Just so we're clear on this right at the beginning, Black Alice - by the late John Sladek and the more recently departed Thomas M. Disch - is neither science fiction nor fantasy. I suppose a case could be made for calling it a psychological horror story, and there are some decidedly Phildickian aspects to the plot and characterisation... but bizarre as the world it describes may seem forty years later, Disch and Sladek did not invent it.
Alice, the only child of Roderick and Delphinia Raleigh, is an extremely bright but decidedly troubled eleven year old girl. Neglectful parents and a quietly sadistic governess had driven her almost to the brink of schizophrenia before her great-uncle Jason realized what was happening and replaced the governess. Two years later, Alice still converses with a voice in her head, named 'Dinah' after her only confidante of the time, the daughter of the household's black cook.
Roderick, who married Delphinia for her inheritance, is discomfited when his father-in-law leaves his entire estate to Alice - bypassing Roderick, who is too lazy to work and tires of having to beg Jason for money. When his plan to have Alice institutionalized fails, he finds accomplices who will kidnap Alice and demand a million-dollar ransom. Inspired by John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me and possibly Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, they force-feed Alice drugs that will darken her skin, dye and curl her blonde hair, and tell her she is now a black girl named Dinah... confident that even if she escapes, no-one will believe a black girl who claims to be missing heiress Alice Raleigh.
Alice is then left with Bessy, a madam who Roderick has known from his days in Kappa Kappa Kappa fraternity, but whose business has dwindled to only two prostitutes in a former funeral home in Virginia - the masculine black Clara, and the beautiful but severely retarded blonde Fay. Alice quickly works out who is behind the scheme, and does her best to leave a trail of clues that will lead the FBI to her... but the only FBI agent in the area, Owen Gann, is deep undercover with the Ku Klux Klan, and can't afford to have his secret known, because the local Klan is busy preparing for a visit by busloads of civil rights activists from the north.
Apart from an amazingly twisted and satisfying thriller plot (especially for a novel less than 200 pages long), Black Alice can also boast wonderful characterisation. Apart from Alice, with her internal battle to retain her own identity, Disch and Sladek give us insight into: Roderick, who seems to have studied Nietzschean philosophy under Leopold and Loeb; Bessy, much possessed with death (her own); Gann, chosen for his role because of his Southern upbringing, and torn between his job and his loyalty to the sort of people he grew up with; Jason, a sympathetic lawyer; Peter Boggs, a sympathetic Klansman (in stark contrast to the perverted Cyclops and Dragon above him); Fay; and many others.
It is, of course, out of print. I'd like to think it's because its American setting, with its murderous racism, now seems more alien than most sf futures and darker (no pun intended) than many dystopias, too fantastic to be believable as the past. I'd really like to think that...
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
MEMORY: 21
Flavius recoiled from the creature, throwing up his arm between them. The thing stared at him briefly, nictating membranes sliding quickly across the eyes before its spindly arms abruptly produced a translucent, frosted dinner plate with crusted orange balls delicately arranged upon it. It deftly set the plate before Flavius as another arm deposited a tall flute of burgundy liquid on the table. It cocked its head without saying a word, the swiftly retreated straight up.
Mouth agape, Flavius watched it go. Half a dozen stubby legs pulled effortlessly up an impossibly thin silken strand to the ceiling of the dining hall. An instant later it disappeared onto a balcony encircling the ceiling, cleverly hidden by an optical illusion of the architecture.
More of the creatures tumbled down from the ceiling, their fat, segmented orange bodies punctuated by rings of long, hairy spikes. An array of spindly forelegs held assorted drink refills, finger bowls and any other luxury an Imperial diner could want. They expertly completed their tasks at the various drifting tables on the floor, and instantly scurried back up its silken thread.
“You really need to eat your spondl before it melts through the crust, Flavius of Clan MacDuff. It defeats the purpose otherwise.”
Flavius pulled his attention from the acrobatics above. His table had joined with another, and the occupant was a familiar one. Like others of the Eternal Dominion, her skin was reddish-copper and her hair a glistening silver, but her features were broader than the delicate Empress’. She was thick-shouldered and muscular by Dominion standards, but compared to the lassies of Scotland she was positively fey. Flavius racked his brain for a name before Memory offered it up.
“Sajal Anacaona, I’d nae thought to see you here,” he said, remembering the Sajal were mid-level Dominion nobility far outside the Imperial line of succession. “Of course, I nae thought to see me here again, either.”
“It’s safe to say many here shared those sentiments. Your departure was quite the topic of conversation.” She picked up one of the orange spondl with long, over-jointed finger and held it to her lips. She nipped the crust with her teeth, then sucked the filling out with far too much skill to be anything other than seductive.
Flavius grabbed a handful of spondl off his plate and shoved them into his mouth. The honeyed crust crumbled between his teeth, releasing a minute burst of alcoholic burn. The creamy brine of the filling made for a pleasant contrast on his tongue.
“Oh my,” Anacaona said, barely suppressing a grin. “I see Her Royal Majesty’s boldness isn’t misplaced.”
Flavius swallowed, eyeing Anacaona suspiciously as her lips worked over another spondl. “And just what d’ya mean by that?”
“Only that spondl is reputed to be a strong aphrodisiac, and Her Royal Majesty had it added as the second course right after your audience in the audience hall,” she said airily. “The scandal is all anyone’s talking about. His Imperial Majesty cannot be pleased with this affront, I would think. And spondl, of all things...” Anacaona shook her head. “I can’t imagine a dish that clashes more with the dry elegance of Brusselia cuisine, can you? At least it’s fresh spondl...”
“Yer having me on.”
Anacaona leaned forward on her elbows, smiling wickedly. “I am not. Ask anyone you share a table with this evening. They’ll tell you exactly what I have.”
“But those whatchercallem, the nuse--”
“Aren’t steeped in Her Imperial Majesty’s blood.”
“Emperor Camargo-- er, His Imperial Majesty said they’d kill me if released.”
Anacaona shrugged. “That’s a risk she’s willing to take.”
Flavius opened his mouth to say something, thought better of it, then resorted to beating his temple with the heel of his palm. “Bugger me,” he muttered.
“That is a possibility. Her Imperial Majesty’s tastes are reputed to be quite varied.”
“If she’s that damn horny,” he said, measuring his words carefully, “why dinnae she just go off and shag Camargo and be done with it?”
Anacaona stared at Falvius, eyes wide and mouth open, only partly scandalized by his use of the Tricentennial Emperor’s familiar name. “You’re serious? You honestly don’t know?”
“Dinnae be a tit, you. I’m nae from around here, remember?”
Anacaona looked away with a hand over her mouth, composing herself. When she looked back, the mirth had gone from her face. “Full citizens of the Eternal Dominion are different from the lesser sentients--”
“Aye, that’d be me.”
She frowned at him, but continued. “There is a degree of physical compatibility with lesser sentients, but there’s a genetic disconnect. Crossbreeding cannot happen.”
Flavius shrugged. “And? That’s one of the first things I learned, going on three lives ago.”
“Try to understand this,” she said in a whisper. “We of the Eternal Dominion, we mate once. Copulation involves a physical bond between the man and woman and lasts weeks, ending only when the man dies, his body utterly spent. Staggered gestations immediately begin in the woman, and continue until her death. Empress Teotalco outlived her Emperor an unheard-of seven years, birthing forty-three heirs. That’s also a record.
“To consummate their union would be the death of his His and Her Imperial Majesties, both. They choose to avoid this as long as possible, you see, but the need remains. Our base drive for copulation defies all attempts to tame it, but it can be sated for a time. That’s why Her Imperial Majesty will have you tonight, nuse or no nuse.”
“This is a bonny bag of shite. If the nuse dinnae kill me, His Imperial Majesty will do the honors.” Flavius considered the situation. “Parric’s gonna be pissed.”
“You have alternatives, you know,” Anacaona said.
Flavius snorted. “Such as?”
Anacaona lowered her eyes, her cavalier confidence suddenly fleeting. “I’m of the Eternal Dominion, too, and share this curse. I’d shelter you this night, Flavius of Clan MacDuff. If you’re willing.”
"They're still applauding"
The great Howard Waldrop ("That's MISTER National Treasure to you!") has suffered a series of major ailments in recent months, culminating in heart surgery and an extended recuperation at the veteran's center in Temple, Texas. Traditionally, Howard gives the final reading at Armadillocon to close things out (Joe Lansdale and Neal Barrett, Jr. subbed admirably during Howard's years-long exile to the Pacific northwest to fish during the 90s). This year, since he couldn't be at the convention, a novel solution was struck--a round-robin reading of Howard's brilliant "The Ugly Chickens" by a number of con guests, with Howard himself providing the finishing touches via the miracle of modern technology. I'll let Lou Antonelli take it from here, as he was uniquely positioned for the final act:
Go read the whole report at Lou's blog. It's well worth your time. Also, make sure you add the forthcoming anthology Fast Ships, Black Sails to your must-have list. Howard's got a story therein that is pure Waldropian gold. You will never, ever look at Certain Pirates in the same light ever again.
The reading back in Austin started at 4 p.m. and while Howard's pals back in Austin were reading "The Ugly Chickens" we all visited and had a nice time.
When they got close to the end, Brad called and Barb and Howard began to follow along, so Howard was able to jump in and finish up. Howard's spirits and wit remain strong, but he's still a little frail physically (or else he wouldn't be in the hospital). Since I'm a journalist I always carry a camera, and so I took digital pics for posterity of the event.
What impressed me was how, when he began reading,Howard sounded his old self. It was like he was back at the first Armadillocon. I guess that came through to the folks back in Austin, from all reports. After he finished, Howard just sat there for a while listening on the cell phone. Finally he said with a big smile, "they're still applauding".
Go read the whole report at Lou's blog. It's well worth your time. Also, make sure you add the forthcoming anthology Fast Ships, Black Sails to your must-have list. Howard's got a story therein that is pure Waldropian gold. You will never, ever look at Certain Pirates in the same light ever again.
Friday, August 15, 2008
Eating Michael Phelps?
Aquaman is a dorky Super Friend, and Prince Namor is like Heathcliff with gills.
Watching the Olympic swimmers torpedo their way through Beijing's magic aqua cube, I try to summon both prototypes, but can only think of Flipper, the lovable TV dolphin with a heart of gold.
I watch the network's self-parodic profiles of chlorinated Midwestern übermensch Michael Phelps, with the "can you believe that, Bob?" banter about his daily 12,000 calories of pancakes and Ann Arbor strip mall moo goo gai pan, and I wonder if his next gig will be jumping for energy bars dangled by his trainers at the main arena of Sea World. Do you suppose he can leap from the water and do back flips? Swim backwards the length of the pool with a beach ball balanced on his nose?
Every time they break for an interview with him or one of his teammates, I half expect him to be unable to speak in human language, to instead answer all questions with a series of seal barks or ventriloquized whale sign. If only.
Perhaps there is something de-evolutionary about fully aquatic humans, living in their simpler human world of nothing but swimming, eating and sleeping down in the tranquil silence of the deep blue.
I think of Patrick Duffy as the Man From Atlantis of late 70s American television, bizarro occupant of the otherwise undiscovered congruence of Jacques Cousteau documentaries and The Six Million Dollar Man. Interviews with superhuman swimmers should be more like this choice clip:
All variations on homo superior, right? I'm with John Tierney, when he argues in Tuesday's Science Times that we should abandon the self-evidently anachronistic idea of the "natural athlete," as quaint as the idea of gentleman amateurs in an era where the Olympics (at least the big events that make the American networks) are little more than the ultimate two-week product placement opportunity, advertisements on the back of young people segregated from society for the technologically-assisted pursuit of pure athletic perfection.
"Let the Games be Doped"
Let the super-swimmers really indulge their de-evolutionary tendencies, transforming them into dolphin people. Orcas with dorm rooms, maybe with a special event where they get to chase the color commentators through the pool with predatory vat-grown incisors. And blowholes!
The losers could be handled Soylent Green style, served as exotic entrees in Beijing's culinary underground, Anthony Bourdain licking his lips over the well-seasoned shoulder meat.
Maybe it's just me.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
It's that time again.
Those yahoos (in the Swiftian sense) at San Jose State have posted the results of the Bulwer-Lytton Contest, so I have to continue my (likely Quixotic) effort to defend the man. The following is the appendix to my Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana:
In his lifetime Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron of Knebworth (1803-1873) was a popular, prolific, and influential writer. But thanks to the vagaries of time and changing literary tastes Bulwer-Lytton’s name has become synonymous with bad writing, to the point that the English department of San Jose State University has, since 1982, held the "Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest" for the "opening sentence of the worst of all possible novels." The decline in Bulwer-Lytton’s reputation is at least somewhat understandable, as many aspects of his style have not aged well. Bulwer-Lytton’s work can be stiff, wooden, and melodramatic. He often unsuccessfully strains for affect. He had a fatal weakness for prolixity, fustian, and bombast. He is little-read today.
But Bulwer-Lytton deserves better. Never mind that he wrote in the style of his era, and that to single him out for writing like his contemporaries is unjust. Never mind that other writers who are his stylistic inferiors are not targeted so; no sober critic would read Walter Scott or Fenimore Cooper, and then read Bulwer-Lytton, and declare that Bulwer-Lytton is more deserving of derision. Never mind that, as Jaime Weinman says, "It was a dark and stormy night" isn’t really that bad. (I can find several opening lines in Dickens that are worse).
Bulwer-Lytton deserves praise and admiration. Few writers, of any time or of any country, were as influential during their lifetimes. Few writer possessed his commerical instincts or had as great an insight into the tastes of the reading audience. And few writers were as consistently experimental over as long a period of time. The following is a summary of his accomplishments:
• Pelham (1828) was the most popular and influential of the Silver Fork genre of novels. The Silver Fork (or "fashionable novel") genre described the improper behavior of the aristocratic set, as told to the public by (supposedly) one of the aristocrats themselves. The Silver Fork novel was popular from the 1820s until the 1840s and was the transitional genre between the novel of the upper classes and the domestic realism of the Victorian novel proper. Pelham made the fortune of the publishing firm of Colburn and Co. and may have been the best-selling novel of the 19th century. Pelham also set the style, still the standard today, for men wearing black evening dress rather than blue.
• Paul Clifford (1830) and Eugene Aram (1832) were the first two major Newgate novels and essentially established the genre. Neither novel was quite as popular as William Harrison Ainsworth’s Rookwood, but both novels were successful (and scandalous), and Rookwood and the succeeding Newgate novels would not have been written without Bulwer-Lytton’s precedent.
• The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) was not Bulwer-Lytton’s first historical novel (the undistinguished Devereux (1829) was), but it was his first success in the genre. It is the best historical novel of the 1830s and was seen by critics as having topped the work of Sir Walter Scott. Bulwer-Lytton followed Pompeii with Rienzi, the Last of the Roman Tribunes (1835), The Last of the Barons (1843), and Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings (1848). Scott deserves credit for the creation of the modern historical novel, but Bulwer-Lytton’s historical novels were among the most popular in the genre in the 1830s and 1840s, and The Last Days of Pompeii created the subgenre of historical novels set in Rome, a group which would later include Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurian (1885) and Lewis Wallace’s Ben Hur (1880). Bulwer-Lytton’s historical novels set the standard for applying scholarship and research to the writing of historical romances, and The Last of the Barons and Harold were among the first historical novels to apply contemporary social political issues to the past: in Barons, the negative effect of the Industrial Revolution on England; in Harold, the question of what it is to be "English" and a celebration of the romantic Toryism of the Young England movement of the early 1840s.
• England and the English (1834) was an important criticism of English culture which was politically radical in its call for education and child labor reform.
• Athens: Its Rise and Fall (1837) is one of the best and most readable Victorian histories of ancient Greece.
• Ernest Maltravers (1837) is the novel in which the influence of the Germans on Bulwer-Lytton is the most pronounced. Bulwer-Lytton was greatly influenced by the German thinkers and writers, Goethe and Schiller especially, and he translated Schiller’s lyrical poetry and wrote essays on Wieland, Lessing, Herder, and Klopstock. Bulwer-Lytton admired and liked the Germans and helped spread an appreciation for German thought among the English, and in Ernest Maltravers Bulwer-Lytton did a passable attempt at emulating Goethe.
• Night and Morning (1841), another of Bulwer-Lytton’s Proto-Mysteries, was reviewed by Edgar Allan Poe in the same issue of Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine in which appeared Poe’s "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," Poe’s first C. Auguste Dupin story. Though not wholly complimentary of Bulwer-Lytton, Poe nonetheless praises Night and Morning’s plot construction. Poe probably did not read Night and Morning before he composed "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," but it is likely that the complicated plot of Night and Morning had some effect on Poe’s composition of "The Mystery of Marie Roget" and "The Purloined Letter." Moreover, Night and Morning’s detective Monsieur Favart, though an imitation of Eugène François Vidocq, is an early example in crime fiction of the police detective character. Both Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins knew of Night and Morning, and it is arguable that Favart was an influence on Dickens’ creation of Inspector Bucket (in Bleak House) and on Collins’ creation of Sergeant Cuff (in The Moonstone). The mystery genre would be different without the example of the Newgate novels to draw upon. The mystery genre would not exist without the work of Poe, Dickens, and Collins, all three of whom were influenced by Bulwer-Lytton.
• Zanoni (1842) and A Strange Story (1861-1862) created the occult fantasy genre. Bulwer-Lytton had predecessors, including William Beckford (in Vathek), but it was Bulwer-Lytton, Zanoni and A Strange Story which were influential on and imitated by later writers of occult fantasy.
• The Caxtons (1849) was not the first major domestic novel–Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847) has that honor–but Bulwer-Lytton’s prestige (by the mid-point of the century Bulwer-Lytton was seen as England’s leading novelist) gave significant impetus to domestic fiction and helped make it fashionable.
• The Haunted and the Haunters (1859) was the first modern haunted house story. It is set in the London of the day and uses psychic phenomena rather than the rationalized supernatural of the Gothics. The Haunted and the Haunters has been imitated dozens of times and is one of the two or three most influential haunted house stories ever written.
• The Coming Race (1871) was multiply influential. It is a significant early work of science fiction and uses concepts which would become standards in science fiction, including a version of atomic energy in the vril force. The Coming Race is the best-written of the 19th century Hollow Earth novels and was influential on later utopian novels, including Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872). And the mystical vocabulary and ideology of The Coming Race were adopted by Helena Blavatsky and incorporated into the philosophy of Theosophy.
The preceding list does not include Bulwer-Lytton’s work (1831-1833) as an editor on the New Monthly Review, one of the most popular of the monthly fictional magazines; his political career as a Member of Parliament (1831-1841, 1852-1866) and as Secretary of State for the Colonies (1858-1859); his satires, including The New Timon (1846), with its then-shocking attack on Tennyson, and Money (1840), which like England and the English retains its bite today; his great influence on modern occultism, including the Order of the Golden Dawn; his influence on other writers, particularly Dickens; his efforts on behalf of other writers, both toward creating effective copyright laws and, through the Guild of Literature and Art, to support struggling writers and artists; his extensive critical work on the theory of fiction; and his attempts to experiment with narrative structure and to expand the possibilities of contemporary fiction, especially in My Life (1853), in which the narrative is interrupted by criticisms from the characters.
The callow call Bulwer-Lytton "Barely Literate," and the annual "Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest" invites similarly shallow jibes, but Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton is as deserving of respect and appreciation as any other writer of his age.
In his lifetime Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron of Knebworth (1803-1873) was a popular, prolific, and influential writer. But thanks to the vagaries of time and changing literary tastes Bulwer-Lytton’s name has become synonymous with bad writing, to the point that the English department of San Jose State University has, since 1982, held the "Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest" for the "opening sentence of the worst of all possible novels." The decline in Bulwer-Lytton’s reputation is at least somewhat understandable, as many aspects of his style have not aged well. Bulwer-Lytton’s work can be stiff, wooden, and melodramatic. He often unsuccessfully strains for affect. He had a fatal weakness for prolixity, fustian, and bombast. He is little-read today.
But Bulwer-Lytton deserves better. Never mind that he wrote in the style of his era, and that to single him out for writing like his contemporaries is unjust. Never mind that other writers who are his stylistic inferiors are not targeted so; no sober critic would read Walter Scott or Fenimore Cooper, and then read Bulwer-Lytton, and declare that Bulwer-Lytton is more deserving of derision. Never mind that, as Jaime Weinman says, "It was a dark and stormy night" isn’t really that bad. (I can find several opening lines in Dickens that are worse).
Bulwer-Lytton deserves praise and admiration. Few writers, of any time or of any country, were as influential during their lifetimes. Few writer possessed his commerical instincts or had as great an insight into the tastes of the reading audience. And few writers were as consistently experimental over as long a period of time. The following is a summary of his accomplishments:
• Pelham (1828) was the most popular and influential of the Silver Fork genre of novels. The Silver Fork (or "fashionable novel") genre described the improper behavior of the aristocratic set, as told to the public by (supposedly) one of the aristocrats themselves. The Silver Fork novel was popular from the 1820s until the 1840s and was the transitional genre between the novel of the upper classes and the domestic realism of the Victorian novel proper. Pelham made the fortune of the publishing firm of Colburn and Co. and may have been the best-selling novel of the 19th century. Pelham also set the style, still the standard today, for men wearing black evening dress rather than blue.
• Paul Clifford (1830) and Eugene Aram (1832) were the first two major Newgate novels and essentially established the genre. Neither novel was quite as popular as William Harrison Ainsworth’s Rookwood, but both novels were successful (and scandalous), and Rookwood and the succeeding Newgate novels would not have been written without Bulwer-Lytton’s precedent.
• The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) was not Bulwer-Lytton’s first historical novel (the undistinguished Devereux (1829) was), but it was his first success in the genre. It is the best historical novel of the 1830s and was seen by critics as having topped the work of Sir Walter Scott. Bulwer-Lytton followed Pompeii with Rienzi, the Last of the Roman Tribunes (1835), The Last of the Barons (1843), and Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings (1848). Scott deserves credit for the creation of the modern historical novel, but Bulwer-Lytton’s historical novels were among the most popular in the genre in the 1830s and 1840s, and The Last Days of Pompeii created the subgenre of historical novels set in Rome, a group which would later include Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurian (1885) and Lewis Wallace’s Ben Hur (1880). Bulwer-Lytton’s historical novels set the standard for applying scholarship and research to the writing of historical romances, and The Last of the Barons and Harold were among the first historical novels to apply contemporary social political issues to the past: in Barons, the negative effect of the Industrial Revolution on England; in Harold, the question of what it is to be "English" and a celebration of the romantic Toryism of the Young England movement of the early 1840s.
• England and the English (1834) was an important criticism of English culture which was politically radical in its call for education and child labor reform.
• Athens: Its Rise and Fall (1837) is one of the best and most readable Victorian histories of ancient Greece.
• Ernest Maltravers (1837) is the novel in which the influence of the Germans on Bulwer-Lytton is the most pronounced. Bulwer-Lytton was greatly influenced by the German thinkers and writers, Goethe and Schiller especially, and he translated Schiller’s lyrical poetry and wrote essays on Wieland, Lessing, Herder, and Klopstock. Bulwer-Lytton admired and liked the Germans and helped spread an appreciation for German thought among the English, and in Ernest Maltravers Bulwer-Lytton did a passable attempt at emulating Goethe.
• Night and Morning (1841), another of Bulwer-Lytton’s Proto-Mysteries, was reviewed by Edgar Allan Poe in the same issue of Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine in which appeared Poe’s "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," Poe’s first C. Auguste Dupin story. Though not wholly complimentary of Bulwer-Lytton, Poe nonetheless praises Night and Morning’s plot construction. Poe probably did not read Night and Morning before he composed "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," but it is likely that the complicated plot of Night and Morning had some effect on Poe’s composition of "The Mystery of Marie Roget" and "The Purloined Letter." Moreover, Night and Morning’s detective Monsieur Favart, though an imitation of Eugène François Vidocq, is an early example in crime fiction of the police detective character. Both Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins knew of Night and Morning, and it is arguable that Favart was an influence on Dickens’ creation of Inspector Bucket (in Bleak House) and on Collins’ creation of Sergeant Cuff (in The Moonstone). The mystery genre would be different without the example of the Newgate novels to draw upon. The mystery genre would not exist without the work of Poe, Dickens, and Collins, all three of whom were influenced by Bulwer-Lytton.
• Zanoni (1842) and A Strange Story (1861-1862) created the occult fantasy genre. Bulwer-Lytton had predecessors, including William Beckford (in Vathek), but it was Bulwer-Lytton, Zanoni and A Strange Story which were influential on and imitated by later writers of occult fantasy.
• The Caxtons (1849) was not the first major domestic novel–Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847) has that honor–but Bulwer-Lytton’s prestige (by the mid-point of the century Bulwer-Lytton was seen as England’s leading novelist) gave significant impetus to domestic fiction and helped make it fashionable.
• The Haunted and the Haunters (1859) was the first modern haunted house story. It is set in the London of the day and uses psychic phenomena rather than the rationalized supernatural of the Gothics. The Haunted and the Haunters has been imitated dozens of times and is one of the two or three most influential haunted house stories ever written.
• The Coming Race (1871) was multiply influential. It is a significant early work of science fiction and uses concepts which would become standards in science fiction, including a version of atomic energy in the vril force. The Coming Race is the best-written of the 19th century Hollow Earth novels and was influential on later utopian novels, including Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872). And the mystical vocabulary and ideology of The Coming Race were adopted by Helena Blavatsky and incorporated into the philosophy of Theosophy.
The preceding list does not include Bulwer-Lytton’s work (1831-1833) as an editor on the New Monthly Review, one of the most popular of the monthly fictional magazines; his political career as a Member of Parliament (1831-1841, 1852-1866) and as Secretary of State for the Colonies (1858-1859); his satires, including The New Timon (1846), with its then-shocking attack on Tennyson, and Money (1840), which like England and the English retains its bite today; his great influence on modern occultism, including the Order of the Golden Dawn; his influence on other writers, particularly Dickens; his efforts on behalf of other writers, both toward creating effective copyright laws and, through the Guild of Literature and Art, to support struggling writers and artists; his extensive critical work on the theory of fiction; and his attempts to experiment with narrative structure and to expand the possibilities of contemporary fiction, especially in My Life (1853), in which the narrative is interrupted by criticisms from the characters.
The callow call Bulwer-Lytton "Barely Literate," and the annual "Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest" invites similarly shallow jibes, but Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton is as deserving of respect and appreciation as any other writer of his age.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Do you think they're still calling him "Pootie-Poot" on Pennsylvania Ave.?
Pics as seen here on August 22, 2007, Vlad's Siberian Vacation
NYT: Russia, and Putin, Assert Authority
See also: Wikipedia's List of nicknames used by George W. Bush
Monday, August 11, 2008
Mike Davis reconnoiters the Borderlands
Pic: Cruising the Border Fence, San Diego-Tijuana, 2008
At Bomb Magazine this month, Lucy Raven drives around the San Diego-Tijuana border with Mike Davis, discovering pirate urbanization, the border fence, drug tunnels, Iraqi groceries, war dolphins, and the urban warfare simulators at Yodaville, where poor immigrants masquerade as insurgent Iraqis:
LR How do the public sector and the public servants of San Diego function in the context all of these other, privatized operations?
MD San Diego not only supplies research and technology for the Bush-era hybrid of empire and homeland-security police state, but it also provides—together with nearby desert areas of Riverside and San Bernardino counties—an extraordinary proving ground for their application and integration. These days there are approximately one quarter-million soldiers, sailors, and marines, either officially based or in training, in our Pentagon beaches and deserts. The border—now reinforced with National Guard and Coast Guard detachments as well as ICE and its friends—has become an integral part of this virtual (and real) warspace.
Since most tourists and non-military residents—I suppose beguiled by pandas and wet t-shirts—don’t even register the monumentality of these mega-bases and naval installations, they are unlikely to read the surrealistic fine print. For example, about 50 miles east of San Diego along the border is an obscure naval facility called La Posta Naval Reserve Base. In fact, it is “virtual Afghanistan” where Navy SEALs and probably the elite Marine recon guys train before they go to Afghanistan, because it so strikingly resembles that landscape. Forty or fifty miles northeast of La Posta, still in San Diego County, is the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) facility at Warner Springs where SEALs try to survive in the mountains but are inevitably captured and brutally interrogated. You might have seen the SERE (Florida) sequence in G.I. Jane where Viggo Mortensen beats the shit out of Demi Moore. SERE training has been invoked in the defense of waterboarding and torture, since our commandos and pilots themselves undergo what the Spanish Inquisition used to call “The Question.”
Live here for a while (I grew up in the San Diego backcountry in the ’50s and early ’60s) and you will inevitably have eerie, unexpected encounters with the brave new world that a trillion dollars of recent military expenditures is summoning into being. On hot days I like to run at the harbor with a sea breeze in my face. Frequently, in the mornings, there are dolphins doing Sea World–like stunts in the water; after an encore, they hop aboard the flat back of a Navy fast-boat which roars back to the “marine-mammal weapons facility”—or whatever it is actually called—at Ballast Point. The dolphins, of course, are the advanced descendants of pioneering ancestors domesticated and weaponized in the ’70s. Together with some killer whales and a few sea lions, they are now a routine part of the naval arsenal and were used to penetrate Sadaam’s harbor defenses during both Iraq wars. They are also rumored (most recently by the London Independent) to be efficient underwater assassins with a gunlike device attached to their friendly faces.
The military also operates its own versions of Disneyland. San Clemente Island, just over the horizon, west of the Encinitas surf shops and pickup bars, is one of the Pentagon’s most valuable assets. It’s about 25 miles long and has been bombarded, strafed, and invaded almost daily since the early Second World War. Recently they opened a 21-million-dollar American embassy on San Clemente: smaller than Madonna’s house, but still useful for practice by Marines and SEALs.
More well known perhaps are the stage-set versions of Fallujah and Sadr City. These “urban warfare simulators” include “Yodaville” at the Yuma Marine Corps Air Station just across the Arizona border, and the MGM-quality complexes at 29 Palms and Fort Irwin in the Mojave Desert, where Arab immigrants impersonate unruly natives and give young Marines and soldiers an extra jolt of Baudrillardian hyper-reality.
Pic: "Welcome Space Brothers": Mike Davis goes all BLDGBLOG on the Model Unarian City
In the Parking Lot of San Diego Christian College
MD This is the local megachurch and Christian college: probably the only curriculum in the world where you can pursue a double major in aviation and creation studies. The spiritual and earthly architect is Tim LaHaye, one of the authors of the Left Behind series, who now lives in L.A., but was the pastor here when I was in high school. The campus used to be a convent and Catholic girls’ school.
Presumably the Rapture will begin at this very spot: North Greenfield Drive in El Cajon. The real estate agents, used car dealers and trophy wives will be beamed up to paradise in a flight path ordained by their fierce Republican God while the white trash, the Chaldean Catholics, the Chicanos, and all of us pagans are left to burn. This is why I truly regard the Unarians—those pleasant reincarnations of Joan of Arc and Rudolph Valentino—as tantamount to the Age of Reason (or at least pleasant tolerance) in medieval El Cajon.
LR It looks like they give you a good parking space if it’s your first time.
MD If we don’t leave, they will come out and shanghai us for a sermon. Honestly, if I was a more adventurous student of paranormal popular culture, I’d attend some of these megachurches. But neither my wife nor I are good spies. We blurt out the goods at the first opportunity. We were once at the Alamo and one of the tour guides, a daughter of the Texas revolution, came up to us and said, “Welcome to the birthplace of Texas independence. Do you all have any personal connection?” And my wife says, “Oh, I do. My great-great-grandfather, General Juan Amador, helped execute the survivors.” I thought we’d have to get an ambulance for this poor lady.
Mike Davis, by Lucy Raven, Bomb, Issue 104, Summer 2008
The Essential Mike Davis:
City of Quartz (1990), the original neo-Marxist dissection of Los Angeles as the quintessential postmodern city.
Ecology of Fear (2000), a study of Los Angeles as the setting of disaster movies real and imagined.
Planet of Slums (2006), a deep exploration of the mass-produced improvised interstitial cities of the world.
The latest, Buda's Wagon (2007), tracing the history of the car bomb from its first known use, when (who knew?), on a September day in 1920, an angry Italian anarchist named Mario Buda exploded a horse-drawn wagon filled with dynamite and iron scrap near Wall Street, killing 40 people.
Also at Bomb: excerpts from Rachel Kushner's brilliant debut novel, Telex from Cuba
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