William, I'm glad you have a light case of Covid. Keep resting for about 10 days or it can bite back on you. After 4 years of caution and masking in most public places, I caught it in late February. My sister and brother-in-law hosted 2 of our cousins from Texas. The oldest brought Covid and at the first big congregate meal he sat across from me. A few days later I tested positive. But the Dr prescribed Paxlovid. Ot worked fast and prevented it reaching my lungs. A secondary sinus infection was also arrested the following week.
As for Philip Jose Farmer, I have Alley God unread, and never imagined it was so weird, "gnarly," and problematic. He wrote porn on the side, like several SF luminaries, and in a few cases--Imagr of the Beast and Blown--he combined this into genre novels and stories, especially from the late 60s in. His historic, groundbreaking 1950s novel The Lovers was safer territory, although the magazine publisher said that by serializing it he knew he'd lose subscribers but believed in raising the level of the SF field by printing it.
This is my second bout with Covid unfortunately. Last January it was mild but I was testing positive for about three weeks. Not good.
With Farmer you’re frequently juggling sex, religion and references to other texts. He has a—to overuse the term—gnarly streak throughout which belies that by all accounts he was a pretty mild mannered man.
My first Farmer was one of his novels for the porn publisher Essex House, A Feast Unknown, which opens with Lord Grandrith, a stand in for Tarzan, killing a lion and eating its semen. It had sat unread on my bookshelf for at least five years and when it finally exploded across my brain something about it turned me into a Farmer fanatic. Not sure what this says about me lol.
My favorites by him are probably “Mother,” a Freudian womb return story on another planet, “The Blasphemers,” a sort of James Dean movie about hermaphroditic sphinx aliens, and “The God Business,” a fantasy about resurrection and the third story in the Alley God which I I look forward to rereading soon.
Novel-wise I love all the Tarzan stuff but it’s the two least gnarly that are my favorite: Tarzan, Alive! and Time’s Last Gift.
The Lovers is a good one for sure. People correctly emphasize its groundbreaking focus on sex and exogamy. It also has a strong theme of how religious ideology can warp one’s view of the world. The Sturch literally calls things at variance with its teachings “unreal!”
This is probably a bridge too far but I’ve mused before that perhaps Farmer prefigures some of the themes explored by Octavia Butler in “Blood Child” and in her sequence of novels beginning with Dawn.
William, I'm glad you have a light case of Covid. Keep resting for about 10 days or it can bite back on you. After 4 years of caution and masking in most public places, I caught it in late February. My sister and brother-in-law hosted 2 of our cousins from Texas. The oldest brought Covid and at the first big congregate meal he sat across from me. A few days later I tested positive. But the Dr prescribed Paxlovid. Ot worked fast and prevented it reaching my lungs. A secondary sinus infection was also arrested the following week.
As for Philip Jose Farmer, I have Alley God unread, and never imagined it was so weird, "gnarly," and problematic. He wrote porn on the side, like several SF luminaries, and in a few cases--Imagr of the Beast and Blown--he combined this into genre novels and stories, especially from the late 60s in. His historic, groundbreaking 1950s novel The Lovers was safer territory, although the magazine publisher said that by serializing it he knew he'd lose subscribers but believed in raising the level of the SF field by printing it.
This is my second bout with Covid unfortunately. Last January it was mild but I was testing positive for about three weeks. Not good.
With Farmer you’re frequently juggling sex, religion and references to other texts. He has a—to overuse the term—gnarly streak throughout which belies that by all accounts he was a pretty mild mannered man.
My first Farmer was one of his novels for the porn publisher Essex House, A Feast Unknown, which opens with Lord Grandrith, a stand in for Tarzan, killing a lion and eating its semen. It had sat unread on my bookshelf for at least five years and when it finally exploded across my brain something about it turned me into a Farmer fanatic. Not sure what this says about me lol.
My favorites by him are probably “Mother,” a Freudian womb return story on another planet, “The Blasphemers,” a sort of James Dean movie about hermaphroditic sphinx aliens, and “The God Business,” a fantasy about resurrection and the third story in the Alley God which I I look forward to rereading soon.
Novel-wise I love all the Tarzan stuff but it’s the two least gnarly that are my favorite: Tarzan, Alive! and Time’s Last Gift.
The Lovers is a good one for sure. People correctly emphasize its groundbreaking focus on sex and exogamy. It also has a strong theme of how religious ideology can warp one’s view of the world. The Sturch literally calls things at variance with its teachings “unreal!”
This is probably a bridge too far but I’ve mused before that perhaps Farmer prefigures some of the themes explored by Octavia Butler in “Blood Child” and in her sequence of novels beginning with Dawn.