MF Korn Louisiana Melancholic

Edison's Hired Movie Thugs, Buffalo Bill as First Movie Star and Other Trivia

2011-02-28T07:37:00.000-08:00

From the very start, the advent of cinema had created a byproduct, that of creating famous entities. Ages before Eastern Syndicate writers like Walter Winchell could toy with an actor's fame, the very existence of an audience watching a strip of celluloid through a projector created personas. Actually, Buffalo Bill was considered the first movie star from the filming of his Wild West Show which featured Buffalo Bill recreating "getting his first scalp", etc. Audiences got to see silent footage in theatres of him on his trick horse in the Show where, before movies existed once included Sitting Bull.

In those days Thomas Edison hired his 'thugs' to chase down those who were trying to trying to start movie companies and were using his patent for the moving picture machine and not paying his company. These people learned that if they ran to California that perhaps Edison’s thugs were too far away to do anything to them.

Speaking of Buffalo Bill's travelling show onscreen and cowboys, Wyatt Earp decided to actually move to Hollywood. After several money-making ventures in New York City and elsewhere, and even in New Orleans running the lottery (Louisiana was notorious for crooked Lotteries), he lived in Hollywood until he died there in 1929. His friend, silent star Tom Mix and others were at his funeral. On another note, untrained actor Harry Houdini was showcased in several films as a leading man.

This blog entry is just a series of various trivia from me, an avowed non-expert, about Hollywood since the Oscars were just on last night. Mostly, this is just a series of semi-strange trivia. By the way, the apocryphal story about Charles Manson auditioning for “The Monkees” tv show is untrue – Manson was locked up in jail for various small crimes at the time the auditions took place.

The lure of being in the movies was so great in the beginning that signs had to be put up by companies advising the droves of anxious people to go home and not attempt to audition. Later, an actress named Peggy Entwistle arrived from back East to audition and after utter failure after failure, jumped to her death off the Hollywood sign, thus inadvertently creating some notoriety.

It is common knowledge that several writers arrived in Los Angeles for work as well. The list is lengthy but some interesting stories came out of the eccentricities of some of them. Raymond Chandler used to wear white gloves in the heat and once while taking a bath drunkenly shot his revolver into the ceiling several times before he got out of the tub. Aldous Huxley on one of his first experimental acid trips, while walking down a major thoroughfare in Hollywood, stumbled into a drugstore and marveled at various things there, eventually to the magazine rack, touching each magazine. Again, these are a series of jumbled strange facts.

British writer Evelyn Waugh used his Hollywood experience to write a very slim book “The Loved One” about the Cemetery business in Hollywood, the result of which became a cult film. James Agee, nearly drinking himself to death, was just a movie reviewer. He parlayed just writing reviews into writing great scripts like the Charles Laughton-directed “The Night of the Hunter” based on Davis Grubb’s work.

Faulkner was woefully underpaid as a writer for Warner Brothers. When he left the movie business to get back to writing his own novels, someone at the studio found several empty whiskey bottles in his desk and a writing tablet filled with the line “Boy meets Girl” written 500 times in his tiny handwriting. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda had to deal with each other when she was still in Hollywood with him. Once, he and Zelda were arguing while playing tennis together while a movie person watched. After every point played Zelda took off an item of clothing until none were left.

Hemingway let others write screenplays of his work. But he visited Hollywood a few times. Once, on the MGM lot with no real business dealings to do there at that time, while roaring drunk he burst into Louis B. Mayer’s office for no reason and laughingly called Mayer very offensive slurs, one after another. A very angry Mayer yelled at his security guards to “get this (expletive deleted) off the lot” and they did.

Wannabe writer Ed Wood and his wife lived in a slum building on Yucca street in North Hollywood (where Aldo Ray and John Agar used to visit to drink with Wood) and when Wood and his wife weren’t drunkenly fighting (he knocked her out twice during their marriage, they fought terribly) she used to give some of his penned adult books to the owner of a local liquor stand to help pay for alcohol.

Earlier in Hollywood history, Samuel Goldwyn tried to recruit H. G. Wells (he did pen “Things to Come” for William Cameron Menzies but this is apart from Goldwyn), George Bernard Shaw and dozens of others but most declined even though the money was excellent at the time. This was after authors could claim movie rights to his/her written works and Hollywood blindly stole from every famous writer there was, dead or alive.

Disappearing in a Public Library

2010-09-03T13:03:00.000-07:00

Before I discovered the joy of being stunned by some plot twist while reading a PKD novel and subsequently ransacking all the used bookstores for PKD books(and H.E. back then), I grew up going to the Mid City Library and discovered treasures like “Journey to the Mushroom Planet,” “Secret of the Marauder Satellite,” all the RAH Juveniles like "Have Spacesuit Will Travel," DAW's “Secret of the Ninth Planet.” I kept graduating to other things back them, like Groff Conklin SF anthologies and Orbit anthos. I found those Derleth anthologies like “A Porthole to Eternity” and onward to Bradbury, Asimov and Silverberg. I can almost remember being there between the stacks, a skinny kid stumbling upon Arthur Clarke and various horror anthologies and anxiously checking them out.

The reason I am writing this is because a friend of mine’s mom just passed on and he was a good friend that introduced me to EE Doc Smith’s “Skylark of Space” and numerous other authors. Another childhood friend introduced me to Analog after I had discovered some old pulps of Edmond Hamilton, etc. My friend and I tried to write a short story to send to Analog at the ripe age of 11 or so, but we never finished it.

I discovered the “X Minus One” radio dramas and “Dimension X” as well, and they enhanced my sense of wonder. I was literally wandering around in a daze of wonder about what could be and what would be. I found a lot of Andre Norton novels at the library, as well as later, Kate Wilhelm and LeGuin. I went through all of my big brother's SF anthologies. I found out about Van Vogt who to me was the ancient precursor to PKD and way ahead of his time.

I later met several authors at Cons. I remember meeting Ray Bradbury and it was rather spoiled by some psycho in the line in front of me pulling a bejeweled massive sword from a duffel bag and wielding it around. I was working night shifts as a computer operator so when I met Mr. Bradbury I was in a disheveled appearance with no sleep. I told him I wrote a couple of novels and had read every word he had written many times.

I remember the Tom Swift books which I discovered, were under the house name of Victor Appleton (I didn’t know what a house name was). I started collecting the original Swift books which are now antiques. In the 7th grade (at age ten) the English teacher asked us down each row what we wanted to do when we were grown. I said, "I want to invent the first Star Drive." Whimsy, indeed.

I guess I am writing this as a paean to my youth and to some childhood friends that introduced me to comic books and SF and Horror.

www.mfkorn.com

HPL, Houdini's Ghostwriter

2010-03-16T07:43:00.000-07:00

Putting on an HPL hat for a second:

If you peruse through the five volumes of "The Selected Lettres of H. P. Lovecraft" or the two bios, you may be interested to know that Lovecraft was contacted by Houdini to ghostwrite some tales for him for Weird Tales. Here, in a letter to Frank Belknap Long, to whom Stephen King's "Danse Macabre" was dedicated:

Lovecraft writes: "(Baird) will introduce a column (in "Weird Tales") by the magician Houdini..." (Feb 7th, 1924). Here again on 14 Feb, 1924 to Frank Belknap Long:

"...Yes, Child, Weird Tales is certainly showin' a lot of work at your aged Grandsire! Entire new job-to rewrite a strange narrative which the magician Houdini related orally to Henneberger; a narrative to be amplified and formulated, and to appear as a collaborated product-'By Houdini and H.P. Lovecraft'."

Here is Lovecraft, sort of badmouthing Houdini: "He's supremely egotistical, as one can see at a glance. The more latitude Houdini allows me, the better yarn I can evolve- I’m asking Henneberger to get me as much as possible from the versatile showman."

The tale was "Imprisoned With the Pharoahs" and is set in Cairo, in a 'singular subterranean place betwixt the Sphinx and the second pyramid (Campbell's Tomb)'.

A while later Lovecraft paid a visit to Houdini in his apartment in New York, and enjoyed himself immensely. Later, someone hit Houdini in the stomach with a baseball bat.

I have a typed letter from Frank Belknap Long to someone towards the end of Long’s life. He was so impoverished they had to take up a collection for his burial.

www.mfkorn.com

Here are Recordings of Robert Browning's voice, Tennyson's and others' around 1889

2009-12-22T09:13:00.000-08:00

A long time ago, I wrote a minor story about a guy that walks into a curio shoppe looking for some rare recordings of Johannes Brahms. Piano rolls, what have you. At the end of the story, the supernatural shopkeeper shows him a Polaroid of Caesar Augustus while orating. Well, it turns out that there really is a recording of him from 1893, playing the piano, and possibly speaking. I never would have dreamed there is a recording of Robert Browning speaking, nor Tennyson. People still argue to this day about whether the recording of Oscar Wilde speaking is real or not. See below:

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Robert Browning (1889 Edison Recording)
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Alfred, Lord Tennyson speaking, around 1890
Some notes on this recording, above:
It is interesting to note that the Edison phonograph on which this cylinder was made was taken to Tennyson's home on the Isle of Wight in 1890 by Staedtler, an assistant of Col George Gouraud, Edison's British agent, and left there for the poet to make a number of further cylinders, several of which survive.

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Oscar Wilde supposedly recites from “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” around 1900, but it is possibly a fake recording-others insist it is real (people are still arguing about it on Youtube in the comments):

Possible recording of Oscar Wilde

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Arthur Conan Doyle : Arthur Conan Doyle talking about his invention of Sherlock Holmes, filmed for about 9 minutes
The filming of him was shot in 1928.

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The voices of Tchaikovsky and Anton Rubenstein (1890), Tchaikovsky died three years later: Tchaikovsky speaking

Here is a translation of the conversation:
Translation >> A. Rubinstein: What a wonderful thing [the phonograph].
J. Block: Finally.
E. Lawrowskaja: A disgusting...how he dares slyly to name me.
W. Safonov : (Sings a scale incorrectly).
P. Tchaikovsky: This trill could be better.
E. Lawrowskaja: (sings).
P. Tchaikovsky: Block is good, but Edison is even better.
E. Lawrowskaja: (sings) A-o, a-o.
W. Safonow: (In German) Peter Jurgenson in Moskau.
P. Tchaikovsky: Who just spoke? It seems to have been Safonow. (Whistles)

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Johannes Brahms (from 1889):
Brahms playing piano and possibly speaking

Here are some comments from various listeners on YouTube about this Brahms recording:

Aimiklingsor93 (1 month ago) Show Hide
0
There is a DVD on which one can hear Brahms' voice. He speaks in English and introduces himself: "I am Doctor Brahms, Johannes Brahms"
Very short but quite moving......
pianiplunker (3 weeks ago) Show Hide
+1
That recording is of Brahms playing a snippit of his Hungarian dance #1. Most scholars agree it is not Brahms himself speaking but the announcer saying:
house of Herr Doctor Fellinger, I have Dr. Brahms,Johannes Brahms.

Still I'd rather have Brahms playing piano than talking.

leonengard (4 days ago) Show Hide
0
Reply
I'm trying to listen something in german, but I just hear something like "I have Doctor Brahms, Johannes Brahms" and with a clear american accent.
I know I'm wrong, but that's what I hear :)
Anyway, I'm happy because I can listen quite well the hungarian dance. It is a treasure to my ears. And I hear it better in the first version.
Thanks for posting.
davidgee100 (3 weeks ago) Show Hide
0
Reply
Can we hear energy and emotional complexity and fanfare in this playing? Does this playing shake up the house?
castromonteiro (1 month ago) Show Hide
+4
Reply
Well, it was not Brahms's voice. But I don't care, since listening to Brahms himself playing his compositions at the piano is quite enough for me ;-)
TheAspenTom (1 month ago) Show Hide
+2
Reply
There was an analysis of this recording at Stanford Univ. The jist: it wasn't Brahms or Felinger speaking, although it was at Felinger's house. It was likely Theo Wangemann, a representative from Edison, introducing Brahms: "Dezember Achtzehnhundertneununachtzig. Haus von Herrn Doktor Fellinger, bei mir ist Doktor Brahms, Johannes Brahms." The researchers cleared up some preliminary noise before the first easily audible word, "Haus" which was the date: December 1889.
voolare (1 month ago) Show Hide
+1

Reply
It's not Brahms' voice here. this is Dr Felinger saying "I have Dr Brahms" not "I am". It's in German! Brahms is at the piano in the background.
FranzFerencLiszt (1 month ago) Show Hide
+1

Reply
@voolare
Yep. It's also quite strange that he says "I I am DOCTOR Brahms, Johannes Brahms". I'm Johannes Brahms. full stop.

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And for the believe it or not Dept, Now, for the first known recording of a human voice from 1860:

The first known recording of a human voice, from April 9th, 1860. (Phonautograph Etching) : On 9th March 2008, this "ethereal" 10 second clip of a woman singing the French folk song "Au Clair de la Lune", was played for the first time in 150 years. It is currently thought to be the oldest...

A woman singing "Clair de Lune", 1860

If this is true, we could have had a recording of Abraham Lincoln’s voice(in Sandburg's LINCOLN, it is accounted that Lincoln had a rather shrill voice), and countless others. If Poe would have lived a little longer we would have his voice on a wax cylinder.

www.mfkorn.com

A Discovery of an Ancient Louisiana Cajun Tome From 1915

2009-12-04T13:38:00.000-08:00

When I was writing one of my novels about Louisiana, a couple of friends (Hal Odom and Keith Odom) and I came up with some Superstitions of Cajun culture and some Ailments and Remedies.In the novel someone finds a dusty Cajun Monograph in a parish library in Cutoff, Louisiana. The remedies and superstitions are said to be based on transcripts from an ageless Cajun woman and that the book was privately published. No Library of Congress number. Dated 1915:

OLD MAWMAW JENKINS' CAJUN SUPERSTITIONS
It’s bad luck to sit cross-legged in a funeral home.
It’s bad luck to see a 3-toed cat.
If you find a bird egg under a rose bush, that means you gonna lose your wheelbarrow.
If you drop an egg, and it’s rotten, that means your husband’s runnin’ round behind your back.
If you have a twinge in your back, that means your cow’s milk gonna curdle.
If you’re goin’ down to the river to go fishin’, and you see a crawfish hole, walk round it three times or else you won’t catch any fish.
Always leave a peach pit in the corn crib to keep away the weevils.
Don’t ever spend a two-dollar bill on April Fool’s Day: if you do, you’ll lose a tooth the next day.
If a cow moo at midnight, that means the corn gonna rot in the husk.
If you hit a dog on the highway, get one of his teeth and wear it around your neck to keep away the Haints.
If you find a nickel under the kitchen table, it means that company comin’.
If the moon got a ring around it on your birthday, that mean you gonna get married that year.
If you find a cutworm on a cucumber, it means that a fox gonna get in the henhouse.
If you step on a hoe handle, it means somebody tryin’ to steal your money.
If your plum jelly ruin, it means that you gonna lose a gold tooth fillin’.
If you fall out of bed at night, that means one of your children gonna die before you.
If you see a shootin’ star on a night with the full moon, it means that one of your cows gonna catch the bloat.
If one of your chickens lay a black egg, it means that somebody gonna catch the pink eye.
It is bad luck to lay down on a pile a’ corn husks.
Never go out of the house backwards or you’ll fall down before you get back.
If a bluejay lights on your clothesline, then a herrycane comin’ thru next season.
If you find a mockin’ bird feather on the sidewalk, pick it up and you’ll get a present from your next door neighbor.
When an armadillo dig in your yard, that means the road gonna wash out.
The only way to get rid o’ the Haints is to spin around three times and sleep on a bed of potato peels in a room with a cracked mirror.
If you get a tick on you, that means somebody tryin’ to mooch your money.
To keep the haints out of your bedroom, wear a horseshoe ‘roun’ your neck an’ sleep with your feet hangin’ over the foot of the bed, wrapped in burlap soaked in goat milk.
When you catch a chicken, that means the roof gonna leak next time it rain.
When you see three one-eyed cats in a row at night, that means one of your pigs gonna get the scours next week.
To keep away bad luck, tack a wishbone over your fireplace.
If you cut open a catfish and find a bottlecap, that means your husband hittin’ the booze.
If a guinea hen moult on your porch, the foundations are et up by termites.
If you find a grey hair in your hairbrush, it means your teeth are gettin’ wobbly.
A chicken foot kept in a shoebox under the sink keep the drain from cloggin’.
If a bullfrog jump up on your back stoop, it means you gonna get the rheumatizz.
It’s bad luck to wade thru a swamp carryin’ a feed sack.
If somebody put a bad thought on you, put a chicken leg in a glass of iced tea and set it in the kitchen windowsill for 3 days, to put the bad thought back on him.
If you get the Booga Bear in the woods, set out a foot-tub fulla corn meal and watermelon rinds, and that’ll get rid’a him.
If you sneeze at the same time lightnin’ strike, it means you gonna wake up with a backache.
If the river flood and wash up a stump that look like a rooster, then your chickens gonna lose all their feathers.
If you stumble on a oak tree root, it means your mule is about to catch worms.
When the woodpecker pecks on the barn after a heavy rain, that means the rat’s in the potato bin.
If you accidentally pick a red blackberry, that means your cat is gonna have a dead kitten.
When a snappin’ turtle pokes his head out the pond, that means the fish’ is gonna nibble your worm off the hook without bitin’.
If you see a one-eyed cat, that means you gonna lose some money.
If you see a coon’s tracks runnin’ by a oak tree, you gonna break a axe handle next time you chop firewood.
If you get corns on your toes, that means you gonna get a bad watermelon.
If you swaller wrong, that means your dawg gonna dig up a mole in the backyard.
If you get goose bumps at the stroke of twelve, that means a haint is watchin’ you.
If a cow eats up your rosebushes, then a weasel gonna eat up your children, cher.
If your dog catch a catfish on your birthday, that means your corn crop gonna be real good dis year.
If a mule gets a gimpy leg, that means your well ‘bout to run dry.
If a rooster loses all his feathers, that means the preacher gonna come over for dinner.
If a pine tree fall on your fence, that means a polecat sleepin’ in your toolshed.
If you swallow a peach pit, that means you got a rat eatin’ your hay.
If you stumble on a tree limb after dark when there ain’t no moon, that means the dam gonna wash out next time it rain.
If you get a rock in your shoe, that means you gonna get the mullygrubs next day.
If you find a silverfish in your bedsheets, that means you gonna lose your false teeth that night.
If a garden slug get up on your window, that means your stockin’s got a run in ‘em.
If you pass the cemetery after midnight, you’ll get the Icy Jaints if you don’t pour some corn meal in your shoes the next day.
If somebody put a bad thought on you, put a banana peel under the doormat and hang a mockin’bird nest over the doorway.
If somebody put a bad thought on you, walk backwards thru a stream flowin’ south with a dead chicken on your back.
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OLD MAWMAW JENKINS' CAJUN AILMENTS & REMEDIES
(SENECIS MATRIS JENKINS PHARMACOPIA)

The Mullygrubs
(Description: General lethargy, minor aches and pains)
Remedy: Regular doses of black-strap molasses with a touch of turpentine.

The Bug
(Minor ailment like the flu)
Sit on a hot water bottle and drink peach liquor with just a smidgion of smellin’ salts

Groans in your bones
(Fatigue, small aches and pains caused by cold days)
A glass of buttermilk with a dash of Worchestershire sauce and a pinch of parsley

Growls in your bowels
(Bowel trouble)
Suck on a sassafras root.

Shiver in your liver/liverstones
(Abdominal pain)
Suck on sugar cubes, take regular doses of lime extract with iodine.

The Bloat
(Unexplainable swelling; caught from cows)
Eat a piece of octagon soap, lie down with ya feet propped up and spit up every hour.

Puffy eyes
(Irritation of eyes caused from lack of sleep)
Eat suet; sprinkle bird seed on cereal; wear bird feathers in shoes; sleep with raw chicken wing in pillowcase.

Sty in Eye
(Sore, bump on eyelid)
Apply wet tomato leaf.

Corns, bunions
(Big bobo on your big toe)
Soak feet in hot jello water, keep feet in till it gels, heat up again, let it gen again; eat jello; or soak feet in rainwater and pigs’ blood.

Groans in your bones
(Fatigue: small aches and pains caused by cold days)
Stand backwards in front of fireplace; yell every five minutes.

Bird foot
(Toes turnin’ in like a bird’s, get the scaleyfoot)
Accompanying symptom: “Bird Tongue”—caught from eating uncooked partridge.

Baldness
Wear birdnest on head; rub liniment into baldspot.

Wobbly spine-
(Back cooches out in every direction)
Remedy: wear barrel hoop with a two-by-four board.

Hickey
(Bruise, sore, bug bite)
Mustard plaster with lots of iodine.

The Piles
(Hemorroids, Trouble down below)
Take Johnson’s Liver Tonic, apply self-rising flour and tallow poultice.

Knock knees
(Self-explanatory)
Plaster of paris splints.

Haints in joints
(Creaky bones)
Wear garlic around neck.

Swoll ankles
(Self explanatory)
Soak feet in clabbored milk and tomato juice.

Twinge in back
(Back pain)
Massage with rubbin alcohol; take bath with lye soap.

Hip popped out of socket
(Self-explanatory)
Wear truss and apply a pork fat compress.

Rheumatizz
(Rheumatism)
Take a bath in hot chicken broth, sleep with a dog, and wear mothballs in your hairnet.

The Vapors
(Vertigo)
Sleep with an onion under your pillow; suck on a rag soaked in vinegar.

The Wheeze
(Phlegm in throat or lungs)
Boil apples and turnip greens, sniff the steam from the broth.

Cauliflower Ear
(Earache)
Wear a sqirrel’s tail to block ear passages; put in vick salve drops.

Lockjaw
(Self-explanatory)
Eat licorice pills and sleep in the bathtub.

The Croup
(Bad cough and cold, fever)
Drink honey with bacon fat, or put a yam in a vaporizer and sleep with the vaporizer on all night; then you eat the yam in the morning.

Lizard Hand
(Hand looks like a lizard’s)
Tape fingers to board, run hands up and down a mule’s back twice a day, sleep wit hand in de breadbox, put lemon peels between fingers and only remove when they turn green, apply mercur'comb.

Crow Leg
(Hop on one leg)
Wear ace bandage dipped in egg batter, sleep with leg propped up in a sack a’ bird seed; every mornin’ and before you go to bed, drink a glass a’ buttermilk and vinegar, thru a paper straw.

Churny Stomach
(Stomach doin flip flops)
Persimmon milk shake with raw egg and alka seltzer.

Tingly Tongue
(Tongue falls asleep or tongue too long)
Pour Formula 44 cough syrup and molasses on a biscuit, eat biscuit, wash it down with a mixture of buttermilk and pine sap. Also wear a piece of freezer tape on your tongue.

Elbow Rot
(Advanced rheumatizz in elbow)
Soak elbow in a bowl of Noxema and Caladryl, then wrap elbow in a piece of linoleum with pecan shells in it.

Goose Lips
(Lips hard and yellow)
Wear two strips of raw bacon on lips, gargle with tomato soup and pencil shavin’s.

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A lot of people believe everyone in Louisiana lives in a swamp and talks with a cajun accent. I don't live in Acadiana(the Cajun portion of the state) and have no accent. But the food down here is the best, from Red Beans and Rice to Jambalaya to Gumbo. My novel where the above made up "Remedies" or "Les Traiteurs" are located is out of print so I thought I would post the entry. Plus, the Saints are 11 and 0 right now.

www.mfkorn.com

A Trip to Boggy Creek in Texarkana, Arkansas

2009-06-17T13:53:00.001-07:00

A friend of mine named Hal I went to high school with is a lawyer in Shreveport, Louisiana, and he and I and his little brother and one other guy wanted to see what the real Boggy Creek was in Arkansas, infamous from the film “Legend of Boggy Creek” and “Return to Boggy Creek.” Twenty years ago we were all in Shreveport at the time so it wouldn’t be that far of a trip into Arkansas to see it. We took a van there and I worked nights as a computer operator down in Baton Rouge so I was on a different time schedule at the time, just up there for a visit. There apparently really was a Boggy Creek there, as a sort of apocryphal legend. We were not sure if we would see a southern Bigfoot but the creek was really there. We drove up there and got to Texarkana, Arkansas.

It also happened to be near the birthplace of famed Ragtime composer Scott Joplin (1867-1917). My friend Hal and I both played a lot of piano(I grew up playing ragtime myself and ended up going to music school in Piano Performance) and we wanted to see any mention of Joplin, any historical markers that might be in town. We found a large mural painted in the middle of town against a building commemorating Scott Joplin. We went around the corner and there was an old wooden building and there was an historical marker there stating that that place was the Elementary school of Scott Joplin.

Now that that was complete, we all drove onward. I mentioned to the guys that in both movies that Boggy Creek was a very large river. One of us said that he heard that the legend of this monster was to scare locals and was really believed in certain locales of Arkansas gentry. We drove to a small store to get something to eat, and we all bought chips, candy bars, drinks. Everything we bought there was rotted and fetid. I kept wondering why the store owners seemed so excited that we were buying their stuff.

Then we get to a certain point in the highway. There is a sign that says “Boggy Creek.” We parked the van. We got out. It was a veritable trickle of a creek. You could literally jump over this creek with one hop. Maybe we had gotten so far north that we had gotten towards the source of the creek. There was no sighting of the monster either.

In Louisiana heading into Mississippi there is a swamp called Honey Island. They have a legend there about an actual boggy creek type monster. There is a Honey Island Swamp Tour that has been going on for years. There is also a Loup Garou Legend, a sort of werewolf. There was a great episode of that with Darrin McGavin in the Night Stalker. Other than that, Louisiana does not have any other legends of monstrocity except for racketeering governors.

Speaking of local filmings, I often wonder that when they filmed the first silent Tarzan movie in Abbeville, Louisiana in 1918, in the swamp, whether Edgar Rice Burroughs actually travelled there during the filming. I have an old copy of the silent film. I have seen several photos of Burroughs on the sets of various movies. Abbeville is in the middle of nowhere, Louisiana. Down in the swamps 150 miles east of New Orleans, and far below Lafayette, Louisiana. Deep in Cajun country. A learned friend of mine said that a mummy movie was ‘set’ in a New Orleans swamp between Hammond, Louisiana and New Orleans, but wasn’t actually filmed there.

Burroughs was born in 1875, was in the US Cavalry when they were on horseback in the wild west, and later lived in Chicago and had a wife and new family, tried to make a living from everything from Vacuum Cleaner salesman (like Lovecraft who rewrote a vacuum cleaner manual but still was not hired by the company he sought a job at) to selling pencils at a little stall in the city. He failed at everything. Dozens of jobs. Then he read a pulp and thought he could do that. He wrote “Under the Moons of Mars” under the name “Norman Bean” and then Tarzan for the pulps, and the rest is history. I have a typed letter from him on Edgar Rice Burroughs stationary, written while he was staying in Hawaii and addressed to his daughter. A few months from the date of that letter he witnessed the Japanese planes as he was playing tennis, as they were flying over him on their way to Pearl Harbor. He was a war correspondent during WWII. He died in his sleep one night after reading a comic book.

www.mfkorn.com

Horror Gimmicks in Movies

2009-06-09T02:34:00.000-07:00

When television burst upon the American scene in the late 1940s there was felt to be a need to give the public something that they could not get on television. Arch Oboler (b. 1907- d. 1987, pioneer of the "Inner Sanctum," "Lights Out" radio programs) was the first to devise a gimmick for his movie “Bwana Devil” known as 3D. Oboler was a radio pioneer who thought the 3D effect using polarized lenses and the showing of various objects being thrust at the viewer would revolutionize cinema. This did not work as well as planned because extended viewing caused headaches and blurry vision. After an initial mid-fifties boom 3D died out until the early 1980s when it enjoyed a brief revival. The two abominations "Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn" and "Spacehunters: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone" come to mind. Recently, I've sat like a good dad through "Spykids: 3D" and "The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl," but missed "Coraline" in the 3d version.

A master of the gimmick was the lowbudget filmmaker William Castle(born as William Schloss 1914- d. 1977). In “House on Haunted Hill” with Vincent Price, this movie used the gimmick “Emergo." This consisted of a plastic glow in the dark skeleton suspended on a theater wire which appeared to move into the audience at the climax of the movie. After an initial skeleton injured a Castle employee, a lighter skeleton was devised that did not work any better due to pranksters shooting it with BB guns. Castle was undaunted by this gimmick's failure and developed his most famous gimmick for the Vincent Price movie “The Tingler" was “Percepto,” which was an electrical shock device attached beneath the seats of moviegoers. During the climax the Tingler monster is supposed to invade the actual theater and to stimulate the monster effect, where the monster invaded the spinal column, thus “tingling" them to death unless they screamed. The theater owner pressed the percepto button, giving his audience an equivalent shock. William Castle even had a chair in his office wired with this gimmick. Most theatres could not afford this so they would have ushers use buzzers.

Other Castle innovations were the “fright break" where the audience would hear an announcement in the theatre nearing the end of the film that if they were too frightened they could leave the theatre and get a full refund and “Illusion-O,” which was a variation on 3D because each audience member could look through a blue or red tinted plastic to determine the outcome of the movie.

In Castle's “Macabre” a lesser gimmick not actually used in the course of the motion picture was the act of taking out ”fright insurance" on theatergoers although some suggested a “boredom insurance." being better for that film. Other Castle pictures such as “I Saw What You Did” contain no gimmicks. In "Mr. Sardonicus" audience members were given thumbs up or thumbs down voting device so they could decide whether Mr. Sardonicus could be cured and live or instead die. Of course the audience's actions had no difference in the outcome of the movie.

William Castle produced "Rosemary's Baby" and early in his career did second unit work on one of Hitchcock's earlier films.

A later 1950s film entitled “My World Dies Screaming” used a gimmick called “psychorama." It is the now banned use of subliminal editing into a movie. This movie edited such horrifying objects as skeleton pictures and the word “blood," and coffin pictures for periods of less than one second at different points in the movie. This gimmick did not work for this particular movie, although some theater owners used it successfully to raise concession sales. Laws were changed to prohibit this in the late '60s.

Another gimmick user was Ray Dennis Steckler (b. 1938 d. 2009). He created the gimmick of “Hallucinogenic Hypnovision" for his movie “Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed up Zombies.” This gimmick told audiences they would be actually surrounded by movie monsters, which ended up being theater ushers dressed up as movie monsters wielding cardboard knives when a spinning wheel appeared at various times in the movie. It was also used for a later movie entitled “The Maniacs are Loose.”

One of the most famous gimmicks used in movies was “Sensuround" originally used for “Earthquake” and later used for the theatrical release of the TV movie “Battlestar Gallactica.” This featured a device which shook the theater seats during the earthquake sequences. Theaters unable to afford this gimmick found they could achieve an equivalent effect by turning up the sound volume of the theaters to maximum volume. In later years the quality of stories was looked upon as being more important than the use of gimmicks and no major gimmicks have been used in recent years. But for students of cinema looking and examining these gimmicks over the years, these make for an interesting sidelight.

www.mfkorn.com

Lectures and Readings by Various Authors

2009-05-06T09:02:00.001-07:00

H.P. Lovecraft went to see Percival Lowell lecture about the canals on mars, almost laughing all the way. He almost sounds like he would have been a heckler in the audience the way he describes how he disagreed with Lowell. Lowell had an observatory built in Arizona so that he could study those famous canals he believed existed on the Red Planet as first surmised by Schiaparelli.

Here is Lovecraft’s letter recounting his thoughts on the lecture:

“As to celebrities—one experience of mine had to do with an astronomical instead of a poetical giant; namely, Percival Lowell, the brother of Pres. Lowell of Harvard, and the widely known observer of Mars—whose observatory is in Flagstaff, Arizona. He lectured in this city in 1907, when I was writing for the Tribune, and Prof. Upton of Brown introduced me to him before the lecture in Sayles’ Hall. Now here is the amusing part—I never had, have not, and never will have the slightest belief in Lowell’s speculations; and when I met him I had just been attacking his theories in my astronomical articles with my characteristically merciless language. With the egotism of my 17 years, I feared that Lowell had read what I had written! I tried to be as noncommittal as possible in speaking, and fortunately discovered that the eminent observer was more disposed to ask me about my telescope, studies, etc., than to discuss Mars. Prof. Upton soon led him away to the platform, and I congratulated myself that a disaster had been averted!” (to Rheinhart Kleiner, 19 February 1916)

But Lovecraft was almost a fanboy when he came to hear Lord Dunsany speak. H. P. Lovecraft was greatly impressed by Dunsany after seeing him on a speaking tour of the United States, and Lovecraft's 'Dream-Cycle' stories clearly show his influence.

"There are my Poe pieces and my 'Dunsany' pieces - but alas - where are my Lovecraft pieces?" [Letter to Elizabeth Toldridge, March 8, 1929, quoted in "Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos"]

Lovecraft also noted how tall Dunsany was.

Walker Percy, a Louisiana writer known for his novel "The Moviegoer," went to see W. Somerset Maugham speak even though he thought Maugham was a derivative author, I guess a sort of ‘pop’ writer. I wonder why he bothered to go see him lecture if he thought that of him.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow sat in on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s lectures and became fast friends with him and recorded on paper various acute responses from the audience. He called Emerson’s lecture on “Holiness” a “great bugbear” that the audience could barely understand and noted that Emerson was more a poet than a philosopher.

Charles Dickens readings were pretty successful. Dickens gave his first public readings in December 1853, in Birmingham, England.

A series of three for charity, they were rapturously received. "They lost nothing," he reported after a performance of the Carol, "misinterpreted nothing, followed everything closely, laughed and cried ... and animated me to the extent that I felt as if we were all bodily going up into the clouds together."

Dickens's warmth, histrionic flair and expressiveness evoked tears, applause, shrieks, laughter, hisses, and shouts of "Hear, hear!" from his audiences, who responded to the most memorable troopers of his great repertory company as if they were old acquaintances. It must have been quite a night at the theater. After attending the final evening in Boston during Dickens's second American tour, poet John Greenleaf Whittier marveled, "Another such star-shower is not to be expected in one's life-time."

Some young ladies at another reading asked for not only an autograph from him but a lock of Dickens' hair. I heard that when Wilkie Collins and Dickens would give readings when they toured together much later in their careers that there would be possible ‘hookups’ from the readings.

For Edgar Allan Poe he packed the house every time. (Among Poe’s later lectures were “The Poets and Poetry of America,” “The Poetic Principle” and “The Universe.”) He had many critics, some long after he was gone:

William Butler Yeats was occasionally critical of Poe and once called him "vulgar". Emerson dismissed "The Raven" by saying, "I see nothing in it” and derisively referred to Poe as "the jingle man." Aldous Huxley wrote that Poe's writing "falls into vulgarity" by being "too poetical" – the equivalent of wearing a diamond ring on every finger.

I believe D.H. Lawrence mentioned him much in an essay entitled “Vulgarity in Literature.” Poe used to go to the opium dens in the wharves around Richmond on occasion in his life probably to escape various criticisms of his day, perhaps.

www.mfkorn.com

Asimov loved "Laverne and Shirley" and other Notable Facts

2009-04-18T06:51:00.000-07:00

Some authors had unique taste in things that one might never guess would fit their persona. Or were in unique situations that are mostly unknown.

Isaac Asimov’s favorite show of all time was “Laverne and Shirley” as mentioned in his two volume autobiography "In Memory Yet Green." When Jack London was a war correspondent for the Russo-Japanese war he wrote a fan letter to a newspaper about what a fan he was of Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women.” Edgar Allan Poe considered himself athletic in his younger years. There was a sport of jumping as far as possible from standing still and he often competed against friends and cousins.

Lovecraft used to go to the Howard Johnson’s and would often eat all thirty one flavors of ice cream. Arturo Toscanini, considered one of the greatest conductors in history used to watch wrestling matches on television in the 1950's. Ed Wood wrote a script for “The Beverly Hillbillies” which was rejected with a single line "Not interested." George Gershwin used to do magazine advertisements for Feenamint Laxative gum. Jack Kerouac had a fondness for watching "The Beverly Hillbillies."

Famous psychologist William James gave only one student in his tenure as a Harvard professor permission to be exempt from a final exam, and she was named Gertrude Stein. Aldous Huxley, known for great scripts like "Pride and Prejudice" and "Jane Eyre" was asked to write a script for the “Mr. Magoo” television show. All the while he was writing it, the producers didn’t have the heart to tell Huxley (who was basically blind) that the premise of Mr. Magoo was that the cartoon character was blind. The script was never used. In 1952 Phil K. Dick was approached to write radio scripts for the "Captain Video" radio show.

www.mfkorn.com

Jack London, Ambrose Bierce and Robert Louis Stevenson at the First and Last Chance Saloon in Oakland

2009-03-19T07:34:00.001-07:00

David Mathew (from the UK and a former reviewer for sf mag Interzone) and I officially sold CREATURE FEATURE, an 84 K novel to a new small publisher, and contracts are going to be mailed to us by the end of this week.

I have written before about writers hitting the booze, and came across this famous Oakland bar where Jack London (London is seen in the above picture studying or writing there as a young man - I guess they didn't card youths then to see if underage), Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce, and Robert Louis Stevenson had a few brewskies at one time or another.

From the SITE:

"Opened in 1883 by Johnny Heinold as J.M. Heinold's Saloon, this Historic Landmark looked much then as she does today. She was built right here in 1880 from the timbers of an old whaling ship over the water in a dock area that even then was at the foot of Webster Street. For nearly three years, the building was used as a bunk house by the men working the nearby oyster beds. Then in 1883, Johnny's $100 purchase, with the aid of a ship's carpenter, was transformed into a saloon.
It is for good reason that this is known as Jack London's Rendezvous."

"As a schoolboy, Jack London (1876-1916) studied at these same tables we still use today. Later, he would return to his favorite table and write notes for The Sea Wolf and Call of the Wild. At age 17, he confided to John Heinold his ambition to go to the University of California and become a writer. Johnny lent London the money for tuition and, although he never got beyond his first year, it was while studying at this saloon and listening to the stories of shipmates and stevedores that he developed his thirst for adventure."

"The theme of men bravely facing danger appears throughout the best of his works. Indeed Johnny Heinold and The First and Last Chance Saloon are referenced seventeen times in London's novel John Barleycorn. Heinold's saloon was where he met Alexander McLean, known for such cruelty at sea that his boat was nicknamed The Hell Ship. At the time of its writing, McLean became a model for London's Wolf Larsen in The Sea Wolf."

"Jack London is not the only spirit that kept company in these walls. Robert Louis Stevenson spent time here while waiting for his ship to be outfitted for his final cruise to Samoa. Other notables to sit at this bar include Joaquin Miller, Robert Service, Charles E. Markham, Earle Gardner, Erskine Caldwell, Ambrose Bierce, and Rex Beach."

There is a musical venue bar in uptown New Orleans called The Maple Leaf which often has poetry slams. There was a dipsomaniac poet that basically resided there, homeless actually, named Everette Maddox (1945-1989). At the end he pined after a woman from Alabama and sought her out but to no avail. The last part of his life he wandered the streets and sometimes slept in the back of a parked dump truck. He ended up dying, perhaps of consumption due to alcohol.

King of the Bohemian movement poet George Sterling (1869-1926), longtime friend of Jack London and Lovecraft buddy Clark Ashton Smith and who was mentored by a much older Ambrose Bierce, carried a cyanide capsule with him wherever he went. He often frequented the Bohemian Club, a famous bar in San Francisco. Whenever people asked about it, he said, speaking of the hereafter: "A prison becomes a home, if you have the key." He took the cyanide pill one day in November of 1926 at the Bohemian Club and died.

Here is the long version of why Jack London quit college and started on his long career, starting with his birth:

"London's mother, Flora Wellman, a music teacher and spiritualist who claimed to channel the spirit of an Indian chief, became pregnant, presumably from her union with William Chaney, an astrologer she lived with in San Francisco. According to Flora Wellman's account as recorded in the San Francisco Chronicle of June 4, 1875, Chaney demanded that she have an abortion, and when she refused, he disclaimed responsibility for the child. In desperation, she shot herself. She was not seriously wounded, but she was temporarily deranged.

"In 1897, when he was 21 and a student at the University of California, Berkeley, Jack London searched for and read the newspaper accounts of his mother's suicide attempt and the name of his biological father. He wrote to William Chaney, then living in Chicago. Chaney responded bizarrely, considering the nature of the exchange, that he could not be Jack's father because he was impotent; he casually asserted that Jack's mother had relations with other men and averred that she had slandered him when she said he insisted on an abortion. In fact, he concluded, he was more to be pitied than Jack.[6] London was devastated. In the months following his discovery of his father who disavowed him and what Chaney did to London's mother, he quit school at Berkeley and went to the Klondike."

In the near future please be on the lookout for what is my 12th novel, CREATURE FEATURE, cowritten with David Mathew:

A journalist and his son travel to the midwest and the small town of Templeton to start a new life. The television station that hires him as a newswriter also hires him to be the kooky midnight horror movie emcee. As they adjust to their new home they realize that the citizens of this town are basically neurotic if not downright crazy, and the schools there have the highest suicide rate in the country. There is a sinister rich old family, the Hawkins, who basically own and run the town. Jim is beginning to think they could be a supernatural force behind the crazed fear.

www.mfkorn.com

A Bizarre Silent Film made at Pathe' Studios in 1907

2009-02-28T07:26:00.000-08:00

There is a brand new podcast of a short story by me, David Mathew (was reviewer for Interzone) called “The Red Spectre” on http://fearondemand.com/, edited by horror writer Sidney Williams. It is free to listen to and was inspired by a real silent film made in 1907 whose director to this day is Unknown. The film features a diabolical red/sepia-tinted, masked skeleton character who hops around a surreal set and pantomimes bizarrely. He madly makes chemical potions and concoctions and disappears on occasion only to reappear and makes others vanish in puffs of smoke as he gleefully looks on and continues to hop and jump around the hellish set.
____________________________
Here is the listing for this bizarre silent film at www.silentera.com:

[The Red Spectre]
AKA El Espectro Rojo in [?] Spain?; The Red Spectre in the USA
(1907) French
B&W : Short film
Directed by (unknown)
Cast: (unknown)
Compagnie Genérale des Établissements Pathé Frères Phonographes & Cinématographes production; distributed by Compagnie Genérale des Établissements Pathé Frères Phonographes & Cinématographes. / Standard 35mm spherical 1.37:1 format. Color-tinted by Pathécolor stenciling process. / Some scenes originally hand-tinted.
Trick film.

Survival Status: Print exists.

Keywords: Coffins - Devils - Fire
__________________________
Here is the IMDB database entry on the film. It states that they figured out who the directors really were.

Le Spectre Rouge (1907)

Segundo de Chomón (co-director)
Ferdinand Zecca (co-director)

Writer:
Segundo de Chomón (writer)
Release Date:
August 1907 (USA) more
Genre:
Short | Fantasy | Horror more
Plot:
A demonic magician attempts to perform his act in a strange grotto, but is confronted by a Good Spirit who opposes him. full summary | add synopsis
Plot Keywords:
Bottle | Skeleton | Cavern | Good Versus Evil | Devil
more
User Comments:
A fascinating, bizarre, and beautiful little film ____________________________________
In keeping with the History of New Orleans, before Hollywood as a movie factory came about, four cities were considered to be potential centers of filmmaking: New Orleans, Jacksonville Florida, a city somewhere in New Jersey, and of course, somewhere in California which turned out to be Hollywood. New Orleans failed as a possible center for this due to the weather factor: Lighting was critical and they realized that it rained a lot in New Orleans. The first film made in New Orleans was called "Mephisto and the Maiden".

MEPHISTO AND THE MAIDEN (1909/Selig Polyscope Co.) 15mins. BW. Silent. US.
A lustful friar trades his soul with Satan in exchange for two hours with a young woman.

The first silent Tarzan movie "Tarzan of the Apes" (1918) was filmed in the swamps of Abbeville, Louisiana in Vermilion Parish 150 miles west of New Orleans and below Lafayette. It starred Elmo Lincoln (born Otto Elmo Linkenhelt).

Speaking of Hollywood, Oscar Wilde went there in 1890 with the D'Oyly Dance Company when Hollywood was just a bunch of orange groves and before films were really ever made.

And now to change the subject entirely I thought I would submit this. Here are some little known "facts" about some Southern writers:

They say that when Truman Capote visited Willie Morris at Ole Miss that it was rumored that they practically dented every car while driving on campus and imbibing.

One day, William Faulkner was invited to take a drive (probably by his good friend Howard Hawks) with Clark Gable. Gable, trying to take a dig at Faulkner, asked him when he got in the car, “So, Mr. Faulkner, what do you do for a living?” to which Faulkner responded, “I am a writer. What do you do, Mr. Gable?”

When Faulkner lived in the French Quarter of New Orleans long ago, in a third floor apartment (not on the side street Pirate’s Alley where an old apartment of his is now a notable quaint bookstore), he and a lawyer friend of his used to imbibe spirits, and when that happens sometimes it can lead to rather dumb activity. One time they got a bb-gun and from Faulkner’s apartment window the future Nobel laureate and his drunk friend shot bb's at hapless and unfortunate older, genteel ladies on the backside as they innocently walked down the street in the French Quarter.

Consider checking out the Podcast of a short story by MF Korn and David Mathew, "The Red Spectre" at http://fearondemand.com/ .

www.mfkorn.com

A Brief History of Writers who came to New Orleans

2009-02-04T11:21:00.001-08:00

I wanted to talk about writers and New Orleans but first I would like to mention that I am doing rewrites per a publisher of a novel tentatively titled CREATURE FEATURE, cowritten with David Mathew of Britain. The cover has not been chosen yet. In other news, four of my latest eight books are going out of print due to a publisher tanking. I made a few short story sales and am still waiting for a book of mine to be published in Germany that has been translated already.

New Orleans is preparing for Mardi Gras so I thought I would talk about writers in the French Quarter of N'awlins. If you ever wanted to know where Weird Tales writer and friend of H.P. Lovecraft lived, SF fantasy writer E. Hoffmann Price lived at 300 Royal Street. Some of his later Chinese Fantasy books are excellent. Lovecraft visited him in June of 1932. Here is the backstory:

Price's relationship with H. P. Lovecraft did not get off to an auspicious start; in a 1927 letter, Lovecraft remarked that his story "The Strange High House in the Mist" was, after "grave consultation with E. Hoffman Price", rejected by Weird Tales' Wright "as not sufficiently clear for the acute minds of his highly intelligent readers".

But when Lovecraft visited New Orleans in June 1932, Robert E. Howard telegraphed Price to alert him to the visitor's presence, and the two writers spent much of the following week together. The legend is not true that Price took Lovecraft to a New Orleans brothel, where he was amused to find that several of the employees there were fans of his work; the story, apocryphal or not, was first told about Seabury Quinn.

L. Sprague DeCamp mentioned the Seabury Quinn rumor in his biography of Lovecraft. During the New Orleans stay, Price and Lovecraft tried to get Robert E. Howard to show up but he couldn’t afford the trip from Texas. But Price eventually met the inventor of Conan the Barbarian when he took a trip to Texas in the 30's, the only pulp writer to actually meet Howard. In New Orleans the first night, Lovecraft sat up with Price for around nineteen hours and several pots of coffee for the longest conversation you could imagine. He had arrived there and called Price from his hotel, having just travelled through an "industrial Baton Rouge." He must have seen the Standard Oil Refinery here (now Exxon).

300 Royal Street eventually became a unique bookstore years later, a bookstore with no real name or sign out front. Sometimes there would be a proprietor there and sometimes there wouldn’t, actually. It was a nice musty place where you had to carefully walk through mazes of stacks to see some unearthed treasure of a tome. I remember when I went there once, they were selling mint condition Argosy’s from the early 1930’s for five dollars apiece. There were stacks of old newspapers, Life magazines, every possible book you could imagine with the dust of antiquity. The last time I went there it was shut down, empty. I am sure there is a new business there now.

Next to the St. Louis Cathedral in the French Quarter there is a small alley named “Pirates Alley.” A place in that alley is called the “Pirates Alley Bookstore.” It used to be a two story apartment of a young William Faulkner where he wrote “Soldiers Pay.” There are signed copies of books of his and Tennessee Williams and numerous others. Faulkner lived at another time on another street in New Orleans in a third floor apartment where years later on the street below, William Burroughs used to score his heroin and Lee Harvey Oswald handed out pamphlets on that corner. There are several apartments in the French Quarter where Tennessee Williams lived that have historical markers on them.

In Jackson Square near the Jax Brewery and the Cabildo and the Cathedral, on one side was an apartment where Sherwood Anderson lived and way on the other side lived Anita Loos, screenwriter friend of Aldous Huxley.

On Bourbon Street is The “Old Absinthe House” which no longer serves absinthe but the spigots are still there, and it has been around for over 200 years, since around 1806. There was a famed meeting there of pirate Jean Lafitte and Andrew Jackson on the second floor, planning the victory of the Battle of New Orleans. Outside this bar at 240 Bourbon Street is an historical marker naming a few celebrities that visited New Orleans: (many left out here): Mark Twain (he became a riverboat pilot here), Henry Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, singer Jenny Lind, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Jack London, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Herman Melville, Enrico Caruso, Aldous Huxley, Walt Whitman (he was editor briefly of the New Orleans Crescent newspaper down here). Oscar Wilde visited here (I've also seen a picture of him in front of the Vicksburg, Mississippi Opera House). I've left out dozens of other writers that visited or stayed in New Orleans. Eugene O'Neill took a drunken rail trip down here. Charles Bukowski lived here for a while. Kerouac stayed at W.S. Burroughs house on the West Bank of the City as noted in "On the Road." Nelson Algren lived here and was a newspaper crime reporter on the graveyard shift; Walker Percy wrote "The Moviegoer" here. William Sydney Porter started writing as O. Henry after he came through here for a while to escape embezzlement charges in Texas. Scott Fitzgerald lived Uptown on now bohemian Prytania street in 1920. Malcolm Lowry and his wife Margerie were editing a late draft of “Under the Volcano” in a bar on St. Ann street and got thrown out for that instead of drinking and not editing.

The very fancy Monteleone Hotel is where Truman Capote stayed for a good while as a child and they say that is where he first got a sort of air of privilege. The large D.H. Holmes building on Canal Street had a clock on the front of it. This clock was the proverbial place in New Orleans for people to meet under, and was the setting in the beginning of “Confederacy of Dunces” where Ignatius Reilly agrees to meet his mother. John Kennedy Toole taught English at University of New Orleans for a while.

The literary history of New Orleans far surpasses this blog listing. If you go HERE on my webpage and scroll beyond the bio stuff you'll see a more complete list of writers of New Orleans and Louisiana in general. And if you go to the small link at the bottom of that list as noted you'll see an even more complete list of writers with their former addresses. You can take a Literary Walking Tour in the French Quarter which is a lot of fun. There is a Voodoo Tour, a Swamp Tour (down the road), a tour of Old Metairie Cemetery, and a Ghost Tour. There are a couple of neat Voodoo shoppes in the French Quarter as well. The French Quarter is a great place to visit. Lots of bars. Malcolm Lowry's "Under the Volcano" opens with a description of Cuernevaca as having a certain number of bars and churches and golf courses. Sure there are lots of bars in New Orleans. But the restaurants are just as plentiful and some are the greatest in the world: Galatoires, Brennans. You can get a great oyster poboy, dressed, here. Mardi Gras is coming up very soon and everyone can swill as much liquor as possible before he/she gets ashes on his/her forehead.

www.mfkorn.com

The Education of a Writer

2008-12-27T09:41:00.000-08:00

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.

www.mfkorn.com

Ragtime - The First Truly American Genre

2008-12-05T08:04:00.000-08:00

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

2008-10-22T12:06:00.001-07:00

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

2008-10-02T07:40:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-15T08:25:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-27T08:00:00.001-07:00

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

2008-08-19T10:22:00.001-07:00

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

2008-08-18T13:31:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-14T09:25:00.001-07:00

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.

www.mfkorn.com

HPL in Bell Bottomed Pants

2008-08-11T12:05:00.000-07:00

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.

http://mfkorn.com/

Middle C on the piano

2008-08-08T09:19:00.000-07:00

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.

www.mfkorn.com

Derelicts in Literature

2008-08-08T07:30:00.000-07:00

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…

www.mfkorn.com

To Blog or Not to Blog

2008-08-08T07:26:00.000-07:00

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