Spotlight on … Steven Millhauser Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright (1972) *

* (restored)

‘Whether the point of this novel is to show us the adult that lies latent in the child or to reveal to us the child that the adult never manages to quite fully outgrow is a question that is difficult if not fruitless to answer. What is certain, however, is that the novel Edwin Mullhouse is brilliantly conceived. It is also shockingly well written, replete with uncannily accurate descriptions of childhood perceptions that can at times be overwhelmingly sympathetic. It is at turns funny, sad, insightful, and even profound; but above all else, it is deeply creepy: It reveals — almost imperceptibly at first, but then slowly, incrementally, the inertia builds, like a snowball rolling down the hill of your neighborhood cemetery — the dark, lurking, unconscious desires that shadow what we might otherwise simply take to be our bright, waking, thoughtful acts.

‘Originally published in 1972 by a then twenty-nine year old Steven Millhauser, Edwin Mullhouse is not the sort of novel that you would expect to be produced at that time by someone of that age. It is a novel out of synch with its time, but also ahead of it as well. It prefigures, albeit in a unique — and most likely inimitable — fashion, much of contemorary criticism’s obsession with positing the inseparability of act and artifact, and capturing creativity in mid stride. And by exposing a connection between adult obsessions and nostalgic recollections of childhood behaviors it provided and continues to provide a bounty of insight into contemporary adult psychology.

‘A single conceit enables this amazing feat: We are to believe that this book is the work of twelve year old Jeffrey Cartwright. During the course of this novel the perceptions, conceptions, recollections and general over-all mind-set of a young boy left fatherless by WW II are conveyed with all the skill and adeptness that only an experienced and highly practiced adult writer could possibly accomplish, yet we are to believe that it is the work of a sixth grader. And, implausible as it may sound, we do. While the language used in the writing of this book is clearly that of an adult, it somehow manages to seem– at the actual moments of its reading– that it is that of a child. How exactly Millhauser manages to pull this off it is extremely difficult if not impossible to know. Suffice it to say that Edwin Mullhouse constitutes a classic example of taking something which is in fact an arduous nerve-wracking task and making it seem as though it were mere child’s play.

‘The single most pronounced aspect of the prose that constitutes this work is the pyrotechnic language of its descriptive passages. In capturing the visual perceptions of children– or at least boys– it is simply unsurpassed.

‘It is at times hard to resist– during and after the reading of this work– the thought that Edwin Mullhouse is the secret font of a stream that has been irrigating and nourishing some distant and obscure fenced off field of popular culture about which we think we might have heard tell a tale or two but are never quite sure as to the veracity or accuracy of the reports. In the literature, film and– perhaps especially– the comics of the last few decades, we can’t help but notice faint hints of flavor, subtle aromas, and distant echoes which seem, now, after becoming familiar with it, to have somehow emanated from this work.

‘The inescapable conclusion one reaches after completing Edwin Mullhouse is that it has earned the right to be considered as a fixture in the firmament of 20th Century American literature. It may not shine as brightly as some others, but it is there nonetheless, its light traveling to us on a unique wavelength, neither replicated nor even approximated by any other.’ — The Copacetic Comics Company

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Further

Steven Millhauser @ The New Yorker
SM @ Harpers Magazine
Steven Millhauser @ Facebook
Steven Millhauser @ goodreads
‘Is Steven Millhauser America’s Best Short Story Writer?’
‘Eisenheim the Illusionist’, by SM
SM interviewed @ Transatlantica
‘The Fantastic Realist’
‘A Daydreamer in the Night: An Introduction to Steven Millhauser’
‘Understanding Steven Millhauser’
‘Steven Millhauser’s 6 favorite story collections’
‘The Fascination of the Miniature’
‘Steven Millhauser the Illusionist’
‘MATCHING STYLE AND THEME IN STEVEN MILLHAUSER’S “MIRACLE POLISH”’
‘What Can We Steal From Steven Millhauser’
‘Steven Millhauser’s stories of everyday wonder’
‘The Edge of Comprehension: On Steven Millhauser’
‘Recycling in Steven Millhauser’s Fiction’
‘A Master of the In-Between World’
Buy ‘Edwin Mulhouse’

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Extras

Steven Millhauser: 2012 National Book Festival

“Home Run” by Steven Millhauser – An Electric Literature Single Sentence Animation

Mary Caponegro and Steven Millhauser Read From Their Work

The Story Prize 2011 at The New School

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Interview
from BOMB

Jim Shepard: Perhaps as much as any American writer I can think of, you’ve been drawn to the novella. Are there aesthetic advantages and disadvantages peculiar to the form? Does it even have a form?

Steven Millhauser: Is it possible not to be drawn to the novella? Everything about it is immensely seductive. It demands the rigor of treatment associated with the short story, while at the same time it offers a liberating sense of expansiveness, of widening spaces. And it strikes me as having real advantages over its jealous rivals, the short story and the novel. The challenge and glory of the short story lie exactly there, in its shortness. But shortness encourages certain effects and not others. It encourages, for instance, the close-up view, the revelatory detail, the single significant moment. In the little world of the story, many kinds of desirable effect are inherently impossible—say, the gradual elaboration of a psychology, the demonstration of change over time. Think of the slowly unfolding drama of self-delusion and self-discovery in Death in Venice—a short story would have to proceed very differently. As for novels: in their dark hearts, don’t they long to be exhaustive? Novels are hungry, monstrous. Their apparent delicacy is deceptive—they want to devour the world.

The novella wants nothing to do with the immense, the encyclopedic, the all-conquering all-devouring prose epic, which strikes it as an army moving relentlessly across the land. Its desires are more intimate, more selective. And when it looks at the short story, to which it’s secretly akin, it says, with a certain cruelty, No, not for me this admirably exquisite, elegant, refined—perhaps overrefined?—delicately nuanced, perfect little world, whose perfection depends so much on artful exclusions. It says, Let me breathe! The attraction of the novella is that it lets the short story breathe. It invites the possibility of certain elaborations and complexities forbidden by a very short form, while at the same time it holds out the promise of formal perfection. It’s enough to make a writer dizzy with exhilaration.

JS: And how do such characteristics impact the novella’s form? Is it worth trying to talk about the peculiar nature of that form, or does that simply head us into the land of “There are as many forms as there are…,” etc.?

SM: The novella isn’t really a form at all. It’s a length, and a very rough length at that (sixty to a hundred pages? Seventy-five to a hundred and twenty-five pages?). In this it’s no different from the short story or the novel, which are frequently called “forms” but are in fact nothing but rough lengths. A true literary form exists only in the fixed poetic forms: the sonnet, the villanelle, the sestina, and so on. But having said that, I don’t mean to suggest that nothing more can be said about the novella. Length invites certain kinds of treatment rather than others. Just as a very short length is likely to concentrate on a very short span of time (say, a crucial afternoon), in a tightly restricted space, with a very small number of characters, and an extensive length is likely to cover a great stretch of time, in a wide variety of settings, with many characters, so the novella length seems to me peculiarly well suited to following the curve of an action over a carefully restricted period of time, but one wider than that suited to the short story, in a small number of sharply defined spaces, with two, three or perhaps four characters. To be more precise than that is to risk insisting on proper behavior. But the novella is much too alive to be asked to behave properly. Compared to the short story, it’s a length that hasn’t even begun to be explored.

JS: Part of the revelation of Edwin Mullhouse for many readers was its ability to render the intensity of attention involved in childhood perception: how certain objects, especially for children, become luminous, if not numinous. Does what you’re doing—when it’s going well—feel like aesthetic problem solving, or more exalted than that?

SM: Hmmm: aesthetic problem solving. That sounds like the sort of thing a sly critic might wish to say about a book he particularly dislikes. Of course, there’s no getting around it—one thing you relentlessly do when you write is solve aesthetic problems. But to leave it at that! No, when things are going well, the feeling I have is much more extravagant. It’s the feeling that I’m at the absolute center of things, instead of off to one side—the feeling that the entire universe is streaming in on me. It’s a feeling of strength, of terrifying health, of much-more-aliveness. It’s the kind of feeling that probably should never be talked about, as if one were confessing to a shameful deed.

JS: And is that a feeling that seems important in terms of understanding childhood?

SM: Yes, so long as it’s clear that, for me, childhood is above all a metaphor for a way of perceiving the world.

JS: In that we’re all, if we keep our eyes open, in the position of confronting barely apprehensible wonders?

SM: Exactly.

JS: Don Juan in “An Adventure of Don Juan,” the second novella in The King in the Tree, longs for “a madness of desire, a journey into feeling so intense that he would ride through himself like a conqueror of unknown inner countries.” Is that what fiction should enable?

SM: I’m fanatically reluctant to say that fiction ought to do one thing rather than another. I do know what I want from fiction. I want it to exhilarate me, to unbind my eyes, to murder and resurrect me, to harm me in some fruitful way. But that said, yes, the journey into intense feeling and the conquest of unknown emotional territory is something fiction can make possible.

JS: Your Don Juan also says of his host that “the irrepressible squire had a way of making you feel like a 12-year-old boy following an adventurous 14-year-old brother.” Is that also an ambition of your fiction?

SM: Fiction is an adventure or it’s nothing—nothing at all. What’s an adventure? An invitation to wonder and danger. If what I write doesn’t lead a reader into the woods, away from the main path, then it’s a failure. Somebody else wrote it. I disown it.

JS: Does that mean that your fiction is always in some ways a fiction of initiation?

SM: I would never myself put it in those words. That is, I would never say to myself: Now I am writing a story about initiation, or Now I have written a story about initiation. But if you define “initiation” to mean more or less what I mean by adventure and the wayward path, then it must be true that in some ways my fiction is a fiction of initiation.

JS: The narrator of “Revenge,” the first novella, in her opening paragraph compares houses where doors open right into living rooms to “being introduced to some man at a party who right away throws his arm around your shoulders,” and says she prefers instead “a little distance, thank you, a little formality.” Do you find yourself making aesthetic choices with the same sort of preferences in mind?

SM: Yes, I do. But words like “distance” and “formality” are easily misunderstood. To say I prefer distance isn’t to say I prefer coldness, haughtiness, lack of feeling, deadness. In my view, it’s precisely that “little distance” that permits genuine feeling to be expressed. My dislike of warm, cozy, chummy writing is that it always strikes me as fraudulent—a failure of feeling. Passion, beauty, intensity—everything I care about in art—is made possible through the discipline of distance. Or to say it another way: Powerful feeling in art takes place only through the particular kind of distance known as form.

JS: Many of your works play off literary antecedents in affectionate and complicated ways. Does that mean you’ll reread The Romance of the Rose or “The Cask of Amontillado” half thinking it might engender a story of your own? Or do you continually tell yourself you’re just reading?

SM: It may be that I’m deluding myself, but I never have the sense of looking for inspiration in my lustful, wildly irresponsible reading. What I’m looking for, I think, is pleasure so extreme that it ought to be forbidden by law. As for the engendering of stories: that, for me, is a mystery I don’t pretend to understand. I not only don’t know what gives me the idea for a story, I don’t even know whether it’s proper to say that what comes to me is something that might be described as an “idea.” It’s more like a feeling, vague at first, that becomes sharper over time and expresses itself after a while in images and then in oppositions that might develop into protodramas. A murky business, at best. But once a story starts taking shape in my mind, if that’s where it takes place—I think it takes place all over my body—then it’s fed by everything in my experience that can feed it. And part of my experience is a mile-high mass of books, which I sometimes draw on deliberately to create certain effects. I’m reluctant to talk directly about my work, for fear of harming it with deadly explanations that I’m bound to regret, but let me try just a little. When I wrote Edwin Mullhouse, I made use of a number of models, such as Leon Edel’s five-volume biography of Henry James, Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Mann’s Doctor Faustus. But to say that any of those books somehow engendered my own would be, I think, false. My book came from something deeper, more personal, more intimate, more ungraspable, more obscure than other people’s books, though at the same time it was pleased to make use of those books in order to become itself, in order to give birth to itself. Books as midwives—maybe that’s what I mean.

JS: Books as midwives makes sense. But when asking about how much your reading engendered in you, I didn’t so much mean ideas as feelings: so much of your fiction seems to come from deeply personal responses to already-created worlds, to previous stories: Tristan and Isolde’s, or Don Juan’s, to cite the most recent examples. Is that another way of maintaining what you called that discipline of distance?

SM: It’s true that I sometimes make deliberate use of existing stories, though it’s also true that I very often don’t. Insofar as I do, it is, yes, one way of maintaining a necessary distance, for the paradoxical sake of closeness. But I think something else is also at work. When I make use of an existing story, I take pleasure in participating in something beyond myself that is much greater than myself, and equal pleasure in striking a variation. I take pleasure, you might say, in acknowledging the past and then sharply departing from it. And there is something to be said for releasing oneself from the obligations of relentless novelty; a certain kind of insistent originality is nothing but the attempt of mediocrity to appear interesting to itself.

JS: Given your delight in wonders and your interest in the forbidden, does it surprise you that you haven’t taken an even greater interest in monsters? The Lernean Hydra shows up in Don Juan, for example, but it’s a special effect in a theme park.

SM: Legitimate, bona fide monsters do in fact make occasional appearances in my work, but what interests me is something quite different. What interests me—not exclusively, but in relation to the monstrous—is the place where the familiar begins to turn strange. When things cease to be themselves, when they begin to turn into something else, which has no name—that is a region I’m always drawn to. This, I think, accounts for my interest in night scenes, in childhood, in bands of prowling adolescent girls, in underground and attic places, in obsession, in heightened states of awareness. In this sense, it might easily be argued that the wondrous and the monstrous are very much the same. My plan for Mr. Juan was to estrange him from his familiar world of loveless conquest and lead him toward the terrifying world of genuine feeling.

JS: So is the stress on “terrifying” intended to crucially complicate the novella’s overall design as a moral fable? Or would you claim that it has only the shape and not the intent of a moral fable?

SM: If I hear a piece of writing described as a moral fable, my instinct is to head for the hills. I’ll never admit to having written one myself. But let’s say that, by some oversight on my part, a moral fable did slip out. In that case, then yes, the design is crucially complicated through the new discovery of feeling. Don Juan’s fate isn’t to be punished for sin, but to be led—or shall we say initiated?—into human feeling. To put it somewhat differently: In traditional Don Juan stories, the hero is punished by hellfire. Here, his fiery punishment is unrequited love. Meanwhile the underworld becomes, as you wittily put it, only a theme park.

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Book

Steven Millhauser Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright
Vintage

‘Edwin Mullhouse, a novelist at 10, is mysteriously dead at 11. As a memorial, Edwin’s bestfriend, Jeffrey Cartwright, decides that the life of this great American writer must be told. He follows Edwin’s development from his preverbal first noises through his love for comic books to the fulfillment of his literary genius in the remarkable novel, Cartoons.’ — Vintage

Excerpt

Behind the rich blue luminous curtain, rippling, the pale blue luminous letters ripple, mingling with bright blue luminous melodies jingling with jujubes, in the black-crow licorice dark. In light, caught, the letters, transfixed, stiffen. Brighter than licked lollipops, livelier than soda in sunlight, lovelier than sunshine on cellophane the colors shine: popsicle orange and lemon-ice white, cotton-candy pink and mint-jelly green, cherry-soda red and raspberry-jello red. Cellophane crackles in the green-and-red-tinted dark. Thick with purple shadows, a dim room appears. In the center stands a vertical ladder, from the top of which a narrow shaft of yellow light falls diagonally down, cutting across one end of a bed and illuminating two round white feet sticking up at the bottom of a blue blanket. A white rabbit, wearing one red nightcap on each tall ear, lies on his back, asleep. As he exhales, with a whistling sound, the blanket under his chin rolls down to his feet. As he inhales, with a snoring sound, the blanket over his feet rolls up to his chin. Over his head a dream appears: he is sawing a log in half. As the saw cuts through the log a piece falls out of the dream and hits him on the head. He sits up, rubbing his head. A red throbbing bump grows higher and higher, pushing up his hand, and then grows lower and disappears. The rabbit yawns and stretches and removes both nightcaps. Putting on a pair of large round black eyeglasses he walks over to a little stove and begins to fry an egg, flipping it up in the air and catching it in his pan. He changes hands, flips it up in the air, and holds out the pan waiting. The egg does not return. Sighing, the rabbit walks over to the ladder and begins to climb.He pokes his head out of his hole into a bright green clearing. In the near distance stand several thin black trees, each with three or four leaves. Beside the hole lies the fried egg. The rabbit picks it up and disappears into his hole. From behind one tree an orange snout with a black nose pops out, followed by a V-shaped frown. In long white eyes, little black pupils move to the left and right. The fox tiptoes quickly to another tree, no thicker than one of his eyebrows, and disappears entirely behind it. His foot peeps out and tiptoes across the grass, followed by his leg, which stretches to twice its length and stops behind another tree; the rest of the fox shoots across to the new tree in an orange blur and disappears behind it. His frowning head peeps out. He looks to the left and right. With hunched shoulders he tiptoes over to the hole. He is orange except for his white toes, his white fingers, and the broad white patch that stretches from the top of his chest to the bottom of his belly. Reaching behind his back, he brings forward a huge red firecracker. He lights the firecracker, pushes it upside down into the hole, and tiptoes a few paces away. With his back to the hole he squeezes his eyes shut and blocks his ears with his fingers. The rabbit flips his egg and holds out the pan. The egg does not return. Frowning. He looks up and sees the firecracker. The egg is speared on the sizzling wick. He climbs the ladder, removes the egg, and pushes the firecracker up out of the hole. The firecracker rolls along the grass and stops behind the fox, who stands with his fingers in his ears. After a while he opens his eyes, removes his fingers from his ears, and turns around. When he sees the sizzling firecracker at his feet his eyes spring out of head an the ends of springs. He dives headfirst onto the grass, landing with a crash and covering his head with his arms. The sizzling wick goes out. The fox looks up. He rises to his feet, walks to the firecracker, picks it up, and smiles. The firecracker explodes. When the smoke clears. The fox is still standing. He is entirely black, except for his white eyes and his white smile. The rabbit sits in a rocking chair by the stove, reading a newspaper. The frying pan is attached to one foot. As he rocks back the egg flips into the air. As he rocks forward the egg falls into the pan. The fox approaches the rabbit hole, pulling a rope attached to a shiny black cannon. He places a shiny black cannonball into the shiny black cannon, tips the front of the cannon into the hole, and lights a wick at the cannon’s back. He turns around, shuts his eyes, and blocks his ears. The front of the cannon swings up, followed by a fried egg, and turns all the way around until it is pointing at the fox. The fried egg goes back into the hole. The fox turns around, sees the cannon, and looks at the audience. The cannon goes off. When the smoke clears, the fox is standing with a hole in his stomach, through which a tree is visible. He reaches down and zips up the hole. Then he collapses onto the grass. A new scene begins on the left, traveling to the right and erasing the old scene. The fox enters pulling a rope tied to the top of a bending tree. He hammers a peg into the ground , ties the rope to a trigger attached to the peg, lays the rope in a circle near the hole, and places inside the circle a bright orange carrot that rests at the end of the trigger. The fox sits down against a nearby tree, crosses his legs, crosses his hands behind his head, closes his eyes, and begins to snore. Above his head a dream appears: he is seated at a table with a napkin tied under his chin and the rabbit bound hand and foot on a plate before him. The rabbit’s head pops out of the hole. He sniffs, adjusts his eyeglasses, and sees the carrot. He climbs out of the hole, steps into the rope-circle, and removes the carrot. Reaching into a pocket in his skin, he removes a leg of roast chicken and places it on the trigger. Crunching on the carrot he steps out of the circle and sees the fox asleep against a tree with a dream over his head. He walks over to the fox, unties the dream-rabbit, who runs away, and puts in its place a huge red firecracker. Then he goes back into his hole. The dream-fox bites into the firecracker, which explodes. The real fox wakes up. He spits out a mouthful of teeth.. In the circle of rope he sees the chicken leg. He walks over to the rim of the circle and frowns down, tapping his foot. As he stares, lines of odor twist from the chicken leg to his twitching black nose. He bends over, reaches toward the chicken leg, and suddenly straightens up. He looks at the audience and shakes his head slyly. Reaching into a pocket he removes a cane. Gently he prods the chicken leg until rolls from the trigger. He flinches, but nothing happens. Shrugging, he picks up the chicken leg. Thrusts it deep into his mouth, and removes a clean white bone. He licks his chops, rubs his belly, and tosses the bone away. It lands on the trigger. The fox’s hair stands on end but nothing happens. Frowning, he pokes the trigger with his cane. Nothing happens. He takes out a sledge hammer and slams the trigger. Nothing happens. He steps inside the rope and kicks the trigger. Nothing happens. As he wipes his forehead with a red handkerchief, a small blue bird flies overhead. A tiny blue feather flutters down. The fox watches the feather as it slowly falls, rocking back and forth, descending past his eyes, his neck, his stomach, his knees. It lands gently on the trigger. The rope yanks the fox into the air and out of sight, accompanied by the sound of a whistling rocket. A distant explosion rocks the forest. The fox enters on the left, leaning on a crutch. One leg is bound in a cast and white bandages cover his head. He sits down beside the rabbit hole and thinks. A lightbulb appears above his head. He reaches up and turns it off. Tearing off his bandages and throwing away the crutch, he removes from his pocket a hammer, nails, and pieces of wood. He begins building furiously, working up a cloud of dust that conceals him completely. When the dust clears a vast blue chute is visible. Beginning in front of the rabbit hole, it rises slowly toward the right on taller and taller posts, passing through the forest where small deer gaze up in wonder, passing over the treetops as an old owl frowns and scratches his head, passing beneath a rainbow into the sky, passing clouds and jagged mountaintops until at last it reaches a tall brown cliff on which a vast boulder rests atop a tiny pebble. Beside the boulder, reclining in a yellow and red lawn chair, wearing green sunglasses and sipping lemonade, is the fox. He picks up a straw, tears one end, and blows the paper wrapper at the boulder. The boulder tips onto the blue chute and starts to roll down. It rolls past clouds and jagged peaks, it frightens a buzzard, it flattens a passing airplane, it snaps apart the rainbow, it roars over treetops past the startled owl, and terrified deer take cover as it thunders past. The rabbit’s head pops out of the hole. Grasping the end of the chute, with a quick motion he bends it upward slightly. Then he ducks out of sight. The boulder follows the curve of the chute and sails into the air, hitting a distant treetop that catches it, bends backwards, and springs forward, flinging the boulder back. The fox is standing on the cliff with his head to one side and one hand cupped over an ear. He removes a watch from his pocket and frowns. As he turns his head to look down, the boulder slams into him, rolling over him and flattening him like dough. For a few moments the fox lies like a colorful shadow. Then one end peels up and he rolls into a tube. His eyes move back and forth in the tube. One leg emerges, one arm, a bushy tail. The fox stands up. Cracks appear in his body and he falls apart with a tinkling sound. The rabbit is lying on his back on the floor, doing sit-ups. He stands up and begins to do quick knee-bends. He lifts a dumbbell over his head. As he begins to skip rope, a sudden crash shakes his house. Frowning, he looks up. The fox, eyes bulging and teeth gnashing, is trapped in the hole at his waist. His arms are pinned to his sides. The rabbit breaks into a smile. Pushing over a small yellow stool, he puts on a pair of boxing gloves and begins to punch the fox’s head as the circle slowly closes.

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Agreed. I love early REM when Stipe mumbled and the lyrics sounded like they could be almost anything but increasingly less so when he started articulating like he actually knew something he wanted you to know. Eek, reggae, my least favorite musical form, but I’m sure love pulled that one off because, well, he’s love, he’s the big dude. You won’t be the first, your twisted change is normal, Gossan dirt, whispered to the nodding head, Thrilled you fell apart, instead of them, But they will, ‘cos any hope for love can be killed, If you need a different face, it’s definite time to destroy this place, G. ** Misanthrope, Or maybe one of those fake indoor ski slope joints. Do they have those there? I had a serious boyfriend who was a very bad heroin addict, as I think you know, and he, and surely David, will lie and fuck anyone over to get their dope if they have to, it’s a dead end, and all you can do is try to give them reasons to jump ship. ** _Black_Acrylic, Right, they were considered YBA, and they seem like they’re amongst the few veterans of that moment who aren’t still milking that. That book looks good, indeed. I love looking at books of photos taken back in the early heat of the rave days. Still very charismatic. ** Steve, Yeah, Cave is pretty big over here, or very respected and continually closely attended to at least. I don’t want to talk about the US nightmare here, despite my outburst yesterday, but, yes, good god and holy hell. I didn’t know that about Kane Pixels. How interesting. Yes, curious. ‘The Monkey’, okay, I’ll watch for it, thanks! ** Lucas, Hi. Hm, I remember thinking the ‘Wizard of Oz’ thematic under/overlay and metaphor was pushed way too hard in ‘WaH’ and that robbed the film of the eeriness that I like so much in most of Lynch’s stuff. But there are great sequences. Continued anti-smoking luck. I always dreamt about inadvertently smoking cigs in the years when I quit, when I could rarely remember my dreams anyway. Okay, twenty days to go. That sucks, but you can tough it out, you’re tough, tougher than you maybe know, pal. ** Jack Skelley, Ho! Lucky you. Mine is presumably scrunched in the dreadful French postal system somewhere. That reminds me that I need to tell Ruben that if wants a blog thing he better send me the post stuff soon. Enjoy paging. ** Steeqhen, Hi. Everything good eventually dies while being eaten by cheap copy maggots, I guess. Anyway, your wordage and guesswork re: Analog Horror made much sense. Analog horror will survive because true artists interested in making horror will always gravitate there the same way the truest filmmakers stick to affordable budgets. I love ‘Skinamarink’. It was my favorite film of the year it came out. It gave me a lot of hope. Thanks for the ‘Rodge and Podge’ link. I’ll watch it as soon as I get a 1 1/2 hours. Shouldn’t be too far ahead. I don’t want to talk about the US stuff anymore, at least for the moment, but yeah. If you want me to review your thing, I’m happy to. Do keep in mind that one of DH’s inaccuracies are his claims that Patti Smith had anything to do with what was going on at Beyond Baroque or with me and that she and I were friends because we never were. I’m not sure where he got all those mistaken ideas. Photo shoot sounds to have been invigorating. Is there a more boring actor in the world than Bradley Cooper? I wonder. Enjoyable, yes, taxing, no. xo. ** James, Once again you spoil the blog with your beady, discerning eyes and connected pen strokes. *bowing* (Not easy when you’re sitting at a desk. Well, it’s actually a table, not a desk). Give me the stench of weed over the clouds of beer-y burps. But I was a teenaged hippie. Ah, youth and how it gets wedded to its musical landscape. I have the new GbV on my hard drive and ready to compress into my earphones and spread joy throughout my biology this very morning. Listening to ‘New Day Rising’ would only be good for you. Plus I think it’s Husker Du’s highpoint. ** Chris Kelso, Haha, nah. The producers who made ‘Coraline’ and subsequent films optioned ‘God Jr’ for about ten years, and I was excited about that, actually, but it never happened. But ‘God Jr’ is being adapted into a graphic novel by an excellent French graphic novelist right now, and I’m excited about that. The pure hell of getting ‘Room Temperature’ to the finish line taught Zac and me a lot about what not to do next time, like not making a film that costs that much to make ever again, for one thing. But no. Making ‘PGL’ and ‘LCTG’ weren’t bad experiences, so, with the new film we’re writing, we’ll try to go back to making films that way if we can. The main worry is being able to have a roomy shooting time like we did with ‘RT’. We think there must a way. Because shooting ‘PGL’ in two weeks, which we had to do, was so difficult. Do you have any idea of how long you’ll have to shoot? I did know The Backrooms games, yeah. Nice. I knew Joel Lane. I blurbed his first novel. We were both Serpents Tail authors. Very interesting guy. So sad. You stay well as well! ** PL, The ‘Sluts’ cover is nothing. It’s like a gay greeting card. Yes, ‘The Sluts’ was originally published as a limited edition, illustrated book by Void Books. Cover. That version of the book looks beautiful. Great artists can be minimalists or maximalists. I don’t agree with Matt on that. ‘Emilia Perez’ seems dreadful, so I’m avoiding it. I’m curious about ‘Anora’, but I think I’ll dislike it. My pal Zac thought it was awful, and we tend to agree on films. But I hope they’re both super swell for your sake. ** Dan Carroll, Hi. Well, I’m, like, old, and I like analog horror but maybe it reminds me of cheaply made horror movies from my childhood or something. I love ‘Skinamarink.’ It’s a role model. Thanks for reading ‘MLT’. Hm, I haven’t reread it in a long time, and I don’t think I remember what movie scene I was writing about unless it’s from ‘River’s Edge’ maybe? Huh, I’ll go find a copy and try to figure that out. It was probably a real movie, yes. That makes sense: the crowd effect on your viewing experience. Do you like ‘Devil’s Rejects’? I like that Zombie movie too. But those are his only two films I like much at all, I think. ** Tyler Ookami, I did see ‘I Saw the TV Glow’, and I liked it pretty much, yes. I’m glad I waited until all the hype wasn’t present anymore. I don’t know ‘Y2K’, but I’ll search it out, thanks. It sounds like it bears enough fruit to be committed to. Oh, the 2010s, The Strokes, MGMT, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, etc., okay, that era. I get kind of blurry about what occurred when. Indie landfill is a good term. Rarefilmm I know, yeah, it’s terrific. I actually don’t know the other two, so thank you a lot! Bon day to you. ** HaRpEr, Nice, the instructional video. And ‘Pipergate’, whoa, I’ll get on that. They must be hiding somewhere. Thanks for the alert, pal. Fantastic about making a film for the class! That’s really exciting. Let me know how it goes, obviously. Fuck the lowkey sadistic lecturer. Being embarrassed in front of a class is a special kind of wounding. One time in high school this boy, straight-attempting but clearly closeted, sitting at the desk in front of mine had a little ripped hole in the seat of his jeans, and he saw me looking at it, and he loudly announced, ‘I bet you want to put your finger in there don’t you, Cooper?’ And everyone laughed. But I was in some strangely alert mood, so I said, ‘Not as much as you want me to put it in there, Scott’, and that got even huger laugh from the other students, and I think that was probably some massive traumatic moment in his life, and I felt bad afterwards, but not very bad. ** Florian S. Fauna, Hey! Thanks, Florian. Yes, you certainly have that I know of. Yes, I just got the book in the mail yesterday, and I haven’t started reading it yet, but it looks great. Exciting! I’m good, finishing our film and writing the next one mostly. All good. Good luck with your deadlines. ** nat, Hey, natttttt. That doesn’t work so well with ‘t’ ending name, sadly. Is that true about single authored things being more appealing than collaborative things? Hm, I can see that, I guess, thinking about it. I do recall that project of yours, yes. If that thing you’re making with your friend gets out sneak me a link or directive or something. Cool you’re reading ‘CODON’. Nice. That press, Calamari, is a great press, always does fascinating things. What are you picking up, writerly-wise, from The Bible. I’ve never read it, oops. If you have to be gifted with an ass, you could have done worse, for sure. It seems like a hit. Why wouldn’t it be? ** Charalampos, Thanks. There’s an ‘RT’ teaser trailer, and I think it’ll get released at the same time the premiere date/location is announced. ** Justin D, Hair is so reliable until it starts falling out. Then I guess the falling out part becomes the reliable aspect. I hate small talk. I can do it if I have to, but it works my nerves. I like to try to kill it by asking the person something deep and serious. But sometimes they secretly want to tell you all about their inner depths, and your question pulls the finger out of the hole in their dam, that can be even worse. My day … Zac and I finally had a big talk about the new film script and decided to make a big change in it, so that was exciting because that means now we’re heading into the meat of the thing and the finish line has begun to appear however distantly. Otherwise, just email and stuff. How was your … what is today … Friday? ** Uday, I don’t know, if academia is intimated by you, that’s a plus, isn’t it? I know little about academia, as I probably just proved. Thank you. Dude, it’s gif with hard ‘g’. Sorry, it just is, haha. I wear my clothes loose due to my fabric/dye allergy, but I’ll try tightening them a little and see what happens. Based on the looks of a lot of famous people who seem to accrue groupies, I think you have to be right. ** Right. Today I am reviving the spotlight that I had earlier aimed at one of my all-time very favorite novels, so of course I hope you see the spotlight’s beam as an enticing entrance. See you tomorrow.