Smorgasbord
My friend Stan, bless his heart, wanted to find me a girlfriend. Guess he’d finally gotten fed up with my two-year-long depression following my breakup with GF v1.0. A week or two before winter break, he hosted a dinner party and invited me, Karen, Suzie, and their roommate Kira.
At this point in history, Karen had broken up with BF v1.0, landing her in fresh rebound territory. Stan figured this put her off limits, which left Suzie and Kira, but Kira could serve High Tea on my head (she’s that tall), so that left Suzie.
We played monopoly and poker after dinner. I glistened like a coked-up Robin Williams and Karen was a whip-crack herself, witty and intelligent. Suzie was Suzie (cute and bubbly) and Kira was funny as hell, but Karen had most of my interest. In my anemic language of the time — what I told Stan, and soon after, what I told Karen — I thought she and I were on the same wavelength. That we were psychic twins. Amazing thing is, this didn’t scare her off.
I’ll skip most of winter break. I had a disastrous reunion with GF v1.0. You’d think after two years I could manage a let’s-be-friends scene, which was all I wanted*, but I didn’t give sufficient credit to my capacity for sheer unmitigated assholishness.
Winter quarter: Karen and I had one class together, Physical Chemistry Lab. She sat with Kira (we were all Chemistry or Chemical Engineering majors), I sat by myself. We had a senile instructor, Professor O’Konski, who provided endless jeering entertainment. Once, for example, he drew a stick figure of two-legged creatures and four-legged creatures (I think this was meant to demonstrate some subtle point regarding reaction kinetics) and said, “Here are the cowboys, riding on their cows.” I’m not kidding.
I’d have had more stories from that man, save for the fact my attention was riveted not on him but on Karen. Specifically, on trying to work up the nerve to ask her out. My tongue would not work. I had no trouble calling her on the phone, nor had I any qualms about dropping in at her apartment unannounced. I found ways of getting us together, but not in a manner that would be confused with a date. No, when it came to asking her out, I was verklempt**.
At the beginning of class one day, I passed her a note:
“This is a gimpish way to go about it but what the hell. Would you want to go out with me?”
I’d hoped she would pass the note back with a “Sure!” but no such luck. She made me wait until after class. Then she cornered me in lab, with Kira standing over her shoulder as bouncer-on-call.
“Are you going to explain this note to me?” she said. “What’s a gimpish thing to do?”
I hooked a couple of fingers around her arm and dragged her away from Kira.
“Will you go out with me?” I half-whispered.
“Elaborate!”
“Huh?”
“When? What? Where?”
But I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I mean, jeez, did I have to have everything planned? So I invited her over for dinner the following Saturday night. I gave her my address. As she walked back to her lab station, she called after me: “Jeez, some people are shy.”
Friday night, Kira and Stan walked over to my apartment in the rain. “Kira wants to see your apartment,” Stan said, but I think actually Kira wanted to check me out a bit closer. She borrowed a few books from my bookshelf, undoubtedly a ruse to see which books I had on my shelf. Fortunately, my 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings, Encyclopedia of Serial Killers, and Autopsy, Volume 3 were safely tucked away. And, fortunately, the half-naked Billy Idol poster belonged to my roommate Russ, not me.
Following a detour to Mama’s BBQ for Stan, the three of us returned to Kira’s apartment. Karen was there. We all played cards until 1 AM. That evening, the feeling returned — what I called kismet yesterday. A sense of inevitability.
On Sex and the City, the women hump their beaus like brain-lesioned rabbits and date for months before the subject of marriage ever comes up. Yet here I was, thinking about the future, the far future, and we hadn’t even dated yet. Sure, Sex and the City is a 21st century phenom, while all this stuff with Karen, that was in the OLD days — the 80s! Did people even have sex back then?
D.
*And isn’t that dishonest as hell.
**Fake American Yiddish, courtesy of SNL: overcome with emotion.
Some people have decided to cast their BlogHop votes according to their honest opinion. This misguided policy has shunted Shatter off the first page of their ‘Best’ list. Take a look at that list and ask yourself: does Whurdsderodan really deserve such status? Or Coffee Achiever? Or Much Ado About Me? It’s up to you, my non-voting lurkers, to boot yours truly back into the stratosphere. CLICK ON THE DARK GREEN SMILEY FACE (just check out the right-hand margin . . . scroll up a bit . . . there.) And, while you’re at it, hop on over to Bare Rump’s Diary and do the same for her. You wouldn’t believe how many arachnophobes are bringin’ the old girl down.
21st Anniversary: T minus 3 days
Karen and I met during my last year at Berkeley. I had recently changed my mind about my future. All of those pre-meds I had despised for the last three years — well, I still despised them, but I decided maybe they knew something I didn’t know. Mind you, I had zero interest in patient care, but that (my counselor told me) wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. There was this new creature, see. All the rage at places like Hahvahd or Stanford. They called ’em MD-PhDs. I’d get to live in a lab like a PhD (something I wanted at the time) but I’d get paid like an MD, and NIH would rain grants down upon me, a veritable golden shower . . .
Anyway, this change in direction meant I had to take a hard look at my appearance on paper. The one thing I lacked was research experience. And so, in Fall Quarter of my senior year, I cast around looking for a lab, and soon found myself with Professor Sung-Hou Kim.
I was years-young and world-stupid enough to get deliriously excited over the prospect of twenty hours work per week with no pay, and in that mood I first laid eyes on Karen. I left Melvin Calvin Lab and skipped over to Hildebrand Library. (I did a lot of skipping in those days, skipping and moping. A sure target for the Moonies.) I had to tell someone of my stunning good fortune. I ran over to a table where my friend Stan sat with two girls I didn’t recognize. I began to effuse, but Stan would have none of it.
“What?” I said. “Are you still mad at me?”
He was mad about something, and it was probably me. He’d dropped in on me at my apartment earlier that week, unexpected, and I hadn’t been too welcoming.
“Should I be mad at him?” he asked Karen and Suzie. They both kept quiet. You couldn’t really answer a question like that.
Later, he told me that Karen and Suzie were roommates, and I could take my pick. Later still, he found out that Karen had a boyfriend and retracted his offer. (Stan was like that back then. Different.)
This bummed me out. He’d hyped her to me — told me how smart she was, how she took math classes for fun. (Karen denies this. She says all of those math classes had a purpose.) It didn’t take much hype to keep me interested.
It wasn’t love at first sight. It wasn’t even lust at first sight. No, what I felt was far more ominous.
Kismet.
D.
Chandler: Not a snowflake* kinda guy
Sorry to harp about Chandler, but Karen and I went to see Land of the Dead this afternoon, and I’m still trying to get the taste out of my mouth. This flick was not Dead goodness.
Here’s proof (I think) that Chandler didn’t write from an outline, at least not circa 1947. This is an excerpt from a letter written “To Mrs. Robert Hogan”, March 8, 1947, reprinted in Library of America’s second Chandler collection:
“One of my peculiarities and difficulties as a writer is that I won’t discard anything. I have heard this is unprofessional and that it is a weakness of the amateur not to be able to tell when his stuff is not coming off. I can tell that all right, as to the matter in hand, but I can’t overlook the fact that I had a reason, a feeling, for starting to write it, and I’ll be damned if I won’t lick it. I have lost months of time because of this stubbornness. However, after working in Hollywood, where the analysis of plot and motivation is carried on daily with an utter ruthlessness, I realize that it was always a plot difficulty that held me up. I simply would not plot far enough ahead. I’d write something I liked and then I would have a hell of a time making it fit in to the structure. This resulted in some rather startling oddities of construction, about which I care nothing, being fundamentally rather uninterested in plot.”
Chandler began writing The Big Sleep, his first novel, at age 50 (1938). He wasn’t a fast writer, nor a prolific one by today’s standards. By the time of his death in 1959, he’d written seven novels, all featuring Philip Marlowe.
As for Marlowe, I think the second paragraph in The Big Sleep sums him up best:
The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a group of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a night in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying.
That’s Marlowe: a would-be stand-in for a tarnished knight.
D.
*Snowflake: this is not a reference to Chandler’s machismo or lack thereof. I keep forgetting you’re not all writers. The ‘Snowflake Method’ refers to a particular technique of novel outlining. See link.
Movie trailers for morons
In recent years, I’ve noticed an odd trend in trailers for mature films. (Mature? Read: for adults — after all, you can’t call ’em adult movies.) I noticed it again watching this trailer for the chick flick Asylum.
Everything is revealed. Everything. They’re only holding back on the ending, but anyone with an ounce of dramatic sense knows Natasha Richardson ain’t gonna get iced by the sexy crazy man. My prediction: she breaks up with her husband but she doesn’t end with Mr. Looney Tunes either. They’re going to go for the bittersweet angle. Or: she’ll stay with her husband, and their marriage will be somehow stronger thanks to her intimate brush with a murderer. That’s the Hollywood ending, but since this is a UK flick, I’m going for option 1.
The same cannot be said for children’s movie trailers (and I’ve seen a lot of them). Their problem is they give away nearly every good joke in the movie, as with the movie Madagascar. But at least they don’t give you the blow-by-blow on the plot.
Could it be that adults have less tolerance for uncertainty than children? Or is there a simpler explanation?
We’re going to see George Romero’s Land of the Dead today. That’s one trailer that doesn’t give away the store.
D.
Lethem on Chandler
Gun, with Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem
During internship, I gave all my Chandler paperbacks to an old black man dying of laryngeal cancer. He spent his time in an eight-bed ward, nothing to do but watch TV (one TV for the whole ward, forever tuned to the Spanish language channel), and when I found out he liked to read mysteries, I thought I’d do something nice.
Parting with those paperbacks was like loaning out a stack of letters written to me by my best friend. I’m not usually the type to get sappy about my books, but — The Big Sleep! Farewell, My Lovely! Take my left nut while you’re at it.
There’s something almost painfully endearing about Chandler’s protagonist, Philip Marlowe. I can’t think of a more sympathetic fictional character. There’s more to Marlowe than just smart-ass wisecracks (that’s about all you get from most movie Marlowes — even Bogie, God bless him). More than just his self-effacing humor, or his White Knight ethos. For me, it’s the fact that Marlowe has a vision of how things should be, and he’s inevitably dissapointed. He’s a chivalrous character in a world that relegates its Knights to wax museums.
The few SF-noir-hardboiled hybrids I’ve read usually don’t get it. You can’t do this on snarky smart-alecky patter alone. It’s not enough that your protag, at least once in the novel, drinks hard, is sapped on the head, gets slipped a mickey, runs afoul of the police, and falls for the dangerous dame. You can’t turn Chandler into a formula like that. The only way you can do Chandler is to do Marlowe.
Halfway through Gun, with Occasional Music, I told Karen that Lethem got all the elements right, but didn’t truly get Chandler. By two-thirds of the way through, I’d changed my mind. And if I had any remaining doubt that Lethem understands Chandler, it vanished after I read an interview he did with Trudy Wyss, for Borders. Here’s a relevant excerpt:
The Chandler detective is one who’s self-aware to just a degree where he can see the absurdity of his own actions, and particularly of the urge to rescue other people. That’s something Chandler was very tormented about: What does it mean to try to be a hero? To be a white knight in a kind of crumbling world?
And he’s just also such a beautiful writer. The secret of Chandler is that he’s really very romantic. Behind all that ennui there’s this enormous yearning that causes him to reach, in this very precarious way, for all sorts of beautiful phrases and unlikely poetic comparisons. And then he’s always making fun of himself for doing it at the same time. That’s why writers obsess over Chandler–because he’s found a way to have his lyricism and make fun of it at the same time.
So, yeah, he gets it, and in Gun, with Occasional Music, he’s proven that he gets it.*
Conrad Metcalf is a private inquisitor in a world where questions have all the political correctness of the N-word. Here, Celeste Stanhunt, wife of the murder victim, is talking to Metcalf:
“I’ve answered enough questions today to last a lifetime. Let’s see some identification, or I’m calling in the heat.”
“The heat?” I smiled. “That’s ugly talk.”
“You’re using a lot of ugly punctuation.” She stuck out a hand. “Let’s see it, tough boy.”
It’s an interesting world, not immediately recognizable as a dystopia. One of the beauties of the novel is the way it sneaks up on you like a revelation, exactly how dystopian this place is. The written word is all but extinct, and the spoken word is endangered. Morning news on the radio consists of mood music: the listener must intuit local and world events by the flavor of orchestration. Television news consists of clipped images — politicians smiling, shaking hands, kissing babies. Nearly everyone uses drugs (with names like Forgettol, Regrettol, Addictol) and, guess what, this junk is free courtesy of the government. As time passes, what at first seemed quirky becomes, by turns, ominous, and then outright nightmarish.
That’s why I had my doubts about Gun early on. At first it seemed that Lethem’s approach to Chandler was a sort of novel-sized Mad Lib. For cops, substitute Public Inquisitors; for rye whiskey, substitute make (the individual’s personal blend of drugs; Metcalf’s is “skewed heavily towards Acceptol, with just a touch of Regrettol to provide that bittersweet edge, and enough addictol to keep me craving it even in my darkest moments.”) For the lower class — ubiquitous in Chandler’s work — substitute evolved animals. There’s a kangaroo here you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley.
But things change. The mystery unfolds as it deepens, time passes, caprice becomes meaning. The author has a plan, but I won’t spoil it by telling you. Trust me, trust Lethem.
Gun was Lethem’s first novel, so in fairness we should compare it to The Big Sleep. Like The Big Sleep, the mystery in Gun is, ultimately, a secondary concern. You could quibble over it, but you should bear in mind a much-repeated (and possibly apocryphal) story about Chandler. Humphrey Bogart (Marlowe in the first film version of The Big Sleep) and director Howard Hawks got into an argument over who killed the chauffeur — or was it suicide? Chandler replied that he didn’t know, either. (In another version of the story, it was Jack Warner who telegrammed Chandler with the question. When Chandler couldn’t answer it, Warner billed him 75 cents for the telegram.) Point being, if you’re here for the mystery, then you’re no fun at all.
Post script: My patient didn’t do well. Laryngectomy, fistula, recurrence, sepsis. “Piss-poor protoplasm” is how docs put it when we’re around each other and have to wear our stony faces. He had no family, no friends. When he died in the 10th Floor step-down ICU, I was Intern On-Call, and I had to come to his bedside to pronounce him dead, and I was probably the only one in the hospital who gave a damn about him. Some of you might say, “He would have liked it that way,” but I think he would have preferred not being dead. That would have been my choice.
D.
*Those of you who read this blog regularly may be wondering if I’m incapable of giving a bad review. That I leave all the snarkiness to my wife — the classic good cop, bad cop. Maybe you’re even wondering if I love everything I read, and that I would wax poetic over the ingredients list of Safeway’s Very Maple cookies.
But I don’t.
What’s the point in trash-talking a book, no matter how elegant, logical, and/or humorous that trash-talk may be? Do you really need to know that I sped-read Chris Roberson’s Here, There & Everywhere last night, and now I want my money back? Or that I gave up on Brin’s Kiln People in less than one hundred pages because he can’t control his damned exclamation points? No. You don’t need to know that. And you won’t find snark like that on these electronic pages.
Unrequited lust
John Scalzi openly flaunting his metrosexuality got me thinking: how many times has a gay man made a pass at me? I can count this on one hand, and that would be the hand of some guy who likes to use his band saw after two bottles of Thunderbird. Trouble is, that number still totes up higher than the number of hetero come-ons pitched my way.
Not that I’m complaining. Gay come-hithers leave me feeling good about myself. After all, what could be more flattering than the approval of some fella who might one day star on Queer Eye? But the hetero advances never fail to leave me nauseated and vaguely confused. After nearly 21 years of marriage, I’m still getting used to the idea that my wife is willing to have sex with me. Of course, it might be relevant that, left out in the cold, I become unbearably pissy. Whining: Spanish Fly for the 40-something Guy.
Back to gay men, and the few who thought I was hot stuff. In med school, I took my Preparation for Clinical Medicine rotation at the Palo Alto Veteran’s Administration Hospital. I’d partnered with Fred, a classmate with biceps big as my thigh, a guy credulous enough to accept, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, my tale of the Latest Proceedings of the International Jewish Conspiracy. Yet Fred couldn’t believe me when I told him about the slight-framed, red-headed male nurse who couldn’t pass me on the ward without giving me the eye. Homosexuality was not part of Fred’s world view. That sort of thing happened up the Peninsula, in shops like Hard-on Leather or bars like The White Swallow. You’d never — never ever ever — have to face that sort of thing here in the VA Hospital, surrounded by hordes of Bronze medal-punctured amputees with faded DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR tatts.
One day, I got my chance to open Fred’s eyes. I spotted my admirer from thirty feet away and elbowed Fred in the ribs. “Watch, okay?” I said. “Just watch.” As we passed my little red-head, he winked at me with his whole face. It looked something like this:
I’m really sorry you had to see that.
Fred dragged me off into a stairwell, nearly dislocating my shoulder. “You weren’t kidding!”
“Of course not. I never kid. And, oh, by the way, we were discussing the fate of Your People at last week’s IJC rally, and I’m afraid there are going to be a few changes around here.”
Kidding about that last bit.
Flash forward to 1990. Internship at Los Angeles County General Hospital, which at the time (pre-Northridge earthquake) ranked as the nation’s largest hospital complex. You would most likely know County from the exterior shot used for the opening credits of soap opera General Hospital.
Mandatory reading for any new intern: Samuel Shem’s The House of God, guaranteed to fill you full of misconceptions on the mechanics of internship — the chief misconception being that every female in the hospital, from medical students to attending physicians, nursing students to ward clerks, would, sans warning, drag you off into a vacant call room/operating theater/pharmaceutical cabinet to jump your living bones.
True enough, there were occasional sparks of interest, like the zaftig Filipina nursing student who always had a smile for me, or the Jewish medical student who had me pegged as a Jew the very first day, and whom I had to beat away with an IV pole because when I told her I’m married her response was So? But, with rare exception, no one got laid at LA County. No one.
Men of ambiguous sexuality abounded: nurses, aides, clerks. You never knew where you stood with these guys; wedding rings didn’t necessarily mean anything. Gay or straight, nearly all wore scrubs, so you couldn’t pick up on visual cues.
I remember one fellow in particular: a night clerk named Bub (not his real name — for a change, I’m not being a total dickwad). Bub was a fifty-something Filipino who wore white shirts stained with Ensure and the various other brands of kibble County fed its patients; white shirts that did remarkably little to conceal his whopping V-bagging elephant scrotum-sized man-titties.
One night, fueled by tapioca, Ensure, graham crackers, and Saltines (the only things available after the cafeteria closed), I worked past midnight on the ward, charting. I sat at the front desk across from Bub’s torpid form. The night nurses floated in and out of my field of vision like huge clumsy moths. My zaftig cutie was there, fighting with an IV drug abuser who insisted on smoking in the central hallway, tangling up her femoral line in the process. I had just reset the femoral line, and I was busy writing up the procedure note. Not easy, considering that every two minutes Bub roused from his heavy-lidded fugue to ask me for medical advice.
BUB: So. Doctor Hoffmah. What do you think of this thing on my neck?
All of my nights on the ward had a dreamlike quality, and this one was no exception. Comes from being half-asleep. My pen kept scratching across the page; the nurses kept flitting about behind me; Bub left his station to fuss with a chart rack. At the dimmest boundaries of consciousness, I felt him behind me, moving about. You know how you can sense when someone’s in your personal space, particularly if you don’t really like that someone? I knew he was back there, but I kept on working, because the sooner I had finished, the sooner I could get back to bed.
Then, without warning, I felt two of the warmest, plushiest breasts I have ever felt squeeze ever so voluptuously into my back and hold there for two full breaths, not that I was breathing, because (tapioca and graham crackers rising in my craw) I was too busy thinking
and then he moved away.
I jerked my head around —
I didn’t know what I was going to say to him but damn it I was going to say something. Interns are paid less than minimum wage! This is harrassment! What did I do to deserve this?
I jerked my head around, and saw my zaftig cutie walking away.
God damn! I wanted to scream. Get back here so I can enjoy it!
D.
That honeymoon glow
Early in the 1989 flick Sea of Love, Al Pacino’s character, a cop, indulges in a bit of thinking-out-loud with his partner (John Goodman). Pacino paints the picture of a first date for Goodman. Guy wines and dines the girl, gets her back to his apartment, does the wonder of me routine —
The wonder of me. When Karen and I first saw Sea of Love, that phrase jolted us out of our grad school-numbed complacency. For in those words, she saw me, and I saw myself. Yes, I had done this to Karen on our first date. Oh how I did it to her on our first date.
Hose down your minds, please. “Wonder of m”e refers to that state of being ON. You’re trotting out all your best stories. You’ve cranked your wit to the whip-cracking-snapping point. Baby, your cortex had better glisten, especially since the gal you’re dating takes Complex Analysis for fun (that’s mathematics, folks, not Freud).
It never lasts. Eventually, someone (me) develops a cortical flat tire, and some moronic, indefensible opinion slips the lips. You hope this happens after she’s fallen in love with you.
And it gets worse. One day, you realize you’ve run out of shtick. You have no more stories to tell, and before long you find yourself breaking up lengthy silent pauses at restaurants with, “Isn’t it nice that we can just be together and not have to say anything to one another?” And she says, “Yes, it really is,” but you know she’s thinking, Christ, what happened to him?
That’s when you start making shit up. That is the birth of fiction.
Well folks, I’m here to tell you, we’re still dating, and I haven’t run out of shtick yet.
Tomorrow: my close brush with man-titties.
D.
the number-driven life
Each morning when I sit behind the wheel of my car, I look at the odometer and do two things. First, I check to see what kind of poker hand I have. Second, I ask myself whether I will, today, drive through a palindrome.
You know palindromes: numbers or words that read the same forwards as backwards, like “Ah, Satan sees Natasha,” or 34643. Why should I care about a palindromic odometer reading? Why do I have an instant of irrational worry if, after dictating an operative note, the service tells me I’ve just dictated #341790?
Superstition, you’ll tell me, is fundamentally irrational. You might as well ask why I keep a hunk of wood in my pocket so that I’ll always have something to knock on. (That’s a joke. Not a good one, admittedly, but I’d rather you not think me a full bowl of Fruit Loops.)
I’ll cop to the knocking-on-wood being irrational. But the numbers? Baby, that’s in the blood.
Imagine eleven-year-old me: a good-hearted, believing bar mitzvah-in-training, though not too good-hearted. Actually, I was a surly little bastard who resented the fact that all these Arcadians in my class were a full socioeconomic level above me, and they never let me forget it. Surliness is next to godliness (what, you never heard that one?) so my teachers (who inevitably pronounced my name Dog) frequently sent me to the library to, you know, soak up some Proverbial wisdom. That’s where I discovered Chaim Potok’s The Chosen, and through it, gematria.
Forget the Bible Code. The Jews got there a couple thousand years ahead of you guys. We’ve been crunching sentences into phrases, phrases into words, words into numbers, and numbers into even smaller numbers, because — and I’m sure of this one — we’re not content to accept God’s word at face value. You know that Biblical literalist bumper sticker, “God wrote it, I believe it, That ends it”? The Orthodox Jewish version would be, “God wrote it, now let’s figure out what he really meant.”
The only thing I remember from The Chosen was the gematria — the way the rabbi wowed his Hasidic congregation with wild feats of numerical prestidigitation. If I remember correctly, someone comments to the protag that the rabbi’s math is all wrong, but no one ever cared. And, the funny thing was, I didn’t care either, because the idea of parsing the Torah into numbers that had meaning struck me as unbearably attractive.
I invite you now to delve into that wellspring of knowledge which has given a spiritual enema to Britney Spears, Demi Moore, and (the archetype of all Judaically born-again celebs*) Madonna: kabbalah. For gematria is, in fact, the mathematics of kabbalah. Here’s that website again: The Art of Gematria.
So: is this stuff really in my blood, or did it merely get its teeth into me during my impressionable youth? I’m not sure. What I know — what I feel — is that numbers have a life beyond the abstract; that numerical functions have a foothold in reality that goes way beyond their graphical representation; that when we look at the world around us, we see a mathematical universe, or would see it, if only our senses didn’t lie.
D.
*Sammy Davis doesn’t count. As far as I know, he really did become Jewish.
And now, from SF Hall-of-Famer Adolf Hitler . . .
The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad
For me, Norman Spinrad is most memorable as the author of the Star Trek episode, “The Doomsday Machine”, better known in my household as “Kirk Meets the Cosmic Blunt”. (We have alternate names for all the classic episodes. Three guesses as to the identity of “Captain Kirk, Space Queen”, or “Spock in Heat”. That’s my wife and I. So —
knockingonwood knockingonwood knockingonwood.)
Yup, “Kirk Meets the Cosmic Blunt”. Still saying, “Waaaaaah?” Here’s an unloaded blunt:
Now do you remember? No? Imagine William Shatner and William Windom fighting over who can chew the most scenery. That episode.
The Iron Dream and I only lasted one chapter together. By then, I had tired of the overly dense writing (me like dialog) and the core joke had grown old after ten pages.
Karen, masochist that she is, finished it, and penned the fine review which you shall soon read. She thinks she might have gone a little over the top in her conclusions, but what the hey.
I’ve taken a few editorial liberties. Karen says, “I don’t want to be judged over something you’ve written.” Okay: I’ll put any major interpolations by me in blue.
Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream (1972) caused a mild stir at the time of its publication. This satiric science fiction novel features an alternate history where Adolf Hitler emigrated to the United States in 1919 and became a comic book illustrator and science fiction writer. The Iron Dream (the actual title is Lord of the Swastika. I suspect Spinrad’s publisher chickened out and made him come up with a different title for the cover) is his supposed Hugo Award-winning novel of 1954, a story concerning the rise of Feric Jagger, a national hero who saves the nation of Held from the mutant hordes of inferior and corrupted humans.
Written in the bombastic tones of Mein Kampf, the novel is a distorted version of Hitler’s historic rise to power in Weimar Germany, and his subsequent actions in Europe and Africa. The story begins with Jagger returning from Borgravia (corresponding to Hitler’s youth in Austria). He arrives in Held, the last pocket of genetically pure humanity in a world still suffering from the devastating effects of an ancient nuclear war. Held is surrounded by radiation-contaminated land which has produced grotesque mutants who must be euthanized — for their own good, as well as for the sake of humanity.
Unfortunately for the blond, blue-eyed Heldons, these mutants are commanded by the sinister forces of the mind-controlling Zind, the analogue to the USSR. Ridiculously quickly, Feric gains leadership of a small political party, which he soon parlays into control of the entire country. How does author Hitler account for this? Feric’s amazingly powerful personal will and magnetism lead everyone to recognize his natural superiority. Under his magnificent leadership, the Heldon army finally confronts the vast armies of Zind in the book’s climactic battle.
Since Dream is written by alternate universe author Hitler, fascism is good, genocide justified, and everyone (everyone racially pure, that is) loves the good and wise hero who triumphs in the end. Spinrad’s difficulty, though, lies in maintaining a readable story that’s supposedly written by a psychopathic hack writer with no real insight into humanity. Thus, there is incredibly bad sentence structure and an obsession with the gory details of death and violence.
Desperately needed comic relief is supplied by the homoerotic descriptions of missiles, bullets, and the “Great Truncheon of Held,” Jagger’s semi-magical club that he wields as the true heir to the former Kings of Held:
Despite these attempts to shore up the narrative’s deficiencies, Spinrad lets the novel drag in many spots, particularly in the repetitious battle scenes. After reading 20 or so descriptions of Feric’s mighty blows decimating the mutant horde, I began to skip these passages.
But there’s more to this book than just the smug feeling that we are too clever to fall for fascistic propaganda. (In fact, I found a neo-Nazi review on the internet which didn’t realize this was satire; supposedly, the American Nazi Party loves the book, too.) (That last link — to AryanUnity.com — is more interesting than you might think. According to Karen, the reviewer plagiarized the review from another she (Karen) had just read. Then he tacked on a few paragraphs at the end to the tune of “Great book! Warms the cockles of my pure Aryan heart!”) Spinrad includes an afterword by a fictitious literary critic who discusses the popularity of similar stories in both science fiction and fantasy. Furthermore, the back cover quotes praise the novel as comparable to J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and G.K. Chesterton.
For example: recall, from LOTR, the slaughter of the mutant orcs and the short, debased men from the south by the racially superior elves and the tall and noble Aragorn. I have read a good deal of science fiction and fantasy and I have no doubt that a tinge of fascism, racism, and sexism seeped into a great many of the so-called classics of the Golden Age. In their defense, these stories were written decades ago and one shouldn’t necessarily apply today’s standards. However, their undeniable influence on today’s literature unconsciously leads some of us to separate different ethnic and religious groups into the ‘debased’ versus the ‘noble’, and the ‘fanatically homicidal’ versus the ‘protectors of humanity’. That, in conjunction with the ubiquitous scenes of slaughter and battle in the science fiction and fantasy genres, may lead the desensitized reader to support warfare and death in the real world.
Thanks, Karen. Folks, her next book review will be: “Charlotte’s Web: Beloved Children’s Classic, or Vegan Propaganda?”
D.