Art Imitating Life

When my wife and I were first married we flew up to Maine for a vacation. One day we drove to Lubec to visit an old pulp writer I knew (Ryerson Johnson who--among many other jobs--used to write the old Doc Savage stories). After we stayed with him a while we drove out to West Quoddy Head Island to see the famous lighthouse. As we were driving along the causeway we looked out to sea and noticed a weather phenomenon you would have to have witnessed to believe. It was so visually horrifying that it felt like my guts froze solid. We pulled over on the deserted stretch of road and climbed out of the car to look at it. Trying to describe it is a worthless act. You'd have had to have been there.

Out on the ocean--the COLD North Atlantic--was what appeared to be a solid wall of white, as if sheared off with geometric perfection, flying along the surface of the ocean and extending high into the sky. No imperfections. No iterations. Just this solid wall of white headed for us across the vast, dark sea; as if someone had used a giant ruler to create it.

"What is that?" I barely heard my wife ask.

"Some kind of front. I think. I've never seen anything like that. I've never HEARD of anything like it."

We nervously climbed back into the car and drove on to the island where the lighthouse was located. By then the front had reached us, and by then we were in the trees and so had been spared seeing it actually arrive. We got to the West Quoddy Head Lighthouse parking lot and stopped. The fog was so thick that visibility, even in daylight, was a few feet. We could only see the lighthouse when we got out and walked right up to it along the pathway.

After about fifteen or twenty minutes the fog began to lighten a little. Not enough for it to vanish, but visibility was better and it actually felt like the sun was somewhere above us.

A few years after that I read Stephen King's novella "The Mist". In that story he describes something almost exactly like what we saw on the causeway. I wonder if King was around there that day. If not, then it must mean that this kind of thing happens now and again in Maine.

Frankly, even though at the time I kind of knew what it was, I really don't ever want to see it happen again. It was that disturbing a sight.

(This is where we were headed. I didn't take the photo of West Quoddy Head Lighthouse.)

As a point of silly trivia, the easternmost point of land in the USA is WEST Quoddy Head Island. This is because EAST Quoddy Head Island is in Canada.

Extinction Event

When I was a young man working on honing my writing skills, I had the good fortune of

meeting a lot of the old pulp writers. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the world of the "pulps", they were magazines printed on low-quality paper, often featuring garish covers to attract readers. There were, during the great days of the pulps, hundreds of these magazines on the newsstands. And then...slowly at first and then more rapidly...they died off. It was like a vast extinction event.

When I was speak with these old veterans of the prose world they would tell me of how they could make a good living simply sitting at home with their typewriters churning out one story after another, or one novel after another, and selling them to the pulp magazines of the day. Most of these guys would tell me how they'd sold the first story they ever sent out! It wasn't that they had started out with such great skill, it was just that there were so very many fiction markets that they had a treasure-trove of editors from which to choose.

Pulps at that time were similar in many ways to the comic book markets of that industry's great days. There were groups of pulps for every kind of interest and sub-interest you can imagine. Crime stories. Cop stories. Murder mysteries. Fantasy mags. Horror titles. Horse fiction. Publications about hunters. Romance tales. Kinky romance tales. Aviation magazines. Dog stories. Cat stories. Mainstream yarns. If you could think of a title and purpose for a magazine, then it likely existed.

A lot of the guys I had met and spoken with had written for western pulps and science fiction pulps. And each of them would tell me how they could pay the bills just writing short stories. Screw the novels--they didn't need to do that. All they had to do was sit down and write a respectable, competent, fun short story and it was money for groceries and housing and clothes and maybe a trip to the beach with the family.

And then...one by one...the magazines began to close down. The newsstands changed (and vanished). The fiction publications dwindled and faded until there was no way to earn a living writing short stories anymore. The most talented of the lot adapted and learned to write and sell novels, news articles, what-have-you. Most of them just stopped and went to work in the shops and factories or wherever they could labor for a living.

When I would ask them why--what was it that had killed off the goose that laid those wonderful eggs, they would each and every one of them respond with the same answer:

"Television."

Like some extinction events in the world of biology, it was this one huge thing that slammed into the landscape and changed everything forever. The television was the giant asteroid for the pulp magazines. It created the enormous, dead boundary that killed off an entire way of life. Before the popular availability of television one can examine a rich and varied fossil record of amazing pulp fiction. After...almost nothing remained.

I began to think of these old guys and the world in which they worked because of something that happened to me this year. For Christmas I got one of those USB devices that allows you access to a limitless number of movies and episodic video. I can watch pretty much any damned thing I feel like watching.

Normally I read about two or three books a week. Since I got that damned little TV device on December 25, 2015 I have read...zero books. That's right. Not one freaking book. I haven't read any books and I haven't purchased any books.

Shit. And I know better.

The old dudes were spot on the money.

Pulp Fiction

I enjoy many aspects of pop culture. Not music so much, because for some reason I cannot delineate, I stopped listening to pop music when I hit my mid-20s. I still listen to the stuff that came out during that time (and before), but anything since is largely foreign to me and does nothing for me.

But I do enjoy a lot of the more vulgar forms of pop culture. Books, comics, movies, some TV shows. I also don't muck about with video games, the appeal of which is totally lost on me. But if it floats yer boat, then fine.

My main interest in popular fiction and film is what I would term "pulp fiction". This originated as a largely derogatory term to describe the output of the fiction magazines that were quite widespread and profitable from the late 1800s until around the mid-1950s when TV killed them off. Today, there are only a bare minimum of pulp magazines remaining on the marketplace--ELLERY QUEEN'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE, ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE, THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION, ISAAC ASIMOV'S MAGAZINE OF SCIENCE FICTION, ANALOG SCIENCE FICTION & FACT...and that's about it. I can't think of any other pulp fiction magazines on the shelves of modern newsstands, bookstores, and convenience shops.

Pulp fiction has generally gotten bad press from the critical community. And to be sure it's pretty basic stuff. You aren't going to get much in the way of deep meaning or thinly-veiled philosophy from the likes of Robert E. Howard, John D. McDonald, Mickey Spillane, or their contemporaries. And as the pulps faded the practitioners of that kind of fiction had to migrate like an animal fleeing the effects of global warming. They had to move higher up the slopes or farther toward the poles. In the case of the pulp writers they transitioned to film, or to paperback originals, or to teleplays. There were so few markets for the kinds of modern fiction-speak they were creating that they had to do something.

One thing that I have always liked about pulp fiction, whether it's in comic books, or magazines, or paperback books, or on a TV or theater screen is the simplicity of it. The genius of pulp fiction is that everything is boiled right down to its essence. In this case, conflict. That's what pulp fiction is all about: conflict. You don't have to wonder about anything or dig around trying to figure out what it's all about. It's about a bad guy versus a good guy, or a bad guy against an even badder dude. There are slight variations, but that's basically the theme.

And it's there in all sorts of pulp fiction. Westerns, crime, suspense, science-fiction, fantasy, horror...you mention it, and the name of the game is conflict--the more violent, the better.

That's where, I suppose, the bad rep came in. Pulp fiction was about the basics. Violence and vulgar language and hot sex. As the years progressed, the hotter the sex became and the more bloody the violence, the more crude the language. I've enjoyed the whole sorry lot of it.

The old pulp venues are long-gone, it seems. Those pitiful few volumes on the newsstands, the dwindling bookstores with their paperback books...all going or soon to be extinct. This is sad to me. I am left to find it in film and TV, I suppose. Even the comic books are fading slowly away, supported, I reckon, because it seems for the moment to be fertile ground for the entertainment industries to grow their crops.

Here's to the pulp fiction of old, though! Raise yer glass high for the guys and gals who wrote the great old stuff and the ones who are still with us writing the great new stuff. They'll be gone too soon.

Jove help me, I loved it so.