Book 2: Hong Kong Babylon

In between yesterday and today I managed to read an entire book without really meaning to, but I found some downtime.

I read through Hong Kong Babylon, which is a book about HK cinema's "New Wave" (basically late 70s to early 90s or so) and the rise of Tsui Hark, John Woo and the like. Covers many interesting areas of HK Cinema with a number of anecdotes I was already familiar with.

There are a number of sections to the book.

The first 75 pages or so is essentially New Wave HK Cinema 101 covering many aspects of short history, the economics, the main players, some stories compiled from many interview the author held and a quick examination of potential changes for the Hand Over (the book was largely compiled in 1995 - 96 it seems and published in 97). In the second section are selected filmographies and interview excerpts which didn't fit in to the first section. The third section is plot summaries to some 300 films ranging from 1976 to 1996. The fourth section is labeled recommended viewing, wherein 12 critics ranging in expertise from national figures to the more obscure (but more knowledgeable) like Ric Meyers.

The scope of the book unfortunately doesn't allow it to flesh out and go into detail on some aspects I wished to know more about, but for introducing people unfamiliar with HK cinema (or passingly familiar thanks to the expansion of Jet Li, Jackie Chan and John Woo's filmographies here in the US) it would be a good starting place as it tries to give equal weight to genre films and art films.

But really, this isn't something that I'd suggest anyone who is already familiar with HK film read.

You can read the excerpt which ran in The New Yorker here. (registration required)

Interlude: Strand Books Close Out Bonanza

One of the glorious things about living in NYC is the easy access to Strand Books and their $1 and $.50 close out specials. I've usually been able to find a number of things that I'm interested in reading or had heard about, and the ability to just pick up stuff on a whim is great.

Unfortunately the weather conspired against me by deciding that it did want to snow after all so I didn't get to spend a great deal of time browsing, but I still managed to snag some good deals.

There's no guarantee that these will make it into the 52 books this year because I know for a fact that there are at least two that I'm giving right away.

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand($.50) I snagged this because my girlfriend's roommate is a bit of a leftist/collectivist and I've been trying to teach her dog capitalism and how the invisible hand of the market can rub her belly and scratch behind her ears as easily as the roommate's real hand dispenses of her poop and that free markets lead to free puppies. Now I can leave the book in the dog's suitcase and we can hopefully lead the dog to being self sufficient. If I ever have kids I'm going to teach them to be Randroids to get them out of the house and into the job market at age four.

Murder Ink by Dilys Winn ($1) This is an oversize and rather thick book from 1977 which is a collection of essays on the mystery genre written by several various prominent authors of the time period. From the introduction it looks like this aims to be about the "fun" of mysteries, so it looks like a reverent and gentle poke at some of the tropes of the mystery genre while also providing factual essays such as the history of the English police force, Scotland Yard, America's own Pinkertons a history of cyphers and on and on. Oh, and the font is Baskerville.

Hong Kong Babylon ($1) The famous 1997 book which was an examination of the HK film markets as kind of a primer for the third wave of HK film making to expand knowledge on what little product had begun to seep through to American consciousness. I have never read this book because I frankly never saw a need for it. By the time it had come out I was already well versed in HK cinema and had seen a great deal of the "classic" films back when we had to pay exorbitant amounts to Tai Seng for often times horrible quality video tape transfers. When this book came out the DVD market had really started to take off so some distributors like Mei Ah and Media Asia were able to get their discs to American shores. Tragically companies like Sony and Miramax would pluck up the rights to the bankable stars and just butcher those films to try to appeal to American audiences (for great horror, watch the Dimension films releases of Jet Li's movies) so if you were a purist you had to invest in a region free player and pay a lot for shipping to get these products directly from HK. Thankfully the Weinsteins have founded Dragon Dynasty which puts out far better product than Miramax ever did. Still no uncut and subtitled Drunken Master 2 though.

The Manhattan Hunt Club by John Saul ($.50) I really like John Saul so it's always a treat to find another one of his books on the cheap.

From the Borderlands edited by Elizabeth E and Thomas F Monteleone ($.50) This is a horror anthology series which I've always enjoyed. Thomas Monteleone can be a bit of an arrogant insufferable bastard when writing non-fiction (see his Mother and Father's Italian Association writing in individual issues of Cemetery Dance for example) but he has a great nose for stories and the Borderlands anthology is one I've always enjoyed. I first discovered the first volume in our barracks library in Military school where I was introduced to Thomas Ligotti, Joe R Lansdale (with the amazing story By Bizarre Hands closing out the volume), Bently Little (with a GREAT workplace horror story called The Pounding Room), Poppy Z Brite, Chet Williamson and John Shirley. This one seems a little bit more mainstream at first, featuring works from Whitley Strieber (best known for Communion a non-fiction book wherein aliens steal Whitley away from his home), and Steven King (though King's short story work is usually pretty amazing), there are a number of authors whom I'm not immediately familiar with in the table of contents. A quick search through Amazon turns up a number of the first volume available on the cheap. I'll probably pick up a copy as it's been 18 years since I read it last.

The Mephisto Waltz by Fred Mustard Stewart ($.50) Known largely for the film which was basically a Rosemary's Baby copy, I had remembered reading that the book was fairly good. I can't find anything online to support this and indeed the books existence seems to have been completely overshadowed by the film. This, of course, only intrigues me further.

The Fellowship of the Ring - JRR Tolkien ($.50) First edition paperback from October of 1965 published by Houghton Mifflin Company. I purchased for a guild member. Personally, I loathe Tolkien's disingenuous pastoral nostalgia.

Bug Jack Barron

I'm on page 80 of Bug Jack Barron.

This is some great stuff. Totally 60s, but also predicative of some 70s attitudes while also being timeless in mass media.

So far my only complaint isn't against the liberal use of the various racial slurs, nor against the repeated stream of consciousness, but rather the internal monologue of the lead female character seems less a real person than an idealized form of a 1940's female character. "oh you fool, you fool" and such like that.

The novel is about a fight over the right of chryostasis and is immortality a public right or a private enterprise. There's also some mass media stuff in here as well along with some racial attitude examination which seems a bit dated as well. For example the word "Shade" being thrown around as the white equivalence of "The N Word."

So far there's a bit to chew on, while there promises to be a lot more.

My only other book by Spinrad is The Iron Dream, Hugo award winner Adolph Hitler's Magnum Opus which is done as a leftist examination of the conservative and reactionary tropes found in much heroic fantasy/science fiction.

It looks like this went back into print about 5 years ago and is easily accessible through Amazon.

Book 1 Down

As predicted, I wrapped The Rising last night.

I was thoroughly enjoying myself until I read a sentence pairing which drove me up the wall and seemed to bring all of the faults of the book to the forefront making my continued enjoyment a bit more difficult. I don't have the book with me so I can't relate exactly what it was but it was something along the lines of "A great eagle slammed into the glass, once a symbol of freedom and liberty, it was now a symbol of corruption and decay."

I rolled my eyes at that and through out the rest of the book, I noticed more poor word choices along those lines things which could have been cut back a bit by an editor.

A few other things that I didn't like were the pacing. At about page 150, the story picks up to such a degree that it doesn't stop and most of the nice touches of characterization which make the first parts of the story so enjoyable are kind of tossed out for numerous interchangeable nasty national guardsmen whose sole pleasures in life are raping and pillaging lead by a colonel who could have been made to be more menacing by fleshing him out a bit more. It would have been the perfect opportunity to paint him in a bit more sympathetic light to make his actions far more reprehensible.

The latter half of the book has some absolutely wonderful flourishes though, like the return to science facility which spawned the whole situation, the redemption of Frankie and the establishment of her humanity, the preacher Martin (who I feel becomes the strongest character in the book).

There is one thing which may annoy many readers in that the book doesn't end, but rather it just stops. I was absolutely fine with the ambiguity of the original end, but I also picked up City of the Dead (the book's sequel) and read the opening paragraphs to see what happened.

Overall, I enjoyed it. I liked the mythology, I liked two of the three main characters, there are some excellent set pieces and some neat ideas that are handled well. I'd have loved to had stronger characters from the National Guards and particularly their commander. I also would have liked about 50 more pages to break up the pacing problems.

New Book: Eric Side Steps

To avoid this turning into one book in 52 weeks I have set aside Tristam Shandy and have gone for the powerful cleansing of Brian Keene's The Rising.

I have always liked the Leisure Publishing Horror line. I feel it's very diverse with many different kinds of horror, from the super natural to the non-supernatural yet still horrific (see nearly everything by Jack Ketchum). They also have a tendency to reprint things which you can normally only find in specialist press in inexpensive mass market editions, something which I greatly appreciate because the thought of paying $40 for 100 pages of story is just a bit insane to me. This gives me and others the ability to read these great stories. I have a few issues with the series as well but I'll leave that for another time.

I was drawn to Brian Keene's The Rising not because I'm a fan of zombies or zombie fiction. Frankly, I think I'm a bit over zombies. Yes, they're neat and in the right hands can represent all kinds of modern and post-modern fears while also showing the strength of humanity is in the drive to survive. It is also great for a genre because we get to see people far worse off than us.

Schadenfreude as emotional comfort.

I picked it up because there was a great interview with the author in Cemetery Dance, a "quarterly" horror fiction publication. The author talked abit about his philosophy of horror and writing in general and it marked him as "one to keep an eye on" for future purchases. So when Dorchester publishing (who owns the Leisure line) ran a $1 sale, I picked up a few of his books, including the sequel to this book. Not having the original, I left it to the side.

The Rising is about the zombiepocalypse but thankfully not the shuffling dead brainless flesh eaters. Instead these reanimated corpses are brought to re-life by the consciousness of so far unnamed entities. We're given to believe that they're demons, but I think that they're actually bitter Angels.

The rules laid out are you die, you get possessed. When you're possessed the inhabitor gains access to your memories and therefore the possesor gets your skill sets. So if you knew how to fire a gun, the new undead you can fire a gun. However there is a scene where an undead baby is found in a baby seat but it can't get out of the straps because it didn't know how when it was alive. The hosts have a base set of skills as well, including knowledge of dead languages and the like but that's not well developed yet.

When turned, the zombies kill others, eat them, but the flesh is sublimated, not digested. They always make certain to leave the host bodies mobile so that the corpse can be reanimated and move around.

Even animals can become possessed. There's a great sequence early on in a Zoo where in a gang of stereotypes are dispatched by things like undead lions, anacondas, and such. Sadly, no zombie gorillas. There is also another sequence with a goldfish, which sadly made me think of Klaus from American Dad!

The writing is very breezy. I picked it up at lunch and started reading it on the train home and a bit before bed and i'm on page 129 of 321 (compared to page 25 of Tristam Shandy). There are moments of gore, but nothing really uncomfortable like in the works of Edward Lee who has made me queasy a few times.

I'm also pleasently surprised to find this isn't just a generic zombipocalypse novel (most of which reads like Fulci fan fic at best) but that there's an attempt to introduce a new mythology to the genre.

So far, I'm QUITE pleased and will probably wrap this book today or tomorrow.

Tristam Shandy Continues

Life has gotten in the way of this book. I'm only on page 15 out of 400 and I honestly expected to be finished or well on my way to being finished with this book by this time.

The book is circular and digressive by design coupled with 18th century language making this slow going. As it is I'm only on page 20.

It's not that the book's prose particularly dense, yet the language and the constant asides make me re-read passages to make certain that i'm grasping what i'm reading. It isn't aided by the fact that he will digress while digressing about how he's about to digress from his current digression and inform the reader to skip ahead.

if i were to express this book in a current internet meme, it would be Xzibit.


"Yo, dawg, I heard you like asides. So I put an aside in your aside so you can digress while you're digressing"

Tristam Shandy

on schedule I have begun to read this novel. My only previous exposure to this is passing references in the non-fiction of other authors whose works I enjoy and the wildly accurate/inaccurate film.

so far the book is living up to its reputation. A book with this many asides does not need an appetizer.