Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Eat, pee, walk in the woods




You see, for the past few days I have been putting together material for my launch on Saturday. I am having the usual trepidations that no one will come. I have agreed to give a presentation - they're calling it a workshop - called "how to keep on keepin' on" - likely the worst title ever, but the point is, I don't want to give any kind of lecture on technique, which is a private thing. But I DO know about this, about survival as an artist, about climbing back on the horse again and again and again (and bloody again). Writers are high idealists, and reality clashes hard, time and time again.

Can I help anybody with this? Who can tell. I've had to overcome being stuck, being terrified, then feeling like a total fraud because I never sell any books. Today I wrote nearly four typewritten single-spaced pages however. The ideas just tumbled out. Now I will have to cut them down. I'm getting there. I need to go eat, pee, walk in the woods. Come to think of it, that would be a good title for a writer's self-help book.





p. s. Below is a quote that keeps on popping up in my life, and it occurred to me that it sums up all I was trying to say in preparing my presentation for the launch. Lots of people talk about the novel they're going to write, even outline the characters, situation, etc, generally talk about it endlessly, and somehow-or-other it just never gets done. Meanwhile they poke a lot of holes in the person who went ahead and did it. Don't let the slightly archaic language phase you. Read it out loud. It's truth. Go get 'em, Teddy.




Do a barrel roll




I dare you. I dare you NOW. Do a Google search using those exact search terms:

Do a barrel roll.

And be prepared for fun, fun, fun!!

(NOTE. This was part of a much longer piece I found on a FB link, which of course I can't find now, nor can I remember the name of the person who posted it. Nor can I Google it. Damn. Anyway, it was about all kinds of tricks you can use in doing Google searches, ways to find stuff that you would not ordinarily find. And I lost it, see. My mind is elsewhere.

Monday, June 2, 2014

Know your Poe: The Bells




Hello, and welcome to a new series entitled Know your Poe. (a. k. a. Poe Corner). Though I plan to run through everything Poe ever croaked, yelled or hiccupped, we'll start with an easy one,  a poem so shot through with unspeakable horror that it makes The Raven sound like a Beach Boys song. Little Deuce Coupe, perhaps.

Why am I doing this? Because it intrigues me that there are no apparent degrees of separation between Poe and a similar literary legend, Jerry Lee Lewis. Both married their 13-year-old cousins, a move that today might raise a few eyebrows. Wikipedia makes this comment:

Debate has raged regarding how unusual this pairing was based on the couple's age and blood relationship. Noted Poe biographer Arthur Hobson Quinn argues it was not particularly unusual, nor was Poe's nicknaming his wife "Sissy" or "Sis". Another Poe biographer, Kenneth Silverman, contends that though their first-cousin marriage was not unusual, her young age was. It has been suggested that Clemm and Poe had a relationship more like that between brother and sister than between husband and wife.





Yeah, OK, but. How many brothers and sisters are married? There's just no way you can make this turn out right.

From the demented photographic portraits to the gruesome short stories in which people are walled up inside caves, to the death at age 40 from God-knows-what-but-probably-alcohol, Poe evolved into legend and now belongs to all of us. He's the patron saint of tortured souls, people left to die in the abyss. Never was abandonment portrayed like this, in a way that fascinates us even as we shrink back and shudder. I felt a visceral stab when reading that he lost both his parents in babyhood and was "taken in" by a couple who never formally adopted him, thus leaving him feeling like a permanent charity case. I can just hear them saying to him (and he likely really did hear this, as did many a literary legend): "Edgar, dear chap, do give up this poetry nonsense and make something of yourself."






Poe is part of pop culture as well as literature, and his crossover with Gomez Addams is obvious. If Poe had been happy, he would have been Gomez Addams. He would have had a more normal, wholesome marriage to someone like Morticia. But it was not to be, and at age forty, the poor sod (speaking of ravens) croaked.

Eons ago, I think in my teens, I found The Bells in an anthology somewhere, and a girl friend and I took turns reading it to each other (yes, I was like that, even back then). The locked-in rhyme and rhythm scheme can be headache-inducing and oppressive, but it was the format of the times, before Walt Whitman came along and blew everything apart. In rereading The Raven, a dense, thick, suffocating poem full of rustling purple curtains and velvet divans, I found some lines that were welded into my brain, that in fact were (unconsciously) a part of me:

`Prophet!' said I, `thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird or devil! -
Whether tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted -
On this home by horror haunted - tell me truly, I implore -
Is there - is there balm in Gilead? - tell me - tell me, I implore!'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'






I didn't catch up with that "balm in Gilead" reference until much later, until I stood up and sang it in church:

"There is a balm in Gilead
To make the wounded whole
There is a balm in Gilead
To heal the sin-sick soul."

Sin-sick? I wonder if marrying your thirteen-year-old cousin counts as "sin". By my standards, it certainly is sick, though Poe biographers hasten to assure us that it was "normal" for the times. But I get the feeling she spent most of her short life chronically ill, gently expiring on his purple velvet divan.




Never mind, we're here to analyze The Bells, which to my mind is even more Hitchcockian than The Raven, and certainly more bizarre. I was going to count how many times "bells" appears in this poem, but gave up after 27 or so. Never have I seen so much repetition in any work of literature, making me wonder if Poe's brain was (as we used to say) like a broken record.

And here's a charming little tidbit, which explains several phrases still in common use:

England is old and small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people so they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a bone-house, and reuse the grave.
When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside. They realized they had been burying people alive so they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell.

Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the graveyard shift.) to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be "saved by the bell" or was considered "a dead ringer".





The Bells

HEAR the sledges with the bells,
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars, that oversprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells—
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.




Hear the mellow wedding bells,
Golden bells!
What a world of happiness their harmony foretells!
Through the balmy air of night
How they ring out their delight!
From the molten-golden notes,
And all in tune,
What a liquid ditty floats
To the turtle-dove that listens, while she gloats
On the moon!




Oh, from out the sounding cells,
What a gush of euphony voluminously wells!
How it swells!
How it dwells
On the Future! how it tells
Of the rapture that impels
To the swinging and the ringing
Of the bells, bells, bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells—
To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells!



Hear the loud alarum bells,
Brazen bells!
What a tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells!
In the startled ear of night
How they scream out their affright!
Too much horrified to speak,
They can only shriek, shriek,
Out of tune,
In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire,
In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire,
Leaping higher, higher, higher,
With a desperate desire,
And a resolute endeavor
Now—now to sit or never,
By the side of the pale-faced moon.
Oh, the bells, bells, bells!
What a tale their terror tells
Of Despair!




How they clang, and clash, and roar!
What a horror they outpour
On the bosom of the palpitating air!
Yet the ear it fully knows,
By the twanging
And the clanging,
How the danger ebbs and flows;
Yet the ear distinctly tells,
In the jangling
And the wrangling,
How the danger sinks and swells,—
By the sinking or the swelling in the anger of the bells,
Of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells—
In the clamor and the clangor of the bells!




Hear the tolling of the bells,
Iron bells!
What a world of solemn thought their monody compels!
In the silence of the night
How we shiver with affright
At the melancholy menace of their tone!
For every sound that floats
From the rust within their throats
Is a groan.
And the people—ah, the people,
They that dwell up in the steeple,
All alone,
And who tolling, tolling, tolling,
In that muffled monotone,
Feel a glory in so rolling
On the human heart a stone—
They are neither man nor woman,
They are neither brute nor human,
They are Ghouls:
And their king it is who tolls;
And he rolls, rolls, rolls,
Rolls
A pæan from the bells;




And his merry bosom swells
With the pæan of the bells,
And he dances, and he yells:
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the pæan of the bells,
Of the bells:
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the throbbing of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells—
To the sobbing of the bells;
Keeping time, time, time,
As he knells, knells, knells,
In a happy Runic rhyme,
To the rolling of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells:
To the tolling of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells—
To the moaning and the groaning of the bells.

Sunday, June 1, 2014

What's the magic word? BLINGEE!







Up to now, all I had were bleary thumbnails of this magnificent portrait of His Milkness. Now I have this! And it inspired me to make the following Blingee. . .




Well, clowns are a-spozed to be magic, aren't they? They didn't say what KIND of magic.


Saturday, May 31, 2014

The best thing I've seen on Facebook



http://news.distractify.com/culture/x-history-photos/?v=1

I posted this, then for some reason unposted it, and I'm finding it on Facebook so much that I decided to post it again. It's 60 very interesting pictures - some historical, others poppish, most of them intriguing or startling. I've pulled out just a few that jumped out at me.




Most of these don't have dates, but I would imagine this is 1940s: the very first computer, filling a whole room. Intimidating, and ugly, without a touch screen. As the verse says (Ogden Nash, perhaps?): "Clack clack/went the Univac".




The MGM lion. He has his own hairdresser, obviously.




A teenage Bill Gates grinning after some minor driving infraction. The Biebs has nothing on him.




The Beatles clowning with Ali.




Brando with King. We made fun of him then.




I'd say these are photoshopped, except that they're not. Castro and Malcolm X.




Ali talking down a would-be suicide.




A partially-completed Mount Rushmore. (This one amazes me, but somebody had to do it - even if I can never quite believe it).




Shaken, not stirred. 




Robin Williams shows off his hairy chest, pre-Mrs. Doubtfire.




Amelia Earhart's last hair cut. Chilling.




Bill Clinton and JFK. Some similarities there.




So why would Audrey Hepburn be grocery shopping? It's even stranger than her pet deer. Obviously posed, but intriguing.




Pablo Picasso with Brigitte Bardot. Creepy to the max.




Drew Barrymore cuddling on Stephen Spielberg's lap. Well. . . a bit creepy now, but probably not then.




A young Hemingway's passport. It would take him far.




My personal fave: three of the four Beatles in 1958, barely out of their skiffle phase, dressed in natty three-piece suits for a wedding gig. Note John's Little Richard hair.



Thursday, May 29, 2014

Searching for Rich Correll, take 2




(This post originally ran more than three years ago. Since then, a lot has happened - The Glass Character finally saw print! - and a lot didn't. It is of some benefit to realize there was a time, ONLY three years ago, when I didn't think I'd connect with RC at all.  I have his phone number in LA now, which would've seemed like a miracle then. So something must have happened in the interim. But I have no idea if he has read my book, if he even received it. By the way, back in 2011, I could not find a single up-to-date photo of Rich Correll, so had to use these grainy shots from when he was a child actor. I kept them simply because I like them.)


I can remember a time when I wouldn't touch a computer, afraid it would give me one of those searing visible cracks I always get on car doors. (No one else seems to get these, kinda like people whose watches stop for no reason.)


Then I touched one, though I know not when. There was no internet then, just a Tandy computer I lovingly called Jessica, a daisy wheel printer, and a fax machine. I don't remember my first foray into the internet, or even what it was called then. The Information Highway, I think, and if you tried to use it, some techie guy would brand you a "newbie".


For a long time I was afraid of it and was sure I'd never use it and that it would be daunting and impossible to use and I would feel bloody stupid if I even tried. My kids were printing stuff out on long rolls that you tore off like chunks of toilet paper, with a sort of perforated border with holes in it on the sides. They printed out arcane secret information about the X Files and stuff like that. It was interesting, yes, but intimidating, something for the young.


I don't remember when I found out what a download was, probably last week sometime. I was thrown into the water and swam badly, still swim badly for the most part, but here I am with, drum roll please, not only a web site (which is mostly an ad for my novels) but a blog.


Then, the other day something very strange happened. One second I hated the idea of social networking, knew nothing about it and felt like it was all written in a foreign language, like Armenian or something, then the next second I was "on" Facebook.





I still don't really know how to use it, because there are no instructions. You're just supposed to know. Once more I have that queasy feeling I got to the party late, too late to ever catch up. But I didn't do it to "network". I did it to find one person.





This person, rare as an exotic deer or a species no one has ever seen before, is so elusive I can't find an updated image of him. These pictures are from his child star days, when he had an ongoing role on Leave it to Beaver. There would appear to be no reliable information for contacting him, just a few wretchedly inappropriate mailing addresses, though the Lord only knows I've tried.


The two-and-a-half people who follow this blog might know that I kvetch a lot about the fact that I've written a novel about Harold Lloyd, the silent film genius, and so far can't get anyone in Canada interested in publishing it. People all over the place are telling me to self-publish, and I don't see how that would work if you had to book your own tours, readings, etc., do all your own distribution and promotion, get it in all the stores and on the net, pay for your own ads, etc. etc. and not go bankrupt.


\


I thought when you published your book, you made money. Silly me. But there's a book crisis going on, and no one knows quite where they stand. This means everyone's suddenly an expert telling everyone else what they should do. But paper books are  becoming obsolete, which means that the retail chains will eventually close (and let's not think about those small independent stores that have tried to survive a plague of almost Biblical proportions). Most if not all of the publishing industry will exist online. But when you're between systems, it's disorienting. Writers have to scramble, create their own books, or just endure the slammed doors that eventually lead to a bad case of clinical depression.





SOOOOOO,  to get to the actual point of all this, I'm searching for Rich Correll, the Hollywood polymath who co-invented the character/global phenomenon Hannah Montana and who has been directing hit Disney programs (the kind Caitlin slavishly watches) for years. He has done, and is doing, tons of other stuff in the industry as well, but that's not the real reason I'm looking.


I want to find Rich Correll because he was like a second son to Harold Lloyd: he knew Harold Lloyd, he loved Harold Lloyd, and he just strikes me as someone who might actually be willing to help me realize this labour of the heart, or at least to understand why I did it, and why it means so agonizingly much to me.




Or not. Maybe it'll just be the usual best of luck with this I've heard every other time I've made a "contact", which as far as I am concerned means about as much as a Facebook "friend".  Hard to say. Maybe he's too busy suing the Disney Corporation for $5 million (and imagine suing Mickey Mouse! This is both quixotic and admirable.) I don't know. I just feel at this point like I need to talk to someone who loves Harold Lloyd as much as I do.


It's funny to be in this position now. Everyone seems to be saying, "Accept less." Or even "give it up, it'll never happen". I know I can do this, I know I will do this, but I'm lost in a labyrinth. For this reason, to try to find Rich Correll whom I've been tracking like a bloodhound for months, I joined Facebook and found myself, once again, a stranger in a strange land.


As usual, as with everything I have ever done, I feel like a complete outsider. Some of my "friends" have over 1,000 names on their list, when I have more like nine or ten. It's high school all over again. I sort of blunder around and put up photos, not knowing what else to do. There's a place where you can say "what's on your mind", but judging from the comments, it looks like little snippets of whimsy, not requests for help or advice. Everyone is so cheerful, all day long, all the time. No one has a family crisis or an illness or a reversal of any kind. It's all good! Great things happen to the Facebook gang, non-stop, things so enviable you might  be tempted to wonder if reality isn't being bent just a little, mainly so you'll feel  a whole lot worse about your own life.





I guess I haven't learned Facebook etiquette, its invisible set of rules. When I post comments that are serious, especially about my work, I am usually made to feel like an opportunist who should just shut up and go away. Which I'm supposed to. And which I can't. Not this time.


Over the years I've seen Rich Correll all over the place. I am certain I saw him on Leave it to Beaver, but I was seven or eight years old then and didn't have much appreciation for these things. TV shows just popped out of the screen fully-formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus. But every time there was a documentary on movies it seems he'd show up, and since I did not ever see them in chronological order he would get older, then younger, then middle-aged in the strangest way.

He figured large in the brilliant Kevin Brownlow documentary The Third Genius, a rich dense Christmas pudding of a film just chock-a-block with archival interviews, people who knew Harold "when". This was one of those times he mysteriously got younger, and the reminiscences flowed so easily it was probably one of those things where you could just turn the camera on.






Rich Correll also appeared on the bonus disc in the superb Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection DVD set. At one point, after all the reminiscences, suddenly there was pure magic, more magic than Harold ever pulled off in his entire life as a master conjurer.  He brought out a battered old suitcase full of treasures: Harold Lloyd's makeup kit, full of artifacts going back to the early 1900s. Old gloves (Harold needed a prosthetic glove because half his right hand had been blown off in an accident), tubes of greasepaint, a mirror with his name lettered on it. And pairs and pairs of horn-rimmed glasses. Harold Lloyd's glasses. Though Harold referred to his alter ego as the Glass Character, these were empty frames with no glass in them.


This is why I want to talk to Rich Correll. Harold Lloyd bequeathed this battered old case of magic to him. He has it in his possession. If Harold's spirit is anywhere, it's there, and Rich Correll holds it in his hands.