Upcoming Exhibit: "The Red that Colored the World" (Bower's 11/1/15)

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RED. [v3]

I.
The Matador.
The flag extends in arm outstretched, for sake of bold.
His eye drops along its frame.  The cloth, a sign,
Draped on, in spite of sense, unfurled; it's lack of fold
An offense to the braying monster beyond.

II.
The Bar.
They, shadowed about the pate of varnished wood, says
Little.  Thoughtful quiet, in the reflective glow
are words enough.  For the undulating buzz

of abqjournal.com

Contemplation is found in the gloss of spilled drink.

III.
The Revolutionary.
On her lips the warring colour, the warning one,
Revolt declared by those fierce eyes: ready, wet.
The masses in struggle, civil thoughts undone,
Smoke rose, the fire lit, as she moves to the fore.

IV.
The Couplet.
Alternating tones, its force as the same,

of animpartationofcolor.blogspot.com

Color of wanting, and, by degree, claim.
~ JE, 9 Songs, 9 Stories, 9 Poems

THE EXHIBIT: "The Red that Colored the World" coming to Bower's Museum 11/1/15, displays the power behind the color red and how the American Cochineal creates this dye (see below).  A deeper dive of the exhibit is available at WSJ.

"I always saw, I always said If I were grown and free,
I'd have a gown of reddest red As fine as you could see,..
And he would be a gallant one, With stars behind his eyes,
And hair like metal in the sun, And lips too warm for lies.
I always saw us, gay and good, High honored in the town.
Now I am grown to womanhood....I have the silly gown." ~ Dorothy Parker, The Red Dress

...let's talk...

...let us speak no longer of gossamer wings
of the prismatic hues and the light of air
feelings

...no more of sleepless nights and the fires
that burn on Parnassus and Elysium
homage fires to the Platonian locus

...of ancient warriors on winning steeds
that quake the earth in armor and steel
the lights of the day mingle with tears and anguish

...let us speak quietly
of love
of love
in unpracticed motions
or remembered lines
you
me
our bodies and lives
are undiscovered
and we strike
for love

...mercurial, yes
a genesis
that will
echo
over eons...

poem: ...tempestuous night...from 30nov14...

25,000!

To put an optimistic spin on things, this month started out rough and remained that way through half of it.  Despite the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, I have been able to push out of my aching fingers 25,000 words right before midnight.  The math not being too difficult, that means I have to push out another 25k in two days!  No, it's not going to happen unless I can sit in front of the computer with my eyes pulled open like young Alex from A Clockwork Orange and type like a monkey on cocaine...like that movie about the monkeys on cocaine.

Being a bit thoughtful about it, I will definitely strive to hit another 7k by Sunday night.  This novel is not meant to be 50k to begin with.  It may eventually reach 40k at the very end.  But it's meant as a potboiler, more in the style of dime drug store novellas of the 1940s.  On average, I understand they would reach 40k.  It's a ham-fisted fast affair and not derived on exposition but action (like the titular Jackson).

...A Buffet of Short Horror...25OCT14...

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote horror.  I didn't know this until I was randomly looking up my favorite authors and relating them to horror.  Assuredly, I came across The Body Snatcher, first published in 1884, as part of a magazine extra.  The story follows a pair of questionable medical students that make sure they never run low on cadeavors for their employer.  It is based on the real-life case of the Burke and Hare murders.  Murder as a business came long before Izzy Azalea - this pair made sure that sixteen bodies made it to the nefarious Doctor Robert Knox.

No these are gone....GONE!!!  This is
the greatest horror story of modern times.
That had treacherous murder.  But raspberry
donuts.  Raspberry...donuts.

M.R. James wrote The Tractate Middoth and was published in 1911 in a second collection of ghost stories.  Middoth recounts the deathbed story of a dying man.  Some twenty years earlier the titular book is sought out by one John Eldred, but a ghost takes the book before it can be retrieved.  The ghost is a protector of sorts, as the pages hold within it the inheritance.  There is vengeance from beyond the grave for Eldred.  The story has been adapted several times on British television.

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson (1948), is one of the most famous horror stories of its time, with a theme very well known today.  Not to spoil the ending, but as the name suggests, a small town holds a yearly lottery.  From it, a name is chosen and the fun begins.  This theme has been copied several times since.  There was an episode of Sliders in fact that ran the lottery directly from an ATM.  There's also little known movies like The Hunger Games.

Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is well known, in fact being one of the earliest pieces of American literature to have survived in popularity since it was first published in 1820.  Irving also wrote Rip Van Winkle.  When Disney started to adapt Legend they found the running time not long enough for a feature, so it was packaged along with Wind in the Willows during WWII.

Mark Twain's A Ghost Story comes to us from his 1875 Sketches New and Old.  As Twain is a man of sincere wit, especially as it comes to the pitiable type, he delivers in spades here.

Starburst Flavored Candy Corn

Like Stevenson, Charles Dickens' Three Ghost Stories is an epic writer, and the supernatural is a natural fit for his style.  Dickens and Poe can be considered on the same playing field in many respects.  In Three, the most popular of them is The Signal Man, but The Haunted House and The Trial for Murder are just as effective.  In Signal, a railway signal-man tells the story of sighting a ghost, each time preceding a disaster upon the tracks.  It calls back a disaster five years before Dickens wrote the story, the Clayton Tunnel Disaster in 1861.

The Phial of Dread by Fitz Hugh Ludlow.

For full site, please visit edwardianjackal.com

Zots - never had them.

...Robert Frost...the Heat Wave...12sep14...

My parents returned from Vermont a week ago and brought back with them a copy of Robert Frost's Poems.  A simple paperback copy from St. Martin's Press (1971 version).  Thankfully I received a present I find enriching.  As I am sweating at my desk in the break of the historical record of heat, I came across his Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.  How it awakens the frost long forgotten otherwise.  The type of snow that silently falls, as gentle as nothing else along our hair and skin.

Whose woods these are I think I know.   

His house is in the village though;   

He will not see me stopping here   

To watch his woods fill up with snow.   

My little horse must think it queer   

To stop without a farmhouse near   

Between the woods and frozen lake   

The darkest evening of the year.   

He gives his harness bells a shake   

To ask if there is some mistake.   

The only other sound’s the sweep   

Of easy wind and downy flake.   

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   

But I have promises to keep,   

And miles to go before I sleep,   

And miles to go before I sleep.

 - 1922

As a stone, through lifeless lids, track the monotone horizon

The fire extinguished, the sun black marble

The memory lost.

The cold no different than cold flesh, covered frost

My breath no different in the air

Thoughts decay.

All to ice, the tracks undisclosed, layer upon layer,

Hardened upon itself, a clear glue

The heart last.

- 2014

...wandering the night, on Twitter...13apr14...

Pitching the series of #night photos I've been putting on Twitter the last several weeks.  Enjoying the nightly strolls around and everywhere.  More to come the next two days from Vegas and Temecula.

...it's as you never left...14feb14...

I have not forgotten.  I don't need to.  This is who I am, this is the 'why'.  Meaning is immaterial.  These days, they are formed in chaos and there is little of what should make sense.  I see the undulating greens in the conifers above me.  Their needles dark against the dark blue of dusk.  Darken more and the greens leave first.  The blue changes to the finality of the day.  My head aches for laying too long in the hard dirt that surrounds the root.  The evergreen pulls all the moisture out of the soil, the ring of grassless exposed dirt does not hid it's spindly roots.  It is Valentine's today, but eagerly I want it to end.  The ache comes again, to the surface, hungry and encompassing.  How long will this go on?  Muse!   The internal voice cries out through the day.  The facades echo nothing of your light.  How would they?

:The impassable stone is silent and still
It has set it's flint and shale to the fore
It has patience and knows little more
Than what was proven, what is cast,
And what is still the same, e'en now.:

:The greens of the hills and their contrasted span
The distance insurmountable.
But all around, in moments fleeting
The hues of jade and amethyst
Alternate and alight the memory:

:Patience.  But not in this life, is known
The world conspired against it
How cruelty is proved true by its most diabolical proofs
And that my letters will never be read
But hide in the crags and lines of the eager edifice:

:If you but knew it was only you
I doubt it would change little else.
And you, it was you, and that is all that I knew
But the travails quickly dulled to memory
But who can tear at the stones that shall mount
And oh, how they mount Higher with each passing year:

:I aware at the thought, they shall surpass me
And the records of man prove aright
That may little be known of the man that lay here
But for the woman, his Muse, did he love!:

...Five Pop Horror Short Story Anthologies I Tripped Over as a Child...

Where I survey collections of short stories and drift from the overly popular...

I dug deep into the way back machine for horror books that I read as a child.  I read everything.  Horror really had no particular appeal to me, as it was, and still is, not my schtick.  What did intrigue me with horror, and why I returned time and again, was the thrill of the craft.  Horror, as a genre, has to find that fine line between reality and insanity.  Too often do authors slip into the latter, borrowing little from the former, and you end up with a mess that cannot pretend to keep you interested.  But when it's good - it's thrilling.

The first foray that I remember was drifting from paranormal books, which is a natural interest, then lapsing into horror via mystery.  The first mystery stories I read in grade school were the ones that centered around a picture, then you had to figure out who the culprit was based on the combination of the graphic and the prompt.  It was a back door into a reading comprehension quiz.  But, not being a gifted problem solver, really, I appreciated the lengths of logic that threaded out to arrive at the resolution.

Before I could buy my own books, I had to find them at garage sales with my mother, or, if I was with my dad for a weekend, it would be at the used book shops near Huntington Beach.  There I discovered Alfred Hitchcock, before I had ever seen a movie or TV show, with his anthology series.  The most memorable was "Haunted Houseful".  There was also "Ghostly Gallery".  continued below...

Even in death you would have to imagine Alfred trying to
scare people as much as possible.

Short stories was a normal route for
early King.

Years later, while in the Army, I turned to Stephen King books, more than likely because the small library we had in the Menden (Germany) barracks, which was nothing more than a large room in the attic of the building, had very few popular fiction choices but King.  Luckily, I read Misery first, then moved on to his master work, The Shining.  Both were tremendous reads, but, I think many of us would easily consider Shining such an artful balance of character, pacing and story.  I read it twice while on a 'field problem' - where we had to spend at least a week or two in the field simulating a war exercise.  One night was particularly eerie while trying to get through it, as a wind storm blew through an old farmhouse we were sleeping in.  The attic was well over two hundred years old and full of dust.  Its dark corners wouldn't lighten up even in the day.

From there, and the purpose of this post was short story, so Different Seasons.  King's short stories are a hoot and, in his style, very quick and enjoyable.

Post-Army, when I could start buying my own books, I got into Clive Barker's shorts including In the Flesh.  Barker is much more of a sadist than King, infusing his stories to cringe-inducing effects.  However, it's when he lapses into the more subtle forms of horror do we feel that he understands this world very well.

In The Further Adventures of the Joker, which was a cross-over for me, as comics were a hot commodity from '88 through '95, of moving from graphic renditions of the Batman and Joker and to the written rendition.  Of note was a particular story where, as the Joker was a child, he would lure kids into the forest and leave them dying in a water tower.  Creepy stuff.

Lastly, and fairly recent, was an anthology of stories as part of The Twilight Zone.  These original stories were in the spirit of what Serling did best: stories that are in the transcendent, rarefied air.  Since I couldn't get enough Zone on television and probably watched each episode at least five times each, this anthology gave me 18 new stories to cull over.  Interesting take away wasn't so much the stories, but the forward.  It gives a brief story about Serling's Korean War experience that probably set the tone for his take on storytelling.  Fascinating stuff.  What will you read yourself this Halloween?