Hokkaido diary: Tokyo to Sapporo

A quick aside before we begin: this is the Sententious Vaunter's 600th post. A big thank-you to all you lovely followers who've hung with me for even half that time.

2/3: 

• woke up at 4:30 a.m.; back hurts
• got some H2O
• packed up and left at 5:30
• walked a few blocks to Tokyo Station, mumbling to myself
• found out I can't exchange my voucher for a Rail Pass until 7:30
• went to McDonald's and ate a breakfast sandwich with coffee and watched the light creep into the sky
• allergies are giving me the business this morning—must be the capsule bedding
• Not content to sit in Mickey D's for 90 minutes, I stashed my stuff in a station locker. My rabbit fur hat, strapped to my backpack, was shedding all over it like a living animal
• I stuck my hands in my pockets and walked south to Ginza. The city came awake as I had—slowly, groggily, gray and uncertain. I tried to capture the freshness of the morning, but couldn't. A slimy haze, like last night's hangover, lay over all. I reveled in the cool and calmness, deliberately going against the grain by walking slow and looking happy—the opposite, as Theroux wrote, of most Tokyoites, hurried and worried. This is where I should stick some platitude about "the city was all mine in the predawn light" but that'd just be doggerel. I bought some sandwiches, mikan (tangerines) and water and fruit juices (plus my trusty traveler's fifth of Suntory whisky) at Lawson Station and got my JR Pass. Then I cracked my stuff out of my locker and threaded my way through the labyrinthine passages (flashing my pass at every guard at every turnstile) to the Tohoku platform 22 and the 8:20 Hayabusa to Shin-Aomori:
                 
                       8:20 - 11:19                Tokyo - Shin-Aomori
                        (179 min.)                   (Hayabusa Shinkansen)
                        15 min. transfer
  
                       11:34 - 1:44                Shin-Aomori - Hakodate
                        (130 min)                  (Super Hakucho)
                        29 min. transfer
  
                       2:13 - 6:14                  Hakodate - Sapporo
                       (241 min.)                   (Hokuto)
  

8:00 a.m. So, Steely Dan says you can't buy a thrill, eh? Try pulling out of Tokyo Station on a bullet train. Nothing else like it.

Hung my fur hat on a hook and used it for a pouch to hold things in (finally managed to put on some deodorant, too)

• Everyone else eating their breakfasts—bread or bento (boxed, compartmentalized meals)
• I ate one of my sandwiches (supposedly a BLT, bu really a BLEPT—bacon, lettuce, egg, pickle and tomato—and tried some perfectly awful vegetable fruit juice
• 8:35 a.m. Tokyo still had that slimy film on it that I'd noticed earlier
• 8:45 a.m. Brief stop at Omiya; sure is nice having 3 seats to myself.
• 9:45 a.m. Napped for an hour and woke up to Sendai
• 9:52 a.m. Stop at Sendai
• 10:08 a.m. Passed acres of farmland mysteriously steaming—at first I thought, panicked, of Fukushima and insidious, invisible radiation—then I saw the men burning brush and weeds, scouring the fields clean well ahead of planting season
• 10:15 a.m. Popped out of a tunnel and there was snow on the ground. Always happens like that on bullet trains. Rivers still running like iron bands across the white landscape
• 10:27 a.m. Sky beginning to clear
• Bluish mountains dusted with white rearing their heads in the distance; stopping soon at Morioka
• 11:00 a.m. Flatter now. No snow, just slush, tired-looking rail yards, clusters of houses and brown fields. Too many damn tunnels to see much. Read the Sapporo and Wakkanai chapters of Theroux's book.
• 11:06 a.m. Snowy again, from what I can see. Next stop is Shin-Aomori, the end of the line for the Shinkansen.
  
  Writers are snobs. We're just snobby about different stuff. Theroux is snobby about airplanes, manga, cellphones, computers, and people who walk and eat at the same time. I'm snobby about movies (at best a liberal brainwashing, at worst a cheap shell game, intended to bully, browbeat, shock, desensitize and amuse the populace into acquiescence) and music (hip-hop, created to make both the performer and the listeners think they're cool)
• 11:15 a.m. Will these tunnels never end? Sky's getting grayer. Shin-Aomori should be just minutes away.
• 11:30 a.m. Well, perfect. I suppose I should have expected this. Made a successful transfer to the Super-Hakucho 15 only to find the platform crowded with fatuous-looking foreigners—Americans in a tour group, all wearing name-brand coats and hefting fancy luggage and backpacks with names like "Arcteryx." Here for the snow festival, like me, and the ski slopes too, most of them. When did the outdoors become a penis-measuring contest? I suppose it has always been since the days of rich dentists and newspaper editors going on safari. At least brand names weren't so abundant and intrusive back then. God, there's nothing I hate worse than seeing knock-kneed, buck-toothed jackanapes with bulging eyes and protuberant Adam's apples taking pictures of an oncoming train with a smartphone. Ugh. I'm glad I'm only hear [sic] for the first day of the festival.
  
  Wow, speaking of snobby...
• 11:37 a.m. On the move, heading for Aomori proper. Lots of snow, heaped against buildings and on rooftops in spongy, sagging layers like week-old frosting on an angel food cake. 
• 11:52 a.m. For reasons which I would understand if I spoke Japanese, the train sat for an interminable age at Aomori, then started back the way it came—toward Shin-Aomori. Maybe we need to go back and switch tracks or something, or perhaps Aomori proper was just a branch stop. Ate another of my sandwiches. I have some tangerines, one apple juice and a full bottle of whiskey left. Morale is high. 
• 11:58 a.m. Yeah, we're on a different track now, passing white snow-clad fields with wisps of brown grass sticking up and crossing viscous gray-green streams. 
• I have an interesting map in front of me on the underside of my folding tray. It's a cross-section of the Seikan Tunnel under Tsugaru Strait, which this train will take to reach Hakodate on Hokkaido. According to the map, the tunnel curves at an obtuse angle beneath 140 m of water and 100 m of seabed, for a total length of 53.85 km, 23.3 of which is water (the rest seems impassibly mountainous). It will take us 24 minutes to traverse it. 
• We're just sitting again, this time in the middle of nowhere .I hope I don't miss my connection at Hakodate. I'm getting into Sapporo late enough tonight as it is. 
• 12:19 p.m. Rolling into Kanita, and BAM—there's the ocean off to the right—rolling, windblown, reflecting the gray sky. Snowy mountains across the water—my first glimpse of Hokkaido perhaps?
• 12:56 p.m. Nodding off and drowsing in my sleep. We've been in the tunnel for ages. The map shows some sort of station—Tappi, it's called—1/3 of the way along, just before water. We must have shot right by it. 
• 1:02 p.m. And we're out—still overcast but the snow is blinding after all that darkness. We must be on Hokkaido by now. Deep snow everywhere, piled high by doorways, just as Theroux described
• 1:09 p.m. Brief stop at Kikonai. Next stop, Hakodate. Much colder now. All the snow makes the plows and cottages look like cupcakes. Clumps of wet snow nest in the dead branches of skeletal trees like weird fruit.

2:05 p.m. Easiest transfer ever. The blocky, angular Hokuto 91 was directly across from us, engines rumbling. I bought some more snacks (plus beer) and now we're just waiting around 'til the darn thing leaves at 2:13 p.m. for the four-hour drive to Sapporo. I've got my Nook, my iPod and everything else I need for the journey. All the chuckleheads who got on at Aomori are in my car this time. Bummer. I don't have a window seat, but at least my seatmate (the first since leaving Tokyo) is a shy, retiring Japanese girl, maybe a university student. Okay, beer time. And snacks. I bought Yebisu Malt, some nuts in a small plastic bottle, more water and onigiri—a rice ball wrapped in seaweed and filled with salty tuna. The Koreans would surely think it Gimbap.

2:31 p.m. Somewhat distracted by my book, The Terror by Dan Simmons—getting good only 14 pages in—but must remember to look out the window. Real scenic out here, plains and woods and lofty mountains and the distant gray sea. Can't write too much, though. This contraption is the rockiest, shakiest, bounciest ride yet—worse than the Super Express with its wheezy, whistling brakes, worse than rattling, banging Amtrak. It's like being in a truck on a dirt road, and going through tunnels is even worse.

• 2:38 p.m. Brief stop at Onumakoen—foresty and drenched in thick snow, layered and crusty and flaky like pastry crust. 
• 2:57 p.m. Brief stop at Mori; sea and fog-strewn mountains to the right. This damned car is roasting hot—Why???
• 3:21 p.m. Brief stop at Yakumo
• 3:43 p.m. Brief stop at Oshamambe; young foreign couple got off here. The man had a Japanese sword stuck through the straps of his pack
• 3:47 p.m. Still following the sea around the arm of a great bay. Getting ridiculously snowy. Looks to be knee-deep in most places, and the mountaintops are simply caked with it. Sky and sea are leaden—a cheerless sight. How did the Ainu survive here?
• 4:11 p.m. Brief stop at Toya; Reading Simmons's book really makes you fearful of those cold northern wastes where ice and wind drive men mad and unknown terrors lurk.
• 4:24 p.m. Brief stop at Datemombetsu. Charming little station with a covered platform and a noodle shop.
• 4:44 p.m. Brief stop at Higashi-Muroran—rather big place compared to the others
• 4:53 p.m. Getting dark. Looks dang cold out there. Hard to believe I woke up in Tokyo this morning and it was 45 degrees. This ol' heap keeps wobbling and jerking back and forth and side-to-side. Wheels slipping on snow? Unsteady hand at the wheel? I don't know much about diesel trains but I'd swear this thing has a manual transmission. 
• 4:58 p.m. Brief stop at Noboribetsu. It's not just cold and wintery out there anymore—it's frozen. In the fading purple light I can see slush frozen into jagged ridges on the roads and icicles dangling from the eaves of the houses, which look hunched over against the cold. It's colder in the car, too—have they turned the heaters off, or is it just that nippy out?
• 5:40 p.m. Totally missed the last station. Coming up on Chitose now. I've read 160 pages of this book without pause. 
• 7:18 p.m. FINALLY in my hotel room (as you can likely tell from my neater script). We were delayed 30 minutes getting into Sapporo due to another train having mechanical problems ahead. After a lot of starts and stops, we finally squoze by and sneaked into town like a teenager who's stayed out too late. 

I KNEW those chucklehead foreigners were trouble—Americans and Australians both. I'm beginning to see why my mother and my fiancée both claim to hate people in general, and why Paul Theroux wrote that meeting another traveler is his (and every traveler's) greatest fear. What I should I see [sic] when I get off the train than this same stupid-looking bunch of people forming a gabby, impenetrable knot right at the top of the platform staircase. Fed up (and a bit travel-fatigued, I'll admit) I shoved right through them, gleefully relishing their bemused stares. Halfway to my hotel, however, I had a horrible thought. I remembered that, two months ago, I had by some miracle snagged the last vacant room at the Sapporo Clark. Upon rounding a corner and looking in through the lobby windows, my worst fears were confirmed: that same knot of gabby foreigners had beaten me to the punch. They were all standing in the lobby, yapping as they checked in. I kicked the two-foot-deep snowbank next to me and waited around for 15 minutes until they cleared out.

Now I'm in my room, cramped and lonely and with an iron-hard East Asian mattress. But THERE IS A BATHTUB. I'm going to go find something delicious and decadent to eat, come back, peel off my grimy clothes and stinking socks, and have the most gorgeous bath ever.

Next time, I won't come here when there's a festival on. 

30 Days to a Better Man, Day 24: play!

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, right? Especially if Jack's a writer.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull b--

I should probably stop before you get freaked out.

Anyway, today's challenge is to play. Thirty minutes of pure, unadulterated fun time. Yes, I know that's not really specific. But that's the point. There are many different types of "play." You can do anything you want, as long as it isn't video games. I really like what the AoM article says. "Keep in mind that some of the best play involves novelty, curiosity, and most of all, exploration, whether of the limits of your body, new physical locations, or the corners of your mind." You should stretch a point and do something creative. Build a model, go bouldering, shoot pool, ride your bike, challenge your buddies to a pick-up game of basketball, bust out that jigsaw puzzle, go exploring, whatevs. You just have to make sure that you're doing it for no other reason than fun. The point of the activity is the activity itself. It's time to let go of all those manly responsibilities and have some fun. 

I kind of wish I'd done this challenge in summer. It's hard to get into the mood to play when it's cloudy, slushy, and drippy outside. I have a quick errand to run at Sejong University and then I'm a free man after lunch. I have this whole wide city to play in and I can't decide what to do. I really want to do something outside this jail cell of an apartment, I know that much. I had originally planned to hop a train down to Suwon and see Hwaseong Fortress, but it'd look so dreary in this weather.

Okay.

I have an idea.

I'll pick a section of Seoul I haven't properly explored yet and go explore it. Yeouido Island might be a likely place to start. It's a big island that sticks out from the southern shore of the Han River. "Island" is a liberal term; only a tiny, muddy, meter-wide strip of water separates it from the rest of the peninsula. I've been there a few times before; I really love the park this time of year, and the 63 Building is pricey but has one of the best views of Seoul. I've never taken the time to stroll around and see anything else, though, particularly the National Assembly. I won't go in for the guided tour (you must make reservations three days in advance), but I can at least see the façade, the visitor's center and the extensive lawns out front. It's been a while since I went exploring for exploring's sake. I'll find myself a little mom-and-pop shop afterward and snack on gimbap, ramyeon or bibimbap, and then sit in a coffee shop with a view of the river and read Paul Theroux's Ghost Train to the Eastern Star. Sounds like a nice play-day.

Play along for Day 25.

an escalating situation

I've never written much about the Democratic People's Republic of Korea on this blog. This is the first time I've ever tagged a post with "North Korea," in fact. I'm reading Barbara Demick's book Nothing to Envy, which follows the lives of six North Korean citizens through the famine of the 1990s; I was probably going to scribble a bit about that at some point. But now that the rhetoric and posturing and threats are escalating, I feel like I should tell you what's on my mind. Just in case I get blown away in the next 48 hours.

As you may have heard, things are getting out of hand over here. The situation here is tenser than I've ever seen in my 26 months of living in South Korea. Kim Jong-un has torn up the armistice, effectively putting the Koreas back into a state of open warfare; disconnected the hotlines between the two nations; mobilized his military and beefed up artillery and infantry forces along the border; refused entry to South Korean workers at the jointly-run industrial complex inside the DMZ; and leveled a constant stream of invectives and hostilities against South Korea, the U.S.A. and their allies.

In its latest move, Pyongyang has gone so far as to threaten a nuclear strike against the United States. Stating that its military has been cleared to use "smaller, lighter, and more diversified" nuclear weapons, the rogue nation declared that war could break out "today or tomorrow."

Although Al Jazeera reports that Korea has threatened the U.S. specifically, by proxy those threats refer to South Korea as well. Expert analysts believe that, despite all the bluster, the D.P.R.K. does not have the capability to deliver a missile to an American territory in the Pacific, be it Guam or Hawaii. (The U.S. recently announced its intention to place a missile defense system on Guam, which might be what's got Pyongyang's panties in a twist.)

If that's true, then the only places that North Korea can hit are South Korea or Japan. Japan would be an unwise choice, as it's a key U.S. ally and bombing it would bring on the wrath of the sleeping giant. South Korea is no less an important friend of the United States, but as we've seen with the Cheonan disaster and the Yeonpyeong Island incident, South Korea's not shy about poking its neighbor with a big stick. The attack that North Korea has threatened may come "today or tomorrow" might be leveled at Seoul or somewhere close by.

I don't know about you, but this has got me rather worried. I'm not one to panic easily, but things are different now than they were when I lived in Korea before. This time I'm in Seoul, just in case you missed my last six posts. I'm at ground zero, so to speak. The front lines. I've read that an estimated one million missiles will fall upon this city if war ever breaks out. And it's not just me anymore, either: Miss H is here, and our black cat Charlie. Whatever befalls me befalls them as well, good or ill. That would wrack anybody's nerves. Mine are fraying a smidgen.

On the ground, the situation is calm. Everyone here is going about their lives as usual. Blah, blah, blah, we've seen it all before. And I have to admit, I'm pretty blasé about North Korea now, having lived on the peninsula for almost two and a half years without incident.

So why am I so worried? Well, a couple of reasons. First of all, North Korea usually doesn't close the jointly-run Gaeseong Industrial Region. It's a source of hard currency for the regime and closing it hampers its floundering economy. Even when Seoul and Pyongyang are trading rhetorical blows, the complex stays open. The fact that it's closed to South Koreans now is...disturbing, to say the least.

Second, while I've seen heated exchanges between the two nations before, this most recent one is quite a bit more vitriolic than usual. The barrage of threats from the North has lasted longer and been more vehement than any I've previously witnessed (well, since the death of Kim Jong-il, anyway).

And that brings me to my final point: there's been a recent regime change. Kim Jong-un is running the country now, and he may feel that he's got something to prove. His grandfather and his dad kept the United Nations and the U.S. on their toes for 60 years; now it's Kim the Third's turn. He may have a chip on his shoulder. Perhaps he's looking for ways to make his mark, and has decided that a smoking crater in the center of downtown Seoul is just the way to do it. He may even be foolish or naïve enough to assume that he'll get away with it.

So here I am—with my loved ones—at the epicenter of six decades of stewing resentment and barely-controlled aggression.

What's new with you lately?

if I had $300,000,000

I don't like television. As a general rule, I find it flabby, unwholesome, dissatisfying, crude, and pointless.

So when I tell you that my favorite television show is Firefly, you should understand that the show itself is none of those things. It is, in fact, pure awesomeness incarnate.

Tragically, it was canceled after a measly 14 episodes had been filmed, due to Executive Meddling. More's the pity.

In an interview, Firefly's male lead Nathan Fillion stated that, if he had $300 million on hand, he would buy the rights to the show, and probably continue it, free of interference from the powers-that-be.

That got me thinking. What would I do if I had $300 million?

I'll tell you what I'd do. I'd start up my own movie studio.

On-Target Productions, I'd call it. Or maybe Faithful Studios. Something to convey my sententious but entirely truthful belief that Hollywood is incapable of producing a piece of cinema which is in any way faithful to the source material, and that my studio, by virtue of its firm grounding in literary value (and complete disregard for monetary gain), is.

Anyway, the name isn't important. What's important is that I'd outfit this studio with the best equipment my limited budget could buy, hire the most hardworking personnel I could find, write a bunch of screenplays (the way I like 'em), and make some movies that are entirely accurate and complete interpretations of the media upon which they're based.

I mean that quite literally. Entirely accurate and complete. No chopping or dissecting or mulching being done here; if I mean to make a movie out of a book, I'm using the whole goddamn book: every scene, every line of dialogue, every sentence if needs be. There'll be no "lost characters" like Tom Bombadil from The Lord of the Rings or Peeves the Poltergeist from Harry Potter. And there'll be none of this cutting-out-minor-scenes-because-they-don't-advance-the-action-fast-enough-and-we-can-totally-skip-those-scenes-anyway-because-all-they-do-is-reveal-minor-nuances-of-character-that-we-can-gloss-over-in-the-third-act malarkey. These are going to be faithful interpretations, like I said. That means every little scene, no matter how insignificant a two-bit brain-dead Hollywood screenwriter might consider it, will be reproduced in exact facsimile. No exceptions.

Having my own studio (and not giving a fig whether my productions are marketable, or even if they will be marketed) will give me room to breathe. I don't have to worry about length, or mass appeal, or tone, or censorship, or any of that other crap that the Gilded Mulcher has to worry about in order to sell movie tickets. I can reproduce these great source works as I see fit, with complete creative control, and revel in the realness and truthfulness of the results. I can bring my imagination to life for myself and a few other acolytes to enjoy. Everyone else can go spit.

I'm not saying these films will be unwatchably violent, sexy, or disgusting. There's practically no sex in any of the works I have in mind to adapt. And the violence won't be worse than anything you'd see in a typical action flick. As for the darker, scarier stories...well, it all depends on what you think might blast your soul from your body with cosmic horror.

                                                                                         by Pete Amachree

And mind you, I won't object if a few independent-minded cinemas agree to pick up my works and release them at a few small drive-ins and dollar theaters. Those are the kind of folks I'd want watching my films anyway, not the bigwigs from Hollywood and Cannes.

But that's beside the point! Aren't you curious to know which books and stories I will be adapting for the screen? 

I thought you'd be. I have some very specific ideas on that score. They include, but are not limited to...

• Several tales from Robert E. Howard's Conan the Cimmerian mythos. If you haven't read any of Howard's original Conan tales, it's time you started. Howard's barbarian makes Arnold Schwarzenegger look like a pantywaist choirboy. The stories are gritty, bloody, sweaty, and hard-boiled, bursting with darkness, danger, hideous evil, swashbuckling adventure and testosterone. Some of the stories I have in mind are Beyond the Black River, The Tower of the Elephant, Iron Shadows on the Moon, and Red Nails...as well as a weird Western tale, unrelated to Conan, The Horror from the Mound.
• Selected works of H.P. Lovecraft, including At the Mountains of Madness, The Thing on the Doorstep, The Shunned House, The Haunter of the Dark, The Shadow Out of Time, The Whisperer in Darkness, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and The Dunwich Horror. It'll be interesting to see if Lovecraft's works translate well onto the screen. A lot of the horror and suspense in his stories is conveyed through description and inarticulate mentality, not through dialogue or action. Many of the horrific implications and disgusting monsters are best left to the realms of the imagination, too, rather than put up on a screen in CG and pixels. Still, I'd be willing to give it a shot.
• Most of H.G. Wells's full-length works, including The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, and The Island of Dr. Moreau. Most have been made into films already, but none of them have been done correctly. That's not my opinion, that's fact. I'll treat 'em right if no one else will.
• Many of Jules Verne's classic tales, like Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, and Around the World in Eighty Days. Can you imagine what giant squids, raft-rides through lava tubes, and thrilling heroics on speeding steam trains would look like on a humongous theater screen? It gives me the chills!
• Dozens of science fiction novels and short stories by writers such as Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, A.E. van Vogt, Arthur C. Clarke, C.M. Kornbluth, L. Sprague de Camp, Lester del Rey, and Fritz Leiber. Here are a few I've got in mind.
• The Wendigo by Algernon Blackwood
• The Novel of the Black Seal by Arthur Machen
• The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov
• Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein (a respectful interpretation); also The Roads Must Roll and Universe
• The Empire of the Atom, The Wizard of Linn, The Weapon Shops of Isher, and Black Destroyer by A.E. van Vogt
• The Hammer of God by Arthur C. Clarke
• The Big Front Yard by Clifford D. Simak
• Baby Is Three by Theodore Sturgeon

• A live-action film adaptation of the superb and underrated Hanna-Barbera cartoon Thundarr the Barbarian. A fur-clad warrior with a magic sword wanders the post-apocalyptic Earth in the year 3999, after a rogue planet cast human civilization in ruin. In his ongoing quest to save the scrawny, ragged survivors from evil wizards, mutants and strange monsters (many of which are holdovers from the 20th century), Thundarr is aided by the beautiful Princess Ariel, a sorceress, and a huge, furry Mok named Ookla. I'm thinking some big-budget disaster scenes and a lot of Scenery Gorn. 
• Some of the video and computer games I've played have definite potential, such as Crimson Skies. Maybe if I'm in a really fun-loving and goofy mood I'll do Serious Sam.
• Yes, I know I've railed against remakes on this here blog. But I can't help it. I'd redo a few of the old stop-motion monster flicks, not because I think CG would make them better (certainly not; Ray Harryhausen has no equal and never will), but simply because I'm curious to see what they'd look like with a technological makeover. Just curious, is all. I can't help but wonder what a reboot of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, The Valley of Gwangi, Them!, Jason and the Argonauts, and The Golden Voyage of Sinbad would be like. Specifically, the monsters. You know how much I like monsters.  

And that's it. I think it'd be a lot of fun. I've always wanted to try my hand at screenwriting. And I'll bet I could hire an assistant until I got good at it. Then I'd just go to town. My studio would crank out these films, and they'd go for limited theatrical release or direct-to-DVD, and whoever was interested in real, faithful, true adaptations of good books and cartoons and movies could buy 'em and watch 'em. That's all I want. That's what I'd do with $300,000,000. Maybe a few bucks to charity here and there, but for the most part I'd launch my vendetta against  Hollywood and revel in unmitigated artistic license.

What would you do with $300,000,000? Buy a monkey?

 

the silver key

or, the long road to literary enlightenment

I hope you'll have the patience—or tenacity—to stick with me on this one. This is a landmark post. Seminal, you might call it. Yeah, definitely seminal. It marks a turning point in the career of that damn novel sitting under my bed, dusty and neglected.

Sometimes it pays to reread things. Be it a news feature, an essay, or a work of literature, there's usually some information to be gleaned from it the second time around...and only on the second time around. I knew this to be true with humor pieces (like Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker series) and epic novels, but just a few minutes ago, I received a surprising piece of inspiration from an unexpected piece of material. It's funny how the passage of time and the garnering of experience can alter one's perspective.

Maybe this lays a morbid cast over my efforts as a writer, but the source of this evening's epiphany was none other than the master of cosmic horror himself, H.P. Lovecraft.

I have a tradition. I instituted it this autumn. When the weather turns cold, grey, wet, and otherwise inclement, I take out my H.P. Lovecraft collection and reread it. It's a modest collection, but it includes almost all of his better-known short stories and a modest number of undiscovered gems. It consists of two books: the novel-length At the Mountains of Madness, which has a few brief stories tacked on at the end, and a compendium, The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre.

I didn't really believe that I'd find anything truly instructive in them. Like I've said before, I read for pleasure and education. There's always something to be learned from any book. Every author's style is either a lesson or a warning. I had been warned against Lovecraft's writing by Stephen King, who, by his own admission, adores Lovecraft's talent for horror but loathes his tin ear for dialogue and adjective-soaked prose. Both King and I are ardent fans of Lovecraft and hold the man in high esteem, but I can see King's point. So I keep the editing goggles on whenever I read Lovecraft, to protect my own writing from negative subliminal influences.

So there I was, perusing Lovecraft's best works. I was flipping through the pages, vaguely wondering what to read next. I had reviewed "The Dunwich Horror" and "The Thing on the Doorstep," had devoured the very brief "In the Vault," "Pickman's Model," and "The Rats in the Walls," and was making inroads on "The Whisperer in Darkness." It was a toss-up whether to proceed onto "The Haunter of the Dark" or "The Colour Out of Space," the latter being lengthier but of considerable quality.

Then something caught my eye: "The Silver Key." I have a photographic memory, and a title will usually remind me of the finer details of plot and character. "The Silver Key," however, evaded the grasp of my recollection. Curious, I began to read.

The following passages hit me like a thunderbolt.

     He had read much of things as they are, and talked with too many people. Well-meaning philosophers had taught him to look into the logical relations of things, and analyse the processes which shaped his thoughts and fancies. Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value one above the other. Custom had dinned into his ears a superstitious reverence for that which tangibly and physically exists, and had made him secretly ashamed to dwell in visions. Wise men told him his simple fancies were inane and childish, and even more absurd because their actors persist in fancying them full of meaning and purpose as the blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness.
     They had chained him down to things that are, and had then explained the workings of those things till mystery had gone out of the world. When he complained, and longed to escape into twilight realms where magic moulded all the little vivid fragments and prized associations of his mind into vistas of breathless expectancy and unquenchable delight, they turned him instead toward the newfound prodigies of science, bidding him find wonder in the atom's vortex and the mystery in the sky's dimensions. And when he had failed to find these boons in things whose laws are known and measurable, they told him he lacked imagination, and was immature because he preferred dream-illusions to the illusions of our physical creations.
     ...
     With his dreams fading under the ridicule of the age he could not believe in anything, but the love of harmony kept him close to the ways of his race and station. He walked impassive through the cities of men, and sighed because no vista seemed fully real; because every flash of yellow sunlight on tall roofs and every glimpse of balustraded plazas in the first lamps of evening served only to remind him of dreams he had once known, and to make him homesick for ethereal lands he no longer knew how to find.
     ...
     Then he began once more the writing of books, which he had left off when dreams first failed him. But here, too, was there no satisfaction or fulfillment; for the touch of earth was upon his mind, and he could not think of lovely things as he had done of yore. Ironic humor dragged down all the twilight minarets he reared, and the earthy fear of improbability blasted all the delicate and amazing flowers of his faery gardens. The convention of assumed pity spilt mawkishness on his characters, while the myth of an important reality and significant human events and emotions debased all his high fantasy into thin-veiled allegory and cheap social satire. His new novels were successful as his old ones had never been; and because he knew how empty they must be to please an empty herd, he burned them and ceased his writing. They were very graceful novels, in which he urbanely laughed at the dreams he lightly sketched; but he saw that their sophistication had sapped all their life away.

Wow.

This is heavy stuff.

And with it came a revelation, a breakthrough, a foe-tossing flood of self-discovery.

I was stricken on two fundamental levels: first, I recognized that I had been laboring to construct my own science fiction novel as...well, fluff. Under the noble guise of science fiction, a revered medium which the savants of yesteryear employed to paint pictures of the Universe both unsuspected and overawing, I had constructed something intolerably artificial, mere varnish laid over a poisonous message of social criticism and allegory. Second, it reaffirmed my confidence in my chosen genre. The more I tried to summarize to myself (and explain to others) the premise of my novel, the more I found myself overcome with shame and doubt, a creeping disbelief in the credibility of science fiction as a vehicle for one's literary goals. Sci-fi, I increasingly allowed myself to believe, was kid stuff: childish and immature, not as worthwhile or credible as "realistic" novels.

Lovecraft saved me from that self-destructive train of thought. In one stroke, he made me realize the needlessness and puerility of embedding a sociopolitical message in the flesh of my fiction (indeed, why should it not stand on its own?) and simultaneously assured me of its worth. He reminded me of the marvels of science fiction and fantasy, the wonders which the mind can create, the boundless adventure that the wizard author may manifest on the printed page for all the world's dreamers, poets, thinkers and star-gazers to enjoy.

So here's where the seminal part of this blog post comes in. I'm instituting a major (and I mean major) overhaul of my novel manuscript, effective immediately. I haven't touched the thing in months, years. Perhaps I've been overcome with reality. Logic and realism have—how does it go?—"dinned into my ears a superstitious reverence for that which tangibly and physically exists." I've been unsure of myself as a writer, but more than that, unsure of myself as a writer of science fiction. Thanks to Lovecraft, I'm no longer afraid to delve into fantasy. Why the heck not? It's fun, dang it. You're supposed to do what you want with your life, aren't you? Hang the critics!

But most important of all, I'm ridding my novel (and all subsequent novels in the series) of all traces of ulterior message. The political significance, the social commentary, the biting satire—out with it. I don't need it. It was becoming too much to handle anyway: constantly scrutinizing my plot devices and characters to ensure they encapsulated the proper symbolism. Fundamentally, the novel is about doing what you want with your life, and having the guts to actually carry it through to the finish. So that's what I'll focus on. To the blazes with all the rest. If my fiction isn't good enough to stand by itself without political messages, social mores, commentary or satire, then it shouldn't be written in the first place. I've been ignoring the advice of Stephen King all along: I should write first, and worry about the thematic elements later. I should be teasing them out during the editing process instead of hammering them in too early. I'll write first, and if a message develops out of the subsequent product, then I'll refine it. But it won't be anvilicious and it sure as hell won't be political. If I was meant to be a political writer, then you'd be reading about Obama and Romney and Palin and Pelosi on the Sententious Vaunter, and not Lovecraft and Heinlein and Asimov. Same thing applies to my novels, starting this minute.

So, now that you've borne witness to the Great Revelation, I'll go one step farther and include you in the Great Work. I am GOING to start rewriting my novel soon. I'll keep you up-to-date on the process. In my long hiatus from novel-writing, and my long steep in the cleansing waters of inspirational science fiction and related literature, I've had a few other minor epiphanies which I feel will thoroughly improve the plot, pacing, and characterization of my novel. I'll take this opportunity to implement those changes. And when I get done...I'll have a real, honest-to-God manuscript, not just a bunch of loose pages bundled together and stuck under the bed with the dust bunnies.

And now, you'll have to excuse me. I'm going to take Lovecraft's silver key and use it to open the gate of dreams. It's been shut far too long, and for too trivial a reason. Stay tuned.

May your epiphany come to you likewise, and bear equally righteous fruit.

recommended reading

There's some serious catching-up in order.

Therefore, I won't tell you about what I'm reading right now. I'm taking a break and just doing some stuff for business and pleasure. I'm busting through a couple of sci-fi anthologies (The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volumes I and IIB), which I hope will help me write better sci-fi, and also are a damn lot of fun. I might even tell you about some of the stories I've read, if you behave yourselves.

In addition to that, I'm slowly plowing through Dr. Robert Bakker's paradigm shifter The Dinosaur Heresies, in which the scruffy, courageous maverick first put forth his controversial theory that dinosaurs were not pea-brained, slow-moving, swamp-dwelling sluggards, but were dynamic, lively, active, agile, bird-like and intelligent. This bombshell challenged hundreds of years of universally accepted scientific thought on the terrible lizards. Bakker's discoveries, though initially criticized, withstood all tests and vitriol. Today, when we think "dinosaurs," we imagine the terrifyingly smart and agile Velociraptors from the film Jurassic Park. We have Bakker to thank for that (even though the paleontological consultant to Spielberg's film was Jack Horner, Bakker's bitter enemy, who believed that T-Rex was a scavenger [?!?!?!?]).

I haven't enlightened you about what I've already read, though, and that's why we're here. I have to review a couple of works I completed after finishing Moby-Dick a few months back.

I didn't waste any time sitting on my laurels after conquering Melville's leviathan. I was over at Miss H's place when I spotted Elie Wiesel's seminal work Night on her bookshelf. I asked to borrow it, and before the day was out, I had finished and returned it. It's a little book, but filled with the scope of human tragedy, suffering, cruelty and horror.

I could speak of how Elie and hundreds of other Romanian Jews were removed from their villages by brutal Hungarian policemen, cudgeled into lines, and marched away from their only home...

The last glimpse Elie had of his mother and sister as they were led into the gates of Auschwitz...

The loss of Elie's faith as he witnessed the hanging of a twelve-year-old boy...

How even the rabbis were reduced to blank, staring, godless husks by the horrors of starvation, torture, and brutality...

The long, cold, desperate flight from one camp to another as Allied armies drew near, and how the Jewish prisoners were forced to run through the snow and the darkness, and any who straggled or fell were shot...

...but that would probably spoil the book for you, so I won't.

Wiesel is on the second row up from the floor, seventh from left.

I'll just say this: more than any other work I've ever reviewed—fiction or nonfiction, printed or televised—Night brought home the horrors of the Holocaust most grimly and truthfully. It's a literal punch to the gut. For once it's no surprise that a particular work won the Nobel Peace Prize.

And now on to more cheerful territory...
Have you ever wondered if maybe the scientists were wrong, and the interior of the world wasn't just a mass of molten rock, but was hollow and cool and airy and possibly filled with prehistoric beasts?

Well, even if you haven't, Edgar Rice Burroughs sure did. And he wrote At the Earth's Core just to show the world what he thought.

There are definite fringe benefits to being friends with a scientist. Make a sponge of your mind and you'll soak up a lot of mental detritus. As an added perk, your scientist chum may even let you give his gizmo the first test ride.

Such is the case with David Innes, the wealthy heir to a mining empire who, attempting to make a good show of his father's business enterprise, invests in the invention of his scientist friend, Abner Perry. The invention is the "iron mole" a sort of segmented steel worm with a huge drill on the front, which Perry insists will increase efficiency one million percent. As the principle investor, Innes is given the privilege of riding shotgun in the device while Abner takes it on the maiden voyage.

Everything goes downhill from there, so to speak.

The giant iron mole burrows into the ground like a...like a...well, like giant iron mole. Alarmed, Professor Perry tries to turn the beast aside and regain the surface; but no such luck. Both men strain at the helm until they're blue in the face, but the mole cannot be turned; it's heading straight down at a tremendous rate. Perry and Innes give themselves up for lost, resigning themselves to falling into the Earth's molten mantle and perishing in the blaze.

...but they don't.

Five hundred miles down the mole suddenly bursts out of the ground again. A fresh, cool breeze streams through the cracks. The Professor has collapsed from heat and exhaustion, but Innes is able to crack open the hatch and look outside.

He sees trees. Hills. A beach. An ocean. And a horizon which curves up instead of down. He can see mountains and oceans in the distance, turned on their ends, as though he was seeing from above.

Gradually, the men figure it out. They're standing on the inside of a huge sphere.

They are inside the Earth.

The Earth, it turns out, is hollow. And what's more, it's inhabited.

Welcome to Pellucidar, the savage land at the Earth's core.

All the better to massage you with, my sweet!

Perry and Innes are soon drawn into a millennia-long conflict between the primitive humans who reside in Pellucidar and the vicious Mahars, telepathic reptilian monsters who keep humans as draft animals...and livestock. Along the way they encounter sabertooth cats, dinosaurs, sea monsters, and all manner of nasties, dwelling in a land of eternal sunlight.

At the Earth's Core was first published serially in 1914, and released in book form in 1922. Since then, it has attained a small cult following, but remains largely obscure, probably due to more well-known stories like Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth.

Nonetheless, it's an astounding tale. The concept is intriguing, if totally bogus. (Hey, that's why they call it science fiction, right?) First off, there's no way there'd be eternal sunlightg at the center of the planet, weird electrical phenomena notwithstanding. Second, gravity's pull would be considerably less at the center of the Earth, but it would still pull you toward the center. You could not "walk about" on the inside curve of a chamber inside the globe unless the planet was spinning a lot faster, like a centrifuge. Third, the air would be so dense 500 miles down that it'd be tantamount to breathing water. Human lungs would collapse.

But I didn't come here to pick the science apart. I came to tell you how awesome the story was. And it was awesome. Burroughs sure knows how to write a gripping fight scene (and there's a boatload of fight scenes). The plot rapidly becomes more complex and convoluted as human traitors, mindless monsters, and a ravishing love interest make their appearance. There are desperate scrapes, close shaves, narrow escapes, rousing victories, moments of unbridled joy and plenty of stark, quivering terror. And at the end, there is a very human feeling.

Everything that makes good, rousing science fiction, in my opinion.

You might have a little trouble getting into it, as Burroughs does have what critics called a "stilted, florid style"...but it's nowhere near as bad as Jules Verne. You'll do fine.

And finally, as an interesting sidenote...

In At the Earth's Core, the Mahars (those evil reptilian beings) employ the thuggish gorilla-esque Sagoths to do their dirty work for them, rounding up slaves and enforcing the rules. At the Earth's Core had an enormous influence on another of my favorite authors, H.P. Lovecraft. In Lovecraft's book At the Mountains of Madness, he introduced the shoggoths, huge, slimy, amorphous blobs, also the servants of a master race. These were inspired in name and function by the Sagoths of Burroughs's story. Shoggoths have proven as influential to other writers as the Sagoths were for Lovecraft: the beastly things have appeared in countless works of fiction, sci-fi and horror over the decades. One of these works, notably, was Robert Bloch's Notebook Found in a Deserted House, which is widely accepted to be one of the cardinal inspirations for the 1999 film The Blair Witch Project.

That concludes this edition of "Six Degrees of (Literary) Separation."

Is he bursting out of the hillside in a mindless rage? Or did he lose his toboggan?

Until next time...

Who Goes There?

...is the title of a marvelous science fiction novella by John W. Campbell, Jr. It was first published in 1938 under Campbell's pseudonym, Don A. Stuart, in Astounding Stories. In 1973, it was voted, quite justly, into The Science Fiction Hall of Fame by the Science Fiction Writers of America.

For once I cast my lot with the majority. Who Goes There? is, without doubt, one of the finest science fiction stories ever written. All the elements are there. Campbell's story has a fantastic plot, a spine-chilling premise, is scientifically sound, and makes a very pertinent point about human nature.

You've probably never heard of it, though.

What you have heard about are the three movie adaptations they made out of it.

The Thing From Another World, in 1951, starring James Arness...

John Carpenter's 1982 remake of that, called simply The Thing...

And now this, supposedly a prequel.

[Ahem]

I'd like to share some thoughts with you about books, movies, and what gets lost in between.

Adaptation decay (blithely defined here) is what you wind up with after a particular work of fiction has progressed from print to movie to video game to novelization and wherever else along the way. Similar to photocopying a photocopy, the process is a piranha swarm of human input and rewrites and creative vision...which inevitably skeletonizes the source material, and results in something that bears little to no resemblance to the original work.

And that is exactly what's going on here, to my unending disgust. Campbell's immortal work is, once again, going to Hollywood's chopping block to be packaged and marketed to the masses.

This is nothing new. The same thing happened to Isaac Asimov's I, Robot; H.G. Well's War of the Worlds and The Time Machine; Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; Bram Stoker's Dracula; Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth; and, to an egregious degree, Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan. (George of the Jungle anyone?)

The reason I'm squawking now is because I can't stand to see yet another of my favorite sci-fi stories debased in this manner.

Who Goes There? is an excellent work, one that stands on its own. A bunch of American scientists holed up in an Antarctic research base stumble across an alien spacecraft buried in the snow. Their picks and mattocks are inadequate for the task, so they decide to blow the ship open with thermite. They don't realize that the alien craft is made mostly of magnesium; it goes up like flash paper. However, encased in the ice nearby is an alien life form. MacReady, the expedition' s meteorologist, surmises that the ship must've crash-landed in Antarctica millions of years ago, when the continent was just beginning to freeze. "The Thing" somehow survived the crash of its ship, stumbled out of the wreckage, and was immediately frozen solid.

Well, it doesn't stay frozen for long. The team chips the creature out of its ice grave and transports it back to their base. It thaws and awakes. The humans discover the alien in the dog kennel, and the huskies viciously attacking it. As they watch, the alien begins to change, assuming the form of a sled dog it had recently devoured. The men quickly kill it. With increasing paranoia, Blair (the biologist) theorizes that the Thing is able to absorb and imitate any organic creature by reshaping its own cellular structure. The Thing can either devour its victims or infect them like a virus. More than that, the monster can somehow telepathically absorb the target's memories and personality as well, rendering its mimicry absolutely airtight. Realizing the implications of this—that not only dogs, but humans themselves can be infected, and that any member of the team may already be an imitation—Blair has a nervous breakdown and is confined to a maintenance shack.

MacReady and the rest of the team have a gay old time trying to figure out who's who...

I won't spoil the ending, but you'll love it.

How Campbell could've written something so perfect, so suspenseful, so thrilling, so disturbing, and so sinister (particularly in 1938, when the scariest guys around were Nosferatu, Frankenstein and the Phantom of the Opera) is beyond me. But he did. And his story remains one of the most pivotal, influential and downright horrifying of the genre.

Freddy Krueger doesn't scare me. Jason Voorhees can't faze me. Face-hugging, chest-bursting aliens aren't that bad. Werewolves, vampires and witches just leave me underwhelmed. The Thing is the only creature that's ever truly scared me.

So how did Hollywood portray my ultimate monster?

They turned him into a plant.

Seriously. The plot of the 1951 movie was that an intelligent form of plant life crashed in the Arctic (not the Antarctic) and started sucking the blood out of the researchers stationed there, like some kind of fungoid mosquito. They finally killed it with an electrical discharge.

Puh-leeze.

The 1982 remake was perhaps the most faithful adaptation, but there were still some glaring discrepancies between book and film. In The Thing, a Norwegian research team found the creature first, and got massacred in the most gruesome way possible. The first our heroic American team hears of it is when a couple of half-mad Norwegians burst into their camp in a helicopter, throwing grenades and shooting assault rifles at an innocent(-looking) sled dog.

Things rapidly go downhill from there. MacReady is a helicopter pilot instead of a meteorologist, but he still plays a major role. The Thing is...quite gruesome. Perhaps even more gruesome than he is in Campbell's original story. In fact, the movie was universally panned for its gruesomeness. But I still liked it enough to get it on DVD.

And now the new film is coming out. Like I said, it's supposedly a prequel. It portrays the battle the Norwegian team has with the original creature, before the Americans find it. Although, for some reason, the Norwegian team has some Americans along with 'em. I guess the movie producers just don't believe that an American audience could root for a bunch of Norwegians in an Antarctic research base fighting an alien monster without Mary Elizabeth Winstead riding along as eye-candy.

This is adaptation decay. There wasn't a single Norwegian in Campbell's novella. Hollywood put a Norwegian camp into the story in 1982. Now, in 2011, they're doing a movie whose setting was lifted from another movie. It's a film based entirely on a preceding film. None of Campbell's original characters (except for the monster itself) made it into this 2011 release. It's a film based on a film based on a novella. A photocopy of a photocopy.

A complete piece of crap, in other words.

The movie industry is notorious for this blasphemy. The producers are past masters. They take a perfectly good story, and instead of adapting it faithfully for the silver screen, they choose to adapt it remuneratively. They mutilate, bowdlerize, varnish, cheapen, and over-simplify (all in the name of "mass-market appeal") until we're left with a shoddy,  unintellectual, action-packed, sensationalist, overblown, mutated excuse for a film, devoid of plot, theme, symbolism, statement, or any redeeming feature whatsoever.

I don't know why Hollywood does this. That green stuff called money is probably the reason. Part of me likes to believe so, anyway. But in the blackest shades of night, in my most horrifying nightmares, the eldritch abomination called the Truth rears its ugly head. The producers and screenwriters in Los Angeles probably think Americans like this tripe. It's likely they believe that most Americans couldn't digest the deep thoughts and intellectual horror of John W. Campbell's Who Goes There?, so they dumbed it all down and repackaged it as a cheap horror film (three times!). Tinseltown has become so accustomed to truncating, abridging, censoring, simplifying and regurgitating the best works of fiction that it's become ingrained on the industry's consciousness that Americans like these dull, trite, recycled hack jobs.

Why do studio executives believe this nonsense? I'm not sure. The truth of the matter should be self-evident: that moviegoers prefer a well-shot, well-acted, thoughtfully scripted, original film with practical special effects instead of a CG-filled gore-fest. But then again, human beings have a long history of believing strange things. They believe that aliens seeded the Earth with life. That dinosaurs coexisted side-by-side with human beings. That Dave Mathews can sing.

In short, I believe that the 2011 adaptation of The Thing is yet another hackneyed, money-grubbing, unfaithful and unnecessary waste of digital film; that it should never have been made, or even conceived; and that all discerning and tasteful movie-goers should boycott it with a vengeance.

That's if there are any discerning and tasteful movie-goers left, anyway.

I solemnly swear that if ever I became a successful sci-fi novelist, I will jealously guard the rights to my works. As long as I live, I will never allow Hollywood to get its vile, shameless, mass-marketing hands on them. Because I know what will happen.

The stories, my stories, characters I created lovingly, plot lines I slaved over, villains I kicked around, concepts I nurtured from birth...they will come out of the Gilded Mulcher looking like this:

Nuh-uh. Not happening. No way.

recommended reading

I have completed A Long Way Gone, discussed more fully in the last installment of recommended reading. It possessed a poignant ending. As I turned the pages, Beah's personal tragedy kept mounting, until it was inconceivable that a mere teenager could take any more hardship. He was eventually forced to flee Sierra Leone, at great personal risk and high cost, after his uncle's family was...well, I won't spoil it. Suffice it to say that A Long Way Gone is a powerful book. It's powerful in a sense which no other book I've read can approach. It is heartrending on perhaps the same level as Night, by Elie Wiesel. It portrays the absolute worst of what human beings can do to one another, and even to themselves. It is both sickening and saddening...yet not without hope. I'm more than half done with The World Turned Upside Down, that splendid science-fiction anthology, and have only two stories left to read in The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre. And make no mistake: the tales are bloodcurdling. I have encountered few writers who make my skin crawl in abject terror. Even Stephen King, whom I admire immensely, merely makes the bile rise to my throat, and has perhaps caused me a few nightmares. H.P. Lovecraft evinces an overwhelming, universal sense of horror that leaves a sensitive reader wide-eyed, pale and sweaty. Though I have been rendered wide-eyed and pale, I have yet to break out in a cold sweat. Then again, I still have two of Lovecraft's most seminal stories to read: The Shadow Over Innsmouth and The Shadow Out of Time. I'm a grown man and Lovecraft's shorter tales like The Haunter of the Dark, The Dunwich Horror and The Thing on the Doorstep made me turn on all the lights and go jumping at shadows. I can only imagine what these last, lengthy stories will do to my fertile imagination. Lovecraft is one of the best writers I've ever read, for one simple reason: he knew what he was doing. He had each story's plot in mind the whole time he was writing it, and he knew where to lead the action to reach the terrifying climax. Along the way, he masterfully built suspense and dropped tantalizingly ominous hints relevant to the insidious denouement. He was also a literate and intelligent writer, whose prose is elegant and erudite, and whose vocabulary makes me run to the dictionary or encyclopedia every two or three pages. Furthermore, his imagination was limitless. He envisioned an inherently unknown, nefarious, multidimensional multiverse filled with monstrous evil. Anyone who solved the mysteries of this universe would go mad with horror. Spawned trillions of years ago, gigantic half-ethereal creatures from the outer dark, who once held sordid sway over the Earth and the galaxy, slumber uneasily in the depths of our oceans or behind our nearest stars, waiting to wake and extend their fibrous grasp once again. Innumerable volumes of profane arcana and obscene ritual, like the Necronomicon and the Pnakotic Manuscripts, passed down through millennia by these evil gods and their inhuman minions, lie forgotten in ancient tombs or dusty towers, holding their sickening alien secrets for some innocent eye. Disgusting, bestial ceremonies and barbarous sacrifices are carried out in forgotten catacombs and dusky swamps, breathing life into these ancient monsters, keeping their potent legends alive. Phalanxes of horrific things lurk in the dark and pounce upon unsuspecting (or willing) humans. Though he may have been a tad racist, H.P. Lovecraft was a talented horror writer who knew his trade and his stock-in-trade. I highly recommend him. As an aside, I'd like to reiterate that the more I read William Zinsser's On Writing Well and reread The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White, the more humbled I become. There are things in the latter that I have unforgivably forgotten and things in the former that I have never suspected. More fool me. I started in yesterday on The Book of Five Rings (as written in Japanese at left). Purportedly, it is a discussion of martial arts, particularly kenjutsu, or swordsmanship. It is written by one of the foremost masters of the art, one of Japan's most famous (or infamous) swordsmen, Miyamoto Musashi. I've read the first two pages and already my mind's been changed about both Musashi himself and Japanese martial arts. From what I understand, Musashi, who died in the seventeenth century, was a renowned swordsman and martial arts instructor. He never lost any of the dozens of duels he fought, even though he fought some of them with a wooden sword. He was supposedly a master of the two-sword style, with both a full-length sword and a short sword (or wakizashi). His legacy is less than flattering. It is rumored that he never shaved, never bathed, never combed his hair, and had a disfiguring skin condition. No matter. Musashi didn't care about any of that. Whereas some are merely practitioners of the martial arts, Musashi was a true martial artist. He practiced both physical and mental control in combat, and strove for perfection in every aspect of his life. That included something as simple as calligraphy (which is why I included the above image of Japanese kanji, instead of, say, an image of the book cover or a painting of Musashi). His legend—and his track record—impressed me so much that I decided to use him as one of the protagonists in my novel. There was a hitch, however. I knew nothing more about the man than what I've told you. Ultimately I decided to buy his book, his magnum opus on swordsmanship that many have touted as a road map to personal success in life. From the first pages Musashi defines martial arts, not as a simplistic mindset such as "being prepared to die," but as a way to serve your master, serve yourself, and establish social standing. That took me completely by surprise. I'd always thought of martial arts as a skill demanded only in war, or perhaps in recreation. Now this scruffy, centuries-dead ronin comes along and tells me it can be used to ascend the social ladder? I can only wonder what else lies in store for me. The volume is divided into five sections: the Earth Scroll, the Water Scroll, the Fire Scroll, the Wind Scroll, and the Emptiness Scroll. Each encapsulates different aspects of Musashi's swordsmanship technique and philosophy, except for the last scroll, which discusses other schools. Furthermore, the book's chapters have positively titillating titles, such as "The Way of the Long Sword," "Stabbing the Face," "A Stand against Many Opponents," "Moving Shadows," "Knocking the Heart Out," and "Being Like a Rock Wall." Oh, goody, he said, rubbing his hands. I'll keep you posted. There remains only tell you that I've placed yet another order to Amazon.com, despite my recent dismissal from my job and my slowly dwindling accounts. This particular order was made possible by a generous birthday gift from my grandparents, I'll have you know. Among other things (like the excellent war movie Battleground and a few more volumes of One Piece), I'm expecting Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and The Memoirs of Wild Bill Hickok, by renowned Western writer Richard Matheson. I'm trying to catch up on the classics with Little Women, and Memoirs can only help me get a better idea of Hickok, the other protagonist in my novel. Though a work of fiction, the book eschews the fanciful, heroic light in which the ne'er-do-well lawman is cast, and focuses instead on the rawness and ignominy of his life, as re-imagined by Matheson. It's told from a first-person perspective, as is The Book of Five Rings. Who knows what kind of insight I'll gain? It can't hurt to read it. Like I always say, I'll read anything if I think I can learn from it. Except perhaps for the Necronomicon, written by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, detailing the hideous secrets of the dark cult of Cthulhu and a great many other things too awful to mention. That might not be healthy at all. It might even frighten me to death.