book #23

Many, many years ago, at the 1978 Eastercon (UK national sf convention) at the Heathrow Hotel, I picked up a mass-market paperback copy of a book called All Right, Everybody Off This Planet (1972) by an author I'd never heard of before, Bob Ottum. All Right was a (very) funny sf novel in which ETs who prove every bit as cockup-prone as we are attempt a dignified bit of CETI that comes hopelessly unravelled. The late '70s was a time when really the only other authors who were doing funny sf were probably Ron Goulart and Harry Harrison (although, pass the Drano, there were some others who tried); it was therefore quite a surprise to find myself giggling over Ottum's book. The novel was nothing like Goulart, and indeed nothing like Pratchett, nothing like Holt, nothing like Adams; if I had to make a parallel, I'd say it was a precursor of Christopher Moore's work.

It may seem as if I have Christopher Moore on the brain, bearing in mind that Book #22 represented a (failed) attempt to find a Moore substitute. But wait: there is more . . . It was in that very same thrift shop where I bought the Prill book that, in the very same shopping expedition and perhaps even on the very same shelf (oo-ee-oo-ee-oooo), I discovered another novel by Ottum, whom I'd always believed to be a one-book wonder. (Quickly checking the LoC online catalogue just now, I find Ottum, sadly d1986, published several others.)

This novel is called The Tuesday Blade, was published in 1976, and isn't remotely connected to sf. If you judge by the cover blurb. it "takes its place with such memorable spellbinders as The First Deadly Sin, Marathon Man, and The Boys from Brazil" -- but it's a good idea not to judge by the cover blurb, because The Tuesday Blade bears no resemblance whatsoever to any of these books. In fact, the blurb seems to have been written by someone who couldn't be bothered to read the book, but instead skimmed a three-paragraph outline, got the wrong end of the stick, and winged it from there. You can tell that blurb and book are intended to go together, but that's about the extent of things. (Sort of like the catalogue blurb given to my book Corrupted Science by its US distributor, now I come waspishly to think of it.)

Anyway, in the book as opposed to in the blurb, statuesque blonde bombshell Gloria-Ann Cooper arrives from Oklahoma into the Port Authority Bus Terminal, NYC, and while she's waiting for her cousin to meet her is seized and doped by a high-class pimp who keeps her drugged in his posh Park Ave apartment while various of his "friends" pay to screw her. Finally emerging from the sedation, she discovers in the bathroom his set of seven antique cutthroat razors (one for each day of the week) and uses "the Tuesday razor" to exact an extremely gruesome revenge.

Once started, there's no stopping her. For the next few weeks she stalks pimps and slices them up with a will. NYC lives in fear (etc., etc.) as the cops hunt for the murderer they assume must be another Jack the Ripper. Of course, where Jack the Ripper slaughtered prostitutes, this killer is slaughtering pimps, and clever Det Sergeant Tony DeMario becomes convinced the reversal of sexual roles may extend past the victims to the murderer, too.

Don't get the impression this is a serial-killer thriller-chiller, because it isn't. Despite focusing on a serial killer and showing a quite extraordinary readiness to describe violence, The Tuesday Blade isn't a chiller and perhaps isn't even a thriller -- although it certainly makes absorbing reading (one reason why I've finished this book so soon after the last, the other reason being that the book was published back in the days when its 184 pages was a fairly standard length for a novel). From time to time it's pretty funny; most of the while it shows a depth of psychological understanding for Gloria-Ann that you don't expect to find in thrillers -- not compassion, because this isn't a compassionate account, but a certain sympathy. In this it reminded me slightly of a couple of good books that explore, although not quite as well, this same vein: Bradley Denton's Blackburn (1993) and Richard H. Francis's Daggerman (1980). (The latter was my Book #16: http://realthog.livejournal.com/30263.html.) Although I abhor killing, even I found myself having to suppress a little bubble of good cheer each time one of Gloria-Ann's scumbag victims got his. And, like DeMario in due course, I liked Gloria-Ann, and hated like hell the fact that she had to be caught.

Oh, and the book even contains a prediction -- not hugely accurate but uncannily accurate enough -- of Google.
 

mind blown

I just a few minutes ago started reading Alan Lightman's book Time Travel & Papa Joe's Pipe: Essays on the Human Side of Science (1984), and came across this:

Some years ago an old friend mesmerized me after dinner with his collection of paintings and illustrations by Maxfield Parrish. Parrish used a tedious and time-consuming technique called glazing, in which the artist begins with a white background and then adds successive layers of pure color, clear varnish, color, varnish, and so on -- the aim being to mix light instead of pigment. Each stage of this procedure is methodical and familiar, but the final colors, fashioned from light that has shone down through the layers and reflected out again, are unlike any colors of this world.

This is why scientists write essays. It's why publishers publish them (I think more rarely these days than in 1984). It's why yours truly reads them. But, most of all, what Parrish was doing and Lightman was describing is one of those reasons why people like me write fantasy stories: to show light in colors that are "unlike any colors of this world".

Even if Lightman had filled the rest of the book with selected extracts from the Old Omsk Telephone Directory, Time Travel & Papa Joe's Pipe would have been worth the purchase price for this half-paragraph alone.
 

the Zimbabwean media

. . . except the venue isn't Zimbabwe, it's here. Glenn Greenwald of Salon has some pointers as to one reason why election results can sometimes seem so dissociated from the merits of the candidates. Here's the opening of his piece at
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/04/05/media/index.html:

The U.S. establishment media in a nutshell

The U.S. government suspended the Fourth Amendment and expressly authorized torture. The attorney general lied about how the 9/11 attack happened. Barack Obama can't bowl well. Which revelations did the media cover?

Glenn Greenwald

Apr. 05, 2008

In the past two weeks, the following events transpired. A Department of Justice memo, authored by John Yoo, was released which authorized torture and presidential lawbreaking. It was revealed that the Bush administration declared the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights to be inapplicable to "domestic military operations" within the U.S. The U.S. Attorney General appears to have fabricated a key event leading to the 9/11 attacks and made patently false statements about surveillance laws and related lawsuits. Barack Obama went bowling in Pennsylvania and had a low score.

Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:

"Yoo and torture" - 102

"Mukasey and 9/11" -- 73

"Yoo and Fourth Amendment" -- 16

"Obama and bowling" -- 1,043

"Obama and Wright" -- More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)

"Obama and patriotism" - 1,607

"Clinton and Lewinsky" -- 1,079

These are the supposed news media that are being talked about -- the shapers of opinion, the educators of the voting public, the Fourth Estate -- not, as you might assume from the Nexis results above, the rags at the supermarket checkout which tell you the latest about Brad, Angelina and Jen. Or Katie and Tom. Or Nicole and Joel (which is really baffling Pam and myself because we haven't the first clue who Nicole and Joel are, and neither have the cashiers we've asked).

Not so long ago, hutch0 (at http://hutch0.livejournal.com/67874.html) rightly took issue with the numbskull US tv pundidiot Tucker Carlson, who made the absurd claim that the standards of journalism at the Scottish national newspaper The Scotsman were somehow shabbier than those of himself and his like.

(They must have been laughing themselves senseless at The Scotsman as they watched the clip. It's not the best of the UK newspapers, but it is somewhere in the upper echelon. A few years ago I'd have said the top UK newspapers weren't as good as US equivalents like the New York Times and the Washington Post. In the wake of Judith Miller and the decline -- plummet -- in standards at the Post, it's now hard to make that case. So today, despite the fact that its breadth of coverage can in no wise match the NYT's, The Scotsman is arguably the better journalistic venue. And that's said by someone who prefers Scotland's other main newspaper, the Herald.)

Tucker Carlson almost immediately lost his job, of course, due either to the man's complete incompetence or to the fabled Curse of Hutch0. But, with hindsight, it seems unfair that the Fates singled him out.

1043 mentions of Obama's (lack of) bowling skills.

118 (all told) mentions of Yoo's memo responsible for turning the US into a Torture State.

73 mentions of Mukasey's lie about 9/11.

Brad, Angelina and Jen, anyone?