dark shadows

and i’m not afraid to admit it

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 4 Comments

The phrase "guilty pleasure" has always puzzled me. If it gives you pleasure, why be guilty? Of course, it's one thing if your "guilty pleasure" involves clubbing baby seals or tying girls to railroad tracks, but mostly when people say they have a guilty pleasure, it turns out to be that they really like Journey or Foreigner, or maybe Two and a Half Men.

Stephen Watkins just did a post called "Why Yes, I AM a Fan of the Old Rankin & Bass Hobbit Movie, And I’m Not Afraid To Admit It" and so I thought I'd write a post about my particular enthusiasms, about which I am not guilty in the least.

Dark Shadows

A late 1960s soap opera, it ran for 1,225 episodes (which is a very short run for a soap opera, though it's more episodes than all of the Star Trek series put together – daily broadcasting every week of the year will do that). It started out in Jane Eyre/Turn of the Screw territory, with a new governess showing up to serve a mysterious family. The family secrets might have supernatural elements, but they might not. Ghosts are seen, but are they real, or in the imaginations of the other characters?

But then, with ratings falling and the series in danger of cancellation, the writers decided to go all out, and they introduced a vampire. Barnabas Collins. And he became a cultural phenomenon, almost like a rock and roll star.

Meanwhile, although now much more successful, the show continued to be produced in the same way: shot in a few sets, in real time, on video, all of the special effects (and there were a lot) done in-camera. No post-production, and no retakes, so there were occasional flubs. Actors blew their lines and called each other the wrong names (especially unsurprising since each actor played multiple characters in different time periods and alternate dimensions). Eternal flames blew out at the wrong time. "Outdoor" scenes were obviously shot on a very small sound stage with a few fake trees standing around and a lot of darkness. Stage hands were occasionally seen walking past the windows, or even sleeping on the sets.

Was it good? It was sort of great without actually being good in the usual sense. But, seeing it at an impressionable age (every day after school at 4:00pm), it bored its way into my brain and it's never left. As I talked about here, I saw an episode after at least 25 years, and immediately recognized the head of Judah Zachary when I saw it. Johnny Depp was infected in the same way, which is why there will be a Dark Shadows movie in a few months. It has been his lifelong dream to play Barnabas Collins, and I can understand that.

(I was never a Barnabas fanatic, actually. Barnabas, like the original cast of characters, was pretty much all suffering and gloom. I preferred the later characters Quentin Collins and Professor Stokes, who had a rather sardonic humor about all the goings-on.)

Big Finish has been doing audio plays, new stories based on the existing history of the series, including many of the original cast members. There was even one where they lured Jonathan Frid, the original Barnabas Collins, out of retirement to play the character again. He's in his 80s, and he nailed the character as nobody has since his original performances back in the 1960s. Johnny Depp has a lot to live up to.

Other than some names I've used, I don't think DS has had a huge influence on my writing, with one exception. I do have a character who pretty definitely has Angelique Bouchard in her DNA, along with the comic book characters Emma Frost and Jeannette (both of whom also have elements of Angelique). She's in the project I'm writing now, so I don't want to say any more than that.

Oh, and in addition to Johnny Depp, it would seem that Thomas Pynchon was also a DS fanatic. Inherent Vice refers to DS three times, and a couple of peculiar events in the novel can be explained by assuming that Doc, the detective, has wandered into DS-type "parallel time" for a while, as I talked about here.

I was going to write about some other of my non-guilty pleasures, but I think this is long enough already. Maybe this will be the beginning of a series.

Later: I talk about Philo Vance.

various obsessions

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

A few random thoughts about Inherent Vice.

1. The plot actually does make sense. Who committed what crime and why, it all ties together.

2. The setup is classic: an old flame comes to the detective, asking for help. He agrees to help her, and, when beginning the investigation, he is knocked unconscious. When he wakes up, his police department nemesis is there, accusing him of a murder. The cop then decides to release him, but the old flame has already vanished. (This is, for example, the plot of virtually every episode of Pat Novak for Hire.) Other clients come to the detective, to hire him for apparently-unrelated cases, but then connections start to appear.

3. Various critics have commented on the zany, typically-Pynchonian names (Buddy Tubeside, Rudy Blatnoyd, Dr. Threeply – and that's only the medical men), but nobody has commented on the pattern. Neighborhood characters have nicknames (Ensenada Slim, Flaco the Bad, St. Flip, Downstairs Eddie). Minor characters have zany names (Japonica Fenway, Jason Velveeta, Art Tweedle). Important characters, characters we're supposed to follow and even care about, have regular names, such as Doc's semi-g.f., Penny Kimball. Doc's relationship with Penny would come across completely differently if she was named Petunia Leeway or Trillium Fortnight. And that's also what cues us (subconsciously) that the Charlocks and the Harlingens are families we should care about.

4. When Doc is snooping at the mansion where the Boards (a surf band) live, he comes upon a room where a bunch of people are watching, with incredible attention and seriousness, Dark Shadows, and the narrator mentions that Dark Shadows had, at that point, "begun to get heavily into something called 'parallel time,' which was confounding the viewing audience nationwide, even those who remained with their wits about them, although many dopers found no problem at all in following it."

What "parallel time" really means (which is not completely defined in the novel) is another dimension, which you could find yourself in by accident (either temporarily or permanently), simply by walking through the wrong door at the right time, where the people look like the people you know, but they have different names and personalities and relationships than the people you're familiar with.

Well, Dark Shadows was indeed in parallel time at that point (May of 1970, the "1970PT" storyline to be exact), but this is significant for other reasons. For one thing, as has been discovered by readers even more obsessive than I am, there is an extra day in Inherent Vice. It's possible to figure out what day each event takes place because Doc is following the NBA playoffs throughout, and there's an extra day between May 4 and May 5. During that day, many people act out of character (some fairly extremely), as if Doc has himself stumbled into parallel time for a day.

5. Another possible occurrence of parallel time (which I discovered myself) is this curious progression: a) in Chapter Six, Doc has lunch with Penny and then she hands him over to the FBI for questioning; b) in Chapter Sixteen, Doc sees her again, and this betrayal is a big issue between them. But in Chapter Eight (which falls in between those two other events), Doc spends the night with Penny, and it's never mentioned.

6. And also, in Chapter Eighteen, Doc loses one of his huarache sandals, and walks around with only one for a while. In Chapter Twenty, Sauncho calls him on the phone and mentions, entirely unnecessarily, that Doc should wear some Topsiders for their proposed boat outing, rather than that one huarache he's been wearing. But, as far as we can tell, Sauncho hasn't seen Doc since he lost the sandal. They have two conversations in between there, but the first is presented as a dream, and the second (where Sauncho defines the legal term "inherent vice") appears to be a flashback.

Unless the dream wasn't really a dream after all...

Other Obsessions

Astoria, the cover artist on A Sane Woman, created a book one time where 8.5x11 paper just seemed slightly wrong, so she ended up using a paper cutter to trim 0.25" off of each book, so it would look right to her. I wouldn't do that, but I'm just as obsessive about other things, and one of them is the hypertext construction of "Carly" (as I mentioned last time). Well, I am doing it the "easy" way, in the blog (proving perhaps that I'm more obsessive about the construction of hypertext fiction than I am about elegant code), but it's still a lot of work. I had to do a flow chart (just for the first part) and it ended up spilling off the piece of paper I was using. The first part (of seven) should be up next week.

Oh, and for the duration of "Carly," RSS feeds on the utownwriting site are suspended, since this story won't work unless you're reading it on the web. RSS feeds will continue here, of course, so you can find out when the story is updated.

I'm also starting to think about writing a hypertext mystery story, and how that would work.

miscellany

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

I've never read anything by Joyce Carol Oates, at least as far as I know. I thought I remembered that she wrote some science fiction novels at one point (which I did read and didn't care for), but I can't find any evidence of this, so maybe that was somebody else (Later: that turned out to be Doris Lessing). If I haven't read anything, I don't think I'll start now. She's written 117 books, after all, and I'm not as young as I used to be.

Anyway, I was just reading an article about her, and it said that whenever she finishes a book, she puts it away in a drawer for a year (or more) before starting to rewrite it. I think this is a good policy, and that's about what I intend to do with the new novel. If I ever stop thinking of more things to add to it.

Recently, I was watching an episode of Dark Shadows on DVD. I hadn't seen it since it originally aired in 1969 or 1970, and at one point a character reveals an artifact that he had found on a recent trip overseas. It was a disembodied head ("disembodied" meaning "without a body," not "non-corporeal" – on Dark Shadows either would have been possible), and the moment I saw it, I thought, "Ah, the head of Judah Zachary!"

So, clearly some little part of my brain has been holding onto that name for over 25 years, just in case I might need it. No wonder I have trouble remembering important things, my brain cells are full of the head of Judah Zachary and the hand of Count Petofi and the staircase through time and the I Ching wands.

Actually, Collinwood (the house where a lot of Dark Shadows took place) is a pretty good metaphor for how I want this novel to work. In Collinwood, you could turn a corner and walk up a staircase you'd never noticed before, and suddenly you were in the past. You could enter a room and find a nursery, but the next person entering that room would find a storeroom. You could go through a door and be in "parallel time" (don't ask).

You could be reading a novel, and click on a link you'd never noticed before, and suddenly you're in a collection of short stories about the same characters.

Another great night of Poco on Friday, out at the Boulton Center in Bay Shore. I got there in one of those fancy new double-decker LIRR trains. I didn't stay for the meet-and-greet after the shows (they played two sets!) because I wanted to get back at a somewhat reasonable hour.

Set lists are below, for those interested.

show

I've run out of cut-ups to post over at the utownwriting site, so I posted a scene over there. It's not a deleted scene (those are posted here, and there will be another one next week), this is a scene which will be added in rewrites (whenever I start to do rewrites).

According to the logic of the situation, it's something which would have happened, but it didn't occur to me until I was past the point where it would have fit.