Friday, November 27, 2020

How Carlos Castaneda Made Up Don Juan

How Carlos Castaneda Made Up Don Juan
from Laid Bare, by John Gilmore


John Gilmore (July 5, 1935 - October 13, 2016) was an actor, director, sleaze paperback author, true crime author, and chronicler of Hollywood Excess. Laid Bare, his 1997 memoir of his career during the 1950s and 1960s, is filled with anecdotes and reminiscences about a variety of fellow actors and L. A. citizens and is well worth reading.


On pages 206 - 207 of Laid Bare (Amok Books, 2003), Gilmore describes what his friend Jim Davidson had to say about rooming with Carlos Castaneda in L.A. in the early 60s:

Along with another mutual friend, kid Golden Gloves champ Manny Samon, and a ‘Mexican’ named Carlos Castaneda, the three had sort of stumbled into a dumpy guest house behind some apartments near L. A. City College……Carlos – in love with moonbeams – wrote poems to a female college teacher who’d said he showed promise.....Samon was the first to hook up, driving off with a big black cleaning lady after trying to hang himself in the shower. He tied the rope to the fixture, but being chunky and thick-boned, he only managed to pull the pipes from the wall.

With no shower, Jim and Carlos moved into a front apartment managed by another friend, Frank, a would-be writer working at the VA crazy house. Sharing the cramped quarters throughout the year, the two had little space for furniture. “Carlos would sit around on these tatami mats,” Jim said, “with those big chubby legs crossed, trying to look like a Buddha. We’d hang around a little all-night restaurant up in Hollywood……

“Carlos liked to tell tall tales all the time,” Davidson said, “personal things, making things up. He was a creative guy with a vivid imagination, but made up these ridiculous stories, and I’d call him on it, but he said it made him feel important. He made up a story about some Indian like Tonto, only this guy was a medicine man. He’d tell a couple of girls we talked to about this Tonto character, like he had this close friend who was weird and important. None of the girls were impressed enough to do anything with Carlos…..

“This medicine-man Tonto was just like some imaginary playmate you make up when you’re little,” Jim recalled. “When we started at UCLA, it was Tonto who was sharing his secrets with Carlos. We’d sit around this little apartment on Madison while he wrote his thesis about this Indian character. We had another friend with a doctorate in literature who accused Carlos of being a liar and a phony, and found himself in agreement with the anthropology department, which became furious when they found out Carlos’ tale seemed to be nothing more than a piece of fiction.

“One girl really liked Carlos, but she was a chinless Olive Oyl. He was trying to call her one night when some guy got mad at him for hogging the phone and pulled Carlos off it and slapped him.

“Carlos came back and sat on the tatami mat crying, sitting on pillows without his pants on. His short, bare legs were chubby and brown, and he looked at them, poking at his legs, and said he was a nothing. “I’m nothing,” he said. “I’m just a little brown man.”

….

”People who told the truth were fools, Carlos said. He believed lying was more creative than telling the truth. There was never any such person as Don Juan,” said Jim. Even the name was Carlos’ joke about his inability to get laid. The whole Indian thing was just his imaginative wanderings – like he’d wander at night, never sleeping much. He’d just sit around making up stories to get people to think of him as an intelligent and important person.

“After he got that stuff published, he got some fat checks and moved to Malibu, had a big security system set up, and you couldn’t even see the house. He said, ‘
Nobody is going to slap Carlos Castaneda……’ He told me he didn’t care that UCLA thought he was a fake, or that anyone thought he was a fake. He was going to keep on lying because a superior man never tells the truth – he tells what he wants to be the truth.”

...

“There was no depth to Carlos,” said another friend, a PhD. “He wouldn’t go out on lecture circuits because he was afraid of being challenged. His theory of the superior man who lies was okay as an individual position behind a security wall at Malibu Beach, but on the podium he feared those who could dig into his lies. When UCLA found out there was no medicine man, they kicked him out. It was all fake….”

Tuesday, November 24, 2020

1977: The Year I Stopped Reading Comics from Barry's Pearls

1977: The year I stopped reading comics
from 'Berry's Pearls of Comic Book Wisdom'

An interesting post made last year at the Barry's Pearls of Comic Book Wisdom website. His observations about the impact in '77 of Marvel's price increases, the constant recycling of reprints, the steep drop in the quality of the art and writing, and the poor caliber of the black-and-white magazines, are spot-on. 

Marvel's current editorial and business office staff would do well to read this article..........

Saturday, November 21, 2020

Book Review: The Cloud Walker

Book Review: 'The Cloud Walker' by Edmund Cooper

5 / 5 Stars

'The Cloud Walker' (216 pp) was published by Ballantine Books in April, 1973. The striking cover illustration is by John Berkey.

I first read 'The Cloud Walker' in 1973, and at the time I thought it was a great book. How well does it hold up when read a second time, 47 years later ?

Quite well, in fact.

The novel is set several centuries after two consecutive nuclear wars have returned civilization, and the British isles in particular, to a medieval existence. In Britain, the Luddite Church serves as the national authority and is deferred to by the seigneurs who have carved the island into their personal fiefdoms. 

Believing technological progress to be responsible for the downfall of the First and Second eras of Man, the Church views the construction of machines as sinful. Any man who violates the teachings of the holy Church and its precepts is targeted for extirpation.

In the seigneur of Arundel, young Keiron Joinerson is apprenticed to the painter, Master Hobart. Keiron's talent promises him a bright future as a portraitist to the landed gentry. But Keiron's real ambition is heretical: he wants to fly.

With the aid of a crumbing book printed in the days of the First Men, Keiron begins experimenting with the construction of hot-air balloons. Well aware of the Church's proscriptions, he hopes to evade inquiry by disguising his efforts as a form of elaborate toy-making. But even as he progresses in his understanding of flight and flying machines, Keiron (mockingly referred to as 'Keiron head-in-the-air' by his fellow villagers) draws the unwelcome scrutiny of the Church........and with it, the likelihood of being burned at the stake........

Of the three or four novels by Edmund Cooper (1925 - 1982) that I have read, 'The Cloud Walker' is his best and does much within its small span of only 216 pages. 

Cooper does a number of things right here. The plot is straightforward, and the chapters short and to the point. The narrative is suffused with a foreboding atmosphere, one derived from the ever-present threat posed to the main character and his allies of condemnation, and execution, by the Luddite Church. For dialogue and exposition, Cooper skillfully uses a prose style that evokes the mind-set and beliefs of a medieval-era England without being so stylized as to be opaque. And by introducing a major plot alteration at the novel's mid-way point, the story remains engrossing right until the very last page.

Summing up, 'The Cloud Walker' not only is the best of Cooper's sci-fi works, but among the best sci-fi novels of the 70s. This novel is well worth searching out. I note that while the mass market paperback version is steadily increasing in price, the 'Edmund Cooper SF Gateway Omnibus', which includes 'The Cloud Walker' as one of its three titles, remains affordable.

Wednesday, November 18, 2020

Thorgal: The Archers, part Two

Thorgal: The Archers
By Van Hamme and Rosinski
1985
Part Two























Sunday, November 15, 2020

Thorgal: The Archers, Part One

Thorgal: The Archers
By Van Hamme and Rosinski
1985
Part One

First published in 1985 as 'Thorgal: Les Archers', this English translation was issued in 1986 by The Donning Company. Printed to the same dimensions as the European versions of Thorgal, on glossy paper with very good color separations, it's a nice book.

'The Archers' features some fine artwork from Grzegorz Rosinski, and a plot from Jean Van Hamme that showcases one of the more sadistic archery contests I've ever encountered......along with double-crossing bandits, for good measure.

I'll be posting this story in two parts.