I’m a fan of all things spooky. I always have been. I’m addicted to monsters, campfire stories, urban legends about men with hooks for hands, and things that go bump in the night. Growing up, I’m sure this drove my parents crazy. I wanted to dress as a vampire everyday of the year. And there were a few PTA meetings about my drawings. But for me all those ghosts, ghouls, and goblins were never so much scary as they were fun. And I still think they’re fun.
I think (and this is just a theory) I was attracted to haunted houses, horror, and Halloween because of adrenaline. Let me explain. Looking back I think I must have seen something that scared me (a picture of a Zombie or something like that) but instead of freezing in terror I probably felt a surge of hormones and thus a radical increase of energy. So in a sense I think I became a particular type of adrenaline junky, but instead of engaging in risky behavior I found my fix in fear. Dracula and the Wolf-man became my dealers… and my friends. See, for me everything spooky isn’t so much scary as it is fun. I’m clearly not alone in this. Think of the people you see leaving the theater after watching a really good horror movie. They’re laughing, almost cheering. They’re hopped up on hormones and feeling silly at their own embarrassing screams. There is a lot more going on than just a bunch of jump scares. The horror genre is rich with history. The best pieces of horror have always been metaphors for the more subtle and everyday terrors we don’t know how (or don’t want) to discuss. Invasion of the Body Snatches was really about the fear of conformity and the fear of communism. All werewolf tales are about dual identities and change (i.e. puberty or alcoholism--The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is often referred to as a werewolf story). A lot of the slasher movies are clearly about fear of sexuality—all that penetration going on would give Freud a field day. Last night I found myself rewatching A Nightmare on Elm Street and I realized how much of it is about parental guilt—the failures of mothers and fathers come back to punish their offspring. In the film a group of high school students are all having the same nightmare: a badly burned man with knives for fingers is coming after them. This is, of course, Freddy Krueger, the child killer (really child molester and murderer) who was burned alive by a group of vigilante parents. There is a reason why all the protagonists are only children. Krueger has returned (via dreams) to torture and kill the sons and daughters of his enemies. The parents are drunk, on pills, sometimes just not around, and when they are around they don’t listen to their children at all. In the 1980s the news was plagued with stories of teenage suicide, AIDS, and drugs in the suburbs. Divorce rates had gone sky high between ’75 and ’85, and an entire generation (dubbed by the media as generation X) grew up in broken homes as latchkey kids. Freddy Krueger wasn’t just a boogeyman—he was an Ibsenesque ghost. He was the pack of cigarettes daddy left out at night. He was the bottle of vodka mommy didn’t put away. He was the lack of supervision that came back in forms of teen pregnancy, sexual transmitted diseases, drug abuse, and general self destructive behavior. Director John Carpenter once said there are two types of scary movies: one says “danger is out there” and the other says “danger is here with us.” Freddy Krueger was more than just with us. He raised us and tucked us in at night and wished us pleasant dreams....
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Every fall I go to the Western Literature Association conference to hear people read their essays and creative work. It is a fun time to meet men and women of letters who focus on the American West like I do. For me, as an editor, it is a great chance to meet in person the writers who have been published in Southwestern American Literature and talk shop over a few beers and cocktails. It is also a great way to discover new talent!
The past few years I’ve given some critical and scholarly presentations, but this year I am going to read some of my own fiction. I’ve only read my work in front of an audience once so I’m a bit nervous. Yes, I have until October to get ready, but still. I’ll be reading a short story that hasn’t been published yet which makes it all the more nerve racking. The piece needs some revision and needs to be polished by August 15th to be submitted for the Frederick Manfred Award. I guess I better get to work. Besides reading some of fiction, I’m excited to go this year because the WLA conference will be in Reno, Nevada. I haven’t been to Reno since 2008, and though I’m not a big gambler I think Reno is a great town. I’ll be staying at Harrah’s and plan on eating some juicy steaks and breathing in some crisp October air. I’m also happy to announce that one of my graduate students whom I encouraged to submit to the WLA also got in—so I must not be that lousy of a teacher after all, har har. I’m afraid I also have some sad news. One of my other graduate students was in a really bad fire and is now fighting for his life. His name is Victor Holk and he just graduated from Texas State University with a MA in philosophy. Victor also just recently married. A few weeks ago there was some type of electrical fire at his house, and though Victor got his wife, his friend, and his pets out, he now has severe burns over most of his body. Please visit http://www.gofundme.com/x4tbb3w and make a donation. The Cheatham Street Warehouse recently put on a two night charity event which really brought a lot of people together in support of one amazing guy. And some more sad news… My father recently lost his friend Alex Datchuck. This is super recent so I’m not sure about the details, but it was apparently sudden and unexpected. The last time I saw Alex was about nine years ago. A bunch of us went fishing off Cape Cod and had a wonderful time. Later that evening, Alex cooked up the fish we caught and it was quite tasty. Alex was a good man and a beloved friend of my father’s. I’d like to send my condolences to the Alex’s family and friends. I work at the Center for the Study of the Southwest at Texas State University. It’s a pretty good gig. I get to read, learn, and share information about the region where I’m from. Okay, sometimes I have to grade papers and correct people’s spelling, but generally I like to think I’m getting paid to shatter people’s misconception about West Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The Southwest is an incredibly special but misunderstood location. At the center—or the CSSW—we put out two journals: Southwestern American Literature and Texas Books in Review. We also sponsor symposiums and readings throughout the year, and we offer classes and a minor in southwestern studies. We’re located in Brazos hall which is one of the oldest buildings on campus. It used to be the university police station and the infirmary before that. I like Brazos because it holds onto a certain old Texas charm that the newer buildings just don’t have. At night, when I’m here working alone, it can be a little creepy but that has its own charm, too. During the school year I teach two classes: southwestern studies and editing the professional publication. Southwestern studies is an interdisciplinary course over two semesters. I try to bring in guest speakers to grasp a little bit of everything about the Southwest: history, literature, music, geography, biology, cinema, sociology, economics, and archaeology. Some of my students have driven to the Hueco Tanks outside El Paso, or the cliff dwellings around the four corners, but most of them have not been west of the hill country and are a little shocked when they learn that the Southwest is more than just dirt and rocks. So it is up to me to get them to consider where these misconceptions come from. This is pretty gratifying for me because I remember when I went off to college on the east coast people were a little scared of me when I told them I was from Arizona. People asked me if I rode a horse to school, if I had ever shot anyone. And then they would make ignorant assumptions about Hispanics which always made me grind my teeth. I remember one guy who lived in my dorm told me he was afraid of me because I “came from a place with cactus and snakes.” I like to think of my job as vindication for all the stuff people said about me and my home when I went off to school. A few years ago I was talking with some people about books and their film adaptations. Of course someone said, “Well, the book is always better.” And I politely disagreed. Some people were shocked when I said that. I asked everyone about The Godfather and The Exorcist and Jaws. A few other people spoke up and said they thought The Exorcist and Jaws were both scarier than their cinematic adaptations. And I had to admit it… I had never read those books. I had always just assumed the films were better. Recently I came across some used paperbacks of these novels, and I decided to pick them up and read them so I could see for myself.
And I was right. Both Jaws and The Exorcist work better on film than on the page. But why? I think it has to do with format, and by that I mean essentially the power of language and the power of imagery. Both Blatty and Benchley are pretty flat with their descriptions. There is nothing I want to read aloud. It is all cardboard description, plot, and exposition. Both books could have easily become B-movie stuff. I mean they’re just monster stories when you get down to it. But William Friedkin and Steven Spielberg just happen to be great directors. I think Friedkin’s use of pseudo-subliminal imagery makes the film creepier than the book could ever be. Spielberg’s mechanical shark, Bruce, didn’t work half of the time so he was forced to get creative, and by NOT showing the shark he created incredible suspense and tension. In the book you get the fish’s POV. In the book you also get pages and pages of subplot that doesn’t go anywhere. This summer is the fortieth anniversary of Spielberg’s Jaws. I went and saw it again on the big screen last week with my father. The movie is near perfect. I admit a lot of it is lightening in a bottle. But there are also shots that are near Bergman-esque. Quint sitting up in his crow’s nest, backlit by a fading sun. The machete reflecting off the ocean’s surface. And there is the famous Vertigo rip off of Brody witnessing a shark attack. These are all wonderful pieces of a great film. But those are wonderful visuals. I think books that have wonderful language—which consists of most great novels—can never be truly adapted for the screen. How do you make a visual representation of Hemingway’s short terse sentences? Maybe if you used lots of voiceover. But even then, I don’t think it would work. The Coen brothers managed to make a superb film out of a mediocre book by a great novelist when they made No Country for Old Men, but that book had none of the wonderful sprawling sentences of Blood Meridian. The novel felt like a screenplay. Actually, it started out as a screenplay. Maybe that’s why. But then you have those weird cases where the film becomes its own thing. James Ellroy raised the bar of the mystery when he published L.A. Confidential. There was no way that mammoth novel could be a feature film. It is the War and Peace of hard boiled crime. The filmmakers were smart and didn’t try, instead they condensed the book down to the essential plot points and themes. I think both novel and film are great. I admit I hope to someday see a sprawling HBO mini-series of the book. Yes, most of the time the book IS better. But not always. What films do you think are improvements over their source material? The hits just keep on coming. One week after getting my truck out of the shop, the rain Gods reappeared with a vengeance and put a good hunk of my town of San Marcos under water. I wish I could say I was joking. I was at a wedding in Austin on Saturday (congratulations to Daniel and Meredith!) and it started coming down. I decided to hit the road a little early, and I’m glad I did because that night the rivers overflowed and made many roads un-drivable. We were without internet for days and I didn’t really see how bad things were until Monday. Without the internet I was pretty cut off. Some serious damage has occurred in San Marcos, Martindale, and Wimberley. Some people have died. Others are missing. Many homes have been destroyed by water damage leaving a lot of San Martians with no place to go. I know the HEB is giving out hot meals and there are lots of volunteers, but this is the worst destruction to occur in Central Texas in years, possibly ever. Some areas look like war zones with people hauling out destroyed couches, tables, and beds; their porches have been ripped apart; lawn furniture is strewn across roads and fields. Mobile homes and trailers lay upturned in mud. My little apartment is okay, but I’m afraid almost everything I kept in storage was destroyed by the flood. I lost a lot of books and some furniture, but this is nothing compared to losing an entire home or a loved one. I wish I could say something inspiring or macho, something like “Texas can take it!” or “Hays County is going to bounce back!” but this is really bad and it is going to take a long time for the Hill Country to get back to the way it was. I consider myself lucky. But many are having an even worse time and if you want to help then please go to: http://www.unitedwayhaysco.org/give To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven… After years of hard work, including writing, rewriting, and querying, I am proud to say that I now have literary representation. Mark Gottlieb of Trident Media Group in New York will be my agent. This is a type of dream come true. Needless to say, I’m very excited. Trident Media Group is one of the biggest agencies in the country. Their clients include Marilynne Robinson, Daniel Woodrell, Russell Banks, Larry Heinemann, and celebrities such as Ann-Margaret, Buzz Aldrin, and Stephen Colbert. And now William Jensen. Mark is a young guy like me so I look forward to years and years of working together. Here is a link to his profile at Trident: http://www.tridentmediagroup.com/agents/mark-gottlieb Sadly, I also have some bad news. Over the weekend someone crashed into my pick-up truck and messed her up something awful. My truck was parked. I was inside my apartment. This is the third time someone has rammed into my truck while parked. I guess it has a bull’s-eye on it. Right now the truck—or Rocinante as I call her—is in the shop and I’m driving a rental. My truck is a 2005 Ford F-150 and I’ve driven her to just about every place in the country. Rocinante and I have seen all of South Texas to all of South Dakota. She’s helped me move several times, and she’s helped me move a lot of other people, too. She’s been a good truck and it pains me to see her busted up like this. Luckily, the guys at Service King are working on her and I’ve got insurance to cover my ass. Rocinante isn’t my first truck. That would be a 1985 Ford F-150 with dual fuel tanks. I liked that truck a lot. She had one of those old school bench seats you just don’t see anymore, and she had a shell over the bed so I never had to worry about hauling stuff in the rain. I like pick-ups because I get a simple joy from hauling stuff and helping people move. I know. It’s weird. But there is a type of freedom knowing I can load up all of my belongings and hit the road if I need to. I also like knowing I can help people move mulch, sod, or couches if they need a friend. I like sitting high up and cruising with my windows down while the radio plays some classic rock or maybe some Johnny Cash. There’s a certain victory in knowing what you enjoy. And after all these years I still enjoy trucks, dogs, weather, horses, and the ache in your back when you bring in a big fish. Old Rocinante, I’ll see you soon. A few weeks ago I wrote about playing electric guitar. For the past two weeks I’ve been on an acoustic and trying to learn gypsy jazz—the style of Django Reinhardt. It is incredibly difficult. At least for me. But I’m determined and progressing slowly, carefully. I’ve always wanted to play like Django. There’s some type of magic in his playing. It is so fast yet melodic and lyrical. A lot of guitar players talk about finding a voice, making their Les Paul or Stratocaster talk. I think Django’s axe has its own language.
Jazz has always been a bit of a mystery to me. I grew up listening to Miles Davis but when I try to get away from those blues based pentatonic scales my mind shuts down. Django uses a lot more arpeggios and triads in his solos. This is taking some time to get used to. I feel as if I have to unlearn a lot and rebuild the muscle memory in my fingers. The thing that throws me off is the use of chromatic scales. In my head these notes shouldn’t sound good. They should sound awkward and noisy like broken glass being tossed onto a tin roof. But somehow they work and sound amazing. The theory is new to me, so I hope once I get my brain wrapped around them I can really get going. If you know your history you’ll know that Django’s playing is all the more impressive considering he only had two good fingers on his left hand. A fire made his ring and pinkie unusable. I have no idea how he was able to play the way he did with just two fingers. Two fingers! How could he form some of those octopus chords? I can hardly play at half his speed with all my fingers. It is obvious on a first listen that Django could solo lightening fast. But I truly think he was a musical genius. My favorite Django recordings are actually his improvisations—the pieces that are just him and his guitar. Some of these recordings are just him warming up but they’re still jaw dropingly amazing. Violinist Stéphane Grappelli (who soloed over Django’s guitar) was also a type of genius, but Django by himself could construct wonderfully beautiful pieces that defy what a single guitar should be capable of. The chords are luscious, the melody is clear, and he never lets the bottom fall out. Django died when he was forty-three. I try to imagine what he would have done had he lived longer. I wonder what he would have thought of Rock and Roll, of Chuck Berry and Jimi Hendrix. Toward the end Django played quit a bit on an electric guitar, and for me (though his playing is still sharp) it doesn’t have quite the same sound. The electric guitar makes his solos sound too shiny for my taste. Some things should remain classic. Django, old buddy, you’ll never go out of style. Django is still the king! One of my favorite movies is The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. It is one of those films that a lot of people try (and fail) to duplicate. Though many might consider it a type of gore fest or, as Roger Ebert called it, a cinematic equivalent of a geek show, I feel it is a Hobbesian meditation on chaos and man’s natural state. I know some of you are laughing right now. And that’s fine. But let’s take a step back and see how this notorious film has made its way into cinematic history.
I could start with the Romans—feeding Christians to the lions, the violence of their drama in comparison to the Greeks—but let’s speed things up the twentieth century. For all intents and purposes the slasher genre was born in 1960 with Hitchcock’s Psycho. Yes, there were obviously other films before, but let’s skip the Duryea Motor Wagon and go right to Ford’s Model T. Psycho broke all the rules. I know I’m not the first to say this, but I don’t think a lot of younger people realize how radical it was on its debut. This was the first big film to feature a killer whose motivation wasn’t money or revenge or really anything logical. And it scared everyone because it was true. Based on Robert Bloch’s novel which was inspired by real life killer/grave robber/ necrophiliac Ed Gein, Psycho shoved an unwanted dose of reality onto the movie going public. Fourteen years later Tobe Hooper arrived with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. While Hitchcock worked with beautiful black and white (echoing German expressionism), Hooper used color in raw, natural light. A lot of people say the film is “almost like a documentary,” and I know what they mean but politely disagree. Hooper’s film is hyper stylized. But it is stylized to get the best of both worlds: every image is pretty much storyboarded but you remember it being gory and realistic. There is actually little blood throughout. Just enough to suggest more. Lots more. The plot is about as simple as it gets. Some young people are driving through Texas and they get murdered by a cannibalistic family. That’s it. But what makes the film brilliant is (among other things) how the cannibals are portrayed. Remember, this is an entire family, not just one disturbed man running a motel. Hooper never gives any reason how this household has turned insane. He never lets us know what is going on with Leatherface. But the acting gives a few clues. Gunnar Hansen, who plays Leatherface, wears various masks for various family roles—be it the butcher or the motherly caretaker. At times Leatherface seems as afraid of the young travelers as they are of him. It is all nuanced and subtle. Lesser horror movies try to make the audience feel safe. The ghosts are able to rest in peace. The monster is destroyed. The werewolves return to human form before they die. The madman is killed by a final girl. But The Texas Chain Saw Massacre leaves you out on the side of the road with no closure. How did all of this happen? Who knows. It just happens and there is nothing you can do about it. Coincidently, the only other horror movie to have the same type of gall was also released in 1974. Black Christmas is often cited as “the best horror movie you’ve never seen.” In a lot of ways Black Christmas has been more influential—especially when you consider how Halloween and Friday the 13th clearly built upon that film’s storyline and structure. But all of those movies focus on a type of claustrophobia whereas TTCM captures a sense of isolation. All of the film is out in the middle of nowhere Texas. No one is around for miles and miles. No one is coming to help. This is why, in my opinion, the film endures so well. It is a cynical and mean spirited film that stands by the idea that we are all alone leading lives that are brutish, nasty, and short. It is the cinematic standard of American gothic. I started playing guitar when I was thirteen. I’d tried playing the saxophone because I’d grown up listening to Charlie Parker, but I never really got the hang of it. All it did was make my lips bleed. Then one day I was listening to some surf rock and thought maybe I’d try my hands at the guitar instead.
I started lessons on a beat up used acoustic. The kind of guitar you find on the wall in a Mexican restaurant. I think my mom had found it for me at a thrift store. It wasn’t easy to learn on. The thing wouldn’t stay in tune. The strings were old and I didn’t know how to replace them. But I studied. After a while I was able to play “Jingle Bells” and a few blues riffs. Then I got my first electric. It was a no name electric that came with a little practice amp—nothing special—but to me it was a gift from the rock gods. I was done with that acoustic and not looking back. My hands got used to stretching out to make bar chords and after a while I was jamming with the tunes on the radio. I started practicing all the time. And then I got good. Real good. I’d become obsessed. I’d sit on the edge of my bed practicing pentatonic and modes. I read every issue of Guitar World. At night I poured over catalogs of expensive Les Pauls, Flying Vs, and Stratocasters. I was going to be the next Eddie Van Halen or die trying. But then something happened. Or, more like, didn’t happen. I was never able to find anyone to play with. It sounds a lot more sad when I say it aloud. But that was the truth. I lived in a small town. I didn’t get along well with the other kids at my school. And the students who played instruments wanted to play Christian rock. Still, I played alone; practicing my triads and arpeggios. It wasn’t until my first year of college that I really got to play in a band. And on top of that I was the singer. Double Duty. We didn’t play the shredding metal I'd grown up on, but instead a mixture of blues-rock with folk style lyrics. A steady beat with a good old twelve bar shuffle. The drummer dubbed ourselves Extended Forefinger. Maybe not the best name but we were easily the best band on campus, and whenever we played a show everyone was shocked at just how good our little trio was. And we were loud. I mean dinosaur loud. This one goes to eleven! Everyone else liked to play acoustic Tom Petty covers, love songs, college dorm room jams. We came to rock out, and everybody knew it when we took the stage. After a show or a practice session, my ears would ring for hours. We tried using cotton balls. I eventually bought some professional ear plugs. But I wouldn’t be surprised if we did some permanent damage. At the last show we played people went nuts. Some people jumped up on stage. Others began moshing to our rockabilly rhythms. After we played our last song there was a near riot as we were escorted away like victorious boxers after a grueling match. I have never been in another band since then. Part of me is sad about that. I had tons of fun making friends while playing Chuck Berry songs. And I’ll never forget that fistful of glory we all took away after our first show. We closed our set with a cover of "Roadhouse Blues" that still makes me want to pump my fist in celebration. But the truth is that I don’t thing I could handle all of that again. It was such a pain hauling huge amps all over the place, checking volumes, making sure there are enough outlets, finding a place for a drum set. It was all pretty exhausting. And loud. I still play guitar. But these days it is mostly old rockabilly and some country/western tunes. Maybe a bit of jazz. The funny thing is that I’ve kind of come full circle, and now I prefer handling an acoustic. My father and I went to Europe for Christmas last year. Dublin. Paris. London. Two weeks of planes, trains, taxis, museums, and good beer and wine. Though we didn’t have enough time to do everything we wanted, we were able to cram in as much as we could and call the trip a success. My father had never been to Europe. He had spent several years in Vietnam, courtesy of Uncle Sam, but that wasn’t exactly a vacation. I had done some graduate work in Germany but that was it. This was his and my big “Innocents Abroad” type of adventure, consequences be damned! As my father and I started planning the trip he said, “Will, you’ll probably get to go back to Europe someday. I won’t. I want to see everything.” We had bad jetlag when we got to Dublin. It was cold and drizzly. Our room wasn’t ready so we went and got a big Irish breakfast before we crashed. But when we woke up we found Dublin to be a wonderful and walkable city. The next few days were filled with pubs and Guinness. My father was the man who introduced me to the works of James Joyce, so we made it a point to explore his old haunts, including the Martello Tower on Sandycove Point where the first chapter of Ulysses is set. Up next was Paris. This was a city I had wanted to visit for almost all my life. There is, of course, a history of American writers in the city of lights. Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, and James Jones. All of whom I had read. And now I was there walking the streets, recalling passages of A Moveable Feast in my head. Paris lived up to the hype. Versailles, the Louve, Shakespeare and Company. Cafes and wine. At one point Dad and I got separated on the left bank. I wasn’t worried. I knew that he knew where to meet me, so I just had to wait for him to find his way back. I plugged in my earphones and listened to Sidney Bechet as I roamed the streets. There was a park with a small Christmas festival going on, and I went and bought myself some roasted chestnuts which kept my hands warm. It was nice to explore on my own, not looking for anything in particular. Just enjoying the culture and the crowds. People shopping and eating and walking along the Seine. I imagined myself returning to an apartment on Île de la Cité where I’d find a beautiful woman, a hot meal, and a bottle of rosé. She’d have Erik Satie on the record player, and we would discuss Proust and D.H. Lawrence over the Blanquette de Veau. But I wasn’t traveling with a wife or a girlfriend. I was seeing the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo with my father, a sixty-seven year old man with flat feet. And I was having the time of my life. Traveling with your parents as an adult has various rewards. For one you can communicate with your parents on a more mature level than when you were ten and were more interested in comic books than national parks. Vacationing with children can be frustrating, the youngsters are impatient get bored easily. If they’re real young they need naps and probably won’t remember most it anyway. But when parents and offspring are adults you skip all of those problems. You also get the joy of seeing your parents’ faces when they witness something amazing, just as they got to see your face when you first visited Disneyland. And ultimately you learn about each other as individuals, preferably over a nice Bordeaux. |
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September 2022
William JensenWriter living in Central Texas. Categories |