The Bookshelf

May142013

Amusing Literary Quip of the Day

“Being cranky about a Dan Brown book not being high literature is like yelling at a cupcake for not being a salad.” — John Scalzi

(For the record, I’m not a fan of Dan Brown. I’ve never read any of his stuff, so I have no opinion whatsoever about him, his stories, or his writing abilities. I will say that, from what I know about The Da Vinci Code and its sequels, I don’t think he’d be my particular pint of beer. Nevertheless, I do seem to have a history of defending low-brow entertainment over serious art, whether we’re talking about pulp versus Literature-with-a-capital-L, Hollywood blockbusters compared to indie darlings, or ’80s pop metal against “important” music, so Scalzi’s comment — made in the context of refusing to slam Brown for being immensely successful while not being generally considered a “good” writer — found a sympathetic ear with me. I’ve never understood the disdain that so many people seem to hold for simple escapism. Sometimes you really do just want to hear a story, or have a good time, and what’s wrong with that?)

May122013

My Latest Acquisition

What you see up there at the top of this post is the cover of one of my favorite novels when I was around 11 or 12 years old — middle-school age. While my friends were discovering Tolkien, I was devouring pulpier, frankly trashier stuff: Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom tales, Doc Savage reprints, Alan Dean Foster movie novelizations, and anything relating to Flash Gordon, the space-adventure hero who started in a newspaper comic strip when my grandparents were still children, and who seems destined to undergo periodic revivals every couple of decades. (The latest, a misfire of a TV series, came and went in 2007.)

Massacre in the 22nd Century was the first of a series of six Flash novels that came out in 1980 and ’81. They were written by a guy named David Hagberg, although I never learned that until decades later, after the Internet came along, because his name curiously does not appear anywhere in the books themselves. While I remember them as entertaining reads, their connection to the universe originally conceived by Alex Raymond is tenuous at best. There is no Ming the Merciless in Hagberg’s books, no planet Mongo. And even though the characters at the center of this series are named Flash Gordon, Dale Arden, and Dr. Zarkov, they are significantly “off-model.” I won’t bore you with the details of how Hagberg deviates from the traditional Flash backstory; suffice it to say, I’ve long theorized that these books began as fairly generic space-opera adventures and some editor convinced him to change his protagonists’ names in an attempt to cash in on the notoriously campy Flash Gordon movie that was released around the same time. (Christopher Mills, who runs the incredible Space: 1970 blog, asserts that the Hagberg novels bear some resemblance to a Flash television series that was done in the 1950s, but I’ve never seen that version myself, so I can’t say.)

Even so, I have very fond memories of the first two books in Hagberg’s series (somehow I never got around to reading the others). And one of the things I especially loved about them was their cover art by the master illustrator Boris Vallejo. In general, I’ve always gravitated more toward the work of Frank Frazetta; his style generally has a rougher, wilder edge to it, and his fleshier women push my buttons a bit more than Vallejo’s, which seem to me a bit too smooth and perfect to be believably human. But the covers for the Hagberg books really appealed to me for some reason. I’m not ashamed to admit I spent long evenings during my adolescence closely studying the one above, lusting for Boris’ lovely red-haired take on Dale, and imagining myself as the bare-chested, noble-looking hero standing protectively behind her. It was an ideal I could never meet, of course… but even today, this image evokes so much aspirational yearning in me. It reminds me of who I wanted to be before I discovered who I actually was.

A few months ago, I stumbled across the website of Boris Vellejo and his wife Julie Bell — who is also a commercial illustrator of some note — and I learned that prints of pretty much every cover piece he ever painted are available for purchase… and Boris will even sign them for no extra charge! I’ve been babbling to The Girlfriend about this discovery ever since, certain that I wanted to get something from the site, but vacillating indecisively between the art from Massacre — which Boris incongruously titled “Future Land” — and the cover of the second book in Hagberg’s series, War of the Citadels (officially called “Flash Gordon“), of which I’m also very fond.

Well, I guess she finally grew tired of my dithering, because she took the decision out of my hands and surprised me for our 20th anniversary with this:

She made a good call, from the choice of the print to the red matte (her pick again — I was thinking of a plain white one, myself, but in retrospect, she was right about the red making the colors in the painting pop). I absolutely adore this, and can’t wait to hang it up. Anne may not be Dale Arden, and god knows I’m a long way from anything resembling Flash Gordon… but she awakens many of the same yearnings this painting always has. I’m thankful she’s still standing with me in this strange future land in which we’ve found ourselves…

Feb262013

I Knew Her When, Part II

As I’ve written before, one of the real perks of working where I do is that I so often have the opportunity to meet and befriend smart, creative, interesting, quirky, funny, and extremely cool people… some of whom do very cool and enviable things like writing books that get published by actual, honest-to-god publishers and turn up in actual, honest-to-god bookstores and such, as my friend Diane Olson did last year.

Well, it’s happened again.

Jen Larsen used to be a — how do I put this? — a large woman. She thought, as many people do, that if she could just lose the weight, all her troubles would be over. She’d magically become confident, dynamic, beautiful, successful… that she would finally like herself. And so, like so many other people in a society obsessed with the quick fix, she underwent gastric bypass surgery. And the weight came off. But then Jen found, to her surprise, that her problems were still there… and she was no longer sure who the hell she was. Her memoir of the whole experience, Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head, has just been released. I haven’t read it yet, but I know from my personal experiences with her that she’s witty, funny, self-deprecating, and brutally honest, and I’m certain her book is probably much the same. It promises to be an incredible read. Here’s a nice little animated trailer for it:

That’s Jen herself doing the voiceover, by the way. I’m sure she would deny it, but I think she’s a great reader. Stranger Here has already gotten some good reviews, and Diane Olson and I are taking bets on how long it takes before Jen is invited to meet with Oprah. In the meantime, she’ll be signing books in Salt Lake next week at the King’s English Bookshop; details here.

I highly recommend buying the book from your local bookseller, of course, but you can also get it from Amazon or Barnes and Noble. Jen’s website is here.

(Incidentally, Diane’s book — A Nature Lover’s Almanac: Kinky Bugs, Stealthy Critters, Prosperous Plants & Celestial Wonders — is still available! And still wonderful!)

Aug072012

Public Service Announcement

Just wanted to note that my friend Diane Olson will be signing her book, A Nature Lover’s Almanac: Kinky Bugs, Stealthy Critters, Prosperous Plants & Celestial Wonders, this Saturday from 1 to 3 PM at the fabulous new Natural History Museum of Utah. If you haven’t been to the NHMU yet, you really ought to take this opportunity to drop in. Diane’s book is a great little volume of fascinating factoids that’s well worth adding to your library — FYI, the book’s illustrator, Adele Flail, will be there as well! — and the museum itself is absolutely breathtaking, one of the best public facilities of this type I’ve seen. (I especially like the exhibit on the Great Salt Lake with the floor-to-ceiling window looking out over the valley… and the actual Great Salt Lake in the distance!)

Anyhow, details on the signing are here; the NMHU’s home page is here.

Jul182012

And Now, For No Particular Reason…

…a photograph of Ernest Hemingway that I rather like:

This was taken in 1947 at his home in Cuba, and I just like the whole vibe here. He looks relaxed and healthy and confident, a larger-than-life man at the top of his game.

Incidentally, if you’re into Papa H, a new edition of A Farewell to Arms was published last week containing all 47 alternate endings he tried out and ultimately abandoned, packaged inside the original cover art. Looks like an interesting volume, although to be honest I haven’t read Farewell since high school and don’t recall being terribly moved by it. Perhaps it’s time to revisit it…

Jun272012

I Knew Her When…

Longtime readers (and certainly my Facebook friends and Twitter followers) may have noticed that I sometimes have a tendency to gripe about my job. Occasionally. From time to time. Okay, often. That’s because… well, because it’s what I do. I’m the sort who vents about the things that irritate me, rather than bottling it all up, and lots of things irritate me during the course of your average day. Not to mention what it’s like on not-average days, which seem to come up in my line of employment with distressing frequency, especially during the warmer months, when the livin’ is supposed to be easy — or so we’ve been led to believe — but for some reason always seem to be the most hectic time of the year for me. You know, The Girlfriend and I are currently making our way through the original Twilight Zone, the classic TV series created by Rod Serling that ran from 1959 to ’64 (as opposed to the various revival attempts of more recent years) and I find it grimly amusing that so far in Season One alone, there’ve been two episodes dealing with stressed-out advertising executives who yearn for escape to a simpler, slower-paced, more humane way of life. I don’t know if Serling ever worked in advertising himself, but he definitely understood the environment. I can’t tell you how many days I have when I basically feel just like this:(In case you’re wondering, that animation comes from a really great blog called This Advertising Life, which seeks to convey “the emotions of a working life in advertising as told through gifs.” I don’t know how funny it might be for civilians who don’t work in the industry, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s dead-on-target ROTFL time. Browse through it a little bit and perhaps you’ll begin to understand why I get so frazzled and grumpy.)

Believe it or not, though, I really don’t dislike my job, despite the impression I probably give with all the bitching. I often get insanely frustrated with it, true, but in the big-picture view, there are actually a lot of great things about working where I do, and I know I don’t talk enough about those things. For example, in the almost-seven years I’ve been with this particular agency, I have met an astounding number of smart, creative, interesting, quirky, funny, extremely cool (and frequently very attractive, which is a nice bonus) human beings. I’ve even been fortunate enough to become friends with some of these people, and by “friends” I mean the sort of people who actually welcome you into their homes and introduce you to their children and pets.

One such person is a lovely woman named Diane Olson. Her background is in journalism, but her passion is in the natural world, specifically the things that live in her (and everybody else’s) own backyard. (I’m pretty confident I’m not likely to ever meet anyone who knows more about gardening than Diane.) For 17 years, she combined these aspects of her character to produce a regular column called “Urban Almanac” for Catalyst magazine, Salt Lake’s local alternative monthly. Then, in an completely unexpected bolt from the blue about two years ago, she was approached by a local publishing house about turning that column into a full-length book. It took her much wailing and gnashing of teeth to crank it out while also holding down a demanding agency gig, but somehow she pulled it off, and now, finally, that book is available for everyone reading this to purchase!

A Nature Lover’s Almanac: Kinky Bugs, Stealthy Critters, Prosperous Plants & Celestial Wonders is a nifty little volume of collected science factoids and gardening tips, one for each day of the year, some of which are truly obscure and mind-boggling. For instance, did you know grasshoppers are at their loudest when the air is 95 degrees, and they can’t sing at all below 62? (That’s the entry for August 19th; it’s a small thing, but it fascinates me… I mean, why?) The book is sized like a pocket field guide, with rounded corners so it’ll slide in and out of your pocket easily and a sturdy flat binding, and it’s beautifully illustrated by another Catalyst alum, Adele Flail. If you have any interest at all in nature or in growing things — or even if you just enjoy looking at something fun and breezy over breakfast every morning — I highly recommend it.

Diane told me once it’s been her lifelong dream to write a book and see her name on a shelf at her local library; she’s positively giddy now that it’s happened, and I am very, very happy for her. She’s managed to do what pretty much every copywriter (and certainly this particular proofreader) in the advertising business aspires to do: she’s become a published author. And the least I can do for my friend is congratulate her and give her a plug with whatever modest audience I happen to reach with this forum. If you think you might be interested in A Nature Lover’s Almanac, you can see all the details about it on the publisher’s page here, and you can order it through Amazon.com here.

Oh, one final note: I don’t think Diane will mind if I note that I helped out with the book’s title. The “celestial wonders” part was my suggestion. And yes, I’m pretty proud of that… now what are you waiting around here for? Go buy yourself a copy! (I have two copies myself!)

Jun112012

Great Opening Lines: Lost Horizon

A few entries back, I made a passing reference to James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon, in which survivors of a plane crash find their way to a Tibetan lamasery high in the Himalayas, whose inhabitants don’t appear to age and who live in perfect peace and contentment in their isolation from the outside world. Sadly, this novel doesn’t seem to be very well remembered today, or at least that’s my impression, considering I’ve never met anyone who’s actually read it, and not many more who’ve even heard of it. It’s shocking to me that something could fall so far into obscurity in spite of being a huge bestseller in its time as well as the basis for two movie adaptations (in 1937 and 1973) and the source of an idea that still has currency in the pop-cultural hivemind (i.e., Shangri-La). I’m willing to bet most of the people who saw The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor thought the screenwriters came up with that notion all on their own. Oh, and just as a historical aside, Lost Horizon also has the distinction of being the first book published in the format we now know as the “mass-market paperback”; it was, in fact, Pocket Books #1.

My own memories of this novel go back to early childhood. My mother had a copy of it, which sat for years in a cupboard in my basement playroom (now the fabulous Bennion Archive, a sort of Shangri-La in itself), right alongside a copy of Alive, that infamous nonfiction book about those Uruguayan rugby players who resorted to cannibalism after their plane crashed in the Andes. Apparently my mom had a thing about high-mountain plane crashes or something. Anyway, I was long intrigued by the cover of her edition of Lost Horizon, which you can see above. The glowing green valley in the middle of the icy blue backgrounds whispered to me of magic and wonder; for a kid who’d already somehow developed a taste for decades-old pulp-fiction stories about adventurers and explorers encountering lost civilizations, that image held a magnetic lure. And yet, weirdly enough, I never got around to actually reading the book until my college years. And I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that I don’t remember much about it now — my retention for books appears to have gone to hell in recent years. I remember the basic premise, of course, and that I enjoyed it. But all the details are gone. Well, almost all of them. As it happens, I do recall the opening line, which struck me then and now as a wonderful articulation of something everyone has probably felt, but rarely thought to put into words:

Cigars had burned low, and we were beginning to sample the disillusionment that usually afflicts old school friends who have met again as men and found themselves with less in common than they had believed they had.

Stories work differently upon us depending on what’s happening in our lives when we encounter them. Maybe that line stuck in my mind because I had just experienced that same disillusion for myself around the time I read Lost Horizon. Or maybe something in my psychology is properly tuned for that sentiment to resonate. Or perhaps there’s just such a quiet truth to it that it couldn’t help but make an impression on me. Whatever the reason, those words have stayed with me for 20 years now while all the ones that follow them have evaporated.
Photo: 73rd Pocket Books printing of Hilton’s Lost Horizon, 1971; source.

May242012

Book Recommendation: Lost in Shangri-La

Looking for something good to read over the long holiday weekend? Well, how about a story that begins like this:

The time is 1945, only months before the atomic bombing of Japan brings about the end of World War II. On the remote South Pacific island of Dutch New Guinea, Allied cargo pilots flying over the island’s largely unexplored interior spot a previously unmapped valley high in the rugged mountains that appears to be cut off from the outside world. Seen from the air, it is lush, beautiful… and obviously inhabited. The press dubs this valley “Shangri-La” after the exotic setting of a popular, decade-old novel called Lost Horizon, and soon bored and curious personnel stationed at the remote base on New Guinea’s coast are taking sightseeing flights over this valley and logging them as “navigation training.”

On May 13, 1945, twenty-four men and women board a C-47 transport plane with the ill-considered name Gremlin Special for their own “navigation training.” But something goes disastrously wrong during the flight, and the plane crashes in the steep mountains surrounding Shangri-La, with only three survivors, two men and a woman. Injured, completely unprepared, and mourning the deaths of their friends, comrades, and, in the case of one of the men, a twin brother, the trio now faces a hike through dense jungle to reach the only place where they can hope for rescue: the mysterious valley below, which they know is populated by stone-age headhunters who have never seen a white person.

And this is only the beginning.

Did I mention that it’s a true story?

Mitchell Zuckoff’s nonfiction book Lost in Shangri-La recovers one of the most fascinating tales of World War II from obscurity — the media of the time did report on the amazing rescue of the Gremlin Special survivors, but the story got shoved off the front pages by Hiroshima, and it was virtually forgotten until Zuckoff ran across a mention of it while researching something completely unrelated — and tells it with the breathless pacing of a pulp-adventure novel. In fact, the story sounds tailor-made for the movies, with an incredible cast of strong-willed, eccentric, and heroic characters; a rescue scheme so crazy, it’s amazing that it worked; and a bittersweet undercurrent of the inevitable changes wrought by one of the last true “first contacts” between modern Westerners and an aboriginal culture.

This is really an incredible book about an incredible story, and it tends to linger with you — I actually finished it over a month ago, and I’m still thinking about it. It’s so many things: an adventure tale with all the elements you’d expect from an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel, a tale of survival and the indomitable human spirit, and an interesting bit of World War II lore, with a dusting of ethnography and biography. It’s been a long time since I read anything so thoroughly captivating. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Check out Zuckoff’s official site for more information, including photographs and even vintage film footage!

May052012

A Tale of Two Pitts

How about we discuss something a little less dire now, okay?

I started thinking this morning about something I said a while back in that long entry about my personal history with the Titanic story. Specifically, I opined that the late actor Richard Jordan made a better Dirk Pitt in the 1980 movie Raise the Titanic than Matthew McConnaughey did in his 2005 film, Sahara. Dirk Pitt, to refresh everyone’s memories, is the fictional hero of a long-running series of adventure novels by a guy named Clive Cussler. While I doubt even the hardest-core Cussler enthusiast would ever argue (at least not with a serious face) that the Pitt novels are anything resembling “good” literature, I’ve always found them to be reliably entertaining summertime/airport reads, in large part because the central character is so vividly drawn by the author. Readers of these books know Dirk Pitt.

Now, neither Jordan nor McConnaughey resembles Pitt as Cussler describes him: craggy features, thick black hair, and deep green eyes. In fact, the only actor that I can think of who remotely fits that description is Tom Selleck in his Magnum P.I. heyday. But no matter; oftentimes it’s more important for an actor in a film adaptation to convey a character’s spirit than to literally look the way the author visualized him. So, what do we know about Pitt’s spirit?

Well, he’s a romantic with a deep respect for history and its artifacts, as well as for the sea. He’s a defender of justice, the sort of hero who stumbles into situations in which people are being mistreated and he won’t rest until he’s corrected the problem. He has a kind heart that endears him to women, but he can be single-minded and absolutely ruthless when he needs to be. He’s frequently brash when the action is underway, but he’s also methodical when he’s trying to unravel a mystery or searching for a treasure. He’s a rough-and-tumble man’s man who enjoys a burrito with his pals, but given his background as the wealthy son of a U.S. senator (and occasional lover of another), he’s equally comfortable rubbing elbows with the upper crust and enjoying the finer things.

Little of this is depicted in the two movies, which are both pretty light on the background character details. But again, we’re looking for a sense of the character, if not the specifics. So, given all that, which one of these guys do you think looks more like like he has an explorer’s heart and a gourmand’s taste, who can gallantly offer his arm to a little old lady before cold-bloodedly shooting an assassin between the eyes? Is it this guy?

Or this one?

I suppose it’s all a matter of personal taste, but to me, McConnaughey’s Pitt looks more likely to scarf a bag of Cheetos and a six of Bud Light than sip a flute of Veuve Clicquot, and I just don’t buy him as a rugged sea-faring man with a passion for history. Maybe it was Jordan’s beard. Or the fact that he was my first exposure to the character. Or maybe it’s just that the only thing I’ve ever really liked McConnaughey in was Dazed and Confused, and I can’t see him as anything other than a laid-back goofball.

Not that any of this matters, of course. Neither film exactly set the world on fire, and as far as I know, there are no Pitt fanboys out there clamoring for another one. In addition, Cussler has made no secret of how badly he feels Hollywood mistreated him and his creation — he even sued the producers of Sahara, although I no longer remember exactly why — so he’s not likely going to be too willing to option out another of his books. Besides, it also seems to me that the books are not as popular as they once were. They’re still coming out, but Cussler himself has retired in all but name, and they’re now being written by his son, Dirk Cussler (yes, Dirk Pitt was named for Cussler’s own son). All of which means, it’s pretty unlikely there will ever be another Pitt movie starring… anybody. But the way I see it, Tom Clancy fans like to debate which actor best embodied their boy Jack Ryan, and of course the question of who is the definitive James Bond has been an evergreen movie-nerd topic for decades. So why not quibble over our favorite Dirk Pitt as well?

(Incidentally, my opinions on the other two subjects are Alec Baldwin in Red October, and Sean Connery as Bond, as good as the Daniel Craig reboots have so far been…)

Mar272012

Sometimes We Move Backwards

This morning, Boing Boing linked to an article I found interesting, on the way science-fiction stories often feature apparent “gaps” or imbalances in the technology of their imaginary worlds, and why those gaps are not necessarily a failure on the writer’s part. The starting point for the article was the current phenom movie The Hunger Games and the books from which it is adapted. I haven’t read or seen The Hunger Games myself, but apparently the story has drawn a certain amount of criticism because the futuristic dystopia in which it is set (supposedly descended from our own United States of America following some kind of apocalypse) includes such high-tech flourishes as hovercraft, force fields, and genetically engineered animals, but it still relies on coal-fired powerplants for electricity and has nothing resembling the Internet. Some readers/viewers question the idea of a society that’s so advanced in some ways but not in others. The article goes on to make the argument that real societies choose to adopt or abandon technologies for all sorts of reasons — political, economic, and/or cultural — and the seeming flaws of imagination in this story can be explained quite logically, given the assumptions of the society in question. The whole thing reminded me of what I said a couple weeks ago regarding the usage of swords in so much of the “planetary romance” sub-genre of science fiction, i.e., that it’s not at all unreasonable for John Carter or Flash Gordon to fight the bad guys with a sword while anti-gravity airships hang overhead, because Barsoom and Mongo have societies that, for whatever reason, still value prowess with a blade, even though firearms are available. Because, you know, swordfighting is cool. Especially in stories, which are all this stuff really is, after all.

And just in case you still don’t buy the notion that a society really might choose to go deliberately retro or turn its back on certain technologies, consider the somewhat depressing final line from that Boing Boing post:

A decade ago, you could fly London to New York in a couple of hours. A year ago, America had a reusable spacecraft.

But not now. Because we decided those things were no longer economical. Or necessary.