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Stardust, also by Neil Gaiman. Beyond the town of Wall lies a meadow, which townspeople may enter only once every nine years -- except for one boy, whose quest fills this inventive, lovely (but non-cloying) tale of the land of faerie.
Writing a Woman's Life, by Carolyn G. Heilbrun. A short, provocative analysis of how biographies and autobiographies alike shape the telling of the female experience to fit a narrow definition that conforms with societal expectations but not the truth of life. I've given away (sometimes unintentionally) more copies of this than I can keep track of.
My taste in comics is old-fashioned and surreal. Windsor MacKay captured the hallucenogenic landscape of dreams in the seminal comic strip "Little Nemo in Slumberland." Several years ago a fantasy publisher collected the strip into multiple hardcover volumes. The Complete Little Nemo in Slumberland is out of print but can sometimes be found.
Except for the dated uniform of the policeman who dogs them, a surprisingly modern (and absurd) air permeates Krazy Kat and his mercurial companion, a brick-tossing mouse named Ignatz. Krazy Kat: The Comic Art of George Herriman paved the way for Looney Tunes and Pogo.
In a category all of its own is Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer. It's a series of cartoons exploring a weird, bleak urban world somewhere between 1940s New York and a turn-of-the- century REM state, in which everyone has a vaguely Eastern European name and people engage in singular professions like bra strap adjuster, false eyebrow importer and parked car reader. Bizarrely captivating.
Literature of the 20s and 30s has a special fascination for me. Discovering The Marx Brothers (books & videos about whom you can get through The "Why A Duck?" Bookstore ) led me to read my way through the Algonquin wits and, from them, all the erudite humorists of the time. Two were immediately enshrined in my pantheon. Newsman Don Marquis spun strangely moving free verse about a cockroach named archy, who left messages by hopping from one typewriter key to the next, and his friend mehitabel, a scrappy alley cat who espoused the life philosophy "tour jours gai, wotthehell, wotthehell." The currently available collection is archy & mehitabel by Don Marquis. archyology: the long lost tales of archy and mehitabel is the most recent anthology
The Compendium has been often compared to the style of The New Yorker, early vintage. One original contributor I'e admired for years is Robert Benchley, who was far more prolific than currently available anthologies of his work would suggest. Short of rooting through old bookstores (which is how I've come across my collection), try Benchley Beside Himself, Benchley Lost and Found , Benchley Or Else, (did I mention that the man was prolific?) The Benchley Roundup, My Ten Years in a Quandry and How They Grew, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea or David Copperfield and The Best of Robert Benchley, illustrated by New Yorker cartoonist Peter Arno.
Eating People Is Wrong by Malcom Bradbury is a vicious skewering of academic life. I bought this on the strength of one excerpt in a review, and was delighted by the 297 pages that sandwiched it: "There are parties where everyone comes to like all the others present, and parties where hate burgeons and what is left at the end of the evening is a deep estrangement from the human race. This was the latter kind .... The people who before ten o'clock had been standing were now sitting; those who had been sitting before were now lying. 'This,' Tanya murmured to Treece, 'is a party at which everyone almost imperceptibly moves nearer to the floor.'"
Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett (paperback; mass market paperback) is the funniest book I have every read. When the time comes for the Anti-Christ to be born, a mix-up in the hospital puts him out of the clutches of the forces of evil -- who scramble to get to him as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse fire up their motorcycles for the final confrontation. Working for them, sort of, is a being named Alistair Crowley, who started out as the snake in Eden and drives a car with a strange property: every cassette tape he plays in it inevitably turns into music by Queen. The chapter introducing Famine, who is an international businessman in the fast food business, contains the single funniest footnote in all of literature.
A great commentary on the mad whirl we call modern life is Claudia Shear's autobiographical Blown Sideways Through Life. Ms. Shear has had 50 or 60 jobs, including artist's model, Italian film extra, and whorehouse receptionist, which prove to be grist for a very articulate mill, not to mention the basis for a one-woman show off-Broadway and on PBS.
Penn & Teller's How to Play With Your Food is full of evil tricks and pranks. If anyone ever successfully pawns off the volcano recipe masquerading as sweet little cookies, I want to know about it.
On that ongoing comedy known as relations between the sexes:
Cynthia Heimel has penned the ultimate guidebook, Sex Tips for Girls . With pointed dating tips, testimony to the restorative powers of red shoes, and explanations of "Zen and the Art of Diaphragm Insertion" and where men have been hiding since the 1970s, it makes for great dramatic reading at social gatherings. Heimel's If You Can't Live Without Me, Why Aren't You Dead Yet? is a cheering collection of short columns continuing the general theme.
Jean Shepherd's Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories and Other Disasters apt description of a hormone (and alcohol) ravaged prom night will have you laughing out loud.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (video
script)
Chant along with the series videos: The Complete Monty Python's Flying Circus: All the Words
Vol.
I.;
Vol. II
The Fairly Incomplete & Rather Badly Illustrated Monty Python Songbook
The Brand New Monty Python Papperbok is pre-smudged to save you
the bother, while
Monty Python's Big Red Book is in fact bright blue (and out of print).
Not a Python project, but a kindred spirit, is The Rutles: All You
Need Is Cash (video).
Children's Books for Adults / Film
Annie Dillard's An American Childhood is a poetic memoir, in which images and incidents circle back again and again as memories do in our minds.
I've given L'Engle's meditations,Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art, to more people than I can keep track of. Although she is devoutly Episcopalian, her attitude toward faith is accessible regardless of the flavor of the reader's religion.
Over the past 15 years I've sifted through a lot of metaphysical and philosophical musings about this business of being human, and the person who has best nailed our predicament is Caroline Myss. Not only that, but she's come up with the most profoundly effective tools I've encountered yet. Anat omy of the Spirit, co-written with C. Norman Shealy, looks at physical and emotional imbalances in terms of what they show about our use of our energy and spirit. (It's also available on cassette .) Her tape series Energy Anatomy expounds on imbalances associated with each chakra and how our investment of energy affects our bodies. Why People Don't Heal and How They Can looks more closely at disease and hidden blocks that encourage it.
Books That Make Me Laugh / Film
Moomins usually hibernate during winter, but not in Moominland Midwinter , when a
bewitching bathing house floats into their midst.
Paperback ; hardcover. Moominsummer Madness is my favorite in the series, a
tale of
writing and producing a play. Paperback
;
hardcover . Others in the series:
Moominpapa at Sea ,
Moominpapa's Memoirs ,
Comet in Moominland
paperback;
hardcover ; Tales From Moominvalley
paperback ; hardcover
hardcover.
My favorite is The Enchanted Castle ( hardcover; paperback).Children who are forced to stay at school during a holiday find an enchanted castle with an enchanted princess, a magic ring that grants invisibility, and statues that come to life. This one has a scene that has never left me: The children make figures out of paper bags, which they call "Ugli Wuglis," to serve as the audience for their play. When the castle's spell affects them and they also come to live, they reveal a disturbing speech impediment -- because their mouths have no roofs.
Five Children and It. "It" is a foul-tempered beast (a Psammead) that the children stumble upon in a sand-pit, who has the power to take them back through time ( hardcover; paperback). The Phoenix and the Carpet , the second in the triology, lays the historical groundwork for the power struggles behind the triology. In the final volume, The Story of the Amulet, he children find the Psammead for sale in a pet shop. He takes them into the past again, this time in search of the other half of a broken amulet.
In Wet Magic, children on holiday at the seashore discover a real mermaid in captivity.
The Murry homestead is again the stage for An Acceptable Time, when grand-daughter Polly comes for a visit and unexpectedly slips back 3,000 years, just as a prehistoric confrontation is coming to a head.
L'Engle has also chronicled a family that stays put on terra firma, the Austins. Of this series, The Moon By Night, had a profound impact on me as a teenager. As her family travels across the country one summer, Vicky Austin ponders two boys who are pursuing her and who are as different as day and night. By summer's end, she realizes that what she's really looking for is herself.
Books That Make Me Laugh / Books That Make Sense of Life
Repo Man. An East LA punk joins the chase for a hot Chevy Malibu with a trunk full of dead aliens and enters the weird lattice of coincidence that overlays all existence.
The Marx Brothers' Duck Soup and Monkey Business, available online from the Why A Duck? Bookstore, in association with Amazon.com.
Jean Cocteau's poetic Beauty and the Beast and hypnotic Orpheus. Besides being visually and aurally lyrical, each is a technical marvel as well. In the first, as Beauty enters the Beast's castle, arms extend candlelabra, which ignite in sequence as she passes by; in the second, characters dive into mirrors that dissolve as if water (with no camera reflection in the shots, which were filmed through pin pricks in a wall.)
The Shop Around the Corner, an Ernst Lubitsch film starring Margaret Sullavan and Jimmy Stewart, is one of the finest, tightest scripts ever. It was sapped up for the musical now in revival, "She Loves Me."
The Philadelphia Story. Released in that movie manna year of 1939, this film turned around Katherine Hepburn's reputation as box office poison.
The Palm Beach Story. Directed by Preston Sturges, starring Joel McRea, Claudette Colbert and Rudy Vallee. Only in a Sturges film would an elderly Wiener King find Claudette Colbert cowering in her bathtub (dressed, of course) and give her a bunch of money just because she's pretty. The rest of the plot bears as much relationship to reality. This one is not only wildly entertaining, but has obvious sexual crackling between the leads.
To Be or Not to Be. Ernst Lubitsch's version (if you please!), starring Jack Benny and Carole Lombard in her last role. As always in a Lubitsch film, the script is tight and pointed as can be. Benny and Lombard are archly, and believably, egotistical spouses.
You Can't Take It With You. Directed by Frank Capra, starring Jimmy Stewart, Spring Byington, Lionel Barrymore and zillions more. Imagine a huge old house in which everyone was free to pursue his own creative interests. After seeing this film, lawyers have been known to envy the nerve of the reticient clerk who quits his job to move into the house and build little pop-up toys. Once of those movies that makes you feel good about being alive.
The Women . Not screwball, strictly speaking (no men are on camera, and the essence of screwball is subliminated sexual tension), but definitely screwy. Not to mention bitchy. Joan Crawford is a tart of a shop girl who steals the hubby of Norma Shearer, whose cadre of friends include one very ridiculously dressed Rosalind Russell.
Frog . If Elliott Gould and Shelley Duvall are playing parents, something's bound to be out of kilter. A boy with a thing for amphibians stumbles onto a frog that talks (voice by Paul Williams) and claims to be an enchanted prince. "That's Amore" plays a pivotal role in revenging a science fair atrocity and will never sound the same again. The ending frame of this film is the most perfect in the history of the cinema.
Gregory's Girl . An early 80s Scottish release by Bill Forsyth, whose later "Local Hero" was made with backing from the States. This daft, charming, sweet tale is about a bunch of teenage boys without a clue and a school full of girls who know the score. Even Gregory's 12-year-old sister Maddie understands this boy-girl thing better than her brother, who is infatuated with a new student who displaces him as goalie for the soccer team. He thinks she's his girl, and it takes the entire story for him to figure out who really is.
A Hard Day's Night . If I have to explain this, you are dead, or 10 years old.
International House is one of the strangest movies ever made. W.C. Fields is a pilot who tosses beer bottles out of his plane across the globe and lands on the roof of the Oriental hotel where George Burns and Gracie Allen are the house doctor and nurse. Inside, an inventor is perfecting a device that picks up visual as well as radio transmissions. Every so often the slender plot (which has something to do with a romance threatened by a quarantine) is interrupted, sometimes by a Burns and Allen routine, sometimes by a random transmission. The one to watch for is of Baby Rose Marie belting out deep-throated big-hot-mamma stuff while still in socks and Maryjanes.
The Loved One. Black humor scripted by Evelyn Waugh, with a cast full of surprises, including John Gielgud as a parasol-toting queen, Liberace as a casket salesman, Rod Steiger as a mortician, and Paul Williams as a rocket-building pre-teen. Robert Morse is a perfectly nice young man who gets sucked into the weird machinations of a funeral home owned by Jonathan Winters. Hard to find, and undeservedly obscure. Please alert me if you find a source for this one (that doesn't cost $299)!
The President's Analyst. James Coburn enters a modern-day Kafkaesque world after becoming the president's confidant, which give him plenty of opportunities to flash a world class psycho grin.
The Ruling Class . Peter Toole is a gentle nobleman labouring under the delusion that he's Christ, until he decides he's Jack the Ripper instead. If you were under 30 in the 70s, you saw this film.
Blood and Sand. Rudolph Valentino could too act, and this tale of a bullfighter proves it.
Books That Make Me Laugh / Books That Make Sense
of Life / Children's Books for Adults
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