"I AM depressed."

So says Slim Pickens in Mel Brooks's immortal Blazing Saddles, perfectly encapsulating my feelings at the moment.

Right now I'm in the midst of a project for which I've already read six books in the last month, with at least that many to go in the next two weeks--I have to come up with 3500 words, and so far I can think of only 100 or so to say. Pressure + fear: it happens every time. Why do I do it?

To see my finished work? Today I get offprints of an article I finished a year or so ago--that should restore my equilibrium. I'm reading it--hey, not too bad, and when I get to the end, they MISSPELL the name of the group of writers that I wrote about!

Thank you, my publisher, for making me feel so much better...and least the check didn't bounce.

"Love is Hot--TRUTH IS MOLTEN"

Finally--a decent remastering of one of my favorite Donovan songs, "Barabajagal," appears on the recent compilation Try for the Sun: The Journey of Donovan. The version of the song on Troubador was mixed too low, and all the bite from Jeff Beck's guitar was missing. What a session: Beck on guitar, Ron Wood on bass (and well before terminal jackassery set in, courtesy of Keith and Mick), Nicky Hopkins on piano (did he ever play on a bad song?), and, the booklet tells me, Suzi Quatro on backup vocals. Wow.

I had liked some of Mr. Leitch's softer stuff in the 1960s (as proud owner of From a Flower to A Garden--"Wear Your Love like Heaven" indeed), but I always was much more immediately attracted to his harder-edged stuff--"Epistle to Dippy," and, of course. "Hurdy Gurdy Man," with all the instrumentalists from Led Zeppelin backing him up. And then there's "Atlantis," which I have always received a guily pleasure from, even when Martin Scorsese almost ruined it by having it play underneath the first of the several murder attempts on Billy Bats in Goodfellas. (By the way, Martin, let's give "Gimme Shelter" a rest for a picture or two--oh, you just directed the latest Stones concert flick? Ah, okay...)

"Love is Hot--Truth is Molten." Yeah.

When Did Heinlein Start to Go Bad?

I like to vary the books I teach in a literature course from year to year: for instance, in my science fiction course, I include a few necessary works (The War of the Worlds), a few works that turn out to be necessary (The Foundation Trilogy), works that never seem to lose their appeal (A Canticle for Leibowitz), and choose from a variety of works by an author who has to be included--in this case, Robert A. Heinlein. Starship Troopers is good, but the movie version gets in the way; Stranger in a Strange Land is the first sign of length bloat in Heinlein's fiction, and the early works (Revolt in 2100) are not characteristic enough.

So this semester I decided to try the last of RAH's young adult/juvenile novels, Have Space Suit, Will Travel (1958). (The title is a reference to a popular Western of the 1950s, Have Gun, Will Travel, for which a police officer-turned writer produced some scripts--Gene Rodenberry). One critic claims that this novel is the mostly fondly remembered of RAH's juveniles by his adult fans, and I agree--I have warm memories of it, which however are not standing up under the reality of reading it today.

For me the sign that RAH was becoming too self-indulgent was I Will Fear No Evil (1970), in which the brain of an old man is transplanted into the body of a nubile young woman, with whom he soon has internal conversations, all of which are conducted in parentheses. I'd quote some, but they are not worth the effort. At any rate, I notice this habit of internal conversations begins in HSS,WT, as Kip talks to his spacesuit, which he has named Oscar, and later on, with the alien he calls "Mother Thing." The novel itself, while it does have some rigorously calculated science by its teenaged hero and the ten-year-old girl genius he rescues ("Peewee"--cute names being another RAH weakness), it seems somewhat more episodically plotted than his other juveniles. I remember the climax as being the most satisfying part, so we'll see. I just wish his editors had concentrated more on eliminating his cutesy-poo literary devices and less on censoring his libertarian politics, which at least presupposed his young adult readers had some independence of mind.

Final Fields

I just received The W. C. Fields Comedy Collection: Volume 2, the latest set of Fields films on DVD, so I popped Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941) in first, since it was the film in the collection that I was most familiar with, from showings on local TV in Chicago. It was both a revelation and a disappointment.

It was a revelation because the excellent quality of the image revealed the ravages that alcohol had written on Fields's face. No longer were lines like, "Follow me, tomato-puss," so funny. And Fields himself seemed drained, almost languorous. Sometimes that gave his ripostes an added layer of humor, like his answer to a large waitress's complaint to "don't be so free with your hands": "Listen, honey, I was only trying to guess your weight." But juggling moves were almost non-existent, and even his insouciant walk had seemed to slow from a saunter to a totter. The decline from his best film, the previous year's The Bank Dick, was precipitous.

The film itself has its moments, such as its best sequence, a flight on an airplane with an open deck at the back (!) that's part of a film-within-the-film that Fields (playing himself) is trying to pitch to Franklin J. Pangborn, playing the head of "Esoteric Studios." This is part of the glorious nonsensical mess that was Fields's original script (here attributed to a story by "Otis Criblecobis"). But the film also acquiesces in allowing Gloria Jean, a kind of cut-rate Deanna Durbin, plenty of screen time to warble tunes, much like Allan Jones or Tony Martin did in the MGM Marx Brothers pics. While the Marxes were hemmed in (and increasingly bored, and looking it) by Irving Thalberg's formula for them, Fields was able to produce one triumphant piece of subversive comedy--The Bank Dick--and then succumbed to studio pressures too. Why?

James Curtis's excellent biography of Fields tells part of the reason. One day, Cecil B DeMille's grandson (and the son of Anthony Quinn) wandered from DeMille's house to Fields's neighboring property and drowned in a shallow pool. Fields, the famous on-screen child-hater, was reportedly devastated. He no longer had the will to fight the studios and the Hayes Office (although in one scene, Fields confesses to the audience that the setting has been changed from a saloon to a ice-cream parlor because of the censor's objections). Booze and life itself had sapped Fields's energy, and he looks far older than his 61 years, although still capable of arousing laughter when he says, to a cleaning woman who is inadvertently pushing the head of a large, dark-haired pushbroom in Fields's face, "Get that Groucho Marx outta here!"

Mad, Bad, but Heckuva Lotta Fun to Watch

When planning my Film Analysis class, the decision was not whether to show an excerpt from one of Ed Wood's movies, but when to show one. His movies are so thoroughly rotten that every aspect oozes failure. The scene that I use comes from (what else?) Plan 9 from Outer Space, known as Grave Robbers from Outer Space until the Baptists whom Ed got to finance it complained about the blasphemy of the title--as is pointed out in Tim Burton's lovingly told Ed Wood, itself proof that the right kind of manure can produce a beautiful flower.

The scene involves the intrepid heroes--a cop, a military officer, and a pilot-- venturing into a flying saucer. There they meet the aliens Eros and Tanna, who will explain to them why they are resurrecting corpses. In The Day the Earth Stood Still, a similar scene does not occur until the end of the movie, when Klaatu tells the Earth's scientists why they cannot export atomic warfare into space. This speech in Plan 9 is given to the sublimely named Dudley Manlove (his "real" stage name apparently) as Eros babbles about "solarurbanite" (at least that's what it sounds like to me) and why humans cannot be allowed to discover it. So what's particularly putrid about this scene?

Everything.

1) The production "design" and set. The wall of the room the aliens are in looks like it was cannibalized from the exterior of the saucer, since it replicates the same ladder, which is mounted flush against the cabin wall three feet off the ground. It is unusable. (And how does a flying saucer suddenly sprout an exterior wall with a 90-degree angle?) The table contains the expected hodge-podge of vaguely scientific equipment, including an oscilloscope and an arc-generator, but so few of them that their lack of numbers and sophistication are noticeable.

2) The writing. Every science-fiction cliche appears in Eros's speech, from the "we're persecuted aliens" of It Came from Outer Space to the aforementioned admonitions of The Day the Earth Stood Still. There's actually one nice touch in it, where Eros explains how light could be used as a source of explosions, but it only serves to highlight the grotesqueries of the rest of the speech.

3) The directing and editing. During Eros's ramblings, the camera cuts to a shot of Tanna, who seems to be attempting a "come-hither" look at the policeman, who proceeds to look at her as if she had just offered him an invitation to a glue-sniffing party. A few minutes later, she gives a slightly more provocative look (or perhaps just thrusts her chest out a little more) at the hunky pilot, who does not even notice her. The purpose of these shots seems to be to break up the boredom of looking at Eros's face, but since he is shamelessly overacting (see #4), all the shots do is once again remind us we are watching an extremely bad movie.

4) The "acting." Three of the actors--the pilot, the officer, and Eros--seem to be professional actors (Manlove was more known for his voice than his looks). Tanna and the cop seem to be part of Wood's "stock company," either investors in the picture or unique creatures (such as wrestler Tor Johnson) that Wood befriended and put in front of the camera. All give truly malodorous performances, none more so than Manlove, whose hysterical cries of "stupid, STUPID" never fail to elicit howls from even the most somnolent student.

I end up showing this to students at the beginning of the section on Acting, but not until I had taught the course a couple of times did I realize why Wood's pictures are so bad, so characteristically bad. When we see a movie, it is usually an honest attempt to make us employ our "willing suspension of disbelief" and watch something that is trying to be something else--a story, a drama, a recreation, whatever. Everything in an Ed Wood movie--and I mean EVERYTHING--prods, tickles, and kicks our disbelief and shouts: "This is a movie--and IT STINKS." It's a weird sort of alienation effect; even when we are ready to luxuriate in the badness, the movie veers off in a new misdirection.

And the glory that Burton reveals in his depiction of this Midas-in-reverse is that Wood didn't have a clue he was doing it.

Devine Dreams

I always know when I have failed to take my antidepressants before bed: I have almost preternaturally vivid dreams, shot through and riven with melancholy in remembrance. The last time this happened I dreamt that I was teaching on the Isle of Skye, which in my dream was between Denmark and Sweden, but still a British territory. I walked from the quaint house I was renting to the University library to return some interlibrary loan books, but a huge line forced me to wait for hours . . .

But last week I had a more conventional dream, in that when I awoke and remembered parts of it, I was merely puzzled, not suffering from the "agenbite of inwit," as Stephen Dedalus calls it. Some of the people in the dream were people I work with--there was a picnic by the river--and who should appear but Andy Devine. I remember telling him in my dream how much I enjoyed his work as Jingles on Wild Bill Hickock (I always suck up to celebrities in dreams), and then I asked him what he was doing still alive (it must have been 2007 in my dream). He answered that he was born in 1930, and so I said, "Then you were nine years old when you appeared in Stagecoach"? That's all I remember.

But: why Andy Devine? As a comical sidekick on a 1950s TV Western, he wasn't--to me--on a par with Pat Brady in Roy Rogers or Pat Buttram in Gene Autry. And how did I remember in the dream the year Stagecoach appeared, or even that he was in it? Gate of horn, gate of ivory: dreams are still impenetrable.

"And somebody spoke and I went into a dream."

Spring is Here

This weekend I was finally able to do the activity that proves to me that winter has loosened its grip on this area: I was able to sit outside and read--after hacking, smashing, and tossing into the shrubbery the layer of ice on the front porch that several feet of snow had congealed into, a thoroughly satisfying activity in itself.

I laid on my swing, gazing through the leafless branches of an elm at the tufts of cloud in the sky, listening to Hugo Friedhofer's wonderful score to The Best Years of Our Lives on my iPod. And then, high enough in the sky so that their formation was a V, then blown by the wind into a ragged W, a flock of geese soared by. I don't read as quickly when I read outside--but I don't care.