Category: Reviews

New Compy Incoming

I’ve been posting too little lately, but my laptop computer, several years past its prime, has recently become nearly unusable. Merely booting it up, wrestling it into opening my browser and staying unfrozen long enough to post, has become a major hassle. You will be unsurprised to know it’s killed my writing productivity as well.

In fact, to avoid the hassle of turning on the computer, I’m writing this on my phone.

But good news: My tax refund finally arrived, so I have purchased a desktop computer, which should arrive in a little over a week. Due to expenses, I decided not to buy the high-end machine I was thinking about and instead went with a refurbished computer with respectable business-level specs and a large solid-state drive. I won’t be doing any hard-core gaming on it, but I was unlikely to do that anyway. And since it’s a desktop, I can upgrade the sucky graphics card later if need be.

In short, I aim to write more in the near future when merely booting up the computer and opening the start menu take less than an hour. This is the first time I’ve bought a refurbished machine, so I’m crossing my fingers.

Happy Spooky Month

Happy October, courtesy of my daughter’s plastic-free, Montessori-friendly toy collection.

(My daughter has a huge collection of these toys, thanks to the efforts of my wife, and I credit them for our toddler’s unusually large vocabulary: Around six months, she was constantly picking up these toys and showing them to us to learn their names. And yes, for the record, some of these are here just for the picture: We keep the small ones out of her reach for now to avoid choking hazards.)

‘Secret Jouju’ in English!

My family has been struck down by the Wuhan coronavirus, though we’re lucky enough to have caught it in a variant that amounts to little more than lassitude and a mild head cold. Since we’re sick and off work, we’ve spent this time lounging around, complaining, and watching too much television.

I have mentioned before that I recently bought my toddler daughter a pair of training chopsticks that serendipitously introduced me to the Korean magical-girl series Secret Jouju, a CGI cartoon aimed at young girls and built around a toy line. At the time, I was unable to discover any detailed information about the series or find episodes in any language except Korean.

More recently, however, I stumbled upon the series in English. It’s actually right there on the official YouTube channel for the franchise, but despite being owned by Google, YouTube’s search function failed to discover it for me. Instead, I ultimately found it through Brave Search.

Here’s an embed of the first episode of the first season. Anyone interested can easily find the rest of the English-dubbed episodes from there:

My daughter is barely beginning to speak in complete sentences, but she can already say “Choochoo” (Jouju) and even wave her hand around and cry, “Chiriring chiriring,” which is Jouju’s catch-phrase when she casts spells. So, despite some shortcomings, this show clearly appeals to its target demographic.

Also, if my daughter has to watch some television, I’d rather it be something obscure like this where an ocean separates her from the toy franchise it’s based on. Unlike some other toy franchises, she won’t be able to see Jouju anywhere and everywhere to the point that she is tempted to build her personality around it.

First Impressions

Conceptually, Secret Jouju appears to take its inspiration from Pretty Cure and Sailor Moon with arguably a dash of Winx Club, though it has toned everything down and mushed everything together to the point that it lacks individuality. Although most magical-girl titles have franchise tie-ins, this one feels especially like a weekly toy advertisement, a feeling that is not helped by the look of the cheap animation, which makes the characters look like plasticky action figures.

That being said, the character designs—which improve notably over the course of the series—are fetching and also a relief from the sexually provocative designs that have come to characterize Japanese magical girls in their late stage. Jouju and her friends prefer flowing gowns (reminiscent perhaps of Wedding Peach) rather than micro-minis and bikini tops, which make me more comfortable letting my daughter watch this.

The Plot

When I reviewed the Korean magical-girl series Flowering Heart, I noted that it jumps into the story with almost no explanation. Secret Jouju does something similar.

The premise (what there is of it) is that Jouju is a fairy from the Fairy Tale Kingdom. One day, she impersonates the princess Cinderbella in order to woo a handsome prince and convince him to marry her. However, the real Cinderbella then shows up and reveals the deception. As if that weren’t enough, an evil witch suddenly attacks the kingdom. Jouju attempts to fight the witch but loses her magic in the process. Sensing this crisis, a magical item called the Secret Diary activates and seals away the witch—but also seals away everyone else in the Fairy Tale Kingdom, Jouju excepted.

The next day, Jouju wakes up to find a talking teddy bear and the Secret Diary in her bed. Both give her instructions to travel to Earth where she must make friends and help others in order to return Fairy Land’s inhabitants to normal. Each friend she makes receives a “Secret Flower” to make her a member of Jouju’s magical girl team. And although Jouju is oblivious, the viewer will easily discern that the longsuffering talking teddy bear following her around is actually the prince she’s in love with.

Comment

There’s something interesting here that I, as an adult, would like to see explored in more depth, though the intended audience of early-elementary girls might be bored with it: Jouju’s former job as a fairy had been to turn girls into princesses, which apparently means that she served in the role of the fairy godmother from the Cinderella story, granting girls their wishes in order to ensure their happily-ever-afters.

But Jouju had found, she tells us, that these girls were always ungrateful for what she’d given them, so she finally decided to use her power on herself instead. All of this is delivered to us in brief hints, leaving us to fill out most of the details ourselves, but it informs much of Jouju’s behavior: She insists that she never again wants to use magic to help other people—even though doing so is the only way to restore the Fairy Kingdom.

The Heroine

When I first came across this series and watched some of it in Korean, what I saw came from later seasons, so some elements of this first season have surprised me. The first surprise is the character design, which is primitive in the first season but improves later on.

As a second surprise, Jouju in the early episodes is decidedly obnoxious. Taking inspiration from Sailor Moon, the heroine here is thick-witted, selfish, and gluttonous. She differs from Sailor Moon in a few important aspects, however: She is headstrong rather than cowardly, and she grows noticeably over the course of this series, whereas Sailor Moon’s character flaws (in the animated version, at least) get turned into a running gag.

A parent can easily see that Jouju’s shortcomings are things that Jouju needs to overcome if she is to complete the Diary’s tasks and save Fairyland, but I wonder if my tiny daughter is getting the same message or is merely thinking that Jouju’s funny antics are worthy of imitation.

The Dub

If a subtitled version of this show exists, I have not found it. The options at the moment appear to be the Korean version with no subtitles and an English version. While imperfect, the dub gives the impression that the voice actresses are sincerely giving it their all despite dubious material.

The dialogue frequently plods, but some of this awkwardness is clearly due to the young target audience: Characters express themselves in clear, simple terms and often say things in more than one way as if speaking to someone who has difficulty understanding. Since the intended audience is probably about five years old, we should excuse these affectations even though they sound unnatural to an adult. The dub frustrates me occasionally, but I don’t feel fit to judge it.

Overall Impressions

I have barely scratched the surface of what is now an extensive franchise with multiple seasons. Although I intend to keep seeing it with my daughter, I’m not binge-watching because I don’t want to let her watch too much television, so this post is a set of first impressions rather than a thorough review. My thinking at the moment is that this is little more than a generic magical-girl title for the youngest audience. Jouju’s bitterness over her role in Fairyland is intriguing, though it’s unlikely to get thorough exploration and probably couldn’t hold the attention of the average adult viewer.

The Pulps: ‘The Dinner Cooked in Hell’

We have been moving our way a story at a time through The Pulps, an anthology published in 1970. The last few entries have been through a section of the book called “Exploiting the Girls,” which contains examples of the seamier side of pulp literature. The last of the stories in this section is also the best, “The Dinner Cooked in Hell” by Mindret Lord, a tale from Startling Mystery Magazine, originally published in 1940.

The story is told in first person by a man who, along with his life, is arriving home in anticipation of hosting a small dinner. When they arrive at their house, however, the couple find that their usual maid is absent, and an exotically beautiful stranger, Lucia, has taken her place. Lucia seems to know her way around the kitchen, but the dishes she serves to the couple and her guest are strange in appearance and taste—and the reader can easily guess that they contain human flesh and blood. After Lucia serves up this gruesome meal, her henchmen arrive to capture the couple and their guests and murder them in a bizarre sacrifice.

Although I think this is the best story in this section, the editor, Tony Goodstone, is of the opposite opinion: He refers to Startling Mystery as one of the “really sadistic Pulps” whose stories were “belabored,” “forced,” and “self-conscious.” By contrast, I would say that, while grotesque, “Dinner” at least avoids the titillating exploitation of sexual violence that mars the other tales in this section.

The story’s great failing is that its protagonist is merely a passive observer of some ugly happenings, with the result that the story has no real plot, though it still succeeds as a work of horror because of its unsettling details. There is a harrowing escape at the end, but it takes place only because of chance and not because of any decisive action on the part of the characters.

The Pulps: ‘Labyrinth of Monsters’

We now come to what is probably the second worst story in the collection, “Labyrinth of Monsters” by Robert Leslie Bellem, who had a previouly entry in the form of one of his infamous Dan Turner stories. “Labyrinth of Monsters” appeared in Spicy Mystery in 1937. Like the other magazines of the “spicy” line, this one featured a heavy dose of sexual content to go with the otherwise common genre themes.

In reviewing these stories, I have repeatedly used the word workmanlike. These are shorts by men who knew their craft, who could sit down at a typewriter and pound out, at the rate of at least one a week, a story with a well-designed plot and good prose. Their work was almost always of good quality even if it was only rarely that they produced a true gem. Some of the authors featured here would win accolades in other fields: Some are pulitzer winners, and some, like Ray Bradbury, wrote on such a level that they commanded respect despite their chosen medium.

Bellem, on the other hand, is purely an exploitation writer whose skill is outrageous metaphors and carefully described women’s torsos. Most of the stories in this collection are better edited than a typical mainstream novel today, but “Labyrinth of Monsters” has grammatical errors and malapropisms left and right.

The story features a he-man named Travis Brant, who for reasons I forget is renting half a duplex in an isolated town called Ghost Cove. Next door to him is a voluptuous woman, Anne Barnard, who screams in terror when she witnesses another woman having her throat torn out by a half-human, half-spider monstrosity. Travis kills the monster and rescues Anne, and then the two them, naturally, call the police. The policeman who arrives on the scene acts oddly, but Travis and Anne are curiously unsuspicious as he takes them up to an old mansion where a mad scientist, Dr. Zenarro, soon takes them prisoner. A Frankenstein of a particularly exploitative variety, Zenarro kidnaps women and forces them to breed with a mutant beast who sires monstrous offspring with multiple heads or limbs.

The story then proceeds much as expected with horrifying vistas, harrowing escapes, and bloody action scenes. Although morbid and poorly written, it’s reasonable effective as a horror story. Had it more dignity, it might have come from the pen of Lovecraft. What really mars it is Travis’s ridiculously inappropriate habit of trying to cop a feel from Anne at every opportunity: The poor woman has just witnessed murder by an arachnoid mutant, so she flies to Travis’s arms for safety, and his first instinct is to grab her breasts. As with the other examples of “spicy” stories here, the spiciness is a detriment.

The Pulps: ‘The Purple Heart of Erlik’

We will pass over in silence a few sketch pieces and poems that follow “Hot Rompers,” which we previously discussed, in this pulp anthology, and move on to “The Purple Heart of Erlik,” a tale by none other than Robert E. Howard, writing under the pen name of Sam Walser. It originally appeared in Spicy Adventure in 1936.

As the editor, Tony Goodstone, remarks, “Purple Heart” is “a sharp contrast to his more familiar work,” that work being primarily the stories of Conan the Cimmerian. Although the Conan stories are often racy (Conan is a lusty savage, and his heroines easily lose their filmy clothes), Howard nonetheless has a sense of restraint that in “Purple Heart” is not in evidence, probably because he was obliged to “spice things up” for Spicy Adventure. Partly for that reason, this is not his best work, but his considerable skill as an adventure writer is still evident, making this one of the better stories in the collection.

Set in the sordid back alleys of Shanghai, the story opens by introducing Arline, an adventuress who has recently been cornered by a treasure hunter who can frame her for murder. In exchange for his silence, he forces her to attempt to steal the titular Purple Heart, an enormous ruby in the possession of a ruthless Chinese gangster. Her attempt on the ruby fails, and the Chinese gangster elects to punish her with rape—and, shockingly, the rape actually happens. Were this a Conan story, Conan would have leapt into the room and slain Arline’s attacker before he had his trousers off. But alas, Conan is not here.

Arline does have a hero, however, by the name of Wild Bill Clanton, a sailor and smuggler who, out of infatuation, has been following her like a helpless puppy. Although Arline has rebuffed his decidedly rough advances, desperation finally sends her into his arms. With a combination of muscle and double-crossing, the two of them manage to avenge themselves and make it out alive.

This story displays something I noted repeatedly while reading through this collection: The “spicy” stories are competently written, but their risqué elements generally make them worse, not better. A reader can easily imagine how this might have been a better tale, and a less distasteful one, if Howard had not been obliged to try to titillate with a rape scene. There is still some good adventure here, but in the end, it’s all rather gross. The adventure pulps without “spicy” in their names showed more restraint when portraying Shanghai alleyways, and were better for it.

Revisiting the Landscape with Dragons

A Landscape with Dragons: The Battle for Your Child’s Mind by Michael D. O’Brien. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. 1998. 261 pages.

Years ago, I started my blogging career on my other, now happily defunct, website for the sole reason that a book had annoyed me. I wanted to create a site dedicated to refuting that book, but because I am paradoxically contrary by nature yet also conflict-averse (as well as scatterbrained), I never did much to accomplish that task. I want to turn to it now: I am going to discuss the book that started me on my blogging journey and then, I hope, have done with it for good.

The book in question is A Landscape with Dragons by Michael D. O’Brien, a little-known Catholic novelist who writes dense, religiously themed, and very niche works. He is a well-read and intelligent individual. A monk of my acquaintance, who knew him personally, once called him a living saint. In his nonfiction, however, O’Brien comes across as plum crazy, and it was his apparent craziness that irritated me.

But O’Brien, I have found, is a Cassandra: He has told the truth and made accurate predictions, yet he has done it so unconvincingly, and has made such poor arguments, that he is easy to ignore, dismiss, or mock.

So I am here to say: Mea culpa, Michael O’Brien. You were right about everything.

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The Pulps: ‘Hot Rompers’

This anthology through which we’re slowly walking, The Pulps, spends too much time on what its editor, Tony Goodstone, calls “under the counter” magazines, ones that were too graphic in their sexual content to be sold with the regular fair. Some of these, such as Spicy Detective, which we’ve already discussed, had a modicum of fame and influence, but many of the others are largely (and better left) forgotten. If Goodstone’s aim was to rehabilitate the reputation of the pulps by showcasing their quality and variety, he might have done better to leave the “under the counter” pulps under the counter where they belong. It is primarily because of these exploitative stories that this collection varies wildly in its quality, with Pulitzer winners rubbing shoulders with pornographers—but I suppose one could argue that this characterizes the pulps as a whole, a mixed bag of themed magazines whose readers never quite knew what they’d get when the next issue came out.

Speaking of pornographers, the next work in the collection is “Hot Rompers” by Russ West, which Goodstone describes as “passing as pornography in its day.” Although mild by the standards of the jaded internet age, we could argue that it still passes for pornography, assuming that we use pornography’s customary definition—a work designed for sexual titillation with no redeeming artistic quality.  The titillation “Hot Rompers” offered in 1931, when it appeared in Parisienne Life, might fail to move the modern reader who can see harder fare simply by turning on the television, but it is certainly designed to titillate, and it certainly lacks redeeming artistic quality. This is the worst story in the collection, hands down.

The story is mildly interesting when it begins, but it quickly derails. Our protagonist, the Frenchman Ferdinand de Brissac, is intent on murder: He has recently discovered that an American interloper has been sleeping with his wife. Gun in his pocket, he tracks this American scoundrel to a strip joint called the Club du Nord, where he finds him dallying with ladies of the evening.

This premise of vengeance in the sordid streets of Gay Paree is halfway interesting, but the plot ceases to exist after five paragraphs. A spotlight strikes the stage, a nude woman begins dancing (described in breathless detail, of course), and all is forgotten: Ferdinand follows this woman backstage, has a dalliance with her in her dressing room … and that’s about it. That’s the whole of the story.

“Hot Rompers” pretends to be nothing other than what it is, a work of light pornography, so we need say no more about it because it deserves to have no more said about it. Pornographic literature is very probably as old as human writing, and most of it has been easily forgotten dreck.

But since we’re on the subject, it calls certain other thoughts to my mind, so I will segue: It has long been my opinion that literature, for almost a century now, has been suffering under a curse first laid on it by D. H. Lawrence. Lawrence, who wrote Lady Chatterly’s Lover among other things, believed that pornography could be rehabilitated, that it could be made sweet and tender, and that even the word fuck might be lovely and musical in certain contexts. Despite Lawrence’s own failure to make fuck sound and nice and gentle despite herculean effort, our literati have taken him at his word and have thus frequently subjected their readers to sex scenes that even the “under the counter” writers would blush at, scenes that mar otherwise competently written novels.

I used to follow a social media account that collected such scenes, though I decided to stop after it became too graphic. This account, run by a crotchety feminist, characterized badly written sex scenes as the fault of “men writing women,” but it became clear over time that the problem was neither men writing, nor men trying to describe women, but men trying to describe sex.

C. S. Lewis once explained why writing sex well is impossible. Among his other projects, he took on D. H. Lawrence’s premises and exploded them. He first did a linguistic study that proved, contra Lawrence, that swear words like fuck did not have some noble history that needed to be recalled and rehabilitated; rather, it is the custom in every language to set aside certain words associated with bodily functions and use them for the dual purpose of evoking belly laughs and inciting anger. Fuck is an ancient word that has always served these two purposes.

Lewis also, when interviewed for television on the subject of erotic literature, explained briefly and pointedly why explicit sex scenes are always so badly written—because an author who wants to describe sex explicitly is limited by the very nature of language; he can use the terminology of the operating theater or the terminology of the gutter, but he has no third option.

That is why the best literature dealing with sex does not address its subject directly but instead talks of gardens in bloom and scented unguents and leaping gazelles and flitting butterflies. The Bible itself teaches us this in the Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s, one of the world’s greatest works of erotic literature. The reader who studies that book will notice, above all, that it contains no explicit or direct description of its subject. Indeed, it does not even dare to have a narrative structure but is instead content to be a powerful collection of evocative vignettes.

In the written word, metaphor is sexy but sex itself is not. In fact, this is true of any medium, not just writing: Bodies ramming into each other, when viewed by a third party, are gruesome, and that is why Hollywood made better romantic movies under the Hayes Code when it had to represent sex with waving curtains.

A writer of fiction who wishes to write about sex should avoid directly describing it for the same reason he should avoid giving dialogue to God: Because it inevitably diminishes the subject.

The Pulps: ‘Wake for the Living’

The last story in this collection that is marked as a mystery is “Wake for the Living” by Ray Bradbury. It is not really a detective story, but it was published, in 1947, in Dime Mystery Magazine. Many years ago in high school, I believed I had read everything Bradbury ever wrote, but I was of course mistaken, and this story is one I’m pretty sure I haven’t read before.

The story, like most of Bradbury’s, is simple. It is a standout in this collection not only because of the author’s fame but because it is characteristic of the author’s style: Poetical language, fantastical details, minimal plot, and an ironical, bitter ending.

To describe the story at any length is to give it away, though the ending is easy enough to see coming. The story features two brothers, Richard and Charles Braling, who hate each other. Both are elderly, and Charles, in his workshop, is building what he claims will be the ultimate coffin, capable of saving the expense of most funerals. The coffin is huge and full of complex mechanical parts. Charles asks to be buried in it when he dies, but his younger brother Richard defies his wishes.

Once Charles is dead and in the ground in a conventional coffin, Richard, out of curiosity, climbs into Charles’s invention. It turns out that the coffin is a machine capable of carrying out all the elements of a funeral and burial service by itself: It slams the lid shut on Charles, and the story from there proceeds just as you might expect.

This tale does not exactly have any unexpected twists, and aside from the mystery of what Charles’s coffin is (which the reader can easily guess), it contains no mystery. Bradbury’s whimsical writing, however, keeps it interesting despite its predictability.

H. G. Wells’s ‘Short History of the World’

A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells, with updates by G. P. Wells and Raymond Postgate. Penguin Books, 1965 [Original version 1922]. 363 pages.

(A quick search indicates that the version I discuss here is no longer in print. The link above is to a reprint of the original version of this book.)

Nowadays, we mostly remember H. G. Wells as a pioneer of science fiction, but in his own day, he was better known for his nonfiction. Although he had no remarkable academic credentials, he was a prolific writer and a bold thinker, and he set England abuzz with often outrageous ideas, which changed constantly. A few years ago, I happened upon a volume of his Short History of the World, which is his second attempt at summarizing world history, the first and longer being the Outline of History. I finally sat down to read it recently and might as well offer my thoughts.

Wells opens the book by assuring us that this will be a dispassionate review of the history of the world with no personal editorializing, but anyone with a passing knowledge of Wells probably knows that refraining from editorializing was something of which he was incapable, so this is very much a vision of world history through the eyes of its particular author. But Wells is a difficult man to pin down because his ideas changed from year to year: Right at the turn of the century, he advocated the genocide of all non-white races, but a handful of years later, he was reading Booker T. Washington and expressing sympathy for the plight of the American negro. He liked eugenics one minute and later rejected it. He was a member of the Fabian Society but got kicked out when he argued in favor of polygamy. G. K. Chesterton gives Wells some backhanded compliments in his book Heretics, describing him as always growing—but it’s unclear if he was really growing or simply throwing ideas against a wall to see what would stick.

If Wells had any consistent principles, they were his atheism and his belief in the goodness and inevitability of a future worldwide government. The latter appears to have been his guiding light throughout his intellectual life and the reason why he was mostly a socialist and at times (maybe) a fascist. We may take this as his religious belief, something he clung to despite all obstacles and evidence to the contrary. It is remarkable that he could study history as he did and still believe in some far-off utopia: His portrayal of the past is a catalog of folly and duplicity, yet he continued to believe that this foolish animal called man would in the future produce global unity. Therefore, despite his atheism and malleability, we may say that he was a man of deep faith.

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