Episode 137 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
In this week’s episode, I talk to Annemarie Ní Churreáin about the Irish language, poetry, and the allure of nature,
Photo by Kimberly Lojewski.
plus Will Garland reads his essay, The Art of Telling a Story About Southern Family Living in a Small Southern Town.
NOTES
The music used with The Art of Telling a Story About Southern Family Living in a Small Southern Town is “Color Cave” by Noveller, a one person band, that band being Sarah Lipstate. Check out the link for more info on her upcoming show at The Tinnitus Music Series in Brooklyn.
Episode 137 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
Placing an exclamation point in your title really makes it stand out!
Your Curator of Schlock has long had the wish for a Chucky vs. Leprechaun movie. Another dream of mine is to one day see a Scanners vs. Highlanders movie. Oooh. Maybe the movie could even feature a Scanner-Highlander hybrid. Such a Highlander would only have to explode the heads of the other immortals he was fighting instead of all of that pointless swordplay. That’s my pitch. I’ll sell it to any Hollywood studio for 10% of the gross. Are you listening Mr. Cronenberg?
Anyway, I’m fresh out of Scanners movies seeing as how Scanner Cop is proving hard to find. Never fear, I discovered this movie called Zapped! and it’s all about telekinesis!
Plus, it stars Scott Baio. That’s the guy who played Chachi on Happy Days for all of you oldsters out there. Some of you younglings may know him from the hit sitcom Charles in Charge. Buddy is so funny. Why can’t the idiots who live next door in real life be so funny?
Oh my! The actor who played Buddy is also in this movie! This like Charles in Charge: The Early Years! In fact, I’m going to call the characters by their Charles in Charge names for the rest of this review. Anyway, Charles (Scott Baio) plays a nerdy high school science geek who likes to experiment on mice.
Scatman Crothers pops in the lab every now and then to give him some sage words of advice like “First come the woman. Then the whiskey.”
Buddy (Willie Aames) is a rich kid and the school photographer who takes pictures of cheerleaders in compromising positions. I think he’s also having an affair with one of the school secretaries.
Anyway, the mice turn telekinetic from Charles’s telekinesis juice, he spills some chemicals, and gets zapped. His parents think he’s on drugs or something. That something happens to be telekinesis. He could become one of the X-Men if only Professor Xavier admitted non-mutants! Anyway, Charles’s newfound powers allow him to do all sorts of things like levitate glass beakers, breaking the glasses of nosy school reporters, and control the flight of baseballs so his school can win the big game. Someone call Arnold Rothstein!
Oh, yeah: Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, and episode 131)is an MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida.Scatman Crothers has a pot-induced fantasy where he rides bicycles with Albert Einstein.
That’s all well and good, but I have yet to see one head explode! The crusty old school principal is just waiting to get humiliated in front of the student body, but the joke is on us after we see him go on a sleazy blind date. Ewwww! Charles and Buddy go to a fraternity casino party so they can tele-cheat on a roulette wheel. Eddie Deezen is present at this party (why am I not surprised.) Charles spins the wheel too fast and it levitates off the table. Will the frat learn Charles’s secret and exploit it for their own use? Will Charles throw up pea soup in front of a couple of priests? Did I mention this movie has a flying ventriloquist dummy in it?
Five Things I Learned from Zapped!
They make diving suits for mice!
You could grow pot in high schools back in the 80s.
Night of the Living Dead(1968):George A. Romero basically invents the genre in a low budget masterpiece that used actually news reporters to report on the zombie apocalypse in the film and used actual real entrails as props. A little zombie girl who looks like she’s having a bad acid trip kills and eats her parents. A black man is not monster-fodder, but in fact the chief hero of the film. This movie still rocks.
Dawn of the Dead(1978): Zombies invent mall-walking.
Return of the Living Dead(1985): Don Calfa has an awesome supporting role as the woebegone mortician, Ernie. Linnea Quigley plays the punk girl Trash, who spontaneously gets naked and later will be the hottest zombie you’ve ever seen devour someone’s brains. The zombies can talk. The zombies can talk. They will tell you that they want: “Braiiiinsss!” Dan O’Bannon, auteur, thank you.
28 Days Later (2002): Zombies can run.
Shaun of the Dead (2004): Very British. For the first half-hour, Shaun doesn’t notice that the zombie apocalypse is happening.
The Notebook (2004): A sultry prole zombie (Ryan Gosling) is enamored of a hottie among the upper-class undead (Rachel McAdams) when the entire world is consumed with boredom and the wet dreaming of bad ideas.
Night of the Living Dead 3D (2006): This quasi-reboot of Night of the Living Dead is awfully blasé except for one thing: Sid Haig as Gerald Tovar, Jr., a funeral home director with both a sensitive side and a rather dark secret.
Planet Terror (2007): On Rose McGowan, a machine gun prosthetic leg looks sexy—so sexy I don’t even feel that stupid for saying so. I think there were zombies, too.
Zombieland(2009): The greatest date movie ever. Jesse Eisenberg gives a primer on post-apocalyptic survival, Woody Harrelson reminds us of the glory of Deliverance, and Bill Murray seems like a really nice guy.
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John King (Episode, well, all of them) is a podcaster, writer, and ferret wrangler.
When discussing comics, many people, including myself, usually refer to the writer and the artist as the creators of the comic, but “artist” may not be the correct word. The term, to me, simplifies the process, as if the visual elements were the job of one person. Typically, three different positions affect the visual side of comics: penciller, inker, and colorist. One may argue (me again) that the letterer, the person who actually adds the dialogue and narration captions to the page, also adds to the visual side of a comic, but for the sake of this blog post, I’ll look at just the other three. We’ll save the art of lettering for another day. While the penciller, inker, and colorist may be separate people, sometimes in work from a major publisher (and usually in work from smaller, independent publishers) one person may fill multiple roles. In War Story: Nightingale, David Lloyd (V For Vendetta) fills the three roles. This helps each aspect of art work in sync with one another, giving a dark dread to the story’s proceedings.
The inks are so heavy, darkness seems ready to overtake the Navy men aboard the Nightingale as they help protect convoys against the Axis forces. There’s a scene at a comic book convention in Kevin Smith’s film Chasing Amy in which a fan accosts Jason Lee because he is an inker, or a “tracer” as the fan calls him.
But, the inking stage is much more complex than many people believe, including that so-called fan. The inker must interpret the penciller’s intent (almost like a translator of prose) and give form and dimension to an image. Like a screenplay is only an outline of a finished film, penciled artwork is only an early step toward the finished product. Without a strong inker, not only make the final image not be as strong, but the penciller’s work could be ruined. As an example of how much inked pencils add to an image, take the following images:
Not only is detail and shading added to the image to create more realistic and rounded characters, the image now has mood, has feeling. Even without color, the images become as close to real as they can. Because of the importance of an inker, pencillers tend to work with the same inkers throughout their career, having built a trusting relationship. Some people may say that since David Lloyd is penciling and inking in War Story: Nightingale, he has an easier time. I’m not entirely familiar with his process, and I haven’t been able to find details on it either, but sometimes, an artist who must do both chooses to combine the steps and draw entirely in ink. The work is not made easier by having one person do the job of two, just as any job is not made easier by giving one person two jobs. The only effect is that one person has more work to do. If I had to translate this blog from English to French, I would still have a hell of a time.
Many of the pages are covered more with black ink than with anything else. The Nightingale ship seems to emerge from darkness on page one, as if the men are already in the afterlife, ghosts at sea. The ship looks dead, frozen in time. The sea is desolate and dangerous. There’s no hope for the men aboard. They are surrounded by darkness and it’s no surprise that the men are either torn apart onboard or drown in the dark waters. When one young sailor is sliced in half, his organs and blood are so dark, he looks as if he’s being pulled into some other place, some place far away, into the black inks.
Even in daylight, the men are drawn so thick with ink that they look weathered, old. The sky may be blue and bright, but the war has taken its toll. The wrinkles on men’s faces are as thick as their eyebrows. Their faces, especially their eyes, are typically shown in shadow. They are stressed, beaten, haggard. Yet, they fight. They fight against submarines, monsters deep in the black ocean in which they cannot see. The men know that it is hopeless, but they fight. And die. And are swallowed by the inks. Without David Lloyd’s heavy inks, the comic would be too simple. He adds so much style with his pen. Perhaps war stories have been told too much. Perhaps there’s little to add. But, we can say that about nearly every type of story, can’t we? Maybe we just need the story to be well-told, to be told with style. Hopefully, more readers understand the importance of an inker. An inker is as much of the artist of a comic as the penciller. No tracers here.
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Photo by John King
Sean Ironman (Episode 102) earned his MFA at the University of Central Florida. Currently, he teaches creative nonfiction and digital media at the University of Central Arkansas as a visiting professor. His work can be read in The Writer’s Chronicle, Redivider, and Breakers: A Comics Anthology, among others.
Do you love children? I don’t. To me they are perfect offerings for the dark lord Satan. So when I discovered The Satanic Children’s Big Book of Activities I was ecstatic. I wondered what different recipes it would provide on baking and boiling the little creatures into edible delights. Well, my brethren, I’m here to tell you that I found no such directions. The book is actually written for children! It aims to teach them valuable lessons about math and science. I was beside myself with repugnance.
It begins with two nearly identical drawings of a little girl doing a satanic ritual in front of her class. I wet my mouth in anticipation of bloodshed, but the ritual is actually meant to spread knowledge. The girl performs a science experiment, not slitting a chicken’s throat. It’s a jab at creationism, facetiously comparing science to Satanism. The book instructs the reader to find six differences between the two drawings—a way to teach memory skills. I don’t know why you’d want to teach children anything, but I suppose if you love children this will suffice while also providing social commentary for adults.
This Satanic book of bullshit activities also contains word puzzles that teach how to use inclusive language. The only words children need to learn are “yes” and “please,” but this offers a much broader vocabulary. Yep. Coloring philosophy novels, navigating mazes, and connecting dots (to form a pentagram) are all part of this blasphemous baby. It teaches children to dream big. There is even a sketch of a sleeping puppy named Cerberus with a thought bubble above his head, which you can draw-in what he’s dreaming about. Personally, I’d draw little Bobby or Susie hung over a pentagram with their intestines torn out, but I guess if you love your children this could be for you.
Pair with: Blueberry Capri-Sun and vodka.
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Brett Pribble teaches writing courses in Orlando, Florida. He’s afraid of sharks and often isn’t sure whether or not he’s dreaming. He was previously published in Saw Palm and The Molotov Cocktail.
Episode 136 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
In this week’s episode, I talk to Walter Mosley about crime fiction, characterization, the subconscious work of the writer, and the radical aesthetics of Amiri Baraka,
Photo by David-Burnett.
and I also talk to Petra Mason about Bettie Page, Bunny Yeager, and the legacy of pin up culture.
Photo by Janette Valentine at Terribly Girly.
Plus, Rose Tran reads her personal essay, “Intermission.”
Photo by Jon Findell.
TEXTS DISCUSSED
NOTES
For more information about the Terribly Girly studio, check out their website.
In England, the ban on books being sent to prisoners is being lifted, according to The Guardian.
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Episode 136 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
When I was in college, I was robbed at gunpoint coming home from buying a pint of ice cream. They took my coat, they took my watch, they took the ice cream, and when they discovered I had only a few dollars on me, one of them pressed the gun to my temple and threatened to blow my brains out. But they let me go.
A policewoman came by our apartment to take a report. She drawled, “You were lucky. We found a guy last night with half his head blown away. Needless to say, his family’s making funeral arrangements.”
It so happened that, for someone’s directing class project, I was acting in the Isabel/Claudio scene from Measure for Measure.
Ay, but to die, and go we know not where,
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot,
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod…
It was probably the best performance of my brief acting career.
It helps that it’s a great scene, as are Isabel’s scenes with Angelo. You remember what Shakespeare can teach you about writing a scene which pulses with shift and counter-shift, discovery and response. Angelo and Isabel make a great matched set of opponents, and the Duke is charmingly beneficent, and there are unexpected plot twists, and all this makes Measure for Measure play better than it reads.
When you read it, you really notice how weird it is.
For one thing, the Duke seems much less beneficent when you slow him down. His reasons for leaving Angelo in charge are pretty bad (essentially, he wants Angelo to be the meanie). He never seriously questions the justice of Claudio’s sentence, only its mercy. And he lets Isabel believe that Claudio’s dead because it’s better for her soul or something. He makes a shaky moral center for the play.
All this could just be the strangeness of a moral world four centuries removed from ours, but when you read Measure for Measure in presumed sequence with Troilus and All’s Well, it’s hard not to feel that Shakespeare himself is thrashing about morally. After Hamlet and Twelfth Night, he seems to have plunged into a moral wilderness. Perhaps we can’t get a handle on the moral world of these plays because Shakespeare can’t. The sense you sometimes get in Shakespeare—that he’s spouting the party line but feels deep down that something’s wrong with it—here produces what feel like painful fractures.
Or perhaps we can’t get a handle on it because Shakespeare himself is, of necessity, disguising his own meanings. At the beginning, the Duke hints that the play intends “[o]f government the properties to unfold,” and it’s possible to trace a steady critique of authority throughout the play. It’s no accident that the executioner, representing the power of the state at its most brutal, is named Abhorson (ab-whoreson), or that he’s put on the same level as a brothel-keeper. Moreover, this is the third play in a row which has a character who provides a comic counter-narrative to the poses of authority. Like Parolles in All’s Well, Lucio unwittingly slanders a noble character to his face, burlesquing the illusions of nobility. Lucio may be the moral center of the play: genial, mendacious, venal, and for all that well-intentioned. He’s the one who fetches Isabel to plead for Claudio and urges her on when she does. He becomes a real-world corrective to the Duke’s complacent platitudes. As he says to him, “Nay, friar, I am a kind of burr; I shall stick.”
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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.
The war in Europe winds down. Germans surrender. U.S. soldiers wait on the decision of whether they are heading home or heading to the war in the Pacific. Sergeant Brewer should be happy. He survived. As a soldier in the Hundred and First Airborne Division, he parachuted in the night before D-Day. He fought his way through the whole western front of the war and came out on the other side. But, he’s haunted, not by what he has done to survive but by the deaths of the soldiers around him. His last mission is to take three others who were with him on the night before D-Day, the last three left alive and uninjured, and check out a nearby mansion for when the general comes the next week. Brewer takes the opportunity, destroys his radio equipment, and allows his men a few days of relaxation (and enjoying the company of a few female locals happy to have the Americans arrive). But, he can’t relax, not completely. He’s tired, not physically—mentally. As he tells one of his men, “I ain’t stupid. I know men have to die. It’s the goddamn waste of it that pisses me off.”
He hates the army. He hates regulations. He hates how no one knows what they are doing and soldiers die because of it. And he remembers every man who died under his command.
Most of the comic is laid out like one thinks a comic should be laid out—multiple panels with a thin, white gutter between them. A small amount of time passes between panels so that whole conversations take place in a page and characters interact with one another. But, between scenes, are one-page shots of an earlier moment in war, a moment of destruction and death. The reader is in the middle of a conversation and when he or she turns the page, there is an image of a soldier being blown apart with his intestines hanging out. No dialogue or sound effects are used on these pages. Silent images of soldiers, who were once under Brewer’s command, dying awful deaths. This is something that only comics can do.
I think it’s important for a writer (or in this case a writer and an artist) to use everything at his or her disposal for the genre or medium they are working in. A good comic should be a good comic, not a good screenplay that was drawn. A good short story should be a good short story, not a smaller section of a novel. Because comics are a visual medium, a strong image can create a faster impact than a paragraph of text. The reader doesn’t get a section break, and then a paragraph describing a soldier being blown apart or being crushed by a tank. The single comic book page can show it, can show the horrified faces of the soldiers left standing.
The images come quick, sporadically. Sometimes, the reader has a few pages of the storyline’s present day before being shocked back to death. Sometimes it’s only a page. The present-day story is light and fun. A German soldier hangs himself, but it’s not shown, only briefly mentioned. Even in Eden—a mansion, wine, women—Brewer can’t escape what he has seen, what he has been apart of. Men gunned down. Dismembered. Shot through the head. Impaled by a piece of a building while parachuting. Bleeding out and reaching for help as a city explodes around them.
By having these images appear out of nowhere with no dialogue or sound, the comic recreates the experience for the reader. The reader is placed in Brewer’s mind. This is how he experiences these memories, these flashes. He’s taking a bath and getting a blowjob from a local beauty, and when he closes his eyes he sees Doyle, Fisher, Marks, Linehan, and man whose name is long forgotten being shot to death by enemy planes, not standing a change out in the open. He opens the doors to the mansion and tells his men to check the place out, and then he flashes to Normandy and Little Benny, Murtagh, Grier, and a few others being stabbed and shot in close combat with Nazis.
Nothing happens to stop these images. Nothing can stop them. Brewer will live with them forever. He gives his men a few days of fun, perhaps in an effort to give them something good about the war to remember. But to him, he lives with it. Of course, in the end, the general arrives, sees Brewer and his men and the fun they have been having. And in a repeat of the first panel of the comic, we are given a close-up of Brewer’s face as he responds to the general’s complaints. Unlike the beginning, his face is no longer presented in shadow. We can see every detail of his face, of his tired eyes, of his stubble. And he tells the general, “So why don’t you stick your authority up your ass?” What else is he going to do? He’s damned for the rest of his life. At least, he doesn’t back down from his superior officer. He’s done with the army, at least as done as one can be. He’ll be stuck with the past, but he won’t be creating any new memories, won’t be watching any more men die for nothing.
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Photo by John King
Sean Ironman (Episode 102) earned his MFA at the University of Central Florida. Currently, he teaches creative nonfiction and digital media at the University of Central Arkansas as a visiting professor. His work can be read in The Writer’s Chronicle, Redivider, and Breakers: A Comics Anthology, among others.
In the Riverside chronology, All’s Well That Ends Well sits uneasily between Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure. More problematic than even those plays, there’s nevertheless something chrysalis-like about All’s Well, as if something were stickily emerging, wings still wrinkled and folded.
One thing that’s emerging is a fairy tale element that blooms in the late romances, but is even present in Lear. This element is not the fairy mischief of A Midsummer Night’s Dream but more what I described in my Lears posting: the way the simplicity of the tale points to wells of hidden knowing. It occurs to me only as I’m writing this that a central flaw of Into the Woods may be the assumption that you can make fairy tales darker than they are. You don’t even need the grimmer aspects of the Grimms—birds pecking out the stepsisters’ eyes—to get at the way that a fairy tale, by its very simplicity, by its sparseness of explanation, places us in relation with elemental things. Or as Lafew puts it in All’s Well, “Hence is it that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear.” Fairy tales submit us to the unknown fears.
The most obvious fairy-tale aspect of All’s Well is Helen’s healing of the King and her bargain for Bertram. All of the scenes surrounding Helen’s dealings with the King have the formal, direct rhetoric of a fairy tale, plunked out in rhyming couplets: “Then thou shalt give me with thy kingly hand/What husband in thy power I will command.” This is striking because elsewhere the play continues Troilus’s movement towards more complex and difficult language, as if Shakespeare were pushing to make language do more or as if he could count on a company of actors who knew how to ride the caprices of his lines. The Folger notes are full of perhapses, where scholars are still guessing at Shakespeare’s meaning. Try this: “The reasons of our state I cannot yield/But like a common and an outward man/That the great figure of a council frames/By self-unable motion.”
So we have the simplicity of a fairy tale combined with something else. But what? The most obvious answer is Bertram. If All’s Well is a problem play, Bertram is the problem. He’s awful! Shakespeare can’t even figure out a way to redeem him at the end. He just brings Helen back and rushes everyone off stage, hoping we won’t notice that Bertram remains every bit as much of an asshole as he was at the start of the play.
What’s going on here? The hero is a villain, and the villain—the comic Parolles—ends up being far more likable. Or as one characters says, “He has out-villained villainy so far that the rarity redeems him.” Parolles’ scene with his fake captors has echoes of Thersites in Troilus. His accusations against the lords are meant (I think) to be lies, but they provide a counter-narrative to noble pretensions. As does Bertram. This sequence of plays seems infused with bitterness about human nature, particularly in men, and even more particularly in men in power.
It’s left to women to redeem them. As if in apology, Shakespeare gives the name of Troilus’s “whore” to his heroine, and then gives her the strangest line in the play: Bertram “is too good and fair for death and me.” As if she had the magic to redeem him not just from his own nature, but from death itself. Just like a fairy tale.
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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 135 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
In this week’s episode, I talk about James Wood’s How Fiction Works with Vanessa Blakeslee,
Plus Amy Penne writes about how David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster and Other Essays changed her life.
TEXTS DISCUSSED
NOTES
On Tuesday, January 20th, 7 P.M., Leslie Salas will lead a workshop on imagery at the Orlando Public Library, Herndon Branch.
On Saturday, January 24th, 11 A.M., J. Bradley will host a love poem workshop at the Orlando Public Library.
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Episode 135 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
NOTES
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The Drunken Odyssey 