Fountain of Knowledge

Well, from what I understand about it "pulp" was originally referring to the grade of paper the magazines were printed on. You had the glossy "slick" magazines like The New Yorker and The Saturday Evening Post, who were publishing people like Ezra Pound and John Steinbeck, and then you had the rougher "pulp" magazines, printed on cheaper paper, who were publishing stories about flying saucers, tough private eyes, beautiful deadly dames, and people who discovered they were the last human on earth, said "At least I have time to read!" and then stepped on their glasses.

(Guess which Twilight Zone traumatized me the most?)

So "pulp" is, I would say, not so much a genre as a feel that spreads across a lot of genres. It's the bacon cheesburger from your local dive that comes with home fries, a huge pickle and a Coke in a glass bottle. Good eating, but not pretentious or ashamed of what it is. (This is not the burger that you pay $20 for.) Pure pleasure reading, in other words. (Probably served by a hefty middle-aged lady whose nametag reads "Lou"--who talks like she's been smoking for at least forty years.)

Which is not to say that some of it--Raymond Chandler wrote pulp, and I think Asimov did too--doesn't describe important concepts or even touch on the fringes of literature. The movie "Pulp Fiction" actually demonstrates this, I think. It's a pulpy story in that it's essentially a comic book: two hit men running around for a day, and all the people they meet. It's immensely fun. It's unashamedly violent. But it also is an important movie because of its odd cinematic techniques--the out of sequence telling of the story, the flashing back and forth between several storylines, etc. etc. I like almost all Tarantino's stuff, but in some ways I think he's consistently just retelling "Pulp Fiction" with each movie.

Man, now I really want to drive to the Hardware Cafe and order a cheeseburger. Stupid pregnancy food desires. Lately I'm putty in the hands of any food advertiser. Very hard to be a virtuous pregnant lady.

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