Gary Gygax (1938 - 2008)

We are very sorry to hear about the death of one of the most influential artists of the late 20th century, game designer, Gary Gygax.

Gary Gygax created "Dungeons & Dragons" in the 1970's. This week when you turn on the tv, go to the movies, play video games, take a moment to pause and note that without Gary Gygax and the RPG juggernaut that he launched, your entertainments might look very, very different. There'd be fewer half-orcs, for one.

I reprint here, in full, a post from April 2006, called "No Neal. Gary Gygax Is Your Father":

"No Neal. Gary Gygax Is Your Father"

...to which I replied:

"No. That's not true. That's impossible!"

And so then Gary Gygax said to me:

"Search your feelings, Neal. You know it to be true."

And then I squealed like a little piggy:

"Noooo! Noooo! ..."

And then coming to my senses:

"... Oh, no. Wait. Yes! Yes! Of course! That explains a lot."

Yes, Gary Gygax is my father.

Yet, he did not sleep with my mother - or so my parents insist. So how did this immaculate conception ("I.C.", for those who played on/against Catholic schools in high school sports teams) come to pass?

"Star Wars" (1977) - not "Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope" (various years) - got a lot of us going, but if if I'm brutally honest, the greatest formative influence on my creative life - apart from Mad magazine - was probably Gary Gygax and his Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

D&D was my baptism by fire into the world of gaming. The first time I ever played this greatest role playing game of all role playing games was in a bastardized version which employed only percentile dice rolls (by rolling 2xd20's - for you civilians) and required approximately 30 attributes for each character, also determined by percentile roll.

Within a week of that first game, my father, tragically ignorant of what he was unleashing, bought me the "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Players Handbook". "The Monster Manual", "The Dungeon Master's Guide" quickly followed. And I was the first kid on my block to get "Deities & Demigods" and "The Fiend Folio". I was off and running, and became a Dungeon Master myself (becoming a Dungeon Master is exactly like being a producer in Hollywood - you just tell everyone you are one, then invite your friends to play your game). I engineered epic campaigns with casts of thousands, with elaborate improved rules that I'd invented, with stories of great subtlety and emotional depth and even my supporting characters (derogatorially referred to by some as "non-player characters") had elaborate and, often moving, backstories.

No stealing of the Special Mace of Healing from the band of Gnolls in a trap door-plagued tunnel complex here! No! No, my Lord!

My Dungeons & Dragons campaigns involved world-rending events, orcs with cannons, demons unleashed, an army of Drow Elves, and armadas of dragons of all conceivable colors locked in epic battle. My players weren't trying to get rich and move up to the next level - or if they were, I was stone deaf to their pleas. My players were responsible for the entire fate of the Universe(s)!

And my ambitions today are - to the chagrin of my agents/managers/wife - not much less grandiose.

But creating a world, building every part of it, breathing my own life into it, and then forcing you - as role player/audience - to endure - er, I mean INHABIT that world was my dream - and still is.

I moved on from Dungeons & Dragons and by high school I was creating my own role playing games, cribbing notes and weaponry and character attributes and matrices from all sorts of other games. My favorite - and it had a long run with my role playing friends - who, I realize in hindsight, were very indulgent with me - was a space opera/sci-fi adventure role playing game which featured - again - everything but the kitchen sink.

I called the game "GalaxStar".

I do not know why.

I do not know what a "GalaxStar" is. I did not know then, and I do not know now. But that is what I called it. I was kid, okay. A friend and I even embarked upon a comic book of the adventures that had taken place in the game play, but the steam left that idea quickly when I began to understand the majesty of girls and alcohol.

But even during my precocious and hair-raising transition into the fields of alcoholism and sex addiction, I was always trying to create a new role playing game - set in all kinds of bizarre milieu. I tried insects. I tried secret agents. I attempted a completely generic (or maybe utterly all-encompassing and universal?) gaming system which could be adapted to any scenario. I was briefly in a rock band when I was a kid. The band didn't keep me around long because I was much more interested in creating a mythology, a design, and a conceptual system for the band to dwell in than I was in making music.

Ah, wasted youth! What precious energy I spent on utterly useless creations! What a great and bounteous talent I frittered away on nothing! What a disappointment for my parents to know that I wasn't just masturbating all night behind those closed doors!

How would I ever make it up to myself? And to all those other teens whose lives I helped to ruin?

How would I ever make good?

Out of high school, I moved to Los Angeles, because that's where they made the movies ...

Next week Neal learns: Ralph Bakshi is his father.

Roy Scheider (1932 - 2008)

Roy Scheider died. I feel sad.

Surprised to say, sad.

When major movie stars and media personalities perish, I don't generally feel too much one way or another about it. I feel some curiosity, possibly some sympathy for the person's family. But generally, after the short shock of the initial news, it all feels to me like just one more sequence in their public drama.

I liked ... that guy who just died ... I literally just forgot his name - either because I am old, or I am dangerously out of touch with the very industry I work in, or - most likely - the coffee hasn't taken effect yet.

Heath Ledger.

I liked Heath Ledger a lot. His "Brokeback Mountain" (2005) performance was superb. He managed a character of deeply strangled emotion without giving a strangled performance. Paul Newman pulled that off in some of his early roles. It's not easy.

I regret that I won't be able to see Heath Ledger's career. We always wonder, when a promising talent dies, what spectacular heights they might have scaled, had they been allowed to conttinue and to develop. James Dean, River Phoenix, Jimi Hendrix. But more often than not, promising talents fade away and do not last a lifetime. If a performer stays in the game and takes care of his body & soul, often the best that can be expected is a cycle of hits and misses, missteps and lucky breaks and missed opportunities and minor successes leveraged to great advantage.

We like success and excellence and we like more of it and more of it and more of it. We like to see it played out on our screens. We like to imagine such a thing would be possible in our own lives, and pocketbooks. I do anyway. But I have come to believe that such an expectation is not only childish - or, at least, something born out of childish fears - but that it's also undesireable. Very much the equivalent of wanting the season to be summer all year long.(people relocate thousands of miles to bask in this fantasy). The best of Heath Ledger's career may have already been behind him. Not likely. But not without precedent.

But Roy Scheider. I loved watching him. His image may very well have imprinted on my soft young brain when I first saw him, as Martin Brody, in "Jaws" (1975). I enjoyed every performance of his I ever saw.

I saw "Jaws 2" (1978) on opening day with my friend John Horvath and though, even as a little kid, I knew the movie was crap, I was excited to be able to watch Roy Scheider again. I suppose Scheider - along with Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw - must have been among the very first actors whose names I knew.

Roy Scheider missed out on playing the lead in "The Deer Hunter" (1978) because of his obligation to do the "Jaws" sequel. And here we see the flaw in revering ever-expanding, ever-increasing successes. Had he done the role, we would have been robbed of one of Robert De Niro's great performances, and that film - one of the greatest American films ever made - would have suffered incalculably. So the Big Picture is working out well and one missed opportunity also means another opportunity somewhere else. The end of one career means the beginning of something else.

Thanks, Heath Ledger. Thanks, Roy Scheider.

BRODY: "What day is this?"
HOOPER: "It's Wednesday... eh, it's Tuesday, I think."
BRODY: "Think the tide's with us."
HOOPER: "Keep kicking."
BRODY: "I used to hate the water."
HOOPER: "I can't imagine why."

Evel Knievel Jumps The Styx

Robert Craig "Evel" Knievel

October 17, 1938 - November 30, 2007

Vonnegut

So that was Kurt Vonnegut. All done.

I'm glad we got him. He was good.

My wife wrote a paper on Kurt Vonnegut when she was at Boston College. The faculty resisted heavily because Kurt Vonnegut was considered a "popular" author - and a writer of science fiction, heavens forbid - and so beneath academic study. But she won out.

I haven't read as much Kurt Vonnegut as I should - another peculiar result of my tendency toward avoiding things that I know will make me happier. But I will. I will read more. I will read "Slaughterhouse Five" (1969), for example. I remember "Slaughterhouse Five" sitting on desks of friends in high school. I think they must have been reading it for a class. Very enlightened high school I went to.

I read "Cat's Cradle" (1963) and "The Sirens Of Titan" (1959) a couple years back. They were fascinating and very, very funny. Reading them, I had the suspicion I was being distracted by a first-rate entertainment, so the writer could, in the meantime, perform some fine-tuning of my mental and spiritual state.

Certainly, Vonnegut's service during WWII, and his first-hand experience of the bombing of Dresden and its aftermath, are key influences in any study of his work and absurist point of view. Perhaps experiencing such horror first-hand produces an understanding that the most vital things must never be approached with an attitude of gravity:

"Who am I to shade this staggering moment with so light and shallow brow!"

Dresden, ca. 1900

Gilbert Sorrentino (1929 – 2006)

Obituary of writer Gilbert Sorrentino, quoted in full from today's LATimes.com:

Gilbert Sorrentino, 77; Avant-Garde Novelist, Professor

By Elaine Woo, Times Staff Writer

May 24, 2006

Gilbert Sorrentino once wrote, "If you make a better book the world will build a mousetrap at your door."

With one exception over a five-decade writing career, the mousetrap was always at Sorrentino's door.

The author of 15 novels — including a parodist's feast called "Mulligan Stew" — Sorrentino was a master of avant-garde fiction whose work was admired by other writers. That the world never beat a path to his door did not unduly concern him. That most critics found him hard to peg bothered him more, but their neglect made no appreciable dent in his prolific career on the imaginative rim of American letters.

"Sorrentino was an American master," novelist Don DeLillo said Tuesday of the longtime Stanford University professor of literature and creative writing, who was 77 at his death Thursday in New York City. The cause was complications of lung cancer.

"His work has humor, anger, passion and deep-reaching memory. But he wrote against the times," DeLillo said, "against the pressure to be commercially successful. There was an edge in his work that wasn't always easy to accept."

Said Bradford Morrow, a novelist and editor of the literary journal Conjunctions: "I think of him as a contemporary Swift. Writers adore him. He just didn't do the right move to get famous, like a Norman Mailer barroom brawl. Sorrentino was very retiring. And he was not going to court the culture he was attacking."

Sorrentino's novels could be surreal, erotic and always humorous. His characters were surface-deep, the better to mock their motives, desires and dreams. As befitting a postmodernist, he chose forms that contrived to puncture expectations, leading readers into what one reviewer called "one hall of mirrors after another."

Sorrentino wrote eight volumes of poetry in addition to the novels, and also had worked as an editor. He founded a literary magazine called Neon in 1956 and was an editor at Kulchur magazine in the early 1960s before joining Grove Press, where he edited Alex Haley's "Autobiography of Malcolm X."

He eventually left publishing for academia, teaching at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University and the New School for Social Research in New York before Stanford hired him in 1982. "He had a sharp wit and did not suffer fools gladly," recalled Jonathan Mayhew, a student of Sorrentino in the mid-1980s who now is a professor at the University of Kansas.

He stayed at Stanford for 20 years, despite a strong aversion to California culture. On his arrival, he grudgingly learned to drive — at age 53 — but remained "completely bollixed by the suburban lifestyle," Sorrentino, a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker, told Publishers Weekly a few years ago. "The happiest day of my life was when I sold my car" just before returning to his native Brooklyn in 2002.

"He was like a fish out of water in California," said his son, Christopher, also a novelist. Sorrentino is also survived by his wife, Victoria Ortiz; another son, Jesse; and three grandchildren. A daughter, Delia, died three years ago.

The son of a Sicilian immigrant, Sorrentino grew up in a working-class environment. He attended Brooklyn College for two years, which were interrupted by service in the Army Medical Corps from 1951 to 1953. By then he knew that he wanted to be a writer and embarked on what he later described as "this massive, hopeless novel," which remained in the drawer after he finished it.

He put out two volumes of poetry — much of it inspired by New York and its people — before turning out his first published novel, "The Sky Changes," in 1966. A story about a miserably married couple on a trip across America, it is told out of sequence because "there really is no past that is worse than the present and there is no future that will be better than the present," Sorrentino told the Grosseteste Review in 1973.

His later novels continued to experiment with form. "Steelwork" (1970), inspired by Sorrentino's Brooklyn childhood, "is made up of 96 separate but interlocking dramatic vignettes, scenes which, in their arrangement within the novel, scramble chronology," critic Jerome Klinkowitz wrote. His last novel, "Little Casino" (2002) has unnamed characters and stops arbitrarily at 52 chapters — the number of weeks in a year. "All form is utterly artificial," he declared in an interview.

Such departures from convention annoyed many critics, such as Jeffrey A. Frank, who wrote in the Washington Post in 1990 that Sorrentino "is an acquired taste."

In "Mulligan Stew," Sorrentino pulled out all the stops. A mulligan stew is a mishmash of ingredients, little bits of lots of things. Sorrentino's novel combines what critic Michael Dirda described as "morsels for every literary taste," parodies of forms including cheap detective fiction, the western, bad poetry and pornography.

Critics called it his masterpiece.

Kenneth John Atchity, writing in the Los Angeles Times, said "Mulligan Stew" was a "singular event in the history of wit and imagination." Dirda, in the Washington Post, wrote that it "contains some of the best parodies since S.J. Perelman at his most manic, and perhaps the most corrosive satire of the literary scene since early Aldous Huxley." John Leonard, in the New York Times, wrote: "There is a very real question as to whether avant-garde fiction can survive Gilbert Sorrentino's new novel." The New York Times Book Review named it one of the best books of 1979.

The main character is a writer of middling success named Lamont, and the novel contains Lamont's novel-in-progress. The surreal aspect is that Lamont's characters lead their own lives when Lamont leaves his desk. The well-read reader would glean their heritage: One character, Ned Beaumont, is from Dashiell Hammett's "The Glass Key"; Daisy and Tom Buchanan are from F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby"; and Dick Halpin once worked for a "Mr. Joyce" — in a footnote in James Joyce's colossal "Finnegans Wake."

When Lamont's novel collapses, his characters abandon him.

Such utter failure may have been Sorrentino's fear. He received 28 rejection notices for "Mulligan Stew" before Grove embraced it in 1979.

He was famous for a brief period, then fell into obscurity again, publishing 10 more novels with small presses that were barely noticed by critics.

"He just didn't care … if people didn't get it. He was always his own man," said Morrow, who knew Sorrentino for more than two decades.

Or, as Halpin says to his fellow characters before he deserts Lamont: "To you other cats and chicks out there … a shake and a hug and a kiss and a drink. Cheers!"