The most famous line in Harold Pinter’s script for the 1971 film The Go-Between is also the most famous line from the L.P. Hartley novel it adapted — its first line: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” In his beguiling and unsettling new film May December, Todd Haynes […]
Harry Houdini began his 1924 book A Magician Among the Spirits (likely written for him by his assistant Oscar Teale) with a confession: From my early career as a mystical entertainer I have been interested in Spiritualism as belonging to the category of mysticism, and as a side line to my […]
This is the text of a paper I presented at the Modernist Studies Association annual conference, which this year took place in Brooklyn, New York, not far from where James Purdy lived for many years. Since I don’t have plans to develop this particular presentation beyond what it was, I […]
After my October 7 post about horror movies, my editor at Third Man Books, Chet Weise, asked if I might adapt it for the Third Man website. Chet always has a great sense of what I will happily write about, and the topic of horror movies is one of my favorites, […]
Jill, a film based on my short story “Blood”, is now streaming in the US for free (with ads) on Tubi and the Roku Channel after more than a year on the festival circuit and a theatrical release in Europe. It was written and directed by Steven Michael Hayes and stars Tom […]
In 2018, I wrote a post at The Mumpsimus about Raymond Carver, inspired by Brian Evenson’s little book about Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Soon after I published it, Google decided the post was plagiarized clickbait and removed it. I could never figure out what […]
October is the best month. Though, as the month of my birthday, it is one of the more expensive months of the year for me (mostly because of car registration and inspection), it is also LGBTQ+ History Month and the month of Halloween, giving us an excuse (as if we needed […]
Dad is an inventor. In 1912 his submarine had the world’s record for staying under water. Running as it did by means of a gasoline engine, it left bubbles on the surface, so it was not employed during World War 1. Dad says he does his best work when he […]
I’m going to write a bit here first about a book you are unlikely to read. This of course poses a problem for you as a reader: why bother reading about a book that will have likely no place in your life? That question, though, is one that lurks beneath […]
Since the title of my recent book is The Last Vanishing Man (and the title story includes historically-accurate descriptions of stage illusions), it shouldn’t be a surprise that I love everything having to do with magic — the lore, the history, the illusions, the beliefs in some sort of “real” […]
I expect the title of the new HBO documentary mini-series Telemarketers may limit its audience. Not that the title is inaccurate. This is a documentary about the telemarketing industry over the past 25 years or so. But there likely aren’t that many people out there yearning for a deep dive into […]
Today, I gathered with friends, colleagues, acquaintances, former students, former teachers, and former staff members at the New Hampton School, the high school I graduated from in 1994 and then returned to for my first job after college, a job I planned to stay at for a year or two […]
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