Hey, Halloween isn't over until all the candy's gone. Pumpkins still grin out from porches. The October light still lingers.
I had a more difficult time identifying the costumes this year, not hip to all of the popular characters on television these days. An ordinarily attired lad walked up to the door and held his box out for candy. When asked, he said he was dressed up as a fisherman, his costume apparel consisting of a common fishing ball cap and the small fishing rod he was carrying. First time I'd heard of that one.
I blogged about the Red Riding Hood legend the other day, at this link, and I was delighted to see one couple playing the part better than any other I could find, even with a net search. Not only did Kris and Tracy help to brighten Halloween for us, but Oreo and Gremlin got into the spirit as well.
A lot of ghostly stories take place after Halloween, in November, including a number of detective novels about solving murders that happened on Halloween night. Then too, there are all those other holidays on this week's international calendar, especially those connected to the Gunpowder Plot, a la MacBeth.
One of the best of these is R. D. Wingfield's detective novel, Hard Frost. The murder takes place on Halloween and the novel spans the time from Halloween to Guy Fawkes day. Wingfield's quirky detective, Jack Frost, is not politically correct but he is magnificently funny going up against the Bureaucracy and trying to do the right thing in spite of it. He is flawed but endearingly so, a bit like Colombo of old.
Another good mystery set in November is Stephen Dobyns' Saratoga Haunting, which pushes genre just a bit and is one of the best of the series. Dobyns' straight-laced Charlie Bradshaw is balanced by the cynical, wise-cracking Victor Plotz, his assistant in this one and a central character in novels which came later.
Dobyns hasn't published a mystery novel in a long time, and I surely do miss reading about his characters.
I think the dustjacket illustration on the first edition is great too:
Listen to Stephen King, from Danse Macabre:
"Much of the sex in horror fiction is deeply involved in power tripping; it's sex based upon relationships where one partner is largely in control of the other; sex which almost inevitably leads to some bad end."
"I refer you, for instance, to Alien, where the two women are presented in perfectly nonsexist terms until the climax, where Sigourney Weaver must battle the terrible interstellar hitchhiker that has even managed to board her tiny space lifeboat. During this final battle, Ms. Weaver is dressed in bikini panties and a thin T-shirt, every inch the woman, and at this point interchangeable with any of Dracula's victims in the Hammer cycle of films in the sixties. The point seems to be, 'The girl was all right until she got undressed.'"
And in a footnote at the bottom of the page, King says:
"I thought that there was another extremely sexist interlude in Alien, one that disappoints on a plot level no matter how you feel about women's ability as compared to men's. The Sigourney Weaver character, who is presented as tough-minded and heroic up to that point, steps out of character at the scriptwriter's whim by going after the ship's cat. Enabling the males in the audience, of course, to relax, roll their eyes at each other, and say...'Isn't that just like a woman?'"
That was written circa 1980 and times have changed, of course, but it seems to me that he was stereotyping the men in the audience. I'm a man and I think I would have gone after the cat as well, and I don't think less of the character for doing so. But King raises some points worth discussing.
I recall enjoying that entire movie, especially the end segment, and the part where she stripped down to her panties heightened the tension, made her more vulnerable. Movies (and novels) do this all the time either in symbol or in narrative. Such scenes are appeals to the animal side of us, and our animal side is a part of the human condition--and hence a part of our Art. We can deny it and suppress it, but it is still there.
Sigourney Weaver's part is indelible because it is like the part of Sally Fields in Norma Rae. She is the individual against the monster, and that monster has its obvious twin in the Bureaucracy.
Like comic relief, such scenes seem to me worthy components of our literature, if accomplished either in metaphor or as non-melodramatic and essential parts of the plot.
The fact that she ultimately survives--she and symbolic cat alone--is a more significant signal of her abilities than the fact that she spent some time looking for the cat--which, to this member of the audience, suggested in a literary way that she was getting herself together, gathering up that part of herself that wanted to hide from the monster rather than face it.
Should we be embarrassed about nudity in art in general, or about enjoying that vision of Sigourney Weaver in her undies in this particular work of Art?
I don't think so. The driving force in the original Alien--and in such sequels as B. K. Evenson's novelization of Aliens: No Exit--is always the Individual's stance against Bureaucracy, humanity against the psychopaths. I wish some of them were better written, but I really admire their pillorying of corporate corruption on behalf of the existentialist, labor, and the powerless mass.
Speaking of beauty, I read Judy Collins' new memoir this week, and it is grand. A personal history of a musical great and her time.
The lady is frank about her sexual exploration when young. Always something of a liberated woman, she saw the nudity on her album cover as a positive thing then, and she sees it that way now. In a recent interview, the Denver Post asked her to name her greatest accomplishment. "Being with the same man for the last thirty-three years," she said. In her book she says that she has never cheated on him and has continued to love him entirely, eternally, always.
B. K. Evenson, by the way, knows something of the evils of bureaucracy first-hand. A Mormon himself, he was the author of The Open Curtain, which was critical of some of the Mormon Church's historical policies. He was also the author of some Cormac McCarthy crit-lit before his writing cost him his job at Brigham Young University. According to the notes of Aliens: No Exit, he then became the director of the Creative Writing Program at Brown University.
Well, for teenagers, Halloween weekend is an excuse to throw a party, usually rumored in advance to become what we used to call a make-out party, which meant what our parents called necking. I'm not sure what they would call it today, but whatever it is, it likely won't be nearly as innocent.
There used to be the occasional hayride too, the parties and hayrides always turning out to be better chaperoned than you had imagined. Still, a chance for fun and romance.
The Sunday morning comics today were full of Halloween. Hi & Lois found his old vampire costume. He put it on and imitated Dracula for his kid--who considered him lame, of course. Hi says to his wife, I thought kids today were into vampires. Lois says, not their father's vampires. The next scene shows a kid looking like the vampire hero in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga.
Also today, Dennis the Menace decides that kids in adorable costumes get more candy than those in scary costumes. There is truth in that assumption. And so now teenagers prefer the sexier bad boy costumes, and I suppose that too is only natural.
We listened to this week's Garrison Keillor Show today, which usually touches on Halloween during October. This show's highlight was a cover of Bob Dylan's "To Make You Feel My Love" sung by Stephanie Davis and GK himself. Lovely song the way they sing it.
If a couple were to appear at our door at Halloween today as a young Bob Dylan and Suze Rotolo, would anyone recognize them? Grandparents, maybe. Or great-grandparents. I read Judy Collins' new autobiography this week. Mighty fine it is, with much about Dylan and the other singers of that era.
This evening we watched Masterpiece Mystery's last adaptation of Kate Atkinson's quirky circling mysteries, the last and best part ending fittingly at Christmas time. The music throughout the three novel/movies was American country/folk in keeping with the musical preferences of her protagonist detective.
Thanks to the olderthanelvis blog for a rundown of the soundtrack, here:
The Case Histories Soundtrack:Case Histories, part 1
TRACKLIST - EPISODE 1
Iris DeMent — Let the Mystery Be
Mary Gauthier — Mercy Now
Nanci Griffith — Speed of the Sound of Loneliness
Lucinda Williams — Sweet Old World
Robert Plant & Alison Krauss — Your Long Journey Home
Case Histories, part 2
TRACKLIST - EPISODE 2
Iris DeMent — I'll Take My Sorrows Straight
Mary Gauthier — Mercy Now
Gillian Welch — Paper Wings
Iris DeMent — Trouble
One Good Turn, part 1
TRACKLIST - EPISODE 3
Lucinda Williams — Bus to Baton Rouge
Eliza Gilkyson — Calm Before The Storm
Public Enemy — Fight the Power
Gillian Welch — Paper Wings
Eliza Gilkyson — When You Walk On
One Good Turn, part 2
TRACKLIST - EPISODE 4
Kylie Minogue — 2 Hearts
Lucinda Williams — Blue
Eliza Gilkyson — Calm Before the Storm
Gillian Welch — Paperwings
When Will There Be Good News? part 1
EPISODE 5 - TRACKLIST
Zero 7 — Destiny
Lori McKenna — Drinkin' Problem
Doris Day — Let It Snow
Mary Gauthier — Mercy Now
Gillian Welch — Paper Wings
When Will There Be Good News? part 2
EPISODE 6 - TRACKLIST
Mary Gauthier — Mercy Now
Gillian Welch — Paper Wings
Kris Delmhorst — Since You Went Away
Joan as Police Woman — The Magic
The xx — Vcr
Macy Gray — Winter Wonderland
Atkinson's detective gets beat around more than any other detective in memory since James Rockford in The Rockford Files. And Rockford fans, don't miss J. Kingston Pierce's terrific new interview with James Garner, at this link.
___________________
The gang of black clouds
that had slipped into town under cover of darkness
now loitered on the horizon like unemployed ghosts,
impatient already for the night
when they could begin their Halloween pranks.
The lightning from the night before
now hangs upside down in the mountains
like a recharging bat,
waiting out the day in electric slumber.
Below, a scavenger wind runs the frosted fields,
ribbed and mangy and terribly lonesome
for its buddy the bat up there,
snoring sparks in the tree limbs..."
--Ken Kesey, Sometimes A Great Notion
In Stephen King's Danse Macabre, his 1981 history of the horror genre, there is a chapter entitled, "Tales of the Tarot." King says that through movies (and other popular media), "Americans have created their own tarot deck, and most of us are familiar with the cards."
As Walker Percy's protagonist in The Moviegoer might say, our knowledge of reality is filtered through the images of film. And some of our commonly held archetypes, King points out, have gone "book-into-film-into-myth," with a few of those becoming classics of the horror genre.
The werewolf on the moon card at the left is but one.
The three books of origin King cites and discusses at length in this chapter are Robert Lewis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Mary Shelly's Frankenstein.
Regarding Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, King says "What we're talking about here, at its most basic level, is the old conflict between the id and the superego." But that is also a simplification, for in mythic terms it can also be described as the "split between the Apollonian (the creature of intellect, morality, and nobility) and the Dionysian (god of partying and physical gratification)...."
Even more simply, it is the divide between the mind-dominated and the body-dominated, King says, but I would amend that to mark the real split between the spiritually conscious and the materially bound. King also sees the divide as between free will and determinism--and so do I. The possibilities belong to the enlightened, the grasping materialist is still snared in the coils of mortal compulsions, a slave to his unquenchable animal appetites and fate.
"Bram Stoker's Dracula," King says, "humanizes the outside evil concept...Stoker achieves the effect to a large degree by keeping the evil literally outside for most of his long story. The Count is onstage almost constantly during the first four chapters, dueling with Jonathan Harker, pressing him slowly to the wall."
"'Later there will be kisses for all of you,' Harker hears Dracula tell the three weird sisters...and then the Count disappears for most of the book's three-hundred or so remaining pages. It is one of English literature's most remarkable and engaging tricks, a trompe l' oeil that has rarely been matched."
Both Dracula's vampire and the werewolf are sexual aggressors. In Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Lon Chaney, Jr., mournfully remarks to Costello, "You don't understand. When the moon rises, I'll turn into a wolf." Costello replies, "Yeah...you and about five million other guys."
King devotes much space to the sexual lure of Stoker's Dracula, and indeed, considering the now fashionable and prolific vampire romances, his words seem prophetic. King quotes Stoker's Harker, as one of the three weird sisters bends over him:
"There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the sharp white teeth...There she paused, and I could hear the churning sound of her tongue...and could feel the hot breath on my neck....the soft, shivering touch of her lips on the super-sensitive skin of my throat...I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited--waited with beating heart."
King also gives high praise to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, one of my favorites too. I discussed it recently in relation to David Eagleman's Tales of the Afterlives and my Frankenstein listmania at Amazon is at this link.
Nicole Kidman looks good in her tomato red dress, and I like much of the Bewitched soundtrack. Some of it I've transferred to my own seasonal CD--some but not all. I know the Talking Heads' rocking "And She Was" was written about the Eternal Feminine (via LSD), but I don't think of it as October music.
Frank Sinatra's "Witchcraft" certainly belongs, and I've added his "That Old Black Magic" and "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered."
October has its own soundtrack. Newell Oler's CD Autumn Song, for instance, naturally gets played more in September than October. His "September Song" is strikingly beautiful, and he engages a medley of Neil Diamond's sad "Love On The Rocks" with a mellow "September Morn." After that comes "Canadian Sunset," "Try To Remember," his versions of "Hymne" and "Autumn Leaves," the most gentle background music for fall reading you can imagine. The man can play.
Many of our favorite songs and stories for October are eclectic, very meaningful for us but maybe not for others. With that in mind, I am going to recommend Chris Bohjalian's Water Witches. Bohjalian went on to fame as an Oprah pick and he now has his own Wikipedia page which lists his many accomplishments--however, it is this forgotten early novel, which gets hardly a mention there, that I most enjoy.
On its surface, Water Witches is one of those gentle witchcraft novels like Alice Hoffman's Practical Witchcraft, Joanne Harris' Chocolat, or the film Bell, Book, and Candle with Kim Novak and Pyewacket. There is a deeper symbolism underneath that most people seem to miss. I'll give my analysis of it here on Forgotten Book Friday.
Everyone seems to be reading Tomato Red after the success of Winter's Bone and the printing of a new paperback edition. Last week I read an interview with Reed Farrel Coleman in which he seemed to be particularly enthralled with that novel and with Daniel Woodrell's works in general. Ken, over at the Occult McCarthy blog, talks about Woodrell here.
I like both the old cover art and the new. I think the author meant the title Tomato Red to be a generic shade, a blood meridian or human commonality, running from red hair to tomato juice to heart tattoos to lips to whatever the reader's imagination might make of it. If you're interested in red as a metaphor, you might be interested in my passion-for-red list at Amazon, at this link.
Woodrell's style lives and breathes metaphor. The book is often described as a sad country song, as tragic poetry, or as loser lit. The tragedy here is that these characters are stuck in their mire and can find no way out. They cannot rise above their mindset because all they have to work with is their own minds. Like us, they are merely human with the capacity for grace and disgrace, humor and horror, and the reader's task is to rise above the superficial here to recognize our common humanity.
The protagonist tells us, "I think one of our cardinal fuckups is how we insist that even crazy whimsical shit has to add up, make sense, belong to a reason. We lay this pain on ourselves, there must be a reason behind this horror, there must, but I ain't adequate to findin' it, and that's my fault, so torture me some more."
When the protagonist, wary of the danger, first approaches the house to be burglarized, he says, "The mist felt like a tongue I kept walking into, and my skin and clothes seemed to be slobbered on. The world aped a harmless watch dog, puttin' big licks all over my face." Dogs will later be used as a leveling metaphor, symbolic throughout the novel.
The Shelf Awareness blog has an interesting interview with Woodrell at this link.
Back to this year's October soundtrack, I've now added selections from the soundtracks of Chocolat, Bell, Book, and Candle, The Dumas Club, Practical Magic, Ghost Story, The Witches of Eastwick, Death Becomes Her, and the CD Sax and Violence. No doubt I'll be adding more as the month continues.
"Guilt is like a witch's spell. Once cast it cannot be reasoned away." --Reed Farrel Coleman, Walking The Perfect Square
The truth of that aphorism buzzes around in my own head as I once again read Peter Straub's Ghost Story--in which the guilt is diffuse, contagious, absorbing, pervasive. Like the annoying deer flies that come right back to light on you no matter how many times you've brushed them off, no matter how many you've swatted dead.
That's no deer fly on the first edition dustjacker cover, but rather a wasp which the shape-changing personification of the guilt has morphed into, having previously been seen in the novel as different witch/women and then a lynx.
I prefer the art on the cover to the left, which shows the shape-shifting woman/lynx. When different men of the Chowder Society confront her and ask her who she is, she replies, "I am you," which means that she is that part of their minds which are respectively suppressed--mostly their collective guilt for a deed long buried in the past, but also at times their sexuality and the suppressed animal side of their nature--which is where the lynx comes in.
The movie abandons the lynx, as it abandons the other incarnations of the woman, to retain the one, Alma Mobley. I at first greatly preferred the book, but now the nuances of the movie blur into the novel and my interpretation can no longer do without either one of them.
Some critics said that it looked like John Houseman was the only one having any fun in the movie, but I think that this was by design. The macabre is everywhere twined with irony and dark humor. Actor Melvyn Douglas is discussed in the text of the 1979 novel, then he appears as a main character in the 1981 movie.
Two of the five members of the Chowder Club are named Hawthorne and James respectively, a tribute to Nathaniel Hawthorne and M. R. James. Nathaniel Hawthorne provides the book's first epigraph: "The chasm was merely one of the orifices of that pit of blackness that lies beneath us, everywhere." R. D. Jameson provides the second epigraph: "Ghosts are always hungry."
No blurbs adorn the rear dustjacket of the first edition. Instead there are the simple opening lines of the novel in a bold black font:
"What was the worst thing you've ever done?"
"I won't tell you that, but I'll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me...the most dreadful thing..."
I'm astonished by the number of people who say that they don't get this, even after reading all those later allusions to Narcissus in the novel. The speaker who answers has no empathy. His sense of responsibility is missing--either unevolved or suppressed by his self-aggrandising vanity.
But the members of the Chowder Society have reached the autumn of their lives, and their fear of death, long in denial and projected onto the other in their stories, suddenly becomes the mirror in which they can plainly see themselves. In turn, one by one, they are destroyed by their own fear of annihilation.
The entire cast of Ghost Story is excellent. Melvyn Douglas would only survive another year, dying in 1981. Fred Astaire, then eighty and only a year into his marriage to his young wife, Robyn Smith, lived well until 1987. John Houseman, two years younger than Astaire, died in 1988. Douglas Fairbanks, jr., died of a heart attack at age ninety in the year 2000. Patricia Neal (who played Astaire's wife) died in 2010.
The movie was also blessed with a great soundtrack, now an annual October feature at our house. Spooky, moody strings that seem to have a dark joy of their own. Composer Phillipe Sarde must be some kind of conjurer himself.
