Katherine Anne Porter

“She has simply an eye and an ear sharp, shrewd, and true as a tuning fork. She has given to this little story all her wit and observation, her blistering humor and her just cruelty; for she has none of that slack tolerance or sentimental tenderness toward symptomatic evils that amounts to criminal collusion between author and character.” From Katherine Anne Porter's Introduction to A Curtain of Green by Eudora Welty (Doubleday, 1941) in The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter (Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte Press, 1970).

I sought out Katherine Anne Porter because Austin science fiction author Nnedi Okorafor spoke at Kyle’s Katherine Anne Porter Literary Center (508 West Center Street, 78640) and a review in the Hays County Free Press popped up for scrolling in my Kyle email. When I read the story, I merely recognized Porter’s name, not having read her before, but was nonetheless surprised that she is considered a local Kyle author. So, I went to the library. 

I found her pleasurable. Katherine Anne Porter is good company. I love listening to her  across our distances. In addition to a dozen essays here, some several times, I also read short stories and poems in The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (Harvest/Harcourt Press, 1965, et seq). I read “Pale Horse/Pale Rider” through three times because that is what it took to understand the sequence of events. Clearly, even  though I had read several other stories ahead of that, I was not prepared for a serious engagement. Nonetheless, she was an inspiration. I could have fattened these two anthologies with post-its bearing exclamation points or quotation marks tagging the juxtapositions, the clever and insightful phrases. 

[Added 12 April 2026 8:48 PM - I checked out Ship of Fools from my local library but after about twenty pages, some even from the middle, it is going back tomorrow. She writes well. Her word portraits are cinematic. However, her sense of life is entirely negative and she only delivers a long torrent of small, spiteful insults.]

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FRANKENSTEIN, RAYGUNS, AND BICYCLES

I read for research. This past Christmas break, I read formal philosophy. From 2021 through 2024, I read a lot of astronomy, several of those books cover-to-cover. But I do try fiction. I do not always succeed. I read at bedtime and therefore the sprints are short. Perhaps more to the point, I prefer to read authors who write better than I do and I have no patience for anyone who cannot outdo me because I know that I am not that good at it which is why I do not write fiction. However, as Montag said in Fahrenheit 451, inside each book is a man. So, I give the author a fair chance. 

At ArmadilloCon 47 this past September 12-14, I was working in the Convention Suite and two of the fen (not “fans”) were chatting. “Of course, I read Frankenstein,” said the one. Replied the other, “The 1818 or the 1819 version?” I was loading ice so I missed the rest, but I did check out two editions from the UT Perry-Castañeda Library. The book is nothing like the movies. (I have not seen the newest release from Guillermo del Toro.) 

• Frankenstein : the 1818 edition with related texts / Mary Shelley ; edited, with introduction and notes, by David Wootton. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797-1851, author.; Wootton, David, 1952- editor.
• The annotated Frankenstein / Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley ; edited by Susan Wolfson and Ronald Levao. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797-1851.; Wolfson, Susan J., 1948-; Levao, Ronald. 2012.

The proper title is Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. In my opinion, Mary Shelly failed to complete the analogy. Moreover, that context was not explored in any of the editions or criticisms that I found at the UT library. 

Prometheus (Forethought) was tasked by Zeus with creating animals to inhabit the Earth. His brother, Epimetheus  (Afterthought), gave all of them the strength, speed, agility, powerful talons, fangs, hides, horns, etc., etc., leaving Man with not much else. Prometheus gave Man intelligence — and fire. For that, he was chained to a mountain in the Caucasus and his liver was torn out by a vulture, only to regenerate overnight and be torn out again. We experience the tremors of his suffering as earthquakes. Mary Shelley did not carry through the many possible parallels. 

What does project to the reader is the dual nature of the monster. He is completely innocent, teaching himself to understand language, speech first and then writing. He discovers music, first in birds then from the old man in the cottage. He is vegetarian, subsisting on roots, leaves, and berries, sometimes cooking them after he learns (by accident) fire. He wants to be liked and loved but his horrendous form—eight feet tall and made from inanimate matter brought to life—draws only terror, rebuke, revulsion, and violence from everyone around him. He pays the world back in kind, at first killing a child then turning his attention to Victor Frankenstein’s family. Frankenstein pursues the monster to the North Pole but dies and the monster drifts off on an ice flow, promising to immolate himself. By Aristotle’s theory, the fable must be a tragedy, a story about a being brought down by circumstances not of his own choice but of his own making. 

Rayguns over Texas was published in 2013 by FACT the Fandom Association of Central Texas. It contains 19 short stories and eight essays. I bought my copy at my first ArmadilloCon (39) in 2017. The book disappeared into storage boxes when we moved from Austin to Kyle. Looking for something else, I found it and I now know some of these authors. So, I started with those stories. 

“Texas Died for Somebody’s Sins But Not Mine” by Stina Leicht is another Frankenstein story. This retelling has been informed by decades of science fiction and political theory. This monster is a transgenetic clone labelled “Dallas” and called “Una” who works as a computer programmer and is the legal property of a corporation. She is harmless and truly a victim. She escapes the software factory for one night of selfish pleasure. When she slips back in, she learns that she had been discovered. It does not matter on two grounds: this project is closing, so she was going be erased and reprogrammed with different skills anyway; and against that she knows that she had her own life for a short time, even though she will not remember any of it. 

I believe that “Operators are Standing By” by Rhonda Eudaly is a personal story told through aliens. Set in a galactic sales call center, it is about belonging. If you saw Boiler Room or Wall Street, you get the picture. Moreover, Fahrenheit 451’s Montag would say that this is autobiographical and is on a narrative level forbidden in his society. 

Of these first three stories, I found "Jump the Black" by Marshall Ryan Maresca to be the most emotionally engaged. The viewpoint character is an illegal alien, a Terran seeking to get off the Deathplanet which we turned Earth into. Imagine a world of homeless people, living on whatever is left of the streets, paying smugglers to get them anyplace else. Many die along the way. That’s how it is. Keep moving. 

After I finished the three-part review of ArmadilloCon 47 last month, I left messages in the contact pages of the websites of the vendors, authors, and fans whom I mentioned. Panelist Lauren Teffeau replied with corrections to my blog post. Reading her website, I discovered the Solar Punk subgenre in which home-brew solutions remediate some of the environmental sins of our time. From the libraries at the University of Texas (Austin), the City of Austin, and the City of Kyle, the closest I could come was Bike Topia: Feminist Bicycle Science Fiction in Extreme Futures, volume 4 of the Bikes in Space series from Microcosm Publishing. 

The narrative style of “Riding in Place” by Sarena Ulibarri is matter-of-fact, unadorned writing. So, I just followed the story and I did not foresee the (surprise) conclusion. It is another smuggled alien story told from an outside viewpoint as we follow our human corporate worker on an industrial space station orbiting Earth. I was reminded of Bruce Sterling’s Islands in the Net which opens with a middle class corporate office work gang ripping up old telecom lines and patching the landscape.They do the job they are given but they don’t have much enthusiasm for it: “it’s community work,” they say. In Sarena Ulibarri’s utopia of megacity biking trails and parkways, everybody gets assigned some tough jobs and working on the space station is one of them. Hence the bicycles to maintain bone strength. 

Maddy Spencer’s "Meet Cute" is a graphic flash story with neither narration nor dialog. The pictures tell the story. Montag would have read this before he discovered books. 

"Portlandtown" by editor Elly Blue weaves the threads of self-discovery within a tapestry of complex future sociology told as history. 

The stories in BikeTopia are fresh. The plots are the ones we know from The Bible and The Iliad and Shakespeare. The tellings are new and now. 

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Western Shoot-out: The Virginian versus Bonanza

We watch DVDs and do not subscribe to cable. We enjoyed some television drama from the 21^st century such as Num3ers, Firefly, Bones (earlier years), Grey’s Anatomy (earliest years), and Sherlock, and sometimes we return to an episode or two. We also dig back into classic TV. Most classic television does not meet current standards for writing. Those were simpler times. 

Working our way through the first season of The Virginian, we also tried a Bonanza compilation. Although it is touted as centering on moral dilemmas, Bonanza is slow on the draw. To be fair, as a 90-minute show, The Virginian had the long-range advantage for plot development and characterization. The plain truth is that that actors—James Drury, Doug McClure, Gary Clarke, and even Lee J. Cobb—were comfortable riding horses while the boys from the Ponderosa seldom dismounted smoothly though mounting usually went better. Much of The Virginian was shot outdoors with riding and roping in wide vistas, though the close-ups are often stage sets. (I believe, also, that they used some kind of movie screen background with overlays to blend close-up action supposedly taking place in the wilds.) Almost all of Bonanza was shot on a sound stage. The cowboys in The Virginian wear chaps because they work hard. We seldom see the Cartwrights work at all.

According to Wikipedia, citing “Bonanza Television Show – ONE” at www.onlinenevada.org, Bonanza “is known for presenting pressing moral dilemmas.” But that is the essence of all fiction from the romanticist school. Almost all TV drama and popular fiction in general centers on conflicts of values. Technically, a dilemma is not just any choice, but a pair of undesirable alternatives. That was seldom the core of a Bonanza drama, but, in fact, often the case in The Virginian. Although everything usually works out well enough for the better folks, life on the frontier is uncompromising and unforgiving. 

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Captain America: the original is still the best

We watched Captain America: The First Avenger the other night. It was my fourth viewing. Yesterday, I brought home Winter Soldier, which I sat through a couple of months ago, and Civil War which I had not seen yet. The first movie continues to hold up well. The second was better than I remembered, but not stellar. The third installment was largely a waste of two-and-a-half hours.  

Serial fiction must identify and cross a boundary that separates the uninformed reader from the true fan. The theory of mythology insists that we know the characters: the warrior, the wanderer, the orphan, the magician… Some heroes are born that way and die still blessed even though fallen or taken down. Siegfried is an easy example. Others struggle their whole lives as did Heracles. When you have a boatload of them, as in The Iliad, Argonautica, and Star Trek, the narrator is under some burden. 

 

Captain America: The First Avenger reviewed here.

If you could travel through history you could take the story of Captain America: the First Avenger to just about any castle or camp. You would need more rhyming couplets to explain how Hydra infiltrated SHIELD. I had to consult the oracles at Google and Wikipedia to put Hawkeye in the Civil War and that was all: he was just a character with some attributes. He has no compelling backstory. Similarly, I know of Ant Man, but never followed him and was unaware that resizing himself and other objects is one of his super powers. (Where does the mass go or come from?) The Scarlet Witch, Vision, Black Widow, Rhodey/Rhodes,... they are just a bunch of people with special powers and could be anyone with any powers. That aspect of the movie was definitely for the true fans. But the same unmet challenge afflicts the Star Trek universe: if you do not know the crew before you see the movie, you are ignorant. On the other hand, for all of its flaws, the continuing Star Wars saga makes use of such disposable characters. 

That photojournalist Peter Parker uncritically accepted Tony Stark’s glib talk about Steve Rogers is disturbing. It would have been even worse if the kid had been approached by a wily Hydra salesman. 

The putative cause of the Civil War is the legalization, licensing, and control of “enhanced individuals,” a theme already developed in the Marvel universe through the X-Men. It was explored by The Watchmen. It even pitted Batman against Superman: “They sent me to bring you in.” “You always were a Boy Scout.” It was cited in Haldeman’s Forever War  (1974), where high-IQ kids were drafted first. The identification, nurturing, and therefore control of the gifted is known in public education from the turn of the previous century with the work of Lewis Terman. (See NecessaryFacts here.) It is an interesting theory, one too close to fact in an era of presidential doublethink and double talk. 

However, the “save the cat” school of screenwriting insists that every twisty turn lead to another twisty turn. In this case, in addition to the United Nations, we have one otherwise ordinary but understandably bitter man, Helmut Zemo. He tricks and overpowers a Hydra psychiatrist. (Hey, your shoe is untied!) On the other hand, Tony Stark has spent his life never finding out why his parents just never made it to the airport, as if they suffered a perpetual flat tire down a dirt road with no farm houses in sight. At least Helmut Zemo put two and two together. 

 Zemo: My father lived outside the city, and I thought we would be safe there. My son was excited. He could see the Iron Man from the car window. I told my wife, “Don't worry. They're fighting in the city. We're miles from harm.” And the dust cleared, and the screaming stopped. It took me two days until I found their bodies. My father still holding my wife and son in his arms... And the Avengers? They went home. I knew I couldn't kill them. More powerful men than me have tried. But if I could get them to kill each other... 

That the loss of innocent lives led to the Sokovia Accords to corral the super beings is no comfort (understandably). But did Spiderman sign them before he joined Ironman's team? As a minor, can he? What about the hundreds of other enhanced individuals? 

The middle story, Winter Soldier, held up better to a second viewing. The cast of characters is manageable. But the eye candy of Ragnarok escalates from cataclysmic conflicts in street traffic to the titanic destruction of three aerial carriers (each about ten times the area of football field or maybe 8000 times the volume of a stadium) that crash into the Potomac River without the inconveniently equivalent displacement of water. And it is the same amount that had to have been sucked into the submerged hangars when they opened to launch the helicarriers. 

The premise of Winter Soldier is purely Cold War. From our point of view, it was easy for Hydra to infiltrate the secret laboratories of the USSR. The Russians probably still feel the same way about us today. Pythagoreans, Freemasons, Jesuits, Dr. No, Thrush, Kaos, Dr. Evil … so many have trod that path that it is a superhighway with rest plazas.  

Captain America: The First Avenger must have its own problems. But they remain much smaller. The Red Skull flies toward New York and Chicago in his Valkyrie, a machine similar to the real XB-70 nuclear bomber of the same name wrecked in a collision on its maiden voyage in 1964. 

The original Captain America is lost to time because his world of 1940 is not ours now. As he said to Sam Wilson at the opening of Winter Soldier: “Well, things aren't so bad. Food's a lot better; we used to boil everything. No polio is good. Internet, so helpful.” But what we understand of him is constant, continuous, immutable. The problem is that he sometimes gets lost in the noise and confusion of computer graphics and franchise licensing. 

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A Few Good Men: A Few Deep Flaws

Nominated for both an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences award ("Oscar") and a Hollywood Foreign Press Association (“Golden Globe”) award, the drama is compelling. The movie began as a Broadway play. Live theater is continuous rehearsal for the writer and director no less than for the cast. So, it came to the screen fully formed. But it does not stand up to repeated viewing. As a legal battle engaged in a courtroom, the intensity is irresistible. Contradicting that is the “naturalist” assumption that victory is impossible, that a draw is the best you can hope for.

Most of the $33 million in production costs went for salaries.  Tom Cruise got $12.5 million. Jack Nicholson was paid $5 million. Demi Moore accepted only $2 million for the chance to take on a “genderless” role. (One production insider wanted to know why if she is not going to sleep with the lead is the character a woman? Aaron Sorkin called that his worst experience as a screenwriter. That and more on Mental Floss here.) But any competent screen actors could have had the roles. In fact, Rob Lowe played the lead for a year on Broadway. Regardless of who played the parts, they would still have had to act like Sailors and Marines. Most of them failed at that and the fault lies with the director and producer, Rob Reiner.

Writer Aaron Sorkin and director Rob Reiner have no military experience and they apparently had no military support. So, the production projected an embarrassing lack of military bearing. Lacking US DoD support, Reiner apparently did not hire a military advisor. (Michael McClosky is credited as “Major Michael McClosky” but I found no corroboration for his military rank.) The most glaring evidence is in Demi Moore’s portrayal of LCDR JoAnne Galloway. We might accept LTJG Daniel Kaffee (played by Tom Cruise) whose hands are always his pockets in order to signal us that he is the cocky underachiever whose long string of successes came from plea bargaining. But there is no way that an investigator from the inspector general’ s office who is two grades above him would put up with that. Here is a rhetorical question: What do you do when you have your hands in your pockets? Answer: You better be taking something out of your pockets. It is completely unacceptable that LTJG Kaffee is eating an apple as he enters LCDR Galloway’s office. He might try it, but an IG investigator outranking him would give him a corrective interview immediately. Also unacceptable is her introducing herself as “JoAnne…, uh, Jo…”  On target is the reply from 1LT (MC) Jonathan Kendrick: “May I call you Jonathan?” “No, you may not. You may call me Lieutenant Kendrick because when we have to go somewhere to fight, you Navy boys always provide a nice ride.” That is a stock response, a cliché, and a fact of life. On the other hand, it was for the audience’s benefit that COL Jessep reprimands his executive officer, LTC Matthew Markinson. “Don’t ever contradict me in front of another officer,” is the kind of warning that (a) never would have needed to be said or (b) at worst, was settled between them three years ago.

Within the naturalist school of aesthetics, the universe is indifferent to human action. Technically, that is correct; and it is that which allows success. The universe is not hostile. However, aesthetic naturalism is disingenuous. The inherent indifference of the universe actually means that each victory must be balanced by an equal or greater loss: you can never win. It is not just that there is a cost. Of course, everything costs. But to naturalism the final costs always outweigh the temporary benefits. Therefore, in this story, the accused Marines are found not guilty of murder, but are dishonorably discharged. The slower of the two (LCP Harold Dawson) still does not understand the verdict as they are led away. In the final moment, as recompense, LTJG Kaffee tells PFC Downey that he does not need an armband (his chevrons) to have honor. In return, the Private calls himself to attention and salutes the officer—which he refused to do earlier when he felt that the Lieutenant was not honorable enough to defend him. But for the Private, the dishonorable discharge is the worst possible outcome at the moment. He and the Lance Corporal were willing to suffer life in prison rather than to betray the officers who ordered them to haze (and thereby accidentally kill) their barracks mate. They were willing to accept all of the consequence of following orders. The betrayals by those officers who gave the orders and sought to cover up the murder and their roles in it is not deeply explored but only held up to view for a moment. LTC Markinson’s suicide, hallmarked by a letter to the parents of the victim, would have been a better focal point for the drama. In the universe of aesthetic naturalism, no person or act is more important than another. Naturalism denies the heroic by trivializing it, and at the same time giving focus to the unimportant.

According to the media histories Aaron Sorkin based his screenplay on a real event at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay. Sorkin’s sister was in the JAG Corps, and she told him the story. After the play became a movie, four lawyers claimed that they were the models for the character of LTJG Daniel Kaffee.  (See “Four Lawyers Claimed …” New York Times, here.) See also the true story of the accused and exonerated Marine that came to light when his body was found in a riverbed (“Ex-Marine who felt 'A Few Good Men' maligned him is mysteriously murdered,” by Bill Glauber, Sun Staff Writer, Baltimore Sun, April 10, 1994, here).

Naturalism is supposedly an unvarnished, journalistic recounting. Fiction is a convenient medium for telling the truth. But that is not what happens. The truth is always complicated, and how you simplify it depends on who you are. The Romantic theory is that people come into conflict when their chosen values are opposed. Even the bad guys are purposeful. But evil is powerless. Therefore, the good guys win, even when (as always) victory is purchased at a cost. In the universe of Romantic fiction, that cost brings a value worth the price. In the universe of Naturalism, even if there are "a few good men" it is not clear who they are.

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