UNREAL: Writers Studio Teachers Read Their Work

Published October 4, 2019 by Philip Ivory

Join us on Oct. 18 for a public reading event, cohosted by Antigone Books and The Writers Studio. Teachers from the Tucson branch of The Writers Studio — Lela Scott MacNeil, Richard Leis, Donna Aversa, Reneé Bibby and myself — will read selections of poetry and prose that focus on the unusual, the dark, and the unreal.

WHERE: Antigone Books, 411 N 4th Ave, Tucson, Arizona 85705

WHEN: October 18, 2019 at 6:00 PM

No RSVP or admission fee is required.

At The Writers Studio Tucson, we pride ourselves on being active participants in Tucson’s thriving literary community. Please join us, and patronize Antigone Books, one of the finest independent bookstores in the country. Visit their web site and sign up for their newsletter.

The Writers Studio, founded by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Philip Schultz in 1987, offers writing workshops designed to help students discover and nurture their own voices. The Writers Studio Tucson offers four levels of classes to help students achieve their writing goals.

For more information on The Writers Studio, click here. 

When Reality Doesn’t Cut It, UNREAL Is Our Best Friend!

See you on Oct. 18!

 

During October: 31 Days of Classic Horror

Published September 30, 2019 by Philip Ivory

From my earliest years, horror films have had a profound influence on my creativity and my writing, and it’s time I paid them proper tribute for their artistry and lingering cultural impact.

Starting tomorrow and continuing each day for the entire month of October, I’ll highlight a favorite horror film, one that’s particularly influential in the field, or that impacted me in a profound way. The choices are subjective and entirely mine. The list will proceed chronologically from the dawn of sound films to the present day. 

 

 

Please check in and help me celebrate the cinema of the macabre all this month. Like Dr. Septimus Pretorius in BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935), let’s hoist our glasses and toast the infernal, unholy, misbegotten and malign:

“To a new world of gods and monsters!”

 

 

 

WHAT TERRIBLE BOOK? Answer Revealed

Published September 27, 2019 by Philip Ivory

So a few days ago, I posed the question: Which book is being reviewed here by the editor of The London Sunday Express?

” … the most infamously obscene book in ancient or modern literature … All the secret sewers of vice are canalized in its flood of unimaginable thoughts, images and pornographic words. And its unclean lunacies are larded with appalling and revolting blasphemies directed against the Christian religion and against the name of Christ — blasphemies hitherto associated with the most degraded orgies of Satanism and the Black Mass.”

That was a contemporary 1920s review of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

I came across that remarkable quote in the current (9/26/19) issue of The New York Review of Books. It reminds us that Ulysses, which among its other preoccupations details a variety of human sexual and excretory functions, repulsed many early readers, including Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw, W. B. Yeats and even D.H. Lawrence. Lawrence, who celebrated lusty behavior in his own work, labeled Molly Bloom’s famous concluding soliloquy “the dirtiest,  most indecent, obscene thing ever written.” Other early readers such as T.S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway hailed the book as a masterpiece.

Take a look at “Ulysses on Trial,” The New York Review of Books‘ fascinating account of how publisher Bennet Cerf and ACLU lawyer Morris Ernst waged a brilliant and ultimately successful campaign to help Ulysses navigate its way around anti-obscenity laws so that Joyce’s master work could be published in the United States.

 

WHAT TERRIBLE BOOK IS THIS?

Published September 24, 2019 by Philip Ivory

Which book is being reviewed here by the editor of the London Sunday Express?

” … the most infamously obscene book in ancient or modern literature … All the secret sewers of vice are canalized in its flood of unimaginable thoughts, images and pornographic words. And its unclean lunacies are larded with appalling and revolting blasphemies directed against the Christian religion and against the name of Christ — blasphemies hitherto associated with the most degraded orgies of Satanism and the Black Mass.”

I’ll post the answer in a few days.

 

Shout Out from Better Living Through Beowulf

Published September 20, 2019 by Philip Ivory

 

My thanks to Robin Bates at the excellent literary blog Better Living Through Beowulf. He penned a gracious shout out to my blog post of late last year in which I harnessed the brilliance of quotes by Lewis Carroll to try to make sense of the lunacy of Donald J. Trump’s administration. Click on the illustration above to read his review.

I’ve thought about doing a sequel to my post, since there are many more wonderful Lewis Carroll nuggets to highlight. But to be honest, the mindless anarchy and rampant corruption of the Trump administration has continued to reach such mind-boggling depths of venality and inhumanity that I’m not sure what else can be said. I think Carroll, the Oxford scholar and gentleman, might say: “Enough! Please leave me out of this!”

Let’s face it. There is no bandersnatch frumious enough to make sense of putting innocent children in cages. 

That depressing thought aside, please take time to explore Robin’s wonderful site. My thanks to him for his words of recognition. And if you want to revisit my original post, just click here: THE STUPIDEST TEA PARTY.