One of the neatest aspects of a story is that it exists in the present. When you tell a friend about a story you very much enjoyed, one that pulled you in and kept you there, you say, “It is really good.” You use the present tense. The story is not over. It’s never over. As I write this, Sherlock Holmes and Watson are racing down the Thames, Margot Macomber is ending the short happy life of her husband, the good aldermen of Jefferson are staring at the single strand of iron gray hair on the bed in Miss Emily’s house, and Mme. Loisel is discovering she and her husband suffered years in poverty paying for a fake necklace.
The action is still happening—it occurred as you were reading it, it is happening as someone on the other side of the planet is reading it at this moment, it will take place for someone one hundred years from now. It’s like time travel, or the telepathy Stephen King writes about. He very purposefully described a rabbit in a cage with the numeral “8” on its back in Maine in 1997 and I visualize it today, August 21, 2010, in Indianapolis. And you saw it, too, just now, on whatever day it is for you, wherever you happen to be. How cool is that?
That brings us to the dual action of a story—there is what happens in the story to the characters and there is what happens inside us as we read it. I refer not to the internal emotions we feel—and that are often the author’s primary purpose in writing it—as the story moves along. I mean the action that takes place in our imaginations. Our neurons are firing like crazy as we create each scene in our minds. We are recreating what the author already built in his own head, yes, but we are creating every scene, too, with fresh energy and purpose every time we read a favorite story. And when we clue in a friend that “this is a good read,” she can pick up the story and enjoy the same experience we did—Holmes racing, Margot Macomber shooting, aldermen gaping, Mme. Loisel paying a huge price for her pride. It’s telepathy, it’s time travel. It is magic.
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Saturday, April 10, 2010
The Book of Tentacles Review
The Book of Tentacles (Sam’s Dot Publishing, 2010) is a delightful genre-crossing mix of bizarre and wonderful tales and poems. You’ll find Kraken and Cthulu, soul-sucking air monsters, creeping vines, vengeful octopi, sexy cephalopods, spineless lovers, fertile aliens, and hungry denizens of land, sea, air—and underground. They are horrific and wondrous, beautiful and dangerous, monstrous and eerie.
In his introduction editor Scott Virtes writes, “We haven’t gone out of our way to make it weird or different or artsy. “Weird” just comes naturally to us.” And coeditor Edward Cox explains in his Outro, “Not only were we able to accept the choicest of cuts, but also search for diversity and ensure this anthology had the broadest range of possibilities imaginable.” The editors make good on all claims, and each entry is noteworthy.
Cthulu shows up—in court. Matthew Bey’s “Call of the Bailiff” is full of marvelous turns of phrase as the Old One battles CPS for custody of his offspring—never pretty, especially with a formless blob for a character witness. Also, Keyan Bowes delivers a lovely telling of the Kraken myth in “Blood Amber.”
Tentacled creatures inhabit the world beneath us, too. In “The Signal” by Aurelio Rico Lopez III, codebreakers discover Armageddon releases real monsters. In editor Virtes’s “P6 Is Burning” a young lady faces a car-eating monster in a parking garage on her way to a job interview—but it may end up being the hardest job she’ll ever love. A Scotsman protecting his land from trespassers in “A Ferrylouper at Stenness” accidentally summons a creature from the depths of the earth that “pushed his waking mind to the very chasm between reason and madness.” Author Christopher M. Cevasco’s skillful wrap-around makes one doubt his tale is fiction.
Heroes abound in this collection. A stepfather finds the courage to face a tentacled monster in the basement—and human ones in the kitchen—in Terry Hickman’s “Jar of Peaches.” A sarcastic scribe and his charge battle a castle-climbing Kraken in Steve Gobel’s entertaining “The Temple of Squoad.” Wounded warriors hunt an oasis-draining giant crab in “One Big Drinker” by Billy Wong. In “Cascade,” a poem by Cathy Buburuz, an astronaut rescues and beds an alien damsel—with horrible consequences. And in Laura J. Underwood’s “A Quiet Neighborhood,” a new resident finds an unlikely benefactor beneath her feet.
Camille Alexa traces the origins of the term in her poem “A Lady’s Quick Reference Note on the Tentacle,” a charming accounting of all things tentacled. Other poems explore the themes of hunger and love, sometimes combing the two. The caged monster in Marge Simon’s “Lab Assistant” appears starved but is only very clever. In Terrie Leigh Relf’s “What did she know of love?” a blind girl is betrothed to a tentacled creature, and in Joshua Gage’s “Drosera” a fatal beauty lures a survivor of an apocalypse to a secret garden.
Invertebrates can be lousy lovers, as revealed in Clinton Lawrence’s flash “Low Life” and Brian Rosenberger’s poem “Mister Octopus Hands.” Mark Lee Pearson’s story “Hideki and the Giant Squid” concerns a squid in a gourmand’s digestive tract demanding to be reunited with its mate. Creepy. In Tyree Campbell’s “Slightly Pudgy Writer Seeks Foreign Entanglement,” a flirty cephalopod takes up residence with a writer, but when he tires of the relationship, she claims, “You don’t love me because I’m an alien!” Enchanting fun from this veteran author.
“The incompletion that brought one back from the dead” motivates a murder victim decomposing on the ocean floor in James S. Dorr’s “In the Octopus’s Garden.” Dorr uses his narrator’s inexact memory to weave a beautiful tale. Another sea-dwelling monster seeks revenge on a very human one in Carl Hose’s intense “Dead Wait.” In Rob Brooks’s “Taking Root” a snide mechanic meets a creepy fate from a vengeful tattoo artist. A unique format adds powerful meaning to “The Little Sea Maid,” a poem of retribution from Kendall Evans and Stephen M. Wilson.
In “Sucker Punch” by Mark Onspaugh, a mollusk-fearing physicist attempts to eliminate the species at a critical point in earth’s evolution. Horrible energy-sucking air monsters surround us, reveal Robert J. Santa’s “Professor Hilliard’s Electric Lantern” and Jim Ehmann’s “To See.” All three stories are notably poignant.
“Azure Doom” by William Blake Vogel III describes the eerie domain of an “awakening monstrosity.” David C. Kopaska-Merkel’s scary “The Anemone Garden” follows a nosy marine biologist, and in Kali Black’s haunting “Ink and Shadows,” a Watervoice pursues Ashcan Mary through the streets of an old city.
The poems “Long & black in the middle of the night” by Sharon Bray and “The Mantle of Power” by Matt Betts are delightful, as are the “Weird Sketches” by editor Virtes.
I highly recommend this “down-home tentacle revival.”
Flo Stanton is a writer in landlocked Indianapolis whose work has appeared in The Indianapolis Star, lit mags Literally and Castle Rock, the crime periodical True Police, the anthology Traps from DarkHart, and a miscellany of other print and online publications. Find out more about Flo and her writer-photographer husband John at www.3amblue.com. She received a free electronic version of this book for review.
In his introduction editor Scott Virtes writes, “We haven’t gone out of our way to make it weird or different or artsy. “Weird” just comes naturally to us.” And coeditor Edward Cox explains in his Outro, “Not only were we able to accept the choicest of cuts, but also search for diversity and ensure this anthology had the broadest range of possibilities imaginable.” The editors make good on all claims, and each entry is noteworthy.
Cthulu shows up—in court. Matthew Bey’s “Call of the Bailiff” is full of marvelous turns of phrase as the Old One battles CPS for custody of his offspring—never pretty, especially with a formless blob for a character witness. Also, Keyan Bowes delivers a lovely telling of the Kraken myth in “Blood Amber.”
Tentacled creatures inhabit the world beneath us, too. In “The Signal” by Aurelio Rico Lopez III, codebreakers discover Armageddon releases real monsters. In editor Virtes’s “P6 Is Burning” a young lady faces a car-eating monster in a parking garage on her way to a job interview—but it may end up being the hardest job she’ll ever love. A Scotsman protecting his land from trespassers in “A Ferrylouper at Stenness” accidentally summons a creature from the depths of the earth that “pushed his waking mind to the very chasm between reason and madness.” Author Christopher M. Cevasco’s skillful wrap-around makes one doubt his tale is fiction.
Heroes abound in this collection. A stepfather finds the courage to face a tentacled monster in the basement—and human ones in the kitchen—in Terry Hickman’s “Jar of Peaches.” A sarcastic scribe and his charge battle a castle-climbing Kraken in Steve Gobel’s entertaining “The Temple of Squoad.” Wounded warriors hunt an oasis-draining giant crab in “One Big Drinker” by Billy Wong. In “Cascade,” a poem by Cathy Buburuz, an astronaut rescues and beds an alien damsel—with horrible consequences. And in Laura J. Underwood’s “A Quiet Neighborhood,” a new resident finds an unlikely benefactor beneath her feet.
Camille Alexa traces the origins of the term in her poem “A Lady’s Quick Reference Note on the Tentacle,” a charming accounting of all things tentacled. Other poems explore the themes of hunger and love, sometimes combing the two. The caged monster in Marge Simon’s “Lab Assistant” appears starved but is only very clever. In Terrie Leigh Relf’s “What did she know of love?” a blind girl is betrothed to a tentacled creature, and in Joshua Gage’s “Drosera” a fatal beauty lures a survivor of an apocalypse to a secret garden.
Invertebrates can be lousy lovers, as revealed in Clinton Lawrence’s flash “Low Life” and Brian Rosenberger’s poem “Mister Octopus Hands.” Mark Lee Pearson’s story “Hideki and the Giant Squid” concerns a squid in a gourmand’s digestive tract demanding to be reunited with its mate. Creepy. In Tyree Campbell’s “Slightly Pudgy Writer Seeks Foreign Entanglement,” a flirty cephalopod takes up residence with a writer, but when he tires of the relationship, she claims, “You don’t love me because I’m an alien!” Enchanting fun from this veteran author.
“The incompletion that brought one back from the dead” motivates a murder victim decomposing on the ocean floor in James S. Dorr’s “In the Octopus’s Garden.” Dorr uses his narrator’s inexact memory to weave a beautiful tale. Another sea-dwelling monster seeks revenge on a very human one in Carl Hose’s intense “Dead Wait.” In Rob Brooks’s “Taking Root” a snide mechanic meets a creepy fate from a vengeful tattoo artist. A unique format adds powerful meaning to “The Little Sea Maid,” a poem of retribution from Kendall Evans and Stephen M. Wilson.
In “Sucker Punch” by Mark Onspaugh, a mollusk-fearing physicist attempts to eliminate the species at a critical point in earth’s evolution. Horrible energy-sucking air monsters surround us, reveal Robert J. Santa’s “Professor Hilliard’s Electric Lantern” and Jim Ehmann’s “To See.” All three stories are notably poignant.
“Azure Doom” by William Blake Vogel III describes the eerie domain of an “awakening monstrosity.” David C. Kopaska-Merkel’s scary “The Anemone Garden” follows a nosy marine biologist, and in Kali Black’s haunting “Ink and Shadows,” a Watervoice pursues Ashcan Mary through the streets of an old city.
The poems “Long & black in the middle of the night” by Sharon Bray and “The Mantle of Power” by Matt Betts are delightful, as are the “Weird Sketches” by editor Virtes.
I highly recommend this “down-home tentacle revival.”
Flo Stanton is a writer in landlocked Indianapolis whose work has appeared in The Indianapolis Star, lit mags Literally and Castle Rock, the crime periodical True Police, the anthology Traps from DarkHart, and a miscellany of other print and online publications. Find out more about Flo and her writer-photographer husband John at www.3amblue.com. She received a free electronic version of this book for review.
Monday, March 15, 2010
Wild Books I Have Known
Years ago I ran a mainframe for a mail-order pharmacy. Users felt free to call me or come to my office (sometimes run to it) for help with any type of hardware or software problem, but not many came by just to chat. So I was pleased when Annie, a newlywed accounts receivable clerk, started visiting. She was a quick study—I asked her to demonstrate new software to the other users—smart, and personable. Annie was extremely fast on data-entry and we missed her when she went on maternity leave. She would make a good assistant, I thought.
When Annie returned from giving birth to an adorable little girl, our talks resumed. We talked about babies, store gossip, computers, movies. I mentioned I was reading Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers one day. Annie said, “I wouldn’t have a book in my house.”
I wasn’t sure I’d heard her correctly. “You have no books in your house?” I said.
“Nope. I hate to read. We have a television, though.”
I stammered my way through the rest of the conversation and sat stunned after she left. I was well aware that many people cannot read, do not read, or cannot stand to read. But it was incredible to me that someone of such obvious intelligence chose not to read.
All thoughts of making her my assistant disappeared. Managing the information technology of the store demanded a lot of reading—and writing. Would she refuse to read the manuals lining the walls of my office? How would she learn to program if studying flowcharts and software libraries made her cringe? Could she write a quick how-to?
Soon after, the store manager chose an assistant for me, and although I didn’t chat as often with Annie, my thoughts sometimes turned to the little girl growing up in a household without books. Would Annie or her husband break down and purchase Where the Wild Things Are? Would her daughter be lulled to sleep by Annie’s soft voice reading Goodnight Moon or by a laugh track on an insipid sit-com?
I thought of all the books I treasured as a child. Before I could read. I was fortunate to have parents who valued books and reading and read to me every night. I could not imagine going to sleep without a story. Mother Goose. Little Golden Books. Beatrix Potter. Babar. I memorized them and spoke the words along with my mother as she read. I corrected my father if he skipped any pages. The books I loved someone to read to me became the first books I learned to read. Knowing them by heart helped me turn the ink on the pages into the words I loved to hear.
Receiving a book for a birthday or Christmas was wonderful and I remember them all. On the Banks of Plum Creek started a Laura Ingalls Wilder collection. The Mysterious Island led to a love of Jules Verne. I treasured a volume of Aesop’s Fables with its breath-taking plates. Books by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Grimm and Andersen. Even Johanna Spyri.
My parents kept books they received when they were children, lovingly inscribed from parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. Thus I read early editions of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom and Lad: A Dog. A Wonder-Book and Tanglewood Tales and Wild Animals I Have Known. After five children they had accumulated a respectable library of children’s books and references. I read and reread the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and Bobbsey Twins. Lands and Peoples, The Lincoln Library, and The Book of Knowledge were on our shelves, too.
Although the volumes are long gone to jumble sales, I can describe to this day their covers, the print on the page, how the books felt in my hands and how the pages felt as I turned them. Even how they smelled.
I lost touch with Annie after the store closed. I will presume her daughter grew to responsible adulthood, but if she never discovered the pleasure of reading, I can’t help thinking of the worlds she did not wander in the marvelous realm of her imagination, and the wonders of the real world she missed.
When Annie returned from giving birth to an adorable little girl, our talks resumed. We talked about babies, store gossip, computers, movies. I mentioned I was reading Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers one day. Annie said, “I wouldn’t have a book in my house.”
I wasn’t sure I’d heard her correctly. “You have no books in your house?” I said.
“Nope. I hate to read. We have a television, though.”
I stammered my way through the rest of the conversation and sat stunned after she left. I was well aware that many people cannot read, do not read, or cannot stand to read. But it was incredible to me that someone of such obvious intelligence chose not to read.
All thoughts of making her my assistant disappeared. Managing the information technology of the store demanded a lot of reading—and writing. Would she refuse to read the manuals lining the walls of my office? How would she learn to program if studying flowcharts and software libraries made her cringe? Could she write a quick how-to?
Soon after, the store manager chose an assistant for me, and although I didn’t chat as often with Annie, my thoughts sometimes turned to the little girl growing up in a household without books. Would Annie or her husband break down and purchase Where the Wild Things Are? Would her daughter be lulled to sleep by Annie’s soft voice reading Goodnight Moon or by a laugh track on an insipid sit-com?
I thought of all the books I treasured as a child. Before I could read. I was fortunate to have parents who valued books and reading and read to me every night. I could not imagine going to sleep without a story. Mother Goose. Little Golden Books. Beatrix Potter. Babar. I memorized them and spoke the words along with my mother as she read. I corrected my father if he skipped any pages. The books I loved someone to read to me became the first books I learned to read. Knowing them by heart helped me turn the ink on the pages into the words I loved to hear.
Receiving a book for a birthday or Christmas was wonderful and I remember them all. On the Banks of Plum Creek started a Laura Ingalls Wilder collection. The Mysterious Island led to a love of Jules Verne. I treasured a volume of Aesop’s Fables with its breath-taking plates. Books by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Grimm and Andersen. Even Johanna Spyri.
My parents kept books they received when they were children, lovingly inscribed from parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. Thus I read early editions of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom and Lad: A Dog. A Wonder-Book and Tanglewood Tales and Wild Animals I Have Known. After five children they had accumulated a respectable library of children’s books and references. I read and reread the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and Bobbsey Twins. Lands and Peoples, The Lincoln Library, and The Book of Knowledge were on our shelves, too.
Although the volumes are long gone to jumble sales, I can describe to this day their covers, the print on the page, how the books felt in my hands and how the pages felt as I turned them. Even how they smelled.
I lost touch with Annie after the store closed. I will presume her daughter grew to responsible adulthood, but if she never discovered the pleasure of reading, I can’t help thinking of the worlds she did not wander in the marvelous realm of her imagination, and the wonders of the real world she missed.
Saturday, January 23, 2010
A Walk In The Fog
Saturday night, two A.M.—a dense fog envelops our street. John steps out the front door and snaps time exposures of the swirling mist curling along the sidewalk and empty road. I think our trash bin at the curb is spoiling the shots and scurry out in my pajamas and slippers to move it. He continues taking pictures, including some of me pulling the trash bin up to the side of the house. Would I mind walking up the front lawn to the door and back down to the curb? How about strolling back and forth along the sidewalk a few times? A little bit faster. A little bit slower. A hundred shots later, he has what he wants—a ghostly figure, some thing, perhaps an alien being, out-of-synch with time and space, moving under a halo of light and mist from the corner streetlight set against the firm reality of tree, sidewalk, and roadway. Phenomenal.
The fog affects sounds, too. When John goes indoors to make his digital magic, I am the only ear-witness to an argument two streets over. A car door slamming down the block seems to come from our own driveway. Unsettling. The ambient noise of a party on the corner five houses away reaches me—soft music, laughter and cussing, the clinking and breaking of glass, the low murmur of conversation. The partiers are no louder than usual and would not be disturbing the calm of our quiet little street at all if not for the sound-bending properties of the fog. I cannot make out what the joke is that the girl with the velvet voice finds so funny, or why the man with the gravel in his throat abruptly shouts “Hey!” but because of the fog I share the warmth of her laughter, the surprise at his sudden outburst.
I notice more sounds because of the fog, too. The engineer of an early-morning train blasts through an intersection miles away and lays on the horn; usually we can’t hear this train here in suburbia, only when we’re at Eagle Creek stargazing. The displaced sound of a train through fog is different from the same sound skipped across the surface of the reservoir: the horn tonight is warmer, less melancholy. Planes from Stout Field start their nightly maneuvers, and their roar echoes closer to the ground this eerie morning.
I run into the house and grab coat, hat, gloves, and digital recorder and stand at the foot of our driveway hoping to catch all the sounds that normally stop much closer to their sources—the party down the street, the train miles away, the planes high overhead. John is also a “noisician,” manipulating audio layers as well as he does visual ones. His complex sound sculptures make fascinating listening, and I trust our professional-grade hand-held to capture some of the strange twists, turns, and curves of sound in fog. I am in luck—the sounds repeat for me, and I am an audience of one, a lone sentinel witnessing these ephemeral events.
The heightened audio awareness caused by the fog stimulates me as a writer. The noise-level of the party on the corner rises and falls in a natural rhythm and my imagination fills in words, plots, and relationships from the intonations I can’t completely decipher. Later the angry slam of the car door, the haunting loneliness of the late-train, even the perception-altering experience of listening in the fog itself will find their way into my stories.
At no time do I feel I’m in any danger, a woman in her pajamas standing by herself outdoors at two o’clock in the morning. The fog protects me from harm as well as discovery. I record for some forty-five minutes, and when the cold creeps into my toes I reluctantly leave my post for the warmth of indoors. With the fog swirling around me, morphing sight and sound into strange shapes and resonances, I am that blurry figure so eerily captured by the artist’s camera.
The fog affects sounds, too. When John goes indoors to make his digital magic, I am the only ear-witness to an argument two streets over. A car door slamming down the block seems to come from our own driveway. Unsettling. The ambient noise of a party on the corner five houses away reaches me—soft music, laughter and cussing, the clinking and breaking of glass, the low murmur of conversation. The partiers are no louder than usual and would not be disturbing the calm of our quiet little street at all if not for the sound-bending properties of the fog. I cannot make out what the joke is that the girl with the velvet voice finds so funny, or why the man with the gravel in his throat abruptly shouts “Hey!” but because of the fog I share the warmth of her laughter, the surprise at his sudden outburst.
I notice more sounds because of the fog, too. The engineer of an early-morning train blasts through an intersection miles away and lays on the horn; usually we can’t hear this train here in suburbia, only when we’re at Eagle Creek stargazing. The displaced sound of a train through fog is different from the same sound skipped across the surface of the reservoir: the horn tonight is warmer, less melancholy. Planes from Stout Field start their nightly maneuvers, and their roar echoes closer to the ground this eerie morning.
I run into the house and grab coat, hat, gloves, and digital recorder and stand at the foot of our driveway hoping to catch all the sounds that normally stop much closer to their sources—the party down the street, the train miles away, the planes high overhead. John is also a “noisician,” manipulating audio layers as well as he does visual ones. His complex sound sculptures make fascinating listening, and I trust our professional-grade hand-held to capture some of the strange twists, turns, and curves of sound in fog. I am in luck—the sounds repeat for me, and I am an audience of one, a lone sentinel witnessing these ephemeral events.
The heightened audio awareness caused by the fog stimulates me as a writer. The noise-level of the party on the corner rises and falls in a natural rhythm and my imagination fills in words, plots, and relationships from the intonations I can’t completely decipher. Later the angry slam of the car door, the haunting loneliness of the late-train, even the perception-altering experience of listening in the fog itself will find their way into my stories.
At no time do I feel I’m in any danger, a woman in her pajamas standing by herself outdoors at two o’clock in the morning. The fog protects me from harm as well as discovery. I record for some forty-five minutes, and when the cold creeps into my toes I reluctantly leave my post for the warmth of indoors. With the fog swirling around me, morphing sight and sound into strange shapes and resonances, I am that blurry figure so eerily captured by the artist’s camera.
Thursday, September 3, 2009
15 Movies That Stuck With Me
The Asphalt Jungle
Citizen Kane
Witness for the Prosecution
The Bad Seed
Dressed to Kill (1946)
Night of the Hunter
Psycho
The Heiress
To Kill a Mockingbird
Suddenly, Last Summer
Dr. Strangelove
Lawrence of Arabia
Jaws
The Long Hot Summer
Adam’s Rib
Everybody loves surveys. Lately Facebook friends have been asking each other, “What movies stick with you? You have 15 minutes to come up with your top 15.” My friends’ lists are astonishingly different. I had no idea “Heidi” was Bec’s favorite movie, or that Drake was a big Dustin Hoffman fan—he’s put “Midnight Cowboy” and “Kramer vs. Kramer” on his top 15. But then I found out that “Heidi” was not at the top of Bec’s love- it-seen-it-a-hundred-times list. She just can’t forget the scene where Klara gets out of her chair and walks. And Drake being a fan of Dustin Hoffman? Not really. “Midnight Cowboy” was the first truly adult movie he saw, and “Kramer” came out when he was fighting his ex for custody of their children.
A movie sticks with you for a variety of reasons. It could be that it is visually stunning, like “Lawrence of Arabia.” Or a character like Boo Radley (and Robert Duvall’s performance) in “To Kill a Mockingbird” just won’t let go. Or you shudder every time you think of the look on Olivia deHaviland’s face as she walks up the stairs in “The Heiress.”
I see patterns in my list. Two-thirds are mysteries, and most involve violent crime. At least 11 were based on books or plays. Twelve are in black and white. I saw 14 out of the 15 as a child. I have good taste—most won or were nominated for Academy Awards.
Of all the original and striking aspects of “Citizen Kane”—directing, innovative camera action, cutting, translating such huge stage and radio talent to the screen, rich development of complicated characters—my favorite is Welles’s narrative choice. The way he chose to tell the story of Charles Foster Kane—stories within stories--is so much more than a series of flashbacks. The only movie that comes close to it is “Memento.” A faceless reporter goes on a quest to discover the meaning of a rich and powerful man’s last words. It’s a mystery that the people closest to Kane and the reporter himself never figure out. But the filmmaker gives us the answer. When Welles reveals the secret to us we feel an enormous sense of satisfaction because not only is the mystery solved for us, it is a secret we share with the story-teller.
When I first saw “The Asphalt Jungle” I prayed that gut-shot Dix, played by Sterling Hayden, would make it home to the bluegrass fields of Kentucky and I was sick to my stomach when he didn’t. This was probably the first time I was rooting for a hero, someone I’d come to care about even if he was a criminal, who didn’t win. This was a new experience for me. Did I make a poor moral choice? Why was I attracted to this character? A lot of questions for an eight-year-old.
I cut my teeth on courtroom dramas with one of the best--“Witness for the Prosecution.” Her performance as Christine Vole is arguably Dietrich’s best. And there’s not just one twist at the end but two. Plus, who can forget Janet McKenzie on the witness stand?
Just about any Sherlock Holmes movie starring Basil Rathbone could be on my list. I chose “Dressed to Kill,” the one about music boxes, because I am fascinated by how music can be a clue to solving a mystery. Standard forensic tools—magnifying glasses, sniffing dogs, autopsies, microscopes--are irrelevant. It is Holmes the musician who observes the differences among the variations of the tune and in fact Watson who figures out their relevance. (And Holmes gives him credit.) Adding to the suspense is that a group of very smart and ruthless crooks—the murder of Watson’s old chum Stinky is unforgivable—is following the same clues.
“Night of the Hunter” is not only one of the most visually stunning films ever made, it features one of the creepiest characters ever imagined. The fact that a sociopath hiding behind the collar of a preacher could fool so many salt-of-the-earth people for so long scared the hell out of me. It still does. How can anything be amiss with someone who brings so many souls to Jesus? Movies like this are dangerous—they make you start questioning social institutions and wondering about the hypocrisy you see around you.
Rhoda in “The Bad Seed” was one of my first exposures to a sociopathic personality. More than one person in my family had been treated for neurosis, so the idea that there are genetic tendencies toward mental illness already worried me. Plus Rhoda was female. And a child. Could my parents see that movie and decide I wasn’t so bad in comparison?
The most startling feature of “Psycho” is not that the heroine meets a violent end early in the film, but that Hitchcock and Perkins make the killer so sympathetic. We are morally outraged by murder and want to see justice for Marion Crane, but we’re fascinated by Norman and want to understand him, and at least a small part of us wants him to succeed. We enjoy this internal conflict and seek it by watching the movie again and again. Plus, this film addresses a seldom-treated aspect of murder. The clean-up. Could we do as well, covering up for our own mothers?
“Dr. Strangelove” demonstrated the power of film to me. I was indoctrinated to believe that détente with the Ruskies was tantamount to worshipping Satan and that the U.S. was justified any time it dropped any bombs on anyone, and right here in the living room my parents were laughing at this movie. How did the filmmaker make these bomb-shelter-building ultra-conservatives forget their belief system and relish the humor of a horrifying scenario they swore could never happen?
“Suddenly, Last Summer,” fascinated me because I found myself able to understand the action from metaphor and implication. Williams deals with such taboo themes as the Oedipal complex, homosexuality, and cannibalism without overtly referring to any of them. This subtlety was thrilling for me as a teenager, intellectually and artistically. It was also stimulating that the action revolves around a character who has been dead for months and whose violent end is not only incomprehensible in its ferocity and unfairness, it can not possibly be avenged. Catherine’s reveal is a triple-whammy—it lets everyone know how Sebastian died, it saves her from the nut house and sends the one who wanted to put her there into it. Wow.
In the hands of another filmmaker “Jaws” would have been a good action movie, but Spielberg’s direction elevates it to classic status. The directorial choices he makes are spot-on. He communicates layers of story visually, the actors inhabit their roles effortlessly, and the action and dialog ring true. Add superlative editing by Verna Fields and the most appropriate score imaginable by John Williams, and you have a primer for any aspiring director on how to make a classic.
Movies allowed me to glimpse romances that were different from my parents’, and I paid particular attention when it was obvious on screen that two actors were in love in real life. The 50-year romance Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward began during the filming of “The Long Hot Summer” translated to the screen, and as I watched them spark and spar as Ben Quick and Clara Varner, I wondered, “Is this what falling in love is?”
Real-life partners Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn play husband and wife attorneys in “Adam’s Rib,” and their off-screen intimacy translates to the screen as well. In the play, written by real-life husband and wife Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon, the characters maintain their intellectual integrity, moral idealism, and the sanctity of their marriage while fighting on opposite sides of an ethical and legal issue. This was a very exciting version of the institution of marriage that I wasn’t certain would work in real life. I found out it is quite possible, going on forty years now.
I see deeper patterns here than the ones I stated up front. Yes, I have chosen movies that revolve around crime and murder, revenge and obsession, sociopathy and mental illness. Even the comedies feature major felonies. But the larger pattern is that all these movies are masterpieces of story-telling--the filmmakers chose exciting, novel ways to deliver the action. And as a story-teller, that’s what impresses and interests me the most.
Citizen Kane
Witness for the Prosecution
The Bad Seed
Dressed to Kill (1946)
Night of the Hunter
Psycho
The Heiress
To Kill a Mockingbird
Suddenly, Last Summer
Dr. Strangelove
Lawrence of Arabia
Jaws
The Long Hot Summer
Adam’s Rib
Everybody loves surveys. Lately Facebook friends have been asking each other, “What movies stick with you? You have 15 minutes to come up with your top 15.” My friends’ lists are astonishingly different. I had no idea “Heidi” was Bec’s favorite movie, or that Drake was a big Dustin Hoffman fan—he’s put “Midnight Cowboy” and “Kramer vs. Kramer” on his top 15. But then I found out that “Heidi” was not at the top of Bec’s love- it-seen-it-a-hundred-times list. She just can’t forget the scene where Klara gets out of her chair and walks. And Drake being a fan of Dustin Hoffman? Not really. “Midnight Cowboy” was the first truly adult movie he saw, and “Kramer” came out when he was fighting his ex for custody of their children.
A movie sticks with you for a variety of reasons. It could be that it is visually stunning, like “Lawrence of Arabia.” Or a character like Boo Radley (and Robert Duvall’s performance) in “To Kill a Mockingbird” just won’t let go. Or you shudder every time you think of the look on Olivia deHaviland’s face as she walks up the stairs in “The Heiress.”
I see patterns in my list. Two-thirds are mysteries, and most involve violent crime. At least 11 were based on books or plays. Twelve are in black and white. I saw 14 out of the 15 as a child. I have good taste—most won or were nominated for Academy Awards.
Of all the original and striking aspects of “Citizen Kane”—directing, innovative camera action, cutting, translating such huge stage and radio talent to the screen, rich development of complicated characters—my favorite is Welles’s narrative choice. The way he chose to tell the story of Charles Foster Kane—stories within stories--is so much more than a series of flashbacks. The only movie that comes close to it is “Memento.” A faceless reporter goes on a quest to discover the meaning of a rich and powerful man’s last words. It’s a mystery that the people closest to Kane and the reporter himself never figure out. But the filmmaker gives us the answer. When Welles reveals the secret to us we feel an enormous sense of satisfaction because not only is the mystery solved for us, it is a secret we share with the story-teller.
When I first saw “The Asphalt Jungle” I prayed that gut-shot Dix, played by Sterling Hayden, would make it home to the bluegrass fields of Kentucky and I was sick to my stomach when he didn’t. This was probably the first time I was rooting for a hero, someone I’d come to care about even if he was a criminal, who didn’t win. This was a new experience for me. Did I make a poor moral choice? Why was I attracted to this character? A lot of questions for an eight-year-old.
I cut my teeth on courtroom dramas with one of the best--“Witness for the Prosecution.” Her performance as Christine Vole is arguably Dietrich’s best. And there’s not just one twist at the end but two. Plus, who can forget Janet McKenzie on the witness stand?
Just about any Sherlock Holmes movie starring Basil Rathbone could be on my list. I chose “Dressed to Kill,” the one about music boxes, because I am fascinated by how music can be a clue to solving a mystery. Standard forensic tools—magnifying glasses, sniffing dogs, autopsies, microscopes--are irrelevant. It is Holmes the musician who observes the differences among the variations of the tune and in fact Watson who figures out their relevance. (And Holmes gives him credit.) Adding to the suspense is that a group of very smart and ruthless crooks—the murder of Watson’s old chum Stinky is unforgivable—is following the same clues.
“Night of the Hunter” is not only one of the most visually stunning films ever made, it features one of the creepiest characters ever imagined. The fact that a sociopath hiding behind the collar of a preacher could fool so many salt-of-the-earth people for so long scared the hell out of me. It still does. How can anything be amiss with someone who brings so many souls to Jesus? Movies like this are dangerous—they make you start questioning social institutions and wondering about the hypocrisy you see around you.
Rhoda in “The Bad Seed” was one of my first exposures to a sociopathic personality. More than one person in my family had been treated for neurosis, so the idea that there are genetic tendencies toward mental illness already worried me. Plus Rhoda was female. And a child. Could my parents see that movie and decide I wasn’t so bad in comparison?
The most startling feature of “Psycho” is not that the heroine meets a violent end early in the film, but that Hitchcock and Perkins make the killer so sympathetic. We are morally outraged by murder and want to see justice for Marion Crane, but we’re fascinated by Norman and want to understand him, and at least a small part of us wants him to succeed. We enjoy this internal conflict and seek it by watching the movie again and again. Plus, this film addresses a seldom-treated aspect of murder. The clean-up. Could we do as well, covering up for our own mothers?
“Dr. Strangelove” demonstrated the power of film to me. I was indoctrinated to believe that détente with the Ruskies was tantamount to worshipping Satan and that the U.S. was justified any time it dropped any bombs on anyone, and right here in the living room my parents were laughing at this movie. How did the filmmaker make these bomb-shelter-building ultra-conservatives forget their belief system and relish the humor of a horrifying scenario they swore could never happen?
“Suddenly, Last Summer,” fascinated me because I found myself able to understand the action from metaphor and implication. Williams deals with such taboo themes as the Oedipal complex, homosexuality, and cannibalism without overtly referring to any of them. This subtlety was thrilling for me as a teenager, intellectually and artistically. It was also stimulating that the action revolves around a character who has been dead for months and whose violent end is not only incomprehensible in its ferocity and unfairness, it can not possibly be avenged. Catherine’s reveal is a triple-whammy—it lets everyone know how Sebastian died, it saves her from the nut house and sends the one who wanted to put her there into it. Wow.
In the hands of another filmmaker “Jaws” would have been a good action movie, but Spielberg’s direction elevates it to classic status. The directorial choices he makes are spot-on. He communicates layers of story visually, the actors inhabit their roles effortlessly, and the action and dialog ring true. Add superlative editing by Verna Fields and the most appropriate score imaginable by John Williams, and you have a primer for any aspiring director on how to make a classic.
Movies allowed me to glimpse romances that were different from my parents’, and I paid particular attention when it was obvious on screen that two actors were in love in real life. The 50-year romance Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward began during the filming of “The Long Hot Summer” translated to the screen, and as I watched them spark and spar as Ben Quick and Clara Varner, I wondered, “Is this what falling in love is?”
Real-life partners Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn play husband and wife attorneys in “Adam’s Rib,” and their off-screen intimacy translates to the screen as well. In the play, written by real-life husband and wife Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon, the characters maintain their intellectual integrity, moral idealism, and the sanctity of their marriage while fighting on opposite sides of an ethical and legal issue. This was a very exciting version of the institution of marriage that I wasn’t certain would work in real life. I found out it is quite possible, going on forty years now.
I see deeper patterns here than the ones I stated up front. Yes, I have chosen movies that revolve around crime and murder, revenge and obsession, sociopathy and mental illness. Even the comedies feature major felonies. But the larger pattern is that all these movies are masterpieces of story-telling--the filmmakers chose exciting, novel ways to deliver the action. And as a story-teller, that’s what impresses and interests me the most.
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Timeless Advice from Strunk & Lucas
If you’re driving in Indianapolis on Guion Road, rubberneck to the west as you go under the 38th St. overpass and you won’t see this graffiti—it’s a digital composite. I didn’t really want to get shot defacing some banger’s logo. The spirit was willing even if the flesh was prudent.
I’ve always envisioned Professor Strunk standing before his English 8 class in a rumpled suit, tie askew, hair wild and woolly, pounding his fist on the podium as he hurls Rule Seventeen at his students.
Strunk’s advice is at the top of a poster on the wall in my office (next to the one of Henry Lee Lucas’s Rules for the Successful Serial Killer). Other words of wisdom follow:
Thomas Jefferson: “The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”
Dr. Johnson: “Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.”
William Faulkner and Scott Peterson apparently didn’t mean the same thing by “Kill your darlings.”
And that brings me to Henry Lee’s rules, the simplicity of which I think Strunk would approve:
1. Don’t kill anybody you know. (HLL eventually got caught when he ignored this cardinal rule.)
2. Don’t use the same M.O. twice.
3. Keep moving. Do your next one miles away, in a different jurisdiction.
4. Don’t use the same weapon twice. Dispose of it. You can always score another one.
5. Ditto for your vehicles.
Stay focused, keep it simple, keep writing!
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Touched by Murder
Most of us have been touched by murder. Even without a direct connection to a homicide—even if you don’t personally know a victim or a killer, or are not connected to the criminal justice system on either side--“six degrees”--and probably fewer—separate most people from a murder. How many degrees separate you from a victim of 9/11? A school shooting? A home invasion? A hit-and-run? A domestic disturbance gone bad?
John and I are not involved in criminal activity, we do not live a high-crime area, and none of our friends are murderers, yet we are directly or indirectly connected to a number of homicides.
My father-in-law, a policeman on IPD for twenty years, worked his share of murder cases as a patrolman and a detective. Also, as a rookie cop he was involved in the Elder Avenue shootout--a mental patient shot eight officers before police returned fire and hit him twenty-eight times.
My father, a physician, once worked as the Marion County deputy coroner. He kept a gun from a homicide case as a souvenir.
My brother-in-law, a lawyer for the Indiana Attorney General’s office, argued death penalty cases before the appellate court for many years.
An in-law’s father served on the Manson jury.
Two professional colleagues on opposite sides of the country were murdered in cold blood.
I took piano lessons a few doors away from where a yuppie lawyer murdered his wife and stuffed her in the ironing board closet.
A neighbor killed his ex-wife, her father, and a policeman, and wounded her mother and blinded another officer after a police stand-off at his ex-in-law’s home--which happened to be across the street from the house John lived in when he was young.
My parents knew many of the parishioners of the church of a minister and his wife who were axe-murdered after Christmas Eve services.
A house a few doors down from a home a realtor once showed us was later purchased by a man who killed his wife and baby and stuffed them in the freezer in the garage.
A policeman-colleague of my father-in-law was murdered; the case was never solved. He lived across the street from where we live now.
I covered a murder trial as a reporter.
A co-worker’s baby-sitter also watched the children murdered by serial killer Stephen Judy.
A dear friend’s mother was murdered by home invaders in Zimbabwe.
John and I were witnesses in a murder trial after we were almost victims ourselves—we escaped the killer by a clever twist of words.
Closest to home—literally--was the murder-suicide in the house next door. It happened twenty feet away from us as we slept in our bed.
Is it any wonder, then, that I write true crime and mystery stories?
John and I are not involved in criminal activity, we do not live a high-crime area, and none of our friends are murderers, yet we are directly or indirectly connected to a number of homicides.
My father-in-law, a policeman on IPD for twenty years, worked his share of murder cases as a patrolman and a detective. Also, as a rookie cop he was involved in the Elder Avenue shootout--a mental patient shot eight officers before police returned fire and hit him twenty-eight times.
My father, a physician, once worked as the Marion County deputy coroner. He kept a gun from a homicide case as a souvenir.
My brother-in-law, a lawyer for the Indiana Attorney General’s office, argued death penalty cases before the appellate court for many years.
An in-law’s father served on the Manson jury.
Two professional colleagues on opposite sides of the country were murdered in cold blood.
I took piano lessons a few doors away from where a yuppie lawyer murdered his wife and stuffed her in the ironing board closet.
A neighbor killed his ex-wife, her father, and a policeman, and wounded her mother and blinded another officer after a police stand-off at his ex-in-law’s home--which happened to be across the street from the house John lived in when he was young.
My parents knew many of the parishioners of the church of a minister and his wife who were axe-murdered after Christmas Eve services.
A house a few doors down from a home a realtor once showed us was later purchased by a man who killed his wife and baby and stuffed them in the freezer in the garage.
A policeman-colleague of my father-in-law was murdered; the case was never solved. He lived across the street from where we live now.
I covered a murder trial as a reporter.
A co-worker’s baby-sitter also watched the children murdered by serial killer Stephen Judy.
A dear friend’s mother was murdered by home invaders in Zimbabwe.
John and I were witnesses in a murder trial after we were almost victims ourselves—we escaped the killer by a clever twist of words.
Closest to home—literally--was the murder-suicide in the house next door. It happened twenty feet away from us as we slept in our bed.
Is it any wonder, then, that I write true crime and mystery stories?
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