In the October 26, 2006 number of the Cross Plains Review, there was an article about some recent visitors to the Howard Museum. At that time the World Fantasy Convention group hadn’t pulled into town yet, but the ladies of Project Pride had some exciting guests nonetheless. The article carried no byline, but unless I miss my guess the author must have been Cimmerian contributor Arlene Stephenson.

From Hollywood to Cross Plains

A routine request to show the Robert E. Howard Museum last week resulted in quite an exciting opportunity for local Project Pride members. Arriving at the Museum, they found Bruce Boxleitner and Rob Word wandering around the yard, thoroughly enjoying the peace and quiet. Boxleitner, popular Hollywood actor best known for his television roles and producer Word had flown in from California to participate in the Dean Smith Celebrity Rodeo in Abilene.

Both visitors were very knowledgeable of Howard and his writings and the history behind his life in Cross Plains. Boxleitner was especially interested in Howard’s western stories.

Boxleitner has played in numerous made for TV movies and is currently in the TV series, “Pandemic”. Some may remember him in the series “Scarecrow and Mrs. King” of some years back. One of his real ties to the weekend, however, was perhaps the fact that Dean Smith had played his stunt double in “How the West Was Won.” Boxleitner is married to Melissa Gilbert of the “Little House on the Prairie” fame.

Word is quite the all around over achiever — artist, composer and director. He has served as program consultant for a lot of the Encore network’s westerns, action, mystery and true channels. Most recently, he completed 65 half hours of a cartoon series called “Totally Tooned In.”

Another visitor drove from Florida just to visit the Museum and to attend a pulp fiction convention in the state. Wayne Lindsey has been a member of Project Pride for two years and was finally able to take the time away from his job of moving alligators for the Florida Parks and Wildlife to pursue his other dream of walking where his favorite author walked.

Project Pride received a delightful letter of appreciation for the hospitality extended to visitors, the Greens, from England. In summarizing their extended visit to the U.S., they commented that the three favorite places they had visited were the Grand Canyon, Green Mesa and Cross Plains. And they just couldn’t decide on their top choice!!

Life at the Howard House Museum stays interesting, to say the least.

I’ve known that Bruce was a Howard fan for awhile, ever since James Van Hise (editor of Sword & Fantasy) told me the story of when he interviewed the actor for Starlog or some such magazine and discovered that he owned the Wandering Star books. Boxleitner is best known these days for his starring role in the long-running sci-fi series Babylon 5, but those of us who grew up watching early 80s cable television also remember him fondly from his role in Tron.

While at the World Fantasy Convention a few weeks ago, one of the things I hammered home to non-believers was the breadth and depth of Howard’s fan base worldwide, how his influence was always popping up in the strangest places. Boxleitner is merely the latest in this trend. The fact that he went out of his way to visit Cross Plains all the way from Abilene to satisfy his Howardian curiosity speaks volumes. It’s nice to know that Howard has friends in Hollywood — it is to be hoped that someday this affection will translate into some good Howardian adaptations of his westerns and other stories.

Mark’s long-awaited biography of Robert E. Howard debuted to much fanfare at the World Fantasy Convention, and now it is available for purchase at Amazon.com and other fine bookstores. If you are also planning on buying the new Del Rey Kull volume (and come on, who isn’t?) you can buy both together at Amazon and save some dough.

As it turns out, Blood and Thunder isn’t 400 pages as advertised at Amazon and elsewhere, but only 254. Still, it is chock full of things Howard fans have never seen before. Never-before-seen photos of Hester Howard and Cross Plains, excerpts from the Cross Plains newspaper during Howard’s time, lots of information about the oil booms, Texas history, and the art of the tall tale. The book thankfully has an index, too.

Judging from the comments of various people who have read it, reactions have been largely positive. Even de Camp friend Darrell Schweitzer admitted to me on the last day of the Con that, despite some small errors of fact regarding pulps and such, he found the book an enjoyable and informative read and thought that it brought credit to Howard and the field of Howard studies. The introduction by Joe Lansdale, unlike the wretched Michael Moorcock foreword for the embarrassing Hippocampus REH critical anthology, is appropriately learned and reverent.

At a cost of only $10.85 at Amazon, the first biography on Howard in twenty years deserves to be on every Howard fan’s bookshelf. And with Christmas coming up, it’s a great and inexpensive gift for any Howard fans you may know who might otherwise not know about it. Hopefully this will be the start of a series of biographical treatments of Howard — Lord knows his life was rich and complex enough to support many different interpretations and degrees of focus.

One of the big announcements at the World Fantasy Convention was the formation of a new organization called The REH Foundation, which seems to be Paradox Entertainment’s attempt to foster a connection with fans and do its part to perpetuate the original Howard work that fuels their licenses and various multimedia projects.

Among the Foundation’s stated goals is establishing an ambitious publishing schedule designed to get all of Howard’s work in print, especially the never-published material such as the Complete Letters and poems (the first volumes will be appearing early next year). In addition, there will be a concerted effort to make typescripts and other research materials available to scholars. Apparently the Foundation is also going to help support Howard Days in Cross Plains, and perhaps establish grants or awards to foster the study of Howard by scholars and the emulation and perpetuation of Howard’s style and legacy among modern writers.

If all this works, it should be a great boon to the field. Much will depend on cooperation and organization, things that aren’t always evident among Howard fans. And as we all know, previous Howard initiatives have had a history of going belly-up at inopportune times. Over the years changes in ownership and in the book market have grounded one set of good intentions after another. In any case, Howard fandom and scholarship and publishing seems to be growing by leaps and bounds every year. All of this activity can only be good for REH.

Back from Austin, where after the World Fantasy Convention I stayed an extra few days and did some exploring through the L. Sprague de Camp papers at the Harry Ransom Center. I only got through a single box of correspondence, but what I saw convinced me that I’ll have to set aside a few weeks sometime to go through far more of it. Lots of interesting things to be gleaned in those files, much of it never revealed before in any venue of which I am aware. Some of the best Howard information can sometimes be found in letters that on the surface have no Howard content at all.

I caught a cold in Austin due to lack of sleep, and between that and fighting to get the October issue shipped the last few days have been busy. And after that there is no rest for the wicked: as soon as October ships it’s time to prepare the November issue with all of the World Fantasy Convention coverage. Lots of interesting things happened down there, enough to fill as many pages as the Howard Days trip report usually does.

Unfortunately TC failed in its quest to take home a trophy at the awards, but the experience of being nominated and performing readings and panels at the convention was a lot of fun. I was surprised at how many otherwise knowledgeable fantasy fans knew next to nothing about Howard, but heartened at how many wanted to learn more. There definitely is a prejudice against Howard among certain factions of the Old Guard of fantasy/sci-fi, a cliquish group who fancies themselves as intellectual and progressive, people far above slumming with pulp authors. But I got the feeling that, in addition to being out of touch, those people are fading from the scene just a bit more with each passing year, and that the younger generation is far more amendable to listing Howard among the giants of fantasy. I left feeling very optimistic about Howard’s long-term prospects among the movers and shakers of the fantasy publishing world.

Only two more issues (plus the Awards and Index) to go, and the centennial volume of The Cimmerian will be complete. The year has been everything I thought it would be, both in terms of work and of fun.

One of the greatest film composers of all time has been felled by cancer. Basil Poledouris (1945-2006) leaves us with some of the most stirring and evocative music ever written for the screen, including Conan the Barbarian, Lonesome Dove, The Hunt for Red October, Robocop, The Blue Lagoon, Free Willy, Farewell to the King, Quigley Down Under, Cherry 2000, and Flesh and Blood. He specialized in crafting A-list music for B and C-list movies, and he did most of the scores for one of the favorites of this blog, John Milius. Friends of mine in the industry and out have always reported how generous he was with time, advice, and encouragement, and his interviews in print and on DVDs were always learned and perceptive. In a town that too often lives up to the appellation “Hollyweird,” Poledouris was one of the good guys. The age of sixty-one was way too early to leave us, and he will be missed by all who value film music at its best.

Conan the Barbarian is a film that elicits varied reactions from fans of Robert E. Howard, but I think it is indisputable that the film’s soundtrack is one of the best ever written, with an influence among film composers rivaling the influence of Frazetta on art. Its main theme is instantly recognizable and has been co-opted for all manner of people and events. What is less appreciated is how lush and romantic and nuanced the score is, with many quiet themes that sweep you away as if on a cold wind through a lost age. Poledouris recorded the score in Italy and modified the orchestra with a variety of barbaric-sounding instruments and percussion, which lends the music a tinge of antiquity and exoticness that never fails to thrill me. Many of Poledouris’ lesser-known scores build on the achievement of Conan the Barbarian and offer potent treasures for lovers of such music. Farewell to the King and Flesh and Blood especially owe a lot to the earlier score.

Poledouris’ commentary on the Conan the Barbarian DVD is one of the high points of the disc, and he avoids all of the unseriousness and misinformation that mars too much of the contributions of Milius and Schwarzenegger. He has also been featured in fascinating interviews in publications like Film Score Monthly. I always thought Poledouris deserved far better than the career he had, as brilliant as that career was. Many of his very best scores were for movies that barely rose above the level of dreck, and I wonder what he would have done with some of the non-action blockbusters of the eighties and nineties, the kind of films that too often went to lesser composers secure in their blandness. The few times he was able to cut loose in a film of real quality, such as Lonesome Dove, he was astounding (for that one he won a well-deserved Emmy).

It is sad that there will be no more music coming from such a talent, but thankfully every year more of his older work is released for us to savor. Basil Poledouris was a giant in the field, and his legacy will not soon be forgotten.

It’s all printed and ready to go, but it’s looking as if I won’t have the time to pack and ship them before my flight to the World Fantasy Convention on Tuesday. Lots of goodies to look forward to, however — head on over to the Issues for Sale page and click on the October link to read all about it and savor some excerpts.

Speaking of the Con, those of you unable to go will get complete coverage of the festivities in our November issue, which I’ll start working on as soon as I get back. Should be a lot of fun, with lots of Howard fans present, a trip to Cross Plains, tons of late-night conversation, and a chance for The Cimmerian to take home a World Fantasy Award. I wish I could live-blog direct from the Con, but I’m not quite setup to do that yet. Maybe next year.

Since I’ll be at the Con, don’t be surprised if e-mails and orders go unanswered for the next week or so. The Awards issue is still being put together, but it will be out soon and it’s looking like a real fun read. If you are one of the people still waiting for your article to get through the editing gauntlet (or for a cheque and contract to make its way into your mailbox) thank you for your patience, I’ll be getting caught up on all of that when I return.

Hopefully after this arduous year is over, I’ll be able to get firmly back on top of things again. Coming out once a month has been a thrilling experience, and I’m sure later I will look back on it fondly, but right now a part of me is praying for this year to finally be over. When I glance back through all of the 2006 issues and review how much great stuff has appeared, I find it rather astounding that all of that was edited and published in just a few short months. Wow.

Guest blogger Morgan Holmes is back with a gripe about the gross misuse of the term “scholar” in weird fiction studies of late.

MORGAN HOLMES: I went to Bill Thom’s Coming Attractions site, a Friday-night ritual to see what was new. Scrolling down, this jumped out at me:

RIGHT HAND OF DOOM: A CRITICAL STUDY OF MICHAEL MIGNOLA’S “HELLBOY” is a book of essays & articles to help educate fans and scholars of Michael Mignola’s HELLBOY (TM). It focuses on the narrative & sequential art of the comic book series. It is a homage [sic] to the artist’s talents and a way to establish a bridge between comic books and academe. Collected and Edited by Benjamin Szumskyj (the well-known Robert E. Howard scholar).

Ben Szumskyj is a character known to various degrees by those who are members of the rehinnercircle group at Yahoo! or who buy small press publications such as REH: Two-Gun Raconteur. To call him a scholar is presumptuous. Let’s examine his body of work.

First, most of Ben Szumskyj’s work has appeared in amateur press associations such as his heroic fantasy apa, the Esoteric Order of Dagon, and REHupa. Amateur press associations have small memberships which receive the publications. Being distributed to 30 or maybe 40 people does not constitute being “well-known.” Ben Szumskyj or Ben Zoom as he is sometimes known, was an intermittent member of REHupa from October 2000 to August 2004. Going through these zines, a reader gets a building sense of morbid curiosity as to what Szumskyj would produce next. The contents can be broken down into two categories: surveys of Robert E. Howard fiction and the most incredibly strange essays possibly ever written about REH that can be described as pretentious and funny.

The first fanzine in October 2000 was an introductory effort with the statement that “All fantasy is born from reality.” His second fanzine has an apology for an outburst stating: “I am not ‘illiterate’ or a bad speller.” There is also some writing in cyrillic script. Is English his native language?

February 2001 has this quote: “Read the story that embraced you. Shed a tear if you will, but respect and feel for a man, a misunderstood man, who has. . .only after many years, will now begin and see his name and writings reflect the eternal justice it has long deserved.”

October 2001 brought his “Fear Dunn: Dispelling the Racist Myth.” December 2001 contained a survey of REH’s heroic fantasy characters. April 2002 had a comparison of H. P. Lovecraft’s “Beast in the Cave” and Robert E. Howard’s “Spear and Fang.” August 2002 was another survey of the “Faring Town” stories. October 2002 contained a comparison of Robert E. Howard and J. R. R. Tolkien with this observation:

Although there are similarities, whether for the sake of juxtaposition or coincidences worth noting, they are not to be classed as the same type of author, whether by way of method, style, genre of direction. . .Middle Earth in its scale and background, is a lot like Hyboria but perhaps not as detailed by the author and a task in which scholars have had to expand on. Whether such an addition would have captured the already recognized fan base, we will never know, but is something that grieves fans that wish to fall hopelessly in love with Tolkien’s creations and worlds, but are halted as a result of lost fulfillment and expectations.

In REHupa 183, October 2003 we get the first of the classic pretentious essays: “WHEN LIFE IMITATES ART: Bakhtin’s Concept of the Dialogic Formation of the Subject in Relation to Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Tell Tale Heart’.” Perhaps Szumskyj was taking some college course on literary criticism but this is the first of several examinations that leave you wondering, “What color is the sky where this guy lives?”

February 2004 brought “Brothers of the Night: A Cultural Materialistic Study of Shakespeare’s ‘Prince of Morocco’ and Robert E. Howard’s ‘Jacob’.” This was a comparison of The Merchant of Venice and “Pigeons From Hell.” I kid you not.

April 2004 contained “Cimmerian Gloves: A Study of Robert E. Howard’s Ace Jessel from the Ringside,” a survey of a minor boxing series. This quote is a keeper: “I believe that texts like these, in which Howard portrays coloured folk in a positive and strong role, shows that this so called ‘racist’ was a man trying to be free and express his deepest beliefs.”

Szumskyj’s “The Clean Shaven Barbarian: A Masculine Reading of ‘The Gold and the Grey'” may be his masterpiece of wrongfully attempted criticism resulting in high weirdness. The essay is an examination of phallic imagery in the Robert E. Howard poem. You can’t make this stuff up. “Brothers of the Night” was actually reprinted in REH: Two-Gun Raconteur.

Two-Gun Bob: A Centennial Study of Robert E. Howard is a book due out from Hippocampus Press and edited by Ben Szumskyj. The book will contain an introduction by him and also his “Cimmerian Gloves” essay.

Is Ben Szumskyj a Robert E. Howard scholar? A scholar is a learned person or one who has advanced training in literature, the arts, etc. These qualities are not present here. We have an almost equal amount of surveys and outlandish attempts at criticism and comparisons to other authors. Reading over these, one thought that came into my mind was Szumskyj actually hates Robert E. Howard’s fiction and his essays are a conspiracy to heap derision and contempt on REH. The word scholar is a word that should not be used to describe Ben Szumskyj.

When I announced the September issue of TC a few weeks ago, I plum forgot to alert you all to another item that appeared at the same time. The third volume of The Cimmerian Library is now available, one that begins a branching out for this series of books, drifting from Robert E. Howard into related subjects.

Arkham House expert John Haefele has given us the first of what will be many chapbooks dealing with the publishing achievement of August Derleth. The tome is titled A Bibliography of Books and Articles Written By August W. Derleth, Concerning Derleth and The Weird Tale and Arkham House, and it forms the most complete bibliographical record ever compiled about Derleth on these subjects. The book contains a wealth of information on Robert E. Howard and dozens of related authors, listing where you can find Derleth discussing each. Also included is an excellent introduction by Haefele detailing the efforts various people have made to compile this information in the past, a story which in itself is a real education for the weird fiction fan.

At $8 the book is a steal, and as the print run on Cimmerian Library editions is only 100 individually-numbered copies, best snap one up before they disappear forever. Haefele promises more booklets related to Derleth and Arkham House, so this will eventually be a part of a series that will form a welcome subset of The Cimmerian Library, filling the gap in weird fiction scholarship left by the decline of Necronomicon Press over the last few years.

So head on over to the Order Page to get this and the other volumes in this series. More are being planned as you read this — stay tuned to this blog for all the details.

Manohla Dargis, formerly of the Los Angeles Times and now of the New York Times, can be an irritating film critic. But today, writing about Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers, she gets one as right as it is possible to get:

One view of Mr. Eastwood is that he has mellowed with age, or at least begun to take serious measure of the violence that has been an animating force in many of his films. In truth, the critical establishment caught up with the director, who for decades has been building a fascinating body of work that considers annihilating violence as a condition of the American character, not an aberration.

Annihilating violence as a condition of the American character; Dargis is of course paraphrasing D.H. Lawrence’s most famous epigram from Studies in Classic American Literature, the one that begins “The essential American soul…” Eastwood’s career has been an enactment of that Lawrentian insight ever since No Name rode into the bordertown of San Miguel on his mule, and Iwo Jima, the subject of Flags of Our Fathers and the inspiration, along with the even ghastlier charnelhouse Okinawa, for so much of postwar science fiction’s “bug hunt” iconography, is an appropriate coda, or near-coda, to that career.

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Longtime REHupan and TC contributor J.D. Charles and I could not be farther apart on various political, literary, and cultural issues if one of us resided in the Andromeda Galaxy. That having been said, apparently we’re both Ian Fleming fans as well as REH aficionados, and today Big Jim posted about how the two writers have fared cinematically at rehinnercircle:

Anybody who gripes about the Millius [sic] Conan flick really needs to sit down and read one of the classic Fleming Bond yarns then watch the movie “adaptation” featuring Connery or Moore. You will get down on your knees and thank CROM that Conan never had to undergo such drastic alteration.

In a word, no. Nein. Nyet. De gustibus non disputandem est — except in those emergencies where the “disputandem” part becomes unavoidable in the face of rampant absurdity. The Roger Moore Bond films are what they are (with the commendable exception of 1981’s For Your Eyes Only, into which screenwriters Richard Maibaum and Michael Wilson worked some relict Fleming-derived scenes), but Big Jim also mentions the Sean Connery era. From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, and Thunderball are, like diamonds, forever — launchpads for the modern action film, bravura exercises that imprinted themselves on Sixties popular culture almost as much as did the Beatles. More pertinently, the original creative team of Maibaum, Terence Young (or Guy Hamilton), Peter Hunt, Ken Adam, John Barry, and Connery himself succeeded brilliantly in adapting Fleming’s novels, whereas Milius couldn’t even be bothered to try with Howard’s Conan stories. Goldfinger and Thunderball are recognizable versions of the source material (note that Auric’s masterplan for the raid on Fort Knox is more ingenious and less logistically challenged in the movie than in the novel); Conan the Barbarian is an adaptation of nothing save a bit of “The Thing in the Crypt,” out-of-context signature moments from “A Witch Shall Be Born” and “Queen of the Black Coast,” and Milius’ Zen-surfing superiority complex. Kurosawa for retards. Karl Edward Wagner, an author Big Jim is on record as respecting, put it best: Li’l Abner versus the Moonies.

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