David C. Smith's Blog

So this morning with my first cup of coffee I caught the end of CBS’s Sunday Morning news magazine and learned about how the public library in Brooklyn has set up a way for people who want to be fashion designers can get their start. Most, but not all, are women of color, several of whom have spent half a lifetime already in some other field. But this is what they always wanted to do or try out, fashion design. And I am hooked into watching this the moment we learn that the women at the library who put this project together on a shoestring contacted a famous designer (the guy who used to be on a television program called Project Runway, I think) to help these folks. Once he learned how sincere they all were, he made sure to get involved and offer his professional guidance.

I know zip about fashion and fashion design. I know what bell bottom jeans are because I was a young man in the 1970s. I know about A-line dresses (think of the mid 1950s) because (1) I came across reference to them in an Encyclopedia Britannica article about the history of clothing and (2) I knew about the clothes Grace Kelly and the other actresses wore in Hitchcock’s Rear Window and To Catch a Thief. But here’s the thing: with this episode about learning fashion design in Brooklyn, I was watching people invest themselves in personal goals they had long desired to experience, and they were doing it under the guidance of a professional. What entranced me is that behind-the-scenes glimpse of the professionalism involved in this field.

This was catnip for me. I’m a sucker for this sort of thing–for example, videos online of how musicians hold jam sessions and go back and forth with their ideas about chords or notes or melodies. I know zip about music, too (although I do like a variety of different kinds). But listening in on why certain blues musicians use certain chords or progressions or notes, whatever they may be—well, I feel as if I’m in a sanctum sanctorum and observing the initiation rites of some ancient sacred mystery.

Myself, I like to feel that I operate on some level of professionalism. I still have warm memories of my years at the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons when I was the managing editor of that organization’s monthly peer-reviewed journal. I worked with a first-rate staff of copy editors dedicated every day to maintaining exactness with every term, syllable, sentence, and paragraph we dealt with on the page, making it our protocol to review each manuscript repeatedly.

(This level of perfectionism is now lost at most medical journals, which are produced by publishing behemoths whose primary dedication is to getting studies through a meat grinder and online as quickly as possible. The expertise comes from the doctors who perform peer review; after that, factota do what they can to review and polish as quickly as possible. I failed miserably a few years ago when I signed on to do some freelance copy editing for one of the largest medical publishers in the world. Their protocol, now commonplace at most of these journals, is to hire persons with some experience in medical editing and have them push through 10 manuscript pages an hour. To do that, only the most superficial review is possible: Are the figures cited in order? Do we even need this particular figure? Is dilation or dilatation meant here? A reference citation number is missing: Author, please advise. My cat could do it. There is no time to double check whether the percentages in a table add up to 100, and certainly no time to ascertain whether this section needs a B head or a C head or even a D head. Just…GWA, as I learned from the brilliant Anne Rossi who trained me when I started my career at Neurology: Go With Author.)

Now I pay attention to any opportunity I find to sit in on professionals engaged in shoptalk, even if it’s performative. For instance, I really enjoy watching the FBI shows on CBS (or did, back when they had three different titles) and NCIS. And the reruns of shows on Story Television and the History Channel: who came up with the idea for boxed chocolate chip recipes? for example, or the history of steam power. Hell, I watch Ancient Aliens just to observe brainy, imaginative people gather around a table and discuss the aerial machine described in the Book of Ezekiel or how certain ancient megaliths are clearly the leftover remnants of some temple of the Anunnaki. I am indiscriminate. Again, catnip.

But, why cop shows?  At first I watched them because they’re reliable, disposable, relaxing pulp fiction, following a certain structure of set-up, development, and resolution with a cast of characters we come to care about. But that gets old fast. Now I realize that what gets to me is the fact that we have a group of bright professionals standing around talking about how to solve a problem or address a concern. It echoes what I felt when I was in the Publications department at the Academy and my staff and I had to figure out how to solve some procedural glitch or other, intelligent people coming together to deal with some professional-level issue. I felt the same way when I found a documentary online about the musicians in the Wrecking Crew. Or whenever I come across a show about the development of our space program. Find Failure Is Not an Option, either the book or documentary, and tell me you aren’t riveted every minute you spend with it. And when a group of us local writers and poets used to meet once a month at the now-gone Top Shelf Books here in Palatine, Illinois, to read our work and discuss it with other writers—heaven. I was with my own kind, I guess, and for a few hours not alone at the keyboard and inside my own head.

Professionalism. Expertise. Exactitude. These are the qualities that have allowed us to build the best systems we’re capable of in this country and around the world. It pains me to look at the ass clowns now running our government—arrogant ineptitude in action, grievance rather than fairness, posturing and lies instead of personal integrity and honor, adolescent attitude rather than probity, conscientiousness, and the thrill of dedication to something bigger and better than oneself. Where’s their self-respect and dignity? Those should still mean something, whatever labels we throw at each other. I am ashamed for them.

We are all the less for it when we fail to come together on common ground as we used to, agreeing to assist each other in the American project as best we can, at levels of professionalism learned through steady education and application.

So I just came back in from cutting half the back yard, where the grass (thin as it grows) is very tall. I let it go weekend after weekend because I have been putting in time doing freelance editing, reviewing stories to include in Close Thrones and Arcane Arts (which is nearly done), and before that, reading through the page proofs of Robert E. Howard: A Literary Biography, which will be rereleased soon in an updated paperback edition as well as a hardcover edition for libraries. (I was able to make a few corrections of fact as well of typos, as well as add to or add a couple of notes.)

The morning is muggy. I got started a little before 10. Now it’s 10:30 and the battery of my Ego lawn mower is out of juice. Got to give it a half hour to recharge.

Anyhow, it is damp, I’m catching the overripe aroma of wet grass, trees, all of that, and it takes me back to summers in my parents’ back yard when I was an adolescent and the whole point of summer for me was to take it easy and read sf and anything else that caught my fancy—maybe something about ancient Egypt or the Roman Empire, but usually paperback adventures and sf. Lots of Ace books (I still have many)—Edgar Rice Burroughs, Leigh Bracket, and the usual suspects. We’re talking the mid-1960s, when I would have been 12 (in 1964) and thereafter. I was already following our space program and, soon, Star Trek. For some strange reason I was not drawn to the digest magazines; I don’t know why and realize that there is no excuse for that! It was books for me, I guess. But also Famous Monsters and Creepy and Eerie (I still have all the early issues. And a bunch of FMs, too.)

But one strong memory is that I was a member for a while of the Science Fiction Book Club, so I remember reading Heinlein (Farnham’s Freehold is one, and Starship Troopers) and other authors. What I miss most is those monthly bulletins they put out on that glossy paper. I saved none. They were almost square and they had those exquisite Virgil Finlay illustrations. I thought at that time that I might become a comic book artist or illustrator; I practiced every day with pen and ink, usually a crow quill pen tip and a  bottle of India ink in a rubber base. I practiced a lot but never got past being fairly meh. Still, I loved the feel of drawing with that pen tip in real ink.

To be continued.

The most important question was determining why I was losing blood and how. I had an early colonoscopy (I wasn’t due for one for another year) done by my gastroenterologist. No sign of bleeding in the gut; no sign that bleeding could be because of my hiatal hernia. The oncologist found no signs of malignancy in lab readings. An ultrasound of my heart showed it to be in excellent condition. We were left guessing as to where this slow leak of blood was occurring. There are less common reasons that my hematologist and I will explore.

Meantime, my family and I are still angry that I was told by two physicians that my shortness of breath and fatigue were the result of long Covid. To be sure, my GP ran the regular blood panels every 6 months when I went in for wellness checks; the hemoglobin levels were fine. So there is the mystery. But the pulmonologist I originally saw had quickly labeled me as having COPD; my new pulmonologist (I will never go back to the first one) told me that he had checked that doctor’s file on me and that if I do have COPD, it is at a trivial level. (I thought so myself; I showed no overt signs of COPD.)

So…I did not die. I feel now, a week after my hospital stay, fairly normal and am back to writing and editing. Time and doctor visits will tell where that years-long slow leak and breathlessness came from.

Doctors began arriving late Saturday morning. The attending introduced himself. We discussed what the problem could be and the procedures he wished me to undergo. The immediate problem was that my hemoglobin count was down to 3.8 g/dL. For men, it should be at 13 or 14. If it could be raised to 7 or 8, that would be acceptable. But at 3.8, I was essentially dying and had been suffocating for weeks. (A friend, also a medical editor, told me later that she entered the 3.8 measurement into an online query: Can someone live with a hemoglobin count of 3.8? The answer was, Possibly.)

The pulmonologist came in and we had a pleasant visit; he, too, at one time had considered a scholarly life in medieval studies, as I had back in the seventies. He ran down some facts and told me that I’d also be seeing the cardiac doctor. Indeed, he appeared shortly and ordered me to be given Lasix (furosemide), a diuretic. I was edematous as well as anemic. Clearly he was concerned about fluid buildup around the heart; I could certainly be a candidate for congestive heart failure.

Within 10 minutes of taking the Lasix pill, I began to let the water loose. This went on for more than 24 hours, gradually lessening, until (after having unintentionally made a couple of wet messes in my bed and learning what a condom catheter is) the total amount of fluid I expelled was 7 liters—almost 2 gallons.

So Friday evening, December first, about ten-thirty at night, I asked my wife, Janine, to call for an ambulance. I could barely breathe. I had been barely breathing for days; for weeks, I had found it difficult to take in a breath when I did something as simple as stand up or walk five steps; and for months, for more than a year, I had been told that I had (1) long Covid, which affected my breathing, and/or (2) COPD, the result of my smoking for 26 years, even though I quite 27 years ago.

Once admitted into the hospital, I waited hours before being taken to a room. Lying on the gurney in the emergency room bay was not a problem; moving even the slightest cost me my breath. When I was taken to my room at three in the morning, I was gasping like a landed fish for a long minute or minute and a half at a time—an eternity. Sitting up on the gurney triggered it. So did trying to place my feet on the floor.  Anything did. I told the attendant techs to let me die. Let everything in me go into collapse. I was kind of in shock. Later, one of the nurses told me he was ready to start CPR on me at any second.

Once in bed, I relaxed, even as the nurses treated me like a human pin cushion. I was extremely anemic. But I began to receive blood, eventually 4 liters, and, later, 2 liters of iron.

So I just found this great article in Get Pocket, which shows up on my desktop as soon as I turn on my computer. An oral history of the making of My Cousin Vinny, which is basically a B picture but so well written and so well acted that it has become legendary. “What Is a Yute?” is the title of the article.

Here’s the thing: I will drop everything and pay strict attention whenever I come across an article or a video that provides behind-the-scenes glimpses of how artists think and create, how a movie came to be made, how studio musicians add so much to album tracks while remaining anonymous, or pretty much so, like the Wrecking Crew. It’s kind of like sitting at the feet of some guru, I guess, for me to get glimpses of creativity or inspiration.

It’s the same when I talk with other writers. I can’t get enough of it. I want there to be a group of writers sitting here over coffee or some beers talking shop about their inspirations, their work habits, where this or that character or scene or bit came from. It’s like a drink of cool water if I were hot and really thirsty.

I’ve spent most my life being creative. It’s me. Drawing. Writing stories and novels. For me, there’s still a bit of a holy mystery surrounding this process, despite the hard work and discipline required. And I want that There is a kind of mystery

Few Will Understand, and of Those Who Do, Fewer Still Will Speak of It

I’m not sure what that means, but it has a ring to it, same as So Let It Be Written, So Let It Be Done.  For years I couldn’t remember where I’d heard or read that. Turns out it is spoken by Yul Brynner in that kitschy old Cecil B. DeMille movie The Ten Commandments. It is frightening that our parents and grandparents took such movies seriously, but then, who are we to talk? We have huge and huger audiences for Fast X and Super Mario Brothers. It is, indeed, the end of Western civilization.

Which is right and good. Time for us to take a rest. Pax Americana and all that. Yes, we are still protecting the perimeter and, yes, we are still beholden—more than ever!—to the billionaires and gazillionaires who rule us (let’s be honest about that…they do, and we seem not to care), but things are winding down. This is the Anthropocene, after all, soon to  be the Anthropo-gone, as we burn up or melt away or drown or whatever awaits us. It is coming at us, some of it already here.

Anyhow, the meaning of the title of this blog, and of more to come, is this: Typically, once I start typing (or talking), I don’t know when to stop. So the only way to stop is…to stop. Which I will do in every blog from now on, whether it

I’ve finished reviewing the pages of Oron, which will soon be released by Wildside Press in a refreshed version.

I say refreshed because I have not heavily revised the story. I’ve corrected the typos in the Zebra edition of 1978, removed or amended the many “hysterical” dramatic elements that mistakenly seemed appropriate when I first wrote this epic as a beginning writer in the early 1970s (the spittle flying from frothing bearded faces, for instance), and added language and dialogue to make clear that the character Oron is now on familiar terms with a world steeped in sorcery and evil. He has, after all, confronted many such dangers in the “prequels” of the early 1980s and other stories I’ve written since then that feature him (“The Shadow of Dia-Sust” and a novelette now near completion, “The Iron Law.”).

However, I have not gone to extremes to alter the story; I’ve come to appreciate the romantic dimension of it: Oron learning that he has a destiny; the characters speaking to themselves solus like figures in a Shakespearean play; the depths of a primitive, brutal world juxtaposed with the heightened elements of the more civilized, refined atmosphere in Cenre, the capital city of Neria.

I’ve also now been able to address two very important things that have nagged at me since the book first appeared. First, I’ve finally settled on an opening line that begins with poetic alliteration but then descends into common vocabulary, my way of invoking the Muse before settling in, in media res, to the story proper with the horrors of the battlefield. (“They lay everywhere, the dead and dying men, littering the landscape, groaning in the blood-drenched mud, howling as vultures hopped toward them to tear at them, helpless as they were.”) Second: the subtitle Part III: The Na-Kha has finally been reinstated with chapter 17, thus dividing the book into three equal sections denoting the ascension of the formally tragic figure Oron to his destiny, while keeping the whole at 24 books (done deliberately as an echo of Homer and Virgil).

Perhaps a third thing: I’ve added dialogue in chapter 1 between the dying Padukos and Oron making the old man more distinctive as a character. His words are evocative, although Oron is reluctant to admit this. But it also gives Padukos a presence equal to that of the dying Lord Semranus in the second part. (Oron, of course, rounds out this fatal series by dying in the third part, not as an old man but as an anciently destined hero).

I’m now going to let the pages cool, as it were, before rereading the text and then sending the doc on to Wildside Press.

I haven’t been writing much on my blog for a few weeks. I think it is from the feeling of being snowed in and so cold. But! I just found an article on how scientists have extracted some Neanderthal DNA and have grown a Neanderthal “mini brain” in a petri dish. Jesus Christ. I wish I were making this up, but it is a fact. Here is the link to the story: https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/18/world/....

The mini brains are called organoids, which are “3D blobs of brain tissue” nurtured in a petri dish. The word “blob” already has me concerned for obvious reasons reaching back into cinematic history. A scientist involved says that these are not “lab-grown Neanderthal brains,” which is what scientists always say when they have, in fact, grown full-size Neanderthal brains in petri dishes. “This is totally different from Jurassic Park,” the scientist continues, which tells me that this is precisely like Jurassic Park.

But here is what really concerns me. A little while ago some other scientists figured out how to recreate the speech from the mummified vocal cords of a 3,000-year-old Egyptian high priest. Here is the story; it is titled “Mummy returns,” as you would expect from an article like this, which sounds like another horror movie to me: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle....

The sound of this Egyptian mummy, as replicated by these scientists, is like the bleat of a sheep. It goes, “Eh. Eh.” In other words, it sounds exactly like something you would expect a mummy ghost to emit. “Eh. Eh. I am coming for you!”

The article states that “it is believed to be the first project of its kind to successfully recreate the voice of a dead person through artificial means,” to which I ask, “It is believed to be”? We don’t know for sure? How many other bleating mummy corpses are out there that we have not been informed about? You’re scientists! Tell us!

But follow these two lab results to their natural end, as I have done. All these scientists need to do is get together and wire up the Egyptian vocal cords to the Neanderthal brain and we would have a Neanderthal speaking to us in ancient Egyptian! The mind boggles. Mine does, at least. But maybe I have a mini brain.

What would this Neanderthal say in ancient Egyptian? We would need a translator to make sure we knew for certain, but I am thinking something like, “It is so frickin’ cold in this petri dish! Where are your manners? Get me some clothes! Turn up the heat!” But that is just me. You draw your own conclusions.

Mini Neanderthal brains. Talking mummies. I think we have all been inside too long this winter, what with Covid and other disasters, and this is the result, Neanderthal/mummy ghosts that bleat like sheep.

The mini brain boggles.

So Svengoolie last weekend showed Creature from the Black Lagoon (not The Creature from the Black Lagoon, which is how it always fools me, with that initial definite article, like Carpenters, the sister-and-brother act, not The Carpenters), and I watched it for the umpteenth time and enjoyed it just as much this umpteenth time as I ever have, going back to when it was shown on Four O’Clock Showtime on WFMJ, Channel 21, in Youngstown, Ohio, when I was, like, 12.

Every time I watch it, I seem to notice something new or find something new to think about in connection with it. This time, there were a couple of things.

Yes, the blaring horns that announce the appearance of the creature every time it shows up get old real fast, starting with the first time they intrude. Then there is the casual racism regarding the native “boys” who help out on the expedition and are basically food for the creature, but there’s no getting around that sort of stuff in pictures made before…well, before last year, I guess. Maybe the year before.

But one of the things that struck me strongly this time is that Creature from the Black Lagoon is basically a perfect script and, consequently, a perfect little movie. Everything fits together just as it should, with no wasted lines or dead time or empty bits. And part of the reason for that seems to me that, whether intentionally or not, it mimics or echoes King Kong from 20 years earlier. I can’t be the first person to have noticed this, although I’ve never read anyone comment on it before. But that’s a big clue as to why Creature from the Black Lagoon continues to be worth watching after all these years. The story is tight and smart, the ensemble characters work extremely well together, and—most important of all—Creature from the Black Lagoon, like King Kong, starts out being kind of typical or easygoing until it goes back in time and descends into nightmare territory. King Kong still delivers more strongly in this regard because it winds up putting all of its players into the middle of a monstrous madhouse, but Creature from the Black Lagoon nevertheless generally follows the Kong script and thereby delivers the goods. It is something of an anomaly from a stretch during the 1950s when science fiction/monster/horror pictures pretty much followed the template of living atrocities being the result of errant atomic radiation.

The movie opens with a model of the earth in outer space, with voice-over read from the Book of Genesis, and stock footage of volcanic explosions and stormy seas to remind us how unstable creation was, so you never know what Mother Nature is going to cough up from the shadows or from the deeps. Then we get scenes of an expedition deep upriver in the Amazon, an exciting paleontological find, and the ghastly murders of Luis and another “boy” by something with big old claws for hands. That’s all we see so far of the monster.

The picture starts to echo King Kong when we’re introduced to the main characters—the fetching Julia (later Julie) Adams, playing a scientist, Kay; her fiancé, David, played by Richard Carlson, at the time a name actor; and her boss, Mark, played by Richard Denning. Basically, they are Anne Darrow and Jack Driscoll alongside Denning playing the ambitious, unscrupulous asshole, a Carl Denham who this time runs a scientific institute and wants to make his name by claiming whatever it is in the Amazon that left behind the giant fossilized claw hand the older scientist brought to Denning’s institute for examination.

Adams is kept front and center at all times, just as Fay Wray is in King Kong. A beauty contest winner, Adams went to Hollywood following a brief modeling career and quickly landed roles in theatrical movies and television shows. She was a classic mid-century American beauty of Ava Gardner caliber, and her job in the movie is essentially to act as the object of lust for the primitive creature of the title, in the same way that Anne Darrow made King Kong’s top spin, even if he never quite could figure out why. That’s okay. The animal tension is the whole point. They are stand-ins for us, who are stuck in a  movie theater auditorium or on our couches at home.

The trip upriver moves at a sufficient pace, and we get the necessary lectures about the Devonian Age and how life moved from the sea to land and who knows what else might be out there, like the lungfish, which is one of God’s mistakes or Nature’s oddities. This the gradual build while we are ourselves basically in the Devonian Age, or at least the actors are.

Now, the build in Kong is so tight that when the nightmare monster appears, the picture takes off at super speed and never quite lets us catch our breath. Creature from the Black Lagoon does not suddenly zip off at super speed; it keeps to a gradually quickening pace and creates its own tension because of that, toying with us and intermittently interrupting the proceedings with that brassy explosion of noise and underwater views of the Gill Man.

The famous scene in Kong in which the fascinated monster rips away Fay Wray’s clothing is paralleled here by the famous underwater ballet scene. When Kay removes her robe at about the half-hour mark and stands there face-front in her tight white bathing suit for all us with glands to admire, we know why we are watching the movie. (Well, for the swimsuit model and the monster.) She dives into the lagoon and for the next four minutes, at least, swims, does backstrokes, and performs her water ballet, while the fascinated Creature watches her, then swims parallel to her underwater as she does on the surface of the lagoon, mimicking her. Finally, he touches one of her feet uncertainly. Kay, of course, will be the undoing of this strange creature just as the beautiful Fay Wray was for King Kong.

When the Creature follows Kay back toward the boat, it becomes trapped in a net but tears free. It is that powerful. The scientists try to anesthetize the Creature and finally succeed. It is captured and held in a cage but again escapes, as it does so ripping apart the face of another of the scientists (the reliable White Bissell). We are now in the last half of the movie in which the stakes, for both scientists and the Creature, are raised and raised again. More “boys” are killed. The Creature traps the boatful of invaders in the lagoon by setting up a deadfall of broken trees in the water. To free the boat, Mark and David must work underwater to undo the Creature’s trap, which leads to the Creature wrestling underwater with both of them and killing Mark. The stakes are as high as ever when the Creature comes aboard the boat, grabs Kay, and dives underwater with her, stealing her away to the grotto that is its home.

We are now in a truly dreamy, atmospheric, even Gothic setting, if the most primeval of situations can be termed Gothic. The grotto is a maze of dripping boulders and pools of water covered in mist. It is a miniature replica of the grotto in King Kong where Jack Driscoll followed the giant ape to its lair. When David swims underground to enter the grotto as the Creature did and try to save Kay, he finds her unconscious, lying on her back on a boulder surrounded by water and mist, as if she were a human sacrifice on a rude altar. David grabs Kay but the Creature is there; David barely escapes alive when the other scientists arrive with firearms. The Creature insists on trying to get to Kay, but the bullets do their work. Unlike Kong, who was captured and brought to civilization to be killed, here civilization murders the Creature in its own home. Wounded, it walks into the water and sinks to the bottom of the lagoon.

The back-and-forth, rising action of the Creature versus the scientists in the last half of the picture is not at all similar to the action in the last half of King Kong, but it follows through logically with a scenario that might have succeeded in King Kong had the adventurers had stayed on the island. The sheer weirdness of the last act of Creature from the Black Lagoon is as thematically satisfying as the brutal urban destruction at the climax of King Kong. Witnessing the scientists fight for their lives against the monster when they themselves have no right to be where they are, intruders as they are, allows us to sympathize with Creature, just as we wind up sympathizing with Kong when that monster is removed from the safety of his home and sacrificed in New York City. Both movies end with the unsettling afterglow of human beings going where they are not wanted or needed and screwing things up, which is what human beings do. It’s not a question of whom to root for. We are, instead, witnesses to a tragedy, unnecessary but which was, in fact, inevitable as soon as the story started.

It is odd to think of both King Kong and Creature from the Black Lagoon as tragedies, but it takes only a moment to see in both the monsters the weakness or fatal flaw that dooms them, and it is something so simple that any of us can relate to it: a love of beauty, a desire for something beautiful in their harsh worlds, and that beauty in the form of something as profound and mysterious as a woman, as Woman.

We have seen Beauty kill the Beast once again.