The Last Policeman

I was not drawn to the book by the title, clearly. The title puts me in mind of an I am Legend-Rick Grimes-Deadwood mash-up. The apocalyptic surviver/cowboy thing has been done - although not to death. Those who have watched the entire Space Odyssey and can still talk about it without PTS breakdowns call the detective story, cowboy epic and science-fiction culture siblings. It makes sense, really. Yes, really. Trap activated and now you shall listen to my theories even though I have only watched five minutes of Space Odyssey before genuinely wanting to inflict physical harm upon myself.

Five minutes of my life I lost: Space Odyssey

Then again, if I were an expert, I wouldn't be putting all this down on a blog for fickle readers. Yes, again. That's you.

The Last Policeman is a detective novel. The mystery is staid: a 'hanger' has been found dead in a McDonald's bathroom and our intrepid detective believes he was murdered. The evidence being a black belt. Oh you're waiting for more? There is none. Justifiably, his colleagues think he is young and overzealous and way too committed to the whole justice thing (they have a point).

Did you notice it? The tide of silver-grey herrings? A 'hanger' is a suicide by noose. Why would one have slang for types of suicide? (I have been drawing this one out.)

An asteroid is flaming through space aimed like a stone in a slingshot slung by Hercules for Earth. And everyone is offing themselves - hanging being a popular method. (Not smart, peeps. Like, at all. It is incredibly difficult to successfully hang yourself, for reasons I shall not explore.) When the novel begins, the asteroid (sentimentally named Maia) is seven months away and 103% on course to hit Earth.

Now, I am not against a natural disaster wiping out the destructive toddler that is the human race. In fact, if I were somehow given the choice, I would choose to resurrect the dinosaurs. Partly because I have always wanted to see a dinosaur, from a secure hiding place obviously. This reminds me of the meme that if human beings had to fight for survival against the dinosaurs, the egg-laying creatures would win.

I also never understand the reactions to the apocalypse. You know we aren't immortal, right? As someone once said, we are pretty much hamburger meat. We make it until we don't. And there are lots of places on Earth where the apocalypse is pretty much every day. "Kill the cockroaches", Russian gulags and Ebola being good examples.

But while we're - I'm - discussing this, our unconscious delusions of immortality counter our death drives, like the self-correcting nervous system and Gaia. Freud said that we have to believe we are immortal in order to face our mortality and lots of psychologists whose names I don't know agree that the popularity of horror movies and apocalyptic fiction is in seeing someone else die so we can feel relief at still being alive and reinforce the idea that we are immortal.

True as Bob.

Ok, so by the time Maia gets here, she won't have many people to irradiate, and if she doesn't, there won't be anyone to say 'I told you' to. But believe it or not, some really sadistic people are still doing their jobs, including this very naive detective (I actually think he has a mild form of autism or Asberger's). Well, not doing their jobs, which is why they don't believe - or care about - the murder. Perhaps this is how he deals with his imminent demise: by obsessing over someone else's death. Oh Freud, you could write a trilogy of books about this.

 As the narrator repeatedly reminds us, the fallible scientists slid down a slide of probability until they reached the mud of almost certainly (because never say never - or just anything unequivocal. Always leave room for retraction). Our socially stilted detective seems stuck on this, probably because he likes a long shot. Which is a criterion of a good but definitely not romantic hero. These heroes are perpetually - or almost perpetually - dissatisfied.

Think of the many John Wayne or Clint Eastward characters (let's be honest, they are all just one guy with different ponchos). To be a cowboy, the hero needs to be isolated from society, even ostracised, with some trauma in his past that he assumes some guilt for. He is self-reliant in his isolation and eternally awkward in society. He is cruel, but he shows that humanity is cruel. The cowboy always faces the march of civilisation and the extinction of his little corner of desert. He is the last outpost of the old ways, in which people have one-on-one relationships with the environment. Dang society. Where is that asteroid when you need it?

Sigourney Weaver kicking some gross alien ass

Now consider Sigourney Weaver's character in Alien 2. She travelled through time when she travelled through space in the wake of blowing up a really horrid, slimy flock of flies.  Her daughter may as well be dead because she is old and crabby. No one believes her about the flies so they think she is a murderer - an insane one. She is lost in this new world and stuck in the one before having to kill things. In the end, she displays some epic gunpower (she straps two guns together - why has no one ever thought of this?!) in an epic fight wearing a robot suit. Cowboy much?

Back to the apocalypse (to my mind, facing those fracking aliens would be far worse than an instantaneous death). In I am Legend (the book), Robert Neville is all of these things, except he really is utterly alone. You could argue the zombies are a metaphor for society, being a much better catalyst than sheep, but you could also argue that without a society as backdrop, he cannot be a hero. Neville is not your Will Smith martyr; he can only be selfish to survive.

Hank Palace is definitely isolated: he uses boxes as furniture, his sister is a drug addict, and his colleagues are waiting for the day the penny drops and he realises the world is already disaster. One trait I didn't mention: honour. These men all have a code of honour (which is not justice. And I am ok with that). In Detective Palace's case, his code is logic and rules and that takes the form of justice when we meet him. He reads every amendment to the laws (now coming in and heavy), views everyone as equals (except the criminals), and writes down every clue in a blue notebook so he can put them together.

He seems to be in some denial about Maia. I will leave you to figure that one out, because you need something to do other than read blogs.

The asteroid, like bad guys, aliens and zombies is a reminder and fear of society's fallibility. The inevitability of its destruction. And perhaps the isolation that comes of knowing this. Of being unable to stop knowing this. We are attracted to these stories to roll around in their foreignness and convince ourselves they cannot happen. Except I always wonder at this fear. My degree (let's milk it for the tiny ounce of value it has) taught me that 'civilisation' is a fantasy, as is any sort of social Darwinism (I am thinking of technological Darwinism here). Change is as constant as death.

I would prefer to be murdered by an asteroid though.

There's more! I have mislead you twice about this. The detective genre. Cowboy much? One or two people deep in a conspiracy theory who pursue the 'truth' even when faced with physical harm. Look, they yell, way to loudly in a dark warehouse while they are being hunted. Society is fraught with red herrings, but we have found the truth. The world has order, friends! Phew. Joke's on you, buddy, but let's take the win. In an impressive flip, in the end they are welcomed into society, having found a friend or the love of his life or just acceptance. 'Told ya so,' he thinks and sometimes actually yells.

Society is not unequivocally screwed. Not as long as this hero(ine) brings order to the world. Like the movie named whatchamacallit, you do something good for a person, who does good, who does good. But this isn't Carthage and so our land is not about to be sown with salt and we aren't about to be taken slave. Society just is because we are and we are mortal. Good breeds good, but trauma begets trauma.

I seem to be playing both sides of the fence here. But look! There is no fence. (An asteroid took it out after a dinosaur stomped on it.) These works of the imagination conjur up our worst fears, which are part of being human and therefore inevitable, and then sings us a lullaby about our own agency. We can save ourselves, they say. Even in the face of the apocalypse, we can still make meaning of a mystery. And therefore we are immortal. Or something. Maybe just immune to death for the immediate future.

I should know better

I should know better. Haven't I been down this road? And haven't I dragged you with me, just to hear you scream? (Solidarity is what I mean. Scream in solidarity.) Suffer for your art. Lesson learnt. Do what you love. Learnt and burnt. (It rhymes. Stop thinking so much.) Language is a fickle thing, swayed by plays on words. Live what you love and vice versa. Maybe I enjoy testing platitudes, maybe I am just otherwise and maybe there is a teeny tiny origami-ed singularity of... hope... living in a swamp of nihilism. Unlikely, right? Maybe it's just a stagnant pond.

I have struck out on my own, hypothetically earning money by writing. Yes, for a living. Yes, hypothetically for a living. Yes, I know. I should know better.

For those you who are new to said screaming, a publisher in Italo Calvino's novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveller explains, unasked, that a reader should never be a publisher. He leaves his claim hanging, for you to fill in the gaps. For me, it was a) realising that most of the manuscripts you thumb through are just that: a dirty thumbprint as well as an exercise in egoism - you are not discovering Yeats or Morrison; you are packaging products that are shelved and bought and shelved, and to be followed by the sequel, and b) the previous point (I got ahead of myself) about packaging.

See, words and books are the altar at which I scrutinise and decode and generally worship with the nit-pickiness of the editor I am. I am an editor and writer. In the most fundamental existential and religious sense (although I am told this is not possible, I live to be otherwise). A career is something you do to fund your existential crises - and that discord is exactly how you come to be good at your job (and, to be crass, to make piles of money you can use to line your published novels with).

Hang on. Something is out of sync in this tirade. What is it? Is it my bleeding wounds? My rampaging cynicism? My unfed facetiousness?

Bear with me, now. Perhaps this is an old song, taught to me by a long-dead bird (it may be under my bed cuddled by a self-satisfied cat named Selina the Psychopath). Perhaps I am older, bolder and uglier, better poised to defend my altar without necessarily dying in the process. This cannot be. If it is, my days and nights will run together (ok, that began yonks ago); I will hum while I do chores; I may actually finish my novel and at some point I will be... content? Sorry, I dropped my laptop as the shivers paralysed my motor skills. 

A writer is nothing without discontent. Every story has a complication or infinite; every award-worthy literary novel has complication, anti-climax and a resolution that is both unknowable and for you to find out. All writers are cynical, vaguely hostile, isolated and definitely not in any way wealthy. Or even just head-above-water not-broke. Or so volumes of novels and biographies, and degrees of terrabytes of movies tell us.

Virginia Woolf or Marianne Keyes? That is my choice? Oh deity of my absolutely fictional altar, I am just going to hide out under it for a while with you, if that's ok? I don't take up much space. Especially when I have dehydrated myself with hours of bawling.

I still protest the word plays that skip like Little Bo Peeps through this post. Partly because that is just tempting Murphy (remember last week when I left my house keys in my car, which was being serviced, or when I forgot my wallet at home and was already in a queue and had to beg the parking office to let me out, or when I left my lights on at work and had to call for a jump start at 23:00 on a Sunday evening? I have seen him in pyjamas, folks. Pyjamas) and partly because life is more complicated than seven words (which in itself nullifies that clause).

Ok, ok, since you are that insistent I will crawl out from underneath this altar and write everything and only enjoy it a medium amount of much. I will also desist from the crazy meandering of this post.  I will stop crying if you stop screaming. I will not overanalyse how much I do enjoy writing (insurance is more interesting that you think, you). I will do all of this, but I will take my imaginary deity with me. We have a novel to finish. And it needs to be complicated and unresolved.

The myth of the Selkie woman

Once every quarter as I was growing up, a glossy illustrated hardcover book would 'arrive'. My mother would look it over, hem and hah, show me a page or two, and then secure it at the top of the cupboard for me to read when I was older. Older being when she had decided I could decode the stories told by more realistic generations and artwork drawn by artists raised in Bluebeard's cavern. She forgot though that I could climb to the top of any tree, fence or wall with appropriate handholds and so a cupboard where my Christmas and birthday presents were also kept, meant only that I needed to get her out of the room.

The Rape of the Sabine Women

The books were a series of mailorder titles labelled 'Myths and legends'. My mother had begun ordering the series because I was fascinated by myth from around the world - and not the sanitised Disney forever-after myths. When my mother realised the titles were a bit, um, dark, she held onto them as an investment. They were hardcover with dark green and blue dust jackets with gold, embossed lettering. The pages were illustrated and full-colour with commissioned and licensed artwork: The Rape of the Sabine Women by Pietro da Cortino and Ophelia by John Millais.

Ophelia

Myths and legends are advice passed down from one generation to the next using symbolism. (Symbolism being far more effective than straight-out telling someone something. An authority figure says don't look in the cupboard? Like Bluebeard's wife I look in the cupboard. Now, if I had heard the Bluebeard tale first, I might have thought more carefully about what might be in there.) We all internalise social mores on an implicit basis, otherwise advertising that holds no relevance to a product would not work.

Illustration by Edward Dullac from an earlier version of the Little Mermaid. At the end she dissolves into foam.

I am all for scaring children a bit. I would rather my child didn't go into the forest or be nice to darkly handsome men, and deal with the emotional scars later. Generations upon generations of children listened to these stories (best told by a scraggly spinster with a talent for voices and sound effects around a crackling fire), were terrified to the point of wet pants and sheets, and lived to tell the stories in their old age.

Our real deficit I think is losing those old people to old-age homes. And our general disrespect for age and its knowledge, which we imagine is a return to juvenilism.

These stories taught that reality is brutal. Things happen for no discernable reason except that they happened, and a useful way to exorcise them is to turn them into moral tales or allegories. The stories change to adapt to changing dangers, unless they are written down and instead of adapting them we just read them verbatim. Because wolves soon cotton on that if they run across a girl in a red cape, they will wake up with a belly full of stones.

Disney spoke to a post-war and then consumerist society, where the ills were no longer hunger and shelter, but happiness, which remained elusive. Happy endings were maybe not so much a warning as a substitute, and a veil against the pyramid of class sinking into the mud. Our more post-modern Pixar nods at the brutality of life, although it ultimately convinces us of the benefits of living in society because life outside of society is wolves and most importantly loneliness. Wall-e is a beautiful movie, that like movies before it, ultimately confuses the desire for love with its necessity.

Don't get me wrong; animated films as contemporary myth are natural adaptations to the old myths (apparently there are only 10 plot lines but infinite manifestations). The adaptation is just a refusal to accept the brutality and sugarcoat it, sometimes literally, with proclamations about identity and love that, according to smart people, only sprung into being roundabout Shakespearian times. (Also the innocence of childhood, which maybe invalidates my entire argument here, but every argument is inherently flawed, else we wouldn't bother to debate.)

I think I have blogged about this before, but contemporary readers have short attention spans (you), which I am relying on.

This depressing monologue was sparked by the legend of the Selkie. Selkies were seals who concealed living breathing men and woman beneath their coats. Every so often a Selkie would 'unzip' her coat and do a few stretches, and if you caught her coat then you could keep her. So far the social more appears to be mysoginism. But this is a 'real' myth and the empathy you feel for this woman is about to be challenged and complicated.

She lives with her captor as his wife for years, because maybe he captured her from loneliness and is actually not so bad. They are kind to each other and breed some human children. One day he goes fishing and she steals back her coat. She swims out to her first, Selkie family. Husband number 2 is furious, so naturally he hunts down and kills her Selkie husband and children. In her rage, Mrs curses every man in and around the village to die in her ocean.

Yikes. Neither partner is exempt from judgement here, or from our empathy. Even society is implicated in the tragedy, by implicitly enabling this theft of a woman's rights. The consequences are vicious, but although there is a lesson, there are no dichotomies.

In another version, Mrs kills her landlubbing children and husband, and then lies weeping in a stream of his blood. This sounds like a Guy Ritchie film.

The Selkie story comes from varying cultures in northern Europe: Inuit, Celtic and Nordic, although the Celts lay claim to it. This is the type of myth depicted in those hardcover books so expertly hidden from me. Boiling, furious oceans, enraged and tragic characters, no hero or villain, or many heroes and villains, trails of blood and curses and life and death. I internalised these messages because they seemed more genuine. C'mon, even Barbie in an ivory tower must be able to see that Cinderella makes no sense, because someone's story never ends and it certainly doesn't continue for forever after.

Is a brutal mythology a sign of more brutal times? Is it an 'uneducated' peoples attempt to describe their reality? And is it paranoia to suspect that nothing has changed? That life and death are inexplicable, but that they are brutal and they do not always sit easy even when you reconcile yourself to these facts. That it is the trauma we need to be wary of: the curse of the Selkie woman. That we are both the hero and the villain, but that sometimes we are only the villain in someone else's story.That maybe children and adults could stand to be a bit more scared.

A pair of brackets is not just parenthesis

Something happened in my previous post. Something Happened. (By far my cheesiest and favourite opening lines ever.) In other words, I had just finished reading the book Something Happened by he of Catch 22, Joseph Heller. Is it coincidence that my psychoanalytic reading of Alfred Hitchcock's movies and my reading of the psychoanalytic book Something Happened coincided? Am I interested in both because I am psychoanalytically minded? (Now my favourite introduction and perhaps my best SEO-worthy.)

This is not a review and neither is it scrabble, so keep reading you!

As a writer, I am prone to using parentheses to insert a comment, joke, stage whisper or red herring. Maybe that is why I have found myself adopting the voice of the main character of Something Happened. Which somehow makes me a relation of Joseph Heller, I guess, who first adopted his voice. (I think this logic makes us married. I should look into his estate.)

Bob Slocum, the main character, uses enough brackets to move the keys from the top-right to the center of the keyboard, replacing 'f' and 'h'. He even uses them to begin (and break) paragraphs. Sometimes it seems as though these interruptions have rhyme and reason. That's a red herring. Sometimes the parenthesised comments are short: "(So who else does he have?)" And sometimes they are long: "Somehow the time passes (doesn't it, without help from us..."

Towards the end of the book, I lost a partner-in-bracket and had to move on.

My parentheses are usually jokes, sometimes self-deprecating ones. Occasionally they are instructions to you to keep reading. You. In the last post, I used the brackets to relay missing information. My sentence structure was otherwise quite normal. Conventional, I mean. Not normal. Something abducted my colons and semi-colons and long complex sentences used to convince the reader that My Point is within spitting distance. (Spitting distance?! That is not a term I'd use. I do not and never have, not even in diapers, spat.)

The legend of Oedipus is something I try to avoid contemplating, as with most of Freud's juvenile phase theories. (Of course, it is difficult to miss in Birds, but the birds are a handy distraction.) (Also, the sliver of the screenplay that I appropriated was, uh, appropriated. I did not write it. Wish I had, but did not.)

Slocum narrates the novel, in stream of consciousness. It doesn't take a horoscope to predict that a large part of the novel is about Slocum's fears. The ones he admits to and those he doesn't admit to thereby admitting to them. (With this novel in my back pocket, I'd argue that anyone's unconsciousness stream would filter into fear and the need for security. And the consciousness stream would be an algae mound repressing said fear. And somewhere in there, hunger, in the shape of fish. Too far?)

Even his humour has nestled in here. More hardy, less irreverant. Less unpredictable. (That's a joke, too.)

This has happened before. I get the tone and style, but never the award-winning books. Yet. (One day, I am going to have them write on the cover of my book, "The next Virginia Woolf/AS Byatt/Carson McCullers." And you will get the joke. But you won't laugh because it will be true. Because the Booker Prize council said so.) This is different from feeling like you have been abandoned in a book after you have closed the cover. This is like a habit. This is what comes from identifying with a character (which is oddly what Slocum does: he adopts the gestures of people he has been around). Arrgh! I must be living in a book, where all my thoughts are pirated from others.

That's it, folks. This post is about redemption. To confess to the above (initially I thought I was just confessing to appropriating a fictional character's voice). Soon I will forget all of this, until I re-read this post going through my archives (after the award-winning book in which I inherit the title of a ghost), and wonder who is appropriating the voices of my characters. And then I shall sue them for copyright infringement. After I invest in a patent troll.

The romantic Mr Hitchcock

Where the Wild Things Are is one of my favourite movies. Which is surprising because David Eggers is one of my least favourite writers (and one of the writers of the screenplay. He also wrote a book based on the movie. Not the book the movie is based on). It is adapted from the children's book by Maurice Sendak. One of my favourite quotes (yes, I'm committing the great sin of any blogger; beginning with a quote. But, folks, this really is just the beginning) from that mean old man is that fear "is truth".

He also says that parents who think the movie is too scary should "go to hell" and the children should "go home. Or wet your pants."

Alfred Hitchcock, apparently, was just as mean an old man. His ideas on fear resonate with those of Sendak, for example: "Fear isn't so difficult to understand. After all, weren't we all frightened as children?" Then again, there are few ways to understand fear, its meaning being in the name, and any person with a memory of their childhood will admit to being afraid of cupboards and curtains. (My particular fear was of the foot of my bed. I thought a witch (closely related to the fairies on my duvet and matching curtains) waited there to snack on my toes (as if I could reach the bottom of the bed).

I have watched four Hitchcock movies this week - including those classic horrors Birds and Psycho. The other two were the thrillers Vertigo and Rear Window. I admit I hid behind my hands more than once during the first two. And maybe I pulled my feet up onto the couch and cringed a little. Maybe. But the emotion that affected me most wasn't fear and suspense; it was love. (No no, that's not when I pulled my feet up. Cringed maybe, but not in the foetal position.)

Hear me out! I am the first one in line at the Cynicism Convention scoffing at poems about roses and summer's days. (There's a guy here who's gifted in parodies.) Love is a chemical, and when it wears itself out, you have to still be best friends with that person and come to terms with the facts that said other person's hygiene habits and eating noises and how they spend money, annoy the heck out of you. The poems should be about socks on the floor and replacing toilet paper rolls and hot water in the morning.

Yes, I'm a romantic. Seriously, hear me out!

My favourite ending of the four was Birds'. (I shall try not to drop spoilers, if you try not to step in them.) The movie begins with a montage to the heroine's flippant but endearing approach to life. (What first endeared me was her wardrobe.) She pranks the leading man by pretending she is an attendant in the bird section of the pet shop. And he's pranking her by going along with it because he knows who she is: he's a lawyer and she recently went to court regarding some prank involving a smashed window (I imagine there's a car involved).

MITCH (talking about preserving bird species)
I imagine that's very important. Especially in moulting season.
MELANIE
Yes, that's a particularly dangerous time.
MITCH
Are they moulting now?
MELANIE
Oh, some of them are.
MITCH
How can you tell?
MELANIE
Well, they get a sort of hangdog expression.

'Melanie Daniels'

Melanie Daniel's (the heroine's) pleasure in a good joke (a woman after my own heart - I learnt a thing or two, so be warned, you in egg-throwing distance. No worries, I have a poor throwing arm) isn't portrayed as a heartbroken young woman's attempt to distract herself from her loneliness. If it is, I may have missed the point entirely. (A hadedah bird just cawed above me. Oh dear. Now there's a bird that would strike terror into my bleeding heart if a flock swarmed into my living room. One tried to carry my cat off once.)

Long story short, she arrives at Mitch Brenner's (the hero's) family home carrying two lovebirds, a graze to the head and the jealousy of the local schoolteacher. (She also steers a boat, in a suit and heels.) Mitch's mother hates her and doesn't bother to disguise it any more than Mitch tries to disguise his lust. (Interestingly, Mitch is a stereotypical playboy, as are most of Hitchcock's heroes (stereotypical, I mean).) Melanie is intrigued rather than perturbed (she rarely seems perturbed. Even when she's falling into a coma).

Turns out there's some weird Oedipal thing going on, from the mother's side, and Melanie seems confuzzled but still unperturbed. The birds attack (really, so many options: crop dust their asses, stay inside until they go away, army tanks, cut down all the trees (then they can't see you approach)), first Mother gets jealous, then she has a breakdown and leans on Melanie for support, then Melanie saves her child. Saves both of them, you could argue.

Here it is, despite the deceptive introduction, the relationship being explored is between a mother and her daughter-in-law. The look between the two in the very last scene (second last frame I think) is genuinely heartwarming - not schmaltzy or in need of words or unnecessary. That one look tells a whole new story, where it took an hour and a half to tell its prequel. (And where most movies today would need a script that fills every moment of that hour and a half. And be schmaltzy. And be reviewed as 'feminism revived'. And end with all of the characters on the floor covered in dirt or flour, laughing. Or something.)

Where the Wild Things Are offers something slightly different. While the undercurrent of Birds is a relationship, Where the Wild Things Are is about a child's psychology. Which is what makes it deeply frightening. It is about a boy's impulses and emotions as he grows up (not quite into a man) - how unpredictable they can be, as if they were a host of irrational creatures in our brains. We pretend we 'own them' (apply ghetto accent). But really, we're just scared they'll turn on us.

The heartwarming bit is where the boy reaches an unspoken agreement with these creatures and swiftly rows off to the safety of his mother's arms. (Hello again, Oedipus. I thought your name was Mitch?)

I lied. I lied, but not intentionally.Self-preservation I argue, Judge. Fear is not a self-explanatory emotion. We can be afraid of different things in different ways. I could be afraid of birds pecking my eyes out, but that's different from being afraid of a daughter-in-law (luckily I'm not afraid of either). Hidden behind these could be a hundred different sources or manifestations or triggers just waiting like landmines to be stepped on (have I mentioned the suit and heels?). And then there are fears not hidden behind anything, just careening through a highway of abandoned cars.

Now take this all with a pinch of salt and throw it over your left shoulder (or your right if you're left-handed): I have not read up on Mr Hitchcock. I do not know whether he was married and how many times, whether he really was mean or just honest, or whether I am reading too much into what are just thrillers and horrors. (Although I don't think I am.) I found that quote by Gurgling "alfred hitchcock quotes' (search engines don't care about caps).

If I am afraid of anything, it is my sub- and unconscious in a way that beats the snowriders in furry white 80's suits in Inception. Because I don't have two seconds to live faced with that twisted mess of perception, without my more empathic conscious to intervene. I have evidence. This mess is the star of Where the Wild Things Are and that is what guides my reading into Hitchcock's pure works of art. Don't tell anyone; they won't let me into the Cynic Convention next year.