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Sagebrush Thymology

By on June 27, 2019 0

I recall a long car trip with my mother from Colorado Springs to San Diego when I was seven. (We were moving.) (I mean we were relocating to a different residence, not merely that we were in motion relative to our geographical surroundings.) The only reading material I seem to have had with me was a single comic book (Wacky Witch #4, October 1971 – this was before I’d discovered the greener pastures of superhero, sci-fi, and horror comics, a revelation awaiting me in the stores of Ocean Beach), and so I read its contents, aloud, in the car, over and over and over and over and over and over as we traversed the desert landscape. That my mother did not bludgeon me to death with the tire iron is a mystery that passeth understanding. (Maybe we didn’t have a tire iron?)

(I haven’t seen this issue in many years and have no idea whether I still even have it , but I can still assure you: show me a king who can’t sleep, and I’ll show you a sleepy king!)

Anyway, my audio performance included not only the story but also, as an extra treat for my captive audience, the ads. There was one Hawaiian Punch ad that to this day I can still recite nearly verbatim – but I don’t need to, because I just found it online:

As a tot I found this very droll.

Anyway, back then I didn’t give much thought as to why Fruit Juicy Red was excluded from the promotion. (I remember a slight puzzlement, but no real interest in the question.) But now, knowing some economics, I would guess that Fruit Juicy Red was their best selling flavour, and that this promotion was designed to get readers to buy (or to nag their parents to buy) some of the other flavours as well – not to get them simply to switch from Fruit Juicy Red to another flavour (there’d be no particular point in achieving that), but rather on the hypothesis that if kids got to liking a wider variety of Hawaiian Punch flavours, this would lead to their desiring Hawaiian Punch more often (since if they got temporarily sick of flavour A they might then turn to flavour B of the same brand rather than turning to some entirely different brand), and so a greater total amount of Hawaiian Punch would be sold.

Incidentally, let me assure you, for the sake of my mother’s sanity, that the in-car entertainment on this cross-desert voyage did not consist solely in my repeated dramatic readings of Wacky Witch #4. My mother and I also improvised a long drama about two brothers, Maraschino (an aristocratic fop) and Bing (a crude, vulgar sort), though the details now escape me.

Lies, Deceit, Creating Mistrust Are His Ways Now

By on June 27, 2019 0

What Obi-Wan said:

Your father wanted you to have this when you were old enough: … Your father’s lightsaber.

What Obi-Wan meant:

Actually I just grabbed this off the ground from where your father dropped it after I cut off his legs and left him for dead in a lava pit. His final words to me were “I hate you!” But since he wasn’t aware of your existence, he didn’t say anything about NOT giving you this later on. So what I told you was true – from a certain point of view.

There’s a Light Over at the Frank Herbert Place

By on June 24, 2019 1

The Eagles’ song “Hotel California” (henceforth HC) was released in 1976. Three years earlier, Frank Herbert (of Dune fame) published, in his anthology The Book of Frank Herbert, a short story titled “Gambling Device” (henceforth GD). I’ve never seen anyone suggest that the story had an influence on the song, but it seems to me to be a possibility:

In GD, Hal and Ruth Remsen are driving along a highway through the California desert at twilight; the “heavy floral scent of [Ruth’s] corsage wafted up to him.”

In HC, the narrator is driving along “a dark desert highway” (presumably likewise in California, given the song’s title) with the “warm smell of colitas / rising up through the air.”

In GD, the Remsens are lost, and when they come across a hotel by the side of the road, where “the setting sun … gleamed like fire on the windows and their metal frames,” they decide to stop. Later they find that a “silvery glow shimmered” from the hotel’s ceilings.

In HC, the narrator “had to stop for the night,” when “up ahead in the distance” he “saw a shimmering light” – the Hotel California.

In GD, Ruth says she doesn’t “like the looks of that place … It looks like a prison.” But Hal reassures her: “It’s just the way the sunset’s lighting it …. It makes those windows look like big red eyes. … We’d better take this while we can.” An apparent member of the hotel staff leads them down a “hall [that] seemed to stretch out endlessly.”

In HC, the narrator ponders: “This could be Heaven or this could be Hell.” An apparent member of the hotel staff “showed me the way … down the corridor.”

In GD, the Remsens soon find that they are indeed prisoners, and that the entire hotel is actually an alien device designed to prohibit gambling. “You are now residents of the Desert Rest Hotel,” the device itself informs them. “You may decide to leave … but you have no choice of where you will go, in what manner or when,” since this would constitute gambling: “Free choice beyond the immediate decision is a gamble.” A fellow guest elaborates: “You’ll want to know if there’s hope of escape. … Perhaps. Some just disappear. But maybe that’s another … way.”

In HC, the other guests explain that they “are all just prisoners here / of our own device.” The night manager elaborates: “We are programmed to receive; / you can check out any time you like / but you can never leave.”

Are these parallels close enough to make it certain that “Hotel California” was influenced by “Gambling Device”? No. And in other respects the two narratives diverge in their plots and concerns.

But Dune was massively popular in the 1970s, and the 1973 anthology in question featured a cover designed to appeal to readers of Dune (see above); so it’s certainly a possibility.

Despair Could Never Touch a Morning

By on June 21, 2019 0

The air was cool, and smelled of sage. It had the clarity that comes to southern California only after a Santa Ana wind has blown all haze and history out to sea – air like telescopic glass, so that the snowtopped San Gabriels seemed near enough to touch, though they were forty miles away. The flanks of the blue foothills revealed the etching of every ravine, and beneath the foothills, stretching to the sea, the broad coastal plain seemed nothing but treetops ….

The sun was obscured by a cloud for a moment, then burst out again. Big clouds like tall ships coasted in, setting sail for the mountains and the desert beyond. The ocean was a deep, rich, blue blue, a blue in blue within blue inside of blue, the heart and soul and center of blue. Blinding chips of sunlight bounced on the swelltops. Liquid white light glazed the apricot cliff of Corona del Mar, the needles of its Torrey pines like sprays of dark green. Ironwood color of the sun-drenched cliff. … Behind him Orange County pulsed green and amber, jumping with his heart, glossy, intense, vibrant, awake, alive. His world and the wind pouring through it.

As you might guess (since it’s been the subject of my two most recent “guess the author” posts – here and here), I recently got around, at last, to reading the “Three Californias” trilogy (The Wild Shore, The Gold Coast, and Pacific Edge) by Kim Stanley Robinson, about whose other work I’ve blogged before (see, e.g., here and here). (For Robinson’s own account of the origin and meaning of his trilogy, see this interview.)

The trilogy concerns three possible futures for southern California: a) post-apocalyptic, b) urban sprawl, and c) ecotopia – three timelines linked by one character who occurs in all three (and who seems to have a vague inkling of his other lives, his alternative pasts and possible futures – see The Wild Shore, pp. 214-221, and Pacific Edge, pp. 63 and 181), as well as by some structural and thematic elements (for example, each novel begins with an archeological excavation and ends with an attempt at sabotage). There are echoes of Ursula K. Le Guin and Philip K. Dick (Robinson was a student of one and wrote his dissertation on the other), as well as prefigurations of his own later fiction, but the trilogy is very much its own thing – and, as one would expect from Robinson, thought-provoking and beautifully written.

While Robinson’s three futures represent, in effect, two bad possibilities and one good one, the portrait is not simplistic: the two dystopian novels offer glimmers of hope and spaces of freedom, while the third, utopian novel represents utopia not as a fixed end point but as something that needs to be continually fought for, defended, and extended – which seems to me to be the right way to think about it. (And his utopia is certainly not one in which all the protagonists live happy lives or find their way to happy endings.)

When it comes to the specific content of his utopia, as opposed to his abstract idea of how to think about utopia as such, Robinson’s vision is much more of a mixed bag, from my (or more broadly, any LWMA) point of view. As I’ve said before, Robinson’s economic and political ideals leave him with “one foot in vital, grassroots, quasi-anarchist radicalism” and “the other in dreary, top-down, paternalistic authoritarianism.” (This conflict actually gets lampshaded somewhat – e.g., at pp. 282-285 of Pacific Edge – though without resolution.) But the trilogy is well worth reading despite this.

I particularly want to recommend the trilogy, though, not just to readers in general but specifically to those who know and love California, especially southern California. Anyone for whom the towns and climate and natural landscape of the region are a geography of their own heart will find a special joy in recognising them in their varied incarnations through the three novels.

(There’s a certain irony in the fact that Robinson, who has the good fortune to live in the California of the present, has written a trilogy filled with longing for Californias of the past and possible future, but mostly frustration with the California of the present – which by contrast looks pretty damn good to me, despite its admitted flaws. Yes, I’m homesick!)

Thy Phantasy Has Imposed Upon Me

By on June 20, 2019 1

While the book version of Good Omens isn’t my favourite work of Gaiman’s (possibly unpopular take: it tries to do for theological fantasy what Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy did for science fiction, but it’s just not in the same league), and so overall I found the miniseries (which is pretty faithful to the book) to be, like the book, good but not great, nevertheless every scene with Tennant and Sheen is absolutely wonderfully fantastically great. Perfect casting.

Being vague to avoid spoilers but – at one point there’s a twist upon which, if you weren’t aware of it ahead of time, you’ll want to go back and rewatch Tennant’s and Sheen’s performances leading up to the twist and you’ll then notice, in their performances, exactly at what point the, um, well, again, spoilers, but it’s terrific.

Of course there are folks on the Christian Right who are petitioning Netflix to axe the show.

The fact that they think it’s on Netflix is evidence that they have not, in fact, watched it.

Dialectical Utopianism: Who Said This?

By on June 18, 2019 3

There is no such thing as a pocket utopia.

Consider the French aristocracy before the revolution – well fed, well clothed, well housed, well educated – brilliant lives. One could say they lived in a little utopia of their own. But we don’t say that, because we know their lives rested on a base of human misery, peasants toiling in ignorance and suffering. And we think of the French aristocracy as parasites, brutal, stupid, tyrannical.

But now the world is a single economy. Global village, made in Thailand! And we stand on little islands of luxury, while the rest – great oceans of abject misery, bitter war, endless hunger. We say, But they are none of our affair! We have our island. …

What a cheat utopias are, no wonder people hate them. Engineer some fresh start, an island, a new continent, dispossess them, give them a new planet sure! So they don’t have to deal with our history. Ever since More they’ve been doing it: rupture, clean cut, fresh start.

So the utopias in books are pocket utopias too. Ahistorical, static, why should we read them? They don’t speak to us trapped in this world as we are, we look at them in the same way we look at the pretty inside of a paperweight, snow drifting down, so what? It may be nice but we’re stuck here and no one’s going to give us a fresh start, we have to deal with history as it stands, no freer than a wedge in a crack. …

Must redefine utopia. It isn’t the perfect end-product of our wishes, define it so and it deserves the scorn of those who sneer when they hear the word. No. Utopia is the process of making a better world, the name for one path history can take, a dynamic, tumultuous, agonizing process, with no end. Struggle forever. … Utopia is when our lives matter. …

I grew up in utopia, I did. California when I was a child was a child’s paradise, I was healthy, well fed, well clothed, well housed, I went to school and there were libraries with all the world in them and after school I played in orange groves and in Little League and in the band and down at the beach and every day was an adventure, and when I came home my mother and father created a home as solid as rock, the world seemed solid! And it comes to this, do you understand me – I grew up in utopia.

But I didn’t. Not really. Because while I was growing up in my sunny seaside home much of the world was in misery, hungry, sick, living in cardboard shacks, killed by soldiers or their own police. I had been on an island. In a pocket utopia. It was the childhood of someone born into the aristocracy, and understanding that I understood the memory of my childhood differently; but still I know what it was like, I lived it and I know! And everyone should get to know that, not in the particulars, of course, but in the general outline, in the blessing of a happy childhood, in the lifelong sense of security and health.

So I am going to work for that. And if – if! if someday the whole world reaches utopia, then that dream California will become a precursor, a sign of things to come, and my childhood is redeemed. I may never know which it will be, it might not be clear until after we’re dead, but the future will judge us! They will look back and judge us, as aristocrats’ refuge or emerging utopia, and I want utopia, I want that redemption and so I’m going to stay here and fight for it, because I was there and I lived it and I know.

Guess the author.

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