FORGOTTEN MUSIC: STEVE GILLETTE

Steve Gillette has been on the folk music scene since the 1960s, so he isn't as much forgotten as he is overlooked by many people.  This is a shame, because he deserves to be as well known as, say, Gordon Lightfoot.

     He's still performing, most often with his wife, Cindy Mangsen, in venues and folk festivals all over the world.

     His songs have  been recorded by Ian Tyson, Garth Brooks, Waylon Jennings, John Denver, Linda Ronstadt, Tammy Wynette, and Anne Murray, among others.

     Here's an early one, Back on the Street Again:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MX-GuI72xlw

     Probably his best known song is Darcy Farrow, which became a signature song for Ian & Sylvia. Here's Steve and Cindy doing that classic:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJkB-dBj-HY

     A haunting legend and a haunting song, The Erlking.  The graphics on this video are fantastic:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCAfrJZDwyc

    Sing Me That Song About the River:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPLNpCkYJGM

     Here Steve and Cindy recall When the First Leaves Fall:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbYOwTMYeFs

      Choppy, poor video.  Good song -- West Texas Wind:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2veoMmAdcA

************

    For more Forgotten Music, go to Scott D. Parker's blog.

INCOMING

A mixed bag this week, but a lot of good science fiction by some favorite authors, including Farmer, Lafferty,
and Spinrad.  Gilman, Hoffman, and Loomis are great Western finds, just as Warner and Yarbro are for fantasy. 

• Piers Anthony and Mercedes Lackey, If I Pay Thee Not in Gold.  Fantasy.
• Donald Bacon, The Midnight Hour.  Horror.
• Brian N. Ball, The Regiments of Night.  SF novel.  This one's an early DAW paperback (#19) witha great Freas cover.
• Philip Jose Farmer, The Stone God Awakens.  SF novel.
• Eric Flint and David Drake, In the Heart of Darkness.  Science fiction/fantasy.  Another in the saga of Belisarius, Roman general.
• George Gilman, Edge:  Slaughterday.  Adult western, #24 in the series.
• Donald Hamilton, The Devastators.  Spay novel, #9 in the Matt Helm series.
• John Hardin, Tar Heel Ghosts.  Non-fiction.  Stories of ghosts and such from North Carolina.
• Lee Hoffman, Nothing But a Drifter.  Western.  A brilliant writer, sadly forgotten.
• Hans Holzer, The Ghost Hunter's Strangest Cases.  Non-fiction.  I've made no bones about my feelings that Holzer was a humbug, but I do enjoy reading about his "cases".
• K. W. Jeter, Dr. Adder.  SF novel.
• Joan Kahn, editor, Some Things Dark and Dangerous.  Horror anthology.Electric forest  Sixteen stories, including crime, mystery, and non-fiction.
• Tanith Lee, Electric Forest.  Science fiction.
• R. A. Lafferty, Annals of Klepsis.  SF novel.  The rights to Lafferty's entire literary estate were recently auctioned off, with Locus Enterprises the winner; this is good news.
• Noel Loomis, Heading West.  Western collection of seven stories.  Introduction by Bill Pronzini; I wonder if this is one of the single-author collections that Pronzini has edited.  Also, unfortunately, there's no reference to where the stories were originally published.
• Nancy Martin, Some Like It Lethal.  Mystery novel.  Third in the Blackbird Sisters series.
• Jack McDevitt, Infinity Beach.  SF novel.  Nominated for the Nebula, Campbell, and Locus awards; published in England as Slow Lightning. 
• Thomas Mordane, Bloodroot.  Horror.
• Andre Norton, Zarsthor's Bane.  Science fiction.  A Witch World novel.
• Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.:  The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon.  Biography of a writer whose tragic death is still mourned.
• Norman Spinrad, Bug Jack Barron.  The classic SF novel that was denounced on the floor of Parliament.
• Ramsay Thorne, Renegade #11:  Citadel of Death.  Adult western actually written b y Lou Cameron.
• Robert W. Walker, Disembodied.  Horror.
• Richard S. Wheeler, Second Lives:  A Novel of the Gilded Age.  Historical novel/western. 
• Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes.  Fantasy.  Interestingly, this novel (Warner's first) was the first Book-of-the-Month Club selection.
• Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Ariosto (fantasy) and Sins of Omission (horror).  I used to devour Yarbro's novels like peanuts, but for some reason, got out of the habit.  She's a solid writer I have to revisit.
• Roger Zelazny and Gerald Hausman, Wilderness.  Historical novel/western.

DANG!

Well, I cleared ny schedule yesterday, just in case, but I was not raptured, so I had to mow the lawn this morning.

FORGOTTEN BOOK: THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MIRROR

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MIRROR by Enrique Anderson Imbert, translated by Isabel Reade (1966)

Enrique Anderson Imbert (1910-2000) was an Argentinian academic who, despite spending more than  half his life in the United States, regularly returned to his beloved homeland to refresh and recharge his batteries.  A noted writer and teacher, he was one of the main founders of the "magic realism" school that made modern Latin American writing such a vital and interesting literature.  Guggenheim fellow, member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Academia Argentina de Letras, the first Victor S. Thomas Professor of Hispanic Literature at Harvard University, Don Imbert was noted for his uniquely dramatic method of teaching.  Imbert was a proud lifelong Socialist, far more Fabian than Marxist.

     He wrote literary criticism, novels, and histories, but was probably better knoown for his "microcuentes", short -- sometimes absurdist -- sketches blending fantasy with magic realism.  Which brings us to The Other Side of the Mirror, a collection of 31 stories/sketches first published in Spanish in 1961 as El Grimorio.  As if to point out how slippery literature can be, these 31 stories actually contain 71 stories, some only a few lines long.  Imbert plays at conventions:  a locked room murder mystery suddenly veers into a supernatural game; the legendary French villain Fantomas becomes an ardent philosopher,  angels are willing to be bribed -- nothing is as it seems and anything can happen (often for no reason at all) in Imbert's world.  To set the tone, The Other Side of the Mirror opens with one of Imbert's most famous stories, Light Pedro, which begins with Pedro almost falling into the sky (reminding me so much of Shel Silverstein's Falling Up).  Somehow, the more fantasic the story, the more solidly grounded in human nature it is:

          I was practicing medicine the, in Humahuaca.  One afternoon they brought me an injured child:  he had fallen down
     a mountain cliff.  When, in order to examine him, I took off his poncho, I saw two wings.  I examined them:  they were
     intact.  the minute the boy could talk, I asked him:
          "Why didn't you fly, son, when you felt yourself falling?"
          "Fly?" he asked.  "Fly, and have people laugh at me?"

     Not all of the sketches in the book worked for me.  Several presented in play formats seemed a bit too pedantic.  Overall, though, the generous use of language and imagery take these very short stories and extend them to almost infinite length, tickling and stimulating the mind.  Recommended.

A FEW MORE FROM EVAN HUNTER

Here's a few more titles credited to Evan Hunter under the "Dean Hudson" name:

• Casting Couch
• Lust Dream
• Wanton Rendezvous

     Also Glass Mistress is actually titled The Glass Mistress.

     And The Virgins of Cadabra is the third in a series of four books about Phil Scott, Secret Agent XX96.  The other three books in the series are (in order):

• Love Defector
• The Sexpert
• The N.U.D.E. Caper

     Finally, William Hamling, the publisher, was very worried about being prosecuted by the government for obscenity and was constantly closing old publishing lines and opening new ones.  For a while, he also slightly altered the authors' pen names in an attempt to avopid prosecution.  Thus, "Andrew Shaw" became "Andrew Shole", "Alan Marshall" became "Alan Marsh", and so on.  So, for at least one book, Sin Dealer, "Dean Hudson" became "Dean Judson".

     (Prosecution did come, finally.  Details can be found in Earl Kemp's constantly fascinating online magazine eI, which should be required reading.)

     More on "Dean Hudson" as I get more information.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, CHRISTINA!

When Jessamyn, our oldest, was born, we thought there couldn't been a more perfect child.  Turns out we were right.  But then -- thirty-seven years ago -- Christina came along and we learned there it was possible to have two most perfect childs, each better than the other.  Less then a hour after Christina was born, Kitty and I were dancing in her room while a surprised candy-striper was trying to get Kitty into her bed; the candy-striper gave up and ran to find some food for us because, you know, birthin' them babies is hard work.
     Anyway Christina came along, determined from the very start to make her own mark in the world.  She first tried to do this by having colic for her first seven months.  My mother-in-law determined that we were poor parents and took Christina for a night, convinced that she had the magic touch to make the baby sleep.  The next day, she told us, "I was going to rock the baby to sleep, but I couldn't find a big enough rock!"  At seven months, the pediatrician told us that Christina was fine, but he was prescibing cranky baby drops for us.  Within a day, the colic stopped and Christina morphed into the sweetest baby ever, and evidently has been trying to make up for it ever since.

     Up until first grade she was called "Christy"; then one day she solemnly told us her name was "Christina", and she has been Christina ever since.  Christina grew up smart, outspoken, friendly, and talented.  Despite all that she is slow to get a joke, laughing several minutes after everyone else.  (Her favorite jokes:  "A man walked into a bar...and it hurt!" and "Why did the monkey fall out of the tree?  Because it was dead!"  With that reportoire, she'd better keep her day job.)  For a person with just about the greatest amount of common sense I have ever met, she still can get lost trying to find items in a grocery store.  Try as I might, I can't think of anything else even close to negative to say about her.  So anything else I have to say will be nice.

     She always worked hard and studied hard.  Everything she got she earned.  Every obstacle was overcome.  While in college at George Washington University, she took up Tae Kwon Do, eventually earning her Black Belt; her instructors said that every time she hit a plateau (which seemed to happen often) she just kept at and kept at it and then would suddenly make a huge improvement.  In High School, she toured England, Germany and Austria with her school orchestra.  When she was fifteen, she was the youngest student from the school in the Japan foreign exchange program.  When she worked at a bakery near D.C., she would take the muffins that were about to be trashed at the end of the day and hand them out to the homeless.  While working as an emergency room technician, she often spent hours with dying patients -- not because it was part of her job, but because she felt no one should die alone, and no one did on her watch.  As an EMT, she volunteered on an ambulance for over eleven years, always capable, always professional, always compassionate.  She served as an adjuct teacher at George Washington University (adjunct teachers are the ones that teach and do not receive benefits) giving instruction in cardiosonography.  She's now traveling two and a half hours each way to Baltimore to train as a sign language interpreter.

     In her personal life, she met and married a wonderful man, and helped him and cheered him on as he continued his education to move into a technical field.  She has two children and is a strict and loving mother.  ("I love you and I want you to hug me for a full minute, then I'm going to yell at you because you __[fill in the blank]__."  This technique works; the kids are happy, well-adjusted, and well-behaved.)  She is active in their school life and in their activities.  She and her husband coached a girl's soccer team when no one else would stand up -- even though she had never played soccer before.  She spent her thirtieth birthday kayaking with whales in Alaska, her thirty-fifth birthday hiking in Ireland.  She feels a responsibility to her pets (three dogs, one cat, one python, two goat, and a continuously changing number of fish), and spent one night last week nursing a sick goat.  She recycles.  She and her husband take their kids on nature walks.  This Easter marked a spur-of-the-moment trip to Atlanta to check out the aquarium there (a whale shark defecated in front of the kids, which impressed them greatly).  She donates blood every eight weeks because it's the right thing to do.  She's a good person and we are very proud of her.

      (Did I mention that she's also beautiful?  When she was in her early teens, one actress with whom we worked at a professional theater mistook Christina for her good friend, the actress Jacqueline Bisset.)

     (Did I mention she's funny?  I think it's the Irish in her, but nobody can tell tell a story like Christina.)

     (Did I mention that everybody likes her?  Well, no.  But nobody can dislike her.  And almost everybody loves her.)

     (Did I mention that I'm proud of her?  I think I have.  I can't claim responsibilty for the the type of person she has become, but perhaps I helped.  I know my wife had a major input because Christina has the same glow of love and kindess that Kitty does.)

       (Did I mention that I had no white hair before she came into my life?  'Tis true.  My hair is now snowy white.  Any correlation, I wonder?  Christina does take pride in giving me grief.)

     So, Happy Birthday, Christina!  I love you.

 

OVERLOOKED FILM: CARNIVAL OF SOULS

There's nothing like a cheesy horror film to make my day.  Carnival of Souls is the 1962 brainchild of Herk Harvey, a producer/director/writer whose previous work was in industrial and educational films.  His otto seems to have been "We Don't Need No Stinkin' Hollywood!"  Shot in three weeks in Salt Lake City and his home base of Lawrence, Kansas, Harvey utilized local actors almost exclusively for Carnival of Souls, although he did tap Strasberg-trained Candace Hilligoss for the lead.  Never heard of Candace Hilligoss? 
Don't fret, not too many have.

     Hilligoss plays Mary Henry, who is the only survivor when a car goes over a bridge.  From that point on, she is haunted by the reflection of a ghoulish figure.  Slowly, her personality changes as she seemingl;y becomes possessed.

     Why bother explaining it, when you can view it.  So here's the cult classic, Carnival of Souls:

http://www.archive.org/details/CarnivalofSouls

     For a complete rundown of this week's Overlooked Films, Television, A/V and Whatnot, check out Todd Mason's Sweet Freedom blog.