QUARTERLY 1 3 RIVERSIDE QUARTERLY Illiteracy, Inc August '1973 Vol
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RIVERSIDE vol. 6 QUARTERLY 1 3 RIVERSIDE QUARTERLY Illiteracy, Inc August '1973 Vol. 6, No. i (whole number 21) Editor: Leland Sapiro Assistant Editors: Associate Editor: Jim Harmon Bill Blackbeari To replace the customary announcements, etc., I wish to list some Art Editor: Jan Jonsson Redd Boggs misusages of languages in current books and magazines. Since these Poetry Editor: David Lunde Jon White errors were committed by presumably educated professional authors, I infer that grammar, syntax, etc., are no longer taught in school Send poetry to David Lunde, 1179 Central Ave, Dunkirk, NY 1404F —so this listing is an indirect plea that their study be resumed. and other correspondence to Box 40, Univ. Station,Regina, Canada Dangling Participles Certain verb forms that end in -ed and -ing are supposed to modify something—and in such a way that the sentence means what the writer TABLE OF CONTENTS intended. Two classic examples are: "If stewed, the patients will en joy the prunes" and (to quote, from memory, an old Rhodqmagnetic Di Illiteracy, Inc........................ ............................................. ........................... gest) "Being an English teacher, my time is very limited these days." The Prudish Prurience of H.R. Haggard and E.R. Burroughs I refrained from sending this last writer a note—"Your time doesn't teach English: you do—and not very wellI"—so these remarks are Richard Dale Mullen ........................................................................ 4 an Open Letter type of substitute. The Myth of Descent in Vincent King's Light a Last Candle Looking over Heinlein's early stories, it is possible to see an S.C. Fredericks ....................................................................................... 20 increasing grasp of technique. Between Two Moments .....................Norman Poole ..... 29 (Alexei Panshin, Heinlein in Dimension, Chicago, 1968, p.7) A Eulogy for the Dying S-F Magazines.....Robert Lowndes.... 30 Looking back, now, to the sixties, a number of assumptions BUK/For the Party New Year's Eve .............. Lee Mallory............ 37 about our experiences are very firm... (James Gilbert, "American Dreams," Partisan Review, Sprint .......................................................................William McMillen.. 38 vol. 38, no. 4 (1970), p. 580) The Fortune .................,.............................................Norman Poole .......... 39 Glorified out of all proportion, it was inevitable that our Zamiatin's We: A Caricature of Utopian Symmetry scientists would fail to live up to popular expectation. Camille R. La Bossi&re ............................................................................ 40 (David Lang, "Ex-Oracles," Harpers, Dec. '72, p. 38) Rosedale Hotel ..........................................................Edward Hagerman... 44 (For the last read, "It was inevitable that our scientists, The Trap ........................................................................Morris Herman . .. glorified out of all proportion, would fail..." The other two are 45 left as an exercise for the student.) From a Corner Table at Rough-House's ....Bill Blackbeard... 46 "Schizophrenia" Good Art.........................................................................Harry J. Riley.... 60 Vulgar usage is exemplified by Time (6 July 1970) under the head The Seasonal Fan ..................................................... Jim Harmon ............... 62 ing "Schizophrenia at the AMA": "The American Medical Association... displayed a split personality at its annual convention in Chicago." Opere Citato................................................................Harry Warner.............. 65 To quote a pamphlet from the Canadian Schizophrenia Foundation (200A Naked Realism vs. the Magical Bunny Rabbit Brent Bldg., Regina), "Schizophrenia is not a split personality. It 68 is a biochemical disease which can affect a person physically."(Split Darrell Schweitzer.............. ...................................................................... personality, whose medical designation is hysteria, is comparatively Another Einstein Express....................................Leon Taylor................ 70 rare.) In the words of the Foundation's president(plus a co-worker): An Uncommon Collection.........................Wayne Connelly.... 72 The meaning of schizophrenia, as popularly used by journalists... is...wrong. The adjective..."schizophrenic" is becoming a part of Asylum and the Fantasy Element...........Tom Greeniones.•.. 74 our language to mean separateness, as in "schizophrenic nation," New Asimov/Old Zelazny........................................Douglas Barbour... "schizophrenic attitudes..." As used in this way it may impart 77 some vague meaning to the reader, but it actually has no meaning Two New (and Major) Works of Speculative Fiction in relationship to the disease from which it comes. Douglas Barbour ................ 79 (Abram Hoffer and Humphry Osmond, How to Live with Schizo Selected Letters................... .. 83 phrenia , London: Morrison & Gibb, Ltd., 1971, p. 1^) (Unsigned material is by the editor.) It suffices to list one such misusage: Front Cover: REG Back Cover: Adrienne Fein The result of this division was...an irreparable split between Robert Jennings....22, 25, 26 Erik Nillson..........67 thought and action...This schizophrenia of the psyche has remain ed characteristic of bourgeois consciousness to the present time. Rudy der Hagopian..33 Kevin MacDonnell...76 Gretchen Schwenn...36, 42 Jan Jonsson..................81 (David Gross, "Toward a Radical Theory of Culture," Radical Cy Chauvin................... 64 Harry Habblitz........... 65, 83 America, Nov.-Dec. 1968, p. 2) conHnue^on^age^S; The number after your name on the mailing label indicates the issue (this being number 21) on which your subscription expiren. Subscription rate: #2.00/four issues; back issues are 60«! each. ©1973 by Leland Sapiro. All rights reserved. 4 THE PRUDISH PRURIENCE OF HAGGARD AND BURROUGHS 5 The Prudish Prurience of #1—CONVENTIONAL NUDITY: FROM BARE BREASTS TO GOLDEN BREASTPLATES H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs When you are suddenly whisked from Earth to Mars or Poloda, by you arrive naked; at least, that is what happens to John Carter in both A Princess of Mars and The Gods of Mars, to Ulysses Pax Richard Dale Mullen ton in The Master Mind of Mars, and to Tangor in Beyond the Far thest Star, which was written in 1940 and so about thirty years (Sndlana Stale 'Idnlveriilu — Serve Shall?) later than the first Mars books. When our Polodan heroine finds the naked Tangor in her garden, While Victorian prudery was a real enough phenomenon, its ex she does what we would expect any nice American girl to do: she tent and effects on both serious and popular literature have been screams and runs away (Parti, I). But things are different widely misunderstood—as, for example, in the following words by on Mars—or at least used to be. In Princess John Carter is 'Kingsley Amis: completely naked from Chapter III to Chapter IX, when he is permitted by his captors to don the harness of a warrior; in Space-opera...is in its earlier Edgar Rice Burroughs form Gods he is without harness until the end of Chapter IV. During as cold-blooded as a fairy story: a George Eliot love scene these periods no one expresses any surprise, much less any shock, suddenly interpolated would seem dangerously modern and in at his nakedness, noteven the two virtuous heroines, De jah Thoris questionable taste. Later space opera of the galactic-hood and Thuvia. But why should they? De jah Thoris, "save for her highly lum sort does, on occasion, borrow a bit of sadism from its wrought ornaments" is "entirely naked" (Princess: VIII), and private-eye analogue, but for the most part it remains hard Thuvia, at this time a slave, is "entirely unadorned" (Gods: IV). ly less decorous than Superman. (New Maps pf Hell< 65) The explanation for their strange behavior is simply that the The historical development suggested here is the reverse of the Martians represent the nudist ideal: they not only go naked, they truth. From the standpoint of their success with the general pub also remain completely unconscious of each other's nakedness. lic, we might well call Burroughs the Mickey Spillane of science Their unconsciousness presumably derives in part from the weak fiction, but from the standpoint of history we mightcall Spillane ness of "that brute passion which the waning demands for procre the Edgar Rice Burroughs of the crime story, for his mixture of ation upon their dying planet has almost stilled in the Martian sex, sadism, and self-righteous violence is remarkably similar breast" (Princess: XII), which also seems to explain a number of to Burroughs'. other things: first, the existence of "the Martian custom which allows female slaves to Martian men, whose high and chivalrous But Burroughs was not original in these respects, for he was fol honor is always ample protection for every woman in his house lowing a tradition of popular romance that goes back at least as far hold" (Gods: XIV); second, the fact that the women captured by the as Bulwer-Lytton and The Last Days of Pompeii (1834)—a tradition Black Martians—despite Phaidor's fear that "the fate of the in which increasing prudery seems to have been a concomitant of an girls they steal is worse than death" (ibid., VIII) — seem to ever more intense concern with the more violent aspects of sexu be used only as attendants on