Strange Wine, Indeed

At the Harlan Ellison Roast, 1986
by Pip R. Lagenta, from San Mateo

Harlan Ellison is not for everybody; honestly only some of his stuff is for me.  Wikipedia describes him as a writer of speculative fiction, a type of fiction they define as "an umbrella term encompassing the more fantastical fiction genres, specifically science fiction, fantasy, horror, weird fiction, supernatural fiction, superhero fiction, utopian and dystopian fiction ..." Yeah, that pretty much covers Ellison.  After cherry-picking through The Essential Ellison: A 35-Year Retrospective and reading only those stories that held promise of not being too speculative (not really a fan), I have a few favorite stories that would stand up as good literature in any genre.

To borrow the cliched question, do you see the cup as half full or half empty? Is life on Earth full of joy and pleasure, or dominated by pain and anguish? That is the debate taken up in my favorite Ellison short story, Strange Wine. In it, a man named Willis Kaw becomes convinced he is from another planet, but has been exiled to Earth as punishment for a transgression he cannot remember committing.  Understandably, his wife asks him to see a psychiatrist to whom he laments the unrelenting pain of his existence: a loveless marriage, a dead daughter and crippled son.  Tortured by the juxtaposition of memories of the peace and beauty of his home planet and his current Earthly existence, he kills himself and, indeed, returns home.  There he pleads with the wise elders of that planet to disclose the crime he committed in order to deserve such a harsh punishment.  In a twist surprising at least to the pessimistically-inclined, he is told that the opposite is true and that only a few of the most deserving beings in all the universe get to go to that world and, eventually, he comes to realize that is true and he remembers: "He remembered the rain, and the sleep, and the feel of beach sand beneath his feet, and ocean rolling in to whisper its eternal song; and on just such good nights as those he had despised on Earth, he slept and dreamed good dreams.  Of life as Willis Kaw; of life on the pleasure planet." Bravo!

Because one of the short stories Ellison is best-known for is I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream, I felt compelled to read it . It is the story of a sentient, humanity-hating supercomputer who kills everybody except the five people it has saved in order to torture as representatives of the human creators it despises.  AM, as they call it, delights in devising ever new and creative methods to afflict pain and suffering on these pitiable folks, always being careful not to kill them, for how else would he pass the time?: "He would never let us go. We were his belly slaves.  We were all he had to do with his forever time."  In the end, however, the cleverest of these prisoners manages to mercifully kill everybody but himself.  In payment for his compassion, he is turned into an obscene blob-like mass that leaves a trail wherever it goes.  In all, not really my cup of tea-think Dante's Inferno meets Metamorphosis.  Yet the writing and imagery, as in all Ellison's work, is crisp and clear and unforgettable, and so well worth the read.

The most disturbing and haunting of these stories is The Whimper of Whipped Dogs.  Anybody remembering the Kitty Genovese news story would instantly be reminded of it, as I was by this story.  It starts out with a woman living in a crowded urban setting witnessing a brutal knife attack and murder from her apartment window and, inexplicably, not acting in any way to help the victim.  Soon the girl named Beth realizes that she is not the only one to have borne silent witness to this atrocity; she notices other faces peering out of surrounding apartment windows.  In the aftermath of this incident, the woman meets a fellow tenant who admits to watching mutely as well, and they begin to date.  While she is naive and relatively innocent, having come to the big city from a fairly cloistered all-girls college, this neighbor man personifies the cruelty and indifference of the city and after he verbally and physically assaults her, they part ways. While she contemplates the strange behavior of herself and her fellow tenants, she is reminded of the strange vision she had in the sky above the apartment building that night of two eyes staring down at the grisly scene unfolding in the courtyard below.  This is vintage Ellison, combining the mundane with the supernatural.  The Whimper of Whipped Dogs becomes a treatise on the impact urban living has on the human soul.  Beth eventually reaches a conclusion about who or what those eyes belong to and its ultimate meaning to mankind.  I'd definitely recommend these Ellison stories to anyone who appreciates well-written and thought-provoking tales.                                

  

Motivated by a keen interest in psychology, I recently read a fascinating book called The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout.  I was amazed to learn how commonplace sociopaths are, Stout claims four in a hundred people are so inclined.  So when I came across Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry, I immediately found it at my local library and downloaded it to my Kindle.  Before starting to read, I did a little research on Jon Ronson and learned that he is a Welsh journalist, author, and documentarian.  I had not read any of the books listed on his website, though I had heard of one due to the film made of it, The Men Who Stare At Goats, which is about an allegedly real-life, elite group of operatives who believe they possess extraordinary  powers, including the titular ability to kill goats merely by staring at them. I was intrigued as anything dealing with strange or aberrant human behavior captures my attention.      

The Psychopath Test did not disappoint as therein we meet several individuals who may, or may not, be psychopaths.  In the book, Ronson undertakes an investigation of the field of psychiatry or, as he calls it, the madness industry. In the course of his investigation, Ronson comes across Robert Hare’s Psychopath Checklist  (PCL), a list of behaviors and attitudes that may indicate the presence of psychopathy.  Though the meetings and conversations between the author and Hare are detailed throughout the book, and are primarily positive, after publication Hare criticized The Psychopath Test for trivializing his work and the work of other clinicians whose focus of study is psychopathy.  

While I tend to agree with Hare that Ronson does oversimplify the subject matter, Ronson never claims to be an expert and makes clear his approach is strictly as a layman.  Armed with the PCL, Ronson interviews a variety of individuals to see if, based on this checklist, he could determine a diagnosis of psychopathy.  One of the people that Ronson meets through a Scientologist acquaintance is Tony, a patient/inmate in the DSPD (Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder) unit at the Broadmoor Hospital in Berkshire, England.  Tony claims that in order to try to avoid jail time for a crime he committed, he pretended to be “crazy” thinking he would be put in “some cushy hospital”.  Instead he found himself in a maximum security hospital surrounded by the criminally insane.  He immediately began to protest his sanity, which was in vain for many years.   

Because Scientology thinks psychiatry is, as Dr. Sheldon Cooper would say, a lot of hokum, a group of Scientologists are helping Tony with his tribunals, whose aim is to gain his release from Broadmoor, which finally comes about after twelve years.  Tony modeled his psychopath persona after both real and celluloid psychos such as Ted Bundy and the Dennis Hopper character in Blue Velvet. It was his contention, and that of his Scientologist supporters, that the ease with which he duped mental health professionals into believing he was a psychopath proved the arbitrary and nonsensical nature of the industry .

Ronson attempts to evaluate Tony using Hare’s PCL, though he is ultimately not convinced either way.  Among others interviewed for the book is a well-known corporate axman who took great delight in firing hardworking people, an anti-Aristide death squad leader, and a conspiracy theorist who eventually came to believe he was the Messiah.  Both scary and funny, these folks, like the book itself, make us question not only their sanity, but also our own.  Who among us, in an attempt to self-evaluate, has not wondered whether they had this or that disorder, according to some checklist?  Though The Psychopath Test succeeds in pointing out some of the seeming absurdity in diagnostic psychiatry, the field has arguably made some tremendous advances since its inception and has improved countless lives.  Still, if you want an interesting and amusing read about the fascinating subject of human behavior, give this book a try.        

Hare Psychopathy Checklist

A Review of Pain, Parties, Work by Elizabeth Winder: Sylvia Plath in New York

While her two young children slept in an adjacent room, the brilliant poet and writer sealed off any openings or cracks in the doorway that separated them from where she was in the kitchen, with wet towels. She then turned on the gas oven and stuck her head in. Sylvia Plath was dead by her own hand at the age of 30. This is the scene that would come to mind whenever I used to think of her. I was familiar with her mostly bleak history that includes a suicide attempt, self-injury and a grievous marriage. In Pain, Parties, Work, Elizabeth Winder shares a different Sylvia Plath-one that is far from being ponderous and melancholy, adjectives her iconic name too often invoke. In the summer of 1953, twenty-year-old Sylvia, along with 19 other college girls, spent a month in New York as a guest editor for Mademoiselle magazine and Pain, Parties, Work is a remembrance of that time.

Mademoiselle's target audience was sophisticated young women and so featured literature and fashion; Sylvia's invitation to be a guest editor was due to her winning their fiction writing contest and being on the magazine’s College Board in her junior year at Smith College. Winder's book is alive with the vibrant imagery of the fashion industry, though given my limited knowledge of fashion nomenclature, I found the constant references to haute couture to be a bit distracting. Culled from interviews with other guest editors of that summer and Mlle staff, PPW gives us a refreshing new view of Plath. In the Barbizon Hotel's dorm-like atmosphere, Sylvia is known by her fellow guest editors to be vibrant and outgoing, and as much an admirer of Bolero jackets as of Byron. While Sylvia's predilection for adventure and risk-taking might have been an indication of a manic nature, friends and acquaintances of that brief time saw little sign of a depressive one.

Elizabeth Winder came to believe that the Mlle experience was responsible for Sylvia's developing lifetime issues with anxiety. That well may be, I just don't know and am not sure that Winder proved this thesis. I do know that I thoroughly enjoyed being witness to a happier time in a life that saw more than its fair share of sadness. Now when I think of Sylvia, it is not only of pain and sorrow, but also of champagne and glamour.

A Good Writer Is Good to Find: Flannery O'Connor

Better late than never is how I describe my recent discovery of the short stories of Flannery O'Connor.  So far, I have read three: A Good Man Is Hard to Find, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, and A Stroke of Good Fortune.  All were darkly humorous, especially The Life, and populated with characters that are equally recognizable and unlikeable.  The languid pacing and pedestrian plot and settings of these stories don't prepare the reader for the ugly, even shocking, endings.

SPOILER ALERTS! In The Life, an elderly woman in desperate need for a man around the place, sacrifices her deaf-mute daughter in marriage to a ne'er-do-well who ultimately abandons the guileless girl in a diner miles from home as she sleeps, blissfully ignorant .  In A Stroke, a childless woman who is prideful of her station in life, which she attributes in large part to the decision she and her husband made not to have children, realizes she is pregnant.  This discovery is all the more traumatizing due to this woman's long-held belief that her own mother's final pregnancy was responsible for sending her to an early grave. And in A Good Man, a grandmother is the last victim of a serial killer who has already had his minions take the rest of the family off into the woods to be shot, including a mother, father, two young children, and an infant.  I must admit I did not see that coming.

In the research on O'Connor, much is said of the influence her strongly-held religious beliefs had on her writing. Professor Ralph Wood, author of Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South, goes so far as this: "Flannery O'Connor is the only great Christian writer this nation has produced."  Though some may disagree with the professor, the themes of grace and redemption clearly run through the tales penned by the devoutly-catholic O'Connor.  I can only comment on the the three stories I have read, and cannot say how representative these are on her body of work as a whole.  When her characters behave in decidedly unchristian ways, through the grace of God they are given an opportunity to redeem their sins.  In O'Connor's stories, as in life, that opportunity of grace is too often squandered.

Her stories are fascinating in their unflinching look at human nature. I am anxious to read more and if you are interested too, check out this site:

http://www.mediaspecialist.org/

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