Portable Storage Four Cover by Brad W

Portable Storage Four Cover by Brad W. Foster

A Poet’s Life by Alva Svoboda—page 10 A Few Moments by Chris Sherman—page 17 Pictures and an Inner Vision by Dale Nelson—page 24 Hidden Machines by Jeanne Bowman—page 40 Adventures in the Wimpy Zone Pt. 1 by Jeff Schalles—page 44 Familiar Landscapes by Peter Young—page 48 Journal of the Plague Year 2020 by Bruce Townley—page 58 A Digression by Michael Gorra—page 63 Paper Lives by Andy Hooper—page 67 Free Books! by Tom Jackson—page 73 The Cracked Eye by Gary Hubbard—page 75 The Road to Cimmeria by Cheryl Cline—page 84 Adventures in the Wimpy Zone Pt. 2 by Jeff Schalles—page 96 Aces and Eights at the Hotel California by AC Kolthoff—page 99 Letters of Comment —page 101 Cool Grey City of Sex by Donald Sidney-Fryer—page 112 Gorgon of Poses by G. Sutton Breiding—page 133

Crow’s Caw William M. Breiding

I read J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye as a mature adult in a moment when I decided to peruse some classic mid-twentieth century literature that I’d ne- glected as a youthful autodidact. I also read John Cheever’s Complete Short Stories at this time. Among others. I might have liked it had I read it when I was in my teens. But I doubt it, because the book is utter bullshit from word one. Yes, Catcher in the Rye is the real phony. Read as a mature adult its transparency as a placation and reassurance to rich, upper-middle class parents is obvious—too damned obvious. So it was with some trepidation that I started Carl Brandon’s The Cacher of the Rye, Jeanne Gomoll’s little print on demand book from Lulu. Truth be told I was seduced into buying the book by Jeanne’s gorgeous cover of Terry Carr obscured by aged hands of color. But when it came down to the actual reading, Terry’s long and fascinatingly thorough introduction of the life and times of Carl Brandon, his hoax black fan, was far more interesting than “Carl Brandon’s” fannish The Cacher of the Rye. True—Terry’s prose is creamy and executes precisely Salinger’s tone and content. But Terry fails utterly in the phoniness quotient, something Salinger and his bogus book were unable to achieve. Carl Brandon’s fannish version of Rye is followed by Samuel R. Delany’s “Racism and Science Fic- tion”—one of his more lucid and straightforward pieces of observation on the foibles of the science fiction genre and sf fandom. In this moment when BLM no longer stands for the Bureau of Land Management what exactly is the meaning of Carl Brandon, a black fan created by a middle class white man and his white friends in the 1950s? When the BLM-minded are pulling down historic statues as forms of idolatry I begin wondering if the “woke” will soon be insisting that any book that is seen as ideologically incorrect by a few will be banned for all. Portable Storage Four Autumn 2020

Edited by William Breiding. Available in hard copy for the usual: letters of comment, trade, contributions of writing and visuals, or endowments of cash. Also available at efanizines.com. Please send letters of comment and submissions of all kinds to: [email protected]. Hard copy trades: street address is on your mailing envelope.

Artist credits on page 138. Thanks to Mustafa for technical advice.

I just finished reading Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, published in 1912. It is fresh with quaintly portrayed and insulting gender-stereotyping, racist stomach curdling typecasting, and a general sense of good natured imperialism. And while I was disappointed that Doyle chose to focus on the decimation of the Ape Men of the Lost World rather than describing more encounters with the dinosaurs, the book was a hoot, a splendid read. As I read it I couldn’t help but wonder what reach the “woke” will have in destroying free speech and freedom of the press—not to mention whatever is left of the Constitution after Donald Trump is done with it. Visons of dystopian leftist fascism laid atop populist authoritarianism. Will I soon be memorizing and reciting The Lost World as all the copies are mulched and recycled for another type of insistent propaganda? If the social justice warriors get wind of Carl Brandon, that imaginary black fan, that figment of three white guys—Terry Carr, Ron Ellik, and Dave Rike— how will they construe this black creation? What flaming and virulent boycotting might ensue, and exactly what do Jeanne Gomoll and the Carl Brandon Society think of this political irony—BLM, yes, but a mild mannered black man created by white men? It makes you think. It really does. Does Carl Brandon really matter? On the other hand the John Cheever was magnificent. But then he was a privileged white suburban drunk. &&&&& I didn’t become vivid to Chris Sherman until after we met. On the other hand, Chris had been vivid to me from first contact. That’s just the kind of guy he is. Neither Chris Sherman nor I can remember how we actually made first contact. But logic dictates that we met through Darline Haney’s Science Fiction Fan’s Correspondence Club (SFFCC) in 1973. Darline Haney lived in rural Elma, Washington, thirty miles west of Olympia on highway 12 in route to the coast. At the beginning of the 1970s it was still possible for science fiction fans to feel lonely and disconnected. The 2010 census count for Elma, Washington was 3,107. In the early 1970s Dar- line must have felt truly backwoods. So she started the SFFCC by placing classified ads in the back of science fiction magazines such as Amazing and Fantasy & Science Fiction and started connecting fans. Many teenaged science fiction fans responded to Darline’s advert, from all over the country, from every type of environment, rural (myself), small town (Warren J. Johnson), and urban (Frank Balazs). It has always been my theory that 1973 was the year of the last big influx of teenagers into science fiction fanzine fandom. And many of them started forming life-long friendships through Darline Haney’s Science Fiction Fan’s Correspondence Club. Not only did they correspond but they started publishing fanzines, arranging meet-ups, and going to science fiction conventions. Chris Sherman not only corresponded with others but published the fanzine Antithesis, and founded Apa-50 in 1974, collecting many of these teenagers in one very dynamic and often angst-ridden bi-monthly forum. To my knowledge the Science Fiction Fan’s Correspondence Club was Darline Haney’s only legacy as a science fiction fan. But it was a big one. My correspondence with Chris started in the traditional manner, written letters. After I returned to San Francisco from the mountains of southern West Virginia and had access to a portable cassette recorder we began exchanging cassette-letters almost exclusively. This added the extra intimacy of

hearing each other’s voice, and being able to add aural background. Chris would take me to school with him, and I would wander around San Francisco, talking. Chris was also a bur- geoning pianist and would often sit at the piano in Golden Val- ley, a suburb of Minneapolis, and play compositions he was working on. We also included pop songs we were listening to, sharing our tastes (Chris pretty much turned me on to Prog-Rock and Steely Dan). Chris was 15 and I 17 at this juncture. In 1974 I took a long hitchhiking-and-Greyhound tour to the east coast and Bill, 1974 back. This included a stop off to meet my best fan- friend, Chris Sherman, in Chris, 1976 Minneapolis. I had been having bad luck hitching rides so I arrived in Minneapolis by Greyhound. I was standing at the curb waiting for Chris to show up, figuring he’d be driven by one of his parents. A Corvette pulled up where I was waiting and a good looking fresh-faced kid with a feathered haircut said, “Bill Breiding?” Chris cracked up at the shock on my face as we squeezed my backpack into the Corvette and I got into the passenger seat—a long-haired San Francisco post-hippie sitting shotgun with a suburban jock in a Corvette. Chris was still laughing at my shock when he slipped an eight track tape of Yes into the slot and “Round About” started its soul-tingling opening. He put the peddle to the metal and we were off. Chris had just turned 16. After that first meeting, our most unlikely friendship accelerated. Chris returned the favor by visiting me a number of times in San Francisco. As we both transitioned into our twenties Chris relocated to Southern California, not only for school, but no doubt also seduced by the SoCal beach lifestyle. Chris’ visits to San Francisco were frequent, and intense. For me, our friendship ran very deep, but it was often fraught as our very different upbringings and approaches to life collided, yet it never in- truded on our interest and respect in each other’s lives. Chris went on to found a business, a career, and a family. We drifted, as tends to happen in life. Eve- ry couple of years we’d reconnect—often through an exchange of mixtapes (and then CDs), sometimes letters, emails, and occasionally Chris would do zines for Apa-50 (which is still going), and as our Founder was always welcome to contribute without membership requirements. Chris remains vivid—just like that sixteen year old that drove up in his dad’s Corvette—and has lived a vivid, varied and interesting life trotting about the globe. And he was always an extraordinary writer, as Chris’ piece in this issue reflects. &&&&& Michael Gorra was not quite an actifan back in the nineteen seventies. But he came close. He published 10 monthly issues of Random and nine issues of the quarterly Banshee (formerly Starship Tripe), publishing some of the best fan writers and artists of the period (mid-’70s). I remember at

the time thinking Michael was a bit out of my league though that didn’t stop me from sending Starfire in trade and asking him to write a column. Michael’s zines were faanish, quick and dirty, and often humorous. Mine lumbered along like a self-involved hippo, even the humor and fannish pieces treated solemnly. I think our fanzines were a reflection of our different types of mind. Michael did end up writing a column for Starfire, which lasted only two issues. At that point Michael made a swift exit from fandom—gafiated with utter finality. When I decided to publish again there were fondly remembered fans that I wanted to get this zine—Michael Bracken, Jim Meadows III, Linda Michaels, Michael Gorra, John Carl, Tony Cvetko, Roger Sween, among others—because it just made sense, not only in the fannish time-binding sense, but also in the way that I con- ducted my own personal life. So I google-stalked many of these folks and found addresses and sent zines. For some it was a welcome surprise. Others have remained silent. I knew Michael Gorra had gone on to become a successful literary type—hard to ignore when he kept popping up in the New York Review Of Books and the Times Literary Supplement. I tracked him down at Smith College in Massachusetts. After some head scratching Michael responded, and you can read some of Michael’s life experience further along in this issue, in both his article and his loc. Michael had some amusing memories to share when I queried about his fanzining days: Random had ten issues, on a monthly schedule. I had meant to do twelve, ending in August right before leaving for college, but all of a sudden there was a new girlfriend, and I was trying to read Gravity's Rain- bow (what I moved on to after Garcia Marquez) and so it goes, or went. Banshee was I think quarterly, and there were nine issues. But the first four or five were published under the appalling name of Starship Tripe, and dittoed, and maybe bimonthly. People told me I needed a new name, that readers would be apt to dismiss a zine with that name, and I suspect they were right. Anyway, Banshee was much better. The last issue, #9, published just before the 1974 DC Worldcon, was a special issue for which I charged, and was meant to raise money to help send Bob Tucker to the next year's Worldcon in Austral- ia. That was my faanish side kicking in, though I also recognize it now as the part of me that is interested in institutional histories, heritages, genealogies. So I am also interested in the histories of English depart- ments, who studied with and is now rebelling against whom.... That was the only Worldcon I went to--I remember smoking dope with Arnie Katz and Bill Kunkel and Ted White etc, which meant I was in way over my head; and then liberating the pool aka skinny dipping around 6 in the morning with John D Berry and Susan Wood, who had just won her fan-writing Hugo, and half a dozen others. Susan’s somebody I would like to know more about, given she was starting her academic job right around then. I wonder what her scholarly work was like? One other tidbit sticks with me--I had the biggest nametag imaginable, in that I wore my high school football jersey (#77) which had my name on the back. Incongruous, and funny--people commented on it as one of the weirdest things they'd ever seen at a con--but it worked.

Michael is far too modest to mention that his biography of Henry James was a finalist for the Pulitz- er, so I will. &&&&& From its very inception in the early twentieth century science fiction fanzine fandom has been what has come to be termed a “gift culture.” One spends time and money creating their fanzine and then one gifts it, no monetary value attached. Ideally gifts are given without expectation but that’s not really true with fanzine fandom. There is the expectation of some sort of response when a fan editor sends out a fanzine. That’s why in most fanzine colophons there appears the line “Available for letters of comment, trades, and on Whim.” Some begrudgingly include “cash” but make it clear it’s the least desirable form of response. Clearly a fanzine is a clarion call that requires response. Some fan editors have a superb sense of pa- tience and will send their fanzine out into a black void—literally for years, as one fan editor did for me, and this was a fabulous, big fat genzine—until finally I responded with the weight of guilt from all those years of non-response. This generous fan editor spoke to my question: “why did you do it?” The assumption was that I was likely enjoying the fanzine regardless of the fact that I had remained rudely silent for all those years (which I had). Said fan editor continues to publish and I now try to be a good boy and regularly respond with a letter of comment. Maybe I have nothing scintillating to share, but at least the editor knows that I received and clearly enjoyed it, and yes, please keep me on your mailing list! There is a tradition in fanzines of alerting someone they must participate if they want to continue receiving the fanzine. Sometimes it an “X” on the mailing label (don’t use ’em) and sometimes it’s a box somewhere in the fanzine and if it’s X’d you’re toast, it’s your last issue. Read this next paragraph carefully: If there is an X in the box below, this is your last issue. If you want to continue receiving Portable Storage you can achieve this result in a variety of ways. The very best way to stay on my mailing list is to send a nice long letter of comment—feedback on what I’m doing, what the writers and artists are doing, or stories from your life. See the letters this issue on how its done. If you dig this fanzine but feel unable to give comment let me tell you that most every fan editor since time immemorial has lowered expectations and all these said fan editors will be absolutely thrilled if you just communicate in any firm you so choose, and let them know you adore the fanzine and want to stay on the mailing list even though you can’t muster a real letter of comment. Believe me when I tell you that enjoyment is paramount to a fan editor and a note along these lines will be very much appreciated. Being proac- tive is the key. Some fan editors don’t want money and actively discourage it, but I’m not one of them. There was a spontaneous (and unsolicited) contribution of cash after Portable Storage Two appeared that de- frayed much of the cost of the domestic postage for Portable Storage Three, which was much appreciated. If you are so inclined, endowments of cash are always gratefully accepted—but it’s not a sub- scription, but more a donation to your favorite charity. And of course, it goes without saying (but I will) that trades, not of just other fanzines, but anything that interests you, is always a good way to stay on my mailing list. But nice long letters are always best.

So: I’m calling you out now. If the box below is X’d this is your last issue unless you Do Something.

If you have not been X’d this does not mean you are entirely off the hook. This box could appear next issue with an X in it. You do know who you are. Do The Right Thing.

&&&&& Last, but certainly not in the least, I want to thank all of the contributors to this issue for not only coming through, but beating the deadline. These are weird, scary, and paralyzing times we are living through. I could have chucked this fanzine out the window but felt now more than ever it was important to carry on. All the contributors could have done the same, but chose to affirm life and spit in the eye of the Covid. Y’all are awesome. Contact! [email protected]

Your Order Has Arrived!!

Everybody's starting to crash hard.

Remember crashing after an acid trip? Like that.

& William Burroughs on every street corner.

Summer morns are all Blake & dewy angel kisses.

I feel pornographic all the time.

The fog braided with willow limbs.

Bagpipes of a thousand years ago.

Sappho says, " Strum my lyre."

Virginia says, "Follow me down."

So far, so good.

I sing as I sink.

It's like, Poetry for curbside pick-up.

G. Sutton Breiding 9

Alva Svoboda Tom Clark

Part 1 son and with vaguely worm- like lineation. And not having I always wanted to be a poet, anything else to go on in defin- from when I was in seventh ing my poetic vocation, it was- grade and checked the book n’t surprising that the lan- Reflections on a Gift of Water- guage I had to draw on would melon Pickle out of the Peralta have been – shall we say, im- Junior High School library at poverished? least. I learned from racing through that anthology that I continued to dabble in poetry poetry didn’t need to rhyme or -writing through junior high use “poetic” language, and that and high school, discovering line length in poems appeared Don Marquis’s archy and me- to be completely up to the poet. hitabel and e.e. cummings, From those quick apprehen- and for a year refusing to write sions I moved on to the obvious my name with any capital let- conclusion: I could write what- ters. The cockroach archy ever I wanted and call it poem! used no capital letters because he had no way of capitalizing Perhaps I’m not being entirely (which required holding down fair to my thirteen year old self. the shift key on the Don Mar- At a minimum, I could see that quis’s typewriter). In the case poetry required something like of e.e. cummings it was funda- an “image” at its heart, and mentally a question of that its “shape,” in auditory “branding,” though I wouldn’t and/or visual terms, was im- cotton on to that concept until portant. One of my first efforts well into the 21st century, real- in the poetic realm was a ly. But that’s what I was doing worm’s-eye view of the life of a in writing my name in lower worm, written in the first per-

o Alva

Svoboda

But the summer before I started my first year away at college in Redlands, I had a revelation about language of a different order entirely, a lightning bolt of surrealist energy that coursed through me like an endless energy drink for years. In the stacks of the Si- NAROPA mi Valley Public Library, where I was working as a page, I found a fat anthology Anoth- er World which contained case, branding. (And there were, to be fair to myself, a num- work by a whole spectrum of ber of other poets in that era who lower-cased their names, poets I’d never heard of be- including bp nichol and others whose names I can’t recall at fore, who were as I learned the moment.) cummings did in fact offer an entry into a less part of a “New York School” of impoverished language for me, though most of what I got at poetry that seemed as alive the time had to do with hyphenating strings of words and pre- and important as anything I’d tending I had made new words out of them. read about from the modernist I bumped into some other harbingers of the avant-garde as I worlds of before my birth. got through high school, reading a book about Dada for one Coincidentally or not, the first humanities class that had me typing nonsense Dada poems poet in Another World was with abandon and studying the writings of Marcel Duchamp. Tom Clark. And the first po- Basically I was chewing through as much of the experimental em by Tom Clark, entitled “In literature of the twentieth century (Hermann Hesse, Kafka the World,” and perhaps in- and the Theater of the Absurd as much as readily to my taste tended as a kind of dedication as Dada) as I could manage. Somehow I managed to miss of the volume, was a prose most of the poetic heavies of the late nineteenth and early poem that began with the sen- twentieth centuries, so I never made the acquaintance of Rim- tence “The tall policeman baud or Baudelaire. knows the world is a buoyant sphere that glistens with rings

11 and patches of color, like a beautiful Christmas tree ornament adorning space, but he doesn’t let this knowledge stop him from doing his job.” I was immediately taken with the elevated absurdity, veer- ing into jokiness, of that poem by Tom Clark as well as the others that followed. The final work in his “set” was a mini-anthology within the anthology called “The Diplodocus Odes,” purporting to be a collection of twelve poems written by diplodocii with accompanying scholarly annotations. In a memoir of another New York poet, Ted Berrigan, which Tom Clark published in 1985 (a mere ten years after my discovery of Another World), Tom described his discovery of the New York School in terms that resonated strongly with my own first encounter with his own work: “... I stopped at Shakespeare’s, and browsing there, found these magazines, which proposed a kind of writing – and an approach to life and experience – so radically dissimilar to those I’d previously pursued that I felt the boards shake slightly under my feet as I stood and read amid the quiet shelves.” That was just how I felt reading the poems in Another World, though my quiet shelves were in summer southern California rather than history-laden Paris. The boards shook, and I immediately wanted to imitate what I was reading, the combination of artistic ambition and comic book silliness, with a dollop of libertine excess at least implied. Another World encompassed a spectrum of poetries, but it certainly didn’t capture everything. The dark bohemian excesses of Sutton Breiding were invisible to me among the poetic forms feeding off of postwar artistic practices in New York, France, and England. Pop Art, which owed a lot to Dada, was the foremost source of generative forms. In addition, there was a significant representation of the beatnik Buddhist tradition that started with Kerouac and Ginsberg, far more laid back and natu- ralistic than the urban ferocity of the pop contingent, but even more adventurous in its use of “open form” to depict combinations of poetry and pure consciousness. There were also bits and pieces of a tradition of rigorous experimentalism that owed something to the Minimalist sculptural art forms that were being made and written about at that time, such as the one word poems of Aram Saroyan (son of William) and work that prefigured what was later called “language poetry,” by writers like Bernadette Mayer and Clark Coolidge. When I went to college in Redlands, California that fall of 1975, I made full use of the school library, which had a nice selection of “little magazines” as they were known carrying poetic work that I might emulate. We also had cross-borrowing privileges at U.C. Riverside nearby, and it was there that I discovered several books by the poets I had read in Another World, issued by major publishers just as Another World had been (it was put out by Bobbs-Merrill). In particular, two volumes of Tom Clark’s poetry from the Sixties, Stones and Air, were published by Harper & Row, giving them order- of-magnitude-greater circulation among the reading public than any small press publication would have done. The attraction of Tom Clark’s Stones was all the greater for me because the opening poem in the collection was entitled “Superballs.” The ultimate distillation of suburban testosterone-fueled solitary play, in my experience, Clark transformed the superball via the magic of metaphor into a stepping- stone into the whole numinous reality of poetry: “One day/ The wall reverses/ The ball bounces the other way/ Across this barrier into the future/ Where it begets occupations names” were lines (right out of the middle of the poem) that struck me as both comic-book funny and monumentally serious for the future of both the universe and myself. Many other poetic inspirations, as well as adventures, occupied me in the years after I found Stones in the U.C. Riverside library. I took poetry-writing classes at the college I started at where I became acquainted with forms like the sestina as well as with the whole poetry movement most inspired by

Charles Olson and others, which I think of as “open poetry.” Open poetry was anti-poetic in a very different way from New York poetry, and much focused on squirrely line breaks and syntax. It fit well with phenomena like minimalist art and avant-garde music that I also became acquainted with then. When I dropped out of college after two years, I went up to Seattle one summer to commit civil disobedience and then spent several months living and working there while awaiting trial, and discovered other interesting poetry through a bookstore called “Book People,” transgressive authors like Kathy Acker as well as New York poets like Ted Berrigan. But after I returned to California having done my time (three weeks), I landed in Santa Barbara and strangely picked up the Tom Clark thread again. “Strangely” because I never met him during the period we both lived there, but I de- tected his presence in two ways: first, his publisher, Black Sparrow Press, was based in Santa Barba- ra then, so his books were readily available in the town’s bookstores, in the beautiful editions that Black Sparrow put out in the mid-1970s. And second, while working my minimum wage job at Elec- tronic Data Systems Inc., I decided to try my hand at becoming a professional book reviewer by writing about some of Black Sparrow’s issuances for The Santa Barbara News and Review. I got a copy of John Fante’s Ask the Dust, a kind of precursor to Bukowski’s novels as I saw it in my literary ignorance, and wrote a review (“The Consummate LA Novel,” 1980) that was actually published and paid for, which excited me tremendously. But my next attempt at a review was stymied because, it turned out, a better reviewer than myself, Tom Clark, had taken my place (as I regarded it). No further $20 honoraria were forthcoming from the Review. At the time, I was only dimly aware of the inevitable injustice of forcing a poet to work for token payments to make ends meet, because I thought of myself as a poet too. Meanwhile, Tom Clark was writing poems about his life in the area at the turn of the decade, turn of the era, that captured Santa Barbara’s inextricable mix of nature and class privilege, with lines like “Nothing but psychodrama/ and disillusionment/ in the canyons of the wealthy”.

Part 2 After finishing college at U.C. Santa Barbara and going into the Peace Corps for a couple of years in Swaziland, I returned to California with an acceptance letter from Berkeley in the grey-hued field of operations research. I moved to Oakland in 1983 (and never left) and applied myself to optimiza- tion and stochastic processes, with poetry very much on the sideline. In 1986 I started working at Pacific Gas and Electric, and even though I was still in the middle of my graduate education (working on my doctorate), I looked around gingerly for activities that would edify the more liberal side of my nature (even though, until the Iran-Contra scandal broke, I spent the early 1980’s a neo- conservative supporter of Reagan and his partisans). At that time the UC Berkeley Extension held most of its courses right on the campus, where I was spending a good deal of time anyway, so opportunities to take night courses appealed to me. A poetry class with Tom Clark, who had moved to Berkeley, turned out to be by far the most amazing of those opportunities. I realize in retrospect that Reaganism had a lot in common with Trumpism, in terms of its effects on its masses of supporters. But a notable difference between the Reagan and Trump eras was that certain quite visible forms of artistic compromise were possible that essentially aligned artists with the world Reagan was creating (Trump in a sense made life easier for rich artists by allowing all of them to vilify him and his minions on first principles, pretending that Trump World was utterly alien to theirs – though I note that traces of that opportunism remain in acts like Jeff Koons’ taking of pay- roll protection funds that should have gone to bankrupt smaller businesses). In the world of painting, there were millionaire artists creating massive, decadent paintings and sculptures. Nothing of

13 that sort was possible in the poetry world, but poets weren’t interested in obscene wealth anyway: for them, comfortable sinecures were the equivalent, and who’s to blame them? Academic or pseudo -academic tenure provided a lifestyle not too far distant from the hippie paradise many of them described and lived in New York City or Bolinas. Tom Clark, a far more critical thinker than most of his compadres, was having none of it, and wrote polemic works dissecting poetic compromises with the neoliberal world, especially the lucrative poetry school that flourished for a while at the Tibetan Buddhist Naropa Institute in Boulder Colorado. It’s exquisitely ironic that Tom Clark’s attack on Naropa, for cultist authoritarianism and sexual abuse as well as for the moral collapse of some of America’s best known poets, reads extremely well, acute and painfully contemporary, forty years later, when the attacks on Clark at the time were mostly accusations that he himself was a kind of right-wing pawn. A passage like this from the book seems especially prescient of our current disaster: To poets like Waldman and Ginsberg, journalism of any variety -- black, white, red or yellow -- is a lesser order of expression than poems or prayers. Certainly, it seizes less power. The religious men these poets work for, and who manipulate their lives, are equally uninterested in the free press or its social function. In the kingdom of Shambhala, the rational articula- tion of knowledge always was passé.

The poets have chosen metaphysics, magic, and the mumbo-jumbo of a spiritual kingdom ruled over by a witty Oriental whose unashamed contempt for democratic institutions is starting to invade their poetics. "Experiment in monarchy," indeed! Though anti-liberal ressentiment was strong within me, I tried hard to maintain an integrity in my poetic work that was independent of my vagrant ideologies. Thus I was able to “pass” in the Poetry Writing extension course I took with Tom Clark. The class was energizing because Tom engaged the students as poets, and because some of the other students in the class were very good poets indeed. I kept in touch with William Talcott, bard of San Francisco’s original techie working class, until his death. I’m still “friends” with the Berkeley noir master Owen Hill. At the time, I remember being particularly proud when I played for the class a musical rendering (by the avant-garde composer Art Simon) of a poem I had written, which used one of the earliest text-to- voice programs to render my words alien. And I remember disclosing to Tom and the class that my strongest poetic inspirations at the time were W.S. Merwin and Philip Larkin. I liked Merwin because his poems were shorn of all descriptive or personal detail, Larkin because his poems were all personas, struggling or not struggling with fate: “Man hands on misery to man/ It deepens like a coastal shelf.” In retrospect I see Tom Clark’s later poetry as incorporating into his own unstoppable voice some of the cool impersonality of Merwin, and much of the struggling with resignation and fate conveyed in the best of Larkin. Looking for some Merwin to put right here, I found the following in the beautiful Library of America editions of his poetry, not entirely shorn of descriptive detail, and at least as prescient as the clip from Tom Clark’s Naropa Poetry Wars: “Of tomorrow I have nothing to say/ what I say is not tomorrow/ tomorrow no animals/ no trees growing at their will/ no one in the White House/ the words gone out”. That’s at least as contemporary as the latest tweet on Twitter, isn’t it? Part 3 As for the Internet, although I can’t accurately date most of my interactions with Tom Clark, I note that the New College course I audited with Tom Clark on the poetry of Ezra Pound must have hap-

pened in the early Nineties. This I surmise because at around that time I took another class in San Francisco in Experimental Hyperfiction, in which using only raw HTML (in the days before Java and CSS), we built baroque interlinked narratives using the brand new technology of the Netscape browser. My work was pretentiously titled “The Pound Project,” and was meant to be a hyperfiction with Ezra Pound as its protagonist that would somehow mimic the structure of both the city of Ven- ice and his magnum opus The Cantos. It wasn’t a hard reach to conceive of The Cantos themselves as hypertext, and therefore of mimick- ing them to narrative purposes, but the freshness in memory of a trip I’d actually made to Venice (to run in the Venice Marathon, I was doing that sort of thing then), and especially of the class with Tom Clark, made me think I could put such a thing together, though of course I never did. I imagined the hyperfiction as a kind of “choose your own adventure” game in which Ezra Pound might be diverted from his fascist destiny by actions taken early in his encounters with Venice, captured in the lines starting Canto III, “I sat on the Dogana’s steps/ For the gondolas cost too much, that year”. While in Venice I walked out to the Dogana’s steps just to get what it might have felt like to be young and staring at the waters of the lagoon, there at the turn of the twentieth century. But “The Pound Project” never got further than five or six screens of interlocking hypertext, and I never enabled Pound, even in my imagination, to choose anything other than the fascism, corruption, and defeat he ended up with. I took several of Tom Clark’s poetry classes, offered out of his home in Berkeley to New College students and select auditors. I had been in intermittent contact with him since the Extension classes, but jumped at the offer to become an auditor, scheduling my work so that I could take an afternoon off each week for the class meetings. Each course was easily worth a year of any liberal arts education I had done two decades earlier, because we really read and were held to our reading, at least for the interval. I think Tom meant to convey some of what he himself had experienced when he studied in England at the beginning of the Sixties, that form of pedagogy in which a tutor could hold a student to a higher intellectual standard than would ever be possible in the American form of limited, quantified, grade-oriented education. Studying Pound, Keats and Andrew Marvell, I did something I had never done before or since with poems: I memorized them, as I had once memorized lines to parts in plays, not to perform dramati- cally for others, but solely for my own poetic uses. I memorized one Pound canto, XVII, with some difficulty, and four Keats Odes (“Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode on Melan- choly,” and my favorite, “To Autumn”) much more easily. I had never before wanted to hold things in my head more or less permanently (and I haven’t retained them, over the years, though they still resonate), hadn’t even thought of knowing a poem as part of poetic practice. I discovered that poems can be, in some cases are meant to be, inhabited physically. Through the years since the Keats and Pound classes, across the boundary of the millennium, Tom Clark’s poetry deepened and darkened and aged. My own contact with his work became sporadic after Elena and Charla were born and I had no time for anything requiring prolonged attention. Af- ter the turn of the century I determined to self-publish a poetry book, which I titled Collapse of the Grid, and that turned out to be a coda to my career as a poet, at least for a decade or two. Tom Clark was of course one of the poetic teachers to whom I dedicated my book, and I brought a copy by his house – that I think was the last time I saw and talked to him. I read his blog, which over several years became a poetic work comparable in magnitude to the Cantos, but engaged and sympathetic to the suffering of the downtrodden of the world in a way neither Ezra Pound nor I my-

self had ever been. One of his late poems, in his book The New World, begins “Fidelity, after long practice, to/ The things that have crossed one’s path in life” – that indicates the principle on which he wrote. In 2018 Tom Clark, horribly, was killed by a speeding car while crossing a dark Berkeley street on an insomniac late night perambulation. I didn’t find out until I checked his blog several weeks after the fact, and felt one of the bottoms dropping out of things. The same poem concludes “For mere excur- sions don’t suffice on visits/ To dead cities – excavation too’s required,/ Cries out the hungry unborn poem/ Within us, demanding to exist as/ If alive” – and it’s as if Tom Clark still lives, reading that.

1976

I was raised to believe that life was meant to be a coherent journey. A graceful and purposeful stride from place to place and experience to experience, generating chains of connected moments. Mo- ments welded together by time and relationships and integrated into memories that would be unique and lasting. In short, a consistent flow that would be easy to explain to my grandchildren once I inevitably stumbled into dotage. That’s not what happened. Here is some of what did, at least in part. And full disclosure: some of these moments did not resolve with happy endings.

Airborne, Northern America. Early 70s. My first memory of hanging with the Breiding family began with a percussive prelude, a flight on a then modern-day jetliner, originating in Minneapolis late on a Thursday evening. The plane passed through an intense lightning storm illuminating huge thunderheads over Canada as we careened through turbulence toward a stopover in Salt Lake City. The lightning flashes through the cabin weren’t the most frightening part of the journey. It was the stomach-plunging drops in altitude followed by the loud, delayed cracks of thunder, forceful enough to seem like they might rip the fuse- lage apart. The concussions rattling the overhead bins and shaking the seats felt like tangible omens it was now truly time to die. Yet hours later, having somehow survived, I remember pleasantly supping at a Chinatown restaurant in San Francisco just before midnight 1. I could make no sense of the entirely Chinese-script menu but was delighted to gorge on the piled-high plate of tiny Schezwan snails, prying open the

thin coverings on the bottoms of their shells with friend Katie was attending. Because I had never flimsy toothpicks. I was so famished and ex- seen nor met him, I didn’t realize she was talk- hausted I didn’t really pick up on much of the ing with him at the moment I waved at her be- conversation between William (yes, your humble fore striding into a campus restroom. editor) and his friend Gene. I don’t remember much of the “conversation” After dinner we drove in Gene’s Mission Impos- after that. I never saw Brin again, but did make sible lookalike van to the Embarcadero, and as a point of reading most of his novels as they we strolled from pier to pier taking in the gor- were published - with pleasure, I might add. geous sights, I resolved to become a photogra- Nonetheless, I most definitely did not review pher. Later, I ended up visiting them both in another one of his books, not after that close what was then a friendly, clean city at least a encounter of the pissing kind. dozen times over the following decade. And those visits were instrumental in changing my life from a structured narrative to a randomly Beijing, China. Mid-00s. chaotic stream of consciousness. Not totally op- The customs official regarded me for a long mo- posite of what I was raised to believe, but cer- ment, then looked down and stared intensely at tainly forking down a new path that led to all my passport once again. “This is not you,” he kinds of interesting moments and encounters barked, jerking his eyes up to focus directly on with notable people (such as studying photog- mine. The day before, Chinese and American raphy with Phel Steinmetz 2, who had appren- military warplanes had sparred not far off the ticed with Ansel Adams). coast between the mainland and Taiwan, just a So it began. And partly explains why nearly 50 few hundred miles from where I now stood. years later you’re reading about some of these “Of course it is,” I squeaked, instantly visualiz- moments in William’s latest edition of PS (aka ing the sordid jail cell I was almost certainly Phenomenal Serendipity, which he modestly destined to occupy for the foreseeable future. calls Portable Storage. But we all know better). Officer Cheng looked down again. Spent a full

minute tapping away on his keyboard, perusing La Jolla, California. Late 70s. what must have been a highly classified data- base of heathens, hackers or suspected crimi- “Used galaxy salesman, huh?” nals. Then the light reflecting off his glistening I could almost feel his breath on the back of my forehead shifted again. He raised his eyes to neck. I did that involuntary thing guys do when scrutinize me once more. After a few moments, startled while micturating, clenching up and rap- he grunted and visibly relaxed. Stamping his idly zipping my pants. I turned, but he was still official stamp he clapped my passport shut and pushing into my space. flicked it through the opening in his window. “Enjoy your visit!” he hissed through a tight, “Well,” I started, but he persisted: feral smile. “On balance, a fair review, but that one sentence “Thank you,” I said. Turning away from him really stung,” he said. “I’m not Carl Sagan.” and heading to the exit, I immediately startled UCSD’s student newspaper had just published once again. A Starbucks just beyond the pass- my review of David Brin’s new novel, and he was port control exit? Really? My first “official” quoting a line buried deep in the (mostly) ubiq- sight on my first “official” trip to China was uitous praise I had written 3. I knew that he was Starbucks? Huh. Nah. I opted to gather my a graduate student teaching a class that my girl- things and somehow find my way to my hotel

overlooking Tiananmen Square... and then was Johannesburg, South Africa. Late 90s. immediately hit by a taxi. But that’s a story for The chaos hadn’t ebbed. The man dressed in another moment. what looked like a full Victorian military uni- The next evening, I knocked on the door of Jack form was standing in the middle of the intersec- Ma’s suite at the Qin Sheng Hotel in Xiamen. I tion while cars whizzed past at speed, somehow would be interviewing the chairman of the avoiding the throngs of pedestrians who were Alibaba Group on stage early the next morning, zigzagging everywhere without pattern or seem- and his people wanted to know what I planned ing purpose. We were in downtown Joburg after to ask the former English school teacher, who spending a quiet week in deep jungle in the was now China’s most prominent internet pio- heart of South Africa. Now, feeling foolish for neer. lacking a map of the city, I stopped to ask directions. A dour security man opened the door, filling the gap in the opening. “Ni hao,” I attempted. As the cop continued to direct traffic, he glared “I’m...” at me. He looked simultaneously startled but also seemingly in full in control. “We know who you are,” the goon said in flaw- less English, stepping aside to let me pass. The “You need something?” he snapped. next twenty minutes flowed without peril. The “Where is the train station?” I asked. rest was easy: I had been interviewing Internet moguls on stage for years, and found I had an “Motor two blocks forward to the robot, then aptitude for drawing interesting anecdotes out left turn,” he said, gesturing with a broad, ex- of them. Easy, peasy. Colonel Bowers had pansive wave. trained me well, and I wasn’t intimidated in the “The robot?” least to be talking with China’s wealthiest capi- talist on stage with several thousand observers “Yes. Then direct to the station. They will help in the audience. My only niggling doubt was you there.” how I could possibly write about the experience “What’s the robot?” I asked, full of questions years later, in some fanzine or portable storage after having been challenged at checkpoints and device. 4 roadblocks for the past few days as we wended our way from Mpumalanga (known then as “God’s window” and prior to that Eastern Phoenix, Arizona, early 90s & Maple Transvaal and today as “the place where the sun Grove, Minnesota, early 10s. rises”) 5 to the capital of Gauteng province to My grandmother’s grasp on my hand was no catch our train to Cape Town. drier or more calloused than usual, but didn’t “The robot is the robot,” the traffic cop said, seem as firm. She seemed to be sleeping well, growing agitated. He made a pushing-forward but I lingered for a moment just to be sure. She motion. “You must move on: you’re stifling traf- gasped softly, and her mouth fell slightly open. fic.” It took a moment to realize she had just died. I drove another two blocks and stopped at the Years later, during an early dawn vigil in my red light. Waiting for the light to change, I had a grandmother’s daughter’s hospice room, my sudden insight: The “robot” was the traffic sig- Mom stirred in her sleep. Then she quietly nal. As South Africa was developing, robots whispered “mother” before drifting off again. It were discretely and unremorselessly replacing was the last word I ever heard her speak. the humans who directed traffic at other inter- sections in the city.

The light changed and I turned left. Sure tourists were carjacked and killed in downtown enough, two blocks later, we arrived at the train Joburg this morning,” the newscaster said with station. At that moment a complete stranger appropriate sonorous undertones to emphasize started pounding on my window. “You’re here, the solemnity of the news. Video then cut to the you’re here; I will take the car just now,” the location of the incident. It wasn’t hard to spot man shouted. Aghast, I tried to press the car the robot – “our” robot. “He” had let us through forward but was almost immediately blocked just minutes before our unfortunate counter- by the backup of other cars entering the sta- parts obeyed the newly installed traffic signal tion. The stranger caught up with us and and waited to be waved on. Unlike us, they did- pounded on the window again. “I’m here to n’t make it through the signal. 36 hours later, take your car, sir, but you must do this now!” safely ensconced in our inexpensive bed sheets he shouted. and feeling an existential sense of relief, we arrived in Cape Town. He pressed a rental agreement against the window. I saw my own signature at the bottom of the paper, unmistakable in its bizarre twisty- Mountain View, California. Early 00s. slingy curvature. In the early days of Google’s existence, it was “Why do it this way?” I asked, after we exited always serious fun to visit the company, though the car. these drop-ins were usually a last-minute after- “If we don’t retrieve the cars as soon as you thought. On most of our Bay Area trips, my arrive, sir, we will never see them again.” Then “partner in crime” as Danny Sullivan liked to softly, “You obviously don’t know what it’s like call us, typically spent hours with the dominant here,” sliding into the driver’s seat, reversing search engine giants of the day: AltaVista. In- and abruptly pulling away. foseek. Excite. Inktomi. Meetings with those Internet titans were invariably serious, with all Janice and I cast puzzled glances at one anoth- kinds of financial projections and 8x10 color- er, but secured our luggage and pushed our glossy photos with charts and arrows depicting way through the crowd toward the main termi- inevitable domination of the emerging online nal. Only to discover that our travel agent had universe. We were reporting on the future, after screwed our plans by booking tickets from all. So we needed serious jam. Cape Town to Johannesburg, opposite of what we intended and which was clearly in violation of The Rules, despite cities, fares and distance Usually we’d stop off at Google if we had time all being identical. before catching respective flights home. In their After what seemed like hours of negotiation tiny headquarters with desks of well-used and with our fusty, contrary conductor, we finally castoff closet doors perched precariously on agreed to resolve what was apparently the most sawhorses with the company’s handful of em- serious issue by paying an extra 25 Rand (about ployees sitting on cheap plastic yard chairs, we a dollar at the time) for sheets for our cramped would spend time with people like Urs Hölzle fold-out bed in our sleeper car. Once that was and his massive wolfhound Ilsa, listening to his settled, our conductor smiled warmly, and wel- improbable dreams of building vast data centers comed us to commence our thousand-mile in what he described as “the cloud.” Sergey Brin journey across the lower reaches of the conti- would twist tales about his latest trapeze lessons nent. and then moments later deny that the company would ever index things like books or PDF files, Lunchtime. The local news popped up on the let alone video. Maps? Pshaw. television in the dining car. “Two American

Later, when Google appeared to be accelerating created a very secretive company that developed on its inevitable arc of dominance, our meet- a bunch of new technology that would hoist him ings at the expanded and rapidly growing far into the upper atmosphere and then let him Googleplex would take the better part of a day safely parachute to earth. There’s actually a fas- or sometimes two. In those days one of the of cinating documentary called “14 Minutes From the moments I came to relish most was lunch- Earth” that goes behind the scenes and de- ing in the company’s cafe, run by Charlie scribes the entire operation. Ayers6. Former chef for the Grateful Dead, he I’m not sure whether Alan was involved with now cooked up unusual and amazing fare for developing Google’s Project Loon 8, the compa- these people who were rearranging the Internet ny’s effort to provide Internet access to remote in ways few could truly understand or foresee. parts of the world that lack telecommunication Whenever we visited Google our primary point infrastructure. But even now, approaching dot- of contact was Marissa Mayer. One of Google’s age, I have no doubt my brief moment with him earliest employees, she moved with graceful was far more pleasant and enlightening than ease through many jobs and always provided us with Officer Cheng in China. (And parentheti- with great insights on search, local, news—even cally, I am well aware that Google’s parent com- on user experience. Little things like why pany is called Alphabet. But I’ve always called it Google to this day retains the “I’m Feeling Google, ever since they first changed their name Lucky” button on its home page when during from “Backrub.” And since previously men- its entire existence virtually no one has ever tioned dotage is just over the horizon I am cate- clicked it. gorically allowed to ignore everything that is true. Even if I do or don’t run for precedent But now Marissa had moved on to run Yahoo, (sic).) so today we were meeting with a new contact: Alan Eustace 7. Despite our familiarity with the company, it was not entirely clear to us exactly Luverne, Minnesota. Mid 00s. what he did, and for some reason we spent the better part of an hour listening to him explain Ken Burns greeted me with a welcoming hug. the details of Google’s internally developed Earlier that day it had been a mere handshake, software evaluation system that helped guide immediately after he bounded off stage in the product development. My impression was of a high school gym and wrapped my father in an very nice man, very understated, though a tad enormous bear hug. That’s how Ken greets you, more corporate than most at Google. Nonethe- which on reflection is no surprise given the sto- less, like everyone at the company, sharp as a ries he draws from the people in his documen- safety pin. taries. I instantly took a liking to him. He would have Dad was just a kid during World War Two, but been a good fit for the primitive social media his memories of the era were still sharp, and as network I had created in the early 70s called a natural-born storyteller he spent several days APA-50, and he would have been the right age, with Ken and his partner Lynn Novack recalling back then. events that occurred in his small southwestern Minnesota town during the early 1940s. So it was something of a surprise a couple of years later when I read the top headline on the Now on stage at Luverne’s Palace Theater, Ken New York Times: “Alan Eustace Jumps From was thanking the community for its role and Stratosphere, Breaking Felix Baumgartner’s support of his new film, The War. He turned 2012 World Record.” Turns out that while and gestured to Dad in the front row of the the- working at Google as a Senior VP he had also ater, and personally thanked him for his partici-

pation 9. As the film opened for its world prem- tion and cow-trading venue. As the massive iere, I saw Mom buss Dad with a quick kiss. elevator doors shusshed shut on the group For some reason, Mom’s typical affectionate ahead of me, I realized Sonya had pushed for- act surfaced a memory - a moment when Dad ward and was on the way down to the bottom of poked his head into our locker room after a the conference center without me. Bad Dad. particularly bad high school basketball game Moments later, when I was able to cram into where I had failed miserably at just about eve- the elevator and then finally touched down at rything. I was despondent. He just grasped my street level. I found Sonya in rapt conversation shoulder and said, “I’m proud of you,” Despite with Jimmy. They were discussing the subtle- just having sat through what for a parent must ties and nuances of Webkins (he has daughters have been a horrific spectacle. Then he turned apparently her same age). Looking up, Jimmy and walked away. actually did recognize and acknowledge me, Snapping back to Luverne, as Burns pirouetted and quipped “your daughter is great. Planning and left the stage, I looked at Dad and suddenly to have another?” felt a deep insight into what all parents feel at Relieved she was safe and comfortable in such some point. As the film began, I felt a deep trustworthy company, I replied “no, we’re hap- rush of pride for my father. py to have just her...” Along with her brother, our two kids were all we needed. Life was good. London, England. Mid 00s. For many years, because I flew all over the fuck Colorado. Boulder, early 60s, Fort Col- everywhere I “achieved” elite status on many lins mid 90s and then Mishawaka, mid airlines. Because many of my flights were very 10s. long and concluded in destinations strange but Writing recollections as if they are diary entries wondrous, I relished the perks that came with is a conceit that can only be maintained if chro- status and also relished sharing them with my nology remains stable. Otherwise, just as in a family. During my time of high travel, I took J.G. Ballard story, the topology of time and nar- both of our kids on “coming of eight” trips to rative structure disintegrates. I understand London. That’s how it came to be that my this. But these next few last but hard-drawn daughter Sonya became a BFF with Jimmy moments are appropriate for that kind of devia- Wales, the founder of Wikipedia 10. tion. I was onstage for the “prenote keynote,” then Mom was strapping the cloth diaper around my shook hands with Jimmy as he took the stage newborn brother Lincoln’s butt. The tiny black following my warmup. I had no idea if he re- and white TV on the counter was broadcasting membered me from months earlier when I in- Walter Cronkite, and he kept repeating a word I terviewed him at one of our conferences in Cal- did not yet know: assassination. “What does ifornia. After all, this was what we both did that mean?” I asked Mom, simultaneously much of the time, speaking at conferences with pushing the safety pins that would bind Lin- other people who spoke at conferences. Sad to coln’s diaper into the mattress to “sterilize” say, but it’s hard to remember names as you them so he would be safe when fully wrapped. endlessly shuffle through airports and Power- As a five-year-old currently diligently attending Point presentations. kindergarten, I was fully confident I knew as But now that we were done speaking, we were much about health safety as national leader- exiting Olympia London 11, a huge ancient Vic- ship, despite being ignorant of current events. torian venue that was once a major train sta- 22

“Somebody shot President Kennedy,” Mom quick transient flash. Like a safety pin unsnap- replied. “It’s sad, but you and your brother ping, then vanishing into thin air. don’t need to worry.” Decades later in Fort Collins, Lincoln handed me a bottle of Full Sail pale ale, flashed the goofy grin that endeared him to everyone he talked to (which was everyone - the word “extrovert” captures just a slice of his love of interacting with people). “I’m going to die early,” he said, taking a long swig, and twisting that goofy grin up another notch. “What are you talking about?” I shot back, alarmed. Lincoln and Sky Sherman “Just one of those things Mom used to talk External References about when she was changing diapers,” he said. 1: Probably not where we ate that night, but my cur- Mom had died months earlier and Lincoln and rent favorite restaurant in Chinatown: I were spending more time together, mostly 2: In memoriam: the time we had spent away with her as she 3: Not the actual review, but a scan of an issue with declined in hospice. Lincoln always liked to one of my photos on the front page: ing him talk like this was still a shock. 4: An account of the interview from my friend Barry Schwartz’s SEO Roundtable: pins, I stepped up to the microphone to say 5: Stunning beauty: days earlier. Hundreds of people had come to 6: Charlie, in his own words (video): their last respects. The day was brilliantly Colo- 7: Alan Eustace: 8: Project Loon: forts had at least in part sustained my brother 9: Dad’s bio on The War’s website: ing spoken before crowds of thousands all over 10: Jimmy’s own Wikipedia page: sorts of notable people, I found myself wordless 11: Olympia: https://olympia.london/ in front of this group. What could I possibly 12: The Mishawaka: https:// say? www.themishawaka.com/ “Farewell, brother,” I began, and then paused Bonus: Search Engine Land as an arc of light reflected off of a rock hundreds of feet above us at an elevation in Colora- Douglass Elementary https://doe.bvsd.org/ do most people would only seek when they’re The true story behind Google’s hilarious first name: BackRub 23

I think of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, as orchestrated by Rimsky-Korsakov, when I remember how I began -- knowing very little -- to explore classical music recordings. Pictures and certain other works, such as Holst’s Planets and Vivaldi’s Seasons, were immediately appealing. Seated facing two stereo speakers, I knew I was in a good place. Much earlier in my life, certain pictures quickly intrigued me, a wet-behind-the-ears kid. I don’t know if the kind of experience I’m about to describe has happened very often to people of a younger generation, who grew up with visual information streaming into their eyes from phones, personal computers, television, DVDs, digital displays shown on wall monitors, and games. Conversely, people of my grandparents’ generation, born in the late 19th century, must, as youngsters, have seen far fewer reproductions of art and photography than I did. But people born around the time I was – in 1955 – or a few decades earlier, might recognize the kind of experience I’m about to discuss. We had access to captivating pictures and we studied them again and again. Bill Meyers, for example, was a student at Columbia University when, in 1962, he wrote “Tolkien

Pictures and Dale an Inner Vision Nelson and Temperaments” for a fanzine. Meyers re- confident – but not always sure – that I remem- members his Chattanooga boyhood, in a house- ber from when I was a kid living on the Oregon hold where a picture of the Black Forest hung coast, let’s say around age 10-13, or even farther above the piano and cast its spell on him. back, from when my family lived in Utah or Cal- ifornia. “It was a very popular print for its time but no one seemed to have known who painted it. It I suspect that it was common for middle-class showed a broad path, almost a cathedral-like households 50-odd years ago to hang few pic- corridor, which led into the forest and was cov- tures, aside from family photos; items such as ered by vast, over-hanging tree limbs. …A floral china cups and brass vases and carafes strange white mist hovered above the path and, were favored rather than paintings. off in the distance there was a glow of white light I wonder: Did any of these pictures that I’m where, apparently, the path left the dark seclu- about to describe cause a sudden new interest sion of the trees and came out into the open, or to take hold of me? Or was it because I was al- else something which glowed was coming up the ready interested in something, that a picture path.” fascinated me? I’ll forgo a lot of speculation. Meyers adds, “The painting helped to shape me 1. A Mojave Desert Scene, by Robert Wood and my imagination.” A framed reproduction of a 1944 Robert Wood It became associated in his mind with the tales of desert landscape (whose official title is un- the brothers Grimm. Furthermore, liking the known to me) drew my eye when I was in the painting’s remote world of the imagination, Mey- family living room. Whether it’s a close portrait ers was prepared to enjoy Tolkien when the time of an actual scene, or an imaginary scene based came. on observation of real places, Wood (1889- It seems, then, that works of visual art, often 1879) depicts the scene realistically, with an seen and pondered, formerly appropriately subdued pal- helped to make the child into ette. The former popularity the fan as well as the man or 1. of Wood vs. the more recent the woman. popularity of Thomas Kinkade (1958-2012) sug- Herewith, pictures at an ex- gests something about the hibition in my personal hall decline of middle-class taste. of memory. To reduce tedi- um for the reader, I’ll keep A Mojave locale would have expressions about my degree strongly appealed to my fa- of certainty to a minimum. ther, a dedicated rockhound These are pictures I’m pretty in his young manhood.

Mountains and deserts drew him. In his final months, affected by dementia but cheerful and lovable, he liked to talk about a part of California where the highest and the lowest parts of North America were close together. He had climbed that high point, Mt. Whitney, with the lowest point on the continent about 85 miles away, the Badwater Basin in Death Valley. Early in adult life, Dad worked for American Potash and Chemical in desolate Trona. Seldom Seen Slim, “last of the Death Valley single-blanket jackass prospectors,” and Pete Aguereberry were legends of the Panamints, and, maybe 25 miles from Trona, Ballarat survived -- as a ghost town. For most people, Wood’s picture shows an alien landscape, like the excellent matte painting of the brooding surface of Talos IV that you’ll remember from the Star Trek pilot “The Cage” (filmed 1964- 1A. 1965). Wood’s picture needs no trite bleached bones, but it makes no con- cessions to viewers who would like something prettier. The reproduction’s austerity may be due partly to fading, but I suppose its predominant colors were always browns, greys, and drab greens. (The image provided here is one I found online; the Nelson household copy was gone years ago.) The yucca elata at the center of Wood’s painting is a boundary marker between the viewer and the houseless, pathless realm beyond it. This picture must have played a part in my youthful turn to science fiction and fantasy. People who like such fiction often are attracted to the idea of strange, remote landscapes. Like the terrain of some other planet, like space itself, the Mo- 2. jave requires that explorers prepare themselves with food and water or means to get them, protective clothing against extremes of heat and cold, etc. By the way, my dad generally had no interest in science fiction – but he liked the movie Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964), which was filmed in Death Valley. Like Meyers’ Black Forest picture, Wood’s desert scene draws the receptive viewer in. 2.Egyptian-Mythological Motifs on a Sewing Ma- chine Remote landscapes often appeal to fans, and so do evocations of a legendary past. My mom had an old Singer sewing machine with a 26

black body and golden “Egyptian” decals. Its ornate design stood out in the middle-class residences in which we lived. I didn’t actually make up stories about the sphinx, but I sensed strangeness and ancientness – elements that permeated much of the fantasy I would eventually read, especially the romances of H. Rider Haggard, whose obsession with long-ago Egypt is manifest in tales such as She as well as other tales now mostly forgotten. That sewing machine, by the way, bespeaks a whole bygone world of domesticity, in which a girl learned to be skilled and thrifty. Clothes could be mended rather than thrown away, just as meals should be made from scratch, with minimal packaging. The modern girl is usually much more of a consumer than her grandmother was. 3.The Middle Eastern Coffee Drinker on the Hills Brothers 1A. Can; 4. The Gas Station Dinosaur That turbaned, white-bearded, slippered and robed, straight-spined old fellow was the Hills Brothers emblem for may years. His statue has stood in San Francisco since 1992, near the site of a Hills Broth- ers factory. For a youngster like me, he was an emblem of a faraway and perhaps time-lost culture. The fact that he’s tasting his coffee from a bowl, not a cup, subtly bespeaks different ways. He could have appeared in an Arabian Nights tale – or, to name an author I began to read at 13, a Lord Dunsany fantasy. (There was a faint note of fantasy that sounded even in the elfin figures of Snap, Crackle, and Pop, on boxes of Rice Krispies when I was a kid in the 1960s, but I can’t point to a particular image.) It might be nothing but a striding green outline that I saw reproduced on magazine ads and the like, but I liked the Sin- clair gas station brontosaurus. If Sinclair stations had been 3. available in the places where we lived, no doubt I’d have wanted Dad – the sole driver in the family – to buy gas there. Some realistic plastic dinosaurs that were given to me might have been Sinclair products. For, without a doubt, dinosaurs fascinated me. Before we step over to the next pictures, let me pause to say that -- surely -- images of

dinosaurs played a big role in turning many youngsters towards fantasy and (especially) science fiction. Here you had towering monsters that had existed a long time ago, right here on this same planet – and their exceeding ancientness was part of the mystique. How many people reading this article could say they remember dreaming about a dinosaur? Perhaps more than one or two. I dreamed about being at my grandparents’ home in the woods of rural Grants Pass, Oregon, and that 4. there was a tyrannosaur treading around outside. Tolkien said that, when he was a boy, he desired dragons with a profound desire. Many of us must have desired dinosaurs -- as well as dragons. 5.Carl Barks’s Old Spanish Apparition Marvel’s superhero comics fascinated me after I bought my first issue, Thor #140, which went on sale on March 2, 1967, according to the superlative Mike’s Amazing World of Comics site. Before then, I bought Gold Key’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E. #1 off the stands, and Mike’s World says that was on sale all the way back on Feb. 18, 1965, when I was nine years old. I might have been given a few comics before then. I’d buy more U.N.C.L.E. issues, and, beginning 2 ½ years later, Star Trek #1 and a bunch of successors too. But, undoubtedly, it’s the work of Carl Barks – “the Duck Man” – that I regard most fondly today. I bought Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories #307 (on-sale date Feb. 24, 1966) and relished Barks’s story much more than anything else in the issue. In it, Donald is throwing a garden party and hopes it will win him a respected place in polite society. He’s decided on a jungle theme and commands his nephews to play the part of capering monkeys off in the trees. Nothing doing! they say. Donald buys a pair of hypnotic spectacles with which to try to sub- due them to his wishes. Huey, Dewey, and Louie pretend that the cheap novelty glasses work. When they try using them on Unca Donald, he proves to be entirely more susceptible and does fall under the spell, believing himself to be an ape, swinging from branches and capturing Daisy. The nephews wrestle Donald to the ground and tell him to stand still. His mind, they assume, is blank. But rashly one of the kids puts the spectacles on Donald, in whose mind Daisy and the youngsters look like monkeys, and that’s how they behave when the spec-

tacles work on them. Now all four ducks believe they are chattering monkeys. This results in a hilarious and, for Donald, ultimately terribly sham- ing eruption of hijinks at the garden party. What a debacle! In the final panel, having recovered from their monkey delusion, the ducks flee Duckburg for Little America, populated only by pen- guins. It’s from The Best of Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck #1 (on sale Sept. 1, 1966) that I have drawn the memorable picture that will stand for my enjoyment of comics. The story is “The Ghost of the Grotto,” written and drawn by Barks for a 1947 comic. Though he knew his readers would be young kids, Barks does not cheat. He tells the story perfectly, conjuring a delectably creepy atmosphere and convincing background detail. Donald and his nephews have become kelp harvesters in the West Indies. The seaweed beds are becoming exhausted, but they can see there’s a rich supply in Skull- Eye Reef. They are warned that this very night it’s 50 years since the last time a little boy disappeared, and this has been happening twice every hundred years for centuries in the vi- cinity of that haunted reef. But they resolve to get at that kelp no matter what mysteries the locals talk about. And there is someone there, a menacing armored figure who steps out of the shadows of a rotting shipwreck, beneath the beams of the full moon. Barks would speak of himself 5. as a hack. But he was a worthy American original. He was born in 1901 and died in 2000. Af- ter his death, I learned that he’d resided at 810 NE Oregon Avenue in Grants Pass, Oregon, an estimated four miles from where my grandparents on my father’s side lived. Carl Barks’s mortal clay was laid to rest in Hillcrest Memorial Park in Grants Pass (Rosewood, Lot 2, Section 31), where my grandparents on my father’s side also have their graves.

6.Space Map Now we pause before a masterpiece. When I was about 10 years old, that © 1959 map of the solar system hung on the wall in the utility room where I slept, in our little rental house at 654 Elrod Avenue in Coos Bay, Oregon. A table on the map told kids that radio signals from Venus would take two minutes and 18 seconds to reach Earth, while a signal from Pluto could take six hours and 25 minutes. You’d weigh 34 pounds on Mars, and 238 pounds on Jupiter, if you weighed 90 pounds on earth. Zipping along at 25,000 miles an hour in your spaceship, it’d take a fraction over eight 6. hours to get to the moon, but 4,446 days to get to Pluto at its closest. Even a math-wary kid like me would ponder those numbers. Maps imply journeys, so a solar system map implies science fiction voyages. The paintings may be over-colored, but, against deep space’s blackness, the colors seemed luscious to kids. They made you want to read stories about people who went to the moon and planets and saw, with their own eyes, the forms of things unknown beneath extra- terrestrial skies. Subtly, the picture of an erupting volcano on Mercury may have touched on Cold War-era anxieties about atomic-bomb mushroom clouds. 8. 7, 8.Prehistoric Gardens Dinosaurs

7. An hour south of Coos Bay on Highway 101 was Port Orford, the location of the Prehis- toric Gardens roadside attraction. It was created by an artistic retired accountant, Ernie Nelson (1907-1999), who dug Nation- al Geographic pictures of dinosaurs when he was a boy. A dozen or so years after the Gardens opened back in 1955, I was among the schoolkids who took a field trip there. A

trail wound through ferns and past mossy branches to places where the enormous creatures emerged from the primordial shade. Ferns were perhaps the first plants to fascinate me, growing abun- dantly in coastal Oregon, and their prominence in the Gardens and in dinosaur books must have helped me to appreciate them. Ferns appear a few times in Watkins-Pitchford’s The Little Grey Men, one of the great books of my young days. They are mentioned nu- merous times in Tolkien’s description of Ithilien, in The Two Tow- ers, but that is a rather Mediterranean place. 9. I saved the Prehistoric Gardens brochure and a postcard or two, and liked to look at them. Today the site boasts 23 life-size dinosaur sculptures, not all of which had yet been made when I was there. 9.An Album Cover from Outer Space Coos Bay had a Pay Less drug store that sold LP records. There I saw Mr. Spock’s Music from Outer Space (Dot Records, 1967), which was given to me or bought with money given to me. I’d been a Star Trek fan even before sitting on the floor to watch the first broadcast on Sept. 8, 1966, because the “NBC Week” trailers fascinated me. In Coos Bay, by the way, the only TV channel you could get, if like us you didn’t have cable, was NBC. My life would’ve been different if Star Trek had been on a different network. The same publicity photo of Leonard Nimoy in Vulcanian make-up, holding a model of the U. S. S. Enterprise, that appeared on the album, was sold as a poster, and I got that too. 10.Billboard’s Top-Selling LP for 1966 A record album cover that arrested my attention in a different way was the one for Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass’s Whipped Cream and Other Delights. The model, Dolores Erickson, was three months pregnant, and no doubt her breasts had swelled in that first trimester. Unless his mother is nursing another child, a boy of 12 or 13 doesn’t usually 10. think of breasts as fountains of nourishment for babies. It’s a shame if Dolores’s baby ended up being formula-fed. I wonder about my reaction to this picture. I associate it with the onset of puberty. If I saw it when the record was first released by A&M in 1965, I suppose I would have been embarrassed rather than enticed by that lady who wasn’t wearing very much, and would have flipped on to other records. But then arrived the day when the picture held my gaze. And what a silly and very sexist image that was: the woman as al-

most literally a consumable object. But is it fanciful to see a couple of other, certainly faint, suggestions? In all that billowing white- ness, she looks a little like a bride with a rose – a flower that can symbolize virginal sexual integrity. And perhaps, despite the obviously demeaning savor of the composition, there’s a hint of something regal there coming through, almost like she’s a crowned queen with a scepter. Perhaps das Ewig-Weibliche in some form is a concept that will reassert itself when our present day has passed, as pass it must. That album photograph appeared when I was leaving behind early boyhood, when one is untroubled by sex, but before adolescent appetite sets in. When I gazed at the picture, I didn’t feel obvious desire, but (though I couldn’t have articulated it) I knew, at some level, that the model was a woman and that I was male and that this difference was important. “An essential condition of adult sexual equilibrium, and with it of virility of spirit, is the acceptance by the [boy] of his sex at as early an age as possible,” wrote the personalist philosopher Emmanuel Mounier. Now, a few spaces on the wall of this mental gallery are missing their pictures. My parents had a reference book to the Bible – it was hardcover, and, it seems, bound in green cloth. I’m haunted by a monochrome painting in it – last seen many years ago. The small picture showed Egypt’s pharaoh, seated, holding the out- stretched lifeless form of his firstborn son, at the time of the Plagues just before the Exodus. The king looks up towards a dark sky, his face stricken, and perhaps his eyes in their deep sockets are glittering with tears. The picture was eerie and I’m not sure I was comfortable looking at it. The volume had disappeared by the time I sorted my parents’ books after their deaths. A classmate brought to school one of those paperback collections that Pocket Books published in the 1960s from the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Syndicated newspaper feature. A drawing of a somber vault illustrated an item on the “floating coffins of Barbados.” A generation of gruesome movies has intervened between that time and the present, having driven out the more innocent stuff that used to be plenty creepy enough for us. A blog called I saw Lightning Fall occasionally challenges readers to write scary stories of exactly 100 words. I wrote a story based on a National Enquirer first page, probably seen at a McKay’s market in Coos Bay. Many years after the incident this hundred-word piece was the result:

A Trip from the Supermarket In 1967, at the grocery-store checkout, a boy named Brad saw a tabloid front-page faked photograph of a baby born old, white-haired, dreadfully wrinkled, sad-eyed. Brad flinched away. His mother paid for the groceries; he had already forgotten the picture. Brad grew, listened to the radio, played sports, dated girls, went to college for two years, worked in offices, married, fathered children, drank responsibly, earned promotions, made his parents proud. One lazy Sunday morning he glanced up and noticed a shrunken tuber on a kitchen counter – wrinkled. Something inside awoke and his skin shriveled, his breath shortened, and he collapsed. Another missing picture was an encounter with mythological feminine beauty. I might not be remembering it well. But it seems there was an issue of National Geographic with an advertise- ment for some high-end item, perhaps a luxury wristwatch, and the background was the face of Venus from Botticelli’s famous Birth, with her flowing golden hair. 11. Botticelli’s Venus is an embodiment of Mary McCarthy’s description of the post-medieval concept of the beautiful: something com- bining strangeness and allure. A few years ago, I looked through library volumes of National Geographic from what I supposed was the right period, but didn’t find the image I seem to remember. A picture of the Taj Mahal may have been the first image of a building that I gazed upon because it seemed beautiful to me. Of course it looks like something from a tale of fantasy or from a space opera – think of the castle in “The Cage.” The rest of the pictures in this exhibition will be taken from books that I remembered from my young days. As an adult, I acquired copies: a book inherited from my father; here and there a library discard, there a find in a used book store, there again a copy sourced from an online bookseller. 11.“In the Jungle,” from Raymond Ditmars’ Reptiles of the World I often browsed the pictures in this family book. Dad owned the 1940 reprint. Most of the plates are typical textbook-type images

showing distinctive features of lizards, crocodiles, turtles and tortoises, and snakes. But the final plate is a somber, poetic one, suggesting a lonely, painful death somewhere far from help. I liked to capture the harm- less garter snakes that lived 13. around blackberry patches. I’d throw my jacket over them, pick them up, and bring them home. Mom could tell I had brought snakes into the house by the smell of the musk they would exude when frightened. Then I’d let them go. In my mind, I called them “mountain slitherers.” 12.The Dwarf in Fairy Tales by the Brothers Grimm (Windermere Series), Painted by Hope Dunlap My family moved around in my first 16 years. In the early 1960s, we rented a house, for us an unusually nice one, 3831 Honeycut Road in Salt Lake City. It turned out that the former residents, the Claytons, had left some things behind, including a basement freezer loaded with ice cream. There was a finished attic, and a few children’s items awaited discovery by my sister and me, including small yellow plastic records, with songs about a sneezy rag man and brushing your teeth and 12. other things. There was a copy of The Tin Woodman of Oz and a fairy-tale collection. Most of the pictures in this Grimms’ book (Rand McNally, 1913/1928) are pretty soppy, but I was interested in Dunlap’s deep-forest scene showing a gnarled dwarf with his beard somehow caught in a partially-split portion of a tree trunk. But Snow-White and Rose-Red are too doll-like! 13-16.Some Images from Scandinavian Lore More to my taste, a few years later, were the crisp, dramatic, and stiff-figured compositions in an oversize book, Scandinavian Fairy Tales (Golden Press, 1962). The book was printed in Italy and the artist was Federico Santin. (One summer, during my undergraduate years, I visited an old friend in Coos Bay and went to 14. the library, looking up this volume and taking

a color snapshot of one of the illustrations.) 15. That dreadful flier looks like a vampire, not a troll – much less a three-headed troll such as the text spec- ifies! But, yeah – I liked that double-page spread, however inauthentic. Drenched in authenticity were the illustrations in one of my lifetime-favorite books, Norwegian Folk Tales of Asbjørnsen and Moe, translated by Pat Shaw Iversen (Viking, 1960). This book was a great find for me in the children’s section of the Coos Bay Public Library. That priceless volume called upon the vision of two artists, Theodor Kittelsen and Erik Werenskiold. The exhibition of my mental gallery could easily hang a couple of dozen pictures from this book, but I have selected two, a benevolent hag with a nose long enough to stir the embers with, and a menacing, but doomed, troll, both from “Soria Moria Cas- tle.” A third book feeding my youthful love of Northern fantasy was a retelling of the Nibelung-story by James Baldwin (Scribner, 1931) and illustrated by Peter Hurd, who had been a pupil of the great N. C. Wyeth. Look at the cover art for The Story of Siegfried, showing Siegfried forging the “‘glittering terror – the blade Balmung,’” as he himself names it. That evening moon with earthshine might be a good example of Coventry Patmore’s theory of the point of rest in art (from Principle in Art, 1889). As I wrote elsewhere, Beginning with examples derived from paintings, Patmore finds a punctum indifferans, a “point, generally quite insignificant in matter, on which, indeed, the eye does not necessarily fix itself, but to which it involuntarily returns for repose.” This object is, in itself, “the least interesting point” in the whole canvas, but “all that is interesting” in the picture “is more or less unconsciously referred to it.” In a landscape it might be the “sawn-off end of a . branch of a tree.” In Raphael’s “Dresden” Madonna, it is 16 the Infant’s heel. The point of rest doesn’t create harmony where it does not exist, but where it does exist, “it will be strangely brought out and accentuated by this in itself often trifling, and sometimes,

perhaps, even accidental accessory.” 17. Patmore proposes this test: “Cover [these points] from sight and, to a moderately sensitive and cultivated eye, the whole life of the picture will be found to have been lowered.” I knew that celestial stars don’t have five points, but I liked those: they were magical. 17.The Shen Before the time when I got to know those Scandinavian books, I opened Arthur Bowie Chrisman’s Shen of the Sea (Dutton, 1925), illustrated by Else Hasselriis. I don’t think much of this book mattered to me, but the weird silhouette of the Shen, “demons of the sea,” impressed me. I never tried to buy a copy. The pretty world of Perrault, with Frenchified fairy godmothers or the like, was even less to my taste. I liked fantasy but not all fantasy. 18.John Polgreen Borrows from Chesley Bonestell Below is an image from another of the great books of my boyhood, Roy Gallant’s Exploring the Planets (Garden City Books, 1958). If the Rand-McNally space map made you want to go to the other planets of our solar system, John Polgreen’s pictures were the images that took you there. I espe- 18. cially loved the painting of Saturn as seen from Titan. It is, of course, almost certainly indebted to one of the renderings of Saturn as seen from Titan that were painted by Chesley Bonestell (1888-1986). One of them appeared in Life for 29 May 1944, but I love this one most: So Polgreen’s imitating Bonestell. But then, every art museum should hang a few fakes of the Masters, shouldn’t it? Both pictures combine beauty with a terrible coldness. I wish I knew when I first saw the Bonestell. But I’ll always be fond of the version by Polgreen (1910-1970, apparently). 19-20.The Dinosaurs of Rudolph Zallinger What Chesley Bonestell was to science fiction-astronomical paintings, Rudy Zallinger (1919-1995) was to the prehistoric Earth. 36

Their paintings are enthrallingly imagina- tive, and also seem realistic, presenting scenes as if we were there. Notice that both artists provide beguiling backgrounds: you can easily imagine yourself walking towards those folded upthrusts of stark stone. 19. During 1943-1947, Zallinger painted the Age of Reptiles mural in the Great Hall of the Peabody Museum of Yale University. He used a fresco secco technique deriving from the Italian Renaissance. Because of the location of the visitors’ entrance, Zallinger designed the 110 foot-long mural to be “read” from right to left; i.e., the most ancient scene is at the right end. That first zone depicts the Late Devonian Period. The 1,760-square- foot painting ends with the Cretaceous Period. The creatures have ranged from Psaronius tree ferns and a ray-finned fish, Cheirolepis, to a beautiful magnolia and two familiar dinosaurs loved by kids, the Triceratops and Tyrannosaur – and so has ranged over 300 million years. Here is part of the mural: The dinosaurs’ movement appears to be stately, even ponderous, suggesting their enormous weight as well as vast size. Plant forms that are alien to us today evoke distant epochs, like descriptive passages in Lovecraft’s “Shadow Out of Time.” 20. Formidable cliffs rise in the distance – young landforms not worn into smooth and rolling shapes by millions of years’ weathering. Volcanoes and lava flows seemed more exotic to me when I was a boy; while still young, though, I would learn about a new island, Surtsey, forming off the coast of Iceland. Years later, a high school teacher by then, I stepped out from my apartment to find a film of ash from Mt. St. Helens had settled on everything (May 1980).

I knew Zallinger’s dinosaurs through Prehistoric 21. Animals: Dinosaurs and Other Reptiles and Mammals (credited to the Editorial Staff of Life and Lincoln Barnett, the text being adapted by Jane Werner Watson; Simon and Schuster’s Gold- en Library of Knowledge, circa 1958). My copy disappeared, perhaps worn out from much use. 21.The Last Painting: Alex Schomburg’s End- paper for the Winston SF Juveniles There it is, the single greatest image for us, today, of yesterday’s tomorrows. Surely no one picture better captures what it was we wanted when we

wanted science fiction, us kids of the mid-1960s, than this design by Schomburg (1905-1998). Donald Wollheim’s The Secret of the Ninth Planet (1959), another 21A. of the very greatest books of my youngster days, was one of the last of the nearly 40 Winston releases. While exploring Incan ruins in the Andes, the young hero learns that unknown beings have installed a sun-tap station on our planet, stealing solar energy and eerily causing sunlight to dim and tem- peratures to fall all over the world. He sets out with his father and fellow spaceship crewmembers to reach the other sun-tap stations – on Mercury, Venus, Mars, Callisto, etc. – and shut them down, working their way towards Pluto, where they will discover the identity of the robbers and defeat them with the help of Neptunians. 22.The Face That Launched the Marvelmania Trip My boyhood friend Kurt Erichsen had a copy of Thor #132, which went on sale in early summer 1966. The final page of the main feature was the revelation of Ego, the Living Planet. “I am Ego!” is to say “I am I,” but it didn’t occur to me at the time that the word bal- loon was nearly a quotation from the Biblical book of Exodus, Chapter 3. But the murkily-printed collage was awesome enough to fascinate me. Whenever it was that I saw this comic, I began to collect Marvel’s productions with Thor #140. The Norse-inflected sci-fi grandiosity of that magazine was greatly to my taste. I soon was buying all of the Marvel superhero comics, and writing and drawing my own 22. comics. I began to read Thor about the same time I was getting into Tolkien. 23.The Last Drawing: Tolkien’s Misty Mountains I discovered The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in the Bal- lantine paperbacks when I was 11. They were greater literary loves than any science fiction had ever been, and still are. In the public library, I found out that the hardcover edition of The Hobbit included Tolkien’s own illustrations, and the drawing of the Misty Moun- tains was a favorite. It’s very free with perspective, so that a wonderful sense of mysterious distance comes through. What a romantic pull one feels towards far-off, long-ago lands. No creature of fantasy appears – no dragon, no dwarves -- nor are they needed for the sense of wonder to come through. That was a picture that helped me to learn to love the sight of Oregon’s trees and mountains. Because my paperback of The Hobbit provided only the maps, not the drawings, I photocopied this and other drawings from a library

hardcover copy, so that I could look at them whenever I wanted to. Julia Shaw’s The Memory Illusion isn’t the last word about how and what the mind recollects, but autobiographers who read it may be humbled about their ability to know and to tell their personal history as it really was. In regard to our sense of who we are, “the roots of the seen remain unseen,” as the Scottish fantasist and preacher George MacDonald said. Still, it seems likely that what Wordsworth called certain “spots of time” – youthful experiences of unusual meaning for oneself – help to shape our imaginations and passions. The pictures I’ve dis- cussed here seem to have stayed with me ever since I was ten to thirteen years old. Years ago I found a passage in Owen Barfield’s Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning that sheds light on this memory-gallery of pictures. Barfield is quoting – from a source he doesn’t identify – a passage from George Santayana. “Men are habitually insensible to beauty. Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition. … “Taste is formed in those moments when aesthetic emotion is massive and distinct; preferences then grow conscious, judgments then put into words will reverberate 23. through calmer hours; they will constitute prejudices, habits of apperception, secret standards for all other beauties. A period of life in which such intuitions have been frequent may amass tastes and ideals sufficient for the rest of our days. Youth in these matters governs maturity, and while men may develop their early impressions more systematically and find confirmations of them in various quarters, they will seldom look at the world afresh or use new categories in deciphering it. Half our standards come from our first [teachers], and the other half from our first loves.” That sounds about right. Credits Most images here are taken from Internet sources, including: Bos- ton.com, crediting the Peabody Museum of Natural History (Zallinger mural portion); Harvard Magazine (sewing machine); Oregon Historical Society Research Library (brochure for the Pre- historic Gardens); Prehistoric Gardens website (postcard), etc. Ted White reprinted a version of Meyers’ “Tolkien and Temperaments” in the August 1969 issue of Fantastic. The Mounier quotation is from publisher Rex Collings’s “‘Watership Down’: The Penalties of Success,” in the [London] Times Literary Supplement, 6 December 1974.

A column formerly known as 0982, located at the intersection of 38° by 122° and a few in the 95442.

Egyptian Easter But Not the Quail The special tool for cutting the tops off eggs, an A California valley quail bonked itself dead egg topper, was acquired long before our spring against our living room window. I found it, confinement. It looks like a mojito muddling skinned it, gutted it and fried it up so everyone bar tool on shiny stainless steel steroids. Works could taste. Then left the skin stretched over a great. I was describing to a friend our Easter paper towel wrapped bottle in the back hall way. preparations including seed broadcasting, yard This would have been fine if I had also skinned art and glitter infused pink polka dots. the head and stretched it over something, but no, I just cut it off at the neck and I don’t know... “You trepanned the eggs,” she exploded. My finish and polish to projects is lacking at the Yes, and then washed and dried the empty moment. A few flies have found the feathers, but shells, filled them with mixed vegetable and not too many. I am going to have to pull the flower seeds with added compostable confetti brains out but, kind of like my writing, I really hand cut from high fiber handmade paper. The do prefer to let nature take its course. (Or should cap was reconnected with a careful application I say coarse? Yes.) Why didn't I think of salt tan- of artisanal papier-mâché. Then dried, again. ning the head while I was elbow deep in the On Easter Sunday they were placed in the gar- gore? It is a male California quail and I didn't den to be discovered and smashed. want to lose that topknot.

I Have Big Hands and That Is No Lie route. It has been a while since I operated a clutch driven machine, and not only due to our I've been procrastinating when not breaking the sequestration. (Wherein I haven’t driven a car mower or being bossed around by the resident since I don’t know when, say March 19, when we three year old. Did you know my hands are a spi- turned around and came home after we bought der that raises its front legs and says I’m warning gas (before the price dropped)). I quit on autos you, back off but also a sea anemone that stays in with clutches a decade ago as my knee was get- one place and will grab you if you get too close to ting testy and I had to choose between walking in my waving sticky tentacles? Both hands also my dotage or better mileage with a clutch car make an octopus that is very smart, arranges gar- right now. Yup, I took the route with the future dens with toys and disguises itself and will jump me pottering around the back forty on my day glo out if you get too close. Single handed I become orange Swedish cut and mulch machine. Except squeaky mousies (okay, mice because there is that the tootling around now includes a quick never just one) that love to run over tummies action down shift to get the thing to back up. looking for tasty baby belly buttons when invited. Never fun on the down slope. It felt like the Also rolly pollys (pill bugs or sow bugs), jelly fish bumper took all the impact with that hidden (tasty and delicious, other times poisonous and stump. The lid popped up, but there was no visi- will get you) and the current favorite, the duck. ble damage. There was the bad noise again when How does one make a duck? Hold one hand just I tried to engage the blades and go back to cut- the way you would to make the swan shadow on ting. So I rolled to the barn for a closer inspec- the wall. The child holds out hands full of imagi- tion. Well, there was a ding down under the en- nary mud for duck-me to eat. You might like be- gine on the deck where the dent in the metal coming the rolly polly, which scurries along on caught one of the blades so it couldn’t move. That extended fingers then curls into a ball when it is the blade cut into the steel and stayed there. gets scared, because someone might grab it! Got Which bent the blade, yoiked the spindle, you! Get ready. Lately there is a roaring lion sheared off the mounting bolts and flanges, blew around that causes the duck head to explode into the bushings and uh something else (roached? a giggle of jazz hands. torqued?) the pulley. No worries; we had purchased extra blades and a spare spindle. I Broke It There will not be a third. So I thought. I swore I Now, if I can just keep from wrecking the riding would be careful, I would be cautious; I would lawn mower (again). . . I might get back to carv- wade through the waist high forbs and grasses ing the grass. Last year the field sculpture was before each approach on my scything orange my best seat of the pants approximation of a monster. Hey, I promised myself I would never maze, labyrinth or St Catherine’s thing. again treat the mower as a moveable stump grinder (true confession, it had sort of worked The first time the awful noise wasn't my fault, that way on the ground level prune tree remnant just metal fatigue. The end of one of the blades that I couldn’t see until motoring over it made gave way and peeled back on itself. Course that the funny shredding noise.) I even dug out rocks. could have been related to knocking into low ly- My trusty mechanic had wisely raised the blade ing rocks and swiping at hidden gopher and big- deck too. There was good growth in the greenery ger than expected mole mounds. Put on new by this time, given the weeks between prangs, blades, spindle, pulley and all good. parts delivery and time available to able mechan- The second was a much louder bit of misjudg- ic (see *deathtrap* car, as below). We love Dave ment exacerbated by gravity. I swear that stump our big brown delivery truck essential worker. wasn't there in the thistles when I checked the We gave him the derelict “cocktails” sign to re-

turn to Burning Man; he offered to buy the In Stitches, Reflections on Clothing Con- *deathtrap* cool 90’s Honda CRX. struction 70A Yes so sharp blades, cleared path, slicing and My trusty mechanic and I car pooled to classes mulching on. Our fields are a bit bumpy and at the local community college this spring (until lumpy, as you might have guessed, even more so mid-semester when we didn’t.) I thought it after Cal Fire cut fences and ran big tread ma- would be fun to hone my sewing skills. Maybe chines around while stopping the fire of ’17. They make me more efficient and fast. The machine were the kind of bladed dozers that can push shop courses meant fabrication of a number of over big full grown trees and such, and throw excellent items I hadn’t known I needed. Fabric berms of topsoil when they turn. A bit crunchy weights. They can be bought or made with bags on the driveway as well, but we have a house. of beans. Oh no, not around here. Now all the Growling up a slight slope (no more than ten glorious small dense objects that fill me with joy degrees, I am following the manufacturers man- and litter my desk are dusted off and gleaming. ual now) I come up to level and there it is, the They are ready to sit on a wide swath of cotton to weird new noise. Only this time I stop the revo- give it gravity and hold it still. Hunks of mineral lutions, just pop it right out of gear, and the deck and chunks of fossils! Grandmother’s leaded wobbles earthwards. Huh, this is unfamiliar glass cats, ugly or charming ceramics the chil- new, maybe the belt snapped! There are little dren made. And the perfect stack of brushed alu- side wheels which are usually non weight bear- minum machine learning test blocks – true cir- ing, like training wheels on a bike. I dismount cles engraved on squares rotated forty five de- and walk around to inspect and see that there is grees inside of squares and accurate to two thou- just one rod that suspends the deck, so it is now sandths of an inch. The pattern cutting layout sitting very close to the dirt and is disconnected becomes a fantasy landscape ready to make from the harness on the engine frame. I guess a twirling pink polka-dot princess style… missing cotter pin is technically a fail, but some- Like (many) (most) (every) (all) women of a cer- how the wibbly horizontal shimmy didn’t feel tain age I hate ironing. This class gave me no like I broke anything. This smack down to the out. If I want to make French seams I must ground was not nearly noisy enough. press. Also, I am not patient; I can now see how When our stout mechanic replaced the fiddly persistence in picky pinning pays off. I must get linkage bits he also took care of the leaky tire. over the fuzzy hot shredded mess of culled fabric And found a one inch long, extremely thin sharp and trimmed threads that stick to everything. pointed plum thorn. That came free with a glori- The worms will eat deconstructed cotton, I don’t ous whoop and choice use of barnyard appropri- know about the polyester thread (yet.) Gathers ate language. The same language exercised dur- (yuck) make flounces (ick) required for the sev- ing the dangerous stump removals. Drive in a eral many items created during this class. How wedge, split the wood, reset the wedge repeat many you wonder? Two spools of pink thread until there are shards and voila no digging! Did worth. I got over making gathers, see my list. you know that Osage orange wood is very dura- Use sharp tools, the right tools, specialty ble and hard? It was used as gate posts back in tools. Slashers and snippers. Seam the day. It is not easy to split when it is fully rippers. For fabric only. cured. Impossible when set in concrete there under the red hot poker plants and forty years of All the weird feet in the sewing box. leaf mulch. Hold threads to the back for button holes (or get a snarl that will break

the sewing needle.)

Iron. Press. Also wash. Meld, open, align, under stitch, seam. Layout, meticulously match fabric grain. All the pattern transfer, every damn stupid little dot. Non-toxic does not mean washable marker. Pin, baste, ease = magic. But first comes pin. Pin. Sharp, fresh, sturdy, clean, long, glass topped pins. Pin from the outside in. Pin facing forward for easy out. Pin inside the lines. Also check machine needles. Interfacing – it melts, even when it isn’t supposed to. Use it anyway. Grade, trim, clip, notch = Construction! Structure! Flexibility! The word is tink for knitting, meaning rip out and redo. I have always loathed the phrase “practice makes perfect”. Now that I have experienced good instruction on how to rip out a seam to undo an errant tuck and then seen the perfection of the redo that attains ease with smooth even drape, I do love the do over. Really just love being able to make what I want better, don’t think I don’t still hate that phrase. Oh, and everyone in this multi-generation household has observed that glitter embedded pink polka dot damask makes super sparkly dryer lint. Possibly enough to stuff that quail.

Funny thing, I woke up a few weeks back ducive to fannishness (thanks to Linda, and found myself in Minneapolis. I'm a little Ginjer, and Suzle.) Then I went off to col- worried because it's only October and I've lege and embarked on many years of adven- already seen a couple good ’ol boys with big tures with my nonfan college friends. After ’ol rusty snowplow blades on front of their living on farms and communes, bicycling, 4x4s. What are they worried about? And it's hiking and hitchhiking around the North the first time I ever really noticed the exist- American continent, I slowly learned that ence of the Central Time Zone. Now I grasp my college friends had different plans and in wholeness that network television here different visions from mine. I dreamed of really does run in a real-time link with the moving to a fannish city, which in the ’70’s East Coast, somewhat in the way, back in consisted of New York, L.A., and Minneap- my fannish past, I came to comprehend that olis. Oh, there was Seattle. And San Francis- when it's midnight in Grove City (where I co, Boston, Baltimore, maybe even Philadel- went to college) it's nine in L.A. This excited phia. I might have been happy in one of Mike Wood so much he wrote a song about these, but then I fell in with a bad crowd it for me. and moved to Northern Virginia. I stayed a week or two at Ted White's house in Falls When I was active in APA45 in the early Church, then shared a house in Arlington 1970’s, half the membership seemed to live with Dan and Lynn Steffan for a year. Next I in Minneapolis (or in Madison, which regis- had an apartment in Riverdale, Maryland, tered in my born-in-Western-Pennsylvania hanging around with Avedon Carol for eight mind as Somewhere Near Minneapolis.) I months, before moving back to Arlington to knew immediately upon discovering fandom room with Steve Stiles. Until the ’80s ar- in the pages of fannish fanzines like John D. rived. Berry's Foolscap, particularly Ted John- stone's “LASFS History: 1956-61” in issue 6, Ronald Reagan lied, raving and drooling, that I wanted to live around other fans. It risking the lives of our Iranian Embassy was 1968 and I was in the 10th grade and I hostages to get into the White House. Soon lived in Pittsburgh, which was briefly con- 44 after that I lost my job as a photographer Geri for me to move in with her...here...in with the D.C. Regional Planning Authority. I Minneapolis, Minnesota. moved to New York City at the end of 1981, Leaving New York for Minneapolis was the staying for a while with Bridget Dziedzic in closest thing to an adult, planned move I've her gigantic urban homesteader apartment ever made. I moved from Pennsylvania to at the south fringes of Harlem before finding Virginia, and then on to New York, in a ’72 my own studio apartment in Long Island Volkswagen—except for my stereo speakers City, Queens. For eight years I hung on to and a few heavy odds and ends (like boxes that place, the longest I’d lived anywhere of books and fanzines), which friends since leaving home. I continued my rock ’n moved for me later in their vans. Two hun- roll adventure, explored, photographed, took dred and some odd miles, five hours each notes, developed social and career survival leg, more or less. Nothing like the 1,200 instincts. I worked as a photo retouching miles I faced to get to Minnesota. Eight studio messenger, production typist, promo- years in one place, a tiny studio apartment, tion assistant, ad traffic manager, slush pile left me with a few things I wanted to keep reader, film truck driver and 3rd electrician with me. My place resembled a trapper's for a gaffer, data entry supervisor for the cabin, stacked floor to ceiling wall to wall Harris Poll, and East Coast stringer for Lo- with books, records, tools, electronics, cus, finally learning a typesetting system, drums, ’70 Chevelle parts, typewriters, Compugraphic, in a small A/V studio. Then plants, two huge old enlargers in a kitchen things got hairy. I began to move up through darkroom, and, of course, mountains of New York's rough and tumble type house fanzines (including the mysteriously disap- jungle, learning all I could, struggling for the peared Larry Carmody’s collection.) Oh Big Money. Through all of this I was also yeah, and Huey and Louie, 32 pounds of playing drums in a series of loud fast bands: white cats. The Killer Bunnies, Intensive Care, War Pigs. I'd sold my last drum kit in 1974 to fund my My last few weeks in New York passed by in bicycle trip across Canada, but it all came a hazy dream state of not enough time, not back, once I was in New York and hanging enough boxes, full blown satori. I shot roll out in clubs like CBGB’s till 5:00 A.M., how after roll of film, trying to catch up on important playing music still was to me. things I'd seen and wanted to take with me, stayed out late partying, thinking how I'd But I grew tired of the tension, weary of the probably never drive around the bombed- madness in the streets. Drinking with out East Village late at night with such fa- friends, my main topic turned to Getting miliarity ever again. I quit working full- Out. A typesetter can work anywhere. Then time in May, worked part time here and one day Gary Farber called and asked if I there, including several interesting days at could drive him to LaGuardia Airport to pick High Times Magazine. I also made sure I someone up. He was a bit vague and evasive got up into the mountains several times, about who we were picking up, but I finally camping in the Delaware Water Gap Na- dragged the name out of him...Geri Sullivan. tional Recreation Area. Well. This lead to that, and come the next spring I found myself making plans with And I finally found my way to the summit 45 of Sunrise Mountain. bums trying to wash my windshield and interesting subway graffiti, onto the Indiana One Sunday morning in the midst of July, toll road, where we finally checked into a Pa- Chris Couch and I went down to Ryder to tel Palace for the night. The boys found lots pick up my 24-foot diesel. It was cloudy and of interesting smells, and I learned of a mys- early and I wasn’t done packing. Fans, edi- terious land called Michiana. Thank ghu the tors, artists, musicians and other people ar- air conditioner worked. rived, drank all the beer, shoved everything down the stairwell into the truck. Bridget I'd been letting the boys out of their box dur- took maniacal charge of the packing, whoop- ing the drive. Louie sat up on the seat beside ing with glee as the final box and board me chirping questions and watching out the shelves came down, giving her a pile of stur- windows, purring in my lap. Huey hid be- dy Chinatown crates to fill. By four o'clock in hind the seat. Louie loved meeting the toll the afternoon the truck was full and I was collectors and insisted I carry him around to faced with two terrified cats and a handful of see the other diesels at the truck stops. Huey wonderful people in the empty shell of what sulked. I'd never driven this far west before. had for so long been a safe, book-lined ha- In 1974, coming back from the California end ven, and I had to leave. of my trans-Canadian bicycling trip, my college friend Martin and I drove a $50 Dodge I wanted a big truck, something with heavy panel truck across the continent on I-70, but springs and big tires, because, though I don’t this flight to Minnesota was a different ad- have much furniture, I really do have lots of venture, a different era, with powerful posi- books and fanzines. This truck had 64 origi- tive emotions and a solid sense of purpose. nal miles on it—I was its first user! As the boys and I wheeled out of Queens and onto I dwelt on the enormous amount of responsi- the Triboro Bridge, I tuned in a last time to bility I was adding to my life. Building a rela- my favorite rock station on the truck radio, tionship with Geri, tearing the boys away and swallowed a lot of lumps in my throat. from their adopted mother, my ex-girlfriend Huey and Louie were in their oversized air- Valerie, to whom they half belong. They lived line container on the seat beside me making with her from time to time, but she had trou- going-to-the-vet sounds and all I wanted to ble caring for them in her small place. They do was get through New Jersey to Pennsylva- do run around a bit. The last time I took nia and find a motel. them back to my place, Val and I agreed that the first one of us to get a big house to live in Nine o’clock that night, out I-80 somewhere should keep them for good. Little did I know in the Pocono Mountains, I found a little mo- that I would be moving to Toad Hall a year tel, checked in, called my parents, called later. These guys aren’t the sort of cats you Geri. Huey wandered around the room cry- can just give away when you move. ing and sniffing the rug, Louie stretched out on the other bed and went to sleep. After a Chicago was pure driving hell, and I foolishly couple beers, so did I. decided to punch my way around it at 1:00 on a weekday afternoon. It took two hours to Monday the sun came out and we drove go 12 miles and there was nowhere to pull off across Pennsylvania and Ohio, heartened by to pee. And it was raining, hard. Later that the blue skies and remarkable absence of

46 afternoon I rolled along I-94 in Wisconsin, seeing these...Dells...for the first time. When driving the rural stretches of Wisconsin my mind would relax, stop worrying, about traffic and other things. A weary part of me was still doggedly counting off the miles. I like driving, I love driving big trucks, sitting high up. This diesel had such a great sound, mrrrm- rrrmrrrmrrrmrrrmrrrm, and there was this incredible after-the-rain cloud structure playing with the setting sun way up there in this enormous sky. I pondered what this city, Min- neapolis, was doing so far out on the prairie, hundreds and hundreds of miles from anything else (except St. Paul) and how there could possibly be civilized life so far from...a coast. Never mind for now about the weather in the coming winter. Would there be real rock ’n roll? I'm here to find out. from Geri Sullivan's Idea #3 October, 1989

Jeff at Sleepy Hollow Sound, NYC

Familiar Landscapes, Unfamiliar Futures:

The Southern Reach and the New Normal

PETER YOUNG

I’ve never been big on trilogies. Too many just feel like needless book-bloat, but I still try (and sometimes fail) to read at least one trilogy a year because they’re certainly not all without merit. However, the usual problem applies when trying to review a whole series of books: the avoidance of spoilers is pretty much impossible. Anoth- er, more general problem also applies – although not necessarily to a trilogy as open-ended as the Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer – in that the conclu- sions that can be reached are usually already provided by an author trying to tell the whole story in as many words as his publisher will allow, and there is little left for a reviewer to speculate upon. Think of Lord of the Rings: it has a beginning, a middle and an end, and the story is pretty much adequately explained in ways that leave little room for doubt, and only the more astute critics will find sufficient room for teasing out interpretations. However, in the case of the Southern Reach trilogy, VanderMeer’s intention is never so straightforward. Yes we have a clearly-defined landscape – even with clearly-defined boundaries – but no, its exploration is not presented in any

straightforward fashion, with the first vol- current vogue for dismantling the institu- ume stating the central mystery, the sections that were designed to fight such a ond volume documenting the inadequate problem. If VanderMeer ever wanted to human approach to it, and the third vol- find a real-world example of our inadequate ume tying up some loose ends yet leaving method of problem-solving that doesn’t in- others less clearly summarized. I actually volve ‘nuking it’ (to use the vernacular), he like this trilogy’s structure and have often need only have waited a few years. It is no- reflected on how unusually organic it ap- ticeable throughout his trilogy that the pears to be: it seems to mirror the general standard ‘Hollywood’ military response to human approach to problem-solving and, an alien infestation is thankfully resisted, with a problem as large as Area X, the fail- and thankfully again, our own problem of ure of the human method to resolve any- Covid-19 could never be solved in such a thing in the face of the unknowable. Char- heavy-handed manner anyway. The correct acters just carry on doing what they be- response appears to be: withdraw as far as lieve they can do based on past form and possible, and accept that the New Normal method, even when the results are more would appear to be to adapt and live along- than likely going to be inadequate when side it – as with the scenario presented in faced with such an enormous unknown. the Southern Reach trilogy – until, hopeful- But what else can they do? ly, it runs itself out or withdraws completely into the background. Writing this essay in the time of a global pandemic also means that parallels can be *** discerned, because at present we also I first saw the UK first edition of Annihila- seem unable to globally coordinate an ad- tion in a Reading bookstore. I loved the equate response to our own worldwide cover, and I’m a sucker when good cover viral problem. Like Area X, nothing we designers do their job and sell the book. I have yet done has completely halted the also did a rare thing by starting the novel advance of an infectious agent that is baf- the same day, and I had only read one other flingly inconsistent in its outcomes, and VanderMeer title before this one so I felt a this has not been made any easier with the need to do some catching up at the same

time. It was also the cover blurb that sold it to me, probably because the premise reminded me of a long-standing favorite, the Strugatsky Brothers’ Roadside Picnic, and I wanted to see how it compared. The premise is that of a zone marked out by some kind of alien invasion, or if not alien, then some kind of weird ‘otherness’. I’ve not read too many of these kinds of novels (another one I will probably avoid is Stephen King’s The Dome – that book-bloat accusation again), and VanderMeer has said somewhere online that he’d not read the Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic before starting the Southern Reach trilogy. I’m naturally skeptical when authors make statements such as this, as when Mary Doria Russell said she had never read that other famous ‘Jesuits in space’ novel, A Case of Con- science by James Blish, before writing The Sparrow. I’m probably being too cynical, because it’s surely possible to write one’s book without knowledge of all its thematic prede- Jaime Merritt cessors. As we open Annihilation and begin the exploration of ‘Area X’ that VanderMeer takes us on, a stretch of American coastline has already been colonized for the best part of thirty years by… what exactly? No one is sure. This has resulted in the creation of the Southern Reach, a shady organization with largely concealed origins that attempts to study Area X and if possible contain it. They have had almost no success beyond questions being answered with more questions, and minds and sometimes bodies tragically altered beyond mental or biological norms before, occasionally, being returned to the ‘Normal’ world. Every interaction between Area X and humans seems to end badly one way or another, and other animal life seems to fare little better. The narrator of Annihilation is the Biologist, one of the nameless, all-female team that ventures into Area X on the twelfth expedition. There is a line of text near the beginning of Annihilation – almost a throwaway line – which for me opens the case on everything The Southern Reach Trilogy al- ludes to: “If you looked out through these areas, toward the ocean, all you saw was the black water, the gray of the cypress trunks, and the constant, motionless rain of moss flowing down. All you heard was the low moaning. The effect of this cannot be

50 understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.” That statement by the Biologist – “Desolation tries to colonize you” – is a latent observation of something that is already well underway with no actual fight-back against the advance of Area X taking place or even, seemingly, possible. The zone itself behaves as a kind of void, although one in which life can continue to exist. In human terms, one could characterize it as a steadily-expanding mental zone of despair that presents insurmountable challenges when trying to contain and overcome it: it simply can’t be done. Whatever battles may be won are revealed to be so small as to be insignificant. In Annihilation the imagery for me that worked best were the two features of the landscape known as The Tower and The Lighthouse. The Tower especially held mystery, it not being an actual tower but an inversion of such, a vertical hole going deep into the earth with an improvised, chiseled-stone spiral staircase that leads to deeper mysteries such as the long, cryptic message being somehow written by a plant species, downwards from the entrance on the Tower’s inner wall, by a creature named by the Biologist as the Crawler, that seemingly lives in its depths: “Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives…” Decoding the message becomes something for which little headway is made until the trilogy’s third volume Acceptance, in which the other prominent feature of the landscape, the Lighthouse, is also examined more closely and reveals its connection to the Tower – what else could it possibly be that pro- vides the light source at the bottom of the Tower? Despite Annihilation purportedly being a science fiction novel, VanderMeer doesn’t go further and try to explain this connection with any scientific handwaving. He prefers to just let the two – Lighthouse and Tower – meet in this inexplicable way without actually touching, leaving the connection to be made inside the reader’s own mind. And this is what Vander-

Meer generally does throughout the novel: tease the reader with possibilities hopefully answered in the following two volumes of the trilogy. The Southern Reach’s twelfth expedition that is featured in Annihilation becomes an almost total disaster, with the Biolo- gist’s story later involving an injury that seemingly saves her from a fast transformation into a being of light, and also an encounter with the expedition’s injured Psychologist who repeatedly shouts at the Biologist the word “Annihilation!”, something that had been previously implanted by hypnotic suggestion to trigger suicide. The biologist believed she became im- mune to this suggestion after inhaling the plant spores that created the writing deep in the Tower. With the rest of her expedition dead, she will continue to search for any presence of her missing husband who was on the eighth expedition, and whose old journal was also discovered among many others piled high at the Lighthouse. The Area X strangeness that invades the lives of many of the characters is unset- tling, especially when they return (or are mysteriously returned) to the Southern Reach, where it is left to the senior staff there to understand, if they can, what has happened to them. Something is certainly awry with their altered minds and behaviors, with the expedition’s scientists no longer able to form easy or even meaningful communication and who are often left catatonic in de- meanor, as is explored further in Authority with the return of the Biologist to the Southern Reach… except that she is no longer the Biologist, she is a clone with the self-given name Ghost Bird. *** Where Annihilation does the job of adequately setting the scene for the whole trilogy, VanderMeer uses the remaining two volumes to focus in more detail on the entities that exist on each side of the barrier that separates them. The trilogy’s sec-

52 ond volume Authority is largely set in the Southern Reach, and at first sight would appear to be an “office politics” novel as the main character John Rodriguez, who prefers to be known as ‘Control’, establishes his place in the organization he has inherited, while assessing the assorted characters he is surrounded by. They appear to all be misfits in one way or another, shoe-horned into this odd organization while serving peculiar functions that rarely cohere into an effective whole. And again there are mysteries, mostly of a botanical nature, with samples of plant life seemingly not following natural laws, and a wall appearing in the building that should not be there and yet also appears to be alive. What on Earth – or in Area X – is going on? Despite its mostly urbane setting on the ‘human’ side of the Area X barrier I found Authority to be the most directly engaging of the three books, but only once you’ve suspended any expectation of the plot actually moving forward. As Ro- driguez and his assistant director Grace constantly tangle and conflict over the internal running of the Southern Reach, Control also reports to an unknown, manipulative handler known only as ‘The Voice’, and also has to deal with his mother, connected to the overseeing office known as Central and who knows secrets that suggest her actual function in relation to the Southern Reach is far more directly conse- quential and deeper than Rodriguez ever knew: his mother has always been a woman with a secret second life outside the home… and is she in fact ‘The Voice’ itself? VanderMeer ex- celled in writing these sequences because they present a con- spiracy of genuine and believably lifelike tension that affects the twisted development of a family. Other characters in the Southern Reach are also fleshed out more than in Annihila- tion, and we see lives outside their day job that depict how little the people who work there actually know each other. That’s still not to say the characters are much more than ci- phers, although we are given insight into Control’s self- paralysis that frustrates him from achieving much with his role, despite making some unexpected connections and dis- coveries about his Southern Reach colleagues. The novel clos- es with the escape of Ghost Bird, who Control pursues only to discover she has created a new portal into Area X in the form of a pool of water. Ghost Bird jumps in, as does Control, re- linquishing all control to forces bigger than himself.

*** At the outset of the third volume Acceptance, the Southern Reach has collapsed into chaos and confusion with nothing resolved or much advancement being made of any under- standing about Area X. The only thing agreed upon is that Area X blindly experiments with the biology of natural life resulting in both successes and failures, something that is actually self-evident. The successes appear to be those that re- tain much of their human form; the failures, well… Some of these experiments are also not limited to just biology: human minds appear to be rehabilitated in other bodies, both corporeal and non-corporeal, either transformed beyond under- standing or merely cloned. This is because there appears to be no way the human mind can exchange meaningful information with Area X and find any mutual ground. This is illustrated by an exchange between Saul the Lighthouse Keeper and the nine year-old girl Gloria near the beginning of Acceptance, who later (or earlier, in Annihilation) was to become the psychologist of the twelfth expedition: Saul: “That fish down there sure is frightened of you.” Gloria: “Huh? It just doesn't know me. If it knew me, that fish would shake my hand.” Saul: “I don't think there's anything you could say to con- vince it of that. And there are all kinds of ways you could hurt it without meaning to.” In this exchange, humanity is of course ‘reduced’ to being the frightened fish, and Area X is the vastly superior mind that is toying with it. And here we go back to the quote further above from Annihilation, which suggests the nature of Area X as a void, a desolation, that is colonizing or somehow terraform- ing the Earth while at the same time unknowingly ‘hurting the fish’. We are not given a definitive explanation as to how Area X arrived on Earth, or even a reason, but we can infer from events how it may have come about. Possibly it was planted by Henry and Suzanne, two operatives of the ‘Seance & Sci- ence Brigade’ who interfere with Saul the Lighthouse Keeper by conducting unknown experiments on his lighthouse lens. In the grounds of his lighthouse Saul discovers a small plant 54 made of light that stabs his finger, and he soon has night- mares of being in his lighthouse that has somehow transformed into its inversion, the Tower. When he awakes he re- cites the sermon that later is to appear inside the staircase of the Tower, and he becomes increasingly obsessed with it. When Saul is inside the lighthouse at night he sees a light coming from a trapdoor beside the lens, and descends to somehow become one with the light. When he awakens, Hen- ry and Suzanne are now dead but a clone of Henry has appeared, and the two fight only to both fall off the side of the Lighthouse. Saul survives and flees with visions of Area X filling his head. Eventually he stops running, accepting defeat, and Area X is born. It’s a small failing of Acceptance that its back-and-forth- across-time structure is not made clearer, as it can provide some confusing moments for the reader when trying to place events into the necessary chronological sequence. But the climactic sequence, while closing off the series as a whole, is also am- bivalent as to the final outcome. It involves another fatal encounter with the Crawler in the Tower… Has Area X been destroyed? Possibly. Or has it enlarged further to engulf the Southern Reach? Again, possibly. Choose your own ending. I prefer the latter because it describes, like Saul’s final actions, an acceptance of defeat, a resignation that says one knows this is far bigger than anyone can deal with, and all that remains is to be assimilated and accept one’s place in… the New Normal. *** We’ve probably all had those occasions, when wandering in a forest, when we know we are inside something vastly larger and more unknowable than oneself. I think this is what VanderMeer is trying – and in my case succeeding – to get us to feel. Inside Area X we are presented with alternate biological and mental possibilities that sit alongside the natural world, and when they manifest they do feel genuinely strange to the reader because VanderMeer

55 conceals their intent preferring, most of the time, to neither show all nor tell all. I’ve seen general comments about the trilogy that say, either directly or indirectly, that Annihilation is the only volume you really need to read of the three. I disagree. Some have said, flippantly, that Authority is a waste of time just because the plot does not advance sufficiently and wastes itself by not going deeper into Area X, but as I indicated above, it can still open up a different and more nuanced kind of satis- faction. Others say Acceptance is still too open ended to resolve a trilogy and is far from being thorough enough in providing resolutions to plot threads. As I also indicated above, that is just not in the nature of the structure of this trilogy. If you have not read the second and third volumes, you will miss some wider implications of the story and still be left with just the unresolved nature and highly effective tease that is contained in Annihilation. What do we look for, or hope for, when we read? That’s a moveable feast with a million possible answers (if we could ever establish clearly what those answers might be), none of them true for everyone, all of them true for at least one reader. A series of novels such as the Southern Reach trilogy will never satisfy everyone; it is clear there are too many different ways the plot (such as it is) could have developed, and similarly many ways the resolutions that we might want from the story (such as the true origin of Area X) could have differed in detail. What Vander- Meer chose to give us is what his own meander through the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge in Florida gave him. Different routes can provide different results, much like our own incomplete lives are a tangle of unresolved plot threads that can head in a multiplicity of directions, and never more so than now as we learn to adjust our own experience of being under a less-than-benign viral occupation that can transform lives or simply bring us death. Wel- come to the New Normal.

HYPERSURFACE ISSUES Kennedy Gammage More than 6 parsecs from the hole crawling at 0.22c but it didn’t matter or rather it suddenly mattered bigtime because we started bending then bending back

Riding the hypersurface sir Thank you lieutenant Coherent on the boundary divisor Toric stack polytope wrap Roger that

Turned inside-out then rightside-in Amoeba sir – skeletal localization Mirror symmetry – recommendation Floer endomorphism sir Agreed – pushforward pullback

Acknowledge sir – coherent union with zero section in 3-2-1

March 15 ginning. Turns out there was no audience. It Yesterday afternoon when I was in a drug was just the people up on stage and, a bit lat- store in my neighborhood buying a choco- er, the five or so people who were working at late bar the rest of the people in the line the Fox. It was eerily quiet during what were (and there's almost *never* a line in there) usually applause breaks. Eeesh. had big ol' packages of toilet paper, paper I hope you and yours stay well in this in- towels, frozen pizzas, giant bottles of fruit creasingly troubling time. juice and other panic buying items. There March 23 was a notice listing paper face masks and hand sanitizer as unavailable. The lady who Walking around in my neighborhood on var- checked me out told me that a store in her ious errands yesterday I noticed a few things. neighborhood would not accept cash due to A) I’m glad that the people who own and op- fears of the virus. I told her that was illegal erate the newsagent/cigar store on Polk near and she seemed relieved by that. Broadway consider themselves to be indis- [Update as of May 13: stores from Bob’s Do- pensable enough to remain open. It’s not like nuts on Polk Street to the nearby Whole I need ’em for the cigars but in this increas- Foods supermarket are now only accepting ingly post-Gutenberg age actual newsprint is plastic. Same deal with Starbucks. I don’t getting harder to find. argue with them – I just want my donuts B) Whole Foods update: There was still a line and coffee.] out of the one on the corner of Franklin and WAIT WAIT ... DON'T TELL ME the Na- California last night when I went to buy some tional Public Radio news quiz show usually stuff for dinner. But it had changed some- has a sold out audience as it is one of NPR's what. Social distancing was in play which most popular shows. Yesterday they were on meant the line curled around the perimeter the road broadcasting from the Fox Theater of the parking lot even though there weren’t in Atlanta GA. It sounded odd from the be- that many folks lined up. The gaps between people were variable. As individuals gazed 58

raptly at their smart phones they lost track and dog walkers. Sometimes these activities of the line’s slow but steady forward move- have been combined when one encounters ment. I had to semaphore my arm to get the jogging dog walkers. attention of one couple (Matching facemasks! How cute!) stuck in those tiny, hard E) I see from the on-line catalog for the Me- to read screens. chanics’ Institute Library that their version of Daniel Defoe’s JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE Another adjustment had become apparent YEAR is only available as an on-line audio when I reached the end of the line near the book. Which I have no idea how to access. entrance. The beefy, bouncer looking guy Well, guess that means I’ll be ordering my had been replaced by two kind of bored own copy. looking young people. The young man had a stack of shopping baskets of which he’d March 29 wiped down the handle and top rim part Was getting ready to go out and buy some with a sanitary wipe. The young woman was dish detergent (being the kind of neighbor- stationed behind a folding table that had on hood that I live in, I do this at a hardware it a big ol’ bottle of hand sanitizer and a cou- store) when a nice young man stepped out of ple of containers of sanitary wipes, one of Apartment # 6, down the hall from mine. which the guy was using. Possibly he heard me muttering to myself They both looked like they’d rather be gaz- (something I admittedly did before the ening at the tiny, hard to read screens on their forced self-isolation of COVID-19) and smart phones. wanted to see what was up. He cheerily called out to me: "Hi! I'm your new neigh- C) A couple of bars and the café near where I bor!" I walked up to him, returned his live have tacked up sheets of particle board friendly greeting and then gave him a hand- over their windows. I’ve even noticed this shake. being done to at least one bar downtown in the Financial District. I assume this is to We both then drew back in a cartoonish prevent break-ins but it kind of gives the double-take worthy of Tex Avery and then streets the air of hunkering down before the shrugged at the ridiculousness of the mo- strike of a hurricane. It seems that some ment. thieves have been emboldened by the emp- April 9 tied out streets. There was a car parked in Facebook is doing that thing again where front of my apartment building yesterday that had had one of the windows busted out. they stick a bunch of ads on my timeline. Plus many more garbage and recycling bins But since this is Plague Year 2020 they are for NOTHING BUT FACEMASKS. have been knocked over and their contents torn through, with their contents left scat- April 10 tered about on the sidewalk. Making for an I see that McDonald's (just about the only ugly sight. restaurant open within a six square block D) Not so many e-scooters, skateboards and area downtown) is now offering a Misery bicycles up on the sidewalk now in Polk Meal Special. Gulch. They have been replaced by joggers

April 13 couple of things that I've noticed: Year of the Plague 2020: Facemask Bingo A) I was bit surprised at how much one, more or less unconsciously, relies on the bot- A game I like to play in my head the few tom of one's peripheral vision field for doing times I venture out these days. various things, like walking down stairs or Facemask under chin (AKA “the Chinstrap”). stepping off of siedwalk curbs. I find myself Minus three points. gazing downwards to judge these things Facemask hanging off one ear, nowhere near which probably makes me seem like even the face. Minus five points. more of an Old Weird Guy to people walking by. I shake my cane at the whippersnappers. Facemask on forehead: Minus three points. B) Sneezing while wearing a facemask is a Facemask on elbow or wrist: Minus three misery. points. C) Taking the fershlugginer thing off when I Nose sticking out, not covered by face mask get home is a special joy. (really quite common indeed). Minus three points. April 19 Facemask covering eyes, leaving nose and Spotted on Polk Street yesterday a beat up mouth totally free (really quite rare) Minus white van with two speakers sketchily se- ten points. cured to the top of it by bungee cords, The speakers were blasting out some screeching, April 15 guitar shredding heavy metal. Thanks for Like Governor Newsom said in yesterday's sharing, dude. press conference, there appear to be signs of April 20 a light at the end of the tunnel during these otherwise bleak times. In Polk Gulch, around Got kind of overly excited yesterday when I the corner where I live, the nice little cafe discovered that the corner store nearest there has removed the plywood from its win- where I live had cans of liverwurst from Un- dows and appears to be open for business derwood. Guess I'll save the deviled ham for again. Yay! later. April 17 April 22 What did those companies that made all of Things I sometimes remember when I'm those clear plastic shields that have now putting my face mask in place: popped up in the checkout counters of gro- “Camilla: You, sir, should unmask. cery and other stores do before the COVID- Stranger: Indeed? 19 outbreak? Cassilda: Indeed it’s time. We all have laid April 19 aside disguise but you. While I'm very happy with the Simpsons Stranger: I wear no mask. themed masks that my fine pal, Candi, made me and wear them with some pride, there's a Camilla: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No

60 mask? No mask! April 27 —The King in Yellow, Act I, Scene 2, Robert C'est pour les oiseaux. W. Chambers While walking around in the otherwise more April 24 or less deserted Financial District this morning I noticed a large seagull strutting down San Francisco Strong. Montgomery Street, inspecting the garbage Yesterday morning I was crossing the street that had been strewn about by thoughtful (Polk Street) to go to the bus stop for the street hobos, as though he or she owned the northbound 19 Polk when I was honked at joint. That was until a cop car came blaring by a 19 bus that was waiting for the light and down the street, with the flash bar, uh, flash- would be going in the opposite direction. ing. Cheese-it, the cops! The driver half leaned out his window and May 1 gave me a big ol' wave and a cheery 'HEY THERE!" He was wearing one of those face All Lined Up. masks that includes a plastic shield so it was I'd finally gotten to the front of the line last hard to tell who he was but I recognized his night at the local Whole Foods Market when voice. He was an operator on the California a well-dressed lady of a certain age strode Street cable car line. I hollered back briskly up to the front door. The employee "HOWDY!" And he told me "We'll be back!" monitoring the line said that she'd have to Meaning the cable cars. Boosted my spirits wait in line and the time for Seniors to get in way up. before everybody else was 9 to 10 AM in the April 24 morning. She said with exasperation "But they let Seniors in at Trader Joe's ALL DAY A Puzzle: How does one raise the offer of a LONG!" This didn't cut any ice with the door spritz of hand sanitizer from a cute Asian guy. woman at McDonald's to the next level? May 3 April 25 Facetime. Keep It Clean. A) actually saw my first jogger wearing a While entering the Real Foods grocery store facemask just now while I was waiting for on Polk Street this morning to get some, the bus. Since it's a sunny day I've seen a well, groceries I noticed a fellow with a mas- couple of jogging dudes who were not only sive, Santa Claus-like beard whose disposa- sans mask but also sans shirt. Sweaty torso, ble paper face mask made his whiskers stick ick. out in a wild way standing at a portable hand washing station that had been set up outside B) Saw a guy in a lucha libre/Mexican wres- of the store. He was washing his hands, good tler mask last night on Polk Street. "Great for him. I took a closer look to see that he mask!" I told him unironocally. It was too. It was wearing a pair of those blue disposable encased his whole head and even had goggle gloves and he was actually washing *those*. -like eyepieces.

May 4 Plenty of Parking. Instead of the usual smart BMWs and Mercedes Benz parked in front of the fancy schman- cy Le Méridien hotel in San Francisco's Financial District there's been a flat bed truck that some shade tree mechanic converted from a pickup as, apparently, a weekend project, parked near the front door for the past few weeks. May 9 When I was a kid and I'd cough in my Mom's hearing she'd quip "What's the matter, got TB?" Mom had kind of a dark streak. It if happened now she might reference COVID-19. May 11 Scene: The Starbucks across from the TransAmerica Pyramid. Time: Approximately 8 AM this morning Principals: A nice young female Starbucks employee and crusty old me. We are both wearing facemasks. Me: I’d like a medium coffee, black with a box of apple juice. She: Mbbrrppffl.

I sold my fanzines in graduate school. I’d shucked, the one I’d somehow decided I There was a science fiction bookstore a no longer was. Because I often went into block off University Avenue, a low ochre that store, scanning dustjackets but never building across the street from a parking ever buying anything. Then one day I no- lot. Everything on Palo Alto’s side streets ticed they had a bulletin board. People had then seemed to be across from a parking pinned up cards, advertising—well, I don’t lot, and spaces were both plentiful and free. remember what, so let’s make it up. Star I can’t imagine that’s true now, but it’s thir- Trek memorabilia, or first editions of ty years since I’ve been there, and longer Heinlein, say—he was still alive, up in the since I wandered into that store, comics nearby hills, a friend with local roots had and paperbacks, probably some used books met him, found him strange. And eventu- in the mix, and on the back wall a rack with ally I wrote up a card of my own, with my the prozines, the ones I’d read in high name and number—fanzines for sale, a col- school, Analog and F&SF, and then Locus lection of classics I’d built up during my too, offset instead of the mimeo version I’d active years in high school, Hyphen, War- known, the first fanzine I’d ever gotten. I hoon, Quandry, et al. read it standing up, recognizing a few Sometime later I got a call—a physics post- names, and then walked the aisles, admired doc, that I remember, and somehow in- a few dustjackets: a store that would once volved with FAPA. Also with SLAC, not a have been to me heaven but that now faanish acronym but the nearby linear ac- seemed a relic of my earlier self. celerator that ran dead-straight over the Reading was still fun, it was life itself, but San Andreas fault, you could see it below real life now, not just a pleasure or an es- you on the highway, sprinting away cape but on its way to becoming a profes- through fields of live oak. We met down- sion. I wasn’t tempted by the books I saw, town in a café by another parking lot, ate but I must have been interested in the self carrot cake, agreed on a price, a few hun-

63 dred in the dollars of 1983. Probably I spent can summon up the books themselves, Mrs it on wine or restaurants, pleasures I could- Dalloway and Sons and Lovers, Northang- n’t often afford; anyway, I never regretted it. er Abbey and Oliver Twist, the kinds of books that I thought I should read, and then = = = found that I wanted to. And after that I was I hadn’t been an active fan for seven years by just happily rolling downhill through one that point, having fallen off early in my classic novel after another. I expect I was freshman year at college, and I hadn’t picked pretty insufferable. up any sf for longer than that. I’d known = = = from the moment I started high school that I was going to major in English, but there was Science fiction in general and fandom in still a gap between what I read, and liked particular had provided a refuge from my reading, for school, and what I read on my own awkwardness; the books I read in col- own, the hundred pages and more that I put lege took me out my small town, and gave away each night after dinner. That was all me a world as large and as intricate as the sf, every evening, what seemed like the gen- ones I’d read of out there in the stars. I did re’s entire canon of it, at a time when it still a Ph.D. and found a job at the kind of liberal looked possible to grasp it whole. Other- arts college where I’d always hoped to teach, wise, I’d read a bit of Hemingway on my and eventually began to write about English own, but not Fitzgerald or Conrad or Hardy, fiction for American newspapers and Ameri- mainstays of our school curriculum, and I can fiction for British ones. Later I taught knew nothing about poetry at all. Dickens? travel writing and got interested in the his- The girl down the street read him and I tory of Americans abroad, in the new old couldn’t see why. But then came a moment world of Europe that my marriage to a Swiss at which my reading shifted forever, a high art historian had introduced me to. At some school field trip in the spring of my senior point I moved offices and cleared a filing year, three hours on the bus to Manhattan, cabinet of a lot of things I thought I’d never and me with a book I’d heard was both again need—clips of the first book reviews strange and good, weirder than anything I’d published, in Bay Area newspapers, and else around, and with a first sentence that I then my own file copies of Banshee and could soon recite by heart. “Many years lat- Random, the zines I’d published in high er, as he faced the firing squad…” That’s how school. Maybe I no longer wanted to re- it began, 100 Years of Solitude, and though I member that self, though I happily swapped never learned Spanish and El Boom hasn’t reminiscences with another old fan who was been a part of my teaching repertoire, once briefly on our faculty. But our paths are I’d read that it was decades before I read any never straight. Portable Storage is the first sf at all. zine I’ve seen in years, certainly the first I’ve written for, and I’ve no real idea how or why College made me feel underequipped, and I William found me, after over forty years of thought I had better catch up. Part of me not being in touch. Still, some things have remembers having had no time at all to read been pushing me back this way. my freshman year, not for pleasure, not as I used to. Another part knows that I did, and My college has a science fiction club, and

each year they put on a small con, a weekend through His Majesty’s Dragon. N.K. at the end of March. They get a few writers, Jemisin stands for the latter, and I share run panels, show movies, and because we’re that admiration, one of the most consistent a women’s college there’s a decidedly femi- and provocative American writers of our nist slant to many of them. There’s a huck- moment. I’m told Ann Leckie has to come sters’ room, though I’ve learned it’s no long- next. er called that, and if the weather is decent a Miriam keeps me up on the Hugos, and gets demonstration of historic sword-fighting on into a rage at the Sick Puppies; she writes a the lawn outside. And always a lot of people tumblr blog, under a screen name, has got- in costume, LARPing. I know about the con ten me to see the point of fanfiction, and because it’s held on the lower floors of my with her it’s no longer a guilty pleasure to go building, and I often have a deadline that to superhero movies, but a pleasure plain puts me in the office on a weekend. I climb and simple. She’s shown no interest in fan- the stairs through the fannish crowd, hoping dom as such, fandom as I understood it, a they haven’t taken over the xerox room, realm with its own history quite apart from wondering if anybody will ask me if I’ve reg- that of the works to which it is ostensibly istered, and noting the signs that warn peo- devoted. Still, she did start going to the lo- ple off the fourth-floor office area: “Here cal con—ConBust, it’s called—during her last there be dragons.” Every now and then I see years of high school and has kept on going in one of my students in the hallway, but many college when her own spring break schedule of the attendees look like they come from off allows. But her own school out in Minneso- -campus, people older, younger, male. ta goes us one better. It’s got a science- Then my daughter became one of them. As fiction theme house, with a library and a kid Miriam read the usual fantasy series of weekly movie nights, and for the last four her generation, the Rowlings and the years that’s been her world, the place where Riordans, though she also became a devotee she’s found her friends and the center of her of Joan Aiken and Diana Wynne Jones. In social existence. All this I’ve watched with a middle school I tried to hook her on the stuff bemused pleasure, clichés about apples and I teach, and she did dutifully read and even trees in my mind, though in other ways she seem to enjoy Pride and Prejudice, while is so very different from either of her par- drawing the line at Jane Eyre. But she’s ents, a computer scientist produced by the never wanted to go back to it, and since I marriage of two humanists. There’s only had also pointed her toward the library’s one thing I regret. I’m not sorry I sold my shelf of Anne McCaffrey, well… Soon she fanzine collection, but I do wish I hadn’t got- was on to the Earthsea books, and even ten rid of my own zines. I would have liked Game of Thrones. Her high-school reading to show them to her. was pretty much an updated version of So I felt lucky this year when one of my the- mine, but it didn’t stop when she hit college, sis students told me that both Random and and along the way she’s gotten me to read Banshee were included in the online fanzine some of the things she particularly enjoys or collection held by the library at the Universi- admires. Naomi Novik is one of the forty of Illinois. That’s another story, that the- mer—and since I like Patrick O’Brian I tore sis—a trans kid writing about The Left Hand 65 of Darkness, and flying out to Oregon to work with its manuscript, what could be better? They’d taken a course on Victorian fiction with me and I’d helped them to an internship at the Library of America, where they worked on the LeGuin edition. I must have mentioned reading her as a teenager; anyway, I knew enough to be an adviser, and I’m happy to say that the novel itself seems more daring, now that I know a bit about both narrative structure and feminist theory, than it did when I was fifteen. As for the zines, I gave Miriam a link. She claims to like them, and tells me that even back then I already sounded like myself. Is that a good thing? Or just inevitable, we change and yet stay the same. And now with the help of both William and Andy Hooper I’ve gotten hold of an actual physical copy of Banshee, a glimpse for my daughter of the long-gone self who is me. = = = A coda. Six years ago I was a judge for a book prize, and LeGuin herself was one of the honorees, receiving a lifetime achievement award. Her speech laid into corporate, market- driven publishing, and at my table the CEO of one such company sat on his hands, tight- lipped with rage, when the time came for applause. Afterwards I got my courage up and worked my way through the crowds to her side. I told her how much her books had meant to my daughter—I was thinking of Earthsea but also of her glorious and too-little read Cat- wings series. I told her as well how much her work had meant to me when I was younger. She smiled graciously, and even seemed to recognize the name on my tag. And then she

said “Some of them are for adults too.”

astronaut of dust I fall down eternity still as mimeo paper in winter light all sleek and curve with its legs around the universe my hands of coax are in the sun haunted like a fanzine from another world --G. Sutton Breiding

a column

Bill Breiding was almost apologetic in his ions on the field offered us theorists like solicitation. He had almost everything a fan- Gary Farber, rich brown, Joseph Nicholas, zine editor might want as he approached Ethel Lindsay, Victoria Vayne and Mike this fourth issue – but he had been rebuffed Glicksohn, now even the most committed repeatedly in his attempts to commission a faan is likely to whine, “But I don’t know an- fanzine review column. And with my prac- ything about contemporary fanzines!” tice of selling old and middle-aged fanzines On a few occasions, I have finagled my way through eBay auction, Bill knew that I am around this paralysis by asking the whiner if reading and describing fanzines all the time. they had read the most recent issue of Trap If a review of current fanzines just couldn’t Door or Floss or Banana Wings or Sense of be obtained, maybe something about old Wonder Stories. And when they indignantly fanzines would be a fair replacement. replied, “Well, of course I have!” we would have a basis for further dialogue. But because the field has changed – contracted, I certainly had to sympathize with Bill’s removed online and become infinitely more quest. He wanted to drag his little magazine polished and legible than it once was – many Portable Storage back into fannish territory fans feel like criticizing or even acknowledg- and thought that some remarks on other ing fanzines is tantamount to living in the fanzines – maybe even contemporary fan- past. Better to make posts on your own blog zines – would help him accomplish that. I or pour your energies down the rathole of knew the desperation that lay hidden in that social media, than to bother organizing request – as co-editor of Chunga, I have things into manuscript pages or writing an spent the bulk of the 21st Century trying to actual letter of comment. find someone who would write reviews or any sort of comment on fanzines. And where Anyone trying to write about fanzines today once a bracing salon filled with arch opin- has to deal with their uncertain presentation

and distribution. Beam, one of the most gotten the pleasures of writing a letter of elaborate of current fanzines, is seen by the comment nearly as long as the fanzine that majority of its readers online, but a handful inspired it; once many zines were termed of very slick and imposing paper copies are “letter-substitutes,” as personal correspond- also produced and distributed to contribu- ence was prized even above the performance tors. Sitting in a comfortable chair reading and craft of a fine fanzine. one of these lavish and glossy Beams is a very different experience from studying Perhaps this is one reason why most fanzine the .pdf file on a tablet or a smart phone reviews published now tend to be short, cap- screen. The sheer luxury of the physical arti- sule assessments, and part of an overview of fact has an appeal independent of the fan- some or most of the field, as in Guy Lillian’s zine’s contents – which are also usually quite The Zine Dump or the “Fanzine Countdown” impressive. that I offer at the end of each issue of Flag. These short, often non-committal reviews The best fanzines being published now – ti- are also a kind of “letter-of-comment substi- tles like Pete Young’s The White Notebook, tute,” and by acknowledging a wide swath of Bruce Gillespie’s admirable Science Fiction the titles available, we hope to expiate our Commentary, Fred Lerner’s quarterly guilt for not sending a proper letter of com- Lofgeornost, Christina Lake’s Nowhere Fan, ment. I can only think of one really notable Alan White’s eye-popping Skyliner – are as exception to this pattern at the moment. The good or better than those titles that we re- swaggering Beam has also featured some member fondly as focal points, fanzines of excellent in-depth fanzine reviews by John record, Hugo-winners and nominees, etc. Wesley Hardin and Jacq Monahan, covering But almost all the needs and expectations Charles Lee Rector’s Fornax, Graham Char- which fandom had of fanzines in the past nock’s Vibrator, W.O.O.F. (the Worldcon have evaporated. They are no longer likely to APA) and Skyliner, one of each since issue be a reader’s primary lifeline to a world of #12. No one would mistake Hardin and Mo- shared interests and ideas because technolo- nahan’s style for D. West, but he would ap- gy has made that contact effortless and in- preciate the care with which they cover each stantaneous. There may still be plenty of title, before excoriating them for their terri- pride attached to being a faan, but it’s un- ble taste in subjects. likely to be a lonely thing for long. Perhaps Bill really ought to have asked them. Because only a handful of titles are still published on paper and sent through the postal When we are young fanzine fans, whenever service, there is also a dwindling sense of any that may occur in our overall lifespan, each obligation to reply to a fanzine once we read title which arrives in the mail, is handed it. People who begin to read fanzines now round at a convention party or greedily have little sense of what “the usual” once scooped up from the freebie table, excites meant, or that interaction with the reader is our sense of wonder merely by existing. As the primary object in publishing fmz. It is we encounter more of them, we begin to see our shrinking supply of habitual letterhacks relationships between them, and the broader that makes me really fear for the future of community which they create. And by the fanzine fandom. Fandom seems to have for- time we are old and tired, we have the

chance to judge and appreciate fanzines distribution fanzines and quickly becoming across their entire run, something which can acquainted with the wider world of fandom. easily take decades. Sometimes these pro- And I feel like that process actually started in vide an amazing narrative of events, the evo- 1975, when MadStf member Janice Bogstad lution of science fiction and its fandom, as began publishing Janus, a serious, construc- well as the events of personal significance to tive, feminist-focused fanzine that would be the writers, the music they listened to, the nominated for the Hugo Award in 1978, 1979 sports cars they drove. And sometimes they and 1980. Jan’s co-editor Jeanne Gomoll just form a big pile of paper jammed full of was just as interested in science fiction by 40-year-old book reviews and terrible puns; women, but she also possessed a fine sense not everyone in fandom is a gifted personal of humor, and kept Janus from being entire- essayist. ly academic or critical. Later, when these ap- The difference between reading fanzines as proaches became incompatible, Jan would they are published and encountering them start New Moon, while Jeanne and Diane after their run is complete must be some- Martin continued Janus as Aurora. It per- thing like reading A Tale of Two Cities as a sisted through issue #26 in 1990. serial, instead of a novel-length lump. The I never contributed to Aurora, although I gaps allowed for consideration, interpreta- helped collate or address it a few times. The tion and anticipation, as opposed to simply program book at my first convention, picking up the next issue in the pile to see if Wiscon 2, was also an issue of Janus. There the promised interview with Robert Anton were several other titles produced by MadStf Wilson ever materialized. Plenty of fanzine members around the same time. Hank and fans find a way to have the best of both Lesleigh Luttrell’s long-running Starling was worlds; copies of a frequently appearing fan- probably the best-known, and Hank also zine can easily pile up and then be caught up owned the mimeograph on which he dupli- with in an orgy of staple-pulling and careful cated the first 5 issues of Janus. They came cutting of tape. I can remember treating Dale to Madison from Missouri, where Hank had Speirs Opuntia in this way, and clubzines also edited the club fanzine OSFic, and Les- like De Profundis too. Yes, once there were leigh and her brother Chris Couch were sec- so many fanzines arriving in the mail, they ond-generation fans. I think their presence were sometimes a nuisance. in the group was critical – I believe they were Just as newspapers and census records are the only early members who had ever been vital for researching family history, fanzines to a Worldcon, let alone worked on one. are a critical tool for tracing our “fannish ge- Most of the group had their first convention nealogy.” I have been a Seattle resident for experience at the 1976 Minicon in Minneap- 28 years, but my first contact with fandom olis. was in Madison, Wisconsin, where I grew up. I can also recall seeing copies of Corr, edited I became a casual member of the MadStf by Perri Corrick-West. Her future husband, Group, and a habitué of their convention, Richard C. West, founded the University of Wiscon, before my 16th birthday. Eight years Wisconsin Tolkien Society way back in 1966, later, I was married to a fan, chairing the probably 8 years before MadStf coalesced in convention, publishing my first general- the back of the Madison Book Cooperative. 69

The society’s handsome fanzine Orcrist was which he followed me out of town. sold at some campus-area bookstores, where Hope Kiefer resurrected Cube with #54 in it kept company with Famous Monster of October 1994 and would continue it through Filmland. And John Bartelt also began pub- #61 in December 1995. During this period, lishing Digressions while a graduate student and under Swartz’ editorship, the fanzine in Madison. was frequently duplicated using a state-of- Two more “local” fanzines seduced me into the-art Gestetner mimeograph, giving it a the field. The first of these was the Mad remarkably traditional – or archaic – ap- Moose Gazette, a convention “daily” pearance. After #61, Cube lay dormant for newszine at Wiscon, edited –lightly -- by over a decade, but was eventually resurrect- Jeanne Gomoll. I began composing grandi- ed as the “e-Cube” by Jeanne Gomoll, but its ose or spurious stories for the Mad Moose publication schedule remained erratic. and found the laughs quite gratifying. And as These various “official” publications occu- Aurora had never been a frequent fanzine, pied only a portion of the group’s fanzine- nor concerned overmuch with local fannish making energies. This was a golden age of events and activities, Jeanne also began pub- cheap photocopying and affordable postage lishing a bi-monthly club newsletter in Octo- rates, and anyone with a typewriter could ber of 1982. It was called Cube, a reference to paste together some text and mail it out to our non-profit group moniker, SF3. names found in the letter-columns of other Cube was a 4- to 6-page newszine for its first fanzines. The original Janus mailing list was two or three years, but then began to expand, the genesis of Jeanne’s list, and she gave me with letter columns, book reviews, conven- a copy that became the sourdough starter for tion reports, feminist pastiche of Ian Flem- distributing my early titles like Take Your ing – all the sort of things one expects in a Fanac Everywhere, Nine Innings and Spent general-interest fanzine. And like most club- Brass, which was co-edited with my spouse zines, it had a succession of editors across its Carrie Root. Jeanne published a great per- 61-issue history. Jeanne edited #1 to #9, sonal fanzine, Whimsey, a fund newsletter then admitted a succession of new editors, titled Taffiles, and a wonderful auction list- including her sister Julie Gomoll, Peter The- ing titled J. G. Taff – Our Catalog. She col- ron, Diane Martin, Lynne Morse and Spike. laborated on one-shots like Six-Shooter and Spike took over with issue #15 and would be Sisters, and in 1993, exhumed the “Women the sole editor through issue #40 in Novem- and SF Symposium” published in Khatru in ber 1989. I co-edited issues #41 to #44 with November 1975. Significantly expanded, it Spike, then Kim Nash and I collaborated on was published and distributed at Corflu 10 in #45. Issue #46 in November 1990 was my Madison. only solo issue. It ballooned up to 18 pages, Several other writers who had contributed to and the herculean effort was followed by a the Mad Moose and Cube published their two-year hiatus, broken when Ohio trans- own fanzines. Bill Bodden produced Solo- plant Steve Swartz edited #47. Steve man- mon’s Seal and Raw Goof; his eventual aged to produce three issues before a vote of spouse Tracy Benton was responsible for no confidence by the SF3 board restricted Monstrous Crow and Cazbah; Jae Leslie Ad- him to a single sheet through issue #53, after 70

ams published Alphabet Obsession, Fugitive Building these informal “fanzine trees” Particulate Matter and Zighn. All three col- makes me feel for just moment that I am on laborated on the 6 issues of Wabe, which an equal footing with great fan historians won the FAAn Award as best fanzine in like Rob Hansen and Harry Warner Jr. Ac- 2002. quiring a somewhat longer perspective has made me admire Harry all the more; despite Spike produced a piquant personal fanzine, I having seen countless fandoms rise and fall, -94, and supervised the Chuck Harris Ap- he continued to respond to every fanzine preciation Society Magazine for Corflu 6. that he received, as if every fan editor might Nevenah Smith published a personal fanzine live forever and no one had ever heard of the titled Life, Love and Art. Lynne Morse, who Glades of Gafia. Harry was a thread running recruited me as a gopher for Wiscon 2 while between nearly all the titles I’ve listed here – we were high school students, was a dedicat- he replied to almost all of them, except posed apa-hacker, who later moved to Europe, sibly the punk rock fanzines. And Rob con- married Roelof Goudriaan, and was a found- tributed a history of early Wisconsin fandom ing member of the Dutch Apa, DAPPER. to Cube #36 and helped mimeograph issue Madisonian Randy Everts was the first mem- #38 when Spike was in England for Mexicon. ber of FAPA that I ever met, but I was not All things are truly one. aware of it at the time. Many, if not most of these writers and editors were also active in I’ve been working on a kind of fanzine tree at least one apa during the 20 to 30 years I’m for Seattle fandom too, even though my com- discussing. mand of the 45 years that it thrived before I arrived here is certainly spotty. But it helps And there were Madison fanzines produced to have an amazing Clubzine like Cry of the by people I never met, like Intergalactic Nameless as your foundation. Lately, I’ve Starbarn by Joe Alt and Mike Smith, and been looking over stuff that happened before Don and Sandy Taylor’s World Domination I became aware of Seattle fandom by reading Review. There was also a thriving music fan- trades sent by Seattle fans to Janus and Au- zine scene that included dozens of local and rora. That group started in 1978 or 1979, regional titles; I made one foray into the with fanzines like Izzard, Fast and Loose, field, co-publishing 5 issues of Slander! with Mainstream, Wing Window and Some Luck. fellow theater student Charlie Cheney. Our Reading them, as well as meeting some anonymous assaults made us briefly notori- friendly Seattle fans at early Wiscons, was ous; the local mainstream free paper did a one of the first things that gave me an ambi- story on us and we posed for a photograph tion to move to Seattle. behind bandanas and dark glasses. The gag was blown when I used the same unusual But there was roughly a decade between black and red bandana to wipe my face dur- when Cry ended its run in 1969 and when ing a gyro sandwich eating contest that was Jerry Kaufman and Suzle Tompkins started attended by several local punk rock bands. up Mainstream in 1978. So, I’ve been trying It’s not widely known, but this incident was to fill that space in, with fanzines by Frank the basis for two feature films, Cameron Denton, like Ash-Wing and Rogue Raven, Crowe’s Almost Famous and Porky’s II: The Paul Novitski’s Caradaith and Pogo, Loren Next Day. MacGregor’s Quota and Talking Stock and 71 early work by Jessica Amanda Salmonson, this segment of my karmic burden, compos- including her fanzine Windhaven. There is a ing letters of comment to issues 2 through 4 lot more to fill in, but I think I’ve got at least of one-time Seattle fan Steve Bieler’s person- two or three titles appearing in those puta- al fanzine On Company Time. These were tive “wilderness years.” published between the fall of 1982 and De- I also acknowledge that this focus on long cember 1983. Steve has been a very faithful runs of fanzines from decades in the past has correspondent despite having largely aban- been a fairly transparent means of armoring doned fanzine fandom 30 years ago, and I myself against the grief caused by the death felt like I owed him at least a little reciproca- of so many fanzine fans in the recent past. tion. To my surprise, Steve was completely We have lost some truly prolific talents in delighted to receive my letter, particularly recent years, great artists like Steve Stiles, since I included copies of four of his fanzines writers like Randy Byers and so many faith- to help remind him what I was talking about. ful letter-hacks – Glicksohn, Milt Stevens, He was happy to take up the discussion of Roy Tackett, Pamela Boal, Diane Girard and the most over-rated songs of the 1970s, and so many others. Hell, Bob Bloch is missed the identity of the US Navy ship that played for many things, but I swear that he also the German “pocket battleship” in the fea- wrote the shortest, funniest letters of com- ture film Pursuit of the Graf Spee. (The an- ment in history. And he still lives in the pag- swer was the heavy cruiser USS Savannah.) es of so many fanzines. In fact, I’m con- This was such a pleasant exchange that I vinced that Bloch actually died in 1991, but plan to repeat it in the near future, maybe he had so many letters of comment pending with some of the titles and editors that I that no one noticed until 1994. mentioned in this essay. Although the fan- My only real regret in reviewing all this pa- zines that I named may have ceased publica- per lifestyle is that I appear to have been far tion, the overwhelming majority of their edi- too busy publishing my own fanzines to com- tors are still alive, and would probably enjoy pose the letters of comment which should the hell out of a bit of thoughtful, if long de- have appeared in so many others’ efforts. layed egoboo. If you need help tracking any- There’s no question I enjoyed them and one down, let me know; but I’ll just go ask on thought of witty replies to almost every one. Facebook. Just as soon as I finish the issue, I thought. And honestly, I don’t know anything about Recently, I started working on a solution to contemporary fanzines.

Free Books!

Tom Jackson

David Langford, the British author, fan writer and Ansible newsletter publisher, has begun an ambi- tious project to preserve much fan history and fannish literature and make it available for a new generation of readers. TransAtlantic Fan Fund Free Ebooks (taff.org.uk/ebooks.php) is a collection of about 50 titles, prepared for the TransAtlantic Fan Fund by Ansible Editions, Langford’s publishing arm. The “fannish gift-culture project” includes famous titles such as The Enchanted Duplicator by Walt Willis and Bob Shaw, Ah! Sweet Idiocy! by Francis T. Laney, and fan writing collections by writers such as John Berry, Terry Carr, Vincent Clarke and Langford himself. Downloads of the e-books are available in the most common e-book formats. All downloads are free, but readers are invited to make donations to the TransAtlantic Fan Fund, the long-running (since 1953) project to send well-known fans across the Atlantic, to conventions in North America and to Europe. (Fans are sent in both directions and are expected to publish a trip report). Langford and the people who assist him are skilled e-book publishers. I’ve been reading the e-books in the Mobi format for Kindle. They are nicely formatted for Amazon e-readers and well-illustrated. So far, I’ve read two of the titles: Francis T. Laney’s Ah! Sweet Idiocy! and Terry Carr’s Fandom Harvest. I liked the Carr better. Ah! Sweet Idiocy! is Laney’s memoir of 1940s fandom in Los Angeles, centering on figures of the LASFS scene, including Forry Ackerman and Morojo. It was apparently written to explain Laney’s disillusionment with fandom and why he decided to give up fan activity. (LASFS stands for the “Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society,” a club founded in 1934 which remains active.) One of the apparent reasons Laney disliked the LA scene was that some of the fans were gay; in his

summary of the book, Langford alerts, “Please be Writer three times and won in 1973. He was warned that a few passages display a level of nominated for Best Fanzine five times and won homophobia perhaps excessive even by 1948 in 1959 for Fanac, which he co-edited with Ron standards.” Ellik. At least those passages are generally pretty short. Fandom Harvest is a reprint of what was origi- Endless space is devoted to Laney’s feuds with nally a book published in Sweden by John-Henri other fans. I suppose the accounts must have Holmberg, a fan and admirer of Carr’s. It in- been interesting gossip at the time, but I wasn’t cludes an introduction by Robert Silverberg very interested. I much preferred the descrip- (credited as “Bob Silverberg,” apparently to dis- tions of some of the pros Laney encountered, tinguish his fan writing from his fiction writing) such as Clark Ashton Smith and Fritz Leiber. and very fine cartoon illustrations by Grant Can- field. The book features archival photos of many of the fans Laney wrote about, and the TAFF edition Silverberg, praising Carr’s writing, says “you will also includes careful bibliographic notes by Lang- not find a paragraph that is less than delightful.” ford, a glossary explaining some of Laney’s ab- Silverberg’s judgment holds up much better than breviations, an introduction by Harry Warner Harry Warner’s, although it seems fair to observe Jr., and a commentary on Laney’s work by Alva that some of Carr’s pieces date better than oth- Rogers. ers. Ron Ellik, for example, was probably just as Rogers says Ah! Sweet Idiocy! is “rightly consid- interesting a fan in the 1950s as William Breiding ered one of the great contributions to the litera- is in the 2020s, but I couldn’t make myself care ture of fandom,” while Warner calls Laney “the very much about the anecdotes Carr tells about only fan who has ever been compared with Dean him. Swift without creating a storm of laughter.” But I loved every word of Carr’s memoir about These statements seem rather generous to me, working for a literary agency, “Confessions of a but thanks to Langford, you can read Laney’s Literary Midwife.” His article on women in sci- famous (or infamous) work and come to your ence fiction, “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby” own opinion. also still reads well, even though it was first pub- Francis Towner Laney is an obscure figure unless lished back in 1975 and written when nobody you know a lot about the history of fandom, but knew “James Tiptree Jr.” was a pen name for a many readers of Portable Storage will know who woman. Terry Carr is, even though he died 33 years ago, The reprinting of books such as Carr’s makes a when he was only 50. He was a science fiction nice case for fannish writing as a genre of litera- writer, although not terribly prolific, and perhaps ture that is worth preserving. I hope Langford the most important science fiction editor of his will continue to make more fannish e-books time. He edited annual “Best SF” anthologies, did available. the “Universe” anthologies and is particularly remembered for the “Ace SF Specials” novels he [Editor’s Note: Langford’s TAFF FREE E- selected for publication. The first series of spe- BOOKS include electronic reprints of important cials included Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Hand of sercon works: Charles Platt’s Patchin Review, Darkness. His revived “Ace Specials” in the Bruce Sterling’s Cheap Truth and 286 pages of 1980s included William Gibson’s Neuromancer. previously uncollected sercon material by Algis Budrys. The two collections of the uber fannishly Fandom Harvest, however, is devoted to another sercon D. West are milestones. This is the tip of a aspect of Carr’s literary career: The fan writer. mighty iceberg to which Dave Langford is con- He was nominated for the Hugo for Best Fan tinuously adding. Thank you, Mr. Langford!]

“I know you like to read too…” my mother she liked gossip, because she also read Con- said. fidential, that ur-tabloid. There was always a copy lying around and I was an avid read- She’s gone now – passed away at Xmas a er of it myself, although I was too young to couple of years ago—but I can still see her in understand what it was all about, but youth happier times, sitting on the patio, in her wants to know. horn-rimmed glasses, with a book in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She was Confidential featured in its pages lots of reading Peyton Place by Grace Metalious, a stories about people who were famous long novel which in its time was infamous for ago, but not so much remembered any being a dirty book. I’m reading it right now more. It had lots of photos of people with in her honor and I must say it pretty much black bars over their eyes, and the names lives up to its reputation. What my mother, Ezio Pinza and King Farouk were frequently a woman famous for her probity who in no featured on its covers. Who were they you way could be called liberal-minded and was might ask? Well, I don’t know about Pinza sharply critical of any loose behavior in her (who’s name sounds kind of dirty), but Fa- children, was doing reading a book like that rouk, the last king of Egypt, led a lavishly is anybody’s guess. But it could just be that secular lifestyle. He was a fabulous spend-

75 thrift and lecher who was eventually forced where I found it. (Bess asks: “Didn’t you from his throne and went into exile in Eu- have a dictionary?”) When I explained I’d rope, where he joined the Jet Set. He also read it in a magazine at home, she seemed had one of the largest collection of pornog- to accept it, but what do you think she must raphy in the world, which makes him a kind have been thinking about my family. To her of hero to me. credit she remained a professional and encouraged me to keep learning new words– What I mostly liked about Confidential, just not words like that. however, was the Frederick’s of Hollywood ad that appeared in every issue and usually Both our parents worked weekends at the took up one whole page. I loved those illus- auto plant and left me in charge of my trations of tall, willowy women dressed in brothers from a young age. I was expected harem outfits, crotchless panties, and in- to keep them in line, but that was never go- flatable padded bras, until the FAA banned ing to happen with this crew. As soon as them. they were out the door, the cold war changed to hot and blows were exchanged; I (When I first wrote that line above, Bess blame TV for that. We all liked to watch the read it and said: “The FAA? You mean the wrestling matches on Saturday afternoon. Federal Aviation Administration? Why The Sheik and Dick the Bruiser were our would they ban inflatable bras? So I had to favorites, but we liked Leapin’ Larry Shane tell her the story of the woman whose bra the best. He fought in a very acrobatic style, exploded at 30,000 feet. She’d never heard bouncing off the ropes and wrapping his that story.) legs around his opponents as he brought Most of the clothes depicted in the Freder- them crashing to the mat. After watching ick’s ads were what my mom called the wrestling matches, we were all so “trashy”, but Lincoln Park, Michigan in the churned up with youthful adrenaline that we Fifties was a smaller world then and things started bouncing on the furniture and plow- change. Kalamazoo isn’t much bigger, but ing into each other. Sometimes things broke when I moved here in the early Eighties and and got us in trouble. married Bess, there was a Frederick’s store The War of the Brethren aside, what I liked in the local mall and a couple of Bess’s to do when the parents were away was friends—for a gag—bought some edible snoop around in their bedroom; youth panties there as a wedding gift. Bess refused wants to know. I was particularly drawn to to wear them, so I had to eat them by my- their dresser, a massive dark red mahogany self. Raspberry, I think. affair, which was a kind of cabinet of won- Once I saw something in Confidential that ders to me. Mom kept her cosmetics on the could have potentially gotten me in trouble. top and one of the things she had up there It was a word I didn’t understand, so I was a perfume bottle with a rubber squeeze wrote it down and showed it to my grade bulb. Through experimentation, I found that school teacher and asked her if she knew if you held a lit match in front of it and what it meant. That word was squeezed the bulb, the perfume that sprayed “homosexuality”. That rattled her and she out would catch fire. I found this enormous- refused to define it for me and asked me ly rewarding and also possibly of use against 76 the lesser brothers. However, I also quickly a total war and fought with robots as well as realised that if Mom came home and found men. All of the men of the country were mo- the level of liquid in the bottle was going bilized to fight overseas while the women down or that the house smelled like roses remained home to work in the factories and all the time, it would be bad, so I had to put offices. But the war is over now and there’s my impromptu flame thrower aside. been some kind of a victory, because there’s a big parade occurring through the center of But that was okay, because there were more town and all the women are lining the interesting things in that magic cabinet. The streets and leaning out of office windows, top drawer was filled with knick knacks: hoping to get a glimpse of their husbands spare change, stray buttons, old movie tick- and lovers as they march by. But the robots ets, matches for setting perfume alight and, are out front and they’re marching and among other things, Sen Sen which was a marching and marching. So far no men licorice-flavored candy meant for sweeten- have appeared. A woman asks, “Where are ing smoker’s breath. There were also these the men?” and her question is soon echoed mysterious, round rubber things in little by a few other women and then more and square packages. Mysterious then, but from more until the story ends in a collective my adult perspective, it’s understandable wail. that, after giving birth to five juvenile wol- verines, they wanted to protect themselves. On another occasion, I found a couple of small, strange black and white comic books I hit the jackpot when I found the Playboys in the top drawer of the dresser hidden un- hidden in the bottom drawer. I spent many der a box of Luden’s. They were so crudely a stolen hour pouring over all that female drawn they were obviously not published by acreage, but, believe it or not, at this late DC. A little later on, I learned from some stage of my life, the nudes in Playboy were guys in the school yard that these books the least memorable things about it. I liked were called Tijuana bibles. None of us could the cartoons and the Vargas pin-ups, but say where Tijuana was—somewhere in Mex- also—and I say this non-jokingly—I read ico we supposed—but we all believed that’s Playboy for the articles. Mostly the fiction; really where they came from. I remember especially the occasional science fiction sto- one that was being passed around the gym ry, often written by guys like Bradbury, about Froggy, a character on the Buster Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont; Brown Saturday morning TV show. Buster whom I already knew from reading. I admit Brown was a company that made shoes for I was a little surprised to find them in Play- kids and, before that, a comic strip charac- boy, but on the other hand, Heinlein some- ter as well; kind of meta, don’t you think? times wrote for Boys’ Life. He had a motto: “I’m Buster Brown. I live in There’s one story I read that’s never left me. a shoe. Here’s my dog Tige. He lives in I don’t recall who wrote it, but it could have there too.” and his face was imprinted on been one of the abovementioned. It was the inside of every shoe, so, when you were very short and had a very Twilight Zone-ish wearing them, you were constantly mashing feel to it. It goes like this: Buster in the face. There’s been a war, but it’s over now. It was Froggy was a magical frog who lived in a 77 clock and would appear in a puff of smoke when I was in Paris, but he was selling when summoned by Andy Devine (a famous French postcards, which is an entirely dif- character actor and host of the show) by say- ferent genre.) They just seemed to pop up ing, “Plunk your magic twanger, Froggy!” out of nowhere in schoolyards, locker and say, “Hiya kids! Hiya, hiya hiya!” Froggy rooms and wherever men gathered. was made of hard rubber with no articula- In my teen years and later on in the army, I tion at all, but was moved around by an in- read quite a few of those men’s magazines visible hand that just shook him back and of the “blood and guts” genre, but because forth. With a line like “magic twanger”, I I’ve already covered this subject elsewhere, suppose Froggy was just asking to be put in- I refer you to Dan Steffan’s Fugghead #4 on to a dirty book. About the same time, the efanzines. However, shortly after I wrote it, guys in the lunchroom were passing around Robert Lichtman sent me a copy of an arti- a mimeographed story called Behind the cle from one of those old mags written by a Green Door which you may have heard of woman named Jane Dolinger. Well, I had since it was the basis for that Marilyn Cham- no idea that women wrote for the men’s bers movie (if you’re old enough to remem- pulps, although, you know, men wrote for ber that Marilyn Chambers movie). the women’s magazines like True Confes- I don’t know what happened to those dirty sions. Back in the day, confession mags and books in the Old Man’s dresser, he never men’s pulps were entry-level markets for seemed to keep his porn for very long. May- aspiring writers, and a few years back, Jack be Mom would throw them out when she Vance wrote an article identifying several discovered them; I don’t know. But it’s a big name authors who got their starts there, shame if she did. Once reviled as the dirtiest including himself. kind of pornography, those old Tijuana bi- In fact, it never occurred to me that anyone bles now reside in the category of outsider wrote for the pulps. I imagined the stories art: beloved nostalgia and one of the inspira- just sprouted up out of the paper they were tions for the underground comix of the Six- printed on like mushrooms. But they really ties. I recently saw an expensive coffee table did have authors, and one of them was Jane book collection of them with an introduction Dolinger. What must she have been like? I by Art Spiegelman on sale at Amazon. The never imagined I would ever find out, but originals are worth a lot of money, as Dan the answer came to me due to an amazing Dreiberg said. I wish I’d inherited Dad’s old instance of serendipity. One day, shortly eight-pagers, I might have made my fortune after I’d received that article from Robert, I from them. was stumbling through the stacks in West- Interesting question: How did the original ern Michigan University’s library where I creators (whoever they were) make any worked and—like out of the blue—came money off them—did they? I’ve never heard across a book entitled: Jane Dolinger : the of anybody who actually bought one and I Adventurous Life of an American Travel never came across any creepy old men in Writer by Lawrence Abbott. I’m not one to dirty raincoats hiding in dark alleyways say- believe in fate, but you know, just some- ing, “Psst, kid, want to buy some dirty com- times… ics.” (I did, however, run into a guy like that 78

The men’s magazines employed a number (whatever that is). It was so dicey-sounding of tropes that appealed to their all-male au- that any other woman concerned with her dience: You had your thrilling war stories, personal safety probably would have given it daring rescues from behind enemy lines, a pass, but Jane was attracted to the promise exposés of government corruption, vice of adventure and travel promised in the ad. rackets, envious tales of suburban swingers, Personally, I would have let out a snort, said, etc., etc. But what I liked were the ones “Yeah, right!” and turned the page. But Jane about wild primitive sex practices in fara- answered it and met Ken Krippene, author, way exotic lands. I call this type of story the adventurer and bullshit artist supreme. “I found the Lost Tribe of Amazon Women” Krippene was an established author who trope and it imprinted on my impressiona- wrote for magazines like Saga, True and Na- ble young mind the idea that the only way tional Geographic when it was a tit maga- to get laid was to go overseas. As a teenager, zine. Shortly after their meeting, Jane’s sta- I used to imagine myself living on an island tus went from Girl Friday to Wife, and they somewhere in the South Pacific with a har- were married in Peru (where they would lat- em of girls who wore grass skirts and little er spend most of their time) in 1954. Abbott else. I’d been reading Michener’s Hawaii calls Krippene a literary scamp “with few and Margaret Meade’s Coming of Age in scruples about truth” who apparently recog- Samoa at the time and they influenced my nized in Jane the same talent for fabrication nocturnal habits. Years later, when I was in and encouraged her to become a writer her- college, I actually used “I Found the Lost self. So in the years that followed, she inter- Tribe of Amazon Women” for the title of a viewed head hunters in Peru, visited a harem paper I wrote for a class in ethnographic in Morocco, spent some time with a polyan- writing. drous tribe in central Africa and reported on If anyone ever found that Lost Tribe of Am- strange marital customs in the South Seas. azon Women, it was Jane Dolinger. In her She must have been pretty ballsy for a dame, own words: because she frequently went on these excur- sions by herself, believing that headhunters “I’m no Doctor Kinsey, but during the past and desert nomads would afford her more several years, traveling to the far corners of respect and be more open to her because she the world in search of the bizarre and unu- was a woman alone. That doesn’t sound sual has perhaps unwittingly taught me right, but it seemed to have worked for her. more about the strange sexual habits and customs of little-known peoples than I The journals she published her findings in, could hope to glean from a half dozen text- magazine with titles like Adventure for Men, books.” Modern Man, Man’s Action and South Seas Stories, valued bullshit over veracity, and, According to Abbott, Jane’s career in the according to Abbott, Jane herself never drew pulps began in the early Fifties when she an “uncrossable line between hard facts and was living in Miami, working as a secretary embellishment” to tell a good story. A nice and taking modeling classes. One day she example of that is her book, The Forbidden came across an ad placed in a local newspa- World of the Jaguar Princess. per by someone looking for a Girl Friday

In 1961 or thereabouts, Jane heard about a was within walking distance, I was in there a woman named Pamela Hawkins who was lot. I bought all my early Beatles albums living on a plantation deep in the jungle of there (Rubber Soul was my favorite) and my Ecuador. The local natives, who worked for Ace Doubles and Edgar Rice Burroughs nov- her, called her Shia Shia Nua, or the Jaguar els from their book section, where I also dis- Princess, because of an encounter she’d had covered the Mr. Moto books, which were be- with one as a little girl. To Jane this sounding reprinted at the time. ed like a perfect “I found the White Queen Mr. Moto was a counterpart to the popular of the Jungle” story, but when she tracked Charlie Chan stories by Earl Derr Biggers. down Pamela Hawkins, she found, instead They were written by J.P. Marquand, who of an exotic princess, an elderly woman was famous long ago and won a Pulitzer Prize running a day-to-day business and whose for a novel called The Late George Apley. employees weren’t headhunters and whose The Mr. Moto stories were a series of potboil- sex habits were no more exotic than that of ers about a Japanese secret agent he churned any small town. Finding this an unsatisfac- out when he wasn’t writing high art and they tory development—and with an eye to her originally appeared in the Saturday Evening readers—Jane gave to Miz Hawkins. She de- Post in the 1930’s. The stories were great fun aged her a few decades, made up a story if you can ignore history the way Saturday about a tragic love-affair involving a hand- Evening Post readers were able to ignore cur- some Frenchman, and described the lurid rent events, as the character was popular details of the Jaguar Princess presiding over enough to be played by Peter Lorrie on the moonlit native orgies—like in a Ramar of silver screen. Of course, Mr. Moto fell from the Jungle episode. grace when the war broke out. However, he I don’t judge. I like Jane Dolinger, bullshit was revived on the radio, and the original and all, and wish I could have met her, but I Saturday Evening Post stories were reprint- was just a kid. As untruthful as her stories ed in the Sixties, so he didn’t stay in Coventry may have been, she wrote what she wrote for good. I understand there’s also a Mr. Mo- and that’s all what she wrote. And even seri- to graphic novel that came out in 2003. ous and respected anthropologists, as I Another genre you could find on the book pointed out in my paper cited above, were racks in those days—but maybe not so much not above characterizing the customs of tra- anymore—was the gothic romance. This was ditional peoples as “bizarre and unusual” to not a genre I was much interested in to be goose up interest in their work. frank. I’d already read Jane Eyre and Wuth- Around 1956 or ’57, a tornado tore through ering Heights in school. In retrospect, that our town, and while we all cowered in the may be a mistake and I should probably look basement, the wind knocked a pillar off our into it someday; could be something worth front porch, dumped a bunch of wood from reading there. a nearby lumberyard into our backyard and Every genre has its conventions when it carried my brother Craig’s bike off to parts comes to using the cover of a book to attract unknown. Really! It was never found. A few its potential reader. Well, that’s self-evident. years later, the lumberyard was converted SF, obviously, has spaceships and alien land- into a discount department store. Since it 80 scapes; fantasy has its homoerotic barbari- found work in the paperback industry, ans and dragons; detective novels have which was banging in the late Forties and tough guy detectives and leggy dames; and early Fifties. He changed his name to nymphomaniac librarian stories have nym- George Zielinsky, but most often signed his phomaniac librarians. (You’ve never read work Ziel. It’s said he was a meticulous art- any nymphomaniac librarians stories? ist who worked slower than other illustra- Don’t bother looking; I just made that up.) tors; nevertheless he was able to produce 300 covers over the course of his career. He The conventions of gothic romance covers, never learned to speak English very well however, seemed to be a deal more single and never read the books he was illustrat- minded than most other genres and pretty ing, which allowed him to look into the much presented to the potential customer deepest recesses of his soul, which must the same image endlessly repeated, signal- have been dark indeed, considering his ing they were looking at a gothic romance past, and made him the perfect artist to de- book: In the background, a full moon rises pict gothic themes. above a shadowy and sinister castle and in the foreground, a fearful damsel in a night- While investigating George Ziel on the in- gown or a loose fitting dress whose folds are ternet, I came across what I consider a per- flapping in a breeze we can’t feel but she fect example of his work. It impressed me can, is racing away from the castle behind so much that I copied it, had it framed and her. The aura of menace is palpable. And it now hangs over my desk. In the bottom every book cover offers the same tableau. center portion of the painting, we see a woman. She’s dressed all in black and wear- You can’t judge a book by its cover, but eve- ing a cobwebby sort of cape around her ry cover has a story behind those endlessly shoulders, and it’s blowing in that unseen repeated images. Most of them were paint- breeze along with her long, black hair. In ed by one man, George Zielinsky. His name the lower left, is the inevitable castle in the was originally Jerzy Zielezinski when he distance and at the top right is the inevita- was living in Poland during an unfortunate ble full moon. Behind her, is a sky filled time in history. He had the misfortune of with blue-gray clouds. The woman seems to being Jewish, so when the Nazis invaded be peering anxiously up at a huge black Poland, he was sent to the concentration mass overhead that takes up about a quar- camp in Dachau. Jerzy was an artist. He ter of the painting. It may be just a dark was denied drawing materials during his cloud, but it seems to be worrying her and imprisonment. However, he secretly man- appears about to engulf her. aged to draw scenes of the concentration camp on scraps of paper that he managed to I like to look at it and wonder what’s going find and which grew into a book called Pris- on in her head. Maybe someday I’ll write oner Album which was published after his my own story to go with it. release in 1946. A copy is on display in the So, to repeat, my mother said, “I know you Holocaust Museum in D.C. like to read too…” After the war, Jerzy came to America and— It was a sunny summer afternoon and Bess rather than continuing in the fine arts— and I were paying her a visit. She’d been

81 cleaning out her house, declaring her inten- things like a new axe handle or a plug of tion of moving into a smaller place now that chewing tobacco. The last story she told me her husband was dead and her children were was about an uncle or great-uncle, who was scattered to the winds. She often started a always cheating on his wife, who decided to conversation by stating that the house was exact her revenge by having sex with a farm- too big, too hard to keep clean and the taxes hand, but one fine day they were disturbed were too high. She often talked about mov- by the unexpected return of her husband, so ing, but in the end kept putting it off until it they quickly hid under the bed. He had a was almost too late. woman with him and they proceeded to fall on top of the bed and got down. So, as Mom “Would you like these?” she asked. Knowing described it, there were now two couples— that I like to read, she offered me a box of one on top of the bed and one underneath— paperback books with pictures on their co- “going at it”. Was that for real; or just local vers of bare-chested men clutching women gossip? I’ve never been able to find any liv- whose own clothing was about to come un- ing relatives who could confirm or deny it. done—historical romances or “bodice rippers” as they’re sometimes called. Despite When she passed away, I gave her books to the somewhat rapey pictures, these were ac- my friend, Jack, who was a huge fan of his- tually perfectly respectable books for an oc- torical novels; really huge. He had the larg- togenarian mom to be reading. They must est collection I’ve ever seen. He had all the have been, because you saw them every- classics: Sir Walter Scott, Conan Doyle’s Sir where: in grocery stores, in 7-11s, airports Nigel novels, Sabatini, Howard Lamb, Frank and even book stores. I guess they replaced G. Slaughter; anything historical. Jack was the gothic romances, because by that time the only person I know who actually liked there didn’t seem to be any more of them Silas Marner. He was no snob and gladly around. added my box of bodice rippers to his collection. In fact, he was already a fan of I don’t know why Mom thought I’d like Georgette Heyer’s Regency novels, which them, but I guess it was just that she was a were basically Jane Austen done to death, reader and I was a reader and books are which brings us to my last story. books. I read a few, and it gave us something to talk about, especially after Mom had Do you remember all those Jane Austen moved into what others call “assisted living”, movies that were all the rage a few years but I call “controlled living” and she was get- back? I do, because Bess was a big fan of ting a little dotty. Besides our book study, them and we own every one of them on Mom also had a repertoire of raunchy stories DVD. Sometimes, when she’s blue, she pulls from real life when she was growing up in Pride and Prejudice off the shelf and we’re Tennessee, and she was a veritable Erskine in for a week of Liz and Darcy goodness. Caldwell. (What she doesn’t know, but I do, is that I have a copy of Pride and Prejudice and Her favorites were about the ancestor who Zombies and one of these days I’m going to waited out the Civil War, hiding in a cave slip it in on her.) The irony is that neither of and the man who owned most of the county, us has ever read any Jane Austen, so I sug- but bartered parcels of land away for simple

82 gested we might want to read them together someday. We frequently do this. The family that reads together, breeds together – or something like that. We started with Pride and Prejudice and got halfway through Emma when Bess lost interest when she got distracted by Downton Abby. I, however, soldiered on, just so I could say: “Nya, nya; I read all of Austen and you haven’t!” so I read Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park and Northanger Abby, but only got halfway through Persuasion before all the gos- sipy conversation got to me. The one thing that I came away with through it all though is this: How come none of the film adaptations of Pride and Prejudice include the last chapter of the book where it turns out that Mr. Darcy’s initial misgivings about allying himself with Elizabeth’s family all come true: He ends up having to financially support Wickham and Lydia for the rest of his life and Liz’s father drops in on Pemberley and mooches off them whenever he feels like it. So there we have it; I wonder what I’m going to read next?

The Road

“Howard never tried, or never tried intelligently, to give his pre- posterous saga the ring of truth — but they have something … a vividness, a color, a dream-dust sparkle, even when they’re most insulting to the rational mind.” -- Damon Knight, In Search of Wonder One day I wandered into an odd bookshop — one I had passed countless times but had never noticed. The shop windows were thick with dust, and the door made an eldritch skreeek as I pushed it open. Tall bookcases rose in the gloom. Suddenly a book fell — bang! — to the floor. With trembling fingers I picked it up — it was a book full of strange tales — Okay, I lie. It was a Barnes & Noble in a suburban shopping center, brightly lit and only strange for being so dull. The part about book is true: it was a cheap omnibus collection of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian and it was full of strange tales. I bought it partly out of curiosity, partly out of a sense of duty, self-assigned reading of a classic to fill a hole in my fannish schooling. Later, home sick and casting around for something easy to read, I picked it up. And put it down hours later. These stories were great! Maybe the Theraflu heightened the dream-dust sparkle, or fever affected my rational mind. Or maybe it was because I was at that impressionable age when a thud-and-blunder hero swaggering around a pseudo-medieval Eurasiafrica battling muahaha villains in thrall to

To Cimmeria

Cheryl Cline

an ancient and evil race of aliens sounds like The Shit. I was fifty-six. I’ve never been that much of a fan of sword & sorcery — or high fantasy either. I read Tolkien because everybody reads Tolkien, but I’ll confess, it was a bit of a slog. I cut my fannish teeth on Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein. Science fiction! Time Travel, FTL spaceships, interstellar empires, real stuff like that. But as it turns out, some of my favorite books are sword & sorcery. But it wasn’t something I chose. I did not seek it out. Frank Frazetta paperback covers did not move me. No, I was tricked into reading sword & sorcery by three con artists of the first water: Fritz Leiber, Joanna Russ and Samuel Delany.

I read Fritz Leiber’s Swords Against Wizardry and Swords in the Mist when I actually was young and impressionable. The books were possibly a bit adult for me, but then again, I was just starting to trade my 16 Mag- azines for Rolling Stone and the Berkeley Barb, courtesy of an older cousin who came to stay with my family in the summer of 1968. Along with the alternative press, he also turned me on to KMPX-FM, Country Joe & the Fish, and science fiction. He gave me the Leiber books and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, so I imprinted on both hard science fiction and low fantasy in one fell swoop. All this fascinating — and adult — reading made a big impression on me. I loved the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories for their dream-dust sparkle and their humor as much as I loved the gosh-wow-oh-boy-oh-boy sense of wonder of science fiction, but as I sought out more of both, I found it easier to find more authors “like” Asimov. It’s always been harder to find that just-so mix of weird and humorous that drew me into the Fafhrd & Gray Mouser stories. Most sword & sorcery either takes itself too seriously or takes it as a joke. Leiber’s stories are funny, but he doesn’t spoof Howard. The humor comes from the heart of the trope, and from the humanity of the characters. Fritz Leiber wrote all kinds of stuff: science fiction, fantasy, horror. He helped to put sword & sorcery on the map, not least by coining the term. He popularized some of the genre’s main tropes and invented others. He introduced the “buddy” story into sword & sorcery. The heroes that followed in Conan’s solitary strides are chiefly loners. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser form one of the few true partnerships in sword & sorcery, even avoiding the hero/ sidekick trope. Leiber makes this pretty explicit. In the “Induction” to Swords and Devil- try, he describes their first meeting, writing that “they were already dimly aware that they were two long-sundered fragments of a greater hero and that each had found a comrade

86 who would outlast a thousand quests and a lifetime—or a hundred lifetimes—of adventur- ing.” The two are equals, though different: they take turns playing straight man and wise- guy, the cautious one and the reckless one. They rescue each other from howling towers, murderous buildings, the underground keeps of Mad Lords, assorted thugs, wizards and squid-people, and their own bad ideas. The series has some… issues. Girlfriends are taken lightly and the serious ones are fridged; and a few of the bad guys hew a bit too close to ethnic stereotypes (Mingols? Seriously?). Leiber’s “iteration,” as one critic puts it, is closer to Howard than those of Russ and Delany, but he nudges the genre in a similar direction. Once hooked by SF and fantasy, I haunted the science fiction section at B. Dalton’s, where after much agonizing over covers and blurbs and first pages and cover price, I would finally pick out one or two. I didn’t know anyone who read science fiction except my cousin (who had been drafted and spent four years at Point Arena). I didn’t know about fandom, and had nobody to recommend books, except for one time when a grandfatherly man, tickled that a twelve-year-old girl was in the science fiction section at B. Dalton’s, recommend- ed Asimov’s Lucky Star series. I hoped to meet him again, if only to ask him to recommend something more grown-up, but I never did. Was he a Fan? Or just a solitary reader like me? By the time I graduated high school I had amassed what I considered a large collection of paperbacks -- it filled a tiny book- case. But then I met Lynn Kuehl, who had a whole room full of books (don’t ask how many we have now). He introduced me to used bookshops, science fiction conventions with their dealers’ rooms, and serious collecting. And also to weirder SF writers than I was used to, like Philip K. Dick and R.A. Lafferty. This was in 1975, and I’d traded my Rolling Stone and Berkeley Barb for Ms. magazine and Off Our Backs, so I was also picking up books like The Left Hand of Darkness, Women of Wonder, and The Female Man. Delany writes in his introduction to the Gregg Press edition of Alyx that Russ had read neither the Conan stories nor Brack- ett’s Jirel of Joiry stories before writing the Alyx stories; and that “the wit and irony apparent through Russ’s tales owe more to

Fritz Leiber’s variant of the genre than to How- ard’s.” So it’s no surprise that I liked Alyx. I smiled at the reference to Fafhrd in Russ’s “The Adventur- ess,” and was pleased to find that in return, Leiber had given Alyx a small cameo in “The Two Best Thieves in Lankhmar,” where Fafhrd points out “that gray-eyed, black-haired amateur Alyx the Picklock,” at a gathering of thieves. Delany also writes, “the traditional Sword and Sorcery fighting woman is, by a large, a useless archetype for the Woman’s Movement,” but that it’s a place to start. “We must not be surprised if a woman writer beginning with it, goes on to put it to a very untraditional use.” That Russ puts the archetype to an untraditional use is an under- statement. The first story in Alyx, “The Adventuress,” is the most purely Leiberesque. It takes place in the Mediterranean-ish city of Ourdh, an obviously sword & sorcery name complete with unneces- sary “h”. Alyx is a small, plain, “governessy” person. She is also a thief, a mercenary, and an assassin, hired by a young woman to help her escape an arranged marriage. The story is basically a series of adventure episodes — there’s a sea monster to slay and pirates to fight, and the two women become friends. Meanwhile, Russ is quietly creating her “iteration” of the sword & sorcery genre with small, deft, often humorous details that would have raised Howard’s eyebrows. Alyx is not the adventuress of his dreams. “I Thought She Was Afeard Till She Stroked My Beard” is Alyx’s origin story, and still squarely sword & sorcery. With “The Barbarian,” Russ starts to move Alyx towards science fiction, and also takes up the question of who is civilized and who is a barbarian, a theme that runs from the original Conan through Fafhrd & the Gray Mous- er, Delany’s Raven, Saunders’ Imaro and Pratch- ett’s Cohen the Barbarian. In Howard’s

“Shadows in the Moonlight” (Weird Tales, 1934) Conan is compared to civilized people and the latter come up short. “Her lips twisted in a bitter smile. ‘Aye, civilized men sell their children as slaves to savages, sometimes. They call your race barbaric, Conan of Cimmeria.’ ‘We do not sell our children,’ he growled, his chin jutting truculently. In Russ’ story Alyx is far more “primitive” than the time-traveler who hires her as an assassin, but he’s easily the more barbaric. From a techno- logically advanced future, he uses his “magic” to basically be a jerk throughout the time-space continuum and to bully Alex into submission. But Alyx doesn’t care what the source of his power is, she just figures out how to thwart it. Alyx’s more primitive survival methods work. This is more deeply developed in Picnic On Paradise. I had read Picnic On Paradise as a standalone paperback, not realizing it was part of a sword & sorcery series featuring a woman warrior. It takes place on an alien planet. In the future! In a serious meta-fictional move, Russ transports her character into a completely different setting by making her a time-traveling agent. Pretty sneaky! Interestingly, in a small continuity hitch, Alyx is inadvertently scooped by the Trans- Temporal Military Authority not from Ourdh, but from ancient Greece. This makes sense in the story, since to grab Alyx from Ourdh, the Tem- poral folks would have had to not only go back- wards in time, but sideways in dimension (or as Terry Pratchett would say, down a different leg of the Trousers of Time). Since Russ is usually careful about such things, it makes me think she left it there as a sort of artifact signaling a change from sword & sorcery to science fiction. Or I could be overthinking it. Read together, the Alyx stories probably come

89 across differently than reading them in the wild, as it were. They’re arranged in a progression that moves from pure sword & sorcery to sword & sorcery with a science fiction element to pure science fiction. Up through Picnic On Paradise, you can read the Alyx stories purely as adventures — of a particularly literary SF type. But the last story, “The Second Inquisition” slams you up against the metafictional wall. It’s a time travel story, a coming-of-age story, possibly an origin story — and a story about creating stories. It’s obvious from reading criticism of the story (and for that matter, the series) that it’s given the more theory-oriented critics plenty to chew on. All I know is that I liked all of the Alyx stories, and would have been very happy to read a long series. Ah well!

If Russ’s Alyx tales are meta-fictional, Delany’s Nevèrÿon. stories are, like, maxi- mum-strength meta-meta-fiction. With bells on. A USA Today review/blurb describes them “as if Umberto Eco had written about Conan the Barbarian,” but who needs Eco? It’s as if the author of Dhalgren had written about Conan the Barbarian. Right? Like Russ, Delany led me down the garden path to sword & sorcery. I’d read some of his more SFnal stuff first and was surprised to find that Tales of Nevèrÿon. was sword & sorcery, and it took me a while to recognize “Conan” in it. But I liked them because they were experimental, feminist, anti-racist, and literary. I also liked them because — once again — they reminded me of the Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser stories. Like Leiber, Delany rewrites his “Conans” (Gorgik, Raven) as a bit more human than

90 the original, both in their good traits and bad. Their flaws don’t quite make them anti-heroes (such as Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser might be called), but simply people embedded in their culture. Adver- saries — or “frenemies” like Norema and Raven, aren’t good or evil but representatives from two different cultures, which clash. There’s a lot of humor in these stories, too. Delany’s language is often playful. You can’t help but smile every time Raven says “your strange and terrible land” or at the obligatory tag the characters must add after mentioning the Child Empress -- whose reign is proud and prudent, just and generous, good and gracious, etc. Delany is basically working out a feminist and anti- racist ‘Conan’ before our eyes. Russ, doing much the same thing, is more economical, dropping hints about matriarchies, wars, social changes, or gender- bent creation myths. Delany goes into a lot of detail. The mysterious traveler Raven gives us the long- form version of her peoples’ woman-centered creation myth. Gorgik holds forth on his relationship to slavery from the point of view of both slave and owner, including his sexual kink about wearing the collar, and Old Venn lectures us on the change from a barter economy to a money economy. There is a large ratio of exposition to action, and it sometimes feels like Delany is world- building rather than writing a story. Which is fine, world-building is part of story-telling, and in a story about story-telling, it’s not out of place. But it’s a departure from Howard, to say the least. It’s hard to imagine Conan sitting still for the stories by Old Venn or Raven. And yet, with all Delany does say, he still manages to tease the reader with what he doesn’t, leaving more than enough mystery hanging around the exposition. Delany’s dream dust has a bit more grit in it, but it still sparkles. The stories in Tales of Nevèrÿon. are bracketed by an introduction, “Return…a Preface” by K. Leslie Steiner (which isn’t in the original paperback copy I first read) and an afterword, “Some Informal remarks Toward the Modular Calculus, Part Three” by S.L. Kermit, both obviously pseudonyms for Delany. These are delightfully confusing — I mean, metafictional, purporting to elucidate the text and amplify themes, Steiner telling us, as if we couldn’t figure it out for ourselves, that “Delany’s mega-fantasy is a fascinating fiction of ideas, a narrative hall of mirrors, an intricate argument about power, sexuality, and narration itself.” 91

Each chapter is set off by a quote from one or another of the darlings, I mean giants, of modernist or postmodernist literature, philosophy, and history. All of this went right over my head the first time I read the book, so I ignored them, the way I do now that I know (in a general way) who they are. Who but Delany would think it’s a good idea to quote Spivak and Foucault in a sword & sorcery novel? Samuel Delany is a genius, but he’s also a braniac goofball. But I appreciate it as a concept. As a whole package, it’s a wonder of meta-fictional science fiction/fantasy, and if you are into this kind of stuff, this is certainly the stuff for you. Unlike the way I was hoodwinked by Russ and Delany into reading sword & sorcery, I read Charles Saunders’s Imaro on purpose. By now I was interested in new takes on Howard’s stories, and picked it up because Saunders writes another “iteration” of Conan. The version I picked up was the Night Shade edition, revised by Saunders and published in 2006. The DAW originals had been long out of print. “Imaro would be the anti-Tarzan,” Saunders writes in his preface to the new edition, “and the setting in which his story unfolded would be an alternate-world Africa rather than an imaginary prehistoric era of the Earth we know, as was the case in Howard’s Hyborian Age and Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Imaro’s Africa, which I named Nyumbani, would serve as an antidote to the negative stereotypes about the so-called ‘Dark Continent’ that crept -- ad- vertently and inadvertently -- into the fantasy world of far too many other writers.” So of course, DAW Books marketed the series as “An epic novel of a Black Tarzan,” to Saunder’s chagrin and to the disapproval of the trademark-conscious estate of Edgar Rice Burroughs. The cover had to be re-done, which delayed the book, which caused distribution problems. By the time the second book came out, the first was out of print; the third book didn’t sell, and DAW discontinued the series. In some ways, Saunders writes closest to Howard’s original than the other authors here. The stories are certainly more action-oriented. Imaro comes up against rival warriors and bad guys, wild panthers, lions and crocodiles, and evil sorcerers, one half-changed into a lion, the other half-changed into an alien, and vanquishes all mostly by sheer force, wading in with his knives and clubs and not incidentally, his rage. Imaro is a six-foot tower of sim- mering rage. Saunders brings in the Howard/Lovecraftian Weird wholesale with Ancient Evil Gods/ Monsters complete with tentacles. But Saunders has his own version of the dream-dust sparkle, and uses it to create a larger-than-life, extravagant, magical version of Africa. It’s a place of diverse tribes and cultures, deep time, ancient legends, storied people, traditions that shade into magic, and magic that turns evil. He kicks up the savagery of nature red in tooth and claw to something more supernatural; familiar animals become the source of magic, and their special characters are intwined with the destinies of humans. The landscape of Imaro shimmers with weirdness like a heat-mirage. And while Imaro charges across the African continent battling monsters and madmen, he

92 also, like Gorgik, Raven, Alyx, Fafhrd and the Gray mouser -- like Conan himself -- also deals with the human problems of slavery and freedom, the nature of stories and story- telling, and the question of who, exactly, is the Barbarian. (Hint: it’s not Imaro.)

I’m not really fond of parodies of Conan. It’s just… too easy a target, I guess. The exception is Terry Pratchett’s take on Conan in his Discworld novels. Of course, Terry Pratchett is an exception in general. He takes the spoof just to the edge of what I can stand, but he tem- pers it with a dollop of weird. And it’s metafictional, to boot. Pratchett doesn’t just “interrogate the trope,” he subjects it to the third degree with rubber hoses and bright lights. If a Discworld character was trans- ported to Nevèrÿon, Raven or Old Venn would find their tales interrupted by a wide-eyed skeptic who’d pepper them with the repeated question: “Why?” Each Discworld novel centers on a fantasy trope or theme, whether it’s Fairy Tales, Vam- pires, Australia or the Post Office. But Pratchett always multi-tasks in the Discworld novels; he’ll have pastiches of several different things going on at once, plus references to other things pulled in from everywhere, like keeping a bunch of spinning plates in motion. Sword & sorcery is often there in the background, or the B-plot, as it were. There are nods here and there to Leiber. The city of Ank-Morpork, owes more to Lankhmar than its name; and in The Colour of Magic Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are parodied as Bravd and the Weasel. And of course Pratchett references Conan. In Sourcery we meet Conina, the daughter of the great Cohen the Barbarian, who has inherited her father’s strength and fighting ability, but longs to be a beautician. (Eyeroll). Cohen the Barbarian (first name Ghengiz) appears in three books in which Pratchett delves into sword & sorcery storytelling: The Light Fantastic, Interesting Times, and The Last Hero (illustrated by Jack Kirby). Pratchett pushes the aging Conan -- as written by L. Spra- gue de Camp and Lin Carter -- into his eighties, though Cohen and his band the Silver Horde can still take on a team of Ninja fighters and win. But when we meet him in The Light Fantastic he’s a wheezing, toothless, broken-down bag of bones who throws out his back during a fight. Still, he’s a living legend. Which is the problem. “Hang on, hang on,” said Rincewind. “Cohen’s a great big chap, neck like a bull, got chest muscles like a sack of footballs. I mean, he’s the Disc’s greatest warrior, a legend in his own lifetime. I remember my granddad telling me he saw him… my granddad telling me he … my granddad…” He faltered under the gimlet gaze. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, of course. Sorry.” “Yesh,” said Cohen, and sighed. Thatsh right, boy. I’m a lifetime in my own legend.” Underlying the humor is Pratchett’s deep interest in legend, myth, and storytelling. What

93 is the truth behind legends? What is a hero? Who owns a story? What makes a story myth- ic? (or “Myffic,” as Pratchett’s characters often say.) Pratchett, too, is interested in the question, “what is a Barbarian?” Cohen is ruthless and violent, but he has principles. In Interesting Times he resists the civilizing attempt by the character called Teach, who thinks he can educate the Silver Horde into good citizens, but he is shocked by Lord Hong and his exquisitely civilized but barbaric courtiers. In The Last Hero, Cohen kidnaps a bard (then as an afterthought hires him by offering a fortune in rubies) to write the saga of the Silver Horde as they embark on their last quest -- to return fire to the Gods. The embedded bard gets caught up in the story and follows it to its end -- both to see how the story comes out, and to make sure he gets it right. By the time the Silver Horde have performed their final (--or is it?) act of heroism, he realizes how important they are. “He’d never been keen on heroes. But he realized that he needed them to be there, like forests and mountains… he might never see them, but they filled some sort of hole in his mind. Some sort of hole in everyone’s mind.”

I didn’t read the original stories of Conan the Barbarian until late in life. But in a way, I had read them. I read them in Fritz Leiber’s more human and humorous take in Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. I read them in Joanna Russ’s genderbending Alyx stories that mod- ernized them with a “governessy” woman warrior (and more humor). I read them in Sam- uel Delany’s metafictional treatment that -- well, did a lot of things. I read them in Saunders’ Imaro, where a Black African warrior is the hero instead of an ooga-booga extra, and I read them in Pratchett’s Ghengiz Cohen, an octogenarian hero who doesn’t know how to be anything else and wants to be remembered in legend. So, after reading all of these different iterations of Howard’s series, all of these very thoughtful — if not over-thought — literary and political and meta-takes on Conan the Bar- barian that would have given Robert E. Howard the fantods, what did I think of the original? Well (she says, looking guiltily over her shoulder), I like them a lot. With reservations! The Damon Knight quote at the head of this essay pretty much sums it up for me. Howard had a genius for casting that weird dream-dust over his stories, adding a shine and a shimmer to his hero’s adventures in testosterone. It’s enough — barely — to offset the facepalming thud and blunder. It’s enough — obviously! — for writers who find his views on race and gender odious or the character simply too one-dimensional, to take up the tales and recast them, and in the process explore how stories are told and re-told. It’s interesting how seriously these very serious authors take the old sword & sorcery hero. It’s a pleasure, above and beyond reading good stories, to see the way they take themes and ideas from the original and blow them up, bend them ‘round, turn them inside out, carry them over into new settings. I’m impressed at how much all these writers appreciated Howard’s Barbarian; and think how thin and careworn his legacy would be without writers like Leiber, Russ, Delany, Saunders and Pratchett to create him anew, again and again.

One more thing – this essay is my own personal journey through S&S and not a survey of the genre. What about Jirel of Joiry? The Swords & Sorceresses anthologies? Etc.? In an earlier draft I mentioned Chicks in Chainmail, as an example of spoofs I didn’t much care for, but since it was just a negative mention, I cut it. And I did read the Bradley anthologies, and was planning to look at them again – but can’t find them. They’re either in a box in the (cue scary music) garage or I gave them to the shop; either way they must not have impressed me much. (Though the table of contents of Volume 1 looks pretty impressive.)

Fafhrd and Gray Mouser

The Books Fritz Leiber Swords Against Wizardry (1968) Swords in the Mist (1968) The Swords of Lankhmar (1968) Swords and Deviltry (1970) Swords Against Death (1970) Joanna Russ Alyx (1976, Gregg Press edition w/Intro by Delany) Samuel R. Delany Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979, 2004 edition w/ added introduction) Charles Saunders Imaro (1981, revised 2006) Terry Pratchett The Light Fantastic (1986) Conan the Barbarian Interesting Times (1989) The Last Hero (2001) Robert E. Howard Conan the Barbarian (2010 unabridged collection, Carlton House)

I miss fresh smelling moist salt air from few friends, empty out the Savage Rock Pho- Long Island Sound late at night walking tos post office box, take a few last pictures. from the Queens subway. More than two My ’70 Chevelle leaked 5 quarts of crankcase years have gone by since I wrote my “New oil along the Pennsylvania Turnpike (sorry, York-to-Wimpy Zone” travel and moving environment), but responded well to oil pan essay for Idea. I still miss New York’s China- bolt tightening and Permatex at my parents’ town (and an unknown-in-Minnesota dish house, in Pittsburgh. You can’t go home called chow fun), I miss CBGB’s, newsstands again, but you can still leave oil stains on and good cheap pizza by the slice, St. Mark’s your dad’s garage floor. Place, driving over big weird old bridges like I did family visits, looked up old friends, had the Bayonne Skyway, visiting once and fu- a look at my old post-college neighborhood, ture faneds in their plush publishing offices. East Liberty/Shadyside, Pittsburgh’s East No more wild hot late nights drumming in and West Villages. Then I headed north for a cheap rocked out beer soaked practice studi- college reunion on a farm north of Grove os, playing with Josh and the War Pigs at a City. The timing was great. Many of us had- place called The Dive. Josh now lives atop a n’t seen each other since 1975, some of us mountain in the Adirondacks pubbing a lo- still had long hair. Ben had driven from Day- cal rock tabloid. I even fondly remember ton in a Chevy 13 years older than mine. I Fanoclasts gatherings at Stu Shiffman’s and tried some back roads I used to know to get later at Lise Eisenberg’s. I don’t miss cock- there and got good and lost. Instead I some- roaches, late-night subway platforms, driv- how I found myself at the big rocks in the ing ’till dawn around the streets of Queens State Game Lands where I met my power looking for a parking space. Or most of the animal, a mountain lion, one night long ago. Lunarians. When I finally arrived at Jan's farm, I found Two weeks after I arrived in Minnesota with a note saying everyone was swimming at the my life-in-a-Ryder-truck I flew back to New strip mines. They came back and found me York to look for my car. I had to say absolute replacing my sparkplugs. We spent the next final “yes-I’m-really-leaving” goodbyes to a 96

hour drinking beer and sticking our heads making rights on red without stopping or under car hoods. We concluded that Ben’s even slowing down much. And I’m talking engine was cleaner but mine was a lot big- about the balding hippies in old Volvos with ger. Everyone seemed pretty happy with Deadhead stickers! The Type-A BMW driv- their lives, no one seemed to have been ad- ers are far worse. versely mutated by the massive doses of ly- But this isn’t what’s on my mind, what I’m sergic acid diethylamide we all took 17 years trying to write about here. My never-ending before. It was almost too cosmic for me to go lifework, the search for transcendence, is. through all of this while on my way to a new Sometimes it just hits me over the head, giv- life in Minnesota, touching all the bases, ing me a warm, clear, light-diffused image, a running for home. swelled chest, a new idea. Other times I can So here I am. I’ve found the rock ’n roll sce- arrange for things to happen, place myself in ne here isn’t quite what I had in mind. I may surroundings like ones that have worked in have to change the name of my business. the past, like the Lake Poets, like wandering There’s bars and bands all right, lots of the meadow in Wordsworth’s “The Prelude.” them, with weird names and arty posters Finding spots of time in the world where I stuck up on all the best utility poles in Up- can sit and think clearly. I even found a few town. But I find that many of the mundane such cosmic places in the heart of New York rockers, artists, musicians and their hangers itself, bicycling amidst junkyards by the East -on up here are isolated, nihilistic, apolitical. River, watching tugboats go by, looking Worse than the usual suspects, I mean. The across at Manhattan. Peering down a side- Minnesota rockers I’ve met through my walk grate and seeing a sunken mini-forest punk friend from work unanimously chain- of weeds and junk trees on Park Ave. And smoke cigarettes, laughed at me for wearing there’s always the Staten Island ferry at 4:30 a hat into the C.C. Club one night when it am. They even have a bar! was 40 below, have permanent bronchitis, I like to find places that haven’t yet been don’t want to hear that they need to move to stomped on by the Wise Use fascists, or L.A. or NYC for a while. Weird small town spots that have had a century or so to recov- stuff. er from clearcutting. There were reforested The bars close at 1:00 A.M. up here. Not on- state game lands in Pennsylvania where I ly do they literally throw you out but they camped in the summers, cliffs above the Po- turn up the lights 15 minutes before and yell tomac River a few minutes north of the up- at you like you’re stupid. In Pennsylvania, per beltway bridge where I could be all alone they stop selling drinks at 2:00 A.M., in New on a weekday evening. I found satori on hot York at 4, but you can usually sit around summer nights sitting on the edge of the drinking your last one while the bartenders stone portico at the back of the Lincoln Me- clean up. Not here. This means there’s a morial, legs dangling over the stonework, nightly highway horror show as all the smelling the old swamps back there, watch- drunks pile into their rusty beaters and sim- ing planes land at National. I know a little ultaneously race for home. Everyone drives yoga, a bit about breathing, some relaxing like they’re in Cairo up here anyway, foot to tricks. And I know I need to get away from the floor, running stop signs and red lights, home once in a while to shed distractions. 97

So here I am, in Minnesota, in a nice little got smaller—twice—since this place was house with my cats and my books and stereo built. You have to get bigger sizes and rip and a darkroom in the basement. I can set them down to size. my drums up if I feel like it, though I don’t But I still had this itch to track down that bit often feel like it. I live with someone who of prairie by the Crosstown. I decided that understands and respects creativity and who this search would be the theme of my next likes to go camping just as much as I do, installment for Idea, and told Geri, so she probably for more or less the same reasons, would be reassured that I was, indeed, actu- dwelling on the whichness of what. ally writing it. And then it happened, we Here in Minnesota there are still vast areas were returning from the airport and Geri of green. Much is farmland, most of the rest shook me to my very soul with the an- is in its second or third growth of trees or nouncement that the ratty little patch of grass. One thing I’d been trying to find was a weeds with the chain-link fence around it a real prairie. There is a conserved patch in mile west of the airport was, indeed, The Western Pennsylvania, the eastern-most Crosstown Prairie. Not what I thought it prairie ever found. A guy named Jennings would look like, nowhere near where I bought it long ago and kept it from develop- thought it would be. ment. I’ve been there. But I wanted to see Then, reading about Wirth Park, the oldest where the buffalo roamed. One day an article regional park, just west of Minneapolis, I in the paper caught my eye about this dan- found some vague references to a couple of gerous little jog that Route 62, the Cross- acres of prairie acquired by the park system town, makes, to avoid tearing up a preserved in the 1960’s. They were tacked onto the patch of unplowed prairie. I thought I’d just western border, behind the 9-hole golf head out one day, drive west on the cross- course. All right, I’ll go find that instead. town, find a place to pull over, go visit this Following the cross country ski trails, Geri thing. and I found a hill top clearing with little Time went by and I found a good job setting Park Ranger signs identifying various type on the nightshift in a small studio. I also clumps of vegetation. Surrounded by rail- soon found myself literally up to my elbows yards, suburban homes, a golf course, in Toad Hall, Geri Sullivan (Girl Homeown- bounded on the west side by Twin Lake, the er)’s wonderful little wooden house, now my local nude beach. Not exactly secret or pri- home also, which apparently had been near- vate, but still a couple acres of real prairie! ly eaten by the squirrels. The usual Sears I go back occasionally. It has its moments. Roebuck All-American thing to do is to cover It’s not the most wonderful wilderness everything over with vinyl plastic siding. around, but it’s what I’ve found so far. I’ll Geri and I don’t feel that that is what you do keep looking: that’s half the fun. with an antique wooden house. What we’ve done instead has been to tear off large sec- from Geri Sullivan's Idea #4 tions of bad wood, hunt down replacement February, 1992 moldings from lumberyards, putting it all back together with a spiff coat of paint. It’s hard to find lumber that fits, though, 2x4’s

I’m old. I am Medicare card carrying, AARP-eligible old. I remember Claudine Longet as a singer, not a murderer old. I know how to do the Bossa Nova, the Po- ny and the Swim. I’ve worn mis- matched string bikinis, jeans with the waistband cut off and line- backer power suits in the original, old. I’ve owned Janis Joplin on vinyl, Easy E on cassette, and I’ve seen turntables with the number 78 on them. I’m that kind of old, old. And I love the freedom it offers-- not only the new leaf but the whole damn tree where my credit rating and my resume are as un- necessary as a street map of Bor- neo. I don’t have to do fucking anything anymore because “old” launders all sorts of societal mala- dies. No longer is one lazy or shift- less or drugged or smelly or weird—one is simply just old. That is not to say I am unaware of the clichéd sword hanging over my head, and much worse, over the heads of those that I love. I am writing this in the time of the pandemic, when fear of death has hijacked everyone’s minds. Old people are used to this. We live with an element of non -specific sadness in every happy moment. We live with the knowledge that it’s all going to end badly with someone in a hospital bed in the living room. No wonder the transition from our working to not-so-much working lives is difficult. We are no longer “building”— not a career, not a family (for those so inclined), not a treasury of vehicles, kitchen machines and home furnishings, not a solid financial base. We’ve stopped enjoying the boats, trampolines and swimming pools that litter our gardens and driveways. We can choose to hold on to those things and continue to define ourselves as we were in the world. And we could end up looking like Cher. Alternatively, we can slowly disassemble our former lives and keep only the treasured essentials. The idea that we get wiser with age is a crock of shit. Our experience has taught us only that there is a bunch of junk we don’t know and that is too much trouble to learn. I can eas-

ily buy heroin on the corner of Mission and 16th but will never want to figure out the dark- net market, it’s just too much of a bother. This is not to say that old people don’t want to learn—senior enrollment at universities prove otherwise. We are just picky and selfish with our brains and now have a modicum of time to dive deeply into the things we previously took note of. General knowledge is for the half-drunk and overly-medicated young at a hip- ster bar. We old are glad to say that we don’t know and we just don’t care, except for those few specific topics—Civil War sites, metal detector finds, scrapbooking, which we plan to drone on about at your next Thanksgiving dinner. When I realized it as a child, going from a small middle school to a large high school, it comforted me to know that a whole world was already set up to make the next step. Instead of having to create a new environment from scratch because I had not imagined it yet, I simply merged onto a new, busy freeway of folks already going the speed limit. In old age, there are many merges, some chosen and some forced by ill health and loss. But now is also the time to enjoy the leftovers that we didn’t notice when creating the broad strokes and big productions of our younger years. Eventually, everyone gets stuck in place until they die, so we can be watchful of our capacity and imagine the vistas that we would like to see on our last day. Finally, unless we are Shakespeare, we leave no legacy. Our homes once carefully tended fall into the worst sort disrepair. All those things we looked after—the kitchen counters, the weeded garden, the savings account of all credits and no debits are disposed of in minutes after our deaths. They are not abandoned dreams, they are aged-out dreams that our bene- ficiaries don’t hold. You were the dreamer of this particular set of cabinets with the straw- berry shelf paper— no one will care after you. And to that I say, so the hell what. I tend to my counters, I fill my brain with images of junk that people have created, I ornament everything—-none of it is a legacy. It is just good enough for now.

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LETTERS

COMMENT

[I wanted to start the letter column acknowledging that 2020 was The Time Of The Covid. Phil Paine wrote a moving post for his blog at PhilPaine.com. When I asked if I could use it in the locs this ish Phil admitted he was a bit puzzled by the strong reaction this post had garnered. I think he gets to the heart of it in this beautifully written “letter”.]

PHIL PAINE PhilPaine.com Toronto, Ontario When Olive Fredrickson published her autobiography in 1972, after a long and hard life in Canada’s wilderness, her chosen title, The Silence of the North, was instantly meaningful to anyone familiar with the hard and empty country north of the temperate deciduous forests. Most of the forests of the world are noisy. At night, the relentless sound of cicadas, the scampering of animals, the sway- ing limbs of trees and rustles of leaves, and the sounds of humanity, even if only in the form of distant trains or highways, are evident. But the vast boreal regions of Canada, roadless, trainless and townless, dominated by motionless black spruce and tamarack, are silent at night. You have to be near a waterfall or a stretch of rapids to hear noise. The cold lakes are like black sheets of obsidian. Ironically, if there is a noise, it will carry across a lake for miles, so that you can make out a quiet conversation by a campfire from the opposite shore, and when a loon makes its occasional solemn cry, you don’t know if it’s nearby or three kliks away. I have vivid memories of that silence, and the phrase never had to be explained to me. I live in a small apartment in downtown Toronto. In fact, it is known to statisticians as the most densely populated place in Canada. Within a short walk from my door, there are more people than in all of the Yukon, Northwest and Nunavut territories combined. Normally, this is a very noisy neighbourhood. The streets are usually crowded with traffic, people pour in and out of the subway stations, the stores are full of shoppers. There is always music. A few blocks from my home, the gay village has been a continuously lively party for the last half century, and it’s normal to see flocks of people on the streets at 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning. Forests of condominium towers fill the air with domestic noises, and construction crews are always hammering, hoisting, and mixing concrete to build new ones. Motorcycles, helicopters, cop cars, fire engines and ambulances add to the din.

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Now, under lockdow, my neighbourhood has the it seems, and that it is properly deployed. I follow Silence of the North. For most of the day, you all the available covid statistics daily. New Zea- hardly hear a sound. For me, it’s a bit of nostal- land and Iceland, both of which are places whose gia. For the hardcore denizens, those “bred and statistics are unquestionable, demonstrate that buttered in Toronto” as the saying goes, it must the virus can be beaten if the citizenry, medical be very disconcerting. It’s “damned eerie,” one profession, and elected officials co-operate and elderly gentleman told me. But, every day, at are pro-active. Canada is, of course, a much larg- 7:30 on the dot, a raucous din erupts, and lasts er and more complex country than those two, for about five minutes. You hear the national with some inbuilt disadvantages that neither the anthem loudly playing. People are out on their Kiwis nor the Jáarar have, but the evidence so far balconies blowing whistles, banging pots, and is that the methods should be basically the same. singing. The custom, which began in Italy and We will not come out as squeaky-clean ― the spread around the world, is a needed emotional scandalous failure in our care for the elderly will outlet as well as a tribute to the doctors, first be a stain on our record ― but we may at least get responders, care-givers and store clerks who a “good effort” report card. As I write, testing lev- must risk infection so that life can go on. els have been consistently better than average, For myself, I’m as satisfied as a well-fed cat with immediate prospects of drastic improve- sleeping near a fireplace. Well-stocked with sup- ment, no regional medical system has been over- plies, blessed with good neighbours who are self- whelmed, though some are working at a frenzied disciplined and mutually helpful, and surround- pace, procurement of essential supplies seems to ed by a vast collection of books, films and music, be assured, public response has been as good as I am in no position to complain about anything. anyone could reasonably expect, social solidarity While the public authorities made some errors and public morale have remained high, the co- in the beginning, on the whole they are acting operation between private industry and govern- responsibly ― even the ones I voted against. ment has been exemplary, and there are no food None of them are wasting time with self- shortages or significant failures in the supply promoting propaganda videos and all of them chain. I went to a supermarket to stock up on are publicly committed to following the science fresh vegetables on Tuesday morning, after more to determine policy. Alberta, which began plan- than a week spent entirely at home. I arrived just ning for the pandemic last December, and is at store opening, and there was as yet no line-up consequently less seriously affected, is sharing to get in, though it had started to form when I its surplus medical supplies with the other prov- left, with all the protocols adhered to. I scanned inces, and Air Canada has volunteered three the shelves, and everything appeared to be well- large jets to move them. Politics in Canada is not stocked, and even toilet paper, cleansers, eggs, as a rule much concerned with race or religion, and canned goods were plentiful. The selection of as it is in our neighbour to the south, but it has produce was excellent. There was no evidence of always been characterized by extreme rivalries price-gouging, but some items had limits-per- and constant bickering between the provinces, customer, and there were none of the usual “loss- each of which sees itself more or less as a mini- leader” sale prices. If this normalcy can be sus- nation. But in this crisis, all such rivalries seem tained, I know not, but in any case my personal to have disappeared. I’ve never seen the provinc- stockpile is sufficient for months, and I am only es get on so well, or co-operate so efficiently. shopping for fresh items. The one sour note is that the crisis has revealed I’m able to keep my finances on an even keel, the shocking level of ill-preparedness and in- since my income is not dependent on leaving the competence in privately-run homes for the aged, apartment, and I have a small cushion in the where half of our deaths have occurred. In one bank to deal with any temporary shortfall. I’ve case, criminal charges are being considered. On never eaten so well! Since the best way to relieve the brighter side, a company in Ottawa has de- the inevitable cramps from sitting at the comput- veloped an efficient portable testing kit, giving er is to get up and prepare a meal, and I no long- results in less than half an hour, that meets the er have the temptation to run out and get three government’s standards, and mass production of slices of pizza or indulge in other unhealthy this kit is already underway. Mass testing, when whims, I am steadily improving my cooking combined with social distancing and contact skills. My neighbours tell me they are also doing tracing, is the solidly proven way out of this this (except for the one who is a professional mess. Let’s hope that the kit is really as good as chef). I have fresh herbs growing on the window-

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sill. I’m going to be using a lot of basil. If you time we were on our way to Texas. By last Friday plant basil it will just leap out of the soil and we were in College Station and the package had overwhelm everything, like the Blob in the 1958 arrived at our local post office, and on Saturday Steve McQueen movie, while every other herb it was out for delivery. A friend was staying in has a tough Darwinian struggle. My only regret the house and taking care of the cats, but on Sat- is that I didn’t stock enough caraway seed, so my urday the status of the package was "Notice Left goulash and my borscht will no longer have the (No Secure Location Available)". We have a taste I prefer. But with all that basil, my Italian large mailbox by the front door, so now I was dishes will shine. thinking that this must be something large. But At the moment, I’m listening to Otmar Mácha’s on Monday, as we were about to board our flight Double Concerto for Violin, Piano and Orches- home, it was "Delivered, In/At Mailbox". During tra ― a somewhat melodramatic piece. The cats the convention a number of attendees men- are snoozing. After writing the next few sentenc- tioned that they had received Portable Storage es, and posting them, I’ll curl up with the cats Three, but I still didn't made the connec- and read The Journal of Nicholas Cresswell, tion. And of course when we got home there it 1774–1777. Am I troubled or inconvenienced by was. I'm still catching up from the trip and have- the lockdown or social distancing? It’s a laugha- n't had a chance to read the issue yet, but as usu- ble idea. When Olive Fredrickson’s husband al it looks very good. Let me know when you're drowned in a lake, and her three children were ready to put the PDF on eFanzines. nearing starvation, she walked forty miles in a [I had a similar experience with the Post Office blizzard to reach the closest neighbour in order when ordering over $200 worth of stamps. It to get food for them, and remarked that the ex- took three separate orders to receive them. The perience left her with little love for wolves. There first order appears to have never left Kansas were as yet no phones or radios in her part of the City where the Fulfillment Center is located. The world. There was no internet. packet was scanned into the system then went I have an apartment full of technology that, in down a black hole. The second shipment left my childhood, I would have considered a fantas- KCMO on September 23rd, arriving in Tucson tic science fiction dream. The speed of light is on the 26th, the town I live in. The stamps sat 299,792,458 metres per second. My average there for two days without an attempt to deliver download speed is 28 Mbps. My friends are not them to my address. They were then shipped to far away in time, though some are pretty far in Phoenix arriving on the 28th. They were then space. And I have very, very good friends. shipped to and arrived in Chicago on the 30th, BILL BURNS with a notice appended that there was an unsuc- cessful delivery attempt in Chicago that day. On [email protected] nd Hampstead, New York October 2 it was still stuck in Chicago. I called Mary and I just got back from Corflu, and I sus- the PO who followed the same tracking I did and pect that may be our last trip for quite a while, could not explain why this had happened. They as we'll almost certainly have to cancel our up- then shipped out a third order of stamps over- coming trip to the UK for Eastercon. Corflu at- night, which I did receive the following day. The tendance was down, but those who could be second order finally arrived a month later, which there (about 33 of us) had a very good time in I returned. No one knows what happened to the th Texas. On March 3rd I had received a notifica- original order placed on September 6 .] tion from USPS that a package was on its way (I'm signed up with them for notifications of [When Christina Lake confessed to writing locs incoming mail). As I hadn't ordered anything I on issues One and Two and never sending them wasn't sure what it was, and while I knew it was I sufficiently whined about her withholding that coming from Tucson I didn't connect it with she relented. I now await her loc on Three.] you. So I flagged it as "Mystery item from Tuc- son" and waited for updates. Nothing happened CHRISTINA LAKE until the 12th, when it arrived at the Los Angeles [email protected] distribution center. This left me even more puz- Falmouth, Cornwall zled, but eight hours later it had crossed the con- Portable Storage One tinent and was in the distribution center on Jo Walton might be able to immerse herself in Long Island a few miles away from here. By this fiction from Cardiff to London, but that takes a

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mere 2.5 hours compared to the 5-6 hours from I’m glad I did, and I’m glad your mother made London to Falmouth. After an hour or two fiction her peace with Paul Theroux. Though there is a starts to feel an indulgence, and not active difference between taking against a person for enough to engage my faculties for a whole train what happens outside of the pages of a book, and journey. That’s why I like best to put on music, the things that are part of the persona they reveal look out the window and think and occasionally in their work. It’s even more strange what differ- write. And I like to read fanzines and apas to ent people find unacceptable in fiction, even stimulate that thinking and writing process, and though it is fiction and the writer is not usually give it focus. So on with your article in the latest endorsing the thing that has caused the reader to fanzine. I’m sure I consciously imbibed some of C stop reading (usually cruelty to animals, or rape). S Lewis’ dictums about literary-ness when I was a I don’t think I ever found an entirely acceptable teenager enthralled to his essays on Christianity, alternative to Tolkien, though I did my best with values and books. His fantasy which wasn’t Tol- Stephen Donaldson, and Tolkien’s high fantasy kien but predated him in my reading life had all predecessors. And more recently, of course, the cachet of childhood first love for fantasy (and George R R Martin. I would agree with Dale Nel- which were regularly reread). His definition of son over the appeal of the old in Tolkien. Old the unliterary now sound hopelessly prescriptive, Norse sagas also might appeal, at least to fans of despite your generous contextualising. And as the Silmarillion (are there any?). I hadn’t your essay neatly encapsulates, rereading can be thought of the jeopardy cross-country adventure an unliterary activity, especially when picking up and agree that there is a similar narrative satis- an old favourite. When I re-read it is mainly for faction, but would the lack of higher order of re- comfort, but can be for re-engaging with or reap- ality really be satisfied, except perhaps if the his- praising books I’ve read in the past and want to torical or geographical setting was sufficiently think about again in a different context, or more exotic? Which is where the historical travel books likely because I’ve completely forgotten them. sound appealing, at least to the present day me. But I don’t think that’s what Lewis meant. I think The same with environmental books. While Tol- he meant the kind of critical re-reading that you kien’s conservationism and love for the English undertake for Michael Swanwick and Julia El- countryside is appealing, it’s not what I read his liott, but for the kind of works that are conven- book for. (Though on the subject of “What do tionally seen as literary, such as Mallory, Shake- they teach them in school” it was good to see par- speare and Dickens, or in the fantasy genre, may- ties of school children in Kew Gardens getting be William Morris, Dunsany. I do find that if I enthusiastic about identifying trees). want to write about a book in any depth then I do need to re-read it, unless I get my impressions Portable Storage Two down straight away. And it’s also possible that on I started off very enthusiastic about the idea of reflection, those impressions might be simplistic producing something like Portable Storage. Car- or mistaken. But life is too short, and my reading ried away by the idea and buoyed up by reading speed too slow to go into this detail for every about the energetic apa publishing of Alva, it book I read, so I just try to record short impres- seemed like the perfect format for the modern sions as a placeholder. Or discuss with someone fanzine fan. But then life intervened and Portable else, which is one reason why I so much enjoy Storage got put aside for a few weeks (despite the being part of a book group, and at more remote $7.91 invested in sending it to me). When I re- remove, fandom (which is full of people who like turned, my mood had changed. I read on, but to discuss books, some like Jo Walton who do it began to be intimidated by the writers, the talk of in print for anyone who is interested.) I’m not books I’d never read, the Bay Area vibe (even surprised to hear that Jo liked Pournelle’s Janis- lovely Rich and his appreciation of Di Fillipo). saries. Not because I’ve ever read it or doubt your The illustrations. Was this a fanzine or a nascent judgement, but because her own book The Just literary, small press production? Was this some- City uses the same stratagem of taking people thing I could ever do? Then I became irritated by from different periods of history and putting Dale Nelson and his lack of sympathy for broad- them together in one place and time to create the ening out the syllabus. Then bemused because eponymous just city. Incidentally, on the dangers every word that Dale wrote about his experiences of personal encounters, it took me a lot of persua- with inspirational teachers and their enthusiasm sion to read Jo’s work due to an unfortunate inci- for a wide and non-traditional range of books left dent at the 1995 Worldcon involving cider which me baffled as to why he didn’t see it as another gave me a negative impression of her as a person. 104

generation’s way of engaging with literature. And TOM JACKSON then I was back on fannishly familiar ground [email protected] with Jeanne’s story of her son’s electrocution, Berea, Ohio and the letter column which I had failed to con- Portable Storage Two: tribute to despite writing my loc in May. I remain Cy Chauvin was correct for pointing out that impressed but uncertain whether it’s a model I John Fugazzi didn't name a favorite Beatle, and could successfully follow. you were correct for pointing out that Cy didn't [Some things here: My mom was a big fan of the volunteer one. I was surprised that you named Silmarillion. And probably Norse Saga. She was Ringo as your favorite. Are you trying to be a so wide ranging in her reading it was hard to contrarian? keep up. // In my enthusiasm for Print On De- But I wonder how many people are like me. I mand I may have lost track of the individual voice have not had a fixed favorite Beatle all of my life; of others. Not that I think that voice would be- my choice has changed over the years. As a teen, come lost if POD were used, but that POD simply my favorite was George. He seemed to be kind of may be undesirable to others. // If I had done a an underdog, only allowed a couple of songs per traditionally stapled (and slightly sloppier) fanzine album, and All Things Must Pass was the first but presented the same material I wonder if you really good solo album. Then, too, he organized would question the authenticity of Portable Stor- the charity concert for Bangladesh, which coaxed age’s fannish heritage. I have always published a great live performance out of Bob Dylan. Then earnest little fanzines. And in my way have John Lennon was a favorite for a while -- he strived for Art in that context (no matter how im- seemed like the intellectual of the bunch, the one perfect they were). Now that I am older I tend to who seemed the most interesting, and the one be less emotive (and gushy) but the sincerity of whose songwriting seemed to hold up the best my endeavors remain almost identical to those after the Beatles broke up. But as I aged, I decid- displayed in that fanzine from the 1970s. // There ed Paul was my favorite. In many ways, he seems is an odd common undercurrent among our best the most adult of the Beatles, the one who valued writers and thinkers in fanzine fandom to feel children and treated them well, the one who was intimidated by the prowess and excellence of loyal to women and seemed to treat them well, others. I can’t help but think this is because of too, and the one who always seemed to be work- something in all our upbringings that causes ing hard at his art. He has been the one who has twinges of insecurity and questioning of our own regularly toured, allowing fans to see him, and self-worth. How sercon is that?] who has worked all the time on new recording projects, and gone out of his way to challenge himself with different approaches -- he even made electronic music albums that no one noticed for a long time. I finally got to see him live in Cleveland a couple of years ago. [Ever since A Hard Day’s Night I have identified with Ringo. As I became an adult Ringo seemed to be the only Beatle that had a sense of humorous perspective. Upon rediscovering the Beatles in my 60s I came to realize that Ringo’s drumming completely dominates the sound of the Beatles. Without him they would have been a different band. Your argument for Paul is not without merit. He is probably the nicest of the Beatles. I never liked John. He always seemed like a mean little man to me. George? A lost spir- itualist. ] I love Roger Zelazny probably about as much as Kennedy Gammage does, but although I don't want to wound him, I'm not a huge fan of the Amber books. They are OK. Zelazny is interesting in the sense that there's no one better when he is

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good, but he can also be pretty bad. I certainly was in 1964, when I spent the summer in Berke- didn't care for To Die in Italbar, for example, but ley, studying Hindi at the University of California I sure loved This Immortal, Isle of the Dead and on a National Defense Education Act fellowship. Lord of Light. But I think maybe he was at his This opportunity came to me because, in those best in short fiction. Brett Cox, by the way, has post-Sputnik years, Congress determined that it written a book on Zelazny. It is supposed to come would be useful to develop a cadre of people com- out next year, and I am looking forward to it. [I’ll petent in various exotic languages spoken in plac- go you one further, Tom, and say that Zelazny es of potential strategic importance. Under the was only at his best in the novella and novelette influence of too much Kipling I had begun my length. Brett, when your book on Zelazny is pub- study of Hindi as a Columbia freshman, not lished please let us know!] knowing about the NDEA, but I took advantage of the chance to I could not help feeling nostalgic for my old APA- spend summers 50 days when I saw the names in your zine -- not at Chicago and just you, but Cheryl Cline, Alva Svoboda, Ken Berkeley at the Gammage, Jim Bodie, even Steven Black and Jim government’s Khennedy in the WAHF! Loved Cheryl's sly com- expense. I nev- ment about having a 20-volume collected works er did learn of Frank Stockton around the house, "as one much Hindi – does." I'll bet it would be fun to see what else she the only Hindi I has around the house. remember is

hathi aam I really like the elaborate Steve Stiles drawing on khata hei, page 36; is there a story behind it? which means “the elephant is [From Steve Stiles’ email, accompanying the art- eating man- work: “I’m sending a piece of artwork for your goes”, a phrase consideration; the attached is an unpublished of surprising page, undiscovered in decades, that I did in the usefulness: I early 1970s for TANGRAM, a fanzine which was recite it just group edited by Eli Cohen, David Emerson, and before hanging the late Asenath Hammond: it never got off the up on tele- ground. This was page two of a three page comic phone calls strip (other two pages remain lost); it’s not about from scammers with Indian accents. (One of an acid trip, but a reaction of receptive people to them was sufficiently upset by this that he called the new music of that era: John Fugazzi’s article me back and cursed me out in Hindi. I didn’t un- on the Beatles reminded me that I had it & that derstand anything he said, but I did notice that you might want it. Kevin Kallenger (KAL), terrific he addressed me with the familiar tum rather editorial cartoonist for The Economist and The than the respectful aap, from which I deduced Baltimore Sun, liked it a lot (“Dammed good!”).”] that my response had not pleased him.) By the end of my sophomore year I had pretty FRED LERNER well concluded that fluency in Hindi was not like- [email protected] ly to play a role in my future, but the NDEA folks White River Junction, Vermont still had their hopes, so I received a second fel- My reaction to reading Portable Storage #2 was lowship. This time the program was in Berkeley, that you certainly knew a remarkable variety of so I took the train – actually, a series of them: the fascinating people. Portable Storage #3 made it Twentieth Century Limited, the City of Denver, clear that your supply of fascinating friends and and the California Zephyr – to Pleasanton, Cali- acquaintances is inexhaustible. Like Armistead fornia. There I was met by my friend Ed Meskys, Maupin you have brought them together in one who then lived and worked in nearby Livermore. city. He drove me to Cloyne Court in Berkeley, where I’ve been to San Francisco only three or four after becoming a member-for-life of the Universi- times, the most recent of them in 1995. (I’ve been ty Students Cooperative Association and deposit- to San Jose twice since then. I’d best get my pri- ing my luggage in my room we went to Orinda. At orities straight.) My first encounter with The City a party at Poul and Karen Anderson’s house I was

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introduced to Fandom as it is practiced on the responsible for--and fewer magazines. So it was West Coast – which I found much more interest- last night before I sat down with Portable Stor- ing than Hindi. age Three, which I found entirely captivat- Bay Area Fandom in those days seemed to have ing. San Francisco, mostly in the ’70s.....I was little to do with San Francisco. My weekends there for the first time in ’75, which must be that were spent mostly in the East Bay, with a couple visit I wrote about in “Wolverine” [in Starfire 6], of forays to Los Angeles. But I did spend some and then down in Palo Alto from ’79 to ’83. I re- time in the City. I saw my first opera, a perfor- member envying those in my grad school cohort mance of “Manon”, at Stern Grove. (It wasn’t un- who lived in the city itself, which I didn't have the til seven years later that I saw another one: two confidence for—I didn't make friends easily then, thirds of Beethoven’s “Fidelio” at Covent Garden. without the structure of work or school, and so (A pillar cut off the view from the cheap seats. was afraid of being lonely without someplace to But I did hear the whole thing.) One day in Chi- go each day (MUCH better at it now) and the ad- natown I wandered into a restaurant with no oth- mittedly tiny network that my dept's lounge pro- er Caucasian patrons, and no English-language vided. So my San Francisco was a matter of day menu, so I chose my lunch by pointing to what trips, a lot of them built around food and/or another customer had on his plate. At the Cow art. Lots of visits to the Asian Art museum--the Palace I picketed the Republican nominating de Young itself wasn't so attractive to me, but the convention on behalf of Barry Goldwater; I found jades and ivories and painted screens were a rev- a more sympathetic audience there than I ever elation--and then the Palace of the Legion of did on the Berkeley campus. And I rode the trol- Honor. North Beach and Chinatown, Clement St. ley cars and cable cars, two forms of transport too. 8 Treasure Crispy Fried Noodles, one of the alien to New York City. I’m sure I saw and did a treasures being chicken gizzards. Often a visit to lot more in San Francisco, but that’s what I can that fort under the Golden Gate Bridge, esp. remember fifty-six years later. when I had visitors from back east. The San Francisco One thing about San Francisco that I do remem- bookstores ber was that it seemed a very formal city. It felt were never a appropriate to wear a jacket and tie when cross- great lure, ing the Bay, and there was nothing about San though, not Francisco that discouraged this. I gather from compared to some of the accounts in Portable Storage #3 that Kepler's and had I been there a year later I would have felt out others down of place dressed so formally; but I was there dur- on the Pen- ing the Summer Before the Summer of Love. insula, and By my last visit I had read Armistead Maupin’s later I had Tales of the City and watched the television mini- some series on PBS. Naturally Sheryl and I made a friends at point of visiting Macondray Lane in Russian Hill, Berkeley the inspiration for Anna Madrigal’s Barbary and got to Lane; and we stopped at Grace Cathedral and as know Cody's many other places as we could find that played a and part in the Tales. Moe's. One of the essays My thanks for the splendid anthology of writing spoke too of about San Francisco that you put together in La Honda Portable Storage Three – and for the reminder and Wood- that I’m overdue for another visit. side--I remember those crowds of friendly motorcyclists, MICHAEL GORRA and the sheer beauty of driving through those [email protected] hills and out to the coast. North Hampton, MA So lots of nostalgia in play as I read. I have been In the pandemic I seem to be reading more fic- back to the Bay Area just three times since I tion than I usually do--I mean, I read a lot of fic- left. Once in ’88 when my then-wife had a con- tion anyway, but I don’t have big writing projects ference; once in ’90 when I used a conference of this summer, so more stuff that I'm not directly 107

my own (the Dickens Project, in Santa Cruz) to sonal fixation on the ’60s counterculture party take a break from a marriage that by then was (that ended before I was old enough to attend) failing; and then again in the early 2000s when and probably guessed I’d be fine with that im- Smith sent me out to talk to an alumnae group balance. I remain frustrated, however, by the and I spent a few days in San Francisco and failure of writers generally to produce memoirs Berkeley each. I swore then that I would go back or fictions that really give the sense of what it sooner rather than later, but my wife's scholarly was like to be there. There are but a few books work (she's a medievalist) and family are in Eu- that linger in my mind for doing that (M.W. rope so we fly east instead from Massachusetts, Jacobs’ San Fran '60s: Stories of the Hippies, and then my own solo travels began to look to- the Summer of Love, and San Francisco in the ward Mississippi and other points '60s and Marco Vassi’s The Stoned Apoca- south. Faulkner country, and Civil War battle- lypse at the top of a very short list). Your fields. One of these years.... brother Michael’s “Adventures of a Hillbilly Another thing I do remember, and that this issue Hippie” is a good addition to that canon and brought back—on that first visit in 1975, walking one of my favorites pieces in the issue. out west from Union Sq, where we'd been staying One thing I’ll be curious to see if any of your (I was with my grandparents) and all the way to LoC-writers pick up on is what strikes me as a Grant Canfield's apartment, where I got a warm subtle supporting theme about memory run- welcome. So it was a pleasure to read his account ning through the issue. Memory is probably an of those years, and then to see so many other unavoidable element of collection of personal names I remembered either at the heads of es- anecdotes, as the issue proved mainly to be, of says or in the LOC section. course. It’s only implicit in some pieces, while a Your Arizona has now become ground zero in the few writers – notably Kim Kerbis – commented resurgence. Hoping you're well. on it more specifically, mainly about its fallible nature. Did you notice how almost every writer mentioned lost or uncertain memories of their L. JIM KHENNEDY various stories? [email protected] Mesa, AZ That said, the fact that people forget things isn’t First, it’s a lovely piece of work and I’m suitably nearly so interesting, to me, as memory’s place impressed. The writing, of course, is highly vari- alongside perception, dream & imagination and able in quality. I’ve enjoyed pretty much all I’ve the way it can veer wildly from “objective reali- read so far, although it’s hard to say how much is ty” and distort and mutate with time. (I heard, because of the content’s innate quality and how not terribly long ago, of studies counter- much of my pleasure is due to my affection for a intuitively concluding that the more one men- large percentage of the people, places, and events tally revisits a memory, the more it becomes involved. deformed.) No one wrote very explicitly about this quality of memory in PS3, but there was One thing that made my reading experience some good evidence of it. Note, for instance, particularly enjoyable has been noting the way you and your brother Michael’s differing recol- certain things (again, people, places, and lections of where your bed came from, in the events) pop up repeatedly in different arti- family “back to the land” experience (or, outside cles. It’s hardly surprising, given that we were of the zine, your shock over your certainty over all writing about the same town – small in size when your formal education ended vs your fam- if not stature – and were part of, or related to, ily’s). the same tiny subculture, but it gave the whole immense undertaking a kind of cohesion and [I think the theory behind the distortion of the same kind of frisson one sometimes gets memory when it is often revisited is because running into a captivating detail (p,p & e.) in humans are story tellers and have a tendency large, complex novels, “shared world” antholo- to want to refine and maybe embellish. My fas- gies or broader canvases like the Cthulhu My- cination with memory is that our lives are com- thos. prised of nothing but memory. Take away our memory and what are we, even if it proves in- I found it a bit curious that there was far more accurate against reality, as in Kim Kerbis’ writing about the hippie than the punk scene, piece, and as you say, possibly my memory given how involved you and our contemporaries th flunking 5 grade, and no one in my family re- were in the latter. You know all about my per- 108

membering it that way—it still informs who we speech, we got to joking about the controversial are—in a big way.] episodes of Gilligan’s Island Sam Peckinpah I appreciated Terry Floyd’s comment that his had directed before striking gold with The Wild memories of the epic, acid-fueled “Messiah Bunch. (Pure silliness - Peckinpah did, in fact, Bunch” adventure “probably differ significantly do a lot of TV work early on – but almost all in from those of my brothers.” Just one excellent Westerns; no high-concept sitcoms.) Much lat- example of how right he is: At a key point early er, Dan explained that he believed Terry and I in the trip, he describes our friend Dan plead- had actually crewed on those Gilligan episodes, ing, “Let’s go to the beach,” while Terry serenely during which something profoundly terrible replied, “This is the beach.” (We were, in fact, had happened. He was certain that I was vil- at the side of a little pond or grassy area, just lainously using the memory of that (…tragedy? yards from one of the busy streets bordering …crime?) to blackmail Terry into making the Golden Gate Park.) [So, long death-march to that was either Speckles The Beach. Lake, or the lake at the I believe that my ver- Golf Course, both which sion is the more histor- are near Fulton Ave.— ically accurate: Terry and both pretty far out in had taken twice the the Numbered Avenues] dose as Dan and I and In my memory, which uncontrovertibly had seems unusually clear the most impaired given the circumstances, mental function *I* was the sole Messiah throughout. I’ve dis- who felt obsessively cussed the whole ad- compelled to march to venture with both Mes- the Bay. [Ha! Surely, siah Brothers in the you mean Ocean years since without Beach!] It was Dan who serious contradic- became the blissed out tion. He may no long- LSD philosopher who er recollect, but, at one said – and profoundly point, Terry explained believed that “This” was that, in those minutes the beach, just as acid- before we set out on heads past have intoned the death march, he revelations like, was experiencing the “Wherever you world as inside are, there you are, out. Rather than being man,” or on the surface of the “Hallucinations are just Earth’s enormous realities we don’t want sphere, he was walking to admit.” In that par- in place on its inner ticular mo- skin, the whole planet ment, Terry was almost revolving around him entirely non-verbal, for a long while unable to like a vast hamster wheel to create an illusion of say anything except “I took – a – psy–che-del– progress. His droning chant of “I took – a – psy ic drug” over and over and over. (Much to Dan – chedel –ic drug,” which he didn’t realize he and my chagrin, we being aware that he was was intoning aloud, was his attempt to reassure carrying a substantial stash and listing into par- himself that the world had not been inverted anoia.) and that he was simply taking a heavy trip. Man. (And, no, neither of is old enough – Terry was entirely passive. Dan was in touch nor was successful enough in our media ambi- with his mellow Buddha nature while I had be- tions – to have worked on Gilligan’s Island.) come one with my inner Captain Ahab, so my will prevailed. [I never understood why people put themselves through these experiences on LSD. I started far As we walked and Terry regained his power of too early—at 13—had very spotty trips, and

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never any that I would really call “good”. I yard) of any town, but the San Franciscos stopped all drugs entirely by the time I was 15, of Portable Storage really does only exist in the with the exception of when I was 18, and I took world of our memories. acid with Gene Young. That last time was so It’s a question that I don’t think I’m articulating intense Gene had to talk me down, as Terry well, and one that I haven’t been able to go any- was trying to do to himself that night. After that I where with. I was crudely groping toward some gave it up forever. My grip on reality is already kind of intelligent thought about the conun- too infirm for all that.] drum in the last bit of my article. Alva Svoboda might have been thinking in the same direction But which of us remembers those events most when he wrote, in his own piece, “There’s some- “accurately” from an objective perspective isn’t thing to be said for not having a… map at hand, the point. (I freely admit the possibility that my to preserve a city like San Francisco in the mind memory is the warped one). What intrigues me and memory as a place of limitless potential.” is how different memories can be from the “reality” they reflect. (Another example, from OK, that bit of awkward philosophizing is prob- my own PS article: I fear I made the tiki pillar ably as close as I’m going to get to a outside Tiki Bob’s restaurant sound like a grand LOC. Strictly between you and me, Terry monument to Exotica, which is the picture I Floyd, Grant Canfield and brother Michael’s carry of it my head. The photo you dug up as an were my favorite histories, Stacy and Joan illustration, however, proves it was actually as (didn’t she go by “Joanie?”)’s my favorites as simple, cheesy and unimpressive as could be. writing. (The first three for content + style, the other two mainly for style.) Speaking of Our experience of the universe is far more memory: I say that based on what stands out in memory than immediate experience. The hu- my memory, which is how I usually determine man “present,” the smallest increment of time “faves.” Other contributions probably struck we can perceive, is something like 5-20 micro- me as strongly but somehow haven’t lin- seconds. Reality isn’t made of movie-type gered. That’s especially true of “Pre-Built Ru- frames of that duration and our ability to recog- ins,” which was the first I read, so long ago now nize or comprehend anything more complex that all I remember of it is agreeing that you than a flash of light in any useful way probably were right-on in pairing it with my modest ram- requires a bit more than the 24th of a second bling. that a movie frame lingers on-screen. The present, a perceptible moment, is an incredibly brief and fleeting thing. Different people at dif- STEVE JEFFREY ferent times might mean the current day, week, [email protected] year, etc. when they refer to the present, but Kidlington, Oxon however short an increment they’re thinking of, Your fanzines get even more impressive and am- almost all of it has already happened. bitious with each issue. I'm half expect- ing Portable Storage Four to arrive in a slipcase So, given all that, what we experience as with a tipped in signature sheet. It's a far cry “reality” is actually, for all intents and purposes, from when I first encountered fanzines at Mexi- memory. Which means, in a way, when two or con III as typically a dozen or so pages of mimeo more of us remember the same thing differently or photocopied sheet stapled down one edge from each other, we’re actually experiencing (there were even, I learned, disputes over wheth- different realities. What intrigues me even er you should use two or three staples). This was more is that, though a healthy mind keeps them pretty much the accepted definition of what a sf properly labeled, memories of “real” events are fanzine was, despite a handful of legendary ex- probably stored in pretty much the way and ceptions like the 100+ page Les Spinge 14, as- place as those of dreams and things we’ve read, sembled with a power drill and metal straps, and seen or heard be they fiction, lies or facts. So, the 680-page hardcover anthology issue on a basic level, are scenes we remember of Warhoon 28. I have a copy of the latter. I have from Star Wars and treasured moments from never even seen a copy of Les Spinge. (I wonder our own pasts almost exactly the same thing? I if Les Spinge was pronounced in the same way as liked your sister Joan’s line, “Memories are all the name of the London folk club Les Cousins, as that is left of the city of dreams.” There are if it was the same of some bloke called Les, rather plenty of physical “relics” (buildings and roads; than with a French (or quasi-French) pronuncia- the shard of the Palace of Fine Arts in our back- 110

tion. Fancyclopedia3 doesn't mention.) to go hunting in the library and dig out my own Although technically, Mexicon III was my sec- copy of Carr's Fandom Harvest (the same 1986 ond, or maybe even third, encounter with fan- Laissez Faire Productions issue that Grant men- zines, although my first with sf fanzines. About a tions) which I must have picked up at a fan auc- decade before, in the summer of 1977, I picked up tion. My copy has a price of £8 penciled inside a copy of a handwritten purple and red ink the front cover, so I must have wanted it quite a mimeoed fanzine titled Psychedelia in the UK (an lot to bid that much in those days, although now, obvious nod the the Sex Pistols' Anarchy in the of course, you'd pay twice that much just for a t- UK) distributed at a gig by the alt-hippie band shirt. Here and Now and Mark Perry's Alternative TV. Curiously also inside the front cover is a post-it Then there was Mark's own punk fanzine Sniffin' note, long forgotten, on which I have scribbled a Glue and more local fanzines in the local Beggars' note "see Carr, FH, p179-81" and which on fur- Banquet record shop, which inspired a friend and ther examination turns out to be a reference to I to create and exchange our own punk fanzines, Carr's closing article, taken from a speech titled a combination of literal cut and paste and hand “You've Come a Long Way, Baby”, later a guest written or badly typed record and gig reviews. editorial for the Nov 1975 issue of Amazing. But back to Portable Storage Three. There a further note above this that references ‘Gomoll - After The Symposium’, which I take to It's an interest- be a reference to ing idea to do a Jeff Smith's themed issue on Khatru 3/4, a particular “Symposium on place, although a Women in Sci- lot depends on ence Fiction”. I've whether you no idea why I left have lived there, this note inside or even visited. the cover, apart Since I've done from a cryptic neither, it largely 'Acne' at the top, confirms a sense which suggests of San Francisco this was for a disas a mythical cussion thread in place, a heady the Acnestis apa. mixture of pop culture, adven- We digress (I di- ture and some- gress, anyway. times run-down Again. I'm afraid (even squalid) this isn't going to cheap living conditions - an impression I also be the most impeccably thought-out and con- get , albeit on the opposite coastline from reading structed letter of comment in fandom. Or even of Patti Smith's Just Kids. The other overwhelming 14th June 2020.) I met Grant at Corflu 36 (Corflu impression I get reading though these pieces is Fiawol). I was being dragged back, somewhat just how many references there are to drugs, par- nervously, into fandom after several years of in- ticularly LSD, which make you wonder if every- creasing gafiation, while Grant, to several peo- one in SF wandered about permanently stoned. ple's surprise and evident delight, was making his It's a bit like listening to an early Steely Dan lp. own return after a period away. Maybe for that reason, Grant and I fell in together during that It wasn't until about halfway through Grant Can- weekend, taking in various side trips and excur- field's long memoir, “My San Francisco Century,” sions to museums, tourist spots and bookstores. when he mentioned his involvement with Terry Carr's Fandom Harvest that I made the connec- It was also the first time (I think) that I met Steve tion. I'd seen some of Grant's work in early fan- Stile (sadly no longer with us) and Dan Steffan, zines back in the '80s when I remember being two fan artist who obviously admired Grant's impressed by, and trying (and failing) to emulate work as much as I did theirs. Indeed, one of the his enviable facility with line style in his cartoons highlights for me of Corflu 36 was a slide show and drawings. Seeing that mention prompted me

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presentation by Grant, Steve Stiles and Dan Steffan on the work their own favourite fan artists. One thing

Grant and I evidently do not share though is my nerv- ousness with heights. as shown by that photograph of Grant’s brother Curt perched high atop the Golden Fryer

- Gate Bridge. No way you would get me up there. (Or possibly even back down, without prying my fingers from a vice like grip on whatever I was holding onto.) I do like Gary Mattingly's opening remark about his memory being like Billy Pilgrim's life, "unstuck in time". Mine often feels like that, full of unanchored and detached flotsam drifting by. Remind me though Sidney Donald not to go to a gig with Gary, or accept a lift home from him afterwards. It all sounds far too exciting and dangerous. (Despite being to a number of punk gigs in the late 70s, I only really felt threatened by imminent vio-

lence once, at a Siouxsie and the Banshees gig when the singer of the support band launched himself off stage into the crowd after someone gobbed on him.)

I've never met Ray Nelson but it seems we have some- I resided in the City during the so- thing else in common apart from the need for optical called Hippie Period, c. 1965- assistance to read anything smaller than 12 point type, 1975. In earlier less crowed and in both having a feminine alter ego. Susie, as a distinct hectic times, San Francisco had personality, arrived somewhat late in my case, about already become “The Cool Grey six years ago (although the seeds had been there far, City of Love,” as aptly termed by far earlier, almost as long as I can remember), initially George Sterling her own poet lau- as an online persona, and then, only in the last few reate. But also, from the time of years, as someone out the world, albeit known to only the Gold Rush, it had been the a handful of people (still not, up to this time, to my Cool Grey City of Sex, of street- family, friends or even fandom.) And while slim, at 6 walkers, bordellos, and escort Cool Grey Cityof Sex ft plus I was never going to be Audrey Hepburn, alt- services, as it remains to this day. hough I have discovered the truism that older plainer I first encountered San Francisco women are (perhaps thankfully) largely socially invisi- as the Cool Grey City of Sex, apart from ble when out and about, except perhaps to other older my earliest contacts as a tourist. women. I was born and raised in New Bedford, RICHARD DENGROVE Massachusetts. Like San Francisco, New [email protected] Bedford had once functioned as a mari- Alexandria, Virginia time city, as the greatest whaling port of I remember entertainment like that, magazines like the 1800’s, but since the near destruction that, living like that, and nights like that. Only as a of the whales worldwide, it has now be- borderline hippie, and later a borderline SF fan. My come the greatest fishing port on the East experiences weren’t quite as crazy. Still, I was drown- Coast. At 18 I joined the Marine Corps, ing in all that the issue spawned. There was a lot and accomplished my military service, on Steve Stile’s death at the beginning of Portable which gave me the G.I. Bill for college. Storage. I saw him last on May 5, 2019 at the Rock- After my three years of military service, I ville, MD, Corflu, about seven months before he died. found myself in Southern California, and At one point, we didn’t get along. That changed at the with that G.I. Bill I attended U.C.L.A. for 2018 CapClave: he had heard I was a good fan and he four years. wanted to be friends. After that, he was. At the 2019 While in the service I discovered a won- Corflu, he told me two anecdotes. The first concerned derful, unique group of older California his comic book tale where he combined the styles of writers and poets via the fiction and poet- John Norman and R. Crumb. A wild and woolly mix- ry of Ambrose Bierce and Clark Ashton ture.–literally. Hairy barbarians were putting women Smith, and through those two, George into luggage. Then the unthinkable happened: one

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woman (a wild feminist?) told them that she didn’t Cool Grey (con’t) want to be put in luggage. So they let her go. In John Norman, women weren’t beaten unless they wanted Sterling and Nora May French. In my it. There was some fallout from this. Steve sent the tale ignorance I considered them, and called to R. Crumb. Crumb replied in a letter, which he them the California Late Romantics. Lat- signed, that he didn’t do action/ adventure. Steve said er I modified the term to the California he got $500 for Crumb’s autograph. I guess Crumb’s Modern Romantics. (If A. E. Houseman comment on his style made all the difference in the is a modern poet, then the four enumer- world. Steve also told another anecdote as well about ated above would rate as modern.) Since how he became Jewish. He was in grade school. Some- that first encounter these authors have how the subject of Noah came up, and he argued with become far better known as a group, other school kids about it. After that, he said he be- much admired and appreciated. I am came Jewish. I wish I knew why and how. Maybe I happy and proud that initially I played a should have been doing more listening. Finally, I have major role in gaining that greater recog- a third anecdote. This one is my own. For some rea- nition for them. son, I remembered an R. Crumb comic almost 50 years before. Usually, I can’t remember yesterday. Ste- Before first visiting San Francisco, no less ve was trying to remember the story where the ‘God of moving there, I was already doing re- a lot of people’ has Mr. Natural taken to Heaven. search in Northern California on Ashton There, he is proud to display all the angels singing. Smith and these other figures, sojourning Mr. Natural laughs that it’s corny. That God is not go- as needed in Sacramento and nearby Au- ing to stand for that comment. He tosses Mr. Natural burn. I first experienced San Francisco out of heaven; and sends for a lawyer, Cheesis K. and the Carmel-Monterey region under Reist. Mr. Natural wants to forget the whole thing; but the olden glamour of these elder scrive- Reist replies with the much heard ‘60s cliché: ‘You ners. Just as when I first went to Britain know and I know that that is not possible.’ Steve and experienced the southwestern part thanked me for remembering, and laughed that that of the island (thanks to great friend Jack God is a real reactionary. Those are my last memories Hesketh) under the olden glamour of Ar- of Steve. thur Machen. GRANT CANFIELD How does one describe San Francisco of [email protected] the Hippie Period, 1965-1975? Half the Novato, CA time I worked as a claims examiner for Thanks again for the excellent job you did with my the State of California, the other half I set memoir -- and everybody else’s pieces -- in Portable up and ran a business as a house-cleaner Storage Three. As it was my first appearance in any for close friends and others in the City. fanzine for several years, I really appreciated the extra Mixed in with all this, I also pursued my effort you obviously devoted to it. new career as a poet-performer, reciting The bylines in PS3 reads almost like a list of my per- my entire repertoire from memory (as I sonal friends in the Bay Area. At the last actual social still mostly do), sometimes in the U.S. gathering I attended before the COVID-19 pandemic and sometimes abroad. But ever I came hit, our local Second Sunday get-together back in back to the dear old City. March, I was pleased to get both Jay Kinney and Rich As others have expressed it, entering or Coad to sign their pieces in my copy, which I plan to re-entering the City, the individual does keep in my car, hoping that someday I’ll once again indeed feel as if escaping into a special get to see Jeanne Bowman, Stacy Scott, Ray Nelson, country set apart from the continental Don Herron, Gary Mattingly and Robert Lichtman, U.S. For me, as a gay or bisexual man, it live and in person, so I can get them to sign their piec- was a candy shop of endless erotic en- es, too. I expect Portable Storage Three to be one of counters. I had previously discovered this my prized possessions for the rest of my life. basic fact from the gay baths dispersed I think PS3 may be the first fanzine I’ve read cover to throughout the town. But residing and cover in, like, forever. That’s probably because I know working in various neighborhoods, I soon so many of the contributors, but I also read all the oth- began experiencing a variety of other er stuff, too. Since you and I never met in person partners, some briefly, but others devel- (yet), I was especially interested in your introduction oping into genuine amours or lasting

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Cool Grey (con’t) and all the contributions from members of your family. I think it was way cool that all of the contributors friendships. to this issue seemed to have different interesting Besides encountering real fraternal or paths in our treks to and through San Francisco, not collective affection and camaraderie for to mention different opinions about the City and its the first time (apart from the Boy Scouts influence on our lives. That broad spectrum of per- in my early teens), I could slake my often sonal viewpoints was one of the things that made this outrageous sexual appetite, and passion issue so special. for both male and female. It did not hurt Jim Khennedy’s entertaining “Weird Stairways”, fo- that I was a muscular bodybuilder, and cused in part on the Palace of Fine Arts and the Ex- for a little guy fairly well endowed, and ploratorium, a building with which I had a fairly spe- that most people considered me hand- cial relationship. Well, actually, my ex-wife Catherine some and/or cute. did. For several years, she worked as the Executive Meanwhile the City had become a Mecca Assistant to Frank Oppenheimer, the founder and for disenchanted young people drawn by director of the Exploratorium when it was housed at what the media had revealed of this old, the Palace of Fine Arts. Frank is long gone, and the but “happening,” ambiance. I had already Exploratorium interactive museum now resides at found myself in place thereat and went Pier 15, though it’s temporarily closed for the dura- along for the ride. Quite the ride, as it tion of Mr. Trump’s Plague. Frank, of course, was the resulted! While I was well prepared to brother of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the understand the disaffection of the young atomic bomb.” Frank was also a particle physicist people flocking to “Bagdad by the Bay” (a who worked with his brother on the Manhattan Pro- perceptive phrase courtesy of columnist ject, with particular responsibility for instrumenta- Herb Caen), I also dealt with my own dis- tion at the Trinity test site, among other duties, so affection. Catherine and I often referred to him as the “uncle of the atomic bomb.” I rarely took part in the Hippie demon- She and I were invited to dinner at his house in Marin strations even if I did get caught up with County a couple of times, along with other Explorato- them on occasion, and with genuine sym- rium senior staff and their partners. I was young, pathy. I also remained amazed and callow, awestruck and shy, so I kept mostly mute, but astonished by them. That such protests I remember Frank and his wife Jackie as two of the could have come about by the disaffected most interesting, scintillating people I ever met, with youth of the American middle class still many fascinating stories to tell. Their house was full strikes me as exceptional and unprece- of impressive paintings (including at least one Van dented, prompted as this “revolution” Gogh!), objet d’art and other mementos. was by mere “suburban angst,” though it went much deeper than that. They were both atheists, and both had been members of the Communist Party in the late 1930s, which led Eventually I left the City. I had gotten to his subpoena to testify before the House Un- into some bad habits (no, not drugs nor American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1949. hypodermic needles). The only way to Blacklisted, he was unable for many years to get a overcome them?—to leave, which I did, passport, let alone a job in his field in the United heading for “pastures new” in the state States, so he and Jackie bought a ranch in Colorado. capitol, Sacramento. They were cattle ranchers until the late ‘50s, when he However, I continued to work and so- was finally allowed to get back to teaching physics -- journ to the City as need commanded. high school at first, and later at the University of Col- San Francisco remains for me a great, orado. In 1969, adapting his talent for teaching scien- good, glamourous place as environed by tific principles to elementary and high school stu- the Bay Area, always a magical ambiance, dents by using classic models of physical experiments, and environment of enchantment. I have he opened the Exploratorium in San Francisco. He described my 10-year residence in the said it had taken him about four years to develop it City at length in my published autobiog- and get it set up. He seemed particularly proud of raphy (Hobgoblin Apollo, Hippocampus creating its Artist-in-Residence program. The Explor- Press, 2016). atorium evolved into an exciting and fascinating blend of art, science, technology and creative genius.

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There are reasons it’s one of San Francisco’s best Cool Grey (con’t) tourist attractions… when it gets to be open, that is. As anybody knows who has lived in San Jim’s anecdotes about the Tactile Dome at the Ex- Francisco for any real period of time the ploratorium were very evocative and amusing. I also City holds many treasures and surprises enjoyed crawling through the Dome, which I got to do that the resident encounters often by ac- several times when Catherine worked there. Here’s a cident without official guidebooks, how- nice little factoid about the Tactile Dome: it was de- ever useful they are for the serious tour- signed by August Coppola, father of movie actor ist, or pilgrim. Nicholas Cage and brother of movie director Francis Ford Coppola. It’s a great example of art merging I discovered the following on my own, with physical science, in an environment much dark- and not via any San Francisco source. I er than a movie theater. had been reading a biography of the cele- brated illustrator and painter Gustave I used to love going to the Exploratorium when Cath- Doré (1832-1883). I learned that the Cool erine worked there. I’d drop her off in the morning Grey (con’t) before driving downtown for my job, and I’d pick her up at the end of the workday. Naturally, I got to at- painter had experimented with sculpture. tend a lot of Exploratorium public and private events. Among his most artistically successful I played with all the exhibits, sometimes while they pieces was a fairly large one done in met- were still in development. I watched some early radio al, entitled “The Vintage” (“La Vendan- -controlled robot fights. I got to play one of the earli- ge”). To my amazement I discovered that est video games ever invented, a little number called this piece existed in San Francisco’s Pong. I was not yet a licensed architect, just a draft- Golden Gate Park. Mirabile dictu! er/designer, but once I helped the museum’s admin I set out to find it. It did not take long, staff surreptitiously build a group of temporary offic- standing not far from the de Young muse- es against one wall, using a bunch of prefab partitions um. It is in fact a big sculpture realized in somebody had donated, and some other found mate- bronze, a little more than twice my rials. Uh, by “surreptitiously,” I mean without a height, say, twelve feet or so. A beguiling Building Permit. [cough] I probably shouldn’t have artifact, a gigantic vase. It would appear said that. that Doré donated this unique sculpture It’s a Small World Sidebar: A few years after Cathe- to the City and Golden Gate Park. I urge rine left that job, my future friend (this was before I the interested reader to go discover it! met her) Ellen Klages also worked there. With Pat (Incidentally, such a piece is not cheap to Murphy and others, Ellen wrote several books for the make, and must have cost the sculptor Exploratorium, my favorite of which is The Brain much creative effort, not to mention Explorer: Puzzles, Riddles, Illusions and Other Men- money.) [Doré’s vase stands eleven feet tal Adventures. and weighs about three tons. Michael de The first thing I noted when I read Kim Kerbis’s “San Young purchased it for ten thousand dol- Francisco Soliloquy” is that, like me, she came to San lars for his museum in 1894, after its Francisco from an Illinois/Iowa background, albeit a exhibition in Chicago and San Francis- couple of decades later than I did. Then I noted that co.] she came here in the company of architect friends, and rented a San Francisco flat from an architect, so there’s another point of coincidence. Then she got a job at the Academy of Art about the same time that I was taking a night school figure drawing class there. And she loved the City. So although we were nineteen years out of phase, and had different life paths, we both still managed to fall into some of the same big bubbles on a Venn diagram. Predictably, Don Herron’s article was esoteric, eclec- tic and entertaining. Since I had never heard of the guy he was writing about, I’ll add educational as well. Don did mention Fritz Leiber a couple of times, so I

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stuck in a comment-hook Post-It to remind me ry. Anyway, I really enjoyed the article. that I occasionally gave Fritz a ride to the East When your brother Michael’s memoir got to the Bay. But I already mentioned that in my PS3 part about bands and other musicians he enjoyed . [See Sidney-Fryer’s piece here embed- article in concert, I experienced several flashes of hot ded, and the Bio Page] jealousy: Staples Singers, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, I had a powerful flash of déjà vu reading Jeanne Canned Heat, John Mayall, Janis Joplin, Siegel- Bowman’s memories of the Cliff House, the cam- Schwall Band, Credence Clearwater Revival, and era obscura, the seals and sea lions, and the Altamont. Just, wow. On the other hand, I did- creepy fortune teller at the Musée Mécanique. I n’t feel any jealousy whatsoever when he wrote was an arcade junkie in my youth, so the Musée about almost dying from eating a poisoned plant. was a frequent haunt, so to speak. I wasted At that Second Sunday in March, as Jay Kinney many an hour playing Tank Battle there. As for was signing his “Staying Put” article for me, Dix- the Cliff House itself, the restaurant on the top ie tickled my ivories, so to speak, by telling me floor was the first place I ever ate abalone, which she learned from my memoir that she and I had I loved. Even then, abalone was invariably the both moved to San Francisco in the same month: most expensive item on the menu, about three March of 1970. I didn’t actually meet her until a times the cost of any other entrée. Now, of few years later, but as you know from what I course, you’ll never even find it on any local wrote, she and Jay are two Bay Area people menu. The abalone beds down by Pacifica were whose company and friendship I have particular- all fished out years ago, and will probably never ly enjoyed and treasured over the last half centu- come back in my lifetime. At least not soon ry. I’ve known them long enough to remember enough for me to their Fell Street eat some more of apartment, and of that savory, suc- course I’ve visited culent shellfish. their 16th Street In Craig William place multiple Lion’s “Core times. That’s not Samples,” I hit overly impressive two déjà vu when you remem- points: Fort ber they’ve lived Point, and the there for forty smell of roasting years. Frank Lun- coffee from the ney and Cathe- Folger’s plant. I don’t drink coffee, but I loved rine Jackson (my ex) were also good friends of that roasty smell. Jay and Dixie. The last time I ever saw Catherine That John Benson cartoon you used at the end of before her death was in early September, 1993, Kennedy Gammage’s “Cole Valley” nicely illumi- when she cooked a tofu dinner at Jay and Dixie’s nated his story about getting together with his place. At the end of the evening, I waved to her future wife for good. Nice touch. as she and Dixie crossed the street to go to a local bar. Less than four months later, she was dead. Robert Lichtman’s “Hippies” was a fascinating But enough of that. At that Second Sunday in history lesson about a subculture that had a big March, the gathered group toasted farewell to influence on my life, once upon a time. I’ve al- our friends Steve Stiles and Frank Lunney. As ways enjoyed Robert’s stories about his days on you know, Steve died just before I sent you my The Farm. So I know that when it comes to his- memoir, and Frank just after you were already tory of the counter-culture, he speaks with au- going to print. After a start like that, I didn’t ex- thority and authenticity. I was quite amused by pect 2020 to get any worse, but then Trump said, that picture of him in the back of the book, with “Hold my beer.” I’m really looking forward to an ultra-full beard and mega-long hair. Ever seeing my local friends again sometime, includ- since I’ve known him, he’s been clean-shaven ing the bottom half of their faces. (except for a moustache) and has regular short- ish hair. To me, he looks more like a retired his- As for my own piece, “My San Francisco Centu- tory teacher than a hippie. As we all know, he’s ry,” I was amazed to see first-person pronouns wicked smart and possesses an almost encyclo- could be used so profusely and frequently. I just pedic memory about old fanzines and fan histo- hope I left some for other folks. Actually, I do

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have a couple of comments regarding my omis- reviewzine Other Realms? I learned a lot about sions. I could probably have gone to 18,000 book reviewing from Chuq. words, so you’re lucky I let you off with 14,000. Gary Hubbard: Nice to see that someone other For instance, I left out several names that proba- than myself recalls Dr. Alan E bly should have been included, but then I real- Nourse, a popular midlist writer ized I was better off limiting my anecdotes to of the 1950s. I take credit for get- those about people I actually met in San Francis- ting Dr. Nourse and his wife invit- co. Most of the people I left out were friends I ed to Balticon as “special guests” met in other cities, mostly at conventions, or lady in the 1980s. I had dinner with friends about whom I opted for discretion. So them. I got a sense he had not there’s that. My friend Patrick Mason, upon been invited to an SF con in many reading my memories of our “gentlemen’s games years, and quite enjoyed it. I still of skill” over the years -- pool, frisbee, dominoes, have several of his books, long out poker -- asked, “Why didn’t you mention our of print. Raiders from the Reef racquetball?” I had to remind him that that had- was always a favorite. [Surprised n’t gone so well. Even though we used appropri- you did not catch that uncorrected ate PPE (goggles and gloves) when we played, I gaff about Nourse! See Jerry’s comment below.] still managed to crack him in the skull with my racquet during a poorly coordinated backhand A few days after the successful NASA/SpaceX slash. Other than a few skinned knees on the manned launch, talk show host Kelly Ripa told fields of frisbee, that was the only time in all of what she was whispering to the American astro- our competitions that either of us drew actual nauts as she watched the takeoff: “Wait! Take blood. I think he still has the scar just above his me with you!” eyebrow. Anyway, racquetball was definitely not Get a glass jar. Buy a packet of dry figs. Cut them my sport. in half (if very large, in thirds) Place in jar. Add Once again, and finally: great job! I’ve personal- slice of lemon and a half teaspoonof pepper. Fill ly already received a number of appreciative and up with bourbon or brandy (I prefer the brandy). laudatory comments about PS3, not just about Cloe lid tightly. Place in cupboard at least two my own article, but about the book itself. As I weeks. Do not refrigerate. Strain. Drink. You can said, I’ll always treasure my own copy, which I also eat the figs. . . . hope you’ll be able to sign for me someday. Take care, stay well, we will get through this. In Thanks again, and keep on keepin’ on. the long run, basketball, fandom, and other useless things will survive. I enjoy Portable Storage, DAVID SHEA and not because it’s the only fanzine (if it’s a fan- Ellicott City, Maryland zine) I receive. And I liked the cover on Three. What struck me most about the San Francisco essays was the intense feeling of the writers. the JERRY KAUFMAN City seems to have been a critical, even formative [email protected] place in each life. I don’t know that I have ever Seattle, Washington felt that strongly about a place, any place. I spec- I'll have to start by praising the Frank Vacanti ulate that San Francisco may be like New York, it cover - quite beautiful, and I imagine the face as selects out for a special personality. I have been yours, even if it's not meant to be. I also liked there but only as the proverbial visitor. If per- Craig Smith's collages, the great quantity of haps I understand the City a little better now, I Grant Canfield's art for his own article, and also grasp I will never understand it. many of the photos you, Simon Agree, and others took. Alas for the passing of Steve Stiles, one of the greats of fandom—and still, I fear, underappreci- The vast number of San Francisco memoirs ated. daunted me at first, but I spread my reading over a week, and found them all interesting, and a few Gary Casey: Connie Willis has said much the compelling. Maybe Grant's was my favorite be- same thing; that she was eager to learn the skills cause he mentioned so many people I knew and by which writers surprise readers, and rendered many more I knew of. I liked reading his memo- herself unable to be surprised. I sublimated by ries of Jerry Jacks, Marta Randall, Allyn Ca- book reviewing, a lower stress exercise. Does dogan, and more. anyone remember Chuq von Rospach and his 117

Your mention of Ted Whipple on page 4 remind- famous “To Serve Man”, and any others you ed me that I haven't heard from Ted since last may have caught; summer. I know I mentioned to you that Ted sometimes they just was a college friend in Columbus, Ohio, when we slip by. I apologized were both attending Ohio State University. I did to Leigh profusely visit him in San Francisco not long after I moved after I got your loc, to Seattle in the late 1970s. On that visit, or one Jerry—that was em- soon after, I got to visit Mabuhay Gardens with barrassing. There such folks as Rich Coad, Gary Mattingly, Denise were other glitches Rehse, and others. Although I went to a World- throughout Three con in SF, and a couple of Corflus in the Greater that I only caught Bay Area, most of my memories of the city derive after publication. But from those earliest trips - taken on the hippie as Cordwainer bus service, the Green Tortoise. Smith said, I'm looking forward to Mike Dobson's publica- “Perfection offends tion of Sandra Bond's first novel. I hope Mike's the Gods.” Or at able to get it into reviewers' hands early enough least that’s what I to get decent publicity. tell myself!] For someone who doesn't know how to write and I enjoyed the issue and hope many more are in doesn't aspire to be a critic, Gary Casey does a my future. [Me too!] fine job in his brief review of the Dr. Doolittle books, one of my childhood favorite series. (I KENNEDY suspect I'll never try rereading them.) GAMMAGE Greg Benford talks about "savages" being people [email protected] who "pierced their ears..." and so forth, but when San Diego, California he was "growing up," that stuff became "hip and Wm, when I finished Portable Storage Three I fashionable." It seems to me that, unless my had a visceral reaction to it, starting with the sense of cultural history is way off base, Greg wraparound cover by Frank Vacanti. Is that your grew up well before piercings, tats, or unique face as a young boy juxtaposed with the Golden haircuts became trends. I think the adoption of Gate? I just noticed the folded hands at the bot- tribal body modification began to catch on in the tom, as if you were hugging the bridge. My feel- late 1970s. (Which reminds me that the Museum ing was, that I had just experienced something of Popular Culture has a show about tattooing, meaningful, and I was honored to be part of it. which I want to visit as soon as the lockdown Not just as a minor contributor, but as a partici- ends.) pant in that world. I was there then and, thanks to your many talented writers who painted such Someone else may have already pointed this out, a vivid panoramic (kaleidoscopic!) portrait of but Gary Hubbard misremembers the author of San Francisco, there I was once again. As your "To Serve Man." Damon sister Susan said, it was “a time almost more Knight wrote it, not Alan than a place.” Nourse. A minor criticism: I noticed in the letters and [Jerry, Kennedy—not my face the cover, though articles that you let stand a I do know the artist well enough to know who it is number of misspellings of likely based on!] names. I would have cor- I know so many of the people who wrote for you, rected them (assuming that some of them close friends going back decades. I actually caught the mis- Your own introductory comments in” Crow’s takes during proofreading). Caw” to the themed issue are particularly apt Was this a conscious deci- from a sociopolitical perspective: “The City’s pol- sion or did the errors slip by itics became oddly conservative while toeing the you? Leigh Edmonds may have already told you liberal party line…it is (and always has been) a about misspelling his name and email address. jangly uptight racist town, one of complete seg- (Not "Edmunds.") [Entirely my fault—yes, I regation and disharmony.” True statements. Yet would have corrected them, had I caught them, for all of us who have touched and been touched such as Damon being the author of the highly (or worse) by it, San Francisco is an important

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place. It’s a nucleus we’ve all been revolving attraction of the new and novel was part of around for the past 40 or 50 years. Like Joyce’s it. Also, perhaps, the need for an adventure Dublin, the San Francisco of your family and which moving such a long distance and settling friends has once again been memorialized in into a new environment is. literary fashion. Is this a fanzine? I think it’s a book! A beautifully designed and printed book I The other item I really liked was James Ru’s ‘The really enjoyed reading - and yes one I plan to re- City’. Being boringly heterosexual (I loved his read soon. You can be proud of what you’ve ac- comment on that matter ‘'I mean, ew, who would complished here, and I’m definitely looking for- want to be that?’) the world that he describes is ward to Portable Storage Four. largely alien to me though gay friends have ac- LEIGH EDMONDS quainted me with some of their stories. I get the [email protected] impression that at some stage Sydney became a Mount Clear, Victoria magnet for the gay and lesbian community in I hope you won’t be too disappointed if I tell you Australia in the same way that San Francisco that Portable Storage Three beat me. It is just was in the US and that the lifestyle there, and the police brutality, was similar too. I have a gay too big and impressive for me to take it all in, friend in Melbourne who still hates and fears the enjoy it and respond to it all. I can see the attraction of producing a themed issue, and San police in a way that I almost cannot under- Francisco is a better theme than most, but there stand. The way James finishes his piece, going is just so much of it. Perhaps like the city itself. back to the lobby of the Pine Street Hotel drinking gin with retired musicians makes me wish that I'd been there, and I can feel his longing for I only spent a week there in 1974 and liked the a past paradise, and I wouldn’t mind it too. place, it seemed very lively and somehow the layout, geography and architecture seemed more appealing than Los Angeles. On the other hand, I loved Grant Canfield’s piece, almost nostalgia it seemed to me to be like Seattle but on a much for a past I never had. And those characters, larger scale so I liked Seattle even better. Per- most of them didn’t even need captions for me to haps I would like Portland on the west coast recognize them, but I’d never seen photos of Blish, Frank Belknap Long or Andre Norton so I even better since a more human scale seems to have an excuse there. Robert Lichtman’s expla- be the go for me. nation of the emergence of the hippie phenome- The best way I can describe my feeling about this non was very interesting and enlighten- issue was that it was like an arcade with lots of ing. There’s more, much more. Can I be potentially interesting shops to fossick around blunt? This is just too much for one issue, it’s overwhelming. I wish you’d broken it into four in. Some I did not find so interesting and gave or five chunks and published them over a num- them only a cursory glance, others sucked me in ber of issues. Then I would have been hanging with their style or their story and I stayed for a longer look. Some again seemed to rely on a out in eager anticipation for the coming issue, knowledge of the place to make sense, I can im- rather than feeling frustrated and almost angry agine those who know the city nodding their at the richness that you are offering here. Of heads in agreement, but that didn’t work for me. course, it’s your fanzine and you can do what you like with it, even if I’m not happy. You might say

that I should treat this issue as an anthology I The two I enjoyed the most were Kim Kerbis’ contribution about her move to San Francisco can dip into from time to time, which would be and musings on her memories of getting and fine if I didn’t already have a house full of books living there. It reminded me very much of the that I can dip into whenever I have a spare decision that Valma and I made to move to Perth hour. Unfortunately, if I were to do (Western Australia) after spending a week there that Portable Storage would just disappear into the shelves of books, never to be seen again I for a convention. Like Kim, we drove there and, suspect, and where am I going to find a spare after a decade there we decided to move back to the eastern states and drove back again. Read- hour anyhow. ing Kim’s thoughts made me try to remember what attracted us to Perth apart from the cheap Your letter column was a little ripper too, with houses and the climate. Perhaps we were just lots of comment hooks and interesting comments from a very wide range of people, some of ready for a change, as Kim probably was, and the

119 them new to me, and happily so. days I also draw from my reading the pleasure of seeing how a historian assembles and expresses I can understand Alan White’s feeling the story they want to tell. (Or get annoyed when that Skyliner has run its course and he wants to they are not very good at it.) There are moments move on to more rewarding ventures. That’s when I almost want to clap with joy when I see what happened to me the previous time I was how somebody has put two ideas together to con- involved in fandom. Sometime towards the end struct an argument, which is even better than the of the 1970s, I think, I was beginning to feel that argument itself. I also spent a few years learning I had done as much as I was able and that the music composition in my youth and I find that it options open to me were to become a filthy pro - adds another dimension to my enjoyment of mu- which I never felt a strong urge to do - or find sic. (For example, at the moment the radio is something else to do. As it turned out, going to playing me Samuel Barber’s famous adagio university as a part time mature age student be- which is a pleasure in the sonority of the piece came a possibility and so that’s the direction I and also in the way its counterpoint has been took. These days I’m back indulging in a bit of structured to give those sonorities.) I enjoy fanac as a fun hobby which also helps to inform reading music scores (poorly) along with pieces my thinking for this history of Australian fandom as they are played to make even clearer the struc- that I’m going to write. I’m not likely to ever tural arrangement of the piece. publish a genzine again, but writing letters of comment is a not terribly difficult thing to do, Greg Benford’s comments about the tech/science keeps me in the loop and, I hope, is some kind of background of a lot of stf, particularly the older payment for those fans who still do want to pub- stuff, suggested to me that that might be why I lish genzines. Maybe Alan will find himself on like the genre so much. I, unfortunately, do not the same path and will return to the fold one day. have a mathematical bone in my body and while the logic of math evades my thinking I can un- Talking of apas, I was an apahack at one stage derstand that it is a form of symbolic logic and I and counted myself in eight or nine apas. No really like logical arrangements of ideas. Unlike more. Even the small SAPS mailings these days the collaborative nature of much engineering and are as much as I can handle and I turn my face scientific work, history remains a fairly solitary away from various suggestions that I should re- exercise though there are attempts to form col- join ANZAPA because there would be not enough laborations, and I’ve done a few now that I think hours in the day to cope with such a lively apa, about it. I imagine that conferences, seminars especially since it is bi-monthly. I see mentions and the like are as lively for history and science of APA-50 which is, I imagine, a younger version with the opportunities to push ideas on to great- of APA-45 which was my introduction to interna- er understandings through discussion. Greg lists tional fandom. I loved it and would still count a couple of collaborations in writing stf but I many of its members then as my friends, though wonder how many there are these days when a many of them are, I suppose, now no longer with lot of the genre seems more literary (from what I us. I still occasionally see various ex-members hear) than it used to be. on Facebook and they remind me of the great delight and education that apa was for I liked Ingrid Cardon Downey’s letter a lot. Part- me. When we went to the US in 1974 many of ly that is because she feels the same way about the places we went to were where I knew fans Australia that I do - but apart from New Zealand though APA-45 (a fabulous week in Minneapolis) where else in the world would one want to though there were diversions such as a visit to live? (Not to get into politics, but watching her Seattle where we stayed with Elinore and FM PM and mine on the tv makes me wish that we Busby, which might be where I got roped into had a PM and government like hers.) I share her SAPS, or I might have been a member by then feelings about leadership. When I was back in already. My memory is as good as Kim’s with the public service, a lifetime ago, I ended up with things like that. a staff of three or four and I was not a good leader. I’m not very good at telling people what to do Gary Casey seems to miss the point and I have to and very bad as disciplining them when they tell him that learning the tricks of the trade don’t do the right thing, or don’t do anything at makes the trade even more interesting to observe all. I was glad to be out of it. In volunteer organ- or take part in. Once upon a time I just read his- izations I’m better because, I think, people are tory because I liked it, I still do that but these there because they want to be. I ended up being 120

chairman of one group for a year and ran tight about meeting his wife was funny and new to me. meetings in which everyone was consulted and I The details of the acid trips were new to me as was amazed that when I told people that it would well, since as OG of Apa-50 he always gave such be good for them to do this or that they a different impression. His tale also makes you agreed. It is, I’ve discovered, fun to have other wonder how we all managed to survived our people do things you want to have done, but I youth, even through such thorny details as late wouldn’t want to do it professionally. night bus journeys and double shift jobs. I also enjoyed Grant Canfield’s memoir, especial- (I just came across the part where you spelled my ly his caricatures, both fan and pro. It was in- name incorrectly. Don’t worry and join the long sightful to read his comments that he found it queue.) more fun to do his caricatures from real life than from photographs, especially since I’ve seen so There, that’s it. I’m sorry that this little letter of much of the latter. A great many authors and comment is such small repayment for such a even fans we know only from photos. (Neither grand and grandiose fanzine. Arnie Katz nor Frank Lunney match my mental [Leigh—I tried to edit your letter but found that I image of them, but that’s one of the fun things couldn’t, so here it all is. Your frustration with the about fanzine fandom.) length (or the embarrassment of riches) of Three Your photos and design are quote good (I hate to was palpable, and I get it, completely. I suffered think of how much work and especially head- a mild form of Nydahl’s Disease after its publica- aches may have gone into some of it). I especially tion and was wrecked for a good couple of like the photo of the man snarling on page 148— months. But there it stands in all its glory, and any story behind that? I’m glad that it does so. As always, thanks for your generosity of spirit.] [It was taken for a Color Theory class where the color red had to dominate the photograph. The CY CHAUVIN wall and chair are red. While I was composing [email protected] through the viewfinder The Man walked by and Detroit Michigan snarled at me. One of my greatest faults as a The wraparound cover is simply gorgeous, and of photographer is that I am not good at what is course it fits your San Francisco theme so well. I called “the decisive moment” where you snap at wondered who the woman might be floating or just the right second before it is gone—this is peering over the Golden Gate Bridge, and sud- one of those times I caught that moment. If I’d denly I was reminded of my favorite prose poem been quick I could have asked him to pose in the by Clark Ashton Smith, “The Muse of Hyperbo- chair! My photos are generally still or rea:” Too far away is her wan and mortal face, “composed” with little movement or fluidity. You and too remote the snows of her lethal breast, can view this photo in color at eFanzines.com.] for mine eyes to behold them ever. But at whiles her whispers come to me, like a chill unearthly Gary Mattingly and the Id of a Moose. Gary was wind that is faint from traversing the gulfs be- already talking about synchronicity while he tween worlds, and has flown over ultimate hori- lived in Detroit on his way to San Francisco, and zons on ice bound deserts. And she speaks to me probably demonstrating it often. He would al- in a tongue I have never heard but have always ways swerve his car to the sides of railroad track known; and she tells me of deathly things beau- crossings (never slowing down) in some sort of tiful beyond the ecstatic desires of love. And it spatial synchronicity demonstration. But now ends: I shall go forth and follow where she calls, that I know that the End of Times means not just to seek the high and beatific doom of her snow the End of this Universe but literally the End of pale distances, to perish amid her indescrate Time, since it is a construct as much as gravity horizons…from the collection Hyperborea. Clark and space and the speed of light, I don’t lie Ashton Smith lived in Auburn, near San Francis- awake at night in a synchronicity fugue. co. Obviously, the Muse of Hyperborea was at- Jeanne Bowman is even more a rush than Gary! tracting all of your writers to San Francisco it- (But at least she’s not pushing endless tubs of self! hummus like she did at OperaCon!) Could San My favorite article was by Terry Floyd. Someone Francisco be not only a place or even a “time” as wrote about films that romantic comedies are the your sister said, but something else? I guess I most underrated and enjoyable, and his story never felt the siren lure of San Francisco, alt- 121

hough I was there two or three times. I remember the odd feeling of seeing the corner of Haight KEVIN COOK and Ashbury, and the ordinary reality of it butt- [email protected] ing up to the dream-quality of a famous place. Summerville, South Carolina While I have never lived nor worked in San There are still three (complete) Beatles songs Francisco, just been a visitor, I still enjoyed I’ve never heard. [Okay, stop baiting me! What reading the contents of Portable Storage Three. are they?] I was just unsure a bit about some of the geogra- Gosh, William, where are you going to go from phy at times, but that was a minor point that did here? [I hope you like where I went—and the not interfere with the overall theme of the issue. next two issues are already beginning to form.] Your sister's line "A time almost more than a place" is so true of the places all of us have lived JIM JONES in our pasts. What we loved is gone because the [email protected] city/town has moved on and we have not kept Santa Cruz, California pace with it, whether from distaste of the direc- I read Portable Storage Three from cover to cov- tion or simple inability or refusal to meet the er in about a day. Like other fans in the ’70s and new parameters of existence that each new gen- ’80s, I came to San Francisco to find something: eration creates. Only our memories remain. I people of similar interests, a place to be accept- was reminded of this very vividly recently when I ed, excitement, novelty, even a job. I loved read- met an individual born in the same town I was ing other fans’ accounts on the same time and born in, although we are now both a long dis- place. And what they found. I didn’t come to the tance from there. The problem was he was born city from very far away: 30 miles, straight down 25 years after I was, and our visions of the place I-80. But I wanted to see if life held more than a were completely different. I did not get the same civil service job, civil service parties, and week- jarring discord from any of Portable Storage end movies at the triplex. San Francisco showed Three, though, because almost all your contribu- me that life did. The City didn’t make me a dif- tors seem to have lived through the same time ferent person — I still had hopes — but it set me periods in the city's history, roughly the last half on a different course. I met a lot of people and century. In Fact, Grant Canfield's tour de did a lot of things that I never would have done force memoir "My San Francisco Century" was otherwise. I found a new career. San Francisco brilliant in encapsulating what life in the city had fandom was a big part of that. been like during that era. There have been many different San Franciscos As far as emulating Bill Bowers goes, you have to over the last 170 years, and this very accessible, remember that Bill had a natural genius for se- very accepting San Francisco only lasted about quence; the rest of us have to work at it, and you 30 years before changing into something did a fine job with Portable Storage Three. Leigh else. By the late ’80s I already had one foot out Edmonds touched on another point in the letter- the door to a city where it was still 1975 — And I col with the sense of "intellectuality" in Portable could have my own parking place and not have Storage, although I might just argue that it is a to move the car every three days for the street higher quality of writing than one expects in sweepers. most fanzines. You can rightly accept credit that the submissions you receive are up to a certain Portable Storage Three is a real history book in high level; people do not want to contribute sub- spirit as well as format; get a copy into an ar- standard material to Portable Storage and look chive somewhere. And thanks for Portable Stor- bad compared to the other contributors. age Three’s coda, Joan Rector Breiding’s “The House of Fools.” It is a fitting memorial for The I can't get away from the whole rereading topic. Way Things Were from one who hung in As someone semi-retired for the past three years there. As for change: I’m writing this in shelter- I have done more rereading in that time period in-place mode thanks to COVID-19. My entire than in the 40 years prior. I have done it both organization is working at home: Zooming and ways; binge read novels by authors I wanted to Hanging Out and Sharing Docs. Will corona- go back to, and then moved from author to au- virus show that giant white-collar cities have thor, story to story. I recently went through a jumped the shark? What happens then? Stay period of alternating stories/novelettes from tuned. Actually, you have no choice. None of us collections written by Richard Cowper, Robert E. do. Howard and James Crumley. Talk about variety!

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I am often more impressed with works that I um, which I liked a lot. I got lost in a room full of may not have fully appreciated the first time. For mirrors, gazed at an illusion of a leprechaun at example, how did Cowper's "The Custodians" the bottom of a well and saw the shrunken head not win a Hugo award? 40-odd years later no and breasts of a woman that, according to the one cares, of course, but that's not the point; I description, once belonged to Ernest Heming- had read the story once, thought it excellent and way. Personally, I have to wonder if – as grue- then moved on to the next story in the collection; some as it was – it was real at all. I can under- now in a more leisurely, slower reading pace I stand how you can shrink a head (because Jane could fully appreciate how brilliant it was. That's Dolinger explained it in one of her articles), but the true joy of rereading for me, rather than go- how do you shrink a whole torso. I posed in front ing back to a favorite book where you know eve- of a submarine that was docked at the wharf and ry plot element and can recite lines. Bess took a picture. Later we went to the Comic [Thanks for the tip on Cowper’s “The Custodi- Arts Museum and saw an exhibit of the work of ans”. I’ll be looking for it. I like your example of Moebius. Then we took a trolly to Chinatown, why you reread. It makes total sense to me.] while the jingle: “Rice a Roni, the San Francisco treat” played in my head. GARY HUBBARD The next day, we went to the Castro and had [email protected] brunch at an open air café and visited an antique Kalamazoo, Michigan shop which had a It was back in 1997, I believe. Bess Dominatrix Barbie and I were on our way to a Corflu doll that I couldn’t (Wave?) in Walnut Creek, but we de- afford and a couple of cided to go a couple of days early and post cards, which I see the sights, and Bess had found a could. They both cheap hostel for us to stay in. Clean, showed pictures of but run-down and the bathroom was people of indetermi- way at the end of the corridor. The nate sex in leather outfits and gas masks. I’ve room was pretty crappy too. The room never owned a gas mask (outside of the one I was hot, the beds were uncomfortable was issued in the Army), but I do collect pictures and the room was illuminated by a of them. I think what I like about them is how single bare lightbulb depending from they inhumanize the wearer, kind of shamanistic a cord high overhead that hardly pro- -like. Then we went to Good Vibrations, where I vided enough light to read. I turned bought a copy of Michael Manning’s Spider Gar- on the radio and they were playing den. Finally. Don McLean’s American Pie. “People Among other places we visited were the renovat- still listen to that?” I asked myself. The room had ed public library, the cathedral of St. Mary (Bess a window that looked out over an ally that was likes churches. Me not so much. I fear I’ll get behind a Japanese restaurant and all night long struck by lightning), and the Presidio. After that there were people in the ally making noises. initial visit, we talked about going back, but nev- Whether they were employees on break or some of the many homeless people we later encoun- er did, and now we’re too old to go anywhere. tered, I can’t say. (By the way, the restaurant was pretty good. We had dinner there the next even- GERARD GLEASON ing.) [email protected] In contrast, Bess liked the hostel just fine and San Francisco, California complained when we moved to a much nicer ho- I really enjoyed Portable Storage Three, especially your brother Michael’s piece. I recall one tel in Oakland that there were bed bugs in our day at TMJB, when I first knew you and you room. I didn’t find any bed bugs, and I think the were passing yourself off as some guy who just only reason she complained was that she found landed from West Virginia. I was saying some- our new room too decadent for her taste – she’s thing about a hippie hangout, The Family Phar- always been a fan of austerity. macy, having been in my neighborhood on Cali- The next day we went down to the Fisherman’s fornia Street at 6th Avenue. And you piped up I Wharf where we looked at the Bay Bridge and was wrong, that Family Pharmacy was at Califor- the sea lions. There was also the Ripley’s Muse- nia and Divisadero. Family Pharmacy had start-

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ed at California and 6th Ave...and sometime later moved to the Divisadero location...and I recall at STEVEN BLACK the time I said I was right ... but then it dawned [email protected] on me how the fuck would a guy from West Vir- Berkeley, California ginia know where Family Pharmacy had been. Excuse the purple pen, and the challenged pen- And I love that on page 96 there is a photo of manship to match! My Brother printer is on Fillmore Street w/ a "voodda voodda" *engine strike (lacking toner) but this LoC cannot wait! noise* muscle car ... but in the background is the It’s tempting to begin with commenting on the original Sanchez Mexican Food restaurant, be- author bios/photos in Portable Storage Three fore they moved to the Mission. One of my best first because those are the parts I looked at last. friends in grade school was George Sanchez, his I spent the last month dipping in at random, parents owned the place. Their logo was a kid reading most of the contents out of order, as I sitting on an ear of corn that was a rocket encountered them. There is so much here that ship. We'd call him resonates, either because the writer is someone "Corn Rocket with whom I have some acquaintance or famili- Boy"...and ask him arity—or better yet, no direct knowledge of at all. how he got to Yet their story-telling draws me in, introducing school. "On your corn me to people and worlds entirely unknown to rocket?" We were me. fucked up ... especially In the case of Grant Canfield, he is someone I to our friends. feel I should have met and gotten to know early And John Fugazzi in my fan career. I met more than a few of the mentions the 1975 SNACK concert at Kezar Sta- other artists he mentions—Derek Carter, Joe dium...specifically Bob Dylan coming onstage as Pearson—yet by missing to make his acquaint- the surprise closing act...I was there, but had had ance, I can at least find consolation for the FO- enough when Joan Baez finished ( I was tired of MO (fear of missing out) in the pages of his “My Virgil Caine & Ol'Dixie, and anyway The Band's San Francisco Century.” version was better)...I walked outside Kezar and Besides enjoying the large, extended family sense THEN heard the roar of the crowd when Baez I get with all of fandom you have drawn together introduced Dylan...and the fucker gate guys in the these pages, another delight is the literal would not let me back in. I heard "Knock Knock family—brother sister, mother—reflected and Knocking" from outside. embodied here. So great to read other accounts Lots of good memories from the pieces in Porta- of legendary characters in your life—Gene ble Storage Three. But still not as good say you Young!—and events (poison hemlock!) that I singing "Crimson & Clover" while you karate have heard only tantalizing bits of over the years. chopped your own neck to cause the reverbera- What a pleasure it is to pinball through these tion effect. HaHa. pages, and see many of our overlapping worlds— And of course the classic from the 1981 Beach the fannish multiverse—reflected in these wistful Chalet Party ... the hall rented from the VFW... memoirs. One picture that stirred me was Allyn the jukebox got moved to the other side of the Cadogyn. I was privileged to receive issue one of Genre Plat so many years ago. A few months af- room during set up... I arrived with Art Gilberg, nd who had ordered 6 kegs of super shitty Hamm's ter I moved to SF and met her in a 2 Avenue beer, and my friends were pissed off the beer was fan shack. It worked out that she delivered me by Hamm's ...and the old VFW guy came in, (we had car to my flat on Laussat, near Haight and Fill- rented the hall and told him it was a birthday more. Curiously she knew this block-long street party)... he saw all the beer and yelled "THIS well, and believed she had many years earlier AIN'T A BIRTHDAY PARTY!! -- IT'S A BEER resided in this very same apartment I then occu- BUST!! AND WHO THE HELL MOVED THE pied with Ann Weiser. She spoke of tear gas and JUKEBOX ??". I sheepishly went over to move martial law—late ’60s riots. the jukebox back to where it had been... but Memories can be maddening in their fluidity, someone had loaded the machine with quarters which makes Portable Storage Three such an and picked songs...as I reached to unplug it the admirable anthology of lives lived looking back VFW guy barked "DON'T UNPLUG THAT -- IT'S and looking inward. These days, the view from PLAYING 'DANNY BOY' !!!" my east-window on Crap St. serves as my virtual

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background on some of the many zoom sessions here. Even without the prefiguring I could proba- I do in the course of my Library business. Sutro bly have guessed what was going to be in the en- Tower never gets old. velope, given its general size and shape and that News from SF is that the Mission has highest it was clearly from you. I thus instinctively knew Covid-19 rate in the City. I expect that someday what it was without even looking at it, but I think the virus will find me and there will be a reckon- I'd picked up PS3 two or three times before I ing. even spotted the understated title lettering on a crossbeam of the Golden Gate Bridge. I rather Looking forward to your next issue. From this like this way that it does not advertise itself. mad lead-poisoned attic in Elmwood on College From external appearances alone, and without Avenue in the People’s Republik of Berzerkeley I the prefiguring clues, it could be a volume of am yr ever humble ob’t, Steven. manga or perhaps one of those pricey high-class MARK PLUMMER journals of architecture or design. [email protected] Croyden, Surrey I do find that PS reminds me more of a little Earlier this year we bought a new armchair. We magazine than a fanzine and that's not just a shuffled the dining room table towards the mid- consequence of the nature of the artefact. I think dle of the room to make space for it and now it Leigh Edmonds has it right, as he so often does, sits under the window at the back of the house, when he talks about its sense of 'intellectuality'. to serve as a reading spot with both natural light It just presents as the kind of thing that smart and a view of the garden where foxes, neighbour- people read, although that's not to say that I'm hood cats and assorted bird life cavort in if not positioning myself within that demographic -- quite cosmic harmony then something approach- smart people rather than PS readers, that is -- or ing mutual tolerance, at least until a cat decides indeed that fanzine readers are not smart. Years to actualise the metaphor of being among the ago a colleague saw a copy of Bruce Gillespie's pigeons. The Metaphysical Review on my desk and I'm sure her opinion of me went up on seeing some- And that's where I was sitting a few of weeks thing of such obvious jiant braned rigour and back, reading Portable Storage Three and work- depth rather than my more usual pulpy science- ing through a small stack of CDs gifted to us by a fictional fare, little knowing that TMR was prob- fan friend who decided that he didn't like them ably full of Bruce being soppy about his cats. I quite as much as he'd hoped. It was all very com- would try leaving our copy of PS3 on my desk to fortable, bordering on the luxurious even, an op- see what impact that has, were it not for the fact portunity to combine a couple of pleasurable ac- that I've no idea when I'll next get anywhere near tivities and with no sense that I should instead be my office. doing something else, and yet it was also an odd experience. Nothing to do with Portable Storage There's an eclecticism to your content, even if it itself, I should add, or even anything about the all fits within your general theme. I was a huge not-wanted-on-voyage soundtrack, but rather fan of Science Fiction Eye back in the day, and because it seemed such a normal thing to be do- one of the things about it that appealed to me ing and yet every so often I kept shocking myself was the diversity of its coverage. It almost back into remembering that right now things are seemed personal, the way that they'd stretch the anything but. Or maybe they are and it's just a scope of their content to include anything that I question of adjusting to a revised version of nor- might like. They had a high hit-rate. PS also mality. makes me think of a line from The Haunted I really like what you're doing with Portable Bookshop by Christopher Morley (1919): 'I hope Storage and PS itself as an artefact, made all the you don't think I'm a mere highbrow,' he said. more pleasurable by the way it just turns up in 'As a customer said to me once, without meaning my mailbox. It's arrival wasn't unexpected. You'd to be funny, "I like both The Iliad and The Argo- mentioned its imminence in an email a few days sy."' earlier and I was impressed by how quickly it made the journey from Arizona given that the I'm probably of an age (born 1964) that I first same postal delivery brought a postcard from encountered San Francisco in Scott McKenzie's James Bacon that had taken two weeks to travel paean to tonsorial horticulture. I was a huge fan from High Wycombe, 37 miles north-west of of pop music from a young age and the radio was always on during the day in our house so I 125 doubtless heard the song when it hit the UK pop And while I'm singling out Grant I'll specifically charts in the middle of 1967, even if I then had mention his description of his 'frank and open' no idea where San Francisco was or precisely encounter with his co-worker Bonnie, and com- why a floral headdress was a prerequisite for any mend his honesty in writing about it. visitor. (I recall, or at least have convinced myself A friend said recently that letters to fanzines are that I recall, loving the single 'Fire Brigade' by 'hard work' and I know what she means. I'm far The Move which was released in early 1968 and too prone to fiddling with the wording, rewriting which struck me then as being about a wholly to the point where there's a danger that the letter sensible subject for a pop song, fire engines be- will never attain a finished state and from which ing so much more interesting than girls or love the only escape is to accept that it falls several when you're four years old.) yards short of perfection and just click (Send). It's only later that I find I have been praising a I may not have understood Scott McKenzie in fanzine for resembling something other than a 1967, but maybe I absorbed part of his message fanzine, and that fanzines by implication lack subliminally. In later years 'San Francisco' came 'intellectuality', something from which I do not to be a shorthand for certain forms of music, lit- entirely save myself by the appended remark that erature and counter-cultural values that ap- 'that's not to say that ... that fanzine readers are pealed to me hugely, even if I still probably had not smart'. Honestly, I don't know what I was little idea of where this legendary city was be- thinking. yond being 'in America somewhere'. (My US geography was embarrassingly sketchy before I was For all that PS may present like a little magazine, in my thirties. It has now improved substantially, I think it is clearly a fanzine all the same. Para- one of many things I owe to fandom.) We first phrasing something I said about Bruce Gillespie visited the city in 2005 for the Corflu/Potlatch fifteen years ago, and checking back I now see it double-header -- I think we did see you at the was something I admitted I'd pinched half- former, albeit briefly? -- and we've been in the remembered from Ansible, you may wear the general Bay Area several times since, but as best outer garments of a respectable literary quarterly I recall we've been in San Francisco proper rela- but you wear your fannish underpants with tively infrequently, and I'm still rather surprised pride. 'Earnest' isn't a word I'd use, and I do now with myself that I've never visited City Lights, or wonder about 'intellectuality'. Is 'erudition' per- Haight-Ashbury, or The Fillmore. I suspect my haps better? Actually, I think that Morley quote younger self -- say, aged 18 or so -- would be still rather sums it up, although perhaps 101 years on more surprised and probably a little disappoint- we need better representatives than The Iliad ed in his successor. For him, these places were as and The Argosy. Edgar Rice Burroughs and Wil- remote and inaccessible as Mars and the idea liam S Burroughs? No, that's pretty dated too. that they might one day come within reach was Perhaps Eric Frank Russell and Karen Russell, utterly unimaginable, and yet miraculously his seeing as the latter's on my mind having recently older manifestation got to visit this fabled-in- read Vampires in the Lemon Grove. I particular- song-and-story place and yet chose to spend his ly liked 'Barn at the end of our Term' in which time sitting around in hotel lobbies with science President Rutherford B Hayes discovers he's fiction fans rather than walking in the footsteps turned into a horse, living on a farm with 21 oth- of the Grateful Dead, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and er horses, 10 of which are also former US presi- The Diggers. dents while the others are just, you know, horses. Lots of good stuff here for sure, from a few peo- Are you familiar with Christopher Morley, by the ple I know and others who are only vaguely fa- way? I found The Haunted Bookshop on the miliar names. A lot of it comes out of a period of Standard Ebooks website, something that feels American fandom I don't know as well as I would wrong somehow as it's rather the kind of volume like, and in that respect and more Grant Can- that should be discovered in a bookshop field's half-century is the standout. I met Grant ‘haunted’ by the ghosts of great literature, filed briefly at the Chicago Corflu in 2016, but before next to an inconstant copy of Thomas Carlyle's that knew him only through his artwork, espe- Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell. cially the pieces in Fandom Harvest which is a Portable Storage Three is a fine thing, like its very well-read book in our house as we have two two precursors. To the extent that I can claim to copies, one of which somebody put down in the know you, it feels very *you* and that's a good bathroom in 2004 and it's been there ever since. thing to say of any fanzine.

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We Also Heard From

AUSTIN BRONSON With every passing head-scratching Covid day, Billy Ray and I say, "Gonna write William today". But the days keep going by. Health and spirits are great here, considering. (As long as Amazon doesn't stop delivering Billy books, that is.) Currently I am rearranging Billy's library-bedroom- office for efficiency. Been on our to-do list for the last couple of years. On the North side of E St, my 6yr old daughter attends school online, so no pause in education. We've just gained dad as a full- time learning coach...Lots more reading and drawing, science experiments, hikes in the forest etc. (Have a great picture of Emmy hugging a tree in the Deschutes forest that I've been meaning to send you since Christmas (reminds me of the Rose Motel...Larry? "I’m a tree hugger")...We trust you’re keeping yourself healthy. (Hopefully the Covid virus couldn't survive in the lungs of the Breiding Cowboy). For now Sir, thank you again, so very much for Portable Storage Three! Billy says he will be in contact with you very soon, and I believe him.

CRAIG MAINS The first time I hitchhiked to San Francisco I had nowhere to stay and a street person showed me where some people were staying. He referred to it as the Carousel Ballroom but I eventually figured out that it was the Fillmore. It was just a cavernous empty room at that time---I think around 1974 maybe 75. There was still a bunch of psychedelic paintings that had been applied directly to the walls and handbills advertising past concerts scattered on the floor. The stage was still there. I think I stayed there for three or four nights and wandered around the city during the day enjoying the gradual dissipation of the fog. You got into the ballroom by wandering up a couple levels of an adja- cent parking garage and wiggling through a narrow opening.

GERARD GLEASON (again) Coffee, beer, meat pies and Dirk Dirksen!

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TED WHIPPLE Amused by Craig Lion's piece. After I moved out of Gene’s (circa July '77), my bedroom got used for sparring—adding to the consternation of the neighbor below who constantly whined over the least amount of noise. A transplanted New Yorker studying to pass his CA bar exam. The stucco walls in that building had zero insulation. No carpets to buffer the sound. He must have been driven to the breaking point. (Some solace in that thought.) Hadn't realized how formative Craig’s sparring with Gene would become. // Liked your brother Michael's extensive piece. I had forgotten just how uniquely connected Gene has been with your family. Was very touched by seeing photos I've never seen of him. And hearing more about his Hawaiian years. Gene has a magical connection with everyone he's allowed in. And I would bet that each person knows a somewhat different Gene. // I'm not sure I can suspend the disappointment I've more recently felt about San Francisco in contrast to my first three decades here—but maybe I'm just more regretful than angry. Joan's short take on San Francisco strikes a chord that resonates with me.

CRAIG LION

SUSAN BREIDING Portable Storage arrived yesterday just as I was taking the last tray of granola out of the oven. It is amazing. Magnificently overwhelming (or is that overwhelmingly magnificent?). So much in it: ad- dictive reading, even as I feel myself being emotionally over loaded. One memory leads to a million others. The cover is truly amazing. It is beside my rocker now, and I will try to read it slowly. Just for fun I tried to imagine my own MINI-BIO, and image: That photo you took in the kitchen at 2381 Bush Street of me kneading bread, looking about 12 years old, hair pony-tailed, eyes present and faraway at the same time; timeless and true, this image. And the words: “Susan lives alone in West Virginia where she walks and reads and writes letters and still bakes all her own bread and very occasionally sings. She still plants flowers and tomatoes.”

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JEANNE BOWMAN And I have been reading my way through Portable Storage, what a gas. Jim Kennedy is a lovely writer.

JIM RU Kim Kerbis’ story. That was great. Yeah. That's what we did. Just pack it up and go! And sourdough bread. I remember discovering that for the first time. It was so exotic. It made any meal classy. I just watched tv news from San Francisco. The streets are pretty much empty. A page is turned.

MICHAEL BREIDING Quite a diversity of backgrounds, experiences and observations. Herron's axiom: "If you don't know the city, it's neither here nor there, but if you do, confusion" could certainly be said to apply to our entire existence. Grant Canfield? I have run into people like him before. I always walk away feeling inadequate and irrelevant. Some people seem to get it all - for whatever reason. His writing flows like water. I did not know you took so many pictures back then. Some I have seen for decades but with no attribution. I am glad you still have them. I cannot help but wonder if such a compilation as this has been done before for SF or indeed any other city. VINCENT MCHARDY Thank you so very much for the copy of Portable Storage Three…the front cover is fantastic. Haunt- ing and seductive. A timeless combo for my aging (soon to be falling off) naughty bits. Makes me want to get into Mr. Peabody's Way Back machine and take off to the land of Portable Storage and get lost. You are saving a history. // Have you been watching some viral movies? Andromeda Strain and Contagion? Planet of the Apes covers the new danger of quickness of dispersal. We are now in a highly restricted infectious mode. Sigh. I'm cleaning out the garage. Bit by bit. I'm lessening the giant hoard. I will return to my cats now. They are scratching at my chamber door. I must let them in.

CHRISTINA HIONIDES Dingwall [Scotland] is celebrating the typewriter this week. A stream of triangular flags have been raised high above to crisscross the High Street. Typewriters of all ages past adorn the shop windows, even Harry Gow’s, The Baker. And somewhere further north they are screening Populaire [French film about a typewriter]. What beloved innocence!

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AL SIROIS I am reading through PS 3 (at last) and I have found Jim Khennedy's piece fascinating. I liked Ray Nelson's, too. I love how comfortable he is with himself.

HARRY O. MORRIS Glad yr still publishing…I don’t see how you manage it—pandemic or not. Portable Storage must take up a fair amount of your time. I’m glad you don’t have to retype all the contents thanks to the internet. I often regret the countless hours I spent typing Nyctalops. Damn. At least I met good people. Glad to see so many of your photographs (capturing as much—or more—than the words).

THERESA L. REED My favorites? Probably L. Jim Khennedy and Michael Breiding followed by Grant Canfield, Jay Kin- ney and Kennedy Gammage. Three is so wonderful I couldn’t put it down!

TONY CVETKO I think the wraparound cover is lovely and conveys the feeling of the issue. This entire issue was a kind of revelation. While I enjoyed the entire issue, two pieces stood out for me. Your brother Mike's, because I can't imagine what it must take to move the family across the country. He did a good job bringing that to life. And Grant Canfield. Someone I don't know but certainly knew of, as one of those BNFs that I, as my shy-self doing fanzines back in the '70s, wouldn't have had the courage to approach. He seems like such an interesting guy with an interesting life. I think you deserve a Hugo!

RICH COAD It took me much longer than either reading the book or writing the review for Portable Stor- age, but I finally got the COSMOCOPIA jigsaw puzzle done.

DONALD SIDNEY-FRYER I especially enjoyed Grant Canfield’s memoir with his delicious artwork. Please tell Grant that he should have this memoir and the others referenced in it gathered into a one volume tome with his art as well. // I don’t miss the hectographed or mimeo’d fanzines of the 30s and 40s. Going through Forrest Ackerman’s collection (looking for Clark Ashton Smith) was enough! It took me a month or so turning over many musty pages—usually without contents pages!—but I managed to get through a 25 foot pile! // SRO Hotel—what is that!

[SRO = Single Room Occupancy. Tons of those hotels in the Tenderloin and all along Mission Street—or at least there used to be. Probably not anymore.]

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And We Also Heard From. . .

Billy Wolfenbarger Nigel Rowe Tracy Nusser Bobby Goodspeed Beth Oliver Ballentine Christina Kourkoulis Rob Imes Julian Martin Frank Vacanti Richard Johnson Linda Michaels Miguel Marqueda Mitzi Kanbara Dale Nelson Joan Breiding Hope Leibowitz Peggi Jane Jeung Gil Price Arlington Joseph Michael Dobson Therese Vanzo Kim Kerbis M. D. Lucid Barbara Hille Michael McClure Simon K. Agree

And thanks to these folks for endowments of cash:

Fanny Jo “Babe” Biggs Richard Johnson Joan Breiding Bobby Goodspeed Rob Imes

You rock!

BILLY BOB SEZ: Loc Me, Loc me now!

Contact!

[email protected]

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The Gorgon of Poses G. Sutton Breiding

MY LUTE DOTH YET REMAIN sleep comes with trembling hands a river of moongrey voices pages of soot and hair and diesel oil somewhere between the trains and the caterwauls the bone-sharp cries of my mother and there's Old Death, taking notes, eating a sandwich alone as a paper clip in a Sunday office

I wanted to be a myth unto myself the head of Orpheus, Pan in exile, a wandering sunflower resting on lawn chairs of the summer dawns I worked on sentences of snow and necromancy unicorns and despair, the whispers of dying memories passing in an endless pilgrimage of silent rags there were woodcuts of the wind deer in their castles the graffiti of runes in a book of hawks and afternoons power plants glowed like skulls I wrote like a fiend filled with dread and wonder

I tasted the salt of ancient things the sky was all coal and spaceships hedges hummed with steampunk witches as I crammed the pages margin to margin with forgotten mantras, dead mojos black suns rumbling, Virginia's nerves moments of being on an alien planet

I walked and walked in the afterlife of time consciousness waxing waning waxing waning seeking a literature of the aging, the dying, the diseased silver streets in Victorian twilights of the heart sublime idiot visions of Rivendell, tattooed thighs psychedelic coffee grown on Mercury days like Twombly, nights like Basquiat

I smelled, over and over, that long lament of sex dog winds blew the fumes of Hades hard all exorcisms and alchemies failed wordhaunted, I sought my apocalypse of solitude I wanted to break my precious alphabet into tiny pieces and fuck myself to the end of the world such are the ways of poetry

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Alva Svoboda was subdued as a child, moods out of a pristine guidebook to the museums of Orange, where he made his home. Lusting at doltish but lovely ladies as young as he was, thrown down a trout run by kindest toothsome direction, he hooted at schoolgirls. Note: up to him, he would not tell them, nor shred itching servi- ettes honed to irk independent truths, the hot growth blest.

Chris Sherman emerged from a recursive H.P. Lovecraft short story in 1837, equipped solely with an outline of a collective bargaining agreement that eventually led to the formation of APA-50. After gafiating in the mid-1980s, he served as vice-president of technology for an international consulting firm and published eight obnoxiously geeky books. Later, he was founding editor of Search Engine Land and orchestrated the Search En- gine Strategies and Search Marketing Expo conferences for more than two decades. Today he resides with his lovely wife Janice at their home in Boulder, just scant blocks from where he witnessed the hatching of three chickens in the single-room schoolhouse where he attended kindergarten.

Dale Nelson is a columnist for CSL: The Bulletin of the New York C.S. Lewis Society and the Tolkien newsletter Beyond Bree. His Lady Stanhope’s Manuscript and Other Stories was published by Nodens Books and is out of print.

Jeanne Bowman is home at 38° 21' 19" N latitude 122° 31' 46" W longitude. Now and again she uses her grandmother's portable Singer sewing machine for perfect rolled hems and ponders the question of restore or repurpose for the treadle operated antiques in the barn.

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Jeff Schalles was born in 1951, Pittsburgh, Pa., discovered rock & roll in 1962 and science fiction fandom in 1968. Earned a B.A. in English Literature, graduated in 1973. Bicycled and hitch-hiked across Canada in 1974, ended up working on a cattle ranch near Omak, Washing- ton. Hiked most of the Appalachian Trail in bits and pieces spanning 20 years. Writer, musician, artist, photographer, gardener, typesetter & printer. Got my first drum kit in 1965. Retired from printing in 2011. I've lived in Minnesota since 1989 and wander around the bits of remaining prairies with a camera a lot. Motto: I fix more things than I break!

Peter Young thinks he lives in Hua Hin, Thailand, but he’s not so sure any more having been exiled against his will to Stoke-on-Trent, England, for four months now. He was usually at altitude somewhere around the planet when not plugged into the internet, but now the internet gets him full-time. He has two young boys, he publishes fanzines, he runs speculative fiction- and Thailand- related websites.

Kennedy Gammage majored in English at U.C. Berkeley. He resides in San Diego, and his personal website is www.travelogorrhea.com. He has been published in A Café in Space, SN Review, DEUS LOCI, The San Die- go Poetry Annual and Portable Storage.

Bruce Townley is a man in his 60s who lives in a tiny, rent-controlled conapt that is crammed with books, comic books, records and dinosaur models. It is located in the best city in the whole world, San Francisco. He misses going out for breakfast at the local diner.

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Michael Gorra was an active fan from 1973-75 and now teaches English at Smith College in Massachu- setts. His books include Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Master- piece and The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War.

Andy Hooper was introduced to science fiction by Gold Key comics and Lost in Space and has been struggling to raise his standards ever since. He attended his first convention in 1978, and began contributing to and publishing fanzines in the early 1980s. He collaborated on the Hugo-nominated fanzines Apparatchik and Chunga, and has won or ties for FAAn Awards 19 times since 1995. In 1970, he lived within a few miles of the Breiding family farm in West Virginia.

Tom Jackson is a longtime science fiction fan and a newspaper reporter who lives in the Cleveland area. He hopes somebody will publish an ebook anthology of the writings of fan writer Redd Boggs. He does not always have a cat sitting on top of him when he is trying to write, only sometimes.

Gary Hubbard is currently a retired librarian, but used to sell games in a hobby shop. He still cherishes a wide-ranging knowledge of the gaming world despite never having actually played any of the games. He spent the Sixties in the Army and it was not a happy experience. He didn’t like the Army and the Army didn’t like him. He wrote his first “Cracked Eye” for Frank Lunney in either Beabohemia or Syndrome (he can’t remember which) and it’s been an albatross around his neck ever since. Likes long walks on the beach and tentacle porn.

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Cheryl Cline is a science fiction fan and reader who lives in a house filled with too many books. She's been married to fellow SF fan Lynn Kuehl for, like, forever, and he had too many books when she met him. Together they own a used bookshop, which only partly accounts for fact they have too many books.

AC Kolthoff lives in Tucson, AZ with her husband, William, and a pack of invisible dogs that she is certain will materialize one day soon.

Donald Sidney-Fryer was born in 1934 in New Bedford, Massachusetts. After serving in the Marine Corps he attended UCLA where he began pursuing his lifelong love affair with Clark Ashton Smith. He lived in San Francisco during one of its seminal butterfly stages, 1965-1975. He has had three dozen titles published, many by Arkham House and Hippocampus Press. He was once bard to Edmund Spenser. DSF currently lives in East Sandwich, Massachusetts.

Talking points for G. Sutton Breiding, a poet for our times, include siskins, deep green moss and Kate Moss, old age, amethyst, myrrh, space cowboys and la- mia. His bio can be accessed at Wikipedia in all its full- ness.

Cover Artist Brad W. Foster has been making toons, cover art, and fine art, for zines and professionally, for Umpteen Years. Awesomely prolific, Brad etches and sketches away in Irving, Texas.

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Artists in this issue

118 (left)—John Benson 17—Michael McClure 43—Jeanne Bowman 52, 55, 66, 133—Harry O. Morris 111—G. Sutton Breiding 3, 127—Ray Nelson 8, 9, 58, 109, 129 , 140—William Breiding 47—Jeff Schalles 128—Austin Bronson 6—Marc Schrimeister 72, 106, 116, 136—Grant Canfield 23—Chris Sherman 24—Kurt Erichsen 40, 75—Al Sirois 84, 87—Jude Fulkerson 105, 118 (right)—Taral 5 (left)—Gil Gaier 99, 135—Bruce Townley 88, 89, 90, 91—Don Herron 132—Unknown 101—AC Kolthoff 48, 56—Frank Vacanti 100—Karen Rae Kolthoff 107—Wendy Victor 57—Vic Kostrikin 11—Joe West 129 (center)—Craig Lion 86—Michael Whelan 123 (left)—Mark Manning 44, 58, 63, 67, 96—Alan White 85—Jim McLeod 5 (right)—Gene Young

Poems Uncredited Your Order Has Arrived! — G. Sutton Breiding, page 9 Hypersurface Issues — Kennedy Gammage, page 57 Poem—G. Sutton Breiding, page 66

For the edification of Leigh Edmonds and Nic Farey: Word Count: 64,832

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