Ambrose & Elsewhere

Remember the Monty Python episode with the abortive interview of Raymond Luxury-Yacht?

I was listening to Gerry Mulligan’s Jeru the other day and I practically fell off my chair when the track “Blue Boy” came up. It’s the intro music for the interview program.

Had I known back in the 70s who the artist was I would have skirkled to the nearest record store (such things still existed in those distant days) and laid hands on the LP with reverent violence and listened to this tremendously cool album at intervals ever since. But I didn’t because I didn’t know.

So I think that TV programs need footnotes. Not all programs; just the ones I happen to watch. I will begin my campaign to bring about this sorely needed social revolution after lunch. If I remember.

Reuters reports that Sam Raimi is on-board to make a new movie about the Shadow:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061211/film_nm/shadow_dc

No word yet on what minor role Ted Raimi will play.

The article misleadingly states that “Walter B. Gibson created the character…” In fact, the Shadow on the radio and the Shadow in the pulps were entirely different characters. The hero of the radio serial was, as the world knows, Lamont Cranston who fought crime using his mystical ability to cloud men’s minds, assisted by his friend and companion Margot Lane. In the pulps, Lamont Cranston was a playboy who sometimes allowed the Shadow to use his identity in his endless war againt crime. The pulp Shadow had no magical abilities, but he was an impressively sneaky bastard who was always firing two revolvers simultaneously, for reasons that always seemed adequate at the time. His real identity, as revealed in “The Shadow Unmasks”, was the fantastically dull aviator Kent Allard. Having gone to some lengths to remember this, I will try now to forget it again. It has to be the single most tedious naming of a previously anonymous character, except possibly for an infamous episode of The Prisoner. At least Dashiell Hammett never published a Continental Op story where we found out that the hero was named Bob Smith. I hope.

For a brief period in the late 90s there were dozens, if not hundreds, of old Shadow pulps that had been scanned and put up the internet by Shadow enthusiasts. When Condé Nast, who own the copyrights to the old Street and Smith pulps, found out about it they moved in and stepped on everybody’s face. Then they immediately launched a reprint series of the entire Shadow run. No, not really. Apparently they don’t value the property, but it’s theirs and they don’t want anyone else to have any use of it.

I read many of the old pulps in that brief internet revival; unfortunately, I didn’t save any of the texts, as my computer then was not as roomy as my computers are now. Nor can I report that they are great literature, even by contemporary pulp standards. Still, there was something about them that caught the imagination. It might partly be that the Shadow stood alone against the sinister forces of crime, yet he had a secret army of allies who would assist him at need. It might be just that he got to wear a cool hat and commit various crimes in the name of justice. For some reason this sort of paradox has tremendous appeal, even to people who should know better.

12/31/06: UPDATE

Actually, the Shadow pulps are being reprinted. A Shadowphile named Anthony Tollin has acquired the rights from Smaug Condé Nast and is reprinting them (2 per volume, $12.95 a pop) under the imprint The Vintage Library. Send before midnight, etc.

James Nicoll posted a link to the infamous Hitchens Vanity Fair piece about women not being funny. (Unlike Hitchens himself, for instance.)

I’d seen it before, and was in two minds about commenting on it here. On the one hand my views of Hitchens are colored by politics, and I don’t want to make this a blog a political soapbox; there are plenty of those on this tubulous interweb thing. On the other hand, the issue is really about writing and genre, which is on-topic. The things Hitchens says about women and humor, others were saying about women and sf not so very long ago.

The trouble with discussing Hitchens’ piece for its content is that there isn’t much there there. Hitchens’ acuity on the subject of humor can be summed up by his rhetorical question, “Though ask yourself, was Dorothy Parker ever really funny?” Anyone who even has to ask himself this can’t know much about Parker or about humor. People have expressed some bewilderment about how CH manages to publish blather like this. I think some publications (like Slate and VF) keep him on in the interests of diversity: they can’t be univocal bastions of liberal purity with a saber-rattling chickenhawk like Hitchens as a regular contributor.

But what was interesting to me was the lack of self-knowledge that CH displays. He obviously considers himself funny because he can make women laugh (see his third paragraph) but he doesn’t seem to be acquainted with the idea of polite laughter or of nervous laughter. He later remarks “it could be that in some way men do not want women to be funny. They want them as an audience, not as rivals.” If he’d replaced “men” and “They” with “I” he might have begun to approach the real issue.

Seen via James Nicoll‘s blog: the old Meyers-Briggs thing with a snide twist.

It turns out I am:

__________

Almost Perfect- INFP
40% Extraversion, 100% Intuition, 40% Thinking, 46% Judging

So, you want to make the world a better place? Too bad it’s never gonna happen.
Of all the types, you have to be one of the hardest to find fault in. You have a selfless and caring nature. You’re a good listener and someone who wants to avoid conflict. You genuinely desire to do good.
Of course, these all add up to an incredibly overpowered conscience which makes you feel guilty and responsible when anything goes wrong. Of course, it MUST be your fault EVERYTIME.
Though you’re constantly on a mission to find the truth, you have no use for hard facts and logic, which is a source of great confusion for those of us with brains. Despite this, in a losing argument, you’re not above spouting off inaccurate fact after fact in an effort to protect your precious values.
You’re most probably a perfectionist, which in this case, is a bad thing. Any group work is destined to fail because of your incredibly high standards.
Disregard what I said before. You’re just easy to find fault in as everyone else!
Luckily, you’re generally very hard on yourself, meaning I don’t need to waste my precious time insulting you. Instead, just find all your own faults and insult yourself.
*****************
If you want to learn more about your personality type in a slightly less negative way, check out this.
*****************
The other personality types are as follows…

Loner – Introverted Sensing Feeling Perceiving
Pushover – Introverted Sensing Feeling Judging
Criminal – Introverted Sensing Thinking Perceiving
Borefest – Introverted Sensing Thinking Judging
Freak – Introverted iNtuitive Feeling Judging
Loser – Introverted iNtuitive Thinking Perceiving
Crackpot – Introverted iNtuitive Thinking Judging
Clown – Extraverted Sensing Feeling Perceiving
Sap – Extraverted Sensing Feeling Judging
Commander – Extraverted Sensing Thinking Perceiving
Do Gooder – Extraverted Sensing Thinking Judging
Scumbag – Extraverted iNtuitive Feeling Perceiving
Busybody – Extraverted iNtuitive Feeling Judging
Prick – Extraverted iNtuitive Thinking Perceiving
Dictator – Extraverted iNtuitive Thinking Judging

The Brutally Honest Personality Test written by UltimateMaster on OkCupid Free Online Dating.

_____

Once upon a time I was INTJ with an accent on the J. If these tests are accurate (and how could they not be?) I must be a lot more warm and fuzzy now. Of course the last time I took one of these tests was twenty-some years ago, and the test was administered to me by a friend who was mad at me because I’d laughed involuntarily when she claimed Jim Morrison (the Lizard King) was a feminist. Should I trust the snide robot of today or the annoyed friend of yesteryear? I’d rather just sit and think about New Hampshire. (This one, not this one.)

Seen via CLASSICS-L:

At The Onion, Aristophanes complains that audiences just don’t get him anymore.

A clip: “Even my best gags get little more than a blank look these days. It’s like the average audience member never heard a friggin’ parabasis before in their life.”

I’m not sure whether this is humorous or just painfully true.

Scott R. Bakker has an interesting article in August’s Heliotrope (seen via David Soyka’s recent review of short fiction at Black Gate).

The core of his argument is that fantasy is socially useful because it promotes what he calls interpretational literacy, a prerequisite for scientific literacy.

The trouble is that his argument is directed at people (academics in the liberal arts) who are not themselves especially literate in science and so is not likely to be effective. But I’m for it if it will help me understand why I’m compelled to write about Morlock Ambrosius fighting monsters in darkly numinous woods. I think.

I can’t say I was crazy about Heliotrope‘s fictional offerings, though. Samantha Henderson’s “Honey Mouth” is the best, a well-written if unsurprising ghost story. The closing lines are beautifully conceived. Edward Morris’ “On the Air” is an amusing alternate history. It’s not clear to me why all of these things would have resulted from from the USA entering WWI a year earlier than it actually did (the apparent cusp where Morris’ imaginary history diverged from ours), and the story drifts a bit (to the extent it can be called a story). But it was entertaining to contemplate Bix Beiderbecke, Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa and others swinging out in the house band of a 1930s “Twilight Zone.” Last and least was Michael Colangelo’s “American Gothic”. Aristotle criticizes two types of tragic plot: one where a good person comes to a bad end and one where a bad person comes to a bad end. This story combines both of these, along with some talking animals who have a penchant for eating human flesh. If you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’ll like (in Max Beerbohm’s deathless words). I found it dully dismal and dismally dull.

The common problem I had with these stories is the one I have with most of the fantasy I read nowadays: it’s not fantastic enough. Don’t bring me slices of this world: the odds are that you’re not showing me something I haven’t seen the like of. Bring me new worlds, so that I can see this world anew.

And a sandwich, if you’re passing by a deli on the way.

A short thread at deadcity icon‘s Livejournal provoked the question, Does genre matter?”

I think it does. Like anyone I can see the mainstreamification of sf/f concepts and tropes (e.g. Pynchon’s new book), but this phenomenon isn’t really new (e.g. most of Vonnegut’s work).

But the thing is, the sf concepts that transfer easily to the mainstream are largely sf-lite: alternate history (e.g. The Plot Against America), “my boyfriend is a vampire” (see approx. forty billion examples), Nightmare in Red! type of dystopia (e.g. 1984), etc. These involve worldmaking decisions (e.g. “If I have vampires in my book will I also have werewolves? Mummies? Abbot & Costello?”) but on a very low level. (At a thread on the sword and sorcery community I kicked this idea around recently.) The world (in mainstreamified sf/f) will not be flat, or ring-shaped; the sun will rise in the east and set in the west; there will be cars and corned beef sandwiches and telephones: a huge array of background material that can be assumed and does not need to be explained (or invented/appropriated).

If writers (or readers) want to explore a genuinely different world, though, they have to turn to genre fiction of a particular type: “deep genre,” in Judith Berman‘s trenchant phrase. In my view, something would be deep genre if the imaginary world (and the reader’s exploration of it) is a major part of the story-telling: the world is in the foreground, it is not just part of the background. Particular examples would fall along a continuous spectrum (from deep genre to fringe genre) rather than into discrete categorical boxes, but either end of the spectrum will be pretty clear. Margaret Atwood’s famous dismissal of sf as “talking squid in space” is relevant here. There will be no “talking squid in space” in mainstream sf/f until the likelihood of talking squids in space is much more widely accepted than it is right now. (Vonnegut’s Tramalfadorians might be an exception, or not.)

And that’s why genre matters. It’s your one sure source of fresh speaking squids when you want some. And sometimes some of us do.

Seen at James Nicoll’s blog: all the Nebula-award-winning novels hymned in haiku.

But it only went up to 2004, so the latest winner (Joe Haldeman’s Camouflage) isn’t included. Here’s a shot at haikuifying it:

The alien shark
changes its gender to “her.”
Chameleon’s bad.

Because this sort of thing is hard to stop, here’s one for the 2005 Hugo winner:

Jonathan was strange
and so was Mr. Norrell.
King George: stranger still.

I haven’t even looked at Wilson’s Spin, so I’ll lay down my pen here and (like Basho) walk away northward in the autumn rain.

It looks like there’s going to be a collection of four Philip K. Dick novels in the Library of America “You are now officially a dead writer of classic stature” series of tombstone-heavy volumes.

Here’s the story at GalleyCat:

http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/authors/its_official_philip_k_dick_great_american_writer_48160.asp

Jonathan Lethem is doing the notes but stops short of saying he’s the editor. It’s too bad there are no short stories: “The Father Thing”, for instance.

They’ve already done a Lovecraft collection, so it looks like the ice has been broken for sf/f. Future volumes I’d like to see (but don’t expect to): Fritz Leiber, Leigh Brackett, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Heinlein, Roger Zelazny, Kuttner & Moore…

[JE drifts so far from consensus reality that he can’t reach the keyboard]

_____

Addendum (11/29/06): You don’t actually have to be dead to be LibraryOfAmericized. Philip Roth is an example. He also writes sf/f, although it’s never marketed as such: e.g. Our Gang (part of which takes place in Hell), The Counter-Life, The Plot Against America etc.

In a recent thread on the many-threaded blog of James Nicoll, someone expressed surprise that Clifford Simak received the Grandmaster Award from SFWA.

This didn’t surprise me much (although I enjoy Simak). The Zeitgeist of the 1970s could not have been more friendly to Simak, “the bucolic poet of science fiction”, but the tenor of the 2000s couldn’t be more hostile. Simak is not especially literary in his conception or his delivery; his characterization is sketchy; his plots do not hinge on issues of hard science; his poker-faced quirkiness may not play well in an age when the boundary of quirk has moved very far from where it was at any point in Simak’s life. He was fond of dogs, goblins, comic strips, robots, androids, psychics and time travel, and it is hard to think of any theme more unfashionable nowadays than these, except for the countryside of the upper Midwest in autumn, which Simak was also very fond of.

But there are three reasons why I think Simak deserved his Grandmaster Award. One is simply time served: he was one of the few writers whose careers predated Campbell’s tenure at Astounding who were still steadily producing work in the 1970s (and continued to do so until they died). The only similar example I can think of is Jack Williamson, who was Grandmaster the year before Simak.

Another is his dogged willingness to pursue an idea to its limits, no matter if it ran counter to generally accepted notions. What if dogs ruled the Earth? (City.) What if peace and understanding are bad things? (“Paradise”, published in the burst of idealism that followed WWII.) What if space travel is impossible? (Time Is the Simplest Thing, published in 1961 as the Mercury Program was getting underway.) What if runaway capitalism destroys our culture? (This the theme of a couple novels written smack in the middle of the Cold War, Ring Around the Sun and They Walked Like Men.)

The last reason is that Simak seems to have had a lot of influence on writers who are better-remembered than he is. This occurred to me tonight as I was reading through Time and Again. I can’t say this is Simak’s best work: it takes itself a little too seriously for my tastes. (Although there is an amusing bit in the middle where an aged Simak appears and bores the hero by maundering on about a story he once wrote which is obviously Time and Again). But one thing that particularly struck me about the book is a sequence where the hero goes back in time to fulfill his destiny and he is befriended by a man named John Sutton. When Heinlein finally wrote a time travel novel (six or seven years after Time & Again was published), his hero goes back in time to fulfill his destiny and he is befriended by a man named John Sutton. The similarities are too close to be accidental; in fact, it looks like a deliberate tip of the hat by Heinlein.

Time and Again also involves a transtemporal war over the shape of the future. This looks a lot like Leiber’s Changewar stories, which would begin to appear some years later. The precursor of the Changewar stories is generally held to be Leiber’s own Destiny Times Three, which obviously influenced Time and Again. I may be completely wrong (tracing influences among contemporaries is tricky business), but it looks like Simak picks up the idea of a transtemporal war from Leiber, who takes it up again in response to Simak. The development of the idea is less like a monologue (Leiber talking to Leiber) than a conversation (Leiber talking with Simak) and maybe other voices should be added (e.g. Asimov’s End of Eternity).

Ursula LeGuin somewhere compares sf in the 40s and 50s to classical music in the 18th C., when Mozart and Haydn and that crowd were swapping musical ideas and forms to create a style of music that transcended any one composer’s creativity. If the comparison is valid (and I don’t know enough about music or sf to say for sure), Simak is one of the players in that orchestra.