[The following editorial appears in Shards #4, New Blood #23, Blood of Ten Chiefs #12, Jink #1, and The Rebels #1. --MK]
You've played this game, right? You know, the one where you imagine you're going to be stranded on a desert island (in a starship, whatever) for the rest of your life, and you have to choose your single most favorite book, record album, video tape. For some reason I was thinking about that recently; perhaps all the tumultuous events and opportunities that have thrust themselves upon me lately have got me thinking about things not subject to easy change. Things that are dependable.
So what would I take along on this extremely constrained trip?
Books is easy. If I could have only one book, knowing that it would be my reading material from that day on, I would choose THE DISAPPEARANCE by Philip Wylie. This is a work of social commentary, thinly disguised as fantasy. It's the story of a man and a woman, husband and wife, and what happens to them one very strange day. On that day, from the viewpoint of all the men in the world, all the women instantaneously disappear; and from the viewpoint of all the women, all the men vanish. The world splits into two parallel twins, one inhabited solely by females, the other solely by males. The Disappearance is a wry novel, and during the course of it the male protagonist (a philosopher by trade) advances a hypothesis about why the split occurred. It's a powerful bit of thinking, all the more so given that the novel was written in 1950, a time not widely praised for social enlightenment.
I don't want to give away any more than that. If you read it, you'll either get it in a rush, or you won't. When I finished my first reading of it (there've been many since), I wept noisily and long from a sense of tremendous release. If I were allowed only one, that's the book I'd take with me.
Let's say I could choose a half dozen. Hm. CITY by Clifford Simak, because it's a heartstring-tugger. Something or other by Loren Eiseley for its dark poetry of nature. THE ODYSSEY - A MODERN SEQUEL by Nikos Kazantzakis, because it would take me that long to do it justice. An excellent dictionary, so at least I could keep learning the language. THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES by Joseph Campbell, the best examination on the universality of myth ever written.
(By the way, I'm assuming that, as a co-creator, I can take along a set of ELFQUEST books. I'm still EQ's biggest fan. If I can't take those, hey, I'm not going!)
Music. That's a toughie. Music has played a large part in my life; in one way or another it's always had a hook in me. ***DIRTY GUILTY LITTLE SECRET WARNING*** When I was eight years old, my parents made me take accordion lessons. Every week for what seemed like forever, my mother (who also played the Stomach Steinway) would drive me to the studio. I hated it. But there was one thing that those lessons accomplished - something I didn't understand until much later in life. No, it wasn't the ability to belt out "Lady of Spain" at loud volume. It was an appreciation of the structure of music, of how a melodic line builds, of how harmony and counterpoint and meter all intertwine. That knowledge seeped in slowly, over years, until one day in college, long after I'd given up on the squeeze-box. I sat transfixed, listening to Beethoven's SEVENTH SYMPHONY, and suddenly realizing, "So that's how it works!" And today there's very little of music I don't like.
What single album would I take with me on this endless trip? That's a lot tougher a choice than for books, but I think the Beatles' ABBEY ROAD makes the top of the short list. It's a tour de force for the group, and though it's certainly not the first "symphonic" album to come along the pike, there's something about the way the trumpets in "Carry That Weight" reprise the theme from "You Never Give Me Your Money" that gives me chills every time I hear it.
Of course, if I took ABBEY ROAD, I'd have to leave behind Judee Sill's eponymous first album, a captivating suite of twangy ballads. It's another album (and there are very few) from which I like every single cut. And I'd have to do without Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in a rousing rendition of Moussorgsky's PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION (the climactic "Great Gate of Kiev" is guaranteed to raise goosebumps) or Erich Leinsdorf directing the Boston Symphony Orchestra into a controlled frenzy with Stravinsky's FIREBIRD SUITE. (Once upon a time, the Boston Museum of Science gave public demonstrations of man-made lightning using a humongous Tesla coil in their Theatre of Electricity, and they used this version of the FIREBIRD for the ending of the show. Now I know what it was like, being inside a towering thunderhead when Zeus was in charge of things.) I dunno. I think I'd make a strong argument for a half dozen at least.
Movies. Now there's a category that, had I been writing this not so long ago, wouldn't even have been under consideration. The gyrations I can remember going through in my attempts to record cherished old movies from the TV, finger poised on the pause button of the VCR (what remote control?) to cut out every commercial because the blank tape was twenty dollars a cassette. (Okay, okay, and I walked every day to and from school, too. In the rain and snow. Uphill. Both ways.)
I'm a sap, I admit it. If I had to choose one movie, it'd be THE PEOPLE, Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of the Zenna Henderson story. If you've ever seen it, you know what I mean when I say that those are ELFQUEST elves in there. The world of ELFQUEST is the world as we'd like it to be. THE PEOPLE comes pretty close to that dream; the elves are just bigger and have five fingers, is all.
But then I'd miss TWELVE ANGRY MEN (a dozen guys in a nearly bare room, and it's one of the most riveting films I've ever seen - now that's storytelling), and the Fleischer animated GULLIVER'S TRAVELS (me being sappy again), and Max Reinhardt's 1935 MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM With Jimmy Cagney and Mickey Rooney, and I can't forget THE WIZARD OF OZ ("...and your little dog, too!") or Alistair Sim in the 1951 THE CHRISTMAS CAROL, or...
Oh dear.
Life's too short to choose from a short menu. I guess I won't be settling in on any desert islands any time soon.
Richard A Pini