• About
  • Cats Dig Hemingway
  • Guest Bookings
  • John King’s Publications
  • Literary Memes
  • Podcast Episode Guide
  • Store!
  • The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film
  • Videos
  • Writing Craft Discussions

The Drunken Odyssey

~ A Podcast About the Writing Life

The Drunken Odyssey

Monthly Archives: June 2014

In Boozo Veritas #48: What to Drink in Westeros

30 Monday Jun 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Drinking, In Boozo Veritas

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Dansk Mjød Viking Blod, Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin, Red Light Red Light, Shade of the Evening, Teege Braune, Waiting for New Season of Game of Thrones, What to Drink in Westeros

In Boozo Veritas #48 by Teege Braune

What to Drink in Westeros

It has now been two weeks since the Game of Thrones’ season four finale aired, and if you are anything like me, the long, drawn-out, nearly endless interval before season five has you jonesing for an Ice and Fire fix. Common symptoms of withdrawal from GoT include nervousness, phobia of weddings, the fear that friends and loved ones will die violently without warning, itching, and hallucinations of Peter Dinklage.

What is one to do to assuage the agony? Binge on something like Supernatural just to get that dose of fantasy? No, of course it doesn’t hold up against Game of Thrones. Diehard fans, those with the worst yen, already know what’s going to happen in the next couple seasons as they’ve no doubt read the entirety of George R. R. Martin’s groundbreaking Song of Ice and Fire series. Furthermore, those who have followed Martin for any extended period of time, must be used to waiting by now as a period of over five years went by between the publications of A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons, so what’s the big deal? Why the jittery, anxious impatience?

Untitled 1

Here’s the rub: even the most colorful imagination can’t always hold up against a cast of talented and often very attractive actors, lush sets and costumes, and a budget of millions of dollars. The TV series and the book series have a marvelous way of filling in each other’s gaps, and sometimes seeing how one’s favorite scene plays out is exciting as reading that scene in the first place.

If waiting is just that unbearable, there is one recourse left to you: have a drink, and then have another.

Anthropological evidence has recently suggested that alcohol is the oldest form of artificial patience in human history. Before folks were able to kill time with Facebook, iPhones, and HBO, they had booze. Additionally many of the characters in the technologically challenged land of Westeros combat their ennui with alcohol. In his books Martin mentions many different adult beverages enjoyed by his characters: ciders, dark beers and rich ales, and especially wines such as the highly regarded Arbor Gold and the strong, sour Dornish reds.

Untitled 5

The Inn at the Crossroads is the official food blog for The Song of Ice and Fire, and while they do an excellent job of recreating the exotic menus that Martin describes in his novels, their input on the booze is more limited. Much of the technology and culture found in Westeros is comparable to that of Europe in the late middle-ages, so one can imagine that the booze would be similarly linked. For example, the cider Brienne enjoys at the Inn at the Crossroads (the fictional one, not the blog) wouldn’t be the overly sweet, fizzy stuff we refer to as hard cider in the United States. A cider in Westeros would probably be very dry or tart with perhaps even a mineral quality such as Hogan’s Cider out of England. It would also likely be still or contain only a slight effervescence from the natural fermentation process.

Untitled 6

Before he was gored to death by a wild boar, King Robert Baratheon was unconventional in more ways than one. While the nobles of GoT usually only drink wine, Robert seemed equally at home indulging in beer, a beverage that was a staple among the commoners and clergy of medieval Europe as well. Truth is, Robert was apt to drink anything he got his hands on, and his love of the common folk was more amorous that it was paternal. If the ales Robert enjoys share their origins with the ales of the middle ages, they would have most likely be missing the hops, which characterize the bitter flavors of American IPAs and pale ales. Before hops became a popular ingredient, ales were more akin to what we call gruit today, an odd, malt-forward fermented beverage that utilizes herbs and spices in place of hops, not something that is particularly easy to come by these days. Pale, crisp lagers weren’t even invented until the nineteenth century, but then again, the same goes for stouts, and we’re told that these exist in Westeros, so perhaps the seven kingdoms have a more developed brewing history than did the people of medieval Europe, or perhaps the strong, dark beers that Robert enjoys are more akin to Gouden Carolus Cuvée van der Keizer, which means Grand Cru of the Emperor, a rich, Belgian ale that is brewed every year in honor of Charles V, certainly a beer fit for a king.

If you want to drink like a Lannister, the wealthiest family in Westeros, then wine will be your pleasure and your poison. Other than their surname, the one thing Cersei and Tyrion have in common is that both our seldom seen without a chalice of wine in their hand. Martin describes many kinds of wine in The Song of Ice and Fire: along with the Arbor Gold and Dornish red, he mentions iced wine; honeyed wine; warm, spiced, mulled wine; wines made from plums, apricots, persimmons, or blackberries; spicy pepper wine. One’s mouth waters imagining slurping down all these delightful, albeit fictitious, beverages. TV does a shoddy job of filling in the gaps in this context, and what’s more, examining the wines of medieval Europe isn’t much help either. Is there a historical antecedent for the Dornish sour? Sour flavors are usually avoided in fine wines, and yet this is a prized vintage in Westeros. I imagine it has more in common with Flemish reds, such as Rodenbach, which while actually beer, have a tart, decadent, semi-sweet flavor, perhaps an acquired taste, but one that is worth the initial shock.

Mead, on the other hand, a staple of hospitality in the northern regions of Westeros, is easier to get one’s mind around. That is assuming one has tried mead in the first place. Brewed from water, honey, and occasionally spiced with other ingredients like hibiscus, hops, or ginger, mead is the oldest fermented beverage in the world, and has evolved relatively little in the last few centuries. Only recently rediscovered outside of a few small circles, mead has enjoyed a surge of popularity in Orlando thanks to its availability at innovative bars such as Redlight Redlight, Li’l Indies, and Oblivion Taproom. After all, how could fantasy fans resist something with a name like Dansk Mjød Viking Blod.

Untitled 3

There are other more illicit beverages floating around the world of Game of Thrones as well. Maesters often give a drink called milk of the poppy as an anesthetic, and we can assume this would be similar to laudanum. The warlocks of Qarth drink a mysterious beverage called Shade of the Evening that stains their lips blue and supposedly enhances their magic. Perhaps one could dissolve a grape Jolly Rancher in a tea of psilocybin mushrooms to capture this effect, though I can’t legally recommend you actually do this. Nevertheless, one can only imagine that a decent enough portion  of this drink would be ample to propel the uneasy fan, dreading the upcoming Game of Thrones-less year, straight into George R. R. Martin’s universe, a place that I, for one, would much rather observe than actually live in, but I’m the voyeuristic type who’d rather gander at other people’s cosplay than actually participate in it. Maybe a tripped-out, hallucinated afternoon in Westeros would be just the thing to ease the agony of waiting.

___________

teegenteege

Teege Braune (episode 72, episode 75, episode 77, episode 90, episode 102) is a writer of literary fiction, horror, essays, and poetry. Recently he has discovered the joys of drinking responsibly. He may or may not be a werewolf.

Shakespearing #2: Henry VI, Part 1

29 Sunday Jun 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespeare, Shakespearing

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

David Foley, Henry VI Part 1, Shakespeare

Shakespearing #2 by David Foley

Henry VI, Part 1

Untitled 1

Let’s imagine that Shakespeare has been hanging around London theatre for a while, acting in productions but also using his “honey’d” way with words to tart up some old warhorses for this or that company, and finally someone persuades him to write, or he persuades them to let him write, his own play, something like the English history plays that have been such hits for other companies.

Or maybe he just arrives at the theatre one day with it already written. “Here, try this one out,” he says. “No, really.” Let’s assume, that is to say, that Shakespeare wrote Henry VI, Part 1 first, and all by himself. What can we notice? He begins by nodding to the stage itself. “Hung be the heavens with black,” which refers not only to the death of Henry V but, according to the note in Riverside, to the black bunting hung from the “heavens” or canopy of the stage to indicate a tragedy.

I don’t know how unique such meta-moments are to Shakespeare, but he does them a lot. There’s the “wooden O” speech at the top of Henry V, the “two-hours traffic of our stage” of Romeo and Juliet, the Christopher Sly framing device in Taming of the Shrew, and the various envois with which he ends plays, such as Puck’s at the end of Midsummer.

The line (Bedford’s) continues, “Comets, importing change of time and states,/Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky.” There’s that Shakespearean compression: the “crystal tresses” of the comet anneals metaphor to metaphor. There are also signs in the play of what Virginia Woolf called his tendency to “[follow] recklessly” “the trail of a chance word” so that “[f]rom the echo of one word is born another word.” Here is Joan of Arc: “Care is not cure but rather corrosive.” And William Lucy blames “[t]he fraud of England, not the force of France” for the defeat of Talbot. There are less felicitous lines, lines perhaps that an older Shakespeare might have blushed to re-read: “O, were my eyeballs into bullets turn’d,/That I in rage might shoot them at your faces!” says Lucy. All these lines give you a sense of the meter of the play: steady, unenjambed iambic pentameter. No prose.

As for staging, everything seems rather rambunctious, with people brawling and scaling walls and attacking and counter-attacking, and for all that the plot lacks a certain narrative momentum. But Shakespeare is already holding his plays together with iterations of the same pattern, in this case a series of squabbling rivalries that undermine the nation, leading, among other things, to the tragic deaths of the heroic Talbot and his son. Weirdly, in the scene in which the Talbots prepare to die together, the dialogue falls into thumping rhyming couplets and all verbal play drains from the language, perhaps a sign that these lines come from an earlier play or perhaps a sign that Shakespeare was uncomfortable with full-on heroics.

Joan of Arc

His oddest creation in 1 Henry VI is Joan of Arc or Joan de Pucelle, whom he portrays, according to the best English tradition of the time, as a crazy, conniving witch. But she’s also wily and funny and hence may be the first of Shakespeare’s double-edged women, women smarter and more powerful and fascinating than the men around them, whether they’re Rosalind or Juliet or Lady Macbeth or that most urbane of heroines, Beatrice, who can sling an epigram with the best of them, but can still cry, “O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market-place!”


 

David Foley

David Foley is a playwright and fiction writer living in Brooklyn. His plays include Cressida Among the Greeks, Paradise, Nance O’Neil, The Murders at Argos, A Hole in the Fence, and Sad Hotel, among others. His novel The Traveler’s Companion is available on Amazon. He teaches at New York University.

Episode 106: Nicole Callihan!

28 Saturday Jun 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Episode, Poetry

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

A Coney Island of the Mind, Carlton Melton, Dump Amazon, Jane Eyre, Maureen Vance, Nicole Callihan, Sock Monkey Press, Superloop, The Tequila Worms

Episode 106 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

On this week’s show, I talk to the poet and essayist Nicole Callihan,

Nicole Callihan

plus Maureen Vance writes about Jane Eyre.

Maureen Vance

TEXTS DISCUSSED

Superloop

jane eyre

NOTES

According to The Guardian, British publishers and the Society for Authors (a trade union for UK writers) are trying to push back against Amazon’s fierce demands for more power in the book industry. They liken Amazon’s terms to a form of “assisted suicide.”

According to The Times, Barnes and Noble will spin off its Nook division as a separate company from its traditional bookseller endeavors.

Carlton Melton’s “Spiderwebs” accompanies Maureen Vance’s “Jane and Me.” This song is available on the album Always Even.

Carlton Melton Always Even

The Tequila Worms have generously offered their album Cantina as a free download.


Episode 106 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

The Curator of Schlock #45: Zombie

27 Friday Jun 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Film, Horror, The Curator of Schlock

≈ Leave a comment

The Curator of Schlock #45 by Jeff Shuster

Don’t go to Zombie Island!

ZOMBIE

I guess it was only a matter of time before I got around to reviewing another zombie movie. What? Nightmare City wasn’t enough for you? Okay. How about a trip to an island of zombies from horror maestro Lucio Fulci? No? Tough. This isn’t a democracy. It’s a banana republic…full of zombies…that eat people.

1979’s Zombie starts out with a mysterious yacht drifting into New York Harbor. A couple of harbor patrol officers board the ship to investigate. One of the police officers declares that they stand to make a nice little bonus. If by nice little bonus he means a bloated, maggot-infested zombie tearing open his partner’s throat in the deck below, then I’d say he hit pay dirt. The bloated zombie climbs up to the  deck and said police officer keeps saying “Don’t move or I’m going to blast you!” He keeps repeating the words over and over hoping the zombie will just stick his hands up and have his rights read to him. Unfortunately, the zombie keeps stumbling towards him so the police officer has no choice but send a few shots into the zombie’s chest.  The zombie loses balance and falls over the side of the yacht.

The corpse of the police officer’s partner is sent over to the city morgue where two CSI types try to determine if lacerations or bites to the jugular were the cause of death. While they’re debating this point, we see the deceased officer’s hand move ever so slightly. I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about.

Meanwhile at a major metropolitan newspaper which may or may not be the New York Times, ace British reporter Peter West (Ian McCulloch) wants to get the scoop on the mysterious yacht. A woman by the name of Anne Bowles (Tisa Farrow) is also interested in the yacht seeing as how it belonged to her father.

Untitled 3

They both bump into each other on the yacht and discover a note from Anne’s father. Apparently, Anne’s father has caught a bout of a mysterious disease on the island of Matool.

Untitled 2

Meanwhile, on the island of Matool, Dr. David Menard (Richard Johnson) is trying to figure out why the dead are rising up and attacking the living. It might have something to do with all that voodoo chanting coming from the locals on the island. The doctor insists that there must be some rationale explanation for all the zombification going on.

Untitled 1His wife ridicules his research while downing Southern Comfort. She says he’s no better than one of the local witch doctors. Now that’s just plain rude!

Meanwhile, back in New York, Anne and Peter get tickets and fly over to the Virgin Islands. They need to charter a boat to Matool and, as luck would have it, a couple by the name of Bryan and Susan have a boat at the ready. They’re a little hesitant due to the fact that the island is cursed, but who believes in curses anyway? Susan decides to go scuba diving and runs into a killer zombie swimming around in the ocean depths. You’d think that would be enough of a reason to turn the boat around, but not for our adventurers. They see the island of Matool emerging in the distance and go ashore. I’d tell you what happens next, but I just discovered that The Muppet Movie is on Netflix! Can you picture that? Can you Picture that?

5 Things I Learned From Watching Zombie

  1. Zombies like to kill people in interesting ways…like gouging their eyes out with splinters of wood.
  2. If a shark and a zombie have a fight, the zombie will win. Take that Spielberg!
  3. 400-year-old zombie conquistadors shouldn’t even be a factor in the zombie apocalypse, but they are.
  4. If you use Molotov cocktails against the undead, don’t set your house on fire in the process.
  5. If your loved one returns to you as a zombie, don’t stand there stupefied and allow her to bite a chunk out of your arm.

___________

Jeffrey Shuster 4

Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47, episode 102) is an MFA candidate and instructor at the University of Central Florida.

Heroes Never Rust #47: And So, Then, to the Death?

25 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Heroes Never Rust

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Alan Moore, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Heroes Never Rust #47 by Sean Ironman

So, Then, To the Death?

The penultimate issue of volume on of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen gets everyone caught up on the villain’s plan and moves everyone into position for the climax. Not much actually happens in this issue in terms of moving the plot forward. We find out Professor Moriarty’s plan and the league heads out to stop him. But the issue is held together because each scene shines in the dialogue. Also, it’s great to finally see the league begin to come together as a team.

A flashback to Reichenbach, Switzerland in 1891 starts off the issue. The final showdown between Moriarty and Sherlock Holmes. The scene is interesting, even though it’s somewhat unnecessary. It explains how Moriarty is still alive, but that’s about it, since Sherlock Holmes doesn’t really play a part in the rest of the volume. But it works because their fight is so proper. Moriarty, while a villain, allows Holmes to write a letter to Watson before they fight. As Holmes writes, Moriarty stares off the cliff. “Ah, what is to be a man below so blue a sky.” But when Holmes asks him if the fight is to the death, Moriarty replies, “Oh, yes. Yes. Absolutely.” He relishes in that moment. There’s an animal underneath the proper, intelligent man, something more primal.

Untitled 2

They fight. Holmes wins, and throws Moriarty off the cliff into the water below. But Moriarty doesn’t die. Campion Bond finds him. Then we get why the league is necessary, why superheroes are necessary. “He thought me…an enemy…of the state…never reasoning…that it might suit the state…to create…its own enemy. Shadowboxing, Bond. We’re all just shadowboxing.” The league must exist to fight against any enemy, even if the enemy is the government. It’s common in Moore’s work to have a corrupt ruling system. Here, we have Moriarty as both a government man and a criminal ruler. Even he doesn’t know which one he really is. “Am I, for example, a director of military intelligence posing as a criminal or a criminal posing as a director of military intelligence or both?” I think, in the end, it doesn’t really matter. Not to the league, at least. In turns out, Moriarty had the league steal the cavorite from The Doctor, a criminal ruler, in order to use against The Doctor and fuel Moriarty’s own warship to bomb Limehouse, destroying The Doctor’s criminal empire.

Untitled 1

One thing I really like about the comic, and one of the things the movie got wrong, is how focused on England the whole thing is. Moriarty’s not out to rule the world. Maybe eventually, but he makes no mention of that here. He’s fighting over London. The threat against the country had come from the inside, and to continue the treatment of minorities from earlier issues, Moriarty, in the words of the Invisible Man, plans for the cavorite to be “a weapon in his war against he Chinaman.” Moriarty’s going to destroy part of what he’s fighting for to destroy the foreigner.

Most of the league just stands around this issue and learns about Moriarty’s plan. Although, the Invisible Man, the member to sneak out and discover Moriarty, proves just how horrible he is by killing a police officer. The officer didn’t discover him. The Invisible Man killed him because “I was cold. It’s getting rather chilly out there, you know.” He smashes in the man’s face and stole his clothes.

Mina is mad at the group in most scenes because she feels they don’t take her seriously because she’s a woman. To be fair, they don’t. But I don’t think it has much to do with her gender. Maybe a little. But there’s more to it. Nemo says to Quartermain, “Why the authorities chose her to assemble our group, I have no idea.” And I have none as well. Jekyll/Hyde is a monster. The Invisible Man can spy. Nemo has his contraptions. Quartermain is a national hero. And Mina is…? One thing I will give her is she gets shit done. Maybe that’s it. She’s capable of getting the job done and making sure there’s a plan. She’s a good leader, even if, in the field, she doesn’t help much. She complains to Quartermain for not catching on to Moriarty earlier. “Now half of London’s to have horror rained upon it. All because of my ridiculous female naiveté.” With the mistreatment of women in the background for most of the series, it was interesting to hear Mina go along with it. But in a move that speaks to the team coming together, as well as Quartermain’s own romantic interests in Mina, he says, “You were no more naïve than I. We’re just lucky that Nemo was ingenious enough to work things out.” The person who’s a representative of England’s past speaks well of two minority groups in one line. Things seem to be changing and the team is finally a team who respects each other.

Well, maybe not the Invisible Man. He’s just a bastard.

___________

Sean Ironman

Sean Ironman (Episode 102) is an MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida, where he also serves as Managing Editor of The Florida Review and as President of the Graduate Writers’ Association. His art has appeared online at River Teeth. His writing can be read in Breakers: An Anthology of Comics and Redivider.

 

In Boozo Veritas #47: Mon Semblable, Mon Frère!

23 Monday Jun 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in In Boozo Veritas

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Black Swan, Edgar Allen Poe, Psycho, Robert Louis Stevenson, Split Personalities, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, True Detective, William Wilson

In Boozo Veritas #47 by Teege Braune

Mon Semblable, Mon Frère!

If there’s one trope every editor of mystery, suspense, and horror asks aspiring writers to quit using, it’s the multiple personality disorder twist-ending. You’ve seen it before, and odds are, you’ve seen it done well. Psycho, Fight Club, and Black Swan are some of the better forays into this sub-genre, and these movies’ ability to truly surprise us is all the more special because we are so used to this reveal that we sometimes anticipate it and find ourselves delighted when something else happens instead. Take True Detective, truly an original show, one of the best to find its way on television for a long time. Before the unexpected conclusion of the first season, the internet was awash with theories about the identity of the killer. Was it Rustin Cohle or Marty Hart, each or both of them dreaming up the Yellow King and acting out their fantasies in a state of somnambulism? One of my favorite ludicrous ideas was that Rustin Cohle was the secret identity of Marty Hart. I laughed at most of these, but secretly harbored a silent dread that this would be the cheap, easy ending of an otherwise groundbreaking program. (Fortunately, it was not.)

The split-personality twist-ending finds its root in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a work that has so infiltrated popular culture, it has inspired well over a hundred direct film adaptations and influenced countless others, and yet even Jekyll and Hyde has its antecedent in Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson,” who in turn was inspired by an apocryphal anecdote from Washington Irving. “William Wilson” remains unique among split personality tales in that it flips the script before the script was ever written: instead of a good person discovering that he is the perpetrator of the story’s mayhem, Poe’s debauched and immoral narrator discovers that the nemesis who has foiled each and every one of his misdeeds throughout his wicked life is in fact himself, a manifestation of his own conscience, which he despises. “William Wilson” explores the nature of evil by taking the notion of mind/body dualism to a literal level, the title character is a man so torn between his wanton desires and rational sensibility that he, at least in his own mind, splits into two separate people, mere guilt replaces actual compassion, empathy, and true goodness. When the narrator finally succeeds in killing the double, the consequences are dire indeed, but not because some vengeful God or devil sends Wilson to hell; rather, without his conscience Wilson loses all sense of propriety whatsoever. Instead of indulging in the affairs, boozing, and swindling that his doppelgänger interrupted, Wilson turns to out and out violence and murder. The story, like many of Poe’s most famous tales, is both confession and excuse for the crimes the narrator has perpetrated.

“William Wilson” was written long before dissociative identity disorder was a thing or even before psychology was a field of study. The reader doesn’t have to figure out how the mechanics of the story work. Unlike Jack and Tyler of Fight Club, we don’t need to bother worrying how both Wilsons could have been one place or the other at the same time, and furthermore, Poe’s precise and measured story telling relieves the pressure. Much of “William Wilson” is, in fact, expository and only becomes episodic in the three pivotal, most suspenseful scenes. Fans of literary history will, likewise, find it interesting that the fictional Wilsons provide a stand-in for Poe himself. Many of the details of the narrator’s youth are reflections of Poe’s own childhood and education. He didn’t even bother to fictionalize the name of this school’s headmaster John Bransby. “William Wilson” perhaps hyperbolizes a conflicting nature in Poe who was himself a rational, intelligent man with plenty of personal demons and a propensity for vice.

I have had several doppelgängers in my own life. When you have a red beard, you are sometimes inclined to wonder if that is the only detail some people notice when they look at you. Once a picture of me had been tagged on Facebook as my friend Mike, another guy with a red beard. Another acquaintance named Nathan and I are often mistaken for each other. Whenever we happen upon a chance encounter we share stories of our often confused identity. People tell me that they recently passed me on my motorcycle, a vehicle belonging to Nathan, while they’ll tell him how much they enjoy his bar Redlight Redlight, the one I work at. Amused by these incidents, Nathan and I have agreed, however, that red beard aside, we bare little resemblance to each other. My first and most favorite doppelgänger is my brother Nic who even my fiancé tells me I do mirror, though Nic and I don’t see it.

Teege and Nic

People often asked my mom if Nic and I were twins when we were children, although I am almost two years older than him. Once while drinking together in a bar, two acquaintances from high school, guys I hadn’t seen in several years, walked straight up to my brother, shook his hand, and greeted him thus:

“Teege? Teege Braune?”

My brother responded: “He’s literally sitting right next to me,” pointing in my direction as he spoke.

Amused, I pretended not to notice the interaction. Without missing a beat, the two gentleman turned to me:

“Teege? Teege Braune?” they said enthusiastically, shaking my hand.

What followed was nearly an hour of catching up and remembering old times, which while not unpleasant, was neither an entirely welcomed diversion in my half-drunk, about-to-be-dumped-by-my-then-girlfriend state of mind. I couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened had my brother pretended to be me, took the ruse to its logical conclusion, and answered their questions as me to the best of his ability. He knows me well enough to pull something like that off. I imagine that sitting next to him, witnessing this conversation would have been akin to an out of body experience, tranquil, and dream-like, but if someone were pretending to be me behind my back, without my knowledge, how would I react? Depending on who it was and what I imagined their motives to be, I think I might become conversely angry or amused. I can see myself playing along, taking over their identity as well, the two of us moving in and out of each other’s lives fluidly, the borders becoming increasingly blurry until neither of us was sure where we really belonged. On the other hand, I might become so upset that I took it upon myself to confront and challenge this person at a masked ball, stab him to death only to realize, too late, my error: that he had been I all along, and in so murdering him, I had destroyed all my goodness as well. Face to face with my bloodied mirror image, I can hear his voice as he dies:

“You have conquered, and I yield. Yet henceforward art thou also dead–dead to the World, to Heaven, and to Hope! In me didst thou exist–and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou has murdered thyself.”

___________

teegenteege

Teege Braune (episode 72, episode 75, episode 77, episode 90, episode 102) is a writer of literary fiction, horror, essays, and poetry. Recently he has discovered the joys of drinking responsibly. He may or may not be a werewolf.

Shakespearing #1: An Overabundance, Pleasures

22 Sunday Jun 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespeare, Shakespearing

≈ 2 Comments

Shakespearing #1 by David Foley

Riverside Shakespeare

A few weeks ago—late night, between books—I pulled the collected plays of Christopher Marlowe off my shelf and started reading Edward II. I hadn’t read it, or any Marlowe, since high school, and what struck me most about it now was how un-Shakespearean it is. Having first encountered anti-Shakespearean theories in a book that claimed Marlowe wrote Shakespeare’s plays, it now seemed bizarre that anyone could think the same man wrote, say, Edward II and Richard III. It was hard at first to name what was different or, at the risk of slighting Marlowe, what was missing, but I missed the pleasure of Shakespeare, and that made me wonder what the pleasure of Shakespeare consists of. Marlowe writes a good line (a “mighty” one, according to Ben Jonson), but the range of those lines, at least compared to Shakespeare, is narrow, a vision intensely focused. So I guess what I missed in Marlowe was the wide-rangingness of Shakespeare, the way his eye and ear go everywhere, doggily darting over the landscape. I opened my Riverside Shakespeare at random and landed on Phebe’s speech to Silvius in As You Like It:

Thou tell’st me there is murder in mine eye:
’Tis pretty, sure, and very probable,
That eyes, that are the frailest and the softest things,
Who shut their coward gates on atomies,
Should be called tyrants, butchers, murtherers!
Now I do frown on thee with all my heart,
And if my eyes can wound, now let them kill thee.
Now counterfeit to swound; why, now fall down,
Or if thou canst not, O, for shame, for shame,
Lie not, to say mine eyes are murtherers!

Here are the pleasures: a kind of joyous compression of image, so that images are wrapped in images (“Who shut their coward gates on atomies”); language that, for all its poetry, is continually, dramatically active (“Now counterfeit to swound; why, now fall down”); and a loving attentiveness to character as revealed in speech (“’Tis pretty, sure, and very probable”). You could argue that Shakespeare’s love for the intricate image is sometimes at odds with his love of character. Would dim-bulb Phebe really say, as she does later in the speech, “[L]ean upon a rush,/The cicatrice and capable impressure / Thy palm some moment keeps”? But this just adds to the main pleasure of Shakespeare: a sense of overabundance, perhaps the overabundance that made Ben Jonson wish that Shakespeare could sometimes have been persuaded to “put a cork in it.” (I take this to be a reasonable translation of Jonson’s Latin phrase.)

The other day, perhaps because my mind was dwelling on these things, I impulsively bought a copy of James Shapiro’s Contested Will, a wonderful book as it turned out. Shapiro does a good, compassionate job of debunking the anti-Shakespeareans, but he also brought me back to some of my own concerns about Shakespeare. He sifts the evidence to show us Shakespeare the working playwright, all of whose plays were created in the crucible of a living theatre, a circumstance that makes nonsense and deep offense of anti-Shakespearean theories. I wanted to try to get at Shakespeare working and learning, and also to get at what makes Shakespeare Shakespeare. And I thought if I started at the beginning and read the plays in order (to the extent that anyone can say what that order was), I might begin to see some answers to my questions.

This is a naïve task, and I’d like to go about it naïvely, just reading and responding to the plays, avoiding outside commentary as much as possible, looking only for what strikes me, at the mercy of my own tastes and prejudices. And trying to keep each posting down to 600 words. Still it makes for a long project. Thirty-seven plays means we’ll be well into 2015 by the time we get to The Two Noble Kinsmen. Will I make it to the end?

Henry 6

Well, one step at a time. See you next week with Henry VI, Part 1.


David Foley

David Foley is a playwright and fiction writer living in Brooklyn. His plays include Cressida Among the Greeks, Paradise, Nance O’Neil, The Murders at Argos, A Hole in the Fence, and Sad Hotel, among others. His novel The Traveler’s Companion is available on Amazon. He teaches at New York University.

Episode 105: Alden Jones!

21 Saturday Jun 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Craft of Fiction Writing, Episode, Memoir, Travel Writing

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Alden Jones, E. L. Doctorow, Edward Said, Harper Lee, Peter DeMarco, rick moody, The Blind Masseuse, To Kill A Mockingbird, Unaccompanied Minors

Episode 105 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

On this week’s show, I talk to fiction writer and memoirist-extraordinaire Alden Jones,

Alden Jonesplus Peter Demarco writes about discovering Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

Peter Demarco


TEXTS DISCUSSED

Unaccompanied Minors

The Blind Masseuse

To Kill a Mockingbird

Orientalism

NOTES

According to The Guardian, Salman Rushdie has won the PEN/Pinter award for 2014.

Also according to The Guardian, Quentin Tarantino and Matt Wagner will collaborate on a Django/Zorro crossover comic book.


Episode 105 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

The Curator of Schlock #44: The Funhouse

20 Friday Jun 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Film, Horror, The Curator of Schlock

≈ Leave a comment

The Curator of Schlock #44 by Jeff Shuster

The Funhouse (or, Don’t Go to the Carnival, Kids)

Untitled 1

1981’s The Funhouse from director Tobe Hooper (of Texas Chainsaw Massacre fame) has one of the most terrifying opening credit sequences I’ve ever seen in a movie. That’s because it’s clip after clip of audio-animatronic dolls! I don’t like puppets and dolls, especially the kind that laugh at me!

Untitled 2

They creep me out, and I don’t need to see them during opening credits. And some of these puppets look like clowns! I think I’m going to faint now.

The movie opens with teenager Amy Harper (Elizabeth Berridge, who played Mozart’s wife Constance in Amadeus) showering naked. A masked killer pulls back the curtain and starts stabbing her, but it’s okay.

Untitled 3

The knife is made out of rubber and when Amy pulls off the clown mask, it’s none other than her little brother, Joey. Amy chases him down and yells at him, saying that she won’t take him to the carnival this weekend. I hope the prank was worth it, Joey! No carnival for you! No funhouse with audio-animatronic dolls dressed as clowns laughing at you! Uggghhhh. I’m feeling dizzy.

Where was I? Oh yeah. Amy has a date with a guy named Buzz who works at a filling station much to her mother’s chagrin. Still, he’s a hunky enough guy with an ample supply of marijuana so it’s all good. Amy’s father tells her not to go to the carnival because of the dead bodies that were discovered after the carnival left the year before. Still, Buzz wants to go and Amy doesn’t want to be a buzz-kill.  They’re joined by an obnoxious couple, Liz and Richie.

Untitled 6There are many sights to behold at the carnival like cows with two heads, cows with cleft pallets, and mutant babies around in floating in glass jars. There’s a magician by the name of Marko the Magnificent who drives wooden stakes into the hearts of unsuspecting audience volunteers. There’s a peep show which costs three whole dollars to get in, but you can always sneak to the back of the tent and use your pocket knife to give you a free glimpse of the action. Just watch out for carnies who use the back of the tent as their own personal lavatory. You may want to skip Madame Zena (Sylvia Miles) , the fortuneteller. If you laugh too much at hackneyed predictions, she’ll threaten to break every bone your body.

Untitled 5

As the carnival winds down, our intrepid band of youngsters decides it will be cool to spend the night in the Funhouse, a dark ride featuring…puppets…laughing puppets. Anyway, the kids look through the funhouse floorboards to witness a disturbing scene. A strange carny in a Frankenstein mask grunts at Madame Zena indicating that he’d like her to take part in the world’s oldest profession. He pays her a hundred dollars, but things don’t according to plan and he ends up choking her to death.

Untitled 7

It’s a good thing the door to the Funhouse isn’t locked, providing our young protagonists an easy escape. Oh wait. It is.  It’s a good thing Richie didn’t decide to steal the carnival proceeds when no one was looking. Oh wait. He did. It’s a good thing the guy wearing the Frankenstein mask isn’t a mutant freak with splotchy white hair, protruding red eyes, and jagged monster teeth. Oh wait. He is. Yeah. There’s a good chance they’re all going to die. Incidentally, Dean Koontz wrote the movie novelization of this The Funhouse which apparently has nothing to do with the movie save for character names.

Untitled 7

How’s that for a reversal?

Five Things I Learned from The Funhouse

  1. Don’t fake-stab your naked sister in the shower. Actually, I didn’t have to learn that from The Funhouse. That’s just common sense.
  2. Don’t go out with hunky guys who work at filling stations. Your parents won’t approve.
  3. Two-headed cows need love, too.
  4. Carnies are even seedier than they appear.
  5. Puppets are evil. EVIL!

___________

Jeffrey Shuster 4

Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47, episode 102) is an MFA candidate and instructor at the University of Central Florida.

Heroes Never Rust #46: The Turning Point

18 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Heroes Never Rust

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Alan Moore, Heroes Never Rust, sean ironman, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Heroes Never Rust #46 by Sean Ironman

The Turning Point

The fourth issue of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is the most action-packed one yet. The league attempts to retrieve the cavorite from “The Doctor” and stop the devious foreigner from building his airships. We finally see Mr. Hyde cut loose and rampage his way from room to room creating a distraction so Quartermain and Mina can get their hands on the cavorite. Of course, the team succeeds, escapes unscathed, and hands over the cavorite to Campion Bond. Job well done. Britain has been saved.

But wait, this is the fourth issue of a six issue miniseries. It’s not over. It’s just beginning. With all the violence and death and dismemberment in this issue, many readers might think the gruesome deaths of the countless evil henchmen take center stage. But there’s a lot of suspicious behavior to be found. There are a lot of secrets.

Untitled 1

The issue opens with Captain Nemo talking with two of his own men (Ishmael and Broad Arrow Jack). Nemo doesn’t trust Campion Bond. “Bond believes we are his pawns. He thinks no-one observes his game. But I am no-one. I observe everything and to play with Nemo is to play games with destruction.” He refers to himself in the third-person so you know he’s serious. Captain Nemo sits out most of the action, putting together his plan.

Another trick of a character is Mr. Hyde pretending not to see the Invisible Man. We get a couple of panels from Mr. Hyde’s point of view, and we see that he can make out the heat signature of the Invisible Man. Mr. Hyde is like Predator from Predator. But he pretends that he can’t see him. When the Invisible Man points in the right direction to go, Mr. Hyde says, “You keep forgetting, Griffin. I can’t see you.” The reason behind this lie doesn’t come out in this issue. But it does change the way the reader views Mr. Hyde. He isn’t a mindless hulk. He might not look like a person, but he’s not quite an animal either. Dr. Jekyll’s more dangerous than a beast. When the Invisible Man tells him they have to rescue Mina and Quartermain, Mr. Hyde still holds a grudge from when they captured him. “Murray and Quartermain. Huhughh. Yes, I remember them from Paris. They shot me, poisoned me and abducted me. I don’t think there’s any great hurry, is there?” I don’t know why Mr. Hyde lies to the Invisible Man, but I can make an educated guess that it’s not for something good. The Invisible Man better watch out.

Untitled 2

The last segment of the issue reveals the largest and most dangerous of the hidden truths. Last time, I wrote about how based on Alan Moore’s previous work, we were going to get to a point when the league turns against the government. This issue features the beginning of that turn. Campion Bond leaves with the cavorite, but then we find out the Invisible Man is nowhere to be found. He’s following Campion, seemingly under the orders of Captain Nemo. I really enjoyed that the only reason we now see where Campion goes off to is because one of the members of the league follows him. Many writers might have just chosen to reveal to the reader the identity of Campion’s boss. But that always comes off as bullshit. If the reader is following a character or set of characters, then we should know what they know. There may be exceptions to that rule, but I think it’s a good one to have. If a point-of-view character knows something, the reader should know it to. We find out the identity of Campion’s boss because one of the characters finds out. We don’t just get the writer revealing it to the reader. It’s a part of the story.

Untitled 3

Mina Murray thought Campion’s boss, Mr. M, meant Mycroft Holmes, is the elder brother of Sherlock Holmes. She was close. While Mr. M is not Sherlock’s brother, he is a Sherlock Holmes’s character. Mr. M is Professor James Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes’s arch-nemesis. Apparently, he used the league to fight a rival crime lord and to steal the cavorite for his own insidious schemes. We’ll have to wait until the next issue to see what the league does with this knowledge.

___________

Sean Ironman

Sean Ironman (Episode 102) is an MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida, where he also serves as Managing Editor of The Florida Review and as President of the Graduate Writers’ Association. His art has appeared online at River Teeth. His writing can be read in Breakers: An Anthology of Comics and Redivider.

← Older posts

Online, shop here:

If you must, shop Amazon and help the show.

Audible.com

Blogs

Not forgotten

Categories

  • 21st Century Bronte
  • A Word from the King
  • Aesthetic Drift
  • animation
  • Anime
  • Art
  • Autobiography
  • AWP
  • Biography
  • Blog Post
  • Bloomsday
  • Buddhism
  • Buzzed Books
  • Cheryl Strayed
  • Children's Literature
  • Christmas
  • Christmas literature
  • Comedy
  • Comic Books
  • Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart
  • Craft of Fiction Writing
  • Creative Nonfiction
  • David Foster Wallace
  • David James Poissant
  • David Lynch
  • David Sedaris
  • Disney
  • Dispatches from the Funkstown Clarion
  • Doctor Who
  • Drinking
  • Dungeons and Dragons
  • Editing
  • Education
  • Episode
  • Erotic Literature
  • Essay
  • Fan Fiction
  • Fantasy
  • Film
  • Flash Fiction
  • Florida Literature
  • Francesca Lia Block
  • Functionally Literate
  • Ghost writing
  • Graphic Novels
  • Gutter Space
  • Help me!
  • Heroes Never Rust
  • History
  • Horror
  • Humor
  • Hunter S. Thompson
  • In Boozo Veritas
  • Irish Literature
  • Jack Kerouac
  • James Bond
  • James Joyce
  • Jazz
  • Journalism
  • Kerouac House
  • Kung Fu
  • Like a Geek God
  • Literary Magazines
  • Literary Prizes
  • Literary rizes
  • Literature of Florida
  • Litlando
  • Live Show
  • Loading the Canon
  • Loose Lips Reading Series
  • Lost Chords & Serenades Divine
  • Magic Realism
  • Mailbag
  • manga
  • McMillan's Codex
  • Memoir
  • Miami Book Fair
  • Michael Caine
  • Military Literature
  • Mixtape
  • Music
  • New York City
  • O, Miami
  • Old Poem Revue
  • On Top of It
  • Pensive Prowler
  • Philosophy
  • Photography
  • Poetry
  • politics
  • Postmodernism
  • Publishing
  • Recommendation
  • Repeal Day
  • Science Fiction
  • Screenwriting
  • Sexuality
  • Shakespeare
  • Shakespearing
  • Sozzled Scribbler
  • Sports
  • Star Wars
  • Television
  • The Bible
  • The Curator of Schlock
  • The Global Barfly's Companion
  • The Lists
  • The Perfect Life
  • The Pink Fire Revue
  • The Rogue's Guide to Shakespeare on Film
  • Theater
  • There Will Be Words
  • translation
  • Travel Writing
  • Vanessa Blakeslee
  • Versify
  • Video Games
  • Violence
  • Virginia Woolf
  • War
  • Word From the King
  • Young Adult
  • Your Next Beach Read
  • Zombies

Recent Posts

  • Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #118: Swamps & Things
  • Episode 467: Ciara Shuttleworth!
  • The Curator of Schlock #349: Greyhound
  • Aesthetic Drift #29: Chewing on the Words of Miami’s Incarcerated
  • Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #20: Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain (2020)

Archives

  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel

 
Loading Comments...
Comment
    ×