Spinster Aunt

Charlotte Canda

2012-02-03T07:08:00.000-08:00

My obsession with Charlotte Canda is well-known by readers of this blog or of my book, Boroughs of the Dead: New York City Ghost Stories. Charlotte Canda was a Victorian-era debutante who lived in New York City. She died in a tragic accident on February 3rd, 1845: her 17th birthday.

According to the historians at Green-Wood Cemetery, where she is interred,

The story of Charlotte Canda and the creation of her monument is a true Victorian drama, filled with tragedy, symbolism and beauty. Charlotte was the only daughter of Charles Canda, a Frenchman who had served as an officer in Napoleon’s Army and later emigrated to America.

On Charlotte’s seventeenth birthday, as she was returning home from her party in a storm, she was thrown from a carriage when the horses bolted. She died in her parents’ arms shortly after the accident.

Her tomb is an exquisite "richly carved Gothic Revival structure in the form of a tabernacle [and] an open, arched canopy flanked by two slender spires contain a portrait statue of the young woman wearing a garland of seventeen rose buds representing the years of her life," though when I look at it it seems more to resemble the bed of a Sleeping Beauty in a fairy tale than a tabernacle. I can imagine her slumbering there, frozen in time. (She'll never wake to her lover's kiss, though; in a sad post-script, "her fiance Charles Albert Jarrett de la Marie, a French nobleman, took his own life out of the grief of losing Charlotte. He is buried in the adjacent plot marked by an elegant headstone bearing his coat of arms.")

Victorian-era New Yorkers were quite taken with the tragic tale of the beautiful Charlotte, and her grave became a major tourist attraction. I can certainly understand why; her story is captivating and the monument itself is arresting. Most incredible of all is the designer of her monument: Charlotte Canda.

Yes, that's right. Charlotte Canda designed her own grave.

The artistic Charlotte had been designing a monument for her recently deceased aunt and had sketched the ideas for it on paper. Her father adapted the design concept and personalized it for Charlotte by adding her initials, musical and drawing instruments, books, sculptures of her pet parrots and other symbolic details. The concept featured a niche containing a portrait statue of Charlotte with a star above her head symbolizing immortal life.

When I first read this, I was so taken with the concept of the pretty girl who made her own grave that I decided to immortalize her in a story. I did so in "A Fitting Tribute," a ghost story of Victorian New York. Since today is February 3rd, I'd like to offer the free story as a gift to my readers in tribute to Charlotte, who will not be forgotten as long as obsessive writers live next to Green-Wood. The real story of Charlotte will linger in your mind. (My fictionalized version is scandalously inaccurate, but don't let it fool you.)

Happy birthday and seventeen pink rosebuds to you, Charlotte.

BotD Book Giveaway!

2012-01-21T14:26:00.000-08:00

Yes, friends, you read that right! Enter to win your own copy of Boroughs of the Dead! Details below.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Boroughs of the Dead

by Andrea Janes

Giveaway ends February 13, 2012.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Updates on my brain PLUS! Bribery!

2012-01-12T10:04:00.000-08:00

I just finished my YA novel. How triumphant! How enriching! How... much work I still have left to do!

Sweet balls there's a lot of it! Polishing the damn thing, to begin with. Then shopping it 'round to all the likely agents and bracing myself for the 6 million inevitable rejections while I twaddle my thumbs and play the waiting game. This greatly benefits my blog-reading audience (hello mum!) because I'll finally have time to sit down and transcribe alllll those brilliant thoughts I've been having while also updating you on all the literary news here in New York City -- because I've got my ear to the ground and my finger on the pulse of this city! (Putting your ear on the ground helps your finger hear the pulse better, FYI. That's kind of common knowledge in the Industry.)

Obviously I've descended into a kind of madness (see nonsensical metaphor, above) so this should be a lot of fun for you people. I hope to have links to more of my very public ramblings here soon, as well as a few private ones for the six readers of this blog. Cheerio!

A.

P.S. The bribery! I almost forgot! Like my book's Facebook page and I'll send you a PDF copy of my book OR a handwritten thank you note! Really!

Janus is indeed a two-face god

2012-01-09T19:53:00.000-08:00

January is a double-edged sword isn't it? You're terribly inspired to get out and do things and see thing and achieve things, and yet you're flat-ass broke from your piggery over Christmas. What's a modern spinster to do? Perhaps we can borrow a page from Newyorkology and see what illuminating cultural-type things are cheap and/or free.

Free hours at NYC museums, zoos and gardens

New York City’s museums are in a state of flux with some undertaking major renovations (such as the Cooper-Hewitt and the Museum of the City of New York;) price changes (such as the Met Museum’s increase to $25 from $20 and the Fraunces Tavern Museum’s decrease to $7 from $10;) and others struggling to stay open (such as the mostly closed Seaport Museum and the down-sized American Folk Art Museum.)

Many museums have slowed the pace of new exhibitions and others have cut suggested-admission or free hours. Among those making cuts is the Brooklyn Museum, which last month reduced hours and canceled a high-profile graffiti exhibition. However, the museum is keeping its free First Saturday programs and suggested-admission policy at all other times.

“We are always grateful to visitors who can contribute the full admission price,” Sally Williams, the public information officer for the Brooklyn Museum, said of the suggested $10 admission price. “These difficult economic times have had an impact on most non-profit institutions, like the Brooklyn Museum, as they have for our visitors,” she told NewYorkology via email.

Twice a year, NewYorkology surveys the free and suggested-admission policies at the city’s museums, zoos and gardens. The following day-by-day list is for museums that offer free or pay-as-you-like hours only on a weekly or monthly basis. It complements the lists of always-free NYC museums and the always suggested-donation ones.

Image source: Brooklyn Museum’s work of Auguste Rodin (French, 1840–1917). Pierre de Wiessant, Monumental Nude (Pierre de Wissant, nu monumental), 1886, cast 1983. Bronze, 78 1/4 × 44 3/4 × 36 1/2 in. (198.8 × 113.7 × 92.7 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the B. Gerald Cantor Collection, 86.310

More reviews for Boroughs of the Dead!

2011-12-12T19:04:00.000-08:00

Two great new reviews for BotD just came out in the past week, from Fangoria and The Horror Zine respectively. Here are some choice words:

"Janes can write—and this package is not [just] a zombie book. Sure, it has the odd ghoul, but also a few choice ghosts and other dead things. BOROUGHS contains 10 tales of Gothic, Penny Dreadful-esque dread and classic terror, some set in contemporary times, some in the haunted past, all taking place in different neighborhoods in New York City. Like the best of the pulps, the narratives are creepy, darkly comical and elegantly composed, with lovingly detailed descriptions of place and an ample whiff of lurid decay." - Chris Alexander, Fangoria

"[These] stories end entirely differently than what the reader expects. And that is the brilliance of Andrea Janes’ work: she doesn’t play by the rules. She teases you with one idea and then twists the knife, sometimes literally, into an entirely different direction. There is nothing sub-standard in Boroughs of the Dead. Each story is unique and exciting, and her writing style is absorbing." - Jeani Rector, The Horror Zine

"It's not often you come across a fairytale cottage complete with witch's cat."

2011-12-09T11:18:00.001-08:00

Archeologists in Lancashire, England have discovered the ruins of a 17th century witch's cottage!

From the article:

"Historians are now speculating that the well-preserved cottage could have belonged to one of the Pendle witches.

The building contained a sealed room, with the bones of a cat bricked into the wall.

It is believed the cat was buried alive to protect the cottage's inhabitants from evil spirits."

Horrid! And wonderful!

Ghosts of Christmas Past Walking Tours!

2011-12-08T11:51:00.001-08:00

This Saturday December 17th and Sunday December 18th, yours truly (me!) will be giving guided walking tours of Manhattan's East Village, in collaboration with Ghosts of New York.
Here is a description of the tour:

New York's Ghosts of Christmas Past

December 17th, 1 pm; December 18th, 1:00pm & 3:30 pm

Join us for a festive holiday walking tour of New York's Ghosts of Christmas Past! Follow us through the East Village as we discover New York City's special connection to Christmas and its vital role in many holiday traditions, from Santa Claus to Christmas trees. We'll show you where Charles Dickens read A Christmas Carol on his 1865 American tour, invoke the ghosts of the old Dutch Colony, and tell tales from when the East Village was Kleine Deutschland. Along the way we'll treat you to shiver-inducing stories of East Village Ghosts, from Washington Irving to Gertrude Tredwell, then finish at Tompkins Square Park's Greenmarket where you can warm up with a hot apple cider, or at a local pub where you can warm up with a hot toddy.* A festive variation on our classic East Village Tour, Peter Stuyvesant and His Ghostly Friends of the East Village.

* The 1pm tour on Sunday ends at the Greemarket and are suitable for all ages; all others end at pubs and are for guests 21 and older

Please visit Ghosts of New York to book your tickets!

Christmas Ghosts Update

2011-12-06T15:30:00.000-08:00

New post up today, this one all about Santa!

Follow the link!

XO,

SA

"Christmas Ghosts" is back!

2011-12-04T12:53:00.000-08:00

For those of you with long memories, you will recall I started Christmas Ghosts some time ago, and posted many a ghost story of my own there. These stories have been subsequently yanked as they were sold and reprinted elsewhere, but the blog is back, with a slightly different slant.

My aim now is nothing less than to single-handedly revive the tradition of telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve! I'm also going to post lots of general fun, fact-y, Christmasy tidbits as well as ghost stories, so there ought to be something for everyone! And, because I am always scheming, there is an extra, added, as-yet secret bonus to top it all off. So stay tuned....

And Happy Holidays to All!

Love,

SA

New York Ghosts: Mark Twain

2011-11-30T08:30:00.000-08:00

Today marks the 176th birthday of Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain. Twain lived in various locales throughout New York City for much of his adult life, from the West Village to Wave Hill in the Bronx. He often claimed his favorite residence was 14 West 10th Street, located between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, on one of the Village's most picturesque blocks. It is perhaps no wonder, then, that he still haunts it now.

Twain lived at this address from 1900 – 1901 and if you visit it you will see a small bronze plaque in his honor. The beautiful 1830s townhome already had a reputation for being haunted at the time he moved in. Twain, though, was an inveterate skeptic who mocked the idea of ghosts and refused to believe in the unexplained. He even expressed his disbelief in a short story appropriately called "A Ghost Story" in which a ghost haunted his own fake corpse. Even the sight of a truly unexplained phenomena couldn't shake Twain's skepticism. One night he saw a piece of kindling wood moving by itself near the fireplace; he grabbed a pistol and shot at it. The kindling fell to the floor, where Twain saw a few drops of blood. No intruders, human or animal, were ever found to explain the event, though Twain sniffed he was sure it was a rat and still refused to believe that what he had seen sprung from supernatural sources.

These days, Twain's ghost is said to appear to current residents of 14 West 10th Street on the first floor and at the lower level landing of the staircase. Some say the house is haunted by no fewer than twenty-two spirits, the ghosts of people who formerly lived and died in the house. Perhaps Twain does take his place among this cavalcade of shades, or perhaps it is merely wishful thinking on the part of those who spot the spirit – after all, who doesn't love a good celebrity ghost?

One former resident who attested to Twain's presence at the townhouse was Jan Bryant Bartell. Bartell was an actress and writer who discovered she had a touch of the second sight when she moved into the neighborhood. She began to see and experience different psychic phenomena when she moved in to the house next door (16 West 10th Street), hearing noises, seeing visions, and generally feeling oppressed by dread and foreboding. She ended up moving next door (to number 14) but still felt the presence of ghosts, including a very strong feeling that Twain was still there. One day she inquired of the superintendent if he had ever noticed anything strange in the building.

"The super before me, he had some stories to tell," the super replied.

"What kind of stories?" asked Jan.

"About that fella Clemens."

"Has he been seen here?"

"Yes ma'am, twice that I know, and by two different folks," the superintendent continued. "On the ground floor, back in the 1930s. A mother and daughter, a young widow woman, were sharing the apartment. The mother, she comes into the living room one evening before the lamps are lit, and she sees a man with white hair, wild-like. He's sitting in a chair looking out the window and she says, 'Who are you and what are you doing here?' and he says, 'My name is Clemens and I got problems here I gotta settle.'"

A Tour Guide's Speech

2011-11-29T13:40:00.000-08:00

Some of you may know that certain double-decker tour bus companies in NYC are hoping to replace live tour guides with automated video recordings. I'm sure you can guess what I (a tour guide) think of that. I don't do the buses but I work with a lot of people who do. One of these made a right purty speech today at a city hall rally. In case you weren't out there today, here it is:

My name’s Andy Sydor, and I’ve been a New York City tour guide for over thirteen years. I used to take tourists to the top of the Twin Towers. I have taken them to all five boroughs. And throughout my career, I’ve fought the attempts of irresponsible companies to replace live guides with tapes. I remember back in 2000, I even saw test buses trying out tape systems rolling right past us on our own buses. Some said it was inevitable, that there was nothing we could do to stop it. But we are not helpless. So we alerted city officials, and their pressure and inquiries compelled the company to not use those tape systems.

Again, after 9/11, that same company tried to use that catastrophe as an excuse to eliminate their professional guides. But we are not helpless. We used protests and professionalism to keep our jobs, and we succeeded. In 2005, the threat of tapes raised its head again, and again, things looked grim. But we are not helpless. We drafted a bill to reinforce already-existing Department of Consumer Affairs regulation to ensure that visitors to New York would have the opportunity to have a live, licensed guide give their tour. To block that bill, the companies running the double-deckers swore to never replace their guides with tapes, so we were safe again.

But never doesn’t last forever, not in this town. Now, the industry is taking advantage of a new mandate by the city to ensure that the customers use headphones to allow them to replace human beings with tapes. We tried to add language to ensure that these customers could continue to have licensed, tested guides on their tours, but those efforts were blocked by the claim that the City could not do such a thing.

But the City is not helpless. The City has the right, and the obligation, to regulate its tourism industry, and to guarantee that our visitors get to experience guaranteed quality. That’s why we guides are licensed. That’s why we guides are tested. That’s why we need to know ALL the boroughs , and ALL the neighborhoods. That’s why, even though I’ve never driven a bus, I have to know how to advise any bus driver where he can go, and what he can do on the streets of this City. These are all consequences of City legislation.

There are things that the City can’t force by law. They can’t force me to love this City as much as I do, and to show that love to our visitors. They can’t force me to obsessively study and re-study everything about this place, and to share that with the world. That’s just part of the fringe benefit of having a licensed, living guide. And that’s a benefit that can never be replaced by a machine. There is no app for that. But the City can use its powers and its laws to guarantee that visitors to the greatest City in the World can be guided by the greatest guides on the planet.

Thank you.

Mini-review of The Well and Interview with Author Peter Labrow

2011-11-17T14:02:00.000-08:00

The Well by Peter Labrow is masterfully paced -- it almost made me miss my subway stop, a sure sign of a good read if ever there was one -- and contains complex, morally ambiguous characters.

Although it contains a supernatural element, the crime-novel aspect of it was as gripping as anything by Denise Mina. Though, since I love witches, I was pleased to find them pop up in the midst of all the gritty realism. That realism, incidentally, is what really endeared the book to me. The novel's heroine, Becca, who is trapped in a well, is a swimmer (which scored points with me) with a will -- and lungs -- of iron. This stands her in good stead, but not before she has to endure countless horrors. Most of all I loved the fact that, a few hours after she falls in the well, she realizes something very important: I have to go to the bathroom. I mean, come on, isn't that always the first thing you worry about in any entrapment scenario? Finding a pee corner? So score extra points for that.

Also score extra points for ingenious uses of iPod and condoms (just read it to find that one out). Finally, one more point for the sheer horror of one little girl's fate that involves an, um, medical scenario so icky I almost fainted. The female regions are always a fertile (ahem) locus of horror, and they are used to great effect here. Actually, there's a strong sexuality/birth subtext in this book that's pretty god damn resonant. To wit: Becca is about to lose her virginity when she falls down the well. Becca's mom is off on a fuck-holiday with her new husband while this happens. There's a pedophile on the loose. Girls are violated on more than one occasion and mourn their loss of innocence. And the theme of children and birthing runs throughout. Water in many contexts symbolizes sexuality, along with dreams, visions, femininity and intuition. Like water, The Well is symbolically rich and psychologically complex.

But mostly it's the excellent plot handling and nuanced characters that got me. You'll breeze through this book in no time, alternately loving and loathing every cast member in this drama. The slightly downbeat ending will stay with you, too, I imagine. Nothing is simple when you're trapped in The Well.

So -- how do I write a book like that, you may be wondering? Read on as Peter Labrow shares insights into his process, the adventures of self-publishing, and his favorite kind of pie.

Why did you decide to self-publish? Did you initially want to go with a traditional publisher?

It wasn’t an ideological decision, it was a practical one. I could either pound the streets of London for months (or more likely years) looking for an agent or publisher, or I could publish it myself. I decided that doing the latter didn’t stop me doing the former – and it enabled me to build up an audience and prove my commercial worth. I’m glad I did it, at least now I have affirmation that people mostly like it – not only via sales, but also via direct feedback too.

Did you query agents? And if so, what were their notes?

Not with the manuscript for The Well but I had for a previous manuscript. It was helpful in most respects. It made me realise that a book has to sell itself quickly in order to be bought, for the first page to be read, the reader has to be hooked and really want to carry on reading. On the downside, it made me realise that a lot of agents aren’t looking for something new – they want something that rides the current wave. I guess that’s OK, but it’s not how I wanted to write. I also learned that they are very busy people and you’re not likely to get their attention very easily. Again, self-publishing should prove commercial worth.

The pacing of your book is indeed gripping. What was your process/method for accomplishing this?

I have several answers to this. The first was to be aware of the reader and of the need for pace – at least in this book, or a book of its kind. Careful plotting is important, so that the story is always moving forward and the characters always on their own particular journeys. Things shouldn’t stand still for long. Also, I wanted the way that life really works to influence the narrative – in real life, unexpected things happen. In Greek theatre, that would be referred to as a ‘thunderbolt from the gods’ – something out of the blue. That keeps the reader guessing and the stakes high. But also, normal things need to happen. Some genres frustrate me, in that they suspend reality a little too much. What I mean by this is that every book, TV series or film lives within its own set of rules – usually at least one step away from reality, or the ‘what if’ couldn’t happen. But they go too far. If my house was surrounded by flesh-eating zombies, I’d still want to go to the toilet at some point or have a cup of coffee. I wanted The Well to be supernatural, but really grounded too – so the stakes were genuine.

Do you have experience in another medium (I'm thinking screenwriting, based on your ability to handle pacing)?

I do a lot of copywriting for a living and have for many years. This seems unconnected, but actually a copywriter does have to think about language, pace, plot (really) and so on. Not to the same degree, of course – most of the copy I write is just a few hundred or perhaps a couple of thousand words, but it still needs a tight structure. It has to sell, to persuade. So does a novel. The structure of The Well is very intentionally that of a television drama – in three or four parts. This was mainly because applying that structure allowed me to think clearly about the changes taking place within the book at various points, more than anything else. I also think visually (I’m a designer by training) so I like to think about how each scene looks, how it’s bookended and so on.

What inspired the story of The Well? Where did the idea come from?

The truth is that I’d previously tried to write a novel and, after getting halfway, felt overwhelmed. I had too many characters doing too many things. It was plotted out, but it still felt a challenge too far. I decided to write something with one character, in one situation. I’d rather liked the way that Stephen King’s Gerald’s Game starts with a couple, her chained to a bed in a remote cottage and him in his underwear, playing sex games. He dies straight away and you wonder how the idea can be sustained through an entire book. The same was true of this, originally it was to be just Becca’s story, trapped down the well. Nothing other than her point of view. Once I’d plotted this, I realised that not only wasn’t this enough for a novel, the stakes could be far higher if we looked at how those around her were affected by the simple fact of her disappearance. From that, I decided to weave in two terrors, one supernatural and one horribly everyday. Of course, what happened was that the second book took on the same form that the first had – multiple storylines and characters woven together.

One interesting thing about your book was that the heroes and villains were not cut and dried. Abby and Helen definitely did some dubious things, and Sarah could be selfish; meanwhile Tom Randle, while evil, actually served a purpose in his own way. I liked that complexity. Who was your favorite character in The Well? Who did you find despicable? Or were you continuously on the fence due to their moral ambiguities?

I feel very strongly that all people have some ambiguity about them. Even Hitler was an accomplished watercolour artist, though perhaps that was his only positive trait. For me, Superman is dull, because he’s just too darned nice. Batman is interesting because of his ambiguity – are his actions for revenge or justice? In many ways, his actions are very close to those of the villains he pursues. Good people can do bad things when pushed into a corner, or have particular personality traits (which would have otherwise remained hidden or manageable) vastly amplified. I hope this is what makes the characters real. People can do very unpredictable things in extreme circumstances. Tom Randle is the closest to being a black and white character, but that was mainly because I felt it wouldn’t be acceptable for someone of his nature to be sympathetic. My favourite characters would actually be Abby and Helen – I adored writing them, it was wonderful to write about two people so in love, so in touch, and so connected to each other.

Patricia Highsmith once said she liked to take naps when she was experiencing story problems and when she woke up she would know what to do next. How do you work through tough story problems?

I seldom find that you solve such issues sat in front of the screen. I had some revelations when waking, daydreaming or in the shower, while conversely some seemingly trivial plot points took several solid days of thinking to resolve. When in doubt, I walk away. Also, it’s not always right to solve a story problem for your own convenience, otherwise it can be too contrived. Sometimes creating a problem in the story is good for it – it forces change that can enrich the narrative. Let’s face it, that’s what happens in real life. Inconvenient things happen and have to be dealt with – from that point on, everything’s changed. I also have a good friend, Emma, with whom I discuss such things – she’s a massive help, and, although I don’t always agree with her, I always benefit from her input.

Which authors/books most inspire you to write?

Stephen King. Oh, I know, it’s a trite answer. But he has a gift for writing words that evaporate as you read them, so reading the book is like watching a film. That’s a gift. I adore the language of writers such as John Irving, but I get distracted by the beauty of the language itself. I don’t aspire to be a worthy writer, with intellectuals dissecting my books on late-night television or radio. I just want to entertain. Yes, I want what I write to have themes, but they’re an optional pleasure.

Do you have any future books in the works?

Yes, I’m at work on my next book. It’s second in a currently planned series of six, all set in the same general location but definitely not a single story. They will each be very different, though interrelated tales where some characters reappear. But it’s not like Harry Potter – with a single clear hero, pursuing a single clear villain. Like many writers at the start of the curve, I still have to juggle my day job, which this year has been so demanding that I’ve not had much time to write, sadly.

What is your favorite kind of pie?

Almost any. Pie is excellent. Although I’m not a fan of rhubarb and I dislike crumble.

Spitalfields Life

2011-11-11T08:54:00.000-08:00

My new favorite blog is Spitalfields Life.

Written by The Gentle Author, the blog is devoted to the minutiae of one London neighborhood, from historical tidbits to contemporary personalities.

The Gentle Author has certainly set him (or her) self a formidable task:

"Over the coming days, weeks, months and years, I am going to write every single day and tell you about life here in Spitalfields at the heart of London. How can I ever describe the exuberant richness and multiplicity of culture in this place to you? This is both my task and my delight.

Let me disclose to you the hare-brained ambition I am pursuing, which is to write at least ten thousand stories about Spitalfields life. At the rate of one a day, this will take approximately twenty-seven years and four months. Who knows what kind of life we shall be living in 2037 when I write my ten thousandth post?"

Who knows indeeed? Will we be zipping around in Zeppelins? Will movies be in 4-D? It boggles the mind!

Until then, be sure to check back periodically for such delightful posts as Jack Sheppard, Thief, Highwayman & Escapologist and The Stepney Witch Bottle, and the gape-worthy, jealousy-inducing Transformation on Princelet St.

Outstanding link of the day

2011-11-04T07:56:00.000-07:00

A wonderful post over at Grim Reviews details two excellent books of spectral theory: Warnings to the Curious: A Sheaf of Criticism on M.R. James by master anthologizer S.T. Joshi and The Ghost Story 1840-1920: A Cultural History by Andrew Smith. Both sound like absolute musts for anyone interested in the mechanics of good ghost story writing.

And for those who prefer their theory in bite-sized morsels, here's an old post of mine in which I share many of M.R. James' personal theories and demonstrate the Usefulness and Importance of Dots.

Book Review: Grave's End

2011-11-01T08:14:00.000-07:00

As a semi-professional Halloweenie, I have to say I'm glad October is over. Sometimes I just get so saturated with all this ghost business. Endlessly researching ghost stories, forever looking at horror and paranormal websites to promote my book and tours, constantly dwelling on the paranormal -- it all becomes too much sometimes. As soon as October petered out and November swept in, I felt a decidedly fresh breath of air. So I can only imagine how tiresome it would be to have every damn day be Halloween in your house.

Poor Elaine Mercado, then. Grave's End is her story about a "true" haunting that occurred in her house from 1982 to 1995. Mercado felt a sensation of being watched as soon as she moved into the place. Her daughters also reported strange "suffocating" dreams and unexplained phenomena (water being thrown on them, hair clips being hurled at them, etc.) and saw eerie mists and flickering balls of glowing light bouncing around the ceiling. Mercado's then-husband remained tight-lipped about the whole thing, but after he moved out admitted to having had a few of those dreams himself.

Mercado comes across as a kind and reasonable if not-very-bright person. I don't mean to imply she lacks intelligence. She's a nurse, so she is capable and not stupid. But she comes across, in the book, as astonishingly slow-witted or perhaps obstinate, I can't quite decide. Either she really cannot make the connections between these strange happenings and a capital-h Haunting, or she is incredibly stubborn. For years the house shows clear and definite signs of being Very Haunted Indeed and she refuses not only to believe but even to understand what's happening to her. She takes a course on parapsychology at Kingsborough Community College and, because she cannot find anything in her textbook that exactly matches what is happening in her home, comes to the bizarre conclusion that she is not experiencing anything truly paranormal:

"I was glad to have read about other people in similar circumstances but in each story I found so much that was not related to what we were experiencing. We had such a "mix" of things in the house, such a jumble of seemingly disconnected phenomena. My studies in the paranormal left me with the feeling that there might be no way to resolve the problem plaguing my house."

Her strange incapacity for any kind of lateral thinking at all makes for a decidedly frustrating reading experience. It's really shocking it took her thirteen years to figure this shit out. It's also really shocking the way they discover things, like crawl spaces and "dirt rooms" in the cellar that they didn't even know existed. I'm like, "How did you not check out these things before you bought the house?!" They hadn't even looked in the basement when they bought the place! They hadn't even seen the furnace! Granted, there was an old couple living in the basement when they went to look at the place who were quite hostile and essentially blocked them from looking at these things, but still! They hadn't seen the furnace!

The other issue I have with the book is that she's no storyteller. I don't mind her straightforward, plain-spoken prose (even if I suspect she doesn't know the difference between tortuous and torturous). She's a layperson, not a professional writer. And indeed, her plain-speaking and, yes, skepticism, do add to the overall sense of horror in the book. But her pacing is completely off; the book is front-loaded with extraneous detail and then quite rushed at the end. Thirteen years of build-up is summarily undercut by a single chapter that takes place over the course of a single nine-hour period in which Hans Holzer and a fellow medium "cleanse" the house. After all that, the ghosts are banished in an afternoon.

I suppose this would be my major beef with the book. Well, that, and the fact that she fails to really get into any of the history of the neighborhood. I was looking forward to some investigative facts that would lend new insight into Gravesend. She does talk about some 19th century Dutch "settlers" who were trapped in a mine but fails to expand on any factual/historical details (also I'm not sure you'd use the term "settlers" for people living in Brooklyn in the 19th century). Also, I wish she hadn't dropped certain storylines, such as the embittered elderly couple who had to leave the house when she and her husband bought it. I was sure they'd come back.

Since it's generally a pretty breezy read, though, I have to forgive it many of its faults. Also, it's a great little slice of NYC history, in its own way. Most importantly, the book does deliver the chills. One scene in particular stays with me. Elaine and her daughters give a house party (for Halloween, no less) and one of her co-workers who is sensitive to all things psychic is basically stopped in her proverbial tracks as soon as she enters the house. "There's a tiny woman in a wedding dress under your stairs," she says. "She's crying." The week before, Elaine had found an old, yellowed size-four wedding dress in the crawl space beneath the stairs. For some reason, that image really got me.

And hell, something -- a plastic bag, I think -- rustled in my closet just now and I fucking froze in my seat. So that's hubris for ya: just when you think you're so clever, it happens to you. And then everything's different, isn't it? Suddenly you're no so smart anymore. I think that's the real lesson I'm going to take away from Grave's End. Be humble, and check your crawl space.

May You Have A Thrilling Halloween

2011-10-31T08:48:00.001-07:00

Happy Halloween everyone!

May you eat lots of candy, drink lots of beer, watch lots of Treehouse of Horror reruns, and, if the mood strikes you, whip up some Skittlebrau.

Also, if you have a Kindle, might I suggest buying Boroughs of the Dead to celebrate this spookiest of holidays? It's only $2.99 and the stories in it are terrific (in the old, medieval sense of the word), as this review will attest. What? You know I don't go in for false modesty. Spinster Aunts tell it like it is.

XO,

SA

Thirteen Days of Halloween (pt. 7) -- Our favorite spooky tales

2011-10-28T12:53:00.000-07:00

Read writers' (including me!) picks of their favorite horror stories at The Second Pass.

Thirteen Days of Halloween (pt. 6)

2011-10-26T07:17:00.001-07:00

Alfred Hitchcock's Ghost Stories for Young People makes my day a whole lot more awesome.

Thirteen Days of Halloween (pt. 5) -- Fun with cemeteries!

2011-10-25T08:14:00.003-07:00

Go West Young Man. Horace Greeley's monument in the setting sun....

I always enjoy seeing my name in print.

Thirteen Days of Halloween (pt. 4)

2011-10-24T11:23:00.001-07:00

Another smorgasbord of trailers, links and general All Hallow's fun:

Trailers from Hell covers that wonderful witchy romp Bell, Book and Candle.

Slant covers the 25 Best Horror Films of the Aughts.

And Cracked gives us more Creepy Urban Legends.

And my book giveaway is still going strong! So enter now!

Thirteen Days of Halloween (pt. 3) -- Book giveaway!

2011-10-21T07:55:00.000-07:00

First of all, I am happy to announce that Boroughs of the Dead is now available at St. Mark's Bookshop and Babbo's Books in Manhattan and Brooklyn respectively. If you live in or near NYC please do try to buy your copy at one of these bookstores. Popping into St. Mark's yesterday was so fun. Browsing was amazing. The kindly old man behind the counter was adorable. Walking through the neighborhood, by Grace Church's elegant spires, on a crisp, refreshing autumn day was everything you imagine it would be from the way I phrased that sentence. There's nothing quite like going to a real bookstore.

Now! Speaking of books.... I am going to give away one free copy of Boroughs of the Dead between now and Halloween. Contest rules are simple: tell me what you think is the scariest thing about New York City and why. It can be anything at all, from the jokey/mundane (Broadway musicals) to the I-really-do-find-it-very-frightening (Willowbrook). The best answer will be selected on Halloween. You can submit answers here in the comments section, or to @SpinsterAunt on Twitter.

Thirteen Days of Halloween (pt. 2)

2011-10-19T09:17:00.000-07:00

So many curios to put into the wonder cabinet today!

There are, to begin with, the trailers for Hugo and Woman in Black (Woman in Black trailer via Daily Dead).

My new favorite podcast, devoted to M.R. James: A Podcast to the Curious.

Tor makes suggestions for Halloween reading with their All Hallows Read.

And I, why today I shall spend my time putting together my Gallus Mag costume and working on a soon to be announced top-secret project!

Thirteen Days of Halloween

2011-10-18T14:31:00.000-07:00

So I feel like I've been buried alive, and my tomb was my own ambition. Hustle, hustle, hustle, to get that little book all ready and shipped out in time for Halloween. Send out lots of little emails begging for reviews. And now... wait. Frankly, I'm glad! I'm getting a little tired of being so businessy. We all know that's what I'm worst at.

Now to get back to what I'm best at! Strolling through autumn leaves and letting my mind wander! For the rest of the month I think I'll just savor the lead-up to Halloween, reading and watching as many spooky things as I can, traipsing through Green-Wood, giving ghost tours, and generally enjoying life instead of clickety-click-clicking relentlessly on my sales figures. And you will benefit, dear reader, by not being bored to death hearing me drone on and on about my bloody book!

I'm off to the movies now! Can't wait to share things with you soon.

XO,

SA

Boroughs of the Dead now available on Amazon.com

2011-10-10T08:40:00.000-07:00

Hello friends and readers!

I am pleased to announce that my collection of short stories is now available in trade paperback on Amazon.com.

I am working on getting it listed on Amazon.ca as well (for you Canucks out there) and in e-reader editions. It is already available for Kindle, with a slightly different cover.

Thanks for all your support!

SA

A.J. Sweeney strikes again

2011-10-03T14:53:00.000-07:00

That fang-toothed hussy has been busy lately. As usual, she's been shamelessly flogging my writing to any number of magazines and brazenly claiming credit for it. She's sidled up to the following publications, batting her lashes and whispering in their ears until she gets what she wants...

The Horror Zine
Bards & Sages Quarterly
SNM Horror Magazine

Her story in The Horror Zine made Editor's Pick this month -- whose editor Jeani Rector called it "original and awesome" -- and placed third in SNM's October Opiates issue. Third! Ha! She'll never be number one. She'll have to kill me first.

BotD Funded and Ready to Go!

2011-09-26T19:21:00.000-07:00

Another update: I just now finished uploading my cover art and manuscript to CreateSpace and am awaiting approval. It looks like I'm on track to have this thing done in early October, as was my goal. Speaking of goals, my Kickstarter campaign has been fully funded, which is awesome. Thanks to my incredible family and friends it was funded in less than four hours! This entire process has been so rewarding... I can't believe that some software and a major corporation are making me this happy, but, well, here we are. I'm hot and sweaty and my eyes are blurry but I can't say I've felt such a sense of a job well done since I finished my last screenplay. The only difference is, this time round, it won't just be sitting around in my hard drive with no one to read it.

Boroughs of the Dead Update

2011-09-23T08:57:00.000-07:00

The people have spoken: the skeleton-attacking-the-Statue-of-Liberty cover has won! Thanks to all who emailed and posted their votes.

In other news, my Kickstarter campaign has launched! Please visit: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/724877501/boroughs-of-the-dead for more info or to make a donation.

Thank you!

Vote for my book cover image!

2011-09-07T14:08:00.000-07:00

First off, I am pleased -- no, thrilled -- to announce that I have finally finished my book of short stories. They're all horror stories, all set in New York City. I'm set to publish it in October. Currently I'm in the throes of editing and formatting the text, as well as working out the cover design. I've narrowed it down to two possible covers, but, as some of you may know, I have terrible trouble making decisions. For those who don't: I have terrible trouble making decisions. In that spirit, I cordially invite you to vote for your favorite book cover image:

1. The Pulpy Cover:

2. The Scary-Picture-with-Clouds Cover

Please do vote for your favorites. Also, "You suck at Photoshop, get a real designer" is a valid vote. (Oh, and please note I am still tweaking the skeleton/Statue of Liberty Image.)

Get your votes in by September 19th!

Thanks everybody!

Dark Water(s), Withholding, and Point of View

2011-08-21T17:30:00.000-07:00

For whatever reason, I decided this past week that I really needed to see both versions of Dark Water. (Maybe because it's been so rainy lately?) I picked up both Hideo Nakata's 2002 original and the 2005 American remake.

Watching these two different approaches to the same story turned out to be really helpful for me in terms of thinking about how character point-of-view can add to or detract from horror in storytelling.

The Hideo Nakata version of Dark Water allows the main/mother character (Yoshimi, played by Hitomi Kuroki) to see the ghost and interact with it far earlier than Walter Salles' version allows Jennifer Connelly's Dahlia to. Yoshimi sees the ghost about fifteen minutes into the film, whereas Dahlia doesn't see anything supernatural until almost the very end. Instead, Salles has her little girl, Ceci, see and interact with the ghost for most of the film, which has several unfortunate side-effects. First, allowing the child a privileged POV vis-a-vis the ghost is something we see all too often in horror films, and therefore feels hackneyed and trite. Second, it doesn't necessarily pay off in the specific context of the film. This is supposed to be Dahlia/Yoshimi's story, so to rob her of agency by not allowing her to see the ghost lessens its impact overall.

By contrast, confining the ghost to Yoshimi's POV in the J-horror version calls her mental stability into question in a much more effective way than Salles/Connelly's dull, repetitive neurotic shriekings at, say, an unfinished load of laundry. The audience has far more empathy for poor Yoshimi, who is seeing horrifying visions, than it does for Dahlia, who merely comes off as alternately whiny and strident for most of the film because essentially the only thing that's really bothering her is a drip in her ceiling. Oh, yes, and her flashbacks to her childhood.

Which brings me to another point: these flashbacks, as well as some other really obvious scenes in the Salles film, hammer home their points a little too hard. In the Hideo Nakata film, we are told obliquely that Yoshimi had a neglectful mother; in Salles' version, we are told this explicitly, and repeatedly, as though he doesn't trust his audience to make any connections for themselves.

Finally, one last little gripe I have with the writing in this film is that it is riddled with missed opportunities. The writers let things be far too easy for Dahlia. For example, when she is late to pick up Ceci from school because of a job interview, there are absolutely no consequences. She shows up late and kindergarten teacher Camryn Manheim cheerfully says, "Oh no worries, we put her in the after-school program." Little Ceci is happily reading a story with her fellow future latchkey kids. Phew! Good thing that scene ended comfortably! I'd hate for there to be any conflict in this story. In Nakata's version, the child's father ends up taking her home from school, and a bitter parental fight subsequently ensues.

Everything just comes so easily to Dahila. In her job interview she is hired on the spot. Yoshimi runs out of the interview to pick up her child and doesn't find out until later that she actually got it anyway. Oh, and a little reality-based nit-pick? Dahila is a former copy-editor who gets a job as a lab assistant at a radiology clinic. With absolutely no medial training. "I've always been interested in medicine." "You're hired!" Sure, why not? I mean, maybe in the heady pre-recession days of 2005 you could just waltz into a doctor's office and demand a job, I don't know. Seems to sound a bit of a false note to me. Anyway. Minor gripe. But it does relate to the writers' total inability to allow Dahlia to feel anything really serious at all for basically the first hour of the film.

Which brings me back to the concept of POV, and withholding information.

Why do Salles et al not allow Dahlia to get into anything honestly frightening for such a very long time?

I think perhaps they were trying too hard to create atmosphere and maintain suspense, all at the expense of storytelling.

As a writer, I find I am very often afraid to give too much away lest I undercut the Mystery of It All. The writers of Salles' Dark Water seemed to suffer from this same insecurity. Certainly withholding some information is necessary for suspenseful storytelling, to an extent, but so then is revelation. Let them see the bomb under the table for goodness sake. By withholding so very much in the first hour of the film, the American version just ended up boring the pants off me.

Extended scenes of Dahlia and Ceci on the Roosevelt Island tram, at the lawyer's office, at school, in the apartment, etc. began to wear me down. The scene where they view their potential new apartment seemed to be filmed in real time. Without an ounce of exaggeration, I've seen actual New York City apartments in less time than it took John C. Reilly to show us the one in Dark Water (his best lines in this scene: "There's the stove. There's the dishwasher."). As a result, the pacing in this film suffered terribly. Which is a shame, because the last 45 minutes of the movie actually weren't bad. It's amazing how easily I can see this in someone else's story and yet I commit this same error constantly while writing my own. Scene after scene of exposition and atmosphere-establishing clog the beginnings of my stories despite the fact that I must have been told to start in medias res about a thousand times.

Suddenly it became clear to me how POV and info withholding (and by extension, pacing) are intimately entwined. If you deny your main character access to the world of the story by overly restricting his/her point of view, you'll end up excessively withholding information, and a delayed story-start will be the inevitable consequence. Yes, you can certainly give secondary characters information and integrate them into the storyline but you've got to remember who your main character is and not lose sight of that.

Again, I think the temptation with writing horror is to withhold excessively out of fear of losing suspense or coming off as unsophisticated. But the alternative -- a boring 60 minutes of watching Jennifer Connelly on the phone with her landlord -- is much, much worse.

When You Reach Me

2011-08-16T12:49:00.001-07:00

I just finished reading Rebecca Stead's thrilling YA novel, When You Reach Me. It's a bit of a genre-bender, starting out as a mystery and becoming more science fiction-y by the end of it, with plenty of the best kind of YA coming-of-age tenderness and poignancy all mashed up in there. I have kind of a pet peeve with really maudlin coming-of-age stories (I'm looking at you, Bridge to Terabithia) so I doubly appreciate a book that makes me cry while never stooping to manipulation. When You Reach Me walks that fine line ably, with such spare, unsentimental prose that the emotional effects of it cut that much more deeply. I kept having to stop whilst reading it on the subway and pretend to look up at something verrrry interesting and invisible on the ceiling.

With finely woven mystery elements, exquisite attention to detail, and some superb characterization, even in the minor characters (like Alice Evans, the shy-bladder girl at school), When You Reach Me doesn't drop a single stitch. Stead's obvious geek-girl fandom of Madeleine L'Engle is endearing, too, since it puts the reader in the place of sharing some collective memory -- what girl aged ten-to-twelve was not enraptured by L'Engle trilogy? -- and creates a kind of instant intimacy with Miranda, the protagonist. A vintage NYC setting only helped matters in my mind, as did the wonderful character of Miranda's mother, a frustrated, artsy type forced to toil humiliatingly in a law office. Next time I go to work I may wear purple and black striped stockings.

P.S. I found the image here.

Sprucing up the old homestead

2011-08-03T10:16:00.000-07:00

I hope you like Spinster's re-design. I'm rather fond of it. It works in tandem with my new site, A.J. Sweeney, which I am now using as a semi-official "author site" to showcase my pretty little tales of death and murder, most of which were written under that pen name, and www.andreajanes.com has had an awesome new face-lift, courtesy of the kickass web-designer Oleg Jelezniakov at OJ Works. Spinster Aunt will remain, as ever, a place for me to get cranky online. I feel positively modern.

Dale Carnegie and me

2011-07-26T17:13:00.001-07:00

I've always kind of ignored Dale Carnegie. I never really wanted to win friends, or, you know, influence people, so I kind of figured I didn't need him. Then I stumbled across a book at a relative's house called "How to Stop Worrying and Start Living" and the title amused me so I picked it up -- I admit it -- ironically. Me, the big city big shot, flipping through ole Dale Carnegie's moth-riddled homilies and laughing at chapter titles like, "When life gives you lemons, make a lemonade"! Oh, those old-timey 1940s people, they were soooo funneeee! And then, as poetic justice would have it, I got my comeuppance. I couldn't stop reading the goddamn thing. I even took it on the subway. People saw me reading it. Yeah, they saw it. They saw the title and everything. And I didn't care!

See, the thing is, Dale Carnegie is completely and utterly badass! They ought to call this book, "Shut the fuck up and stop whining, you pussy!" It would sell a lot more copies. Seriously. There are case studies where people are like, "When I was stranded on a raft in the South Pacific for 22 days, I realized something..." and "On the beaches of Normandy I finally managed to cure my insomnia" or "After an operation that restored my sight, I wept when I saw the tiny rainbows in a soap bubble as I was doing the dishes, and I never complained about boredom again." These are just paraphrases of course. The real quotes are much more devastating and awesome (lots of wars and excellent Great Depression stuff). You see, essentially, the book tells you to stop worrying because, probably, you have nothing to worry about. I mean, if you're an American (or North American, or Westerner in general) and you're not impoverished (like, food stamps and foreclosures poor, not I-can't-afford-a-daily-latte poor) and have all your limbs and your sight, and you don't have cancer, then you have absolutely nothing in the world to complain about. It's all trivia. And de minimis non curat lex, dude. The law does not concern itself with trifles.

What, you may be asking yourself, oh gentle reader, is the point of this post? Generally the Spinster does not dispense advice. (Though now that I am venturing into this territory, if only for one single outing, I'm glad it could be of the decidedly old-fashioned and non namby-pamby variety.) I guess I just wanted to do something nice for once. This book, despite some of it's more bizarre advice (e.g. you don't need sleep; you must believe in god or you're screwed, etc.) is kind of amazing. So if you've gotten to the point where you're tired of the sound of your own voice complaining about shit, go get a copy of this book. It's verrry soothing.

Oh, and for all the writers out there -- everything in HTSWASL goes double for you.

All right, that's enough of my soft side. Let us never speak of this again.

Writing Bits

2011-06-25T20:59:00.000-07:00

Since I've been remiss in getting my links up on my website, here are a few to tide over my raging torrent of fans.

Fiction

Nethermead A woman walking in Prospect Park meets someone unexpected.

A Fitting Tribute A young girl designs her own tomb! Featuring haunted wigs!*

The Attraction A story about a time machine, and the one person who must never use it.

Morbus A tale of greed... and cholera! (Note: you actually have to pay for this story! PDFs cost $2, print editions cost $5)*

* Highly recommended for young adult readers.

Non-fiction

Interview with Corinne May Botz

Film Reviews

Sleeping Beauty

The Secret Beyond the Door

The Ward

2011-06-13T20:54:00.000-07:00

This weekend I watched The Ward -- John Carpenter's first film in a decade -- on a thoroughly gloomy drizzling day and I really wanted to love it, but there were just too many cumulative weaknesses, mainly in the script (well, and some of the perfs, too) for me to honestly say he drove this one home. Still, there's a subtle magic to The Ward, mostly in its B-movie cheapie goodness; it comes off as grindingly low-budget, something that could have come out of Val Lewton's RKO production unit in the 1940s, a feature I value highly in a horror film. That Carpenter manages to squeeze scares out of three sets and five actors is admirable indeed. The main problem I had with The Ward was its shoddy script.

This whole "review" is really just going to be one great big spoiler, because I can't really discuss what I see as the main story pitfalls without it. So if you haven't seen the film, take note that I really, really liked the opening credits, and come back in 88 minutes.

Ah, there you are. Nice to see you again. OK, we can continue.

Didn't you like the opening credits? Come on, medieval woodcuts, Horgarth etchings, circa-1950s stock photos of shock treatment? In chronological order? How could you not? As an archival photo researcher, I was especially thrilled by that credit sequence. (Yes, I work as an archival photo researcher for documentaries when not writing. And yes, I am available for hire.)

Unfortunately, things start to sputter as soon as the narrative kicks in. The film progresses in fits and starts, with occasional moments of suspense strung among much atmosphere-y mood-setting. The action picks up when the ghost of murdered mental patient Alice Hudson starts aggressively pursuing the heroine in addition to all the other girls in the ward, and we are treated to some truly fun running-around-being-scared sequences. That all the characters are stock cutouts bothered me until the final twist was revealed -- then it somewhat made sense.

But -- and here come the spoilers --I was slightly disappointed by the multiple personality disorder explanation. I'm not sure why, since I particularly like any narrative of dissociative amnesia or dissociative fugue. Fractured identities are always awesome (story-wise). Perhaps it was because so little was done with diagnosis of MPD once we got to that exposition-heavy portion of the script. The whole third act felt verrrry hastily slapped together, and I'm not sure but that the final twist couldn't have been handled better. Putting aside all my other problems with act three, I'd even be happy with just a revised version of that final twist.

If I had a world of my own, this is how I would have ended it: the scene plays out just as it is now, with Alice looking into the mirror. But instead of Kristen's demon-ghost arm grabbing at her, she'd just be staring back at her placidly from her reflection. And then Alice could say something like, "I'd never let them kill you, Kristen," and smile at her. You know, indicating she's still crazy. Or maybe not say anything at all. Lately I've been of a mind that being crazy is scarier than actual supernatural beings. Maybe it's just a phase I'm going through and in six weeks the pendulum will swing and I'll be bored by psychological horror again. But right now I find myself unmoved by Kristen's demon-ghost arm.

Which leads me to another thing: is Alice Hudson a ghost, a demon, or what? I mean, obviously it ends up with her just being a hallucination, but for most of the movie -- when we think she's a supernatural creature -- we're not sure what she is. She seems to be a ghost, but then Kristen is able to injure her with the axe. I kind of like that, though, that she doesn't fit into a clearly identifiable taxonomy of baddie.

I also have to say I like the way each personality was killed off. The death of each girl was actually a sign Alice was getting cured. What we non-crazies would see as an unequivocally positive event was represented as a horrible trauma on screen (it clearly hurt Alice to give up her safety personalities). This is indeed a twisted way to look at becoming healthy, as well as a fresh approach to the possible meanings of murder.

Although The Ward is not unflawed, it certainly takes its place alongside Shutter Island and Bedlam (1946) as an interesting foray into the dark side of the cure.

Time-Travel Ride debuts at New Coney!

2011-06-02T07:58:00.000-07:00

Have you ever longed to travel back to a simpler, more innocent time? Then step right up and ride THE ATTRACTION, the world's first time-travel device with automatic chrono-wipe (TM)! Lets you experience all your nostalgia with none of the fuss of accidentally eliminating your own existence! Try it now! Warning: epileptics must not ride THE ATTRACTION.

Promotion paid for by the New Coney marketing department.

Haunted Venice Part III: Parte the laste

2011-05-30T17:21:00.000-07:00

And so our imaginary journey through the streets of Venice comes to an end. The last two itineraries have blurred into one another, so I'll go just ahead and heartily recommend to one and all to buy the book, whether you're going to Venice or just plan to sit in your own backyard and imagine you're somewhere lofty and far away. I'll leave you with one last story, this one about beauty, for beauty has been on my mind of late (did you know your skin stops regenerating new cells or some shit after you turn 30? According to L'Oreal it does).

So, voila: The Fairy who Bestowed the Gift of Beauty

A young girl, just freshly turned sixteen, was walking home from Vespers one evening when she spied a beautiful woman all dressed in white. The beautiful woman watched her silently as she passed. This happened every day for three days and the young girl became curious. Who was this strange creature? On the fourth day the woman said, "Girl, wouldn't you love to become as lovely as I am?" And of course the girl replied, "Yes."

The woman told her to go home and cover all the mirrors in the house with white cloth and wait until midnight, when she would be visited by three beautiful ladies who would bestow their beauty upon her. "Do not be afraid, do not call upon the Virgin Mary," the woman said.

The young girl went home and did exactly as she was told, but in her excitement, she forgot to cover one mirror. The three women showed up at the stroke of midnight, dazzlingly radiant. But in the one small mirror she forgot to cover, the young girl saw the reflection of their backs: hideous, hairy and malformed, like "those of an animal."

The girl screamed and ran out of the house. On the street, she smacked right into the beautiful temptress who had conned her into this in the first place.

"Fool!" cried the woman, for she knew exactly what the girl had done.

She advanced toward the girl, who backed away. As she cowered she saw that the beautiful woman had the hairy cloven hooves of a goat peeking out from beneath her robe.

"Mother Mary, save me!" screamed the girl.

A bright white flashed from the sky, and when it had vanished, the evil fairy was gone.

The moral of this one? Don't trust a beautiful woman with ugly feet.

****

I'd love to do an imaginary ghostly travelogue again some time. If you're reading this, you must have a ghost story or two from your home town. Why don't you share it with me? Or, maybe you can suggest another town I can do a series on. Haunted Cincinnati? Haunted Krakow? Haunted Panama City? Do tell, won't you?

Kino

2011-05-23T11:22:00.000-07:00

Hi readers,

Today is a bit of a somber day. I went to the memorial service for Don Krim, long-time president of Kino International and my former boss. If you are a movie fan at all, you'll want to have at least one Kino DVD in your house: "Movies without Kino would be like parks without trees, museums without paintings." Do me a favor and check their catalogue out here. If you live in one of those fancy high-priced cities with tiny movie-houses, you might even be able to find some of their theatrical offerings. Kino is definitely holding the torch for a lot of the best foreign, silent and classic films, and in an age when so many distribs are going -- or have gone -- out of business, it's important to show them we care, and that we appreciate Don's service to cinema. If you're short on cash, you can get a lot of their stuff on Netflix, and of course you can like them on FB or follow them on Twitter.

On a personal note, Don was a great boss -- he was always fair and equitable to those who worked for him and with him, and was incredibly generous and kind to me for the nearly four years I worked there. I remember being amazed to learn he actually paid his interns. In a business where this is almost unheard-of, I think it goes to show what kind of person he was. He believed in paying people for their work: an old-fashioned concept from a true gentleman.

"A Fitting Tribute" finds a home

2011-05-19T07:24:00.000-07:00

My short story "A Fitting Tribute," has found a home over at Lightning Flash e-zine. The story was inspired by Charlotte Canda and Carmilla, and by my ex-roommate's girlfriend's weave, which would float on the floor in ghostly tumbleweeds....

Haunted Venice, Part Two

2011-05-18T07:47:00.000-07:00

Our second appointment with death begins in the sestiere of Castello, near the salizada de Pignater, where there is featured the sotoportego dei Preti. I think salizada means street and sotoportego means arch. No translation of these words is provided in the book, so hey, you'll learn by immersion! Over the arch you'll find a brick heart, which you can touch for a good luck charm if you're looking for that special humanoid to mate with. Here's the romantic story that goes with it:

Once upon a time, when "magic and reality peacefully shared the same dimension," a fisherman named Orio (yum) caught a mermaid in his net. Naturalment, they fell in love, and she agreed to give up the life aquatic to marry him. There was only one problem: because of a witch's curse, every Saturday she would turn into a snake. She warned him not to try to see her on Saturdays but of course he disobeyed. No biggie, though, because once they were married the curse would be lifted anyway (maybe it was contingent on her not having legs or something). Are you still following? Good. So now the mermaid has legs and she's a regular human wife and she keeps house and squeezes out some kids and everything is going fine until one day she grew ill and died, poor thing. The fisherman misses her but, hey, life goes on. Plus, an interesting thing is happening: no matter how sloppy the fisherman and his kids are, the house always stays clean. It's like some kind of ghost-maid is taking care of them or something. But Orio doesn't put two and two together and one day when he returns home from fishing unexpectedly early only to find a snake -- a snake! -- in the kitchen, he chops it in half! Orio, nooooo! Sure enough, the house thereafter grows messy and cold, as his dead mermaid snake-wife was to visit nevermore.

I think the moral of this story is fairly clear: don't do housework.

Moving right along, we get to another deliciously irreverent tale, that of "The Magician who Joked with the Devil." I quite like this one: in the late 15th century there lived a man who practiced black magic. He was cruel and mean and despised by all, and he was comfortable with that. One night he was out walking when the moon went behind a cloud and it was too dark for him to find his way home. So he summoned his old pal Lucifer and asked for a torch, which was summarily provided. After he got home, he snuffed it out and put it in the woodbox to use again later. In the morning the maid opened the woodbox and screamed -- inside was not a torch at all but a charred arm! Now, this is my favorite part of the story: the magician's reaction. Apparently, he just laughed. Oh Old Scratch, you are a funny guy! You sure got me!

Zing! I love that he isn't disturbed in the slightest that he just used a flaming human arm as a torch.

As long as we're on the subject of wizards, here's another story I liked in this itinerary: "The Wizard with the Heart of Stone." It takes place near the Arsenal, in front of which stands a frightening-looking stone lion.

In November 1719, the mangled bodies of two sailors appear floating in the city's canals. The corpses look as though they've been torn apart by wild beasts. Six days later, another body surfaces, that of Jacopo Zanchi, a Venetian who apparently "lived hand to mouth" with his wife Giovanna. Now, Giovanna had a bad rep and occasionally turned tricks for money, so nobody was surprised when she stood outside the house of a merchant named Fosco and started screaming, "Murderer! Bastard -- you'll pay for what you've done!" I mean, bitches be crazy, right? Now, Fosco leans out the window and hisses, "We'll see, woman, where your boldness will take you, on the next stormy night!" Slightly suspicious, no? Ten days later, said storm blows up but nothing happens, not for hours and hours. Giovanna walks the wet streets; business is slow. Then, at one o'clock in the morning, an "arch of fire" sizzles out of Fosco's house and "literally materializes the old man" in front of the statue of the stone lion. He walked around the lion, running his fingertip along its body, until a huge bolt of lightning appeared and struck it with a blinding flash of brilliance. Slowly the stone crumbled and a huge flesh and blood lion emerged, roaring, from its casing. The lion bounded down the alley and pounced on the helpless Giovanna. The wizard then began to cast a spell on a second lion, but a guard witnessing the scene rushed toward the wizard and plunged his sword into his chest. Now, according to the book, "with a tremendous roar and a blinding flash of lightning, everything suddenly fell silent under the driving rain: the mangled body of the woman on the paving stones, the guard's blackened sword on the ground. There was no trace of Fosco, except for a heart of stone near the razor-sharp sword: it was the stone heart in his chest that could change stone into flesh." Then the guard picked up his sword and cut off the lion's head. Instead of falling to the ground, "the head rose several meters up into the air, and with a final roar exploded into a black substance which covered everything below."

Awesome!

The guard then cut off the head of the second lion, whose body still stands before the Arsenal today. If you look closely, you can see the line around its new where a new stone head replaced it.

(Now this is a slightly amended version of the tale. In the book, there are three lions, and two women, Giovanna and her friend, also a hooker. But this abridged tale retains the essential awesomeness of the original.)

There are a number of bad-weather stories in this itinerary, as it turns out. (I suppose humans need something to do while waiting out the rain and snow.) The next one takes place on a cold, snowy night in November 1917, and is called "The Death Shawl." It's a classic tale of a waifish little girl who flags down a passing gondola with a call of, "Doctor, doctor, come help my mother, she's sick!" and the doctor therein agreeing to help the poor little thing (although he is somewhat puzzled -- "How did she know I was a doctor?") and he helps the sick woman just in the nick of time because she totally would have died of pneumonia if he'd gotten there even a minute later and when he says, "Good thing your daughter flagged me down," the mother replies, "But doctor, she's been dead for a month...."

I just like the classic simplicity of this tale. It's the kind of ghostly tale you could really believe might have happened in the dreary aftermath of the War when death was present everywhere and half of Europe consorted with the ghosts...

But what a downer to leave you with. Our final tale shall also deal with stormy weather, but in a lighter way:

Saint Peter was a stand up kind of guy but, unfortunately for him, his mother was a total scrod. She was such a mean, jealous, selfish woman that she inevitably ended up in hell when she died, despite St. Peter's pleas with god to extricate her from the underworld. Finally, though, god relented and allowed Peter's mother to visit him on earth once a year for fifteen days, seven days before and seven days after the feast of the apostle. Peter was delighted, but the old hag was "so full of envy and spite that every year she brings with her storm, winds and hurricanes, so that no one feels sorry for her anymore, and can't wait for her to go back where she came from."

Haunted Venice, Part One

2011-05-13T11:50:00.000-07:00

I've been working my way through the four itineraries described in Venetian Legends and Ghost Stories; here are the highlights from the first walking tour:

The tour begins at the gothic church Santi Giovanni e Paolo and wends its way over to the campo de Gheto Novo. At the Gothic church, author Alberto Toso Fei entertains us with the story of the Bell Ringer's Skeleton. In this 19th century tale, a curiously tall bellringer is approached by a medical doctor who, marveling over his strange proportions and giant hands, convinces him to sell his body to science. The bellringer accepts, as the doctor pays up front. Now I bet you think you know where this is going, right? But no, no body-snatchers here. The bellringer merely assumes he'll outlive the aged doctor, and happily takes the money to the tavern every night thereafter, where he drinks and drinks to his heart's content. Unfortunately, the bellringer, who's never had so much money all at once before, goes a tad overboard and ends up drinking himself to death. Whoops! Guess who's body's on display at the Museum of Natural History right now? Sucker! Watch the booze kids: that's the moral of this story. Ghost quotient: medium. The spectral skeleton apparently climbs up the tower to ring the bell at midnight, then stumbles down to the street to beg the passersby for enough money to buy himself back. Might've been scarier if the premise wasn't so wryly amusing. [Disclaimer: "ghost quotient" is an entirely meaningless criterion I just invented now to make this sound more fancy.]

Along we walk, and, strangely the author skirts the tour past the Island of the Dead, possibly because he disdains the obvious... although he does tell the perfect story to imagine whilst staring out over the water: The Cosmographer who stole Lucifer's Dreams. Fra Mauro, a monk living on San Michele in the mid-1400s, was an amazing cartographer who left a treasure trove of maps when he died. The only strange thing about him: he never once left Venice to visit any of the places he drew. This is how he did it: he saw the images in dream -- not his own, mind you, but the dreams of the devil, which he (get this) projected onto the cloudy skies above Venice. Art! Hubris! Proto-cinema! I love it. But, as all things the devil wrought, these dreams sometimes slipped out of his grasp and moved through the skies freely, terrifying townspeople and directing witches on their way to the sabbath. Some say they can still be seen up there on cloudy nights, when a storm rages... Weird quotient: high. This story is pure awesome.

We keep toddling along on our imagination tour just until the fondamenta dei Mori, where we stop at number 3399. There, we learn the story of Tintoretto -- yes, the painter -- and how his daughter was nearly tricked by a witch. Apparently a beautiful, mysterious woman told the little girl that she could become a nun if she hid her communion wafers instead of eating them in church, and instead took them home and hid them. Once she had ten, she'd become a nun. The girl obeyed the woman but halfway through the plan, freaked out and spilled it to her pops. Tintoretto was wise in the ways of the witch and knew the old crone would recruit the girl to the craft once she got the ten wafers. He told his daughter wait five more days, then invite the woman into the house to get the wafers. Of course, once the witch crossed the threshold, the artist "rushed her with a knobby stick" until she screeched, changed herself into a cat and flew out the window. Witch factor: medium to high. I like the idea of the witch recruiting a youngster through deceit, like a drug pusher.

Finally, at the Gheto Novo, we learn of the Plague of the Children, a twist on the Pied Piper tale, where the sins of parents are thrust upon their sons and daughters. In the summer of 1576 there was a Plague in Venice and many people died. But in the Jewish Ghetto, a strange thing happened: only children died. One after the other all the children perished, but not a single parent died. They begged the rabbi to find a solution and he pored over esoteric books like Buffy the Vampire Slayer for days and days to no avail. Finally one night he had a dream: in his dream he saw little children playing and dancing in the graveyard. He tore the shroud off one of the children, whose ghost returned the next night to beg for it back. "I cannot return without my shroud," the ghost child said. The rabbi refused unless the child could tell him the cause of the Plague of the Children, and the child told him it happened because a woman had killed her newborn. Well, they brought that crazy bitch to justice and, sure enough, no child died in the Ghetto again... for the rest of the summer. Little lamb* quotient: High. I love the idea of a ghost child wailing, "Give me my shrouuuuud!"

There are far, far many more stories than these; I've merely selected my favorites. No doubt any ghost aficionado will find their own favorites if the buy the book, and no doubt the tour will be even more impressive if walked while glimpsing the macabre floating island of death and such things. But for now, I am content with my virtual tour, and happy to let myself imagine what the ghosts themselves might look like something even someone present at the scene might be forced to do (ghosts have a strange habit of being uncooperative with tour groups and often failing to appear on demand).

One last little bit of business: nowhere in the book does the author mention how long it would take to walk this route, though I doubt it very much matters since time has no meaning in the land of the dead....

Join me next week for part two, where for wizards and mermaids and sainted mothers.

* Little lambs mark the graves of dead children in Green-Wood Cemetery.

The Man In The Picture and other Venice Ghosts

2011-05-09T12:02:00.000-07:00

Just got through finishing Susan Hill's The Man in the Picture, a capably executed novella of the M.R. James school. I generally agree with the criticism out there -- it's classic, restrained, elegant, a wee tad disappointing at the end -- but am intrigued enough by her style to go out and get a copy of The Woman in Black. It's not easy being a writer of classical ghost stories these days, and I'm happy to have found someone with a similarly old-fashioned sensibility. Look for a review of that soon.

There's not much more to discuss about The Man in the Picture, other than I very much liked its use of an inanimate haunted object (I love me a good inanimate haunted object!) but the book is a handy springboard for introducing my newest adventure, the first in what will hopefully be a recurring series: virtual tours through haunted cities. The first, of course, will be Venice (I've already alluded to it here) and draws heavily upon this book, since I've never actually visited the place. (The book is the magic lantern show to my 19th century country rube.)

Before we actually wander the haunted streets of our imaginations, a little background on Venice, specifically on Venice as a trope in the horror canon. According to TVtropes.org, cities with canals instead of streets are a perennially popular setting for works of fantasy, though they're not sure why -- perhaps it's an aesthetic thing, or perhaps it's simply because watery bi-ways are so unusual. My theory hews somewhat closely to the latter; the unreal, shape-shifting quality of water opposes all that is solid -- earth, asphalt -- and thus lends itself to fevered imaginings, to the dreaming of dreams. And in dreams, of course, we all know the symbolic qualities of water include birth, death, sex, the deepest parts of the psyche: the perfect setting for our darkest tales.

Perhaps the most famous suspense story set in Venice is Daphne du Maurier's "Don't Look Now," though a significant portion of "The Talented Mr. Ripley" is set in Venice as well. (The is also a ghost story called "The Haunted Hotel" by Wilkie Collins, which I shall clearly have to read.) "The Man in the Picture" joins this illustrious crowd as its narrative moves between the Most Serene Republic and sedate Cambridge. Hill's descriptions of the city are marred with dread: "It seemed to me to be a city of corruption and excess, an artificial place, full of darkness and foul odors... [of] dark and sinister water." In the course of the book, two young couples visit Venice on their honeymoon; the first couple visits quite innocently, the second seem drawn to it even though they know it brought death and tragedy in the past. In Hill's world, the city and the eponymous painting depicting it exert a dark power over anyone who beholds them.

Though I'm sure it's a perfectly delightful city, thanks to speculative fiction I can now only think of Venice in terms of gloom and darkness. Why not profit from my fear and misery, gentle reader? Come with me on a journey that starts dark and will only get darker. Headless monks, drowning witches, the sighing ghosts of dead children... all these things await you as you shiver through the summer months in various dank and moldy catacombs, taking the Deathly Grand Tour with your beloved Spinster Aunt...

Venetian Cemetery Photo courtesy of Lisa Manetti

Ghost books, follow me home

2011-05-07T13:05:00.000-07:00

I'm currently reading two books about ghosts and Venice: Susan Hill's The Man in the Picture, and Alberto Toso Fei's Venetian Legends and Ghost Stories, which jumped off my friend's bookshelf and thrust itself into my hands back in February, and so I obligingly took it home. The chapter titles alone fire the imagination: The Flight of the Witch, The Sigh of the Severed Head, The Sad Song of the Mermaid. Perhaps, as I move through the book next week and through the rest of the month, I shall post updates, imaginary travelogues, that take you and I through the very hauntedest haunts of the city watery graves! And, of course, a review of The Man in the Picture is forthcoming as well!

It's a great day for millinery

2011-04-29T02:55:00.000-07:00

5:56 a.m. Kate's in the car! She went for the Grace Kelly look -- good call. That's what you wear to become a princess. I hope this spells the end of the strapless trend in wedding dresses for a little while.

I've been up since 5:30. The good china's out, the tea's on, and both the Queen and I are wearing yellow.

Update: For more on my extremely important impressions of the Royal Wedding, pop over to my Twitter feed!

Double update! The Toronto Star issued a special commemorative coin! I will try very hard not to lose it.

Triple update: Grace van Cutsem rules:

There's still snow in the colonies

2011-04-28T18:21:00.000-07:00

I'm in Huntsville, Ontario. There are patches of snow on the ground. We're elbow deep in preparations for the royal wedding tomorrow. My Nana gave us a quick tutorial on how to sit whilst drinking tea (ankles crossed). My sister briefly read a recipe for scones, then seemed to get bored and wandered off to do something else. My niece is safely asleep in her Disney Princess sleeping bag. I'm enjoying this history on the creepy history of the royal family, watching as much pre-wedding coverage as possible and eating pie. That is all.

A Very Royal Weekend

2011-04-27T09:40:00.000-07:00

Dear readers,

As many of you may know by now, I am flying to Canada tonight then driving up to Huntsville, Ontario to watch the Royal Wedding on TV with my Nana. Stay tuned for frequent updates on dresses (mine -- what, I'm going to dress up too, you know!), the tea I drink, the amount of whiskey I pour into my tea, and what I put on my crumpet.

Love,

Spinster Aunt

This just in: girls can drink whiskey now

2011-04-11T14:46:00.000-07:00

According to my good friends at the Canadian Press, women are just discovering this awesome new thing called bourbon.

"I think there's this sense of relief that finally we were at a point where we can be taken seriously as women who enjoy bourbon and the lifestyle that accompanies it," said Mary Quinn Ramer, a founding board member from Lexington.

And man, what a lifestyle it is. It's pretty much all success all the time.

Here's another fun fact: "Bill Samuels Sr., concocted the Maker's Mark recipe in the 1950s, but it was his mother, Margie, who coined the brand's name and came up with the idea of adorning the bottles with dripping red wax."

I'm thinking Mama Margie's "idea" came about kinda like this: "Oh fuck me, I spilt the goddam wax again!"

Insidious (2011)

2011-04-04T07:59:00.000-07:00

Insidious is a tautly-crafted, old-school, genuinely terrifying movie.

Some of the crappier reviews of Insidious throw around the word "cliche" but don't you believe it. Don't believe the inept and condescending critics who say things like "you'll like it if you've never seen a horror movie before." Genre is wasted on these dorks, who prissily sit there and tick off the things they recognize from other movies. Yes, the film references other movies in a fan-boy kind of way. Deal with it.

As for those who complain the scares are lame, well -- ! The much-derided baby-monitor scene spooked the hell out of me. I don't know, I guess I find simple things like demon voices on baby monitors frightening. I'm a simple woman, I guess. But the scene I really, really, REALLY loved more than anything else in the movie was the one in which the weird midget guy starts playing "Tiptoe through the Tulips" on the record player while Renai (Rose Byrne) is outside putting out the garbage. I love the way it's shot, with her hearing the record before glimpsing him through the window. I love the use of sound in both these scenes. (One critic said the film relied too much on sound. Say what?) And what about the scary old lady in the photos, getting closer in each picture? How on earth can anyone not find these concepts, these images, scary as hell? And don't say it's because you've seen a lot of scary movies before. If a 19th century newsie ghost started fucking around with your record player, you wouldn't act so cool.

Things do break down a little in the third act, I will concede that. I can see the necessity of the father fighting for his son, I liked the romp through the haunted house, I even liked the twist. (Again, as with the whole genre-versus-cliché argument, there's something satisfying about a twist that you see coming.) And oh how I loved all the ghosts crowding into the house. I don't know that I would have given up that pleasure, even though I sort of wish the story had diverged after the seance scene. (How I would have done it? Let the demon posses the boy, kill the boy. Maybe I would not have gotten a PG rating.) The break-down, as I see it, only stems from the necessity of tying up the story. In other words, there's less of that amorphous creepiness I so enjoy, and more plot strands dutifully tied up. It doesn't feel like a climax so much as a chore duly executed.

Luckily for me, the rest of the film more than makes up for the imperfect third act. The true genre pleasures are all present and to those who decry them as clichés, I have to ask them: "How would you have done it? What totally original spin on the concept of haunting would you have come up with?" Or, more theoretically, "Does it make you happier to deny yourself the pleasures of genre than to immerse yourself in them?" Likely I would be greeted with silence. But not an ominous silence because, you know, that's totally been done before.

Booky-wooks

2011-03-31T09:51:00.000-07:00

Here's a nice little list of "Old Fashioned Horror" books from Abebooks.com.

Old-fashioned. Doesn't that have a nice, wholesome ring to it?

In a completely unrelated story, my birthday is coming up soon.

"Miss Marple Resurfaces, And This Time She's No Spinster"

2011-03-28T14:04:00.000-07:00

According to Deadline.com, "Disney has made a deal to revive the Agatha Christie mystery series staple character Miss Marple, but with one big difference: instead of the elderly spinster who lives in the English village of St. Mary's [sic] Mead and solves mysteries as a hobby, the new configuration is for Mark Frost to script a version where Marple is in her 30s or 40s."

That's interesting because I'm adapting an Hercule Poirot mystery for the Dizneee Channel wherein he is a 25-year-old Asian man played by John Cho who can communicate psychically with elephants. He works at the San Diego zoo and solves mysteries in his spare time, when he's not riding his Harley. Also, Veronica Mars makes a bunch of cameos.

A not-at-all-timely review of Breillat's Sleeping Beauty

2011-03-23T18:32:00.000-07:00

It is axiomatic that fairy tales morph with each re-telling. This narrative shape-shifting lets each new version capture new anxieties, reflect new eras; each new author adds his or her own personal stamp. Catherine Breillat’s Sleeping Beauty is no exception. As the director said in a recent interview, “When I made the film I had to ask, ‘Why me?’ I have to become part of the story. I have to be it.” With Sleeping Beauty, Breillat re-imagines the plot by starting from the most seemingly obvious point: the heroine’s dreams. (After all, what else can you do with a character whose main action is sleeping?) Breillat imagines a girl who “wanted to be daring and do things that were dangerous, forbidding, and do them in her own way.” So the passive protagonist of yore becomes an adventurer, whose soul fearlessly roams the universe as her body lies asleep in a silent chamber. Or, as Breillat puts it, this is no “a little Barbie pink dream.” This decision is both brilliantly simple and dazzlingly inspired. Whether the film always holds up to this conception is a matter of debate, but as a guiding construct it is nearly perfect.

Want more? The rest of the review is here! Aren't you angry I'm making you click something?

In Which I Celebrate Drunken Irish Novelists*

2011-03-17T09:17:00.000-07:00

Let's take some time out of our very busy day (accomplished so far: gone to deli for milk, learned how to pronounce Justin Bieber in Spanish, drank coffee, briefly opened windows, closed them again, now eating oatmeal) to pay tribute to some of my literary heroes who also happen to be Irish!

After spending much of yesterday arguing about the correct spelling of Saint Paddy's Day (D's, not T's people!) I got to thinking about words, language, and the old sod. Apparently James Joyce didn't give a shit about spelling and made up a bunch of 100-letter words in Finegan's (sp? who cares!) Wake. I don't know, I never read that fucker. I'm just not smart enough, honestly. Anyhoo, so then I thought some more and realized that two of my all-time favorite scribes were Irishmen.

One: first love, Oscar Wilde. I had a children's edition of The Happy Prince and other Tales when I was tiny -- illustrated by Arthur Rackham, sigh.... so beautiful -- and loved, loved, loved it. Later, as a teenager, I learned Wilde was master of the bitchy one-liner, and my devotion was renewed. I still heart you, fatty.

Two: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. The master, the absolute master, of gothic ghost stories. Along with M.R. James, one of my very very most beloved favorites, ever! There's a very comprehensive bibliography and link to articles here, and a very nice appreciation of J.S. by M.R. here. And here's a link to one of my favorite Le Fanu stories, The Sexton's Adventure!

Some smarty-pants critics have posited that some of Le Fanu's anxieties were rooted in his fractured identity as an Anglo-Irishman. Again, I'm not smart enough to know what this means. All I know is that he totally rules, so a toast to him! Hurrah for ghost stories, hurrah for mad novelists, and hurrah for holidays on which intemperance is celebrated, nay, encouraged!

* And here's a full list of Irish references on The Simpsons! You caught that Simpsons reference, didn't you? Of course you did, clever reader! That's why you really boil my potato!

Once upon a film

2011-03-14T18:37:00.000-07:00

There's a delightful round-up of fairy tales on film over at Movie Morlocks; it runs the gamut from classic (Cocteau) to obscure (Valerie and her Week of Wonders) to contemporary (Red Riding Hood). Insightful readings add new dimensions to old favorites (Freeway's "subtext is not about sex, but about class and taste, as it reveals the hypocrisy and condescension of the liberal middle class toward the 'unfortunates' of society..." zing!) while her list also adds at least three previously unknown titles to my Netflix queue.
An excellent list that should inspire any fairy-tale fan, or fan of film for that matter. The only thing I might add to it might be Hawks' Ball of Fire, which bears a very loose resemblance to Snow White, as gangster moll Barbara Stanwyck hides out in a houseful of seven* mild-mannered professors who are writing a slang dictionary.

* There are eight, actually, if you count Gary Cooper, but we all know he's the Prince!

"Hey... they both wear capes!"

2011-03-06T11:41:00.000-08:00

"Industry expert" Mark Lisanti on how fairy tales became the new comic books. Picture the phrase being uttered by a dim-witted studio exec and it actually sounds like a fairly accurate, or at least plausible, explanation. Add to that the two most beautiful words in the English language -- public domain -- and you've got yourself a trend!

"That oughta have a highball around it"

2011-02-28T18:33:00.000-08:00

As anyone who knows me is aware, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is one of my all time favorite movies -- certainly my favorite Hawks movie, and that's saying something. I never understood criticism of the film; I remember vaguely hearing something to the effect that "those women" were gold-digging "monsters" who should be reviled. That maybe some boring old prude somewhere would like to toss them right off the great big cruise ship of life. Well let me tell you something, buster: those girls wouldn't drown.

I learned everything I need to know about life from Dorothy and Lorelei. (Well, those two, and the Golden Girls who, if you think about it, follow the same paradigm: Rose + Blanche = Lorelei, Dorothy + Ma = Dorothy Shaw.) For example, here's a little advice that comes in handy most any where, any time:

"If a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing well."

"If we can't empty his pockets between the two of us, we're not worthy of the name woman."

"A lady never admits her feet hurt."

"Nobody chaperones the chaperone."

And there's more! So if you've never seen it, go rent, steal, or charm someone into lending you Gentlement Prefer Blondes tonight.

As for me, I'd like to make a toast: to friendship, highballs, song-and-dance numbers, Henry Spofford III (and valet), and diamonds.... shiny, shiny diamonds.... I raise my glass and recite this little number:

There once was a fellow named Sidney
He drank til he ruined a kidney
It shriveled and shrank
But he drank and he drank
Well he had his fun doing it, didn't he?

I know another one: bottoms up.

Interview with Corinne May Botz

2011-02-09T16:01:00.000-08:00

One need not be a chamber to be haunted,
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.

Ghosts have a strange relationship to their spaces: they are part of the home, yet they are frightening; they are unknown, and yet they reveal themselves to us. They are integral to the space, which may explain why so much ghostly activity comes from the house itself (moving furniture, smashing dishes, etc.). The house becomes its own agent, and yet is entwined with its inhabitants – and interlopers....

I write about ghosts, art and haunted houses in this interview with photographer, writer and all around nice lady Corinne May Botz. Read it if obsession holds no fear for you, if you can tread the darkest places of the mind without trembling....

Secret Beyond the Door

2011-02-04T07:04:00.000-08:00

When I'm not writing random screeds against perfectly innocent children's movies, I craft thoughtful considerations of fairy tales on film: read my take on the Bluebeard-inspired Secret Beyond the Door at Cabinet des Fees!

The Little Mermaid

2011-02-02T17:58:00.000-08:00

Five grown women gathered in a Brooklyn apartment one wintry Friday evening to watch The Little Mermaid. Why? That actually, I can’t explain. A mass email had gone out mentioning a “girl’s night,” that included, for reasons unknown to me, the mention of “a Disney movie.” Somehow this grew to mean the specific aquatic-themed Disney movie, and I was, if you will, hooked. Not so much on the idea of the film, but on the nautical concept surrounding the whole event. We were to eat fish and crab-cakes, and drink salty dogs. Swedish fish were in the offing for desert. One girl thought to bring a sack full of oranges, “to prevent scurvy.”

What can I say? I'm a sucker for nautical crap. I like to imagine I’d enjoy being an explorer on one of the early journeys to map the New World, though my husband assures me these trips were terrible. (I know they were, but wouldn’t the thrill of discovery outweigh the inconvenience of being eaten by your starving shipmates when you ran out of rats and mast-bark? Some people have no sense of adventure.)

So it was this, more than the prospect of the Disney movie, that drew me in. To be frank, I never cared for this particular studio offering. In general, 1990s Disney always struck me as too precious and cloying, too snide and self-congratulatory. I don’t hate Disney. I respect the animation and even like some of the songs (though not all – again, many of the ‘90s songs struck me as too Broadway, and I despise Broadway musicals). And there are some sequences in Disney films that are almost literally enchanting: the dwarves’ “Whistle as you Work” song in Snow White, the terrifying spindle-pricking scene in Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella’s opening credits. And Alice in Wonderland entranced me as a child (it still does). Though I can respect, appreciate and even enjoy certain aspects of the Mouse’s imagined universes, I can’t help but loathe certain Disney princesses.

Some are less irritating than others – Sleeping Beauty, for instance, I find quite elegant. But I have the usual feminist gripe with Walt’s stable of fair maidens, and little Ariel seems to bother me most of all. Her unnecessarily enormous eyes, for instance. All Disney heroines are wide-eyed, but there’s something about her proportions that irritate me. Obviously I’m not looking for verisimilitude in a cartoon character; I just don’t find her aesthetically pleasing. I do like that she has red hair, though, so I’ll give her that.

I have another issue with The Little Mermaid: I think it frankly butchers Hans Anderson’s exquisite story. I realize it is irrelevant and useless to compare filmic adaptations of literature to their source material in such a way. There’s nothing worse than hearing some nerd whine, “It wasn’t like the booo-oook!” Film is an art form unto itself. So I will concede this point is critically irrelevant but note that it biases me against the film from the get-go, since I cherish the tragic original story so very much.

So maybe I should check myself here, and try to locate the locus of my hatred: other than twisting a delicate tale of love and loss into a cheerful fable about “being yourself” and spoon-feeding it to hordes of already over-entitled, delusionally self-confident little girls, is the movie really so bad? I don’t know. Plot-wise it dutifully hits all the requisite points. Song-wise, I guess it’s all right, if a little poppy (thought thankfully nowhere near as appalling as The Lion King). The sidekicks are average, neither especially charming or especially annoying. The sense of place is nicely rendered. It is mentioned at one point that they dwell in the Caspian Sea, and Prince Eric’s seafaring kingdom boasts a dreamy beachside castle. (Though I would have liked to spend more time in the undersea kingdom; I think the lack of time spent in this world merely demonstrates the lack of imagination put into this film.) There are interesting little touches here and there (Ariel’s stash of human detritus includes a de la Tour painting of “A Penitent Magdalen,” an interesting choice). So far, it seems to be coming up a draw. Now what about the villains?

This may be the only area where The Little Mermaid really shines. Ursula the Sea-Witch is the best Disney villainess since the evil queen in Snow White.

Her oozing flesh jiggles and quakes monstrously, as she quivers with delight in her own evil. Her big musical number is actually pretty decent, very lurid and smoky and filled with obscene suggestion. I’m unclear as to what her motivation for evil is exactly, other than mere generational jealousy – she seems to motivated partly out of an admirable desire to displace King Triton and rule the sea (who wouldn’t want to rule the sea?) and a generalized dislike of the willful, self-regarding Ariel – obviously something I can understand. Whatever the reason, she pursues evil with resounding style, from her clip-on earrings to her fire engine lipstick. Her flabby, fulsome body is a masterstroke of monster design; you can hardly tell where her back-fat ends and her octopus legs begin. And the final showdown, in which she turns Triton into a weird sea-ghost, raises a thunderstorm, and attempts to murder both Eric and Ariel, is an astoundingly frightening climax for a children’s movie. You can’t help but respect Ursula.

Overall, there is a nullity to The Little Mermaid that I just can’t quite get behind. I feel hollow after I watch it, experiencing neither joy for Ariel nor pity for her father, the imposingly rendered King Triton, who sacrifices everything to let her join Prince Eric’s kingdom. I don’t even feel feminist rage* at Ariel giving up everything she knows for a man, because all she ever knew before was a petulant, sullen sort of discontent. In essence, she gets everything she wants, no matter how many people she has to destroy (Ursula) or almost destroy (Eric, her father) to get it. When the movie begins she is spoiled and selfish, and when it ends she is spoiled and selfish. (How many months will go by before she wakes up one morning next to Eric and says, “Darling don’t you that I long to live in the air!”?)

But most of all (and I realize now I veer dangerously close to "it wasn't like the book!" territory here) this is a tragic tale of longing (not petty whims, Ariel!) and loss, utter, utter loss! This is not a peppy story, it shouldn't have a happy ending, damn it. The message of The Little Mermaid seems to be “let your children do what they want.” Surely this isn’t a lesson American parents need to learn.

* On a side note, Disney's pandering to feminism is quite blatant and enraging here: Ariel finds her voice, don't you see? I'm not buying it, no sir.

This self-promotion fills me with shame...

2011-01-25T04:02:00.000-08:00

...but Spinster Aunt's alter ego, A.J. Sweeney, has a short story up at Flashes in the Dark! Normally Spinster Aunt is too reserved to toot her own horn like this, but that A.J. Sweeney is a cold-hearted, fang-toothed hussy.

Goblin markets

2011-01-17T07:20:00.000-08:00

Lately I've been getting back into fairy tales, having read some great contemporary updates in recent months (e.g. Baba Yaga Laid an Egg) and I'm pleased to see the form is thriving online. A couple of intriguing sites I've stumbled upon recently include Cabinet des Fees, Enchanted Conversation, and the sensibly named Fairy Tale Review. I like the sense of continuation and collaboration as new stories from multiple authors mesh with existing narratives. The Fairy Tale Review organizes its issues by color -- this month's is red, abounding with tales of the girl in the riding hood, and an upcoming issue will be gray. Enchanted Conversation favors story-based themes, with every issue focusing on a specific fairy tale. Upcoming: Rumplestiltskin. EC's editor also has a blog called Diamonds and Toads, where she muses on all things fairy tale with great passion and visual panache. Finally, Cabinet des Fees is a quasi-highbrow affair that tempers whimsy with some sturdy academic offerings, making it a good source for further (non-fiction) reading in addition to its short stories. My only problem at this point is finding enough hours in the day to read everything therein, so if anyone has any spells for stopping time, let me know.

Winter...

2011-01-07T12:13:00.000-08:00

I like to imagine I live in an enchanted secret world about 90% of the time... a soft blanket of snow and a hushed, empty park help me do that splendidly...

It's lovely to see this meadow so child-free...

I chose this angle to hide the blue smear of spray paint on the rocks...

......
.......
.........

Critters

2011-01-05T07:17:00.001-08:00

I've been having weird dreams lately (I don't know why I bother to use the word "lately") about sinister little forest creatures.

In one dream, I have a pet who is a re-animated taxidermy squirrel named Mabel.

In other, an owl is stalking me. He perches at my window and stares...

According to dreammoods.com, to dream of an owl symbolizes -- wait for it -- wisdom! And to see a squirrel in your dream indicates that you are involved in a loveless, pointless relationship, an unprofitable business project, or are pursuing empty and fruitless endeavors!

Interestingly enough, to dream that you are trying to run over squirrels with a lawn mower means you are looking for some form of acceptance.

Life imitates art

2011-01-03T18:47:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas!

2010-12-23T10:29:00.000-08:00

I hope you enjoy this lovely gingerbread graveyard I baked just for you. In truth, the gingerbread looks more like gravestones without the candy on it, but frankly I plan on eating this sucker. Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! See you in 2011!

Ghost Building

2010-12-13T07:26:00.000-08:00

Last week my friend Mike and I went walking around the financial district to gaze at old graves and dream of Dutch colonial things but, this being the financial district, couldn't help but crane our necks upward and get carried away by skyscrapers. Inspired by the hollow grandness of the bank buildings, I blathered on a bit about how I love narratives of financial ruin, the sheer drama of histories of crashes and panics. Then we stumbled on a gorgeous Art Deco building at the corner of Wall and Pine, and, well, witnessed history.

Fascinated by its sleek elegance, we trotted round and round the edifice, vainly looking for an open door, but all ingress and egress was blocked off and everything was shuttered up tight. Odd, considering it was five o'clock on a weekday afternoon.

At last we found a single open entrance and passed through a revolving door into an unusually
quiet lobby suffused with warm-colored marble. (I remember it being a gingery gold color, but memory is fallible. I should have snapped a picture, darn it.) A plaque informed us of the building's ownership, and we walked through the hushed, utterly deserted interior to the only people in the place: two uniformed security guards. They stood amidst the silence and half-packed cardboard boxes.

We greeted them and asked, "Is this the AIG Building?"

The kinder of the two guards replied slowly: "Used to be."

We spoke to him some more, and he revealed to us that the building had been sold "to the Koreans." I asked him if he would keep his job. "I don't know. I'm just living from day to day," he replied. (Reverting to a strange Little Orphan Annie diction that overtakes me sometimes, I piped up, "You're real nice, mister, I'm sure you'll keep your job, sure you will!") The other guard stood stoically, as soundless as the empty lobby.

At one point a slim young man with light-brown hair and a sad face came into the building. He was dressed in what I imagine bankers wear on weekends, and had on a backpack. As he passed by the stack of boxes, I realized he was likely going upstairs to pack the last of his work things into that backpack.

We waved goodbye to the friendly security guard (I really do wish I had more of a controlling stake in the universe so I could ensure him a job with the new owners) and headed back into the darkening afternoon. As we left, we saw a lone, white-haired lady, perhaps some ancient secretary, shuffle noiselessly across the floor, swipe her ID card at a golden turnstile, and move toward the elevator bank.

***

P.S. Did you know there are no happy hours in the financial district? A waitress explained, "We don't really need them down here."

Bacon Porn

2010-12-06T19:35:00.000-08:00

My new Hams & Jams catalogue came in the mail today, and when I say "new" I mean my first ever. I have no idea how they got our address, but frankly it doesn't matter. When you're pitching meat-in-the-mail, I'm buying.

To start, I think I'd like the Sizzle Pack, featuring one pound of Country Smoked Bacon, 1 lb Belgian Waffle and Pancake Mix and an 12 oz bottle of Maple Syrup. Then I'll move on to the Loveless Smokehouse Special, featuring:

1 lb Country Smoked Bacon
2 lbs Country Smoked Sausage
12 oz Center-Cut Country Ham Slices

Then maybe I'll grab a nice jar of pumpkin butter to go with my Butter My Biscuits! gift pack, and, finally, top it off with a nice bag of Piggy Popcorn, that is to say, popcorn popped in bacon grease sprinkled with Real Country Smoked Bacon Bits.

And if that's not enough, I might for for a Whole Hog Gift Pack or two.

Teeny tiny deadly things

2010-11-30T22:37:00.000-08:00

"Morgues and crime scenes were hardly places for ladies of good breeding to discuss, let alone visit."

So, in characteristic fashion, I discover Frances Glessner Lee long after the rest of the world does. What can I say, it isn't easy living in a state of calculated obliviousness. In any case, it isn't when you find her, I suppose, that matters: it's finding her at all. Imagine my euphoria when I learned that not only was this woman a fellow dioramist, but she made tiny dioramas of real-life crime scenes! What's more, she was a society woman, which made the contrast between her gentle good breeding and the gruesomeness of her chosen art all the more delightful.

Observe:

"Conducted within the contours of conventionality, Glessner Lee’s activities were consonant with the one career she was expected to assume, that of society matron. Her tables were elegantly appointed, her fortune endowed a worthy cause, and her leisure time was productively devoted to a hobby many women enjoyed: making miniature scenes."

Oh yes, please continue!

" [H]er dinner guests dissected grisly details of crime scenes over their consommé [and] within her dollhouse dioramas, cheery dotted-swiss curtains and floral wallpapers belied the presence of dead bodies..."

As if that wasn't enough, the brilliant woman gave her circa-1940s dioramas the best name ever: The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death.

Sigh.

Oh and, sure, yeah, they were scientifically significant and had some major impact on criminologists at Harvard, etc. But for me, I think it's just enough that they are. Would I have liked them better if they served no purpose? No. I'm just sayin. I mean, sure she revolutionized the science of forensic pathology, but it would have been as charming coming from someone who wasn't a millionaire heiress? I mean, I'm picturing her as a sort of Katharine Hepburn/Carole Lomard type, you know? Or maybe, in her later years, a J.B. Fletcher type:

Anyway, this completely badass woman who took dentist's drills to her dollhouses is now the subject of a new film:

Let's all just bask in her awesomeness. And perhaps I can convince my more ghoulish family members to buy me the book.

P.S. Scholarly sources on the preceding quotes can be found here. More info on the amazing woman who took these photos can be found here and here.

Spinster Travelogue: Green-Wood Cemetery

2010-11-14T15:58:00.000-08:00

We all know how much I love cemeteries (I'm sure I've alluded to rambling madly over the tomb-strewn hillocks of Green-Wood before) but as I am camera-averse and rarely document anything, I have never actually bothered to post photos of the excellent locale.

Until now:

This is one of my favorite, and most vampirey-looking graves.

A tree. No more, no less. I thought the color was rather nice.

Surely Aunt Abbey was a Spinster Aunt, no?

The grave of Charlotte Canda, which I walked past many times without noticing. Why? Because the False Japanese Cedar always stole my attention. Incidentally, I have written rather an excellent ghost story about Charlotte and her diabolical aunt. (Disclaimer: there is nothing anywhere in written history that proves her aunt was diabolical. This is merely a figment of my fevered imagination.)

The chapel. I like the dusky autumn light.

Again, color!

The path of life leads but to the grave!

Where the dead come alive (metaphorically)

2010-09-27T13:10:00.000-07:00

Hey everybody, just wanted to announce that I'm now leading walking tours of lower Manhattan!

I offer non-cheesy walking tours of the historical variety... contact me if you love the Dutch colony as much as I do, and I'll give you my Stuyvesant special (just a fancy name for a Colonial-themed walking tour of lower Manhattan).

Enjoy!

I like it when worlds collide

2010-09-24T14:03:00.000-07:00

So the other day I go to Green-Wood's art show, and one of their notable artists is George Catlin, right? Then I go to a lecture on Five Points over at the Smarmy Marxist Tenement Museum (I love them, but geez, sometimes it's all a bit much) and what do I see? This painting of Five Points, by George Catlin:

Boom.

Artists in (Permanent) Residence

2010-09-14T07:06:00.001-07:00

Panther Shooting, Brazil (George Catlin, 1854)

This weekend there is a free art exhibit in the Green-Wood historic chapel of many of the artists buried in the cemetery. I'll be going, so, you know, it'll be awesome.

Teeny tiny seedy things

2010-08-18T07:18:00.000-07:00

My new favorite thing in all the world are these tiny, seedy sculptures by Alan Wolfson, which I found over at Vanishing New York. My favorite, of course, is the Triple-A Detective Agency (pictured above), but his wee Times Square peep shows and dingy hotel rooms are worth ogling, too. Visit his fun world-in-miniature website here. I really need to beef up my dioramas after seeing this.

2010-08-08T20:50:00.000-07:00

I feel like I'm turning into one of those people who insist on showing their vacation slides* because all my recent posts have been, "Here's what I've been up to this weekend," while really no one cares. But I really did take some tremendous walks -- despite the heat -- and I saw turtles! Tiny frogs! Flowers! Bees! And it was so exciting, really it was, that I whipped out my camera-phone in a great passion and snapped things that seemed terribly important at the time...

I saw very gorge roses:

... and butterflies... ... and scads of other lovely things, but since I'm not really a good photographer I won't embarrass myself with awful snaps of the turtle (especially since the poor creature was shrinking from the attention and begging not to be photographed, really) and other things, but I do have to leave you with one lovely bit of whimsy -- my bagel took the shape of a heart, when cut (or rather the centre of it did) and whenever my food accidentally takes on a heart shape there's a part of me that can't resist:

So there: hearts and flowers and butterflies. It's been that kind of weekend. But don't think I've gone soft on you: I can still kill a man twenty-seven different ways with a hairpin and 9-volt battery.

* Do those still exist?

Olmsted docu at Prospect Park, August 4th

2010-07-30T20:17:00.000-07:00

I had a pretty magical walk in the park today, which reminds me to tell y'all that the film I worked on this winter is screening at Prospect Park this coming Wednesday!

THE OLMSTED LEGACY, featuring the voices of Kevin Kline and Kerry Washington, premieres in Olmsted and Vaux’s classic park–under the stars, and free for all.

Wednesday, August 4

8pm

The Celebrate Brooklyn! Stage at the Bandshell, Prospect Park.

Come nerd out with me at the park!

Weekend Projects a la David Lynch

2010-06-30T19:37:00.000-07:00

I'm gearing up to start my summer diorama, which I'm very excited about. The spring diorama was a great success, and I'm sorry to see it go.

The narrative here is that Victorian street urchins discover a magical world of giant toads and flowers. Sorry about the glare in this photo. These were taken with a camera phone under high lights, with shiny paper, and I realize you can't even see the toad here. I'll have to take some more before I dismantle it.

I started creating dioramas in my living room earlier this year, when I noticed that an empty air-conditioner hole just begs to be turned into a tiny theatre of wonders. This was my winter diorama. It's sort of a Russian fairy-tale version of Red Riding Hood:

Not to give too much away, but my summer diorama will involve nuns.

Au revoir, Madame Devereaux

2010-06-05T09:28:00.000-07:00

I know this happened three days ago but I just can't stand to be party to the vulgar internet eulogizing in which many of my peers indulge, so I held off until I felt it was decent.

All I shall say is this: Blanche was, is and always will be my soul mate (though in my dumber moments I'm very Rose, my heart will always belong to the Slut). And we have the exact same reaction to form-letter rejections:

In which I trivialize Memorial Day

2010-05-31T11:32:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm back. Although I grew tired of blogging and went into a self-induced semi-retirement back in January, I now realize I have far too many hilarious photos and trivial anecdotes to share with the world, and must return to the blogosphere to, at the very least, keep those Chinese spam comments from gathering in the comments section of my blog like cobwebs.

To celebrate my triumphant return from obscurity, here is a photo from my Memorial Day celebration, in which I re-enact the Battle of Gettysburg using blue and gray cupcakes:

As a great man once said, "You're welcome America."

Brevity

2010-01-28T11:40:00.000-08:00

Hey ladies and gents,

Posting in the upcoming months is going to be light and sporadic so there won't be much going on around here, but why not follow me on Twitter? I'm much easier to take in small doses.

http://twitter.com/SpinsterAunt

Or take a gander at www.andreajanes.com for new short stories and other updates!

In the meantime, I'll be staying at my friend Jack Handle's.

Stay gold,

Christmas Ghosts: The Third Story

2009-12-30T21:27:00.000-08:00

OK, I upped the cheese factor for this one, a retelling of an urban legend about jewel thief Estelle Ridley, a.k.a Fanchon Moncare. Like a souffle that doesn't quite rise, this story is missing something -- I think the tone is a little off.... it came out sounding a bit Dan Brown (or Caleb Carr!), when I was going for Stephen King. Anyway, hopefully you, dear reader, can overlook its flaws and enjoy the pulpy, silly goodness.

Happy New Year!

Why story #3 is taking a little while....

2009-12-28T20:34:00.000-08:00

"Setting aside the highest masterpieces of literature, there is nothing more difficult to achieve than a first-class ghost story."

- Montague Summers

Christmas Ghosts: The Second Story

2009-12-22T07:14:00.000-08:00

Click here to read "Notes Taken At Keen's."

Christmas Ghosts: The First Story

2009-12-18T18:17:00.000-08:00

Telling ghost stories while sitting round the fire (or, if you will, space heater) is a time-honored holiday tradition, one I've promised to share with my readers and fellow spinsters-at-heart this year.

The first is a local tale, from right here in Brooklyn. Gravesend, in fact. It's rather a spooky name, isn't it? Indeed. So without further preamble, here is a very chilling story I heard around the fire tonight; its author claims it is completely true but, of course, punch was served so there may be embellishments here and there, which is to be expected, of a ghost story.

Click here to read "Lady Moody of Gravesend."

Feelin' Christmasy Part Deux

2009-12-17T13:21:00.000-08:00

Yaaaaaaaaayyyyyyy!!!!!!!!!

I know technically it's impossible for a person without a "real job" to have a holiday, but I've been verrrry busy lately and today, just today, I seem to have gotten the last of my errands and things-to-do out of the way! Hurrah! Which leaves, between now and Christmas, a delightful window of time to fill however I please, specifically, in the following ways:

1. The baking of cookies

2. The baking of cakes

3. Ditto pies

4. The brewing of punch and drinking thereof

5. Ghost stories!

6. Gingerbread house diorama contest (contestants: self)

7. Prezzies! The buying thereof. Particularly for long-suffering husbands who may or may not have endured a rough week with their insane spinster-wife ("Is my hair turning green? I'm convinced it's turning green.") And holiday cards!

8. Movies!

9. Winter solstice walking tours and Knickerbocker lectures

10. Various festivities, possibly including Festivus... and.... ice skating!

Also, I will be following the Bowery Boys' delightful "A Very Special New Amsterdam Christmas," in which they detail how many of our (national!) Christmas traditions have their origins not in the stuffy Massachusetts Bay Puritans but in our own delightful rollicking roistering Dutch colony. Hurrah!

Why I love old ladies -- Reason #294

2009-12-16T16:14:00.000-08:00

294. They nonchalantly bake fifteen-layer cakes

'Many experienced cooks in the South assume that everyone knows how to bake. Virginia Willis, author of “Bon Appétit, Y’all,” sent me a coconut cake recipe she got from an 80-year-old family friend from Augusta, Ga. It begins: “Make a yellow cake.”'

Bond No. 9 Signature Perfume is Gold

2009-12-15T13:46:00.000-08:00

What does it take to make me shill a product here on Spinster Aunt? Specifically, a product that retails for $330 an ounce and comes in a gold bottle? In a word: oud.

Bond No. 9 continues to send me free samples of their glorious perfumes, some of which are more memorable than others (my favorites are Saks Fifth Avenue For Her and Chinatown; my least favorite is Nuits de NoHo) but I treasure them all.

Well, a little gold vial showed up at my house last night, and while I was at first merely pleasantly amused by the copy ("Here is the incomparable beauty and derring-do of our island metropolis distilled in liquid form!" Tee hee, I love it!) my benign amusement suddenly turned deadly serious: this is THE BEST THING I HAVE EVER SMELLED. Seriously. I can't stop smelling it.

Do you want to know what it smells like? This is what it smells like:

Will they churn out a version in a non-gold, more reasonably priced bottle? Should they? Who cares! For now, I am going to deck myself out in this powerful sample for as long as humanly possible.... and breathe....

Feelin' Christmasy

2009-12-11T20:32:00.000-08:00

1) A rather excellent Patricia Highsmith article in the NYT: "To all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envies, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories, with which I do battle — may they never give me peace."

2) Ghost stories. I've been into them lately. Today I had a marvelous experience at the Brooklyn Public Library after a wondrous wintry walk: I got The Hours After Midnight (J.S. Le Fanu, who I've been loving recently) and The Lottery (which I've been dying to re-read; I may love Shirley Jackson even more than Highsmith). So this kick I've been on, it started with the ghost stories of Dickens, moved on to M.R. James, and in the past month has expanded to Le Fanu. I am completely entranced by his "Ghost Stores of Chapelizod" and "Dickon the Devil" (which I have the unfortunate habit of referring to -- in my head -- as "Dikon the Radish," which just makes it kind of cute instead of scary). What am I getting at with all this?

The Point.

3) It's Christmastime (almost) and apparently, in England, telling ghost stories is a Yuletide tradition. Now I reckon there's about two weeks to Christmas, and I really want to write some ghost stories, so here's what I'm proposing: a story or two every couple of days until December 31st (I need an extension on my deadline already!) in rough form, right here, the best of which I shall revise and post on my website. Hopefully I'll get a few good tales out of it. Then again, in England they drive on the wrong side of the road, too.... so....

4) ... oh yes, punch. In Le Fanu, his protags are always drinking "punch." By the fire. With booze in it. Warm and wintry, indeed. In an attempt to be more ghosty, I have made a rather tasty punch of my own, currently simmering on my stove. Which means I stop typing.... now....

The Best of The Aughts...

2009-12-08T20:15:00.000-08:00

I think my love for old-timey things is starting to rub off on my long-suffering husband: check this out! It's a run-down of the best short films of 1900-1910, in honor of all the "best of the aughts" lists that are circulating these days, heavy on the Porter and Melies, and totally freaking awesome. Porter's 1907 "Dream of a Rarebit Fiend" didn't make the cut, but I want to include it here since I love anything that has to do with eating too much late at night/bizarre dreams:

Green-Wood's new blog!

2009-12-07T07:28:00.001-08:00

The loveliest place in Brooklyn finally has its own blog! It's my most favorite place in the borough, and if you haven't done so already, make the time to ramble through it. But if you have no time today, enjoy a virtual ramble right now!

The weirdest *$%#-ing book EVER

2009-11-16T19:28:00.000-08:00

So I'm reading Spindrift: Spray From A Psychic Sea and -- what, you've never heard of it? Well, let's see, how to describe it? Frightening? Strangely mesmerizing in a horrible way?Completely effing bat-poop?

Let's take a look at that cover flap, shall we? "It started out as a search for an apartment, changed to a ghost hunt, became a deeper spiritual search that led through the occult and the esoteric philosophies, and concluded with [author] Jan Bryant Bartell's death a few weeks after she had completed this manuscript, which recounts her experiences!" Eek! But wait, there's more: "Like a game of Ten Little Indians, deaths began to occur in the house. The first to die was a dog, Jan's own beloved Penelope. But within twenty-four hours, she was to learn of the death of the first human tenant. Whether by heart attacks, suicide or murder, the deaths came in rapid succession.... In terror, with nine little Indians gone, the Bartells moved far away from Greenwich Village. But the haunting followed them. After the completion of Spindrift, Jan Bartell became the tenth."

Seriously, this might be the most macabre marketing ever. Even for a publisher.

So, to back up a bit, Jan Bryant Bartell was an actress who moved into an apartment on West Tenth Street in 1957 and started feeling chills and things bumping in the night almost immediately. Her husband was a skeptic and no one else saw the ghosts, leading her to undertake a solitary, Rosemary's Baby-like research into psychic phenomena. The thing is, nothing she sees is actually, well, very convincing. It reads like a manual for errors in formal logic as Bartell refuses to consider any number of very real alternative possibilities for the "psychic phenomena" she encounters. Take this whole dog dying business: her dog was 10 years old and epileptic. A sign that someone is reaching out to you from the other side? Or an old dog? You decide.

Also, despite claiming to be an actress, composer, and sometime author, Bartell seems to have spent most of her time decorating and puttering around the apartment. Seems to me like batty housewife syndrome (or "BHS"). She was, apparently, mentally unstable in real life, and her writing certainly brings this across. It's written in an strangely disjointed style, with awkward flourishes, odd imagery, unfathomable turns of phrase ("I was in a state of deferred feeling") and Bulwer Lytton prose: "I was face to face with the unseen!" Oh, and lots and lots of exclamation points! Like this! Far be it for me to diagnose, but her descriptions of sluggishness followed by dazzling bursts of creativity sounds a wee bit... manic-depressive?

And yet...

Her house on West Tenth Street really has been reported to be haunted. And, despite her wackiness, there's something that makes me keep reading this book. Maybe it's just the fascination of trying to figure out if the woman was an insane 1950s housewife who let her neuroses consume her or if she really saw something in that place. Or maybe it's the feeling of dread and unease that I get when I read the damn thing. Seriously, this is not the best book to read before bed (though that's totally what I'm going to do right now). There's something unsettling about it that I can't put my finger on yet, but I'll let you know more when I finish it.

Until then, you can read more about Jan Bartell and the "murder house," here.

"I'm the last of the Tiddly-Winking Leapfroggers of the Golden Summer of 1914"

2009-11-11T07:42:00.000-08:00

210-year-old gravestone found in Washington Square Park

2009-10-28T11:17:00.000-07:00

Construction workers found a three-foot-tall sandstone marker as they dug below Washington Square Park yesterday: a 210-year-old gravestone, the writing still clear.

“Here lies the body of James Jackson,” the inscription declares, “who departed this life the 22nd day of September 1799 aged 28 years native of the county of Kildare Ireland.”

A glorious treasure, surely. More on the story here.

How to Write Ghost Stories

2009-10-25T15:33:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading a collection of short stories by M.R. James (Casting The Runes) that featured a lovely appendix chock-a-block with sage and practical advice from the master of the antiquarian ghost story. It's not often you find a how-to manual of this caliber, so I thought I'd share it with you, dear readers. The funny thing is, after reading the whole book straight through, I wanted to do nothing so much as write an M.R. James parody (working title: The Oxford Don's Seaside Holiday in Which He Finds a Very Strange Book and Is Followed Home) but of course ghost stories aren't meant to make us laugh, as he would sternly inform us. And so, in that vein, James' advice for writing the most terrifying and brilliant stories ever. But first, some dots ....

Let's have some more .....

.........

..............

........................

"Contemporary, even ordinary...."

First off, the author thinks, "as a rule, the setting should be fairly familiar and the majority of the characters and their talk such as you may meet and hear any day." This is something I noticed long before the appendix: James loves to sneak the terror up on you so he deliberately avoids trying to build a dreadful atmosphere. The drier the atmosphere, the more impact the eventual introduction of the ghost will have. He'll start off with a very plain, simple, quotidian chain of events and ever so lightly add in that one strange dusty object that, of course, turns out to -- whoops! -- open a portal to hell. Or, as he puts it, your protagonists must be "undisturbed by forebodings, pleased by their surroundings."

No nice ghosts....

Another requisite "is that the ghost should be malevolent or odious: amiable ghosts and helpful apparitions are all very well... but I have no use for them." True enough. James will never introduce the ghost of a friendly uncle to help you find a bit of hidden treasure. No, he'll make you wish you had never blown that whistle, written that letter, disturbed that skull or opened that book. His ghosts aren't fucking around. They do want

to kill you. And often succeed.

"Some degree of actuality is the charm of the best ghost stories...."

Though, as mentioned, James likes a contemporary setting, you are allowed to hazard a few ghosts out of the past, although preferably obscured by "a slight haze of distance," for instance, thirty years ago, or "some time before the war." If you can somehow create the effect that you are handing down a "true narrative of remarkable circumstances" that happened to, say your cousin, then you have all the more authority, and everything you say is decidedly scarier.

If you do prefer your ghosts ancient, at least have some sort of rational or contemporary interlocutor to bring it into the present. Medieval knights being chased by ghosts are a nice bit of folk tale, but not really frightening. The ghosts of medieval knights chasing a hapless antiquarian, though, seem all right (because the antiquarian's "finding of documents about it can be made plausible").

Not too gory, please....

James likes to frighten you to death. He does not like to dismember your corpse. If any blood is shed in his stories -- which can indeed involve violent death; how do you think the demons get you? -- it must be "shed with deliberation and carefully husbanded." Got it?

The Climax....

A must: the nicely managed crescendo. James likes the slow burn but once he's got the ghost going, he knows he's got to bring it home and quick while you're still feeling shivery. Drag it out too long and your reader gets bored. A bored person is seldom shivery.

And finally --

Use big words to embiggen your story.....

Here are just a few words I found whilst reading Casting the Runes: peroration, recrudescence, veridical and recondite. I have no idea what any of them mean, which is why M.R. James is a famous writer and I am not. I am going to learn these big words and sprinkle them in all my stories until everyone who reads them thinks I'm so smart I must know what I'm talking about.

........

............

.................

Now you should be equipped to "inspire a pleasing terror" in your reader. But first, perhaps, a few selections from James' reading list. Where he has indicated specific titles, I have faithfully reproduced them here. If only a name is supplied, it means James recommends them pretty much across the board.

- J.S. LeFanu (apparently everything he wrote was "absolutely of the first rank")

- Mrs. Oliphant, "The Open Door"

- Marion Crawford's "Uncanny Tales"

- W. de Morgan, "Alice For Short"

- E.F. Benson

- Ambrose Bierce

- A.M. Burrage, "Some Ghost Stories"

Go forth and read, and write.

Post-weekend smatterings: Hotels and old photos

2009-09-25T06:04:00.001-07:00

This Times article recounts the endearing tale of Abe Lincoln's 1860 visit to NYC and his stay at the Astor House Hotel. I love the story of how the Illinois senator seemed so ill-at-ease in his countrified garb... until he started speaking.

And my new favorite website is Shorpy.com, from whence this view of the NY harbor circa 1901 was taken. Scroll through their amazing photo archives for hours of fun and inspiration.

Medical London: A Self-Guided Walking Tour

2009-09-22T10:37:00.000-07:00

Nobody is healthy in London, nobody can be.

I mentioned this before, here. (Since I've waited an awfully long time to blog about it, you are forgiven if you don't immediately recall.) Published by the good people at Strange Attractor UK, a publishing company so abstract I don't understand them at all -- apparently they publish anything that strikes their fancy and occasionally hold science fictiony rituals from time to time -- with a little bit of assistance from a pharmaceutical company (really, a little disclosure would've been nice but honestly I don't really care), Medical London: City of Diseases, City of Cures, is the most fun I've had with a book since I discovered my stepmother's Penthouse Forum when I was eleven.

Medical London is a portmanteau, part map, part history, part walking-tour guide, stuffed with beautifully illustrated full-color prints of such points of interest as Bedlam Insane Asylum and Thomas Crapper's water-closet manufactory. This wondrous cabinet of endless delights promises to "guide its readers on their own journey through the city’s streets and landmarks, and resurrect the vanished traces of its past."

Indeed it does, though I wonder if these sites aren't best enjoyed in the imagination. It's always terribly disappointing to go somewhere you've been dying to go for ages, where you've built up a mythology in your mind, only to find it's been turned into a McDonald's or something. The book is rich and seductive, promising such untold delights as a walk through the footsteps of Daniel Defoe in the plague year, "pox and pleasure" in Soho by night, and perhpas most wonderfully of all, a walk entitled "Gallows, Ghosts and Golden Boys: A day in the life of an eighteenth century medical student" ("Round off your day with a visit to the haunted house on Cock Lane.... can you keep up with the hectic life of a London medical student at the dawn of the Enlightenment?").

The six walking tours, organized thematically, are briefly outlined in the fold-out maps, and supplemented by a corresponding guidebook that presents the themes geographically (sound confusing? it is, at first, then you realize each walk is organized twice, once by theme and then again by location... and they don't line up quite exactly but presumably this all makes sense when you're walking the streets of London as opposed to lying in bed in Brooklyn).

The accompanying booklet, Sick Sity, is written by an actual doctor, so you know it's good for you, and divided into chapters with titles like City of Multitudes, City of Money, City of Madness, etc. City of Madness is my favorite, because where else would I read about "railway spine" and other neurotic diseases of the 19th century?

Dr. Richard Barnett has a flair with his pen and phrases like this, in City of Pleasure, are thoroughly entertaining:

"Classical theories of medicine, based around the four humors, stressed the importance of a balanced existence as the key to good health. A little of what you fancy might do you good; reckless intemperance on the other hand, would lead to decline, disspiation and even death -- most of all through the spread of venereal diseases such as gonorrhea and the dreaded syphilis, a chilling apotheosis of pleasure's private agonies."

There are lots of fun facts in this book, like did you know that medical students made life-sized plaster casts of dead criminals and even nicknamed some of them? My favorite: Smugglerius, the cast of a dead smuggler. And the suggestions for further reading are fairly mind-boggling: how can I not read Jonathan Swift after this description of a city shower:

"Sweepings from butchers' stalls, dung, guts and blood, drowned puppies, stinking sprats all drenched in mud, dead cats and turnips-tops come tumbling down the flood."

And now the final question: why hasn't someone written a book called Medical New York, eh?

The Fog: Or, Betty Draper Approaches Horror-Movie Levels of Weirdness

2009-09-14T16:57:00.000-07:00

I've been fascinated by Betty in Mad Men ever since "Shoot" in Season 1 (you know, the one where she shoots the neighbor's pigeons). She is tragic, she is insipid, she is repressed (but she's remarkably dressed) she's the gorgeous blonde caged bird who's been clearly nuts from the start but hasn't yet totally boiled over. Season 3 is her time. Each year she becomes more and more insane. At first, it was just a little harmless couch time. Then it was drinking in bedraggled party dresses at ten in the morning and porking strangers during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

But now, with last night's episode, our neurotic housewife and tattered WASP princess approaches horror-movie levels of madness.

The birth/birthing trope is a staple of the genre, from Dead Ringers to the Brood to Rosemary's Baby. There's nothing quite as terrifying as birth -- where else can so much go so monumentally wrong? -- and we've all seen enough Bad Seeds to know that the horror doesn't stopped once you've pooped them out your lady-chute. Procreation is a mine-field of potential disasters as children have the unique ability to shatter marriages and destroy a mother's delicate mental health with their shrill cries and constant demands. So it's no wonder Betty's birthing episode is the catalyst for the breakdown we've been waiting for these past two years.

The episode begins with Betty in Sally's classroom, hearing about her offspring's latest mischief from an earnestly idiotic third grade pedagogue. She gets up to pee, saying, "I can't control this." Her body is this THING she can't deal with, see? Flash forward to the birth. Betty's unnatural calm is in evidence, as usual, but begins to break down when she notices her "father" sweeping up in the hospital hallway. Note this is before Betty takes any drugs. Once she gets her "twilight sleep" on, there's no stopping her. Fabulous Lynchian hallucinations alternate with psychotic episodes in which Betty screams obscenities at her nurses, until finally, she hallucinates a conversation with her father. (Her mother -- and Medgar Evars -- are also present in the land of the dead.) Her father tells her: "You're a housecat. Very important with not much to do." Then she wakes up and names the baby Eugene.

A few minutes later, we see Betty standing at the window of her hospital room, holding the baby and waving at her family on the street, smiling serenely. For the rest of the episode she appears preternaturally calm and serene; when she arrives home she smilingly assures her friend the birth was nothing ("You know, it was all a fog") and that she'll make do just fine without any hired help. Meanwhile, we see Don and Sally have a conversation about the baby sleeping in Grandpa Gene's room ("It's not Grandpa Gene's room, it's the baby's room," Don reminds her) and since the apple doesn't fall far from the crazy tree, I'll be keeping my eye on that Sally kid, too.

The episode ends, naturally, with baby crying. Betty gets out of bed and walks down the hallway. Throughout her hallucinations we have been treated to several shots of the back of her perfectly-coiffed blonde head. This parting shot mimics that sense of unreality, as we watch her walk down the hall from behind. She stops, and steels herself before she enters the baby's room.

That moment where she has to physically steel herself to go into the room of that squalling infant, born amid clouds of paternal guilt, living in the dead father's room, named after him for goodness' sake, is, I believe, the most disturbing in a long list of disturbing Betty moments. What mother has to steel herself before entering her newborn baby's room, I ask you? No good will come of this ghost baby, or Betty's twilight sleep, I tell you.

Update! With boats!

2009-09-13T20:11:00.000-07:00

So apparently no one cares about this thing, but I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed Harbor Day. The bluest of blue September skies, sunlight sparkling on the water, and this coming at me out of the narrows:

That's right, it's the replica of the Half Moon! I stood on the Battery and watched it moved through the Upper Bay on its way up the Hudson.

All right, so it's lame. It's lame to be kind of awed by the exact same view you would have had 400 years ago. But tell that to the over-excitable Cypriot who captained my (free!) water taxi right this afternoon as we sailed up the Hudson among the flotilla of Dutch naval craft both modern and antique! George freaked out when we saw the replica of the Onrust dock at the Intrepid ("Onrust means restless, I just learned that today"). But we won't believe you.

Maybe you're too cool (or hate Robert Moses too much) to be awed by the sight of the graceful Verrazano Bridge spanning the narrows on your left while the GWB soars across to the sheer cliffsides of the New Jersey palisades on your right, but I'm not, and George is definitely not. Our tour guide, after handing out junior captain's badges and launching into the occasional spontaneous Billy Joel song, pointed madly as we sailed downriver, the Half Moon still partially in our sights, and excitedly screamed into the mic, "We're in the flotilla! We're in the flotilla!"

September 11: St. Paul's Chapel and The Half Moon

2009-09-11T06:17:00.000-07:00

You know how they say there's something about autumn in New York? Well, perhaps there is a little something unusual about this season in our coastal city. Events of great significance seem to happen in lower Manhattan in early September, leading me to wonder if there isn't some sort of geographical and temporal convergence here on the Eastern seaboard at a latitude of 40.74°N.

Now, not to get silly, but there are certain places around this town with a little more presence than others. I'm not talking about the gaping hole in the ground where everyone is gathered today. I am talking about a small, pretty structure that lives right next door: St. Paul's Chapel.

St. Paul's has its back to Broadway; its entrance faces west onto its own compact churchyard, giving it an air of separateness from the city. There is a distinct feeling of peace in that churchyard, and the long-standing building, the oldest in lower Manhattan, is unique for having survived the many disasters that felled its Colonial neighbors. Inside it looks more like a baroque drawing room than a Protestant church, all pale blues and pastels and crystal chandeliers -- you wouldn't be surprised to see Cupids cavorting on the ceiling -- giving it a light, airy, and distinctly non-oppressive, non-denominational feel. In other words, you are not overwhelmed with religiosity. Now a surviving Colonial building may not seem like much unless you know what has happened in lower Manhattan over the years - for instance, a great fire in 1835 destroyed nearly everything. (Trinity Church, in contrast, has been destroyed and rebuilt twice.) And St. Paul's location right next to the twin towers is positively astonishing -- the towers turned into huge columns of ash and St. Paul's survived with nary a crystal of its chandeliers shattered. Only its pipe organ was damaged by dust, rendered unplayable, and a single tree -- one tree -- was felled.

The chapel now is the most vivid and moving memorial to 9-11 that exists in this city; simple displays of the cots used to shelter rescue workers as they sifted through the wreckage are still set up in the aisles, accompanied by handwritten notes of thanks. Somehow, between the strange, quiet, steady peacefulness of the church and churchyard, and these simple monuments to thanks and grace, St. Paul's gave me pause in a way that few other places in New York ever have. There is a steadiness to this place, an uninterrupted steadfastness, that quietly yet firmly whispers to you as you walk through, "This is our church. And our city. And no one will disturb it." Gazing at the front of the building from the strangely silent churchyard (where did all that street noise go?) you can believe the chapel is sternly warning you, daring you to touch it or its island's inhabitants. It's almost intimidating. This tiny, unostentatious chapel will not be moved. You don't see a lot a buildings so obstinate. St. Paul's, I think, will always watch out for this city.

Another important September 11, of course, was 1609. History nerds will be celebrating the voyage of the Half Moon today, without which New York would never have been colonized and we wouldn't have all those charming Dutch names peppering our streets and lexicons (Bowery, stoop). I'm rather fond of Henry Hudson myself, the strange man who overtaxed his crew in this relentless search for the Northwest Passage until they finally mutinied and dumped him in the freezing waters of Hudson Bay. I have to admire that kind of singlemindedness, and of course the tragic eloquence of all those explorers who searched desperately for passages that were never found, and died before the world was fully mapped. What can I say, I love stories of human failure. But wait -- a kind of posthumous vindication may have finally come to the captain of the Half Moon. Today on the cover of the New York Times I read the following headline: Arctic Shortcut, Long a Dream, Beckons Shippers as Ice Thaws.

See Henry? All you had to do was wait for the ice to melt. Now you know what would be really ironic? All that sea ice washing over our little archipelago and swallowing us whole. But that won't happen for many Septembers, I think.

Best September Ever?

2009-09-06T19:51:00.000-07:00

Possibly.

Just look at the myriad fun activities blessing our fair city this month:

Harbor Day! Celebrate the quadricentennial in style with a fitting, watery tribute to Henry Hudson. If you can't make it to one of the four Hudson River Rambles, or the Half Moon Annual Voyage of Discovery (Voyage of Discovery!), at least make it to Harbor Day for free bikes, boat rides and all the oysters you can eat (though I think you have to pay for the oysters).

Too dorky? Nuts to you. But maybe NY Craft Beer week would be more your speed. Any event involving a beer passport sounds just jim dandy to me.

But what's that you say? You don't like beer? Strange. Well, what about wine? The Bohemian Hall will serve up Moravian wines as part of their Vinobrani festival on Sept. 12th and 13th. I'm not sure what Vinobrani is, but they say it "kicks off the start of harvest season" and that's all right by me. While I'm only "meh" about wine, I'm very excited about the promise of the "delicious pastries," they mention in their ad.

Yup, harbors and harvest festivals. That's what it's all about this month. And if you can't find joy in that then I can't help you.

The City Concealed

2009-09-03T14:04:00.000-07:00

I've been watching these videos and getting a mild kick out of them, especially the dour Newton Creek episode. I especially like all the old maps and clippings ... but what about this story I've heard told, that the creek caught on fire at one point in the '80s? That wasn't in the video. Maybe it was the Gowanus Canal? I know Newton had a massive oil spill, but I'm sure *something* caught fire. Off to research now... or possibly just wait til one of my more astute readers writes in and schools me (please? it's so much easier then Googling things for myself).

Booky-wooks

2009-08-31T10:53:00.000-07:00

Early in 2009, I got caught up in a '30s mood, what with the economic collapse and all, and suddenly got a yen to read That Scatterbrain Booky. Now it doesn't take much to put me in a '30s mood -- I don't know what I like about the decade 1929-1939, if it's the drama of a total worldwide economic collapse, the amazing fact that red-blooded Americans actually dared to try the New Deal and give us the massive public works projects we still enjoy today (Sunset Park pool!), the slimming fashions or the wonderful, wonderful movies (probably the latter) but there's something about this era that really appeals to me. Now, after finally getting around to re-reading the Booky Trilogy (I had to go home to Ontario to get it, since it's not readily available in the States), I realize it may have been ingesting these books as a child that made me such a fan of the Depression. You know, if one can be said to be a "fan" of a Depression.

But Bernice Thurman's snappy YA novels make growing up in 1930s Toronto sound downright fun. There's so much to love about these books: richly drawn characters, Booky's unique voice, coming-of-age poignancy, etc., but it's the finely-etched details of old Toronto that truly captivate me.

The Canadian specificity -- dropping phrases like "Bloor and Jane" without feeling the least need to explain that those are street names; adulation for L.M. Montgomery; rapturous descriptions of Ontario Place; references to Muskoka and Laura Secord chocolates -- is refreshing. It does a heart good to read a Canadian book, I tell you. Photographs and images from the Eaton's archives and catalogue are scattered throughout, interspersed with photos from the author's private collection (and what appear to be stills from a CBC adaptation, starring a girl who looks for all the world like Scott Thompson from Kids in the Hall).

"For all the world." Well that's a Booky phrase right there.

Characters in her book talk in a sweet, sort of down-home vernacular peppered with quaint phrases and the "latest slang" (by cracky!) and after 480 straight pages of it, it starts to rub off on you. People in her books are always hollering, getting their hopes dashed, and being thrilled. It's hard to read it through and not start dropping those phrases (I think I'll ask my husband if he'll give me a nickel for a shinplaster, then go down and see a friend for a good chinwag).

While it's hard to read the books without feeling serious twinges of nostalgia for bygone Toronto institutions (The Uptown Nuthouse, Eaton's), if you aren't equally caught up in the story of Booky's family, you have no heart (I defy anyone to read the passage where Willa can't go to medical school because she's a girl without feeling enraged). The first book, set in 1932-1933 is the most nerve-wracking, set as it is in the profoundest depths of the depression. As the story wears on, the family begins to fare better financially and the books turn to rather more frivolous subjects (like boys, kissing parties, and the universal girl experience, the bad perm) and other aspects of our heroine begin to emerge: her ambition to be a writer, for instance, is touched on in the second book and fully explored in the third. When her little brother steals and reads her diary, he saves himself from a thorough ass-whooping by apologizing and telling her, "It was just like reading a real book." She stops, hand poised in mid-air. "Do you really mean that?" "Yes, I'm sorry." "No. About it being just like a real book."

And and book with the following passage has got to steal my heart, it's just got to:

"Bea..." his voice became suddenly shy like Jimmy Stewart's.

"What?" Mine went all husky like Jean Arthur's.

"Will you be my girl?"

Thurman-Hunter's descriptions of her family and friends in Swansea (a neighborhood near High Park) are, quite literally, unforgettable: Willa and Arthur and Aunt Aggie and Aunt Susan and Cousin Winn and Aunt Milly and Grandpa and Roy-Roy and Raggedy Rachel.... Seriously -- you will start to hallucinate these people on the street. Even her littlest brothers, Jakey and Billy, develop defined voices and personalities by the third book (I have a soft spot for Billy, possibly because the harrowing story of his birth is addressed in such detail in the first book, or possibly because he's just such a darn sweetheart: "You're the best cooker in the world, mum!") She's got some wonderful spinster aunts, too. Her Aunt Susan started the Uptown Nuthouse during the depression -- a double-whammy of impossibility -- and her Aunt Aggie ran their Muskoka farm singlehandedly. In the third book, Bea wins an essay contest in the now-defunct Toronto Telegram by writing about her Aunt Aggie (the title of her essay? "The Bravest Man I Know Is A Woman"). I'm dying to get my hands on that -- surely it must exist on microfilm somewhere? I wonder why it wasn't reproduced in the book. The events in the series are mostly true-to-life (though "enlivened" a bit, I'm sure) but I wonder if that part really happened.

Well, even if it didn't really happen, it feels to me as though it did, as though I could go down to Hunter's corner store and pick up a copy of the Telly right now. Maybe it's a by-product of reading the entire trilogy straight through, but all these people and places seem so immediate.

Maybe this week at the Ex, the Swansea ghosts will rumble down to the the gates in Sandy Beasley's rattly old slat-sided truck and sneak in some free rides.

Imagination Picnic

2009-08-29T07:21:00.000-07:00

A few days' hard work -- and some good advice -- helped me turn my POS screenplay around (yes, that's right, my point of sale screenplay) and it's not half bad now, if I may be so bold (it's amazing how letting things breathe allows them to, well, live... every time I write a new script I realize how much I cram scenes on top of one another out of a terrible fear of being boring, then I always have to go back in and rip out lots of chatter and create some quiet time for my characters). Plus, it's cold and rainy today which is so refreshing. It's definitely the perfect day for Green-Wood walks and Brit Noir. And I can cook -- in my own kitchen! -- without creating an inferno of biblical proportions. So what if it's too cold outside to have a picnic. I can create my own imaginary indoor picnic with Mad Men and booze! Rice Krispie treats for all!