My daughter Cait and me and Cait's daughter Jessie, the determined- looking "Time for New Power" girl, marching on the state capitol at this year's edition of the I Love Mountains protest against mountaintop-removal coal mining. Photo by my daughter Kris.

08/12/2010

(Roughly) Midsummer Night's News - Updated!

In the Fall of 2011, Counterpoint Press will publish, as a paperback original, a new collection of my stories titled I JUST HITCHED IN FROM THE COAST: THE ED McCLANAHAN READER. The book will be a gathering of 14 stories, both fiction and non-fiction, including, to my delight, all three stories in The Congress of Wonders, my favorite book, which has been out of print for a long time. (My friend and collaborator and cohort Tom Marksbury has been immeasurably helpful in the process of assembling the collection, and is officially its editor.) This will be a nice, fat book (460 pages in manuscript), and even though it's still a year away from publication, just knowing that it's in the works is a very great satisfaction to me.

My story "The Essentials of Western Civilization" has been published in the Summer 2010 issue of New Madrid, the national literary journal produced by Murray (KY) State University's low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program.  The story will also be included in my forthcoming new collection, I Just Hitched In from the Coast (Counterpoint, Fall 2011).

My Lexington (KY) photographer friend Guy Mendes and the non-profit Lexington art gallery Institute 193 plan to publish, in November 2010, a collection of Guy's portraiture titled 40/40--FORTY YEARS, FORTY PORTRAITS. As I wrote in my foreword to his splendid 1986 collection, LIGHT AT HAND, "The camera has the reputation of being a cold, objective instrument, but Guy Mendes' portraits are unfailingly warm, good-humored, even playful. ... Vision, Swift tells us, is the art of seeing the invisible.  Guy Mendes sees it every time--and takes its picture." You can find out all about his new book project by clicking here.

Academy Award-winner Paul Wagner's great short film (24 min.) of my story "The Congress of Wonders" is available at last on DVD. The film (shot at Spindletop Farm, just outside Lexington, in October 1993) features a wonderful performance by my oft-aforementioned pal Tom Marksbury, in the coveted role of the Bodiless Head. I love this little movie, and I'm tempted to go on and on about it ... but I won't. I'll just say that you can read more about the movie, and watch a nifty little preview of it, and, if you're a true McClanafan (a status to which many aspire, but all too few achieve), even purchase, for a mere pittance, your very own Congress of Wonders DVD! Just click here.

I suppose you think these shirts are just amusingly inept Superman knock-offs, huh? Well, think again, bunky; this is the logo of Sandoz Laboratories, where, in 1938, the good Dr. Albert Hofman synthesized LSD. My Prankster friend Kirko happened to notice the similarity, and had the shirts made up in Superman colors. Then my wife Hilda took this high-fashion foto of our Great Dane, Frida the Wonderdog, and her faithful sidekick Acidboy.

The "I Love Mountains Day" march on the state capitol building in Frankfort, Kentucky, on February 17th, 2009, protesting mountaintop-removal coal mining. That's Ed on the left, in the red jacket.

Jack The Bear

Here's a video of my daughter Annie and me singing my Kesey tribute song "Jack the Bear" at Booksmith in San Francisco, during my Fall, 2008 book tour with O the Clear Moment. The video was shot by my Prankster friend Freddy Hahne. The song appears in the book, in the story called "And Then I Wrote ... "

Un-retouched photo by Clay Gaunce of Ed McClanahan reading from "Famous People I Have Known" at a benefit show for Metropolitan Blues All*Stars bassist, Ricky Baldwin, at The Dame in Lexington, August 4, 2005.

I've been working sporadically for the last several years on a novel which I usually describe as "a sort of left-handed, latter-day sequel" to THE NATURAL MAN, titled THE RETURN OF THE SON OF NEEDMORE, in which Harry Eastep, the point-of-view character in NATURAL MAN, returns to his hometown after a career in academia on the West Coast, and finds himself on the jury in a murder trial. Readers who remember NATURAL MAN may be interested to know that much of SON OF NEEDMORE is in the form of flashbacks, in one of which the late Monk McHorning makes a cameo appearance, and that Oodles Ockerman, who has survived the intervening years, also looms large (so to speak) in the foreground of the story. Sample chapters from the book — "Harry at the Breach," "Freejack," and "Poodad" — are posted on the "Writings" page of this website.