Gulp! Merritt of the Pulps, I presume?

I met the ghost of the late Abraham Merritt on the Hornby Road pavement in 1954. I was 18 then and he had been dead and gone for 11 years. I used to go there frequently to hunt for bargain book buys. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2007/03/revealed-at-last-my-shameful-neurotic.html. I distinctly remember picking up at least three of his novels: The Moon Pool, Burn Witch Witch! and Seven Footprints to Satan. All of them were paperbacks published by Avon Books, an imprint I don’t come across much these days. I was a total genre-illiterate then. (In fact, I doubt if I even knew the meaning of ‘genre’.) What probably attracted me to Merritt was the back cover blurb extravagantly promising weird and mind-blowing story lines in the comics/pulp novel style. In hindsight, I was a pulp junkie back then without quite knowing the name of my ailment. Recently when I saw the movies of The Shadow and The Phatom on the idiot box, I got a distinct feeling of déjà vu. Now I know why. I used to be a regular visitor to the pulp realm once upon a time, see? If memory serves, The Moon Pool is an expedition-into-a-lost-world fantasy in the best escapist tradition – contrary to the sci-fi genre tag on the back cover of its Collier Books edition which I subsequently purchased probably at the Strand Book Stall out of sheer nostalgia but haven’t so far read. Burn Witch Witch! is a horror novel about witchcraft while Seven Footprints to Satan combines horror with mystery and detection. At the time of reading Merritt, I used to be also a regular watcher of the B-Grade black and white sci-fi movies with flying saucers and alien invaders in them. I don’t think I ever thought they were in the same category as Merritt’s alternative worlds. Not having read H Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs, I also did not make the connection between them and Merritt. Project Gutenberg considers The Moon Pool meritorious enough to deserve an inclusion. http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/765. (The novel was written in 1919. Merritt’s second wife, Eleanor, renewed the copyright in 1947. Now it seems to be out of copyright – which explains the sudden upsurge of interest among publishers to bring out special editions such as the University of Nebraska Press's Bison Frontiers of the Imagination Edition, for example.) P.S.: Considering that I was a flying saucer flick fan, I should have been reading Ralph 124C 41+, the sci-fi novel by the so-called ‘father of science fiction’, Hugo Gernsback. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2007/03/revealed-at-last-my-shameful-neurotic.html. It is said to contain predictions of wondrous inventions to come including electronic music, fluorescent lighting, glass skyscrapers, helicopter buses, jet planes, jukeboxes, liquid fertilizer, loud speakers, micro-film, night baseball, organ transplants, plastics, radar, radio directional-finder, radio and television networks, solar power, stainless steel, synthetic fabrics, tape recorders, tear gas, the word "television", tin foil, vending machines and voice prints. As things turned out, I could not have read Hugo Gernsback’s magnum opus. Its debut was in a serialized format in the world's first radio magazine, Modern Electrics in 1911 in the US and I guess it was never brought out as a solo novel except recently in tandem with a Merritt trio. http://www.handango.com/avantgo-channel/PlatformProductDetail.jsp?siteId=141&platformId=2&productType=2&productId=161163&sectionId=3700&catalog=30&topSectionId=-1 .

Revealed at last! My shameful neurotic past.

I was 18 and in the second year of college when I became convinced that I was neurotic. Having just read an American paperback on the subject (I cannot for the life of me remember its title and author), I had come to the conclusion that every young American worth his or her salt had neurois and had undergone long drawn psychoanalysis for it. In fact, I thought it was a rather chic and smart malady to suffer from. I continued to read pop psychology and search for labels for my neurosis. Like a true hypochondriac, I used to imagine a whole gamut of typical symptoms in myself such as vague unease, wakefulness, a forlorn feeling of loss and foreboding and the meaninglessness of life. I used to walk up and down on the terrace above our third floor flat at 233 Khetwadi Main Road for a long time at night on the pretext of a constitutional. My neurosis library was built from books bought on the pavement of Hornby Road. I also used to borrow from a comics wallah at Lamington Road a pseudo medical and slyly prurient magazine from the US, quaintly called Sexology. Started by Hugo Gernsback – after whom the Hugo Award for sci-fi is named – in the 1930s, it contained vaguely written gibberish about various maladies and conditions and was full of scientific seeming line drawings. I used to borrow and browse through every issue religiously as soon as my comics wallah got it. I don’t think I read many articles in their entirety, though. (To add a cloak and dagger flavour to the whole affair, he used to always cover it with a newspaper before handing it over to me.) I had also got into the habit of reading a slim DIY magazine called Psychology. After a couple of years of all this, I slowly got out of my delusional mode and, somewhere along the way, came to realise the utter sham of the whole thing. Today, I am of the firm opinion that all the so-called angst, anxiety, low self-esteem and resultant suffering that people bitch about are mostly bogus and self-manufactured and the therapeutic ‘help’ industry is a vast money-making racket. The whole self-delusion is created by unrealistic over-expectation, greed, jealousy and an obstinate refusal to call a spade a spade. I fully agree with what Samuel Goldwyn had to say on the subject: "Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined." See what Sexology looked like: http://www.magazineart.org/main.php/v/healthandfitness/sexology. There’s a slide show of Sexology covers too at http://www.magazineart.org/main.php?g2_view=slideshow.Slideshow&g2_itemId=6961. To read an article from the magazine set to pop music from the sixties including Beatles, click here: http://www.samsloan.com/sexology.htm

Not even a startle.

When I was in Guam http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/06/stinkeroo.html for a couple of months in 1991-92, I met a jovial American architect, a friend of my son Abhijeet. Apart from a body odour sharper than his wit and a stunning Scandinavian live-in girl friend, his most unforgettable characteristic was his love for and intimate knowledge of the sci-fi movie genre. I remember going with him for a sci-fi movie (most likely The Terminator – I seem to have forgotten the movie’s name as well as the avid movie goer’s) and listening to his almost non-stop commentary about the lore and the treatment as if it was a matter of life and death. I almost cited to him Ashok Kumar’s “It’s only a film” comment borrowed from Hitch. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/06/its-only-film.html. I was reminded of the incidence while watching Batman Begins Friday night on HBO. That the movie did not dazzle me, did not get a startle response from me means nothing at all, really. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startle_response. The original intention of the movie maker was to undo the damage done to the Batman myth and lore by the spectacular box office and critical flop of the expensively mounted trio preceding it, I guess. According to all indications, Batman Begins marked the beginning of the success of the Batman franchise in moviedom. The gamble to make the Batman myth as preached by the Batman Comics more credible and more human has apparently paid off. For instance, how Batman became so adept at combative skills. (Ans: By joining the League of Shadows.) How and from where he got his costume, his weapons, his armoured vehicle, his hang glider cum cape and so forth. (Ans: From Wayne Enterprises’ experimental lab.) Central to the tale, though, is the theme of Brue Wayne’s fear of bats. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_bats. He got it when he fell into a well as a lad of eight and was startled by the drove of bats. He overcame it under the hallucinogenic influence of a mountainside blue flower during his spell as a League of Shadows rookie. The introduction of Bruce’s childhood girl friend Rachel Dawes early on and her continuing presence in the narrative may be interpreted as a ploy to lay to rest once for all the lurking suspicion that he is gay. (It seems George Clooney wittingly, unwittingly, or maybe even mischieviously, resurrected the gay ghost by telling Barbara Walters that in Batman & Robin he played Batman as gay. "I was in a rubber suit and I had rubber nipples. I could have played Batman straight, but I made him gay." Barbara Walters laughed, then asked, "George, is Batman gay?" To which he responded, "No, but I made him gay." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Wayne) Emulating the excellent Hitchcock and equally admirable Ashok Kumar, I would like to remind all those who take such matters seriously: “It’s only a comics character, for Pete’s sake.” P.S.: A couple of months ago, I resisted the temptation to buy an expensively produced paperback about the movie. Bully for me.

Ensconced in velvet. (Later, in denim.)

The first three are not my words. I stole them straight out of George’s mouth. (‘The Label Maker’) http://www.seinfeldscripts.com/TheLabelMaker.html. The George I’m talking about is Costanza who declares his affinity for velvet in these immortal words: “I would drape myself in velvet if it were socially acceptable.” This velvety diversion comes to you because of my sudden remembrance of one phase in early childhood when I used to be “ensconced in velvet” – velvet pants of ridiculous hues actually – ludicrous as it sounds to me now. All my life, I’ve been bereft of a sense of personal style or grooming (I wear any – preferably old and therefore comfortable – shirt that comes to hand as soon as I open my ‘wardrobe’ without bothering about matching it with the rest of my apparel), I guess. And that must have been the nadir. Velvet corduroy has always been socially acceptable in the circles I move in and still seems to be. But I remember owning only a couple of velvet corduroy trousers in my youth. Strangely though, I was one of the first guys to take to denim early in life. I’ve never been out of a jean ever since I was around twelve. My love for denim must have grown of my affinity for cowboy comics and lore. (“Hey, hombre. I ain’t about to let this town go to coyotes like yuh. Draw!”) Denim lured me by its comfortable feel. At a wedding sometime back I met an old acquaintance who confirmed my presumption that I was the first one to don denim in my neighbourhood. Whew! http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/05/not-my-best-friends-wedding.html.