The December 2011 Mythaxis is out today.

With this issue, its tenth, Mythaxis has
moved into double figures. And a fine edition it is, too.

We have another great story, a haunting one at that, from Les Sklaroff.

Martin Clark contributes a sequel – “All Avenues Closed” to the story he
gave us in issue 9 – “Let Every Voice be Still”.

Matthew Kirshenblatt delivers an atmospheric little story based on a
missing chapter.

Tom Davies contributes a weird little nightmare.

My own modest effort about an unusual NIMBY situation now seems rather
bland in comparison to the fevered imaginations of our other authors.

The issue is rounded off with two unconnected and separately contributed
stories of personal development from Andrew Leon Hudson and Jonathan
Joseph. When you read them you will understand why I felt compelled to
head them with fragments from Hieronymous Bosch.

If you’re thirsty for more, don’t forget the Authors’ Links page.

First, we were struck by the delightful modern building .

And inside – I do not think I have ever seen a better display of an author’s work. This photo from the museum website does not do full justice to it. I wish I had taken some photos myself.

There is a twenty minute documentary narrated in various languages. A gallery of photographs covers the wall of the cinema room. There are letters to and from important admirers, including Albert Einstein, framed in perspex holders. All his major works are given an individual display. His modern Odyssey, to which I referred in my earlier post, took several decades to produce and is 33,333 lines in length, a fact I had missed, despite owning a copy. Obviously, there are manuscripts and first editions and translations of his fictional books, plays, travel journals, two children’s books (who knew?), as well as political and religious writings. I thought I had read a high proportion of his works. I was wrong.

One display case contains original model set designs, mainly for dramatic productions of Christ Recrucified. There are dvd trailers for the films made of his books. His table, writing materials, pipe, notebooks, spectacles and other personal items are preserved.

One display drawer contains a letter to the Church, complaining about his excommunication (he had a well-attended funeral, but is not buried in hallowed ground) and a reply from the Church stating that they have no record of it.

In short, it was a beautiful, modern example of how a museum should be. The atmosphere was excellent. If you read books and you are in Crete, visit it.

A footnote: The museum, in July 2011, was reported to be in financial trouble. It would be a disgrace to let it die. I would recommend to the museum that they set up a Paypal donations button on their website. The donations page requires a rather old-fashioned route to financial support that most of us web-based surfers would be unwilling to follow.

I think we have succeeded in displaying some new talent in writing, and I am constantly pleased at the standard of our contributors. The only area I think I would like to see in future issues is some sf and fantasy art. I make it clear on the site that we are open to graphic content, but, so far, only Liam Baldwin’s cartoons (good though they certainly are) have appeared.

I wasn’t able to get the book of Zorba immediately, but I managed to obtain a copy of Christ Recrucified (also known, in the USA, as “A Greek Passion”) at my local library, and promptly lost it on the Tube (London Underground) when I was just a few pages in. Not only was I bereft of my reading matter, but I had to pay Hampstead Public Library for the lost book, while they failed to replace it on their shelves, adding injury to insult.

In short order, I succeeded in obtaining a second-hand copy. This one. It was yet another financial sacrifice. Sharp eyes will perceive on the attached image the then very expensive price of six shillings and threepence (£0.31 in today’s money), exactly half of its list price of twelve shillings and sixpence. In those days, a new Penguin book would typically cost two shillings and sixpence, and I was earning just £37 a month at the time. It was well worth the price. Although Zorba the Greek is Kazantzakis’ most famous book, Christ Recrucified is, in my opinion, his best.

Christ Recrucified is set in a Greek community that is ruled over by a Turkish Agha – a sort of District Commissioner. Life and society is somewhat primitive, and you might imagine at first that the book is set in a past century, but it gradually emerges that the action takes place in Anatolia, near Smyrna, some time in the mid 1920s, after Turkey recaptured the region subsequent to the First World War. The villager are preparing to perform their passion play, an event that occurs every seven years.

The style is a little like that of a fairy tale. You are told what the characters do and say, but not a great deal about what they are thinking.

The Church comes out of it rather badly. I first read this book when I was twenty or so, and it may have influenced my view of the Christian message ever since. Less shocking than “The Last Tempation”, which got Kazantzakis excommunicated, it is nevertheless an indictment of organised religion (relieved partly by a “good” priest) in contrast to the basic Christian message.

I am reluctant, as ever, to write any spoilers. I recommend Christ Recrucified unreservedly. This is a towering work, unmistakably a masterpiece, and rewards a read. Perhaps happily, only a couple of attempts have been made to bring Christ Recrucified to the screen. One, a miniseries, has barely seen the light of day. The other, a French film, appeared at Cannes in 1957, entitled Celui qui doit mourir.

Nikos Kazantzakis was born in 1883 and died in 1957. He lived a very cosmopolitan life, spending relatively little time in Greece, though all his important work was written in modern Greek. His views on religion and politics led him into trouble from time to time. He was briefly a member of the Greek government in 1945. Kazantzakis was evidently a complex character and I’m prepared to guess he was as fiery in person as some of his fictional characters.

When I bought Zorba the Greek (some time after 1972) I had just seen the movie again, and I was impressed how well the movie stuck to the plot and spirit of the story, a rare attribute these days. Nevertheless, the book conveys so much more of the irrepressible Zorba, more acutely because he is viewed through the eyes of a young intellectual.

In addition to Christ Recrucified and Zorba the Greek, my library also contains the earlier work – Freedom or Death (originally Captain Michales, a more suitable title). Captain Michales is as unsympathetic a character as it has been my displeasure to read about for many a year. The narrative is heart-breaking. The novel as a whole concerns a short-lived rising of Cretans against their Turkish rulers in the late 19th century. The insurrection is just one of a number of bloody and unsuccessful Cretan insurrections that happened through the 19th century. Michales is represented as a sort of wild animal. His relationship with his wife and daughter could only be described as disfunctional. His stern, unmoving stance at all levels of his life attract admiration from his fellow Greeks, and grudging respect from the Turks. The whole novel is set against the life of Megalokastro (now Heraklion), with its characters a riot of contrasts and individualism, like a sort of Greek “Under Milk Wood”.

Finally, I should remark that Kazantzakis spent over a decade writing The Odyssey – a Modern Sequel. I have a copy of that somewhere, too, in a translation by Kimon Friar. I see that it is rather expensive these days. It picks up after Odysseus has dealt with Penelope’s suitors. Here are the first lines:

And when in his wide courtyards Odysseus had cut down
the insolent youths, he hung on high his sated bow
and strode to the warm bath to cleanse his bloodstained body.
Two slaves prepared his bath, but when they saw their lord
they shrieked with terror, for his loins and belly steamed
and thick black blood dripped down from both his murderous palms;
their copper jugs rolled clanging on the marble tiles.
The wandering man smiled gently in his thorny beard
and with his eyebrows signed the frightened girls to go.
For hours he washed himself in the warm water, his veins
spread out like rivers in his body, his loins cooled,
and his great mind was in the waters cleansed and calmed.
Then softly sweet with aromatic oils he smoothed
his long coarse hair, his body hardened by black brine,
till youthfulness awoke his wintry flesh with flowers.
On golden-studded nails in fragrant shadows flashed
row upon row the robes his faithful wife had woven,
adorned with hurrying winds and gods and swift triremes,
and stretching out a sunburnt hand, he quickly chose
the one most flaming, flung it flat across his back,
and steaming still, shot back the bolt and crossed the threshold.

Let me know if I’ve missed you out.

Latest issue – issue 8 of Mythaxis Magazine.

In particular, Les Sklaroff, lifelong writer of very short fiction, has supplied us with two unlikely tales, “Conspiracy Theory” and “Spawn” and he promises more delights in our next issue.

Martin Clark unleashes another excellent story – “The Great Divide” – a thriller within a fantasy within a mystery.

This issue’s featured science fiction author of old is Lester Linesmith. There is an ‘original’ story from Linesmith together with an incisive biography of this pillar of the pulp era by Liam Baldwin. Liam’s movie blog was recently highlighted by BBC Radio 4′s Film programme. (He specialises in what you might call B-movies, or C-movies, if there were such a category).

“The Prophets Speak”, from Andrew Critchley, carries a clever idea to an ingenious extreme.

The chilling “Outpatients”, from Jonathan Joseph, completes this issue. You will not readily forget the pictures he leaves in your minds.

And where would we be without a cartoon from Liam Baldwin? Answers on a postcard, please.

He writes with a dry humour and an impeccable command of language, apparently effortless, yet beautifully crafted, leading you into, often, punchlines loaded with bathos. His work takes its place in the canon of American essayists such as Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Stephen Leacock, S.J. Perelman and, most recently, P.J. O’Rourke.

The result is hilarious, and still fresh.

Excerpt from The Secret Life of James Thurber

I have only dipped here-and there into Salvador Dali’s “The
Secret Life of Salvador Dali” (with paintings by Salvador Dali
and photographs of Salvador Dali), because anyone afflicted
with what my grandmother’s sister Abigail called “the permanent
jumps” should do no more than skitter through such an auto-
biography, particularly in these melancholy times.
One does not have to skitter far before one comes upon some
vignette which gives the full shape and flavor of the book: the
youthful dreamer of dreams biting a sick bat or kissing a dead
horse, the slender stripling going into man’s estate with the high
hope and fond desire of one day eating a live but roasted turkey,
the sighing lover covering himself with goat dung and aspic
that he might give off the true and noble odor of the ram.
…..
Let me be the first to admit that the naked truth about me is
to the naked truth about Salvador Dali as an old ukulele in the
attic is to a piano in a tree, and I mean a piano with breasts. Senor
Dali has the jump on me from the beginning. He remembers and
describes in detail what it was like in the womb. My own earliest
memory is of accompanying my father to a polling booth in
Columbus, Ohio, where he voted for William McKinley.

Excerpt from The Night the Bed Fell

I suppose that the high-water mark of my youth in Columbus,
Ohio, was the night the bed fell on my father. It makes a better
recitation (unless, as some friends of mine have said, one has
heard it five or six times) than it does a piece of writing, for it
is almost necessary to throw furniture around, shake doors, and
bark like a dog, to lend the proper atmosphere and verisimilitude
to what is admittedly a somewhat incredible tale.

And from Fables for Our Time

The Little Girl and the Wolf
One afternoon a big wolf waited in a dark forest for a little girl
to come along carrying a basket of food to her grandmother.
Finally a little girl did come along and she was carrying a basket
of food. “Are you carrying that basket to your grandmother?” asked the
wolf. The little girl said yes, she was. So the wolf asked her
where her grandmother lived and the little girl told him and
he disappeared into the wood.

When the little girl opened the door of her grandmother’s house
she saw that there was somebody in bed with a nightcap and
nightgown on. She had approached no nearer than twenty-five
feet from the bed when she saw that it was not her grandmother
but the wolf, for even in a nightcap a wolf does not look any more
like your grandmother than the Metro-Goldwyn lion looks like
Calvin Coolidge. So the little girl took an automatic out of her basket
and shot the wolf dead.

(Moral: It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be.)

In addition, his cartoons are possibly even more famous than his writing.

Veterinarian’s Advice column

Q. Mr. Jennings bought this beast when it was a pup in
Montreal for a St. Bernard, but I don’t think it is. It’s grown
enormously and is stubborn about letting you have anything,
like the bath towel it has its paws on, and the hat, both of which
belong to Mr. Jennings. He got it that bowling ball to play with
but it doesn’t seem to like it. Mr. Jennings is greatly attached
to the creature.
MRS. FANNY EDWARDS JENNINGS

A. What you have is a bear. While it isn’t my bear, I should
recommend that you dispose of it. As these animals grow older
they get more and more adamant about letting you have any-
thing, until finally there might not be anything in the house
you could call your own—except possibly the bowling ball.
Zoos use bears. Mr. Jennings could visit it.

Thurber confessed that some of his weirder offerings were the result of mistakes, best described as follows by Thurber himself, “My drawings have been described as pre-intentionalist, meaning that they were finished before the ideas for them had occurred to me. I shall not argue the point.” The captions are often reminiscent of Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoons.

I found it hard to restrict the examples to these few. If you like them, and investigate further, you will find the quality is retained throughout his work. A good place to start is The Thurber Carnival.

Here is my old Penguin copy of The Thurber Carnival, bought in about 1959, second-hand from Bobby’s Bookshop, as indicated by the clipped corner of the cover (a primitive code used by Bobby, meaning: “It took ages to shift this book. We don’t intend to buy it back”). It was abridged in 1950, reprinted 1957.

It’s out of print, but obtainable. A few years ago, I thought I’d lost my paperback or loaned it out once too often, but I was able to buy an even older edition from eBay. This edition – 1945, reprinted 1950 – contains a number of extra items not in the Penguin.

Thurber has dropped out of sight since his death, a regrettable, though predictable, outcome that I am seeking to reverse with this review.

Two wonderful stories, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” and “The Cat-Bird Seat”, were made into films that were unrecognisable as the work of Thurber. If you think you know Thurber from either of these, you are wrong. You know Danny Kaye and Peter Sellers, who are both laudable in their way. But the films missed the point, which is Thurber’s dead-pan delivery of a really funny concept.

Mea Culpa. I finally got around to investigating this problem in detail today, only to find that I had made an error in my style sheet. IE and Firefox were navigating around my mistake, but Chrome was taking me at my word, and displaying the Courier font at an unreadably small size.

It’s fixed. You may have to do a Refresh if you’ve got Mythaxis in your cache.