“Afterward” (1910)

[spoilers] My first Edith Wharton horror story is in The Dark Descent and for once I don’t think editor David G. Hartwell was trying too hard to pump up the volume on literary credibility. Wharton is obviously good at this—far better than her mentor Henry James, who could rarely get out of his own way when it came to horror. I still need to take another look at “The Turn of the Screw.” At any rate, Wharton’s story does involve Americans living in Europe, or anyway England. Our young American couple rents a house in the English countryside that is reputed to be haunted. They joke about wanting to meet a ghost, but there’s an unusual twist to this one. It’s only later (“afterward”) that you understand the ghost or haunting. This is a strange, almost arch concept, not easily grasped, but the payoff is quite good. The couple seems like an ideal of American innocents, but shade soon begins to fall on the husband. We see he is worried about something and hiding it from his wife. We know we need to keep an eye on that. But mostly the Jamesian air holds sway of light banter, blue skies, and easy good fortune. Then Wharton springs a big surprise when the husband suddenly disappears and is never heard from again. She knocks us off balance as we are not prepared for the unexplained disappearance of a main character. The events of the day are detailed up to the point where peak annoyance has begun to turn to anxiety. The next section starts two weeks later, with a police investigation underway and the wife with a bad feeling. As the weeks and months elapse, she begins to remember things that are a little ghostly and only become more so as she gradually adds up clues and learns what her husband was involved in that enabled them to move to England and pursue their easy, carefree way of life. I’ve given away the main surprise of this story, but the surprise is not the point of it. Wharton is careful from the start to make her characters vividly felt, as normal or bland and humdrum as they may seem. While many things are explained, the ghost story aspect is not. It exists at the center of the story as a mystery that can’t be understood or penetrated even. And like all the folks in this story say, you only really get it afterward, as the inescapable futility of explanation becomes apparent. Very nicely done.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
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“Amour Dure” (1887)

This long story by Vernon Lee is epistolary, presented as a series of diary entries by one Spiridion Trepka, starting in August 1885. I’m calling it a Christmas story because that is when—and that is how—it climaxes, with a finish that may fairly be called stunning. Trepka is a poor young Pole, an art historian with a burgeoning enough career to be able to travel to Italy on a modest grant to pursue his studies. He’s keenly aware of his native country’s relatively lower cultural position in the scheme of things. His research leads to his discovery of a historical figure (fictional, I’m pretty sure—I hope), Medea da Carpi. Her motto, emblazoned on her jewelry: “Amour Dure – Dure Amour.” “Hard love” seems the best and most apt translation. This story is long and very slow, especially in the first two-thirds, Part I, where we are brought along as Trepka discovers this woman in the historical literature, learns details of her appalling life, and falls in love with her. Spiridion, we hardly knew ye. Medea da Carpi’s story is riveting, a notorious woman emerging slowly from the mists of history and fragments of the documents Trepka examines. There’s a good payoff for all this in Part II. I love the complications of Medea da Carpi’s life, which is full of intrigue and seduction as she pushes herself into high social position purely by the power of a ruthless will. She betrays and murders or sees murdered a series of increasingly powerful lovers. It takes place in the 16th century or so, some 300 years before Trepka reassembles the story. But one day, now getting into December in the diary entries, Trepka receives a note signed by her. He recognizes her signature and handwriting from the documents. It’s a short note—she wants to meet him late at night at a church. Trepka had seen this church in town before and thought it abandoned and unused. But he finds a gathering and a service taking place when he gets there at the appointed time late at night. If you think this is heading for some bad end, you’re probably right. Vernon Lee was the pen name of Violet Paget, a prolific essayist and feminist as well as fiction writer. As with E. Nesbit and Margaret Bowen, it’s the gender-based rage and sense of oppression that fascinates me most in Lee’s horror stories. “Slow burn” is a reasonable enough way to describe “Amour Dure.” It required a fair amount of patience. The language is relatively straightforward, but the revelations are slippery to trace, only come into focus slowly, and then the story hits very hard.

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Trout Fishing in America (1967)

I have always thought of this slender Richard Brautigan volume as a novel proper, but Wikipedia calls it a novella, which is fair. It’s not even 200 pages in mass market size. It was written in 1961 but it has a decided summer of love twang—strange, funny, absurdist, deceptively light-hearted. I loved this stuff when I was 18 but sadly it has lost a lot of its charm. It's still a lively little read, remarkable for something with virtually no narrative thread. I liked Brautigan’s native confidence that he could write anything that entered his head and I loved his loopy indulgent metaphors and various flights. I’m still OK with them, but his biography does cast some pall over it now. He committed suicide at the age of 49 and by all reports was a miserable man. A lot of his attitudes toward women are already notably antiquated, not so much toxic as wince-worthy but sometimes toxic. Ultimately he is still daffy and gentle enough that I’m willing to give him a pass, being dead and all. I have some sense that In Watermelon Sugar may presently be his best-liked novel (and/or story collection and/or poetry collection), but Trout Fishing was always up there. In fact, insofar as Brautigan was ever taken seriously, Trout Fishing in America usually went to the head of the class. “Trout fishing in America” means many different things here, including places and people’s names, but one of them is trout fishing in America. Brautigan is plainly aware and enamored of Ernest Hemingway, and Mark Twain too, and he is working consciously in their traditions—combining the humor of Twain with Hemingway’s nouns-and-verbs rhythms and stoic low-energy depression. Brautigan also knows trout fishing the sporting activity, injecting it with veracity as needed into the ongoing surreal twists. Trout Fishing is dreamy and weird, sometimes petty and foolish, more often making things work on their own terms. I still like the spirit but rereading it all these years later did not do much for me. It’s just not as inspired as Brautigan seemed to think it was and many of his recurring poetic devices—such as a statue of Benjamin Franklin in San Francisco—are evocative but a little lame and underdeveloped. But he may be winning over new readers and that’s good to hear. I see him discussed on booktube. He lives on for Harry Styles who wrote a song about watermelon sugar and he lives on for the kid in 1994 who legally changed his name to Trout Fishing in America. For me, Brautigan is a sad figure with an elfin side that can win you over if you have a big enough heart, not that I always do. His humor can be sharp and precise. Worth a look.

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

It Happened One Night (1934)

USA, 105 minutes

Director: Frank Capra

Writers: Robert Riskin, Samual Hopkins Adams

Photography: Joseph Walker

Music: Howard Jackson

Editor: Gene Havlick

Cast: Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, Walter Connolly, Roscoe Karns, Alan Hale, Ward Bond, Jameson Thomas, Arthur Hoyt, Frank Capra

Going on 90 years later, there is lots of trivia to discover about the sprightly It Happened One Night. Men’s undershirt sales reportedly fell after Clark Gable tears off his shirt in one scene and reveals a bare chest. The picture stands as an early marker of screwball comedy, arguably one of the most popular of all time as, among other things, It Happened One Night made a sweep at the Oscars that has only been matched since by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Silence of the Lambs. My favorite piece of trivia is that Looney Tunes animator Friz Freleng wrote that the movie influenced the creation of Bugs Bunny. In one scene Clark Gable is eating carrots and talking fast and Roscoe Karns as a minor character on a Greyhound bus has a habit of calling people “Doc.” It may not be much but it’s an honest influence.

I think it's interesting to note that It Happened One Night is considered pre-Code, released just four months before the Hays Code went into effect policing the content of movies. Yes, the picture is somewhat candid about sexuality—candid for 1934, let’s say—but I’m always more shocked by Clark Gable’s roguish brand, before and after the Code. Only James Cagney was a worse role model. Peter Warne (Gable) is a vaguely corrupt, hard-drinking newspaperman who can tell a woman to shut up and make it stick. Warne tells his future father-in-law that his daughter Ellie (Claudette Colbert) needs “a guy that’d take a sock at her once a day, whether it’s coming to her or not.” This, of course, seals the deal with Ellie’s father. He's all for Warne now. Next stop, Peter and Ellie with a baby carriage.

Horror in the High Desert (2021)

SPOILERS, STOP READING AND WATCH THIS MOVIE IMMEDIATELY!!! I wandered into Horror in the High Desert on a bleary night’s trek about the internet, looking for something to look at. Nowadays I tend to default to true-crime content (“content,” we call it). With true-crime, even if the production values are down, which they are more often than not, many times the cases themselves make up for it in terms of interest values. I thought Horror in the High Desert was pretty good, but I have to admit it fooled me and that might have been exactly what made it work. When I checked in over at IMDb, I found a clear line of demarcation: those who knew ahead of time what they were getting into didn’t like it much (overall 5.4 with 3,400 ranking). Those fooled by it, like me, did tend to like it, writing reviews and rating it with an average closer to 8.0. Among other things it makes this a tricky review to write. In general, I’m more impatient than sympathetic with people who get mad about spoilers (especially things that are decades or centuries old), but at the same time I have to admit that some of my best movie/reading experiences are “unspoiled,” that is, entering them without a clue. LAST CHANCE STOP READING NOW! The fact is that this picture is not true-crime at all, but rather another found-footage horror. I had my qualms about the story as it unspooled, involving a hiker who disappeared. In retrospect it’s easy to see—now that I know—how a lot of it even verges on true-crime parody. Notably the interviews are off, a little too hysterical. But there’s a lot of cringy stuff all over true-crime anyway, and this story moves swiftly with alluring clues and mysteries. The last 20 minutes were as scary as anything I can remember seeing in a while. It’s also when I realized the picture is probably fiction, although I certainly enjoyed the round of terrors it provided in the moment and immediately after. But the bloom comes off the rose here pretty fast in terms of final judgment. It also puts me in a bit of a muddle. I truly enjoyed it, but immediately began to think less of it once I knew more. Would I have had the same reactions if I had understood what it was going in? Frankly, I’m not sure I would have even looked at it, nor have I even been tempted to go back and look at it again for a better sense of how it was done. How it was done is that I’ve been watching a lot of true-crime for some time and adjusted my expectations for that. The case isn’t even as interesting as a lot of disappearances. But it was good enough, it hooked me enough, and then it fooled me enough that it produced the kind of scares I like to get from horror movies. Surprise has a lot to do with it.

Masters of Doom (2003)

I learned a lot and remembered a lot in David Kushner’s account of the developers responsible for the video game sensation Doom (and Quake, among many others). I never played it much myself, mainly because I’m never good at any game based on hand-eye coordination. But I knew a lot of people who went for Doom hard. I even worked with a group who set up so-called “death match” bouts and went at it on their (slightly extended) lunch hour. I bought my first PC in 1988 and was a consumer of shareware, including games, and later went to work for Microsoft doing content chores. So I have been adjacent to a lot of the milieu described in this perfectly delightful book. But of course there was much more I didn’t know, starting with the term “Silicon Alamo” for a game creation nexus in Texas and Louisiana (compare “Silicon Valley” and “Silicon Alley”). Doom is most famously the origin of first-person shooter games, which among other things Joe Lieberman blamed for Columbine. In a way it's not hard to see how you get there. The basic goal of Doom is to kill everything you can, and the rich graphic environment leaned into that with shrieking on the soundtrack, gore, and a lot of splatter-type special effects. One of the game’s many innovations was the persistence of corpses, which had generally been cleaned up quickly in most games before it. The U.S. Marines picked up Doom for training purposes, whatever you might want to make of that. I think of these games, including Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty (which I also know only by reputation ... Kushner actually has another book that looks good about GTA)—think of them more as cathartic than anything, in addition to the fun and kick of any game. They may be triggers for unstable people, and we seem to have a lot of unstable people around the place nowadays, but that’s as far as I’m willing to go to condemn them. I also loved the way Kushner’s story goes deep into the strange, utopian world of shareware. I missed a lot of the origins of Doom there but was off on my own little gaming adventures, notably Hack aka The Amulet of Yendor. Masters of Doom is a great tour of computer gaming in the ‘90s. It’s appropriately fast-paced, readable, and highly entertaining. If you played Doom and/or Quake then you’re probably going to want to play them again. If you ever stopped.

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

Big Iron’s Honkey-Tonk Holidays (1997)

This anthology from the Big Iron label offers a festive mess of Texas, Xmas, and booze. Original tunes are mixed with a motley of holiday chestnuts, usually of the more lighthearted variety: “Holly Jolly Christmas,” “Santa Looked a Lot Like Daddy,” etc. Leading the way on the freewheeling irreverent front is “Alcoholidays” by the Sutcliffs, generally the first song that jumps out, with its memorable chorus of “Old Grand-Dad, Budweiser / It’s good to be drunk again.” True confession, they are sentiments I have lived in holiday seasons past. But the rollicking Honkey-Tonk Holidays is not all western swing mockery and drunkenness. The Sutcliffs may complain that “Little Drummer Boy” is giving them a headache, but Andy Owens & Druha Trava cover it later. There’s room for many points of view here, with sweet country (and/or “alt-country” if we must), a very nice blues or two, and traditional / religious stuff as well, driven by lovely arrangements with horns, a fiddle as needed, and lots of rockin’ good guitar. There’s even an Elvis impersonator to round things off. The Mutineers play “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” like a Halloween fright-fest, with the dark “oh-wee-oh wee-ohhh-oh” chant that signifies the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz at home in her castle safehold—it’s Santa Claus as Satan Claus. You better be good. Cowboys & Indians takes jolly St. Nick a more conventional way on “Santa, Santa,” pleading with him to bring his baby back. “I got cookies, milk, whatever you need.” “Christmas Made for Two” by Mark David Manders & Nuevo Tejas is just beautiful. And the Old 97’s—the only act here I even sort of know—demonstrate as countless others before them that it is virtually impossible to ruin the tender wartime ballad “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” It always sounds good. I suppose you could give it the Roseanne Barr treatment, but please don’t. Honkey-Tonk Holidays is a terrific little Christmas set. I don’t even remember now how I came to acquire it, but I happen to know my brother owns a copy too and I assumed it was in the generally wide currency of things these days. When I came to write it up, however, I discovered how obscure it has become. Apologies! But you really have to hear it once if you can. Happy holidays all!

“A Visit to Santa Claus” (1957)

[spoilers?] The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB) sniffs at this story by Richard Matheson as “non-genre,” which, OK, fair enough. Call it a crime thriller story then. Either way it’s reasonably good for December, though it is soulless conte cruel in a way that Matheson and only a few others can do. It works quite well as suspense, though it trucks in the familiar midcentury trope of the homicidal marriage. This husband and wife have been together maybe 10 years, with a boy of 5, who still believes in Santa Claus. It’s December. They’re out shopping at a mall. They are tired. The kid won’t stop nagging them to see “Sanna Claus.” They have finished shopping and are at their car loading in purchases, when the husband decides he wants to humor the kid after all. They had been promising him he would see Santa on Tuesday. Now the husband says he’ll take the kid in, the wife can wait there, they won’t be long. It’s not hard to see something is off here. Why leave her waiting in the car on a cold winter night? As things unfold, we learn it's part of a nefarious plan. The husband has hired a hitman to kill his wife and this is when it’s going down. There’s a lot of business with the car keys—the wife wants them so she can pull the car up to get them when they come back out again. It’s a sensible plan, but the husband pretends he doesn’t hear her. When he drops the keys for the hitman to pick up the kid notices and calls it to his attention. Handing off the keys thus becomes a substantial part of the story, and it’s more and more apparent it’s all a harebrained scheme, hatched with a guy the husband met in a bar, and further confirmed when we learn the terms: $100 up front, $900 later. It’s not the way these things are done, as we know from movies and such—harder to say perhaps whether people were as sophisticated about murders for hire in 1957 as we are now. Matheson skillfully makes his own plot holes work for him, by making the scheme so painfully elaborate and amateurish. All kinds of complications keep coming along even as Matheson is revealing more about the plot. The kid is a perfect uncontrollable element. Yes, ISFDB, it has no supernatural or fantasy elements. It’s just an incident in December. But if it’s Matheson you can count on getting hooked and then getting a ride. This story goes to a bleak place, of course, with a twist of a twist of an ending, but that’s all just the usual drill. Get it on your kindle and read it at the food circus in your mall while taking a break from shopping.

The Best of Richard Matheson, ed. Victor LaValle
Story not available online.

Fools’ Gold (1958)

This novel by Dolores Hitchens is one of the best in the Women Crime Writers Library of America collections, second only to Charlotte Armstrong’s Mischief. Sadly, a lot of these short novels seemed way off the standards of the LOA’s American Noir series, which is essential. Fools’ Gold is the source novel for Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 movie Band of Outsiders. It’s a movie worth seeing—Quentin Tarantino’s favorite Godard, I’ve heard—but not a good representation of the novel, a taut thriller that is all business about a heist going very, very wrong. The characters here are stock types but Hitchens somehow makes them lively, interesting, and believable. There is a hilarious sendup of Southern California Alcoholics Anonymous culture, apparently already in place in 1958—a mix of seeing the light of spiritual epiphany, on the one hand, and knocking elbows with the richies and celebs on the other. Skip is a cocky young dude of 21 who has learned via a girl he meets in a typing class, Karen, about a house where a man from Las Vegas is storing cash for some reason. Karen lives in it. She thinks there’s as much as a million dollars there. Skip’s plan is to waltz in and take it. Only Karen and an old woman, Mrs. Havermann, live there. Mrs. Havermann felt to me created with Miss Havisham in mind from Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations because they share many traits. Karen is Mrs. Havermann’s “ward” (whatever that means) and mistreated by her as a servant. Skip’s Uncle Willy—an ex-con who attends an AA meeting to establish an alibi and ultimately see the light—gets word of the job and brings in some serious heavies to help, like “Big Tom.” Hitchens’s bad guys are bad in many different ways. Skip is a manipulative weasel, for example. Big Tom is violent, physically powerful, and scary, like some of the worst in Elmore Leonard novels. Uncle Willy is shrewd but weak. Karen means well but she is naïve and easily manipulated. The story of the owner of the house and the cash, Stolz, basically spells doom for this caper but no one in this story figures it out until too late. That’s another thing I like about it. It’s mostly downbeat, but there is one very nice story of redemption. Fools’ Gold is well balanced in general, ranging from the suspense promised in the series title (and too rarely delivered on in the series) to some very funny scenes, rooted believably in these characters Hitchens has created, this great cast. Very good one at the very end of this series.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

Uncut Gems (2019)

USA, 135 minutes

Directors: Benny Safdie, Josh Safdie

Writers: Ronald Bronstein, Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie

Photography: Darius Khondji

Music: Daniel Lopatin

Editors: Ronald Bronstein, Benny Safdie

Cast: Adam Sandler, Julia Fox, LaKeith Stanfield, Kevin Garnett, Idina Menzel, Eric Bogosian, Mike Francesca, Judd Hirsch, The Weeknd, Tilda Swinton, Natasha Lyonne

Adam Sandler appears to be one of those actors—Sylvester Stallone and John Travolta might be two others—who have a surprising amount of ability to perform when they are motivated but seem to be more often satisfied to run the paces of uninspired but potentially boffo payday productions. Every now and then something seems to get into them—some hunger for respect in their chosen craft, or maybe they just want an Oscar after all—and they take on roles that demand the best from them. By my admittedly biased and perhaps ignorant count (set me straight, please), Sandler has made two of them: the highly eccentric Punch-Drunk Love from 2002, and this relentless, over-the-top thriller directed and cowritten by the Safdie brothers Benny and Josh. Sandler is better-known (per IMDb) for the comedies Big Daddy (1999), Little Nicky (2000), The Waterboy (1998), and The Wedding Singer (1998). Due to mostly peer pressure, I have seen Shakes the Clown (1991), Happy Gilmore (1996), and Hubie Halloween (2020), all of which have their dim pleasures and may be best seen with someone already prone to like them. Shakes the Clown is the best and I don’t know if it’s a coincidence that I don’t remember Sandler in it.

As for the Safdie brothers, I was impressed enough with Uncut Gems to go back and check out the thriller Good Time (2017), which I thought was also pretty good. Uncut Gems bristles with kinetic energy and a stream of unfortunate events as New York City jewelry merchant and gambling addict Howard Ratner (Sandler) attempts to square all the various debts in his high-flying, heedless life, dealing with underworld creditors as well as his embittered estranged wife. He has a hot love affair going on the side with Julia (Julia Fox) but spends most of his time wheeling and dealing and trying to get down exotic parlay bets. A brief establishing sequence introduces us to a rock the size of a large russet potato, obtained illicitly from a mine in Ethiopia and massively embedded with opals. Then the picture starts on live footage from a colonoscopy camera, wends its way through a concert by The Weeknd, and finishes on a basketball game on TV—proving, once again, that gambling simply makes everything more intense. Here we see what is purported to be a live game 7 between the Boston Celtics featuring Kevin Garnett and the Philadelphia 76ers. There’s a lot riding on it, and we are content to spend most of the last 30 minutes or so of Uncut Gems watching this game with Ratner.

Priscilla (2023)

My moviegoing habits have changed since the pandemic and are still out of focus. I finally went back into theaters earlier this year. My first preference is this newfangled 10 a.m. Tuesday matinee at the multiplexes, although the choices are not as good as at the local art house. I’ve seen a bunch of morning movies with only one or two others in attendance or even by myself. So I was a little set back to find my 11 a.m. matinee of Sofia Coppola’s latest just simply packed. Yes, it was the opening week, but come on. They all looked like retired biker outlaws. I guess that figures, given it’s an Elvis Presley movie, based on Priscilla Presley’s outrageously entertaining 1985 memoir, Elvis and Me. These days the seating in my multiplexes is all assigned and I was thoroughly nonplussed to find one such outlaw and his chick taking seats right next to me and carrying on for the duration as if they were sitting in their living room. They would remember things like that RCA was Elvis’s major label after Sun. Save it for later! I was further nonplussed to recall that I still hadn’t seen Baz Luhrmann’s much-celebrated Elvis from a year or two ago. It seemed to me in this bad moment that I really should have looked at it before seeing Priscilla. But you can’t do everything and I made what I could of the picture at hand: Cailee Spaeny is effective playing the title role low-key, Jacob Elordi did not impress much as an Elvis impersonator, and in general it is faithful to the book but the book is better, for example in bringing out the bizarre sexual tensions of their early relationship. I chalk up the feeling of restrained veracity to Priscilla Presley’s role on the picture as an executive producer. Priscilla is worth seeing for Elvis and/or Sofia Coppola completists. It’s all a bit wooden, but, as always, Coppola’s soundtrack choices are intriguing and often startlingly appropriate, including the Ramones’ cover of “Baby, I Love You” under the titles, “Crimson and Clover” during the late ‘50s period, Brenda Lee’s “Sweet Nothin’s,” and a bunch of hip-hop that worked when you might think it wouldn’t. No word on that from the couple sitting next to me.

I couldn’t shake my self-accusatory mood of being a lazy underachiever, so I hurried home after the credits started to roll and took a look at Elvis online. Yes, my heart sank when I saw it was almost three hours long, but it turned out to be entertaining and a lot more lively than Priscilla. Of course, Priscilla has the advantage of being far closer to the truth. I have already filed director Baz Luhrmann under unrepentant fantasist, for better or worse—The Great Gatsby no, Moulin Rouge maybe, and in general he’s one of those “from the mind of” guys. Austin Butler as Elvis has been oversold, I think, but he is good and has a few moments where he is almost transcendent. Tom Hanks in prosthetics, I believe (or is it CGI?), plays Colonel Tom Parker as a simpering manipulative huckster—he’s not bad, but the script is. Elvis is more telling the story of Parker, not Elvis. And it’s basically just riffing on the legend and known facts: Elvis, under Parker’s management, blazed onto the scene in 1956 and got in trouble for his lewd stage moves. He was drafted and served his time. He spent much of the ‘60s making bad movies. He had a big comeback TV special in 1968 and then became a star in amber in Las Vegas. He took a lot of pharmaceuticals and eventually died from them. It's all dutifully here, but the motivations offered are insane, or at least depart from what I thought I knew. He’s explicitly forced into the Army to get him off the stage, for example. He is defiant toward Colonel Parker, notably in the TV special, whereas I’ve always heard he was absolutely deferential to Parker (he certainly is in Priscilla). I take it that these things “made narrative sense” to Luhrmann and his cowriters Sam Bromell and Craig Pearce because they aren’t the way I understand Elvis’s career or even his legend exactly. On the other hand, looking up the song “Trouble,” I see that it was indeed written in 1958 by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. But I’m pretty sure Elvis never used it to stir up a riot at a show in the South circa 1957 where he was closely watched by authorities. “Trouble” is more famous for being Elvis’s opening number on the TV special. But OK, fine, never mind. Elvis can be vastly entertaining even as it mangles my sense of history (which might be wrong?). Priscilla looks and feels closer to the truth, but it’s not as exciting. Still, it’s a great double feature, and I swear too that I saw them in the right order.

Poor Cedric’s Almanac (1952)

I had a blast revisiting this collection of column fragments by Cedric Adams, a Minneapolis-based journalist who also had a career on radio. Arthur Godfrey wrote an introduction and Bob Hope kicked in a postscript, so you can tell Adams had some profile in 1952, if you’ve never heard of him. It was a book my parents had that I took down off the shelf and read and loved when I was 9 or 10 or 11. It has a lot of the breezy gossip columnist style, with boldface type and such, but the topics are less about celebrities and more like a parade of what we now call factoids. Reading is more like browsing a strange collection of trivia. It’s culled from Adams’s column writing in the 1930s and 1940s and breaks down into topics like the weather, health, children, etc. The section labeled “S - E - X” is not once ever about s-e-x but only marriage and dating. I’m not exactly nostalgic for stuff this coy and chaste but I will say it’s refreshing. A lot of the nostalgia that is there comes from finding some of the items of my conventional wisdom which have stuck. For example, Adams writes that scientists have determined—scientists have determined lots of things here but nothing is sourced (it’s a chatty newspaper lifestyle column, Jake)—that humans respond more quickly to green lights than to reds and thus ideally they should be reversed in traffic lights. But of course it’s too late now or even in the 1940s. Absolutely trivial things like that have stayed with me all this time. If you are inclined to read it you should be prepared for a full blast of midcentury values, for better and worse. Race is utterly invisible, and gender is pretty much hopeless. Most of the advice for women is about housework. There is a syrupy father-and-son heart-to-heart thing that recurs frequently. It has a fair amount of Minneapolis and Minnesota detail and lore that appealed to me then and still. I think a lot of my appreciation for trivia may have started here. The publication date is 1952 but the material is older than that, extending back into the 1930s. Among other things it is familiar with WPA projects, so it’s even a little bit older than it appears. I instinctively reject most of Adams’s obviously well-intended advice and also have to admit to regular wincing. But I can’t deny Poor Cedric’s Almanac is very charming and a lot of fun.

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

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)

USA, 14 minutes

Directors: Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid

Writer: Maya Deren

Photography: Alexander Hammid

Editor: Maya Deren

Cast: Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid

I warmed up for writing about this 14-minute experimental film by looking at the 103-minute 2002 documentary In the Mirror of Maya Deren. I had seen Meshes of the Afternoon previously, via youtube videos of varying quality with and without a soundtrack, and not had much patience for it. I particularly did not like the nun-like figure with a mirror for a face, which reminded me too much of Luis Bunuel and his work, notably Un Chien Andalou, although it is L'Age d'Or where he really starts getting carried away with nuns. And it’s not really exactly a nun here anyway, but never mind. In the Mirror covers all of Deren’s abbreviated career (she died in 1961 at the age of 44) and her six or so movies. Deren was another beneficiary of last year’s Sight & Sound poll, ultimately elevating Meshes of the Afternoon from #277 on the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? up to #99, though she does not appear again in the list of 1,000. I suspect other pictures by her may be better, but Meshes also has depths that are remarkable for a little 14-minute cinema play. In fairness, it is merely her very first film whereas especially the footage she shot in Haiti, clips seen in In the Mirror, looks more interesting to me. I thus still had some bias against Meshes of the Afternoon going in again. Then I had a hard time getting comfortable at first with the “intentional silence,” enforced by Deren with intentional markers of sound such as a record-player playing a record. But I came to like it for that, especially when I peeked in on a youtube version with music. Meshes is mostly a dream story, and the dream stories we have at night after all are mostly silent. Meshes is rooted in feminist anxiety, if I’m reading it right, but with its own internal logic as dream narrative more or less, with potent symbols and/or artifacts of the mundane day—the flower, the key, the knife.

It has the inexplicable physical forces and dislocations of dreams too when the dreamer within the dream (Deren) is blown down a staircase, and later when she is edited down and up the same staircase after an unsettling encounter. It is randomly erotic. There is a lot of clarity to how the scenes are staged and shot, and the use of repetition is skillful. Even so, for all the force of Deren’s vision, it often feels much like what it is, some fooling around with a motion-picture camera in the glintingly bright sunshine and etched shadows of California, albeit at the same time admittedly visionary somehow. I found the more I looked at Meshes the better it seemed to get. I have some trouble, I must admit, adjusting to such a purely visual experience as this little 14-minute workout delivers. All of Deren’s films are on youtube, as far as I could see, even a 52-minute 1985 documentary which appears to be the only way to see her Haiti footage. It’s called Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, put together by Cherel and Teiji Ito, finally released eight years later. Teiji Ito was Deren’s second husband, 18 years her junior, married when they were 43 and 25. The youtube video is typically frustrating, with burnt-in Spanish (Portuguese?) subtitles and footage obviously decayed by iterations of duplication. But Deren’s seeming rapport and intimacy with these Haitians gave her amazing access to some remarkable rituals and wonderful, mesmerizing music and dance, which generally come through fine. Voiceovers by John Genke and Joan Pape provide some useful information when they are not sounding like educational films for classrooms. Maya Deren—start with Meshes of the Afternoon, I suppose, fair enough, and then proceed.