I know about him because I’m writing a novel set in 1960s LA. My research included What Really Happened to the Class of ’65, a best-seller in the ’70s, forgotten now. The book is nonfiction and follows a dozen or so kids during the first 10 years after they graduated a fancy high school in LA. A lot happened to them, ’60s and ‘7os stuff, transcendental meditation and drug smuggling and massage certification and God knows what else.

Here’s a review of a romance menage novel, of all things.

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More of the Same

Be With Me is an erotic romance, which means hot semi-nude bodies on the front, lots of graphic thrusting in the interior, and splurting gobs of exploitation plastered across the back-cover blurb . Heroine Reggie Fallon is in love with not one, not two, but three manly hunks — and since she refuses to choose among them, they’ve decided to share her. In other words, this should really be titled Be With Us.

That, though, would be just a little too outré. Author Maya Banks is determined to shoehorn her protagonists’ thoroughly unconventional ménage into a thoroughly conventional romance narrative. She manages this with brilliant obliviousness. Her simple strategem is to treat the three “boys” — Hutch, Cam, and Sawyer — as if they were a single six-armed, thirty-toed, three-dicked heartthrob. Oh, sure, each guy has distinguishing characteristics: Hutch can cook, Cam has glasses, Sawyer likes anal sex. But they were all brought up together with the same foster mother, they’re all business partners in the same architectural firm, and they all live together in the same enormous dream home. When Reggie needs help, they all come running; when it’s time for a romantic misunderstanding to spin out the plot, then by God they all misunderstand her in the same way. They even sleep together, but only when Reggie’s there, because, as they are careful to tell us, they aren’t gay, no, no, no.

Reggie is, of course, herself a thoroughly familiar spunky romance heroine. Her main distinguishing features are (1) she’s a cop, and (2) she’s beaten senseless by a perp in the first three pages. Convalescence fortuitously allows her to be needy and feminine without compromising her independence. Nor does it compromise her libido; once she’s out of the hospital, she cheerfully fucks her way through a series of efficient and crowded sex scenes. If you love generic romance novels, but wish they featured a tad more triple penetration, then this book may just be heaven.

The same guy directed the pilots for Star Trek, Hogan’s Heroes, and Batman. He also did the pilots for Hill Street Blues and Moonlighting. And the pilot for Remington Steele. And he directed a Disney film I saw years ago, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, that starred Kurt Russell at age 17 or 18.

I’ve got an article up at Comixology about why Spider-Man should be a pacifist:

Indeed, Spiderman’s real sin here is not against morality or society, but against the tropes that keep the genre afloat. Super-heroes have to act. They’ve got to fight crime. If they don’t, you don’ t have a narrative. Super-heroes have “great responsibility,” but it’s always the responsibility to do something. You could conceivably have an origin story in which Wombat-Man decked a baddy, the gun went off, Cousin Joe got shot, and the hero decided “With great power comes great responsibility!” And so Wombat-Man decides never to mess with crime again, and instead uses his phenomenal digging powers solely to aid with infrastructure projects! Again, you could have such an origin – but what you’d end up with would not exactly be a super-hero comic

Bram Stoker
The Lair of the White Worm

It’s hard to believe that this novel was the basis of the excellent 1988 Ken Russell movie. Indeed, Bram Stoker seems to have written The Lair of the White Worm with his brain tied behind his back. The protagonists wander like lobotomized puppets from scene to scene, pausing occasionally to launch into long passages of earnest, muddled exposition, and then to congratulate each other on their lucidity. They are, moreover, bland to the point of culpability. Lady Arabella is a decidedly ineffective villain, especially considering the fact that she can turn into a giant snake, but, though it was clear early on that she wasn’t up to the task, I spent most of the book hoping against hope that she’d devour that prig, Adam, and his little wife too.

The book would be unreadable if it weren’t for a loathsome current of anxiety sliding underneath the surface malaise. This anxiety breaks through most distastefully in the novel’s insistent racism, which even by the low standards of 1911, is embarrassingly vicious. It peeps out rather ludicrously in the bizarre, unmotivated plot devices — the confused references to mesmerism, the multiple mongooses, the giant menacing kite, the titular, antideluvian white worm itself. And it is most effective in the last few pages, which, in true horror fashion, come leaping out of the general fog to deliver heaping and gratuitous gouts of gross-out.

Entertaining as that ending is, the real reason to check this book out of the local library is the set of lovely and evocative illustrations by Patricia Coleman Smith. Just another reminder that, from Dracula on down, Stoker has always inspired better art than he himself could produce.

Well, another gig I had lined up crashed and burned. For a brief shining moment I was the book reviewer for a magazine to be called Prettyboy — kind of a Maxim for girls, supposedly. Didn’t quite get off the ground though, leaving me with a bunch of reviews and nowhere to publish them. But there’s always the blog. So, here’s the first of several random book reviews that I’ll be posting over the next couple weeks; this one of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ memoir,”The Beautiful Struggle.”

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The American memoir is a fairly simple formula. Clearly identify your colorful ethnic heritage (Chinese, Jewish, Irish…even Appalachian will do.) Milk said heritage for all it is worth. Discuss your simultaneous love of and resentment of said heritage. Milk your ambivalence for all it is worth. Feel deeply. Stir well, then appear on Terri Gross.

In The Beautiful Struggle (a deeply felt title if ever there was one) Ta-Nehisi Coates has followed the formula down to the ground. Coates grew up in Baltimore, the son of a Black Panther who ran his own Afrocentric press. Heritage, consciousness, and a fetishization of his own family’s exotic difference form the core of the story. Young Ta-Nehisi hated his oddity — his name, his family’s refusal to celebrate the Fourth of July, the ban on eating most kinds of meat. Yet at the same time that difference, that heritage, is his salvation — both in the narrative, since consciousness saves him from the street, and in the bookstore, where the ethnic accent is what he’s got to sell. Why are we reading this, after all, if not to learn about this unique subculture, where young men play the djembe drum and drop ebonics like the scatterings of Yiddish in a Philip Roth novel? It’s all about being torn between two worlds and reconciling with the father you leave behind and selling your nearest and dearest to a public that smacks its lips over each new flavor of nostalgia.

And yet, contradictorily, there’s something heartening about seeing this kind of book — a basic, tiresome, clichéd memoir — being written by a black man. Because, at least for the past hundred years or so, African-Americans have been pretty much the only Americans who could write memoirs that didn’t suck. Richard Wright and James Baldwin and Malcolm X wrote about their pasts with a bitterness that made it very hard to turn memory into all-purpose, non-denominational spice for a happy ethnic buffet. When they served you up their difference, it was, at least partially, in the hope that you’d choke on it, as they had been forced to do repeatedly, and for years.

The U.S. hasn’t become color-blind or anything; we’re still an awfully segregated nation, black President and all. But reading this book, I felt a little like blogger Andrew Sullivan said he did when, after going to hear Obama give a disappointing economics speech, he came home, sat down, and realized with something of a shock that a black candidate for President had just bored him for several hours on tax policy. The goal of integration is, in some sense, to become mundane. Why, after all, should African-American writers be burdened with writing all our decent memoirs, anyway? Why shouldn’t they be able to shamelessly exploit their ancestors just like every other two-bit poetaster? If the Holocaust can be a guarantor of sensitive seriousness and triumphant book tours, why not the crack epidemic in inner-city Baltimore?

Admittedly, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ memoir isn’t that bad. Occasionally he sets down his literary pretensions long enough to fire a zinger worthy of his very entertaining blog. I think my favorite is his quip about how frat boys ruined Bob Marley “like they do everything they touch. You can’t write as dreadfully as Art Spiegelman all in a day, I guess. Perhaps next generation, though. I have a dream.