I’m Jealous of My Daughter’s New Training Chopsticks

My wife is from the Philippines, so every once in a while, we make a trip to the nearest medium-sized city where she can go to an Asian market and find some of the products she likes.

We’d been talking about getting our daughter some training chopsticks, which come with a hinge at the top and a guide for where to place the fingers. Chopsticks are not commonly used in the Philippines, but I like to use them, and our daughter always snatches them from me and gets upset when she struggles to use them.

This weekend, while we were at the Asian market, she toddled off to explore—and immediately came upon a rack of training chopsticks. I bought her the pink, girlish-looking ones that she grabbed first, and which came with a matching spoon.

The chopsticks are decorated with a computer-generated image of a blond girl in a fancy gown, labeled “Secret Jouju.” After a little searching, I discovered that this is a Korean magical-girl title created by a brand called Young Toys. I’ve found only a little information about it: There are some minimal descriptions on the magical girl wikis, and there’s an English-language site, but it looks to have been written with a meaningless string of buzzwords its writers probably think English-speaking parents want to hear.

There is an official YouTube channel, but it’s entirely in Korean. It’s also on Netflix but unavailable in my country.

Near as I can make out, the protagonist of this cartoon, Jouju, was originally a fairy who could grant girls the power to become princesses. However, contrary to fairy law, she uses her power on herself in order to rescue a prince she loves and is thus banished to the human world where she has to restore the balance of magic while also singing in a rock band. Or something like that—with so little info available in English, I’m fuzzy on the details.

Out of curiosity, I loaded up an episode when we got home and watched it even though it had no subtitles. It’s obviously a glorified toy ad, as the characters wield magical smartphones and watches (collect them all!) and play plasticky-looking instruments (collect them all!).

My daughter was entranced and reacted with enthusiasm to the characters’ actions, though I know for certain she understood none of it—since I understood almost none of it. She swiftly picked up the main character’s name and was calling for “Choochoo” while waving her new pink spoon. My wife laughed and said I now have somebody to watch magical girl shows with.

Ironically, I’ve become less interested in magical girl shows since marrying and having kids, but I suppose I could rekindle my hobby. We’ll need to make it only an occasional thing, though: We try to keep the little girl’s screen time to a minimum, and I believe that’s why she has an enormous vocabulary, excellent fine motor skills, and a well-developed imagination for someone still under two, because she gets books, Montessori toys, wooden animal figurines, and practice gardening instead of television and computer tablets.

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.

Handyman Update

As someone born right on the dividing line between so-called Generation X and the so-called Millennials, I find myself accomplishing things late in life that men of earlier generations would have accomplished by late childhood. Now that we have a house, I find myself thrust into the role of handyman and fixer-upper, a position with which I have no previous experience.

I’m easing into it, however. Last week, I successfully replaced the sacrificial anode in the water heater without even injuring myself. This week, I returned to the water heater closet to rodent-proof it.

We recently had what seems to be a mouse in the house, though it doesn’t appear to have made it out of the walls and into the living area. I traced its point of entry to the water heater, which is in a closent in the garage. The water heater is elevated eighteen inches, as its suppose to be, but the space underneath it offers rodents direct access to the walls of the house. Yesterday, I cut a spare piece of sheetrock and used it to cover the space, and then I coated every visible gap in the closet with foam insulation and left a present of rat poison. Then I went around the house to fill visible drill holes and spaces around electrical outlets with more insulation, which I’ll paint over later this week. After that, I’ll finally start in on re-grouting some of the tile.

I’ve never handled foam insulation before, so I made a mess of it. Fortunately, the stuff can be pared with a knife after it sets. I’m thinking about getting more cans to do the space between the brick and the foundation next, though I need to research whether that’s a good idea first. That should not only help prevent more mice but might cut down the brown recluse and hobo spiders: When we moved in, this place looked like something from a horror movie, and we’re only now getting the creepy-crawleys under control by diligently sweeping out corners, killing spiders on sight, laying glue traps, and using lots of insecticide to cut off their food supply. They have twice colonized the mailbox, but the last time, I nuked the box’s interior with spider spray and left it open to dry, and haven’t seen them since. The garage, however, still looks like the Arachnophobia wine cellar, and nothing I do seems to significantly reduce their numbers.

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.

Continue reading “Revisiting the Landscape with Dragons”

Selling Out at Nescatunga

My computer is becoming increasingly unreliable, which is one of the reasons I’m not posting as much as I ought. After talking to my wife about it, I’ve decided to replace it once our tax refund arrives (we always get ours late, for reasons not worth explaining at the moment). We wanted to put that money toward the house, but this decrepit machine is making it difficult to write my books or do my other work, and I need to get a new one before it finally goes kaput. Years ago, I had dreams of saving up for a high-end gaming PC, but that’s not in the cards (or the budget), but I can at least get a respectable multimedia laptop similar to what my present computer was before it got old.

Although this is more than a week late, I want to report on my first author’s appearance. Last weekend, I was in a little town called Alva, Oklahoma, which has an annual festival for arts, crafts, and local performers. It also draws in a handful of writers.

I went with the assumption that authors’ booths are desolate places unless the authors are household names, so I didn’t bring much stock. I had a few books printed and brought them along with a folding table and a couple of posters, and I was prepared to spend a solitary day getting minimal attention. Much to my surprise, I sold out before noon. I will probably return next year—with more books and higher prices.

I also found myself wishing I had some books with more toned-down content, as it were. A lot of the interest I got was from children, and I had to tell them, “Um … ask your parents first.”

And speaking of children, my success was likely due to my sales assistant, pictured in the image up top (with her face hidden for safety, of course). She loves reading, even though she can’t do it yet, and is always flipping through any book she can get her hands on. In the days leading up to Nescatunga, I had to keep those two posters out of her reach because she would point at them and yell, “Book!” before trying to grab them. She likes ripping paper right now, so the posters probably wouldn’t have survived if I’d let her have her way.

Speaking of which, you can have those posters if you want:

Rags and Muffin poster.

Jake and the Dynamo poster.

I mocked those up myself in Canva and had them professionally printed. They turned out better than I expected. But as a vaguely amusing aside, the backdrop on the poster for Rags and Muffin is one of Canva’s free backgrounds, “city at sunset,” to which I added more reddish tint. On the computer, it looks like an urban hellscape and therefore an appropriate representation of the book. When blown up to poster size, however, it is obvious there are a lot of trees and parks, so it’s not quite as threatening as it is on the screen.

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.

Why ‘Sailor Moon’ Is Not Feminist

The hot take to end all hot takes.

I have sometimes argued that Sailor Moon fans give Tuxedo Mask a bad rap, treating the character as if he is utterly useless when he in fact makes an important contribution to the Sailor Moon saga, albeit in a role that becomes more peripheral as the story advances. Because of my unorthodox view of this subject, I recently made a tongue-in-cheek comment on Twitter. Then, to my surprise, all hell broke loose—and I’m not sure that’s a metaphor because some of my interlocutors act as if they’re demon-possessed. This is not the tweet I would have selected to go viral, but beggars can’t be choosers:


To give some context, @t_unmasked is an account dedicated to Sailor Moon trivia. It revealed that an old Sailor Moon video game had two modes, hard and easy, which it facetiously listed as “boy” and “girl.” It’s not clear what joke the game’s designers were trying to make; possibly, and indeed most likely, they were referring to the fact that, in the Sailor Moon universe, girls have the most powerful magical weapons. But another possibility, assumed by @t_unmasked and most of her readers, is that the designers were implying that girls are bad at video games.

My cheeky comment was supposed to point out that, contrary to the beliefs of many of the franchise’s American fans, such a joke would fit right in with Sailor Moon’s sense of humor, as I’ll explain below. But nobody understood what I meant, and @t_unmasked’s followers quickly dogpiled me, ranting and raving like a pack of banshees.

I was flabbergasted by this response because I thought what I said was obvious, being right there in the show. But @t_unmasked, to my surprise, went so far as to claim my comment was “factually incorrect,” as if empirical science had refuted my opinion about a Japanese funnybook.

And that was the nice, civil response. Most of the responses I got were more along the lines of, “I HATE YOU YOU BASTARD YOUR MARRIAGE ISN’T REAL YOU’RE GOING TO DIE ALONE JUST SAY YOU HATE GIRLS I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YUUUOOOOO!!!1”

I started this blog because I noticed that discussions of magical girls were, let us say, philosophically monolithic, so I thought a fresh perspective was warranted. Since I write in a niche genre and am bad at SEO, I get few interactions. Doing my own little thing in my own little corner, I sometimes forget that a lot of you are crazy.

Continue reading “Why ‘Sailor Moon’ Is Not Feminist”

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.