To Kill a Flying Rumor

Once upon a time, back when dinosaurs read newspapers and so forth, I wrote a short piece for the Mobile Register's Sunday Book Page about why I thought Harper Lee was in fact responsible for To Kill a Mockingbird, despite regional gossip to the contrary that the book is at least partly the work of Truman Capote. As a hot-button topic of cultural conversation in Alabama, this nugget of literary intrigue ranks up there in popularity with perpetual Iron Bowl remembrances/prognostications/trash talk. I learned this firsthand: my byline included the name of the library where I worked, so the phone began ringing at 8am on Monday morning, a flattering number of readers looking to chat with me, to agree, disagree, work the Iron Bowl in there somehow, et cetera.

That Thursday evening, just as we were locking the doors, the phone rang one more time. I took the receiver, still flattered but really just wanting to head home for the night. From the other end, an older woman's voice, Is this Jim Gilbert? Yes. The same Jim Gilbert who wrote the article on Mockingbird that appeared in Sunday's paper? Yes, that's me. Well, I just want to say, that's a very nice article you wrote. Thank you very much, you're very kind. And I want to let you know: you're right. I did write that book.

The sort of thing that stops your heart.

For the next moment or two, I made little more than croaking noises. She was gracefully pleasant, complimentary of my writing in a few words, and hung up before I could embarrass myself too badly.

Once the room stopped spinning, my first duty was to check the whereabouts of a couple well-known literary pranksters, for whom the telephonic impersonation of a little old lady would be considered junior varsity-level conning, only to find them as truly flabbergasted as myself by the story I was telling. Continuing to check around over the next couple days, a process I'd liken to inquiring about whether or not I'd just seen a ghost, the truth grew clearer and more hilarious: I had indeed fielded a call from Harper Lee.

When Stories from the Blue Moon Cafe was published the following year, I contacted my editor at the Register, John Sledge. The phone call had meant a lot to me, did he know of any way I could send a copy of the book with a note of thanks? Some strings were pulled along the coconut telegraph, a few days later I had a PO Box address in Monroeville. I entrusted the book to the mailman, expecting nothing more.

Turns out, Harper Lee is prompt with her Thank You notes.

11 September '02

Dear Mr. Gilbert: 

What a lovely thing to do. I have just now (noon) received The Blue Moon Cafe stories, and look forward to reading yours first. I can pre-judge (ala Sydney Smith) it to this degree: if you are not the greatest writer in the world, you are certainly the nicest. 

It is I who am in your debt: for many years I've had to live with the Truman Capote rumor, which was kept briskly alive in Monroeville and beyond, not only by an envious aunt of his, but by an envious Truman himself. You may wonder why, with his great gift of words, he could envy anyone, but the truth is he envied any writer's success, and when TKAM, written by his oldest friend, was successful, his reaction was deep and bitter. Imitation was his sincerest form of envy: he copied my style, copied Carson McCullers, copied Eudora Welty and had what his friends called his Henry James Period.

So thank you for putting forth the idea that I might have written my own book!

Sincerely, Harper Lee

She concludes with a (see over) leading to three lines on the back of the card, an unnecessary wish: I hope that during my lifetime you don't put this on sale at your bookshop! Best, N.H.L.

So there I was. Heart-stopped again. Thinking to myself, There's been a terrible accident somewhere in the Universe, that I have ended up holding this treasure. Something I still occasionally think. Or, maybe those aforementioned literary pranksters pulled off quite a multilevel con on me after all: impersonation, accomplices, forgery, mail fraud, everything. I'm sure there are some who would be eager to think so. But that's a nutty idea, a conspiracy without a core -- much like the idea that Harper Lee isn't the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, right?

The Endless River (2014)

Pink Floyd's final studio offering is a resurrection of ideas abandoned in 1994, when The Division Bell was cut down to a single album from earlier plans for a double: lyrical songs on one disc, instrumentals on the other. Traditional songs won out, the ambient scraps went to the archive, a casualty of band apathy, yet soon to spawn Internet rumors such as the April Fool's joke of 1997: a surprise release entitled Liquid. Which, dated jibe against Roger Waters aside, still wouldn't be a bad title for what eventually trickled down as The Endless River. (Equally, this could have been called Son of "Marooned," an instrumental from Division Bell, which a fair share of this record resembles, production-wise when not also musically.)

Divided into four musical suites (designated as untitled "sides," moot on any format other than vinyl), River is a mercurial, career-spanning showcase of Floydian techniques, gimmicks, signatures, and moods. Richard Wright's previously recorded keyboards are augmented by new guitars from David Gilmour and drums from Nick Mason with an eye towards arranging all the like pieces together. The soundscapes are languid and droning, here and there working up to a dark, sultry pulse, occasionally even a burst of actual, driving rock, all rich with Floydian callbacks (though with fewer-than-usual sound effects, more stretches of ambient weirdness). It doesn't take a careful listener to hear a luxurious mashup of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" and "Welcome to the Machine" in the album-opening "It's What We Do." Both "Allons-y" and "Surfacing" sound like they were developed from musical sketches cut from The Wall. In fact, much of the album seems to have been scrambled in a time machine: witness a 1968-era Wright on the Royal Albert Hall's pipe organ, a whirling, majestic ghost playing an overture for the Afterlife. Meanwhile, the percussive "Sum/Skins" is Nick Mason getting his joyous drummer freak on for the first time since Ummagumma. And "Eyes to Pearls" finds Gilmour teasing up a suitably murky surf music riff (the man has locked within him the Greatest Surf Rock Album Yet Made, and the 1970 Casino Montreux performance of "Atom Heart Mother" provides the better evidence). Point is, you're looking for a hit or two of Floyd, you've come to the right place.

While far from the first time the hands controlling Pink Floyd have cobbled dusty material into fresher shape, call it inherent vice, this time around not everything works. "Anisina" is a corny, misguided foray into late-1970s Yacht Rock. "The Lost Art of Conversation/On Noodle Street" will appeal most to those who have been waiting for the Floyd to retro-score a Film Noir. There are dead spots, places that don't quite seem to have thawed after two decades on ice (in the name of being Ambient Music, one must suppose). Gilmour's stinging Ebow guitar effects can be more annoying than evocative, an alien bee piercing the sonic siesta. And let's remain silent about the lyrics to "Louder than Words."

One thing bound to be endless about this album: arguments among certain sections of the Floydian fan base regarding whether or not it constitutes a suitable Final Statement from a brand name known for Making Statements. (Not to mention legitimate, that's a whole other can of worms you have to wait for.) Gilmour has made clear, the album is a tribute to Wright, a reminder of his foundational role in the band's sound. Beyond that, expectations for a profound (or even coherent) message will lead only to disappointment; by design, the music is too adrift for that. But as an hour-long bonus track, some lagniappe, a simple coda to a long and ridiculously varied rock career, it absolutely has moments that serve well enough. The curtain went down (and some time back, if you didn't notice), the lights are up, here's a mixtape to play you out the door.

When lyricist/bassist Waters left the band in 1984 to pursue a solo career, a fair number of people, myself included, assumed that was the moment the curtain fell on Pink Floyd. It was too bad, but the angry, articulate The Final Cut made an admirable headstone. Which, three years later, made A Momentary Lapse of Reason the abomination that crawled out from under that headstone. Prank Floyd to some, Pink Fraud to others, David Gilmour and all his hired hands had no business hijacking the prior artistic achievements of Roger Waters, fooling everyone into thinking they were the same band that released Dark Side of the Moon, dammit. Especially not when Waters had apparently asked them nicely please not to do so, right before broadcasting Radio KAOS to an uncaring world.

Thanks to natural sentimentality for a more youthful time, I'll always have a soft spot for KAOS, a sore spot for Lapse, though both are profoundly flawed (experiments in "modernizing" the classic sound now provide hard evidence that all parties forfeited the title deed to Pink Floyd during that long, chilly season of Reagan/Thatcher). As the 1990s dawned and lawsuits settled, both camps returned to proper sonic form, Waters with Amused to Death, Gilmour's Floyd with Division Bell. Waters' album is a sprawling complaint about War as Television Programming, released shortly after the first Gulf War; by turns vicious and tight, then baggy and incoherent, but always mesmerizing and challenging, it is essentially his solo follow-up to The Wall. A loose meditation on miscommunication, The Division Bell is a more relaxed and genuine release than its predecessor, serving to remind listeners (far better than Lapse ever could) Gilmour/Wright/Mason were more than mere sidemen to Waters and his concepts; he was undoubtedly the Direction, but they were equally undoubtedly the Vehicle.

When finally computer-capable of such trickery, I forged a mix CD from both efforts. With Roger Waters ranting and David Gilmour wailing and the filler jettisoned: Behold! a lost Pink Floyd album! (albeit one without a pop-up theme, more like one of Floyd's early soundtracks, perhaps). Death By Division stayed in prolonged heavy rotation -- long enough to refreshingly exhaust my long-time listener's interest in the Waters/Gilmour feud. Direction and Vehicle might no longer be in tandem, but, never mind, I'm just a guy with a pair of headphones, no dog anywhere near the actual fight, able to read the album credits and appreciate what I'm listening to accordingly. As I am one of those fools (numbering in the millions) who will tell you how Pink Floyd has been a steady soundtrack to his hilarious life, it was a revelation: my love of the musical structures assembled by these former architecture students didn't have to be attached to their stupid personal problems. (Besides: didn't I already have enough stupid personal problems of my own?)

I turned with renewed interest to the younger incarnation of the band, which I'd never given more than academic attention, sticking more to the refined, anxiety-charged Waters-led Floyd (read: from Meddle to The Final Cut). The band's over-romanticized Big Bang, the short, sweet, psychedelic Syd Phase, quickly gives way to the wandering Prog Phase: transformative late-60s experiments which the band had wholly disowned (at least until the release of the Early Years box material). Darker and heavier cosmic dust-ups prevailing, personified in official releases chiefly by Ummagumma and Atom Heart Mother, fulfilled by the nebulous warmth of "Echoes," this era is arguably best experienced via scattered media of vintage live performances of Floyd as a living band: engrossing sets of existing but expanded material arranged as new conceptual narratives, The Man and The Journey, not to mention the smooth, surf/acid rock band-only versions of the "Atom Heart Mother" suite (which trump the recorded Ron Geesin version, overstuffed as it is with harsh, brassy horns and silly, gulping choirs). The Live at Pompeii film captures the band in a moment of literal transition, performing material from Meddle and prior while also recording Dark Side of the Moon. The well-known Classic Floyd Phase begins with the shamefully under-appreciated Obscured by Clouds (which could serve as an album-length B-Side to Dark Side) and ends with the infamous Montreal spitting incident during the 'In the Flesh' tour supporting Animals. The 1978 release of David Gilmour begins the prevailing Solo Phase, wherein certain individuals are more obviously in control of whatever Floydian Project is in question than are certain other individuals, and in which (most) solo albums and touring projects can be considered canonical.

With everything in that kind of relief over such a diverse body of work, worrying about who likes to work with whom, who has the more obnoxious ego, and therefore whether or not some albums/tours are more legit than others, just takes time and energy away from actually loving the music -- and I had discovered I loved all those early moods and wild band explorations just as much as I loved the later, more deliberate, more focused song cycles. Because, ultimately, far as I'm concerned, they are all part of the same weird body of work from the same weird musicians. Imagine those Alien Anthropologists exploring a post-human Earth at the end of "Amused to Death" -- without a troubling context of band drama, just the catalog of work itself to experience, could they somehow conclude Waters parted amiably for his preferred solo career, perhaps even blessing Gilmour & Company on their intention to continue, best they could, as Pink Floyd? That, subsequently, everyone made a couple-three missteps but eventually found even keel, peace with their choices, satisfaction with their careers? How different would that music sound to those ears, as opposed to ears that have also heard all the ego-driven bickering? According to the resounding successes, in both artistic and commercial terms, of the recent legacy-claiming tours of both Gilmour and Waters, "Pink Floyd" persists, just in its component parts rather than completely assembled. (In 2007, I watched Roger Waters and his crack surrogate band burn through an amazing performance of The Dark Side of the Moon. A year later, I sat stunned by the Gilmour/Wright-led "Echoes" performance on Live in Gdansk, the final haunting six minutes of which is quintessentially, beautifully, inevitably Floydian. Once all the chatter is shut out, best as I can tell, wherever those guys go, whatever they call it, Pink Floyd follows.)

Beats, bars, rhythms, movements, moods -- music is a form of mass communication more flexible than language in that it transcends all culture, appealing to sheer, universal emotion more readily than to rational, organized thought. We feel connected to it; it is part of us, sacred, the joyous noise of the cosmos we are luckily attuned to hear. As younger people, we identify ourselves to others by our musical tastes, finding the beat of our true tribe. Or, by chance two separate glances meet, and I am you and what I see is me, as Roger Waters once put it.

Even before the release of The Endless River, it was prejudged in some corners for not including a Waters-penned lyric. Responding to such confusion with "Get a grip," Waters, sounding more characteristic of his old Wall self than his new Wall self, pointedly reminded everyone that Gilmour and Mason constituted the band, and were free to do whatever they wanted. Coming from a man just off a three-year long, record setting, award winning, career culminating tour of an updated Wall show, it was an unnecessary statement, and therefore sounded bluntly conclusive -- even more so than his recent admission of having been wrong in obstructing Gilmour/Mason/Wright in the first place.

If Gilmour's primary heresy in continuing Floyd can be said to be based on the attempt to maintain the conceptual, lyric-driven Floyd perfected by Waters rather than focusing on his and Wright's and Mason's instrumental strengths, their trademarked sound as a trio of musicians (Gilmour had admittedly been playing bass on Floyd albums for years), then with the majority of The Endless River he has at last genuinely steered the Floyd brand according to his own abilities. As was the case with The Final Cut, too bad it'll be the last. (Dot, dot, dot.)

Well, thank you, for now, Mr. Floyd. Whoever you are.

Stories from the Blue Moon Cafe (2002)

Christmas 1998, Sonny Brewer invited a retired actor friend of his, Sam Busby, to do a holiday reading at Over the Transom. We borrowed the photography studio space next door, cobbled together what chairs we had, and set out some cookies. Sam rolled out selections from Truman Capote, Shakespeare, the Bible, a solemn, gorgeous recitation of Silent Night. The gathered few were reluctant to leave. "We should do more of this," Sonny declared as we swept up afterwards. "This should be what the bookstore is for."

By the next holiday season, Kyle Jennings had come aboard and Over the Transom had developed a publishing arm with a book to promote: Frank Turner Hollon's The Pains of April, a slender meditation on aging, Jonathan Livingston Seagull set in a nursing home. During the SEBA bookseller's trade show that autumn, Sonny, Kyle, and Frank were introduced to William Gay by Tom Franklin, each there launching respective book tours in support of The Long Home and Poachers. Learning Tommy would be down in our neck of the woods around Thanksgiving, and with William in tow, an organic plan developed -- Let's paint the barn and put on a show! -- a one-night-only event featuring all three authors reading onstage, followed by an Over the Transom-hosted signing the following Sunday afternoon, corresponding to Fairhope's annual downtown "open house," merchants ceremoniously opening their doors in the hopes of attracting early holiday shoppers (spoiler alert: it generally works).

We were told we were crazy. Three unknown, debut authors, reading literature on a Saturday night, not just any Saturday night but during the Iron Bowl? Nobody would show, not even for free.

We secured use of Centennial Hall, which seats 200+ if you include the balcony. I dreamed up a circus poster design and an eponymous moniker for the event, Southern Writers Reading; Sonny supplied text and soon they were taped up in windows all over town. Kyle rented a van to shuttle everyone around (un-wrangled writers, scattered watering holes, so forth) and Sonny ordered giant "Over the Transom" magnets to slap on the doors. Crazy, whatever, we saw things lining up a certain, undeniably entertaining, way. Frank's book had sold well in the local market, serious accolades were boosting Tommy's freshly-minted Poachers, and The Long Home was to be reviewed in the New York Times the very Sunday morning William would be signing books at our storefront on De la Mare Avenue. We spent our energy praying for good weather.

Somewhere north of 100 souls ventured out to the reading that night, braving clear skies and scattered college football broadcasts. With Sonny as a born Master of Ceremonies on a set decorated with props borrowed from the bookstore, the evening began somberly as Frank remembered Robert Bell (author of The Butterfly Tree, a novel set in 1950s Fairhope) who had provided a soulful introduction for Pains of April; that very morning, Bell's daughter had called the bookshop to inform us of his passing. But spirits raised quickly: Sonny introduced each author by reading a particularly striking paragraph or three from their work, then asking, "Now, what were you thinking when you wrote that?" (Tommy tried to convince the audience his stories were written during commercial breaks in Friends marathons.) As William's thick rural Tennessee accent, song of pure earthen Southern literature, reverberated over the gathered, I thought to myself, "In ten years, it'll seem like a miracle, we got this guy to read here."

Up to that point, I'd drifted pretty casually through the 90s, bookselling at Page & Palette, endlessly scratching at a novel-in-stories, listening to a lot of surf music, not much else. I'd started working for Sonny more or less by happy accident, aggressively hanging around his bookstore until he offered me work, sort of thing. For the past year we'd been doing used-and-rare book searches, learning valuations and rummaging like biblio-anthropologists through library and estate sales to boost our own inventory; I self-taught myself book repair, tightening hinges, rebuilding channels, loving old books back to life (including a terrific first edition/first state copy of To Kill a Mockingbird lucked into by Sonny at a garage sale). Now here was a kind of energy swell happening, a wave to catch at last. The question arising wasn't Should we do this again next year?, but rather Can we have more fun doing this next year?

Yes, plenty more, it would turn out. Because we had, indeed, found what the bookstore was for.

As the next handful of years blurred past, Sonny toured the Southeast by way of weekend literary conferences, rooting out a network of emerging authors while his own writerly star brightened. Southern Writers Reading, which I dubbed a "literary slugfest" on our website, divided amoeba-like into two sessions, eventually spreading over two days -- including for a couple years a Friday afternoon luncheon with the authors, and "Alumni Grill" reading sessions to accommodate veterans who had enjoyed themselves so much in prior years it hindered their ability to stay away in succeeding years (this included, as it turned out, William Gay). The shows leapfrogged from location to location (our favored arena being Theatre 98), but remained counter-programmed against the Iron Bowl, and always ended with a celebratory Sunday afternoon booksigning at Over the Transom, where it wasn't uncommon for Sonny to bust out his guitar and start serenading everyone within range. We hosted bestsellers and award winners, Oprah picks and heralded debuts, a few special writers with nothing more than a good manuscript and some hope. We drew audiences from around the Southeast, selling out shows in advance. We attracted benefactors who opened their homes for generously grand post-show parties, or volunteered to host the visiting authors, or both. (For the record, we rarely declined such offers.) Things turned into a pretty fine ride, no matter the direction.

At some point in there, with scribblers coming out of the proverbial woodwork, Sonny declared our bayside town "the home of more writers than readers" (long, long before self-publishing became a thing); soon the non-profit Fairhope Center for the Writing Arts was drawn up, a board assembled, early plans made for Southern Writers Reading to be its tentpole fundraiser, and a resurrected Red Bluff Review (a one-off journal Sonny had edited some years prior) to be an annual tie-in, a chapbook of flash fiction commissioned from the authors we'd feature on stage. But a funny thing happened on the way to Theatre 98...

In a story unto itself, Frank's novel had meanwhile bounced onto the desk of Pat Walsh at MacAdam/Cage, who called inquiring about a follow-up; after contracting The God File, Walsh and publisher David Poindexter flew over to attend that year's [2001] Southern Writers Reading events, to hear Frank read from his new book, months in advance of its publication. They got more than that; they got a full-on grassroots literary revival, three days and more than a dozen authors, reading sessions that blended from one party to the next, Grayson Capps providing musical punctuation throughout. Poindexter would later describe the experience as "falling into a nest" of wordsmithing talent. "I don't get it," Walsh confided to me after just the first night, "We do this in San Francisco, we get seven people. You do it here in this little Alabama town, and a hundred plus show up." I didn't have an answer for him then, and I wouldn't have one now, other than we'd picked the right battle, some kind of magic, a celestial alignment, whatever, it worked.

Sonny, long-time sailor and therefore no stranger to celestial navigation, knew exactly where to steer. The year prior, following a reading by Suzanne Hudson that had the audience howling with laughter, he declared, "I wish I could publish that," then scanned the offstage shadows for Joe Taylor of Livingston Press, in attendance that night. "Joe, is she not a writer you'd be proud to publish?" Opposable Thumbs had been available from Livingston since late summer. So when from the podium at the conclusion of the ceremonies, Sonny began describing a hardbound anthology featuring not only all the authors featured that weekend, but all previous SWR participants, I could feel the question gathering in the aether. "David Poindexter, does that not sound like an incredible book?" What choice did the man have?

Inclusion on MacAdam/Cage's Fall 2002 list gave Sonny a manuscript-assembling deadline of mere weeks. No problem: not only did everyone contacted gladly offer up a submission within a month of being asked, but Sonny found himself eyeball-deep in rich material besides, even as the contributors list swelled to include writers who hadn't (or hadn't yet) been featured on a SWR stage. The most difficult task involved therefore fell to coming up with a zippy title; nothing useful suggested itself, and everyone hated everyone else's ideas, which ranged from the square-pegged Red Bluff Reader to simply and vaguely Fairhope. Finally, Frank Turner Hollon twigged on the Blue Moon Cafe, a fictitious Fairhope location mentioned in Robert Bell's Butterfly Tree.

An unbroken circle. Often enough in the year or so before all the literary shoutin' began, I'd drift up to the bookstore of an evening, where the bounty of some or other "book haul" waited to be cataloged, tomes piled elbow-high in the narrow back area we dubbed the Engine Room. Just to do an after-hours repair on some volume, or key a few books into our online inventory, Zen work in the quiet lamplight, a bubble of a moment without foot traffic or phone interruptions that could equally be spent freely leafing through generations-old travelogues, forgotten fiction, pages where the foxing was overtaking the baroque woodcuts, scandal-ridden biographies of vaudeville-era celebrities. You never knew when a treasure would flutter out of a binding: an old love letter, perhaps never sent; grandly printed opera tickets; undated photographs of mystery relatives; newspaper broadsheets too brittle to be unfolded, their news turning to acid. Alchemic inspiration, the after-dinner hours were best for such work and discoveries. (Also because, as every writer will tell you, there is no balm quite like procrastination.) And often enough, it wouldn't be long before I'd hear Sonny's own keys rattling at the lock. "Someone needs the Cafe," he'd say in greeting, tossing his longshoreman's cap atop the glass front counter. And that was the mantra. Whenever asked, strapped for time and energy as he was, devoting his mojo to numerous projects ("Busy as a one-eyed cat watching three rat-holes" was a favored description), why Sonny kept the bookstore open, that was the perpetual answer. Someone might need some well-lighted place, even if (especially if?) it were only to be found within the pages of a book. That, too, is what a bookstore is for.

Short story long, as Kyle used to say, that's the backstory behind this book with the checkered blue jacket designed like a menu for a diner ready to serve up thirty different Southern authors. Jacket is protected by Mylar, small purple ink smudges on interior fore-edge but otherwise minimal bumping, Near Fine. Book block is straight and sound, clean edges, tight channel. Clean boards, silver title stamping on spine (some gold variants are known). Ephemera laid in from publisher launch events in Jackson and Oxford MS, as well as later promo information for a Penguin/NAL reprint, and a publisher's postcard. Interior stories are SIGNED by nearly everyone involved, including publisher Poindexter (who quipped at the time, "I usually only sign checks.") Typical shelfwear to board/heel edges. In all, a Near Fine/Fine association copy. [NFS]

Carrie (1974) / Joyland (2013)

I read Carrie during the return car trip from summer vacation last year. Or, I thought I did. Pretending to spring-clean, I was shelving stray books earlier this week and realized this one was still marked some ten, twelve pages from the actual end. The epilogue untouched.

That same trip, I also took King's latest up to that moment, Joyland, figuring it would be interesting to see the contrast between the two. Joyland, an endearing coming-of-age story draped with a supernaturally-dusted mystery at a seasonal amusement park (seriously, just imagine Stephen King scripting a Scooby-Doo episode for adults, and you've got it), is one of his best novels -- understated but engrossing, emotionally charged, just a whiff of fantasy/horror to provide friction. Whatever faults a more serious reviewer might feel the need to dig for, I'll tell you that book was a perfect companion for those early morning hours before the Florida sun chased away the high mist and set the beach sand alight.

I'd never read Carrie, never seen the Brian DePalma adaptation. But turning the pages, soaking up the easy pulp-noir tone King employed for that story, I realized aside from enjoying the way King unspooled the yarn, I wasn't processing anything new. I knew the story, inside and out, every beat of the plot, every turn, every character, from the opening tampon-throwing bedlam in the locker room to the climactic bucket o'blood at the prom. It was great fun, but if you're a fan of the horror genre, you're familiar with Carrie, enough said. Not hard to see why I put the book down without realizing I hadn't finished.

True, I haven't seen DePalma's Carrie (1976) in full, but years ago I did catch the closing moments on an episode of Monstervision. So by standing interrupted this week in our sunlit parlor and reading the last ten pages while the cat circled my ankles, my one surprise came from learning that the book and the film employ slightly different endings. King's own is a riff on the typical "The END ... or is it???" sci-fi stinger; DePalma's capper is more along the lines of "It was all a dream ... OR WAS IT???" and effective enough to jolt audiences of the 1970s out of their seats and become legend in the bargain.

What about audiences of 2013? Last year's remake seems to have fallen on a deaf culture, at first glance. More likely the attempt to deliver "a more faithful adaptation" of King's novel is to blame. One becomes unnerved by way of sudden and/or unfamiliar shock; familiarity and horror can't mix, so why? We live in a moment when parents can nearly set their watches to school shootings and roadside billboards alert us, with no-irony-intended bullet points, to ACTIVE SHOOTER PROTOCOL. Seriously? Skip the faith: a more truthful adaptation would have found the modern metaphor, mined all that anxiety, not buried it in a nostalgia exercise. Chalk it up to opportunity wasted, and we'll all hope for an edgy, pertinent reinvention of, say, Psycho... oh, right.

Well, Carrie, I guess if nothing else, we'll always have Joyland...

Ripping Yarns

I used to tear books in half for a living. Managing inventory for an indie bookstore during the 1990s, one of my tasks was "stripping" the mass market paperbacks. This entails, for those not in the trade, ripping the front cover off to return to the publisher in exchange for credit, then tearing the book in half (or into thirds or quarters, depending on the thickness of the tome) and trashing/recycling the remaining paper. I was often asked, Aren't you disturbed on some level, destroying all those books? Answer: Yes, I am disturbed on some level, but it's not from destroying all those books.

You might try and excuse this blasphemy by saying, well, they weren't sacred texts. It was a lot of unsold Danielle Steele and Zane Grey and Margaret Truman and Allan Folsom and Robert James Waller. But I'd rip up classics as well as over-ordered bestsellers -- not all those high school kids pick up what they need for Required Reading, after all, and there was no reason to keep stock of an extra 200 copies of The Awakening until the next fall, not when we needed credit for twelve cases of the new John Grisham novel, due to land come springtime.

That's how the book business works: We got only so much room for only so many books.

As of this writing, my library is comprised of just over 500 titles. (I know that number because, being disturbed on some level, I grabbed a cup of coffee and spent a couple-three minutes doing an inventory count, just like in the old days.) This is as small as my collection has been in many years. I reduced it significantly prior to our move to Birmingham, by somewhere in the neighborhood of forty percent, weeding out books I'd read decades prior, or might not read until decades hence, or might not read ever. It wasn't an entirely painless process, I will admit. Then again, neither was moving. We're talking four flights of stairs, here. Halfway through the day, I found myself wishing: If I knew which boxes my Really Treasured Books were in, I'd set the rest on fire, right down there in the street in full view of God and everybody, and only call the firemen to hose the ashes into the sewer.

My library has routinely expanded and contracted by way of constant acquisitions and occasional purges. I've tried to keep my collection bound by available shelf space, but this hasn't always worked; books tend to end up here and there, in decorative piles. But the purges accomplish more than clearing floor-space: as a dedicated apartment dweller, I never assumed permanence. Meaning, at some point, all that stuff has to be picked up and moved again, so why have more than I'm willing to carry? It's not so much about shelf space as it is about life space.

My sister Dena taught me to read when I was four, using Heckle & Jeckle comic books. (I disliked being read to, wanting instead to read for myself -- a characteristic I still have, pretty funny from a guy who came up with Southern Writers Reading as the eponymous title for an onstage literary event.) I was the unofficial class librarian throughout fourth grade, each week quickly raising my hand to volunteer for the task of dusting and tidying the industrial metal bookshelves that lined one wall of our classroom. I majored in English for five years, then found work in bookstores for the next thirteen -- and frankly got a much better education, taking home books about social and scientific theories, religion, histories, biographies, even a bit of literature now and then. I am, in short, no stranger to the joys that books provide.

I used to assume that a healthy personal library had to be a steadily growing thing -- it was a physical manifestation of the owner's mind, or at least a window into it. Books in that sense were trophies of achievement, each shelf the equivalent of a sheepskin certificate, even if it was only from the School of Nurse Romances. A library was evidence of the worthwhile shape of your life, and the more you had, the better, the faster, the smarter. But as somebody who hasn't lived in one particular place for more than a handful of years, my practical need to purge physical objects outweighs any urge to showcase what I've read in the past in order to perhaps prove to visitors that I can carry on an interesting conversation (because I often can't, anyway).

Buddhist monks spend hours, days, weeks creating those intricate mandalas out of colored sand, only to brush them away (ceremoniously, but still) after they finish. So, I wonder: What is this library but a multicolored mandala, a dreamcatcher, a skein of flexible ideas grouped here only temporarily, in this form, before again taking to the wind? Why hang onto books? Why even try? When Sonny Brewer and I were chasing dollars with used and rare tomes at Over the Transom, we'd occasionally receive a beloved copy of something, like that first state edition of To Kill a Mockingbird, or that full collection of Lafcadio Hearn's Japanese ghost stories -- and as tempting as it was to keep such things for ourselves, we had a great notion: we were only a temporary transit lounge. We were just keeping those books until their rightful owners came to collect them. We loved them, but we also loved seeing them go. (That is, after all, another way in which the book business works.)

At the end of Fahrenheit 451, there are almost no books left in the world, only people who remember those books. But it is more than memory, it is life itself. I am Plato's Republic, says one character, introducing others: I want you to meet Jonathan Swift [...] and this other fellow is Charles Darwin, and this one is Schopenhauer, and this one is Einstein, and this one here at my elbow is Mr Albert Schweitzer. And so do we all become Spartacus, one book at a time.

I suppose it all boils down to a rephrasing of an old cliche: When I croak, I won't take any of these books with me. I'll only take what I've read. And what a gift that will be.

[This was a response to The Wily Blogger who will, I hope, one day reinstate her wily blogging.]

The Road (2006)

There is a distinct branch of Science Fiction, what we might call the Office of Dystopia, which quietly began operations during the Industrial Revolution, late in the 19th Century. Earlier, in accordance with prevailing philosophies, speculative fiction tended towards more rose-tinted outlooks; people believed history was progressing and improving, the trend was upwards, Heavenwards, and the fortunes of Mankind were leading to if not Earthly Paradise then certainly to some graceful, affluent state. Many metaphorical tales for the Age of Exploration do in fact revolve around quests for "lost" civilizations, heretofore undiscovered countries inside the planet's crust or hidden at the poles, or accessible dream worlds -- all of which represent the kinds of beatific society assumed to be the ultimate fate of Earth's citizenry. Two definitive, if late, expressions of this school of thought appeared in 1933: James Hilton's Lost Horizon, a travel brochure for the Utopian hideaway of Shangri-La, and H.G. Wells' The Shape of Things to Come, a prophetic dispatch from a future society dedicated to the global promotion of science and the arts. (Neither of these novels is entirely Utopian in scope, each hinting at impending world war, and can thus be said to provide bridge material for the harder, more pragmatic brand of SF just around the corner....)

As the world entered first the Machine Age and ultimately the Atomic Age, the "scientific romances" popularized by Wells and Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs turned quaint, even gauche. Speculative fiction began directly siphoning the promises of applied sciences and engineering -- disciplines increasingly applied to military weapons development, bottom line being the cost of human lives during wartime -- and was thus forced to view Utopian dreamscapes through a harsher, more cautionary lens. (The more recent "steampunk" offshoot of SF retrofits 21st Century sensibilities into Victorian settings and tech, resulting in yarns dyed deeply with irony. See: Pynchon's Against the Day (2006) which by no accident contains, among many such plot threads, a futile search for Shambhala during the run-up to World War I, as though uncovering such an idyllic place might somehow save the world from impending doom.)

Propulsion being a by-product of detonation, rocket technologies did not generate only stories of travel through outer space; as the Cold War dawned across the 1950s and the geopolitical landscape divided into East and West, nuclear apocalypse mushroomed into a daily threat, an invisible cloud looming over the planet, likely to burst at any moment. Writers best equipped to scry the future saw grim patterns in the crystallizing mist; proposing improved futures fell to nostalgia for a better world that should-have-been but never came within reach -- the perpetual folly known as The Good Ol' Days. Tapping into underlying fears of the future, the sub-genre of post-apocalyptic SF was easily geared up and sent shambling over the literary landscape.

Whether dealt with via metaphor or more directly, post-apocalyptic narratives break down the business of survival in an environment rapidly coming to pieces, or already in pieces. The means of destruction may differ -- plague, unnatural depletion of resources, nuclear annihilation, brain-munching zombies -- but the response is every time identical: just like the song says, Hit the Road, Jack. It's never safe where you are, but there's a Promised Land just over the next hill, and you may as well die trying to reach it. (Notable exception, in which a cadre of characters dig in and band together: Frank Conroy's Alas Babylon (1959). Following a one-day nuclear war, citizens of a south Florida community coalesce so firmly that when the military finally arrives, offering to move them elsewhere, they refuse to go, steadfastly believing they can best rebuild where they already are. The novel is a dramatic study in the civil defense mindset of the Eisenhower Era, but is otherwise a statistical anomaly within the sub-genre.)

George Romero's zombie films trace their pathos to the Richard Matheson novel I Am Legend (1954) in which prototypical last-man-on-earth Robert Neville is besieged by bloodthirsty creatures (humans transformed by a mutant virus) who swarm his suburban castle after sundown; like any good mid-century American citizen with a backyard bomb shelter and an instructional brochure on nuclear fallout, Neville pragmatically hunkers down to wait out the insane disaster. Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978) takes doomsday prepping to the next level, with a band of characters holing up in a shopping mall they convert into a fortified private compound, shutting out the undead hordes. While Romero satirizes consumer habits, the real truth unveiled is how quickly and terribly society deteriorates when under siege, and how safe places become hideous traps. To survive, keep moving -- the moving target is hardest to hit.

More than simply fleeing danger, Apocalyptic Wanderlust is fueled by the basic desire for human connection, for families and clans. Dystopian novels often feature characters beginning their journeys alone, then in slowly aggregating communities as the plots progress. In Nevil Shute's On the Beach (1957), Australian survivors of a nuclear war await the arrival of drifting radioactive clouds. When a Morse Code distress signal from North America is picked up, the military dispatches a submarine to investigate; this quest for fellow survivors becomes a major plotline but the novel remains chiefly concerned with how people address their fates, how much quality and grace they carry into their final acts.

Two novels by Stephen King follow a more typical "travel narrative" pattern: The Stand (1978) and Cell (2006). In both books, overnight catastrophe wipes out the majority of the human race, leaving those unharmed by either flu-like plague or brain-frying microwave pulse to suffer dreams and visions which compel them to a common destination (in The Stand, it's Colorado; in Cell, central Maine). Staying alive is not a solitary endeavor, but a common one -- it's going to take a village to reconstruct civilization, after all. Anyone who has endured the calamitous, ongoing aftereffects of severe weather (hurricane, earthquake, tornado, take your pick) understands how important, how inherently logical, neighborly relations are. Permanently wrecked infrastructures of course means the disappearance of law enforcement, the rise of self-deputized vigilantes, not to mention armed highwaymen with a severe case of the Self Interest. Within this void, citizens necessarily become clan members -- continually protective, defensive, wary.

So, as characters strike out for the Unlikely Promised Land, they must also watch their backs. This is the underlying scenario of Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006), a novel that differs from the usual post-apocalyptic template in one important way: in most cases, whatever disrupted society remains part of the ongoing story, like the tribal struggles over gasoline in George Miller's film The Road Warrior (1981), or how in John Wyndham's novel The Day of the Triffids (1951) deadly bio-engineered plants have usurped mankind's primary position on the food chain, with plot revolving around efforts to keep the creatures at bay while also seeking permanent sanctuary from them. But in The Road, the only real goal in sight for the unnamed father and his son, heading inexorably south to the coast during relentless nuclear winter, is daily survival. Killers and cannibals roam unchecked through the poisoned landscape, as if the ashen wastelands were not obstacle enough, but man and boy persist because that is all there is to do -- cling to each other and continue.

Like Rod Serling's classic Twilight Zone episode "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street" (itself an allegory of the Cold War-related Red Scare), the story is concerned only with what the characters do with the incomplete hands dealt to them -- whether they will act rationally or succumb to hysteria. In many ways, The Road echoes On the Beach, illustrating how disaster and death are not just inevitable, but ever-present -- we shouldn't need a global disaster to remind us how to live and love and take each day to our bosoms like rare treasure.

At the end of McCarthys' novel, there is no ultimate Better Place, only more of the same. While on one hand this contradicts the logic of setting out in the first place, it also underscores the intrinsic importance of believing in a Better Place. That a phoenix might arise from the ashes of the old world, and be waiting at the end of a hard journey, is reason enough. Even when faced with overwhelming odds, hope dies hard -- and that's exactly as it should be. More than youthful vanity or misplaced survival tactics, the drive to outlive an apocalypse -- atomic, viral, or zombified -- is what makes us fully human.

Being Harper Lee

I don't know Harper Lee, and I don't pretend to. I know some people who do know her -- but this is like saying "I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV." So when Charles Shields contacted me last fall about the biography he was putting together, I spoke to him more out of my own curiosity than anything else. What could I know that could possibly be of interest? He was surely scraping the bottom of the barrel, calling me.

And there are arguments to be made that Mockingbird: a Portrait of Harper Lee is composed primarily of barrel scrapings: Shields did not have access to Lee herself, and many of her closest compatriots were loyally mum. Still, like any mulligan stew, the success lies in how you combine the elements you do have on hand. Given that this particular stew is one for which people have been hungering for some time, the question becomes: How much flavor can something have when there's no main ingredient?

The book concentrates on the obvious eras: Lee's childhood and college years; her early period in Manhattan during the writing and revising of To Kill a Mockingbird; the time spent with Capote researching In Cold Blood in Kansas; the release of her book and then the film version; and finally an essentially speculative section, only fifty pages or so, devoted to the time since 1965. To flesh out what little is known, Shields uses heaping helpings from previously published biographies of Truman Capote, Gregory Peck, and Horton Foote. He's collected a multitude of interviews with and articles about people who surrounded Lee at one time (it seems he dug up every article ever published that even mentions Lee's name, quite a feat of research). Though of questionable value, there's also an abundance of first-hand accounts from people who claim to be former classmates, childhood friends, and other varieties of distant acquaintance. 

Even with his careful reliance upon this bounty of sources, Shields misses crucial inconsistencies and downright contradictions that prove the fallibility of such varied subjectivity: in describing A.C. Lee, the man whom so many believe is the template for Atticus Finch, neighbors recall him being "detached... not particularly friendly" and further say "the image of facing down the crowd of rough necks has never rung true to me." But a page later, without comment, come two hearty, if slightly at-odds, accounts of A.C. facing down a group of Klansmen. Shields also leads himself into some early, unwarranted speculation about the personality of Lee's mother; by the time he offhandedly admits, late in the book, such views come from mistaken (or intentionally mistaken) accounts, the damage is done -- he has perpetuated the error. 

It is reasonable to assume that a reader wishing to better understand the author of To Kill a Mockingbird would appreciate a detailed description of small town life in Monroeville during the 1930s and the prototype personalities and events that would eventually find their way into Lee and Capote's stories (the Jewish store owner who knowingly sold bedsheets to Klan members; the snuff-addicted baker of fruitcakes; the Monroe County court case that became the basis for Tom Robinson's trial). The book is therefore flush with ornamental, atmospheric, secondary detail. While impressive and engrossing, it ultimately becomes testament to the Invisible Center: Shields at one point spends six lines of text describing the functions of an Underwood typewriter. 

He makes the same miscalculation later on, describing the Clutter investigation and initially making the most of newly unearthed materials from the Capote Papers at the New York Public Library -- but buries the effort by piling on information (a four-page room-by-room description of the Clutter home, mainly devoid of any firsthand accounting) that can be more effectively gleaned from the pages of In Cold Blood itself.
 
The book is most effective when Shields stands back and lets Lee speak for herself. Good use -- revealing Shields' reverence for his subject -- is made of excerpts from the University of Alabama publications Crimson White and Rammer Jammer; Lee wrote for both during her time there. Even better are the snippets from interviews conducted during press junkets following both the 1960 publication of Mockingbird and the release of the film version a handful of years later. All of the excerpts showcase Lee's warm personality, not to mention wicked wit. (An authorized collection of these first-hand materials, framed only by editorial, contextual narration, would make a great read -- though such a beast seems unlikely to appear any time soon.)

+ + +

On a chilly November evening in 2005, I entered the Capri Theatre in Montgomery and settled in to watch Phillip Seymour Hoffman in the title role of Capote. Even in understanding that the film was a speculative, compressed take on the investigation of the Clutter murders that led into the writing of In Cold Blood, I was taken out of the experience each time Catherine Keener appeared onscreen as "Harper Lee." I knew by the report of a mutual friend that Ms. Lee had indeed already seen the film and, though she reportedly thought Hoffman did a fair enough job, was largely dismissive of its many inaccuracies.

I could not keep from wondering how uncommonly weird it must be to live a complete life, quite like anyone else, but for a moment or two, decades prior, when you had a hand in something extraordinary and which left a profound legacy. And for someone to then make a movie about that legacy, that singular moment from your life, without your input or consent. A movie that then hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people see. I tried to think about how I might feel if someone in Hollywood made a film about something that happened in my life during, say, my college years (our intramural water polo team, while not heroic on the order of the 1980 US Olympic hockey team, did, in fact, rock). Would they get the details right? What would it be like to look into the 30-foot face of my onscreen avatar and think, Some of this is right ... but the rest is all wrong?

About a month later, I was contacted by Charles Shields. His research had led him to an old essay I wrote for the Mobile Register Sunday book review page, describing how I tackled the popular Alabama parlor-game of half-baked speculation regarding whether or not Truman Capote had actually written To Kill a Mockingbird by reading Mockingbird and In Cold Blood back-to-back and, observing the different styles and tones, concluding that a kindergartner could figure out the truth of it. I was rewarded for this exercise by a phone call from the author of To Kill a Mockingbird. You can surmise that it was, indeed, Harper Lee -- Truman Capote having been dead since 1984. Not to mention, our mutual friend Wayne Greenhaw confirmed the call, chuckling, "She doesn't make a lot of those." For a while, I included short account of this interaction as a "postscript" to my essay, but finally excised it since, frankly, it's more fun to tell in person, with added jokes and detail and whatnot; that Shields could use the Way Back Machine to access it anyway is a reminder that the Internets never forget.

+ + +

Meanwhile, there is no disputing the mystique surrounding the author of To Kill a Mockingbird. But I don't think you can pin it down easily by attributing it to a "literary mystery" regarding her singular output and long silence. After all, go tell it to Emily Bronte. I don't think the ongoing fascination has, at its core, anything much to do with Lee's personal choices -- that is just a symptom. The fascination, truly, is deeper -- having much less to do with Lee herself than is comfortable to admit.

We live in a culture that equates success not only with cash flow but with notoriety, where the media feeds on personalities who are famous for being famous -- a phenomenon so common, it's become an accepted joke. Lee is someone who bucks all expectations, who has achieved unqualified success in her chosen field of endeavor, and who has subsequently chosen the joy and satisfaction of simply having done Good Work. There is no evidence of a drive to better what, perhaps, could not be bettered. Not even the apparent need to ride the self-satisfying gravy train of celebrity that could certainly accompany Being Harper Lee -- at any moment, she could pick up the phone and start making the talk show and lecture circuits. But there's really no need. The literary and popular stature of To Kill a Mockingbird is above and beyond any aid she could give at this point.

And I'm banking that Harper Lee knows it. So she has chosen for herself the dignity of a quiet, normal life. Being the woman who wrote a book that defines a watershed moment in American culture and has touched and inspired millions -- millions -- of human beings around the planet, she chooses, courageously, to let her Good Work speak for itself.

For many of us, that choice -- the conundrous decision to not behave like a famous person when in fact it is always within her ability, at any moment, to do so -- is baffling. The unfortunate thing is that it should not be. We should all just aspire to have a little value in our lives, to do a spot of Good Work, find pleasure in it, and move on.

Atticus himself would ask of us little more than that.

Originally published in the Mobile Register, July 23 2006

The Lurking Lovecraft

If I were to describe to you a writer who did the bulk of his work in the early half of the 20th century, attracted the attention of a key editor, garnered a small but devoted audience during his short life but ultimately died broke and out-of-print (though his work outlived him, reemerging in the latter half of the 20th century, leading to canonization and reverence) you'd probably assume I was describing F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Born in Providence RI in 1890 and a resident of greater New England until his death in 1937, Howard Phillips Lovecraft published exclusively in pulp magazines: Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, Home Brew, and others. His stories, essays, and poems were well received in this format and won him choice followers and correspondents (among them Robert Bloch and Robert E. Howard), but he never saw his work collected in book form. Following his death, fellow writer August Derleth founded Arkham House publishers in 1939 for the sole purpose of bringing Lovecraft into hardcover print.

Lovecraft's weird fiction has been creeping into our literary consciousness ever since; he is now considered the primary architect of modern horror. The early Arkham volumes eventually begat a handful of popular mass market and trade-sized paperbacks from Ballantine's science fiction imprint DelRey. But the contents of those books were taken from older, corrupt forms -- pulp magazine reprints that had been indiscreetly chopped by editors seeking to fit the stories into available space. Beginning in the 1980s, Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi began painstakingly restoring the texts for Arkham House, using original manuscripts.

Joshi's revisions are newly showcased in the Penguin Classic editions of The Call of Cthulhu (1999), The Thing on the Doorstep (2001) and The Dreams in the Witch House (2004). These books comprise most of what Joshi dubs HPL's "major fiction." The first two volumes feature tales of cosmic horror culminating in the novellas "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" and "At the Mountains of Madness" while the latter volume is built more around Lovecraft's early penchant for phantasmagoric ramblings (he was chiefly inspired by fantasist Lord Dunsany and the poetry of Poe before finding his own voice). While Lovecraft's narrative sojourns into a psychedelic dreamland do have their pleasures, it is his horror and the philosophy behind it that paints his ultimate legacy.

Lovecraft's medium of choice: Alien Terror. War of the Worlds, masterpiece that it is, represents a tinker-toy version of HPL's cosmic philosophy; indeed, Wells's Martians are downright cuddly compared with what Lovecraft had in mind. In his universe, mankind is but a germ, at the mercy of eminent larger forces we cannot hope to comprehend. These so-called "Mythos" stories (though HPL was always adamant that his fictions were unconnected) are populated by a group of so-called Elder Gods and Old Ones who exist beyond the knowable barriers of time and space, though they do sometimes take shape in our reality; his narrator characters stumble across one or two pieces of arcane information (evidence of these "gods") that send them on giddy academic quests towards a truth that is, ultimately, a horror. Despite this cosmology, Lovecraft was not interested in depicting typical forms of morality, of Good v. Evil. There are no supreme gods or devils with their attendant dogmas, only bad choices on the part of the curious humans. The maxim from King Lear to them applies: "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport." That is, when they notice us at all.

The undisputed Big Daddy of these stories is "The Call of Cthulhu," a tale involving the discovery of a statue bearing cryptic inscriptions, and subsequent investigations into a voodoo-like cult in Louisiana and the sinking of a boat off the Australian coast by a hideous creature that arises from the deep. With "Cthulhu," Lovecraft perfected the quasi-reporter/historian/scientific storytelling technique that would serve him the rest of his career. Lovecraft understood how critical verisimilitude is for the weird tale better than his contemporaries, and better than most who have come after. Only Stephen King, who spends whole chapters weaving convincing internal lives for his characters, comes close. Perhaps critically, Lovecraft leaves no pauses for irony or comedy (a sticking point for some critics, who contend that a little levity would have taken Lovecraft a long way); thus invested, he drags the reader toward agnostic punchlines that may reveal little or nothing (the narrators, confronting unspeakable horrors, are often reduced to madness).

Other of Lovecraft's stories, such as "The Shadow Out of Time" and "At the Mountains of Madness" -- a short novel chronicling the discovery of an ancient Antarctic alien city -- represent similar variations on this theme (and provide templates for such modern horror as Neil Gaiman's American Gods and The X-Files). HPL also explored ramifications of the alien "Elder God" influence on humans who wrongmindedly seek power through them in "The Dunwich Horror" and "The Thing on the Doorstep." In these tales readers find the many references to Abdul Alhazred's evil volume The Necronomicon, arguably the most famous non-extant book in all of literature. HPL fabricated a tongue-in-cheek "history" of the book in 1927, and belief in its existence outside his stories has flowered ever since, due in part by Lovecraft citing it in association with other well-known if archaic tomes like The Sceptical Chymist and Hermes Trismegiste.

Most of Lovecraft's stories take place in an achingly detailed, shadow-draped corner of New England: those rural provinces surrounding Arkham (Lovecraft's fictitious stand-in for witch-haunted Salem). Elements from "The Colour Out of Space" and "The Picture in the House" evoke a backwoods dread on par with anything from Dickey's Deliverance, even as the landscape comes -- literally, in some cases -- alive. Rounding out Lovecraft's atmospheric Colonial Yankee oeuvres is the short novel "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward." If you're hungry for Grand Guignol horror, "Ward" has everything you're shopping for: black magic, vampires, séances, zombies, spirit possession, and finally the requisite god-like alien entities who stand to destroy all. 

Each of the Penguin Classics volumes comes with a typical scholarly apparatus of endnotes. Joshi has done far more than recall Lovecraft's seminal intentions: he amplifies the autobiographical echoes buried in the tales, and impressively reveals historical minutiae. "Ward" is peppered with obscure but contextually correct place and character names, all of which are defined. Also helpful are the cross-references to characters and "Elder God" entities who are named (or Unnamed as the case may be) throughout the Lovecraft canon; Joshi sorts them all out while explaining Lovecraft’s inspirations. Especially fun are the dissections of Lovecraft's faithful descriptions of Boston's North End and the routes of the Green Line trains, all of which add to the ghoulish verisimilitude of stories like "Pickman's Model."

Sure, Lovecraft has his follies. There is scant psychology (excepting gibbering madness) in his stories, and no romantic interests. His racism, though submerged, cannot be ignored any more than Cthulhu's own sunken throne. And many of the stories begin with the now-hackneyed "I will tell you my tale, though you may think me mad" approach. Even so, there is an addictive potato-chip quality to Lovecraft's stories. Once his cadence takes hold in your brain, you're apt to keep reading and reading and reading. This is a trait Lovecraft, a good storyteller above all else, shares not just with fellow horrormeister Poe, but with writers who were his contemporaries: Nathaniel West, Gertrude Stein, and Raymond Chandler.

HPL wrote while the Victorian ghost story faded as the dominant form of supernatural escapism and weird/science fiction (eventually popularized for mass audiences by Rod Serling) began rising to take its place. That his work appeared mainly in the pulps of the day has been one reason for Lovecraft's slow acceptance; another is that his work is unabashedly pure genre, and his philosophies cannot be extracted from their presentation. Only one other author comes to mind as one so embraced by readers yet deflected by critics and academics: Tolkien. Much like Tolkien, Lovecraft employs rich, rococo language to set his moods, pacing, and atmosphere, even to contextualize his message. This is purple prose elevated to an art form. This is over-writing with teeth. And because of his baroque, hypnotic skill, Lovecraft gets away with what so many others cannot; only Hunter S. Thompson has more failed imitators than HPL. Contemporary genre writers, willing to acknowledge Lovecraft's pervading influence on modern horror, are reticent to laud or even acknowledge his writing chops. Laura Miller, writing for Salon, called Lovecraft "American literature's greatest bad writer." Still, Stephen King, while accepting the Distinguished Contribution to American Letters medal at the National Book Awards a couple of years ago, asked critics whether they believe they "get social or academic brownie points for deliberately staying out of touch with your own culture." He was speaking in his own defense, of course. But he might well have been asking the question on behalf of Lovecraft. 

Now, the prestigious Library of America added Lovecraft to their curation of "America's best and most significant writing," with Lovecraft: Tales (2005). Edited and notated by Peter Straub (based on the Joshi texts), this compendium represents, in 800 pages, truly the best of Lovecraft's efforts, concentrating mainly on the "Mythos" tales. Every disciple will bicker over omissions, but Straub has undeniably put together the best single-dip of Lovecraft currently on the market, better even than Derleth's original Arkham House volume, The Outsider and Others. 

From beyond the grave, the self-styled "Old Gentleman" from Providence does seem to be getting his due. 

Originally published in the Mobile Register, October 30 2005

Stone, Wood, Water

It is three days before Christmas and only a few degrees above freezing in Concord, MA when I crest the rise in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery known as Author's Ridge. Laid out below me is a slumping dell clustered with graves, wound through by footpaths that crisscross before leading back out through the trees. The morning light sets aglitter a few stubborn patches of snow; in contrast the slatted shadows of the evergreens seem as heavy as the tombstones over which they pass.

Family plots are numerous -- central obelisks swarmed by smaller stones, like satellites orbiting a fixed celestial point. Such are the markers for the Family Thoreau, at the head of the ridge. The focal marker is tall and stout but of modest craftsmanship, bearing only names and dates -- no titles, no epitaphs. At the northeast corner of the plot, on ground suitably gnarled with the exposed roots of a nearby oak, stands a simple weather-worn stone, barely a foot high. Henry. It is adorned by no "bawbles" but a few yellow flowers only, preserved in the cold, and by piles of smaller stones, undoubtedly brought by other pilgrims, from the Pond to here. Many a traveler came out of his way to see me…

The Thoreau family marker broadcasts a long shadow across the footpath, over a plot of graves even more anonymous, each marker carved identically with a single name: Hawthorne. We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death. Bartlett's 1885 guide to Concord describes Nathaniel's grave as "surrounded by a low hedge of arbor vitae, as if the gifted author sought in death the modest retirement which he loved in life." No such flora exists now, and I am left to guess that Hawthorne's grave is the one farthest from the path. It too is garlanded with frozen daisies.

A walk farther down this increasingly sunlit path reveals a who's-who resting ground of 19th century Transcendentalists and social reformers and literati who were the architects of the American Renaissance -- that moment when we at last shrugged off English and Continental cultural influences and came into our own on the stage of Global Thought. A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the World. Here is Elizabeth Peabody, the progressive educator who opened the first kindergarten in the United States. Here is Harriet Lothrop, author of Little Peppers and How They Grew. Here is Sam Staples, the constable who jailed his friend Thoreau, thus inspiring Civil Disobedience. The Alcott family is marked by an elaborately carved obelisk, still faithfully decorated each Memorial Day by the residents of Concord.

Finally there stands a towering boulder of native pink quartz, alchemically glistening as though fresh from the quarry. Bartlett mentions that friends of Thoreau, after his passing, had intended to place just such a monument at Walden Pond; that dedication seems to have been reserved instead for his mentor and friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Give me insight today, and you may have antique and future worlds.

And here I pause. There is a natural expectation of graveyards for a spectral haunting, or at least some chance of revelation -- that to visit and refresh a feeling of loss and disconnection will allow us to reroute those emotions into something more privately constructive. These are the places where we might allow the Dead to lead us back to ourselves. A parapsychologist would argue that the expectation itself is the key; poltergeists appear only in conjunction with certain personality types, just as specific chemical reactions occur only when the correct elements are mixed in the correct proportions.

If so, then this particular morning the Dead and I don't mix. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. My own experience with death has convinced me funerals and burials and the hallowed grounds that result are for the living. (What living person haunts the site of his future burial, if he knows it? What ghost would want to linger at his eternal one?) The spirits of the departed, if they move among us, are more likely to do so in familiar environments, both psychic and physical, and appear to us in ways to which we are most receptive.

So though I have come here to pay my respects to a pocket of men and women who noticeably shaped their world, and I believe still weave a certain magic in our own, I am left bereft. I am too late, even to kneel before unfamiliar stones and send silent prayers, a few words of thanks… Perhaps they have been dead too long, and there is nothing beneath these rocks but dust, and more dust. For what are they in all their high conceit, when man in the bush with God may meet?

The fabled row of black ash trees leading to the front door of the Old Manse is now gone, as is the apple orchard which once connected the backyard with the bank of the Concord River. It is certainly the most unexcitable and sluggish stream that ever loitered, imperceptibly, towards its eternity, the sea. Only a few winter-barren birches remain. Leaves float on an updraft breeze, like angels seeking heaven at last.

The Manse itself appears much as it did in 1770, when it was built according to the specifications of Rev'd William Emerson (Ralph Waldo's grandfather), and the furniture within still dates from the time of construction. Relatively modest by current standards, the arched, barn-like structure was the first two-story (three, if you count the garret) home in Concord; chock-a-block extensions of the ground floor snake from the rear, toward the river -- symbolic of Concord at-large, which has expanded and modernized gracefully, retaining a historical identity without falling victim to excessive over-development and franchising.

This persistence of Native Spirit could very well be attributed to the silent influence of the Manse. Built for a minister and later inhabited mainly by clergymen, including Ezra Ripley, it seems a spot conducive to that reverence and meditation which concerns the soul. Awful to reflect how many sermons must have been written there. One exception was Nathaniel Hawthorne -- a "profane lay occupant," though certainly known for wrestling with his own Demons of Morality; Mosses from an Old Manse was scribed here, including Young Goodman Brown's midnight encounter with the Devil. Hawthorne claimed the house haunted by none other than Ripley -- describing how door latches would raise without the aid of human strength, and cold otherworldly gusts would sweep through the rooms.

As a gift to newlyweds Nathaniel and Sophia, upon their moving in, a new garden was planted on the south side of the house by Henry Thoreau; each spring this vegetable patch is resurrected, as per the specs of Hawthorne's journals, with the eventual produce donated to local soup kitchens. The giddy Hawthornes employed Sophia's wedding ring diamond to etch inscriptions in the windowpanes of the upstairs study (the room where Emerson wrote "Nature," a cornerstone of the Transcendentalist movement, a few years prior). These etchings can still be seen: Nath Hawthorne/This is his study/1843.

Through this same window, eighty-six years earlier, William Emerson viewed a singular skirmish on the planks of the Old North Bridge. Here once the embattled farmers stood. Four hundred minutemen, tipped off by Samuel Prescott, lay in wait for the advancing British army. (Paul Revere was already captured at Lexington, ten miles east of Concord.) Setting a pattern which has resonated throughout history, the Americans did not fire until fired upon, but at the command of Major John Buttrick -- Fire, fellow soldiers, for God's sake, fire! -- let loose volley after volley after volley, and sent the Redcoats scrambling.

The original bridge, of oak and stone, was dismantled in 1793 due to dilapidation from wear, weather, and war. When Hawthorne wrote the introduction to his Mosses, only a modest cenotaph erected in 1825 marked the spot. (Some locals were rankled that this monument stood on the east bank, where British, not Colonial soldiers, fell.) The North Bridge now in place, built in 1956 and of a design and materials meant to replicate the original, links with the west side where stands the famous Minuteman statue, commissioned by Louisa May Alcott's friend, Daniel Chester French.

If there is any ounce of soil that might be said to lay claim to the conception of the American nation, this is it. Yet this field, separated from the Manse grounds by a shin-high stone fence, interested Hawthorne less as a historic battleground than as a former Indian village. Thoreau, who has a strange faculty of finding what the Indians have left behind them, first set me on the search. It is not hard to imagine the two of them, Thoreau stooping low to scrape the earth with the blade of his garden-trowel, while Hawthorne allows himself a moment of distraction at the beauty of the early springtime blue squill in bloom. There is an exquisite delight in picking up an arrow-head that was dropt centuries ago, and has never been handled since, and which we thus receive directly from the hand of the red hunter.

The first places we go in seeking a past, whether personal or cultural, are the graveyards. The stones point the way back into immovable history, even as the temporal sun winds shadows around and around them. Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it, but I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. We are, for the same reason, drawn to the wood in well-traveled homes -- window sills and doorframes, shelves, cabinets, the handles of hammers and shovels, knives and cutting boards -- any place that wears away beneath our hands, soaks up our natural oils, allowing the grain to rise and speak in testimony of our arrivals and departures, of the work we have done.

In the Concord woods, one half-mile from Walden Pond, is a ten-by-fifteen foot patch of land, lined in stone. A small house once stood here. I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately. A replica of that house stands nearer the pond; it is built of new and treated wood and will serve, for now, as well as any monument.

And here is a kettle-hole, formed 12,000 years ago by the retreat of a mighty glacier. It is lined with evergreens, along steep grades that lead down to a broad sandy cusp. The water is mirror-clear: green and silver where it reflects the trees and sky, shading to blue towards the center, where mysteries arise about its ultimate depth, a quarter-mile from shore. The scenery of Walden is on a humble scale, and does not approach to grandeur.

On the shore, a curiosity on this bitter winter day, a lone seabird pecks at the shallows. My life is like a stroll upon the beach, as near the ocean's edge as I can go. The temptation is too great not to walk toward it, as though it might carry some message... but the bird launches itself from the sand, over the water, then into the sky.

Overhead, the moon floats in the afternoon heavens -- that glowing rock loved by poets and dreamers ever since we have had language for our dreams. For it is those dreams that allow us to trespass against time -- and language that allows us to navigate the way. In a way, it is Language that brought you here... Heaven is under our feet.

Closer, to the spot so hurriedly abandoned by the seabird, where just beneath the water caressing the shoreline is a smooth white rounded stone, about the size of an egg and appearing to hold as many secrets, and as much promise. The water is cold, remembering the glacier it once was. The stone is quickly fished from the shallows, snatched from the threshold of another world. Not a stolen treasure, but a measure of wordless insurance -- proof that this place is real.

What better could be done for anybody, who came within our magic circle, than to throw the spell of a tranquil spirit over him? And when it had wrought its full effect, then we dismissed him, with but misty reminiscences, as if he had been dreaming of us.

Originally published in the Mobile Register, June 30 2002

Pentimento: Paper Projections

Before I saw the movie myself, I took in several reviews of Billy Bob Thornton's take on Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, most of which echoed a lazy sentiment: The Book Was Better. I've been a reader since before kindergarten, worked among books for more than a decade now, and this phrase increasingly annoys, belying as it does a blanket disregard for storytelling in a medium other than that of the printed page. If the filmmaker made a bad movie, okay. But saying "the book was better" is a reaction particular to one's appreciation of a book, not a review of a film. In that regard, what I would really want to know is whether or not the film does justice to that source material -- the Story Itself -- and not the novel by which one came to first know that Story.

I believe there exists, like a diamond floating somewhere on the ethereal plane, an Essential Idea for a story, of which a book, channeled through one particular writer, is only a single facet. It should be that Essential Idea which is followed -- a smart filmmaker should reach beyond a novel and into that idea -- fully aware he's using a different medium (nobody would expect a painting or a radio show or a stage version to be the same as a book -- why do we expect it of film?).

Writers like John Barth or Kurt Vonnegut, whose works present particular difficulties for the Silver Screen, might be the first to argue that a story is, first and foremost, in the telling. It was an argument good enough for Twain, after all. But moviemaking is a specific and very different way of telling a story than is writing. The currency of language is images, not words. Think for a moment about great movies which were conceived as movies -- and how poorly they might fare as novels. Citizen Kane. O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Even Night of the Living Dead draws a great deal of its effect from what is seen (and also by what is not seen) and heard; a textual version would lose a fair amount of impact -- unless of course major changes are implemented.

A few movies do manage to change or even transcend their source material. Jaws. Love Story. Forrest Gump. Think what you like about their content -- the makers of these movies openly accepted the books as mere source material, and by not attempting mere visual translations of what was already on the page, but warping the situations to befit the celluloid medium, perhaps they produced something that improved upon the textual basis, and perhaps revealed more of the Source. Why should we think a book is automatically the best way to tell a story, simply because it appeared to us first?

There's terminology in the painting arts to describe evidence of change to the original composition: pentimento. Often the opaque pigment with which the artist covered a mistake or an unwanted beginning will, with time or injudicious cleaning, become transparent, and a revelation of original intentions will become visible through the finished composition. A celebrated example is Caravaggio's Lute Player (in the Metropolitan Museum of Art) in which X-ray photography was used to uncover evidence of the painter's original intention. 

Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow, for example, uses Washington Irving's famous tale as a transit point for a loving exposition and homage to Gothic storytelling traditions. Irving's legendary headless specter was an excuse for a bit of fun between rival suitors, a 19th century version of The Blair Witch Project; in Burton's version, the Horseman is a visceral revenant, summoned forth by a witch for purposes of greed and revenge. In execution, the stories are nearly mirror-opposites, but both respect a central idea -- the way we weave tales in our lives ultimately gives shape to those lives.

On the other hand, the filmmakers of The Name of the Rose didn't pretend they could bring to the screen all of Umberto Eco's philosophical and religious musings, the intricate symbolic structure, the deep political machinations of the Inquisition. At best, within a 2-hour celluloid environ, these things could only be mentioned or evoked, rather than expounded and invoked. Indeed, the opening credits name their attempt a "palimpsest" of Eco's novel -- terminology for a partially erased and written-over manuscript. But boiling the 500-page novel down to its murder-mystery core was a moot exercise -- all the meaning of the book lay in the clues, not the solution -- and the filmmakers offered nothing new or different as an offset.

Billy Bob Thornton faced the same sort of puzzles by taking on Cormac McCarthy. Celluloid cannot possibly convey the moment young John Grady Cole looks out across the plain and envisions the exodus of the Indians: "…nation and ghost of nation passing in a soft chorale across that mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all history and all remembrance like a grail the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives." It is, in total, a passage less than a thousand words -- but an equal number of pictures (about 41 seconds, at 24 frames per second) could never match their worth.

A moment later Cole picks up, Hamlet-style, a horse skull he finds in the sand, and turns it, and listens to the sand shifting inside it. And while that alone is certainly a filmable event, the narration that precedes and follows it, which lifts the scene aloft in meaning and character, evokes things which cannot be seen, or filmed. Film, therefore, must necessarily try something else.

Thornton, for his part, tried to reach beyond McCarty's prose; he spent a lot of time capturing the sweep of the Mexican vistas, but ultimately finally fell victim to the same trap as did, say, Demi Moore's version of The Scarlet Letter (for which, I am sure, Nathaniel Hawthorne is still a-spin). In these books, much of the action takes place by way of character monologues, or observances and impressions -- Thornton follows McCarthy's book too closely with his camera, and when the characters finally open their mouths to explain themselves, the results are staged, stilted speeches. The only way around this would have been to change the story itself to fit the visual medium (well, I'll give Moore's Letter an A for effort in that regard -- I sure don't remember any sponge-baths in Hawthorne's novel).

These are also matters of perception and expectation, in our visual age. We have to acknowledge that movies can't be books, nor should they want to be. Still, a rare success, when truly successful, fuels that expectation -- and so we sit through a thousand more bad film adaptations, hoping to be treated again. The film that comes to mind is To Kill a Mockingbird, which I recently (and correctly, in my opinion) heard described as a "perfect distillation" of the novel, to the point that "we think we're remembering the book, when we're really remembering the movie."

I can think of only one other book that could be paid such a compliment -- Dracula. The nuances of Stoker's elongated Victorian melodrama are now all but forgotten as we recall simply the icongraphic mugging and hypnotic gaze of Bela Lugosi, who drills down to the very sinister heart of the character and takes viewers through the story in just 70 minutes. Lugosi was chosen for the film (after Lon Chaney turned down the role) thanks to the strength of his performance in the stage production. Which brings us back, finally, to what someone else once said, about being true to the Muse, about the Play being the Thing…

Originally published in the Mobile Register as "Double Images: On Paper, On Screen," March 24 2002

See Also:
Ode to the Headless Horseman
The Scales of Myth