James Dorr's Blog, page 157

At the Movies: “Must See” Gothics before Crimson Peak?

This comes courtesy of On the Edge Cinema on Facebook for those of us anticipating Guillermo del Toro’s (of PAN’S LABYRINTH fame) latest movie, CRIMSON PEAK, but perhaps feel weak on its genre background.  Please note however that in some ways it’s not a horror movie, or as author Evry puts it, “[a]lthough the advertising emphasizes the supernatural apparitions, audiences may be surprised in how foregrounded the love story is over the ghosts.  As they say in the film, it’s not a ghost story, but rather a story with ghosts in it.”  Thus forewarned, behold, via SHOCKTILLYOUDROP.COM, Max Evry’s “12 Gothic Horror Films to Watch Before You See CRIMSON PEAK” (even though the film itself, I understand, opened yesterday) by pressing here.

Corpus Deluxe Contract Received

More of the business side of writing Friday with the contract received for “River Red” in CORPUS DELUXE:  UNDEAD TALES OF TERROR (cf. September 25, 24).  This one’s moving fast with the acceptance only three days after I’d sent the story, and now three weeks later the contract with a note that if all signed returns come back quickly enough, Editor Jorge Salgado-Reyes hopes to have it out as early as October 25.

The publisher of this one is Indie Authors Press, of London UK, while “River Red” takes place mostly in the Port City in the far-future, dying Earth world of the “Tombs.”  It’s a tale in a sense of undying love, or perhaps that’s “undead” love, which as it turns out is not always a good thing.  “River Red” was originally published in ESCAPE CLAUSE (Ink Oink Art Inc, 2009) and also appears in my collection THE TEARS OF ISIS (Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing, 2013).

What NOT to Do Making Movies: Emily Asher-Perrin on Pan; Blight Digest Discontinued

Well maybe it’s a bit dyspeptic, but here is an interesting review of a movie that morphed into more of a general complaint via TOR.COM, “5 Mistakes That Hollywood Blockbusters Should Stop Making, as Proved By PAN,” by Emily Asher-Perrin.  Interesting not because I’d really planned on going to the movie myself (but now maybe I will!), but because I wonder which, if any, of these I might have made in my own writing.  Or maybe it should be how to avoid them.

Or . . . maybe . . . how to use them, or twists thereon, in some possible new tale?

Be that as it may, for the skinny from Asher-Perrin, please to press here.

Then for some sad news:  Editor/Publisher Ron Earl Phillips announced today that BLIGHT DIGEST has been discontinued.  This was the one that had accepted my tale of hunger and wild plants, “Strawberry Fields,” as a reprint (cf. January 28).  However Editor Phillips adds “This isn’t to say that Blight is done, or at least the inclusion of short story horror in the business plan of One Eye Press for 2016 and/or 2017.  I love short stories and hope to make a push for a themed horror anthology in the next 18 months.”

So, dead for now, but perhaps it may yet bear fruit in the future

How to Trick the Devil Official Release October 15 (Plus Nightmare Stalkers/Dream Walkers Still Available)

Editor Stephanie Buosi has just announced that links are live for purchase of HOW TO TRICK THE DEVIL (cf. September 29, et al.) from either Lulu or, with a ten percent discount, direct from publisher Horrified Press.  My story in this is of carny folk of the less-than-honest sort on Halloween called “Lobster Boy and the Hand of Satan.”  Checking the Horrified website myself, I’m reminded that another book with a story of mine, NIGHTMARE STALKERS & DREAM WALKERS featuring the surrealistic gustatory tale “Flesh,” was released two years ago under their imprint (see June 28 2013, et al.) and, while it seems it may be out of stock at the Horrified site, it is available (I just checked) from both Lulu and Amazon, here and here.  As for HOW TO TRICK THE DEVIL, to find it on Lulu one can press here, or for the publisher’s site (and remember at ten percent off, at least for now) here.

Perfume: A “Tale of Murder and Sensual Depravity”

(Or, so I may still not have actually read it, second from top on Monday’s list of Most Disturbing Novels, but last night I did watch the DVD.  The quote in the headline, however, is cribbed from Amazon’s blurb on the book.)

There is a legend (if I remember the details correctly) that a vial of perfume thousands of years old was discovered in a tomb in Egypt, still sealed and intact.  The archaeologists opened it and the scent of its contents was so exquisite that, for a moment, everybody on the Earth forgot they were living and thought they were in heaven.  The perfume was subsequently analyzed and twelve of its ingredients identified, but a thirteenth remains unknown.

This we learn about an hour, of a total 147 minutes, into the movie PERFUME.  Subtitled THE STORY OF A MURDERER — no spoiler here — the movie details the life of one Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, born with a preternaturally enhanced sense of smell and, as he determines just about halfway through the film, no natural body odor himself.  He, by then a connoisseur of smells, fears this means he has no real identity, while from a practical point of view it also means he can sneak up on people fairly easily.  So the movie itself (as is the book too) is one about smells, with a movement progressing from the stinky to the near-divine.  Jean-Baptiste is born in the fish market of 1738 Paris, the smelliest part of the smelliest, if only because it’s the largest, city in France.  From the start he is fascinated by odors with no judgment as to “badness” or “goodness” until as a young man working for a tanner, while making a delivery in Paris he comes upon a young, just-pubescent woman whose smell fascinates him.  Cue in a truly creepy scene in the course of which he accidentally kills her, then strips her and sniffs all over her body — but the thing is, he knows now some smells may be especially desired.  This, he also soon learns, includes shops that sell perfume as well as women who buy it.

He now gets himself apprenticed to a perfumer where he learns how perfume is mixed and made.  There are three stages in a completed perfume — the initial impression, the odor continuing to be enjoyed with its wearer present, then that which remains after — each of these composed of a harmony of four distinct scents, plus a theoretical thirteenth scent.  This is the one unanalyzed in the Egyptian legend, which he learns at this time too, but, as his master explains, it’s only a legend.

Still, he must learn more, and, receiving his journeyman’s papers, he travels to the flower-growing town of Grasse, a center of perfume manufacture, and it is here he conceives his grand plan:  if he has no identity himself as a result of having no odor, he will gain one by concocting the ultimate perfume.  Learning the process of enfleurage — capturing scents in odorless fats — to augment the more common distillation method his old master taught him, and recalling the young woman he’d killed in Paris, he proceeds to extract the scents of women.  Twelve women in all, but then a thirteenth. . . .

Perhaps we can sense where this is going — but what a journey!  The idea behind the tale may be fantastic but the sets, the costumes, the details are supremely naturalistic.  The ugly depravity of Paris’s slums, the opulence of a wealthy estate outside of Grasse, the fields of flowers, all enlisted to help supply for the imagination the dimension that’s missing from both book and film, the smells themselves.  The inhuman despair of the Parisian rabble contrasted with the brightness, especially, of the two women, the young girl of Paris and now, at Grasse, a rich man’s daughter that Jean-Baptiste has designs on for a thirteenth new victim, both strikingly red-haired, leading the eye if not the nose, literally, to the exotic.

And then the ending, at least for me quite unexpected, yet perfect in its own disturbing way.  It’s a kind of film that I enjoy, intricate, beautiful, chilling as well but especially so as one recalls details well after it has ended.  I recommend it.

How Many Have You Read? Listverse: The Ten Most Disturbing Novels

Me, I’ve seen the movies of at least a couple.  But as for the books . . . well, today’s excursion of Facebook leads us, courtesy of poet Mary A. Turzillo, to Jamie Frater on LISTVERSE.COM with “Top 10 Most Disturbing Novels.”  And, just as a bonus, each of the entries (of which, this disclaimer is also added:  “Some synopses courtesy of Amazon and Librarything”) includes a link to Amazon for convenient fillings of holes in one’s bookshelf.

So what did you do on your Columbus Day holiday this year?  For one possibility, press here.

IU Cinema Screening of Nova Express, Oct. 8

A “three-hour science fiction experimental masterpiece,” according to the Indiana University Cinema docent.  “A Burroughsian interpretation of Burroughs” as opposed to NAKED LUNCH (as a less Burroughsian interpretation, though still a “masterpiece”).  He went on to say the film NOVA EXPRESS existed as a kind of rumor from the late 1990s, also that Perkowski had said, when he first read NOVA EXPRESS, that he didn’t understand it at all — but that the idea had been planted that later, ultimately, became what we would see.  He would look forward to a Criterion edition with the second disk with the other 75 some hours Perkowski put together but didn’t use.  But (for tonight at least) “three hours is enough.”

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An exhaustive examination of cut-ups, the control machine, and the algebra of need figure in this epic found-footage adaptation of Burroughs’s 1964 novel, which pits Inspector Lee and the Nova Police against the Nova Mob:  Sammy The Butcher, Green Tony, The Brown Artist, Jacky Blue Note, Izzy The Push, The Subliminal Kid, Uranian Willy, and Mr Bradly Mr Martin, alias The Ugly Spirit.  Features unreleased readings by Burroughs and voiceovers by Proctor & Bergman of the Firesign Theatre on such topics as hot crab people, language as virus, tape recorder warfare, death dwarfs, and Hassan Sabbah:  the Old Man of the Mountain.  “Minutes to go.  Souls rotten from their orgasm drugs, flesh shuddering from their nova ovens, prisoners of the earth to come out.”   “Like the radical science fiction novel on which it is based, the film cuts-up, remixes, incorporates and detours through social satire, science fiction, film noir, and the image archive of the twentieth-century to create a visual counterpart to the soundtrack voices of William Burroughs and others.  Combining found footage, original film, animation and collages the film is a mammoth, visionary work that has screened in various forms (some versions lasting three-hours) offering a truly cinematic realisation of Burroughs’ world.  This screening is essential for anyone interested in Burroughs, radical cinema, and storming the reality studio.” –Jack Sargeant   “As the film reaches its climax, Perkowski’s images become less literal and more visionary, intensifying into hallucinatory, stroboscopic collages. Its ‘Final Words’ (in fact the first words of the book), written half a century ago, are apocalyptic and all too timely: ‘Listen all you boards syndicates and governments of the earth. And you powers behind what filth deals consummated in what lavatory to take what is not yours. To sell the ground from unborn feet forever … Show your cards all players …These words might be too late.’” –The Boston Globe (HD Presentation)  

(IU CINEMA:  Nova Express film — program notes)

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This is the kind of film that grows on you.  It’s weird, almost beautiful in places, perhaps ploddy in others.  It’s cut and paste, repetitions, stock pictures sometimes from other films, sometimes brilliantly used.  It reminded me to some extent (though in a different way) to the final third of TALES OF POE described late last month (see September 28), as well as, again in a very different way, THE FALL OF THE LOUSE OF USHER (see July 17).  From my own notes:  “Images and sounds that flow one into another.  A moving collage.”

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NOVA EXPRESS is a 1964 novel by William S. Burroughs.  It was written using the ‘fold-in’ method, a version of the cut-up method, developed by Burroughs with Brion Gysin, of enfolding snippets of different texts into the novel. It is part of The Nova Trilogy, or “Cut-Up Trilogy,’ together with THE SOFT MACHINE and THE TICKET THAT EXPLODED.  Burroughs considered the trilogy a “sequel” or “mathematical” continuation of NAKED LUNCH.  […]

Interpretation

NOVA EXPRESS is a social commentary on human and machine control of life.  The Nova Mob — Sammy the Butcher, Izzy the Push, The Subliminal Kid, and others — are viruses, “defined as the three-dimensional coordinate point of a controller.” “which invade the human body and in the process produce language.”  These Nova Criminals represent society, culture, and government, and have taken control. Inspector Lee and the rest of the Nova Police are left fighting for the rest of humanity in the power struggle.  “The Nova Police can be compared to apomorphine, a regulating instance that need not continue and has no intention of continuing after its work is done.”  The police are focused on “first-order addictions of junkies, homosexuals, dissidents, and criminals; if these criminals vanish, the police must create more in order to justify their own survival.”   The Nova Police depend upon the Nova Criminals for existence; if the criminals cease to exist, so do the police.  “They act like apomorphine, the nonaddictive cure for morphine addiction that Burroughs used and then promoted for many years.”

Control is the main theme of the novel, and Burroughs attempts to use language to break down the walls of culture, the biggest control machine.  He uses inspector Lee to express his own thoughts about the world.  “The purpose of my writing is to expose and arrest Nova Criminals. In NAKED LUNCH, SOFT MACHINE and NOVA EXPRESS I show who they are and what they are doing and what they will do if they are not arrested. […] With your help we can occupy The Reality Studio and retake their universe of Fear Death and Monopoly.”  As Burroughs battles with the self and what is human, he finds that language is the only way to maintain dominance over the “powerful instruments of control,” which are the most prevalent enemies of human society.

(WIKIPEDIA, NOVA EXPRESS — The Novel)

(Bet You Didn’t Know) Today Is World Octopus Day

As far as social behavior, most octopuses appear limited to “copulation or cannibalism,” says Janet Voight, a cephalopod expert and associate curator at the Field Museum in Chicago, who wasn’t involved in the study. “And after copulation, cannibalism is back on the table.”

(Douglas Main, “Bizarrely Social and Crafty Octopus Stuns Scientists,” NEWSWEEK.COM, August 12 2015)

Nevertheless, and I only e-discovered it myself this afternoon, there is a day specially set aside to celebrate our eight-tentacled oceanic friends who, one might add, have other hobbies than just the two noted above.  In addition, asks NEWSWEEK writer Douglas Main, “What other animal has three hearts, a brain-like set of nerves in each leg and blue blood?  What other 50-pound beast could fit through a two-inch hole?” in the opening of his piece today, “It’s World Octopus Day!  Here Are Eight Awesome Octopodes” via NEWSWEEK.COM, the rest of which can be seen by pressing here.  Or, to read the article quoted at the top, specifically on the Larger Pacific Striped Octopus (a.k.a. Awesome Octopode number eight), press here.  And while celebrating, while Earthly octopodes might not necessarily be exactly the same thing as Cthulhu, one might set aside an extra glass for H.P. Lovecraft.

Bloomington Writers Guild First Sunday Prose Resumes October 4

There had been a hiatus for September, that being the weekend of the Fourth Street Festival of the Arts and Crafts with its Writers Guild-sponsored Spoken Word Stage (see September 6), but this afternoon, October 4, brought back the 2015 First Sunday Prose Reading season (see August 2, et many al.), including an “open mike” reading by me.  Sponsored by the Writers Guild at Bloomington (about which more can be found here) in conjunction with Boxcar Books, the session opened with featured reader Samrat Upadhyay, award-winning author of such books as ARRESTING GOD IN KATHMANDU, THE GURU OF LOVE, and BUDDHA’S ORPHANS, who read a short story set in Nepal, “Fast Forward,” from his latest, soon to be published collection.  He was then followed by Wendy Teller, currently working on her first, as yet untitled novel, who read its opening chapter, followed in turn by Molly Gleeson, a mostly nonfiction writer but “dabbling” in fiction, who read her newest (and also as yet untitled) short story.

These were followed by a refreshment break and then the open mike readings, in which I took the third spot of four with a new story (alluded to below on September 19), “His Dead Ex-Girlfriend,” a saga on why the mere fact of one’s significant other having become a zombie shouldn’t prevent a rekindling of romance — or at least going through the motions.

But Is It Horror? A Few Quick Impressions of Serial Mom

It is hilarious.  This was the Friday night, 10 p.m. showing at the Indiana University Cinema — hence my writing this just after midnight Saturday — of director John Waters’s 1994 SERIAL MOM.  “A hilarious and dark twist on the everyday mediocrity of suburban life,” so say the program notes, “SERIAL MOM gives us Kathleen Turner as we’ve never seen her before.  As Beverly Sutphin, Turner plays a seemingly perfect homemaker, who will stop at nothing to rid the neighborhood of anyone who cannot live up to her perfect moral code.”  This even includes, as we find out when she’s finally caught, brought to trial, and in a parody of courtroom dramas acts as her own lawyer to gain an acquittal, murdering one of the jury members for wearing white shoes after Labor Day.  This even after the juror explains that particular etiquette rule is no longer in force.

So it’s a crime film in a way too, or a satire of one — but is it horror?  Her son and his friends’ watching horror movies (he works in a video rental store, which helps feed his habit), which mom does too augmenting it with reading about real live serial killers, is certainly part of the “corrupting” mix.  But what of the neighbors?  Those who she finds “guilty” and metes out varying degrees of punishment to.  How well, in fact, do you know your own neighbors?

Even at this moment they could be watching you.

But the supreme horror for me was at the end, just as the jury found mom not guilty, and one sees the looks on her family’s faces when it sinks in:  They will have to continue living with her.  (The daughter hastily assures her new boyfriend, the previous one deceased after mom overheard the daughter complain when he’d stood her up, that everything would be okay as long as he was careful not to get mom upset.)  Granted, of course, they had stood by her, but to the extent of wearing “anti-death penalty” buttons and hoping for an insanity finding.  And such was her fame already that Susanne Somers was set to play her in an upcoming SERIAL MOM TV film.

Paranoia anyone?