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Ladies and gentlemen, meet Sam.

Talking of Titles...

(...and we were, you know, not so long ago), I find myself reminded of one of the many reasons to lament the passing of Mystery Science Theater 3000: the indelible "Movies made for the USA Network" routine...

Jeff Conaway is a college professor who's up to his mouth in murder in "French Pistol"!

Eric Roberts is the freaked-out artist who gets more than he bargained for in "Naked Came The Nude"!

The C-list celebrities, the naughty taglines, the whole tone of the bit—for those of us who were of a certain age, in a certain time and place, there's the crystal chime of truth that's found in all the best comedy, and we nod wisely even as we wipe the tears of laughter from our eyes.

The Daily Howler

Most of it wasn't even this good, mind you: the choicest bits are the real forehead-slappers, the moments when the prose screeches over the line from serviceably bad to the screechingly awful...

• She was dark, with strong features—a face like a jailhouse tattoo: heart-shaped and bisected by a dagger of a nose...
  


• We headed away from Freeport itself, knocking deeper into the two-horse town that hunched around the motel, in search of pizza to go and an acceptable beer. We found both in a sort of strip mall that formed the center of town—laundromat, liquor store, Famous House of Pizza, post office. From the meager selection of beers at the liquor store, Harper chose Bass Ale (“I’ll never understand the American relationship to imported beers, I never will,” he said a little too loudly. “Nobody at home drinks this stuff any more, much less considers it a premium brew. It’s like 1979 just opening a fucking bottle”); from the Famous House of Pizza he selected two large, pepperoni and Hawaiian (“That’s the essence of American invention,” he said again a bit too loudly; “I mean, honestly—ham and pineapple? With cheese and tomato sauce? In a culinary sense, it’s utter barbarism—but it’s inspired barbarism”). The English: they may not go in for flavored teas, but they practically invented Constant Comment.
  


• ...Dr. Costello, crusty dowager empress of the Creative Writing faculty (although, like many things crusty, she was flaky on the inside) ...
  


• [Beth was] tall, scissor-legged (the sleek curve of her hips where the grip would be, and just as inviting to the hand), hair the color and sweep of a cherry wood stain baby grand piano, a sound-board belly and a spine like mother of pearl. She was a distance runner, lean and muscled, swollen in all the places you’d want her swollen, sunken in all the places you’d want sunken. A landscape of rills and dells, musky ravines and soft, taut mounds... Her eyes could be whip-cracks, could snap like bear traps, or could melt like butter on pancakes.
  


• Dagmar’s laugh made me think of Miles’ trumpet when he put the Harmon on and murmured down low, like the end of his second chorus on “Old Folks”...

...or this quote-unquote "hilarious," Marx Brothersesque exchange wherein Pin—what a wag! what a cut-up!—torments a half-deaf old woman with his lightning-quick recall of Scandinavian folklore, as she endeavours to introduce him to a man named Finn Harper...

“I’m sorry?” I called out as if puzzled. “Who is this… this ‘Finn’ of whom you speak?” A goodly portion of the audience glared in my general direction—Not Knowing Finn, apparently, was a state less to be pitied than to be scorned, or an indicator of some great moral failing: to Dr. Costello it seemed nearly inexplicable.

Dr. Costello, who was having trouble seeing me (and, I soon realized, trouble hearing me as well), said, “Finn, of course. Finn!”

I cocked my head to one side. “Sibelius?

Dr. Costello blinked slowly. “No, it’s not an alias. His name. Finn Harper.”

“Finn Harper? Does he play the kantele?”

“No, of course we can’t delay,” sputtered the doctor. “We’ve still got to—

“No, no—the kantele—like Wainamoinen? ”

Dr. Costello was becoming agitated. “Young man, I don’t know what you’re—we can’t delay, and we can’t wait ‘til morning, so if you’ll just…”

I persisted, “You know—the Kalevala?

“Call whom? Call a doctor? Young man, are you ill?”

Oh how we larfed.

Chunks

This week featuring more from my abortive NaNoWriMo project.
This excerpt: in which Crispin encounters the literary establishment...

In my third semester, I decided to involve myself with the University’s literary magazine as a way of keeping my profile inconspicuously conspicuous: the magazine (title: Cumulus) was a fat, glossy thing that came out twice a year, with high production values and poor copy-editing and thoroughly unexceptional contents—typical of the sort of thing that usually results when adolescents are encouraged to express themselves, maaaaaaan: lots of mean-spirited free-verse diatribes decrying the lack of feeling and sensibility among the Common Herd; bitter denunciations of the empty values of capital-S Society; a smattering (or perhaps a splattering) of Vaseline-smeared softcore erotica; shock tactics; true confessions; expanded English 101 themes; in short, all the parent-hating diary tripe that any twentysomething can bang out at a rate of fifty thousand words a month. “a magazine of arts and ideas,” it proclaimed itself, in all lowercase, though it was usually low on either. Or both.

You may recognize the bitter voice of a veteran of academe in all of this.

His Name Is Flying Drunkard!

By the bye, I do realize that Pin the Tale is a dull, smarmy title: I might've done better to use any of these, product of five minutes' mesing with the Random Kung Fu Movie Title Generator...

• Barefoot Invincible Guillotine


• Spooky Magic Killers


• Enter the Butterfly Avengers


• Iron Diagram Assassins


• Drunken Secret Express


• Little Dragon Among Heroes


• One Armed Ghost Style


• Enter the Liquid from Shaolin


• Black Monkey To The Death


• He Has Nothing But Secret Stars


• Old Devil Taoism V

These titles make me want to write comics again.
No finer compliment can I muster.

Scornworthy

Another excerpt from the unfinished (and in probability unfinishable) novel Pin the Tale: in which Pin Blake hits adolescence, and adolescence hits back...

I was fourteen and Beth Genovese sixteen when the high school drama teacher discovered us in the properties store-room behind the auditorium, my hand in Beth’s blouse, her tongue in my mouth, and my tail up her skirt. The teacher, a big, phlegmatic man named Negri, turned mauve and spluttered, “Gawd dammit, Crispin—” then paused; and peering into the dusty shadows of the store-room, got a good look at Beth and, seeming to perform a sort of mental calculus, muttered, “Clean up in there when you’re done.”

And closed the door. We were “done” mere moments later, though not in any climactic sense—instead in the sense of my stumbling headlong back into the wings with one hand still tucking in my shirt, flushed red to the tip of my tail. (Beth sauntered out a few minutes later, imperturbable—ever imperturbable, as I would come to learn.) Mr. Negri himself was “done” some sixteen months later, sacked without references for gross negligence—a girl in the Drama Club was found to be knocked up, her erstwhile boyfriend having impregnated her under a pile of coats in the back seat of a school bus, during a Club outing that Mr. Negri himself had ostensibly been chaperoning. The aura of discipline that had once surrounded Mr. Negri had dissolved like sugar in water; he no longer seemed to have any iron in his spine, and his students (though never hurtful or cruel) did largely as they pleased without fear of reprisal. It was a time of soft, sensual anarchy—the kids pushed student-penned “experimental” dramas past him, with profanity and rock music and onstage snogging, then made out in the back of the auditorium during rehearsals; they smoked hoodah in the wings and gave giggly, more-than-naturalistic performances in a jury-rigged production of Hair; when the spring musical was Marat/Sade, it was hard to say which was the more debauched bacchanalia—the onstage action or the cast party.

More to come. Mock me freely.

November Spawned A Monster

Regular readers of this blog who also frequent the Underground (and if you're a regular reader who doesn't frequent the Underground, then who the hell are you?) will know that I spent much of November caught up in, and most of December recovering from, the glorious folly of NaNoWriMo. I did not complete my 50,000 words in the thirty days allotted, but I did get 28K, a headful of strange people, and a rough outline pointing me towards a conclusion.

I haven't dared to look at any of it since I abandoned the project—but now, from the remove of a month, I thought it might be fun to run some excerpts...

Pin the Tale is the story of an unusual young man called Crispin Blake, How unusual? Here's a passage from early in the book, wherein Crispin relates the circumstances surrounding his birth...

I have lived my life under a curse.

The doctor cursed when I was born, twenty-four years ago; oh, all right, he wasn’t cursing me, exactly, or even cursing at me: but still. My father used to tell the story—he was in the delivery room, which wasn’t so common in those days, not so long ago—that when I poinged first my head and then the rest of me out of my mother (“You shot out like a champagne cork,” he would guffaw), the attending doctor caught my bloodied form, held me up to the light, and exclaimed, “Sweet mother of fuck!” in probable violation of his Hippocratic oath. One of the nurses began to laugh nervously at this, which annoyed the doctor: he took his anger out on me, slapping me harder than was strictly necessary until I filled my lungs and began to wail.

“Eleven. Son of a bitch,” muttered the doctor, and my father, who had been holding my mother’s hand while she labored without anesthesia (not so common in those days, either), gratefully extricated himself from her now-limp grip, stood up (shaking his wrist to try to stimulate blood flow to his hand, which was white and stiff) and asked, “Eleven pounds?”

The doctor half-turned and snorted, and it was then that my father saw that I was nowhere near a scale: I’d been laid in a bassinet, and the medical team was standing in horseshoe formation around it, goggling downwards. The doctor then grabbed my right wrist and held up my little right hand, its six fingers groping blindly.

“Oh,” said my father, and stepped closer to where I lay, kicking and squirming in the cold and the bright, the room too bright for any shadows and cold steel beneath me. “He’s a—lively little fellow, isn’t he—?” said my father, managing to finish the sentence but somehow seeming not to, as he looked down on his son and heir, legs paddling the air, arms pinwheeling, six-inch tail flicking randomly.

. . .

For two days my parents consulted doctors and psychiatrists and clergy: they read, they discussed, they prayed. There was no medical reason to amputate—but no medical reason not to do so, either; my errant finger was not a vestigial digit, but rather, perfectly formed and fully functional. Likewise, X-rays revealed that, although my vertebrae continued into my tail, no autonomic function would be disrupted if it were severed. Doctors were at a loss to explain what they called my “deformity”; theories of a partially absorbed Siamese twin were floated, along with mutterings of random mutation, the deleterious effects of microwave ovens (which were then quite new on the market), and even whispers that my mother had been frightened by (or, as some suggested, seduced by) a spider monkey. A course of sedatives was ordered for my mother, who refused them; her only concern was for my health, and she had not a tremble about holding me as any mother holds her child. A vasectomy was quietly suggested for my father, who quietly agreed and made arrangements to have the surgery done within the next month.

In the end, after all their prayer and consultation, my parents eventually decided to leave me as God made me: they resigned themselves to a certain level of difficulty with diapering, and my mother resolved to take up crochet, so that I should never lack for warm gloves when the time came I should need them.

They did, however, have me circumcised. Go figure.

More excerpts to follow in the coming days.