Critical Apprehensions & Intemperate Discourses

Kip Manley, proprietor

Chivalry, being dead—

The scene: it’s 1965. Travis McGee, that amiable skeptic, that waterfront gypsy, thinking man’s Robin Hood, killer of small fish, ruggedly sexy boat bum, that big, loose chaser of rainbows, that freelance knight in slightly tarnished armor, Travis McGee has picked up an old friend, Nora Gardino, who puts on a deep shade of wool, not exactly a wine shade, perhaps a cream sherry shade, a fur wrap, her blue-black hair glossy, her heels tall, purse in hand, mouth shaped red, her eyes sparkling with holiday for their date. He takes her out to the Mile O’Beach for steaks and cocktails in the Captain’s Room and when dinner’s over and the old-times talk is just about spent he tells her why he’s called her for the first time in a year or so to take her out to dinner: Sam Taggart, the man who left her hard and bad and stupid as hell three years before and lit out for parts unknown is coming back, and it turns out he is still carrying a torch, as big as the one she’s got in her own hands.

So Nora’s pole-axed, wheels around, drops her head between her knees. Trav motions the maitre’d over to bring some smelling salts. Out in the parking lot, she leans against a little tree and pukes up the steak. He takes her home in his electric blue Rolls Royce pickup truck to his place, his houseboat, the Busted Flush, Slip F-18, Bahia Mar, Fort Lauderdale, where he turns up the heat (it’s February, hence the fur in Florida) and makes her a mild drink and they settle down to talk about how maybe Sam let her catch him in bed with her shop assistant a month before the wedding because maybe he’s the sort of guy who’s afraid of being tied down, how a real live complete woman can be a scary thing, how even if maybe she thinks she came on too strong she has to be what she is, and how Trav heard from him and knows he’s coming back, and how he’ll set it up so she gets to see him again. And as the talk winds down again, he says,

“Don’t plan anything. Play it by ear, Nora. Don’t try to force any kind of reaction. It’s the only thing you can do.”

“I guess,” she said. She gave me a shamefaced look. “This is idiotic, but I’m absolutely ravenous.”

“Nora, honey, you know exactly where everything is, including the drawer where you’ll find an apron.”

“Eggs? Bacon? Toast?”

“All there. All for you. I’ll settle for one cold Tuborg. Bottom shelf. No glass, thanks.”

—Filed 6735 days ago to Indulgences; Comment [1].

Evil is conquered and the blade’s work done.

“Then share this, as well,” said Dallben, who had been listening closely and now held out the heavy, leather-bound volume he had kept under his arm.

“The Book of Three?” Taran said, looking wonderingly and questioningly at the enchanter. “I dare not…”

“Take it, my boy,” Dallben said. “It will not blister your fingers, as once it did with an over-curious Assistant Pig-Keeper. All its pages are open to you. The Book of Three no longer foretells what is to come, only what has been. But now can be set down the words of its last page.”

The enchanter took a quill from the table, opened the book, and in it wrote with a bold, firm hand:

“And thus did an Assistant Pig-Keeper become High King of Prydain.”

—Lloyd Alexander, 1924 – 2007

—Filed 6739 days ago to Indulgences; Comment [3].

Three foggy mornings and one rainy day.

It was a while ago that Chris Bertram announced he’d finally pulled down Junius, his old Bloggered blog. So it was a while ago I sighed and went and searched the pier for whatever links I’d made to Junius, way back when. —Turned out there was only the one, to a write-up on three-sided football, but a rotten link is a rotten link. I copied the old href, brought up the Wayback Machine, and thumbed through the archives for an appropriate copy of Chris’ old page, then copied that href and replaced the rotten link in my entry with the internet archived deal.

Then I checked the other links in that entry, just in case, and found that Tales of the Legion: the Origin of the Legion had also rotted away. Ditto and so forth.

It’s becoming more and more of a chore, this scraping the hull for linkrot. And though the pier’s been a mostly going concern for five years now, it’s only got (checks) about a thousand entries with, I dunno, three or four outbound links per, on average? There’s no way an actual jumping joint like Eschaton or Crooked Timber could even begin to think of keeping up. (Not that I’m keeping up myself. I just check when I’m specifically reminded of something. Like the tickle in the back of the brain that says hey, I think maybe once you linked to Junius, back in the day. Depsite the constant bloggering it suffered.)

—About the same time as Chris was pulling Junius down, John Holbo was trying to figure out how to avoid linkrot upfront, maybe by using WebCite® right off the bat? But that links to WebCite®’s archived copy from the get-go and not the cited site itself, mucking with traffic and googlejuice and whatnot, and anyway WebCite® only wants scholarly papers to use their service, and even if it’s free I hitch at people so profligate in their use of marcæ registradæ®.

(Also of idle note: the various Bad Actors, over the ages. It’ll be a cold day indeed before I ever again link to a Yahoo news article, or anyone’s AP piece, or the Washington goddamn Post, let me tell you. —Plus, yes, there’s the linkrot I’m responsible for, Bad Actor myself, having once used an old Movable Type link-numbering scheme that I can’t easily mask to the new, sane, easily replicable link-naming scheme. I still get hits on those old pages, from time to time. No clue what they pointed to, without Waybacking myself. I wince a little every time I see one in the logs.)

Anyway, here’s what I want, oh plugin developers, oh API jockeys, oh Web 3.0 entrepreneurs agleam in someone’s eye: I want something that will spider through my site on a regular basis, testing outgoing links in all my various entries. Anything that returns a 404 gets automagically plugged into the Wayback Machine, and the href of the archived version closest in time to the date of the entry in question is returned and replaced in the rotten link. Once a week a report is generated: here’s what was found and fixed, so I can go through myself and re-correct any overly zealous corrections. If needed.

Lazyweb powers activate! Thunderbleg explodes into action NOW!

—Filed 6776 days ago to Indulgences; Comment [2].

Hole of darkness.

(Back to the Anodyne well. —Almost ten years ago I was holed up in a sleeping bag on the floor of an elementary school gymnasium somewhere outside Edmonton, speed-reading my way through a copy of—well, you’ll see in a minute. I hadn’t read it in years (had I read it, really, at all?), but I’d decided it was the perfect thing to pastiche for a piece on the Woodstock Mystery Hole. I ended up liking it well enough—this piece, I mean; I liked it even better when I heard it had been read aloud, in most of its entirety, at a poetry night at that breakfast joint on Hawthorne, but it has a new name now. —The breakfast joint, I mean. Has a new name now. I don’t think they do any more poetry nights.

(Barron doesn’t so much do in-person tours of the Hole these days, so I’ve cut the bit with the phone number, and cleaned up some old typos and undoubtedly inserted some new ones. Photo’s by Juliana Tobón. All due apologies to Konrad Korzeniowski, without whom, etc.)

The Henry, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of sails, and was at rest. The Slough stretched before us like, well, like the end of a terminable waterway. Sky and sea would never weld together without a joint here; too many trees, and used car lots and office parks, and besides, the Pacific was a hundred and twenty miles away. The air was dark over Swan Island, and further back seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest and the greatest town hereabouts.

Val, the Editor of the magazine and our host, stood in the bow, looking off toward the interstate. Still, nothing else on the Slough looked half so nautical, and we looked upon her with great affection. Anne had, because her her many years and many virtues, the only cushion on deck, and was lying on the only rug. Carter sat squarely in the aft, round sunglasses perched on his nose despite the gathering gloom. He had sunken cheeks, a stylishly pale complexion, stylishly black clothing, and, with his legs crossed, his hands resting on his knees, palms up, he resembled not so much an idol as someone who wished to be mistaken for one. Val, satisfied the anchor had good hold, or at least that we were not going anywhere for the immediate moment, made her way aft. The day was ending beatifically. The slick oily sheen of the water shone brilliantly, struck by the declining rays of the sun. The pacific stillness of it all was broken only by three young men thirty yards or so off, taking great pains to catch a fish they would not be able to eat. Only the gloom to the south, downtown, brooding (as I said), became more somber, more slatey, every minute. It was difficult to countenance that our normal work was not out here in the bright Slough, but behind us, within, yes, that brooding gloom.

At last the sun set, dusk began to fall about us, and the three young men left, without a fish. Lights began to appear in the used car lots. The US Bancorp Tower, an incongruously pink thing erect in the midst of downtown, shone strongly in the last rays of the sun. Lights of cars and trucks roared past on the interstate, a great stir as ever going north and south.

“And this also,” said Carter suddenly, “has been one of the dark places of the earth.”

His remark did not seem all that surprising. It was just like Carter. Still, Anne and I exchanged glances, wondering perhaps if one of us ought to say something, before—

“I suppose you folks remember I did agree to write a story on the Woodstock Mystery Hole once,” said Carter, and then it was too late. We were fated to hear about one of his interminable experiences.

“I don’t want to bother you too much with what happened to me personally,” he began, betraying with this remark that was what he would best like his audience to hear. “But to understand what happened to me you ought to know how I got out there, what I saw, how I came to travel down the long dark thoroughfare of Woodstock Street where I first met the poor chap.

“I got the assignment from Tiffany, your Cyberculture Editor. I don’t know how she first got involved. Murky connections there, I don’t doubt. I met her one hot afternoon in the Brasserie Montmartre, which was gratifyingly cool and deep in shadow. She appeared suddenly, the back of her head freshly shaved, dressed in a pink thrift-store Chanel knock-off. She stayed long enough to eat two of my fried artichoke hearts and hand me a most singular envelope.

“It had been white once, turned grubby now and worn to a state of extremely dirty softness, as if it had passed through many hands before travelling from hers to mine. Inside was an extraordinary assortment of papers, articles culled from a variety of periodicals, from the Oregonian, a state-wide newspaper run by a reclusive family back East, to the Grantonian, an exercise in high school journalism. Also newsletters, a pitch-black postcard, obscure flyers, a singularly odd liability waiver…

“The gist of it all was a story about a man named Barron, of indeterminate age and height, who grew up in Madras, discovered the joys of substitute teaching, lived in New Mexico and California for a brief time, then came to Portland, where he bought a house in Southeast, and dug a deep hole in his backyard.

“Apparently, as more than one of the journalists reported with a straight face, the hole had always been there. Or so Barron said—all he’d had to do was take a shovel and remove the dirt, and lo and behold, there it was.

“It presented an extravagant mystery. I looked up from the papers, dazed, and seemd then to catch sight of this Barron, in my mind’s eye. It was a distinct glimpse, of a lone man, pale against the ever-present overcast, standing above a great dark gaping hole in the earth, his hand moving a bit, gesturing, beckoning me down.” And here Carter moved for the first time, startling us all, his form silhouetted against the sickly salmon glow of the sodium-vapor lights, his hand gesturing in conscious mimicry of his vision of this Barron. “I shuddered,” he said, and he did. “Every account of the man commented on his air of inscrutability, that he is ‘shrouded in dark mystery’, ‘too fast to be caught off-guard’, ‘prone to wearing grey suits and thin ties’. That sort of thing. Not one of them came close to answering the great question now looming before me: Why.”

Here Carter drew a deep breath, and ran a hand through his lank black hair. “Of course, that question begged another. How. The only directions I could find turned out to be the (of course) mysterious phrase, ‘Just two miles west of I-205’. Not terribly helpful in getting me to the man.

“I was still pondering this problem when the answer dropped almost literally into my lap. A bit of email, from Barron himself, allowing as how he’d ‘heard’ of me, and wanted to invite me to a ‘Meteor Shower’. Just a brief, cryptic note appended at the top of a standard form letter, giving date and time and details about the potluck and, most importantly, driving directions. I was set.

“His house turned out to be a small grey affair, set close on a dusty cul-de-sac. The front of it is screened by shrubbery and a grey wall, and just off to one side of the front patio has been set up a Gift Shoppe, where I could buy more of the pitch-black post cards (close-ups of the Hole, it seemed), flasks of genuine ‘Vapors’ exhaled by the Hole, various tracts dealing with the Hole, and with an organization known as the Universal Church of Fun, ‘magick’ mojo crystals.

“Next to the Gift Shoppe was a pipe which rose out of the ground and terminated at about chest height, with a sign on it, inviting me to toss in a coin and make a wish. ‘All wishes 100% guaranteed.’ I shook my head at the impossibility of this claim and walked through the open doors of the house and out, into the backyard.

“‘There is pot-luck beer,’ turned out to be the first words I heard Barron speak. ‘But it’s so bad it’s been here year after year… feel free…’ He was taller than I expected, though not so tall as you might think. Still, I had almost no inclination to take him in at the moment, his thin, wiry frame, his unruly mop of grey hair. I was too busy staring at the yard.

“Along the back of it, utterly incongruous in this Southeast neighborhood, was a twenty-foot tall laurel hedge, a perfectly straight, tailored wall of greenery. Below that, spread in a smooth oval, was a lovely, close-cropped green lawn that stretched from the hedge to the back porch. Scattered about its rim were clusters of lawn chairs; already a number of people had arrived, and were disporting themselves genteelly.

“Barron noticed how the hedge drew my attention. ‘Nice, isn’t it,’ he said. ‘I wanted a tree house, but I didn’t have a tree. So I grew a hedge.’ He took me across the lawn and showed me the inside, which was hollowed out; built within was a platform which ran the length of the hedge. ‘People like to climb up here and peer out at the party.’

“I took the opportunity to ask the first question which came to mind: how on earth could he guarantee those wishes? ‘Ah,’ he said, sagely. ‘They are 100% guaranteed to be wishes. What happens after that—well.’ And then he was off, greeting a new group of partygoers.

“I followed slowly, stepping out from behind the hedge, looking back towards the house. And stopped dead in my tracks, feeling for a moment the ineffable mystery I had come here to answer tickling tremulously at the edges of my perception.

“I saw, for the first time, the complex of the Mystery Hole.

“It was a simple affair, but bizarre. A kiosk stood over the Hole, with a sign on it, announcing that this was the ‘Deluxe Mystery Hole.’ Behind that stood a blue fiberglass tower, atop which, incongruously enough, was a rowboat. And rising from the very lip of the Hole was what appeared to be a flight of stairs, climbing dizzily up to meet the roof of the house; as I approached, it resolved itself into a clever trompe l’œil—incredibly narrow, it proved nothing more than a plank of wood, cut cunningly to seem a full staircase.

“I went closer. A concrete apron surrounds the hole, shoring up its edges; an orange safety strap guards one side of the kiosk, and, on the other, a simple wooden ladder rises provocatively out of the depths.

“How long I stood there, on that apron, I could not say.

“Though I could see the bottom—Barron has installed small lights in the Hole—I could not tell how deep it was. Some of the news accounts I had read offered figured which ranged from 15 to 16 feet deep, but standing there, breathing in the cool air wafting from the depths, I was struck by uncertainty. The ladder seemed to descend much further than that, dwindling off to some strange horizon far below my feet, while the cobbled floor of the Hole, gleaming in the dim lights, seemed close enough to touch.

“‘How deep it it?’ asked a serendipitious voice behind me. ‘Well,’ answered Barron’s mellifluous tones, ‘it goes all the way to the bottom.’ I looked up. He was showing a couple of young men to the Hole, and smiled at me, pointing to an enormous sheet of black glass attached to the side of his house, like a sheet of darkness from the Hole lifted up and hung, frozen, in the air. ‘The Black Obsidian Mirror of Higher Truth,’ he said to me. ‘In which we can all see our dark sides.’ One of the young men asked, ‘Should we wear a hard hat?’ Barron pointed to a rack of them, beside the Hole. ‘If you like,’ he said. ‘Hmm,’ said the young man, selecting one, which had the name ‘Larry’ printed on it. ‘What happened to Larry?’ ‘Well,’ said Barron, ‘we have his hat…’

“And as I stood there, unmoving, the men climbed down the ladder, quick as you please, and Barron greeted an older man with a long and tangled white beard, who had driven up from San Francisco for the Meteor Shower, and his companions, two women who had been college roommates many years before, and now were sisters.

“Larry, and his hat. A boat sitting high on a blue tower. Our dark sides revealed. A hedge-house. A Hole. For a moment I was seduced; it all seemed so simple. Of course. The Hole went all the way to the bottom; what other answer was there?

“No. I shook my head. That way was too easy. I would get to the bottom of it; climb down the ladder and see for myself. Only not yet, not yet.”

Anne grunted again at that, a sharp, sardonic sound of amusement. “What?” said Carter. “You laugh? Give me a cigarette.” She did so, wordlessly, and held out her lighter for him. In the sudden light of its flame the hard planes of his face leapt out in sharp contrast to the gloom. “I don’t have a head for heights, as you well know. Nor for depths, as it turns out. People came and went as I steeled my resolve, many of them signing one of the liability waivers attached to the kiosk, planting a hard hat on their heads, and climbing down. A couple got up into the boat high above our heads, settled the oars into the oarlocks, and insisted to any who asked they were headed for Zanzibar. Voices cried out suddenly, peals of laughter rang out, coming from nowhere I could see—until I remembered what Barron said about the hedge, and saw the eyes peering out from the laurel leaves, high above the gathering throng, which in turn jeered the unseen lurkers.

“For some reason, that I couldn’t say, those voices clinched it. I made my choice. Before I could think about it, I signed the waiver, clapped a hard hat on my head, and climbed down, into the Hole.

“It was cool, and dark, though the lights helped. It was not a very long descent. At the bottom, the Hole stretched out into a short tunnel, turned a corner, and ended at a dead end. It seemed unremarkable enough, but that only deepened the mystery. Why? Why were all these people here? What drew them? What about this assemblage of strange, cast-off objects held such a deep fascination? This is only a hole in the ground, after all!

“It was when I turned to leave that I saw the first sign. On a small sheld on the wall stood three tiny figurines: Fred Flintstone, Mister Spock, and Harry S Truman. Left by pilgrims to the Hole? Or Barron himself? I couldn’t say, but something obscure, almost sinister in their juxtaposition urged me to hurry out of the Hole and back into the light. But before I set foot on the ladder, I saw one last thing, that gave me pause.

“How I wish I had not stopped.

“Light spilled out from something low, close to the ground by my feet. I knelt, and saw there a tiny door, a hand’s span in height, with a light shining through, from somewhere behind.

“Where had it come from? How had it gotten there? What lay on the other side? I reached out to touch it, try its handle—it would not turn. The door would not open. Was it a genuine mystery? Or another clever fake? The question maddened me, as I knelt there, an indeterminate distance beneath the surface. Until, with thundering suddenness, the answer came upon me.”

And here Carter stubbed out the cigarette Anne had given him, and something about that last little spark of light going out caused all of us to shiver, I think. “I could not learn what was on the other side,” said Carter, “because there is nothing there. I could never learn the reason why because there is no reason. All these people, the Hole itself, its accoutrements, Barron and his enigmatic sayings, all were here for one thing and one thing only:

“Fun.”

We were all silent for a moment, a long moment, that seemed to stretch almost to a breaking point. Val finally was the first to speak. “What about the meteors?”

“Meteors?” hissed Carter with startling vehemence. “After that, you want to know about meteors? That’s the only question you have?”

“Well,” she said, with more patience than I could have mustered, “it was a Meteor Shower you went to, and—”

“A joke! A simple joke, like everything else there! The Hole, that tower, all that effort expended over a dozen years, his entire substitute teaching career for all I know, all of it for nothing more than silliness, whimsy, fun!” He seemed overwhelmed, and took a number of deep, panting breaths to calm down. “I fled. Climbed out of the Hole, dropped the hard hat, and fled out of the gate. I didn’t care to stay and find out what silly joke would lurk at the bottom of the meteors.

“Needless to say, the story will never be written.”

Silence reigned again. Anne seemed about to say something, then thought better of it, and busied herself with lighting a fresh cigarette. Carter lurched to his feet and moved forward, heading belowdecks at a slow, shambling pace. “The fun! The fun!” I heard him mutter as he passed.

We three waited until he was out of earshot.

“You know,” said Anne, “I asked Barron about his Hole once.” It did not surprise me to learn that she knew him; Anne knows everyone. “It seemed dangerous to me, having folks crawl in and out of a hole in your backyard, and I called him on it. ‘You’re always in danger underground,’ he said. ‘Some folks drive for hours to experience that sort of danger, spelunking in caves and such. I just wanted to be able to do so in my own backyard. So I wouldn’t have to risk my life out on the highways.’”

“Eminently sensible,” I said.

“You want to visit sometime? We just have to give him a quick phone call. He’s in the white pages, under ‘Barron’. He likes to have a couple hours’ notice, before you drop in.”

“Sounds like fun,” I said. “Val? You interested?”

But she was staring amidships, at the hatch which led below, through which Carter had lately passed.

“What an utter drip,” she said.

“Yeah,” I sighed.

—Filed 6791 days ago to Indulgences; Comment.

Unzeitgemässe betrachtungen.

I don’t at this point remember what the flyer looked like. It would have mentioned Buffy if Buffy had existed at that point, but it was 1992, and Buffy (as we know it now) was five years away. Did it say something about the X-Files? It would have, if the X-Files hadn’t been a year away itself. I’ll say this for them, if nothing else (though I’ve said more, and will again): they were surfing what ended up becoming one hell of a big, big wave.

I don’t remember what the flyer looked like, but it worked on me at least: I auditioned. On a whim, but. I rode a bus out to Hampshire College, memorizing my lines on the way, and stood in the middle of an empty classroom and read them back: the opening lines of the epilogue to The Secret History. (Have I mentioned that Gonzo is my favorite Muppet? He’s my favorite Muppet because he says in the first movie that he wants to go to Bombay, India to become a movie star.) —Anyway, it worked on them: I got the role: I was going to play Harlan, the one who read from the Necronomicon and went mad but nonetheless lived to tell the tale.

“I managed to get out of taking my French exams the next week, due to the very excellent excuse of having a gunshot wound to the stomach.”

I knew who Lovecraft was at the time, even if I hadn’t read much Lovecraft at all. Maybe “The Call of Cthulhu.” (I’d played the game.) But of course I’d heard of the book. Who hasn’t? —I’ve read a lot since then. Even the Houellebecq. He was very, very good at what he did, Lovecraft, but what it was he was doing wasn’t writing, per se. Took me a while to figure that out.

I’d almost forgotten this part, so I might as well write it down now. They were still looking for someone to play—was it Harlan’s girlfriend, whose name I can’t remember? Or Liz West? Who later became Harlan’s girlfriend, when I simplified things. Whichever; anyway. I actually asked the girl who was working in the software store in the live mall if she was interested in auditioning. (It was called the live mall because it had actual stores in it, and was across the frontage road from the dead mall, which is where I was working, in the market research phone bank.) She was blond and sharp and dressed in the sort of suits you wore to sell software in retail shops in those days, and I rode the bus with her down to Hampshire for her audition in the TV studio we’d later use for the bluescreen work, and I couldn’t tell you who was more nervous, me or her: her because she’d never really acted before; me because I’d been crushing on her for months. (I’d asked her out once before, right after I’d seen Husbands and Wives in the live mall movie theater, but she hadn’t noticed, and anyway she had a boyfriend.) Whichever it was, it didn’t work out. —She got a ride home from her boyfriend. I rode the bus back to Sunderland.

This wasn’t the film student, mind. Nor was she the other girl at the live mall I’d occasionally hangdog around, who worked in the Sam Goody or whatever it was called, and who’d been mishearing the lyrics to “Fuck and Run” until I pointed out it was “fetters and sodas.”

Yeah, I know. I still like it better.

Filming—taping?—filming started in November or so of 1992 and ran through the spring of 1993, on just about every campus in the five-college area: the Hampshire library, the UMass physical plant, exteriors at Amherst, me dancing shirtless in a Mount Holyoke dorm room. (I don’t think we shot anything at Smith, come to think of it. Did we even shoot anything in Noho? I don’t think so.) There was a camera guy and a sound and lighting guy and the writer and the director and the guy who would have been the producer if there’d been more money involved. (Glenn was there, too. Glenn could tell you a lot more than I can. I’m terrible at this sort of thing.) The writer faded away after a bit, though I don’t want to speak ill of him, and the director and the producer guy, especially the producer guy, ended up writing a lot more as scenes had to change given the locations and the actors that were available. —I ended up writing some, too, ad libbing in the scenes in Harlan’s room, where he reads from the Necronomicon and goes mad; I’m afraid I was reading The White Goddess at the time, and so there’s a lot of “I am the shield for every head; I am the tomb of every hope” in that stuff. I wrote a scene between Harlan and his girlfriend that I was really happy with, when we got the physical plant for a couple of days to shoot in, until somebody pointed out I was riffing on what Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher had done to rewrite their scene in Empire Strikes Back. —Have you ever done a play or a student film or anything like that? Then you know what I mean. (Do you? I haven’t made any actual gestures in that rhetorical direction. Ah, fuck it: I just need the transition. —And anyway if you haven’t, let’s face it: this digressive blog post isn’t going to get you any closer.)

I’ve mentioned in the past the last time I took anything hallucinogenic? When I ate mushrooms with the crazy Greek up in Butterfield? And I spent most of the trip grabbing people by the lapels and demanding they show me, right then, something magic, and laughing maniacally when, of course, they just stared at me blankly. Magic? In this day and age? Please. —Pretending to be someone who’d read from the Necronomicon and gone mad for months on end had taken its toll, you see. It’s my only excuse. The crazy Greek finally got tired of my whingeing and dragged me outside, up to the top of the hill above Butterfield, where some crazy artist at some point had built Butterhenge. —There, he said.

Wow, I said.

And I’ll always love him for that, and forgive him anything, even though he used to bellow Ladies! Kiss me! It’s okay, I’m a Lesbian! (He was from Lesbos, you see.)

I rewrote his role as Jamshid. The Exco 347 scene is I think maybe the one most directly lifted from the original script.

“As bad as it looked, there in the Albemarle, I still think we could have patched it up somehow. It wasn’t from desperation that he did it. Nor, I think was it fear.”

Everything was filmed. Taped? Filmed. On little 8mm videotapes. I have no idea what became of the footage (I only ever saw the trailer, which premiered some months after the filming was finished; again, Glenn could probably tell you more). I know it was finished, because they told me, and I asked if they were sure, and they said yes, and I asked if they were damn near positive, and they said Kip, Jesus, we’re done already, it’s in the can, and I said okay, and I cut all my hair off and shaved off my beard. I looked so different they used me as a Miskatonic University administrator in one of the last pickup scenes it turned out they needed to film.

When filming began? Back in November? I would have told you love was a crock. It didn’t exist, and if it did, it was a mug’s game. Which was maybe why I’d been able to ask the girl who worked in the software store in the live mall if she wanted to try out for a movie, even though that sort of cold call is otherwise terribly out of character for me.

By the time it was done? I’d already kissed Jenn for the first time, in December, which I’d like to think surprised us both.

Wow, I said.

We moved to Portland in 1995, and by one of those quirks of fate that unites places like the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts and the People’s Republic of Multnomah County, the director and the producer guy and the guy who’d done either the camera or the lighting and the sound (I remember the guy, just not whichever thing it was he’d mostly been responsible for) had all moved to Portland, too. I actually worked in the same building they had offices in for a while, as Portland is when you get right down to it a terribly small town. —Anyway, for one reason or another they decided they wanted to redo the whole damn thing from scratch. The Necronomicon. You know, some college kids find a copy and read from it. Hijinks ensue. They wanted to know if I was interested in writing—rewriting?—the script. They’d use it to go chasing dot com money, which was thick on the ground in those days.

Turned out I was interested. Who knew? —What resulted isn’t technically speaking mine, though I did write most of it. I’ve long since lost the original original script, the one we actually filmed back in Massachusetts, so I can’t tell you for sure what little was lifted from there. Nor can I tell you which bits were written by Amy Glynn, or which bits were cut by her, either. I won’t play coy and tell you she did the funny bits. There’s some (very) weak stuff in here, yes (I will play coy a little), and only some of it was intentionally put in so the producer guys would have had something to cut if this version had ever actually found some dot com money to burn. There’s stuff I regret leaving out, yes, like the dialogue that would have rationalized the gun, and maybe I would have put it back in before the cameras had ever actually filmed that scene, if. If. —But I’m mostly happy with how it ended up, the script anyway, or I wouldn’t be sticking it in the commonplace book. Mostly, rereading it, I’m fascinated by how quickly it’s become so anachronistic, having characters who so flagrantly smoke. You know?

Amy, by the way, used to have the same voice teacher as Mark Eitzel, but that’s a story for another time. —As for the here and now, folks, I give you:

• Act I: “Some secrets of this world, that God has damned.”
• Act II: “You just want it to be true.”
• Act III: “Satisfaction brought it back.”

1. A young man cannot possibly know what Greeks and Romans are.
2. He does not know whether he is suited for finding out about them.

—Filed 6800 days ago to Indulgences; Comment [5].

Time to Frenzy.

Distressing news via BlogTown: Reading Frenzy, the amazing zine and comics and independent press emporium that’s been a Portland fixture for 13 years, needs our help. Here’s the message from Chloe Eudaly:

We’re rounding the corner on our 13th year, and while I’m not particularily superstitious, it does seem to be adding up to a rather unlucky phase in our long, illustrious history. A series of unfortunate events, both business and personal, have brought us to a critical juncture and we need your support to see us through.

As a faithful reader, I’m sure you appreciate Reading Frenzy and what we offer to our community of readers and publishers: a rare outlet for independent and alternative media, a hub of local literary activity, and a cozy space for art and literary events. Internationally recognized for our devotion to the small press and zines in particular, we’ve even inspired others to follow suit and open shops in their own towns.

Reading Frenzy is as much a community resource as it is a business, and as such has always depended on the generousity of volunteer staff, a team of supportive professionals who help us for free or cheap, and the occasional fundraiser. We have a couple bigger events in the works, but in the meantime here’s how you can help break the spell:

• Go on a Reading Frenzy shopping spree! Can’t find what you want now? Buy yourself (and a few of your friends) gift certificates!
• Buy a Co-Frenzy membership for $100—you receive a 10% discount for one year, plus a signed/numbered Reading Frenzy/Spiral Bound print by Aaron Renier!
• Have a bright idea for a fundraiser? Bring it on! We’re thinking rock show, spaghetti feed, and book sale—but not at the same time!

Thanks so much for your continued support!

Go. Continue your support. And spread the word!

—Filed 6801 days ago to Indulgences; Comment [2].

Woke up strange.

Meant to note this earlier, but what with one thing or another. —Dreamed last night (and while I’m sure I dream as much as the next fellow, I don’t often remember my dreams, so) that I was headed to Michigan to meet someone I can only assume was Lindsay Beyerstein so we could spend the next three months tooling up and down the East Coast, following Michael Bérubé on a book tour. I can only assume it was her because I’ve never actually met Lindsay Beyerstein; I have not, to my immediate recollection, even spoken with her via chat or email. But she had short blond hair and when I asked for something warm to put on (it was cold, you see, in Michigan), she gave me a jet-black hoodie.

Lindsay: I have to apologize for how strangely cold I became. The handwritten note that was slipped under the door when neither of us was looking, the one I grabbed and wouldn’t let you see? Whatever I read there made me suddenly distrust you. But just because I could read it in the dream has nothing to do with whether or not I could actually read it, and some of the questions I was starting to rather belligerently ask were really just me getting frustrated with how much of a jerk I was being and trying to figure out what was really going on. Since I wasn’t telling myself, see.

—We never did get to the East Coast, which is fine, since I’ve never met Bérubé before either, and I’d have no idea what to say to him. Maybe this is why I don’t too terribly often bother to remember my dreams.

—Filed 6862 days ago to Indulgences; Comment [5].

After the late, great unpleasantness.

I am a Southerner, for all that I’m expatriate—born in Alabama, raised in Virginia and the Carolinas and Kentucky, I graduated high school in John Hughes land and attended a famously liberal arts college on the North Coast of Ohio. Since then, I’ve lived my life in New York and Boston and the Pioneer Valley and Portland, Oregon, and I haven’t spent more than two weeks at a stretch south of the Mason Dixon. (And those stretches are sometimes awfully few and far between.) —But I cook up hoppin’ john for New Year’s, every year (though, apostasic, I make it without the fatback). I taught my Jersey girl how to eat grits and I make my biscuits from scratch. (Food? Don’t laugh. Look to the roots of your own tongue.) —I’m haunted by the smell of magnolia blossoms, plucked and left in a drinking glass on the mantelpiece. (They smell lemony, the same way apples do.) Long pine needles crushed underfoot, dry, not wet and silvery grey; evergreens burnt brown by the sun. I always forget until I see it from the window of the plane, how red the dirt is, scraped up, laid shockingly bare in circles of development scars that will always ring Charlotte: how wrong it looks, how raw. It’s not the color the earth is supposed to be. It’s alien; I’m home.

For a couple of weeks, at most. And then.

(“You will find no other place, no other shores,” says C.P. Cavafy. “This city will possess you, and you’ll wander the same streets. In these same neighborhoods you’ll grow old; in these same houses you’ll turn grey.”)

—If you aren’t Southern, I don’t know that I can explain the little thrill I felt when I saw the motto for the Levine Museum of the New South: “Telling the story—1865 to tomorrow.” Shock is hardly the word. Frisson even seems too strong. It’s a stifled giggle; a flash of a grin, at something you’d’ve done yourself, but never would have thought to do. It hardly seems worth mentioning, but—well, maybe the About Us page will bring it into focus for the Yankees among us?

What is the New South?

The New South means people, places and a period of time — from 1865 to today. Levine Museum of the New South is an interactive history museum that provides the nation with the most comprehensive interpretation of post-Civil War southern society featuring men, women and children, black and white, rich and poor, long-time residents and newcomers who have shaped the South since the Civil War.

New South Quick Facts

• A Time—The New South is the period of time from 1865, following the Civil War, to the present.
• A Place—The New South includes areas of the Southeast U.S. that began to grow and flourish after 1865.
• An Idea—The New South represents new ways of thinking about economic, political and cultural life in the South.
• Reinvention—The New South encompasses the spirit of re-invention. The end of slavery forced the South to reinvent its economy and society.
• People—The New South continuously reinvents itself as newcomers, natives, immigrants, visitors and residents change the composition and direction of the region.

To say that you are about the South, but dismiss the antebellum—not to forget, because who can forget, not even to repudiate it, but to wave it off as no longer important to the South you want to look at, here and now— Don’t throw out the cotton and the rice, the pastel dresses and grey uniforms, the stars and bars and whips and chains. Those things are all still very much alive and kicking. But cut out the thing that props them up, the hollow rites, the archly wounded pride; blithely (if a little self-consciously) announce you’re leaving the Civil War well enough alone, to all the many other hands that want it; you will turn your attention to everything else, and watch it all fall into some saner perspective—1865 to tomorrow—

(“How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?” says C.P. Cavafy. “Wherever I turn, wherever I happen to look, I see the black ruins of my life, here, where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”)

The Levine Museum of the New South is currently hosting an exhibit called “Families of Abraham.” Eight photographers spent over a year with 11 families in the Charlotte area—Christian families, Jewish families, Muslim families—recording their holidays and everydays, putting the photos together to demonstrate that when you set aside the different words we’ve each plucked from the same shambolic Book and just look at the people, going about their lives, well, under the chadors and yarmulkes and double-knit blazers we’re all, y’know, the same. Basically.

Which is why, given the way things currently are, what with the Pragers and the Goodes and the Qutbs, this show is important. —But it’s not why it’s important to me.

That’s a photo (by my mother, which is why the show is important to me, yes, but), a photo of Basheer Khatoon with her great-grandson, Raahil, taken in the home she shares with her son, a Charlotte cardiologist.

My South—the South in my head, the South I came from—doesn’t have a Basheer Khatoon. But there she indisputably is. Alien—and yet, from all the years I’ve spent since and elsewhere, heimlich. The world has come to the South; the South—my South—is becoming part of the world.

No matter where we go, there we are; we find no other place, no other shore. We wander the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods. —But those streets change.

—Filed 6872 days ago to Indulgences; Comment [1].

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