Collected Essays (95 page)

Note on “William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg”

Written in 1983.

Appeared in
All the Visions
, Ocean View Books, 1991.

This is an excerpt from my book
All the Visions
, which I wrote at white heat over a couple of weeks in June, 1983, when I was thirty-seven, and living as a freelance writer in Lynchburg, Virginia. That book was a memory dump of somewhat fictionalized tales about wild things I did to seek enlightenment, usually in the context of drinking or getting high.

My inspiration for
All the Visions
was Jack Kerouac’s
On the Road
, and to mimic the master, I wrote
All the Visions
on a single long roll of paper. I rigged up the roll on a length of broomstick propped up behind my beloved old rose-red IBM Selectric typewriter.
All the Visions
was about eighty feet long when I was done. In order to enhance the flow, I didn’t use many breaks—the book consists of only three paragraphs. Eventually I got it published by a small press.

Robert Sheckley

When I was fifteen I was injured when the chain of a swing broke; I ruptured my spleen. While I was in the hospital, my mother brought me a paperback copy of
Untouched By Human Hands
, a collection of science fiction stories by Robert Sheckley. Somewhere Vladimir Nabokov writes about the “initial push that sets the heavy ball rolling down the corridors of years,” and for me the push was Sheckley’s book. I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen, and I knew in my heart of hearts that my greatest ambition was to become a science fiction writer. Sheckley’s work was masterful; it had a jokey, real-life edge that—to my mind—set it above the more straightforward work of the other SF writers. Most of all, there was something about his style that gave me a sense that I could do it myself. He wrote like I thought.

I went to my very first science fiction convention, Seacon at Brighton in 1979, hoping to sell my novel
White Light
. I met Sheckley at a party; he had a couple of beautiful women in tow. He was soft-spoken, friendly, hip; strangely approachable for being such a hero. Eventually my novel came out, Sheckley read it, and he said he liked it “exceedingly.”

A lot of my short stories were influenced by Sheckley. “Faraway Eyes,” “The Man Who Ate Himself,” “Inertia,” and my early novel
Master of Space and Time
all involve characters called Joe Fletcher and Harry Gerber, whose roots go back to Robert Sheckley’s AAA Ace stories about a couple of guys who get themselves into odd futuristic fixes. In my story, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” the words “geezel” and “lesnerize” are both taken from the master, who used them to stand for, respectively, a kind of alien food, and the act of sneezing. And, in my story, “Soft Death,” the character-name “Leckesh” is a near-anagram of Sheckley. In my 2004 novel
Frek and the Elixir
, I introduced the neologism “shecked out,” meaning “freaked-out or jaded or world-weary.” I asked Bob if this was okay with him, and he responded, “Yes, I feel shecked out, but in a darker, more terminal kind of way.”

I almost sold my story “The Last Einstein-Rosen Bridge” through Bob when he served a stint as the
Omni
magazine fiction editor in the early 1980s. He called back to say he was going to buy it, provided I made a small change to the ending. My wife and I were about to go to New York for a conference anyway, so we arranged to meet Sheckley, and he had us up to the apartment he shared with his wife of the time, Jay Rothbel. Sheckley suggested a Hamlet quote for the head of the story:
“O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”
We went out for dinner. On the way, Bob and I nearly got run down crossing the street. At dinner the waiter began flirting with Jay, behaving like an out-of-control Sheckley robot. Whenever I was with Bob, everything seemed perfect, mythic, in-depth. In the event, Bob was eased out of the
Omni
job before my story was allowed to run.

In 1982, Bob and Jay showed up at our Lynchburg house in a camper van and lived in our driveway for a few days, their electric cord plugged into our socket, and their plumbing system connected to our hose. I could hardly believe my good fortune. It was like having ET land his ship in your yard. I was interested in William Burroughs’s cut-up technique at the time. I’d started a novel named
Twinks
(never completed) in which ghosts were talking to one of my characters. For the ghosts’ dialog I was making cut-ups of material printed from chapters later in the book—to give their utterances a precog flavor. I was using the old-school method of printing out pages, cutting them into phrases, reassembling the phrases more or less at random, and retyping what emerged. I had my pile of phrases on a drawing board in a corner of the room behind an armchair, and I showed them to Bob. I remember him leaning over the back of the chair, studying the set-up. “That’s a good idea,” he said. “I’m always looking for new ways to get new textures into my prose.”

When I moved to California in 1986 I got to see Sheckley again. His writer, comedian and tummler friend Marty Olson of Venice Beach had dreamed up the idea that Tim Leary would start hosting a PBS series about the future. Sheckley and I were to be the writers. Olson paid my plane-fare to LA, where he and “the Sheck-man” (as Olson called him) picked me up. It was a wonderful goof, hanging out with them, and then driving over to Tim’s house in Beverly Hills. Tim was up for the meeting, with pencils and pads of papers; he was a nice old guy, a freedom-fighter from way back. We were all in full agreement about everything, but the hitch was that we never found a sponsor. But what a day that was for me. For the visit, I’d brought along a CAM-6 cellular-automata-simulating board to plug into Tim’s computer so he could see the wonderfully psychedelic new computer graphics I was working with. He had a weak machine, something like a regular PC instead of an XT or an AT, but I got the graphics to work, and from then on, Tim would throw “cellular automata” into his rants. After the meeting, I mentioned to Bob that Tim had a “Victrola computer,” which he found very funny.

Around the same time I co-edited with Peter Lamborn Wilson and Robert Anton Wilson an edgy SF anthology called
Semiotext(e) SF
(AK Press, Edinburgh 1989). I got Bob to mail me Xeroxed pages from his journals, which we included as a piece called “Amsterdam Diary.” Let me quote three good bits here.

How much reading of other fiction writers must I do to convince myself that the finest work done is woven out of the author’s own experience, his own and no others, no matter how much he chooses to disguise or exploit the fact.

Good fiction is never preachy. It tells its truth only by inference and analogy. It uses the specific detail as its building block rather than the vague generalization. In my case it’s usually humorous—no mistaking my stuff for the Platform Talk of the 6
^th
Patriarch. But I do not try to be funny, I merely write as I write. In the meantime I trust the voice I can never lose—my own. The directions of its interest may change, even by morning. But what does that mater if I simply follow them, along for the trip rather than the payoff (always disappointing), enjoying writing my story rather than looking forward to its completion. Wise-sounding words which I hope describe where I’m really at.

Two weeks until my 50
^th
birthday. The thought, the mood, of impending doom. Fifty is well enough—but what about 60, what about 70? What about death, a second away or 20 more years, but looming up faster every year. They go by faster & faster as one grows older. What happened to the golden inexhaustible summers of my youth? Maybe they weren’t always golden, but they did seem to stretch on forever. I thought I’d never grow up.

Bob did me the signal honor of writing a very warm and hilarious preface for my collection
Transreal
(WCS Books, Englewood CO 1991). He initially protests:

What is Rucker trying to do to me? Why did he select me for this job? Why is he seeking to undermine me with his mind-experiment, why does he want to invade my mind with the contents of his trashy situation, with the faecid droppings of his clever simian mind?

 But then he relents.

This is SF rigorously following crazy rules. My mind of science fiction. At the heart of it is a rage to extrapolate. This is what Rucker does. Among other things. At the heart of it is a rage to extrapolate. Excuse me, shall I extrapolate that for you? Won’t take a jiffy. And so we have it. Rudy the crazed mathematician, like a poet hidden in the light of thought singing songs unbidden ‘til the world is wrought to sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not…

A few years later, I got the opportunity to return the favor and write a preface for Sheckley’s
Minotaur Maze
(Pulphouse, 1990). I said:

The paramount quality of Sheckley’s writing is the purity of his language. The timing of his cadenced phrases is exquisite. His richly charged clarity arises, I would say, from the excellent moral qualities which Sheckley as a writer exemplifies—he is a man in love with writing an with the simple sweetness of life.

One final quote from the Sheck-man himself in
Minotaur Maze
, one to bring tears to the eyes:

The premise could be seen wavering, there were repercussions of a rhetorical nature, and the author could be glimpsed, a ghostly figure of unbelievable beauty and intelligence, trying desperately, despite his many personal problems, to put things together again.

Note on “Robert Sheckley”

Written 2005.

Appeared in
Locus
magazine, 2005.

Robert Sheckley, William Burroughs and Thomas Pynchon are the three prime models for my fiction writing. I wrote this piece to appear with other appreciations in the
Locus
SF magazine after Bob’s death in 2005, at the age of 77.

Ivan Stang

Ivan Stang is the High Scribe and co-founder of the Church of the SubGenius, a kind of dadaist religion that centers around the iconic image of a ‘50s-style pipe-smoking man named “Bob.” Attracted by some small zine ads promising
slack
, I myself joined the Church of the SubGenius in 1982. It cost me a dollar to get hold of the classic
SubGenius
Pamphlet #1
, and soon after that, Stang ordained me by mail in exchange for copies of some of my books.

A cellular automaton rule based on “Bob.”

Over the years I’ve met Stang (not his real name) in person a few times, which is always a great experience. He’s a true media artist and wonderfully intelligent force against all things pink—”pink” being a SubGenius word for all the dumb, repressive and soulless aspects of our society.

Stang started our telephone interview with a disclaimer.

Stang:
Don’t interview me. The article should be about the Church of the SubGenius, not about me. I’m just a part of the Church, though perhaps the hardest working part. I want to keep it clear that “Bob” comes first, not me.

RR:
I often feel a lack in my life these days, Ivan. Can “Bob” actually fill the hunger for religion?

Stang:
No, he can’t. For that you need, “Yoko and me.” As Charlie Manson used to say, “I trust the only one who’s left to trust…me.”

RR:
One thing that makes me not take “Bob” completely seriously is that when I’m in a hospital thinking I might die, I feel more like praying to Jesus than to “Bob.”

Stang:
There’s nothing wrong with repenting on your death bed. It’s all a “just in case” thing anyway. Pray to Jesus just in case there’s an afterlife. Pray to “Bob” just in case there’s an X-day and the saucers come to kill all the normals.

RR:
When is X-day?

Stang:
July 5, 1998, 7 o’clock in the morning at the International Date Line. California will be the last ruptured. You can watch X-day on TV for nearly a full day before it hits you. Watching X-day in progress may be “Bob”‘s biggest test of faith. You may not like what you see. You may feel like burning your Church of the SubGenius membership card.

We’re not going to end up like the Jehovah’s Witnesses who are always predicting the end of the world and making fools of themselves. We have several outs. We may end up having to have a big X-day party every year.

RR:
What about the Church’s new book,
Revelation X
?

Stang:
Our first book,
The Book of the SubGenius
, showed the glory that is “Bob.” It had more sheer bullshit than the
Book of Mormon
. But
Revelation X
shows the danger that is “Bob.” Thanks to our art director Paul Mavrides, it’s really really sick, it’s like a Jehovah’s Witness comic book.