1 BEAM THE OCCASIONAL UNOFFICIAL JOURNAL OF THE UNUSUAL SUSPECTS ISSUE #12 : NOVEMBER 2017 May Tucker’s Ghost be Smiling Upon Us

EMINENCE FRONT

Welcome back, my friends, to the show that’s yet to end, as this particular clown car is gassed up and ready to take another careening turn around the awkward corners of fandom, professional driver at the helm and a fierce-eyed navigator on shotgun. This given issue of the World’s Finest Fanzine is brought to you by a timely “They threw us out clashing cacophony of two of fandom’s of England. They greatest contrarian iconoclasts: Jeff Schalles threw us out of and Roy Hessinger... no, seriously, did I France. So here we have you going for even half a fuckin are.” second? Might I have had you going if you were even bothering to read this or any

This issue of BEAM is edited by Nic Farey and Ulrika O’Brien.

3342 Cape Cod Drive, Las Vegas, NV 89122, USA, email : [email protected]

418 Hazel Avenue N., Kent, WA 98030, USA, email : [email protected]

2 other fanzine editorial, a chunk in any given with a crucial conrep, which was well good when publication typically noted for self-serving shite I got it, but caused him to become the butt of and general dullness? snark ever since, and really quite deservedly so. The keen observer (if such a person exists, We’ve been massively lucky the last nine years pretending to be Andy Hooper) may have idly (#1 came out June 2008) in that we’ve had a lot noticed the addition to the masthead of Ulrika of terrific and, yes, unusual contributors, names O’Brien, who co-edits thish and, as plans stand, you’d have rarely seen elsewhere, who’ve been the next one at the very least, and I do rather willing to have their names attached to pages up hope ishes beyond that an’all. in here. When BEAM got started, the genesis being in a Jim Mowatt (aka Trash) was on board as co- few drunken nights in a penthouse suite at the editor, in a fine fannish collaborative tradition for Plaza hotel in downtown Las Vegas, before it had several issues, adding to the scope and range of a bit of money spent on nicing up the rooms, and content, while still adhering to the spirit of the as I commented at the time, although it was alcoholic foolishness that started it all, or at least generally a bit grotty, the penthouse was at least a the sense of foolishness in general. bit more spacious grot, the enthusiasm of punting Back in the day, it seemed to be a “thing” that a new title was energizing, despite Curt Phillips’ fanzines which aspired to goshwow had to have best efforts at grinding it all to a halt by taking transatlantic co-editors, although in some cases half a fuckin century (or so it seemed) to come up the collaborators had actually met, and there may well have been some casual knob involved, which leads us not so delicately into lauding the long-term partnership behind Banana Wings, that fine publication’s original insistence that no knob occurred during the curation of the zine, only to cohabit with assumed thrusting mere decades later. You will find on page 63 a thoroughly believable and sincere declaration of lack-of-knob-between- co-editors in the construction of the publication you are currently perusing, despite the fact that we are perhaps unusually, but ultimately usefully, in the same actual time zone, though sufficiently far apart that we could think that the tequila may have worn off before anything untoward might occur. I’m not trying to put out any implicit criticism of other co-edited zines in what I’m about to say, since there are somewhat different versions of how this is done. Banana Wings and Littlebrook, for example, are zines where the co-editors are demonstrably partnered, accustomed to each other, and produce work which is reliably comforting and enjoyable, contrasting with, say, Journey Planet with its cast of (essentially) session players who are brought in according to need.

3 Thish of BEAM is “none of the above”, A phrase I’m still fond of saying, in addition to somewhere in between? “Good arrers!”, and “It’s all good” (both of which As I write, the co-editorship so far has been also apply) is: “We’ll find out”. occasionally adversarial, sometimes frustrating, As indeed we will. but at base typified by a spirit of understanding that we share fundamental fannish values, and is proceeding as a genuine collaboration. Nic Farey At risk of stretching credulity and/or pissing some Member fwa and Unusual Suspect people off, I have to observe that I’m exceptionally enthused, and looking forward to where this goes. Las Vegas, NV

ACID QUEEN

It’s always an interesting trip, when you ride with aside claiming Jim wasn’t well. That turns out to Nic le Taxi. You’re not sure how or where you got have been a species of joke, Nic’s allusion to a in, you have no idea where you’ll end up, but it 300-year-old Spectator schtick re the hung over non won’t be boring and there will be music. And appearances of Jeffrey Bernard, a joke which drinking. Lots of drinking. literally no one on the planet but Nic got, judging Thursday morning, early. There’s a Facebook IM by the outpouring of concern and condolence it waiting for me long before I even get up. It’s the elicited for Jim. But somehow we got to chatting first day of Nic’s weekend, so he’s been up before about things beyond TAFF and its mysteries. And the sun, putting away the cheap pish and cranking Bob, as the Brits so mysteriously claim, is your out the fanac for all he’s worth. He has an article uncle. in hand from a contributor, he wants feedback on When I was a kid back in the unenlightened ‘70s, I art for the next issue, or to update me on progress had a toy called a Wizzer. Or possibly Wiz-z-zer. on the next Farey Filk , or he’s nine and a half It was a gyrostatic top, a hard plastic spheroid months pregnant with scurrilous news from the roughly the size and shape of a billiard ball with a fandom front, and he’s vibrating with eagerness to rubber-footed spindle emerging from one end. share. (Men: they gossip with an ardor and Inside its guts dwelt some sort of fancy, fabulously vituperation that fishwives can only dream of. high tech bearing gizmo, which let you to rev that Srsly.) We chatter away in IM as I get ready for thing up super tight by swiping the conical wheel work, trading snark and character assassination across the floor a few times in rapid succession. It and occasionally even a tidbit pertinent to the made a high-pitched whizzing as you wound it up, upcoming issue. This is my life now. I’m co- and when you let it go it would BAM! zip away editing BEAM with Nic fucking Farey. What the across the linoleum, pinging and caroming hell? randomly off whatever it encountered, whining Already, I don’t quite remember how I got into like a heat-maddened hornet as it went, but this. One day, I’m minding my own fafia, and the careening away upright and wound tight for a next I seem to have agreed to co-edit not only surprisingly long time. Something about issue 12 but issue 13 as well. It may have started collaborating with Nic reminds me of that toy for when I privately expressed some concern about the first time in decades. At times I see my job as Jim Trash’s health in the wake of Nic’s editorial mainly keeping him from flying right down the

4 cellar stairs or doing bodily injury to the dog as he ricochets off the furniture. Yes. Yes, I am giving Nic Farey shit. That’s another component of what I see as my job. Nic wanted to dub me the Acid Queen for this first outing in the editorial sphere to keep the musical references going (if you haven’t found the musical allusion in whatever Nic Farey does, you probably haven’t looked hard enough); I have to give him his money’s worth. Vituperation. It’s not just for breakfast any more. So yeah, welcome to our shakedown cruise. Do please buckle your seatbelts; safety not guaranteed.

Ulrika O’Brien Member fwa and Unusual Suspect Kent, WA

A SPECIES OF JOKE

Nic writes: Bait is for rising to, that is its purpose. Having been teased (putting it charitably) by Ulrika for the use of a 300 year-old schtick, how better to respond than with another 300 year-old reference, as we banter over the delights which await you within these pages. That’s it to the right, by the way. It may be properly unusual that BEAM pieces can have a long gestation period (insert your favorite Curt Phillips dig here), and in the case of both Jeff Schalles and Pádraig Ó Méalóid, turned up as I’d given many approving and appreciative nods to something quite other than that originally Jeff ’s postings of his old fan photos, thinking that suggested. I’ve been on at Pádraig for fuckin ages they’d make a terrific photo essay, but I got for something, remarking that a bit on the quite countered with an offer of a reprint of his taxi- bonkers Alan Moore (and perhaps his even more driving piece in his delusional belief that it might bonkers devotees) might fit the bill. Perhaps wisely, be more widely read here than its original my Irish genius friend came up with a quite appearance in the Hugo-winning Science Fiction Five- different person of interest, who cannot sue since Yearly. he is dead. What’s a local fandom for, you might think, if you can’t lean on them for contributions for your zine,

5 although I do like to think I’m not so demonic night before, to which the Randmus factually about it as others (ahem). JoHn Wesley observed that he had found me asleep in the Hardin and Jacqueline Monahan are, I stairwell adjacent to the main consuite. My suspect, beginning to cringe a bit and lose the riposte that “It doesn’t count when you passed sheen of niceness in their zine reviewing, at least out” met with some incredulity at the time. that’s the impression you might get from thish’s Good to see the man back in the saddle, whether entry. There’s a school of thought that the mere one on wheels or legs. effort of producing anything resembling a Personal histories of various kinds have always fanzine should be rewarded with a modicum of been a staple of zine articles, locs and sometimes admiration. Then there’s KTF, of which our even artwork. Lucy Huntzinger deftly charts JoHn is shaping up to be a fine latter-day her fannish life cycle from start to now, practitioner. conveying what perhaps ought to be an obvious The affable beer-nut Reverend Roy wisdom that we are all diarists at heart, whether Hessinger, unaccustomed as he is (usually), we achieve this through reportage, reminiscence commented after the fact that you can possibly or photography. tell he was getting tired because the reviews get The non-local though really not that far away shorter. Always a welcome fixture at our parties Andy Hooper showed me a contrast in how (when not taking one of his ten annual vacation pieces make it to the page. JoHn, Jacq, Rev. Roy months), I’m especially pleased that we could I can intimidate in person. Not only is Andy not include his piece, reminding us of the alcoholic exceptionally prone to being intimidated, since origins of the World’s Finest Fanzine and that it’s he’s typically an intimidator, I’m dependent on not all cheap pish. him replying to emails, or resorting to other of A Corflu conrep in these pages is a bit of an his locals to please have a fuckin word, if they inevitability, but always a welcome one, even would. It occurred to me that if we’d been in the when [insert tired and tiresome Curt Phillips same room and had a recording device, our insult #94]. Certain values of crogglement back-and-forth on the FAAn awards would have ensued upon realizing (as did he) that Randy been sorted in mere hours, although we’d Byers had been a four-year absentee from probably have gone on to spend weeks arguing fanzine fandom’s annual bash at which he’d about the edit. Nevertheless, I’m very grateful been a seeming fixture. Randy & I first met at a that we both persisted in getting the discussion Corflu, in fact, Annapolis in 2002 (or was it out there since it’s a topic in which we share a Boston the year before?). I remember fundamental interest. complaining that I’d had very little sleep the

BEAM MEMORIAL WALL

DIAN CRAYNE 1942-2017 BEAM #4 : “Labor of Love”

BARON DAVE ROMM 1955-2017 BEAM #10 : “Minicon 51”

6 UNUSUALLY IN THIS ISSUE...

Intended to be in time for Hallowe’en, another slice from Hugo- winning World Dominator and Original Crazy Man STEVE STILES decorates the front end with not unusual aplomb. COVER

There’s no monopoly on unusual taxi tales. JEFF SCHALLES allows us a slightly updated version of advice to Never Back Up, which originally appeared in Science Fiction Five-Yearly. PAGE 9

Unusual or not (you be the judge), LUCY HUNTZINGER maps out a personal history of The Life Cycle of a Fanzine Fan. PAGE 12

They had a Worldcon in a possibly unusual location. Some of the attendees felt obliged to send out some Postcards From Helsinki., as well as one letter.

PAGES 15,37,48

RANDY BYERS, with not so unusual faint surprise, finds that a return to Corflu after a four-year hiatus is just Like Riding A Bike PAGE 16

PÁDRAIG Ó MÉALÓID, unusually devoted to Flann O’Brien scholarship, shares a work in progress on the topic: more Irishly, Extractum Ó Bhark i bPrágrais (it says here).

PAGE 21

Playing bad cop/even worse cop (in reverse), JOHN WESLEY HARDIN and JACQUELINE MONAHAN dissect both the zine reviewers’ lot and the possibly unusual content of Fornax 20.

PAGE 29

ROY HESSINGER likes his beer, or indeed anyone else’s beer, and is prone to seek out the unusual and obscure brews, suggesting that certain IPAs might be best approached With Both Feet and Crazy Eyes.

PAGE 34

7 UNUSUALLY IN THIS ISSUE...

Not one to favor an unusually brief title, ULRIKA O’BRIEN suggests How to Get More Europe into Fan Funds (and More You, Too). PAGE 39

As crowds avert their eyes, ANDY HOOPER and NIC FAREY voice their opinions on the FAAn awards procedure, an unusual Action/Reaction.

PAGE 43

THE READERSHIP : Suscipe Verbum.

LOCS : PAGE 50

ON OTHER PAGES...

Uncredited text by Nic Farey and/or Ulrika O’Brien. Unable to be contained by a mere postcard, Eve and John Harvey provide a more extensive Letter From Helsinki. (p37), in addition to the more succinct offerings from Lilian Edwards, Ian Sales and Ylva Spångberg Unusually inspired by a zine review, BACOVER by AL SIROIS Art: Brad W. Foster : “2 types of people” (p3), “Real effort” (p46); Jay Kinney : BEAM label logo (p2); Denny E Marshall : “Orbs” (p43); Rotsler : (p44); Anne Stokes : TAFF logo (p40) Photography: Vincent Docherty : Padraig O Mealoid (p7); Suzanne C. Show : Steve Stiles (p7); Alan White : Nic Farey (p8) Prufrede by Famous AuthorTM J L Farey Other photographs/illos, predictably nicked off the internet, selfies or unknown credit. Or bloody Facebook profile pics.

THE UNUSUAL SUSPECTS...

...is the name devised to describe the late-night fangatherings, surprisingly often in the environs of N Farey, which are mostly laid-back affairs, tending to involve the consumption of Jim Beam and other fine liquors, and a whole lot of bullshit amenable conversation on whatever topic might arise. If you think you might be or might have been an Unusual Suspect at any point in time, then you probably are. Wherever two or more may be gathered in the spirit of Tucker, we encourage you to raise a glass to the Suspects’ Toast: “Absent Friends”.

“Whoever drinks beer, he is quick to sleep; whoever sleeps long, does not sin; whoever does not sin, enters Heaven! Thus, let us drink beer!”

8 NEVER BACK UP

JEFF SCHALLES

The second group of downtown Bell Telephone side of the oncoming lanes, flooring the Checker. ladies were a lot of fun that warm spring night in Those sturdy 6-cylinder motors didn't like being 1976. I'd already had one slightly-eventful treated like that, you had to pump on the gas telephone operator trip out to Homestead. pedal like mad to get it revved up. Of course, just Homestead is about 8 miles up the Monongahela as we drew alongside, the fucker weaved right River where, a hundred years before, heroic back at us. The ladies were shouting “Go! Go! striking steel workers fought-off Andrew Go!”, and somehow we made it through, leaving Carnegie’s Pinkerton thugs, courageously holding the drunk in our cloud of blue exhaust. the mill's pump house landing on the river bank. I dropped them off and deadheaded back The thugs were brought in from the slums of downtown, hanging around hoping for a second Boston, armed with guns and clubs, sneaking up trip. Around 1:00 A.M. I snagged three real the river on an old barge in the dead of night. characters going to Duquesne Heights. They The strikers won that battle but eventually lost the laughed and joked and included me in the fun. fight when the Governor of Pennsylvania sent in Not all of the night shift telephone operators National Guard troops, firing on the strikers, Pittsburgh Yellow Cab contracted with the phone killing several. company to drive home were this entertaining. There's an undivided 4-lane highway along the Usually the chatty ones tipped you something, too. west bank of that river, with a steep cliff on one They didn’t have to, 15 percent was added into side, and, many years ago now, a solid wall of steel the flat rate, but it was nice when they did. It was mills and blast furnaces along the river bank. one of those newly-minted warm spring nights, Small villages of very old brick and wooden still a touch of chill in the air and patches of snow houses and bars line the cliff-side of the road and ice in the shadows, maybe it was Tuesday. across from the mills. Several miles out of That part’s just a guess. This was forty years ago. downtown, we rounded a curve and I had to jam on the brakes. There was an old beat-up 4-door It was probably one in the morning when I Ford Falcon, listing heavily on the drivers side, dropped the last operator off. Duquesne Heights is weaving its way slowly upriver, using... all four the hilltop working class neighborhood just lanes. As we got closer, we got to see the downstream from Mt. Washington, the better enormously large driver hanging half out his known historic and restaurant district. I was on a window, left arm practically dragging on the narrow little street, practically vertical, lined with pavement, steering with his right hand. I got close solid old brick row houses, but no driveways, no enough to see how red his face was. He was going alleys. This neighborhood was built to take about 5 MPH. The speed limit was 55. Oncoming advantage of the passenger cable-car railways that cars were squeezing onto the narrow shoulder on used to run up the downtown side of the the cliff side to avoid the drunken fool. mountain. There used to be many steel mills and factories down below on the river bank. The Traffic was backing up behind me. I didn’t want to original home owners up there had neither horses pass him, but one of the telephone ladies said nor automobiles, they rode down the inclines to “Oh, just go ahead and do it!”, and the rest work. There used to be dozens of inclines in agreed, so I timed his weaving until he was all the Pittsburgh, tucked into the western foothills of the way on the right shoulder and no traffic was Appalachian Mountains, now there's only two left, coming at us, crossed the double line into the far

9 JEFF SCHALLES

long ago given historical protected status and still was going downtown to Heinz Hall, the orchestra running regularly. hall. He never stopped talking, made constant I knew I was somewhere west of Grandview observations on anything and everything around Avenue with its vast panorama of the three rivers us. I thought he was a few fries short of a happy meeting in the big bowl containing the West End, meal, but he was ok. He also kept alluding to old North Side, Hill District, Oakland, South Side, money stuff and dropping Pittsburgh’s wealthier Downtown, and, visible in the haze, far to the family names. He hadn't put on his tie by the time east, the Penn Hills. But I didn't know exactly we got downtown. I assumed he wanted the side where I was. The map didn’t always help at this entrance, but no, he wanted out in the limo zone. point. It often showed streets jumping across He tossed me a wad of bills, real nice tip, and chasms where there was no bridge, streets that jumped out into the crowd of top-hatted and were really steep, abandoned, streetcar rights of jeweled concert-goers, who immediately way, streets that turned out to be steep city steps. surrounded him, pounding him on the back, So I kept going straight, up the hill. I wasn’t shaking his hand, genuinely happy to see him. Life concerned. At least none of my passengers so far is full of useful lessons. that night had been carrying a vacuum cleaner. I picked up a downtown fare going to Oakland, One night the summer before, the last night of the ended up in Shadyside again, took another call. month and a full moon, early in the evening, a bit This time the guy coming out of the apartment after dinner, a guy calls for a cab and he wants to building was carrying 2 or 3 shirts on hangers . . . stick a few things in my trunk and back seat, some and an upright vacuum cleaner. He's moving, not boxes, a suitcase or two, couple of shopping bags, far. Must be a minimalist. Now I’m in East and a canister vacuum cleaner. Sure, why not, I’ll Liberty, one of those mixed housing, urban at least get the 50 cent baggage surcharge. Cab renewal areas. Another radio call, up a dark street rides cost 50 cents extra back then, on top of the into a bit of a bad spot. A very young, slender, meter, if the driver needed to get out and help African American woman comes to my window with bags. That was in our union contract. and hands me an infant wrapped in a blanket. “Hold my baby, I’m going back in for his things. If This was no big deal, people would transport stuff I’m not right back, call the police.” She disappears in our big old Checkers all the time. The next ride inside before I can say anything. The baby is took me back downtown from the West End. I was sleeping. I keep the motor running, lock my doors, sent to an apartment building in Point Breeze, out kill the lights, and watch. She comes back very came a wild-haired character, chattering away, quickly with a few parcels, we pull away without jacket and tie in hand, wanted to sit up front. He incident. I hate incidents.

10 JEFF SCHALLES

Finally that night, late, I get a radio call and the trying to get me to attend suddenly sounds like less dispatcher asks if I'm willing to help load of good thing. But maybe I could sit next to this furniture. Someone's moving. Sure, why not. I pull nice young lady? up and it turns out to be a retiring cab driver who But, whew, no. I didn’t take that fork in the road. I vaguely remember seeing around the garage. He Instead, a few months later, I drove off a cliff. and his wife are moving to Florida and they've Probably a better deal. offered all their extra stuff to these nice young church people who proceed to fill up my cab with Backed off, actually. Returning to that second load it. I have to tie the trunk lid shut. They want to of Bell Telephone ladies, I got to the top of the stick a couch on the roof, I refuse, it gets left at the street in Duquesne Heights to find it dead ended curb. There's lamps, toasters, small tables, winter with a right turn into a dirt lane. Nice view of the clothes, boxes of dishes, and, of course, another Ohio River valley to the West. I could hear cars vacuum cleaner. on Grandview Avenue in the trees somewhere below. I pulled part way into the dirt lane and was The kids, five or six of them maybe, clamber in blocked by a pile of gravel. Pulled in, then backed around their stuff, they’re all skinny and very clean slowly out with the wheel cranked hard over. cut. Squeezed in next to me is a very pretty young Suddenly the back of the Checker jerked a bit and girl. Very pretty, very big breasts, very big breasts quickly rolled back. I jammed on the brakes as the pressed up against my big strong cab driver right frame went clunk on the gravel. Putting it in gear arm, a pack of unfiltered Camels tucked under did nothing, the wheels were spinning. I opened the arm of my t-shirt. She’s rubbing against me, my door, gingerly looked down, thankfully saw appears to be coming on to me, I’m shoved up dirt. Shit. My back wheels were out in space. against my door as far as I can go. It’s not far, Fortunately it was a great spot for the big ol’ some back street in Oakland. “Have you ever vacuum tube cab radio, taking up a third of the heard of Reverend Moon and the Unification trunk, to transmit from, and I got the company Church?”, she asks brightly. Yes I have, actually, tow truck up there pretty fast. The driver, a tall, and the big free vegetarian dinner she’s been thin, older African American gentleman who also sometimes ran the night end-of-shift gas line, growled at me after he slowly dragged the cab back from the precipice, the frame scraping on the gravel: “Son, let me give you some advice. Don’t you ever, ever... EVER . . . back up.”

11 THE LIFE CYCLE OF A FANZINE FAN LUCY HUNTZINGER

It started with a party. scandal. I wished very much I had lived in the It was 1981 and I was twenty-three. I’d been out time of Francis Towner Laney; I was slightly of college for two years and I was extremely bored shocked to realize Charles Burbee was still alive. with my minimum wage life. No one I knew Did I mention I was twenty-three? So innocent, so enjoyed reading or even thinking too hard. Most ignorant. of the people I hung out with were either rock Seattle fandom was fun. We were mostly in our musicians or girlfriends of rock musicians. I did early twenties, everyone was very friendly and graphics for a few bands, I made the rounds of there was much socializing. There was a venerable taverns and clubs to hear my favorite groups, and monthly social gathering, Vanguard, where I was of course it was fun to party every weekend, but it awed to meet Joanna Russ and Vonda McIntyre. wasn’t a lifestyle I found sustainable. I missed Some of us started a book club and called it Babel being around bookish, clever people. I didn’t know 17. It was a golden age, if slightly later than where to find them now that I was on my own and normal, for someone who loved sf, wanted to write working full time. My future looked dismayingly amusing articles and talk endlessly about science dull and I was worried that I might have already fiction, fantasy and the future. I moved to the Bay had the best years of my life. Area about a year and a half after finding Then I made a friend at work of all places, one of fandom, having finally realized that I would never a long list of tedious temp jobs where I was need to be alone among the non-readers again. miserable; believe me, I rarely made friends at I dipped my toe in the publishing water with a one work. Janice Murray found me reading a science page zine called Poot (March 1983), probably to fiction novel at my desk, stopped to ask me how I have something to hand out at Norwescon. Under liked it, and we spent the rest of our lunch hour the influence (ahaha) of Ted White I finally talking about science fiction, conventions and published a multi-page fanzine in October of music. We bonded immediately. A couple of 1983 titled The Newfangoled Epicritic. Yes, there was weeks later I went with her to meet a few of her a misspelling in the title of my fanzine. Not for the science fiction-reading friends at someone’s house, last time, either. charmingly known as the Jumping Jesus Bar and There were lots of co-edited fanzines that Grill, and realized within minutes that I had followed. I love a collaboration. Rude Bitch, finally found my people. That evening I met the Convention Girls Digest, and Abbatoir were all done cream of Seattle fanzine fandom and fell into hero the same way: sitting in a room with my co-editor worship mode most embarrassingly. (s), talking over our ideas, one of us madly typing I didn’t know what a fanzine was, but I embraced away, the other making revisions on the drafts as the concept immediately. I had, after all, been a they accumulated. By now we were typing up our school newsletter writer and editor and already zines on word processors or personal computers, knew the ways of hectographs. Fanzine history then photocopying them. Some people didn’t fascinated me and I had many eager teachers think photocopied zines were as fannish as the willing to loan me old zines and tell stories of The mimeo’d kind. Some people thought using a Olden Days. I was envious of everyone being such computer was an elitist act. I thought it saved a lot old hands at fannishness. How I longed to have of time, myself. attended the infamous IguanaCon, which My writing improved and I edited a fanzine with sounded fascinating, filled as it was with contributions solicited for specific topics, called unnecessary drama, important sf writers and Love and Friendship. It was about the Brontës,

12 LUCY HUNTZINGER

Georgette Heyer, romance novels and women’s and I devoutly hoped no one would ever find it. writing. I was very proud of that one. Indeed, I’m How could I possibly share such personal feelings very proud of everything I wrote in my final paper with the world? fanzine, Southern Gothic. It was a product of my Fifteen years later it seemed confessional, chatty eight years in Nashville, an attempt to cope with a public diaries were all the rage. I read a few in lack of local fandom. I did four issues, the last one 1996 and thought they were awesome. I in 1997 when my husband John Bartelt and I painstakingly published my first website, hand moved back home to the Bay Area. It was, in fact, coded in barely competent HTML, and got scorn the last fanzine I would publish on paper and mail heaped on my head by Nigel Richardson, good out. friend, fanzine fan and online diarist, for having Zines and I were breaking up after fifteen years, or nothing dynamic to offer. He said I ought to be so I thought. In 1996 I had become enchanted by doing a journal so I would be publishing new online diaries. Social media, as we did not call it in content all the time, that I was a natural with my those days, was the coming thing, no longer the fanzine writing background. Not me, I said huffily, sequestered playground of tech-oriented folks. All I’m not a copycat. Then I realized he was right the action was at Usenet or Genie or the Well or and this was the perfect combination of fanzine on people’s personal websites. and diary. The first entry of Aries Moon was Even before fanzines and school newsletters I’d published on January 1, 1997. been writing diary entries for a long time. At The last entry was December 31, 2002. By then I thirteen I faithfully wrote entries in my brand-new was an established and moderately popular diarist. diary about my super fun school life, complete I’d been interviewed for local, national and with non-existent boys falling in love with me. It international radio shows and magazine articles was something I hoped my putative grandchildren about this new thing of sharing your life online. I would read and admire. At age fourteen I realized made a lot of new friends for the first time since… it was all a humiliating lie and I threw it away. I well, since I’d found fandom. Online diaries missed writing, though. I bought another diary gradually became known as online journals, but to and abandoned my fake audience, preferring to me they seemed as confessional and intimate as fill pages with my true feelings. It was cathartic anything I ever wrote in my private journals. It was thrillingly personal and frequently voyeuristic. I also learned the hard way that some people were very good at hiding behind their online personas. Nonetheless, many of us met up in real life for drinks or dinner or parties. We dated each other (not me, I was married, but a lot of my journaling friends met their partners that way). We had conventions. We gossiped like mad. It was a whole lot of fun. But I found, as we all found, that life online was less and less a big party where we knew everyone and more and more an opportunity for creeps and people making money off our free content.

13 LUCY HUNTZINGER

So I shut down Aries Moon and tried to live the understood that everything we wrote, even our non-writing life. It lasted less than a year. account profiles, was mined and sifted, the data The new social media place to be was on wrung out to be monetized. I was warier and centralized sites like Livejournal where the warier of sharing my personal thoughts. HTML was generated automatically: all you had Finally, I sat down a couple of months ago to to do was type your words in, press “post” and write another journal entry that no one would voila. No more slaving over the latest HTML read and thought, “It’s been twenty years and it code. My kind of publishing! Journals were dead, was grand, but diaries/journals are done and so long live the blog. I got myself a Livejournal am I.” I wrote my farewell and ceased posting. Of account in 2003. Soon I was writing every day course, people do still have online blogs, but the and my diary/journal friends were there, too. I large, chatty community that formed around found crafting diary entries to be a lot like writing journaling has dispersed. There is no more built- fanzine articles. Well, really, there was no in, easy to find audience for the generalist blogger. difference. I’d always written fairly personal stuff. A personal blog can still be massively popular and Only by the mid-2000s there were too many a community of reader commenters will form if choices and I couldn’t go to just one place to read the writing is engaging enough, but for most of us everyone. There was also this new thing called journalers it’s not easy to do. Facebook. It wasn’t new, really, but it was now I don’t miss the olden days, but boy, do I miss open to non-students and a whole bunch of my writing for an audience who knows me and shares friends got accounts. I thought it was too much some history with me. The other day I found when I already had so much invested at myself wanting to bust out the old journal again Livejournal. I didn’t bother with Facebook until so I could tell a certain story, but it wouldn’t have 2008. given me the result I wanted. Dang, I thought, Turns out that’s where most of my old fanzine fan there must be some kind of format that would let friends had gathered. Unlike most people, I didn’t me write long-form essays and share them easily hear from a single school friend when I finally with a bunch of like-minded people who would joined Facebook. No, I was inundated with comment on it oh hey, fanzine. fanzine fan friends making Friend Requests. It was It makes sense, actually. I could do a fanzine, a lot like finding the good party at a convention. upload it to eZines and announce the URL to my In fact, plenty of people were over at Twitter, too, fannish friends on Facebook. I could send a but I have never felt particularly at home there. notification in email to friends who aren’t on Meanwhile, readership was slowly dropping at Facebook who might like to read it. People might Livejournal, and even Dreamwidth. There were even send me letters of comment in email. platform sales, from small companies to big Fanzines never went away, after all. I did. companies, from American-owned to Russian- I’m back. owned. Writers migrated or gave up altogether. Fewer and fewer people left comments. I stuck with my journal despite all that because I crave personal writing, but I saw the end coming. By now the Internet was emphatically not Us, but Them. We wrote and posted our content, but we

14 POSTCARDS FROM HELSINKI LILIAN EDWARDS, IAN SALES

I don't like liquorice let alone salty liquorice but that's what people buy to take home from Helsinki because everything else needs a second mortgage. Instead , I swam in the huge outdoor sea pool/ spa near the market, ate salmon and reindeer, and drank neat gin on buses out of my yoga water-bottle. There may have been a convention but it was a long way away and I had a nasty cold! Oh the free transport card was" ace and every Worldcon should arrange this in future

Lilian

nice brasserie - where I'm Worldcon75 venue, Messukeskus,great, with large concoursescattered boasting around plentiful food outlets. Hotel attached has spending my con. No actual con hotel, so attendeesreceive free transport city. Most staying within walking distance of Worldcon75. My tohotel dine, next to Helsinki 1970srailway Soviet-style station - decor.con members Helsinki a great city. pass - love its Eating out each evening with friends- huge variety of places like Russian/Finnish restaurant founded by member of Leningrad Cowboys... One sour note: someone overheard American con-goer complain Worldcon75 "too Eurocentric". Fuck‘em: Worldcon75 excellent. Finnish fandom excellent. More, please.

Ian

15 LIKE RIDING A BIKE RANDY BYERS “It’s just like riding a bike, right?” I said. “If it single word, “Burbank,” when she and Tom throws you off, you just climb back on again.” Becker landed around the same time we did. The subject was Corflu. I went this year for the first time since 2013. I wasn’t sure I still knew how to do it. It was also the first Corflu I’d been to since I vowed never to bribe my way out of the Guest of Honor selection. So, of course, Pete Young picked my name out of the “hat” (actually a box called the Spirit of Corflu that Nigel Rowe had created for the purpose at last year’s Chicago Corflu and then passed along to LA, although I heard later that it didn’t survive the trip back to Toronto, where the next Corflu will be held, so it won’t become a keepsake passed down from generation to generation), and I not only had to remember how to Corflu but had to prepare a fanzine-career-summation GoH speech as well. Conspiracy theories immediately sprang up that somehow the fix had been put in by Ted White or Marty Cantor to honor the popular guy with brain cancer. But both of them pled innocent in convincing ways. Marty even showed me the slip of paper with my name on it, as if that proved anything! Pete was this year’s guest of the Corflu 50 — a fund that brings a popular fan to Corflu every year — and he was the true guest of honor in my eyes, leaving the convention with a FAAn Award Chair Marty Cantor had called the convention for Best Fanzine (the excellent white notebooks) and Corflu 34, rather unimaginatively in my opinion, the coveted past presidency of fwa. One of the so in my own mind it quickly became Corflu recurring moments of the convention was Pete LASFS, partly because Marty is a mainstay of being rendered speechless by some new accolade LASFS, but also because most of the people at or award. His gob was well and truly smacked. this Corflu whom I hadn’t met before were members of LASFS. In particular Karl Lembke Here’s how to arrive at Corflu in style: Catch a impressed me by running a good, if sugary, ride to the airport from Jerry Kaufman and Suzle, consuite and supplying it with home-brewed catch the same flight with them to beautiful apricot stout, which immediately became my downtown Burbank, and then catch a ride in a drink of choice. Largely because of my heavy rental car with them to the convention hotel, drinking of it, all the bottles Karl had brewed which was a Marriott in Woodland Hills. The were gone by the end of the dead dog party. traffic lived up to LA’s reputation, but we still arrived just behind Spike, who had texted me the Tom Becker had promised to take me on a tour of interesting sites in downtown LA on Thursday. So

16 RANDY BYERS on Thursday morning he directed me to a bus, Tom wanted to visit Clifton’s Cafeteria, but it which a half hour later dropped us off at a wasn’t open when we visited it the first time, so we subway station. I knew that LA had a subway, but returned to the Grand Central Market to have a riding it made me realize that the image of LA we beer at the Golden Road brewery. While we were get in movies and TV shows is still largely the old there a lion dance broke out to celebrate the “great big freeway” LA. Randy Newman’s love of opening of a new Chinese restaurant in the LA does not extend to the subway, as I recall the market. Meanwhile, back at Clifton’s, we couldn’t song. We wandered around the downtown area for find the table where a young Ray Bradbury used a bit, spotting the Angels’s Flight railway that runs to sit. Tom had heard that Bradbury had liked to up the side of a hill, which I recognized from the eat there as a starving young writer, because you Burt Lancaster film noir, Criss Cross. Then we could pay what you wanted for the food in those visited the extremely phallic City Hall, which was days. He had heard that there was a plaque familiar from a zillion LA-based film noirs and commemorating Bradbury’s favorite table, but we cop shows. Next was the obligatory visit to the couldn’t find it. No one who worked there seemed Bradbury Building, where both Blade Runner and to know anything about it. Later we learned from the Twilight Zone version of “Demon with a LASFS member Nick Shaw that LASFS used to Glass Hand” were shot. It was under renovation, hold their meetings at Clifton’s for a period in the so there was scaffolding in the way of the beautiful ‘40s when they were otherwise homeless. metalwork.

17 RANDY BYERS

Even on the subway, I had begun exchanging find decent Peruvian food in Seattle. The main emails with Claire Brialey back in Croydon, which dish was a kind of stirfry called saltanado. Ulrika felt very modernistic, for all that email is an said saltanado is Spanish for “tossed,” which ancient 20th century technology. She was immediately made me wonder how you say simultaneously exchanging email with Spike, as “tossed green salad”? Ensalata verde saltanado? well as watching the livestream of convention I found most of the program to be a pretty dull programming, at least after the epic efforts of Bill rehash of the same old topics we always grouse Burns and Rob Jackson to get it to work. It was about at Corflus. The most memorable lines were probably my email spellchecker that suggested I when we got onto the topic of how science fiction meant “rhinoplasty” when I typed “egoboo.” has taken over the world, and LASFan Lee Gold Honestly? Do nose jobs really make people feel lamented, “They kicked us out of the gutter.” that much better? When the talk turned to Leland Sapiro, an LA fan Bill and I talked quite a bit at this Corflu, with the who edited the scholarly fanzine Riverside Quarterly, main conversation being about, you guessed it, we heard the story recapped by Mike Glyer in his underwater cable technology and the fandom of obituary for Sapiro at file770.com: “So the story enthusiasts that has grown around it. I had goes, in the 1950s a prozine published a bigoted contacted Bill a few months earlier about a cable [specifically, anti-Semitic] letter by a Louisiana fan station that had existed on Yap, and the remnants [named Edwin Sigler] that pushed Sapiro’s of it that still existed when my family lived on the buttons. Sapiro, who then lived in Los Angeles, island in in the ‘60s. Bill, being a bit obsessive on took a plane to New Orleans and a taxi to the the topic, did some research, and told me about fan’s house. When the fan answered the door, what he’d found. It turns out the Pacific is such a Sapiro punched him in the face, returned to his wide ocean, that laying a cable across it was much taxi, and flew back to LA.” This story caused more complicated than doing so across the Marty Cantor to quip, “That’s when the fan hit Atlantic. There had to be a series of stations along the shit.” On the flight down to Burbank, I’d been the way to boost the fading signal occasionally, reading Julie Wade’s biography of James Tiptree and Yap was one of those stations. It turned out Jr, where I learned that Ted White had been one that the cement towers I had thought were a part of her earliest editors in the magazines. I asked of the station were actually for a massive radio Ted about that before one of the panels, and he mast, which was shot down during World War I. had time enough to tell me, “Yes, in fact, in a It was a small convention even by Corflu sense I discovered Tiptree!” But then the panel standards, so I ended up hanging out a lot with a started, and I never got the full story from him. small group of friends like Bill, Tom, Spike (with The consuite that night was lots more apricot whom I enthused about the prospect of attending stout as well as some bourbon that Tom Becker the Eastercon in 2018), Rich Coad, Nigel Rowe, had brought. I think by that point I was feeling Pete Young, and Sandra Bond (one of only two pretty wiped out from my first convention in over Brits in attendance, not counting Bill or Pete, a year and went to bed relatively early. I got up in which must be a record low in recent years).. On time for the banquet the next morning. I had Friday after the opening ceremonies in which I written my GoH speech on Saturday, and I was tagged by Pete as Guest of Honor, Ulrika practiced delivering it a couple of times on O’Brien drove Pete, Spike, and me to a nearby Sunday morning. Unfortunately, the practice Peruvian restaurant. Apparently, you just can’t didn’t help much, as my actual delivery was a

18 RANDY BYERS stumbling affair. Still, I had composed a good driver waxed rhapsodic about the Armenian food enough text, I think. The best part of it was in LA, telling me that LA is “the biggest probably its shortness, although Nigel Rowe was Armenian city outside of Russia.” That kind enough to tell me afterward that he wished perspective seemed a little Cold War era to me, there had been more detail in my story about how since as far as I know Armenia is now I got into fanzines and what they’ve made out of independent of Russia, but it probably reflects his me. I called it “Fandom is a Forge,” and it will be own family history. Anyway, he was so enthusiastic published in Banana Wings. After the banquet and about the Armenian restaurants in LA that I the presentation of the FAAn Awards, past immediately wanted to go back and search for the presidency of fwa, and the bid for next year’s best, probably with John Hertz to guide me. John Corflu (which will be held in Toronto, exact dates was not at this Corflu, due to a conflict with a still to be announced, Greg Benford, whom I’m dance event he apparently found more not sure I’d ever talked with before this Corflu, compelling,. That was a disappointment, since I came up and told me, à propos my speech, that he didn’t get a chance to talk to him much the last and Terry Carr always felt that writing for time I saw him, at Sasquan. So maybe the fanzines had made them better writers. He also convention could have been named Corflu proposed that David Hartwell belonged in the Hertzless. conversation about the most influential editor in In any event, I hope to make it to Toronto next the history of science fiction. Hard to argue with year. Corflu is apparently just like riding a horse: that, nor did I want to. Benford struck me as very you never forget how. genial and approachable, not to mention a bit elfin in appearance. Does Alabama even have elves? Between Benford and Mike Dobson, Alabama was disproportionately represented at Corflu 34. It was only after the banquet that I noticed the sign outside the function room that said Corflu 34 was being run by the Institute for Specialized Literature. I asked LASFan Christian Maguire, who was sitting at the door, what that was, and he said it was another Bruce Pelz idea. According to Fancy 3, it’s a fan-run library founded in May 1962 for preserving periodical and ephemeral literature, which is to say, fanzines. Seemed like an appropriate sponsor for a Corflu to me. Dinner that evening was at a Mexican restaurant called Xoc, with Tom, Spike, and my inseparable twin brother for the convention, Pete Young. I really hadn’t given much thought to LA as a food town, but on Monday morning my Armenian airport shuttle

19 FAN ROOM INCIDENT

NOT WIZZARD

Well, I'm sittin’ in the fan room on the north-west side of town Picturing last night’s crazy panel where they shot my fanzine down It wasn’t Hooper, oh no, no, no And that may be a surprise to you A shoddy duper, yeah, yeah, yeah Made ‘em take me back to school

They came to question my fancred, I wanted to drop down through the floor Said I was the worst ever faned and I should go right out that door I should be cryin’, but no, no, no And I planned to get over the hate I won’t be lyin’, yeah, yeah, yeah Since they added me to a slate

[G Charnock shred solo, N Farey concurrently smashes piano to bits]

Hold on, Teddy, I need you, honey Won’t you spread my name around You've gotta help me show those fuckers We're gonna tear the Hugos down

The writing’s crappy, oh sure, sure, sure Well, how does that matter to us? But we’ll be happy, yeah, yeah, yeah Thrown real fanzines under the bus

[Repeat verse 2] [Scotty McDonald mangles saxophone impressively, N Farey destroys 2nd piano]

Well, I'm sittin’ in the back porch with a rocket on the shelf And I’m kiddin’, the way that I do That I did it all myself

Oldpharts are cryin’, oh, boo-hoo-hoo, well, that don’t matter a bit The rest are dyin’, yeah, yeah, yeah Won a Hugo for a piece of shit...

Graham Charnock complained mightily that his magnificent authorship of lastish’s “Johnny, It’s Too Bad” lyric was, according to him, insufficiently clear. He had a point, up to a point. Willing to tweak the layout to satisfy the old scrote, we’ll add the following to this and future lyrical parodies: Original song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tp0PrMBkh_w Lyrical manipulation by Nic Farey and not Leslie Fish...

20 EXTRACTUM Ó BHARK I BPRÁGRAIS

PÁDRAIG Ó MÉALÓID A Flann O’Brien A to Z alone. And I had been toying with the idea of trying to B write a book about Flann O’Brien, if I could find an original way of doing so. And, finally, I really do like a [A note on nomenclature: Flann O’Brien had a number of list, especially if it’s alphabetical or chronological. So this different names he went by, even including his own original is a partial chapter from that putative book, which is name, Brian Nolan, and versions thereof. Although it may deliberately unfinished, at the moment. They may be more look as if I’ve just used different ones purely at my whim than just the Bs, or there may not. If it comes to pass, I’ll throughout this, that is not actually the case. The name finish writing all those [to be written] entries then. Ask used is usually relevant to the topic at hand. Usually. me about it in a few years’ time!]

And a note on the work in general: Probably the seed of all Bailey, The: A public house on Duke Street, this is the piece about the Birds in At Swim-Two-Birds just off the fashionable Grafton Street on the - I wanted to write it, but felt it was too obscure to stand Southside of Dublin’s city centre. It was the finishing point of the first Bloomsday commemoration, on 16 June 1954, although the participants - Anthony Cronin, Tom Joyce, Patrick Kavanagh, Brian Nolan, and John Ryan - had intended to go further, presumably as far as 7 Eccles Street, the fictional residence of Leopold Bloom on the other side of the River Liffey, but were too overtaken by drink to proceed. John Ryan bought The Bailey in 1957 and, ten years later, installed therein the front door of 7 Eccles Street on Bloomsday 1967, having bought it from the Dominicans Sisters, who were having the property demolished. The door has since moved back across the river to the James Joyce Centre in North Great George’s Street, where it can still be seen.

See also: Bloomsday; Cronin, Anthony; Dublin; Joyce, James; Joyce, Tom; Kavanagh, Patrick; Nolan, Brian; Public Houses; Ryan, John; Ulysses

Baker’s Corner: see Baker’s of Kill-O-The Grange

Baker’s of Kill-O-The Grange: A public house in Kill o' the Grange, in the area of Blackrock in County Dublin, colloquially known

Grafton Street, c1945

21 PÁDRAIG Ó MÉALÓID as Baker’s Corner, which it was eventually The Bard of Booterstown and The Poet of the renamed. Pick, Casey was the author of poems like The On 25 November 1961 O’Nolan wrote to the Working Man and The Workman’s Friend, often proprietor thusly: misattributed as A Pint of Plain is You Only Man, of which one verse will easily stand in for the whole: Me dear man, Since last seeing you I went down with a When things go wrong and will not come right, ferocious dose of flu (or that’s what they Though you do the best you can, call it) and am still out of action. When life looks black as the hour of night - I have however managed to do some A pint of plain is your only man. quarrying in bed in the matter of cheques. You said that prior to the recent See also: At Swim-Two-Birds; Jem Casey call of self and younger brother, I owed you money which I had not paid. I Barnabas, Brother: see Brother Barnabas enclose the paid cheque, which please return. Barnacle, Nora: Wife of James Joyce. On their I know nothing about the bottle of first date, on 16 June 1904, they walked from whiskey and half doz. stouts connected Finn’s Hotel on Leinster Street South, where she with our visit. It is quite true that I am was then working, as far as Sandymount Strand, capable of drinking the contents of a where she masturbated her husband-to-be, bottle of whiskey, but not the bottle itself. thereby setting up several key aspects of his 1922 There is no empty bottle in my house. I novel, Ulysses, as well as one location for John am writing to my brother in Tuam to see Ryan and his associates to visit on their first can he throw any light on this. He had a Bloomsday expedition, and indeed to those of car and it is possible the articles were put many subsequent Joyceans. in the back and forgotten when he drove me home. I’ll also ask did he pay for See also: Bloomsday; Joyce, James; them. Sandymount Strand; Ulysses It would be no harm for you to realise that you, too, can make mistakes. You Bars: see Public Houses own me an apology in connection with the cheque enclosed. Bash in the Tunnel, A (book): see A Bash in the Tunnel (book) See also: Public Houses Bash in the Tunnel, A (essay): see A Bash in Banned Books: Flann always wanted to be the Tunnel (essay) banned, but never was, perhaps because, at heart, he was too strongly Catholic, and too repressed, Basketweaving: When he was interview by to ever have written anything actually bannable. Time magazine, the resultant story included the [More to be written] following, about O’Nolan’s trip to Germany,

Bard of Booterstown, The: Jem Casey, a He also met and married 18-year-old character in At Swim-Two-Birds, is a parodic Clara Ungerland, blonde, violin-playing example of the Navvy Poet stereotype. Known as daughter of a Cologne basketweaver. She

22 PÁDRAIG Ó MÉALÓID

died a month later. O’Nolan returned to Behan, Brendan: Eire and never mentions her. Friend, fellow writer, drinking companion See also: Berlin; Germany; Cologne; [To be written] Ungerland, Clara Bell, The: An Irish BBC: According to the BBC’s Genome Project literary magazine website, on Wednesday 18 April 1962, at 10pm, and published by BBC TV’s Bookstand programme included a Seán Ó Faoláin in section with Flann O'Brien and Peter Duval Dublin from 1940 to Smith discussing O’Brien’s novels The Hard Life 1954. [More to be and At Swim-Two-Birds. No written record of this written] is to be found in the BBC Written Archives Centre, unfortunately. Berlin: According to stamps in his passport, Neither is there a written copy of a radio Brian Ó Nualláin cashed travellers cheques for programme called A Letter From Dublin by Myles na RM50 (50 Reichsmark) in Deutsche Verkehrs- Gcopaleen, originally broadcast on the Third Kredit Bank (the DVB or German Traffic-credit Programme on Tuesday 12 August 1952 at Bank) on 31 August 1936, another for RM100 9.05pm, which was rebroadcast three days later there on 2 September, and a further RM50 there on 15 August 1952 at 6.20pm, but about which on 5 September. Cheques were also cashed for no other information seems to exist. Research is RM25 in the DVB in Cologne on 28 & 30 ongoing. August, and for RM8 on 8 September, making a total of RM 258 in all. See also: At Swim-Two-Birds; Hard Life, The See also: Cologne; Germany; Ungerland, Beal Bocht, An: More fully An Béal Bocht, Nó, an Clara Milleánach: Droch-Sgéal Ar an Droch-Shaoghal. Most people miss that an Milleánach is a pun on Tomás Best of Myles, The: A collection of mostly Ó Criomhthain's autobiography An t-Oileánach, early articles from Myles na gCopaleen’s though. O’Nolan’s only Irish language novel, Cruiskeen Lawn column in the Irish Times. First published in 1941 by An Preas Náisiúnta (The published by MacGibbon & Kee of London in National Press), under the name of Myles the 1968. [More to be written] gCopaleen. Translated (badly) into Irish in 1973 by Patrick C Power, and published as The Poor See also: Cologne; Cruiskeen Lawn; Irish Mouth by Hart-Davis, MacGibbon of London in Times; MacGibbon & Kee; Myles na 1973. [More to be written] gCopaleen; Myles na Gopaleen

Beard: Was she or wasn’t she? [To be written] Bicycles: Was it about a bicycle? [To be written]

Beckett, Samuel: An Irishman abroad [To be Bilingualism: [To be written] written]

23 PÁDRAIG Ó MÉALÓID

Billiards: In the Cruiskeen Lawn column for 2 these birds are real. Which is to say that, whilst March 1966, titled Graduate’s Reverie, Myles gannets and gulls and owls undoubtedly do exist, wrote of his years at University College Dublin: they do not have variations called the Mohar gannet, or the peregrine plough-gull, or the long- ...what have I to show for five years of my eared bush-owl. And, whilst the carrion sea-cock life when I was young, alert and very sounds perfectly legitimate, a seacock is actually a healthy? [] The only result my father got kind of valve on the hull of a boat or ship, for his money was the certainly that his permitting water to flow into and out of the son had laid faultlessly the foundation of vessel, for taking in water to cool an engine, or for a system of heavy drinking and could be a sink or toilet outlet. It is likely that most of the always relied on to make a break of at names above could be broken down into more least 25 even with a bad cue. interesting sub-components, like cracking quarks out of atoms, but that is work for another day. See also: Alcoholism; Cruiskeen Lawn; Meanwhile, there are a few particular things I University College Dublin want to highlight here.

Birds in At Swim-Two-Birds: In Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (Longman Green & Co, London, 1939) one of the characters, Finn Mac Cool, says,

I am friend to the pilibeen, the red- necked chough, the parsnip land- rail, the pilibeen móna, the bottle- tailed tit, the common marsh-coot, the speckle-toed guillemot, the pilibeen sléibhe, the Mohar gannet, the peregrine plough-gull, the long- eared bush-owl, the Wicklow small- fowl, the bevil-beaked chough, the hooded tit, the pilibeen uisce, the common corby, the fish-tailed mud- piper, the cruiskeen lawn, the carrion sea-cock, the green-lidded parakeet, the brown bog-martin, the maritime wren, the dove-tailed wheatcrake, the beaded daw, the Galway hill-bantam and the pilibeen cathrach. First on the list, and first in that list, there’s the There are a number of interesting points here. pilibeen, and variations thereon, being the Before I even get to them, though, I should point pilibeen móna, pilibeen sléibhe, pilibeen uisce, out that, with almost a single exception, none of and pilibeen cathrach. The pilibeen is

24 PÁDRAIG Ó MÉALÓID presumably the pilibín, which is Irish for the had an airedale called Hackett. Maybe he just lapwing, and the others are, respectively, the bog liked the name... lapwing, mountain lapwing, water lapwing, and The other thing about using pilibeen, rather than city lapwing. It is odd that Flann would choose an pilibín, is that it lends a certain legitimisation to Anglicisation of the Irish name, but there are a the Anglicisation of another of the names, the few reasons why this might have been the case. cruiskeen lawn. Cruiskeen lawn is the The first thing is, it allows him to insert another anglicisation of cruiscín lán, meaning, more or hidden joke. There was a long tradition amongst less, a full little jug - the Irish language suffix -ín is Irish writers, especially those writing in the Irish a diminutive, denoting either smallness or language, of using pseudonyms, and not just affection, or indeed both. Cruiskeen Lawn is also pseudonyms which exchanged one person’s name the name of a song sung by a minor character in for another, but usually more fanciful names like Dion Boucicault’s play The Colleen Bawn, or The An Seabhac - The Hawk - used by Pádraig Ó Brides of Garryowen, called Myles na Coppaleen, Siochfhradha, or An Craoibhín Aoibhinn - The who originated in Gerald Griffin’s novel The Pleasant Little Branch - as used by Douglas Hyde Collegians, where he is Myles-na-Coppaleen. aka Dubhghlas de hÍde, later the first President of Cruiskeen Lawn was also the name of the Ireland. One writer, John Hackett Pollock, wrote column that O’Brien wrote for the Irish Times under the name of An Pilibín, The Lapwing (and from 1940 until his death in 1966, under the indeed wrote such bird-related works as The Valley pseudonym of Myles na gCopaleen, which was of the Wild Swans (Talbot Press, Dublin, 1932), changed to Myles na Gopaleen in 1952. The Mount Kestrel (MH Gill, Dublin, 1945), and The inclusion of cruiskeen lawn as a bird’s name in Lost Nightingale (HR Carter, Belfast, 1951)). this list, in a book that was published in March This is particularly interesting in view of the fact 1939, a year and a half before its use in the Irish that, according to Anthony Cronin’s No Laughing Times is, at the very least, interesting. Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O’Brien (Grafton, London, 1989), when Brian Nolan was See also: At Swim-Two-Birds; Boucicault, looking for a pseudonym to have his book Dion; Broc, An; The Colleen Bawn; Cronin, published under - for the usual reason that Irish Anthony; Cruiskeen Lawn; The Dalkey writers used pseudonyms, which was that he was Archive; Fionn mac Cumhaill; Griffin, an Irish Civil Servant, and disallowed from using Gerald; Hackett; Hyde, Douglas; Irish his own name to write under - he had toyed with Times; Myles na Coppaleen; Myles-na- using the name John Hackett, so the proliferation Coppaleen; Myles na gCopaleen; Myles of pilibeens in the above list may have been na Gopaleen; Pseudonyms; Smyllie, RM intended as an oblique reference to that name, even though it was eventually abandoned in Bisexuality: Was he or wasn’t he? [More to be favour of the frankly far better Flann O’Brien. written] On the other hand, Cronin was eleven years old when AS2B was published, and was a poet to Blackrock: Townland in South County Dublin. boot, so this may have to be taken with a [More to be written] reasonably decent-sized pinch of salt. None the less, Flann had a character called Hackett in his Blackrock College: Alma mater of a young last novel, The Dalkey Archive (MacGibbon & Kee, Brian Nolan. [More to be written] London, 1964), and according to Cronin, once

25 PÁDRAIG Ó MÉALÓID

Blake, Sexton: see Sexton Blake Boston College: see John J Burns Library, Boston College Blakesley, Stephen: Author of Sexton Blake and other pulp crime fiction books in the 1940s Boucicault, Dion: Dublin-born writer Dionysius and 1950s. Alleged by some to have been Lardner Boursiquot, more commonly known as O’Nolan, based on very dubious evidence. Dion Boucicault. Author of The Colleen Bawn, or Research is ongoing. [More to be written] The Brides of Garryowen, a melodramatic play in the paddywhackery style of its time. First performed Blather: A shortlived Irish magazine by Flann at Miss Laura Keene's Theatre, New York, on 27 and friends. March 1860, with Boucicault playing the part of Myles na Coppaleen, a poacher and poitín maker. ‘Blather doesn't care. A sardonic laugh escapes us The play was based on Gerald Griffin’s 1829 as we bow, cruel and cynical hounds that we are. novel, The Collegians, which in its turn was based It is a terrible laugh, the laugh of lost men. Do on the story of Ellen Scanlan (née Hanley), a you get the smell of porter?’ [More to be written] fifteen-year-old Irish girl who was murdered on the River Shannon in 1819. Brian O’Nolan Bloomsday: 16 June 1904, the day on which the borrowed several names from The Colleen Bawn, majority of the action in James Joyce’s Ulysses both for the titles of columns, and for a takes place. [More to be written] pseudonym.

Bónapart Ó Cúnasa: Clueless protagonist of At See also: Colleen Bawn, or The Brides of Swim-Two-Birds. [More to be written] Garryowen, The; Collegians, The; Column Bawn, The; Cruiskeen Bawn, The; Griffin, Bones of Contention: A column for the Gerald; Myles na Coppaleen; Myles-na- Nationalist and Leinster Times under the pseudonym Coppaleen; Myles na gCopaleen; Myles na George Knowall; these were collected in the Gopaleen; Pseudonyms volume Myles Away From Dublin, edited by Martin Green (Granada, London, 1985). [More to be Bowling Green: Brian O’Nolan was born at 15 written] Bowling Green, Strabane, County Tyrone, on the 5th of October, 1911. There is a blue plaque Bookmark: ‘St Augustine Strikes Back: De commemorating his birth on a house on Bowling scribendi periculo,’ Bookmark, World Book Fair Green, but online sources suggest that this is either Special (London, 1964) [More to be written] on No 6, or on No 17. Research is ongoing. Boy From Ballytearmin, The: TV play Books: An Béal Bocht, At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third (Raidió Teilifís Éireann, 1962) [More to be written] Policeman, The Hard Life, The Dalkey Archive, etc, etc [More to be written] Brian: The only part of his given name that remained consistent in the various versions of it Bookstand: see BBC he used - Brian Nolan, Brian O’Nolan, Brian Ó Nualláin, Brian Ua Nualláin - although it should Borges, Jorge Luis: Argentinian writer [To be be noted that the pronunciation of Brian is written] different in the latter two, being pronounced in the Irish language. BrEan, as opposed to BrIan.

26 PÁDRAIG Ó MÉALÓID

because the author hoped it would help make the column more saleable abroad.

Brother, The: Who was he? [More to be written]

Brother, The: Eamon Morrissey’s one-man show The Brother, based on the works of Flann O’Brien, premiered in Dublin’s Peacock Theatre on 18 February 1974, and still occasionally gets produced. [More to be written]

Brother, The (Myles): A biographical reminiscence by Micheál Ó Nualláin about his brother Brian, self-published in Dublin in 2011. [More to be written]

Brother Barnabas: Brian O’Nolan wrote in University College Dublin’s student magazine Comhthrom Féinne from 1931 to 1935, under the name of Brother Barnabas, and possibly others. Also undoubtedly the source of the surname in his Much of this work is collected in Myles Before most famous pseudonym, Flann O’Brien. Myles: A Selection of the Earlier Writings of Brian O’Nolan, edited by John Wyse Jackson, and See also: Nolan; Brian, O’Brien, Flann; published by Grafton of London in 1983. Perhaps O’Nolan, Brian; Ó Nualláin, Brian; Ua the most important work of his to appear in Nualláin, Brian Comhthrom Féinne is a story called ‘Scenes in a Novel (probably posthumous) by Brother Brinsley: Niall Sheridan, a college friend of Barnabas,’ which appeared in volume 8 number Brian O’Nolan, appears as the character Brinsley 2, dated May 1934. This story anticipates several in At Swim-Two-Birds. [More to be written] of the ideas and themes that would later appear in his first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds. Broc, An: The first Cruiskeen Lawn column in Brother Barnabas is the first known pseudonym of the Irish Times, on 4 October 1940, was subtitled O’Nolan’s, although Anthony Cronin, in No ‘From A Correspondent,’ and signed at the Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O’Brien bottom with the name An Broc - meaning The (Grafton, London, 1989), states that O’Nolan, Badger - a name supposedly suggested by the aided by his brother Ciarán and others, sent paper’s editor, RM Smyllie. From the second letters in to an Irish weekly Roman Catholic column, dated 10 October 1940, onward the newspaper called The Standard (later The Catholic column was signed off by Myles na gCopaleen, Standard) on the subject of schoolboys’ homework which name it would continue to appear under under various noms de plume, such as Concerned until 9 December 1952, when it was altered Parent and Father of Four. However, despite a slightly, to Myles na Gopaleen, supposedly certain amount of searching through microfilm in

27 PÁDRAIG Ó MÉALÓID the National Library of Ireland, this current See also: At Swim-Two-Birds; Children of author cannot verify that. Destiny; Ready-Mades The source for Brother Barnabas is probably George Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methuselah (A Burgess, Anthony: Burgess included At Swim- Metabiological Pentateuch) a series of five plays he Two-Birds on his list of Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best produced in 1921 which are set at various times, in English since 1939 - A Personal Choice. from BC 4004 to AD 31,902, and of which the second is called The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas: ‘If we don't cherish the work of Flann O'Brien we Present Day. There are two Brothers Barnabas, are stupid fools who don't deserve to have great Franklyn, a retired cleric, and Conrad, a biologist, men. Flann O'Brien is a very great man.’ [More to of whom Franklyn is presumably the one intended be written] by O’Nolan. Burns, John J: see John J Burns Library, Boston See also: At Swim-Two-Birds; Comhthrom College Féinne; Cronin, Anthony; Jackson, John Wyse; No Laughing Matter; Shaw, George Bernard; Standard, The; University College Dublin

Brothers: Brian O’Nolan was the third of a family of twelve, and the third born of seven boys in that family. Brian’s brothers were, chronologically, Gearóid (1908), Ciarán (1910), Fergus (1915), Kevin (1917), Micheál (1928), and Niall (1931). Of these six brothers, the two most significant are Ciarán and Micheál, although separated by eighteen years from each other. [More to be written]

See also: Brother, The; O’Nolan, Ciarán; O’Nolan, Fergus; O’Nolan, Gearóid; O’Nolan, Kevin; O’Nolan, Micheál; O’Nolan, Niall

Buile Shuibhne: The Madness of Suibhne or Suibhne's Frenzy. an old Irish tale about King Suibhne mac Colmain, who was driven mad after being cursed by cleric St Ronan, and spent the rest of his life wandering. Much of Buile Shuibhne ends up in At Swim-Two-Birds, and Sweeney is one of the primary characters in the book. [More to be written]

28 FORNAX 20 JOHN WESLEY HARDIN & JACQUELINE MONAHAN JoHn: Welcome back to BEAM Reviews, where About That Nightmare JoHn and Jacq flail about in the face of their lack Dr. Robin Bright contributes several thousand of methodology in picking fanzines to review. words to this ish of Fornax, very few of which are Where do you draw the line on what’s worth easily digested. I’ve run into Dr. Bright’s stuff reviewing? That’s a pertinent question because it’s elsewhere and my initial estimation; that his accompanied by a more interesting one, to wit: writing is dense and impenetrable, must fall to my where do you draw the line on what’s worth estimation that Dr. Bright suffers from publishing? schizophrenia (not trying to be funny, alas). That leads us to Charles Rector’s Fornax #20 Take this paragraph from “Puzzle the Mule,” (available at an e-fanzines.com near you). ostensibly an essay on Asimov’s Mule from On my first reading, I noticed a minor bit of Foundation and Empire: fannish political tone-deafness. “In Christian iconography Jesus` mother, the On my second reading, I was struck by the Virgin Mary, is depicted crushing the head of incidental-at-best layout. the serpent, Satan, with her foot, because she On my third reading, I was mired in a nightmare. gave birth to Jesus Christ, the redeemer, uncontaminated by male semen. Mary`s `foot` On my fourth reading, I had a crisis of faith. is `futanarian` human women with penis` About That Tone-Deafness semen of their own. When Jesus was taken to In a near-the-front-of-the-book article, Charles the hill of Calvary outside Jerusalem by agents takes Sarah Hoyt and her Puppy pals to task for of the Empire of Rome and nailed to a cross attacking the Hugos, but a dozen pages later, his of wood, he died but had Resurrection and website reviews speak approvingly of a few places Ascension to heaven, because he was the that are on Hoyt’s side (or would be, if they were prefiguration of the Resurrection and aware of fannish contretemps). At one point he Ascension to heaven of futanarian women writes approvingly of GamerGate, seemingly with their own penis` semen for the sexual unaware that his naive “it’s about ethics in game reproduction of their own brains` powers for journalism” stance puts him squarely on the side the development of labor-saving devices and of Vox Day. It struck me as an odd contrast; ditto immortality conferring medical science that his appraisal of alt-light troll Mike Cernovich. would free women from slavery in host womb About That Layout parasitism to men of the `serpent`s seed` who`d subjugated their race since Eden. It’s a lack of layout, unfortunately. Very little effort Trapped within a fiction in which women is taken to make Fornax look like anything other don't sexually reproduce their own brains` than a Microsoft Word document. There are no powers with each other for the liberation of pictures or cartoons to alleviate the 67 pages of their own species, Asimov`s Mule is occluded. text. Charles Rector does mention he has cerebral And that`s true for all readers.” palsy, which makes me the asshole, but if the brother can bother to pub his ish, how much extra Well, this reader certainly feels occluded. effort does it take to put a box around your Wright’s essay goes on in similar style for ~1400 publication/contact info, put it at the bottom of a words; a few pages later there’s a suspiciously- page, and call it a colophon? I’m just picking nits; similar fiction piece by a “Robin Usher” that it’s content that matters... extends to ~3000 words. I can’t tell you what it’s

29 JOHN WESLEY HARDIN & JACQUELINE MONAHAN

about, but it also references the bible, Jesus’ crucifixion, Mary, Mary’s foot, penises, semen and serpents; it’s less of a running theme and more of a cry for help. The text matching analyzer at http:// www.utpsyc.org/synch found .91 ratio of similarity between the articles, which it called very high correlation. And why bother writing under a different name if you’re going to use the non-word “futanarian” in both pieces? Whoever wrote it, they seem to have been gravely affected by Japanese hermaphrodite, AKA ‘futa,’ pornography. These strike me as the writings of a person who is ill, and I think it’s kind of irresponsible to publish them. About That Crisis Which leads me back to asking “what should be published?” What should be reviewed? What are we doing here? Are we wasting our time (and yours, friend) by plucking random samples out of the slushpile that is efanzines.com? Eridanus. Latin for furnace (named by French Am I pissing on earnest, well-meaning fans by astronomer Nicolas Louis de Lacaille in 1756), giving my honest opinion about their efforts? Fornax is one of the 88 modern constellations, and is also the name of the Goddess of Ovens in Ah, well. With the passage of time and sufficient ancient Rome. quasi-legal recreational herbs, this crisis too, shall pass (I’m giving it another 5-6 minutes, tops) and To continue… we’ll be back next ish with the same routine. While perusing the lengthy introduction, curious Take it away, Jacq. souls will find that most of Fornax’s content comes from the editor himself, with help from a handful of contributors and a small loccol which ends the Fornax Issue #20 issue. Rector is precise about his requirements: no http://efanzines.com/Fornax/Fornax-20.pdf illustrations, no poetry, and a 20,000 word limit on Edited by Charles Rector submissions which is wildly generous. He’ll accept any text format and submissions can be in the What’s in a Name? form of email text or attachment. Despite its name, Fornax is NOT a prescription In Rector’s own words, “Fornax is a fanzine devoted to for Erectile Dysfunction. Whether or not it history, science fiction & gaming as well as other areas produces a four-hour hard on is solely up to you. where the editor’s curiosity goes.” Fornax (/ˈfɔːrnæks/) constellation in the A preliminary scan through the online ish brought southern sky, partly ringed by the celestial river the realization that it was 67 pages; my lazy slag of

30 JOHN WESLEY HARDIN & JACQUELINE MONAHAN an alter ego backed away slowly. Provocative titles definition of "fanzine" has been allowed to drift and subtitles seduced me onward: The Vampire of until it's largely unrecognizable.” Go, Bill. St. Louis, Shiny Pretty Garbage, Drier than Mars?, and The History of the Original Space Merchant and Original the mysterious R Spynes Amanga by the equally Space Merchant Newbie Game #8 offer Rector’s mysterious Robin Usher who uses unique and somewhat lengthy explanations as to the game’s peculiar words in the vein of Dr. Robin Bright. current downfall from back in its glory days. It’s a They are both in this issue, all one of them. tale of alienation, multiple accounts, and bad The quirkiness and flavor of Fornax, if you will, ideas by administrators. Hmm, sounds just like comes through in the targeted subject matter, what happened with Wells Fargo. including disability rights, road rage, reviews of Puzzle The Mule By Dr. Robin Bright and R Spynes decades-old movies and TV shows, and lots of Amanga By Robin Usher are either written by one Rector-based opinion. You will encounter lines of and the same person or there are two individuals words stacked upon other lines of words, in in the universe who regularly use the word regimented block-style paragraphs, tiny futanari-(an) (the Japanese word for indentations here and there. hermaphroditism) and link sf stories (Heinlein, Contents Asimov, C.S. Lewis) to the Bible, utilizing Rector owns his cerebral palsy as a simple fact, examples of Jesus, Mary, semen-less procreation, wanting neither pity nor a pass. He describes his serpents, and the female foot. There are 13 slow driving style and the wrath it incurs in Incident instance of some form of the word “occlude” in on IL 20, following up with opinions (My Idea) on Puzzle the Mule, and one instance of that word in R making disability more palatable to employers via Spynes Amanga, which also features an analysis of a advertising. His solution? Use humor. Normal Madonna film role in addition to the deities and isn’t always better. sperm references listed above. In The Attack of the Anti-Fan Science Fiction Authors, I Bright asserts that futanarian women have the would have left off the first THE, making it ability to procreate without semen, but are comparable to other famous attacks (Puppet occluded by men (the Virgin Mary succeeded). People, 50 Foot Woman, Killer Tomatoes, Hermaphrodite is a word which, for me, is loaded Monster Crabs -which have nothing to do with with the connotation “Go f*ck yourself.” The the 50 Foot Woman). Rector rants about hate- good Doctor gives us yet another example from th filled blogs and names Sarah Hoyt as their poster the 8 century One Thousand And One Nights: child, alleging that she and her posse, which “The woman, Scheherazade, tells him stories includes Larry Correia and Vox Day, are fandom each evening to stop his practice of marrying trashers. “Either you are on the side of fandom or a new wife every day and beheading her each you are against it. No middle ground.” Later evening, which is a metaphor for how men Rector seems to flip-flop on at least one of these occlude futanarian human women and guys. prevent their sexually reproducing their own A Bill Burns quote from The 2017 Hugo Awards brainpower from their own penis’ semen.” Nominations Mess for Best Fanzine is the entire short Maybe we’ve had that “GFY” thing wrong all article, and I will quote only, “the administrators along. seem to know very little about fanzines and the The Vampires of St. Louis Shiny Pretty Garbage By history of fandom, over the last ten years the Charles Rector is a short, short story, a

31 JOHN WESLEY HARDIN & JACQUELINE MONAHAN conversation really, that you might have to read Other Rector opinions focus on the book, Why twice in order to nail the characters’ relationships Mars by W. Henry Lambright (uninteresting, to one another. It seemed the enticing start of a disappointing) how much of the game Dungeons larger project and I wouldn’t have minded more of and Dragons “borrowed” from J.R.R. Tolkien it. (hobbits to halflings) and why Indie Baseball is THE EXPLORATION OF THE OMEGA PLANET Booming (trades suck, baseball is boring, penny by Gerd Maximovič (Translation: Isabel Cole) pinching). This 15-page short story is full of looooong, The Boys on the Tracks: Death, Denial, and a Mother's painstakingly descriptive passages that can force Crusade to Bring Her Son's Killers to Justice by Mara one to go back to the top of the sentence again to Leveritt is packed with conspiracy theories, while find the subject. Here is one of them: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Middle Ages by “There were blue and green shimmering seas Timothy C. Hall, M.A. New York: Alpha Books which covered about half of the surface, and 2009 shows us, by Rector’s reckoning, that land masses in a great diversity of form, dummies appear to be more intelligent than idiots sloping green hills, gentle valleys through at least in book form (I always wondered) as editing which streams wound, steeply rising mountains is terrible and the whole volume is poorly done. over whose flanks waterfalls plunged foaming The Kamikazes by Edwin P. Hoyt, Jove paperback into the depths, broad plains, green, red and edition 1984 includes information on Kamikaze brown, in which silvery-gleaming, majestic submarines during World War II. Most of us have rivers rolled, vast woods, mostly brightly never heard of them because of the resounding colored, as if autumn had broken out failure of the manned torpedoes. They leaked; everywhere at the same time, as they orbited they were hard to maneuver. 15 men died in Karlsson and Lindren even saw deserts with training, and they had to have been the world’s picturesque oases.” slowest bombs with a top speed of 34 m.p.h. They Maximovič is meteorologically, geologically, and were named Kaiten, a name that translates as geographically gifted in his ability to summon forth “Return to Heaven.” This is all stuff I researched. both exterior and interior conditions of a planet Hoyt’s book tells us that kamikazes were not always with half the mass of the earth’s moon. His two volunteers. protagonists have an adventure, and for the most True Crime Detective Magazines 1924-1969 by Eric part, my hat is off to translator Isabel Cole for Godtland, edited by Dian Hanson, 2013 Taschen wading through such dense text. Only one line GmbH. This is a journey from quality to trash as “clunks” and that is, “Then they were electrified by the decades-old formula (limited suspects, women a stone tower on the highest peak…” No, they in bondage, women with cigarettes) tanked the weren’t. Otherwise, worthy of eyes. genre by 1995. Book Reviews Movie Reviews (including TV shows) Why the Duke Lacrosse Books Failed is Rector’s opinion Herschell Gordon Lewis: The Godfather of Gore (2010) on the subject. Long story short: Athletics do Lurid exploitation, bad taste, titles like Blast-Off NOT honorable men make. Because the authors Girls, Blood Feast, Color Me Blood Red, The Gruesome of these three books tried to make it so, the public Twosome, Just for the Hell of It, She-Devils on Wheels, wasn’t buying, literally, from their own personal Two Thousand Maniacs! What’s not to like? I revel experiences. in the fact that the Northwestern Journalism graduate morphed into a blood-soaked Jackson

32 JOHN WESLEY HARDIN & JACQUELINE MONAHAN

Pollock, unabashedly in it for the money. He alternative media, Maggie’s Farm (freedom from called himself the Wizard of Gore and his slick, nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control- shiny, viscous brick road, I’m sure, was NOT freaks, and idiots) agriculture, war, the pro-Brexit, yellow. Even if this guy’s not to your taste (warm, anti-PC, UK-based Spiked Online, and the alt- metallic, salty) Rector believes you’ll find right Danger and Play (the content of which something to chew on. puzzles because it seems to bestow admiration on In a 54 year span, Rector weighs in on Black one Vox Day, someone Rector associates with the Brigade (1970 TV) dated, unrealistic, inauthentic, hateful Sarah Hoyt). Well, this IS a pretty long fanzine and minds DO change… Into the Blue (2005), New Jack City (1991), Pavement (2002 TV), Supreme Sanction (1999 TV) and Quo LoCs Vadis (1951). I’d call it Retro Reviews, but it isn’t Milt Stevens and Gerd Maximovič, author of the my zine, now is it? Unencumbered by current Omega Planet short story, end the ish with long year features, Rector is free to choose any moving Letters of Comment, making the column look image from any era and thrust it into the fannish more robust than it actually is. arena. Satyricon anyone? Freaks? I’d tune in. Rector doesn’t hold back on his commentary, but Website Reviews he can disparage without being vicious in his The many website reviews cover B-movies, pulp (mostly) perzine with a little slice of gen now and movies, space development, medical quackery, then – fresh from the space oven that is Fornax.

33 WITH BOTH FEET AND CRAZY EYES ROY HESSINGER

Leaping into IPAs with Both Feet: Where to scale is so ubiquitous for IPAs that we will use it begin? here. What do you like? Sorry, it is that simple. But for There are IPAs that range from low IBU — they the most part, that is all there is to it. Critics will are barely an IPA — to an IBU so high your taste try to tell you what is best, but it comes down to buds can’t even tell how bitter it is. Varieties go what you like. Instead of telling you what to drink, from pale ale tasting IPAs to IPAs that, in the I will give you my take on a well-balanced beer words of a friend; “I want so many hops it takes and where it rates for me. the enamel off my teeth.” If you are like me, you will like something in between those two. IPA background Hops come in 3 basic flavor profiles: fruity, piney, and floral. The combination that brewers use IPAs are like scotch; they are an acquired taste makes an endless variety. Brewers can balance an that you can train your taste buds for, especially IPA with malt, hops, and alcohol (ABV) for less of with the hoppier or high IBU (International an extreme taste. Bittering Units) IPAs. But keep in mind, bitterness is not exactly the same as hoppiness, but the IBU Pliny the Elder – Russian River Brewing Company ABV – 8% IBU - 100 Pliny the Elder is brewed with Amarillo, Centennial, CTZ, and Simcoe hops. It is well- balanced with malt, hops, and alcohol, slightly bitter with a fresh hop aroma of floral, citrus, and pine. Making the Leap If you want to leap into IPAs, Pliny the Elder is the IPA for you. The high IBUs make you think it will be bitter, but it is smoother than many pale ales. If you can drink this, then you can handle any IPA, adjusting for your flavor profile preference. Pliny uses all flavor varieties of hops. Many critics and drinkers alike back up their “well-balanced” claim. If you are looking for balanced yet hoppy beer, this is it. Pliny is a great example of a west coast IPA. If, on the other hand, this is too much for you, then a milder citra hopped IPA with a milder taste will be more your style.

34 ROY HESSINGER

You may think the way I am gushing that I rate get the best flavor out of it. They are still good this my favorite IPA, like most critics and drinkers after that, just not as good. This means brewers do. While I really like it… it is not my favorite. may tend to make smaller batches and more Oh, it is in my top 10 and you should try this as frequently. often as you can, but I prefer a more fruity hop Simcoe Eyes – Mikkeller Brewing San Diego profile. Ratings are so subjective and when you go back and compare old ones with new ones, it ABV – 6.6% seems mood plays as much of a factor as the taste, Simcoe Eyes is single hopped with Simcoe hops. but… 8-9/10.

Crazy Hazy: Simcoe Eyes There are always many crazes that go on all at once in craft beer, but the biggest one around my drinking area this year is definitely Hazy IPAs. Hazy IPAs, or if you are from the east coast New England IPAs, are generally cloudy with big fruity or juicy taste. Their initial appeal is the cloudy visual. They are not how most breweries make beer, i.e. Stone Brewing who filters out particles to 1 nanometer for their beer. How long this craze will last is anyone’s guess. HAZY IPA background Hazy IPAs are not new, but the craze sure is. The amount of Hazy IPAs being made, the “craze”, is staggering. Even brewers who do not like hazy IPAs are making them. They have been around at least since the 90s, if memory serves me. Also, any home brewer has probably made one, though Grapefruit delight maybe not on purpose. You can use certain kinds Simcoe Eyes is fruity, slightly floral grapefruit of yeast or add more malts/grain, like oats, always deliciousness. The grapefruit flavor for me was in specific proportions and at specific times to bigger than other branded grapefruit IPAs, like create the haze. There is more to it than that, but Grapefruit Sculpin by Ballast Point brewing that I that is why I made a lousy home brewer and a love too. It was not too bitter—some IPA fans will great drinker. miss that—but it is both hoppy and refreshing. To Hazy IPAs have issues that other beers may not this point, it was the best Hazy IPA I have had. It have. They have a shorter shelf life — it is just the has made me want to try more Hazy IPAs. I nature of the beast. As another reviewer of IPAs would rate it… 8-9/10. put it, “Haze is ultimately fighting gravity—and it This would also be a good start for those who may tends to eventually lose…” I have heard different be new to IPAs and are worried about the time frames for when they are good and they will bitterness. Also, if you are looking for a more degrade gradually, but my general rule is to drink citrus/fruity/juicy IPA that is not a bitter hop them during the first 2 weeks the beer is tapped to bomb, this is a great IPA for you. Given the

35 ROY HESSINGER smaller and sometimes single batch of many of Neapolitan Dynamite – Stone Brewing/ these Hazy IPAs and limited distribution, I Abnormal Beer Company/Paul Bischeri & Patrick recommend trying a few in your area. If you are Martinez getting them in bottles or cans, try to buy them ABV – 8.5% when they first come into your store. It really will taste better. If it is on tap at your local pub, ask the bartender when it was tapped. Neapolitan Dynamite is “… the winning recipe in the American Homebrewers Association Stone Liberty Station annual competition.” Made by When Your Best Stouts are Collaborations homebrewers Paul Bischeri & Patrick Martinez, Stone brewing is an iconic west coast brewery, but Abnormal Beer, & Stone like many other people, I like their attitude more So Many Flavors Going On than I like many of their porters or stouts. They make really good IPAs—some of my favorites— Neapolitan Dynamite is the latest stout but they have not been great at making porters or collaboration from Stone. There is so much going stouts. Then they started doing collaborations on in this stout, you may get lost. It contains with other breweries and homebrews. At least for chocolate, coffee, vanilla, and strawberry. It starts me, these beers are winners. The most notable of out with a good mouth feel with the chocolate and these is Farking Wheaton w00tstout. This beer is a coffee very dominant. Then there are hints of collaboration between Wil Wheaton (an actor and vanilla, but very little strawberry flavor. Its finish is an avid homebrewer), Drew Curtis (founder of the very dry. The dry finish isn’t my favorite taste, news aggregator site fark.com), and Greg Koch unless you are drinking a hop bomb IPA, but still a (then CEO of Stone brewing). After this success, solid stout. I rate this stout… 7-8/10. In full they have collaborated on many beers since and it disclosure, my wife thinks I am too harsh and rates has been, in this writer’s humble opinion, a huge this… 9/10. success. If you want to try a Stone dark beer, I recommend their collaborations over their regular offerings. I wish I could tell you why this is, but sadly some brewers have core competencies that are not as broad as others. This isn’t a bad thing—their IPAs are among the best in craft beer and their philosophy is one of the best in the craft beer business. But until I taste one of their regular beers that matches something like Neapolitan Dynamite—or any other collaboration—I will stick to the collaborations.

My bona fides: I like and drink a lot of beer. I tried brewing and made one good batch out of 7. I realized I was a better drinker than brewer.

36 LETTER FROM HELSINKI JOHN AND EVE HARVEY So here we have the Worldcon. Why didn’t the you, it was good to see the opening ceremony – name of the convention let you know where you very different from what I expected, and very were going to – perhaps Helsinki Worldcon or ‘Scandinavian’ containing local dancing and something like that? singing. Obviously the guests and committee were introduced, that is rather important! I forgot to ask the organisers at the convention, so I thought I’d start this with the question here. Given room size problems, the committee were very good and over the weekend made more So what was it like? Well, for me it was fantastic to rooms available which were of a larger size. be going to Helsinki again. I had been once to run a week’s course to Finnish bankers. That was my job in the 1980s and 90s – to train bankers, and I specialised in 3rd world banks. The fact that it was the 3rd world says a lot about the differences in Finland between then and now. John wasn’t with me, so I was looking forward to showing him the country too. Did I? No, it had changed so much that I couldn’t recognise anything so there was no way I could show him anything!

Anyway, that had nothing to do with the Scientist panel convention. For me – and I’m sorry for all the organisers who did so much hard work – it wasn’t I must admit, though, that John and I went to very that great for us. When I found out that all the few major programme items. We concentrated on convention was happening in one place, I thought the small, chatty offerings such as the excellent it was brilliant. However, I hadn’t known it would ‘Portrayal of the Scientist and Science in SF’ be in so many different rooms on different floors which had Adrian Tchaikovsky – the GoH for that you had to spend a long time wandering Novacon this year – and Ian Stewart – past around. And also, to my mind, there was too Novacon GoH . (If you didn’t know, John and I much on at the same time – are both members of the well over half a dozen Novacon committee.) programme items running concurrently, so there was Also there was ‘Why is Mars so bound to be a conflict. Also, Hard?’ about the failed the rooms weren’t always big missions. Then there were the enough. So although the presentations from all the programme looked really people wanting to organise good, it was difficult to actually future worldcons – in which attend. For instance, John and John and I got too excited I tried to get to the opening about the potential Worldcon ceremony, and though we were here in France, so offered them queuing for a long time, we our help. With a bit of luck could only have 2 seats they won’t want English people on the committee! separate from each other. Mind Doug Spencer and friend

37 JOHN AND EVE HARVEY

Another great fun item was the Fan Fund Auction taken by John, but there is a very similar one which actually had people who could live up to taken by Baron Dave Romm, who has since died. the roles. You can see his arm at the back of the two birthday girls. Very sad!) However, we spent the majority of our time meeting people. For me the main element for any convention is to meet old friends and make new ones, and with Worldcon it’s great to have to opportunity to meet people normally not at a UK convention. There were all the Aussies and the US friends we hadn’t seen since Loncon 3 or even longer which we tended to meet either at one of the bars in the convention area, or at the bar outside.

Unfortunately around the convention centre there were few places to have evening meals. So we after that first night we went back into Helsinki, and after wine and food and chatting with friends there wasn’t enough energy most evenings to make it back to the con! It sounds like we had a bad time – no! We had a fantastic time and were very pleased to be at the con. Thank you committee! In addition, Helsinki is brilliant, and so was Finland as a whole, so we’ve decided to go back and do the north of the country when the northern lights have arrived!!! This is a photo of a standard day, sitting in the bar next to the convention. The prices weren’t too fantastic, so you can see Rich Coad looking in his wallet to see if he’s got enough money, Tony Berry looking on enviously and Ric Cooper celebrating a bought beer! But we were not always lighthearted – sometimes we actually discussed things. I can’t remember what Lennart Uhlin and Doug Bell were talking about, but it looks serious. On the first night we stayed at the convention centre as there was a birthday party for Lena Jonsson and Lucy Huntzinger. (This photo was

38 HOW TO GET MORE EUROPE INTO FAN FUNDS (AND MORE YOU, TOO) ULRIKA O’BRIEN

One recent Saturday Wolf von Witting got in But, as I told Wolf, it’s possible that looking at touch rather out of the blue to ask my opinion on expanding the scope of TAFF among Europeans the Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund, and getting Europe by focusing exclusively or even primarily on the more involved in it. He didn’t call it that, but I flashy part, on who should be a candidate or a envisioned this effort as a sort of anti-Brexit move. delegate, is the wrong end of the stick, and not the Or perhaps more of a Eur-In move, though you’d most effective approach. The race for the shiny have to be r-e-a-l-l-y careful about how you laurel, for who will win the honor and the trip, is pronounce that. the most visible part of the Transatlantic Fan I have opinions about TAFF. Rather decided Fund, yes, but it’s not the only one, not the largest ones. This will not be news to those who know or most important. Insert tediously over-used me and apparently not to Wolf, either. And ever iceberg reference of your choice here, but the since the day I gratefully, sadly, exhaustedly put point is that the biggest part of the fund, the down the often-fraught burden of administering reason it exists, is the people who support it. And the fund 17 or so years ago, I don’t usually hesitate the most important part of a TAFF trip is the to voice even the controversial ones. Which my dozens or hundreds of fans who participate in that opinions often are, somehow. I am the opposite of trip in the hosting countries. anodyne, it seems. Despite that, I agreed to tell The best way to get more Europe into TAFF as Wolf what I thought. far as I’m concerned, and for Europe (or anyone, What Wolf wondered was whether it might put really) to get more out of TAFF, is to put more into people’s backs up if European fans were to band TAFF, and I don’t particularly mean money. I together and agree in advance on a single mean time, and attention, and care. At the risk of Continental candidate to nominate and support in getting all JFK on you, I think that the question the 2018 TAFF race. At first blush, it didn’t seem isn’t what TAFF can do for you, but what you can like a concern. Well, almost anything has the do for TAFF. Because in the end, what makes an potential to put people’s backs up when it comes to organization like TAFF go is service. And if you TAFF, of course, but this idea didn’t immediately want to get things out of it, you have to put the set the alarm klaxons off in my head. service in yourself, if not before the race, then International amity, Worldcons and fan funds certainly after. That’s just the pragmatic reality. getting more international in their scope, these all TAFF gets most attention when there’s an active seem like ideas that are very much at the cutting race on. Races are the exciting bit. But the best edge of fannish thought these days. But before I part happens when the race is over, when could get any of that out, Wolf let the other shoe someone actually gets to make a trip. If you pay drop. Would people read it as a ballot-stuffing more attention then, not just when there’s a move, a hostile insurgency, like unto the chance to send someone to the other side of the maneuverings of the Sad or Rabid Puppies, Atlantic, but when a winner is being selected or passim? Oh. Ah. There go those klaxons, now. I planning a trip to yours, that’s the real suppose if you put that particular construction on opportunity to start building connections. You it, there is a slight risk of Thermonuclear World only get one TAFF winner per side of the Atlantic War III, yes. per two-year cycle, but you can get dozens, scores,

39 ULRIKA O’BRIEN or hundreds of people involved in TAFF trips on Anything that someone might be interested to the receiving side. know about your area and how to get there is When someone has just won TAFF, once the crazy worth offering. It might turn out to be the very surreal feeling of euphoria wears off a little bit, best part of the delegate’s trip. they must plan their trip, figure out where they Another way to get more out of TAFF is to help will go, in what order, and for how long. Sure, promote it. Fandom has long since hit its Tower there is a target convention that the winner has of Babel moment. Fanzines and e-mail discussion pledged to attend, usually an Eastercon or a lists and even Usenet still exist, but they are a Worldcon, but a lot of winners travel for quite a rather small part of the raveled and patchy quilt bit longer than the weekend of the con. And that is fandom. Ironically, with the proliferation of when they get ready to plan that longer trip is ways of talking to each other, it’s actually harder when they stand in most need of local guidance, for any given pair of fans to find each other and and people to invite them to visit. That’s the time have conversations. Which is by now an old to reach out and offer a place to stay, to throw a complaint in these parts, but what it means for party, to host a pub outing, to act as tour guide in TAFF is that it takes more work from all your city, to take them to a particularly fannish or concerned to get it to work the way it’s supposed interesting local attraction, or whatever you can to. When I went to the UK in 1998, a great many do. It’s certainly not going to work for every of the fans I finally met in person were people I traveler to accept every invitation, but speaking had already met virtually, long before I even from experience, having invitations in hand when thought to stand for TAFF, through fanzines and putting together an itinerary is an absolute Usenet and even an old APA I used to belong to. godsend. The TAFF winner will be eternally And thanks to the phenomenon of lurking on grateful to you, I promise. Usenet, even more of them had ‘met’ me. We If you have a nearby fannish convention that were getting together in meatspace for the first happens soon before or after the TAFF target con, time, yes, but we weren’t total strangers. We it’s a great idea to check in with the con and see if already had a base of shared jokes and stories to they will issue an official invitation and build on, and shared acquaintances to gossip membership to the TAFF winner. The winner about. Oh, the things I learned about Greg may not even know about Pickersgill! And you, too, your con, and might be very probably. The old idea of happy to attend if invited. TAFF as a means for If you have a smaller local bringing together fans who fan event like a club meeting already had a relationship or a pub gathering that built on conversation in happens within the scope of print was still working fairly a potential trip, that too well. would make an excellent I haven’t asked either of destination to suggest to the them, but my guess is that TAFF winner. If you have when Anna Raftery and expertise in especially cheap Nina Horvath came over, train or air travel to your they’d never even heard of city, by all means offer it. most of the people they met

40 ULRIKA O’BRIEN over here. No blame to them, or anyone, it’s just evening quiz games, make a TAFF ballot one of how these things will often work these days. the items players must find to complete your Which means that the people they are meeting on scavenger hunt, or come up with your own clever their trip need to put out a bit more effort to meet and exciting ways to get the name and the TAFF winner halfway. In the US most of the information about the fund out there to your TAFF hosting seems to fall to us old fartes who members. have been doing this stuff for decades. It would And if you want to level up, and I say this be awesome to see more younger folks get knowing that I may finally have wandered into involved, but that, too, takes effort on the that controversial territory I was talking about receiving end. earlier, consider soliciting the seated TAFF So if there’s a TAFF race coming up, or going on, administrators to make your convention the target then you, yes you, can take a bit of extra of an upcoming TAFF race. This wouldn’t ownership and get the word out. Have a fanzine? happen overnight. It would require planning and How about interviewing the candidates, or coordination and building a base of enthusiasm. running their fannish bios, for your next issue? Because while Eastercons have traditionally been Don’t know too much about them? Do some the stated goal convention of Eastbound TAFF research, hunt up their vitae, or heck, get in touch races, except when the Worldcon was in Europe, and ask them directly, and then pub your ish about there’s no actual rule that says that a Eurocon, for it. Get into heated arguments online about the example, couldn’t be decided to be the target comparative merits of the candidates. (Okay, I’m instead. That’s up to the current administrators. half joking about that, but only half. Thanks to But tradition is a pretty powerful force in fandom, the Sad Puppies, the Hugos actually hit major perhaps more so in the hallowed halls of TAFF. I news outlets and became question on Jeopardy. think it would take a very organized effort to Never underestimate the public relations reach of convince a set of seated administrators that it’s a a good, enthusiastic mud fight.). Going to a good idea to move the target, and it probably convention soon? Print up some ballots and talk wouldn’t happen on the first attempt. You’d have up the race, and the candidates, and the fund to convince them that there’s enough genuine when you see your friends. Running a interest in, organization for, and support of, TAFF convention? Maybe you could insert some fan- to make the attempt successful, but if Continental fund programming. Hold an auction, sure, that’s Europeans have been demonstrating their interest great and we love you for it, but even better if you in TAFF and its delegates for a while, that would can include some concrete expositional nuggets go a long way to making the case, I should think. about what fan funds are, how they work, and So taking up my above suggestions would, I think, what they can mean to your event and the fans be an excellent way to start making that case. who attend it. Include a blurb about fan funds in And sure, since the current race is going to be a your program book, especially if you aspire to Westbound race, by all means field a Continental host current or future TAFF winners – by all European candidate. Or two. Or more. The means include links to the excellent and more the merrier. Big TAFF races are great – informative TAFF website that St. David they draw attention and enthusiasm from more Langford runs. Heck, link it on your website partisans and some of those partisans stay for the under other fannish institutions of possible long haul. But remember that the race and the interest. Feature fan funds questions in your trip are the glam part of TAFF. After the race is

41 ULRIKA O’BRIEN run, after the winner is announced and the trip’s So if you really want to get into TAFF, please been taken, the work still needs to be done, remember it means being willing to do the work. keeping the accounts, sending out the newsletters, It’s rewarding work; sometimes it’s even a lot of organizing the auctions, running the next race, fun. But you don’t get the glamour of the next keeping your temper when fuggheads tell you how TAFF win without it. to do your damn’ job. (And a lot of that work And though my title says ‘fan funds,’ I see I’ve could probably benefit from more volunteer help talked nothing but TAFF so far. That’s because too – here I tip my hat to St. Claire Brialey, who TAFF is just what I know best. But I would keeps the accounts for UK TAFF winners in order imagine that virtually everything I have to say and makes sure the checks all clear and money applies equally to GUFF, and any other fund gets where it needs to go. If the winner of the where the Anglophone fandoms are currently next race is on the continent, it would be very dominant, and others want to play. If you want to helpful if there were someone like Claire keeping get more out of anything, put more into it, and the lights on for TAFF in Euro-denominated putting more in means work. Pretty prosaic, but funds, and that doesn’t necessarily have to be the so many things are, at bottom, prosaic. So pull winner, so long as its someone responsible who’s your boots on, and get moving! willing to take on the job for at least two years.)

42 ACTION / REACTION ANDY HOOPER NIC FAREY Who died and made Nic Farey Pope of the FAAn awards? Somehow, in about four years, we have gone from a state where I accepted all votes cast, no matter how erroneous or wrong-headed, I suspect we’ll have to consult Ansible for any including the famous example of calling the late likely candidate of demise, or wait for a plume of Elmer Perdue the Best New Fan of 1997, to a white smoke to emerge over Toronto. situation where you think you could dictate to I’m sure, however, that everyone appreciates your Robert Lichtman which of his fanzines is “eligible” apparent difficulty in winnowing the prodigious for a given year's award. output of Lichtman in any given year.

Various changes to the categories or the number of choices cast are perhaps frustrating, but not as disturbing as the truncation of options around voting overall - no voting for yourself, no voting for the admin, no votes for things that didn’t come out in the calendar year as defined by the admin - and to what end? What would you hope to accomplish I agree with you about all the limitations you by making these changes? The sole motive in quote except for the last. The original concept of creating the awards was to allow people to give out the awards was clearly stated as recognition for egoboo -- what does it matter if they bollux up the work published in the previous calendar year. bategories, or name a zine that failed to appear I can’t think of a good argument for doing since December of the previous anything else. year? If a fan felt strongly enough about a choice to make it and send it to me, I entered it into the record. I can’t think of a good argument for doing anything else.

All of this happened “Fannish judgement” will InTheBar, of course, and I had vary in quality between to actually read Rob Jackson’s the likes of ourselves, who ponderous fanzine to find out I like to think submit about it, which is a whole thoughtfully considered ‘nother issue. votes, and others who may I’m all for returning to the awake from their wine- same general system that induced stupor sometime allowed for larger scores and in March or April and more egoboo, but I hope you adhere to the baby duck would go back to trusting principle. fannish judgement as well, because that always served me well when I had the job.

43 ANDY HOOPER NIC FAREY

I have all these suspicions around your motives in By your logic, Gone With the Wind could win the appointing yourself the eligibility police - are you Oscar for Best Movie in 2018, assuming enough going to write back to voters and correct their voters had seen it for the first time in 2017. choices if they vote for an artist that didn’t put out Ladies and gentlemen, a rare occurrence of any work last year? Will you make them vote until utter incoherence from the usually sane Mr. they get it right, and choose someone who was Hooper. active? I mean, I’ve spent the last several months And actually, yes, I would question a vote for orbiting back to 1978 and 1962 and other years some person or zine that I was unaware of preserved in the pages of genzines of the past, like having any skin in the game. The voter should Outworlds and Granfalloon and Warhoon. As far as have the opportunity to cite the work they I’m concerned, Susan Wood has been the best deemed vote-worthy, or to go “Oops!” writer of 2017, with competition from Tom Perry, Eric Lindsay and Doc Lowndes - I suppose you’d force me to vote for Eric Lindsay since he’s the only one I named who’s still alive. Honestly, Nic, what would be a better application for your time, trying to get more disinterested people to vote for the “right” choices, or collaborating with me on the long-delayed publication of Fanthology 1962? The fear of picking something “wrong” is the single most common reason I have heard people give for not voting in recent years. My response was to say that there are no wrong votes, and to let people write in what or whomever they liked. I honestly don't think I ever had less than 40 people cast ballots, and sometimes I got more than 60, and no dead people or fanzines that were not published in the previous year ever won anything.

One of the things I’ve run into in my 1970s I’ve got no doubt at all that’s a fascinating read, fanzine reading is some of the conversation that and if you have scans of those ishes I’d be very arose around the creation of the Faan Awards interested to peruse them myself. back in 1976. I read Issue #2 of The Zine Fan, It’s indeed amusing to note Terry Carr’s edited by Linda Bushyager – issue #1 laid out the criticism of the award name, though (and basic rules and principles of the awards, and #2 perhaps because it’s now ingrained), it’s hard to contained fandom’s replies. All these fans wrote in imagine another that isn’t even worse. The and responded to the proposal: Terry Carr, Terry “Russies”? The “Palmers”? (The estate of Len Jeeves, Don Markstein, Darrol Pardoe, Norman Deighton may sue.) “The Comet Awards” Hochberg, Sam Long, Bushyager, Jeff Smith, might have traction, but that’s almost certainly Lesleigh Luttrell, Jeff Smith, Mike Shoemaker, being used for something else already. Tom Digby, Don D’Ammassa, Moshe Feder, I’m sure at least one person might forcefully Harry Warner Jr., George Flynn, Bill Bowers, wish that they were the “Arnies”, but I believe Mike Glyer, Ruth Berman, Cy Chauvin and Ben we’ll successfully resist that campaign. Indick. I was highly amused to see Terry Carr

44 ANDY HOOPER NIC FAREY remark that the name of the award was truly terrible, perhaps even worse than the idea of re- As Baron Dave Romm noted in his photo-essay naming the Fan Hugos the “Pong Awards.” Most of Minicon in these pages, the “greying of correspondents seemed to agree, but no one had a fandom” goes along with an “ancillary greening better idea they could agree on, and so began of fandom”, although there’s little indication what I once called “Our Unknown Tradition.” that the newer generations are at all seized with the fanzine tradition, and by that I mean What really impressed me about that conversation fanzine-as-artifact rather than ephemeral was the sense of a populous and enthusiastic chatter in any number of online fora. fandom, overflowing with opinions about fanzines and fan activity. Despite the existence of the Checkpoint Poll, the Locus Poll, the Black Hole Awards and numerous serious and farcical popularity contests that focused on fandom and its activities, there was still a general consensus that another set of awards with a particularly Trufannish cast was just what we needed. The thirst for egoboo practically leaps from the page.

That thirst has always had a paradoxical effect on I’ll agree to a point that topic can have an fandom; the more attention we crave, the more influence, and undoubtedly some voters might we seek to direct it at things we love – in our salad have been attracted by your Worldcon days, science fiction and fantasy, but eventually, scholarship just as others may have been put off. sports cars, long-imagined travel, robot jazz and Style, readability and consistency are also high- Georgette Heyer all exert their hypnotic appeal. I scoring factors for me, and let’s not forget that don’t feel like winning the Faan Award for Best awful layout and/or editorial cluelessness can Writer this year was really a tribute to me as doom the best writing. much as it was to the 1939 Worldcon, which I Examples from 2017 (other than yourself) that spent so much of my time writing about in 2016. have engaged my attention: Fishlifters, I think fans tend to vote for subject choice as stylistically and often thematically consistent, much as superior execution – memorials for the quality always seems effortless; Graham particularly beloved fans or career-spanning Charnock, again stylistically consistent with an anthologies have historically been given a lot of often provocative worldview, not to mention attention by award voters. Something that frequency of publication; Simon Ounsley, engages people’s enthusiasm, encourages them to whose output has been less in quantity, but reply with praise and egoboo. So that may be our frankly Godlike in its brilliance, and as of the first problem – sometimes it feels as though we time of writing my clear #1. lack things worth remembering when ballots are due.

Nic, I’m sorry I haven’t played this game properly. I haven’t been able to make myself role-play Hamilton Burger, not least because I don’t feel that much attachment to the procedures and

45 ANDY HOOPER NIC FAREY particulars of the awards. They have evolved To the baffled reader: I’ve been rewatching perpetually since Arnie and Joyce brought them classic Perry Mason, and had suggested to Andy back in the mid 1990s. In fact, I feel like all the that we might try to present this argument in tinkering that I did myself in my tenure as the adversarial tradition. Obviously that didn’t administrator, introducing all these new work out. categories – perhaps someone needs to hit some As far as “all those new categories”, there’s a reset button and just take us back to 4 awards for balance between that and your suggestion of a Best Writer, Best Artist, Best Fanzine and Best reversion to a basic four awards. It makes sense Letterhack. But that really wouldn’t help to me that there should be a differentiation encourage more people to vote either. between the likes of Flag, Vibrator or Opuntia and larger-scale productions such as Chunga, Challenger or BEAM. Then again, it’s arguable that Banana Wings has certainly more than occasionally has the feel of a personal zine, whereas conversely the production values of Random Jottings put it up there with the best. I’m in favor of maintaining this differentiation, and also keeping the “Special Publication/One- Off ” award, if there are enough candidates to qualify. Repurposing that as “Best Single Issue” as was done 2013-15 just seemed like a sop to the so-called “Rule of LAWS”. “Best Cover”, yes also, since it just seems, well, nice to do. “Best Website”, not so much, with all due deference to Magister Burns, the special award given to efanzines in 2004 should perhaps have been left at that. If we’re going to honor online activity, I think we should either define it much more broadly, or, the view I’m increasingly coming to, is that we should stick firmly if prehistorically to the recognition of “fanzine-as- artifact” and the contributors thereto. When the awards were undertaken in the 1970s, they represented an active and self-sufficient community that feared being swallowed up by a larger fandom that didn’t like to do the same stuff as us. The Hugo Award gave out a certain amount of egoboo, but there were so many hungry writers and artists and editors in the field that it seemed like they deserved to be recognized. Popularity polls were almost

46 ANDY HOOPER NIC FAREY mandatory for a focal point fanzine – and people voted in significant numbers. Maybe because we wanted to place well ourselves? It all seemed to indicate that there was a general hunger for the kind of recognition that awards represent, while now, I’m not sure how many people want to win a FAAn award.

But then things happen like The White Notebooks I’m not at all sure what you’re getting at with the winning this past spring, when it just felt so great Rocky Horror allusion to Pete’s excellent zine to see Pete win – he was clearly very pleased too, (which I’ve been enamored of since the off), but but it just felt like something unexpectedly whatever it is makes me queasy. wonderful had happened to me as well. I felt like Tim Curry in Rocky Horror: “I didn’t make him for you!”

I now think making lists of “eligible” items and parties is one good step to encourage people to vote. But I also think that if we are to continue to I agree that there are others, including the names issue the awards, we need to attract the interest of you cite, operating in what we’d surely recognize people who are doing the same things we do, as the “fanzine tradition”. Are they even aware without necessarily being aware of it. Or in some of “our” awards? Do they give a Rat Sass? I’d cases they are – some of these guys, Andrew suspect, or at least like to think that their output Ivamy, Charles Rector – seem to publish a new is informed by our history. fanzine every ten minutes – did they vote? Why Bloggers, nah (as noted above). not? If we asked Steve Erickson to promote the Let’s continue to honor what we deem worthy, FAAn awards at Amazing, or sent a release for and if we’re all so shamelessly retro and dying Dave Langford every month or so, would that out, well then, that’s what we are... increase interest? If you could get the various bloggers who are nominated for the Hugo for Best Fanzine to encourage their followers to vote, I bet we’d get a lot of votes, and we’d be relieved of the onus of giving awards to ourselves very quickly. I said “our” awards, intending to refer to the Mesozoic purveyors of that “fanzine tradition” I had a small flash when I read your reference to we doggedly adhere to, and thus I cannot help “our awards.” Perhaps all awards are exercises in but agree with your statement that “all awards defining what is ours, who we are, what we do. At are [...] defining”. the moment, I feel much more interest in doing A broader voter pool, I suggest, could be more the work and keeping the conversation alive than representative of the larger swath of fanzines out in worrying over which of us is nominally the best there, rather than just a reiteration of the same or the favorite or the people’s choice. My mailing old names; and after all, we agree that the list has shrunk steadily for two decades, and I widespread bestowing of the ‘boo is what it’s all need to conduct an active search for new names about. to add to it. I received 20 letters of comment on

47 ANDY HOOPER NIC FAREY

Flag #19 - and every one was from a male fan. As to command of the field, I doubt there are The younger generation of fandom doesn’t seem many who might have sampled a large to suffer from the same kind of demographic proportion of the available publications, with the imbalance, and neither did the fandom of 1978 possible exception of noted most frequent loccers that I’ve been enjoying so much lately. It all Lloyd Penney, Milt Stevens (RIP) and John contributes to the feeling that things are skewed Purcell (70, 35 and 24 locs respectively logged in somehow, from the course we we set out to take. 2017 at the time of writing). I’m trying a variety of things - reaching out for Thus “cluelessness” isn’t defined as you imply, an correspondents on Facebook, mining other letter indicator of poor command. You (or any other columns, trying to write more letters of comment voter) may only be sufficiently familiar with a myself. Although Murray made me one of the restricted amount of the work published this nominating grandees for the awards this year, I year, but in my book that doesn’t disqualify you felt like my command of the field was alarmingly from voting for those which you liked best. True poor. I hope I can get a better grip on things this cluelessness consists of voting for something or year - I’d hate to have my vote excluded for someone you may erroneously consider must have cluelessness.... had some input, without pausing to consider whether that contribution actually exists. Not, I’d judge, a trap into which you personally would fall.

POSTCARD FROM HELSINKI

YLVA SPÅNGBERG

WorldCon in Scandinavia, who would have dared think it a decade or two ago! But here it is. And here I am. Its only my second time in Finland proper, and to a Swede Finland is like being home without understanding the language. Things look and feel the same – but if I ask bus drivers if they’ll stop at Whatever, I don’t understand the answer. Consequently, Ive done some involuntary sight-seeing. But only around midnight, so Ill call it darkness-staring instead. Its also only my third WorldCon after 40+ years in fandom, because I don’t like big cons. But Finnish fandom has worked its magic again. Almost 6000 attendants, yet my feeling is more like 600 – because I keep running into people I know. Im happy here! I barely attended the programme, so no comments there. But Saturday night’s thunderstorm was spectacular. Maybe the concom didn’t organize it, and maybe they did. Finnish fandom can do anything. Want to tell you more, but Im running out of space and want to post this, so cheers! Ylva

48 THE SPIRIT OF FANAC

NOT RUSH

Begin the day with a shiny badge And companions, actifannish Look for the place that may be so slannish And the magic hum that sets your Friday mood

Off on your way to that fanzine lounge There is goshwow in those pages Of that fanac of past ages Demanding just the usual for a Blat! or Attitude

Invisible eyetracks, left on the page Brighten the fan room with their secret energy Typewritten feedback on a timebinding line Bearing the gift of egoboo, almost free.

And now, new machinery, making modern fanac Yet still stays open-hearted, we finish what we started We never look to question your honesty, yeah your honesty Ghu, Roscoe, we believe in the freedom to write this But shitty small prizes require compromises That belie the illusion that there is a "we"

Do pixels equally crackle with life, As paper did with an intrinsic energy? Where is the feedback? Where is the smile? Where is the gift that we had? No longer free.

Now the words of the faneds are written on Facebook walls And they're all balls Faint echoes of the ghosts of oldfen, of oldfen… Lichtman!

Original song:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFivuv5jIPM

Lyrical manipulation by Tracy Benton, Nic Farey, Ulrika O’Brien and not Graham Charnock...

49 SUSCIPE VERBUM

THE READERSHIP

Loc illos and comment mostly by Ulrika. in a timely fashion. As long as I keep up, I guess… like that’s going to happen… (Nic, I will also send this to Jim…I am sure he’ll be up to snuff with DENNY E MARSHALL issue 12.) April 1 The passing of Peter Weston and Dave Holmes… we are of the age, I guess, where we are going to lose our friends. We will continue to lose the good In Beam #11 noticed that on your review of ‘uns, and the rest of us, too, for as long as it takes. Tightbeam #275 you used two of my drawings in As long as there is someone left to honour those the review with that issue. Think this is the first past, they will not be forgotten. In every month’s time had art in a fanzine that I didn’t submit to. Ansible, Dave Langford must be truly tired of the Most zines ask. huge RIP list he puts in each issue. Some months, [Drum kit (p29)], The title of the drawing is the list is enormous. More absent friends, all the “Beats”. Unlike as stated in the review this is not a time. female drum kit but a metaphor for feeling the Don D’ammassa’s Practical Joke War got some music in your head. (Inside you). [Tightbeam laughs out of me, mostly because my two brothers #275 cover (p27)], the title of the drawing is and I tried that same kind of thing, a few jokes “Peeking Thru”. here and there, and it got us spanked until we couldn’t walk properly. The idea of a chunk of Nic muttered something about, “It was a pure sodium in a water-soluble gel, and then REVIEW,” but you’re right, of course, it’s flushed…this idea will rise again, I have no doubt. always best to check with the artist before If I hear at a con a hotel’s septic system exploding, using their art. Our bad. I shall flog Nic I’d have no choice but to suspect Don, or anyone within an inch for this, unless he’s into flogging else who’s read this article. No, no! It wasn’t me… in which case I shall have to think up something truly unpleasant. Our apologies. – Ah, to be considered artwork… I have heard of USO other mass gatherings of the naked as artwork, but it’s not something I’d do, blue paint or not. I Nic mutters further: I'm actually not inclined guess hundreds, if not thousands, of wobbly bits to apologize for "quoting" artwork which I see here and there would not be out of place in this, as equivalent to quoting text, which reviewers and could (maybe) be easily ignored. I admit that typically do no ask permission for. In either one thought I had was thousands of white hats to case credit is given to the creator. Fanartists are set the Guinness record for biggest collection of such a precious species, aren't they…? Smurfs… Many years ago, we visited with a dear friend of LLOYD PENNEY ours in the southern reaches of Ontario, and we April 6 spent a weekend on the farm. We rounded up loose horses, generally relaxed, and in the mornings, Yvonne would go to the henhouse to Thank you, kind sir, for Beam 11! Yes, I am loccing gather eggs for breakfast. She would be chased by it already, I have ploughed my way through so Irving, a tough old rooster who was just doing his many zines lately locwise, so I can start responding roosterly duties in protecting the hens and their

50 SUSCIPE VERBUM eggs, and perhaps doing them a little too well. What I wouldn’t give to join you all again there We’d laugh about it, and go home. Another some fine day. weekend on the farm came about the next year, Ah, Peter Weston has been the subject of more and we went down for another relaxing weekend, than a few zine articles, lately…I wish he was still but Yvonne’s gathering the eggs was a little easier with us, he’d be so chuffed. The key words I see in this time around, for Irving was not there and Martin Tudor’s article…fun, charm, successful, presumably derelict. Dinner on Saturday night innovative, generous, largesse, driving, persevered, was, as you might be expecting, chicken. Yvonne rejuvenating, giving. Seems to sum up Peter was told she would especially enjoy dinner that Weston, and I never met him. night…we were dining on Irving. All I can say is, as said above, a tough old rooster. Points of divergence…you’ve got an even chance to making the right decisions at the right time. Aha! Egoboo is again mine! My thanks to Jacq Sometimes, I feel that I made some poor decisions and JoHn for their review of Tightbeam 275. I in my life, and didn’t handle my PoDs quite right. will happily take the description of ‘thankfully I could just sign myself off as a screw-up, and ubiquitous’, mostly because it sounds much better some might easily agree. My worklife is honestly a than ‘Oh, Ghod, not HIM again?!’ Come on into shambles, and I question most things I’ve done, the Tightbeam locol, Jacq, the water’s fine! Your except for one very vital PoD…I met Yvonne. We own contributions might get other fannes into will mark our 34th anniversary next month, and if contributing, too. You never know… Speaking of I have done anything right with my life, it is which, Jacq and Alan White (I got to wish him meeting and marrying Yvonne Robert, and I Happy Birthday on LinkedIn, of all e-places…), happily state that for all to read. great article on Anna Raftery’s visit to Vegas. And now for the loccol, home away from home… I am reading my own loc, and I think I must have been overly tired when I wrote it. I now do have a little work, but it is horrific telephone solicitation, and not worthy of further mention, except that it does pull in a paycheque, and allows me to look for something better. There are irons in the fire, and hopes are still high. (Had a great telephone interview this afternoon, so good thoughts, good thoughts…) It’s getting close to dinner time, and Yvonne’s quite busy getting a new blouse ready, so I will look after dinner myself. Time to fold it up, and start thinking of other things. Thank you for a nice-sized, unreduced Beam, and I hope you do it again the next time. Jim, get well soon, and see you both.

I don’t think you should give up prematurely on getting naked for art, Lloyd. The idea has loads of potential. This could be the means to

51 SUSCIPE VERBUM wobbling your way to international fame. – seems to have been just what he always USO needed. At any rate, their marriage appears to Nic writes: Jim Trash is quite well. be going strong, lo these many years later, where his previous ones… did not. And the Ian Sorensen Thrifty Scotsman Persona goes CUDDLES way back, I see. – USO April 27/28 MARK PLUMMER As memory serves, Ellison met Sue at Albacon 86 May 3 in the Dealers Room, where she was working at Rog Peyton’s Andromeda tables. Ellison had I did skim Beam #11 when the electronic copy turned up to sign books before his GOH speech. arrived but I admit I was holding out for the paper When Sue told him she would deal with him after version, and it turns out to be very handsome her customer, he immediately fumed “Do you indeed. Generally I’m all in favour of metrication know who I am?” I don’t recall her reply word for but there’s just something intrinsically more word but basically it was along the lines of: I don’t appealing about your imperial paper sizes, and care because I’m working here! Rog turned up at Beam #11 looks particularly slick with its heavy this point and Ellison said to him “Oooh, I like stock centre-stapled covers. her!” The rest, they say, is history. And there’s so much in it. I'd remembered the Clarification: Ellison actually spoke to Rog after stuff about Peter and Dave from skimming the his GOH speech, asking about Susan. Rog electronic copy, and also the TAFF segment, the confirmed that Sue didn’t take shit from anyone so fanzine review, Lee Wood’s NZ tales and so on, Ellison was lucky she had been polite! That’s when but looking again through the paper version he said “Oooh I like her!” there's so much more. There’s also a back story to Ellison being at Although it is the Peter and Dave stuff that Albacon. He was discussed as a potential guest for primarily grabs my attention. I am a little 1985 but convincing Iain Sorensen was difficult surprised to hear you saying you didn’t know Pete (he was the Treasurer) but finally, Joan Paterson well, but also not. In my mind you’re perhaps told him that HE would fill the hall (the huge disproportionately associated with Birmingham Logie Baird room at the Central) and that was all for somebody who never lived there -- you didn’t, he needed to hear – chaaching! did you? -- and the only real reason I can think of Ah, the heady days of 1980’s fandom! for that is that I first encountered you in Birmingham, at the 1986 UFP con you ran with Kim in the very hotel that's just hosted this year’s Harlan was, as it happens, the first person to Eastercon. Subsequently there were all those field the idea of Hal & I getting married (long Novacons obviously, but there are still plenty of before we were even a couple), so I am people I’ve been seeing there for even longer who particularly tickled to get the story of how he don’t have that mental connection for me unless and Susan met. As far as I can tell, she they actually live there. Perhaps it's your continues to take no shit from him, and it pronounced Brummie accent...

52 SUSCIPE VERBUM

So maybe that’s why on one level I sort of expected you would know Peter well, but at the same time I keep being surprised by how many people say they didn’t really know him so what’s one more? It’s not necessarily a comment on Peter per se, but perhaps rather more on the way that fandom results in lots of relationships that might be described as close acquaintances. I don’t know. Then again, I’d balk at saying I knew Peter well despite intermittent convention acquaintance over twenty years, coexistence on various elists, and fanzine interactions. I enjoyed Prolapse/Relapse enormously and can certainly relate to Martin’s description of Peter as a mentor and evangelist but was always conscious of that generational gulf. In particular I’m very aware that my personal long fannish timescales -- two or three decades, so under normal circumstances not inconsiderable -- are as nothing to so many of my friends and acquaintances who are carrying on conversations in one of those Little Magazines. That seems a bit they’ve been having on and off since the tail end thin but I don’t know what else to say. And Kev of the Second Schleswig War. You’re the was good on the Tunick event. I’d heard about it, honourable exception here, Nic, given we've and seen pictures, but I liked the insider known each other for... what is it, about 73 years perspective. When “Teacher Mandy” said “she’d now? never done anything like this before” I assume she was talking about generic public nudity. I may be By way of balance, I didn’t know Dave Holmes wrong, but I’m pretty sure wandering around Hull well despite nearly thirty years of Novacons in the early morning, naked and painted blue including a fair few when we were both regular hasn’t been common practice for anybody since inhabitants of the dealers’ room. There’s no the Roman occupation so being new to it can particular reason for that; he always seemed like a safely be taken as a given. perfectly decent bloke, somebody I would get along with, but for some reason we never Good letter column too, although I’ll pick up on connected, just a few brief exchanges across a just one thing. You say in a response to Skel, ‘It dealers’ table, enthusing about something or other, did give me pause for thought that if that year’s and latterly at the last night beer tasting similarly. I ish of Trap Door (and also the subsequent two hadn’t really thought about it, but yes, I can years) was “Best Single Issue”, then shurely it absolutely see that the two of you are of a type should have also been “Best Genzine”?’ Well, not all that common in the fan community. maybe. Clearly I can’t speak for anybody else here, but I know that when I think about best Aside from your obitzine coverage, I think I really genzine -- and the other ‘publication’ FAAn have to say something about ‘Annie and Nicky’ categories -- there are several facets to consider but I’m not sure what. Great piece, really and any one title might not be the best at all of unexpected here or indeed anywhere. Well, maybe them. Sniffing Gussets might be impeccably

53 SUSCIPE VERBUM

presented with a great fannish feel to it, but Puke! JERRY “KILLER” KAUFMAN might have the better writing and so on. And, I May 7 would submit, frequency of publication could also be a factor. That’s not to say that a good annual couldn’t be better than a monthly, but if the best Quite a good issue of BEAM, I’d say. Thanks single issue of the year is an annual and a again for sending it. Teddy Harvia’s cover is a quarterly produces the second, third, fourth and delightful play of words and numbers, and Steve fifth best issues, which is the better fanzine? I'm Stiles’ back cover continues his run of horror/sf/ trying to speak genuinely objectively here, and not Lovecraftian art. The green alien in the fire seems as the co-editor of an to be enjoying itself entirely too much. aspirational quarterly... I never knew Dave Holmes but found your and Theresa Derwin’s I, of course, didn’t know memories of him painted a Pete at all well. I met clear picture of a much- him first at the 1998 loved and much-missed Eastercon, after a panel friend. We Seattle fans have on fandom or fan funds gone through the loss of or something, that I had dear friends, ones well- been on. Pete came up known to us but who didn’t and introduced himself, have many connections to and explained that he fandom at large. Would had not voted for me for that we could all share TAFF that year, because these wonderful people at the time of the voting before they left us instead of he hadn’t thought that I after. was The Right Sort of Fan I don’t think I was on the for TAFF, but that after mailing list for Harbinger, so hearing me speak on the Don D’Ammassa’s “The panel he had entirely Practical Joke War” was changed his mind and new to me. (Even if I did was pleased that I had won, after all. I am read it before, it’s new for all practical purposes.) I always happy to know someone who is able to used to hear stories about such pranks, usually by change their minds on receiving new and students at one or another major university. Stuff better evidence and admit they were wrong like Volkswagens disassembled and then about something. I think that shows a reassembled inside someone’s dorm room. Don’s largeness of mind and maturity of spirit that is anecdotes are a mix of funny and scary - I kept always worth emulating. So I was very pleased waiting for the climax of several stories to be, to meet Pete when and how I did. I’m sorry I “Then I spent the next three months in a full-body never knew him better. – USO cast.” Allison Scott's “Follysophy” of running a convention, especially the program, is very much

54 SUSCIPE VERBUM in line with my own ideas of what to aim for. Of notice the gaps, the segues, or the impossible course, one is limited in striving for excellence and juxtapositions. The stories I’m telling myself in novelty by the human resources available. Who’s sleep are true while they happen. (I used to have actually going to be in attendance? Who can you dreams in which I knew I was dreaming, and tried entice with only a free membership to offer (and to direct them or to do things like flying, but I for a smaller convention, maybe not even that)? haven’t had a lucid dream in a long time.) Over all, I can say her article tempts me to come It was very pleasant to see a letter from John to Britain again next year to attend Follycon. (And Bangsund lead off the letter column. there’s lots of the UK we haven’t visited.) I think you can tell I got tired part-way through I loved Kevin McVeigh’s account of being an art this letter. object in Spencer Tunick’s “installation.” Or would it be better termed a “performance”? I I hereby relieve you of the need to send me a think of installations as being less ephemeral. paper copy of BEAM. Next issue I will either print it out myself (but in black and white) or I will I wonder if Lee Wood knows our friends Marilyn read it on-screen. Holt and Cliff Wind? (They could be Facebook friends.) Marilyn and Cliff own a ranch in Kitsap And perhaps next year we will see you in Toronto. County (across Puget Sound from King County in which we live) and raise organic chickens (among other edible flora and fauna). I believe they can Well, hey, you’ll probably see me next month share stories of chicken butchering with Lee. I in Seattle. And at least we finally, FINALLY have never done this myself, but things could have have some information about dates and hotel been different - my maternal grandfather ran a for Toronto. I was getting to the point of th kosher butcher shop in Cleveland, Ohio, and suggesting Nic’s 60 birthday party as an several of my uncles worked there, too. alternative to Corflu. At least we know when that IS. And as for myself, I inevitably get tired Graham James and the team of Jacqueline partway through writing letters of comment, Monahan and John Wesley Hardin gave me which is why I have what may be fandom’s entertaining reads, but not much in the way of largest collection of unfinished, unsent LoCs. comments. I will say that I was a member of the Now that I’m co-editing BEAM, I find I am N3F for a couple of years. They had a function tempted to send us my partial LoC on BEAM room in which to greet people at my first #5. At least I can feel reasonably certain that I convention, Tricon (the 1966 Worldcon) and I met won’t get WAHFed. I’m also coming to the several life-long friends through their conclusion that it’s okay for me not to Welcommittee, round-robin letters, and so forth. comment about every single aspect of a I don't do Twitter, but I do see Lilian Edwards’ fanzine in order to send a LoC. It’s rare that I Facebook page. “That Conrep in Full” captures have something genuinely interesting to say her style quite well. about an entire fanzine. – USO More appreciative comments: Loved the Nic writes: And thanks for the check to cover photojournalism for Anna Raftery’s Las Vegas the printing costs of your ish. That may well visit, and Martin Tudor’s Pete Weston have ensured you'll guiltily receive this one appreciation. Your own dream-piece, “Annie and also. Nicky,” was bittersweet, strange, and sad. Dream logic isn’t logical, but while I’m dreaming, I don’t

55 SHAMELESS PAGE FILLER STOLEN FROM PAUL DI FILIPPO

56 SUSCIPE VERBUM

JOHN NIELSEN-HALL pages, so blame can be appropriately June 12 assigned.

This is isn’t a LoC, not really. I enjoyed the ish, but I basically wanted to complain about the scurrilous verse, “Johnny It’s Too Bad”. I know Charnock has had a hand in this too. I recognise the graphic. This is the third go I have had at this missive. I don’t want to sound sorry for myself, ridiculously willing to be offended or just a miserable old git. Its just that wherever you got the idea from that I am against the NHS, an organisation I depend on for merely to go on walking around, you should regard that source as wholly unreliable. There is much more I could say but it wont help. My sensauma seems to have been washed away with the impurities in my system. Sorry. I’m sorry also you have recently had to get up close and personal with what passes for healthcare in the US of A with a case of suppurating bum. I sympathise - I had a case of suppurating leg a couple of years back. I hope you are quite CHUCK CONNOR recovered. I'm still putting anti-bacterial cream on June 27 my leg. More as a talisman against it ever happening again. I dunno if there is anything I can do against the next issue of BEAM. Perhaps Don’t get involved with fandom much these days just ask for it not to be sent? (my sainted other half has COPD, and it looks like we’re going to get to the ‘portable oxygen’ stage quicker than we both thought) – however, grazing Let me guess, you also have a terrible pain in the editorial of Beam #11 I was suddenly all the diodes down your left side? But don’t confronted with two ghosts from the past – Ken worry, surely the Tories will eventually come Cheslin and John D. Rickett. The memories up with a scheme for importing American-style generated come from the 1980s (Ken) and the healthcare to Britain so you can really have 1990s (John) – and it’s odd to remember they both something to complain about, rather than died in 2000. mere scurrilous verse in BEAM. Cheerio! – The memories of Ken are mostly from fanzines, a USO couple of Birmingham conventions (Ken: “Have Nic writes: And Grah whined about his you got any elastic bands on you?” And when I authorship being insufficiently clear. Having fished out 3 from a jacket pocket, he’d started thought about that, we've made some changes ‘fixing’ his right arm – Heath Robinson to the to the song parody credits directly on their end) and a weekend with him, Jean, and Guinness

57 SUSCIPE VERBUM the three-legged cat. I’d smuggled some Roneo ink That plus the weekends ‘minding’ him for Josie, to him as Jean’d previously forbidden him to try and trying to encourage him to stop smoking and sort his old machine out, as a standby for his (around 40 to 60 Gitanes pr day – non-tipped) photocopier. I was always a Gestetner fan, but along with his drinking. he’d only used a Roneo, which was a different When he passed away, Josie rang me (Sunday inking system. I remember being shown the fabled morning – I was still living in Suffolk, and was map that he’d often mentioned in Pieces of Eight – bagging up some magazines and fanzines for him) though now I cannot remember what it was all and asked if I could pass the news on to the fans about, except that it was massive – something like he know. Then at his ‘funeral’ I drove Mic Rogers 4ft x 6ft backed onto plywood. Both John and I and Alan Sullivan to Uley, where a bunch of us sat kept him afloat in many respects – Ken was through the Humanitarian Service reading that forever skint, and I don’t think he got to draw his the vicar had concocted from what I’d written – State pension before he died – I’d add some paper all the time wondering who the fuck had picked and toner to an order I’d place, and get the out the music because it certainly wasn’t John – no suppliers to split the delivery to two addresses. Teutonic/Wagner – bloody Sibelius of all things – Can’t remember how I got to hear of his death – while the Pieces of Eight crew were all willing him but something in the back of my mind says that to push the coffin lid off, sit up, and say “Got he died of a heart attack in a shop doorway, and you!” Only he never did. that Jean was with him, in that cranky mobility scooter they’d bought secondhand, and that never That was the funeral where all three of his ex- worked properly. I also remember Ken sitting wives turned up – in black, despite John down on the Saturday afternoon, and casually specifically requesting no black, only bright mentioning that his son, Matt, was going to be colours. touring America. Matt was bassist for Ned’s Not sure what happened to Josie come the finish. I Atomic Dustbin, and it was their first US tour. got pulled into the incomplete will dispute (I was a John was something else. I’d been based in PJHQ witness back in the Snaresbrook period) but the Northwood for a fair part of the 1990s, and after old bugger never filed it (AFAIK) – and John & some fanzine chit-chat I ended up meeting him on Josie were never officially married. a regular basis – not only at the London pub So, if you did any pieces on either of them, and meetings, but also at the Kings Cross Pieces of can remember where they might be, then I’d Eight meetings (Mic Rogers, Alan Sullivan, Chris greatly appreciate being pointed towards them. Carne, etc.) Visited him when Josie and he still Again, many thanks for reviving some wonderful had the Snaresbrook place – and then when they memories that I’ve not really touched on for a moved out to Uley (Willow Cottage). John had lost decade and more the confidence to drive after his Honda had been t-boned while he was coming out of a Snaresbrook junction – so when Josie broke her kneecap falling over some of the dog’s toys, I Thanks for sharing the memories of Ken and ended up chauffeuring him around bits of John, Chuck. I think there’s a special place in Gloucestershire in my old shagged out Mazda 626 heaven for those who help prop up indigent Exec. Also ferried him up and back from Attitude fans in the pursuit of their fanac, so good on – which was the last time I saw Peter Weston, also you for that. I’ll let Nic chime in on the Pamela Boal and her husband – amongst others. locations of any more complete pieces on

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Dave Holmes, but Dave was one man I never them, because I’m new here, and haven’t a knew or interacted with. I can think of many clue. – USO however whose characteristics, as Nic describes Nic writes: Both Ken & John contributed to them, I recognize in some of my own particular Arrows of Desire back in the day, but apart old loves. from more than a few mentions, I've never If anyone was to run an Eastercon I cannot think been aware (or have written) of a single of a better person than Alison Scott, whose jovial memorial piece. Over to you, Chuck, if you'd drunkenness always sustains me in the illusion that like to expand on the loc. I considered them I am not the only drunkard in the world after all. I both good friends, but would love to hear have always had mixed feelings about Eastercons. more anecdotes from those who knew them Even when I was better, as you clearly regularly attending them did. Time to call in the they were growing too big 74 favors Alan Sullivan for their own britches and probably owes me? I usually felt a distinct Thinking about it, a sense of strange Pieces of Eight alienation wandering reminiscence piece around their crowded wouldn’t be an unusual concourses. But I have inclusion for the remarked elsewhere I am World’s Finest Fanzine, not a clubbable person now would it? and prefer my socialization in small controlled groups, usually GRAHAM where I am the puppet CHARNOCK master twitching the September 1 strings. In truth I am not particularly good company (as many can Nic’s touching editorial testify). I tend to get about Dead People argumentative and touched me only confrontational in tangentially. I had a love/ company, I mean even hate relationship with Peter Weston which largely more so than on Facebook. It’s the drink, you see. excluded love. His geekish obsessive traits and I also basically see that I have little in common clubbish mentality were diametrically opposed to with the people who largely attend the major cons. my own, although God knows what they were My interest in sf is historic, but theirs is a quest for exactly. I’ve spoken about this at length elsewhere immediate gratification in pursuit of the latest so don’t want to go into endless iterations here. I episode of Game of Thrones or whatever other was sorry he died, as one is whenever someone ersatz sf production is currently making one knows and has met dies, but people have died megabucks for media corporations. And I don’t before and since who certainly meant more to me. particularly like watching other people dressing up I recognize Nic had a special drunken affection for and acting out their fantasies, either in role play or

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costume parades, let alone being tutored in the of a sort of chicken Vietnam strikes terror into my “art” of tying one another up with silken ropes. I heart. would like to stress here I have never tied Alison up, not even in knots of the verbal kind. Ah, Graham, we can always count on you to be the same little ray of sunshine you’ve I have a lot of respect for Kevin McVeigh for always been. That’s nice. And you can read being willing to dress up (or down) and make a the minds of other fans who attend fool himself in the spirit of an art, but I am conventions you don’t go to, which is a neat generally too old for that sort of shit. Do you trick. On the other hand, I feel certain that really want a seventy year old man to parade you’re entirely clubbable, so long as one around naked and paint himself blue? I rest my brings a big enough club – USO case. I don’t really want to comment upon Lee Wood’s piece about killing animals, except her description

This issue’s loccloud by www.wordclouds.com

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JOHN PURCELL mammoth TAFF Trip report. That sucker is September 2 gonna take some time to produce, And speaking of which, since that lovely Jim Trash was one of my nominators, would you editors of Beam be I see how this works in your editorial offices: you interested in a chapter or two of said trip report? hire on Ulrika O’Brien to be the heavy, the hit So what have we got here in Beam #11? A couple man (er, woman, er, person), the fannish mafia, to of tribute pieces to fans who have left us for the brow-beat readers into writing letters of comment con suite in the sky, sadly, a feature of fanzines to your fanzine. Nice. Really nice. It's a good thing and social media that has become all too I like Ulrika, otherwise I might not be writing to commonplace as sf fandom ages. While I am you guys this morning. After all, I did just return a gladdened by the sight of younger fen joining the week and a half ago from a lengthy trip to fray, it still reminds me that my generation of fans Europe. Sheesh! Some days you just can't get a are now in their 60s and early 70s. But that is to break. be expected. So what can I say? Long before Valerie and I took Then this changing of the guard also reminds me off on my 2017 TAFF Trip, this fanzine appeared that even fanzines come and go. For example, Jacq on Messer Burns’ phantasmagorical fanzine Monahan’s and John Wesley Hardin’s review of website, and I distinctly remember reading it back Tightbeam. Clubzines are a dying breed in the in those pre-trip days when my brain wasn't as realm of fanzine fandom. Time was they frazzled and filled with all sorts of fannish proliferated like a turd of hurtles, but there really memories. As always, the cover art sets up the are not that many science fiction club fanzines issue very nicely, and Teddy Harvia is a good way floating around anymore. The only ones I can to kick things off. His sense of humour is always think of offhand besides Tightbeam are DeProdundis, funny and punny, so well done in getting him to DASFAX, and Instant Message, and there are do this cover. One of these days I will have to ask probably more, but like I said, not that many him for another cover to Askance. Why should you come to mind. So when I read the review of guys corner this market? Wait... don’t answer Tightbeam that just made me pine for the days that... when Rune, the Minn-stf clubzine, was one of the Speaking of markets, as in readerships, the next top tier fanzines of that time (1970s and 1980s), big fan project on my laptop - actually, Val has the and clubzines were quite prolific. As for Tightbeam laptop; I use a PC - is creating a TAFF newsletter, itself, it is one of those zines that I will peruse with hopes of getting that out in the next few when it is posted on efanzines, sometimes read weeks. It will have the obligatory links to the articles of interest, and so on. I find a zine like this TAFF website and mention the TAFF Facebook hard to write a letter of comment on, but at least I page and other business-type things, and also can tell them that their zine has been read and contain a letter of introduction on my part, a enjoyed, but otherwise nothing to comment on parting letter from Curt Phillips (since I have now (rae bnc, y’see). replaced him as the North American All in all, this is yet another sterling issue of Beam. Administrator of this legendary fan fund), and You folks should be proud of your efforts, and I updates on the account and sundries. After that look forward to the 12th issue to be seen Real TAFF newsletter is done, then it will be onto Askew Soon Now. You kids are doing well. and Askance, in which I shall start distilling down my trip notes into the beginnings of my eventual

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WAHF : Thanks, John, I like you, too, so remember that the next time you think you’re too busy to Lilian Edwards : “Beam was good! Really liked comment on BEAM merely because you’re Graham James’ history of the Leeds group. I’m trying to run a TAFF race and write a trip report enjoying thus new fanhistory I actually remember in a timely manner, in addition to two fanzines (tho actually I remember precisely none of the and a day jobbe, because after all, I’m hardest dialogue attributed to me! I only remember going on my friends… Anent to club zines, on and on (and on) about Arrival. I’ll try the vagina theoretically LASFS also produces Shangri game again tho! Kevin McVeigh’s blue people L’Affairs, affectionately known as “Shaggy”, story also intriguing. Not sure if I’m exactly but I don’t know how that is going these days. envious but it sounded like an amazing Back around the turn of the millennium I was experience.”; Kevin McVeigh : “I liked it”; trying to wrest the zine away from Charles Lee Andy Hooper : “Ours is still bigger. Jackson the Deuce in order to turn it back into Congratulations!”; Alison Scott : “What a great a regularly appearing genzine as it had been in looking fanzine!”; Graham Charnock : (pre- its heyday, rather than a funny animal perzine loc) “Must thank you for Beam 11 hard copy for Charlie’s Mary Sue adventures, but I had to received via Fishlifters Mail Service. Very give it up after we moved away from Southern impressive. How can you afford it?”; Paul Di California. At last check, Charlie was Filippo : “Thanks for the quintessentially groovy determined to put out One More Issue to finish ish of BEAM. A rich feast of fannish fun! Proud his plot arc, but was actually doing fuck all to be a small part of it!”. about it. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that that’s where things still stand, fifteen years later on. – USO

62 Shagging Disclaimer

Whereas... the co-editors of BEAM 12 occupy cisgendered and notionally “opposite” sex roles, and also whereas the fanzine community is historically skeptical of the persistent non-shagging status of such co- editorial relationships, The Editors herewith jointly, severally and individually issue a Statement of Mutual Non-Shagging. As the standard “Whatever Happens In Vegas” Exception Clause is necessarily precluded by one of the members (ahem) of BEAM 12 Associates VLLP being resident in Las Vegas, the cities of Macao and Monte Carlo are hereby designated to stand proxy for Las Vegas should circumstances eventuate such that The Editors find themselves simultaneously in either city with a few hours to kill and rather too much tequila onboard. This disclaimer supersedes all prior non-shagging disclaimers between or among the contracted parties. No non-shagging status is warranted, offered, or implied with respect to non-contracted parties, actual or imagined. By passing zir eyeballs over these words, the reader understands and freely acknowledges that any speculation on the utility, necessity, or validity of this or any other non-shagging disclaimer shall be understood to be without merit on its face and laughed out of the room with extreme prejudice. Non-shagging policy by BEAM 12 Associates VLLP and all other BEAM 12 contents licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0

References: Fishlifters v Illingworth (Croydon Crown Court, 1966), in which the opinion of Bacon (J) held that any shagging would be solely in his purview, citing Moorcock, et.al. v Ballard (Shepperton Studios, 1951). Edwards, Gonzalez & Sorenson v Brown, Valois & Holmstrom (Edinburgh Assizes, 1993) in which the opinion of Charnock (G) that it was none of your fucking business narrowly prevailed against vigorous dissent.

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