Episode 395 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
In this week’s episode, I talk to short story writer Karen Best about magic realism, folklore, fairy tales, the relationships between reader and writer, the psychological darkness of childhood, and other important matters. We name drop H.P. Lovecraft, Henry James, George Eliot, and others.
TEXT DISCUSSED
NOTES
This episode is sponsored by the excellent people at Scribophile.
TDO Listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
Check out my literary adventure novel, Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame.
I said I wasn’t going to cover anymore cannibal movies for Thanksgiving. I had learned my lesson last year with a little French/Belgium production called Raw. But your humble Curator of Schlock must give his readership what they want. I know you want cannibal movies. And this is blog #300. I have to make it count. Jess Franco’s The Cannibals that also went under the title White Cannibal Queen should do the trick.
The movie begins with an explorer named Professor Jeremy Taylor (Al Cliver), his wife Elisabeth, and his daughter, Lana, taking a boat ride somewhere in South America. I think the country is named Melabi, but nothing showed up in my Google search. Jeremy tells Elisabeth that it may have been a mistake to take his family with him due to rumors of cannibals attacking other boats going down the same river. Naturally, the cannibals show up right after mentioning this. They spear the boat captain and then proceed to devour poor Elisabeth Taylor on sight. That’s Elisabeth Taylor not Elizabeth Taylor, who to my knowledge did not die by getting devoured alive by cannibals.
Was there a market for this type of movie back in the day? Did people have a fetish for seeing wild tribesmen in grass skirts ripping and choking down the intestines of screaming victims? These scenes go on forever. I didn’t know where the term “gutmuncher” came from. I do now! Professor Taylor is bound and carried to the Cannibal Village. They chop his arm off and eat it in front of him, but don’t manage to finish him off because their Chief proclaims that he found the “White Goddess” on the riverbank. Wouldn’t you know it? It’s Professor Taylor’s daughter, Lana!
Professor Taylor slinks off as the tribe worships their new deity. Some explorers find him in the forest, but he’s delirious. Professor Taylor spends the next five years in a mental hospital in New York City. He keeps rambling about seeing his wife eaten alive. Finally, he snaps out of it and visits Barbara Shelton, head of the Shelton Foundation, which funded his original expedition. Professor Taylor hopes he’ll get funding for another expedition to rescue his daughter. Barbara and her elderly, wealthy, blue-blooded boyfriend, Charles Fenton, tell him he’s crazy and ask him to leave their penthouse.
Professor Taylor travels back to … Melabi, trying to no avail to get a guide to take him back into cannibal country. Guess who shows up? Barbara Shelton and Charles Fenton had a change of heart and have decided to fund an entire expedition to help Professor Taylor find his daughter. Fenton says shooting a few cannibals for sport sounds smashing. I think wealthy Americans traveling to exotic locals where violent natives reside always works out well. Just fire off your boomstick. Show them who’s boss!
Of course, to get to the cannibal tribe, they have to travel through a swamp infested with alligators and rattlesnakes. Barbara sprains her ankle and gets a fever. Charles gets lost while having a heart attack. Cannibal Tribesmen start picking off members of the party with poison arrows. Barbara gets abandoned and is eaten alive in slow motion.
Seriously, I don’t get off on this crap.
The “White Goddess” looks on as her husband, the chief, feasts on entrails of poor Barbara.
I think Professor Taylor has gotten eight people killed in his quest to retrieve his daughter from the Cannibal Tribe. Maybe he just should have left well enough alone. His daughter seemed fine taking on the role of the “White Goddess.” I don’t think anyone thought this through. Maybe it’s best just to stay out of Cannibal Country.
Anyway, Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Enjoy your leftovers.
Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #46 by Drew Barth
Furthest Star
In the pantheon of DC heroes, Green Lantern has maintained as one of the most iconic characters for the past eighty years. From the white gloves to the lantern battery to the green rings around their fingers, Green Lanterns are one of the most distinct characters in a typical Justice League line-up. And this area of iconography is where Young Anima, DC’s Gerard Way-run imprint, has flourished over the past few years. Green Lantern in particular is one of the newest characters to get the Young Animal treatment with the recent release of Far Sector by N.J. Jemisin and Jamal Campbell, and this new take is one of the most interesting the character has gone through.
When thinking of Green Lantern, most readers think of one of the original Earth lanterns: Hal Jordan, Guy Gardner, John Stewart, or Kyle Rayner. And from there, readers know the iconography mentioned above coupled with the idea of the intergalactic space cop Green Lanterns represent. But this is where Jemisin and Campbell disrupt the canon. We are introduced to a new Lantern, Sojourner “Jo” Mullein, on assignment in the off-world metropolis, the City Enduring. The City Enduring is as ideal a city as can be conceived: no murders in the last 500 years, a beautiful cityscape, and the hub of a three-civilization empire. The only caveat is that no one in the city can feel any emotions. And this makes the first murder in 500 years the most shocking thing to ever happen in the city.
As a first issue, Far Sector excels. The murder is introduced as a police procedural, and the mystery and world-building presented here should be used as a masterclass in story craft if only for establishing our three main alien species in the City Enduring within a couple pages. Couple that with the consistency of Campbell’s art that helps to maintain our immersion within the city and this new branch of the universe, and we have a first issue that brings readers right from the familiarity of past Green Lanterns into the present with Jo and her new ring that is still veiled in mystery.
Creating new characters and stories from the established DC canon is what has been making Young Animal such a refreshing imprint. At times, it feels like the pre-Vertigo work being done in The Sandman, Doom Patrol, and Shade, the Changing Manas. Every creator here seems revved up, and Far Sector is absolutely continuing the trend of these refreshing books coming from Young Animal.
Get excited. Explore new stars.
Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.
Episode 394 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
In this week’s episode, music!
NOTES
This episode is sponsored by the excellent people at Scribophile.
TDO Listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
Check out my literary adventure novel, Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame.
Episode 394 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #45 by Drew Barth
Devil’s Night
I love, and always will love, short works. Blasts of story and character that know the precise moment to end with the biggest impact possible. Warren Ellis in his newsletter years ago ruminated on the idea of a graphic novella that would fill this purpose: short bursts of story that can be picked up and read by anyone in a single sitting. Some works like Crécy, Frankenstein’s Womb, and Aetheric Mechanics had shown this basic idea of graphic novellas at work. Some ten years later, we now have the beginning of another graphic novella idea from Matt Fraction and Elsa Charretier in their new work, November.
November is a story in three parts that focuses on three different women over the course of a single night—the night before Halloween, or Devil’s Night. And this Devil’s Night is on the cusp of massive disaster. All three women are somehow connected to the disaster. One through a shady deal in a greasy diner, another through being a 9-1-1 dispatcher as the city burns, and another through the a serendipitous gun in a puddle. Each strand of story twists and ties together under the machinations of someone known only as Mister Mann.
What makes November so interesting in the scope of new graphic novels out this year is the collaboration between Fraction and Charretier. Fraction’s previous work on Hawkeye, Sex Criminals, and Casanova establishes November among his pantheon of wonderfully executed crime stories with interesting characters who can’t seem to stop fucking up. When tsuch storytelling is combined with the incredible art of Elsa Charretier—strengthened further by Matt Hollingsworth on colors—the hard noir feeling of November flourishes. And that noir feeling is hard to miss with a story so masterfully paneled and paced. Shadows abound for the dramatic shrouding of corrupt cops, but showing panels slowly crush characters as the city around them begins to violently erupt only bolsters that feeling of tension.
November is only the first part of a three-part graphic novella series. Fraction and Charretier are working toward what Warren Ellis had been theorizing about graphic novellas, but also working in the same vein as the Vertigo crime graphic novels from a decade ago. When thinking of ways to get more readers into comic shops and into comics in general as this is another good example of a new series being both fantastic in its storytelling and presentation as well as being something new for readers to look at on store shelves. November is another shot in the arm for comics,
Get excited. Comics evolve.
Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.
Episode 393 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
In this week’s episode, I talk once again with the graphic novelist, Peter Kuper, this time about his latest literary adaptation, Heart of Darkness.
TEXTS DISCUSSED
NOTES
This episode is sponsored by the excellent people at Scribophile.
TDO Listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
Please check out my Indiegogo campaign to help get me down to Miami for Miami Book Fair International this year. T-shirts will be available.
Episode 393 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
I know I covered this movie once before. I think it was back in 2015. I rambled about the summer movies that year. One has to wonder in twenty, thirty, or even fifty years, which movies from the 2010s will be remembered? Scott Pilgrim vs. The World? Interstellar? Sicario? Gone Girl? The Peanuts Movie? Rise of the Planet of the Apes? Blade Runner 2049? Mandy? Alita: Battle Angel? I think so.
Terminator Genisys? Ehhhhhhh.
2015’s Terminator Genisys from director Alan Taylor serves as a direct sequel to Terminator 2: Judgment Day, so forget about that Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines nonsense! Terminator Genisys begins in the future after The War of the Machines is well underway. We see a young Kyle Reese grow up fighting in the human Resistance and being mentored by John Conner (Jason Clarke). Grown up Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney of TRON Legacy fame) and John Conner go to a Skynet base on the final night of the war. Inside this base is a secret weapon, a time machine that Skynet uses to send a Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) back in time to kill John Conner’s mother before he is born. John Conner sends Kyle Reese back in time to protect his mother from the evil cyborg.
We’ve seen this story before…or have we. We see the Arnold Terminator show up in the early 80s just like he did in the first Terminator movie, but an older version of the Arnold Terminator is waiting for him. Middle-Aged Arnold Terminator terminates Young Arnold Terminator. Kyle Reese shows up back in time and gets attacked by a T-1000 played by Byung-Hun Lee.
Sara Conner (Emilia Clarke of Game of Thrones fame) shows up with Middle-Aged Arnold Terminator to save Kyle Reese from the T-1000. Sara grew up with Arnold Terminator and he served as a pseudo father figure for her. Oh, and she knows that Kyle Reese is supposed to impregnate her with the future leader of the Resistance, but the timeline has been changed since they eliminated the first Terminator. I think they melt the T-1000 with an acid trap they set up in advance and Sara wants her and Kyle to time travel to 1997 to stop Judgment Day, but Kyle tells her the date has been moved to 2017 due to new childhood memories he received while time traveling.
This is where the movie loses me because it starts throwing around alternative histories and timelines and blah, blah, blah. Sara and Kyle time travel to 2017. Arnold Terminator stays behind so his skin will grow back. Plus that de-aging computer graphics technology is rather expensive. Kyle also remembers a warning about Skynet actually being Genisys. Turns out Genisys is a new tablet app everyone is excited about. The son of Miles Dyson of Cyberdyne Systems created it.
Oh, and John Conner shows up in 2017 too. And it turns out he’s an evil half human/half Terminator thing. What can I say? He’s working for Skynet now. I guess yesterday’s heroes become today’s villains. I think I’ve lost the plot at this point. I’ll call it quits for now. There’s still Terminator: Dark Fate, but I think I’ll take my time getting to that one.
Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #44 by Drew Barth
Slipping Through the Cracks
Throughout the year, hundreds of comics are released. Dozens of new series begin. Sometimes those new series escape the eye of even eager readers. This happens to me every few months—a series just doesn’t appear on the new release calendar or I simply don’t hear any talk of it from the comic crowd I follow. And that almost happened this last month with the release of issue two of Strange Skies Over East Berlin by Jeff Loveness, Lisandro Estherren, and Patricio Delpeche.
But the strange irony of Strange Skies Over Berlin almost slipping through the cracks is how its story deals with the lies and spies that slipped in and out of East and West Germany in the early 70s. As a story, it is diving deep into the idea of things that are unseen even in a meticulously watched area. When we meet our main character, Herring, we see him trying to slip people through the Berlin Wall as he masquerades as a Stasi operative. The story is so ingrained in the tensions of the era that it’s no wonder the story would shift from the streets of East Berlin to an underground bunker by the end of the first issue.
And then the twist.
During that escape attempt, a massive stream of light flashes above Berlin, landing somewhere on the eastern side. All anyone knows of the strange light is that no one knows what it could be or how it came to fly over Berlin. And of course, with the extreme secrecy of the time, anyone who would know anything about the strange light is maintaining silence.
Until the mystery of the strange light begins to reveal itself to Herring as he is sealed into that underground bunker. The light itself infects people—takes over their minds and bodies until they split open in a blaze of electric light. And for now, that’s all we as the audience know.
Strange Skies Over East Berlin is one of the only series I can think of that sits in the space of sci-fi/historical fiction/political thriller/noir, and I’m still amazed that I only happened upon it on the rack of my local comic shop. Strange Skies fills that hyper-particular niche that isn’t seen all that often but feels necessary when many other series stick to only one or two genres. To experiment with genre is always what comics need to do as a medium. A series like Strange Skies lives and dies on the word-of-mouth around it—even if it comes from a larger publisher like Boom!—and I don’t want to see something so fantastically crafted by Loveness and Estherren to disappear before anyone gets the chance to read it.
Get excited. Try something new.
Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.
So Maggie Smith portrayed Portia in a 1972 BBC production ofThe Merchant of Venice, and since this wasn’t part of the BBC’s dreadful complete Shakespeare project (which looks as if Roger Corman directed it), I thought it safe to venture my eyes and ears on it.
This Merchant was better than the complete Shakespeare series, which, alas and fuck, doesn’t make it good. Maggie Smith is an amazing actor, but—
It was nice to see Charles Gray—who you may recognize as Blofeld in Diamonds Are Forever, or as the narrator of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
He plays Antonio, the fleshly collateral for a loan to Shylock, played quite well by Frank Finlay.
The Venetian set looked especially artificial without seeming stylized, and all of the actors between Gray and Finlay look especially untalented between them. To perform Shakespeare’s words, one must be able to think in those words, and these miscreants could not.
Why did I watch this thing made for the BBC’s Play of the Month series? Right: Maggie Smith. Maggie Smith is such a badass—except in this. She seems a little bored, and the lump portraying the suitor she is supposed to feel passion about would have made acting difficult.
The cameras rove in this production, and such movement becomes a little distracting, though I suppose the restless cinematography was meant to compensate for a lack of dynamic visuals from the actors and sets. Maybe the cameraman had restless leg syndrome.
Apparently Charles Gray portrayed Antonio earlier in a television production starring Orson Welles. Why isn’t that available?
Maggie Smith and Frank Finlay.
Maggie Smith was fun in the last act, in which she disguises herself as a law scholar and insinuated herself into the trial in which the legal status of Shylock’s bond would be determined. Michael Radford’s Merchant of Venice is the gold standard for that play—or the lead standard, if you will—but Lynn Collins’s fake beard was really unconvincing in what is in almost all respects a masterpiece.
Still, if you get the chance to watch this 1972 made-for-television adaptation of Merchant, you definitely shouldn’t anyway.
Read the play out loud with friends, perhaps.
Go ride your unicycle.
Have a martini.
Write me a letter.
Do what you will.
John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.
Episode 392 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
In this week’s episode, I talk with podcaster, editor, journalist, and journeyman writer Jonathan Small about how to build a career as a writer who gets paid and merges into the cultural styles of the magazines one writes for.
This episode is sponsored by the excellent people at Scribophile.
TDO Listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.
Please check out my Indiegogo campaign to help get me down to Miami for Miami Book Fair International this year. T-shirts will be available.
Episode 392 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).
