“Teddy” (1953)

When J.D. Salinger was working on this story he knew it would be the last in the Nine Stories collection, and he wrote it deliberately as a kind of symmetrical balance to the first story in the collection, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” It works that way—notably the endings are echoes and reflections of one another. However, this might be a point where I’m thinking of getting off the boat with Salinger. This kid, Teddy, is just too special. He’s 10 and he’s psychically gifted. He wants to make people understand reincarnation, Zen enlightenment, and stuff like that. What are his powers? We see that he can predict the future and/or has extraordinary insight into others. He’s vastly more evolved than his parents. His dad says things like, “I’ll exquisite day you, buddy.” The family of four—dad, mom, Teddy, and sister Booper—are on an ocean cruise of some kind, maybe a transatlantic crossing. Mysterious sidelong intimations suggest scientific and religious groups have interest in studying him. For further elucidation—but not really enough—Salinger inserts some kind of journalist or young man interested party on the boat who buttonholes Teddy and asks a lot of questions for the sake of readers. We see Salinger really going headlong into the mystical stuff of Eastern flavor here. It’s the kind of thing that would specifically get developed with the Glass stories to come. “Bananafish” very much presages the Glass drama. “Teddy” fits them in terms of themes and elements but no one here, as far as I know, has anything to do with the Glasses. I’m not sure what to think of this story. I’ll be looking into that next with Salinger’s late novellas and only other published material, outside of the novel The Catcher in the Rye and some scattered stories. I’ve been checking the internet semiregularly since Salinger’s death in 2010. I understand he left a lot of manuscripts and that they are on the way. I look forward to that if they ever get here. I don’t even need to know more—are they Glass family stories? novels? or both? or something else? “Teddy” suggests I may see more limitations than I did when I read Salinger so avidly as a high school teen.

J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories
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“Within the Walls of Tyre” (1978)

This story by Michael Bishop has its points, notably the treatment of ‘70s/’80s shopping malls and life, charting part of the US journey in the last century from cities to suburbs and exurbs. But starting with the title, it more like delivers an assault of intellectual pretension that annoyed me when it didn’t depress me. The internet tells me Tyre is “one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world.... one of the earliest Phoenician metropolises and the legendary birthplace of Europa ... and Carthage's founder Dido (Elissa).” But the venerable ancient city figures in this story only metaphorically. More: the story basically turns on another strange word likely unfamiliar to most readers: “lithopedion.” I looked it up for you (to be fair, it’s also explained in the story): “a rare phenomenon which occurs most commonly when a fetus dies during an abdominal pregnancy, is too large to be reabsorbed by the body, and calcifies.” It’s also called a stone baby and again it’s very rare—even the woman in this story carrying one mentions how rare and unusual it is. But it’s certainly grotesque and could very well reach people as a type of body horror, although it seemed more strained to me than anything, or even just cheap shock, which wasn’t helped by the necessity of follow-up research. Between Tyre and lithopedion it felt like some preening on the part of Bishop, and cringy. But the story is good on its 1978 time and place, with both shopping malls and casual sex done well. The story is set at Christmastime but Bishop seems to have missed the oppressive omnipresence in shopping malls of seasonal music. But that’s just picking nits on my part. Bishop’s mall here is otherwise good in the way director and writer George A. Romero’s is in Dawn of the Dead (something in the air in 1978). The sex scene reminded me of the Beatles song “Norwegian Wood,” except in this case the lover man does not crawl off to sleep in the bath (and remember, it was really the ‘70s more than the ‘60s that memorialized the fine points of casual sex pre-AIDS). “Within the Walls of Tyre” devolves down to an unpleasant revenge tale, only made more lame by all the intellectual tarting-up. A rare misfire from editor David G. Hartwell’s otherwise extremely useful phonebook-sized anthology The Dark Descent.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
Story not available online.

More Than Human (1953)

Theodore Sturgeon’s much celebrated novel is a kind of fix-up of three novellas. The first and third—“The Fabulous Idiot” and “Morality,” respectively—were written expressly for the novel. The centerpiece second part, “Baby Is Three,” was previously published and won awards of its own. The novel has followed a crooked path to its present status as one of the 100 best sci-fis. I didn’t know any of this when I went to read it, but I did notice that “Baby Is Three” was notably the best part. The other two were way too unnecessarily coy about letting us in on what’s going on. It’s a fantastic idea, this Homo Gestalt, the next evolutionary step from H. Sapiens. As readers, we need all the help we can get without some peekaboo routine of the determinedly slow reveal. But it’s a big and intriguing idea, this vision of human mutants. I got such a hit of X-Men at points that I wonder how well Stan Lee or whoever worked on the comic might have known this novel. The big ideas are there to be discovered (not without labor, alas, at least in my experience). Sturgeon is a name I knew way back when I was reading science fiction stories as a kid, along with Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein. I don’t remember much about the Sturgeon stories, whereas stuff by Bradbury and Heinlein has stuck with me. I think most of Sturgeon’s greatest achievements are wrapped up in this novel. I wouldn’t know where to go next with him. The first part, “The Fabulous Idiot,” has some affinities structurally with William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and its baffling first part, which is also explicitly about “an idiot” (term of art in more benighted times). They are very different works, but I do wonder if Sturgeon was prone to literary pretension. Two-thirds of this book anyway suggest he might be, but I don’t know. He wrote a lot of stories that might be worth a look for a next stop. Kudos to the Library of America anthology, American Science Fiction, 1953-1956, for reminding me science fiction doesn’t have to be just space opera, which we see a lot of, of course. More Than Human is decidedly not space opera and has lots of interesting ideas about psychology and evolution, though it may not be necessarily done well overall—ambition, reach, grasp, all that. Read the first part to get to the second part. Third part optional. Another reminder of the problems with fix-ups.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

Chungking Express (1994)

Chung Hing sam lam, Hong Kong, 102 minutes

Director/writer: Wong Kar-Wai

Photography: Christopher Doyle, Wai Keung Lau

Music: Frankie Chan, Michael Galasso, Roel A. Garcia, Faye Wong

Editors: William Chang, Kit-Wai Kai, Chi-Leung Kwong

Cast: Brigitte Lin, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Faye Wong, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Valerie Chow, Piggy Chan

Director and writer Wong Kar-Wai does not entirely fit with my conception of a Hong Kong filmmaker of the ‘90s, benighted as that might be. My expectations are still more along the lines of extravagant action set-pieces and outrageous settings and setups—Jackie Chan and John Woo kinds of things. There’s much less of that in Kar-wai pictures, of course, but he has perhaps outdone the others with his dazzling style and unusually pure commitment to romance, which only seems to go over better every year. I am astonished to see that In the Mood for Love has now reached the top 20 of the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? (#17 to be specific). Chungking Express is next on the list, at a perhaps more sedate #159. But it has also seen a steady rise over the years from the lower echelons of the top 500.

For me, it is Kar-wai’s deeply romantic vision that wins me over, augmented as it is with the stunning cinematography and canny soundtrack choices. It is a full-on package of sensation. Chungking Express splits across two mostly distinct narratives. The first is a ridiculous young policeman, known as Cop 223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro), who is trying to grasp the reality of a failing relationship. He has just been dumped. He calls her family members and acts like everything is fine, hoping they will be his allies. He buys cans of pineapple, her favorite food, looking for expiration dates of May 1 because she broke up with him on April 1, because May 1 is his birthday (turning 25), because the young woman’s name is May, or perhaps more than anything because he believes it will somehow help his cause. It’s somewhat murky and hovers close to silly—among other things he takes up with a drug-dealing spy who wears a wig, sunglasses, and trenchcoat—but it’s a useful overture, familiarizing us with Kar-wai’s style and approach for what is to come in the second narrative.

The Visit (2015)

The Visit was considered something of a return to form for director and writer M. Night Shyamalan, who had struck out just previously with After Earth in 2013 and The Last Airbender in 2010 (I had given up on him before that so I don’t know either except by their terrible reputations). It’s fair enough to give him the accolades—The Visit is a nifty horror picture which includes the rare feat of a jump-scare that continued to scare me even after I jumped. Usually I’m just annoyed by jump-scares. The story involves two siblings—Becca (Olivia DeJonge) and Tyler (Ed Oxenbould)—who are sent to stay with their grandparents while their mother (Kathryn Hahn) goes on a cruise with her latest boyfriend. Becca is the older of the two. Both are in their teens and still in school. They have never met these grandparents. Their mother had a terrible fight with them when she was 19 and ran away and has never spoken to them again since. Details of that story elude us all the way to the end. Their mother won’t tell them what happened, says they’ll have to ask her folks if they want to know. The grandparents—Nana (Deanna Dunagan) and Pop Pop (Peter McRobbie)—seem to be typical grandparents at first, in spite of the awkwardness of meeting for the first time. They listen to Tyler rap extemporaneously on the subject of their choice, pineapple upside-down cake. Rapping is his ambition. Tyler says his sound is like Tyler, the Creator, but of course Nana and Pop Pop have never heard of him. Becca, meanwhile, is an aspiring filmmaker, talks a lot about visual tension and mise en scene and such, and shoots a lot of this movie. Wikipedia describes The Visit as a found-footage movie, but it isn’t really, only has some elements of that. Pretty soon strange things begin to happen after 9:30 at night, the household bedtime. Becca and Tyler hear weird noises outside their bedroom at night. When they open the door what they see is almost traumatizing—for us, let alone them. Nana apparently has sundowner’s syndrome, which is dementia that grows much worse with nightfall (hence the 9:30 bedtime). Pop Pop, for his part, is doing something in the shed on their property which he keeps hidden from the others. And so it goes, as the kids investigate and the reality becomes more disturbing. There is a plot twist, of course, which in this case is the explanation for what’s going on. While it is not particularly original, it upends everything we have believed about the movie’s reality to that point. It’s convenient but not really cheap, as so many of Shyamalan’s plot twists can be. The result is a pretty good picture overall. Shyamalan makes his share of dogs, no question, but he can turn out some pretty good ones too.

Rendezvous With Rama (1973)

I had a good time with this much-honored award winner by Arthur C. Clarke (Hugo, Nebula, etc.). It involves a cigar-shaped asteroid, dubbed Rama, which comes sailing into the inner solar system circa 2130. Humans have settled a handful or so of solar system planets and satellites under a “United Planets” (U.P.) governing structure. Rendezvous With Rama is a first contact novel, a very quiet, mysterious, and ultimately powerful one built on observing things that are hard to explain. The asteroid is hollow. A crew is dispatched to investigate. I don’t really have anything close to an engineer’s imagination, so a lot of the descriptions and explanations were lost on me a little, which was frustrating. Some diagrams might have helped. The asteroid / vessel, caked in a kilometer of rock, is 20 kilometers wide by 50 long, spinning on its long axis to create an artificial gravity that is strongest at the inner edges of the cylinder. There is an enormous sea in there and many, many wonders to be discovered. The science is basically straightforward and understandable and often creative. Various mysteries are never resolved, but in the end that amounts to more a strength of this novel. In the late ‘80s and ‘90s Clarke returned to Rama for three more novels so there’s still more to be discovered. I remain generally dubious about sequels so I’m in no hurry to get to them, not least because of the time lag, but maybe I will. For now I enjoyed the opportunity to dip a little more into Clarke, one of the titans of classic midcentury sci-fi. Somehow I always think of him as US (with Asimov, Bradbury, Heinlein, Simak) but Clarke is British. His novels, the ones I know, are always evenhanded and paced well, with lots of interesting futuristic ideas and a strong sense of the science driving them. Much here, for better or worse, has vaguely the wooden tones of 1950s SF—literature and movies. I like it because I associate a certain wooden feeling with the nerds and geeks of SF, living in dreams of the future. As a first contact novel, Rendezvous With Rama somehow has the kind of veracity that makes it feel like it really happened. Some wonderful moments here.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.