Romkey: Nota Bene

Basement mandolin

RIVER CITY RADIO HOUR

Hosts Scott Tunnicliff and the Barley House Band invite you to an evening of entertainment. Featuring poet David McMillen, musical guests Lost Nation Station, storyteller Kai Swanson, and the humor of Steve Couch.

Friday, Feb. 15, at 7:30 p.m., The Moline Club, 513 16th St., Moline; $7 at the door. For reserved seating, call Heidi, 309.762.8547.

McCarty intro

Intro for Michael McCarty’s new novel, “Liquid Diet.”

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Vampires are sexy beasts. By now, that is a well established element of the canon.

It is easy to understand why.

Even in the tradition’s early, pre-Freudian ur texts, vampires do not attack their victims but seduce them. A wild beast may chase down its prey and rip it to bloody shreds, but the vampire smoothly insinuates himself with the mortal society he -- or she -- preys upon.

The central act of vampirism -- the passionate bonding of two bodies and exchange of vital essences -- is sensual and packed with erotic overtones. Drinking blood is a deeply intimate act. The fact that it goes beyond anything we experience in ordinary biology does not lessen its power. The vampire lives within each of us on a primordial level. Stories about vampires well up from forgotten archetypes that are no less potent for our inability to identify their source.

Michael McCarty explains it perfectly in his new novel, “Liquid Diet,” when one of his characters says: “Vampires are bathed in the waters of magic. When you throw blood and sex into the mix -- our magic becomes very powerful.”

McCarty, a prolific writer with a fascination for horror in general and vampires in particular, pays homage to the world’s favorite vampire stories in his new novel. Strains from Stoker to Rice and everyone in between reverberate down the darkened streets and dank stairwells in his story. In this book, McCarty is the literary equivalent of Brian De Palma paying tribute to Hitchcock in “Sisters” and “Blow Out.”

“Liquid Diet” could qualify as a doctoral dissertation on popular themes in vampire fiction, but McCarty has too much fun for this to to be a scholarly treatise. There are flourishes of vivid creativity and over-the-top interludes with the Amazing Kreskin that bring to mind the wacky imagination of Ed Wood. The novel is subtitled, “A Vampire Satire,” so that gives McCarty license to throw convention over the rail and celebrate all that is blood-red and bigger than life in the universe of vampire fiction.

There’s also plenty of sex. But to end as we began, vampires are sexy beasts.

-- Michael Romkey

Baby, it's cold outside

How cold is it? Sounds like a Johnny Carson joke. If you remember Carson, that is.

I went outside this morning to take the kid to school, and it was 10 below. I had a steaming cup of coffee I jostled as I set it on the dashboard to start the car. Before I could utter an expletive deleted, much less reach for one of the McDonald’s napkins I keep stowed in the console, the coffee froze.

How cold is it?

Cold enough to instantly freeze scalding-hot coffee on your dashboard.

And brother, that’s cold.

The book from hell

Sleepytown: Chapter 1

Jackson dreamed he was jogging down the middle of the street past Lafayette Cemetery trailed by a Cadillac hearse. The omens were bad, even while he slept. Not that Jackson believed in omens.

What, more software?

So, what the hell do I need with more software? Am I insane? Yes. Truly.

How does it work?

Ah ha. Journal here, automatically update the blog we there. Very clever.

Happy Jan. 2

The other day I heard someone talking about looking forward to celebrating their favorite holiday on Jan. 2.

Of course, there is no holiday on the calendar when the second day of January rolls around. That’s what makes it worth celebrating.

You don’t need to have any Ebenezer Scrooge in you to be ready to put the holidays in the rear-view mirror once New Year’s Day is over. As much as I enjoy the holidays – family and friends, food and drink, giving and receiving, decorations, and family traditions and Christmas Eve service – it gets exhausting.

In our house the holidays start before Halloween. Halloween isn’t any a legit holiday, of course, but we have a party every year. That means sometime around the middle of October every year, we start gearing up.

Once that soiree is finished, it’s time to start figuring out who is coming for Thanksgiving and whether we’ll have enough beds at the family inn to accommodate everybody.

Hosting a holiday is a lot of work, but it has its perks. You get to have the turkey cooked the way you want, and if you want yams as well as mashed potatoes, they’re on the table. It more than makes up for having to wash all those dishes. At least that’s what I was telling myself the day after Thanksgiving, when I was still running the last of the dessert plates through the dishwasher so my wife could stow them till next time.

Then comes Christmas but I already feel too winded to recount that.

We were going to visit friends out of town for New Year’s Eve, but we decided we’d had it and would just stay home. I can’t say that I mind.

So happy Jan. 2 to you. Let’s just not say much about it. We don’t need anything else to celebrate for a while.

Samuel Johnson was right!

I found these tidbits of Johnsonian wisdom and offer them up for your enjoyment.

* We are more pained by ignorance than delighted by instruction.

* The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

* Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.

* The safe and general antidote against sorrow is employment.

* Merit rather enforces respect than attracts fondness.

* Many need no other provocation to enmity than that they find themselves excelled.

* The vanity of being known to be entrusted with a secret is generally one of the chief motives to disclose it.

* Among other pleasing errors of young minds is the opinion of their own importance. He that has not yet remarked, how little attention his contemporaries can spare from themselves, conceives all eyes turned upon himself, and imagines everyone that approaches him to be an enemy or a follower, an admirer or a spy.

* The cure for the greatest part of human miseries is not radical, but palliative.

* Whatever is proposed, it is much easier to find reasons for rejecting than embracing.

* Discord generally operates in little things; it is inflamed...by contrariety of taste oftener than principles.

* So willing is every man to flatter himself, that the difference between approving laws, and obeying them, is frequently forgotten; he that acknowledges the obligations of morality and pleases his vanity with enforcing them to others, concludes himself zealous in the cause of virtue.

* We have less reason to be surprised or offended when we find others differ from us in opinion, because we very often differ from ourselves.

* I would injure no man, and should provoke no resentment. I would relieve every distress, and should enjoy the benedictions of gratitude. I would choose my friends among the wise and my wife among the virtuous, and therefore should be in no danger from treachery or unkindness. My children should by my care be learned and pious, and would repay to my age what their childhood had received.

What I realized

Saturday morning I was lying in bed, drinking black coffee and reading movie reviews in the Wall Street Journal Weekend Edition, when I had an epiphany…

I used to love going to movies. My wife and I, before we were married and thereafter, went to the movies all the time. If an “important” movie was coming out, I had to see it shortly after it opened. It was a necessary thing, something to keep up culturally, but also because it was interesting, entertaining, stimulating.

Once the kids came along – well, kids. You know. We rarely went to the movies. Too much hassle, and we had other interests, ones who liked to build block towers and refused to sit still.   

In the midst of all this, videos and DVDs became a major channel. The advantages to watching a movie at home are obvious. No tall person sits down in front of you as the opening credits roll. If you want to get something to drink, you hit the pause button and go to the kitchen. And you’re not drinking overpriced sodas, either. You can have a glass of wine or beer, if you want, and in a glass. Like Vincent says to Jules in “Pulp Fiction:”

    Well, in Amsterdam, you can buy
    beer in a movie theatre.  And I
    don't mean in a paper cup either.
    They give you a glass of beer, like
    in a bar.  In Paris, you can buy
    beer at MacDonald's.  Also, you
    know what they call a Quarter
    Pounder with Cheese in Paris?

About the time it became easier to rent movies that go to the theater, digital effects got to be really great – and proceeded to destroy movies, at least in the short run. What I mean is this: Once the focus switched to spectacular digital monsters and incredible (fake) explosions and disasters, movies got to be a lot more dull.

These days, there are a few movies that come out with interesting plots, good dialog and masterful characterization, but mostly it’s just stuff blowing up.

So – this is my epiphany – I now find it a lot more entertaining to read about movies than see them. If I read a great review that makes me really want to see a movie, I will. Otherwise, reading about it is good enough. Movie-viewing by proxy.

MAKE MINE A ROYALE WITH CHEESE.

“Satanic Verses”

I read a lot of nonfiction but little literary fiction – and almost never on spec. I don’t feel especially good about the fact, but that’s the way it is.

A Sikh friend recently recommended “Satanic Verses” to me, so I decided to give it a try. “SV” is famous because of the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie. Knowing about a book and reading it are two different things, however. I don’t know a lot of people who have actually read “SV”. When my friend bought it, back when during its original controversy, the clerk took a copy out from underneath the bookstore counter in a plain paper bag as if the mere sight of it would incite violence.

There are a lot of books people talk about without bothering to read. To quote something I read the other day in the newspaper, “The fate of most art is cruel.” But that’s another story. 

Book chat

So, I'm working on a new book proposal. Well, actually, I'm working on my eighth new book proposal. I start them up, and then either I decide it isn't right, or my wife decides it isn't right, or my agent decides it isn't right. Indeed, I'm becoming a book-proposal mini industry. A specialist. A one-man proposal mill. I wonder if there's a market not for finished books, but for book proposals that never become books? If there is, I'm going to have to adjust my net worth upward, because I have eight on in my DOCS folder that I've started in probably the past three months.