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Volume I
Issue V
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CORE is published monthly by Rita Rouvalis (rita@eff.org) and is
archived on eff.org in the /journals directory. Subscriptions
and submissions should be sent to core-journal@eff.org.
Feel free to reproduce CORE in its entirety across Cyberspace as
you see fit. Please contact the authors to republish individual
articles.
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___________________________________________________________________________
Sneak Previews
Roger and Alice ................................... Barbara Hlavin
At Nineteen ................................... Randy Money
Whither Horror? ................................... Fiona Oceanstar
John Carl
Hunter Goatley
And now on with The Show!
___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________
Barbara Hlavin (twain@u.washington.edu)
ROGER AND ALICE
Here is Alice, sitting in the living room. She is wearing a blue
woolly robe. Her feet are tucked under her, to keep them warm, for
it is long past midnight and the heat has been turned off. She looks
charming sitting there, her blonde hair tied at the back of her neck
with a narrow blue ribbon.
Alice is holding a book, but she is not reading the book. The
book (_Dark Night of the Soul_, St. John of the Cross) lies open in her
lap. There is a troubled expression on her face. Her lips are parted,
and she is breathing quickly, the deep open neck of her robe rising and
falling beneath one hand, which is pressed to her bosom (also charming).
Alice rises from the chair with a swift movement, closing the book and
placing it on the seat behind her. This is pleasant to watch, for Alice
is a graceful woman, and a careful one, which satisfies our desire for
harmony and order. She walks into the bedroom, where Roger is asleep.
"Wake up!" says Alice. "Roger, there is an angel inside me,
opening its wings."
Roger opens his eyes. He closes them. Then he opens them.
"What?" he says. "You say you're being attacked by angels? Good angels
or bad angels?"
"Angels are by definition good," she replies. "Besides, you
misunderstand. I am not being attacked by angels. I have an angel,
singular. I seem to be hatching an angel. An angel is becoming,
to speak existentially."
Roger thinks of larvae, of pupae. He thinks of caterpillars.
"Perhaps you are turning into something," he says finally. "Something
else, I mean."
"It's very small," says Alice, sitting on the edge of the bed. "It
fits inside my breast. But its wingspan is too large. Roger, I love you.
I think."
Roger closes his eyes.
"Furthermore," Alice continues, pinching Roger thoughtfully, "there
is a black music in my ears, and there is a terrible white light
shattering my head. There is a pain in my breast, where the angel is
trying to get out. These are signs, Roger. Can we afford to ignore them,
revelation rare as it is these days?"
"Angels," says Roger. "Life is certainly never dull with you,
Alice." Although, he adds to himself, if there is one time a man could
reasonably expect a little dullness in his life, it is 2:30 in the
morning.
"Move over," she says. "Move over and I will sing you 'The Jewel
Song' from Faust. To show you I love you. Or the national anthem of
Denmark, if you prefer."
"Thank you," says Roger. "But I think I will sleep in the bathtub
tonight, Alice."
Alice cancelled their subscription to Newsweek. Roger sold the
toaster oven. Alice catalogued their books according to the Dewey Decimal
System. Roger washed the fishbowl. Alice read six books by John D.
MacDonald, and two by Proust. Roger slept in the bathtub.
Alice is crying. "Why is Alice crying?" wonders Roger. "Why?
Why?" Alice takes a bath. Roger fixes himself a drink. Then he eats the
anchovy paste.
Alice asks Roger if he loves her.
"Sometimes."
They argued. Resolved: that Alice loves Roger when she is reading
_Middlemarch_. Roger took the negative.
Alice is very hard to live with, thought Roger. Alice sat bolt upright at
the office. Roger thinks I am very hard to live with! She asked her
friend Mabel if she knew how to be easy to live with. "The best thing to
do," said Mabel, "is forget it. Everyone is hard to live with." Alice
didn't tell Mabel about the angel.
"Do you think marriage is moral?" Alice asked Roger's friend
Edward. Edward agreed that they were living in odd times, when there was
no apparent foundation for ethical certainty and decisions were hard to
come by. They ate roast turkey for dinner. Roger's wife dropped in.
They all drank gin and tonic. Roger caught a cold.
Roger asks Alice what sorts of dreams she has for herself.
Alice's eyes glaze over. "Last night I dreamed that I was reading a
book," she says. "I couldn't figure out the price index at the back. It
was printed in white on blue, which Rabelais says are the colors of purity
and heavenly delight. All the books cost $240, whether in cloth or paper.
There was an article in the book about Theodore Roethke, written by a New
York City policeman. He wrote: 'We don't like this guy Roethke, see?'"
Roger told Edward that Alice was out of touch with reality.
"Lucky girl," said Edward.
"$240 for a paperback is ridiculous!" thinks Alice. "I shall
write a letter to Harper and Row." She sits down at the desk.
Roger combed his hair, looking into the bathroom mirror. "Does my
hair look funny?" he wondered. He had spent Christmas Eve with his
parents. Whenever his mother looked at him she burst into tears. She
said she loved him. She said she wished he would get his hair cut. Roger
left then, and spent the rest of the evening sitting in the apartment,
waiting for Alice to come home. He ate cold salmon and pickled cucumber,
listened to Grieg's Piano Concerto in A Minor, and read an article in
Newsweek about the war.
"I have bad karma," he thinks. "I wish Alice would cook chili.
She makes very tasty chili. I will tell her when she gets back. Alice is
a good cook, but she's hard to live with. On the other hand, Alice is
hard to live with, but she's a good cook. Shall I go and stay with Edward
for a month, shall I go home to my wife, shall I catch a fast freight to
Chicago?"
Roger, considering his possibilities.
Alice's mother called on the telephone. She asked Alice when she,
Alice, was going to get married and have a baby. "Never," said Alice.
Alice, considering her possibilities.
Alice is in the kitchen, crying. Roger decides to go in anyway.
"Have an injury?" he inquires kindly. "No thanks, Roger. I've already
had one."
Roger walks alone through Griffith Park. The sun shines. The sky
is blue. Dogs bark, leaves rustle. "I am not happy," he thinks.
Alice wondered about her angel. Mabel moved in with Harold.
Mabel and Harold came to dinner with Alice and Roger. Roger's wife didn't
come.
Alice went to see a priest, Father X_______,. She wore a blue
linen skirt with a white silk blouse, a green jacket, and blue shoes with
two-inch heels. "This is the best I can do. Priest or no priest." She
asked Father X_______ if angels could be experienced authentically.
1. Could they be invoked?
2. Could they be contained?
3. Could they be refused?
4. etc.
Father X_______ asked her when she had last taken communion. "I
am not a Catholic," said Alice. "Although I think the 'Hail, Mary' is a
very pretty prayer," she added politely. He asked her if she was
interested in taking instruction in the Catholic faith. "No," she said.
"I am interested in finding out if angels can be experienced
authentically. Do you think... Is Church doctrine... "
They spent a pleasant ten minutes together, discussing
Kierkegaard's _Diary of the Seducer_. Father X_______ shook Alice's hand
at the door. "Nice chatting with you."
Then Alice went to the Ambassador Hotel and had a drink. A man
sat down at her table and asked if she would like to make love. "Yes,"
said Alice, whose lover, Roger, had been sleeping in the bathtub for a
week. "Not with you, however." She went home, baked four loaves of
bread, and began to braise chicory for Veau Prince Orloff. "I wish I knew
how to make Roger happy," she thought.
"Roger, would it make you happy if we had a baby?"
"No!"
"Oh."
Roger buys a Gro-lite and puts it in the closet. Alice watches
him locate the ceiling studs. Then he drills holes for the installation
of anchor bolts, using a 1/16th inch bit. He strips and patches the
wires. He hangs the light. The light comes on when Roger twiddles the
connection. "How wonderful men are!" thinks Alice.
"Hello Roger," said Edward.
"Hello Edward. An afflicted spirit is a sacrifice to God."
"Do you actually believe that?"
"No. I think an afflicted spirit is a rotten deal."
Roger and Edward talked about afflicted spirits from the various
viewpoints of experience, observation, and theoretical possibilties.
Alice and Mabel talked about pregnancy.
"I was pregnant once," said Mabel.
"Was the conception immaculate?"
"No, thank God. Maculate."
"What did you do, Mabel?"
"I called him from Honolulu. Collect."
"You called God *collect*? From Honolulu?"
"No, Alice, don't be silly. The alleged father."
"Did he accept the charges?"
"He evaded the issue."
"Mabel, have you ever thought about law school?"
Alice and Roger went to Sequoia National Park with Mabel and
Edward. Harold didn't come.
"How winsome you look, Alice!" exclaimed Edward, shaking her hand
and leading her to the couch. "I have always admired embroidered yokes on
nightdresses."
"Edward, I have come to ask you a question."
"About Roger?"
"Only indirectly. Edward, I want to know why there is not enough
love in the world."
"That's easy!" cried Edward. "I was afraid you were going to ask
something difficult, like the score of the Boston-Miami game, or the
closing Dow Jones average. The reason there is not enough love in the
world..."
Just then there was a terrific noise at the door and three masked
men burst into the room, carrying crowbars, tire irons, and wrenches of
various sorts, such as open-end wrenches, ignition wrenches, ratchet box
wrenches, internal pipe wrenches, and locking-plier wrenches, with which,
after knocking Edward to the floor, they beat him unmercifully,
particularly about the head, until he was insensible.
"Poor Edward," said Roger. They were leaving the hospital, where
they had delivered an assortment of flowers to Edward's room. Edward's
head was all wrapped up in white gauze. Alice thought that Edward's head
looked just like a big toe. "It was lucky, Alice, that you were there and
had the presence of mind to call the International Red Cross. And by the
way, Alice, what were you doing in Edward's apartment alone with Edward at
three o'clock in the morning?"
"Went to ask him a question," said Alice.
"About me?"
Alice kicks the yellow fire hydrant by the edge of the pavement.
Small, savage kicks.
Roger wonders: Why is life not the way they told me it was going
to be?
Alice cut holes in Roger's denim jacket, using a paper punch she
had stolen from the office. She broke the fishbowl and rubbed peanut
butter on the recording of Grieg's Piano Concerto in A Minor. "There,"
she thought.
Roger picked out the stitching in the gores of Alice's black
chiffon velvet evening skirt. Then he sewed it up again, making the seams
an inch smaller in the hips. He put her Mexican jumping beans in a pie
plate and left them in the oven for an hour, under Broil.
"I am cruel only to be kind, Alice," says Roger.
"No, Roger, you are cruel because you have a mean streak in your
nature and in order to hurt my feelings, which you are able to do because
of my grossly exaggerated sense of the value of your person."
There might be a bit of truth in that, thinks Roger.
Roger enters the apartment, which I have neglected to describe.
The front room is twenty-two feet by eighteen feet and it has three doors:
one leading outside, one to the bedroom, one to a workroom where Roger
splices his film and stores his cameras. There are two windows: a west
window overgrown by a hawthorne bush, the other a south window with a view
of a hill upon which the landlady has imposed a kitchen garden. Runner
beans are staked at the bottom of the hill. There is a fireplace above
which are pinned, with pushpins, seven sketches of large-eyed waifs drawn
by Roger's wife. Each waif holds in its arms a morbid looking animal.
Four addition drawings, also done by Roger's wife but after she had
started taking acid, are hung, inconclusive swirls which look like
question marks or bruises. Beneath the window is a table. This table is
low and round, and on it are --
a dish of water containing a camellia
an undeveloped roll of film
twenty-six Bic Bananas
_Krapp's Last Tape_
a tape recorder
a box of black Go stones
--and an Oriental Thing carved in twelve separate concentric spheres
from a single piece of ivory, a gift from Roger's twin sisters who sing
gospel music in night clubs on three continents. There are six floor
cushions which Alice has made: one of blue, one of crimson, one of bottle
green, one of mottled purple and white, one gold with a rich upholstery
texture, one of brown, green, and gold stripes. There is a couch covered
in blue, and a red and blue carpet. And of course the chair. There is no
fire in the fireplace, and on the mantle are thirteen Heineken bottles,
empty, a tribute to Alice's favorite writer and to a lot of fun Alice and
Roger had had one night. Alice is on the floor, reading a book. The room
smells cold.
There.
"I am leaving for Chicago, Alice, on the next train. See? Here
is my ticket."
"Oh, Rhett, Rhett! Where shall I go? What shall I do?"
"Help me pack. And don't call me Rhett."
There was not a moment to be lost. Already several of the guests
were lying down in the dishes, and the soup-ladle was walking up the table
toward Alice's chair, and beckoning to her impatiently to get out of its
way.
"I can't stand this any longer," she cried...
But no; that's not the way it ended; that's the end of someone
else's story: a better story, a better ending. To tell the truth, some
stories end badly. I don't like the way this story ends. Alice didn't
like it. Roger himself found it unsatisfactory. But when we begin we do
not know the ending. We are often artful in our beginnings, but we have
no choice in the matter of endings, of endings, of endings.
___________________________________________________________________________
Randy Money (librbm@suvm.bitnet)
AT NINETEEN
I saw a man crucified:
Naked, moth-like, bound vertical
along a slab suspended in hoops of chrome;
arms and legs and penis dangling;
broad, thick chest leeched with electrodes,
wires weaving across the woven wires of hair;
mouth agape, gasping; eyes bulging, begging.
Away from my father, down the hall,
A window bleary with midnight rain,
Iced black asphalt reflecting gothic
Towers and turrets, a music school:
The Castle of Otranto preserving
Butterflies and whipporwills.
___________________________________________________________________________
Fiona Oceanstar (fi@grebyn.com)
John Carl (johnca@microsoft.com)
Hunter Goatley (goathunter@wkuvx1.bitnet)
WHITHER HORROR?
A Three-Part Lament
(instrumentation optional)
John: It's well known that Harlan Ellison thinks horror is dead.
Is he right? A simplified accounting of his position:
It's his thesis that Stephen King created contemporary horror, and
that everyone else (aside from a few major talents) has just been
gliding along on his coattails ever since. The momentum has slowed, he
maintains. The books aren't selling half as well as they used to, the
publishers are changing their minds as to whether it's a good idea to
publish horror. And so horror is dying.
Hunter: I think that's an accurate assessment. Of course, the publishers
are the main reason it's dying. They screwed themselves.
John: Ellison says it's partly a good thing--because the Stephen King
clones and the lower-quality writers will suffer most from the
shakedown, and who needs them anyway?--and partly a bad thing--because good
beginning writers will shy away from the field for lack of a market.
Fiona: Or maybe lack of a respectable image! I mean, jeez, would you want
to introduce yourself at a party, in any place more sophisticated
than the neighborhood pizza joint, as a HORROR writer? We're talkin' major
DIS material here. You can claim to be doing it for the money--then if you
bomb out, you can say you were misguided--but you certainly can't claim to
be doing it for Art. I'm not kidding about this: I think it's a serious
problem for the field. Earnest, talented young writers are shying away
from the darker themes, because they don't want to compromise their
literary ambitions. A writer wants to be known as a writer--not as a hack.
John: Tom Weber, a friend of mine who works as an editor at Tor books, a
major horror publisher, says that Tor is getting out of the horror
business entirely except for just a few writers. He says: "If you want
to be a writer, don't write horror whatever you do. Call it suspense,
or dark fantasy, or anything but horror. Supernatural horror and
hard-core splatterpunk are on their way out--unless it involves
vampires." Tor is going to reallocate its horror resources to science
fiction and mystery.
Fiona: I know it's the real world, but it's strange to think of writing in
business terms--to think of novels as a product. Back in, oh, I
think it was '84, at a college reunion, I ran into Lawrence Watt-Evans (an
sf/fantasy novelist who won a recent Hugo), and he said, "You're into
horror? You should WRITE horror. That's what Tor wants--they keep saying:
horror, more horror." He seemed exasperated, and I could understand why.
There he was, trying to tell the stories he has to tell, and Tor was
saying, "No, write this instead--it'll sell better." It's a controversial
distinction we're talking about here: some people are content to be
schlockmeisters (and I certainly have no problem with an honest dollar for
honest work), but others get very touchy, when accused of writing what the
market desires.
Hunter: I think even the supermarket horror buyers have been inundated
with so much crap, they won't buy it all any more.
Fiona: That makes me think of something Dean Koontz says in the intro to
_Night_Visions_6_: "Sturgeon's Law--which states that ninety
percent of *everything* is crap--needs to be revised to be applicable to
the horror genre; the percentage has to be raised." It's a good essay. He
also says, "We are unquestionably in a boom..."--this is 1988, when he's
writin' this--"And we are overwhelmed by trash. . . Attempting to read
nineteen out of any twenty horror novels, a well-educated person will
despair, for so many writers seem never to have learned the basic rules of
grammar and syntax. Most books and stories have nothing to say; they speak
neither to the mind nor heart; they are clockwork mechanisms laboring
mightily to bring forth, on schedule, not a cuckoo bird but a vague shiver
of ersatz fear."
I don't know about you, but slap-in-the-face ("Thanks, I needed that")
criticism is just what I'm hungry for these days. Koontz makes those
supermarket novels sound like worn-out, played-out, falling-apart
versions of the Overlook Hotel. No ghost at all: just a dumb machine.
Hunter: I remember when I started reading horror around 1978, there were a
few King novels, Robert R. McCammon's _Baal_, some Robert Bloch
reprints, and not much else that was highly visible. Since 1986 or so, the
market just exploded with new crappy titles by new crappy authors. The
*good* ones are generally overlooked because there are so many books out
there.
Publishers like Zebra and Pinnacle (and TOR for that matter) put out so
many titles a month that all have practically the same cover that there's
no way they can expect to sell all of them. IMHO, TOR has been one of the
biggest reasons for horror's downfall. For the last couple of years,
they've printed *so* much stuff and never really promoted any of them. I'm
not a fan of Charles Grant's stuff, but I've met him a few times. He's
getting close to dire straits, and I think the main reason is because TOR
hasn't done anything to promote him. He was a fairly "big name" in the
early '80s, but when he moved to TOR, he's pretty much become a no-name.
Hunter: The problem is, many of TOR's books use the same fonts for their
titles, the same artists for multiple books, etc. How is the
average supermarket buyer going to tell if she's already read a book or
not---you certainly can't go by the cover. You need to look carefully at
authors, and most of them couldn't tell you who wrote a book (unless it was
King; because they've been brainwashed into believing that he's the best,
they read everything he writes).
Hunter: I interviewed Rick McCammon on August 31 for the last issue of
_Lights Out!_. We talked about the current state of horror and
here's what he said:
HG: Mark Turek wrote: Because of horror "splatter" cinema, I've
noticed the trend toward "splatter" horror fiction. Originality
is hard to find except in a few cases; your most recent novel
[_The Wolf's Hour_] was a very refreshing read, as was
_Stinger_. What do you see on the horizon for the genre,
and do you think we'll rise above the blood-and-gore rubbish?
RM: My feeling---and I know this is gonna get a lot of people
upset---is that the future of horror is in films. Horror
literature may be non-existent soon. Books have tried to mirror
films because it's perceived that films are popular---they make a
lot of money, usually---so the books have become more like the
films. I think fewer people are reading horror novels now. I
think you'll see the trend continue in horror films, but I think
horror novels are taking their last gasp. I wish that weren't
so, but it seems to be so.
Fiona: Hmmm.... seems awfully alarmist, not to mention short-sighted.
I think we need to keep in mind that different strains within
the whole corpus of literature tend to go through ups and downs. Phases,
regressions, reversals, etc. Death isn't going to go away. The inner
darkness of humankind isn't going to go away. So horror literature won't
go away, either. It'll transform, perhaps emerge anew under a different
label. The label is just a label of convenience, anyway: it's a strange
one, too, since it names a specific emotional experience as the
_sine_qua_non_ of the genre.
You see, while I'm disgusted, too, with the likes of Tor and Pinnacle and
Zebra, I also see a lot of good stuff out there. It's not getting labeled
as horror, and maybe that's a blessing. What shall we call it? Dark Lit?
Katherine Dunn's _Geek_Love_, for example. Patrick Suskind's _Perfume_.
The stories and novels of Patrick McGrath.
But back to the obvious horror genre, such as it is...
John: Ellison's explanation of the underlying force behind the wane in
sales is the usual: just look at the real and increasing horrors the
real world has to offer--gangs in LA, nuclear terrorism, etc.--and tell him
why anyone has to read horror to be horrified. Horror literature is
not scary, because the real world is scary enough.
As if anyone--or at any rate, most readers--read horror to discover
anything horrifying about the external world or events at large.
Fiona: I bet if we could get Ellison in person here, he could defend his
view better, but I agree: it sounds counter-intuitive, but we
don't read horror to be horrified. As tedious as his writing is, I think
Noel Coward (in _The_Philosophy_of_Horror_) has a good point when he
emphasizes that horror readers seek not horror _per_se_--the emotion you
feel when confronted by violence on the street, for example--but what he
calls "art-horror." A simulacrum of the emotion. An experience that's
easier to work with, easier to handle. As corny as it sounds, I still
think it's true: most people who read horror are trying (unconsciously) to
get control over things that scare them, to gain mastery in their minds,
over things they couldn't master in reality. What's hard to swallow about
this, is that of *course* you never catch yourself thinking, "I'm reading
this book about a rabid dog in order to re-capitulate, and thus master, my
feelings about my father who beat me." If you could think such a thing,
then the charm wouldn't work--because it wouldn't be unconscious.
John: This is why I read horror--
--to discover the possibility of something creepy within myself;
--to discover the possibility of something creepy about my
perfectly normal-looking neighbors;
--to tantalize my suspicion that the world can't possibly be as
orderly as it's advertised to be, even taking into account the
aforementioned chaos;
--to discover an external cognate (in the imagination of the
author) to what I think of as my own dark secrets--a denial of
solipsism;
--for plain old entertainment and escapism.
As for me, I don't care much about the exact form or packaging of the
literature which provides these qualities. I'm not a horror fan, per
se, so much as a fan of dark literature, which includes horror and a
lot of other stuff. Lately I've been reading a lot of private
investigator novels, some of which are very, very dark....
Fiona: I like your reasons a lot--especially the way that you emphasize
the process of discovery. Primates are curious creatures by
nature: we apes are always going to be picking things up and poking
underneath them, looking for what we haven't found yet, searching for what
we can't see (because it's dark). What I said earlier about the horror
reader's drive for mastery over trauma, is only part of the picture. We
have to include that inquisitive spirit--the "private investigator" indeed!
That's where I think the river of horror lit will find its true channel,
and wend its way, however circuitously, into the future--in the never-
ceasing need to ask unpleasant questions, to look behind the walls of our
perception, and then look again, and look again, _ad_infinitum_.
I know I'm slinging metaphors with abandon here, but if you go with the
image of a necessarily limited view of reality that is destroyed and
re-constructed in never-ending cycles, then horror is, by its very nature,
going to do a phoenix number. Once we've exploited all the possibilities
of the modern horror tale as envisioned by such pioneers as Richard
Matheson and Stephen King--all the splatterpunk body catastrophes, all the
sexual-perversion scenarios, every version of realism that the human mind
can imagine--then horror will have to turn into something else. Maybe it
won't look like fictional realism anymore. Maybe it'll look more like a
twisted religion, or an alternate universe, or a horrible version of a
virtual reality. A new, and newly fantastic, vision of the Dark. We can't
just recycle the same product: that's becoming obvious. We may have to
kill the beast, or at least declare it dead ("He's dead, Jim"), in order
for the new beast to emerge.
^^^//January 1992\\^^^
