Saturday, December 08, 2001
As much as anything else, the books we read as children make us who we are. This is doubly true of writers. As much as the difficulties and adventures and genuine horrors of childhood, the books that see us through all that give us our visions and voices. This has been in my head all day long (along with stray lines from Jackson Browne's "The Pretender" which just showed up and refuses to leave), thinking about how I lived so much of my first eighteen years in books and how I can see them, every now and then, showing through the veneer of my own work.
It often seems that the books I read in high school, especially, are the books that led me here. To these words, these stories. It was a mismatched lot of authors. First an obsession with Tolkien and Richard Adams' Watership Down (I actually read the latter eight times in eighth grade alone), but also C. S. Lewis, Madelaine L'Engle, Ray Bradbury, Peter S. Beagle, Alfred Hitchcock anthologies, Poe, and lots of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Later, the stuff I read got darker, as my life got darker, as school (which had always been an unpleasant place for me) turned nastier. I moved along to John Steinbeck and Harlan's Ellison's Deathbird Stories, Stephen King and Peter Straub, Stephen R. Donaldson's Thomas Covenant books, Lovecraft and Kurt Vonnegut. I've never again read so voraciously as when I was in high school, which is a shame. Books were magic for me back then, and I needed magic, desperately. Books are something else to me now that I am grown, but I can still remember that they were once not merely stories on paper. Once they were doorways.
My high school (well, my second high school, because we moved from one town to another when I was sixteen) was an old building that I think must have been built around the turn of the century. I'd discovered a way up into the attic and I'd skip class and sit up there with stacks of chairs and dust and spiders and read The Grapes of Wrath or Dagon and Other Macabre Tales when I was supposed to be in English learning to diagram sentences or in algebra learning . . . well, whatever it is you learn in algebra. On cold winter days it was always warm up there, the sun coming in through high windows and all the heat from the radiators rising up from below through the floorboards. No one ever caught me hiding up there.
I think this is all in my head because I liked the Harry Potter film a great deal and Peter Jackson's film adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring is only a little more than a week away. I have great hopes for it, despite rumors of what's been left out and what's been changed. And despite the fact that I'm hot and cold on Jackson's work, at best. I loathe his early films and didn't care for Dead Alive or The Frighteners. But Heavenly Creatures showed promise and the stills and clips I've seen of his work on LOTR is impressive. I am hopeful.
Tonight I watched Ralph Bakshi's peculiar 1978 The Lord of the Rings for the first time since it's original release. I was a freshman in high school then and I so wanted Bakshi's film to capture the heart and soul and wonder of Tolkien, and was so disappointed at what I saw instead. Watching it again, so many years and so much life later, it didn't seem quite as bad as I remembered, but it isn't very good, either. Overall, it has the feel of those odd, quasi-psychedelic Roger Corman horror films from the '60s, The Fall of the House of Usher or The Dunwich Horror. The rotoscoping was an interesting experiment, but a failed one. Legolas, Galadriel, and Celeborn look like members of ABBA. The Rankin-Bass versions of The Hobbit and The Return of the King were much better.
Anyway, I'd half intended to write tonight about how impatient I can become with editors, but it's better I did this instead. As for my own writing, I finished the revision of the first Bast: Eternity Game script this afternoon and made more notes on Low Red Moon, which is really starting to excite me. I've seen the Publisher's Weekly interview and I'm pleased with it. I'm finishing up work on Gauntlet Press' Trilobite:The Writing of Threshold. You can sleep when you're dead, right?
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