It’s a Zoo

Obligatory excuse-making: I’ve been finishing up a project at work (now completed) and trying to get done the Tile Job From Hell (not completed).

In the meantime, I’ve finished Parallel Lives, The Aeneid, Pilgrim’s Progress (Part 1, like Dante’s trilogy, I couldn’t make myself do the rest), and am halfway through Arabian Nights, and most of the way through The Moulding of Communists.

Parallel Lives was interesting, in part for the history it covers. I thought I knew a good bit about Roman history in the transition period from Republic to Empire, but nope – there was way more to it than I had previously learned, and Plutarch crams a whole lot of it into a short piece. The other interesting part was how obviously it was a primary source for several of Shakespeare’s plays (Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus, specifically).

The Aeneid was slow going, and as I’ve discovered is typical for classic epics and dramas, was poorly structured and edited by modern standards. It was like a story told by a five-year-old: this happened then this happened then this happened for ten thousand lines of dactylic hexameter. But like Parallel Lives, it was an engaging overview of Roman pre-history (albeit heavily mythologized and not exactly reliable), or at least how Romans of the early Empire wished to see their history.

It also portrayed the Trojans as the heroes of the Trojan War and the Achaeans as the bad guys, which amused me at first and which I attributed to the pro-Roman slant of the poem. Then I looked it up. Yeah. Even by Homer’s pro-Greek account, the Greeks were dicks.

Pilgrim’s Progress wasn’t bad, but it was overly-long and by the end seemed like a treacly Anglican reduction of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Arabian Nights is not what I expected at all. I knew it was a series of stories, but the framing device and its nesting/recursion of stories is handled quite well (in contrast to the chaotic structurelessness of The Aeneid), with the stories fairly short and to the point. They remind me very strongly of the stories in Idries Shah’s books, although it’s not entirely clear that they’re intended that way (some do appear have an obvious moral or underlying meaning, but that could simply be me reading things into the story out of habit from reading Shah).

Finally, The Moulding of Communists has been somewhat of a slog up to the current chapter, but it’s turning into an insightful look at how communists were recruited into the Party back in the day, and after recruitment, selected and formed into “cadre” members. The resemblances to cult practices are remarkable, so much so that I repeatedly wonder whether the cults of the 1960s-1980s weren’t actually following the same playbook (and in turn, it makes me wonder how Soviet communists managed to figure all that out, systematize it, and successfully spread it globally such that it was already commonplace by the mid-1930s in the US).

Shaver Mysteries, cont’d.

I’m a few pages into the wonderfully-titled “Zigor Mephisto’s Collection of Mentalia”, the second of the stories in the collection, and can already see why Shaver is compared to Ed Wood. The writing is schlocky, the names are cheesy, the dialogue is campy, and the overall quality is at the level of a high-school creative writing assignment.

But…

There’s something endearingly strange about it all, and something compelling about the storytelling. For all its faults, there’s something that holds my interest enough to keep going with it.

I suspect that someone could make a project out of rewriting Shaver’s stories in a more competent form (assuming they’re out of copyright) and organizing and clarifying his mythos along the way. Behind the ineptitude there are some interesting ideas a good writer could explore further in new Shaver Mythos stories as well.

They Make It Sound So Appealing

Resuming my personal project of reading classic SF from the 1930s – 1950s, I decided to give the oft-discussed Shaver Mysteries a try. I figured that if I’m going to make arch jokes about hell-creatures from the hollow Earth and Nazi flying saucers, I should probably know the source material. This wasn’t what I expected to find:

Armchair fiction presents extra large paperback editions of the best in classic science fiction novels. “The Shaver Mystery,” by Richard S. Shaver, is perhaps the most controversial piece of science fiction ever written. Supposedly a true story, it is widely considered to be the nadir of science fiction literature, the “Plan 9 From Outer Space” of the whole genre. Some people considered Richard Shaver to be a genius, but most others considered him and his editor, Ray Palmer, to be two of the biggest blights to have ever entered the field of professional science fiction writing. Shaver’s wild ramblings are a thing to behold. We have never encountered an author who could write such consistently overlong sentences that appeared to make no sense whatsoever. Genius or nut-case? You decide. Here in Book One, are the first three parts, just as they appeared in the June, 1947 issue of Amazing Stories: “Formula from the Underworld,” “Zigor Mephisto’s Collection of Mentalia,” and “Witch’s Daughter.” Also included in Book One is the mind-boggling, yet essential “How to Read the Shaver Alphabet,” which pertains to Book Two as well. “The Shaver Mystery” is presented in paperback for the first time. Heaven help us.

In other words, Shaver’s writing skill is on the same level as today’s Hugo Award winners. On the plus side, at least he (probably) didn’t write his stories as clumsy vehicles for cockamamie cultural Marxism and cringeworthily intimate unwanted explorations of his personal dysfunctions.

We shall see.