Potrzebie
Sunday, June 06, 2010
Someone asked me if I thought my story "Bugged!" had inspired the recent Orkin commercial. I doubt it, but the doorway shot in the commercial is almost identical to the last panel of "Bugged!" Although credited to Jack Younger, the pseudonym frequently used by Russ Jones, the script is entirely by me, and Alfredo Alcala did a remarkable job of illustrating the story exactly as I had envisioned it. I regarded it as a horror story, but Marvel put it in their humor title, Arrgh! (February, 1974).
Bills arrived in the name of the previous tenant. I didn't pay the bills in an effort to get rid of an unwanted roommate, thinking he would leave when the power was turned off. He didn't. There was a period when I would go downtown weekly to pick up an unemployment check during mid-morning. Trash bins were filled with newspapers discarded as everyone headed for offices. I would select every NY newspaper from the trash and then go to a coffee shop, deserted except for the busboy cleaning up after the morning crowd. One morning he stared at the stack of newspapers on the table and said, "This isn't a library."
In the late 1960s I lived on West 12th Street. The building's superintendent lived directly below me. Drugs and gambling debts prompted him to flee the city in the middle of the night, and soon cockroaches from that empty apartment began to crawl up one flight. One visitor commented that my place had more cockroaches than any New York apartment he had ever seen. Evidently some even traveled with me when I moved to Boston. The address on page seven is 18 Lee Street, roach-free and where I was living in Cambridge when I wrote the story.
Labels: alcala, arrgh, disch, ralph reese
¶ 9:15 AM 2 comments
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Ralph Reese #2: Ashcan angst
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Recent Ralph Reese artwork (2009) resusitates the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents characters.
When I lived on West 12th Street during the 1960s, there was a garbage strike. On West 12th between Hudson and Greenwich, huge piles of trash bags stacked up just outside the nursing home facing Abingdon Park. The fetid odor increased daily, and I had to look alert when I walked by because large rats were crawling around inside the bags and suddenly darting out across the sidewalk. There was a rumor that the rats were multiplying, and the longer the garbage strike stretched out, an army of rats could take over the city, marching in a massive parade up Fifth Avenue. Some recalled Dick Gregory's warnings about covert government labs for the breeding of super-rats.
Once I went to an American-International Pictures press luncheon at Danny's Hideaway, where I asked James Nicholson if he would ever produce film adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft stories such as "The Rats in the Walls" to expand beyond what AIP had done with Poe. "No," said Nicholson, "because rats don't sell movies." (That was six years before Willard was released in 1971.)
Tom Sutton and Ralph Reese reigned as the rodent royalty of comic books, the Grand Vicars of Vermin, and Ralph was equally adept at fashioning festering panels with close-ups of cockroaches crawling into the foreground. Many who read his adaptation of Thomas Disch's "The Roaches" have never forgotten the story. I asked Ralph for some background on those memorable pages, and here's what he told me:
Recent Ralph Reese artwork (2009) resusitates the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents characters.
When I lived on West 12th Street during the 1960s, there was a garbage strike. On West 12th between Hudson and Greenwich, huge piles of trash bags stacked up just outside the nursing home facing Abingdon Park. The fetid odor increased daily, and I had to look alert when I walked by because large rats were crawling around inside the bags and suddenly darting out across the sidewalk. There was a rumor that the rats were multiplying, and the longer the garbage strike stretched out, an army of rats could take over the city, marching in a massive parade up Fifth Avenue. Some recalled Dick Gregory's warnings about covert government labs for the breeding of super-rats.
Once I went to an American-International Pictures press luncheon at Danny's Hideaway, where I asked James Nicholson if he would ever produce film adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft stories such as "The Rats in the Walls" to expand beyond what AIP had done with Poe. "No," said Nicholson, "because rats don't sell movies." (That was six years before Willard was released in 1971.)
Tom Sutton and Ralph Reese reigned as the rodent royalty of comic books, the Grand Vicars of Vermin, and Ralph was equally adept at fashioning festering panels with close-ups of cockroaches crawling into the foreground. Many who read his adaptation of Thomas Disch's "The Roaches" have never forgotten the story. I asked Ralph for some background on those memorable pages, and here's what he told me:As a native New Yorker, I had a good deal of first-hand experience with cockroaches, garbage cans and urban blight. As a kid, my parents were the supers in an old tenement building, and we had a little apartment in the basement. My brother and I had to collect all the garbage from the building, pack it into cans and haul it upstairs onto the sidewalk before we went to school in the morning. So I grew up poor on the streets.
When I got into doing comics, I wanted to bring a little of that ashcan realism to my work. In the world of comics at the time, there was no trash on the streets, no bums sleeping it off in the gutter. Super heroes never had an attack of diarrhea or just felt too depressed and hung-over to go to work that day. Throughout my career I tended to shy away from super heroes in favor of stories that had more to do with real life. Perhaps this worked to my detriment in the end, since that sort of thing never attracted much of a fan base and now has pretty much ceased to exist.
--Ralph Reese
--Ralph Reese
Labels: disch, ralph reese, rats, roaches
¶ 6:13 PM 1 comments
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Alternate Realities: Disch on Dick, Deities and Digital Immortality
Despite death, Disch rolls on. Here is his last interview (June 25, 2008) on The Bat Segundo Show. Here's The New York Times obituary:
Here are the final posts he made on his Live Journal blog. For the full text of a Thomas Disch story, start reading here and continue via the link:
Understanding Human Behavior
By Thomas M. Disch (30 July 2001)
He would wake up each morning with a consciousness clear as the Boulder sky, a sense of being on the same wave length exactly as the sunlight. Innocence, bland dreams, a healthy appetite -- these were glories that issued directly from his having been erased. Of course, there were some corresponding disadvantages. His job, monitoring the terminals of a drive-in convenience center, could get pretty dull, especially on days when no one drove in for an hour or so at a stretch, and even at the busiest times it didn't provide much opportunity for human contact. He envied the waitresses in restaurants and the drivers of buses their chance to say hello to real live customers.
Away from work it was different; he didn't feel the same hunger for socializing. That, in fact, was the major disadvantage of having no past life, no established preferences, no identity in the usual sense of a history to attach his name to -- he just didn't want anything very much.
Not that he was bored or depressed or anything like that. The world was all new to him, and full of surprises: the strangeness of anchovies; the beauty of old songs in their blurry Muzak versions at the Stop-and-Shop; the feel of a new shirt or a March day. These sensations were not wholly unfamiliar, nor was his mind a tabula rasa. His use of the language and his motor skills were all intact; also what the psychologists at Delphi Institute called generic recognition. But none of the occasions of newness reminded him of any earlier experience, some first time or best time or worst time that he'd survived. His only set of memories of a personal and non-generic character were those he'd brought from the halfway house in Delphi, Indiana. But such fine memories they were -- so fragile, so distinct, so privileged. If only (he often wished) he could have lived out his life in the sanctuary of Delphi, among men and women like himself, all newly summoned to another life and responsive to the wonders and beauties around them. But no, for reasons he could not understand, the world insisted on being organized otherwise. An erasee was allowed six months at the Institute, and then he was dispatched to wherever he or the computer decided, where he would have to live like everyone else, either alone or in a family (though the Institute advised everyone to be wary at first of establishing primary ties), in a small room or a cramped house or a dormitory ship in some tropical lagoon. Unless you were fairly rich or very lucky, your clothes, furniture, and suchlike appurtenances were liable to be rough, shabby, makeshift. The food most people ate was an incitement to infantile gluttony, a slop of sugars, starches, and chemically enhanced flavors. It would have been difficult to live among such people and to seem to share their values, except so few of them ever questioned the reasonableness of their arrangements. Those who did, if they had the money, would probably opt, eventually, to have their identities erased, since it was clear, just looking around, that erasees seemed to strike the right intuitive balance between being aware and keeping calm.
He lived now in a condo on the northwest edge of the city, a room and a half with unlimited off-peak power access. The rent was modest (so was his salary), but his equity in the condo was large enough to suggest that his pre-erasure income had been up there in the top percentiles.
He wondered, as all erasees do, why he'd decided to wipe out his past.
¶ 8:39 AM 0 comments
Despite death, Disch rolls on. Here is his last interview (June 25, 2008) on The Bat Segundo Show. Here's The New York Times obituary:Thomas M. Disch, an author, poet and critic who twisted the inherently twisted genre of science fiction in new, disturbing directions, including writing his last book in the voice of God, died on Friday in his Manhattan apartment. He was 68. His friend Alice K. Turner said Mr. Disch shot himself. She and other friends told how his apartment had been devastated by a fire; then his partner of more than 30 years died; then his home in Barryville, N.Y., was flooded; and finally, he faced eviction after he returned to the apartment. He also suffered from diabetes and sciatica. “He was simply ground down by the sequence of catastrophes,” his friend Norman Rush, the novelist, said Monday.
Photo: Ann Monn
Understanding Human Behavior
By Thomas M. Disch (30 July 2001)
He would wake up each morning with a consciousness clear as the Boulder sky, a sense of being on the same wave length exactly as the sunlight. Innocence, bland dreams, a healthy appetite -- these were glories that issued directly from his having been erased. Of course, there were some corresponding disadvantages. His job, monitoring the terminals of a drive-in convenience center, could get pretty dull, especially on days when no one drove in for an hour or so at a stretch, and even at the busiest times it didn't provide much opportunity for human contact. He envied the waitresses in restaurants and the drivers of buses their chance to say hello to real live customers.
Away from work it was different; he didn't feel the same hunger for socializing. That, in fact, was the major disadvantage of having no past life, no established preferences, no identity in the usual sense of a history to attach his name to -- he just didn't want anything very much.
Not that he was bored or depressed or anything like that. The world was all new to him, and full of surprises: the strangeness of anchovies; the beauty of old songs in their blurry Muzak versions at the Stop-and-Shop; the feel of a new shirt or a March day. These sensations were not wholly unfamiliar, nor was his mind a tabula rasa. His use of the language and his motor skills were all intact; also what the psychologists at Delphi Institute called generic recognition. But none of the occasions of newness reminded him of any earlier experience, some first time or best time or worst time that he'd survived. His only set of memories of a personal and non-generic character were those he'd brought from the halfway house in Delphi, Indiana. But such fine memories they were -- so fragile, so distinct, so privileged. If only (he often wished) he could have lived out his life in the sanctuary of Delphi, among men and women like himself, all newly summoned to another life and responsive to the wonders and beauties around them. But no, for reasons he could not understand, the world insisted on being organized otherwise. An erasee was allowed six months at the Institute, and then he was dispatched to wherever he or the computer decided, where he would have to live like everyone else, either alone or in a family (though the Institute advised everyone to be wary at first of establishing primary ties), in a small room or a cramped house or a dormitory ship in some tropical lagoon. Unless you were fairly rich or very lucky, your clothes, furniture, and suchlike appurtenances were liable to be rough, shabby, makeshift. The food most people ate was an incitement to infantile gluttony, a slop of sugars, starches, and chemically enhanced flavors. It would have been difficult to live among such people and to seem to share their values, except so few of them ever questioned the reasonableness of their arrangements. Those who did, if they had the money, would probably opt, eventually, to have their identities erased, since it was clear, just looking around, that erasees seemed to strike the right intuitive balance between being aware and keeping calm.
He lived now in a condo on the northwest edge of the city, a room and a half with unlimited off-peak power access. The rent was modest (so was his salary), but his equity in the condo was large enough to suggest that his pre-erasure income had been up there in the top percentiles.
He wondered, as all erasees do, why he'd decided to wipe out his past.
Continue reading here...
Monday, July 07, 2008
Dirge for Disch
I met Tom Disch only briefly, but I'm saddened to learn of his suicide. Deleted on July 4 by God's red, white and blue pencil, he truly ranked as one of the past century's magnificent imaginative writers. This photo by Beth Gwinn is remarkable in that it is instantly evocative of his fiction, with walking-on-water joyfulness set against a rising tide of impending darkness. He did it all: novels, short stories, poetry, non-fiction, criticism, blog entries and a text adventure game (Amnesia). His work was adapted to both animation (The Brave Little Toaster) and comics (Ralph Reese's "The Roaches"). The great horror tale of "Descending" on an escalator to sub-levels where there is no escalator ascending was followed by the future world of "Concepts," in which he foresaw webcams, social networking, cyber romance and lifecasting. On the Wings of Song (1979) is a novel that soars.
"In Defense of Forest Lawn" and other poems by Thomas Disch.
Interview: Thomas M. Disch by David Horwich.
Disch liked this powerful poem by Bret Harte (1839-1902), told first-person by a bullet. It prompted him to write his own follow-up:
What the Bullet Sang
O JOY of creation,
To be!
O rapture, to fly
And be free!
Be the battle lost or won,
Though its smoke shall hide the sun,
I shall find my love—the one
Born for me!
I shall know him where he stands
All alone,
With the power in his hands
Not o'erthrown;
I shall know him by his face,
By his godlike front and grace;
I shall hold him for a space
All my own!
It is he—O my love!
So bold!
It is I—all thy love
Foretold!
It is I—O love, what bliss!
Dost thou answer to my kiss?
O sweetheart! what is this
Lieth there so cold?
--Bret Harte
l
Tears the Bullet Wept
We know that bullets sing.
Bret Harte transcribed their song.
But give them this: they weep as well,
And theirs are the most precious souvenirs
That venders hawk on the streets of hell.
What is so tragic as the lethal blast
Of thunderbolt or .38
That turns what had been present
Into past? There he stood
And here he lies at last.
Will you not shed a single tear
For any such? Is that too much to ask?
Here is a tear. Weigh it,
Please, Sir, on your scale--
And I will tell you the whole tale.
But only when your job is done.
Kill all the rest first. I will wait.
I met Tom Disch only briefly, but I'm saddened to learn of his suicide. Deleted on July 4 by God's red, white and blue pencil, he truly ranked as one of the past century's magnificent imaginative writers. This photo by Beth Gwinn is remarkable in that it is instantly evocative of his fiction, with walking-on-water joyfulness set against a rising tide of impending darkness. He did it all: novels, short stories, poetry, non-fiction, criticism, blog entries and a text adventure game (Amnesia). His work was adapted to both animation (The Brave Little Toaster) and comics (Ralph Reese's "The Roaches"). The great horror tale of "Descending" on an escalator to sub-levels where there is no escalator ascending was followed by the future world of "Concepts," in which he foresaw webcams, social networking, cyber romance and lifecasting. On the Wings of Song (1979) is a novel that soars.
Photo © Beth Gwinn
"In Defense of Forest Lawn" and other poems by Thomas Disch.
Interview: Thomas M. Disch by David Horwich.
Disch liked this powerful poem by Bret Harte (1839-1902), told first-person by a bullet. It prompted him to write his own follow-up:
What the Bullet Sang
O JOY of creation,
To be!
O rapture, to fly
And be free!
Be the battle lost or won,
Though its smoke shall hide the sun,
I shall find my love—the one
Born for me!
I shall know him where he stands
All alone,
With the power in his hands
Not o'erthrown;
I shall know him by his face,
By his godlike front and grace;
I shall hold him for a space
All my own!
It is he—O my love!
So bold!
It is I—all thy love
Foretold!
It is I—O love, what bliss!
Dost thou answer to my kiss?
O sweetheart! what is this
Lieth there so cold?
--Bret Harte
l
Tears the Bullet Wept
We know that bullets sing.
Bret Harte transcribed their song.
But give them this: they weep as well,
And theirs are the most precious souvenirs
That venders hawk on the streets of hell.
What is so tragic as the lethal blast
Of thunderbolt or .38
That turns what had been present
Into past? There he stood
And here he lies at last.
Will you not shed a single tear
For any such? Is that too much to ask?
Here is a tear. Weigh it,
Please, Sir, on your scale--
And I will tell you the whole tale.
But only when your job is done.
Kill all the rest first. I will wait.
--Tom Disch (June 17, 2008)
Control click heading at top for Tibetan mantra.
Control click heading at top for Tibetan mantra.
Labels: death, disch, harte, ralph reese
¶ 10:17 AM 1 comments
