Bertram's Atheism (a brief segment)

            “Bertie?”  It’s Mama’s voice.  I picture her standing by the chicken coup, her hands balled into fists and driven into her thin waist as if she’s squeezing my name out from her body like how I squeeze toothpaste from the tube.  I think about ignoring her.  She only calls me ‘Bertie’ when she wants something from me and right now I don’t figure I’ve much to give.

            I pick up my magazine and thumb through until I find the story I’d been about to read when I fell asleep.  It’s by Lovecraft, so I know it’s going to be dark, but it’s called “The Cat’s of Ulthar.”  There’s nothing all that objectionable about cats, is there?  Maybe Mama wouldn’t mind if I let Sissy read this one, but then again, Mama didn’t even like Daddy reading Weird Tales.  I reckon it’s the covers she finds so distasteful.  The last issue that came to the house before Daddy’s subscription ran out two years ago had a very provocative cover.  It’s one of my favorites.  There’s a girl, or a woman I ought to say, naked as the day she was born, kneeling all shameful-like before a man in a hooded robe.  Her wrists and ankles are bound, her breasts firm, and her hair like golden wheat, a memory to me now. 

            When that particular magazine came in the mail, Mama said to me, ‘You’ll go blind looking at those things,’ and I thought long and hard over what ‘things’ she could have meant.  Breasts?  Is that what would blind me?  Why now?  If I didn’t go blind after the September issue from 1933 what chance did this new issue have in rending me sightless?  Maybe she meant real breasts.  I considered this and decided there must be some sort of talisman to protect married men from losing their eyesight during the dangerous task of love making.  But what about babies who breast fed?   Surely everyone should be blind.  No, it couldn’t be that.  Perhaps my blindness would come from the stories contained within.  But Daddy was a voracious reader of pulp and fantasy, yet he was always the first to see a duster coming, sometimes when it was still just a haze on the horizon.  And why should the words in Weird Tales have any such power over a man’s sight when the words in the bible do not?  So perhaps, and this is what I finally settled on after a good deal of rumination, Mama doesn’t know a damn thing about the real world.  Her mouth would move and the Preacher’s words would come out, mixed and remade to sound like her own, but I knew better.  Had it always been like that?  Had she ever had a thought that was her own?

            I cried myself to sleep that night.  Mama overheard me and lectured me thinking I was crying because the subscription had come to an end, but that wasn’t it at all.  I sobbed because it suddenly seemed that my mother had never really belonged to me.  Even when she used to sing me to sleep, it was always for Him; I was just an excuse for the song.  Whenever anything good happened it was God rewarding us, and whenever anything bad happened it was God testing us.  It wouldn’t have bothered me so much if I wasn’t so sure there was no one up there listening to her.  Thinking on it now, I guess she was right.  I did ‘go blind looking as those things’ and now I’m lost in the dark, no God to save me, no Preacher’s assurances to make it better, no life-everlasting-world-without-end, amen.  I’m fine with it, though.  Life everlasting would be pretty boring, anyway.

Day Seven in Boston - Convoluted Time and Shutting Up

Day Six of the Residency.  I find myself pondering the  magical and relative nature of time.  As the Good Doctor said: "... from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff."  I've been here only seven days and six of those have been spent going to workshops, meeting and fostering relationships with fellow writers, attending lectures, zipping in and out of the cafeteria and various bathrooms, pouncing on naps, putting dibs on showers, waking early, waking late, but always waking in time.  Time.  Only six days and it feels like a month.  A good month.  That is why today, after workshop and lunch, I took a four hour nap.  It was glorious and further disrupted my concept of time and rhythm while stealing precious little moments which I could have put to better use, but didn't and will never get back, but that is just life and, do I regret my nap?  No.  I do not.

This morning's workshop was interesting.  Sandra is indeed a 'tough one' and she even told us that she knew we'd all been warned of this trait.  Owning up to it doesn't make her seem less scary.  For about three hours I sat there, frightened to say anything.  The first time I spoke, it was to tell her of my love for Robert E. Howard.  First of all, she doesn't like that I don't have a contemporary author to fan-girl over and second of all, she didn't like that I gushed over his brilliance without giving her a taste of 'what he writes like.'  I thought my explanation of his fight scenes coming from his own personal experience was some sort of indication, but apparently I was wrong.  Then, because I thought she wanted us to be succinct in our answers, I spoke quickly and briefly of 'observations' that I'd made in the first piece for workshop.  This resulted in her telling me that I couldn't just say 'word play' because it didn't mean anything in relation to the piece, and also that I had to slow down and give multiple examples of tense shifts.  I thought I'd be giving those examples later... when I was allowed to talk.   She talked about trying to give the workshop piece plot and said she had no idea how one might do that.  People made little suggestions.  I made a suggestion and was told that my suggestion worked as a perfect example of what never to do.  She said that I was imposing my own creativity onto the piece.  I thought I was brainstorming.  My bad.  The next time I spoke it was in relation to a character's motivation and she told me that I was reading way too much into things and that I shouldn't try to psychoanalyze.  So I kept quiet for a while.  And then she asked us to think of something that would put a character in a state of disequilibrium (and I love that she used this word!) and so I gave her my example after everyone else had gone and it was sort of expected of me to talk.  She pretty much rolled her eyes and said "Oh, dear God."  By the time workshop was over I had learned... a few things (mainly I learned that I like the idea of disequilibrium) about writing.  The real lesson, however, was 'you're comments are not necessary.'  I'm fine with this.  I am perfectly happy to sit back and listen and jot down notes.  And I wouldn't even mind having her for a mentor (as that is very possible at this point), but what troubles me is the disregard.  I felt fairly humiliated.  Which is why I went and took a four hour nap.  The world is clearer now and I know that I will be able to keep my mouth shut tomorrow.  I will avoid giving her the option to belittle me and in that I will be able to take in her lessons more readily.  She is hard, but I am very excited to learn from her.  The fact that she left a bitter imprint on me this first day leads me to believe that, in the end, she may well become one of my favorites since I'm drawn to hard asses and challengers.

Something else I learned today, from conversation concerning the piece I read for the student reading yesterday, was that I come off very strongly as a writer of YA fiction.   My characters (many of them, it seems) have all the makings for the ideal, youthful protagonists that we find in stories such as The Drowned Cities, The Bartimaeus Trilogy, Harry Potter, and others.  This is not to say that my writing is anywhere near as fascinating, exciting, or sculpted as the aforementioned works, but that perhaps my characters would be happier in worlds meant for a 12-18 audience.  I don't know.  It's an option.  I can focus on YA next semester if I choose, but I think that depends a great deal on new pieces and my handling of them.

Tonight's readings were excellent.  Kathy Aguero, one of three wonderful authors to share their work, read an excerpt from a story talking about dealing with a parent growing old and succumbing to Alzheimer's.  It was absolutely beautiful and the juxtaposition between infants (and children) and the elderly has never been drawn so perfectly.  I turned to Marilyn after the reading and told her that everyone who works in health care should read this story because it paints a whole new perspective on what is really going on within the minds of those that we discount as lost.  Just gorgeous.

Robert E. Howard and Other Authors

I recently finished reading the graphic novelization of Robert E. Howard's, Conan: The Frost Giant's Daughter.  It was a great read with exciting art.  What I enjoy most about Conan, be it short stories, graphic novels, or even movies, is that this Barbarian is the amalgamation of Robert E. Howard's interaction with the world around him.  In the small afterword of the graphic novel, it is written that he took from all the real life people he had met growing up in Texas during an oil boom and put the most dominant of all of those characteristic into what would become his most famous of all characters.  There is something very real about this character.  He is raw, he is rough, he is horny, he is loyal, he is noble, and despite the fact that he never really cries, he wears his heart on his sleeve.  He is not one for deceit or for trickery.  He delights in honest, real battle and he takes pleasure when he can find it.  For anyone who is not familiar with this character, I would suggest going straight to the source first and foremost.  A great many of Robert E. Howard's stories are available for free through various public domain sites and it is through one such site that I first became acquainted with the author behind Conan.  

There is much I have yet to read, and many characters that I have yet to get to know, but of the Howard creations I've encountered, my favorite is, by far, King Kull.  The movie, Kull the Conqueror, staring Kevin Sorbo was a huge disappointment and I long for a better, more accurate, motion picture representation of my wonderful Kull, the exile turned King.  Alas, this will probably never happen since Kull and Conan are very similar - both have dark hair, bulging muscles, brooding faces, and fight as beserkers - and the world has already claimed one as their favorite.  They chose well, as I too love Conan, but it's a pity that there can't be two brave, brawny barbarians ruling the silver screen.  They have, however, recently started releasing new graphic novels of Kull and my girlfriend has been ever so diligent in acquiring these for me.  

Along with Robert E. Howard, I have been very swept away by H.P. Lovecraft and during explorations of both of these amazing and influential authors (one being the father of sword-and-sorcery and the other the father of modern horror) I have come across a variety of names that merit further investigation.  Clark Ashton Smith and his horror/fantasy comrades, Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft, were known as the 'three musketeers' of Weird Tales, a magazine that frequently published their materials.  Other authors of the time who delved into similar subject matter were Frank Belknap Long, August Derleth, and Robert Bloch.  Of the three just mentioned, I have actually read some of Robert Bloch: This Crowded Earth, an obscure look at the future of an overpopulated world and the means and measures people take to adapt for survival.  However, Robert Bloch authored much more popular pieces, one of those being Psycho.  I have seen the film, loved it, and would very much love to get my hands on the original book as I am finding that it is best to stick to the horse's mouth when it comes to horror stories.