It Was Twenty Years Ago Today...

Actually it was only ten years ago today, but I couldn’t let a good Beatles reference go to waste. I’m usually not much for self-promotion or self-congratulatory back-slappery (probably to my own detriment), but I thought in this instance I’d make an exception, as today marks the tenth anniversary of the blog.

First off a big thanks to Justin Marriott, Marty McKee, and Zwolf, who inspired me to start Glorious Trash. I’ve never really gone into why I started the blog, but what the heck, I might as well now. It was 1945, and I’d just returned home from the war. Wait, sorry – wrong story. Let me start over: As a kid in the ‘80s, I obsessively read men’s adventure novels, and even got a letter from Gar Wilson, the writer of Phoenix Force. (Who turned out to be William Fieldhouse – thanks again to Stephen Mertz for letting me know!) But as I got older I moved away from men’s adventure novels, into sci-fi and eventually “literature”…I still remember the last one I ever bought new off the bookstore shelf: the first volume of Body Smasher, by none other than Jan Stacy, complete with a homoerotic cover drawing of a half-nude dude flexing and Lou friggin’ Albano making a goofy face above the drawing of the guy. For some mysterious reason, I never read the book… (I did pick up another copy of it a few years ago, but haven’t gotten to it yet.)

A few years after college, sometime in 2000 (I refuse to believe I graduated from college over 20 years ago…), I briefly got interested in men’s adventure novels again; this was when I discovered that “Gar Wilson” didn’t exist, though it would be several years until Stephen told me the true identity of the person who’d written me. The only men’s adventure novels I picked up at this time, however, were the installments of the COMCON Trilogy by Gerald Montgomery. I don’t think I even managed to finish the first one until I moved on to more “literary” stuff.

Then sometime around 2005 I came across an interesting-looking paperback at a Half Price Bookstore: it was titled The Last Buffoon, by someone named Leonard Jordan, and had a wacky cover photo of some guy standing in a trash can. The book sounded like something I’d like, the first-person yarn of an action-book author, but I was bummed that someone had written their name inside it…some guy named “Leonard Levinson.” Of course it would be another few years until I realized that, of course, Len Levinson was “Leonard Jordan,” and I’d picked up an autographed copy of his book. Indeed I even learned who Len had signed the book for, as he included a note to her with his signature and I asked him about it when I met him years later.

But it wasn’t until the summer of 2010 that I really got interested in the whole men’s adventure field again for real. I remember it well. I was working at a sinking ship called “Blockbuster Entertainment,” managing the email marketing and working in a ghost town of a corporate office – the entire place had been laid off, for the most part, and it was just me and a couple other people on an entire floor. I was only working as a contractor, and plus I spent like 3 hours a day commuting because it was all the way in downtown Dallas (I believe they’ve sinced moved, though), and I live way up north in Frisco. The only highlight was the vintage lobby card that was on the wall right behind my desk: Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, from 1938, with Claudette Colbert in a bikini.

The main thing is, I was bored – and also bored with what I’d been reading. For the past several years, for some strange reason, I’d become fascinated with comparative religion, reading deep books on ancient religions and philosophies. Then one day in early 2010 I found myself reading a book titled Homer The Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading And The Growth Of The Epic Tradition (Robert Lamberton, 1989), a heavy tome on the “inner meanings” of The Iliad and other works of the ancient world. Half of it was written in Attic Greek, and it was filled with the most arcane of classical academia, and I realized with a sudden jolt of clarity that I was reading this book for fun. It was one of those “what the hell’s wrong with me?” moments.

Instead of getting a sports car and finding some young floozie, I instead did what I ususally do…started looking online for something else to read. It was around this time, bored that summer at Blockbuster, that I came across the blogs mentioned above. Somehow I’d been thinking of those pulpy action novels I’d read as a kid, and I was particularly interested in hunting down ones from the ‘70s. I’d only had a few of those as a kid in the ‘80s – even though they were only a decade old at the time, they just seemed so much older to me at the time, and I didn’t dig them as much. But I suspected that now, as an “adult,” I’d be more into the wild and wooly ‘70s series books.

Marty’s writeups on the Craneshot blog really got me interested in all these crazy-sounding series from so long ago: John Eagle Expeditor, The Enforcer, TNT, so many others. And TNT is what really set me off. I’d seen volumes of that one as a kid, when they were being published in the ‘80s, but had never really read them. But that would now change! I went crazy, purchasing books from various sellers on the web – some of them weren’t easy to find, but luckily they weren’t as grossly overpriced as they now seem to be. I slowly began to build a veritable library…this on top of the veritable library of ancient religion/modern “literature” books I’d already acquired over the years.

But the thing is, in the past I’d go through these various interests, hunt down and buy various books…and never read them. In particular the collection of ultra-obscure “toga trash” books I put together a couple years before starting this blog. I trawled the web for mentions of any trashy paperback historical I could find, especially ones set in Rome or Greece, and bought pretty much all of them. But how many did I actually read? Maybe four or five?

When I started buying all these men’s adventure novels, though, I made a commitment to myself that this wouldn’t happen again – if I went to the trouble of finding them and buying them, I’d read them. Even if it took me several years. At this point I was exchanging emails with Justin Marriott, and he encouraged me to start up a blog with my reviews. This is how Glorious Trash came about: I figured if I had a blog I would be pushed to keep reading the books I’d bought and not lose interest, as usual. And I guess it’s kind of worked out, because I haven’t lost interest yet. I’m still really into all these books, and I can’t believe anyone even comes here to read my pedantic observations on them.

So what I’m saying is, I pretty much started the blog for my own amusement, and really that’s why I continue doing it, but it’s awesome that all of you out there have chosen to spend your time with me. I realy appreciate hearing from all of you, even when I sometimes tick you off with my comments. And coincidentally I’m approaching two million page views...sure, most of it’s coming from ISIS territory, but hey, traffic’s traffic! 

Personally not much has really changed for me in the past decade. I’m still married, still live in the same house, still drive the same car. I long ago left Blockbuster, though (but man I wish I could’ve taken that lobby card along with me). Otherwise, the only major change in my personal life occurred a little over three years ago, and is best summed up by this recent photo:

Glorious Trash Junior! Anyway, thanks everyone!