theinferior4+1

Earlier this year, when Miss Liz was visiting Providence, we all watched--or tried to watch--a legendarily bad film titled RAT FINK A BOO BOO, by Ray Dennis Steckler. The experience was excruciating.

Well, last nite Deb and I popped in another Steckler masterpiece, WILD GUITAR. An earlier film, it was actually viewable on a campy level.

Here's the trailer. I'm only sorry Liz wasn't present to enjoy the show.

In my work as an occasional copyeditor of romance fiction, I've encountered some strange and even disturbing subgenres--for example, the Alpha-Male Subgenre, which can be described as "when men were men, and women liked 'em that way." Except all the action takes place today, and the men aren't just plain old-fashioned manly men but obsessive stalkers with a sadistic streak who help their chosen woman to bloom into her full submissive sexuality with a bit of the old ultra-v. That this stuff is written by women, for women, was an eye-opener.

Now I'm working on a book that features a pregnant single-mom-to-be and her studly next-door neighbor--another romance subgenre. The fetishization of pregnancy is almost wearying: this rich, handsome dude, who has his pick of babes, finds himself fascinated almost despite himself by every aspect of his neighbor's gravid form. He is more sexually turned on by this pregnant woman than he would be otherwise. Note that it's not a question of being captivated by her personality, falling in love with her as a person--no, it's all about lust for a pregnant woman, quite apart from who she is. He pursues her because she's pregnant, and only later gets to know her as a person. It felt weird and creepy to me -- but maybe that's just because I'm a male and not sensitive to the fantasies of women?

My pal Rory Raven has his second book just out, the true account of a sensational murder and trial from the early nineteenth century. I sense a rich lode of steampunk material here.

Amazon link: http://tinyurl.com/y9vv3ej

Folks might enjoy my brief coverage of the popular science book THE BLACK HOLE WAR:

http://tinyurl.com/yk8d26q

Posted by Paul DiFi.

Just saw that DiFi is one of the new judges for the John W. Campbell Award. Congrats, Paul! If this keeps up, we may have to change the name of this blog. The Not-So-Inferior 4+1? The Somewhere-Along-The-Vast-Inferior/Superior-Spectrum 4+1?

Tor.com is going to post stories from _The Year's Best Fantasy 9_ every Friday, and they're starting tomorrow with my story "Reader's Guide" and stories by Jeffrey Ford and Al Michaud. The anthology is pretty good, actually. The winner, and by winner I mean "story by an author new to me, all of whose books I am now going to read," is Catherynne M. Valente's "A Buyer's Guide to Maps of Antarctica" -- it's beautifully evocative, and I'll try to remember to post here when it shows up on Tor's blog.

You know you've all been waiting for it, breasts heaving, lips parted, loins bedamped with — well, whatever: the annual Bad Sex in Fiction Awards. A lot of heavy hitters here — Phillip Roth, Paul Theroux, John Banville, Amos Oz, Nick Cave (Nick Cave?).

But only one woman out of the whole lot??? Girls, we need to protest, NOW! I can only imagine that the judges, with their hoity-toity attitudes towards Literature, failed to read any Laurel K. Hamilton, who — let's face it — is a lioness among lions, a yoni among yobs, a steel-plated leather strap-on Eleven among multicolour Durexes. Though this guy gives it his best shot.

"Then, Bobby starts scrabbling frantically across the carpet for Mr Condom, sending five or six multicolour Durexes flying through the air, and he struggles getting the packet open and Georgie has to roll Mr Condom down Mr Penis for him and she has to help insert him into Mrs Vagina."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/nov/19/bad-sex-factor-prize-shortlist

My novel FUZZY DICE originally appeared as a PS Publishing hardcover, then as an iBooks paperback. Both those editions are long out of print. But now the book is back, still featuring its great intro from Rudy Rucker. This time, I'm proud to be associated with Warren Lapine's Fantastic Books.

Here's the Amazon link for anyone looking for the perfect Xmas present about/for depressed, sardonic dimension-hoppers.

http://tinyurl.com/ygl6kue

Posted by Paul DiFi.

I finished watching The Prisoner yesterday. It was godawful. I watched the second one to see if it got better, and the third to see if it actually had an ending (it did, amazingly, but that doesn't excuse the rest of it).

I'll let my husband, who wasn't really watching all that closely, give the review: "You know, if they didn't call people by numbers, and if it wasn't called the Village, it wouldn't have any relation to The Prisoner at all." And later, when two people were talking interminably: "Which one is Estragon again?"

[Click to enlarge. From Legends of the DC Universe #15.]

I ran across this ad last nite, and thought it deserved a wider audience, given that Warren Ellis concluded this fine series just last month, with issue #27.

A review here: http://comics.ign.com/articles/103/1033093p1.html

The series: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_%28comics%29

Posted by Paul DiFi.

This is a new one on me: Chess Boxing! It's a hybrid sport that alternates rounds in the ring with speed rounds on the board. The sport even has it's own governing body, the World Chess Boxing Organization, which is attempting to bring chess boxing to the Olympics.



And no, white does not get to punch first!

Every time I finish writing a novel I think, Okay, I know how to do that now, I'll be all right writing novels from here on. And every time I start another novel I realize that this new one has problems all its own, and that, once again, I have no idea what I'm doing and have to start all over. This new novel is the worst of the lot, though, and is making me tear my hair out on a regular basis. Usually I start at the beginning and go straight through until the end, but this time my frustrations led me to do something I've never done before -- jump ahead in the story and write something that takes place much closer to the end.

I've noticed that writers do either one or the other, either start at the beginning and work straight through, or jump around. It doesn't seem to affect the quality of the books, whichever one they choose. I've always envied the "jump around" crew, though, because I have a theory Shakespeare was one of them -- in "Timon of Athens" he has a character defend another character who killed someone, though we have no idea who the murderer was, or who he murdered. Presumably Shakespeare was going to fill all that in later. (This partly explains why "Timon of Athens" isn't shown very often.)

Anyway, I just managed to connect my narrative with something that I wrote last year, which makes me very happy. Yay!

A sort of sideways broadsheet thrust into Martin Amis's essay on Nabokov — a sharp observation of Auden, Late Style, and playwriting from Alan Bennett in the London Review of Books:


http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n21/alan-bennett/alan-bennett-writes-about-his-new-play

"Feeling I'd scarcely arrived at a style, I now find I'm near the end of it. I'm not quite sure what Late Style means except that it's some sort of licence, a permit for ageing practitioners to kick their heels up."

I always like a song where the singer's voice ululates wordlessly. The Ellington piece is 100% thus. The Roxy Music song of course features only snatches, albeit unforgettable ones. Is it too much to draw a straight line from Ellington to Bryan Ferry?

Posted by Paul DiFi.

A masterful essay on Nabokov by Martin Amis, who herewith redeems his lackluster work of late, imho anyway, and nicely sums up the posthumous appearance of Laura (along with other late works) as leaving "a faint but visible scar on the leviathan of his corpus." I dutifully read Ada in the late 1980s, and was too insecure to admit how much it bored me as I assumed the problem was my puny intellect. I'm relieved I don't have to reread it.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/nov/14/vladimir-nabokov-books-martin-amis

"They call it a "shimmer" – a glint, a glitter, a glisten. The Nabokovian essence is a miraculously fertile instability, where without warning the words detach themselves from the everyday and streak off like flares in a night sky, illuminating hidden versts of longing and terror."

Next year marks the 100th anniversary of the first cinematic adaptation of Mary Shelley's novel.

Posted by Paul DiFi.

edward woodward died yesterday at the age of 79. Best known for his work in the American TV show, the Equalizer, he did great thing in films like Breaker Morant and The Wicker Man, and also in many British TV shows, notably the remarkable Callan.





Here's my review of Gentleman Broncos.

I suppose there must be a Hollywood movie in which a writer is portrayed as heroic, brave, or at least good-hearted. The best I can come up with at the moment are Peter Lorre’s inquisitive, somewhat craven Cornelius Leyden in the 1944 spy movie, =The Mask Of Demitrios=; =Adventures of a Young Man=, Martin Ritt’s forgettable attempt to sew together a movie out of Hemmingway’s Nick Adam’s stories; and the unremittingly awful, platitude-riddled Gus Van Sant film, =Finding Forrester=, that gave us Sean Connery’s emotionally crippled, Salinger-esque recluse who, during his last days, mentors a basketball-playing, ghetto-dwelling young writer (whose work seems to promise that he’ll turn out to be the black Nicholas Sparks) and babbles some generic nonsense about honor prior to kicking the bucket. Generally writers are depicted as they are perceived by the industry, as a necessary breed of vermin, some few of them eccentric and lovable in their way, like genius pets, yet mainly a scummy bunch, devious, deviant, pathetic, pompous and conniving, eavesdropping on others, stealing their lives and lines. (I’ve heard book editors espouse more-or-less this same view, wishing half-jokingly that writers could be eliminated from the publishing process—a wish that may soon be fulfilled). Of course, the characterization isn’t entirely unjustified, since writers are by nature somewhat vampiric.

All this leads us to consider =Gentlemen Broncos=, the latest picture from Jared Hess (=Napoleon Dynamite=, =Nacho Libre=), a member of the isn’t-everyone-quirky school of filmmaking (Wes Anderson, president). GB isn’t a very good movie, yet for anyone associated with the science fiction field, be it fan, editor, or writer, it may hold a morbid fascination. It concerns a withdrawn home-schooled teenager named Benjamin Purvis (Michael Angarano), a friendless loner who lives with his quirky mom in a geodesic dome and writes bad science fiction stories, a pastime that inspires him to attend a fantasy writer’s camp where he meets a quirky teenage girl, Tabitha (Hailey Feiffer), a quirky young filmmaker, Lonnie (Hector Jiminez), and super-quirk Dr. Ronald Chevalier (Jermaine Clement of =Flight of the Conchords=), a famous, ultra-pretentious science fiction writer with a ghastly upper-crust accent (think Thurston Howell III with a bad cold) who’s in the midst of writer’s block and a career crisis—his publisher just rejected his latest novel. In addition there’s also the quirky Dusty (Mike White) who’s been appointed Benjamin’s “Guardian Angel” (a kind of non-secular Big Brother program) by his mom’s church and comes accompanied by a large yellow snake. At the camp Benjamin submits his novel, =Yeast Lords=, to a contest judged by Chevalier, who promptly swipes it, does a superficial rewrite, and submits it as his own work. In process he changes Benjamin’s hero Bronco (played in visualizations of the novel by Sam Rockwell) from a bewigged space cowboy into a bewigged space-going tranny named Brutus who at one point has his genitalia reconfigured by evil aliens.

These visualizations (some of which we view as Benjamin wrote them, others as envisioned by Chevalier), complete with rocket-powered reindeer, optically enhanced surveillance does, and Rockwell going joyfully over the top…They’re ridiculous yet they’re the best part of the movie. Indeed, without them the movie would be no more than a collection of caricatures. The picture never feels as if its sails are full, as if it’s driven by any real spirit. This is due in part to the fact that Angarano as the brooding, pissed-off Benjamin doesn’t have the clueless =j’ne sais quoi= of Jon Heder or the frantic energy of Jack Black, Hess’ previous lead actors, and thus =Gentlemen Bronco= lacks a sufficiently appealing character with whom we can identify. Then too, despite Hess’ professed affection for science fiction, he has chosen to lampoon rather than to parody—his caricatures are drawn as clods, buffoons, and charlatans of various stripe, and the literature is depicted as the work of idiots. It isn’t that the genre (or any group) is devoid of clods, buffoons, and charlatans—often all three qualities are present in the same person—yet neither is it devoid of intelligent, thoughtful people. Not so, however, in Hess’ version of our little corner of the universe.

There are a few things to like in GB, scenes and characters and snatches of dialog that would have been better off embedded in a different movie. Rockwell, as mentioned. Hess’s eye for the culturally bizarre remains canny, and in his role as Dr. Chevalier, Clement has some good moments, though his unctuous, Bluetooth-wearing twit is too tired a creation to elicit more than a grin or two. The whole thing has the air of a TV skit that’s gotten out of hand.

Frankly I’m fed up with the disrespect that films like GB represent, and until Hollywood proves they can give me and my colleagues their proper due, I intend to boycott all movies featuring portrayals of writers. The studios have a lot to make up for—even journalists, the mimes of our profession, are portrayed in a kindlier light than creative writers. I’m looking for something to boost our self-esteem, something ennobling and heroic like =James Joyce and the Temple of Doom= or =Bret Easton Ellis Vs. The Mole People=. Anything of the sort will do. Maybe when Arnold gets tired of playing politics, he can reunite with John Milius and shoot the picture that many of us (us writers, I mean) have been champing at the bit to see: =Conan The Intellectual=.

No, not Superman!

Not Monty Python!

Not even the Spanish Inquisition!

It's the annual Leonid meteor shower, which will peak in the predawn hours of Tuesday and vary in intensity depending on the location of the observer (watchers in North America are likely to see from 20-30 meteors/hr, according to NASA, while those in Europe and Asia will have a much better show).

Anyway, I'm going to try and haul my butt out of bed tomorrow morning at 4 a.m. or so for a look . . . Weather conditions here in NYC, apart, of course, from the glare of city lights, should be optimal for good viewing. I'm hoping that my proximity to Green-Wood Cemetery will cut down a bit on the light pollution.

Okay, I never really wanted a Barbie doll till now....

Posted by Paul DiFi.

This interview has been up for almost two years now on YouTube, but has received only 800-some hits. Also, since KSR's MARS trilogy is referenced as "recent," the actual age of the interview is probably even older. Nonetheless, always a pleasure to hear Stan speak!

Posted by Paul DiFi.