something about Dalton Trumbo's "Johnny Got His Gun"

Johnny Got His Gun, a well-known anti-war novel by American writer Dalton Trumbo, chronicles a soldier's waking nightmare. The protagonist is Joe Bonham, a young American whose service in World War I costs him his arms, legs, vision, hearing, and mouth. Bonham, disoriented and displaced, regains consciousness in what turns out to be a hospital bed and gradually realizes the nightmare: that his mind is doomed to live on as the prisoner of a helpless, unidentified, and incommunicable torso on a hospital bed.

Bonham’s reckoning with his fate, his reasons for going to war, and the horror of it all comes amid rushes of pre-war memories. He also uses what remains of his senses to interpret his environment, and he grows determined to communicate with the hospital staff that keep him alive against his will.

Bonham’s extended memory flashbacks did not often connect with me, but some passages set in the present moved me in their intensity of anxiety and outrage.

Notes:

• Johnny Got His Gun was written in 1938 and published in 1939.
• Trumbo was blacklisted by Hollywood but continued working under pseudonyms. The influence of the blacklist soon waned, and he resumed getting credit for his accomplishments during his remarkable career.
• Trumbo directed the 1971 film adaptation of Johnny Got His Gun.
• Hearing Metallica’s single, “One,” around 1992, was my introduction to Johnny Got His Gun. The music video uses clips from the film.

another overly generous review—this time of an Italian death metal band's debut

The influences are classic, but new life runs through these veins

 

Miscreance debut a heavily and colorfully barbed wire of sound on Convergence. The opener “Flame of Consciousness” represents the album well—pointy riffs, deft musicianship, roaring vocals, impatient songwriting, slips of atmospheric interludes, and wildly smooth guitar solos.

 

Forty-two seconds into the second song, “Fall Apart,” a studded few moments of rapid double-bass drumming carry a ready-fire riff. Ten seconds later, the riff changes, and the throat opens up, roaring verbal warfare. And at 3 minutes the mood falls into the young dawn with a guitar solo rising in gorgeous tone.

 

“My Internment” opens with a staircase-climbing dual-guitar riff over a hokey and fun deep voice-over, but from atop the stairs come some of the album’s best vocals—raw, animalistic—enough to terrorize the neighborhood. And at 3:00, Miscreance finally finds a riff that can move you, and the band plays out the song.

 

The young Italians' white-high-top metal recalls genre pioneers Death. Miscreance also cites Atheist and Sadus as influences. But this young band is fresh. The only issue with Convergence is that, over and again on the album, the fun stops as quickly as it starts, and at times it seems no riff is too small.

 

The band issued a demo called From Awareness to Creation in 2018 and put three tracks on a split with Australia’s Vile Creation last November. Convergence was released September 19, 2022, in three formats via Unspeakable Axe Records, Danex Records, and Desert Wastelands Productions. The band plans to tour Europe with Chilean band Ripper in 2023.

 

(posts) a poem, "Lift Your Right Arm"

Lift Your Right Arm

    Lift your right arm, she said.
    I lifted my right arm.
    Lift your left arm, she said.
    I lifted my left arm. Both of my arms were up.
    Put down your right arm, she said.
    I put it down.
    Put down your left arm, she said.
    I did.
    Lift your right arm, she said.
    I obeyed.
    Put down your right arm.
    I did.
    Lift your left arm.
    I lifted it.
    Put down your left arm.
    I did.
    Silence. I stood there, both arms down, waiting for her next
command. After a while I got impatient and said, what next.
    Now it's your turn to give the orders, she said.
    All right, I said. Tell me to lift my right arm.

—Peter Cherches