MSR Winter 2004/05
(actually listed as 2005 for bookshelf purposes)
Features:
Jim Ferris: Winner of the 2004 MSR Poetry Book Award
Interview by Caitlin Driscoll and M. Scott Douglass
Essays
Protecting Poetry by Frank S. Palmisano, III
Star Trek’s Monsters in Disguise by Alan Rauch
Let Me Tell You Why by Shirley UphouseFiction
Free by Dennis Must, a runner-up in the 2003 MSR Short Fiction Contest.Reviews by Tony Morris, S. Craig Renfroe, Jr., Richard Allen Taylor.
of the following work:
The Woman Who Has Eaten the Moon by Lucinda Grey, Whistling Past the Graveyard by Kristin Berkey-Abbott, High Noon at Pompeii by John Foster West, Far Sides of the Only World by David Williams, Ghost in the Bloody Show by Martin Vest, Foreign Bodies by Sandra BeckerPoetry by Jim Ferris, Lisa Dominguez Abraham, Tony Artuso, George Held, F.J. Bergmann, Alicia Bessette, Alan Catlin, Robert Cooperman, Ryan Eckes, Jilly Dybka, Cheryl Gatling, Rod Farmer, Paul Hamill, Gayle Elen Harvey, Marianna Hofer, Glenn Hutchinson, Rob Ingraham,
John Jenkinson, Robert K. Johnson, Tim Jones, Tim Keane, J.R. Kangas, Sarah Kanning, Gary L. Lark, Barbara J. Mayer, Elizabeth S. Miller, Matt Morris, John McKernan, Charles Rammelkamp, Richard Luftig, Jim Spurr, David Thornbrugh, E. R. Turner, Lisken Van Pelt Dus, Chuck Hicks, Lynda C. Ward, Chris Waters, Jonathan Hayes, Eric A. Weil, Steve Wentz, Dede Wilson, Paul Worley, Anthony Zanelli.
Cover Art: Sunrise At Rocky Mountain, a photo by M. Scott Douglass.
Images by M. Scott Douglass, Irene Blair Honeycutt, Gerald Wheeler, Frank S. Palmisano, III
Alan Rauch, Charlotte, NC
Star Trek’s Monsters in Disguise
The shelf life of the original Star Trek is one of television’s more remarkable phenomena. Priceline.com has revived the Shatner-Nimoy partnership and Shatner himself is now ensconced in a new role on “The Practice.” But what’s most intriguing is the way that the series is nostalgically invoked. A recent newspaper article recalled, with fuzzy hindsight, how the show “often with subtlety and sophistication, used the future to tackle modern social issues.” The notion that “The Enterprise” was an interstellar melting pot reflects a general sentiment about the “noble” goals of the Star Trek franchise. But that sentiment deserves closer attention.
I was just a boy when the series first appeared and was not a fan of science fiction. Star Trek didn’t change my attitude. As I watched the crew of the Enterprise explore planetary caves I couldn’t help notice that, despite their cragginess, all subterranean passages seemed to have shiny linoleum floors. I struggled with my suspension of disbelief. Perhaps, I thought, the worm-like Horta of Janus VI simonized as it burrowed.
Yet despite its inconsistencies, the show was appealing and I couldn’t resist watching it. But the most significant attraction of Star Trek, in my circle at least, was the fact that the overwrought William Shatner was, like me, a good Jewish boy from Montreal. He attended McGill University, as I would eventually do, and, no doubt, played pick-up games of ice hockey as virtually every Canadian boy did. But, unlike other Montrealers, Shatner had commandeered his way, through Hollywood to outer space. Could any Canadian kid, Jewish or not, dare aspire to such heights?
My parents seemed less impressed by all of this than I would have liked. When I forced my father to watch a Star Trek episode with me, he was distinctly and disappointingly underwhelmed. When the unarmed Captain Kirk had to fight a menacing lizard-like creature called, as I recall, a “Gorn,” my father seemed to miss the point entirely. Instead of noting Kirk’s resourcefulness in fashioning a weapon out of meager minerals and materials, he pointed derisively at the Gorn. “You do know,” my father said, unimpressed by it all, “that that’s just a fellow in a lizard suit.”
To be sure, it was. On a low budget, the Star Trek costume designers could barely cobble something together that diverged from Godzilla. (No doubt, an ancestor of the Gorn.) Years later, I came to appreciate yet another problem faced by all monster-oriented costume designers…and, perhaps, even by my father. The 18th century philosopher, David Hume, devotes a section of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding to, of all things, monsters! Our imagination he argues is “really confined within very narrow limits.” Hume continues his point by noting “that all [the] creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience.” In other words, we can only imagine monsters in shapes that we already know and understand.
In like fashion, we can only form heroes in shapes and forms that we understand.
And it was this point that turned me back to my father’s original observation about the man in the lizard suit. What was true of the Gorn, was also true of Captain Kirk. Beneath the character, James Tiberius Kirk, named poignantly after the brother of Christ, an emperor of Rome, and the Church itself (“Kirk” in Scots referred to the Presbyterian Church), was—bottom line—a Jewish kid from Montreal.
Now, of course, all actors play someone else. But, more and more, it bothered me that for all its eclecticism and in spite of the remarkable achievement of creating so ethnically diverse a crew in the mid-60s, there was still no room for, say, a “Captain James (Chaim?) Rabinovitch.”
No, instead Shatner had to be “Gorn-ized,” to coin a phrase, or to use Hume’s language, “compounded” to look like a familiar hero.
Nor was Kirk like Superman, the creation of the New Yorkers, Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster. For many comic book readers, part of Superman’s appeal was that he had what might be called a “nebbish” side. Thus while the bookish and awkward Clark Kent had neither the powers or panache of his alter-ego, he was certainly a comfort to the Siegels and Schusters, and perhaps even the Shatners of this world.
It’s wonderful to applaud Star Trek and Gene Roddenberry, its creator, for advancing social issues. But, by the same token, it’s also worth noting, as we reflect historically, the unacknowledged “frontiers” beyond which Star Trek writers could not or would not go, boldly or otherwise. Looking back now, I recognize something I believe my father saw, which was that the man in the lizard suit was not the only one in disguise those many years ago.
Dennis Abbott, St. Paul, MN
Free
(A runner up in the 2003 MSR Short Fiction Contest)
I couldn’t hardly believe it was happening to me. I never got a break before and don’t look for none. They call rednecks like me “poor white trash” and “trailer-trash,” and nobody ever went out of his way for me. But here I was on a Greyhound bus with the trees going by, and the farther I got away from Eddyville, the closer I got to thinking it was true.
A middle-aged lady got on at Marion and sat down next to me. She smiled friendly like and said “Good morning,” and I nodded and said “How do.” I wanted to tell somebody about it, but I knew it wouldn’t be polite, so I set to watching the trees going by again. Elm, popple, and blue spruce in front of people’s houses, until we were in the country again, with alder, birch, and scrub pine, once in a while a maple or ash, or a little grove of pin oak.
The lady asked if I was going very far. I held back and only told her, “I’m going to Wyeville, that’s where I live.”
She said she was just going to the next stop, where her daughter lives, but then she didn’t go on talking, so then I thought I didn’t say enough to tell her it was all right to, so I said, “I just got out of the state prison at Eddyville. They found out another man did what they said I did, and they finally let me go.”
She looked at me real surprised, and I could see she went through some different feelings about that, and then she said, “Well that’s just wonderful! I mean it must have been awful to get put away for something you didn’t do, but you must be awful glad you got absolved of it in the end. Your people must have been praying hard for you.”
It was nice of her to be neighborly, considering I’ve got a mean-looking face and people don’t trust me much. I nodded, and she said, “It must have been terrible for you, if you didn’t know when it was going to get all straightened out. How long did you have to stay there?
“I was in there for ten months, but it was only eight months until they found out who did it, so then I hoped they’d let me go.”
“What was it they accused you of, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“It don’t matter. It was somebody else. It don’t really matter what he did.”
“I understand, but it must have been just awful to have people thinking you committed any kind of a crime! Your wife knew you were innocent though, didn’t she, and the people who know you?”
“Guess so. I’m going back there now.”
“Well that’s so wonderful! It’s good to know there’s still justice in the world.”
Want the rest of the story?
The conclusion can be read in the Fall 2004 issue which is still available direct from MSR for $7 at
The Main Street Rag Bookstore.BACK TO TOP
Jim Ferris, Verona, WI
Normal
Across Oak Park Avenue
is a city park, lush
and busy, where men play softball allevening, too far away
to watch, their dim voices
drifting across the green. Their cars linethe streets as far
as I can see. Sammy and I,
Robert and I, Hoffmann and I call outthe makes and models
as the cars pass. Dodge Dart.
Chevy Nova. We are seldom wrong—Corvair,Pontiac GTO—we who drive
wheelchairs and banana carts—
Mustang, VW, Rambler American—who have not yetrounded second—
‘57 Chevy! My dad had one of those—
who watch out windows a world so soft—T-bird—so fair—Corvette—
so normal—Ford Fairlane—
a world going on, going by, going home.
Cheryl Gatling, Syracuse, NY
The Married Man Dreams
It was the season of plenty, but who knew?
Women and girls smiled so easily,
there would always be too many to harvest.
He had only to admire the hair, the thighs,
the beautiful faces as they drifted past him.
How easy it was to say to one blue-eyed blonde,
“Yes, yes, forever, forsaking all others.”
Excellent woman, she gave him no cause to regret.
But at fifty everything is finite, and the girls
at the gym, at the shop, at the office seemed to whisper,
“Never, never, forever lost to you.”It was the night the waitress dropped his drink,
then bent over him to say, “I’m sorry.”
With a single gesture, she exposed her breasts.
“Let me make it up to you. Suck on these.”
He said, “Whoa, I’m dreaming. And that means…
I can make things happen.” And it worked.
Her uniform opened, button by button.
She hiked the satin slip. She straddled his lap.
When she arched her back, the straws fell on the floor.It was a new world. At night they came,
young, old, familiar, imagined, but always
yielding, eager, and ready. His son’s teacher
said, “I’m glad you’ve come for this conference.
It’s important we get to know each other better.”
The female mechanic, bent naked over his engine,
said, “Would you mind giving me a hand
keeping my breasts out of the air filter?”
The girl at the deli said, “Congratulations,
our one thousandth customer. Come on in back
for a special treat. You want mustard or mayo?”
And that poor hitchhiker, wearing only a hat.
It was only charity to warm her frozen limbs,
only efficiency to use both mouth and hands.He woke, honest and faithful, beside his wife.
He pulled her closer, magnificent woman.
He let his hand rest on the rise of her hip.
He smelled the heat of her neck. But he kept his eyes
closed, kept them sticky with the grit of sleep.
He had to get back to that waitress.
Gary L. Lark, Coos Bay, OR
America is Hungry
Our leaders wear six-guns
and ride to glory
on the bucking dollar.Magicians appear
in ice blue Cadillacs
giving us time in a needle.
Our TV lovers have perfect teeth,
smile from perfect masks
as they rifle our pockets.
Babies cry in shopping carts
trying to reach their first fix
from shelves of false promise.
America is hungry,
hungry for mythos and blame,
hungry like a knife.
We meet in locked rooms,
imagine the dark hands outside
scratching to get in.
Our America, my America,
dances on the edge of darkness
looking for its face.
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