Star Trek: Vanguard – and a lot of other stuff

Periodically, I return to obsessions I thought I left far in my past. I have been a fan of Star Trek since soon after the original series went off the air and into syndication. Born at the end of 1961, I think I was just barely too young to get caught up in it during the original airings, which began in September 1966 and ended in June 1969. I would therefore have been four years old when it debuted and seven when it went off. Moreover, my obsession with space really began with the Apollo 11 moon landing on 20 July 1969 – ironically within weeks of Star Trek being cancelled. Just as I do remember flashes of earlier manned space missions (most clearly, Christmas Eve 1968, popping firecrackers with my older cousins outside my grandmother’s house, my uncle commenting that there were astronauts circling the moon right then – Apollo 8), so do I recall flashes of earlier Star Trek episodes on TV, but not clearly enough to know what episodes they might have been.

The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life (2013)

By Rod Dreher

Rod Dreher is another recent discovery whom I’m somewhat surprised not to have encountered earlier – or if I did, the name didn’t stick.  I do a good bit – far too much, if the truth be told – of what I call “net’surfing,” tending to concentrate in the more conservative political and religious corners of the Internet, but The American Conservative is not a site that I make a point to visit unless I’m taken there by some link that looks interesting. Nonetheless, given the subject matter which Dreher tends to write about, I’d be surprised if one or more of those interesting-looking links would not have taken me to something by him from time to time. Nevertheless, I don’t recall his name impressing itself upon my consciousness until just a couple of months ago. I was visiting with my mother, and we were watching The World Over on EWTN. That night, host Raymond Arroyo was interviewing guest Dreher, specifically about his most recently published book, How Dante Can Save Your Life (which I am currently reading).

20 July 1969 … From the Earth to the Moon (HBO, 1998)

Produced by Ron Howard, Tom Hanks, and others.

Today is the 45^th anniversary, to the day of the week, of one of the most vivid memories of my childhood, and – although few really recognize it as such, given how little fanfare it receives each year – one of the most important events of the 20^th century, even of human history: When Neil Armstrong stepped off the landing pad of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module Eagle and planted his boot on the ground of another world, the Earth's moon, mankind left his infancy and became a toddler in the perspective of the universe. It's tragic that we barely followed up on that event and, realistically, do not look like we will be taking any further steps any time soon, possibly not even within my lifetime. I hope I'm wrong. I am grateful, however, that I did witness that event with my own eyes, late in the evening of Sunday, 20 July 1969. [LINK]

For my own celebration of this year's “Moon Landing Day,” I finally started watching earlier in the week the HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon. In 1998, of course, as a recently minted Ph.D. struggling to secure a tenure-track university position while cobbling together teaching assignments at several different institutions in and around Baton Rouge, I did not have HBO. I still don't, but I picked the DVD set up a couple of years ago. I was actually under the misimpression that From the Earth to the Moon was another product of collaboration between Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, done after Band of Brothers and The Pacific. It's obviously not, but it matters not. It is of similarly outstanding quality, telling the story in a docudrama format, varying the storytelling style and perspective in an interesting fashion from episode to episode. I am particularly impressed by the special effects, although I guess if I think about it by the late 1990s CGI had indeed advanced very far. Honestly, they look entirely modern, 2010s-era quality, to me.  My son says I don't have a very discerning eye, though.

Actually, since I typically limit myself to an hour of “summer series” watching, whether via Netflix or DVD, per day – working my way through various series that I've either never seen or not seen in a long time (I set aside my first viewing of HBO's Rome since its initial airing, and for which I benefited from a generous colleague who taped them for me then, after its first season in order to take up with this) – I'm only a few episodes in at this point. I'm hoping that this evening I can monopolize the TV and watch the few episodes I need, back to back, to get to their depiction of Apollo 11 at approximately the right time.

Cheers! – and Ad Astra!

My First Real Memory - 22 November 1963

I have maintained all my life the firm conviction that the first clear, specifically dateable memory that I have is of Walter Cronkite cutting in during the CBS soap opera As the World Turns and announcing the death of President John F. Kennedy.  I was two years and four days old, playing in the living room while my mother folded clothes and watched television.  I remember it in great detail.  I do, of course, have scattered flashes of memory from probably before and after that event, but this is, as I said above, my "first clear, specifically dateable memory."  In any case, my grandmother always insisted that there would be no way that I could possibly remember something that clearly from that early in my life.  My mother always corroborated the context and the details, however.  

Neil Armstrong, R.I.P.

(1930-2012)

Once again the passing of a public figure important enough in the formation of who I am overcomes my reticence to jump on the blogosphere obituary bandwagon.

Along with much of the world, seven-year-old Kent sat mesmerized in front of the TV to see mankind's first steps on another world on the evening of Sunday, 20 July 1969.  At that moment, like millions of other kids of my generation, I conceived a deep interest in science, astronomy, and the like.  Like millions of other kids, I wanted to grow up to be an astronaut.  That didn't happen.  I didn't even become a scientist -- although I was an engineer for a time, and did try to join the Air Force as an engineer (severe myopia shot that down).  Star Trek had, sadly and ironically, aired its last new episode only six or seven weeks before (3 June), but by the next year I discovered it in early syndication and that conception was nurtured to manifest itself in my life-long love of science fiction and fantastic fiction in general.  Had I not been primed for it by the sense of wonder inspired by Neil Armstrong's first steps onto the moon, however, no one can say what course my life would have taken.

To play off the words spoken from Tranquility Base six or so hours before those steps, "The Eagle has ascended."

Ad Astra!  As Jerry Pournelle states in his blog entry of last night, "We will be back."

Spinner-Rack Memories!: Superboy #171 (Jan 1971)

As I've said before and will again – and often, no doubt – Aquaman was my first favorite super-hero. As corny as his concept may have seemed to some nay-sayers even then, I was swept up in the adventures of the King of the Seven Seas at least from the first time I saw him on the Superman/Aquaman Hour of Adventure. So when Aquaboy made his first – and to my knowledge only significant – appearance, in the pages of Superboy – the adventures of Superman when he was a boy – I was tickled pink. I don't remember if I knew it was coming from some DC Comics house ad, or if I was suddenly made aware of it by seeing it on the stands, but I do remember reading and rereading this comic. I most associate it with the back sun-room of my paternal grandmother's house, which faced across a big field toward my childhood home. When I conceived the idea for this blog devoted to significant comics I remember from my childhood, this issue was among the first to spring into mind. Like the vast majority of my childhood comics, it was lost or sold off – or possibly just fell apart from wear – long ago, so I had to buy it back from my on-line back-issue vendor. In my memory, however, I did not dream that it was significant for more than just the appearance of Aquaboy.

If you want to know why, check out my "other other blog" here.

Cheers!

The Return of Dallas

This post is, admittedly, a little late, but I just got finished watching the second episode of the new TNT show, Dallas.  Yes, the great night-time soap opera from the late 1970s-early 1990s is back, telling the story of the next generation of Ewings, their wheelings and dealings and backstabbings.  Best of all, J. R. Ewing is shown not to have committed suicide as was implied in the final episode of the original series, but is back, evil-grinning and chewing up the scenery with renewed vigor.  He truly is the epitome of the Magnificent Bastard.  During the early years of its original run, watching Dallas with my grandmother on Friday nights was a weekly ritual.  A generation later, I already have a new weekly ritual -- watching the new Dallas with my mother on Wednesday evenings.

Yippee-ki-yay and Cheers!

Spinner-Rack Memories!

My Secret Origin!  The beginnings of my life-long obsession with "funnybooks" are revealed at last!

Spinner-Rack Memories!

Superman#215 and Superman's Girl Friend Lois Lane #91 (Apr 1969).  

Superman marries Lois Lane ... twice in one month!  With very different consequences each time....

Stop on over and check out my newest blog, devoted to comic book memories from my childhood.

Cheers!

The Perilous Journey of the Donner Party (1999)

By Marian Calabro

Probably the Hares' biggest family vacation when I was a kid was ten days to two weeks to Colorado and Wyoming in June of 1970, I believe. I was about eight years old. I have a lot of “flash-memories” of that trip: My dad driving almost a thousand miles, all the way from north Louisiana into Colorado, on the first day. Taking an enclosed ski lift up to the top of a snow-covered mountain. Seeing Colorado's Royal Gorge. Staying in rustic cabins at several different locations. Yellowstone Park. My kid brother (four years younger) belting out Home on the Range (I think) incessantly, giving us someone to blame when we didn't see any bears in Yellowstone. “Home, home on the range! Where the deer and the cantaloupe play!” Old Faithful. Hippies departing from the marked routes along the wooden walkways through the geyser field, my father filming them as they leaned over bubbling pools and commenting that if they fell in he was sending his 8mm home movie to Walter Cronkite. Buffalo Bill Cody Museum. Jackson Hole. My father fishing on one of those lakes. My father gritting his teeth in the night and breaking a tooth. Playing in the snow along the side of the highway … in June! And I'm sure I could come up with more, even though I also remember being fussed at because – laying on the back seat of the green Oldsmobile with the white top as I was, reading and rereading the stack of comic books I'd brought along – I was missing everything!

But among those disjointed memories is a clear recollection of first hearing about the Donner Party. I have no memory of why or where exactly, because we were nowhere near where those horrific events transpired. I have a clear memory of laying in bed in one of those rustic cabins during that trip, being scared spitless. Stranded in the snow! Cannibalism! The stuff of which an eight-year-old's nightmares are made!

Of course, the Donner Party is one of those cultural touchstones that everybody has heard of, that has given birth to a myriad of macabre jokes. It's a subject of endless fascination – how civilized beings can be reduced by desperate circumstance to breaking “the final taboo.” But I have known nothing more than the basic fact of a wagon train snowbound in the mountains through a grueling winter, slowly starving to death, until now.

A couple of weeks ago, our local parish public library (remember, this is Louisiana, so a parish is a civil unit, basically what all you other states call a “county”) had its annual book fair, selling off both discards from the library's own holdings and donated books for next to nothing to help finance buying new books. My wife and I try to hit it whenever we have the chance. This year my haul included (in addition to an almost complete and pristine set of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels in paperback – fifty cents apiece – each of the two that I was missing cost me more than all those I walked away with combined when I compulsively picked them up later, one in a bookstore, the other off Abebooks.com) a slim volume, ostensibly a discard from the youngsters' section of the library, Marian Calabro's The Perilous Journey of the Donner Party.

At about 180 pages, it's a quick read – I flew through it in about three hours. Partly it's the compelling narrative compounded with the horrific subject matter. Calabro bases her account mainly on the observations of Virginia Reed, the thirteen-year-old daughter of one of the leaders of the ill-fated group, but succeeds in bringing many of the other characters in the drama to life even as the reader knows that many of them will be snuffed out, one by one, mostly by starvation and exposure, in a few cases by more direct means. She analyses very well the varying emotional costs the experiences had on the survivors – somewhere around half of the number who had begun the journey early in 1846. And she augments the narrative with a wealth of photographs of individuals, the landscape, their (or similar) tools and transportation, several helpful maps, charts of the members of the various groups who made up the “Donner Party” (named for one of the other men, who was ultimately elected leader but who did not survive), a chronology, and a list of the victims along with the date and circumstance of their demise (whenever that can be determined).

Going into the book with nothing more, as I said, than the most basic knowledge of the event, I can say I've learned a lot. Among many other things, I had no idea where the events actually took place, and how close – on a map at least – they had actually come to their destination when winter slammed shut their way forward and locked them down, many of them to die. As I said above, they were nowhere near where I was during that 1970 trip in the Rocky Mountains but much further west, just west of modern Reno, Nevada, within their destination territory of California, just shy of the eastern ridge of the Sierra Nevada.

Its late, I'm headed to bed … but 42 years later I admit that after this gripping read I dread the darkness just a little. I find myself shuddering a little when I think about being placed in a similarly desperate situation.

Thanks for reading.  Good night.

Thuvia, Maid of Mars (1916)

1972 SFBC edition
Art by Frank Frazetta
(and see below)

By Edgar Rice Burroughs  (The Barsoom Series #4, All-Story Weekly serial 8-22 Apr 1916, book 1920)

This fourth in the “John Carter of Mars” series actually focusses on his and Dejah Thoris's son, Carthoris, and the red Martian princess and “banth-whisperer” introduced in The Gods of Mars, Thuvia of Ptarth By the end of Warlord of Mars it was, I think, pretty apparent they were smitten with each other (or perhaps I read that into the text with foreknowledge of this book). But when we begin here, their undeclared love seems fated not to be consummated, because Thuvia's father, Thuvan Dinh, has promised her to his and John Carter's ally, Kulan Tith of Kaol. But there is another suitor, Astok, son of the Jeddak of Dusar, who is not willing to take “no” for an answer – and has a grudge against Carthoris. Thus is executed a plot whereby Astok means to steal Thuvia away and place the blame on Carthoris.

Art by Frank Frazetta

And so the adventures begin, which take Carthoris and Thuvia to a remote region of Barsoom, where they first encounter the Lotharians, a strange remnant of the old Barsoomian auburn-haired race that had once ruled much of the planet, now reduced to a few hundred who espouse a strange philosophy regarding the very nature of reality – or actually competing philosophies which share in common the ability to manifest images of and even ultimately to materialize objects and even persons from their minds. The competition is between the “Etherealists” who believe that there is no such thing as matter, only mind, and the “Realists,” who accept the existence of matter as a creation of mind. (I wonder how much this has to do with the strange doctrines of Theosophy that seem to inform certain aspects of Burroughs' fiction, especially his Barsoom series, first noticed, I believe, by Fritz Lieber way back in 1959 and discussed here). Such a distinction matters little to their enemies, local green Martian barbarians who periodically attack their city and are turned back by legions of Lotharian archers who rain on them very lethal hailstorms of arrows because they have no reason to believe they are not real. In the course of their escape, Thuvia is stolen away from Carthoris by Dusarians while the warrior ends up meeting the fulfillment of the Lotharians' mental development in Kar Komak, a memory of the greatest archer of ancient Lothar, who has indeed taken on independent material existence. Carthoris and Kar Komak become allies and by the end of the book have rescued Thuvia from death at the hands of Astok – or rather at the hands of one of the Dusarian nobles because Astok is not man enough to do his own evil deed to hide the infamy of his actions that have set the great city-states of Barsoom at war with one another.

Art by Frank Frazetta

In the climax of the story, as they escape Dusar toward Ptarth in Astok's own racing airship, they come to the aid of a downed Kaolian airship besieged by green Martians, saving Kulan Tith himself. Overwhelming numbers of Lotharian bowmen pour from the small airship – many times over more than it could possibly hold – and rout the attacking green men in an unforgettable sequence that is followed by Kulan Tith's realization that Thuvia's heart truly belongs to Carthoris.

“'Take back your liberty, Thuvia of Ptarth,' he cried, 'and bestow it where your heart already lies encchained, and when the golden collars are clasped about your necks you will see that Kulan Tith's is the first sword to be raised in declaration of eternal friendship for the new Princess of Helium and her royal mate!'” (1972 SFBC ed., p. 124)

Such is the nobility of the best of the red Martian warriors.

1973 Ballantine Books ed.
Art by Gino d'Achille

Like the entire series, this is at least the third time I've read this novel. The first was in the early 1970s in the Ballantine Books paperback editions with the beautiful covers by Gino d'Achille. In my memory, this was indeed one of my favorite of those covers. The second was a few years later when I acquired the series as a six-volume hardcover set from the Science Fiction Book Club – which I still prize for the powerful covers and interior art by Frank Frazetta (well, except for the sixth volume, by Richard Corben, I believe – and although I know he's considered a great artist that volume must not be representative). The basic production quality of SFBC books of that era may have been inferior, but I would not trade the vision of Barsoom presented by Frazetta for anything. Between the two of them, d'Achille and Frazetta formed the mental image of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars that I will likely carry to my grave. Nevertheless, my current reading has been predominantly in ebook form, the free Kindle format available from Project Gutenberg. I find the convenience of carrying a library with my on my iPod Touch mostly overwhelms even the sensation of holding a real book in my hands and turning real pages. I don't think that ebooks will ever completely replace physical books, but in just a couple of years I have gone from a conviction that ebooks would never be for me to doing a large part of my reading on my iPod Touch – as in this case, even if I have the physical book I will often grab a free or inexpensive ebook format simply for the convenience of always having it handy. (It's great for doing quick word searches as well.)

Full Painting by Frank Frazetta

As to the story told here, although some of the later tales in the series I remember less fondly, as far as I'm concerned Thuvia is right up there with the opening trilogy as a rousing tale of adventure and romance. I am struck by how the real age difference obviously meant little or nothing to Burroughs' Martians who hatched from their eggs presumably somewhere near fully grown and aged little over their typical life-span of a thousand years. It's unclear how much time has passed since Warlord of Mars; Carthoris would seem to me to have still been somewhere shy of twenty Earth years in age. Thuvia had, for an unspecified reason, taken the pilgrimage down the River Iss fifteen years before John Carter first appeared on Barsoom, therefore if I'm counting it right somewhere on the order of thirty-five years prior to Gods of Mars where she is introduced, having spent all that time in slavery to the Therns. Presumably she was not newly hatched when she took that ill-fated pilgrimage. It's impossible from Burroughs' own writings to know how old she really is, but the Dynamite comic series Warlord of Mars: Dejah Thoris introduces her as a youthful princess in Ptarth four hundred years in the past. Admittedly that's not canon, but in Dynamite's main series, Warlord of Mars, Thuvia has now made her appearance in their adaptation of Gods of Mars, so in that version of the stories there is a considerable age difference. But what does that matter when the “older woman” is all-but-eternally young and beautiful?

Kaor! – and thanks for reading!