In 1984, the movie version of the science-fiction novel Dune came out and intersected with my life in a most curious way.

The first science class I ever had in my life was a junior-high biology class taught by Mr. Weast (rhymes with “yeast”), who had an interesting philosophy. He would write an entire blackboard full of notes before each class, and we’d begin the class by copying them down by hand. He did his notes in outline format, and he had an entire year’s worth of them. By the end of the year, if a student had paid careful attention to the outline, the result would be a copy of his notes. I doubt anyone did that good of a job, however, taking notes. I didn’t. My outline levels were always way out of synch. Sometimes I would get to the classroom early enough that he would still be writing the day’s notes on the board.

Mr. Weast’s biology class started at the cellular level, learning about extremely small bits of flotsam in pond water, and their cellular organization. There was one long-named thing that started with “m”, and another called the flagella (which I always liked for some reason), and the amoeba. We inspected various pond scum under a microscope. We learned about DNA, RNA, and various other –NAs in excruciating detail (on which I had difficulty fully applying my attention, since we were seated in alphabetical order, and The Raven was in the row to my right and a seat or two in front of me, and presented quite a distraction). After that, we studied various animals and more complex organization all the way up the food chain: we went from unicellular little blobs to multicellular blobs, then plants, and animals. I made up a little saying to remember the classification system for critters, “Keep Cats Off Gus”. Kingdom, Class, Order, Phylum, Genus, Species. The phrase contained a rather strange mnemonic scheme of the first letters in the classification system, K C O F(->Ph) G S. We had to be able to sprout this off from memory on a test. I still remember it, for some reason.

This was seventh grade biology, where for the first time in their lives students got to cut up dead animals. Honesty compels me to admit I have yet to realize any benefits from this in my life. I sliced and diced hapless worms, frogs, and crawdads; I smelled the Egyptian mummy smells of formaldehyde; and I soaked in the wonders of nature as I looked at organs and body parts from animals which gave up their lives to educate me. In vain was their sacrifice. To this day, I can remember what the innards of a worm look like, and can vividly recall the smells of a biology lab, but in terms of practical use the experience has availed me nothing. Ironically, I was not the least bit squeamish about the dissections, and probably should have been a doctor, but that wasn’t the life for me.

We did at least three dissections, maybe four, in the class. We whacked and hacked on the helpless carcass of an earthworm, a crawdad, and a frog. Once, we cut up a grasshopper, but I can’t remember if it was in the 7^th grade. In some kind of strange irony, I had both of my biology classes (in the 7^th and 10^th grades) the period before lunch. Makes for a fun lunch to have just mutilated a dead animal.

The grasshoppers were the most interesting critters, since the rest of the animals were fairly normal representatives of their species. But the grasshoppers were not the happy little guys I saw all the time hopping around in fields of the Western North Carolina. The only way I can describe them is big honkin’ grasshoppers. They looked as if they’d have been hand-picked by Moses to plague the Egyptians. They were several inches long; industrial strength, scientific grasshoppers. I have no idea where these came from, but where ever it was, I’m sure that whoever lived there was glad to see them gone.

Scientific as my education was, I didn’t get to use a Bunsen burner until the ninth grade, though, and I don’t think the science labs at the junior high were even equipped with gas. I understood the old phrase “as nervous as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs” when I was in a room with gas line taps and adolescents; the potential for negligence was amazing, itself, and the potential for intentional mayhem unimaginable. (I can recall only one chemistry-related accident the entire time I was in school, though, and it wasn’t very severe.) The only thing that prevented utter chaos from exploding was the fact that most of the true miscreants were incapable of thinking up a way to ignite a flame in the science lab without being there and taking themselves out in the resultant conflagration. What could be achieved through sheer carelessness, though, was enough to make me nervous.

For the climax of Mr. Weast’s class, we watched the science fiction “classic” The Black Hole. This reaffirmed the fact that I did not like science fiction all that much. Dune has been about the only science fiction novel I enjoyed. Instead of a riveting plot, The Black Hole consists of these people who fall into a black hole, and wander around this gigantic spaceship for hours upon end, and finally fall into the black hole far enough to get to the other side. During the interminable hours of the movie, they wander around and around, boring viewers to tears. I remember the third day of this boring movie, when the end was finally in sight (I was rooting for the robot to kill everyone so the movie would be put out of its misery; this long predated Mystery Science Theatre 3000 or I could have had quite an entertaining time lampooning the movie), when Mr. Weast made the movie live up to its PG billing by giving us guidance: before the hair-raising scene of whassisface being trapped in his robot, he guided us that some people thought hell was being trapped in what you feared most. In my case, hell must be being bored to tears by watching a movie.

What does this have to do with Dune? Well, Mr. Weast, among other things that year, had a copy of the book that was being passed around. The various teachers were taking turns reading it, because of the movie. It must have put the idea in my head to read the book. Turns out it was a great experience, although it ruined me in terms of reading science fiction. Dune is so good that it makes all other science fiction seem bad in comparison. I’ve never encountered a story that simultaneously existed on so many different levels and layers at once. I have probably read it straight through at least six times, and each time something new comes out. Herbert created something so complex that it is almost too good since so few people can appreciate it.

Thank goodness I read the book instead of seeing the movie. Dune went down in flames as a movie, mainly because it stunk. I did not see it at the time, but when I was older I caught a rerun on television. The movie was only loosely based on the book, despite the author’s insistence (in his preface to the book Eye, a collection of his short stories, he discusses his perspective on the movie) that it was the movie he wanted to make. In a later book, Herbert included a lengthy essay about the movie and I didn’t understand how he could defend it. He must have seen something (likely prefixed by a dollar sign) in the movie which no one else could.

It’s odd, I suppose, but I had a great love of The Police at the time Dune came out. I got into them right when I was going to junior high in the 7th grade. “King Of Pain” was the first single, and in fact the first commercial recording of any sort, I ever bought. Back then, “singles” were 45-rpm vinyl records with a 7-inch diameter. They had an “A” side with the main song, and a “B” side with some other song. The other song on the “King Of Pain” single was “Someone To Talk To”, a song which did not make it onto the Synchronicity album, likely because Andy Summers sang it. He is, almost universally, condemned for his singing. But I heard this song at a very impressionable age, and I didn’t even know it was him singing it. Later on, Summer’s XYZ album became one of my favorite recordings, in spite of (or because of) Andy’s singing.

What does this have to do with Dune? The Police’s lead singer, Sting, dyed his hair orange and wore “flying underpants” in the movie. Fortunately, I did not see the move until much later in life, and was spared from having my image of Sting the serious intellectual ruined. For some reason, Sting always played the villains. He was never a good guy in his movies. I think every movie he was ever in flopped, too, for some reason.