Damozel: Just Eat the Damn Peach.

Fri, 04 Aug 2006 10:28:21 GMT

I am relocating my blog to the following address:

http://theflatlandalmanack.typepad.com/ (THE FLATLAND ALMANACK)

I will continue to maintain this site and everything posted here but will do all my further posting there!

Do stop by for a visit!

The Party

Sat, 22 Jul 2006 20:14:56 GMT

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Peter Sellers rocks The Party *

*contains spoilers

Can I be honest? I am not a big fan of Peter Sellers. With the exception of one or two of The Pink Panther series, I didn't find most of his films amusing when they were made and I don't find them, including most of The Pink Panther series, amusing now. While Nick venerates Sellers, his films seem to me to be hopelessly dated. I didn't even like Being There all that much.

With one shining exception: The Party, a 1968 Blake Edwards film which many of Sellers' dedicated fans seem never to have heard of.

Now at first blush, for me to adore The Party is clearly politically incorrect. In this film, Sellers plays Hrundi V. Bhakshi, a gentle Bollywood actor (of the "Goodness Gracious me!" variety) imported to Hollywood to play Gunga Din in an epononymous film.

When I first saw the film, I thought, "Right. Here's the stereoptypical [particularly in that period] obsequious Indian who speaks in 'hilarious' sing-song and malapropisms." The only reason I sat through it was because I was watching it with friends. You might think the same thing initially if you are not warned in advance.

So wait. Seriously, wait. Give it time. There really IS more to this film than meets the eye. Mr. Bhakshi, being Indian as well as a very minor actor, really is the ultimate outsider. He's me. He's also you. He's the unpopular kid at fraternity Rush who isn't going to be chosen but doesn't seem to get it He's the poor relation at the family feast. Though overly endowed with humility and the tendency to apologize if caught out in a blunder, he really does NOT realize that he's totally out of his depth. But as the party wears on, you start to realize that he is the one person among the depthless 'celebrities' present who has anything on the window shelves behind the shop window. This happens very slowly, but it definitely happens.

The first 5 or 10 minutes of the film (before the roll of the credits) yields---to me, anyway---some of the funniest footage in history, which takes place on the set of the film in which he's starring. After he gently, naively, heedlessly destroys take after take and ultimately, the entire set, the frothing director of course bellows , "YOU'LL NEVER WORK IN THIS TOWN AGAIN".

BHAKSHI (after a moment's bemusement) "Does that.... include television, sir?"

Exit, pursued by an irate director.

Cut to the office of the humorless, cigar-chomping boss of the studio Mr. Clutterbuck. "What? What? The WHOLE DAMN THING? ...Well, what's his name?... I'll see to it he never works in this town again!" Furious at the loss of his set, he jots down the soon-to-be-fired Mr. Bhakshi's name on what he thinks is a piece of scratch paper. Instead, it's the edge of a carefully typed-out guest list for a celebrity-studded party at his mansion. He hands the list over to his secretary with an order to send out the invitations. All this before the opening credits.

So then---in what I have always thought was one of the film's most telling moments----you see Mr. Bhakshi at home. He is tuning his sitar. This, I have always thought, was the portrait of Mr. Bhakshi's true self: dignified, tranquil, apparently unabashed by his humiliating ejection from the set, intent on making music. The postman knocks; Mr. Bhakshi pads to the door to receive it. He opens it solemnly and reads it without surprise. He begins to prepare for the party. The opening credits roll, accompanied by a particularly bouncy Henry Mancini theme featuring sitars.

The rest of the film all takes place at the party. Mr. Bhakti tools up in his tiny three-wheeled car, pulls in behind the limos, and is ushered in, eagerly friendly, anxious to make a good impression, but with insufficient attention to the fact that he is out of his depth and swimming with the sharks. His fatal flaw (from the standpoint of the assembled guests) is his humility; most of them write him off as of no importance. His real fatal flaws are his self-consciousness, which is inseparable from his humility, which is inseparable from his dignity, which is inseparable from his innocence. Fortunately, he has a childlike resilience in the face of humiliation and social catastrophe and limitless good humor that see him through.

Co-starring in the film is his hosts' horrible 1970's 'house of the future,' where everything is stupidly automated; and things like a giant fireplace in the middle of the room can be activated by the push of a button. A babbling brook runs through the house. All of this is as grass before the scythe of Mr. Bhakshi's inadvertent attempts to avoid the consequences of his many naive blunders.

For example: Rebuffed by the other guests, Mr. Bhakshi removes himself from the center of the party and begins fiddling with one of those intriguing-looking buttons and nearly roasts several of the guests alive. And so on. He ultimately destroys his relentless enemy the house (though certainly not intentionally).

In the interim, no social catastrophe can daunt him, or not for long; he rises above the chaos that he constantly, invariably creates. The chaos arises not so much because of his constant social blunders as a result of his painful struggles to conceal them or to avert the consequences. Each attempt to avert disaster causes an equal reaction in the opposite direction.

The party unfolds in real time. From the time the credits end to the conclusion of the film, the whole film is the party. One of my friends found it 'slow.' I think the pace is just right. It's a party!

As Mr. Bhakshi stumbles through the evening, his superiority to those present begins to shine through. First, you notice his sweet nature and touching humility. Later on, though, you start to see his dignity and admirable character. The surface stereotype crumbles away. We witness the budding (only that) of a charming friendship between Mr. Bhakshi and a French starlet played by a luminous Claudine Longet. He stands up---albeit in a most non-western way----to C.S. Divot (Gavin McCleod)---the producer of Mr. Bhakshi's film, and a casting couch pig. (Mr. Bhakshi's display of eastern-style courage is subtly contrasted to excellent effect with the western style of courage displayed on the big screen by Mr. Bhakshi's film idol, a rhinestone cowboy called "Wyoming Bill" Kelso.)

The viewer's first impression of Mr. Bhakshi crumble away, along with the host's house and patience. Through it all, there is much MUCH music by Henry Mancini. Like it or not, the sprightly background plinking and strumming (provided in the film by the hired band) definitely conveys the feeling of a period cocktail party. You can practically smell the martini olives and the Breck shampoo.

There is one character who almost steals the whole show out from under Seller's a nameless and mainly silent martini-swilling waiter who consumes all the drinks that Mr. Bhakshi declines and stolidly soldiers on.

I stumbled on this film in the late Nineties while trolling the aisles of my local Blockbuster in search of comedy. I'm fond enough of this film that I watch it at least a couple of times a year. I watched it one dismal New Year's Eve when I was visiting my mother; my husband had just died, I didn't want to do anything but sleep, but my mother dragged me over to her friend Howard's to get me out of the house. I had brought the film with me from home because my mom had asked me to. I didn't want to see it again particularly, but since it was her evening and I didn't care much about anything, I went along for the ride.

It was an unqualified success. While I won't claim it took me out of myself, it was curiously comforting. At first I got my enjoyment, such as it was, of anticipating the moments that would make my mother laugh, but pretty soon I was laughing along too. The film reminded me, among other things, that a person with an innate sense of dignity can retain it through the worst of times, including the most egregious social embarrassments.

Unlike contemporary films, it doesn't conclude with an unambiguous triumph by Mr. Bhakshi over those who undervalued or disliked him. As in life, he doesn't win it all. But the ending is amusing and affirming and very true to life. Most important, this rather undervalued Sellers film is FUNNY ALL THE WAY THROUGH.

If you are in need of being taken out of yourself, or if you just like to laugh, or if you are a Sellers fan who missed this one, you will love this film.

Click for IMDb page

Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

Sat, 15 Jul 2006 00:13:44 GMT

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It's All About the Templars: Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum (translated by William Weaver)

Foucault's Pendulum is one of my favorite novels in life. My copy is dated 1990, so it's been around awhile, and I've read it at least once a year since then.

The main characters are three intellectuals, two editors and one much younger consultant for a publishing house that publishes material dealing---among other things---with occult and esoteric knowledge. They make up a game that emulates the very special reasoning processes they have learned from certain of their more eccentric authors. Using their combined learning plus one of those newfangled computers they had back in the mid 1980's, they develop a complete history of the world by a process of connecting bits of arcane information, actual historical fact, and any number of handy fictions and half-baked hypotheses. Among much else, they learn that once you begin to synthesize...uh, anything really (including "Minnie Mouse is Mickey Mouse's Fiance"), a startling pattern emerges! And when you put the patterns together, the dots all connect!

Everything proves everything else!

It's a dangerous game, it turns out: perhaps the most dangerous game, having the potential to destabilize reality itself, not to mention their personal safety and mental and physical health.

Is all of western history a creation of, or a response to, the secret machinations of a certain Secret Society dating back to the Middle Ages? If so, what secret were they guarding and where are they now? If three men make up a theory of the world that explains everything, is the theory true? Is everything connected? And does everything have something to do with the Templars?

Before we all become too credulous---before we give credence to too many synthesized versions of history or reality----we should all read it, probably again and again. Actually I do read it again and again. It's entertaining. It's extremely funny. But it is also terrifying. Among other things, the novel illustrates the type of process used in the generation of a certain genre of books which purport to shed new light on old questions (including some of which I am personally rather fond).

Here's the bit of dialogue that I make myself reread periodically, even though I naturally have decided ignore its implications; it would not be possible for me to go on blogging otherwise.

DAMOZEL: "What's a moron, Professor Belbo?"

PROFESSOR BELBO, IN BETWEEN DRINKS AT PILADE'S BAR, ANSWERS:

"Morons...get their reasoning wrong. Like the fellow who says all dogs are pets and all dogs bark, and cats are pets, too, and therefore cats bark. Or that all Athenians are mortal, and all the citizens of Pireaus are mortal, so all the citizens of Pireaus are Athenians... Morons will occasionally say something that's right, but they say it for the wrong reason....

CASAUBON:

"All great apes evolved from lower life forms, man evolved from lower life forms, therefore man is a great ape."

BELBO:

"Not bad. In such statements you suspect that something's wrong, but it takes work to show what and why. Morons are tricky....[T]he moron reasons almost the way you do; the gap is infinitesimal. A moron is a master of paralogism. For an editor, it's bad news. It can take him an eternity to identify a moron. Plenty of morons' books are published, because they're convincing at first glance. An editor is not required to weed out the morons. If the Academy of Sciences doesn't do it, why should we?"

CASAUBON adds:

"Philosophers don't either. Saint Anselm's ontological argument is moronic, for example. God must exist because I can conceive him as being perfect in all ways, including existence. The saint confuses in thought with existence in reality."

BELBO replies:

"True, but Gaunilon's refutation is moronic, too. I can think of an island in the sea even if the island doesn't exist. He confuses thinking of the possible with thinking of the necessary....And God loves every minute of it. He chose to be unthinkable only to prove that Anselm and Gaunilon were morons. What a sublime purpose for creation, or, rather, for that act by which God willed Himself to be: to unmask cosmic moronism."

Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum (BALLANTINE BOOKS 1990) at 56-57.

DAMOZEL: What's a lunatic then?

CAUSAUBON:

"It's two o'clock, Pilade's about to close, and we still haven't got to the lunatics."

BELBO:

"I'm getting there. A lunatic is easily recognized. He is a moron who doesn't know the ropes. The moron proves his thesis; he has a logic; however twisted it may be. The lunatic, on the other hand, doesn't concern himself at all with logic; he just works by short circuits. For him, everything proves everything else. The lunatic is all idee fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars."

Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum (BALLANTINE BOOKS 1990) at 57-58

Highly, highly recommended. In addition to these three characters---who in the process of imaginatively making over the history of the world go a bit too far in experimenting with the lunatic's methods--- everything, including (but not limited to): mediavel history, alchemy, kabbalah, John Dee, Nicolas Flamel, publishing, Brazilian culture, syncretic religion (voodoo and candomble), Rosicrucians, Masons, the Albigensien crusade, Cagliostro, spiritualism, Atlantic, the hollow earth theory, the Priory of Sion, and---of course---the Templars. Especially the Templars.

In addition to everything else, it's a book about The Da Vinci Code, or its theoretical underpinnings, even though it was written long before it.

It is a mine of information you probably did not know. But it is also a novel. Despite their formidable intellects, the main characters are likable. They pull you right in.

CAVEAT: This book is not exactly light summer reading. It is intellectually challenging and demands a great deal of the reader. It's well worth the effort, and is a hell of a ride once you get into it, but it isn't the best book for reading while you supervise the kids at the swimming pool. It requires concentration.

Furthermore, it WILL get you thinking about the Templars. You may even end up feeling that they have something to do with everything. And you know after reading this where that leads. Proceed at your own risk. You have been warned.

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Second-Hand Bookstore Gold: The Short Stories of H.H. Munro. [book review]

Lynda Barry Rocks My World: The Greatest of Marlys, One Hundred Demons, and Cruddy. [book review; graphic novel; fiction]

Peter Sellers Rocks The Party [film review]

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Played-Out TV and Film Devices.

Lynda Barry

Tue, 11 Jul 2006 15:22:06 GMT

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Lynda Barry: The! Greatest! of! Marlys!, One Hundred Demons, and Cruddy.

The purpose of this blog/blog category is to recommend things to other people that have helped me cope with life's failure to live up to fantasy. On the list of those who have helped me along the way, Lynda Barry's name ranks near the top.

I first encountered Lynda Barry's comics (essentially short stories in graphic format) at Salon.com, where it is described as a "serial comic." If you haven't read her comics, you can find One Hundred Demons there---this link is to the last one in the series-----but if you do a search, you'll find the rest of them.

Now the "serial comic" is a genre of which I've always been particularly fond, though my preference isn't for the serial, but for the final product (the whole enchilada) after a publisher puts them all together and you can read them as an ongoing story. (I have plenty of recommendations for those adults who have never experienced the joys of 'comics as light literature.') Though the serial comic is designed to be read in daily or weekly small doses, that is not how I prefer to read them. Even when I first discovered Barry's work at Salon, I didn't read the serial in little bites (they just left me hungry for more and mildly dissatisfied). I'd wait awhile for the backlog to build up, then greedily devour a rich and pungent meal of them in one sitting. When it comes to serial comics, I always prefer to be super-sized.

At some time during the early evolution of my Barry-love, I stumbled on a Barry collection, The!Greatest!of!Marlys! at a local bookstore. Once I had it in my hungry little hands, I rushed back to my cave and disappeared until I'd read it straight through, emerging to reassure Nick that I was still alive and to demand that he make a run for sufficient chocolate and Jordan almonds to sustain me. I didn't even stop to sleep.

Barry's work evokes aspects of childhood and adolescence that I think most novels about childhood don't come close to touching. Furthermore, her novels are set in or grounded in a Seventies sensibility. Even the slang the kids use is Seventies slang.

While my childhood experiences were very different from the experience of the children in Barry's novels, I have a lot of the same points of reference. As a child and adolescent during the late Sixties and early Seventies, I suffered from vague free-floating anxiety and generalized angst for which I had words because no one had yet named it; and which in any case I assumed was the ordinary way for a child to feel (and maybe it is). I dealt with it was through drawing, keeping journals, and playing made-up games with other kids. I spent a lot of time trying to bring myself into some sort of relation with the world, trying to work out how to be.

The kids in Marlys! come from a poor family where the adults are mainly just background static. In my experience, a lot of kids growing up in that period (whether rich or poor) had parents who simply didn't factor much into their day to day experience. At mealtimes and when you couldn't avoid interacting with them; that was about it. "Soccer moms" hadn't---thank GOD---been invented in those days. We didn't have videogames or computers but we DID have the right (the lucky ones) to be left alone as long as we didn't make trouble for anyone or get sick or in trouble at school.

"Parenting"---again, thank God!---wasn't a verb in the days in which the story of Marlys and her cousins appears to be unfolding. Meals appeared and bedtimes were set without our input; but we were allowed to roam free (extraordinarily free compared to today) and to choose our friends without much interference and without having to inform our parents of our exact whereabout every damn minute as long as we stayed within a certain range. The world of the children in Marlys! is that world, a world of curious freedom, arbitrary restrictions, and remote, vaguely terrifying adults.

The children are as ordinary and extraordinary as all normal children. The ordinary part of them is what other people mainly see. Marlys is fat, freckled, and homely (though wildly imaginative and---as she often reminds the others---"gifted"). Arna is shy and withdrawn, but also sensitive and deep. Arnold is outwardly a tough guy, but has a tender side he mostly hides from his siblings and cousins (the soft side emerges when he falls in love with a silent, strange girl that he---and the other children---refer to as "the hare-lip.") Freddy is a gentle oddball. Maybonne, 'the teenager,' is pretty and puts on a convincing game face to the younger kids, but has the uncertainties and anxieties that an adolescent has and had.

A lot of the stories deal with the miseries of childhood. Since these children come from families where there is little money, gifts---from the Sears catalog! Remember the Sears Catalog?---are few and far between and when a doll or a dress is destroyed, it is gone for good; there aren't any replacements. I don't think any words could convey more effectively than Barry's drawings the grief and horror of a child who---ignoring the instructions---feeds milk to "Baby Tiny Tears" (who "came with a whole wad of accessories which is the best part of any doll"). "You were supposed to let her only drink water," Arna says, "but some of us felt sorry for Baby Tiny tears and let her drink milk. This was a big mistake, especially if it was summer and you left her take in the hot sun for about five hours afterwards." The picture portrays with breathtaking accuracy the horror and revulsion of a little girl whose favorite doll reeks irrevocably of rotted milk and it's your own stupid fault. Sears Catalog Part 1. Ah, how it takes me back!

Sears Catalog Part 2 addresses the agony of the birthday present which doesn't live up to expectation. Dispensing with the advice of her cousins, Marlys---a physically unattractive child obsessed with 'glamour'---is seduced by the photographs in the catalog into buying the "exclusive molded rubber glamour wigs for your young little miss." I remember those wigs! The little girl next door had them. My mother kept my hair cut as short as a boy's for reasons I will never know, and I remember trying to convince her to let me wear one of them to school. Arna: "When the wigs finally came they were about five hundred times worse than I ever could have imagined. Marlys started crying and for once I didn't blame her. They looked like a bathing cap with a bad infection...Like old gum in the dirt." MARLYS (crouched on the floor, spraying tears in all directions): "Can you even believe it?"

Obviously, I was less realistic than Marlys and Arna because I thought---just possibly---that someone might believe that they were real hair. The one I favored was a peculiar silvery yellow color (perhaps intended to be platinum) in a bouffant Sixties style, but when I turned it upside down, it looked--to me---like the long hair I longed to have.

The cartoons I love best are about the anxieties, jealousies, humiliations, and occasional and often inexplicable joys of young children left to their own devices. The joys were usually of your own making; the others were inflicted on you by life. In Extra Credit, Arnold, Arna's brother makes a model of South America "out of chewed-up gum. You might think that would be ugly but it came out beautiful. He said gum was perfect because ther's 13 kinds for the 13 countries and gum lasts good." (Adults everywhere, because that's what happens: EEEEEEEW.) But Arnold puts his heart into making this map. ARNA: "When he presented it to Mrs. Brogan she said it could spread disease. I had Mrs. Brogan last year and should have known to tell him the topic of her whole life is germs. Arnold said just spray it with Lysol, kills germs on contact! Don't throw it out! But no." Humiliation and heartbreak. Who doesn't remember what that was like?

There is also the matter of love, of falling in love, I mean. Children do. On this topic, the narrative of the characters can verge on poetry. Marlys falls in love with a teenager who smacks her in the butt with a tennis racket while Marlys was "bending over one day, looking at some ants." That's how love happens when you're young (meaning "under 35.") To express her love for "Richard the Teenager," Marlys insists on doing the Mexican hat dance ("It was her specialty"). "The upstairs window shoved open and Maybonne's head came out yelling Bug off Marlys, will you? But no, she couldn't. She couldn't, she couldn't, she just couldn't." Marlys' Love.

ARNOLD: "The kiss of Jeanette the hare lip was incredible...She said close your eyes. With her hand covering her mouth she said close your eyes. And she kissed me....Then I said close your eyes and it was my turn. My turn to move her shaking hand away from her mouth and kiss her strange and beautiful lips." The Kiss of the Harelip.

The children in Marlys!---Marlys in particular---often cheer themselves up with storytelling and make-believe (one of my favorite things in the book is each child's drawing of his or her dream-house), but they are exceptionally clear-eyed when it comes to other people and the behavior of other people. For this reason, one often tells the other's story

There's also sex. Barry addresses (and illustrates) a moment that I've seldom seen so aptly expressed: the innocent discovery of sexual pleasure before you have information or words to know what it is. "In my cousin Marlys's back yard was the clothes line T-pole which we loved to hang upside down on....If you hook your legs just right and swing, there's this feeling you can get like your pants are itching you in this most perfectly gorgeous way." As my friend Sarah remarked, there is no better description anywhere of, uh, that. T-Pole. And you really need to see Barry's drawing of the faces of the upside-down Marlys and Arna to appreciate their appreciation.

One Hundred Demons is similar but different. Though I read it first at Salon, I bought the hard cover version. It's a work of art, really, and---fittingly---about the size and shape of the autograph albums we used to pass around in school in the Seventies. The book is amazingly beautiful to look at, filled with gorgeous collages addressing unexpected subjects as well as Barry's cartoons. Barry painted the cartoons using the technique for painting used "by a Zen monk named Hakuin Ekaku, in 16th Century Japan. I checked out some books, followed the instructions, and the demons began to come." (DEMON: "They were not the demons she expected...At first they freaked her, but then she started to love watching them come out of her paintbrush.")

One of the recurring subjects of One Hundred Demons is Barry's relationship with her terrifying mother, but there are many others. The perspective is different from Marlys!; it's told more from the perspective of an adult looking back at childhood than from the perspective of the child, but it is equally deep and insightful and funny (sometimes horrifyingly funny, which is a good kind of funny). Some of the subjects are more overtly disturbing, but again, in a good, clean, purging way. Guess what: You are NOT alone. Whatever hurts that you can't articulate has happened to others who can.

My favorite of all the Demons is Dancing. It exactly tracks my own experience: first the sheer pleasure in movement, then the desire to dance yourself, then the perhaps well-meaning friend who lets you know that you can't dance and look stupid. "I don't blame that girl for knocking me out of my groove. I was about to start Junior High School. It was going to happen anyway. But it was a long time before I got it back." Like Barry, I'm still "secretly spaz-dancing alone in my room."

(Barry's graphic novel Cruddy is reviewed at Salon. It's an excellent review by Heidi Bell, so I've linked it here.)

Secondhand bookstore gold--Saki

Sat, 08 Jul 2006 04:14:28 GMT

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Second-hand Bookstore Gold *: H.H. Munro: Saki

*also available free on the internet.

[1] A few biographical facts about H. H. Munro.

I bought my 1930 Random House Edition of The Short Stories of Saki (with introduction by Christopher Morley) on a grey January day back in 1995. I was in a most depressed frame of mine. My husband and I were living in different cities; I had a room at the house of a friend who had just been fired and was taking it out on me; and my husband's job was looking pretty problematic. I needed diversion----I needed to contemplate someone else's troubles.

Since I've had trouble finding the collected stories of two of my favorite short story writers (L.P. Hartley and Robert Aikman), I wondered if it would be similarly difficult for an interested person to procure a copy of Saki's stories. Happily, the Penguin Classics collection of The Complete Saki (both used and new) is presently available at both Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Certainly most libraries should have all or some of his works (or even the same collection that I love so dearly).

Even better, if you're not sure you want to invest, three of his short story collections are available online at no cost to the reader , including my hands-down favorite, The Chronicles of Clovis. Most of the stories I recommend below are from the Clovis book.

According to this article at Wikipedia, Saki was born in Scotland . His real name was Hector Hugh Munro; if you want more biographical information, check out this link or this link (or read the biography his sister wrote). I always thought that his name was from the Rubaiyat, but the previously cited article indicates that its source may be in dispute. He died in France in 1916, killed by sniper fire.

Saki's best stories are gently twisted, usually infused with irony or understated malice, and sadistically witty. Many of them will leave you slightly shaken. Even the more prosaic ones are entertaining.

2. Stories you may already know.

A few of Saki's short stories are often anthologized. The ones I've seen in anthologies are: Tobermory, The Easter Egg, and Sredni Vashtar (from The Chronicles of Clovis); Laura, The Open Window, and The Story-Teller (from Beasts and Super-beasts).

The Open Window is a famous ghost story, although it is not really about ghosts. It is not very frightening ultimately, but before you get to the 'ultimately' you might well experience what Edith Wharton called 'the fun of the shudder.' It's one of his best known stories, and I imagine that most people who have finished high school have read it. I like the story, but it is not one of Saki's more powerful (by which I mean 'disturbing') stories. His best stories have a tendency to linger.

The Story-Teller isn't exactly disturbing. It's a story within a story: annoyed by the ruckus created by a pack of young children on a train, a young man offers to tell them a story to keep them quiet. Nothing terrible happens to anyone in the 'frame' story, but the story-within-the-story (about a little girl named Bertha who was very very extraordinarily good) ends on a sadistic note---to the great delight of the children. In Saki, the only good children are naughty children (sometimes psychopathically naughty, as in Hyacinth, a particular favorite of mine). Saki knew the sort of story that children would find absorbing and he knew how such a story ought to end.

Tobermory is one of his animal stories. It was featured in an anthology someone gave me as a Christmas gift of famous stories about cats, but I've seen it elsewhere. As cat stories go, it is one of the more realistic. Saki liked cats, but he was not sentimental toward them in his writing.

In Tobermory, a professor who is visitng at a country house announces that he has developed a technique for teaching animals to talk and that he has been given lessons to the hostess's cat (Tobermory). Tobermory, a stellar pupil, is invited to lunch to demonstrate his newly acquired skill. Alas, he is all too adept. (This is, after all, a Saki story).

[T]hen Miss Resker, in her best district-visitor manner, asked if the human language had been difficult to learn. Tobermory looked squarely at her for a moment and then fixed his gaze serenely on the iddle distance. It was obvious that boring questions lay outside his scheme of life.

... Major Barfield plunged in heavily to effect a diversion.

"How about your carryings-on with the tortoise-shell puss up at the stables, eh?"

The moment he had said it everyone realized the blunder.

"One does not usually discuss these matters in public," said Tobermory frigidly. "From a slight observation of your ways since you've been in this house, I should imagine you'd find it inconvenient if I were to shift the conversation on to your own little affairs."

The panic which ensued was not confined to the major.

The Easter Egg is the story of a cowardly young man's single courageous act. It is both funny and horrifying, as many of Saki's stories are. That is to say, it is at first funny and then horrifying.

In Laura, another one of his better known stories, the title character is a dying woman who believes in reincarnation. After her death, she returns in various successive animal forms for the purpose of tormenting her brother-in-law, who---failing to recognize her----kills her repeatedly. It's funny in an edgy and uncomfortable way. It seems to be frequently anthologized.

Sredni Vashtar is one of Saki's most violent and macabre stories, involving an abused and neglected child's terrible revenge against his abusive aunt. I first encountered it in my treasured book, Great Stories of Terror and the Supernatural. It's more a story of terror than the supernatural.

3. The Achievement of the Cat

I love Saki's stories for the light amoral tone and the whiplash sting of wit infused (as true wit so often is) with quiet malice. "[M]y mother never bothered about bringing me up," says Saki's Clovis Sangrail. "She just saw to it that I got whacked at decent intervals and was taught the difference between right and wrong; there is some difference, you know, but I've forgotten what it is."

If you're introduced to a tender and moralizing soul in a Saki story, or if the narrative takes a sentimental turn, watch out. Middle-class convention, particularly if accompanied by self-satisfaction, is also regularly punished. Though sometimes the punishment is probably more often than not social humiliation (particularly galling to the conventional), there are a few stories in which it is lethal. The 'sadism' in Saki to which commentators always refer is genreally not expressed as a thirst for blood, but in enjoyment of another's (often well-merited) suffering. And it is clear in most of the stories that Saki himself enjoys their suffering and expects the reader to enjoy it.

Saki's 'villains', to the extent he can be said to have them, are typically characterized by pettiness. They may even take their faults for virtues. In The Lumber Room, the nasty aunt---evidently based on the unpleasant woman who brought up Saki and his siblings----enjoys punishing the children, but is perhaps not aware that the children know this as well as she does, though the reader is aware. She may be able to convince herself that she is simply trying to bring them up properly, but it is clear to the reader that she likes causing them pain.

So his boy-cousin and girl cousin and his quite uninteresting younger brother were to be taken to Jagborough sands that afternoon and he was to stay at home. His...aunt...had hastily invented the Jagborough expedition in order to impress on Nicholas the delights that he had justly forfeited by his disgraceful conduct at the breakfast-table. It was her habit, whenever one of the children fell from grace, to improvise something of a festival nature from which the offender would be rigorously debarred; if all the children sinned collectively they were suddenly informed of a circus in a neighboring town, a circus of unrivalled merit with uncounted elephants, to which, but for their depravity, they would have been taken that very day. ...A few decent tears were looked for on the part of Nicholas when the moment for the departure of the expedition had arrived.

The tears do not appear, further illustrating to the aunt the need to punish. But in this story the tables are turned and the little boy gets revenge on his aunt. The sadistic strain that characterizes so many of these stories is played out to comic effect; no actual bloodshed ensues. But the story is funny because the reader is aware that the very astute little boy---and the likable children in Saki are always amoral and always precocious--- is relishing the opportunity to make the aunt suffer just as much as she secretly relishes making the children suffer and by using her own weapons against her.

The stories often turn on an opportunity to make someone who is smug, self-righteous, sanctimonious, greedy, manipulative, or stingy suffer a bit (usually through social or physical humiliation) or occasionally much more than 'a bit.' When the opportunity arises, the character generally seizes it. In Saki's stories, the oppressed are very seldom inclined to show mercy to their oppressors. The stories are so contrived that the reader seldom or never wishes for this to occur----though in some cases the punishment exceeds the crime. It's the dread of excess punishment that creates much of the tension for me. In Saki, you just never know.

The qualities that Saki admired (and admires in his characters) are spelled out quite clearly in one of his later stories, The Achievement of the Cat. I say 'stories' but it is not so much a story as a short essay in praise of the cat's 'achievement.'

For not as a bond-servant or dependent has this proudest of mammals entered the human fraternity; not as a slave like the beasts of burden, or a humble camp-follower like the dog. The cat is domestic only as far as suits its own ends; it will not be kennelled or harnessed nor suffer any dictation as to its going out or comings in. Long contact with the human race has developed in it the art of diplomacy, and no Roman Cardianl of medieaval days knew how to ingratiate himself with his surroundings than a cat with a saucer of cream on its mental horizons.

But the social smoothness, the purring innocence, the softness of the velvet paw may be laid aside at a moment's notice, and the sinuous feline may disappear in deliberate aloofness to a world...where the human element is distanced and disregarded. Or the innate savage spirit that helped its survival in the bygone days of tooth and claw may be summoned forth from beneath the sleek exterior, and the torture-instinct (common alone to both human and feline may find free play in the death-throes of some luckless bird or rodent.

It is, indeed, no small triumph to have combined the untrammelled liberty of primeval savagery with the luxury which only a highly developed civilisation can command; to be lapped in the soft stuffs that commerce has gathered from the far ends of the world; to bask in the warmth that labour and industry have dragged from the bowels of the earth; to banquet on the dainties that wealth has bespoken for its table, and withal to be a free son of nature, a mighty hunter, a spiller of life-blood. This is the victory of the cat.

But besides the credit of success, the cat has other qualities which compel recognition. The animal which the Egyptians worshiped as divine, which the Romans venerated as a symbol of liberty, which Europeans in the ignorant Middle Ages anathametized as an agent of demonology, has displayed to all ages two closely blended characteristics---courage and self-respect. No matter how unfavourable the circumstances, both qualities are always to the fore.Confront a child, a puppy, and a kitten with a sudden danger; the child will turn insintively for assistance, the puppy will grovel in object submission to the impending visitation, the kitten will brace its tiny body for frantic resistance.

And disassociate the luxury-loving cat from the atmosphere of social comfort in which it usually contrives to move, and observe it critically under adverse conditions....The cat of the slums and alleys, starved, out-cast, harried, still keeps amid the prowlings of its adversity the bold, free, panther-tread with which it placed of yore the temple courts of Thebes, still displays the self-reliant watchfulness which man has never taught it to lay aside.

Perhaps it is because I am a lover of cats that Saki's stories so appeal to me. The characters in his stories that he likes himself are essentially catlike.

4. Three of my favorite stories (with excerpts)

The stories I like best are the ones which mix Edwardian drawing room manners of the drawing room with the uncanny and terrifying. With a couple of exceptions (e.g., The Soul of Laploshka"), his stories aren't ghost stories. The horror is more elemental and less prosaic. Animals (as in Laura) and elementals are particularly likely to show up and start behaving strangely. Gabriel-Ernest is one story that involves both.

Gabriel-Ernest. Van Cheele, a pompous young man discovers that a beautiful young boy (who happens to be a were-wolf) is living on his land. When Van Cheele orders the beautiful young man to leave his land, the beautiful boy turns up (naked) on his doorstep ("You told me I was not to stay in the woods," said the boy calmly).  The boy is immediately adopted by Van Cheele's well-meaning do-gooding aunt.

Clothed, clean, and groomed, the boy lost none of his uncanniness in Van Cheele's eyes, but his aunt found him sweet.

"We must call him something till we know who he really is," she said. "Gabriel-Ernest, I think; those are nice suitable names."

Van Cheele agreed, but he privately doubted whether they were being grafted on to a nice suitable child. His misgivings were not diminished by the fact that his staid and elderly spaniel had bolted out of the house at the first incoming of the boy, and now obstinately remained shivering and yapping at the farther end of the orchard, while the canary, usually as vocally industrious as Van Cheele himself, had put itself on an allowance of frightened cheeps.

After consulting a friend in London,Van Cheele becomes convinced that the boy is a were-wolf and responsible for the recent disappearance of a couple of local children. What to do? "He dismissed the idea of a telegram, "Gabriel-Ernest is a werewolf" was a hopelessly inadequate effort at conveying the situation, and his aunt would think it was a code message to which he had omitted to give her the key."  The story ends disturbingly, like all of Saki's best stories.

Esme.  Esme is a story-within-a-story told by a recurring character known simply as 'the baroness.'

During a fox hunt, the baroness and another woman, Constance, get separated from the pack and lose their way. While trying to find their way back, they encounter a hyena which has escaped from his owner (an eccentric local lord). After an unpleasant moment with some of the hounds, the hyena decides to follow the baroness and her companion, a woman whom the baroness dislikes on social grounds for general tediousness and charmlessness.

The hyenea "hailed our approach with unmistakable relief and demonstrations of friendliness. It had probably been accustomed to uniform kindness from humans, while its first experience of a pack of hounds had left a bad impression....Constance and I and the hyena were left alone in the twilight." The baroness decides that she will call him (the hyena) Esme. He trots along beside them as they ride slowly "along a faintly marked cart-track, with the best following cheerfully at our heels." Eventually they pass a gypsy encampment, where a small child, picking berries, is frightened by the sight of the hyena and begins to cry. The two women ride on.

""I wonder what that child was doing there," said Constance presently.

""Picking blackberries. Obviously."

""I didn't like the way it cried," pursued Constance; "somehow its wail keeps ringing in my ears."

""I did not chide Constance for her morbid fancies; as a matter of fact the same situation, of being pursued by a perpetual fretful wail, had been forcing itself on my rather overtired nerves. For company's sake I hulloed to Esme, who had lagged somewhat behind. With a few springy bounds he drew up level, and then shot past us.

""The wailing accompaniment was explained. The gipsy child was firmly, and I expect painfully, held in its jaws."

""Merciful Heaven!" screamed Constance, "What on earth shall we do? What are we to do?...Can't we do something?" she persisted tearfully, as Esme cantered easily along in front of our tired horses.

"Personally I was doing everything that occurred to me at the moment. I stormed and scolded and coaxed in English and French and gamekeeper language; I made absurd, ineffectual cuts in the air with my thongless hunting-crop; I hurled my sandwich case at the brute;...And still we lumbered on through the deepening dusk with that dark uncouth shape lumbering ahead of us, and a drone of lugubrious music in our ears."

I'll leave it there.  It is an excellent example of a Saki animal story (and of my favorite sort of Saki story).

The Music on the Hill. Saki wrote several stories in which people who 'escape' to what they expect will be a life of peace in the country instead find themselves sucked into a mysterious atmosphere of menace and dread. Examples are: The Blood-Feud of Toad Water, The Cobweb, The Peace of Mowsle Barton, and The Music on the Hill. My favorite is The Music on the Hill (though The Peace of Mowsle Barton is a close contender).

The Music on the Hill illustrates rather graphically the meaning of the word Pan-ic (the terror of unseen things).

Sylvia Seltoun, the main character, has through various methods overcome her husband's reluctance to move  to move to his country house. Though Saki does not say so directly, she appears to be an officious or even bossy woman, some years older than the husband she has recently married.  When the story opens, she is preening herself on her success in getting him to marry her and on "wrenching her husband away from Town."   She has apparently married the homosexual Mortimer at least partly in order to get her hands on the house in question.   "To have married, Mortimer Seltoun, "Dead Mortimer," as his more intimate enemies called him, in the teeth of the cold hostility of his family, and in spite of his unaffected indifference to women that had needed some determination and adroitness to carry through."  Her decision to get him to move to the country was apparently the result of her new "distrust of town-life" because of its (unstated) effects on Mortimer.

The land surrounding the house, Yessney, is the stock 'beautiful-but-menacing' scenery that you are told quite early on conceals a lurking danger.

"In its wild open savagery there seemed a stealthy linking of the joy of life with the terror of unseen things. Sylvia smiled complacently as she gazed with a School-of-Art apprecitation at the landscape, and then of a sudden she almost shuddered."

"It is very wild," she said to Mortimer, who had joined her; "one could almost think that in such a place the worship of Pan had never quite died out."

"The worship of Pan never has died out," said Mortimer. "Other newer gods have drawn aside his votaries from time to time, but he is the Nature-God to whom all must come back at last. He has been called the Father of all the Gods, but most of his children have been stillborn."

Sylvia was religious in an honest, vaguely devotional kind of way, and did not like to hear her beliefs spoken of as mere aftergrowths, but it was at least something new and hopeful to hear Dead Mortimer speak with such energy and conviction on any subject.

"You don't really believe in Pan?" she asked incredulously.

"I've been a fool in most things," said Mortimer quietly, "but I'm not such a fool as not to believe in Pan when I'm down here. And if you're wise you won't disbelieve in him too boastfully while you're in his country.

She does not take her husband's advice. The consequences for her are not pleasant. This is one of Saki's more disturbing stories.

5. Other stories

I've recommended several stories, but I could really go on and on. Though many of the stories are disturbing or have a sadistic twist, others are merely amusing in his trademarked light and malicious fashion. Often the focus is the less admirable aspects of human nature, but not all of them end disastrously for the characters. Some end quite happily. Here are some I particularly enjoyed:

The Soul of Laploshka
The Secret Sin of Septimus Brope
The She-Wolf
The Schartz-Metterklume Method
The Seventh Pullet
Cousin Teresa
The Feast of Nemesis
The Name-Day
The Philanthropist and the Happy Cat
The Toys of Peace
The Wolves of Cernogratz
Excepting Mrs. Pentherby (actually one of my all-time favorites)
Morlvera
Shock Tactics
Hyacinth

6. Quotes.

The epigrammatic quality of Saki's writing lends itself to quotations. Here are a few.

"If you're going to be rude...I shall dine with you tomorrow night as well."

Reginald on the Academy

"You are really indecently vain of your appearance. A good life is infinitely preferable to good looks."

"You agree with me that the two are incompatible. I always say beauty is only sin deep."

Reginald's Choir Treat

"Some one has observed that Providence is always on the side of the big dividends," remarked Reginald.

The Duchess ate an anchovy in a shocked manner; she was sufficiently old-fashioned to dislike irreverence toward dividends."

Reginald at the Carlton

"It's the maddest thing I ever heard of," said Lucas angrily.

"Well, there is a strong strain of madness in our family. If you haven't noticed it yourself all your friends must have."

Adrian

"I love Americans, but not when they try to talk French. What a blessing it is that they never try to talk English."

Adrian

[W]henever a massacre...is reported...., every one assumes that it has been carried out "under orders" from somwhere or another; no one seems to think that there are people who might like to kill their neighbors now and then."

Filboid Studge, The Story of a Mouse that Helped

"Waldo is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death."

The Feast of Nemesis

Umberto Eco: Foucault’s Pendulum---It’s Always About the Templars

Comfort Food for the Psyche: Why I Love Anne Tyler’s Novels. [book review; fiction]

“A Modicum of Blood, Carefully Husbanded”: Famous Ghost Stories---How to Find the Good Ones [book review; fiction]

Updike for the 21^st Century [book review; fiction[

Second-Hand Bookstore Gold: The Short Stories of H.H. Munro. [book review]

Lynda Barry Rocks My World: The Greatest of Marlys, One Hundred Demons, and Cruddy. [book review; graphic novel; fiction]

Peter Sellers Rocks The Party [film review]

Diverse Delights: Manolo the Shoeblogger

Depression-Blocker: Go Fug Yourself

The Cutest Place on the Net: The Addictive Bliss of “Cute Overload.”

Played-Out TV and Film Devices.

The Cutest Place on the Net. I'm serious here

Thu, 22 Jun 2006 06:11:24 GMT

Hi, I've moved my address. To jump to the updated version of this review, click on this link!

For the Jaded: Ohmigod, it's soooo cuuuuuuuuute! The addictive bliss of "Cute Overload (TM*)."

This site has to be seen to be truly understood; no description will be adequate.

I have never understood people who spend time looking at porn. I also have never understood girls---or men---who after adulthood continue to send pastel birthday cards with cartoons of kittens or puppies holding little baskets of flowers in their mouths. I don't like or trust people who make their kittens wear little booties or who put little outfits on their dogs, much less women who carry their animals around in a handbag. I am---in theory---against cuteness.

But not immune to it. Cute Overload(TM) is a Webby-award winning site. The name tells you all you need to know about it, but in case you want to know more, its designers explain its purpose right at the top of the page: "We scour the Web for only the finest in Cute Imagery.... We offer an overwhelming amount of cuteness to fill your daily visual allowance. Drink it in!" The site is blessedly ad-free, though they do accept contributions.

Warning: The amount of cuteness on offer there is indeed overwhelming. If you stumble on it without preparation while net browsing at work, you will end up with shiny eyes and a big stupid grin that will convince your boss or whoever that you have been surfing for porn.

I clicked on it through another website. I didn't intend to look, I swear! It has a lot of photos and they took awhile to load; in the meantime, I forgot all about it, leaving it open on my desk. When I later---totally accidentally, I swear it!---opened it up, I shrieked, "Oh my God!" My husband came running. "What's the matter?" he yelled.

"Nick," I said, "Look....Look. Oh, look at this."

I swear I could feel my eyes dilating from the effort to absorb as much baby-animal based cuteness as they could hold and begin to water from the sheer cuteness of it all. I could feel my mouth spreading in a goofy, beatific grin.

Because the pictures I saw---they are updated daily---were the cutest damn photos of baby animals I have ever seen in my life. "Look, Nick," I moaned, "Look, oh look, oh my God, look at this...."

Nick looked. "A baby rabbit!" he said. "What's wrong with it?"

I was busy scrolling down the parade of uber-cuteness. "Oh," I squealed, "Oh....! Oh....! Nick. Look. Isn't he darling? Look, oh, look at these. Look at the expressions on their little faces. Loook. Look at this one's feet! Look at this one's tummy! Oh, sweet God in heaven, look at this one's tiny little ears. Oh my god, they are so cuuuuute!"

"Yeah, um, they're sweet," said Nick. He likes baby animals. If he sees one, and it wants petting, he will pet it.

"Eeeeeeek! Hammies! Bun-buns! Mousies!" I gibbered. "Nick, look at them, just look!"

Instead he looked at me. "Are you all right?" he asked.

"You're looking at that site again, aren't you?" he said to me a few minutes ago. "I could hear the moans and squeals from outside."

He wasn't susceptible to the cute, like, at all. Maybe men---or only straight men?---really are immune. Maybe they are as cute resistant as I formerly aspired to be. It's possible. I once offered Rumcove an armful of baby kittens, and he waved them all away dismissively! "I don't want those," he said, even though he was in an awful mood and really needed an armful of kittens..

As for me, I've relinquished my cute-resistance forever. I am now compelled to seek my daily hit of cuteness. I feel better about my insane response now that I've read the site's useful explication of the "Rules of Cuteness (TM)." You might want to start there to get yourself oriented to the revelations of cuteness waiting to burst upon you. Start slowly. Try to stay in control.

It's not easy. Just for example, just look at this. And how about this? Or this? Can you deal with these? Or these? Can you look at this without melting into a puddle of cuteness-saturated pleasure? Isn't this the cutest thing you ever, ever, ever saw in your life? (Be sure and read the commentary!)

If you are still able to function after checking out those links, you are probably ready for the full cuteness experience.

Of course, to get the full benefit of this site, you must read the very funny commentary by Meg Frost. Her interpolations infinitely enhance and embellish the depth and richness of the whole cuteness overload (TM!!!) experience. The comments of readers are usually very funny as well!

When you feel strong enough and are sure you're ready, experience the triple threat of Cute Overload's "Cuteness Trifecta (TM)."

Aaaaaagh! Must....resist...the---cute....

Ahem. Back now! I recommend this site for anyone too oppressed by the daily grind to feel up to enjoying life's more majestic splendors. Hell, I recommend it for anyone. The note accompanying this photograph shows that the site can be effective as a tonic against some of life's grimmer obligations. As one of Salinger's character remarked in a moment of deep spiritual drama, "There are some nice things out there." And many of them can be seen at Cute Overload (TM). Go on, relish the cuteness! I mean, resist...resist...resist....resist....

So on behalf of the world's cuteness-deprived, thank you, Cute Overload (TM)! I mean: curse you for your nefarious exploitation of a confirmed cynic's susceptibilities!

Diverse Delights: Go Fug Yourself

Sun, 18 Jun 2006 20:16:32 GMT

Hi! I've changed addresses. To jump to the updated version of this review, please click this link.

Depression-Blockers on the Net: Go Fug Yourself

This bloggy-winning site, the production of the incandescent Heather and the winsome yet trenchant Jessica, has one and only one objective: mockery of bad fashion and of celebrities and their hangers-on who purport to be fashion forward. (For those who don't already know it, the definition of "fugly" according to Heather and Jessica is: "frightfully ugly; of or pertaining to something beyond the boundaries of normal unattractiveness. Ex: "That 'Kabbalists Do It Better' trucker hat is fugly."

They don't need my endorsement. They have been praised in: The Village Voice, The Guardian, and many, many others. But "Eat the Damn Peach" is meant to be all my remedies against prufrocking Turn-of-the-Millenium general hopelessness, and there's no better cure for despair over the meaninglessness of existence than pointing and laughing at those whom the universe has otherwise richly favored..

A lot of sites exist for the purpose of mocking celebrities for their fashion failings, but the difference between those sites and this site, and why even sites that may have preceded this one in time seem to me to be but pallid imitations, is: Heather and Jessica. I don't care enough about fashion to read these other sites and I don't even know who half of the people in the fuggers' crosshairs even are, but I love my daily helping of tasty Heather and Jessica-style snide. Here are a couple of samples (but you really MUST click on the links to appreciate the finger-looking goodness of a good fugging:

Heather:

Thoroughly tired of going to parties and finding herself inappropriately dressed for the rash of impromptu gynecological exams that contantly break out -- who hasn't suffered that indignity, really -- [Click to see Heather-fugged celebrity] came to this shindig properly prepared for a drunk, willful pap smear.

Stars -- they're just like us! They dress stirrup-ready!

Further Heather:

This dress is somewhat unflattering, rather see-through, and wholly hideous...but there is another reason I wish that this [click!] person hadn't worn it.

Quite frankly, her navel scares the life out of me.

That is chapped evil, right there. You are staring into the eye of Satan. Have you ever seen the South Park "Woodland Critter Christmas" episode? If you have, then you'll understand why the words "blood orgy" are so appropriate here. And if you haven't, well, you are figuratively (and in some ways literally) staring at the belly of the beast in this photo. That thing is all monster. Don't stare at it too long, or you'll be compelled to drink the blood of a righteous woman while carving pentagrams into the walls.

What is it planning?....Was it hoping to cross paths with a jewelry-toting hobbit?... What? WHAT? WHAT DO YOU WANT WITH US?

Jessica:

Oh, [click to see].

I think I've seen this outfit before. Where was it? Where was it? It's right on the tip of my tongue. Oh, yes! On the cover of the bodice-ripping novel Love, Remember Me, wherein the beautiful English heroine is kidnapped and sold into a harem in some unnamed but beautiful and exotic Middle Eastern country, where she's forced to have threesomes with other girls in the harem and she's very against the threesome in theory, but when she does it, she sort of secretly likes it, but not as much as she likes the English lord she was engaged to before she was kidnapped, even though he's not as kinky as the guy who owns the harem. At one point in that book, she wore this outfit. And then the harem housemother made her take it off because the color washed her out.

Jessica, some more:

A VOICEMAIL FROM [click!]

Theriously, what you looking at? There'th nothing new or different about my lipth. They've alwayth looked like thith. No, really. It'th not collagen! I would never do that to mythelf!... I am a rethponthible mother -- WHO ITH NOT ON DRUGTH -- and I have done NOTHING to mythelf that could ever be conthtrued as plathtic thurgery!

Thank you for your kind attention to thith matter.

By the way, how do you like my kicky little necktie? Ithn't it totally Dreth for Thucceth as reinterpreted for the new millenium? No, Dreth for Thucceth. DRETH FOR THUCCETH! Thop acting like you don't underthand me! I THREAR I WILL THROW THITH MICROPHONE THAND AT YOUR HEAD!

Please, for your own sake: bookmark this site. As the Fuggers say, "Fugly is the new pretty."

RELATED POSTINGS:

Diverse Delights: Manolo the Shoeblogger

Depression-Blocker: Go Fug Yourself

The Cutest Place on the Net: The Addictive Bliss of “Cute Overload.”

Manolo the Shoeblogger

Wed, 14 Jun 2006 19:45:12 GMT

Hi! I've changed addresses. To jump to the updated version of this review, just click this link!

Diverse Delights: Manolo the Shoeblogger*

*not Manolo Blahnik.

I stumbled across the brilliant Manolo completely by accident. The Manolo---always the Manolo!---writes one of the most amusing blogs you are ever likely to encounter. His writing style is unique and inimitable.

His blog is about shoes, yes, but so much else as well.

I am definitely not the sort of person who would normally read a fashion blog. While I have diligently studied the Manolo's advice and counsel for those who wish to be superfantastic, I live a place where most people change out of their shorts only for state occasions where khaki pants are de rigeur. Many of my friends remove their baseball caps only for funerals or to sleep. My friends taunt me for the rigid formality of my wedge-heeled sandals and for preferring skirts to shorts. Before I began reading the Manolo's site, I had never even heard of Crocs. Even persons referred to by the Manolo as "the pot-smoking hippies of the crunchiness" do not bother to wear Birkenstocks or Earth shoes. Mostly they wear flip flops or the sandals you can buy at CVS pharmacy.

Thoroughly beguiled by the Manolo's intelligence, wit, and inimitable style, I check his site every day for the Manolo's remarks on topics of interest to the Manolo and therefore now to me. Every Tuesday I check out what the Manolo is reading, eating, and watching. I follow with interest the floating "Carnival of the Couture." I relish the fashion failings of the fashion forward in "Bad Fashion." And of course I also look at all the pretty, pretty shoes with great admiration and pleasure.

Thanks to the Manolo I at least will never on any account be guilty of purchasing a pair of baby pink Uggs, a pair of Birkenstock Bostons, or a pair of Crocs (all prominently featured in "The Gallery of the Horrors"). Regarding the Crocs, the Manolo says:

The Crocs people they seem to believe that the womens and the mens they deserve the exact same shoe.

Perhaps, this it will be true in the socialist utopia of the future when the differences between the genders they have been eliminated by the selective breeding, but not yet. We, happily, still live in the world where the shoes for the man and the shoe for the woman they are different....These they are indeed the shoes of a hypothetical distopian future, one in which the inmates they must be dressed in the footwear least likely to be useful in the popular uprising against the regime.

Of the Dansko Teton, he says:

[H]ere you see the Dansko Teton, the shoe that its makers describe as the "men's sport clog".

As far at the Manolo knows, there is no sport that is best played with the clog on the foot, and so it is most likely that this description, it was given in the hopes that the potato of the couch, as he clomped the aisles of the Wal-Mart, or sank into his Boy of Laziness for the protracted TV viewing, would feel good about himself.

Thanks to the Manolo, I am now acquainted with (and can quote to my young friends) Miuccia Prada's wise words on the message conveyed to others by maintaining dignity in one's dress. I have learned to recognize the minions of the Manolo's nemesis in the perhaps unlikely event of my encountering any. I have even learned to recognize (and flee in terror from) Russian fashion trends.

As of July 12, this blog had two million visits to its credit. It is a diverse feast of internet delights. Manolo's shoeblog: not just about the shoes.

RELATED POSTINGS

Diverse Delights: Manolo the Shoeblogger

Depression-Blocker: Go Fug Yourself

The Cutest Place on the Net: The Addictive Bliss of “Cute Overload.”

Updike for the 21st Century

Tue, 13 Jun 2006 21:05:12 GMT

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Updike for the 21st Century: Let us Praise Him with Faint Damns

Peter Mehlman: Rabbit Reads. When John Updike gives a talk at the Writer's Guild Auditorium in Los Angeles, it's a big deal, roughly the equivalent of Georgio Armani stopping by the Dockers's showroom. But here Updike was last Tuesday night, all smiles, distinguished gray and Ivy elegance, gliding on stage to discuss literature in a town where full sentences leave a lot of people really wiped out. Drizzling a queasy vapor over the event was Michiko Kakutani's fairly savage review in that morning's New York Times of Mr. Updike's latest novel "Terrorist." On the ticket line, one woman shook her head and said, "How do you chit-chat about your book knowing the audience has all read a review like that?" [The Huffington Post | Raw Feed]

You know, Updike is one of those late Twentieth Century icons whose work I always really felt I ought to like. His books are cerebral yet sensuous, exalted yet sensual, tender yet deep and incisive, vibrant yet insightful, and a whole host of other contradictory pairs of adjectives that I would readily concede to him (though he'd doubtless prefer to use much more obscure ones).

And the fact is, I do like some of it. I haven't read all of his novels---there were a couple I just could not manage to make myself read---but I did read a number of them. There were some I rather enjoyed reading, there are only three I've ever wanted to read again.--and for me, re-readability is the acid test for the book's importance on my personal scale.

And this is why, though I recognize that Updike is considered one of the important novelists of the Twentieth Century, he isn't at the end of the day at all important to me. When I think a writer is important, I go back again and again to the writer's work. I return to the well, thirsty for more of the same. The writers who matter to me didn't just embellish the world for me; they reframed it. Furthermore, they created characters I wanted desperately to know.

Salinger is rumored to be an unfriendly recluse, but he has created some of my favorite characters in fiction: Zooey and Franny Glass, good old Holden Caulfield, and Teddy from the short story 'Teddy.' I have re-read Franny and Zooey over a hundred times; and I wish that I could be hypnotized to forget it so I could come to it fresh all over again. That book had a profound effect on my spiritual and emotional development at a critical time in my life.

Similarly, I love and revere the ghost-seeing sister in Amy Tan's The One Hundred Secret Senses and the dutiful daughters in The Bone-Setter's Daughter. They too have changed my life by teaching me new ways of seeing.

Ursula LeGuin creates whole cultures I'd like to inhabit. The summer my father died, I used to lie in bed at night and imagine that I was one of the Kesh who [will have] lived in the town of Wakwaha-na in the Na River Valley---in what is now the Napa Valley---one million or so years from now. I had even decided which House I would belong to (the Serpentine) and what my name would be. My favorite story in the book was actually part of the subsidiary material, the story of the visionary, Flicker. But I loved all of it. I even tried some of the recipes (there was one for corn that was especially good).

Besides these fictional teachers, there are characters I have loved for their ability to make me laugh, I love H.H. Munro's (Saki's) sybaritic Clovis Sangrail and the young girl from The Open Window whose speciality was 'romance at short notice.' I love Bertie Wooster and Jeeves.

Another writer on my list of "most deeply satisfying writers" surprises most people. That writer is the erstwhile "angry young man," Kingsley Amis. "That misogynist pig?" said one of my friends. And I admit that he has created a number of characters who on the surface appear to be misogynists as well as a number of extremely unpleasant and/or difficult women. But each one of the characters I in theory ought to hate has a side above and beyond the misogyny that illuminates and redeems it---at least for me. And there is no one whose books have amused me more than dear old KA's. Lucky Jim is one of my five---assuming I could only choose five---desert island books.

Those are just some of the books that I love and that I've read over and over again.

Updike has never affected me in the same way as any of the writers I truly love. When (as a much younger woman) I was still interested in his books, I often said to myself, 'there's real wisdom here.' But even then I noticed that it was all wisdom of the sex-as-sacrament-and-path-to-enlightenment. After having had a certain amount of both, I have pretty much lost interest in that theme. If I were now to read a reference to someone's balls as, say, "nacreous spheres engendering the white-hot spume of eternity,"* I would not be moved, except possibly to raucous laughter. [*I made that one up, but it is definitely 'after Updike.']

I am also bothered by the way in which he portrays the relationship between the sexes. I say 'oddly' because Updike's characters are much less overtly misogynistic than, say, Kingsley Amis's. I suppose it's because although Amis's characters say horrible things about women, the horrible things they say don't seem (usually; I can certainly think of a few exceptions) with what they actually try to do. His characters actually work pretty hard to get on with the women in their lives; furthermore, though some of his female characters are extremely nasty, they are nasty out of general malice or spitefulness and by conscious choice, so I feel okay about loathing them or--in some instances---even rather liking them. I like many of Amis's characters, including some who are really rather nasty. I suppose they must seem real to me.

I can't think of a single woman in Updike I'd ever want to know or spend time with. At the end of the day, the women in his books strike me as marionettes. There's very much a sense when I read his work that the female characters have only as much reality as the male protagonists (and Updike through those characters) choose to grant to them. The male characters always seem to be holding back out of atavistic lust, rage, hatred and fear. In the end, the women tend to feel like thinly veiled capital-A Archetypes. Despite all the details he provides about their appearance, appetite, modes of thought, and public and private behavior, they just don't ring true to me.

Even when he makes his protagonist[s] female, I always feel in the end that I can't see the woman for whatever it is she represents to Updike (standing behind them in plain sight, working the strings).

Take for example the book The Witches of Eastwick. The three main characters were female and all were quite literally 'empowered' by (obscurely) their having been abandoned by their spouses. They develop strange powers which they then---boringly----totally waste on some man/demon lover and ultimately use to destroy a rival for his affections. I've seldom hated a book as much as I hated The Witches of Eastwick. Women banding together are a force of nature that can dog you down, man; FEAR US. It's not exactly a new idea under the sun; and in fact is a theme that seems to me to percolate through a lot of Updike's work.

And of course in addition to the TERROR OF FEMALE POWER UNLEASED, The Witches of Eastwick includes one hell of a CATFIGHT.

Contrast The Witches of Eastwick with one of my favorite novels, The Robber Bride, by Margaret Atwood. That book also involves three powerful women who band together to do battle with another female. In The Robber Bride, three gifted women form an alliance against one of the great female villains of modern literature. As she is incredibly powerful in her own right, the outcome is anything but a forgone conclusion. In the Atwood book, the temptress (correct word here) Zenia uses her sexual and intellectual powers to entrap and subsequently to destroy their men. Their alliance is the only thing that stands between them and the ruin of what remains to them when she's done. It's an amazing book, amazingly poignant in its portrayal of a strange friendship and the events that sustain them.

I like some of Updike's male characters. I like: [1] 'Rabbit' Angstrom, sort of; [2] the erring minister in A Month of Sundays, and...um, that's about it, really. The rest of those all seem to be either sad cases or head cases. While (in contrast to the women) most of them seem real enough, they are so brimming over with perceptiveness and sensitivity and strange insights that you just want to say, "Dude: take a prozac." So many of them seem to be the guy who can't finish up if you giggle during sex and who spends the rest of the night sulking and subsequently becomes incapable and blames it all on you..

I do realize that Updike is a master stylist. He is a compelling writer if you like your prose heavily embellished, as I sometimes do, and if you can machete your way through all the overwrough angst to some sort of core meaning. The meaning is sometimes there and accessible, but not always. In The Centaur, a humble schoolteacher is really the centaur Chiron; after being shot with an arrow, he becomes a constellation. Actually, I had, and have, no idea what in the Hell to make of that book. It was too grandiose and ineffable and allusive and so forth to be really moving (assuming the guy died in the end).

That book is beautifully written. I doubt that any American has ever written more poetically about sex, religion, or sex-as-religion and religion-as-sex. But it seems to me that the sexual taboos that his characters consciously and unconsciously resist gave his writing much of its force. To justify their decision to Do It, they work themselves up into frenzies of yearning, anxiety, spiritual torment, doubt, and excessive poetic metaphor. Unless the reader recognizes the framework in which the action of novels such as Marry Me and Couples takes place, the average person reading Updike for the first time is very likely to find the characters whom the reader is supposed to like irritating, solipsistic, deeply neurotic.

Two of the most annoying male characters I have ever encountered appear in those two books (though they seemed to me to be virtually the same character). I just wanted to slap them and their Archetypal Females upside the head and scream, "IT'S ONLY SEX, YOU MORONS. DO IT IF YOU'RE GOING TO AND LET'S MOVE ON."

Perhaps this urge simply reflects the extent to which the destruction of old taboos has drained all the real poetry out of sex and books about sex. Nowadays people can call a fuck a fuck; a married man about to commit adultery doesn't really need to get himself into an acceptable state to do the deed with a fellow schoolteacher by (somehow) morphing into the Centaur Chiron having very, er, athletic sex (his 'nether parts' are a horse's, right?) with 'amber-haired' Venus.

And Updike's whole sex-as-seeing-God thing is so pre-21st Century. At 27, I was shocked and impressed when one of his most annoying characters ever said in effect that sex is getting off with God. Today? Eh.

His books depend in may instances on his male (and female) characters are pushing against boundaries that no longer exist. Unfortunately, without the belief in capital-T Transgression there just is no capital-P Poetry or capital-S Sex It's just two people doing something that every animal and some plants can do.

I think one reason that A Month of Sundays---hands down my favorite Updike novel--- seems to me to have weathered the changing times is that it involves an adulterous minister, and therefore addresses a taboo that still exists. Ministers still ain't supposed to be interfering with their flocks. Since the minister in question is an intellectualizer with a guilty conscience, he cranks out some very pretty rationalizations (together with a fair amount of blasphemy) during his enforced sojourn at a 'rest home.' His badly mixing up his religious and sexual feelings makes sense in the circumstances..

If you're looking for summer reading, you could definitely do worse than A Month of Sundays. It seems to me to have a much lighter and dryer texture than Updike's other books and deals unweightily with the Great Imponderables.. In fact, it's hilarious and still retains the power to shock. Excellent summer reading.

RELATED POSTINGS

Comfort Food for the Psyche: Why I Love Anne Tyler’s Novels. [book review; fiction]

“A Modicum of Blood, Carefully Husbanded”: Famous Ghost Stories---How to Find the Good Ones [book review; fiction]

Updike for the 21^st Century [book review; fiction[

Second-Hand Bookstore Gold: The Short Stories of H.H. Munro. [book review]

Lynda Barry Rocks My World: The Greatest of Marlys, One Hundred Demons, and Cruddy. [book review; graphic novel; fiction]

Umberto Eco: Foucault’s Pendulum---It’s Always About the Templars

Ghost Stories---Treat Them Gently

Sat, 13 Aug 2005 05:48:56 GMT

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‘A Modicum of Blood, Shed Deliberately and Carefully Husbanded’

Ghost Stories---Treat them Gently.

If you truly need to be taken out of yourself, there’s nothing like a ghost story---a real ghost story, written by someone who understands the art---to make you forget your free-floating anxiety through the study of dread sufficiently subtle and menacing and separate from you to bring your ordinary workaday stress into proper perspective. I’ve spent more years than I care to count searching out the best. But the best ones aren’t easy to track down. Many are out of print or available only in anthologies which are also out of print. You have to track them down, in libraries and used bookstores (now thankfully accessible online). The ones I discuss are well worth the trouble.

Since college, I've been 'collecting' ghost stories. I don’t mean campfire tales nor yet the sort of stories written by Stephen King or Peter Straub. With a couple of notable exceptions---The Shining by King and Straub's early novels, If You Could See Me Now and Julia---very few of their writings fit my definition of a 'ghost story.' Straub in particular has written some brilliant fiction (along with some that isn't), but both are writers in the so-called 'Horror' genre and it's not the same thing. Even Straub's novel Ghost Story wasn't what I call a ghost story, though it mixes in some terrifying moments some that are simply ludicrous.

The greatest ghost story writers according to me are probably Henry James, M.R. James (no relation),and Edith Wharton, though Sheridan LeFanu deserves honorable mention. All of them wrote a number of ghost stories and some of the ghost stories they wrote are among the greatest there are. On the other hand, it’s probably a bit misleading to focus on 'ghost story writers’---a list of great ghost stories would be more to the purpose. Some writers whose other work has been forgotten are the authors of some of the greatest ghost stories---Oliver Onions, for example, the author of the incomparable The Beckoning Fair One.

James, successively Fellow, Dean, Tutor, and Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, set out the criteria for ghost stories in a 1931 essay in The Evening News entitled “Ghosts---Treat them Gently.” The quotation that follows is from Casting the Runes and Other Stories, a ‘World’s Classics’ anthology assembled by the (to me and to ghost story connoisseurs the world over) indispensable Michael Cox and published in 1987 by Oxford University Press.

The ghost story can be supremely excellent in its kind, or it may be deplorable. Like other things, it may err by excess or defect. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a book with very good ideas in it, but---to be vulgar---the butter is spread far too thick in it. Excess is the fault here: to give an example of erring by defect is difficult, because the stories that err in that way leave no impression on the memory….

Since the things which a ghost can effectively do are very limited in number, ranging about death death and madness and the discovery of secrets, the setting seems to me all-important, since in it there is the greatest opportunity for variety.

It is upon this and upon the first glimmer of the appearance of the supernatural that pains must be lavished. But we need not, should not, use all the colours in the box. In the infancy of the art we needed the haunted castle on a beetling rock to put us in the right frame of mind…. It cannot be said too often that the more remote in time the ghost is the harder it is to make him effective, always supposing him to be the ghost of a dead person. Elementals and such-like do not come under this rule.

Roughly speaking, the ghost should be the contemporary of the seer. Such was the elder Hamlet and such Jacob Marley. The latter I cite with confidence and in spite of critics, for, whatever may be urged against some parts of A Christmas Carol, it is, I hold, undeniable that the introduction, the advent, of Jacob Marley is tremendously effective. …

Setting or environment, then, is a principal point, and the more readily appreciable the setting is to the ordinary reader, the better. The other essential is that our ghost should make himself felt by gradual stirrings diffusing an atmosphere of uneasiness before the final flash or stab of horror.

Must there be horror? you ask. I think so. There are but two really good ghost stories I know in the language wherein the elements of beauty and pity dominate terror. They are Lance Falconer’s ‘Cecilia de Noel’ and Mrs Oliphant’s ‘The Open Door’. In both there are moments of horror; but in both we end by saying with Hamlet, ‘Alas, poor ghost!’…

On the whole, then, I say you must have horror and also malevolence. Not less necessary, however, is reticence…..Of course, all writers of ghost stories do desire to make their readers’ flesh creep; but [some] are shameless in their attempts. They are unbelievably crude and sudden, and they wallow in corruption. And if there is a theme that ought to be kept out of ghost stories, it is that of the charnel house. That and sex…spoil the whole business. James, Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories at 338-40 (ed. Michael Cox, Oxford University Press 1987). James, Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories at 338-40 (ed. Michael Cox, Oxford University Press 1987).

James, Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories at 349-350 (ed. Michael Cox, Oxford University Press 1987).

And in an introduction to a collection of ghost stories (I’m quoting from the source cited above), he wrote,

Often I have been asked to formulate my views about ghost stories and tales of the marvellous, the mysterious, the supernatural. Never have I been able to find out whether I had any views that could be formulated. The truth is, I suspect, that the genre is too small and special to ear the imposition of far-reaching principles. Widen the question, and ask what governs the construction of short stories in general, and a great deal might be said, and has been said. There are, of course, instances of whole novels in which the supernatural governs the plot; but among them there are few successes. The ghost story is, at its best, only a particular sort of short story, and is subject to the same broad rules as the whole mass of them….

[W]hile I cannot undertake to write about broad principles, something more concrete is capable of being recorded. Well, then: two ingredients most valuable in the concocting of a ghost story are, to me, the atmosphere and the nicely managed crescendo. I assume, of course, that the writer will have got his central idea before he undertakes the story at all. Let us, then be introduced to the actors in a placid way; let us see them going about their ordinary business, undisturbed by forebodings, pleased with their surroundings, and into this calm environment let the ominous thing put out its head, unobtrusively at first, and then more insistently, until it holds the stage. It is not amiss sometimes to have a loophole for a natural explanation; but, I would say, let the loophole be so narrow as not to be quite practicable. Then, for the setting….For the ghost story a slight haze of distance is desirable. ‘Thirty years ago,’ ‘Not long before the war,’ are very proper openings. …On the whole (though not a few instances might be quoted against me) I think that a setting so modern that the ordinary reader can judge of its naturalness for himself is preferable to anything antique. For some degree of actuality is the charm of the best ghost stories; not a very insistent actuality, but one strong enough to allow the reader to identify himself with the patient; while it is almost inevitable that the reader of an antique story should fall into the position of the mere spectator.

James, Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories at 338-40 (ed. Michael Cox, Oxford University Press 1987) (Emphasis added).

The slow creeping incursion of malevolence into the victim’s ordinary life is the element that makes James’s short stories so remarkably shocking, even at this distance in time from the original setting.

This final bit of advice from ‘Some Remarks on Ghost Stories’ reprinted from The Bookman (December 1929) exactly explains why I have so little time for modern ‘ghost’ stories and horror fiction.

Reticence may be an elderly deoctrine to preach, yet from an artistic point of view I am sure it is a sound one. Reticence conduces to effect, blatancy ruins it, and there is much blatancy in a lot of recent stories. They draft in sex too, which is a fatal mistake; sex is tiresome enough in the novels; in a ghost story, or as the backbone of a ghost story, I have no patience with it.

At the same time, don’t let us be mild and drab. Malevolence and terror, the glare of evil faces, ‘the stony grin of unearthly malice,’ pursuing forms in darkness, and ‘long-drawn, distant screams’, are all in place and so is a modicum of blood, shed with deliberation and carefully husbanded, [without] the weltering and the wallowing….

The greatest ghost story writers according to me are probably Henry James, M.R. James (no relation),and Edith Wharton, though Sheridan LeFanu deserves honorable mention. All of them wrote a number of ghost stories and some of the ghost stories they wrote are among the greatest there are. On the other hand, it’s probably misleading to focus on 'ghost story writers’---a list of great ghost stories would be more to the purpose. Some writers whose other work has been forgotten are the authors of some of the greatest ghost stories. Oliver Onions, for example, the author of the incomparable The Beckoning Fair One.

Over time, I will be compiling a list of some of the best ghost stories I’ve read with perhaps a short ‘review’ to whet the appetite sufficiently to prompt interested persons to do the necessary work of seeking them out. But if you are interested now, here are some you can check out now.

One of the greatest, most terrifying, and most restrained, of all the great ghost stories ever written was written by an American, Shirley Jackson. I read The Haunting of Hill House when I was 12, but all these years later, I can’t read it before bed if I expect to sleep. The beauty of The Haunting of Hill House is that you never have more than the vaguest of vague notions as to the reason for the terrible manifestations of Hill House. (And if you think you have seen the movie, think again, because no film could do justice to the book---so much of the terror springs from Shirley Jackson’s inimitable narrative voice---gentle, detached, ruthless, and infused with subtle menace from the very first line. The Haunting, the original 1963 version was adapted from the Shirley Jackson book, and is a tremendous film in its own right, but it is not the same as the book. The 1999 version, The Haunting of Hill House, was a waste of a wonderful cast on a ridiculous, mainly unfrightening farce which was nothing at all like the book in any respect, except for an incidental correspondence between the characters’ names. As I said, I doubt that any film could do justice to the book.

In addition to The Haunting of Hill House, you might see if you can find a copy of Kingsley Amis’s The Green Man, another of the few ghost stories I’ve ever read that works as a full length novel. If you didn’t already have to read it in college---or if you did--- The Turn of the Screw is one of the most terrifying novels of all time.

If you want a connoisseur’s anthology, The Oxford Anthology of English Ghost Stories and The Oxford Anthology of Victorian Ghost Stories (both published by Oxford University Press and edited by Michael Cox and R.A. Gilbert) will introduce you to some of the best of the best. There are many anthologies, but most have mixed in with one or two legitimate gems a hell of a lot of crap. It’s worth it to me, but it might not be to you.

And of course, the M.R. James collection is definitely worth the cover price if it’s still available. From these collections only, here are what I consider to be the ‘top twenty’ from these three anthologies. I’ve omitted stories by some of my favorite ghost story writers because the stories included aren’t among those I like best in these collections. Furthermore, some of my all-time favorites are missing from these anthologies, but never mind; these will do to be starting with. I put them in alphabetical order because which I like best depends entirely on my frame of mind.

An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street (Sheridan LeFanu)(OBVGS)

An Eddy on the Floor (Bernard Capes)(OBVGS)

At the End of the Passage (Rudyard Kipling)(OBVGS)

A Visitor from Down Under (L.P. Hartley)(OBEGS)

A Warning to the Curious (M.R. James (COLLECTED STORIES)

A Wicked Voice (Vernon Lee)(OBEGS)

Bosworth Summit Pound (L.T.C. Rolt)(OBEGS)

Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook (M.R.James)(OBVGS & COLLECTED STORIES)

Casting the Runes (M.R. James)(COLLECTED STORIES)

Count Magnus (M.R. James)(COLLECTED STORIES)

The Clock (W.F. Harvey)(OBEGS)

The Friend of the Friends (Henry James)(OBEGS)

‘To Let’ (B.M. Croker)(OBVGS)

The Lost Ghost (Mary E. Wilkins)(OBEGS)

The Shadows on the Wall (Mary E. Wilkins)(OBVGS)

Mr. Jones (Edith Wharton)(OBEGS)

Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You My Lad (M.R. James)(same + OBEGS)

Rose Rose (Barry Pain)(OBEGS)

Smee (A.M. Burrage) (OBEGS)

Thurnley Abbey (Perceval Landon (OBVGS)

Missing from the list---sadly--- are certain all-time favorites which are anthologized in a book I’ve had since I was a teenager called Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural. I can’t lay hands on it so I can’t give any more exact information, but---among many rather dull or fairly lame anthologies---it’s one of the best.

The stories I've listed below are definitely worth a little trouble to find (if you’re serious about enjoying what Edith Wharton called ‘the fun of the shudder’). The Great God Pan, I admit, isn’t exactly a ghost story---it involves what James referred to in his essays as ‘elementals’, which in their way are possibly more terrifying. All are in my top ten list of all-time greatest stories (with Casting the Runes and An Eddy on the Floor.)

Some libraries may have this anthology. I’ve seen it here and there.

Green Tea (J.S. LeFanu)

How Love Came to Professor Guildea (by I don’t remember whom, but unique and uniquely terrifying)

The Beckoning Fair One (Oliver Onions)

The Great God Pan (Arthur Machen)

Finally, an incomparably terrifying story, if you can find in your library, as I could in mine, a collection of stories by Algernon Blackwood:

The Willows (Algernon Blackwood)

Why I Love Anne Tyler's Novels.

Fri, 12 Aug 2005 14:49:23 GMT

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Comfort Food for the Psyche: Why I Love Anne Tyler's Novels

I didn’t really appreciate the novels of Anne Tyler until I was old enough to have developed real curiosity about the ordinary lives of other people. In my earlier years, I preferred books that were more fraught (John Updike) or that were more sardonic (Kingsley Amis). I am sorry to say that I was quite dismissive of most contemporary female novelists---though in my defense I have to say that it was because the ones I’d happened to encounter just weren’t very good. I hadn’t yet discovered Margaret Atwood or A.S. Byatt, I didn’t fully appreciate Ursula LeGuin, and Amy Tan and Donna Tartt hadn’t yet come along (just to name a few of the female novelists whose work has become part of my consciousness over the years. Nowadays I can take Updike in only minimal doses, though I still like Amis).

I read The Accidental Tourist because they’d made a film based on it and I recognized the title when I went into the bookstore. It struck me at the time because the characters were such odd people. They weren’t like any other fictional characters I could think of. I was still pretty young when I read it, so I didn’t realize that the reason that they seemed odd is because---in contrast to most works of fiction--- they really were like real people. Real people are usually quirky, full of contradictions, and quite vague about what they want out of life if you get to know them well enough to get past their pretences and defenses.

Tyler’s characters struggle with life. In one sense, their struggles are trivial---her people aren’t the CEO’s of corporations, university presidents, politicians, judges, or in positions of power. Except for the genuine eccentrics, they live very ordinary lives. The ones who are successful are often successful in very odd occupations---Tyler is ingenious at inventing the sort of businesses that don’t exist where I live, but I wish they did (e.g., the Clutter Counselor in Saint Maybe, Rent-A-Back in A Patchwork Planet, the very special travel writer in The Accidental Touristi, the very special ‘handyman’ in The Clockwinder, the very special restaurant in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, and so on. Often the very successful people are the fringe characters; the leading ones tend to be teetering on the edge of financial success, but you don’t necessarily see them arrive there.

Her books are comforting exactly because her characters do struggle and they are the same struggles that everyone has. They find love and lose it or they lose it and then find it. People die; children are born. The characters’ reactions to both events, and to everything else, are richly mixed. They often don’t feel the way they think they should feel or behave the way they intended. In every book, not just the main characters but the peripheral characters as well grow and change. They affect one another.

Though all the books end on a note of hope or happiness, it’s always a fragile and hard-won happiness that the reader realizes could collapse at any moment. Her stories are filled with transformations and epiphanies, but the changes don’t always push the characters in the direction that you expect.

Each book is a slice of ordinary life and each has a completely different flavor from the others. They span the last twenty years or so, but it doesn’t matter---they could be happening today or tomorrow. I can’t say what my favorites are because I like all of them. Which I feel most like rereading (and they are books I’ve read and reread) depends on what I need from Tyler.

They are very comforting books, and are often very funny, but they are also full of insight---often very strange, skewed, unexpected insights: life seen from the perspective of

an unworldly and agoraphobic artist who falls in love with his lodger (Celestial Navigation)
the agnostic wife of a fundamentalist preacher, taken hostage by an insecure bank robber and forced to accompany him on a road trip (Earthly Possessions)
an overweight and rather dull teen-ager who falls in love with the local aspiring rock star and town bad boy (A Slipping-Down Life)
a middle-aged man who deals with his angst by adopting various fictive personalities (Morgan’s Passing)
a handsome young scion of a wealthy philanthropic family with a history of petty theft and a job doing manual labor for the elderly (A Patchwork Planet)
another charming young man who, after accidentally bringing about his older brother’s suicide, finds God through ‘The Church of the Second Chance’ and greatly annoys his family thereby (Saint Maybe
an unappreciated and restless wife who leaves her family without notice and starts an entirely new life in a small town (Ladder of Years)
a widow who decides at the age of 50 that she ended up in the wrong life, and tries to recreate a past romance (Back When We Were Grown-Ups)
the loving and tender-hearted middle son of an embittered, embattled family whose sole desire in life is to own a restaurant where he can bring them all together (Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant)
a family coping (not necessarily very well) with the death of a difficult (and somewhat ignored) six year old girl (The Tin Can Tree)
a happily married middle-aged couple whose stability is threatened by the wife’s craving to connect with her divorced son’s daughter (Breathing Lessons)
a miserably married middle-aged couple who can’t get along or get out of the marriage until one day…one of them does (The Amateur Marriage)

As I said, each book is entirely different from every other book, but all are full of compassion and humor. The characters---even the baddies---are all in their ways desperate, afflicted, and hopeful. (They are also perhaps unrealistically gentle). But if I had to identify a theme it would be a theme of transformation. The ordinary people in an Anne Tyler novels often find extraordinary ways to cope with the pain that life hands out to everyone.

For this reason, though Tyler never appears to take sides with her characters and never preaches, the books deepen the reader’s experience of the world and even provide the reader with resources for coping with pain and loss that reader not have realized he or she possessed. They force you to see the unique beauty in ordinary people and things.

If you are feeling alienated, bereft, jaded, or just fed up, and you haven’t read anything by Tyler, I highly recommend her to you.

A very British Response

Fri, 05 Aug 2005 20:03:58 GMT

To jump to the current version of this note, click on this link.

To do a Proper Gallows Laugh Requires a Stiff Upper Lip.

Terror brings politics to comedy. The London bombings mean comedy at Edinburgh will be the most political since the 1970s, the Fringe boss says. [BBC News | Entertainment | UK Edition]

I remember reading a comment shortly after 9-11 by some pundit or maven (I truly don't remember who) that those tragic events had put the Nineties into proper perspective---specifically that it had overnight sucked out all the edgy, cynical humor that the Nineties had spawned. Seinfeld was mentioned, I remember. The pundit's/maven's position was that this was a good thing---he clearly thought it was time to put the brakes on all of that flippancy and irreverence towards God, the law, and our elected officials. Time for a return to basic values---and a nation capable of being amused by Everybody Loves Raymond! Time to put a stop on the smug, cold-hearted humor perpetrated by Seinfeld and its imitators!

I'm sorry, but Seinfeld? Seinfeld wasn't exactly what you'd call mordant. Curb Your Enthusiasm is, yes, but note that it's on HBO. You couldn't show CYE on any network. Americans basically just aren't fans of mordant wit (particularly at the expense of sacred cows) or of the gallows laugh.

For that we have to look to the Brits. And when we do, many people are shocked! shocked I tell you! to find out just how fundamentally cynical and mean-spirited British comedy can be. We might have been evolving in that direction---Curb Your Enthusiasm, the HBO series by Jerry Seinfeld's co-creator is definitely bitterly funny in the British mode and Arrested Development is also in the mode---but Arrested Development is apparently struggling in the ratings and the Larry David offering is on HBO.

There have been several aborted movements by American producers to imitate madly successful British comedies like Absolutely Fabulous, The Office, the various ‘Alan Partridge’ series, Green Wing, or (darkest of the dark) Nighty Night. It can't be done. You can't make---or be successful---with an American show that is that mean. You can't do it even if you try to imitate the British formula, because Americans who will laugh at Brits being cynical/ironic/bitterly funny/trenchant/mordant will (generally speaking) not laugh if the perpetrator of the bitterness is American.

And quite a few of us don’t find it funny when they do it either. A friend of mine recently wrote:

I just watched the first two episodes of “Green Wing.” Almost all of the characters are despicable -- and very strange as well as mean. It is as if one populated a hospital with a lot of clones of the lead female character from “Nighty Night.” I know that some of the critics love the show.....Maybe it will grow on me with time.... Maybe it's because I am a “Yank,” but I find Scrubs, although in some ways “sillier,” to be more good-natured and edifying, teaching, if one will, moral lessons.

I too am a Yank but seriously? Ugh. I like Scrubs fine and I do watch it, but I liked it a lot better in its early phases before it became ‘edifying.’ I suppose that once a program becomes really popular here the writers fall victim to the MASH syndrome or there is pressure in that direction and they start bringing the ‘edifying.’ I can get moral lessons from reading Time Magazine or---these days---The New York Times, thanks. For relief from the solemnity and fear that surrounds me in these dark times, I need someone to mock the darkness.

So I hope that the Brits hang on to their cynicism and that very British ability to laugh through their stiff upper lips. I hope that they won’t let the tragedies of the last two months turn them into a nation of solemn, canting, fearful post-Millenial Puritans.

Other Monty Python fans will remember the last scene in Life of Brian (which probably wouldn’t make it into American theaters nowadays). “Always look at the bright side of life—or death/Just before you draw your terminal breath.” It’s such a British attitude, but it’s one I’d commend to my fellow Americans (or to those who still retain a sense of humor).

When the darkness closes in and your knees are knocking together with fear, that gallows laugh is so liberating.

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Image drawn by Mr Tenniel; painted by Damozel.

Harry Potter.

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 16:14:40 GMT

to jump to the current version of this note, click on this link.

"Keep the ending to yourself, Damozel, and we'll throw in an Invisibility Cloak, a Marauder's Map, and a Remembrall."

US boy buys new Harry Potter book. A nine-year-old boy returns the latest Harry Potter book after a shop accidentally sold it to him. [BBC News | Entertainment | UK Edition]

Honesty is the best policy. Sylum Mastropaolo returned the book to a bookstore that sold it to him by mistake after reading only a 'few pages'. His stepfather felt that they had to do the right thing in order not to ruin it the book for other children who have to wait for the official release on Saturday. Not sure how that follows, but I'm happy to say that young Sylum was rightly rewarded with 'Harry Potter goodies.' As well he should have been. You have to give him credit.

Or rather, I have to. It would have taken more than a few Harry Potter action figures and assorted memorabilia (though those are cool too) to keep me from reading the whole thing in a single gulp---and probably rereading it. And I'm no nine-year old child. In fact, I'm too old even to have children who would consider themselves the right age to read Harry Potter. My husband reads them too---though not till after I've had the first go.

And I have to differ with Potter-detractors such as Robert Winder [linked article at bbc.co.uk.] that adult readers of Potter are necessarily developmentally stunted fanboys and -girls who babble about Gryffindor and Slytherin. According to this article, those detractors apparently include A.S. Byatt, all of whose books I have also devoured. She feels that an adult reader of Potter must by necessity by reverting to his or her 'inner child' (as if that is a bad thing') and that they are "for people whose interests are confined to the worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip." Would she be shocked to learn that one of her devoted fans has repeatedly read both the Potter books and The Game, The Matisse Stories, and Possession.

I think if I'd got my hands on an illicit copy, I'd have read it straight through from beginning to end. They wouldn't have had to worry about me keeping silent about it because it's not the sort of thing I am going to admit to anyone I know, is it? But the point is: if I had acquired it, I'd have read it. I totally would NOT have returned it. I admit it. And I would do it, knowing that it was wrong.

So perhaps the Pope is right, as the above-cited article states, that these books 'deeply distort Christianity.' Though to be fair, he apparently made that statement before he became infallible. Clearly, someone needs to introduce him to the child saint Sylum Mastropaolo.

In the meantime, if you are an adult who has not had an occasion or an excuse to read the Potter books (or see the films), you have a whole world of guilty pleasure in store. I'd recommend starting with the third one, The Prisoner of Azkaban, which is where I think she really hit her stride, but I love the first two just as much. Go on, they're psychic comfort food!

TELEVISION WITHOUT PITY

Wed, 06 Jul 2005 22:47:42 GMT

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That's Television Without Pity

RECAPS. If you're fretting or frazzled, or suffering from ennuie or garden-variety existential nausea, you just might need a good diverting dose of Television Without Pity (TWoP as the cognoscenti call it). Its motto: 'Spare the snark, spoil the networks.' Guests have available to them 'recaps' of literally hundreds of shows and members have access to the forums.

There are loads of message-boards for discussing TV, but for me, the big draw for TWoP was the recaps. I didn’t start posting in the forums for about a year after I discovered the site; I just read the recaps. That may sound strange, but TWoP recaps can be independently entertaining, in the same way a 75 year old review of a play or a book by Dorothy Parker is entertaining, whether or not you’ve ever seen or even heard of the book or play.

Enjoy your television with a side of snide. TWoP can change your TV-show watching from a guilty pleasure to something you feel quite smug about. It's so meta.

TWoP is definitely the website I recommend if you’re someone who secretly watches America’s Next Top Model, The Apprentice, or American Idol but can’t admit it to anyone you know without losing all of your hard-won credibility. It’s good if you really used to love E.R. or The West Wing and still watch it because it’s your show, but with a growing sense of irritation and rage. Finally, it’s a great site if you watch Deadwood and Six Feet Under because it’s not TV but HBO and they are quality productions, but end up afterward nervously pacing the floor and tearing at your cuticles or lying limply in bed staring sightlessly at the ceiling.

TWoP recaps are excellent value for money, and are free!   They're a good read even---or perhaps especially---if you have never watched even one episode of the show. (If you really loved the show, identified heavily with the characters, have set up a fan site, have made it your life's ambition to meet/marry one of the cast, and are really, really heavily invested, it's actually probably best to stay away). The recaps are heavily infused with the particular recapper's view of the show generally, the particular episode, the plot and the characters.

Even if you've never seen a single episode of the show, I recommend for beginners the recaps of the following shows:

[1] American Idol, Seasons 1-3 by Shack.

[2] The Amazing Race, Seasons 1-3 by Miss Alli.

[3] The Apprentice, season 1, by Miss Alli.

[4] Joe Millionaire, Season 1, by Kim (remember: the dumber the premise, the more ready to hand the "snark").

[5] America’s Next Top Model, by Potes (seriously, you do NOT need to have watched it.)

[6] Desperate Housewives by Jessica and Evany.

[7] Deadwood by Al Lowe.

[8] Project Runway by Jeff.

But if those don't appeal, you can find lots more to choose from on the Shows Page.

Every recapper has his or her own voice and every long-time TWoPper has his or her favorites. My own favorite recappers are Shack (formerly the American Idol recapper), Jacob (currently recapping American Idol and responsible for two excellent recaps of ‘Dr. Phil’ specials under the Mondo Extras section ) and Djb (who has recapped a lot of things).. I recommend starting with the easier ones and working up to theirs. It’s probably a little difficult for anyone who has never tried the TWoP recaps to swallow the notion of a recap as 'mordant' (Shack),  'insightful and compassionate' (Jacob), or 'surreal' (Djb), but…you’ll see what I mean when you look at them.  All are very, very funny writers. (I've actually only seen American Idol two or three times, not just because I'm a TV snob but because I just don't like the premise.. But I have read every TWoP recap because I love Shack and Jacob).

TWoP recaps can be long. You can’t download and print them out and you have to click each page to see the next one. I never mind this as I really enjoy the recaps for themselves. If you’re in a hurry or just want to know what happened on the damn show, check the episode thread on the network and save your TWoP recaps for later when you can relish them.

DISCUSSION FORUMS. As noted, TWoP has a huge number of forums, both from the recapped shows and for shows they don't recap but that the members have chosen to discuss. If you're feeling brave, you might give them a try. They are heavily moderated and they are not kidding when they tell you to lurk a bit and READ THE RULES (in the FAQs) before you barge in. Go ahead, see how long you can go without deserving a moderator smackdown for being rude, for 'tone,' or for some other violation of the rules (at TWoP, you've got to walk a pretty fine line between 'snark' and between being rude to a poster or a mod). Right now, during the summer, the pace has slowed down, so it's a good time to get your forum legs.

I’ve been posting there for years and have never had any trouble, but you do need to get the feel for a forum and a sense of the moderator’s style. (Recommendation: before you start posting, make sure you have read the FAQS and the moderator’s thread; I also recommend using the search function to check out the moderator’s recent posts so you know whether he or she has made any announcements.) The TWoP administrators’ objective is to have the threads be like conversations, so there is a rule that you must read the posts from the last 15 days or the last 15 pages, whichever is less. (Whatever you do, don’t start your post off with the statement, “Haven’t got time to read 30 pages of posts, so….”)

The up side of the strict moderation is that standards of civility between posters are enforced and that posters who can't write standard English don't tend to last very long. You get a real discussion, written in real English, using real words and sentences. Is there a downside? You be the judge.

The show recappers moderate the show forums, which is nice if you enjoy the person’s recaps. As noted, there are forums for types of television shows---even cartoons and commercials, even shows that have been cancelled, even British shows---that aren’t recapped on TWoP. Traffic is slower on these threads and some people might prefer it that way.

If you're an HBO user, I especially recommend the forums for 'Six Feet Under,' 'Deadwood,' and the 'Sopranos.' Unlike shows that attract a larger audience, forum traffic on these threads even during the seasons isn't so frantic, the posters are usually passionate about the show, and the moderators tend to be a bit more laid back.

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The Office (UK)

Wed, 06 Jul 2005 18:01:09 GMT

To see the current version of this post, click here.

The Office (UK)---Accept No Substitutes.

Contemporary English comedy makes me believe the theory that laughter evolved as a response to an enemy's defeat and discomfiture. I saw the original (UK) version of The Office [link to bbc website] when I was visiting England in 2002. I watched it with my hands over my eyes, peeking through the fingers. It's so painful. So excruciating. So gut-wrenchingly funny. But not in the good-natured American sitcom way. No, not like that.

I own both 6-episode series plus the final episode (the 'Christmas special'); BBC America has also shown them. At my house, we watch them every 2-3 months. There are sections I still haven't seen because my hands are over my eyes.

If you haven't seen the British version, you haven't seen The Office. The American version wasn't the same show. Don't assume you’re up to The Office just because you saw and liked the American version. If I hadn't seen the original, I might have liked it, and I certainly didn't hate it. But I had seen the original and there is just no comparison. It's like the difference between English and American beer. Both will get you drunk, but the English version tastes better, kicks in faster, and knocks you back on your arse for much longer.

If you saw only the American version of The Office, you probably wondered what all the fuss was about. I like Steve Carrell a lot, but there is just no way that his portrayal of boss 'Michael Scott' compares to office co-creator Ricky Gervais's 'David Brent.' 'Scott' comes across as shallow, socially and professionally inept, willfully oblivious, and as obnoxious as only a coworker who believes he thinks he is funny, savvy, and universally liked and admired when he's not can be. His interactions with his employees are funny and embarrassing---but they are not devastatingly embarrassing. They don't make you flush all over with vicarious humiliation.

'Brent' has all of these qualities, but so much more (a lot of it emerges in the second series). His grandiose opinion of his own abilities (as 'a comedian first and a boss second') are coldly contrasted with the actual response of his employees. He is also fumbling, needy, desperate to be liked, desperately afraid of losing face, transparently envious, ineptly competitive, and so much more. He is also weirdly likable, so that while you look forward eagerly to his comeuppance, it's also with a sinking feeling that you aren't going to enjoy it when it arrives. (With NBC's "Michael Scott," you end up feeling that there wasn't nearly enough of it; there's a feeling of deflation and anticlimax at the conclusion of the 6-episode series).

A lot of fellow Americans I know who have seen the UK version on DVD or on BBC America find it too unbearably embarrassing to be enjoyable. Many of them can't get through the first episode. One person who watched it to the end without laughing once said that it was 'riveting, in the same way an impending train wreck is riveting.' I suppose it must be true that we are predisposed to like shows about people who are successful, as Ricky Gervais said in an interview I read.

The Office is brutally funny in good, cold-hearted, cringe-inducing British fashion. It's not like any sitcom. There's no laugh track to point out the jokes or to guide your reaction. There are some brilliant performances by the other members of the cast, including (but not limited to) MacKenzie Crook (who plays Brent's sycophantic sidekick, Gareth) and also Martin Freeman and Lucy Davies, star-crossed lovers who are as poignant in their way as any television lovers ever . Why is it so deeply riveting, so addictively funny? It's not what people usually mean by a "feel-good comedy". Yet it is.

The Office is not edifying and won't make you a better person. But if you are suffering from pangs of futility, impotence, despair, ennui, helplessness, and failure, I guarantee that it will make you feel better. Because as big a loser as you may be and as much as your life may suck in general, at least you're not David Brent.

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An Update on the Cirencester Problem

XXX (Of a Sort) from the Mother Country: Mr. Rumcove & the Very Cruel Poll

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The Two Floridas

Image drawn by Mr Tenniel; painted by Damozel.