Fiction work, Twilight Zone/Robert Florey, Peel session Jam, Christmastime Libertines, sea noir, going nuclear, Little Willie John/Route 66, Boris and Bela impersonations, Way Out West, film dignity

Sunday 3/22/26

I have about a dozen nonfiction pieces to write in quick succession and then I can get back to fiction and book things. To paraphrase the Rolling Stones via Mississippi Fred McDowell and Sam Cooke, gotta move. Op-eds, film pieces, and three music pieces on Jerry Lee Lewis's live albums from 1964, the Byrds' Turn! Turn! Turn! LP, and the song, "I Think We're Alone Now." Located a rare 1968 live version from Tommy James and Shondelles. This is for starters. New Beatles pieces need to be written immediately thereafter. Haven't had a Beatles piece published in a few months.

Worked on a number of short stories over the weekend. One took as its inspiration something in these very pages pertaining to a whistler, which is called "Oh No Not That." Another is about ten words long, called "The Sighs Have It." Consider these starters.

Then there is "Open or Closed," no question mark, which also isn't long, word count-wise, but again, what does that measure, and what, especially does it measure with the likes of my work? Word counts mean nothing when you can have more life in a story that is 200 words long than someone else can have in the whole of their career's output.

"Open or Closed" is, fittingly, a kind of open-ended story. It appears to be told by a woman. It is about something that happened, repeatedly, that most definitely should not have happened, when this person was a child. What this thing was happened with a male. I say male, because that male could have been a boy--a brother, a friend--or it could have been a man.

The story is about the process of determining how much the door behind which this action took place should be left open afterwards. Like this kind of erasure ritual, as if someone else could look at how the door to this room has been left and read something shady or incrimination in the percentage of the aperture.

So obviously it's an intensely psychological story, about where we store memories and how, and also what we do in real-time to protect ourselves from the memories to come, or before they're brought to term. I've been working on the story for two weeks now. This is the first sentence:

We’d go into the bathroom for what he called simple fingerings as if the first word made the other remember it was supposed to sound funny.

It is a contender for inclusion in Longer on the Inside: Very Short Fictions of Infinitely Human Lives. I quality it this way because we may be talking two separate books on this idea of a kind of physics-defying fiction in which far more is contained in these works than anyone would have believed could have been based on what they've known or assumed to date and experienced.

There's been much work as well this weekend on "Still Good," and I've spent probably half a dozen hours so far this weekend with "Dead Thomas." These can't be equaled by anyone and I won't surpass them because they represent the full extent of my ability and the cumulative force of everything I've ever done, ever thought, everything I've put into my art, my mind, my heart, my soul, brought to bear on that ability. This is how it is supposed to be with everything I write and it was here.

At four in the morning Saturday, I was alternately laughing and crying as I went back to the beginning and began my way through another pass of "Dead Thomas," making changes. In some ways, I don't feel like I can take credit for what it is. It is both of me, and beyond me. I understand that no one "should" be able to do that.

What I really should say that this character--and I feel like that's not the right word for her, but I'll use it for the convenience in this journal entry--who narrates the story in Bonita is more real than I am. She is more real than Colin Fleming, this man in Boston. I am in awe of her realness. I'm honored to have been fortunate enough to do what I could on behalf of her story.

For about three quarters of this story you think it's about these particular things. The dead boy who shows up one day and knocks on the door of an in-progress high school English class and the girl, Rachel, who both falls for him and wants to do something for him. And it is about those things. Definitely. But it's about something else even more, and we don't see that coming. And when it gets there, good luck to you.

Downloaded high-def versions of Ride the Wild Country (1962), A Christmas Carol (1938), Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol (1962), and How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966). Watching 1949's The Crooked Way for the second time in a short period. John Payne is a prepossessing actor. I thought he was perfectly cast in 1947's Miracle on 34th Street. With The Crooked Way, you also have John Alton as the cinematographer. Anything shot by him or Nicholas Musuraca gets an immediate bump up.

Listened to the Jam's Peel session from November 5, 1979, which I listen to a lot. It's one of the best, and that's saying something, given the history of Peel sessions. Their best album, Setting Sons, was about to come out, featuring three of these four Peel session songs, including "Eton Rifles," which works well as an anti-publishing system song even if many of those publishing system types would probably hear it as some jolly tribute. Cheers then, mate. And the confidence in "Saturday's Kids." The sound of a composer knowing how good he is. Wallpaper lives...The line "What goes on, what goes wrong," reminds me of the line, "Everybody lies, everybody dies," in Alexander Vvedensky's Christmas at the Ivanovs'.

Watched the season five episode of The Twilight Zone, “The Long Morrow.” A beautiful tale about the power and rarity of a true connection, and how that connection may still not be enough in this world. Directed by the talented Robert Florey (Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Crooked Way). He's aged forty years and is now seventy when he returns to earth from his mission, and she hasn't aged at all. She says they can still be the thing they intended to be together, and he says, no, they can't, and they part.

It's a gesture of love on his part, but we're also left wondering if it really needed to be like that. But then we also think about these nasty ass billionaire men today, these corpulent blobs who are even uglier on the inside and how "normal" it is to basically buy a willingly bought twenty or thirty-something as a spouse or girlfriend. And yet, this story in the Twilight Zone acts treats a union between this two as a flat out no way, no go. Which isn't to detract from the astronaut's decision.

What would these people think of all of these wealthy white guys we could name who do this thing like they've never had a single real connection in their lives and couldn't and don't give a fuck about such things, which is how it goes when you're a vampire who's dead inside.

Downloaded some blazing Libertines' Christmastime gigs from the Forum in London in 2003. There was a time--a time for heroes?--when they really had it going on.

Now might be a good time for the people who haven't seen them to watch When the Wind Blows (1986) and Threads (1984). Sneaks up on you fast--the end of it all. Or I figure it would. There are events, rumblings, news cycle adhesion (rather than a story being cast out after a day or two or twenty), and then one day, the world is gone.

Watched 1948's I Love Trouble, directed by S. Sylvan Simon, who usually worked in comedies. It's a (semi) coastal noir. Such films intrigue me--which is no surprise, given how the sea is in my blood--and I'll be getting into and revisiting some others shortly. Not a remarkable picture by any means, but as I've said, with noir you rarely go wrong even as lots of things go wrong for the immediate participants, though this one isn't as fatalistic as all that.

Isn't it neat how 1931's Dracula has a character doing a Bela Lugosi impersonation (and with Lugosi starring in the picture no less!) and 1968's Night of the Living Dead has a character doing a Boris Karloff impersonation? I like that these two got these tributes that are a natural and necessary part of each film. Win win.

I think you can call Laurel and Hardy's Way Out West one of the great Westerns, up there with The Searchers, Rio Bravo, Winchester '73, Stagecoach. Oddly, perhaps, I tend not to think of Shane and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre as Westerns. I guess, for me, a Western isn't just this movie that is set at a particular time in the West. The Lusty Men is a very much a Western. Shane is one of those great cinematic works of dignity, like Umberto D. Very different films, but they have this in common. Perhaps the greatest sense of relief I've ever felt from watching a film is when man and dog are reunited in Umberto D.

It has always been so strange and mysterious to me that the only footage we have of Little Willie John is from an episode of Route 66 where he’s unbilled and playing claves in a random group on stage in the background. I wonder how this came about and why it happened. Actually, I think I know a place where I can find out. What I wouldn't do for a live album from Little Willie John in his prime during his King label days.

His widow died last fall at the age of ninety-two. Little Willie John made his final recordings in 1966 and died in 1968. Between the former and the Route 66 thing, you can kind of drum up a "Paul is Dead" sort of angle. The (recording) route ended in '66. Route 66 was a Western at times.