The Education of a Writer

Childhood for some writers was not that great. Early in his childhood, H. P. Lovecraft’s mother would walk him around and when running into a neighbor or two would tell them right in front of her child, “I’d better get Howard inside before anyone sees him. His face is so ugly."

He had a nervous condition that for a young person in modern day could possibly be solved with antidepressants. Here is what describes Lovecraft’s early education years:


Early speculation that he may have been congenitally disabled by syphilis passed on from father to mother to fetus has been ruled out. Due to his sickly condition and his undisciplined, argumentative nature he barely attended school until he was eight and then was withdrawn after a year. Four years later he returned to public school at Hope Street High School…

In 1908, prior to his high school graduation, he claimed to have himself suffered what he later described as a "nervous breakdown", and consequently never received his high school diploma (although he maintained for most of his life that he did graduate)… This failure to complete his education (he wished to study at Brown University) was a source of disappointment and shame even late into his life.

Philip K. Dick had asthma as a child and took medicine for that, but took semoxydrine a little later in the 1950's. That led to his taking hundreds if not a thousand amphetamines per week later in life which resulted in him staying up for five or more days at a time and then crashing for a couple of days. Dozens of good novels were written as a result of this which he sold to Donald Wolheim for around 1500 dollars apiece. It also probably led to what killed him later in life.



Dick attended Berkeley High School. After graduating from high school he briefly attended the University of California, Berkeley as a German major, but dropped out before completing any coursework.

From what I understand, it was less than a week before he dropped; he could not take the college classroom setting and his nerves just could not take sitting in the classroom among the other students. He had a fear of swallowing as a child, and other phobias like crossing bridges in a car. He had a recurring dream that became a fear later on that he would one day receive a letter that was so horrific that reading the contents of it would kill him. At his front door in glaring sunlight, a Pink Beam bounced off a metal symbol on a young delivery lady's necklace in Feb/March 1974 and resulted in an 8000 page "Exegesis: An Exploration of the Dialectic" and a profound changing point in his life to the very end, and unfortunately gave us much less SF from him from then on.

As a child, author Malcolm Lowry (Under the Volcano) had bad styes on his eyes that required being scraped off with a razor by an oculist. His Victorian father occasionally took him to the Syphilis museum on Paradise Street in London to teach him about the horrors of social diseases. Lowry’s mother showed no affection or love for him and never read a word of his fiction. Lowry spent the rest of his life hitting the booze and occasionally writing great fiction, including writing one of the towering novels of the 20th century.

Having learned how to drink at a young age, he attended St. Catharine’s College at Cambridge but was hardly ever seen on campus unless completely drunk, usually under a table strumming a ukulele, and barely squeaked by with a lower level Third Tripost degree by submitting his first novel Ultramarine. After this novel was accepted for publication it was lost completely after all alterations had been done for the publisher. He literally had to rewrite it completely from memory from a very crude and old first draft. Lowry spent the rest of his life running away from himself.

They all contributed greatly to fiction.

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Ragtime - The First Truly American Genre

I was forced to take piano lessons as a boy although I did not care at the time for Classical piano pieces. All I really wanted to do was play sports and live in a Ray Bradbury world of imagination through books and movies. I used to go down the street to a Mrs. Burhans for an hour a week to take a lesson. She would ask me if I had practised. I would stammer: "Umm,...yes." And then she would ask me
to play the same Lizst Hungarian Rhapsody (an easier part of it) as she did the six previous weeks, and she knew I had not practised and she would chew me out for it. Finally, I was about to quit taking lessons.

Then, that year, the movie "The Sting" came out. "The Entertainer" was a big hit on the radio. I went down to the music store and found this large book of Ragtime sheet music by Scott Joplin who died around World War I. I took it home and the music seemed difficult. But a friend of mine and I learned "The Maple Leaf Rag." It was complex for me at the time. I proceeded to learn and memorize every piece in the book.

I found more Ragtime music by other composers like James Scott, Arthur Marshall, Tom Turpin, Joseph Lamb, James Johnson. My interest in the piano was saved by Ragtime. I had ended up learning hundreds of Ragtime pieces. I discovered George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue." I memorized that at age 16. In college, I dropped out of Engineering to go to music school. I memorized the piano version of American In Paris, Gershwin's Concerto in F, and then Rachmaninoff's pieces and his Piano Concerto # 2 and half of his Piano COncerto # 3, and tons of Brahms, Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy. But I will always remember that I would have given up piano years before that, if I had not discovered Ragtime:


Ragtime (alternately spelled Rag-time) is an American musical genre which enjoyed its peak popularity between 1897 and 1918. Ragtime was the first truly American musical genre, predating jazz[1]. It began as dance music in the Red-light district of American cities such as St. Louis and New Orleans years before being published as popular sheet music for piano[2][3] . It was a modification of the march made popular by John Philip Sousa, with additional Polyrhythms coming from African music. [4]. The Ragtime composer Scott Joplin became famous through the publication in 1899 of the Maple Leaf Rag, although he was forgotten by the 1970s.[5][6]. For at least 12 years after its publication, the Maple Leaf Rag heavily influenced subsequent Ragtime composers with its melody lines, harmonic progressions or metric patterns.[7]

Ragtime fell out of favor as Jazz claimed the public's imagination after 1917, but there have been numerous revivals since as the music has been re-discovered. First in the early 1940s many jazz bands began to include ragtime in their repertoire and put out ragtime recordings on 78 RPM records. A more significant revival occurred in the 1950s as a wider variety of ragtime styles of the past were made available on records, and new rags were composed, published, and recorded. In 1971 Joshua Rifkin brought out a compilation of Scott Joplin's work which was nominated for a Grammy[8], and in 1973, the motion picture The Sting brought ragtime to a wide audience with its soundtrack of Joplin tunes. Subsequently the film's rendering of Joplin's 1902 rag The Entertainer was a top 40 hit in 1974.

Ragtime has been seen by some critics as an important influence on American music in the 20th Century.[5] Ragtime (with Joplin's work in the forefront of the movement) has been compared to an American equivalent of minuets by Mozart, mazurkas by Chopin or waltzes by Brahms.[9] Ragtime influenced Classical composers including Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky, and Brahms.[10]


Scott Joplin died in a mental institution, forgotten at the end of World War I; James Scott died in the 30's totally forgotten. Louis Chauvin died young as a wastrel creole genius. Tony Jackson died in New Orlean's Storyville. Eubie Blake, a frequent guest on the Tonight Show, who composed a lot of ragtime, had met Scott Joplin in a music shop maybe around 1910 or so. He saw this guy with a bandaged propped up foot. He introduced himself and found out he was talking to Scott Joplin. Not once did the host of the Tonight Show ask him about that all those years Eubie Blake appeared on the show.

Jelly Roll Morton, who was born in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans at a house that now has an historical marker on it (I am assuming it is still there (the house) but there is a chance it disappeared after Hurricane Katrina), he could not sight-read music. They asked him to play something and put Scott Joplin's "Original Rag" in front of him. He played it of course because he had it memorized by heart, including his own embellishments, and pretended to sight-read the music. He got the job.

In the late 30's, Jelly Roll walked into the Libary of Congress, nearly on his deathbed, and they began recording an oral history of his entire life and his piano playing as well, for the next 8 days or so. He talked and played the piano for them. It is all recorded somewhere at the Library of Congress.

Dr. Robert Weatherly, a professor of mine at Music School who was widely known as the greatest Trumpet player in the world in the 1940s - his father played in John Phillip Souza's band. At the World's Fair of 1904 in St. Louis, Scott Joplin played on a single piano in a tent right down from Souza's full Band and was totally drowned out by them as he tried to play his pieces.

In music school I used to play 14 hours a day locked in a practise room, now I barely play at all, only when asked to by friends. And Science Fiction, Horror, and Literature in general were of main interest for me in my life and later of creating a body of work. But I am glad I went the music route before I started writing novels.

www.mfkorn.com

"Furniture" of SF

I was going to write little marginalia about events like “what H.P. Lovecraft really thought about Abe Merritt’s style of writing (but would never dare tell him) and what was the topic of conversation when Merritt invited him for dinner at his fancy private club in New York,” or for that matter, when Houdini invited Lovecraft to dinner in New York as well. Lovecraft was hitting the circuit more than a New York club kid. But I won’t, and can’t think of anything else to blog about so I thought I would blog about more gadgets or apparatus or what is called the "furniture" in a science fiction story. So here are just a tiny few I came up with:

In Phil Dick’s The Penultimate Truth an assassin fires a weapon that shoots a high tech homing projectile into a home (a Conapt is what Phil Dick called it) and once it impales the victim it expands into a dummy object, a television appliance. Also in the same novel is a computer-like device that asks you for a word and then it will respond with some similar word or phrase which to me, predicted AI software like Racter, which generated English phrases by answering whatever question one would ask it. In PKD's "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" the main character willfully uses a computer in a briefcase called "Dr. Smile" that is supposed to deliberately confuse a human's brain so that he will fail a military test and not have to go into military service. There are "Perky Pat" dolls used with hallucinogens to transform humans into a high state of consciousness.

The Hermetic Algorithmic Computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey” is to me, a rather wary way to run a large Fusion reactor craft. The Nasa Space Shuttle had two parallel Unisys computers, one on board and one on Earth, that were run in tandem to make the shuttle run properly. The HAL computer had emotions, and made critical decisions based on those - which is not a good idea at all in trying to maintain a spacecraft of any kind I would imagine. In a Ray Bradbury story in a deep space ship the computer essentially is made to emulate George Bernard Shaw and thus charm the bored crew. In Dean Koontz's “Demon Seed,” a home with a built-in computer automated systems much throughout the house like Bradbury's "And There Will Come Soft Rains" computer actually violates a human being.

In Bradbury’s “Zero Hour,” kids are instructed by an invisible alien being named Drill, and build death rays with simple hand tools like pliers and nails and screwdrivers from their dad’s garage. Also, I actually think that Bradbury’s “The Veldt” probably predicted virtual reality and took it a step further.

In Lester Del Rey’s “Helen O’Loy” we have a famous SF story of a man falling in love with a female robot he gets through mail order. In Isaac Asimov's collection "I, Robot" the robots’ intellect consists of some complicated electronic system he made up off the top of his head called “Positronics.” Jack Williamson’s “With Folded Hands” has passive aggressive blackmailing robots who take over the human race and each has a computer ‘brain’ called the “Mach Four” developed at Harvard. Adventure-SF writer Martin Caidin coined the term “Cyborg” by the book of that name melding human and machinery which led to the abysmal “Six Million Dollar Man” television show.

I’ve suggested devices before in my science fiction. In a novel I wrote in 1989, "Movietone Mars" I proposed a world where everyone was his/her own celebrity and had a fifteen minute show every day. What we know as cinema became illegal to make or watch. Each person's Conapt had walls which were complete Vidscreens and Vidcams - I called them "Wallmelts," whereby a vast network of a few billion people with these were connected through an interface. If a person's show became too popular, Gov censors cancelled it for a while to keep everyone 'equal' in fame or popularity. After the internet became what it is a few years later, Youtube, webcams, Myspace, internet blogs, personal webpages, Facebook are social networks for entire nations. Cable and satellite entertainment packages now have hundreds and perhaps soon thousands and millions of channels. Reality tv shows have flourished and make a good bit of television programming now which create celebrities of sorts out of everyday people.

But science fiction is not just soothsaying and trying to predict inventions, it is more than that. A writing professor I had only liked literary authors like John Updike and looked down on the bastard genres of horror and science fiction. I like John Updike, and Cheever and Mary McCarthy, etc... The prof said that all that SF writers seemed to be interested in was “transportation.” Who knows, maybe John Updike could have written a SF novel, too. I had another writing professor that stated emphatically that if Stephen King were in his class he would flunk him immediately. Even though I only touched upon a few items, it is sometimes worth thinking back to what is called the “furniture” in various SF stories.

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Having a Job to Pay the Rent or First Jobs

A lot of writers, poets and composers have or had to work day jobs to survive and keep body and soul together.

Tennessee Williams (b. 1911 - d. 1983) was reportedly a very poorly performing waiter at a restaurant in the French Quarter of New Orleans while he wrote “A Streetcar named Desire” and other plays. Later, when he was a real sensation as a playwright and Williams was asked to do a curtain call in London, John Gielgud tried to keep him offstage because he said he looked like a hick waiter in his tuxedo.

Albert Camus (b. 1913 - d. 1960)sold auto parts while he wrote the earlier part of his body of Existential philosophy.

George Gershwin (b. 1898 - d. 1937)was a cashier for six months at a restaurant (or drugstore, I'm not sure).

Jim Thompson (b. 1906 d. 1977) had to work in aircraft plants in California (which was not the greatest line of work back then).

Sherwood Anderson (b. 1876 - d. 1941) owned a couple of paint stores early in his career before he had his nervous breakdown.

William Faulkner (b. 1897 - d. 1962) was postmaster on campus at Ole Miss and got fired because whenever postcards would come in for customers he would elaborate on the handwritten cards by adding his own funny lines, like “By the way, I am pregnant, etc…” He worked nights at a power plant in Mississippi and on a large overturned bucket he wrote the Pulitzer prize-winning “As I Lay Dying.”

EE Cummings (b. 1894 - d. 1962) graduated from Harvard and had one job his entire life, as a mail clerk, and that job lasted exactly one day. The rest of his life he ranted about having that job.

Hart Crane (b. 1899 - d. 1932), now considered a great national poet, had a millionaire father who invented the "lifesaver" candy, so Crane never had to work. His father disapproved of him being gay though, and a poet as well. Crane finally got hired as a travelling companion for a rich person on a trip to California, where Crane later wrote about attending risqué Hollywood parties of half-dressed Hollywood actresses innocently bobbing for apples, etc. Howard Lovecraft (b. 1890 - d. 1937) was friends with Crane's roommate Samuel Loveman, who corresponded with Ambrose Bierce (b. 1842 - d. 1914?). Lovecraft always mentioned in his letters how drunk Crane always was, and that he would come to no good end, and Crane mentioned in his letters about this "windpiping" Lovecraft who forced Loveman on these long architectural walks throughout New York City. After a troubled Crane committed suicide by jumping ship in Perdido Bay, when Crane was pretty reknowned as a poet, Crane's mother and Lovecraft and many others held a party in the memory of Hart Crane.

Russian Composer Nickolai Rimsky-Korsakov (b. 1844 - d. 1908) was in the merchant marines and also a chemist.

Charles Ives (b. 1874 - d. 1954), a very important 20th century composer, was big in the Insurance business.

Rimbaud (b. 1854 - d. 1891)was a brilliant poet and one day just quit and made a fortune in business.

T.S. Eliot (b. 1888 - d. 1965) was a banker in England but was not just a little clerk downstairs as Huxley often said, but was a rather important, high level person in the Bank.

Cole Porter (b. 1891 - d. 1964) was supposed to become a lawyer but the best thing he did at Yale was compose a lot of songs for their Glee Club.

Hoagy Carmichael (b. 1899 - d. 1981) was supposed to be a lawyer as well.

Norman Mailer (b. 1923 - d. 2007) studied Engineering Science at Harvard but did not take up that profession.

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Hurricane Gustav and some Inventions in SF

A personal aside: I have not able to blog for the last two weeks until now due to Hurricane Gustav. I was without electrical power until two days ago, and then I lost it again yesterday. Now it is back on again. Some people in Baton Rouge still do not have power. Now Hurricane Ike has run through the western part of Louisiana and Texas and has done a lot of damage.

To put something in this blog excerpt besides personal filigree, I submit this:

Edward Everett Hale wrote a short story called "The Brick Moon" just after the Civil War which I remember reading in Sam Moskowitz's "Science Fiction by Gaslight" anthology. Father of Rocketry Konstantin Tsiolkovsky expanded on this idea by Hale in 1895 in a SF short story. In 1923, Hermann Oberth coined the term "space station" to describe an orbiting outpost that would serve as the starting point for flights to the Moon and Mars.

Wernher Von Braun designed a space station in 1952 that you see above from a concept by Willy Ley in his book Rockets, Missiles and Space Travel (Illustrated by Chesley Bonestell, 1949) which eventually led to George Pal's movie "Conquest of Space" (1955). In the movie onboard the large "tin doughnut" they chart and map a hurricane in Hawaii. Arthur C. Clarke predicted the use of satellites to do the same thing in 1945.

Phil K. Dick put an invention as a precursor to the Fax machine, in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. It is rather silly, actually. There was a sort of very small ‘messager rocket’ that could immediately send important documents by air to a destination. I’m sure someone else predicted the Fax machine, I just don’t know who it was. Ray Bradbury uses the name “facsimile’ as a description of a duplicating machine in the Twilight Zone episode “The Electric Grandmother.” In a great cheeseball sf movie “Flight to Mars” with Cameron Mitchell, the crew launches a similar very small messenger rocket back to earth from the manned ship, to give data and information to the control center. I’m not sure if they had the obvious foresight to do this by radio transmission in this 1950’s film.

In Ambrose Bierce’s “Moxon’s Master” (San Francisco Examiner, 1908) there is a Chess Automaton whereby a person is discovered within the machine making all the chess moves. Bierce got the idea from the actual Maelzel Automaton built in 1769 and Edgar Allan Poe’s Chess Automaton story/reportage of it, “Maelzel’s Chess Player” (p. Southern Literary Messenger, 1836). Here is a description of the actual automaton by the Museum of Hoaxes website:

Kempelen, who was a Hungarian nobleman, built the chess automaton in 1769 and then toured throughout Europe with it, exhibiting it before audiences filled with royalty and aristocrats. He typically invited audience members to challenge his automaton to a match, and these challengers invariably lost. The automaton even defeated Benjamin Franklin.

In 1790 Kempelen finally dismantled the machine and stored it away. But this was not the end of its career, because in 1805, after Kempelen had died, his family sold the machine to Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, a German university student.
Maelzel reconstructed the automaton and toured with it throughout Europe before bringing it to America in 1826. There it again entertained and fascinated audiences, while regularly beating challengers.

While it was touring America, the writer Edgar Allan Poe had a chance to watch it in action, and he wrote an article in which he tried to use strict logic to solve its mystery. He theorized that a man was hidden in the body of the turk itself. He was almost right, but not quite.

This is the explanation excerpt from The Turk, by Tom Standage:

The real secret was revealed on February 6, 1837, almost seventy years after the automaton’s creation, in a tell-all article published by the Philadelphia National Gazette Literary Register. Hidden inside the box out of which the body of the Turk emerged were full-sized men (they weren’t in the body of the turk as Poe thought). These men were usually chess champions, one of whom wrote the exposé. Among the chess masters who had served as the automaton’s hidden operators were Johann Allgaier and Aaron Alexandre.

A series of sliding panels and a rolling chair allowed the automaton’s operator to hide while the interior of the machine was being displayed. The operator then controlled the Turk by means of a ‘pantograph’ device that synchronized his arm movements with those of the wooden Turk. Magnetic chess pieces allowed him to know what pieces were being moved on the board above his head.

So the Great Chess Automaton was not sentient after all, but only a hoax. This disclosure proved its undoing. Its mystery snatched away, it was relegated to a warehouse, where a few years later, in 1854, it perished in a fire. Future generations would never again have the chance to match wits with the world’s first thinking machine. (Museum of Hoaxes: http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/ )

Now to go to a baser level, Edward D. Wood, Jr. invented “Solarmanite” or “Solamite” or "Solarmite" in “Plan Nine from Outer Space (1956 or 1959).” It is a weapon that ignites all light sources, like our Sun and all stars in the Universe and all places that receive the light. The weapon has several different names because the actors mispronounce it several times in the movie with variegations on the name. Dudley Manlove, who plays the second fiddle alien to Bunny Breckenridge in the movie, explains how the Solarmanite works by explaining a simple analogy of the sun as a Gas can and the earth is ignited by it as a match to a stream of gasoline by exploding particles of light. I found out that alien creatures knew all about gasoline cans and matches after that.

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Genre Fiction by Literary Authors

In every other genre anthology we often find SF or horror stories by edified literary authors. How often have we seen Hawthorne’s “Rappacinni’s Daughter” (1844) in a SF anthology. Or Kipling’s “With the Night Mail” (1905) or for Horror anthologies, D.H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking Horse Winner” (1926) about a little kid who rocks away like mad on a hobby horse which somehow leads to successfull betting on horses until the little kid dies, but it doesn't matter, the family is now rich. Lesser known in SF circles is E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” (1909) which I believe has actually come to pass. He wrote of a future society of people each in compartmentalized cells, complacent and flabby, subsisting on “white pap.”

The Machine Stops is a short science fiction story. It describes a world in which almost all humans have lost the ability to live on the surface of the Earth. Each individual lives in isolation in a ‘cell’, with all bodily and spiritual needs met by the omnipotent, global Machine. Most humans welcome this development, as they are skeptical and fearful of first-hand experience. People forget that humans created the Machine, and treat it as a mystical entity whose needs supersede their own. Those who do not accept the deity of the Machine are viewed as ‘unmechanical’ and are threatened with “Homelessness”. Eventually, the Machine apocalyptically collapses, and the civilization of the Machine comes to an end.

I think of folks sitting in their living room, eating junk and comfort food and watching “Law and Order” and Reality TV.

H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Colour out of Space” (1927) has often been included in past SF anthologies. Normally a writer of horror fiction, he wrote a story “The Walls of Eryx” (1936, cowritten with Kenneth J. Sterling, or in other words, Sterling paid Lovecraft to clean up and ghostwrite the story) about a ship stranded on Venus. The lone survivor finds himself trapped in an invisible maze while reptilian creatures are attacking him. Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Balloon Hoax” (1844) is considered SF. A horror story, "The Vengeance of Nitocris" (1928) was Tennessee Williams first published story and it was in Weird Tales. That was his first and last in that genre.

William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” (1930) has shown up in many an anthology, too many to count. Kafka’s novelette “The Metamorphosis” (1915) (shelves of books of literary analysis and criticism have been written about this one single short story) is considered horror, albeit surreal, as well as “In The Penal Colony.” Jack London’s novel “The Star Rover” (1915) about San Quentin inmate Darrell Standing is considered SF because it takes place within a jail cell there is a sort of astral travel to other planets to mentally escape from being severely beaten by the prison guards. Some even consider his “The Iron Heel” (1907) to be a sort of horror novel as well as a Socialist tract. Of course his "Before Adam" (1906) about a caveman got him into trouble with another writer, Stanley Waterloo who claimed that London ripped off Waterloo's 1897 novel "The Story of Ab." There were several other incidents like this for London in other works, including "The Iron Heel," where one chapter was practically lifted from an essay by Frank Norris.

London's first published short story is definitely SF and Horror both:

A Thousand Deaths" is an 1899 short story by Jack London, and is notable as his first work to be published. It has as its theme the deliberate experimentally induced death and resuscitation/resurrection of the protagonist, by a mad scientist who uses multiple scientific methods for these experiments. The plot is Freudian, inasmuch as the scientist who carries out the painful killings and resuscitation experiments is the subject's own father, whom the subject eventually succeeds in vaporizing.

McKinley Cantor’s “If the South had Won the Civil War” is an alternate history novel.

Maybe one day we will see a science fiction novel written by Danielle Steele. We do have Newt Gingrich’s “1945” alternate history novel which did not seem to be a success.

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The End of an Actor's Career = Great grade-Z Movies

It is interesting to me to see the end of great actors' careers: Two of Joan Crawford’s latter screen appearances were in “Straitjacket” (s. Robert Bloch) and lastly in “Trog” which some people think of (not me) as a big step down from her days in James M. Cain’s “Mildred Pierce.” Sherlock Holmes actor Basil Rathbone’s last two appearances were “The Autopsy of a Ghost” (Mexican) and then “Hillbillies in the Haunted House” (billed under hayseed Ferlin Husky, country western singer).

John Carradine made it a point to take any role for a paycheck, no matter how bad. He was nominated for “The Grapes of Wrath” as the rather confused preacher and ended up doing movies like “The Astro-Zombies” and “Billy the Kid vs. Dracula.” A film professor friend of mine told me once, “It is a good idea to make a movie about Billy the Kid. It is a good idea to make a film about Dracula. But it is not a good idea to make a movie about both of them in the same movie." John Carradine made all these grade-z movies with no artistic quality but was a champion of aesthetics apparently because he did artistic things--his last--he died because he never recovered from climbing the entire stairs of the Milan Cathedral to see the architecture of the massive structure.

The last movie for both J. Carrol Naish and Lon Chaney, Jr. was a Grade Z movie called "Dracula vs. Frankenstein" in 1971 directed by cult cheese/sleaze director Al Adamson (who himself was later murdered and buried in wet cement in the den of his house). For the last several years, directors knew that they had to get their scenes with Chaney done before 11 am because he would be drunk by then. I read somewhere that he had a phobia, a fear of running out of stored food (seriously).

Agnes Morehead, a member of the Mercury Theatre with Orson Welles, did a horror movie that was almost unmentionable it was so bad, and she ends up losing her head at the close of the movie. Joseph Cotton ended up in forgettable films like “Baron Blood” and “Lady Frankenstein (two decades earlier in Cotton’s acting life, Ed Wood, Jr. forced him to attend his terrible play, “The Casual Company” and he told Ed, when pressured to say something nice about it, said, “I think it will go okay...” just to get Wood off his back). Glenn Strange who often played the Frankenstein monster ended up being the bartender of the Long Branch saloon on “Gunsmoke.” To a lesser extent, George Tobias starred in a lot of films with James Cagney and ended up being Agnes Cravitz’s henpecked husband.

As a horror writer I love these Grade-Z movies, no matter how bad, but there must be some built-in rule for actors that it is inevitable that towards the end of their career that they will end up doing movies that cult Horror/SF fans like a lot (people like me who like MST3000 perhaps) but standard movie fans don’t like very much.

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Pouring Coffee in Space

In “It, the Terror from Beyond Space” (s. Jerome Bixby), early on in the movie a crewmember is cheerfully pouring steaming hot coffee into the coffee cups of the crew on a sleek cylindrical spaceship which has several ‘decks’ and there is no explanation of how gravity is explained in any way. But maybe that is good because in a lot of these old movies they make it a science lesson with every move they make (in "Destination Moon" there is a Woody Woodpecker cartoon shown to prospective big wheeler-dealers to explain how rocket propulsion works), explaining why they do this or do that, usually to some guy from Brooklyn in the crew that keeps mentioning the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Many SF movies do the same thing: “Forbidden Planet,” the redoubtable “Angry Red Planet,” “Rocketship X-M," the Flash Gordon serials, Star Trek, Lost in Space, almost any SF movie or TV show, and Star Wars. In Heinlein’s “Destination Moon” and others, like “Flight to Mars they explain about why one has to be strapped in so as 'not to float' on the nuclear-powered ship run on steam thrust. Also done in the Willy Ley inspired "Conquest of Space" (p. George Pal) but the movie goes as step further as the Earth-orbiting space station revolves and spins to create artificial gravity. It was not until “2001: A Space Odyssey” that there was an actual rotating living quarters on a ship that generated some centrifugal force to create artificial gravity, and again in the sequel, “2010.” Even in “Alien” there is no explanation for the induced gravity in the ship. In the Star Trek movies they finally explained it all with convenient Anti-Gravity devices.In H.G. Wells “The First Men in the Moon” there is a “Cavorite” substance which works the same way.

In many spaceships in older movies there is no space below to account for the mechanics that make the ship run. If you ever look at a V-2 rocket diagram you’ll see Werner Von Braun’s genius apparatus that made it go. Look what it took for the Apollo missions. In very ‘cheap’ movies you’ll see the gangplank to get into the ship is at the very bottom of the ship. In Jules Verne’s “From the Earth to the Moon” the ship is just a large bullet but we realize that shooting a large manned projectile is essentially “Spam in a Can” to anyone within the projectile.

In James Blish’s novels he came up with this:

SpinDizzy: A device that made use of a relationship between electron spin, electromagnetism and gravity allowed any object to leave the Earth's surface.

Famed Astounding Editor John W. Campbell, Jr was big on the Dean Drive, which did not work. He was obviously a legend as an SF editor. He often talked about Scientology and Psionics as well.

The Dean Drive: The Dean drive is a device intended to be a reactionless thruster that was invented by Norman L. Dean. Dean claimed that it was able to generate a uni-directional force, in violation of Newton's Third Law of Motion. Such a violation is generally considered to be impossible in Physics. While it is theoretically possible for a mass that moves in one direction to have its momentum balanced by something other than a reaction mass (e.g. see Nuclear photonic rocket), there is no known theoretical mechanism for a mass to be moved one way while nothing moves the other way, besides the Woodward effect. A reactionless thruster would have many practical applications, including the propulsion of spacecraft.
According to Dean, his drive is a reactionless thruster, and his models were able to demonstrate this effect. He received two patents for related devices that are known to be unable to generate a uni-directional force, but he occasionally demonstrated devices that were different. Dean's claims of reactionless thrust generation have subsequently been shown to be in error; the thrust generated is understood to be reliant on friction with the surface on which the device is resting. (wikipedia)

Sidenote: I read that Phil Dick sent him a lot of stories but that Campbell thought that PKD was ‘insane,’ just plain crazy. That is, his stories were so far-fetched that he did not understand them. So he never bought anything by PKD.

I wrote a short story about twenty years ago called "Jimbob Goes to Mars" which essentially took from Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" about how one of the Joad boys had 'a certain way of knowin' about engines and trucks and could just fix 'em'. I just applied that to rockets and had pimple-faced Jim-bob Johnson offworld on Io applying the courses of a Dr. Biddle, etc.

I've also left out 99 percent of what is left to talk about propulsion in literature or reality, star drives or ion drives or fusion drives. When I was a kid in all our Encyclopedias they had diagrams of potential moon shots and potential Mars shots and how we would get there. I never did outgrow the sense of wonder about the way we could get to a destination in space. I remember reading books on how to build a Moonbase, whether to dig out a vast pit on the surface and cover it, hence the base is completed. When I was a kid I realized while watching enough space launches that certain things in science fiction movies were taken for granted and there is not much verisimitude. I just know that Nasa astronauts don't talk much about the Brooklyn Dodgers while inflight.

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The Merits of Cheesy SF Movies

I heard that H.G. Wells had given Eisenstein the rights to his book, War of the Worlds, and then Paramount got them, and to this day, George Pal’s version is still the best in my opinion. Sir Cedric Hardwicke’s narration of the famous first few sentences from the book is chilling.

H.G. Wells wrote the script for “Things to Come” loosely based on his 1933 book, and it was directed by William Cameron Menzies with Hardwicke, Ralph Richardson and Raymond Massey. Menzies’ production set design for the silent “Thief of Baghdad” was incredible.

But what about the cheesier movies? There are zillions of them. Ed Wood’s “Plan 9 from Outer Space,” or “Zontar, the Thing from Venus,” the Commander Cody movie “Zombies of the Stratosphere” (Republic, 1952) with an unknown star named Leonard Nimoy, and numerous others. If you get a copy of The Psychotronic Dictionary you’ll get an insulin rush of descriptions of incredibly bizarre or bad movies. In the movie “Zontar” (d. Larry Buchanan), the control room system for the launching of the large rocket almost appears to be behind the lounge bar in the den of someone’s house. Zontar, the monster appears to be a cross between a Wookie and a Hi/Lo Shag Carpet. In “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes” (1978) there is an actual helicopter used in the film that crashes and was left in as part of the movie. A friend of mine was an extra in the final scene in a football stadium in San Diego when a huge crowd runs across the field all the while stomping on an extraordinary amount of tomatoes. In “The Giant Spider Invasion” it appears a Volkswagen Beetle is dressed up as a huge fuzzy spider. It stars Alan Hale, Jr. (“Gilligan’s Island”) and his sister, Barbara Hale (“Perry Mason”), whose dad Alan Hale, Sr. was Porthos in the silent “Three Musketeers.”

To read about Edward D. Wood you can read “Nightmare of Ecstasy” by Rudolph Grey. His life has been documented more than most legit filmmakers, egregiously so. When he and his wife were evicted for the last time in a slum apartment in North Hollywood, the landlords threw all his scripts, book mss and mementos in the dumpster. He died a bit later in late 1978.

I don’t know when I realized the soothing quality of watching cheesy movies. There is something fun about watching old SF movies where the ships are shaped like pointed, sleek cylinders with no regard for trying to explain the semblance of gravity within the ship. It is pure bliss. Especially if you put the TV on as background ‘noise’ while you are trying to write your latest manuscript.

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HPL in Bell Bottomed Pants

I saw a photo of the SF editor Hugo Gernsback wearing sixties Bell Bottom pants (b. Luxembourg 1884- d. New York 1967). when he was at a science fiction convention con in or around 1967. He is known famously or infamously for starting the first Science Fiction (Scientification) magazine AMAZING STORIES back in 1926, which led to other magazines and science fiction writers published within those magazines.

I read in an article that Hugo Gernsback paid his writers “promptly upon lawsuit.” That is he paid authors for their stories only when he was sued by them.

I have always been interested in timelines of authors and/or composers. Richard Strauss, the famed German composer was born in 1864 and lived all the way to 1949. The great conductor, Arturo Toscanini was born in 1867, circa post Civil War, and lived to 1957 when he used to watch wrestling matches on television in his spare time when he wasn’t conducting the Symphony of the Air. It is hard to imagine he was born one year after the Italian Opera composer Rossini died (b. 1792- d. 1868, composer of “The William Tell Overture” or the Theme from “The Lone Ranger”, if you will) and Toscanini died the year they lauched Sputnik (Oct 4, 1957). Toscanini was born 40 years after Beethoven died (b. 1770 - d. 1827), and was 19 years old when Franz Liszt died (b. 1811- d. 1886), who was the first Rock Star of the classical world.

HG Wells was born in 1866 and lived to see the Atomic Bombs used on Japan and he died the next year in 1946.This is obviously a blog listing about not much at all, but I think about things like this once in a while.

I always wonder what would have happened if HP Lovecraft had lived past the late 30’s all the way to say, 1970 or even 1980 so. I guess he would have been seen at conventions wearing bell bottoms as well.

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Middle C on the piano

On a wholly obtuse subject, I basically obtained a piano degree (the full credits worth) in piano performance years ago and have always heard that for every small instructor position at a small college there are hundreds if not thousands of applicants of brilliant pianists with masters degrees and PhD's vying for that one position. I mean people who could play concertos, you name it. And there are some pop artists today that could not even pick out Middle C on a piano if their life depended on it.
Just a thought.

I remember when I was 16 and had just memorized Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. I was pretty happy. I discovered much more difficult stuff in college, like Rachmaninoff's 2nd Piano Concerto. Then I wrote my first novel, Rachmaninoff's Ghost. It did not get published until twenty years later, after several other books had been published.

Rachmaninoff was this extremely melancholic composer with a Russian short hairstyle, (they called it 'convict' for some reason) who composed the absolutely saddest 'heart on your sleeve', lachrymose compositions. He wrote a symphonic poem called "Isle of the Dead" based on the City of Dis or Hades, from a painting by a famous German expressionist artist named Arnold Bocklin. This painting literally shows a portrait landscape of hell itself. He later composed a "Vespers" or solemn choral piece based on Edgar Allan Poe's "The Bell's". I mean, Rachmaninoff was doing some interesting things. He was also considered one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century. He was born in 1873, died 1943.

One of my music professors had met him (considered the greatest orchestral trumpet player in the entire world a few years later) in 1939 at a famous concert, and shook his hand. I later put that and my music school and some semi-versions of my friends and professors loosely into the plot.

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Derelicts in Literature

My pseudo-blog revisited: Here are some interesting tidbits. Malcolm Lowry had to drink out of a urinal pot while housed in a Mexican jail. Kerouac was considered Dementia Praecox (schizophrenic). In his later years he was a shut in that watched Beverly Hillbillies episodes with a bottle of whiskey next to his lazyboy chair. Truman Capote would check himself into a sanitarium after he would finish a novel or screenplay. Philosopher/Math genius John Stuart Mill kept his waste in little jars, sealed.

Why am I writing this?I guess I am fighting at not being “writer besotted”. That is, namedropping authors, being too fascinated with author’s eccentricities than one should. How they dealt with life as it came at them.The anomaly has always fascinated me: Nobel laureates for Literature (Hemingway, Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, a non-Laureate named Scott Fitzgerald for starters -- all extreme alcoholics) who got the dry heaves when they went without alcohol for more than 48 hours. Faulkner desperately lining his coatpockets with bottles during Prohibition when he lived in a little apartment in the French Quarter in New Orleans and wondering how he could last without always have a bottle of whiskey lying around. Jim Thompson used to go to a flophouse in New York City across from his publisher’s building and for a few months fuel himself on alcohol and cigarettes and then when he finished the novel in question, fall into a great delirium of depression.

It smacks of romanticism in literature, almost as if Thompson was in a paradise of depression, the way I’ve heard it. Mostly when writers who drank a good bit before there was Prozac and when the first crude tranquilizers weren’t even around until the 1920’s from what I’ve heard, their form of medication was liquor.Why is any of this interesting to me, personally? Because there is this relationship between some writers who were almost literally bums, that is, living a squalid lifestyle, some of them constantly roaring drunk, and their output, which some of it was and is considered great.

Louisiana, especially around New Orleans, is a fat, drunken state. It is know for the expression "Laissez Bon Temps Roule', "Let the Good Times Roll." The Mardi Gras is here. We've had more crooked politicians than a banana republic. Our state law is still based on the Napoleonic Code. And I've met some strange people in this place. I’ve been to a bar in Sun, Louisiana where a lot of the biker patrons were packing heat. Most amusing gentlemen. I’ve been to a place in Mississippi where if you found a dead raccoon in the road you could trade it in for a pint of whiskey in the Bottoms of Franklin County.I’ve worked as a laborer during college summers at refineries like the massive Exxon refinery where all literally half the plant was drunk or stoned. So I wrote about it in my novel SKIMMING THE GUMBO NUCLEAR and tried to insert every apocryphal myth and legend about Louisiana culture within it. I've had a guy come after me with a knife once. I've met maniacal offshore roustabouts in Lafayette who spent their entire month's pay in one night, buying drinks for crowds of people.

I guess all I really care about is, how could some of these authors, considered social misfits, derelicts, ended up turning out very interesting books. Why were the good citizens and bigshot businessmen of Cross Plains, Texas ragging Two-Gun Bob Howard about getting a real job instead of writing when he was making more money then most of them, bankers and businessmen alike.Maybe it does not matter. I’m sure there were just as many authors who turned out great fiction and did not get into wild insane adventures. Maybe it really doesn’t matter, just the actual prose itself on its own.But if the prose was already considered good writing on its own then why not find out about the author as well…

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To Blog or Not to Blog

I don’t have a blog yet because I just refer people to far more interesting pre-internet blogs such as Jean Cocteau’s Diaries or the famous 20th century song-cyclist Ned Rorem’s Paris Diaries. Andy Warhol’s diaries published after his death were simply transcribed from tape recordings because he was too lazy to write down his musings (gossip) apparently.

I may consider a blog or simply send out scintillating remnants of bon mots via bulletins, far less worthy than the likes of those chronicled by Auden and Cronenberger, such as Dorothy Parker. I feel I have nothing much to say on a daily basis worthy of being entrapped in an internet audit stamp on the electronic sprawl.Here is just a trial balloon bulletin.

In 1988, I wrote a science fiction novel called MOVIETONE MARS, which was pre-internet, and I predicted that in the future everyone would be his/her own semi-celebrity and have his/her own 15 minute television show. With the advent of reality television shows, blogs, Myspace, Facebook, internet webcams and Youtube, there may be something to it.

I have a nondescript life with as much excitement as the the Elephant Man subsisting on potatoes in the carnival, living here in the wondrous peasant state of Louisiana, so I do not have much to describe daily living on a blog diary. I’ve written voluminous correspondence pre-internet, about 12 thickly bound volumes of single space epistolary discourse that would make Howard Lovecraft nod slightly with agreement as he reaches for his A & P Spagetti. So I’m sending this much the way candidates now set up exploratory committees to see if they will run for office or whether they have stomach gas. My new website URL is http://www.mfkorn. com

Thanks