Wednesday, March 19, 2014
Daniel Sherrier: "RIP: Vol. 1: Choices After Death", a prototype of a miniseries, a bit like "Ghost Story"
Author: Daniel Sherrier
Title: “Rip: Vol 1: Choices After Death”
Publication: Sherrierbooks: 2013, near Richmond, VA; ISBN
978-1494237226 226 pages, paper
Amazon link is here.
Daniel Sherrier is a fiction writer living in central
Virginia, more or less near Richmond, perhaps.
That’s where sci-fi director Richard Kelly (“The Box”, “Southland
Tales”, “Donnie Darko” comes from – well, actually the Tidewater area familiar
to me). It seems that both geography, cultural background and content would
give Sherrier and Kelly a reason to collaborate. Let me add the aside, the last story in my
new “Do Ask, Do Tell III” book (Feb. 27, 2014), called “The Ocelot the Way He
Is” is set in Virginia, more or less the Piedmont, near the foothills of the
Blue Ridge. There are stories that the
CIA has major secret facilities not only at Langley, but in Tidewater (“The
Shop”), and south of Charlottesville in a house near IS 29 (the town is Faber,
as in Courtney Brown’s “Cosmic Voyage: A
Scientific Discovery of Extraterrestrials Visiting Earth”, Dutton, 1994).
Well, I’m getting ahead of myself. The book itself comprises
four “novellas” (“Touch”, “Alone”, “The Crazy Line”, and “Point B”. There is an “interlude” which is a short
story called “Strength”, involving a wild eagle (no relation to my own
“ocelot”). Each novella has several
“Acts” and sometimes a “teaser”.
Now, this structure for the book suggests a television
mini-series, of course, structured tightly to fit into television with commercial
breaks. I presume Mr. Sherrier has
fashioned teleplays from this material.
But the concept is interesting in another sense. The novelettes and intervening story are
connected, with the same characters, more or less like a complete novel in parts, yet they can stand alone. I experimented with this idea in a novel in
the 1980’s, and I’ll be covering that effort soon on my Wordpress “Bill’s Media
Reviews” blog. Calling the middle short
story (more or less like a middle section in a musical composition) an
“interlude” is interesting. My 1969 mammoth novel manuscript “The Proles”
calls its Chapter 4, where I recount my own experience in Army Basic Combat
Training, and “Interlude”, because of what precedes and then follows it. I’ll come back to that soon in this other
blog.
Now for novel itself.
Rip Cooper is a late-teen bookworm and introvert, having grown up in a
small Piedmont (I presume) town (There is no Sidwick county, but there is a
Sedgwick county in Kansas and Colorado), apparently in a possibly haunted
house. Already I think of the movie
“Beautiful Creatures” with the young teen hero Ethan Wate played by Alden
Ehrenreich (Movies blog, Feb. 19, 2013).
Rip’s personality is rather like Ethan’s. (I knew a chess player, almost a master,
named Rip Smith back in the 1960’s.) Rip
gets challenged to prove he isn’t a candyass by showing he can stand up to
ghosts. He probably has been too close
to Fort Eustis (Tidewater Virginia, Richard Kelly country again). He works as a professional photographer, and
has the gift of seeing and hearing ghosts that don’t show up in photo negatives
(or in cell phone photos for that matter).
Now, taking pictures of people in public – in places like bars and
discos – is usually legal, but getting troubling because of tagging and
Facebook and the like. Ghosts don’t have
that problem, or online reputation sundering.
There’s an issue here of the science of life after
death. It seems that some people get
half a second chance (rather like a half-pawn advantage in chess) by being
ghosts for a while, before their eternal fate is decided. And somehow some people become angels, but
not all ghosts and not all angels are good people. In fact, that’s the reason for being a ghost
for a while.
During the last year of my own mother’s life, one of her
caregivers believed in ghosts as part of a spiritual process, and claimed to
have heard my later father in the house.
I do hear sounds at night. Are the animals, floorboards settling, or
something else.
So Rip becomes ghost killer, not quite following the script
of “Ghostbusters”. When ghosts get shot,
thrown off buildings or hit by cars, they don’t show the same damage from
mechanics that real people do.
Rip does form a tag team, particularly with his ex-best-friend’s
ex- girl-friend. Interesting things
happen. Ghosts can be dyslexic it seems,
catching the ire of English teachers.
And they may have powers, being able to teleport the way Clark Kent in
Smallville does.
I’m reminded, of course, of Peter Straub’s mammoth 1979 novel
“Ghost Story,” in which the protagonist, Donald Wanderlay, and cohorts
rediscover a supernatural sin of drowning a woman in the trunk of a car to
cover up a crime. That sets off all
kinds of supernatural creatures and the story of the girl, Alma Mobley as one
name, becomes a memorable middle section of the book. That became a film from Universal
and director John Irvin in 1981, and I saw it, but the film seems miniature
compared to the book.
Daniel Sherrier also has a book “Earths In Space, Vol. 1:
Where Are the Little Green Men?” The
idea seems to be that there are other planets populated with people. That would require spawning of life through
meteorites traveling between solar systems. (I think of the character A-lan in
Dan Fry’s “To Men of Earth”.) If you
ever had seen a non-ghost with powers (like Clark Kent’s), then you’ve seen an extraterrestrial
(not an alien) and proof of pan-spermia.
Maybe I have. Maybe we are all
extraterrestrials.
I reviewed the book from a complimentary sample.
Sunday, March 09, 2014
"When I Grow Up, I Want to Be a Firefighter: Will's Amazing Day": Children's series has meaning for adults
Authors: Mark Shyres, Debbie Hefke
Title: “When I Grow Up I Want to Be a Firefighter: Will’s
Amazing Day”
Publication: Wigu Publishing, Laguna Beach, CA, 2014, ISBN
978-1-939973-11-5, 54 pages, paper, heavily illustrated
Series: “When I Grow Up I Want to Be …” has other entries:
“in the U.S. Army, in the U.S. Navy, in the U.S. Air Force, s Teacher, a Race
Car Driver, a Nurse, a Veterinarian, a Good Person, a World Traveler, a Police
Officer, Green”.
Amazon link:
First, note that this booklet is part of a trademarked
series for children. I must say right
off, I wonder what’s in the “Good Person” book. As for the title of the series, I remember a
coworker, back in 1972, asked me, “Bill what do you want to do when you grow up
… when I grow up, I’ll sit back and contemplate.”
I generally don’t review children’s books, although I get
emails offering samples (as I do for almost everything imaginable – there are a
lot of particular agendas out there). I
did decide to do this one because there are some very adult points behind the
subject.
Children’s books are indeed a specialized genre. Some literary agents don’t work with this
area. When one writes for children, one
is teaching them what they should grasp at a particular age. Sometimes you don’t mention potential
complications that can drive then away.
So it’s a little bit like talking about Santa Claus and the Easter
Bunny. You can’t tell the full truth all
at once. This is a little bit like a
children’s story in a church service. All parents have to deal with these
stages.
The book does cover a lot at a child’s level. As the book opens, Will is afraid of fire and
apprehensive about a class field trip to a fire station. (I can remember, as a child, that one of the
most frightening stories could be that someone “fell into the fire.”) The fire captain says he is more concerned
about someone’s getting hurt than he is of the fire itself, and that is how he
can do this job.
The booklet presents the fact that there are female
firefighters. It also shows that fire personnel sometimes live and sleep in the
fire station in dormitory style while on duty.
It does say that men and women have separate quarters.
Here is where the adult stuff comes to play. I’ve written a lot about gays in the military,
and the perception during many years of debate (leading to “don’t ask don’t
tell”) that the privacy of other persons of the same gender would be
compromised in situations of living together in situations of forced
intimacy. There was also the more subtle
overflowing idea of “unit cohesion”. Over
time, as a younger generation populated the military and as overseas militaries (like Israel’s) seemed to have little trouble when they lifted bans, concerns
over “privacy” and “cohesion” faded. In
fact, back in the 1970s, when ordinances banning civilian employment discrimination
based on sexual orientation started to be circulated, there were screams from
some quarters about forced intimacy in firehouses, in the days when almost all
firefighters had to be men. I remember a
particularly vociferous ad about this point in the New York Daily News around
1977. The issue still is controversial
within the Boy Scouts, which has recently lifted its ban for members but not
leaders.
There’s a more subtle issue, from the grown up world, not
only adults but older teens. That is,
firefighting is inherently dangerous work.
That’s even more the case with wildfires. Of course, serving the military means “risking”
sacrifice, too. But firefighting can
risk especially painful and gruesome injuries as part of the job. That has an impact of loved ones and on
marriages, which need to survive disability and deformity. The culture in which
I grew up in the 1950s emphasized that men needed to be open to taking these
kinds of risks to protect women and children.
That idea is still prevalent with lower income people today. Most of us who are more privileged depend on
others to take risks or deal with 24-hour hardship that we don’t see. Imagine expecting an electric utility lineman
to restore power after a blizzard or ice storm. In the past, that sort of concern has fed ideologies like Maoism.
A few others remarks.
I chuckled that the main character was named “Will”, since that’s the
name of a conspicuous but likeable gay young adult character in the soap “Days
of our Lives” – no doubt a coincidence.
There are other series of children’s books, like “If You
Give …”. In his series “Reid.ing”, the
first film, “It’s Free”, producer-actor Reid Ewing has some fun with “It You
Give a Mouse a Cookie” on his visit to a public library. (See my Movie Reviews blog, May 13, 2013.) It isn’t hard to imagine the political metaphors -- for adults (especially libertarians) –
that follow.
There is a documentary by Myers Video, “A Day in the Life of
a Firefighter”.
I do have a copy of the “Fun with Dick and Jane” First Grade
classic (July 20, 2007).
Sunday, March 02, 2014
NatGeo, SciAm educate us about black holes and multiple universes in heavily illustrated articles: the afterlife could be real even for agnostics
The March 2014 print issue of National Geographic is
important to mention for a detailed article by Michael Finkel, impressive art
work by Mark A. Garlick, “The Truth About Black Holes: Star Eater”.
Albert Einstein had, at one time, thought that something
like a black hole would not exist. Now, we know that our galaxy and probably
most or all galaxies have large black holes in the center, areas where gravity
is so strong that light cannot escape.
At the center of the sphere there is a mathematical point of
infinite density called “the singularity”.
It is possible that sometimes singularities “explode” with a big-bang to
create a new universe. Could this happen
at the center of the Milky Way and obliterate our existence? Conceivably it has happened in the Universe a
few times. It seems to be rare, and an
act of intentional creation.
The article imagines what happens as one goes into a black
hole. Nothing, because time stops. But one microinstant later you are “spaghettified”. But the stoppage of time raises an intriguing
idea: at death, maybe our sense of time stops, and we remain conscious of our
last moments (which could be horrible for some people) or of our entire lives,
with every day easily retrievable.
Back in February 2012, Michael Mayer had authored a piece in
Scientific American, “The Quantum Universe: Is Space Digital?” He had proposed that information associated
with consciousness (and free will, capable of moral accountability) gets
transferred on “light sheets” to black hole surfaces. There could be an issue of how long it takes
that sheet to reach the center of a galaxy (at “c” as the limit). But there’s also a problem in that the larger
the black hole sphere, the less adequate the surface would he in holding all
possible information, relative to the volume.
(That’s pretty easy to prove with calculus.) Also, because of Hawking radiation, black
holes can “evaporate” or sublime (like snow in the sun when the air temperature
is below freezing) so stored consciousness could be lost. Maybe this supports the need for
reincarnation. Or maybe absolutely
eternal life is still relative. Maybe
the Mormon idea that we advance toward becoming “gods” through eternal marriage
could even make some sense, cosmologically.
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