{"id":60999,"date":"2013-10-08T11:15:41","date_gmt":"2013-10-08T15:15:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=60999"},"modified":"2013-10-08T11:35:22","modified_gmt":"2013-10-08T15:35:22","slug":"turkey-in-a-suitcase","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/10\/08\/turkey-in-a-suitcase\/","title":{"rendered":"Turkey in a Suitcase"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Malzberg-Paris-Review\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

\u201cTo define terms at the outset, this will not be a novel so much as a series of notes toward one. Nevertheless pay attention.\u201d \u2014Barry N. Malzberg, Galaxies<\/i>, 1975<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I began vomiting somewhere over Turkmenistan. But it was not until the second day on the ground in Benares that I became desperately ill, losing a quarter of a pound an hour every hour for forty hours. \u201cI figured you would be all right in the end,\u201d Jamie told me after the ordeal was over. \u201cThen again, I have seen patients die, and that is more or less what it looks like.\u201d<\/p>\n

From my India notebook:<\/p>\n

\n

A pair of mouse turds on the table. Amazing to think that I ever planned to write about this place. Why not spend ten years becoming better acquainted with my own country. And spend more time with S, you fool, what is it you think life is about. The river priest, dressed in brilliant orange, gives me his blessing, custom-tailoring my reincarnation: \u201cNot come back as parrot, not come back as mosquito, not come back as dog.\u201d Malzberg for TPR: The Falling Astronauts<\/em>, In the Enclosure<\/em>, his Kennedy books, Galaxies<\/em>. Just because I like it doesn\u2019t mean it isn\u2019t crap.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That\u2019s how much I wanted to write my Malzberg thing. And I would have done it, too, if I had lived.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/center><\/p>\n

I first encountered Barry N. Malzberg in my twenties during a confused summer spent with David Pringle\u2019s Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels<\/i>. Malzberg\u2019s Galaxies<\/i> was number seventy-seven.<\/p>\n

Malzberg\u2014author of Horizontal Woman<\/i> and The Masochist<\/i> and Oracle of the Thousand Hands<\/i>and Screen<\/i> and In My Parents\u2019 Bedroom<\/i> and many other books; aka K.\u2009M. O\u2019Donnell, author of Final War<\/i>, Universe Day<\/i>, Gather in the Hall of the Planets<\/i>, and so on; aka Howard Lee, who wrote novelizations of the 1970s television series Kung Fu<\/i>, starring David Carradine; aka Mike Barry, author of Night Raider<\/i>, Bay Prowler<\/i>, Desert Stalker<\/i>, Boston Avenger<\/i>, etc.; aka Eliot B. Reston, author of The Womanizer<\/i>; aka Claudine Dumas, author of Diary of a Parisian Chambermaid<\/i>; aka Mel Johnson, writer of I, Lesbian<\/i> and Instant Sex<\/i> and Nympho Nurse<\/i> and The Sadist<\/i> and Do It to Me<\/i>\u2014was unquestionably a hack, God knows. He knew it, too. But what a workhorse! <\/p>\n

His science-fiction novels tend to be assembled from a store of repetitive raw materials: insane astronauts, the Kennedy assassination, sexual dysfunction, and omni-explanatory figures like Christ, the prophet Jonah, and Freud. But these books are really about writing<\/i>: he begins to tell a story, then wrong-foots the reader by substituting the difficulty of telling<\/i> for the tale.<\/p>\n

\n

The novel itself cannot be written, at least by this writer, nor can it be encompassed by any techniques currently available, because it partakes of its time and that time is of the fortieth century \u2026 these fifty-five thousand words are little more than a set of constructions toward a construction even less substantial. \u2014Galaxies<\/i><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

You get the ur-modernist gravitas of Hofmannsthal\u2019s 1902 Lord Chandos Letter<\/i> (\u201cMy case, in short, is this: I have lost completely the ability to think or to speak of anything coherently \u2026 Once again words desert me. For it is, indeed, something entirely unnamed, even barely namable,\u201d etc.) blended with the luxuriance of self-loathing, of self-consciousness: a vortex of self. Imagine a twelve-volume novel called Why I Can\u2019t Write<\/i>, and you\u2019ll get the picture. It is a revolting trick, and, during my summer of reading Malzberg, I wanted to know how to do it.<\/p>\n

When you read enough of a guy like this, you learn a few things. He\u2019s small enough to walk around, and he has any number of habits. You learn that he never misses a chance to repeat the idea of falling<\/i>: \u201cBefore I have even fallen, I am falling; it is as if death catches me twice, first by intimation and then at the root\u201d; \u201cAnd fell, fell, into the absorbing blackness, curiosity his only emotion as he tumbled into the swelter of the night, the screams and squeals of his wife punctuating the heave and billow of his mortality\u201d; \u201cIt is strange and complex, complex and strange and my orgasm is like a giant bird torn wing to wing by rifle fire, falling, falling, in the hot drenched sun of that damned Southwestern city.\u201d<\/p>\n

You learn that he likes the idea of notes<\/i>, having written stories called \u201cNotes Just Prior to the Fall\u201d and \u201cNotes for a Novel About the First Ship Ever to Venus\u201d and \u201cSome Notes Toward a Useable Past.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

Evans returns to his various tasks in confinement: he must continue his notes toward the novel he will write. \u2014Beyond Apollo<\/i>, 1972<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

J.\u2009G. Ballard, a colleague of Malzberg\u2019s in the this-isn\u2019t-exactly-science-fiction school, had by 1967 published his own \u201cNotes Toward a Mental Breakdown,\u201d included in The Atrocity Exhibition<\/em> (1970). Maybe notes<\/em> or notes toward<\/em> in the science-fictional seventies was something like the late fifties trend of jazz records calling themselves portraits<\/em>: Adderley\u2019s 1958 Portrait of Cannonball<\/em>, or the Oscar Peterson Trio\u2019s A Jazz Portrait of Frank Sinatra<\/em> (1959), or Bill Evans\u2019s Portrait in Jazz<\/em> (1960). Serious people in those years did not do anything so commonplace as playing music<\/em> or writing<\/em>; serious people made portraits<\/em>, or notes toward<\/em>.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/center><\/p>\n
\n

\u201cMy God, I\u2019m blind, I can\u2019t see anything!\u201d Allen had screamed in space and the sound, tinny through the transmission, had afflicted Martin and all the others who were listening because Allen was talking to the part in themselves they had always suspected. \u201cI\u2019m going crazy, I\u2019m going blind!\u201d Allen had shouted, \u201cyou sons of bitches, I can\u2019t stand this anymore!\u201d but the center had alertly cut the transmission, already anticipating while Allen had screamed, \u201cGet me back to that fucking ship! Oh mother, get me out of this! There\u2019s nothing out here at all!\u201d \u2014The Falling Astronauts<\/em>, 1971<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In 1968, Apollo 8 <\/em>orbited the moon. In 1969, Apollo 10<\/em> brought the module close to the lunar surface; Apollo 11<\/em> and Apollo 12 <\/em>touched down that same year. In 1970, Apollo 13 <\/em>famously did not land. Apollo 14<\/em> and Apollo 15<\/em> landed in 1971, the year of Barry Malzberg\u2019s novel The Falling Astronauts<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Apollo 16<\/em> and Apollo 17<\/em> landed in 1972, the year of Malzberg\u2019s Beyond Apollo<\/em>, winner of the inaugural John W. Campbell Award for best science fiction novel.<\/p>\n

Astronaut psychosis was in the pop-cultural atmosphere of the seventies: 1969 saw David Bowie\u2019s \u201cSpace Oddity\u201d (\u201cGround control to Major Tom, your circuit\u2019s dead, there\u2019s something wrong\u201d), and 1972 gave us Elton John\u2019s \u201cRocket Man\u201d (\u201cI miss the earth so much, I miss my wife, it\u2019s lonely out in space \u2026 I\u2019m not the man they think I am\u201d). Then, too, there was the less well-known Van Der Graaf Generator\u2019s \u201cPioneers Over C,\u201d from the 1970 album H to He, Who Am the Only One<\/em>: \u201cI\u2019m falling down into sky, into earth \u2026 it is so dark around \u2026 I am the one you fear, I am the lost one, I am the one who pressed through space, or stayed where I was, or didn\u2019t exist in the first place.\u201d<\/p>\n

The epigraph to Malzberg\u2019s 1971 novel The Falling Astronauts<\/em> purports to be a quote from 1959 Project Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter (\u201cGet me out of here. Get me out of here!\u201d), who later turns up in another novel, Galaxies<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\n

Carpenter had screamed in the capsule on the seas, begging for release, convinced that they would never come; Carpenter had in fact forced the mission to early conclusion because he could not stand the interior of the capsule. White had panicked at the end of the rope when he had lost the ship and had begun to sob in space. \u2014The Falling Astronauts<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

It was not casual that our astronauts returned to give us their vision of otherworldliness, not casual that they staggered in their thick landing gear as they came under the salute on board, not casual that White screamed on his space walk and begged to return to the capsule or Carpenter shouted get me out of here<\/em>! \u2014Galaxies<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Or, as the poster for Alien<\/em> had it in 1979, \u201cIn space no one can hear you scream.\u201d<\/p>\n

Or, as Captain Cutshaw said in William Peter Blatty\u2019s film The Ninth Configuration<\/em>, \u201cThe man in the moon tried to fuck my sister.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

I tried, sir. You see the stars. So cold. So far. And so very lonely. I was so lonely. All that space. Just empty space. And so far from home. I\u2019ve circled round and round this house, orbit after orbit. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like never to stop and circle alone up there, forever. And what if I got there, got to the moon, and couldn\u2019t get back? Sure, everyone dies. But I\u2019m afraid to die alone, so far from home. And there\u2019d be no God. And that\u2019s really, really alone.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Or, as Pascal had written long before: \u201cThe eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread \u2026 This is what I see and what troubles me. I look around in every direction and all I see is darkness.\u201d<\/p>\n

* * *<\/center><\/p>\n

Beyond Apollo<\/em>, 1972. Astronaut Harry M. Evans narrates this novel from inside the asylum where he has been held since his return from the Venus expedition. It was a two-man mission, and Evans has, unobserved in space, somehow killed the captain and disposed of his body by letting it fall into the sun (unless it was not a two-man mission, and Evans himself is Captain Jack Josephson\u2014or was it Joseph Jackson?). Evans flashes back to his excruciating astronaut training, to his sexual problems with his wife, to conversations with the dead captain; he hallucinates conversations with the astronauts of an earlier failed Mars mission called Kennedy II<\/em>. Pretending to resolve to come clean at last, Evans ends by redoubling his faith in the purity of his nervous breakdown and tells his supervising psychiatrist the same riddles with which he began.<\/p>\n

Let me see if I\u2019ve got this straight, Colonel Evans: in Beyond Apollo<\/em>, you and the captain, a powerful paternal supervisory figure, were approaching the planet Venus, named for the goddess of beauty and erotic love, when you killed the captain, or possibly became him, or had been him all along. Is that correct?\u2014I\u2019m going to be honest with you: I think I might have heard this one before.<\/p>\n

Oedipus Rex<\/em>: \u201cIt was Apollo, friends, Apollo, who brought to fulfillment all my sufferings. But the hand that struck my eyes was mine and mine alone.\u201d<\/p>\n

* * *<\/center><\/p>\n

Malzberg\u2019s overt concerns in his astronaut novels of the 1970s are twofold: the effect of mass mechanization on humankind, and the question of the difficulty of telling<\/em>.<\/p>\n

These paranoid involutions are knock-off Dostoevsky: fevered rewritings of 1864\u2019s Notes from Underground<\/em>, that cautionary tale so often mistaken for a manual of style. If it\u2019s good Dostoevsky you shouldn\u2019t mix it and if it\u2019s bad Dostoevsky you shouldn\u2019t drink it, I know, what can I tell you, I was thirsty.<\/p>\n

\n

Men still are men and not the keys of a piano \u2026 the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key! \u2014Notes from Underground<\/em>, 1864<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

In none of it, when the truth is finally known, was there anything personal. None of it was ever personal at all: it was merely a question of machinery, intersection, causality, orbits. \u2014Beyond Apollo<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

\u201cSomebody should tell the truth. Just once. Somebody should really get a look into the way this thing works, because it just isn\u2019t all machinery, you know. There\u2019s got to be a guy inside all of this stuff, making it work.\u201d \u2014The Falling Astronauts<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In The Frogs<\/em>, Aristophanes has Aeschylus mock Euripides by showing how the iambics of his prologues are more alike than he might suspect, and tend to be rhythmically completable with the phrase \u201clost his oilcan.\u201d Malzberg, if you read more than one of his books, is also revealed as semimechanized:<\/p>\n

\n

I have a wife. Evans has a wife. Evans and I are the same person \u2026 I have a disassociation reaction. Evans has a disassociation reaction. Each of us has a disassociation reaction. \u2014Beyond Apollo<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

I am a tortured man. Monaghan is a tortured man. \u2014Revelations<\/em>, 1972<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

I sigh; Evans sighs. \u2014Beyond Apollo<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

Maybe they think he is Busby. Maybe he is Busby. \u2014The Falling Astronauts<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

\u201cCall it disassociation if you want but what Busby does is a matter of total indifference to me. I feel outside of it, see? It\u2019s not me up there; it\u2019s him.\u201d \u2014The Falling Astronauts<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

\u201cI do not understand. Evans does not understand.\u201d \u2014Beyond Apollo<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

\u201cStop referring to yourself in the third person. That\u2019s disassociation reaction.\u201d \u2014Revelations<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

When you admire an artist, you dignify his limits by calling them a style: Bruckner always sounds like Bruckner, but you won\u2019t hear me complaining. If you don\u2019t care for a style, you can define its limits, often pushed against, as tics, medicalizing them as spasms; the assumption is that no one would behave in such a way voluntarily. Style is demoted to symptom, or to mere reflex action.<\/p>\n

It is, I think, what Auden meant when he said in 1940 that \u201cwithout an adequate and conscious metaphysics in the background, art\u2019s imitation of life inevitably becomes, either a photostatic copy of the accidental details of life without pattern or significance, or a personal allegory of the artist\u2019s individual dementia, of interest primarily to the psychologist and the historian.\u201d<\/p>\n

* * *<\/center><\/p>\n
\n

I remember that, when a child, I pulled flowers to pieces to see how the leaves were inserted into the calyx, or even plucked birds to observe how the feathers were inserted into the wings. \u2014Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit<\/em>, 1811<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Overinterpretation is the rather frantic desire to be as close as possible. \u2014Adam Phillips, Missing Out<\/em>, 2012<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

I loved the Captain in my own way, although I knew that he was insane, the poor bastard. \u2014Beyond Apollo<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I love Barry Malzberg, in my own way. Anyone can see that. I have read many of his novels, several of them more than once, in order to construct the authority I felt I needed to make these remarks. If that isn\u2019t love\u2014or is it only obsession: I read Beyond Apollo<\/em> seven times, and retyped almost all of it to get it into my working memory before a friend convinced me that would not be necessary.<\/p>\n

At one point I wondered if I were writing an entire book about Barry Malzberg. \u201cIn literature, as in love,\u201d said Andr\u00e9 Maurois, \u201cwe are astonished at what is chosen by others\u201d; and, I might add, we are also astonished at our own choices. What would you do if you were aboard the train before you discovered a turkey in your suitcase? Did you pack your luggage yourself? No, officer, I did not. Then it\u2019s not your fault if there\u2019s a turkey in your suitcase. That\u2019s what\u2019s in your suitcase. You carry it to the end of the line.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/center><\/p>\n

An archaeological aside. At this point in a previous draft, there followed a section on Malzberg\u2019s self-enabling insistence on the difficulty of telling<\/em>: some three thousand words on H.\u2009P. Lovecraft, F.\u2009R. Leavis, and Wallace Stevens. And Malzberg, let\u2019s not forget Malzberg.<\/p>\n

Malzberg, from Galaxies<\/em>: \u201cLet it be made clear again; this is not a novel but merely a set of notes for one. The novel itself remains unutterably beyond our time and hence outside of the devices of fiction \u2026 These notes are surely as close to the narrative as anyone of this time can get, because the novel cannot be written for almost two thousand years.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lovecraft: \u201cThe Thing can not be described,\u201d \u201cto convey any idea of these monstrosities is impossible,\u201d \u201cAnd then there came to me the crowning horror of all\u2014the unbelievable, unthinkable, almost unmentionable thing,\u201d \u201cit\u2019s too utterly beyond thought\u2014I dare not tell you\u2014no man could know it and live,\u201d \u201cwould not such a vaporous terror constitute in all loathsome truth the exquisitely, the shriekingly unnamable?\u201d<\/p>\n

Leavis: Conrad \u201cfeels that there is, or ought to be, some horror, some significance that he has yet to bring out. So we have an adjectival and worse than supererogatory insistence on \u2018unspeakable rites,\u2019 \u2018unspeakable secrets,\u2019 \u2018monstrous passions,\u2019 \u2018inconceivable mystery,\u2019 and so on \u2026 a \u2018significance\u2019 that is merely an emotional insistence on the presence of what he can\u2019t produce. The insistence betrays the absence, the willed \u2018intensity\u2019 the nullity. He is intent on making a virtue out of not knowing what he means.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stevens on Phoebus Apollo, in 1942\u2019s \u201cNotes Toward a Supreme Fiction\u201d:<\/p>\n

\n

Phoebus was
A name for something that never could be named.
There was a project for the sun and is.<\/p>\n

There is a project for the sun. The sun
Must bear no name.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The section in question had, in its turn, once been a freestanding Lovecraft essay\u2014called first The Secret Gospel<\/em>, then At the Picture Show<\/em>, then An Accidental Piecing Together of Separated Things<\/em>, then If We\u2019re in a Garden<\/em>, then, in its death throes, I Am Providence<\/em>\u2014you want a title? I can get you a title, believe me\u2014and I had mown it back from a jungly nine thousand words by excising Longinus, Milton, Schopenhauer, Ortega y Gasset, Broch, Samuel Johnson, Karl Jaspers, Eliot, George Steiner, Poe, Whitman, and Kierkegaard.<\/p>\n

I was moving too quickly and everything had become a blur. Then again, \u201cIf everything seems under control,\u201d as Mario Andretti said, \u201cyou\u2019re just not going fast enough.\u201d<\/p>\n

This pattern is familiar. When the initially insubstantial science-fiction roundup begins to metastasize into a quote-heavy messianic-prophetic explanation of all existing phenomena, it is called, without sarcasm, the Key To All Mythologies; next, as its manic unrealizability accelerates, friends smile and call it the Mentaculus; finally, when it is clear that the ticket will not be redeemed, the project is derided as the Encyclopedia Shittanica.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/center><\/p>\n

I have learnt Malzberg\u2019s obsessions. I sawed and cracked him open and inserted my sternum-spreader, and I ate his heart. Was that nice? It\u2019s Lecter-style cannibalistic analysis: possibly comprehension, but not much compassion.<\/p>\n

\n

The Captain and I had a disagreement just as we were settling into orbit and I murdered him \u2026 I struck him heavily on the temple. \u2014Beyond Apollo<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

He swings the wrench at me. I try to duck but am too slow, too caught up in my own dialogue, to retain reflexes and take a shattering blow on the scalp, no, it is the temple. \u2014Beyond Apollo<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

I hoist the wrench, pivot, move toward him, hit him a shattering blow in the temple. \u2014Beyond Apollo<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

My head turned in a slight pivot, the temple exposed, the temple exposed to the line of fire\u2014and I take the shot squarely. \u2014The Destruction of the Temple<\/em>, 1974<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

That is when they shoot me. One of them shoots me. I do not know which. A single smash in the temple. \u2014The Destruction of the Temple<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

I hear the shots \u2026 Here they come, one in the neck and the other in the temple. \u2014The Destruction of the Temple<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Thou that destroyest the temple, and buildest it in three days, save thyself \u2026 Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost. And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain. \u2014Matthew 27: 40\u201351<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

At this point a real doctor would heal him. Then again, I have seen patients die, and that is more or less what it looks like.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/center><\/p>\n

The radical finitude of Malzberg\u2019s talent did not seem to dishearten him\u2014strike that, reverse it: practically his whole game was claiming to be disheartened, but it didn\u2019t prevent him from getting piles of writing done. He wrote the same book again and again, often using the same words. Didn\u2019t he know that? Didn\u2019t it bother him? Why didn\u2019t it bother him? And if it did bother him, so what, who cares, he transmuted his botheration into\u2014another book.<\/p>\n

A writer becomes dependent on the device of notes toward<\/em> perhaps because the technique permits foregrounding the teller rather than the tale, even if or perhaps especially because<\/em> the focus is on the teller\u2019s incapacities\u2014and perhaps \u201cbecause he is instinctively afraid of attaining his object and completing the edifice he is constructing,\u201d surmised Dostoevsky\u2019s narrator in Notes from Underground<\/em>, saying further: \u201cperhaps I consider myself an intelligent man, only because all my life I have been able neither to begin nor to finish anything.\u201d That\u2019s enough about the word perhaps for now.<\/p>\n

Malcolm Bowie, from Freud, Proust and Lacan<\/em>: \u201cFreud speaks in the closing pages of his \u2018Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis\u2019 (1909) of the neurotic patient\u2019s need for uncertainty and doubt and of the elaborate manoeuvres that he is often compelled to adopt in order to remain uncertain in a world where accurate measuring devices and reliable sources of information exist. Secure knowledge would bring him unspeakable terror.\u201d<\/p>\n

* * *<\/center><\/p>\n

I aim to condescend to Malzberg and repudiate him, but not to such an extent that I must cast him off with utter finality, because I still love him and want him somewhere near me\u2014\u201cin town and out of my sight,\u201d as Jack Lipnik said to Barton Fink\u2014and that, I think, is an ugly trick to play on him. Make no mistake, I do not want you to read him. I wouldn\u2019t wish that on my worst enemy: myself. Malzberg is an unsuitable love object, and he\u2019s all mine. I love him, all right, but as my friend Donna used to say: Everything that look good to you ain\u2019t good for you.<\/p>\n

Virgil speaks to Dante on the highest step of Purgatory, saying:<\/p>\n

\n

My son, you\u2019ve seen the temporary fire
and the eternal fire; you have reached
the place past which my powers cannot see \u2026
from now on, let your pleasure be your guide;
you\u2019re past the steep and past the narrow paths \u2026
Await no further word or sign from me:
Your will is free, erect, and whole\u2014to act
against that will would be to err: therefore
I crown and miter you over yourself.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I am revealed to disadvantage by the pleasure I take in Malzberg\u2014I have not<\/em> seen the temporary and eternal fires, I am not past the steep and narrow paths. His novels are terrible, but I am drawn to them: (especially because?<\/em>) they are not a suitable object for intellectual inquiry. From Twilight of the Idols<\/em>: \u201cAt thirty one is, in the sense of high culture, a beginner, a child.\u201d There is no time to waste: When am I going to knuckle down and learn to read cuneiform? Why would I read Malzberg\u2019s The Cross of Fire<\/em> when I can reread the Gospel according to John, or his The Remaking of Sigmund Freud<\/em> when I can return to Moses and Monotheism<\/em>? I don\u2019t have time to read everything, I barely have time to read anything<\/em>: it\u2019s like being an astronaut driven mad by the infinity of space.<\/p>\n

I learn from Malzberg that, like me, someone has run in circles without quite realizing or admitting it, or that yet again I have projected my obsessions onto a relative innocent in order to deny and disown them. All the corny tricks I tried will not forestall the rising tide: in an invented enemy, I find every part of myself from which I flee. I run from my death in Baghdad to find it in Samarra; I leave off reading Sophocles to watch Schwarzenegger, only to find that Dutch Schaefer unmasks his Predator and delivers the inescapable verdict: \u201cYou are one ugly motherfucker.\u201d Maybe the alien from outer space<\/em> is, but not me, whew, that was a close one.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/center><\/p>\n
\n

The novel I will write about the ultimate truth of the voyage will be divided into small chapters \u2026 The novel will be brilliant and everyone will want to read it \u2026 I loved the Captain. I was devoted to him \u2026 perhaps even a movie or cassette option. \u2014Beyond Apollo<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Now they are going to make a movie of Barry Malzberg\u2019s Beyond Apollo<\/em>. Doesn\u2019t that sound like something they would do? Haven\u2019t you heard: books are for making into movies, books exist only in the hope of being apotheosized into movies, books are not yet made, they are fetal.<\/p>\n

2014 should bring us the cinematic adaptation of Beyond Apollo<\/em>, assuming its director does not panic, initiate retrofire sequence, and eject his coproducers from the space capsule, leaving them to plummet into the sun. The movie will star Scott Speedman and Bill Pullman, the two of whom are expected jointly to metamorphose into Man-Man Speed-Pull.<\/p>\n

But Malzberg\u2019s books, in their tortured self-awareness, are primarily about writing<\/em>: its technical difficulties and moral pitfalls, its potential to cheapen or calcify, its temptation to fraudulence or ventriloquism, the insisted-on inadequacy of language as an excuse for not being a less recursive or less involuted writer, and so on. It\u2019s not easy to understand why or how anyone would attempt to film the emphatically verbal artifact of Beyond Apollo<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Barry Malzberg is seventy-four years old and living in Teaneck, New Jersey. I hope the movie is a gigantic hit. I plan to see it seven times\u2014just as I plan eventually to be reborn as a parrot, a mosquito, a dog, and four other things. Get in the suitcase and enjoy the ride.<\/p>\n

J.\u2009D. Daniels lives in Massachusetts.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cTo define terms at the outset, this will not be a novel so much as a series of notes toward one. Nevertheless pay attention.\u201d \u2014Barry N. Malzberg, Galaxies, 1975 I began vomiting somewhere over Turkmenistan. But it was not until the second day on the ground in Benares that I became desperately ill, losing a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[11976,11985,11983,11977,11981,11997,8321,11978,11984,11980,11982,200,1417,7618],"class_list":["post-60999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-barry-n-malzberg","tag-blaise-pascal","tag-claudine-dumas","tag-david-pringle","tag-eliot-b-reston","tag-howard-lee","tag-j-g-ballard","tag-k-m-odonnell","tag-mel-johnson","tag-mike-barry","tag-pulp","tag-science-fiction","tag-turkey","tag-william-peter-blatty"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nTurkey in a Suitcase by J. D. 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