Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 06/07/24
Dateline: Cross Plains Edition
This briefing comes to you from Cross Plains, Texas, where author Robert E. Howard was busy writing himself into literary history some 90 years prior. The annual Robert E. Howard Days gathering brings people from across the country and oftentimes around the world to West Central Texas for a few days of food, fun, fellowship, and for some of us, a re-invigoration of what caused me to fall in love with language and storytelling in the first place. I have taken to referring to our annual gathering as a family reunion, because that’s the function it serves for many of us.
Over the years I’ve been fairly evangelical about Robert E. Howard Days, and I have only missed a few gatherings since my first visit in 1996. But I have been relentless, bordering on obnoxious, about bringing like minded friends and family to Cross Plains. I mean, you really gotta see it to believe it. There’s nothing else quite like it for fans of the Texas author.
I tried to make an accurate count of the number of people I’ve cajoled and wheedled into attending over the years. I stopped counting at 75 people, and there’s been some more since then. That’s a lot of people to expose to small town Texas and Texas literature subculture, not to mention, fellow Robert E. Howard fans, all of whom run the risk of being labeled in cryptozoological terms. We have a lot of really hairy guys in Howard fandom. A lot.
This year is a special one for us. Ever since the early 1990s the writing desk in Robert E. Howard’s room was a pretty good placeholder, but it was not the real desk. When the Howard House opened to the public, it was more of a great idea than a spot-on execution, since most of what they had was period-centric, but not necessarily Howard-centric.
Things are much different now, There’s a lot of actual artifacts that have been returned to the house over the years, but there were still a handful of really personal objects that would be huge gets. Things like Howard’s original writing desk. And here it is.
The story of its journey out of and then back into the house is long and rambling, but suffice to say, we are lucky to have it back in the house at all. For decades, the table was being used as a coffee table in a private residence. Yeah. The desk went through a couple of different people’s hands, and then the person that had the desk liked it, but didn’t need a full-sized table. So they cut the legs down to make a coffee table.
One of the goals of the REH Foundation was to restore it to its former glory. The legs had to be repaired. Thankfully, the foot of the legs was intact, so the silhouette remained intact. With the restoration and refurbishment, the conservator managed to keep the character of the wood and the natural patina of wear, so you can see the indentations in the tabletop where Howard’s forearms rested when he typed.
Kickstartery
Several years ago I attempted to Kickstart a fiction anthology called Chicken Fried Cthulhu, essentially a collection of Cthulhu mythos stories from Texas and Southwestern genre writers, set in and around the area, all the better to take advantage of the high weirdness that is a part of Texas genre fiction.
It didn’t fund. I was devastated, frustrated, and all of the other -ateds, as well. I’d had such big plans, you see. The project went on the shelf, to be resurrected at a time and place to be named later.
Fast forward to this year. James Palmer posted that he was finalizing his anthology, Southern Fried Cthulhu, and he was excited for who he’d managed to get in the book. I messaged him to tell him I’d tried the idea years ago and it didn’t fly, and here’s hoping this time it will land. I also sent him a copy of the story I’d written for my anthology.
I’m pleased to report that my story now has a home in Southern Fried Cthulhu and the project is now live on Kickstarter and moreover, has already met its initial funding goal. The line-up of authors is indeed quite fine, but I’m particularly pleased to be sharing the Table of Contents with my friends Jayme Lynn Blaschke and Don Webb. If this sounds like something you’d like to read, please go check out the Kickstarter and consider backing the book. You gotta look at the great cover, if nothing else. I want that as a poster.
Huge in Brazil
Last year, the Spanish language edition of Blood and Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard, was published, and it was the first foreign language edition of the book to be produced. This year, the book is being translated into Portuguese for the legion of fans in Brazil. This is what it will look like. Pretty cool, eh?
I am not telling you this to inveigle you to buy foreign language editions of the book. Rather, I am saying, if people in Spain and Brazil are reading the book, and you haven’t read it in English, despite it having been available in the second edition since 2013, then I’m going to need you to just venmo me some cash right now, because I can’t even with some of you.
Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review
Lift (Netflix)
A master thief with a heart of gold is tasked to steal a shipment of actual gold that is to be used to commit utter mayhem and destruction. Can he keep his hands clean, stay out of the firing line, and get the girl?
Kevin Hart is a better comedian than he is a movie star, mostly because it’s really hard for me to see him outside of any role other than just KEVIN FREAKING HART. Mind you, I don’t blame him one bit—ain’t nothing wrong with being Kevin, and Lord knows he’s not even close to being the first crossover actor who played heightened versions of himself. Lift might just be an attempt to move himself into the realm of playing a role as opposed to playing Kevin Hart doing something stupid with The Rock. He’s way cooler in this movie than I’ve seen him in anything else.
There’s not a lot of real estate in this movie for deep character development, so most of the groundwork is done by having character actors doing fun things in quick cut montages, and then using a lot of subtext in the group scenes to convey past relationships. The chemistry on the screen is noticeable and everyone feels like they belong in the crew.
That being said, most modern heists are thinly disguised fantasy magic—there’s not any tech on earth that can do some of the things that this movie requires. As such, there’s a weird logic hiccup that happens when the job gets under way. All of the expected beats are there, but the whole time I was watching it, was thinking, “This is bullshit. It’s tense bullshit, but it’s still bullshit.”
The science fictional components of the plot aside, Lift is a fairly straightforward and engaging heist movie with great pacing and genuinely fun characters doing cool stuff. It’s not required viewing, but if you’re flipping around and need something that won’t break your cranium, this is a great movie to land on.