Nick Mamatas's Blog, page 25

In 2015...what year is it?

This is the year we bring sexy back.

Foxcatcher

I am sufficiently out of it that I had no idea that a film was made of John E. du Pont's murder of wrestler David Schultz until today. While Olivia went to go see Into the Woods and her mother watched the baby, I saw and was thrilled by Foxcatcher.

Channing Tatum is Mark Schultz, a 1984 Olympic gold medalist reduced to giving talks to elementary school assemblies for twenty bucks a pop, and lives in a dumpy efficiency apartment. Ultra-creepy du Pont, in an Oscar-caliber performance by Steve Carell, has a fascination with wrestling and the money to get whatever he wants...plus just enough family pedigree to believe that he is Doing Something Important For America, as had generations for his warmonger polluter family before him.

Mark is set up with a $25,000 salary--the highest number he could think of, he tells brother David--and is treated like a prize stallion...du Pont's mother keeps and trains those at Foxcatcher. The poor kid even has to train du Pont in wrestling basics, and call him "coach" or sometimes "Eagle", which du Pont claims his friends call him.

John is insane, a cocaine user, a bit of a gun nut, and played with a really bizarre and quiet intensity by Carell. If the movie has a flaw, it's that it doesn't trust Carell, so we get a few too many interstitial scenes of him acting kooky. Really, we know it from the very first sentence he speaks, even if the naïf Schultz is clueless.

David Schultz, probably the best freestyle wrestler of the second half of the twentieth century, is Mark's more together older brother. He's played by Mark Ruffalo, who really inhabits the role, including the little easy-limbed hunch Schultz walked with. He resists du Pont's overtures at first, and du Pont puts the pressure on Mark, even slapping him across the face. (This got an audible ooooh from the audience here in Pennsylvania--about forty miles from the real Foxcatcher Farm.) Finally, David shows up to coach...or be the assistant coach under the incompetent beginner du Pont.

The rest is history, literally. Schultz disappoints du Pont by not winning gold at the Seoul Olympics-a knee injury hindered him in real life, but the movie suggests a purely psychological cause--and then he left Foxcatcher Farm permanently. David continued on coaching du Pont's private Foxcatcher team...and then in a slowly simmering fit, du Pont shoots David Schultz three times, killing him. The film does a great job with the moment, basically underplaying it. There's no swelling music, no slow-mo, it's just a causal murder by a rich old maniac who has tired of his toy.

Foxcatcher is a well-done film. The wrestling looks good, Carell refuses to chew the scenery, and Tatum's prosthetic cauliflower ears are perfect. The movie plays with time and space, like any other fictionalized version of real events (e.g., du Pont only built the wrestling facility after his mother's death; it took du Pont two days to surrender in real life, not so in the film) but is super accomplished and respectful. A couple of scenes which feature du Pont and his mother are probably just guesswork or hearsay, but still ring true.

Watch this movie. I see Supporting Actor Oscar nominations for it.

For the first time in about ten years...

I am home on Christmas Day.

Soon a five-six hour train ride to get to Pennsylvania to get to Olivia and Oliver.

How to spend the bookstore gift card you might get on Thursday

New review of The Nickronomicon reads, in part:

Augmented by a creepy metafictional introduction by Orrin Grey and wicked interior illustrations by GMB Chomichuk, The Nickronomicon works both as an interesting piece of lovecraftiana and a kick-ass short story collection. It will make an ideal present for that seeker of eldritch occult knowledge in your life.

Only four copies left on Amazon btw. (Plenty on Kindle, of course!)

2014

The most important event in my life this year was the death of my grandfather in April, which was doubly sad as he did not meet Oliver before passing. We've seen been to Florida twice to visit other relatives including my grandmother, and enjoyed both trips.

This year we also lost Jay Lake, who was a friendly acquaintance and my co-editor for Spicy Slipstream Stories —all the royalties to which (not a lot, ~$100 a year) I signed over to his estate. I was also sad to see writer J.F. Gonzalez, whom I met a few times, pass. My former co-worker Courtney Utt also passed. When I first started working at Team Rocket, she sat me down and taught me a liquid ton about design. Her work on The Book of Heroes (check out her essay here) is one of my favorite things I've been a part of.

Oliver is doing very well—he's walking and is musical and is beginning to cough up some words and signs. I'm looking forward to his continuing development. It'll be very interesting to meet the human being he is becoming.

I was fairly productive in both sections of my professional life. This summer my sister and I attended the world premiere of Edge of Tomorrow, which I'd helped midwife from its days as the novel All You Need Is Kill —the mass-market edition of which became the first work of adult science fiction in translation to hit the #1 spot on Bookscan's SF bestseller list in the Bookscan era. I wrote the Western graphic novel of All You Need Is Kill , and though fans preferred the simultaneously released manga edition the project did earn me a guest of honor berth at the Vegas Valley Comic Book Festival—it was a blast to celebrate Oliver's first birthday in Vegas.

I did two other my-name-on-'em books for my day job as well: the non-fiction anthology The Battle Royale Slam Book , which includes an essay by Sam Hamm that is worth the price alone, and Phantasm Japan . Both of these were co-edited by Haikasoru's editor-in-chief, Masumi Washington. Given the Hugo Awards and how promotion is not just common but mandatory for political/culture war reasons, I'll start promoting Edge for Best Dramatic Long Form, and Project Itoh's "From the Nothingness, With Love" from Phantasm Japan for Best Novelette pretty soon, I guess. I blame the liberal left for this.

Two books of my own came out this year: my novel The Last Weekend was released in the United Kingdom as a hardcover via PS Publications. Since I just signed the contracts this evening, I'll tell you that Skyhorse/Start will be bringing out a US paperback and ebook in 2015. My Lovecraftian collection The Nickronomicon was released last month, and a bunch of you bought it, thanks! It includes a brand-new novelette "On the Occasion of My Retirement."

With my friend Alexandra Kostoulas, I co-hosted and co-curated two Greek American Writers Nights, one at the art/performance space The Emerald Tablet in North Beach, and one in conjunction with San Francisco State University's Modern Greek Studies Program. I was also let go by The Writing Salon, where I've been teaching for four years, and will bring my class over to Alexandra's new outfit in 2015. I taught at both residencies at Western Connecticut State University's MFA program in Professional Writing, and taught two online classes at LitReactor.com. I spoke on a panel about genre fiction at the Associated Writing Programs annual conference in Seattle. Many put-upon undergraduates were excited to hear what we had to say.


My 2007 novel Under My Roof was optioned back in 2010, and the option was renewed in 2013. in July, I got the email—the project was a go. Casting happened in September and October, and test footage was shot last week. Shooting begins next month, right after the holidays. A check is en route to my agent.

I published a number of short stories this year, mostly in anthologies, and across a few genres.

Crime story "If Graffiti Changed Anything, It Would Be Illegal" appeared in Schemers, a mostly UK/mostly science fiction/fantasy anthology.

Horror story "Exit Through the Gift Shop" appeared in Searchers After Horror, from a press and by writers and an editor mostly associated with Lovecraft, but this was not a Lovecraftian anthology. I liked this story a lot, and hope some of you check it out.

The pornographic flash fiction "The Third Plug" appeared in The Big Book of Submission, edited by my old LJ/New York pal Rachel Kramer Bussel.

A realist fiction, called "Slice of Life", which I read at KGB Bar back in January of 2013, appeared in this year's number of the literary journal Gargoyle, #61 to be specific.

"Burning Stones", a Bradburyesque fantasy I wrote for Oliver, appeared in Lamplight Vol. 3, no. 1. I also read it at this year's LitCrawl, and at the SFSU event.

"Der Kommissar's In Town", a fantasy-noir, appeared in Streets of Shadows, an anthology of the same.

"Work, Shoot, Hook, Rip" was a straightforward noir in Ellen Datlow's Nightmare Carnival, an anthology of otherwise supernatural stories of horrific and fantastical carnivals and circuses. If the title doesn't give it away, my story is about professional wrestling.

I'm told that two other stories have appeared, and I've seen people waving around copies of the books in which they appear on Facebook, but I haven't received my own copies or seen them in stores yet. Both are Lovecraftian:

"Black Book of the Skull [Mαύρο βιβλίο του κρανίου]” is in The Starry Wisdom Library, which is a fun high-concept book designed to look like a real auction catalog. (Here's a little blurb about it from Fine Books & Collections.)

"The Semi-Finished Basement" appears in Letters to Lovecraft, published mostly in the UK. The gimmick here is that all the contributors took a line or two from Supernatural History in Literature and wrote our stories as a riff on the text.

I had a few pieces of non-fiction published this year as well. For The Smart Set, I looked at Harlan Ellison's recent publications and HE yelled at me. To support The Nickronomicon, I wrote two essays on Lovecraft. For SFSignal, I asked Why Write Lovecraftian Fiction? (it's really about racism), and for the Los Angeles Review of Books I shoved my way into a long-standing discussion about popular versus difficult writing and carved out a space for Lovecraft as "a difficult writer."

One poem, "Landmark (After Hitchcock)", appeared in the Greek-American literary journal Φωνές.

I also finished and sold a few other stories, and have to finish a mystery novel that Skyhorse will also be putting out...but that's 2015!

Bill The Galactic Hero

I normally don't bother with Kickstarters, for a few reasons. I really don't consume that much stuff, especially not chintzy anthologies, role-playing game materials, video games, or other stuff that I see promoted across social media. (Maybe I need to follow a better class of people on social media?) But I was interested in this project: Alex Cox directing Bill the Galactic Hero with film students as cast and crew. Cox has been doing microbudget features for years—they're like extended, radical SNL skits, but funny. Bill is no exception.

It's hard to make a film with $150,000, especially when one insists on shooting on 35mm film rather than DV or even 16mm. Harder still when it's SF. Luckily, the source novel by Harry Harrison is plenty goofy and can only be dealt with as a nostalgia piece at this point. A fair number of its themes and jokes and whatnot can be found in more recent books and films (e.g., Hitchiker's Guide), and Harrison's vision of down-on-their-luck suckers fighting a losing war isn't quite what America is experiencing now: a volunteer force overwhelming developing nations militarily and technologically, but being routinely partially thwarted in its imperial designs by insurgencies anyway, while spawning new generations of opponents. Think Forever Peace, not Forever War. It's a Vietnam movie in an Afghanistan era.

The trailer:



Anyway, the movie. It's an often very funny student film, well-directed. Like many student films, the sound is a bit of a mess. In addition to the usual issue with microfeatures—the bizarre idea that anyone with arms can be a boom operator—most of the cast wears either bubble helmets, or masks, all the time. It begins with some animation, crude but in color, and when the scene shifts to space it becomes B/W—almost like The Wizard of Oz in reverse.

To be a Trooper is to be in a ridiculous battle against the enormous (tiny) ruthless (docile) and deadly (pacifist) Chingers (Chingers). Bil (two l's are for officers) lucks his way into heroism and medals, and then everything gets worse thanks to the immensely wealthy planet Helior, as played by several interesting buildings. Bill is very much in the mode of cult books/films—an alienated outsider finds himself trapped in a world he didn't create, soaring to the top of it and then crashing back to the bottom (sometimes vice-versa). The cult fiction of the book/script meshes fairly well with the cult look of the microbudget film. It feels 70s or early 80s, indie film before She's Gotta Have it and other "calling card" pictures.

Is it a good movie? Sure, it's fun! Does it offer the typical experience of a film adaptation, despite being much closer to the source text than most adaptations? Not at all. Partially because it's closer than most adaptations while depending on a heavily symbolic/gestural visual language that doesn't even attempt verisimilitude—not with sets and effects (obviously) or acting or cinematography. If you're ready for that—and you should be, having grown up on either 1970s paperback cover art or 1980s eight-bit video games, check out this film when you get the chance.

You don't get to be a fancy ladyblogger by writing a lot of checks...

A few weeks ago, a former student of mine contacted me to ask my thoughts on a contract, specifically a contract for The Butter, which is the new literary sister site to The Toast. The contract had issues—specifically a claim on the copyright and associated moral rights for the story, for the sum of $50.00. My student tried to negotiate, was told that the contract could not change but that sometimes those provisions she disliked were not enforced, and so she withdrew the piece.

The information got to Writers Beware, linked to above, and I tweeted it, as I do. It was retweeted, as tweets are. I was asked why I didn't just approach the visible staff on Twitter and talk to them directly, and I said that I doubt that would work. And gee, I was right, as someone else did tweet to COO Nick Pavich, and here is his response:



For those who have trouble looking at screencaps, he responded to someone's question about the contract by saying, "Of course, you can always keep your precious words and write for us without collecting a fee."

Here is the tweet again, embedded:

@karenbowness @NMamatas Of course, you can always keep your precious words and write for us without collecting a fee.

— Nick Pavich (@Nick_Pavich) December 17, 2014

Incidentally, I was on my phone when the tweet came in and could not screencap it. I asked other people to do it via twitter and Pavich tweeted to me again:

@NMamatas I can write it to you again, for a fee of course, Nick.

— Nick Pavich (@Nick_Pavich) December 17, 2014

Again, for those having trouble with gifs or embeds: "I can write it to you again, for a fee of course, Nick."

Anyway, something to consider if you were thinking of submitting short fiction to The Butter. They might not enforce the contract that would basically mean that your story could only be reprinted on their terms—because they own it—or that your story might appear under a byline of their choice instead of your own, or they might decide to enforce it after all. If the tweets above are any guide, it depends on how nice to them you are.

If writers are lucky, Butter editor Roxane Gay ( rgay ) will get her way. She's apparently struggling with Pavich on the issue:

@ruthwhippman @nick_pavich @nmamatas Nick is his own man but I have been having productive convos w/ him about the contracts.

— Sugah Daddy (@rgay) December 17, 2014

@ruthwhippman @nick_pavich @nmamatas He is not trying to do evil. I speak for The Butter and we will try to find a compromise w. writers.

— Sugah Daddy (@rgay) December 17, 2014

Though, to be perfectly blunt, a "compromise" would be very simple: for fifty bucks, The Butter should get no more than one-time rights (maybe two if articles/stories are bundled into an ebook for sale on amazon) and a limited period of exclusivity. This issue should have taken about seventeen seconds to resolve, when my student brought it up earlier this month.

Five Books I Loved This Year

Here are five of my favorite books of the year. Note: these are books I read this year, not books that were released this year. A list of 2014 titles I loved would have to include Next To Nothing, Keith Banner's collection of realist stories with working-class and gay themes (reviewed here), Cara Hoffman's Be Safe I Love You, William Boyle's Gravesend (reviewed here) and Michael Kazepis's Long Lost Dog of It (reviewed here). I liked Dog so much that I sent a copy to Long Lost Australian Cousin Anthony to try to get him to make a film of it. Those last two are published by Broken River Books, which has been doing some great things.

But now, the five books I really loved this year!

Thrown by Kerry Howley. Supposedly creative non-fiction, but with fiction elements. Did author Kerry Howley become a "spacetaker" (a sort of non-sexual groupie or hanger-on) to a pair of MMA fighters—the down-and-out Sean Huffman, who won't even cut weight to fight anymore, and the up-and-coming Erik Koch, who made it to the UFC? Well, someone followed them around for a couple of years. In the book, Kerry takes the form of Kit, a graduate student of phenomenology—making the title a pun, get it?—who is definitely real. As "fictional as longitude and latitude", to name two not-quite-real things. Kit stumbled upon an MMA card after slipping out of a boring conference on philosophy, and decides to make her search for the ecstatic through watching these fights her big research project. Needless to say, she quickly washes out of grad school. The boys aren't quite meatheads, and Kit is utterly hilarious in her enthusiasm and her intellectualization of MMA. The high-low game was old when Barthes did it to pro wrestling, but I cracked up reading virtually every page of this book. Kit-the-construct is infectious. Try this.

Becoming Dickens: The Invention of A Novelist by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst. This biography of Dickens is really about a thin slice of life—specifically his career as a journalist and his first published fictions as Boz. It is primarily a look at how changing technologies, economies, and politics created the possibility and necessity of a Dickens. Douglas-Fairhust even begins the book with a shout-out to Sterling's and Gibson's seminal steampunk novel The Difference Engine. Technology and industry are at the forefront here, and anyone with an interest in the history of journalism or publishing must read this book. Dickens himself is an ever-compelling figure, but the reputation he achieved at the height of his powers often obscures the young hustler he was. The book is supposedly scholarly and is published by a university press, but is quite readable, with a minimum of academic-historical gibberish. (Thrown has tons of gibberish, but it is self-consciously gibberish.)

The Martian by Andy Weir. Self-published a few years ago, and a big hit when it was brought out by a commercial publisher in 2014, I first heard about the book by someone complaining about it on Twitter. She haaated it, though all the people at the science fiction convention she had recently attended were raving about it. I checked out the sample on amazon.com, hoping for a lolcow, but I was hooked. Mark Watney, an astronaut stranded on Mars by himself, is a good engineer and clever botanist, but he is not a Heinleinian hero, thank God. He's a goofball and almost pathologically cheerful, and he makes a ton of mistakes in this survival story. The journal entry structure is well-done, and the shift of scene back to Earth comes at just the right time. Hard SF has a sufficiently bad rep in certain circles that when I recommended it to an acquaintance, she was already pre-appalled about "another white male" book. But The Martian, despite its Robinson Crusoe-style conceit is actually about collective endeavor, not rugged individualism. The one tiny flaw in it is a shift to a weird and momentary omniscience to explain something about the habitat in which Watney is hiding out, but overall this book does exactly what hard SF is supposed to—it locates and explores the drama in human beings running up against the limits and rules of the physical universe.

The Patrick Melrose Novels by Edward St. Aubyn. I read these four novels—two of them actually novellas, in an omnibus of four. (There's a fifth volume, which I also read and loved, but I'm already pushing the limits of "five books I loved this year.") Patrick Melrose is a very unfortunate person—the son of a sadistic rapist father whose family ran out of money, and a pathetic rich mother eager to give all her money away—life starts out shitty enough. He's raped by his father at age five, and Dad finds himself thinking afterward:

During lunch David felt that he had perhaps pushed his disdain for middle-class prudery a little too far. Even at the bar of the Cavalry and Guards Club one couldn't boast about homosexual, paedophiliac incest with any confidence of a favourable reception.

Indeed. That's Never Mind, a short novel which spins around the drama of a dinner party. In Bad News, David is dead and adult drug-addict Patrick has to go to New York to fetch his rapist's ashes. It's another day or two in the life, with plenty of debauchery and very good look at the East Village before gentrification ruined it by rehabilitating the ruins. In Some Hope, there is some hope, and another dinner party, featuring an utterly terrible and hilarious Princess Margaret. Mother's Milk is a little longer and a little different, as it covers the summers of several years. Patrick is married, with children, now, and his dying mother has signed away their fancy French guest-house to a New Age charlatan. The books are best read as one large novel, given the number of recurring characters and how perfectly they age and change, or age and refuse to change. There are a few too many coincidences—a New York drug addict in book two finds his way to England to be part of the band playing for the party in book three, for example—but as a story arc the four-books-in-one holds together extremely well.

And the best book I read this year? Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham. I was recommended this novel by an ASMR video:



And it is excellent. It's not one of the more widely read of Maugham's novels, but it is in print, and the video above has a whispered summary of the major events. It's about writers, and publishing, and the arbitrariness of fame, and a woman dedicated to free love in a time when such things were forbidden, but the best parts are when Maugham stops the plot to take giant shits on Hugh Walpole. He does this for roughly eighty percent of the book. If only it were eighty-five percent! Read this book!

Under My Roof: The Movie

The option for the film version of my 2007 novel Under My Roof has been realized. Principal photography begins next month. Test shots and script readings are happening now have been happening for about a month now.

Bringing our the script to life with our part-time table readers #UnderMyRoof #excitingtimes pic.twitter.com/p21JqdX1V1

— Tallgrass Pictures (@TallgrassFilms) November 14, 2014

It's a fine Friday night for a test shoot of a big battle that's brewing #undermyroof pic.twitter.com/vnysDby7XA

— Tallgrass Pictures (@TallgrassFilms) December 6, 2014

We pulled UMR from it publisher—or rather its publisher's heir, who was doing nothing with it—and are seeking publication for the author's preferred text (i.e., not what was rushed out the door to avoid the book being an asset in Soft Skull Press's bankruptcy proceeding) in 2016. We're penciled in some place fairly heavily, but if the wrong person has a heart attack it could be tricky.

So do those morning jumping jacks, Southern California people!

And Now, Some Genetic Astrology

You know those gene tests people take and use to declare themselves a Secret Asian or Native American after all? I took one. The shocking results:



Scotland and Qatar, eh? Partially, it's a matter of genetic astrology, and partially it depends on what markers you look at.

I know my background well enough that the results were going to be unusual, depending on what was checked. Check a few other things, and you end up with the hilarity of this exchange between Skip Gates and George Stephanopolous from a recent episode of the PBS show Finding Your Roots:

AND FOR PEOPLE WITH GREEK ROOTS, THIS CAN BE A FASCINATING EXPERIENCE—SINCE GREECE HAS LONG BEEN A MELTING POT FOR PEOPLE OF BOTH EUROPEAN AND MIDDLE EASTERN BACKGROUNDS.

GEORGE STEPHANAPOLOUS–WHO IS GREEK ON BOTH SIDES OF HIS FAMILY TREE–WAS EAGER TO SEE HOW THIS HISTORY PLAYED OUT IN HIS DNA.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Whoa!

GATES: (Laughs)

STEPHANOPOULOS: Boy, I’m as Greek as it gets!

GATES: (Laughs) You are as Greek as it gets! You are 98.9 percent European, my brother.

STEPHANOPOULOS: This is surprising to me.

GATES: You’re a white man.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Yeah.

GATES: You are.

STEPHANOPOULOS: I mean, I guess I sort of knew that but I didn’t know it to this extent.




Oh George, you still don't. 5,000 years ago everybody who was alive was either the common ancestor of everybody alive today, or of nobody alive today; at this point in history we all share exactly the same set of ancestors. These commercial tests are fanciful and more or less impossible to take seriously.

Also, explicit migrant populations—you know, social groups dedicated to traveling for one reason or another—exist.