This Mean Everyone!

What Becomes A Legend Most: The True Identity of The Headless Horseman

2011-10-13T11:45:00.004-05:00

[The last time I'm aware of more than one person (which I suppose means "anyone") reading this blog was around last Halloween, when I posted my seasonal reading suggestions. While I do not expect anyone to read this post, I do want to put up something for Halloween, so here is my "scholarship" on the source of many of the elements of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and the inspiration for the Headless Horseman. Boooo!]

In The Cambridge History of American Literature, Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is called “an immortal legend of the Hudson” and The Sketch Book in which it appeared “became an international best–seller . . . [bringing] its author a measure of fame unequaled by any other American writer of his era,” (Trent et al., pg. 255; Rubin–Dorsky, pg. 393). In Robert Bone’s words, “Sleepy Hollow” is Irving’s “finest achievement and his most enduring contribution to our literary history,” (Bone, p. 169). Daniel Hoffman calls The Sketch Book, “the first important literary statement of the themes of native folk character and superstition,” (Myers, p. 345), while Edgar Wagenknecht contends that “no American writer has been more successful than Irving in creating a legend,” (Wagenknecht, Moderation Displayed, p.167, 169).

The plot of “Sleepy Hollow” is essentially an account of a Connecticut schoolteacher who comes to a secluded New York hamlet, ingratiates himself to the local housewives, and vies for the affections of a wealthy farmer’s daughter, until run out of town by a rowdy, but beloved local character. The most memorable image in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, so essential to the story’s atmosphere and endurance, though, is that of the Headless Horseman pursuing the terrified Ichabod Crane down a forest road at midnight. Without the Horseman as catalyst to Ichabod’s flight, the story is as ordinary as the summary, above.

To take nothing away from Irving’s accomplishment with “Sleepy Hollow,” it must be recognized that Irving did not create his legend purely out of his own, singular artistic vision; in fact, the climactic scene with the Headless Horseman was adapted, virtually intact, from a German tale. “Sleepy Hollow” is, instead, a skillful amalgam of pre–existing elements assimilated from many disparate sources. That it is still read and studied 175 years after its first publication, attests to Irving’s ability to absorb his influences and mold them into something that strikes the reader as thoroughly American. In his pursuit to contribute to an American literature, Irving himself became influential, likely beyond even his own wildest aspirations.

Irving’s “Sleepy Hollow” is especially notable in light of its contemporary literature, and the balance of the collection in which it was ultimately published, The Sketch Book. As noted by Lloyd Daigrepont, in Irving’s time, fiction was something of a devalued commodity. The “commitment to progress” so prevalent in America at the time “caused even men of enlightened views such as Thomas Jefferson, Noah Webster, and Timothy Dwight [to look] upon fiction as useless, distracting, or at best merely amusing.” To Daigrepont, Irving’s “chief concern in writing ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’” was the lack of “a valid concept of fiction [in] the opening decades of the new republic,” (Daigrepont, p. 68, 71).

Similarly, Martin Roth cites Irving’s concern with “the question of whether the creative imagination could take root in a county of such thin traditional soil,” especially when such leaders of contemporary thought as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson “had reasoned that the level of economic luxury necessary to foster a class of fine artists was incompatible with the nature of a democracy,” (Roth, p. 162). Roth sees “Sleepy Hollow” as nothing less than “Irving’s literary response to the question of whether or not America could produce an imaginative literature of its own,” (Roth, p. 177). Irving was clearly aware of the dearth of American tradition on which he could draw, as indicated by his reference in “Sleepy Hollow” to “a remote period of American history,” just thirty years ago,[1] (The Sketch Book, henceforth denoted as SB, p. 400).

Irving’s tale of “Sleepy Hollow” may have had its origin in his early experience with the “witching effect” of the “Kaatskil Mountains” as he floated down the Hudson, watching the surrounding landscape “undergoing a thousand mutations under the magical effects of atmosphere,” (Wagenknecht, Moderation Displayed, p.6). Not until many years after his boyhood exploration of the Hudson and its surrounding environs, though, did Irving incorporate the setting into his fiction. Some of the themes that later appeared in “Sleepy Hollow,” however, appeared early in Irving’s writing. As early as 1804, for instance, “Irving’s comic feud with schoolmasters and natives of Connecticut” could be seen in his work for The Corrector, the anonymous paper founded by Irving’s brother, Peter, (Roth, p. 163).

While not an accomplished scholar, Irving does appear to have been sufficiently well–read to have some literary background to draw upon; he was familiar with Aristotle, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton, and “knew his Bible thoroughly,” (Wagenknecht, p. 53). Also, he had a “passion for old Dutch stories,” he was apparently familiar with European chroniclers of the supernatural, and he expressed his intention to “get into the confidence of every old woman I meet in Germany and get from her, her budget of wonderful stories,” (Wagenknecht, p. 53–55).

His childhood experiences on the Hudson aside, it was not until Irving left America that he accumulated most of the components that he would later incorporate into “Sleepy Hollow,” including numerous “wonderful stories” that he absorbed during his lengthy stay (from 1815–1832) in the United Kingdom and Europe. Among the lore that Irving encountered and would later use was the Tam O’ Shanter myth, as portrayed in Robert Burns’ poem, and the German fables of the Mountain Lord, Rübezahl, (Myers, p. 300). Irving also absorbed “his brother–in–law’s recollections of his early days at Tarrytown on the Hudson” during a visit with his sister’s family in Birmingham, England, in 1818, (Myers, p. 298).

Irving struggled with personal and professional concerns during his years abroad. His first love, Matilda Hoffman, the daughter of the judge under whom Irving served as a law clerk, died in 1809 but was to remain a significant influence throughout Irving’s life, (Williams, vol. 1, p. 102–03, 407). Her death “fixed his idle moods of reverie into feelings about the unseen world,” (Williams, vol. 1, p. 120), possibly heightening his interest in the supernatural. He was also receptive to mythology; indeed, in the early eighteen–hundreds Irving had “imagined Santa as a bulky man who smoked a pipe and wore baggy pants,” introducing lasting elements to secular Christmas tradition and American folklore, (Shenkman, pg. 13–14).[2]

In 1809, before leaving America, Irving had also initiated a major myth of his own with the creation of Diedrich Knickerbocker. In “one of the cleverest hoaxes in the history of publishing,” Irving first provided the New York Evening Post with a notice of the disappearance of “a small, elderly gentleman . . . by the name of Knickerbocker” a month prior to the “discovery” of the manuscript of Diedrich Knickerbocker’s History of New York, (Wagenknecht, Moderation Displayed, p. 9). Despite his accomplishment with the Knickerbocker History—for instance, it is considered by William L. Hedges to be Irving’s masterpiece—Irving spent the ten years following its publication “torn between the desire to make literature a full–time commitment and the fear of abandoning a career in law and business,” (Myers, p. 444, 447).

The decision was taken out of his hands by the bankruptcy, in 1818, of the Irving family import business, in which Washington was an inactive partner, (Tuttleton, p. xxi). His new writing began appearing in America in 1819, and was then published as a collection, The Sketch Book, both in England and America, in 1820. That Irving used a new pen name, Geoffrey Crayon, rather than his own (or Knickerbocker’s) for this collection may be indicative of the author’s continued uncertainty about his career prospects.

Many of the influences Irving absorbed during his years abroad surfaced in the pages of The Sketch Book, which was largely a collection of observations based on “Crayon’s” travels, some of which had already been published separately.[3] The major exceptions were “The Spectre Bridegroom” (which first appeared in November, 1819), “Rip Van Winkle” (May, 1819), and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (March, 1820), the latter two of which are widely considered to be Irving’s greatest achievements.

According to Walter Reichart, “The Spectre Bridegroom” is “based entirely on literary sources,” and an important precursor to “Sleepy Hollow” in terms of recognizing Irving’s sources and his manner of utilizing them, (Myers, p. 301). Reichart cites two sources that Irving could reasonably have accessed for “The Spectre Bridegroom.” An 1813 collection, Tales of the Dead, billed as a translation from the German, includes a story titled “The Death Bride” which is similar both “in title and content” to Irving’s story, although it centers on a ghostly bride rather than a spectral groom. Reichart also asserts that Irving obviously knew Walter Scott’s “William and Helen,” an adaptation of a famous German ballad, Lenore, by August Bürger, first printed in 1773; in fact, Reichart considers “The Spectre Bridegroom” a parody upon Lenore. The German ballad relates a “folk legend” of a soldier, killed in battle, and his sweetheart, who “vainly awaits his return.” Lenore’s “lamentations summon her lover’s spirit from the grave,” from where he comes for her in the night, and they ride away together. At midnight, the soldier is revealed to be a skeleton. With “The Spectre Bridegroom,” Irving “utilized the theme [of Lenore] but . . . avoided any serious implications,” (Myers, p. 303, 307–08).

“The Spectre Bridegroom” retains its German setting, while “Rip Van Winkle,” also rich in European lore, is transplanted to take place in America. More than either of its predecessors, though, “Sleepy Hollow” is a unique pastiche, an extensive integration of European folklore, American archetypes, and New York settings.

The extent to which “Sleepy Hollow” was inspired directly by any specific source is debatable. Mary Bowden, for instance, sees “Sleepy Hollow” as a “reprise” of “The Spectre Bridegroom,” both stories being “basically the same,” (Bowden, p. 72). In each story, two men are enamored of a wealthy man’s daughter; Starkenfaust (in “The Spectre Bridegroom”) and Brom Bones each “rely on the effect of a superstitious tale . . . to win the girl, . . . both ride black horses and . . . both get the girl by means of a prank,” (Bowden, p. 72–73). While the two stories have other, minor details in common, they differ so substantially that it is difficult to see “The Spectre Bridegroom” as more than a minor source for the later story.

The most striking inspiration for the supernatural elements of “Sleepy Hollow” is the German folk legend of the Mountain Lord Rübezahl. In his essay, ”Irving’s German Tour and His Tales,” Henry Pochman briefly notes that Irving knew of the Rübezahl legends even before his 1823 visit to the German Riesengebirge, “the legendary home of Rübezahl,” (Pochman, p. 1158).[4] Rübezahl is a notorious “spirit prince” whose true appearance is unknown, with a “character as changeable as his form” (Lee and Carey, pg. 5). The Lee–Carey volume, Silesian Folk Tales (The Book of Rübezahl), published after Irving’s time, in 1915, collects a number of the better–known Silesian folk tales, the first such collection of Rübezahl stories translated for American consumption. The collection emphasizes the Mountain Lord’s “better side,” concentrating on his “merry prank[s],” while avoiding the spiteful revenge he took on “mankind for the great injury it inflicted on him,” (Lee and Carey, pg. 6).

One common theme of the Silesian stories is Rübezahl’s (often fierce) protectiveness of his domain. Also, these stories continually invoke Rübezahl as a generally–unseen threat, an entity, like the Headless Horseman, largely defined by his reputation, a reputation spread by word–of–mouth. While the Lee–Carey collection softens the negative aspects of Rübezahl’s nature, the stories contain other elements that echo in Sleepy Hollow’s Headless Horseman: the Mountain Lord is known for his “vicious pranks,” he is reputed to have “silenced” those who cross him, and is dismissed (interestingly enough, by a college student) as “a mere fancy of the brain, a belief that exists only in spinning rooms when maidens frighten one another with tales of horror,” (Lee–Carey, p. 31, 41, 46).

It is most likely that, among the “marvelous stories” he collected, Irving first heard the Rübezahl tales in a German “spinning room,” rather than having read them himself. Several Rübezahl stories were among Johann Karl August Musäus’s five–volume Volksmärchen der Deutschen which, written in German, were not directly accessible to Irving, but were a probable source for the stories he heard.[5] Unlike the stories in the Lee–Carey collection, Musäus’s “Legenden von Rübezahl” (“Legends of Number–Nip”) combine idyllic settings with a sense of “satire [that] emerges predominantly in their form of travesty and parody, explicitly or indirectly employed to ridicule such popular genres as the adventure romances,” (Musäus, p. x, xi).

Just as the Silesian mountain setting is central to the Rübezahl tales, in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Irving places his influences in a setting that is an integral element of his story. Sleepy Hollow has remained immune to “the great torrent of migration and improvement [that] sweeps by them unobserved,” like “a little [nook] of still water [bordering] a rapid stream,” a place unaffected by outside influences (SB, p. 400). It is an environment of “uniform tranquillity” where noontime finds “all nature . . . particularly quiet” until disturbed by an interloper, such as the squirrel–hunting narrator, whose gunshot echoes angrily and startles even himself, (SB, p. 397–98).

Sleepy Hollow “is a self–contained world . . . [where] the people . . . are as much a part of the landscape as the natural growth of the valley,” (Rubin–Dorsky, “The Value of Storytelling,” p. 403). Throughout the story, Irving links the people of the area with the unchanging, natural surroundings; the narrator wonders if, years after his visit, he would not still find “the same trees and the same families vegetating in its sheltered bosom,” (SB, p. 400). This background—a “little retired Dutch [valley] . . . embosomed in the great State of New York, [where] population, manners, and customs remain fixed,” (SB, p. 400)—is essential to “Sleepy Hollow” succeeding as more than a romance with supernatural trappings, like the “The Spectre Bridegroom.”

The supernatural is a strong presence in Sleepy Hollow, where the people are given to all manner of “marvellous beliefs,” including that of a “dominant spirit” about the area, an “apparition of a figure on horseback without a head . . . the ghost of a Hessian trooper whose head had been carried away by a cannon ball . . . during the revolutionary war,” (SB, p. 398–99). The “galloping ghost” said to haunt the actual Tarrytown area was among the folk stories Irving learned from his brother–in–law, (Myers, p. 298). Irving’s incorporation of this superstition in “Sleepy Hollow” not only links his story to the rich folk tradition of Europe, with its echoes of the “dominant spirit” of Rübezahl, it also grounds his story in the region’s, admittedly brief, history. While the area may have been “bewitched” by a “German doctor during the early days of the settlement,” (SB, p. 298), it is now haunted by a casualty of America’s revolution.

With the Hessian reference, Irving evokes the war early in the story, making use of what little history he had available to him, just before introducing another unwelcome interloper, the itinerant Yankee schoolteacher, Ichabod Crane. The schoolteacher is not only an intruder in the insular community, he is set on “improving” these people of fixed manners and customs. Irving, as noted, had something of a history of ridiculing Connecticut Yankees; with Crane, he both skewers and indicts the subject of his ridicule.

Irving also links Crane with nature, here to demonstrate how the Yankee schoolteacher is in opposition with the natural world. At best, Crane might be mistaken for “some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield”—in other words, a tool in service of the agrarian community, (a teacher for their children, for instance), who abandons his post to spirit away one of their women, (SB, p. 400, italics mine). At worst, he might be seen as nothing less than “the genius of famine descending upon the earth,” (SB, p. 400–01). He is further described with unflattering, animalistic attributes: long (simian) arms, huge (elephantine) ears, “a long snipe nose,” (SB, p. 400). His arms flap like wings as he rides, his elbows stick out “like grasshoppers’,” the grasshopper, not coincidentally, being a type of locust linked with pestilence in the Bible.[6] The sight of Ichabod and his (borrowed) steed “was altogether such an apparition as is seldom to be met with in broad daylight,” an apparition with its midnight equivalent in the Headless Hessian, (SB, p. 417; italics mine).

Ichabod Crane not only represents a type of character that Irving wanted to caricature, (continuing his “comic feud” with the people of Connecticut), he was modeled on a specific, real–life counterpart, a tutor named Jesse Merwin, with whom Irving had become acquainted in 1809, (Williams, vol. 1, p. 408, note).[7] Surprisingly, the original of Ichabod not only was aware of his inspiration, he “was always proud of the delineation”; a letter from Merwin, found among Irving’s papers after his death, was “endorsed in Irving’s own handwriting—‘From Jesse Merwin, the original of Ichabod Crane,’” (Bruce, p. 147–48).

While Wallace Bruce finds Merwin’s pride indicative of Irving’s “kindly . . . wit and humor,” (Bruce, p. 148), Charles Dudley Warner believed that “Sleepy Hollow” would have been better if Irving “had displayed a little touch of pity for Ichabod Crane,” allowing him at least a bit of pathos, (Wagenknecht, pg. 133). Instead, Crane is cast in a negative light throughout the story, called a hero only sarcastically, and then when he admires, not the “bevy of buxom lasses,” but the “ample charms of a genuine Dutch country tea table in the sumptuous time of autumn,” (SB, p. 420).[8] His defining personality traits, those which lead to his downfall, are his acquisitiveness, his cowardliness, and his gullibility.

These traits define all Crane’s interactions with the people of Sleepy Hollow. Although he occasionally helps the farmers with “the lighter labors of their farms,” he learns nothing either of the true workings or the value of the farms, and so fails to truly integrate himself into the community by serving any essential purpose, beyond his self–serving ingratiation into their households. He befriends his elder students only to gain entrée to their homes, if they “happen to have pretty sisters, or good housewives for mothers noted for the comforts of the cupboard,” (SB, p. 402). The housewives find Crane useful—perhaps even tolerable—only as a gazetteer for local gossip, as a source of stories from Cotton Mather’s History of Witchcraft and “marvellous events” from his native Connecticut, and as a receptive audience for their own ghost stories.[9] It is, in fact, from these housewives that Crane first hears of the Headless Horseman, (SB, p. 405, 425).

The women’s ghost stories, and the men’s elaboration upon them, are instrumental to Crane’s intimidation by the Headless Horseman. With the quilting frolic at the Van Tassel farm and the attendant stories of the supernatural, Irving begins the most conspicuous and noteworthy synthesis of his sources. From here on out, Irving increasingly develops an integration of character and setting that adds to the depth of the conflict between Ichabod Crane and Sleepy Hollow, both as a locale and as a way of life.

The “castle of Heer Van Tassel” is a “stronghold” on the banks of the Hudson from which the people of Sleepy Hollow launch their defense of their domain, (SB, p. 419, 407). While the host of this merrymaking, Baltus Van Tassel, is “jolly as the harvest moon,” oblivious to any threat, the livestock seem to be instinctively aware of the need for self–defense: the geese are assembled in a “stately squadron,” the turkeys have formed “regiments,” the pigs are in “troops,” and the “gallant cock” is strutting protectively before the barn door, (SB, p. 408). Even the barn’s weathervane is a “wooden warrior . . . armed with a sword,” (SB, p. 413). This is the “scene of rural wealth on which [Crane] had so often gloated,” and in his “devouring mind’s eye,” Crane has reduced the livestock to sumptuous victuals, (SB, p. 426, 408).

The supposed object of Ichabod’s affections, Katrina Van Tassel, is characterized in terms that link her both to nature and to food: she is a “blooming lass of fresh eighteen, plump as a partridge, ripe and . . . rosy–cheeked as one of her father’s peaches,” (SB, p. 407, italics mine). Crane’s plans for Katrina, like those for the farm’s livestock, run counter to the Van Tassel’s interests; Crane imagines Katrina as his wife, (with himself as Van Tassel’s heir), abandoning the family farm and heading for new pastures in “Kentucky, Tennessee, or the Lord knows where,” (SB, p. 408). Crane envisions himself as “lord of all this . . . luxury and splendor,” using his inherited wealth not to become part of the community, but for conversion to liquid capital, (SB, p. 421, 409). His aspirations reveal Crane as disloyal to his profession—he envisions himself turning his back on “any itinerant pedagogue . . . that should dare to call him comrade,” (SB, p. 421)—and reveals his true character as “the farmers’ greatest enemy—and a recognizable villain in the early Republic—the land speculator,” (Rubin–Dorsky, Adrift in the Old World, p. 117–18). Though not so credited by the narrator, Katrina seems, if not aware of his scheme, at least immune to what Crane sees as his exotic appeal. Although the content of their tête–à–tête is not known, she clearly turns him away. Irving suggests that Katrina’s encouragement of Crane’s interest may have been “all a mere sham to secure her conquest of his rival,” Brom Bones, (SB, p. 426).

The setting for this gathering, the exemplar of the community’s way of life, has been identified as the home to an actual Mynheer Van Tassel, in a community [Tarrytown] known for its “haunted spots and twilight superstitions,” (Myers, p. 298). Likewise, according to information “in possession of Jesse Merwin’s grandson, G.D. Merwin,” Irving was rumored to have planned to marry the original of Katrina Van Tassel, (Williams, vol. 1, p. 429–30, note). The local hero was drawn directly from Irving’s “brother–in–laws’s recollections of his early days at Tarrytown . . . and the story of one Brom Bones, a wild blade who boasted of having once met the devil on a return from a nocturnal frolic,” (Myers, p. 298). Bones was further identified by Irving’s brother, Pierre, as “a wag of Tarrytown,” probably Brom Von Allstyne, who “boasted of once having met the devil . . . and run a race with him for a bowl of milk,” (Hoffman, p. 428, note).

The Brom of “Sleepy Hollow” may not have originated the story of the Headless Horseman, but he freely embellishes it. Crane’s belief in this particular ghost story is virtually ensured by his gullible nature and his appetite for the supernatural; after all, the tale is told of how even “a most heretical disbeliever in ghosts,” old Brouwer, had met the horseman, (SB, p. 424). With this preface, Brom tells of besting the Horseman in a race for a bowl of punch, making light of the “galloping Hessian as an arrant jockey,” (SB, p. 425). By the time a “chopfallen” Crane departs the party “with the air of one who had been sacking the henroost” (as, indeed, he aimed to do), he has been inundated with tales of the “haunted region” he is about to traverse, (SB, p. 426, 423). Irving has set the stage for the climactic scene with elements from his own past, interwoven with his brother–in–laws’ reminiscences, along with newly–minted American myths. He concludes his legend with a return to European folklore, which he firmly places in the Sleepy Hollow milieu.

At the witching hour of Ichabod’s last ride through Sleepy Hollow, he comes upon Major André’s tree, appropriately, in light of Crane’s plans, a symbol of betrayal and deceit. While André, a British officer hanged as a spy, may have been a scapegoat (Bone, p. 173), the legends he inspired are illustrative of the difficulty in separating fact from fiction, (Owens, p. 20). Crane’s fear of this myth–shrouded Revolutionary War landmark reinforces his willingness to believe in the incredible.[10]

The further Crane rides, the more apparent is his isolation—the barking of a watchdog, man’s best friend, is faint and distant; the only “signs of life” near him are the “melancholy chirps” from a cricket and the croaking of a bullfrog, (SB, p. 427). Nature mocks him, as his whistle is answered by a blast of wind through the branches of Major André’s tree. He is more than physically alone; he is philosophically isolated from the people of Sleepy Hollow who live in harmony with nature.

Near the locust trees of the haunted church, the grasshopper–like Yankee encounters the object of his fears, a ghost straight out of the Old World. Without further elaborating on the source, Henry Pochman identified the Legenden von Rübezahl as the source of Ichabod’s encounter with the Headless Horseman, “the climactic incident . . . [of] “‘Sleepy Hollow,’” (Pochman, p. 1158). Walter Reichart further identifies the derivation of the “Sleepy Hollow” climax as “the adventure of a simple–minded and credulous coachman,” (a postilion rather than a pedagogue), which Musäus used only as an introduction for one of his fairy tales, (Myers, p. 300).

The coachman John’s encounter with Number–Nip [i.e., Rübezahl] and Ichabod’s with the Headless Horseman are quite similar in several passages: “All the stories of Number–Nip [that John had] formerly devoured with such eager attention, came rushing at once into his mind,” while “all the stories of ghosts and goblins that he had heard in the afternoon” came “crowding” upon Ichabod’s “recollection.” John found himself “traversing the stage where these adventures [of Number–Nip which he had heard] had happened,” while Ichabod found himself “approaching the very place where many of the scenes of the ghost stories had been laid.”

For John, fear makes his hair become “stiff like bristles”; the hair of “the affrighted pedagogue rose upon his head with terror.” John’s adversary is a “a jet–black figure, of a size exceeding that of man,” wearing a “Spanish tippet,” while Ichabod faces a “huge, misshapen, black and towering . . . monster . . . muffled in a cloak.” (The creature John meets is on foot, though, where the wraith of Sleepy Hollow is “mounted on a black horse of powerful frame.”) As he appears to John, Rübezahl has “an head as well as other people, only he did not wear it, according to the usual fashion, between his shoulders, but carried it under his arm, just as if it had been a lap–dog.” The Horseman’s head, “which should have rested on his shoulders, was carried before him on the pommel of the saddle.” Ichabod attempts to continue singing a psalm; John begins “the salutation appointed to be addressed to all good spirits, Angels and Ministers.”

“Before [John] could speak it out,” though, “the monster took his head from under his arm, and hurled it” at the coachman, striking him “right on the forehead,” and sending him “[tumbling] headlong from the box over the forewheel.” As the “parched tongue clove to the roof of [Ichabod’s] mouth,” Ichabod sees the Headless Horseman “in the very act of hurling his head at him.” Ichabod is struck in the “cranium,” and left in the “dust.” While also “stretched in the dust,” John receives “a severe stroke with a club,” one final injury Ichabod is spared. It is only later that the monstrous “head” hurled at John is recognized “for a huge hollowed out gourd filled with sand and stones,” as the Horseman’s “head” is found to be a “shattered pumpkin,” (Myers, p. 300; SB, p. 432; Rübezahl references, Myers, p. 316–17).

As mentioned above, Irving was likely familiar with the Tam O’ Shanter’s myth, and the “bridge over which, according to [Tam’s] belief . . . fiends may not cross” may have come from Robert Burns’ poem, (Myers, p. 300), incorporating another source into a scene lifted, virtually intact, from the Rübezahl tale. There are certainly echoes of Tam’s belief in Crane’s thought, during his pursuit by the Horseman, that reaching the bridge will lead him to safety. Crane’s misconception is that the bridge over the haunted stream (as it is considered by the locals) functions to keep the “fiends” contained. More accurately, it acts as a barrier to unwanted outsiders; while Crane does make his escape, it is Sleepy Hollow that is saved.

“What chance was there of escaping ghost or goblin,” Crane wonders, “which could ride upon the wings of the wind,” (SB, p. 429). Obviously, there is no escape when the ghosts exist only in one’s own gullible mind. Crane, although named for a bird, (albeit an appropriately ungainly one), cannot take flight on the wings of the wind; he is rejected by this place that is in harmony with nature.

Sleepy Hollow is female–centered—Tarrytown itself is so named by “the good housewives of the adjacent country, from the inveterate propensity of their husbands to linger about the village tavern on market days,” (SB, p. 397)—as is Crane’s experience there. Crane’s gullibility is his own undoing, compounded by his insincere attempts to be embraced by the women of the “embosomed” valley. The tales the women tell establish the basis for Brom’s own Horseman story, and for his midnight masquerade, a prank that some see as nothing less than a figurative neutering of “threatening masculine interlopers” by “the emasculated, headless ‘dominant spirit’ of the region,” (Plummer and Nelson, p. 175). The narrator himself “establishes women as the greatest source of fear for men: ‘[Ichabod] would have passed a pleasant life . . . if his path had not been crossed by a being that causes more perplexity to mortal man than ghosts, goblins, and the whole race of witches put together, and that was—a woman,’” (Plummer and Nelson, p. 179).

Certainly, Crane’s disregard for Katrina’s feelings, and his discounting her intelligence, not crediting her with the ability to recognize him for the opportunist he is, could be seen as sufficient cause for the failure of his plans. It is unfortunate that we are not told more about Katrina’s reaction to the Yankee schoolteacher, such that we may better understand her reasons for rejecting him, but this would not be consistent with the narrative point of view. As it is, her rejection would have been sufficient cause for Crane to move on, rendering the encounter with the Headless Horseman, unnecessary. Of course, that is not the story Irving set out to tell. Had Irving not incorporated the supernatural, it is doubtful that he would have labeled the story a “legend,” and unlikely that would we would be reading it today.

While it is virtually indisputable that Irving did not, himself, read the Rübezahl stories, but rather heard them, he most likely became familiar with these tales as interpreted by Musäus, the chief popularizer of these tales. It may be a credit to Irving’s ability as an assimilator that he was able to incorporate in “Sleepy Hollow” some of the more elusive motifs Musäus brought to the German legends. It may also be largely coincidental, a common appreciation of, and facility with the elements of legend shared by the two authors.

Though not identified by either Reichart or Pochman, one of the Rübezahl stories in particular, “The Horse Dealer” (in the Lee–Carey collection), shares with “Sleepy Hollow” a focus on avarice met with appropriate punishment, and suggests the villain’s ongoing role as an admonition against similar offenses. For trying to deceive the Mountain Lord, the dishonest, traveling horse dealer is turned into a statue and adorned with a sign attesting to his disreputable nature. Crane escapes with the comparatively–light punishment of banishment. “The old country wives . . . the best judges of these matters,” though, see to it that Crane is remembered as having been “spirited away by supernatural means,” and this becomes “a favorite story . . . about the neighborhood,” (SB, p. 434). Like the horse dealer, Crane becomes a story, forever associated with his greed and gluttony, a warning to would–be deceivers.

Irving and Musäus also share an ambiguous approach to the supernatural. As Ulrich Scheck writes in introducing Carlyle’s translations, in Musäus’s telling of the Rübezahl stories the “status of the supernatural [is] ambiguous,” (Musäus, p. x). Similarly, although Irving has Brom Bones “burst into heartily laughter” whenever Crane’s story is told, and to know more about the matter than he chooses to tell (SB, p. 433–34), the existence of the Headless Horseman is never explicitly discounted. Just as Musäus’s stories of Rübezahl are “neither folk nor fairy tales in a narrow sense” (Musäus, p. x), but are rooted in the everyday life of the area, the fantastic elements of “Sleepy Hollow” are hearsay and do not preclude the story from remaining “rationally accountable,” (Aderman, p. 16). Nonetheless, the narrator himself casts doubt on the story’s credibility, saying he does not “believe one–half of it,” (SB, p. 436). Where Musäus’s ambiguity about the supernatural, as Scheck says, prohibits “unequivocal categorization” of his tales, Irving labels his tale a “legend” while maintaining a tone of realism, even disparaging the supernatural, especially in his treatment of the gullible Crane.

Finally, Scheck alludes to a “saturation with utilitarian principles” that “distinguishes [Musäus’s tales] from rococo idylls,” (Musäus p. xi). Although Scheck is referring, specifically, to stories outside those treated by Lee and Carey in their Rübezahl collection, there too, can we see Rübezahl consistently rewarding utility. In the story “Three Students,” Rübezahl is also seen punishing an aesthete (the student who doubts the Mountain Lord’s existence), in accordance with the utilitarian preference for practicality over aesthetics; the episode is especially prominent as one of the rare acts of vengeance in this collection. Likewise, the implications of utilitarian thinking, both positive and negative, are present in Irving’s idyllic environment. The people of Sleepy Hollow are best rid of Crane—his banishment constitutes the greatest good for the greatest number of people—even though some of the children, like Hans Van Ripper’s, will be denied further schooling. Crane also “represents the modern debasement of imagination [as embodied in the storytellers of Sleepy Hollow] by materialism,” bringing to [Sleepy Hollow] this “pious utilitarianism . . . the idea of progress,” (Daigrepont, p. 72). And progress is anathema to “little nooks of still water” such as Sleepy Hollow, which border the “rapid stream[s]” from whence Crane came, and where he is bound, (SB, p. 400).

There have certainly been eras and contexts in American history in which “progress” was not a derogatory term, but in his time and situation, Ichabod Crane forces the “question of the value of change and progress if they must be bought at the price of the destruction of stability and order,” (Myers, p. 407). Crane is the embodiment of “a particularly American, entrepreneurial idea of progress,” (Myers, p. 485). In this, he prefigured pioneers like Daniel Boone who “wanted to turn beautiful abundance into cash in order to buy more of nature’s bounty and do the same once again” which, as Haskell Springer writes, is a “sad version of the American Dream,” (Myers, p. 485).

The “sad version,” though, is only one possible interpretation. In the “onion skin layers of tales told and retold” in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” (Daigrepont, p. 78), the “facts” are filtered through a number of interpreters before reaching the reader. As immortalized by the “good housewives” of Sleepy Hollow—who, as victors, write history as they see it—Crane is not only the aspiring entrepreneur, he is something of an tragic figure, a would–be conqueror who is turned back, a “hero” undone by his own nature. The unidentified narrator, however, tries to wrest final interpretive authority away from the Sleepy Hollow storytellers, putting a positive spin on Crane’s humiliation, as he reveals that Crane became a New York lawyer and, ultimately, a justice. Several more layers (Knickerbocker and Crayon) removed, however, the author’s disdain is apparent in the telling detail that, although Crane became a judge, he sat the bench of the Ten Pound Court, the least–significant small claims court of the day, a final insult to the ambitious Yankee.

In his appreciation of Washington Irving’s humor, Martin Roth expresses the opinion that Irving’s despair over his contemporary American literary culture arose from his belief that that impoverished culture “had fallen into the hands of the Yankees and the spiritual traits which they represented,” (Roth, p. 177). As we see in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Irving saw those traits leading to a voracious acquisitiveness that not only stifled art and threatened nature, but was a menace to what Irving saw as the ideal American way of life. In fact, when Irving returned to America in 1832, he settled south of Tarrytown and, in 1853, bought a house formerly owned by a Jacobus van Tassell, (Owens, p. 52). Irving integrated stories, learned in England, that originated in the Hudson Valley, and incorporated elements of German folk tales intermingled with an apocrypha about a headless European mercenary fighting in America’s Revolutionary War, to tell a story that both embellished America’s brief past and helped inspire the nation’s new literary tradition. It is not that Irving created “an American setting so genuine and realistic” (Myers, p. 299) alone that makes “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” so noteworthy, but that he created it while paying tribute to his influences, in the most substantial way: by ensuring their survival.

References:

Aderman, Ralph M. (editor). Washington Irving Reconsidered: A Symposium, [Hartford: Transcendental Books, 1969]

Bone, Robert A. “Irving’s Headless Hessian: Prosperity and the Inner Life,” American Quarterly, volume XV, (Summer 1963), p. 167–175.

Bowden, Mary Weatherspoon. Washington Irving, [Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981]

Bruce, Wallace. Along the Hudson With Washington Irving, [Poughkeepsie, N.Y.: A.V. Haight Company, 1913]

Daigrepont, Lloyd M. “Ichabod Crane: Inglorious Man of Letters,” Early American Literature, vol. XIX, (1984), p. 68–81.

Flanagan, John T. and Arthur Palmer Hudson (editors). Folklore in American Literature, [Evanston, Illinois–White Plains, New York: Row, Peterson and Company, 1958]

Lee, James and James T. Carey. Silesian Folk Tales (The Book of Rübezahl), [New York: American Book Company, 1915]

Litchfield, Mary E. (editor). Irving’s Sketch Book, [Boston: Ginn and Company, 1901]

Lohafer, Susan and Jo Ellyn Clarey (editors). Short Story Theory at a Crossroads, [Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1989]

Musäus, Johann Karl August, 1735–1787. Stories by Musäus and Fouque / translated by Thomas Carlyle, [Columbia, SC: Camden House, Inc., 1991]

Myers, Andrew B. (editor). A Century of Commentary on the Works of Washington Irving, 1860–1974, [Tarrytown, N.Y.: Sleepy Hollow Restorations, 1976]

Owens, William A. Pocantico Hills 1609—1959, [Tarrytown, N.Y.: Sleepy Hollow Restorations, 1960]

Plummer, Laura and Michael Nelson, “‘Girls can take care of themselves’: Gender and Storytelling in Washington Irving’s ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’,” Studies in Short Fiction, volume 30 (1993), p. 175–84.

Pochman, Henry A., “Irving’s German Tour and His Tales,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, volume XlV (December, 1930), p. 1150–87.

Pochman, Henry A., “Irving’s German Sources in The Sketch Book,” Studies in Philology, volume XXVII (1930), p. 477–507.

Roth, Martin. Comedy and America: The Lost World of Washington Irving, [Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1976]

Rubin–Dorsky, Jeffrey. Adrift in the Old World: The Psychological Pilgrimage of Washington Irving, [Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1988]

Rubin–Dorsky, Jeffrey. “The Value of Storytelling: ‘Rip Van Winkle’ and ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ in the Context of The Sketch Book,” Modern Philology, volume 82, (May, 1985), p. 393–406.

Shenkman, Richard. Legends, Lies & Cherished American History, [New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1988]

Trent, W.P., J. Erskine, S.P. Sherman, C.V. Doren (editors). The Cambridge History of American Literature, [New York: The Macmillan Company, 1933]

Tuttleton, James W. (editor). Washington Irving: The Critical Reaction, [New York: AMS Press, 1993]

Wagenknecht, Edward. Washington Irving: Moderation Displayed, [New York: Oxford University Press, 1962]

Williams, Stanley T. The Life of Washington Irving, [New York: Oxford University Press, 1935]

[1] All pagination for “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” refers to the Standard English Classics edition of Irving’s Sketch Book, (Mary E. Litchfield, editor; published by Ginn and Company, 1901).

[2] Irving was later “mainly responsible” for crediting Christopher Columbus with proving that the world is round, a concept actually proven by Aristotle and popularized by Plato. In his Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus, which was “billed as a biography,” Irving portrayed Columbus seeking to prove that the Earth is round, whereas his mission was actually to settle the issue of “the width of the [Atlantic] ocean,” (Shenkman, pg. 14).

[3] The Sketch Book includes “26 papers . . . which concern English themes,” including three on English Christmas celebrations; these three are today the most–read portions of the book, after “The Spectre Bridegroom,” “Rip Van Winkle,” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” (Wagenknecht, Moderation, p. 175).

[4] Shortly after his visit to the Riesengebirge, Irving referred to his landlord as “old Rübezahl,” (Pochman, p. 1158).

[5] Three of Musäus’s stories were included in Thomas Carlyle’s 1827 edition of German Romances, volume 1, which Irving may have read. None of Carlyle’s adaptations were Rübezahl tales, but they did exhibit features that characterize Musäus’s “Legenden von Rübezahl.”

[6] “If there be dearth in the land, if there be pestilence, if there be blasting or mildew, locusts or caterpillars . . . if I command the locusts to devour the land, or if I send pestilence among my people,” (2 Chronicles 6:28, 7:13).

[7] “Merwin’s identity with the Yankee schoolmaster of The Sketch Book is proved conclusively by a manuscript note in Irving’s own hand,” (Williams, vol. 1, p. 429, note).

[8] This is also reminiscent (albeit probably coincidentally) of the Rübezahl story, “The Braggart’s Punishment,” in which the title character is treated sarcastically by the narrator, including an ironic reference to “our hero.”

[9] The reader must wonder to what degree the image of Crane listening to ghost stories told by the “old Dutch wives” (SB, p. 405) is based on Irving absorbing “wonderful stories” from “every old woman” he met in during his German excursion, (Wagenknecht, Moderation Displayed, p. 54–55).

[10] It may be worth noting that, in this account, Major André’s is a tulip tree, the tulip being associated with the Dutch.

How About a Big Hand for Category 1

2011-09-14T02:38:00.000-05:00

No, I did not watch the September 12 CNN-Tea Party Express debate between Republican presidential candidates; it is doubtful I will watch any GOP, disturbed as I am by the current roster and their stated positions.

(Before you take me to task for proudly stating my intention to remain uninformed, I am not saying I will not follow the campaign or endeavor to be as knowledgeable as possible on all the presidential candidates’ positions. Anyone who believes that televised debates are a valid means of determining candidates’ worthiness for office must also believe that voter ID laws, like Indiana’s, are necessary to stem rampant voter fraud.)

Ron Paul is a Texan, a U.S. representative, and the self-proclaimed, “America's leading voice for limited, constitutional government.” Oh yeah, he’s also a doctor.

The CNN host asked Paul a hypothetical question about a healthy 30-year-old who opts not to carry health insurance, and who goes into a six-month coma. Paul stated that, “freedom … is all about taking your own risks,” and that paying for this hypothetical patient’s intensive care should not be the responsibility of the government.

This doctor is stating that, because this patient took a risk on ever needing extensive medical care, he is left to face the consequences without assistance from a government that he has, involuntarily supported with his taxes. Even if he hasn’t paid a dime into the government’s coffers, would not the compassionate position be that a government with the means to save citizens’ lives, should? And isn’t compassion at least an implicit requirement of the medical profession?

My feeling is that an element of compassion, along with a sense of service, should be requisite for members of Congress, but that is undoubtedly an impractical, bleeding heart attitude.

Shocking as I find Paul’s position on this issue, the big story is the audience reaction to the debate host’s follow-up question, “Are you saying that society should just let [the hypothetical patient] die?”

Someone—possibly more than one individual—shouts, “Yeah!” A smattering of laughs ensued from the crowd.

And I wonder how heartless, self-serving politicians get elected, and re-elected.

Something I did recently watch was the 10-episode season of the British sci-fi series, Torchwood. Long unavailable for my viewing, I was able to watch the previous (five-episode) series, titled “Children of Earth,” and it is both thoughtful and deeply disturbing.

The latest Torchwood series hinged on a “Miracle Day” when all humans on Earth simply cease to die. World governments are forced to take action when populations, undiminished by death, soar beyond sustainable levels, fast. Some, including the U.S. government, adopt “categories of life,” a scale of classification based on one’s condition at the time the “miracle” struck.

Category 1 is “dead alive,” those who would be deceased were it not for the end of death. The government essentially defines what “life” is, and which categories get what (if any) medical care. Eventually, it comes to light that “category ones” are being incinerated in giant, government-run ovens.

How far is it from a doctor denying care to the uninsured, and the public supporting the decision to let them die, to relieving stress on the medical system through categorization and incineration?

The Sky Is Crying

2011-08-14T10:45:00.007-05:00

In our region, last night was, at best, a rough one for outdoor music events. At its worst, it was tragic.

Our band was scheduled to play an outdoor event that they expected as many as a couple hundred people to attend. At 7 p.m., when we were scheduled to load in, rain was coming down in torrents, winds were gusting in the double digits, and there was hail nearby.
The event got moved indoors and the "couple hundred" turned into a few dozen, tops.
It was a pain and a disappointment, in addition to being our last gig with our lead singer.
But I got to have both our boys on guitar with us and we, and our gear, stayed safe and dry.

And there were some spectacular views once the rain stopped. I snapped the one above after the storm.

Our previous scheduled outdoor gig, a street dance on July 2, was completely stormed out, and most of my gear got soaked. Which is reportedly what happened at the nearby Mosey Down Main Street festivities. The previous Mosey of the season, in May, was also rained out.
Yesterday, one or more of the bands had their equipment drenched, and the whole event was canceled.

There is one more scheduled for next month. Seeing that our band doesn't have an outdoor event scheduled for that day, they may be able to pull off that one.

When I got home from our gig late last night, the Indianapolis stations were still covering a weather-related story from the state fair. After the opening act, and before Sugarland came on, gusting winds took down the stage, killing at least five and sending forty-some to hospitals.
The amateur video of the collapse is something I wish I could un-see, brief as it is. From the fabric roof ripping away, to the towering scaffolding and light rigging folding, to it all coming to the ground ... maybe fifteen seconds.

There were t-storm warnings for the area, and not five minutes before the collapse, a concert staffer reportedly made an onstage announcement about weather contingency plans.
No one could have foreseen that the right combination of conditions would bring down a structure that, presumably, has withstood similar conditions in the past.

The summer music season is winding down. Here's hoping we never have another like it.

Serenade the Weekend Squire: The Monkees In Concert

2011-07-17T04:12:00.010-05:00

For my title, I had to use a Monkees lyric that isn't "Here we come" or "Listen to the band." A squire is, I believe, kind of a knight in training, and I am not a knight in fact, or in training, so the title is appropriate only in that I was "serenaded" by The Monkees and it was on a weekend.
On my lovely wife's birthday, in fact.

My remarks about the concert appeared on Blogcritics earlier this week.
For the benefit of my reader who already saw it there, I'm doing a value-added presentation of the review here, sort of annotated [like so] with comments I either cut or could not gracefully place in the BC piece.
Enjoy! And listen to the band! 'Cause here they come!

The Monkees at Old National Center
Indianapolis, Indiana, 6/26/11

The Monkees have reunited and are on tour?! Right. Next you'll be telling me someone's staged a play about The Shaggs!
[If I were the kind of "writer" who people read or who received comments, I fully expect that I would have elicited a smug remark that there is, in fact, a musical about The Shaggs currently playing in New York, which, of course, was the point of my "witticism" and which I couldn't have mentioned here without knowing of it. Much as I'd like to see this unlikely musical, I doubt I will unless and until it becomes a film.]
Putting aside issues of their age and ability, and their potential to draw an audience decades past the height of their popularity, a Monkees tour was an unlikely prospect due to their experience last time around. In 2001, Peter Tork (a recovering alcoholic) quit before the tour’s end, alleging excessive drinking and abusive behavior by Davy Jones and Micky Dolenz. As recently as two years ago, Tork was quoted saying he had no interest in either another reunion or in sharing a stage with Dolenz.
[There was absolutely no evidence of tension among the three while they were onstage, not that I would expect any even if I'd read they were at each other's throats every moment they weren't in public. They gave every appearance of being the same fun-loving scamps of the TV show, indulging in the same dopey (uh-huh) humor and hijinx. Every indication, in fact, was that they legitimately enjoyed being onstage with each other. At the end of the concert, however, we waiting around for them outside the theater--it was my wife's birthday, after all, and an autograph would have made it especially memorable. After a few of the band boarded one of the two buses, Micky finally emerged ... and got in a nondescript white van. Later, the others snuck onto one of the buses, an embarkation we couldn't see and realized only after the buses started rolling. Also, each of them spent time offstage during the show, seemingly Micky doing that the most.]

The lure of a 45th anniversary commemoration of the band must have proved irresistible to all concerned, because Tork is currently sharing a stage with Dolenz and Jones on a 30-some-city tour. And however he felt in the recent past, Tork at least gives the appearance of having a blast onstage with the other two. (Mike Nesmith, who reportedly dislikes touring and can’t possibly need the money, is sitting this one out, as he has nearly all the previous Monkees reunions).

Given their origins as a “pre-fabricated” band created for a TV show, along with the “boys’” advanced ages (65-68), modest expectations for a contemporary Monkees concert seemed reasonable. Personally, I would not have been surprised if the show had been a blatant cash grab—brief, heavy on hits medleys and schmaltz—a “hand wave” farewell gesture to their fans. At best I expected the kind of competent yet uninspired “nothing but hits” performances that constitute so many oldies package tours.

What we got instead, at the recent concert my wife and I attended (on June 26, in the fabulous Egyptian Room of Old National Center, Indianapolis, Indiana), couldn’t have been much further from my cynical forecast.
[My cynicism has not abated, however, over the VIP Room package I bought. Prior to our arrival, I have read, the tour manager appeared to say that one of the guys was sick (maybe Micky?) so there would be no meet and greet. So I paid rather a lot for the privilege of shorter lines at a smaller bar and restrooms. Not at all a good value, but convenient.]

Over the course of more than two hours, The Monkees delved some 40 songs deep into their catalog, proving themselves to be at least the equal of any of the nostalgia acts we’ve seen. The song selection, energy, and musicianship so exceeded the typical nostalgia show, in fact, I’d put this among the top ten concerts I’ve attended in recent years.
[Unlike other 60s acts like The Turtles, The Association, and Gerry Lewis & The Playboys, who have to play package tours to have an audience, The Monkees (who, admittedly, had much greater exposure back then) are a draw on their own. The Association, by the btw, did a phenomenal show here some years ago, but filled far fewer seats in a much smaller theater.]

Having experienced the Monkees’ phenomena first-hand the first time around, with all the fallout over the “pre-fab four” not being a “real” band, it was extremely gratifying to witness Davy, Mickey, and Peter’s energy and proficiency belying their age and the group’s origins. The three took turns providing surprisingly strong lead vocals; Mickey did several numbers from behind his drum kit; Peter contributed integral keyboard, guitar, and French horn parts; and even Davy strapped on an acoustic guitar for a song or two. Tork is singing particularly well, maybe better than he was during the band’s heyday, delivering both his traditional leads and Nesmith’s with truer pitch and authority than I’d ever heard from him, (especially impressive given his recent bout with cancer on his tongue).
[In the kind of comment that would get me strung up around the PSML, I am going to admit, I'd rather listen to the singing of today's Peter Tork than the 21st century voice of Brian Wilson. Not to suggest there's much in The Monkees catalog that approaches the sublime heights of the best of Pet Sounds, Brian's concerts are best when his voice is couched in layers of harmonies, or absent entirely. There, I said it.]

And not to get too sidetracked, but it always seemed to me that all that righteous outrage over The Monkees should have been aimed at Hollywood for co-opting yet another facet of youth culture, not over their legitimacy as a band. The four Monkees were hired as actors, not as musicians. And how many rock bands are competent comic actors?
[Anyone who bashed The Monkees for not writing their own material or playing on their records should have borne in mind that, just like "I'm A Believer" and "Last Train To Clarksville," The Byrds' first #1 single, "Mr. Tambourine Man," was not written by the band and only one of them played on that record. And I love The Byrds. Just feel compelled to point that out.]

The set list—reportedly developed with fan input—strayed into album cuts, B-sides, and non-hit singles for a nice balance of the inevitable and the unexpected. Nesmith’s “Mary, Mary” is more substantial than its under-powered studio version (if still not as heavy as the Butterfield Blues Band cover); the long-unreleased “All of Your Toys” sparkles with Tork’s harpsichording and Dolenz offering more evidence that he was among the 60s underrated rock vocalists; Tork’s “For Pete’s Sake,” the TV show’s season two closing theme, has all the vibrancy of an essential period classic; and on the pure pop confection, “She Hangs Out,” Jones still shing-a-lings like a man his wife’s age.

Tork also shined on “Shades of Gray,” a gem from songwriters Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, one of the highlights from The Monkees’ breakthrough album, Headquarters (the one where they forcibly took away the reins from Don Kirshner and played nearly everything themselves), an LP especially well represented in the concert. If Peter was responsible for some of the evening’s finest moments, though, he also must answer for the inclusion of “Auntie Grizelda,” which was considerably more appealing to the 11-year-old me than to the current version. At least, unlike some UK stops on the tour, we were spared “Peter Percival Patterson's Pet Pig Porky.”
[Apart from this one marginal song selection, and it was, admittedly, fun, the only other significant weak spot in the show was the lead guitarist's utterly inappropriate shredding on one song (which I wish I'd noted) and use of some obtrusive, inappropriate effects.]

Head, its legacy, and its effect on the band’s fortunes. While the film spotlighted some of their most sophisticated music, it also led to the dissolution of their working relationship with director Bob Rafelson and producer Bert Schneider. Now considered a cult classic, the film effectively ended the brief era of intense popularity that accounts for the band’s continued appeal.

Any misgivings they may have about Head, however, are swept away by their dazzling mini-set of the best of the film’s soundtrack. Peter led the band through powerful takes on his “Do I Have To Do This All Over Again?” and “Can You Dig It” (the latter just bit disappointing with the absence of the live belly dancer of earlier shows). The six song stretch was a high point of the night and a well-earned reward for the film's apologists.

The Head set, in particular, benefitted from the continuous videos projected above the band, although clips from the Monkees’ TV show enhanced the entire concert. At times the show felt like watching an episode with a live soundtrack, a very pleasant sensation for those with any affection for the TV series.

And who could have grown up then not liking The Monkees? Or at the very least, envying them, living on the beach, driving a customized GTO, and playing in a band. All the girls wanted to be with them, all the boys wanted to be them. And even 45 years on, Dolenz, Jones, and Tork make being a Monkee look and sound like a whole lot of fun.
[So much fun, in fact, that we considered seeing them again four nights later. Even though we knew we'd hear the same "ad libs." It's just a wonderfully entertaining rock and pop show.]

Blogcritics would like me to tell you that my original piece, with convenient links to some fine Monkees product, appears here: http://blogcritics.org/music/article/the-monkees-in-concert-listen-to/

"Cliche" - not just a great Rundgren song

2011-05-05T04:32:00.001-05:00

The recent prospect of me attending a meeting reminded me of another of my critic's cliches-in-the-making. Well, it's a term I've used in other situations, especially professional, but it seems well suited to review use, too.

Bartleby would "prefer not to" ...

Examples: Boss: Will you be going to that marketing meeting today?
JAG: Bartleby.

If I weren't so averse to, ahem, verbing nouns, I might "bartleby that meeting," missing it out of personal preference.

Uses in the world of criticism are nearly endless.

Example: Assignments Editor: How would you like to review the new
Rush box set?
JAG: I'm afraid that's going to be a bartleby for me.

And, "The prospect of watching one more frame of Jim Carrey
makes me go all bartleby."

Now I need to get ready for work.

Definitely bartleby about it, though.

. . . and the answer is . . .

2011-05-04T17:35:00.001-05:00

. . . the notorious guitar-slinger, Christopher Cross!

What, ol' CC doesn't spring immediately to mind when you're listing your fave shredders? You say he's no carbon copy of Stevie Ray (or Steve Marriott, for that matter)?

Obviously, I agree, or I wouldn't have posted that misleading quote.
Turns out, though, on the evidence of the DVD I'm going to write about Real Soon Now, Cece is a pretty credible axe-man!

No, there was no point to this, other than gratuitous bashing of the reptilian Mr. Cross.

Oh, and to give me the opportunity to lull myself to sleep singing one of my favorites of his:

"If you get sauced between the moon and New York City . . ."

Clue #3

2011-05-04T02:37:00.000-05:00

Last clue, people! (Person? Me?)

Itchycoo Park, the concert.*

* Over which, yes, I'm still obsessing and planning to write about.

Clue #2

2011-05-04T02:08:00.001-05:00

Think early 80s and monster debut album.

Clue #1

2011-05-04T01:08:00.000-05:00

He's been classified as Yacht Rock and claims to be fine with that.

Guess the Celebrity!

2011-05-04T00:58:00.000-05:00

Possibly, the subject would be less misleading with "Has-Been" in place of "Celebrity."
If it weren't for misleading, though, I wouldn't do any leading. So it stays.

While I work on something worth posting here (for myself to read, if that ain't sad),
here's a fun quiz:

Identify the celebrity who said, of his new album, in a recent interview:

"I approached it from a real guitar place. I've been ... getting back into the guitar thing,
'cause that's where my roots are from."

Start guessing (and no fair Goobling it)!

When It Rains Clichés, It Pours

2011-04-19T18:15:00.002-05:00

Recently I was starting to write something about the new remake of the 1981 film, Arthur, which is about (to quote Wikipedia) “a spoiled, alcoholic New York City playboy” that inexplicably was even more successful that the creepy voyeur fantasy, 10,¹ despite the presence of Liza Minelli and theme music by Christopher (“I voiced the hair dryer in Pixar’s Appliances!”) Cross.²

The 2011 remake stars Russell Brand, who I find surprisingly effective—even appealing, in a dangerous reprobate kind of way—in his other roles I’ve seen. My guess is, funny trailers notwithstanding, I’m going to find the remake even more tonedeaf than the original.

Has narcissistic alcoholism even been less cute, funny, or appropriate? Not that I’m on a moral high horse, I’ve just spent too much time around these types in reality to find them entertaining in film. And I believe the practice of drunks getting behind the wheel will never be universally condemned so long as we laugh at it, if the drunk is sufficiently charming. (You know, if I were a kid, I’d want to emulate Russell Brand’s Arthur, hilariously drunk-driving the Batmobile. Wouldn’t you?) I’m way past the point in my life where sharing the road with someone’s rolling cocktail party seems like a risk I should have to take.

While I may still write even more puritanical (possibly hypocritical) screed about Arthur, old and new, I have reservations. I’ve seen the original, but only the trailers for the remake. Some time ago, I wrote here about the Rolling Stones’ Shine A Light film, acknowledging that I hadn’t seen it, focusing on my speculation about the film, based on a few of the musical guest star tracks I’d heard. I’ve since seen the film—it bore out a lot of my reservations, while being more entertaining and gorgeously shot than I expected. Still, I don’t believe making a practice of reviewing music, books, movies—anything that I haven’t heard, read, or seen—is a good one.

I don’t believe I should Maxim my reviews or comments.

Remember 2008? (JAG answers, “Barely, and only as fragmentary retcon flashbacks.”)
The turn-it-up-to-10 creepy lad’s magazine, Maxim, fessed up to “reviewing” a Black Crowes’ album on the basis of a single track. There were also allegations from Nas that the magazine had given a 2.5 star rating to an album of his that, not only had the magazine’s staff not heard, he hadn’t even finished.

So, another of my clichés in the making:

Maxim (e.g., “to Maxim,” “I Maxim-ed it”): To write a review based on incomplete/no exposure to the work being reviewed. To draw conclusions based on minimal, if any, information.

Like all the others, I anticipate seeing it in wide use, the soonest.

¹ No, at the time I saw it in the theater, when it was new, the slow-mo beach scenes of Bo Derek in 10 most likely did not offend me. In the context of Dudley Moore’s stalkeresque dirty old man, it sure bugs me now, if it didn’t then.

² More about Chris (“I voiced the air compressor in Pixar’s Junkyard”) Cross in my oft-delayed, thoroughly unanticipated “Itchypoo Park” post. Real soon now.

³ About my preoccupation with footnotes, it may seem merely annoying; once you know it’s a symptom of my unrequited desire to be a professor, it’s kind of more a cause for pity, isn’t it? My abuse of dashes, something I just can’t account for.

Creating Clichés

2011-04-14T00:23:00.000-05:00

A couple of years ago, Michelle Kerns published a clever piece on examiner.com (and PopMatters, which I still sometimes read, despite their snubbing me) about the “Top 20 Most Annoying Book Reviewer Clichés and How to Use Them All in One Meaningless Review.”

Without going back to look, I feel reasonably sure I’ve never used the word “gripping” in anything I’ve written, unless it was something about what my younger brother and sister used to do to one another. And I would hope that if I used the word “readable” in one of my book reviews, it was only following the word, “barely.”

That said, I’m not at all certain I have avoided some of the clichés Kerns indicts, if not “nuanced,” probably “compelling,” maybe even “deceptively simple.”

It seems to me that the only way a hack of my (small) caliber can avoid using hackneyed clichés is to invent some of his own. Looking back over some of my “work” from the past, I can see that I’ve already laid the groundwork for establishing my very own lexicon of strained lingo, so I’m already well on my way toward a hefty arsenal of personally-coined clichés.

Here are a few:

AFUM: Another Fouled-Up Mess. This is a real time-saver for my music reviews, especially with bands that consistently cranked them out. Back in The Day, Styx and Journey issued one AFUM after another.

“Tribute band”: Reserved for bands that play their own stuff as blandly or otherwise poorly as a cover band plays the band’s stuff. Applicable to the majority of REM’s output since Automatic for the People.

“Last song, people!”: Live performances so rushed and sloppy, you can virtually see the band sprinting for the limos. For example, the last 1/3 of the (otherwise beloved) 1973 Beach Boys In Concert set, the Mike Love-Fest portion, is all “last song, people!”

What a Wonderful World!

2011-04-01T12:17:00.001-05:00

[left, some nature]

At this time of renewal and rebirth, I find myself taking pause to drink in the world's small wonders and imponderable mysteries . . .

the glint in the eye of the majestic hawk as it swoops down, relentlessly, on its prey
a drop of dew on a kitten's whisker
the laugh of a baby in her mama's lap, behind me in the theater
how the lowly stinkbug can produce such a magnificent stench throughout the picnic area, and make such a hearty crackle 'neath my sole
whoever made it possible to text while behind the wheel
The Shaggs
the insurance industry -- why, God, why?
while I'm at it, what's with lobbyists? would it kill You to smite a few, once in a while?
the downy softness of baby chicks and the tangy zest of BBQ chicken
how the delightful kaleidoscopic hues of nature's brilliant bouquet can in no way compensate for how utterly miserable the golden pollen renders my existence.

Happy April 1st, everybody!

2011-03-31T06:53:00.001-05:00

This review was first published on Blogcritics, where it was an editor's pick. As an added value to my loyal blog reader (if there is, in fact, even one), I have corrected an error I made in the published version.
An early draft included my searingly cogent observations on the enduring influence of the short story in American popular culture--from the short prose that provided some of the most enduring episodes of The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents; to Matheson's "The Box" serving as the (far removed) basis for the 2009 film of the same title; to Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge" inspiring films from the silent The Spy to Jacob's Ladder, and possibly being responsible for innumerable "it was all a dream" fictive plot twists, calling out Bobby Ewing in particular.
I also evoked the names of other authors who, perhaps unlike Lewis Shiner, are known primarily for their short fiction -- Poe, Sherwood Anderson, O. Henry, Ray Bradbury, Flannery O'Connor -- and who I also love reading.
And in keeping with my "style," this paraphrase is longer than what it describes. Huzzah!

COLLECTED STORIES by Lewis Shiner

Lewis Shiner is best known—revered, actually, by a devoted following—as the author of Frontera and Deserted Cities of the Heart (both finalists for the Nebula Award for Best Novel) and Glimpses (winner of the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel and the Violet Crown Award for Best Novel), in addition to other acclaimed novels; as one of the progenitors of cyberpunk, represented in this collection by the seminal “Mozart in Mirrorshades,” written with Bruce Sterling; and as creator of pivotal characters in the innovative Wild Cards series of “mosaic novels.” Given the diminished markets for short fiction, Shiner’s reputation in the field is perhaps lesser than his renown as a novelist. With Collected Stories, Lewis Shiner establishes himself among the masters of the short story form.

Collected Stories is a beautifully presented, 500 page collection of 41 of his short works, spanning three decades and an impressive range of structures and genres. For future editions, Subterranean Press may want to consider including a caution: “Do not read Lewis Shiner’s writing if you are uncomfortable having your mind expanded, your beliefs undermined, your values questioned, or your sense of reality challenged.” This is not passive reading for the complacent, but rather, is a collection as rich with startling new ideas as a Phillip K. Dick greatest hits anthology.

Effective short fiction requires economy without seeming incomplete or abrupt. As with the classics of the form, Shiner’s stories draw you in, make their point, and snap closed, with often devastating efficiency. “The Circle,” an ominous lesson in the great power of storytelling and ritual, brings the reader to the point of realization just as the doomed characters experience the dread chill that arrives on the howling October wind. The story shares an eerie Sartresque atmosphere with the Twilight Zone adaptation of Charles Beaumont’s “Shadow Play”; in fact, “The Circle” was filmed for NBC’s recent horror anthology series, Fear Itself, before thet show’s premature cancellation, and can be seen on the DVD set, Fear Itself: The Complete First Season.

Speaking of Sartre, here’s an existential nightmare that will stick with you: a merging of our world with another in which each of us has a doppelganger. This scenario in the unnerving “Primes,” (a story that the author himself says he find difficult to revisit), raises the question: If there were two of you, wouldn’t one be redundant? In addition to subtle indictments about racism and materialism, Shiner places his protagonist in the subordinate role to his double, inextricably in a situation that would make Camus or Genet blanch. A lesser writer might have Nick contrive to kill his Earth Two version and attempt to take his place, but, as in real life, things are rarely tidily or predictably resolved in any of Shiner’s worlds. (It’s not difficult to imagine the creators of the current sci-fi series, Fringe, taking inspiration from Shiner’s story for their cosmology of dual Earths and doubles competing for primacy.)

Characters learning tough lessons about their place in existence, or at least having ample opportunity to do so, is a recurring theme in Shiner’s work. An utterly original take on the alien abduction story, the heart-rending “Nine Hard Questions about the Nature of the Universe,” finds nine-year-old Danny taken up into the uncaring vastness of space, growing up in an emotional vacuum and seeking answers to fundamental questions about his role in the universe, his humanity, and how to relate to the opposite sex and equally alien species. Like the narrator in the Seatrain song, “13 Questions,” to Danny, each inquiry becomes “an endless hole.” If nothing else is accomplished by raising these questions, they at least challenge the notion that our most cherished human characteristics and concerns are of any consequence to the whole of existence.

A very different challenge to human dominance takes place in the pulpy “Lizard Men of Los Angeles,” a virtuosic mashup of a Mandrakian magician detective and his enigmatic assistant, Alistair Crowley’s acolytes, and a monstrous sub-culture in 1930s L.A. More than a mere genre exercise, “Lizard Men” delivers a fully-realized world, populated with vivid characters, all rendered with elegant economy.

Take Cairo’s masterful put-down of Crowley, capturing both the tenor of the adversaries’ history and the haughty bravado the seasoned performer employs: “. . . whatever else may be true of me … I can at least console myself that I am not the author of poetry so wretched that it is universally reviled in my lifetime and will be forgotten promptly thereafter.” And a single line of arch dialog from Cairo’s charming assistant, the delightfully mysterious Mrs. Lockhart—“I trust you're not waxing metaphorical . . . you know how I feel about that”—suggests a John Steed-Emma Peel bond between the two, while the author winks at his readers about literary devices he may, or may not be putting to use. There is even a subtle shout-out to another sorcerer supreme, as Cairo makes a certain mystical hand gesture closely associated with Dr. Strange. It’s a fantastic excursion into a fascinating underworld, one that demands a return appearance for the remarkable duo of Johnny Cairo and Myra Lockhart.

Shiner’s venture, along with Joe R. Lansdale, into hard-boiled detective fiction yielded Private Eye Action As You Like It, now a highly sought-after, out-of-print collectable. Three of Shiner’s stories from that elusive collection are included here, sparing readers laying out the $800 that hardcover now fetches. If Dan Sloane, his Vietnam vet PI, didn’t lead Shiner to a long career as a “tough-guy writer,”* the Sloane stories do showcase his economy with rendering unique characters with a few strokes, as when clashing architectural details (in “Deep Without Pity”) “set [the detective’s] teeth on edge.” (*A revealing, somewhat painful essay about his “short, unhappy career” as a “tough-guy writer” is available on Shiner’s Fiction Liberation Front, along with a wealth of other essays, more short stories, even several of his novels.)

Telling details that ring true give many of Shiner’s stories their bite—as in “Scales,” wherein a character compares a divorce to “being in a body cast for six months.” In the same story, Ann’s unfaithful husband recounts how his father would make his mother, “bring him the mail, and then he would open it … and throw what he didn’t want on the floor,” leaving it for his mother to “get down on her knees and pick it up.” This kind of economical, effective characterization anchors the stories’ fantastic elements in a reality that often in Shiner’s writing feels flinchingly autobiographical.

Details that seem to come from the author’s personal history must have inspired the harsh vicissitudes Shiner sometimes visits on his characters. Conversely, his writing often has an underlying unsentimental sense of compassion that may also stem from authorial experience; for every bleak scenario, there are abundant opportunities for redemption within these pages. Of course, even when characters come to an awareness of their flaws, as with the tragically addicted Blake in “Stuff of Dreams,” self-awareness comes at a terrible cost. These are people Shiner seems to have known, or even the person he has been, who, in many cases, could as easily have been any one of us.

For all his everyman protagonists, one of the book’s centerpieces showcases Shiner at another extreme, inhabiting historical figures he knows only through research, and weaving an alternate history where the actual and fanciful are indistinguishable. “The Death of Ché Guevara,” a 2010 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award Finalist, is told as an expansive interview with Haydée Tamara Bunke Bider, aka Tania, Ché’s partner in revolution. Her account of U.S. adventurism in Argentina, Eugene McCarthy as president, and an all-too-credible scenario for martial law in the United States is told with such conviction and passion, we want to believe, regardless of our political sympathies.

And that may be Shiner’s greatest talent, the ability—like all the masters of the short fiction form—to create characters we can care about, can even relate to, in brief tales and in the most incredible circumstances. Regardless of allegory or fantasy, what makes his Collected Stories so memorable is the humanity at their heart.

This is a substantial collection in every sense, one that places Lewis Shiner among the finest of today’s short story practitioners.

I'm down. Start kicking.

2011-02-24T12:24:00.002-06:00

In my experience, the "scheme of things" is anything but "grand."

Life's too short . . . even for keyboard players.

2011-02-10T21:11:00.000-06:00

Given the sorry outcome of most (and by "most," I mean "all") my creative endeavors the past, oh, 30-some years, I've determined that I've simply set my sights too high.

Can't finish writing that book? Don't despair, Sunny Jim! Try a postcard!
(They do still make postcards, don't they?)

Having trouble getting a new album off the ground? Hum to yourself during your work day--a suitable melody is bound to emerge sometime in that nine hours!

Is your design work greeted with derision? Keep a doodle pad close at hand. Today's stick figure could be tomorrow's next animated superstar!

In order to get the creative ball rolling for myself, and start that long overdue economic juggernaut I keep envisioning for myself, I've decided to introduce a line of tee-shirts.

They'll be series, so people will want to collect 'em all!

The first one will be the "Life's Too Short" line.
All of them will have the same set-up on the front:

And the back will sport such world-weary witticisms as:

. . . and this:

Then there's the series that works off the premise that, in every band that has one,* the keyboard player is the lowliest life form, and the (generally deserving) rear end of every joke. Here's how this one works: We saw an amazing band last night! Everyone was sober. Even the keyboard player!

Such as:

I figure these will really take off, especially among band members and their romantic interests, once I get around to making "The whole band was good-looking ..." and "Everybody in the band got laid ..."

So I'll be getting a batch of those made up and will post the ordering information here, real soon now. In the meantime, remember, it's all c. 2011 by James A. Gardner.
This is my eureka idea, you know!

* Every band that's smart opts to include a useful player, like a triangler or electric bagpipist, in place of employing an instrument best suited for tent revivals and grade school dance recitals.

The hoax, the hero, the hemoglobin—the untold story of the fabled Bat Boy!

2010-11-16T06:27:00.000-06:00

There seem to be two kinds of people in this world: the reasonable, open-minded folk who trust their own judgment and senses, who know what’s what. And then there are those who ignore the facts staring them right in the face, who won’t acknowledge that Elvis is alive even when they see him special- order a TCB Whopper with peanut butter and ‘nanner. Who won’t believe in Bigfoot until he’s strangling them with their own descending colon. These people are called “skeptics.”

The heralds of truth at Weekly World News have done it again, blowing the lid off another suppressed story that skeptics refuse to believe. Thanks to the uncompromising WWN journos, along with a dauntless, daring scientist-substitute teacher, Dr. Barry Leed, we finally learn the untold story of the mutant sensation that has captivated the nation, the incomparable Bat Boy. Going Mutant: The Bat Boy Exposed! may just be the greatest mutant expose since that documentary showing how Hugh Jackman got his metal skeleton.

Leed holds the MBS (Master of Bat Studies) from the University of Indianapolis, so is basically what you’d call an unimpeachable expert. (Plus, I’m pretty sure only presidents can be impeached.) Who better than the expert known to his students as “Dr. Squealgood” to stalk the world’s most accomplished human-bat hybrid and bring his story to light?

No one, that’s who.

The sheer breadth of Leeds’ research, the steel of his tenacity, the enormidad of his cojones will leave you blubbering in amazement. You may not believe some of the astounding accomplishments and startling revelations until you see the numerous supporting photos and, as we all know, photos don’t lie!

Beginning with the 1992 discovery of Bat Boy, Leeds has unearthed the entire life story of a simple, bulgy-eyed, pointy-toothed flying boy, from humble beginnings in the caves of West Virginia, to distinguished U.S. military service, to flying on the space shuttle. By the time you reach the end of this pulse-pounding account, you won’t be asking why Bat Boy’s picture is now on the five dollar bill, you’ll be digging out a few “bats” to buy the book!

Along the way, the authors separate fact from insinuation, innuendo, and other words you’ll have to look up, finally putting to bed the rumored romance between Bats and Brittany — it was actually BB g.f. Betty Barnett, a virtual double for Ms. Spears, down to the crossed eyes and pointed teeth. They uncover the mighty mutant’s likes (Count Chocula cereal, featherless lizard chickens) and dislikes (modern art, disco balls, and any recording by Cher since 1984).

There are enough interesting — and in true Weekly World News style, inflammatory — facts in Going Mutant, well, to fill a book! Along with the kind of value-added content that makes the WWN the world’s only reliable news source, such as, according to experts, one in ten lap dancers “sport silicone butt implants.” And valuable advice for those visiting West Virginia: when you hear banjos, paddle faster, and, in that state, a virgin is defined as “a girl who can outrun her brother.”

Just try getting that sort of information from your high-falutin’ newspapers, bub! There is simply no other source for the kind of journalism that, as Dr. Leed eloquently puts it, covers events that are like “Woodstock, Caligula, and Plato’s Retreat rolled into one.”

Once you’ve read Going Mutant, you’ll realize you didn’t know how much you don’t know about Bat Boy and his role in the events that have shaped our current world in which we live in. Sure, there will be skeptics who deride valiant works like this. To them, in the words of the great psychic, The Amazing Criswell, we say: Can you prove that it didn’t happen?

This article was first published as Going Mutant: Bat Boy Exposed! on Blogcritics.

Review copy provided by Weekly World News.

Halloween Reading Recommendations

2010-10-29T01:05:00.002-05:00

In the years between trick or treating myself and turning on the porch light to pass out candy to the kiddies, I developed a deep appreciation for classic horror fiction. Some of the greatest horror writing has always been found in the short fiction form, and I have a list of perennial favorites I try to revisit annually, once the leaves begin to turn.

Ambrose Bierce is generally known only for his satirical Devil’s Dictionary, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” and his mysterious disappearance. His portfolio, however, is packed with tales of ghosts, dread, and damnation. The collection, Can Such Things Be?, offers a wealth of eerie reading. Especially recommended are “The Moonlit Road,” a chilling realization of the Rashomon effect, and “An Inhabitant of Carcosa,” as desperate a story as can be put to paper and the inspiration for H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos and Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow.

Speaking of which, Chambers’ collection of stories about the malevolent King and the dread Yellow Sign effectively evoke a Gothic atmosphere of despair and doom. The stories in this mythos are highly effective chillers, and seem to be an aberration among Chambers’ flowery romantic fiction.

W.W. Jacobs’ “The Monkey’s Paw” is a cautionary story culminating in an image so horrific, it’s rightfully earned a reputation as a classic. Although the story’s been adapted to radio and TV, the original prose version is unsurpassed.

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Feathertop” is more whimsical than horrible, a morality tale involving a witch, a scarecrow, and some insufferable Puritans. And something that keeps lighting Mother Rigby’s pipe.

Charles Beaumont was responsible for nearly as many memorable Twilight Zone episodes as was Rod Serling. Like Serling, Beaumont was adept at crafting allegorical stories of suspense and terror. There are the hellish neighbors of “The New People,” the twisted psychology of killer and victim in “The Hunger,” the world’s deadliest prisoner in “The Howling Man,” and the most atrocious parenting this side of Mrs. Bates in “Miss Gentibelle,” all of which can be found in his collected stories.

Finally, just when it appears that there are no worthy living, working authors who could add to my autumnal required reading, I discovered Collected Stories by Lewis Shiner. Known best as a cyberpunk pioneer, and later for the remarkable rock and roll fantasy, Glimpses, Shiner offers an abundance of evocative horror, science fiction, and suspense—among an array of other genres—in this substantial collection, which is strongly recommended overall.

A few of the Collected Stories enhancing my haunting season this year include:

• “Primes”— If you have a double in the world, wouldn’t one of you would be superfluous?
• “The Circle”—About the great power of storytelling and ritual, especially at this time of year.
• “Nine Hard Questions about the Nature of the Universe”—This should disabuse us of the notion that our most cherished human characteristics and concerns are of any consequence to the rest of the galaxy.
• “Lizard Men of Los Angeles”—A pulpy reality in which a Mandrakian hero and his enigmatic assistant encounter acolytes of Crowley and an even-more monstrous sub-culture in 30s L.A.

I hope among these suggestions you’ll find what you need to get into the proper frame of mind for a chilling Halloween. The thought of my readers lacking a good read, now that’s frightening.

Article first published as Recommended Halloween Reading on Blogcritics.

Halloween Wishes DO Come True!

2010-10-29T00:50:00.000-05:00

Ah, Halloween, that magical season of the unexpected, when the out-of-the-ordinary waits around every bend, when all the wonder you wish for may be realized!

Or something. All I know is, like many adults, I’ve never outgrown my enthusiasm for it. And while I have adjusted my expectations to the extent that I no longer fully expect to see ol’ lady Liptrap take to the sky on a broom, I have to acknowledge some mysterious happenings at this time of year.

Growing up, I viewed every horror and sci-fi film I could, and was fortunate to have two highly entertaining TV horror film hosts within our reception range—Svengoolie (followed by, what else, Son of Svengoolie, in later years) and Nightmare Theatre MC, Sammy Terry. I'm not sure what he was supposed to be, but Sven resembled nothing so much as Mad Dogs and Englishmen-era Leon Russell with an extreme motel tan. Sammy dressed as a sort of unspecified ghoul with Dracula aspirations, and yellow latex gloves. His corny humor and booming baritone voice made even The Navy Versus the Night Monsters enjoyable.

When he got hold of fare like Bucket of Blood or Horror of Party Beach, it was great entertainment, and my ongoing affection for those films, and their like, is largely due to having Sammy Terry introduce me to them.

Flash forward to a few years ago, a spectacular October Saturday, and we’re in the scenic hills of southern Indiana, visiting one of our sons at college. The local library is having a sale, and I pick up a stack of LP's for 25 cents apiece, including a sealed copy of Best of Mancini, which includes the chilling “Experiment in Terror” that had been used (along with Link Wray’s “Rumble”) as theme music for Sammy Terry’s late night TV show.

We later went to the artists’ colony of Nashville, Indiana, with no specific plans. Wandering around the cluster of galleries and shops, we came across a line of people waiting to see, in a rare public appearance, Sammy Terry. An appearance we'd known nothing about!

Imagine stumbling across an autograph session with one of the formative figures of your youth, in the first place, and having an album of “his” theme music with you.

Sammy is now in his 70s and apparently hard of hearing, so his assistant had some difficulty explaining why I was asking him to sign a Mancini album. But once he got it, he was happy to sign, and was as gracious, and corny, as I could have hoped.

He even posed for this photo with me:

(I’m on the left. Ha!)

So whenever friends ridicule you for feeling a little magic in the air this Halloween, show them this photo, and remind them that, if you wish hard enough, perhaps you, too, can be choked by a childhood hero!

Article first published as Halloween Wishes DO Come True! on Blogcritics.

Our Scary Neighbors

2010-10-17T04:33:00.001-05:00

I never intended to use this forum to approach any weightier topics than whether the worst rock band ever is REO Speedwagon or Styx. There are times, though, when I simply can't suppress my despair and I have to wail, to anyone reading, about the discouraging, downright frightening views held by those around me.

Within the past few weeks, on the same day, two of my nearby fellow citizens published letters in the local paper that are so dangerously misguided, they could have passed for the work of The Onion.

One had been given the heading, "Gun control hurts law-abiding people," which opened with the inarguable (and poorly-punctuated) statement that "it is not the guns that are committing the crimes; it is the people who are pulling the trigger." The writer contends that those people--this would be those committing crimes with guns--"are not law-abiding citizens." Again, no argument there; by definition, people are not law-abiding if they are committing gun crimes.

But this is just picking at his semantics.
Where he starts to seriously run off the rails is with the claim that "law-abiding citizens are the only ones affected by gun-control laws." Can it be that not one would-be criminal is inconvenienced by mandatory waiting periods or limits on automatic weapons. Could be, I suppose, but it sure seems improbable.

So what does the letter-writer propose we do about this intolerable situation? Apparently he is advocating universal gun ownership (although, possibly being against more government interference in our lives, he stops of short of demanding a legal mandate).

It is quite clear to this gent that, if "every citizen had a gun on his [sic.] hip," we wouldn't have to worry about "1.3 women" being "raped every minute" or 20 people losing their lives annually in bank robberies. Because the local gun-slingin' fella would intervene in these crimes, in a manner that would not cause loss of life, presumably. Hard to tell whether the 20 bank robbery victims include any perps, due to the total lack of supporting data. Also hard to tell if we are to issue shootin' irons to the little ladies, or just count on an armed good guy to be on hand whenever a rape is about to be committed.

There are more unsupported "facts," such as "most gun crimes are committed by people who had a record prior to the crime." Um, does that include gun crimes in which the perpetrator gets away? How do we know if those criminals have prior records? And as long as we're tossing around unsupported "facts," how about the one that says most gunshot victims in the U.S are shot by someone they know? Are all those accidental, "I didn't know it was loaded," family shootings done by convicted criminals?

Maybe the most irresponsible supporting anecdote offered by this NRA shill is the one lauding two students who restrained, at gunpoint, a killer of three at a Virginia law school in 2002. Two students who had guns in their cars despite a gun ban on the campus.
Does the letter-writer believe that flaunting the law is acceptable if those doing it seem like ok citizens, like the students, and not "criminals"?
And this guy clearly has not spent much time on a college campus if he seriously believes MORE guns should be introduced into the hotbed of hormones and alcohol that is many universities.

Obviously, the writer isn't concerned about presenting a shred of empirical evidence to support his views. Allow me to refute those views with some: thanks to the laxity of existing firearm laws, his state of residence is fifth in the nation in exporting guns used in crimes in other states; "right to carry" firearm laws have not reduced crime rates and are linked to an increase in aggravated assaults; guns are used in crimes four to six times more often than they are used in self-defense. (Citations available upon request.)

How could we be safer with even more guns in the hands of inexperienced users, even those with the best of intentions? Why does this guy's desire to own guns trump my right to live where every yahoo is packing? Does he truly believe that more guns in more citizens' hands would lead to less crime, or does he just want to continue to be able to buy as many guns as he wants, as easily as possible?

The second letter . . . "I agree that we should have engaged in war with Iraq, but I do not agree with being there this long. I think we should have gone over there, crippled the country and left. Why should we spend billions of dollars to rebuild a country that we spent billions of dollars to destroy?"

Why, indeed.
Who knows who she is agreeing with: those who think Iraq had anything to do with 9/11 or those who believe Saddam had weapons of mass destruction by the time we invaded them? Either way, they were asking for it, so why should we rebuild what we so justifiably destroyed?

What kind of human being acknowledges that our country "crippled" another, and has no obligation to help that nation return to the condition it was in when we invaded?
Do even those who believe "we should have engaged in war with Iraq" believe that innocent civilians there should suffer because of the destruction we wrought?

There is just one statement she writes that I agree with: "Our country now is in a recession because of this." So, I suppose by her reasoning, we should not incur any more debt to repair what we broke, even if it might be the right thing to do.

But, of course, to her way of thinking, it isn't.

I am sickened and disheartened by these views, and downright frightened to think they live right down the road from me.

Schrödinger's Radio Shack

2010-10-05T17:55:00.001-05:00

I'm not even going to pretend to understand physics -- heck, I can barely handle experiencing them -- so the concept of Schrödinger's cat* pretty thoroughly eludes me. Which I will likely illustrate by saying I understand Schrödinger's cat to refer to outcomes not being fixed until observed. For my purposes, that's what it is.

[Let's go wiki for a summary of Schrödinger's Cat: A cat, along with a flask containing a poison and a radioactive source, is placed in a sealed box . . . If an internal Geiger counter detects radiation, the flask is shattered, releasing the poison that kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when we look in the box, we see the cat either alive or dead.]

To my reductivist mind, this live/dead cat in a box notion also applies to a lot of the simple binary outcomes in my daily life: as I approach the intersection, that idiot will/will not run the stop sign; when I open the icebox, the leftover fettucini will/will not sport green fuzz; when I need a specialized piece of gear, I will/will not find it at a tiny, small town Radio Shack.

A few weeks ago, I had a gig with the (cover) band I play with, and went to the local 'Shack to pick up an SC card for my recorder. I'd been having trouble getting a sustain pedal to work with one of my keyboards, and was on the verge of ordering a pricey one from the manufacturer, Korg. The only pedal I'd used with success with this instrument was, inexplicably, one made by Yamaha, and I had to use it with my other instrument.

Perusing the clearance shelf, there was a dusty box, priced at $5, that promised to contain a sustain pedal, for use with RS or Yamaha keyboards.

Until I entered that store, it was equally likely, Schrödinger would say, that the pedal was, and was not there waiting for me.

Wouldn't it be something if I opened the box and there was a dead cat inside?

Battle of the Beatle Boots: when the pros turn amateur

2010-10-05T04:19:00.000-05:00

Got a reminder recently, that some people find cover bands, in general, to be bogus.

This guy I used to be in a band with, one of the last times I saw him, gave me a rough time--as if I was supposed to be ashamed or apologetic--because playing in a cover band was "all" I was doing musically at the time.
Wish I'd had the presence of mind to point out it was more than he was doing. But that was essentially his contention, that he'd rather not play music than play cover music.

Certainly, if I had my preference, I'd rather always play music that I've written. And I consider myself very fortunate, not to mention atypical, to have had a band that played nearly as many of my original songs as it did covers, for a couple of years.

The fact is, for most of we amateur, part-time musicians, if we want to perform for anyone other than ourselves, we either play cover songs or we play to ourselves. By and large, folks who go out to a club or bar to hear live music want to hear live music they're familiar with.
So the choice for most of non-pro rock and rollers is not whether or not to play someone else's songs, but whether to play in public or not.

Along with being reminded of this smug former band mate, the other thing that brought the cover music issue to my mind was hearing Dwight Twilley's album, The Beatles.
It's a 2009 release whose cover emulates "The White Album," although the set covers material as old as "I'll Be Back" from A Hard Day's Night.
And it's . . . ok.
None of Twilley's arrangements are going to supplant the originals as anyone's favorites. His signature tremulous vocals sound to be in top form, and his voice and ear for harmony certainly lend themselves to this material. I question the need for another version of Come Together; the Aerosmith cover was all it took to convince me that the song is ridiculous, even unbearable, without Lennon's vocal. Several of Twilley's selections--Helter Skelter, Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey, Bungalow Bill, Tomorrow Never Knows--would make most short lists of the most challenging Beatles songs to attempt, which may have been the point. But there's no excuse for a cover version of the sniggering throwaway Why Don't We Do It In the Road, especially one that runs longer than the original.

Listening to Twilley's The Beatles is not unlike, oh, going to hear a really solid cover band.
You will enjoy it while it's in your ears, and you will never yearn to hear these versions again, over the originals. That's about the most good cover bands can aspire to.

(Also demoralizing, my discovery that he also released another all-covers album last year, Out of the Box, which includes five Beatles songs--at least some of them overlapping his all-Beatles album--among selections as inexplicable as Good Golly Miss Molly and, lord help me, Old Time Rock & Roll. The disappointment of learning about this has been somewhat mitigated by news of Green Blimp, apparently a new album of original material, due out yet this year.)

Twilley is a novice, though, compared to The Smithereens, who have released two albums composed entirely of Beatles material, including a complete cover of the Meet the Beatles album, essentially. a note-for-note rendition, only with DiNunzio's distinctive lead vocals. Which, after hearing it on two consecutive albums of the stuff, I can only conclude isn't all that well suited to stand in for either Lennon's or McCartney's.
To their credit, the 'reens' second album of Beatles covers, B Sides the Beatles, features some more-rarely covered material--Cry for a Shadow and Ask Me Why, in particular. Like Why Don't We Do It In the Road, it's just possible these songs aren't recorded that often because, in comparison to the rest of the Beatles' catalog, they just aren't that great!

(Ask Me Why, in fact, often makes "worst of the Beatles" lists. Bing that phrase and see what I mean. While I'm at it, Revolution #9 is not their worst song--it's a sound collage, not a song at all--and Ob-La-Di isn't the worst song ever, polls to that effect notwithstanding, although it sure is lame and annoying.)

Even more-worthy contributions to the vast Beatles tributes, such as Cheap Trick's live Sgt. Pepper's-with-orchestra, nice as they are to listen to, and impressive as they may be as performances, seem rather pointless. Yeah, you can play an entire album's worth of challenging songs extremely well . . . lots of people can! When are you going to turn out another album as good as In Color? You know, really contribute something new to rock and roll?

What disturbs me about this isn't hearing, sometimes buying more versions of songs I already own, dozens of times over. Or even that most of these renditions are imminently unnecessary.

It's that these bootleg Beatles could be performing their own songs, and that's a choice that's largely denied to we amateurs. Dwight Twilley and Cheap Trick, and to a lesser degree, The Smithereens have all written substantial amounts of original material, to the extent that, if tribute albums to them don't exist, they could.

Since when is it a legitimate career move for immensely talented songwriters to poach on the cover bands' turf? These are artists of the same caliber as those whose material we cover!

Maybe everyone wants to play Beatles' music, which is understandable, and who am I to claim that as exclusively the amateurs' province? Maybe I'm just sour because these pros play cover band out of choice, and I do it out of necessity.

Maybe I'm just ashamed of never having made it any further than the local cover band.

Resumption of Service

2010-10-01T22:01:00.002-05:00

Huh, another month goes by, and outta me, nothin'.

Since we last talked, I saw that long-running Charlie Sheen TV sitcom, and only made it through a few minutes. Until I saw the title in the credits, I thought it was called Two Half-Men. So it was kind of different than I was led to expect.

Thanks (?) to a CD titled Before They Were Hits Volume Five, I have now heard a version of "(They Long To Be) Close To You" I can tolerate even less than The Carpenters' . . . the original 1963 recording by Richard Chamberlain. At least Karen's amazing voice can distract from those drippy Richard Carpenter arrangements.

If vibrato were dynamite, Chamberlain's vocal on this thing would blow a crater the size of Tunguska. As it is, it just blows craters.

On the subject of intolerable singers, Kevin Cronin is doing infomercials for a dreadful Time-Life "rock ballads" collection. Hope they run it this month--it's creepy!
Kevin looks like that aunt who always smelled like gin rickies and hugged you considerably longer, and lower, than you were comfortable with.
Oh, and his voice makes "co-host" Amy Motta sound like a tough guy.

Look at me, I finally show up here and I'm nothing but a nattering nabob of negativity!

On more pleasant subjects, can you believe there are, at this late date, unheard Beatles recordings?
(Of course, if they were truly unheard, not even the bootleggers would know what they are. And what's with the phrase, "never before seen photos"? How did they process and print them if they've never been seen? How do they know what they are photos of?)
Last year brought the, um, revelatory Revolution 1, Take 20, a 10:47 version never before heard! Last I knew, experts considered it legit, and it's remarkable.

My latest Beatles boot discovery has probably been around for a while, just escaping my notice until now: Abbey Road minus the vocal tracks. This was their only album recorded on an eight-track recorder, and the power and depth of the instrumental tracks, already impressive on the released album, is stunning. The tightness of the collective band and signature flourishes of their individual players allows for the discovery of all kinds of nice little touches on songs I've heard hundreds of time. And it makes it easier to spot the little missteps, for those who are into that. Simply remarkable.

In yet more evidence that he's too good for the masses, Lew Shiner's "Death of Che Guevara" didn't win the Theodore Sturgeon Award for which it was nominated, which is both a shame and a puzzle. Though I'm hardly impartial, it's difficult to imagine a better piece of recent fiction. Go read it, at no cost, and see if you don't agree:

http://subterraneanpress.com/index.php/magazine/fall-2009/fiction-the-death-of-che-guevara-by-lewis-shiner/

I don't know much about much, but I do know good writing, and this is it. See if, like me, you don't read it a second or third time. I loves me some short stories and this has become one of my favorites.

And since you asked, more of my favorites from the inimitable Mr. Shiner are available in his COLLECTED STORIES (which is not only a pleasure to read, it looks spectacular on your end table), here:

http://www.subterraneanpress.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=shiner03&Category_Code=B&Product_Count=124

and he's posted loads of his short and long-form writing, to read for free, at his Fiction Liberation Front site:

http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/index.htm

Did I mention, it's FREE!
Now you have no excuse not to be reading . . . go there!

At last, GLIMPSES is back!

2010-08-31T19:25:00.001-05:00

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/08/30/shiners-glimpses-bac.html

Now you have no excuse for not having read it.

Do so, then come back here and we'll discuss.

The Lewis Shiner Appreciation Society

2010-08-04T00:10:00.000-05:00

It's rare that I find myself to be moved to action -- really, by anything -- specifically by my strong reaction to art of any kind. And so, as with most things, in this situation, I find myself at a total loss how to effectively or appropriately respond.

Because a friend took exception this week to my referring to myself as a "failed writer," let's say I'm a writer who fails to reach his potential . . . who overreaches his abilities . . . who don't write good. Or very much.

My admiration for those who can and do "write good" is exceeded only by how much I enjoy their work.

One of those exceptional writers is Lewis Shiner. Reading his writing is one of my greatest pleasures at this stage in my life, and the friendships I've made by being a Shiner fan are among the greatest I've known.

I want more people to read Lewis Shiner. I think discerning readers will find themselves challenged, provoked, and moved by his writing. They may even make some new friends.

The Lewis Shiner Appreciation Society aims to bring more readers to his writing and to bring together those who already know, and appreciate it. Give it a look:

http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/pages/The-Lewis-Shiner-Appreciation-Society/143125009049253?ref=mf

I Write Like H.P. Lovecraft

2010-07-15T05:15:00.000-05:00

I write like
H. P. Lovecraft

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

http://iwl.me/s/147eabd8

In addition to looking like him.

Diluted to Death

2010-06-29T05:07:00.003-05:00

Imagine you own a Bugatti Veyron.

(For anyone reading who doesn't watch the BBC's Top Gear, if anyone is reading, the Veyron is a 1,000 horsepower luxury touring car, priced around $1.5M, one of the most expensive production vehicles ever made. So I consider it likely you, like I, have to imagine owning one.)

Now imagine that you take the Veyron to the garage for some work and, instead of a component made by Bugatti, your mechanic replaced the old part with one from a Ford Pinto. Depending on the part, there may not be a noticeable difference in performance.

But what if, every time the Veyron needs a part replaced, the mechanic slaps on some crappy piece from the Pinto.

Or for an example more of us can relate to, imagine you have a bottle of vodka in your liquor cabinet, and your lush uncle keeps drinking out of it, and adding water so you will never suspect.

Until you taste it, that is, and it becomes apparent just how weak and watered-down the vodka has become. If old unk does this often enough, the beverage will become so diluted, it cannot accurately and honestly be called "vodka" any longer.
"Vodka-infused water," maybe.

Likewise, swap out enough parts and the Veyron is no longer a luxury super car. It's a Pinto.

It seems to me that bands can be like that.

How many original members must a band lose before it's no longer honestly the same band people recognize? Which crucial members have to be lost to inferior replacements, or not replaced at all, before the performance is noticeably inferior and unsatisfactory?

How dishonest is it to bill your band as, I don't know, The Periodic Chart, when there no members of the beloved original incarnation remain?

You can call a Pinto, a Veyron, but that don't make it so.

just in case it didn't hurt enough . . .

2009-01-05T07:34:00.002-06:00

We lost our school, get to pay $1M extra just to have it located in the middle of a busy intersection of stop-sign-runners, and have the additional pleasure of paying more than 200 grand to demolish it.
But someone didn't think that was quite enough to ensure that we felt sufficiently miserable about it, so they had to desecrate our school, too:

/

This really feels like the kind of thing you'll have to account for, someday.

Shine a (Dim) Light

2008-04-07T02:09:00.000-05:00

What kind of reviewer, blogger, or writer of any kind would presume to comment on a film or its soundtrack without having seen or heard it?

Hi, everybody!

The idea of Scorsese's Shine A Light appealed to me: a concert film, at IMAX size and volume, by the director of The Last Waltz, contender for best rock concert film to date. No, I haven't yet seen the film or heard the soundtrack, and yes, I am prejudiced against it already, despite my initial enthusiasm.

Initial, brief enthusiasm. And then, I reflected on how many live albums the Rolling Stones have released, and how frequently, and how most of them performed like Brian Jones in a swimming pool. Floating face-down on the surface or listlessly skimming the bottom.

Only their first live album (not counting the questionable Got Live If You Want It!, which is pretty clearly a studio recording with dubbed-in audience sound effects), Get Your Ya-Ya's Out!, conveys the unpredictable, swaggering, messy Stones at their peak. Ya-Ya's was the sound of the still-dangerous band that made a string of albums as good as any in rock and roll, from Beggar's Banquet through Exile on Main St.

Since then, the six live sets they've released have mostly (with the exception of the refreshingly different Stripped) suffered from listlessness (Still Life, an ironically appropriate title), anemic set lists (No Security), or both (Flashpoint). And still, those qualities are preferable to the main deficiency of the last two, their slickness.

I'm no "back to mono" Luddite, contrary to my glowing review of the crudely recorded Battle of the Bands CD a while back. I wouldn't expect a 21st century Stones live album to sound as crude as one released in 1970. But the Stones I grew up rocking out to didn't fix their mistakes in post-production, or at least, didn't sound like they did.

And they sure didn't have a pop diva-du-jour onstage with them. It may be that, as I've read, Christina Aguilara acquits herself admirably on Shine A Light. It's possible that 1977's Love You Live would have been enhanced with a guest vocal from Olivia Newton-John, too. That would just make it a different kind of inferior Stones album.

Nothing would please me more than to walk out of the film amazed by the power and vitality of the Stones and their songs. I would just like to hear them play without a net, again. And give "Satisfaction" a well-earned rest.