"The Doll-House" (1967)

James Cross was a pseudonym of Hugh J. Parry (not to be confused with Hugh G. Rexion), a sociology professor who was at pains to keep his two professional lives separate. Sadly, it's hard to say now which is more obscure than the other. Neither has a Wikipedia entry—in fact, this story seems to be the only reference to him there. In his introduction to the story, editor Harlan Ellison relates that he solicited his own literary agent in the hunt for material, which yielded up this story and another. As a side note, I like how many of the writers in this collection are offbeat or unknown and not just the "usual suspects" of '60s SF. Ellison as usual sings highest praise of the story, and it's not bad. It feels like a lift from The Twilight Zone but there is little conceptual overlay to parse, always a relief. A man, Jim Eliot, is in financial straits, and he turns to a haughty and pretentious relative for help (a retired Ivy League humanities professor), who gives him a half-mocking gift: a dollhouse that is home to a Roman sibyl. Yes, that's right, an actual tiny divine creature who can predict the future if you treat her right. That's important. Even if you treat her right, her answers are cryptic. For example, asked for the winner of the World Series (the setting is 1964), she responds, "Fringillidae sunt." Eventually a Latinist and then a zoologist lead Eliot to the St. Louis Cardinals. Well, you can probably imagine how this goes, as our hero grows increasingly imperiled financially and increasingly impatient with his personal soothsayer. In his afterword, Parry emphasizes the "dangerous" aspect of his story—I appreciated that because the further I go with this collection the more I find myself worrying the concept. I often sense it in Ellison as well. In a way I like how elusive it is, but like the desperate character in this story I also want answers—ones I can understand. Parry's view of the dangerous vision in his story, if I understand him, is about challenging entrenched class structures. Eliot, who is a banker, has nonetheless married over his head, sealing his doom. Even the sibyl probably looks down on him. Actually, being divine, she probably looked down on the humanities professor too. I'm starting to think, more and more, that a lot of the dangerous visions in the best of these stories are as old as the struggle for class position: ancient and unceasing.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison

Change of Heart (2008)

I'm not sure how this ended up in my house, let alone why I felt such an obligation to read it. Later, looking up the conventional wisdom on Jodi Picoult, I learned the hefty novel is a bit of an also-ran in her ginormous catalog of over two dozen titles, often top 10 in rankings and polls but rarely top 5. In its details the story is as clanking as its title (someone here is going to need a heart transplant, you see, and others will need to reevaluate their opinions), but what bothered me more was the glib religiosity, for which I wasn't prepared. It sounds like Change of Heart is typical for Picoult in its topicality. I mean, check this out: A handyman, Shay Bourne, is convicted of the murders of the daughter and father in a household where he worked, and there is evidence the girl had been sexually assaulted. Bourne gets the death penalty, the first in New Hampshire in decades. While on death row, he learns that the younger sister of the murdered girl needs a healthy heart. Bourne wants to donate his, but there are complications because of the lethal injection he will get, which makes it impossible for him to be a donor. On top of all this, Bourne starts performing miracles. That's approximately where I got off the bus, and these miracles start early. Picoult is a skillful novelist—her book feels researched and believable in many important ways, and she juggles nicely the first-person reports of a few different characters. We only see Bourne from the outside but like many of these characters he's hard to believe as anything more than a device. At the same time, I have to give it up to Picoult for the book's other obvious function, which is the book reading group market. They are playing to it directly in my paperback edition, with a WSP Readers Club brand and, in the back, a Readers Club Guide, with suggested topics of discussion. And there is so much to discuss here, for people of goodwill: the death penalty, prison conditions, the justice system, organ donors and transplants, violence, death, loss, and of course that's good old Jesus coming along for the ride too, kinda sorta (still doesn't have any smokes). Change of Heart practically brings its own impetus for social interaction with it. And, yes, it might be fun to hang out with friends and loved ones and kick around some of the ideas, like dipping into Gregory Stock's Book of Questions on summer vacation or during Christmas week. The story in Change of Heart moves in swift, simple, and broad strokes to illustrate all its busy bullet points. You really should belong to a reading group to finish the experience. I'll give Picoult the benefit of the doubt that the simplifications are deliberate—to make it seem like a parable. But as a general rule for regular reading I don't like parables that much either.

In case it's not at the library.

"The Escaping" (1967)

David R. Bunch's second story in Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions collection is basically more of same, a very short story set on the war planet version of Earth called Moderan. For whatever reason, it did not make it into the recent republication of Bunch's 1971 Moderan collection (though I'm not sure it was in the original either). I have to say I'm never really sure what's going on in this story, which might be the reason. It's also not included on the comprehensive list of Bunch's stories at Wikipedia. "The Escaping" features a first-person narrator, and he seems to be pondering work, but it's also possible he is undergoing punishment, or some treatment, and/or remembering his work or a former life. Any or all of the above. On another level it's not that hard to understand—it's about a kind of dissociative state that can be achieved (see title), which helps in dealing with the privations of this culture. Moderan prizes and loves hatred above all else. These eternal soldiers are less like noble warriors such as Crazy Horse or King Arthur's bunch, and more like the monsters of varying skill you encounter in RPGs. The language is difficult—I'm not surprised Bunch was also a poet!—and if the vision is dangerous it is also maddeningly undetailed. In many of the stories in this collection the "dangerous vision," as such, involves collapses of enlightened democracies into immoral autocratic societies. In Bunch's Moderan, I have the impression you can forget the foregoing enlightenment, even if it is Earth. Arguably our enlightenment has been feeble. War and hatred are all that has ever been known. Further clarity may lay in Bunch's Moderan collection, either the 1971 version or the 2018 version, which both have dozens more stories. But I'm not inclined to push much further myself. I'd almost just rather read the screenplay treatment versions of stories like this, with these flimsy narratives thrown like loose scarves around them. For every time my mind is well and truly blown by SF concept there are 10 or 20 more where I'm only confused and impatient. Maybe somebody else will have better luck with this one. Bunch has been remarkably obscure, at least until the recent republication of Moderan, which might change that. You never know.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison

Venom (2018)

I was sucked into another comic book superhero movie by the strange mash of reports coming of it. At first the cacophony looked like the familiar divide of critics and audience. That's confirmed for me anecdotally by two review sites I follow regularly, Tim Brayton writing at Alternate Ending and Christy Lemire at RogerEbert.com, who both hated it, whereas notwithstanding it owned most of October at the box office. Presently it appears to be busy preparing to break further records but we'll see. Some of the chatter made me think word of mouth is having its way here. Then somebody somewhere on social media described it as more like a romantic comedy and that was good enough for me. I went. Understand that Venom is the first movie of a franchise that exists in some "other" "new" Marvel universe, but don't ask me because I don't care about these byzantine continuity issues. Maybe Venom feels so fresh and spontaneous because it's not encumbered with them. Or maybe it feels that way to me because I so rarely go to comic book superhero movies. But I did find Venom hugely entertaining, reminiscent in some ways of The Mask with Jim Carrey—basic strokes of slapstick, mad scientists, aliens from outer space, a spectacular auto chase across San Francisco (one of the best I've ever seen and I've seen Bullitt), a comforting if patently ridiculous moral compass, and, yes, a romantic comedy, a funny one. Which transmutes into a feel-good buddy movie, also funny. Or actually, the romantic comedy between a man (Tom Hardy as Eddie Brock) and a woman (Michelle Williams as Anne Weying) is more like rudely interrupted by a buddy movie between a man (Brock) and a symbiotic alien (Hardy in booming throaty inside-the-head voiceover). It's easier for me to think of it that way. The ultraviolent impulses of the alien life form, which inhabits the bodies of human beings—this is also a bit of a disgustingly biological science fiction horror movie in the mode of Alien—are thus tempered by the comforting framework. It's not a contest of wills between human being and terrifying alien so much as a roommate situation where the pals have a lot of natural chemistry in their clownish wisecracking superhero lifestyle. Yet inevitably they chafe in ways that lead to laugh lines that worked for me. After Venom has killed about 20 or so nefarious over-armed corporate henchmen in an apartment brawl, for example, he says, "Outstanding! Now let's bite off all their heads and pile them up in the corner." Host Brock is disgusted by the very idea. "Why would we do that?" he asks. "Because," Venom says, "a pile of bodies and a pile of heads." In Marvel terms, Venom for me was a lot funnier and sharper than Guardians of the Galaxy, though maybe not quite up to the comedy highs of Deadpool. Even the Stan Lee cameo is above average. Obviously it's Marvel's universe now. We just live here.

Narrative of the Life of J.D. Green (1864)

The last slave narrative in the Library of America collection feels a little like an addendum. At 50 pages, it's on the short side, telling tales of a persistent escape artist and trickster character. J.D. Green's story brings us chronologically nearly to the end of the Civil War, which began with the secession of South Carolina in 1860. The narrative proper seemed a little carelessly edited, though that's probably from the original, with odd and inconsistent spellings, capitalizations, and even typos. It happens with some of the others too but I suspect this one is here more for its own addendums, which are fascinating. The first is a newspaper article from a British publisher about the secession of South Carolina, attempting to understand in real time what it means for slavery and the US. The second is a speech credited to a Georgia statesman, A.H. Stephens, arguing in the Georgia legislature against secession. The picture he paints has many depressing parallels today, with Southerners successfully setting the agenda for the country. Stephens points to how the North had relented on spreading slavery to new territories in the Fugitive Slave Law, which also made the North legally responsible for returning runaway slaves, and he points to the Dred Scott decision too. He lists all the advantages the South has enjoyed, including the original notorious three-fifths provision in the Constitution on slaves for tax accounting purposes, which enabled slaveholders to keep people without rights of any kind who nevertheless contributed to the political power of the owners. Donald Trump may seem unprecedented, but the animus that motivates him and his followers has been in this country since its beginnings. Next up there is a response by Scottish clergy to a statement written by Confederate clergy defending slavery. The Scots condemn slavery in no uncertain terms and even pound the Bible a couple of times, which I found interesting. Their critique of the Confederate argument seemed solid to me, in terms of debunking it, but I also wondered how they responded to the justifications for slavery found in the Bible. Maybe that's Old Testament stuff? I don't mean to minimize Green's story—it's pretty good in its own right, doing the usual work of these narratives laying bare the realities of homegrown American slavery and its legacy of assault, rape, and murder, as well as the casualties of families separated forever.

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)

All That You Can't Leave Behind (2000)

The other day I was shopping in one of my local hypermarket superstores, filling my basket with the usual weird motley of groceries, linens, hardware, and clothes, when I noticed familiar music playing. Why, my goodness, it was a song from the very album I was preparing to write about—"Beautiful Day," from U2's All That You Can't Leave Behind. This led me to look it up and realize that the song had been a #21 hit at the end of 2000, which led me to further marvel over the band's surprisingly substantial entry in my circa 2009 Billboard book: 16 hits to that point, six top 10s, two #1s. I knew they had become crass sellouts to every audience they ever had, except maybe Jann Wenner, but I hadn't realized how far it went. I had been mulling over a defense of All That You Can't Leave Behind because over the years it has shaped up as my answer to the party question, What is your favorite U2 album after all? But now in this citadel of consumerism, fortified later by those refreshed chart statistics of the past, it sounded so disconcertingly apt that it all started to collapse in front of me. Clearly the song belongs more now to the layered shared memories of the Billboard hit parade over the decades, and at 18 years old this year it's just old enough to feel a little instantly stale. In fact, I admit that was my reaction when I played the album for the first time in years a few weeks ago. I kind of flinched at it a little. By the third time through, a few days later, all the elements of warmth reassembled and I found myself looking forward again to hearing it regularly. Is it a case of self-fulfilling prophecy? "Beautiful Day" was not just the only (relatively modest) hit but it also opens the album, a kind of corollary to the Beatles' "Good Day Sunshine" to start side 2 of Revolver. Very sweet, in other words, just this side of saccharine, but an effective mood-setter for a nice batch of anthems. In the case of U2 it is some kind of moral sugar rush—the song titles tell a story too, "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of," "Elevation," "Peace on Earth," "When I Look at the World," finishing on "Grace"—but once it's familiar it gets to be comforting. I did love this album in its time, taking it as the band's welcome (if meditated) retreat from nearly 10 years of incessant "pop" posturing and return to a certain soulfulness they always had that appealed to me (in retrospect, more and more, I have to ask myself what was my problem again with The Joshua Tree? ... for another time). All That You Can't Leave Behind also later became one of the side anthems of 9/11, as the song "New York" was so poignant in the historical moment and brought the album back for me for another fall and winter. And now this fall and winter, at home, in my car if I want to use the CD player, and even in what passes for shopping malls these days. God bless us every one for all that we can't leave behind.

Nosferatu (1922)

Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, Germany, 81 minutes
Director: F.W. Murnau
Writers: Henrik Galeen, Bram Stoker
Photography: Fritz Arno Wagner, Gunther Krampf
Cast: Max Schreck, Gustav von Wangenheim, Greta Schroeder, Alexander Granach, Max Nemetz, Wolfgang Heinz

I'm going to blame the Universal monster movie franchise for my stubborn confusion in thinking that Bram Stoker's novel Dracula came before Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein. Actually, Stoker's vampire tale was published in 1897 and Frankenstein in 1818. Among other things, that means this silent movie version by German director F.W. Murnau—more or less officially the first Dracula movie—came only 25 years after the novel, which is comparable today to a movie based on Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, say, or Donna Tartt's's The Secret History. Dracula had been around awhile, but still might have felt new in 1922. Frankenstein was over 100 years old by that point.

I'm also holding Universal accountable (with Hammer not far behind) for treating the Count Dracula less as a loathsome monster of the night and more in the direction of a Playboy Mansion leisured gentleman, a popular conception of vampires that evolved into George Hamilton in 1979's Love at First Bite and may be extended to include Jim Jarmusch's Adam and Eve in 2013's Only Lovers Left Alive. Note how the word "love" occurs in both titles. Let the Right One In, from 2008, is another recent example. In these pictures the vampire often works as surreptitious seducer (or practical black marketeer, in the Jarmusch, making surreptitious contacts directly with hospitals for blood). But nothing like that is happening in Nosferatu. This Count is not discreetly sucking blood in sexy make-out sessions but is more like the earthworms crawling in the dirt that you spade up when it's time to go fishing. In fact, Nosferatu plays up that aspect of Stoker's novel—Dracula's affinity not just with bats but with other nocturnal vermin and disgusting insects, and especially the way he travels in boxes ("coffins") filled with dirt. It's not the coffins, folks, it's the dirt. Nosferatu even one-ups Stoker by making it plague-infested dirt, complete with swarming rats.

"Incident in Moderan" (1967)

David R. Bunch is the only writer in the Dangerous Visions anthology to get two stories, probably because they're so short, but it's interesting partly because it's not a name I know at all. Bunch published mainly in the speculative genres but pursued a PhD in English and also wrote and published poetry and more traditional literary work. He remained obscure all his life and after, for the most part. He died in 2000. "Incident in Moderan" later became part of a 1971 cycle of Bunch stories, Moderan, which is now considered a significant influence on cyberpunk SF (and was actually republished in a reworked edition just last month). This very short story presents a dystopic vision of future Earth with the planet covered in plastic, a cyborg technology that has made great advances, and perpetual war. It takes place during a rare break in the war, enabling one side to repair its defenses. The first-person narrator is a cyborg, which we learn eventually through inference. The story involves an encounter with "mutant forms," which appear to be humans who have rejected cyborg technology, though they may be mutants and not human as we think of it now. Again, learned by inference, through the blizzard of oblique conceptual detail given as scenes unfold. This is how the narrator perceives one of the mutant forms talking: "Blue soft lips parted and a yellow-pink piece of gristly meat jigged up and down in wet slop ... [a] somewhat vulgar performance of meat and air." I have to admit I'm probably more fascinated now by Bunch's obscurity than his stories. He published a fair amount in his life—albeit a share of that at the level of fanzines—but his two stories in this collection were basically all that was in print until the recent rerelease of Moderan. If "Incident in Moderan" did not make much impression on me, it could be a problem like I had with Poul Anderson's story last time, just too much concept for the in media res treatment within the confines of a short story (or, indeed, short short, as this very nearly is). But Bunch's language certainly has a nice sheen of clarity, and that element of cruelty which editor Harlan Ellison has shown a consistent taste for is present as well. The story is almost very good. Looking forward to Bunch's second bite at the apple next week.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison

A Star Is Born (2018)

I'm somewhat patchy and probably a little out of step on my Hollywood legends and iconography—I've never much liked All About Eve, for example, have little use for the Oscars ceremony or its fruits, and have seen only three of the previous four versions of A Star Is Born (counting the 1932 What Price Hollywood?—the Barbra Streisand vehicle is the one I skipped). But there is plenty of juice to this Bradley Cooper version, and I'm not just talking about the drinking. Cooper directed, cowrote, and stars in it. The meteoric rise it charts of Ally the nobody (Lady Gaga) happens with lightning speed and is truly thrilling, certainly when she takes to the big stage for the first time. When Lady Gaga opens up with that aching wailing bellowing thing she does it was all over for me—she elevates the whole thing to next realms and it's not hard to understand why Jack the country star (Cooper) has such faith in her. I had already seen bits of these sequences in the trailer, one of the very few that lit me up regularly this year on my forays out, and so the first half of A Star Is Born felt a little like the long version from the album. Really great stuff. I will also say I've never shared the antipathy toward Bradley Cooper as some kind of uniquely abhorrent pretty-boy phony. Is it something about The Hangover? Me, I can't really see much difference between Cooper and, say, George Clooney, Matt Damon, Jake Gyllenhaal, or Brad Pitt. I liked the TV show Alias, I like Limitless quite a bit, and weak outings such as Silver Linings Playbook or American Hustle just never bothered me—others are worse in those two movies alone (*cough* Robert De Niro *cough*). And Cooper is trying very hard for credibility here—it's hard to say at this point whether he is looking for Oscar gold, additional directing gigs, or what. But he is looking for something. He not only cowrote and directed this latest installment of a venerable Hollywood institution, but he also learned to play the guitar and sing country for the starring role. As Jack the country star, he is convincingly lost in himself, with a rumbling whiskey-soaked voice that feels like it already has one foot in the grave. The scenes of him before Ally, isolated in the deep shadows of limo backseats and backstage chaos, pulling on quart bottles of booze, are certain pictures of desperation. The back half of the picture, with everything going sour except Ally's career, felt more pro forma and much less convincing to me. But the breakout scenes were so amazing I could sit there in the dark still in thrall to them and feel friendly toward the picture even as the tired old story of fame and bad faith and drunkenness unreeled—some of it, such as a Grammy scene, just impossible to believe. Gaga and Cooper may not have much chemistry and Gaga especially may feel tentative and a little unsure of herself in places. Yet they are not hard at all to watch. When Gaga sings she is almost always riveting and she is often singing. Kudos to Cooper for playing the whole thing so well.

The Nearest Thing to Life (2015)

James Wood's collection of four lectures, under the auspices of Brandeis University, is a wonderful exploration of the relations and interpenetrations of life and art (the nearest thing to life). A Harvard professor and New Yorker staff writer, Wood brings the intimidating clarity. Like the best critics he inspires one to read further, and explore far, even as the hash of his ideas can send sparks flying. In the first piece, he starts with every kid's most annoying question—"Why?"—and spins that into a meditation on life and death. "It is our first and last question," he writes, "uttered with the same incomprehension, grief, rage, and fear at sixty as at six." He looks for answers to this lifelong irresolution in Dostoevsky, Cervantes, D.H. Lawrence, Knut Hamsun, Italo Calvino—in literature generally, when he characterizes fiction as a useful game of "not quite," a kind of rehearsal. In the next two pieces—"Serious Noticing" and "Using Everything"—he goes deeper into techniques of fiction. He lauds the well-chosen detail (using Chekhov and Henry Green as examples) to the point nearly of anthropomorphizing. "For details represent those moments in a story where form is outlived, canceled, evaded. I think of details as nothing less than bits of life sticking out of the frieze of form, imploring us to touch them." In the last piece, Wood roots around with ideas of home and loss, and the various experiences of emigrants, exiles, and expatriates. A British citizen, Wood has lived in the US since 1995. In one telling detail (speaking of the power of the detail) he notes that his children are American. Here he focuses on work I don't know, such as W.G. Sebold's The Emigrants. One way I know I like a book of criticism is when I come away from it with lists of things to be read immediately. I got a look at Chekhov's "The Kiss" before reading Wood's discussion of it, and there are more things I hope to get to. Wood has a reputation as a memoirist or personal essayist as well as a literary critic. I can see how you get to that—he's explicit (though almost too delicate for me) about including the frame of his own life, which is inevitably how we all view both life and the nearest thing to it. Wood is just extraordinarily honest about acknowledging it. Great stuff.

In case it's not at the library.