I am working on an essay I hope to get into an upcoming anthology. I’ll let you know when it’s finished.
Month: May 2020
Spaghetti Night
I have a funny story. My wife is a nurse, and she works nights. The other day, when I was off work, I promised her that, before she left for the night shift, I would make her a spaghetti dinner.
I had ambitious plans including a complex, flavorful sauce, meatballs, and garlic bread. I briefly considered homemade noodles but ultimately decided not to be quite that ambitious.
The funny part is that I fell asleep in the middle of the day and woke up when it was time for my wife to go to work. I quickly roused her out of bed (she was running late) and had to send her off with a makeshift dinner.
Fortunately, she has a sense of humor, so this resulted in no particular problems to speak of. In the end, it was probably a good thing, because I finally made her the promised dinner on her first day off after a four-day run, and it took me considerably longer than I anticipated: I started about six, and with her help, got dinner made, eaten, and cleaned up at almost ten o’clock, when I’m writing this post.
Part of the reason I wanted to do this is because we got a food processor as a wedding gift, and I’ve been having fun with it. I made meatballs in which I hid oats, almonds, chia seeds, flaxseed, and the superfood blend I put in my morning protein shakes. In the sauce itself, I pureed almost the entire refrigerator’s worth of vegetables. I followed a recipe as a sort of suggestion rather than a rule as I ground up vine-ripened tomatoes, bell peppers, mushrooms, onions, and three bulbs [sic] of garlic, and mixed them with white wine, olive oil, and whatever spices I felt like. The result was quite flavorful and really good.
We ended up with a ton of this, which is great, because now we’re set for spaghetti for the next week or so.
Cherry 2000!
I am, against my better judgment, presently working my way through the anime adaptation of Chobits in order to write my long-promised essay on the same. In the process, however, I have inadvertently discovered that the campfest Cherry 2000, which I haven’t seen since I was a kid, is available free and legal on YouTube.
So I’m going to watch that, and I’ll put up a review when I’m finished. This will be relevant to my discussion of Chobits, since Cherry 2000 is about a man who goes looking for a replacement for his robot sex doll and finds a real woman instead—almost the opposite of Chobits’s plot.
I’m kind of excited in a silly sort of way. The last time I saw this movie, I was a little kid and came across it randomly while flipping channels in a motel room. My reaction was along the lines of, “What the hell is this?”
‘The Night Land’: An Addendum
Featured image: “The Last Redoubt” by Jeremiah Humphries.
Looking back over my review of William Hope Hodgson’s epic novel The Night Land, I am not entirely satisfied. I meant everything I said, but I think I focused too much on the negative.
I used a paragraph from H. P. Lovecraft’s essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” as a focal point, but the paragraph I chose, likewise, focused on the negative. Lovecraft made additional comments. In the interests of fairness and completeness, I wish to quote in full his passage on this particular book:
The Night Land (1912) is a long-extended (583 pp.) tale of the earth’s infinitely remote future—billions of billions of years ahead, after the death of the sun. It is told in a rather clumsy fashion, as the dreams of a man in the seventeenth century, whose mind merges with its own future incarnation; and is seriously marred by painful verboseness, repetitiousness, artificial and nauseously sticky romantic sentimentality, and an attempt at archaic language even more grotesque and absurd than that in “Glen Carrig”.
Allowing for all its faults, it is yet one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written. The picture of a night-black, dead planet, with the remains of the human race concentrated in a stupendously vast metal pyramid and besieged by monstrous, hybrid, and altogether unknown forces of the darkness, is something that no reader can ever forget. Shapes and entities of an altogether non-human and inconceivable sort—the prowlers of the black, man-forsaken, and unexplored world outside the pyramid—are suggested and partly described with ineffable potency; while the night-bound landscape with its chasms and slopes and dying volcanism takes on an almost sentient terror beneath the author’s touch.
Midway in the book the central figure ventures outside the pyramid on a quest through death-haunted realms untrod by man for millions of years—and in his slow, minutely described, day-by-day progress over unthinkable leagues of immemorial blackness there is a sense of cosmic alienage, breathless mystery, and terrified expectancy unrivalled in the whole range of literature. The last quarter of the book drags woefully, but fails to spoil the tremendous power of the whole.
Book Review: ‘The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature’
The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature by Elizabeth Kantor. Regnery, 2006. 278 pp. $19.95.
I stumbled upon Elizabeth Kantor’s handbook to English literature by accident, and I cannot recommend it too highly. Simultaneously an introduction to the subject and a skewering of the way English is taught in today’s universities, it is witty, illuminating, and, as the title indicates, politically incorrect. Kantor shows open contempt for feminist, Marxist, and “queer” theories of interpretation, but once she has swept those away, she reveals that English literature is full of beauty and insight.
If you follow the link above to Amazon and read the one-star reviews, you will see that she has rustled some feathers: Many of the reviews are by the English professors Kantor contemns, and they go on at some length. Although a few offer insightful criticisms, most betray exactly the intellectual snobbery Kantor is attacking, calling her uneducated or claiming—with some slight self-contradiction—that only illiterate people could enjoy her book (one of the reviewers even calls her “essentialist,” a term Kantor repeatedly mocks).
One reviewer sneers at her for being a woman (as feminists often will when a female breaks ranks), suggesting that the editors of the P.I.G. series selected her for her vagina so she would be immune to criticism—missing the fact that Kantor is herself an editor of the series and probably selected herself.
Most of these attacks miss their mark: Kantor has a Ph.D. in English and knows her subject. Perhaps her book could be more in-depth if it were twice as long, but for a slim volume meant to introduce rather than exhaustively cover its topic, The PIG Guide to English and American Literature is masterful.
Continue reading “Book Review: ‘The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature’”
Book Review: ‘The Night Land’
Featured artwork: “Attack of the Abhumans” by Jeremiah Humphries.
The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson. . Published by various, but available through Project Gutenberg.
Around the turn of the century, the Englishman William Hope Hodgson spent several years as a seaman before he attempted to make a living as a personal trainer, during which time he led a colorful life and even had a controversial run-in with Houdini. When making money from exercise didn’t pan out, he in 1904 turned to writing fiction in the vein of Edgar Allan Poe and ultimately produced a large body of work.
Recently, I read my way through the most famous of his writings, including The House on the Borderland, the stories of Carnacki the Ghost-Finder, and The Ghost Pirates. Then, with much trepidation yet determination, I turned to the most gargantuan and formidable of his works, his novel The Night Land.
Twice before, I have tried to get through The Night Land. Twice before, I failed. But this time, I grit my teeth and slogged my way through, though I believe the effort took me almost a year (I read a lot of other things in the meantime, of course). Hodgson was never a great writer by any standard, but he could spin a good yarn from time to time; some of his stories set at sea show both a genuine knowledge of seamanship and skill at adventure-writing, and certain scenes in The House on the Borderland show him to be a competent action writer as well. But The Night Land is simultaneously a breathtaking work of imagination and a nigh unreadable act of self-indulgence and pretentiousness. It is Hodgson’s magnum opus—but the problem is that he knew it was his magnum opus, so he wrote like a middle-schooler picking up a pen for the first time, convinced that he was crafting a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.
I likely would not have read this book if it did not come highly recommended by John C. Wright, the husband of my editor, who has produced a series of frightening and beautiful novelettes based on it (collected in Awake in the Night Land) and who insists that its fantastic elements are so important that its glaring flaws deserve to be overlooked.
Having read the novel, I haven’t decided whether to agree with him or not. On the one hand, yes, Hodgson forged a new path in the world of fantasy and deserves credit for such bold inventions, but on the other hand … the book is just awful. I mean it’s really, really bad.
Working Away
I’m over here working on the third volume of Jake and the Dynamo, which is going all right, though I’m a tad frustrated that I still haven’t heard anything from potential publishers. Anyway, while I’m writing a rough draft, I often listen to music, and I have recently found some dude on YouTube who does “ambient metal,” which is kind of nice because it’s a style I like and doesn’t have any words to distract me.
‘Alien’ vs. ‘Bloodchild,’ Part 3: The Director’s Cut
Before we get into a further discussion of the themes of Alien, I want to spend a little time on the director’s cut, which released in 2003. Ridley Scott went back over the film, tightening up parts and adding in a few deleted scenes. Unusually, the end result was a minute shorter than the original theatrical release.
My personal opinion about “director’s cuts” in general is that I don’t like them. In my experience, more often than not, a director’s cut is analogous to a novelist who goes over the head of his editor and includes a bunch of material he was advised to take out. More often than not, it’s material the final product was better off not having.
The biggest change in Alien is a scene near the end in which Ripley finds two of her crewmates cocooned into a wall by the alien’s secretions, a scene that anticipates the alien hive full of ill-fated colonists in the sequel—a concept James Cameron apparently came up with independently. Although kind of a welcome detail in hindsight, it disrupts the tension of movie’s climax, and for that reason the film is better off without it.
Also, I have twice now seen fans interpreting this as depicting human victims transforming into alien eggs, something that would contradict the alien life cycle that the franchise ultimately developed, though I admit this interpretation does not appear to me to be warranted by anything in the scene.
The only included scene that I thought made an improvement is after the first crewman, Brett, gets killed: Two others rush in to see the alien dragging him away, which makes for a better transition to the next scene.
Aside from that, most of the changes are almost impossible to notice except to someone who’s memorized the film.
I thought something similar when I watched the theatrical and director’s cut versions of the sequel Aliens side-by-side. Aliens is an action movie, and the theatrical version is faster-paced and more intense. The added scenes—a monologue by a marine, a pointless subplot featuring automatic gun turrets, a lengthy scene featuring the doomed colonists—accomplish nothing except slowing down the action. Again, there’s one exception, the detail that Ripley had a daughter who died while Ripley was in suspended animation, which anticipates her relationship with the orphan girl Newt.
Also, I have to add one additional curiosity: I have never thought Alien, with its deliberately slow pacing, was very scary. I recently showed it to the magical girl for the first time, and she made the same comment, that it was an impressive film but not particularly frightening. She was clearly much more moved by Aliens, which made her jump or squeal several times and during which she showed a lot more emotional engagement.
Working Away
I’ve been out of communication partly because our internet has been wonky, but everything seems to be working again, at least for the time being.
I am admittedly having trouble with Son of Hel, my novel about Krampus and Santa Claus, so for the time being I’m working on the third volume of Jake and the Dynamo, which is under the working title of The Shadow of His Shadow.
I still have manuscripts out but haven’t heard back from publishers. I’m also working on an essay I’m going to submit to an upcoming collection; I’ll tell you more about that when the time comes.