I celebrated the fall of 2008 by sending my agent a nonfiction book proposal and the completed, polished manuscript of a crime novel. Shortly after La Agent fired off some submissions to various interested editors, the publishing industry began rending itself with layoffs, budget cuts, and severe restrictions on the purchasing power of the editors who survived the staff reductions.

What’s that you say? Great timing, Steve? Tell me about it. The editors who didn’t get the ax got the workloads of those who did. The nonfiction proposal is finally getting some atttention, but a year after the novel manuscript went out, its fate is still an open question. Things are tough out there. 

Maybe you’ve heard about John Scalzi, a very good SF writer who posted an entire novel online, chapter by chapter, via his blog. He did it because he wanted people to read his work. He ended up getting a book deal and went on to become a successful novelist, but all that was after the fact. The chief thing is, he wanted his work to be read.  

I like my crime novel, a lot, and I want it to be read. So on Wednesday, with my agent’s full blessing, I’m going to start posting it a chapter at a time. It should be complete by late December, at which point I’ll post a short essay describing how I came to write the novel, and the sources of inspiration for the (rather unusual) main character. I’d be delighted to get comments from readers, but they should come as e-mails to moi. Comments will be switched off for the individual posts. If you want to send me a few bucks in exchange for the posts, that would be nice, but mainly I want to get some daylight on the novel.

Cuba gives a cache of Ernest Hemingway’s papers to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, which is certainly ironic when you consider the historical relationship between JFK and Cuba. The papers reportedly include a different ending for For Whom the Bell Tolls, corrected proofs of The Old Man and the Sea, and thousands of letters.

Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, in words and photographs.

Lynn Viehl shares the latest numbers from her bestselling novel.

The new issue of The Biographer’s Craft is up.

A few words in praise of Ayn Rand.

Jon Stewart does Glenn Beck. He has to call it imitation, but you don’t have to.

Neil Young, who has already released more good music this year than Bob Dylan, has a new disc coming out next month.

Getting to know Lester and Judy-Lynn del Rey.

Watching-the-driveway-flow edition.

My coffee maker has a problem. Which means I, too, have a problem.

The problem is this: the coffee maker has about as many functions and tricky settings as a missile defense control panel. However, all it is required to do is make coffee. I don’t want it to guide nuclear missiles to designated targets, as amusing as that might be on a slow-starting morning. I simply want it to heat water, pour the water through a basket full of ground-up coffee, then keep the drippings hot in the coffee pot. A perfectly acceptable, one might even say, laudable mission for a coffee maker. Vital, even — especially in my house.

But the coffee maker evidently yearns for greater things, and it’s developed a bit of a complex about performing what ought to be a simple function. It prematurely stops brewing and flashes “Error” messages above the sludgy oil slick at the bottom of the pot. It beeps and stops heating the brewed coffee while I’m only halfway through my first cup. No machine that really wants to be my friend is going to do that kind of thing.

I’m beginning to imagine the voice of Marvin the Paranoid Android every time I pop the cover off that big can of Chock Full’o Nuts. “My intellect, which is capable of solving every known mathematical theorem simultaneously, is instead going to brew supermarket coffee . . .” Marvin the Malcontent Coffee Maker may not realize it, but he’s about to switch roles from The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to WALL-E, and not in the starring role.

Come back, Mister Coffee — all is forgiven.

James “Blood” Ulmer plays the hardy perennial “Sittin’ On Top of the World” with backing from Alison Kraus on violin. Though I’ve never really understood the “harmolodic” music theory espoused by Ulmer and his mentor, Ornette Coleman (as with Buckminster Fuller, Coleman’s ideas become harder to understand the more he explains them), I know I usually like what I hear.  

Here is Ulmer’s solo version of “Are You Glad to Be in America,” one of his earliest records: 

Here’s a showstopper: “First Blood” with Bernie Worrell on Hammond organ:

Check out the lame audience member with his fingers in his ears.

No Harry Potters this year. Lots of Transformers — must have been four or five Bumblebees in The Divine Miss T’s school Halloween parade. Only one Spiderman, but Jedi knights made a comeback after being missing for the past few years. I guess that’s the intended result of George Lucas’ endless recycling and re-releasing of Star Wars.

All you need to celebrate Halloween the H.G. Wells way. (And the George Pal way, and the Oson Welles way, and the Hugo Gernsback way. . .) The image above, incidentally, shows Michael Condron’s sculpture of a Martian tripod in Woking, Surrey, where all hell breaks loose in the original novel. Check here for the New Jersey location used in the radio broadcast.

How about some literary costume ideas for trick-or-tweeding?

Halloween, B’more style.

Continuing our Halloween theme, it turns out that Dan Aykroyd based the Ghostbusters storyline on the psychic exploits of his own dad.

Novelists nominate books they think have been unfairly neglected.

A medievalist tries his hand at the Dante’s Inferno board game.

Taking on Knut Hamsun.

No need to be skeptical about Martin Gardner.

Patricia Cornwell’s latest mystery tale is playing out in court.

Gore Vidal’s sunset years.

How Paul Shaffer was crucified and resurrected by Bob Dylan.

There’s nothing more pathetic than a whining contrarian.

Maurice Sendak has three words for parents who think Where the Wild Things Are is too scary for their kids.

The Guardian harkens back to its coverage of John Steinbeck’s Nobel Prize for Literature. A writer retraces the journey described in Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley.

M*A*S*H was Robert Altman’s first big hit as a filmmaker, but his son ended up making more money off it than he did.

I have to agree with J.D. Rhoades that the idea of a bottle of tequila that sells for over two grand is pretty astonishing. I mean . . . tequila? Cactus juice? Grapes, okay, maybe. Grapes are friendly. They practically ask to be squished and bottled and allowed to ferment in a dark place. There’s nothing friendly about a cactus.  Cacti mean to do you harm. They practically say: Yeah, fool, c’mon and try to squish me, see what happens. You wanna take off your shoes and stomp on a big vat full of cacti, go ahead, be my guest.

In point of fact, much as I love my red vino, I’d be afraid to drink a two-grand bottle of wine. I can’t imagine what would be there in the flavor and bouquet that could justify the premium price, but if I found out, I’d be stuck with a jones for something that costs the equivalent of a monthly mortgage payment to enjoy. At present, my vices have a pretty manageable price tag. Unless the publishing industry loosens up, and unless Oprah comes calling, they’d better stay that way.

Did-you-hear-something? edition.

There’s an old joke to the effect that when an Irishman gets Alzheimer’s Disease, he forgets everything except his grudges. No Surrender, a pitch-black U.K. comedy from the late Eighties that’s crying out for a DVD release on this side of the pond, is tailor-made to illustrate that line. The story takes place in the Thatcher era, while the Troubles were still tearing Northern Ireland apart, but the mood and tone are strangely prophetic of the Good Friday Agreement that was still more than a decade off.

The script — the first and so far only film written by playwright and television scenarist Alan Bleasdale — centers on a nightclub that rises like a penitentiary cellblock in a particularly grotty part of Liverpool. The new manager (Michael Angelis) arrives to find that his predecessor has skipped out after booking a New Year’s Eve party for two feuding groups of Irish emigres, one devoutly Catholic and the other hardline Protestant, as well as a busload of pensioners with senile dementia, a punk band whose members can barely finish a song without getting into fistfights onstage, and an inept stage magician (Elvis Costello, in his first movie role) whose rabbit is on its last legs. Meanwhile, the club’s gangster owner is giving somebody the back-room treatment, and police are busting down so many doors in their search for terrorists that carpenters are kept on standby for repairs.

The new manager’s only allies are Bernard, a bouncer whose mental energy is used up in the maintenance of his pompadour (Bernard Hill in his pre-Theoden days, and hilarious), and Cheryl, the club’s sole waitress, played by Joanne Whalley, whose status as the thinking-man’s bombshell would be cemented with her roles in Scandal and The Singing Detective. It all builds to a gratifyingly chaotic conclusion, and a line of dialogue — “I’m know I’m a nobody, but I’m nobody else’s nobody” — that could serve as the motto of beleaguered commen men everywhere.

“Auld Lang Syne” provides an ironic background for the movie’s other plotline, which follows Bill McRacken (Ray McAnally), a onetime Unionist thug known as “Billy the Beast,” who has turned away from his violent past and found a measure of peace as a Liverpool businessman, though he still refuses even to speak to his Catholic son-in-law. On this night, looking for nothing more than a night out with his friends, he finds himself with too many auld acquaintances to deal with. One, a gun-runner from the old days, is threatening reprisals against McRacken’s family unless he gets help hiding from the police. Another, Paddy Burke (James Ellis), is a Catholic bruiser spoiling for one last round with Billy the Beast. Though blind, Paddy is an ex-boxer still tough enough to beat the daylights out of a pair of would-be muggers, and he has a nasty surprise planned for McRacken.

Bleasdale is known for what used to be called kitchen-sink realism: he made his name in 1980 with The Black Stuff, a television play about some Liverpudlian workmen who land a choice job laying tarmac at a new housing development, only to lose their savings and their jobs after trying to do a little business on the side. The show aired on BBC One and proved popular enough to spawn a sequel, The Boys from the Black Stuff. The cast of No Surrender is studded with Black Stuff alumni, notably Angelis and Hill, and the story showcases the deft blending of politics and gallows humor that remain Bleasdale’s trademark as a writer. No Surrender is angry but not despairing: the diehard fighters on both sides are viewed as bloody minded clowns, and when Cheryl, a Catholic, defuses a situation by singing a hymn and getting the others to join in, there’s a sense that both sides can find a way past the violence if they use a little ingenuity.

For me and a lot of other American viewers, the biggest revelation in No Surrender was  Ray McAnally, an Irish actor well known for his stage and television work in the U.K. After No Surrender, McAnally enjoyed a late explosion of high-profile roles in big ticket films like The Mission, We’re No Angels, and especially My Left Foot, in which he played Christie Brown’s roughneck father. When death took him too early in 1989, McAnally was set to play Bull McCabe in Jim Sheridan’s film version of The Field. The role went instead to Richard Harris, a gluttonous scenery chewer, and one can only imagine how much better the movie would have played with McAnally’s more reserved approach at the center. His Billy McRacken is outwardly easygoing and ready to laugh things off — when his old gunrunning buddy shouts “No surrender! No foooking surrender!” McRacken shrugs and says, “I surrender. In fact, I give up.” But the old steel is still there, not too far from the surface, and when McRacken gets pushed too far the results are pretty spectacular.

There was a time back in the late Eighties when American filmmaking had become effectively brain dead, and it seemed the theaters had nothing to offer that wasn’t big, loud, and stupid: Stallone movies, each one worse than the last; John Hughes teen-worship flicks; formulaic fodder from the Jim Cash-Jack Epps hack stack (Top Gun, Legal Eagles, etc.); special effects extravaganzas from the Spielberg-Lucas production plant.

What saved the latter half of the decade was the appearance of a string of low budget, high talent films from the U.K., most of them black comedies with terrific character actors and scripts that were, if not overtly political, then certainly politically aware. At the time it was simply a relief to be able to see a movie that was about something real, instead of the umpteenth retread of the go-for-it formula. My Beautiful Laundrette is probably the best known of these semi-cult films: it helped launch the career of Daniel Day-Lewis, just as Withnail and I turned Richard E. Grant into a cult hero. Among the others were Letter to Brezhnev, A Private Function, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, and How to Get Ahead in Advertising. Not all of them were great, but most of them were at the least very good, and now that I’ve been able to find a VHS copy of No Surrender, I can confirm it’s one of the best of the bunch. Won’t the nice people at Criterion give this one a little buffing up (the soundtrack desperately needs remixing) and put it back into the spotlight?