BELA LUGOSI AND THE MONOGRAM NINE Has Been Nominated For a Rondo Award!

The official ballot for the 18th Annual Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards has just been announced, and I was pleased to discover that my latest book, BELA LUGOSI AND THE MONOGRAM NINE (co-written with Gary D. Rhodes), has been nominated for "Book of the Year"! I'm delighted to be included on the same list with such excellent books as THE LADY FROM THE BLACK LAGOON: HOLLYWOOD MONSTERS AND THE LOST LEGACY OF MILICENT PATRICK by Mallory O'Meara, JAMES WARREN: EMPIRE OF MONSTERS by Bill Schelly, and THE BIZARRO ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM by John Skipp and Heather Drain.

I'd like to take this opportunity to once again thank the inimitable Michael Kronenberg for going above and beyond the call of duty in designing the eye-catching cover and interior layouts for BELA LUGOSI AND THE MONOGRAM NINE... and to filmmaker Larry Blamire for his illuminating introduction!

If you want to vote for BELA LUGOSI AND THE MONOGRAM NINE, you must first click HERE (to view the official ballot), then follow these simple directions prepared by journalist David Colton, perennial Burgomaster of the CLASSIC HORROR FILM BOARD:

Since 2002, the Rondos have been fandom's only classic horror awards -- decided by fans, for fans. Every nominee below is being recognized for significant work or achievement in the year 2019. So add your voice and help make a difference.

HOW TO VOTE:

-- All voting is by e-mail only. Simply copy this ballot (cut-and-paste into an email and marking your choices with an X or highlighting works fine). We know that can be awkward so you can also just type out your choices. Send an e-mail with your picks to me, David Colton, at taraco@aol.com by Sunday night at midnight, March 29, 2020.

-- No, you do not have to vote in every category. Vote for all, one or a few.

-- One vote per person, please. Every e-mail must include your name to be counted. All votes are kept strictly confidential. No e-mail addresses or personal information will ever be shared with anyone.

-- Again, TO VOTE e-mail your picks to taraco@aol.com
 
Finally, thanks as always to the thousands of fans, pros and friends who have voted year after year. We look forward to hearing from you again. Let's make RONDO XVIII the best ever.

Attention, CHAMELEO readers! I recommend checking out George Knapp's recently released interview with MISSING 411 author David Paulides in which the two discuss the possibility of "CHAMELEO technology" being used to "abduct victims" in our national forests. Click below to see this excerpt....

 

Is Someone Using "Chameleo" Technology to Abduct Victims?

  
Click HERE to see the rest of this interview.

Acoustic Levitation

From Matt Simon's 1-28-20 WIRED article entitled "How to Levitate Objects With Sound (and Break Your Mind)":

Along with personal jetpacks for every man, woman, and child (sure, why not), levitation is one of those conveniences that sci-fi has long promised us but has yet to deliver, other than magnetically levitating trains. But at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, physicist Chris Benmore and his colleagues are levitating objects with an unlikely tool: sound. It's called acoustic levitation, and after breaking your brain with what seems to be an optical illusion, it's poised to deliver advances in pharmacology, chemistry more broadly, and even robotics....

To read the entire piece, click HERE.

Welcome to 2020!

What follows is a brief excerpt from Alison Flood's 1-17-20 Guardian article entitled "Sci-fi Magazine Pulls Story by Trans Writer After 'Barrage of Attacks'":

A science fiction story that repurposed the transphobic meme “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” as its title has been removed from the magazine Clarkesworld following a “barrage of attacks” on its transgender author.

Isabel Fall’s story, which was published in Clarkesworld earlier this week and quickly went viral, opens as the narrator describes how they “sexually identify as an attack helicopter”. “I decided that I was done with womanhood, over what womanhood could do for me; I wanted to be something furiously new,” Fall writes. “To the people who say a woman would’ve refused to do what I do, I say – Isn’t that the point?”

Some readers felt the story was transphobic, with some accusing Fall of being a troll. There was also a raft of positive reactions from writers including Carmen Maria Machado and Phoebe North, who wrote an essay praising the story: “Thank you for making me feel seen and heard. We don’t get a lot of ourselves in fiction. We often only get scraps. This was more than that. A mirror.” However, due to the criticism, Fall asked Clarkesworld to remove the story from the monthly science fiction and fantasy periodical.

To read Flood's entire article, click HERE. 

This second excerpt is from Conor Friedersdorf's 1-19-20 Atlantic article entitled "The Talented Victim Is Not the Point":

The National Book Award finalist Carmen Maria Machado declared herself “crushed” and “angry” at “a trans sf/f writer being excoriated for writing a messy, gorgeous, interesting story,” and defended “stories that are dangerous, weird, jagged, ambitious,” because “art that bites off more than it can chew” can variously “change your temperature, provoke your heart, crack open your brain.” Sometimes, “what seems, to you, to be a failed experiment is actually not a failed experiment at all, and has provided someone else with brain-cracking or heart-provoking or temperature-changing,” she continued, and sometimes that value “only becomes clear in retrospect.”

Needless to say—or maybe not—short stories that are ahead of their time will be lost if their early critics succeed in creating an artistic landscape where ostensibly flawed work is quickly disappeared.

The science-fiction writer M. L. Clark urged better modes of engagement. “When a work *unsettles* you, & you have misgivings about whether the message is clear or ‘correct,’ absolutely, you should talk about it! Name how it falls short for you!” he wrote. “But also: allow it to be broken for you w/o asserting that its jagged edges can *only* be used as a blade, NOT because we shouldn't resist poor messaging, but because *effective* resistance doesn't just take the form of vehement public outcry & denunciation.”

The Vox critic Emily VanDerWerff opined, “This is a story with a lot––maybe too much––on its mind, and to see it written off as agitprop is sad. Art that only celebrates the bravery of trans people, or our fortitude in the face of all we must endure to be ourselves, is fine. But art should embrace our weakness, our shame, and our doubt, too. To insist otherwise is its own kind of prejudice [...].”

The left, as distinct from the right, has long dominated high and low art. To its credit, it has used that position in part to tell humanizing stories about historically marginalized people that increase understanding and empathy. America is a more inclusive place as a result. But I don’t know that a salutary tradition running from the films of Sidney Poitier to Will and Grace to Transparent and beyond can endure if Millennial creators and succeeding generations allow their art to be policed by the most essentialist, intolerant voices; or if they are persuaded that deleting a piece of fiction is more ethical than discussing it in the open if anyone at all feels harmed by it; or that it is wrong to truthfully relate one’s own experiences if they are in tension with political orthodoxies.

As Wesley Morris observed in an October 2018 essay:

Art might not have the privilege of being art for art’s sake anymore … It has to be art for justice’s sake … So we wind up with safer art and discourse that provokes and disturbs and shocks less. It gives us culture whose artistic value has been replaced by moral judgment and leaves us with monocriticism. This might indeed be a kind of social justice. But it also robs us of what is messy and tense and chaotic and extrajudicial about art.

The controversy over “Attack Helicopter” is another case study suggesting that rejecting “art’s for art’s sake” in favor of “art for justice’s sake” doesn’t necessarily yield more justice. It may help no one, harm many, and impede the ability of artists to circulate work that makes us think, feel, grapple, empathize, and learn. Americans will always seek out, discuss, and be moved by art that is messy, tense, and chaotic, whether the censors of any moment like it or not. If liberals stop producing art like that, illiberals of all sorts will fill the breach.

To read the rest of Friedersdorf's article, click HERE.

If you want to read Isabel Fall's story "I Sexually Identify as An Attack Helicopter," you can find it right HERE. 

This third excerpt is from Jane Ridley's 1-16-20 New York Post article entitled "Missouri Librarians Could Be Jailed for Loaning ‘Age-inappropriate’ Books":

Librarians in Missouri who loan “age-inappropriate” materials to children could face jail time if a controversial proposed bill is passed.

They would be forced to pay a fine or spend up to a year in prison if they refuse to comply with the proposed new rules designed to protect kids from sexual content.

Republican state Rep. Ben Baker wants panels of parents to decide what content is suitable for minors, with any public libraries that ignore the panels’ edicts stripped of funding.

His proposal has been attacked by critics as “a shockingly transparent attempt to legalize book banning.”

“The main thing is, I want to be able to take my kids to a library and make sure they’re not gonna be exposed to something that is objectionable material,” Baker told local news station KOAM. “Unfortunately, there are some libraries in the state of Missouri that have done this, and that’s a problem.”

Titles that have come under fire in Missouri over the past decade include the award-winning “Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” by Sherman Alexie, which includes references to masturbation; Kurt Vonnegut’s profanity-laced “Slaughterhouse-Five“; and “Speak,” a young-adult novel by Laurie Halse Anderson about the rape of a teenager.

“Every reader and writer in the country should be horrified, absolutely horrified, at this bill,” James Tager, of the freedom of expression group PEN America, said in an interview with the Guardian.

Tager said the planned move is “clearly aimed at empowering small groups of parents to appoint themselves as censors over their state’s public libraries.”

He added that books containing sexual themes, LGBTQ characters and explorations of the impact of sexual assault could be “on the chopping board if this bill is passed.”

“The fact that a librarian could actually be imprisoned for following his or her conscience and refusing to block minors from access to a book, that tells you all you need to know about the suitability of this act within a democratic society,” said Tager, PEN’s deputy director of free-expression research and policy.

His sentiments were echoed by the Missouri Library Association, which said it was opposing the bill since it will “always stand against censorship and for the freedom to read.”

To read Ridley's entire article, click HERE. 

And now, a timely quote from the late Ray Bradbury....

"War begets war. Destruction begets destruction. On Earth, a century ago, in the year 2020 they outlawed our books. Oh, what a horrible thing--to destroy our literary creations that way! It summoned us out of--what? Death? The Beyond? I don't like abstract things. I don't know. I only know that our worlds and our creations called us and we tried to save them, and the only saving thing we could do was wait out the century here on Mars, hoping Earth might overweight itself with these scientists and their doubtings; but now they're coming to clean us out of here, us and our dark things, and all the alchemists, witches, vampires, and were-things that, one by one, retreated across space as science made inroads through every country on Earth and finally left no alternative at all but exodus."

--Edgar Allan Poe speaking to the ghosts of Charles Dickens and Ambrose Bierce in Ray Bradbury's short story "The Exiles" (collected in THE ILLUSTRATED MAN, 1951)

"Fleshy Mounds" in THE MAILER REVIEW

My new short story "Fleshy Mounds" has just been released in the latest edition of THE MAILER REVIEW (VOLUME 12). 

(Cineastes and Lugosi-heads, take note: My BELA LUGOSI AND THE MONOGRAM NINE coauthor, Gary D. Rhodes, has a poem entitled "Prisoner's Cinema" published on the page right after my contribution to this very same volume.)

If you're at all interested, you can buy a copy of THE MAILER REVIEW VOLUME 12 right HERE!

Colleges Are Turning Students’ Phones into Surveillance Machines...

What follows is from Drew Harwell's 12-24-19 WASHINGTON POST article entitled "Colleges Are Turning Students’ Phones into Surveillance Machines, Tracking the Locations of Hundreds of Thousands":

When Syracuse University freshmen walk into professor Jeff Rubin’s Introduction to Information Technologies class, seven small Bluetooth beacons hidden around the Grant Auditorium lecture hall connect with an app on their smartphones and boost their “attendance points.”

And when they skip class? The SpotterEDU app sees that, too, logging their absence into a campus database that tracks them over time and can sink their grade. It also alerts Rubin, who later contacts students to ask where they’ve been. His 340-person lecture has never been so full. 

“They want those points,” he said. “They know I’m watching and acting on it. So, behaviorally, they change.”

Short-range phone sensors and campuswide WiFi networks are empowering colleges across the United States to track hundreds of thousands of students more precisely than ever before. Dozens of schools now use such technology to monitor students’ academic performance, analyze their conduct or assess their mental health.

But some professors and education advocates argue that the systems represent a new low in intrusive technology, breaching students’ privacy on a massive scale. The tracking systems, they worry, will infantilize students in the very place where they’re expected to grow into adults, further training them to see surveillance as a normal part of living, whether they like it or not.

“We’re adults. Do we really need to be tracked?” said Robby Pfeifer, a sophomore at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, which recently began logging the attendance of students connected to the campus’ WiFi network. “Why is this necessary? How does this benefit us? … And is it just going to keep progressing until we’re micromanaged every second of the day?”

This style of surveillance has become just another fact of life for many Americans. A flood of cameras, sensors and microphones, wired to an online backbone, now can measure people’s activity and whereabouts with striking precision, reducing the mess of everyday living into trend lines that companies promise to help optimize.

Americans say in surveys they accept the technology’s encroachment because it often feels like something else: a trade-off of future worries for the immediacy of convenience, comfort and ease. If a tracking system can make students be better, one college adviser said, isn’t that a good thing?

But the perils of increasingly intimate supervision — and the subtle way it can mold how people act — have also led some to worry whether anyone will truly know when all this surveillance has gone too far. “Graduates will be well prepared … to embrace 24/7 government tracking and social credit systems,” one commenter on the Slashdot message board said. “Building technology was a lot more fun before it went all 1984.”

To read Harwell's entire article, click HERE.

Chilean Plane En Route to Antarctica Disappears

From the BBC's 12-10-19 report entitled "Chilean Plane En Route to Antarctica Disappears with 38 on Board":

A military plane with 38 people on board has disappeared en route to Antarctica, Chile's air force says.

The C-130 Hercules transport aircraft took off from Punta Arenas at 16:55 local time (19:55 GMT), and operators lost contact at 18:13 (21:13).

Those missing include 17 crew and 21 passengers.

They were travelling to provide logistical support to a military base on Antarctica's King George Island. A search-and-rescue mission is under way.

Air Force Gen Eduardo Mosqueira told local media that the plane did not activate any distress signal. He said the plane, whose pilot had extensive experience, might have been forced to touch down on water.

An air force statement said that the plane was about 450 miles (725km) into its 770-mile journey when contact was lost, placing it within the Drake Passage. The air force published a map of the plane's last known location on Twitter....

To read the entire report, click HERE. Two days later, the BBC published an update entitled "Chile Missing Plane: No Survivors, Confirms Air Force Chief":

Rescue workers in Chile have found human remains after an air force plane with 38 people on board went missing on Monday.

There were no survivors, said Chilean Air Force head Arturo Merino.

Magallanes Governor José Fernández said relatives of those missing had been informed of the find.

Earlier, Chile's air force said that wreckage had been found floating in the area where the C-130 Hercules cargo plane had last made contact.

It was en route to a military base in the Antarctic.

Mr Merino said the human remains "are most likely to be body parts of those travelling on the C-130".

"The condition of the remains we discovered make it practically impossible that anyone could have survived the plane accident," he added [...].

Three of the passengers were Chilean soldiers, two were civilians employed by engineering and construction firm Inproser, one was a student and the remaining 15 passengers were members of the air force, an official said.

Ignacio Parada had been studying civil chemical engineering at Magallanes University and was heading to the Antarctic base for an internship. His professors described the 24-year-old as "an excellent student". He was particularly interested in renewable energy, he had said recently.

Inproser employees Leonel Cabrera and Jacob Pizarro were going to carry out work on the military base.

The three soldiers who boarded the Hercules plane on Monday were Col Christian Astorquiza, Lt Col Oscar Saavedra and Maj Gen Daniel Ortiz.

There was only one woman on board: 37-year-old geographer Claudia Manzo joined the air force in 2008 and was passionate about remote sensing - obtaining information about areas from a distance by aircraft or satellites.

To read this entire report, click HERE. 

Supplementary reading:  Sherman Skolnick's  "The Secret History of Airplane Sabotage" Parts 1 through 4.