My review of Becoming Superman: My Journey from Poverty to Hollywood:
The most meaningful autobiography I've ever read is hands down David Zindell's
Splendor. Zindell's Requiem for Homo Sapiens has made me who I am more than any other book (save for
The Neverending Story). Reading about the life that made David who he is was merely an extension. (Also,
Splendor culminates with an epiphany. How many nonfiction books have a climax?
)
Becoming Superman shot straight to the same stratospheric height with its first pages. Here's why:
~ This story starts with two very, very broken people:
In July 1927 Sophia gave birth to a son, Joseph, who passed away of pneumonia three months later. She never recovered from the loss and each year on the anniversary of Joseph’s death made a grim pilgrimage to leave flowers on his grave.
Determined not to let tragedy derail her dreams of stardom, Sophia began bedding down directors, photographers, producers, and anyone else she thought could help her career. But her efforts were hindered by her thick, muscular silhouette, typical of Russian stock, and a face hardened by mood and circumstance into a look of perpetual disapproval. When her efforts hit the wall of her talent and her cervix, she became deeply embittered, and would sit for hours on the front stoop of their apartment, drinking and shouting curses at neighbors. If the name of someone she didn’t like was mentioned, she would spit on the sidewalk and grind it under her heel. She was not, in short, a people-person.
And:
Fearing that she might eventually be caught in the cross fire, she convinced some of the soldiers to smuggle out letters to Kazimier in hopes of securing safe passage home. Her letters went unanswered for six years. Given the vicissitudes of wartime correspondence it’s possible that Kazimier never received her letters and in that vast silence concluded that she had been killed in the blitzkrieg, a sign from God that his marital suffering was at an end. It’s also possible that the letters were received but ignored in the fevered hope that she might catch a stray bullet while stuck behind enemy lines. But the most likely scenario is that the letters reached their destination only to be lost in the course of Kazimier’s inebriated battles with the forces of gravity.
Who came up with another broken person:
Once they were settled, Charles entered St. Mary’s College seminary, the only institution that would accept him without a high school diploma or a clearly defined moral center. He often said that the best thing in the world was to be a crooked priest; there was easy access to church funds, and plenty of women eager to have affairs with dashing young priests with dramatic wartime stories. But by the end of the first term he was booted out for drunkenness, leaving him with no choice but to work for Sophia at her bar. The humiliation and debasement reflected in this turn of events almost certainly proves the existence of God, which is to be fair a pretty solid achievement for a first-year of seminarian.
Who (maybe) fathered ...
Shortly afterward, Evelyn discovered that she was pregnant, and gave birth to a son on July 17, 1954. Given the timing, Charles wasn’t sure if the baby had been conceived during the period when Evelyn was working as a prostitute or later.
“I don’t even know if you’re my son,” Charles often said in the years that followed, an allegation that culminated in two letters he sent in 2003. The first demanded that his son take a DNA test because he had been “conceived in a whore house your mother was employed in Seattle Washington either by the pimp she slept with or one of the pimp’s clients. She forgot the pimp’s last name and for sure did not know the name of the clientele.” He argued that under the circumstances his son “could have been born a black. After (your mother) viewed your pictures on the internet she agreed that there is no resemblance to me, and who should know better than the mother.” His goal was to ensure that his alleged son “cannot inherit any of the estate because I am not your father.”
The second letter, from Evelyn, elaborated on the situation. “When I was 17 I was in Seattle Washington and unfortunately I wound up in a house of prostitution . . . I am not sure if you were born 8 or 9 months later.”
You were conceived in a whorehouse.
That would be me.
... can't wait to see
whom exactly.
~ Meanwhile, people keep trying to break one another:
As the date of my mother’s release from [institutionalized] care approached, my father’s escapades became bolder, and on several occasions he brought prostitutes back to the Graham Avenue apartment. One night, when Sophia confronted him about his behavior, he made the mistake of hitting her. Her eyes wide with anger, she punched him in the face hard enough to draw blood then threw him out into the street, followed immediately by his clothes and personal belongings.
~ Luckily, not all the time:
That winter Pan Rafael received the biggest commission of his career: a painting based on photographs of the client’s ancestral home in Poland, destroyed during the war. He worked for over a month on that canvas, painstakingly rendering every leaf, branch, and brick. From my perch on the stairs I hardly breathed as I watched him work. I’d never seen him as proud as when he finished the last stroke. Eager to show Sophia the result, he trotted past me up the stairs.
I approached the canvas. It was beautiful, the best he’d ever done. He was rightfully proud.
Then, on closer review, it occurred to me that it lacked something.
A cat. That’s what it needed.
So I picked up his brush, dipped it in black paint, and drew a big ol’ black cat right in the middle of the canvas. I’d barely finished when I heard Pan Rafael and Sophia coming down the stairs. I turned and stood proudly before my work. When my grandmother saw what I’d done, her face turned a shade of white usually only seen in coroner’s offices before spiraling into bright red. She let fly with a thundercloud of obscenities in three languages then started to lunge for me, murder in her eyes.
Pan Rafael put out a hand to stop her. Without saying a word he approached the canvas and studied it, angling it one way then the other to catch the light. “It’s good,” he said. “Obviously he thought it needed a cat, and you know, he’s right.”
He set the painting on the floor. “This one is mine,” he said, “because the work is now much too fine to give to anyone else. I will hang it on the wall where I can see it every day.”
He turned and patted me on the head. “For the client, I will make another.”
Then he pulled out a blank canvas, put it on the easel, and began again.
Later, as though nothing had happened, he pulled me and the blue pedal car to the corner store and we had ice cream.
Those moments have stayed with me as the most perfect examples of what it is to be a human being.
~ Wait. It gets better:
The one incident that most firmly locked me into a lifetime of emotional isolation, the shibboleth that denotes the moment when I realized there was absolutely no one I could trust, came when my mother became pregnant again in 1960. (...) when our washing machine broke down, no one was overly concerned when Evelyn took me along as she carried a bag of diapers to an adjacent apartment building with a working machine.
Once the clothes were washed, my mother and I climbed the stairs to the third-story roof, where a clothesline was stretched across to a nearby telephone pole. Nervous, agitated, crying one moment, angry the next, she pinned up the diapers, then shoved them down the line as if slapping an unseen face, moving faster and faster, almost manic as she attacked the symbols of her captivity. Then suddenly she stopped and grew very quiet, looking off into the distance as if coming to a decision.
She pointed past me to some trees behind the house. “Look at the birds,” she said.
I turned to look but didn’t see any birds. Then I felt her hands lifting me from behind. For a moment I thought she was helping me see the birds, or that she might turn me around and hug me for the first time. My heart leapt at the prospect.
She dropped me over the edge of the roof.
I mean, do you even have a choice when it's like that? Can you choose
not to become Superman?
~ Straczynski's comedic talent turns pure horror into pure gold:
As the worst blizzard in years roared across Paterson, I arrived at school on a Monday morning grateful to be inside anything that offered four walls and warmth. I hurried into the cloakroom, shucked off my wet coat, then turned to see the homeroom nun approaching on an attack vector, her face an angry red.
“You didn’t take a chocolate box,” she said, so furious she was shaking.
The previous Friday, crates of World’s Finest Chocolate had arrived, the sales of which helped raise money for orphans and pagan babies. I never understood why pagan babies were so important to the Catholic Church, but we were constantly being encouraged by Sister Mary Fisticuffs to think about the pagan babies, to pray for the pagan babies, to be glad we weren’t pagan babies (which seemed odd since apparently pagan babies were always first in line for everygoddamnthing), and if possible, to buy a pagan baby.
In 1962, admittedly a more robust economy, you could buy a pagan baby for five bucks. This entitled you to a certificate of ownership as your “souvenir of the Ransom and Baptism of an Adopted Pagan Baby.” (...) Given my own impoverished conditions, as far as I was concerned if a pagan baby needed five bucks that badly, he could try to steal it off my father’s dresser like the rest of us.
Not to put too fine a point on it, fuck the pagan babies.
The chocolate bars were narrow slabs of brown awfulness wrapped in white-and-gold foil, sent by the truckload to be sold by children to friends, neighbors, family members, and anyone else you held a grudge against. You could only consider them to be the World’s Finest Chocolate if you were, in fact, a pagan baby, and a 1960s pagan baby at that, because even the most isolated twenty-first-century pagan baby—a pagan baby that had never even tasted chocolate before—would take one bite, throw up, then use the box to beat you to death.
~ To those who still think science fiction is pure escapism:
Determined to understand the social changes whirling around me, but lacking teachers or family who could explain it, I turned to the smartest voices I could find: science fiction writers. I figured that somewhere in all those books predicting shifts in future societies somebody must’ve had something brilliant to say about this one. I wanted stories with meat and heft and social relevance, but the school library only stocked titles they deemed safe for young minds, the public library refused to let me check out books that were considered inappropriate for my age, and I didn’t have the money to buy them.
(...)
Several stores in our neighborhood sold paperback books in spinner racks at the back; mostly romance and crime novels, along with an assortment of adult science fiction novels and anthologies. (...) These stores became my personal libraries, offering books by such cutting-edge writers as J. G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Norman Spinrad, Roger Zelazny, and Philip K. Dick. It was the dawn of New Wave Science Fiction, which turned its attention from starships to social issues and pushed the envelope of what was considered acceptable by the literary establishment. They were exactly the stories I needed to read.
~ Which leads to:
Not long after we moved out, large swaths of the city went up in flames during the Newark uprising, one of the largest riots in the nation’s history. When the fighting finally bled to an end, the country went back to watching Lassie, Gentle Ben, Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, and Bonanza as though nothing had happened. Certainly very little changed, and less still was learned. Each side seemed incapable of understanding the other.
And I thought, Someday I want to write about people forced to experience how others live, and think, and act, so they’ll understand that we’re not really that different. We all want the same things: to be happy, to find love, to have our lives mean something. There has to be a story in there somewhere.
There was, but it would take several decades before it was written—and titled Sense8.
~ Nature or nurture? Genetics or upbringing?
How about ... neither?
(...) I decided to go another way: rather than killing [my father], I would negate him. Whatever he was, I would be the opposite. He drank, so I wouldn’t touch the stuff. He smoked; I wouldn’t. He was brutal to women; I would strive to be chivalrous. He never kept his promises; I would always keep mine. He blamed others for what he did; I would take responsibility for my actions. With each choice I would try to balance out the meanness and suffering he brought into the world.
The realization that I didn’t have to become my father was electrifying. Kazimier, Sophia, and Charles all believed that they were the inevitable product of their circumstances, that they had no choice other than to become what they were. But negating my father would allow me to decide what I wanted to do with my life.
~ Another example of JMS's trademark humor:
Ever since its debut the show [The Real Ghostbusters] had been attacked by media watchdogs who accused the show of advancing leftist politics and radical feminism on one side, and black magic and Satanism on the other. (Between this show, He-Man, and She-Ra I had apparently been in the employ of Satan for nearly three years without knowing it, so there’s a considerable back-pay issue that needs to be resolved.)
Also, an illustration that American line editors don't care about repetition. See what I mean?
~ Wow ... so it was actually JMS who introduced the concept of overarching plots to TV shows (while developing
Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future, a favorite of my, ahem, impressionable youth):
Like all dramatic television at the time, science fiction shows were episodic in structure. Story threads set up in one episode had to be paid off in the same episode, pushing the reset button at fade out so the next episode could start clean with nothing left unresolved. Long-form storytelling simply wasn’t done because the networks and studios didn’t think audiences were capable of following a plot line that went longer than the occasional two-parter.
Being rather contrarian, I wanted to try something different: a season-long story that would build on events in prior episodes and foreshadow incidents that would play out much later.
~ Sneaky, sneaky Straczynski:
“The Halloween Door” told the story of Dr. Crowley, a madman with a machine that would destroy all the scary supernatural books in the world because kids shouldn’t be exposed to such things. I even put some of BS&P [Broadcast Standards and Practices]’s comments in the mouth of the censorship-driven madman to illustrate the idea that however well intended, censors can be as destructive as any demonic entity by curtailing independence of thought.
The kicker? After being falsely accused for years of trying to slip in references to Satan, I named the antagonist after Aleister Crowley, a famous practitioner of the dark arts, often referred to as the most evil man in the world, and not one of the censors caught it.
~ Ahahaha ... I can't stop laughing (or quoting):
(...) publishing the article [about censorship in network television animation] would be worth every lost dollar. Because this wasn’t about creative disagreements or wanting my own way; it was about confronting a broken system that put itself above correction. The consultants and censors fudged facts and wrapped their prejudices in jargon presented as scientific fact to exploit the legitimate concerns of parents, all for their own financial betterment. If I didn’t at least try to punch them in the nose on my way out the door, I could never live with myself.
(...)
Unfortunately, magazines like TV Guide were too cozy with the networks to publish anything this critical, and I couldn’t come up with any mainstream magazines that might care enough about censors vivisecting children’s television to print it. Then I remembered one magazine that had been battling censors for years and might be willing to accept the controversy such an article would stir up.
I sent the article to Penthouse, one of the leading men’s magazines of the time.
A few weeks later their nonfiction editor called to say they wanted to buy the article. “I just have one question,” she said. “Of all the magazines in the world, why pick Penthouse to publish an article about children’s television?”
“Because when the article comes out, these tight-assed consultants and censors are going to want to see what I said about them. I like the idea that the only way they can do that is by buying a magazine full of racy photos. I like that idea a lot.”
~
Michael O'Hare's illness during
Babylon 5 and especially his response to JMS's suggestion to suspend production for a few months are heartbreaking.
“No,” he said, “absolutely not. Don’t do it. If you pull the plug even for a little while, Warners will kill the show. Don’t let me be the reason all these people are put out of work.”
We went back and forth for nearly an hour, with me giving every reason why we should shut down and Michael arguing why we shouldn’t. At one point, he laughed and said, “We both know I’m the crazy one here, so why am I the only one making sense?”
~ There are truly no words for the following response to 9/11. I could talk about maturity and channeling and other
words, but it is not the words that matter.
I wrote, There are no words.
I stared at the page. No words.
Follow the thought, I decided.
Some things are beyond words. Beyond comprehension. Beyond forgiveness.
How do you say we didn’t know? We couldn’t know. We couldn’t imagine.
The sane world will always be vulnerable to madmen, because we cannot go where they go to conceive of such things.
I struggled to keep up as the words tumbled out of my head. My pen raced across the page. Automatic writing.
What do we tell the children? Do we tell them that evil is a foreign face?
No. The evil is the thought behind the face. And it can look just like yours.
Do we tell that evil is tangible, with defined borders and names and geometries and destinies?
No. They will have nightmares enough.
Perhaps we tell them that we are sorry. Sorry that we were not able to deliver unto them the world we wished them to have.
That our eagerness to shout is not the equal of our willingness to listen.
That the burdens of distant people are the responsibility of all men and women of conscience, or their burdens will one day become our tragedy.
Or perhaps we simply tell them that we love them, and that we will protect them. That we would give our lives for theirs, and do it gladly, so great is the burden of our love.
~ A coda to Joe's father:
Correspondence discovered between Charles and his estate planners at the Royal Bank of Canada’s Cayman Trust Planning in October 2008 laid out the details of his will and made sure that they could not be challenged by any of us. The document allocated a few personal bequests to people who had worked for my father in his last days, or who he had known years earlier, then stipulated that my sisters and I would receive a check for one hundred dollars each, a deliberate insult launched from the other side of the grave.
The remaining funds, nearly $2.5 million, were donated to the University of California, Davis, School of Veterinary Medicine, in Davis, California.
Why a veterinary hospital?
Because whenever someone my father hated would come to him for financial assistance he would decline, saying with a sneer, “I’d rather give it to the dogs.”
That’s why a veterinary hospital.
He gave it to the dogs.
~ And a fitting coda for Joe himself:
In the end, we wanted Sense8 to be about hope, about the idea that while humanity has advanced technologically through conflict, it’s only through the social-evolutionary engines of compassion, understanding, and empathy that we will be able to attain a better and nobler future. We believed viewers were hungry for a story in which kindness trumps cruelty, and the common coin of our shared humanity is stronger than whatever would try to drive us apart.
, интересно ми стана.
Омръзна ми да се превежда предимно най-нова литература, и то главно за БОЛЕЗНЕНИ неща - Холокост, осиновени, книгата долу вляво дори няма да я споменавам 
. И дотук с филмите, че стана страшно. 
) по-желан в ЧоБи учебник, защото е непрестанно осезаемо човеколюбив, авторът – със страстен ум и мъдро сърце (е, в личната си комуникация понякога е с твърде емоционален "ум"... особено във fb), използва изключително мили названия на животинки и на аспекти, свързани с детството (личи си, че е поет, макар и асоциален), набляга на животоспасяващата нужда от 
