Are “bad books” good for young brains?
Posted: January 30, 2012 Filed under: art, reading, reviews, weird 15 Comments
I put the poster from the movie in here because, unless I miss my guess, over half the kids assigned to read the book will have watched the DVD instead.
There is a big flap here in Michigan about whether or not high school students in advanced placement English in the Plymouth/Cantor School district should be allowed to read books like Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.” Apparently some members of the local Tea Party in Plymouth have seized upon the issue as emblematic of “what is wrong with America” and want Morrison’s “Beloved” out of the schools. “Beloved” apparently has some salty language and some racy scenes, including rape, incest, bestiality, etc., but it is apparently set in the time when Americans owned slaves so I would argue that it can’t all be rainbows and unicorns or “Gone with the Wind.”
The controversy got me thinking about some of the books I read in high school that really interested me and helped turn me into a life-long reader. I was in an ‘advanced’ reading group in high school and many of the books I remember best were ones that challenged me in terms of the content. I made a list of some of my favorites from high school that I am now promising myself I will pick up again. I think if I still remember a book so many years after having read it, it is probably worth reading again.
Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess: This book blew my mind, not only due to all the sex and violence (of which there was plenty), but also because of the ‘Nadsat’ language (look it up). Yes, there was rape, lots of drug use, lots and lots of violence, etc., but there was a point to all of that ‘bad’ content and even as a teenager I understood that Burgess wasn’t really encouraging us to want to be like Alex and his ‘droogies.’ I was told that when the movie version was released in 1971, it was given an X rating.
The Tenants by Bernard Malmud: Racism, violence, sex and mutually assured destruction follow when two very different writers (one, a liberal educated Jew, the other a militant and angry black nationalist) become friends after they discover that they are neighbors in this story. I remember that the level of hate that the two principle characters developed for the other was the most frightening thing of the book. The two men are both sleeping with the same woman and there is lots of ‘hate speech,’ sex, bad language, drug use, drinking, etc. It ends with one of the principles getting castrated and the other one getting killed. I just found out that it was made into a film starring Snoop Dogg, but the film was only screened once.
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury: Yeah, I don’t think it should be controversial either, but there is (if I remember right) some sex and betrayal, drug use and suicide. Plus the the main character in the book, eventually rejects everything that his society stands for and becomes a traitor and an outcast.
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut: Sex, violence, insanity, more violence, more sex, sex while aliens are watching, masturbation, pornography, infidelity, a picture of a woman fucking a pony, lust, etc., are all in this book so I guess it belongs on the moral majority’s “this ought to be banned” list. It was one weird (and interesting) book — the film does not do it justice (but gets good marks for effort IMO). Definitely in my “Books you MUST read.”
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov: I still can’t believe we read this book in high school. Yes, it is a book about a child molester that tells the story from his point of view (put it in the ‘disturbing but meant to be that way’ category). The book has great literary merit and reading it will not turn you into a child molester. Goes on the ‘Must read’ list.
Johnny got his Gun by Dalton Trumbo: The main character is a deaf, dumb and blind quadruple amputee war veteran without a face who survived an exploding artillery shell and now lays in his hospital bed thinking about the events that led to his current condition. When a nurse finally figures out that the amputee is attempting to communicate by tapping his head against his pillow, his communication with the world outside his own skull is briefly re-established. The patient wants to be allowed to die, but when the doctors don’t allow that, he asks to be shown to the public so they can see the true horrors of war. It was written between the two World Wars and is perhaps the most disturbing book of fiction I have ever read.
More is better; Who Cares and What is the proper response?
Posted: December 28, 2011 Filed under: douchebaggery, philosophy, publishing, sexuality, weird 20 Comments
Cut and Paste me!
More is better: First things first — I no longer feel obligated to post on every Old School Renaissance event or outrage, but in my web wanderings I frequently come across people expressing the sentiment that when hobbyist gamers sit down to write their ‘own’ rule book, they should write something new and different from what has come before. “Don’t give us another cut-and-paste job!” the masses scream en masse from the internets with the same rage that others reserve for dolphin killers and child molesters.
I think that’s dumb advice. I think if someone sits down to write their own rule book, they should write it exactly the way they want to write it. If that means that the only difference between your new ‘Towers & Trolls‘ and the original game written by Gygax & Arneson is the name and just enough of the text to stave off a cease and desist letter from Wizards of the Coast, then so be it. In the scheme of things, who cares if ‘Towers & Trolls’ sells only 3 copies and never gets played? I’m under the impression most people in the OSR do this for fun and love rather than money… and, for most of us, if we make enough $$$ to buy a pizza and a sixer we can consider it a job well done. Like collecting stamps or building ships inside bottles, rewriting games is a niche hobby.
I realize that producing yet another clone is probably not the winning strategy if your goal is to support yourself by selling games, so the true entrepreneurs who are out to sell books and games in order to make big money might want to avoid tossing yet another undifferentiated clone onto the heap of available games… but the few OSR-ers I’ve met via the internet who are doing this for money already seem to have figured that out, anyway.
One of the reasons why I think this is so cool is I have been reading these posts on A-Plus’s “Outland” game and think it is just the shiznit. I wish I was in his group.
Who Cares?: Paul Jaquays is now a woman named Jannelle Allyn Jaquays (sp?). If you follow that link and read the responses, you will find out that the fact that he is now a she makes some people mad — which is really fucking weird. What are the angry people angry about? I imagine them saying things like, “I played ‘Dark Tower’ back in 1982 and loved it… and Paul Jaquays wrote ‘Dark Tower’ so now I feel like my world has been rocked… how could he betray us by becoming a woman!?!”
One poster wrote something like, “This cannot be true because I know he is a conservative.” I didn’t know there was a single specific conservative viewpoint on gender reassignment. Is there?
I’m reasonably certain Jannelle Allyn Jaquays will not read this, but, if you do, I hope all this works out for you.
If you are one of the people who is made mad by Paul Jaquays becoming Janelle Allyn Jaquays, please post why in comments. I want to know why someone else changing their gender harms you.
What is the proper response?: A few days ago I posted something stupid about new years resolutions and old fruit cakes selling for big money at auction and how I ought to invest in fruit cakes since I could either sell or eat them if worse came to worse. One person responded to tell me something along the lines of, “For your new year’s resolution you could try being less of a douche bag,” or something like that. I deleted the response. In your opinion, what is the proper etiquette in this case?
Little tiny people
Posted: December 22, 2011 Filed under: art, inspiration, weird 1 CommentRecently Annie turned me on to the artworks of someone named ‘Slinkachu.’ Slinkachu takes little tiny model people and photographs them living their tiny lives and having adventures in the regular sized world. Check it out at http://www.gwarlingo.com/2011/street-art-of-slinkachu/
One Day He Will Notice Me; Slinkachu
The new Hobbit trailer is out…
Posted: December 20, 2011 Filed under: butter crisis, douchebaggery, weird Leave a comment…but I don’t give a shit because I’m trying to keep up on the butter crisis’ from Norway:
Oww!
Posted: December 19, 2011 Filed under: inspiration, weird 2 Comments
Should have listened to mom.
That’s how they did it in the old country!
“The Evil Underground: Chapter 2” (slightly nsfw)
Posted: November 30, 2011 Filed under: art, comics, project, publishing, Shaver, underground, weird 7 CommentsLongtime followers of the blog may remember when I presented chapter 1 of a biographical comic book I was working on about the life of Richard S. Shaver (artist, conspiracy theorist, author, paleo-archeologist, philologist and philosopher). If you haven’t yet read it, go back and read chapter 1 before you read chapter 2.
You can click on each page, below, to see a bigger version.
I’m writing the chapters as I go (which may or may not be the best way of going about this; I don’t know). The story is ‘true’ (at least from the narrator’s point of view; objective truth or whether or not Shaver was psycho are not my interest). The next chapter will probably involve Raymond Arnold Palmer and the famous “Mantong” letter.
At the current rate of production, I should have the whole thing done sometime around 2020 or so (sigh). Actually, I hope to have it done sooner, but every project I currently have on the workbench is unfinished and I’m getting a bit psycho feeling over not getting any single one done. Evil Underground/Richard Shaver Comic will come out sometime after I finish ‘Exquisite Corpses’ v2… which should be sometime early next year (I hope).
Sympathy for the kids at UC Davis
Posted: November 23, 2011 Filed under: art, politics, weird 2 CommentsGiven all the pepper-spray cop art floating around the web, I thought I would remind folks that I was into the pepper spray meme before anyone one else. This is a drawing I did for one of Goodman’s DCC Classics a few years ago (I don’t remember which one):
"Get outta here yah dirty hippie!"
It was from some book where there was a kitchen where this big, ugly, hairy bastard was cooking, and, when you bothered him, he would throw pepper in your face. Once again, I was ahead of my time. (Note to self: get with Goodman to do mousepads and T-Shirts and coffee cups so we can cash in on this thing.)
In related news, talking head Megyn Kelly recently opined to Bill O’Rielly that being sprayed in the face with pepper spray was ‘not that bad’ because pepper spray is ‘basically a food product.’ This makes it sound like the campus police were spraying them down with PAM. I would invite her to take a single habanero pepper and rub it on her hands, then touch her own lips, eyes and nostrils right before doing a broadcast and see how chirpy she can be with even minute amounts of this ‘food product’ on her face.
Strange Dream
Posted: November 21, 2011 Filed under: dreams, inspiration, weird Leave a comment
Sorta like this...
OK, this is a dream I had last night (at least as well as I can remember it).
The dream started with me playing some sort of video game. The first part of the dream took the form of a computer video game involved loading a musket. One had to select the proper tools and parts from a list (like the ramming rod, wadding, ball, powder horn and other stuff) in the proper order and drag and drop them onto the right part of the musket. I have never loaded a musket, so it felt kind of ‘educational’ to me. There were a lot of weird looking tools in the menu; I suspect some of them were just ‘red herrings’ that my subconscious inserted in there to make the game more challenging. I think if you didn’t load the musket properly, it wouldn’t fire.
The second part of the video game was what they call a ‘first person shooter.’ You are looking down the barrel of the musket across an area where there are trees, houses, etc, as well as the shore of a river. As you sit there, possible targets appear, some of which will be things that one might presumably lose points if you shoot them (fellow citizens, milkmaids, sheep, etc.,) and enemy soldiers. The goal is to shoot the enemy soldiers (who look a lot like Hessians from the American Revolutionary war) without getting shot or wasting your shots on civilians, sheep or cows. I think every time you shoot the musket, you have to load it again.
Somehow, through the magic of dream logic, suddenly it was not a video game any more. I was in the battle, and instead of a bucolic, colonial setting, I was a part of an army defending a cliff. We could see the enemy swarming up stairways and towers. We had obviously just lost the battle.
I was dressed like this but my clothing was more colorful
The dream somehow transitioned to me being a captive. A group of soldiers were walking me and a companion down a road. My friend and I were dressed up like conquistadors; jackets with puffy sleeves, helmets and breastplates. I suddenly became convinced that the enemy soldiers behind us were going to shoot us in our backs and I told my comrade this. We decided to run and advised one another to run in a zig-zag pattern to make us harder to hit. The street we were on looked like part of a neighborhood that I lived in when I was growing up. We ran down the street in our zig-zag pattern and as I was running it occurred to me that by zigging and zagging it was taking us a lot longer to get away from our enemies than if we had run in a straight line. As I considered the advantages and disadvantages of both, we continued to run. We reached a hedge and dove through to escape our enemies.
Suddenly we were rolling down a hill. I was OK with this sionce rolling head over heels down a hill in a dream didn’t seem dangerous and we were getting away from our enemies much faster. At some point I landed on my head and squashed my helmet so it no longer fit on my head. It seemed to be made of thin aluminum, but, in my waking world I have been repairing our roof which involves a lot of shingles and aluminum flashing metal, so maybe there is some connection there. My helmet seemed to have been made from aluminum flashing so I don’t imagine it was much good as a helmet, anyway.
We reached the bottom of the hill and decided that although we had evaded our enemies for now, they would be looking for us, so we needed to ditch our uniforms and dress in some other clothing. Searching through a dumpster, we found some ragged old clothes and changed. At this point we were somewhere near Williams Pharmacy (which is also near where I used to live). This seemed to make sense since Williams Pharmacy is three or four blocks north and downhill from the corner of Lindell and Asbury (where we evaded our enemies). I noticed that the pharmacy seemed to be closed and paper was taped up over the inside of the windows so you couldn’t see in.
After this we crossed a busy street and hid near some railroad tracks. I realized that my companion was actually my partner, Annie. She pointed out a mutual friend of ours, Phoebe, who was unloading some stuff from a trailer that was hooked up to her car along with some other people. The ‘stuff’ looked like furniture and boxes of personal items which they were dumping on the side of the busy street. Annie suggested that we could ask Phoebe for a ride but I didn’t want to because I was suddenly self conscious about my ragged clothing (which isn’t really like me — in real life I wear ragged clothes all of the time).
And that’s where the dream ended. Weird, huh?
Sugar Plum Fairy doesn’t know naughty words…
Posted: November 14, 2011 Filed under: crass commercialism, douchebaggery, weird 1 Comment
sugar freak
I’m currently away from the cave while visiting family. Always on the hunt for amusement, I came across a story good enough to share: Saint Charles, Missouri, fires ‘Sugar Plum Fairy’ after she uses “bad words” during her drug test.
The background: St. Charles is a town east of St. Louis (my old home town). Every year the apparently have some Christmas deal in their downtown section where people walk around in costumes like this is some Currier & Ives holiday fantasy, singing carols and encouraging people to buy stuff. One of the ’employees’ was a woman named Laura Coppinger who would wear a ‘sprite’ costume with wings and run around like a sugar addled maniac in order to amuse the kiddies.
However, this year festival employees were all required to submit a drug test, because, well, you know that the good citizens wouldn’t want someone who runs around pretending to be a pixie to get high on her off hours. Sugar Plum Fairy apparently flushed the toilet during her drug test; she said it was just out of habit… you know, you go, you flush. City of Saint Charles told her she had to go back to the waiting room and drink a lot more water so she could take the test again. Sugar plum fairy was frustrated and said some ‘naughty words.’ Sugar plum fairy was fired on the spot. When asked why, the events coordinator cited the special rule, “Christmas Characters Don’t Know Naughty Words.”
Replacing Mind-Flayers and other I.P. protected monsters
Posted: November 5, 2011 Filed under: aldeboran, art, ideas, monsters, publishing, weird 16 Comments
I was doodling in the sketchbook this a.m. and came up with some sort of flying squid that was eating an off-market He-Man’s brains — something inspired by looking at too many old pulp sci-fi / horror magazine covers no doubt.
It occurs to me that this is how I might replace ‘I.P. protected’ monsters like ‘the mind flayer’ and others when I publish Mines of Khunmar eventually — plus it has an ‘Aldeboran’ vibe that I like.
I imagine this thing is capable of eating the victim’s brains and then using the brainless victim as a puppeteer uses a marionette. Obvious ripoff of Wolverton’s Brain-Bats of Venus I guess… but nothing really feels original anymore, so why not just go with it? Of course, it should have other cool powers as well. Gone is the mind-flayer’s human body — but the mind flayer really didn’t ‘use’ the human-like body it had (other than for walking around and using it’s hands to open doors). The ‘brain octopus’ (don’t have a good name for it yet) could travel around by crawling unless it has a ‘puppet’ — then it could just ride around and let the puppet do the walking.
While we are on the subject, since monsters like “The Displacer Beast” were obviously ripped by Gygax and company from an A.E. Van Vogt story (1) how is it that Wizards now ‘owns’ it? I mean, I guess Gygax (or someone at TSR) came up with the name ‘Displacer Beast’ — shouldn’t the monster itself belong to Van Vogt’s estate while Wizards owns the name ‘Displacer Beast’?
1) Wikipedia tells me it is called ‘Coeurl’ and appears in the story, “The Black Destroyer”, which also features a space ship called ‘The Beagle’. I know ‘Beagle’ is a reference to the career of Charles Darwin, but didn’t a space ship called ‘The Beagle’ for the basis of some of the ‘Blackmoor’ adventures published by TSR (I’m thinking ‘City of the Gods’ and ‘Temple of the Frog’?)