Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 12/11/23

Faking and Making It Edition

Seeing the Grinch in the theater made me happier than I’d like to admit.

Everyone here in the Administration department is tentatively excited at the very real possibility that we are finally finished with all of the necessary Christmas shopping necessary to ensure smooth Inter-Bunker relations. The last of the Christmas cards have been mailed—and we used all of them up, too. We will need either less friends or a larger order next year. I’d prefer Door number 2 if I’m given a choice.

In that respect, at 4:57 PM Central time, December 11th, it did indeed begin to look a lot like Christmas. This observation was helped along by hearing Louis Prima singing “What Will Santa Claus Say When he Finds Everybody Swingin’” in one of the shops we frequented. I mean, if you gotta listen to Christmas music, why listen to bad Christmas music? There’s a lot of great vintage Christmas tunes that really swing and jive, and there’s a lot of recent Christmas music that has nothing to do with Wham or Mariah Carey. Cutting bad Christmas music out of your life will automatically improve your holiday spirit by 34%, according to the boys in Statistics. They know math. You can trust them on this.

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Letters From ATNAS

The Christmas missives are arriving at the Bunker, and while it’s not actually a competition, Friend of the Bunker Larry Young (of Astronauts in Trouble fame) has sent THE Seasonal Greeting to Beat so far. I absolutely needed a Puppers, and stat. Talk about Crackerjack timing. Also, I didn’t know I needed the ostrich sticker, but evidently, I do. Allegedly.

Note to Larry: I did rotate the package, but I’m not sure what good it did.

Janice and I are fighting over who gets the Ostrich sticker. Allegedly.

Just in time for the new season of LetterKenny to drop! Thanks, Larry!

We’ve got one more of these newsletters before the holidays seize us all in the grip of terror and shakes us like a terrier with a dirty gym sock for two straight weeks. During that time, there will be a theater-wide employee Secret Santa Gift Exchange, at least one brunch scheduled, plans made for the week of New Year’s—and I’m making the black eyed peas again, because we do NOT eat canned black eyed peas for New Years. We’re not honyaks. I can’t recall if I shared my black eyed pea recipe last year or not. Reply with a comment if you’d like me to post it for your edification.

Michael Chabon

A couple of weeks ago, Michael Chabon posted a picture to his Instagram account:

To everyone I know—yeah, I’ve seen it.

I know people are fishing for some kind of response and I have none to give right now. Chabon is a fan, and he’s on the record as saying so. To find out he’s doing a book with REH as a character is...interesting. I wonder if it’ll be the same kind of veiled biography that Kavalier and Klay was? I have no idea. As soon as I saw this, I reached out to him through Insta and offered him a copy of Blood & Thunder. This was met with stoic silence, and I can’t say I’m surprised by that. He’s been in it for a year, according to him, which means two or more years in his head.  If he’s been to the house three times, then he’s seen my biography, and all of the other fine books in the gift shop and library by my fellow Howardists, near and far. But that’s neither here nor there. He’s under no obligation to buy those books, nor read them. He’s going to write what he’s going to write, and at this point, all I can hope is that he jettisoned all of the L. Sprague de Camp/backhanded compliment/character assassination/damming with faint praise and decided to write a more nuanced story. We’ll all see together, now, won’t we?

If anyone would like a comparison attempt at what Chabon might be doing, an author named Marly Youmans penned a magical realism novella called Maze of Blood. It fictionalizes REH’s life and times as a jumping off point. She was very gracious about my review and we’ve exchanged emails since. I liked the book, but it was made very clear that she wasn’t trying to reinvent or explain away what she perceived to be Howard’s shortcomings. Something de Camp never had the capacity to do.

Rest assured, as soon as I know more, so will all of you.

Mark Finn is one of the most opinionated and influential experts on Robert E. Howard in the state of Texas. He’s an author out of largesse rather than as a vocation and writes stories because he can’t play the guitar. He loves gorillas, values a well-placed conversational movie quote, and treasures the picaresque in literature. Annoyed with people’s misunderstanding of popular culture, he took it upon himself to buy a movie theater so he could lord it over every film student on the Internet. He likes to say, “If three people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down.”