False Face, False Life

Observations:

1) For all of my life, I've been considered "not quite like anyone else," and this might be caused by my refusal (or perhaps inability) to put on a happy face when I feel grief.

2) Yet here on the margins of Canada, we have many people, like me, who never seem able to wear that mask. Perhaps our visibility is part of a traditional Canadian sadness that has not yet been corporatized and marketized out of sight. After all, we spend half the year in a deep freeze, with short days and long nights, in a country that hides any number of seasonal stings behind a calm white wall. We have social space, then, to frown when life creeps up on us.

Jason E. Rolfe: Life is a play, but everything is improvised

THE PUPPET-PLAY OF DOCTOR GALL.
From the original 1832 manuscript of Sebastian Haarpuder.
Translated faithfully from the original German of Doctor Gall
by Jason E. Rolfe.

"I believe the world is a stage. I believe we are mere players. I do not, however, believe in playwrights. I do not believe in scripts and rehearsals. The world is a stage, my dear readers. Life is a play, but everything is improvised."

It can be hard to specify the appeal of certain writers; we like their stories because we like their stories. Jason E. Rolfe provides an exception. I can point to the clarity of his prose, the playfulness of his wit, the endlessly-quotable sentences, but I can pin down three more qualities that make his work stand out for me.

"Ernst took himself far too seriously. He was, if I am being honest, a bit player on life’s stage. His lines were those he gave himself, and while he played his role admirably it was invariably uncredited."

Jason E. Rolfe never thinks in the ways that I do, yet no matter which pathways he follows into strange meta-textual mazes, he leaves behind footprints easy to recognize and to follow.

He works within a heritage of Absurdist fiction that rarely communicates to me, perhaps because I remain unsteeped in its history and its methods, yet he compels me to turn pages and to laugh at his puns, his jokes, his wordplay. His writing never fails to keep me reading with a smile:

"He is dressed in a fine suit. Not, I can assure you, a fine suit by my estimable, if not flamboyant standards, but fine to those of the clerical persuasion. I refer, of course, to dismally formal daywear -- a tailcoat with the front cut straight across his waist while its tails hang down in the back. It is black because he is dreadfully unimaginative. His trousers are beige because he is monotonously boring. Waistcoats, of which there are two, shirt and cravat are white because white requires no thought whatsoever, and our Stranger is unwaveringly thoughtless."

And finally, he experiments with fiction in ways that I never do; he bends time, causes personalities and identities to shift and spread, plays games with settings and voices, and all because he can. That seems to be the sole reason for his methods, and I am happy to see where the test results might lead.

"There is no singular organ, no faculty of the mind that explains the perception or the creation of beauty."

True? False? No idea. I only know that Jason E. Rolfe has written something new, that I have read it twice, that I have grinned and laughed all the way through it.

Losing

At the end of a long and complex dream last night, a stranger told me that I must confront the problems of creativity as if I were a lawyer pleading cases.

"And if you need to know where to plead the hardest, then just think of a case you're losing."

Hateful In My Silence

"Never do to others that which is hateful to you."

Yet so much is hateful to me that I often fall into silence and isolation as an alternative to hatred. I like people -- sometimes, within limits, and mainly women -- but holding myself back to spare others the worst of myself denies me the chance to be myself, in all of my hateful splendour.

A puzzle!

Lost in the Baxian Bog

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No matter how often I try, I cannot hear Bax. Not even a great conductor with a great orchestra, beautifully recorded on a great label, can make this music work for me.

And yet, I love the uncharacteristically firm Symphony no. 1, which is unlike anything else he wrote, and which comes to life under any baton. Bryden Thomson with Chandos, David Lloyd-Jones with Naxos, Myer Fredman with Lyrita: all of these recordings bring out the power and structure of no. 1, qualities I have never found elsewhere in Bax, not in the other symphonies, not in the tone poems.

I would never deny the sudden sparks that flicker up in "Tintagel" or in "November Woods," until the music sinks back into a glutinous Celtic bog. People love these tone poems; I want to love them, too, but I can only think of how much more I find in Sibelius, and of how many times I have heard these Baxian efforts without epiphany and without pleasure.

Walt Kelly and Mervyn Peake: the Teachers

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In the summer of 1979, when the gruelling work on the final exams of high school gave way to the sweating, aching work of the farm, I was finally able to sit down and read the Titus books by Mervyn Peake. During the last few months of school, I had tantalized myself by tasting passages here and there; now, given the chance to sink into the books without mental distraction, I took them slowly.

Peake had arrived with an echo. In the spring, while stalking through the library at Carleton University with my father's card, I had found a book by Walt Kelly, TEN EVER-LOVIN' BLUE-EYED YEARS WITH POGO. I recalled the strip from childhood; it had seemed like a shipwreck from the past on the tidy modern beach of PEANUTS: elaborate, incomprehensible, crowded with panels and words, with an ink and colour style that looked like nothing else in the newspaper. With all of this in mind, I borrowed the book, fell in love, and read it repeatedly.

The Titus books made me realize how little I knew about writing. After the duel between Flay and Swelter, which fattened page after page after page with obsessive detail yet still excited me as few action scenes had before, I put down the book, stared out the window at the Gatineau Hills, and wondered why no one had ever told me that such writing was possible.

At the same time, Walt Kelly revealed an anger at the world that somehow found ways to laugh, even if the laughter rang a bit crazed and desperate. He showed me dishonest, delusional, dysfunctional idiots, lunatics trapped in their own obsessive mazes; he made me love the mazes and the fools.

That was then. Decades later, both Peake and Kelly remain a living influence and a constant challenge. My wrestling with the candour and strangeness of Peake's verse is one of the foundations for ICE AND AUTUMN GLASS. Kelly's angry laughter suggests a more healthy response than my own seething bitterness.

Kelly and Peake were teachers in 1979, and remain teachers now. I still need to learn from their lessons.

If You Say, Miss: I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE

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BETSY [voice over]:
It seemed only a few days before I met Mr. Holland in Antigua. We boarded the boat for St. Sebastian. It was all just as I'd imagined it. I looked at those great, glowing stars. I felt the warm wind on my cheek. I breathed deep and every bit of me inside myself said, "How beautiful!"

PAUL HOLLAND [aloud]:
It's not beautiful.

BETSY:
You read my thoughts, Mr. Holland.

PAUL:
It's easy enough to read the thoughts of a newcomer. Everything seems beautiful because you don't understand. Those flying fish -- they're not leaping for joy. They're jumping in terror. Bigger fish want to eat them. That luminous water -- it takes its gleam from millions of tiny dead bodies. The glitter of putrescence. There's no beauty here. Only death and decay.

BETSY:
You can't really believe that.

[Cut to the shot of a falling star.]

PAUL:
Everything good dies here -- even the stars.

Of all the Lewton films, I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE might be the most dreamlike and mysterious. It owes much of this mood to the shadowy, often iridescent images of Jacques Tourneur, to long moments without dialogue punctuated by the skittering of wind in the leaves and dry sugarcane, to the sparse and elegiac music of Roy Webb, to the broken family relations on this island with a long history of suffering:

COACHMAN:
Times gone, Fort Holland was a fort, and now, no longer. Holland's was the most old family, miss. They brought the colored folks to the island. The colored folks and Ti-Misery.

BETSY:
Ti-Misery? What's that?

COACHMAN:
A man, miss. An old man who lives in the garden at Fort Holland. With arrows stuck in him and a sorrowful, weeping look on his black face.

BETSY (alarmed):
Alive?

COACHMAN:
No, miss. He's just the same as he was in the beginning. On the front side of an enormous boat.

BETSY:
You mean a figurehead.

COACHMAN:
If you say, miss. And the enormous boat brought the long ago fathers and the long ago mothers of us all, chained to the bottom of the boat.

BETSY (gazing around):
They brought you to a beautiful place, didn't they?

COACHMAN:
If you say, miss. If you say.

The other source is a narrative strategy that offers an event long-completed before the film begins, one that is interpreted with conflicting views by the people involved, but never shown to the audience. In films, we believe what we can see, but when we are denied this authoritative perspective on what happened, we can only hear about it from second-hand accounts.

A few of the characters explain this event in the framework of modern medicine, others, in the framework of religious belief. At the end of the film, we are shown magical intentions to manipulate events, but we have also been shown, earlier, that identical results have been caused by ordinary means: one character is known to wander aimlessly; another does exactly what he had asked someone else to do before the climax. Just because magic is being used does not imply that magic is a cause; all too often, instead, people can mess up their lives through typical sorrows, obsessions, and addictions.

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In a similar way, the film denies itself narrative clarity by refusing any firm opposition between cultures. The Houngan, the Voudou priest, uses religious rites to apply practical psychological therapy to ordinary human suffering, while the Western doctors use religious terms for medical advice. Two of the Western characters believe in magic, while others do not, but in the end, neither science nor magic are given authority. We can see the result, but we cannot specify the cause.

Even during the final moments, the one character who might be given authority, the Houngan, offers no explanation, no clarification, but only a prayer in hope that the sorrows of the island will be healed. In the face of the island's long history, in the face of ordinary human suffering, such a hope seems impossible:

"Everything good dies here -- even the stars."

How to Stop the Leopard Man

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Even when extremely well made, slasher films have never appealed to me. For example, when I watch Mario Bava's BLOOD AND BLACK LACE, I can respect the astonishing use of light, colour, and texture, but I cannot respect the use of human beings.

I respond in the same way to THE LEOPARD MAN, a small film that improves every time I see it, and one that confirms, again, that Jacques Tourneur was born to direct stalking scenes by night. The film offers one sequence in particular that must have shocked viewers in 1943, and that still kicks hard today. You know the sequence: every critic of the Lewton films raves about it, and for damned good reason.

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Yet despite all of the cinematic skill that can go into such material, killings are not for me. What I do like about THE LEOPARD MAN is the sense of a small town in danger; I like the rapid ways in which the film sets out its characters in a place where they all know everyone else. At a running time of 66 minutes, the film packs in many people and many sub-plots without losing sight of its overall story.

Above all, what gives the story meaning is a sub-theme about the necessity for compassion. The two lead characters have lived through hard times, and reject any hint of being "softies," but that is exactly what they are, and in their empathy, their basic human goodness, they find the courage to confront evil. In that sense, THE LEOPARD MAN, for all of its emphasis on death and fear, is actually one of the more optimistic of the Lewton films: it shows that a community matters, and that strength comes from caring.

The Murk of THE SEVENTH VICTIM

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JACQUELINE: Who are you?

MIMI: I’m Mimi. I’m dying.

JACQUELINE: No!

MIMI: Yes. I've been quiet, oh ever so quiet. I hardly move, and yet it keeps coming all the time, closer and closer. And I rest and I rest and... and still I'm dying.

JACQUELINE: And you don’t want to die. I’ve always wanted to die. Always.

MIMI: I’m afraid. And I’m tired of being afraid, of waiting.

JACQUELINE: Why wait?

MIMI: I’m not going to wait. I’m going out, I'm going to laugh, and dance, and do all the things I used to do.

JACQUELINE: And then?

MIMI: I don’t know.

JACQUELINE: You will die.

What can I say about THE SEVENTH VICTIM that has not been mentioned before in countless articles? That the film has more symbolic weight than dramatic resolution? More characters than it needs, yet insufficient reasons for them to act as they do? More explanations than seem necessary, yet nothing to dispel the murk of motivation and consequence?

What we have, here, is the search for a victim whom the heroes cannot save, and the villains cannot kill, in a film that cannot be forgotten. For all of its twisting complexity and fundamental simplicity, the film remains unlike anything else I have seen from its decade, with an ending as abrupt and as final as a back-alley stabbing. That makes it worth celebration.

Our Alien World of Childhood: THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE

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Although she often asked for the reasons, my last girlfriend rarely understood why certain films left me in tears. Yet when we saw THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE, she not only cried at the end, she gave way to wracking sobs that went on for several minutes. I could only hold her close until the storm had passed by.

For me, this film has always provoked a complex emotional response. Less a horror film than a troubled fantasy about fantasies, THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE resembles Victor Erice's THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, in that it remembers just how strange a world is childhood. Most films forget, and either fall into the overly-stylized, melodramatic approach of THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, or dilute the everyday strangeness with needlessly "magical" icing, as in PAN'S LABYRINTH. CURSE never falls into these traps.

What the film does, instead, is to maintain a tension between the typically fearful experience of a child, and the supernatural: "Is this *really* happening, or are these purely psychological fantasies?" It also maintains a tension between benevolence and malevolence: "If this *is* really happening, then is the ghost benign, or covertly sinister? Is this an act of compassion, or an attempt at vengeance by proxy?"

To its credit, the film never answers these questions, and maintains its delicate tension right to the ending, perhaps beyond. Consider, for example, the actions of the "ghost" during the climactic sequence: Does the ghost offer protection, or endangerment? Everything depends on the viewer's perspective; the film itself offers no confirmation either way.

How a viewer decides to interpret that sequence might depend on how the viewer feels about CAT PEOPLE, which must be seen before CURSE if the sequel is to make any sense at all. The first film haunts the second, colours almost every mood, and forces me to suspect that the results of this childhood "fantasy" might be darker than the ending implies.

After all, this child will grow up some day... but into what kind of person, amongst what sort of people?

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The Tidiness of CAT PEOPLE

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CAT PEOPLE has never worked for me; I would love to understand why.

Those who know the film will understand my confusion. On every scale of excellence, from script and performances to direction and photography, CAT PEOPLE can rival any horror film ever made. Its high reputation is more than justified. And yet, for me, something is wrong.

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Perhaps the film is too tidy, too neat. It "dots every i, crosses every t," and leaves out the messy uncertainties that make later films by Lewton so fascinating.

There is nothing tidy about THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE, in which even the ghost might not be a ghost at all; nothing neat about THE BODY SNATCHER, with its intensely bitter personal conflict that not even death can erase; nothing is dotted in I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE, which is a baffling family drama; nothing is crossed in THE SEVENTH VICTIM, which is... THE SEVENTH VICTIM.

These thematically complicated films are as excellent as CAT PEOPLE, but they reject an easy closure; instead, they nag at the mind long after the screen has faded. For all of its power and beauty, CAT PEOPLE ends with its ending.

Levels of Silent Running

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SILENT RUNNING can be hard to assess. On one level, it fails completely, but on a different level, it works beautifully.

On the level of science fiction extrapolation, SILENT RUNNING makes no sense at all. Once you begin to look at its concepts and at certain aspects of its plot, the doubts arise, and question follows question. (I will ask a few at the end of this post, after a spoiler warning).

Beyond the level of extrapolation, however, as an illustration or parable of our inability to love the world on its own terms, or to recognize what we need in life before we toss it away, SILENT RUNNING hits hard. Along with Tarkovsky's adaptation of SOLARIS, it might be the most heart-breaking of all science fiction films.

Over the decades, much has been written about this; I have little to add, beyond noting that Bruce Dern's performance turns a character who is both crazy and untrustworthy into someone with emotional depth. As the film goes on, his character begins to show layers of remorse and humanity; isolated, losing his mind, he becomes more of a person, which makes his final decision all the more painful. I might not like this character, but I certainly feel for him, and his ending never fails to make me cry.

Sadness, regret, loss, and hope are aspects of life that I wish more science fiction films were able to confront. SILENT RUNNING has the courage to be beautifully tragic, and this makes it unforgettable.

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WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD.
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I expect science fiction to unroll with a certain logic: one idea should develop from another, and the implications of this development should make sense.

SILENT RUNNING, however, builds on a foundation of sliding sand. It fails to cohere, and so you might find yourself asking questions.

How can the human species live without a biosphere? Why are the last ecosystems of Earth isolated in space? Why are they set far out in space, in the orbit of Saturn? Why, when they are self-sufficient, must they be destroyed? Why would a trained astronaut with advance warning of a dangerous impact at a definite date and time not prepare himself and his vessel to meet that impact? Why would a trained biologist not recognize that plants need certain conditions to survive?

Foundations of sand. The miracle of SILENT RUNNING is that, somehow, it can build on a slippery base; it can grow towards meaning and emotional power, and it can hurt.

E. R. Eddison and the Dangers of Being a Spectator

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E. R. Eddison's THE WORM OUROBOROS remains one of the greatest of all fantasy books. Reading it for a third time, I find my reaction as it was before: I wish I could love it.

Eddison brings to his work a strong style, a keen eye for costumes and settings, and an ear for dramatic dialogue, all in the service of epic fantasy -- but I have never liked epic fantasy. The nightmares of Clark Ashton Smith and C. L. Moore, yes; the eccentric, highly-personal fantasies of Mervyn Peake and E. T. A. Hoffmann, yes; the waking dreams of Bruno Schulz, Murray Gilchrist, and Marcel Brion, yes; but voyages and quests and battles have always left me cold.

What drew me to the book in the first place, and what has always drawn me back, is Eddison's respect for dramatists I love, John Webster in particular. Then again, I would rather spend my time with Webster, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ford, and all the other playwrights who influenced THE WORM. I would also rather spend my time with Thomas Browne, from whom Eddison steals blatantly in Chapter VII; there can be no excuse for this.

Eddison steals from Thomas Browne's PSEUDODOXIA EPIDEMICA (Third Book), 1646-1672. Click on this image for a better jpeg.

Still, I have to praise Eddison for his writing style. He understands the power of a brief description:

"And as they stood in the court-yard in the torch-light there came forth on a balcony the Lady Prezmyra in her nightgown, disturbed by this ransacking. Ethereal as a cloud she seemed, pavilioned in the balmy night, as a cloud touched by the exhalations of the unrisen moon."

Elsewhere, I find the style undeniably vivid, yet static. He loves costumes, preferably on mannequins:

"Like a black eagle surveying earth from some high mountain the King passed by in his majesty. His byrny was of black chain mail, its collar, sleeves, and skirt edged with plates of dull gold set with hyacinths and black opals. His hose were black, cross-gartered with bands of sealskin trimmed with diamonds. On his left thumb was his great signet ring fashioned in gold in the semblance of the worm Ouroboros that eateth his own tail: the bezel of the ring the head of the worm, made of a peach-coloured ruby of the bigness of a sparrow’s egg. His cloak was woven of the skins of black cobras stitched together with gold wire, its lining of black silk sprinkled with dust of gold. The iron crown of Witchland weighed on his brow, the claws of the crab erect like horns ; and the sheen of its jewels was many-coloured like the rays of Sirius on a clear night of frost and wind at Yule-tide."

Certain descriptions bring to mind stage settings:

"And now were all gathered together in the great banquet hall that was built by Gorice XI., when he was first made King, in the south-east corner of the palace; and it far exceeded in greatness and magnificence the old hall where Lord Juss and Lord Brandoch Daha were held in duress. Seven equal walls it had, of dark green jasper, specked with bloody spots. In the midst of one wall was the lofty doorway, and in the walls right and left of this and in those that inclosed the angle opposite the door were great windows placed high, giving light to the banquet hall. In each of the seven angles of the wall a caryatide, cut in the likeness of a three-headed giant from ponderous blocks of black serpentine, bowed beneath the mass of a monstrous crab hewn out of the same stone. The mighty claws of those seven crabs spreading upwards bare up the dome of the roof, that was smooth and covered all over with paintings of battles and hunting scenes and wrastling bouts in dark and smoky colours answerable to the gloomy grandeur of that chamber. On the walls beneath the windows gleamed weapons of war and of the chase, and on the two blind walls were nailed up all orderly the skulls and dead bones of those champions which had wrastled aforetime with King Gorice XI or ever he appointed in an evil hour to wrastle with Goldry Bluszco. Across the innermost angle facing the door was a long table and a carven bench behind it, and from the two ends of that table, set square with it, two other tables yet longer and benches by them on the sides next the wall stretched to within a short space of the door. Midmost of the table to the right of the door was a high seat of old cypress wood, great and fair, with cushions of black velvet broidered with gold, and facing it at the opposite table another high seat, smaller, and the cushions of it sewn with silver. In the space betwixt the tables five iron braziers, massive and footed with claws like an eagle’s, stood in a row, and behind the benches on either side were nine great stands for flamboys to light the hall by night, and seven behind the cross bench, set at equal distances and even with the walls. The floor was paved with steatite, white and creamy, with veins of rich brown and black and purple and splashes of scarlet. The tables resting on great trestles were massy slabs of a dusky polished stone, powdered with sparks of gold as small as atoms."

Even his most vividly-conveyed people often seem like portraits:

"Gorice the King stood up and went to the south window. The casement bolts were rusted : he forced them and they flew back with a shriek and a clatter and a thin shower of dust and grit. He opened the window and looked out. The heavy night grew to her depth of quiet. There were lights far out in the marshes, the lights of Lord Juss’s camp-fires of his armies gathered against Carcë. Scarcely without a chill might a man have looked upon that King standing by the window; for there was in the tall lean frame of him an iron aspect as of no natural flesh and blood but some harder colder element; and his countenance, like the picture of some dark divinity graven ages ago by men long dead, bore the imprint of those old qualities of unrelenting power, scorn, violence, and oppression, ancient as night herself yet untouched by age, young as each night when it shuts down and old and elemental as the primaeval dark."

What I miss, here, is the technique of description-in-motion used consistently and well by Clark Ashton Smith:

"So, all that night, and throughout the day that followed, Gaspard du Nord, with the dried slime of the oubliette on his briar-shredded raiment, plunged like a madman through the towering woods that were haunted by robbers and werewolves. The westward-falling moon flickered in his eyes betwixt the gnarled, somber boles as he ran; and the dawn overtook him with the pale shafts of its searching arrows. The moon poured over him its white sultriness, like furnace-heated metal sublimed into light; and the clotted filth that clung to his tatters was again turned into slime by his own sweat. But still he pursued his nightmare-harried way, while a vague, seemingly hopeless plan took form in his mind." [The Colossus of Ylourgne]

"The doors on either side of the hall, with cunningly mated valves of ebony and ivory, were all closed. At the far end, Tiglari saw a rift of flaming light in a somber double arras. Parting the arras very softly, he peered into a huge, brightly illumined chamber that seemed at first sight to be the harem of Maal Dweb, peopled with all the girls that the enchanter had summoned to his mountain dwelling over a course of decades. In fact, it seemed that there were many hundreds, leaning or recumbent on ornate couches, or standing in attitudes of languor or terror. Tiglari discerned in the throng the women of Ommu-Zain, whose flesh is whiter than desert salt; the slim girls of Uthmai, who are moulded from breathing, palpitating jet; the queenly amber girls of equatorial Xala; and the small women of Ilap, who have the tones of newly greening bronze. But among them all, he could not find the lilied beauty of Athlé." [The Maze of the Enchanter]

"Crossing the threshold, he was engulfed instantly by a dead and clammy darkness, touched with the faint fetor of corruption, and a smell as of charred bone and flesh. He thought that he was in a huge corridor, and feeling his way forward along the right-hand wall, he soon came to a sudden turn, and saw a bluish glimmering far ahead, as if in some central adytum where the hall ended. Massy columns were silhouetted against the glimmering; and across it, as he drew nearer, several dark and muffled figures passed, presenting the profiles of enormous skulls. Two of them were sharing the burden of a human body which they carried in their arms. To Phariom, pausing in the shadowy hall, it appeared that the vague taint of putrescence upon the air grew stronger for a few instants after the figures had come and gone." [The Charnel God]

In a story by Smith, visual descriptions are never paintings, as they are in Eddison, but moving images that propel the story. His details are discovered, uncovered, revealed. This method is driven by a need for economy (books have space and time for stillness, while stories demand compression), but I suspect, as well, that the pressure of imagination took different forms in these two writers. Eddison stood at arm's length and watched his events, a spectator, while Smith prowled through his dreams, a participant.

Being a spectator can bring another limitation. For all of the dramatic influence on his book, Eddison's detachment can hinder the drama. This rarely gets in the way of his villains from Witchland, who remain from start to finish a vivid crowd, but it does make his heroes of Demonland one-dimensional. This limitation shows up especially in the final chapters, where Eddison reveals himself at his best and worst.

Unlike a participant, a spectator can look away; Eddison falls into this trap at precisely the wrong moment. When characters succeed against impossible odds, I want to know how they did it, but when Eddison pits his heroes against Laxus and a sea-fleet that outnumbers them drastically, in a fight they cannot win, all he can offer is this:

"O I’ll tell thee the tale to-morrow, madam. I’m surfeited with it to-night. The sum is, Laxus drownded and all that were with him, and Juss with his whole great armament northward bound for Witchland."

Unforgivable!

The best, however, is a climactic chapter that shows the dread of the Witchlanders in the certainty of their defeat, and their confusion when the deed is done.

Unlike our heroes, the Demons, the Witches actually care about the loss of their kingdom, and when the spells of Gorice XII fail to protect them (in an eerie scene of livid light and thunder, a sorcerous Chernobyl), their shock and anger is dramatized with a conviction that I could not find elsewhere in the book.

Mourning for her husband, Corund (a soldier whose decency and sense of honour have impressed even his enemies), Queen Prezmyra becomes a tragic figure: someone on the wrong side, full of scorn for the victors, yet loyal to her loved ones and dignified in her bitterness. Shown to be an actual human being, she makes the heroes look shallow and ridiculous in comparison:

"It was ever the wont of you of Demonland to eat the egg and give away the shell in alms."

I can be critical of many scenes and aspects of this book, but I have to give Eddison credit for a superb climactic chapter.

For all that I respect this book, and for all that I recommend it, I prefer to be "inside" a story. Readers who come to THE WORM OUROBOROS with a different set of aesthetic principles might fall in love with it -- many have -- but I love other stories, and they live elsewhere.

It Came From Outer Space

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A favourite of mine since adolescence, IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE not only holds up well, but gets better with each viewing. Like THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD, it creates and justifies a set of images and methods that would be copied by other films to the point of cliche.

Everything is here: a small town, an eerie desert setting, the sudden appearance of an alien ship and chameleonic beings, the paranoia that comes with incomprehension. All of this would be seen again later in countless films, but IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE feels new. Like a fresh-water spring, it remains clear and unpolluted by later developments.

It also stands out as one of the few science fiction films of this period to reveal the aliens as non-humanoid, monstrous, yet beings that can be understood and respected. In that sense, IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE could almost be a refutation of THE THING. It even recalls the final message of that film ("Watch the skies!"), but with a difference in both tone and implication:

"There'll be other nights, other stars for us to watch. They'll be back."

That sense of hope might feel uneasy, perhaps even fragile, but in the end, it remains hope.

Conceptual Simplicity: QUATERMASS 2

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Of the Hammer films adapted from Nigel Kneale's television plays, QUATERMASS 2 works the best because it was based on the simplest concept.

The teleplays written before and after used the extended range of a mini-series to explore the implications of complex ideas. Hammer ignored these ideas in THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT, and degraded Kneale's unusual alien threat into a standard movie monster; the studio remained a bit more faithful to QUATERMASS AND THE PIT, but abridged severely the exploration of its concepts, and in doing this, took away the pleasures of escalating discovery that had made the original so compelling.

QUATERMASS 2, on the other hand, was less about the exploration of ideas than about the suspense of an alien invasion that spreads in technocratic governmental secrecy: a threat less important in its nature than in the question of what Quatermass can do to stop it. The simplicity of this concept allowed Hammer to condense the plot of the teleplay without sacrificing nuance, and the result is a film that moves rapidly without seeming to have lost its reasons for moving at all.

The film also benefits from strong direction by Val Guest, who stages events on several planes at once, in foreground, background, and often in middleground. This hive-like activity builds a sense of encroaching, claustrophobic danger even in wide-open spaces.

Other benefits are the score, the photography, editing, and cast: those familiar Hammer faces. In this crowd, only Brian Donlevy seems to be in the wrong film. His performance is competent, sometimes even good, but he is never convincing as a man of intellect and scientific perception; he never feels like the true Quatermass.

This one disappointment never takes away the pleasures of the adaptation as a whole. Hammer's reductions of THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT and of PIT have never worked for me, but QUATERMASS 2 is a film I recommend.

Swamps And Dry-Ice Fog: PUMPKINHEAD

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Perhaps because it deals with teenagers being killed off by a monster, Stan Winston's Pumpkinhead has never gained the recognition it deserves. Despite a pair of minor weaknesses -- a musical score that offers nothing of interest, and characterizations that serve the purpose of the story in the most immediate ways without going much deeper -- the production as a whole has always impressed me, and improves every time I watch the film again.

Right from the opening sequence bathed in Mario Bava-style blues and reds, the film provides a strong visual impact. What I love especially is the transformation of Topanga Canyon into something strange. Unlike the over-blown and ugly designs of a typical Tim Burton film, the natural settings in Pumpkinhead resemble slightly-hallucinatory extensions beyond our world into the sinister zone of a fairy tale. Much of the action takes place on hillsides, in a slanted, choking wilderness of dust and forest, swamps and dry-ice fog; in such a place, the sudden appearances of a witch hut, of a cemetery pumpkin patch, seem almost inevitable. The shanty-town, as well, could almost be an actual place, if not for the slightest of stylizations.

These touches of dreamlike reality give the film a conviction that stands out. If Pumpkinhead seems fated to be nothing more than a cult film, it can at least be one that offers genuine merits of atmosphere and image.

Brief And Personal

The dead disappointment that sinks into your gut when you want to support a kind-hearted author, only to find that he writes 600,000 page novels, or that she writes only books in multiple series, or that he writes only Lovecrapean stuff....

Please, make the work personal. Make it yours, and make it brief.

The Features Of The Real Mr. Hyde

Illustration by Mervyn Peake for The Folio Society, 1948. Click for a better jpeg.

A few comments on "Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde," revisited for the first time in decades.

-- The disclosure that Hyde and Jekyll are one man comes without warning, without preparation, in the final pages of the story: a narrative trick that I would call insanely bold.

-- Adapters from Rouben Mamoulian to Mervyn Peake have shown Hyde as monstrous, but Stevenson makes clear that Hyde gives "an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation." Hyde is "dwarfish" yet otherwise normal, but people respond to his face with "a spirit of enduring hatred."

“He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn’t specify the point. He’s an extraordinary looking man, and yet I really can name nothing out of the way. No, sir; I can make no hand of it; I can’t describe him. And it’s not want of memory; for I declare I can see him this moment.”

-- My only criticism of the story is that I wanted to return, at the end, to Utterson. The story begins with Utterson, follows him throughout the mystery, but leaves him to brood offstage at the death of his two closest friends. I would have been happy with one final paragraph about his thoughts on the "strange case."

-- The one path into a story is the prose.

"Six o’clock struck on the bells of the church that was so conveniently near to Mr. Utterson’s dwelling, and still he was digging at the problem. Hitherto it had touched him on the intellectual side alone; but now his imagination also was engaged or rather enslaved; and as he lay and tossed in the gross darkness of the night and the curtained room, Mr. Enfield’s tale went by before his mind in a scroll of lighted pictures. He would be aware of the great field of lamps of a nocturnal city; then of the figure of a man walking swiftly; then of a child running from the doctor’s; and then these met, and that human Juggernaut trod the child down and passed on regardless of her screams. Or else he would see a room in a rich house, where his friend lay asleep, dreaming and smiling at his dreams; and then the door of that room would be opened, the curtains of the bed plucked apart, the sleeper recalled, and lo! there would stand by his side a figure to whom power was given, and even at that dead hour, he must rise and do its bidding. The figure in these two phases haunted the lawyer all night; and if at any time he dozed over, it was but to see it glide more stealthily through sleeping houses, or move the more swiftly and still the more swiftly, even to dizziness, through wider labyrinths of lamplighted city, and at every street corner crush a child and leave her screaming. And still the figure had no face by which he might know it; even in his dreams, it had no face, or one that baffled him and melted before his eyes; and thus it was that there sprang up and grew apace in the lawyer’s mind a singularly strong, almost an inordinate, curiosity to behold the features of the real Mr. Hyde."

Scars, Bloody Wounds, Aches and Joys: THE AMERICAN

The American, by Jeffrey Thomas.
Journalstone, 2020.

An honest review should balance the merits of a book against any weaknesses. Here, the weaknesses are almost buried by the power of the story and the fascination of the characters. Any book that keeps me turning the pages until five o'clock in the morning deserves my full attention; any book that shocks me and moves me in scene after scene deserves all the praise I can bring to it.

Let me start with praise.

At one point in the book, a thoroughly despicable character tries to justify his own evils:

"[He] had read somewhere that 4% of the population (in the US…or was it worldwide?) were sociopaths. That 1% were psychopaths. He wasn’t clear on the difference, but it was food for thought. It wasn’t an anomaly, he thought. It was a trend.

"In the past, human beings had relied on close groups to ensure their survival against the rigors of nature. Of nature’s harsh elements, of nature’s predatory -- or at least, competitive -- animals. Nature had required that humans bond together, create tribes, societies, cities and nations (and of course, the resultant aberrations of religions and political parties).

"But…wasn’t humanity beyond all that now? Survival was more assured, taken for granted. And hence: the evolution of a superior human. No longer inhibited by the bond to a tribe. A human freed of fearful loyalties, except the loyalty to oneself. To one’s own needs and urges."

In a modern world where the values of the marketplace have stamped out the values of human communities, this philosophy might carry weight, but in The American, Jeffrey Thomas brings out the necessity for bonds of family and friendship. Even in cities where murders are currency, where cold killings become tools of business, people still matter; they hang on, they work together to keep the world in one piece.

This focus on human compassion takes the book in directions that I had not anticipated. Against the temptation of a thriller to keep the plot simple, Thomas has chosen, instead, to emphasize meaning and a personal perspective. The horror of this book is undeniable, but so is the humanity; chapters that show the worst of human actions alternate with scenes of people at their best.

Thomas writes with a keen eye for landscapes -- not physical landscapes, but social. He knows how people interact in bars and offices, theme parks and morgues; he understands the ways in which families and friendships fall apart, and then come together again; he feels, in his gut, how the past can wound, and how -- unexpectedly, without warning -- the present can heal. This might sound abstract, but his approach to the story is relentlessly physical: pain and loss, community and reconcilation, are things that we can touch in this book. Thomas never shies away when a bullet shatters through an eye socket, but he also finds comfort in cold beer and hot soup, in Buddhist temples and christmas lights, in the stop-and-start exhilaration of high-speed motorcycles on jam-packed streets. Scars, bloody wounds, aches and joys, all come to life on the page.

Now for the criticism.

I suspect that most readers will have no trouble with the book's prose. Thomas knows what to say, and often writes with eloquence:

"[He] came to a glass-walled office in which Evelyn was housed behind her desk like a museum specimen representing her species."

"Vietnam was full to the brim with beautiful women -- who knew better than Chen, who made his livelihood off that beauty in all its hunger and desperation? -- but this woman’s beauty was transcendent in a way that was hard to put a finger on. She emanated a deep, unarticulated misery that spoke of classical drama, beyond the scope of one person’s paltry life; a misery of the whole of human existence, no doubt beyond her own capacity for understanding. She was a mute and uncomprehending vessel of that suffering, like a small child with terminal cancer."

Elsewhere, just frequently enough to be noticed, the prose trips on itself, but seems not so much badly written as badly proof-read.

For example, in certain passages, when present participles gum up the prose and choke out the simple past tense, results precede actions:

"He slung her off him, grabbing hold of her tank top to do so."

"'Indeed,' the American said, his laughter dying away."

"Thanh asked about their father, deciding to change the subject."

"Trenor couldn’t help but chuckle, finding it funny that here they were both amused now over the subject of Quan’s father’s demise."

Subjects and objects fade into obscurity:

"The madam’s laughter died away quickly, her expression darkening, but she knew better than to give in to her anger with this man."

"The bloody garment tore away in his hands, leaving her thudding onto her back."

"He didn’t return the eye patch to his head, stuffing it into the pocket of his jacket."

"He nodded at Quan’s wallet, which he was just returning to a pocket in his fatigues."

When sentences break into fragments, they lose immediate clarity:

"Closer now, entering into another thrown pool of light."

Tacked-on qualifications intrude:

"Her eyes remained staring from her mask of blood, however."

Sometimes, the viewpoint characters alternate within a scene; this feels like having a door slammed on your face while a secret panel drops open at your feet.

A fast reader might skip over these flaws, a captivated reader might glance at them in passing, but I read slowly, for pleasure; I could feel these potholes jar the bones of my feet. In a book so compelling and so clear with its intentions, written by someone so obviously thoughtful, these flaws represent a failure to revise.

They might have crippled a lesser book, but this one kept me reading beyond every speedbump of language and technique. Its characters made me fear and hope for them; its narrative made me think about my own losses and my own moments of community. I can ask many things of a book, but above all, I want the book to seem alive. The American lives.

The Thing From Another World

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For all of its impact, and for all of the praise the film has won since it debuted, The Thing From Another World has been dogged by two persistent criticisms.

The first, I have to concede: in terms of concept, the film's "intellectual carrot" is a big step downwards from the shape-shifting alien of John W. Campbell's original story, and in visual terms, it brings to mind not so much a being from another planet as a variation on the Jack Pierce / Boris Karloff Frankenstein's monster. The makers of the film concealed this limitation as well as they could with stark shadows and camera set-ups; perhaps no one at the time could have filmed Campbell's monster convincingly. (Except for Willis O'Brien? I wish he had tried!)

The second criticism I find hard to accept. Many have argued that this film sets military "practicality" and force above scientific curiosity. For example, in the words of John Baxter:

"Typically for [producer Howard] Hawks the characters quickly separate themselves into professionals and dreamers. The airman, the reporter he takes with him and some of his crew are professionals; the scientists, and especially their leader, are dreamers. Hawks's contempt for the former comes out clearly in the various exchanges at the base, science and scientists generally shown as being incapable of adjusting to the real world."

-- Science Fiction in the Cinema, A. S. Barnes & Co, New York, 1970.

I have never seen this in the film. What I find, instead, is a nuanced opposition between a community of reason and flexible thought (a community of soldiers and scientists), and one authoritarian scientist who prefers to work alone within his own assumptions, who considers knowledge more important than communities or individual human beings.

This authoritarian scientist, Dr Carrington, begins with an argument that most of us would find reasonable, and which, in the context of the film, is undeniably true:

"When you find what you're looking for, remember it's a stranger in a strange land. The only crimes involved were those committed against it. It awoke from a block of ice, was attacked by dogs, shot by a frightened man. All I want is a chance to communicate with it."

Later in the film, however, when the Thing is revealed to be a possible biological threat to the world, Carrington goes beyond this argument to stress that human beings are expendable:

"We've only one excuse for existence: to think, to find out, to learn. It doesn't matter what happens to us. Nothing matters except our thinking. We've fought our way into Nature, we've split the atom... We owe it to the brain of our species to stay here and die, without destroying a source of wisdom. Civilization has given us orders."

Carrington has learned about the Thing by conducting experiments in secret. The other scientists, equally curious, have kept in mind reasonable precautions against too quick an investigation without proper safeguards. When Carrington proposes an immediate examination of the frozen Thing, Dr Chapman mentions the risk of contamination by germs from another planet, and the possible risk of damage to these alien remains by the atmosphere of Earth. Even the scientists eager to learn about the Thing right away come to disagree with Carrington when they realize the implications of the creature's biology; they join the soldiers and contribute to the fight. Carrington's assistant comes up with a method to destroy the Thing, and Dr Redding offers a refinement of this plan.

When the scientists warn Carrington that mental and physical exhaustion have clouded his judgement, he ignores them. Still, he does have a point: no effort has been made to find a means of communication. In the end, he puts his own life at risk to find such a means, but without endangering anyone else. For this, he earns the respect of the soldiers, even if they disagree with him. Carrington's flaw is not scientific curiosity, not "dreaming," as Baxter would say, but a refusal to see his own limitations, and a disregard for the community of his fellows.

In contrast, the military leader, Captain Hendry, shows concern for his men and for the scientists around him. When the men want his ear, he listens; when scientists object to his actions, he apologizes, explains that he must have military authority to act on their terms, and then he requests that authority by radio. He does the same with Ned Scott, the news reporter: he imposes a news blackout, but also requests permission for the news to be spread. Hendry never assumes that he knows best, but he keeps eyes and ears open to events as they develop; in that sense, he is more scientific than Carrington.

Carrington is willing to conduct experiments in secret; he leaps to conclusions, and then sticks to them ("Its development was not handicapped by emotional or sexual factors.... No pleasure, no pain, no emotion, no heart. Our superior in every way"), but Hendry is an open leader, dedicated to a task yet willing to accept new information and to improvise. Carrington sets knowledge above life and community; Hendry is determined to keep his community, military and scientific, alive.

This focus on community permeates the film, and might explain, in part, why critics rushed to pan the John Carpenter remake. The camaraderie and cooperation of the first film was tossed out in the second, for legitimate reasons: Carpenter wanted to convey the breakdown of a small group, not the cohesion. I believe the critics, very much like Dr Carrington, brought assumptions to their viewing of Carpenter's film that distorted their perspective. The Thing was not The Thing From Another World, and it should have been reviewed on its own terms, just as the original film should be considered by what it reveals on the screen, and not by the reductive implications that critics have imposed on it.

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Flight From Complexity, Flight From Humanity

Long before the spinning of the World Wide Web, as I read articles about digital libraries and hypertext, I hoped that these developments would bring about a new age of thought, feeling, and literacy. I was wrong. For many people, the Web has become not a college library, not a gallery and museum, but a backyard fence for gossip.

Even a fence might be fine if an endless variety of people could lean on it, to share some of the world's complexity, but instead I have noticed a relentless desire for simplification.

Whether people apply the structure of abstracted and schematized wolf packs to the complexities of human character, to end up writing about simplified "alpha males" or "beta females" as if these artificial categories could explain anything about our lives, or whether people reduce the mystery and fascination of a woman down to a mere number -- "She's an eight!" -- so much interaction on the Web has become a flight from complexity, a refusal to laugh and cry at just how beautifully messed-up we are as communities, countries, human beings.

Beyond the Web, we can find antidotes to simplification, cures that have long existed but are often disregarded in Web discussions. Personal experience is one cure, science is another, but I can think of something equally powerful.

Art is created for many reasons, often reasons hard to define, but one of its many benefits is a recognition and celebration of human complexity. Art reveals to us that human beings are bigger on the inside, more convoluted on the outside, than the Web often admits. Art can make demands on us, not through difficulty or lack of accessibility, but because art can steer us away from reduction.

In our complicated lives, art's reminders of just how much more complicated we are can be disturbing, perhaps even terrifying, but that is one of art's greatest beauties. We are not simplified diagrams; we are people, and people need art.

That Is All

In his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (the 1891 edition), Oscar Wilde wrote:

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

I would call Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One (1948) very well written --

The complete stillness was more startling than any violent action. The body looked altogether smaller than life-size now that it was, as it were, stripped of the thick pelt of mobility and intelligence. And the face which inclined its blind eyes towards him -- the face was entirely horrible; as ageless as a tortoise and as inhuman; a painted and smirking obscene travesty by comparison with which the devil-mask Dennis had found in the noose was a festive adornment, a thing an uncle might don at a Christmas party.

-- Well written, but almost sociopathically cruel. This cruelty has been yoked with humour so closely that every laugh (and the book incites constant laughter) makes me feel as if I were an accomplice to some crime against an innocent fictional character: Aimée Thanatogenos, whose only failing is that she is American and therefore much less bright than the British expatriate poet who lies to her, and then drives her to misery.

With Wilde's comment in mind, I feel that Waugh's book is more than justified by its prose, and since my teenage years, I have thought of it as one of the funniest books I know:

When as a newcomer to the Megalopolitan Studios he first toured the lots, it had strained his imagination to realize that those solid-seeming streets and squares of every period and climate were in fact plaster façades whose backs revealed the structure of bill-boardings. Here the illusion was quite otherwise. Only with an effort could Dennis believe that the building before him was three-dimensional and permanent; but here, as everywhere in Whispering Glades, failing credulity was fortified by the painted word.

This perfect replica of an old English Manor, a notice said, like all the buildings of Whispering Glades, is constructed throughout of Grade A steel and concrete with foundations extending into solid rock. It is certified proof against fire, earthquake and Their name liveth for evermore who record it in Whispering Glades.

At the blank patch a signwriter was even then at work and Dennis, pausing to study it, discerned the ghost of the words "high explosive" freshly obliterated and the outlines of "nuclear fission" about to be filled in as substitute.

I still find a laugh on every page, but I now have greater admiration and respect for Ronald Firbank's The Flower Beneath The Foot, which is not only more funny, but which has the courage to recognize, in its haunting final words, the pain of despair.

Think Of The Reader, Dammit!

When people study an ancient or a foreign language, they begin with grammar, which offers a scaffolding for each word, a skeleton for every muscle, but when they hear a language from birth, only later on do they study grammar -- if, that is, they reach a later on.

This might explain why so many authors write badly.

It also makes me wonder if the study of Latin and Greek was the secret advantage of yesterday's writers. When you force yourself to learn the grammar of another language, you find yourself drawn inevitably to think about the grammar of your own. For my part, I learned more about English when I studied German and French than I ever learned in English class; Greek and Latin could offer the same advantage, not only to writers, but to the reader who now stumbles along through the prickly vacant lots of too many stories.

Not Even Worth A Yawn

Perhaps once every decade, something comes along that wins popularity, and I can understand the reasons, but for the most part, I have no idea why prize-winning, cash-grabbing books or films or pieces of music become hits. I look at these things, and I can only ask what other people have discovered in them that I cannot see, not even under ultraviolet light.

Then again, I can think of so many books and films and pieces of music that have made me want to crow from rooftops, jump around like a kid on christmas morning, rave at luckless girlfriends until their eyes roll up in their sockets, but to the world at large, these things I love are not even worth a yawn.

I have never understood this, and my failure gnaws at me.

One-Track Spine

Here, at the age of 56, I would have guessed that my libido might slow down, but no, not yet: all day long, and for most of the night, brimming functions of my brain chant WOMAN WOMAN WOMAN.

Vast And Cool, Yet Sympathetic

Cover by Harry Willock, 1971. Click for a better jpeg.

When I revisit favourite stories of the past, nostalgia never molds me. I assess everything now by whatever standards I have learned to use, and for this reason, many old favourites no longer speak to me. Still, many do, and some of them expand when revisited, to show more facets and more nuance than I had seen before.

I first read The War of the Worlds when I was nine years old; reading it now, I feel the same pleasure of discovery. I could write about its layers of theme: about its unsettling idea that natural selection will continue within a technological society, when our machines become the environments to which we adapt; about ecological succession, and the changing of the biosphere by invasive, opportunistic species; about the parallels between Martian colonists and British imperialism, conveyed not by satire, but by analogy; about the failure of a bourgeois society to anticipate the shocks and upheavals of the future that plunges toward them.

These concepts are presented in the book not merely in subtext, but by explication; they add a troubling richness that goes beyond mere story-telling. For my purposes, however, I want to look at the story, because here, in his narrative techniques, Wells has achieved remarkable things.

The War of the Worlds is not presented as a novel, but as a romance. This liberates the story from the baggage of a novel's emphasis on characterization, and gives the book a drive, a momentum, that most novels could never match. All we know of the protagonist's life before the story begins is that he writes philosophical essays, and this is all we need to know; what matters more than background, here, is what the character thinks, feels, and does.

Instead of giving details about the narrator's past, Wells puts us inside the narrator's mind. We experience what he sees and fears; the result is an immersion into the storm-lit clarity of nightmare:
 

Flashes of actual flame, a bright glare leaping from one to another, sprang from the scattered group of men. It was as if some invisible jet impinged upon them and flashed into white flame. It was as if each man were suddenly and momentarily turned to fire.

Then, by the light of their own destruction, I saw them staggering and falling, and their supporters turning to run.

I stood staring, not as yet realising that this was death leaping from man to man in that little distant crowd. All I felt was that it was something very strange. An almost noiseless and blinding flash of light, and a man fell headlong and lay still; and as the unseen shaft of heat passed over them, pine trees burst into fire, and every dry furze bush became with one dull thud a mass of flames. And far away towards Knaphill I saw the flashes of trees and hedges and wooden buildings suddenly set alight.

It was sweeping round swiftly and steadily, this flaming death, this invisible, inevitable sword of heat. I perceived it coming towards me by the flashing bushes it touched, and was too astounded and stupefied to stir. I heard the crackle of fire in the sand pits and the sudden squeal of a horse that was as suddenly stilled. Then it was as if an invisible yet intensely heated finger were drawn through the heather between me and the Martians, and all along a curving line beyond the sand pits the dark ground smoked and crackled.

Wells maintains this dreamlike mood even during the speculations about Martian biology, and he makes the lectures as compelling as the dangers. These lectures never stop the story, because they retain the vividness and foreboding of the story itself.

One secret of this clarity is the reliance on physical details and visual impressions, even during the lectures. Wells could have mired himself in abstraction, but his love for the tactile, his passion for the everyday world around him, brings to life his creatures from another world.
 

We men, with our bicycles and road-skates, our Lilienthal soaring-machines,our guns and sticks and so forth, are just in the beginning of the evolution that the Martians have worked out. They have become practically mere brains, wearing different bodies according to their needs just as men wear suits of clothes and take a bicycle in a hurry or an umbrella in the wet. And of their appliances, perhaps nothing is more wonderful to a man than the curious fact that what is the dominant feature of almost all human devices in mechanism is absent -- the wheel is absent; among all the things they brought to earth there is no trace or suggestion of their use of wheels.... Almost all the joints of the machinery present a complicated system of sliding parts moving over small but beautifully curved friction bearings. And while upon this matter of detail, it is remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in most cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature of the disks in an elastic sheath; these disks become polarised and drawn closely and powerfully together when traversed by a current of electricity. In this way the curious parallelism to animal motions, which was so striking and disturbing to the human beholder, was attained. Such quasi-muscles abounded in the crablike handling-machine which, on my first peeping out of the slit, I watched unpacking the cylinder. It seemed infinitely more alive than the actual Martians lying beyond it in the sunset light, panting, stirring ineffectual tentacles, and moving feebly after their vast journey across space.

Cover by George Underwood, 1975. Click for a better jpeg.

Wells presents his concepts, makes analogies, links the strangeness of his war to scenes and habits of everyday life, to things that we can touch and see. His concepts drive the plot, from the effect of Martian weapons on terrified human beings, to the ecological rise and fall of the Red Weed -- a cycle of robust growth followed by infection and ruin, with hints of what lies in store for the Martians. At the same time, his intense focus on the psychological storms of the narrator anticipates the methods of William Sansom and J. G. Ballard, who would also emphasize a stripped-down, clinically physical approach to their characters.

In its power and economy of means, The War of the Worlds can remind readers that other methods are available for science fiction, and that, in abandoning the streamlined forms of romance for the bloated realism of the novel, science fiction lost a compelling way to tell stories. Less is often more, and a sharp focus often reveals finer details than are seen by a panoramic view. For this argument, Wells provides a living set of reasons.

"Halt!" she squaloured spasmosidlingly.

"To say" is a perfectly fine verb, and in prose can bear the weight of any conversation. Except in highly farcical or melodramatic circumstances, characters have no reason to bark, murmur, assert, explain, rebut, query, put forward, agree, waver, conconglomerate, ricochet, or even grunt, when they can merely say.

Then again, at certain moments, a character might shout or whisper, and this information can be useful in the text.

In very few cases will "to say" need an adverb. The context of a scene, and the wording of the dialogue, tend to make adverbs pointless at best and noisy at worst. Never waste time by having a character say anything queryingly, querulously, quaveringly, callously, carelessly, combatively, or contumaciously, when attention might be better spent on making the character say something worth a font.

Monsters on Asphalt

[Sunday, August 09, 2020.]

Yesterday, after sunset, I walked through a local neighbourhood of well-maintained split-level houses on a hill above dense forest. The night was warm and slightly humid, the streets were quiet, and rabbits were out in full hordes.

On one street, I came across a line of cartoon figures drawn across the asphalt, barely visible in the gleam of a street lamp. They stood under a heading reinforced by emphatically multiple strokes of yellow chalk: 1738.

Many of the figures (Pat, for one) were childishly vague, but Will, at the centre, stood out because of his elaborate ski toque.

On the far left of the line was Coco, whose boneless, wavey arms extended far beyond the length of his body. One arm rippled like a banner above his head, the other sagged like a dead tentacle at his feet. What impressed me was that Coco had managed to find a long-sleeved shirt to fit him.

If Coco had long arms, then Lila had four arms. Not even her lobster-claw hands could reduce the impact of her severely-squinting eyes.

On the right end of the line stood a pair of much smaller beings with what looked like pointed ears, or perhaps pointed haircuts. A curved line ran below them to connect all the figures, and below that was the question, Which is your favourite?

Hard to say. All I could think was that I used to spend Saturday nights with my loving and sensual girlfriend, but now I was more likely to spend my time staring at monsters on asphalt.

Five Major Divisions In Science Fiction

"We have just five major divisions in science fiction. Neo-fans -- big name fans -- hacks -- pros -- and J. G. Ballard."

From
"The Guest of Honor Speech at the 31st World Science Fiction Convention, August 31, 1973," by Robert Bloch.

The Alien Critic, Number Ten, August 1974.

Focus On The Good

 

I've noticed on Youtube a looming trend of people who not only criticize corporate "pop" culture, but have grown to hate it. I know this feeling, because I reached that point in the 1970s, and promised myself that I would never own a TV set. I never have.

Still, I would urge these people to keep something else in mind: tearing apart lousy films and TV shows might reveal to us details of technique and of our unconfronted needs as humans, but eventually, we have to face our needs; we have to find things we can support as alternatives to corporate crap.

 

To these people I would say -- Turn off the TV set. Forget these modern films. World cinema has been with us for more than a century, and we have piles of treasure waiting for attention. Not only films: take a leap into the long history of art and fiction, poems and plays, essays and comic strips, paintings and symphonies.

Why focus on the new, when you could focus instead on the good?

 

Crow Beer

Jason E. Rolfe has tried a beer called Murder of Crows. He wrote, "It tastes like somebody actually murdered a crow and then stuffed it into this can."

His comment inspired me... sort of.

Crow Beer, Crow Beer:
Carrion, canned and creamed!
I'll take no beer
Over this one I've deemed
 

A beakful of birdhouse blather,
With hints of equine lather.
One sip of you
Has blocked my view
Of the lifetime for which I schemed!

Serious Massage

"SERIOUS MASSAGE. An mail was sent to you with the expectation to have a return mail from you but you never bothered to reply. Kindly reply for further explanations."

-- From the Spam box, Tuesday, August 18.

Repetitions Of The Red Brain

WEIRD TALES, October 1927. Illustration by Hugh Rankin. Click for larger view.

 

Because Donald Wandrei was only sixteen years old when he wrote "The Red Brain," a gentler person might look away from its prose. Being as gentle as a hornet, I wish the editor had taken Wandrei aside and shown him that a story can only repeat its opening information so many times before the reader wants to hurl that pile of echoing paper into the woodstove.

Repeat, repeat, repeat until the reader screams.

Once the story has limped beyond the first two pages, it does reveal an interesting core. Wandrei has combined the "dying universe" concept explored by previous writers like George Sterling and Leconte de Lisle with a mood similar to "The Masque of the Red Death." I can excuse Wandrei's inability to handle the concept with the poetic skill of Sterling (in "The Testimony of the Suns") or of de Lisle (in "L'Astre Rouge, "La Joie de Siva," "Solvet Saeclum," "La Dernière vision"); very few of us can write so well. The concept remains a good one.

But is a concept enough to save a story? No. Style and structure matter, because these are the only tools a writer has to convey a concept with economy, clarity, and force. With its rhetorical style and repetitive structure, "The Red Brain" is a could-have-been story: it could have been good, if someone had shown the writer better ways to handle his ideas. *

* We know from his article in the Overland Monthly (December, 1926) that Wandrei admired Clark Ashton Smith's poetry, but I have no idea of how much Wandrei knew at the time about Smith's prose. Smith had a better grasp of pacing and structure than anything shown here, and he made stories move: he could integrate exposition, physical description, and settings in ways that put readers inside a story, as participants. Wandrei does nothing like this in "The Red Brain."