Yesterday’s fine blanketing of new-fallen snow is now, after hours of light freezing rain, today’s encasement in ice. I just finished chipping and shoveling a mountain of ice off our front steps.
Just as I was wearily leaning the shovel near the front door, an enormous passenger liner hove into view, moving at top speed. It struck my mountain of shoveled ice, capsized, and broke in two. The scream of wrenched metal! The shrieks and lamentations of tumbling bodies! Down, down it slid with eerie grace into the snow near where Kai peed on a bush just a few hours earlier. And yet the band played on. A pitiful few lifeboats, some only half full of wailing women and children, managed to break away and row down 41st Ave. toward the more traveled depths of Andover Street and possible rescue. The last thing I saw was Leonardo DiCaprio sinking into the lawn. I would have offered him a rope or the shovel handle or something, but just then, from the kitchen, I heard the kettle for the hot chocolate. I feel kind of bad about that, but, after all, needs must.
Now not only do I expect difficulty getting my car started tomorrow, I gotta hire somebody to clean up the lawn by hauling away all those deck chairs.
Just as I was wearily leaning the shovel near the front door, an enormous passenger liner hove into view, moving at top speed. It struck my mountain of shoveled ice, capsized, and broke in two. The scream of wrenched metal! The shrieks and lamentations of tumbling bodies! Down, down it slid with eerie grace into the snow near where Kai peed on a bush just a few hours earlier. And yet the band played on. A pitiful few lifeboats, some only half full of wailing women and children, managed to break away and row down 41st Ave. toward the more traveled depths of Andover Street and possible rescue. The last thing I saw was Leonardo DiCaprio sinking into the lawn. I would have offered him a rope or the shovel handle or something, but just then, from the kitchen, I heard the kettle for the hot chocolate. I feel kind of bad about that, but, after all, needs must.
Now not only do I expect difficulty getting my car started tomorrow, I gotta hire somebody to clean up the lawn by hauling away all those deck chairs.
... Just in case it's different in the backyard...
... Nope, about the same...
... Definitely not ham.
Not "snowpocalypse." Not "snowmaggedon." Both examples of lingua hysterica can be retired now....
... It's just snow....
... Still pretty damn cold, though.
...On the other hand...
...The neighborhood kids are out playing.
It's enough that Google's recent changes to Picasa Web Albums for a while screwed up the way I post images to my Google-driven "mostly movies" blog. But these latest undesired "enhancements" just foul up my Google searches with unasked-for social-network detritus that makes what once was an easy-like-breathing search effort into what is now something else I have to skim through a handkerchief to remove content I didn't ask for.
It's a cryin' shame. While most of my social networking is done via Facebook (privacy settings, yes, yes, I know), I liked Google+ not because it's easier or smarter (it's not), but because thus far my "circles" there were refreshingly free of the petty complaining and pity-fishing that seems to be a growing percentage of "social" content. Because that percentage is so high, its cumulative effect has been wearing on me like a cheese grater, exposing my own raw nerves underneath, thus making me less productive and less good company in my own right (hell, in my own head). So I'm making an effort to filter/reduce/avoid that percentage as much as possible in my own choices of online venues and interactions. (And yes, I acknowledge that I may be perceived to be complaining pettily myself here. I get that.) Google+ was by comparison relaxing and almost energizing in the lack of metronomic complaining and pity-fishing that scrolled before my eyes. So I'll miss that.
If Google ultimately retracts its recent changes due to public hue and cry, I may go back to Google+. But because after deleting that account I can already see big improvement in my mundane Google search results, I won't miss it very much.
So, as of today we can expect to see Peter Weller (RoboCop, Buckaroo Banzai), Noel Clark (Mickey on Doctor Who), and Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock) in Star Trek 2. Cumberbatch will be the villain. With of course Simon Pegg again as Scotty. The internet just geeksploded.
(The only reason David Tennant hasn't also been cast is because io9.com pleaded with J.J. Abrams against it to avoid a catastrophic server meltdown.)
(The only reason David Tennant hasn't also been cast is because io9.com pleaded with J.J. Abrams against it to avoid a catastrophic server meltdown.)
Bud sinks down happily on the couch, and Fran holds out the
deck to him.
FRAN
Cut.
Bud cuts a card, but doesn't look at it.
BUD
I love you, Miss Kubelik.
FRAN
(cutting a card)
Seven --
(looking at Bud's card)
-- queen.
She hands the deck to Bud.
BUD
Did you hear what I said, Miss
Kubelik? I absolutely adore you.
FRAN
(smiling)
Shut up and deal!
Bud begins to deal, never taking his eyes off her. Fran
removes her coat, starts picking up her cards and arranging
them. Bud, a look of pure joy on his face, deals -- and
deals -- and keeps dealing.
And that's about it. Story-wise.
FADE OUT.Kai says...
"Hey, everyone's home! Let's go out, chase things, run on the beach! I'm a dog on the go! There's my ball!"
"What? You don't wanna? Damn primates. That's okay, I'll wait for you."
"No, really, you go on and do your monkey things. I'm ready when you are."
"Actually, this is a comfortable spot."
"Screw it. Wake me when there's ham."
"Hey, everyone's home! Let's go out, chase things, run on the beach! I'm a dog on the go! There's my ball!"
"What? You don't wanna? Damn primates. That's okay, I'll wait for you."
"No, really, you go on and do your monkey things. I'm ready when you are."
"Actually, this is a comfortable spot."
"Screw it. Wake me when there's ham."
At my "mostly movies" blog, Open the Pod Bay Doors, HAL.
Like Peter Jackson's film versions of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, cinematic adaptations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes canon are vulnerable to an extra lens of critical analysis. The legions of fans, aficionados, devotees, and armchair scholars of a book-to-film's original source material must, like skeptical clerics studying the Shroud of Turin, hold up every foot and frame of the filmmaker's work to the light of the hallowed author's words and pages. And we all know what the first four letters of the word analysis are. Is the film version faithful to its revered source? Does "faithful" mean dogmatic word-for-word translation from one medium to another, or are creative and practical allowances excusable?
Like Tolkien's fantasy epic, Doyle's beloved Victorian detective stories evoke an idealized time and place that never existed except between our ears, so any attempt to visualize them onscreen is inevitably judged through filters found, as Holmes authority Vincent Starrett put it, "in a romantic chamber of the heart, in a nostalgic country of the mind, where it is always 1895."
In any case, here are a few that I'm pleased to have on my DVD shelves....
Like Peter Jackson's film versions of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, cinematic adaptations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes canon are vulnerable to an extra lens of critical analysis. The legions of fans, aficionados, devotees, and armchair scholars of a book-to-film's original source material must, like skeptical clerics studying the Shroud of Turin, hold up every foot and frame of the filmmaker's work to the light of the hallowed author's words and pages. And we all know what the first four letters of the word analysis are. Is the film version faithful to its revered source? Does "faithful" mean dogmatic word-for-word translation from one medium to another, or are creative and practical allowances excusable?
Like Tolkien's fantasy epic, Doyle's beloved Victorian detective stories evoke an idealized time and place that never existed except between our ears, so any attempt to visualize them onscreen is inevitably judged through filters found, as Holmes authority Vincent Starrett put it, "in a romantic chamber of the heart, in a nostalgic country of the mind, where it is always 1895."
In any case, here are a few that I'm pleased to have on my DVD shelves....
Elizabeth and I together never forget those three little words: "Jeeves and Wooster." Alternatively, "Fry and Laurie" work well too.
I make it a rule to rarely post rants. Rants are to the internet what rain is to a tin roof, and by nature I'm not a ranty guy. Yet here's an exception to the rule.
God DAMN Orson Scott Card and the "God Hates Fags" jalopy he rode in on. Not merely as a Shakespeare enthusiast, but as a reasonably decent human being, I find what he's done to Hamlet in this novella to be vile from a half-dozen vectors. Fortunately I didn't care for his work even before he proved himself to be a bigoted spite spigot, and I have a big shelf of Shakespeare fiction to serve as a palliative.
Still, to quote a bloke, what a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.
Still, to quote a bloke, what a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.
According to Google Analytics, since Aug. 29 someone (singular or plural, I don't know) from Leuven, Flemish Brabant, Belgium has returned to my site-archived Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine story "Mustard Seed" nearly 40 times, sometimes four of five times in a day, each time by Googling the phrase "thank you god for making me an instrument." My curiosity piqued, I've added a note to the story inviting them to drop me an email to say Hello.
Also, since early August there's been a dramatic upswing in people from all over Googling "Calvin and Hobbes" + astronomy/universe/stars/philosophy and thereby landing on my Astronomy page. Is there a C&H meme going around?
And over at Open the Pod Bay Doors, HAL, I posted about revisiting the Peter Cook/Dudley Moore comedy Bedazzled ahead of revisiting Faust yet again in London later this month.
Also, since early August there's been a dramatic upswing in people from all over Googling "Calvin and Hobbes" + astronomy/universe/stars/philosophy and thereby landing on my Astronomy page. Is there a C&H meme going around?
And over at Open the Pod Bay Doors, HAL, I posted about revisiting the Peter Cook/Dudley Moore comedy Bedazzled ahead of revisiting Faust yet again in London later this month.
Next month, Elizabeth and I, in the company of 
shelly_rae, will be spending a week and a half in London, house-sitting for fjm. All rather sudden and unexpected, but welcome indeed. Elizabeth has been wanting to get me out on a Big Trip since just after the events of 2009, and I've been uncharacteristically balking (stuff, things), so this was an offer too good to refuse.
On our itinerary is catching the current production of Dr. Faustus at Shakespeare's Globe. Last night we secured our tickets well in advance. (Good thing too, as those tickets are moving like a bat out of Mephistopheles' front door.) In so doing, we registered a new account at the Globe's website. There we noticed the dropdown list of titles/honorifics you can choose to apply to your name. No big deal, lots of sites have such a list. Yes, they do. Nonetheless, this was their list:
Elizabeth is now, I believe, Countess of Seattle.
Yep, that's Arthur Darvill, Doctor Who's serially deceased "Rory Williams" as Mephistopheles. And may I say, Oh hell yeah.
shelly_rae, will be spending a week and a half in London, house-sitting for fjm. All rather sudden and unexpected, but welcome indeed. Elizabeth has been wanting to get me out on a Big Trip since just after the events of 2009, and I've been uncharacteristically balking (stuff, things), so this was an offer too good to refuse.On our itinerary is catching the current production of Dr. Faustus at Shakespeare's Globe. Last night we secured our tickets well in advance. (Good thing too, as those tickets are moving like a bat out of Mephistopheles' front door.) In so doing, we registered a new account at the Globe's website. There we noticed the dropdown list of titles/honorifics you can choose to apply to your name. No big deal, lots of sites have such a list. Yes, they do. Nonetheless, this was their list:
Elizabeth is now, I believe, Countess of Seattle.
Yep, that's Arthur Darvill, Doctor Who's serially deceased "Rory Williams" as Mephistopheles. And may I say, Oh hell yeah.
First, the egoboo:
At the top of the list (by frequency) are general permutations of my name:
- mark bourne — with or without enclosing quotation marks
- mark bourne books
- mark bourne fantasy
- mark bourne seattle
- mark bourne website
- mark bourne writer
...and so on. Surprising yet gratifying how many times this has occurred.
Sometimes my fiction or other work has been searched out specifically:
- mark bourne action figures — My Realms of Fantasy story, or else a new line of toys I'm not getting royalties for.
- mark bourne boss "alternate tyrants" — Alternate Tyrants was the Resnick/Greenberg anthology with my Al Capone story, "Boss." One of my favorites, actually, in a book that received zero promotion as far as I could tell.
- mark bourne - brokedown — One of my F&SF stories.
- mark bourne brokedown summary — Just read the fucking story, person from Budapest.
- mark bourne mustard seed — Another F&SF story.
- like no business i know mark bourne — My second Chicks in Chainmail story.
- mark bourne xora — A character in my second Chicks in Chainmail story.
- mark bourne the nature of the beast , the nature of the beast by mark bourne — An Aeon magazine story.
- boss: an oral history of the rise and rise of president alphonse capone — That's the title of a fictitious Studs Terkel book within my Alternate Tyrants story "Boss." Odd that someone was looking for it specifically.
- mark bourne what dreams are made on — My Full Spectrum 5 and university lit textbook antho story.
- My Sherlock Holmes in Orbit story, "The Case of the Detective's Smile," is far and away the most popular published story I have on the site, with new pings almost daily. Search variations have included:
- detective's smile — Dozens of 'em.
- mark bourne the case of the detective's smile sherlock holmes in orbit
- the case of the detective's smile amazon
- the case of the detective's smile download
- the case of the detective's smile audiobook
- the case of the detective's smile mark bourne read online
- mark bourne short story collection — Looking for the OOP Scorpius ebook or a print collection (alas)?
- stories and mark bourne
- mark bourne star trek — My ST planetarium show?
- mark bourne ray bradbury — I directed a couple of his plays and corresponded with him back in the day.
- what are mark bourne books about? — I’d like to know the answer this person came up with.
- I've written over a half-million words for various venues on movies and such things (and have a "mostly movies" blog), so related searches on record are mark bourne film critic, mark bourne film.com, "mark bourne" dvd, and mark bourne films.
- mark bourne dr. jekyll — I sure hope this referred to the appropriate movie write-up.
Of course, there are plenty of Mark Bournes in the world, especially in the UK, so the site has received hits from strangers probably disappointed to find the wrong one:
- mark bourne architect in omaha
- markbourne comic book artist — I wish that were me.
- mark bourne medieval — not "...on your ass," alas.
- mark bourne football — So not me.
- mark bourne first christian church of merritt island — Ditto.
- mark bourne looking for love — My favorite.
Now it gets amusing. Or just weird. Several of my pro published stories are archived at the site, and Google searches that land people on them can be … varied. Here are selected keyword sets that have led wayward netizens to various parts of my site. These are verbatim and unedited:
- "and a beautiful diaphanous girl willing to be turned into a chimpanzee"
- "and thence we came forth to see again the stars" dante means what?
- "let me tell you bout momo, the missouri monster"
- "the sign said" "harlan ellison"
- a man who's licked his weight in wild caterpillers
- a piece of something that drove a woman insane literature
- action figure that look like a fly
- action figures pamela anderson — also "pamela anderson action figure" on four separate occasions.
- al capone still alive
- alien seed in her belly
- and my younger brother received pigeon shit in one of his eye when he looked up in the sky to see if it was an aircraft or something else
- baboons fucking a human being
- the beast of titan his snout sniffed the air
- big bat like things that wrap their wings around people and liquefy them movie
- bloody roosters of cantaloupe isle
- bruce willis action figure doll
- building instructions for star trek space docking station
- bulging breechcloth
- captain dichario, star trek — (The name of the main character in Star Trek: Orion Rendezvous. Named after writer and Rochester, NY pal Nick DiChario.)
- cary grant swims from one backyard pool to another to get home
- casablanca movie vs antigone by anouih — (There's a college freshman I don't envy.)
- chritian groups og the 90'simage lord i've reached the mark once more
- cosmic irony in the love song of j. alfred prufrock
- cum sprite mistress elf
- deadly figures and pamela anderson
- des belles et une bete dog sex dvd
- detached from brain .... soul adrift
- did a human being think with his mind or his heart?
- disturbed woman and a beast of nature — (This one appears twice, from separate origins and dates.)
- does anyone remember that ghost story from in a dark, dark room? it’s the story about the little girl that had a ribbon tied around her neck, she had it throughout her whole life until she grew old and sick. when she laid upon her death bed, she asked her husband to untie the ribbon.. he did, and then her head fell off.
- don't tell me the moon is shining in russian
- dream hairy palms hairy wrists
- eating whipped shit
- everything about western literature
- fat couple action figure
- fat women action figures
- fiction he like to spread eagle hairy women
- floating giggling dirigible — (My Asimov's SFM story "Being Human" has just such a character.)
- galactic wizard bus
- gardner dozois mark twain invented television
- gates mcfadden legs
- gates mcfadden leg video
- gates mcfadden long legs
- giant man huge erection grew walked towards her screamed
- going to museums is very educational
- greek mythology believes that many millions of years ago men and women were adjoined. having 4 legs and 4 arms. believing that they had become too powerful, the gods decided to cut them in half. leaving them forever to search for their soul mate.
- "he kissed her" "she slapped him" "script"
- "her skull" "her brain" wires breasts cock
- her wings made it difficult for her to get into the car
- hollywood undead im sorry no nuther web.com
- how is it like being human?
- huckleberry finn link to cosmology
- "i entered him" -butch -rooster -fair -competition -cat -dog -race
- i got us an itinerary. afraid to fly girl, it's not that scary. i want to show you around the world. i only pick a few so that makes you a special girl. its somethin about the way you smile. those dimples in your cheeks just drive me wild
- i have the cape, i make the fucking whoosh sound
- i realize that i miss being human
- i would like the joke about different parts of the body wanting to be boss of the body , but only the asshole can be the boss.
- if it wasn't me but i really ferocious beast i would just take you and they would have to lock me up forever until i died and went to hell where i would finally learn my lesson and return as me who would never dream of doing that again. its good that i wouldnt.
- is philip glass a cat person or a dog person?
- jeff goldblum flirts
- jeff goldblum intensely private person
- jeff goldblum touch nose on subway
- judy garland wore prosthetic in nostrils in wizard of oz
- jungle fuck a monster beast
- king kong blonde tied to poles
- "king kong" hanging wrists "ann darrow"
- king kong tears away fay wray's dress
- kong ann torn dress
- kubrick movies sex with many women, cuckoo clock, kubrick
- laser show slugs story faerie — (Someone seeking my first "Chicks in Chainmail" story. I hope.)
- lawyer action figure
- mark proving god's love through the solar system
- metal tight body move my tried sit up mouth device
- movie about woman visit village and beast descending from hell
- photo of chimp dressed in denham
- pics of guy goes so fast then stops his eyeballs fall out
- picture of silver slug slime left behind
- pictures of women with wrists bound by manacles and chains. — (I'm not including similar search phrases that are more disturbing than this.)
- rachel sunk back in her chair, clutching her throbbing head. she picked up the roses and inhaled deeply the sweet sent. but there was nothing sweet about this gesture.
- retro sex movies 1922
- roles and responsiblites of the bridge staff on a federation starship
- sexy adult fantasy action figures
- sexy posable pamila anderson toy action figure
- shitty action figures
- short stories on difficulties of being human
- slugs laser show planetarium story — (And another search for that "Chicks in Chainmail" story. Again: I hope.)
- small bald spot crawling on back, head, top spine
- space chimps movie flesh devouring beast picture
- spock visine whale
- sun palace has earned mark bourne — (From Bangkok. Being here in Seattle, I'd like a sun palace, yes, please.)
- tiny men being stepped on videos
- warlock summons a demon and she turns him into a girl
- wasn't jeff goldblum married a third time?
- what are the chances of our visiting mercury on a field trip without using the magic school bus?
- when da vinci saw saturn's rings — (DaVinci, Galileo, whatevs)
- where in the bible does it say that satan is wrapped in diamonds
- works of western literature, mark bourne
- yell at me. leave and come back to me. musicians, painters, poets, sculptors, actors, writers, all they who like me misplace their love, who stuff it into mirrors, shatter them into half-truths, and paint the pieces and hand them out. i am compelled by a desire for them. aren't you? legless birds. we are all just too funny, too ugly, our coughs too thick to ever be tired of. bark. bark. bark at nothing.
I only hope that these visitors enjoyed whatever landing pages my site offered them, and that otherwise they found the sites (or psychiatric care) they needed.
At Open the Pod Bay Doors, HAL:
The Trip -- Britcom angst with Steve Coogan.
Trollhunter -- Then Ole says to Sven, "I thought you said toll bridge."
The Trip -- Britcom angst with Steve Coogan.
Trollhunter -- Then Ole says to Sven, "I thought you said toll bridge."
At Open the Pod Bay Doors, HAL. here's a a full-on emotional, three-hanky crowd-pleaser that freely fires the big guns of sentiment. And I was okay with that.
Also, Shortbus (2006) — Think kink and For your consideration — "Hues of cobalt and magenta" edition.
Also, Shortbus (2006) — Think kink and For your consideration — "Hues of cobalt and magenta" edition.
One of the two films I saw at yesterday's SIFF press preview screenings. (The other, Paper Birds, I'll get to next.) I joined a nearly packed house. No surprise there — Ewan McGregor (feted this year at SIFF) and Eva Green! "Action/Adventure, Romance, SciFi and Beyond" exclaim SIFF's category tags! It's a slam-dunk!
Well, hmm.
At Open the Pod Bay Doors, HAL.
Well, hmm.
At Open the Pod Bay Doors, HAL.
Another SIFF press preview screening today, the Wes Anderson-like British comedy Submarine. The write-up is at Open the Pod Bay Doors, HAL.
ironymaiden purchases a Full Series Pass to the Seattle International Film Festival, which annually pretty much takes over cinephilic Seattle for a month or so. This year, however, unexpected family travel at the other side of the continent means she won't be able to take her SIFF vacation this year. The good side is that she has bequeathed her Full Series Pass to me. (Yes, she's that kind of awesome, and then some.) Her asking price: that I blog a bit about the films I see at SIFF. Although the festival proper doesn't begin until the 19th, advance press screenings of selected festival entries began yesterday. And since the pass allows me to attend those as well, I managed to sit in on two of yesterday's three press-preview films: Miranda July's The Future, and Reha Erdem's Turkish/Bulgarian Kosmos. I blog a bit about them at Open the Pod Bay Doors, Hal.
Thank you, Jennifer. You are indeed the embodiment of awesome.
One of my first university English professors was Francis Irby Gwaltney. "Fig" to his friends, chief among them being his army buddy and lifelong corespondent Norman Mailer. Mailer had met his fifth and final wife, Gwaltney's former student Norris Church Mailer, when she crashed a party at Gwaltney's home. Gwaltney was the inspiration for the gruff sergeant in Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, and his own novel rooted in their WWII experiences, The Day the Century Ended, was made into the so-so 1956 movie Between Heaven and Hell with Robert Wagner, Buddy Ebsen, and Broderick Crawford. At a gathering associated with Gwaltney's funeral I met Mailer, which was sort of like encountering three Harlan Ellisons packed into one large Brooks Brothers suit.
Gwaltney's bylines included TV episodes of The Fugitive and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, for which he was nominated for an Emmy. But he was best known for his novels, each to one degree or another steeped in the distinctive northern Arkansas regionalism that he had experienced growing up during the 1920s-40s in the woo-pig-soo. That regionalism included the local customs, morés, dialect, and — a key tent pole of Southern fiction — sex, typically presented with such straightforward and unobscured élan that it's like to give you a case of the fantods.
My aunt and uncle in Fayetteville, Arkansas were on "Fig" terms with Gwaltney and his wife "Ecey." Unlike my parents, my aunt and uncle were both readers and educators, my Aunt Ann being a librarian and Uncle Harry now memorialized with a school named after him. And unlike my parents' house, they had books. Shelves and stacks and tabletops of books. While visiting them as a kid of about 11 or 12, I recall reaching for Gwaltney's novels lined up next to a table lamp, then being told that they were "too old" for me to read. And it's true, they were — what did I care about a bunch of talky grownups before and during WWII? But that admonition against opening such forbidden pages (I had a fair inkling of what actually was being forbidden therein) snared me as surely as a trout on a split-shank hook. So when I was left to my own devices and no one was looking....
Oh, that sweaty southern summer carnality! The best part wasn't the fact that these conniving, hard-talking characters were "screwin'" or "doing it" — although that was pretty great as no book in my house ever had such, um, reality in it. It was the language. The sexual lexicon was like something out of William Faulkner by way of Dr. Seuss. Not just "pecker" and "pussy," which were common enough argot, but (respectively) tallywhacker and twitchet. And my favorite: gillyclicker. Clear via context, that was another term for the vagina or the clitoris, depending on how close the third-person POV was in the moment.
For spelling purists, Google is split regarding tallyw(h)acker, with "about 27,200 results" for tallywhacker and "about 26,200 results" for tallywacker.
Growing up in Arkansas decades after the settings of those novels, I'd heard "tallyw(h)acker" only rarely, and probably not at all outside the occasional ribald joke or literary/folktale commentary pointing at the word from an academic remove. It possesses a quaint, Dogpatch-like ring long since superseded by "pecker" and "cock" and all the other more familiar monikers. "Twitchet" was totally new to me, though over the years I've noticed that it's not quite as obsolete as its male counterpart.
But gillyclicker? Until recently, Gwaltney's novels were the only places I'd encountered that word, and I've never heard it spoken out loud in any context. I have no doubt that Gwaltney's use of it was authentic, genuine, true to his experience of his books' time and place. But it was a bona fide rarity, like Momo the Missouri Monster or compassionate conservatism. Because I haven't opened any of Gwaltney's novels in years (for me they're anthropologically interesting, but they don't quite make my list of crackerjack reads) I haven't bumped into a single gillyclicker (ahem) in all that time.
Until a few days ago.
I love these books. Through their beautiful, bawdy saga we come to know well roughly a dozen characters at various stages of their lives, with a walk-on character in one novel becoming the central lead in another. Harington's world-building is as rich as Tolkien's, just scaled more compactly, or as viewed from the other end of the telescope — and considerably more satisfying, by my lights.
Harington experimented uninhibitedly and accomplished so much with voice, setting, character-creation, point of view, narrative swirl, humor, and ... spirit? ... that his books are rewarding for their craft and sheer pleasurable storytelling buttressed by their humanist authenticity. One of his novels, The Cockroaches of Stay More, is an Aristophanean comic satire told from the perspective of the town's hidden subcommunity of cockroaches, and yet it's more "true" than just about any designated "fantastical fiction" novel I've read in years.
Seriously, I can't recommend Harington's books highly enough. Pretty much by osmosis he has become the #1 influence on my own nascent novel, Jasper, set in the real town of Jasper just a few miles north of "Stay More," albeit in the final months of this century.*
I'm currently reading the final Stay More novel, Enduring, published just before Harington died in 2009. It's just a coincidence that its main character is named Latha Bourne; however, at about the time Harington was spending his boyhood summers in nearby Drakes Creek, my father was growing up with the Bourne clan just one county over in Van Buren. So maybe Harington had known of them and I can therefore feel justified in imagining a sidelong connection. In any case, Latha Bourne is one of the most finely wrought characters I've ever come across. She is a woman of great and admirable agency, as they call it in lit-crit circles these days, and her long life is the watch-stem of the series. I'd be proud to be somehow related to her.
And in Enduring, there it is again: gillyclicker, used exactly the way Gwaltney did, in a setting just up the mountains and around the hollers from Gwaltney's lascivious rednecks.
Holy shit! It's not there! Right now as I sit here, when I put "gillyclicker" into Google all I get is a photo caption on some guy's MySpace page, apparently the name of some now-extinct garage band. The second hit is a new item (it didn't show up yesterday), a books.google scanned page from Arkansas, Arkansas: Writers and Writings from the Delta to the Ozarks, edited by John Caldwell Guilds — and that's a passage from Francis Gwaltney's Destiny's Chickens. **
Period. Full stop. That's the end of it. Apparently, as far as the Internet is concerned, gillyclicker might as well have never existed. Nor is it archived...
- as regional slang preserved alongside twitchet or its poetical kin in trochaic dimeter, tallyw(h)acker;
- as a relic of linguistic Americana ambered in a niche lexicon for cultural-historical study or folk language anthropology;
- even as an arcane but amusing word that deserves better than to go the way of the dodo (an arcane but amusing yet ultimately pointless bird that, by the way, has its own Wikipedia page).
I would have thought that by now every word in the English language, no matter how regional and obscure, would be "on the Internet" and eminently Googleable. I mentioned this inexplicable omission to Elizabeth, noting the aforementioned closely related slang terms that are easy to find there.
Elizabeth: "Are there twitchets on the Internet?"
[wait for it]
Me: "Honey, there are twitchets all over the Internet."
[wait for it]
Me: "Honey, there are twitchets all over the Internet."
So now I'm a man with a mission. It may not be sending a crew to Mars (
davidlevine has that one sewn up), but it's mine and it's important, dammit.I'm putting gillyclicker on the Internet, starting with this blog post.
That's Part One.
Part Two is a asking you to find a way to use gillyclicker somehow in your own writing for the Web. The only proviso is that you use it with its original meaning and in an appropriate context. Naming an alien species "the Gillyclickers from Epsilon Eridani" won't cut it. However, you're welcome to apply it to something like, say, "When she encountered the lost aliens in that cave near their broken ship stranded in the deep woods of the Missouri Ozarks, Prof. Janice Duncan felt a thrill in her gillyclicker she'd not experienced since the first night she had become acquainted with Prof. Jamison's SETI-tattooed tallywhacker."
Think of the opportunity. Think of the history. Think of the language. And for god's sake, think of the children.
* I've coined the term "coondogpunk" as a flippant elevator-pitch neologism for Ozarkian science fiction or contemporary southern spec-fic. I've tried it on a handful of readers/writers whose opinions I respect. A few love it, some others approve noncommittally, and one told me without hesitation that she no no no no hates it. Care to weigh in? "Science fiction Lake Wobegon" sort of works, despite the geographical dislocation, as it captures the tenor and texture well enough.
** John Caldwell Guilds' intro graf above the quoted passage tells me that Gwaltney "was charged with the use or prurient language and phallicism in Destiny's Chickens (1973). In the 'Acknowledgment' to Destiny's Chickens, Gwaltney defended the realism of the novel's language, describing it as 'English as it is spoken in Franklin County, Arkansas, south of the River.' " Note the use of the present tense. Was "gillyclicker" still in active use as recently as '73? Is it still in that area today? ***
*** Phallicism?
I'm not usually one to jump on the memewagon, and until today the recent Ten Things I Have Done That You Probably Haven't meme has, to me, come with a faint whiff of one-upmanship that put me off a bit. But I like how Elizabeth tweaked it into something more embracing, and I'm going to tweak it one further: Ten Random Things In My Past That Make Me Nod And Say, Yeah That Was Pretty Sweet or At Least Didn't Altogether Suck.
As with your personal list, this could be much longer. Meet me for drinks and we can exchange more with each other.
1.
Worked with Ray Bradbury on directing and producing two of his plays. Thanks to this event, my master's degree in theater led directly to a career in astronomy, where I found my professional bliss (even if ultimately temporarily).2.
Met Norman Mailer at a funeral.3.
There's a star system named for me in the Star Wars expanded universe. 4.
Wrote and saw produced scripts for Patrick Stewart and other ST:TNG cast members on starship Enterprise sets, including Brent Spiner who insisted on being in character on the Bridge as Data. Relatedly, provided cause for Jonathan Frakes, while in character as Will Riker, inserting a hearty “fuck” and breaking up laughing in the outtakes. Within all that, I wrote what may have been the last script Gene Roddenberry approved before he died; I don't think cause-and-effect was at work there. Similarly, for Discovery Communications I wrote an hour-long script for a former U.S. president. That it was George H.W. Bush for his library/museum in Texas, and that my private notions regarding his official biography and every member of his immediate family are not exactly laudatory … well, that was all beside the point professionally.
On a project similar to that one, exchanged ribald jokes with Capt. Jim Lovell, a.k.a. the guy Tom Hanks played in Apollo 13.
5.
The biggest but not necessarily most obvious one: Came to after a weeks-long coma to be told that my heart had stopped on the operating table, that my sternum had been emergency splayed open like a lobster and then left open for five days, that my lungs then tried their damnedest to kill me, and that my stay in the hospital was a long way from being over.
This one I could break down into an easy couple dozen meme-able subpoints:
- (a) Feared that I was going to live the rest of my life "locked in."
- (b) Felt a rush of genuine thrill the moment in the ICU when I regained the muscle strength to push my glasses up my nose. Related newly appreciated “awesome little reminder” moments continue to this day, including the fact that I'm sitting here now typing this.
- (c) Being told that the nursing staff had determined, based on experience, that I probably wasn't going to leave the room alive; that after I beat those odds they nicknamed me Miracle Man; then having them say "you remind us of why we got into medicine in the first place."
- (d) Having been spooned a breakfast of sausage and eggs and pancakes -- puréed to a pale, drinkable slurry, and taking joy in it being the first sensations to cross my taste buds in weeks while experiencing the wonderment that it tasted exactly like sausage and eggs and pancakes and was therefore the Best. Breakfast. Ever.
- (numerous etceteras)
Would I undo it, make it not happen, if offered the chance via, say, a genie in a bottle or an eccentric Englishmen in a TARDIS? Hell yeah I probably would, largely for Elizabeth's sake. Even so, I'd be aware that I was sacrificing some good things in the bargain. Okay, sure, it sounds like a line from a bad rom-com, but it made me a better me.
6.
Sat between David Duchovny and Kevin Smith at an invitational “friends and family” preview screening, on the Paramount lot, of Smith’s Jersey Girl. Afterward had nice separate chats with Smith and his mom. Also in the "writing about movies" dept., saw my byline pullquoted alongside Roger Ebert's at the New York Film Forum. (cf. The President's Analyst.)
7.
Had a story reprinted in a fat Norton-style college textbook anthology of world literature, positioned thusly in the TOC: 8.
9.
In a public place, accidentally bumped into a former casual lover two years after she had broken up with me for mysterious reasons. We were both on the move, but we took a few moments to catch up with each other's lives since then. While doing so, she hugged me and thanked me for having said something to her that caused her to take action to change her life in ways that led to her current far happier place. We parted ways warmly, but before I found out what that life-changing thing I had said actually was. To this day I have no idea. 10.
(and by no means last or least)
Married Elizabeth. I'm not the first bloke to be able to say this with pride and pleasure, but odds are looking good that I'll be the last. The quivering web of random happenstance, choices, forces, events, and quantum wave function collapses that converged and coalesced into this singular emergent event -- and thus the number of alternate-history parallel universes where we never even met -- still rocks me back on my heels.(and by no means last or least)
Thus concludes, with a loud slam and the sound of a key in the lock, the past year and a half.
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