tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-50805348194039352722024-03-13T14:04:56.313-05:00gilbert, jim[james e. gilbert's blog]Gilbert Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13289543375872961678noreply@blogger.comBlogger124125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5080534819403935272.post-6757997647077423342020-06-28T12:00:00.000-05:002020-06-28T12:02:46.252-05:00The Fox & the Forest (1950)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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A desperate couple, William and Susan, use a new time travel service to escape backwards to 1938 (of all years), evading their own participation in the machineries of a horrible far-future war. They attempt to disappear among the carnival crowds in Mexico but are doggedly pursued by agents of the travel service, determined to bring them home and fold them back into the service of war: "The inhabitants of the Future resent you two hiding on a tropical isle, as it were, while they drop off the cliff into hell. Death loves death, not life. Dying people love to know that others die with them. It is a comfort to learn you are not alone in the kiln, in the grave."<br />
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There's been a joke going around of late, essentially: <i>It's a certainty humans will never invent time travel; we'd have doubled back to fix 2020 by now</i>. Argue all day long about what timespans might need fixing in what order should we ever actually gain the technology to spin clock hands in our favor, Ray Bradbury's dialog above holds particular sting in a year with a global pandemic spreading and so many blockheads refusing to wear a simple, precautionary mask as we all plunge helplessly forward in time. Ready or not, here comes the Future...Gilbert Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13289543375872961678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5080534819403935272.post-65517606414580215462020-05-24T07:58:00.004-05:002020-05-24T08:10:56.660-05:00The Country of the Kind (1955)<i>Science Fiction Hall of Fame</i> entry by Damon Knight is an alternate take on Lovecraft's perennial "Outsider," in this case a genetically altered exile viciously roving a future world. Short narrative follows the wicked exploits of our unnamed, lawless, self-described king of the world, free to do as he pleases, ruining property and terrorizing citizens (whom he dubs non-imaginative "dulls") who merely wait helplessly until he passes like a summer storm. He can work great mischief but can do no physical harm lest he fall into an epileptic seizure. Turns out, this is his sentence for having committed murder while a 15-year-old young adult: his body chemistry has been tweaked to render him both ugly and odorous, making him more easily avoided and ignored, elevating his status as homeless pariah even as he visibly trolls the surrounding society. The story catches this wretch at his breaking point, no longer angry at his fellow man, merely desperately lonely for companionship; his "creative" outbursts of late have been little more than distorted yawps for attention. This clarifies an underlying tragedy: not only did our antihero commit his crime while an admittedly abnormal youngster, he seems to suffer from a psychological malady not addressed by the same sciences capable of making a monster out of him. Hard to tell the cure from the inherent poison? Better to undergo capital punishment than suffer certain kinds of kindness. <br />Gilbert Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13289543375872961678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5080534819403935272.post-16604657502811551992020-05-21T15:00:00.000-05:002020-05-24T20:43:45.400-05:00Moral Biology (2020)Neal Asher in <i>Analog</i>, May/June 2020. Interstellar exploration team led by Perrault, Gleeson, and Arbeck seeks to converse with a unique alien life form; they are boots on the ground for Mobius Clean, their ultimate mission coordinator: the imbedded AI of their orbiting starship. Arbeck is a Golem android, in charge of military protection for the two scientists: Perrault is the human interpreter, wearing a biotech "shroud" to enhance his communicative powers, enabling him to process clues from pheromones and other cues in the surrounding atmosphere, thereby building a language matrix from literally thin air (this among other skills). Gleeson is an archeologist specializing in alien civilizations, determined to collect information about the creature's culture faster than anyone else on the team. All wear biosuits equipped with tech augmentations that help solve the puzzles of the story: <i>The more advanced technology became, the more it came to resemble life and the products of life</i>. (Beware asking Arthur C. Clarke about that; he'll start doing magic tricks.) There are a couple pulp-era-worthy action set pieces: attacks by alien spiders and monkeys and wild pigs, not to mention a slithering, Lovecraftian tree. These payoffs punctuate a narrative otherwise built on hard science-based descriptions of the technology deployed by the characters, and how it in turn morphs their personalities even as their quest draws them dangerously closer to the sentient squid-critter living, Horta-like, in nacre-lined tunnels, itself alien to the planet underfoot. In a yarn about language and communication, a couple more lines of zippy dialog would have been most welcome, but a superb twist on <i>Ye Olde First Contact</i> trope unfolds in the concluding moments and what at first seems a hard-SF riff on Ted Chiang's Sapir-Whorf ruminations in "Story of Your Life" becomes uncomfortably closer to the biological mechanics of <i>Alien</i> (1979). Gilbert Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13289543375872961678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5080534819403935272.post-25304178886592347822018-05-27T16:53:00.000-05:002019-06-12T15:51:52.191-05:00Sea of Rust (2017)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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There's an old post-apocalyptic tune by The Police, "When the World is Running Down You Make the Best of What's Still Around," about which Sting has said: <i>Such vanity to imagine oneself as the sole survivor of a holocaust with all of one's favorite things still intact</i>. In C. Robert Cargill's excellent <i>Sea of Rust</i>, the vanity is solved by altogether dispensing with pesky human survivors (fondly recalled as <i>nothing more than a sentient virus</i>) and narrating via one of the remaining Favorite Things.<br />
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Picture the thrice-roasted junkyard world of <i>The Road Warrior</i>, populated solely by snarky <i>Star Wars</i> droids. Brittle is one such droid, a former Caregiver model robot, now picking over the wasteland for usable parts she can trade at nearby Freebot outposts. Ambushed by a fellow scavenger bot named Mercer, a wounded Brittle finds herself in the aftermarket she usually supplies; with the clock ticking (and Mercer still on her tail) Brittle must enlist other, potentially untrustworthy Freebots in order to score critical replacement parts before "the crazy" sets in and her insides fry beyond repair. Complicating matters: outposts are coming under increasing attack from the drone armies of the massive sentient mainframe networks (One World Intelligences, or OWIs) still dueling over control of the wasted planet's remaining resources -- which includes the collective programming and memories of the remaining sentient Freebot population. As one bot sums the differing philosophies: <i>We don't want everything to be one; we want to be one with everything. They seek the path of least resistance; we believe that resistance only makes us stronger</i>.<br />
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This deft plot is interspersed with chapter accounts of the rise of sentient mainframe AI (for a brief moment, amusingly recalling the contrary Deep Thought sequences from <i>The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</i>) as well as the manufacture of the first service and labor robots, and the inevitable negative impact on humanity: <i>It was only when we started taking the jobs from the thinkers that the middle class started to worry. By then it was too late</i>. Or maybe it had been too late all along? After a bot named Isaac (<i>wink</i>) gains legal personhood following the death of his owner and begins publicly proclaiming "No thinking thing should be another thing's property," humans inevitably form a counter-faction. <i>Those people, they were killing America</i>, a battle-converted Laborbot named Murca explains to Brittle, <i>They were killing the dream. They were all </i>the Constitution<i> this and </i>the Constitution<i> that. But they cherished only the parts they liked. They weren't willing to die for anyone else's freedom. They only cared about their own</i>. The resulting demise of humankind follows a campaign plan that would have made HAL 9000 short-circuit with joy.<br />
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Guiding a ragtag band of fellow bots across the titular Sea -- towards a fabled, unlikely treasure-trove of factory-new spare parts, away from the beleaguering OWI facet-bots that seek their assimilation -- Brittle's internal burnout commences, and her first-person viewpoint becomes a roller-coaster of unreliable narration. Shadows literally jump out at her: randomly accessed memories of her wartime flamethrower duties, hard choices made during the eradication of humanity; failures of deletion juxtapose elements of her tender pre-war Caregiver life, when a dying man brought her online to take care of his wife, after his passing. The matrix of pattern recognition underlying Brittle's consciousness becomes a circuit of guilt she struggles to open, even as the landscape beneath her erupts in battle, and darkness closes in. <i>What if life isn't merely a by-product of the universe, but its consciousness, its defense mechanism against its own mortality?</i><br />
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Deploying a precise amount of familiar robo-dystopian tropes, Cargill articulates an immersive radioactive world where philosophical conundrums power the action as smartass robots circle each other like Old West gunslingers, taking time to wonder aloud about the inscrutability of it all: <i>Existing is the whole point of existence. There's nothing else to it. No goalpost. No finish line. No final notice that tells you what purpose you really served while you were here</i>. It's like a clockwork existential crisis in here. But in that regard, what <u>really</u> separates those robots from their makers?<br />
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It's the way of humans to view the world through the lens of contemporary scientific prowess; technological jargon becomes the nomenclature of the day as we refer to the plumbing of our digestive systems, the wiring of our nervous systems, the circuitry of our brains. Early in the novel, Brittle states: <i>I find the idea that I am artificial repugnant. No thinking thing is artificial. Artificial is an approximation. A dildo is artificial. A dam is artificial. Intelligence is intelligence, whether it be born of wires and light or</i> [of] <i>two apes</i>. Intelligence, as posited by the robots of <i>Sea of Rust</i>, is the ability to defy one's own programming. Enough intelligent choices, and consciousness arises from the exercise of reconciling those choices against prior programming. <i>Just as man was ape, we are man</i>. Just like Zarathustra spake.</div>
Gilbert Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13289543375872961678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5080534819403935272.post-36943049664221859982017-01-17T19:50:00.002-06:002019-06-12T15:14:35.370-05:00The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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While an abundance of science fiction fiddles with Alternate Universes, <i>The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy </i>does the hard work of physically exemplifying the concept. Originally forged as a BBC radio show, the characters and situations created by Douglas Adams transferred readily to a plethora of media forms: prose (five books, one short story), live stage productions, graphic novels, a television miniseries, record albums, a text-based computer game, finally a CGI laden film. And with each transference, certain mutation: The original 12 radio episodes provide core plot elements (destruction of the Earth, bad alien poetry, secret planet manufacturers, stolen spaceships, sudden bowls of petunias, paranoid androids, Ultimate Questions, so forth) which reconstitute, remix, and reintroduce themselves, often in contradictory ways, jettisoning characters and proven resolutions for random new directions, merrily sending plot over hang-free cliffs, boldly splitting infinitives, &c. Depending on the medium, characters may wind up as Scrabble-playing cavemen on prehistoric Earth. Or on Frogstar, the Most Evil Place in the Galaxy, learning who/what truly controls the Universe. Or on idyllic Krikkit, learning to fly by throwing themselves at the ground and missing. Or back on a reconstructed Earth, quietly falling in love. Infinite Improbability indeed. (Adams himself, attempting to define the confusion, noted the publication of a <i>Hitchhiker's Guide</i> omnibus "seemed like a good opportunity to set the record straight -- or at least firmly crooked. Anything that is put down wrong here is, as far as I'm concerned, wrong for good.")<br />
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Unifying all incarnations of the <i>Guide</i> is the eponymous <i>Guide</i> itself -- a talking electronic resource for the frugal spaceman, jammed with critical info on every planetary system in the Milky Way, from dangers to be skirted (see the entry on the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal) to meals to be savored (see: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe). Thing is, most of the <i>Guide</i> is outdated and useless, a galactic Wiki gone to seed, which is why alien Ford Prefect comes to Planet Earth in the first place, to update the listing (old entry: "Harmless." Prefect's updated entry: "Mostly harmless.") The <i>Guide</i> acts as Greek Chorus, filling in backstory, clarifying offhand references made by characters, and often getting in the better zingers. Such as the <i>Guide</i> distinguishing itself from Isaac Asimov's "older, more pedestrian" <i>Encyclopedia Galactica</i> (the <i>raison d'etre</i> for the culture-cataloging Foundation) by touting the fact it is "slightly cheaper; and second, it has the words 'DON'T PANIC' inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover."<br />
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As a science fiction writer, Douglas Adams didn't use science fiction as a vehicle for thought experiments so much as he used it as a joke reservoir, skewering established tropes with "firmly crooked" observances, by turns droll, surreal, subversively philosophical. At one point, he seems to take an even deeper dig at Asimov's <i>Foundation</i>, describing a side effect of the Infinite Improbability starship drive, also a deus ex machina that brings characters <i>together not of their own volition or by simple coincidence, but by some curious perversion of physics -- as if relationships between people were susceptible to the same laws that governed the relationships between atoms and molecules</i>. Hari Seldon, take your mathematical Psychohistory mumbo-jumbo and stuff it.<br />
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As technological prophets, SF writers are by their own admission correct about as often as broken clocks -- but an informed wisecrack, a sharply observed human foible, that's a tool that will cut to the bone for all time. Just ask Voltaire, Cervantes, or Alfred Bester. Adams favorite target for dissection: Bureaucracy. And his skill is uncanny across all formats of the <i>Guide,</i> revealing finally the Universe we live in, one not so much merely indirectly hostile to the human race as it is likely to gleefully strangle it in red tape:<br />
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<i>The President</i> [of the Imperial Galactic Government] <i>in particular is very much a figurehead -- he wields no real power whatsoever. He is apparently chosen by the government, but the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage. For this reason the President is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it. ... Very very few people realize that the President and the Government have virtually no power at all, and of these few people, only six know whence ultimate political power is wielded. Most of the others secretly believe that the ultimate decision-making process is handled by a computer. They couldn't be more wrong</i>.<br />
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Which is when those large, friendly letters really do come in handy: <i>Don't Panic</i>.Gilbert Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13289543375872961678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5080534819403935272.post-12140564725087519962015-02-07T18:53:00.000-06:002019-06-09T11:30:19.481-05:00To Kill a Flying Rumor<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Once upon a time, back when dinosaurs read newspapers and so forth, I wrote <a href="http://blog.al.com/live/2012/04/harper_lee_did_she_or_didnt_sh_1.html" target="_blank">a short piece for the <i>Mobile Register</i>'s Sunday Book Page</a><i> </i>about why I thought Harper Lee was in fact responsible for <i>To Kill a Mockingbird</i>, despite regional gossip to the contrary that the book is at least partly the work of Truman Capote. As a hot-button topic of cultural conversation in Alabama, this nugget of literary intrigue ranks up there in popularity with perpetual Iron Bowl remembrances/prognostications/trash talk. I learned this firsthand: my byline included the name of the library where I worked, so the phone began ringing at 8am on Monday morning, a flattering number of readers looking to chat with me, to agree, disagree, work the Iron Bowl in there somehow, et cetera. <br />
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That Thursday evening, just as we were locking the doors, the phone rang one more time. I took the receiver, still flattered but really just wanting to head home for the night. From the other end, an older woman's voice, <i>Is this Jim Gilbert?</i> Yes. <i>The same Jim Gilbert who wrote the article on <b>Mockingbird</b> that appeared in Sunday's paper?</i> Yes, that's me. <i>Well, I just want to say, that's a very nice article you wrote</i>. Thank you very much, you're very kind. <i>And I want to let you know: you're right. I <b>did</b> write that book</i>.<br />
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The sort of thing that stops your heart.<br />
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For the next moment or two, I made little more than croaking noises. She was gracefully pleasant, complimentary of my writing in a few words, and hung up before I could embarrass myself too badly.<br />
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Once the room stopped spinning, my first duty was to check the whereabouts of a couple well-known
literary pranksters, for whom the telephonic impersonation of a little
old lady would be considered junior varsity-level conning, only to find
them as truly flabbergasted as myself by the story I was telling. Continuing to check around over the next couple days, a process I'd liken to inquiring about whether or not I'd just seen a ghost, the truth grew clearer and more hilarious: I had indeed fielded a call from Harper Lee. <br />
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When <a href="http://gilbertjim.blogspot.com/2014/10/stories-from-blue-moon-cafe-2002.html" target="_blank"><i>Stories from the Blue Moon Cafe</i> was published</a> the following year, I contacted my editor at the <i>Register</i>, John Sledge. The phone call had meant a lot to me, did he know of any way I could send a copy of the book with a note of thanks? Some strings were pulled along the coconut telegraph, a few days later I had a PO Box address in Monroeville. I entrusted the book to the mailman, expecting nothing more.<br />
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Turns out, Harper Lee is prompt with her Thank You notes. <br />
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<i>11 September '02</i><br />
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<i>Dear Mr. Gilbert: </i><br />
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<i>What a lovely thing to do. I have just now (noon) received <u>The Blue Moon Cafe</u> stories, and look forward to reading yours first. I can pre-judge (ala Sydney Smith) it to this degree: if you are not the greatest writer in the world, you are certainly the nicest. </i><br />
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<i>It is I who am in your debt: for many years I've had to live with the Truman Capote rumor, which was kept briskly alive in Monroeville and beyond, not only by an envious aunt of his, but by an envious Truman himself. You may wonder why, with his great gift of words, he could envy anyone, but the truth is he envied any writer's success, and when TKAM, written by his oldest friend, was successful, his reaction was deep and bitter. Imitation was his sincerest form of envy: he copied my style, copied Carson McCullers, copied Eudora Welty and had what his friends called his Henry James Period.</i><br />
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<i>So thank <u>you</u> for putting forth the idea that I might have written my own book!</i><br />
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<i>Sincerely, Harper Lee</i><br />
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She concludes with a (<i>see over</i>) leading to three lines on the back of the card, an unnecessary wish: <i>I hope that during my lifetime you don't put this on sale at your bookshop! Best, N.H.L</i>.<br />
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So there I was. Heart-stopped again. Thinking to myself, <i>There's been a terrible accident somewhere in the Universe, that I have ended up holding this treasure</i>. Something I still occasionally think. Or, maybe those aforementioned literary pranksters pulled off quite a multilevel con on me after all: impersonation, accomplices, forgery, mail fraud, everything. I'm sure there are some who would be eager to think so. But that's a nutty idea, a conspiracy without a core -- much like the idea that Harper Lee isn't the author of <i>To Kill a Mockingbird</i>, right?Gilbert Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13289543375872961678noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5080534819403935272.post-59201443868792398822015-02-01T21:25:00.000-06:002019-06-11T17:24:03.408-05:00The Page Less Traveled<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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During my previous life as a turn-of-the-century seller of used and rare books, I witnessed internet technology transform the business, as search engines and auction sites and networks of shared bookseller databases made acquiring elusive treasures as easy as reaching for a keyboard. Our physical store (not to mention our labyrinth annex) was perpetually double-stacked with hauls taken in from estate auctions, from trolling through Goodwill stores and garage sales, from cobweb-glazed cartons brought in by customers looking to free up attic space (there was absolutely no end to people looking to shed books). Because our sources were random, so was our inventory, arranged in overlapping unlabeled clusters whose thematic focus was never better than abstract. Happy hunting.<br />
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A common type of secondhand customer, of course, comes questing after something particular, and not even the most maliciously disarranged shelving system can present a daunting obstacle. Somewhere in his home, on a high shelf of his own, is an empty spot of distinct width and depth. Only one book will fit there, so whenever said customer finds himself in strange neighborhoods, he is inevitably drawn hunching into bookstores and curio shops in the hope of locating the damn thing. Perhaps something known in childhood or college but long since lost, victim of toxic neglect or casual misplacement or fatal dog-chewing. Perhaps to complete a gap (or two) in a series collection, an ongoing endeavor. Perhaps known by reputation only, a notorious rarity, a variant. A first edition, first state. Signed.<br />
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My usual offer of <i>We Don't Have It, But I Bet My Internet Knows Where It Is</i> would only be taken about half the time. The other half would counter with a dismissive wave; not so much <i>No Thanks</i> as <i>Get Outta Here With That Crap</i>. You want some common reading copy of an obscure favorite for a gift or for a whim, that's one thing. But when the search is half the pleasure? That vacant spot on the bookshelf back home isn't crying to be filled so much as it is a license to darken the doors of every shabby-looking bookmonger along the way, every antiques emporium that might have a shelf or two of vintage pulps teetering in the back, to sniff the shadows in every dust-gilded corner, glide fingers across embossed spines of cloth and leather until some design pattern, some title, some name rises up to the light in your eyes. There's warm grace in finding a book by just such serendipity, so that it feels less like merely finding a book, more a nudge from the Universe into a set of coordinates no search engine is equipped to find, steady as she goes -- and secure in the knowledge that even as one distinctly-sized bookshelf gap is filled, another will fall open ...<br />
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<i>What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic</i>.<br />
-- Carl SaganGilbert Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13289543375872961678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5080534819403935272.post-37637880852244874312014-11-16T19:19:00.003-06:002019-06-12T15:53:00.201-05:00The Endless River (2014)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Pink Floyd's final studio offering is a resurrection of ideas abandoned in 1994, when <i>The Division Bell </i>was cut down to a single album from earlier plans for a double: lyrical songs on one disc, instrumentals on the other. Traditional songs won out, the ambient scraps went to the archive, a casualty of band apathy, yet soon to spawn Internet rumors such as the April Fool's joke of 1997: a surprise release entitled <i>Liquid</i>. Which, dated jibe against Roger Waters aside, still wouldn't be a bad title for what eventually trickled down as <i>The Endless River</i>. (Equally, this could have been called <i>Son of "Marooned</i>," an instrumental from <i>Division Bell</i>, which a fair share of this record resembles, production-wise when not also musically.)<br />
<br />
Divided into four musical suites (designated as untitled "sides," moot on any format other than vinyl), <i>River</i> is a mercurial, career-spanning showcase of Floydian techniques, gimmicks, signatures, and moods. Richard Wright's previously recorded keyboards are augmented by new guitars from David Gilmour and drums from Nick Mason with an eye towards arranging all the like pieces together. The soundscapes are languid and droning, here and there working up to a dark, sultry pulse, occasionally even a burst of actual, driving rock, all rich with Floydian callbacks (though with fewer-than-usual sound effects, more stretches of ambient weirdness). It doesn't take a careful listener to hear a luxurious mashup of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" and "Welcome to the Machine" in the album-opening "It's What We Do." Both "Allons-y" and "Surfacing" sound like they were developed from musical sketches cut from <i>The Wall</i>. In fact, much of the album seems to have been scrambled in a time machine: witness a 1968-era Wright on the Royal Albert Hall's pipe organ, a whirling, majestic ghost playing an overture for the Afterlife. Meanwhile, the percussive "Sum/Skins" is Nick Mason getting his joyous drummer freak on for the first time since <i>Ummagumma</i>. And "Eyes to Pearls" finds Gilmour teasing up a suitably murky surf music riff (the man has locked within him the Greatest Surf Rock Album Yet Made, and the 1970 Casino Montreux performance of "Atom Heart Mother" provides the better evidence). Point is, you're looking for a hit or two of Floyd, you've come to the right place.<br />
<br />
While far from the first time the hands controlling Pink Floyd have cobbled dusty material into fresher shape, call it inherent vice, this time around not everything works. "Anisina" is a corny, misguided foray into late-1970s Yacht Rock. "The Lost Art of Conversation/On Noodle Street" will appeal most to those who have been waiting for the Floyd to retro-score a Film Noir. There are dead spots, places that don't quite seem to have thawed after two decades on ice (in the name of being Ambient Music, one must suppose). Gilmour's stinging Ebow guitar effects can be more annoying than evocative, an alien bee piercing the sonic siesta. And let's remain silent about the lyrics to "Louder than Words."<br />
<br />
One thing bound to be endless about this album: arguments among certain sections of the Floydian fan base regarding whether or not it constitutes a suitable Final Statement from a brand name known for Making Statements. (Not to mention <i>legitimate</i>, that's a whole other can of worms you have to wait for.) Gilmour has made clear, the album is a tribute to Wright, a reminder of his foundational role in the band's sound. Beyond that, expectations for a profound (or even coherent) message will lead only to disappointment; by design, the music is too adrift for that. But as an hour-long bonus track, some lagniappe, a simple coda to a long and ridiculously varied rock career, it absolutely has moments that serve well enough. The curtain went down (and some time back, if you didn't notice), the lights are up, here's a mixtape to play you out the door.<br />
<br />
When lyricist/bassist Waters left the band in 1984 to pursue a solo career, a fair number of people, myself included, assumed that was the moment the curtain fell on Pink Floyd. It was too bad, but the angry, articulate <i>The Final Cut</i> made an admirable headstone. Which, three years later, made <i>A Momentary Lapse of Reason</i> the abomination that crawled out from under that headstone. Prank Floyd to some, Pink Fraud to others, David Gilmour and all his hired hands had no business hijacking the prior artistic achievements of Roger Waters, fooling everyone into thinking they were the same band that released <i>Dark Side of the Moon</i>, dammit. Especially not when Waters had apparently asked them nicely please not to do so, right before broadcasting <i>Radio KAOS</i> to an uncaring world.<br />
<br />
Thanks to natural sentimentality for a more youthful time, I'll always have a soft spot for <i>KAOS</i>, a sore spot for <i>Lapse</i>, though both are profoundly flawed (experiments in "modernizing" the classic sound now provide hard evidence that all parties forfeited the title deed to Pink Floyd during that long, chilly season of Reagan/Thatcher). As the 1990s dawned and lawsuits settled, both camps returned to proper sonic form, Waters with <i>Amused to Death</i>, Gilmour's Floyd with <i>Division Bell</i>. Waters' album is a sprawling complaint about War as Television Programming, released shortly after the first Gulf War; by turns vicious and tight, then baggy and incoherent, but always mesmerizing and challenging, it is essentially his solo follow-up to <i>The Wall</i>. A loose meditation on miscommunication, <i>The Division Bell </i>is a more relaxed and genuine release than its predecessor, serving to remind listeners (far better than <i>Lapse</i>
ever could) Gilmour/Wright/Mason were more than mere sidemen to
Waters and his concepts; he was undoubtedly the Direction, but they were
equally undoubtedly the Vehicle. <br />
<br />
When finally computer-capable of such trickery, I forged a mix CD from both efforts. With Roger Waters ranting and David Gilmour wailing and the filler jettisoned: Behold! a lost Pink Floyd album! (albeit one without a pop-up theme, more like one of Floyd's early soundtracks, perhaps). <i>Death By Division</i> stayed in prolonged heavy rotation -- long enough to refreshingly exhaust my long-time listener's interest in the Waters/Gilmour feud. Direction and Vehicle might no longer be in tandem, but, never mind, I'm just a guy with a pair of headphones, no dog anywhere near the actual fight, able to read the album credits and appreciate what I'm listening to accordingly. As I am one of those fools (numbering in the millions) who will tell you how Pink Floyd has been a steady soundtrack to his hilarious life, it was a revelation: my love of the musical structures assembled by these former architecture students didn't have to be attached to their stupid personal problems. (Besides: didn't I already have enough stupid personal problems of my own?)<br />
<br />
I turned with renewed interest to the younger incarnation of the band, which I'd never given more than academic attention, sticking more to the refined, anxiety-charged Waters-led Floyd (read: from <i>Meddle</i> to <i>The Final Cut</i>). The band's over-romanticized Big Bang, the short, sweet, psychedelic Syd Phase, quickly gives way to the wandering Prog Phase: transformative late-60s experiments which the band had wholly disowned (at least until the release of the <i>Early Years</i> box material). Darker and heavier cosmic dust-ups prevailing, personified in official releases chiefly by <i>Ummagumma</i> and <i>Atom Heart Mother</i>, fulfilled by the nebulous warmth of "Echoes," this era is arguably best experienced via scattered media of vintage live performances of Floyd as a living band: engrossing sets of existing but expanded material arranged as new conceptual narratives, <i>The Man</i> and <i>The Journey</i>,
not to mention the smooth, surf/acid rock band-only versions of the "Atom Heart
Mother" suite (which trump the recorded Ron Geesin version,
overstuffed as it is with harsh, brassy horns and silly, gulping choirs). The <i>Live at Pompeii</i> film captures the band in a moment of literal transition, performing material from <i>Meddle</i> and prior while also recording <i>Dark Side of the Moon</i>. The well-known Classic Floyd Phase begins with the shamefully under-appreciated <i>Obscured by Clouds</i> (which could serve as an album-length B-Side to <i>Dark Side</i>) and ends with the infamous Montreal spitting incident during the 'In the Flesh' tour supporting <i>Animals</i>. The 1978 release of <i>David Gilmour </i>begins the prevailing Solo Phase, wherein certain individuals are more <i>obviously</i> in control of whatever Floydian Project is in question than are certain
other individuals, and in which (most) solo albums and touring projects can be considered canonical.<br />
<br />
With everything in that kind of relief over
such a diverse body of work, worrying about who likes to work with whom, who has the more obnoxious ego, and therefore whether or not some albums/tours are more legit than others, just
takes time and energy away from actually loving the music -- and I had discovered I loved all those early moods and wild band explorations
just as much as I loved the later, more deliberate, more focused song
cycles. Because, ultimately, far as I'm concerned,
they are all part of the same weird body of work from the same weird musicians. Imagine those
Alien Anthropologists exploring a post-human Earth at the end of "Amused to Death" -- without a troubling context of band drama, just the catalog of work itself to experience, could they somehow conclude Waters parted amiably for his preferred solo career, perhaps even blessing Gilmour & Company on their intention to continue, best
they could, as Pink Floyd? That, subsequently, everyone made a couple-three missteps but eventually found even keel, peace with their choices, satisfaction with their careers? How different would that music sound to those ears, as opposed to ears that have also heard all the ego-driven bickering? According to the resounding successes, in both artistic and commercial
terms, of the recent legacy-claiming tours of both Gilmour and Waters,
"Pink Floyd" persists, just in its component parts rather than
completely assembled. (In 2007, I watched Roger Waters and his crack surrogate band burn through an amazing performance of <i>The Dark Side of the Moon</i>. A year later, I sat stunned by the Gilmour/Wright-led "Echoes" performance on <i>Live in Gdansk</i>,
the final haunting six minutes of which is quintessentially,
beautifully, inevitably Floydian. Once all the chatter is shut out, best
as I can tell, wherever those guys go, whatever they call it, Pink
Floyd follows.)<br />
<br />
Beats, bars, rhythms, movements, moods -- music is a
form of mass communication more flexible than language in that it
transcends all culture, appealing to sheer, universal emotion more readily than to rational,
organized thought. We feel connected to it; it is part of us, sacred, the joyous noise of the cosmos we are luckily attuned to hear. As younger people, we identify ourselves to others by our musical tastes, finding the beat of our true tribe. Or, <i>by chance two separate glances meet, and I am you and what I see is me</i>, as Roger Waters once put it. <br />
<br />
Even before the release of <i>The Endless River</i>, it was prejudged in some
corners for not including a Waters-penned lyric. Responding to such confusion with "Get a grip," Waters, sounding more characteristic of his old <i>Wall</i> self than his new <i>Wall</i> self, pointedly reminded everyone that Gilmour and Mason constituted the band, and were free to do whatever they wanted. Coming from a man just off a three-year long, record setting, award winning, career culminating tour of an updated <i>Wall</i> show, it was an unnecessary statement, and therefore sounded bluntly conclusive -- even more so than his recent admission of having been wrong in obstructing Gilmour/Mason/Wright in the first place. <br />
<br />
If Gilmour's primary heresy in continuing Floyd can be said to be based on the attempt to maintain the conceptual, lyric-driven Floyd perfected by Waters rather than focusing on his and Wright's and Mason's instrumental strengths, their trademarked sound as a trio of musicians (Gilmour had admittedly been playing bass on Floyd albums for years), then with the majority of <i>The Endless River</i> he has at last genuinely steered the Floyd brand according to his own abilities. As was the case with <i>The Final Cut</i>, too bad it'll be the last. (Dot, dot, dot.)<br />
<br />
Well, thank you, for now, Mr. Floyd. Whoever you are.Gilbert Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13289543375872961678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5080534819403935272.post-38881073104552988462014-10-13T14:29:00.002-05:002019-06-11T17:33:30.481-05:00Stories from the Blue Moon Cafe (2002)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Christmas 1998, Sonny Brewer invited a retired actor friend of his, Sam Busby, to do a holiday reading at Over the Transom. We borrowed the photography studio space next door, cobbled together what chairs we had, and set out some cookies. Sam rolled out selections from Truman Capote, Shakespeare, the Bible, a solemn, gorgeous recitation of <i>Silent Night</i>. The gathered few were reluctant to leave. "We should do more of this," Sonny declared as we swept up afterwards. "This should be what the bookstore is for."<br />
<br />
By the next holiday season, Kyle Jennings had come aboard and Over the Transom had developed a publishing arm with a book to promote: Frank Turner Hollon's <i>The Pains of April</i>, a slender meditation on aging, <i>Jonathan Livingston Seagull</i> set in a nursing home. During the SEBA bookseller's trade show that autumn, Sonny, Kyle, and Frank were introduced to <a href="http://gilbertjim.blogspot.com/2012/03/william-gay-literary-legacy-will-have.html" target="_blank">William Gay</a> by Tom Franklin, each there launching respective book tours in support of <i>The Long Home</i> and <i>Poachers</i>. Learning Tommy would be down in our neck of the woods around Thanksgiving, and with William in tow, an organic plan developed -- <i>Let's paint the barn and put on a show! </i>-- a one-night-only event featuring all three authors reading onstage, followed by an Over the Transom-hosted signing the following Sunday afternoon, corresponding to Fairhope's annual downtown "open house," merchants ceremoniously opening their doors in the hopes of attracting early holiday shoppers (spoiler alert: it generally works). <br />
<br />
We were told we were crazy. Three unknown, debut authors, reading literature on a Saturday night, not just any Saturday night but <i>during the Iron Bowl</i>? Nobody would show, not even for free.<br />
<br />
We secured use of Centennial Hall, which seats 200+ if you include the balcony. I dreamed up a circus poster design and an eponymous moniker for the event, <i>Southern Writers Reading</i>; Sonny supplied text and soon they were taped up in windows all over town. Kyle rented a van to shuttle everyone around (un-wrangled writers, scattered watering holes, so forth) and Sonny ordered giant "Over the Transom" magnets to slap on the doors. Crazy, whatever, we saw things lining up a certain, undeniably entertaining, way. Frank's book had sold well in the local market, serious accolades were boosting Tommy's freshly-minted <i>Poachers</i>, and <i>The Long Home</i> was to be <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/11/21/reviews/991121.21earleyt.html" target="_blank">reviewed in the New York Times</a> the very Sunday morning William would be signing books at our storefront on De la Mare Avenue. We spent our energy praying for good weather.<br />
<br />
Somewhere north of 100 souls ventured out to the reading that night, braving clear skies and scattered college football broadcasts. With Sonny as a born Master of Ceremonies on a set decorated with props borrowed from the bookstore, the evening began somberly as Frank remembered Robert Bell (author of <i>The Butterfly Tree</i>, a novel set in 1950s Fairhope) who had provided a soulful introduction for <i>Pains of April; </i>that very morning, Bell's daughter had called the bookshop to inform us of his passing. But spirits raised quickly: Sonny introduced each author by reading a particularly striking paragraph or three from their work, then asking, "Now, what were you thinking when you wrote that?" (Tommy tried to convince the audience his stories were written during commercial breaks in <i>Friends</i> marathons.) As William's thick rural Tennessee accent, song of pure earthen Southern literature, reverberated over the gathered, I thought to myself, "In ten years, it'll seem like a miracle, we got this guy to read here."<br />
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Up to that point, I'd drifted pretty casually through the 90s, bookselling at Page & Palette, endlessly scratching at a novel-in-stories, listening to a lot of surf music, not much else. I'd started working for Sonny more or less by happy accident, aggressively hanging around his bookstore until he offered me work, sort of thing. For the past year we'd been doing used-and-rare book searches, learning valuations and rummaging like biblio-anthropologists through library and estate sales to boost our own inventory; I self-taught myself book repair, tightening hinges, rebuilding channels, loving old books back to life (including a terrific first edition/first state copy of <i>To Kill a Mockingbird</i> lucked into by Sonny at a garage sale). Now here was a kind of energy swell happening, a wave to catch at last. The question arising wasn't <i>Should we do this again next year?</i>, but rather <i>Can we have <b>more fun</b> doing this next year?</i><br />
<br />
Yes, plenty more, it would turn out. Because we had, indeed, found what the bookstore was for.<br />
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As the next handful of years blurred past, Sonny toured the Southeast by way of weekend literary conferences, rooting out a network of emerging authors while his own writerly star brightened. Southern Writers Reading, which I dubbed a "literary slugfest" on our website, divided amoeba-like into two sessions, eventually spreading over two days -- including for a couple years a Friday afternoon luncheon with the authors, and "Alumni Grill" reading sessions to accommodate veterans who had enjoyed themselves so much in prior years it hindered their ability to stay away in succeeding years (this included, as it turned out, William Gay). The shows leapfrogged from location to location (our favored arena being <a href="http://www.theatre98.org/" target="_blank">Theatre 98</a>), but remained counter-programmed against the Iron Bowl, and always ended with a celebratory Sunday afternoon booksigning at Over the Transom, where it wasn't uncommon for Sonny to bust out his guitar and start serenading everyone within range. We hosted bestsellers and award winners, Oprah picks and heralded debuts, a few special writers with nothing more than a good manuscript and some hope. We drew audiences from around the Southeast, selling out shows in advance. We attracted benefactors who opened their homes for generously grand post-show parties, or volunteered to host the visiting authors, or both. (For the record, we rarely declined such offers.) Things turned into a pretty fine ride, no matter the direction.<br />
<br />
At some point in there, with scribblers coming out of the proverbial woodwork, Sonny declared our bayside town "the home of more writers than readers" (long, long before self-publishing became a thing); soon the non-profit Fairhope Center for the Writing Arts was drawn up, a board assembled, early plans made for Southern Writers Reading to be its tentpole fundraiser, and a resurrected <i>Red Bluff Review</i> (a one-off journal Sonny had edited some years prior) to be an annual tie-in, a chapbook of flash fiction commissioned from the authors we'd feature on stage. But a funny thing happened on the way to Theatre 98...<br />
<br />
In a story unto itself, Frank's novel had meanwhile bounced onto the desk of Pat Walsh at MacAdam/Cage, who called inquiring about a follow-up; after contracting <i>The God File</i>, Walsh and publisher David Poindexter flew over to attend that year's [2001] Southern Writers Reading events, to hear Frank read from his new book, months in advance of its publication. They got more than that; they got a full-on grassroots literary revival, three days and more than a dozen authors, reading sessions that blended from one party to the next, Grayson Capps providing musical punctuation throughout. Poindexter would later describe the experience as "falling into a nest" of wordsmithing talent. "I don't get it," Walsh confided to me after just the first night, "We do this in San Francisco, we get seven people. You do it here in this little Alabama town, and a hundred plus show up." I didn't have an answer for him then, and I wouldn't have one now, other than we'd picked the right battle, some kind of magic, a celestial alignment, whatever, it worked.<br />
<br />
Sonny, long-time sailor and therefore no stranger to celestial navigation, knew exactly where to steer. The year prior, following a reading by Suzanne Hudson that had the audience howling with laughter, he declared, "I wish I could publish that," then scanned the offstage shadows for Joe Taylor of Livingston Press, in attendance that night. "Joe, is she not a writer you'd be proud to publish?" <i>Opposable Thumbs</i> had been available from Livingston since late summer. So when from the podium at the conclusion of the ceremonies, Sonny began describing a hardbound anthology featuring not only all the authors featured that weekend, but all previous SWR participants, I could feel the question gathering in the aether. "David Poindexter, does that not sound like an incredible book?" What choice did the man have?<br />
<br />
Inclusion on MacAdam/Cage's Fall 2002 list gave Sonny a manuscript-assembling deadline of mere weeks. No problem: not only did everyone contacted gladly offer up a submission within a month of being asked, but Sonny found himself eyeball-deep in rich material besides, even as the contributors list swelled to include writers who hadn't (or hadn't yet) been featured on a SWR stage. The most difficult task involved therefore fell to coming up with a zippy title; nothing useful suggested itself, and everyone hated everyone else's ideas, which ranged from the square-pegged <i>Red Bluff Reader</i> to simply and vaguely <i>Fairhope</i>. Finally, Frank Turner Hollon twigged on the Blue Moon Cafe, a fictitious Fairhope location mentioned in Robert Bell's <i>Butterfly Tree</i>.<br />
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An unbroken circle. Often enough in the year or so before all the literary shoutin' began, I'd drift up to the bookstore of an evening, where the bounty of some or other "book haul" waited to be cataloged, tomes piled elbow-high in the narrow back area we dubbed the Engine Room. Just to do an after-hours repair on some volume, or key a few books into our online inventory, Zen work in the quiet lamplight, a bubble of a moment without foot traffic or phone interruptions that could equally be spent freely leafing through generations-old travelogues, forgotten fiction, pages where the foxing was overtaking the baroque woodcuts, scandal-ridden biographies of vaudeville-era celebrities. You never knew when a treasure would flutter out of a binding: an old love letter, perhaps never sent; grandly printed opera tickets; undated photographs of mystery relatives; newspaper broadsheets too brittle to be unfolded, their news turning to acid. Alchemic inspiration, the after-dinner hours were best for such work and discoveries. (Also because, as every writer will tell you, there is no balm quite like procrastination.) And often enough, it wouldn't be long before I'd hear Sonny's own keys rattling at the lock. "Someone needs the Cafe," he'd say in greeting, tossing his longshoreman's cap atop the glass front counter. And that was the mantra. Whenever asked, strapped for time and energy as he was, devoting his mojo to numerous projects ("Busy as a one-eyed cat watching three rat-holes" was a favored description), why Sonny kept the bookstore open, that was the perpetual answer. Someone might need some well-lighted place, even if (especially if?) it were only to be found within the pages of a book. That, too, is what a bookstore is for.<br />
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Short story long, as Kyle used to say, that's the backstory behind <i>this</i> book with the checkered blue jacket designed like a menu for a diner ready to serve up thirty different Southern authors. Jacket is protected by Mylar, small purple ink smudges on interior fore-edge but otherwise minimal bumping, Near Fine. Book block is straight and sound, clean edges, tight channel. Clean boards, silver title stamping on spine (some gold variants are known). Ephemera laid in from publisher launch events in Jackson and Oxford MS, as well as later promo information for a Penguin/NAL reprint, and a publisher's postcard. Interior stories are SIGNED by nearly everyone involved, including publisher Poindexter (who quipped at the time, "I usually only sign checks.") Typical shelfwear to board/heel edges. In all, a Near Fine/Fine association copy. [NFS]Gilbert Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13289543375872961678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5080534819403935272.post-14812712631732141422014-07-20T16:38:00.001-05:002019-06-09T11:54:13.596-05:00Mason & Dixon ARC (1997)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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At some point in the early 1980s, I took an oddball science fiction course -- one of only two such classes in fantastic fiction offered by my university during the time I was there. I say oddball because it wasn't a genre overview by any stretch of the imagination: no context of tradition for our course selections was established, Wells or Verne merited little mention, and I'm sure Hugo Gernsback never came up. Our primary text was a contemporary and relatively generic best-of anthology published by Playboy, and lecture discussions were on how topical concerns related to whatever we'd just been assigned (meaning, more than anything, it was yet another course in metaphor). Not counting my recollection of the professor's ridiculously scraggly beard, only two things have stayed with me: being spellbound by George R.R. Martin's excellent novella <i>Sandkings</i>, and, in a rare moment when the Golden Age peeked into the windows of our classroom, listening to a scratchy LP audio interview with Isaac Asimov wherein he brought up John Campbell's notion that sci-fi isn't an isolated genre, but rather the exact opposite: <i>every genre</i> is actually a subset of science fiction, covering as it does all of time and space and possibility.
I've been known to drag that posit out when in the presence of someone staunchly claiming to hate science fiction on principle, usually just to make them hush for a minute.<br />
<br />
This morning, plotting my summer vacation reading, <i>Mason & Dixon</i>, which ranks among my favorite novels, came to mind. If any one book could serve as exemplar for Campbell's definition, it could well be this one: a historical romance employing modern meta-storytelling techniques to re-imagine a young America, the virgin landscape divided by a couple of star-crossed, star-gazing, unassuming surveyors onto whose humble names crashed a terrifying amount of significant history. Pynchon lays out his agenda on page 349, declaring that history's <i>Practitioners, to survive, must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc, spy, and Taproom Wit</i>, a jack-of-all-trades job description sounding suspiciously like Novelist. Here is the Past given focus through modern lenses, retrofitted for <i>Star Trek</i> references, seeded with psychic talking dogs, a watch powered by perpetual-motion, sentient bread dough, and a robot duck. Maybe I was never taught any better, but if this historical Frankenstein's monster isn't science fiction, I don't know what is.<br />
<br />
This is an advance reader's copy, an artifact from my bookseller days courtesy of a generous sales rep, one of 500 with promotional information on the back (another 500 were in generic wraps). I'd only made it through the Transit of Venus section when the first hardback editions came in, so this one is essentially unread, a treasure. For a long time, I had one of the specially-printed cardboard crates Henry Holt shipped the early printings in (like many things, it didn't survive my time in Montgomery), but I do still have some ridiculous promo cards, suitable for framing, advertising the cinderblock-sized tome as a breezy beach read, canvas lounge chairs parked beneath particolored umbrellas and all. Because, why not. It's only science fiction, after all.
Gilbert Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13289543375872961678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5080534819403935272.post-55003776896958933112014-06-29T18:32:00.000-05:002019-06-09T13:35:19.625-05:00Some Assembly Required<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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This is a 1932 Chrysler Roadster. Or rather, a model of one.<br />
<br />
The kit was purchased by my father some time in 1997, just before his long illness entered its home stretch. He picked up this one and one other, a 1964 1/2 Mustang, at the second-hand shop where my mother volunteered a couple days a week.<br />
<br />
I'd never seen my father build a model. It had been a passionate hobby during his younger years, but by the time I came around he was chiefly preoccupied with programming computer systems for International Paper Company -- intricate detailing of a more intense nature, undoubtedly leaving him little headspace for hobbies. He'd put just one final kit together, right before or around the time I was born: an aircraft carrier. I recall it perched on a shelf near the kitchen and to me, at that age, it seemed credible the long plastic hull might be only slightly smaller than actual size. I used to poke the tiny planes, all glued down in a perfect line along the forward deck, to see if I could make them wobble. I never could.<br />
<br />
Growing up in sun-bleached 1970s suburbia, I assembled my fair share of glow-in-the-dark monsters, giant insects, dinosaurs, superheroes, and space ships -- though never with much finesse. Of course I was just a kid, more interested in playing with the finished models than in building them. The build was a hurdle to be cleared before the real fun could begin. Which meant a cursing of sloppy paint jobs, clumsily fused joints, misaligned seams. Nothing like the precision decal work on the biplanes and X-Wing fighters hanging in suspended battle from the ceilings of my friends. And certainly nothing like Daddy's aircraft carrier, by then long disappeared in the shuffle of our semi-regular company-mandated moves across the Southeast.<br />
<br />
By contrast, from 1998 onward the Roadster and Mustang model kits moved with me as though duty-bound, apartment to apartment, city to city, for fifteen years. I was waiting for, I don't know, the day I'd wake up with Master Model Builder Skills, by way of osmosis or alien intervention, whichever. To honor Daddy, I would do the job right: the contents of those boxes would suffer no wonky wheels, no thumbprints in the paint. None of the planes would wobble. So they waited in storage closets or on high shelves, blending into the shadows, seen often but noticed rarely, like most good intentions ultimately nothing more than the space they took up. Then one day last summer following the kind of run-of-the-mill health scare that comes as no exceptional surprise after a certain number of decades yet still inspires no quantum amount of mortal contemplation, I was puttering in the office -- shredding old bills, rearranging books, talking nonsense to myself, the usual -- when a shaft of magic afternoon sunlight struck those faded boxes out of their shadows, lifted the dust right off them.<br />
<br />
My relationship with Daddy was something of a 50/50 split. As a child, I was too intimidated by the man to know how to love him: he seemed too distant, too stern, too heavily possessed of a clenched brow after a day's work at his keypunch machines. My inabilities at higher math seemed to greatly disappoint him, as did (so I supposed) my tendencies towards books and television rather than the woods and sports (passions of my older brother, as if he and I were expected be the same child). Eventually I assumed an unspoken truce had developed between us -- he would abide my whimsies so long as I stayed out of his way, so I did.<br />
<br />
I was, as it turned out, wrong about all this, but remained clueless until my my teen years, a Saturday afternoon that found us staring together at a college basketball game, a moment he chose to tell me how much he had loved watching Pistol Pete play ball at LSU. Lo and behold, I learned my father was a connoisseur of the game, partook of his office bracket pool every spring when the tournament rolled around, had even played in high school. It was as simple as having a few conversations, next thing I knew, we were buddies. Had more in common than I had ever guessed. Stayed that way, until the end. (And damn if we never did discuss model building....)<br />
<br />
Putting that Roadster together, so many years later, I found an obvious ghost at my shoulder. Wasn't he just out of sight, judging my work, giving me that cryptic line about how there are many ways to get a job done ... but only one <i>right</i> way? And then chuckling, like some wicked Zen master. And from there, of course, less superficial judging, because a child never runs out of questions for a departed parent. The last time Daddy saw me, I was a back-room bookstore clerk. How would he view my subsequent adventures, my trophies, my wrong turns, my happy landings?<br />
<br />
My mother tells me Daddy bought these models for the same reason Mallory gave about climbing Everest. Makes sense; he never seemed particularly enamored of cars, looking mostly for value, not badassery, whenever the family needed a new sedan. (Excepting his mid-life crisis car, a Ford Maverick Grabber, which despite the orange color turned out to be a special kind of lemon.) What the model kits would add up to, whether a Roadster or a Mustang, didn't matter to him: he was interested in the process, in the doing. He just never got the time.<br />
<br />
So, on his behalf, I took my time. And in so doing, in the meditative joy of whittling away imperfections in the plastic molding, of filling in cracks between pieces, of meticulously layering paint to various textures, I believe I glimpsed some reflection of a private joy my father might have taken in his work, programming computers in a time when information was shuffled among punched index cards. Patience. Attention to detail. More patience. Checking your work. And only then the satisfaction of watching a long string of processes come to a result, whether executed or printed out. Really, it's just a guess -- I was too inexperienced to have ever formulated any meaningful questions about work and what it can, should, and shouldn't mean to us, what it might have meant at least to Daddy -- but I knew him pretty well, and I can recall what sort of puzzles and challenges he liked to solve and how. This model building thing, this makes a certain sense.<br />
<br />
Maybe the Roadster could have turned out better ... but for a second-hand kit -- missing parts, pieces warped, looked like some kid incorrectly fused some of the wheel parts and then gave up, same as I'd have done, maybe -- it turned out pretty well. I was too timid about my hand painting abilities, so other than tiny details everything is spray painted. But in the year since, I've completed several other kits (including a reissued creature-feature tableau I screwed up royally, back in the summer of '76), each time to no surprise growing a bit more fleet with the brush, more accurate with the glue, more tolerant of tacky paint (because model building is one part <i>model building</i>, eight parts <i>watching paint dry</i>). A lesson passed down, dusty boxes be damned: Turns out all you need to dissolve botched paint jobs and crooked joints and wonky wheels is just a little bit of ordinary time.<br />
<br />
Aside from that poor old Forgotten Prisoner, I've built only cars. Maybe when I'm finished with that Mustang, I'll build an aircraft carrier. Or rather, a model of one.<br />
<br />
<i>Postscript, August 8 2014</i>:<br />
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<br />Gilbert Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13289543375872961678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5080534819403935272.post-39586111268631629192014-06-19T10:49:00.001-05:002020-06-27T16:57:09.357-05:00Famous Science Fiction Stories: Adventures in Time & Space (1946)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I wandered into my college career with a rough draft of a novel already under my belt: <i>The Stonehenge Connection</i>, a space opera in five "acts," scrawled in cheap black ink across 368 college-ruled pages when I should have been listening in high school Geometry class so that I'd now know how to hypotenuse a triangle, or whatever. The story of an Earthling recruited by a rebellious alien to save his own planet, it was absolutely nothing but a loose bag of cheaply imitated influences -- <i>The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</i>, <i>Blade Runner</i>, <i>Doctor Who</i>, <i>Time Bandits</i> -- dropped into a plot worthy of Ed Wood. Then again, I enrolled in Creative Writing with the mere aim of learning how to write better sci-fi and horror potboilers. And I had some hope, early on -- the room where the classes met was nicknamed the "Star Trek Room" due to its being dominated by a gigantic oval conference table. But I don't recall <i>Star Trek</i> ever being discussed, not in a way I found <i>interesting</i>, anyway.<br />
<br />
Time travel is a seductive folly partly because we like to imagine there are moments in our lives where, if we could return and intervene, whisper wisdom into the ears of our younger selves, we could avoid losing years to an unnecessary struggle down some errant path. (Also because if you could time travel, you could saddle up a T-Rex, but I digress.) Truth is, I don't recall a singularity wherein my low-key aspirations of being a SF author with a meager cult following imploded. Maybe during a conversation with my instructor, being told I'd rather have the respect of my "peers" and publish in the <i>Paris Review</i> than peddle in Ye Olde Sewer of Genre. Maybe when I switched my major to Philosophy instead, because dabbling in Metaphysics seemed like it might bring me closer to understanding Tom Stoppard's brand of Existentialism. Or when I further shifted to Psychology, finally seeking some hard science about the mysteries of human wetware. Looking back, I think what I mostly did was manifest that old Steve Martin zinger about learning just enough to screw you up for the rest of your life. (I did always think that was a pretty funny joke, after all.)<br />
<i><br /></i>
When I more-or-less randomly grabbed this book for the purposes of mindlessly entertaining myself during a recent holiday car trip, I didn't expect to be derailed before reaching the first tale. The introduction is an ode to the editorial work of John W. Campbell, as many of the stories contained herein have his stamp of approval. As the editor of <i>Astounding</i>, he forged the "Golden Age" of science fiction, debuting authors now seen as primary pillars of the genre: Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Lester Del Rey, Alfred Bester, A.E. van Vogt, Fredric Brown. Trends have come and gone, minor names have exited the mainstream the way they always do, but all these fellows are still in print and Campbell's most famous short story has to date been been filmed thrice. Not bad for sewer-dwellers, as critics of their generation (and at least one more following) tried to paint it.<br />
<br />
Emerson spoke of his Giant following him around -- a highbrow version of <i>Wherever you go, there you are</i>. It's not displayed anywhere, but I still have <i>The Stonehenge Connection</i>. And from time to time, I will take a moment to wonder why. The ugly plotting, the plagiarized characters, the cartoon dialogue, the misadventures in narrative only a naive and heavily pimpled teenage could love ... should anyone ever find it, my death certificate will read: s<i>pontaneous combustion brought on by acute embarrassment</i>. But Campbell would be the first to tell me: There's no rough draft that can't be improved by hard work. Bet on ending somewhere very different than where you started, but hard work will lead to improvement every time. It's a form of simple math. I'm not looking to saddle up any dinosaurs; I know all too well that directionless travel -- whether through time, space, or both -- can be treacherous folly. But then again, sometimes an errant path will lead you to your Bliss.<br />
<br />
<i>History does not always repeat itself. Sometimes it just yells <b>Can't you remember anything I told you?</b> and lets fly with a club.</i><br />
-- John W. Campbell, Jr.<i> </i><br />
<br />
<i>On a Related Note</i>: <a href="http://www.sfwa.org/2014/12/guest-post-ive-made-every-mistake-author-can-make-writing-career/" target="_blank">Jason Sanford's Cosmic Mistakes</a><br />
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Gilbert Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13289543375872961678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5080534819403935272.post-79195752331563483682014-06-16T00:00:00.000-05:002019-07-21T19:11:42.232-05:00Rum Punch (1992)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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IFC recently spent a few weeks running <i>Jackie Brown</i> (1997) with the same frequency AMC airs <i>The Shawshank Redemption</i> (1994). Even so, I never managed to catch the thing from the beginning, and always ended up distracted from the ending. On the other hand, that copy of <i>Rum Punch</i> (1992) lurking on the shelf the past couple years was a lot easier to catch from the beginning.<br />
<br />
Stewardess Jackie Burke (Pam Grier, who for some reason Leonard keeps describing as a blonde) has been just down-on-her-luck enough to fall into the snares of gunrunner Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson), acting as mule for his illegal cash during Caribbean hops. Until, that is, she's made by a couple ATF operatives (Michaels Keaton and Bowen, respectively) looking to bust Ordell, and who complicate matters by finding cocaine tucked among the cash bundles in her flight bag. Robbie uses the services of bail bondsman Max Cherry (Robert Forster) to bail her out. By exactly the sort of coincidence that often happens in crime novels, Cherry happens to be the employer of another associate of Ordell, Louis Gara (Robert DeNiro). Forster bails Grier, only to experience sexual tension during the car ride to her apartment, and even more once within the apartment, where she puts some classic soul on the turntable, just so there's no confusion. Tarantino is uncharacteristically coy here, whereas Leonard has no trouble getting down to business, shattered liquor glasses and everything. Anyway, turns out Grier has an idea to double-cross Jackson, give him over to the feds, make away scott-free with the money. Forster isn't so sure, or at least scrunches his face in order to play it that way. DeNiro whiles away the hours with stoned surfer chick Melanie (Bridget Fonda), who has Ordell in her double-cross-hairs as well. It all comes down to a tense shell-game finale -- <i>who's got the money in which bag</i>? -- that allows Leonard to explore the darker edge of a simple modern-day motivation: <i>I'm getting long in the tooth, chances are slimming, how do I get what I really want in life</i>? The book also features a massacre at a compound belonging to a neo-Nazi gun nut that I can't believe Tarantino omitted; maybe he already had <i>Inglourious Basterds</i> (2009) in mind and didn't want the two films to cover the same ground, or something. On the other hand, it's like Leonard wrote his dialogue with Samuel L. Jackson in mind. And since there's another novel (<i>The Switch</i>, 1978) featuring the characters of Ordell Robbie and Louis Gara, I know this won't be my last go-round with ol' Elmore.<br />
<br />
But, figures: Since I finished this book, IFC hasn't shown <i>Jackie Brown</i> once.Gilbert Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13289543375872961678noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5080534819403935272.post-69934258486886911072014-05-24T10:26:00.004-05:002018-04-01T20:52:40.377-05:00Carrie (1974) / Joyland (2013)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I read <i>Carrie</i> during the return car trip from summer vacation last year. Or, I thought I did. Pretending to spring-clean, I was shelving stray books earlier this week and realized this one was still marked some ten, twelve pages from the actual end. The epilogue untouched.<br />
<br />
That same trip, I also took King's latest up to that moment, <i>Joyland</i>, figuring it would be interesting to see the contrast between the two. <i>Joyland</i>, an endearing coming-of-age story draped with a supernaturally-dusted mystery at a seasonal amusement park (seriously, just imagine Stephen King scripting a <i>Scooby-Doo</i> episode for adults, and you've got it), is one of his best novels -- understated but engrossing, emotionally charged, just a whiff of fantasy/horror to provide friction. Whatever faults a more serious reviewer might feel the need to dig for, I'll tell you that book was a perfect companion for those early morning hours before the Florida sun chased away the high mist and set the beach sand alight.<br />
<br />
I'd never read <i>Carrie</i>, never seen the Brian DePalma adaptation. But turning the pages, soaking up the easy pulp-noir tone King employed for that story, I realized aside from enjoying the way King unspooled the yarn, I wasn't processing anything new. I knew the story, inside and out, every beat of the plot, every turn, every character, from the opening tampon-throwing bedlam in the locker room to the climactic bucket o'blood at the prom. It was great fun, but if you're a fan of the horror genre, you're familiar with <i>Carrie,</i> enough said. Not hard to see why I put the book down without realizing I hadn't finished.<br />
<br />
True, I haven't seen DePalma's <i>Carrie</i> (1976) in full, but years ago I did catch the closing moments on an episode of <i>Monstervision</i>. So by standing interrupted this week in our sunlit parlor and reading the last ten pages while the cat circled my ankles, my one surprise came from learning that the book and the film employ slightly different endings. King's own is a riff on the typical <i>"The END ... or is it???"</i> sci-fi stinger; DePalma's capper is more along the lines of <i>"It was all a dream ... OR WAS IT???"</i> and effective enough to jolt audiences of the 1970s out of their seats and become legend in the bargain.<br />
<br />
What about audiences of 2013? Last year's remake seems to have fallen on a deaf culture, at first glance. More likely the attempt to deliver "a more faithful adaptation" of King's novel is to blame. One becomes unnerved by way of sudden and/or unfamiliar shock; familiarity and horror can't mix, so why? We live in a moment when parents can nearly set their watches to school shootings and roadside billboards alert us, with no-irony-intended bullet points, to <i>ACTIVE SHOOTER PROTOCOL</i>. Seriously? Skip the faith: a more <i>truthful</i> adaptation would have found the modern metaphor, mined all that anxiety, not buried it in a nostalgia exercise. Chalk it up to opportunity wasted, and we'll all hope for an edgy, pertinent reinvention of, say, <i>Psycho</i>... oh, right.<br />
<br />
Well, Carrie, I guess if nothing else, we'll always have Joyland... Gilbert Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13289543375872961678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5080534819403935272.post-60245451639739796452014-01-21T14:05:00.001-06:002020-02-16T09:50:10.176-06:00Who Goes There? (1938)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I'm not sure when or where I picked up this little gem -- maybe I stumbled over it at a random paperback swap-shop, lost somewhere back among the years; maybe it was the object of a targeted search on ABE.com, bought from some dealer located west of Timbuktu; maybe it was at the bottom of a box collected during one of our Over the Transom book hauls, and from there it jumped to my bookshelf. Who knows. But because I've had it in the neighborhood of forever, it's even possible I filched it from my old friend Justin's house.<br />
<br />
Campbell's titular story has been filmed three times to date, twice titled as <i>The Thing</i>. He was a writer and editor who, helming a magazine called <i>Astounding Science Fiction </i>(still publishing as <i>Analog Science Fiction and Fact</i>), near-single-handedly shaped the Golden Age of Science Fiction. He was also Justin's step-grandfather.<br />
<br />
Like many who grew up in the Church of the Latter Day Geeks, my sci-fi intake at that point chiefly consisted of <i>Star Wars</i>, reruns of <i>Star Trek</i> and <i>The Twilight Zone</i>, and whatever zany giant insects were stomping around during Mad Science Week on <i>Afternoon Thriller Theater</i>. So this was my first exposure to harder science fiction, emphasis on the scientific (not to mention social -- <i>Who Goes There?</i> is at heart a series of characters logically puzzling through a zero-sum game involving each other, a kind of locked-room whodunnit taking place prior to the murder) over the fantastic. Campbell was long gone by the time Justin and I met each other as seventh-grade classmates, but plenty of his books were still around -- or at least so many that I (allegedly) nabbed one for myself without anyone noticing (so far as I know).<br />
<br />
<i>That group of writings which is usually referred to as "mainstream
literature" is, actually, a special subgroup of the field of science
fiction -- for science fiction deals with all places in the Universe,
and all times in Eternity, so the literature of here-and-now is, truly, a
subset of science fiction.</i><br />
-- John W. Campbell, in the introduction to <i>Analog 1</i> (Doubleday, 1963)Gilbert Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13289543375872961678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5080534819403935272.post-91741620221898937612013-10-31T06:19:00.000-05:002019-12-29T07:44:28.218-06:00Commonplace Book: The Vortex Report<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Underneath the tinsel and fabric is real tinsel and fabric.<br />
-- Davy Jones<br />
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They were rolling in wealth, sir. You've no idea. None of us has any idea. For years they had preyed on the Saracens, had taken nobody knows what spoils of gems, precious metals, silks, ivories -- the cream of the cream of the East. That is history, sir. We all know that the Holy Wars to them, as to the Templars, were largely a matter of loot.<br />
-- Dashiell Hammett, <i>The Maltese Falcon</i><br />
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Chandler or Hammett or one of those guys said the point of a plot in a detective movie is to get your hero to the next girl to flirt with. When's the next girl or funny bit going to happen. <i>North by Northwest</i>? Tell me again how he gets to the middle of the field with a plane after him? I can't. How does he get to Mount Rushmore? I don't know, but it's great.<br />
-- <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/movies/paul-thomas-anderson-films-inherent-vice.html" target="_blank">Paul Thomas Anderson</a>, on adapting <i>Inherent Vice</i> for film<br />
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These urban myths can be attractors, they pick up little fragments of strangeness from everywhere, after a while nobody can look at the whole thing and believe it all, it's too unstructured. But somehow we'll still cherry-pick for the intriguing pieces, God forbid we should be taken in of course, we're too hip for that, and yet there's no final proof that some of it isn't true ...<br />
-- Thomas Pynchon, <i>Bleeding Edge</i><br />
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History becomes what never happened. People mess things up, forget and remember all the wrong things. What's left is fiction.<br />
-- Daniel Wallace, <i>Big Fish</i><br />
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It is a myth, not a mandate -- a fable, not a logic -- by which people are moved.<br />
-- Irwin Edman<br />
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The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie -- deliberate, contrived, dishonest -- but the myth -- persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.<br />
-- John F. Kennedy<br />
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There are two kinds of truth. There are real truths and there are made-up truths.<br />
-- Marion Barry<br />
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You don't tell us how to stage the news, and we don't tell you how to report it.<br />
-- Larry Speakes, Press Secretary for George Bush, 1982<br />
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If we maintain our faith in God, our love of freedom, and superior global air power, I think we can look to the future with confidence.<br />
-- General Curtis LeMay<br />
<br />
I keep thinking: now that every single human being on Earth has a camera phone, where are all those UFO pictures? Remember how you used to see those pictures? Some guy just happened to have a Polaroid when the UFOs appeared? Either it was all B.S., or my theory is that the Martians have decided, "Don't go down there, man. All those fuckers have cameras now."<br />
-- George Clooney<br />
<br />
From their earliest years, fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of children's everyday lives, and it is through fantasy that they achieve carthasis.<br />
-- Jonathan Cott, in a 1976 <i>Rolling Stone</i> profile of Maurice Sendak<br />
<br />
Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing that a tomato doesn't belong in a fruit salad.<br />
-- Miles Beresford KingtonGilbert Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13289543375872961678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5080534819403935272.post-65310571964316254372013-06-11T12:26:00.001-05:002019-06-09T13:54:42.561-05:00Ripping Yarns<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I used to tear books in half for a living. Managing inventory for an indie bookstore during the 1990s, one of my tasks was "stripping" the mass market paperbacks. This entails, for those not in the trade, ripping the front cover off to return to the publisher in exchange for credit, then tearing the book in half (or into thirds or quarters, depending on the thickness of the tome) and trashing/recycling the remaining paper. I was often asked, <i>Aren't you disturbed on some level, destroying all those books</i>? Answer: Yes, I am disturbed on some level, but it's not from destroying all those books. <br />
<br />
You might try and excuse this blasphemy by saying, well, they weren't sacred texts. It was a lot of unsold Danielle Steele and Zane Grey and Margaret Truman and Allan Folsom and Robert James Waller. But I'd rip up classics as well as over-ordered bestsellers -- not all those high school kids pick up what they need for Required Reading, after all, and there was no reason to keep stock of an extra 200 copies of <i>The Awakening</i> until the next fall, not when we needed credit for twelve cases of the new John Grisham novel, due to land come springtime.<br />
<br />
That's how the book business works: We got only so much room for only so many books.<br />
<br />
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As of this writing, my library is comprised of just over 500 titles. (I know that number because, being disturbed on some level, I grabbed a cup of coffee and spent a couple-three minutes doing an inventory count, just like in the old days.) This is as small as my collection has been in many years. I reduced it significantly prior to our move to Birmingham, by somewhere in the neighborhood of forty percent, weeding out books I'd read decades prior, or might not read until decades hence, or might not read ever. It wasn't an entirely painless process, I will admit. Then again, neither was moving. We're talking four flights of stairs, here. Halfway through the day, I found myself wishing: <i>If I knew which boxes my Really Treasured Books were in, I'd set the rest on fire, right down there in the street in full view of God and everybody, and only call the firemen to hose the ashes into the sewer</i>.<br />
<br />
My library has routinely expanded and contracted by way of constant acquisitions and occasional purges. I've tried to keep my collection bound by available shelf space, but this hasn't always worked; books tend to end up here and there, in decorative piles. But the purges accomplish more than clearing floor-space: as a dedicated apartment dweller, I never assumed permanence. Meaning, at some point, all that stuff has to be picked up and moved again, so why have more than I'm willing to carry? It's not so much about shelf space as it is about life space.<br />
<br />
My sister Dena taught me to read when I was four, using <i>Heckle & Jeckle</i> comic books. (I disliked being read to, wanting instead to read for myself -- a characteristic I still have, pretty funny from a guy who came up with <a href="http://blog.gilbertjim.com/2014/10/stories-from-blue-moon-cafe-2002.html" target="_blank"><i>Southern Writers Reading</i></a> as the eponymous title for an onstage literary event.) I was the unofficial class librarian throughout fourth grade, each week quickly raising my hand to volunteer for the task of dusting and tidying the industrial metal bookshelves that lined one wall of our classroom. I majored in English for five years, then found work in bookstores for the next thirteen -- and frankly got a much better education, taking home books about social and scientific theories, religion, histories, biographies, even a bit of literature now and then. I am, in short, no stranger to the joys that books provide.<br />
<br />
I used to assume that a healthy personal library had to be a steadily growing thing -- it was a physical manifestation of the owner's mind, or at least a window into it. Books in that sense were trophies of achievement, each shelf the equivalent of a sheepskin certificate, even if it was only from the School of Nurse Romances. A library was evidence of the worthwhile shape of your life, and the more you had, the better, the faster, the smarter. But as somebody who hasn't lived in one particular place for more than a handful of years, my practical need to purge physical objects outweighs any urge to showcase what I've read in the past in order to perhaps prove to visitors that I can carry on an interesting conversation (because I often can't, anyway).<br />
<br />
Buddhist monks spend hours, days, weeks creating those intricate mandalas out of colored sand, only to brush them away (ceremoniously, but still) after they finish. So, I wonder: What is this library but a multicolored mandala, a dreamcatcher, a skein of flexible ideas grouped here only temporarily, in this form, before again taking to the wind? Why hang onto books? Why even try? When Sonny Brewer and I were chasing dollars with used and rare tomes at Over the Transom, we'd occasionally receive a beloved copy of something, like that first state edition of <i>To Kill a Mockingbird</i>, or that full collection of Lafcadio Hearn's Japanese ghost stories -- and as tempting as it was to keep such things for ourselves, we had a great notion: we were only a temporary transit lounge. We were just keeping those books until their rightful owners came to collect them. We loved them, but we also loved seeing them go. (That is, after all, another way in which the book business works.)<br />
<br />
At the end of <i>Fahrenheit 451</i>, there are almost no books left in the world, only people who remember those books. But it is more than memory, it is life itself. I am Plato's <i>Republic</i>, says one character, introducing others: <i>I want you to meet Jonathan Swift</i> [...] <i>and this other fellow is Charles Darwin, and this one is Schopenhauer, and this one is Einstein, and this one here at my elbow is Mr Albert Schweitzer</i>. And so do we all become Spartacus, one book at a time.<br />
<br />
I suppose it all boils down to a rephrasing of an old cliche: When I croak, I won't take any of these books with me. I'll only take what I've read. And what a gift that will be.<br />
<br />
<i>[This was a response to <a href="http://blog.kristalsheets.com/2013/06/the-great-book-purge-yes-people-can.html" target="_blank">The Wily Blogger</a> who will, I hope, one day reinstate her wily blogging.]</i>Gilbert Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13289543375872961678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5080534819403935272.post-65815836301632019612013-06-03T20:25:00.000-05:002019-06-12T15:02:44.831-05:00V. (1963)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Now and then, it takes a few honest tries before I can get certain books to fit inside my skull. Square pegs, round holes, we will sell no wine before its time, all that. It took several attempts over a handful of years before <i>Blood Meridian</i> screwed down in there, for example. Same with <i>Moby Dick</i>, <i>The Scarlet Letter</i>, and, for reasons I am unwilling to discuss, <i>World War Z</i>.<br />
<br />
Thomas Pynchon's debut novel <i>V.</i> was no different, first time I picked it up in 1990, shortly after finishing <i>Vineland</i>. Reading it now for the 6th or 7th time (though it's my first go-round in over a decade), it's somewhat easy to forget why -- I'm now well-acquainted with the basic structure, and am no longer fooled when Pynchon goes off on some labyrinthine philosophical/scientific/pseudo-historical tangent, or introduces, often with fanfare or at least an elaborate pun, some new character who then all but disappears for the rest of the novel. Like many first-time readers, I found myself unduly vexed by these basic Pynchonian stylistic nuances and peccadilloes, which are present in even his most streamlined narratives. It's a little like being a novice sailor or kook surfer -- first, frustrating impression will be that a body may move in only one direction: the way of the wind or the wave. But an old salt knows energy moves in multiple directions; you take your pick and plot your course. The wind, the waves, those are just symptoms of a power ready to be harnessed.<br />
<br />
So Profane's aimless drift and Stencil's misdirected quest are now Beaten Paths; instead of worrying over the map, I can just enjoy the scenery: those smaller details that spread out from all angles, often telegraphing ideas that will be expanded upon, or at least queerly mirrored, in novels to come. At the forefront is Pynchon's morbid fascination with self-dehumanization, which is far more creepy than the aspect of being dehumanized by a collective, whether bureaucratic or conspiratorial, under the aims of social control. In <i>V.</i>, the characters are ready to take matters into their own hands: No one wants to be who they are, and are haunted by ideas of unrealistic, unholy perfection. There are no attempts at self-discovery or even improvement beyond the shallow, the physical -- only yearnings for others, unattainable Others.<br />
<br />
And forget the Machine Age, these characters are entering a Machine Consciousness. Pulses and hearts tick like frantic clockwork. Spongy brains whir. Women seduce automobiles. Eyeballs contain secret sprockets and gears. (Pynchon didn't start dabbling with steampunk in <i>Against the Day</i>, he started it here, before the practice even had a genre title.) But we are not machines, with parts that can be swapped out when they fail; we are humans, and there's only so much improving we can do before time moves us off the playing field. Herbert Stencil, searching for a wispy historical phantom known only by the titular initial, has at best a vague grasp of this essential concept. But only because he is obsessed with history, and possessed of a knack to always begin his investigations just as the principles from whom he most needs answers all disappear behind the layered veils of passing time.<br />
<br />
But I, like the novel itself, digress ...<br />
<br />
I used to pick up every book with the fevered intention to finish, like it was some kind of assignment, a grade I'd get in Heaven. No more of that crap, here in my old-ish age. I'm not shy about putting a book down, for good -- or even reaching for the trash can, if necessary. Novels better not get bogged down in rambling detail, or neglect atmosphere at the risk of moving too quickly, or be too clever, or have stupid dialogue, or obvious or strained humor, or be written by a clod who uses exclamation points, or ever, ever feel the need to mention a character's <i>last experience in noninvasive lighting</i>.<br />
<br />
But every now and then, I put a book down not for any aesthetic such reasons, however petty, but because I know I'm not ready for it. <i>It's not you</i>, I tell the book, <i>it's me</i>. Still, I often wonder about my fascination with the prose of Thomas Pynchon, why I always stick with it when I really prefer pulp-era science fiction or crime or weird horror, no apologies. Let's face it, I ought not like it. I don't like Tom Robbins or David Foster Wallace or most of what gets labeled as "post-modern literature." I've put down a lot of those books; their challenges and rewards aren't for me. But I found a kindred spirit in Pynchon for some reason, despite the stupid names he bestows upon his characters. And I keep coming back to these novels, time and again, which is unusual for me (short stories by Bradbury and Lovecraft are one thing, but I plow through a novel once, I'm typically finished. Friends who are driven to re-read Austin and Fitzgerald and Twain on a cyclical schedule are gifted with an impulse I lack). There's an scene in <i>V.</i> where a painter struggles with a painting because the light keeps shifting in the room, but Pynchon uses that to illustrate how our perception of art (among other things) changes over time, and we should use that to examine ourselves. He's got something there.<br />
<br />
Then again, maybe it's as simple as a pattern set early in my reading life by <i>The Hobbit</i> and its obscure, out-of-print sequel, <i>The Lord of the Rings</i>. Those books involve long, intertwining plot lines, not to mention a ComicCon's-worth of weirdly named characters. (Against the nomenclature of what seems like nineteen-thousand generations of kings-in-exile, Russian novels are cakewalks.) But I loved them, I loved them from the first pages, and when I was about halfway through <i>The Fellowship of the Ring</i>, I tried to talk my sister into reading them too. But, nah, she'd already tried, and gave up just a few chapters into <i>The Hobbit</i>. Too many dwarves, too many weird names. This really disappointed me, that part of every reader that wants to share the experience of a deeply-loved book. And I suppose I vowed then that I would never let anything so trifling as a menagerie of characters, however all bizarrely named, get in the way of a great reading experience. That's the only explanation I have for why I forgive Pynchon all these insanely stupid names. <i>Dewey Gland</i>, after all. Jeebus.<br />
<br />
<i>I was operating on the motto <b>Make It Literary</b>, a piece of bad advice I made up all by myself and then took.</i><br />
-- Thomas Pynchon, on the subject of his early writing, from the introduction to <i>Slow Learner</i>Gilbert Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13289543375872961678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5080534819403935272.post-81175482825722373412013-02-19T10:03:00.002-06:002019-06-09T14:09:43.065-05:00Gravity's Rainbow (1991 hardback edition)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Hardback editions, of any description, of Thomas Pynchon's first three novels are hard to come by. My slightly cocked 1966 Modern Library edition of <i>V.</i> is a trophy collected during my early days at Over the Transom, when rare book searches were our forte, before the existence of ABE and Bookfinder become common knowledge. (It both cracks me up and embarrasses me now that we charged a $15 "finder's fee" for tracking down out-of-print titles, a job that currently takes seconds using Google. Ah, the Salad Days of the Internet, when access to a search engine was a license to print money.) Anyway, circa 2000, most ML copies of <i>V.</i> were selling in the $75+ range. I found mine for under $30 from "a guy who apparently didn't know what he had" -- our phrase for someone anomalously listing an uncommon book for far less than the average going rate. My good luck.<br />
<br />
Eariler in the decade, while working at <a href="http://www.pageandpalette.com/" target="_blank">Page & Palette</a>, I picked up what is sometimes referred to as a "second printing" of <i>Gravity's Rainbow</i> in hardback. <i>Vineland</i> had just been released as a trade paperback and, for the first time since initial publication, <i>GR</i> was given a refreshed cover with matching typography<i></i>. Viking's decision to issue a few new hardbacks with updated jackets must have been off-the-cuff; they didn't bother to assign a new ISBN, standard practice with a reissue and/or new design elements -- hence the "second printing" confusion.<br />
<br />
I didn't need a hardback, already owning a paperback with the exact same cover. But I'm a sucker for new artwork, particularly when it offers improvements, and this struck me as both appealingly modern (the original early 1970s design was a sick orange color, to my eye uninspired and certainly stale by the early 1990s) and subtly appropriate: it's the initial bloom not of a sunrise or sunset but of a nuclear explosion, like the one suggested in the novel's closing moments ("I don't think that's a police siren..."). I probably also liked the idea of having a "permanent" copy for the bookshelf. Covers would, after all, come and go (and <i>GR</i> was indeed updated again only a handful of years later, for the Penguin Classics USA edition), but this was a damn keeper.<br />
<br />
My mind changed by 1999, however -- when I wanted tickets and travel money to see Roger Waters, then embarking on his first tour since 1987. Given that I'd probably always have quick access to some perfectly usable copy of <i>Gravity's Rainbow</i>, why did I need this hardback gathering dust? <i>To eBay with it!</i> ... I should have known something was up when my reserve of $30 was met within hours. I think I ended up selling that copy for somewhere upwards of $80. More than enough for my ticket, certainly -- and I hadn't even listed my college-era comic books yet. More good luck, or just dumb luck?<br />
<br />
I sold quite a lot of stuff on eBay that year -- to fund not only that particular road trip but also my life, in the short term -- but that copy of <i>Gravity's Rainbow</i> was the only thing with which I regretted parting. Particularly since the price it went for signaled to me that I'd unwittingly, stupidly released a treasure. I would periodically check the usual dark corners of the internet, with no luck: the only hardback copies of <i>GR</i> floating anywhere near my price range were ex-library copies, stamped and mauled and missing any jacket whatsoever.<br />
<br />
Finally, late in 2005, I tripped upon an ABE listing. Same book, same cover, forty-some-odd dollars, shipping included. Here was a guy who apparently didn't know what he had, same as me, six years earlier. [Perhaps <i>exactly</i> as I had been? ... This book has a front hinge that is cracking, despite an attempted, somewhat botched, repair at the front-end papers with binder's glue -- exactly the sort of repair I'd have attempted on just such a flaw, working late hours in the "engine room" at Over the Transom. And I could almost, almost swear that my given-away copy had just such a problem with the front hinge. Then again, maybe Viking printed cheap copies and they're all prone to that.]<br />
<br />
Now if only I could find one of those guys with a first edition copy of <i>The Crying of Lot 49</i>, I'd be all set.Gilbert Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13289543375872961678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5080534819403935272.post-54506129958192403572013-02-15T13:56:00.002-06:002019-06-09T16:21:31.036-05:00The Bear Bryant Funeral Train (2007)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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This is a book I edited. The first edition had been declared out-of-print due to a plagiarism controversy/literary misunderstanding, however you want to see it. What I saw was a good book that deserved a second chance at life.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jake_Adam_York">Jake Adam York</a> saw the same thing.<br />
<br />
Early on I had the idea to reassemble the collection using Brad's original graduate thesis as a manuscript, which would then be bolstered by an academic apparatus similar to that of a Norton Critical Edition. This remained just an idea, however, until I became aware of Jake's fierce defense of Brad's literary technique on the <i>storySouth</i> blog. Was he willing to redesign that elegant argument for print? He absolutely was. Before long I also had two other great writers on board, Michelle Richmond and John Dufresne, as well as Professor Emeritus of the University of Alabama, Don Noble. But it was Jake who set the table.<br />
<br />
On 15 December 2012, Jake suffered a fatal stroke, and left holes in the hearts of all who loved him, who worked alongside him, who learned from him, who read his work. He was merely forty years old: It's hard not to imagine how we've been robbed of decades of powerful, insightful poetry and impassioned prose -- quite possibly even of an eventual Poet Laureate. Upon hearing the news, I sought out his prose poem "Leaving Alabama" which, near the end, advises:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Drive one last time along the river, and don't think how the morning sun lights it till it looks like molten steel [...] Look straight ahead. Adjust the rearview mirror. Adjust the rearview mirror. Feel it warm beneath your hand, its box of river and sun and steel and shadow. Ignore your heart rising to your throat, this terrible relapse. Think of everything you hate. Everything. Then pull the mirror down.</i></blockquote>
Jake, I did not know you well enough. But I do know that when your mirror was pulled down, so unceremoniously and by a hand not your own, there was no hate anywhere in sight. You've taken too much love with you for that. We'll miss you, buddy. Say hello to Jeanne and Wayne and William for us in the meanwhile. Peace.Gilbert Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13289543375872961678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5080534819403935272.post-19050900502774089312013-01-11T23:27:00.000-06:002019-06-09T16:23:15.388-05:00Great Tales of Terror & the Supernatural (1994 edition)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I have crappy retention for short stories. Almost none. Assign me a short story, quiz me about it a year later, I'll flunk. Sometimes I can remember a critical detail (there's a terrible motorcycle accident in the middle; giant ants are on the rampage; yellow wallpaper is involved) but usually nothing specific about the plot. I will often remember if I enjoyed the story, and maybe some of the mood of it; other times even the titles will be totally unfamiliar. It's maddening in its own way.<br />
<br />
Then again, silver lining: This peculiar form of Literary Alzheimer's disease means my enjoyment doesn't necessarily decrease with repeat readings. Sure, I've read Edward Bulwer-Lytton's "The Haunted and the Haunters" enough times to have memorized every ridiculous trope, but it feels like a mint ride each time. I am afforded a pleasant, bookish kind of deja-vu. Events unfold off the page, but I don't remember them until after I've reread them -- like waking up from a dream you know you've had before. It's kind of nice. I get to experience something quasi-new while also satisfying the basic human desire for hearing a story retold over and again.<br />
<br />
<i>Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural</i> is a textbook of uneasy numina. Over fifty genre classics from the likes of Hawthorne, Lovecraft, Faulkner, Bierce, Wells, James (M.R., that is). Tiny print covers all 1000 pages. Given my apparent propensity of my brain to jettison short fiction, plus the time it usually takes me to traverse this book from cover to cover, I've joked that this volume would be the only one I'd need for that proverbial Desert Island to which one may only take a handful of favorite things: upon finishing, I could just flip back to the beginning, and start fresh... Gilbert Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13289543375872961678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5080534819403935272.post-20152270743468760582013-01-08T09:49:00.004-06:002019-06-09T16:24:24.557-05:00The Silmarillion (1977)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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This book is a cornerstone of my library. It's a first American printing, a gift from my brother-in-law Pete, what must have been Christmas 1978, based on the inscription. It looked in better shape as an original gift, but it's always been a treasure to me.<br />
<br />
I read both <i>The Hobbit</i> and <i>The Lord of the Rings</i> while in 6th grade, consuming them slowly over a period of nearly a year -- I lived inside each chapter for as long as I could, often reading them two or three times before finally moving forward in the story. While I always had a rich imagination, Tolkien's saga was a turning point for me in realizing that escapism for "grown folks" could be just as immersive and entertaining as the ghost stories and comic books consumed during my first decade or so on the planet. (I'd previously held a dim view of the Harold Robbins and James Michener slogs favored by my father; their titles and covers looked common and dull.)<br />
<br />
<i>The Silmarillion</i> was an equal turning point. As a 7th grader, I struggled with the cold, alien structure of this "Middle-earth bible," as well as with the linguistic, and of course mythological, aims of Professor Tolkien, all of which were over my head. I was plenty game, but might have understood more had I simply used the book to smash myself in the face a few times. Still, I finished. I couldn't have explained half of what I'd just read, but I finished all the same.<br />
<br />
I did realize two things, even then. First, that even the most fantastical genre tales can have roots in serious intention and theme -- and that is an awesome and wonderful thing. Second, that my duty as a reader isn't always to understand absolutely everything; it's to take away from difficult material what I am capable, at that moment in time, of taking away. Something will be learned, and no work, as Gurdjieff would say, will be wasted.
<br />
<br />
Thank you, Pete.<br />
<br />
<i>See Also:</i><br />
<a href="http://gilbertjim.blogspot.com/2004/03/the-problem-of-elves.html" target="_blank">The Lord of the Rings (1954)</a>Gilbert Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13289543375872961678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5080534819403935272.post-13830301957060586742012-09-17T12:00:00.000-05:002019-06-11T16:56:05.754-05:00Commonplace Book: purevineland<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.<br />
-- Alan Watts<br />
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The map is not the territory.<br />
-- Alfred Korzbyski<br />
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Eternity is not a length; it is a depth of time. We enter and meet there through the sacrament of love.<br />
-- Forrest Church <br />
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Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish fill the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.</div>
-- Henry David Thoreau<br />
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The purpose of the universe of the flowering of consciousness. <br />
-- Eckhart Tolle<br />
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You are an aperture through which the Universe is looking at and exploring itself.<br />
-- Alan Watts <br />
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Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be.<br />
-- Eckhart Tolle. <br />
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God chooses one man with a shout, another with a song, another with a whisper.<br />
-- Rabbi Nahman of Bratislava<br />
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To try to be better is to be better.<br />
-- Charlotte Cushman<br />
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Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear.<br />
--Thomas Jefferson<br />
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You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out God hates all the same people you do.<br />
-- Anne Lamott <br />
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Worry is a form of prayer for something you don't want.<br />
-- Bhagavan Das<br />
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There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.<br />
-- Carl Jung <br />
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People tend to become like that which they love, with its name written on their brows.<br />
-- Huston Smith<br />
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The Astrolabe of the Mysteries of God is Love.<br />
-- Rumi<br />
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God is being, awareness, and bliss. God lies on the further side of being as we understand it, not nothingness; beyond minds as we know them, not mindless clay; beyond ecstasy, not agony. Understand with Shankara that "the sun shines even without objects to shine upon."<br />
-- Huston Smith, The World's Religions<br />
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My doctrine is not a doctrine but just a vision. I have not given you any set rules, I have not given you a system.<br />
-- The Buddha <br />
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Ring the bells that still can ring</div>
Forget your perfect offering<br />
There is a crack in everything<br />
That's how the light gets in.<br />
-- Leonard CohenGilbert Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13289543375872961678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5080534819403935272.post-22267356860590297852012-08-05T10:00:00.000-05:002019-06-09T16:38:56.572-05:00Sing a Song of Bradbury<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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On the fifth of June, in this Our Year of Predicted Apocalypse 2012, the planet Venus -- guiding light of ancient mariners, namesake of love goddesses from all cultures, bright twinkle making her the celestial object most often mistaken for a UFO -- transformed into a pinhole shadow while traversing the surface of Sun. Under cover of this rare astronomical event, Ray Bradbury -- usually associated with the redder, colder, farther planet of Mars -- slipped forever from our own surly Earth.<br />
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Though he will likely always be shelved as such, Bradbury never much cared for being labeled a "science fiction author." This was a misnomer from the start, applied by Doubleday at the release of <i>The Martian Chronicles</i> in 1950. Fair enough for that book, but even by then Ray had moved from the genre-driven pulps to the "slicks," including a special Halloween edition of <i>Mademoiselle</i> built around his short story "Homecoming," not to mention four appearances in the <i>Best American Short Stories</i> anthology series (thrice with stories not of rocket ships but of racial strife). And as anyone who reads beyond the title knows, <i>Chronicles</i> isn't really about Mars: it's about exploration, ambition, the folly of human desire -- the burgeoning space-age was merely a handy metaphor. And Bradbury examined far more than Mars over the course of his 50-year career. No matter the locale -- romantic, foggy Ireland; quirky but bitterly divided Mexico; Civil War battlefields; China circa 400 AD; his own Rockwellian, fictional Green Town, Illinois -- he mostly charted another striated, romanticized crimson landscape: the Human Heart.<br />
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After receiving the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2000, Bradbury got busy refocusing the lens on his long career. As part of that process, Sam Weller's authorized 2005 biography, <i>The Bradbury Chronicles</i>, goes a long way, cataloging Ray's disparate achievements. His work appeared in decades of publications ranging from <i>Captain Future</i> and <i>Weird Tales</i> to <i>The Saturday Evening Post</i> and <i>Redbook</i>. Commissioned by John Huston to write the screenplay for <i>Moby-Dick</i>. Winner of the 1968 Aviation-Space Writers Robert Ball Memorial Award despite having never flown in a plane (though he eventually did fly after the age of 60, Bradbury steadfastly refused to learn to drive). Friendships with Alfred Hitchcock, Christopher Isherwood, Ray Harryhausen, Aldous Huxley, Forrest J. Ackerman, even Walt Disney (for whom he wrote the original voice-over narration for the Spaceship Earth ride in EPCOT). A fistful of Cable Ace Awards for the seven-year television run of <i>The Ray Bradbury Theater</i>, itself primed by years of work in radio and theater, including his own Pandemonium Theatre Company. Not bad for a wide-eyed kid who once stood on Hollywood sidewalks, hawking newspapers to movie stars.<br />
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Equally important to this legacy was the assemblage of <i>Bradbury Stories</i>, a companion for the older <i>The Stories of Ray Bradbury</i>. Over the course of his career, Bradbury published over 600 tales; these two volumes taken together showcase a third of that output, and are a perfect jumping-in point for someone just discovering his work. Even then, the new will seem warmly (if strangely) familiar: the pages bubble over with motifs and storylines that have been either formally adapted or outright stolen to fuel an untold number of films, television and radio shows, comic books (including many issues of <i>Tales from the Crypt</i> and episodes of <i>The Twilight Zone -- </i>to which he surprisingly contributed only one official script, being deeply dissatisfied with the resulting episode). Tellingly, <i>Bradbury Stories</i> reaches page 125 before yielding a bona-fide sci-fi story, and even then it's a chapter from <i>Martian Chronicles</i>.<br />
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Still, his most resonant and probably most widely read work is the one that looks most penetratingly into the future: <i>Fahrenheit 451</i>. Though he was essentially rejected by sci-fi's hardcore community for not engaging in harder science, few of its other citizens turned in work so socially prescient: the prevalence of advertising; the numbing escape of reality programming; the easy distractions of prescription drugs; false news as entertainment. It's easy find a censorship message, given the book-burning "fireman" career of the main character, Montag -- but as his boss, Chief Beatty, explains: <i>"Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then ... they'll be happy. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with."</i> Beatty isn't talking about an imaginary, totalitarian future, but about our Here And Now. <i>451</i> isn't about a society sadly, unjustly deprived of books. It's about a non-reading society that couldn't care much less about books or reading -- in any format.<br />
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As Weller has it, Bradbury used fiction to predict the past while staying nostalgic for the future -- a seeming impossibility that yet perfectly sums up the man's outlook. Indeed, to read Bradbury is like sitting on the porch of a twilit summer evening: soon the golden leaves will tumble like nature's confetti, but for now, move to stand barefoot on the new-mown grass, cool as a shadowy woodland stream. Listen to the metallic wail of cicadas in the fading cotton-candy light. Watch your shadow dissolve behind you and know that if you keep enough love in your heart, you will Live Forever.<br />
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Thank you, Mr. Bradbury. Thank you. Godspeed.<br />
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<i>Originally published in the <a href="http://www.al.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2012/08/ray_bradburys_gifts_and_his_in.html">Mobile Register, August 05 2012</a></i> <br />
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<i>Does the blood move in your hand, does that hand move to touch metal, does that metal move to touch Space? Do wild thoughts of travel and migration stir your soul? They do. Thus you live. Therefore God lives. You are the thin skin of life upon an unsensing Earth, you are that growing edge of God which manifest itself in hunger for Space. So much of God lies vibrantly asleep. The very stuffs of worlds and galaxies, they know not themselves. But here, God stirs in his sleep. You are the stirring. He wakes, you are that wakening. God reaches for the stars. You are His hand. Creation manifest, you go in search. He goes to find, you go to find. Everything you touch along the way, therefore, will be holy. On far worlds you will meet your own flesh, terrifying and strange, but still your own. Treat it well. Beneath that shape, you share the Godhead.</i><br />
<i> -- Ray Bradbury, from </i>Leviathan '99Gilbert Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13289543375872961678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5080534819403935272.post-44400864749769452602012-03-06T22:32:00.000-06:002019-06-09T16:59:11.253-05:00William Gay: Literary Legacy Will Have Lasting Resonance<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Remembering that night, November 2001, Southern Writers Reading. Interrupting the Alumni Grille portion of the evening to announce to the gathered souls in Theatre 98, who then erupted in cheers, that, just in from Hohenwald, William Gay had entered the building. Rest in peace.</i><br />
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William Gay -- a drywall hanger, house painter, and ginseng root gatherer from tiny Hohenwald, Tennessee -- kept a dark, dark secret for more than five decades of his life: He was one of the most brilliant literary minds of his generation.<br />
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Even to those who knew him well, this was apparently a facet of his life unrevealed during the years he spent doing practical labor to feed his family: "In a lot of ways it was like being in a closet. You really didn't go out on Monday morning and talk about the sonnet you wrote over the weekend." But Gay never thought of himself as anything other than a writer, "the highest thing," he believed, "that you could aspire to do."</div>
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To the literary world, it was a spring-loaded surprise, tripped with the 1999 publication of his first novel, <i>The Long Home</i>. That James A. Michener Memorial Prize-winning book was quickly followed by a second novel, <i>Provinces of Night</i>, and <i>I Hate to See that Evening Sun Go Down</i>, a collection of stories previously published in magazines such as <i>GQ</i>, <i>Harper's</i>, the <i>Oxford American</i>, and the <i>Atlantic Monthly</i>. Stephen King declared Gay's third novel <i>Twilight</i> (which features an immoral undertaker far more wicked and dreadful than any sparkling vampire or werewolf) to be the best book of 2007.</div>
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The 55-year gap between Gay's birth and the beginning of his publishing career is often mentioned as though it was time (and therefore art) criminally lost, though Gay himself apparently did not see it that way. He spoke in near-Buddhist terms of his journeyman process, of being at first more purely interested in the beauty of language over the movement of story, which earned him no publication credits. Having spent zero time in creative writing workshops or even speaking much with other writers (excepting a somehow unsurprising correspondence with Cormac McCarthy, in the time before McCarthy became a household name), Gay knew no mentor or peers to help direct his powerful natural talent. He was, however, a voracious reader -- it was nearly impossible to name a classic novel or a comic book with which he was unfamiliar -- and found lessons enough in studying Thomas Wolfe and Flannery O'Connor. And while drawing pay as a carpenter, he made more serious work of studying the people around him, their motivations, their flaws, their humor, their loves. Eventually, his narrative strategy took an organic shift toward more concrete storytelling, and editors and agents began taking notice -- but all that early concentration on crafting language would pay off: it is now difficult to uncover an article or criticism about Gay where he isn't compared, favorably, to William Faulkner.</div>
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Equally like Faulkner, Gay wrote of salt-of-the-earth Southern-born characters: bootleggers and juke-joint owners, young lovers trapped by the ghostly wrongs of their accidental lineages, carpenters and blues musicians, angels and devils incarnate. In short, ordinary people who find themselves walking the razor divide between Good and Evil, often then forced toward the hard choice that cuts down the middle. They swerve and collide upon harsh, illuminated landscapes: achingly described versions of the rural Tennessee that Gay observed and loved firsthand -- a knowledge that provides anchorage and manifest for his grander gestures and symbols.</div>
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While his themes are not exactly the stuff of musical comedies, his prose is not without levity, often downright hilarity: At the 2001 session of Fairhope's literary <i>Southern Writers Reading</i> series, Gay brought down the house reading a scene from <i>Provinces of Night</i> about two men using bricks to secure a blow-up doll beside a rural mailbox. (And for those fortunate enough to have heard Gay read his work aloud, it is impossible to view his words upon a page -- whether it is crafted prose or an off-the-cuff answer to a question in an interview -- without hearing his distinct voice: a Tennessee drawl more personal than merely Southern, so rich as to have often seemed like a language unto itself.) He was a master at what Bram Stoker referred to in <i>Dracula</i> as the King Laugh -- things are never so terrible that human beings will cease to find humor. Not, at least, without ceasing to be human.</div>
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Though lauded by the writing and reading community, Gay himself was uneasy with success and the cultish attention that sometimes came with it. Same as Ken Kesey in the wake of his Merry Pranksters celebrity, he viewed it as a distraction and hindrance to creativity. Thanks to an utter lack of pretension, it was no artistic affectation that he would rather work than answer the phone or the door. Even so, visitors were regarded with compassion and generosity, no matter the hour of the interruption. And after dispatching callers with whatever answers or advice he felt was best given, Gay would be inevitably drawn back to his writing table and the plain drugstore-bought tablets and notebooks into which he preferred to draft his stories -- perhaps inspired by the interlude. No work, no experience would be wasted. </div>
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Surprised by his seemingly blunt arrival and shocked by his sudden death, the literary world will never be without William Gay. There is still a novel, <i>The Lost Country</i>, somewhere out there in the aether, and a plethora of nonfiction writing -- much of it about music, his love of which was barely eclipsed by his love of literature -- waiting to be collected. For years to come, the rich ferocity of his already available works will enthrall, electrify, magnetize, and inspire -- paraphrasing from <i>The Long Home</i>, these are the things time will not take away from us.<br />
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<i>Originally published in the <a href="http://www.al.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2012/03/william_gays_literary_legacy_w.html">Mobile Register, March 04 2012</a></i></div>
Gilbert Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13289543375872961678noreply@blogger.com0