Happy Halloween, October Surprise

October surprises are not a rare thing.  Ever since I was a kid, it seems like it doesn't take much to ruin Halloween: some urban legend about razor blades in apples, stock market crashes, real serial killer scares, acts of terrorism, and freak storms.

Happy Halloween, anyway.

 

Top Ten All-Time Most Beautiful Witches

First Prize in Book Art this month: Loopy Dave's Coffee-drinking Witch

This coffee-drinking witch by the artist known as Loopy Dave now ranks with our favorite illustrations from previous years.  Spiced coffee, I'd say.  I like the details in this, the designs in the back of the chair, the mouse familiar with its own hat, the teeth in the skull.

The all-time best-looking witches include:

 

1. Veronica Lake - She starred in I Married A Witch, based on Thorne Smith's novel, The Passionate Witch.

2. Elizabeth Montgomery - She starred in the TV series, Bewitched, based in part on the Thorne Smith novel.

3. Nicole Kidman, in Bewitched, a movie remake of the television series.  Kidman also plays a witch in the movie, Practical Magic, which we liked better.

4. Catherine Bell, who plays in The Good Witch and in a number of sequel Hallmark Channel movies.  Absolutely lovely.  She also played a beautiful witch in the movie, Death Becomes Her, which also starred Goldie Hawn and Glenn Close.

5. Kim Novak in Bell, Book, and Candle.  The comedy in Bewitched must have been partly inspired by this classic.

6. Sandra Bullock was a very good witch in Practical Magic, which also starred Nicole Kidman, previously listed.

7. Rachel Ward - She starred in Black Magic, one of our favorite witchy movies of all time, a comedy about the eternal feminine. She was simply gorgeous in it.

8, 9, & 10.  Cher, Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer in The Witches of Eastwick, based upon the John Updike novel.

 

For my Witches In Red blog, see this link.

For the Wyrd Sisters blog, go here.

HALLOWEEN I DREAM OF JEANNIE COSTUME; BOOKS, AND OTHER PHANTOMS

"A tide is coming in and the kingdom of books, with their white pages and endpapers, their promise of solitude and discovery, is in danger, after an existence of five hundred years, of being washed away."

"The physical possession of a book may become of little significance.  Access to it will be what matters, and when the book is closed, so to speak, it will disappear into the cyber.  It will be like the genie--summonable but unreal."

The quote is from noted author James Salter, in his introduction to Jacques Bonnet's Phantoms on the Bookshelves (2012).  That genie metaphor is worth taking to heart.

When I was kid, the children's story of Aladdin's Lamp was a part of the communal ocean of mythos in which we all bathed.  Barbara Eden's perkiness became a part of that ocean too.  Times changed, and that cultural ocean evolved.

Back then, the "I Dream of Jeannie" icon inspired such consumer products as Barbie Dolls and halloween customes, not so politically correct now.

But the concept of the genie is still with us, if somewhat altered.  Just the other day, I read Joe R. Lansdale's short story, "The Case of the Lighthouse Shambler," involving a modern genie, collected in Ghosts: Recent Hauntings (2012).  Before giving us the story of the Jenni, Lansdale's protagonist makes fun of the ghost hunting "reality" shows now on cable TV:

I find that kind of stuff silly and unbelievable, and mostly just annoying.  There are all those shows on TV about ghost hunters, and psychic kids, and so on, and they make me want to kick the set in.  I guess it's good business, making shows where it's all shadow and innuendo.  People saying that they hear this, or they hear that, or they see this, or they see that, and you don't actually see or hear jack.  You've just got to take their word for it.

Another thing, when they do have something, it's a blurry camera image or a weird sound on their recordings that they say is the ghost telling them to get out of the house, or some such.  I don't become more of a believer when they do that, I become less of one.  The sounds just sound like one of the investigators getting cute, and the images look a lot like my bad vacation photos.

Some reality.

Actually, this poohing of the supernormal has become a customary prelude to such a genie tale as Landsdale then delivers.  Check out Roger Ebert's review of the movie, Red Lights, at this link.  He liked the movie fine as long as it was debunking bunk, but when the plot turned into the uncanny, he was annoyed.

Just last night, we watched the 100th episode of The Mentalist in which the mentalist disavows the showmanship of the psychic, and all psychics, shortly before doing a trick with tarot cards which gives the unconsciousness of those around him more power than is observable by any scientific measure.  It is bunk in denial, or merely bunk pretending to laugh at itself for the sake of entertainment.

We like it fine and we'll applaud the act, even if we're not fooled by the trick.

Forgotten Book of the Week: INSIDE JOB by Connie Willis

Last October I blogged about the division in crime fiction between those who abhored supernormal elements in detective stories and those who took them in stride:

Should We Kick The Ghosts Out Of Crime Fiction?

We've Met The Ghosts And They Are Us

Life is sometimes absurd or fogged in the dreamy cloud of unknowing; and in literary metaphors, ghosts can represent many things including that absurdity, the unfathomable blank beyond the capacity of everyday human conscious experience.

But in the typical detective novel, the ghost story is a red herring.  The ghostly evidence usually turns out to be nothing of the sort, a contrived cover story for the real murderer, or a con job used to extract money out of the gullible.  A hoax.

Connie Willis's Inside Job concerns a professional debunker, who makes a living by investigating and explosing the false claims of professional mediums and spiritualists.  It is a crime novella in a minor key, a ghost story in the way that the movie, Ghost, is a ghost movie.  It assumes that the reader knows that such mediums are bunk, and then it throws the reader a funny curve.

It does this in the way that Ghost does it, by having one of these con artists unwillingly and unknowingly conjuring up a real ghost, and to compound the comedy, the unwitting ghost is none other than that of hard core skeptic and humorist, H. L. Mencken.

That's the premise, and veteran wordsmith Connie Willis pulls it off beautifully.  My only complaint is that it is a 99-page novella rather than a full length book.  I finished it, when it first came out back in 2005, wanting more.

I reread it again just now wanting more.  Still, a funny read in a beautiful book.
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For this week's links to other selections of Friday's Forgotten Books, by other bloggers, go to the pattinase site at this link. 
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Tuesdays Forgotten Film or A/V: TIME AFTER TIME

Time After Time (1979) is a timepiece itself, with the familiar pocket watch which plays a tune and, opened, now serves as a symbol for so many other  time travel movies like Groundhog's Day and Somewhere In Time.

Time After Time compares the pecksniffian Victorian age to the relatively liberal 1970s, using a romance between Michael McDowell as H. G. Wells and Mary Steenburgan as a modern, liberated woman.  It is a sci-fi historically connected romantic comedy, lovely to the eye and with a compelling plot.  The villain, David Warner as Robert Leslie Stevenson (an obvious reference to Hyde in Robert Louis Stevenson's famous work) is a charming, darkly humorous psychopath.

A great atmospheric movie for Halloween.

The opening scene shows Stevenson beating H. G. Wells at chess, showing that he is possibly the smarter man, certainly the more cunning, but the movie turns on whether Wells, being the more humanist and loving, is ultimately the superior man.

Based upon the Karl Alexander novel, there are references to Sherlock Holmes, Susan B. Anthony, and other humorous and ironic allusions.  It is simply delightful, making me hope that they will soon make a creditable adaptation Felix J. Palma's The Map of Time.  And perhaps they will find a part to play for Mary Steenburgan, as they did for Back to the Future.

According to Cyndi Lauper, the movie inspired her song, Time After Time,

If you're lost you can look--and you will find me
Time after time
If you fall I will catch you--I'll be waiting
Time after time

After my picture fades and darkness has
Turned to gray
Watching through windows--you're wondering
If I'm OK
Secrets stolen from deep inside
The drum beats out of time--
 
But the earworm of the day is the Sammy Cahn/Jule Styne upbeat jazz standard from 1949:

Time After Time

 What good are words I say to you?
They can’t convey to you what’s in my heart
If you could hear instead
The things I’ve left unsaid

Time after time
I tell myself that i’m
So lucky to be loving you

So lucky to be
The one you run to see
In the evening, when the day is through

I only know what I know
The passing years will show
You’ve kept my love so young, so new

And time after time
You’ll hear me say that i’m
So lucky to be loving you

You can hear it by Dinah Washington at this link.
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This is an adjunct to Todd Mason's Friday's Forgotten (or overlooked) Film or A/V. You can read today's other selections by a bevy of authors and bloggers at this link.

CLOUD ATLAS VS. ATLAS SHRUGGED and other tidbits

Soon Atlas Shrugged, a new movie version of Ayn Rand's angry novel, will be showing opposite the movie adaptation of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas.  Rand extols the virtues of utter selfishness, while Mitchell's novel stresses the interconnected nature of human existence.

 
Some will see this as selfishness and ego versus altruism and compassion and, indeed, that's the way the novels read.
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Here's a link to David Mitchell's take on the adaptation of his difficult novel into film link.
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“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” --John Steinbeck
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You should read Thomas Frank on the Ayn Rand Fantasy at this link.
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Robert Wilson, author of A Small Death In Lisbon and other fine novels, on his love of reading:

 
What value does reading have for you?
"I used to just love it. There is nothing like the grip of a great book, one where you put life on hold because you have a whole alternative world in which to live. Now I find that that experience is very rare and that being a writer has made me more aware of the artifice. Once you become aware of that, the experience is diminished and it becomes more like study than an alternative world. I do still get it, though. The last book to do that to me was Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian."
 
--from Len Wanner's excellent interview with Wilson, link.
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What do you look for in crime fiction?
"Not to get political, but capitalism doesn’t work on so many levels, it’s frightening … but it’s mostly frightening because it facilitates crime like no other economic system. America’s social structure is burdened by the disparities inherent in capitalism, and in some segments of our society we’ve returned to the Wild West (except now they use Uzi’s and AK-47’s in place of six-shooters). I tend to favor crime fiction that deals with organized crime (which at one time was a response to the injustice of corrupt policing—probably why it was first so easily romanticized). Organized crime is nothing more than capitalism without restraints; essentially what we’ve just witnessed in the banking world; sometimes we really do reap what we sow."
--from Len Wanner's interview with author Charlie Stella, link.

 
Stella is the author of the crime novel, Rough Riders, and several previous novels (Amazon link).  Noted detective novel blogger Peter Rozovsky calls him "my favorite American crime writer" at this link.
 
I've yet to read any of Charlie Stella's works, but after reading the interview and seeing his blog, I'm going to have to give him a try.

Friday's Forgotten Book: JAMES THURBER ON CRIME

THURBER ON CRIME by James Thurber, edited by Robert Lopresti, has a foreword by crime author Donald E. Westlake, the author of some comic crime literature himself.

Westlake says that James Thurber and Robert Benchley taught him about gentle humor in fiction and informed his own writing.  Indeed. you can see the Thurber influence in the opening of Westlake's The Fugitive Pigeon, which I reviewed at this link, a funny of parody Hemingway's "The Killers."

"Hell Only Breaks Loose Once," Thurber's own parody of James Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice is among the many pieces included in this volume, several of which gently critique the form of the popular crime novel, such as "The Man Who Knew Too Little," "The White Rabbit Caper," and "The Macbeth Murder Mystery."

In the last named story, an American who only reads detective novels--Hercule Poirot is her favorite--picks up a copy of Shakespeare's Macbeth by mistake, thinking that it was one of her beloved mysteries.  With the narrator playing straight man, she then commences the interpretation of the play as if it had been written as a mystery novel:
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"In the first place, I don't think for a moment that Macbeth did it."

I looked at her blankly.  "Did what?" I asked.

"I don't think for a moment that he killed the King," she said.  "I don't think the Macbeth woman was mixed up in it, either.  You suspect them the most, of course, but those are the ones that are never guilty--or shouldn't be, anyway."

"I'm afraid," I began, "that I. . ."

"But don't you see," said the American lady, "It would spoil everything if you could figure out right away who did it.  Shakespeare was too smart for that.  I've read that people never have figured out Hamlet, so it isn't likely "Shakespeare would have made Macbeth as simple as it seems. . ."

Who do you suspect? I asked.

"Oh, Macduff did it, all right. . .Hercule Poirot would have got him easily."

The Wyrd Sisters

How did you figure that out? I demanded.

"Well," she said, I didn't right away.  At first I suspected Banquo.  And then, of course, he was the second person killed.  That was good right in there, that part.  The person you suspect of the first murder should always be the second victim. . ."
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Thurber's crime novel expert goes on for several pages in that way, pointing out the cliches of the murder mystery and, in the process, she touches upon some of the real mysteries of Macbeth, including Banquo's ghost and the identities of the Wyrd Sisters and the Third Murderer.

It is traditional to take in a performance of Macbeth in October, if only on DVD, a seasonal thing like the Nutcracker in December.  Last year I posted about Terry Pratchett's Wyrd Sisters at this link.

Thurber wrote that, at one of his favorite literary bars, "Dashiell Hammett, whose The Maltese Falcon had come out a couple of years before, suddenly startled us all by announcing that his writing had been influenced by Henry James' novel The Wings of the Dove.  Nothing surprises me any more, but I couldn't have been more surprised than if Humphrey Bogart, another frequenter of that old salon of wassail and debate, had proclaimed that his acting bore the deep impress of the histrionic art of Maude Adams."

Thurber said that in his later investigation he was unable "to find many feathers of 'The Dove' in the claws of 'The Falcon,' but he does find some resemblances which he then names.

James Thurber is largely forgotten, but his name lives on in the Thurber Award, given to the humorist of the year.  How many of those award winners can you name?  Not many, I suspect.  There is a list of them at this link.  David Rakoff, who won this last year, died of cancer in August.

Last year, at this link, I blogged about Little Red Riding Hood Halloween costumes and about the variations on the tale.  Thurber has his own interpretation in here, where the wolf cannot possibly pass himself off as Red's grandmother any more "than the Metro-Goldwyn lion looks like Calvin Coolidge."  So the girl takes an automatic handgun out of her basket and shoots the wolf dead.

The moral of the story, Thurber says, is that women are not as naive as they used to be.
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This is just one of many forgotten books revived in blogs this friday, and as usual you can read about the others at this link.

THE EIGHTH CIRCLE by Stanley Ellin; Friday's Forgotten or Overlooked Book

I looked for this book after reading about it in J. Kingston Pierce's "The Book You Have To Read" column over at the Rap Sheet.  It was not available in fine condition at the time,  at least in my price range, so I passed on it then and went on to something else.

This last week, I obtained a fine hardcover in the Best Mysteries of All Time edition for less than $20, and good gosh, I'm delighted to have it.  It is indeed a book to treasure.  It seems to me that it stands to the detective novel as The Spy Who Came In From The Cold stands to the spy novel.  It turns its heel on some genre cliches, yet it rings truer and deeper to what the genre is fundamentally about.

You can read J. Kingston Pierce's essay on The Eighth Circle at this link.  Lawrence Block praises the author and tells some funny stories about him at this link.  There's a nice piece on Stanley Ellin over at the Tipping My Fedora blog, here.

 The epigraph of the novel is from The Inferno:  "...so in the eighth circle are the liars, flatterers, and sellers of office, the fortune tellers, hypocrites, and thieves, the pimps and grafters, and all such scum."

And why is The Maltese Falcon included in the picture above?  Well, if you recall the irony, Sam Spade has something to do with his partner's wife, yet after his partner is killed, Spade is determined to track down the killer.  Perhaps Stanley Ellin did not intend for such a connection to be made, but perhaps he did.  Inspired or crafted, either way the novel is magnificent.

I like the Robert McGinnis art work enough to take the time to scan it full size on my own dustjacket for my personal hardcover copy of The Eighth Circle, now in a clear and protective Brodart cover.

ARSENIC AND OLD LACE: Tuesday's Forgotten or Overlooked Film (or A/V)

This was the poster for a remake, but you can't beat the original movie.

We're not fond of the colorization of black and white movies, in general, except when it comes to Frank Capra's Arsenic and Old Lace.  It is, after all, a Halloween movie, complete with trick-or-treaters.  And with autumn leaves blowing through the graveyard in that wonderfully scripted romantic segment, starring Cary Grant and Priscilla Lane.

And Priscilla Lane impresses us, not only with her fresh good looks but with her comedic presence.  It is a shame that she did not do more movies.

Cary Grant plays a playwright who has long been famous as a critic of marriage.  Some think that the character was based upon H. L. Mencken, who wrote such essays.  Mencken wrote:  "Men have it easier than women--they marry later and die earlier...Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't, they'd be married too. . .A man can be a fool and not know it--but not if he is married......Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another."

Mencken later surprised his readers by getting married, at age 50, to the love of his life, author Sarah Haardt.  Long after their deaths, their collected letters and his memoirs reveal a deep and lasting love.

The movie was made in 1941, when Cary Grant was thirty-seven.  Priscilla Lane was then twenty-six.  Both looked much younger on the screen.  The movie is largely slapstick, but it is timeless slapstick, over-the-top but a comfortable over-the-top.  The jokes are as funny now as they were when I first saw this.

It is said that the idea of movie may have been inspired by the real serial murderer Amy Archer-Gilligan.  Arsenic and Old Lace has certainly inspired many later mystery novels, plays, and movies.  But you can't beat the original with Grant and Lane, supported by Josephine Hull and Jean Adair as the Brewster aunts, a heavily made up Raymond Massey as a Boris Karloff lookalike, Peter Lorre as Dr. Einstein, John Alexander as Teddy "Roosevelt" Brewster, Jack Carson, and Edward Everett Horton.

A comic crime movie, and one that fits the season.

This is an adjunct of Todd Mason's Forgotten (or Overlooked) Film or Other A/V series. For the other selections by many authors and bloggers, see this link.

Seasonal Books: October's Halloween Novels

Hey, today is Columbus Day Observed, or Native American Day if you're thinking of the folks who were doing the observing, who met the boat.  Anyway, Halloween is the next notation on the calendar and it is high time to get into the mood.

Last October, I was much more in the spirit of things.  My blog headlines for the month were:

• Halloween Reading; ALIEN and ALIENS: NO EXIT
• Sunday's Halloween Eve Ramblings
• Grimm, Little Red Riding Hood, and the Earworms of...
• Friday's Forgotten Book: THE GHOST HUNTERS by Deb...
• Nightmare of the Night: Fuseli, Craig Ferguson, a...
• Should We Kick The Ghosts Out Of Crime Fiction?
• Walt Disney's LONESOME GHOSTS: A Literary Interpr...
• Medium vs. the Mentalist?
• The Best Literary Halloween Horse: Washington Irvi...
• Friday's Forgotten Book: Charles Beaumont's NIGHT ...
• The Halloween Tarot, Stephen King's DANSE MACABRE
• Book Cover Art of the Day: Cornell Woolrich's PHAN...
• EARWORM OF THE DAY: SHE'S NOT THERE by the Zombies...
• Friday's Forgotten Book: WATER WITCHES by Chris Bo...
• October Surprises; Trick or Treat
• BELL, BOOK, AND CANDLE, soundtrack and movie
• THE CHURCH OF DEAD GIRLS by Stephen Dobyns
• GOD, MACBETH, WYRD SISTERS, WITCHES, and FATES
• Earworm of the Day: Vampires, Mummies, and the Hol...
• TOMATO RED, BEWITCHED, & Other October Novels and ...
• GHOST STORY, Peter Straub, novel, movie, soundtrac...
• An analysis of October Road, as sung by James Tayl...
•  halloween-red-riding-hood-again-.html

Fun stuff.  The year before last, I read several Halloween-related books in October, including a reread of Deborah Blum's Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death, then Peter Ackroyd's A History of Ghosts: The True Story of Seances, Mediums, Ghosts, and Ghostbusters, then Norman Partridge's Johnny Halloween: Tales of the Dark Season and Dark Harvest. I also read Mike Ashley's excellent Starlight Man: The Extraordinary Life of Algernon Blackwood which goes into the spiritualism of the fantasy/occult novelist.

Every year I put back the spookiest mysteries and literary ghost stories to read in October.  But every year I find myself rereading some old favorites as well.  And every year I have some left over that I put back til the next fall.

New books for Halloween this year include Otto Penzler's The Big Book of Ghost Stories, which  is exactly that, including both classic and contemporary ghost yarns.

Another new anthology is Ghosts: Recent Hauntings, this one edited by Paula Guran and featuring new stories by Neil Gaiman, Elizabeth Hand, Glen Hirshberg, Peter Straub, Joe R. Lansdale, and many others.  In her introduction, Guan offers a good survey of the ghost stories, movies, and novels published since the turn of the century.

Guran touts such novels as Michael Koryta's So Cold the River, Michael Marshall Smith's The Servants, Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black, Simone St. Clair's The Haunting of Maddy Clare, Peter Straub's In the Night Room, and Diane Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale.

Ghosts will always be with us, especially at this time of year.