‘Early in Lydia Davis’s story collection Varieties of Disturbance, we encounter a husband and wife who have subjected themselves to a “good-taste contest,” judged by a jury of their peers. In this single-page piece, we are shown how the contestants measure up in a variety of categories—lighting fixtures, window treatments, food—then told, simply, that the husband wins. The story’s surface is stunning and taut, but it also provokes the reader to consider what’s happening just beyond the contours of Davis’s well-sculpted prose. Why does the husband have better taste in garden furniture? Was the wife angry about the verdict? And who is telling this story?

‘This kind of writing—elliptical, clear-eyed, harboring concealed emotions—has been flooring readers since Davis’s first major collection, Break It Down (1986). She has a knack for capturing the peculiar rhythms of minds behaving badly. One character in Varieties of Disturbance turns the decision of what to cook a date for dinner—beef? beets? definitely not snails!—into an all-consuming fixation. Her narrators tend to split their perspectives relentlessly, turning even the most ordinary domestic experiences—walking the dog, family spats—into dense nuggets of irresolvable contradictions.

‘It’s inspiring to watch Davis map out knotty ruminations without devolving into tongue-tied panic. Her stories are also deeply funny, though not in a willful way. Eschewing one-liners, Davis creates humor by making distressing topics collide with matter-of-fact, vaguely fascinated tones. It’s as if her characters were rubbernecking while cruising past the pileups of their own obsessions.

‘While the short pieces in Varieties will seem familiar to Davis’s fans, the longer ones reveal she is still pushing her material into even more complicated territory. The standout “We Miss You” masquerades as a sociological analysis of get-well notes sent by 1950s fourth-graders to a convalescing classmate. As the study’s author carefully analyzes sentence structure, gender differences, and imagery, the narrative subtly shape-shifts into the OCD musings of a methodical wack-job. The more authoritative the author gets, the more the study seems to undermine itself. She notes that one student’s handwriting frequently drops beneath the lines, speculating: “This may indicate a desire for more stability on his part, a fear of imagination, or, on the contrary, an unusually firmly grounded personality.”

‘Varieties also finds Davis cranking up her trademark philosophical jolts. Quite possibly buzzed on Proust, Davis (who recently translated Swann’s Way) delivers some intricate meditations on the elasticity of time. One new mother explains how having an infant has forced her to become so organized and forward-thinking that “the future collapses into the present.” Another story takes on the task of seeing twenty sculptures in one hour: the narrator wonders, at first, if three minutes is enough time to devote to an artwork, then, after executing some acrobatic logic, argues that three minutes is a long time—so long, in fact, it’s hard to imagine twenty three-minute periods fitting into a single hour.

‘Abstract yet accessible moments like this point to what makes Davis’s work great. No topic that falls under her characters’ gaze sits still, because they can see through almost anything, even themselves. But that doesn’t make their fascinations—with subjectivity, conflict, the fallibility of scientific assessment—irrelevant. Rather, hard-to-pin-down topics demand zigzagging eloquence.’ — Michael Miller

 

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Further

Lydia Davis: Ten of My Recommendations for Good Writing Habits
Lydia Davis, Art of Fiction No. 227
Lydia Davis @ Twitter
Lydia Davis @ PennSound
The Writers’ Writer’s Writing
The Many Voices of Lydia Davis
Lydia Davis @ Bookworm
Twenty Questions with Lydia Davis
TMO meets Lydia Davis
‘Learning to Sing’, by Lydia Davis
Balance and Coherence
Analyze This
a woman of few words well chosen
When going too far is going just far enough
‘Forgetting Caen’, by Lydia Davis
‘New Things in My Life’, by Lydia Davis
Honor the Syntax
Lydia Davis: how to write the perfect sentence
Buy ‘Varieties of Disturbance’

 

____
Extras

Lydia Davis with Ben Marcus, Conversation, 16 May 2012

Lydia Davis Interview: Advice to the Young

Lydia Davis reads “Once a Very Stupid Man”

the caterpillar by lydia davis – shadow puppet show by tadeyeske/perry

 

____
Interview
from BRICK

 

Eleanor Wachtel: You were raised in a literary household. Both your parents were writers; your father taught English literature at Columbia University. What was it like growing up in that environment?

Lydia Davis: It made you very self-conscious. Both my parents started as fiction writers. My mother continued to write short stories. My father gave it up eventually and became a professor of English and a critic. But we couldn’t really say anything after a while—I mean, after a certain age; I imagine at three I didn’t mind—but at a certain age we couldn’t speak without being aware of how we were saying something, how it was being phrased, as well as what we were saying. So if we made a sort of clumsy repetition, one of them might very well point that out, sort of lightly with a smile, but it was a very language-saturated household. And my father loved etymologies—a love that I inherited from him too—so he would often go to the dictionary and say, “I wonder where that word came from” and find some fascinating origin, which was truly entertaining to a child.

Wachtel: Did the idea of having your language corrected have a repressive effect on your talking?

Davis: It did, and that continued right up to the end, you know, that I would be very aware—less so with my mother, who was a little more garrulous and so was sort of waiting for a chance to start talking as soon as I was done, but my father would consider very carefully what I had said and that made me feel very insecure. I don’t know if this is a good example, but I remembered it just the other day. When he was in the nursing home—you know how you want to say the things that you don’t want to have forgotten to say . . . our family was not, as you can imagine, given to spontaneity—I said to him, “You’ve been a very good father.” I just wanted him to know that, and he said, “In what respects?” [laughter]

Wachtel: Did you also concern yourself with being potential material, because both your parents published stories in The New Yorker, for example?

Davis: No, and that’s nice. My father had stopped writing by then, and although my mother took a great deal from our domestic life, she didn’t take it very closely. I mean, she would take bits and pieces, interactions with a maid or with a teenager, but she didn’t take me exactly, so there was never that discomfort. I did it a bit with my sons but very sparingly also. Although, my younger son loves the one story that he is most clearly represented in, and he loves me to read it in public, so it’s a kind of attention in a way.

Wachtel: I read somewhere that you started reading Beckett when you were about thirteen. What did you like about his work?

Davis: Well, the house was full of books, so I was always taking a book off the shelf and looking at it. It’s not that my parents were great Beckett fans, because they really weren’t. They came from an earlier kind of writing, more traditional. They found Beckett a little lacking and difficult. I guess I had been immersed in all the good children’s books, the really wonderful ones—Jane Eyre, of course, was a book that would appeal to a teenaged girl, and Dos Passos—I’m thinking of the books that had impacts at various points. Then I picked up Malone Dies, I think, and there was so little material and it was such a narrow focus, and such plain language and no attempt at lyricism or flowery language, that he would spend a page or two talking about how he dropped his pencil, and what kind of pencil it was. This just seemed utterly strange to me, and wonderful, just so simple and clear. I didn’t read the whole book. I have to say that that’s a habit that continued. I rarely read the whole of a book, especially a book that really interests me stylistically.

Wachtel: Really?

Davis: Yes, I mean, sometimes I go back and finish it, and sometimes I read it all the way through, but it’s somehow enough to read the first ten or twenty pages and be amazed by what’s going on. But I think in those cases I’m reading it for my own craft. I’m really a lot less interested in what happens in that kind of book and how it ends, even though I know that’s a whole other part of it. I’m just interested in how the writer is approaching the material and what he or she is doing with it.

Wachtel: Would you read whole novels otherwise?

Davis: Oh sure, sure. There are all different kinds of reading. There’s reading to completely forget where I am and what I’m doing, so those books I read all the way through without even wanting to stop.

Wachtel: When you were a child, your family spent a year in Austria, where you learned German. How do you think that affected your sensitivity to language?

Davis: People muse endlessly on their own psychological makeup and history, but the theories could be all wrong. My theory is that it did have a profound effect because I was seven years old and I had never encountered another language before. Actually, the very first foreign language I was surrounded by was French, because we stopped in Paris on the way to Austria, so it was actually in the Tuileries gardens that I first heard another language around me and asked my mother, “What’s going on? Why are they speaking this way . . . and still having fun?” But then they put me in the second grade of the Ursulinenklosterschule, a convent school, and German was spoken in the classroom, and as I remember the teacher herself had some English, but it was broken English; it was not fluent. Some of the children could speak a little English, but I more or less had to learn German, and after a month I was reading in it. And the rest of that year I existed pretty happily in German with my school friends. But even though it was 1954, the war still felt very close, and there were still wounded people in the street and a sort of depression hanging over the city. My mother was also very ill and had to go into the hospital there for—I don’t know whether it was days or weeks. But it was a difficult year emotionally, and that was all in the German language. I do relate it to becoming a translator because I think that experience of being in the classroom, being surrounded by a language I didn’t know and yet knowing it, meant something. Then having it become transparent and something I understood. I think I’m just repeating that over and over. It’s not that I don’t know French any more—I know it by now—but it’s still a strange language to me. It’s not home. So I keep bringing it into English.

Wachtel: Yet you didn’t become a translator from the German.

Davis: Well, if you want stage two of the psychological story, how a translator comes into being . . . I went from a comfortable small town, Northampton, Massachusetts, to the big city of New York when I was ten and was put into a big school and felt very lost there, but I had tutorial sessions with a French teacher to catch up with the other children who had been studying French since kindergarten. So I think—maybe again this is a construct—that in those comfortable little sessions with my French teacher, I made a little home, a comfortable place in a strange school in the strange city. And I loved the book that we learned out of. A few years ago I finally managed to find another copy of it; like Rosebud, my original French grammar textbook.

Wachtel: You were also passionate about music as a young person, but you didn’t continue with that. Why not?

Davis: I can’t tell whether that’s because it wasn’t in the family tradition—

Wachtel: It wasn’t the family business.

Davis: It wasn’t the family business. You know, we were all shoemakers, and a shoemaker I was going to be. My sister played the clarinet very well, so music was in the house, but my mother and father did not play. My father could play the piano, but he simply didn’t. So I think either that, or I realized at some point that I wasn’t as good at music as I was at writing. I’ve continued the music ever since, in one form or another, and sometimes it’s been more exciting and compelling. It’s often hard to stop playing music in order to go write, because writing is more difficult for me.

Wachtel: Were your parents encouraging that you be a writer?

Davis: They didn’t discourage it. They kind of left me alone, as far as I can remember, which is good. They didn’t put pressure on me to be a writer, but so many of their friends were writers, so much of what they talked about was writing, and I was good at it, and they helped me. If I read a poem to them that I was going to take into school, they would talk to me about rhymes and rhyme schemes and how it could be a little better, but in a nice way. I showed my mother a short story that I’d written that had a not-very-nice mother in it, in fact a very not-very-nice mother, and she was a little hurt by it because it was so close to home, and yet she was giving me all the suggestions she could about “this part more” and “a little less of that.” I think I found the note or something that she wrote on it. So there was a lot of encouragement but no pressure.

Wachtel: You said somewhere that you realized that being a writer wasn’t a happy fate.

Davis: It wasn’t a happy fate when I first started out, but it became happy, say, when I was working hard at it and copying sentences from favourite writers and trying to work on my own stories—some of them endlessly. One took two years of work before it seemed at all finished. That was difficult. There were always moments of elation in the middle of it, and happiness, but the whole thing wasn’t happy, and it wasn’t until a few years later when I just found happier forms that I began to really take pleasure in it.

 

___
Book

Lydia Davis VARIETIES OF DISTURBANCE
Picador

‘Lydia Davis has been called “one of the quiet giants in the world of American fiction” (Los Angeles Times), “an American virtuoso of the short story form” (Salon), an innovator who attempts “to remake the model of the modern short story” (The New York Times Book Review). Her admirers include Grace Paley, Jonathan Franzen, and Zadie Smith; as Time magazine observed, her stories are “moving . . . and somehow inevitable, as if she has written what we were all on the verge of thinking.”

‘In Varieties of Disturbance, her fourth collection, Davis extends her reach as never before in stories that take every form from sociological studies to concise poems. Her subjects include the five senses, fourth-graders, good taste, and tropical storms. She offers a reinterpretation of insomnia and re-creates the ordeals of Kafka in the kitchen. She questions the lengths to which one should go to save the life of a caterpillar, proposes a clear account of the sexual act, rides the bus, probes the limits of marital fidelity, and unlocks the secret to a long and happy life.

‘No two of these fictions are alike. And yet in each, Davis rearranges our view of the world by looking beyond our preconceptions to a bizarre truth, a source of delight and surprise.’ — Picador

 

Excerpts

A Man from Her Past

I think Mother is flirting with a man from her past who is not Father. I say to myself: Mother ought not to have improper relations with this man “Franz”! “Franz” is a European. I say she should not see this man improperly while Father is away! But I am confusing an old reality with a new reality: Father will not be returning home. He will be staying on at Vernon Hall. As for Mother, she is ninety-four years old. How can there be improper relations with a woman of ninety-four? Yet my confusion must be this: though her body is old, her capacity for betrayal is still young and fresh.

 

Dog and Me

An ant can look up at you, too, and even threaten you with its arms. Of course, my dog does not know I am human, he sees me as dog, though I do not leap up at a fence. I am a strong dog. But I do not leave my mouth hanging open when I walk along. Even on a hot day, I do not leave my tongue hanging out. But I bark at him: “No! No!”

 

Getting to Know Your Body

If your eyeballs move, this means that you’re thinking, or about to start thinking.

If you don’t want to be thinking at this particular moment, try to keep your eyeballs still.

 

Enlightened

I don’t know if I can remain friends with her. I’ve thought and thought about it—she’ll never know how much. I gave it one last try. I called her, after a year. But I didn’t like the way the conversation went. The problem is that she is not very enlightened. Or I should say she is not enlightened enough for me. She is nearly fifty years old and no more enlightened, as far as I can see, than when I first knew her twenty years ago, when we talked mainly about men. I did not mind how unenlightened she was then, maybe because I was not so enlightened myself. I believe I am more enlightened now, and certainly more enlightened than she is, although I know it’s not very enlightened to say that. But I want to say it, so I am willing to postpone being more enlightened myself so that I can still say a thing like that about a friend.

 

Passing Wind

She didn’t know if it was him or the dog. It wasn’t her. The dog was lying there on the living- room rug between them, she was on the sofa, and her visitor, rather tense, was sunk deep in a low armchair, and the smell, rather gentle, came into the air. She thought at first that it was him and she was surprised, because people don’t pass wind in company very often, or a t least not in a noticeable way. As they went on talking, she went on thinking it was him. She felt a little sorry for him, because she thought he was embarrassed and nervous to be with her and that was why he had passed wind. Then it occurred to her very suddenly that it might not have been him at all, it might have been the dog, and worse, if it had been the dog, he might think it had been her. It was true that the dog had stolen an entire loaf of bread that morning, and eaten it, and might now be passing wind, something he did not do otherwise. She wanted immediately to let him know, somehow, that at least it was not her. Of course there was a chance that he had not noticed, but he was smart and alert, and since she had noticed, he probably had, too, unless he was too nervous to have noticed. The problem was how to tell him. She could say something about the dog, to excuse it. But it might not have been the dog, it might have been him. She could not be direct and simply say, “Look, if you just farted, that’s all right; I just want to be clear that it wasn’t me.” She could say, “The dog ate a whole loaf of bread this morning, and I think he’s farting.” But if it was him, and not the dog, this would embarrass him. Although maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe he was already embarrassed, if it was him, and this would give him a way out of his embarrassment. But by now the smell was long gone. Maybe the dog would fart again, if it was the dog. That was the only thing she could think of –the dog would fart again, if it was the dog, and then she would simply apologize for the dog, whether or not it was the dog, and that would relieve him of his embarrassment, if it was him.

 

Nietszche

Oh, poor Dad. I’m sorry I made fun of you.

Now I’m spelling Nietszche wrong, too.

 

The Mother

The girl wrote a story. “But how much better it would be if you wrote a novel,” said her mother. The girl built a dollhouse. “But how much better if it were a real house,” her mother said. The girl made a small pillow for her father. “But wouldn’t a quilt be more practical,” said her mother. The girl dug a small hole in the garden. “But how much better if you dug a large hole,” said her mother. The girl dug a hole and went to sleep in it. “But how much better if you slept forever,” said her mother.

 

The Good Taste Contest

The husband and wife were competing in a Good Taste Contest judged by a jury of their peers, men and women of good taste, including a fabric designer, a rare-book dealer, a pastry cook, and a librarian. The wife was judged to have better taste in furniture, especially antique furniture. The husband was judged to have overall poor taste in lighting fixtures, tableware, and glassware. The wife was judged to have indifferent taste in window treatments, but the husband and wife both were judged to have good taste in floor coverings, bed linen, bath linen, large appliances, and small appliances. The husband was felt to have good taste in carpets, but only fair taste in upholstery fabrics. The husband was felt to have very good taste in both food and alcoholic beverages, while the wife had inconsistently good to poor taste in food. The husband had better taste in clothes than the wife though inconsistent taste in perfumes and colognes. While both husband and wife were judged to have no more than fair taste in garden design, they were judged to have good taste in number and variety of evergreens. The husband was felt to have excellent taste in roses but poor taste in bulbs. The wife was felt to have better taste in bulbs and generally good taste in shade plantings with the exception of hostas. The husband’s taste was felt to be good in garden furniture but only fair in ornamental planters. The wife’s taste was judged consistently poor in garden statuary. After a brief discussion, the judges gave the decision to the husband for his higher overall points score.

 

Collaboration with Fly

I put that word on the page, but he added the apostrophe.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Yeah, see, I don’t find any of those actors you like attractive, so we’re in different realms, I guess. Actually, I can’t think of any actors I’m attracted to. I think I’m more into real people or maybe non-actors and maybe a few porn stars, ha ha. I’m doing a Christophe Honore day this week, coincidentally. ** Misanthrope, Then Sypha was very brave to make that post. Yeah, here too, rain, rain and almost nothing but. Nice pit fire? Even parties sound appealing to me at this point. ** Sypha, Thank you! It was a big hit once again. And I’m glad my gif insertions weren’t intrusions. Very good news that your dog is turning out okay. Oh, man, sorry. I watched LG sing the National Anthem too, believe it or not. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. I’ve never met Viggo, but everyone says he’s great. I read a long interview with Tomato du Plenty over the weekend — the last one he gave before the died — and he made it clear that Tommy Gear is the one in charge of The Screamers stuff and is the reason so little has ever been released. So I’m guessing TG was talked into releasing the demos with the caveat that it be limited to vinyl as a way to make their stuff available but just barely or something. I don’t remember being scared by ‘The Twilight Zone’ as a kid but that show ‘The Outer Limits’ used freak me the fuck out. ** Scunnard, Hi, J. I’ve been pretty okay under the circumstances, you? No, no objection to you using the blurb. I’ll go find the kickstarter thing. Take care, man. ** ae, Hi, a. Thanks for sharing your scares. Um, no, I didn’t see that comment, hm. Sometimes comments come in while I’m doing the p.s., and I forget to refresh and miss them. I’d love a copy of the zine! Do you need my snail mail? If so, write at me email: denniscooper72@outlook.com. Thanks!! ** Jack Skelley, Hey, Jack! ‘A History of Violence’ is one of the Cronenbergs I haven’t seen. On it. Thanks, bud. How’s your week’s dawning? ** Dominik, Hi, D! Scared of the wind! That’s interesting, that’s cool. I can totally how that could be a really scary fear to have. In fact, I think if I start thinking too much about wind I’m going to be like you used to be. Oh, like an in-person escort writing workshop? Now that would be, err, interesting. Hmmmm. It’s funny: after I invented that love I ended up reading a review of RM’s sister’s book — which I’m imagining you’ve read? — wherein she supposedly makes a fairly plausible case that he’s living in a kibbutz in Israel. Your love is lucky. A freshly Bresson de-virginised love sounds nice. Love traveling back in time and erasing the idea of Mickey Mouse from the young Walt Disney’s imagination, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, B. Oh, you’re a dog fearing guy. I know a bunch of you guys. For me, it’s tarantulas. One chased a running, screaming me for about 10 minutes when I was 6 years old or something. ** Eoghan, Hello, Eoghan! Welcome, very nice to see you! Do you know where that fear of yours comes from? My hugest fear is outer space, like being in outer space, and especially the idea of being outside a capsule or rocket ship or whatever doing a ‘space walk’. I could literally die of a heart attack if I let myself think about that. But I have no idea where that came from. How and where are you? ** Bill, Hey. Oh, okay, I’ll check youtube. You never know. You’d be amazing (or not) how much stuff gets blocked over here. Finish your work? ** Steve Erickson, It seems me the problem with mainstream gay movies is that they’re inevitably psychological dramas with actors, gay or straight, acting their fucking heads off. Ugh. As someone living in a very cold city at the moment, I hereby will whatever magical powers I may have to your heater. ** G, Hi, G. Yikes, that childhood fear of yours is pretty fucking scary. Oh, right, I remember that story in ‘Ministry’. Wow, interesting. ‘The Worst’ is all true. It was originally a confessional talk I gave at a literary foundation here in France. There were more ‘worsts’, but I edited some of them out for the published version. xo. ** Brian O’Connell, Hi, Brian. Thanks for sharing all those scares. Scary. The only childhood fears I can remember, apart from being chased by a tarantula, came from expectable places like horror movies, yawn. I was mostly a kid who found being scared kind of interesting and exciting. I think I thought of my fears as potential premises for writing even then. My weekend … not a lot. Rain, cold. Worked on the script-fiction thing. I watched the new Errol Morris film, ‘My Psychedelic Love Story’. I love his work, and it’s not one of his masterpieces, but it was complicated and twisty/back-pedalling and fascinating like only his films can be. And emails and blah blah. Pretty quiet. How was yours or your Monday if you prefer? ** Okay. I realised the other day that I’ve never spotlit a Lydia Davis book, and that seemed weird given her work’s never-ending excellence, so I made the post you see before you today. See you tomorrow.

* (restored)

 

I think it is only human nature to look back on our childhoods as a time of idyllic happiness. But that’s a sentiment I’ve never quite understood. To quote from an unpublished short story of mine, “Nostalgizing on one’s childhood memories is like handling a rose: while it is pretty to the eyes and often smells divine, one must be ever wary of the thorns prickling such recollections. For behind the radiance of nostalgia is a shadow that can never be forgotten” (yes, “Nostalgizing” is a word). Even though my childhood was normal and very non-traumatic (some might even say boring), for whatever reason I recall being a very anxious and easily frightened child. I saw the world as a big and scary place, an impression that I’ve never been able to shake as I’ve grown older. Like most children, I had a number of fairly commonplace phobias, such as a fear of death, a fear of bees, a fear of throwing up, a fear of being possessed by the Devil (these, incidentally, are phobias I’ve never been able to conquer). But at the same time, there were other more specific things from my youth that gave me “the howling fantods” (to cop a phrase from the oeuvre of Mr. David Foster Wallace). Overheard stories, stuff I saw on TV or in movies or video games, certain illustrations in books or things that I read, and so on. I’d like to briefly examine a few of these, and maybe in the comments section today you can share with me a few of your own.

 

Stories

The Rainbow Homily

As many of you know, when I was a child I was raised as a Roman Catholic. So every Sunday I went to Mass with my family at 8:00 AM. The church we went to was Our Lady Queen of Martyrs Church in Woonsocket, Rhode Island (O.L.Q.M. for short). Even though this was not the church I was baptized at (as my parents had been members of a different parish at the time of my birth), it was at O.L.Q.M. that I attended Mass once a week until maybe I was 18 or 19 years old: by then I had a part-time job at the local Super Stop & Shop supermarket (located across the street from O.L.Q.M.) where I often had to work on Sunday mornings, thus letting me off the hook when it came to going to church. I guess I would have liked going to church there more if O.L.Q.M. was a nicer-looking building, but I always thought that it was kind of bland, architecturally speaking, especially when compared to the pictures of the old European cathedrals from the Middle Ages that I would look at in my history textbooks at school. It had like, no stained glass windows or anything like that. It almost felt more like a Protestant church or something. Or a church built post-Vatican II, though O.L.Q.M. was actually built in the late 1950’s, so really, it had no excuse.

Anyway, there was this one priest I liked, Father Barry Gamache was his name. He was the assistant pastor. He wasn’t like most of the other priests at O.L.Q.M. He was like an actual human being, someone who I could relate to. He was a fat, jovial fellow; heck, his cheeks were practically rosy. I don’t think that I ever saw him without a smile on his face. He had his little vices, of course, like all of us: he smoked all the time, and was somewhat obsessed with his golf game, though he freely admitted that he was terrible at golf. He was really popular with the rest of the parishioners. At the start of each of his homilies, he would warm the crowd up, so to speak, with a little joke. Sadly, I’ve forgotten most of the jokes he told, but here’s one that I still recall, after all these years: a guy goes into his kitchen, opens up the freezer door of his refrigerator, and he sees a Bugs Bunny-like rabbit sleeping in his freezer. When the guy asks the rabbit what he’s doing in the freezer, the rabbit answers, ‘I thought it said Westing House!’

As I said, Father Barry wasn’t like some of the other priests at O.L.Q.M. The other priests there were, for the most part, grim old fossils with no sense of humor. I remember one summer when one of those pastors was away on a religious retreat for a week, leaving Father Barry in charge of the parish. That Sunday, when Father Barry stepped out from behind the lectern to deliver his homily, he simply said, ‘When the cat’s away, the mouse will play. You guys get the week off.’ Or words to that effect. And that was it. It was easily the shortest sermon I’ve ever heard in my life, lasting not even ten seconds. Needless to say, the congregation loved that: they laughed and even applauded. And yet, the irony is, it was one of Father Barry’s homilies that scared me more than any other homily that I’ve ever heard in my life.

I forget exactly what year it was, or how old I was… I think I was still in middle school at the time, so I want to say probably 1991, when I was 11 or so. The homily in question consisted of a story Father Barry told us, no doubt as a means of explaining that week’s Gospel reading. I forget if this story was something he had read in a book, or if it was a dream he had had, or just something he made up: the fact that I’ve never been able to track down the story to its original source is something that has haunted me throughout my life. I forget the exact details, but this is what I remember about the story he told us that day:

One day, a rainbow appears in the sky, a rainbow that can be seen at any point on Earth. As people look up at the rainbow in shock, burning letters begin to appear across the rainbow itself. The letters form the following message: that all people’s sins will be unveiled, and that the world will end in seven days. And sure enough, everyone’s sins begin to manifest as words on their faces. By that I mean, say you were guilty of the sin of lust: then the word “LUST” would appear on your face. People all over the Earth panic. They try to wash the words off their faces, but the words remain, despite their best effort. At one point in the story, Father Barry mentioned a couple, a husband and wife I think, who decide to remain married, even when they can plainly see that they’ve been unfaithful to each other. Then on the seventh day the rainbow reappears and the world ends. That’s the gist of the homily, as best as I can recall it.

For years afterwards, I had a bad fear of rainbows. I would get very nervous every time it would rain, and whenever I was outside I tried my best not to look up at the sky, for fear of seeing a rainbow that had words on it announcing the advent of the end of the world (plus, the idea of my sins appearing on my face for all the world to see was also a big part of that worry). I know it sounds silly, and eventually I outgrew it (hell, in college, I joined the campus gay/straight/bi/trans/questioning student group, which was called RAINBOW). A few years ago I began studying the fear of rainbows, and found that it was an actual phobia: iridophobia (incidentally, another phobia I had growing up was fear of buttons, the clinical name for which is koumpounophobia. It’s more common than you would assume. Steve Jobs, for example, suffered the same fear, which is one of the reasons why the elevator in Apple’s Tokyo store has no floor buttons. In my case it was so chronic that, when I was growing up, I would refuse to wear any type of clothing that had buttons on them. Just the act of touching a button would leave me feeling physically ill. Of course, with some people the phobia is so severe that the sight of a button is enough to induce vomiting. I wasn’t that bad though. I still find large buttons to be very disgusting, however).

 

The Bloody Mary Urban Legend

The following story occurred when I was in middle school, probably the 7th grade. There was this one day at school where all the kids seemed to be talking about the Bloody Mary urban myth. The way they were describing it was, if you stood in front of a mirror in a darkened room and said the words “Bloody Mary” ten times while staring into the mirror, then the bloody disembodied head of a dead witch would appear in the mirror and, if you did not escape from the room or turn the light on fast enough, then she would chop your head off or something. As I said, many of my classmates were talking about this on that day, and some were even saying that they had tried it out themselves and that it was true, that she had appeared in the mirror.

Now, there are two kinds of people in this world: those who make up bullshit stories, and the superstitious, easily-fooled poor souls who believe such bullshit stories. As you can probably have guessed by now, I fall into the latter category. I even asked this one girl who said she had tried it out if she was telling the truth and she looked into my eyes and swore to God that it was true, that she wasn’t lying (I should have known better: this girl really had it out for me that year, for whatever reason: she looked exactly like Anne Frank but she was pure evil, and she took a special delight in tormenting me: once in Home Ec class our assignment was to bake pancakes and after we had baked the pancakes we ate what we had baked and this girl’s hands got all covered in maple syrup and at one point as I walked by her she grabbed my arm and she wiped her hand over my arm, as if it were a napkin, so as a result it got all sticky with maple syrup. It was a very embarrassing situation for me. But years later, I happened to find out that she had gotten knocked up, so, you know, like, karma, but I digress). Long story short, I fell for the urban legend hook, line and sinker, and by the end of that school day I was very shaken up.

I suppose I must have been pale when my parents picked me up from school, because they asked me what was wrong with me. So I told them about how all the kids were talking about Bloody Mary. My parents assured me that it was all a hoax, but I didn’t believe them. To prove it to me, they took me into the bathroom of the first floor of our house. They closed the door and turned off the lights. My dad began chanting “Bloody Mary” at the mirror while I stood at the door, my hand gripped on the knob, beads of sweat popping out on my forehead, and with each utterance of the words “Bloody Mary” my terror seemed to keep rising at a feverish pitch. Finally, with the tenth “Bloody Mary” being uttered, I screamed and ran out of the room, and in the hallway outside the bathroom I (somewhat humiliatingly) burst into tears. Naturally, Bloody Mary did not appear in the mirror. And yet, I developed a phobia that day, not so much of mirrors, but mirrors at night. Even now, to this day, whenever I’m passing by a darkened room at night with a mirror in it, I keep my head down so that I won’t accidentally look into the mirror. I remember in 2011, we had a hurricane hit New England, and we lost power for a day. That night, I had to take a shower in the bathroom, but because we had no lights I had to bring a flashlight in with me, so I could see what I was doing. On the front of the medicine cabinet above the sink is a mirror, the same mirror that my parents chanted “Bloody Mary” into all those years ago. So I covered it up with a towel!

 

Books

The Man With The Blue Face

When I was a kid, my dad was really into reading fantasy novels, by writers such as J.R.R. Tolkien and Stephen R. Donaldson and Terry Brooks and so forth. He would often describe the plots of these books to me in great detail: I remember how, in trying to read Lord of the Rings myself when I was in middle school, I had found that I had liked my father’s description of the book more than the book itself. But my dad also owned a lot of fantasy novels by lesser known writers as well. Pictured above is the illustration that graces the front and back cover of Robert Silverberg’s 1980 fantasy novel Lord Valentine’s Castle. On the book’s spine there was this creepy-looking man with blue skin who I would always refer to as “The Man With the Blue Face” (my dad would tell me the character’s real name, but I could never remember it). I’ve circled this character in the above JPG, and below is a (somewhat blurry) close-up; my apologies for the poor picture quality…

Anyway, this “Man With the Blue Face,” well, he terrified me, to the extent that my dad had to hide this book on his bookshelf behind another book. Although I don’t suffer nightmares much anymore, when I was a child I had many nightmares, and this Man With the Blue Face probably appeared in like 50% of them. This was one that occurred often: in the nightmare, I’d be lying in bed in my bedroom when I’d hear a voice call my name. Thinking it was my parents, I would go to the top of the stairs and look down. Every time, it would be the Man With the Blue Face standing at the bottom, waiting for me. I would find myself unable to run as he charged up the stairs. He’d grab my ankles and then yank me down the stairs. Then he would drag me along the hallways of the house until we came to the door that led to the basement (the basement of my parent’s old house was also the source of great childhood terror to me: the previous occupants of the house had painted sinister-looking people on the walls, and on one of the other walls there was a large black gaping hole that my parents told me never to stick my hand into: I used to fantasize that it led to Hell, or some alien parallel dimension). The Man With the Blue Face would swing open the basement door and start pulling me down the stairs. Then the basement door would slam shut and I would wake up, usually screaming for my mother.

 

The above illustration appears in The How and Why Wonder Book of Insects, which my parents had purchased for me at a Toys “Я” Us for $1.08. Written by Ronald N. Rood and illustrated by Cynthia and Alvin Koehler (and published by Price/Stern/Sloan Publishers, Inc. Los Angeles, 1983), it is basically a 48 page informational book about insects, with illustrations (some of which are in color, others in black and white). This drawing appears on page 28, which strikes me as ironic, seeing as I consider 28 to be one of my lucky numbers. At the bottom half of this page, as you can see, there is a black and white illustration of a startled-looking mouse that is surrounded on all sides by five honeybees, who seem to be readying themselves to sting the mouse to death. The text above the illustration says, “A warm beehive sometimes attracts mice and other animals. If a mouse finds the hive, it may eat some of the honey the bees have stored for food. It may build its nest in front of the entrance so that the bees cannot get out in the spring. Often the bees drive the mouse away with their stings. Sometimes they sting it so much that it dies. Then they have to leave the body there. But the bees often cover a dead mouse with their wax, sealing it up so that the air in the hive will stay fresh.” And beneath the illustration is this caption: “The mouse has a sweet tooth, especially for honey, but bees know how to defend their property from enemies.” Perhaps my fear of bees stems all the way back to seeing this picture at an early age?

In the JPG above are some panels from the comic book adaptation of Don Bluth’s classic 1982 film The Secret of NIMH, which was itself an adaptation of Robert C. O’Brien’s Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. I recall being quite fond of the movie when I was a child (in fact, I had had a crush on the animated version of Mrs. Brisby, who I thought was kind of hot). Anyway, this comic book adaptation was published by Golden Press in 1982, and though it was priced at $2.95 my parents had purchased it for $2.46 at Caldor. The illustration in this book that had scared me was on page 29, the portion of the book dealing with the rats and mice trying to escape from the NIMH research labs by fleeing through a ventilator system. At the top of this page in question there was a panel showing some of the rats crawling along a string that stretched like a tightrope at the top of the air shafts. The inside of this air shaft was red, with gaping black holes, making it look more like the interior arteries of the body of some horrific eldritch monster than the inside of an air shaft. I mean, at that point in my life, I had never seen the insides of an actual air shaft, but my gut feeling was that they didn’t look like that. Some of the rats are shown falling to their deaths as they got sucked down the air shafts, horrified expressions on their cartoony faces: at the top of the panel is a caption stating: “But all the mice except Jonathan and Mr. Ages were sucked to their doom down air shafts!” Incidentally, I would sometimes have nightmares in which I’d find myself getting sucked down similar air shafts.

 

The Johnny Dixon Mysteries of John Bellairs

“I write scary thrillers for kids because I have the imagination of a ten-year-old. I love haunted houses, ghosts, witches, mummies, incantations, secret rituals performed by the light of the waning moon, coffins, bones, cemeteries, and enchanted objects.”
-John Bellairs, Locus 1991

When I was young, I was a huge fan of the gothic novelist John Bellairs (January 17, 1938–March 8, 1991), who pretty much wrote books mainly for kids and teenagers, though he did a few adult novels as well (these adult novels of which I have not read). Not only were they my entryway to the world of Gothic/horror fiction, but also to the art of Edward Gorey, as his illustrations would usually grace the front cover, back cover, and frontispiece of the books of John Bellairs. When I was a kid, I was especially obsessed with his series of supernatural mystery/thriller novels featuring Johnny Dixon. His Johnny Dixon books take place in New England in the 1950’s, and concern Johnny Dixon, a lonely and quiet bespectacled boy who, though he likes nothing more in life than to read his books in peace and quiet, always finds himself being drawn into inexplicable adventures, often revolving around cursed objects, undead wizards, killer robots, time travel, and so forth. Usually accompanying him on these adventures are his best friend and classmate Fergie, his neighbor Prof. Childermass (an elderly man who is Johnny’s second best friend), and Father Higgins, the town priest. The titles of these books were quite evocative: there was The Curse of the Blue Figurine (1983), The Mummy, The Will and the Crypt (1983), The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull (1984), The Revenge of the Wizard’s Ghost (1985), The Eyes of the Killer Robot (1986), The Trolley to Yesterday (1989), The Chessmen of Doom (1989), and The Secret of the Underground Room (1990). Following Bellairs’ death in 1991, further Johnny Dixon mysteries were written by Brad Strickland, but I never read those. The first Dixon mystery I read was the third one in the series, The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull: I think I got it through my school’s Scholastic book club. I loved it so much that I began collecting the other ones in the series.

Having said that, I also found the books of John Bellairs to be very scary at times. Take The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull. In this novel, Johnny Dixon and Prof. Childermass visit an old inn in a little New Hampshire town. The owner of this inn just happens to have in his possession a clock that had been built years ago by Prof. Childermass’ father, a clock that is said to be haunted. In the bottom half of the clock there’s a small dollhouse room, decorated like the parlor of a Victorian house from the 1870’s. Inside this parlor are various objects, including a tiny skull and a doll of a man that’s supposed to represent Prof. Childermass’ granduncle, who was murdered by a sorcerer many years ago. That night, Johnny sleepwalks down to the inn’s basement, where he has a vision in which he sees the doll come to life, only to get smothered to death by a tall, gaunt shadow. That scene is creepy enough, but things get worse. When the Professor touches the skull, he unwittingly is cursed, and later on vanishes. When Johnny visits the house of his friend, he encounters this creepy scene (the fact that it involved a face in a mirror made it doubly nightmarish in my mind):

“Halfway to the window Johnny froze. He had seen something out of the corner of his eye, a sudden image in the small rectangular mirror that hung over the bureau. He turned and looked. In the mirror he saw the professor’s face, looking haggard and disheveled. His eyes pleaded and, as Johnny watched, his lips formed silent words. ‘Help me.’”

Another of the spookier Dixon mysteries is The Eyes of the Killer Robot. The plot for this one is pretty silly: it’s been years since I’ve read it, but I think the story revolved around this: the town that Johnny Dixon lived in was holding some kind of baseball contest where if you could strike out a major league batter, you’d win $10,000, and some evil inventor planned to win the contest by building a robot that resembled a man in a baseball uniform and using “an ancient magical formula” to bring it to life. The crux of the story was that the robot could only be brought to life when a pair of dead man’s eyes are placed within the robot’s head. The inventor had a grudge against Johnny’s grandfather, so to get back at him he plans on using Johnny’s eyes to bring the robot to life. As I said, pretty silly stuff. Still, there are some unsettling moments, such as this one, where Johnny spots a ghost lurking outside his bedroom window:

“But just as he was turning to pull down the bedspread, he froze. Out of the corner of his eye he had seen something.

There was a figure crouching on the porch roof outside his bedroom window.

An icy breath of fear blew across Johnny’s body. In a flash he knew that the creature was someone who shouldn’t be there, someone who couldn’t be there- it was a visitor from another world. Slowly, Johnny turned to face the thing. The flashlight’s beam cast a ghostly sheen on the window, and beyond the glass Johnny saw a fearfully thin shape shuffling forward on his knees. As Johnny watched, rigid with terror, the shadowy form groped at the window… and then Johnny blacked out, and he fell in a heap on the floor.”

By this point, one would think that Johnny should just stop looking at things he notices at the corner of his eye.

Here’s another of the spookier scenes:

“Not far from the back door of the house stood a bench covered with peeling white paint. It was a garden seat, the kind people used to make so they could sit outdoors on hot summer nights. The bench stood in a patch of wild rosebushes not far from the rugged wall of the mountain, which towered overhead. A man was sitting on the bench- a man Johnny had never seen before. He wore baggy, dusty overalls and a faded plaid shirt, and he had a big mop of straw-colored hair. The man sat hunched over with his face in his hands, and he seemed to be crying. Johnny stood dead still. The bunch of pieweed stalks fell from his numb fingers, and he took a couple of shuffling steps forward. And then, as Johnny watched, the man stood up. He took his hands away from his face and he stumbled. Johnny gasped in terror- the man had no eyes. Streaks of blood ran down from empty black sockets.

‘They took my eyes,’ the man moaned. ‘They took my eyes.’

Johnny opened and closed his mouth, and made little whimpering noises. He shut his eyes tight to block out this horrible vision, and when he opened them again a second later, the man was gone.”

Granted, that’s the kind of scene that, when I read it over now, makes me giggle, but when I was a kid, I thought that was pretty scary stuff.

More info on John Bellairs and his work can be found here:

http://www.bellairsia.com/

 

Songs

“Aqualung” by Jethro Tull

Growing up, I would often listen to the same music that my parents listened to. They mostly listened to progressive rock, bands like Yes and King Crimson and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. My dad liked Jethro Tull as well, especially their album Aqualung. I hated the song “Aqualung,” though. For some reason, I misheard the lyric “feeling like a dead duck—spitting out pieces of his broken luck” as “spitting out pieces of his broken lung,” the visual image of which so disgusted me that, upon hearing it on the radio of my parent’s car one day as we drove to some parade, I went into a state of almost borderline hysterics as I demanded they switch to a different station before that lyric came up, even though they insisted I had misheard the lyric. I also found the artwork that accompanied the Aqualung album to be quite creepy and disgusting as well. Bottom line, I hated Aqualung: the song, the album, even the fucking artwork.

 

TV shows

Mummenschanz on the Muppet Show (1976)

I don’t think I need to comment much on this one. Let’s just say that while I loved The Muppet Show when I was little, the Mummenschanz characters would often manifest in my nightmares. How the audience could be laughing at this surrealistic nightmare, I have no idea!

 

Movies

Luke’s vision in Empire Strikes Back

When I was a child, I was really obsessed with the Star Wars films (in fact, the first film I ever saw in theaters was Return of the Jedi, all the way back in 1983). I had all the toys and books and everything. However, there was one scene in the second film, where Luke Skywalker has a nightmarish vision involving himself battling Darth Vader, that always scared the hell out of me.

watch it here

 

Video/Computer Games

Alien (Commodore 64)

This old computer game, first released for the Commodore 64 in 1984, was, of course, based on the classic Ridley Scott film. The game was designed and programmed by Paul Clansey, who also did the awesome music heard playing at the title screen (this was back in the days when all it took was one person to crank out a video or computer game). It’s mostly a menu-based game that is surprisingly faithful to the film and, through the use of subtle sound effects, really captures the tension and paranoia of the movie in question. All the characters who appear in the film appear in the game, as does the ship where the main action takes place… All that’s missing is the face hugger and the bursting chest (one presumes this happens off-stage, right before the game begins). The graphics are kind of dull and basic and the interface is a little clunky, but all-in-all, I’d say they made a good effort. I played this game A LOT when I was a kid, even though it scared the hell out of me. One thing that interests me about the game was how, in place of a soundtrack, all the game consists of in terms of sound is a steady beating sound as the clock ticks down (which I guess also stands in for the character’s heartbeat) and an annoying metallic hiss every 7-8 seconds. Every now and then you’ll hear a metallic scrapping sound which indicates the Alien is moving around the ship’s duct system (or maybe moving into the next room). This heightens the game’s creepiness and paranoia. The main goal of the game, like the film, is to destroy the Alien. There are a few ways to do this. One, you can use weapons on him and try to beat him in hand to hand combat, though I’ve never been able to do this (the weapons, most of which include laser pistols, harpoon guns, and incinerators, are very hard to come by)… The most I’ve ever been able to do is wound him, and when that happens his acidic blood damages the room he’s in. I have no idea what happens it the acid damages too much of the ship, and frankly, I don’t want to know. Another option is to entice him to enter an airlock, then shoot him into outer space, but odds are against that he’ll fall for this. The easiest way (and I mean the word “easy” in its most ironic sense) is to capture the cat Jones, set the ship to auto self-destruct, then get at least three crew members into the “Narcissus” escape pod to win. But try as hard as I could, I was never able to beat this game. One thing that added to the paranoia factor is that you can never actually see the Alien on the game’s map until it attacks you: then the game jarringly switches to a screen of the Alien itself.

 

Ikari Warrios 2: Victory Road intro (NES)

Ikari Warriors 2: Victory Road is a shoot-‘em-up action video game released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in April of 1988. My family never actually owned this game, but we did rent it once, and for some reason my brothers and I found the game’s intro scene to be terrifying. First off, it’s kind of creepy (to say nothing of irritating) how the text slowly appears on the screen one letter at the time, and when you get to the grand appearance of Zada at the 2:51 mark (he looks a bit like a Satanic Yoda), well…

 

The Ending to Monster Party (NES)

Monster Party is a fairly obscure game released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1989, though over the years it has built up something of a cult following. It’s basically about a boy named Mark who meets a gargoyle-like creature named Bert. Bert is from the “Dark World,” and this home of his has been attacked by monsters. It’s essentially your basic platformer game, just with a somewhat quirky and macabre sense of humor (as some of the bosses you fight in the game are quite outlandish). But the ending is pretty, well… see for yourself:

 

The Town of Yomi in Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest (NES)

Towards the end of Castlevania II, right before you reach Dracula’s Castle, there’s a town you have to go through called Yomi. What makes this town different than the game’s other towns is that it’s completely abandoned, utterly devoid of life, save for one crazy old woman hiding in her house who, when you speak with her, simply says “Let’s Live Here Together.”

 

The Death Scenes of Uninvited (NES)

All I have to say to this is: AAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

Shadow’s Dream in Final Fantasy VI (SNES)

When I was in high school, my favorite video game of all-time was Final Fantasy VI for the Super NES, though back then, when it was first released in the West, it was known as Final Fantasy III. One of my younger brothers and I were so obsessed with the game that we each created a trilogy of novels based on it (this was around 1995 or so). Like most of these Japanese role playing games, your party can sleep at inns to replenish lost health. Usually when you sleep at an inn in the game, you’ll see your party each climb onto a bed. The screen goes black, you hear a nice little sound effect, then the game fades back into the view of the inn as the party gets out of bed and you can control them again.

That’s what’s supposed to happen, anyway. However, if one of the characters you can play as in the game, Shadow the Ninja, is in your party, and you go to sleep at an inn, there’s always a chance that one of 4 different dream scenes will appear, these dreams being flashbacks into Shadow’s life, before he became a ninja. What made this so scary to me at the time was that I didn’t know about this: the strategy guide I owned for the game made no mention of it. So when I saw his first dream for the first time, it came as a real shock to me: not helping matters is that in this first dream scene, an incredibly loud and abrasive droning/air-siren-like sound effect plays in the background, adding to the “jump out of your seat” effect. I can at least take solace in one thought: quite a few other people who played the game when it first came out freaked out at that first dream scene as well!

* * * *

 

To make this fairly short day of mine a bit longer, here are a few more recent things that have creeped me out over the last few months:

Squidward’s Suicide:
http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/Squidward’s_Suicide

 

Pokemon’s Lavender Town Syndrome:
http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/Lavender_Town_Syndrome

 

Yume Nikki: Uboa (shit gets real at the 7:39 mark):

Well, I think that’s enough horror for one day!

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. You’re in ‘It is not …’? I need to watch that again. Benjamin Britton is vastly preferable to James Taylor for me, yes. I’ve never found Viggo Mortensen to be physically attractive at all, and I’ve never been especially interested in his acting, and his poetry is well-meaning but so-so, but his decades-long strong support of Beyond Baroque makes me think he’s a cool guy. ** Bill, I didn’t realise he was still making films either until I made the post. Okay, you’re kind of selling me on those specific mermaids but … no others! I’ll see if that film is on one of my ‘illegal’ sites. Thanks! Excellent something great-filled weekend. ** Dominik, Hi! My brain cells are about half-working this morning, and I have no excuse unless the coffee I bought yesterday and am drinking now is accidentally decaf. Yeah, I get the feeling that just being admired for their prose would not be enough for most escorts. Sadly/ understandably. It’s the inability to travel until further notice that’s driving me the most crazy. And no cafes. Great, enjoy your imaginary wealth! Ha ha. I especially like that the paintings are miniature. Love strolling across Severn Bridge on the night of Feb. 7, 1995, noticing a forlorn looking young fella staring ominously into the water below and inviting him home for a nice cuppa tea, G. ** Misanthrope, My newness streak continues, yay! I thought that concept might give you the willies, and I apologise, although the willies can be instructive. Sounds like your health may very well be in the clear, tentative whew. Outdoors sounds smart. My outdoors is freezing cold and pounding rain, and I need to dash out and buy cigarettes, yuck. ** Steve Erickson, Only on vinyl?! That’s obnoxious. Maybe Tommy Gear is still trying to maintain The Screamers’ elusive thing, but that’s just counterproductive. Well, you’ve completely warded me off the Viggo Mortensen film, thank you. Yikes. No, no deadline on the script-cum-novella thing. I wish we had one, actually. I may have to pretend we do. Yes, Zac’s pretty much all better now. Just some headaches, he says. But he seems totally good. ** Brian O’Connell, Hi, Brian. von Praunheim’s films are all over the place. I prefer his kind of wacked out, super gay costume extravaganza ones to his more political ones, but that’s just me. Weirdly, the workers just stopped showing up a few days ago. Their equipment and ladders and stuff are still all over the floor, and the job isn’t finished, but … nothing. I hope they didn’t die. I feel like so far Biden seems to be doing what he should be doing. I’m still blissed that there hasn’t been even a tiny peep in the media that I’ve seen about the Ex and what he’s doing since he stepped on that plane. Man, so sorry to hear about your very down day. We seem to be at a point where everyone, or everyone I know, has hit the wall about the pandemic and the lockdown and stuff. Badly need a second wind. ‘Yi Yi’ … no, I don’t think I’ve seen it. I’ll find it. Sounds worth a view. I hope you get into the city. Mm, I had a couple of potentially fun plans for today, but they both fell apart, so I’m not sure what I’ll do. I really need to stop procrastinating about a couple of writing assignments I have, so hopefully I’ll do that. I’ll let you know if anything I did was shiny. Enjoy whatever the next couple of days puts in your path. ** Corey Heiferman, Hi. I hope your investigation of von Praunheim is a feeding type of situation. Thank you for the fill-in about the weedkend thing. I really should know that stuff. Religion gives off a bit of a stink for me. The first time I visited France in the mid-late 70s, all the stores closed from about noon to 3 pm every day, but that was just some kind of traditional French laziness or something. Guess I don’t think much about mythical creatures. I can’t think of any that actually bore me other than mermaids. It’s just a lack of excitement that seems to be a prerogative to finding, oh, dragons or giant cyclops or whatever else interesting to contemplate. Strange, I know. I should probably see a therapist or something. Why, do you have a thing of some heady sort for mythical beings? ** Okay. This weekend I have restored a post by the legendarily masterful DC’s guest-post maker Sypha aka author James Champagne. Perhaps you would like to respond by ponying up with some of your childhood fear inducers? That might be nice. But your response is completely your call, don’t get me wrong. Oh, and Sypha, apologies for inserting those two gifs in your Day, I just couldn’t seem to help myself. And with that I’ll see you on Monday.