#early work

...It definitely helped me outline the story, before I started writing or posting. So kind of like concepts of what I wanted the story to look like. There are others I'll post, eventually, just not now to avoid spoiling the story.

Pudding scene / Lucifer and Lottie dynamic

THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS Toronto 1990

John Flansburgh and John Linnell - known as "the Johns" or "the Two Johns" (a joke only '80s alt-rock nerds will still get) - met in high school in Massachusetts but formed They Might Be Giants in 1981, when they moved into the same apartment building in Brooklyn after attending different colleges. They built up a following playing clubs in the NYC area, a duo playing accordion, saxophone and guitar backed by a drum machine or taped backing tracks. They had just emerged from what we used to call the indie circuit and released their third album, Flood, on Elektra Records in 1990, when I was assigned to photograph them for the cover of NOW, the big alt-weekly in the city.

They Might Be Giants had proved to be deft hands at self-marketing during their years as an indie acts, putting on a theatrical stage show in NY clubs and running Dial-A-Song on an answering machine starting in 1985. Fans could call a number (718-387–6962) and hear demos or incomplete songs from Flansburgh and Linnell. More than a gimmick, it helped establish the band's identity as creative but unpretentious, produced a compilation album and was still in service until 2008 when they had to retire it and the number. (It was revived in 2015 as a toll-free number, a website and radio network.) The band have written themes for TV shows like Malcolm in the Middle, songs for musicals and won Grammys for their children's albums.

It was still early in my time at NOW magazine when I got the assignment to photograph They Might Be Giants for a cover story, which meant both colour slide and black and white. I have no memory at all of where these photos were taken - probably a hotel room downtown - but I know I brought my single Metz flash on a light stand shooting into an umbrella, and used my Nikon F3. NOW covers were shot to a rigorous formula at this time - the subject squeezed into at most two-thirds of a vertical frame with space at one side and the top for the logo and cover type. It was restrictive and tiresome, but we had just innovated slightly by convincing the paper to drop their unofficial (and baffling) ban on white backgrounds.

I had obviously found the white wall in whatever space where this shoot took place, and got the band to tuck themselves into my frame. Flansburgh and Linnell were more than cooperative - they seemed to sense what I needed to convey the quirky energy of the band, and provided me with more than enough material for the cover layout - a big deal since I still felt very much on probation at NOW at the time. This is the first time these photos have been published since the story ran almost 35 years ago.

Gordon Parks

The New Tide, early work 1940-1950

Various people in the last couple of years on Tumblr and Reddit have recommended Lady Susan, one of Jane Austen's earlier works. Scholars think she wrote it around 1794, but they're not positive. It is an epistolary novel; that is, the action is told entirely through letters from one person to another, except for the Conclusion, when the narrator suddenly drops in. Sense and Sensibility was supposedly, in its first draft, also epistolary, and maybe Pride and Prejudice was, too; they seem first-drafted at the same time. However, Austen changed them to what we know now. She never changed Lady Susan or published it in her lifetime; her family published it almost six decades after her death.

I tried reading it on Project Gutenberg, but I could never get past the second chapter (i.e., second letter). Finally, this last Christmas (2025), Daughter surprised me by gifting me a physical copy. That was thoughtful of her, and it did the trick. I finished it before January arrived, and I just re-read it a couple of weeks ago (April).

It's a weird format, very common in European fiction of the eighteenth century. Dangerous Liaisons (1782) is also written in an epistolary format. Of course, the format is perfect for revealing that what A says to B is a lie when one reads A's letter to C. It makes the action a little choppy, which is also kind of the point. The reader is brought up short several times.

Lady Susan Vernon is a recent widow with a daughter, Francesca. Susan is more or less a psychopath, a proficient liar and actress, and seduces, emotionally or sexually, various men. She had to leave the Manwarings because she (probably) bedded him, so she visits her husband's brother, Mr. Vernon. His wife Catherine Vernon heartily distrusts Susan - with, as we soon see, good reason. Susan inveigles Catherine's brother, Reginald, though probably only emotionally (but it's possible it was more). She is pretty abusive to her sweet and timid daughter Francesca, whom Susan wants to marry off to some Sir James guy, who even Susan acknowledges is an idiot (but she really, really doesn't care about her own daughter). Susan takes up with Manwaring again when she gets to London. Manwaring visits her every afternoon for a few hours, while Mrs. Manwaring is increasingly enraged; what conclusion can we draw except ... ? Since it was written in the 1790s one has to make those assumptions, because it's all heavily implied.

Catherine gets firmly on her niece Francesca's side, but will Susan or Catherine have more power over Francesca's fate? Will Reginald be disillusioned and escape Susan's clutches? Who marries the dimwitted Sir James?

You know how all the other Austen novels go, so I don't really need to answer. Her trademark "won't do successful marriage proposal dialogue" technique is here in full force, while free indirect speech is an omniscient-narrator technique, so it doesn't fit letters, so we don't really see it. Austen's witty and sharp observations on human nature are here, though rather indirectly, embedded in the letters. Susan's letters to her friend Alicia Johnson are the most fun to read; Catherine reads like a stick in the mud, though an entirely accurate and intelligent one, while her father's one letter seems to show him as far too easily surprised, and her brother Reginald's letters show him to be easily swayed by the latest person to talk to him.

It's pretty short, and not as developed as her later novels, two of which came from the same era, but which (as I said above) were revised and published later. Thus, it offers amusement, but not the deeply interesting complexity and dry, cutting, and hilarious commentary about the many versions of stupidity and evil among humans that we read in the main six novels.