Bev Vincent

The Spirit of Poe is available at Amazon, finally, after some prolonged production delays. It contains my story “The Case of the Tell-tale Black Cat of Amontillado (with Zombies and an Ourang-Outang).”  This collection, introduced by Dr. Barbara Cantalupo, offers a range of stories from dark to light, from playful to pensive, and from hopeful to horrific, a breadth of themes befitting the man best known for his pioneering work to literature in ways unmatched by any since. The Spirit of Poe, edited by WJ Rosser and Karen Rigley, includes two of the Master’s works, along with dozens of stories and poems from new and established authors. All profits from its sale will be donated to the Poe House.

My wife was feeling under the weather recently and asked if I’d make her some oatmeal for breakfast. We were out, so I went to the grocery store and bought some rolled oats. While I was there, I started pondering oatmeal.

My father was in charge of making oatmeal in later years at my parents’ place. He used to get up ahead of mom and get it started. It was a process. Not minute oats or even five minute oats. It took a long time, it seemed. And the end product was nothing like what you make with 5 minute oats. It was dense. You had to add milk, and the milk pooled around it until you stirred it. Same thing with the brown sugar. It just sat on top. That made me think there must be another kind of oatmeal that I wasn’t using. I saw something called “steel cut oats” (aka Irish oatmeal) in the store. The instructions said it would take 30 minutes, which sounded more like it. I didn’t buy it that day because I didn’t want to take that long, but I did buy a can subsequently and cooked it up on Saturday morning. It was much more like what I remember from childhood, but it was darker and had a lot more texture. It uses the whole oat, so it’s a little like eating multigrain bread. But it was good! So much better than the five-minute stuff.

I finished off my Cemetery Dance essay and got it off to the editor this morning. I worked some more on my next essay for Screem magazine, but I got a revised deadline that’s a few weeks later than the original, so I put it aside this morning and got back to work on a short story that’s due at the end of the week. I was starting to worry that I wasn’t going to be able to get everything done on time, but now that things are spread out a little I have some breathing room. Ahh.

I finished  Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury and read half of Red Snow by Michael Slade, the first of his novels to be available as an eBook. I’d been meaning to get around to it, but never did, so when he told me it was out for Kindle, I got it and pushed it to the top of the queue. Bloody, gory crime thrillers where the regular cast is never safe from one book to the next.

We watched a quirky film called Here on Saturday night. It stars Ben Foster (Clare’s art school boyfriend on Six Feet Under) as a cartographer working for an unnamed company (*cough* Google Earth *cough*) mapping remote sections of Armenia. To be honest, I couldn’t have picked out Armenia on a map before watching this film, and was surprised when the main characters pass by a border with Iran. (It’s east of Turkey and west of Iran). He meets a local girl who has a semi-successful career as a Polaroid photographer. She’s just back from an exhibition in Paris. She becomes his translator (and lover) as he wanders around, setting up satellite equipment and taking measurements. She takes him to meet her friends. They venture into the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, which is a little like going through the Berlin Wall at Checkpoint Charlie. He starts finding inconsistencies in his readings, but the nature of them is never explained. Peter Coyote provides occasional voice-overs, uttering mystical and profound observations that the film could have done without. The female lead (Lubna Azabal, who is Belgian not Armenian) reminded me a little of Noomi Rapace, her face full of angles and her eyes full of fire. Some lovely landscapes of Armenia and a good love story, but I have no idea what the rest of it was about.

We also caught up on last week’s Longmire, where all manner of truths were revealed, including the real reason Branch is running for sheriff, the introduction of Gerald McRaney (hopefully as an ongoing character), and a moderately cunning mystery, though the identity of the real killer came a little out of left field. Lots of twists and turns in this week’s Inspector Lewis, too. Titled “Fearful Symmetry” after a line in William Blake’s “The Tyger,” it had red herrings aplenty. Entire subplots that turned out to be unrelated to the murder (subsequently murders). A lot of characters in British crime shows are silent when asked things by police, even when not being interrogated. They don’t say, “I don’t know” or “What’s it to you?” they just go stone faced and say nothing at all. Fascinating.

Breaking Bad had an intriguing trajectory last night. It started with the long scene in the Madrigal offices in Germany ending with suicide by defibrillator. Then there was the ricin caper and the Roomba, all of which was presumably to console Jesse and bring him fully back into Walt’s fold. And then there was Mike. One of the great heavies. He’s a killer who plays Hungry Hippos with his granddaughter. He asks men if they’re “ready” before he plugs them. He’s solid with his people. He knows Walt is a ticking time bomb (he was watching The Caine Mutiny) and he doesn’t want to be around when he goes boom. He’s calm—most of the time. We now know that he’s an ex-Philly cop who left the job under less than glowing circumstances. The scenes between him and Hank were classic. He’s the man. He’s in charge. His men are bought and paid for—they won’t roll over. Then Hank drops the big bomb: the numbers in the picture frame were for the accounts that were guaranteeing his guys’ cooperation, including a couple of million for him. All of a sudden that umbrella is gone and he’s forced to reconsider Walt’s offer. How pissed would he be if he realized how Walt & Jesse’s caper last week led to the discovery of those accounts? I’d love to see Mike become the major third player on the show. He’s such a great character. There was a lot going on in those two scenes between him and the antsy Madrigal exec, especially the second one, where she knew she was about to die. I have to say, though, the final scene between Walt and Skyler was just plain icky.