Beyond the Veil of the Ordinary with Theodore Sturgeon

I can’t decide how to describe these six stories (really four stories, one novella, and one novelette) by Theodore Sturgeon. They are not science fiction—although there is travel between dimensions in time and space. They are not fantasy—although there is the novella about the man Gorwing, who mysteriously knows whenever someone desperately needs something (no scientific or logical explanation given). And they are not horror—although a story like “The Bones” echoes spooky like Bradbury meets Lovecraft. 

Despite the portraits done in music, the giant worms fermenting alcohol in coconuts to pass along to an aging and phantasm-tortured alcoholic, the transdimensional old men in floating chairs, despite the determined preparation for the beavers to inherit the earth, this collection is closer to nonfiction, to the real world, than any genre. Read a single page of Sturgeon and you’ll understand why this is.

Underneath the clever plots and strange situations featured in this collection are characters that are heartbreakingly real and recognizable in their neuroses and hang-ups, in their victories and defeats.

In “Need” there is the man and his wife—him plagued by the eternal worry of being a coward (and thus a cruel husband), and her who only wants someone to care for.

In “Abreaction” the man who has forgotten everything has only one concern. It doesn’t bother him that he is unsure where he is, who he is, or how to do his job; for him, it is somehow much more significant that he remember the name of his Puerto Rican coworker.

“Nightmare Island” presents a man who finds his first real friend in an unexpected place (and species) only to have him ripped away.

“Largo” is about the man who seems to regenerate from one generation to the next, both in fiction and real life: the man in love, rejected by his girl and duped by her lover, forever haunted by her face, always in love, constantly plotting revenge.

“The Bones” gives a peek into the last living moments of the dead. You don’t just see the way they die—you see all they felt leading up to it, all their hurts, the memories that grip them and won’t let go.

The final piece in the collection, “Like Young,” is the obvious place to end the book. In this story, a man is tasked with writing an ode for a ceremony heralding the passing of the torch of culture and intelligence from man to beaver. As he sits alone by the sea trying to hammer it out, he experiences a moment that seems inevitable, irreplaceable, and priceless, a moment in which the human past is given meaning and the uncertain future is imbued with hope.

These pieces may be strange and outlandish, but they also project small aspects of our humanity into the void for us to contemplate. They shine a flashlight in the dark at the things we often consider mundane, the things that are really the most telling.

Keats and Near Tragedy Have Set Me to Thinking

It is my opinion that we don’t think in big enough terms. Our metaphors and similes fall short.

When I say ‘we’ and ‘our,’ I am speaking for the average American in the here and now. I can’t speak for the little boy that navigates through the lanterns and balgha laid out like fish at Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar any more than I can speak for the first Lakota to pierce his flesh in the ritual performance of the sun dance.

If there are any among us who can still discern the secrets that are inherent in every object, or the epic nature of the most seemingly insignificant events, it is the religious woman or man. I say this with hesitancy. I do not mean to say that a person who calls himself religious is automatically indoctrinated into some secret society of Seers. I mean to say that religion is one of the only lenses left in modern times through which to see the world as more than what it seems, material and static.

Everything is bigger and more wonderful than it seems at first glance.

Right now I am working my way through Keats’s poetry, and I just finished Endymion. My reading of this major poem happened to coincide with Tyler getting in a bad car accident and breaking his back. I love when things align just so and everything becomes clearer.

Endymion, who falls in love with Cynthia, goddess of the moon, undertakes a journey through the cavernous depths of the earth, past sleeping Adonis and Venus and her doves, to the bottom of the sea, through Neptune’s palace, through the atmosphere on the back of a winged steed. All for love.

I can’t claim such fantastic experiences myself, but, when you’re in love, every moment and every glance takes on epic and magical qualities. We take so much for granted. Not just in terms of loved ones we can lose in a moment’s shifting of the universe’s weight, but simpler things, too. I don’t want to see a door as a door. I want to see it as a threshold opening into every possible corridor or chamber in the maze of actuality and possibility. I don’t want heartbreak to be a sugarcoated few nights of depression. I want it to be the descent into hell that it is. And I don't want love to be a convenient routine you fall into with someone who conveniently has the same habits. I want love to be otherworldly and strange and beautiful and dangerous.

Tyler is alive and well, and everything around me promises More if I just take the time to look.

On Cults and Mayonnaise

Silverberg, Robert. The Masks of Time. New York: Ballantine Books, 1973. Print.

While I highly doubt the average person would admit it, there is no doubt in my mind that we live in an age fueled by cult madness. You, your best friend, and your mother might disagree, but we’re knee deep in it even though no one’s pulled out the pitcher of kool-aid yet. I don’t think anyone realizes how truly Bizarre with a capital ‘B’ the world is. Everyone is so hell-bent on pushing the terror of meaning out of their mind that they’ve set up alters to the most ridiculous, shocking, and grotesque things.  It’s all about the meaning and priority you assign to the things in your life. Would you believe that some of the most straight-laced, square people are members of some of the sickest unofficial, unorganized organizations in the world? Facebook can be a cult, and so can fashion and yoga and rigid, organic lifestyles. It all depends on how a person treats a thing, institution, pastime, or whatever. We dedicate abnormal amounts of time to things that don’t matter at the end of the day, all the while suppressing the mortifying and frightening thought that this is where we’re looking for and assigning meaning. 

Robert Silverberg’s The Masks of Time is a novel about cults. Two cults, really. One that does a merry dance of death around the thought of an impending doomsday, the other putting all their faith and love in a man that might be from the distant future (could also be an alien, a hoaxer, or a crazy). The story is told from the perspective of Leo Garfield, a professor of physics assigned to a team that is supposed to chauffer Vornan-19, the man of the future, through the United States, protecting him and assessing him as they go. I won’t say whether Vornan turns out to be what he says he was, because it doesn’t matter. An object is only what others perceive it to be, and for people looking for meaning, for a god to creep out of the rubble of anarchy and provide a Way Back Out, Vornan-19 was a god. Whether he actually was from the future or not. Whether he was all-powerful or not. Whether he was even likeable or not.  I really enjoyed this book. For me, Vornan-19 was the perfect personification of the kind of weird attitudes I notice in the world today. Hell, you can polish up a jar of mayonnaise real shiny and call that your god, if you feel so inclined. And our handy human brains will allow you to do it subconsciously, without wasting the time of even acknowledging the beatific mayo’s divinity.

Brian Barker Makes Me Pitch a Fit

Let me stamp my foot and act out the written, adult version of a child's tantrum: IT'S NOT FAIR.

Here's what I'm talking about: Brian Barker. And I'm not referring to his talent--yes, one might call it unfair to be that damn good, but I'm not about to cast stones of jealousy towards someone who can make my head spin so in the weirdly enchanting alleyways of sinister country.

I've spent a fair amount of my pre-shutting-down-for-bed-time reading poetry, and Barker is my latest find. I came across his poem, "A Brief Oral Account of Torture Pulled Down Out of the Wind", in the winter 2011 volume of Pleiades, then went on to his website and read all of the freely available stuff I could find.

Barker is a professor at the University of Colorado Denver, the co-editor of Copper Nickel, the recipient of numerous awards, and the author of two books of poetry, The Animal Gospels (2006) and The Black Ocean (2011).

Here's what I'm complaining about: the irreconcilable conflict that arises when a passionate person is broke.

Right now, on Amazon, The Animal Gospels is selling for $16.95. That's $16.95 for 76 pages. Same price from his publisher, Tupelo Press. The Black Ocean will not be available until June, but I imagine the price will fall somewhere in the same region.

Now, I'm not saying Brian Barker's work is not worth seventeen bucks. Based on what I've read, I'd say it's worth more, and I'd gladly pay it in order to show my respect and chip in whatever I could to support the guy, however dull that quarter might be, coming from my pocket. But seventeen dollars? For seventy-six pages? I realize the economy is no friend to writers right now. But when books put out by worthy authors such as this are that expensive (and the economy is really no more a friend to anyone else than it is to writers), things are not going to get any better any time soon, because no large base of buyers is going to develop, even if there are tons of people like me interested in purchasing copies.

I don't even know how to round off this post. I'll at least say this: Brian Barker is a wonderweaver and my life stinks because I'm having to put off buying his first book until my checkbook register gets bored with this hostility bender its been on lately.

Where the Weird and Brilliant Converge: Grant Morrison's We3

Morrison, Grant, writer. We3. Illustrated by Frank Quitely. Colored by Jamie Grant. Lettered by Todd Klein. New York: DC Comics, 2005. Print.

Last weekend found me in the crosshairs of a conversation between my comics-obsessed boyfriend and my comics-obsessed former roommate. As they talked my attention wandered. After taking a course on comics/graphic novels (I’m indifferent when it comes to the terminology--life is too short for such battles) last spring semester and a good deal of persuasion from Tyler (my boyfriend), I’ve become a fan of the medium, but on this particular evening I was more engrossed in my beer after the long car ride up to Athens earlier that day. I might have mentally wandered back in on any number of topics, but what I did happen to catch was their brief exchange about Grant Morrison. Tyler is a pretty big fan of his work, but my one time roomie was less impressed by him, claiming him to be “too weird,” or something along those lines.

I’m not totally sure how this was meant to be received--as my roommate finding Morrison to simply be too weird for his personal tastes, or as his feeling Morrison made too much of a deliberate effort to be weird in his work (in an attempt to establish his own quirky trademark, essentially). He also could have been suggesting something else. Language leaves frustratingly ample room for interpretation.

Whatever he meant, Grant Morrison is just the kind of “too weird” I like. Today I read We3, and for all of its brevity and compactness, it was one hell of a read.

The plot follows three pets that have been put on the frontlines of science and war by a highly classified government project. The dog, cat, and rabbit (“1”, “2”, and “3”, respectively) roost within the confines of robotic machinery that visually conjures up images of both insectoid exoskeletons and, strangely, Easter eggs. Bright, cherry-like bulbs tip the ends of antennas that run down the central strip of their heads and necks like an alien’s mohawk. The end result of all this metal and fur is a trio of cyborgs that are part animal, part machine, and entirely deadly. They talk, they shoot missiles, they can spew a shower of poison gas when necessary. The problem: We3 are up for decommissioning, and their ultra fine-tuned fight-or-flight instincts are kicking into high gear.

Aside from being an engaging tale, We3 takes a magnifying glass to a number of ethical issues. Not only does it deal metaphorically (yet quite clearly) with questions of animal treatment, it also touches on more general notions of the basic necessities for survival, which become more heartbreakingly obvious with the animals’ limited vocabulary: “danger”, “run”, “sick”, “hungry”, etc. Perhaps the most woeful and telling word in the entire graphic novel is the repeating question/statement/lament/fuzzy memory, “home”. If science paves a path toward displacement and indifference, Morrison provides a remedy with this empathy-inducing tale.

The storytelling would have been superb either way, but Frank Quitely’s artwork takes We3 to a level of excellence that is located somewhere outside of Earth’s atmosphere. He manages to contrast extreme violence with images of natural beauty and tranquility, which subtly evokes the empathetic response in the reader that Morrison is looking for while heightening the sense of disgust at the cruel and needless acts being perpetrated.

In terms of page design, Quitely has here produced some extremely original and innovative work. Numerous pages are top to bottom populated with the small square boxes of security camera feeds, which paints a large and complex picture of events through disjointed glimpses of particular places and particular persons over a finite period of time. There are also a number of full-page bleeds that take things into epic realms: this could be a myth of our present's future, our distant future's past.

The most impressive pages are those in which larger images are overlaid with smaller boxes presenting fragments of what is happening in the larger context of things. These pages are invariably violent, and the smaller boxes serve to visually convey chaos, speed, and simultaneity of destruction.

Overall, Morrison’s writing and Quitely’s art combine to create an ingenious and disturbing graphic story that can be read in thirty minutes or poured over for hours as desired. Yes, it’s weird. But I ain’t complaining.

My First Encounter With Roger Zelazny

Zelazny, Roger. Doorways in the Sand. New York: Harper, 1991. Print.

Black cats, rooftop clambering forever-students, sentient, organic computers, talking wombats and kangaroos, star stones, inversion machines, telepathic Venus Flytraps, stereoisowhiskey, and desert-tramping lackeys, all wrapped up in a science fiction detective story of epic proportions. This is Roger Zelazny’s 1976 novel, Doorways in the Sand.

It’s not that I don’t want to give a good, informative, brief summary. I want to very much, but I can’t figure out where to even start, so convoluted and meandering (yet easy to follow) is the plot of this book. So instead, this random sampling of the kind of outrageous objects and characters that await the reader will have to do.

I don’t know that I have ever had as much fun reading a novel as I have had reading this one. The characters are well-developed and funny, the writing simple yet poetic in its descriptions, the ideas grand and sweeping, touching on everything from philosophy to alien anthropology and sociology. I can’t wait to get my hands on more of Zelazny’s stuff.

This is cool!

I randomly came across this site and had to share it. I'm usually pretty behind on the times, so the case might be that most people who would care for this site already know about it, but if not, check this out:

http://hirsutehistory.com/

It is a brand of t-shirts that feature the hair, glasses, pipes, etc. of famous writers, philosophers, musicians, scientists, even 80s wrestlers. My personal favorite is Isaac Asimov,

but there are umpteen other really clever ones. I want one!