Book Review: The Man Who Would Not Die

My friend and colleague Tom Page wrote The Man Who Would Not Die - twice. No, I'm not referring to the multitude of drafts, experimental and otherwise, that any writer generates when producing a book. Back in 1981, Tom first wrote, and then Seaview Books published, what has now become a cult sci-fi classic about a handsome rake on inconveniently non-terminal life support. Then came a Signet edition, then one from Hamlyn.

Fast forward through intevening years, when predicably but unaccountably, the movie almost got made several times (it's still trying to climb out of the Hollywood ooze).

Then came a phenomenon that sounds a like a writer's fantasy - well into the twenty-first century, a mainstream publisher decided to resurrect the works of the venerable Thomas Page. First with The Hephaestus Plague, and now with The Man Who Would Not Die, the virtuous, fan-centric Trashface Books of Dublin, Ireland has come out with high-quality trade paper editions of these creepy cult faves.

Which brings us to the second writing. As Tom discussed the new release with Trashface (which itself sounds like the name of some misunderstood Marvel hero), he resolved to "freshen" it. After all, a futurist novel set in the early 1980s might not seem so bleeding-edge without a few zombie-pancake touch-ups.

So the rejuvenated book is replete with cell phones, laptops, slick interactive displays, microciruitry, nanotechnology, and genetic engineering. None of this was absolutely necessary to keep this sci-fi story alive - but it keeps it from smelling old. Without this infusion of new blood, a new generation of iPad readers might think the technology of thirty years ago quaint, if not downright odd.

As he did in The Hephaestus Plague, Tom spins a central metaphor that goes to the heart of social pathology. With the bugs that spewed fire, he concocted a race of beings better equipped than humans to survive the end times on a resource-depleted planet. With the Stendahl Holmes Life Support (LS) capsule, he's mocking a healthcare system that goes to heroic lengths to prolong life, with less regard for the quality of the result than for the seeming miracle of the achievement.

Congratulations to Tom Page on yet more proof of his literary agelessness. He's a bit of a contrarian, too. Why else would protagonist Kate make sure she had plenty of film for her camera?

Der Ring Roundup - Everything You Need to Know About Siegfried and His Friends

If you think Achim Freyer's character design for the evil dwarf Alberich looks like a Nazi cartoon stereotype of a Jewish banker, you are a student of history.

Now that Los Angeles Opera is in the midst of three consecutive cyles of Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle, here's a recap of all four operas:

Wagner's Ring Cycle at LA Opera - Recap for Late Deciders



Photo by Monika Rittershaus courtesy LA Opera

It's a One-Man Show

No, I'm not talking about the story of my life. Last night Georja and I took in the opening night of Palomino, David Cale's storyteller performance about a New York gigolo. More than thoroughly in touch with his feminine side, Cale also plays the fellow's lady clients, as well as a gay book publisher who (wait for this surprise) rejects his memoirs. May 13 - June 6 at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City.

It's about casual intimacy and loneliness. If you're not sure how one is inevitably entwined with the other, you are one green boychik.

Read our review for LA Splash.com: Palomino Review - Rake and Pony Show at the Kirk Douglas

Photo by Craig Schwartz courtesy Center Theatre Group  

Alas, Poor Ubermensch Boychik

As Wagner fans all over the world know by now, the Los Angeles Opera is engaged in an audacious two-year project to stage Achim Freyer's postmodern version of the Ring Cycle. Having attended the first three operas in sequence, Georja Umano and I just sat through Gotterdamerung, the last installment, which shows the destruction of the gods, in five hours and twenty minutes and two intermissions. Read our review for LASplash here: Gotterdamerung Review - A Thrilling End to the Ring.

I've commented previously in this blog about Wagner's superhero character Siegfried, a demigod in whom the hope of the world seemed to depend. He is a brash, impetuous fellow, very much the boychik, the putz with more chutzpah than brains. He has it all with goddess-babe Brunnhilde, and he blows it. (Her stereotyped character used to be portrayed onstage as a bellowing cow wearing breastplate and horned Viking helmet. In LA Opera's production, Linda Watson softens her considerably, with no loss of vocal amps.)

But back to Siegfried. Why does the hope of the world run onto his own sword?

I don't know. I'm asking.

(That's not a spoiler. He doesn't literally run onto his sword. You have to invest the five plus hours to find out, or find yourself a used copy of Grove's.)

P.S. Los Angeles Opera will present three more cycles of the Ring, starting in late May and running through the month of June.

(Photo by Monica Rittershaus courtesy LA Opera)

Read an eBook Week March 7 - 13

In this new Smashwords.com promotion, you'll find Rollo Hemphill's misadventures My Inflatable Friend and Rubber Babes in popular formats, including EPUB (Nook), HTML, and Sony Reader.

(Also available in Kindle from Amazon, and PDF at Diesel eBooks.)

Vicious Cross-Posting!

Photo by Jeff Kubina

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kubina/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

A writer friend and colleague of mine recently complained in the IWOSC forum that his press release had mysteriously appeared on a strange website. Here's my (cross-posted) reply:

"The situation you find about your press releases being posted on other blogs has happened to me quite a few times.

I'm not an expert in these matters, but my interpretation is this. Your PR release is essentially a public document because you've put it on the Web with the express purpose of inducing anyone who is interested to spread the news. It's certainly not unheard of in the news industry for a publication to simply run a lot if not most of the text of a release as an article. It's lazy journalism, but the original poster hardly complains because you're getting what you want -- your story out to the world.

But what's happening here is that these blogs are content whores. They surround themselves with click-thru ads and promotional URLs. They know that search engines seek out pages that change frequently. So they seek out content they can lift, any content, even it it's dated. For example, my release that I'd be reading from my novel Rubber Babes at Dutton's keeps getting reposted, even though Dutton's is long closed.

If you find that the other website has links to objectionable material, I'd say you're within your rights complaining to the webmaster and asking for the post to be removed. Some of these sites appear to be offshore so I wouldn't bet on them taking any action, but it's worth a try.

If the item did not originate as a press release -- say, it were a post on your own blog -- then this "cross-posting" without your permission would be a copyright violation, I believe. But when you're putting it out there as a release, its getting recycled is not necessarily a bad thing from the standpoint of your exposure. You just don't want to get into a situation where links to your own site get blocked because somehow the search engines have "associated" you with inappropriate content. For example, if you try to post an article on ezinearticles.com, they might block it if they think your links back to your own site lead, in turn, to nasty places."

Gerald Everett Jones

Author of the Rollo Hemphill novels
- in paperback and ebook -

Book Review: Noah's Compass by Anne Tyler

In the virtual scheme of things, my comic-novel hero Rollo Hemphill is now twentysomething. So it might at first seem odd that I'd review a book about a curmudgeon. Perhaps Anne Tyler's sixty-one-year-old Liam Pennywell is simply Rollo in flash forward, a boychik who wakes up one morning to find out his youth is so yesterday.

Here's some brief background, no more than you'll read in publicity blurbs: Liam is teacher in a private school in Baltimore. He was trained in philosophy and his academic credentials far exceed the mundane requirements of his job. Then he loses his job. Soon afterward, he has a traumatic experience that requires healing and readjustment. In the process (the length of the book), he regains his bearings. Hence the title's allusion to the Biblical captain and his navigation device.

Much of life is ordinary, or so Anne Tyler seems to say. And that's the wondrous part of it, she apparently believes. She writes that way and always has, as far as I know. Her sentences are straightforward, spare, honest. The events she describes seem not at all unusual. Her characters are people you know, and they usually don't dare to be the least bit different.

Much of the time, when their lives are proceeding in ordinary ways, they don't surprise you. Tyler is careful to give lots of detail, including ingredients of their lackluster meals and frequent mention of their clothing choices, moods, and physical complaints.

But then the character does something unexpected. In an Anne Tyler novel, it usually doesn't involve picking up a gun or taking an overdose or punching out the most powerful man in town. No, sometimes it's nothing more than a look, an odd comment, or a gesture. But it's the result of a momentous decision, typically something remarkably brave or generous.

Her characters surprise you this way only a few times in each book. In Noah's Compass, you can count those times on the fingers of one hand. But they're stunners. In reading her other books, I have often wondered how as a writer she achieves this effect. When I reread those passages, I can usually find the sentence that marks the revelation or the turning point. But the words are, in themselves, unremarkable. The trick, I believe, is in the meticulous layering of narrative and detail that went before. Some critics have called hers an "angel's eye view" of her characters. Because she loves them so much, even the outwardly nasty ones.

I won't give you any spoilers from the book, because I don't want to deprive you of those surprises. I'll give you an example from my own (ordinary) life. When I was Rollo's age, a young female coworker dropped by my place on a Saturday morning and asked me if I would help her look for an apartment in the neighborhood. I did so gladly. She was a looker, and I welcomed any excuse to get to know her better. After we pounded the pavement all afternoon, as the dinner hour approached, I suggested dropping into the local grocery to get some things we could cook for dinner. It was an Anne Tyler moment when she picked up a carton of eggs and asked:

"Won't we need these for breakfast?"

Learn from Anne Tyler, and stay alert. The ordinary could become wonderful in the blink of an eye.