Thursday 10/22/20
I wrote a 2900 word short story today called "Dead Thomas." Wrote one the other day called "The Diving Board." Here is Tuesday's segment on Downtown, which covered Halloween-related episodes of Cheers and The Dick Van Dyke Show, Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain," the witty intertextuality of "Monster Mash," and Orson Welles in 1949's Black Magic. This is a new essay on Théodore Géricault‘s 1819 painting, The Raft of the Medusa. I also sold a piece to them on It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown--Linus, in large part--and Lewton's Curse of the Cat People, which is a kind of first person arts piece, I suppose one could term it, which will be out shortly.
No Great Pumpkin on TV this year--which to me makes the world a little more off than it already is.
Watched the 1971 horror film, Let's Scare Jessica to Death. They weren't working with much. Watchable, I suppose.
A shot from the Facebook:
I think ultimately a work--a work of art, a work of love, a work of friendship--has what value it has in direct proportion to how much humanity it contains. How much of the essence of being human. The more of that essence the work has, the more we can see beyond our own personal humanity--we even see beyond our world because of what we experience in the work while in our world. And I think that is something you don't get in writing right now. Even when something is "okay" at the level of the sentence--which is itself rare--the humanity is not there. The unmistakable spark of life. The life force itself. It's something beyond sentences, really. It's beyond words, but you get there via words, and it's built into the words in their relation to each other, as we, too, are built into something else.