The Bookshelf

Jan312012

2011 Media Wrap-Up

And here’s another of the myriad things that frustrate the crap out of me: my utter inability to stay on top of this blog to my satisfaction. The first month of 2012 is nearly over and I still haven’t gotten around to tying up the loose ends from 2011. Not that anybody else cares about what movies I watched during the past 12 months, I’m sure. But I care — I’ve been keeping lists of this stuff for years, and I find it interesting and sometimes even useful to track my media-consumption habits — and if I was doing this blogging thing right, I would’ve had this post up shortly after New Year’s, if not before. Yes, I’ve had a lot going on during the month of January 2012, but I know my situation well enough to know it wouldn’t have mattered either way. I’d still be playing catch-up regardless. Because that’s just the pattern I’ve lapsed into in recent years. A quick check of the Simple Tricks archive reveals I have 74 unfinished, unpublished entries on this blog. Seventy-four. And nearly every single one of them has followed the exact same pattern: some subject catches my interest, I start composing an entry, and then I get distracted by some mundane matter of daily life and a day or two (or five or ten) passes, and in the meantime more subjects of interest come down the pike and then the moment is lost and that poor orphaned scrap of writing slips into blog-entry limbo. Sometimes I can come back to them later, but usually the topic has lost its relevance and I can’t rekindle the creative spark to get back into it anyhow. Nobody knows or cares about these unfinished things except me, but they drive me batshit crazy.

So, this topic may be well past its sell-by date, but I’m going to do it anyhow. If you’re not interested, I understand. Lists below the fold…

Jan132012

Appreciation for the Classics

I’m currently reading Stephen King’s latest release, 11/22/63, and, so far, I’m enjoying the hell out of it. If you haven’t heard about this one, it’s a time-travel story in which our protagonist Jake learns there is a portal back to the year 1958 in the pantry of his local diner; the diner’s owner persuades him, naturally, to use the portal and attempt to change history by preventing the assassination of President Kennedy. But that’s still a few hundred pages ahead.

At the point where I am in the book, Jake has just completed his first lengthy foray into the past, kind of an exploratory mission, during which he spends several weeks driving a ’54 Ford Sunliner. Upon returning to 2011, he makes this observation about his “real” car:

As I turned off the engine I thought about what a cramped, niggardly, basically unpleasant plastic-and-fiberglass shitbox my Toyota was compared to the car I’d gotten used to in [1958].

As someone with — ahem — a bit of experience driving classic cars, I can totally relate. Modern cars get you where you need to go and of course they’re far more fuel-efficient than the chromed phantasms from Detroit’s golden age, but once you’ve been behind the wheel of something that feels like your living room, it’s really hard to get comfortable in a footlocker.

Nov192011

Lament for Bill Mantlo

One of my favorite ways of disposing of my allowance when I was a kid was a comic book called The Micronauts. It was based on a line of imported Japanese toys — Loyal Readers of a certain age may remember them — and, like pretty much everything else around that time, it was heavily influenced by Star Wars, in particular by the Star Wars comics that were being published by the same company, Marvel. Despite its derivative elements, though, Micronauts quickly established its own rich identity. Its pages were filled with all sorts of wild ideas and concepts: another universe nestled within our own at a sub-microscopic level; a brave space explorer whose body spent 1,000 years in suspended animation while his conscious mind, merged with that of his robot co-pilot, traveled to the literal edge of their universe; and the decadent, violent society they returned to, where the rich and powerful prolonged their lives to near-infinity by replacing worn-out body parts with components harvested from the poor. It was all pretty heady stuff for a ten-year-old living in a sleepy little town in parochial old Utah, and it left a big impression.

Micronauts ran for five years, 1979 to 1984, resulting in 59 regular issues and two double-length “annuals.” Remarkably, all of those issues save one were written by the same man, a guy named Bill Mantlo. Even more remarkably, Mantlo was simultaneously scripting all the issues for another toy-based comic, Rom Spaceknight, as well as contributing to other titles such as The Incredible Hulk, Spectacular Spider-Man, Thor, and Iron Man, a simply amazing level of productivity. By the late ’80s, however, Mantlo was pretty well finished with comics; he left the industry, reinvented himself, and shortly became one of the great “where are they now?” mysteries from the pop culture of that era.

Earlier this week, I learned the fate of Bill Mantlo, and it isn’t pretty. In 1992, he was struck by a car while rollerblading. It was a hit-and-run; the driver has never been found. Mantlo survived, but honestly it would’ve been better for him if he hadn’t. He sustained massive brain injuries and was left severely impaired, both mentally and physically. But the accident was only the beginning of the real nightmare for Mantlo and his family. Although he made significant progress in his early rehabilitation, his insurance company soon started balking at the cost of the rehab, pressuring Mantlo’s brother Mike — who has been handling his affairs since the accident — to find cheaper and cheaper facilities. Finally, the insurer decreed — contrary to the opinions of doctors, mind you — that further rehab was “unnecessary.” Mantlo was cut off altogether. Mike was forced to liquidate everything Bill owned to qualify him for Medicare, and today Bill Mantlo, once such a prolific and creative force to be reckoned with, is warehoused in a geriatric nursing home in Queens, the only place his family could afford to send him. He is penniless and helpless. What progress he’d once made toward recovery has entirely dissipated without continuing therapy. His quality of life is essentially nonexistent. He is simply waiting to die.

That’s the executive summary; you can read all the details here. It’s a long article, but it’s well worth your time, and I highly recommend that you read it and ponder it. Consider it a cautionary tale of how thoroughly a human life can be destroyed, short of death itself. And keep in mind that Bill Mantlo was one of the “lucky” ones. He had health insurance.

For me, this sad story constitutes just one more outrageous piece of evidence that the way we handle healthcare in this country is seriously broken. Conservative politicians scared a lot of people silly a couple years ago by claiming that a single-payer health system would lead to rationing of care and so-called “death panels,” but what was Bill Mantlo subjected to if not rationing? And what were the faceless, implacable bureaucrats who decided his fate if not the equivalent of those dread death panels? Actually, they were worse than a “death” panel, because they condemned him not to death itself, but to a lingering, living hell until he finally gets around to dying. And they made that decision entirely on how much he was going to cost them, not whether he was responding to care or was still capable of improvement. If the United States truly is, as I’ve always been told, the richest country on earth, the best country on earth, how can we in good conscience abandon a human life in this way? The dirty truth behind our for-profit insurance industry is that insurers are more concerned with the dividends of their shareholders than the needs of their policy holders. People carry insurance as a hedge against anything really bad ever happening to us, but if anything really bad does happen, the insurance companies fight like hell to not actually help you, and that is just wrong. No… it’s obscene. Our society’s treatment of the long-term ill isn’t quite as perverted as what Bill Mantlo imagined in the pages of The Mirconauts, i.e., Baron Karza’s evil body banks, but in my book, it is just about as cruel and inhumane. I wish more people could see that and agree to change it.

Nov142011

Pepys for Sale!

Well, it was bound to happen eventually… the fabled Bennion Archive has finally outgrown its physical domain and I’ve had to make the difficult decision to start letting things go for the sake of reclaiming my modest living space. I’ve actually been in the process of that for over a year now, quietly selling off books and other small items on Amazon Marketplace (go here if you’d like to peruse what I’ve currently got in the inventory). I’ve had some degree of success with that, but I’ve also found that Amazon isn’t always the best option, depending on what exactly you’re trying to sell. So I’m exploring some other venues, including the direct approach, i.e., pitching certain items to my Loyal Readers here on Simple Tricks and Nonsense. I hope you’ll forgive me for going commercial on you; I promise the items I mention here will be things I think may be of interest to my audience, and I promise as well not to do it very often.

So, that said, the first item up in the Giant Liquidation Sale is an 11-volume set of books comprising the complete Diary of Samuel Pepys. (That’s pronounced “peeps,” for you non-English majors out there.)

If you’re not familiar with Pepys, he’s a pretty fascinating guy. I first discovered him and his famous diary in a college course on the English Restoration, the time period immediately after the British monarchy regained control from the Cromwells. It was an exciting, high-spirited time in Britain following several decades of Puritan repression. Theaters were reopened (the Puritans had had them shuttered), and the immensely popular, extremely bawdy plays they hosted would later be recognized as a distinct genre, the Restoration comedy. Women were allowed to perform onstage for the first time, social restrictions of all kinds were loosened, and there must’ve been a sense in the air that history was sweeping Britain along at immense speed toward the destiny of Empire.

As a dashing young man-about-town working for the Admiralty, Samuel Pepys was in the ideal position to witness history firsthand, and his diary is today considered a prime historical source on many notable events, particularly the Great Plague that killed 20% of London’s population in 1665-66 and the Great Fire that destroyed much of the city in 1666. But Pepys wrote about far more than the news of the day. He wrote about pretty much everything: gossip about the high-ranking people he crossed paths with, affairs of state, his own wenching and carousing, his health complaints, his marriage, the plays he saw, the coffeehouses and taverns he frequented, the whole tapestry of 17th century London. It’s fascinating, invaluable material if you’re at all interested in the period.

So, you may be wondering, if this diary is so endlessly fascinating, then why am I selling my copy of it? It all comes down to my number-one complaint: a lack of time. When I bought this set several years back, I had a lot of grandiose ideas. I had it in my head that I was a Literary Fellow not too different from Pepys himself, that I would someday own a vast library lined with built-in oak bookshelves that would be stuffed with thousands of volumes on all sorts of arcane subjects, which I would then read while sitting in a wine-colored wingback chair, wearing a favorite cardigan and smoking a pipe. You know, something like this. I imagined also that I would have time to take advantage of such a library. Well… you all can guess how that’s turned out. I haven’t smoked my pipe in years and my library is all in banker’s boxes that are kept in a cold, dark basement. I don’t own a wingback chair, and I don’t think I’m even all that literary anymore, to be honest. If I ever was. As interesting as I found that class on the Restoration, I’ve always preferred convenience-store pulp novels to the books my high-school teacher Mr. Bridge used to call “literature with a capital L.” And then there’s the matter of how much time I have at my disposal these days…

Basically, I’ve just realized that I’m not likely to ever read these books, so I’m hoping to get them into the hands of somebody who will. And who has the space to store books that I increasingly do not.

As I said, this is an 11-volume set of trade paperbacks that includes the complete text of Pepys’ diary, spanning the ten-year period 1660 to 1669, as well as a book-length index and a companion. They were published by the University of California Press in 2000, and are brand-new, still in their factory shrinkwrap, just as you see them in the picture above. I’d like to sell them as a complete set, and I’m asking $50 for the lot, a real bargain considering each volume lists for $28.95 on Amazon. If anyone reading this is interested, just shoot me a message at jason-at-jasonbennion.com (you know, of course, to replace “-at-” with “@”, right?). If you live in the Salt Lake area, we can arrange a face-to-face exchange; if you’re someplace else, let’s talk about shipping…

FYI, I’ve also got these listed for sale on craigslist, KSL.com, and eBay, so if you are interested, don’t dawdle in letting me know, because you never know when one of these other venues might produce a bite…

Jul252011

A Bit of Explanation

Over on my Flickr photostream, where the image from the previous entry resides, our friend Cranky Robert asked if I could explain a bit about the book you see in that photo standing alongside my bottle of The Good Stuff. I thought some others among the Loyal Readers might be curious about that as well, so here is an extended and somewhat reworked version of what I said over there:

The book is a childhood treasure of mine, a Christmas gift I received when I was ten or eleven. (If I recall correctly — and I’ll admit that I might not — it was a stocking stuffer along with a non-fiction book about black holes and the novelization of the Disney movie The Black Hole.) Copyrighted in 1979, two years before the first orbiter actually reached space, Shuttle: The World’s First Spaceship was a work of pop-science, essentially a primer for laypeople (and precocious 11-year-olds like myself) on just what the shuttle was, how it was supposed to work, and why it was going to be cool. Like so many similar publications from that general era — I’m thinking primarily of magazines like OMNI, Science Digest, and Popular Mechanics, as well as a number of book-length works by so-called “futurologists” — it was breathlessly optimistic and filled with wild predictions of space stations, orbital factories and laboratories, solar-power-collecting satellites that would beam energy back to Earth, and, eventually, vast cylindrical colonies in space. And all of these would be constructed and/or serviced by shuttles and their descendants, which would of course be refinements of the shuttle’s spaceplane design, and not Apollo-style capsules, which is where we’re headed back to now in the post-shuttle era. All that stuff about cities in space may sound laughable now, but it really wasn’t so
outlandish when I was a kid. In a culture where we’d just recently had men walking on the moon, it all seemed plausible, if extremely ambitious. And back then I believed we had the ambition. I wanted to believe that, anyhow.

As you may have gathered, this book was the source of many of my visions of the future that never arrived. I was interested in the shuttles before I read it — which is why Mom and Dad got it for me as a gift — but Shuttle: The World’s First Spaceship was what really fired up my dreams and gave them specific, real-world forms. More real-world than Star Trek, anyhow. And so, for the purposes of the photo and the occasion, the book seemed like the most appropriate symbol of what I was saying goodbye to. (It was also convenient to hand, and small enough to sit beside the bottle and glass without distracting attention away from them.)

And at this point, I imagine my Loyal Readers have read quite enough about space shuttles for a while. I still have some thoughts on the subject, but I’ll hold onto them for the time being and promise the next few entries will be on different subjects…

Jul192011

Irony Sucks, Doesn’t It?

I don’t buy a lot of books anymore — long story — and Salt Lake is lucky enough to have a handful of good independent shops that somehow survived the corporate incursions of the ’90s, but I still thought this cartoon was deadly accurate:

I’ll be honest… I actually like Barnes and Noble, even though my buy-local instincts tell me I’m not supposed to. Borders has never done a lot for me; they never seemed to have what I was looking for and what they did have always seemed to have been lightly flogged with a weed whacker. (I’m very big on condition… if I’m shelling out ten bucks for a paperback, I want one that looks like I just plucked it off the printing press, not one that’s been creased and dog-eared just getting it out of the carton and onto the shelves.) But B&N was cool. For a faceless corporate giant and all.

It does make you wonder… many areas don’t have any book-buying alternatives except the big chain stores. If B&N goes the way of Borders — and that certainly looks likely — then what’s left? Wal-Mart? Eww. There’s always Amazon.com, but wonky “recommended for you” algorithms aren’t the same as leisurely browsing physical shelves with pleasant classic music on the PA and a cup of coffee in your hand. One more way in which the digital revolution has brought us unprecedented convenience, but at a great cost…

May132011

Isn’t That Always the Way It Goes?

You’ve just managed to talk a girl out of her clothes when in barges ~~her father~~, er, a giant, four-armed dude with the head of a gorilla, or maybe it’s a lion, or some damn thing, and he’s seriously pissed that his little girl is standing there nekkid in this bachelor pad of yours with the suggestive carvings on the walls, and you’ve got a pitcher of something that probably isn’t Hi-C sitting at your feet, and well, he’s just spoiling for a fight. If you’re like me, that’s going to seriously cramp your style. It’s such a drag, man.

On a more serious note, I apologize for throwing up another lame image post instead of something worthwhile — well, as worthwhile as my drivel ever gets — but I just haven’t felt much inspiration to write this week. I guess I’m still picking through the emotional knots surrounding my uncle’s death, or maybe it’s just one of those periods when I don’t have a lot to say. In any event, I hope all you Loyal Readers out there are at least enjoying the cool pictures. There are so, so many of them to be had out there in the vastness of the InterWeb. This particular one is a book illustration of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ immortal hero John Carter of Mars and (I presume) his mate, the lovely Dejah Thoris, being menaced by… well, some freaky thing or other. It’s been a long time since I read the Barsoom stories so I don’t really recognize who or what that’s supposed to be. The artist is a gentleman called Reed Crandall, who was a mainstay of the infamous publisher EC Comics (the one nervous Senators, prudes, and scolds feared was corrupting America’s youth with Tales of the Crypt back in the lily-white 1950s); you can see a gallery of Crandall’s Burroughs-related work here. It’s beautiful stuff, in my humble opinion. I especially like this one. But then, I was corrupted myself as a kid by rock-and-roll album covers and TV shows like Three’s Company.

In any event, credit where it’s due: I spotted this image over at Michael May’s Adventureblog Annex, which is one of those Tumblr thingies Michael set up so he could move this sort of thing off his regular Adventureblog. That’s a pretty good idea, really, a subset of a blog reserved just for trading cool pictures… Hmmmm.

May112011

I’d Buy This Book

Nifty piece of artwork here by a cat named Phil Noto:

There are, of course, quite a few Star Wars tie-in novels that focus on everyone’s favorite Corellian smuggler pilot, but none sport a cover done in the style of classic 1960s pulp paperbacks, and that really is a shame, you know? As a lover of that era’s commercial illustration aesthetic, I almost wish my favorite movie had been made 10 years earlier. Yeah, I would’ve missed seeing it in the theaters and all, but just think of all the cool book covers that would’ve come out!

No? Okay, fine, I’ll just enjoy the post-modern retro-fantasy stuff then…

Incidentally, this came to my attention via Boing Boing. Naturally.

Apr152011

The Fig Tree

I’ve never read Sylvia Plath, but I recently came across a passage from her novel The Bell Jar in, of all places, an article on New York’s famed Barbizon Hotel for Women in a year-old copy of Vanity Fair magazine. This passage struck a chord with me, strongly enough that I want to record it someplace, if not share it with others. I admire the craftsmanship of this paragraph, the strong imagery that so clearly illustrates a fairly nebulous idea. It”s a level of writing to which I aspire.

The thing that really gets me, though, is how strongly the passage resonates with some thoughts I’ve been having lately. I have no idea what the context is here, or even what The Bell Jar is about. But this single image, shorn of plot and standing all on its own, is powerful stuff that I find myself relating to, regretfully more than is entirely comfortable…

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the
story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful
future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and
children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a
brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and
another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig
was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with
queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady
crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I
couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig
tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which
of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but
choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to
decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they
plopped to the ground at my feet.

Mar032011

2009 Media Wrap-Up

Yeah, I know, I’m a little late with this one. Usher, would you please show that heckler to the door? Thanks. I’ll wait until he’s… oh, okay, good now we can talk.

Last night, I was trying to look something up when I realized that I never got around to doing my customary overview of the books, movies, and home video I enjoyed in 2009. I’ve managed to hit every other year since 2005, but somehow ’09 got away from me. Well, anyone who knows me knows I can’t tolerate that sort of inconsistency! Luckily, I was able to find my handwritten notes for that year — yes, I keep notes about these things — so I’ve now been able to put together the official Simple Tricks and Nonsense 2009 Media Wrap-Up.

(I realize, of course, that this information is likely of very little interest to anyone but myself. I’m only going to the trouble of making a blog entry at this late date for my own records, and to satisfy my OCD. Thanks for your understanding. If you’re vacillating about whether to read on, it might help you to know that I’m not going to bother with any commentary on this one, it’ll just be lists of titles.)