Of old books and dying telegrams

                                                                                                                          Photo © Prashant C. Trikannad

I usually don’t post pictures back to back. However, I couldn't resist posting this photograph I took last Sunday, of two largely secondhand booksellers in the old central business district of Mumbai. These fellows are “sitting” at the junction of Veer Nariman Road and Mahatma Gandhi Road at Flora Fountain (Hutatma Chowk, or Martyrs’ Square). A few more booksellers are on the opposite footpath, outside American Express Bank. They're the last of a handful of used booksellers in the area; the rest were driven out by the municipal corporation more than a decade ago. 

They sell all kinds of books including vintage paperbacks and hardbacks. The books are preserved in cellophane. Very rare books are rarely on display. They are hidden away and are brought out for regular customers or discerning readers. These booksellers know the value of their books for they seldom bargain. If you want a book, you buy it, perhaps with a marginal discount. If you haggle over the price too much, they turn their backs on you and put away the books.

If you look at the picture carefully, the third stall in line is a footwear seller whose immediate neighbour is a sugarcane juice seller (not in the frame) followed by a seller of stationery items (I think) and two more booksellers. The man with the large white sack walking along the footpath is a ragpicker or a scavenger, one of a thousand of his kind engaged in the city’s unorganised recycle trade. Every single non-biodegradable item that I throw out goes into his dirty sack, so to speak. You can enlarge the picture for a better look.

The stone facade that you see behind the booksellers is the Gothic-style Central Telegraph Office building erected by the British over a hundred years ago. A couple of months ago, India Post succumbed to competition from its virtual enemy—email, sms, whatsapp, whatnot—and officially shut down telegraph services across the country. The night before saw a mad scramble by people who wanted to dispatch one last telegram for the sake of posterity. The death of the telegram, after 163 years, made headlines the next morning. Hopefully, the old books will be around for a long time.

Steamboats on the Mississippi

I received this lovely photograph of steamboats on the Mississippi River, 1907, by email. It shows hectic activity on the 6,210-km (3,860-mile) long river which rises in northern Minnesota and flows southward into the Gulf of Mexico. Steam-powered river boats carried both passengers and cargo up and down the river until the advent of the US railroad in early 19th century. Even then, steamboats continued to play a key role in trade and commerce till the 20th century. Frontier settlements came up in the Mississippi River region as well as on the vast and barren land between the river and the Rocky Mountains. Several rivers like the Missouri, Ohio, Tennessee, and Arkansas are tributaries of this great river. The Mississippi has a rich history. It was the cradle of the Frontier.

For previous Vintage Pictures, see under Labels.

The Draw by Jerome Bixby, 1954

This Friday, George Kelley takes over the reins of Forgotten Books from Patti Abbott. You can check out the links to many reviews of early and not so early fiction at his blog. 

Stories of the old West were filled with bad men who lived by the speed of their gun hand. Well, meet Buck Tarrant, who could outdraw them all. His secret: he didn't even have to reach for his weapon...

Illustrations by William Ashman

Buck Tarrant was a terrific shot, once he got his gun in his hand. Until then, he could only dream of taking Billy the Kid and “Wild Bill” Hickok and being the fastest gun from Mexico to Canada.

“He couldn't draw to save his life.”

And then one day something happens. Tarrant is practicing in front of a tree, pretending the tree is Billy the Kid, crouching, fumbling, drawing, shooting, when Joe Doolin, a local cowhand and narrator of the story, comes along on horseback. Mimicking the folks in the little town in Texas, Doolin pokes fun at Tarrant and nearly falls off his saddle when out of nowhere he sees the gun in the hands of the “bony runt of about eighteen.”

“I swear, I hadn't even seen his hand move, he'd drawn so fast! That gun just practically appeared in his hand!”

The story appeared in Amazing Stories,
March 1954

Suddenly, Doolin finds himself at the receiving end of Tarrant’s Peacemaker and his foul mouth. The terrified narrator knows he is a goner. But, the no-good kid with bulging eyes, a wide mouth, and buck teeth has other plans: he wants revenge against the townsfolk and he wants to prove he is the fastest gun alive. He orders the cowhand to run into town and tell Sheriff Ben Randolph that he, Tarrant, is coming for him.

The sheriff, who had collared the wayward boy on a few occasions, has two choices—he faces Tarrant or he gets out of town. Randolph decides to confront Tarrant. He is brave and quick on the draw but is he a match for the wild and reckless ‘gunman’?

That afternoon, Tarrant, looking ugly and fearsome, rides into the deserted town and goes into the Once Again Saloon for some free “likker” and a little fun at the expense of Menner, its owner, who had turned him out a couple of times. He uses the poor bartender’s ears for target practice.

“You know,” Buck said, grinning at how Menner's fear was crawling all over his face, “I can put a bullet right where I want to. Wanta see me do it?”

The twist in the tale comes in the form of Jacob Pratt, a professor of psychology who is passing through town on his way to San Francisco and, unlikely as it may seem, is at that moment sitting in the saloon nursing a drink. He finds out the reason behind Buck Tarrant’s newly-acquired speed with the gun: telekinesis. Tarrant thinks his gun into his hand and thinks it back into its holster.

“He just thinks his gun into his hand?”

“Exactly.”
“Faster than anyone could ever draw it?”
“Inconceivably faster. The time element is almost non-existent.”

If you want to know what happens to the gunfight between Buck Tarrant and Sheriff Ben Randolph, then you should read this very unusual 7,114-worded story. It’s fast-paced and entertaining all the way to the end.

Final word
Jerome Bixby has written a story with a time-tested theme, of a half-crazed cowboy who desperately wants to prove he is the deadliest gunman, and added a scientific element to it. The author’s work in science fiction may have inspired the tale. If Bixby meant to experiment, then he succeeds very well. He doesn’t tell us in which year or period the story is based. Given the setting, I'm assuming it is well before 1890, the year the term “telekinesis” was officially coined. In that sense, The Draw is before its time. Either way, the story is improbable but imaginative and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

About the author
Jerome Bixby (1923-1998) was an American short story writer, editor and scriptwriter. However, he was best known as a science fiction writer. Below are five important things about Bixby. 

Photo source: www.imdb.com

1. He wrote short stories, including sf and westerns, under his own name as well as pen names like D.B. Lewis, Harry Neal, Albert Russell, J. Russell, M. St. Vivant, Thornecliff Herrick, and Alger Rome.

2. He was the editor of Planet Stories and Two Complete Science Adventure Books.

3. He wrote the 1953 story It's a Good Life which became an episode of The Twilight Zone and was later included in Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983).

4. He wrote four episodes for the Star Trek series and co-wrote the story for Fantastic Voyage (1966), the classic sf movie based on a novel by Isaac Asimov.

5. He completed the screenplay of The Man From Earth in his final days. In 2007, it was made into a film, produced by his son Emerson Bixby and directed by Richard Schenkman.

You can read more about Drexel Jerome Lewis Bixby at Wikipedia, sfsite, and Weird Fiction Review. Todd Mason has often written about the writer at his blog Sweet Freedom.

What’s in a meme?

Etymology: derived from the Greek mimëma, ‘something imitated,’ by Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 1976.

I first heard of the word “meme” (pronounced as meem) after I started blogging in August 2009 and subsequently enrolling in two memes—Tuesday’s overlooked films, audio and video at Todd Mason’s blog Sweet Freedom and Friday’s forgotten books at Patti Abbott’s blog Pattinase.

While I haven't always been a regular participant, I have connected with lots of interesting people (and intrepid bloggers) who are. Their knowledge of films and books across genres has enriched my own. For me, this has been the biggest reward of a meme, not just the ones I'm a part of but even those where I’m not. Sometimes it does well to sit back and read what others are talking about. Another benefit is that it makes you disciplined, both as a reader and a reviewer.

What exactly is a meme? The internet is flush with definitions that say more or less the same thing. I selected five sources that gave five slightly different meanings.

Common definition: A meme is an idea, behaviour, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. It acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena.

Richard Dawkins: Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes, fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leading from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.

Urban Dictionary: An idea, belief or belief system, or pattern of behaviour that spreads throughout a culture either vertically by cultural inheritance (as by parents to children) or horizontally by cultural acquisition (as by peers, information media, and entertainment media).

The online dictionary also describes meme, in blogspeak, as an idea that is spread from blog to blog.

InternetSlang: An idea that spreads like a virus by word of mouth, email, blogs etc.

The above two definitions are the ones I'm most comfortable with as I can tell others easily.

The Free Dictionary: A unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another.

Then there is another thing called “internet meme” which, according to Wikipedia, is “an idea, style or action which spreads, often as mimicry, from person to person via the Internet, as with imitating the concept. Some notable examples include posting a photo of people in public places or uploading a short video of people dancing to the Harlem Shake.”

I see little difference between a meme and an internet meme.

My basic understanding of a meme is that it refers to the collective imitation or replication of a specific idea, a theme or a concept in which players or participants are free to choose their topic or subject provided it corresponds with the idea, theme or concept as specified.

For example, under Friday’s Forgotten Books, a meme now in its sixth year I think, you are free to review any book so long as it is, indeed, forgotten, as in a rare or vintage mystery that you seldom hear or read about. Here “forgotten book” is the idea, theme or concept.

A meme, also known as a challenge on some blogs, takes a different turn when, say, a particular book or author is specified. Patti Abbott recently hosted Patricia Highsmith for FFB where you had to review only books by the American author. Ross Macdonald is up next, on November 8.

There is a slight twist in the meme, however. Even when the idea and the topic are specified, you can still broaden their scope to suit your taste. For instance, if you couldn't read and review a novel by Patricia Highsmith, you could still write about her in other ways, say, an essay, a short story review or a compilation of quotes. I did something like that for the Georges Simenon FFB on July 20, 2012. I couldn't find a single book by the iconic writer, so I did the next best thing: I wrote about my futile search for Georges Simenon. In this sense memes afford leniency but that would depend on the promoter of the meme. Patti and Todd have been extra generous.

I'd also like to think of a meme as a domino effect, in the positive sense of the term. Now after all that I hope I haven't got my meme wrong. What are your thoughts on this acculturation?

Ants in the Plants, 1940

A classic animated feature film for Overlooked Films, Audio & Video at Todd Mason’s blog Sweet Freedom.

“He's a menace, he's a brute, he will scoop you with his snoot.”

One of the joys of watching an animated film like Walt Disney’s The AristoCats (1970) or The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977) in theatres, in the 70s, was the short cartoon clips that were often shown before the start of the film. They were like the appetiser before the main course, the small cup of steamed and salted corn before the large bag of popcorn, samosas, and coke.

Ants in the Plants, a classic animated short film by Max and Dave Fleischer of Disney rival Fleischer Studios, is about a bustling colony of brave and enterprising ants who find strategic ways to fight a pesky anteater hell-bent on devouring the ants with his periscopic snout. The ants work with military precision: they fight, suffer casualties, retreat, regroup, and eventually fall back on their “Sewer Side Squad” to drive away the enemy.

This 35mm Technicolor film has been labelled as a “war allegory” because of its emphasis on tactical preparation for a war.

Ants in the Plants is a cute little animated film. Its appeal lies in its old-style animation and its 7.32-minute length as opposed to its modern cousins like Antz (1998) and The Ant Bully (2006).

Click here to watch the film, again.

Westerns in my library

Every one of the westerns in the picture is crying out to be read. They’re sitting on one shelf of a wall unit sharing space with an army of Chinese-origin Laughing Buddhas, other classics and general fiction, and some curios. 

Laughing or Smiling Buddhas are supposed to bring good luck to those who keep them at home, but they've to be gifted by someone. They have been lucky for me, I guess, for I bought each of the secondhand (and tattered) western novels in the picture for Rs.10-20 (less than 25 cents). 

Click and enlarge for a better view. 

Some of these notable westerns are authored by Matt Chisholm, Jack Schaefer, Jory Sherman, Luke Short, George G. Gilman, Wayne D. Overholser, Loren D. Estleman, Dirk Fletcher, Jonas Ward, Giles A. Lutz, Peter Field, Louis L’Amour, Frank C. Robertson, Max Brand, Romer Zane Grey, and Robert J. Randisi. I haven’t read these particular books but I've read others by these fine authors. I have a few more stored elsewhere.

My prized collection of westerns is the Sudden series by the late British author Oliver Strange who wrote about the Wild West and his hero James Green alias Sudden, the Texas outlaw, without ever once crossing the Atlantic.

‘Wonderful Tonight’ by Eric Clapton

A few days ago, I was watching an episode of Friends in which Monica proposes to Chandler and then Chandler proposes to Monica and then the two lovebirds hold each other and gently rock in the candlelit room as only the music of Eric Clapton's Wonderful Tonight plays in the background. That’s when I rediscovered this beautiful song, actually a ballad, though I wouldn't know the difference between the two. It forms part of Clapton’s 1977 album Slowhand.

According to an article at Wikipedia, Clapton wrote the song about Pattie Boyd, a model, photographer, and author, while waiting for her to get ready to attend a party hosted by Paul and Linda McCartney.

“For years it tore at me. To have inspired Eric, and George before him, to write such music was so flattering. Wonderful Tonight was the most poignant reminder of all that was good in our relationship, and when things went wrong it was torture to hear it,” said Boyd, who was first married to George Harrison and then to Eric Clapton.


For previous Music & Lyrics, see under 'Labels'