PORTABLE STORAGE ONE

Portable Storage One

Cover by Tracy Nusser

Portable Storage One

Editorial (3)

Imperfect Recollections by ALJO SVOBODA (6)

Warning: here be sercon

Sort of Like Tolkien by DALE NELSON (13)

Musings of an Unliterary Man by WILLIAM BREIDING (30)

The Pivot Point by JOHN FUGAZZI (44)

Blue by JANET K. MILLER (50)

Not a Good Day to Die by VINCENT MCHARDY (57)

LOC$ (62)

The Gorgon of Poses by G. SUTTON BREIDING (68)

Edited by William Breiding. Available in hard copy for the usual: letters of comment, trade, contributions of writing and visuals, or, if hard-pressed, five bucks. It is also available at the world’s largest online retailer, and, eventually, may be hung at eFanzine.com; also available as a .pdf upon request from: [email protected]

Please send letters of comment and submissions of all kinds to: [email protected]. Hard copy trades: street address was on your mailing envelope, barring that use [email protected] for further enquiry.

Artists this issue: Grant Canfield (2), G. Sutton Breiding (w/ help from Niven & Farmer) (3), Jim Shull (5), William Breiding (30, 31, 35, 40, 42, 52, 56, 57, 59, 61, 62, 70), Dale Nelson (43, 67), Frank Vacanti (44), Janet K. Miller (50). All others fair use internet capture.

Entire contents © 2019 William M. Breiding. All rights revert to contributors upon publication.

Crow’s Caw William Breiding

Although my fannish origins began in the trufan camp, and as a neofan I reveled in faannish hijinks, I’ve always been a closet sercon fan. I started collecting sf criticism fairly early on (Blish, Knight, etc.) but kept it stashed away in secret spots as though it were porn. It took about twenty years for me to come out, when I subscribed to Bruce Gillespie’s SF Commentary and David Hartwell’s New York Review of Science Fiction, and had locs published in both. Strictly speaking, that’s not really true. I’ve been striped from the beginning. From the first issue of Starfire, published in February of 1974, but brain-childed during late 1973, I ran a

piece by Gary Warne about the necessity of fantastic literature’s ability to instill wonder and create beauty in our lives. From there I went on to publish more general criticism and reviews, all surrounded by personal essays, humor, poetry, and yes, even fiction, stories by such fannish luminaries as Donn Brazier and Dale C. Donaldson. I’d also scheduled the appearance of Ben Indick’s gloriously romantic “Maeve by Moonlight”, but I must have typed it on a bunch of old stencils; they deteriorated rapidly as the ink hit them, and the imprint on the fuzzy Fibertone paper became nothing but a big inky blob. Never the perfectionist (understatement) I ran the issue with a big hole between pages 26 and 41, and never got around to publishing Ben’s story. In this regard I harkened back to the EO-fannish ways of First Fandom, where fiction was considered a natural part of a fanzine. And I may publish fiction in future issues of Portable Storage. Just saying. And yes, this is the first issue of a new run of a fanzine. It took some convincing. I was reluctant to make the commitment. To the future. To the editorial state of mind. To the financial drain. But after issuing Rose Motel I knew that publishing my ish was a now or never situation. At the moment Print on Demand (POD) technology is at its most streamlined and will probably never get any cheaper. Of course you have to buy into the format, which feels unfannish to some. But hey! It’s the 21st century. Mutate or die! The urgent combination of aging (I’m now 62) and still having a (somewhat) discretionary income (highly unlikely when I retire) is propelling me. You might ask, why not just do a digital fanzine. Answer: I’m not a digital kind of guy. I have this problem with reading on- screen, one that I’ve come to understand is a general population problem: scrolling causes skimming. Any digital fanzine I want to read, and take seriously, I have to print out, hence, I read very few digital fanzines, and remain limited and old school in my fanzine reading, and ideas of production (hard copy). I have been forcing myself, with the acquisition of an iPad, to spend more time with digital fanzines, attempting to rewire my brain, so that I can enjoy such great digital fanzines as Peter Young’s White Pages and Big Sky. And when Bruce Gillespie’s fanzines go entirely digital I would be bereft without them. So: mutate or die. I would like to say Portable Storage is the first of a projected long run of a fanzine, and I hope that it is. (Someone one in the Bay Area Punk-Fan crowd has to pick up where Rich Coad left off!) I have no idea of frequence, but I’m hoping for at least twice yearly. Like Starfire of old, I hope to publish a real genzine, one that encompasses all of my varied interests. This first issue is by design top-heavy with sercon, dominated by Dale Nelson’s Tolkien- related piece, my own piece discussing six different books, and John Fugazzi’s piece on the Beatles. Book and music talk is high on my list of pleasurable things. If an author can also pull in personal thoughts, as well as ones bookish or musical, so much the better. Receiving Alva Svoboda’s fannish memoir of the Moffatts, and the Outlander Los Angeles scene of the early 1970s, pretty much knocked my socks off. It was the ideal submission, and

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completely unexpected, and I was thrilled to get it. The other pieces by Janet, Vince, and Sutton hit all the buttons: personal essays and poetic screeds. In future issues I hope to also include fanzine reviews, humor, fan history, more things bookish and musical, and always, the personal essay. Fanzines are a labor of love, given away for free, at the expense of their publisher. Coin of the realm—you know the drill—is feedback: locs—letters of comment—and trades, not necessarily of just other fanzines, but all kinds of groovy things. And of course, contributing to upcoming issues: essays, art, photos, and cover paintings (yes, please!). I take the obligations of fanzining seriously—it’s a call and response—as an editor it is what you thrive on. Which brings me to the sticky question of how to CONTACT me. Being of the old school, as I am, I’m loathe to forego the inclusion of a street address, my own and the contributors, and letter writers—it’s a fannish tradition and means much to those who remember when it was a proud and lonely thing to be a science fiction fan—but it may be necessary to forego, since Portable Storage will be available through online retailers and probably at some point hung at eFanzine.com. Privacy issues, as well as hacking, and identity theft are serious and real. But email addresses only make certain types of CONTACT one step harder. If you want to send me your hard copy fanzine (yes, please!) you have to email me to get a mailing address; if I run across your name in a fanzine and it has only your email I have to CONTACT you for a street address. You get the idea. Of course, to all of you receiving Portable Storage, my return address will be on the envelope. Be sure to save it if you want to send me a fanzine (yes, please!). Future Letter Writers (yes, please!): only your email address will appear in this fanzine unless you specifically request I publish your street address. Future Fanzine Reviewers (yes, please!): include only my email address in your review for further inquiry. CONTACT! [email protected]

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1972 would have been the year Aljo Svoboda was fourteen. I would have been fifteen and yet to have discovered fandom, living in the mountains of southern West Virginia. By the time our paths crossed Aljo had already established himself as a fannish boywonder (and gotten over it). It’s possible we met in the flesh before 1976—I have a vague memory of a tall, slim, shadowy figure on a dark, wet stairwell in San Francisco—but certainly we shook hands and smiled selfconsciously at each other at the Worldcon—Big MAC—in 1976. Since then our friendship has been punctuated by long silences and moments of rhapsody and startlement.

Imperfect Recollections: June Moffatt Aljo Svoboda

We’re All Bozos on this Bus Getting to know the Moffatts is tangled in my memories with getting to know about Los Angeles in the early 1970s, of course. I knew the industrial landscapes and wastelands courtesy of my dad’s peripatetic shopwork, but the city itself (the cities, really) was revealed only through my increasing involvement in fandom at age fourteen. Via a couple of Placentia fans, Ed Green and Connor Cochran (then Freff), I made physical contact with fandom and ultimately was introduced to the marvelous Moffatts.

My first clear recollection of Len and June’s company is sitting in their living room with Ed and Freff listening to excerpts of the Firesign Theater and Emerson Lake and Palmer eagerly curated by Freff, who asserted that ELP was the modern equivalent of Bach and Beethoven combined. At that age, I had nothing to say to my elders (and I spent a lot of time saying so), but the equanimity with which they all treated me, and especially the hospitality of Len and June, went an enormous way toward making me feel a grown-up (of sorts).

More than that, I’d have to say that I really joined the whole twentieth century in their company. In representing First Fandom they were also living ties to the world that had existed prior to my own existence, be it the intricate histories of science-fiction fandom or the even more intricate and difficult to fathom intricacies of Los Angeles and Orange County history.

The Moffatts lived in suburban Downey, a border region between urban and suburban, between residential

community and industrial semi-wasteland, and between the monstrous mass of L.A. and the developing maw of Orange County, and I found their habitat mysterious even though it looked exactly like the older suburbs of Anaheim where my Oma lived. They echoed for me the stylistic distinction between the 1950s and the 1970s, with the 1950s meaning for me (as translated by them) not Cold War paranoia but stylish late-night diner tolerance, an interest in things off the media-beaten path.

They looked nothing like the people of the 1960s (whom I myself wanted desperately to resemble), but they received the new (or really, not the new but the suggestion of the new) with interest and respect for the passions of the young. As a couple, perhaps they hearkened back even further than the 1950s in my eyes; at any rate, when I watch The Thin Man or its successors even now, I catch a resonance of their repartee and what I perceived as appreciation for each other, an uncanny resemblance. Len and June Moffatt

First Fandom I have no clear memory anymore of how I got in touch with Stan Woolston and Rick Sneary, but I know I wrote a ton of letters in my two or three years of infatuation with fandom, and somehow I must have been connected with them via others, whether it was Fred Patten answering every question I had about fandom with infinite patience, or following up on fanzine letters of comment the way I surf the web today. Rick Sneary was definitely writing LoCs then, but I don’t think Stan Woolston was active in that way, so I’m not sure how we began to correspond, but one way or another I wrote letters to and received letters back from both of them. (It may be that I corresponded with Stan Woolston out of my voracious desire to become a member of every apa in the world, as I think he may have had something to do with the N3F’s apa, but I don’t think I ever actually produced anything for that one, so maybe he dissuaded me even as we continued to correspond.)

As I consider my acquaintance with Stan Woolston I find myself nibbling at an ort of niggling guilt lodged somewhere deep in the realm of the not-yet remembered, an incident or moment of public insensitivity in which I made a remark about Stan’s being single and living with his mother at what was to me an advanced age. I suspect it was an act of Trumpian projection avant la lettre, as I had good reason to expect a similar fate for myself (Jenny rescued me from that completely out of the blue in my mid-forties, and if it weren’t for her I’m quite sure I’d be the lonesome misanthrope I was perhaps really meant to be, here as I begin to sniff oblivion.). But whatever the underlying psychic mechanism, the good people of fandom somehow called me on it, or that’s the feeling I have, unattached to a memory with an solidity or detail. My one real memory of meeting Stan Woolston was of going to his house, in Buena Park or Garden Grove, one of the old-line Orange County suburbs, for a meeting of an invitational group of elder fans which included the Moffatts and Larry Niven.

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I sincerely hope that wasn’t the occasion of my faux pas, but I wouldn’t put it past that callow teenager.

At any rate, it may have been through my acquaintance with Stan and Rick that I made my connection with the Moffatts in the first place, and ultimately arranged an evening to attend my first LASFS meeting, all the way out to the great city proper.

A Deep Blue Goodbye It would likely have been the result of my visit to the Moffatts’ living room that I became interested in their fannish passion for the thriller/mystery writer John D. MacDonald. My sense of the possibilities of mysteries and thrillers had probably been limited to the Hardy Boys and (my mother’s more esoteric favorite) the Jean Sisters, and maybe Nick and Nora Charles, prior to my borrowing a Travis McGee and finding myself propelled headlong into a seemingly grownup world of graphic violence and (to my fourteen year old Catholic boy’s eyes) sex.

I’m not even sure whether I’d seen The Maltese Falcon before reading MacDonald. And beyond the novelty of the genre, I was fascinated by MacDonald’s seemingly infinite series of color-coded novels, and by the intimacy of Len and June’s relationship to the author. They seemed to me the priestly keepers of his fandom, a mode of interaction between fan and creator that I had not previously seen.

John D. MacDonald fandom was some ways along on the spectrum of fan-creator distance between the extremes of science-fiction fandom (where most authors were fans or former fans themselves) and movie fandom (where the sacrosanct and pathological attributes of celebrity were required separations and intermediations, as close to hand yet effectively secure as the Popemobile), and the notion of particular knowledgeable and witty parties being the keepers of an esoteric fandom was quite appealing to me.

Although I couldn’t make it through more than two or three of the color-coded McGees, reading them left me with a sense of what tough-guy thrillers with a literary edge were meant to be, which served me well in later investigations of Walter Mosley, James M. Cain, and even the “true” outsiders like B. Traven. And of course there was a direct line through to Sue Grafton’s alphabet mysteries, which later served as my psychic guidebooks to the Santa Barbara I couldn’t see for myself when I lived there. Fred Patten, June Moffatt

But the main thing was, Len and June’s loving attention to John D. MacDonald extended

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my notion of what “fandom” was, and what an “adult” relationship to creators and material could be like.

A Harp That Once The letter-of-comment gods of that fannish early adolescence were Harry Warner Jr. and Rick Sneary, as I remember it. I never had a letter from Warner, and probably never wrote him any—he was a fount of inspiration who could always find something utterly relevant and interesting to respond to any fanzine, whereas I tended to make a big fuss about having nothing to contribute—but Sneary on the other hand was a generous letter-writing pal. My memory of him is as a marvelous source of fannish history of all sorts, and that magical aspect was thoroughly confirmed when June drove me out to South Gate one day to pay him a visit.

I don’t know if it’s still characteristic of non- drivers in Los Angeles—I haven’t lived in the area for forty years now—but the necessity of depending either on drivers or very tenuous public transportation at that time produced a certain insensitivity to the demands I made on others in order to get around. I frequently Stan Woolston, Len Moffatt, Rick Sneary treated persons who gave me rides lasting multiple hours, and requiring elaborate pickups and drop-offs, the way I suppose I would now treat Uber drivers if I made use of that service (one doesn’t really need to in this special corner of Oakland, and moreover I drive a car now). I cringe at my ingratitude.

But at least on that one occasion, I felt the full specialness of June’s driving me into the far reaches of the Outlands. I had never been into the regions of South Gate, where the neighborhoods and freeways looked even older than Downey or Garden Grove, and I drank in the industrial bungalow aesthetic of it all avidly. And then to be dropped off for several hours of visit at the Sneary manor—it was like being allowed to visit the wise man of the forest in some personal version of The Enchanted Duplicator, which coincidentally I believe I read through there, on the premises, for the first time as I delved into Sneary’s amazing fanzine collection in his garage.

Sneary himself I remember as reclusive yet somehow debonair. After some conversation and refreshment, he directed me to the garage, gave me some idea of how to find my way around, and left me there for several hours of browsing. I reveled in the glories of two renaissances— the fanzines produced by Ted White and Terry Carr through the fifties and sixties, archetypes of what a beautiful fannish fanzine should look like, combining the lushness of colored mimeo paper and intelligent illustration with narrative that Seinfeld must have been patterned on (consciously or not) about fans doing nothing, or sometimes something.

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The other renaissance was far more inaccessible, culturally and in its ornate yet unassuming wit: Sneary had an extended run of Hyphens, and having been told on many occasions that Walt Willis was the greatest writer fandom as such had ever produced, I made my way through several issues. There I found a propensity for the non sequitur equaling that of Carr and White, but combined with, as it were, a foreign accent. I don’t remember whether a pub ever actually came into the picture—yet that’s my overwhelming sense of the writing, of people who’d run into each other at the pub, or perhaps at the door of the pub, and of circuitous shaggy dog arguments that went on forever. It was a kind of heaven—I had been enabled to enter a world that existed just before I was born, and it was almost as if I were there, for that afternoon.

The Birthday Party It occurs to me that Len’s surprise birthday might well have taken place on the evening of the same day that June took me over to Rick Sneary’s. That makes sense logistically, although how I convinced my parents to allow me to spend a day with fans is testimony both to their irrational trust in me, and the apparent trustworthiness of June herself.

But the arc transits from the heights to the depths if both of these events occurred on the same day, because it was in the event of Len’s birthday party that I first disgraced myself before June (and therefore Len), when I said something to Len, on my arrival at the Moffatt house, that completely gave away an elaborately planned surprise to him. (I would have said something along the lines of “Oh, I’m here for your party this evening,” almost certainly after having been warned that the party was meant to be a very special surprise: at any rate, I showed a complete lack of discretion that I’m afraid hasn’t come to me in my older age, except that I’m no longer trusted with such things at all by those who know me.)

June’s forced pleasantness toward me after my faux pas reminds me of an incident a couple of weeks ago, in a local store when a patient and friendly salesperson tried to show my daughter Elena how to open a trick box. Naturally she broke the latch, at which point the salesperson tried to act as though nothing had happened as she took the box and put it on the back shelf with the broken things—but something came through of her disappointment that reminded me of June’s—her realization that I really was just a fourteen year old callow kid, I would guess.

Having been responsible for the spoiling of the surprise, I remember the party itself as something of an ordeal—Len, after all, had to pretend surprise even so, and only June and I would have known he was having to feign. The event was held in a restaurant banquet room, with many famous and historic fans in attendance. Len gave a speech which I remember primarily because he was well into telling a mildly obscene joke about the customer of a prostitute, with an unusual capability to control his erections at will, before he realized that I might not be an appropriate member of the audience for that humor—indeed, that I would have been the only inappropriate member of the audience. (Speaking of which, my truest claim to fame in internet fan history remains that I was the last member of the Cult to be Breenmarked, meaning my mailings were excised of materials not suitable for children. I didn’t know about it at the time, but in retrospect I’m proud to have had that historical role.)

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Corflu Many years passed. Stan, then Rick, and finally Len passed on to fannish Arcadia, or Valhalla. I tried rejoining Apa-L for a while, (and did tip my hat to the generosity of the Moffatts on my return) but couldn’t maintain my minimum activity there, so moved on to Lasfapa, where I’ve written what might generously be construed as a page and a half of nothing much every couple of months, and thus once again out of the Moffatts’ orbit. While making that second round of Apa-L, I was much struck with the graceful humor June equipped her zine with in the face of death and age.

A couple of years ago I finally made it to a Corflu taking place close enough to Simi Valley, where my sister still lives, that I could attend without having to pay for the hotel. There I saw June one last time, in an audience gathered to review the history of fandom which included Ted White as well, and where Susan Wood was discussed along with other fans who’d died too young. June was regal but infirm, and sat in the front row. When I walked up to say hello, it was with some trepidation, and we both seemed to realize that either she didn’t really recognize me, or more likely that there was nothing really to say: resonant of my tongue-tiedness at fourteen, but lacking any of that earlier age’s charm.

Still, when I learned last year that she herself had departed, I felt the loss of that last opportunity to properly thank her for all she had done for me once, and to bid her well. They were giants, those elders. I bow to them.

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CONAN vs Blow Dry Fantasy

I met Dale Nelson in the traditional fannish manner, through the letter column of a fanzine. Dale is deeply involved with the lives and the worlds that the Inklings created. He is scholarly but not academic, his essays suffused with a warm personal touch. Dale’s fiction questions the boundaries of our daily lives, probing the mysterious and strange as they rub up against our reality.

Sort of Like Tolkien—but Not Fantasy Dedicated to the Memory of Jane R. Donaldson

Dale Nelson

J.R.R. Tolkien Here are some pages of book talk—that is, a bibliographic essay. In what follows, I’ll suggest that, though Tolkien is a very great fantasy writer, a great deal of fantasy is not Tolkienian, whether or not its authors want it to seem Tolkienian; and, on the other hand, that a lot of writing that might prove to appeal to some of Tolkien’s readers is not fantastic.

Fantastic, But Not Necessarily Very Tolkienian The global success of Peter Jackson’s movies ensures that, for many people, “Tolkien” and “fantasy” suggest the same thing: plenty of noisy violence played out on an “epic” scale against a backdrop of spectacular scenery and involving multiple more-or-less human-sized species or “races,” and huge, less-human creatures such as trolls, animated trees and mountains, and demons. Obviously, more books, television series, movies, comic magazines, and games cater to the taste for this type of fantasy than any one person can keep up with.

Forty-odd years ago, when there was much less “fantasy” available than there is now, readers like me would discover The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and want more. More what? Well, Tolkien wrote fantasy, ergo we obviously wanted more fantasy.

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Publishers of paperbacks aimed marketing appeals at us. It’s fun to look at some of the books that were marketed as Tolkienian in the second half of the 1960s. Lancer's first paperback of Robert E. Howard's barbarian, Conan the Adventurer (1966), promised “adventures more imaginative than ‘Lord of the Rings’” on its back cover. The next year, Lancer published Michael Moorcock’s The Jewel in the Skull. The text on the back cover describes the book as "a stirring new saga of swords and sorcery by a brilliant writer, the first of a series destined to rank with the Conan series and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.” When Howard's “Hour of the Dragon” novel was first issued (at sixty cents a copy) as Conan the Conqueror, and as “Volume 3 of the complete Conan,” the following blurb appeared on the Lancer paperback’s front cover: “Howard's only book-length novel, worthy to stand beside such heroic fantasy as E. R. Eddison and J. R. R. Tolkien.” From the 1967 Lancer Books paperback of a novel by L. Ron Hubbard: “SLAVES OF SLEEP is a magic carpet into adventure, romance, fantasy, and dazzling color. It rates a place on your shelves next to the works of Tolkien, Burroughs, and Robert E. Howard.” Paperback Library's edition (1968) of L. Sprague de Camp’s The Tritonian Ring promised’” Thrilling sword and sorcery for the fans of Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings.’” Ace Books also invoked Tolkien. Ace paperbacked Alan Garner’s young readers’ fantasy The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (G-570) as a “fantastic novel in the Tolkien tradition.” The company’s Dune (N-3) sported a blurb from Arthur C. Clarke: “I know nothing comparable to it except THE LORD OF THE RINGS” – though Herbert’s novel is science fiction, not fantasy. One of the things that’s striking today about those books is how un-Tolkienian most of them are. Tolkien’s own American paperback publisher (once the Ace reprints were phased out), Ballantine, issued reprints of E. R. Eddison’s fantasy novels with cover art designed to recall the Barbara Remington designs for the Middle-earth books. Their paperback of Eddison's Mistress of Mistresses first came out in August 1967, with back cover copy: “The second volume in the fantasy classic most often compared with J. R. R. Tolkien.” Their Adult Fantasy series was launched in 1969. June’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter, by Lord Dunsany, included L. Sprague de Camp’s testimonial: “A fantasy novel in a class with the Tolkien books.” July’s title, William Morris’s The Wood Beyond the World, tantalized readers with back cover copy: “William Morris has been described as ‘obviously a Nineteenth Century Tolkien’.”1 Without invoking Tolkien explicitly, other reprinted and newly-published fantasy paperbacks appeared, many of them aimed at the newly-identified audience for sword-and- sorcery. All right. We may have enjoyed these books. For some readers, they were all “Tolkienian”; when these readers wanted something “like Tolkien,” it was something like these that they wanted. Conan, Brak, Fafhrd and the Mouser, Jirel of Joiry, Jorian, Dorian Hawkmoon, Camber of Culdi, Manuel of Poictesme, Welleran, Cugel, “mathematics-of-magic” Harold Shea, T. H. White’s Wart—they were all characters in fantasy fiction, and, so, were felt to be

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kin of Bilbo, Gandalf, Boromir, and Aragorn. The readers who thought that way and continued to think that way have, I suppose, many successors today. With the passing of years, though, other readers found that Tolkien remained indispensable, but a whole lot of other fantasy just wouldn’t do any more, or maybe never had been satisfactory in the first place; at the least, that when they wanted “something like Tolkien,” these books were not to their taste. Speaking for myself: Lord Dunsany was one of my favorite authors almost 50 years ago when I was 14, and I remember carrying the first Ballantine collection of his stories, At the Edge of the World, and such books to school with me, dear connections to a rich world of fantasy that I was beginning to explore diligently. But later on, I found that I could hardly bear to read most of Dunsany’s tales. I now think of him as being the great Anti-Tolkien, as being a fantasist who flaunted the unreality of his stories and whose fiction is singularly lacking in the warmth and depth of Tolkien’s. To say nothing of their stories’ other qualities, the other fantasy works I’ve mentioned, and a great many more, were always or almost always less convincing as accounts of fantasy worlds than Tolkien’s work was. Vance’s Dying Earth, Howard’s Hyborian-Age world, Leiber’s Nehwon, and so on were replete with obvious improvisations. Even the authors who’d lived in time to have heard of Tolkien weren’t necessarily setting out to write like him. And I’ll grant that, if one is in the mood for a giant- ape-god-prowling-ancient-ruins story, Tolkien won’t do. When you’ve read enough of Robert E. Howard’s stories, though, you can just about write your own. Many of us did, back in our teens. (My barbarian hero was named Koroth; if you were reading—and writing— fantasy back then, what was yours named?) Around that age, a knowing, cynical tone in one’s reading can be very appealing, and authors such as Leiber and Vance served it up. It wasn’t hard to imitate. The taste for cynical fantasy was a taste you can outgrow, like that of some of the cheap sweets we used to consume. There was an occasional work of fantasy that could still please the reader who loved Tolkien but didn’t, perhaps, much like, any more, a lot of the fantasy available on paperback racks. For example, there was a gravity, a fine imagination, and a humanity in Ursula Le Guin’s original Earthsea trilogy that made it stand out and that still do. But Le Guin’s stories weren’t all that Tolkienian. Her work was distinctive, imbued by an affinity for Eastern philosophy and for psychology, especially Jung’s—things quite non-Tolkienian. I have come, by now, to the place where the sight, at the bookstore or the library, of new fantasy fiction—especially the multi-installment series books—is a great turn-off. All those pages spawned in a word processor, all that (dreadful term) “world-building,” all that cover art of dragons and pyrotechnic magic and swords and blow-dried hair—no, no; if that’s “fantasy,” I feel a great aversion to “fantasy.” And I might sometimes think: who reads all this stuff?

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Though I usually shun the fantasy from the past thirty-odd years, I’ve kept some of the books I bought in the Seventies, but I realize that my main reason may be affection for their look and feel. If I pick one of them up, I may say to myself: Really, I’ll never read this; there will always be something I’d rather read or reread. I wonder if this kind of change in reading preferences isn’t pretty common. I have the impression that a lot of old-time fantasy fans now usually don’t read fantasy, but choose other things, such as historical fiction (Hornblower, Aubrey and Maturin…), horror, detective stories, etc.—and biography and history. After all, if one is going to take the time to get a handle on a large canvas of people, intrigues, battles, and so on, it might as well be real history, real empires.

Sort of Tolkienian, But Not Necessarily Fantastic So I come back to the topic of what to read when one wants something “sort of Tolkienian”; and my thesis is that one might find something to one’s taste outside fantasy fiction. Tolkien wrote fantasy, but there’s a lot more to Tolkien’s fiction than the specifically fantastic element. I hasten to add that I write, for the sake of discussion here, as if one can precipitate out the fantastic element and other elements of his work, when, in fact, of course, it’s all a whole. That’s one of the things that makes Tolkienian fantasy Tolkienian.

What are some qualities of Tolkien’s writing that are appealing, but that are not inherently fantastic? The Hobbit and, especially, The Lord of the Rings are pervaded by an antiquarian quality. “Antiquarian” suggests a fascination with the old in part simply because it is old. John Wain’s memoir of his mid-1940s student days in Oxford, Sprightly Running, is remembered for its early account of the Inklings, and was published in 1962 when C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien were still alive. Perhaps the most memorable pages, though, are those devoted to Edward Harry William Meyerstein, a hypochondriacal antiquarian. Wain remembered going upstairs to his lodgings, as a young undergraduate, to see him—a learned, disappointed, misogynistic collector of books and manuscripts in his fifties. After the older man became comfortable with Wain, he’d see Meyerstein scurrying to

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find where he had set down his false teeth amidst his books and papers so that he could pop them in before opening the door to some other visitor. Poor man, he accidentally stepped on them once while pacing his room. Meyerstein hated spending money. Once, having tea with him, Wain found a bit of glass in his marmalade. Meyerstein explained that he’d dropped his jar of marmalade but had been able to save most of the marmalade. Wain was terrified that he’d swallowed glass and “Meyerstein laughed himself sick over the episode and referred to it for the rest of his life as one of his most amusing memories.” But I digress. Out walking together, Meyerstein’s “love of the antique” flared forth. “’That’s old!’ he would say, suddenly, on catching sight of a door, window, or chimney-stack, and immediately dart across the road to investigate. To walk around a strange town with Meyerstein was an extraordinary experience. His first action, on getting off the train, was to ask to be directed to the old parish church (‘That always takes you straight to the old part of the town, you see’), and within a few minutes the cry would begin to go up: ‘That’s old!’ It was not that he had no aesthetic discrimination; as between one ‘old’ thing and another, he preferred the more beautiful, and his taste was always fine. But age was the first important condition.” Isn’t there something of that fascination with the old, in Tolkien? There’s his evocation of thousands of years of human and Elvish history, but there’s also that more familiar little world of the Shire as a thoroughly lived-in region whose inhabitants cherish their Michel Delving museumful of mathoms. They “liked to have books filled with things that they already knew, set out fair and square with no contradictions.” Except at the end of the long tale, you never, I think, read of hobbits in the story’s present building new things; everything has already been built and already has the patina of age. At the end of the tale (dropped from the movies), Saruman, diminished but thoroughly malevolent, has settled in the Shire, and arranged for old dwellings to be demolished and wretched new ones erected. In a long romance with many moments of sorrow, Tolkien here evokes that sadness that comes from seeing a beloved old neighborhood pulled down and cheap new buildings run up. There’s a lot more to antiquarianism than affection for old things, but I suppose antiquarianism usually begins with such feelings. Antiquarian feeling comes across also, in Tolkien’s fantasy, when we read of Bilbo in Rivendell, that great repository of Elvish lore, and of Gandalf researching the One Ring among manuscripts in a tower library in Gondor. Therefore, someone wanting something “kind of Tolkienian” might enjoy reading an eerie story with a strong flavor of the antiquarian—and the word will suggest a book Tolkien is known to have taken up, M. R. James’s Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904). (For Tolkien’s interest, see the critical edition On Fairy-stories prepared by Flieger and Anderson). James was a world-class scholar of medieval manuscripts, and one of the pleasures of reading his tales is their air of plausibility when the matter of antique documents comes up, as it often

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does. I relish James’s audacity in starting one of them with a long paragraph in Latin. James’s haunters are not translucent specters. For the possibility that Tolkien was actually influenced by this book, by the way, in his conception of Gollum, see the illustration by James MacBryde of the haunter in “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book,” the first story in the collection. Gollum’s starved but ghastly tenacity is in keeping with the demeanor of the typical Jamesian haunter. Read again the episode in The Fellowship of the Ring in which the hobbits encounter a hoard and a barrow-wight. At first, the haunter manifests itself as a menacing shadow-being, but the episode becomes rather Jamesian. If you haven’t read M. R. James, you may have a treat coming. And by the way, the antiquarian flavor can be really appealing to some younger readers. When I was a youngster, I stumbled across Barbara Ninde Byfield’s The Glass Harmonica: A Lexicon of the Fantastical (1967). Its tongue-in-cheek quality probably went by me from time to time, but its entries on peasants, tallow, tankards, tinkers, types of armor, varieties of old weapons, parts of a castle, treasure, and the like could have interested me as well as its entries on dragons, witches, trolls, etc., as illustrated with fine-point pen drawings by the author herself. An antiquarian or pseudo-antiquarian atmosphere is all over the book. Non-fantastic antiquarianism may be found in many places, such as Joseph Mitchell’s classic essay “Up in the Old Hotel.” There’s plenty of literature that rummages in old books: there’s Robert Burton’s prodigious Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), which, perhaps, very few people have ever read cover to cover (I haven’t), and (mostly unread on my shelves) Isaac D’Israeli’s Curiosities of Literature. (I have a 1964 Dover selection from 1871’s four volumes). The proof of the pudding is in the eating; I can only suggest to the reader that sometime when he or she feels like spending time with something Tolkienian, a better choice might prove to be something antiquarian rather than some new thick-as-a-brick fantasy series installment. Toponyms often partake of the antiquarian. Twenty-odd years ago, poking around in a bookstore in my old home state, I noticed Oregon Geographic Names by Lewis A. McArthur and Lewis. L. McArthur (1981 edition). The authors explain, sometimes record speculations about, thousands of place-names. It’s a great browsing book, and you the reader might like a similar book about a region where you live or have lived. Tolkien helped to get me interested in place-names as I pored over his maps: the Green-Hill Country, the Woody End, Crickhollow, Bree, Rivendell, and beyond. Maps themselves, especially topographic maps,

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might appeal to readers of Tolkien. City-dwellers may learn the stories of the names of neighborhoods, parks, old buildings, and streets. Allied to antiquarianism is what could be called localist conservatism or conservative agrarianism. Neither of the two major American political parties is seriously, thoroughly, and deeply conservative, because, though they have important differences, both are more or less profligate, globalist, and utopian. Each seems largely to cater to the notion of the “world [as] now a giant airport lounge through which happy consumers could wander at will, picking baubles off the shelf, unmoored from history, place and meaning….If we want to see what a world without belonging would look like, we have only to look around. If an identity is an alliance between people and places, then airport-lounge modernity means taking the places out of the picture. All that is left is people who could be anywhere: citizens of nowhere, consumers of objects and experiences, connected by their little screens, the same white light shining into their faces from Doncaster to Dubai” (British author Paul Kingsnorth in a 2015 Guardian piece, “Rescuing the English,” reprinted in Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist). I suppose neither leading American political party would say (in Rod Dreher’s words) that “Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract.” Neither could say that “Beauty is more important than efficiency”—or would deserve to be trusted if it did say it. A good choice, for readers willing to entertain the idea of conservatism as something connected with caring about particular places, might be philosopher Roger Scruton’s eloquent, readable book News from Somewhere: On Settling, published in 2004. He went to live in rural Wiltshire, in an old cottage at Sunday Hill Farm. “This is the only pocket between Swindon and Bristol where you encounter that most precious commodity, and the one that attaches you to the countryside more than any other, which is the night.” I think of the hobbits walking in the Shire by night and hearing the Elves burst into song under a starry sky. A whole book—much better than its title—on Tolkien’s world and conservation of our own is Dickerson and Evans’s Ents, Elves, and Eriador: The Environmental Vision of J. R. R. Tolkien (University Press of Kentucky, 2006). Here are agriculture (plowed fields for food; hobbits), horticulture (gardens for beauty; Elves), and feraculture (preservation of the wild forestlands; Ents). Stewardship is the single word that best characterizes Tolkien’s understanding of man’s intended relationship to the earth. Stewardship, Dickerson and

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Evans believe, is a Christian principle: the universe is the Creator’s work, in which He delights; in Tolkien’s legendarium, it is entrusted to the care of “gods” (the Valar), Elves, and men, who should praise its Maker, enjoy its bounty, and pass it on to later generations in a wholesome condition, and who must not tyrannize over it or hoard its fruits. Humans (and the Valar and Elves) are ontologically superior to plants and animals. Elves and men, the Children of Ilúvatar, are “physical creatures who are a part of nature,” also are “transcendent beings” who “can be assigned the moral calling of caring for nature.” Stewardship belongs to mankind and to Elves from their beginnings. Possessiveness is the opposite of stewardship. Dickerson and Evans note that, in Tolkien’s conception, it is specifically modern agribusiness that has estranged Hobbits from men! While Hobbits love good tilled earth, they cannot bear “industrial farming” and “the needless use of complex machinery when simpler tools will do.” Readers of Kentucky essayist Wendell Berry will recall his advocacy of farming based largely on draft animals and his prophetic warnings about the use of fossil fuel- based agricultural chemicals and machines. Farmers Maggot and Cotton appear to practice good husbandry and are also notable in the defense of the Shire when Saruman seeks to subjugate it to industrialism. Given that Tom Bombadil is a near-embodiment of land and water, his esteem for Maggot may be considered to be praise from nature itself. Incidentally, I learned from this book that “maggot” means “grub worm” or “earthworm” rather than housefly larva, and so is a well- chosen name for an outstanding member of an agrarian people. Dickerson and Evans cite Wendell Berry’s “Conservation and Local Economy,” which includes theses with which Hobbits would agree:

“II. Land cannot be properly cared for by people who do not know it intimately, who do not know how to care for it, who are not strongly motivated to care for it, and who cannot afford to care for it.

“IV. People are motivated to care for land to the extent that their interest in it is direct, dependable, and permanent.

“VII. A nation will destroy its land and therefore itself if it does not foster in every possible way the sort of thrifty, prosperous, permanent rural households and communities that have the desires, the skills, and the means to care properly for the land they are using.” But Sauron, lord of Mordor, “is a model of corporate [distant, impersonal, exploitative] landownership,” the authors observe. Presumably he has “no choice” but to wage wars for resources to feed his slaves, since land under his and their control is stripped of its

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“resources” and becomes incapable of supporting anything more than brambles. Dickerson and Evans cite Wendell Berry’s “The Pleasures of Eating” for seven principles that, they suggest only a little whimsically, boil down to the counsel: “Eat like a Hobbit.” Here are those principles:

(1)Participate in food production to the extent that you can; (2) prepare your own food; (3) know where your food comes from and buy food produced close to where you live; (4) deal directly with local farmers, gardeners, or orchardists when possible; (5) learn as much as possible about how industrial food production really works; (6) learn about the best farming and gardening practices; (7) learn about the life histories of food species. Berry urges that we practice those seven principles not as a tiresome duty but as a way of extending our pleasure in our eating. He says, too: “Eating with the fullest pleasure— pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance—is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world.” A corollary of Tolkien’s deep concern for right living with the natural world is that nonfiction books on similar themes may appeal to readers interested in finding something new to read that possesses a Tolkienian spirit. Obviously, Wendell Berry’s essays are recommended. I’d also cite (as against industrial food production) conservative speech writer Matthew Scully’s Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy (2003). The only video production I will mention positively, in connection with this Tolkienian essay, is one I haven’t seen, but have read about: a British TV series on the Tudor Monastery Farm. It evidently conveys something of the wholeness of the life of medieval people, for whom the land, and time, the heavens and nature, and themselves were inherited as a kind of living tapestry. A book by Douglas Wilson and Douglas Jones called Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision for Middle Earth hopes for a culture that will integrate the best of what we have learned and acquired in modernity, with the best of our forefathers’ and foremothers’ legacy. Tolkien is conservative too in believing that a decent society is easy to lose, because the timber of humanity is crooked, and would-be straighteners thereof are to be regarded with wariness. One fears the ranks of educators, politicians, celebrities, counselors, bureaucrats, activists, psychiatrists, and social justice warriors who want to fix people for their own good by propaganda, intimidation of dissenters, endless elaboration of laws, editing of old books, social pressure (making workplace “allies”), etc. Here’s a poem by Tolkien’s friend C. S. Lewis, written in 1945:

Under Sentence

There is a wildness still in England that will not feed In cages; it shrinks away from touch of the trainer’s hand; Easy to kill, not easy to keep, it will not breed In a zoo for public pleasure. It will not be planned. Do not blame us too much if we, being woodland folk, Cannot swell the rejoicing at this new world you make; We, hedge-hogged as Johnson, we unused to the yoke As Landor, surly as Cobbett (that badger), birdlike as Blake.

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A new scent troubles the air – friendly to you perhaps – But we with animal wisdom understand that smell. To all our kind its message is guns, ferrets, traps, And a Ministry passing the little holes in which we dwell.

Antiquarianism also suggests the huge topic of memory. However unimportant memory may be in other fantasy worlds, it is of extreme importance in Tolkien’s Middle-earth. Here’s Bombadil coming as close as he does to defining himself: “‘Eldest, that's what I am. Mark my words, my friends: Tom was here before the river and the trees; Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn. He made paths before the Big People, and saw the little People arriving. He was here before the Kings and the graves and the Barrow-wights. When the Elves passed westward, Tom was here already, before the seas were bent. He knew the dark under the stars when it was fearless—before the Dark Lord came from Outside.’” Here’s Treebeard described by Pippin: “‘One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present: like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake. I don’t know, but it felt as if something that grew in the ground— asleep, you might say, or just feeling itself as something between root-tip and leaf-tip, between deep earth and sky had suddenly waked up, and was considering you with the same slow care that it had given to its own inside affairs for endless years.’” In desperate circumstances in the tower of Cirith Ungol, Samwise finds comfort in remembering that “above all shadows rides the Sun/and Stars for ever dwell.” During the dreadful final phase of the journey to Mount Doom, Sam remembers cooking rabbit stew for himself and Frodo, and seeing an elephant, but Frodo can’t remember that, can’t remember the oliphaunt. “‘At least, I know that such things happened, but I cannot see them. No taste of food, no feel of water, no sound of wind, no memory of tree or grass or flower, no image of moon or star are left to me.’” He is close to a state of utter dereliction. There are one’s personal memory—a faculty to be cultivated (memorize poetry, anyone?)— and the keeping of personal records, such as a log of one’s reading. There are the published diaries, journals, and letters of interesting people—I relish Nathaniel Hawthorne’s American Notebooks, which may be sampled by a recently published excerpt from them, Twenty Days with Julian & Little Bunny by Papa. On the cultural level—here’s a remark attributed to Milan Kundera: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” In the later chapters of the final LotR book, The Return of the King, Saruman’s nascent reconstruction of the Shire requires the obliteration of cultural memory. There shall be a proliferation of regulations replacing folkways and a proliferation of enforcement agents, the cutting down of trees and the erection of raw, ugly buildings, the billeting of intimidating aliens (Men), the buying-up of small family-based businesses, such as Sandyman’s mill, by a distant “corporation” focused

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simply on grinding “more and faster” (the cult of efficiency), and the like. The hobbits are able to resist successfully, largely because they remember what was and have the courage to defend it. The Fellowship of the Ring had given us a leisurely description of the land that Saruman and his minions, both men and hobbits, would have spoiled. This first LotR book provides the account of a walk across the Shire from Bag End of Hobbiton to Crickhollow near the Old Forest. We may turn to the great importance for Tolkien’s fiction of walking. Tolkien’s heroes walk more than they talk, fight, read grimoires, etc. Open a few pages of The Hobbit or LotR at random and you are bound to come upon passages about walking. These books were, early on, categorized as Quest stories with a capital Q, but sometimes critics didn’t see clearly what was right under their noses, that a traditional quest story is often a story about walking (or, all right, about riding a horse). Very well – then a reader seeking something Tolkienian, but disenchanted with typical modern fantasy, might find appealing literary fare in the abundant literature of walking. You could go all the way back to Bashō’s Narrow Road to the Deep North (written in the 17th century, translated and issued by Penguin in 1966). A Victorian classic of the genre is Alexander Kinglake’s Eothen: Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East (1844), an account of the “Turkish Near East – from the Danube to the Nile.” Thoreau was an eager walker (see 1864’s The Maine Woods), and after his death there arose a whole category of literature about “tramping.” There’s Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879). Stephen Graham was an exemplar of the tramping genre, in books such as A Vagabond in the Caucasus (1911), Undiscovered Russia (1912) and With the Russian Pilgrims to Jerusalem (1913). Tolkien seems to have read some Algernon Blackwood and (as I have argued) been influenced by him. Blackwood is remembered today for his eerie supernatural tales such as “The Willows” and “The Wendigo,” but might Tolkien have seen Blackwood’s nonfiction pieces “Down the Danube in a Canadian Canoe” and “’Mid the Haunts of the Moose” from around the same time that Graham was publishing his books? These writings by Stevenson and the rest celebrated the freedom of life on the river, the rural road, and the obscure path. The walking books may be illustrated by the authors. I suppose it was Hilaire Belloc himself who illustrated his The Path to Rome (1902). I suppose further that such self-illustrated walking books influenced Tolkien and his publisher towards the inclusion of the author’s own drawings—typically landscapes, never portraits or battle scenes—in The Hobbit. Paul Fussell wrote Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars (1980). From that period come Peter Fleming’s highly entertaining Brazilian Adventure (1933) and his News

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from Tartary: A Journey from Peking to Kashmir (1936), Graham Greene’s Journey without Maps (1936) and his cousin Barbara Greene’s account of the same Liberian walk, Too Late to Turn Back (1938, also known as Land Benighted), Evelyn Waugh’s Brazilian Ninety-Two Days (1934), and more. These are all narratives of long walks and are, in that regard if not a great many other ways, like The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Published later, but before Tolkien’s death, I liked Eric Newby’s amusing A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958) and the cheerful Love and War in the Apennines (1971), also Negley Farson’s Caucasian Journey (1951). I read Peter Matthiessen’s The Cloud Forest, another South American journey, as serialized in back issues of The New Yorker (1961), a magazine that has declined sadly since then. Gaston Rébuffat’s Starlight and Storm (English translation 1957) is about mountain-climbing in the Alps, and let it not be forgotten that the young Tolkien had an Alpine tour. One need not confine one’s exploration of writings about long walks to volumes published long enough ago that Tolkien might have read them. An outstanding trilogy about a long walk is Patrick Leigh Fermor’s trilogy A Time of Gifts (1977), Between the Woods and the Water (1986), and the posthumous The Broken Road (2013). Fermor set out to walk from the Horn of Holland to Constantinople in the 1930s. Nick Hunt followed in Leigh Fermor’s steps in 2011, writing Walking the Woods and the Water (2014). Readers wanting to try locales far from Europe could read Alan Booth’s books The Roads to Sata: A 2,000-Mile Walk Through Japan (1986) and Looking for the Lost: Journeys Through a Vanishing Japan (1995). William L. Sullivan crossed Oregon’s wilderness on foot and wrote Listening for Coyote (1988). Among the long-walk books on my shelves that I haven’t read yet is Robert MacFarlane’s The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (2012)—foot-journeys in England, Scotland, Spain, and further east. Let me quote the celebrated movie-maker Werner Herzog: “Humans are not made to sit at computer terminals or travel by aeroplane; destiny intended something different for us. For too long now we have been estranged from the essential, which is the nomadic life: travelling on foot. A distinction must be made between hiking and travelling on foot. In today’s society—though it would be ridiculous to advocate travelling on foot for everyone to every possible destination—I personally would rather do the existentially essential things in my life on foot. If you live in England and your girlfriend is in Sicily, and it is clear that you want to marry her, then you should walk to Sicily to propose. For these things travel by car or aeroplane is not the right thing. The volume and depth and intensity of the world is something that only those on foot will ever experience.” Surely that—though with the omission of “which is the nomadic life”—is very close to the

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outlook pervading The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. So are these words of Denys Watkins-Pitchford (aka “BB”), printed at the front of some of his books: “The wonder of the world, the beauty and the power, the shapes of things, their colours, lights, and shades; these I saw. Look ye also while life lasts.” That seems Tolkienian to me—but I suppose we would look in vain for that quality in a very great deal of “fantasy fiction.” The books might contain dutiful descriptions of grandiose panoramas, but do the authors seem to know the “volume and depth and intensity of the world” such as Tolkien suggests? Now let’s think about a subset of walking, namely cross-country adventure, and books of similar spirit. Biographer Humphrey Carpenter assures us that Tolkien liked the fiction of John Buchan, who is best known for The Thirty-Nine Steps, a landmark of fast-moving cross-country adventure fiction (and one that, from what I have seen, has not been well served by adaptations in other media). Buchan wrote the delectably-titled A Book of Escapes and Hurried Journeys (1922). From his preface: “I have never yet seen an adequate definition of Romance, and I am not going to attempt one. But I take it that it means in the widest sense that which affects the mind with a sense of wonder—the surprises of life, fights against odds, weak things confounding strong, beauty and courage flowering in unlikely places. [Doesn’t that sound very much like The Lord of the Rings?] In this book we are concerned with only a little plot of a great province, the efforts of men to cover a certain space within a certain limited time under an urgent compulsion, which strains to the uttermost body and spirit. “Why is there such an eternal fascination about tales of hurried journeys? In the great romances of literature they provide many of the chief dramatic moments, and, since the theme is common to Homer and the penny reciter, it must appeal to a very ancient instinct in human nature. The truth seems to be that we live our lives under the twin categories of time and space, and that when the two come into conflict we get the great moment. Whether failure or success is the result, life is sharpened, intensified, idealized. A long journey even with the most lofty purpose may be a dull thing to read of, if it is made at leisure; but a hundred yards may be a breathless business if only a few seconds are granted to complete it. ….I have included "escapes" in my title, for the conflict of space and time is of the essence of all escapes, since the escaper is either pursued or in instant danger of pursuit.….The escapes I have chosen are, therefore, of a special type—the hustled kind, where there has been no time to spare, and the pursuer has either been hot-foot on the trail or the fugitive has moved throughout in an atmosphere of imminent peril.” I hasten to add that I agree with C. S. Lewis, who wrote that, though a character may be in mortal danger either way, it makes a great difference to some readers, such as himself,

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whether the threat is from “Red Indians” or from gangsters. The former kind of story – I think he had Fenimore Cooper in mind—evokes a strange world of men who live in the forest, who slip silently behind the trees, who possess preternatural woodcraft, who chant of their heroes, who paint their faces for war, while the gangster story carries a very different atmosphere. I’m about to refer to stories about pursuit by deadly enemies who are basically the same as the pursued: British soldiers, Nazi agents, etc. Pursuits by Nazi agents who want to kill a character and pursuits by Orcs who want to kill a character are, from one point of view, basically the same thing, but from another are radically different things. I do see that. Nevertheless, sometimes a Tolkien fan might enjoy stories without Orcs and other inhabitants of the Third Age but that do contain “escapes and hurried journeys.” Tolkien certainly did. I suppose Buchan was influenced by Robert Louis Stevenson, but not by his Treasure Island nearly so much as by Kidnapped. “The flight across the heather” will be an evocative phrase for many who have read Stevenson’s 1886 tale. In 1751, young David Balfour and formidable swordsman Alan Breck Stewart seek to evade their British pursuers. The nicest edition known to me is the one with N. C. Wyeth’s paintings. The sense of a particular landscape and its weather contributes greatly to the flavor of the adventures. At last David comes into his inheritance. He’s a little bit hobbit-like in (re)turning to a middle class type of life, while Alan is akin to Aragorn the Ranger, with his connection to an older and more dangerous way of life. Then there’s Buchan, a literary heir of RLS, whose most Tolkienian novel might be Huntingtower (1922), a possible influence on The Hobbit, with its middle-aged retired grocer hero who finds that he can be more courageous than he knew (when there’s a kidnapped Russian princess in the case). I’ve enjoyed many books by Buchan. The Thirty- Nine Steps (1915), with the narrative of Richard Hannay’s desperate flight across the countryside, might be the best one to read first. Then one could go on to further Hannay adventures, Greenmantle, Mr. Standfast, The Three Hostages (with its “Seek” poem that might have suggested to Tolkien his “Seek for the sword that was broken” poem), etc. Buchan’s heir, in turn, is Geoffrey Household, author of Rogue Male (1939) and others. You’ll remember much in LotR about the necessity of escaping detection while trying to get somewhere. That’s much of what Rogue Male is about. The hero is a skilled hunter who went into Europe to get an unnamed dictator in his gun-sight. Though he is caught, tortured, and (at first) believed by his captors to have died, he escapes to England. Vengeful agents track him down. The sense of location, in Dorset, is strong. After reading Rogue Male, look up Holloway by MacFarlane, Stanley Donwood, and Dan Richards, a very short book with appealing artwork.

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All of these adventures are rereadable books – I can read them again, knowing how the heroes will come through, but still relishing the intensity of their adventures beneath the sky. I mentioned Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960) earlier. Here the cross- country adventure does have a very strong fantastic element, but one passionately associated by the author with the real Alderley Edge in Cheshire. You can follow just where Colin and Susan have got to, using the British Ordnance Survey Map #268 for Wilmslow, Macclesfield, and Congleton. I advocate the term topographic romance for the type of story that features a real landscape as the scene of high adventure. Works of fiction set in imaginary landscapes that are mapped in some detail are cartographic romances (Middle- earth, Earthsea, etc.). Ace claimed that the Weirdstone was a novel “in the Tolkien tradition”—it was, but in a more interesting way than simply that of featuring elves, wizards, etc.; it abounds in feeling for the land and a deep investment in the flight from pursuit theme, as Tolkien’s fantasy does. Nonfiction stories about grim circumstances requiring sustained courage might please many Tolkien readers more than turning the dreary pages of some redundant market-niche fantasy release. Instead of reaching for a Tolkien imitation, why not try V. I. Albanov’s first- person narrative In the Land of White Death (1917), about the Brusilov expedition to navigate the Northeast Passage? Two survived, 22 did not. However doubtful its truthfulness, Sławomir Rawicz’s The Long Walk (1956; ghostwritten by Ronald Downing) is a good read for what it is, the story of prisoners escaping from a Siberian gulag to British India. Hallworth’s The Last Flowers on Earth (1967) is about British mountain-climbers in Greenland; two perished there. Geoffrey Moorhouse crossed 2,000 miles of the Sahara, west to east, in The Fearful Void (1974; as I recall, everyone did survive). I wouldn’t describe W. Stanley Moss’s Ill Met by Moonlight: The Abduction of General Kreipe (1950) as grim, but it’s adventurous, all right. The setting is Nazi-occupied Crete. Lansing’s Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage (1959) deserves its reputation as a masterpiece. David Howarth’s We Die Alone (1955), which I haven’t read yet, sounds stirring—the story of Jan Baalsrud’s cross-country escape from the Nazis in Norway. Some nature books may suit the Tolkienian reader. When we read Tolkien, for example the Withywindle Valley sequence in The Fellowship of the Ring, we sense that the imagination at work here is deeply engaged with the natural world; but most of us live indoors almost all the time, or, when outdoors, are on pavements, under street lamps, passed by motorized vehicles, and may be absorbed by electronic communication devices. When we get away from these things, we are likely to be closer to “Middle-earth.” One of the chief things about the natural world is that it is almost always beautiful in some way, whether we are observing the shapes and subtle shadows of vast clouds or the enameled patterns of insects’ wings. Natural sounds are usually pleasing, be they the hiss of tall grasses in a chilly wind or the sweet notes of songbirds or the goblin laughter of crows. You almost never see ugly things in the natural world. You’re more likely to see a dead animal in town—a run-over squirrel on the asphalt, for example—than in the countryside. Animals that are ugly, such as toads

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or hippopotami, probably possess a droll look that has a charm of its own; they are not simply repulsive. Slugs are ugly, but more noticeable on sidewalks than in the woods. Deer ticks are ugly, but they are small. Your sight isn’t likely to be offended by them unless you go off-trail. For an affront to our sight, we usually have to look at man-made things; nature is almost always pleasing to the eye. It may surprise readers to learn that, when he was an adolescent, Tolkien’s most treasured book wasn’t a work of fantasy. It was C. A. Johns’ Flowers of the Field, a book about “the flora of the British Isles” (the specific edition is described below [2]). Tolkien’s friend George Sayer remembered a rural walk with Tolkien in which the latter noted wood avens growing. Tolkien identified the plant as Herb Bennet, Herba Benedicta. It was, he said, not “St. Benedict’s plant,” but the “blessed plant”; it was thought that it kept the devil from the house. You will not find that explanation of the old name of Geum urbanum in Johns, interesting to browse in as his book is, but you will find two paragraphs about Herb Bennet in Geoffrey Grigson’s The Englishman’s Flora (1955/1987)—a fine browsing book. Grigson cites the Ortus Sanitatis (Mainz, 1491), for just the point Tolkien made. Tolkien is a fitting author, as his excellent critic Tom Shippey has said, to turn his readers into bird-watchers, tree-spotters, and hedgerow-grubbers. Tolkien can dispose his readers to want to see stars, trees, birds, wild flowers. Our educations have probably been such that we know almost nothing of the constellations and of the plants and animals of the place where we live. As Prof. Kirke says (in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe), “What do they teach them in these schools?” Teach us to be “global citizens” adept at “networking” and most at home in airports and office-tower cubicles? But buying field guides to our place and using them is a Tolkienian thing to do, and Tolkien devotees may also want to acquire books about Northern European birds, British wild flowers, etc., to consult when reading his books. Getting a planisphere and learning some of the constellations, if you have a dark enough night sky, is (in my sense) a conservative and a Tolkienian thing to do. Looking up and applying the “Bortle Scale” can help one to evaluate one’s night sky. The Lord of the Rings was started in late 1937 and mostly written during World War II and the postwar “Austerity” period. There have been those who have regarded as puerile the hobbits’ enthusiasm for abundant good food and for comforts such as hot baths and clean beds. And to a degree, Tolkien makes sure that the attentive reader will see hobbit greed as a fault. But learning about British hard times, wartime, and austerity-time deprivation helps us to appreciate that, for most of us, disparaging good food and comfort is unbecoming; we may disparage these things because we are used to enjoying them as a perpetual environment (coinciding with our captivation with electronic media, by the way), but for British people back then, including Tolkien and his family, these were blessings not to be taken for granted, and which they had to do without, with few or no moments of relief, for year after year. Tolkien and those who heard chapters of LotR read aloud while it was being written might have been cold, underfed, and underwashed. Scoffers against hobbit

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comforts ought to get hold of Juliet Gardiner’s three books The Thirties, The Blitz: The British Under Attack, and Wartime Britain: 1939-1945, and David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain. These four books are teeming with fascinating details from diaries, letters, books, etc. about those hard years. They can help readers to be more grateful for the things we enjoy, and a lot more understanding about a notable element in Tolkien’s writing. I suggested that sometimes a non-fantasy work might be more “Tolkienian” than most fantasy. Does the reader agree with the converse? — Perhaps we used to think that what we loved, reading Tolkien, was hobbits, Elves, wizards, and Ringwraiths—and we did; but, also, without our realizing it, we loved the walking, the sense of the old, the evocation of our own natural world. Those things too are attractors that bring us back to his books again and again. I've never done it, but I wonder what it would look like if I attempted to organize my books by mood or "quiddity" rather than author or genre, so that I might have The Lord of the Rings side-by-side with the Patrick Leigh Fermor trilogy and Grigson’s Englishman’s Flora… How about you, reader? If you habitually reached for a work of “fantasy” when in the mood for something Tolkienian, are you now interested in thinking of non-fantastic books that might offer satisfaction? I do want to stick in a plug for Eugene Vodolazkin’s Laurus. I’ve been harsh on post- Tolkienian fantasy. But this is a great book. It is probably on its way to becoming a “cult book,” that is, a book that most people haven’t heard of but that becomes a very special book indeed for readers here and there who are delighted when they discover someone else who knows the book—kind of the way The Lord of the Rings was for a while. But yes, when we really want the Tolkienian, only Tolkien’s works will do—however often we’ve reread them. ______1 Darrell Schweitzer’s interview with Lin Carter, in the February 1977 issue of Fantastic, confirms the unsurprising fact that Ballantine wanted to capitalize on the success of their Tolkien paperbacks. Carter’s agent had offered his “Look Behind” book on Tolkien to Ballantine. They took the book (published 1969) and noticed Carter’s references to other writers of fantasy. They “were making so much off Tolkein [sic] (that) they wanted to offer these same readers” other works of fantasy. “The publishers felt that if they could make the readers understand that this was stuff like The Lord of the Rings, that the same readership, all those millions of college kids out there, would buy it, that they didn’t have to do anything more than say, ‘This is like Tolkein.’ They found out that that wasn’t true. …in direct ratio to how much it was like Tolkein it sold well. The [William] Morris for example sold marvellous…but the other stuff didn’t do as well. For example, Khaled by F. Marion Crawford, a sort of Arabian Nights fantasy novel was not anything like Tolkein. It was just a good fantasy novel, and it sold terribly. It sold 16,000 copies.” It would be interesting to see a history of the Ballantine series—I think Douglas A. Anderson might be working on something of the sort—that included sales figures for each of the volumes. My impression is that the Kurtz Deryni books and Walton’s Mabinogion books sold well, while Chesterton’s Man Who Was Thursday didn’t. (Too bad, since that is one of my all-time favorite books.) ______2 Johns, The Rev. C. A., Flowers of the Field. Second Impression. Revised Throughout and Edited by Clarence Elliott. With 92 Coloured Illustrations by E. N. Gwatkin and 245 Cuts [i.e. black and white illustrations] in the Text. London: Routledge, 1908. This is the specific edition Tolkien described in a list of books in his library made during the 1930s for insurance purposes. Christopher Tolkien identified the edition in a 2009 letter to the editor of Beyond Bree. I’m indebted to him and to Nancy Martsch. Tolkien’s statement about it as being his most treasured book when he was an adolescent appears in Evelyn B. Byrne and Otto M. Penzler’s Attacks of Taste (New York: Gotham Book Mart, 1971).

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I never intended this piece to run so long. By the time I got to the last section I was starting to feel like Harlan Ellison, with his seeming inability to end the personal commentary in Dangerous Visions (1967) and Again, Dangerous Visions (1972). I’ve never claimed to be an astute literary observer. In old age I find myself grappling with such shortcomings.

The Musings of an Unliterary Man Vacation time and the conundrum of which books to cart along puzzled my little head. This was a road trip, its trailhead starting from home, so theoretically I could have brought an entire box. Instead, I chose Michael Swanwick’s 2007 collection The Dog Said Bow-Wow, and Julia Elliott’s 2014 collection, The Wilds. Two books by writers with playful but vastly different minds.

I am a slow reader with limited time. This is exacerbated by many things. I love reading, and have owned a library from a very young age, but I am not a compulsive reader. Much of the time I’m in no mood to read. When I do, my physically demanding jobs often create what I call The Droops. My eyelids start dropping, a descent I fight against until I can no longer read, finding myself in snooze mode. Serious reading is usually done in the very early mornings when brain and body are fresh from rest.

It took about two months to read these collections. I have a taste for reading about writing, literary criticism, and book reviews, and frequently intersperse this kind of nonfiction with my current choices in fiction, along with fanzines, which intensifies the length of my reading time for fiction.

I rarely reread. The world seems divided into those who reread and those who do not. Frankly, I’ve never understood the compulsion to reread. If I devoured a book a day, instead of two, in two months, perhaps things would look different. There are far too many books to

read and at my pace rereading rarely makes sense. Or perhaps it has to do with the way in which my brain and mind were formed as a child. Rereading may require a couple of diametrically opposed skill sets that I never acquired, or have found necessary.

Just as I more or less randomly chose the Swanwick and Elliott collections for my vacation reading, so too did Jo Walton’s What Makes This Book So Great, a book about rereading books, and C. S. Lewis’ On Stories and Other Essays on Literature come at random to my bedside reading table.

“An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books only once.” This pronouncement by C. S. Lewis is then backed up with: “There is hope for the man who has never read Malory or Boswell or Tristam Shandy, or Shakespeare’s Sonnets: but what can you do with a man who says he “has read” them, meaning he has only read them once. And thinks that this settles the matter.” That is a sort of damning, faint, but complete. But: there is still hope for me. I have not read any of the works cited. But if I did it would only be once, for surely, I am an unliterary man.

Lewis is tackling the nature of rereading in this section of “On Stories” and it would be unfair and unkind of me to leave it at that. The hallmark of Lewis, within certain bounds, is his inclusiveness. His defense of the imaginative story is constant, even “bad” stories, ones poorly written, plot-driven only, and designed to assuage baser desires. He speculates that the importance of junk stories for those who suck them up like a cherry Slurpee on a hot Sunday is that they tap into the deeper need of their subconscious, probably acting more in a mythopoeic sense, than being strictly escapist.

He asserts that the unliterary man will reread only for a taste of strange. After a first reading, an imaginative fantasy or science fiction tale has revealed all. To reread is to already know, and anticipate that strangeness, and to find in it a certain kind of comfort. He contends that the child and the unliterary generally use their own imaginations to fill in, and build, larger and more complicated worlds than the author could himself imagine, hence it becomes a far more private fantasy than the author has offered. Page | 31

These two skill sets, that of being literary (I assume Lewis means a person with finely tuned critical facility, and the ability to read closely and infer deeper meaning), and that of being able to create a world in your head from the mere hint of a writer, are ones that I mostly lack. This could suggest that I am a disabled reader. I would not disagree with that assessment. As a child I craved fantasy and fairytale—the mythopoeic, if you like. It might have been an escape, or it might have been an essence that somehow became warped or rejected as I aged, and experienced the hard chips of life.

I rejected fantasy outright as a genre as I grew older, and doggedly taught myself, over a number of years, to understand the language of science fiction. At that critical juncture it was easier to fully embrace Carson McCullers, Francoise Sagan, and Hermann Hesse. I assume that the boy saw life reflected in these writers, as he did in certain “horror” writers like Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson, whom I now think of in terms closer to Albert Camus. But what do I know? I’ve only read these books once.

Jo Walton is an incessant reader and compulsively rereads. I think she validates as well as gives lie to C. S. Lewis’ theory of the unliterary. Jo Walton has the deepest need, and the greatest ability, to lose herself in Story, with a capital S. Her sense of the mythopoeic is in the everyday, and every day she must plunge herself into it, neck deep, then submerges her head, surfacing only occasionally to see what time of day it might be. Although most of her book-talk lacks any sort of critical theory this is by design.

What Makes This Book So Great is by and large breezy in tone, but there are short set pieces among the raves that indulge philosophical reach. Walton is also a novelist. The book I read (just once, though it calls for a rereading), Among Others, is imbued with the mythologies of childhood, and is nuanced in the traditions of the mysterious and the unexplained, encumbered with an underlying somber, or perhaps an informed, happiness.

Walton’s ability to lose herself time after time in the same world of the Story is enviable if inexplicable, to me. I’ve been trying to figure out which one of us is broken. Walton reads so much that I groggle that she finds the time to live her actual life; between her reading and her writing where does the living in the everyday come in? And what are the base causes of Walton’s constant and apparently necessary submersion into fiction? To me this is a form of escape, and of losing one’s self. That is not meant meanly, but asking a larger question, trying to understand why this might be so, for it appears that there has been a successful integration of her submersion and her ability to function in daily life as an adult woman. As I said, enviable.

As a boy, one of the afflictions I suffered as a reader was to fight against secondary world building. It was this that caused my mind to rebel against, and frequently reject, science fiction, and to dismiss fantasy altogether. Yet the young child in that forming boy stubbornly fought to immerse himself in this very kind of reading, perhaps even needed it. So here was the conflict of rejecting a need, yet persisting until there was a kind of breakthrough, or integration, of the needs of the child and the boy. But only reluctantly, and with a sense of unease.

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My world view is frequently grey in tone; often darker. In science fiction I came to be drawn to those writers that appealed to both facets of the self I knew. Two extremes would be Clifford D. Simak, a reflection of the child and his needs, and Brian Aldiss, whose very essence was to place an existential question mark into the body of everything he wrote, just as the growing boy was learning to do.

Jo Walton is looking for a kind of happiness in her reading. She is disturbed when she does not find it. I, on the other hand, seek the darkness that I know to be the real pitch of life. Walton detested and found great fault in Mary Doria Russell’s science fiction novel, The Sparrow, which grapples with religion, violence, evolution, revolution, misunderstanding, rape, utter darkness, and the possibility of redemption. It is by no means a perfect book, and relentlessly reflects the prejudices of its author, but it is a very beautiful one, one that I fully embraced.

No clearer dividing line exists between Jo Walton and myself than this example. Walton’s need for a frequent and complete immersion into secondary worlds with a satisfactory, or even better, a happy ending is, perhaps, the cry of the child.

My own child wants this, too, but that older boy constantly turns to face that child, shaking his head, for he knows that the beast is real, darkness is unavoidable, and there are no happy endings.

Jo Walton writes about the comfort she receives from boarding a train from Cardiff to London with a delicious book in hand to reread. She asks this question: what are all of those people thinking about, the ones that don’t have their nose stuck in a book (as if it were an unimaginable act). That image is a romantic ideal. When I think of traveling that notion pops up in my head—reading on the train, looking about now and again, being reabsorbed into the Story. How gorgeously cozy the image is; it makes me salivate just to imagine it.

But the bold truth is, I will leave the book unread most times and look out the window. For me the real world is more interesting. Perhaps I have seen the view hundreds of times. Though familiar, it will be different. The light alone will change everything.

“No man would find an abiding strangeness on the Moon unless he were the sort of man who could find it in his own back garden.” Again, C. S. Lewis. I find truth in that statement; I am rarely bored. What is before me in the here and now is interesting, though perhaps less exciting than my book, but I choose it just the same. To answer Walton’s question, what am I thinking, it ranges far and wide, from near absolute stillness of thought—truly being in the observable present—to thoughts of all kinds, from the inconsequential (I wonder if her shoes are comfortable?) to thoughts with greater implication (I wonder what dad would have been like had he bucked society and not married nor had children?). And sometimes I am sitting there thinking about a book, and not reading one. In this case, four books, the Swanwick, Elliott, Lewis and Walton books. Among others.

C. S. Lewis never really satisfactorily explains what the hallmarks of an “unliterary man” might actually be, with the exception that he usually reads a thing once. By ellipses he

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indicates that the “unliterary” reader does not think much about what he has read, and is under the mistaken impression that he can understand it once he has done so once, which best I can tell, from one reading, makes Lewis’ stomach turn.

Dale Nelson, who read this piece in first draft, and is a bit of a C. S. Lewis scholar, corrected me in my misrepresentation of Lewis’ “unliterary man”.

“Wasn’t not-rereading one of the characteristics of the unliterary reader, but not the only one? My memory is that Lewis also said that the unliterary reader is inattentive, impatient with the words if they do more than tell the story so that he or she can pass the time. Also, I think Lewis said that the unliterary reader uses a text egotistically, sort of to get the daydream going. This reader will want a familiar type of character to identify easily with— the virtuous, pretty poor shop girl who marries well, the mighty barbarian who throttles his foes and crushes the ivory breasts of a panting girl against his massive chest (or the like). The unliterary reader wants the same thing over with enough surface difference that reading is not rereading.”

I chose not to reread Lewis’ essay, “On Stories” and so missed, or misremembered the whole of Lewis’ concept. This probably illustrates Lewis’ point about rereading and the “unliterary man” fairly aptly.

In a similar regard, about being viewed as a “real writer”, Brian Aldiss, in his memoir “Magic and Bare Boards”, from Hell’s Cartographers, warns: “…sf is the best-equipped of all literature to indulge power-fantasy”… “the disgrace that the sf community still (perpetually?) thinks it is in is precisely the shame it shares with pornography, of transforming a man into an organ of conquest in a knocking-shop of wish fulfillment.”

Jo Walton is very much the populist, and her rereading is done for very different reasons than C. S. Lewis. There is a connect point, though, between Lewis’ intellectual approach and Walton’s rereading for fun, comfort and joy. Walton can reread a book and turn in a complex criticism of a text if she so chooses, but her attitude is, why bother? She reads for enjoyment. I’m sure Lewis did so as well, for much of his writing about writing is a spirited defense of genre. But his essays rarely reflect the satisfaction he must have attained widely reading in science fiction, fantasy, fairytale, and romantic fiction (by that I infer the works of H. Rider Haggard, etc., not Barbara Cartland). Both find deeper meaning in genre fiction and can intelligently write about it. Both achieve a sense of wonder from their reading but only Walton has that *goshwow!* part of it intact; Lewis is unfailingly academic, his delight clothed by the critical.

The forgoing thoughts were instigated by my resistance to rereading, and knowing that to do justice to The Dog Said Bow-Wow and The Wilds I must reread at least certain of the stories, if for no other reason than to refresh my memory of their actual content, and my reaction to that content. My resistance may simply be habitual, and all unexamined habits should be broken to determine the reasoning and needs behind them. Then if the habit still makes sense you can be obliged to return to it with a fuller knowledge; if not, then you have set yourself free of an unnecessary tether. Page | 34

Michael Swanwick and Julia Elliott are both classists in their chosen modes; Swanwick pure quill genre, Elliott an indefatigable misty-eyed regionalist.

The back cover of The Dog Said Bow-Wow, published by Tachyon Press, broadcasts a basic truth about Swanwick: “Everything Old Is New Again”. I am by no means a Swanwick scholar having in the past read only the occasional short story, now this collection, and none of the novels. Contained in The Dog Said Bow-Wow is everything you know about fantasy and science fiction, retold.

The fantasy stories are charming, and the fey are earthy, slang-ridden, licentiously besotted, and tragic tricksters. But too much these stories reminded me of Joss Whedon’s Buffy and Angel universe, or the Fred Ward film, Cast A Deadly Spell, a 40s-noir pastiche done up with magic, snarky, snappy dialog, and a detective named Lovecraft. The science fiction stories herein also seem familiar. The paradigms have been fully explored; Swanwick works from the core of the genre out, sounding mellifluous stfnal minor chord grace notes, while the fantasy stories are brash, sustained power chords.

The plain truth of the matter is that I remembered very little about the stories in either collection. Did this have to do with the nature of my broken processes, of my being an unliterary reader, or were these stories just so much piffle that they were, ultimately, unmemorable? Or, do they only now start to become memorable with rereading, and further contemplation, as C. S. Lewis seems to indicate?

I chose to reread the three Swanwick stories that seemed most representative of the breadth of this rover’s mind.

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Upon first reading, “Hello, Said the Stick” seemed a risky opener for the book, short, plotless, and dialog-centric; an existential tract, basically. It is a nuanced genre piece about alien intervention, but could have as easily appeared in the New Yorker as Asimov’s, alongside the latest Steven Millhauser, had the fiction editor been at all imaginative or adventurous. (Doubly so for “The Last Geek” which harkens back, in its deadpan manner, to Damon Knight, Ray Bradbury on an ironic and less florid day, and Shirley Jackson, all writers who tended toward blurring borders.) Upon rereading, the story seemed a satisfying opener, indicating the broad palette of intellectual play to follow, and Swanwick’s intentions of borrowing and transforming.

The title story, “The Dog Said Bow-Wow”, is the first of three Darger and Surplus stories. These are classically relaxed, frequently ribald tales of two con men, one a modified dog, set in the far future, after the fall. I was unimpressed by this story, and Darger and Surplus. But as I ran across the other two tales of these scamps in the collection I came to enjoy and appreciate them and their stories. They follow the caper formula, with plenty of color thrown in—dashes of Jack Vance, Cordwainer Smith, Robert Silverberg, and Arthur Conan Doyle— satisfying science-fantasy written in a formal, leisurely style, nothing new, but still very inventive, fun entertainments. The Darger and Surplus stories bare up under rereading, and reveal more.

“The Bordello in Faerie”, my favorite of the collection, is exactly as titled, with a twist: when Ned Wilkens, stock fairytale blue collar medieval dude, makes his first visit to the bordello, just over the border in Faerie, he comes to find that it is he who is the prostitute, but after his experience, decides he doesn’t mind a whole lot. The story is a series of erotic interludes, transcendent, but each encounter darker and darker in nature. Ned is a human hooker with a heart of gold, but in the end swears off sex with the Fey as too shattering. By firm resolve, and with the love of a good human woman, he is able to put down his addiction to Faerie sex, living happily ever after.

Three of the stories in this collection won the Hugo Award” “Legion In Time”, “Slow Life”, and “The Dog Said Bow-Wow”. I will not reflect on these other stories except to say they fully embrace the statement on the back cover—“Everything old is new again”.

Three other stories I found to be sheer drudgery: “The Sky Sailor’s Tale”, “A Small Room in Koboldtown” and “Urdumheim”. These stories have moments of color and invention, but ultimately seemed dreary class exercises in genre: steampunk, noir-fantasy, and the creation myth.

C. S. Lewis might not have approved all this windy commentary, citing lack of classical education, inability to read closely, all exacerbated by inarticulate expression. Sadly though, I remember best the stories I liked least in this volume. An odd bit of quandary.

Michael Swanwick is the consummate genre professional. He has nine novels and eleven short story collections under his belt, and apparently no other career in the offing. How one begins to parse Julia Elliott is another matter entirely. She is a straddling enigma: the recipient of the Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award ($30K) for emerging women writers; awarded Page | 36

the Small Press Pushcart Prize; writer in residence at Amazon’s Shared World Residency, a workshop that encourages teens to write science fiction and fantasy; teaches English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina at Columbia. She has published one collection of short stories and one novel, both by the same small press, Tin House Books (“Portland and Brooklyn”—trendy or what?).

I have discussed Elliott’s novel, The New Improved Romie Futch at length, elsewhere. Her book of short stories, The Wilds, could be described as the inverse of Tachyon’s declaration of Swanwick, “Everything old is new again”, to “Everything new is old again”.

Julia Elliott is an American southern regionalist in the best sense, in the way that Ivan Doig is to Montana, Larry McMurtry is to Texas, or John Cheever and Steven Millhauser are to New York, and suburban Westchester County and Connecticut. Her south is by nature eldritch, gothic in character, and frequently, if not always, peopled by those just this side of feral, whether it is children trying to bring sense to an older order of things (“The Wilds”) or thirtysomethings in the midst of their lives and careers (“The End of the World”).

Trying to pick three stories to reread from Elliott’s collection was trickier than with the Swanwick. Her stories, while all wildly different from each other are of a piece, connected by language, technology, and outlook. I finally chose “The Wilds”, “The Love Machine”, and “The End of the World”.

I’ve spent considerable time trying to untangle my responses to Elliott’s fiction. I’ve read interviews and reviews, I’ve cogitated over morning coffee, and mulled while grounds- keeping at the University of Arizona. It seems to me that the most important aspects of Julia Elliott’s work is never really addressed by those writing about or interviewing her.

While there are cybernetic limbs attached to the elderly (“LIMBs”), near future technological innovations such as robots programmed to experience love (“Love Machine”), beauty salon techniques guaranteed to form a brand new you (“Regeneration at Mukti”), etc., the important thing about it all is that everything that could and would be shiny and new in an actual science fiction story experiences a transubstantiation into the old, into the dark, and into the natural, organic world, where it rots and goes slightly crazy. (Elliott’s “biocomputer” in “Love Machine”, an organic computer made of animal parts floating in a blue liquid is her poster child of such imagery.)

Elliott’s stories are peopled by those just one step away from the hills. While they may live in urban and suburban milieus they have not been domesticated, quite yet, and never will. They’ve evolved, instead, into savvy, hyper-verbal rednecks.

“The End of the World”, while ostensibly about the possible reformation of the ’90s rock band, Swole, is actually a riff on the post-apocalyptic; while three of the band members discuss the breakdown and how it will arrive, the fourth member, Bill, is actually already living it, sequestered in the Carolina mountains, scruffy, self-sufficient, and determinist. Possum (“…neck deep in law school debt…financed three ghetto properties with credit cards, and never sleeps”) is a drug addled attorney, flitting about like a bat at dusk, a tweaker with a day job, muttering about “wetware made of insect and frog neurons” and “telepathic Page | 37

cockroaches creeping around your house, gathering data for marketing companies.” Tim, described as a rather doughy nebbish, somehow becomes the only one with real responsibility, with a wife and the arrival of a new child. Lisa, the narrator, is grading English papers at Georgia State, while daydreaming about the Mystics. She is dark, but opalescent, like many of Elliott’s female characters. The final paragraphs of this story subtly reaffirm that it truly is the end of the world.

Elliott’s day job as a prof at the University of South Carolina teaching English and women’s and gender studies feeds into the puzzle of her work. Her writing is fat with lush imagery, the tone and tense always spot on, just this side of clotted purple: “It was a warm day and autumn mange patched the ragged trees.” This is concise visual poetry powdered with arch perception, and it’s indicative of her entire product, both in the writing, and in her worldview. When I read this line to my wife she said, “That’s just too close to being badly written.” But I disagree. Elliott’s writing is shaded in the same way that Frank Sinatra’s vocals tumble through the air. Sinatra’s singing nearly always comes to the edge of being off-key but never is; it’s what makes him mesmerizing, and gives him the lasting, elastic tension of time, and it’s the same with Elliott’s writing.

While flights of fancy are integral to everything Elliott writes, her men and women remain grounded in reality, or at least my view of reality coincides with hers. Her gender roles are steadfastly Darwinian, immutable feminine and masculine archetypes, a product of our evolution down from apes, and up and out of the natural world. The assigned gender roles never waver, are hard-wired. There is modern fluidity within these confines, of course; as a woman studying/teaching gender it could be no other way, but the basis is concrete, mired in the muck of our monkey brains and instinct.

Elliott’s work twines through with big issues. Aging, the quest to retain youth and beauty, dementia, rampant technology and it uses and misuses, Big Pharma, social media and the internet’s effect, teen suicide, and more. In the strictest sense, her stories don’t go anywhere. These issues give skeletal structure, but no real plot. While attention must be paid to their inclusion, Elliott is not overtly critical (except, perhaps, by tone), and is interested in neither solution, nor resolution. She achieves a kind of climax or pinnacle, follows with drifting descriptive, then moody repose.

In terms of genre writing Elliott’s stories just fizzle out, or are too subtle for the unliterary man. Where Michael Swanwick guarantees a satisfying end, and lead-up to that end, Elliott’s stories just end.

This puts Elliott’s work squarely in the court of meditative, slice-of-life mainstream fiction, though her work is scattershot with the phantasmagorical. Ultimately, Elliott’s work is about color. Think Jack Vance’s Cudgel’s Saga placed in the Deep South.

Elliott has revealed a number of things in interviews that directly affect her fiction. Her dad used to make up imaginary diseases and claimed his daughter suffered from an “incurable hyperbolic condition” as a girl, and she believes she is an inheritor of the South’s “centuries of ancestral looniness”. She also claims that the conditions of the Deep South’s summers

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may cause as yet undetected brain-viruses, another explanation for unexpected Southerner behavior.

Within the hyperbolic text and imagery of the psychedelic South there is gritty realism. The rotting, humid, luxuriant landscape pulses, ever creeping towards the suburban complex. Strange experiments are taking place. Children run feral. There is fairytale simplicity and morality within every stroke of the Key.

The original title of this piece was “Michael Swanwick vs. Julia Elliott—Who Will Win?” Compare and contrast? Forget about it. Apples and oranges are two round fruits that dangle from a tree.

Swanwick comes from the culture of commercial fantasy and science fiction writing, knowing at every turn where he is going and what the story is doing. His prose is clear and creamy. He teases the tropes of genre with genial mischief. Yet somehow Swanwick’s work has a disengaged, antiseptic aspect. This is not pejorative but declarative. He is a writer creating fun, fascinating other worlds, and I’ll be reading more.

Julia Elliott, on the other hand, is writing like she’s just dropped down onto an alien planet, with every sense engaged, rushing to get it all down before her brain catches fire with an unknowable virus, and she is left with just a ticking noise in her head.

And just so, the musing of an unliterary man.

Postscript of an Unliterary Man My mom once threw Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bizarre down disgustedly and avoided reading him for the next ten years because she’d come across a passage where Theroux described pushing trash out the train window as it moved through the Indian countryside, justifying himself with a “when in Rome” context—everyone else was doing it. I was the one who’d recommended Theroux to her because she took so much joy in so many other travel writers. Mom could be very open-minded and I thought once she’d become accustomed to Theroux’s deeply embedded cranky and dark worldview that she would love him. But her open mind could just as easily snap tightly shut at the hint of any too far gone ethical divergence with an author.

I was amused when mom explained her trouble with Theroux. My argument pro-Theroux first took on the actual text. Wasn’t he submersing himself in his environment; wasn’t he trying to globalize his behavior, go as native as possible, especially for some cushy white guy from Medford, Massachusetts? When this tact failed I switched to the larger problem of separating the artist from the art, advancing the supposition that many artists are jerks. Same with writers. If you avoid a writer because you think he/she is a jerk you wouldn’t have a damned thing to read. But her mind was set. This scenario ended happily, though. Ten

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years later she came back to Theroux. She called to tell me she’d just finished The Patagonia Express and had enjoyed it very much. (Of course, she was a big fan of Bruce Chatwin, who had also written about Patagonia. There may have been some influencing going on.)

I confess to bearing the mark of my mother. I, too, can carry unreasonable grudges against authors and artists whose personal behavior I find repugnant. I have disliked Jerry Pournelle since July 1974 when I first encountered him at a Westercon—a loud-mouthed loutish prig with definite narcissistic tendencies—spouting a deeply conservative/libertarian doctrine as abusively as possible, to any who would listen. I vowed at that time, when I was seventeen, to never read a Pournelle book, and kept to my unwavering prejudices until November 2018, forty-five years later (that’s not too many). (Okay, I admit to reading one of Jerry Pournelle’s collaborations with Larry Niven, The Legacy of Heorot, but only because my mom had sent it to me. Who was I to argue with a world-class reader, (as my brother Sutton once called her)? And indeed, The Legacy of Heorot is a splendid adventure novel. Thanks, mom!)

“Black and white and read a million times: Jerry Pournelle’s Janissaries”. When I saw this chapter title in Jo Walton’s What Makes This Book So Great, and read her gushing reasons for voracious rereadings of this novel I thought it just might be time to break my vigilant watch against all things Pournelle. I can’t say I actually regretted reading Janissaries, but I did learn a lesson. Sometimes virulent, primal prejudices such as mine, against Pournelle’s person, coincide with taste in literature, and author ability. Janissaries is military science fiction. That’s not an automatic strikeout but it puts it very low on my interest scale. I’ve enjoyed other libertarian-leaning military sf by the likes of Poul Anderson, Dean Ing, and H. Beam Piper. But these authors, unlike Pournelle, are actually good enough to engage me. I can enjoy the story yet completely disagree with its tenants.

One of the aspects of C. S. Lewis’ unliterary man is that the reader, as Dale Nelson couches it, uses a text egotistically, as a starting point for a broader, more personal fantasy. Jo Walton has honed this particular reader characteristic more than anyone else I have ever encountered.

Pournelle’s set-up for the novel is that the ancient astronauts really do exist. They have been seeding the galaxy with humans, all in various states of tech, from low to high. Why these Page | 40

ancient astronauts would plunk their seedlings down, only to claw up, tooth and nail, I don’t quite get. There is a galactic civilization out there, with aliens galore. Some of these aliens are greedy moneygrubbers trying to make a buck off of drug cultivation on a planet whose conditions only allow this to happen once every 600 years. This planet is unknown to the galactic overseers, its discovery having been shielded by these nasty druggie aliens. And they’ve been hijacking humans from planet Earth every 600 years and ordering them to cultivate this drug for them or be killed. They’ve plucked up ancient Grecians, Romans from Caesar’s time, clannish Scots, etc., all of whom still coexist on this planet. The latest group to be kidnapped is a platoon of mercenaries doing battle with “the Cubans” (Janissaries was first published in 1978, okay?) in…Africa, of all places. These are their warring adventures on the planet Tran.

Basically Janissaries is a medieval fantasy wearing the robes of science fiction. There is a plucky princess, described as a child-bride, who has been serially raped (she was a virgin) and tortured by a neighboring conquering king. However…she immediately falls in love with our man Rick, with his nice big rifle, and all the torture and rape are immediately forgotten, with the exception of revenge…but not for the rape and torture, but because the invading king murdered her husband-to-be. I could go on, but why bother. You undoubtedly have read more than one of these hackneyed “adventure” books in your rifling through the realm of story.

Jo Walton calls ’em as she experiences ’em: “…they have brilliant weird cultures…interestingly weird tech…when our heroes give them gunpowder, things get interesting…beyond…blowing things up, there are fascinating hints of a wider universe…it has girls who [aren’t] just there as a prize or a sexual partner—well, it has one of those, too…they don’t make military adventure fiction better than this….”

Walton has a powerful, perhaps even an enviable, ability to project on to the prose she is reading. Where I found clunky plot, ridiculous romance, rudimentary skill, gender stereotyping, etc., Jo Walton found brilliance, excitement, can even be brought to tears by bad dialog. She says books have to be written to a certain standard to make the grade, but apparently this unliterary man has a higher standard than Jo Walton.

Keeping C. S. Lewis’ inclusive nature in mind—and his argument that even the worst of genre fiction has value to those who read it—I will come to the defense of both Pournelle and Walton. To Pournelle’s credit, he tries to give Rick, our hero, some softer qualities and reasonableness, while dealing with his women, and he holds the notion that the intellectual life is perhaps more important than war, and more than once indicates that going to University is preferable to going to War, even as he is preparing to do so, and does so, at the climax of the novel. There are two women in lead roles who, as Walton says, “do significant things”, like manipulating by withholding crucial information (Gwen), and charging fearlessly in to battle (Tylara, the sex object, Gwen being pregnant, apparently putting her out of the running in this regard). He need not have done this. It was very white of him to try. Walton is by no means a dupe, she just has a much stronger and more adaptive ability to suspend disbelief than I, and to imagine a deepness into an existing text, and to use it selfishly, over and over again.

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Walton says of Jerry Pournelle, “he’s the best, especially when he’s writing on his own.” I would counter this. There is a very good reason why Pournelle collaborated so frequently with Larry Niven on what would, eventually, become a series of bestselling novels: Larry Niven is actually capable of investing his prose with a sense of urgent reality, and if you can buy into his world view, charm the pants off of his readers. My mom would have hated Janissaries, and likely would have donated the book to a thrift shop, unfinished, unable to stomach the book’s worldview and shoddy craftsmanship. My mom was by no means unliterary, though she liked to pretend she was. She caught all the complex nuances of fiction and read great varieties of nonfiction I will never get to. She was, indeed, a world- class reader.

Unliterary, Unstoppable Apparently this unliterary conceit has yet to work itself out of my system.

I recently (January 2019) ran across Joseph T. Major’s review of Jo Walton’s An Informal History of the Hugos in Alexiad, at eFanzine.com where Joe indicates Walton stating John Varley lost his “talent” just before the end of Titan (1979), which was the first volume in a trilogy that (more or less) updated Larry Niven’s Ringworld (1970) idea. I can understand why Walton might have said this because of Varley’s reflective sheen and light tone, particularly in the final two volumes of the trilogy, Wizard (1980), and Demon (1984), but I was still incensed by it. (I haven’t read Jo Walton’s actual comments, so bear with me.)

My friend Kent Johnson (now resting in peace, I hope) disliked John Varley for two stated reasons: 1.) surface gloss and 2.) he perceived Varley’s frequent subject matter and subtext of gender, sexual identity, feminism, and physical disability to be too trendy—there was an explosion of writing in sf in the ’70s and ’80s dealing with all of these issues—and Kent felt Varley was just climbing on the wagon to catch a ride to the Hugo ceremonies. Let this unliterary man put these misapprehensions of Kent Johnson and Jo Walton to rest right now.

1.): Surface gloss. As if this were a bad thing. John Varley was always about pretty, smooth surfaces, from his first published story, “Picnic on Near Side”, and only became more so throughout his following body of amazing short story output, and his less powerful, but just as fascinating novels. By the time he got to Steel Beach (1992) and The Golden Globe (1998) he was as maddeningly a brilliant writer as Brett Easton Ellis, but working within stfnal tropes; slick, decadent, byzantine, cautionary, and relevant. Far from having lost his “talent”, Varley was perhaps at the height of his power—just a power and talent gone unappreciated and unnoticed by Jo Walton.

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2.): Trendy subject matter. This was just a completely bogus accusation. When John Varley came onto the scene in 1974 he was a dope smoking Boomer fresh from the Haight-Ashbury, married to a strongly feminist wheelchair-bound paraplegic, so the topics of disability, feminism, sexual identity, and gender were front-and-center issues in Varley’s everyday life. Not to mention issues of psychotherapy and childhood trauma.

I suppose I could equate Jo Walton’s imputation of Varley’s loss of “talent” during the writing of Titan with my own assertion that Roger Zelazny (and Varley and Zelazny have a great many similarities) lost his “talent” when he embarked upon the Amber series (1970- 1991), which seemed to play into all of Zelazny’s weaknesses and none of his strengths.

Thus I refute Jo Walton and Kent Johnson, but not Beelzy.

—end it—

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John Fugazzi strolled into my life in 1974 and never left. Although he is not a fan John took a keen interest in my fanzine and ended up writing an appreciation of Clifford D. Simak for the fifth issue of Starfire. His influence on my musical tastes has been appreciable, and wide ranging, from Mozart to Joni Mitchell and Sam Neely, from film scores and the jazz quartet Oregon to Mike Oldfield. He reignited my interest in the Beatles, whom I’d been refusing to listen to for the last forty years, when he sent a stack of CDs covering their mid-career. When I invited him to contribute to Portable Storage his suggestion of material ranged from sixties pop music to zombie movies. His reflection on the moment and environment into which Sgt. Pepper was dropped is succinct, accurate, and thoughtful.

The Pivot Point: The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

John Fugazzi

Rock and Pop music has always created a lot of exaggeration and hype, but in the case of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band it's all true. Sgt. Pepper was not just a great album

by the Beatles; it was the high point of the Sixties decade itself. It was the unexpected artistic triumph of all that had begun in early 1964.

In the spring of 1964 Beatlemania and the British Invasion precipitated a virtual mass extinction event for almost the entirety of the Early Sixties American pop music scene. Nearly everyone who had been big then never had a hit again and the few acts that survived (Lesley Gore, Gene Pitney, Jan & Dean, Elvis) were never as big as they had been after a final hit or two in '64. After that they mostly had to settle for the Top 25, though Elvis had a lone Top 5 hit with “Crying in the Chapel” in 1965. Even stalwarts like Connie Francis, Brenda Lee, the Everly Brothers, Rick Nelson, Bobby Vee, Bobby Rydell and the whole roster of Phil Spector's Girl Groups vanished. Artists as big as Roy Orbison and the Drifters would have their last big hit in 1964 and then disappear. The Four Seasons still were a top act in ’64 but after that, “Let's Hang On” was their sole Top 5 hit. Only the Beach Boys went on to greater heights, peaking with 1966’s “Good Vibrations” before becoming another casualty. Beatlemania was dismissed as a teen-idol type fad that would soon die out. But it only gained steam. Capitol records had turned down releasing Beatles singles sent to them by Parlophone (both EMI) on the grounds that British groups didn't sell in the U.S. Instead they were sold to small labels like Swan and Vee Jay, Tollie, Atco and MGM, who suddenly realized they had gold in their hands, and re-released them all in early ’64. This quirky event led to the Beatles having far more music out at once than anyone ever, and a total dominance of the airwaves and the charts. On April 4, 1964 they held all the Top 5 chart positions, the only time this has ever happened. There was one more thing that was different about the Beatles. They wrote most of their material themselves. This was not the usual thing in the music business. Generally there was a big line between composers and performers, going all the way back to the turn of the century, and the early days of Tin Pan Alley. There were exceptions to this, of course: Roy Orbison, the Beach Boys, Jan & Dean and the Four Seasons. Many folk singers were writing new songs, where it was becoming the norm. The Beatles would soon make it the norm in pop and rock as well. But that wasn't the end. Beatlemania was immediately and contemporaneously followed by The British Invasion. This included Dusty Springfield, the Dave Clark Five, the Searchers, Billy J. Kramer & the Dakotas, Gerry & the Pacemakers, the Swinging Blue Jeans, Cilla Black, Peter & Gordon and Chad & Jeremy. Most of these had multiple hits for a while, some until 1967, and most artists could be called Pop, at least from the vantage point of now (though many, being on Top 40 radio, were automatically considered rock in those days). The second wave of British Invasion groups that arrived in the summer and autumn of '64 had a generally darker edge. They included Manfred Mann, the Animals, the Kinks and the

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Rolling Stones as well as the Nashville Teens, the Honeycombs and, in a pop vein, Herman’s Hermits, Marianne Faithful and Petula Clark. This new proliferation of artists showed that there was more to this music than at first seemed the case. As 1964 ended the only really new American musical acts were Roger Miller, Bobby Goldsboro, the Dixie Cups and the Shangri-Las. Dean Martin launched a major comeback and Al Hirt a minor one, while both Barbra Streisand and Dionne Warwick solidified their place as major artists. The only other truly big thing besides the British Invasion was the sudden explosion of Motown onto the scene. They had been around a while with the Miracles, Marvelettes, Marvin Gaye and Martha & the Vandellas. But in ’64, with new groups like the Supremes, the Four Tops and the Temptations, they would totally dominate mid- 60s R&B and have one huge pop hit after another. The British Invasion continued with yet a third wave in early ’65 with the Zombies, Freddie & the Dreamers, Wayne Fontana & the Mindbenders, the Moody Blues, Unit 4 + 2 and the Yardbirds, and that was essentially the end of the British Invasion. The Hollies would finally have an American hit in the fall of 1965 though the Who flopped with “My Generation” in the U.S. and would have to wait until 1967 to establish themselves here. Other new groups huge in Britain like the Ivy League and Hedgehoppers Anonymous would fail to do anything in America. After this new British artists would appear, but not in such a sweeping way as to be called an invasion. The door was simply open to them now. What was really the happening thing by the summer of ’65 was Folk Rock. Coincidentally, by 1965 the Folk Music scene, which had been big from 1961-’63, was winding down very fast, with less and less interest being shown by anyone but die-hard fans. Bob Dylan’s going electric seemed to act as a signal, sending many of the creative artists of Folk Music into the pop/rock scene, which had been so re-energized, not only by the British Invasion, but the concurrent rise of Motown. The British Invasion had also had a big effect by introducing and expanding on a harder-edged rock music based on the electric guitar band. This music brought many more boys into the music scene who had enjoyed but never been totally excited about the usual American Bandstand artists (look at old shows on YouTube, the audiences are almost all female). Folk Rock began with Dylan and the Byrds and at first seemed to be about singing Folk Music with an electrified band. But there was far more to it than jingle-jangle 12-string guitars and Dylan songs. The Folk artists brought in a whole new set of musical values that included literate lyrics, topics besides romantic love, and the idea that the album was the thing, not just two hit singles and a bunch of covers. Artists from Folk would be in many of the top groups or solo acts of ’65-’66 including the Byrds, the Mamas & the Papas, the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Association, Simon & Garfunkel, the Turtles, Donovan etc. It would also spawn Sunshine Pop and create a whole new youth lifestyle. In the end this migration of artists from the Folk scene would totally change the music scene and see it mature into something more than the kids' music it had been before.

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The Beatles did not ignore all this. They responded with two releases. “Yesterday” was accompanied by a string quartet, and by doing this, opened the door to rock & pop absorbing classical influences and instrumentation, a major trend in 1966-’67 in Folk as well as pop. Then with the acoustic, Folk-influenced Rubber Soul, they indicated their joining with the olk artists and accepting their views on making truly artistic albums. At this point the rock/pop scene was open to virtually all influences. By late summer of ’66, everything went into a kind of hyper-drive; in the period roughly book-ended by Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, everyone was doing their finest work, even the purely pop artists, with great material coming from every quarter. By this time the mass public couldn't ignore what was going on any longer, and even the adult media, who typically dismissed the teen scene, had to take notice, peaking with Leonard Bernstein, in patrician tones, extolling the value of this music on the CBS special, Inside Pop—The Rock Revolution in Spring, 1967. Music was not all that was changing. To understand the Sixties you need to understand it as being a time of total and unbridled optimism. Since the late Fifties, in the U.S. and Western Europe, there had been a feeling that everything was really wonderful; prosperity was the new normal, and what few problems there were would soon be solved by science. Environmental problems were still basically unknown (Silent Spring by Rachel Carson had only been out since late 1962) and it was over-optimistically believed that the Civil Rights Act alone would cure past racial disparities. The only problems were those of “The Affluent Society”. From their prosperous lives, the Sixties teens looked out at the world and saw things weren't so nice everywhere, and like a generation of Siddharthas sought to save the world from its problems. The old order began to fray, especially on the two coasts (things stayed the same in the interior much longer) and a new youthful counterculture began to arise, their answer being Universal Love. Naive? Yes, but it was very sincere and well-intended, and music became the vehicle that spread it. It was almost as if everyone was waiting to see what the Beatles would do. They were the unofficial leaders of the pop movement. In the early sixties pop was always changing songs yet always basically the same. Now it seemed to be going somewhere, expanding its form and content. The Beatles were the forefront of pop, the first mass-audience band to experiment with feedback, sound effects and a general openness to anything that worked. After Revolver included everything from “Eleanor Rigby’”s string quartet to “Tomorrow Never Knows”’ backwards tapes (used in a far more sophisticated way than “Rain”) everyone wondered what could be next. In February the answer was a huge leap forward with the classically and psychedelically-influenced “Strawberry Fields Forever” and the wonderfully bright “Penny Lane” with its Baroque piccolo trumpet interlude. Then, on May 26, 1967 The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and everyone was paying attention. It was a concept album, though rather than tell a story it was based on the idea of this mythical band putting on a show. The Beatles wore 19th century

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military-style costumes, imitating the latest fad in London where hip young people were buying old military jackets from thrift stores and wearing them. The album contained every kind of effect, from animal sounds to the crescendos of “A Day in the Life” (itself a clever joining of two separate songs, one by Lennon and one by McCartney). There were rock guitars and clarinets, sitars, extensive use of reverb, audience murmurs and laughter and the long and complex carnival atmosphere that ends “Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite!”. None of this would have been possible without help from the brilliant arranger, orchestrator and producer George Martin, the true "Fifth Beatle", who took their ideas and created the sounds they wanted. The album had no political theme or specific message. It begins as an actual show with the audience talking while the orchestra tunes up. Then the band enters with electric guitar fanfare to introduce itself. From there it goes into the joys of friendship, the mysterious “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” (and everyone knew what that was about despite Lennon saying otherwise), and then to making things right, and a song inspired by an old carnival poster. The album's feeling was mostly optimistic with only occasional stops for darker musings. “She’s Leaving Home” seems sad but at the end the subject is finally having fun, a true ’60's goal. “Within You Without You” seems entirely too serious and philosophical for this album but is lightened by the audiences’ nervous laughter at its conclusion. The songs flow into each other without the usual silence, another innovation, and the old time music of “When I'm Sixty-Four” follows George Harrison’s seriousness, a pure McCartney touch. In fact things stay light again until the end. At the end the band seems to sing their song and leave the stage but instead of audience applause we get - another song. An unexpected song, in terms of the album’s format, since the band has left the stage. This is now the Beatles singing, not the Sgt. Pepper band. And this song would be no ordinary song. From its opening guitar and spacey piano you know this is something different, something unlike any pop song you've ever heard. “A Day In the Life” is a five and a half minute long meditation on life itself, oblique and mysterious and not all that clear at times (another favorite 60’s quirk), dark but not quite despairing, with wordless choruses and deep orchestral notes that seem to go down to the firmament of all things. And all of this is broken up by a gigantic orchestral crescendo, unlike anything anyone could have expected, unlike anything even in classical music. And this repeats itself at the end going even higher and faster before resolving itself in a profoundly deep piano chord which drifts on endlessly before finally reaching silence. This is what everyone talked about. This was the ne plus ultra of all pop music up to that time.

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Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was received with absolute and universal acclaim from all quarters, even those whom had always made fun of rock and roll as teenage trash. It was seen as the great fulfillment of all the recent trends in pop music, the greatest pop album ever made, perhaps even one of the greatest works of art ever made. The superlatives were endless. Sgt. Pepper sold far beyond any album before it. Though it had no singles, radio stations played it as if every track was a single, even all of “A Day in the Life”, especially at night, its uniqueness seeming to sum up everything that was going on. Sgt. Pepper was like an explosion, played everywhere all summer long, with other pop music almost at a standstill, reacting to it. All the rest of 1967 and early 1968 were enveloped in its psychedelic haze. Then everything changed again. Almost all the mid-Sixties artists vanished, and the new, heavier era of the Late Sixties began. Gone, or no longer really popular, were the Mamas & the Papas, the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Byrds, the Beach Boys, Nancy Sinatra, Petula Clark, Gary Lewis & the Playboys, Paul Revere & the Raiders, the Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits, the Four Seasons, the Righteous Brothers and others. The radio even split in a kind of Great Schism, with many new groups who weren't making AM-friendly singles being played on new FM “underground radio”, which would become the dominant force by the early ’70s. The new sound was represented by heavier groups. Already in 1967 we had Jefferson Airplane, the Doors, the Who, Jimi Hendrix, and Cream, and by ’68 added Big Brother & the Holding Company, Blue Cheer, Steppenwolf, Deep Purple, the Chambers Brothers, Vanilla Fudge and Iron Butterfly. In addition there were new artists, not quite as heavy, but still outside the usual bounds of AM Top 40 like Traffic, the Moody Blues, Joni Mitchell, Procol Harum, Blood Sweat & Tears and Jethro Tull. The sixties sorted itself into three fairly distinct periods. The Early Sixties was typified by American Bandstand, and a cultural uniformity that made it closer to the Fifties. The Mid 0Sixties, beginning with Beatlemania, and ending in early ’68, was still a time of great optimism and prosperity but with many new ideas and forms appearing; this is the era that peaked with Sgt. Pepper. Then the Late Sixties, which was a time of greater change, great cultural and political conflict, and the end of the cohesion and optimism that had begun the decade.

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It was in the late ’90s when I met Janet K. Miller in a café that no longer exists in central Tucson. She was wearing an ankle-length wraparound skirt and said she was an artist. She is. Among a great many other things. Because of her, Tucson truly became my home. Our friendship has twined and grown and changed, like a road trip, going from desert to mountain to sea then back to desert again. She has many adventures to relate from the story of her life.

BLUE Janet K. Miller

THE FIRST SUMMER I saw the sign in curlicue teenage girl script, taped up at the entrance to Archer pool, where I stopped to pay my dollar entrance fee on a scorching June afternoon.

After a lifetime of inactivity and a recent devastating heartbreak I was moving into my body at the age of forty. Why not diving? I signed up, paying $10 for two months of springboard diving lessons four days a week, thanking City of Tucson Parks and Recreation for this bargain. On the first day of class it turned out I was the only person signed up, so I got a serendipitous upgrade to private instruction. My coach was Alex: African American, fresh out of high school, working as a lifeguard for the summer. She set to work teaching me the most fundamental part of diving, the approach and hurdle. She taught me to pace the board off, jump up on one foot driving up with the other knee to gain as much air as possible, land with both feet at the edge of the board and spring up to land feet first in the water, as straight as possible. Timing and spacing the approach and hurdle are critical. I practiced at home in the hallway. After several days of hurdle practice, I was ready to dive. We started with a tuck dive, an ungainly beginner move. At the highest point of the hurdle, the diver tucks both knees up and kicks her legs out straight causing her to rotate to a head first position, and lands cleanly, arms overhead, hands first, in the water. Alex demonstrated it to me a few times, landing without a splash. She made it look easy.

The mind may have one idea but the body has a deeper common sense. I had every intention of diving. I watched Alex, I visualized it, I imagined how my body would feel through each step of the dive. But my bones and cells refused to plummet headfirst towards the earth. I kept practicing. Hurdle, into the air, belly flop, out of the water, repeat. Approach, jump, puppy-flail, back on the board, repeat. Four days a week, an hour a day, round and round. It must have been painfully tedious to watch, but Alex had infinite patience. She was always encouraging. Flail, repeat, smack, ouch, back on the board. Hours, days, weeks went by. Every night as I drifted off to sleep I practiced in my head. Archer Pool is on the desert edge of Tucson, surrounded by creosote bush, prickly pear and jackrabbits. Above, the bleached blue of the searing summer sky. Below, deep cool turquoise water. In the pool, scrappy southside kids played Marco Polo, some of them in shorts and t- shirts because their parents couldn't afford swimsuits. As I struggled to dive, there was an older woman at the other end of the pool learning to swim for the first time. She had a young lifeguard/teacher too. Sometimes as I was gathering my focus on the board, I would see her struggling with her fear in the shallow end, working up the nerve to let go of the edge. We were both pushing at our limits. Some days in the changing room afterwards we made small talk about big fear. After about a month, something shifted. One afternoon out of the blue I flew up into the air and dove straight in. In the silence underwater I felt a rush of joy, and the first thing I saw when I broke the surface was Alex's dancing feet doing an elated jig. We were both thrilled. I dove and dove and dove, feeling intense liberation, flight, cool rushing rapture. We moved on to another beginner dive, a pike, a lovely graceful dive where the diver touches her toes before opening up and slipping cleanly into the water. For the rest of the summer, we worked on form. We were an odd couple, a reversal of standard roles. I had a beginner's obedience to Alex, and a great respect for her, my 17 year old honored sensei. While I was in the air and under water she was standing in the 110 degree mid-day sun. I felt deep gratitude to her. At the end of summer, Alex asked if I wanted to go to the All-City diving meet but I was too shy and declined. On the last day of class, she brought me yellow flowers that made me cry. She went off to start college in Flagstaff. THE SECOND SUMMER I went back to Archer Pool, eager to sign up for another season. Alex wasn't there and the lifeguard on duty told me Archer wasn't offering diving that year because the previous year only one person had signed up. He told me to try another city pool. When I showed up at Himmel Pool I was stunned to discover that I was the only adult in the class. I joined a motley team of a dozen kids aged twelve to fifteen. We were all levels, from

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lithe gymnastics girls to a tubby completely uncoordinated boy. I was secretly relieved that I wasn't the clumsiest diver. My new coach was Amanda, home for the summer from Duke University where she was on the diving team. She had straight golden hair, perfect white teeth and cool sunglasses so we never saw her eyes. Amanda drove us hard, with as much strength training as diving. We started every day with pike-ups, like situps only harder. We did wall sits until our thighs and abs were on fire. Amanda made us tread water in the deep end with our hands in the air for five minutes. She wouldn't allow us to use the ladder to get out of the pool; we had to develop the upper body strength to lift ourselves out from the edge after every dive. In my mind she was Mistress Amanda the BDSM Dive Coach but I didn't mention that to my innocent teammates. Mistress Amanda made a rule: if she heard any of us utter the word "can't" she made us all lie down on the broiling hot pool deck and do thirty pike-ups. It made us self-police: if one of us dared whisper the C word, the rest of us would huddle around them and encourage them. Shhhh! Of COURSE you can! I loved my team mates for treating me like an equal despite my graying hair. They didn't seem to notice I was a grownup once we all started diving. We talked diving while we waited in line together for our turns on the board. We were each pushing at our edge of fear and

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ability. Diving is scary; sooner or later you will hit the board. And then you will get out of the water and get back on the board and try again. Every day I biked to the pool, four miles each way in the desert afternoon. Tucson summer days are routinely over 100 degrees, and the pavement radiates heat like a cast iron skillet. I liked the contrast of the hot bike ride and the cool water. I loved flying, piercing the blue, the feel of the luscious water on my skin. Every dive ends with an underwater somersault and a push with the feet off the floor of the pool that sends the diver speeding up into the shifting mercury ceiling of water and light. It was addictive bliss. I felt alive in my bones and cells. Himmel Pool is in a park of lawns and stately old pine trees casting deep shade, surrounded by a well-heeled neighborhood with lots of university professors. A handful of helicopter moms came every day and watched from a shaded bench. One of them had a pink streak in her hair; one day she told me she was the Cool Mom. All that summer I worked on my form and at the end I went with my team to the All City dive meet, where I discovered I was the only adult signed up in the whole city. To compete in the Novice category you need to be able to do three dives, and in the Advanced, five dives. I did my best with the hurdle, a tuck dive and a pike. I felt pretty dopey competing with a hurdle, which isn't even a dive. I didn't place but every participant got a medal. Hung mine with my 18th birthday pears, my great-grandmother’s necklaces, and the beads I brought back from the years I lived in Africa. THE THIRD SUMMER I came back to Himmel pool. A lot of my team mates were back, taller. Mistress Amanda kept pushing us hard. The Cool Mom was back on the bench. I learned a back dive and a front flip. For a back dive you stand at the very end of the board with your back to the water, balanced on the balls of your feet with your heels hanging off. With all your strength, you launch into the air and arch backward, straightening out just in time to slip cleanly into the water. If you get it just right it's a glorious surrender, throwing yourself into space you can't even see, landing in the loving arms of the blue water. A front flip is a hideous froggy thing even when well done. The diver somersaults and lands feet first, so it's unimpressive. It's the first part of a one and a half which lands head first. I never did accomplish a one and a half although I spent many hours trying, always landing with dramatic painful back smacks. At the end of the third summer I went with my team to the All City meet. I competed in Novice again with a pike, a back dive and a front flip. I placed first. I was thrilled and proud; I had pushed so hard against my fear, and worked so hard on my form. Afterwards in the parking lot the Cool Mom accosted me. Her daughter hadn't placed. "You

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should have been diving in Advanced!' she scolded. I guess she assumed because I was advanced in age I must be advanced in diving. I told her I didn't have five dives to qualify. "So just add a half twist to your back dive, that would make five!" I wanted to fight her right there in the parking lot, or challenge her to a dive-off if she thought it was so easy. Fuck you Cool Mom! But I kept my peace. THE FOURTH SUMMER my team gathered again. Amanda was back too, icy and tough as ever. I pushed beyond my beyond and learned three scary dives: a back flip, an inward, and a reverse flip. A back flip is as ugly as a front flip. You start on the board with your back to the water and jump as high as you can, throwing a backwards somersault at the apex of the jump. If you do it well, you land unimpressively feet first; if you do it badly you land with a smack or a back splat. An inward dive is scary. Stand on the very end of the board with your back to the water. Balance the balls of your feet with your heels hanging off. Give a few light bounces and launch as high as you can, then rotate forward and dive towards the board into the water. It's not as dangerous as it looks, but it sure feels like it. I expected to hit the board with my head every time, but I never did. If an inward is scary, a reverse flip is terrifying. It's commonly known as a gainer, a specialty move commonly done by harebrained teenage boys hellbent out of the gene pool. You do the standard approach and hurdle, but at the top of the jump you do a backwards somersault: not only towards the board headfirst, but flying blind because the board is behind you. I did it. That fourth summer was my last. I went with my team to the All City meet, and finally had five dives to compete in Advanced. I was happy to be trounced by a bevy of bendy little gymnastics girls who could do reverse double flips with full twists.

On the final day Alex, my sensei from that first summer, showed up. She must have heard though the lifeguard grapevine that there was an old woman diving at Himmel. I held her hands and thanked her for changing my life, and this time she cried. I showed her all my scary dives that I never would have been able to do if it weren't for her patient coaching that first year. My heart felt enormous.

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Polish Edition

ANNIHILATION

In Damon Knight’s article “Writing and Selling Science Fiction” he has a section about getting ideas. One way is to invert an idea by another author (the so-called “conversation” of science fiction). He goes on to give several examples of how this might work.

Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation seems very much to be such a book. Specifically, an inversion of Gene Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus, with its themes of identity, isolation, mimicry and “pristine wilderness” on the planet of St. Anne. Humans have colonized (or perhaps invaded) St. Anne, decimating a fabled indigenous population of mimics, who might have become the population of St. Anne under decadent human guise. It’s a complex work I’ve read at least three times, always left thrilled and puzzled at the exit.

Annihilation inverts this concept with Area X. An undisclosed section of the “forgotten coast” in the Deep South appears to have come under invasion, possibly from the sea, and begun to mutate and subsume the land, and possibly become mimetic. The narration is so cool and removed, the imagery so weird, the narrator so damaged, that it’s hard to grasp anything—which is perhaps its point. There is a distinctly Lovecraftian overtone to the book also, as Vandermeer—very successfully— circumnavigates around the phenomenon of trying to write about “the indescribable horror” that is occurring as the narrator explores Area X.

There are also (probably coincidental) echoes of Julia Elliott’s work (The New and Improved Romie Futch, and The Wilds) in Annihilation, both giving testament to the Deep South’s utter weirdness. But where Julia Elliott’s vision is a slaphappy, surrealist, and ultimately positive view, Vandermeer is dark and mistrustful, and relentlessly downbeat. Again, an inversion.

It is conceptually impossible to reduce Annihilation to its core, because it has none. It remains as perpetually fascinating as it does irritating, just like its narrator, the nameless, damaged, ghost-bird biologist. —William Breiding

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Not a Good Day to Die Vincent McHardy

It was probably in 1982 when Vincent McHardy and I made first contact. I was in the process of editing and publishing a series of three small press horror fiction anthologies and Vince was an up- and-coming writer in the genre, appearing in both the pro zines and the small press. I remember opening the envelope at my desk on Brighton Ave., which overlooked the foggy streets of the Oceanside neighborhood in San Francisco, and realizing I had something special in my hands. Of all the many writers I had contact with during that period Vince was the only one with whom there was a connection. Over the span of 35 years we’ve met but twice. Our friendship is no less solid for that. Mr. McHardy’s penmanship is a scrawl, and his manuscripts are a mess, but he cleans up very well.

Alfred Noyes’ The Highwayman’s “I'll come to thee by moonlight though Hell should bar the way”, is a great line about romantic devotion and death. Come to think of it, are they not one and the same? Scratch a cynic and find a failed romantic underneath. The walking dead eating the dreams of others. Where failure is always an option.

And there are two options with death: now or later. The best you can do is delay. I've dodged a few exits along the way. I hope to miss a few more. But like that civilization killing asteroid lurking in deep space, there are no guarantees you will be home tomorrow to feed the cats.

I survive through dumb luck.

I was eleven years old bouncing on a ten foot diving board. My younger sister had just jumped in ahead of me. I look and see she landed straight under where I planned to jump. I stopped, and instead of turning around and walking back to the other end of the board, I backed up with a slight bounce and torqued off line. My right foot slipped and I fell over backwards into the abyss—heading straight down, towards the water and the concrete pavement below. My reptilian brain took over. I curled into a fetal position with hands around the back of my head. I hit water not concrete. As my backside entered the water I felt my elbow rasping against the side of the pool. I missed my first attempt at brain surgery by inches.

Sitting on the bottom of the pool I replayed what had just happened. I could hear the muffled cries of the lifeguard. All I could think of was the embarrassment I would

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feel once I resurfaced. So I put my feet of the side of the pool and pushed off and frog stroked, not resurfacing until my lungs were exhausted. I did not look back as the life guard yelled at me. Joe Cool on campus. I was glad there were no chemicals in the water to trace my urine trail.

I was thirty years old and needed release.

“If I can't get to my switchblade, I keep this here.”

She reached under the driver’s seat and pulled out a machete.

“If someone tries anything … it will cost them.”

“I didn't know Lifestyle Consultant was such a dangerous job.”

My voice sounded pre-pubescent, squeaky high.

“You meet all kinds.”

I thought this was an odd statement coming from such a number one Beauty and the Beast fan. Who in the car was the beauty and who was the beast? My mom named me after Vincent Price not Vincent from Beauty and the Beast.

She maneuvered her black land-shark, an Oldsmobile 88, with the precision of a brain surgeon excising a tumor. It was not raining that night but my window had fogged up.

“You missed my turn off,” I said.

“I'm kidnapping you,” she murmured in her best whisky radio voice.

“Be gentle.”

I hoped she hadn’t heard my erection rasping against my zipper, hope being the last thing to die. She smiled.

Was this a scene from Penny Dreadful? Meeting “cute” in an unpublished Raymond Chandler novel? The reason I sleep with a nightlight?

It could be all three. I sleep with a glowing cross. The extra protection might help. And this from an atheist! One never knows does one?

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“We are not going to have sex tonight,” she said as she unlocked the three dead bolt locks to her apartment.

“Of course not. It never entered my mind,” I said. It had entered my pants. At times like this I find the mind can be a terribly overrated organ.

“I'll make us some tea. It will help you sleep.”

She disappeared into the kitchen.

I looked around the room. It looked like a gypsy camp rummage sale, all tapestries, candles, and pillows. A large bed centered the space. A grab bag set of weights huddled along one wall, a portable massage table by the window.

In vetting a possible new paramour I always check her personal library. Things were looking up. Four feet of illustrated sex manuals.

No sex tonight? Mixed signals for sure.

The phone message light had been frantically flashing since we’d entered the apartment. She handed me the tea, listening to the messages while I sipped.

I was lucky to have heard them. A series of broken, pleading guys begging her to talk to them again. She didn’t hide these pitiful missives. Was this a dare? A test? A break me moment? Capture my soul on a recorder and wear out the tape?

I fumbled to come up with a response. But that tea was so relaxing and the bed so soft. Her hands so strong. I hardly gave up a fight. It wasn’t really fair.

I didn’t care, dickhead. Lifestyle Consultant indeed. Danger Will Robinson. Danger!

It wasn’t until late afternoon the next day when my head was clear enough that I remembered the scars and the mutilated genitalia. I felt the sting of the cuts on my back. She could turn around, look at me, sigh, and I would cum. A powerful weapon to have and to hold. I didn’t phone back.

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She phoned once. She went butter soft and whispered.

“If you can find your way back, please do. Please.”

It was all I could do not to sign bad checks for her. I ate a hell of a lot of ice cream trying to forget her. It didn't work. I still remember. If I saw her today I’m sure she could cure my impotence and baldness. But I would run. I didn’t want to become a pathetic dickhead like those guys on the message machine.

You can be dead and still have a pulse.

I was a fifty year old, driving home along Highway 401, Canada's largest highway. Perhaps you’ve seen it featured on “Ice Highway to Hell”, or some such reality trucking show. The 401 slices through Toronto, six lanes divided by a concrete divider. And while it is not the German autobahn, the 401 has its share of random, unsafe at any speed idiots. Going home, and facing a two hour drive, I settled into the slow lane of a three lane section. I thought I was safe. My first mistake. When you are in a car you are never safe.

I quickly came up to a sixteen wheeler transport truck filling up the entire middle lane, and partly straddling the slow lane. I stayed put until the asshole of the night came up behind me, tailgated, high beamed me, and honked. My second mistake. I moved to change into the middle lane to let him try and get passed the truck. As I did he had the grand idea of changing lanes, too. He clipped my back right edge and sent me spinning closer to the grave.

Air born, revving engine, two wheels landing, bouncing into the side of the truck, facing the oncoming traffic. I was wedged between two sets of tires while the edge of the truck chewed down the side of my car, drawing the car further under. I knew that under the truck was bad. So I jerked the car in the opposite direction, straight into the concrete divider.

Smash. Stop. Safe on the emergency section of the highway. All I could think of was I was going to be late getting home.

The cop arrived and told me to buy a lottery ticket and give him half. I was sure to win since I was the luckiest person in the world. I wasn't physically hurt, but mentally something ate out from my subconscious, deep inside.

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I thought of my musician ex-lover, long dead these twenty years. She had been fixing a flat tire with her latest boyfriend when their van was hit by a truck, killing them— fifty yards from where I had come to rest. If we hadn’t broken up would I have been the guy with her, changing the tire on this cursed stretch of highway? Was she reaching out? Did I reach back? Was I living on borrowed time? The questions continue to tumble out in my dreams.

It was a clear moonlit night.

Death by water, vaginal juices, or gasoline. There are many exits. Make your own list. My dad kept a straight razor nearby in the event things got too tough. He wanted a way out. As it so happened he didn't get to use it. He got too weak. I have the same razor on my desk. It makes a good paper weight.

To be continued...

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LETTERS OF COMMENT

To get the ball rolling, I thought to include two letters received on Rose Motel. I was the recipient of some really amazing, heart-felt letters, but don’t think many were intended for publication as much as direct communication to me. In fact, the excerpt from the following letter by Ray Wood was marked “not for publication” but he amended that to allow me to include his comments on the piece about Mike Oldfield. He accurately pinpoints my feelings the night I saw God on a rocknroll stage. Following that is Gary Hubbard’s letter, a prime example of commentus letterus delectablus. Pretty please send letters of comment to: [email protected]

RAY WOOD | [email protected] | Quourn, South Australia

There is one piece in your article, "The Meaning of Mike", subheaded "God on a Rock and Roll Stage" (pp 152–53) that I'd like to comment on. You say in it, "I came away from the concert feeling as if I had been touched by God", and you add later, "But since then I have seen God again."

I don't know if you've heard the Spanish word, duende. If you look it up in a Spanish dictionary, it'll probably tell you it means "fairy". But it has a deeper meaning than that, and there's no English word equivalent to this deeper meaning.

The Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca gave a speech in 1934 in Havana on his way to the US, titled "The Duende : Theory and Divertissement", or "Theory and Function of the Duende" ("La Teoria y Juego del Duende"). There's a translation of it into English in the Penguin Poets series,

Lorca, selected and translated by J.L. Gili (1960). But you can also find it on the Net in different translations.

It's a word you can use to describe a work of art that is so sublime that it exalts your spirit beyond anything you've ever experienced before. It's most usually used for a work of performance art, though John Berger uses it of Picasso's paintings in his 1965 book, Success and Failure of Picasso. Apparently in Spain it's most often used for Flamenco, and Bullfighting.

If it happens to you, since it's beyond any experience you've ever had in your life before, well, your mind has to find some kind of image for it. The image of a God is common, even in people who don't think of themselves as religious. Often if you were brought up as a child in some religion, even though you became an atheist later on, your mind seizes on that particular God in trying to make sense of it. Depends on what religion it is which God you either "become" or "see". Many religions forbid you "becoming" God, and in your case you put the experience as being "touched by God" instead of "becoming God" as many do. It doesn't have to be a God-experience, of course, and for some it's a "Universe-experience" instead. In other words, you experience it in terms of the most absolute thing you know.

I've experienced duende twice. Off and on through my life I've been a high school teacher, mostly teaching English Language, and English Literature to 12th year students. And I've always taken my students out of school on as many excursions as I could—they always seemed better education than sitting in a classroom.

(Why my teaching was "off and on" was that I had polio in 1950 when I was 14, six years before the first vaccine became available, and since then, every now and then the effects of the polio wrecked me for a while, and I'd have to quit teaching until I'd recovered. And sometimes as I recovered, I'd take on casual jobs of different kinds.)

So when I was teaching at Mildura High School (in north-western Victoria), once a year I'd take my 12th year English Literature students the 350 miles to Melbourne for a weekend to take in plays and films of books we were studying.

"English Literature" was a misnomer, because many of the books for study were translations from other literatures. So one year in Melbourne we went to see a stage production of the Classical Greek play, Oedipus Rex. It was in a small theatre on the banks of the Yarra, the river that flows through the heart of Melbourne.

The semi-professional company acted it as authentically as they could, in long robes, masked, and chanting and dancing, as the ancient Greeks would have. By chance that night they achieved duende. Their performance was out of the world. (An ancient Greek play is not much more than an hour long, so there was no interval to break the spell.) When it finished, the actors themselves were so dazed by what they had done, that they simply stood where they'd finished (no curtain was used), staring at us. And the audience was also so stunned that we simply sat there too, staring back at them.

No one even thought to applaud. I've no idea how long all of us stood there (actors) and sat there (audience), maybe only a couple of minutes, though it did seem for quite a while. But in the end, here and there members of the audience stood up, and silently moved out of the theatre as if in a dream. To have applauded in any way at all would have been a travesty, would have broken that magic spell. My students gathered on the pavement outside looking at the river, under a sky ablaze

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with stars, no moon, and we all just stood there, still too awed to even speak.

The second time was when I got back to teaching in Adelaide in South Australia, after a bout in hospital from the polio's after-effects. I always took my own class to the opera and ballet every year. I'd persuade every girl and boy to at least try it once. And if they ended up disliking or hating it, they could say they hated it with the authority of experience, for the rest of their lives.

So we'd start off the year with the entire class, at the first opera. The State Opera of South Australia would put on five operas during the year, and every second year or so, the Australian Opera (a world-class company, based in Sydney) would visit with a couple of operas.

Well, this year I'm remembering, we began with, I think it was 42, mostly students, some teachers, and a couple of parents. And by the time we reached the end of the year and the Australian Opera arrived, there were ten students left, plus me, I think it was.

Now the Australian Opera were putting on Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, from Sir Walter Scott's novel, The Bride of Lammermoor. And who was singing Lucia, but Dame Joan Sutherland. She's been considered one of the finest soprano opera singers of the 20th century. And singing the part of Lucia was what had made Joan world-famous in the first place. It was her signature role.

We were freakishly lucky because one of the students was a boy in a wheelchair, who could walk no more than a few steps with walking sticks. So we got ideal seats half-way back in the stalls because the only door we could get his wheelchair into the theatre was there. (Since the students paid only $1 each, what a bargain that was!)

It was the Saturday matinee. And they achieved duende that afternoon. I never believed such a huge company as it takes to put on an opera (maybe, counting the backstage crew and orchestra, 150 people) could ever achieve it. But they did.

The result was the opposite of Oedipus Rex, and the audience—all of us—went into a frenzy. People were clapping insanely, and standing on the seats, and yelling. And they continued for maybe half an hour. I'd never before believed you could want to go on clapping as if forever, but found it true that afternoon. Joan kept coming out over and over again until she simply gave up, despite everyone keeping on applauding.

Anyhow, the students who were there—the ones I saw years later, that is—became confirmed opera buffs. I remember two of the girls saying it was the greatest thing that ever happened to them.

Lorca gives an interesting example in his speech:

Once the Andalusian singer, Pastora Pavon, "The Girl with the Combs", a sombre Hispanic genius whose capacity for fantasy equals Goya's or Raphael el Gallo's [he was one of Spain's greatest bullfighters], was singing in a little tavern in Cadiz. She sparred with her voice—now shadowy, now like molten tin, now covered with moss; she tangled her voice in her long hair or drenched it in sherry or lost it in the darkest and furthermost bramble bushes. But nothing happened—useless, all of it! The hearers remained silent.

There stood Ignacio Espeleta, handsome as a Roman turtle, who was asked once why he never worked, and replied with a smile worthy of Argantonio : "How am I to work if I come from Cadiz?"

There, too, stood Héloise, the fiery aristocrat, whore of Seville, direct descendant of Soledad Vargas,

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who in the thirties refused to marry a Rothschild because he was not of equal blood. There were the Floridas, whom some people call butchers, but who are really millennial priests sacrificing bulls constantly to Geryon; and in a corner stood that imposing breeder of bulls, Don Pablo Murabe, with the air of a Cretan mask.

Pastora Pavon finished singing in the midst of total silence. There was only a little man, one of those dancing manikins who leap suddenly out of brandy bottles, who observed sarcastically in a very low voice: "Viva Paris!" As if to say: We are not interested in aptitude or techniques or virtuosity here. We are interested in something else.

Then the "Girl with the Combs" got up like a woman possessed, her face blasted like a mediaeval weeper, tossed off a great glass of Cazalla at a single draught, like a potion of fire, and settled down to singing—without a voice, without breath, without nuance, throat aflame—but with duende! She had contrived to annihilate all that was non-essential in song, and make way for an angry and incandescent Duende, friend of sand-laden winds, so that everyone listening tore at his clothing almost in the same rhythm with which the West Indian Negroes in their rites rend away their clothes, huddled in heaps before the image of Saint Barbara.

The "Girl with the Combs" had to mangle her voice because she knew there were discriminating folk about who asked not for form, but for the marrow of form—pure music spare enough to keep itself in the air. She had to deny her faculties and her security; that is to say, to turn out her Muse and keep vulnerable, so that her Duende might come and vouchsafe the hand-to-hand struggle. And then how she sang! Her voice feinted no longer; it jetted up like blood, ennobled by sorrow and sincerity, it opened up like ten fingers of a hand around the nailed feet of a Christ by Juan de Juni— tempestuous!

The arrival of the Duende always presupposes a radical change in all forms as they existed on the old plane. It gives a sense of refreshment unknown until then, together with that quality of the just- opening rose, of the miraculous, which comes and instils an almost religious transport.



Gary Hubbard | [email protected] | Kalamazoo, Michigan

Contra your experience, science fiction was always a bigger part of my life than fandom. All through my junior and high school years all I did was read SF; didn’t even go to the senior prom because I wanted to finish Childhood’s End. Fanac for me in those days was mostly confined to purchasing bundles of old fanzine from Seth Johnson and corresponding with Rich Benyo and Frank Lunney. Later on though, I wrote a few things for Beabohema and Syndrome. By about 1969, however, I was pretty much through with science fiction. I guess my Sense of Wonder had devolved into a sense of wondering why I’m reading this stuff, with one exception. Around this time Sol Cohen, the new owner of Amazing, started mining stories from old issues of the mag and packaging them in titles such as Science Fiction Classics and I Can Reprint Anything I Want Without Paying Royalties So There. None of the stories in those magazines were in any sense classics, but they were camp and had a bit of piss and vinegar that contemporary SF was lacking. However, when I mentioned to Cy Chauvin that I was reading them, he said words to the effect of: “So you’re the one. I was wondering who was reading those.”

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Everyone I’ve know who rode a bike has had an accident on it. (Everyone I’ve ever known who’s owned a gun has had an accident with it too, but that’s another story.) I’ve only been on one once and that was enough for me. I rode on the back of my friend Rbt’s, slightly panic-stricken and trying to figure out if it was more bro-ly to ride with my arms around him or brace myself against the back. Rbt has had a few spills in his time, although nothing too major fortunately. One time he was riding up north to catch a ferry, because he knew a girl who lived on an island in Lake Michigan, and hit a patch of loose gravel and went spinning. He wasn’t going very fast and was wearing leather pants anyway, so he just got a few bruises. When I was a kid there was a man who lived on our block, Mr. Presnell, who owned a Harley and kept it parked out in front of his house where we kids were magnetically drawn to it—almost as much as we were to the Good Humor man when he came around. I don’t know if he belonged to a motorcycle club (more commonly known as a “gang”), but he probably did. He had two sons, Dwayne and Carmen; both of whom went to Viet Nam later on. Dwayne came back, but Carmen never did, which caused Mr. Presnell a great deal of sorrow. My old man was the kind of person who thought he could master anything right off the bat and he was usually wrong. I’m much like that, the only difference being that the Old Man actually acted on his impulses. So one day he tried to ride Mr. Presnell’s bike without ever having been on one before. So he got on, started it up and wobble-ly careened off to the end of the block and right up an embankment on top of which was a railroad track. He went up the side, flipped over and broke his arm. Bike was okay, though.

Well, I’ve never read Paul Theroux either, although I did skim Mosquito Coast when I had to catalog it for the library. There used to be a man around here who read books on the radio and once read some selections from Sunrise with Seamonsters. I remember the bits about his [mis]adventures in Africa that you cited. Dipping ahead, I noticed that you made a passing reference to The Pearl, a collection of Victorian pornography and, along with The Romance of Lust, one of my favorite. I’m sort of big on Victorian porn: Pearl, Romance of Lust, My Secret Life, Venus in India, etc, etc. The combination of elegant language about an inelegant subject and the funky slang (i.e. gumahauche for oral sex) always makes me smile. However, I guess not everyone conversant with the genre approaches it with the same childlike glee as I do. About a year ago, I was snooping around in the library’s English literature section and came across a collection of selections from Victorian porn books I was unfamiliar with. I cheered, but this was the most schizophrenic book I’ve ever read. The selections were great: A story that I liked in particular was about a teenage boy with rather delicate features and his dominant aunt who, noticing a strong resemblance between the two of them, dresses him up in one of her outfits and plays a game with her guests who have to guess which is the aunt and which the nephew. Afterwards they make love in her bedroom. Quite charming, but the anthologist prefaced the story with some very snarky comments condemning the incest theme. In fact, he prefaced every other story in the book with some pejorative comment or other and seemed to be actually embarrassed to be associated with his own book in the first place. Makes you wonder why he even bothered. [The word “gumahauche” also stuck with me—to this day I still try to pronounce it with my tongue. –wmb] Thanks to all you letter writers—you know who you are! BillyBob sez “Loc me, loc me now!” [email protected]

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The Gorgon of Poses G. Sutton Breiding

Notes on Prose Prose what is that. The Pomegranate sun of Shangri-La. My biopsy wound. This liminal space I inhabit like a guild navigator. A rose with a P. Newspapers hitting porches.

“as if sentences” wrote Gail Scott. “a paragraph of marble” wrote Raymond Chandler. “sentence-forming like Miles Davis in Paris with his trumpet right out in the night” wrote Ane Schmidt. “the polished sentence had arrived, it seemed, at just the right moment” wrote James Salter.

“tender buttons” wrote Gertrude Stein. Or is it The Shadow of a Cloud but No Cloud by Killarney Clary. The Last Novel by David Markson. The curve of a buttocks in a room full of shadows and poetry. Is it all the onyx diamond gold agate beetles skittering all over the pages of Sheeper by Irving Rosenthal. Mist. Red leaves. Lawn chairs. Suicide. I can’t get my head around prose. Can prose get its head around me. Are the skinny poems of Eileen Myles prose. How about this heady cup of Balthazar blend I sip into Eternity. How about Chris Offutt’s sublime haiku-novel, Country Dark. How about coughing fits that nearly make me faint. How about the steel engravings by Cecelia Holland called The Firedrake. Not to forget Marguerite Duras’ theory of “a writing without grammar, wayward, immediately abandoned. Someday it will come.” You ask me for a prose. I want “syllables syllables long arabesques of silver-tipped sentences the marvelous word” by Claire Malroux, and, “in bravely connected sentences and unresolved paragraphs, I shit idiocy, aware of no valid final order to impose” by Alexander Trocchi. Prose that eternal itch. Prose that rock-hard style. Prose that Kate Moss stance. Prose that Martian light filling to the afternoon’s Earth right here on this page. As I write. Prose a merry-go-round poetry a gyroscope. Prose a giant water bug poetry a whirligig beetle. Prose a deer in snow poetry also. Prose is Timothy Olyphant in Hitman. Poetry is Alain Delon in La Samurai. “dreams of an impossible prose” wrote Alejandra Pizarnik. “Language Death Night Outside” wrote Peter Waterhouse. There is no prose. There is no poetry. There is writing.

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Examples of my Prose 1. I feel like a hundred year old sparrow, the last prophet of silence, the coyote grinning among the trash cans, the bright sound at the end of everything.

2. I want to be an old bridge humming in the summer night, the tick of engines cooling in winter, the cry of the glazier, bluebells in a fading mind, signboard creaking in the great aloneness of it all, words with their brilliant emptiness, a fig eaten by Bo Derek.

3. Some days just smell like ghosts in the rain black chai ancient warehouses by the river Bradbury stories childhood cellars crumbling bricks hashish in a Victorian slum lacquered nights in Chinatown secret trysts in mystic alleys bookstores that never were the sunlit rooms of 50 years ago.

4. Tell me again of catbird witches, young deer gods, ancient winds of the mind, the bejeweled phantom cities of Mars, black maps, golden wyverns, flying saucers, rebar in the rain, Grendel’s dreams, and that holy of holies called writing.

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The Crystal Silhouette: for Isabella Blow Days pass into modems, lightning bugs, suicide mantras, there is a sphinx of dust on the sill the smell of fog and ammonia planets, foaming at the mouth with acid blue nostalgias I’m reading Piero Heliczar and my new phone bill, my Luddite tendencies flaring like Victorian dragons, but how can I resist YouTube documentaries on those inscrutable Baudelaireans, Diana Vreeland and Alexander McQueen?

Do I miss vodka, cocaine and Balkan Sobranies? I should say I do, not to mention Paris openings and half naked girls pouting at mirrors.

Now if only I could write and fuck my way through the rest of this hallucinatory, scary theater of the deepest vogue moon mind of geriatric madness, maybe I could leave behind a few gorgeously revelatory poems to strut like white peacocks, just so, through a field of purple lilies, up and down the runway of these pages,

Throwing off showers of iridescent pheromones onto the stoned, stunned up-turned faces of my sublime and adoring audience—

Because, in the end, there will be, as Yoshioka Minoru so presciently wrote, only

“sentences studded with diamonds and word spirits art will perish fashion will thrive” so goodnight, dear Isabella, good night.

[I’ve known G. Sutton Breiding my entire life. For a couple of lazy summers we even shared a bedroom. He has been influential, and off and on, has sometimes held that special place in a person’s life: my best friend. We took fandom by storm in the mid-seventies when we both started spitting out fanzines from my hand-crank Speed-O-Print mimeograph machine, Libby the Liberator. Those were special, glorious days when, as Aljo Svoboda says, we walked among giants. In the late 1970s and early 1980s punk rock and new wave took us by storm. We spent many late nights together in drunken revelry mesmerized by some truly amazing bands in some shithole punk clubs. Soon after, we both met dazzling women who changed our lives irrevocably. Sutton now lives in seclusion in West Virginia, and I in Arizona, where we both walk towards the infinite.]

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ALVA SVOBODA, aka Aljo Svoboda, was an active science- fiction fan from approximately 1971 through 1974. More recently he has AUTHOR participated in the most peremptory fashion in a few apas, notably BIOS LASFAPA, and maintained a longstanding friendship with William Breiding. He is a damned baby boomer who believes in nothing but the value and efficacy of the scientific project.

DALE NELSON is a columnist for the Tolkien newsletter Beyond Bree and for the bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society. His first collection, Lady Stanhope’s Manuscript and Other Stories, was issued by Douglas Anderson’s Nodens Books in 2017. He is working on a second collection, The Ivy and the Wind: Strange Stories. His J. R. R. Tolkien: Studies in Reception will be published by Nodens Books. He lives in North Dakota.

YOUR UNLITERARY EDITOR is a groundskeeper in Tucson. He tends to rake marks in the gravel. He was once a pupil to Young Fu. Consider these things.

JOHN FUGAZZI grew up in suburban Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1974 he moved to San Francisco and never looked back.

JANET K. MILLER (center) grew up in Santa Cruz in the golden 1970s. Educated in rain-soaked Portland, Oregon, baked her bones in the West African dust before settling in Tucson, Arizona, her forever home. She has planted hundreds of trees and learned six languages and had many adventures instead of having children.

VINCENT McHARDY is 63 going on 12. His mom said when he was born it was the first time she came. And you wonder why he’s writing horror? How could he not? There must be a pony under all of that shit. He died 20 years ago when he stopped writing. He has started writing again. He’s alive. For how long? He doesn’t t know. He’s keen not to know. He’ll let his fingers walk him to the grave.

G. SUTTON BREIDING: for a complete bio please access his Wikipedia page. Amen.