James Dorr's Blog, page 62

Speaking of Cats, or, Third Sunday Write Strikes Again

Once again the third Sunday of the month and time again for the Bloomington Writers Guild “Third Sunday Write” (see November 18, et al.).  These are sessions where a bunch of us will be given prompts, assignments, whatever for timed (short) writing sessions, sometimes resulting in usable ideas for subsequent stories or poems, otherwise possibly only for fun.  But one never knows, my most recent story for instance came out of just a portion of a long past exercise, combined wi[image error]th some quite unrelated ideas — or at least until they became parts of the story.  But mostly . . . well . . . this time one cue was to make a list of things done every day — in my case I picked things I did every morning.  Then we were to pick just one item, but draw it out into a set of instructions (so others, presumably, could do it too?)

So we ran out of time fast (in fact, I had to complete my last half-sentence in “overtime”), but here’s my contribution:

“FEEDING THE CAT

“1.  It is important, first, to avoid stepping on the cat — the cat’s breakfast should be a full and enjoyable experience for all involved.

“2.  So, deftly avoiding the cat’s extremities, reach down and pick up her water dish.  CAREFUL, DON’T SPILL IT!

“3.  The Water Dish:  Empty it first into the sink, then run water in it to wash it out — use fingers, if needed, to capture soggy bits of food the cat may have dropped in it.

“4.  Then fill it with fresh water just over half full, and bend down again carefully placing it gently on the newspaper that serves as the cat’s place mat, being careful, again, not to let it spill when the curious and/or hunger-crazed cat tries to head-butt it out of your hand. . . . ”

(Perhaps next month we’ll learn that the other bowl is used for dry food, along with the extra challenges that may bring.)

Triana Wishes To Remind: Rescue Kittens Need Valentine’s Day Love

[image error]

(And older cats can use it as well)

Burning Love Now Out In Paperback Format

This will be another quickie report, that BURNING LOVE AND BLEEDING HEARTS (see February 5, January 20) is now available in paperback format. To let Amazon tell it:  Britain’s most respected living horror writer Ramsey Campbell has said of this magazine-sized charity book of short stories:- “A fine anthology for a fine cause.  Invest your imagination in [image error]it and you’ll be investing in the world as well.”  BURNING LOVE AND BLEEDING HEARTS is a collection of dark Valentine’s Day tales; a charity anthology to raise funds for the Australian bush-fire victims, and ALL sale proceeds will be donated to the Australian Red Cross.  For more information, including a list of all authors and titles, one need but press here.  (Or if preferred, the Kindle edition, to be released officially Friday for Valentine’s Day, is available for pre-order as well.)

Lust Nears Consummation, Bio Checkover Needed

That is to say the anthology SEVEN DEADLY SINS:  LUST (cf. February 6, December 8 2019), Black Hare Press’s promised compilation of tales of . . . well . . . lust, careening toward a less-than-two-weeks-after-Valentine’s Day, February 25 release.  My story in this, a brief tip of the hat (or other item of clothing) to sweet lesbian vampire love, “A Cup Full of Tears,” originally published in MON COEUR MORT (Post Mortem Press, 2011).  But before publication, the details of authors’ biographies must be checked over to ensure correctness.

So yesterday late afternoon, mine was.

Eraserhead IU Cinema’s Friday “Not-Quite Midnight” Film

It’s not a pretty film, dark, dingy, a low-level industrial machine noise permeating the soundtrack. Interesting, though, and I’m not sure whether I like it or not. A man has made his girlfriend pregnant and now they must marry. She moves in with him in his slum apartment along with the already prematurely born baby, a creature that looks more like a reptile’s head sticking out from a cloth-swaddled body. It also cries — not a baby’s shrill cry but more a constant whimpering sound — until the mom can no longer take it, moving out and leaving the baby with hapless pop.

So pop muddles along, has a brief affair with the woman who lives across the hall; there are several dream sequences, one with a puffy-cheeked woman who “lives in a radiator” and sings a song.  In another dream sequence the man’s head flies off; it falls out the window and a boy[image error] finds it, takes it to a pencil-making factory where it’s made into erasers.  Thus the name of the film:  ERASERHEAD.  When he wakes up(?), he finally unwraps the baby’s full-body diaper to find there’s nothing beneath to serve for skin. . . .  Ick!  But eventually may find some kind of salvation, somehow, with the radiator lady.

As the film ended, a girl in the row behind me blurted, “What?”  But, yes, ERASERHEAD is nothing if not surreal.  I’d seen it before, but on DVD, and a lot seems to make more sense (symbolic and/or actual) when seen on the large screen — and some parts are quite good on any level, the awkwardness of a dinner with the man’s girlfriend’s parents as one example, though others to me seemed perhaps a bit drawn out.

To quote the IU Cinema’s blurb:  A dream of dark and troubling things, David Lynch’s 1977 debut feature, ERASERHEAD, is both a lasting cult sensation and a work of extraordinary craft and beauty.  With its mesmerizing black-and-white photography by Frederick Elmes and Herbert Cardwell, evocative sound design, and unforgettably enigmatic performance by Jack Nance, this visionary nocturnal odyssey continues to haunt American cinema like no other film.  Contains mature content, including violence and disturbing imagery.

And whether one likes the film or not might not really matter.

Thursday Triple Header: A Proof, An Edit, A Contract Signed

So sometimes several things come all at once, such is the magical life of the writer.  And so today, Thursday, there are three new items under the aegis of “The Writing Life.”  (1)  For starters, an authors proof copy arrived from publisher Things in the Well for BURNING LOVE AND BLEEDING HEARTS (cf. February 5, January 20, 15) in which my story “A Saint Valentine’s Day Tale” appears in number three slot in the table of contents.  So says the publisher:  We’ve wound the stories and poems — all 60 of them — into a bit of a narrative.  You’ll find no two are alike, in any way.  It’s so wonderful to have such a diverse representation of dark or dangerous love.  We are delighted with how it has all come [image error]together, and hope you are too.  (2)  Then second, for Black Hare Press’s SEVEN DEADLY SINS:  LUST anthology, I received an edited copy of my story, “A Cup Full of Tears” (see December 8), to be checked over.  (3)  And then, last, a contract came from The Great Void for using my novelette, “The Garden,” in their upcoming UNREAL anthology.  So. . . .

A flurry of reading, okaying the proof for an already announced February 14th Kindle edition, with paperback following in its time, for vampiress Claudette and “A Saint Valentine’s Day Tale”; more reading to check out Black Hare Press’s edits and find them okay for “A Cup Full of Tears”; and a gimlet-eyed poring over the contract for UNREAL and “The Garden,” with a hoped for publication date of March 14 — all of which I have okayed, approved, and signed and sent back to their respective recipients.  Or, in a word, just another day in the Writing Life lived.

Prose, Poems, “Casket Girl” Rerun In 2020’s First First Wednesday Spoken Word Series; Burning Love Set for Feb. 14 Release

New Year’s Day was on a Wednesday last month which meant taking a bye, but this evening’s First Wednesday Spoken Word Series at local tavern Bears Place (cf. December 4 last year, et al.) came on strong to start a new decade.  The featured readers were Antonia Matthew, who we’ve met a number of times before, with a prose retelling of the Pied Piper of Hamlin from the point of view of a boy left behind; and Bonnie Maurer, author of RECONFIGURED and THE RECONFIGURED GODDESS:  POEMS OF A BREAST CANCER SURVIVOR as well as a 2020 Indiana Poet Laureate finalist, with a gathering of poems on various topics; with musical interludes on sitar and guitar by SITAR OUTREACH MINISTRY.  Illness prevented a third scheduled reader from attending, but there were a total of eleven open-mike walk ons to take up the slack, of which I came seventh with “A Saint Valentine’s Day Tale” (presented about a year ago too but this year to [image error]celebrate finally being sold), of the New Orleanian vampiress Claudette and what she once did to an unruly husband.

Then in a somewhat related item, news came today that BURNING LOVE AND BLEEDING HEARTS (cf. January 29), including “A Saint Valentine’s Day Tale,” is officially scheduled for a February 14th release — at least on Kindle.  This is the anthology earmarked for relief for victims of the recent Australian bush fires, details on which, including a partial list of authors, can be found by pressing here.

Country Doctor: Another Ghost From The Past Re-Emerges

FAKE NEWS, don’t we just love it!  I don’t mean the term the President uses when he means “real news,” but really fake fake news.  Conspiracy theories, that sort of thing, though it may seem real to those that believe it.  But now it’s time for a trip into history.

Hie us back to the year 2018, to June 13 to be exact.  A call from “a (very) small publishing cooperative” called Old Sins:  Let’s write about conspiracies that have been debunked thoroughly but do so through the lens of Alternate History, where they have actually happened.  Let’s write about the second shooter, chemtrails, the Illuminati, Lizard People, Greys, the Loch Ness Monster, Pope Joan, Templars worshipping Satan, and so many other rumored conspiracies throughout history as if they were real.  As it so happened, I had such a tale, called “Country Doctor,” a reprint first published in BOOK OF DARK WISDOM for Summer 2005, one of UFOs and a strange humanoid creature being held by the military and needing medical attention.  And so off it went.

The above itself was reported here about a year later (cf. June 20, 2019), along with more news.  On August 27 2018 an email had come from Old Sins Editor Joseph Cadotte concerning possible minor changes, and that he liked it and “Country Doctor” [image error]was being forwarded to “his partner.”  Not an acceptance but, what the heck, I sent some changes plus reasons for keeping some other things the same.  Another exchange on October 25 about “Pending Acceptance,” and then on January 27 2019 an email titled “Re. Pending acceptance to FAKE NEWS” that said in part:  We have a preliminary layout, and, if you are included in this message, you are on it.  An acceptance then, yes?  But it didn’t really, exactly say.  But then on June 19, and hence the day the June 20 2019 post referred to, came an announcement explaining delays and concluding I will try to send you a contract soonish (which, by the way, I don’t recall subsequently receiving, but you get the idea — the wheels of artistry grind slowly as well as, sometimes, quite casually too) so, what the heck, let’s assume by now that it’s all official.

And then again silence until yesterday an email arrived, “FAKE NEWS News and Request,” and later that afternoon “FAKE NEWS News and request, part 2,” to send in a bio, etc., plus a small questionnaire about original inspirations (“which conspiracy,” e.g.), plus an announcement that “the whole text is going to our design person” (that is, if there are any story changes, to get them in quickly).  So it seems, despite delays, the anthology finally is on its way!

Unless, of course, it’s all fake news.

Tokyo Drifter — Guns, Fistfights, and Japanese Gangsters

With its bright color palette, creative use of the Ginza nightclub district, and catchy pop-ballad theme song, TOKYO DRIFTER starts by indulging the hedonistic youth culture of 1960s Tokyo and builds toward stylistic abstraction in its climactic gunfight, filmed in nearly empty studio space with striking shifts in color and lighting.  Suzuki’s minimalist soundstage set blurs the distinction between fantasies, supernatural, and reality, creating a fever-dream-like cityscape.  In English and Japanese with English subtitles.  Contains mature content, including violence.  (IU Cinema Program)

Thus Monday night’s Indiana University Cinema fare, another one of those that discourages an orderly plot-based description.  Think spaghetti westerns, themselves with Japanese cinema roots, a man with a sense of personal honor, but otherwise existing mainly as a stimulus to violence.  One side played against another, loyalties, betrayals, and, in the case of this [image error]city-based crime shoot-em-up, beat-em-up, lots of color.  Color a-go-go.  Gorgeous color, although the beginning is in black and white — but even then with one quick color flashback!  A hero who’ll take being knocked down three times but then will go wild, or so we’re told, who’s taking it this time because he’s going straight.  Because his almost father-like boss is going straight too — but of course you know it’s not going to work out.  Gorgeous, if generally sleazy settings, and gangs being allied to other gangs, or else maybe not, until you’d be lost even with a scorecard.

But what a ride!

To end, two brief Amazon reviews:

Watching this as a straight-ahead movie is difficult.  The plot starts and stops and veers into strange places.  But watching it as a conflicted mash-up of cinematic genres — coming at a crucial time in Japan’s postwar development — turns it into a hyperkinetic meditation on art and art’s boundaries (or lack thereof). I ‘ll avoid doing a plot summary, but will say that, if you can handle a movie that steps back and makes sport of its own genre conventions (not necessarily caring for the characters or action, as such), then this is as good as it gets.  (marko a pyzyk – 4.0 out of 5 stars – “A jazzy western/samurai/martial arts/gangster mash-up”)

James Bond and the Yakuza.  Goddard and Fuller.  Might and Majesty.  And the best editing of a film that I’ve ever seen.  It’s all here in a movie with negligible plot and characters who are intended purely as archetypes, stereotypes, and ciphers.  But that makes it sound all academic and no fun, when really it is a fun movie.  (Michael A. Duvernois VINE VOICE – 5.0 out of 5 stars – “The perfect sums of the 1960s”)

La Fatale Captures Midway Spot In Feb. 10-Minute-Story First Sunday Prose

The Bloomington Writers Guild “First Sunday Prose Reading and Open Mic” session (cf. January 5, et al.) was a little bit different this month.  Instead of the usual featured readers plus walk-ons format, it was all “open Mic” but with doubled time, ten minutes instead of three to five, allowed for each reader.  Regardless of format, about fifteen people attended at local tavern Bear’s [image error]Place, with some suggesting that possibly more might in the future should it be repeated, allowing as it did a little more flexibility for walk-ons with slightly longer than flash pieces.

In all, seven attendees read, including two with short novel chapters.  Of these, I came precisely in the middle, in number four spot, with a 1300-word story, “La Fatale,” recently mentioned here as a possible entry in a locally edited anthology, RAPE ESCAPES (see December 23), a variation on DRACULA in which Mina Harker, fled to France after becoming a vampire herself after all, proves a savior to three new Frenchwoman friends when attacked on the streets of after-dark Paris.