I’ve read a lot of great literature and used it in my own work. I’ve also read a lot of airport bestsellers, including complete series titles by Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, John D. McDonald, Ross McDonald, Ellery Queen, Sue Grafton, Patricia Cornwell, and even a few Erle Stanley Gardners (Bertha Cool is cool!) Yes, I’ve also read Gone With the Wind (only once) and seen the movie more times than that (women you know..). I’ve seen a truly staggering number of movies and TV shows too. (Recently took a sidebar test on my knowledge of vintage network TV series and answered 50 questions with a perfect score.) Comic books and grownup magazines were another guilty pleasure when they still existed. Even my grandmother’s unread copies of Redbook and Cosmopolitan (she have perished in mortification if she ever found out what was in there).
This kind of indiscriminate taste was a fixed component of my behavior from earliest childhood. I had a crush on Sally Starr, Philly’s most successful children’s entertainment host. Popeye cartoons, the Three Stooges (never liked them) and Sally herself, “My Gal Sal” with her colorful cowgirl livery and ever-present hat. My Dad didn’t approve of the show and I had to turn it off when he got home, but my mother took me to see her in person at the Bridgeton High School when all the other kids were caravaning to a new Disney movie called “Old Yeller.” They all came home crying, whereas I had seen my first ever celebritee…
Sally Starr (1923-2013)
There’s a lot this pedestrian stuff that I run into when I’m looking for other more important book covers, serious art, and other weighty influences on my youth. It’s not that I’m contemptuous of these influences. I’m not.the probkem is, when I’m looking for something I need for an essay I keep coming across these distractions whose impact on my work can’t really be summarized or integrated into my grander notions of literature, art, and imagination. But they still captivate me and I wind up wasting time trying to figure out what I was using them for in my other work. Why I called it an iceberg in the post title. They’re there. They matter. But mostly as proof that I have not spent my life in a monastery.
Except for all the exceptions, of course. I’ve probably learned as much about lean narrative writing from Rex Stout as I did from Ernest Hemingway. Which amounts to a distraction. A couple years ago, I wasted a few days writing a sample chapter and a book outline for a Nero Wolfe mystery called “Too Many Victims,” in which one famous literary detective after another shows up at Wolfe’s brownstone, only to be murdered within hours. I was never going to finish that book. It gave me a couple days off, but once I knew where it was headed, the actual writing was a slog I had no stomach for. Just one more instance of me trying on another writer’s voice to see what it feels like from their side of the keyboard.
At the top of the post I inserted a picture of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. My mother wouldn’t let me read them till I turned 13 in July 1966. By the time I left for boarding school in September I had read all of them. Ironically, I had made the acquaintance of Ian’s brother Peter Fleming some yewrs before, in a hilarious book called Brazilian Adventure about a real expedition to the Amazon to locate the missing Percy Fawcett. His voice in writing it was charming, a self-conscious parody of previous Fawcett books loaded with self-deprecating humor and some very real dangers.
James Bond has become iconic beyond his literary merit, though, by the sheer enormity of his enduring presence in the movies, finally laid to ignominious rest by Daniel Craig’s leaden performance, Judy Dench as a schoolmarmish “M,” and a heretical cameo by the legendary DB5 Aston Martin. An essay I haven’t written is how the succession of actors miscast as Bond after Connery (with an Honorable Mention to Timothy Dalton) illustrates the parallel decline of our view of men, manhood, and desirable women. Bind was already in intensive care when Pierce Brosnan took the reins, and Craig just completed the death with a frantic fossil replacing attraction with action. Maybe I’ll write it on some slow future day.
BUT… I have used my James Bond memories in other ways. The reason for this post is my rediscovery just the other day, looking for something else, of an Instapunk post I wrote and illustrated in 2009, shortly after Obama’s first inauguration in January 2009. I used the comparison to smuggle in my own predictions about what the un-macho Obama would be spending time on in the White House. I still like it.
Not the only time I’ve ventured into this kind of territory. There was a similar opportunity to weigh the attributes of my favorite comic book hero Spiderman, this time because Frank Rich of the NYT had tried to use the comparison for his own purposes.
That one’s called “Spider-Man for President”. Couldn’t, wouldn’t have done it without my own experience following the coming of age complications of Peter Parker.
[That’s interesting. Just got a death threat on Substack. I get these notifications from Substack and Threads, where I go to take the temperature of the functional sociopaths in the TDS silo. While I was working on this I got a notification that someone was demanding his followers go after the dumb shit MAGAt who needed to be put in his place. I took the link and told him there was no chance he could prove me a dumb shit and promised him that I could clean his clock on any subject. I informed me there was nothing he could say that would hurt me and the best he could hope for was laughter. About half an hour later I got another notification telling me all MAGAt’s were cowardly pussies and inviting me out to California, where he would kill me. So I took the link and got a 404 screen, telling me there was nothing at the link.guessing they shut him down. My standard reply to the death threats is, “Go ahead. I’m old. You kill me and I become a martyr. My existing books will immediately become bestsellers, and my estate and heirs will/thank you.”]
Is that interruption of this post ironic or just funny? Maybe both.
Where was I? Oh. I was about to tell you that in my midlife crisis after my divorce in ‘92-‘93, I went through a second wave of pop culture entertainments that did indeed make a significant contribution to my serious work. I was alone in a big house at the time and installed a state of the art media system with high end stereo, VHS and laser disk players, and a Genesis video game console. It took no time at all for me to become hooked on video games. A friend gave me a version of Doom with all the cheats included, which enabled the pure fun of shooting up the bad guys as much and as long as I wanted. When I tired of that, I went shopping for my own self. I bought Evander Holyfield Boxing and eventually won all the way through it, twice. I also played with Street Fighter, mortal Kombat, and Streets of Fire. Fun but more trick than treasure.
My favorite was a motorcycle game called Road Rash.
It takes practice, practice, practice…
By then I’d had a Honda 360, a Norton 850 Commando, and a Harley Sportster. But riding a bike with a game controller is its own learning experience. I had always had amazing reflexes (able to catch a cup falling off a table before I knew it was falling…), and that had been useful to me in my motorhead days years back as well.
As I learned more about video games, evolving quickly as I tried to keep track, I came across a novel game(?) called “Myst,” which would prove a turning point in my writing life.
Myst wasn’t a game as much a place you had to earn your way through challenges and feats of coordination to explore. The desire was not to score points or save up powers and lives but to see the whole damn place as far as it went.
The experience of Myst immediately made me think of another pop culture hit of the day, a graphic novel-cum-Internet app called “Maus.”
There was nothing unserious about Art Spiegelman. He was trying to use abilities he had to cover an experience most would regard as inappropriate for cartoons. I loved it.
Myst and Maus stewed in my creative crockpot until divorce and subsequent personal floundering had cost me everything, including my family home, all my cash and possessions, and even my one bedroom apartment in Delaware, from which I was evicted without a driver’s license to carry me to some haven of renewal. Instead I got rescued by a spectacular blonde woman who had once been my next door neighbor and was now struggling with a protracted divorce proceeding of her own. She had a house in my old home village of Greenwich and she took me in, with multiple trips of my stuff in her Cadillac in a single exhausting night. The next seven years are a story in their own for another time, but when I settled in at the desk containing my old computer, I started working on a single graphic to see how the drawing app in Microsoft Word97 worked.
It worked fine but slowly. I could make one change on that drawing and wait five minutes for the screen to repaint itself. My last friend from my business life came to visit, watched aghast at what I was working with, and returned two days later with his own computer to replace mine.
When refresh speed entered the picture, Myst and Maus converged in my imagination and became a new place, a serious place that would have to transcend my limited and entirely computer based drawing skills. The place was Shuteye Town 1999, which I began serious development work on in late 1997 and finished just before New Year’s 2000, when I had reason to believe, the computer world we’d known would come to an end. I wanted to leave a record of what our culture had become after decades of decline and technological addiction.
My focus was as intense as it had been with The Boomer Bible. I worked on it seven days a week, including even the day of my Dad’s funeral. Finishing it before 2000 was a race I refused to lose.
That work has had its own complicated history and is still in a state of peril not unlike what I was dreading when I started it. But it’s as big and ambitious in its own way as TBB. As with TBB, ST99 had its own unbelievable instances of serendipity. Most notably an accident that incapacitated my right hand for a few weeks as stitches healed. I continued nonetheless, drawing with my left hand, which took me in an inspired direction of variation and completion on the Wonderland theme that underpinned the whole project. Like TBB, it also had an equally ambitious companion work, this time a sequel not a prequel. TBB had Punk City. Shuteye Town had Shuteye Nation. That , too, is a story for another day.
That’s all I’ll cover here. My point in starting this was to explain the distractions that frequently send me in different directions from what I set out to today. Story of my life as it turns out.
I hope that’s not too annoying a trait.
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