Where have all the ghost stories gone?

I don't really get that into Halloween. Carving pumpkins is fun, and trick or treating is okay for little kids. But I really hate giving candy to the adolescents who show up at my door having put minimal effort into a "costume" consisting of a hoodie and a mask they bought at Spencer's.

And I hate spook houses. Nothing but a cheap trick designed to get girls to grab onto guys who lack the guts to actually make a move. The same goes for horror films---a genre which these days has degenerated into one of two things: 1) a boring, not-scary, not-suspenseful blood fest, or 2) uncreative occult creepiness. It has been many years since we had a horror film that stood on its own two feet for suspense. The common practice now is to use gore or satanism as a crutch for scariness.

But it was not always so. There used to be ghost stories. Most of the great scary stories are folktales too old for authorship. Look at the Brothers Grimm (the real brothers, not that filmic abomoination)---their collection of Germanic folktales isn't all princesses and fairies. In fact, those fairy tales go more to the gothic and the sublime than the picturesque. Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle, a classic spook tale, drew heavily on this Germanic legacy. So also did Lord Byron when he proposed a ghost-story-telling contest to his guests one dreary Genevan summer. That challenge spawned both the Frankenstein and the Vampire traditions---now Halloween staples. These stories create fantastic worlds of supernatural mystery that ooze the essence of the gothic and the sublime. They are a far cry from the contemporary blood-soaked and gore-splattered plotless excuses that make their perennial appearance on HBO.

But before it devolved into that, there was a golden age of horror film. The Wolfman, the Mummy, Frankenstein's monster, and Count Dracula were the golden boys of that golden age. Those films struck a perfect balance between spooky and fun---just spooky enough to make your skin crawl, but not so violent or evil that you feel sick. Most importantly, they had characters and plots. And they had their stars as well. Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi stood astride the narrow world as two legs of the great campy colossus that was the horror genre. Vincent Price wasn't far behind.

Aside from also redefining the music video genre, Michael Jackson's Thriller is also a great tribute to that golden age. Watch the video. It's chock-full of the landmarks of camp: the 50's dress, the convertible, the misty night, the frightened girl, and Jackson's agonized transformation into a were-wolf (although if you ask me, it looks more like a were-cat, which is odd, but somehow fitting). If you pay attention in Thriller, you see Vincent Price's name on the marquee outside the theatre. And yes, that is Vincent Price doing the spoken word incantation that brings the zombies out to dance.



Thriller is a nice tribute. But my favorite is the granddaddy of Halloween horror spoofs, Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein. Ghostbusters is of course genius, but can that count as a Halloween flic? I'm not so sure. The gothic darkness of Batman jives well with Halloween, I suppose, but I think its safe to say that the Bat fits more squarely in the superhero genre than the Halloween pile. I suppose the two Halloween greats of the 1990s were Interview with the Vampire and Blair Witch, but neither one takes my breath away.

So what are the best Halloween movies of all time? What was the last Halloween movie that wasn't a plotless slasher?

A poem

I wrote this one a while back when they were starting the construction to move the railroad tracks to accommodate the new twins stadium. I don't think I like the title, and I'm not really sure where I want to go with it. Any good ideas?

The Maintenance of Progress

Between the tracks, eternal parallel lines
(and all lines, we know, are circles):

To the right, a hobo’s blanket soaking in a puddle—
plaid flannel smeared with grime,
besmirched with mud and corruption,
debased,
limp and defeated under a sky of cold steel.

To the left a sapling, two seasons old—
a thin stem whipped with trans-American winds
dusted with coal particulates,
dogged,
baked under the hardening sun,

and marked with an orange nylon flag,
while orange paint poured out like blood upon the ground
cuts cross-ways in a jagged perpendicular
between clumps of splintered wood.

Buffalo Ghosts: A poem in one part.

Here's a short poem I recently composed. What sort of feedback might the blogosphere yield?

After a thunderstorm on the prairie,
great herds of clouds amble across the plains,
obscuring the sun without darkening it.
Their massive bellies ride low
in the heightening immensity.

They fill the infinite sky
—from east to west
and north to south,
three-hundred-sixty degrees
with no end
and no beginning—
casting numberless shadows
on the emerald waves of grain,
and eternal rows of sugar beets and corn.

I wonder if they’re the ghosts of the buffalo.

The Ancient of Days

No, this post is not about Adam, pre-Adamites, or the origin of the Nodites. Nor is it about Mormonism except perhaps in a very tangential and attenuated way. I've been asked to explain the image in my profile. It is a painting by an English poet, painter, printer, engraver, and some say, prophet, William Blake. The painting is entitled "The Acnient of Days" and represents a creator figure, framing the earth with a compass.

Recognized as one of the "big six" canonical romantic poets (Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats), Blake is one of the most perplexing figures in Romanticism. He is a poet, like the others, but he is more than a poet because he often created his words with visual art that intertwines with its meaning. And he is more than an artist because he was also a creator of mythology. Volumes could be written (and have) about him, so I won't attempt to make a complete statement about the man.

I will say only that he was intensely religious, but hated the established church. He often had visions of heavenly visitors, beleived that he conversed with Old Testament prophets, and when he saw a sunset he claimed to behold "an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty." He was also an intense beleiver in equality, humanity, charity, and love, often speaking against slavery and expounding on the wrongness of racism.

Many of his poems (I don't pretend to understand what are called his propetic books) appear deceptively simple. With a nursery-rhyme rhythm you might think you're reading kids stuff, but the themes are complex and sometimes dark, and he packs a lot of meaning into a few simple lines. Consider this indictment of London's booming prostitution industry at the turn of the century and its effect on young poor women:

O Rose, thou art sick!
The Invisible worm,
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
Of Crimson joy;
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

Blake is one of my favorite writers. His art is also high on my list. One of his most underappreciated works is the set of illustrations he did for the book of Job. His visionary and mystical esctasies lead many to conclude that he was insane. For example, he once looked up and saw "God's head upon the window" and launched into a screaming fit. Indeed, as you read his life, it is hard to escape this conclusion. Even so, he ought not to be dismissed. Wordsworth said of him:

There was no doubt that this poor man was mad, but there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott

Trivia:
1) What band got their name from a Blake writing?
2) Which U2 song is taken from a Blake poem?
3) Name one novelist and one additional artist who identify Blake as an influence.

Lyrical Power Ballads: Installement the Second

Here's a poem I've been tinkering with for the past several months.

Thoughts on the Mpls housing projects

From the window of the law school library
—the way the early morning light plays off the golden leaves of a sycamore,
gradually lights across a green slope, manicured and trimmed,
while pines throw their shadows down the grass—

out of obscurity
the towers rise, seemingly ex nihilo,
materializing in the shadows as the morning breaks on them,
valleys of concrete crags, the everlasting hills of the metropolis.
Sheathed in mismatched panels of unwanted cast-aside colors,
the towers hang in picturesque, pathetic majesty.

What Dickensian scenes will play out in dismal rooms today?

O, the nobility of the poor!
Apotheosized like inhuman Olympians,
cold alabaster, eyes plucked out,
their lifeless, stony heroism
incapable of sin, of sorrow, incapable of joy—

To us, devotees, their poverty becomes a quaint fable
that ends with a contented quietist moral,
an old lie.

This is too extravagant to be maintained.

I await feedback.

Lyrical Power Ballads: Installment the First

Okay so maybe the title is a bit overblown. A Lyrical Power Ballad is what would happen if any of these bands wrote a song with lyrics by William Wordsworth. I don't think that anything I write could truly be considered a lyrical power ballad, but I'm appropriating the term anyway because it just sounds cooler than plain old "poems." This is one I wrote while working in a congressional office in D.C.. I've tinkered with it a bit from time to time.

Seeric Gifts

Listen!
to the words of one who sees:

He sits on a grate at Farragut North.
Metro steam rises round his head,
wraps him as a mantle,
mingles in his grizzled beard and hatted matted mop of hair.
A palsied hand extends a plastic disk,
wordlessly petitioning for spare coins.
Encircled in rags he does not speak,
but searches with his flashing eyes.

Meanwhile a man with an armful of shirts
(cotton shirts in white and blue) passes by and notices him not—
because he is struggling, pushing with his smooth, scented chin
to get the folds of starched cotton out of his eyes.

So that's it. I'm open to feedback.