Somehow it’s already October & as I watch deadlines fly by somewhat akin to the leaves blowing off trees, I realize it’s been weeks (months?) since I’ve written a blog post. I could blame the volume of reading I have to do for Grad School “comps” or the hundred manuscripts I have to read or the heavier workload at my “day job” this semester, but really, it’s this “non-writing” thing that’s been happening since August. I’ve gone from writing a “poem-a-day” to maybe one every couple of weeks. I haven’t written a word of fiction since August & the only non-fiction I’m writing is of the academic variety: dry and focused on exposition and argument, not image/character/plot/rhythm. For a while in September, I was creating “erasure” poems from various texts and that was fun but it didn’t stimulate my writing the way I’d hoped it would. Much of my energy these days is focused on keeping up with the workload(s) and getting my body moving again post-surgery. I’ve done a couple of hikes & I’m walking to/from work again most days (about 1.5 miles each way). A walk that can be both freeing and irritating (cars blasting through crosswalks, bicycles on sidewalks/blocking crosswalks/ignoring red lights, tourists, people glued to phones). My commute takes me from the West Village to the East Village and this time of year, everything is decorated for Halloween except the banks & that hideous IBM tower in the midst of Astor Place. Halloween has always been my favorite holiday & this year is no exception. I’ll be celebrating in various ways: a séance at the Merchant’s House Museum, two episodes of Radio Theatre NYC’s HP Lovecraft Festival, and maybe a spooky movie or two. I may even go see The Damned. Every few years I attend the Village Halloween Parade but last year it was such a crowded mess, I’ll likely skip it. There’s something about the season that brings on a certain post-Goth nostalgic-melancholy that is both uncomfortable and oddly pleasurable. I miss dressing up. I miss going to see “scary” bands with my scary Goth friends. But seeing the new Clash-inspired film London Town last night I was reminded of just how dirty, cold, and brutal London was under Thatcher. I lived there at the height of the London Goth scene and while it was a formative year for my very young self & rife with positive new experiences (Joyce’s Ulysses, punk rock/Goth boyfriends, Sisters of Mercy/Virgin Prunes/Nick Cave-Bad Seeds/Neubaten) I also have a strong memory of ALWAYS being cold. Freezing in fact. London was damp and everywhere I lived suffered from poor heating and terrible water pressure (when there was running water). It’s not much different in NYC. Although I have a door that locks, a toilet that (mostly) flushes & a shower that (nearly always) has hot water, and at least an expectation of heat at home and work, I’m still cold. And maybe that’s a lesson I learned all those years ago living in my own version of Halloween Town, all the beautiful words & books & all the loud music in the world won’t keep me warm. Sometimes writing eases that deep, dark cold inside but sometimes it serves only to open another door into that well of nostalgia and melancholy from which much bad poetry emanates. Still, I’ll celebrate the best holiday of the year & maybe I’ll even write a line or two in celebration.
Tag: Halloween
best of halloween-things
I meant to post these a few at a time over the past few weeks but as is often the case, life got in the way…So quickly and off the top of my head…Here are some of my favorite spooky reads:
- The Bloody Chamber/Angela Carter
- Dracula/Bram Stoker
- The Haunting of Hill House/Shirley Jackson
- Collected Ghost Stories/Le Fanu
- Something Wicked This Way Comes/Ray Bradbury
- Poe. all of it.
- the Call of Cthulhu/HP Lovecraft
- the Hellbound Heart/Clive Barker
- Salem’s Lot/Stephen King
- The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All/Laird Baron
Some of my favorite spooky viewing:
- Dracula (1932)
- Don’t Look Now
- Nosferatu (1922)
- The Hunger
- The Shining
- The Others
- Nosferatu: the Vampyre (1979)
- Shadow of the Vampire
- The Hunger
- Near Dark
And some of my favorite spooky music:
- Saint-Saens: Danse Macabre
- Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique
- Liszt: Mephisto Waltz No. 1
- Bauhaus: Bela Lugosi’s Dead
- Rolling Stones: Sympathy for the Devil
- Nick Cave: Red Right Hand
- Sisters of Mercy: Alice, Body & Soul, Temple of Love
- Christian Death: Only Theatre of Pain (entire)
- The Cramps: TV Set, Voodoo Idol, so many more
- The Misfits: Skulls [and too many others to list here]
of halloween and crimson leaves and things that go bump in the night
“The night was sweet with the dust of autumn leaves that smelled as if the fine sands of ancient Egypt were drifting to dunes beyond the town.” Although I first read it when I was very small, Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes remains one of my favorite books. I recently gave a copy to a young friend who is reading his way through a lot of Sci-Fi and Fantasy classics (and not so classics). He said he “really liked it” but that it was “too short.” I remember when I used to judge the weight of a book by the number of pages but I’ve learned since that a book can be “short” and still have immense weight. Without turning this into an essay on Jeanette Winterson or Angela Carter or Shirley Jackson, I’ll turn instead to the season: when the door swings open between worlds [to paraphrase Carter] and the leaves start to fall. Today is the first day that’s really dipped below 60 and the air has that specific sharp taste that means summer is gone. The leaves are changing to gold and crimson and most shop windows in my neighborhood are decorated with badly painted zombies, wolfmen, and of course, there are pumpkins everywhere. I’ve lived in this city so long, I’ve forgotten how we carved our pumpkins when I was a kid and what we did with all that pumpkin flesh. Most of the brownstones in the West Village are decorated for Halloween and it’s one of the joys of working in this neighborhood though, really, this time of year always makes me nostalgic for New Orleans where people REALLY know how to dress up and celebrate this best holiday of the year. Reading AO Scott’s predictably snarky review of “Crimson Peak,” I’m reminded why for much of my teen years (and well into the decades after), I lived with the conviction that “normal people don’t get it.” Because they don’t. You can watch zombie dramas on TV and dress up in Day of the Dead masks from Rickys NYC once a year but you still won’t get it. There is a certain slant to the way some of us view life: the way we like to scare ourselves with movies and books and ghost stories, the way we find beauty in dark and shadowed places, and it’s a way of viewing the world that you can’t buy. Certainly, I’m happy that it’s so much easier now to find like minds than it was when I was a quiet, shy kid obsessed with all things gothic and I’m not going to join the ranks of crabby old people complaining about “kids today.” Instead, I want to acknowledge a few of the books and movies that reflect that certain sensibility I mean when I use the word “gothic” and that I will likely be watching and reading and enjoying this time of year. In the days to come, I’ll be posting brief lists or reviews or what-have-you because, for me, Halloween isn’t just one day a year. And for anyone who’s read my fiction, that should be pretty obvious.
yvonne C. garrett 
