The film They Might Be Giants, about a retired judge who believes he is Sherlock Holmes, eventually goes so far off the rails—eschewing allegiance to plot in favor of madcap surrealist exuberance—that you wonder whether there were any rails to begin with, or if such things as rails exist.
I recommend watching it while you have a fever, as I did recently.
Over at Weird Fiction Review, several dozen writers reveal their favorite monsters. I contributed a brief defense of goblin-kind:
Goblins have gotten a pretty bad rap over the centuries. Sniveling, mean-spirited wretches, bowing to whatever power they most fear, they’ve pestered, tricked, and cajoled their way into the grimy underbellies of countless tales and legends. But I say that goblins are the great unsung worker-heroes of monsterdom. . . .
You can read the rest here, along with the responses from many others.
On a personal note, I knew a goblin once. He began life as a mischievous cat named Goblin, a fine companion to me and my siblings. He vanished one day, and though we called his name into the woods out back, and left out bowls of food, we failed to summon Goblin home.
Years later, a strange creature appeared in the back yard, huge and furry, with shining yellow eyes and battle-scarred ears. Goblin had become a goblin. He regarded us with mild curiosity, but eyed the food we offered him with obvious disdain. After an hour or so, he sauntered back into forest, to rule whatever strange domain he had conquered for himself.
We do need our monsters, don’t we? To haunt the edges of our maps, to keep the shadowy spaces perilous, to rend and devour if it comes to that. To be something worse than we are. We squirm at the violence and gore of the horrors we build for movies and video games today. And that’s nothing new. Just look at what the Cyclops did to Odysseus’ crewmen (from the Fagles translation):
Lurching up, he lunged out with hands toward my men
and snatching two at once, rapping them on the ground
he knocked them dead like pups—
their brains gushed out all over, soaked the floor—
and ripping them limb from limb to fix his meal
he bolted them down like a mountain-lion, left no scrap,
devoured entrails, flesh and bones, marrow and all!
Monsters have been popping up in my work since the beginning. My first published story was a bestiary of sorts, and it’s still lurking over at La Petite Zine. Most terrifying of all, I think, are the monsters we keep hidden. The secret monsters whose twisted existence we don’t dare acknowledge. That was the idea I was working from when I wrote “Inheritance,” a story about a man who discovers a strange beast in his recently deceased father’s basement.
That story, which originally appeared in the green issue of Fairy Tale Review, has just been reprinted in Monsters: A Collection of Literary Sightings, edited by B.J. Hollars.
The book includes stories by the likes of Kelly Link, Benjamin Percy, Matt Bell, Alissa Nutting, Kate Bernheimer, and Brian Baldi, who I first met some seven or eight years ago, on the night he read his Godzilla-themed story in a barn somewhere in Western Massachusetts.
Want to get your paws on a copy? The book is available now from Powell’s, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and your local independent bookseller.
Some very smart people have been transforming parts of the UMass Amherst campus into garden plots. These gardens are “diverse, edible, low-maintenance, and easily replicable.” This brief documentary shows the UMass Amherst Permaculture Initiative at work.
The group is breaking ground in many ways. With three gardens cultivated, its members have made UMass the only public university in the country adding new on-campus permaculture gardens each year. They’re teaching these techniques to the community, and they’re even putting food in the dining commons.
We need more of this. And right now, the UMass Amherst Permaculture Initiative is in the running to secure a trip to the White House (and an appearance on MTV). It’s a great opportunity to bring more attention to their important work. If you’d like to support them, you can vote for their project in the White House’s Campus Champions of Change Challenge.
For more about the Initiative, and about permaculture more generally, visit the UMass Permaculture site.
If you are among those who believe in that species of monster that goes by the name “spoiler,” and if you haven’t read The Third Policeman, you may wish to skip this one.
Seventy-two years ago today, Flann O’Brien (Brian O’Nolan) (Brian Ó Nualláin), wrote in a letter to William Saroyan: “When you get to the end of this book you realise that my hero or main character (he’s a heel and a killer) has been dead throughout the book and that all the queer ghastly things which have been happening to him are happening in a sort of hell which he earned for the killing. . . . I think the idea of a man being dead all the time is pretty new.”
Discussing The Third Policeman in class today, my students and I wondered whether this now familiar twist had in fact been done before 1940, but we couldn’t come up with an example. We also wondered whether certain phrases in the book—in particular “it is a difficult pancake” and “I am nothing but a gawm”—were O’Brien’s inventions, or if they were drawn from the common parlance of the day.
In any case, this novel is the finest of difficult pancakes, and I continue to puzzle over it with pleasure.