Saucers

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I just read this story by Douglas Lain. Very modern, very socialist, but I liked it. For years I’ve wanted to write a story about a summer in Montreal when a big flying saucer parked itself overhead and stayed there. Now it may be too late, which goes to show.

Here’s a story I did write, and it was published in the same place as Lain’s. Strange Horizons comes up a few times in the Best S.F. of 2006 collection I got at Worldcon, so I gather it’s not a bad venue, though neither is it a rich venue. Writing quirky little s.f. stories seems to be up there with poetry and avant-garde jazz when it comes to worldly acclaim.

“The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories”

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Seeing Gaiman at Worldcon caused me to buy his big short story collection, Smoke and Mirrors. My favorite story so far is “The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories,” which I happened to read years back while sitting in the book store. It’s kind of a sideways rendering of Gaiman’s first time out in Hollywood, when Good Omens had been optioned and he and Terry Pratchett were doing the script. I love Hollywood stuff, especially modern Hollywood and the nonacting side, the agents and studio people, so it’s no wonder I like the story. But it’s a good job, too. He captures odd little moments that bring out the disjunction and strangeness in the way these people approach life (or the way that one hears they approach life), and he manages the tricky job of creating a long series of quick but distinct glimpses of producers, execs, flunkies, etc., each person different enough from the others and yet cognitively deformed in the same way.

The inside-Hollywood, studio-idiocy business stays funny but also becomes unsettling. The speed with which it moves, a pace that at first seems wide awake and brisk, becomes creepy; this is the only case I can think of where narrative speed is turned into something like a horror element. (Not a suspense element, which, as I understand it, would involve plot: how soon will that train hit that girl?) You start out by enjoying the contrast between the brisk Hollywood material and the story’s otherwise Gaiman-like air of menacing dreaminess; then the Hollywood material becomes the atmosphere’s key ingredient. Not bad.  

Okay, content. A small-time British writer of quiet horror stories hits it big with a novel and is brought out to Hollywood to do the script. Nobody at the studio or the production company knows what they’re doing, and they keep being fired and replaced and no one remembers that the previous batch was there. Neither do they remember the old stars of the past, and the memory shortage gets more marked as the narrator approaches the end of his string of executives and they get younger.
Meanwhile, there’s a goldfish pool at the narrator’s hotel, and he learns from the pool’s caretaker that the fish have no memory and so they swim about forever and get nowhere and every 20 seconds it’s a brand-new world to them. Which is the Hollywood situation as the narrator finds it.
The narrator starts sketching out a story set back home in England and involving a stage magician in a sad little seaside theater. So he wants to be creative again and get out of this Hollywood bullshit. He writes a poem about the seaside theater, and that’s his creativity giving a sign of life.
In reading up for his story, the narrator comes across two 19th-century stage-magic tricks, both of which involve frames (I think) and thereby prefigure 20th-century show biz and its screen-based entertainment. Okay, but why? To me it just seems like a flourish — here’s a fancy idea! One of the tricks does involve a lady who descends from a painting and tells an artist to buck up, he’s got the stuff, and that is obviously apropos to the narrator’s situation.
To tell the truth, the story doesn’t seem too hard to decipher (except for that business about 19th century/20th century show biz, which may not be just a flourish after all). But it works better if you don’t. 
Still, if anyone has further thoughts on meanings, or whatever, go ahead.  

Well, duh

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Palin’s favorable is down 7 points in Gallup.



Okay, fine. Anyway, we now have WMDs, Bush’s competence, and Sarah Palin. What I hope is that anyone who has been wrong on all three topics might now take a second look at the health care debate. Maybe reform isn’t about killing off old citizens and paving the way for rationed toilet paper (which I suppose would roll down the paved way).

Word Verification for Comments

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I’ve enabled word verification for comments, which I believe means you’ll all have to type a word in to show you’re human when you leave comments. Hopefully this will help deter the Japanese spam, which has sort of gotten out of control.

Let me know how this is working; if it ends up being too irritating or won’t let people post comments, I’ll reassess.

all good things

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The green beans are flourishing, my peonies are dying, and my summer vacation is drawing to a close. Probably also Bill Randall will be returning at some point, so this marks the end of my guest-blogging stint on The Hooded Utilitarian. It’s been fun! Thank you, Noah and company, for having me.

Comics of the Wack and Outdated

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My last efforts in this direction were greeted mostly with indifference and hostility, not to mention the lawsuit from Tucker. So I figured, what the hell, let’s roll.

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Secret Six #1
Gail Simone
Brad Walker/Jimmy Pamiotti

My favorite thing about this comic is that the North Korean prison camp is supposed to be this horribly evil place because they kill your family and your baby and everything. But I happen to have just read a bit about North Korean prison camps, and you know, the thing about them is that there aren’t actually families, because people spend their entire lives in them, and the jailers more or less put couples together, and the kids never actually really know their parents. In fact, they don’t even necessarily know that there’s a world outside the prison camp at all. Which just goes to show that you think you’re being evil and cruel, and then it turns out you just haven’t really done your research. But fuck it, North Korea is really just there so that the anti-heroes can look good in comparison, like how we all love Ronald Reagan because of George W. Bush. Of course, it’s maybe a little callous to use the horrific experiences of actual people as a way to make your boring baddies seem soulful, but hey, the North Korean prisoners probably aren’t allowed to read Secret Six anyway. Their loss; nothing cheers a bleak, brutalized existence like a largely incomprehensible mish-mash of portentous pithy proclamations leavened with continuity porn. I can just see that North Korean child now, beaten to a pulp, bloody snot dripping onto each page, shivering to himself, and then getting to the last panel, smiling with joy because….

…it’s a guest appearance by the Mad Hatter! That makes it all worthwhile.

Wolverine: Worst Day Ever
Barry Lyga

This is a book, not a comic, and it’s actually pretty good. Barry Lyga has simple ambitions — he wants to be mildly touching, he wants to be amusing, he wants to have a story with Wolverine in it. And hey, mission accomplished; young mutant narrator Eric, whose mutant power is that nobody notices him, is both funny and winsome. He’s lonely because, well, nobody notices him, but he’s also sufficiently acid to notice that, for example, Professor X ‘s penchant for covering everything in the entire compound with Xs reeks of egomania. And there’s also lots of Wolveirne…being noble, being tough, fighting Sabertooth, singing “These Are a Few of My Favorite Things” and drinking strawberry milk. Perfect.

Oh, and the book also provided me with multiple epiphanies.

1: Wolverine is, like, Han Solo and Chewbacca at the same time. No wonder everybody loves him.

2: I fucking hate Wolverine.

Cry for Justice #2
James Robinson
Mauro Cascioli

I haven’t actually read this. I’ve just seen that one page everyone is up in arms about:

cry for justice

And yeah, I have to say I’m pretty offended too. Let me count the ways:

1. Ollie and Hal (can I call you Ollie and Hal? Aw, thanks.) are totally out of character here. Because…hello? They’re dead. Dead, dead, dead. Even if they hadn’t been wiped out multiple times in various storylines, they started, what, 50, 60 years ago? If they’re not dead, they should be in wheelchairs, not posing like plastic action toys and making frat boy jokes about who put his green wiener where. Those wieners are old and shrivelled, fellas. A mountain of viagra, even abetted by ridiculous facial hair right out of Look At This Fucking Hipster, isn’t going to get you up out of your underwear, much less onto that rooftop.

2. Man-Bat is completely out of character. Last time I checked, he was a doting family man, who would cover his ears and emit high-pitched squeaky noises if anyone started to tell him an off-color story. Besides, he’s way too busy trying to subjugate the mammals to his reptilian will to hang around swapping locker room….

Or, wait, is that the Lizard?

Anyway, whoever he is, he’s out of character, and it makes me sputter.

3. James Robinson is out of character. Continuity has clearly established that he doesn’t even know what women are, much less how to surf to YouPorn for plot points.

Also, he’s lent his toupee to Hal, and it looks ridiculous.

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Also, as long as I’m mangling poor Tucker’s zeitgeist, I might as well point out that I noted an error in his last column.

He wrote:

“Abstract Comics is a tremendously random (as opposed to “diverse”) collection of graphic design pieces and black and white sketches, only a few of which might conceivably have a place in Kramer’s Ergot or one of those other anthologies people look at but don’t read. The rest are in the same category as the Buddha Machine, or Rafael Toral’s Space series–a specific, niche creation for a specific, niche audience. The only real difference is that the guys who make the Buddha Machine don’t start calling people idiots when they say they’d prefer a little more music with their purchase of sound.”

But what he meant to write was:

“Abstract Comics is boring, except for those two pages by Noah Berlatsky! Man, when I saw those, my cynical eyes beshat themselves, and my hectoring anus voided salty tears. I was such a mess I had to use leaves from the book to clean myself…but, fear not, for I saved those two pages by Noah Berlatsky! I have stapled them now to the visage of my true love, that I may contemplate them whenever I see her, and know that, even in this fallen world, beauty and truth are not forsaken.”

So, there. All fixed now.

Whoops

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I was reading this pretty entertaining interview with Fred Van Lente over at Comic Book Resources, and he was talking about his various projects like Hercules and Amazing Philosophers, or whatever; and I thought, well, maybe I should look for some of that….

And then I realized that he’s the guy who wrote Marvel Zombies 4.

I felt a little betrayed, honestly.

It just goes to show; giving a good interview and writing a good comic are two separate skills.