Ur (2009).

Stephen King has had a very ambivalent relationship with technology.  This is something that may apply just as much to his real life as it does to anything that happens in his works of fiction.  This sense of inherent ambiguity about the Machine is something worth stressing, because a lot of times it can seem that this is anything but the case.  In his study of some of the author's most famous works, Bev Vincent establishes what might be considered an opposite, more or less positive take on the Maine writer's relationship with the Gadget.  "Over the years", Vincent points out, "King has experimented with nontraditional forms of publication (158)".  From there, Vincent goes on to provide the reader with a catalogue of all the times the Bangor Scribe has been willing to utilize the digital space to advance the publication of his stories.  He makes these little experiments in digital publishing sound like fun for the most part.  At the same time, the one thing none of this changes is the way the author treats machines within the confines of the product that matters most in King's career.  That would be the writer's books in and of themselves, and also the way that the theme of the Gadget keeps getting handled in them, even past the point where King owed his life to modern medical science.  Caution is still mixed with gratitude.  

By and large, it seems that King's thoughts about modern machinery (or at the very least, the mindset that exists in back of most pieces of our current tech) was summed up long ago by scholar Tony Magistrale in his book, Landscapes of Fear.  It's in that study that Magistrale lays out the best academic summation of King's thinking about machines.  "The more pessimistic side of science fiction..."stresses the danger of the machine age and how reliance upon science and technology weakens the basic human body and spirits" (7).  This awareness of the darker aspects of technology and the moral sacrifices that accompany its proliferation is an issue that often appears in Kings fiction (50)".  That's an accurate enough assessment so far as Magistrale is concerned.  Yet even here, it seems like just scratching the surface of things.  He notes the negative portrayals of technology within King's fiction.  However, I'm not sure he gets us any closer to the mindset underlying it all.  In order to get that, it seems like you have to get the information direct from the artist's own personal testimony.  It seems that the best explanation King ever offered for his technical themes is in the pages of Danse Macabre.

In the introduction to this sprawling non-fiction study, King talks a bit about how his upbringing in the Post-War America of the 1950s had an enormous effect on the way he's looked at the Machine more or less ever since.  "We were fertile ground for the seeds of terror, we war babies; we had been raised in a strange circus atmosphere of paranoia, patriotism, and national hubris. We were told that we were the greatest nation on earth...but we were also told exactly what to keep in our fallout shelters and how long we would have to stay in there after we won the war. We had more to eat than any nation in the history of the world, but there were traces of Strontium 90 in our milk from nuclear testing.  We were the children of the men and women who won what Duke Wayne used to call “the big one,” and when the dust cleared, America was on top.  Further, we had a great history to draw upon (all short histories are great histories), particularly in matters of invention and innovation.

"Every grade-school teacher produced the same two words for the delectation of his/her students; two magic words glittering and glowing like a beautiful neon sign; two words of almost incredible power and grace; and these two words were: pioneer spirit. I and my fellow kids grew up secure in this knowledge of America’s pioneer spirit—a knowledge that could be summed up in a litany of names learned by rote in the classroom. Eli Whitney. Samuel Morse. Alexander Graham Bell. Henry Ford. Robert Goddard. Wilbur and Orville Wright. Robert Oppenheimer. These men, ladies and gentlemen, all had one great thing in common. They were all Americans simply bursting with pioneer spirit. We were and always had been, in that pungent American phrase, fustest and bestest with the mostest (9-10)".  Consider this aspect of his life as the first part of those "terror seedlings" that King and his peers got sprinkled with as young, impressionable minds back in the day.  The second ingredient in the recipe the artist is describing for us came about through the gradual arrival of an inevitable understanding about the so-called adults in the room who are ostensibly "responsible" for modern technological life.

King sums this up through a neat and precise quotation from Sci-Fi author Jack Finney's novel Time and Again.  From the way the quotation is framed, it's clear that while Finney might have been writing about imaginary people in make-believe circumstances, it's pretty damned obvious that King see it all as a reflection of his own personal experience.  "I was... an ordinary person who long after he was grown retained the childhood assumption that the people who largely control our lives are somehow better in¬ formed than, and have judgment superior to, the rest of us; that they are more intelligent. Not until Vietnam did I finally realize that some of the most important decisions of all time can be made by men knowing really no more than most of the rest of us (333)".  In other words, it was the slow dawning recognition that often the people who create and are in charge of machinery often wind up not knowing as much about the consequences their creations will either create or unleash.  In other words, even with a lot of know-how under the hood, it's still no guarantee of an entirely one-hundred-percent optimum outcome.  This paints a picture less of someone who is any kind of thoroughgoing luddite, and more an artist with a healthy recognition of the balanced benefits and hazards of modern machinery.

When it can be demonstrated to work well, then it's enough to consider it good.  If any number of downsides begin to multiply in near perfect compliment to all the benefits, then at this point I'd have to say we're all aware in one form or another of being stuck in a land of perpetual mixed blessings, at best.  The fact of modern technology at its worst is when the design is made with the express purpose to harm or disrupt daily life.  It seems to be this negative mindset that can infuse the making of the Gadget, and the consequences that can sometimes stem from it, that fascinates King, more than anything to do with the Machine, in and of itself.  This train of thought might be expressed in a series of questions.  Is there such a thing as a bad machine?  If so, what kind of mind would be capable of constructing such a man-made monstrosity?  How much damage can such technology inflict upon the world?  Even worse than this is a very troubling corollary.  How much would it take to turn an ostensibly good machine into a bad one?  In many cases, the answer is as frightening as it is simple.  All you have to do there is to find the right way to abuse its otherwise correct use, and then, you have turned a help into something more horrible than a hindrance.  It's thoughts such as these that appear to be at the back of King's treatment of machines.  It's also at work in a short story simply called Ur.

A Tribute to Roger Corman (1926-2024).

I wasn't expecting to write this.  Not in the strictest sense, anyway.  All that happened is one of the bright lights of the Entertainment world went out not too long ago.  In a sense, I guess you can say it was expected.  They say it happens to everyone sooner or later.  At the same time, it's like you never can be ready for when it happens to any artist whose life and work you've come respect.  That's how it was for me, anyway, when I learned of the recent passing of Hollywood producer, director, and film distributor Roger Corman.  For the longest time, he seemed like something of a permanent fixture in both my childhood and life.  I suppose that's the reason why it came as such a shock to know he'd finally passed on.  When an artist can leave a big impact on the way you watch and think about not just films, but also storytelling in general, then it's like something vital has been lost from the Entertainment scene.  I almost want to compare his death to that of a lighthouse being shut down.  It leaves a  lot of blank spots on the map that results in an incomplete picture of the terrain, and that can come with a whole lot of costs.  I'll elaborate on where my thinking is going with this idea as we get further along in this tribute.  For now, it's enough to say that Corman's insights into the nature of filmmaking or of telling stories are a key factor in his legacy.  Beyond that, I think the best place to start a tribute like this is with his personal impact.

The Ray Bradbury Theater: The Screaming Woman (1986).

If there was any downside to growing up as an 80s kid, then it would have to be the fact that you were living in a pre-Internet, analog era.  Granted, that's not a bad thing in and of itself.  It did mean, however, that you couldn't just log on like you do now, enter the name of your favorite movies, TV shows, or sometimes even the very commercials you grew up with, and then binge watch to your heart's content.  I guess what I'm trying to say is that the closest thing to a downside about having an 80s childhood is that you could never experience all of it at once.  There was always the risk that you might miss out on something important.  Maybe you were like me, and were so addicted to the cartoons airing on the Disney Channel that you didn't bother to realize you could also catch airings of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or Gremlins as well once Mickey, Donald, and Goofy had taken their final curtain calls for the day.  Or maybe you're thinking is so damned one-track because you're still just a kid that you never even realize that HBO might have been showing a George Lucas produced animated fantasy called Twice Upon a Time, and so you miss out on an obscure yet valuable gem.  These were the risks for 80s kids.  The good news on my side of the equation is that I wasn't that dense.  Sometimes I'd be smart enough to think, "You know, that Tom Hanks Big movie sounds like it could be a lot of fun.  Maybe I'll keep an eye out for whenever its on".

Still, even with these occasional moments of insight thrown into the mix, the sad fact remains that while most of us 80s kids were blessed with what I can only describe now as a resurgence of the Romantic Movement in the Arts , it still meant none of us had the kind of childhood were you were able to capture it all.  Even today, 80s media presents one of the richest cornucopias in terms of both viewing and reading material outside of the Golden Age of Hollywood.  It's an entertainment catalogue whose plethora is so vast that it makes perfect sense that a lot of its best offerings were unrecognized on their first initial run.  So that a lot of us are just now rediscovering what we missed out on when we were young.  That's sort of how it's been for me when it comes to the treasures offered by The Ray Bradbury Theater.  It's the kind of TV show that can only exist as the product of another time and era in the thinking of corporate media.  This was an era when everything was less commodified.  The original Hollywood studio system had come to an end, and the net result was a brief moment when artists kind of had full control of the car keys.  It meant they could assemble their little red wagons and not be afraid to install as many types of story engines as their Imagination could allow.  This applied to the realm of television as mush as it did to the now fading institution known as the movie theater.

It meant you were in for a treat if you were a kid in the 80s.  Because a lot of the big networks now found themselves sort of having to take risks on high concept Fantasy and Sci-Fi ideas.  Some of them were pretty obvious, like the staples we've all come to know and love such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Inspector Gadget.  Others, however, took a more daring approach to the kind of stories they could tell.  This was the case with the series that author Ray Bradbury wound up producing for HBO.  By then the noted Sci-Fi scribe was already something of a giant in the industry.  The kind of name with the sort of clout that no longer exists in the strictest sense of the term.  If Ray were still alive, odds are even he could never have managed to pitch a series which consisted of little more than adaptations of his most famous short stories and get it greenlit today.  It's also sort of an open question in my mind whether Hollywood in its contemporary form would be capable of doing his work justice.  As a character in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard once observed, "It's the pictures that got small".  That seems to apply to our ability to try and recapture all the worlds and characters we fell in love with so long ago back when we were kids.  Everybody seems to have had bigger imaginations in the 1980s.

It's in part because of this, along with the factor of the breakout success of films like Jaws, Star Wars, and E.T. that Ray was in a position where the idea for a TV show made up of nothing but his own words and characters was able to get that much coveted greenlight.  It didn't hurt his chances that HBO was also still just a fledgling network at the time, ready and thankfully more than willing to take chances on the kind of material it would broadcast in order to let itself stand out from what was then a very large and generous yet competitive pack.  It was an era when the Nielson Ratings ruled the roost.  Anyone who could get even a sizeable enough chunk of eyes glued to sets showcasing the network's products would guarantee it at least a good enough spot to begin with in the Ratings charts.  Hence the willingness of HBO to take chances with stuff like Lucas's almost forgotten animated feature, or Ray Bradbury's own collection of short stories.  The final results turned out to be pretty good, by and large.  At the same time, this was one of those programs that was ostensibly a part of my childhood  that I just never got around to seeing when it first aired.  I've been playing catch-up for a while now.

In that sense, it's like being given a second chance to recapture those aspect of your childhood that you may have missed the first time around.  When it comes to reviewing a show like this there's a lot of good offerings to be had.  Some of the stuff on that old anthology can surprise you with the level of their sophistication.  I think it's best to start out by keeping things simple, however, and focus for now on one of the more easily read episodes to feature on the program.  It's a nice little little bit of childhood thrills and chills, and it goes by the title of The Screaming Woman.

Antigonish (1899): or The Man Who Sold the World (1970).

Here's the deal.  There's this thing my mind does with works of art.  I'm not sure how much of a conscious process or choice this is.  It's just something I've noticed every now and then.  What I'm talking about here is the ability to understand one work of art (regardless of medium, be it a poem, TV episode, book, or film) in terms of another.  In other words, sometimes I'll manage to get a better understanding of one story or narrative when I find myself contrasting it with another.  The reason I'm able to do this is because sometimes I'll just run across a Creative Idea that sounds interesting, yet it's also too obscure to figure out on its own.  Then the I'll find yet another, seemingly unrelated story concept, and for whatever reason, just the act of reading and being able to understand this bit of unrelated material will help me to gain a greater knowledge of the previous one that I had difficulty with before.  I'm not sure how common this is among the faces in the aisles.  All I know is that it's just something I do.  I want to say this is a habit that got started sometime way back when I was little.  Like somewhere before I hit the age of nine.  I'm basing this judgment call on a lot of those hazy memories that you're surprised to find still hanging around after such a long time.  The kind that exist on the edge of recollection, and yet the basic gist of their content remains somehow understandable.  This is how it's been for me, anyway.

Like I say, I can't really tell anyone how common this particular type of reading practice is.  I just don't know how many others study the narratives they like in the same way that I do.  So it's kind of useless to ask me if this is anything like part of a greater phenomenon of literary practice.  All I can tell you beyond this point is that this is what happened to me when I had the good fortune to read first an old, forgotten poem (I guess you could call it a children's rhyme), followed by song, also old, this one dating back to the start of the 70s.  The name of the poem was Antigonish.  It's one of those titles that no one remembers, even while there's something memorable about it.  The sort of thing you hear in passing, and then wonder why the word popped into your head later on.  The almost limerick style composition was written and published in the year 1899 by a now obscure poet and educator named William Hughes Mearns.  The song that helped me understand Mearns' poem was The Man Who Sold the World, by David Bowie.  I'm sure that's a juxtaposition few if anyone reading this would be expected to make.  I know I wasn't.  For the longest time, this forgotten poem and the chart topping song were complete and separate entities in my mind.  I ran across Mearns' work in a collection of children's verse in an illustrated primer book whose title I know forget, except that it was edited by Jack Prelutsky.

The Bowie song I ran across by seemingly pure chance one night while staying up late watching a now defunct VH1 programming block.  It was an entire program or segment dedicated to music from the 70s, as I recall.  Somewhere between Ozzy Osbourne's Iron Man and being introduced to the music of Leo Sayer for the first time (yeah, VH1 was dedicated to it's eclecticism back then) someone in a broadcast booth somewhere made the now wise choice to air an old live performance that Bowie gave of the song way back during a 1995 MTV concert special.  It was one of those things where at the time it had no greater meaning than just a way to enjoy a few minutes before dozing off to sleep.  It was the kind of thing I caught once or twice, enough anyway, so that the song got lodged in my head.  The sort of tune that recalls itself to your conscious mind, and you sort of remember it as being kind of interesting, yet you still don't attach all that much importance to it.  What changed that for me was running across that song again in connection with Mearns' bit of poetic doggerel.  What I didn't expect to happen was for Bowie's lyrics to help inform the meaning of Mearns' little rhyme.  The result wound up as something that was less a pair of unrelated verses, and more like a complete and greater poem told in two movements.  That's how I'd like to look at each effort, as two parts of a greater whole.

I do this first because the ideas that came about from pairing the efforts of these two artists in my mind suggest a rich vein of thematic ore that is just too interesting not to share.  Another reason for looking at these two poetic attempts together is because each of them seem to share the same genre.  In many ways, the placing of Antigonish and The Man Who Sold the World together is to create the kind of narrative that is more or less perfect as we get into the Autumn Festival season.  What we have here is a kind of ghost story that I don't think either Bowie or Mearns intended to write.  Yet when you pair their efforts up, what you get is a whole greater than the sum of its parts.  I'd like to know it's meaning.

The Tell-Tale Heart (UPA, 1953).

A while back I did this brief little retrospective on an old animation studio.  It was called United Pictures of America, or UPA for short.  To try and summarize a whole lot of history in just a short span of words, the studio was created out by a cadre of Disney animators as a result of their collective decision to revolt against the House of Mouse over the question of wage pay.  For the purposes of this review, that group included all of the artists who worked on the short film under discussion today: Producer Stephen Bosustow; Ink and Paint Designer Paul Julian; Animator Pat Matthews; Production Manager Herb Klynn; Cameraman Jack Eckes; Scriptwriters Bill Scott and Fred Gable; and Director Ted Parmelee.  With Bosustow in the lead, these and a host of other animators, in-betweeners, and illustrators first went on strike against Disney, then left the company all together to set out their own course in the field motion picture animation.  UPA was the eventual result of these efforts, and for a time, it was possible to claim that they were the closest rivals Walt ever had outside of Warner Bros. when it came to making successful theatrical cartoons.  One of the reasons UPA was so good at this was because of their deliberate choice not just to animate outside the boundaries that Disney and Chuck Jones had established with their previous successes.  They were also able to successfully wed their chosen avant-garde minimalist technique to the type of sophisticated subject matter that was perfectly suited to it.

Its a mistake to claim that UPA was the first ever animation studio to base its films off of pre-existing literary source material.  That honor doesn't even belong to Walt Disney himself, but rather to former newspaper comics illustrator Winsor McCay, who has to count as the first published author to ever use the then new medium of animated pictures to bring his own Little Nemo comic strip to life.  From there, of course, Walt would go on to draw from the sources of European folklore and the Brother's Grimm to create some of his most iconic works.  In this sense, UPA wasn't even trying to play catch-up, so much as just continuing the game of Follow the Leader.  What continues to make their efforts stand out from the pack was in the type of literary models they used for inspirations.  UPA was the first studio to take the works of of modern writers such as James Thurber, popular contemporary music, or as in the case of today's offering, popular works of Gothic Fiction.  They did all of this in an effort whose goals were twofold.  First, they wanted to prove that they had what it took to get out of Walt's shadow.  Second of all, Bosustow and Company knew that the way to do that was to prove to the audience that animation could be used to tell stories whose subject matter was more mature than the regular cartoon fair.

It was with this goal in mind that one day Scott and Gable appear to have been the ones to hit on the idea of taking the work of one of the great pioneers of Horror fiction, turning it into a theatrical animated short, and getting none other than Oscar winning actor James Mason to star and narrate in it.  The result was a 1953 adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart", and it went like this. 

The Power of the Sentence (1971).

One of the cardinal goals of The Scriblerus Club is the ability to shine a light on the efforts and creative achievements of forgotten names.  These are the artists (writers, for the most part, though there have been a handful of filmmakers in this particular group) who have fallen through the cracks of history, and are often in danger of disappearing altogether if someone doesn't draw attention to their efforts.  That's very much the case with David M. Locke.  He's someone who I know more or less nothing about.  All I've been able to discover about him is what is revealed in his author bio, and that goes as follows.  "David M. Locke is primarily a science - not a science fiction - writer.  He earned a Ph.D. and spent a year as a Fulbright fellow and five years as a research chemist before taking up writing.  So far as I can determine, this is his first story.  Surprisingly, despite his background, this is not filled with heavy science.  The only evidence of a highly trained mind comes from the meticulous care with which this tale is developed (56)".  Those words were written all the way back in 1972 by Sci Fi author and editor Lester Del Rey, as part of his editorial notes.  They were part of an anthology that he was editing way back when.  It was called Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year.  Those words also count as just about all I've been able to discover about David M. Locke.

Del Rey doesn't seem to have kept any close contact with this particular artist.  He was one of the most prolific storytellers and anthologists back during the Silver and New Wave eras in the history of Science Fiction.  His role as an editor made it essential that he keep in close contact with a long list of who's who in the field of Speculative Writing.  For whatever reason, David Locke is the one name that no one ever seems to have bothered to keep track of.  It's possible to know more about guys like Del Rey than it is this one obscure byline on a title page.  Even the scant piece of information that Locke was once (still is?) a Fulbright scholar doesn't tell us much, as its an international program attached to numerous academic institutions.  So any information about where Locke came from, what schools he went to, where he graduated from, or whether he maintained or continues in these academic settings would be so much guess work I might as well be creating a fictional character.  The only true statement I can make about him is that he is a name that has all but vanished off the literary map.  All that's left is his story about a very peculiar classroom lecture, and so I thought it might be interesting to look into it.

Vanishing Point: Doctor of the Soul (1986).

Being a fan of old radio dramas can sometimes be filled with a lot of interesting perks.  At least that's the case if you're the kind of story enthusiast who whose devotion to the world of fiction can sometimes lead you into all sorts of interesting avenues that have remained unexplored by the vast majority of the audience.  It's in wandering down all these forgotten pathways that you begin to discover all fascinating broadcast history that has fallen through the cracks.  For instance, the history of the radio drama is filled with a lot of forgotten names.  This can sometimes be a shame, because every so often you run across a writer, actor, or showrunner who for one brief moment was able to make a genuine contribution to the medium, and yet history has an often-cruel way of not remembering their achievements.  I think something like this is what happened to those now out of the way programs such as Vanishing Point.  If the name sounds at all familiar, that's because I've given the show a few moments of column space here on the Club once before.  

The whole show was very much a textbook example of the successful follow-up from a parent program.  Much the same way as the character of Frasier Crane was able to take on a life of his own after Cheers.  In the case of the show under discussion today, Vanishing Point grew out of the success of a previous Canadian Broadcasting radio entry known as Nightfall.  That earlier series was a classic example of the late-night Horror anthology.  A version of Tales from the Crypt for the theater of the mind.  It became enough of a ratings hit that eventually the CBC was ready to try and build a sister project.  This one would share the same late night anthology format as Nightfall.  Even some of its episodes would echo the previous entry in terms of genre and situation.  However, it was made clear right away that this new project wouldn't just be imitating the same ideas.  Instead, the new series was to be free to explore as much of the terrain of the fantastic as its writers wanted or felt they could get away with under a radio budget.  In other words, it didn't always have to be straight-up Horror.  Sometimes it could be Sci-Fi, Urban Fantasy, and even the occasional narratives delving into nothing more than slices of life.  It was going to be less Tales from the Crypt and more Twilight Zone for radio, in other words.

The result is a series that really seemed determined to explore as much of the range of the theater of the mind as possible.  It's an entry from this forgotten bit of Canadian broadcasting that I'd like to take a look at today.  Tonight's play is written especially for radio by David Helwig and concerns one of the greatest conundrums that mankind continues to grapple with.  So if you'll join us for tonight's journey into the unknown, I believe we're do for a most unusual appointment in a psychiatrist's office.