Superman Comics!

I am and will always be a DC man. I guess it comes of watching all those episodes of Superfriends when I was a kid. It saddens me that DC movies have been so crummy lately, though I do have high hopes for Wonder Woman. But I'm allergic to tie-ins and sprawling media franchises. I've seen only one Marvel movie to date (Guardians of the Galaxy, which was light on crossover stuff), and my exposure to the comics is limited to the inept newspaper Spider-Man.

Really, though, the DC trinity captures everything I'd ever want in a superhero. You've got Superman representing science fiction and planetary romance, Wonder Woman representing mythological fantasy, and Batman representing the purely human. What more do you need?

I read some Batman comics last spring, and enjoyed them so much that I decided to move on to Superman. Superman is, of course, the superhero, the exemplar of the breed, descended from the science fictional supermen of the thirties and the long-jumping John Carter of Mars. He's certainly the first superhero I ever knew about. The only comics I read as a kid were Superman comics.

To get myself in the mood, I rewatched Richard Donner's Superman: The Movie, which is, I suppose, the best Superman movie we're ever going to get. That John Williams score still gives me a thrill. What struck me this time around is how closely it follows the life of Christ, with an infancy narrative marked by danger and assumed poverty and a kind of kenosis, a brief boyhood idyll among the green fields and blue skies of Kansas, a coming-of-age and period of testing in the wilderness, and a beginning of work at the age of thirty. The sequel is a lesser movie but still watchable (especially in the recently released "Donner cut"), while the rest of them just go downhill from there.

As I wrote at the time, I was less than impressed with the recent Man of Steel, which replaces the mythic conformation of Superman to Christ's life with a vulgar, superficial, commercially-motivated appeal to Christian consumers (and relentless, painfully overt product placement, which forces us to contemplate an alternate America in which Superman is unknown but IHOPs abound). And I have no desire to watch the grim and superviolent Batman vs. Superman. (Well, maybe just a little desire.)

But we'll always have Superman: The Movie.

*

When I read comics, I'm not terribly interested in consistent character arcs reaching across decades. All the metafictional infinite-earths-crisis stuff just makes my head spin. It also strikes me as unnecessary. For me, Superman is a mythical character like Heracles or King Arthur. The stories don't all have to match up. I'm coming at it from the point of view of a casual, occasional reader, of course. At any rate, I tend to gravitate toward one-off stories that seem reasonably self-contained. I'm also not averse to a little tweaking or even subversion.

In making my selections, I tried to find comic books graphic novels that are well-regarded by fans, with 4+ stars on Amazon. I wanted at least one modern take on the origin story and at least one Justice League story. I also wanted stories meditating on what Superman really means as a pop culture icon.

I had the most fun reading All-Star Superman (2005 – 2008), which follows Superman through a sacrificial death-mission into the sun, an episodic account of twelve mythic labors accomplished as a kind of zany Silver-Age bucket list, and an implied immolation-apotheosis. It portrays Superman as a kind of predestined solar deity while sending him on nutty space-age adventures with all his old friends, from Jimmy Olsen (now a flamboyant columnist) to Krypto the Superdog, as he fights for truth and justice against the likes of Lex Luthor and Bizarro. Time-pretzels and near-death experiences return him to his roots on Krypton and his coming-of-age in Smallville. Lex pontificates on what life is all about in an exclusive interview / supervillain prison riot. Sun-eaters eat rogue sentient suns. Superman descends to the underworld with Lois Lane and arm-wrestles for her love. You get the idea.

All-Star Superman is an exuberant, funny, nostalgic, and poignant celebration of the Superman you grew up with (if you're my age, anyway), and more brightly colored than a bubble gum wrapper containing the secrets of the universe. If someone were to read only one Superman comic in their lifetime, I think this is the one I would recommend.

To satisfy my craving for a good origin story, I tried Superman: Birthright (2003 – 2004). There's nothing daringly new or different about it, but then again that's what you want in an origin story: an update hitting all the main points from a contemporary point of view, an exploration and temporal "localization" of a well-known myth-cycle. Amirite?

That's not to say Birthright isn't genuinely engrossing, however. This is partly because it goes far beyond kryptonite in exposing Superman's deep and very human vulnerabilities. It paints a sensitive portrait of the person behind the artificial Metropolis Clark Kent: there's Superman, of course, but there's also Smallville Clark Kent, which you're made to realize is an integral part of his genuine personality. Smallville Clark is who Superman is when he's just being himself.

Superman is a person with dual identities – last son of Krypton and Kansas farmboy – encountering the same obstacles any child adopted as an infant by parents of another culture might face. Much of the story focuses on his struggles to realize his Kryptonian heritage while dealing with the guilt and fear of betraying his adopted parents' love. The meditations on tribal identity that arise during Clark's coverage of an African conflict mirror his eventual adoption of the Kryptonian "S" symbol as his symbol. The story's climax, which involves his troubled boyhood chum Lex Luthor, is, of course, insanely over-the-top, with giant robots and wholesale destruction, as it should be in an decent Superman story, but also dwells on Superman's need to win the trust of a suspicious public.

I would recommend Superman: Birthright to anyone looking for a sensitive, modern take on Superman's origin story.

Now, you know how Superman stands for truth, justice, and the American way? Have you ever wondered what might have happened if his rocket had landed, not in Kansas, but on a collective farm in the USSR? Wonder no more, my friend, but pick up a copy of Superman: Red Son (2003). It's bizarre, terrifying, and a bit sad, with a mind-bending twist at the end. All of which is to say, it's right up my alley.

Life under Superman the benevolent communist dictator is about as fun as you might imagine. Oh, but he has only the best of intentions, comrade! Intentions that gradually transform him from the workers' champion into an incarnation of the all-seeing, all-knowing Big Brother of 1984 (complete with compulsory brain surgery), in an arc not unlike that of the pigs in Animal Farm.

Red Son interweaves Superman's public career with an alternate history beginning in the Eisenhower administration, pitting him against chess-wizard supergenius Lex Luthor and everything Luthor can throw against him. Superman's presence in the USSR sparks a kind of superhero arms race. The time around, the USA is on the losing side, growing increasingly isolated and eventually turning into a capitalist North Korea.

Wonder Woman comes into the story, throwing in with the USSR and adopting a Soviet version of her usual costume. Batman is a freedom fighter / terrorist with a distinctly Soviet backstory, a crazy, creepy grin, and a bat-ushanka with earflaps. Colonel Hal Jordan, a.k.a. Green Lantern, is a crazed, commie-hating zealot who went off the deep end after years of waterboarding in an Asian POW camp.

Red Son uses its inversion of actual history infused with heavy overtones of George Orwell to prompt questions about American foreign policy yesterday and today as well as the nature of human progress. Not bad for a comic book. What's more, the art is really cool, resembling Soviet propaganda posters at some points and the old Fleischer cartoons at others.

Red Son isn't to everyone's tastes, but I thought it was terrific.

The Superman mythos is subjected to even closer scrutiny in Kingdom Come (1996), which takes place in the not-so-distant future, pitting an older generation of out-of-touch, retired superheroes – Superman and company – against a younger generation of amoral, violent vigilantes who've begun tearing the world apart in ruthless turf wars. Narrated by a pastor who views and sometimes takes part in events in a series of visions, replete with ominous quotations from the Book of Revelation and fiery visions of angelic battles in the heavens, it looks and reads at times almost like one of William Blake's books of prophecy. It's an unabashedly religious, quasi-biblical comic-book apocalypse whose antichrists are metahumans like the horned Magog and "the Captain of Lightning and Thunder" and whose false gods are the superheroes of yore.

I imagine this hit a nerve in the late nineties, when everyone halfway expected the world to end with the coming of the new millennium.

Kingdom Come is more a Justice League story than a Superman story. It features pretty much everybody you've ever heard of, and probably some you haven't. For me, Batman steals the show. (As he always does.) He's a cynical, hardboiled old recluse whose battered body is now encased in a steel exoskeleton, remotely patrolling Gotham's streets with scary, crime-fighting robot drones from a ruined Wayne Manor. Wonder Woman, as beautiful and high-minded as ever, battles demons of her own as an outcast from Themyscira.

But Superman is the central protagonist, no doubt about it. He swings from bitter hermit to fascist avenger, coming out of self-imposed retirement after millions of people die in a superhero-sparked atomic blast, only to make things worse before he makes things better. The battle that begins as a riot in Superman's Kansas Gulag is like something out of a Brueghel painting, ending in a second holocaust that leaves the barren battlefield strewn with charred superhero skeletons.

Are superheroes really a blessing, or are they a curse in disguise? That's the question Kingdom Come asks without offering a satisfying answer.

The art is quite different from what you typically see in comic books; quite different, and quite beautiful. It was executed in gouache, using black-and-white underpaintings with a transparent color overlay, touched up here and there with airbrush or opaque paint. Lightning flashes. Flesh glows. Metal gleams. Every page is a feast for the eyes.

*

As you can probably tell, when it comes to Superman – who seems hard to write for – I gravitate toward the meta. There are some other Superman stories I'd like to dip in to. Before I do that, though, I may try to acquire some well-regarded, fairly modern (post-crisis) Wonder Woman comics, in anticipation of her upcoming film, the trailers for which look pretty cool. Do you know what Wonder Woman's theatrical debut is? The Lego Movie. Isn't that wrong? For her sake, I hope they don't come out with another stinker.

Noir Reviews: Murder, My Sweet, December 1944

Today we go from a screenplay written by Chandler to a film based on a Chandler novel: Murder, My Sweet, directed by Edward Dmytryk and adapted from Farewell, My Lovely. It appears to be the first movie based on Chandler, beating The Big Sleep by a year and a half. It's also the first film in this series to feature an honest-to-God trenchcoat-wearing, chain-smoking, wisecracking private eye. Maybe Dick Powell's Marlowe is the one all those other laconic dicks are trying to be.

Now, I have to confess here that I'm a bit biased. I've read Farewell, My Lovely many times, which has tended to make me overly critical of Murder, My Sweet. Every little line that's altered, replaced, spoken by a character who didn't speak it in the novel, or repeated because the writer apparently thought it so effective ("cute as lace pants") makes the creative thought-process a little too obvious. Even the change in the title irritates me. Significant plot alterations make it worse, e.g., putting an actual jade necklace into play, turning spunky sidekick Anne Riordan into lady-in-distress Ann Grayle, and making a jealous jade-collecting husband central to the resolution. The omnipresent seediness of the novel is sanitized away. And it's got a cute, happy ending, which is not what we want in a film noir, especially one about a private detective.

A really good detective never gets married. He would lose his detachment, and this detachment is part of his charm. [Chandler, "Notes on the Mystery Story"]

Or, to put it more succinctly,

That said, considered on its own and not as an adaptation of a novel, there are worse ways to spend an hour and a half. Murder, My Sweet packs an insanely meandering plot with an assortment of bizarre characters into an incredibly narrow compass. The world it depicts is dark, dirty, and corrupt. The dialogue, being mostly Chandler's, is fast, sharp, and funny. And there are some interesting special effects sequences, particularly when Marlowe's hopped up on dope.

The femme fatale is played by the versatile Claire Trevor, already a bit past her prime but still with an Academy Award in her future (for playing a past-her-prime torch singer in John Huston's Key Largo). Mike Mazurki plays Moose Malloy. I'm fond of Mazurki, a pro-wrestler-turned-actor. He's not the best of actors, and he's not exactly what I imagine for Moose Malloy, but you can't deny that he makes a good big galoot. Two big galoots from the novel are actually combined into his character, which doesn't help the logic of the plot any, but his interactions with Marlowe are enjoyable to watch.

In general, however, everyone seems to be mouthing Chandler's dialogue rather than inhabiting it. I much prefer Humphrey Bogart and The Big Sleep, though that one also suffers from happy-ending-with-romantic-interest syndrome.

* * *

I give Murder, My Sweet a grade of C for commonplace on the following scale:

• A: awesome noir film, to be owned and watched a zillion times or until you have it memorized
• B: good (bueno) noir film with excellent passages but significant flaws, to be watched on occasion
• C: fairly commonplace noir film, to be watched once or twice
• D: dud of a noir film, to be avoided if possible

Others will disagree with this assessment. But I've got it in my DVD collection, and I've only watched it twice. What else can I award it?

High points in Murder, My Sweet include...well, nothing much stands out to me, sorry. I kind of like the swirling black clouds that appear whenever Marlowe is struck unconscious, which happens with disconcerting frequency. Takeaway quote:

"Only reason I took the job was because my bank account was trying to crawl under a duck."

Metapost: 2016

Ah, 2016! To be known to future historians as the Year from Hell. You know what I mean.

On the positive side, 2016 saw the release of my novelette "Salt and Sorcery," which takes place in a salt pan and appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, in August, as well as my novel The King of Nightspore's Crown, the second installment in my Enoch series (reviewed here), which also came out in August. I wrote several other stories, one of which is to appear next month, and am at work on the third Enoch novel.

I also wrote quite a bit on my blog, whose name changed from Alone with Alone to Cosmic Antipodes. Some of my favorite posts from 2016 include:

• Was Robert E Howard Autistic?
• Ghosts, Personal and Otherwise
• A Festival of Wrap-Around Cover Art
• Land of Enchantment and Atom Bombs
• A Bit More Burroughs Art
• D.O.A.
• The Eladogran Cosmogony
• Fantasy Cathedrals and McMansions
• Release the Kraken! Eighties Fantasy Schlock
• Keftu Dissected

These aren't necessarily the most popular posts as measured by clicks, but they're the ones I like the best. I also wrote a really nifty glossary, some form of which will accompany future editions of my Enoch books.

Now, most importantly (for me, at any rate), the list of stuff I read in 2016, arranged in reverse chronological order:

• The Histories by Herodotus
• My Gun is Quick by Mickey Spillane
• A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
• Smiley's People by John le Carré
• I, the Jury by Mickey Spillane
• The Gulag Archipelago, I - II by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• VALIS by Philip K. Dick
• The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré
• Linguistic Material from the Tribes of Southern Texas and Northeastern Mexico by John Swanton
• The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander
• The Honourable Schoolboy by John le Carré
• The Shining by Stephen King
• The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
• Lord Foul's Bane by Stephen Donaldson
• The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle
• The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
• Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré
• Regular Polytopes by H. S. M. Coxeter
• The Interior Castle by Teresa of Avila
• Five Children and It by Edith Nesbit
• Zothique by Clark Ashton Smith
• Emma by Jane Austen
• Solar Lottery by Philip K. Dick
• The Pnume by Jack Vance
• The Dirdir by Jack Vance
• The Lost Continent: The Story of Atlantis by C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
• Servants of the Wankh by Jack Vance
• City of the Chasch by Jack Vance
• Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
• The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson
• The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
• The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• Chimayo Valley Traditions by Elizabeth Kay
• The Gambler / Bobok / A Nasty Story by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Missions and Pueblos of the Old Southwest by Earle R. Forrest
• A Guide for the Perplexed by E. F. Schumacher
• The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
• In a Glass Darkly by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
• The Urth of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe
• Nostromo by Joseph Conrad
• The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
• My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George
• Imaro 2: The Quest for Cush by Charles Saunders
• The Relation of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca
• Bhagavad Gita
• Imaro by Charles Saunders
• Bleak House by Charles Dickens
• Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O'Brien
• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
• Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers by L. Sprague de Camp
• King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard
• Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural (Modern Library)
• Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott
• Howliday Inn by James Howe
• Dracula by Bram Stoker
• Bunnicula by Deborah and James Howe
• The Bloody Crown of Conan by Robert E. Howard
• The Language of the Night by Ursula K. Le Guin
• A Wind in the Door by Madeleine L'Engle
• Dark Valley Destiny: The Life of Robert E. Howard by L. Sprague de Camp, et al.
• "Gaudium et Spes"
• The Possessed by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake 

There are sixty-four entries in all. Some came in the form of audiobooks, which I listen to while painting, as it relieves the extreme anxiety I typically experience while working on art. But I rarely listen to an audiobook if I haven't already read the book in print -- it's too easy to miss important details. Right now I'm listening to the Parallel Lives of Plutarch, which will probably carry me through a corner of my current painting project. Maybe two corners.

True "literary" novelists on my list include Austen, Conrad, Dickens, and Dostoevsky. Nothing new there! I read quite a few ghost/horror stories, by the likes of Sheridan le Fanu, Oliver Onions, Rudyard Kipling, Henry James, Edith Wharton, M. R. James, Bram Stoker, Shirley Jackson, and Stephen King. I also read a number of books having to do with the Soviet Union and the Cold War, including several spy novels by John le Carré and the first two parts of The Gulag Archipelago.

Several entries were read as research for a cycle of sword-and-sorcery stories set in an alternate sixteenth-century Texas and New Mexico. I've completed two, the first of which is due to appear in Heroic Fantasy Quarterly next month, with an illustration by yours truly. Charles Saunders' Imaro stories are a big inspiration for these, as are Robert E. Howard's tales of Solomon Kane. I'm currently in the planning stages of a third, which will be set in the Santa Fe area.

A number of the entries on my list were read-alouds to my kids, currently aged six and eight, including A Wind in the Door, Bunnicula, Howliday Inn, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, My Side of the Mountain, The Hobbit, Five Children and It, The Last Unicorn, The Book of Three, and A Princess of Mars. When asked to select their top three, they both included A Princess of Mars and The Hobbit, naturally. (I should mention that I sometimes "translated" Burroughs' sentences as I read; being a bit of a hack, he never uses a short Saxon word when a convoluted phrase full of polysyllabic Latin words will do. In contrast, Tolkien, who was a master linguist, writes simply and directly. Reading to kids has made me a lot more sensitive to this.) We also read numerous selections from Andrew Lang's collections of many colors, The Arabian Nights Entertainments, and Tales of King Arthur and the Round Table, as well as Edith Hamilton's Mythology and the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series.

2016 also saw our first cautious forays into the world of RPGs. We began by (slowly) playing through Final Fantasy IV together. (We're still not done yet, but we've gotten to the Lunar Subterrane at last.) My kids liked it so much that I decided to start moving toward Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, or something along those lines. We began with Dungeon!, an extremely cool, simple-enough-for-young-kids board-game dungeon crawl that first came out in 1975. Now we've moved up to Wrath of Ashardalon, which is considerably more challenging. However, we successfully completed our first quest together last week. I'll blog about it once we play a bit more.

I also read a few comic books graphic novels in 2016, including:

• Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
• The Dark Knight Returns
• Batman: Year One
• Batman: The Killing Joke
• Batman: The Long Halloween
• Batman: Hush
• Superman: Birthright 

The first entry is the long-running manga by Hayao Miyazaki, the first parts of which became the animated film of the same name. I'll come right out and say that finding Nausicaä this year was a major event in the life of my imagination. I'll most likely blog about it once I've had a chance to reread the manga. I got a few more Superman comics with Christmas money, so those are next on my list. This is something of a departure from my usual reading habits. Before 2016, the last comic book graphic novel I'd looked into was The Death of Superman, which I read soon after it came out in, um, 1992.

So there's my 2016 in stories and pictures. All in all, not a bad year. Here's to an even better 2017.

Superman and Bishop Ussher

Today I happened to watch some of the terrific Fleischer Superman cartoons from the early 1940s with my almost two-year-old daughter (this is what we do for fun). I'm very fond of them (see here and here for my loving slideshow tributes), less so of the war-propaganda installments produced after Famous Studios took over.

But at any rate, today I noticed something odd in The Arctic Giant, which pits Superman against a thawed-out "Godzilla" clone (though the actual Godzilla was still more than a decade in the future). The voice-over at the beginning announces the monster as having roamed the earth "millions of years ago in the Mesozoic Age." Pleasingly accurate according to the scientific theories of our time. But here's the nameplate on the museum display:

Let's send it through my state-of-the-art html auto-processor:

TYRANNOSAURUS
HABITAT     SIBERIA
DISCOVERED DECEMBER 1940
AGE  ABOUT  2,400  B.C.
DONATED BY ALFRED R. LEY

Stop the presses! 2,400 BC??? That's not what the voice-over guy said!

Being the weird sort of person I am, I couldn't stop thinking about this all day. Then, while washing the dishes, I suddenly recalled having read about Bible-based chronologies many years ago. Various persons, including the Venerable Bede and Sir Isaac Newton, have attempted to construct these, but the most famous is probably the Ussher chronology proposed in the seventeenth century by the Irish bishop James Ussher. I remembered that his chronology sets creation at 4004 BC.

So now I've looked it up, and confirmed my suspicion: according to Ussher's timeline, the Flood took place in 2348 BC, or about the date given on the nameplate.

What's the story here? Is the date a joke on creationists? Is it a subversive visual comment by a creationist animator? Recall that the Scopes Trial had taken place only about fifteen years before. What did the animators know about the voice-over and when? The other "scientific" aspects of the nameplate are so ludicrous that it's possible to see the entire thing as a joke. Especially since Willard Bowsky, one of the two animators, also worked on the hilarious Arabian Nights Popeye cartoons. (Bowsky was killed in action in France two years later.)

Unfortunately, my diligent Internet search for the mysterious Alfred R. Ley failed to turn up further information. In fact, I appear to be the only person on the entire Internet to have noticed the disparity. Hence the post. I'm actually kind of disappointed. I thought this was the sort of thing we invented the Internet for in the first place.

Watch the cartoon here if you like; it's public domain, as are all the Fleischer Superman cartoons. I've been into reading Superman comics and watching the Richard Donner films lately. No doubt I'll have more to say about the Man of Steel before long.

Noir Reviews: Double Indemnity, April 1944

Yes, I killed him. I killed him for money – and a woman. I didn't get the money and I didn't get the woman. Pretty, isn't it?

After the good but uneven Phantom Lady, we proceed directly to the murky, guilty heart of noir, to Double Indemnity, directed by the great Billy Wilder, whose work we'll be reviewing several times in this series.

If you don't know (and really, you should; if you haven't seen this movie, go watch it right now), Double Indemnity is a murder story told from the point of view of the murderer. He's a likeable insurance salesman named Walter Neff, played by Fred MacMurray, who one day grabs hold of a red-hot poker and isn't able to let go. (Let those who think film noir is all about private detectives take note!) The supporting role of Neff's coworker and mentor, claims manager Barton Keyes, is played by the immortal Edward G. Robinson, who handily steals every scene he's in.

To me, a claims man is a surgeon. That desk is an operating table and those pencils are scalpels and bone-chisels. And those papers are not just forms and statistics and claims for compensation. They're alive. They're packed with drama, with twisted hopes and crooked dreams. A claims man, Walter, is a, is a doctor and a bloodhound and a – [Phone rings.] Who? Okay, hold on a minute. A claims man is a doctor and a bloodhound and a cop and a judge and a jury and a father confessor all in one.

He delivers a couple of monologues that make me want to stand up and cheer every time, while his final assessment of the case is grimly, delightfully terse: "Walter, you're all washed up." The tableau he and Walter Neff form in the last shot is an icon of of noir tough love.

The femme fatale, on the other hand, is played by Barbara Stanwyck, who can chill you to the bone with a single look. She wears a hideous George Washington wig, a directing mistake retroactively explained as a deliberate artistic decision, and hilariously spoofed by Steve Martin in drag in Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid. But what a role!

Walter narrates his story into a dictaphone while nursing a cigarette and a bullet wound. His guilt and doom are predetermined from the first moment we see him. That's typical of film noir. There's no emotional hook, no what's-going-to-happen-to-these-characters-I-care-about??? You know from the outset that everyone is damned. In a strange way, that takes the pressure off, allowing the viewer to be engrossed by the mechanics of how, precisely, this damnation occurs. Wilder, who I think understood this very well, later topped himself in having Sunset Boulevard narrated by a dead guy floating face-down in a swimming pool. Your average melodrama, on the other hand, keeps you interested by making you fret about what's going to happen to the people. Its watchability depends on getting your emotions involved, a game that cloys pretty quickly. No one buys a melodrama to watch over and over again. (At least no one I know.)

Double Indemnity is certainly no melodrama. It's not a cautionary tale, either, despite the fact that it's about a crime that doesn't pay. On the contrary, it compels you to connive at a man's murder. You like Walter Neff. The very real love that exists between him and Keyes only makes this all the more poignant. Horribly, you want his plot to succeed and fear his exposure, even though you know it won't succeed and he will be exposed. When he starts befriending the victim's daughter to keep her quiet, you're acutely conscious of what a heel he is, yet you're anxious to keep her quiet, too. Nevertheless, you're aware at each moment of the impossibility of his position and know that an evasion of justice would be intolerable. A lesser movie would either make Walter an out-and-out bad guy or else try to exculpate him in some manner.

Apart from the wig, everything about Double Indemnity is perfect. Though based on the novel by James M. Cain, the screenplay was cowritten by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler. Chandler's influence is felt at every turn. The dialogue is a delight to listen to, abounding in witty repartee and colorful metaphor.

They know more tricks than a carload of monkeys. And if there's a death mixed up in it, you haven't got a prayer. They'll hang you just as sure as ten dimes will buy a dollar.

Chandler makes a cameo appearance sitting outside Keyes' office, looking very much the sourpuss he was. The score, composed by the legendary Miklós Rózsa, perfectly captures the feeling of an exciting, relentless drive toward some predetermined destination. It supports the plot, instead of attempting to comment on it or accentuate it, or (worse still) merely providing background noise, as many of the thundering scores of the period do. (Rózsa, incidentally, also scored Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, one of his final films.)

Wilder's direction eschews studio sets in favor of filming on location. There's a wonderful long take right at the beginning, in a midnight elevator ride from a lobby to a big, empty insurance office inhabited by nocturnal workers. Numerous night-for-night scenes make Double Indemnity a true black film, the most memorable being when the body is placed on the tracks, for which each telephone pole had to be individually illuminated by spotlights. The indoor scenes tend to be barred with light falling through half-open blinds.

For me, Double Indemnity is the quintessential film noir.

* * *

I give Double Indemnity a grade of A for awesome on the following scale:

• A: awesome noir film, to be owned and watched a zillion times or until you have it memorized
• B: good (bueno) noir film with excellent passages but significant flaws, to be watched on occasion
• C: fairly commonplace noir film, to be watched once or twice
• D: dud of a noir film, to be avoided if possible

High points in Double Indemnity include the opening, Walter Neff's practiced "sales pitch," the body-placement scene, and pretty much every scene with Edward G. Robinson, especially the suicide statistics monologue. Takeaway quote:

"How could I have known that murder could sometimes smell like honeysuckle?"

Noir Reviews: Phantom Lady, January 1944

After touching on The Maltese Falcon in our first episode, we proceed to Phantom Lady, directed by noir veteran Robert Siodmak, whose films The Killers (1946) and Criss Cross (1948) we'll look at later in this series.

[Films that come between The Maltese Falcon and Phantom Lady that I might return to include The Glass Key (which I personally dislike), This Gun for Hire, and Shadow of a Doubt (which, being a Hitchcock film, I don't regard as truly noir, just because).]

Though it comes at the beginning of the period, Phantom Lady features some of the most beautiful and most expressive photography in film noir. The mildly incoherent plot follows a strange dream-logic, but the film as a whole is a visual poem of urban alienation and societal subversion, with long passages shot in stark blacks and whites and an almost nonexistent score.

The story revolves around a funny hat. The lady who wears it can provide a "perfect" alibi for a civil engineer Scott Henderson (Alan Curtis) whose wife is strangled, but she has vanished without a trace. All vestiges of her are wiped even from the memories of the tradesmen and performers who saw them out together that night. He doesn't know her name and, apart from the hat, can't remember what she looks like. The nuttiness of his story lands him on death row.

The film's first stand-out moment is the quiet, chilling scene in which Henderson returns home to find three detectives and a dead wife. The sense of claustrophobia mounts as the sneering, insufferably smug, gum-smacking cops slowly invade his personal space, until they're fingering his tie and their smirking mugs are right in his sweaty, frightened face, which now fills the screen. "Your wife was strangled with one of your ties," they taunt him. "Yeah, knotted so tight it had to be cut loose with a knife."

The real protagonist is Henderson's tenacious assistant, Carole Richman (Ella Rains), who, convinced of her boss's innocence (and secretly in love with him), sets out to clear his name. The contrast between the two is sharp. While Henderson is laid prostrate by circumstances – weeping when his estranged wife is killed (while remarking that men aren't supposed to cry), scared and irritable under investigation, shrill on trial, petulant on death row, confident and self-absorbed when his position in society is regained – Carole always rises above circumstances. Gender stereotypes are inverted: Henderson's personality is weak, "womanish," while Carole's is strong and manly.

It's pretty plain that Carole is the one who really runs the office from the first moment we see her, striding in to begin a day's work, greeting the mousy secretary, mastering her emotions when she learns of Henderson's plight, and dictating a letter as she smokes a cigarette. This is underscored by an obtuse crack Henderson later makes about keeping bobby pins off the floor and the seams on her stockings straight. He really has no idea.

After her boss's conviction, Carole sets about pursuing the forgetful witnesses. Here film noir takes on almost mythic dimensions as she hounds a barman to death like an avenging Fury. The scene in which she pursues him through the immense, night-black, rain-soaked city might well stand as the epitome of the style.

It's followed by a scene in which she transforms herself into a gum-chewing "hep kitten" to seduce Cliff Milburn (Elisha Cook, Jr.), a sleazy little jazz drummer. It's hard to convey in words how utterly bizarre, abrupt, and awesome this transition is. She goes from urban professional to strumpet, flashy, vapid, and wanton, complete with painted-on mole, seemingly without effort. After she catches Cliff's eye during a performance, he takes her to a backroom jive session, where she visually mounts him during a crazy orgasmic drum solo. They retire to his squalid rat-hole of an apartment lit intermittently by a flashing sign outside.

This middle act is one of the great passages of film noir. It's almost as though Carole is trying on female archetypes; given the deaths of the two witnesses she goes after, we might wonder what became of the poor cabby, whose fate isn't treated on screen. The film transitions to the final act with Carole's visit to Henderson in prison. The image of Carole talking to Henderson across the bars, both bathed and blackened by light streaming down through smoky darkness, is a noir icon.

But the third act is more like a Hitchcock thriller than a true noir. For me this knocks the film out of the top tier. It keeps up its subversive probing of female roles as the murderer (Franchot Tone), a narcissistic sculptor with undertones of the stereotypical homosexual woman-hater, takes center stage. He despises Carole, the police, and most of all Henderson, whose community-planning projects he derides as an obsession with drainpipes. Much of his screen time is spent in contemplation of his large, expressive hands, which are frequently lit with bright white light, in an almost masturbatory way.

The film closes with what I take to be intentional (though understated) irony. Henderson, back in the office, busy and self-confident, leaves Carole some dictaphone instructions that end by informing her that she's having dinner with him that night, and the next night, and the next night… The film actually concludes with this phrase "next night" repeated over and over again on the skipping belt. Are we getting a glimpse of Carole's future?

Like many noirs, Phantom Lady seems to operate on two levels. On the surface we have a seemingly happy ending with everything restored to the way it should be. But underneath that, we see a resourceful, masterful woman sent back to the prison of her traditional role, happily submitting to a man who will always take her for granted. What's true of the ending is true of the movie as a whole. The more you pick up on subtleties, the more twisted it gets.

* * *

I give Phantom Lady a grade of B for bueno on the following scale:

• A: awesome noir film, to be owned and watched a zillion times or until you have it memorized
• B: good (bueno) noir film with excellent passages but significant flaws, to be watched on occasion
• C: fairly commonplace noir film, to be watched once or twice
• D: dud of a noir film, to be avoided if possible

High points in Phantom Lady include the tie scene, the platform scene, the jive orgy scene, and the visitation scene. Takeaway quote:

"What a place! I can feel the rats in the walls."

Noir Reviews: An Introduction

This post marks the beginning of a series about my favorite films noir from the forties and fifties. I'm an enthusiast, not an expert, but I have about a zillion titles on DVD that I watch over and over and over again. I've actually thought about making a separate blog for noir reflections, but then, knowing me, I'd just stop posting here, so I'll just dump these with the rest. Keeps me out of trouble, at any rate.

So, what is film noir? That itself is a matter of controversy. Is it a genre? A style? A period? Or some combination of the three? My approach will be to take it as a fuzzy set, defined by a few films that I regard as definitively noir, and measured by proximity to those. Some of the elements commonly regarded as central, e.g., private detectives, voice-overs, and femmes fatale, I regard as inessential, though such things do often appear in the films I intend to cover. Speaking a posteriori, I would say that films noir tend to involve detached or alienated elements of a fragmented society chained by the relentless logic of guilt and futility, using low-key lighting and visual abstraction to create an atmosphere of moral and emotional detachment. The settings are generally seedy, the scale is small, and the characters are bit players on the world stage. Films noir sometimes stray into this or that genre, such as that of science fiction (Kiss Me Deadly), the police procedural (The Big Combo), the spy film (Pickup on South Street), the western (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), the heist film (The Asphalt Jungle), and the prison film (Brute Force). What binds them together is not subject matter but approach.

I plan to proceed in chronological order, more or less, unless my whims direct otherwise. However, I intend to skip the seminal entry, given how famous and well-known it is. Of course I'm referring to The Maltese Falcon, that is, the 1941 version directed by John Huston, which was the third (!) time Hammett's novel had been filmed. There's not much I can add to what's been said about it. But let's at least list some key elements:

• use of low-key lighting
• odd, often low camera angles
• a weird assortment of colorful characters who inhabit a perverse world outside the boundaries of normal life
• a mean, hard protagonist whose only moral ethic is a strict professional code that he follows for reasons he doesn't understand, whose every act is calculated, even the outbreaks of his violent temper, his sneering, casual beat-down of a homosexual, and his prolonged humiliation of a "gunsel" (catamite)
• a plot-mover that's ultimately a nonentity and, indeed, a metaphor for the futility of all things human
• an ending that's both as satisfying and as utterly unsentimental as they come

It seems fair to call this a watershed moment in Hollywood. The Maltese Falcon ushered in the film noir era.

What appeals most to me about film noir is the detachment referred to above. There's never a sense that you have to like or empathize with the protagonist; you identify with him or her without becoming emotionally involved or hoping that it will come out all right in the end. The focus is objective rather than subjective. Somehow, because of this, I find films noir oddly satisfying, or even comforting; there's nothing better after a tough day at work than coming home, plopping down in a musty old armchair, and watching Double Indemnity or The Asphalt Jungle.

Strangely enough, though, despite the restrictions of the Hays code, I also find film noir much bolder and edgier than most anything you see coming out today. With rare exceptions, you won't see a movie about a thief or an adulterer nowadays that doesn't make some attempt to exculpate the protagonist in the viewer's eyes and give them some kind of happy ending. But true film noir takes the approach of portraying a culprit with all their good points and bad points rolled into one, and slowly but inexorably leading them to their doom. Visually, the film may make use of stark contrasts, but, morally speaking, there are no white hats or black hats. That makes the modern viewer queasy. Aside from the occasional farce, biopic, or gangster film, modern movies about "black hats" tend to reassure the viewer that, deep down inside, the protagonists are really white hats.

Because I have a tendency to be long-winded, I'm going to limit myself to 1000 words per review. Like I said, I'll go in chronological order, limiting myself to DVDs I own and films that I don't own but like well enough to include. If I ever get done with my list, I'll go on to neo-noirs and tech-noirs that approach the style with varying degrees of success. But it's my contention that a self-knowing noir is probably not really a noir at all.

Keftu Dissected

The greatest height of heroism to which an individual, like a people, can attain is to know how to face ridicule; better still, to know how to make oneself ridiculous and not to shrink from the ridicule.

— Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life

Being halfway completed, my Enoch novels are undergoing their midlife crisis. Where are they coming from? Where are they going? Should they shave their head and get a sports car?

Since my blog is the place where I write about things I want to think about, my lucky readers get to glimpse some writerly musings in the next few posts. Today let's begin with Keftu, my protagonist.

Keftu is of a sanguine temperament. He would never write a post like this, unlike melancholic-phlegmatic me! He's also a bit of a fool, as my other characters remind him from time to time. He owes a lot to Percival, the bumpkin-turned-quest-knight whose innocence and stupidity allow him to be used by God. Whether Keftu is useful to the abscondent gods of Enoch remains to be seen, of course.

Like Daedalus, he makes his own wings, but he really has more in common with Icarus. My depiction of him with only one wing on the back cover of Dragonfly is meant to suggest Paul Klee's The Hero with the Wing, which depicts a tragicomic figure who has injured himself in his idiotic attempts to fly.

Quite a few other figures from fable, myth, history, and romance are present in Keftu's DNA, both positively and negatively. He is Gilgamesh (seeker after immortality), Cain (wanderer) and Abel (sacrifice-offerer), Noah (ark pilot), Nimrod (mighty hunter), Abraham (visionary) and Jacob (dream-traveler), Moses (seer of the burning bush), Tobias (vanquisher of demons), and Christ (harrower of hell). He is Prometheus (fire-giver), Hermes (argus-slayer), Theseus (maze-runner), Perseus (gorgon's head-bearer), Bellerophon (steed-tamer and chimera-slayer), Heracles (monster fighter), Orpheus (singer of the dead), and Odysseus (trickster). He is Solon the Lawgiver and Pompey the Great. He is Beowulf and Siegfried. He is the Continental Op and Gilbert Gosseyn. He is Batman, Superman, and Luke Skywalker.

In addition to all of this, I consider Keftu an ironic antitype of Frodo Baggins. Frodo's quest is more or less handed to him. You know where he's going from the first chapters of The Lord of the Rings. The drama lies in the spiritual cost of his continued adherence to this goal. But what if he'd been driven out of the Shire – driven into the arms of the quest, so to speak – without ever having heard of Gandalf, Sauron, or the One Ring? Gandalf is busy elsewhere, with no time to spare for Hobbits; Sauron himself couldn't care less about them; there never was a Ring to wrap incarnate evil up in a neat little package. Frodo has no high destiny but, cut off from his past, finds himself unable to live without one, and therefore invents it for himself. Nevertheless, not a day goes by in which he doesn't look into the abyss and think: what if I'm only deluding myself?

Who in our time hasn't experienced this anxiety? I've gone through phases when I imagined myself acting on a divine mandate. I'll bet that just about everyone, even thoroughgoing materialists, try to see some kind of pattern or logic in the events of their lives. It's part of being human. But, for me, it's always been undercut by a nagging doubt that I'm just talking to myself. After many colorful disappointments, I've come to decide that, if there is a divine agency guiding us to some appointed end, then its action is dark and mysterious, not a voice booming on a mountaintop. It's something that acts from outside time, and therefore in a way that's not really comprehensible to us, and is much less concerned with "geography" than we are.

I attempt to capture some of this in my description of Keftu's songlines, which I adapt from the worldview of the Indigenous Australians, combining it with the mnemonic palace of Sephaura inspired by the method of loci developed by Simonides of Ceos. Keftu's greatness, if he has any greatness, lies in that he knows that he does not know. But his world is littered with grand failures, with persons, human and otherwise, who think they know but do not.

One such is Vaustus, whose character is a composite of several pastors and missionaries I encountered back in my wild college days. The episode that lost him his leg actually happened to someone I knew, except that my friend was unsuccessful in his amputation, which he attempted, naked, with a handsaw in a stranger's open garage. (There, doesn't that make you want to read my book?) But we were all a bit like that.

You'd think that a person, when faced with the cosmic contradiction to the divine mandate they've claimed as a guide for their personal actions, would be forced to admit that they've been acting under a delusion. But you'd be wrong. Their entire ego and worldview are wrapped up in a particular vision of themselves. So, instead, they go a little bit crazy. They revise the past, reinterpret the prophecy, attempt to see what isn't there. Every time this happens, they go a little bit crazier. Deliberately short-circuiting your ability to see reality isn't good for your psychic integrity.

My point is, life is a frightening, painful, messed-up experience ending in death. We all desperately want it to have some kind of meaning. A quest fantasy is comforting because it seems to present life as a logical progression of events with a clear and definite end. But real life isn't like that. Attempts to live like it is only result in madness and despair, or else boundless fatuity and narcissism. Sword-and-sorcery, as opposed to epic fantasy, seems to take what we might call the cynical view. At any rate, it's not particularly concerned with overarching narratives. That's what I like about it.

Still, we are all on a kind of journey, aren't we? It's just that we're making the quest up as we go along. We're more like Don Quixote than the Redcrosse Knight. The joke's on us. Perhaps there is a path, but, if so, it's not like the road to Rivendell. We go blindly, trustingly or not, choosing as seems best at each moment, never quite knowing whether we do well or ill. The climax of our journey is otherwise than we imagine it, and what we regard as most insignificant is possibly quite the contrary.

Come to think of it, though, that could be applied to Frodo's journey. At no point is he altogether certain of his means. The goal is never really in question, but all responsibility is laid on his shoulders. Even Gandalf and Elrond refuse to advise him. And, in the end, he fails! Or would have failed, had not Gollum intervened. In fact, you could argue that, far from being Winnie-the-Pooh for adults, The Lord of the Rings is way more cynical (or mature) than the Elric Saga. So I find that my characterization of Frodo's quest doesn't do justice to the text, though it does describe your cookie-cutter mass market quest fantasy.
 
Still, it's true that Keftu has no Gandalf, as is pointed out in the passage quoted at the top of Fletcher Vredenburgh's kind review of my most recent novel. He's on his own in a way that Frodo never was. He has no goal but what he sets himself.

Of Hippogriffs and Cocadrill-Serpents

The world didn't ask for it, but it's coming anyway: a new wrap-around book cover for The Worm Ouroboros. Here's the progress I've made so far:

It's a stylized landscape showing Koshtra Pivrarcha, Koshtra Belorn, and the Lake of Ravary. In the distance we glimpse the Bhavinan and Morna Moruna. The Lords Juss and Brandoch Daha stand before Sophonisba; poor Mivarsh Faz is about to become dinner for a cocadrill-serpent. I've purposefully incorporated images from Keith Henderson's illustrations, including this hippogriff:

The style is somewhat inspired by Persian miniatures. I don't do justice to the tradition, of course, but I'd like to try my hand at adapting it again in the near future. At any rate, the Iliad and Icelandic sagas are often mentioned in connection with The Worm Ouroboros, but I've always detected something distinctly Oriental in it as well.

Mivarsh's legs echo Brueghel's painting of the fall of Icarus, which I've always found humorous:

A giant landscape, with the purported subject represented by two tiny legs kicking in the corner. Poor Icarus! And poor Mivarsh! Who told us that he was destined to be devoured by a crocodile, and then was devoured by a crocodile.

West Texas, the USSR, and Reprehensible Reading

This is the kind of post I write when I have things floating around the pelagic zone of my head but no single topic to focus on. I seem to be emerging from one of the phases of isolation I pass through whenever I've been overstimulated or taxed by too much interaction. Ugh.

I have been keeping busy with my Texas stories, my next novel, and a painting for The Worm Ouroboros, however. That's the key to being productive. When you're tempted to look the gorgon in the eye, just keep working. The stuff you bring to light at the end of the tunnel will be about as strange as what you'd expect a blind painter to produce, but there just might be a certain aureole of beauty about it as well. You can't tell while you're still in the pit. You just have to keep going and hold on to all the shards until you're competent to judge them.

Still, I think anyone who produces in isolation is apt to go at least a little bit insane, and not necessarily in a good way. I'm a great admirer of William Blake, as readers of my blog know, chiefly for his early poetry and his lifetime output of paintings and prints. I have to admit that I find most of his "prophetic" books unreadable, as I think most people do. But he wrote what he felt he had to write, in utter isolation, in the face of decades of neglect and incomprehension, and he's my hero for that.

Nevertheless, when I consider how much he warmed up to even the smallest token of appreciation for his work (as, in the evening of his life, he became the center of a circle of young artists), I wonder how much his outrageous, elliptical style owed to the scorn and amused indifference his works tended to arouse. Perhaps, if he'd found himself placed in slightly more congenial surroundings, or his education or personality had been slightly other than what they were, then his life's work wouldn't have forced down such eccentric channels, and he would be a Universal Man like Goethe or somebody instead of a kind of "cult classic" of English letters. Then again, maybe he wouldn't have done anything memorable at all.

I went to that West Texas con a few weeks ago and gave a slideshow talk about the Ballantine series. Four people attended my talk. Ouch. This owed partly to personnel changes just prior to the con. But the room also cleared out before I got up, so I think it's more that the topic and speaker were too off-the-wall for common interest. That's too bad (for them), because I really put together a spanking good slideshow (festival of wrap-around covers and all) and gave a brilliant talk. (I'm better at speaking in public than you might suppose, despite my almost total inability to navigate small talk; after all, I make my living giving lectures on abstruse topics to persons of varied backgrounds.) Anyway, it was kind of a bummer. I don't take it personally, though I did write down who left the room before my talk. (Just kidding.) The episode just underscores how very isolated I am out here. Without the Internet, I could never survive as a writer-artist guy.

There was a bit of a silver lining to the whole experience, however. A local seller of vintage comic books saw my talk on the schedule and donated a stack of Ballantine paperbacks to hand out as visual aids. He even let me keep the leftovers for proselytization purposes. We chatted a bit, and he told me that he's collected (and sold) the entire series twice over. Now that's impressive. So, by going to the con, I discovered that there's at least one other person (and probably only one other person) between San Antonio and El Paso interested in what I'm interested in.

In other news, my intellectual life seems to be coming up against Soviet Russia for some reason. It began with my decision to begin reading John le Carré, most famous for The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I've enjoyed what I've read immensely. It calls to mind both Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad, two of my favorite authors.

Then I acquired the first part of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago from the county library book shop for $0.25 and read it straight through. I'd read a couple of Solzhenitsyn's novels back in school, and had then perused the Archipelago, but without really delving into it. There's nothing I can say about it that won't sound trite, but it's a book that I think everyone should read at least once.

Last but not least in my encounters with the USSR, I recently attended a seminar by a now-nonagenarian friend of a friend of mine, a journalist who spent the bulk of his career (through the late 1970s, I think) as a war correspondent, covering such conflicts as Vietnam and visiting a total of 120 countries. Last fall when he was in town (our mutual friend brings him for a series of public talks every year at Veteran's Day), we all split a six pack of Spaten Optimator in a hotel lobby. His stories about intrigues and death on the Russian borders of Red China came immediately to mind when I read The Honourable Schoolboy, which centers on the community of foreign correspondents in 1970s Hong Kong.

But his entire life is almost unbelievably storied. He started out as a child actor, his parents being vaudeville performers in New York. He was a cast member in the original production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, which went on to win a Pulitzer. During World War II, his family performed for troops around the country through the recently founded USO. He enlisted once he was old enough and fought in the Battle of Okinawa. After the war he went to college.

As a journalist, he became an enemy of communism, and he counts among his greatest achievements his having been labeled a "very dangerous man" by the KGB. He was actually escorted out of Russia by the KGB, and subsequently refused reentry until after the fall of the USSR. (In later years he managed to get a glimpse of his old case file through a contact in Moscow.) He lost none of his energy with retirement, and used to appear on CNN's Crossfire among other things. He still travels to France, Russia, China, and elsewhere, giving talks at universities and meeting with State Department officials. Did I mention that he's 90? A gentleman of the old school, a hell of a speaker with a biting sense of humor, and a principled professional. Quite a person to have had a beer with.

Getting back to John le Carré and Solzhenitsyn, I've started to realize that it's not very good for me to read fantasy while I'm engaged in writing fantasy. Reading Lord Foul's Bane over the summer made me pretty cranky, but I would probably have gobbled it up if I were writing spy novels. That's how I've always been. I can't do my job well as a math professor if I don't paint at night, and my painting suffers if there's no math or logic going on. I think it's just that I'm very immature, and most productive when I feel like I'm getting away with something by working on a project that the little voice in my head says is the opposite of what I should be doing.

So I recently read Mickey Spillane's I, the Jury, another little item I picked up at the library bookstore. It was enjoyable enough, I suppose, but also quite moronic. It made me think of Raymond Chandler's soliloquy on lurid pulp stories and the apocalypse:

Their characters lived in a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction, and was learning how to use it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine gun.

I've always loved Robert Altman's incoherent noir apocalypse, Kiss Me Deadly, which skewers the Mike Hammer character, but I'm big enough to appreciate both satire and subject. So there are two more Spillane rocker-shockers in the hopper.

Speaking of reprehensible reading, I may venture into Gor in the not-so-distant future. I've never read (or been tempted to read) a single Gor novel, though it's been hinted that I work coded references to the series into my stories. People tell me that they start out okay, but get sicker and sicker as you go on. However, under a humorous post on the subject over at Black Gate last month, a commenter linked an interview with John Norman so straight-facedly bizarre that I kind of want to read a few now. After all, as authors, we have quite a bit in common, being otherwise-obscure academics who write pseudonymous sword-and-planet stories set in the counter-earth. Actually, given some of the things I've written about, it's not terribly surprising that someone would assume I'm a fan.

But I'm not, of course, and don't suppose I ever will be. It's kind of strange, though, that those who would normally speak out against censorship are perfectly okay with keeping people from reading stuff they think is really bad. And maybe the Gor books are really bad! But everyone who tries to ban something thinks that what they're banning is bad. Otherwise they wouldn't ban it. If you say you're against banning as a general principle, you have to be against the banning of any book, even "bad" ones; otherwise you're just a viewpoint advocate with a penchant for moral posturing.

You can argue, as a commenter at the Black Gate article does, that John Norman's excommunication from the mainstream publishing world isn't an example of censorship but of free-market capitalism. To be honest, that's what sounds most likely to me. But people like Michael Moorcock did advocate "strategies which marginalize" John Norman's output, and his output has in fact been marginalized. In my opinion, the specific action Moorcock suggested (placing the books on the top shelves to keep them out of the hands of young adults) is perfectly reasonable. But some books celebrated during Banned Books Week have faced far less opposition. So what's the difference?

I don't have much of an opinion either way. It's just something I've thought about.

Well, I guess that's about it for now. I may start a series of short reviews of my favorite films noir. I've got about a zillion titles on DVD that I like to watch and rewatch. It'll be a good thing to keep me posting on my blog while I devote the other parts of my brain to my ongoing writing projects and other things.