Scratch Pad 37

Scratch Pad No. 37 March 2000 Congratulations, Cath Ortlieb, for achieving what no one else did: taking a photo of two of our most recent ANZAPA recruits, TAFF winner, Maureen Kincaid Speller, and GUFF Winner, Paul Kincaid. Scratch Pad No. 37. A fanzine for Acnestis and ANZAPA by Bruce Gillespie, 59 Keele Street, Collingwood, Victoria 3066, Australia. Phone & Fax: 61-3-9419-4797. Email: [email protected]. Cover photo: Paul Billinger. ME AGAIN, NATURALLY Let me tell you all the things I haven’t done since last The only thing I have done is about 30 per cent of the September. work on the new fanzine that Paul Kincaid, Maureen Kin- I haven’t read more than a few mailings of Acnestis or caid Speller and I are publishing before Easter. Paul and ANZAPA. But I did have to catch up on reading some books Maureen have done most of the work. Paul has also learnt (see later in this issue). Microsoft Publisher 2000, for which I should give him a gold I haven’t finished publishing the Turner Issue of SF star and a blue certificate. MS Publisher drives me crazy, so Commentary. I had finished 90 per cent of it before Aussie- I’ve bowed out of the page design part of the business. con 3, but I haven’t gained that week or so I need to put it Steam Engine Time — that’s the new monster’s name — together. has gone its own way. We don’t seem to be reprinting I haven’t made any progress on the general issue of SF brilliant stuff from Acnestis, which was my aim. We do seem Commentary that has now been mouldering on diskette for to be publishing a lot of brilliant other stuff, which will more than six years. encourage brilliant contributors and letter writers. I haven’t assembled the Metaphysical Review that has been I’m way behind on reading mailings, and way behind on sitting on manuscript or computer file since October 1998. everything except endless boring work, work, work. It would I haven’t finished the article on Joanna Russ that has be great if I were making a fortune, but instead the next been 99 per cent finished since November 1998. cheque is always all spent before it arrives. So I keep on And I haven’t adequately thanked Acnestids who have working. While there’s hope there’s life, as somebody sent me marvellous books over the last year or so. I will didn’t say. But where’s the million-dollar cheques with my retaliate as soon as somebody in Australia publishes some- name on them?, say I. thing brilliant. LISTS! The Epic Lists and John Foyster Alfred Bester To John Foyster, another’s little eccentricity can sometimes Leigh Brackett loom as a major sin. In recent years, he has taken to berating Kurt Vonnegut me for spending my few spare hours in making up lists of John W. Campbell this and that, forgetting that his own lists of favourite SF in Australian Science Fiction Review in 1967 were the first sign to Short Fiction: me that other people indulged in this peculiar pleasure. Smith: The Burning of the Brain On page 39 of ASFR No. 12, October 1967, he proposed Russell: Metamorphosite the following lists of ‘Foyster’s Top Ten’: Farmer: Sail On! Sail On! Surgeon: Baby Is Three Authors: Miller: The Big Hunger Cordwainer Smith Ballard: The Voices of Time Philip Jose Farmer Clarke: The Star Theodore Sturgeon Shiras: In Hiding Walter M. Miller Jr. Matheson: Born of Man and Woman Henry Kuttner Budrys: The Executioner A. E. Van Vogt 2 Novels: pitched cartoon voices were recorded by Seville speeding I can’t think of any. up and multitracking his own voice), but I have never again heard ‘Ragtime Cowboy Joe’, by the same group, which was The last line is one of the most striking in ASFR’s short No. 18 in Melbourne on 12 September 1959. history. Could John Foyster think of no SF novels good Did these songs actually hold the positions that 3AW enough to appear on a Top Ten list? Or was he saying that claimed for them? Occasionally I looked at the 3DB Top 40 the term ‘SF novel’ is an oxymoron? chart, which was published each Friday in The Sun News Lest you think that Mr Foyster abandoned the joys of lists Pictorial. I recognised few of the songs. Was it possible that in the 1960s, I mention that as recently as 17 April 1981 he one or the other station was concocting its chart, or at least sent me a list of Top Books of the Year. His best ten books taking their statistics from very different record shops? of 1980, as published on page 62 of SF Commentary No. 62/63/64/65/66, June 1981, were: I discover higher authorities Late in 1959 or early in 1960, I discovered Stan Rofe’s deejay 1 Henry James: The Europeans program on 3KZ. Listening to ‘Stan the Man’ involved a 2 Doris Lessing: Stories major change of loyalties, as his program was on at the same 3 Oscar Lewis: Living the Revolution time as the ABC Children’s Hour, which had had my total 4 Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie: Montaillou loyalty for many years. Loyalty be (slowly but surely) 5 Edmund Wilson: Upstate hanged! 1959 was the year when I decided to stop being a 6 Jacques Donzelot: The Policing of Families child. Out went my comics collection. I almost stopped 7 E. P. Thompson: The Making of the English Working reading children’s books. And, slowly but surely, I stopped Class listening to the Argonauts. 8 John Franklin Bardin: Omnibus Out went 3AW. At the beginning of the football season 9 V. S. Naipaul: A House for Mr Biswas in 1960, 3AW began to broadcast both football and racing 10 Gilbert Sorrentino: Mulligan Stew. on Saturday afternoon, interspersing sports results with a few Top 60 songs. It became difficult to work out the weekly As with Thomas Disch’s Year’s Best, in the same issue of SFC, chart. Also, I realised that 3AW programmers based their I’ve used John Foyster’s list extensively when buying books. Top 60 pretty much on their own prejudices, rather than I’ve read only Nos. 1 and 5 on Foyster’s 1981 list, but for weekly record sales. many years I have owned most of the others. 3KZ was the station where I could hear the records that were actually popular. 3KZ never bothered with a Top 40 My first list chart, but I soon noticed that the 3DB Top 40 usually Are lists merely useful to the people who read them? No. I reflected the songs Stan Rofe had been playing the week construct lists for pleasure, but it’s not easy to describe the before. nature of that pleasure. Why should I, in 1959, when I was twelve years old, a few I invent new lists months after I received my own radio, not only discover pop Listing pop songs became an addiction, and remained my music, despite the disapproval of everybody else in my main hobby until 1969, when I was twenty-two. My next list family, but also start writing down the positions in the 3AW was a weekly tally of the new songs heard on radio. In those Top Sixty as I heard the tunes were played each Saturday days, there was no gang of pop radio stations that decided afternoon? The songs were not played in order. On the first the three new singles that would be added each week to Saturday on which I wrote all the placings, 5 September radio playlists throughout Australia. During the 1960s, 1959, here was the ‘top ten’: more than sixty new singles a week were released, most would be played at least once on radio. Often, my greatest 1 ‘Lonely Boy’ (Paul Anka) favourites would be played only once, then disappear for- 2 ‘My Heart is an Open Book’ (Carl Dobkins Jr) ever, or linger at No. 40 until they slipped off the chart. 3 ‘Waterloo’ (Stonewall Jackson) For my next list (started on 5 December 1959), I chose 6 ‘Sweet Sugar Lips’ (Kalin Twins) my Top Four favourites for the week. The heading was ‘Hits 9 ‘Ring-a-Ling-a-Lario’ (Jimmie Rodgers) That Should Be Top’: 10 ‘The Battle of New Orleans’ (Johnny Horton). 1 ‘Just Ask Your Heart’ (Frankie Avalon) Where were Numbers 4, 5, 7 and 8? To find out, I would 2 ‘Oh, Carol!’ (Neil Sedaka) have to wait until next week. But by then the positions would 3 ‘Woo Hoo’ (The Rocketeens) have moved, so the pattern might take weeks, even months, 4 ‘Oh Yeah Uh Huh’ (Col Joye). to become clear. Next week, the only Top Ten numbers read out were: Frankie Avalon was one of those ‘teen idols’ that are now seen as the emblem of everything that was wrong with pop 6 ‘I’m Gonna Get Married’ (Lloyd Price) music between 1957 and 1963. ‘Just Ask Your Heart’ be- 7 ‘Big Hunk o’ Love’ (Elvis Presley) came so obscure that I didn’t hear it again for nearly forty 10 ‘Only Sixteen’ (Sam Cooke). years (on Magic AM). The records on hit parades during the fifties and sixties It’s unlikely that anybody but me remembers these songs, were a mixture of fifties-style ballads, rock and roll-style unless you have access to Golden Oldies radio station, such moanin’-’n’-groanin’ love songs, country-and-western, as Magic AM in Melbourne.

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