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The Drunken Odyssey

~ A Podcast About the Writing Life

The Drunken Odyssey

Monthly Archives: November 2020

448: Peniel E. Joseph!

28 Saturday Nov 2020

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Episode, Miami Book Fair

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr, Peniel E. Joseph, The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, The Sword and the Shield

Episode 448 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).

Photography by Kelvin Ma.

Dr. Peniel E. Joseph and I discuss the careers of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcom X, and how examining them together reveals the complexities of both of their evolving understandings of American history and politics.

TEXT DISCUSSED

NOTES

Scribophile

  • TDO Listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
  • Register with Miami Book Fair Online in order to stream its free events, including a debut poet panel moderated by yours truly.

  • Check out my literary adventure novel, Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame.

Episode 448 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).

The Curator of Schlock #333: The Rock

27 Friday Nov 2020

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Film, The Curator of Schlock

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Tags

Nicolas Cage naked, Sean Connery

The Curator of Schlock #333 by Jeff Shuster

The Rock

Sean Connery and Nic Cage. ‘Nuff said. 

This was the worst Thanksgiving ever! I sat with Jervis, Wally, Celestial, Bud, and some guy that looked like the Amazing Kreskin. They were eating a ham dish with extra glaze. I’m not a big ham eater, and Thanksgiving is Turkey Day! Jervis then tells me that he didn’t forget about me and sets a Smart Ones turkey dinner on my plate, microwave steam flying in my face! We then sat down to watch Love Actually. Somebody shoot me!

schlock mansion

This week’s movie is 1996’s The Rock from director Michael Bay. It stars Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage—wait! What? How is this possible? Sean Connery and Nic Cage in the same movie? I don’t think modern audiences would be able to handle this much testosterone on screen. But this was made back in the 90s before the Age of the Namby Pamby that has so polluted modern entertainment. And we got Michael Bay as the director. I think I liked one of his movies.

I’m not sure how The Rock eluded me all these years. What was I so busy doing back in 1996 that I didn’t seek out this cinematic masterpiece? Maybe I had become so fixated on my newly purchased Tamagotchi that nothing else in the world could compare. I rectified that mistake this week in an effort to celebrate the life of the late Sean Connery. Does The Rock stand the test of time? Uhhhhhhhhhhh…

Our movie begins with a renegade Brigadier General named Frank Hummel (Ed Harris, naturally) leading a group of figurines marines to steal some highly classified toxic gas-armed rockets from a weapons depot. Hummel and the figurines rogue marines then set their sights on Alcatraz, the former prison turned tourist trap. They make hostages of the tourists and threaten to gas San Francisco. He informs the FBI and the Pentagon that if he doesn’t receive 100 million dollars to pay the families of soldiers that died under his command, he will send the gas straight into the heart of San Francisco and melt everyone’s face off. That’s what the gas does. It melts your face off! I wonder if John Woo saw this movie.

Enter Nicolas Cage as Special Agent Dr. Stanley Goodspeed, an expert at chemical warfare and disarming bombs. He also spends $600 on Beatles vinyl records and plays the guitar in the nude. Oh, and his pregnant girlfriend, Carla Pestalozzi (Vanessa Marcil) is pressuring him to marry her. Goodspeed is brought in to join a U.S. Navy Seal unit that will infiltrate Alcatraz Island, neutralize the traitorous soldiers, and stop the missiles from getting launched. But the team needs to know how to get inside the most impenetrable prison ever built. For that they need the help of the only man ever to escape Alcatraz, John Patrick Mason (Sean Connery).

Mason was a former SAS Captain that, according to him, took the wrap for something he didn’t do. The Director of the FBI, Jim Womack (John Spencer), offers Mason a pardon if he cooperates. Goodspeed learns that Director Womack has no intention of honoring the pardon which is why we cheer when Mason breaks Womak’s arm and leads the authorities on a high speed chase through the hills of San Francisco causing millions of dollars worth of damage in the process.

I have to say, Connery upstages Nic Cage in the weirdness territory for this movie. In one scene, he barks like a dog and in another, he laments how he should have been a poet instead of a SAS Captain. Oh, and if you ever wanted to hear Connery say the word snacks then this is the movie for you. He pronounces it shhhhhhhnacks!


Photo by Leslie Salas

Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443 and episode 444) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #98: November, November

25 Wednesday Nov 2020

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart

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Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #98: November, November

I’ve talked in the past about how much I love short blasts of story. There’s honestly little better to me than picking up a novella after a long novel. And what Matt Fraction, Elsa Charretier, Matt Hollingsworth, and Kurt Ankeny have crafted with the second volume of their graphic novella series, November, is nothing short of an absolute marvel of comic storytelling in less than eighty pages. As a creative force, these four creators have come together to tell one of the most exciting and structurally interesting stories to come out of Image.

November is three-pronged story: Dee is a woman contracted by Mister Mann to broadcast short-wave radio signals from a tenement roof; Emma-Rose found a gun in a puddle and is currently being kidnapped; Kowalski is a police dispatcher three shifts deep as bombs go off across her city. Their stories all intertwine according to what we need to know as readers. It’s one of the more clever tricks the creative team works with across these two volumes. As we’re at the second volume, we’re starting to get a larger sense of the happenings in this unnamed city. Emma-Rose was simply unlucky and kidnapped; now we see her tenacity in trying to escape as well as the past that brought her to the city. We see more of Kowalski as she attempts to solve the broader mystery of the crime scenes she has been receiving calls from. And Dee. Well, Dee is having a rough night.

What makes the second volume of November such a good piece of comics is the way in which Fraction, Charretier, Hollingsworth, and Ankeny have constructed their work.  This non-linear storytelling helps to heighten the tension and unfold the mystery slowly. We could have all three stories concurrently, but then we lose opportunities to get to know the characters better. So we have this chronological balancing act where Kowalski’s story is coming hours after Dee and Emma-Rose’s, but the emotional beat we’re given from her perspective fits right into the tension of Dee’s story afterward. It feels like it shouldn’t work and yet I could feel the tension building in my heart throughout.

What Fraction, Charretier, Hollingsworth, and Ankeny have proven with the second volume of November is that graphic novellas work. We’re seeing more and more of this thinking—single issues/volumes with a higher page count released less frequently—in other mainstream publishers, like with DC’s Black Label series, and the results are almost all universally strong. This is a good direction to go in.

Get excited. Get into the future.


Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Episode 447: Candacy Taylor!

21 Saturday Nov 2020

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Episode, History, Journalism, Memoir

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Episode 447 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).

Photo by Katrina Parks (Assertion Films).

On this week’s show, Candacy Taylor and I discuss her new book, Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America. We talk about how research can transform a project, and how our understanding of our family’s histories give us windows into understanding our nation’s history, including our own precarious, sometimes alarming moment in it. We also discuss how instrumental color-coded index cards can help us balance the complex work of presenting the long threads of history.

TEXT DISCUSSED

NOTES

How to stay organized when your project has a lot of moving parts: Candacy Taylor’s color-coded index cards for Overground Railroad.


Scribophile

  • TDO Listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
  • Register with Miami Book Fair Online in order to stream its free events, including a debut poet panel moderated by yours truly.

  • Check out my literary adventure novel, Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame.

Episode 447 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).

The Curator of Schlock #332: The Black Cauldron

20 Friday Nov 2020

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in animation, Disney, Fantasy, Film, The Curator of Schlock

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Lloyd Alexander, Richard Rich., Ted Berman, The Black Cauldron, The Chronicles of Prydain, Walt Disney Studios

The Curator of Schlock #332 by Jeff Shuster

The Black Cauldron

I liked it!

Wally has kept me locked in my bedroom as I churn out pages for a spec script that reads like My Dinner With Andre, but with vampires.

schlock mansion

Wally figures once we pique the interest of Hollywood execs, he can pressure them to choose him as director. Of course, he’ll insist on directing the scenes at night. I keep trying to explain to him that nobody buys spec scripts anymore!

Tonight’s movie is 1985’s The Black Cauldron from directors Ted Berman and Richard Rich. This Walt Disney production with a sordid reputation is is based on The Chronicles of Prydain series of children’s fantasy novels written between 1964 and 1968 by Lloyd Alexander. The House of Mouse snatched up the film rights in 1971, but the film suffered a deeply troubled production.

I remember The Black Cauldron being hyped by Disney back in 1985 along with the movie Return to Oz (another problem release for the studio). That summer, my mother took me to see The Black Cauldron and I remember liking it at the time. I didn’t love it, but I liked it. The estimated budget was around 44 million, but the box office only took in 21.3 million.

This was my first introduction to a box office bomb. The news media tore into it, calling it one of the worst movies of the year. The Black Cauldron had a eputation of being too dark and scary for children (the same could be said for many children’s movies from the 80s). I also remember fans of Lloyd Alexander’s work dismissing the film as it deviated quite a bit from the source material.

The Black Cauldron faded from my mind. I never got the chance to re-watch it during my childhood. The movie became one of these forbidden Disney movies like The Song of the South. The Black Cauldron hadn’t gotten a VHS release nor was it aired on The Disney Channel.

Whenever someone tells you that you can’t watch a movie, you want to watch it all the more.

The Black Cauldron had received a European home video release and I managed to get my hands on a crummy bootleg while studying film at community college. Disney eventually relented and gave The Black Cauldron a home video release in the late 90s. I eagerly purchased a copy, but again the quality wasn’t ideal. Disney must have used the cheapest VHS tapes they could find and the movie was pan & scan which is a problem for movies shot for widescreen. Years later, Disney would begrudgingly release a decent print of it on DVD (a Blu-ray has yet to be released), and I believe you can catch it on Disney+.

Is The Black Cauldron worth your time? Shot on 70mm, it is one of the most gorgeous animated features I’ve ever seen. John Hurt voices The Horned King, a skeletal menace WHO has to be the scariest Disney villain I’ve ever laid eyes on. Elmer Bernstein provides a score that is both haunting and enchanting. Is the movie good? Yes, and good is good enough for your curator of schlock.


Photo by Leslie Salas

Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443 and episode 444) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #97: Do You Have a Moment to Talk About Robots?

18 Wednesday Nov 2020

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Blog Post

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Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #97 by Drew Barth

Do You Have a Moment to Talk About Robots?

From Gundam to Pacific Rim to Big O, I’m likely to be all in if there’s a robot bigger than most buildings stomping around somewhere. The newest series from Vault Comics, Alex Paknadel and John Lê’s Giga, gives me robots as big as buildings because they have become actual buildings. From cathedrals to apartments, the giant robots of old have opened themselves up to become the habitats for the people left behind after their war had devastated the planet.

Giga, however, isn’t the story of the giant robots and their fights—it’s the story of the people left behind inside the giant robots and their fights. As a result of the battles the Giga had commenced years prior, they have been deified. These giant robots have been opened up, studied, and turned into grand cathedrals to their power as well as buildings for everyday use. Baba Yaga is somewhere furious her house only has chicken legs instead of pneumatic skyscrapers. And it’s in these grand cathedrals and buildings that we meet our main character, Evan Calhoun. Evan is a person who uses a wheelchair and used to be a part of these cathedrals until being cast out for unknown reasons. When his story begins, he’s struggling. Barely able to scrape together enough scrap for rations, him and his robot, Laurel, enter a Giga beyond their city limits and directly into peril.

Vault Comics excels at first issues. Giga continues that trend. A first issue is one of the hardest things to write in comics—the balance of world-building, introducing characters and tone, and establishing a story in roughly twenty something pages is a feat. Paknadel and Lê manage this balancing act due in part to their method of storytelling in this issue. We learn a small amount of Evan’s past and his connection to the religion around the Giga, but an explosion occurs and we hard cut to thirteen years later where he’s struggling to survive. We’re given our world in just a couple pages—from the attitude of the world to the Giga to the general struggle of living in a world that exists in the shadow of giant robots.

Giga satiates my need for giant robot stories by giving me a giant robot story I’ve never seen before: one where the giant robots haven’t even moved. I’ve seen robots fight, I’ve seen them brood, I’ve seen them choke slam the living embodiment of entropy, but I’ve never seen one stop and become a part of the setting. What Gigadoes so well throughout its first issue is it makes you think of these behemoth machines as immovable—they’re just as much a part of the background as a skyscraper in Metropolis—and focus in on the people who have to live around them. It feels like the kind of thing Paknadel and Lê can set up just long enough before one of the Giga begins to move.

Get excited. Get huge.


Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

The Diaries of a Sozzled Scribbler #21

16 Monday Nov 2020

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Sozzled Scribbler

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The Diaries of Saint Sozzled Scribbler #21

Transcribed by DMETRI KAKMI

16 November 2020

In an exclusive interview with CNN’s silver-haired cutie-pie Anderson Cooper, Saint Sozzled Scribbler talks in a sonorous voice through a burning bush about Donald Trump.

AC: As a saint of the Catholic Church, how do you feel about the Trump defeat in the recent elections?

SSS: I’m disappointed, oh my child.

AC: Why?

SSS: I’d hate to see Melanoma homeless and sleeping under a bridge with her brood of starving children.

AC: I hardly think they’ll be homeless. Donald Trump is a millionaire.

SSS: That’s where you’re mistaken, dear boy.

AC: I am?

SSS: It’s a front. The Trumps are prostitute—I mean destitute—poorer than the poorest money lender in the Temple. Oh, when I think of that sweet dear boy Barlow Trump—

AC: You mean Barron Trump, of course.

SSS: Baron who?

AC: Barron Trump.

SSS: Yes, but what’s he baron of, my boy? What’s he baron of? You must be a baron of something, like my dear friend the Baron of Zouche, or the Baron de Strabolgi and let’s not forget Le Baron Etrange. Your dear Mama knew him you know.

AC: Really?

SSS: No, not really. I just mentioned her to open fresh wounds. Did she jump out of a window like your brother?

AC: You go too far.

SSS: Toughen up, fag face. You’ll never survive the apocalypse.

AC: There’s going to be an apocalypse?

SSS: Yes, as a saint of the Holy Catholic Church I have the power to start the end of world.

AC: Oh my God.

SSS: He won’t help you. You’re gay. And we all know what God thinks of buggers. Now where was I? Oh, yes, dear, sweet Balderick Trump. If he’s not a real baron I’m afraid his mama and papa will have to sell him to a boy bar in Budapest to barter his bum in a backroom. You don’t want him, by any chance?

AC: No.

SSS: He could clean your penthouse naked.

AC: I have a child. I don’t want another.

SSS: How did you manage that if you’re into peccatum Sodomiticum?

AC: Surrogacy.

SSS: Rich gay man uses poor woman as incubator. Interesting…

AC: What’s that supposed to mean?

SSS: Nothing. Just saying…

AC: Yeah, well, don’t.

SSS: Oh, when I think of my poor dear Ivanka Trump, penniless, lacking in the essentials of maquillage. She will look a fright. She’s a real intellectual, you know, especially when she’s had a few tequilas. She has a wonderful saying about tequilas.

AC: I’m sure you will tell me what it is.

SSS: I like to have a tequila, two at the very most. After three I’m under the table, after four I’m under my host.

AC: Dorothy Parker said that about martinis.

SSS: I didn’t say Ivanka is original. I just said she’s smart. I suppose she’ll have to go back to selling her kidneys to the Russians.

AC: Ivanka sold her kidneys to Russia?

SSS: Sure, thankfully she has an inexhaustible supply.

AC: How come Ivanka Trump has an inexhaustible supply of kidneys?

SSS: Harvests them from Republican voters when they pass out from too much banality after her father’s rallies, don’t you know. Nothing quite like skimming the cream from the milk pail, aye?

AC: Are you pulling my leg?

SSS: I swear to you on the Virgin Mary’s beard, it’s all true. She’s trans, you know.

AC: Ivanka is trans?

SSS: No, you idiot. Mary is trans.

AC: Mary, Jesus’ mother, is trans?

SSS: One of the first. Had the full operation in old Judean stable. But things didn’t quite work out internally, so to speak. That’s why it was an immaculate conception. Angels intervened because Joseph couldn’t do anything about it. Est voila, la Sainte Vierge.

AC: Surely you jest.

SSS: Not at all. Now that I’m a saint of the highest order I have access to the Apocrypha, the secret or secrets, of the Holy Family. They make the Carringtons in Dynasty look like The Brady Bunch.

AC: We’re getting off the topic.

SSS: Suit yourself, pretty boy.

AC: How can Donald Trump to be broke? He’s worth 2.5 billion. He owns property around the world.

SSS: He doesn’t. It’s mine.

AC: You own the Trump Tower and Mar-a-Lago, and—?

SSS: Yes, but I had to pretend to get rid of them when I was beatified. Vows of poverty and all that…

AC: But you didn’t really sell.

SSS: Of course not. I’m not dumb.

AC: What arrangements did you make with Trump?

SSS: The Trumps stay in my luxury homes as a tax dodge. They don’t own a thing. Except for the silverware Melanoma stole from the White House, of course. I suppose she’ll have to go back to pole dancing in a Slovenian sausage shop. Oh, my poor gorgeous Melanoma. (Sobs volubly.) How will she cope? I will send thoughts and prayers, and we all know how much they help.

AC: Why can’t they go back to living in your homes?

SSS: I kicked them out.

AC: Why?

SSS: Because they disgraced themselves before the entire world. No one will have a bar of them. Not even that lovely sane Rudy Giuliani. They are a laughing stock, worse than the monster in Tobe Hooper’s Funhouse.

AC: What’s next for the Trumps?

SSS: I see a triumphant Trump return in a reality TV show about an ex-president who runs a crematorium, an ex first lady finding redemption in a nursery, and their capricious children who dally in a dildo shop. It has smash hit written all over it.

À bientôt, mes amies.


The Sozzled Scribblerwas born in the shadow of the Erechtheion in Athens, Greece, to an Egyptian street walker and a Greek bear wrestler. He is currently stateless and lives on gin and cigarettes.

Dmetri Kakmiis the author of Mother Land (shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards in Australia), and the editor of When We Were Young. His latest book is The Door and Other Uncanny Tales. He does not endorse the Sozzled Scribbler’s views.

The Curator of Schlock #331: Sword of the Valiant

15 Sunday Nov 2020

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

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The Curator of Schlock #331 by Jeff Shuster

Sword of the Valiant

Now in widescreen!

Okay. Here’s a summary of my life in the last couple of months. I moved into an old southern manor house somewhere on the outskirts of the Florida Everglades. I had a servant named Jervis who cooked me fine food, but it turns out he just fattening me up for the kill. You see, I’m living in a house full of vampires, but they’re not saying they’re vampires, but they are vampires all the same. One is an hippie girl named Celestial, one is a biker guy named Bud, and the third is southern gentleman named Wallace Jameson Volkasin VIII (we call him Wally for short). I’d be a dead man or one of the undead, but Wally has employed my writerly skills to write a full screenplay for a treatment of what reads like a knockoff My Dinner With Andre. It’s been done, Wally. Don’t eat me!

While I take a break from this surefire Oscar contender, I want to discuss 1984’s Sword of the Valiant: The Legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (that’s a mouthful) from director Stephen Weeks. This was a Saturday afternoon staple of my childhood, kind of a low budget Excalibur, but it’s stuck with me all these years. A recent Blu-ray release has allowed me to revisit this movie, uncut and with no commercials. The producer credits of Golan and Globus may scare you off, but I urge you stick it out and enjoy this slice of 1980s sword and sorcery. The movie is inspired by the famous Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that many of us English majors had to read at some point in our academic career.

The movie begins with an unspecified king (Trevor Howard) rebuking his court of knights at Christmastime. He’s angry that none of them have great knightly deeds to boast about. There will be no Yuletide feast until the king has some proof that “knightliness still lives within these walls.” At that moment, the front door of the castle bursts open and in comes the Green Knight (Sean Connery) on horseback. The Green Knight wants to play a game. He asks that any one of the knights in the king’s court take up his axe and chop his head off with one blow. The Green Knight’s only demand is that after the blow is struck that he has the right return the blow in the same manner.

Not one of the knights comes forward. This angers the king and he decides to take the task upon himself until a humble squire named Gawain (Miles O’Keeffe) asks the honor of cutting the Green Knight’s head off. The king knights the young squire before he takes up the axe. Sir Gawain succeeds in severing the Green Knight’s head from his body, but that doesn’t stop the Green Knight from picking his head up and reattaching it to his neck. The Green Knight is about to return the blow, but refrains, offering Gawain a year’s grace before he returns the blow. The Green Knight even offers Sir Gawain the chance to escape his fate if he can solve a riddle by year’s end.

The rest of the movie centers around Sir Gawain’s many adventures on his quest to solve the Green Knight’s riddle. He encounters a black knight, a beautiful maiden, a wicked sorceress, and even manages to assemble his own band of merry men. For me, one of the highlights is a vile villain named Oswald played by Ronald Lacey. It was on this rewatch that I realized Ronald Lacey had also played the awful Gestapo agent Arnold Toht in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Other highlights include Peter Cushing as the cunning Seneschal and John Rhys-Davies as the warmongering Baron Fortinbras. I’ve always liked this movie. Maybe it’s not on the same level as Conan the Barbarian or Excalibur, but it does the job. Maybe I’m still a romantic when it comes to brave knights in shining armor and beautiful maidens in distress.

In Memoriam

Sir Thomas Sean Connery

I received my Blu-ray of Sword of the Valiant in the mail on October 31st, the same day that Sean Connery left this world. You’ll always be one of the legends of the silver screen. You made James Bond a household name. Rest in peace.


Photo by Leslie Salas.

Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443 and episode 444) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.

Episode 446: Phil Klay!

14 Saturday Nov 2020

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Craft of Fiction Writing, Episode, War

≈ Leave a comment

Episode 446 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).

Photo by Hannah Dunphy.

On this week’s show, fiction writer and veteran Phil Klay and I discuss finding the right form for a novel, war literature, and winning the National Book Award.

TEXTS DISCUSSED

NOTES

Scribophile

  • TDO Listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
  • Starting on Nov 15, register with Miami Book Fair Online in order to stream its free events, including a debut poet panel moderated by yours truly.

  • Check out my literary adventure novel, Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame.

Episode 446 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).

Aesthetic Drift #26: Dr. Paglia Probes

12 Thursday Nov 2020

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Aesthetic Drift

≈ Leave a comment

Dr. Paglia Probes — Pop, the Net and Alfred Hitchcock

by DMETRI KAKMI

In 1998 I was writing for SevenMag—a print and online publication dedicated to the singer Prince, of all things. One day the editor Vicki Shuttleworth asked who I wanted to interview. Camille Paglia was my immediate response. The feminist firebrand had burst onto the scene short of a decade earlier with her mammoth bestseller Sexual Personaeand I counted her among my idols. Moreover, her new book about Hitchcock’s The Birds had just been released, and that seemed as good a reason to talk to her as any.

Little over a month later, after to-ing and fro-ing with Paglia’s agent and time differences between Australia and North America, I stood with phone in trembling hand and nervously dialled Paglia’s home number in Philadelphia. They say you shouldn’t meet people you admire, and I was about to do just that. Would I regret it? No, I did not.

Among the first words Miss Motormouth said was, ‘I haven’t much time. I have to be at work in half an hour.’ And hour and a half later she was still talking full tilt before suddenly going, ‘Oh my goodness, look at the time. I gotta go,’ before slamming down the phone, leaving me stunned and feeling thoroughly pleased with what I had caught on tape.

SevenMag went offline several years ago, and it seems a shame this interview is no longer available for the curious reader. We present it here for your ardent pleasure.

Dmetri Kakmi, 3 July 2020


‘I talk very fast, I’m sure you’ll get enough material,’ was one of the first things Professor Camille Paglia said to me when I rang her Philadelphia home for this interview. I laughed and said, ‘Yes, I know.’But I knew nothing.

The essence of Camille Paglia is in her rapid-fire, high-velocity speech, with its guffaws, screams, high, derisive laughter, startling asides, sudden changes of thought in the middle of a sentence, a word even, and her ability to circumnavigate to her original thesis, twenty minutes later, seemingly without drawing a single breath. Her scope of reference is so panoramic, that a simple question propelled us into a galaxy of references to music, film, classical art, television shows, politics and education. A self-proclaimed television junkie and ‘rock ‘n’ roll intellectual’, she is the embodiment of the age of ‘information overload’ on two legs, and the owner of the sexiest, brassiest voice I’ve heard in many an age. She was a dazzling maw of words and ideas before which I was a mere prompter, quickly flinging in morsels to tempt her voracious intellect.

In this transcript of the interview she talks about pop culture, the Net, and her book on Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’.

Pop Culture

Dmetri Kakmi: Since you first appeared on the cultural scene, you’ve slowly been absorbed into pop culture. That’s rare for an academic. First of all, how did this happen and what are your feelings about it?

Camille Paglia: Well, the reason it happened is because I’m a total product of the 1960s generation. Pop culture, pop art, was the sensibility that burst onto the scene at that time … What has carried my work is that I’m not coming at popular culture from the point of view of those sterile European styles — the Frankfurt school or poststructuralism, which permeates postmodernism. I’m not looking at it from the superior vantage point of seeing what’s wrong with it — that it’s a product of some sort of evil, corrupt capitalist plot — all that kind of moralistic language that impugns popular culture. I’m coming from the point of view of an aficionado, of a fan, okay? That’s why I’m very angry, VERY angry as I now see all of these academics in the Ivy League in America all of a sudden — now that poststructuralism is disintegrating beneath their feet — okay, all of a sudden desperately trying to glom onto popular culture, knowing nothing about it, because you have to have lived with it for as many years as I have to understand it. All of a sudden now they’re running desperately after it, and they’re putting in their books picture of Michael Jackson … trying to catch up and they don’t know what they’re doing.

DK: They’re using the wrong language when they analyse pop culture, aren’t they?

CP: Absolutely! Completely, but not only that, I mean, in order to write about popular culture you must write about it with as great a sympathy, and as great an emotion as you would if you were studying any kind of a foreign culture. And so that the arrogance and the exploitation with which these academics, who are my age, all right, who are trying now to gain cache by sprinkling their work with icons from popular culture. I just can’t tell you how much I’m at war with this gross exploitation, that’s everywhere now. You know, the kind of ironic quotation of popular culture imagery … and you like have this detached irony and present everything in this kind of disconnected way with a kind of whimsical tone. I’m an absolute devotee of popular culture. I see it from the point of view of the mass audience. I don’t look down on it from some ivory tower. And this is what gives my work on popular culture the kind of resonance that people find with it.

DK: Are you concerned that young people are attaching themselves to pop culture and forgetting, or not even being aware of, what Harold Bloom would call the Western Canon of literature and art?

CP: I can see a problem with it, if indeed your whole world is nothing but popular culture, which I fear is so much the case for American youth these days.  I’m very concerned about this because what, I think, gives my work power is that I’ve had a very conventional and conservative education in the old style public school … and then a very excellent college education as well. So this gives me the base of knowledge, of history, of literature and of art to be able to play with popular culture. Everything is the media here. We are just inundated with television. Television really is contemporary reality in America, which I like on one level. On the other hand, I can see the effects on the young that have had an appalling, bad education. They have no sense of history, they have no sense of geography. All they know is pop.

DK: Do you see any dangers with this kind of ahistoricism?

CP: Not only am I worried about the loss of contact with and familiarity with the great art of the past, I’m even more worried by the loss of a sense of time and of history, because I feel that a country, a culture fed only on popular culture, where everything is hallucinatory, that that is very ripe for fascism. The idea that fascists will know … we saw Hitler immediately giving Leni Reifenstahl a much bigger budget than she would have got in Hollywood as a woman. All it takes is a severe climatological shift of some sort, whether through an asteroid hitting the earth or through some change in the weather, which causes an economic destabilisation in the world. So I’m very worried that the entire mechanism of the Internet can be taken over, in a time when the people want a strong man, because that’s the thing. People don’t realise that fascism is a permanent threat, all you need is a breakdown of the economy and a breakdown of law and order … and so always there’s the danger of the people longing for a strong man to come, as they did for Hitler following the economic collapse in Germany, following World War 1.

The Net

DK: You owe some of your success and the spread of your ideas to the Internet. Do you think we’re using the Internet to its fullest capacity, or is it early days yet?

CP: This is so right because before people even knew the Internet, there was an underground thing going on, unbeknownst to me, in 1990-91, spreading my ideas underneath the radar screen, as it were, of the academic establishment and the major media establishment in America at the time. My picture was not on my first book [‘Sexual Personae’] and there was no publicity budget, but that book mysteriously sold and sold and sold. We couldn’t figure out what was selling it, okay? Well, soon I found out what it was.

I had been invited to give this lecture [MIT, 1991], because I had written this expose called ‘Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders’. A man came up to me and said, ‘Do you realise your ideas are all over the Well?’ And I said: ‘What is the Well?’and he said, ‘You don’t know what the Well is? Okay, we’ll send something to your university about it.’ And so one week later, arrived a big package with a print out, this long print out and I went around the office, ‘Look at this, look at this,’ I said to everyone. ‘What the heck is it? Someone in Boston is talking with someone in Tennessee who’s talking with someone in California and they’re all talking about me. What is this?’ Well, of course, the Well was one of the first examples of the Internet, okay. So, you see, I owe much to the Internet, now that I’m part of the Internet, also because my ideas are spread worldwide, from being on Salon magazine on the Internet.

DK: What is the future of the Internet?

CP:  Well I consider myself the first Internet intellectual, okay? I consider myself the first rock ‘n’ roll intellectual, in that rock ‘n’ roll and television were the great, the original, art forms of my generation. However, I think the Internet is the medium of the young generation that is coming along. I feel that there is as great a gap and a chasm between my generation and these young people as there is, between me and, let’s say, Harold Bloom, my mentor, who has never been touched by television or rock ‘n’roll. And I mean he doesn’t view much television, which is amazing because television as a medium took over American culture in the 1950s, okay, so we’re talking about the major literary critic of the generation before me, Harold Bloom — here he is in the 1990s, okay, untouched by television and is still considering rock ‘n’ roll a barbaric form. It’s hard for me to understand that there are critics in this world, serious intellectuals, all right, who have not been touched in any way by rock ‘n’ roll, which has reformed my brain.

Similarly, just as there is a gap … between me and Harold Bloom, there is just such a chasm between me and the younger people coming along. Yes, I’m on the Internet, but my brain has not been formed  by it in the way these young people’s brains have been formed by computers. These young people have had computers in their home already, okay, been fiddling around with it, and they feel at home with a computer. Now I use it, and it was easy for me to switch over because I was so used to looking at television, so to go from television to the computer screen is easy for me, okay. I enjoy it. However, what made it possible for me to become involved in the Internet was when all of sudden the Internet went from the DOS format into these beautiful graphics, where everything is like flashing graphics and colours and all these things, so I feel like I’m watching TV, okay.

I consider the logic with which the computer is constructed is quite different from the way I was trained. It’s not in the old Apollonian style … so I feel that the brain of the young people — we will not understand that for thirty years, not for forty years, not until they grow up and the works that they produce in art and literature and so on, will come out in a whole other way. So I think it is the future, I have great hopes for it in terms of international understanding, you know. To me it’s the ‘Star Trek’ future. Look, ‘Star Trek’ was prophesying, okay, [it] is the visionary thing of the future, when we move into outer space. This is the way I’m convinced that people on the earth will be communicating with people in other galaxies and so on.

Hitchcock and ‘The Birds’

DK: Hitchcock is the master of the cinematic narrative. He conveys a world of meaning purely through visuals, without relying on dialogue. He once said, ‘What appeals to the eye is universal; what appeals to the ear is local.’This can be said of your writing also.

CP: As I was doing this project on ‘The Birds’, for the British Film Institute, I found wonderful quotes from him, similar to what you just quoted, and they’re in my little book, where he says things like: ‘I don’t read novels. I’m a purely visual person.’ He has to see everything in visual terms. I realised that what comes from Hitchcock is that a lot is in mime, a lot is in choreography, and in body language, in facial expressions and so on. And I realised that this is something that he had from earliest years, Hitchcock’s silent films from the late 1920s and his obscure films from the early 1930s.

There’s a lot of wonderful writing on Hitchcock, but I have the advantage now of the VCR, so I’m able to take my print of ‘The Birds’, and I’m able to go over it in a way that no former writer on ‘The Birds’ has been able to do. I’m able to go over that film again and again and again and stop it, slow it, go over things, so I’m able to discover it now and in my little book on ‘The Birds’ now I’m able to find things in it that no one has noticed, that Hitchcock put in there. No one has seen them. They go by so fast when you’re watching the thing in the theatre, you know.

And everybody knows, of course, it’s been established for decades, that Hitchcock had everything planned ahead of time, everything on storyboards, everything in his mind. He’d cut the film already in his head and therefore often he was bored on the set because he was just having to go through what he had already imagined. He said again and again how his favourite part of movie-making was the six-month or the year-long period ahead of time, just sitting, drinking his brandy, in his room just refining, discussing things with the writers and discussing things with the art direction and so on.

At any rate, in ‘The Birds’, there is so much in there, little details that only when you are able to freeze frame it, as you can with a VCR, can you appreciate what he is doing — his sense of humour!  I’m hailing him in my little book as the heir of the great British Romantic, Coleridge, the vision of nature as savage. He’s got a vision of [nature] that’s so vast and also his sense of style, his sense of fashion, that’s another thing which conventional and traditional feminism dismissed. Fashion, fashion industry, fashion magazines all corrupted, capitalist conspiracy, all sexist. And I hate that because I come at these things almost from a gay male point of view, which sees fashion as a great art form. So that one thing I also discovered in my research for this book on ‘The Birds’ is that I’d never realised the extent to which Hitchcock not only chose the costumes of his leading ladies, he went shopping with them! He actually went, for example, with Eva Marie Saint, I discovered, to find her fashions for ‘North By North West’. He went with her to Bergdoff’s and sat there and chose the clothing, he chose all the clothing for Tippi Hedren in ‘The Birds’, every single little thing … and Edith Head, the great designer, I found quotes from her which, you know, she is credited with the designs, but she said everything he chose and he told her what to design and so on. So these are the sorts of things, I never realised, this was part of what was attracting me to Hitchcock all along.

At any rate, I consider this little book on ‘The Birds’ the culmination of my career because to me it’s such an honour, the greatest honour I can think of to have the British Film Institute to ask me to write on ‘The Birds’, which is one of the great (obviously it was made in America) but Hitchcock is obviously a great British genius — his early career was in England. So he is one of the leading lights of modern British art and I just feel like everything I’ve ever learned about the history of art, everything is there, in my ability to read images and what body language means, and all these things which people have acknowledge.

DK: Two words: Tippi Hedren.

CP: Tippi Hedren has never got one good word anywhere in film criticism. The mass audience loved this movie, they liked Tippi Hedren, but the critics have been snobbish about her from the very start because they viewed as well ‘She’s not Grace Kelly,’ ‘Oh, she’s not Ingrid Bergman,’ ‘She’s not Eva Marie Saint.’ But Tippi Hedren has always suffered from the fact, ‘Marnie’ also was a flop, only the French critics said a good word about ‘Marnie’ all those years. So anyway, what I’m really loving about having this opportunity is that I’m lauding, Tippi Hedren’s performance, as well as Suzanne Pleshette’s performance, which has been very much ignored in ‘The Birds’. People have talked about the technical aspects but I didn’t find in my research for this book one single positive remark about Tippi Hedren anywhere in any in writing on ‘The Birds’ or ‘Marnie’. In fact, it’s fashionable to demean her and to insult her… So I think it’s about time that people realise she is the ultimate Hitchcock heroine.

DK: ‘The Birds’ was not popular with critics. Pauline Kael, for example, disliked it. Yet it’s reputation has grown over the years. What is the mystique of ‘The Birds’?

CP: Well over time, I realised that it had such an enormous impact on me, and that you can feel the influence of this film in my work, in ‘Sexual Personae’, for example, and that is this view of nature as this enormous unknowable force, much greater than human life, the power of nature, so much greater than that of civilisation, and that if nature turned on humanity it could crush everything to egg shells. This is why I despise poststructuralism so much, the school of Foucault, which denies nature exists, which edits nature out of its point of view, and I look at nature from the point of view of a pagan. I have a pre-Christian attitude towards nature. I don’t see any god above nature. I see nature as being the most powerful thing in all of human life and in the universe.

So ‘The Birds’ sees that, and not only that, I realised the fashion of it, the body language of it influenced me enormously.  Gay men, drag queens often love that aspect of Tippi Hedren, she’s almost a kind of a drag. As it turned out she was a model and that was how Hitchcock discovered her, seeing her in a television commercial, so that I emphasise this. So that the very things that caused the critics to dismiss Tippi Hedren, her modelling quality, okay, is in fact what attracts me to her performance from the start.

DK: Did The Birds influence your work overall?

CP: I reveal in this book, that there are things in [‘The Birds’] which influence my theory of civilisation. For example, the great ‘jungle gym sequence’ where Tippi Hedren is sitting there smoking, smoking outside the school house while the crows are landing on the jungle gym, okay. Well that image of the jungle gym stayed with me for a very long time, and I say in this book that my theory of Apollonian form of structure, of civilisation, is coming from that jungle gym, I realise. Hitchcock himself understood, that’s why he had that jungle gym installed there on those grounds. There was no jungle gym, there was no playground at that school, at that authentic school house in the countryside, near Bodega Bay. That’s an authentic building, the school house, but he had the jungle gym constructed, that whole thing was in his mind. And so I don’t need Foucault to tell me about power, I don’t need him because I had Hitchcock, and any one with a brain in their head and part of popular culture would have been introduced to all of these things that are in poststructuralism — in fact every single thing that is in poststructuralism is in some way in the great foreign films. It’s in ‘Last Year at Marienbad’ all those theories about language and reality and time and relativity, it’s all there.

And the other thing is, I treat Hitchcock as a great surrealist. In my research, I found that indeed he was, as I was so glad to find, he acknowledged his influence by the great surrealist films of Bunuel and‘Un Chien Andalou’and Dali, and so I treat ‘The Birds’ as a great work of Surrealism — capital S Surrealism. I have a great instinct for surrealism. I have interpreted, for example, Rod Serling, the creator of ‘The Twilight Zone’, as a great Surrealist. I’m a Surrealist and I feel that Hitchcock has to be seen not as an entertainer but as the person …

DK: He’s a first rate artist.

CP: Well okay, absolutely, but the thing is in feminism in the last 20 years he has been dismissed as a misogynist. You have to realise how low his reputation is right now among feminists. It is an atrocity, it is an atrocity the way that he has been demeaned and defamed by these theorists among feminists. Feminist theory is universally condemning him, there’s hardly a woman who defends Hitchcock do you realise, coming out in the last 20 years. It’s outrageous! So that’s another thing I’m doing here, I’m saying feminism has been totally wrong with this. Hitchcock revered women, he worshipped women, he felt women were like goddesses and so on. And my God, Hitchcock is one of the major, major artists of the 20th century, in any field, to me, he’s one of the great geniuses of the 20th century and it is a shocking situation, indeed. We have young women being taught not to look at Picasso and not to look at Hitchcock. It’s ridiculous!

DK: Let’s talk cinematic violence. You’ve said that eruptions of violence in art show the buried paganism in Western culture, yet you abhor extreme violence in films. Are you squeamish or do you deplore it for aesthetic reasons?

CP: I think it is for aesthetic reasons. Take a film like ‘The Hunger’, for example, the vampire film with Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon. I feel that aesthetic, artistic errors are made there, that there is too much bloodshed and it makes one queasy. Whereas Hitchcock was a master of violence, he knew exactly how to present it in aesthetic terms so that there’s a kind of continuity of response, you respond to the beauty of him and you respond to the violence in him. That’s, of course, why the shower sequence is so famous. Because he goes out of his way, you never actually see the knife entering Janet Leigh’s body, of course, it’s all very distanced because it’s black and white film. You have a sense of the horror of it. The blood being washed down the drain, but again you don’t see the red of the blood it’s all  black and white. It’s all very much distanced.  And the same thing again in the scenes of the attacks of the birds.

You know the Greeks, in great tragedies, had a rule which is that you would narrate violence in messengers’ speeches and then you wouldn’t show it. It was considered vulgar, an artistic error to show it, so you would suddenly have the doors swing open at the very end and you would see a corpse laid out. Or at the end of Ibsen’s ‘Hedda Gabler’, for example, you would  hear her — ‘boom’ the gun goes off. You hear her blowing her brains out, you don’t see it. And I’m wondering to what extent have we gone too far when things are too much shown? Do we lose that kind of contemplative, metaphysical quality that art demands. I think that it’s a very, very fine line one has to tread there. Hellenistic art would say show violence, show bruising, show barbarism, show Laocoon being attacked by serpents. Whereas you would never see that in High Classic Greek art, where everything would be very much more removed and after the fact. It may be that we’re in a more Hellenistic period, which demands a bit more wallowing, let’s say, in blood and guts of violence. But I think it’s something an artist has to ask himself, or herself. How far should you go before you lose the artistic detachment that’s demanded … or think of all the great art that’s lasted.

‘The Birds’, by Camille Paglia, is released through the British Film Institute.

Originally published in Sevenmag, June, 1998.


Dmetri Kakmi is a writer and editor. His first book, Mother Land, was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards in Australia. His newest book is The Door and Other Uncanny Tales.

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