of these narratives share several important features. The passionate intellectual is usually arrogant, for one thing, operating under the delusion that his mastery of the life of the mind encompasses mastery of the unrulier life of regions lower down. This fatal mistake is almost always the root of the intellectual's undoing. In the end, these stories are about hubris as much as they are about passion, and their chief purpose is to provide a series of entertainingly humiliating correctives to the professor's inflated sense of self.

All true, all true. What one could add -- regardless of whether one is under the thrall or not (one is, at the moment) -- is that it is far better to fall -- far better to accept this unruliness and to accept that one will most likely spaz out, and that one will be simultaneously be quite at home in one's skin one moment and quite willing to crawl out of it the next. That one can't go through with it without a good deal of slapstick, and tripping at every other step, and falling into trap doors set up by one's worse self.

Here's the thing: relax, let it all happen, see what happens, enjoy it while it lasts, and be very grateful for the kindness of women.

The Cult of the Cult

Is it very hard to tie together John Updike, Francine Pascal, the guy who wrote War of the Roses, and Jack Chick? And also Shannen Doherty? And The Simpsons? It is not, not if you have nothing to do and you're at work and stuck in front of a computer on a Sunday.

Also, you should know that even though Our Little Corner of the World has nothing to do with cults, it might be worth checking out anyhow. Even if Rhino mispells the last artist on the soundtrack. Also, there is this.

Royal Journal

I've mailed this this python ad, and this love note to Royal Journal. They do not top the Plaid Hippo. They do not even come close to The Thumbs Up Guy.

Hootchie-Kootchie

Sally Bucher's concept of the nonmusical never gained the respect it deserved. Sally, like most people bent on deconstruction, loved what she set out to tear apart. She thought up the nonmusical not because she felt that the American musical movie needed to be done away with, but because she felt that having a movie set up as a musical, but with no musical numbers, could work. That yearning for a song and a dance could produce an equivalent, if different elation from the one felt when presented with a song or a dance.

Sally's obsession took root after watching Meet Me in St. Louis for a whole night. She rewound the tape and played it the minute it ended. Vincent Minelli did many things right in the movie, but what did it for Sally were the moments were you'd hear a cue for a song, wait for the number to begin, and instead have the scene play out with the song bursting in later, unexpected.

She wrote letters to Sally Benson's estate, thinking that the original New Yorker articles would make the perfect nonmusical. It was already one of the finest musicals around. It would be the first nonmusical. You'd have all the cues, even some from the original. But you'd have no songs. You'd have people about to break into dance. They'd lean into a step that would turn, with balletic precision, into an ordinary, earthbound motion.

Bucher's letters received an unexpected warm response. Bucher, alas, had been deep into the film, had in fact gone so deep that she convinced herself that the response to her letter was written by Sally Benson herself, and she also believed that she (Sally Bucher, Sally B.) was Sally Benson reincarnated. Benson wrote a flurry of letters back -- some dealt with the nonmusical in question, and some with the basic filmic groundings for the nonmusical, but most spilled out Sally B.'s life in tragic and effluent detail. Her handwriting betrayed her desperation, her anger, and her delusion. Sally B. killed her creation with her derangement. The nonmusical was not to be.

What happened to Sally? I don't know. I don't know anyone who knows. The letters remain in the archives. The person who wrote them has vanished.

Daisy

I have turned into someone overly concerned with lists. Here are some:

1. The Rolling Stone 200: A list of 200 essential rock and roll records. I've discovered a few amazing albums via this list, and I've picked up some very mediocre CDs as well, but for the most part (specially the 50s part) the list has been a revelation. CD burners rock.
2. Anthony Burgess' 99 Novels of the 20^th Century: A terrific list with some great and sometimes forgotten books. Surely Burgess included more than a few in there simply because they'd be overlooked otherwise (Nabokov is in there twice, but not for the obvious)
3. El Diablo Songs: Songs whose name is "El Diablo." Must find them all.
4. Ebert's Great Movies: Yes, Ebert. Matt Groening said that the nicest thing about movie critics on TV is that they wear nice sweaters. The other nice thing is that they seem to have a good grounding in film history. I'm about halfway through the films, thanks to the university's terrific library.
5. Movies mentioned in A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American MoviesI'm also halfway through these. I've been looking for one that features an army of women running into a mirrored hall in slow-motion while an unbelievably melancholy voice runs through a voice-over. I forget which movie Scorsese pulled the scene from. But the other movies he's picked (and that I've seen) are pretty damn cool.
6. Compact Deuce: I've discovered some terrific bits here, many available for next to nothing on Half.com. And some I knew already and was pleased to see that they were well liked elsewhere.
7. William Shakespeare, in Chronological Order: I'm up to Richard II.

Lists offer the illusion of completion. These items are all you need. These books are all the books you need to read. These movies are all the movies you need to see. This is all you need to know. It isn't. There's far more out there than one can absorb. But I think that as long as the illusion is acknowledged as such, it's fine, and other than betraying an obssessive-compulsive streak, it's mostly harmless, or about as harmless as setting up an elaborate train-set in your garage, or building a replica of monuments with toothpicks in your living room, or writing and illustrating beautiful, bloody epic stories about little girls in danger while working as a janitor, or preparing for the inevitable coming of the lord with tinfoil and a high degree of intuitive art.

I also love lists posing as anti-lists. They too have a point.

Work

Emeril Naranjo died of cirrhosis on the eve of his forty-fifth birthday. He weighed three hundred pounds, was five foot flat, and owed enough rent to include this datum into his checklist of writerly dolors. He died broke. He died drunk. He died owing money. He did not die in obscurity: his stories had been much admired by fans of genre fiction, specially by fans of evil ventriloquist dummy stories.

Genre efforts suffer from doggedness -- the worst of it, no matter if it's crime fiction, horror, fantasy,or science fiction, reads like a checklist of expectations. The best plays with those conventions. Naranjo wrote 103 short stories about animated dummies. The best of these subtly played with the expectations of the reader. Several raised the possibility that the dummy might not be alive and demonic at all, and some deconstructed the story even as it unfolded. (The least succesful of these featured titles for individual bits of the story. (Ie, "4. IN WHICH THE CHARACTERS BEGIN TO SUSPECT THAT THE DUMMY MIGHT BE COMMITTING THE KILLINGS," "7. IN WHICH THE DUMMY HIDES IN A WOODEN ORANGE CRATE AND WAITS FOR HIS NEXT VICTIM," "8. HIS NEXT VICTIM.") Given his massive output, some repetition was to be expected. He wrote quick, and he hardly revised, and his kind of writing could only find a home in magazines that accomodated quick, patchy prose.

For all his flaws his stuff bristled with life. He could be very funny and very creepy. He had Sam Fuller's taste for lowlifes, and his same distaste for hipocrisy. Fuller admired Naranjo, and before he teamed up with Hanson for the fantastic but ill-fated White Dog had considered an evil dummy story about white supremacy in Peoria. Naranjo jotted down a couple of scenes but the project never materialized.

He wrote a few screenplays and teleplays. Not one was filmed -- odd given how his influence can be felt in movies like Devil Doll, Attenborough's Magic, The Unholy Three, and can be seen (albeit diluted) in the Chucky and Puppet Master movies. In television, Naranjo partly inspired "The Glass Eye" in Hitchcock's TV series, episode 6X20 of Hooperman, the Bobcat Goldwaith episode from Tales from the Crypt, several episodes of Hammer House of Horror, and Joss Whedon's Talent Show from Buffy, which includes a very clever nod to Naranjo, as well as the kind of twist that the master of the evil dummy story excelled at.

The dummy, blank and sinister, lends itself to many interpretations. It's an uncontrolled ID, a savage Other, an Inner Child gone wrong. The dummy's everywhere, and has been associated with hack television and low-budget movies for so long, and so effectively parodied, that it's easy to forget that when the concept works, it really packs a punch.

Naranjo devoted his life to it. He never owned a dummy. Like Spielberg, who distrusted the ocean and its great predators after completing Jaws, Naranjo believed that he would incur some kind of karmic, all-too fitting retribution if he were to ever bring a dummy into his shabby apartment. He did learn to throw his voice around, but his friends said that you could see his lips move.

You Won't Let Those Robots Defeat Me

Nothing right now but half-thought thoughts on the infinite variations of stories about evil ventriloquist's dummies in television and movies. One particular writer crafted a hundred-odd stories, teleplays, and film-scripts -- all centered on dummies. More on him Wednesday.

But why not listen to the new Flaming Lips album right now instead? Online? Yes!

What are you looking at?

Pornography may be joyless, humorless, dull, depressing, damaging to its participants, drab, and badly lit. It is also a legitimate consumer product. Some of it is not, obviously. Some of it is plain evil. But most of it is harmless.

Pedophilia is not. Obviously. Pedophilia is evil and unambiguously wrong. No circumstances excuse it.

Of course, great art has always been made of great evils, and even funny art has been made at the expense of grim and humorless idiots. Great art can deal with with the sordid, but many confuse the latter with the former. Nabokov has been particularly unlucky in this regard. (Even Hunter S. Thompson has muddled the author with his subject matter, but in the good doctor's case alcohol plus a general and pure desire to mess with the world is excuse and justification enough. He is exempt.) And when you set up a half-assed site devoted to a great artist, it's almost inevitable that those looking for the sordid subject matter end up at your front door. They're grubby folks. Here's some of what they have been after for the past five days:

Day of 6/21/2002:

Top 10 Search Keywords by Server Used

[ Result keywords removed because they were attracting a great deal of pervies looking for precisely those keywords. Me dumb. ]

Removed from this list are the many legitimate searches -- all the people looking for everyone from Amis to Zadie. This is all to say that Dear Abby did the right thing. And to say that for all the good the internet has done, it has also exposed (partly because it's mediated, and partly because everyone remains more or less anonymous) more of of this unpleasant, damp underside of one's fellow that one would wish, and that every once in a while it's probably healthy to expose that damp underside to the world, so that we can all say, collectively, "Yuck," except for the person who was looking for "feet newsgroups," who is probably OK if only a little strange, and for the person who searched for the hippo cartoon, whom Dr. Millmoss bless.