Erik Geiger's Blog

Several years ago I read an interview in which Margo Kidder lamented the fact that Richard Donner's version of Superman II had never been released. Having seen it myself, I now understand why.
In comparing this cut to Richard Lester's version I found every difference to favor Donner.
For whatever reason, the studio releived Donner of the helm after he shot 75% of his movie. They replaced him with Richard Lester who reshot many sequences, and shot several new ones. The result was a far different, inferior film.
But Donner's cut restores the original scenes, replacing much of the weaker material shot by Lester.
A large part of what I liked most were Marlon Brando's restored scenes. We see the absolute committment Jor-El has made both to his son and to the people of earth. Through him we see the essential dilemma of the character Kal-El, who was raised a human, but who is not and can never be one of us. We see what a terrible burden it is to be the last son of Krypton.
Many of Lois's scene were better, including the one in which she manipulates Superman into admitting his secret identity.
I was also glad to see several Richard Lester spawned idiocies gone from the film; gone was the poorly conceived and executed sequence where Lois runs afoul of terrorists in Paris, gone was the Lois falls into the river scene, gone was the bizarre powers battle in the fortress of solitude.
The end of the film was more satisfying too. While it may have been repetitive to once again have Superman orbit the planet so fast that he travel's back in time again, it worked better this time than it did in the first film, largely due to the perspective from which it was shown - the clock simply begins to run backward as Superman sets the world right. If nothing else, it made far more sense in terms of the character's traditional abilities than the kiss of forgetfulness in the Lester version - time travel stories were a staple of the Superman comics in the days when Mort Weisinger was editng them.
I never had any desire to own a copy of Superman II, not until now. Having seen the Donner cut, I will buy it, and never again will I watch Richard Lester's version of this film.

In a recent column on Wired News, Literacy Limps into the Kill Zone, Wired's Copy Chief Tony Long decries the state of American literacy. This letter is a response to his use of the phrase "comic-book generation" as synonymous with "post literate society".
Dear sir,
I object to your use of the term "comic book generation" in a pejorative context. You imply that comics books are an example of the decline in literacy, but you don't follow your implication up in your article, making this a cheap rhetorical trick.
While you make many valid points regarding the effect of technology and rapid communication on literacy, your criticism of comic books, even by implication, simply reveals your ignorance of one of the few areas in publishing that has steadily improved in literacy over the last 40 years.
While the bar was admittedly quite low 40 years ago, even a cursory survey of comic book publications over the last 40 years shows that comic books are one of the few areas in publishing where effective story telling skills are encouraged and rewarded.
Do yourself a favor and read any comic book by Joss Whedon, Will Eisner, Alan Moore, Neil Gaimain, Joe Straczynski or Dave Sim. Works by all of these authors are deservedly studied as great literature at Universities around the world. And please don't argue that the inclusion of comic books in university curricula proves your point. You would not be tempted to make such an assertion if you'd read Moore's The Watchmen, Miller's The 300, Gaiman's Sandman, Eisner's Contract with God, Straczynski's run on The Amazing Spider-man, Whedon's work on The Astounding Xmen or Dave Sim's Cerebus.
You might suspect that I'm supporting my argument by citing the exceptions, rather than the rule. Certainly this short list contains conspicuous luminaries of the field, but even among the most prolific, mainstream comic book writers of the last 40 years, such as Alfred Bester, Stan Lee, Gardner Fox, Jim Steranko, Dennis O'Neil and Chris Claremont, you'll find many examples of notable literary merit. Being extremely prolific authors writing to deadlines, they have written works that were sub-par. However, their general level of writing is excellent, and often reaches the sublime.
There are many reasons for the decline of literacy in America, but no valid argument can be made that comic books are among them.
As a professional writer and the holder of a degree in literature from one of the public ivies, I am proud to be a member of the comic book generation.

"Long", "Convoluted", "Jesus Christ, aren't I finished with this fucking book yet? "
are just a few of the words that came to mind when I read Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian.
I almost didn't read it.
The hype surronding Anne Rice's books pretty much killed my interest in vampire novels. The only ones I've read since the late 1980s were Dracula and The Historian.
However everything I heard about the novel suggested I'd like it. The richly detailed historical backdrop, the European settings, the complex narrative structure, these are characteristic of many books I've enjoyed in the past. And I did like The Historian. Mostly.
But I'm not compelled by stories that I like - I'm compelled by stories I love, and I didn't love The Historian.

While I respected the audacity of the attempt and mostly enjoyed it, I found the narative-within-a-narrative-within-a-narrative conceit distracting. Also, I was also distracted when Mrs. Kostova fell into the major pitfall of epistolary novels, one that even Richardson fell into with Clarissa: the letters are too bloody long! It strains credulity that a narrative describing vampire hunting in central Europe which spans hundred pages in the novel, somehow fits into a few hand written letters that the protagonist reads on a short train trip.
This mistake is repeated with variations - an aging scholar reads aloud an article containing commentaries and an account of a pilgrimage from Wallchia to Istanbul to Bulgaria, within a few stolen minutes.
The main weakness of the novel, however, is Vlad himself. Reading Vlad's history both within the novel and outside it, his complexity emerges. He was at once a savagely brutal dictator and a devoted patron of the orthodox church and a fierce nationalist.
Yet his actual appearances as a character in the novel are anticlimatic and disappointing, revelaing little of what made him interesting as an historical figure.
And frankly, his motivations are not compelling. He pursues successive generations of talented historians because he needs a librarian, someone to help him catalogue his vast, ideosyncratic library in order advance his vaguely sinister goals. What he hopes to accomplish, why he feels he needs a brilliant scholar, laboring as a willing servant, these are unclear.
Also unclear is why these several scholars are motivated to extent they are by the unlikely and outre proposition that Dracula walks the earth. These are brilliant people with excellent critical thinking skills, yet they hare off on the vaguest of missions, after the thinnest of clues.
These caveats aside, the book has some excellent bits. If you're looking for a long, langourous read that will engage you as long as you don't think about it too hard, something to read on the deck of a cruise ship, or from a beach vacation, The Historian should please you.

I've always enjoyed reading short story introductions by my favorite authors, because it gives me a look inside at their process for writing.
Roger Zelazny once wrote one in which he explored an idea he got from Hemingway which is that an author could elect to omit any part of a story, and that the story would be the stronger thereby, so long as the author understood the role of the omitted portion. I like that idea because of the narrative freedom it offers a write.
It also struck me that one implication is that I could use this blog in writing what I call pick-up scenes for my novel, that is additional material for which a close reading of the first draft has shown me the necessity. I can write a given scene on this blog, treating it both as a stand alone piece and as part of a larger whole, to be integrated later.
Here goes the first such installment in this experiment. This is original work and is protected by U.S Copyright law, and my .45 automatic.
--

How long I sat in the musty comfort of the wood paneled library, I don't recall. Eventually, I dozed off reading, waking only hours later with a brown tabby sleeping on my lap. As I watched her paws twitch and jerk while she dreamed of chasing and killing small helpless creatures, I reflected on what I'd read, trying to assemble a coherent whole from my own journal and various bookmarked chapters, highlighted passages and countless marginalia from a double dozen books on topics ranging from Buddhism to evolutionary psychology to dream interpretation.
It was a strange sensation, sitting there, trying to rediscover what I'd lost with my memory, trying to deduce what I'd done to myself that brought about my amnesiac condition.
Most of what I deduced that night, proved to be true, at least in the sense that I accurately reconstructed a subset of my past beliefs. Somewhat less of it was literally true, in the sense of having later been verified by experimentation and reproduction of experimental results.
The gist was that I belonged to a small group of academics in fields ranging from mine, Anthropology, to comparative Folklore, to Psychology and Neurology, to Physics.

Musing, stroking the sleeping cat on my lap, I recalled how we'd concluded, each in our own ways that the consensus reality, that narrow, homogenized bubble in which most of us live was inadequate to preparing the individual for the task of understanding ourselves and realizing the outer limits of our own potential.
Each of use had then gone our separate ways to explore the fringes of our own fields, magpies searching for shiny bits to illuminate our own nests. Periodically we came together and presented our findings to one another, then we chewed them over, trying to synthesize these disparate elements into a coherent whole.
It sounds, on the surface of it, like a dry, dust academic process, and at times, my journal indicated, it was. There were other times when it was a raucous, drunken and salacious festival.
The journal piqued my memory to a few of these:
Drinking single malt scotch and extemporizing Limerick to accompany illustrations from the Kama Sutra, for example.
Gradually, we made some discovered or synthesize some useful techniques. We awakened in ourselves greater powers of observation, recall, clarity of thought, powers of deduction. Physical disciplines - I lost 30 pounds over the course of 2 years without diet or exercise.
Then we started to die.
Caruthers, the Physicist, was the first, dead of an apparent automobile accident. A year after him Addams, the Psychologist, caught in a gas main explosion. Six months later, Jackson. A month after that, my wife, the philologist of the group.
There were only three of us left at that point. Me, Steve Jackson, whose specialty was comparative Folklore, and Wilkinson, an anthropologist like myself, and as it happens, the man who murdered my wife, and the others, although I didn't find that out until later.

Last night I drafted a scene that I think will be a valuable addition to the novella I've been working on, on and off, for about 7 years now. It involves a number of notions that have been fermenting somewhere in my subconscious, having to do with Evolutionary Psychology and ritual magic.
Funny thing is, I think these are bunk. But they do provide the means for me to explore certain ideas in my story. I wanted to rationalize ritual magic, and establish for it a connection to the unconscious mind and the undeveloped potential of the individual.
There's a lot of background sources that I've considered in this story, essays by Robert Anton Wilson, writings by Dylan Evans and Oscar Zarate, fiction by Joe Straczynski and Jeanne Cavelos, and a healthy dose of narrative structure borrowed from Roger Zelazny.
I've learned a lot from writing this story, but it's become a bit of an albatros around my neck. I really want to finish this thing up and get it out there. Then I can move on to something else. What's the saying? Writing is never finished, just abandoned? I want to take this piece through to the point where I feel comfortable abandoning it, and hopefully sell it.
If I can't sell it, I'll publish it on this web site, either in free installments on this blog, or maybe on some kind of micropay system.

Well, I'm back

I've taken a long break from this blog, but I want to get back to it. I rather doubt the absence of posts was noticed by anyone - I've never got the impression that anybody reads this thing, other than a couple of friends, but that's okay. For me, the value is in the writing. If you are reading this, send me mail at stonyman@gmail.com and say "hi". Let me know how you found my blog, how long you've been reading it and what you like or hate about it.

Speaking of writing, about the only non-work writing I've done for the last year has been journaling. I've got a couple of longer stories in the works that I have some ideas about how to complete, so I plan to do some work on one of those today. My goal is to get at least one of them submitted for publication by the end of the month. It's time to start collecting rejection slips.

Obviously, I'll be deliriously happy if it sells, but I want to condition myself to regard rejections as a positive thing. Every story I write that gets rejected is valuable in that I can learn from it how to write fiction that will sell. An author I admire, Roger Zelazny, wrote of using his rejection slips in just that way.

For the last year, I've been interested not just in the process of writing, and finally doing something to realize my longtime ambition to be a writer, but also in writing instruments, particularly fountain and dip pens.

I've used a Parker fountain pen since college, first with ink cartridges, then with a refillable reservoir adaptor. These have worked okay, but the nibs are steel and have no flex whatsoever. No flex means no variation of line width. Without variation of line width, you may as well use a rollerball or ballpoint pen. I would just go to office depot and buy a new Waterman Phileas, but that pen uses a cartridge converter system, and I've come to dislike such pens. I want a vintage pen with a built in reservoir in the market for a vintage Waterman or Pelikan pen. There's a lively trade for such things on eBay, so I expect to have something by the end of the month. If I don't find something on eBay, I'll probably buy something from Pendemonium

Earlier this year, I bought a stunning glass dip pen from Madison artist Martha Kauppi.. It's a thing of beauty, but I am too afraid of breaking it to use it regularly. Signing cards and writing letters is about the right frequency of usage for me. My pen looks like one depicted on Martha's site at www.glass-gem.com/pens.html. It's the one second from the top at the far left.

It may seem completely off topic, but I want to plug the movie Serenity. It's showing on about 2000 screens across the nation right now, but due to poor marketing, it's not making huge gobs of money and will likely be pulled from many of those screens this weekend. While you've got a chance, go and see this movie. Here are some links relevant to it. Click them.

• Serenity: The Official Movie Website


• Another Serenity Review


• http://forums.prospero.com/foxfirefly/start


• Test Screening-Early Reviews


• FireFlyFans.net
  

• Serenity: The Official Movie Website


• Another Serenity Review


• http://forums.prospero.com/foxfirefly/start


• Test Screening-Early Reviews


• FireFlyFans.net

I am a big fan of Joss Whedon's TV show, Firefly. Never heard of it? Of course you didn't. The Fox TV network killed the show because they couldn't figure out a way to sell advertising spots for this funny, smartly written TV show with compelling characters and situations. By airing episodes out of order, revealing surprise plot points in promos and changing the show's timeslot, they managed to keep it from developing a large audience. The audience that did develop was a dedicated fanbase that went to extraordinary lengths to keep the show alive. As I said, Fox killed it, but, the Fans brought it back. Fans organized and demanded a DVD box set that contained all the episodes, in order, even those Fox didn't air. Before the set was even released, it became a number 1 seller on Amazon due to pre-order sales.

This got people's attention. Joss Whedon had sworn all along after the show's cancellation that he'd bring the show back in some form, even as puppet theater, if necessary. With the buzz for the show at high volume, he was able to swing a movie deal with Universal.

That movie, called Serenity, opened last weekend and took the number 2 spot in the box office gross, and the top spot for a new movie.

If the movie continues to do well, the faithful fans may get a sequel. That's why I'm writing this. I want you to get out and see this movie. It's a fun ride, well written, with likable characters.