Wednesday and somehow, we’ve made it to the middle of the week. There’s only a few more days left in Spooky Season, so I’ve got to get moving on reading Mazywood, although I can also listen to it on the drive to Baton Rouge and can finish reading it while up there on Friday night, or when I get back to the city on Sunday. My responsibilities for the day end at three, and so I’ll probably get home around five.
Oh, here is my schedule for Saturday in Baton Rouge:
11:00 am to Noon
Iberville Building, Le Francois, Room C
Rebels, Empires, and Impossible Choices in Young Adult Sci-Fi
Kristen Illarmo, Against the Red Sky: Colony Exposed
Yoon Ha Lee, Starstrike
with moderator Greg Herren
(Ages 12 to 17)
1:00 pm to 2:00 pm
Bienville Building, First Floor, Conference Center 173
Killer Calendar: New Orleans Mysteries for Every Season
Ellen Byron, A Murderer’s Guide to Mardi Gras: A Vintage Cookbook Mystery and A Crescent City Christmas: A Vintage Cookbook Mystery
Greg Herren, Hurricane Season Hustle: A Scotty Bradley Mystery
Michael Rigg, Shadows of Frenchmen: A Jonathan Gray, M.D. Mystery
2:15 pm to 3:00 pm
Cavalier House Books Tent
Book Signing
So, as you see, I should be home by five. It shouldn’t be an issue, since I’ll get home early enough to do some things and not be a total loser, if nothing else I can watch the night football games, or not; it looks the evening line-up is Texas-Mississippi State or Missouri-Arkansas; I’m not sure why Georgia-Florida isn’t a marquee night game, but it’s not. I should be able to catch the end of that one; LSU is off this week (the Louisiana Book Festival is always scheduled for LSU’s bye week, in case you’re wondering about priorities in the Pelican State) so not really caring too much to miss games, frankly. It’s also Halloween on Saturday, which will make the drive through town from the interstate interesting. Halloween is a big weekend in New Orleans, as I am sure one can imagine, and we turn the costume dial up to at least 20 on any costuming holiday….even so, I don’t miss going out for the evening, either.
Yesterday was a pretty good day, over all. We weren’t busy but not slow, either, so I didn’t have a lot of down time because I was trying to stay caught up on everything administrative and my other responsibilities. I was feeling a bit tired on the way home when I stopped to make groceries; tonight I have to run uptown to get the mail. I managed to get some things that were weighing on me done yesterday, too–I don’t know why I procrastinate on some things because I don’t want to deal with them at the moment but…it’s never terrible, you know? I always make things worse in my head than they actually are, and the meds don’t help with that, alas.
Apparently we’re cancelling Freddy Krueger because (checks notes) he molested and murdered children…um, he is the villain of the films. Just because he also had funny lines doesn’t mitigate that he’s a predator; are people really this media illiterate? (Ha ha ha, what am I saying? Of course they are.) Freddy isn’t, and never was, the hero: he was a child molester/murderer who was murdered and burned alive by the Elm Street parents, so in the original he was invading the dreams of their children and killing them in their sleep. How that turned him into a pop culture icon was two things: Robert Englund’s scenery chewing performance, and his snarky-funny dialogue. I am sure there are any number of academic tomes, essays, and dissertations on how serial murderers like Michael Meyes, Jason Voorhees, and Freddy Krueger became the heroes of their franchises; we are all primed to root for the main character through being conditioned by media (people think Lolita is a love story, which always makes me roll my eyes)–and you can see the difference in the Scream series, where the killers change in every film and the survivors are the stars. We root for Sidney, not Ghost-face, who is inevitably as witty and snarky as Freddie.
A big shout out in thanks to Kristopher Zgorski–the font of all information, I swear1–who let me know you can buy the entire run of Friday the 13th–The Series on DVD, which will arrive today or tomorrow! Then I can start my gradual re-watch of the show, which will include episodes I’ve not seen; it wasn’t a network show but rather syndicated so I would often forget to watch when it aired. I had friends who also watched and I watched it with them when it was on, or watching an episode they’d recorded. I loved the show and the entire concept behind it–an antique store selling objects cursed by the devil, with each episode centering on one object the team was trying to track down by checking newspapers for odd deaths (if it is ever rebooted–please and thank you, God–they can do the Supernatural thing of looking on-line). I still want to do some kind of supernatural style series of my own a la Sookie Stackhouse/Dark Shadows, but this concept, much as I love it, wouldn’t really work outside of New Orleans and I’d rather do it in a more rural, bayou parish.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely morning and day, Constant Reader, and I will see you again tomorrow morning.
- Check out his blog, an excellent source for good reading, by clicking here. ↩︎
