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ukjarry.bsky.social
@ukjarry.bsky.social
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Just another Matthew on the internet
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ukjarry.bsky.social
A selfish, cynical TV executive haunted by three ghosts at Christmas Eve?

Scrooged from 1988, script - Michael O'Donoghue?

Nope! It’s The Return of A Christmas Carol (Esquire, Dec 1961), script - Harvey Kurtzman, art - David Levine

The original massive 1960s’s Esquire pages are truly impressive
December 5, 2025 at 11:04 PM
ukjarry.bsky.social
By the great, lamented cartoonist Richard Sala, this is his fabulous round-up (anatomy, even?) of

!!! PSYCHO SANTA MOVIES !!!

Sala’s original comments on how much harder it was to compile this kind of piece back in 2003:

hereliesrichardsala.blogspot.com/2009/12/slig...
Header: a skeleton in a Santa costume clutches a butcher’s knife, in panel bordered by holly and candy canes “Knock back some eggnog and curl up in front of a warm TV screen - Here is your guide to PSYCHO SANTA MOVIES” 1st panel “And all through the house – a segment of 1972’s Tales from The Crypt, this is the daddy of all psycho-Santa-on-the-loose pix, adapted from the classic EC comic book and remade by HBO in 1989. – Eeeek!” (1972). A young girl happily says “Look who’s here, Mommy!”, pointing at a looming wild-eyed maniac in an ill-fitting Santa costume wielding a large ax. 2nd panel: “Black Christmas (1974) – No killer Santa Claus this time, but it’s the best phone-calls-from-a-psycho-hiding-inside-the-house-urban-legend film ever made. Don’t watch it alone!” A black-haired young woman in a yellow jumper holds a white telephone from which a voice says “Billy! What have you done with the baby?!!” and she replies “Who’s there?” A Christmas tree is in the background. 3rd panel: “Christmas Evil (1980) – This psycho Saint Nick is a sad schlubby loser traumatized by seeing Mommy doing Santa Claus! Watch out for that toy soldier! Ouch!” A real, but crazed-looking Santa extends a hand clasping a toy soldier which holds a long thin spike aimed at the horrified, comically bulging eye of his victim. 4th panel: “To All A Goodnight (1980) – You better watch out for Santa in this every-cliché-in-the-book slasher film, as he depletes a sex-hungry sorority with ax, knife, cross-bow, rock and propeller!” A raging Santa Claus looms out of the panel, wielding a crowbar and saying “I know where you’ve been sleeping, slut!” 5th panel: "Don't Open Till Christmas" (1984) – In a shocking twist, this time it’s Santas who are being slaughtered by a holiday hating maniac! Ho ho-oh!” A Santa Claus cowers before a towering monstrous-looking man wielding a knife over him. 6th panel: “Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) – This is the one that upset all the parent groups, so of course it’s the one that everyone has seen. Remember? It’s the one with the blonde impaled on reindeer antlers!” An alarmed blonde woman is held aloft by Santa Claus on the panel’s left. On the panel’s right is a wall on which is a large stuffed reindeer head with prominent antlers poking toward the woman’s back. 7th panel: Silent Night, Deadly Night 5 (1989 – really 1991) – The beloved children’s classic PINOCCHIO is ‘reimagined’ as a twisted fever dream having something to do with toy-maker ‘Joe Petto’ (get it?) and his ‘so’, a murderous, sex-crazed, life-size doll. Scariest of all, the toy-maker is played by (gulp!) Mickey Rooney!” A round-faced caricature of Mickey Rooney in a Santa Claus costume with the beard pulled low to reveal his face says to the reader, “Hey, a job is a job! Merry Christmas, folks!”
December 5, 2025 at 10:44 AM
ukjarry.bsky.social
A nice anatomy of a centuries-old literary habit:

D. Keith Mano
National Review
JUNE 9, 1972

from a review of The German Lesson by Siegfried Lenz, translated by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins
The digressive method has its venerable ancestry: Jacques le Fataliste out of Tristram Shandy. In The German Lesson we have predictable devices, “How shall I describe his hat?” “I must stop here and set the scene.” It puts a MAN WORKING sign over the author’s head. These phony associations are a substitute for the business of metaphor making. And the reader, with noticeable condescension, is made to participate in, to be present at, the artist’s great moment of creation.
November 23, 2025 at 10:43 AM
ukjarry.bsky.social
What happens if you think of Avram Davidson, less as sf writer, and instead as a contemporary of Saul Bellow, Delmore Schwartz , Isaac Rosenfeld, Philip Roth, and Wallace Markfield:

Avram Davidson: Jew d’Esprit

efanzines.com/SFC/SFC122L....
What Davidson’s readership delights in and celebrates is this rare instance of the style of the Jewish American Writer applied to the Roald Dahl/John Collier-type short story. At its Davidson-ian mostest his style exemplifies the brilliant, flickering style of Jewish American Writer-dom, animated action-paintings of the psyche. This self-attentive style is often employed by the Jewish American Writer on quasi-autobiographical materials, whereas Davidson is rarely so explicitly personal, instead employing it as the means of elliptically arranging the elements of his stories… Davidson’s particular method where readers trace his apparently multitudinous and inconsequential threads to the revelation that they constitute a singular perfect knot. The writer Avram Davidson, wearing a beard and yarmulke, stares down at a bagel, while attending a 1962 science fiction convention. photo from the Jay Kay Klein collection In a centennial mood I noted that 1923 gave the world both Norman Mailer and Avram Davidson. Assorted articles declaring the defining contribution Fanny Mailer’s little Norman had made to Jewish American literature invited a corresponding thought that Avram Davidson, the most rabbinical-looking author ever to wander a science fiction convention floor dispensing bagels, gets NO credit as a Jewish American Writer.
November 13, 2025 at 4:46 PM
ukjarry.bsky.social
Given these are excerpts from a mere magazine column I could easily, happily believe it's some extended scene-setting from Saul Bellow, “Mr Sammler’s Planet” or “Humboldt’s Gift” maybe.

D. Keith Mano
NATIONAL REVIEW
November 24, 1972
I have been in Hell; it’s a place where old men exercise. God, the bodies... Gross flesh meringues, invertebrate. You can memorize death from them. The belly fig-leafs over the groin; dewlaps serve as a saggy bib; varicose vein garters wrap the shin. Muscles no bigger than portions of ice cream at a Chinese restaurant. One strong push-up and terror bugs wide the eyes. Is it now? Is this the cardiac infarction? (Infarction—wonderful word. Let me die of an infarction. Satire to the end.) Stalls in the bathroom wait, confessional boxes perhaps. Not merely a metaphor, this. I have seen men worship before them, “Oh, Lord, please give me success this time. Protect me from the shark nip of my kidney stones.” They can hardly walk, but they’re in shape, in . . . shape, in-shape, three-four. It’s an old club: twenty stories plus above Manhattan. I belong; that is, I’m a member. You see, all my life I’ve wanted lats. Frankie Ritello on 181st Street had great latissimus dorsi muscles: we kids would pay him a dime to show us. They seemed wonderful things, a cobra’s sinewy hood, the vestigial wings of man. And, crucified now on the special lat-making device, I watch the old men come in. Impressive leathery faces, garnished below with wide-tie mod clothes, like John the Baptist’s head on his charger. Maitre d’ hailing heads; heads whose nods are influential. But that’s all they are — heads . . . the rest is hollow, amorphous cloth, like Kukla and Ollie, hand puppets. They stand in front of sunlamps hopefully: but their skins have glossed mirror scales and flash the tanning rays back. They make sauna sweat; they make steam-room sweat. Belt machines strop them, throwing stone and stone after stone into the flabby pools of their stomachs. The masseurs work, Rodinesque, in clod handfuls of flesh. And then the workouts are over. It enfeebles them to get dressed again. Putting on socks is an isometric exercise. I have seen one seventy-year-old man stand helpless, blindfolded, arms up — mugged by his own undershirt — until the shoeshine boy helped him yank it down. Mr. Zinsser waves distractedly, Sisyphus pushing his own body uphill, uphill…What makes Sammy jog? Health fear first. Then the payments, man, the payments.
November 12, 2025 at 2:21 PM
ukjarry.bsky.social
Did you get a notice in the press for staring a new job?

Here's a report on Avram Davidson as the first kosher fish-liver inspector, in "The Jewish Post" 21 November 1952
Kosher Vitamins A job classification guaranteed not to be found in the U. S. Bureau of Commerce listings, since it is the first in U. S. Jewish history, finds Avram A. Davidson, young Orthodox scribe of Yonkers, N. Y., as the first mashgiah (supervisor of kashrut) for vitamins being manufactured in Ossining, N. Y., for kosher margarine. Davidson was assigned to the task at Collett-Week-Nibecker, Inc., which is manufacturing the vitamins for Miami Margarine Company, Cincinnati, under supervision of the Kashrut department of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations. Davidson is responsible for making sure that the vitamins come only from kosher fish
November 2, 2025 at 12:12 PM
ukjarry.bsky.social
Walter Van Tilburg Clark - "Why Don’t You Look Where You’re Going?" (Accent, Summer 1941)
WHITE AS a sainted leviathan, but too huge for even God to have imagined it, the liner played eastward easily. It swam at a much greater speed than appeared, for it was alone in open ocean, and there were only the waves to pass. Everyone on board was comfortable, even satisfied. The sea was a light summer one, still blue, although the sun was far gone toward the mountain range of fog on the horizon astern. Its swelling, and the rippling of the swells, could not give the slightest motion to the vessel, whose long hulk glanced through it as through warm and even air. The sense of well-being in the passengers was made firm by the knowledge that their fate was some- body else’s responsibility for the next three days. ‘There was nothing an ordinary mortal could do about a ship like this; it was as far out of his realm as the mechanics of heaven. He could talk about it, as he might about one of the farther galaxies, in order to experience the almost extinct pleasure of awe, but he could not do anything about it, and what was even more comfortable, he could not be expected to do anything about it. Even the crew shared this un-Olympian calm, for the liner was a self-sufficient creature who, once put upon her course, pursued it independently, with gently rhythmic joy. The wheel took care of itself, the fuel sped upon quick wires, the warm and supple steel joints rose and fell, self-oiled to perfect limberness. More like a white Utopian city than any the earth will ever bear, she parted the subservient waters and proceeded.
October 11, 2025 at 1:56 PM
ukjarry.bsky.social
Terry Bisson – Talking Man - 1986

Off-page for much of story the titular silent demi-urge is “one of those deals where a tall man was called Shorty or a fat man, Slim”

First half replicates the world of Bobbie Ann Mason’s new South, bookended by an Alan Garner–esq Brisingamen/Elidor mythos
September 22, 2025 at 10:06 PM
ukjarry.bsky.social
Kate Wilhelm - April Fool’s Day Forever - Orbit 7, 1970

In which a conspiracy of stagnant immortality is counteracted by an upsurge of the collective unconscious expressed by artistic works like this sculpture:
He knew, his hand knew, what she meant. Order over something wild and unordered, ungraspable. Something unpredictable. Something that began to emerge, that overcame the order with disorder, distorting the lines. The feeling was not visual. His hand seemed to feel the subliminally skewed order. Rain. Snow. Wind. The imperfections became greater, a deliberate deterioration of order, exposing the inexplicable, almost fearful inside. A nightmare quality now, changing, always changing, faster now. Grosser changes. A peak too thin to support itself, falling sideways, striking another lesser peak, cracking off the needle end of it. Lying at the base, weathering into sand, running away in a stream of red-yellow water, leaving a clean basalt base. Deeper channels being cut into the thing, halving it, dividing it into smaller and smaller bits, each isolated from the rest, each yielding to the elements, faster, faster. A glimpse of something hard and smooth, a gleam of the same red and yellow, but firm, not giving, not yielding. A section exposed, the quartzite, polished and gleaming. Larger segments of it now, a corner, squared, perfect, sharp. Even more unknowable than the shifting sandstone, untouched by the erosion. But it would go, too. Eventually. Slowly, imperceptibly it would give. And ultimately there would be only the basalt, until in some distant future it would be gone too.
September 21, 2025 at 9:11 PM
ukjarry.bsky.social
Kate Wilhelm - The Fusion Bomb - Orbit 10, 1972
He walked on the beach and seemed to feel the earth stirring beneath his feet. Bits of the earth flowing down the river, into the bay, material to be used by the sea as it constructed the islands grain by grain, shaping them patiently, lovingly as the very face of the earth was changed, subsiding here, growing there, swelling and ebbing. Eternal cycles of life and death….He left her and walked through the darkness of the shadows cast by the oak trees and the pines, around the ruins that rose abruptly, smelling the night-blooming cereus, and the sea, and the constant odor of decay that was present wherever there were tropical plants. The scents mingled, the drive toward life stronger than death, blossoms in decay, greenery erupting from the black.
September 21, 2025 at 1:09 PM
ukjarry.bsky.social
I'll never remember this otherwise.

Raymond Burr imitating Jackie Gleason, and accidentally foreshadowing John Cleese's silly walk and the worst of Freddie Garrity

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8S4h...
Raymond Burr silly walk entrance on Jack Benny Show 1961
YouTube video by Scott Hettrick
www.youtube.com
September 21, 2025 at 1:03 PM
ukjarry.bsky.social
Kate Wilhelm - THE PLASTIC ABYSS - 1971

Gary, not believing a word until he uttered it aloud, then believing it to be gospel. We say what we want to hear, not what others want to hear, and when it pleases us, we call it truth
September 20, 2025 at 12:51 PM
ukjarry.bsky.social
Kate Wilhelm "Somerset Dreams", Orbit #5, ed. Damon Knight, 1969
Ahead of me on the dark stairs the rustlings hurry along; they pause outside my parents’ room, scurry down the hallway and precede me into my room, where, when I turn on the light, there is nothing to see. I know it is the settling of floorboards untrodden for eleven months, and rushing air, and imagination. Memories that have become tangible? I don’t believe that, but it has a strangely comforting sound, and I like the idea of memories lingering in the house, assuming a life of their own, reliving the past.
September 18, 2025 at 9:00 PM
ukjarry.bsky.social
Amanda Cross - Death in a Tenured Position, 1981

"Men are always writing books about murdering women — it's one of their favorite fantasies: revenge for having their prerogatives usurped: sexual prerogatives, political prerogatives, social prerogatives "
September 14, 2025 at 11:32 PM
ukjarry.bsky.social
Horace McCoy in a 1951 interview with Ward Moore mentions he originates from *those* McCoys of "Hatfields and..." fame:
September 6, 2025 at 12:37 PM
ukjarry.bsky.social
Bobbie Ann Mason - Love Life (1984)

As a retired, slightly drunken teacher enjoys watching MTV, her thoughts on zombies as the horror of aging watching Michael Jackson’s Thriller:
The ghouls are so old and ugly. That’s how kids see us, Opal thinks. She loves this story. She even loves the credits: “Scary Music by Elmer Bernstein.” This is a story with a meaning. It suggests all the feelings of terror and horror that must be hidden inside young people. And inside, deep down, there really are monsters. An old person waits, a nearly dead body that can still dance.
July 20, 2025 at 8:22 PM
ukjarry.bsky.social
@briansiano.bsky.social
I've spent half a day wondering why your name seems familiar.

Could I be remembering your name from ancient days of the (Harlan) Ellison Webderland bulletin board?
July 16, 2025 at 4:21 PM
ukjarry.bsky.social
Kate Wilhelm - Oh, Susannah! (1982)
"Some things you just don’t understand about Americans, Anna Maria Lucia. We like nice wide highways without any bumps, without any towns to slow us down every five or six miles, without any traffic lights. This is a big country, Anna Maria Lucia, and it’s the interstates that have made it accessible to everyone who has a car. Used to take two weeks to drive coast to coast and now you can do it in five or six days, in comfort and safety. Those other roads, why they’re for the locals to go shopping on, or to church, or to visit each other, but when they really want to travel, they head for the interstate same as anyone else. That's what they’re for, to travel.
July 14, 2025 at 5:58 PM
ukjarry.bsky.social
Elmore Leonard, Freaky Deaky, 1988
"See? You really want to drive," Chris said. "You just didn't know it."

Maybe quintessential EL. Manoeuvring somebody into a position where they can't resist, with this line as the capper to assert awareness and speaker's superiority.
And this is the good guy
June 26, 2025 at 6:18 PM
ukjarry.bsky.social
Probably - rock critic Lester Bangs as a crowd scene extra in the movie version of Everything You Know is Wrong (1974) by the Firesign Theatre. An uncollected Creem article (April 1975) by Bangs recounts he was mostly drunk for this appearance.
Shaggy-haired man with droopy moustache resembling other mid-70s photos of Lester Bangs
June 25, 2025 at 12:48 PM
ukjarry.bsky.social
John D. MacDonald - Dead Low Tide - 1953

Mosquitoes fell on us with shrill cries of delight, yelling to all their relatives to pile on and have some nice blood.
May 17, 2025 at 11:09 AM
ukjarry.bsky.social
The debt to "The Faculty" in "Sinners", which Coogler has mentioned:

Not just scene where all have to eat garlic repeating Faculty's characters having to snort speed as proof not infected

But also that its possessions produce a gestalt: memories, sensations are shared and everyone genuinely happy
April 25, 2025 at 6:44 PM
ukjarry.bsky.social
Avram Davidson takes up a heavily sarcastic cudgel on behalf of Sholem Aleichem after reading a poster promoting the film of "Fiddler on the Roof"

San Francisco Examiner, 31 October 1971
Sir: Writers, artists, musicians, choreographers, and other such creative people like to see credit given where credit is as, for example, when it is due either to themselves or to other writers, artists, musicians, choreographers, and other creative people. Credits are certainly very extensively given in the Sunday Entertainment section, or Pink sheets, in the advertisement of the screen version of "Fiddler on the Roof." We are, for example, advised that the picture is by The Mirisch Production Company, that it is "A Norman Jewison that it is "Starring Topol," that it is "Produced and Directed by Norman Jewison," and that the screenplay is by Joseph Stein. We are further informed that the film has been "Adapted from the stage play," with "Lyrics for stage play and film by Sheldon Harnick," and that Jerry Bock provided the "Music for stage play and film.” And the information contained in the advertisement is also the effect that the play was "Produced on the New York stage by Harold Prince," with the "Entire stage production directed and choreographed by Jerome Robbins," with "Music adapted and conducted by John Williams." Further: "Original choreography by Jerome Robbins / Adapted for the screen by Tom Abbott / Soloist Isaac Stern / Filmed in Panavision," and, for a last line, "Color by DeLuxe." This is all very impressive and even exciting all these great names. However.However, it has been called to my attention by my friend Professor Milton Weiner, the well-known Sausalito Yiddishist, and editor and publisher of that justly-famed journal of letters, "'The Suspicious Humanist" and I find his call to be based, alas, on fact that there is a most curious omission from the long list of names of people whose talents have gone into the creation of "'Fiddler On the Roof." I have gone through the whole advertisement with magnifying glass and fine-tooth comb, down to the tiniest letters, and I fail to find a trace, anywhere, in any form, in any language, of any credits …
April 22, 2025 at 9:48 PM
ukjarry.bsky.social
An odd moment when Ward Moore as book reviewer gets name-dropped by Roy Cohn during the McCarthy Hearings

Especially as there is a parody of this kind of political purity inquisition by committee in Moore's "Greener Than You Think" (1947) - 6 years before this 1953 incident.
Mr. SCHAPPES . I have a refutation, and I want to make this point. First, that what counsel called a review never appeared in print. It was surreptitiously distributed in a mimeographed form, widely, but not through ordinary channels of scholarship, and it was refuted not by me—I didn't need to stoop to this—but it was refuted in the American Jewish Congress Weekly of May 7, 1951, by the reviewer of that periodical, under the title : “Distorted Literary Criticism.” I ask for permission to enter this. Senator MUNDT. What is the name of the reviewer? Mr. SCHAPPES. The reviewer's name is Ward Moore, M -o - o- r -e . I should like to have this incorporated in the same way in which the other is . Senator MUNDT. Moore, did you say? Mr. SCHAPPES. Moore. The first name is Ward. Senator MUNDT. Do you know Mr. Moore? Mr . SCHAPPES. I do not know Mr. Moore. Senator MUNDT. It will be accepted as an exhibit . (The documents referred to were marked exhibits 6 and 7, and may be found in the files of the subcommittee.) Mr. SURINE . Do you know whether or not Mr. Moore is a Communist ? Mr. SCHAPPES . I have no knowledge at all on that.
April 20, 2025 at 12:02 AM
ukjarry.bsky.social
Before Avram Davidson ever refused permission to reprint his works in Germany, Ward Moore took the action below regarding a potential German reprint of Greener Than You Think:

National Jewish Post, 12 September 1952
Headline: Spurns German Printing; Deeds Rights to Israel Text: LOS ANGELES — Unwilling to sign a contract for publication in Germany of his novel, an American Jewish writer has asked the State of Israel to accept the German rights as a gift. Ward Moore, author and critic, who for several years reviewed books for The National Jewish Post, was asked recently to permit translation of his novel, “Greener Than You Think,” into German, with a view to publication in Germany. (The book has been published in England and France as well as in the U. S.). In a letter to the Consulate of Israel here, Moore said: “Since I do not wish to enter into any contact with citizens of that country, nor to sign agreements with them, nor to accept money from them, nor to receive notice of the sales of any book of mine there, it is my desire to make over to the State of Israel, as a free gift and clear of all obligation, any and all property rights within the territory of Germany . . . which I possess in any past or future literary work of mine ....”
April 19, 2025 at 11:06 PM