Wee Publication

A short essay I wrote will be appearing the October issue of Quiet Mountain, a journal of women's writing. You may remember them as the place where I was interviewed by Diane Saarinen (August issue). Yay! My essay is about the ambivalence many teachers feel at the end of the summer; however much you love teaching, the freedom of summer is an illusion we have a hard time giving up.

Rogues and Pirates

There was an ad in the Sunday NY Times for a new YA book, Capt. Hook by J. V. Hart and illustrated by Brett Helquist. The letter from the author (screenwriter of Hook) says:

"Growing up in Texas, my gang of neighborhood kids would gather on Saturdays to act out movies like ROBIN HOOD, THE WOLF MAN, and CAPTAIN BLOOD. I discovered then that playing the bad guy was a lot more fun than being the hero. The villain always had the best lines and the big death scenes... "

Even better, the website also says:

"In the spirit of the Peter Pan charitable legacy, a portion of the author’s royalties will go to the Peter Pan Children’s Fund, an organization that supports children’s hospitals through philanthropy programs."

Rogues with good hearts, what could be better? I'm going to keep my eye out for the book. Speaking of rogues, I am trying to find out whether the ever-fabulous Vic Reeves' Discovery series Rogues Gallery will ever come to the States. Vic looks into the lives of famous rogues like Dick Turpin and Black Bart.

Return of the Pikebone Kantele

At last, it has returned! Earlier this summer, Gerry Henkel sent me the pikebone kantele he had made, but it arrived at the writer's colony broken. Over the summer he repaired it and, after dealing with some problems caused by the US Postal Service, it has arrived. It looks beautiful, even in this hazy PDA picture of it sitting on one of my drums:



You can see a better picture here. I mentioned its return on the Kantele Players Guild list and Jane Ilmola of 3 Rivers Kanteles mentioned that she had a link to a real pikebone kantele. From their website, click on the link for instruments, then click on the Martti Pokela collection. You can scroll down and see the boney kantele.

The pikebone is traditionally the source of the first kantele. According to the Kalevala, the runesinger Väinämöinen made the first instrument from the jawbone of a giant pike he and his cohorts had wrestled from the sea. Its strings came from the tail of Hiisi's mare. You can find a version of the tale here, and more about real pikes here.

Thanks, Gerry! I am so lucky.

Publishing News

Two new items this week:

Grimma Gaest: I wrote this short essay on Beowulf for a collection on cannibalism and eating "the other" [terminology from literary theory, defining the one who is not "us" the assumed narrator -- it can mean women to a male point of view or indigenous people to a colonialist POV, etc.]. My piece focuses on Grendel as the horrific "other" to the warriors of the story. He turns their world upside down and breaks the most fundamental taboo by eating them.

The Sorcerer: Thanks to S. T. Joshi I may have another piece to write for Greenwood Press. The collection is Icons of Horror and the Supernatural and I would be writing the section on the figure of the Sorcerer from antiquity to the present, in literature and popular culture. I'm just awaiting official word (and a contract) from Greenwood.

I was going to write a review of Weird Tales of the Ramones, but Gene beat me to it!

Stumbling

No, the title doesn't actually have to do with the first day of classes today, although there were stumbles aplenty. Funny how a summer with a lot of contemplation makes you forget what it's like to speak through three classes in a row. So I just finished a mug of Throat Coat tea.

As it happened, while trying to find something else, I ran across this short review (at Gothic Press) by Gary Wiliam Crawford of my encyclopedia entry on Ramsey Campbell:

Laity, K.A.  "Ramsey Campbell, 1946-    )."  Supernatural Fiction Writers:  Contemporary Fantasy and Horror.  2nd ed.  Ed. Richard Bleiler.  New York: Scribner's, 2003.

A good biographical and critical survey with a selective bibliography.  Discusses Campbell's subtlety and his use of urban settings that make Campbell's work more immediate and gripping.

It's also right below the review of the previous volume's entry on Campbell (an accident of alphabetizing), and I'm relieved that it shows me in a favorable light. It's also a mark of the desperate writer who is cheered by such a small thing.

Campbell is not only a wonderful writer, he's also a savvy film reviewer. See his film reviews at BBC Liverpool.

What is it about me and that seaside town? I'm currently reading Steven D. Stark's Meet the Beatles, which I will review as soon as I finish it. So far, I'm enjoying it and -- can you believe it? -- finding out a couple things I did not know about the Beatles.

Sandman Papers

I recently received and signed my contract for the essay "Illusory Adversaries?: Images of Female Power in Sandman: The Kindly Ones," which will be a part of The Sandman Papers, a collection of essays on Neil Gaiman's comix series edited by Joe Sanders. It will be forthcoming "between April and September" of next year from Fantagraphics. I originally gave a version of this paper a few years ago at the comics area of the Popular Culture Association Conference. It's great to see it heading toward published form.

Encyclopedia coming soon

I heard from editor S. T. Joshi that World Supernatural Literature: An Encyclopedia will be out from Greenwood Press this September. I wrote two entries, one on Clive Barker and another on The Books of Blood. It also features a lot of folks I know like Faye Ringel, Richard Bleiler, Stefan Dziemianowicz and many others. Greenwood lists a slightly different title. Who can say which will be the one that ends up on the cover?

Review: Grizzly Man

We got free passes from the Brazos Bookstore to see Werner Herzog's new film, Grizzly Man. It's the story of Tim Treadwell, amateur grizzly observer who, with his girlfriend Amie Huguenard, was eventually killed by a grizzly. They gave us "Grizzly Man" water bottles when we came in. Very odd -- celebrate the horrendous death of this man with a refillable water bottle! It had measurements on the side, but it also contained a piece of paper which disavowed any attempts to use it to measure anything. Ah, the weird world of film promotion.

If you're familiar with Herzog's work, you know to expect no easy answers. Herzog lets Treadwell's remarkable footage speak for itself most of the time. Treadwell becomes an intimate part of the grizzly world in Alaska, maintaining a foothold on the dangerous periphery of the bears' lives. Through his lens, we see them: powerful, individuals, enormous! The up-close view of grizzly life will perhaps be Treadwell's greatest contribution.

But there's also the unravelling of a deeply damaged person. In the months of solitude, Treadwell turns to his camera as to a confessional. His disgust with the human world emerges clearly, as do his erratic mood swings. The childlike delight in the beauty of the remote paradise clashes with his increasingly antagonistic anger toward perceived enemies of his sanctuary. Companion interviews with Treadwell's friend and family fill out the portrait of a deeply troubled man. The grizzlies provide an initial rescue from substance abuse, but seem to become another destructive obsession. It's hard not to see Treadwell's choice to remain longer and longer among the bears as a kind of intricately orchestrated suicide.

In the end, Herzog cannot resist imposing his own view of nature as chaotic and cruel. Over footage of the bear that most likely killed Treadwell and Huguenard, Herzog expresses his view of the grizzly's "blank stare" and sees him as a cold killer, without acknowledging that his reaction is just as shaped by his expectations as Treadwell's was. Neither can see nature without romanticizing or demonizing it. But Herzog chooses from the hours of footage sequences that show the amazing lives of these animals, their beauty and their power; the footage itself inspires awe in the simplest form for these magnificent creatures who live in a harsh and alien world.

There are some extremely horrific moments, though not the deaths themselves. There is an audio tape of the event, taken by Treadwell's video camera with the lens cap still on. In a overly self-conscious moment, Herzog listens to it in front of Jewel Palovak, Treadwell's former girlfriend and co-creator of Grizzly People. Herzog asks her to turn it off, declares she should burn it and never listen to it, which makes the scene feel much too exploitive. Similarly, the scene where uber-creepy coronor, Franc Fallico, hands Treadwell's (still functioning) watch to Palovak while explaining that it was found on his severed arm, is both awkward and, well, creepy. Likewise, Fallico's singular dramatic recreation of the death scene adds new resonance to the bizarre coroner, now a seeming staple of television.

The film is fascinating. I'm not sure how I feel about Treadwell in the end. He was deeply troubled, no doubt, and perhaps misguided. What really stays with me is the ironic difficulty people have dealing with nature. Living in the midst of a mostly unnatural city which seems at times paved end to end, I can see how the separation from the natural world leads to both Treadwell's and Herzog's viewpoints, either romanticizing it as a lost paradise or demonizing it as dispassionate killer. That separation is the real tragedy.

Gender & Ecstasy

I received another acceptance to a conference today; better yet, it's in England. Hurrah! It's for the 2006 Gender and Medieval Studies Conference at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge. Here's the topic:

Joy of Warriors: Juliana’s Masculine Ecstasies

The Cynewulfian poem Juliana features a harsh connection between physical pain and spiritual ecstasy. The young virgin saint’s very body becomes the alchemical cauldron that converts the sadistic torture of her fiancé into a public spectacle of pious triumph. While the events take place in ancient Rome, Cynewulf’s singular vision replays the drama in the realm of Anglo-Saxon warrior poetics. Juliana’s power derives not just from her divine connection to the god who is the wigena wyn (joy of warriors), but also from her embrace of hegemonic masculinity. Because heroic behavior to the Anglo-Saxon audience was equivalent to the strict warrior code, even female saints like Juliana (although this can apply as well to Judith and Elene) could become heroic by performing masculine behavior. Her appropriation of masculine vocabulary and action has immediate effects on those around her, including the demon she holds and tortures while herself in prison. The demon recognizes her as wigþrist ofer eall wifa cyn (most battle-ready of all woman kind) and the warriors gathered in the city respond to her courage with the clashing of weapons. In her final ecstatic speech of triumph before her martyrdom, Juliana employs martial language, reminding her audience to keep on their guard and watch for the clamor of battles. In Cynewulf’s heroic poem, the virgin saint transforms from a passive canvas for divine presence to an active warrior for ecstasy.

Even more fun, one of my colleagues also submitted an abstract, so it's quite possible we'll both be going (ahem, assuming our department can afford to send us).

Ten Seconds of Fame

As my friends all know, I am never keen to have my picture taken. Video is worse, so it is with great ambivalence that I learn I am to be featured in the 30th Anniversary promo video for UHD. I'll be in it for about ten seconds. Of course, it will take about two hours to film that ten seconds -- or even less than ten, come to think of it. They're going to use some footage from the awards ceremony from May.

Adding to the ambivalence: I only got this opporunity due to the recent death of poet Lorenzo Thomas. Lorenzo was our big name in the English Department, well known in the world and respected by so many people. He was a big part of the Houston Poetry Fest; I saw a number of the Poetry Fest folks at Lorenzo's funeral.

The wheel of life, always turning...

Clive's Bible

I'm working on editing my essay on Clive Barker for an anthology on sexuality and the gothic Other, and came across this excellent interview with Barker in the L. A. Weekly. Dennis Cooper is the interviewer. All right, back to work --

Interview

I am interviewed by intrepid Finnish-American reporter Diane Saarinen (international woman of mystery!) at Quiet Mountain Essays, a journal of women's writing. Quite an honor to be the featured interview.

There are some other interesting reads there, too. I really enjoyed Kat Mead's "Authoress Despair," about the vagaries of film versions of writers. I admit it -- I love those films even when they're awful. Even if they're not awful, they are usually nothing at all like reality. But the reality of writing could not be more dull to watch, so I understand why filmmakers dwell on the angst and crumpled papers. On the more serious side, there's an essay on "Advertising and the Exploitation of Female Sexuality" by Chineze J. Onyejekwe, which not only highlights the phenomena but also discusses efforts to address the problem. There are also a number of related links that provide fascinating reading.

Dandelion Zen

Among other things, I have been reading Ray Bradbury's Zen in the Art of Writing. It's a great inspiring kick in the pants. Bradbury writes with such enthusiasm about writing, it's hard not to catch it too. His descriptions are lively and engaging. He describes stories like this:

"They run up and bite me on the leg -- I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go, and runs off."

Bradbury conveys well the excitement of creative work. He also tells great stories: meeting sideshowman Mr. Electrico who claimed to know him in another life or, feeding dimes into a pay typewriter to furiously type Farenheit 451. He also gets to the heart of what makes the struggle worthwhile:

"What is the greatest reward a writer can have? Isn't it that day when someone rushes up to you, his face bursting with honesty, his eyes afire with admiration and cries, 'That new story of yours was fine, really wonderful!' Then and only then is writing worthwhile."

Of course he's also distressingly sexist. It's always "he," always. I remember why I lost patience with him in later books. The Halloween Tree was terribly misogynistic. But I could not do without The October Country, or Dandelion Wine or Something Wicked This Way Comes. It's a pity though that he could never see the little girls who ran through the fields just as wildly as his beloved young boys.

In the end, it's the work that matters. As Bradbury writes, "Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together. Now, it's your turn. Jump!"

Tori Tori Tori!

I got tickets to the Tori show in Houston September 3rd. Hurrah! There was a fan club sale yesterday but I only found out about it last minute and the tickets I came up with were near the back of the Hobby Center so I decided to take my chances with the real sale. I found out there was a special Ticketmaster pre-sale today (tickets go on sale tomorrow at noon) but it requires a password.

Hmmm. Let's see -- her latest single and video is "Sweet the Sting." Let's try "sting" -- bingo! Two orchestra seats. I just wonder why it wasn't on any of the BBS...

Thank you, Ticketmaster, for the $9.10 service charge per ticket!

Good thing her shows are always worth it. Always surprising, always intense -- you never know quite what she'll do, or sing, or what story she might tell. This tour even includes the "Piano Bar" where she will play cover songs the fans have requested, just like in the old days when she played in a bar and took requests. Fun! Hmm, what request shall I send?

Charlie & The Chocolate Factory (SPOILERS!)

Memo to Tim Burton: Find a competent therapist and deal with your issues, so you can stop making movies about how much your daddy did not love you.

Three disappointments in a row from Burton: the less said about Planet of the Apes, the better; Big Fish could just as easily have been a "fine Lifetime movie" as we refer to them; and then, Charlie. Sigh. I wanted to like it so much. I do love the original, but this seemed an ideal remake, one that would -- according to Burton -- stick closer to the book. Well, hmmm -- except for the ENDING.

Here's where I talk about a lot of things that SPOIL both movies, so if you haven't seen either yet, avoid this!


The overall problem are those changes -- creating a backstory of a mean dentist dad who won't let the elborately braced Charlie eat any candy who, like an evil Sauroman, throws his Halloween cache (yes, supposedly in England -- I know, I know) on the fire. Even Christopher Lee cannot keep the maudlin sentimentality from dripping off the screen. Burton's Wonka is damaged goods, a germophobic man-child. Yes, comparisons to Michael Jackson are inevitable, but despite Depp's gamest efforts, the film falls flat. His Wonka seems on the brink of collapse.

While Wilder's Wonka -- as Gene never fails to point out -- acts as a kind of YHWH in his little candy land, Depp's Wonka is apparently powerless. Things just happen and he is helpless to stop them. While the earlier film allowed all good children to vicariously enjoy bad children (for once!) getting punished, the new film barely fleshes out the bad kids. Rather than revelling in their just punishments, we feel (if not sorry for them) very little at all. Burton's Wonka seems more like a serial killer than a man who loves candy, one who has surreptitiously planned the "accidents" occurring to the children. He's terrified by that grey hair, not realizing an inevitability of passing the baton. The ridiculous assertion that Charlie must choose between his family and the factory betrays Burton's own ambivalence, not Dahl's.

The squirrels are a hoot; but think of all the weeks Burton spent trying to train them. What a waste of time, when he could have been developing the roles of his fine supporting cast. Pity. And what is with Helena Bonham-Carter's teeth? Like most films of late, more attention has been spent on appearance than on content. And let's face it; however much you tart them up, the Oompah Loompahs will always be colonialist baggage.

The one shining light is Freddie Highmore, who continues to show the wonderful qualities he brought to Finding Neverland. He infuses Charlie with spirit and thoughtfulness as well as wonder. He was one of the reaons I had high hopes for this film, because the glaring error of the first film was Peter Ostrum as Charlie. Never mind that he wasn't English; he was unbearably homely and a poor actor. He had to be the emotional center of the film, but he created a vaccuum. Wisely, he became a veterinarian rather than continue acting.

The grandparents are wonderful from David Kelly on down. James Fox is totally wasted as Veruca's stuffy father, and it's a crime to give so little rein to the often hilarious Missi Pyle. Way too much effort was spent on the musical numbers which already look dated ("word!") rather than clever. The only song that works is the Wonka theme (one of those catchy Elfman bits that sticks in your head like taffy) sung by robotic dolls that spark then catch fire, melting horribly, even losing an eyeball.

It's the best moment of the film.

Like the running subtext of cannibalism, which is enough to disturb but never gets developed in a meaningful way, there are all kinds of potential themes. If only Burton realised that subtext is where the power lies. Psychological issues need not lead to bad filmmaking. Look at Hitchcock. His unresolved issues created some of the finest films of the last century. He even turned loveable Jimmy Stewart into one of the most disturbingly repulsive characters ever in Vertigo. Dahl's book is full of themes both wonderful and troubling. Burton should have read it more closely -- and he should have relegated his own problems to the subtext.

Trinoc*con

Back from Trinoc*con where we had a chance to laugh with Joe R. Lansdale hisownself (who's got a damn spiffy website). I'm happy because I even got to be on a panel with him (and Lee Martindale, my "neighbor" in MZB's Sword and Sorceress XXI and always a hoot) and I didn't get too tongue-tied. We had a lot of fun at Joe's reading too, and ended up with his copy of Bumper Crop from which he read such fun stories as "Billie Sue," "Chompers," "Bar Talk," and "Fire Dog."

Of course the best part of the con is staying with Susan, and hanging out with Mildred and Birdie. And of course, Gene managed to add to the fun by making both me and Birdie spew things out our noses laughing (or across the kitchen floor in my case -- at least it was the tile floor). Laura rounded out the crew once again, although she managed not to spew liquids out her nose, she did share her uncanny ability to mimic a cat purr. That's got to fit in a story somewhere...

I had a lot of fun serving on panels, giving a talk on weird facts from the middle ages and of course, doing a reading myself, something I always enjoy. I performed a version of "Raven Sister, Cuckoo Sister" with my kantele, then read one of the new short stories "Eating the Dream" to a small but appreciative audience. We all had fun with films like Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, the dubious Evil Alien Conquerors, Terminator (which Gene had never seen), and Peter "Lord of the Rings" Jackson's tastelessly tacky Meet the Feebles. We also nearly fainted to see a picture of Jackson in a recent entertainment mag -- he's lost 70lbs and had lasik surgery.

Always hard to return to reality after so much fun -- thanks again to Susan for being the hostess with the mostess (food, fun and beer!) and to Mildred and Birdie for...everything!

Goin' to Alaska (er -- no, North Carolina)

We're off to Trinoc*con in the morning. It will be fun seeing our pals Susan, Mildred and Birdie (and all the cats!). And of course, we're also guests at the con. Lit GOH is Joe Lansdale his own self, so that will be
fun too. With luck, I will have time to send updates from NC, so we'll see whether the Horror curse gets invoked (either that yet another chuckle-filled showing of The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra.

Whoohooo!

Words Do Have Meanings!

I received a message from one of the (too many) email groups I am on publicizing an event entitled "Dancing with Dionysus." After describing the camping getaway, a note at the end clarified that it was a "drug and alcohol free event."

Named after Dionysus?

I realise that learning Greek and Roman culture, history and literature has become a thing of the past, but surely people look up names before they use them? Or is there some kind of irony at work?

Our campus has a local chapter of BACCHUS, an organization which says it is "an international association of college and university based peer education programs focusing on alcohol abuse prevention and other related student health and safety issues." Nothing wrong with that -- but why call it Bacchus? Yes, it stands for "Boost Alcohol Consciousness Concerning the Health of University Students," but is there an intentional irony? Or an attempt at an elaborate bait-and-switch? Maybe they hope that students in search of a bacchanalia will stay for a sobriety talk -- yeah, that's likely.

Beyond the Fringe

Recently we went out with friends to see a local production of Beyond the Fringe at the Main Street Theater. Yes, it was an American cast performing the quintessentially British show; yes, they were doing accents. Okay? We'll just let that lie ("but you wouldn't let it lie..!"). It's amazing how well most of the bits stand up even with an American cast and setting. They offered a couple of updates -- substituting Blair for Macmillan, changing a line referring to African-Americans to Latinos to make better use of regional racism -- but for the most part the pieces work with little change. Perhaps, as in the case of the Civil Defence sequence, one can never overestimate the callous disregard politicians and bureaucrats will show the public. In many cases though, it is simply the loopy acknowledgement of just how foolish people are. Although I tended to hear the original voices of Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett in my head, the cast -- which unlike the original, actually included a (pregnant) woman -- did a credible job of handling the humor, although sometimes cultural differences were a detriment. For exmaple in "Take a Pew," Bennett's send up of a clueless Anglican minister's sermon on the apparently randomly chosen verse ("But my brother Esau is an hairy man, but I am a smooth man"), much of the humor is wrung out of the lines by Bennett's very dry and understated delivery. The MST version went more for the Joel Osteen-type bombast (not surprisingly). But some bits are just so funny, it doesn't matter who's reading the lines (well, provided they have some sense of timing), like Cook & Moore's "Frog and Peach" and "One Leg Too Few." Oh, and "The Great Train Robbery" remains one of the funniest wordplay bits ever.

I just finished Sunshine on Putty which I enjoyed despite a lot of reservations about the style (and the accuracy -- if he got things wrong that I knew like mistaking Smokey Robinson for Otis Redding (!) and calling Tod Browning's Freaks "the great silent classic," how many more things did he get wrong that I wouldn't know?). But as an overview of the 90s comedy in Britain, it hasn't much competition yet. Someday more people will realize the genius that is Vic. In the meantime, I've started Humphrey Carpenter's (much more competently written) A Great Silly Grin and, as usual, am always amazed at what a small country England is.

Speaking of amazing: in a theater we saw the trailer for Rob Zombie's new film which appeared to be entitled The Devils Rejects. Saw TV ads too. Finally, this weekend, it was changed at last to The Devil's Rejects. In all the many months of creating, marketing and exploiting the film, no one noticed the missing apostrophe? Wow. It's still incorrect on his website, which is needlessly Flash enhanced. How many posters did they print then fix?

Vipunen

My short story "Vipunen" has just come out in the summer issue of New World Finn (v6 n3). It's another of the Unikirja stories and is based -- oh, so loosely -- on Runo 17 of the Kalevala. That runo has been interpreted in various ways, including musically by Estonian composer Veljo Tormis. My version is a comic one; a hiker falls into the mythic realm (i.e. into Vipunen's belly with Väinämöinen, the ancient rune singer) and is unprepared to deal with what transpires.

Thanks go out to Gerry Henkel, editor of New World Finn, who has been enthusiastically supportive of my work and who illustrated the story with the mythically elemental paintings of Joyce Koskenmaki. Thanks also are due to the Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow where I completed the story earlier this summer.