Finding Nemo (2003)

For once the celebrity voice talent in a modern animated feature—Albert Brooks, Ellen DeGeneres, Willem Dafoe, Allison Janney, some others—worked pretty well for me in Finding Nemo, although I kept hearing DeGeneres as Kristen Wiig for some reason, which may or may not speak to cross-influences there. I don’t know. Director Andrew Stanton is also surprisingly good as the voice of a surfer dude sea turtle named Crush. As with Up (or the Pixar flagship Toy Story for that matter), the main story in Finding Nemo is built to contain a lot of natural resonance and emotional touchpoints: after a family tragedy has left the fish named Marlin (Brooks) with only his son Nemo (Alexander Gould) he is unnaturally protective of Nemo, but then in another accident they are separated. The movie is about their search to reunite. Marlin is joined in his quest by Dory (DeGeneres), who has a short-term memory disorder. Nemo in turn is also disabled, with an underdeveloped fin on one side. Representation of disability is thus another strength of this picture. But also like Up for me, I was ultimately more entertained, surprised, and cheered by the comedy. The chemistry between Marlin and Dory, between Brooks and DeGeneres, is rich, sharp, funny, and executed well. Another good gag is the depiction of those airborne bottom-feeders, the seagulls, whose relentless drilling screeching is reduced here to calls of “Mine! Mine!” So Finding Nemo has a lot of good laughs and that should not be missed about it. Still, with that said, it also made me cry so mission accomplished on that front too. It is working pretty well on all its intended emotional levels. I missed Finding Nemo when it was new and by the time I was more aware of it and Pixar (let’s say around the time of Ratatouille, Wall-E, and Up) it looked a little too sicky-sweet sentimental for me. Yes, even for me, or so I told myself. But while Finding Nemo is indeed guilty of all these feel-good elements it is never particularly cringey. And it can also be very funny. And you know the animation is going to be first-rate. Plus the story is tender in many nice ways. Now I’m taking the position that I’m officially dubious about the 2016 sequel, Finding Dory. If that’s a good one too, somebody please let me know so I don’t have to spend the next 13 or whatever years avoiding it.

“How Fear Departed From the Long Gallery” (1911)

This ghost story by E.F. Benson is somewhat unusual in that it ends on a happy note—uplifting even. At first, I admit I was a little disappointed somehow—E.F. is one of my favorites of his time—and I was certainly surprised. Benson is very good at ghost effects, and in a way this story is a clinic. It starts on a whimsical note with a mansion overrun by mostly friendly ghosts, all past relations of the Peveril family: the Blue Lady (Aunt Barbara), Master Anthony, Great-Great-Grandmamma Bridget. Their stories are briefly given, along with a profile of the family, which is a happy one, comfortable with their ghosts, and prone to playing pranks on guests. “But there is one ghost,” Benson writes, “at which the family never laughs.” And so to the horrendous 17th-century story of a fight for an inheritance, when brother killed brother and then burned a pair of 5-year-old twins alive in a fireplace in the long gallery of the mansion. Shortly after, a servant saw their ghosts and died 24 hours later in a horrible way. It’s like the video in the movie The Ring. If you see these ghosts of the twins, you die, often horribly. Sometimes it takes a while. Examples follow. Benson is just one of the best I’ve seen at this. One cruel relation, Mrs. Canning, a free-thinker, nonbeliever, and friend of Voltaire (excellent detail), makes a point of going to the long gallery at night until she sees them. As it happens, it’s safe while the sun is up. Then “she thought it good, poor wretch, to mock at them, telling them it was time to get back in the fire.” Her death is suitably awful. Benson is also really good at setting a pace—it’s not a fast one, generally, but it’s steady. He spends about two-thirds of this story setting up the scene promised in the title, which naturally takes place in December during the Christmas season. If it all errs too much on the side of cute—I don’t think so myself—it’s properly a gem with unstinted ghoulish details by the time we get to the story of the twins. Then it becomes a story about a guest who accidentally oversleeps her afternoon nap in the long gallery. Ruh-roh, as they say. But it all comes to a lovely ending. Kudos to everyone involved except the bad folks here, who get their just deserts.

Read story online.
Listen to story online.

Dekalog (1989)

Poland / West Germany, 572 minutes

Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski

Writers: Krzysztof Kieslowski, Krzysztof Piesiewicz

Photography: Piotr Sobocinski, Witold Adamek, Jacek Blawut, Slawomir Idziak, Andrzej J. Jaroszewicz, Edward Klosinski, Dariusz Kuc, Krzysztof Pakulski, Wieslaw Zdort

Music: Zbigniew Preisner

Editor: Ewa Smal
Cast: Artur Barcis, Olgierd Lukaszewicz, Olaf Lubaszenko, Aleksander Bardini, Krystyna Janda, Piotr Machalica, Jan Tesarz, Stanislaw Gawlik, Krzysztof Kumor, Katarzyna Piwowarczyk, Maciej Szary

Maybe the best thing director and cowriter Krzysztof Kieslowski ever did—though admittedly it has stiff competition—Dekalog is more properly a TV miniseries, which aired in Poland in 1989. It consists of 10 episodes of about an hour each. Each one riffs on one of the 10 Commandments, in order. But don’t dwell too much on the biblical side of this, because apparently there are versioning problems even with the freaking 10 Commandments. In fact, most of their representations here are knotty oblique stories of moral imperatives and moral difficulties. They move slow and meditative, like a lot of European art cinema, but these characters and their situations tend to stick. The relation of each plotline to its likely respective Commandment is not always easy to make out. Though these dramas arguably weaken toward the later episodes, they are all the stuff of after-viewing pie and coffee discussion.

I should note that the cast list above only shows people who were in more than one episode, many in very minor parts, rather than the numerous stars of each, who are uniformly excellent. Among other things, Dekalog is an actor’s showcase with a lot of Polish players who are more familiar the more Polish cinema you’ve seen. I don’t have the space for them all—there are literally at least two or three great performances in each episode. Most of the people I listed above are more like the connective tissue of Dekalog, which frankly is not that strong. Glancing plot points resurface in other episodes, but they are scattered and often very slight. All the characters live in the same brutalist-style apartment complex in Warsaw. Occasionally others from another episode wander by or their story is directly if briefly retold. These stories, each one, are richly dense and it’s not hard to spend 10 days or two weeks or longer on Dekalog.

Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894)

Ten years after Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain went ahead and wrote another novel with Tom Sawyer and Jim the slave, narrated by Huck. I didn’t even know this existed until recently. It’s very short, under 200 pages, and another parody of European romantic literature. This time the target is specifically Jules Verne, who was only seven years older than Twain and alive at the time. Full disclosure, I have never read Verne, not even when I was a kid and slogging through Robert Louis Stevenson adventure books for kids, so I can’t speak to how well Tom Sawyer Abroad works that way. It looks more to me like Twain put his favorite characters in a balloon and that was supposed to be enough. They step into the thing in a carnival passing through Missouri, it breaks loose, and here we are. It is reminiscent to me in many ways of the Wizard of Oz story too, but that came later. Twain’s balloon is a finely tuned machine, much like a steamboat. It ranges up high for cooler temperatures and can practically scud along at ground level. But it takes even Tom Sawyer some time to figure out all the controls. There’s also a mad scientist on the scene, and food and water to last for months. That’s handy, because they’re crossing the Atlantic before Tom figures out how to control the balloon. They end up over the Sahara Desert for retellings of stories from Arabian Nights along with raft loads of American innocence. It’s supposed to be funny but it’s not really, and the treatment of Jim is at least as bad as in Huck Finn. I enjoyed Tom Sawyer Abroad more than I expected but I didn’t expect much. It’s certainly for completists only. I like Huck’s voice, which is more or less Twain but with more dialect. Are we seeing Twain run out of ideas as he approaches the age of 60? Or was this the only thing he could get publishers and/or the reading public to go for? It’s his second book with “Tom Sawyer” in the title, his third book with “Abroad,” and the umpteenth parodying European literature. At least there is no plot point about babies being switched at birth. Tom Sawyer Abroad does have the virtue of being short and quick and who knows? Maybe some will like the chance to hang out more with Tom, Huck, and Jim. I’ll admit it was probably what I liked most about it. But then there’s the problem of Jim’s continuing mistreatment, which is unfortunate enough to torpedo the whole fragile vessel. File under I read it so you don’t have to.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Armchair Theatre (1990)

In the ‘70s, I must say I liked Fleetwood Mac a lot more than the Electric Light Orchestra (ELO for those with no time for the syllables). But playing through Armchair Theatre lately, ELO principal Jeff Lynne’s first solo album, I kept thinking of the parallels with Lindsey Buckingham I never noticed before: Lynne is a natural pop tunesmith, with a fearlessness about going for open-hearted and unabashed heartstring sentiments, and actually a pretty good guitar-player too. He was also good in the studio, responsible for most of the ELO product and collaborating with the Move, Dave Edmunds, and others. But the Traveling Wilburys in the late ‘80s and all that followed—including this album—were a certain zenith. I’m not sure this work has ever got its full due. Not only did Lynne have a hand in producing that exquisite first Wilburys album, The Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1, but in the aftermath he also worked with Roy Orbison on Orbison’s much-lauded comeback album (Mystery Girl) and with Tom Petty on Petty’s best album (Full Moon Fever), plus Armchair Theatre. I thus declare Jeff Lynne, aka Otis Wilbury (or Clayton Wilbury?!), to be the most underrated Traveling Wilbury of them all. (I also know who’s the most overrated, but I won’t say.) Exhibit A is this album, which followed two years on from the frisson of that first Wilburys album. It’s a solid set and better than you probably think. The sound is fat and saturated, sweet and sauntering, with thrilling musical effects. Every track has the goods. I pulled it out of an office slush pile in 1990 and listened to it a lot, thinking it couldn’t possibly be so good. Couldn’t get anyone to bite on a review anyway. (Now that I think of it I had a lot of luck with office slush piles in that period: Full Moon Fever, Green, Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814, The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste, The Reggae Philharmonic Orchestra, Tokyo Rose, etc.) Those inclined to complain may note that three of the 11 tracks on Armchair Theatre are covers: “Don’t Let Go,” a rock ‘n’ roll standard first recorded by Roy Hamilton in 1958, Kurt Weill’s “September Song,” and the Tin Pan Alley standard “Stormy Weather.” But all three are worthy additions to much-covered material. Armchair Theatre is an essential part of any Wilburys collection.

Pitfall (1948)

USA, 86 minutes

Director: Andre de Toth

Writers: Jay Dratler, Karl Kamb, William Bowers, Andre de Toth

Photography: Harry J. Wild

Music: Louis Forbes

Editor: Walter Thompson

Cast: Dick Powell, Lizabeth Scott, Jane Wyatt, Raymond Burr, Byron Barr, Ann Doran, Jimmy Hunt, John Litel

Pitfall does not rate even one star in my Halliwell’s film guide (“Modest suspenser, quite efficiently made,” it notes). But elsewhere film critic Andrew Sarris alphabetizes director Andre de Toth into his “Expressive Esoterica” list and specifically calls out Pitfall as one of his most interesting pictures. As a film noir, Pitfall assembles a lot of the basic familiar elements: a woman of undeserved reputation, her jailhouse boyfriend, a cynical insurance agent and the sinister private detective he uses, and an impossibly wholesome family out of midcentury movies and TV, featuring Jane Wyatt who would become more famous as the Mom in Father Knows Best.

Many are primarily fascinated in this movie by Lizabeth Scott, who plays Mona Stevens, the woman of reputation. Scott is a bit of a Hollywood cult figure at this point and it’s not hard to see why. She made sporadic appearances on TV shows like Burke’s Law, but her most famous roles are film noir or adjacent—Dead Reckoning with Humphrey Bogart, Too Late for Tears with Dan Duryea, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers with Barbara Stanwyck, etc. And I like her here too—a calculated woman of mystery, Scott brings a nice girl-next-door way about her while also somehow being sultry and inviting. But what tends to keep me coming back to Pitfall is the strange, unsettling, and simmering relationship between insurance agent John Forbes (Dick Powell) and the detective he throws work to, J.B. MacDonald, or “Mac” (Raymond Burr).

“Young Goodman Brown” (1835)

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Very Important American horror story gets my goat in a way. The language can be deadly stultifying—well, I always seem to have that problem with Hawthorne, as with Dickens—and the plot points are more like blunt force objects having an allegorical go at your skull. In the end, it was all a dream but was it. With the publication date you have to wonder if it isn’t among the first to use this it-was-all-a-dream-but-was-it stunt (acknowledging I know squat about ancient literature). Obviously, first, “Young Goodman Brown” is a take on the hypocrisies of puritanism and a forthright one too. It sets up as no less than the titanic battle between Calvinism and Satanism (otherwise known as human appetite). But for all the window dressing—and, yes, it’s nice window dressing, in the American style, with macabre bonfire scenes in the autumn night of a deep New England woods. But for all that, ultimately it’s more on the order of an allegory to be ciphered than a horror story as such. All these devilish doings, the serpentine staffs and disappearing acts, etc., are just production design for a community theater story about American hypocrisy. A lot of the horror anthologies snapping it up are maybe more trying to class up their joints with a Great Author. I mean it’s a pure staple of American literature just sitting there. That’s the only way to understand it. The special effects can be delightful but also thuddingly obvious and they are patently not to be believed. That would be superstitious, the story somehow implies. Hawthorne’s wilderness is not as cool and fascinating as Algernon Blackwood’s, say, but has its own tang. There are witches with broomsticks, for example. And these names: Brown, the young good man, is married to Faith. Then there’s Satan himself, done nicely as a shape-shifter but it always feels stagy. And then, I’m cynical, but I had a hard time believing the whole blinking town including most notably church leaders would turn out to be part of a nighttime carousing mob. Beyond the credibility problem (I KNOW IT'S AN ALLEGORY) it seems to be turning cynicism unpleasantly into bitterness, next stop nihilism. If it is all a dream, Young Goodman Brown is scarred for life by it. “Often, awaking suddenly at midnight, he shrank from the bosom of Faith; and at morning or eventide, when the family knelt down at prayer, he scowled and muttered to himself, and gazed sternly at his wife, and turned away. And when he had lived long, and was borne to his grave a hoary corpse, followed by Faith, an aged woman, and children and grandchildren, a goodly procession, besides neighbors not a few, they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom.” That’s how the story ends and it always annoys me and then haunts me.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
My Favorite Horror Story, ed. Mike Baker & Martin H. Greenberg (out of print)
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

Monsters, Inc. (2001)

So in September I decided to subscribe to Disney because all signs were that a movie I wanted to look at was there (Amelie), but then when I did subscribe in October it was already gone. Why do streaming services do this peekaboo thing? Sometimes I feel like I could waste the rest of my life running down Criterion Channel “Leaving Soon” titles and still would never catch up. Attempting to make lemonade, I decided to spend my month of Disney looking at Pixar pictures I still hadn’t seen. The first and main thing about Monsters, Inc., not surprisingly, is the excellence of the animation, which is stylish and always fun. Then I noticed for once I could recognize the voices of the main characters without having to look them up. John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Billy Crystal—well, Crystal was merely vexingly familiar, and I did have to look that one up. The Monsters, Inc. premise is all pro forma but reasonably clever. There’s a place where monsters live, called Monstropolis, and the energy there is powered by children’s screams. A whole factory system has been worked up for monsters to get jobs going into children’s bedrooms at night by way of their closets, do scary things, and collect the screams. It turns out the monsters are as afraid of children as children are of them. Ultimately one little girl makes it into Monstropolis and various hijinks ensue. Among other things our main monster, Sullivan (Goodman), finds that she is too adorable to destroy (admittedly, she is quite adorable) and he works to protect her. Sullivan is a pretty good character overall, furry and blue with purple highlights, but I have to say he reminded me of Shrek from another animated movie that also came out in 2001—both the kindly affection and the ogre-like oversized body. I know animated pictures have long lead times, so I doubt anyone was copping anything off anybody else. Monsters, Inc. is the better picture if the IMDb Top 250 Movies list is anything to go by—it’s on it whereas Shrek is not, at least when I looked just now (in October). Monsters, Inc. reminded me again how starved we were for sophisticated animated pictures like this in the ‘70s, where the hardest-core among us lived off the old Disney features and Fleischer cartoons in revival houses with folding chairs. Those old Disneys are masterfully done, I can admit now, but I had a beef with Disney back then that lingers on. I prefer what came in the wake of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, with the animation fully funded (unlike, say, Hanna-Barbera’s Scooby Doo, Where Are You! TV series, which is charming and everything, maybe even culturally revolutionary, but cheap). I also like scripts that are full of sly jokes for the grownups. But that is something someone who loves Daffy Duck and Bullwinkle would think. Monsters, Inc.? Yes, absolutely, if you like a cartoon show don’t miss it if you can.

The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (2005)

Jim Fusilli’s little 33-1/3 book raised the bar for me in terms of these authors liking, appreciating, respecting, and/or loving their albums under consideration. I assumed they all liked them but here is where I have felt it the most yet. Fusilli, who also writes detective fiction and used to be a house rock critic at the Wall Street Journal, is an unapologetic boomer. I am more of an apologetic one, but it may be the generational affinities that are reaching me here. My experience with the Beach Boys (and inevitably the Beatles) is different from Fusilli’s, certainly, but he’s only two years older than me and I always feel like I know where he’s coming from. He was raised in New Jersey, for example, and me in the Midwest, but I know very well his version of California as the perfect place. I was up on all the Beach Boys hits starting with “California Girls,” a little later than Fusilli. I had no sense of Pet Sounds really until the ’80s, aside from the many hits, and then I had mixed feelings about it. It took me a long time to come to really love it. It came to Fusilli a lot more quickly but he understands it basically the way I do, which meant some of his assessments felt so true they almost hurt. It reminded me all over again of the album’s uncanny strengths, now evocative even by title alone: “Sloop John B.,” “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “God Only Knows,” “Caroline No.” Fusilli does spend a good deal of time discussing technical aspects such as chord changes, which as usual are mostly lost on me, but in this case confirm my sense of how carefully constructed and rendered these songs are. The movie Love & Mercy, which came out nine years after publication of this book, is another good place to go for exciting portraits of Brian Wilson the studio original in action. Fusilli also talks about the hits and albums before and after Pet Sounds and has some interesting thoughts. He seems to have a good deal of loathing for “Barbara Ann,” a song I have come to like less and less myself over the years. But I must say I adored it when I was 12, even then understanding in the Beach Boys catalog it was one of those things not like the others. I suspect the taint of boomer may be on Fusilli for many readers. When he compares Mike Love to Eddie Haskell it feels as true as a poem, but perhaps too highly specific. So caveats. Also, Pet Sounds haters are unlikely to be convinced by Fusilli, technical points and all. That’s my hunch. For me, somehow—since approximately Love & Mercy—all encounters with the Beach Boys tend to make me insanely happy. This was just another one.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

The Conversation (1974)

USA, 113 minutes

Director/writer: Francis Ford Coppola

Photography: Bill Butler, Haskell Wexler

Music: David Shire

Editor: Richard Chew

Cast: Gene Hackman, Frederic Forrest, Cindy Williams, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Teri Garr, Harrison Ford, Robert Duvall, Elizabeth MacRae

“Masterpiece” is always a loaded, fuzzy term to use. But in the case of director and writer Francis Ford Coppola it’s probably fair to say it about the four movies he released in the ‘70s, even if by reputation alone: The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now. It’s also fair to say he never came close again after that, though some of his pictures have their partisans: The Cotton Club, Dracula, Tetro, others. I’ve always liked One From the Heart, Peggy Sue Got Married, and the S.E. Hinton adaptations, but they’re not really within shouting distance of the big four.

The Conversation is the quietest and most compact of them and was also the least successful commercially on its release. The cast today looks absolutely star-studded, featuring the versatile Gene Hackman who is excellent as always. It’s a certain representation of prime ‘70s American cinema, shot by Bill Butler and Haskell Wexler and with a soundtrack (a good one) by David Shire. John Cazale and Allen Garfield are stellar, and the small but indelible appearances by Teri Garr, Harrison Ford, and Robert Duvall are fun and impressive too. Ford is impossibly young. Cazale, as you may have heard, died young and thus gave us only a handful of performances, but they are uniformly knockouts (both of the Godfather movies, Dog Day Afternoon, The Deer Hunter, and The Conversation). He was the Anton Yelchin of his time. Frederic Forrest and Cindy Williams as anonymous surveillance targets are also impossibly young. In one way they are barely in the movie at all. In another, they are at the center of it.

Top 40

1. Miles Davis, “All Blues” (11:32, 1959)
2. Black Sabbath, “Children of the Grave” (5:17, 1971)
3. Jeff Buckley, “Forget Her” (5:12, 1994)
4. Gipsy Kings, “Hotel California (Spanish Mix)” (5:46, 1998)
5. Ratt, “I’m Insane” (2:56, 1984)
6. Otis Rush, “Double Trouble” (2:44, 1958)
7. Jack Harlow, “First Class” (2:53)
8. Harry Styles, “As It Was” (2:47)
9. Lizzo, “About Damn Time” (3:11)
10. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, “Tere Bin Nahin Lagda (Remix)” (5:43, 2018)
11. Clash, “Know Your Rights” (3:40, 1982)
12. Omni of Halos, “You Suck” (3:54)
13. Binker and Moses, “Accelerometer Overdose” (9:51)
14. Stromae, “L’enfer” (3:09)
15. Range, “Urethane” (2:58)
16. Denzel Curry, “Walkin” (4:40)
17. Wet Leg, “Ur Mom” (3:21)
18. Lalalar, “Abla Deme Lazim Olur” (3:09)
19. Soulglo, “Spiritual Level of Gang Shit” (4:53)
20. The Weeknd, “Sacrifice” (3:08)
21. Lucky Daye, “Candy Drip” (4:40)
22. Momma, “Speeding 72” (3:58)
23. Smile, “The Smoke” (3:39)
24. Confidence Man, “Catch My Breath” (3:58, 2018)
25. Chuck Berry, “I Want to Be Your Driver” (2:13, 1965)
26. Ray Charles, “It Makes No Difference Now” (3:35, 1962)
27. Ray Charles, “Greenbacks” (2:51, 1955)
28. Elliott Smith, “No Name #3” (3:13, 1994)
29. James Brown, “Super Bad (pts. 1, 2, & 3)” (9:16, 1971)
30. Ultramagnetic MC’s, “Traveling at the Speed of Thought (Hip House Club Mix)” (4:22, 1988)
31. Miles Davis, “Maiysha” (14:55, 1974)
32. Curtis Mayfield, “We the People Who Are Darker Than Blue” (6:05, 1970)
33. Jimmy Reed, “Bright Lights, Big City” (2:36, 1961)
34. Albert King, “Crosscut Saw” (2:33, 1966)
35. Sun Ra, “Where Pathways Meet” (6:32, 1978)
36. Bo Diddley, “Bring It to Jerome” (2:29, 1958)
37. Bo Diddley, “Bo Diddley (Single Version)” (2:46, 1955)
38. King Curtis, “Memphis Soul Stew” (2:59, 1967)
39. Brian Eno, “Sombre Reptiles” (2:21, 1975)
40. Champaign, “How ‘Bout Us” (4:34, 1981)

THANKS: rockcritics.com, Billboard, Spin, Skip, unusual suspects

“The Preserving Machine” (1953)

Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, editors of The Weird and other highly recommended anthologies, really talked up this story by Philip K. Dick somewhere. It’s not widely included in collections—the VanderMeers’ point, if I recall correctly, was that they had not been able to license it, for whatever reason. Maybe the estate thinks the story is too weird. It does have an interesting premise that is very weird even for Dick. The hero is an academic, Doc Labyrinth, who is worried about nuclear extinction and saddened most by the idea that music would be lost. So he draws up plans for a machine that will save music by converting printed sheet music into animal life forms. The idea is staggering in its way yet also a great example of Dick’s willful soft science fiction. This is creating life that we’re talking about, which is only an incidental function in Doc Labyrinth’s mind. He can’t even build the machine himself. He only draws up the plans and ships them off to a manufacturer. There is not a single theoretical basis for any of this. Take at face value—take it or leave it. I like the cheek, the confidence, but wish for a little more science. The manufacturer at any rate is excited about the project and promptly assembles the machine and ships it to Labyrinth. A sort of charming Holmes-and-Watson scene follows, with Labyrinth and the story’s first-person narrator sitting around trying it out. First they convert the Mozart G Minor Quintet, dropping the score into the machine. Out comes a bird, apparently of heretofore unknown species: “pretty, small and slender, with the flowing plumage of a peacock.” They call it a “mozart bird.” Later they produce a “beethoven beetle” (note that this story was written before the Beatles and even before Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven”) and then a “schubert animal.” The ones that are described merely as “animal” are far and away the creepiest but lowercasing the proper noun has its effect too. Doc Labyrinth is kind of disappointed and lets them loose in the woods behind his house. He doesn’t think about them for some time. When he finally checks on them, they have evolved and changed. Some have died. He tries running a bach bug through the machine—evidently reverse-processing these animals is how the preserved music is obtained again—but the music he gets back is mere cacophony when he plays it. More disappointment. So weird!

Philip K. Dick, The Preserving Machine
Read story online.

“Dickon the Devil” (1872)

I liked this story by Sheridan Le Fanu pretty well—it’s quick and to the point and comes with surprises. ISFDB has it as part of a Martin Hesselius series by Le Fanu featuring a psychic investigator. The series includes some of Le Fanu’s best stories, such as “The Familiar” and “Mr. Justice Harbottle.” But the first-person narrator in “Dickon the Devil” is more by way of an estate lawyer and we don’t hear much from Hesselius. Apparently this is a case from his files? Two elderly sisters have hired the estate lawyer to assess and possibly sell (“make partition of”) a property that includes a house. Well, it’s a mansion, more like, which has been uninhabited for 20 years. Of course it’s haunted. What did you think? Our narrator knows it was the source of rumors in the past, but he doesn’t know or can’t remember the details, and none of the locals are talking. At one point, early in the story, the village idiot goes racing by—it’s Dickon the Devil, whose story is told along with the former owner’s and the two old ladies too. It’s a ghost story but this is a ghost with strange powers—visible from afar, recognizable as the former owner, and somehow able to blight and kill cattle. It turns out to be a dispute about the will. Apparently the two old ladies are more rapacious than we suspect at first. Or perhaps not, because the narrator doesn’t seem to see anything off in them. But the eternal fury of the ghost of the former owner must be coming from somewhere. He was well enough liked when he was alive, and good for the community too, basically. The narrator encounters the ghost in his overnight stay, on which basically the whole (incomplete) story turns. Le Fanu skillfully foreshadows and holds off on telling the backstory, making it more effective when he does. There are gaps but I like how they are just sort of left to sit there. Who, if anyone, is at fault in the dispute about the will? The former owner intended to rewrite it before he died—but why? Did the sisters know he intended to change it? Did they have something to do with his death? We never learn, and it seems to work that way, as Le Fanu distracts us with the terrible story of Dickon, who was not always as he is in the present of this story and now has been for 20 years. He was good with the cattle the sisters invested in and put there. But the former owner, as ghost, objected to this plan with the cattle for some reason. When blighting the cattle grows tiresome, he drives the hired man insane. Dickon’s insanity is better than anything like it by H.P. Lovecraft, for example, although credible insanity may be a low bar there.

Read story online.