The real life Doctor Manhattan. Think Artificial on how chemist Louis Alexander Slotin’s lethal exposure to the “radiation, equivalent of being 1500 meters away from a detonation of an atomic bomb” was possibly inspiration for Alan Moore’s famous Watchmen character.
Rumors began a few months ago at Comic-Con where an advertisement in the program promised a big Ghostbusters related announcement in San Diego (it never came.) Now Variety reports that Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky of The Office may be writing a script. BTW, the original film is the first to be released on a USB flashdrive.
Iain Sinclair on HG Wells’s The War of the Worlds, “The impact of this 1898 novel lies in its topographic verisimilitude, its forensic examination of the comfortably mundane, the complacency of Surrey suburbia, railway towns surrounded by golf links, tame heathland, somewhere to walk a dog… The War of the Worlds is told with tabloid speed and the lovely poetry of the commonplace.” (And if you don’t know what happened during Orson Wells’ 1938 radio broadcast, Radiolab’s March episode is worth a listen.)
Alejandro Jodorowsky originally wanted to direct Dune. “[Salvador] Dalí agrees with much enthusiasm the idea to play the Emperor of the galaxy. He wants to film in Cadaquès and to use as throne a toilet made up of two intersected dolphins. The tails will form the feet and the two open mouths will be used one to receive the “wee”, the other to receive the “excrement”. Dalí thinks that it is of terrible bad taste to mix the “wee” and the “excrement”.” Wow! I very much recommend his graphic novel The Metabarons. Also, I’m looking forward to checking out the recent translation his memoir The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky.
Jessa Crispin reviews Christopher Priest’s Inverted World on NPR, “while much of SF from that era is outrageously outdated (cough Heinlein cough), Priest’s work has not aged a bit.” My review here.
I don’t share Design Observer’s frustration with steampunk, but am dismayed at its prevalence for the same reason I’m not so keen on most space opera: it gets cliche. The best science fiction has an innovative and unexpected use of setting. Brazil was fantastic because is was fresh, as was City of Lost Children when it premiered. While there are ways to innovate within the literary genre, (Perdido Street Station comes to mind,) I’m not enthusiastic about upcoming steampunk movies, because we already know how it looks. I recently watched The Golden Compass, which is in many ways terrible. Online reviews declared its only redeeming aspect is the steampunk fashion and set design. But I couldn’t disagree more: had the director taken risks with the aesthetics (something Pullman’s material gave him plenty of room to do) and created a world as unexpected as the best of sf/fantasty — Dark City, Neverending Story, even Lemony Snicket — it might have made up for all the script’s omissions and failures.
Owen Thomas on Orson Scott Card betraying his geek fans with anti-gay screeds: “Ender’s Game … is a surpassingly fine work. Though the hero is schooled for warfare, he ultimately learns empathy for those who are different. Perhaps Card should read it himself.”
Five Books I Recommend to Everyone
I hate the idea of a canon of good books one must read “before you die,” or that sort of thing. Many of these are books aren’t beloved so much as revered. Has anyone ever felt passionately about “A Separate Peace?” If you do, it’s probably because you had a dog when you were nine named Phineas or some other subconscious sentimental reason. But besides the titles that only developed a reputation for substance, even the ones that are of merit and historical importance aren’t necessary to you, at least, not right now.
So many people make the mistake of plodding along with every sewer sub-plot in Les Miserables because they think doing so makes them smarter. One should be confident enough to call the “emperor has no clothes” on books that bore or fail to say anything illuminating. Many 19th century novels like Thomas Hardy’s were sold by word count. So don’t few guilty if you’re skimming through yet another description of the color of the fields for a scene with Eustacia Vye doing something crazy.
While it’s good to read popular and much loved books for a shared experience with the culture, how much like the rest of the world are you? Shouldn’t your reading reflect your personal fears and dreams and expectations? It’s sad to see how little readers demand of their writers. The experience I get with Anna Kavan’s or Steve Erickson’s novels seems to go way beyond anything I’ve ever felt about a book. I can’t say for certain that another reader might have the same feeling, but I hope you all come to love an author that much. Trial and error, really. Would you marry the girl you just kinda like, but find annoying sometimes, but guess is cute cause others say she’s cute? Then toss aside the book you’re not so into, and keep hunting for the right ones.
Here are several books I imagine anyone might like:
If you like Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, try Christopher Priest’s Inverted World
Every once in a while the elder statesmen book reviewers let a cult writer in the canon of great literature like Beckett or, to a lesser degree, Burroughs. O’Brien seems to be the newest corronated one. The Third Policeman is great, but after a million retrospective pieces in Harper’s, The Atlantic, and so forth, and a mention on the tv series Lost you might want to try another book about riddles and shifting dimensions. This is a traditional science fiction book, but ingenious — very reminiscent of Ballard’s early earth-disaster SF. And it’s a mindfuck. An Escher sketch in novel form. I couldn’t put it down. Proof that Modern Painters is better cued in to good literature than most literary publications, they have a review of this book in the newest issue.
If you like William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, try Anna Kavan’s Eagle’s Nest
As much as I like Burroughs, Naked Lunch is so full of 50s junkie slang it can be difficult to read. Anna Kavan, his contemporary, has a liquidy way of writing. Scenes are so full of life they seem to fall off the page. A heroin addict until she died in her sixties, with a truly heartbreaking lifestory, you can feel, with some bitterness, where the drug is influencing her writing as you read along. Adored by the likes of Anais Nin, Jean Rhys, Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Current 93’s David Tibet, and many others, why she isn’t better known here or abroad really baffles me.
If you like Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, try I’m Not Stiller by Max Frisch
I can’t imagine anyone disliking I’m Not Stiller. It’s witty and so smart. Imagine the best parts of Confederacy of Dunces and the best of Nabokov, with a little bit of Chandler suspense and Kafka humor, all written so well the Dalkey Archive would publish it.
If you like Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body, try by The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter
Winterson’s novel is a good book about gender and androgyny and all that, with pretty poetic language, but you can get all of those things plus a post-apocalyptic setting and a bunch of fun in The Passion of New Eve, Carter’s best and inexplicably most obscure novel. Were I handed a few million dollars, turning The Passion of New Eve into a musical would be on a short list of things I’d do with the money.
If you like Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, try Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai
Ok, I don’t like Safran Foer’s book at all, but a lot of people whose opinions I respect seemed to enjoy it. A better book about a young braniac, chock full of random information and done in a sweet, never cloying way, is The last Samurai. Of the 80 people reviewed it on Amazon, 56 gave it 5 stars, which should give you an idea how much people love this book.
Fashion photography by Alix Malka
Oh, to be in Barcelona with the beautiful people, tiny alleys, tapas, Zara outlets, Palau de la Musica, Gaudis, and the new JG Ballard exhibit. Ballardian has a great review of “Autopsy of the New Millennium” –”The first bit of irony comes quickly when you discover this building was first constructed as a hospital.” The show also includes Ballard-influenced art by Ann Lislegaard, Michelle Lord, and others. Nice quote from Bruce Sterling in the program: “Ballard never predicted events or devices; instead, he described future sensibilities–how it might feel, what it might mean. A bizarre contemporary event like the paparazzi car-crash death of Princess Diana is perfectly Ballardian. No flow chart, no equation, no profit projection could ever have predicted that, but if you’ve read Ballard, you swiftly recognize the smell of it. I daresay that’s the best the SF genre will ever do–and no more should ever be asked of it.”
“In praise of Delia Derbyshire” from The Guardian. The musician best known for her theme to Doctor Who, created a number of legendary and pioneering electronic sounds with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. She was adorably geeky about it, studying math in college and keeping a “book of logarithms in her back pocket.” Last week, lost tapes of hers were discovered. Paul Hartnoll, interviewed by the BBC says the track “could be coming out next week on [left-field dance label] Warp Records.” Ziwzih Ziwzih oo-oo-oo!
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