Last night I finished reading Fredric Brown's Madball, a suspense novel set in a carnival. First published in a magazine under the title "The Pickled Punks" (which refers to unborn fetuses in formaldehyde exhibited in carnival sideshows), the novel was renamed for Dell paperback publication in 1953. The "madball" is the crystal ball that Doc Magus, an erudite if alcoholic fortune teller in the story, sometimes uses to impress the suckers as he makes his prognostications about the future.

Reading this book so soon after Brown's The Wench is Dead, I was impressed by how beautifully he created an atmosphere totally different from the first book's Skid Row setting. The basic plot revolves around a number of carnival workers trying to get their hands on money stolen in a bank robbery by two other carnies. One of the best scenes is when Doc Magus, pretending to be a professor of psychology at a prestigious university, cons a nurse into giving him some valuable information which might lead him to the money. The book is filled with interesting vignettes about the lives of the carnies as all the personal storylines mesh to a very dark climax.

I was talking to my writer friend Nathan the other day about how people like to learn things through fiction nowadays, and this was equally true a half century ago when Madball was written. Fredric Brown, who worked in a carnival himself at one point, gives us the lingo of "mitt camps" (fortune tellers) "unborn shows" (with the fetuses) and "model tops," where semi-nude girls shimmy for the "marks" (suckers). But more impressively, he captures the feeling of what it must be like to live and work, and dream and drink and screw, in the itinerant world of the carnival.

I bought Madball at a memorabilia show a couple of years ago, and it cost me $30.00 for a copy in pretty decent condition. That seems to be the approximate rate online, give or take a few dollars, for editions of this book. But just click on the link below to read about Fredric Brown at Wikipedia, and if you scroll down you can see the original art of the paperback edition of Madball. One of the pleasures of reading vintage paperbacks is taking a break from the story to gaze at the evocative art on the cover. Note the subtly outrageous line on Madball: "Step right up, gentlemen--they're all alive inside!" Although not all of them will be by novel's end!

I started another book last night called In the Miso Soup, a 1997 Japanese thriller set in the equally carnival-like atmosphere of the Japanese sex industry. It was written by Ryu Murakami, a multi-talent who directed a memorably kinky film called Tokyo Decadence, which is long overdue on DVD. Like Madball, In the Miso Soup is an information-packed tour of a bizarre world. I'll share some of its tidbits when I'm done...

FredricBrownOnWikipedia

There was an article in the New York Post today about women sharing stories about the various men who "catcall" and make comments to them on the New York streets during the skimpy-clothes days of summer. Writer Mandy Stadtmiller seemed to take the tack that these men are "harassing" the women, but the anecdotes she cited just impressed me with how bold these guys are. In fact, I wish I could be bold like that and make comments to the beauties I see, instead of keeping my praise and poetry all bottled up, which has the effect of depressing me more and more.

As I see it, the problem with making comments to women on the streets is this: my impression is that women take it the wrong way and consider it harassment mostly if they don't find you attractive. If they think you're cute, it's flattery, even if they act huffy about it just for propriety's sake. I don't want to give a woman a compliment and have her get pissed off and have a hissy fit because she doesn't see the real me, but sees rather just the outer shell, the tired, gray, bald shell which is merely a disguise that time and biology have thrust upon me!!

Maybe just a discreet wink and a "Lookin' good, sugar" might do the trick? And unlike these guys cited in the article who get flustered and back down when the women mockingly take them up on their challenges to hook up, I'd be ready to flip out the credit card for a hotel room. Then we'd see who's for real!

And isn't it funny that the anecdotes in articles like this mostly cite the situations where the women intimidate the men by acting willing, and then the guys pull back? But they rarely cite situations where guys say, "Great! Your place or mine?" Because those anecdotes would show the women succumbing to the men, even seeming a bit spontaneous bordering on slutty, and in these days of so-called "empowerment," the media prefer articles that show females banding together and making fun of men, rather than admitting to the fact that women might still actually want to have sex with penis-bearing individuals.

I commuted out to New Jersey today to work at the office of my freelance client. Sure was hot and humid...

I didn't get to work on my novel today, but I plan to pick up Thursday morning, after another trip to New Jersey tomorrow. However, I did think about the storyline a lot on the commute and during my lunch break, and I came up with a resolution for a problem that was bothering me; so when I resume my daily 2000 word daily word quota, I'll know just where to start.

I'm looking forward to seeing what the main female character is going to try to pull on the hero next. Gee, this is turning into a substitute for wondering what was going on in the minds of my favorite strippers like Lily or Angela...

At least I don't have to slip tips into my computer for the entertainment.

I can't figure out completely in advance everything that's going to happen in the story, and seeing how it develops is both the fun part of the writing, and what gives me anxiety. You see, I like to know where I'm going; uncertainty makes me nervous; but maybe I'll learn to tolerate it a little more as I move ahead with this little opus.

I had a very enjoyable dinner on Saturday night with a writer friend I hadn't seen in awhile. Let's call him Nathan. He's around my age, married with two teenage daughters, a lover of poetry and fine literature, and has made his living both as a freelancer and is now on the staff of a magazine.

Like myself, he's working on a novel, and so we talked about the ups and downs of trying to find publishers. He spent some time in Japan in his youth, and we got into a discussion about Japanese women he'd known then and Japanese strippers whom I've met in New York in recent years. I hadn't seen him in quite some time and it was good to chat.

He's been reading my blog too, and he gave me an interesting perspective on it. He said that I describe a kind of life that most people don't have the time to lead anymore, a life of reading books and seeing films and discovering the pleasures of obscure classics. His comments were helpful because I sometimes can't see the forest for the trees as I write this blog, and I occasionally wonder why people find it interesting as I don't describe very many dramatic things--especially now since I don't have much money to hang out with strippers and get my knickers in a twist over them.

Nathan told me that last summer he'd read through all the works of Jane Austen, and since I've never read her books, I asked for a recommendation. He said Persuasion was a good one, so when I take a breather from all the noir I'm reading, I'm going to pick it up. I actually had a dream later that very night that I went to Barnes & Noble and bought it...

My own recommendation to Nathan was to check out The Last Days of Pompeii, a book I've written about on this blog which was kind of contemporary to Jane Austen's work, give or take a decade or two. It was more of a bestseller type of thing in its day (1837), rather than an immortal classic like something by Austen, but I found it a wonderfully entertaining book that evoked a fascinating period in Roman history.

On Sunday I went down to the Lower East Side to see art work featured in a seminar about UFOs. I'm not really into flying saucer culture myself, but some of the paintings were fun, especially those that combined ancient warriors and beautiful maidens with saucers hovering over Greek temples, and works that depicted scenes from movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still, Man from Planet X, and Invaders from Mars.

I asked my writer/artist friend ZP if he wanted to go this art show, but he couldn't because he's studying to qualify to become a New York City schoolteacher this summer, and was loaded down with work. But he recently moved to a low income housing project near the art show, so I stopped over for a half hour to see his apartment for the first time and have a ginger ale. I didn't want to keep him from his studying, so I only stayed about thirty minutes. Now, his small but cozy two-bedroom apartment, complete with kitchen, dining room, living room, and nice size bathroom, looked almost palatial to me, a longtime denizen of cluttered studio apartments. It's very hard to get into these low-income apartments, but ZP was able to because he recently got divorced, his income has been very low (although he made some money writing, he was essentially the househusband while his ex-wife made the bulk of the income), and he currently has custody of his teenage son. So after two years on the waiting list, he got in. It relieves a lot of financial pressure on him, and I think it's going to be a good base as he goes in new directions in his life. Plus, he can see the East River, the Chrysler Building, and the Empire State Building from his bedroom window! Very cool.

So, even though I stayed inside my own midtown apartment most of Saturday, I certainly made up for it by having dinner with Nathan on Saturday night and checking out the UFO show and visiting ZP on Sunday. I was a pleasant Sunday in New York; however, the only thing that was missing, I realized later, was getting laid...

When I was coming home on the subway, this very cute, somewhat chubby but shapely girl with a low-cut summer frock got on. She was about twenty-two, I'd say, and hanging out with two obviously gay guys. They sat down diagonally to me. One of her friends indicated that she had a stray piece of fabric right on top of her very bountiful cleavage. She laughed as the gay guy picked it off her jiggly, half-exposed rack, but then she glanced over at me, sitting ten feet away with my eyes practically bulging. I wanted to say to her, "You are the cutest girl in this subway car, and there are a good number of hotties here!" She had a very pretty face and smile, her dark brown hair was pulled back in a sexy ponytail, and she had very nice feet in wedgie sandals. She was the prototype of the kind of girl I used be very hot for in my younger days, the voluptuous, zaftig beauty of either Jewish or Italian extraction. She had a very sibilant voice as she talked to her friends, drawing out her "s's"; they were talking about gay clubs or something, but I couldn't be sure; this is all speculation based on their conversational fragments. Her voice was pretty distinct, though...perhaps she's a budding actress. Anyway, I stole a number of furtive glances at her, mixing it up by looking at the other gals in the subway car, but always coming back to her.Then I happened to see my BALD, GRAY SELF in the reflective wall opposite me, and I thought, "That's not me! I'm not that old guy! What am I doing in this body???"

The girl and her buddies got off at 34th Street and I continued on, but I realized that the only thing that would have made yesterday complete as a pleasant summer Sunday would have been to go to bed with that girl. Alas, all I got was one final look at her hefty and alluring derriere in her summer flower-print frock, as she exited the train.

Ah! What I would have given to have been that errant piece of fabric on her tits!!

But careful what you wish for, Cranky...

It calls to mind the old joke about the genie from the bottle who tells a guy he'll grant his fondest wish. "I want to be between Marilyn Monroe's legs!" the guy says, and the genie makes with the magic wand. "POOF! You're a tampon!"

I don't think that's what he had in mind...

A beautiful day, but I've spent most of it inside my apartment. It gets so crowded on the midtown Manhattan streets near where I live that sometimes I just feel like avoiding the weekend throngs...and avoiding having my eyes pop out at the endless parade of busty young babes whose tits are half-hanging out of their tops and who will never press those tits against my particular middle-aged mug and balding dome.

Still, staying home in this case is not as mole-like as it sounds. When I open the blinds somewhat, the mid- and late afternoon sunlight is really lovely in my place, slanting across the dusty stacks of books and magazines and videos. I sit on my frayed futon couch, read, and occasionally drift off into a pleasant half-sleep. The windows are open and I can hear people's voices and the traffic.

It was a tough go writing my 2000 words on my book project (see my previous entry for more on this) today but I slogged through. I was talking to a friend on the phone this afternoon about it, and he said, "I'm sure it's going to be good, Sir Cee." I replied, "I just hope it's going to be DONE."

I mentioned in my last entry that I was reading a novel set on Skid Row. I finished it last night: The Wench is Dead, by Fredric Brown, one of the mid-20th century masters of the popular suspense novel in hardcover and paperback. Sadly, a lot of his books are out of print. My copy was practically falling apart (the edition is from 1955) but the book itself had barely a hint of rust in its straightahead prose.

The premise: Howie, a twenty-eight year old high school teacher in Chicago, feels that he hasn't experienced life enough, so he decides to pursue a higher educational degree and chooses a raw subject for his sociology thesis: life on Skid Row in Los Angeles. To gather his material, he hops a freight train like a hobo to L.A. and lives there for the summer as a muscatel-swigging denizen of Skid Row, completely immersing himself in the life of cheap hotels, six-dollar-a-day dishwashing jobs, and endless rotgut wine. He gets involved with a heart-of-gold prostitute named Billie, a nicely drawn and sympathetic character, and then becomes the object of a murder investigation when he's in the wrong place at the wrong time when another prostitute is murdered.

The plot moves along briskly, but it's the depiction of life on Skid Row that really sustains the book. You feel like you're right there in the dive bars alongside men who've given up on anything but booze, or in hotel rooms lit by a single 40 watt over-hanging bulb which illuminates the gallon jug you're swigging from.

One thing that's interesting and unusual about the novel, for a thriller, is that it has a couple of scenes that are interesting just as illuminations of Howie's character, and don't lend themselves to the solution of the murder mystery. It gives the book a texture of real life, because after all, even though a murder happened, there are other things going on down on Skid Row. One character who is portrayed as a potentially dangerous psycho, and maybe even the killer, just turns out to be one more drunk sadly spiralling down to oblivion.

It's obvious throughout the novel that Howie is fooling himself that he's going to be able to just give up his newly acquired muscatel (or "muskie") habit and get back to teaching in Chicago after the summer is over, and Brown gives us an understated but well-detailed scene where Howie is trying not to drink and stay sober in preparation for leaving town. Needless to say, it's not as easy as he thought it would be! The inquiring academic is hooked on the muskie...

At the end of book, Howie is in the clear as far as the murder is concerned, and he and Billie have stumbled upon a nice chunk of money which will take them out of Skid Row; but he faces a tough choice: go with Billie (who's also an alcoholic) to Mexico on an extended vacation and continue to drink, or get on that train and go back to his more sedate life in Chicago. But Billie is too tantalizing to leave, and another shot of muskie will taste so good...

I read somewhere that author Fredric Brown used to take long bus trips to plot his novels, and then he'd come home and get down to work. That's one of the apocryphal "writer's legends" that has rattled around in my head since I was young. I always thought that sounded romantic, and an interesting way to work. Well, he was a hell of a writer, The Wench is Dead was a terrific book, and I immediately went to my shelves to see if I had another one by Brown. Yes indeed: Madball, his 1953 novel of murder in a seedy carnival milieu. I started it this afternoon, while the sunlight filled my apartment...

Man, it's fun to read this noir stuff, and in its own way it's probably as addictive as "muskie."