"Mail-art wardrobe malfunction" does not deter Lisa Iversen of Skybridge Studios

[Nancy Bell Scott]

Lisa sent me what she calls one of the strangest MA she has ever made: And I believe her! (The rest of the book appears in the first comment below. Don't miss it.) This Sarah Saunders story presented like a gift, with the ribbon around it, and its gentle, beautiful, mysterious qualities were immediately apparent. Then, as I read it, it seemed a bit disorienting and sad. Haunting. Finally, after some time, it made a kind of sense that I felt I was supplying with my own imagination, and it was touching. I even wondered if was autobiographical (it isn't). Lisa tells me that part of the reason for the disorientation would be that she accidentally skipped a page as she was writing, and had to go back and supply the die-cut as a sort of intermission, somewhat fixing what she called a "mail-art wardrobe malfunction." (Go ahead, laugh out loud, I did.) She put this book together in half an hour! It sounds like it wrote itself. Lisa herself feels a bit haunted by the experience.

We ended up having quite a discussion about her creation of this book from leftover old Sarah Saunders materials and about my run-the-gamut reactions to it. Way too much detail to include here, but between the two of us our discussion involved Henry James's "Turn of the Screw" (very scary); an old movie based on it ("The Innocents") (very scary); and the fact that one of us was once locked INSIDE our own house the morning after reading the James story (scariest of all).

It was after our back-and-forth discussion that I accidentally made a scary mail art (not usually my thing at all), and I thought it must be meant for Lisa, since we'd just got done scaring each other to death. But then I decided she was spooked enough and sent it to Svenja instead.

In the end, this book is a truly gorgeous, quietly mind-bending piece, and I see it as a kind of textual-pictorial tone poem. Rest of the book follows in comment below.

[David Stafford]

The James Dean Pancake Twitch....I've heard of it...

[David Stafford]

Do the James Dean impersonators parachute into Fairmount and land on the ground twitching in Method Acting spasms?

[Nancy Bell Scott]

Wow, sometimes the perfect word just shows up out of thin air, like in a bubble out of the mouth of an invisible person.

i reeaallly don't want to see that remake, but now the intellectual challenge of comparison may force it.

[David Stafford]

Dispiriting! Exactly...the ghosts have no power whatsoever in the remake....

 

[Nancy Bell Scott]

Triumph of technology over poetry--how dispiriting. Julie Harris was a nurturing kind of girlfriend in East of Eden, I think. Your wish probably speaks well of you. No bimbo for David! It probably won't matter that James Dean can't actually be on the porch. We'll just leave a rocker empty and hallucinate him. He'll be there.

[David Stafford]

If you want to know what went wrong with American movies, a comparison of the original Haunting and the remake would be a good place to start. All of the wonderfully eerie tone and menace are leached out of the new one in favor of impressive but distracting CGI, a triumph of technology over poetry.

 

[David Stafford]

Yeah, Night of the Hunter...one of the weirdest films ever made...manages to combine serial killers and fairy godmothers without missing a beat....Too bad Laughton didn't have a chance to make more films.  Julie Harris...she was the girlfriend I always wanted after I saw East of Eden....Of course, that would have made me James Dean who would be 80 had he survived his crash....James Dean at 80...we'll have to make a space for him on the porch of all porches....

[Nancy Bell Scott]

Thanks, don't know it, will look it up ~

[Nancy Bell Scott]

Aha, we have the original Julie Harris "Haunting" recorded and ready to watch. You do know your stuff. Julie Harris is so fine in that role. (I saw it in the theater when it came out. It was really fun walking the 3/4 mile home afterward, *past the town graveyard* which had no fence, in the dark. Sure.) I'm with ya on slasher/horror--no interest. But suspense, a big Yes.

[David Stafford]

I'm your man for ghost stories, Nancy. Not much for slasher or horror. Spain has produced some nice ones lately. And there's original of The Haunting with Julie Harris in the Lily Taylor role.