The indentations left from paperclips, usually in the upper left corners of the sheets. Round confetti from hole punchers. Rows of staples stuck together inside their box, waiting for use. Tom Robbins making characters out of cigarette packages and spoons. Fairy tale postmodernism. Is it crap or is it good?
Was a time when this writer, Vic Neptune, went by another name. He'd see, on several occasions, parked cars crammed with clothes, empty bags, full ashtrays, beaded necklaces, and the inevitable Tom Robbins trade paperback novel. A sight for my walking eyes in the first half of the 1990s. Some Generation X women affected or lived deeply an "alternative" lifestyle, listening to "alternative" music (the Lemonheads were hardly radical, but oh well), "crashing" on friends' and acquaintances' or just-met-you couches, car serving as transportation and clothes closet.
I saw the Robbins novel, Another Roadside Attraction on top of folded laundry in a plastic basket on the backseat of a Chevy Beretta. I saw Still Life With Woodpecker amid a scattering of CD cases on the passenger seat of a Chevy Cavalier that had a Grateful Dead sticker on the rear window.
My mother, born in 1924, read Skinny Legs and All for her book club. She enjoyed its fairy tale qualities with characters based on inanimate objects, similar to an old cartoon from her 1930s film-watching.
Robbins, interviewed by telephone, said he was lying in bed with the radio on, waiting to hear the number 23 uttered or sung before he would get up. Gus Van Sant adapted his novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, with River and Joaquin Phoenix's sister, Rain, who proved that not all of the Phoenix children can act. Van Sant showed with this movie how even a good director can make a turkey. Alfred Hitchcock made the great film Strangers on a Train but also the mind-numbingly boring The Paradine Case, a courtroom drama managing to make even Alida Valli uninteresting to watch, with Gregory Peck doing a lawyerly Atticus Finch except we care about Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird, if not the racist Atticus from Harper Lee's posthumous somewhat "controversial" novel, Go Set a Watchman.
I see knickknacks on my desk now that could be characters.
The yellow marble pigeon figurine from Mexico, the beak broken off when I dropped it on a hard floor. An old shoelace. A Winnie the Pooh in yellow plastic, a green Piglet, both from an early 1970s cereal box. A copy of The Hamlet by William Faulkner on my desk because last night I wanted to grab a random quote but didn't get around to it. Sometimes a book used for this purpose will sit on my desk for months, moved around or just occupying one spot, dust lines forming around its edges. The Hamlet is next to The Ticket That Exploded by William S. Burroughs, quoted in the post dated September 18, 2021, please read it if you haven't. Read all the others too if you haven't, please. Recommend them to friends.
A collection of Robert Louis Stevenson short stories supports the Burroughs trade paperback. 19th Century adventure and intrigue, Jekyll and Hyde, The Body Snatcher underneath Burroughs' experimentalism, and why not? Burroughs was born in St. Louis, home of the St. Louis Arch. The city was named after Louis the Ninth of France, son of Blanche of Castile, the king who died on crusade, in Tunisia of all places. The Arch represents an arc connecting east and west, but also a steel rainbow, like railroad tracks, commercial interconnections, the interruption of migratory patterns of hoofed animals that provided the main food supply of Plains Indians, thus, the St. Louis Arch is a metallic slam against Native Americans made to live on reservations now threatened by oil exploration approved of by the Biden administration.
Run-on sentences must be avoided, my high school English Honors teacher said. The above paragraph might've been marked by her with red Sharpie, accompanied by explanations of my errors in black ink.
"I expect more from you," she once wrote about my mediocre essay on Oedipus Rex.
I could've simply written: "Oedipus killed his father, fucked his mother, when he found out the truth he blinded himself. Tragic."
Even in high school, the problem was my brain spills out through my fingers; I feel a need to acknowledge these thoughts (in first draft, anyway) read by strangers in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, Australia, Bolivia, Portugal, Singapore, Vietnam, and all other nations at one time or another. I aim to be interesting, but I also try to not let my mad way of expressing thoughts become incoherent, like the late essays of Ulrike Meinhof, a leftist commentator turned terror group member (Baader-Meinhof) whose work for the first several years of her career as a journalist formed a cogent anti-capitalist argument, but gave way to rants seeming to resemble piles of pulled out uncombed hair.
Meinhof's political dedication, I suggest, warped her sense of reality. A story goes that when she lived in Hamburg, well into her radicalization, she refused to decorate her apartment with lamp shades. Naked bulbs made her rooms glow with blaring light because lamp shades are "bourgeois." She voluntarily had in her apartment the kind of light one finds in basements, or in the prison where she committed suicide (if she committed suicide).
I mention small things like indentations from paperclips because I'm a filmmaker (YouTube channel John Berner, watch them please) but also I notice the little objects in a room, in a scene, a shot, arrangements of objects and how they form relationships depending on the composition.
There are many ways to film Dracula, based on the Bram Stoker novel from 1897, but first one must confront the novel's epistolary format. Written as letters and diaries, the story isn't presented directly, but as memory, and subjective memories at that. Dracula's subjective viewpoint isn't presented--he's the Other. A former man who drinks blood, shape shifts into a wolf, sleeps in a coffin during the day, doesn't drink wine, can't be seen reflected in a mirror, so does that mean his reverse image is invisible? What is the nature of Dracula's Shadow? Is that Shadow timid? Imbued with a sense of unworthiness, like a slave or captive of the past, the 15th century when the real Prince Vlad Dracul breathed the same planetary atmosphere as King Edward the Fourth of England?
Did Dracul venture to England long before coming to live in Carfax Abbey? Did he have a summit with Edward IV? Did he donate to the Yorkist Cause, the Red Rose, the more appealing color, to Dracula, than the White Lancastrian Rose?
In the 15th Century, in Britain, two aristocratic factions duked it out for thirty odd years, Wars of the Roses so-called, the White Rose representing the Royalist faction "led" at first by allegedly feeble-minded, definitely mentally ill King Henry VI of England and France, by condition of the Treaty of Troyes in 1420, whereby also mentally ill King Charles VI (Henry's maternal grandfather) disinherited his son Charles (of later Joan of Arc-related fame) in favor of whatever issue may come from the marriage of marauding King Henry V and Princess Catherine, Charles's daughter.
Henry as a baby became King of France and King of England, with elder relatives running the government. A crown the size of a halved coconut, I guess, was used to crown the infant.
Little Henry, about the age of ten, witnessed the burning to death of Joan of Arc. Did this traumatize him? Were sensibilities and stomachs a bit different then?
His father, the fifth King Henry, whom the child didn't really know (the elder Henry died in 1422), watched horrific executions as a teenager, sitting next to his father, Henry IV. Creativity with names didn't exist with aristocrats then or with commoners for that matter. I have an early seventeenth century Norwegian ancestor named Engebret Engebretsen.
The smell of cooking human flesh probably didn't faze Henry the boy King. At ten did he understand the underlying reason why the English wanted Joan dead? She was mainly a threat to them due to her "Voices." Throughout her trial there seems to have been a mounting desperation to hear her confess her Voices, rather than God's messengers (St. Michael and St. Catherine), were actually from the Devil. The English needed Joan of Arc to be wrong, or rather, a messenger (unwitting perhaps) of demonic power. If God supported Joan, God supported the French in a war that had been going on since 1337. Now, at the trial in 1431, Joan must confess her guidance by the Deceiver, otherwise, God must oppose England and that can't fucking be.
Joan, though she recanted, changed her mind, an act sending her to the stake prepared for her outside Rouen Cathedral.
Vlad Tepes, the man who gave his history to the Dracula fictional legend, came along after Joan, but he lived during the Wars of the Roses in Wallachia (some of modern Romania), concerned mostly with containing the Turks. From them he learned impalement.
Impalement: a wooden stake pounded into the ground and then sharpened provides the "chair" for the condemned. Naked, the victim is lowered via the anus onto the stake, down and down until the victim has a shaft of wood thrust up inside his or her body, the torture technicians careful not to pierce vital organs which may lead to a quick death. Feet hanging near the ground, the victim may last days. They can be heard begging for mercy from passersby to kill them, something not done, probably, because a citizen of Draculaland doesn't go against the wishes of the Count, or Prince in this case.
Why people carry out such punishments (as well as modern torture-death punishments) is one reason we haven't been let back into Eden.
The burning of Joan, the impalement of Vlad's victims, the probable creation of Covid-19 in a lab...these events and diseases, wars and wanderings of peoples fleeing strife, civil wars and the more gentle arts of life, exist as actual moments gone or recounted, lived in now to be remembered later, but also forgotten. A person's experience is always genuine. Whether it's understood, or believed, or sympathized with, is usually an unreliable thing to count on. Many people, including those with entries of their own in encyclopedias, saw Joan of Arc burn.
A citizen of the U.S. or Mexico, or Singapore, or wherever else, dying of some ailment also feels a special drama deeply gripping to their lives and those around them, just as Vlad's impaled were up against a great question mark so tantalizingly close but far enough away in a subjective time caused by pain, that the eternity of their last moments, suspended inches above the ground provided to them Forever-on-a-stick, the material object holding them to Earth, even as the wood flaming below Joan smoked and ashed her body, while leaving behind (reportedly) her heart.
A Tom Robbins vampire novel is needed, but the time when young women had his books showing in their cars is gone, like the smoke of their cigarettes.
Vic Neptune
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