Notes Toward a More Coherent Essay, Someday, Maybe (Part 1, on the Fourth)

You know, writing something that is worth reading takes a long time. Maybe not for you, but for me I need at least a month to clear a comma from a lengthy prepositional phrase. I don’t want to just throw words out into the pixelverse. I want to write something that someone else might understand and maybe even appreciate.

In the meantime, I’ll scribble out this or scrawl out that – writing replies or replying to someone else’s queries. Some of these things echo what I’d like to say if I had the time to sit around and do what writers are supposed to do – and nothing else.

For example.

A writer friend for many years is getting back into the harness, sold a nonfiction piece and a short story to one of the pro-zines recently, has been asking me for advice – on particular stories and the field in general. He also read one of my recent book review columns for Galaxy’s Edge magazine (Am I a book reviewer? I am now. That doesn’t mean I’m a book critic or a scholar or a literary essayist. Circumstance has so far spared me from those fates). But he decided, since I was there and convenient to ask: “Is there something missing in my apprehension, something that will block my progress as a writer, if I simply cannot fathom some of the works of the so-called greats in the literary sf field?” He continues, I am willing to give PK Dick another try. But honestly, I have tried Le Guin, Delaney, Russ, others, and in each case I cannot go more than a few pages before putting the book aside, confused and irritated.”

He went on to describe a recent encounter with Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, where he got halfway through before giving up “in despair.” He liked the TV adaptation of The Lathe of Heaven, though, and thought maybe he should try again with that.

I replied that maybe he should. I think The Lathe of Heaven is still a favorite of mine (except on those days when The Left Hand of Darkness takes over). I also admitted that at times I find The Dispossessed a little too ponderous for me, but let’s not pursue that any further now, since I know many who consider it a masterpiece and love it dearly. It’s a great book no matter how I might stumble through it. The fault is all mine.

But my friend asked an honest question, so I tried to answer as honestly as I could:

That there’s so many books in the field of science fiction that we don’t want to read is part of the beauty of the form. Authors can write in so many ways, incorporate so many styles and techniques, and it’s still science fiction. To speak briefly of other “difficult” writers, I don’t think any other literary category, except perhaps fantasy (however one defines the boundaries of that field), contains the equivalent of Delany’s Dhalgren, or Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus, or Lafferty’s Past Master, or Joanna Russ’s Picnic on Paradise. Etc., etc., etc.

Science fiction is a coat of many colors, but we don’t have to like every shade of them.

Sf has had its crews of cultural movers and shakers over the years. … I try not to judge books by critics. A book review is a creative response to a book by one person. Often, I'll like a book lauded by a reviewer – but not for the same reasons.

Reviews and awards, at times, are a way for a culture to, consciously or unconsciously, try to impose a uniformity upon literature. Some might see it as “quality control,” and that’s fine. I’ve nothing against quality control (depending upon the qualities being, or not being, controlled), But in general, I don’t think much of uniformity – and neither does literature (in the widest sense of the term, without the capital L). Literature, in the widest sense, is bigger than that. It’s bigger than everything – almost. If we can read what we love and love what we read, the literary world would be a whole lot better off.

And any time I feel like I’m being forced to read a book – either in school, by compulsion, or through the influence of peers and “betters,” it distracts from any enjoyment I may receive from the task, if enjoyment is to be found there at all.

I want to meet the book on its own terms, and not the terms as defined by its supporters or detractors. Exceptions granted. But the whole notion of having books shoved into my face doesn’t help me figure out what I do or do not enjoy or what I value in my reading.

So, I wouldn't worry too much about what one “should” read in the field over what one wants to read.

If any of those highly-touted books keep calling to you, you’ll get to them, when the time is right. And if you don’t care for them, the “Lit Police” can’t take you away. They have no tin badges. They have no authority. Reading should be an exploration and an adventure, but it should probably contain equal measures of the familiar and the uncharted.

The best thing about books is that you can open them and go nearly anywhere.

The second best thing about books is that you can also close them and put them back on the shelf, whispering, “Not this one. Not now. Maybe not ever.” If reading can’t be an exercise in freedom, what’s the bloody point?

So there.

And … Speaking of freedom, have a wonderful Fourth.

Sixty Years (and a day) Ago Today…

(Notes toward something bigger – if I get the chance to write it)

Sixty years and one day ago (March 8, 1957), Robert Bloch delivered a paper at the University College of the University of Chicago. He was one of four authors asked to make presentations on the subject of science fiction and social criticism. The other three were Robert A. Heinlein, C. M. Kornbluth and Alfred Bester.

Among such luminaries, you would think, perhaps, Bloch would take a back seat, but it is Bloch’s essay which spoke most clearly to me when I read it again just recently.

The best way to appreciate it, of course, is to find a copy of The Science Fiction Novel: Imagination and Social Criticism (1959, Advent:Chicago, Third Edition 1969). You’ll avoid any impressions gathered more from my selections and interpretations.

Every now and then, I stick my nose in a book and find something interesting. There’s no rhyme or reason to it; no plan. I grab a book off the shelf because I hear it calling to me. Many books call to me, and they do it all the time. But some call louder than others.

I’ll look at a book and it looks back at me. You have a few dozen other things to read, but you pull it off the shelf because it looks back at you in that certain way. I’m sure it’s happened to you as well.

With this book – well, the series occurred in the 1950s, when science fiction (at least in the short form), was a bastion of social criticism. Literary trends were moving away from the gritty realism of the pre-war years. And U. of C. was a natural place to have this kind of confab, because the faculty and students (if not the administration) always leaned pretty strongly to the left (except in the Economics department, even pre-Milton Friedman). U. of C. also had one of the first science fiction clubs in the area. The stars were aligned.

Heinlein’s speech reads like a speech from Robert Heinlein. The funny thing about Heinlein is that, whether you find him entertaining or infuriating (or both), he writes like a man who has worked out his story and is damn well going to stick to it. It reads like either an “official statement,” a cover story, or an alibi. You can chain him to a rack, apply red-hot pokers to any part of him, but he won’t break his story, so don’t even try.

Kornbluth starts out stating that there’s no social criticism in science fiction, then he goes into a very effective close reading of 1984. What he accomplishes, mostly, is demonstrating that he maintains high literary standards, knows the territory of any able literary critic of the time, and concludes that most contemporary science fiction, with notable exceptions, doesn’t quite make the grade.

Bester, in his sly way, tries to dissuade his audience from looking to science fiction for social criticism. He values science fiction as a necessary diversion. He’s not writing off science fiction, because that diversion, he believes, is important to intellectual growth. It’s as if he’s trying to say, if you’ll excuse my summarizing, that science fiction works better when it doesn’t deliberately try to address important topics, but rather, unconsciously, touches the sympathetic vibrations of the human experience.

Bloch, however, is forever casting a leering eye at the entire process. He jokes and puns, as if he wishes to impress you that he is the least serious of this volume’s contributors, but almost from the outset he delivers the most serious message of them all.

After making a few initial jokes and puns, he very briefly outlines a number of American novels that may be considered social criticism. He then presents a long list of science fiction novels and places them into three categories: Man Against Nature, Man Against Himself, and Man Against Man.

Throughout his speech he mentions exceptions, but he finds the majority of science fiction novels that engage in what can be considered social criticism somewhat simplistic

 And just how does this wide assortment of writers view the world of the present and the extrapolated society of the future? Ignoring the extra-terrestrial invaders, ignoring the gadgetry, ignoring the universal disaster background, one encounters a fundamental dramatic premise known to all eminent critics who are six years old or older. The world is plainly divided into ‘cops and robbers,’ ‘cowboys and Indians’ or ‘good guys and bad guys.’

There’s a reason, of course. People who have come to revere science almost as a religion place great faith in the ability of technologists to safeguard our future.”

The criticism, as it were, in many “socially critical” science fiction novels, is that the bad guys are not paying enough attention – or too much attention, in the wrong way – to science.

Bloch lists and annotates a number of common elements he finds in these novels. All the words in caps come from Bloch, so excuse me if I don’t put them all in quotes. 1.) There’s a TOTALITARIAN STATE; 2.) there’s an UNDERGROUND bent on toppling said state; 3.) the use by one side or the other of FORCIBLE PSYCHOTHERAPUTIC TECHNIQUES; 4.) the assumption that SCIENCE WILL GO ALONG WITH THE GAG – especially when it involves brainwashing; 5.) ECONOMIC INCENTIVE – the motivation on either side of the battle is to make a buck (Milton Friedman would be proud); 6.) A VARIATION OF PRESENT DAY ‘ANGLO-SAXON’ CULTURE WILL CONTINUE TO RULE THE WORLD; 7.) when it comes to space exploration WE WILL COLONIZE AND RULE THE NATIVES; 8.) THE FUTURE HOLDS LITTLE  BASIC CHANGE in human nature; 9.) INDIVIDUALISM IS DEAD.

The hero rebels, yes – but not superimpose his own notions upon society; merely to restore the ‘normal’ culture and value-standards of the mass-minds of the twentieth century. You won’t find him fighting in defense of incest, homosexuality, free love, nihilism, the Single Tax, abolition of individual property-rights, euthanasia or the castration of the tonsils of Elvis Presley. Stripped right down to the bare essentials, our hero just wants to kick the rascals out and put in a sound business administration …

When we review these premises, we discover that most social criticism in science fiction novels is not directed against present-day society at all … Our authors, by and large, seem to believe wholly in the profit-incentive; in the trend to superimpose obedience and conformity by means of forcible conditioning; in the enduring liaison between the government, the military and scientists and technologists; in Anglo-Saxon cultural supremacy, if not necessarily outright ‘white supremacy’; in the sexual, aesthetic and religious mores of the day. Their criticism of the totalitarian states they envision is merely a matter of degree. They attempt to show the apparent dangers of allowing one group to ‘go a little too far’; actually, reduced to its essence, they merely echo Lord Acton’s dictum that ‘Absolute power corrupts absolutely.’

Hence the necessity of rebellion in the form of some sort of Underground movement. But this is always assumed to be just a temporary measure; ruthless because one must ‘fight fire with fire’ and the ends justify the means. The implication is that once Law and order are restored, everything will settle down to a general approximation of life as it is lived today – if not in actuality, at least in the pages of Better Homes and Gardens.

Science fiction, as it were, rebels against the status quo when it is not the currently-recognized status quo.

When it comes to scientific and technological progress, the science fiction of his day is brilliantly inventive. But whether it occurs fifty, one hundred, or a thousand years in the future, the basic social structure remains the same – or an effort is made to restore it.

But when it comes to a question of personal ethics, when it comes to a question of social justice – again and again we run right smack into our old friend Mike Hammer [Mickey Spillane was referenced earlier] in disguise.

How, in this marvelous world of the future, does one go about settling an argument?

With the same old punch in the jaw … the same old kick in the guts … the same old bullet in the same old belly.

The suggestion throughout his talk is that if the world can change in such striking ways technologically, why would it not change human behavior as well? And why doesn’t the current (for his time) science fiction novel address this possibility?

The science fiction field has often been likened to a literary world in miniature. But one searches in vain through that world for a Jesus Christ … a Sydney carton… or even a George Babbitt or a Leopold Bloom.

The common man is seldom the hero; if so, he doesn’t remain so very long, but becomes a Key Figure …

Isaac Asimov recently pointed out that science fiction heroes are permitted to be intelligent. This is admirable. And yet, emotionally, most of them are primitive and immature.

Where is the science fiction novel with the ordinary family man as hero … or the teacher … or the creative artist … or the philosopher? Where is the science fiction novel that contents itself with showing us the everyday world of the future, devoid of Master Spies and Master Technicians and Master Psychologists and Master Criminals?

He hastens to mention the exceptions. He also hastens to exclude short fiction from his admitted generalizations. And he states a possible reason for the shortcoming of science fiction novels (as opposed to short fiction): publishers won’t allow much more than this sheltering of the status quo in its content; readers won’t buy such highfalutin (and “radical”) books.

And here I am, in 2017, sixty years into Robert Bloch’s future, fascinated that Bloch is the only author among the four concerned that in the decades proceeding from 1957 a few differences may arise in the social order and that science fiction might address those differences.

Bloch himself, on the subject, seems rather sanguine.

But is science fiction, therefore, failing in its function of social criticism?

Quite the contrary.

When a literature of imaginative speculation steadfastly adheres to the conventional outlook of the community regarding heroes and standards of values, it is indeed offering the most important kind of social criticism – unconscious social criticism.

With its totalitarian societies, its repudiation of individual activity in every role save that of the self-appointed leader and avenger, science fiction dramatizes the dilemma which torments modern man. It provides a very accurate mirror of our own problems, and of our own beliefs which fail to solve these problems.

Gazing into that mirror, we might find it profitable to indulge in a bit of that reflection.

Of course, much in this essay puts me in mind of the recent battles within the science fiction community: the calls by some to return the field to its 1950s “heyday,” or perhaps to “make science fiction great again.” What does that really mean?

I wouldn’t speculate as to whether Bloch would be gratified to see a move to greater representation of diversity in the field, but I wonder if the generalizations he made in 1957 would be true in 2017. Maybe not in the media, which still seems tied to the conventions of the previous century, but at least in its literature. Wouldn’t it?

And what about now? What generalizations could we make about science fiction and social criticism today?

And, presuming that we have made some progress, how does the future look from here? It may still prove profitable to regard that mirror reflection.

And I Thought I Had a Bad Year …

We are sitting here, with the end of 2016 in sight. I haven’t had the best of years, but who am I to complain? The planet has had a really miserable year.

This in itself should be something of a lesson: I am not alone.

And you, I hasten to add, can take comfort from it as well: You are not alone, either.

We have each other.

For better or worse.

If you’re reading this, I presume you are not dead. Not everyone who experienced 2016 can make that claim. Not only did many people of note expire sometime between January 1 and now; many people whose obituary would not make the major news media, but people near and dear, either to myself or to friends and family, haven’t made it to raise a glass as this year passes into the rearview landscape. Many of them died in dreadful, painful, unnecessary ways. We are poorer for their absence.

And many of our fellow humans who occupy this planet apparently have mistaken the rearview for the windshield. Reactionary forces are hard at work across the globe, on a mission to make one part of it or another “great,” and add “again” to that, because the rearview mirror is a rose-colored glass, alas.

Those who oppose the reactionaries are not without fault. Many of them followed the notion that whatever didn’t agree with their consensus was irrelevant. They believed this even with significant evidence to the contrary.

So here we are. What do we do now?

I’m not making a list. What I do suggest is that we don’t screw up as much as we did in 2016.

Did we screw up?

Take a look around.

And make no mistake, it is our screw-up. Collectively. We didn’t all screw up in the same way. Each in our own unique way, we screwed up to the point that it profits us not to look for any particular group (or even groups) upon whom to fix blame.

A bunch of suckers got conned.

A bunch of grifters worked the marks, and worked them good.

A bunch of folks who were smart enough not to get conned looked the other way or pretended that a significant number of their fellow humans would not fall for the con. Or worse: that the suckers didn’t really matter.

A bunch of folks raised on “good guys and bad guys” scenarios, figured out who the villains were and pointed their fingers at them because that’s what you’re supposed to do just before you say “Bang! You’re dead.” Except the villains didn’t always fall down.

There’s enough blame to go around.

When the suckers fall for the con, we all pay the bill. And it looks like we’ll be paying this bill off for some time. Thank goodness for installment plans and credit.

What I’ll be doing, I hope, is to redeem myself a little from my own screw ups. I want to do more of what I have been doing, with maybe a little more success. I work in that field of the arts that prides itself, rightfully or wrongfully, in looking at the world clearly and honestly, reporting back the good news, the bad news and what hasn’t been deemed news yet, if ever. We may take sides, but we do so ready to critique ignorance, hypocrisy, magical thinking and outright delusional beliefs wherever we find them, even among those on our own side.

I want to count myself among the artists with an eye on tomorrow as well as today, and one who is ready whenever the opportunity presents itself to say, “It doesn’t have to be this way! We can do better.”

I live in a nation that has never respected education. Not really. We’ve given it lip service. We confuse it with “training.” We confuse it with measurements.

We also pride ourselves in “independent thinking,” but for many of us, when we think, we’re doing so with anything but independence; and when we’re independent, we’re being so without thinking.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

I have not been a fan of the film Easy Rider. The story always seemed to me, even back in the day, when it was immensely popular, a mere excuse to go out and do some beautiful location cinematography. A product of the intensely wishful thinking of a segment of an oversized generation – an effort at creating a romantic mythology. We like doing that a lot. When reality gets pretty ugly we go looking for myths and pretend they’re realities.

But hey, a number of Roger Corman vets worked on it. It’s not so much the document of an era as a document of a state of mind. It’s not that I think it’s a bad film so much as it is a film that never really spoke to me. I was looking for another myth.

However, this year, this 2016, made me think of the film’s penultimate scene. Billy, the character played by Dennis Hopper, tells Wyatt, the character played by Peter Fonda (also known in the story as Captain America), that they had “made it.”

Wyatt stares away thoughtfully and shakes his head. “We blew it, Billy.” It’s a line I always heard as what Pauline Kael labeled “fashionably bleak.” It was hipster existentialism, a set-up for the romanticized nihilism of the ending – our heroes blown away by rednecks. A phony, forced, convenient, stacked deck of an ending.

I hear the line differently now. I hear it speaking to us in 2016, soon to be 2017. The two protagonists have been pursuing a dream of freedom by separating themselves from the rest of the world. They divorced themselves from society, even while engaging with it. They sought what another cultural antihero of the era (Gnossos, in Richard Fariña’s novel Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me) called “exemption.”

In our ways, we’ve all been on a similar journey, pursuing dreams, often without regard to the realities that surround them. We’re big on dreams in this culture. We brand them – “The American Dream” – not that we ever agree on what that dream is.

If we then become angry and dissatisfied with our fellow humans for taking their pursuit of dreams past realities, into illusions, and then straight to out-and-out delusions, we have only ourselves to blame.

In pursuit of making a dream into a reality, we sometimes find ourselves “reversing polarities,” as we say in the trade, turning reality into a dream.

Wyatt is right. We blew it. They didn’t blow it. We all put our knives in Caesar’s back.

We all, as the Three Stooges noted, in a somewhat different situation, put the yeast in.

That’s a reality we can face and move on. We blew it. We’ve blown it before. We will surely blow it again along the way. We’re capable of learning from our mistakes, at least in theory. In a reality that is already so filled with deceptions and illusions, we can at least make an effort not to deceive ourselves.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Books that stuck . . .

Recently, on Facebook, folks have been passing around a post about “books that have stuck with you,” or some such wording. I usually don’t respond to requests that require me to post my list then tag a bunch of friends. I don’t like to bother friends with stuff like that. Friends usually have enough to keep them busy. Most of my friends are writers, artists – people who have to keep busy to keep going. Also, a lot of these Facebook requests require to rate your “favorites,” or something you think is best, or better than something else. I don’t like ranking books or movies or songs – I keep things fluid in that regard.

But John Carl, I believe, tagged me in particular, and since part of the directions were that I don’t give the selections that much thought (“fifteen books in fifteen minutes”), I quickly came up with a list of books I remember and that have become part of my consciousness. The books are me and I am the books.

Even when you give something “little thought,” thoughts take a lot longer to play through. I listed the books, and the list generated discussion, and the discussion generated more discussion.

A book that has stayed – or “stuck” – with me. Did it mean a book I read in my youth, or just any book I’ve encountered over the years? Some of my earliest memories are of exploring books, going through the pages, whether I could read them or not. From age three on, I was poking around in books.

There were lots of books whose titles I don’t remember – just picture books. If I don’t remember the titles, did they stick with me? Well…

My dad made a bookcase. A long one, with two shelves. Plenty of books on there, but with the exception of some Reader’s Digest omnibus collections of condensed books, some cookbooks and a ten- or eleven-volume thing that was a sort of children’s encyclopedia, I think it was called the “Childcraft Library,” the books were all in Polish. It didn’t matter much at the time, since I could read neither Polish nor English. I didn’t read so much as sense the presence of words. And I also sensed that there was something important about these things, these “books.” If they weren’t important, why would someone build a case to hold them?

There was book of illustrated bible stories. I think it came out from Golden Books. I remember in particular an illustration for the David and Goliath tale – a marvel to me for depicting a decapitated giant without resorting to blood and gore. The artist posed the body of Goliath in such a way that his body reclined over a downward turn in the terrain. Further back, David walked away, holding high Goliath’s head. His posture and expression seemed quite triumphant. I wondered over that picture for a long time and on many occasions. I think I wondered why he so triumphant, walking away with a head that was of no earthly good to him. I mean, why not just leave it there next to the body? Was he going to get some sort of prize for bringing the head back? Was he going to have it stuffed and hang it on his wall? I couldn’t guess. Bible stories were like that. They made no sense to me, and yet they were apparently very important to grownups and older kids. I think I was less interested in the stories themselves than in the fact that people found those stories so important. Adam and Eve, Noah, Moses – Moses had to be important; they had made a whole movie about him, and about the ten commandments. God split the sea in half, made pillars of fire, sent lightning down to smash golden idols. They didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but visually they were fascinating.

The most I could make out about God, though, was that “He” had a really bad temper.

Of the Polish books, I found out later that one impressive set of volumes – in uniform size and binding – were the works of Henryk Sienkiewicz and the epic poem Pan Tadeusz. My parents revered these works, but they never read them, not where I could see them. Of course, they read them when they were children, remembered them vividly, and both my parents could quote passages from Pan Tadeusz.

You might think I’d have learned more Polish from my parents, but I didn’t. I think my parents were sorely divided on the subject of teaching my brother and I Polish. On the one they, they wanted us to learn the language of our heritage. On the other, when they spoke in Polish they knew we wouldn’t understand them. They had their own language – the secret language of adults. In the end, I think, the most I learned of Polish were the basic Catholic prayers, the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary. My mother typed them out, in Polish, and taped them on the wall of our bedroom, just above the nightstand and below the crucifix that hung above it.

I do remember my dad reading to my brother and me a children’s edition of Robinson Crusoe. I vividly remember his reading of the scene where Crusoe comes upon the footprint in the sand, his placing his foot within it and discovering that it did not fit his own foot, that there must be someone else occupying the island. At this time, I won’t place too much significance on my remembering that scene, although I can. It is fraught with significance. But I will say that it impressed me because of its vividness – words making a picture in my imagination – and because the scene illustrated a basic sort of deduction – reality could be tested and examined. I needed to test reality because my home life did not resemble the “normal” world I encountered by watching television, or observing the behavior of the other kids in the neighborhood. The world of home and the “normal” world did not match up. I just couldn’t figure it out.

Another bunch of books that have stayed with me: no, not comic books; that’s a whole other story. It was a stack of paperbound books that sat in the lower right corner of the bookcase. Not “shelved” – stacked. They weren’t like American paperbacks. They were what we call now “trade”-sized paperbacks. No illustrations on the cover; no blurbs. The paper was cheap and thin and smelled with a distinct “non-American” scent. The covers weren’t even made of paperboard, just a slightly heavier grade of paper. The covers, titles, texts – all in Polish.

They did, however, have pictures.

There were pictures of soldiers in uniforms. They were pictures of soldiers holding guns. There were pictures of big cannons, of bombers flying overhead, of demolished cities.

Pictures of war.

I understood war in terms of action and activity – shooting, fighting, bombing. Kinesis. Motion. It was fascinating.  Have to admit it was fascinating. I’d seen some war movies on TV and I think my folks took me to see Pork Chop Hill, Ski Troop Attack – a few other war movies. War was in the movies, and I don’t think it could really be avoided. War was reality, or so it seemed. My parents both lived through the Second War War. My father lived in Lublin during the occupation. Nearly all his friends had died by 1945. My grandfather served in the Polish Army and nearly ended up as one of the officers executed by the Soviets in the Katyn Forest – though I didn’t learn that last fact for years. My mother went to school in Scotland after she, her mother and her sister nearly circumnavigated Europe to escape the Nazis.

Which is to say, there was some talk about “the war” in the household. Not a lot of talk. But talk of the war could not be avoided.

So these pictures of the war fascinated me. Unlike what I saw in the movies, they were “real.” It wasn’t the sort of sharp, well-lighted, “pretty" photography that an American cinematographer could perform. They were black and white – and gray. Gray upon gray. Everything gray. The images were often grainy and muddy, the sun too bright, the shadows too deep. I was a kid, but I could sense the authenticity of these images.

Then I reached the last pages of the book.

These were photos taken in the concentration camps.

Remember, I wasn’t much older than four, and I was looking at photographs of bodies – human bodies, naked bodies, bodies so starved you could make out the ribs, the knobby joints of every limb, the skin tightened against every cheekbone, the eyes fallen into the hollow recesses of their skulls. Dead eyes, hollow mouths, twisted teeth, wide open nostrils.

Bodies stacked in brick niches next to what I later discovered were oven doors. Bodies piled on little carts, stacked high – higher than you could imagine a cart so rickety and primitive could bear.

I stared at those photographs as much as I stared at the ones of all the military hardware and the uniformed combatants “doing their jobs.”

I stared at them more. And when I stopped staring I could still see them.

To a four-year-old, war makes a sort of sense. Not a “good” sense. An insane, twisted sense – it’s still a sense. A bunch of guys on one side shoot a bunch of guys on the other side. The other guys shoot back. Somebody “wins,” the way you win a ball game, or a game of checkers. That’s what it seemed like. And World War Two “made sense” in that “we” were fighting some very, very bad guys. Even for a kid, there was no way to mistake Hitler for George Washington – no way to mistake David for Goliath.

But those photos from the camps –

I will not pretend to understand them. I will not pretend to have derived lessons from them. I can’t say that I felt that what happened, what the pictures documented, was evil, because the placing of meaning to words and images is a complicated thing, and I was just too young to comprehend anything so big.

All I knew was that it was awful, it was terrifying, and I was frightened.

It was out there. The war was over, clearly enough. We were living in Chicago, in America, and everything was “all right” now, wasn’t it?

At least that’s what my parents tried to tell me, when I asked them about the pictures.

Nevertheless, it was out there. Whatever made what I saw in those photos a reality could still be out there.

Could.

I knew nothing about history as history. The difference between what was, what is, and what will be was too much for a four-year-old imagination.

It’s probably too much for a fifty-eight-year-old imagination, still remembering the afternoon I came upon that stack of books, in my dad’s den, in the bottom right corner of the bookcase.

So that book, whose name I don’t remember, whose words I couldn’t read, but whose pictures I could see, and did see – that’s the book that has probably stayed with me the longest and has had the most profound effect on whoever it is I have turned out to be.

+                          +                          +

For the record, though, this is the first list I came up with:

1. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
2. The Man With the Purple Eyes by Charlotte Zolotow
3. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
4. Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
5. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
6. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
7. Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov
8. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
9. Orlando by Virginia Woolf
10. Who? by Algis Budrys
11. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
12. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
13. A Walk on the Wild Side by Nelson Algren
14. Native Son by Richard Wright
15. Less Than Angels by Barbara Pym

After some discussion, I added these (I was on a roll): What Is Cinema? by Andre Bazin: The Parade's Gone By by Kevin Brownlow; The Instrumentality of Mankind by Cordwainer Smith; The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy by Ernst Cassirer; The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer; Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges; The Professor's House by Willa Cather; A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor; The Confidence Man by Herman Melville.

And after some more discussion, I added three more books from my misspent youth that have stayed with me: Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut; Revenge of the Lawn by Richard Brautigan; Journey Beyond Tomorrow (aka The Journey of Joenes) by Robert Sheckley.

And yet three more: Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me by Richard Farina, which I read in one sitting and drove me nuts because I could not accept what the fictional character of Gnossos does at the end of the story; a book that wasn’t very good (by my standards, whatever they are) but that I also finished in one sitting: The Butterfly Revolution by William Butler; and I would be remiss not to mention Against Our Will by Susan Brownmiller, who had the courage almost forty years ago to say what some folks still find difficult to acknowledge today.

Poetry? Like comics, that’s a whole ’nother story that would fill another entry at least as long as this.

And you will notice not one inclusion of a book about (or by) dinosaurs. Again, dinosaurs deserve their own sweet, generous chapter. Ask me no more questions and I will tell you no lies.

How I Didn't Stop Feeling Guilty About Not Doing Nothing

A writer needs time to do nothing. To wander. To think. To allow silly, stupid, half-formed scenarios to pop up in his head -- to twist the scenarios around a few times, then make Silly-Putty shapes from them. A writer needs time to stick his (or her) hands in his (or her) pockets, bellow out, "Awww f*ck it!" and take a walk down a shaded street she (or he) has never walked down before. A writer needs time --

-- But not too much time. Sometimes doing nothing is a way to escape the inevitable. Escape briefly, if you must. But before long someone (even yourself) needs to kick you in the cajones (or equivalent antomy) because no matter how long you wait, the inevitable isn't going anywhere.

In the meantime, "downtime" may be "uptime," if it leads to something interesting -- some potential future project you may not have considered before.

I've been reluctant to post anything for nearly two weeks because I felt like I really haven't done anything other than muddle around, sit in libraries, take down books I'm not supposed to be reading and otherwise waste my time.

Facebook is like a social stock ticker, and as such it is just as addicting, granted you have the money to make the comparison valid. So I said: "Hey, you really need to post something, Mr. I-Need-to-Have-a-Blog Guy.  So tell the world what you haven't been doing when you were supposed to be doing something."

And I couldn't. Because in between all that time I was supposed to be doing nothing, I edited the eighteenth chapter of my novel, The Va-va-va VOOM!, which is going to need a new editor (due to circumstances beyond my control -- I better make it look as good as I possibly can, and finish that outline I promised that former editor a while back). And it wasn't easy -- as I may have mentioned before, I'm pushing myself in this novel to do more action scenes, and do them tightly, move them quickly, and do them without so many crappy, dead sentences. I already cleaned up the seventeenth chapter. I read it over today, while sitting in the Panera Bread in Wimette, and it didn't suck as much as I thought it did.

I also wrote an Afterword for a mini e-book I've been working on, explaining a little bit about how I came to write "Surfaces" and "The Ambiguities."

I also pumped out a few thousand words more on an accompanying piece for another e-book that will include "Auteur Theory," "The Cthulhu Orthodontist" and "Where We Go." I'm not liking that one, because it's turning into a memoir, and I don't really think any readers want to know that much about anything I write.

I've also been fiddling with covers and titles and . . . Hey! I thought this was going to be a simple matter of putting this junk into a doc and "making book," so to speak -- like I'm trying to do a careful job! What's with that?

And then, while in the same Panera, I worked a little on "Agent," or whatever I end up calling it, in a scene where I needed to look up some Henry James, so I actually had a reason for going through the shelves at the library and look up a quote from "The Middle Years."

All of this is not to say that I haven't been wasting some time, but at least I've been wasting that time in interesting ways. I got stuck reading a fascinating essay today by Alfred Bester, "My Affair with Science Fiction," where he describes part of the inspiration that went into his writing The Stars My Destination, and a great account of his "demented" meeting with John W. Campbell.

And, at one library or another, I've spent time reading Henry Adams, Isaac Asimov, Edgar Pangborn, Neal Stepehenson, D. F. Jones and Jospeh Epstein. A writer might do worse.

While driving around through ravine territory in Highland Park and Glencoe, I worked out what I needed to do in the nineteenth chapter of VOOM!

The other week, while taking the Metra downtown, I stared at freight cars sitting on a side track and realized that all the research I'd done on boxcar ladders could have been accomplished if I'd just opened my eyes and looked out the window as I rode into the city.

So, as much as I would like to say I feel guilty about having wasted so much time, I'm finding that I haven't wasted enough time to say that -- though I feel guilty about it all the same.

That's what writers do when they're not writing.

Some book cover possibilities

I'm too worn out to write much today, so I'm going to see if I can post some pictures successfully. They're mockups for the covers of the ebooks (or is that "e-books"?) I'm putting together, and an illustration for one of the stories ("The Ambiguities," originally published in Hell in the Heartland). I'm not sure it will help sell the books that they don't much look like the other covers I've seen, but there's a certain sameness to many ebook covers I'd like to avoid. Let me know if you think they stink, or if they might be salvageable if I do this or that.

Also: Please let me know if you think putting "Nebula winning author of Bronte's Egg'" on the cover sounds stupid. One part of me says I should put something like that on the cover because it might sell more books. Another part of me says I'm just being conceited.

Other than these covers, I spent some time changing underscorings to italics in three of the stories for the books (and figuring out some other search-and-replace relics left over from an Alexandria Digital version of one), slipped in a little detail I missed in the second paragraph of "Dixon's Road," and mapped out a change to another old story I'm working on for the saur collection. It's a story called "Agent" (unless you or I can think of a better name), and it includes a scene where several girls encounter an irascible stegosaur named Agnes in a toy store. The story is also supposed to explain Reggie a bit more -- where it came from and why it might have gotten into some trouble.

I also spent some time looking over recent stories in "Year's Best" anthologies, looking for good pieces with unreliable narrators. It's for something Marty Halpern is working on. The one thing I've discovered is that it's not so easy to figure out just what constitutes an "unreliable" narrator. Some narrators are just being deceptive. But "unreliable"? Unless it's someone like the narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart," it's a judgment call. But I'll turn over the few I think might qualify to Marty and see what he thinks.

On Reading and Re-Reading

An inaugural footnote: Your patience is requested as I adjust myself to what for me will be a new mode of communication. Long have I envied the life of a blogger, but watched them all from afar. Now, I get to make all the same mistakes, and invent some new ones, I'm sure.

I'll go at this in an "I Write As I Please" format to some degree, but will probably focus on my immediate concerns these days: my writing, science fiction,  the teaching of writing, the teaching of writing science fiction, all the various related literatures, arts, cultures popular and obscure, and whatever little details intersect with these interests.

Along with those, I also plan to post some "Dispatches from Sauria" -- unless I decide to create a new blog solely devoted to the saurs and to saurian activity, most likely including the harangues of one Agnes A. Stegosaur It's always good to have someone like Agnes around. If ever I find myself short of an opinion, Agnes is only too ready to provide one. For this I feel truly blessed.

Recently, at Wiscon, I appeared on a panel, "Rereading: What Stands the Test of Time and Why?" It's a topic that seems dear to many bloggers and commentators, especially (if not exclusively) to those in the field of science fiction and fantasy.

I wrote this (somewhat edited) on the topic in the thread of one of my Facebook postings, before attending the panel:

"I don't know what "test of time" means . . . All I know is that mucho folks are digging out old tomes and filling blogs with their opinions as to why this one here is no longer relevant (relevant to what?) or that one there has been unfairly neglected (by whom?").

"I don't believe many of these commentators have an objective criterion to make their determinations -- none of them are holding judgeships in the Great Court of Literature and, when I last checked, no authors have been brought before that body to face charges of 'literary irrelevancy' anyway.

"Some of the immediate motivations for this interest in tests and time vary between spite, indignation and a need to trim down a personal library that's grown way too big to manage anymore. Maybe another motivation: a feeling that folks within our little community are checking out which books will embarrass 'the genre' if ever we achieve another modicum of literary respectability, and said books need to be stricken from the shelves, which is an even sillier (and pettier) reason than spite and indignation.

"What continues to be read by readers continues to be read because for one reason or another (even for no reason at all) these works still speak to them. In my class, "The Cold Equations" still generates intense and lively discussions, and I can't tell you how many pieces in NYRSF, essays and letters of comment alike, have tried to bury that story [And, after attending another panel at Wiscon, I can confirm that academics still cringe at the mention of "The Cold Equations" I can't tell you how thrilling and fascinating it was to watch one particular academic's face twinge into 'cringe mode' as I uttered that title. It was like reciting a magical incantation.].

"I am no fan of 'The Nine Billion Names of God,' and yet when a colleague assailed me (good-naturedly, I confess) about its continued relevancy, it being a "punchline story," as he put it, I defended it by pairing it against a more recent story [the most rewarding "Infinites" by Vandana Singh], and tried to demonstrate how the older story addresses concerns which haven't entirely disappeared in the sixty-odd years since it was first written. My opinion of the story has little to do with the conversation created between stories and readers when you put the two together.

"There's no quicker way to gather negative critical responses than by having your work chosen by the Library of America. There seem to be more people who know what LoA shouldn't publish than agree on what what it should. If I have to read one more blog entry by Joe Sourball going back to read to some personally significant work that first lured him into reading SF, and finding that it creaks and totters, I will barbecue Mr. Sourball's cat personally. I'm participating in the panel because I also find this 'test of time' business puzzling and hope to come out of it better informed about what it's all supposed to mean."

Well, that panel has been and gone, and as always happens after a panel, I couldn't really figure out what I had to say until a few weeks after. The panel itself, through no fault of its own, equipped with a capable, intelligent cast and an equally smart audience, made no further headway on the topic. At cons, panels like this often break down to the audience asking for titles to put on their "to read" (or "not to read") lists.

The one thing that's struck me, though, since attending that panel: You know that whole experience of going back to some favorite book, reading it again (or trying to read it again) and finding it somehow diminished, or lacking (for 'lack' of a better word), or otherwise not living up to one's memories of the book? Never happened to me.

Never. Not once.

Why? Am I so lacking in critical faculties? Were my tastes always so highly refined that I gravitated only toward the greatest of masterpieces? Or am I such a bottom-feeder that anything written above the level of a semi-literate ransom thrills me?

I don't think so, bottom-feeder though I may be. I think it has more to do with the way I read books. It may not be that I'm lacking in critical faculties, but that what faculties I utilize are applied to different ends.

Stating this, though, makes me pause, because it's three in the morning and I'm about to enter a labyrinth of "explanation." Let me see if I can find a quick way to explain what I mean:

The book (or story, or novelette, or poem) is itself. It's also the creative act of its author. It's also the creative act of its reader(s). The reading of the book is the summary of the time, place, author, reader -- all sorts of things along with the book itself. Each reading creates its own individual context, and each of these contexts is fascinating to me (no, not too strong a word) -- even if it's of no interest to anyone else.

I don't read books to "test" them. I read books to read them, and will take my pleasures where I find them.