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Author: Thomas Parker

Say It Ain’t So

Say It Ain’t So

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You’ve heard. I know you’ve heard. And I know what your reaction was — first, surprise… shock, even. Then sadness, and probably anger too. “Please, not again, Goddammit! And not him!” (And if you really haven’t heard, forgive me for being the bearer of bad news.)

Those were my reactions, anyway, when I read about the New York Magazine story that was published early this year (“There is No Safe Word,” by Lila Shapiro; the article may be paywalled), a story that contains appalling, sickeningly detailed accusations from multiple women of thoroughly vile conduct (up to and including outright sexual assault) by Neil Gaiman, one of the most successful and admired writers in contemporary fantasy.

Whatever the results of the inevitable adjudication, civil or criminal, I think it is safe to say that Gaiman (who has naturally denied everything, because that’s what a guilty and an innocent man alike would do) has, at the still relatively young age of sixty-four, entered the “public and professional pariah” stage of his life. This has been confirmed by the panicked corporate scramble to cancel any and all Gaiman-related film, television, and literary projects that were in any stage of discussion or production when the accusations began to surface.

I don’t know the truth about any of these allegations, of course, but given their number and scale and specificity, it’s extremely difficult to believe that the predicament Gaiman finds himself in is merely the result of a “misunderstanding” (his characterization). What I do know is how depressing and disheartening the whole thing is.

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In Dreams: David Lynch: 1946 — 2025

In Dreams: David Lynch: 1946 — 2025

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David Lynch is gone; he died Wednesday at the age of  seventy-eight, bringing one of the strangest careers in American film to an end and leaving the rest of us to try to reach a conclusion as to what it all meant.

He never made a western. He never made a romcom or a workplace comedy. He never made a “prestige” period picture. He never made a buddy movie or an action movie or a heist movie or a (straightforward) crime movie. Not for him was getting hold of a franchise and riding it until it died of thirst in the desert; he wasn’t interested in making Mission Impossible 6 and 7/8. The only things he made were David Lynch movies (as the producers of Dune found to their dismay), and those were about as far out of the mainstream of American cinematic entertainment as it is possible to get and still be permitted within the city limits of Hollywood.

I resist calling him an “experimental filmmaker” — though there is a grain of truth in the description (in the effect of his work more than in its intent) — because I don’t think he was experimenting at all; I think he had a cement-solid vision of what film was and what it could do, and he knew precisely what he was up to every single minute.

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A Singular Success: Fat City

A Singular Success: Fat City

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I hold people who write novels in awe. Because writing an entire book-length story is something that I could never do in a million years, I even have a measure of admiration and respect for people who write mediocre novels, so you can imagine how I feel about someone who writes a beautiful novel, a brilliant novel, a great novel; you can imagine how I feel about Leonard Gardner.

“Leonard Gardner — who’s that? I’ve never heard of him.” Well, I’m here to tell you that Leonard Gardner should be a household name, because he wrote one of the finest, most moving novels that has appeared during my lifetime; Leonard Gardner wrote Fat City.

Fat City is set in the waning days of 1959, in Stockton, California, and it chronicles the lives of two small-time boxers. Billy Tully is at the end of his career, newly divorced, washed-up and drifting into alcoholism as he moves from one seedy hotel to another, filling his days with melancholy reverie and back-breaking farm jobs. Ernie Munger is just starting out, working at a gas station during the day and fighting in four round prelims at night to support his new wife, whom he married because he’d gotten her pregnant. Billy and Ernie both dream of glory, but there is no big time here, no Fat City of wealth, fame, and success — just limited young men who win or lose for a few dollars and piss blood for weeks afterward. Ernie, still fresh and hopeful, feels “the potent allegiance of fate,” but his arc will inevitably be the same as Billy’s; the time and place and his own lack of internal resources guarantee it.

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Taking in the Trash: Paul Cantor’s Pop Culture Trilogy

Taking in the Trash: Paul Cantor’s Pop Culture Trilogy

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Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, November 28, 2001)

Having just finished a very lively and thought-provoking book, I did something I almost never do — I decided to write the author a fan letter. Naturally, I hopped on Google to get his contact information, only to discover that he died almost three years ago, in February of 2022. Why do these things always happen to me?

The book I just finished, Pop Culture and the Dark Side of the American Dream: Con Men, Gangsters, Drug Lords, and Zombies was published in 2019, and is the third book in a loose cultural criticism trilogy written by Paul A. Cantor, a well-known Shakespearian scholar (Shakespeare and Rome: Republic and Empire) who was for many years a professor of English at the University of Virginia. The other volumes in the “trilogy” are Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization (2001) and The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty vs. Authority in American Film and TV (2012).

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Operatic Evil: The 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Operatic Evil: The 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

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We are now well into autumn, the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness (according to John Keats) and what’s more, we are well into October, the month of shrieks and gore, according to Prime and Hulu and Netflix and the other streamers, all of which are offering up full slates of horror movies in preparation for the bacchanalia of fright, candy, and cosplay on the 31st. (The Roku collection is called “Stream & Scream”, naturally.)

The horror movie — thanks in large part to those aforementioned streaming services — has apparently never been in better health, at least if we’re measuring nothing more than quantity. Quality is of course an up-and-down, hit-and-miss attribute in any era, but the never-ceasing torrent of “content” (hate that word) simultaneously issuing from so many different “platforms” (another ugly expression) may make it harder than ever to discern the diamonds among the detritus.

But that’s what Black Gate is for, right? We’re here to lift the burden from your tired shoulders and make life easy for you! Therefore, may I suggest for your Halloween season viewing… drumroll, please… a creaky, black-and-white warhorse that’s damn near a hundred years old?

No, I’m not kidding. I am here to seriously assert that the best horror movie you can watch right now is not some newly-minted fright-fest flung fresh from the gaping maw of the Entertainment-Industrial Complex, but the 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. …

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Margaret Hamilton: Wicked Forever

Margaret Hamilton: Wicked Forever

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She’ll get you, my pretty!

The marketing blitz for the upcoming two-part film version of the 2003 stage version of Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel Wicked (itself a “reimagining” of L. Frank Baum’s seminal 1900 novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz) has begun. Years ago, I succumbed to hype exhaustion and saw the musical; I found it mildly diverting, which hardly seemed adequate, considering the superlatives the enterprise was swathed in.

As for the movie, which stars Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba (Maguire’s name, not Baum’s, though it’s supposedly constructed out of his initials – LFB) and Ariana Grande as Glinda, so far all we have to judge it by is the trailer, and from those carefully culled three-and-a-half minutes it looks like all the stops have been pulled out in terms of lavish production values (though in a time when spectacle can be generated on a laptop, one wonders if that means anything anymore). As for the frantic media bludgeoning we’re about to experience, it’s hard to blame the producers for the incipient panic evident in such all-out campaigns; it’s not their fault that movies just don’t mean as much to people as they once did.

Nevertheless, I’m sure that when Wicked is released in November, it will be a smashing financial success and may even be an artistic one; certainly, a lot of talented people are giving it their all. Whatever the size of the film’s box office or cultural footprint, however, I suspect that not many people will still be watching it in 2109, eighty-five years from now — not coincidentally, the same gap separating 2024 from the 1939 that gave us one of the most enduring and beloved of all films, the MGM Wizard of Oz, a flawlessly-cast classic that starred Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, Bert Lahr, and Frank Morgan.

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A Book Worth Reading Every Year: Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White

A Book Worth Reading Every Year: Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White

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In a few days I’ll begin my twenty-first year of teaching fourth grade; as I tell my new families every intro night, I’m going to keep doing it until I get it right.

As always, the year ahead is largely unknown territory; even so, there are some things that I know will happen. For instance, there will be days when it seems like the kids are utterly clueless, and there will be days when it seems like I’m utterly clueless; students will be stricken by strange stomach maladies that come out of nowhere (usually right after a hasty lunch followed by twenty minutes of running around on the playground) and disappear just as quickly. There will be computer troubles and copier failures at the most inopportune times, and chairs or even desks will mysteriously tip over, spilling their contents (human or otherwise) on the floor — inevitably, just as we’re beginning to dig into the mysteries of long division or at some other equally problematic moment. I could go on, but why bother? If you’ve ever been in a classroom, you already know it all.

And I love it; there’s nothing that I would rather be doing, and one reason is because there’s another thing that I know will happen — I’ll read aloud to my students, and it’s the thing that I look forward to most; it’s always the high point of our day.

Every year we get through several books. Some are old favorites that I often return to (The BFG, The Cricket in Times Square, Pippi Longstocking) and some are “new” books that I try out in hopes of adding to my stock of old reliables (The Enormous Egg made the rotation, but after reading The Phantom Tollbooth last year, I know I won’t be revisiting it — it’s not a bad book; it’s just not great for reading aloud). There’s one book, however, that there’s never any question about; every year I treat my kids — and myself — to E.B. White’s masterpiece, Charlotte’s Web.

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Little Madhouse on the Prairie: Wisconsin Death Trip

Little Madhouse on the Prairie: Wisconsin Death Trip

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Like many of you, I own a lot of books. Like perhaps not quite as many of you, I own a lot of very strange books, among them Aleister Crowley’s autobiography, a volume of Criswell’s predictions, a collection of “poems” by Victor Buono (he was King Tut to Adam West’s Batman; the title of his book is It Could Be Verse), a paranoid little volume called The Enemy Within that showed up one day on every driveway in my neighborhood in a rock-weighted plastic bag, and that blames literally everything bad that’s ever happened on the Jesuits (I’m probably the only person in town who actually read it — God, I hope I’m the only person in town who actually read it), the Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (the Lord talked to Phil, and boy, did they have some weird conversations), the collected works of Charles Fort, several volumes of the Shaver Mystery… it goes on and on.

There is no stranger book on my shelves, though, than Wisconsin Death Trip. Catchy title, huh?

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Roger Corman, April 5, 1926 – May 9, 2024

Roger Corman, April 5, 1926 – May 9, 2024

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Roger Corman, the Godfather of American independent film, is gone. He died at his home in Santa Monica, California, on May 9th. He was ninety-eight.

Legendary both for his cheapness (no one could squeeze more out of a budget than he could) and for his generosity (he gave countless actors, directors, writers, and technical people their first chance in Hollywood), Corman began his almost seventy-year long career in the mid 50’s by directing extremely low-budget movies for the fledgling American International Pictures, most of which were shot in one or two weeks for less than 100,000 dollars. Corman’s understanding of the necessity of ruthless economy on the one hand and of the appetites of his largely teen-aged audience on the other made these films highly successful, and during those early years, that success was perhaps the major factor in establishing AIP as an ongoing concern.

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A Reckless and Unwarranted Speculation on the Origin of a Great Science Fiction Story

A Reckless and Unwarranted Speculation on the Origin of a Great Science Fiction Story

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Alice (James Tiptree Jr.) Sheldon

For many writers, asking them the apparently innocent question, “where do you get your ideas?” is like waving a red flag in front of a bull. (Watch the Harlan Ellison documentary Dreams with Sharp Teeth for a great example; at the very thought of someone posing that question, Ellison goes from zero to apoplexy in 1.2 seconds. I know — Harlan Ellison, but still…)

Nevertheless, as a humble reader to whom the mysteries of creative writing are forever veiled, it’s a question that I’m curious about. Having never met Alice (James Tiptree Jr.) Sheldon, I have no idea how she would have reacted to the question, and I’ll never find out, as she died in 1987… but I think I know the answer for one of her stories, at least.

Alice Sheldon (under the whimsical pseudonym that she and her husband cooked up) was a science fiction writer without peer, and her novella A Momentary Taste of Being, which first appeared in 1975 in the Robert Silverberg-edited anthology The New Atlantis (and later in her own collection Star Songs of an Old Primate and the “Essential Tiptree” anthology Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, which you should buy immediately, forgoing food and rent if necessary), is one of her greatest stories, a radical premise pushed to its absolute limits… and I believe I know where that wild premise came from.

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