by Christopher Fulkerson
BLISS
Unusual Aerial Phenomenon Over San Francisco Bay
Photograph by Christopher Fulkerson
Copyright 1999 by Christopher Fulkerson
All Rights Reserved
HINDU APSARA NYMPH
sculpted by Brijesh Kumar
From a Khajurato
Temple in Madhya Pradesh
Honor March 4th!
For ERB Mars fans this looks like it’s all we’re going to get for the year 2014. Grab it while you can, you might even say it is closer to the correct iconography than we’ve yet had. It’s OK, necessary perhaps if you are an ardent fan of the Mars novels, but we could hope for better. There was no 2013 ERB Mars calendar so I recommend this in the hope that we should support and be supported until someday an artist might try actually reading the novels to get his iconography right.
Since the 2012 release of the film John Carter there has been hope – or maybe just a fantasy of a hope - of a filmic future for the proper epic Edgar Rice Burroughs Mars novels, arguably one of the finest pulp fiction creations of a completely worked-out off-world civilization that has ever been written. To call it “pulp” is not meant to be a backhand compliment: there aren’t any high literature creations of whole other worlds, either. Apparently the creation of planets is not something that serious writers take seriously. Though it had some components that were quite recognizable from the texts, the film John Carter was not canonic and it is anyone’s guess as to whether its attempt improves the chances of a faithful ERB Mars sequence ever being made.
In 2012, the anniversary of ERB’s first novel, A Princess of Mars, a Warlord of Mars calendar appeared; my Amazon review of that can be found here:
https://christopherfulkerson.com/martiancalendarreview.html
As I describe in that review, the iconography of that calendar was even more heterodox than the movie, and though the sex fantasy element is orthodox in that it derives from the novels I for one was shocked with the film’s and the movie’s depiction of John Carter as a “bad boy;” he is a steadfast Southern Gentleman, who was only politically wrong to have been on the side of the South in the Civil War, but neither he nor his peers in Helium is ever depicted as someone who would behave as a tough – Carter is more, not less, gentlemanly that any Northerner would be.
I suppose we have to keep the stories alive as well as we can. But this calendar not much of an aide-memoire of the novels. It’s for girl ogling. Throw it on the wall for the sake of the cult, and try to be a better ERB scholar than these artists, who seem out to appeal to convicted felons.
The most important date on Earth for the ERB Mars novels is March 4. ERB’s birthday is observed but not that key date of March 4, which was the date both in 1866 and in 1886 that Carter was transported to Mars in experiences he referred to as deaths: he refers to himself with the words “I who have died twice and am still alive.” Disney actually seems to have tried to honor March 4 by releasing John Carter on the 7th in France. Disney also gets kudos for honoring the Centenary of A Princess of Mars, ERB’s first book.
The depictions with knives are all far from canonical, so the February, April, July, August, October, and December images are just for kicks. Dejah Thoris is never attacked by creatures with tentacles so the November image is out. She never kills anyone so February seems wrong. Dejah is certainly tied or chained up a lot, so we could go for that. I wish the headdresses would be at least practical enough to be used as movie costumes, but the February, April, May, August, and November images are wrong. No woman actually wearing one of those headdresses could ever turn her head the way Miss February does. We need calendars that will encourage real movies to be made.
In terms of images that are within the scope of both the right type of sex fantasy and the correct iconography, the September image is the best. That seems fitting for ERB’s birthday on the first of that month. The images for January and March are good – Dejah as an odalisque is plausible. The image for October is good. I remain puzzled as to why these artists don’t seem to think that generally, an appealing, consenting Dejah Thoris is not useful for their imagery.
The image for June is good, the image for the year overview is also good,
and I sure like the girl in July, just not her knives. That image for Dejah Thoris works well with that marvelous erotic Hindu statuary that would I think be a good model for Martian women. That noble stance and those magnificent bulbous breasts are the best for Dejah Thoris, I feel (assuming Martians don’t wear falsies). You think that a Hindu connection is too esoteric? Then why does the first Martian word we ever learn, Sak, turn out to be Sanskrit? Pronounced more like “Shak,” it’s the verb meaning “to be able,” so when Tars Tarkas says “Sak,” he is not saying “jump,” he is saying “do that thing you do.” The word appears in the Rig Veda; is the basis of the name Sakra, one of Indra’s names; and appears in Sloka 54 of Book XI of the Bhagawad Gita: “BhaKTYaa TWaNaNYaYaa ShaKYa aHaMeWaMWiDho ‘.RJuNa,” By undistracted devotion alone Can I in such a way be known, Arjuna.”
First Posted here 1/1/2014