"The Moon Pool" and other (nearly forgotten) stories for a scary season

Samhain or Dia de los Muertos, Celtic New Year, All-Saints Day or Halloween, whichever festival a reader celebrates at this time of the season it's bound to be fraught with thoughts of impermanence, the comingwinter's chill, the fragility of life, the world of spirits. What to read as the nights grow dark and cold and candle-lit? When the curtains are closed and shadows leap upon the walls, there's always Poe and Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley to scare us, of course. But what else?

Plenty. There are lots of writers these days willing to scare us or spook us, naturally. But there is much more in the dusty stacks of forgotten and near-forgotten fiction, from serious writers like H.G. Wells to pulp master H.P. Lovecraft. (It wouldn't be much of a stretch to include William Burroughs in the ranks of the weird and spooky: Cities of the Red Night is a mind-melting nightmare of a diseased, dystopian world.)

Published in 1980, Cities of the Red Night is part of a trilogy (including The Place of Dead Roads in 1984, and finally, The Western Lands, 1988) in which Burroughs is the master of disaster from the personal to the universal, the greying misanthrope giving reign to his darkest thoughts about the human condition.

The book is dark and discomfiting, and very trippy. Plague, check. 18th-century pirates, check. A crew of very ill, very doomed lost boys, check. But there's also a contemporary element of detective fiction slamming the shifting of time and space together like H.G. Wells after dropping a tab of LSD in a visit to Owsley Stanley: a time-tripping apocalypse that would make the Mayans tremble with anticipation.

As is often the case, Jonathan Williams's view from Skywinding Farm was much more inclusive and forgiving of such matters as what our well-meaning teachers of English literature would deem worthwhile of our time spent reading. And he sadly notes, inthis essay from the Jargon Books website, how much worthy reading eventually slips away nearly forgotten, and how "each of us has read almost nothing."

Williams -- himself "internationally overlooked," with a bit of honor and pride in such a distinction -- was asked by Dennis Cooper, of Little Caesar magazine, to guest-edit an issue called "Overlooked & Underrated." He happily complied, and the result was an extensive list of nearly forgotten novels in every genre, a list which was published eventually in 1981, added to in 1989, and once more in 1998. More than ten years later, it would be easy to imagine that the list in "our dummified times" would be longer still. Here's an excerpt from his letter to Ian Young, with an emphasis on stories of horror and the supernatural.

"What a civilization! Nobody even remembers who wrote THE MOON POOL." Often I think of that ultimate lament by Kenneth Rexroth. However, good buddy, I remember that Honest Abe Merritt wrote THE MOON POOL, and I was very turned on by its unique art-deco, sci-fi eroticism back in the ur-sexy days of Flash Gordon and Batman and Robin.

... I'd love to write you a whole book on marvellous caitiff writers who go unread in our dummified times. But, I remain up to my hunkers in chores for the Jargon Society -- all that reading and writing that serve to make me internationally unknown, like one had better be these days. "Of making many books, there is no end." That's in, I believe, Proverbs ... "The flesh is sad and I have read all the books." That's Mallarmé. These quotations remind us that each of us has read almost nothing.

... If you asked the poet Basil Bunting to name the few, world-class masters, he would name you twelve, half of whom you'd never heard of. Viz: Homer, Ferdosi, Manucherhri, Dante, Hafez, Malherbe, Aneirin, Heledd, Wyatt, Spenser, Sidney, Wordsworth ... For Basil, that was it. No one in the 20th century, even his great mentor, Ezra Pound, made the Top Dozen. I know a lot that's "readable" and that will help get a reader through good and bad days and nights. I'll select a few genres and see what I think of, off the top of my head. One thing to mention at the start is that our friend, The Devoted Reader, is going to need the services of a very excellent library system.

... Horror and the Supernatural? Howard Phillips Lovecraft was my transition from boys' adventure books to the surrealism of Henry Miller and Kenneth Patchen. Nothing wrong with a "third class" writer with a peerless imagination. THE SHADOW OUT OF TIME and THE CASE OF CHARLES DEXTER WARD are perhaps better than I remember. They stick in the conk.

Others that do: THE HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND, by William Hope Hodgson; THE PURPLE CLOUD, by M.P. Shiel; THE HILL OF DREAMS, by Arthur Machen; and a lot by H.G. Wells, Olaf Stapledon, M.R. James, Saki, Lord Dunsany, E.F. Benson, A.E. Coppard, Walter de la Mare, Clark Ashton Smith, Algernon Blackwood, and Colin Wilson.

The two current writers of boogieman prose I like best are Stephen King (The World's Richest Writer, who rivals the Big Mac for style and usability) and the more literate Peter Straub. 'SALEM'S LOT and THE SHINING are first-class books by Mr. King. And IF YOU COULD SEE ME NOW, GHOST STORY, and MYSTERY by Mr. Straub. Two other writers of interest: Whitley Strieber (THE HUNGER, THE WOLFEN) and Robert R. McCammon (MYSTERY WALK). Check your local drugstore. ...

"Corset: Emma Goldman," by Anne Waldman: a selection from OccupyWriters.com

Emma Goldman, 1901 arrest mug shot

(Library of Congress)

"Corset: Emma Goldman"

(in memory of Kathy Acker)

Anne Waldman

what is it to be corset maker binding the bone and cotton in a daily sweat of labor and purpose what is it to know the sweat of all you my sister workers of daily living surviving an economic purse-string purpose what is it to be declared the most dangerous of purpose when J. Edgar Hoover has your number and what is it here now in St Petersburg hungry and anxious and soul-stirring for surviving my purpose what is the cause of insomniac passion my further disillusionment in your systems in your many systems in all the systems that bind the bone in this labor to you who will always profit off the labor of Emma’s hands sewing binding aching toiling bone and cotton in the class struggle a dangerous purpose you want to call it that why you can call it that and it’s so much more but do call it that and you will I’m sure call it that and most dangerous of violence and terror too and you want to call it that? Why you can call it that and it’s so much more but do call it that and you will I’m sure call it that and most dangerous of violence and terror too and what of a Spanish Civil War I’ll call wake up all minions! I’ll call: arise! and would cast in a daily sweat of labor a struggle a sweet edge that way for it’s an energy of daily sweat and toil to be free of the fascisms of how and when and why and why o never free of J. Edgar Hoover but my imagination ever free of the imagination of J. Edgar Hoover who will surely most certainly have your number in his fractious labor and psychopathic toil even now when he the ghost of fractious J. Edgar Hoover is stalking haunting the work places the meeting places the “commune” of all my sweat and purpose…what is it to be a large woman be-speckled and intent in my libertarian socialist moment you want to call it that? Why you can call it that and it’s so much more but do call it that and you will I’m sure call it that and most dangerous of violence and terror to incite a riot what is it to be thus called trouble and to be forever “unpopular with authorities” to be watched and goaded and arrested and in lock-down what kind of terror moment is this and will it survive and assassinate a president this kind of moment will it will it survive McKinley will it survive psychopathic fractious J. Edgar Hoover and will the ghosts of Haymarket stalk the Union Hall still in that old purpose and will that will now sisters break the corset that binds the moment?

"Corset: Emma Goldman" by Anne Waldman appears at the OccupyWriters website, which invites all writers to sign and contribute.

"A School for My Village:" author and activist Twesigye Kaguri tonight at Oglethorpe University

Tonight the Georgia Center for the Book presents an appearance by Twesigye Kaguri, whose Nyaka AIDS Orphan Project assists Ugandan children who have lost one or both parents to HIV/AIDS. In the past several decades he has been involved extensively in international community efforts as a human rights advocate, and in 2001, Kaguri founded The Nyaka AIDS Orphans Project in response to the devastating effects of AIDS in his hometown.

The organization, which recently celebrated its tenth anniversary, provides free education in two schools. It also operates a library, desire farm and nutrition program, medical clinic, clean water system, and a support program for the grandmothers who care for up to 14 children at a time.

In his book A School for My Village he shares how he came to build the first school and the struggles he faced during the first few years. Mr. Kaguri came to the U.S. in 1995 as a visiting scholar studying Human Rights Advocacy at Columbia University in New York. Since that time he has been involved extensively in international community efforts as a Programs Assistant for People's Decade for Human Rights Education (PDHRE International, New York) and as a volunteer for various nonprofit organizations.

Twesigye Jackson Kaguri

Last year, he resigned as Interim Senior Director of Development in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources at Michigan State University to focus full-time on The Nyaka AIDS Orphans Project. Kaguri has been named a Heifer International Hero, recognized in Time Magazine’s ‘Power of One’ Series, and spoken to the UN about his work.

Kaguri's appearance is being held at 7 p.m. in the Oglethorpe University Museum of Art, at 4484 Peachtree Road. For further information visit the Georgia Center for the Book website.

Cory Doctorow's "The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow": Creativity vs. copyright, or what hath Warhol wrought?

Andy, seriously clowning around

These days it is difficult to see an advertisement, surf the web, listen to pop music or watch any media without some form of artistic "appropriation." Whether it's called sampling or theft or even genius, the intentional use and layering of others' ideas is a common thread to our shared culture.

In the 1960s Andy Warhol's appropriation of Brillo boxes and Campbell's soup cans as subjects for art elevated America's advertising to a level of consideration that shocked some and amused others. He was the first to suggest that the nation's disposable post-war culture was something more about form than function, that America was a nation filled with everyday objects fit equally for artistic appreciation as to throw away.

It was the ultimate extension of the old saying about one man's trash -- and, for many, a new gloss on the idea of kitsch. The fact that his iconic and appropriated images continue to contain an appraised value as well as artistic worth -- although some would argue otherwise -- is, at bottom, the economic heart of current discussions about internet rights, copyright, musical sampling, and intellectual property. Cory Doctorow takes up the argument in his essay The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow that there is a fundamental disparity between proposed changes in copyright law and the creative freedom of the artist with 21st century tools.

The past, in this case, seems no guide to the future: recent print copyright changes that extend legal ownership to 75 years and beyond clash with other media decisions: the music industry is just facing up to a 1976 law that reverts ownership rights to songwriters after 35 years -- in time for the age of digital music on the internet, unforeseen all those years ago.

The projected loss of corporate revenue is one factor in the current debate, but the rights of the individual are an even more important one. The ultimate legal argument about intellectual property, of course, will hinge on financial issues: can corporate entities make a profit in the uncharted future? The artist's right to expression, if it's even considered, will pose a thornier path.

Here's an excerpt from Doctorow's essay, condensed from his address to the 2010 World Science Fiction Convention, which is available both in print and -- tellingly -- available as a free download. As Doctorow points out, the decision is one in which -- perhaps for the first time -- the artist can have an activist role:

... we're all of us trying to influence the future, or the present, or our view of the past. Writing about humanity's relationship with technology is an activist pursuit, because it requires that you take a stand on how things really are, or ought to be. We live in a technological society, and it is impossible to write about technological change without writing about social change.

... If you swipe a DVD from a shop you get a small fine, or if you’ve done it hundreds of times maybe you get some community service—but we don’t come to your house and say, OK, we’re going to cut you off from all the services that deliver freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, access to tools, communities, and ideas, access to education, and civic engagement.

This not a principle we think of as belonging in the justice systems of enlightened countries. People like me fight for copyright reform not because we’re cheap and we want DVDs for free but because, in the name of preventing piracy, corporations and governments are attacking fundamentals like the right to assemble, the right to free speech, the right to operate a free press and the right to organize and work together. Information doesn’t want to be free, people do! Artists need to transcend the self-serving, terrorized, crappy narrative that’s been fed to us by the copyright industries and recognize that the collateral damage from this doomed effort to reduce copying includes the free society that we all cherish.

And there are organizations that will help us. In Australia there’s Electronic Frontiers Australia; worldwide there’s Electronic Frontiers Foundation, Creative Commons, and many other organizations that work for a balanced copyright regime that respects all the civil liberties that are part of a free society and also tries to insure that artists can go on earning their livings as well. ...

Warhol, the media outsider, was eventually subsumed by a culture that said "yes! of course!" to his vision as a single artist. The struggle these days seems to be how intellectual property can still be maintained in a multimedia universe that makes accesibility free, to millions, at the click of a mouse. The jury's still out about intellectual property rights, even as all sides -- individuals and corporations -- continue to deliberate furiously with a Supreme Court battle looming somewhere ahead in the uncertain future.

Tom Waits remembers Captain Beefheart: "That's when you realize that words are music. Period."

"China Pig"

(Don Van Vliet)

I don't wanna kill my china pig

No I don't

Uh man's gotta live

Uh man's gotta eat

Uh man's gotta have shoes t' walk out on the street

I don't wanna kill my china pig

Ell he was uh baby I want yuh t' see

I don't wanna kill my china pig

Well I used t' go t' school

With uh' little red box

'n I used to have m' pig go with me

We walked for blocks

I don't wanna kill my china pig

His tail curled five times in uh circle round

It's glazed

He's got uh slot in his back flowers grow

My china pig be uh quite uh show

I don't wanna kill my china pig

Woe no

My china pig

I got him by the snout

'n I takes him by the cuff

'n I whipped out m' fork

'n I poked at um

Three hairs laid out on m' floor

I remember my china pig

I fed the neighborhood

It was uh big neighborhood

Uh lot uh people liked my pig

One little girl used t' put her fingers in his snout

I put uh fork in his back

I didn't wanna kill my china pig

Tom Waits -- who knows a thing or two about the power of the word -- became late friends with musician and painter Don Van Vliet, the visionary Captain Beefheart, who died earlier this year. In a recent interview with Randall Roberts of the L.A. Times, Waits commented on the good Captain's legacy and his obllque writing style. "China Pig" is included on Captain Beefheart's monumental 1969 album, Trout Mask Replica.

I understand you had a friendship with Don Van Vliet in his final years.

I can’t say we were close friends, but he corresponded with a lot of people, and as he got slower and more incapacitated, he was on the phone a lot. And I had asked if I could call him, and I did. And he was very quick, and bright, and original and cultural right up until the end.

It seems as though you channel him a few times on “Bad as Me,” especially in the title track.

Yeah, yeah, well, I hope so. Isn’t that what we all really kind of — we want to enter the culture, we want to enter the bloodstream and be part of the soil, so that when other people are growing they say, “I see that, I see that.”

He was such a unique individual. I think he was constantly covering up his tracks. He was very secretive about his process. He was a riddle. And then you have his songs, and you have those to wonder about. I just played “China Pig” for an Australian radio show, and they said, “Pick a bunch of songs that you want to play,” and we put that on and it was really great to hear. That’s when you realize that words are music. Period.

"Any Day Now": The Bowie book of ch-ch-ch-changes

For those who enjoy tripping down rock's memory lane, David Bowie (...remember him?) now gets the ultra-glam treatment in a coffee-table slab of his own. Any Day Now: David Bowie The London Years 1947-1974(Adelita Publishers) is an eye-popping collection of memorabilia (and a memento of a gallery show) that should remind readers of a certain age that the '70s -- in the UK, at least -- certainly seemed ... well, a bit more colorful than here in the drab, Nixon-browed USA at the time.

Bowie has always been a smart businessman -- he was the first to offer a stock offering in his musical back catalog -- and it seems only natural at this point to expect the Diamond Dog to approve this extravagant look back in mascara at the early years.

The parade of pictures shows The Thin White Duke in his many transformations from Maidstone folkie to Ziggy space case. The resulting tumble of images is a great laugh or a serious head-scratching case of pop remorse ... sometimes on the same page. Lady Gaga's got nothin' on this Aladdin Sane.

Bowie, au-courant, by Kenneth Pitt (1969)

340 pages, 850 images, pull-outs, signed glossies, concert tickets, lipstick traces: if you're interested in Bowie's history, you can read between the promo shots, coy backstage glances, and space-age album-cover art. Author Kevin Cann has put together all the details, as well as "the most concise listing of Bowie performances ever published," according to the Guardian UK.

At a length of 140,000 words, there's not much more to be read about Bowie's UK years. One must admit it was a nice gesture on Bowie's part to ask Dudley Moore to add piano to Hunky Dory, though. (Moore declined.)

Pin-up boy: Bowie by Terry O'Neill (1973)

But if a picture is worth a thousand words, then the price of the book (£24.99 for the no-frills paperback, £175.00 for the all-you-can-collect limited edition of 450 signed and numbered copies) is a bargain. A history stopping at 1974, when Bowie left the UK for his Stateside dukedom, should give the collector and his wallet pause: If you have any quid left over from buying this book of ch-ch-ch-changes, better start saving it for Bowie, vol. 2.

Writing it all down: for the Beats, too much was never enough

Bill Morris at The Millions has had enough. His end-of-2010 post Will you Beat Hagiographers Please Be Quiet Please (with its intentional double please), about the ongoing parade of films and books lionizing the beat generation, contains some valid points about the myth-making and the saint-making machinery of American popular culture. "It's just a bunch of guys trying to get published," Morris quotes James Franco-as-Ginsberg in the movie Howl, and this is an observation Morris generally agrees with. He notes, as well, the increasing trend toward what Joyce Carol Oates has called "pathography" -- that the facts of a creative individual's life are as important as his art, with an emphasis on dysfunctional detail -- in literary biography.

It's ironic that Morris would find this abundance of lurid, personal psychology unwarranted in the biographies of beat figures like Kerouac and Burroughs -- writers who seemingly suffered from logorrhea so much more than most in letters and journals and scribbled diaries and, finally, in books. Many of them wrote everything down and some, it seems, were impatient waiting for the ink to dry before turning their lives into literature.

Their personal lives, and the stories they fashioned from them, form a carnival ground of (in Oates's phrase) “dysfunction and disaster, illnesses and pratfalls, failed marriages and failed careers, alcoholism and breakdowns and outrageous conduct.” With the beats, it's all there on the blotted page, with the "artifice" of fiction very nearly removed from the "art" of the story. But learning more about a writer's life, Morris writes, doesn't count for nearly as much as the books themselves:

... Since we live in an age that’s obsessed with personalities and celebrities, it’s not surprising that so few readers are satisfied with loving a book and so many insist on knowing as much as possible about the person who wrote it. While this appetite has inspired literary biographers to produce a long shelf of pathographies and other monstrosities – does the world really need Norman Sherry’s three-volume biography of Graham Greene? – it has also resulted in some well researched and finely written literary biographies that did what such exercises do at their best: they led readers back to the subject’s books.

Among these I would include Blake Bailey’s recent biographies of Richard Yates and John Cheever and, strangely enough, Ann Charters’s thorough and balanced 1973 bio of Kerouac. In her introduction, Charters wrote insightfully, if a bit clunkily: “The value of Kerouac’s life is what he did, how he acted. And what he did, was that he wrote. I tried to arrange the incidents of his life to show that he was a writer first, and a mythologized figure afterward. Kerouac’s writing counts as much as his life.”

I would argue that his writing counts more than his life, much more. Eventually Charters seemed to come around to my way of thinking. In 1995, after she’d edited two fat volumes, Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1940-1956 and The Portable Jack Kerouac, I interviewed her for a newspaper article. “I wanted (the book of letters) to be a biography in Jack’s own words,” she told me. “His life is in his books, but on the other hand the most essential thing is missing from those novels. What he tells you in the letters is that the most important thing in his life is writing.”

At the time The Gap was using Kerouac’s image – and images of James Dean and Marilyn Monroe and other ’50s icons – to sell its khaki pants. In the face of such shameless hucksterism, Charters’s insistence on the importance of Kerouac’s writing seemed both quaint and heroic to me. It still does today, as the hagiographers keep bombarding us with abominations like One Fast Move or I’m Gone and Howl and A Man Within. ...

Morris is half right. Today's hot-house atmosphere of celebrity and promotion is a blurry mix of authenticity and the artificial. Some would argue rightly everything in ad-land is all packaging. But so what? Morris's own griping about the commercialization of Kerouac seems quaint itself this late in the advertising game -- the appropriation of Kerouac's image doesn't make what he wrote less "authentic," it only questions the decisions of his estate. If fans find this kind of legend-buffing intriguing, it may be that the link between beat writers and beat writing comes close to solving the mysterious alchemy between personality and page. And that leads readers back to the words themselves -- which is Morris's basic starting point.

For many readers the movement's legacy of writing-it-all-down is a key to finding the raw material of fiction in real life. For fans, too, beat literature can seem a kind of romantic ideal, opening the gates to self-expression and revelation. Then the trick, of course, is to find a public outlet, and the internet seems to be obliterating that hurdle more rapidly every day. We can all make messes of our lives, and we now have the means to tell everyone -- friends and complete strangers -- about it.

Making real and discernible art out of a messy and careening life takes perception and some amount of craft, however, and there a writer is on his own without a net. There is a simple way past the image-crafting and the cults of personality, the flood of films and the biographer's "pathography." Writers like Morris suggest it, if a bit over-wrought, in his essay: it used to be called "letting the words speak for themselves."