James Hynes

Here's another Halloween treat: my pal John Marks has interviewed Stephen King for Salon, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the publication of The Stand. You can read the interview here, and listen to it here. It's pretty interesting stuff, all about the writing of the book, King's religious background, his current spiritual beliefs, the current election, and the end of the world. Not necessarily in that order.

Courtesy of my brother Mike, here comes that monster from my id, right back atcha, only bigger and noisier than ever—it's the return of King Zor! Only he seems to have mellowed over the years—he's not fighting mad anymore. In fact, he seems, well, kinda...playful.

On the other hand, maybe not. If you go here, you can watch him play with his food—to wit, a 1994 Honda Goldwing motorcycle. It's funny, but also kinda gruesome—imagine Wall-E with a serious attitude.

At any rate, it's called a T-Rex Attachment and you can buy one here (where you can also see some other amazing videos of this thing in action). It's only $5,250.00. Claw only; the vehicle isn't included.

Still, if it shoots ping pong balls, I want one for Christmas.

It's Halloween again, my favorite holiday, and I'm trying to get in the mood, despite the fact that the scariest thing I can think of right now is Sarah Palin being elected to...well, anything, really. But I'm going to soldier on, in the spirit of the season. I thought I'd do a new version of the list of Halloween reading I did a couple of years ago for Maud Newton (which had some movies on it, too); at the time I told her that it was a pretty arbitrary list, that if she'd asked me on a different day, I'd probably do a completely different list. Well, it's a different day, so here's a different list.

I toyed with the idea of making this new effort a themed list: short stories that had been adapted for the Twilight Zone, or stories that had been published in the New Yorker, from the days when the magazine used to publish macabre stories by writers like John Collier and Roald Dahl, or stories from the Alfred Hitchcock anthologies I loved as a kid, which were my gateway drug, the very books that hooked me on horror even before I discovered  M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood, and H. P. Lovecraft. But rather than limit myself to one of these themes, I've done a sort of mash-up of them all. Not all of them are ghost stories, some of them are borderline science fiction, and some of them are more unsettling than they are flat-out scary. Their one commonality, in fact, is that most of them are dark and melancholy rather than gut-wrenching in the manner of a contemporary torture porn or J-horror film.

The other commonality, I suppose, is nostalgia. Most of the following stories are from my favorite Hitchcock anthology, Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories for Late at Night, or from an anthology Ray Bradbury put together in 1952, with the deeply misleading title Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow. (I was afraid both of them might be hard to come by, but you can find the Hitchcock for as cheap as a buck at AbeBooks; the Bradbury isn't hard to find, either.) I read both of these books, over and over again, in my childhood, in the mid-to-late 60s. In the introduction to Bradbury's book (which is still one of my favorite anthologies of the macabre), he writes, "many of the stories in this collection, directly or indirectly, will prove once again the essential mystery in everything, no matter what or how we know it. Scientists freely admit that they don't really know what electricity or gravity are, or why light rays travel as fast as they do, or what color is or what keeps the atom together or why the sun really shines. In all probability they won't ever know, for there is a certain place in any discussion of any one thing in existence where knowledge ends and the Great Vacuum extends on out into infinity."

There you have it, ladies and gentlemen—a bit of scripture for Samhain, when the membrane between daylight reality and the Great Vacuum gets porous. Some of the following stories may be hard to find, unless you have access to the same crumbling paperbacks I do, but some of them are pretty widely available. Here they are, my 2008 list of Halloween stories:

1) "It's a Good Life," by Jerome Bixby, who was also a screenwriter and TV writer, best known for a couple of good Star Trek episodes. Most people know this story from its superb Twilight Zone adaptation, starring a very young, very scary Billy Mumy. The story itself is a nasty slice of small-town gothic Americana, with a brilliantly bone-chilling sci-fi twist. It's still widely anthologized, I think, but I first read it in the Hitchcock anthology.

2) "Evening Primrose," by John Collier. Another great story from the Hitchcock anthology, which was filmed as an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. This is the one about the secret society of people who live in a department store and who only come out at night. You'll never look at a mannequin the same way again. Collier was a British writer who today is best known for the diamond-hard and wittily cruel stories of the fantastic he wrote for the New Yorker; his anthology Fancies and Goodnights (which includes this story) is still in print (hooray for New York Review Books!).

3) "The Hour After Westerly," by Robert M. Coates, from the Bradbury anthology. This is one of the most unsettling stories I've ever read, and I'm not entirely sure why. It's not overtly supernatural—it's a very subtle riff on deja vu, basically—but I've remembered it for years, and even though I've read it half a dozen times over the years, I'm not sure I could explain how it works. But its effect (on me, anyway) is like opening a very familiar door and discovering that it leads someplace entirely new—a feeling that's both mysterious and melancholy. Not matter how many times I read it, it always gets to me. Until about ten minutes ago, I knew nothing about Coates, but (hooray for Wikipedia!) it turns out he was the author of three experimental novels and the New Yorker's art critic—he coined the term "abstract expressionism." If you can't turn up a copy of Timeless Stories, and you happen to have the complete run of the New Yorker on CD-ROM or whatever, it appeared in the issue of November 1, 1947.

4) "The Daemon Lover," by Shirley Jackson. Another story I first read in the Bradbury anthology. It didn't really stick with me as a kid, but when I reread it in Jackson's own collection, The Lottery and Other Stories, it creeped me out. You have to be an adult, and to have had your heart broken, to be scared by this story.

5) "The Demon Lover," by Elizabeth Bowen. A haunted house story from the great Anglo-Irish novelist. I first read it in her collected stories, but you can also find it in Brad Leithauser's fine anthology, The Norton Book of Ghost Stories, where he also includes two more Bowen ghost stories. Once upon a time, a lot of first-rate literary writers regularly wrote ghost stories—Henry James and Edith Wharton are the most obvious examples—but you don't see a lot of modern writers trying their hand at it. Or maybe they do, and I just haven't been paying attention.

6) "The Man Who Liked Dickens," by Evelyn Waugh. Not a supernatural story, but horrifying in the manner of Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado," on which it is a very witty, and very cruel, variation. The story is a slightly different version of the penultimate chapter of Waugh's novel A Handful of Dust, and I first read it in the Hitchcock book.

7) "The Small Assassin," by Ray Bradbury. When I was a kid reading Bradbury's science fiction, a colleague of my father's at Ferris State College in Big Rapids, Michigan, where I grew up, suggested that I get a copy of Bradbury's The October Country, which he said was better than Bradbury's sci fi. It's a revised version of his first book, Dark Carnival, which was first published by August Derleth's Arkham House (best known for keeping Lovecraft's reputation alive). Bradbury writes in his introduction that the stories in the book present a side to him most of his readers don't know, and a sort of story—i.e., horror—which he had rarely written since 1946. There's some really creepy stuff here, but this one is my favorite. If you have young children, you may want to avoid it. Then again, maybe you won't.

8) "La Grande Breteche," Honore de Balzac. I'm detecting another theme here, but I can't say why without giving away the story. This one comes from another classic anthology I practically lived in as a melancholy kid, Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, a big fat Modern Library book I took out of the Big Rapids Library again and again and again. It's still in print, in a very handsome edition, and I have my own copy now. It's pure nostalgia, the book where I first read stories by M. R. James, Saki, Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and H. P. Lovecraft, not to mention the first place I ever read Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" and Hemingway's "The Killers," which the editors included in the Tales of Terror section of the book.

9) "The Willows," by Algernon Blackwood. Blackwood wrote a number of stories that evoked the mystery of the natural world in a rather sinister way, and this is the most famous one. Don't read it on a canoe trip, is my advice. Another good one, though harder to find, is "The Man Whom the Trees Loved." You can find "The Willows" here and here.

10) "The July Ghost," by A. S. Byatt. This is the newest story in this list—it was published in 1987—and the only one not to come from one of the ancient anthologies of my youth. But it's also one of the best ghost stories I've ever read, and widely anthologized; I have it in several different volumes, including the Leithauser anthology. It's also, if you know anything about A. S. Byatt's personal history, almost unbearably poignant.

So there you go—a list of Halloween reading heavy on the melancholy, with a chaser of poignancy. Perhaps that's how the holiday strikes me at middle-age—what seemed like wicked good fun when I was a kid is now yet another reminder of my mortality. Trust me, Halloween only gets scarier as you get older, as that membrane between the living and the dead only gets more porous. Someday, if I keep doing this blog, you may even get a reading list...from beyond!

Happy Halloween!

Ladies and gentlemen, Mein Damen und Herren, mesdames et messieurs, welcome to the Weimar years of the American republic! Bankruptcy, unemployment, class resentment, wars and rumors of war—what better time for a little light entertainment! So here's a motley, magpie cabaret show for your viewing and listening pleasure. First, a sprightly opening number from our master and mistress of ceremonies, something that captures the essence of, the, the—oh, what's the word I'm looking for? The spirit of the age, something like that. Take it away, kids!

Wasn't that delightful? Edifying and entertaining. We're all feeling just a little richer after that, too, aren't we? And since cabaret is nothing if it's not topical, let's range a little further afield for our next number, with a few words from Randy Newman.

Zeitgeist! That's the word I was trying to think of earlier, and a handy word it is, too! And who knows the zeitgeist better than Tom Waits? But which zeit is he singing about the geist of?

Looking for something a little more ragged, a little more...raw? Our next artiste is so salt of the earth, he can't even afford a haircut! And my goodness, what's he so angry about? Ladies and gentlemen, Mein Damen und Herren, Mr. James McMurtry.

My! That was bracing, wasn't it? And since one bad turn deserves another, perhaps we can squeeze in just a bit more gloom and doom from the tomb from our next performer—you know him, you love him—Mr. Richard Thompson.

Oh dear, ladies and gentlemen, I fear I've abused your indulgence; I can see some of you are restless, some of you are already heading for the exits—please remember to tip your waitresses before you go!—but may I beg your patience for one more song? I'd hate to send you out into the night thinking dark thoughts, so let's bring back Mr. Newman for a charming finale. We can always count on him for a smile.

Ah, I think we all feel better now. I know I do. Good night, guten nacht, bonsoir! Come again soon!

Lord knows I love movies. Lord knows I love movies based on great novels, even ones that take enormous liberties with the original story—Peter Jackson and Viggo Mortenson's reimagining of Aragorn in Lord of the Rings as a tormented, reluctant hero is actually an improvement over Tolkien's more wooden conception of the character—or set the story in a completely different setting or era—for my money, Clueless is one of the best Jane Austen films, and I loved Ian McKellen's Fascist-era interpretation of Richard III. And lord knows I also love—way, way too much—big, dumb, over-the-top action-and-special-effects spectaculars. The first Matrix made me feel like I was fourteen years old again, and I mean that in a good way. Hey, when it first came out, I saw Point Break twice. In one week. So lord knows it's no surprise that I loved the latest movie by Russian director Timur Bekmambetov, Wanted, which was (in the manner of Point Break) simultaneously completely preposterous and enormously entertaining, and not just because it featured Angelina Jolie in high action figure mode. How can you not love a movie where an international secret society of super-assassins gets its instructions from (I'm not kidding) the Loom of Destiny, which works its magic in an abandoned factory on the west side of Chicago? So by some sort of transitive property, I ought to be looking forward to Bekmambetov's forthcoming film of Moby-Dick, right? Right?

I would that it were so, shipmates, but alas, I can protest all I like that I'm as hip and po-mo as the next guy, but the fact is, the idea behind this new version of Moby-Dick sounds awful. You can read the article about it in Variety by clicking on the link above, but here's the passage that got me going, with emendations:

Studio paid high six figures to Adam Cooper and Bill Collage to pen the screenplay [The previously produced work by this team consists of Accepted, a college comedy, and New York Minute, the Olsen twins movie].

The writers revere Melville’s original text [They haven't read it*], but their graphic novel-style version [Uh-oh] will change the structure [alter it beyond all recognition]. Gone is the first-person narration by the young seaman Ishmael ["Call me...nobody"], who observes how Ahab’s obsession with killing the great white whale overwhelms his good judgment as captain.

This change will allow them to depict the whale’s decimation of other ships prior to its encounter with Ahab’s Pequod [Because we all know the problem with whaling in the 19th century was the terrible toll whales took on whaling ships], and Ahab will be depicted more as a charismatic leader [Like, say, Bush going after Bin Laden?] than a brooding obsessive [And while we're at it, where's it written in stone that he has to have only one leg?].

"Our vision isn’t your grandfather’s Moby Dick," [Or Herman Melville's, either] Cooper said. "This is an opportunity to take a timeless classic [A recognizable cultural brand name] and capitalize [nuff said] on the advances in visual effects to tell what at its core is an action-adventure revenge story [Really, you can say the same thing about Hamlet, if you cut out all the boring speeches and just leave the swordfights]."

Okay, I realize my feeble disdain is making me sound like a cross between some prissy high school lit teacher from my youth and the kind of comic book geek who freaks out when Hollywood changes the slightest detail of, I dunno, Spider-Man's costume or something. But why film Moby-Dick if you're just going to turn it into something else? Why not just make your own action-picture version of the story and call it something else, like Peter Benchley and Spielberg did with Jaws (where Robert Shaw made a pretty good Ahab)? Basically, all you're getting by making up your own story and slapping the title of Moby-Dick on it is a little bit of brand recognition, and what does that matter, really, to the modern filmgoing demographic? The handful of actual readers of Moby-Dick who will go to see it will just be pissed off by the changes, and the vast majority of people who will go to see CGI whale sink ships with his mighty CGI tail and watch Viggo Mortensen (or whoever) as Ahab kick cetacean ass (or whatever) won't care. How many people who saw Peter Jackson's King Kong had ever seen or even heard of the original one? I'm just asking.

According to IMDb, there are half a dozen (at least) earlier film versions of Moby-Dick, including two good ones, John Huston's mostly faithful version (though I've never gotten used to Atticus Finch as Ahab), and a TV version with a superb Patrick Stewart as Ahab (considering that Melville's language owes everything to Shakespeare and the King James Bible, casting an actual Shakespearean to play Ahab was long overdue). But still, it's not as if Hollywood fucking with this particular "timeless classic" is a new thing. A couple of years ago, I saw on TCM the sublimely silly 1930 version of Moby-Dick, which dispenses with all that boring stuff about fate and nature and clocks in at a brisk 80 minutes. The film features John Barrymore as a jolly Ahab with a love interest (the pretty daughter of Father Mapple), and it ends (spoiler alert!) happily, with Ahab killing Moby-Dick and returning to the arms of his girlfriend.

And, of course, bottom line, Moby-Dick will survive whatever goofiness the movies inflict on it. Demi Moore's softcore version of The Scarlet Letter didn't ruin Hawthorne's reputation, after all, and Angelina Jolie's kitten-with-a-whip portrayal of Grendel's mother didn't sink Beowulf. And even if he did kill Moby-Dick, John Barrymore didn't kill Moby-Dick. But even so, Bekmambetov et al. may be tempting fate a bit by messing with one of the most iconic metaphors for implacable nature or the divine or hubris (take your pick) in the history of literature. Or, if you won't take it from me, shipmates, heed the words of Father Mapple:

Woe to him whom this world charms from Gospel duty! Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal! Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness! Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor! Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be false were salvation! 



 

*Or maybe they have: I haven't seen Accepted, but according to IMDb, the main character, played by Justin Long, is named Bartleby Gaines. Perhaps I should give them the benefit of the doubt about Moby-Dick, but (and you saw this coming, didn't you?) I prefer not to.

In between bouts of rage at the return of Karl Rove, both figuratively and literally, to another American election cycle (he's about as easy to get rid of, apparently, as Christopher Lee in a Hammer Dracula film--motherfucker just keeps coming back), episodes of despair at the possibility of four more years of the last eight, and fits of bitter sarcasm about the commander-in-chief of the Alaska National Guard (insert your own Marge Gunderson/Annie Get Your Gun/Sexy Librarian joke here), I've found some intellectual solace in an article by Jonathan Haidt, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, entitled "What Makes People Vote Republican?" I haven't read the responses to it yet--they go on for pages and pages and pages--but the article itself is extremely thought-provoking--and possibly not very cheering for those of us who want Obama to win. But however depressing the article may be, it's an original (at least to me) explanation of the underlying reasons for the current flare-up of the culture wars. It's also (without mentioning her by name, or, indeed, without mentioning the election at all) one of the shrewdest explanations of the appeal of Sarah Palin.

I haven't got any interest in blogging about politics—just to be clear, I'm interested in politics, but not in writing about it—but I'm glad my friend John Marks does. Drop what you're doing and go read his brilliant blog entry, "Clinton Agonistes," on the Shakespearean (or is it Sophoclean?) drama of the Democratic convention.

I know all about you, son of Laius.
And now, seeing you at this crossroads,
beyond all doubt I know you in the flesh.
Your rags, your ravaged face--
it's all too clear, they show me who you are,
and in all compassion I would ask you, Oedipus,
doomstruck Oedipus, why are you here?
     —Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, translated by
        Robert Fagles                             

My father once explained the idea of hubris to me by comparing it to a rubber band. This happened, I think, in my early teens, around the time I was discovering philosophy for the first time, at the same time as I was reading lots of science fiction and popular astronomy books, all part of my adolescent jones for a Sense of Wonder. Somehow this lust for wonder led me to pick up my dad's two volume edition of Jowett's translations of Plato's Dialogues, and somehow hubris came up. My father, who was a sociology professor at a small college in mid-Michigan, had gotten his undergraduate degree in philosophy on the GI Bill at Michigan State in the late 40s (like father, like son: I got my philosophy BA at Michigan 30 years later), and I suspected even at the time that his explanation of hubris was something he'd heard from one of his professors in East Lansing as an undergrad.

Anyway, it went like this: hubris was like a rubber band because whatever you did out of pride or ambition, it shaped the rest of your life as well. If you pushed the rubber band on one side, the other side felt the pressure. Since then, I've learned that in ancient Greek culture, the idea of hubris had mostly perjorative connotations (think Oedipus), evoking the cost of tempting the fates or commiting acts of violence, but in my father's explanation, hubris was a more general principle that played a part in every person's life, pretty much at every moment. Everything you do has an effect on everything else you do, making hubris a sort of spiritual or psychological version of Newton's third law, that for every action, there is an equal or opposite reaction. Or, to put it more bluntly, what goes around, comes around. Or even more bluntly, there's no free lunch.

I was reminded vividly of this yesterday, when my wife and I saw Man on Wire, British documentarian James Marsh's remarkable film about the French tightrope walker Philippe Petit and the time in 1974 when Petit walked a high wire between the two towers of the recently completed World Trade Center in New York City. It's a frequently astonishing film, absolutely gripping, and Marsh frames the narrative as a sort of heist story, through interviews, re-enactments, and archival film and photos. I only dimly remembered the act itself, probably mostly because it happened on August 7, 1974, only two days before Nixon resigned, and I was pretty obsessed with Watergate that summer.

What's most interesting to me, though, is what the fim doesn't mention, namely the attack on 9/11 that brought the towers down a quarter of a century later. According the the Wikipedia entry on the film, Marsh decided to include no reference at all to 9/11 because Petit's act was "incredibly beautiful" and it "would be unfair and wrong to infect his story with any mention, discussion or imagery of the Towers being destroyed." I agree with Marsh that the stunt itself was beautiful—heartstoppingly so, in fact—but I'd be astounded if there was a single person on the planet who could watch this film without thinking at almost every point of what later happened to the towers. In the opening section, photos of Petit growing up and learning his trade as an acrobat—juggling, walking a wire—are placed alongside grainy old footage of the construction of the Twin Towers, and I found myself almost in tears at images that were so eerily suggestive of later footage of the excavation of the wreckage. An overhead shot of the empty construction pit before the first pilings were driven looked exactly like the empty pit after the last bit of debris was taken away, and watching giant, rust-red girders being swung into place, covered with chalked letters and numbers, I couldn't help but think that, against all expectation, we've seen those very same girders since, bent and shattered and burnt, being dragged away again on flatbed trucks. As I was sitting in the theater, trying not to sniffle, I thought for the first time in years of that famous passage in Slaughterhouse Five, in which Vonnegut imagines the bombing of Dresden in reverse, as American bombers extinguish the flames of the burning city by sucking the bombs back up into the sky, then returning to base where the bombs are loaded onto ships and returned to factories in America, where they are dismantled so they'll never hurt anybody again. Whatever Marsh's intention, the film's evocation of an earlier time (I won't say more innocent) has the same whimsically redemptive effect.

It isn't just the images of the towers' construction that evoke the memory of 9/11. The film also re-enacts Petit's planning for the stunt, when he cased the towers for months in advance while they were still being finished, constructing elaborate diagrams and models of the towers' two roofs and looking for holes in the buildings' security routines, so he could get his team up to the top. Much of this is played for laughs—and why shouldn't it be?—but, again, it was impossible not to think of 9/11 hijackers (and the earlier terrorists in 1993 who set off the bomb in the WTC parking garage) as they examined the towers in much the same way, with a vastly crueler gaze. Even the act itself, as Petit walked back and forth on his wire between the towers eight times for an astonishing 45 minutes, could not be represented without evoking 9/11. There are only stilll photos of the event (at least there's no film footage in the documentary), and while the photos taken from the roof are breathtaking, the news photos taken from the ground, of a tiny black silhouette against an overcast sky in the space between the squared tops of the towers, cannot help but evoke the images of the tiny figures jumping from the same towers as they burned in 2001. Indeed, the fate of those who were forced to jump adds another layer of ambiguity to Petit's achievement. Not that people in 1974 didn't understand the risk he was taking, but looking at him now, a stick figure on a wire you can't even see in some of the photographs, the fact that many people were later forced into a deadly decision while he undertook the risk willingly, complicates (to say the least) the emotional effect of watching him.

My wife and I enjoyed the movie enormously, but in talking about it afterwards, we realized it had made both of us surprisingly tense, a dim echo of the anxiety we'd felt on 9/11 itself. I don't mean this (or anything I've said so far) as a criticism of the film, which is one of the best movies I've seen this year. I think Marsh was right not to refer to 9/11, but I also think it's impossible to watch the film without thinking of the attacks, not only because of the film's setting, but because it's a film about an act of hubris, which is framed by two much more serious acts of hubris, one of which is in the film and one of which isn't. There's Petit's act, of course, at the center of the film, but there's also the act of having built the towers in the first place, and the vicious act of hubris that brought them down. Each one of these acts evokes a different conception, or, if you prefer, a different facet, of the idea of hubris.

The first act, the building of the towers, can be seen as hubris in its modern sense, as an act of pride that invites retribution. This is not to justify or excuse the attacks, of course, but the fact is, as evidenced by two separate attacks by Islamic extremists in less than ten years, the towers were long seen by people who hate us as symbols of overweening American pride and arrogance. Then there's the attacks themselves, which represent hubris in its ancient sense of an act of violence that shames or humiliates the victim (this, according to Wikipedia, was the legal usage of the term in ancient Greece). More specifically, it evokes Aristotle's definition of the idea (again, from Wikipedia): "to cause shame to the victim, not in order that anything may happen to you, nor because anything has happened to you, but merely for your own gratification. Hubris is not the requital of past injuries; this is revenge. As for the pleasure in hubris, its cause is this: men think that by ill-treating others they make their own superiority the greater."

It's the genius of the film that, in between these two acts, as a sort of illustrative counterpoint, lies Petit's relatively benign, even magical act of hubris, which comes under the definition of hubris as tempting the fates or the gods through pride and arrogance. If you're not tempting the fates by walking a wire 110 stories up, then nobody ever tempted the fates. And yet even Petit seems to have paid something for what he did, since the stunt appears (at the very least) to have trashed his relationship with his then-girlfriend as well as his relationship with his best friend since childhood. The younger Petit of the archival footage is a creature of elfin beauty, like the young Baryshnikov—fantastically fit, without an ounce of fat on him, and possessed of truly awesome powers of concentration and drive. These days Petit, who turns 60 next year, is still amazingly fit, energetic, and excitable, but his elfin features have hardened, and as he tells his story—something he clearly still loves to do—there's something a little frightening about it, as if—true to my dad's rubber band definition of hubris—this singular act has somehow deformed the rest of his life. It's not just the fact that the most memorable thing he ever did happened 34 years ago, but perhaps that one of the consequences of his particular act of hubris is having to live the rest of his life knowing that he has never since felt, and will never again feel, the way he did during those 45 minutes he spent walking in the air between the towers. At one point near the end of the film, as he's talking about the actual stunt itself, he says he did something wire walkers are never supposed to do: he stopped and knelt on the wire and looked straight down, seeing the crowd far below, and even imagining he could hear them. It struck him in that moment, he says, that this was a sight he would never again see, the view from the space between the towers, straight down, from 110 stories up. It's part of the power of this film, and of its almost unbearable poignancy, that he's also the only person ever to see that sight and live to tell about it.

I got a delicious little thrill up my spine today from this, courtesy of the Guardian website. It's a British radio interview last month with Edgar Mitchell, a former Apollo astronaut, and the sixth man to walk on the moon (that we know of, ho ho). In the interview, Mitchell says that he knows there is extraterrestrial life, and that they've visited us, because he's been briefed by government officials about the truth of the Roswell incident, among other things. Of course, he also says, according to this Guardian article, that his kidney cancer was cured long-distance by a Canadian named Adam Dreamhealer. Soooo, bearing that in mind, the interview's kinda thrilling to listen to, if, like me, you're a Scully with Mulder tendencies. At the very least, the breathless, jokey incredulity of the interviewer makes it worth listening to.

Okay, got that? I e-mailed the link to, well, let's just say, a friend, because why drag him into this publically? And he asked me by return e-mail what I thought: was there seriously anything to this, or is Mitchell one of those Apollo moonwalkers who's been driven round the bend by his experience? Well, on the one hand, the guy has a Ph.D from MIT and he was fucking astronaut, okay? On the other hand, Adam Dreamhealer. Which makes it, as my late, great dad used to say, six of one, half a dozen of the other. But, just for the record, I don't believe it (though I think Mitchell does), but I wish I did.

See, there are two Jims when it comes to this subject. One is the kid who spent much of his childhood in the 60s reading Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clarke, as well as every paperback on UFOs for which he could scrape together the cash, from semi-respectable ones like The Interrupted Journey and Incident at Exeter (which my mother tolerated) to really lurid ones (which I hid from Mom), such as the book that posed the question on the back cover, "Is There a Galactic High Command?" Let's call this Jim, say, Lizard Brain Jim, because that's where he still lives, and Lizard Brain Jim really really really wants Mitchell's interview to be the first trickle through the levee of cover-up and denial, culminating with benign Zeta Reticulans shaking hands (or whatever) with President Obama on the White House lawn on the afternoon of Inauguration Day. After which, over the following weeks, they will divulge the secrets of faster-than-light travel and teleportation; cure cancer and end racism, hunger, and war; reveal whether God and the Higgs boson really exist (and if they're the same thing); and show a middle-aged midlist writer how to make a living without having to take a day job. This is the Jim who, even now, still secretly devours books about UFOs, alien abduction, crop circles, and cattle mutilations with the avidity other middle-aged guys devote to internet porn. This is the Jim who never misses an episode of UFO Hunters on the History Channel, the Jim who made a road trip to Roswell once, the Jim who actually saw a UFO once (kinda) when he was a teenager and will tell you all about it with very little prompting. Okay, usually, no prompting at all.

Then, there's Forebrain Jim, who at the same tender age as he was reading Childhood's End and Flying Saucers: Serious Business was also reading every popular physics and astronomy book he could get his hands on, especially the works of Fred Hoyle and George Gamow, and who was planning on studying astronomy in college. This is the Jim who taught himself the constellations from his parents' back yard, and eventually learned how to tell the difference between the planet Venus, a meteorite, a satellite, a jetliner, and, you know, the mothership. This is the Jim who, today, still keeps up a bit with popular physics books (and who even has an ill-informed opinion about string theory), and who knows why it's really really really unlikely, even if there are intelligent ETs, that they would cross vast reaches of interstellar space to make goofy patterns in Wiltshire wheat fields, suck the blood out of cows in Colorado, and diddle middle-class white folks in their sleep. And, since they unfortunately share the same brainpan (where they coexist like Mulder and Scully, though unfortunately without secretly liking each other), at the same moment as Lizard Brain Jim is geeking out over UFO Hunters (or the History Channel's bottomless store of cheesy international Roswells: Russia's Roswell, China's Roswell, Brazil's Roswell, etc.) Forebrain Jim is rolling his eyes, sighing audibly, and often laughing out loud at the sheer, pseudoscientific silliness of the show, especially at the staggering credulity of the Hunters themselves, especially the guy in the MUFON baseball cap, who is positively eager to believe that every blinking light in the sky is an extraterrestrial roadster, that the same government that can't even lie convincingly about Iraq and Katrina could keep dead aliens at Wright-Patterson AFB secret for 60 years, and that lunchtime in the break room at Groom Lake is like the cantina scene from Star Wars.

So there you have it, my Hegelian/Reticulan dialectic. (Only one dialectic of many, of course.) Put a gun to his head, and Forebrain Jim will tell you, don't be an idiot, of course I don't believe in UFOs (even if he did see one). But bear in mind that, even with the gun to his head, Lizard Brain Jim is keeping his fingers crossed behind his back and hoping that they're really Out There, hiding behind the moon where we can't see them. Because he's thinking, just like Lady Brett in A Sun Also Rises, "Wouldn't it be pretty to think so?"

This Just In: But wait, there's more! Bigfoot's real, too...well, maybe. At any rate, there's an article about it in yesterday's New York Times, "Two Georgians Say They Have Bigfoot's Body." And there's even a picture, I kid you not, of a dead bigfoot in somebody's basement freezer. Looks like a gorilla suit with some organ meat tossed in. Did I mention I sometimes watch Monsterquest, too?

Oh, Well: Turns out the two DNA samples collected from the Bigfoot in the Freezer are from a human being and an opossum. And the Bigfoot in the Freezer really is a gorilla suit with some leftovers. Sigh.

Messin' With Sasquatch: Turns out you don't want to piss off sasquatch hunters, either.

These days, you can turn on the Disney Channel and watch tweens busting moves that generations of sweaty guys used to have to pass through threadbare velvet curtains, sit on sticky seats, and buy overpriced drinks to see. So today I'm using the passing of the dancer Cyd Charisse as an excuse to provide an example of what a mature, witty, and non-pandering eroticism looks like, at least in the movies. She wasn't always great; she appeared in some inferior films, with sub-par choreography, as if just having her show her legs was enough. But with great partners and great choreography and a smart director, she could be stunningly hot and stunningly classy all at the same time, as she was with Fred Astaire in Bandwagon, performing "Dancing in the Dark."

But as great as she is with Astaire, her greatest scene was with Gene Kelly in the "Gotta Dance" sequence of Singin' in the Rain. For my money, this is the sexiest scene in American movies. If you don't believe me, watch this:

Not bad, huh, for a girl who started out in Amarillo as Tula Ellice Finklea. Rest in peace, Cyd Charisse.