HOW I FIGURED OUT HOW TO GET ‘REAL’ HORROR BOOKS IN CHINA, WOODY THE DOG AND OUR TOOTH BRUSHES |

HOW I FIGURED OUT HOW TO GET ‘REAL’ HORROR BOOKS IN CHINA, WOODY THE DOG AND OUR TOOTH BRUSHES

I am usually not the sort of blogger to try and veer too far off the theme of the blog. I try to keep as focused as I can on the needs of the blog with what little free time and energy I have. But sometimes I enjoy reading this sort of thing on other people’s blog sites and so I thought I would give a brief glimpse into what is going in behind the scenes so to speak. First I should mention that there is really no horror culture worth mentioning here in China. No comic books culture either. Simply does not exist comfortably along side a skewed Marxist education I suppose. I am a person who likes ‘real’ things when I can get them. By this I mean, for example, books rather than PDFs. Nothing wrong with PDFs and CBRs and digital media. It is where the world is heading and who am I, a mere ESL teacher in China born in the humble hamlet of Peru Indiana, to stand in the way of progress. But I love to lie in bed and read before I fall asleep. Back to my Sherlock Holmes and Edgar Allen Poe lately and yet sometimes I want some lighter fare. Something with pictures even.There are no magazines or books here in English worth looking at and certainly no horror book section in the dreary book stores here. In Kunming there is a book stores with a narrow selection of western literature that sells for about threes the normal cover price. A five dollar paperback can cost fifteen here easily or 105 RMB. Commie bastards! I would have nothing if not for the subversive underworld of bittorrents and Rapidshare files. I have literally thousands of PDF and CBR type files. I can actually enjoy looking at comic books on my PC since I got my new flat screen monitor. But I miss horror books. Film books in general. I fixed that by printing out my PDFs and taking them to the printer and having them cheaply bound for about .50 cents. Yes, the Jack Hill (224 pages) book cost me about .50 to make.

Here are my first two experiments. One book is the tablature to Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy album for when I am in a guitar playing mood. The other book, which I went and had printed today all on my own, is a book on the complete films of Jack Hill. You may wonder why ‘all on my own’ is an issue, but my Chinese is not too good but I went and managed to get what I wanted with my basic language skills and lots of gestures and pointing. Now I can lie in bed and read some great film material again. Of course there is a lot of info on the net but to be honest not as mush as we want sometimes. There are lots of opinions but not a lot of cold hard data on older more obscure films. I am reading the chapter on Spider Baby right now and you can expect a post on that film soon, along with Pit Stop as well and the others of Hills that I have here somewhere in my massive collection. And the cool thing is I can relax and read and have to sit and stare at a monitor screen. I have plenty more books to print out. The next will be a massive history Hammer films. Looking for stuff on AIP and Roger Corman now, but often these files are gotten by chance in big bundles I download. But this opens new doors and directions for the quality of the posts here. I have wanting to improve them for sometime and more reliable information and less opinion and ‘story retelling’ is a beginning.

And lastly here are a couple little things from my non-horror/cult film life. Above are mine and Ivy’s little cute tooth brush holders. Sort of a thing they have here in China that looks dorky but I have kind of grown to like these quirky things in life now. And last is the new addition to our little zoo, Woody the dog. I guess he was abandoned and some children of some other teachers here went door to door looking for its owner or someone to adopt him and Ivy and I said we would try ‘for a night’. Well you know that goes. He is part of the family now. Check out the sock-cat I amde for him.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 7th, 2010 at 7:10 pm and is filed under Notes from Underground . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.