Faulkner in Illinois

You recall the plot of "A Rose for Emily," right? Well, someone in Evanston, IL just did her one -- no, no, make that two -- better:

EVANSTON, Ill. (AP) — A 90-year-old woman apparently has been living in a house with the bodies of her three siblings, one of whom may have been dead since the early 1980s, police in suburban Chicago said.

The bodies were found Friday morning by police...

Geez, what with vampires, werewolves, and scary old nonogenarians, this blog is becoming beastly. Better go back to writing reflective prose like everybody else. And soon too...

Bad Movie Dialogue

Jack Nicholson had been wanting to make a film of Wolf for a dozen years. In 1994, someone finally bit.

The shooting script contains the worst dialogue of any film during the '90's. Sample scene: Jack, a typical werewolf character who alternates between normal and hairy, depending on the phase of the moon, shows up at the New York flat of an old professor who researches lycanthrophy. The scene is played straight, in all dramatic seriousness. At one point...

PROFESSOR: The demon wolf is not evil, unless the man he has bitten is evil. And it feels good to be a wolf, doesn't it?
JACK: Indeed it does.
PROFESSOR: Power without guilt. Love without doubt?...I have a favor to ask of you. I would like you to bite me.
JACK: What?
PROFESSOR: I said, I would like you to bite me...

Which is pretty much what the critics said when they reviewed this entertaining stinker.


Wolfman Jack

I Was a Pre-Teenage Vampire

Are we losing our sense of humor? Not if you can laugh at this story.

Excerpt:

POOLER, Ga. (AP) - When Pooler fifth-grader Jordan Hood drew a bloody vampire in art class, it scared a teacher so much she reported him to the principal and campus police...The school system resolved the Tuesday incident by requiring Jordan to undergo psychological testing the next morning and then returning to class in the afternoon.

Presumably, the battery of tests revealed no anti-social tendencies -- a virtual requirement for most serious artists. We can all rest at ease; there will be no budding young painters from Pooler, Georgia.

Irrelevant Question of the Week

Forgot to return a rented DVD of Hitchcock's Vertigo to the library the other day. Anyone know if an overdue library rental affects one's credit rating?

(And don't tell me it's not supposed to. I know that answer.)

Publishing

In the back sections of Literary Nonfiction. Stephen Minot offers advice on publishing one's own work and includes the following caveat:

If you are by nature an optimist, you are apt to submit work that doesn't have a chance for publication; and if you are a pessimist, you run the risk of never sending anything out.

Guess which category I fall under.

No Narratives

I'll never make it as a writer of narratives. Not because I don't have stories to tell. And not because I couldn't tell them artfully or skillfully.

I will never be a writer of narratives because my batch of stories are for me only, and they are not to be shared.

If I wrote stories regularly, however, they would be primarily objective, comedic, satrical, topical, with dialogues filled with verbal slapstick. But the problem with topical satire is that it ceases being relevant a week or a month after it's been written.

Example: Last year I wrote a short teleplay called "Kid School Board," a satire of the reality show, "Kid Nation." I then sent it to the editor of a local-area college's literary magazine. She raved about it but complained of its length. It easily dwarfed the other entries (mostly poems, it turned out) that she received. As a result, it was rejected.

A few months later, I ran into the editor in the department office as I was collecting my mail. I told her she made the right decision in rejecting my work -- not because it was overlong, but because it had become obsolete; after all, "Kid Nation" had ended last Fall, and has not been seen or heard of since. A big "who cares."

A film critic once described The French Connection as having "all the depth of a mud puddle." Six months later, it won the Academy Award for Best Picture, beating out A Clockwork Orange, The Last Picture Show, and Fiddler on the Roof, all nominated in the same prestigious category.

That film represents my favorite type of creation -- not because I enjoy cops-and-robbers story, but I do dote on something that's fast, funny, and direct, with the gallery in mind largely, and the mezzanine and loge as strictly an afterthought. It might be shallow, but there's something in the cheap and tawdry that represents the American experience -- our experience. A collective experience that we can connect with.

As for my own experiences, they have no connection with anyone or anything remotely collective. Besides, my life and my stories are, for the most part, my own business. They represent me and only me, and the stories in my life would amount to little more than one long cautionary tale that would appeal to neither the loge nor the cheap seats.