The Last Canon

/ Alex Good / 17 Comments

Over at Good Reports I’ve posted “The Last Canon,” which is the first essay I’ve written in years. It’s a return to a question I wrote about 25 years ago (yes, it’s been that long!): What are students who are studying English in university actually reading?

Back in 2001 I noticed that the books on the required reading lists for undergraduate courses were getting shorter. Since then we’ve been hearing a lot more about how students don’t, and in some cases can’t read as much.

This made me wonder: Just what books constitute the list of works that you would expect every student of literature will have read by the time they graduate? I’m not saying mine is a definitive list of great books, or even a list of the books that I think everyone should read, but I had fun playing with it.

Utterly Mad

/ Alex Good / 13 Comments

Utterly Mad

In my review of the Visions of Poetry edition of Poe’s “The Raven,” illustrated by Ryan Price, I mentioned how I had memorized the poem as a kid from a Mad magazine adaptation. Well, the book I read that adaptation in was Utterly Mad. I’ve kept it around a long time now.

The stories collected here are mostly long-form satires of established properties like Robin Hood, Tarzan, Little Orphan Annie, and Frankenstein. And then there are a couple of cultural pieces, one on adapting novels to the big screen and the other on supermarkets. The latter I guess being something new at the time (the book’s first printing was in 1956).

Most of the humour hasn’t aged well. There are a lot of little gags that play out on the edges, but the verbal ones especially don’t land. Plus I think you’d probably want to be acquainted with the source material. “G. I. Shmoe” is a take-off, I think, of a G. I. Joe comic, but I didn’t get the punchline every woman delivers where they ask him if he’s got gum. And “Little Orphan Melvin” won’t work unless you have some idea of the original characters, how they talk and relate to one another, and the sorts of situations Annie finds herself in. Other stories, like “Robin Hood” and “Melvin of the Apes” just weren’t funny. Maybe they thought the name Melvin was funny. Also the Yiddish word “fershlugginer.” Sometimes the crammed visual style does work passably well, as with the “Frank N. Stein” story and the trip to the supermarket, but overall it wasn’t working for me.

That said, I love this little paperback for two stories that, for whatever reason, have stayed with me. Obviously one is the adaptation of “The Raven.” This is typical of the crammed style I mentioned, with lots of different stuff going on in every cell, including a lot that’s totally unrelated to the poem, like a dog that outgrows the narrator’s apartment. But where I give them the most credit is in including the full text of the poem and having all kinds of fun with it, from emphasizing the fearfulness of the narrator, hiding in his room, to presenting the lost Lenore as a beefy, cigar-smoking lady who presses clothes. To some extent, I’m still not sure how much, this interpretation of the poem has for me become a part of it that I can no longer disentangle from what Poe wrote.

The second story that stands out is “Book! Movie!” This is meant to illustrate how Hollywood takes gritty, realistic novels and cleans them up, turning them into tinselly trash. Which is something that I think probably happened a lot more often in the 1950s than it does today. Anyway, the Book part tells the story of a loser living in terrible poverty who cheats on his wife and is caught by a blackmailer (though I don’t know what the blackmailer could be thinking he’d get out of it). The guy then kills his mistress and the blackmailer (with lots of “Censored” dots covering up the gouts of gore) and is pursued by demons back to his home, where he learns that his wife, who he hates, has invited her twin sister to live with them “forever.” The man collapses in despair, saying: “This miserable hopelessly hopeless situation is just perfect for a book ending.”

The Movie part turns the man and his wife into an affluent couple who even sleep in separate beds. As was the custom on screen at the time. The man is pursuing an affair (because he can’t stand that his wife is a slob), and is caught by a blackmailer. He then kills his mistress and the blackmailer with a revolver, which mysteriously doesn’t leave any traces of blood (the man in the Book story had used a knife). Returning home, his wife runs to his arms and says that from now on she’ll be a perfect helpmeet and keep a tidier house, and they skip off together over the rainbow while singing about joy.

As I say, I think this phenomenon of the Hollywoodized/sanitized novel is probably not as big a thing today, but the outline presented here has always stuck with me as a way of thinking about how page-to-screen adaptation works.

As for the cover, I’m not sure how well it would fly in the present age. Probably a little better than Token Mad, and in both cases I’m hoping the sense of irony would help it out.

Graphicalex

Bookmarked! #126: English Country Estates

/ Alex Good / 27 Comments

This week’s bookmarks are brought to you by the fabulous Fraggle, who sent them all the way from the north of England. Gibside and Wallington Hall are both heritage sites and I was thrilled to see that the National Trust still have these embossed leather bookmarks in their gift shops. Because what’s a nicer keepsake than a bookmark? I still have a bunch of them from my visit to the UK in the 1970s (see some from Scotland here), but I don’t think I was ever in Northumberland or Tyne & Wear.

Book: A History of Britain: The British Wars 1603 – 1776 by Simon Schama

Bookmarked Bookmarks

Archer: The Way Some People Die

/ Alex Good / 9 Comments

The Way Some People Die was the third of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer novels and it’s remarkable how much his individual formula had already been set.

In the first place we have a woman coming to Archer with a problem. It’s the ladies who get the ball rolling. That’s how the first Archer short story, “Find the Woman,” kicks off, back when Archer was still “Joe Rogers.” It’s Elaine Sampson in The Moving Target, Maude Slocum in The Drowning Pool, and Mrs. Samuel Lawrence (more on that later) in this book.

Second: most of these women have the same problem they want Archer to solve. Millicent Dreen wants Archer to find her daughter. Elaine Sampson wants him to find her husband. In The Way Some People Die Mrs. Lawrence wants him to find her daughter, Galley. The Drowning Pool is the one exception to this rule, with Maude Slocum asking Archer to investigate a poison-pen letter she’d received, but this is just something to get the ball rolling. The main action of the novel surrounds Archer’s attempt to find the missing Patrick Ryan, just as in this book the search for Galley is passed off to being a search for Joe Tarantine. In short: finding missing people is what Archer does.

Third: the women who hire Archer are all “of a certain age,” meaning perhaps middle-aged though often still possessing a sexual charge. They each, however, also have kittenish daughters who like to sleep around: Una Sand in “Find the Woman,” Miranda Sampson in The Moving Target, Cathy Slocum in The Drowning Pool, and Galley Lawrence/Tarantine in The Way Some People Die. That Galley is the friskiest kitten yet, bordering on being a “crazy for men” nymphomaniac, shows that there was something about sexually liberated young women that fascinated Macdonald. And also worth noting is the conflict in every case between these women and their mothers, something Macdonald often linked to classical myth and Freudian psychology.

Galley is different from earlier kittens in that she’s a bad ‘un. It’s not just that “frank sexuality is her forte.” She’s bad. Bad and dangerous: “a single gun in the hands of a woman like Galley was the most dangerous weapon. Only the female sex was human in her eyes, and she was its only really important member.” Put a gun in this babe’s hand and she gets ugly, and “an ugly woman with a gun is a terrible thing.”

In case you were wondering, her full name is Galatea. And what was her mother’s name, you ask? Why she’s Mrs. Samuel Lawrence. Or just Mrs. Lawrence, for short. Back in the day, married women didn’t have first names. Mrs. Samuel Lawrence is even how she introduces herself to Archer, and this despite the fact that her husband Samuel is dead! I still sometimes see letters being addressed to a Mrs. Man’s Name, but only ones that have been written by people who are now in their 70s. In any event, Mrs. Lawrence ends up a lot like James Slocum, withdrawing into her own preferred alternate reality, though, surprisingly, it’s not one that is antagonistic to Archer. She’s just not as fiery a character. I guess Galley got all of her spunk from her dad.

I felt a real tension in this book between Macdonald’s penchant for complexity with his desire to tie everything up neatly in the manner of a well-made plot. Which just means that the narrative of what “actually happened” here is very hard to follow. I’m not sure I managed to keep it straight, though I don’t think it matters much in the end. You’re in it for the atmosphere, that landscape of unreality and dream/nightmare that Archer operates in. One where everyone is guilty of something and blood seems to follow him everywhere (the yolk of an egg “leaked out onto the plate like a miniature pool of yellow blood,” and a bottle with a candle stuck in it at a restaurant is “thickly crusted with the meltings of other candles, like clotted blood”). There are few heroes in an Archer novel. This makes his morality cut and dried. Or is it even morality? Here he is trying to explain to Mrs. Sampson: “She lived in a world where people did this or that because they were good or evil. In my world people acted because they had to.” But then “Perhaps our worlds were the same after all, depending on how you looked at them. The things you had to do in my world made you good or evil in hers.”

My takeaway from this is that good and evil don’t exist in Archer’s world, at least in a form where we can judge people by their actions. There’s no free will. But that’s not an assumption he seems to operate under. It’s more like a crutch or rationalization he’s come up with, something to help him sleep at night. True, when people get in a jam their options start to be reduced, until they’re finally just trapped by a naturalistic drawing of fate. But at some point they chose a path, and their fate is no longer random.

Archer index

Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Pursuit of the Flesh

/ Alex Good / 16 Comments

Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Pursuit of the Flesh

Not just Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, meaning his intellectual property, but a comic actually written by Clive Barker (and Christopher Monfette). Which I can’t say pays off very much as I didn’t care for the writing. There’s a lot of heavy breathing from the Cenobites that’s all just mumbo-jumbo. If you go back and watch the first movie, Pinhead doesn’t actually talk much. Just a handful of lines. In Pursuit of the Flesh he’s making speeches like this: “It is fruitless to wonder how this came to pass . . . History has no place in hell. We live our deaths within a final, unending chapter. Unraveling, unfolding, forever. And there is no prologue for us but pain.” There’s a lot of this stuff, and while it may sound cool, it means exactly nothing.

As far as I could understand it, the flesh being pursued here was that of poor Kirsty Cotton. Why? I think it has something to do with Pinhead wanting to become human again and he needs to provide her as some kind of blood sacrifice to the demonic powers that be. But I don’t know. And the reason I don’t know is that this book only contains the first four comics in a series and it’s not a complete story arc. It breaks off with a cliffhanger. So I’m not sure what was really going on.

If you want gore, you got it. Those chains with the hooks at the end get a lot of play. Many bodies are torn apart, and the art renders it all quite well. It’s a good looking comic. The story, however, was hard to follow. Something about a team of hell-hunters who each have experience dealing with the Cenobites trying to turn the tables and shut them down. Kirsty seems to be their leader. But it all’s kind of hazy and I didn’t grasp the mythology. The Clockwork Cenobite was a neat addition though.

Not sure I’ll keep going with this series. I’m curious, but not eager. And I watched all the movies!

Graphicalex

What am I?

/ Alex Good / 19 Comments

When I was cleaning up my mother’s house a couple of years ago I held on to these two nifty-looking glass bowls. I remember them sometimes being used in our house when I was a kid. On a hunch I asked a couple of the guys who were working on the renovations at my place if they knew what they were. They were both young fellows, in their early 20s. The looked them over and guessed they were candy dishes. Which I suppose is something they could be used for, but it’s not their obvious function.

Their supervisor, who was 40-something, also pulled a blank.

The correct answer will be found in the comments section!

Tales from the Crypt Volume 1

/ Alex Good / 9 Comments

Tales from the Crypt Volume 1

Another EC horror comic series, very like The Haunt of Fear and The Vault of Horror. Same editor, same stable of artists and writers, same back story of migration from being part of an earlier title (Crime Patrol, in this case) to being its own series (originally The Crypt of Terror and then Tales from the Crypt).

As with the other EC horror comics there’s a genial host in the form of the Crypt-Keeper, who along with the Vault-Keeper and the Old Witch formed a triumvirate that EC tried, unsuccessfully, to brand as the Three Ghoulunatics. There were also a lot of crossovers between the three titles, and in one case there’s even a reprint of a story. “House of Horror” appeared first in The Haunt of Fear #15 (May-June1950), where it’s credited to “Ivan Klapper.” It runs again here in Tales from the Crypt #21 (December 1950-January 1951) where Al Feldstein is named as the author. I assume Ivan Klapper was a pseudonym Feldstein used but I haven’t been able to find any source for this.

Sticking with writing credits, the flash-fiction short stories interspersed with the comics aren’t attributed to any author. In The Haunt of Fear and the The Vault of Horror writing credit is given to either Feldstein or publisher Bill Gaines. I’d assume that they were responsible here as well, but I thought these stories were really inferior in quality so I can’t say for sure.

The contents are mostly in line with what you’d expect from EC at this time. There are werewolves. A vampire. And lots of digging up corpses and burying the living. The writers also seemed to have a thing for the use of quicksand as a plot device. I wonder what happened to quicksand. You used to see it a lot in the pop culture of the 1950s and 1960s. Not so much today. Same as those mail-order chemistry experiment kits that were advertised for $1. “Safe! Harmless!” they say, but I don’t think they’d pass muster now.

One thing that I thought set these stories slightly apart is that they’re more inclined toward rational explanations for a lot of the seemingly supernatural goings-on. A villain may be trying to drive someone insane by manufacturing spooky happenings, or it may be left up in the air as to whether the horrors were all just being imagined. Also, whenever possible scientific explanations are reached for to make things seem a little less crazy. So reviving the corpse of an executed killer by giving it an electric shock? Sort of Frankenstein-ish, but you can roll with it. And the best story in this volume, “℞ . . . Death” (written by Feldstein, art by Graham Ingels) also has a pseudo-scientific explainer thrown in at the end where the prescription that a fellow has been taking turns out to be digestive enzymes that eats him alive, turning him into a puddle of black tar.

Finally, keeping with “℞ . . . Death” I was also pleased to see that it was voted the readers’ favourite story in the next issue’s Crypt-Keeper’s Corner. This led me to think that maybe they weren’t just making those polls up, which is something I’ve always been suspicious about.

Graphicalex

Scanning in the New Year

/ Alex Good / 19 Comments

I ended up 2025 with a trip to the hospital for an MRI.

It was quite an odd experience. The hospital is usually a place that’s packed with people and crazy busy. But the combination of it being the holidays and 4:30 in the morning meant it was eerily quiet. That may also be why I managed to get an appointment for an MRI within a week. Usually you have to wait a lot longer than that.

No cars on the road for the drive to the hospital. I got to the main entrance and there was no one in sight. Only one person in the cavernous main lobby, and she was hidden in the information booth. I didn’t even see her at first. Went to the elevators. Nobody there. Rode them up to the third floor. Nobody. Nobody anywhere.

One person at the desk in the MRI room, who directed me to the waiting room. Empty. I just hung around until somebody came out and told me where to get changed and put my clothes. Then she left. So I got changed (messed up putting on the hospital gown because I don’t wear one of those every day, OK?), then went into the MRI room. Haven’t had one of those before but it turned out to be a pleasant experience. Really nice technicians. Then left. One person was just coming into the waiting room as I was heading out. Back on the main floor there was one janitor pushing a scrubber.

So inside and outside the hospital I saw a total of six people. Two at information desks. Two running the MRI machine. One patient and one janitor. All women. They say healthcare is a predominantly female occupation now but this still struck me as surprising. Though more surprising was just how empty the place was. I mean practically deserted. If I hadn’t been looking for people I wouldn’t have found any. And it’s a big hospital!

This was a great visit. Much nicer than the last time I was in a hospital! Best moment was this sign of a bear reminding me to wash my hands. I really loved this. And I did wash my hands!

Happy New Year! Take care of yourselves and stay out of the hospital if you can!