13 Nights of Horror

Babbo's Books proprietress Leonora is reading ghost stories at her bookstore every night for thirteen nights. Tonight's reading features the "Tell-Tale Heart" and other tales by Poe.

I stumbled on the place by accident on Sunday night, when she was reading "Oh, Whistle and I'll come to you. My Lad" by M.R. James. I'm definitely going to try to make it to the reading of Daphne DuMaurier's "Don't Look Now" on Thursday, and hopefully "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" on the 28th. I adore that story, and I always get a little thrill when I pass by it on the MetroNorth; I must make time to explore the village one day -- I mean, look at it:


I also bought this swell book at Babbo's, and shared my love for Alfred Hitchcock anthologies; I had them as a child and was recently overjoyed when I found two of them in my basement. The editions I had were published by Random House and aimed at young adult readers, and had names like "Witches Brew" and "Ghostly Gallery." I guess you can still find them around, and I want them all!

Anyway, readings are every night at 8 p.m., now through Halloween.

Babbo's Books is located at 242 Prospect Park West between Prospect Ave. and Windsor Place, in a very pretty part of Brooklyn that looks like a small town, with brick sidewalks and gas lamps, and which is lovely to meander in after dark.

Art & Ghosts

I was looking for a picture of a goblin the other day. Then I decided I wanted to find some illustrations that reminded me of the old Czech Fairy Tales my mother used to read to my sister and I, which I'm becoming increasingly obsessed with these days, and I started typing in random things to search for, like "fairy tales" and "Czech fairy tales" and "goblins" and "ghosts" into Google Image. Then I decided, for some reason, to type in "Angela Carter fairy tales" and I found this:and this:and went: "AAAAAHHH!!!"

Immediately, I went here and was so overwhelmed with goodness that it took me a week to post this. Why overwhelmed? Well, besides her blog and her shop, this blogger has got something called The Wonder Cabinet!

Which can keep me amused for hours, literally hours.

On top of all this, the blogger lists among her interests: Twilight Tea Parties, occasional ghostly theatricals, fairytales and mythology, writing, reading, crafts, film, illustration, music, black cats, toast with honey, mittens and snow, dreams and nightmares, [and] Alice in Wonderland.

And she enjoys tea!

What a neat person. What sublime illustrations. What a great blog.

And The Wonder Cabinet!

Every once in a while in life you have a sort of "down-the-rabbit-hole" experience, when you stumble onto wonderment and it's so exciting it feels like you've entered some sort of imaginary labyrinth. This happened to me once when I was walking through a cemetery near my dad's house and I found a path that led down to a ravine, and it was the most beautiful walk ever and I'd had no idea it existed and it just seemed to keep going for miles. It happened when my mom toted us around Southern Moravia and showed us mountains and dark pine forests and medieval walled cities where cobblestoned town squares were lined with petit-four houses, and castles dotted the hills in the distance and I couldn't believe there were places that actually looked like this. It happens with certain books, and certain painting, and certain movies, and sometimes, with certain blogs.

There Is A Curse On These Lemons

Either that, or there is a goblin in my kitchen who is ruining everything.

The spaghetti with lemon sauce, usually light and refreshing, was a drippy, goopy, oily, sloppy, acidic mess.

The cake? It was simply otherworldly. In an awful, awful way. I have more respect than ever for the alchemy of baking, now that I have seen its evil side. The entire cake was chucked. Gone. Garbage. Poubelle. Basura.

Now my kitchen needs an exorcism. Tonight I make guacamole and lemonde and finally rid myself of these cursed lemons!

I banish you, foul gorgon!

Fruit, Murder

So I did bake banana muffins after all.

Also, I bought a whole lot of decorative lemons (you know, to put in a big ceramic bowl in the china hutch, something that strikes me as charming) and now they're old and I need to make a lot of:

- lemon cake
- lemon spaghetti
- lemonade

I'd get right on that, but I've been busy watching things, all manner of things, but notably the first episode of The Women's Murder Club, which has either the best name or the worst name on television.

I felt mixedly about it. I don't know what I think about their silly affairs (I'm looking at you, blonde DA lady) though I do like the idea of having to work with your ex-husband (very His Girl Friday). I like the lady reporter who's a strange blend of autodidact and Asperger's, and even though they've written Angie Harmon some horrid lines, she still seems like a pretty cool cop. The medical examiner seems like the voice of reason, but she lost major points for me with the "Jobs don't hug you back" line.

Incorporating themes of work v. love into the show was somewhat successful; they applied to both the protags and the villains/victims, creating a sense of cohesion. This is the kind of device that signals thematic depth and tautness in television writing, a la House (Seasons 1 and 2, of course) but can feel a little hammered home at times. It would be nice to leave the love v. work dichotomy out of a show about professional women but it's rather inescapable if you're going to delve deeply into the characters at all.

However, I'd like to see the girl-talk angle swiftly dispatched altogether. It seems intended to be humanizing/bantery/juicy but just ends up making the characters come off as a little immature (making girly chitchat at an autopsy seems lame, though I liked the way they determined the victim was seeing someone new by a glance at her Brazilian wax job!). It's a time-honored trope of the genre that detectives have hideous love lives, so it follows that these women might; it just doesn't seem to be handled very well at the moment.

Finally, what's up with the multi-character musical montages at the end of every single drama nowadays? Once I hear the wistful music and see each character reflecting on stuff, well ... it makes me wonder if it isn't the biggest cliche of our time, akin to the freeze frames of the late 70s/early 80s cop/crime shows (J.B. Fletcher!) .... enough with the montages! Other than minor quibbles with the girl talk, montage and some dialog, I don't have too many bones to pick with the writing. It's pretty tight in most places even if the mystery was a little thin.

I'll definitely give it a few more episodes and see what the future holds. There's a serial killer on the loose, so that should be entertaining enough ...

So Very Sleepy

Yesterday I cleaned for nine hours. I was scrubbing off shower-tile mold in my bathroom with a toothbrush at 10:30 p.m., wearing swim goggles and a bra. Afterward, I felt a brief sense of accomplishment, until I looked at the tiles on the floor, where each tiny sludge-filled crack called out for my attention. It filled me with a kind of madness.

Today I am exhausted. Moving sucks. Cleaning sucks. Breathing in bleach fumes ain't right.

I haven't posted in ages because scrubbing mold off the tiles in my bathroom is the most interesting thing I've done in thirty days. Well, that and I made this swell list of my likes and dislikes. (God, Working Girl is a great movie, isn't it?) Also, I am no longer a Spinster, but I won't bother to change the name of my blog.

Tomorrow I may bake banana-chocolate-chip muffins.

That is all.

East Nashville in the New York Times

This is a particularly irritating article. It's an embarrassing little thing, which, neither a music or a travel piece, displays an incredible laziness and ignorance as it purports to be both.

Here's the gist of it: old country is better than new country. Unless you're talking about alt. country or Americana. In which case, it's OK to like it. Also, smoky bars are cool.

Got that?

Good. Now, in case you want to call bullshit on it, and would like another voice to add to your chorus of support, R. Emmet Sweeney is with you all the way.

Madeleine L'Engle

When I came to New York four years ago, I brought only a handful of books with me. One was Pale Fire, one was Strunk and White's Elements of Style. And one was A Swiftly Tilting Planet. I still have that book, and I still consider it one of the most important in my library. So I had to stop and reflect when I heard that Madeleine L'Engle had passed away this week.

The love that Madeleine L'Engle's Wrinkle In Time series inspires in its readers is evident in the obituaries that surfaced for the 88-year-old writer. Her "childhood fables, religious meditations and fanciful science fiction transcended both genre and generation," writes Douglas Martin in the New York Times.

Slate's Meghan O'Rourke recalls how she was initially drawn into the Murrys' world, a world of "cocoa and fraternal telepathy, New England storms and Bunsen burners, a strange old lady paying a midnight call: This was an odd but intriguing world, entirely distinct. And it only got stranger and more distinct as the book went on." There is a magic to L'Engle's work that people never forget, so that the news of her passing wasn't something abstract -- it was more like the loss of a friend. You can sense a reverence in these obituaries, a real love for her books behind all the literary analysis and remarks (good versus evil, Einstein, the cosmos, religion, etc.) that are employed in an attempt to characterize her body of work. What I loved best about her books, besides her ability to create atmosphere, were the little phrases that stuck in your head long after a reading: "kything," "The Might-Have-Beens," "tesseract."

My personal favorite, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, was about the farandolae within the mitochondria, that is to say, about the small, seemingly inconsequential series of actions that can have a chain effect through the ages -- how a move in one direction or the other can change the course of history. The book examined a sort of biological butterfly effect, in which the future of the human race was dependent on the intermarriage and offspring of the two "right" tribes of people (just read it). Characters in the book stayed with me for a long time; a tragic and beautiful element of self-sacrifice in the heretofore written-off Mrs. O'Keefe, who knows far more than she appears to, resonated with me.

There was also something wonderful to me about reading the story of a grown-up Meg Murry, now married to her childhood friend Calvin O'Keefe. There's no reasonable explanation for why that element captivated me, since I was closer to Charles Wallace's age when I read it. I guess I just like the idea that maybe magic didn't disappear completely when you grew up.

But the loveliest thing of all was the connection Meg and Charles Wallace had -- a psychic connection that most siblings have to some degree or another. While we may not all be able literally to "kythe" with our siblings, most of us have created special universes with them, magical worlds created in basements and backyards, worlds only we knew, we named, and we understood. All children create universes of their own, and many, if not most, share them with siblings. I guess we all hope our childhood universes will continue to be magic, even now that we're grown up.

Guest Blogger Review: "The Other Boleyn Girl"

Here's a public service announcement from a fellow spinster, designed to save you from ever plucking this aberration from the book store shelves:

"The quote on the front cover is promising enough that it seems a fair buy for my upcoming book club [editor's note: never went] - a Liz Smith from Newsday claims she read the thing "in one delicious gulp." Seemed plausible and slightly tempting. Until 10 pages in, whereupon I decide Liz Smith is surely a pseudonym for a pre-adolescent girl from Yonkers and Newsday is possibly not as equivalent to the New Yorker as I had supposed.

Philippa Gregory's 'The Other Boleyn Girl: A Novel' (as opposed to what? A poem? An eggplant?) is a bodice-ripping gag-reflex dressed up in some clever graphic design as an eloquent exploration of an age of subtle political change, seismic geographical revelations, and a rift in theological thinking that would rip open the very fabric of western thought. Not to mention the beginning of shifts in consumerism, the arts, architecture, science and thinking on gender and sexuality. In short, a humanist cultural revolution that marked the change from medievalism to the early modern age is boiled down to such insightful passages as:

"He took me in his arms and said delightfully, promisingly: 'We have only a moment, my love: so this shall all be for you.' He would lie me on the bed, unlace my tight dress, caress my breasts, stroke my belly and pleasure me in every way he could think of until I cried out: 'Oh my love! You are the best, you are the best, you are the very, very best.'"

This from the age that brought us More's divinely satiric Utopia and Castiglione's floral dialogue in The Courtier, not to mention early English translations of The Bible and Erasmus' audacious wit. One starts to wonder if Gutenberg was in fact doing us all a service when he cooked up his idea of literacy for the masses. Fat lot of good that's done us, if we've gone from More to Gregory's much, much lesser body of work. (See what I did there? More to less. Get it?... Clearly, Erasmus would have hated my guts.)

Gregory's complete lack of characterization of the many people who needlessly clutter her book drains even the bodice-ripping scenes of any guilty pleasure. It's hard to suspend one's ever-diminishing disbelief when the main character voices-over make-out sessions with: "His tongue slid between my lips and stirred me. I wanted to eat him, I wanted to drink him, and then have him bear me down onto the holystoned boards of the deck and to have me, then and there, and never let me go." It makes one want to lace one's bodice right back up again and go join a nunnery. Shudder.

I won't even touch the larger issue of mistaken macro-history and revisionist feminism being lodged down the reader's throat. Tudor England was unfair to women! Men had the upper-hand! Daughters were subservient to their fathers! First wives get the shaft by upstart young tarts! Yawn. Tell me something we don't know - mainly, the complex social and economic currency of the female gender that still held a surprising amount of sway during this period.

Nonsense, says Gregory. Her main character (Anne Boleyn's sister Mary, natch) is a sassy girl ready to make her way in the unfair world: "For the first time ever I felt as if I had taken my life into my own hands and I could command my own destiny. For once I was obedient neither to uncle nor father nor king, but following my own desires. And I knew that my desire led me, inexorably, to the man I loved." You go, girl! Way to break free from paternalism.

And Gregory's claim in the subsequent 'Reading Group Guide' that she wrote the book so people could understand 'the deep poverty' of the sixteenth-century is truly bizarre, given the minimal number of characters not belonging to the royal inner circle. Those three or four 'poor people' that do poke their heads in for half a page are either mute or useless, adding nothing to either plot or theme.

I'm loathe to do this to you, dear reader, but I must also share Gregory's precious insight that "Margaret Atwood has written novels which have raised the standard of writing. Other writers, me among them, have raised the standards of research." Because she included a sort of bibliography at the back of the book, see? Pity the books date from the 1940s, 50s and 60s. The comparison with Atwood seems....somehow unholy, no?

I guess the 'delicious gulp' quote on the front should of warned me this was a Harlequin romance rather than an actual novel with depth, characterization and, well, plot.

Not to put too fine a point on it, my friends, but I think this reader would rather spit than swallow."

Thanks, fellow spinster & mystery guest blogger!

Rosemary's Baby

Sometimes when the moon is full and I'm in a certain mood, namely a monthly/cyclical mood if you know what I mean (oh, you do, you unloved, fruitless spinsters!) I crave rare steaks, and Rosemary's Baby.

This is one of my all-time favorite horror movies (the other is The Shining) for so many reasons: I love the look of it -- 1960s New York, The Dakota, the decor, the costumes -- I love Mia Farrow (I absolutely adore her hair) I love the subject matter -- a spinster is one step away from a witch, you know, plus I've aspired to be a witch ever since my dad took me to the Salem Witch Museum when I was six -- and I love the fact that I notice something new every time I watch it.

Inevitably, I have to give the film a feminist reading, because, well, it just deals with so much vis-a-vis the archetypes of the female that it's really hard to disentangle it all (and because for me being a female = being a feminist). I mean, besides the unpleasantness of birth, you've got the evil male medical establishment, class issues, religious grappling, male condescension (toward the female capacity for rational thought), "hysteria" and emotionally abusive husbands. So you've got the most stylish witchcraft/urban isolation/theological disillusionment movie in the world, the best haircut ever, and a whole grab-bag of feminist complaints! In other words, the most fun I've had all summer.

But seriously, there are few movies as metaphorically rich and genuinely horrifying as Rosemary's Baby, and I take fresh pleasure with every viewing.

It's also a great adaptation. I read the book when I was ten, but I remember it vividly (since it was riveting and traumatic, leaving me virtually scarred for life). I was far too young to be reading it, but no-one was around to witness me devour the borrowed copy of the red trade paperback with the green-edged pages that Nadia M. had stolen from her mother's basement. I read it in Puerto Vallarta, while my mother was out with a man-friend, and sister was, shall I say discreetly, sick with the shits. It was dark, it was hot, I was alone, I was frightened. It was delicious. I'm surprised no one took it away from me, tender young Catholic that I was, because I must have read it for the better part of a week. That's all I remember about that trip to Mexico, that and bumping my head so hard against the concrete of the pool that I was momentarily blind. The book forever left me with strange ideas, but when I look back I realize how much of it centers on Catholic intermarriages (I think -- remember, the pool). Rosemary had all the weight of guilt and iconography upon her, and she had defied her family by marrying a Protestant man, which is why none of her three sisters, two brothers, or sixteen nieces and nephews help her out at all -- this is more clear in the book than in the film. Anyway, it's wonderfully adapted for the screen, including Rosemary's dreams/nightmares/fantasies/visions.

One reviewer notes that Polanski keeps the film ambiguous enough to make the viewer wonder whether these things are actually happening or if they're in Rosemary's mind.
I thought it was pretty clear what was in her mind and what wasn't. (Guy shows that he hears the chanting, too, at first.) Part of the rage that I feel when I watch it comes from the way Guy tries to gaslight her, which makes it a much better, far creepier tale than if she really *were* hallucinating some or all of it.

Rosemary's whole thing is being talked down to and underestimated by everyone. She's deliberately kept in ignorance and fear, compounding her childlike dependence, and Guy constantly tells her what she does and does not think. When her friends give her some womanly advice, he calls them a bunch of not-very-bright bitches.

Here's a classic mental manipulation scene:

R: "I don't like it, it has an undertaste."
G; "There is no undertaste, you're crazy."
R; "I don't like it and I'm not going to eat it."
G: "Fine, don't eat it. There's always something wrong, isn't there."
Sigh. Rosemary eats it.

Oooohhhh!!!! If that kind of talk doesn't burn me up, nothing does!

So, for me, one of the pleasures of the film is watching Rosemary learn to think for and stand up for herself. I love how observant she is, and I love her smart and pert retorts when she finally does fight back. (My favorite: "Shut up! I don't hear you, you're in Dubrovnik.") The film ends on an ambiguous note, but I like to think she fixes their wagon good. I hope she runs away from all of them, and I hope she drops the baby on its head.

Just Your Standard Monkey Funeral Shot*

So I re-watched Sunset Blvd. the other day, and about fifteen minutes into it I felt the same frustration I'd felt the first time around. My first viewing took place during my Buster Keaton phase, and I watched the film because he was in it for like three seconds. I'd been watching a lot of silent films at the time and maybe that was the thing, because soon enough, Sunset Blvd.'s voice over started to really, really bother me. I just wanted William Holden to shut up. When he said, "Max wheeled in caviar and champagne" and there was a shot of him wheeling in caviar and champagne I was like, UGH!!! STOP!!! Stop reading a novel over this movie, dammit!

I mean, aside from that, it's great. Great story, awful, incredible, ghoulish, creepy story! Terrific cast, dear god (I love Gloria Swanson! Male and Female was awesome, and Sadie Thompson was bizarre -- and I want to see Manhandled!). Obviously, great inside-view Hollywood satire (one of the first, I am told, I wonder if that's true). The dialogue between Holden and Swanson is terrific (between Holden and that oatmeal girl Nancy Olsen, not so much, but intentionally so, I imagine). And yes, very innovative: the voice-over is a dead man. Neat. But they could have sliced a lot of the damn voice over and it wouldn't have been missed. No one needs to narrate the butler bringing in caviar. (Ah, Eric von Stroheim, you magnificent bastard ... )

Richard Corliss called Sunset Boulevard "the definitive Hollywood horror movie," noting that, "the story is narrated by a dead man who Norma Desmond first mistakes for an undertaker, while most of the film takes place "in an old, dark house that only opens its doors to the living dead." He compared Von Stroheim to The Phantom of the Opera, and Swanson to Dracula, drawing comparisons between Wilder's handling of the camera during her seduction of Holden to "the traditional directorial attitude taken towards Dracula's jugular seductions."

One funny thing I read online, which may or may not be true, is that apparently, during a preview screening of the film, actress Mae Murray, a contemporary of Swanson's, was taken aback by the actress's over-the-top performance, and commented "None of us floozies was that nuts." And apparently Mary Pickford got real quiet. I wonder my what my favorite floozy, Mabel Normand, would have said about it.

* This is apparently what Billy Wilder said he wanted from his cameraman during the monkey funeral scene.

Vintage re-releases out of print Ross MacDonald books

Good news for Lew Archer fans -- About half-a-dozen old titles will be made available on Vintage's Black Lizard label, including "The Ivory Grin," "Black Money," "The Way Some People Die," "The Instant Enemy" and "The Blue Hammer."

Scott Timberg's article in the LA Times gives a nice overview of the author and his work:

Macdonald's following ranged well beyond noir's usual suspects: Eudora Welty gave 1971's "The Underground Man" a rave on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, then quite rare for a genre book. During his lifetime, he was friends with poet Henri Coulette and rocker Warren Zevon, and more recently authors Haruki Marukami, Jonathan Lethem and Chabon have hailed his influence.

"Ross Macdonald is the paradigm, to me, of a writer who never wrote outside the so-called 'confines' of his genre yet who expanded those boundaries so far in terms of language, characterization and literary patterning that it makes no sense to talk of confines at all," Chabon wrote in an e-mail. "He just wrote great novels about a private eye."

According to the article there's also a great anthology called "The Archer Files" by Tom Nolan, which features short unfinished sketches in which Archer appears. It might take a while for me to get around to that though -- I've had a copy of The Blue Hammer on my desk for five months, and I just bought a (used) copy of The Ivory Grin.

Here's hoping the new imprints keep the trashy vintage covers. Nope. I've just looked on Amazon and they've rather unfortunately classed them up too much for my liking:
Pity. I do so enjoy a horrible looking cover:

"Behind the Veil"

"Do women kill for different reasons than men?"

This was one of the topics discussed at a panel I attended recently, "Women Mystery Writers: Behind the Veil," at the New York Public Library. The panelists were Mary Jane Clark, Liz Zelvin, Mary Ann Kelly and Robin Hathaway. Truthfully, I haven't read any of them, but Kelly and Clark piqued my interest because they set their stories in Queens (yay!) and among the newsworld of a fictionalized CBS (and I'm such a media maven).

The panel was meant to discuss the intricacies of writing female characters, on both sides of the law, but it was a strangely stifled debate. Jane Cleland moderated, and she was lively and affable, but mis-stepped dreadfully right off the bat when she opened with the following question: "Are you a feminist?" There was a moment of awkward silence before two panelists answered yes and two answered no (a pretty representative proportion of feminists to non-feminists among women). I won't say who answered which way, to protect identities, but even those who said they weren't qualified their stance by adding that they just weren't fond of labels or "-isms" although they believed in the principles of feminism itself. For some, it was a non-issue ("women just assume they're equal"), for others remnants of old-school anti-feminism seemed to cling steadfastly in their psyches ("I don't like women who stomp around with 'metal things on their shoes' and [are] very aggressive and hate men," said one, laughably). Most of the panelists acknowledged the "subtle objectification of women in pre-feminist novels and mysteries," noting the long legs and good looks of the traditional femmes fatales, and all acknowledged the greatness of the new crop of female PIs like Kinsey Milhone and VI Warshawksi (to which I'll add Arly Hanks and Claire Malloy!). Clark summed the issue up nicely: "I certainly don't think that the purpose of women is to serve and support men."

End of discussion. And unfortunately, end of panel discussion.

The rest of the session was extremely muted, and nobody seemed willing to offer any opinions on crafting female characters, villain or detective, or holding forth on the differences between male and female murder/crime-solving styles. When asked, "Do women kill for different reasons than men," lame, non-committal responses ensued: "I don't know if motive is gender-specific" and "This business of gender is overdone a great deal." Now that everyone was enmeshed in a fine net of political correctness and fear, no one was willing to go out on a limb. No one wanted to talk about sex or power or revenge or lust or hatred or frustration or stereotypes or strong women characters or things they loved or hated -- no one seemed to want to say anything at all.

I was a little surprised that, on a panel about female characterization, nobody talked about -- or asked -- who their female characters were, or got into any specific writing techniques. I blame it all on the awkwardness ensured by the divisive opening question. Had I moderated, I might have asked that question last.

In any case, another surprise was that these authors didn't seem to be very avid readers. With the exception of Kelly, they didn't seem to read many novels at all. Kelly cited Jean Rhys (yes!), Iris Murdoch and Margaret Drabble, making her head and shoulders the most literary of the bunch. Hathaway went in for the classic British and golden age mysteries (Sayers, Tey), as well as Highsmith. And Clark confessed to reading very little at all as an adult, but professed to love Nancy Drew as a child (which put her in my good books, as did her statement that she "wrote visually" with little description, and was inspired by Hitchcock). Almost none read contemporary crime fiction!

(Which lead me to an interesting stream-of-consciousness debate in my own mind about the relationship between reading and writing. Of course, I didn't ask any questions at the Q&A, because I'm far too shy.)

I'll probably give Clark and Kelly a whirl sometime ... I'll let you know what I think!

Inoffensive Wimsey

This may be a testament to the staggering lengths of time it takes for me to get around to stuff: I just recently finished the DL Sayers novel my sister gave me for Christmas. It had been sitting on my shelf for lo these many months, and I finally cracked it open this summer.

Shame, because it would have been a really good and Christmasy read, and it suffered, I think, for having been read in July.


However ... we must be brave and carry on.

The idea of reading The Nine Tailors was exciting to me because Sayers is one of these canonical authors I've wanted to read for ages, so I was really looking forward to this Golden Age mystery (even though I've been disappointed by this branch of the genre in the past ... but this was Sayers after all, I reasoned, not The Crime at Black Dudley).

The novel itself was less than exciting, initially, and I was prepared to write off all English Golden Age mysteries indefinitely. The first fifty pages were just interminable description of village life quaintness, bell-ringing vicars, and English countryfolk. Then as a mystery began (slowly) to unfold, I started to feel a little better. Granted, it was the tamest mystery of all time (a stolen emerald necklace, yawn) but then finally, FINALLY, they FOUND a CORPSE! Thank god.

Things really picked up after the inquest. Villagers began to gossip and accuse, and act downright suspicious, mysterious papers found on the corpse take Lord Peter Wimsey (our gentleman detective) to France, and the corpse's true identity emerges, but they still can't figure out how he died. The answer can only be found by listening to the mysterious bells!

All in all it was a decent story, with some hilarious asides (like a two-page rant about how the French have terrible handwriting) and Wimsey was an amusing character with a dry, self-deprecating sense of humor but I can see how this novel would be neither universally loved nor universally reviled. I get the feeling that those who like this type of writing like it a lot, those who don't will simply feel bored and restless. I can appreciate certain qualities in her story but not in her method of story-telling (awfully long and dry and descriptive and sprawling -- I'd have found this story marvelous if she'd lopped off about 100 ages of description) or in her language (stiff!) or in her themes (rather mild for my taste). I won't rush out to read more Sayers the way I did with Tey after the Franchise Affair, or Rendell after No Night Is Too Long. I feel coolly toward Sayers, rather like I do with PD James.

I'll leave you with Edmund Wilson's criticism: "I set out to read The Nine Tailors in the hope of tasting some novel excitement, and I declare that it seems to me one of the dullest books I have ever encountered in any field. The first part is all about bell-ringing as it is practised in English churches and contains a lot of information of the kind that you might expect to find in an encyclopedia article on campanology. I skipped a good deal of this, and found myself skipping, also, a large section of the conversations between conventional English village characters.... I had often heard people say that Dorothy Sayers wrote well... but, really, she does not write very well: it is simply that she is more consciously literary than most of the other detective-story writers and that she thus attracts attention in a field which is mostly on a sub-literary level."

So there. Ladies, you can feel comfortable giving this book to your Nana; she won't be offended by any of it, and she'll learn a lot about bells.

Black Orchid Bookshop is Closing

I found out that Black Orchid bookshop is closing in September.

Of course I'm terribly sad because I loved that store (it was such a sublime shambles), and I bought my first Maggody book there (yay!), and Bonnie and Joe, well, they're just exactly the way you want bookstore-owners to be.

When I Googled the news for more info, I found this delightful blog, which eases the pain somewhat because it's so marvelous. (I also found out, while perusing said delightful blog, that Murder Ink had closed, which is also sad because I always said I'd go there and then I never did. That's what you get for putting things off.) I'll absolutely be visiting her blog again soon.

Though good blogs ease the pain, it's still sad to know that Black Orchid is gone forever (though apparently they'll live on in the ether of the interweb) .... but what I really, really want to know is who's going to get their Lizzie Borden cross-stitch?

Porter Wagoner with The White Stripes

I saw the Wagonmaster again last night! He opened for the White Stripes at Madison Square Garden, and he was supreme. He played with Marty Stuart, who produced his last album, I hear, and he sang such greats as "I've Enjoyed As Much Of This As I Can Stand" and "Cold Hard Facts of Life" (which is an incredibly funny and dark song) and it was such a treat because he played a much longer set than he did at the Opry (where I went with a handsome stranger and fellow fan). I thoroughly enjoyed it and was really excited to see the other country fans in the audience who loved it, too.

Nick Cave's outfit, Grinderman, followed, and they're thoroughly nuts. Their songs "Depth Charge Ethel" and "No Pussy Blues" are riotous.

The White Stripes were great too -- Jack White is so mannerly -- and they played "Little Ghost," which I love, and Jack saluted Porter as "the best dressed man in country music"
and talked about how privileged we were to have him with us that night. It's so pleasurable to see a nice young man who knows about The Music.

Oh, and Porter Wagoner's on Letterman tonight ... I'll be watching. Am I turning into a Wagonhead?

An Unkindness of Ravens

I finished Ruth Rendell's thirteenth mystery today, and found it to be a bit ... silly. I generally love the Inspector Wexford books but was a bit let down by this one. It was so over-the-top in some parts, and utterly simplistic in others, that I sometimes felt I was re-reading one of the lurid pulpy horror paperbacks that so interested me as a young teenager, it was that juicy and salacious. At times I couldn't take it seriously at all and wondered if she was just having fun. Like, "Oh fuck it, let's just throw a secret marriage in there."

Which, in itself, can be kind of fun.

Of course, Rendell knows how to keep the pages turning, but it felt like she really struggled with this one. There were even self-conscious admissions that the story was flagging ("Chandler says when you don't know what to do, have a man walk into the room with a gun") and she'd throw in new elements here and there until it finally felt like she was just heaping soapy absurdities on in an effort to distract the reader from the lack of story.

The most inane elements included Burden's wife moping over the fact that their unborn baby was a girl, a group of militant teenage feminists (man-killers, all!) and a little incest subplot that of course turned out to be a lie (because everyone lies about being raped!) and strange asides about feminism and femininity ( two wives each representing opposite poles of the monster that is Woman, from the simpering twit to the sexless hag) until a reader gets to wondering what Rendell's trying to say about feminism here. She must be making fun of anti-feminism. Radical feminists who stab unwary men? Funny joke, yes? She even threw a lesbian gym teacher in there! She has to be taking the piss. Dry British humor, yes?

Luckily Rendell's a smart technician, so I could ignore the distressing subtext and let the story play out in all its campy goodness. Plotwise, you've got what seems to be an ordinary wandering-husband job, that later turns out to be an elaborate set-up and murder. Add to the mix a fun secret wife and kid (ooh, bigamy!), and two sets of plotting, scheming women (the sets of mothers and daughters) and you've got plenty of motives for revenge.

Only Wexford comes off as a bit of a dullard in this one, and spends way too much time looking for a suspicious typewriter (to find out who typed the victim's resignation letter) and on other false, niggling leads, when anyone could see it was the mothers and daughters who did it.

This was by far the most transparent Wexford mystery I've yet read; very, very thin and rather disappointing over all. And bizarre. Just want to add that yet again. Thoroughly bizarre. I'll never understand what Rendell thought she was doing with that feminist group, other than finding a cool thing to do with the collective noun for ravens.

So what makes a gal keep on reading a bad book? Knowing it's going to turn out badly, maybe she waits in vain to see if it'll get better. (More likely Rendell is just good at turning the screws when needed.) Or, maybe one can thoroughly enjoy a rotten book, because criticizing is fun and it's definitely exciting to see what new stupidity the author will think of next (plus it's always fun to speculate if she's joking or not). It's definitely not a well-written novel, stuffed with absurd cliches and literary pretension (Wexford attends a play about incest, The Cenci, just before discovering incest figures in his own mystery; numerous allusions to detective stories, plot devices and criticism pepper the text, leading one to presume that Rendell spent wads of time staring at her bookcase while writing this, hoping to paste something together; Wexford quotes constantly, irritatingly) and the final explanation is both psychologically pat and vaguely insulting (fake rape accusations are always a deal-breaker for me, as I view them as not only the most irritating of plot devices but they also make me extremely uncomfortable and generally icky-all-over) AND, finally, there was just a little too much coincidence for my taste (the second wife just happens to be dating the typewriter-repair man?).

Much of the pleasure in mystery-reading comes from characterization as much as plot, and the creepy half-sisters were pretty compelling, as were the monstrous wives, though I'd liked to have known more about them, particularly the perpetrator. Maybe, once she realized it wasn't very good, Rendell piled on the scandalous elements, knowing full well it was silly, but still striving to keep the reader mildly entertained. The only really satisfying twist came at the end of the story, because the motive for the murder was a little different than the obvious (revenge). It was actually quite pragmatic, and a rather sad commentary on the state of women's education and financial dependence on men -- so maybe she did make her point after all.

Spinster Travelogue II: Nashville, Tennessee*

Well, fellow spinsters, I've returned from the not-so-deep South an older and wiser woman.

First off, I learned the real difference between whiskey and bourbon. Whiskey involves a charcoal mellowing process; bourbon puts the distilled liquor right into oak barrels, no charcoal. Distillers of the respective liquors will each lay claim to theirs being a superior process. I find each to be delightful. But of course you know where my loyalties lie (cf. name of website). But, if I do happen to indulge in a nip of whiskey, my brand of choice will be George Dickel whiskey. Why? Because I enjoyed the tour of their distillery, even if the waterfall pictured in their brochure turned out to be nothing but a creek.

It was still pretty though ...



The tour guide was a total sweetheart ("Every time I go into a bar ... not that I go into bars ... seems every time I do, someone wants to beat me up ... must be something about me ...") and I learned a lot of useful information about what happens to you if you drink moonshine (the iron content in the water will give you heavy metal poisoning) and that anywhere you distill corn liquor yourself, you're going to get a black mold that grows on everything, which is why you have to move your moonshine still from time to time. (Black tree trunks = dead giveaway.) I also learned that Merle Haggard drinks Dickel #8, which they don't make anymore. Take that, Jack Daniels.

Incidentally, Lynchburg is a really scary company town entirely owned and operated by the Jack Daniels' corporation, and the entire county's on the payroll. It's strange, and I wouldn't be fooled by their ads in which they claim to live in a sleepy, old fashioned town, because it's slicker than a New York City lawyer in a rainstorm. I and my gentleman friend had "lunch" in Lynchburg (at 11:00 in the morning; everything in Tennessee opens and closes absurdly early) at a little place called Miss Mary Bobo's Boarding House.

It was a great lunch (featuring the best fried chicken I ate in Tennessee, great candied apples, crispy fried okra, tasty turnip greens, which I thought were called "collard greens" but maybe they're not, and an unfortunately disappointing pie called "chess pie" which I'd skip if I were you) but the Stepford-y vibe I got from the hostess was kind of freaky.

So if you find yourself in Lynchburg, skip town immediately and head to Tullahoma, where you'll find the much more satisfying Dickel Distillery.

Nashville itself is full of old people. It's great.

I particularly enjoyed touring the Ryman Auditorium, aka the Mother Church of Country Music, where I imagined Patsy Cline up on stage (though they were setting up for, um, Tesla) and snapped pics of Loretta Lynn's sequined evening costumes.
The Ryman housed the Grand Ole Opry back in the day, but later the show was moved to its new location in, well, "Opryland." Yeah, I have a little bit of disdain for the glitzy, mall-like new opry. I guess I like doing things the old way better.

But I saw Porter Wagoner at the new opry, which is awesome.

The Country Music Hall of Fame is a no-brainer; you have to go there if you're in Nashville. It's a beautifully designed museum, obviously curated with care and love. I saw John Loudermilk speak there, and he favored us with a few songs, some hilarious anecdotes and words of wisdom/advice ("You have to reach through the veil"). I love that man.

Other venues of musical goodness included The Station Inn, The Bluebird Cafe, Robert's Western World, and Tootsie's Orchid Lounge.


Foodly goodness was obtained in the form of biscuits at The Loveless Cafe, and pancakes at the Pancake Pantry. I was so enraptured with the vittles that I couldn't even snap a photo. But trust me, they were damn good. The pancakes at the pantry were divine. They were -- sigh -- much much better than mine. My god they were good. I wish I was eating their apple cinnamon pancakes right now. The Elliston Soda Shop was also a good old fashioned meat-and-three lunch counter, but don't go overboard with nostalgia and get a chocolate malted because they sound cool -- stick with the shake.

Also: I rode a riverboat:

*For Spinster Travelogue The First, click thusly and scroll down.

Nostalgia is overrated

Since I'm already breaking promises, I just want to post one more teensy little rant before I go on vacation.

I re-read THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH last night and, man, what a preachy book! I remember loving this as a kid, and I still think the movie would hold up if I could get it on DVD, but the book's just so pointed and moralistic, frankly I'm surprised that kids ate it up the way they did. It's so message-y: Don't waste time, don't misuse the English language, listen only to beautiful music (Beethoven, presumably) and not that "awful din" blah blah blah. It's so ennervating! Shut up!

The only things I still liked were marketplace and banquet in Dictionopolis, Tock and the Humbug, and when Milo conducts the sunrise (finally, some spirit, you little milquetoast! No wonder you're so boring!) ... and I have to admit I still kind of like the princesses, Sweet Rhyme and Pure Reason, because they have kind of cool names. But the "Mountains of Ignorance"? Honestly, we get it, learning is fun, now bugger off. This book is just so well-intentioned it gives me a headache.

Also, I had a very disappointing ice cream last night: Ben and Jerry's S'mores. I thought it was weird that they had it in the freezer at my local deli, since the flavour is officially in their flavour graveyard, but there it was. Reading the description, it seemed exactly like their Marsha Marsha Marshmallow, which I tried about a year and a half ago and was really disappointed with. So why buy an ice cream that already disappointed you once? Well, I figured maybe they retooled it and it would be better this time. Last time, the graham cracker swirl was this really gritty, flavourless mess, almost like someone accidentally got sand in my chocolate ice cream. And the marshmallow was forgettable.

This time they improved the graham cracker's texture slightly, making for something that was discernible as cookie-like chunks. But the marshmallow was barely noticeable again -- I like to see my marshmallow. Here is was just a swirl of light brown goo that was hard to tell apart, visually speaking, from the graham cracker. I didn't realize I was eating it at first. I was expecting marshmallow chunks, dammit. Utterly disappointing, and I don't know why they changed the name -- maybe just to retool the flavour without dredging up bad old memories -- but anyway, I don't recommend it at all.

So I guess the lesson here is that some things are worse than you remember them and some things are just as bad as you remember them, but everything is awful.

Nancy Drew

So I saw Nancy Drew this weekend (okay, opening night) and I had to break my "no posts till after Nashville" promise I made in my last post, cause it was just that good. There are certain critics and fans who did get all up in arms about the movie not being exactly like the book, which I consider a totally invalid criticism for an adaptation anyway -- it's a different medium, people -- but I have to admit I was mad at first because Emma Roberts has plain old brown hair, not titian hair and everyone knows Nancy has titian hair, goddam it. But then I managed to wrap my head around the fact that it's a new interpretation, and Nancy hasn't been around for almost eighty years by not keeping up with the times. The addition of sidekick Corky was a little weird, and I was kind of annoyed that Bess and George weren't in it at all -- then again, they weren't in some of the really early ones either -- but I got over it (the kid is pretty funny, actually). I recently re-read the Hidden Staircase, and Bess and George were nowhere to be seen.

At first I found the whole Hollywood slant is different, and somewhat inexplicable. I mean, why set it in Hollywood and not River Heights? So there are strange artistic choices that might disconcert a fan initially, but then once you think about it in terms of Nancy's revolution, it makes sense. If you're updating Nancy, what else would you do but bring her into a different mileu, a strange and modern one? It makes sense, and I think the idea of living in a haunted mansion with an old Hollywood mystery is a really fun idea. There's a crazy old butler/groundskeeper who's utterly devoted to the ghostly resident, giving it all a Sunset Blvd. kind of vibe.

Evolution, people.

Still, an adaptation should try to retain certain elements that made people love the book in the first place, and the film succeeded on this level, too. In this case, the writers managed to capture what I think the essence of Nancy would be -- not only the fearlessness for which she is known -- but also a certain earnest dorkiness that she exudes even in the books. Nancy really is genuine and sincere and kind of dweeby -- I mean, she's not tough or bad or slick or rebellious; she's earnest and a daddy's girl, and never gives it up to Ned (I mean, Nickerson keeps his knickers on, honestly) so I think it was they really pulled it off.

I actually ended up liking Emma Roberts' performance a lot more than I thought I would. There are some really cute line that she delivers in a high-pitched deadpan, and she manages to be such a smart, high-achieving kid you can't help but like her. It's a fun movie and I think the writers did right by Nancy and purists who complain about putting a little pop culture in their good old Nancy need to relax. After all, she's probably resistant to it anyway. I love how her father just wants her to be a normal teenager, and she can't quite get that going on. It's delightful to anyone who grew up nerdy -- that would be me, and, well, most everyone I know -- and I cannot express the sheer joy of watching Nancy trying not to sleuth and doing things like posing Ned and her friend as revolutionary war heroes for her oil painting. When her father asks her what she's doing she cheerily replies, "Just normal teenage things!" Trust me, this will resonate with you if you were every an sincerely nerdy teenager.

This movie gets total Spinster approval. We should all take our nieces to see this.

Oh my, is it June already?

Do you ever find yourself standing in the kitchen washing dishes and thinking about Charles Coburn?
I just think he's cute is all. I love that monocle. I loved him as Piggy in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and I loved his role in The Lady Eve. I love the fact that he didn't start acting until he was sixty. And then I remembered -- because I did actually know this at some point -- that he was born in June and I had to look it up and there it was: June 19th.

Aside from the great feeling I get from being right about stuff, I also happily remembered a bunch of other people I love are also born in June, folks like Rosalind Russell (June 4) and Hugh Laurie (June 11). Incidentally, Marilyn Monroe (June 1) and Jane Russell (June 21) were also born in June, meaning basically the whole principal cast of GPB (on my top ten list of my favorite movies ever).

I notice this blog has degenerated into a list of people I like who happen to have birthdays. I'm not sure why that it. Maybe it's just because every once in a while I stop drinking long enough to figure out what day it is.

I wouldn't expect more posts for a little while, since I'm going to Tennessee for a bit. There's some distilleries I need to visit. Look for a spinster travelogue when I get back.