Today met with a producer who’s interested in optioning TABOTD (as reported on TAB’s Facebook page). He wants me to write up a treatment for it – all three books, not just the first. Cool that he doesn’t care that this is a small indie book, which is an uphill battle, given that it’s not “Spiderman” and Hollywood’s in love with remakes. But then “Avatar” and “Inception” happened, which were original – but then…they were also the pet projects of obscenely successful directors. Still, it’ll be fun to put together, and I’ll see where it goes…

But then maybe the progression isn’t that far off.  Burroughs wrote science fiction of a kind, Hunter Thompson was continually taking himself into outerspace, Kerouac was obsessed with Buddhism (read his letters, he won’t shut up about it), so UFOs and the end of the world are somewhat related.  Bukowski, though, even though he was a poet and if you hear him talk he sounds wounded and empathetic, not a grumbling drunk, probably wouldn’t have paid attention to any of this.

I expressed this to the editor and sent him the introduction.  Gary (”Gary what?  I forgot to ask his last name again.  I’ve got to remember stuff like that, damn”) said he had his own UFO story and understood where I was coming from.  Here it is:

I was 18, living in Glasgow, a student. Broke. I used to bum dinner at a friend’s house who lived round the corner with his parents. They lived in a bungalow on a busy main road. 4 lanes of traffic kinda deal. Buses, people. A big main road. I was leaving there between 9 and 10. It was a cold winter’s night in Glasgow. The sky was black. Clear.

My friend saw me off at the front door.  Waved me off. It was one of those frosted glass door jobs. I walked up the driveway to their gate (about 30 yards), opened the gate and as I turned  to close the gate noticed something strange. I turned quickly around and faced the road. No traffic. No people. Nothing. Just the stillness and the blackness of the night. Now i know it doesn’t weird but knowing that road, it was weird that there was nothing going on. I looked all the way up the hill and down the hill the other way. Nothing. Then i looked back round at the house. Nothing strange there. Then i looked up, above the house was this floating craft.  A sequence of hooped white light, purring, humming. I couldnt believe my eyes. It was bigger than the house, looming over it. The lights flashed slowly, moving in a circular motion. What was weird was not being able to make out a solid body to the craft itself and the lights werent like anything i’d seen before or since. They were lucid, flowing. Bright then dull. I guess like an oil lamp but more digitised. Shape wise it was almost diamond shaped, like 2 rounded pyramids but again the weird thing was between the bands of light there was no discernible body. I couldn’t work it out. I looked round for help or at least confirmation from someone else that this was happening. There was still nothing. I mean i know it’s not a long time but it was easily 20 – 30  seconds.

I opened the gate and rushed back down the driveway to get my friend out. When I reached the door, I could see through the frosted glass his back towards me at the door. I knocked and he turned round and opened it. I mean he was right there at the door as if he’d only just closed it. It freaked me out. I dragged him outside and the road was full of cars and people walking up and down the hill. There was nothing above his house. It was gone. I explained the whole thing and then he told me it wasn’t possible. He told me he just waved good bye, closed the door, turned to walk down the hall and heard me banging on the door. 2 seconds after I’d left. Even being conservative thats at least a 30 second time lapse, more. It was completely inexplicable. I went home with his laughter in my ears but i knew something very special had just occurred. The most important thing about all this to me was that it wasn’t scary at all. I was left with a real sense of excitement and wonderment. Shortly after it happened i discovered the music of sun ra at a second hand record fair. Space is the place. I bought that record straight away, read what i could about sun ra. saw him live in new york city the next year in some crazy little basement bar. the whole experience felt connected in some way.

I still can’t work it all out.

One of my favorites from that scene was Posthuman Blues.  RIP.  Another is Technoccult – so very cool to be interviewed on the site today.  Click here:

This is weirder though, and amusing:

About:

Plucked from the audience, three contestants live and die their way through a myriad of American incarnations as they compete for the ultimate prize, perfect enlightenment. The entire history of United States becomes their playing field, from Jamestown to the World Trade Center attack and beyond, as they struggle towards their individual goals. In between lives, the contestants visit the bardo realms, wacky worlds between death and rebirth where Stonewall Jackson and Harriet Tubman are husband and wife; where patriot poet Walt Whitman eternally argues with World War II’s traitor laureate, Ezra Pound. Even when things seem like they couldn’t get weirder, they do, as the contestants start to reincarnate as each other and the understanding begins to dawn that enlightenment is now here and nowhere; a trillion light-years and just a blink away.

Reviews of ABOD-TGS were about as mixed as a bottle of Italian salad dressing that’s been sitting for a month. On one hand, the LA Weekly raved, calling it: …a dazzling intellectual vaudeville, written with wit and dash, and executed with verve”; and Entertainment Today dubbed it, “… another world-class collision of combustible talent…. no one but Paul Mullin and Circle X could possibly take you on any better ride.”

On the other hand, The Los Angeles Times and Variety both panned the play mercilessly, claiming, respectively, that it “jumbles icons and ideas” and was, “…inexplicable and mind-numbing”. Often the wisest course of action when notices are this polar is to just go see the show and make your own choice. Anything that can make reviewers simultaneously that effusive and nasty has to be worth at least an evening and the cut-rate ticket price spent.

Still:

The plot came about in a dream—no kidding. The book’s in part about a writer working on a novel who starts dreaming about people who turn out to be real. In the dreams he’ll see a scene and then a voice will tell him, “This is John Doe, he lives at…” This actually happened—I had a dream where I was told a name. I have no idea what that name is and I never looked it up. More, I woke up thinking this was a possible plot for a novel, which is the same thing the writer thinks in the book.

This sounds made up, but it happened.

Not mentioned there, the rest of the plot came to me in a mad rush in the nights after working at a terrible job on the Santa Monica Promenade, full of nubiles and L.A. consumers.  Panicked, I thought, I need to do something with my life, so an office job on the Promenade isn’t my whole future.  So I mapped out the story.  My future is still to be determined.

A depiction – from the Promenade – about what it felt like to conceive this book:

If you’re not a death-cult end-of-days fundamentalist but notice that they’re increasingly and bombastically in our midst, you will easily buy into the terror that informs Henry Baum’s contemplation on the near future suicide/genocide they would like to spring on the world. Done up as a dystopian time-travel apocalyptic dream-state genre-busting journey narrated by a failed novelist and perennial victim who ultimately controls the destiny of the few tens of thousands of survivors of the death cult’s Armageddon, Baum’s compelling work gives eerie voice to what a growing number of Americans must be feeling when they notice that politics and government are being frozen in place and wrested from all other hands by conmen and nutbags posing as the only true Christians. The American Book of the Dead is a wake-up call. It’s good fiction and it’s fun and it seems over the top. But ultimately it describes a plausible end-of-days scenario should the shrinking shadow of effective government and the public commons fall completely to those whose rocket ride to Paradise takes precedence over all that humans can know for a certainty and thus hold dear in this life.

One of the reasons I didn’t send the book to my agent and chose to self-publish was because I knew traditional publishers would be made uncomfortable by the premise – thinking that it’s anti-Christian, when it’s not. It’s anti-Palin Christianity. It’s anti-fundamentalism of the type who says that Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to set up shop in New York City b/c people in the “heartland” are against it.

Heartland, Uber Alles. The American Taliban. The constitution-spouting “patriots” are fundamentally un-American.  There’s a strange and insane irony that the anti-Mosque activists are the same as strict Islamists who protest pictures of Mohammed.  This country’s built on freedom of press and religion.

Anyway, publishers don’t take a lot of chances – even if the 70-million selling Left Behind series needs a counter, and maybe there are people out there who want to read that too. Strangely though, reviewers so far haven’t focused on my take on fundamentalist Christianity, focusing instead on the dream aspect, meta-fiction, or general dystopian themes. So I’m glad to have this review.

TK: Let’s talk about the writing thing. Why do you do it?

HB: I want to change how people think.  I have grand megalomaniacal plans – most of which won’t play out.  But there’s a reason that I write about megalomaniacal people.  And I’m not really interested in writing about the small moments between people. Our world is collapsing at a fairly alarming rate – the oil spill is both a metaphor and direct evidence.  I don’t think there’s time to pontificate about another relationship story.  Big stuff is coming down, and I want to do some small part to get people to pay attention.

Read the whole thing.