Bev Vincent

We’ve watched a number of movies that we enjoyed recently. The most recent was Tully, starring Charlize Theron as a mother struggling with a newborn and a son who is probably somewhere on the spectrum, although he isn’t officially diagnosed, plus another daughter. See this one without reading anything about it. The less you know in advance, the more you’re likely to enjoy it. Theron is impressive in an unglamorous role in which she is called upon to be brash and sarcastic on a regular basis. There is the requisite “didn’t see that coming” moment late in the game.

I finally got around to seeing Thor: Ragnarok on the weekend. I’m still working on my MCU movie catch-up, but this one was a decent entry. A cheeky sense of humor. Especially liked the scenes between Thor and Doctor Strange, and Jeff Goldblum was a hoot. The director voiced one of the funnier minor characters with a full-on antipodean accent.

We also saw Like Father, the new release on Netflix starring Kristen Bell as a workaholic bride-to-be and Kelsey Grammer as her long-estranged father. Improbably, they end up on a week-long cruise together in one of the honeymoon suites while they attempt to ignore each other (at first) and get past their long-standing issues. Lots of cute scenes, and it’s a low-risk film, a rom-com without the rom, really. Seth Rogan plays an awkward Canadian divorcé, and his wife directed the movie. It has the hugest and most pervasive instance of product placement of which I’m aware: the Royal Caribbean cruise ship that is almost a character. Not a very demanding film, but we liked it well enough.

Final Portrait is a Geoffrey Rush showcase written and directed by Stanley Tucci. Rush plays real-life tortured artist Alberto Giacometti, who asks a friend (played by Armie Hammer) to pose for a portrait at his Paris atelier. It’s only supposed to take a couple of hours, but it stretches into days and then weeks, with Giacometti occasionally painting over much of what he’s accomplished in a fit of pique and artistic melodrama. Rush throws himself into the role and at first you wonder whether he’d be an interesting person to know but later you’d probably decide he’d be tedious to be around. He was a conspicuous philanderer, to boot. The big question is why the friend, James Lord, would put up with Giacometti’s behavior for so long, especially when he had pressing business in America. Tony Shalhoub (Monk) is almost unrecognizable as Giacometti’s brother, who has seen this all before. It’s a rare dramatic turn for him, and he’s quite good in it.

I was surprised by Red Sparrow, the Jennifer Lawrence Soviet spy thriller. Based on trailers from back when it was first released, I expected her to be more of a femme fatale. Instead, it turns out she was forced into the sparrow program by her lascivious uncle. There is a decent amount of ambiguity to the story: which side is she really playing, and is she an agent, a double agent, a treble agent or what? We enjoyed the unexpected turn of events at the end. Also stars Charlotte Rampling, Mary-Louise Parker (briefly, as a ditzy and drunken US politician), and Jeremy Irons. It took a critical drubbing, but it wasn’t as bad as we were led to believe it might be.

We also saw The Leisure Seeker, with Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland as a couple of a certain age. She decides to dust off the old Winnebago (which bears the same nickname as the film) for one last long vacation trek with her husband, who has dementia. Her goal is the Florida Keys, because Sutherland was a big fan of Hemingway. They have numerous adventures along the way, and Sutherland’s character swims in and out of awareness. He’s well enough to drive (if she gives directions), but a lot of the time he doesn’t know where they are or, indeed who they are. Mirren’s character is frustrated when he suddenly recognizes a student he had many years ago, everything about her, but then a few minutes later can’t recall their children’s names. It’s a poignant film about a difficult situation that has an ending you might see coming…or maybe not. Two great actors doing their best with a road movie for the ages.

On the TV front, I watched La Forêt (The Forest) on Netflix, a French crime series that reminded me a little of Broadchurch. The local police gets a new boss on the same day that a teenage girl goes missing. The disappearance calls to mind a similar incident from a decade earlier when two girls went missing. All the signs point toward the culprit being someone from the village, which makes long-time friends and acquaintances suddenly suspicious and wary of each other. There is a vaguely supernatural air to the story, which also involves a French teacher who was a foundling who may have lived in a cave in the woods for some prolonged stretch when she was six or seven years old. Not quite as well done as Broadchurch, but I enjoyed it, and it’s a breezy six episodes.

I also saw The Rain, a Danish series that starts off with a misguided scientist seeding rainclouds with a virus that he thinks will “fix” humanity. Instead, it kills off almost everyone. His two children, a teenage daughter and her younger brother, spend years in a bunker until they’re forced to emerge, where they join up with a group of other young people. The rain is still deadly, so they have to take cover every time the clouds grow dark, and there are various groups of people they need to be wary of, including paramilitary guys in armed vehicles scooping up survivors in search of someone who might be immune. There are some real surprises from episode to episode, the individual characters have interesting back-stories and it’s definitely open for a second season. I liked it a lot.

I remember a time when you set your VCR / DVR and it did exactly what you told it to do, and nothing else. If a show was delayed starting because of an overlong basketball game, you missed part of the program.

Now, DVRs are smart. If something is delayed, it knows. And if something random comes along that’s associated with a series you record, it grabs that, too. Thus, we ended up with a recording of a “lost episode” of Doctor Who that I would have otherwise missed. The episode, titled “Shada,” was written by Douglas Adams (of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame) during the Tom Baker / Romana / K-9 era.

As with these things, there’s a story behind the story. Apparently Adams wanted to write a series where the Doctor decided to retire from traveling, but the BBC didn’t want that. Adams decided to procrastinate writing the show (something for which he was famous), thinking that if he waited long enough, the producers would have no choice but to allow him to write what he wanted. That strategy didn’t work, and he was forced to write a new story, which is this one.

They started filming it, but because of a strike by technicians, it was never completed. Last year, someone decided to get it ready for presentation. The actors, of course, have aged a tad in the intervening decades (it was originally supposed to air in 1980), but they were still around, so the missing footage was animated, and the original actors provided the voices. I’d say about a third of the 3-hour (including commercials) show is animated. A lot of it was filmed in Cambridge (scenes of the Doctor punting on the River Cam were used in The Five Doctors when Baker declined to participate in that project). Most of what was animated takes place in various space ships.

It’s an okay story, dealing with a guy who has come to Earth to recover a Gallifreyan book he needs to locate a Time Lord penal colony that all the Time Lords have forgotten about. There’s an old, forgetful university professor with the very obvious name Chronotis, and a student who borrows books, and a floating sphere that can suck a person’s mind dry. The usual Doctor stuff. A few scenes are very Adams-esque, especially one near the end where a don of the college tries to convince a bobby that someone has stolen a room from the university, to which the bobby responds that the number of times a room has been stolen is very low…in fact, it is zero, he concludes. Apparently Adams recycled some of the characters for his novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. It’s been a long time since I read that book, so I didn’t realize that.

In modern hands, the whole thing would probably have been an hour long. A lot of time is spent twiddling knobs and turning dials, but that was the era, when they weren’t wibbledy-wobbly and talking a hundred miles a second.

The show ends with a funny cameo by 83-year-old Tom Baker, who plays the Doctor again, with a wink and a sly nod to the passage of time. It’s fun to see something new from that era, so if you get a chance, check it out!

I learned late last week that Flight or Fright is already going into a second printing with Cemetery Dance, and publication is still six weeks away. So that’s pretty cool.

In other publishing news, Simon & Schuster audio is going to release Shining in the Dark as an audiobook next February. I received my Czech copy last week. (Or, as I told my wife, the Czech was in the mail, har-de-har-har.)

Normally, I would be writing about my NECON experiences right about now, but this year I had a scheduling conflict that prevented me from attending. Turns out, if I had opted for NECON, I would probably have had to cancel because of a day-job obligation. As it was, I was able to duck out mid-day on Friday and catch a plane for Bangor. A group of friends who know each other through Stephen King’s message board held their annual King Kon in that city this year, and a few people were invited, including Robin Furth, Glenn Chadbourne and me.

I got in late (very late) on Friday. So late that all the traffic signals in the city were flashing. It was a little disconcerting and disorienting, driving down Stillwater Avenue. Most of them were flashing yellow, but the odd one was flashing red and with my limited color perception, I had to look very carefully to make sure I didn’t cruise through one of the latter. I was driving a Kia Niro, my first time behind the wheel of a hybrid. It was a little strange, driving something that is so quiet. At times I wasn’t sure if the car was running.

On Saturday late morning, I meandered into downtown Bangor, where I took the above picture, which reminded me of a certain scene from It. No floating balloons, though. That would have been awesome/creepy. I only went a few blocks when I met Gerald Winters, owner of the King bookstore in town. We chatted a few minutes (he was also invited to attend) and I went a few blocks farther, where I encountered Glenn Chadbourne. He and I decamped to a nearby pub for a little fodder before the main event, a panel at the Arts Exchange. The four of us (Robin, Glenn, Gerald and I) signed stuff, answered questions, told tales, took pictures, etc. for a couple of hours. Then Robin, Glenn, Marsha (King’s executive assistant) and I hung out at Denny’s for a while, waiting until it was time to go to the Oriental Jade restaurant, location of a pivotal scene in It. We had a nice buffet dinner, there were door prizes, swag bags, etc. The conventioneers had other things planned, including a trip to Dysart’s (Maximum Overdrive) the following morning, but I had to get back to Texas. Those 5:30 am flights always seem like a good idea when I book them, but getting up at 3:30 wasn’t my favorite thing to do!

Of course, the flight was 90 minutes late departing. First, the navigational computer on our plane was misbehaving and it was going to take an hour or more just to get the repair crew on site. Fortunately, the pilots were able to convince the airline to let them swap to another plane. We were on the taxiway when they were told that they couldn’t take off because of a hold at Philly airport, where we were heading. So we had to sit there until 7 am, Fortunately, I was able to rebook my connecting flight while we waited. After that it was smooth sailing, and I was back home by early in the afternoon.

It was a nice time. Always fun to catch up with old friends and make new ones. My only disappointment was that I discovered, after I was back in Texas, that there are Tim Horton’s restaurants in Bangor. Three of them! And I didn’t get to go to one. No timbits for me! Ah, well. Next time.

I received the above postcard in the mail today. Note the return address! If you haven’t checked out my Castle Rock preview, you can do so here. The first three episodes drop on Wednesday on Hulu.

I finished watching Season 2 of Goliath (Amazon) en route to Bangor on my iPad. Billy Bob Thornton plays a hard drinking lawyer who ends up taking on high profile cases, playing David to various Goliaths. It’s a very good series. Season 2, stylistically, reminds me a lot of Breaking Bad. Episode 7 is very, very strange (in a good way).

Publishers Weekly, the highly respected trade magazine, released their advanced review of Flight or Fright this week. I’m very happy with what they had to say. In part, “This entertaining anthology of horror, mystery, and literary tales about aircraft (most reprinted) will have the reader thinking twice about flying. This is a strong anthology full of satisfying tales.” Click the hyperlink to read the whole thing.

Last week, I was interviewed by a newspaper from northern New Brunswick, where I grew up. Alas, the interview is behind a paywall, but the people for whom it will mean something will be able to see it. The interviewer (also the editor, chief-cook-and-bottle-washer) is someone I knew in school. He’s a year older than I am, so we crossed paths a little, and his mother was a substitute teacher that I had any number of times over the years. It was fun talking to someone from “back home,” to hear the regional accent again.

I have only a sketchy memory of the original Lost in Space. I no doubt saw some of it when I was a kid, in reruns, but I couldn’t remember whether most of the story took place on a planet or whether they flitted around from adventure to adventure. Turns out, both are true. In the first two seasons, they were crashed on two different planets, but in the third they traveled from place to place.

We finally got around to seeing the new incarnation of the show on Netflix last week, watching all 10 episodes over a four-day period. We quite liked it. It’s not as gritty as the Battlestar Galactica reboot, but they’ve added some depth and breadth to the characters, giving them interesting backstories and mysteries that are revealed over the course of the season. The biggest change is to Dr. Smith, who is a conniving, identity-stealing schemer whose motivations aren’t always clear. Not the comic relief like he was in the original, where he ended up being the focal character, along with Will and the robot. The robot, too, is vastly different from the tubby, harmless, arm-waving original, adding an ominous tone to the story. The kids are great, acting pretty much the way kids do. It’s not perfect, but it was enjoyable, and we’ll no doubt check out Season 2 when it becomes available.

I feel bad for the people who spent a lot of time planning, organizing and arranging events for Independence Day yesterday. In the greater Houston area, most of these things were canceled on account of the torrential rain we received, starting in the early morning hours and lasting until late afternoon. It wasn’t terrible where we live, just several hours of solid rain of the sort we rarely get around here. It typically pours for 15 minutes instead of raining gently like that for hours. With the attendant thunder and lightning, parades and concerts were all canceled, although the fireworks went off. One of the best metaphors is this image from the Houston Chronicle, where the letters spelling “Houston” float away from the concert grounds in floodwaters.

After watching “The City on the Edge of Forever” for the first time in a long time (it holds up reasonably well), we dove into the new Lost in Space. We only saw the first couple of episodes, but we’re enjoying it. I like the way they reimagined the story, giving the characters some new backstories and treating the teenagers like real (but exceptional) teenagers.

Our daughter posted about Hannah Gadsby’s standup show on Netflix, so we decided to watch. It’s an experience we won’t soon forget. Gadsby talks about discovering she was “a little bit lesbian” while growing up in very conservative Tasmania, and the problems she’s had throughout her life, in part because of the guilt she was immersed in during her formative years, when homosexuality was both a sin and illegal. Her hour-long set starts out mostly funny, but then it transitions into something quite different. At first it becomes a meta-analysis of stand-up comedy. How comedians like her get laughs by deliberately creating tension and then releasing it with something funny. However, she came to believe that her self-deprecating form of humor was damaging, trapping her ideas about herself in an unhealthy state. She refers back to one of her earlier jokes, a story about how she stood up to a homophobic guy, and reveals that that story was incomplete. The rest of the tale is not in the least bit funny. She is angry and bitter, and the audience experiences a new kind of tension. It’s all designed to make a point (and, perhaps, announce her plans to retire from standup, although he has, admittedly, given that a bit of re-think after the attention her show has garnered), but the anger is real. Definitely recommended (fair warning: the language can curl your hair).

We followed that up with Ali Wong’s first Netflix show (Baby Cobra), which is a very different creature altogether. She’s crude and outspoken and pretty hilarious.

Today is my granddaughter’s second birthday. Well, it’s actually July 3, but where she lives it’s already July 3. It’s all rather confusing. Time zones. What’s the point of them?

At the end of the afterword of Flight or Fright, the forthcoming anthology I co-edited, I ask readers who see anyone in an airport or on a plane with the book to send us a picture. Reviewers have taken up the challenge. So far, I’ve received three photos from people on long flights reading the anthology. The most recent is Larry Fire, who is shown here reading it on a flight to Hawaii. Brave souls.

We don’t often give up on movies, especially ones that star the likes of Juliette Binoche and Gerard Depardieu, but we were bored to tears by Let the Sunshine In  (Un beau soleil intérieur) and turned it off after 45 minutes. It’s one of those films the critics loved (RT: 86%) and viewers like us didn’t (RT: 21%). To me it felt like there wasn’t a script, that the actors were placed in scenes and told to just talk. Ramble, more like—there’s one scene where Binoche’s character tries to ask her new coworker an uncomfortable question that goes on forever. It was almost farcical. Horrible, banal characters.

We were luckier on Saturday, when we watched Woman Walks Ahead and The Shape of Water. The former is based on the true story of an artist (Jessica Chastain) who travels West to paint Sitting Bull (Michael Greyeyes). She arrives when the military is trying to force the tribes to sign an accord that will have them giving up more of their land. Sitting Bull is mostly content to grow potatoes, but the artist helps him rediscover his former glory and he makes an impassioned speech when the tribes are called to vote. It’s a good film, but apparently it plays fast and loose with a lot of facts, especially concerning Catherine/Caroline Weldon, who is portrayed as a widow with no political motivations when she arrives. In reality, she was divorced twice, and had a 12-year-old son who she took with her to the Indian Territory who isn’t mentioned in the movie. Neither are Sitting Bull’s two wives. In the real world she had previously corresponded with Sitting Bull and was an active member of the National Indian Defense Association. Never let facts get in the way of a good story, I guess! And the film has Sam Rockwell, which is always a plus.

I’ve been wanting to see The Shape of Water for a long time. I wasn’t sure it was the kind of film my wife would enjoy, but we both loved it. I didn’t know anything about the story going into it beyond the trailer, so it was all fresh and exciting and new. Such great characters—even the supporting characters had entire little stories of their own. It’s the second thing I’ve seen in the past year where the monster eats a cat. Yes, Stranger Things 2, I’m looking at you.

It’s been a while since I posted here—a solid month. Not because nothing has been happening, that’s for sure! My wife got back from several weeks in Japan and our daughter and two-year-old granddaughter came with her. Our grand-daughter is an energetic and delightful little girl who can talk reasonably well and who sings almost all the time. She’ll be eating supper and, for no obvious reason, burst into the A-B-C song or, more likely, the Baby Shark Song, a simple ditty that gets into your head and is hard to shake off. They headed back to Okinawa a few days ago and I still hear that song.

We also enjoyed many episodes of Puffin Rock and Sarah and Duck, both shows that are surprisingly watchable for adults. I preferred Sarah and Duck of the two, but my granddaughter was apt to call for “puffin” in the middle of an episode of S&D. Fun fact: the “scarf lady” in that show is voiced by the actress who played Mrs. Patmore on Downton Abbey.

Hodder & Stoughton, the UK publisher of Flight of Fright, the anthology of scary flying stories I co-edited with Stephen King, released their cover design recently (see above/right). They went in a different direction from Cemetery Dance, aiming for something more restrained and artistic. It’s quite striking, I think.

I also spent an hour and a quarter in a sound booth at a studio in Houston recording my Afterword from the anthology for the Simon and Schuster audio edition, which was an interesting experience. I’ll write more about that in a few days.

In the Afterword, I put out a call for anyone who saw someone reading the anthology at an airport or, better yet, on an airplane, to snap a picture and send it to me. So far, even though the book is some ten weeks away from publication, I’ve received two photographs from people who received review copies of the anthology and chose to read them on long flights.

Because I knew my daughter wanted to see The Avengers: Infinity War when she got here from Japan, and because I’m woefully out of touch with the Marvel universe (I’d seen a few Iron Man movies and Black Panther), I binged to get caught up, watching The Avengers, The Avengers: The Age of Ultron, Captain America: Civil War, and Doctor Strange before we saw the new film. Very glad I did, or I would have completely lost. Now I’m in the camp of people who can’t wait for the next half of it to come out.

We also watched 15:17 to Paris, Clint Eastwood’s movie about the American soldiers and tourists who tackled a terrorist on a train in Europe. We’ve always enjoyed Eastwood’s movies, but this one was terrible. Terrible. Using the real people to portray themselves might have seemed like a clever idea, but they had limited range and depth, which made the film feel awkward and low budget. Also, because the pivotal incident is over in a few minutes, much of the film is backstory and a lot of it, quite frankly, boring and irrelevant. The older history was interesting, but the parts of the story about their trip around Europe leading up to them being on the train was over-long and beside the point. The boat trip where they meet a cute girl in Venice…we never see her again. The long scene in the Amsterdam disco…pointless. I hate to say the director has lost his touch based on a single film, but, boy, what a drop in quality compared to, say, Sully. Even the professional actors, like Judy Greer, turned in lackadaisical performances.

We binged through Season 5 of The Ranch in a couple of evenings. My wife is a big fan of Sam Elliott. It’s a show I could take or leave. I find a lot of the humor in it awkward and juvenile. It has a few good actors and a few who are clearly playing it purely for laughs. The season ends with the departure of Danny Masterson’s character, the actor having been fired after serious allegations were leveled against him. We wondered how far into filming they were when that happened, and how long they allowed his character to continue in the season after that. Trivia: I briefly met his brother, Chris, in Nova Scotia a number of years ago when visiting the set of Haven.

Oh, yeah, and I had a birthday since I last posted. 19×3.

Last fall, I was commissioned to write an essay about Stephen King’s poetry and his relationship to poetry by the Poetry Foundation. I wrote about that experience here. The essay itself came out today, the day before The Outsider is released, and also the day before King receives the PEN America Literary Service Award (the timing of the release of the essay, which can be found here, is not coincidental). My review of The Outsider also debuted today at CD Online.

My wife has been away for a couple of weeks, so I’ve been finding things to occupy all the free time I’ve had that we would normally spend together. Last weekend I went to a baseball game, my first in over 25 years. Texas Rangers vs Houston Astros…the home team won decisively. However, I’m not entirely sure I enjoyed myself. It was like going to a movie where people go to the concessions stands all the time, and the space in front of the seats is so narrow that you have to get up to let them by.  With the concessions as expensive as they are, I don’t get the draw. Sit down and watch the game, people. It was quite distracting.

Last Wednesday, I went into Houston to meet up with Michael Koryta, who was in town to promote his new book, How It Happened (my review at the link). I first met Michael at a NECON several years ago, and always meet up with him for drinks before his event and for dinner afterward. This time, we were with the owner of Murder by the Book and another store employee. Always an enjoyable time.

On Saturday, I went into Houston for the MWA Southwest monthly meeting where the guest speaker was…the owner of Murder by the Book! Unfortunately, the meeting room in the restaurant had been previously booked, so we were in the main dining area and had to compete with the din of fellow diners. It was the first of these meetings I’ve been to in at least half a dozen years.

Speaking of Murder by the Book, I will be signing at their booth at Comicpalooza next Saturday from 1:30 to 2:30. Then I’ll be on a panel with Joe Lansdale from 3:00 to 4:00 and another panel from 6:00 to 7:00.

Yesterday, I cashed in a Fandango coupon I won in the grocery store Monopoly game that ended recently and went to see Deadpool 2 at the late-morning matinee for less than five bucks. Most of the trailers/previews didn’t interest me much (loud…hyper-kinetic…frenzied), not even the Sicario sequel. I really liked the first movie, but the second looks far less interesting, perhaps because Emily Blunt isn’t in it. I definitely want to see the new Oceans 8, though.  DP2 was pretty funny, with a decent plot that gave it some depth. I probably missed a lot of inside jokes because I’m not fluent in Marvel, but I still laughed a lot. And if you stick around to the very, very end, you’ll hear something that should become popular as a ringtone. Afterward, I went to a nearby pizza place and enjoyed a carafe of wine while watching an intense thunderstorm. A mellow afternoon!

Last night, I finally watched Get Out. I had studiously ignored anything and everything about the film, so I knew virtually nothing about it other than the basic setup: white woman takes her black boyfriend to meet her parents. It absolutely went in directions I didn’t expect, but i thought it was a decent horror flick. The alternate ending was probably more in line with reality, and I imagined an even darker, more realistic way it would have ended, given recent events in this country.

I was interviewed by Lilja and Lou for their Stephen King Podcast (#87) about Flight or Fright, the anthology I co-edited with Stephen King. We talked for over half an hour about how the book came about, how we selected the stories, etc. Check it out!

Last weekend we watched Molly’s Game, starring Jessica Chastain and Idris Elba. It’s the true story of a woman who started running high-stakes poker games that involved high-profile people (although not named in the movie, some of the characters are stand-ins for Toby McGuire, Leonardo DiCaprio and Ben Affleck), who ultimately ran into trouble and was arrested by the FBI for money laundering and other crimes. Elba plays her at-first reluctant attorney and Kevin Costner is her estranged father. It’s a bit talky, but you don’t have to understand Texas Hold-Em to enjoy the movie, and it is quite a journey.

The weekend before that we spent in Surfside, down the coast from Galveston, at a rental house we like to hire once or twice a year. There’s only a dune between the deck and the beach, looking out on the Gulf of Mexico and the oil rigs and cargo ships and other traffic on the water, plus the surfers—the surf was high one day in particular. It was moderately cool but warm enough to sit on the deck, and we took quite a few long walks on the beach and enjoyed watching the families playing on the beach. Very relaxing!

Author Linwood Barclay and I had a DM conversation on Twitter earlier this week in which we diagrammed the finale of The Americans. We agree there will be no happy endings for most (maybe all) of the characters, but we came up with a finale scenario that we thought would be perfect. It’ll be interesting to see how close we come.

I lived in Halifax, Nova Scotia for most of the 1980s while I was a student at Dalhousie University, first getting a B.Sc. in 1983 and then my Ph.D. in 1988. During those years, and subsequently, I’d heard about the Halifax Explosion, and could probably have told you a few things about it, many of them, as it turns out, wrong.

The Explosion happened in December 1917, during World War I, and it devastated the north end of the city. The worst hit section was called Richmond, but by the time I went to Halifax that “neighborhood” name was never mentioned. My impression was that a munitions bought struck a grain ship and the explosion happen immediately. Nope. The munitions ship, Mont-Blanc, was a French vessel carrying unthinkable amounts of TNT, picric acid and other flammables and explosives overseas to support the war effort. Six million pounds of explosives. The aging vessel was heavily burdened, and the crew was forbidden from carrying matches, let alone smoke. The ship had been sent up from New York to Halifax to see if it could find a slow convoy across the Atlantic.

The other ship, Imo,  was empty, on its way from Europe down the US coast to stock up with relief supplies to take back across the Atlantic. After a stupid game of chicken in the narrows part of Halifax Harbour, Imo broadsided Mont-Blanc and a fire started on deck. The crew knew their cargo (although few other people in the region did) and immediately skidaddled. My impression is almost cartoonish when I imagine them leaping into lifeboats, paddling pell-mell for shore so fast they beached their boats and then continuing to run for the hills.

Mont-Blanc drifted toward the waterfront on the Halifax side and burned for ten or fifteen minutes before it finally blew up in what was the biggest man-made explosion in history, and it remained the biggest until decades later when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. About 2000 people died immediately, 9000 were injured (in a city of 60,000). Parts of Mont-Blanc—heavy parts like anchors—were found miles away in the aftermath. A big part of the city was leveled. People—including many children—who were attracted by the spectacle of the ship burning in the harbour, went to their living room windows to watch and were blinded by flying glass.

It was a horrific disaster, but one from which Halifax recovered, with the help of neighboring cities and provinces and, notably, the people of Boston, who sent medical supplies and personnel and, later, rebuilding supplies, much of it en route before they’d even received a request for assistance (the telegram lines were down). The relationship between Halifax and Boston is cemented today with Halifax sending an enormous Christmas tree to be raised in the Boston Commons.

I wish I’d taken the opportunity to visit many of the sites in Halifax that contain remnants and memorials of that incident when I lived there. I knew more about the relationship between Halifax and the Titanic disaster. I think a return trip to Halifax is in the calling one of these days. In the meantime, I read an excellent account of the incident and its aftermath: The Great Halifax Explosion: A World War I Story of Treachery, Tragedy, and Extraordinary Heroism by John U. Bacon.

I bought the book to do research for a short story I’m contemplating, but my wife took an interest in the story, too, and I ended up reading the whole thing aloud to her over the course of a couple of weeks, including while we were on vacation. Now we’re reading  Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World-and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Ola Rosling. The introduction alone is fascinating in that it poses a set of thirteen questions about the world: how well people are educated, have access to medical treatments, etc. And most people get only two out of thirteen right, on average, because we have a negative and uninformed picture of the overall state of things. Most kids on the planet have access to vaccines, for example, and the majority of the world is not in poverty, as one might think.

Last fall, I was contacted by an editor with the Poetry Foundation, asking if I’d like to write an essay about Stephen King’s poetry. He felt there was a story there to be told that hadn’t been explored before. I was game, and it was the Poetry Foundation, after all, publishers of Poetry magazine.

The original brief was for 2500 words, which didn’t take me long to write. I turned my first draft in several weeks before deadline. The editor sent it back covered in red “track changes” marks and a request to expand it significantly. Include more quotes from the works, dive deeper. So I did. Second draft was 7500 words! Sent that in and, after a while, I got another copy back covered in red editorial ink. Maybe I went a bit overboard for an online essay. Draft three was around the 5000-word mark. Another round of revisions. I’ve never been so heavily edited in my life! But at last we were there, nearly. Off it went to the digital editor, who had a few cuts and changes. A new draft.

And then came a process I’ve never been through before: fact checking. I knew it was coming, but in my mind it was going to be an interrogation. What is the source of this fact? Where does this quote come from? However, what it turned out to be was a request for supporting documentation for every single fact and quote in the essay. I ended up sending along nearly 60 scans from primary and secondary sources and hyperlinks to online articles. I only missed out on three “facts,” which I was able to resolve. But still, quite a process!

The essay should be out late next month. I’ll be sure to advertise it when it appears.

Last night I saw A Quiet Place with my buddy Danel Olson. It was playing in the biggest theater in our cineplex, and it was virtually empty. No more than 20 people in attendance. Which was kind of good, because that meant the audience noise was low and for this movie that’s important. I don’t know that I’ve ever watched a film where I’ve spent so much time either holding my breath or with my hands clasped over my mouth. It is an incredibly suspenseful film, one where even an errant nail is a Hitchcockian source of tension.

It’s also a lean movie—no messing around with backstory or exposition. We don’t see the family in their life before the invasion. We don’t even see the invasion: we’re dropped into the story months after things go bad. We learn about the new reality by seeing it in action—and a little bit by reading some headlines posted on a basement wall. The family doesn’t congratulate themselves on surviving because they have a deaf daughter and thus they are better equipped to communicate silently. We just work that out ourselves. The early scene on the bridge shows the stakes: no one is safe. It’s a cleverly written movie that trusts the audience. Tight, intimate, chilling and devastating. The final shot is perfect.

My only question was: why didn’t they find somewhere noisy to live or create a noisy environment around them so they didn’t have to walk on “eggshells” all the time? They understood the concept, so why not put it into practice more on a daily basis? Still, I enjoyed the hell out of this film.