A few covers showing the Joker, who undoubtedly loves April Fools’ Day. I doubt anyone wants to be on the end of his pranks though.
Neal Adams
Jerry Robinson from the Joker’s debut.
Here Dick Giordano shows us the Joker in his own book
And Randy Elliott for an issue of Batman Scooby-Doo Mysteries.
T. Kingfisher’s THORNHEDGE opens with a nervous, ugly fairy watching over a castle. She’s cut it off from the world with a thick wall of thorns, almost everyone’s forgotten it’s even there — only now a Saracen warrior has arrived, determined to find a way in and awaken the princess Which would be a Very Very Very Bad Thing … (a twist that’s been used at least once previously).
As my short story “Obolos” is a Sleeping Beauty riff I was curious what Kingfisher would do with the tale, and if they’d be too much alike. Nope: very different approaches (phew). I liked it, though the nature of the unspeakable monster felt a little off to me (for my taste she’s too powerful for the given origin).
While I saw British pantomime as a kid, I only remember bits of it. Becoming curious (for reasons too convoluted to explain) I checked Millie Taylor’s BRITISH PANTOMIME PERFORMANCE out of the library. Less of a historical perspective than I’d hoped for but a good look at the odd mix of fairytale riff, cross-dressing, slapstick. topical humor and musical that created this distinctive, much beloved form of stage entertainment. Taylor looks at how increasing costs have affected everything from the size of the dance troupe to the “slosh scenes” (slapstick) — sure, a pie fight might be cheap, but cleaning it up later can get pricey. The book looks at the way the pantomime cast invites the audience to participate (while carefully controlling their involvement), the key roles, the different methods for drawing an audience (from big name stars to local connections) and the occasional controversies — apparently some companies are nervous about the tradition of a woman playing the male lead role because they worry it gives the main romance a lesbian overtone (I’d be more freaked out over the Chinese stereotypes in Aladdin). A solid job analyzing the genre.
While TOPPER is novelist Thorne Smith’s most famous work, I’ve never particularly cared for it; as my Genre Book Club was doing “satire” this month I picked it up again and … nope (much as I love the movie).
Cosmo Topper is a successful banker smothering in his own stuffy respectability and the burden of his manipulative, hangdog wife. To perk himself up, he buys the car in which free spirits George and Marion Kerby died recently, drives by the scene of their death and oops, discovers he now has them for a companion. Having two drunken ghosts causing chaos around him soon makes Topper a pariah; not to worry, off he goes for a long, hedonistic vacation accompanied by Marion (George having duties elsewhere). However all vacations have to end …
The movie had the advantage of Cary Grant in the lead; more than that, it has a clear story arc — the Kerbys are stuck on Earth because they’ve never accomplished anything worthwhile so they set out to make Topper’s stuffy life worth living. Here, they drift along until the Kerbys run out of ectoplasm and have to leave. We soon drop the idea of Cosmo becoming a scandal in favor of him drifting through life for a while — and the book drifts with him. And much like James Branch Cabell’s Jurgen, the happy ending of Cosmo realizing his rather miserable marriage isn’t all that bad doesn’t convince. Overall it’s a dry run for better work by Smith later; I’m curious if the sequel, Topper Takes a Trip, improves on it as it’s the one Smith fantasy I haven’t read. Not curious enough to check it out just yet, though.
All rights to images remain with current holders.
Filed under Reading
This Tom Dunn cover captures an era when women working in Washington way outstripped the number of available men. This was a thing in WW I; I don’t know if it was true when this book came out in hardback in 1951.
This is one of those covers that looks a little strange in every era. Artist is uncredited.
All rights to images remain with current holders.
HOW THE HIPPIES SAVED PHYSICS: Science, Counterculture and the Quantum Revival by David Kaiser (the Atom cover was the closest to a physics image I had handy) argues that when the pre-WW II physics community pondered quantum physics, they wondered what it could all mean. Then the Manhattan Project and the push for applied science in the Cold War provided a rush of funding but for practical, applied physics — don’t worry about how the weirdness of subatomic particles makes sense, just crunch numbers!
By the 1960s, funding was dwindling. A new crop of researchers interested in Eastern mysticism and parapsychology began looking at how it all fit together — could Bell’s Theorem that electrons could interact somehow at a distance explain psi-powers like Uri Geller? This drew attention and funding from everyone from the CIA to EST-founder Werner Erhard; in the end, the wild new ideas didn’t lead to anything but they did spark fresh interest in asking “how does it work?”
The idea all of this saved physics is a bit of a stretch. I had a bigger problem in that it’s focused more on the researchers’ counter-culture lives (hanging out at Esalen, attending EST workshops) and I wanted more of the wild physics (quantum mechanics and nonlocality really are weird, wild shit). So a disappointment.
Happily looking for that book in the library catalog introduced me to the more interesting HIPPIE FOOD: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat by Jonathan Kauffman
Kauffman takes us back to the days when soup came in cans, white bread, white rice and white flour were the norm, and cereal was full of sugar. In the 1960s and 1970s, stuff I can now find in Publix or Harris Teeter, such as granola or tofu, were weird, exotic and not terribly appealing.
Change came from a variety of sources, even before the hippies were a thing. Pre-WW II, health reformers and mystic were touting the benefits of fresh food over canned and whole wheat flour over white, though as with The Great American Medicine Show, the sensible advice was mixed in with crackpot ideas and assurances about achieving perfect health (balance yin and yang in your diet and you’ll never get sick!). In the hippie age these ideas really flourished as food co-ops, anti-capitalists and farmers growing something called “organic vegetables” embraced similar ideas. This time they caught on. However the dreams of transforming agribusiness didn’t come to pass: instead, the capitalist system incorporated the ideas and foods and kept going. Many ventures found they had to turn a profit to keep operating; back-to-the-land advocates discovered that when crops fail due to storms or weather, you get very hungry. More informative than the physics book and occasionally amusing (some of the debates over how to proceed remind me of political arguments in college).
All rights to images remain with current holders. Atom cover by Gil Kane.
Filed under Reading
This Lou Feck cover makes me want to find out what the book is about.
This Frank Cazzorelli cover has a German expressionist quality to it, as if the woman’s terror were distorting the surroundings
This Richard Powers cover is from a Y/A book I read as a teen. It’s not as wild as many of his covers but it conveys the sense of Olympics+Science Fiction well.
All rights to images remain with current holders.
First the East Coast — John A. McDermott’s THE LAST SPIRITS OF MANHATTAN is a literary novel about what the author says was a real party Alfred Hitchcock threw in the 1950s at a house owned by McDermott’s relatives. I don’t know if it’s really based-on-truth (authors fudge that stuff a lot) but I also don’t mind. I picked the book up for the historical fantasy aspect — as I write it, it’s interesting to read it — and for the cool cover (my apologies to the artist for forgetting to note the name).
Carolyn, one of the lead protagonists in the ensemble cast, is an upperclass young woman contemplating a marriage proposal; she’s not really into him but then again, what else is she going to do with her life? Meanwhile Peter, a hustling young Manhattanite winds up hunting for a haunted house for Hitch’s party; trouble is, Manhattan’s developed and redeveloped and built up to the point old haunted houses are rare. As it turns out, Carolyn’s family have a house that looks spooky enough — it’ll do even though obviously there won’t be any real ghosts there to disturb Hitchcock, his wife Alma, Henry Fonda (then acting in Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man) and the other guests.
It’s an interesting setup but as I’ve mentioned often enough, literary fiction isn’t usually to my taste. McDermott’s literary stylings didn’t hold my interest, which is not his fault; I also found the more interesting stories (Carolyn and Peter) lost amidst the ensemble cast — I was much less interested in Henry Fonda’s tormented angst, for instance. Ultimately this didn’t work for me.
Now, the West Coast — ECOLOGY OF FEAR: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster by Mike Davis is a late 1990s jeremiad showing the utter insanity of massive multi-million dollar development in Southern California given what an insanely unstable environment it is. Earthquakes. Wild animals becoming increasingly dangerous as we move into their territory. Drought. Tornadoes. Wildfire. All of which Big Money makes worse.
Malibu homeowners, Davis says, oppose sensible firefighting measure such as controlled burns because the ash and smoke hurts their property values; nevertheless if they lose their homes they can count on the state government reimbursing them. By contrast, frequent tenement fires in LA’s poor districts leave tenants unhoused, with little support, and the fire department can’t even bother to make the required fire inspections on the rat-traps.
It’s an interesting read that branches into disaster movies set in LA (he dismisses Blade Runner as having little to do with the real city’s architecture and locations), then a closing chapter on the future that predicts the growth of exurbs and gated communities will kill the suburbs as the suburbs killed the downtown. This stuff was interesting, even if I don’t buy his conclusions, but it also left me feeling like I’d finished one of the 19th century fin de siecle prophesies of doom like the Victorian books Stephen Arata writes about. I’m curious whether much has changed in the quarter-century since the book came out, but not enough to research it.
All rights to image remain with current holder.
Filed under Reading
First this paperback cover. “A century ahead of her sex” refers to the adversaries being homo superior, I believe.
Second, this one, which the source credited to Bergey. Those are some comical looking aliens, aren’t they?
For more Bergey covers, click here.
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More than a decade ago, I listed Steve Englehart’s Captain America run as one of my top 10 favorite comics. It was an unpleasant shock when he left the book, Cap-creator Jack Kirby took over and proceeded to ignore everything Englehart had developed in favor of doing his own thing (for reasons explained here, Kirby wanted to ignore the rest of the Marvel Universe as much as possible). I’ve been following Alan Stewart’s recounting of the Kirby run and I can safely say I don’t like it any better than I did at the time. While I admire a lot of Kirby’s Silver Age and Fourth World work, at this point nothing he was doing impressed me (e.g., Devil Dinosaur).
Discussion on Alan’s blog got me to check out CAPTAIN AMERICA’S BICENTENNIAL BATTLES, one of the big treasury-edition books DC and Marvel were putting out back then — bigger size, bigger price, more profit per issue.
The story, such as it is, has the mystical Mr. Buda challenging Captain America about his belief in America, then sending him across time to experience it: the Chicago fire, a boxing bought with heavyweight legend John L. Sullivan, helping John Brown’s son protect a runaway slave, inspiring Betsy Ross in her design for the new flag she’s working on. There’s no plot, just a set of set pieces followed by an uninspired Why America Is Cool message. Like most of Kirby’s work after his return to Marvel, this had my wondering why people thought Kirby was such a genius.
I had more fun with ULTIMATE OZ UNIVERSE: The Lost Lands by Cullen Bunn and Mike Deodato. It’s the kick off of a new Oz series, adapting Land of Oz with Ozma of Oz to follow (I’m curious if they thought the ur-book was done too much, worried about flak from MGM which made the ’39 movie or what). It looks good —
— stays close enough to the story to satisfy me and the changes (adding a special ops Oz team working for Glinda, amping up Mombi’s powers) don’t annoy me. The exception is that I’d have preferred the Hungry Tiger and Cowardly Lion as animals rather than biped beast-men, and that in stripping Wogglebug of his personality as pompous academic, they’ve made him utterly blad. I’m also surprised given the reveal, that they don’t lean into the trans overtones. Still, a solid start.
Art by Kirby and Deodata, all rights to images remain with their owners.
As I said last month, when I budgeted time off for emergencies into my year’s goals, I didn’t anticipate losing a week to dog problems this soon.
Similarly, while I budgeted several hours for errands into my plans for March, I didn’t expect to use them up last Monday.
I knew it would be a long day because we were taking the dogs to their PT session and it included Plushie’s recheck, adding time. Plus TYG had a couple of necessary errands on the way home, adding time. Still, I’d planned for that: my writing time would be all Savage Adventures. Proofing it doesn’t require the same creative energy as writing fiction and if the workday broke into chunks I could adapt to that too.
Unfortunately Trixie had been peeing in the house the past couple of days, or getting really frantic to go out, so we’d scheduled an afternoon vet visit for her. Still had hopes of getting stuff done … but on the way to PT, our rear left tire took a nail. No immediate threat — it served as its own hole plug — but once we got back I had to take it down to a tire place. They said probably a half-hour; it wasn’t. In fairness I’d asked about patching and they decided it needed replacing. I thought about getting a second opinion but TYG said go ahead and pay it. I was happy not to take more time.
So Monday was a wash as far as doing anything writerly. An hour of Savage Adventures, nothing more. However Trixie’s on antibiotics for a UTI and improving and the rehab vet is very pleased with Plush Dudley’s progress — we may not see much improvement but she doesn’t anticipate things getting worse or having to go through another surgery. Yay.
That said, the week went reasonably well; it helped that The Local Reporter is still on hiatus (I do hope we’re back in action soon, though). I got about 10,000 words done on Let No Man Put Asunder and around 7000 on The Impossible Takes a Little Longer. Part of the work on the latter book was rewriting Chapter Two — normally I don’t go back until a draft is finished but so much bugged me about the chapter I took the time to fix it.
And that was it, other than a post about awkward film endings over at Atomic Junk Shop. Yesterday the cleaners were in and that never works out well for getting anything done. Still, getting some fiction written always feels good. Ditto knowing the dogs are in good health.
I’m not sure when it occurred to me that getting feedback from other people before I submitted my work might make it better.
While memory isn’t always accurate, I’m pretty sure I didn’t show my first novel to anyone until after I sent it off to DAW Books (came back with a “not bad, submit again,” which was quite a thrill). I showed my second novel (currently a new WIP as Let No Man Put Asunder) to my friends Martin and Cindy because I remember their feedback. Cindy, in particular, pointed out that my protagonist Adrienne (Mandy in the current WIP) didn’t have a purse or anything else to carry her stuff. I rewrote accordingly.
I’m a good self-editor. I can spot plot holes. I can sense places where my work needs something more, even if I can’t define what it is (eventually I do). I’m not an infallible self-editor. Showing my work to beta readers has made it so much better.
My short story “You Are What You Eat,” for instance, has the food in a married couple’s house possessed by ghosts. Every editor I submitted to said the ending disappointed them. Cindy made me see what was wrong with it: it had become a standard revenge story when it needed something weirder. I rewrote accordingly; it sold to Tales of the Talisman.
It’s hard as writers to see our work clearly. Once I’ve written a story I tend to think of the finished work as the only possible way it could have been done. Even if I can see alternatives, they’re clearly not as good. Obviously the reader will see that … right. Someone outside my head, reading cold, may (and usually does) have a completely different reaction. Sometimes it’s the aesthetics — the ending lacks oomph, the character’s issue got left unresolved. Sometimes I left out a point on the page that was very clear in my head, leaving the story an illogical mess. Plus the little things like changing a name between drafts and not catching all of them, head-hopping, etc.
This hasn’t always been an option. There have been stretches of time where for whatever reason I didn’t have anyone to provide a critique. I’m pretty sure I wrote Questionable Minds without any feedback; it’s a little too gruesome for Cindy and I didn’t have anyone else to ask at the time. I think it turned out well, and it got positive responses from some editors (even an acceptance, right before the publisher shut its doors). Still who knows if a more thorough beta-reading might have helped.
Now that I have my writer’s group here in Durham, that’s not a problem. I have feedback on almost everything, including my film reference books. They were great help on The Aliens Are Here and Watching Jekyll and Hyde, for instance — pointing out where I wasn’t clear, where I’d gotten bogged down in synopsis, where I’d wandered off topic.
Beta readers are not infallible either. And when you have 10 or more of them, there are inevitable outliers. The ending of my short story “The Schloss and the Switchblade,” for instance, has the lead hooking up with his long-ago crush. One of my beta readers had issues with that; I kept it in. Still, when you have a solid majority of people saying “that was a mistake,” it’s worth thinking about. And even one person can be right when they’re pointing out an obvious mistake.
Occasionally beta reading goes sour. About 30 years ago, I showed an intense, angry short story to one of my writer friends. She didn’t think it was marketable. This threw me enough I don’t think I ever tried to sell it — a shame, because what’s the worst that could happen? A no, that’s what, and I’ve had plenty of those. I didn’t submit it, which guaranteed it would never be accepted (and for various reasons, I don’t think it’s good enough now). I’ve no idea why that critique shook me so much, but it did.
Overall, though, beta reading has been a big win for me. I highly recommend it.
Rights to all images remain with their current holders. Questionable Minds cover by Samantha Collins.
Filed under Sherlock Holmes, Writing
