Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Well, right, Martha -- I always insist on that.  [Squinting shrewdly:]
"Whoa now, you're gonna have a _binding_ on this thing, right?"  In
fact, I think I used the wrong word in describing the 300-copy binding
-- it probably wasn't "tie-dyed" denim; maybe acid-washed? 
Tie-bleached?  It's blobby blue-and-white streaks, anyway.  If I've got
a blue pen when somebody asks me to sign it, it's fun to see a face or
something in the blobs & streaks and then add to it to make it
explicit.  Even if the owner would prefer that I not ("Aw, look what
he's gone and done to my book!").

I should quote Flo & Eddie, you're right.  Do you remember a song of
theirs called "Becky"?  Woof!  One of my four-or-five favorite rock
songs of all time.
  

    
"Flo & Eddie", by the way, for anyone who might not know, is the name
the two Turtles-founders performed under when they had somehow lost the
rights to the name "The Turtles."  They've got it back again since.
  

    
Wow, are they still performing?
  

    
Heh.  One thing I will tell you about the WELL, Powers, is that people
here definitely know their music.  Have you had a chance to drop by
the music conference, g music?  I think you'll be impressed.

That limited edition sounds more and more wonderful.  I'm sure that
even if I found one it would be way out of my price range.  But now I
definitely want one!

So how was the booksigning for _999_?  Any interesting characters? 
Any interesting moments at other booksignings or other opportunities
for contacts with your fans?
  

    
jonl slipped...
  

    

'Wow, are they still performing?'

I guess they're so happy together.
  

    
I know "Rebecca", which is a great song and more Turtles-like than most of
the F&E repertoire.  Is "Becky" different?

I haven't seen them play since I moved from Chicago ten years ago.  Their
audiences were always strange--half the people were obviously there for the
Flo & Eddie weird stuff, and half the people for the Turtles classics, and
they sat uncomfortably together.  I liked it all so I was just fine.
  

    
Martha, of course it's called "Rebecca," you're right.  I was just
thinking of the first word of the song!
  

    
The 999 signing went off fine.  At first it had been planned that
William Peter Blatty would be signing there too -- he's got a long
story in the book -- and I had been looking forward to meeting him,
having heard he's a good Catholic boy like myself.  But as it happened
it was just me.  

But it was a sociable good time, which is what signings are supposed
to be.  (I never imagine that they have any effect on one's "career.") 
I had been worried about some kind of short-circuit in our truck, a
battered '72 Suburban with one headlight, and I unhooked the battery
and put in on a charger in the bookstore's back room while I was
signing, but it got us there & home again, and even turned the engine
over this morning, so all's well.  (In times of bad electricity we
generally travel with a charged spare battery in the back seat, ready
to switch it in whenever the truck dies; I remember having to do it in
front of Dean Koontz's house once, disconcerting his elegant
neighbors.)  (And one time the truck was so crowded that Roger Zelazny
had to sit _on_ the spare battery.)

Yeah, Linda, I've done signings where nobody showed up -- in which
case the embarrassed bookstore owner buys several copies, just as a
gesture -- and ones for which the bookstore forgot to actually order
any copies!  I remember one owner calling me and saying, "Do _you_ have
any copies of this thing for us to sell?"  (Well, I got a copy I was
gonna give to my _mom_ ...)  Blaylock and I always used to try to do
signings together, with lots of beer, in case of developments like
this.

There are a number of SF & F readers who we mainly get to chat with at
signings, so we're always asking about each other's cats and things
like that.  And the owners of this bookstore (Art Cover & Lydia Marano,
Dangerous Visions, Sherman Oaks, great bookstore!) are old pals of
ours.  My wife Serena generally goes outside to smoke & talk with the
other smokers, and we drift down the street afterward to a nice Italian
restaurant ... I wish I wrote books quicker than once every two or
three years, so I could do this more often!

Powers readers always strike me as a genial, well-mannered lot.  I've
never seen a mumbling, scowling guy in a trench-coat halfway down the
line, for instance!  ("Mr. Powers, God wants me to kill you ...") 
  

    
And if you did, you'd find a way to work it into a book!

Sounds like a very good time...

Since I'm reading _Earthquake Weather_ right now, I can't help but
notice that certain cities often appear in your stories, like Santa
Ana, Long Beach, Las Vegas.  Is there some significance in your work or
in your life to these cities?

There are a few that I catch on my own.  Like in _Itinerary_ some guy
calls and identifies himself as someone the character knew from back at
Neff High School, and I know that you, in fact, went to Neff.  Was the
name the caller used that of someone you actually went to high school
with?

In _Expiration Date_ one of the characters likes to go to Miceli's in
Hollywood, which is a place that we used to frequent ourselves way back
when.  Also, Koot Hoomie, the main character, comes from La Mirada,
which is also where you grew up.  I confess that when I read the book,
I pictured your parents' house in La Mirada to the extent that I
wondered if the mantel where Koot Hoomie's parents kept the Buddha
containing Thomas Edison's ghost was the same mantel where your parents
kept the multi-volume lives of the saints.

So, what's up with the places?
  

    
Yes, Linda, it was exactly that mantle and that house!  In fact we
used to have a bust of Dante there, as in the book.

Las Vegas was dictated by the logic of the plot, but my default-mode
is to use places that I'm familiar with -- Santa Ana, Long Beach, L.A.,
San Francisco -- and now San Bernardino, in the case of "Itinerary." 
And cars too -- in the course of the last three books I've used a Ford
Torino, a Dodge Dart, and a Ford Granada that were actually cars I
owned.  And of course our '72 Suburban has been prominent in both _Last
Call_ and _Earthquake Weather._  Yes, Neff High School -- right, again
by default mode I tend to give characters my own background; and my
friend's name was actually "Oney," not "Olney."  

Neff High School's been torn down now, and the grammar school I went
to was changed to a school for mentally-retarded students right after I
left.  (When I'd mention that I went to school at Charlotte Anthony,
people would always take my hand and say, "You're doing _really
well!"_)
  

    
<chortle!>

Yes, that's right, it was Dante, not Buddha.  What a mistake to make! 
How could I possibly confuse those two?  (I think I could word that a
little better, but I am enchanted at the moment by the literal question
it asks.)

You did some remarkable research on Las Vegas and environs for _Last
Call_.  I believe you discovered that the original Flamingo was full of
hidden passageways and false walls and the like, didn't you?  What
else did you learn about Bugsy Siegel?  And please explain about how he
is a Fisher King?  (You could also say what a Fisher King is, for the
unitiated among us, like me, for example.)
  

    
What a feast this topic is! And I'm looking forward to the Dick course...
  

    
Bugsy Siegel was fascinating.  When I realized that the book had to
take place in Las Vegas, I read _The Green Felt Jungle,_ and I really
found myself wondering, What the hell _was_ this guy up to, really?  I
mean, he built the Flamingo way outside of town, with walls a yard
thick and a sewer line for every room, and he opened it the day after
Christmas, closed it on (roughly) Good Friday and re-opened it on
(about) Easter!  And he just committed suicide, financially and ergo
literally, to build it.  And then he got killed on the day the god
Tammuz's death is celebrated, in Babylonian myth.  And on the night he
was killed, a sandstorm stripped the paint off all the cars in Las
Vegas, leaving just bare metal.

When my wife and I went to Las Vegas to do research (first time I'd
been there), the central part of the original Flamingo building was
still standing.  I found the hotel's publicity person and gave her a
stack of my previous books, and begged her to let us see Siegel's
penthouse (with its escape-hatch inside a linen cupboard) and his
tunnels (to which the escape-hatch ladder led) under the building. 
Luckily no one was staying in the penthouse room right then, and she
got somebody from engineering to give us a tour of the whole building. 
It was all just as I described it in the book.  

(On the way out, we wandered around the outside of the building, and
behind a bush we found a deeply-recessed niche, the inner surface of
which was still painted the original 1946 pistachio green!  It was all
cracked, so I busted off a big piece and took it home with us.  ((It's
framed on the wall now, and somehow everybody thinks it's a relief map
of Oregon.))  I felt a bit guilty about that, until they tore the whole
building down in, I think, '96.)

We wandered all over Las Vegas, with me talking into a recorder and
Serena leaning out the window with a camera; and I'm glad we did,
because that Las Vegas is already gone!  At one point we were
introduced to an old woman who had run an Italian restaurant on the
Strip in the 1950s -- Luigi Baker; the restaurant, which is mentioned
in the old books, was called "Luigi's" -- and she and her husband had
known Siegel.  Among a lot of questions, I asked her if Siegel had had
a sense of humor; "I don't know," she said, after a moment's thought;
"nothing funny ever happened."
  

    
I did mean to spell "mantel" correctly up there.  I hate when I do
that -- like confusing its and it's.

Anyway, the Fisher King is an enigmatic figure that shows up most
directly in Welsh mythology, though a lot of cultures have versions of
him.  He's always injured in some way that renders him sterile or
impotent, and his lands are barren.  There's a connection -- if you
could cure him, the lands would be fertile again, and vice versa.  And
he's the caretaker of the Grail, which is a number of things but
eventually encompasses or is encompassed by the chalice that Christ
used at the Last Supper.  For some reason, when the Fisher King is
first encountered, he's fishing in a river.  I guess that just stands
to reason.  

When you read these stories -- the best books on the subject are
Jessie Weston's _From Ritual to Romance, Norma Lorre Goodrich's _The
Holy Grail, and Roger Loomis' _The Grail_ -- you get the impression of
some tremendous old antediluvian story, profoundly important, lost or
at least dispersed in these conflicting, half-remembered fragments.
  

    
When I was researching my recentest book, I found this same figure in
the _1,001 Nights,_ in a story called "The Fisherman and the Genie." 
Very briefly, a lake is found with fish in it that will stand up and
recite poetry when you put 'em in a frying pan; this intrigues the
local king so that he goes out into the desert to find an explanation,
and soon he finds a black castle, and in it a young man sitting &
weeping.  The visiting king asks him to explain "the mystery of the
lake and the fish," and the young man "lifted the skirt of his robe,
and behold, he was stone from the waist downward."  And the young man
says his country wasn't always a waste-land, but used to be green &
fruitful.  Now this is pure Fisher King, I swear.
  

    
I'm always fascinated by stories that insistently show up everywhere,
in every culture; like the shadowy proto-Christs you see in mythology
-- Balder, Osiris, Dionysus.  In fact, for that feeling of getting only
enticing fragments of a vast old lost story, read Euripides' _The
Bacchae!_  At every turn you get that feeling ... well, that feeling
that Oedipa Maas got, when she was watching "The Courier's Tragedy" in
Pynchon's _The Crying of Lot 49_ -- the impression that audiences of
the time recognized a whole lot more heavy stuff in this than we can. 
The older I get, the more the world seems like a Pynchon story.
  

    
Speaking of your recentest book, we've been threatening to talk about
it, so let's make good on that, shall we?

All I know about it is that it's called _Declare_ and will be
published in 2000.  And that you encountered this fascinating story
while doing research for it.  I am now officially intrigued.  Please
tell me more.
  

    
Powers himself slipped in...
  

    

Tim, could you say which writers you have wanted most to be like?
  

    
I did a search for the book you mentioned, now that I have it in my
head that I need one, and at the following URL

http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~jberlyne/powers/lccharnel.htm

I found a photo and the following description:

'Only twenty-six copies were manufactured by Charnel House in April
1992. Originally priced at $400, this lettered state was issued with
the ISBN 0-927389-04-5. Very occasionally this edition appears on the
collectors market. I recently spotted one offered with the following
description.

'"Charnel House, Lynbrook. 1992. First edition, lettered state.
Limited to 26 lettered and signed copies. Hand bound in full green
Morocco (goat skin) with a tarot card and two authentic Flamingo Hotel
poker chips recessed into front cover, gilt lettering on spine,
endpapers made from uncut sheets of one-dollar bills, limitation page
made from an uncut sheet of two-dollar bills signed in silver ink. With
a piece of a two-dollar bill laid in for a bookmark. Tarot card
illustrations by Peter Richardson inside borders by J.K.Potter, with
tissue-guards laid in."

Offered last year in the catalogue of Barry R. Levin - Science Fiction
& Fantasy Literature, this edition would have set you back at least
$3000! The above description fails to mention that this edition also
features an extra poem and a slightly different text to the Morrow
edition.'
  

    
Joe Stefko's page:

http://theturtles.com/bios/joe.html

With photos of Joe and a brief mention of his Charnel House imprint.
  

    
Hi, Mike -- my heroes were always Lovecraft, Sturgeon, Dick and
Leiber.  They wrote stuff I wished I'd written -- especially Leiber! --
but I don't really want to emulate their _lives,_ I suppose.  I hope I
don't.  As far as writers whose _lives_ I wish I had -- I think Robert
Louis Stevenson, or William F. Buckley, or Tom Wolfe; or _selections_
from the lives of Byron or Hemingway.  The fun, sociable parts.

Linda, right, _Declare_ -- it's based on the life & career of Kim
Philby, who was the chief of counter-espionage for the British Secret
Service until 1951, and who turned out to have been secretly working
for Moscow since college.  Vast scandal!  He lived in Beirut from 1956
until January of '63, when he was finally cornered and fled across
Turkey to the USSR.

I read about a dozen books about him, and a book he wrote and one his
last wife wrote, and I began to see the sort of clues I look for -- he
was SIS Head of Station in Turkey in '48, and spent a suspicious amount
of time around Mount Ararat; and in Beirut he had a pet fox that drank
whiskey and sucked on smoking pipes, and Kim fled to Russia shortly
after the fox was killed; and Kim's father (a Lawrence of Arabia figure
in the early years of the century) made sure Kim never got baptized,
but fretted about the properties of baptismal water from the Jordan
River, and even sent samples to the British Museum to be tested for
occult potencies ... and so forth.  I probably wound up reading a
hundred books, on Russia, and Bedouins, and espionage, and every damn
thing.

Kim Philby's life was tied to the Middle East, through his father's
influence; and I found plenty of clues to justify reading the whole
Burton translation of the _1,001 Nights,_ too; and of course I found
tons of great stuff in there!  It turns out (according to my story,
that is!) that the Soviet Union was supernaturally sustained, and the
highest levels of British Intelligence had been aware of it right from
the start -- T. E. Lawrence was working on this problem, and
incidentally found the Dead Sea Scrolls back in 1917, and took the
wildest ones away; Alan Turing learned more than he should have, and
got killed; Feliks Dzerzhinski was sustained as a kind of haunted
effigy in a KGB office in Moscow ... And so forth!

It was fascinating, putting a supernatural back-story to occupied
Paris, and post-war Berlin, and the Suez Crisis.  Lovecraft meets
tradecraft.  I've always wanted to do a Le Carre-style book ... but
with agents who have to carry ankhs as well as fake passports.

Hey, I just saw the last two posts -- the book you're describing is a
copy of the Charnel House edition of _Last Call,_ actually, not _Stress
of Her Regard_ (which was also gorgeous).  Stefko puts books together
the way Michelangelo painted ceilings.
  

    
Mike, back to what we were saying, I think Kingsley Amis had the life
& career I'd most like to have had.  Check out his _Memoirs_ -- and
I've loved all his books.

Jon Lebkowsky was asking if the Turtles are still touring -- yeah,
Jon, hit the Turtles links at the bottom of Joe Stefko's page, which
Linda has kindly given above!

Also, that's a hell of a complete Powers page, that "easyweb" thing
which Linda also provides up there.  It's put together by a guy named
John Berlyne, in England -- I e-mailed him a "fan letter" when I found
his page, and we got to meet him recently, and he's a fine fellow.  (I
was saying Powers readers are a nice crowd! -- which is gratifying; it
would have been dismaying to find that they were a bunch of rude
clods.)
  

    
Mike -- having given it undue thought -- John D. MacDonald,
definitely.