I am Legend to my once-family

“I don’t like nostalgia unless it’s mine.” — Lou Reed

I tried to find a nostalgia quote that was linked to old age, but I stumbled across this one by Lou and was happy to have (sort of) a reason to use it.

Why nostalgia for a zombie novel that is more than 50 years old?  Why did I take time off reading D.H.’s The Rainbow, to read an apocalyptic horror novel? Good questions all, for which I have good answers — I think.

First, a book such has The Rainbow deserves to be read in two or three consecutive sittings as it’s about learning the inner desires of characters and how one life flows into another. Not that I am Legend doesn’t have inner dialogue. In fact, it’s more about the protagonist’s thoughts about loneliness, despair and lost love than it is about zombies. The zombies are termed “vampires” in the novel, but they have a lot more in common with zombies. They stumble; they’re mentally impaired and were made undead by a bacillus rather than by supernatural means. But let’s not split – rather spill — body fluids. Whatever they’re called, the creatures in I am Legend serve more as the backdrop for the novel than the main plot line. They are “the situation,” if you will, not the reason entendre of the story.  The main theme of Matheson’s novel is survival, of social isolation, and of, as I inferred above, extreme alienation. He is completely dispossessed. Even his dog dies.

First, though, if you’ve seen the Will Smith movie by the same name, forget it. Though supposedly based on Matheson’s novel, it is about as much like it as a Big Mac and fries is like a dinner in a four-star restaurant. All the elements may be the same: meat, potatoes, a few vegetables, even some sort of special sauce, but the resemblance stops there.  Both will fill you up, of course, but one will merely sate, the other leave you with a feeling you’ve done something good and memorable for yourself; a moveable feast, if you will

This allusion to Hemingway may offend some, but I actually think stylistically that Matheson is the better prose stylist. Like Hemingway, his word choices are economical. He trims away the fat, and like drunken Papa, he doesn’t care much for lyrical prose. (What a departure both writers are from D.H. Lawrence!)  But Matheson does have these little moments as a writer when he inserts a short insight into his narrative that is more like buried treasure; almost poetry.

BTW, there have been two other movie adaptations of this novel. The 1971 film, The Omega Man,  with Charlton Heston, Anthony Zerbe and Rosalind Cash, was even less faithful to the novel than the Will Smith movie. The infected are purely zombies, but zombies who got a particularly nasty variety of fundamentalism along with their photosensitivity and flaking skin. You do get to see some brief nudity of Rosalind Cash – a real treat for twenty-something me when I first saw it. And the movie broached the inter-racial sex boundary of the early 70s, as I recall, when Charlie and Rosalind get it on.  But the movie doesn’t hold up, and if you enjoyed Matheson’s novel, you feel rather cuckolded. Hollywood cheated again. Hollywood is a whore. What else is new? However, Charlie and Rosalind do get it on, inter-racial sex, which was a sort of courageous thing to do on film in the early 1970s. So Hollywood, in typical cliche fashion, is sometimes the whore with the heart of gold.

By far the movie most loyal to the 1951 novel is the 1964 film, The Last Man on Earth, with Vincent Price playing the part of Robert Neville, a.k.a. the last man, a.k.a, legend to the vampires. Though I thought the  B&W movie very good — which was filmed in Rome, Italy — Matheson, who wrote much of the screen play, did not. He was evidently so embarrassed that he had his credits listed under an alias. You’ll find him listed in the movie credits as Logan Swanson. Hmm… I wonder how Richard, a.k.a, Logan, would have done it differently?

Enough digression. Back to the novel and my allusion to zombie nostalgia. Why did I read this novel that is primarily about a man cut off from all he loved and all that loved him?  Not to whine, but I suppose I was drawn to the novel because that’s the way I was feeling last night.  D.H.’s book is largely about family, love and connections, of which I have little to none these days. For some reason, reading the protagonist’s (Robert Neville) continuing angst, his near failing in to alcoholism, his return to sanity or something like it, and then his contentment with what he calls his solitary bachelorhood, was a kind of therapy. No matter that the novel ends in another personal tragedy for Neville. (It’s hard to do a spoiler on the book when Will, Vincent and Charlie all die at the end of their respective movies.) Despite all that, I came away from the novel feeling a bit more connected to people and the world at large.  It’s not if I not nearly as alone as Robert Neville. My lovers have all walked out the door, some to go back to their husbands, others for greener, younger haunts. My children are long gone and far away, and most the people I deal with day-to-day seem to be in some sort of consumer trance, buying what they can’t afford, moaning over their huge debt loads,  and still shopping like automatons anyway. But I’m good with all that, and I don’t need a drink to deal with the stillness of my own thoughts.  Now, perhaps, I can deal with the extended lyrical love poem that is The Rainbow without feeling depressed. Thanks, Richard.

Undiscovered Sci-fi Gems

I’m making a quick post from ApolloCon in Houston. There were lots of good panels here, but my favorite was “Undiscovered Gems.” On the panel were A.T. Campbell, Scott Cupp, Bradley Denton and Chris Nakashima-Brown, writers and fans all. (There was a fourth panelist, but she wasn’t on the program and I couldn’t see her placard — my apologies.)

The title of the panel could have well as been “Forgotten and Undiscovered Gems” for many of the books were well received decades ago but seem to have been forgotten by younger (under 30-35) readers. There was also some discussion as to the sad state of the NY publishing industry which has become, like Hollywood, afraid to take a chance on experimental fiction. That explains why we get so much crap Vampire Romance novels. The publishing industry has become conservative and hide-bound.

Anywhere, here’s a partial list. Feel free to comment or email me if you have additions:

Red Moon and Black Mountain by Joy Chant

Celestial Matters by Richard Garfinkle

The Goat Without Horns by Thomas Burnett Swann

Way Station by Clifford D. Simak

More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon

The Queen’s Gambit: A Novel by Walter Tevis

Blind Voices by Tom Reamy

Wizard of the Pigeonsby Megan Lindholm

Cosmic Banditos by A. C. Weisbecker

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick (and practically anything written else by him)

KW Jeter was a protégé of PK Dicks; many of his books, but particularly Dr. Adder, Morlock Night, were both recommended by the panel.

A Mirror for Observers by Edgar Pangborn

The Last Starship from Earth by John Boyd

Sex and the High Command by John Boyd

anything Michael Bishop wrote

Nortstrilia by Cordwainer Smith

Lifekeeper by Mike McQuay.

Memories by Mike McQuay

A Little bit of me

Someone made a comment on an older post (Argh! Scope this out) about the surgeon-cam version of my shoulder surgery. The good news is the shoulder is healed and there was no discernible scar. See, here’s the shoulder…..

…..well, there was a tiny one, but it looks like a blemish above Tara’s left eyebrow. Damn, if I can figure out a zombie tie-in to this. Let’s see, vanity? No, zombies are anything but vain. Something about the zombie-like impulse to get tats today. No, that’s an ungainly metaphoric stretch. If I’d been thinking ahead, I guess I should have had a zombie version of Tara (Buddhist goddess of enlightenment) done instead of a 1950’s pinup version.

Robert B.

Agent Zombies

Okay, I’m on a rant about the sad state of the publishing industry. Such rants are rarely interesting to a wide audienc. Feel free to skip directly to the cartoon at the end of the post. I’ll get over this eventually. Promise.

Okay, and onto the rant: Maybe there are good literary agents out there, but I have despaired of finding one in my lifetime. For years I went along, zombie-like, following traditional wisdom which was, like a message from on-high: YOU MUST HAVE A LITERARY AGENT TO GET PUBLISHED!

So for about two decades, I went sent off submissions to agents, waiting months for a reply, only to be turned down. As are most writers, I was insecure enough to take the rejections as note that whatever it took to be a novelist, I didn’t have it.

It was only when bypassed the whole agent process, skipping over agents entirely that I finally got published.

Two things pushed me over the edge: One was letting a friend — a lifelong science fiction reader — read a manuscript. She insisted my manuscript (The Unselfish Gene) was worth publishing, despite the agent rejections. The second thing that encouraged me was that the agent>publisher chain seemed to be selecting — over selecting, IMHO, for vampire romance novels. Why? After some thought and a little study, I decided it was agents, perhaps out of necessity, place the almighty buck over love of writing. So they — and the publishing industry in general — wants to go for the big bucks, the sure thing. The easily marketable thing. Anyway, I finally said screw the agent process altogether, and sent submissions in one form or another, to publishers of sci-fi fantasy who will accept un-agented submissions in one form or another. These publishers include Baen Books, Tom Doherty Associates, LLC, NY.(TOR books). Soft Skull Press, Prometheus Books, Penguin -Ace/ROC Immanion Books, and DAW. (Let me know if you hear of others, please.)

I may still get rejected, but by cutting agents out of the loop, I will have saved myself months of waiting and reading irritating rejection notes.

Click on the image to see a larger version.

The Space Vampires

Yes, it is an unfortunate title, but that essentially how the book starts out.

I read this book years, years ago. Colin Wilson was one of those seminal sci-fiction writers that had a big effect on me as young man. I’m primarily reading it now because I was cleaning under the bed and found a 1977 Pocket Book edition. I reread it years ago because of the movie version, “LifeForce,” a cult classic, due in part I’m sure because of the full-frontal nude shots of the beautiful space vampire. But if you’re looking for a movie faithful to Collin’s book, you’ll be rather disappointed.

That unfaithfulness aside,,the movie was good for what it was intended to be, a good British Sci-fi B-movie, a genre which I contend no one can do quite as well as the Brits. (And the human victims of the Space Vampires turn into soul sucking (not brain sucking) zombies. What more could you want from a movie: beautiful breasts, occult themes, and soul-sucking zombies.

Here’s the trailer:

And here’s an excerpt with the best line of the movie. (”I’ve been in space six months, and she looks perfect to me.”) Note the expression on the female astronaut’s face when her male astronaut colleague utters these words. Perfect!

Back to the book, whose premise is that we are all energy vampires to some degree. Still, the opening of the book and the movie are about the same: A huge, miles-long spaceship is found in space, apparently millennium old, but with perfectly preserved humans in crystal caskets. The Earth space ship bring the preserved humans back to Earth where all hell breaks loose as a vampire plague is released.

After that, the book and the movie diverge. More on this divergence later, but the book has a long occult middle. Collin’s space vampires don’t want to attract too much attention. Their plans for conquering Earth are more like that of a banker. They corrupt powerful people, and run things through them. At least that’s how it looks about 3/4 way through the book. In the movie, the space vampires get right down to business. In about 24 hours, London is a vampire zombie war zone.

More later.

Zombie Newpaper Reporters

My news release, headlined: “New phorid fly species turns red imported fire ants into ‘zombies’” is going International. I got calls from the NY Times, regional papers, and most recently, Ynetnews, an Isreali News Agency. (Human reporters are such easy prey.)

Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

or how we modern readers accept many artificial conventions of the modern novel in a mindless way — you might say Zombie fashion. (There, I got the zombie tie-in. hah!)

I was turned on to this book via James Wood’s “How Fiction Works.” Wood cites Saramago,who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998, as a unique stylist.

That he is. I learned from Wood that the way we expect novelists to handle dialog . . .
(”I love you,” she said.
“I’ve heard those words before,” he said. “Show me.” )

… was the invention of Gustav Flaubert. In the 19th Century, it was innovative, but is a long way from realism.

In Saramago’s novel, we follow Ricardo Reis through the last year of his ‘life.’ I put ‘life’ in quotation marks, because we soon learn Reis is one of the personae of a real-life Portuguese poet. In this way, we are constantly reminded, perhaps in the same way as we are in some new wave cinema, that we are reading a work of fiction. As a result, one (at least I did) teeters on the edge of being emotionally absorbed by Reis’ struggle in 1936 fascist Portugal and intellectually unraveling the portent of his life. I know this sounds a bit obscure, but trust me it works.

Along the way, the reader has to give up the comfort of tradition dialogue. The dialog and exchanges between characters should be run-on and lose one, as their is not a single ,” he said. Or ,”she said, that I can find in the whole novel. But such is Saramago’s power of writing, that even without such punctuation clues, I always knew who was saying what.

Here’s an example, and the quotation marks are mine, not Saramago’s:

“Ricardo Reis is engrossed in these thoughts, some of them perhaps too difficult to unravel for anyone who like ourselves is on the outside, but Ramon, who sees much, inquires, Do you wish anything else, Doctor, a tactful way of saying, thought expecting the negative, that the doctor does. We are apt at understanding that sometimes half a word suffices. Ricardo Reis rises to his feet, says Goodnight to Ramon, wishes him a Happy New Year, and ….”

Maybe that gives you an idea. If you read novels for non-stop action or lots of sex, this book is not for you. Ricardo Reis and the world Saramago builds around him are both complex and compellingly human.

If you want a new way a looking at how an author builds such characters and worlds, then you might find this book interesting.

Both Wood’s book and Saramago’s are required reading for any novelist wishing to improve his or her craft, IMHO.

Robert Burns
http://unselfishgene.com
and
http://www.authonomy.com/ViewBook.aspx?b…





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Rejection Synchronicity and Breathless

Lately I’ve been experiencing some of those events of synchronicity a’ la Carl Jung. No need to hop to the link if you’re not in the mood. In the way I’m using the word here, it means simply experiencing people-events that shouldn’t be connected but are not. Specifically, believe it or not, I’m going to get around about talking about the different ways people respond to books and cinema.

In the last few weeks, I had the same conversation with a number of passionate book readers. (Passionate about books,not about me.) “I can’t go to films,” she says (yes I was trying to get a date) “They put me to sleep.” Or similarly, sort of synchronistic way. “I can’t sit still. I have to go out in the lobby.”

Now I realize that this might not be a psychic synchronicity, but simply the way women are reacting to me these days, that they might really be telling me that it is I who puts them to sleep or I who makes them want to get up and run away, but it got me thinking. All three women are of the type who can read anything; who might just prefer immersing themselves into a literary narrative to anything else. (Including me.) Then why can’t they get into the narrative of film.

It can be observed that for intelligent people many Hollywood movies today are tiresomely predictable, particularly the thrillers and spy moives, but the ones that rely largely on CGI effects too. But there are still good films made occasionally, even by Hollywood, one’s that can provoke thought, but admittedly not in the way that a good book does.

But why? I asked myself. Today I watched Breathless, the 1960’s French New Wave film by François Truffaut. It was, in someway, like reading a book. I kept dropping out to think about things. Because I’m an intellectualy wannabe, I turned on the narrative, in which a professor of film explained to me that’s exactly what Truffaut was up to. In a kind of anarchist fashion, he emphasized naturalism, but at the same time, was always giving these little signals to remind the audience that they were watching a movie. Then would skip over the boring parts of action, say the shooting of a motorcycle cop, with what were called “jump cuts,” in much the same way a writer would just hit the high points to keep the action moving. Truffaut would also spend a lot of time focusing on two characters just talking, not just because they were pretty people, but to expand on their character development.

At the end of the movie, I felt involved as with a book, not absorbed. In other words, the movie made me think about things — people, their relationship to each other and their environment — while the movie was ongoing, not afterward.

In the end, as he lays dying, the anti-hero’s either says life is a bitch or tells his lover she’s a bitch for turning him in to the cops, depending on the translation and how you view the situation. Sort of anti-climatic. The director was saying, I think, that everything is open to interpretation and the time and place, even a woman telling you that she doesn’t want to go to movie with you because cinema zombie-fies her.

Shameless self promotion: visit The Unselfish Gene and click on “Where to Buy.”

I’m a bad, bad Buddhist, Mr. Fire Ant

Well, actually, I’ve never claimed to be a good one, but the moral precept against killing would definitely stop me from reaching an enlightened state. Chalk it up to fire ants.

Actually out the four big ones (killing, stealing, lying, sexual misconduct) I’d probably fail on the last too, but that’s a subject for a different blog.

But fire ants, by Buddha, deserved to be eradicated from the face of the Earth! If you’re lucky enough never to have encountered them, take it from me they are the nastiest little critters on the planet. They are the seeds of sci-fi horror movies. Left to live, they will take over your yard, your house too, maybe kill your horse, and all the beneficial insects in the local environment, including all other ant species

First a flashback. When I was about 12 or so, I saw Naked Jungle, with Charlie Heston (I’ve seen so many of his b-movies including Omega man, that the dead actor and I are on first-name basis.) Charlie is a lonely South American plantation owner who forgoes all the courting and romance and orders a mail order bride from New Orleans. She’s a good girl though, maybe that’s the problem (cough, cough) but the first half of the movie is about, from what I can gather, what an a-hole Charlie’s character is.

Then come the commie ant hordes, and we escape all these complicated human emotions and get right down to war. It’s a great war too, with Charlie making heroic efforts not just to save his plantation from ants who are stripping all vegetation bare and eating his cattle down to bare bones before they can so much as go “mooo?”, but Charlie sacrifices himself to save his indentured servants, including his mail-order bride.

Now back to fire ants, think Naked Jungle in slow mo. Or stop motion. Worse in a way. The ants (Army ants) in Charlie’s movie sting at first crawl. Fire ants will wait until a hundred or so of their sisters are on you, then they’ll all sting at once. Sort of like a Blitzkrieg, the little nazis. (Okay, I also alluded to them as commies, but that was the ants in Charlie’s cold war era movie. Fire ants are more like some sort of entrenched hate group. Or, in the spirit of this blog, a zombie horde, mindlessly shuffling along, devouring all in their path.)

I keep thinking of the image of Buddha touching the Earth with one finger in affirmation of life and the middle way. I wonder if he would have been able to reach that point if he’d been sitting on a fire ant colony. Probably so, but then he was a bodhisattva, and obviously, I’m not. Now pardon me while I go to the hardware store to get some baited poison for my little friends.

Heros like us

Think of it as a kind of hiatus: Your writer (me) standing at the threshold of another novel, deliberating whether to go on, thinking I would make better use of my life doing something more appreciated by society, such adopting a highway. (You and I both know that as I have the writing disease, this is only so much crap, as I’ll keep writing these things until I die though I probably will never make any money at it. Just goes to show ya’; one doesn’t have to be undead to exhibit zombie-like mindless behavior.)

Anyway, it’s at this time, I always try to make an outline and fail. But I typically do a lot of reading,, some of it background, some of writers I’d like to be as good as. Currently, I’m reading something old and something new. The old thing is a work of fiction, “Parasites Like Us,” by Adam Johnson, and the something new (to me) is “The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” by Joseph Campbell.

I’ve read Johnson’s book two, maybe three times before, which makes me a fan, I guess. Several years ago, I found a hard cover edition of the book on the local B&N’s bargain table for like $5.95 or something. I read the first time in one sitting, and my only question was “why haven’t I heard of this guy before?” Moreover, he seems to be a one-novel wonder, which to me is a mystery — both the one-book thing and why the one-book, after winning a couple of awards, apparently didn’t sell well.
Johnson’s prose is at once dark, insightful and humorous, his story-telling compelling. More important, it’s one of those works that taps some unseen mystical place in my imagination. Yes, it’s a cliche, but the book speaks to me and makes me enjoy it as it does so.

I wasn’t sure why Johnson’s book is so effective a work until I began reading Campbell’s book. Now I’m enlightened. Written in 1948, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” posits how the great myths, from Grecian to Hindu, the world religions, from Christianity to Islam to Buddhism, fairy tales and fables, all share a common structure. The over-structure — or rather story line is thus: Separation –> Initiation –> Return. Each of these major divisions — think three-scene structure, is further divided by Campbell into subsections, such as the hero’s call to adventure, separation, atonement with the father-God, etc.

What’s was enlightening to me was 1) that this is probably the reason that Johnson’s book works so well,not just on a surface plot, but yielding sense of telling basic, fundamental truths about human nature. And more amazing, is that (2) as this structure is archetypical (in a Jungian sense) I realize that I’ve been trying, subconsciously, to reconstruct it in my writing. Moreover, when I look back on a novel, say Messengers of an Alien God, and pick out the places that I had trouble with, where the plot or the psychology of the characters just didn’t seem to ring true, that was where I diverged from the archetypical story line of Campbell’s universal hero.

More on this later…..