Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster

 + I was sitting on the back porch, while wearing my “Thoreau Was Right” hoodie, watching the skittish dances of southward-bound warblers on the branches of our apple trees, when Kimberly gave me the news that Annie Dillard had died at 82. First Wendell Berry, now Annie. It’s been a rough month for the neo-Thoreauvians.

+ Annie Dillard’s first husband, Richard Dillard, was a close friend of one of our professors at AU, Henry Taylor, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his collection A Flying Change.  I met Richard a couple of times. He was an English prof at Hollins and an acclaimed poet who, during summer breaks in the 60s, wrote screenplays. His poems were fairly traditional in structure, meter, and rhyme schemes. His screenplays were anything but. Consider Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster, a film which takes place on a post-Apocalyptic Mars, its population genocided by atomic blasts, in which neither Dr. Frankenstein nor his monster make an appearance; nobody cares about celebrity astronauts and the women survivors gladly run off with the alien invaders. Dillard and his screenwriting partner, the novelist George Garrett, named some of the more evil characters after the professors who’d denied them tenure. If only more poets had sharpened their pens by writing screenplays like this, perhaps poetry wouldn’t be in the moribund state it now finds itself mired in…