The Getaway Special, by Jerry Oltion (2001)

One of the many pleasures of summer reading is the serendipitous discovery of new authors.  Since I have raley read much science fiction since my boyhood, I had missed the ascendance of Jerry Oltion (born 1957).  Fortunately, I have just come accross his delightful 2001 novel, The Getaway Special.

Few books would better define summer reading than The Getaway Special, the very theme of which is escape.  It is the story of NASA space shuttle pilot Judy Gallagher and what happens when research scientist Allen Meisner tests his new invention, a hyperdrive that enables spacecraft to travel light-years through space in the blink of an eye.

Meisner is a member of INSANE, the International Network of Scientists Against Nuclear Extermination.  He believes that hyperdrive technology available to the masses will drive humankind’s pioneer spirit, and people will travel through the vastness of space in homemade space craft, populating the universe and ensuring that humanity survives possible nuclear extinction here on earth.  While on the shuttle, and with Gallagher’s help, Meisner broadcasts the secrets of his hyperdrive, which can easily be made with parts at the local Radio Shack.

Instead of being hailed as heroes upon their return, Gallagher and Meisner become fugitives – it seems that the US wants to cover up the whole thing as a hoax and keep the technology for themselves; similarly, governments around the world believe that easy access to off-planet escape technology would greatly reduce the control of people entrapped by their own nations and governments.

Hiding in the American Midwest, the couple are befriended by a redneck cowboy libertarian, his wife, and a friendly Robin Hoodesque bank robber.  With their help -- and with some easily available around the home parts and a well-stocked septic tank (don’t ask) – they leave the earth in search of habitable planets.

In space, further than any human being has ever traveled before, they encounter a race of super-intelligent, space-travelling butterflies, sentient trees that uproot themselves and move around, and … a submarine full of belligerent Frenchmen.

As you can tell from this quick synopsis, The Getaway Special is a lark, designed to amuse and entertain – which is does wonderfully.  It is a very funny book (a rarity in science fiction), and is ultimately extremely humanistic and optimistic (a rarity in contemporary science fiction). 

While reading The Getaway Special, I had the curious feeling of renewing an acquaintance, and then it hit me – in mode of storytelling and imaginative prowess, Oltion was writing a book very much in the vein of L. Frank Baum’s Oz novels.  Like the Oz novels, our heroine and her male friend (often inadequate in some way), travel far and meet a serious of outlandish peoples, who eventually help them return home and resolve the problems that sent them on the road to begin with.  In short, Oltion has written an extremely amusing children’s book for adults.

When looking at Edgar Rice Burroughs yesterday, we said that science is really always about the time in which it is written, and not the future.  That is certainly true here – released before September 11^th, The Getaway Special is frank and honest about how severe a compromise to American interests would be viewed.  However, Your Correspondent read it with a trace of nostalgia – there was still some semblance of law and checks-and-balances of power at play in the novel, and one imagines that today that our heroes would have been shot out of space while broadcasting the hyperdrive specs.

Also interesting is the politics at play.  Oltion seems to appreciate the often good sense of the Right to perceive real and present threats, while also giving credence to the Left and its belief that the vast majority of human beings want the same things.  (And with a forest of sentient trees, Oltion is literally a tree-hugger.)  And one of the more heroic characters (indeed, the one perhaps most responsible for humanity’s eventual survival … is a beer-guzzling libertarian in a cowboy hat.

Oltion’s work is new to me (though he has been active for some time), and I will happily seek out other books.  I was also amused to learn that there is more than a little Allen Meisner in him.  Oltion is the inventor of the trackball telescope, an equatorial mounting system with an electromechanical star tracking drive.  He has put the patent-able portions of it on his Website, making his invention accessible to other telescope makers.

Beyond 30 (AKA The Lost Continent), by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1915)

During your correspondent’s misspent youth – back when dinosaurs ruled the earth – he spent most of his summer vacations reading the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950).

Yes … most of you have just lost what little respect for me that you may have had.  However, I believe you judge too harshly.  I say without shame and in complete candor that some of the people I met in my ramblings through ERB’s corpus are among the most important literary friendships that I have made.  Tarzan of the Apes, John Carter of Mars and the explorers of the subterranean world of Pellucidar, where intelligent reptiles live at the Earth’s core, are as real to me to this day as many actual human beings that I have met in later life.  And some of them even make better friends.

No one will argue for a moment that ERB is a prose stylist, or that his insight into human nature was a rare and subtle one.  More damming to his literary reputation are his sensibilities and taste for high adventure; most modern novels are simply slices of life that may better labeled why we are miserable now.  ERB has no patience for that type of thinking or that type of narrative.  ERB wrote adventure stories – set in some of the most exotic places on and off of the planet – and they were unabashedly plot-driven.  If you want know the plight of unhappy men in a midlife crisis, or women struggling for identity in a world redefined by feminism, look elsewhere.  Want to learn how a Civil War soldier miraculously transported to Mars, befriends four-armed green giants and battles rampaging, carnivorous white apes, and you’ve come to the right place.

Minds as brilliant and creative as Carl Sagan (1934-1996), Gore Vidal (1925-2012), Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), William Joyce (born 1957) and Jane Goodall (born 1934) have all credited him as an influence, and his contribution to global popular culture is incalculable.

Whatever the faults or strengths of his particular novels, what is most remarkable about his work is the experience of reading ERB.  The adventure novels of ERB has the remarkable quality of affecting the reader in ways unexpected and serendipitous.  Aside from (not so) simple narrative pleasures as a compelling storyline and absolutely unfettered imagination, it is impossible to read ERB without a sense of delight and of wonder.  In the world of ERB, all bets are off and most anything is possible.  There is a sense of energy, drive and, for want of a better word … pep.  ERB is a tonic; read him and grow young again.

And … ERB believed in adventure.  Much of the literary establishment has written off ERB not only for his prose, but also for his abundant output and for his choice of genre.  ERB was no hack, churning out novels at a penny a word.  Rather, ERB lived in an imaginative landscape that was a real to him as the workday world is real to us.  His Martian society, the (mostly invented) African jungle of Tarzan, and the land at the Earth’s Core all share a sense of … conviction.  In his way, ERB was a serious novelist--as his worlds mattered to him; there was a compelling urgency to his vision that is evident in his fiction.

Finally, ERB had a very definite sense of what life should be.  Unlike many contemporary writers, ERB let it be known that life was for living.  Or, as the hero in Beyond Thirty says when finding land:

"It is the nearest land," I replied. "I have always wanted to explore the forgotten lands of the Eastern Hemisphere. Here's our chance. To remain at sea is to perish. None of us ever will see home again. Let us make the best of it, and enjoy while we do live that which is forbidden the balance of our race—the adventure and the mystery which lie beyond thirty."

I was thinking about Burroughs recently when I luckily came across his book Beyond Thirty while rummaging through the invaluable www.manybooks.net.  This is a resource of public domain books available for free download – and if you want to learn more about ERB, there is no better place to start.

At any rate, I cannot think of the summers of my past without thinking, too, of ERB.  I make it a point to at least revisit one of his novels every summer, or, if possible, read one I have not come across before.  Beyond Thirty (sometimes also called The Lost Continent), was first published in All Around Magazine, and did not appear in book form in ERB’s lifetime.  It was collected in book form first in 1955, and later in 1963 with a delightful cover by artist Frank Frazetta (1928-2010). 

The story takes place in 2137, when Pan-American’s Navy Lieutenant Jefferson Turck, commander of aero-submarine Coldwater, patrols the 30^th meridian from Iceland to the Azores.  The ship’s anti-gravitation screens fail, and it drifts beyond the forbidden territory into Europe.

Europe had been off limits to Pan-America since the start of the Great War in the early 20^th Century, and Turck and a handful of loyal men find themselves in a now savage landscape that was once the civilized world.  Ladies and gentlemen, Beyond Thirty is a corker.

Most science fiction is never really about the future – but, rather, serves as a distorted mirror to the present.  Written in 1915, the world was then plunging into the conflict of the Great War.  The vast majority of the American population (and their politicians) favored an isolationist approach.  What would the world be like, ERB seems to ask, if the New World withdrew from the world stage?  It would appear as if ERB anticipated the American Century before most of the world did – for his tale tells of a unified North, Central and South America that has achieved many marvels of super-science, while war-ravaged Europe perishes when left to its own devices.

Also interesting is what ERB posits happens to a Europe ravaged by global conflict without American intervention.  In short, England descends into barbarism, the countryside now ravaged by wild animals that were once kept in zoos.  Continental Europe is now largely enslaved by Moslems from Abyssinia – who are using slave labor and whatever military expertise they have to prepare for a definitive conflict with the sleeping giant that is China.  With a little tweaking, it would seem as if the foreign policy concerns of a century ago were as pressing today as they were then.

Beyond Thirty is a remarkable and satisfying romp by one of the masters of the form.  It is an extremely short novel, and as a free download, would serve as a terrific introduction to the imagination of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Master Magicians and Phantoms: An Interview with Lee Falk, Part I

We dig once again into the archives for an interview I did with comic book legend Lee Falk (1911-1999), originally conducted in 1996.

Back in those days, your correspondent worked for several magazines as an interviewer and critic.  I had the great pleasure to interview some of the most significant figures of Pop Culture, but few were as enjoyable as my talk with Lee Falk.

The following interview appeared around the time the film adaptation of his comic strip The Phantom appeared, and was later, in 2011, translated into Swedish (!) for a book celebrating Falk’s centennial.  I hope you enjoy it.

Some men are touched in profound ways by the magic stuff of their boyhood.

A case in point is comic strip legend Lee Falk. He read the stuff of boys, and it stayed. He was touched by Burroughs' Tarzan and Kipling's Mowgli, and with a little world myth thrown in, created The Phantom, The Ghost Who Walks, The Man Who Cannot Die. And now, at 83, he still does it, turning out the adventures of the Phantom three generations of boys later. In fact, 1996 is the 60th Anniversary of The Phantom, and Falk still writes his daily adventures.

That is not all. In 1934, Falk, then a college student with dreams of being a writer, created the elegant Mandrake the Magician, an avenger in evening clothes and suave mustache, one of the ultimate icons of 1930s heroism. Mandrake's adventures are still widely read, and still scripted by the energetic Falk.

Lee Falk is a working legend. He has holds the world's record for writing the continuing adventures of any comic strip character, and with The Phantom, created the costumed superhero. The Phantom's 60th Anniversary will be marked with a new Phantom film from Paramount, starring Billy Zane as the masked avenger, and Treat Williams as the villain. Based on several stories penned by Falk, and set in the 1930s, this promises to be a treat comic strip lovers will not want to miss.

I caught up with the busy Mr. Falk at his home in Manhattan's Upper West Side in June 1995.

Could you give us some background on yourself?

Well, I was born in Missouri, many years ago. I started Mandrake in 1934, when I was still in University of Illinois, and started The Phantom two years later. I'm very proud that this is the 60th Anniversary of The Phantom, and Mandrake is still going strong at 62. I still write them both, always did, daily strips and Sunday papers. I haven't drawn them in many years, many, many years. It takes more than two or three men to do that much work!

When I first started, I first drew Mandrake for fun for myself. I drew up two weeks of daily strips, and took my time with it, very slow, and made changes. I had some help from an older artist. Then I sent these two weeks of daily strips for Mandrake to King Features, and, to my amazement, they optioned them! And they wanted a Sunday page, too.

So I suddenly realized that these are not cartoons, these are illustrations. Whereas old friends of mine like Al Parker and Bud Briggs, well known magazine illustrators at the time, could do one or two illustrations in one week, here I had two comic strips with about 18 panels a week, with another eight panels or so for Sunday. Each panel is an illustration. A lot of work. Eventually I got Phil Davis to take over Mandrake when I started The Phantom.

What comic strips at this time were big influences on you, or inspiration?

That's a good question. What really influenced me more were not comic strips, but novels like Tarzan, or the Jungle Book of Kipling.  As a boy, my reading was the great adventurers and detectives like Arscene Lupin. Mandrake comes out of all that. He was a crime fighter. Remember that Mandrake, started as a stage magician, but I turned him into a hypnotist, an illusionist. He creates illusion, things don't really happen, you just think they do. Incidentally, in the very first story I had introduced this African Prince, bodyguard, Lothar. The idea was teaming a big, powerful physical man and the mental giant Mandrake. And then gradually Lothar, who used to wear a leopard skin and so forth, was modernized, to sports shirts and boots, and his Pidgin English was turned to proper speech, and he became Mandrake's friend, rather than bodyguard. And these two actually were the first black and white crime fighters, as far as I know, anywhere. This was long before Cosby and Culp's I Spy; there weren't any black and white crime fighters. It wasn't my intention to do something in that area, it just happened. And then, as years passed, it became very commonplace to have a black and white team. As you know, it is a common theme in movies to this day.

What was the genesis or inspiration for Princess Narda?

Princess Narda just a beautiful, ideal young woman. There was no special influence for her.

Could you tell us a bit about your relations with Phil Davis, and does he remain your favorite Mandrake artist?

Phil was an older artist that I knew. I was about 22; he was in his early 30. He had a lot of success with his illustrations in magazines like Liberty and Colliers. He did very well, but he got tired of it. He welcomed a chance to get out of the rat race of a freelance illustrator, where he had to submit stuff to agencies and get it backed changed, and so forth. With Mandrake, he could just sit down and draw. He worked with me very early on Mandrake, and then I turned over all the drawing to him. He did very tight pencil work on it. We got Ray Moore, another artist. These guys were all older than me: Ray Moore was kind of a Bohemian artist, very interesting man. He did the inking on the strip. I continued to do some of the layout. But when The Phantom came along, I had no time. I got Ray Moore to come off of Mandrake and onto The Phantom.

Two or three years later, I stopped drawing The Phantom layouts completely. I stopped drawing over a half century ago!  But I continued, without a break, until as we speak, to write the stories.

These are adventure strips, and I think of them as illustrated stories which appear in the newspapers.

More Lee Falk tomorrow!

Empire State and Seven Wonders by Adam Christopher

The cover, sadly, is the best thing about Empire State

We should make it clear from the outset that we here at The Jade Sphinx read a great many trashy novels.  However, as with all things, there are degrees of trash … and I will happily champion the work of writers as diverse as Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950), Zane Grey (1872-1939) and Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961).  However, most genre fiction is barely readable, and much of it downright embarrassing.

This is particularly true in two new subgenres that seem to have taken the science fiction world by storm: steampunk and superhero novels.  Superheroes, of course, are familiar to anyone who has been awake and attentive to pop culture for the past 25 years; steampunk, however, may take some explaining.  Steampunk is science fiction set in the past (usually the Victorian era), but featuring retro-futuristic gadgetry or inverted social structures.  One would think that the possibilities are limitless, but, actually, nearly all steampunk is gimcrack stuff.  The overarching problem with the steampunk genre is that its practitioners really do not understand the past, or, worse yet, that everything they know about the past was gleaned from comic books and old television shows.

These thoughts – and others – drifted through my mind while reading two novels by Adam Christopher (born 1978), an emerging voice in the science fiction arena.  His first book, Empire State (2012), is about an alternate 1920s-1930s: a pocket universe of supervillains, lesser gangsters, hard-bitten PIs, airships and superscience.  In summary, it sounds like something right up my alley – I love that era and the pulp fiction written during it, and the book sounded like goofy fun.  I pulled this, and his second novel, The Seven Wonders (also 2012) from the shelf.  The Seven Wonders, if anything, looked like even more fun: a West Coast city full of superheroes, an ordinary man suddenly gifted (or burdened) with superpowers, and a threat from outer space.

Well… both books are major disappointments to even the most cursory readers of the genre.  Empire State is a thudding bore, and your correspondent found it a slough to get through it.  The book is innocent of a single fresh idea, and the situations and characterizations are third-and-fourth-hand: everything is a reflection of some earlier trope, or, worse still, a reflection of a reflection.  Readers looking for an Art Deco romp should go elsewhere.

More egregious was The Seven Wonders.  The book deals with a team of superheroes and how they react when a new, superpowered entity emerges.  It also has a supervillain who changes alliances, a duplicitous sidekick, a moon base and various global threats.  In it is nothing even remotely resembling a human being: the characters are all riffs on existing comic characters, and the story a pastiche (not a meditation, mind, but a pastiche) of comic book conventions.  Complete with four (or five – I lost count) finales, it seemed to this reader like a novel that wouldn’t end. 

The Seven Wonders also has to be the first book in recent memory that uses the word f-ck as a noun, verb, adjective, adverb, expletive and gerund.  Such linguistic flexibility may satisfy undemanding readers, but adults may be looking for a little bit more.

Both novels were written by someone who knows a great deal about science fiction and comic books, but nothing whatsoever about life.  

Remembering The Man of Bronze

One of the most influential fictional characters of the 20^th Century is someone you’ve probably never heard of: Dr. Clark “Doc” Savage, Jr., the Man of Bronze.  He made his debut in pulp magazines 80 years ago in March, 1933 (around the same time that King Kong made his first appearance).  Doc Savage Magazine was published by Street & Smith, and Doc was created by publisher Henry W. Ralston and editor John L. Nanovic, but most of the 181 novels were written by wordsmith Lester Dent (1904-1959).

Doc Savage was a surgeon, explorer, scientist, researcher, criminologist and all-around physical marvel.  He did two hours of intense exercise every day, giving him a fabulous physique.  His body had been tanned a deep bronze during his world travels, and newspapers have dubbed him The Man of Bronze.

Along with his medical degree, he holds several scientific degrees and has published extensively in everything from physics to anthropology.  He lives on the 86^th floor of the Empire State Building, which includes his living quarters along with his various laboratories.  Doc leaves this fabulous art deco paradise by personal elevator, which moves so fast that he is usually the only one who can remain standing during its descent.

Doc stores his cars, submarine, plane, autogiro and dirigible in an abandoned warehouse in lower Manhattan emblazoned with the legend The Hidalgo Trading Company.  This is something of a joke on Doc’s part (a rarity, as he seldom jokes) – Hidalgo is the Central American nation in which a lost tribe of Mayans mind his private gold mine.

When Doc is not traveling the world, battling mad scientists, super-villains and various fascists, he travels to the Arctic Circle to his Fortress of Solitude, where he can catch his breath and devote time to his scientific studies.  It is also the spot where Doc, an inveterate tinkerer and inventor, creates most of his gadgets.  Doc the Gadgeteer is legendary, creating hypnotic gas, “mercy” bullets that only stun, lightweight bullet-proof vests, the first answering machine, radar…. The list goes on and on. 

How did Clark become the Man of Bronze?  Doc is, in the final analysis, something of a scientific experiment himself.  His father created a strenuous training program for his only son; Doc was reared by a group of scientists who not only developed Clark’s body, but his mind, as well.  Though this sounds like it may have been something of a grind, young Doc was also taken around the world to learn the many languages he speaks, as well as various “mystic” arts of the East.  His boyhood travels alone would have been enough to make Indiana Jones footsore.

Doc has a coterie of friends who go adventuring with him, nicknamed The Fabulous Five.  The Five are the top men in their fields, and include Theodore Marley “Ham” Brooks, famous lawyer and fashion plate; Andrew Blodgett “Monk” Mayfair, brilliant chemist who looks vaguely simian; John “Renny” Renwick, celebrated engineer who has a penchant for knocking down doors with his oversized fists; William Harper “Johnny” Littlejohn, archeologist and anthropologist with a taste for big words; and Thomas J. “Long Tom” Roberts, the world’s leading electrical engineer.  Doc met these five men during the Great War – all are Doc’s senior by at least a decade or more, but Doc calls these men “brothers” and they are fiercely devoted to one-another.

The earliest stories would include all five of Doc’s friends, but later tales would include only two or three, most frequently Monk and Ham, who have a good natured rivalry and inflict endless harassment upon one-another. 

Oddly enough, Doc’s pulp magazine success was not transferable.  There was a best-forgotten radio series and a truly execrable movie version in 1975.  And most Doc Savage comic books fall flat – an oddity considering the visual potential of the corpus.

So … what is so special about the Doc Savage novels?  Well… in terms of influence, Doc’s achievement is colossal.  He was the template for the much better-known Superman, and, indeed, much of the mythology of Superman was stolen from Doc.  Both are named Clark.  Doc is the Man of Bronze; Superman the Man of Steel.  Superman has a Fortress of Solitude up north, and a group of supporting characters beside whom he can look more super.  Most tellingly, advertising art for Doc Savage Magazine often simply read … SUPERMAN.  Doc, however great his accomplishments, is fully human; Superman’s Kryptonian past separates him from us.  Doc is what we all could be, if only.

Doc the Gadgeteer has also influenced everyone from James Bond to The Man From U.N.C.L.E., as well as the adventuring family seen on Jonny Quest and even the dysfunctional adventurers found on The Venture Brothers.  Another key quality of the Doc Savage novels are their exotic locales – the novels usually open in a sun-kissed New York, a sort of art deco neverland – and before long Doc and his crew are in a dirigible or private plane headed for some barely charted spot on the map.  This taste for period exotica was an influence on heroes as diverse as TinTin and Indiana Jones.

All right, I hear you crying, enough!  So, Doc was hot stuff and a huge influence on junk adventure fiction.  But why do you like him?

Well, the simple and unvarnished truth is that I love Doc.  I love him and Ham and Monk and all the rest of them.  There is a portrait of Doc hanging in my studio where I paint, and not a day goes by when I do not think of him at least once.  This does not blind me to the flaws in the series.  Writing at breakneck speed, Dent was not a prose stylist.  He was not, nor could he ever be, Sinclair Lewis.  Hell, he couldn’t even be Edgar Rice Burroughs.  But… Dent delivered what was needed.

I read the Doc Savage novels in my middle teens – the perfect age for the series.  (Since I still love Doc, that teenager is still alive in me somewhere.)  The tremendous sense of Doc’s personal accomplishments along with the variety and scope of his travels and adventures provided a landscape for my own imagination.  Maybe, I thought, one day I would see the world.  Learn a language.  Write a book. Develop deep and lasting friendships.  And maybe … something big, something exciting, something of great importance, would happen to me, too.

The other charm of the Doc Savage corpus is found in the quieter moments of the series.  They are richly infused with comedy (mostly when Ham and Monk bicker), but there are always grace notes that underscore Doc’s quiet benevolence and humanity.  Like the Lone Ranger, Doc would not kill his enemies.  Doc kept a quiet poker face, but it never hid the kindness and warmth that could be found within.

 

After 1949, the world forgot Doc.  But then, something remarkable happened in the 1960s.  Bantam Books started republishing the novels, and several new generations came to know and love Doc Savage.

The best Doc novels are those from the 1930s.  The world was a large place before World War II, and the exotic settings and outlandish plots are delicious.  Doc Savage novels are easily found on ebay, and writer Will Murray has written several new adventures over the past few years, many based on notes that Dent left behind.  For anyone who is young at heart, Doc Savage is highly recommended.

Not bad for an 80 year old.

The World Loses Ray Bradbury Part I

The world lost one of its most haunting, poetic voices when Raymond Douglas Bradbury died on Tuesday, June 5^th.  We are all diminished by his death.

The steady stream of obits and accolades over the past several hours have all read something along the lines of: “the first writer of literary science fiction,” or, “made science fiction respectable.”  He was compared in these notices to his contemporaries, Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008), Robert Heinlein (190701988) and Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007).

This simplifying of the story is expected in our media, but it does a great disservice to Bradbury.  Despite the relative merits of the gentlemen named above, they were not prose stylists as lyric, distinct and evocative as Bradbury.  Bradbury’s brand of American lyrical fantasy has more in common with Our Town and You Can’t Take it With You than the baroque excesses of Stranger in a Strange Land or Breakfast for Champions.  To capture the real flavor of Bradbury’s literary contribution, it makes more sense to compare him to Thornton Wilder (1897-1975), William Saroyan (1908-1981) or Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) than Heinlein or Clarke.

Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1920. It was a particularly American time and place, a moment that would be memorialized in the art of such painters as Norman Rockwell.  The impact of his birthplace on Bradbury’s art is remarkable: it laid a foundation of small-town American sweetness, optimism and community under much of his work.  These qualities are found in abundance in two of Bradbury’s novels, Dandelion Wine (1957) and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962).  Both books are, in your correspondent’s estimation, two of the finest American novels of the 20^th Century.

There are two overarching characteristics to Bradbury’s corpus – love and its blessed accomplice, enthusiasm.  Both are expressed through a deep vein of nostalgia – nostalgia for a lost past and an unforgotten childhood.

Bradbury was a man in love – in love with the pop culture of the American Century, in love with writing, and in love with the world.  When he was a boy, Bradbury met a carnival magician named Mr. Electrico, an encounter that would change his life.  Here’s the exchange, in Bradbury’s own words, from December 2001:

Back when I was twelve years old I was madly in love with L. Frank Baum and the Oz books, along with the novels of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, and especially the Tarzan books and the John Carter, Warlord of Mars books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I began to think about becoming a writer at that time.

Simultaneously I saw Blackstone the Magician on stage and thought, what a wonderful life it would be if I could grow up and become a magician.

In many ways that is exactly what I did.

It was an encounter with another magician that changed my life forever.

During the Labor Day week of 1932 a favorite uncle of mine died; his funeral was held on the Labor Day Saturday. If he hadn't died that week, my life might not have changed because, returning from his funeral at noon on that Saturday, I saw carnival tent down by Lake Michigan. I knew that down there, by the lake, in his special tent, was a magician named Mr. Electrico.

Mr. Electrico was a fantastic creator of marvels. He sat in his electric chair every night and was electrocuted in front of all the people, young and old, of Waukegan, Illinois. When the electricity surged through his body he raised a sword and knighted all the kids sitting in the front row below his platform. I had been to see Mr. Electrico the night before. When he reached me, he pointed his sword at my head and touched my brow. The electricity rushed down the sword, inside my skull, made my hair stand up and sparks fly out of my ears. He then shouted at me, "Live forever!"

I thought that was a wonderful idea, but how did you do it?

The next day, being driven home by my father, fresh from the funeral, I looked down at those carnival tents and thought to myself, "The answer is there. He said 'Live forever,' and I must go find out how to do that." I told my father to stop the car. He didn't want to, but I insisted. He stopped the car and let me out, furious with me for not returning home to partake in the wake being held for my uncle. With the car gone, and my father in a rage, I ran down the hill. What was I doing? I was running away from death, running toward life.

When I reached the carnival grounds, by God, sitting there, almost as if he were waiting for me, was Mr. Electrico. I grew, suddenly, very shy. I couldn't possibly ask, How do you live forever? But luckily I had a magic trick in my pocket. I pulled it out, held it toward Mr. Electrico and asked him if he'd show me how to do the trick. He showed me how and then looked into my face and said, "Would you like to see some of those peculiar people in that tent over there?"

I said, "Yes."

He took me over to the sideshow tent and hit it with his cane and shouted, "Clean up your language!" at whoever was inside. Then, he pulled up the tent flap and took me in to meet the Illustrated Man, the Fat Lady, the Skeleton Man, the acrobats, and all the strange people in the sideshows.

He then walked me down by the shore and we sat on a sand dune. He talked about his small philosophies and let me talk about my large ones. At a certain point he finally leaned forward and said, "You know, we've met before."

I replied, "No, sir, I've never met you before."

He said, "Yes, you were my best friend in the great war in France in 1918 and you were wounded and died in my arms at the battle of the Ardennes Forrest. But now, here today, I see his soul shining out of your eyes. Here you are, with a new face, a new name, but the soul shining from your face is the soul of my dear dead friend. Welcome back to the world."

Why did he say that? I don't know. Was there something in my eagerness, my passion for life, my being ready for some sort of new activity? I don't know the answer to that. All I know is that he said, "Live forever" and gave me a future and in doing so, gave me a past many years before, when his friend died in France.

Leaving the carnival grounds that day I stood by the carousel and watched the horses go round and round to the music of "Beautiful Ohio." Standing there, the tears poured down my face, for I felt that something strange and wonderful had happened to me because of my encounter with Mr. Electrico.

I went home and the next day traveled to Arizona with my folks. When we arrived there a few days later I began to write, full-time. I have written every single day of my life since that day 69 years ago.

I have long since lost track of Mr. Electrico, but I wish that he existed somewhere in the world so that I could run to him, embrace him, and thank him for changing my life and helping me become a writer.

More Bradbury tomorrow!

The New Yorker Misses the Point … Again

Every now and then your correspondent can only shake his head in wonderment at the good people at The New Yorker. 

For example it’s not unusual for Adam Gopnik, the magazine’s resident Renaissance man, to say something utterly and completely off the deep end.  And the art criticism in the magazine sometimes seems predicated on nothing more than insisting that Modernism is still relevant, gosh-darn-it, and you had better believe it because we at the New Yorker say it’s so.  And as for its film criticism …, well, let’s say that, like most Puritans, New Yorker film critics suffer from the sneaking suspicion that some one, some where is having a good time.

So I was not greatly surprised when I found in the latest issue an especially witless essay by Arthur Krystal on “guilty pleasures” in fiction.  (“Easy Writers,” May 28, page 81.)  Now, let me say upfront that I certainly believe that there is such a thing as good art and bad art.  Indeed, The Jade Sphinx is predicated on the very notion that there is a hierarchy in art.  However, your correspondent must part company with Krystal when he uses the idea of genre fiction as his baseline for gauging a guilty pleasure.

Now, as Oscar Wilde, patron saint of our blog wrote, “there is no such thing as moral or immoral book.  Books are well written or badly written.  That is all.”  I’m sure the ghost of Wilde would forgive us if we also observed that there is no such thing as a novel that is a guilty pleasure or not a guilty pleasure – again, novels are well written or badly written.  What astonishes me is not that Krystal is so far off the mark … but that we, in 2012, are still having the discussion at all.

One hundred or so years ago, our intellectual and aesthetic betters knew this.  Bookstores were not broken into ghettos of mysteries, young adult novels or science fiction stories.  Indeed, the new H. G. Wells novel was set alongside the new book by Henry James, and Arthur Conan Doyle shared shelf space with Joseph Conrad.  If you want to make the argument that a mere genre story could never be art, let’s admit that Hamlet is a crime story (and a rather good one at that) and Macbeth a fantasy (ditto) and start relegating Shakespeare to the proper literary ghettos.

Even more amusing is that Krystal seems to have little understanding of what fiction is or what it does.  Here’s a sample: “Skilled genre writers know that a certain level of artificiality must prevail, lest the reasons we turn to their books evaporate.  It’s plot we want and plenty of it.  Heroes should go up against villains (sympathetic or hateful); love should, if possible, win out; and a satisfying sense of closure and comeuppance should top off the experience.  Basically, a guilty pleasure is a fix in the form of a story, a narrative cocktail that helps us temporarily forget the narratives of our own humdrum lives.”  In that brief passage, Krystal has relegated to “genre fiction” nearly the entire corpus of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen.  No small feat, that.

However, even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and Krystal does make one intelligent observation: “Modernism, of course, confirmed the idea of the commercial novel as a guilty pleasure by making the literary novel tough sledding.”  He mitigates the quality of the observation by implying that perhaps, this is the way things should be.  Indeed, “serious fiction was serious business, and a reader might tire of it.”

Well, he’s half right, at any rate.  Most contemporary literary fiction is virtually unreadable.  (The New Yorker is an especially egregious offender in this regard: often, the short fiction reads as if it were missing the opening and closing paragraphs.)  I remember emerging from Susan Sontag’s “novel” The Volcano Lover, for instance, with all the cheer of one who had been repeatedly battered about the head and face.  David Leavitt, Toni Morrison (fit punishment, really, only for serial murderers and repeat sex offenders), Cormac McCarthy and Annie Proulx have all written their share of unreadable books adored by the literati.  And if this is the current state of literature, I think I’ll hide deep within the pages of Edgar Rice Burroughs until the whole thing blows over.

However, I am being too hard on Krystal, as he closes his essay with an apology to genre fiction:  “Such writers have a gift that is as mysterious to nonwriters as plucking melodies out of thin air is to nonmusicians.  Plotting, inventing, creating characters, putting words in their mouths and quirks in their personalities – it all seems pretty astonishing to me.  The prose may be uneven and the observations about life and society predictable, but, if the story moves, we, always involuntarily, move with it.  And, if we feel a little guilty about getting so swept up, there’s always ‘The Death of Virgil’ to read as penance.”

Looking at the Critics

One of the more interesting things about keeping up with the arts, both fine and popular, is reading what my colleagues across the aisle have to say.  Sometimes my reaction can only be a heavy sigh (close-cousin of hyper-ventilating), or a resigned shrug.

Take, for instance, David Denby in a recent issue of The New Yorker.  In the March 26^th issue, Denby undertakes a review of the recent science fiction epic John Carter.  Now, at this point, I must confess that I have not only seen John Carter, but I also enjoyed it immensely.

Before my poetic license is revoked, let me say that John Carter is not art.  However, it never pretends to be art.  Even the most stringent fine arts critic must take a film like John Carter on its own terms.  To expect Summer Hours or The Dreamers (both reviewed in these pages) is fatuity.

Fatuity, however, seems to be Denby’s stock in trade during this review.  His bias is clear in the second sentence:  Andrew Stanton’s “John Carter,” based on an ancient novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs (written at about the same time as “Tarzan”), begins with a battle on Mars…..

Hold the phone.  “An ancient novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs??”  One wonders how he would describe a film adaptation of Hamlet.  “Based on the super-duper ancient play by William Shakespeare?”  What did he say about Troy?    “Based on The Iliad, which is so old that we can’t even imagine its age?”

Later on in his review, Denby also adds I wouldn’t trust the sanity of any critic who claimed to understand what goes on in this movie.  Frankly, I would not trust the intelligence of any critic who couldn’t.

Denby is the author of quite an excellent book on bad behavior called Snark.  Sadly, I don’t think he took his own writing to heart.

My problems with Denby’s snark fade away to nothingness when I read an article by Michael Atkinson in a recent issue of LA Weekly.  This esteemed critic was providing an overview on a film retrospective of various versions of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.  This is his opening sentence.

It's such a toxic-potent paradigm it's hard to believe Lewis Carroll came up with it first -- female puberty as a mud-wrestle with the irrational, a maiden's journey into a quasi-adult sphere drunk on its own rules and power but actually f--king nuts. It's an elemental conflict that's as political as it is psychosexual -- which is why Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, despite having little story to speak of, will not fade into a vague memory of 19th-century kid lit.

You correspondent must admit that he had to read the above three times before he almost got some glimmer of the author’s meaning.  But wait, it gets better.

No, the linchpin adaptation is naturally Jan Svankmajer's 1988 Alice (April 6, 7:30 p.m.), which only loosely intersects with the book yet musters an uncomfortable physical world of unpleasant juxtapositions, mucous mixtures, semi-animated impossibilities, revolting taxidermic tension and a pervasive sense of real childhood danger (without, fascinatingly, inciting the merest drop of anxiety from his star, placid blond Kristyna Kohoutova). Self-referential and playfully conscious of pedophiliac threat as only a surrealist's film could be, Svankmajer's Alice does Carroll better than Carroll did Carroll, swapping the smarmy wordplay and faux innocence for the claustrophobia and stress you taste in a real dream.

Mucous mixtures.  Revolting taxidermic tension.  Playfully conscious of pedophiliac threat as only a surrealist’s film could be.

You may be ready for more, but I don’t think my heart can stand it.  

Orange Pulp: The Pulp Magazine and Contemporary Culture

Proving once again that great things often come in small packages, my New York readers could do no better than a visit to the Palitz Gallery at Lubin House, 11 East 61^st Street.  In this small space, Syracuse University Library has managed to cram 61 super-rare works from the long-ago world of pulp magazines – treasures much too fun to miss.  I attended last night with arts advocate Clarissa Crabtree, and the show is sure to please anyone with even a passing interest in Americana or classic pop culture.

A quick primer for the uninitiated: the pulp magazine was so-named because of the rough, wood-pulp paper on which they were printed.  As such, pulps were not supposed to last – they were the essence of disposable literature.  But many, many American pop culture icons emerged from the pulps, including such characters as Doc Savage, The Shadow, Conan the Barbarian, Sam Spade and Tarzan of the Apes.  Writers who worked in the pulps included Ray Bradbury, Dashiell Hammett, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Isaac Asimov, and even world-class crackpot and religious huckster, L. Ron Hubbard.

The heyday of the pulps was roughly from the start of World War I to the end of the 1940s.  They were largely genre-specific, and to walk into a newsstand in the 1930s was to walk into a paradise catering to every taste.  There were magazines devoted to science fiction or supernatural stories, or detective stories, jungle stories, adventure stories, hero pulps and aviation stories.  There even was a short-lived pulp dedicated to stories about airships! 

One of the greatest things about the pulps was the vibrant cover art, well represented in this exhibit.  Several paintings by Norman Saunders are on hand, and they have to be seen to be believed.  Artists worked at breakneck speed, and most of the work created for the pulps no longer exists.  But it is not scarcity alone that makes this exhibit worthwhile -- the pulps were often lurid, but they were lurid to an almost lyrical degree, and much of the work (both art and prose) attains a status of near-poetry.

Also on hand: rare letters from a young writer named Ray Bradbury, still trying to break into the business; a table devoted to The Shadow (the greatest creation of the pulps), including rare radio scripts, advertising posters, the first issue of the magazine, and an Orson Welles radio show playing on a continuous loop; a payment stub for H.P. Lovecraft for his story At the Mountain of Madness, naming Julie Schwartz (of later comic book fame) as his agent; and a copy of Weird Tales containing the first published fiction of Tennessee Williams.

This exhibit runs through April 12, and gallery hours are Monday to Friday 10 a.m. - 6:00 p.m. and Saturday 11 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.  Admission is free.

Charles M. Russell: The Life and Legend of America’s Cowboy Artist

We close the week by returning yet again to the West of myth and of my yearnings and imaginings.  Why does the West of myth call to me so?  One would be hard pressed to find a place perhaps less suited to your garden variety aesthete, a man who prizes his lapis lazuli dressing gown more than any other article of clothing … or is that not quite so?  The West is a place of stunning natural beauty, and the myth of the men and women who made the West the very building blocks of literature and drama.  There is also a sense of freedom in the West, open ranges and the promise of endless opportunity.  Looking at images of the West, I feel young again.  And so, though some of my more waggish readers quip that I might someday need to rename this column The Jade Cactus, we will continue to look at art inspired by this uniquely American period of history.  (Besides, if Oscar Wilde could drink his way through the Old West while lecturing badmen and miners about Benvenuto Cellini, surely I can spend some time there in my imaginings.)

We have spent several columns looking at the work of Charles M. Russell, the famed “cowboy artist” (1864-1926).  Much has been written about Russell, some of it by the artist himself and his wife, Nancy Russell, and his studio assistant, Joe DeYong.  But there really was no full-scale, authoritative biography until Charles M. Russell: The Life and Legend of America’s Cowboy Artist by John Taliaferro in 1996.  Taliaferro (born 1952), an independent historian and former senior editor for Newsweek, seems fascinated by classic Americana: another of his biographies is Tarzan Forever, the life of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Taliaferro’s Russell biography is a wonderful achievement: comprehensive, engagingly written, and put together with a deep sympathy for the man himself and his world.  Taliaferro tells us how Charlie, born of well-to-do parents back east, became enthralled with the West and became a cowboy before finding his own artistic voice and spending the rest of his life documenting what he saw with paint and canvas.  Charlie was perhaps his own greatest creation – he may have started out a dude, but he ended up the genuine article.

Much of what we “see” when we think of the West is the result of Russell and his contemporary, painter Frederic Remington (1861-1909).  These two artists, along with real-life scout and showman William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody (1846-1917) created many of the visual cues that we associate with the West, and their vision continues up to today in movies and television.  (Indeed, Russell was a great friend of early screen cowboy William S. Hart, and the painter was often on the set as Hollywood started envisioning the West.)

Taliaferro gives great credit to Nancy Russell for making Charlie a success, and this is, in many ways, a joint biography.  Taliaferro is also a smart and perceptive critic – I have been reading about both Russell and Remington for years, and Taliaferro provides the best summation of the differences between the two men that I have ever read:

…who did he think he was, painting the West in such a savage light?  There lay the grudge, and there lay the difference between the two.  Over and over, Charlie would appropriate Remington’s subject matter and designs down to the most minute cock of a rifle or snort of a pony.  But he always injected a different mood and message.  Remington was in many ways terrified by the West and its boundless physicality.  Indians were depraved fiends; whites were always innocent victims or plucky heroes.  Where Remington’s Blackfeet were thugs dragging home hostages, Charlie’s were a bedraggled but brave family struggling through winter.  Or when Remington painted a circle of horses fighting off wolves with their hooves, he succeeded in conveying only grisly violence; in Charlie’s version, the put-upon horses are making a valiant stand to protect their helpless colts.  To Remington, a rider turning in his saddle to shoot at his pursuers is A Fugitive; to Russell, a man in the same situation is an honest soul fleeing to safety.  Where Remington assigns heartless cunning, Charlie sees a more honorable instinct.  And though Remington had better command of color and was a superior draftsman, in his Western work at least he strove to communicate only militancy, danger and dread.  Charlie’s untrained hand was forever guided by sympathy.

Taliaferro’s book closes sadly (as it must, at this late date) with Charlie’s physical decline and eventual death.  However, Charlie Russell, history’s cowboy artist, was an anomaly among great painters in more ways than one.  On any list of truly great artists, Charlie Russell may have been the one who was, by and large, truly happy.

E. Aster Bunnymund and the Warrior Eggs at the Earth’s Core!

Regular readers know my affection for all things William Joyce and The Guardians of Childhood, his on-going project of picture books and children’s novels.  Now just in time for Easter, Joyce returns with his second-ever novel in the series, E. Aster Bunnymund and the Warrior Eggs at the Earth’s Core!

With the Guardians series, Joyce hopes to create an entire cosmology that incorporates all of the beloved figures of childhood: Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, Mother Goose and the Tooth Fairy, among them.  To create a backstory, Joyce has conceived of a cosmic battle bringing together all of these figures into opposition against Pitch, also known as the Boogeyman.  The first novel in the series, Nicholas St. North and the Battle of the Nightmare King, laid much of the groundwork and introduced us to North (who will later become Santa Claus), the wizard Ombric, the girl Katherine and the robotic Djinni.

Now that much of the necessary exposition is out of the way, Joyce jumps into this installment with a great deal of dash and a sense of high adventure.  In E. Aster Bunnymund, the children of Santoff Claussen are kidnapped by Pitch, and Katherine, Ombric and North band together to travel to the earth’s core to rescue them.  On the way, they enlist the help of the last of the fabled brotherhood of Pookas, the seven-foot tall warrior rabbit E. Aster Bunnymund. 

The initial relationship between the giant rabbit and Santa is one of petty bickering and snide remarks.  Though E. Aster Bunnymund is a tough egg to crack, he and North form an alliance that will clearly create the foundation of what will be a league of great children’s heroes.

William Joyce (born 1957) is, of course, the Academy Award winning author and film-maker.  His heartbreaking The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore was one of the more delightful and moving shorts of recent memory.  As is often the case with Joyce, part of the great delight is to track his many, varied and often uniquely intertwined pop culture inspirations.  Joyce’s imagination is like a great attic filled with comics, old TV shows, pulp novels and adventure stories, toys and Americana, and tumbled and jumbled together until it forms something uniquely its own.  Part of the great fun is running a mental finger down the line of his inspiration and watching him tickle the source.

E. Aster Bunnymund, with his large ears, inter-species bickering and snide comments about “humans” obviously is Joyce’s nod to Star Trek’s Mr. Spock.  And much of the backstory for The Man in Moon (with his super-science Golden Age later destroyed in a cataclysmic space explosion) harkens back to Superman, as does Ombric’s inability to alter events of the past.  Joyce also provides a delicious echo of Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of the Baskervilles when he closes a chapter with, “Mr. North,” he said with dramatic relish.  “They were the ears of a gigantic rabbit.”

The most significant influence in the current book is, of course, Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950), author of several ‘Scientific Romances” set in the earth’s core.  (Burroughs so loved the earth’s core that he even set one of his later Tarzan novels there!)  In a neat bit of homage, Joyce employs Burroughs’ method of plotting by splitting his heroes into three separate narrative threads that meet in the closing chapters, and by creating a magnificent “vehicle of wonder” to get our heroes to the earth’s core: the rabbit’s wonderfully realized egg train, much like the Iron Mole in Burroughs’ novels.

Joyce pulls all of these tricks with great humor and elan.  This book is filled with delightful little throw-aways (books in Ombric’s library, for instance, include The History of Levitation While Eating and Mysteries of Vanishing Keys), and his chapter titles are a hoot (consider The Bookworm Turns or the chapter on warrior eggs called The Mad Scramble). 

But what impresses the most is not just Joyce’s narrative drive and endless invention and good humor, but his deep and committed belief in the world he has created.  Despite his pop culture references, Joyce is no ironist and his work is devoid of snark and sarcasm.  It is a fully realized universe created by a man with a mission – and we can feel Joyce’s commitment on every page.  It’s a remarkable performance.

If you do not already own a copy of E. Aster Bunnymund and the Warrior Eggs at the Earth’s Core!, then hop to it!