Blogcritics

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

GreenLit: An American Haunting - The Bell Witch by Brent Monahan

Gordon Hauptfleisch — Sat, 20 May 2006 09:17:40 EDT

GreenLit. It's the fiction that led to the fade-in. These are the "at a theater near you" books -- the literature whose adaptations got the greenlight to production and projection on to your neighborhood silver screens.An American Haunting: The Bell Witch by Brent MonahanAh, the obligatory Sacred Indian Burial Ground - the reason all haunted houses are haunted is because they are built upon ancestral and sanctified Native American land, of course. Ho-hum. You don't even shudder to think it any more, and what should be a frightful story might instead become a tale of misery and no imagination. The reader goes harumph in the night, and rolls his eyes. I exaggerate for effect, of course, just as An American Haunting may stretch what purports to be the truth - the book is, after all, a gussied-up, ghosted-out memoir that "fell into the hands" of the re-teller, novelist Brent Monahan. But since the legend of the Bell Witch of Tennessee, one of the most famous and heavily documented cases of a violent haunting in American history (though not without its detractors), enticingly entails so many of the supernatural elements we hold so shakily near and dear to us -- poltergeists, apparitions, disembodied voices, multiple personalities, witches -- it perhaps also calls for a myriad of possible explanations, including the one about disrupted deep-sixed Chickasaw and Cherokee riled and rising up, their hunting grounds become haunting grounds.I don't know how such ghoulish opportunities for Central Casting and the Prop Department plays out in the current movie version of the book -- lukewarm reviews, poor word of mouth and prohibitive ticket prices are enough to scare me off -- but in the book there is the time and cohesive circumstance to fully consider such Indian graves as "had been found in woods on the Bell property when more land was being cleared for crops."And who were the Bells? They were the farming family of John Bell, who had settled in the early 19th century in Robertson County, and who had got the upper hand in a land dispute with an eccentric neighbor, Kate Batts. A vengeful Kate vowed upon her deathbed that she would get even with John, and indeed the haunting began on this occasion in 1817. Starting with "supernatural visitations," such as a large black animal and a girl in a green dress swinging from a tree, events evolved soon enough into poltergeist activity, but not of the merely mischievous kind. Snatching blankets off of sleeping family members and clawing at walls became more intimidating with incoherent choking and strangling noises, loud shrieking and cursing. Then after gaining vocal strength to the point of being able to converse, the spirit confirmed suspicions and announced herself as "Kate Batts' Witch." She also took her haunting up a few more notches, slapping and pinching people, mostly those she took a disliking to. By this time "Kate" had branched out beyond the Bell family, also targeting neighbors and visitors (including future President Andrew Jackson). Indeed, Kate could travel for miles around, and haunt and taunt two people at the same time - an ability facilitated by the "fact" that a "family" of spirits emerged, calling themselves Black Dog, Jerusalem, Mathematics, and Cypocraphy, each with a different personality.All of these episodes, though often presented matter-of-factly, as befits a detailed documentation, are eerily evocative and make for a solid -- if not supreme -- scare, mostly from being ostensibly rooted in events at least believed real. There are some goofs and gaffes, such as an occasion where there was a diversion set up "whilst the 'witch' was busy entertaining strangers" - this distraction made despite the evidence previously established for Kate's ubiquity and omniscience. The most successful parts of An American Haunting -- effective perhaps for its dichotomous clash -- concerns the latter years of the haunting into 1821 when the bizarre multiple personalities had diminished from the scene. Kate emerges more as a fully realized lone spirit, one that could discourse about theology but who also, like a psychotic housewife, in hum-drum dreary tones "droned on with its usual prattle, alternating gossip with vicious verbal barbs at John." Indeed, it's a contradictory development that could be the antithesis of a spooky story if it were not for some increased torments, physical and mental. These assaults rained down increasingly upon John -- by this time Kate has reiterated and spelled out her death bed threat that she will "get even" by killing him -- and upon, almost inexplicably, his adolescent daughter Betsy. The ending, not to be divulged here, is a mixed affair. A startling development, but one that seems attuned more to modern insights, neatly but nonetheless disturbingly ties up the loose ends, wrapping up in almost anachronistic fashion the disjointed parts of a haunting whole.

Gordon Hauptfleisch, alias Neanderthal Hawthorne, is a Blogcritics Books Editor, free lance writer, and book reviewer for the San Diego Union Tribune. He's also an enigmatic visionary of unfathomable secrets and many a guise, or at least he plays one in his delusions of grandeur. His mandate also includes weird bugs. In a previous life he was a leprous horse thief.

GreenLit: Thank You For Smoking by Christopher Buckley

Gordon Hauptfleisch — Tue, 4 Apr 2006 19:39:11 EDT

GreenLit. It's the fiction that led to the fade-in. Whether it's the real deal or just the real tinsel underneath the phony tinsel, the titles in this series are devoted to the "at a theater near you" books -- the literature whose adaptations got the greenlight to production and projection on to your neighborhood silver screens.Thank You For Smoking by Christopher Buckley: Have Shamelessness, Will Travel. Nick Naylor is one of those Tobacco Industry flacks you love to hate when it comes to absurd cigarette company dig-in-your-heel denials that their products are unhealthy or that there is absolutely no link to lung cancer. He also comes to mind if your cynicism -- read: common sense -- puts the lie to those transparent, gag-smarmy we're-on-your-side campaigns touting Tobacco's care and concern about such issues as underage baby seal smoking. "Where's the data?" Nick continuously asks in Christopher Buckley's witty and incisive 1994 novel -- now a motion picture directed by Jason Reitman and starring Aaron Eckhart and Maria Bello. As an unapologetic lobbyist in Washington, D.C., he's bold enough to convincingly announce that smoking retards the onset of Parkinson's disease and that it helps replenishes the ozone, while contending that clerical workers who puff-away get less carpal tunnel syndrome because they take more breaks. He'll also try to deflect criticism by pointing to the burgeoning health scare posed by Vermont cheddar cheese. As for his own anti-underage smoking campaign, he likes the slogan, "Everything Your Parents Told You About Smoking Is Right" because of the potential subliminal power of the last three words.On the other hand, Nick comprises a cathartic and refreshing, um, breath of fresh air for anyone who feels that the PC pendulum has swung too far to the other side with off-the-charts lawsuit rewards to not-responsible-for-their actions whiners who have managed to ignore fifty years of common sense and warnings about the dangers posed by smoking, by those insufferable truth.com commercials, and by the piling-on of absurd laws by hand-wringing "gaspers" intent on restricting all smoking anywhere indoors and outdoors in the universe and, just in case, the parallel universe should it exist. As Nick justifiably rants: There are an awful lot of sanctimonious people out there who expect everyone else to canonize them because they're going around like hall monitors confiscating all the ashtrays. And once they've confiscated the last ashtrays, do you think they're going to stop there? Oh no. They'll be slapping warning labels on kid's Popsicles. "Warning, the surgeon general has determined that Popsicles make your tongue cold." Not to mention the danger of second-hand cold tongue.Now, righteous rhetoric, on both sides, of the issue, is not enough to sustain interest in a novel. So there's a kidnapping by a bad Hungarian actor, an array of colorful characters, an FBI on the scent of the wrong trail, the "Mod Squad" -- the Merchants-of-Death squad, that is -- and a nifty little mystery for those who just want to be supremely entertained. I mean, if that's your thing. That is my thing, but first I'm going to crawl out in the freezing cold on to a narrow 20th-story building ledge that makes up the smoking section where I am. Not because I smoke, mind you -- but because the company is often better.Author's note: Thank You for Smoking has also been reviewed by Cameron Graham on Blogcritics.