I'M SPEAKING AT A SCI-FI CONVENTION THIS WEEKEND

Eternity is really long, especially near the end. - Woody Allen

I'm speaking at a Sci-Fi convention this weekend.

For those of you who cannot make it ... which means most of you,

I thought I would give you a bit of my first presentation :

IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD!

AGAIN!

AND WE LOVE IT!

We’re doomed. Hollywood says so. Why?

Pop Culture has long had a fascination with the end times.

21st century Man is like the proverbial kid in the backseat :

“Are we there yet?”

Man becomes preoccupied with the end of things During bad times.

And these have certainly been bad times lately :

earthquakes, tsunamis,

famines, wars,and economic collapse.

Sociology professors say that our fascination with the end times

reflects a hunger for meaning in these admittedly bad times.

We want to know where we are going And how soon we will get there.

And while myths and religions have long talked about the end of the world,

It has only been since the rumblings that led to the first World War

that literature,and later movies,

started telling stories of individuals struggling during the world’s death.

H. G. Wells wrote his famous WAR OF THE WORLDS in 1898.

Scholars call the study of the end times … Eschatology.

Which is fun for the dark little boy inside me

because it Is only letter and one syllable removed from Scatology

Which is the scholarly study of folks fascinated with Excrement.

And sadly, sometimes it’s hard to know the

Difference lately what with Hollywood has been giving us.

And so here we are in 2011.

Some experts said we wouldn’t make it.

Some theologians thought the end would come In 1988.

Why then, of all years?

It marked a full generation passing since Israel became a nation in 1948.

Then, the theologians said the time clock For the

End Times started When Jerusalem was in Israeli hands once more in 1968.

2008 came and went.

Terrible times especially around here in Lake Charles after Rita.

But no End Times

Unless all of this is a bad dream.

And sometimes it does feel like one, doesn’t it?

But the truth is when the end comes :

For you, For Man, For the World,

That time is unknown. The unknown.

Its allure is what gave birth to myth,

legend, and tales told around the campfire.

Man wants to know the unknowable.

Nature abhors a vacuum.

Human Nature hates it even more.

Mankind can't abide not knowing.

If Man doesn't have an answer, he will make one up.

And that is why we have myths.

And the desire to make up the answer is why we have science fiction and fantasy.

And the greatest unknown, of course is Death.

We listen to doomsday economic, political,religious jihad news.

We go to the theater and see the world end, only to go outside in the bright light of day,

seeing the cars pass by and hearing the pedestrians chatting away on their cell phones.

Just Hollywood. We're safe. Aren't we?

Not so you’d notice. Jamestown.

Jim Jones convinced his followers that the world was about to end in nuclear horror. They mixed in cyanide with their Kool-Aid and drank it down.

Personally, I believe something stronger was called for. It's a terrible joke for a horrendous reality But …

There is Heaven’s Gate and its herald, Marshall Applewhite,

whose followers believed his tale that

their souls were about to be snatched up by the spacecraft flying in the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet.

All they had to do get on board

Was die.

No Kool-Aid for them. No, sir. They mixed their poison with good old American Pie,

washed down by vodka.

It is no wonder Hollywood considers us gullible.

But there is another reason why we all flock to End of the World movies such as Armageddon, Deep Impact, When Worlds Collide, I Am Legend.

We want to believe

That somehow, someway,we’ll be able to fix it and make things right.

Science has become our new God. And it will make things right.

Right?

Science may be God to some.

But it is a vengeful God.

Man has never made a weapon that He has not ended up using. Even a limited nuclear exchange

{
5% of the global nuclear arsenal}

would almost certainly ANNIHILATE life on Earth as we know it.

Hollywood responds with THE ROAD

THE TERMINATOR MOVIES

THE BOOK OF ELI

SKYLINE

Hollywood tells us what we want to hear :

Something good of what we were would survive.

Hollywood doesn’t seem to get the TRUE message. Which is :

WE want to survive, skippy!

Which is why the end times movies that do the most box office are the ones in which the main hero survives

MAD MAX franchise.

The first MATRIX.

The 1st PLANET OF THE APES movie

{Yes, I know Charleton Heston’s not ecstatic.

But he’s alive and he’s got the babe. And a kicker of a last scene.}

Think INDEPENDENCE DAY : Great last scenes. “Get up and shout” scenes.

Now think CHILDREN OF MEN : “Put the gun in your mouth and pull the trigger” last scenes.

And the box office receipts showed it.

You and I don’t want to spend ten dollars to get depressed! We can stay at home and be that for free!

Oh, and don’t think that the scenario of CHILDREN OF MEN could happen?

Think again, skippy.

The average sperm count has dropped by HALF in the last 30 years!

HALF.

People in industrialized countries don’t make nearly enough babies.

People in the third world lose many of their young children to poor conditions. It gives you something to ponder.

And then, there is the zombie craze.

Oh, sure, it’s all fun and games until your girlfriend suddenly wants to make a snack of your brains.

But Hollywood knows we are drawn to a story following a small group of friends,

facing a world of devastated, formerly familiar streets filled with throngs of trudging,hungering, walking corpses.

We ask :

What would I do in such a situation? Where would I go? Who would I take? What would I bring?

It is why the TV series, THE WALKING DEAD, did so well for AMC.

But behind all the movies lies the promise that we could survive if we were smart and lucky.

Bottom Line : We could survive.

There would be a tomorrow.

We all have an inbuilt need to associate ourselves with those who survive.

We all have this crazy human need to believe that we will beat the odds when others do not.

There's a powerful scene near the end of The Road,

the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize—winning novel,

where a father and son sit silent together under brooding skies on a wasted, nameless beach,

littered with human and whale skeletons.

They have finally reached the coast after traversing by foot a post-apocalyptic America filled with nightmare dangers, hardships, and traps.

The boy, about age 10, has never seen the sea.

"What's on the other side?" he asks.

"Nothing," replies his father,suffering from malnutrition and despair, after having fought off evils both human and animal.

All along he has urged his son to maintain hope —

to "carry the fire" — but has slowly lost his own.

The boy, who believes there's still goodness somewhere in their dark and dying world,

looks out to the sea and says,

"There must be something."

Wanting to keep his son's hope alive, the man pauses and then answers.

"Maybe there's a father and his son, and they're sitting on the beach too."

Like McCarthy's 2006 book, the film is both depressing and redeeming;

it depicts one of the most loving father-son relationships to appear on the big screen.

And this particular scene speaks volumes for all of us asking a universal question.

What's on the other side?

And that is what good Science Fiction and Movies do for us :

They help us discover for ourselves what we feel is on the Other Side.

In my worldview,there is indeed a Father and His Son waiting for us On The Other Side.

And remember …

"apocalypse" doesn't mean end,

but is Greek for "revelation" --

an unveiling of truth.

Let us keep looking for truth in the world around us and

in that most puzzling world : The one within us.

PROSE AS BLUNT INSTRUMENT

A hearty cackle of laughter awakened me. I smelled pipe smoke. Now what? My eyes obeyed my order to open ... but reluctantly.

Mark Twain.

He was sitting in his ghost chair by my bed laughing so that his gray/blue eyes were wet with tears. I saw a thick book in his hands. A dented book. My heart sank. He was reading THE PASSAGE. The same book Marlene Dietrich had thrown down in disgust ... twice.

"Marlene warned me. Why this bejiggered paragraph goes on for miles," he chuckled. "Miles and miles and miles."

"Hi, Sam," I yawned. "So you hate THE PASSAGE, too?"

"Hate it? Son, I love it! Why this Cronin fella gives me more ammunition than James Fenimore Cooper ever did."

Gyspy, my cat, frowned at his smoke-reaming pipe. Mark Twain smiled a crooked smile and put it out. He shook his head, flipping two pages.

"Why this blessed paragraph is a veritable blunt instrument of prose. It assaults the eye, dulls the brain. With a paragraph that winds on for twenty pages, the words just fuzz together, don't you know?"

He smiled wide. "This Cronin boy sure seems in love with his words, don't he? He went and forgot the first rule of writing :

You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God's adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by."

Gypsy jumped in his lap and curled into a purring ball beside the book. Mark Twain's face softened with a slight smile. He began petting her.

"This Cronin fella forgot that the time to begin writing your book is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is that you really want to say."

I half-covered a yawn. "Well, he certainly says a lot in that book."

He jabbed his pipe at me. "And that's the bejiggered trouble, Roland. He says the story. He doesn't show it."

He punched the open pages with his pipe stem. "Take this here section. Why he goes on and on SAYING the story. There's fragments of history. Whole blamed generations of folks just talked about in too many pages. Then, there's Peter, his father, Arlo, Milo, Theo."

He shuddered. "I'm afraid to go on lest I see Hi-Yo and his sister, Silver."

He thumbed the pages, stopped, and yelped, "Lord God All Mighty, I see dialogue. Real honest to politician, quotation marked dialogue."

His face screwed up as if he had bitten into a sour lemon. "Not great dialogue. Not even good dialogue."

"Tepid, huh?"

"Tepid? Hell, son, it ain't even tepid. You'd have to scald it some to get it to tepid."

His gray/blue eyes suddenly lit up. "It comes to me!"

"What?"

"Why ain't he the clever one? He beats you over the head with page after page of blunt prose, saying the story, not showing it, until when he finally relents and grudgingly gives you some dialogue, you don't care if it has all the kick of a dusty tombstone, you're just so blessed relieved to see some, you start to cry."

"You really don't like his dialogue, do you, Sam?"

"Like it? It all sounds the same. All the men sound the same. Amy sounds like Auntie who sounds like ...."

He scratched his head. "I rightly don't know of any non-drooling girl that sounds like Auntie. Why, she's a little girl, right? But old Cronin has her spouting deep philosophical mutterings like some opium-addled poet. Sounded nice ... just not from a little girl. It jarred like nails across my mind's blackboard, don't you know?"

He wrinkled his lips. "Oh, Cronin did half-decent with that Wolfgang character."

"Gast, sir."

"You got gas, son?"

"Never mind."

"Where was I? Oh, yes, Wolfgang and Amy. He could have made all the time spent on his endless backstory worth it, if he had infected the man just a little. You know, making him the eternal father to the eternal little girl. Like THE ROAD but happier, don't you know?"

He fixed me with piercing eyes. "I think I might just have a ghost heart attack if that Cormac McCarthy ever writes a happy tale. Being an ar-teeest doesn't mean you have to depress the bejeesus out of us all the time."

He scratched behind Gypsy's ears. "It's clear there's one man who hates this book more than us, Roland."

"Who?"

"This Cronin fella."

"But he wrote it."

"Yes, and it's clear he didn't want to. Why he goes off on tangent after tanget before he finally drags his feet over to the horror that he promised. It destroys the book. Downright destroys it."

He stroked his moustache. "To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself."

He cackled a dry laugh. "Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph."

His eagle eyes turned to me. "You have a poet's flair, son. And even better, despite the lyrical beauty of your turn of phrase, I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences."

He jabbed his pipe at me again. "That is the way to write English - it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; if you're going to put flowers in, at least arrange them in neat rows. When you catch a stray adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them - then the rest will be valuable."

He nodded as if to himself. "They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice."

He glared at THE PASSAGE. "You know the first rule of writing is that a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere."

"Ah, you already gave a first rule of writing, Sam."

"Who's the highly praised, beloved genius in this room, son? Like I was saying ... The episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help develop it."

"That's not exactly what you were saying ...."

The rest of my words withered under his stare. "I was saying that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. Even in the case of vampire stories, the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there."

"That's an awful lot of first rules," I muttered.

Mark Twain stonily ignored me and thumped the book with his pipe. "Old Cronin went and forgot that."

His face lit up. "Ernie. I think I'll take this book to Ernie."

I went cold. "Ernie as in Ernest? Ernest Hemingway? Why he'll ...."

Mark Twain smiled wide and evil. "Yes, he will. Oooh, I sure wouldn't want to be in this Cronin's dreams tomorrow night."

He rose and softly deposited a sleeping Gypsy on my bed. "Mind if I take this durned book?"

Thinking of all the midnight guests I wouldn't be having, I smiled. "No. Take it, please."

His eyes suddenly twinkled. "I'll have Ernie bring it back."

"No," I groaned.

But Mark Twain was already gone. Gyspy opened one bemused eye then went back to sleep. Ever have one of those nights?
************
And here is Thea Gilmore with an audio lesson on how to paint with words :

THE END IS NEAR! AGAIN! AND WE LOVE IT!

Eternity is really long, especially near the end.
- Woody Allen

IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD!

AGAIN!

AND WE LOVE IT!



We’re doomed.

Hollywood says so.

Why?


Pop Culture has long had a fascination with the end times.

21st century Man is like the proverbial kid in the backseat :

“Are we there yet?”


Man becomes preoccupied with the end of things

During bad times.


And these have certainly been bad times lately :

earthquakes,

tsunamis,

famines,

wars,and economic collapse.


Sociology professors say that our fascination with the end times reflects a hunger for meaning in these admittedly bad times.


We want to know where we are going

And how soon we will get there.


And while myths and religions have long talked about the end of the world,

It has only been since the rumblings that led to the first World War

that literature,and later movies, started telling stories of individuals

struggling during the world’s death.


H. G. Wells wrote his famous WAR OF THE WORLDS in 1898.



Scholars call the study of the end times …

Eschatology.

Which is fun for the dark little boy inside me because it

Is only letter and one syllable removed from

Scatology

Which is the scholarly study of folks fascinated with

Excrement.


And sadly, sometimes it’s hard to know the

Difference lately what with Hollywood has been giving us.


And so here we are in 2010. Some experts said we wouldn’t make it.

Some theologians thought the end would come

In 1988.


What? Why then, of all years?

It marked a full generation passing since Israel became a

nation in 1948.


Then, the theologians said the time clock

For the End Times started

When Jerusalem was in Israeli hands once more in 1968.


2008 came and went. Terrible times especially around here in Lake Charles after Rita.

But no End Times Unless all of this is a bad dream.


And sometimes it does feel like one, doesn’t it?


But the truth is when the end comes :

For you,

For Man,

For the World,

That time is unknown.

The unknown. Its allure is what gave birth to myth,

legend,

and tales told around the campfire.

Man wants to know the unknowable. Nature abhors a vacuum. Human Nature hates it even more.


Mankind can't abide not knowing. If Man doesn't have an answer, he will make one up.

And that is why we have myths.

And the desire to make up the answer is why we have science fiction and fantasy.


And the greatest unknown, of course is

Death.


We listen to doomsday economic, political,religious jihad news.

We go to the theater and see the world end, only to go outside in the bright light of day, seeing the cars pass by and hearing the pedestrians chatting away on their cell phones.

Just Hollywood. We're safe.

Aren't we?

Not so you’d notice.

Jamestown. Jim Jones convinced his followers that the world was about to end in nuclear horror. They mixed in cyanide with their Kool-Aid and drank it down.

Personally, I believe something stronger was called for.

It's a terrible joke for a horrendous reality

But …

There is Heaven’s Gate and its herald, Marshall Applewhite,

whose followers believed his tale that their souls were about to be snatched up by the spacecraft flying in the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet. All they had to do get on board

Was die.

No Kool-Aid for them. No, sir. They mixed their poison with good old American Pie, washed down by vodka.

It is no wonder Hollywood considers us gullible.


But there is another reason why we all flock to End of the World movies such as

Armageddon,

Deep Impact,

When Worlds Collide,

I Am Legend.


We want to believe

That somehow, someway,we’ll be able to fix it and make things right.

Science has become our new God. And it will make things right.

Right?


Science may be God to some. But it is a vengeful God.

Man has never made a weapon that He has not ended up using. Even a limited nuclear exchange {5% of the global nuclear arsenal} would almost certainly ANNIHILATE life on Earth as we know it.


Hollywood responds with

THE ROAD

THE TERMINATOR MOVIES

THE BOOK OF ELI

EIGHT


Hollywood tells us what we want to hear :

Something good of what we were would survive.

Hollywood doesn’t seem to get the message. Which is :


WE want to survive, skippy!


Which is why the end times movies that do the most box office are the ones in which the main hero survives

MAD MAX franchise.

The first MATRIX.

The 1st PLANET OF THE APES movie

{Yes, I know Charleton Heston’s not ecstatic.

But he’s alive and he’s got the babe. And a kicker of a last scene.}


Think INDEPENDENCE DAY :

Great last scenes. “Get up and shout” scenes.


Now think CHILDREN OF MEN :

“Put the gun in your mouth and pull the trigger” last scenes.

And the box office receipts showed it.


You and I don’t want to spend ten dollars to get depressed!

We can stay at home and be that for free!


Oh, and don’t think that the scenario of CHILDREN OF MEN could happen?

Think again, skippy.


The average sperm count has dropped by HALF in the last 30 years!

HALF.

People in industrialized countries don’t make nearly enough babies.

People in the third world lose many of their young children to poor conditions.

It gives you something to ponder.


That’s why I emailed Megan Fox told her of my excellent genes,high I.Q,and sturdy genetic stock.

With her looks and my brains, we’d make beautiful babies. Her lawyer emailed back something silly about cease & desist.

She’s just thinking it over.


Riiiiiight.


And then, there is the zombie craze.

Oh, sure, it’s all fun and games until your girlfriend suddenly wants to make a snack of your brains.


But Hollywood knows we are drawn to a story following a small group of friends, facing a world of devastated, formerly familiar streets filled with throngs of trudging,hungering, walking corpses.

We ask :

What would I do in such a situation?

Where would I go?

Who would I take?

What would I bring?


But behind all the movies lies the promise that we could survive if we were smart and lucky.


Bottom Line :

We could survive.

There would be a tomorrow.


We all have an inbuilt need to associate ourselves with those who survive.

We all have this crazy human need to believe that we will beat the odds when others do not.


There's a powerful scene near the end of The Road, the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize—winning novel, where a father and son sit silent together under brooding skies

on a wasted, nameless beach, littered with human and whale skeletons.

They have finally reached the coast after traversing by foot a post-apocalyptic America
filled with nightmare dangers, hardships, and traps.

The boy, about age 10, has never seen the sea.

"What's on the other side?" he asks.

"Nothing," replies his father,suffering from malnutrition and despair, after having fought off evils both human and animal.

All along he has urged his son to maintain hope—

to "carry the fire" — but has slowly lost his own.


The boy, who believes there's still goodness somewhere in their dark and dying world,

looks out to the sea and says,

"There must be something."


Wanting to keep his son's hope alive, the man pauses and then answers.

"Maybe there's a father and his son, and they're sitting on the beach too."


Like McCarthy's 2006 book, the film is both depressing and redeeming;

it depicts one of the most loving father-son relationships to appear on the big screen.


And this particular scene speaks volumes for all of us asking a universal question.


What's on the other side?


And that is what good Science Fiction and Movies do for us :

They help us discover for ourselves what we feel is on the Other Side.


In my worldview,there is indeed a Father and His Son waiting for us

On The Other Side.


And remember …

"apocalypse" doesn't mean end, but is Greek for "revelation" -- an unveiling of truth.


Let us keep looking for truth in the world around us and in that most puzzling world :

The one within us.