"The more thrilling, wonderful, divine objects I behold in a day, the more expanded and immortal I become."
-Thoreau

Speaking of thrilling and wonderful objects, take a look at this:

Which you can get here (hatchet and knife not included). Immortality is looking me in the rude eye and I intend to expand. As far as the expansion goes, I fell short of my goal for the week on the sequel, but I did more than double what I had last week. I'm just over 8,500 words in -- so it's ten percent finished; I'm in chapter three.

As you can see from the picture, my paperback copy came this week, honestly I set the paper size larger than I intended so the book is a little thinner than I had planned. Rather than change it, I'll make each book in the series that size--and I'm looking for reviews. The ebook is only $0.99.

***

On another thrilling front, I dismembered three corpses this week.

These three individuals had been hanging around my house for some time now. I was getting a little annoyed with the way they threw shade in my direction. I waited, knowing that I could get the drop on them without too much effort. When I started the chainsaw they quivered but were too scared to move. It was like they was rooted in place, I tell ya. I do got to confess that two of them were already dead and the third was so sick that it couldn't have been saved by even the best soigeon.

The first day, my son Paul Bunyan and I cut off all the limbs from the one what was still breathing. We was going to put the blade to the torso, and we did, a little, but we had inferior cutlery that wasn't suited to cutting through a body of that size. So anyway, my son knew a guy who had what we needed. He came back another day with the improved hardware and we cut down all three like it was the St. Valentine's Day massacre. It got a little messy but we didn't mind too much. My son did most of the cutting.

We piled the smaller body parts where we could put the torch to them when we get ready; the rest we're saving for special occasions to dispose of when we got family over and need something to throw on the fire. We like our celebrations. We'll put the torch to the smaller parts later this month.

***
This seems like a good time to give a little review of The Highwaymen.

I saw it via vidangel so that I could filter out the unpalatable parts--which in the case of this movie was mostly language but you might want to filter some of the violence if you want to avoid scenes of bloodshed.

Costner and Harrelson play Frank Hamer and Maney Gault, the Texas Rangers who helped put an end to Bonnie and Clyde. The movie is shown almost entirely from the point of view of these two. If I'm capable of doing basic addition and subtraction (and that is a matter of reasonable dispute), I calculate that Hamer was 50 years old and Gault was age 48 in 1934 when these events took place. Costner and Harrelson play the pair as old men who appear to be in their 60's. It worked for dramatic effect in my opinion.

The film is stunning in a way that doesn't draw attention to that fact. The camera angles, broad shots and narrow shots, are excellent without resorting to peculiar angles or perspectives. The sets/locations are beautiful in a plain and apparently authentic way. I'm no authority on the way things looked in 1934, but the film looked good. The old cars are always beautiful. Notably, there really aren't any good shots of Bonnie and Clyde until they look up into the camera (which is substituting for the eyes of Hamer and Gault) just before their very timely demise. They look like a pair of jr. high school kids skipping class.

The Hamer-Gault relationship is done well but not over done. They share some nice banter. Harrelson is of course the more talkative of the two. His character in speaking with other characters provides background about the pair of rangers. There were a couple quotes that I wanted to remember--but didn't.

I've previously mentioned the 1967 Faye Dunaway, Warren Beatty Bonnie and Clyde movie. This movie is nice contrast to that romanticized version of the criminals. If you're looking to see the seated herky-jerky dance by Bonnie and Clyde to the rapid staccato of several machine-guns, you won't be disappointed--but that scene isn't as memorable for me as it was in the 1967 movie. 

Dumas' Progeny

Although this picture of Faye Dunaway and Christopher Lee in The 4th Musketeer: Milady's Revenge would be from 1974, it causes me to think of the Bonnie and Clyde movie from 1967 in which she starred with Warren Beatty. The coach in this picture seems to have more headroom than the stolen Ford Deluxe in which Bonnie and Clyde met their demise in May 1934, but the shoulder room looks a little tight. Perhaps those two pistols behind the heads of Milady and Rochefort are what raised that memory of the two young bandits jerking like electrified frogs' legs under a relentless spray of lead which perforated both the Ford and its occupants. I saw that movie as a kid on television many years after its theatrical release; the memory of that scene is still quite vivid.

Although I was allowed to watch Bonnie and Clyde on television, I did not get to go to the theater to watch The Three Musketeers, or The 4th Musketeer....because...Mom. I suppose the fact that I was less than 10 years old could've had something to do with it. Fortunately, I did get to see both of these movies after I was married--which was a considerable number of years later--and I'm still angry that I never got to see those movies as a kid. Of course I had not read Dumas' Three Musketeers in either English or French at that time, I just knew that I would love the story--it had SWORD FIGHTING. I did read the book in English when I was a freshmen in high school; several years later I was able to read it in French...and I continue to reread it in that language every few years for fun. It's a great story. My theory is that Dumas' characters were at least part of the inspiration for the Cartwrights of Bonanza, as well as Kirk, Spock, Bones, and Scotty of Star Trek. Some day I may compare the various movies based on Dumas' book...but not today. My copy of the book in the original language came to me via one of the booksellers along the Seine in Paris...but I digress.

The Three Musketeers is an outstanding story because it has adventure, intrigue, sinister villains, beautiful women, interesting characters,...and did I mention sword fighting? Why do I bring that up? Because those are significant elements in memorable stories. No doubt, Dumas has influenced my own writing. In Justice in Season, the hero, McBride, is certainly like D'Artagnan; Parker may be a little like Captain Treville, or Athos; Shorty and Vaughn compare with the musketeers Aramis and Porthos; Sheriff Upton has a whiff of Cardinal Richelieu about him; and McBride's nemesis correlates with Rochefort. The stories are certainly different, and I never made any intentional transposition of characters. However, looking at the completed story, I can see the parallels...except for the sword fighting...unless the gunfights count.