Portable Storage Four

Cover by Brad W. Foster

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A Poet’s Life by Alva Svoboda—page 10

A Few Moments by Chris Sherman—page 17

Pictures and an Inner Vision by Dale Nelson—page 24

Hidden Machines by Jeanne Bowman—page 40

Adventures in the Wimpy Zone Pt. 1 by Jeff Schalles—page 44

Familiar Landscapes by Peter Young—page 48

Journal of the Plague Year 2020 by Bruce Townley—page 58

A Digression by Michael Gorra—page 63

Paper Lives by Andy Hooper—page 67

Free Books! by Tom Jackson—page 73

The Cracked Eye by Gary Hubbard—page 75

The Road to Cimmeria by Cheryl Cline—page 84

Adventures in the Wimpy Zone Pt. 2 by Jeff Schalles—page 96

Aces and Eights at the Hotel California by AC Kolthoff—page 99

Letters of Comment —page 101

Cool Grey City of Sex by Donald Sidney-Fryer—page 112

Gorgon of Poses by G. Sutton Breiding—page 133

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Portable Storage Four

Autumn 2020

Crow’s Caw William M. Breiding

Edited by William Breiding. Available in hard copy for the usual: letters of comment, trade, contributions of writing and

visuals, or endowments of cash. Also available at efanizines.com. Please send letters of comment and submissions of all

kinds to: portablezine@gmail.com. Hard copy trades: street address is on your mailing envelope.

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

Entire contents © 2020 William Breiding. All rights revert to contributors upon publication.

Contact! Portablezine@gmail.com

I read J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye as a mature

adult in a moment when I decided to peruse some

classic mid-twentieth century literature that I’d ne-

glected as a youthful autodidact. I also read John

Cheever’s Complete Short Stories at this time.

Among others.

I might have liked it had I read it when I was in my

teens. But I doubt it, because the book is utter bull-

shit from word one. Yes, Catcher in the Rye is the

real phony. Read as a mature adult its transparency

as a placation and reassurance to rich, upper-middle

class parents is obvious—too damned obvious.

So it was with some trepidation that I started Carl

Brandon’s The Cacher of the Rye, Jeanne Gomoll’s little print on demand book from Lulu. Truth be

told I was seduced into buying the book by Jeanne’s gorgeous cover of Terry Carr obscured by aged

hands of color. But when it came down to the actual reading, Terry’s long and fascinatingly thor-

ough introduction of the life and times of Carl Brandon, his hoax black fan, was far more interesting

than “Carl Brandon’s” fannish The Cacher of the Rye. True—Terry’s prose is creamy and executes

precisely Salinger’s tone and content. But Terry fails utterly in the phoniness quotient, something

Salinger and his bogus book were unable to achieve.

Carl Brandon’s fannish version of Rye is followed by Samuel R. Delany’s “Racism and Science Fic-

tion”—one of his more lucid and straightforward pieces of observation on the foibles of the science

fiction genre and sf fandom.

In this moment when BLM no longer stands for the Bureau of Land Management what exactly is the

meaning of Carl Brandon, a black fan created by a middle class white man and his white friends in

the 1950s? When the BLM-minded are pulling down historic statues as forms of idolatry I begin

wondering if the “woke” will soon be insisting that any book that is seen as ideologically incorrect by

a few will be banned for all.

4

I just finished reading Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, published in 1912. It is fresh with

quaintly portrayed and insulting gender-stereotyping, racist stomach curdling typecasting, and a

general sense of good natured imperialism. And while I was disappointed that Doyle chose to focus

on the decimation of the Ape Men of the Lost World rather than describing more encounters with

the dinosaurs, the book was a hoot, a splendid read.

As I read it I couldn’t help but wonder what reach the “woke” will have in destroying free speech

and freedom of the press—not to mention whatever is left of the Constitution after Donald Trump is

done with it. Visons of dystopian leftist fascism laid atop populist authoritarianism.

Will I soon be memorizing and reciting The Lost World as all the copies are mulched and recycled

for another type of insistent propaganda? If the social justice warriors get wind of Carl Brandon,

that imaginary black fan, that figment of three white guys—Terry Carr, Ron Ellik, and Dave Rike—

how will they construe this black creation? What flaming and virulent boycotting might ensue, and

exactly what do Jeanne Gomoll and the Carl Brandon Society think of this political irony—BLM, yes,

but a mild mannered black man created by white men? It makes you think. It really does. Does Carl

Brandon really matter?

On the other hand the John Cheever was magnificent. But then he was a privileged white suburban

drunk.

&&&&&

I didn’t become vivid to Chris Sherman until after we met.

On the other hand, Chris had been vivid to me from first contact. That’s just the kind of guy he is.

Neither Chris Sherman nor I can remember how we actually made first contact. But logic dictates

that we met through Darline Haney’s Science Fiction Fan’s Correspondence Club (SFFCC) in 1973.

Darline Haney lived in rural Elma, Washington, thirty miles west of Olympia on highway 12 in route

to the coast. At the beginning of the 1970s it was still possible for science fiction fans to feel lonely

and disconnected. The 2010 census count for Elma, Washington was 3,107. In the early 1970s Dar-

line must have felt truly backwoods. So she started the SFFCC by placing classified ads in the back

of science fiction magazines such as Amazing and Fantasy & Science Fiction and started connecting

fans. Many teenaged science fiction fans responded to Darline’s advert, from all over the country,

from every type of environment, rural (myself), small town (Warren J. Johnson), and urban (Frank

Balazs).

It has always been my theory that 1973 was the year of the last big influx of teenagers into science

fiction fanzine fandom. And many of them started forming life-long friendships through Darline

Haney’s Science Fiction Fan’s Correspondence Club. Not only did they correspond but they started

publishing fanzines, arranging meet-ups, and going to science fiction conventions. Chris Sherman

not only corresponded with others but published the fanzine Antithesis, and founded Apa-50 in

1974, collecting many of these teenagers in one very dynamic and often angst-ridden bi-monthly

forum. To my knowledge the Science Fiction Fan’s Correspondence Club was Darline Haney’s only

legacy as a science fiction fan. But it was a big one.

My correspondence with Chris started in the traditional manner, written letters. After I returned to

San Francisco from the mountains of southern West Virginia and had access to a portable cassette

recorder we began exchanging cassette-letters almost exclusively. This added the extra intimacy of

5

hearing each other’s voice, and being able to add aural back-

ground. Chris would take me to school with him, and I would

wander around San Francisco, talking. Chris was also a bur-

geoning pianist and would often sit at the piano in Golden Val-

ley, a suburb of Minneapolis, and play compositions he was

working on. We also included pop songs we were listening to,

sharing our tastes (Chris

pretty much turned me on

to Prog-Rock and Steely

Dan). Chris was 15 and I 17

at this juncture.

In 1974 I took a long hitch-

hiking-and-Greyhound

tour to the east coast and

back. This included a stop

off to meet my best fan-

friend, Chris Sherman, in

Minneapolis. I had been

having bad luck hitching rides so I arrived in Minneapolis by Greyhound. I was standing at the curb

waiting for Chris to show up, figuring he’d be driven by one of his parents. A Corvette pulled up

where I was waiting and a good looking fresh-faced kid with a feathered haircut said, “Bill Breiding?”

Chris cracked up at the shock on my face as we squeezed my backpack into the Corvette and I got

into the passenger seat—a long-haired San Francisco post-hippie sitting shotgun with a suburban

jock in a Corvette. Chris was still laughing at my shock when he slipped an eight track tape of Yes

into the slot and “Round About” started its soul-tingling opening. He put the peddle to the metal and

we were off. Chris had just turned 16.

After that first meeting, our most unlikely friendship accelerated. Chris returned the favor by visiting

me a number of times in San Francisco. As we both transitioned into our twenties Chris relocated to

Southern California, not only for school, but no doubt also seduced by the SoCal beach lifestyle.

Chris’ visits to San Francisco were frequent, and intense. For me, our friendship ran very deep, but it

was often fraught as our very different upbringings and approaches to life collided, yet it never in-

truded on our interest and respect in each other’s lives.

Chris went on to found a business, a career, and a family. We drifted, as tends to happen in life. Eve-

ry couple of years we’d reconnect—often through an exchange of mixtapes (and then CDs), some-

times letters, emails, and occasionally Chris would do zines for Apa-50 (which is still going), and as

our Founder was always welcome to contribute without membership requirements.

Chris remains vivid—just like that sixteen year old that drove up in his dad’s Corvette—and has lived

a vivid, varied and interesting life trotting about the globe. And he was always an extraordinary writ-

er, as Chris’ piece in this issue reflects.

&&&&&

Michael Gorra was not quite an actifan back in the nineteen seventies. But he came close. He pub-

lished 10 monthly issues of Random and nine issues of the quarterly Banshee (formerly Starship

Tripe), publishing some of the best fan writers and artists of the period (mid-’70s). I remember at

Chris, 1976

Bill, 1974

6

the time thinking Michael was a bit out of my league

though that didn’t stop me from sending Starfire in

trade and asking him to write a column. Michael’s zines

were faanish, quick and dirty, and often humorous.

Mine lumbered along like a self-involved hippo, even the

humor and fannish pieces treated solemnly. I think our

fanzines were a reflection of our different types of mind.

Michael did end up writing a column for Starfire, which

lasted only two issues. At that point Michael made a

swift exit from fandom—gafiated with utter finality.

When I decided to publish again there were fondly re-

membered fans that I wanted to get this zine—Michael

Bracken, Jim Meadows III, Linda Michaels, Michael

Gorra, John Carl, Tony Cvetko, Roger Sween, among

others—because it just made sense, not only in the fan-

nish time-binding sense, but also in the way that I con-

ducted my own personal life. So I google-stalked many

of these folks and found addresses and sent zines. For

some it was a welcome surprise. Others have remained

silent.

I knew Michael Gorra had gone on to become a successful literary type—hard to ignore when he kept

popping up in the New York Review Of Books and the Times Literary Supplement. I tracked him

down at Smith College in Massachusetts. After some head scratching Michael responded, and you

can read some of Michael’s life experience further along in this issue, in both his article and his loc.

Michael had some amusing memories to share when I queried about his fanzining days:

Random had ten issues, on a monthly schedule. I had meant to do twelve, ending in August right before leaving for college, but all of a sudden there was a new girlfriend, and I was trying to read Gravity's Rain-bow (what I moved on to after Garcia Marquez) and so it goes, or went. Banshee was I think quarterly, and there were nine issues. But the first four or five were published under the appalling name of Starship Tripe, and dittoed, and maybe bimonthly. People told me I needed a new name, that readers would be apt to dismiss a zine with that name, and I suspect they were right. Anyway, Banshee was much bet-ter. The last issue, #9, published just before the 1974 DC Worldcon, was a special issue for which I charged, and was meant to raise money to help send Bob Tucker to the next year's Worldcon in Austral-ia. That was my faanish side kicking in, though I also recognize it now as the part of me that is interested in institutional histories, heritages, genealogies. So I am also interested in the histories of English depart-ments, who studied with and is now rebelling against whom....

That was the only Worldcon I went to--I remember smoking dope with Arnie Katz and Bill Kunkel and Ted White etc, which meant I was in way over my head; and then liberating the pool aka skinny dipping around 6 in the morning with John D Berry and Susan Wood, who had just won her fan-writing Hugo, and half a dozen others. Susan’s somebody I would like to know more about, given she was starting her academic job right around then. I wonder what her scholarly work was like? One other tidbit sticks with me--I had the biggest nametag imaginable, in that I wore my high school football jersey (#77) which had my name on the back. Incongruous, and funny--people commented on it as one of the weirdest things they'd ever seen at a con--but it worked.

7

Michael is far too modest to mention that his biography of Henry James was a finalist for the Pulitz-

er, so I will.

&&&&&

From its very inception in the early twentieth century science fiction fanzine fandom has been what

has come to be termed a “gift culture.” One spends time and money creating their fanzine and then

one gifts it, no monetary value attached. Ideally gifts are given without expectation but that’s not re-

ally true with fanzine fandom. There is the expectation of some sort of response when a fan editor

sends out a fanzine. That’s why in most fanzine colophons there appears the line “Available for let-

ters of comment, trades, and on Whim.” Some begrudgingly include “cash” but make it clear it’s the

least desirable form of response.

Clearly a fanzine is a clarion call that requires response. Some fan editors have a superb sense of pa-

tience and will send their fanzine out into a black void—literally for years, as one fan editor did for

me, and this was a fabulous, big fat genzine—until finally I responded with the weight of guilt from

all those years of non-response. This generous fan editor spoke to my question: “why did you do it?”

The assumption was that I was likely enjoying the fanzine regardless of the fact that I had remained

rudely silent for all those years (which I had). Said fan editor continues to publish and I now try to be

a good boy and regularly respond with a letter of comment. Maybe I have nothing scintillating to

share, but at least the editor knows that I received and clearly enjoyed it, and yes, please keep me on

your mailing list!

There is a tradition in fanzines of alerting someone they must participate if they want to continue

receiving the fanzine. Sometimes it an “X” on the mailing label (don’t use ’em) and sometimes it’s a

box somewhere in the fanzine and if it’s X’d you’re toast, it’s your last issue. Read this next para-

graph carefully:

If there is an X in the box below, this is your last issue. If you want to continue receiving Portable

Storage you can achieve this result in a variety of ways. The very best way to stay on my mailing list

is to send a nice long letter of comment—feedback on what I’m doing, what the writers and artists

are doing, or stories from your life. See the letters this issue on how its done. If you dig this fanzine

but feel unable to give comment let me tell you that most every fan editor since time immemorial has

lowered expectations and all these said fan editors will be absolutely thrilled if you just communicate

in any firm you so choose, and let them know you adore the fanzine and want to stay on the mailing

list even though you can’t muster a real letter of comment. Believe me when I tell you that enjoyment

is paramount to a fan editor and a note along these lines will be very much appreciated. Being proac-

tive is the key.

Some fan editors don’t want money and actively discourage it, but I’m not one of them. There was a

spontaneous (and unsolicited) contribution of cash after Portable Storage Two appeared that de-

frayed much of the cost of the domestic postage for Portable Storage Three, which was much appre-

ciated. If you are so inclined, endowments of cash are always gratefully accepted—but it’s not a sub-

scription, but more a donation to your favorite charity. And of course, it goes without saying (but I

will) that trades, not of just other fanzines, but anything that interests you, is always a good way to

stay on my mailing list. But nice long letters are always best.

8

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

Do Something.

If you have not been X’d this does not mean you are entirely off the hook. This box could appear

next issue with an X in it. You do know who you are. Do The Right Thing.

&&&&&

Last, but certainly not in the least, I want to thank all of the contributors to this issue for not only

coming through, but beating the deadline. These are weird, scary, and paralyzing times we are

living through. I could have chucked this fanzine out the window but felt now more than ever it

was important to carry on. All the contributors could have done the same, but chose to affirm life

and spit in the eye of the Covid. Y’all are awesome.

Contact! portablezine@gmail.com

9

Everybody's starting to crash hard. Remember crashing after an acid trip? Like that. & William Burroughs on every street corner. Summer morns are all Blake & dewy angel kisses. I feel pornographic all the time. The fog braided with willow limbs. Bagpipes of a thousand years ago. Sappho says, " Strum my lyre." Virginia says, "Follow me down." So far, so good. I sing as I sink. It's like, Poetry for curbside pick-up.

Your

Order

Has

Arrived!!

G. Sutton Breiding

10

Part 1

I always wanted to be a poet,

from when I was in seventh

grade and checked the book

Reflections on a Gift of Water-

melon Pickle out of the Peralta

Junior High School library at

least. I learned from racing

through that anthology that

poetry didn’t need to rhyme or

use “poetic” language, and that

line length in poems appeared

to be completely up to the poet.

From those quick apprehen-

sions I moved on to the obvious

conclusion: I could write what-

ever I wanted and call it poem!

Perhaps I’m not being entirely

fair to my thirteen year old self.

At a minimum, I could see that

poetry required something like

an “image” at its heart, and

that its “shape,” in auditory

and/or visual terms, was im-

portant. One of my first efforts

in the poetic realm was a

worm’s-eye view of the life of a

worm, written in the first per-

son and with vaguely worm-

like lineation. And not having

anything else to go on in defin-

ing my poetic vocation, it was-

n’t surprising that the lan-

guage I had to draw on would

have been – shall we say, im-

poverished?

I continued to dabble in poetry

-writing through junior high

and high school, discovering

Don Marquis’s archy and me-

hitabel and e.e. cummings,

and for a year refusing to write

my name with any capital let-

ters. The cockroach archy

used no capital letters because

he had no way of capitalizing

(which required holding down

the shift key on the Don Mar-

quis’s typewriter). In the case

of e.e. cummings it was funda-

mentally a question of

“branding,” though I wouldn’t

cotton on to that concept until

well into the 21st century, real-

ly. But that’s what I was doing

in writing my name in lower

Alva Svoboda Tom Clark

11

But the summer before I start-

ed my first year away at col-

lege in Redlands, I had a reve-

lation about language of a dif-

ferent order entirely, a light-

ning bolt of surrealist energy

that coursed through me like

an endless energy drink for

years. In the stacks of the Si-

mi Valley Public Library,

where I was working as a page,

I found a fat anthology Anoth-

er World which contained

work by a whole spectrum of

poets I’d never heard of be-

fore, who were as I learned

part of a “New York School” of

poetry that seemed as alive

and important as anything I’d

read about from the modernist

worlds of before my birth.

Coincidentally or not, the first

poet in Another World was

Tom Clark. And the first po-

em by Tom Clark, entitled “In

the World,” and perhaps in-

tended as a kind of dedication

of the volume, was a prose

poem that began with the sen-

tence “The tall policeman

knows the world is a buoyant

sphere that glistens with rings

case, branding. (And there were, to be fair to myself, a num-

ber of other poets in that era who lower-cased their names,

including bp nichol and others whose names I can’t recall at

the moment.) cummings did in fact offer an entry into a less

impoverished language for me, though most of what I got at

the time had to do with hyphenating strings of words and pre-

tending I had made new words out of them.

I bumped into some other harbingers of the avant-garde as I

got through high school, reading a book about Dada for one

humanities class that had me typing nonsense Dada poems

with abandon and studying the writings of Marcel Duchamp.

Basically I was chewing through as much of the experimental

literature of the twentieth century (Hermann Hesse, Kafka

and the Theater of the Absurd as much as readily to my taste

as Dada) as I could manage. Somehow I managed to miss

most of the poetic heavies of the late nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries, so I never made the acquaintance of Rim-

baud or Baudelaire.

Alva

Svoboda

o

NAROPA

12

and patches of color, like a beautiful Christmas tree ornament adorning space, but he doesn’t let this

knowledge stop him from doing his job.” I was immediately taken with the elevated absurdity, veer-

ing into jokiness, of that poem by Tom Clark as well as the others that followed. The final work in

his “set” was a mini-anthology within the anthology called “The Diplodocus Odes,” purporting to be

a collection of twelve poems written by diplodocii with accompanying scholarly annotations.

In a memoir of another New York poet, Ted Berrigan, which Tom Clark published in 1985 (a mere

ten years after my discovery of Another World), Tom described his discovery of the New York School

in terms that resonated strongly with my own first encounter with his own work: “... I stopped at

Shakespeare’s, and browsing there, found these magazines, which proposed a kind of writing – and

an approach to life and experience – so radically dissimilar to those I’d previously pursued that I felt

the boards shake slightly under my feet as I stood and read amid the quiet shelves.”

That was just how I felt reading the poems in Another World, though my quiet shelves were in sum-

mer southern California rather than history-laden Paris. The boards shook, and I immediately want-

ed to imitate what I was reading, the combination of artistic ambition and comic book silliness, with

a dollop of libertine excess at least implied.

Another World encompassed a spectrum of poetries, but it certainly didn’t capture everything. The

dark bohemian excesses of Sutton Breiding were invisible to me among the poetic forms feeding off

of postwar artistic practices in New York, France, and England. Pop Art, which owed a lot to Dada,

was the foremost source of generative forms. In addition, there was a significant representation of

the beatnik Buddhist tradition that started with Kerouac and Ginsberg, far more laid back and natu-

ralistic than the urban ferocity of the pop contingent, but even more adventurous in its use of “open

form” to depict combinations of poetry and pure consciousness. There were also bits and pieces of a

tradition of rigorous experimentalism that owed something to the Minimalist sculptural art forms

that were being made and written about at that time, such as the one word poems of Aram Saroyan

(son of William) and work that prefigured what was later called “language poetry,” by writers like

Bernadette Mayer and Clark Coolidge.

When I went to college in Redlands, California that fall of 1975, I made full use of the school library,

which had a nice selection of “little magazines” as they were known carrying poetic work that I might

emulate. We also had cross-borrowing privileges at U.C. Riverside nearby, and it was there that I

discovered several books by the poets I had read in Another World, issued by major publishers just

as Another World had been (it was put out by Bobbs-Merrill). In particular, two volumes of Tom

Clark’s poetry from the Sixties, Stones and Air, were published by Harper & Row, giving them order-

of-magnitude-greater circulation among the reading public than any small press publication would

have done.

The attraction of Tom Clark’s Stones was all the greater for me because the opening poem in the col-

lection was entitled “Superballs.” The ultimate distillation of suburban testosterone-fueled solitary

play, in my experience, Clark transformed the superball via the magic of metaphor into a stepping-

stone into the whole numinous reality of poetry: “One day/ The wall reverses/ The ball bounces the

other way/ Across this barrier into the future/ Where it begets occupations names” were lines (right

out of the middle of the poem) that struck me as both comic-book funny and monumentally serious

for the future of both the universe and myself.

Many other poetic inspirations, as well as adventures, occupied me in the years after I found Stones

in the U.C. Riverside library. I took poetry-writing classes at the college I started at where I became

acquainted with forms like the sestina as well as with the whole poetry movement most inspired by

13

Charles Olson and others, which I think of as “open poetry.” Open poetry was anti-poetic in a very

different way from New York poetry, and much focused on squirrely line breaks and syntax. It fit

well with phenomena like minimalist art and avant-garde music that I also became acquainted with

then. When I dropped out of college after two years, I went up to Seattle one summer to commit

civil disobedience and then spent several months living and working there while awaiting trial, and

discovered other interesting poetry through a bookstore called “Book People,” transgressive authors

like Kathy Acker as well as New York poets like Ted Berrigan. But after I returned to California hav-

ing done my time (three weeks), I landed in Santa Barbara and strangely picked up the Tom Clark

thread again. “Strangely” because I never met him during the period we both lived there, but I de-

tected his presence in two ways: first, his publisher, Black Sparrow Press, was based in Santa Barba-

ra then, so his books were readily available in the town’s bookstores, in the beautiful editions that

Black Sparrow put out in the mid-1970s. And second, while working my minimum wage job at Elec-

tronic Data Systems Inc., I decided to try my hand at becoming a professional book reviewer by writ-

ing about some of Black Sparrow’s issuances for The Santa Barbara News and Review. I got a copy

of John Fante’s Ask the Dust, a kind of precursor to Bukowski’s novels as I saw it in my literary igno-

rance, and wrote a review (“The Consummate LA Novel,” 1980) that was actually published and paid

for, which excited me tremendously. But my next attempt at a review was stymied because, it

turned out, a better reviewer than myself, Tom Clark, had taken my place (as I regarded it). No fur-

ther $20 honoraria were forthcoming from the Review. At the time, I was only dimly aware of the

inevitable injustice of forcing a poet to work for token payments to make ends meet, because I

thought of myself as a poet too. Meanwhile, Tom Clark was writing poems about his life in the area

at the turn of the decade, turn of the era, that captured Santa Barbara’s inextricable mix of nature

and class privilege, with lines like “Nothing but psychodrama/ and disillusionment/ in the canyons

of the wealthy”.

Part 2

After finishing college at U.C. Santa Barbara and going into the Peace Corps for a couple of years in

Swaziland, I returned to California with an acceptance letter from Berkeley in the grey-hued field of

operations research. I moved to Oakland in 1983 (and never left) and applied myself to optimiza-

tion and stochastic processes, with poetry very much on the sideline. In 1986 I started working at

Pacific Gas and Electric, and even though I was still in the middle of my graduate education

(working on my doctorate), I looked around gingerly for activities that would edify the more liberal

side of my nature (even though, until the Iran-Contra scandal broke, I spent the early 1980’s a neo-

conservative supporter of Reagan and his partisans). At that time the UC Berkeley Extension held

most of its courses right on the campus, where I was spending a good deal of time anyway, so oppor-

tunities to take night courses appealed to me. A poetry class with Tom Clark, who had moved to

Berkeley, turned out to be by far the most amazing of those opportunities.

I realize in retrospect that Reaganism had a lot in common with Trumpism, in terms of its effects on

its masses of supporters. But a notable difference between the Reagan and Trump eras was that cer-

tain quite visible forms of artistic compromise were possible that essentially aligned artists with the

world Reagan was creating (Trump in a sense made life easier for rich artists by allowing all of them

to vilify him and his minions on first principles, pretending that Trump World was utterly alien to

theirs – though I note that traces of that opportunism remain in acts like Jeff Koons’ taking of pay-

roll protection funds that should have gone to bankrupt smaller businesses). In the world of paint-

ing, there were millionaire artists creating massive, decadent paintings and sculptures. Nothing of

14

that sort was possible in the poetry world, but poets weren’t interested in obscene wealth anyway:

for them, comfortable sinecures were the equivalent, and who’s to blame them? Academic or pseudo

-academic tenure provided a lifestyle not too far distant from the hippie paradise many of them de-

scribed and lived in New York City or Bolinas. Tom Clark, a far more critical thinker than most of

his compadres, was having none of it, and wrote polemic works dissecting poetic compromises with

the neoliberal world, especially the lucrative poetry school that flourished for a while at the Tibetan

Buddhist Naropa Institute in Boulder Colorado. It’s exquisitely ironic that Tom Clark’s attack on

Naropa, for cultist authoritarianism and sexual abuse as well as for the moral collapse of some of

America’s best known poets, reads extremely well, acute and painfully contemporary, forty years

later, when the attacks on Clark at the time were mostly accusations that he himself was a kind of

right-wing pawn. A passage like this from the book seems especially prescient of our current disas-

ter:

To poets like Waldman and Ginsberg, journalism of any variety -- black, white, red or yellow

-- is a lesser order of expression than poems or prayers. Certainly, it seizes less power. The

religious men these poets work for, and who manipulate their lives, are equally uninterested

in the free press or its social function. In the kingdom of Shambhala, the rational articula-

tion of knowledge always was passé.

The poets have chosen metaphysics, magic, and the mumbo-jumbo of a spiritual kingdom

ruled over by a witty Oriental whose unashamed contempt for democratic institutions is

starting to invade their poetics. "Experiment in monarchy," indeed!

Though anti-liberal ressentiment was strong within me, I tried hard to maintain an integrity in my

poetic work that was independent of my vagrant ideologies. Thus I was able to “pass” in the Poetry

Writing extension course I took with Tom Clark. The class was energizing because Tom engaged the

students as poets, and because some of the other students in the class were very good poets indeed.

I kept in touch with William Talcott, bard of San Francisco’s original techie working class, until his

death. I’m still “friends” with the Berkeley noir master Owen Hill.

At the time, I remember being particularly proud when I played for the class a musical rendering (by

the avant-garde composer Art Simon) of a poem I had written, which used one of the earliest text-to-

voice programs to render my words alien. And I remember disclosing to Tom and the class that my

strongest poetic inspirations at the time were W.S. Merwin and Philip Larkin. I liked Merwin be-

cause his poems were shorn of all descriptive or personal detail, Larkin because his poems were all

personas, struggling or not struggling with fate: “Man hands on misery to man/ It deepens like a

coastal shelf.” In retrospect I see Tom Clark’s later poetry as incorporating into his own unstoppable

voice some of the cool impersonality of Merwin, and much of the struggling with resignation and

fate conveyed in the best of Larkin.

Looking for some Merwin to put right here, I found the following in the beautiful Library of America

editions of his poetry, not entirely shorn of descriptive detail, and at least as prescient as the clip

from Tom Clark’s Naropa Poetry Wars: “Of tomorrow I have nothing to say/ what I say is not to-

morrow/ tomorrow no animals/ no trees growing at their will/ no one in the White House/ the

words gone out”. That’s at least as contemporary as the latest tweet on Twitter, isn’t it?

Part 3

As for the Internet, although I can’t accurately date most of my interactions with Tom Clark, I note

that the New College course I audited with Tom Clark on the poetry of Ezra Pound must have hap-

15

pened in the early Nineties. This I surmise because at around that time I took another class in San

Francisco in Experimental Hyperfiction, in which using only raw HTML (in the days before Java

and CSS), we built baroque interlinked narratives using the brand new technology of the Netscape

browser. My work was pretentiously titled “The Pound Project,” and was meant to be a hyperfiction

with Ezra Pound as its protagonist that would somehow mimic the structure of both the city of Ven-

ice and his magnum opus The Cantos.

It wasn’t a hard reach to conceive of The Cantos themselves as hypertext, and therefore of mimick-

ing them to narrative purposes, but the freshness in memory of a trip I’d actually made to Venice (to

run in the Venice Marathon, I was doing that sort of thing then), and especially of the class with

Tom Clark, made me think I could put such a thing together, though of course I never did. I imag-

ined the hyperfiction as a kind of “choose your own adventure” game in which Ezra Pound might be

diverted from his fascist destiny by actions taken early in his encounters with Venice, captured in

the lines starting Canto III, “I sat on the Dogana’s steps/ For the gondolas cost too much, that year”.

While in Venice I walked out to the Dogana’s steps just to get what it might have felt like to be young

and staring at the waters of the lagoon, there at the turn of the twentieth century. But “The Pound

Project” never got further than five or six screens of interlocking hypertext, and I never enabled

Pound, even in my imagination, to choose anything other than the fascism, corruption, and defeat

he ended up with.

I took several of Tom Clark’s poetry classes, offered out of his home in Berkeley to New College stu-

dents and select auditors. I had been in intermittent contact with him since the Extension classes,

but jumped at the offer to become an auditor, scheduling my work so that I could take an afternoon

off each week for the class meetings. Each course was easily worth a year of any liberal arts educa-

tion I had done two decades earlier, because we really read and were held to our reading, at least for

the interval. I think Tom meant to convey some of what he himself had experienced when he stud-

ied in England at the beginning of the Sixties, that form of pedagogy in which a tutor could hold a

student to a higher intellectual standard than would ever be possible in the American form of lim-

ited, quantified, grade-oriented education.

Studying Pound, Keats and Andrew Marvell, I did something I had never done before or since with

poems: I memorized them, as I had once memorized lines to parts in plays, not to perform dramati-

cally for others, but solely for my own poetic uses. I memorized one Pound canto, XVII, with some

difficulty, and four Keats Odes (“Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode on Melan-

choly,” and my favorite, “To Autumn”) much more easily. I had never before wanted to hold things

in my head more or less permanently (and I haven’t retained them, over the years, though they still

resonate), hadn’t even thought of knowing a poem as part of poetic practice. I discovered that po-

ems can be, in some cases are meant to be, inhabited physically.

Through the years since the Keats and Pound classes, across the boundary of the millennium, Tom

Clark’s poetry deepened and darkened and aged. My own contact with his work became sporadic

after Elena and Charla were born and I had no time for anything requiring prolonged attention. Af-

ter the turn of the century I determined to self-publish a poetry book, which I titled Collapse of the

Grid, and that turned out to be a coda to my career as a poet, at least for a decade or two.

Tom Clark was of course one of the poetic teachers to whom I dedicated my book, and I brought a

copy by his house – that I think was the last time I saw and talked to him. I read his blog, which

over several years became a poetic work comparable in magnitude to the Cantos, but engaged and

sympathetic to the suffering of the downtrodden of the world in a way neither Ezra Pound nor I my-

16

self had ever been. One of his late poems, in his book The New World, begins “Fidelity, after long

practice, to/ The things that have crossed one’s path in life” – that indicates the principle on which

he wrote.

In 2018 Tom Clark, horribly, was killed by a speeding car while crossing a dark Berkeley street on an

insomniac late night perambulation. I didn’t find out until I checked his blog several weeks after the

fact, and felt one of the bottoms dropping out of things. The same poem concludes “For mere excur-

sions don’t suffice on visits/ To dead cities – excavation too’s required,/ Cries out the hungry unborn

poem/ Within us, demanding to exist as/ If alive” – and it’s as if Tom Clark still lives, reading that.

1976

17

I was raised to believe that life was meant to be a coherent journey. A graceful and purposeful stride

from place to place and experience to experience, generating chains of connected moments. Mo-

ments welded together by time and relationships and integrated into memories that would be

unique and lasting. In short, a consistent flow that would be easy to explain to my grandchildren

once I inevitably stumbled into dotage.

That’s not what happened. Here is some of what did, at least in part. And full disclosure: some of

these moments did not resolve with happy endings.

Airborne, Northern America. Early 70s.

My first memory of hanging with the Breiding family began with a percussive prelude, a flight on a

then modern-day jetliner, originating in Minneapolis late on a Thursday evening. The plane passed

through an intense lightning storm illuminating huge thunderheads over Canada as we careened

through turbulence toward a stopover in Salt Lake City. The lightning flashes through the cabin

weren’t the most frightening part of the journey. It was the stomach-plunging drops in altitude fol-

lowed by the loud, delayed cracks of thunder, forceful enough to seem like they might rip the fuse-

lage apart. The concussions rattling the overhead bins and shaking the seats felt like tangible omens

it was now truly time to die.

Yet hours later, having somehow survived, I remember pleasantly supping at a Chinatown restau-

rant in San Francisco just before midnight 1. I could make no sense of the entirely Chinese-script

menu but was delighted to gorge on the piled-high plate of tiny Schezwan snails, prying open the

18

thin coverings on the bottoms of their shells with

flimsy toothpicks. I was so famished and ex-

hausted I didn’t really pick up on much of the

conversation between William (yes, your humble

editor) and his friend Gene.

After dinner we drove in Gene’s Mission Impos-

sible lookalike van to the Embarcadero, and as

we strolled from pier to pier taking in the gor-

geous sights, I resolved to become a photogra-

pher. Later, I ended up visiting them both in

what was then a friendly, clean city at least a

dozen times over the following decade. And

those visits were instrumental in changing my

life from a structured narrative to a randomly

chaotic stream of consciousness. Not totally op-

posite of what I was raised to believe, but cer-

tainly forking down a new path that led to all

kinds of interesting moments and encounters

with notable people (such as studying photog-

raphy with Phel Steinmetz 2, who had appren-

ticed with Ansel Adams).

So it began. And partly explains why nearly 50

years later you’re reading about some of these

moments in William’s latest edition of PS (aka

Phenomenal Serendipity, which he modestly

calls Portable Storage. But we all know better).

La Jolla, California. Late 70s.

“Used galaxy salesman, huh?”

I could almost feel his breath on the back of my

neck. I did that involuntary thing guys do when

startled while micturating, clenching up and rap-

idly zipping my pants. I turned, but he was still

pushing into my space.

“Well,” I started, but he persisted:

“On balance, a fair review, but that one sentence

really stung,” he said. “I’m not Carl Sagan.”

UCSD’s student newspaper had just published

my review of David Brin’s new novel, and he was

quoting a line buried deep in the (mostly) ubiq-

uitous praise I had written 3. I knew that he was

a graduate student teaching a class that my girl-

friend Katie was attending. Because I had never

seen nor met him, I didn’t realize she was talk-

ing with him at the moment I waved at her be-

fore striding into a campus restroom.

I don’t remember much of the “conversation”

after that. I never saw Brin again, but did make

a point of reading most of his novels as they

were published - with pleasure, I might add.

Nonetheless, I most definitely did not review

another one of his books, not after that close

encounter of the pissing kind.

Beijing, China. Mid-00s.

The customs official regarded me for a long mo-

ment, then looked down and stared intensely at

my passport once again. “This is not you,” he

barked, jerking his eyes up to focus directly on

mine. The day before, Chinese and American

military warplanes had sparred not far off the

coast between the mainland and Taiwan, just a

few hundred miles from where I now stood.

“Of course it is,” I squeaked, instantly visualiz-

ing the sordid jail cell I was almost certainly

destined to occupy for the foreseeable future.

Officer Cheng looked down again. Spent a full

minute tapping away on his keyboard, perusing

what must have been a highly classified data-

base of heathens, hackers or suspected crimi-

nals. Then the light reflecting off his glistening

forehead shifted again. He raised his eyes to

scrutinize me once more. After a few moments,

he grunted and visibly relaxed. Stamping his

official stamp he clapped my passport shut and

flicked it through the opening in his window.

“Enjoy your visit!” he hissed through a tight,

feral smile.

“Thank you,” I said. Turning away from him

and heading to the exit, I immediately startled

once again. A Starbucks just beyond the pass-

port control exit? Really? My first “official”

sight on my first “official” trip to China was

Starbucks? Huh. Nah. I opted to gather my

things and somehow find my way to my hotel

19

overlooking Tiananmen Square... and then was

immediately hit by a taxi. But that’s a story for

another moment.

The next evening, I knocked on the door of Jack

Ma’s suite at the Qin Sheng Hotel in Xiamen. I

would be interviewing the chairman of the

Alibaba Group on stage early the next morning,

and his people wanted to know what I planned

to ask the former English school teacher, who

was now China’s most prominent internet pio-

neer.

A dour security man opened the door, filling the

gap in the opening. “Ni hao,” I attempted.

“I’m...”

“We know who you are,” the goon said in flaw-

less English, stepping aside to let me pass. The

next twenty minutes flowed without peril. The

rest was easy: I had been interviewing Internet

moguls on stage for years, and found I had an

aptitude for drawing interesting anecdotes out

of them. Easy, peasy. Colonel Bowers had

trained me well, and I wasn’t intimidated in the

least to be talking with China’s wealthiest capi-

talist on stage with several thousand observers

in the audience. My only niggling doubt was

how I could possibly write about the experience

years later, in some fanzine or portable storage

device. 4

Phoenix, Arizona, early 90s & Maple

Grove, Minnesota, early 10s.

My grandmother’s grasp on my hand was no

drier or more calloused than usual, but didn’t

seem as firm. She seemed to be sleeping well,

but I lingered for a moment just to be sure. She

gasped softly, and her mouth fell slightly open.

It took a moment to realize she had just died.

Years later, during an early dawn vigil in my

grandmother’s daughter’s hospice room, my

Mom stirred in her sleep. Then she quietly

whispered “mother” before drifting off again. It

was the last word I ever heard her speak.

Johannesburg, South Africa. Late 90s.

The chaos hadn’t ebbed. The man dressed in

what looked like a full Victorian military uni-

form was standing in the middle of the intersec-

tion while cars whizzed past at speed, somehow

avoiding the throngs of pedestrians who were

zigzagging everywhere without pattern or seem-

ing purpose. We were in downtown Joburg after

spending a quiet week in deep jungle in the

heart of South Africa. Now, feeling foolish for

lacking a map of the city, I stopped to ask direc-

tions.

As the cop continued to direct traffic, he glared

at me. He looked simultaneously startled but

also seemingly in full in control.

“You need something?” he snapped.

“Where is the train station?” I asked.

“Motor two blocks forward to the robot, then

left turn,” he said, gesturing with a broad, ex-

pansive wave.

“The robot?”

“Yes. Then direct to the station. They will help

you there.”

“What’s the robot?” I asked, full of questions

after having been challenged at checkpoints and

roadblocks for the past few days as we wended

our way from Mpumalanga (known then as

“God’s window” and prior to that Eastern

Transvaal and today as “the place where the sun

rises”) 5 to the capital of Gauteng province to

catch our train to Cape Town.

“The robot is the robot,” the traffic cop said,

growing agitated. He made a pushing-forward

motion. “You must move on: you’re stifling traf-

fic.”

I drove another two blocks and stopped at the

red light. Waiting for the light to change, I had a

sudden insight: The “robot” was the traffic sig-

nal. As South Africa was developing, robots

were discretely and unremorselessly replacing

the humans who directed traffic at other inter-

sections in the city.

20

The light changed and I turned left. Sure

enough, two blocks later, we arrived at the train

station. At that moment a complete stranger

started pounding on my window. “You’re here,

you’re here; I will take the car just now,” the

man shouted. Aghast, I tried to press the car

forward but was almost immediately blocked

by the backup of other cars entering the sta-

tion. The stranger caught up with us and

pounded on the window again. “I’m here to

take your car, sir, but you must do this now!”

he shouted.

He pressed a rental agreement against the win-

dow. I saw my own signature at the bottom of

the paper, unmistakable in its bizarre twisty-

slingy curvature.

“Why do it this way?” I asked, after we exited

the car.

“If we don’t retrieve the cars as soon as you

arrive, sir, we will never see them again.” Then

softly, “You obviously don’t know what it’s like

here,” sliding into the driver’s seat, reversing

and abruptly pulling away.

Janice and I cast puzzled glances at one anoth-

er, but secured our luggage and pushed our

way through the crowd toward the main termi-

nal. Only to discover that our travel agent had

screwed our plans by booking tickets from

Cape Town to Johannesburg, opposite of what

we intended and which was clearly in violation

of The Rules, despite cities, fares and distance

all being identical.

After what seemed like hours of negotiation

with our fusty, contrary conductor, we finally

agreed to resolve what was apparently the most

serious issue by paying an extra 25 Rand (about

a dollar at the time) for sheets for our cramped

fold-out bed in our sleeper car. Once that was

settled, our conductor smiled warmly, and wel-

comed us to commence our thousand-mile

journey across the lower reaches of the conti-

nent.

Lunchtime. The local news popped up on the

television in the dining car. “Two American

tourists were carjacked and killed in downtown

Joburg this morning,” the newscaster said with

appropriate sonorous undertones to emphasize

the solemnity of the news. Video then cut to the

location of the incident. It wasn’t hard to spot

the robot – “our” robot. “He” had let us through

just minutes before our unfortunate counter-

parts obeyed the newly installed traffic signal

and waited to be waved on. Unlike us, they did-

n’t make it through the signal. 36 hours later,

safely ensconced in our inexpensive bed sheets

and feeling an existential sense of relief, we ar-

rived in Cape Town.

Mountain View, California. Early 00s.

In the early days of Google’s existence, it was

always serious fun to visit the company, though

these drop-ins were usually a last-minute after-

thought. On most of our Bay Area trips, my

“partner in crime” as Danny Sullivan liked to

call us, typically spent hours with the dominant

search engine giants of the day: AltaVista. In-

foseek. Excite. Inktomi. Meetings with those

Internet titans were invariably serious, with all

kinds of financial projections and 8x10 color-

glossy photos with charts and arrows depicting

inevitable domination of the emerging online

universe. We were reporting on the future, after

all. So we needed serious jam.

Usually we’d stop off at Google if we had time

before catching respective flights home. In their

tiny headquarters with desks of well-used and

castoff closet doors perched precariously on

sawhorses with the company’s handful of em-

ployees sitting on cheap plastic yard chairs, we

would spend time with people like Urs Hölzle

and his massive wolfhound Ilsa, listening to his

improbable dreams of building vast data centers

in what he described as “the cloud.” Sergey Brin

would twist tales about his latest trapeze lessons

and then moments later deny that the company

would ever index things like books or PDF files,

let alone video. Maps? Pshaw.

21

Later, when Google appeared to be accelerating

on its inevitable arc of dominance, our meet-

ings at the expanded and rapidly growing

Googleplex would take the better part of a day

or sometimes two. In those days one of the of

the moments I came to relish most was lunch-

ing in the company’s cafe, run by Charlie

Ayers6. Former chef for the Grateful Dead, he

now cooked up unusual and amazing fare for

these people who were rearranging the Internet

in ways few could truly understand or foresee.

Whenever we visited Google our primary point

of contact was Marissa Mayer. One of Google’s

earliest employees, she moved with graceful

ease through many jobs and always provided us

with great insights on search, local, news—even

on user experience. Little things like why

Google to this day retains the “I’m Feeling

Lucky” button on its home page when during

its entire existence virtually no one has ever

clicked it.

But now Marissa had moved on to run Yahoo,

so today we were meeting with a new contact:

Alan Eustace 7. Despite our familiarity with the

company, it was not entirely clear to us exactly

what he did, and for some reason we spent the

better part of an hour listening to him explain

the details of Google’s internally developed

software evaluation system that helped guide

product development. My impression was of a

very nice man, very understated, though a tad

more corporate than most at Google. Nonethe-

less, like everyone at the company, sharp as a

safety pin.

I instantly took a liking to him. He would have

been a good fit for the primitive social media

network I had created in the early 70s called

APA-50, and he would have been the right age,

back then.

So it was something of a surprise a couple of

years later when I read the top headline on the

New York Times: “Alan Eustace Jumps From

Stratosphere, Breaking Felix Baumgartner’s

2012 World Record.” Turns out that while

working at Google as a Senior VP he had also

created a very secretive company that developed

a bunch of new technology that would hoist him

far into the upper atmosphere and then let him

safely parachute to earth. There’s actually a fas-

cinating documentary called “14 Minutes From

Earth” that goes behind the scenes and de-

scribes the entire operation.

I’m not sure whether Alan was involved with

developing Google’s Project Loon 8, the compa-

ny’s effort to provide Internet access to remote

parts of the world that lack telecommunication

infrastructure. But even now, approaching dot-

age, I have no doubt my brief moment with him

was far more pleasant and enlightening than

with Officer Cheng in China. (And parentheti-

cally, I am well aware that Google’s parent com-

pany is called Alphabet. But I’ve always called it

Google, ever since they first changed their name

from “Backrub.” And since previously men-

tioned dotage is just over the horizon I am cate-

gorically allowed to ignore everything that is

true. Even if I do or don’t run for precedent

(sic).)

Luverne, Minnesota. Mid 00s.

Ken Burns greeted me with a welcoming hug.

Earlier that day it had been a mere handshake,

immediately after he bounded off stage in the

high school gym and wrapped my father in an

enormous bear hug. That’s how Ken greets you,

which on reflection is no surprise given the sto-

ries he draws from the people in his documen-

taries.

Dad was just a kid during World War Two, but

his memories of the era were still sharp, and as

a natural-born storyteller he spent several days

with Ken and his partner Lynn Novack recalling

events that occurred in his small southwestern

Minnesota town during the early 1940s.

Now on stage at Luverne’s Palace Theater, Ken

was thanking the community for its role and

support of his new film, The War. He turned

and gestured to Dad in the front row of the the-

ater, and personally thanked him for his partici-

22

pation 9. As the film opened for its world prem-

iere, I saw Mom buss Dad with a quick kiss.

For some reason, Mom’s typical affectionate

act surfaced a memory - a moment when Dad

poked his head into our locker room after a

particularly bad high school basketball game

where I had failed miserably at just about eve-

rything. I was despondent. He just grasped my

shoulder and said, “I’m proud of you,” Despite

just having sat through what for a parent must

have been a horrific spectacle. Then he turned

and walked away.

Snapping back to Luverne, as Burns pirouetted

and left the stage, I looked at Dad and suddenly

felt a deep insight into what all parents feel at

some point. As the film began, I felt a deep

rush of pride for my father.

London, England. Mid 00s.

For many years, because I flew all over the fuck

everywhere I “achieved” elite status on many

airlines. Because many of my flights were very

long and concluded in destinations strange but

wondrous, I relished the perks that came with

status and also relished sharing them with my

family. During my time of high travel, I took

both of our kids on “coming of eight” trips to

London. That’s how it came to be that my

daughter Sonya became a BFF with Jimmy

Wales, the founder of Wikipedia 10.

I was onstage for the “prenote keynote,” then

shook hands with Jimmy as he took the stage

following my warmup. I had no idea if he re-

membered me from months earlier when I in-

terviewed him at one of our conferences in Cal-

ifornia. After all, this was what we both did

much of the time, speaking at conferences with

other people who spoke at conferences. Sad to

say, but it’s hard to remember names as you

endlessly shuffle through airports and Power-

Point presentations.

But now that we were done speaking, we were

exiting Olympia London 11, a huge ancient Vic-

torian venue that was once a major train sta-

tion and cow-trading venue. As the massive

elevator doors shusshed shut on the group

ahead of me, I realized Sonya had pushed for-

ward and was on the way down to the bottom of

the conference center without me. Bad Dad.

Moments later, when I was able to cram into

the elevator and then finally touched down at

street level. I found Sonya in rapt conversation

with Jimmy. They were discussing the subtle-

ties and nuances of Webkins (he has daughters

apparently her same age). Looking up, Jimmy

actually did recognize and acknowledge me,

and quipped “your daughter is great. Planning

to have another?”

Relieved she was safe and comfortable in such

trustworthy company, I replied “no, we’re hap-

py to have just her...” Along with her brother,

our two kids were all we needed. Life was good.

Colorado. Boulder, early 60s, Fort Col-

lins mid 90s and then Mishawaka, mid

10s.

Writing recollections as if they are diary entries

is a conceit that can only be maintained if chro-

nology remains stable. Otherwise, just as in a

J.G. Ballard story, the topology of time and nar-

rative structure disintegrates. I understand

this. But these next few last but hard-drawn

moments are appropriate for that kind of devia-

tion.

Mom was strapping the cloth diaper around my

newborn brother Lincoln’s butt. The tiny black

and white TV on the counter was broadcasting

Walter Cronkite, and he kept repeating a word I

did not yet know: assassination. “What does

that mean?” I asked Mom, simultaneously

pushing the safety pins that would bind Lin-

coln’s diaper into the mattress to “sterilize”

them so he would be safe when fully wrapped.

As a five-year-old currently diligently attending

kindergarten, I was fully confident I knew as

much about health safety as national leader-

ship, despite being ignorant of current events.

23

Lincoln and Sky Sherman

“Somebody shot President Kennedy,” Mom

replied. “It’s sad, but you and your brother

don’t need to worry.”

Decades later in Fort Collins, Lincoln handed

me a bottle of Full Sail pale ale, flashed the

goofy grin that endeared him to everyone he

talked to (which was everyone - the word

“extrovert” captures just a slice of his love of

interacting with people).

“I’m going to die early,” he said, taking a long

swig, and twisting that goofy grin up another

notch.

“What are you talking about?” I shot back,

alarmed.

“Just one of those things Mom used to talk

about when she was changing diapers,” he said.

Mom had died months earlier and Lincoln and

I were spending more time together, mostly

doing things with our own kids to make up for

the time we had spent away with her as she

declined in hospice. Lincoln always liked to

fuck around and say goofball things, but hear-

ing him talk like this was still a shock.

Fifty-three years after I sterilized those diaper

pins, I stepped up to the microphone to say

final words about my brother who had died five

days earlier. Hundreds of people had come to

this stunning mountain amphitheater 12 to pay

their last respects. The day was brilliantly Colo-

rado, warm and clear. I felt cold and foggy.

I was still convinced that my sterilization ef-

forts had at least in part sustained my brother

for more than a half-century. Yet despite hav-

ing spoken before crowds of thousands all over

the world, and having conversations with all

sorts of notable people, I found myself wordless

in front of this group. What could I possibly

say?

“Farewell, brother,” I began, and then paused

as an arc of light reflected off of a rock hun-

dreds of feet above us at an elevation in Colora-

do most people would only seek when they’re

looking for high-altitude thrills. Lincoln’s wife

Renee later told me she glimpsed it too - a

quick transient flash. Like a safety pin unsnap-

ping, then vanishing into thin air.

External References

1: Probably not where we ate that night, but my cur-rent favorite restaurant in Chinatown: <https://rnglounge.com/>

2: In memoriam: <https://visarts.ucsd.edu/people/in-memoriam/phel-steinmetz.html>

3: Not the actual review, but a scan of an issue with one of my photos on the front page: <https://library.ucsd.edu/dc/object/bb7748602x/_1.pdf>

4: An account of the interview from my friend Barry Schwartz’s SEO Roundtable: <https://www.seroundtable.com/archives/003499.html>

5: Stunning beauty: <https://www.sa-venues.com/mpumalanga.htm>

6: Charlie, in his own words (video): <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRX8EwcpuP8>

7: Alan Eustace: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Eustace>

8: Project Loon: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loon_LLC>

9: Dad’s bio on The War’s website: <https://www.pbs.org/thewar/detail_5176.htm>

10: Jimmy’s own Wikipedia page: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales>

11: Olympia: https://olympia.london/

12: The Mishawaka: https://www.themishawaka.com/

Bonus: Search Engine Land <https://searchengineland.com/author/chris-sherman>

Douglass Elementary https://doe.bvsd.org/

The true story behind Google’s hilarious first name: BackRub <https://www.businessinsider.com/the-true-story-behind-googles-first-name-backrub-2015-10>

24

I think of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, as orchestrated by Rimsky-Korsakov, when I re-

member how I began -- knowing very little -- to explore classical music recordings. Pictures and

certain other works, such as Holst’s Planets and Vivaldi’s Seasons, were immediately appealing.

Seated facing two stereo speakers, I knew I was in a good place. Much earlier in my life, certain pic-

tures quickly intrigued me, a wet-behind-the-ears kid.

I don’t know if the kind of experience I’m about to describe has happened very often to people of a

younger generation, who grew up with visual information streaming into their eyes from phones,

personal computers, television, DVDs, digital displays shown on wall monitors, and games.

Conversely, people of my grandparents’ generation, born in the late 19th century, must, as young-

sters, have seen far fewer reproductions of art and photography than I did.

But people born around the time I was – in 1955 – or a few decades earlier, might recognize the

kind of experience I’m about to discuss. We had access to captivating pictures and we studied them

again and again.

Bill Meyers, for example, was a student at Columbia University when, in 1962, he wrote “Tolkien

25

Pictures and

an Inner Vision

Dale

Nelson

confident – but not always sure – that I remem-

ber from when I was a kid living on the Oregon

coast, let’s say around age 10-13, or even farther

back, from when my family lived in Utah or Cal-

ifornia.

I suspect that it was common for middle-class

households 50-odd years ago to hang few pic-

tures, aside from family photos; items such as

floral china cups and brass vases and carafes

were favored rather than paintings.

I wonder: Did any of these pictures that I’m

about to describe cause a sudden new interest

to take hold of me? Or was it because I was al-

ready interested in something, that a picture

fascinated me? I’ll forgo a lot of speculation.

1. A Mojave Desert Scene, by Robert Wood

A framed reproduction of a 1944 Robert Wood

desert landscape (whose official title is un-

known to me) drew my eye when I was in the

family living room. Whether it’s a close portrait

of an actual scene, or an imaginary scene based

on observation of real places, Wood (1889-

1879) depicts the scene realistically, with an

appropriately subdued pal-

ette. The former popularity

of Wood vs. the more recent

popularity of Thomas

Kinkade (1958-2012) sug-

gests something about the

decline of middle-class taste.

A Mojave locale would have

strongly appealed to my fa-

ther, a dedicated rockhound

in his young manhood.

and Temperaments” for a fanzine. Meyers re-

members his Chattanooga boyhood, in a house-

hold where a picture of the Black Forest hung

above the piano and cast its spell on him.

“It was a very popular print for its time but no

one seemed to have known who painted it. It

showed a broad path, almost a cathedral-like

corridor, which led into the forest and was cov-

ered by vast, over-hanging tree limbs. …A

strange white mist hovered above the path and,

off in the distance there was a glow of white light

where, apparently, the path left the dark seclu-

sion of the trees and came out into the open, or

else something which glowed was coming up the

path.”

Meyers adds, “The painting helped to shape me

and my imagination.”

It became associated in his mind with the tales of

the brothers Grimm. Furthermore, liking the

painting’s remote world of the imagination, Mey-

ers was prepared to enjoy Tolkien when the time

came.

It seems, then, that works of visual art, often

seen and pondered, formerly

helped to make the child into

the fan as well as the man or

the woman.

Herewith, pictures at an ex-

hibition in my personal hall

of memory. To reduce tedi-

um for the reader, I’ll keep

expressions about my degree

of certainty to a minimum.

These are pictures I’m pretty

1.

26

Mountains and deserts drew him. In his final months, affected by

dementia but cheerful and lovable, he liked to talk about a part of

California where the highest and the lowest parts of North America

were close together. He had climbed that high point, Mt. Whitney,

with the lowest point on the continent about 85 miles away, the

Badwater Basin in Death Valley.

Early in adult life, Dad worked for American Potash and Chemical

in desolate Trona. Seldom Seen Slim, “last of the Death Valley sin-

gle-blanket jackass prospectors,” and Pete Aguereberry were leg-

ends of the Panamints, and, maybe 25 miles from Trona, Ballarat

survived -- as a ghost town.

For most people, Wood’s picture shows an alien landscape, like the

excellent matte painting of the brooding surface of Talos IV that

you’ll remember from the Star Trek pilot “The Cage” (filmed 1964-

1965).

Wood’s picture needs no trite bleached bones, but it makes no con-

cessions to viewers who would like something prettier. The repro-

duction’s austerity may be due partly to fading, but I suppose its

predominant colors were always browns, greys, and drab greens.

(The image provided here is one I found online; the Nelson house-

hold copy was gone years ago.)

The yucca elata at the center of Wood’s painting is a boundary

marker between the viewer and the houseless, pathless realm be-

yond it. This picture must have played a part in my youthful turn

to science fiction and fantasy. People who like such fiction often

are attracted to the idea of strange, remote landscapes. Like the

terrain of some other planet, like space itself, the Mo-

jave requires that explorers prepare themselves with

food and water or means to get them, protective cloth-

ing against extremes of heat and cold, etc.

By the way, my dad generally had no interest in science

fiction – but he liked the movie Robinson Crusoe on

Mars (1964), which was filmed in Death Valley.

Like Meyers’ Black Forest picture, Wood’s desert scene

draws the receptive viewer in.

2.Egyptian-Mythological Motifs on a Sewing Ma-

chine

Remote landscapes often appeal to fans, and so do evocations of a

legendary past. My mom had an old Singer sewing machine with a

2.

1A.

27

black body and golden “Egyptian” decals.

Its ornate design stood out in the middle-class residences in which

we lived. I didn’t actually make up stories about the sphinx, but I

sensed strangeness and ancientness – elements that permeated

much of the fantasy I would eventually read, especially the romanc-

es of H. Rider Haggard, whose obsession with long-ago Egypt is

manifest in tales such as She as well as other tales now mostly for-

gotten.

That sewing machine, by the way, bespeaks a whole bygone world of

domesticity, in which a girl learned to be skilled and thrifty. Clothes

could be mended rather than thrown away, just as meals should be

made from scratch, with minimal packaging. The modern girl is

usually much more of a consumer than her grandmother was.

3.The Middle Eastern Coffee Drinker on the Hills Brothers

Can; 4. The Gas Station Dinosaur

That turbaned, white-bearded, slippered and robed, straight-spined

old fellow was the Hills Brothers emblem for may years. His statue

has stood in San Francisco since 1992, near the site of a Hills Broth-

ers factory.

For a youngster like me, he was an emblem of a faraway and

perhaps time-lost culture. The fact that he’s tasting his cof-

fee from a bowl, not a cup, subtly bespeaks different ways.

He could have appeared in an Arabian Nights tale – or, to

name an author I began to read at 13, a Lord Dunsany fanta-

sy.

(There was a faint note of fantasy that sounded even in the

elfin figures of Snap, Crackle, and Pop, on boxes of Rice

Krispies when I was a kid in the 1960s, but I can’t point to a

particular image.)

It might be nothing but a striding green outline that I saw

reproduced on magazine ads and the like, but I liked the Sin-

clair gas station brontosaurus. If Sinclair stations had been

available in the places where we lived, no doubt I’d have

wanted Dad – the sole driver in the family – to buy gas there. Some

realistic plastic dinosaurs that were given to me might have been

Sinclair products.

For, without a doubt, dinosaurs fascinated me. Before we step over

to the next pictures, let me pause to say that -- surely -- images of

1A.

3.

28

dinosaurs played a big role in turning many youngsters

towards fantasy and (especially) science fiction. Here you

had towering monsters that had existed a long time ago,

right here on this same planet – and their exceeding an-

cientness was part of the mystique.

How many people reading this article could say they re-

member dreaming about a dinosaur? Perhaps more than

one or two. I dreamed about being at my grandparents’

home in the woods of rural Grants Pass, Oregon, and that

there was a tyrannosaur treading around outside. Tolkien

said that, when he was a boy, he desired dragons with a

profound desire. Many of us must have desired dinosaurs -- as well

as dragons.

5.Carl Barks’s Old Spanish Apparition

Marvel’s superhero comics fascinated me after I bought my first

issue, Thor #140, which went on sale on March 2, 1967, according

to the superlative Mike’s Amazing World of Comics site.

Before then, I bought Gold Key’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E. #1 off

the stands, and Mike’s World says that was on sale all the way back

on Feb. 18, 1965, when I was nine years old. I might have been giv-

en a few comics before then. I’d buy more U.N.C.L.E. issues, and,

beginning 2 ½ years later, Star Trek #1 and a bunch of successors

too.

But, undoubtedly, it’s the work of Carl Barks – “the Duck Man” –

that I regard most fondly today.

I bought Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories #307 (on-sale date Feb.

24, 1966) and relished Barks’s story much more than anything else

in the issue.

In it, Donald is throwing a garden party and hopes it will win him a

respected place in polite society. He’s decided on a jungle theme

and commands his nephews to play the part of capering monkeys

off in the trees. Nothing doing! they say.

Donald buys a pair of hypnotic spectacles with which to try to sub-

due them to his wishes. Huey, Dewey, and Louie pretend that the

cheap novelty glasses work. When they try using them on Unca

Donald, he proves to be entirely more susceptible and does fall un-

der the spell, believing himself to be an ape, swinging from branch-

es and capturing Daisy.

The nephews wrestle Donald to the ground and tell him to stand

still. His mind, they assume, is blank. But rashly one of the kids

puts the spectacles on Donald, in whose mind Daisy and the young-

sters look like monkeys, and that’s how they behave when the spec-

4.

29

tacles work on them.

Now all four ducks believe they are chattering monkeys.

This results in a hilarious and, for Donald, ultimately terribly sham-

ing eruption of hijinks at the garden party. What a debacle! In the

final panel, having recovered from their monkey delusion, the

ducks flee Duckburg for Little America, populated only by pen-

guins.

It’s from The Best of Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck #1 (on sale

Sept. 1, 1966) that I have drawn the memorable picture that will

stand for my enjoyment of comics. The story is “The Ghost of the

Grotto,” written and drawn by Barks for a 1947 comic.

Though he knew his readers would be young kids, Barks does not

cheat. He tells the story perfectly, conjuring a delectably creepy

atmosphere and convincing background detail.

Donald and his nephews have become kelp harvesters in the West

Indies. The seaweed beds are becoming exhausted, but they can see

there’s a rich supply in Skull-

Eye Reef.

They are warned that this very

night it’s 50 years since the

last time a little boy disap-

peared, and this has been hap-

pening twice every hundred

years for centuries in the vi-

cinity of that haunted reef.

But they resolve to get at that

kelp no matter what mysteries

the locals talk about.

And there is someone there, a

menacing armored figure who

steps out of the shadows of a

rotting shipwreck, beneath

the beams of the full moon.

Barks would speak of himself

as a hack. But he was a wor-

thy American original. He was born in 1901 and died in 2000. Af-

ter his death, I learned that he’d resided at 810 NE Oregon Avenue

in Grants Pass, Oregon, an estimated four miles from where my

grandparents on my father’s side lived.

Carl Barks’s mortal clay was laid to rest in Hillcrest Memorial Park

in Grants Pass (Rosewood, Lot 2, Section 31), where my grandpar-

ents on my father’s side also have their graves.

5.

30

6.Space Map

Now we pause before a masterpiece.

When I was about 10 years old, that

© 1959 map of the solar system hung

on the wall in the utility room where I

slept, in our little rental house at 654

Elrod Avenue in Coos Bay, Oregon.

A table on the map told kids that ra-

dio signals from Venus would take

two minutes and 18 seconds to reach

Earth, while a signal from Pluto could

take six hours and 25 minutes. You’d

weigh 34 pounds on Mars, and 238

pounds on Jupiter, if you weighed 90

pounds on earth. Zipping along at

25,000 miles an hour in your space-

ship, it’d take a fraction over eight

hours to get to the moon, but 4,446

days to get to Pluto at its closest.

Even a math-wary kid like me would ponder those numbers.

Maps imply journeys, so a solar system map implies science fiction

voyages. The paintings may be over-colored, but, against deep

space’s blackness, the colors seemed luscious to kids. They made

you want to read stories about people who went to

the moon and planets and saw, with their own

eyes, the forms of things unknown beneath extra-

terrestrial skies.

Subtly, the picture of an erupting volcano on

Mercury may have touched on Cold War-era

anxieties about atomic-bomb mushroom

clouds.

7, 8.Prehistoric Gardens Dinosaurs

An hour south of Coos Bay on Highway 101

was Port Orford, the location of the Prehis-

toric Gardens roadside attraction. It was

created by an artistic retired accountant,

Ernie Nelson (1907-1999), who dug Nation-

al Geographic pictures of dinosaurs when

he was a boy.

A dozen or so years after the Gardens

opened back in 1955, I was among the

schoolkids who took a field trip there. A

6.

7.

8.

31

trail wound through ferns and past mossy branches to places

where the enormous creatures emerged from the primordial

shade.

Ferns were perhaps the first plants to fascinate me, growing abun-

dantly in coastal Oregon, and their prominence in the Gardens and

in dinosaur books must have helped me to appreciate them. Ferns

appear a few times in Watkins-Pitchford’s The Little Grey Men,

one of the great books of my young days. They are mentioned nu-

merous times in Tolkien’s description of Ithilien, in The Two Tow-

ers, but that is a rather Mediterranean place.

I saved the Prehistoric Gardens brochure and a postcard or two,

and liked to look at them. Today the site boasts 23 life-size dino-

saur sculptures, not all of which had yet been made when I was

there.

9.An Album Cover from Outer Space

Coos Bay had a Pay Less drug store that sold LP records. There I

saw Mr. Spock’s Music from Outer Space (Dot Records, 1967),

which was given to me or bought with money given to me. I’d been

a Star Trek fan even before sitting on the floor to watch the first

broadcast on Sept. 8, 1966, because the “NBC Week” trailers fasci-

nated me. In Coos Bay, by the way, the only TV channel you could

get, if like us you didn’t have cable, was NBC. My life would’ve been

different if Star Trek had been on a different network.

The same publicity photo of Leonard Nimoy in Vulcanian make-up,

holding a model of the U. S. S. Enterprise, that appeared on the

album, was sold as a poster, and I got that too.

10.Billboard’s Top-Selling LP for 1966

A record album cover that arrested my attention in a different way

was the one for Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass’s Whipped Cream and

Other Delights.

The model, Dolores Erickson, was three months pregnant, and no

doubt her breasts had swelled in that first trimester. Unless his

mother is nursing another child, a boy of 12 or 13 doesn’t usually

think of breasts as fountains of nourishment for babies. It’s a

shame if Dolores’s baby ended up being formula-fed.

I wonder about my reaction to this picture. I associate it with the

onset of puberty. If I saw it when the record was first released by

A&M in 1965, I suppose I would have been embarrassed rather

than enticed by that lady who wasn’t wearing very much, and

would have flipped on to other records. But then arrived the day

when the picture held my gaze.

And what a silly and very sexist image that was: the woman as al-

10.

9.

32

most literally a consumable object. But is it fanciful to see a couple

of other, certainly faint, suggestions? In all that billowing white-

ness, she looks a little like a bride with a rose – a flower that can

symbolize virginal sexual integrity. And perhaps, despite the obvi-

ously demeaning savor of the composition, there’s a hint of some-

thing regal there coming through, almost like she’s a crowned

queen with a scepter.

Perhaps das Ewig-Weibliche in some form is a concept that will

reassert itself when our present day has passed, as pass it must.

That album photograph appeared when I was leaving behind early

boyhood, when one is untroubled by sex, but before adolescent ap-

petite sets in. When I gazed at the picture, I didn’t feel obvious de-

sire, but (though I couldn’t have articulated it) I knew, at some lev-

el, that the model was a woman and that I was male and that this

difference was important.

“An essential condition of adult sexual equilibrium, and with it of

virility of spirit, is the acceptance by the [boy] of his sex at as early

an age as possible,” wrote the personalist philosopher Emmanuel

Mounier.

Now, a few spaces on the wall of this mental gallery are missing

their pictures.

My parents had a reference book to the Bible – it was hardcover,

and, it seems, bound in green cloth. I’m haunted by a monochrome

painting in it – last seen many years ago.

The small picture showed Egypt’s pharaoh, seated, holding the out-

stretched lifeless form of his firstborn son, at the time of the

Plagues just before the Exodus. The king looks up towards a dark

sky, his face stricken, and perhaps his eyes in their deep sockets are

glittering with tears. The picture was eerie and I’m not sure I was

comfortable looking at it. The volume had disappeared by the time I

sorted my parents’ books after their deaths.

A classmate brought to school one of those paperback collections

that Pocket Books published in the 1960s from the Ripley’s Believe

It or Not! Syndicated newspaper feature. A drawing of a somber

vault illustrated an item on the “floating coffins of Barbados.” A

generation of gruesome movies has intervened between that time

and the present, having driven out the more innocent stuff that

used to be plenty creepy enough for us.

A blog called I saw Lightning Fall occasionally challenges readers to

write scary stories of exactly 100 words. I wrote a story based on a

National Enquirer first page, probably seen at a McKay’s market in

Coos Bay. Many years after the incident this hundred-word piece

was the result:

33

A Trip from the Supermarket

In 1967, at the grocery-store checkout, a boy named Brad

saw a tabloid front-page faked photograph of a baby born old,

white-haired, dreadfully wrinkled, sad-eyed. Brad flinched

away. His mother paid for the groceries; he had already forgot-

ten the picture.

Brad grew, listened to the radio, played

sports, dated girls, went to college for two years,

worked in offices, married, fathered children,

drank responsibly, earned promotions, made his

parents proud.

One lazy Sunday morning he glanced up

and noticed a shrunken tuber on a kitchen coun-

ter – wrinkled. Something inside awoke and his

skin shriveled, his breath shortened, and he col-

lapsed.

Another missing picture was an encounter with

mythological feminine beauty. I might not be re-

membering it well. But it seems there was an is-

sue of National Geographic with an advertise-

ment for some high-end item, perhaps a luxury

wristwatch, and the background was the face of

Venus from Botticelli’s famous Birth, with her flowing golden hair.

Botticelli’s Venus is an embodiment of Mary McCarthy’s descrip-

tion of the post-medieval concept of the beautiful: something com-

bining strangeness and allure. A few years ago, I looked through

library volumes of National Geographic from what I supposed was

the right period, but didn’t find the image I seem to remember.

A picture of the Taj Mahal may have been the first image of a build-

ing that I gazed upon because it seemed beautiful to me. Of course

it looks like something from a tale of fantasy or from a space opera

– think of the castle in “The Cage.”

The rest of the pictures in this exhibition will be taken from books

that I remembered from my young days. As an adult, I acquired

copies: a book inherited from my father; here and there a library

discard, there a find in a used book store, there again a copy

sourced from an online bookseller.

11.“In the Jungle,” from Raymond Ditmars’ Reptiles of the

World

I often browsed the pictures in this family book. Dad owned the

1940 reprint. Most of the plates are typical textbook-type images

11.

34

showing distinctive fea-

tures of lizards, crocodiles,

turtles and tortoises, and

snakes. But the final plate

is a somber, poetic one,

suggesting a lonely, painful

death somewhere far from

help.

I liked to capture the harm-

less garter snakes that lived

around blackberry patches.

I’d throw my jacket over

them, pick them up, and bring them home. Mom could tell I had

brought snakes into the house by the smell of the musk they would

exude when frightened. Then I’d let them go. In my mind, I called

them “mountain slitherers.”

12.The Dwarf in Fairy Tales by the Brothers Grimm

(Windermere Series), Painted by Hope Dunlap

My family moved around in my first 16 years. In the early 1960s,

we rented a house, for us an unusually nice one, 3831 Honeycut

Road in Salt Lake City.

It turned out that the former residents, the Claytons, had left some

things behind, including a basement freezer loaded with ice cream.

There was a finished attic, and a few children’s items awaited dis-

covery by my sister and me, including small yellow plastic records,

with songs about a sneezy rag man and brushing your teeth and

other things. There was a copy of The Tin Woodman of Oz and a

fairy-tale collection.

Most of the pictures in this Grimms’ book (Rand McNally,

1913/1928) are pretty soppy, but I was inter-

ested in Dunlap’s deep-forest scene showing a

gnarled dwarf with his beard somehow caught

in a partially-split portion of a tree trunk. But

Snow-White and Rose-Red are too doll-like!

13-16.Some Images from Scandinavian Lore

More to my taste, a few years later, were the

crisp, dramatic, and stiff-figured compositions

in an oversize book, Scandinavian Fairy Tales

(Golden Press, 1962). The book was printed in

Italy and the artist was Federico Santin. (One

summer, during my undergraduate years, I

visited an old friend in Coos Bay and went to

the library, looking up this volume and taking 14.

13.

12.

35

a color snapshot of one of the illustrations.)

That dreadful flier looks like a vampire, not a troll –

much less a three-headed troll such as the text spec-

ifies! But, yeah – I liked that double-page spread,

however inauthentic.

Drenched in authenticity were the illustrations in

one of my lifetime-favorite books, Norwegian Folk

Tales of Asbjørnsen and Moe, translated by Pat

Shaw Iversen (Viking, 1960). This book was a great

find for me in the children’s section of the Coos Bay

Public Library.

That priceless volume called upon the vision of two

artists, Theodor Kittelsen and Erik Werenskiold.

The exhibition of my mental gallery could easily

hang a couple of dozen pictures from this book, but

I have selected two, a benevolent hag with a nose

long enough to stir the embers with, and a menac-

ing, but doomed, troll, both from “Soria Moria Cas-

tle.”

A third book feeding my youthful love of Northern

fantasy was a retelling of the Nibelung-story by

James Baldwin (Scribner, 1931) and illustrated by Peter Hurd, who

had been a pupil of the great N. C. Wyeth.

Look at the cover art for The Story of Siegfried, showing Siegfried

forging the “‘glittering terror – the blade Balmung,’” as he himself

names it.

That evening moon with earthshine might be a good ex-

ample of Coventry Patmore’s theory of the point of rest

in art (from Principle in Art, 1889). As I wrote else-

where,

Beginning with examples derived from paint-

ings, Patmore finds a punctum indifferans, a “point,

generally quite insignificant in matter, on which, in-

deed, the eye does not necessarily fix itself, but to which

it involuntarily returns for repose.”

This object is, in itself, “the least interesting

point” in the whole canvas, but “all that is interesting”

in the picture “is more or less unconsciously referred to

it.” In a landscape it might be the “sawn-off end of a

branch of a tree.” In Raphael’s “Dresden” Madonna, it is

the Infant’s heel. The point of rest doesn’t create harmony where it

does not exist, but where it does exist, “it will be strangely brought

out and accentuated by this in itself often trifling, and sometimes,

15.

16.

36

perhaps, even accidental accessory.”

Patmore proposes this test: “Cover [these points] from

sight and, to a moderately sensitive and cultivated eye, the whole

life of the picture will be found to have been lowered.”

I knew that celestial stars don’t have five points, but I liked those:

they were magical.

17.The Shen

Before the time when I got to know those Scandinavian books, I

opened Arthur Bowie Chrisman’s Shen of the Sea (Dutton, 1925),

illustrated by Else Hasselriis. I don’t think much of this book mat-

tered to me, but the weird silhouette of the Shen, “demons of the

sea,” impressed me. I never tried to buy a copy.

The pretty world of Perrault, with Frenchified fairy godmothers or

the like, was even less to my taste. I liked fantasy but not all fanta-

sy.

18.John Polgreen Borrows from Chesley Bonestell

Below is an image from another of the great books of my boyhood,

Roy Gallant’s Exploring the Planets (Garden City Books, 1958). If

the Rand-McNally space map made you want to go to the other

planets of our solar system, John Polgreen’s pictures were the im-

ages that took you there. I espe-

cially loved the painting of Saturn

as seen from Titan.

It is, of course, almost certainly

indebted to one of the renderings

of Saturn as seen from Titan that

were painted by Chesley Bonestell

(1888-1986). One of them ap-

peared in Life for 29 May 1944, but

I love this one most:

So Polgreen’s imitating Bonestell.

But then, every art museum should

hang a few fakes of the Masters,

shouldn’t it?

Both pictures combine beauty with

a terrible coldness.

I wish I knew when I first saw the Bonestell. But I’ll always be fond

of the version by Polgreen (1910-1970, apparently).

19-20.The Dinosaurs of Rudolph Zallinger

What Chesley Bonestell was to science fiction-astronomical paint-

ings, Rudy Zallinger (1919-1995) was to the prehistoric Earth.

17.

18.

37

Their paintings are enthrallingly imagina-

tive, and also seem realistic, presenting

scenes as if we were there. Notice that

both artists provide beguiling back-

grounds: you can easily imagine yourself

walking towards those folded upthrusts of

stark stone.

During 1943-1947, Zallinger painted the

Age of Reptiles mural in the Great Hall of the Peabody Museum of

Yale University. He used a fresco secco technique deriving from the

Italian Renaissance. Because of the location of the visitors’ en-

trance, Zallinger designed the 110 foot-long mural to be “read” from

right to left; i.e., the most ancient scene is at the right end.

That first zone depicts the Late Devonian Period. The 1,760-square-

foot painting ends with the Cretaceous Period. The creatures have

ranged from Psaronius tree ferns and a ray-finned fish, Cheirolepis,

to a beautiful magnolia and two familiar dinosaurs loved by kids, the

Triceratops and Tyrannosaur – and so has ranged over 300 million

years.

Here is part of the mural:

The dinosaurs’ movement appears to be stately, even ponderous,

suggesting their enormous weight as well as vast size. Plant forms

that are alien to us today evoke distant epochs, like descriptive pas-

sages in Lovecraft’s “Shadow Out of Time.”

Formidable cliffs rise in the distance – young landforms not worn

into smooth and rolling shapes by millions of years’ weathering.

Volcanoes and lava flows seemed more exotic to me when I was a

boy; while still young, though, I would learn about a new island,

Surtsey, forming off the coast of Iceland. Years later, a high school

teacher by then, I stepped out from my apartment to find a film of

ash from Mt. St. Helens had settled on everything (May 1980).

I knew Zallinger’s dinosaurs through Prehistoric

Animals: Dinosaurs and Other Reptiles and

Mammals (credited to the Editorial Staff of Life

and Lincoln Barnett, the text being adapted by

Jane Werner Watson; Simon and Schuster’s Gold-

en Library of Knowledge, circa 1958). My copy

disappeared, perhaps worn out from much use.

21.The Last Painting: Alex Schomburg’s End-

paper for the Winston SF Juveniles

There it is, the single greatest image for us, today,

of yesterday’s tomorrows. Surely no one picture

better captures what it was we wanted when we

21.

19.

20.

38

wanted science fiction, us kids of the mid-1960s, than this design

by Schomburg (1905-1998).

Donald Wollheim’s The Secret of the Ninth Planet (1959), another

of the very greatest books of my youngster days, was one of the last

of the nearly 40 Winston releases.

While exploring Incan ruins in the Andes, the young hero learns

that unknown beings have installed a sun-tap station on our planet,

stealing solar energy and eerily causing sunlight to dim and tem-

peratures to fall all over the world. He sets out with his father and

fellow spaceship crewmembers to reach the other sun-tap stations

– on Mercury, Venus, Mars, Callisto, etc. – and shut them down,

working their way towards Pluto, where they will discover the iden-

tity of the robbers and defeat them with the help of Neptunians.

22.The Face That Launched the Marvelmania Trip

My boyhood friend Kurt Erichsen had a copy of Thor #132, which

went on sale in early summer 1966. The final page of the main fea-

ture was the revelation of Ego, the Living Planet. “I am Ego!” is to

say “I am I,” but it didn’t occur to me at the time that the word bal-

loon was nearly a quotation from the Biblical book of Exodus,

Chapter 3. But the murkily-printed collage was awesome enough to

fascinate me.

Whenever it was that I saw this comic, I began to collect Marvel’s

productions with Thor #140. The Norse-inflected sci-fi grandiosity

of that magazine was greatly to my taste. I soon was buying all of

the Marvel superhero comics, and writing and drawing my own

comics. I began to read Thor about the same time I was getting

into Tolkien.

23.The Last Drawing: Tolkien’s Misty Mountains

I discovered The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in the Bal-

lantine paperbacks when I was 11. They were greater literary loves

than any science fiction had ever been, and still are. In the public

library, I found out that the hardcover edition of The Hobbit includ-

ed Tolkien’s own illustrations, and the drawing of the Misty Moun-

tains was a favorite.

It’s very free with perspective, so that a wonderful sense of mysteri-

ous distance comes through. What a romantic pull one feels to-

wards far-off, long-ago lands. No creature of fantasy appears – no

dragon, no dwarves -- nor are they needed for the sense of wonder

to come through. That was a picture that helped me to learn to love

the sight of Oregon’s trees and mountains.

Because my paperback of The Hobbit provided only the maps, not

the drawings, I photocopied this and other drawings from a library

22.

21A.

39

hardcover copy, so that I could look at them whenever I wanted to.

Julia Shaw’s The Memory Illusion isn’t the last word about how

and what the mind recollects, but autobiographers who read it may

be humbled about their ability to know and to tell their personal

history as it really was. In regard to our sense of who we are, “the

roots of the seen remain unseen,” as the Scottish fantasist and

preacher George MacDonald said.

Still, it seems likely that what Wordsworth called certain “spots of

time” – youthful experiences of unusual meaning for oneself – help

to shape our imaginations and passions. The pictures I’ve dis-

cussed here seem to have stayed with me ever since I was ten to

thirteen years old.

Years ago I found a passage in Owen Barfield’s Poetic Diction: A

Study in Meaning that sheds light on this memory-gallery

of pictures. Barfield is quoting – from a source he doesn’t

identify – a passage from George Santayana.

“Men are habitually insensible to beauty. Tomes of

aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight

and intuition. …

“Taste is formed in those moments when aesthetic

emotion is massive and distinct; preferences then grow

conscious, judgments then put into words will reverberate

through calmer hours; they will constitute prejudices, hab-

its of apperception, secret standards for all other beauties. A peri-

od of life in which such intuitions have been frequent may amass

tastes and ideals sufficient for the rest of our days. Youth in these

matters governs maturity, and while men may develop their early

impressions more systematically and find confirmations of them

in various quarters, they will seldom look at the world afresh or

use new categories in deciphering it. Half our standards come

from our first [teachers], and the other half from our first loves.”

That sounds about right.

Credits

Most images here are taken from Internet sources, including: Bos-

ton.com, crediting the Peabody Museum of Natural History

(Zallinger mural portion); Harvard Magazine (sewing machine);

Oregon Historical Society Research Library (brochure for the Pre-

historic Gardens); Prehistoric Gardens website (postcard), etc. Ted

White reprinted a version of Meyers’ “Tolkien and Temperaments”

in the August 1969 issue of Fantastic. The Mounier quotation is

from publisher Rex Collings’s “‘Watership Down’: The Penalties of

Success,” in the [London] Times Literary Supplement, 6 December

1974.

23.

40

But Not the Quail

A California valley quail bonked itself dead

against our living room window. I found it,

skinned it, gutted it and fried it up so everyone

could taste. Then left the skin stretched over a

paper towel wrapped bottle in the back hall way.

This would have been fine if I had also skinned

the head and stretched it over something, but

no, I just cut it off at the neck and I don’t know...

My finish and polish to projects is lacking at the

moment. A few flies have found the feathers, but

not too many. I am going to have to pull the

brains out but, kind of like my writing, I really

do prefer to let nature take its course. (Or should

I say coarse? Yes.) Why didn't I think of salt tan-

ning the head while I was elbow deep in the

gore? It is a male California quail and I didn't

want to lose that topknot.

Egyptian Easter

The special tool for cutting the tops off eggs, an

egg topper, was acquired long before our spring

confinement. It looks like a mojito muddling

bar tool on shiny stainless steel steroids. Works

great. I was describing to a friend our Easter

preparations including seed broadcasting, yard

art and glitter infused pink polka dots.

“You trepanned the eggs,” she exploded.

Yes, and then washed and dried the empty

shells, filled them with mixed vegetable and

flower seeds with added compostable confetti

hand cut from high fiber handmade paper. The

cap was reconnected with a careful application

of artisanal papier-mâché. Then dried, again.

On Easter Sunday they were placed in the gar-

den to be discovered and smashed.

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

41

I Have Big Hands and That Is No Lie

I've been procrastinating when not breaking the

mower or being bossed around by the resident

three year old. Did you know my hands are a spi-

der that raises its front legs and says I’m warning

you, back off but also a sea anemone that stays in

one place and will grab you if you get too close to

my waving sticky tentacles? Both hands also

make an octopus that is very smart, arranges gar-

dens with toys and disguises itself and will jump

out if you get too close. Single handed I become

squeaky mousies (okay, mice because there is

never just one) that love to run over tummies

looking for tasty baby belly buttons when invited.

Also rolly pollys (pill bugs or sow bugs), jelly fish

(tasty and delicious, other times poisonous and

will get you) and the current favorite, the duck.

How does one make a duck? Hold one hand just

the way you would to make the swan shadow on

the wall. The child holds out hands full of imagi-

nary mud for duck-me to eat. You might like be-

coming the rolly polly, which scurries along on

extended fingers then curls into a ball when it

gets scared, because someone might grab it! Got

you! Get ready. Lately there is a roaring lion

around that causes the duck head to explode into

a giggle of jazz hands.

I Broke It

Now, if I can just keep from wrecking the riding

lawn mower (again). . . I might get back to carv-

ing the grass. Last year the field sculpture was

my best seat of the pants approximation of a

maze, labyrinth or St Catherine’s thing.

The first time the awful noise wasn't my fault,

just metal fatigue. The end of one of the blades

gave way and peeled back on itself. Course that

could have been related to knocking into low ly-

ing rocks and swiping at hidden gopher and big-

ger than expected mole mounds. Put on new

blades, spindle, pulley and all good.

The second was a much louder bit of misjudg-

ment exacerbated by gravity. I swear that stump

wasn't there in the thistles when I checked the

route. It has been a while since I operated a

clutch driven machine, and not only due to our

sequestration. (Wherein I haven’t driven a car

since I don’t know when, say March 19, when we

turned around and came home after we bought

gas (before the price dropped)). I quit on autos

with clutches a decade ago as my knee was get-

ting testy and I had to choose between walking in

my dotage or better mileage with a clutch car

right now. Yup, I took the route with the future

me pottering around the back forty on my day glo

orange Swedish cut and mulch machine. Except

that the tootling around now includes a quick

action down shift to get the thing to back up.

Never fun on the down slope. It felt like the

bumper took all the impact with that hidden

stump. The lid popped up, but there was no visi-

ble damage. There was the bad noise again when

I tried to engage the blades and go back to cut-

ting. So I rolled to the barn for a closer inspec-

tion. Well, there was a ding down under the en-

gine on the deck where the dent in the metal

caught one of the blades so it couldn’t move. That

is the blade cut into the steel and stayed there.

Which bent the blade, yoiked the spindle,

sheared off the mounting bolts and flanges, blew

the bushings and uh something else (roached?

torqued?) the pulley. No worries; we had pur-

chased extra blades and a spare spindle.

There will not be a third. So I thought. I swore I

would be careful, I would be cautious; I would

wade through the waist high forbs and grasses

before each approach on my scything orange

monster. Hey, I promised myself I would never

again treat the mower as a moveable stump

grinder (true confession, it had sort of worked

that way on the ground level prune tree remnant

that I couldn’t see until motoring over it made

the funny shredding noise.) I even dug out rocks.

My trusty mechanic had wisely raised the blade

deck too. There was good growth in the greenery

by this time, given the weeks between prangs,

parts delivery and time available to able mechan-

ic (see *deathtrap* car, as below). We love Dave

our big brown delivery truck essential worker.

We gave him the derelict “cocktails” sign to re-

42

turn to Burning Man; he offered to buy the

*deathtrap* cool 90’s Honda CRX.

Yes so sharp blades, cleared path, slicing and

mulching on. Our fields are a bit bumpy and

lumpy, as you might have guessed, even more so

after Cal Fire cut fences and ran big tread ma-

chines around while stopping the fire of ’17. They

were the kind of bladed dozers that can push

over big full grown trees and such, and throw

berms of topsoil when they turn. A bit crunchy

on the driveway as well, but we have a house.

Growling up a slight slope (no more than ten

degrees, I am following the manufacturers man-

ual now) I come up to level and there it is, the

weird new noise. Only this time I stop the revo-

lutions, just pop it right out of gear, and the deck

wobbles earthwards. Huh, this is unfamiliar

new, maybe the belt snapped! There are little

side wheels which are usually non weight bear-

ing, like training wheels on a bike. I dismount

and walk around to inspect and see that there is

just one rod that suspends the deck, so it is now

sitting very close to the dirt and is disconnected

from the harness on the engine frame. I guess a

missing cotter pin is technically a fail, but some-

how the wibbly horizontal shimmy didn’t feel

like I broke anything. This smack down to the

ground was not nearly noisy enough.

When our stout mechanic replaced the fiddly

linkage bits he also took care of the leaky tire.

And found a one inch long, extremely thin sharp

pointed plum thorn. That came free with a glori-

ous whoop and choice use of barnyard appropri-

ate language. The same language exercised dur-

ing the dangerous stump removals. Drive in a

wedge, split the wood, reset the wedge repeat

until there are shards and voila no digging! Did

you know that Osage orange wood is very dura-

ble and hard? It was used as gate posts back in

the day. It is not easy to split when it is fully

cured. Impossible when set in concrete there

under the red hot poker plants and forty years of

leaf mulch.

In Stitches, Reflections on Clothing Con-

struction 70A

My trusty mechanic and I car pooled to classes

at the local community college this spring (until

mid-semester when we didn’t.) I thought it

would be fun to hone my sewing skills. Maybe

make me more efficient and fast. The machine

shop courses meant fabrication of a number of

excellent items I hadn’t known I needed. Fabric

weights. They can be bought or made with bags

of beans. Oh no, not around here. Now all the

glorious small dense objects that fill me with joy

and litter my desk are dusted off and gleaming.

They are ready to sit on a wide swath of cotton to

give it gravity and hold it still. Hunks of mineral

and chunks of fossils! Grandmother’s leaded

glass cats, ugly or charming ceramics the chil-

dren made. And the perfect stack of brushed alu-

minum machine learning test blocks – true cir-

cles engraved on squares rotated forty five de-

grees inside of squares and accurate to two thou-

sandths of an inch. The pattern cutting layout

becomes a fantasy landscape ready to make

twirling pink polka-dot princess style…

Like (many) (most) (every) (all) women of a cer-

tain age I hate ironing. This class gave me no

out. If I want to make French seams I must

press. Also, I am not patient; I can now see how

persistence in picky pinning pays off. I must get

over the fuzzy hot shredded mess of culled fabric

and trimmed threads that stick to everything.

The worms will eat deconstructed cotton, I don’t

know about the polyester thread (yet.) Gathers

(yuck) make flounces (ick) required for the sev-

eral many items created during this class. How

many you wonder? Two spools of pink thread

worth. I got over making gathers, see my list.

Use sharp tools, the right tools, specialty

tools. Slashers and snippers. Seam

rippers. For fabric only.

All the weird feet in the sewing box.

Hold threads to the back for button

holes (or get a snarl that will break

the sewing needle.)

43

Iron. Press. Also wash. Meld, open, align, under stitch, seam.

Layout, meticulously match fabric grain. All the pattern transfer, every damn stupid little

dot.

Non-toxic does not mean washable marker.

Pin, baste, ease = magic. But first comes pin.

Pin. Sharp, fresh, sturdy, clean, long, glass topped pins. Pin from the outside in. Pin facing

forward for easy out. Pin inside the lines. Also check machine needles.

Interfacing – it melts, even when it isn’t supposed to. Use it anyway.

Grade, trim, clip, notch = Construction! Structure! Flexibility!

The word is tink for knitting, meaning rip out and redo. I have always loathed the phrase “practice

makes perfect”. Now that I have experienced good instruction on how to rip out a seam to undo an

errant tuck and then seen the perfection of the redo that attains ease with smooth even drape, I do

love the do over. Really just love being able to make what I want better, don’t think I don’t still

hate that phrase. Oh, and everyone in this multi-generation household has observed that glitter

embedded pink polka dot damask makes super sparkly dryer lint. Possibly enough to stuff that

quail.

44

Funny thing, I woke up a few weeks back

and found myself in Minneapolis. I'm a little

worried because it's only October and I've

already seen a couple good ’ol boys with big

’ol rusty snowplow blades on front of their

4x4s. What are they worried about? And it's

the first time I ever really noticed the exist-

ence of the Central Time Zone. Now I grasp

in wholeness that network television here

really does run in a real-time link with the

East Coast, somewhat in the way, back in

my fannish past, I came to comprehend that

when it's midnight in Grove City (where I

went to college) it's nine in L.A. This excited

Mike Wood so much he wrote a song about

it for me.

When I was active in APA45 in the early

1970’s, half the membership seemed to live

in Minneapolis (or in Madison, which regis-

tered in my born-in-Western-Pennsylvania

mind as Somewhere Near Minneapolis.) I

knew immediately upon discovering fandom

in the pages of fannish fanzines like John D.

Berry's Foolscap, particularly Ted John-

stone's “LASFS History: 1956-61” in issue 6,

that I wanted to live around other fans. It

was 1968 and I was in the 10th grade and I

lived in Pittsburgh, which was briefly con-

ducive to fannishness (thanks to Linda,

Ginjer, and Suzle.) Then I went off to col-

lege and embarked on many years of adven-

tures with my nonfan college friends. After

living on farms and communes, bicycling,

hiking and hitchhiking around the North

American continent, I slowly learned that

my college friends had different plans and

different visions from mine. I dreamed of

moving to a fannish city, which in the ’70’s

consisted of New York, L.A., and Minneap-

olis. Oh, there was Seattle. And San Francis-

co, Boston, Baltimore, maybe even Philadel-

phia. I might have been happy in one of

these, but then I fell in with a bad crowd

and moved to Northern Virginia. I stayed a

week or two at Ted White's house in Falls

Church, then shared a house in Arlington

with Dan and Lynn Steffan for a year. Next I

had an apartment in Riverdale, Maryland,

hanging around with Avedon Carol for eight

months, before moving back to Arlington to

room with Steve Stiles. Until the ’80s ar-

rived.

Ronald Reagan lied, raving and drooling,

risking the lives of our Iranian Embassy

hostages to get into the White House. Soon

45

after that I lost my job as a photographer

with the D.C. Regional Planning Authority. I

moved to New York City at the end of 1981,

staying for a while with Bridget Dziedzic in

her gigantic urban homesteader apartment

at the south fringes of Harlem before finding

my own studio apartment in Long Island

City, Queens. For eight years I hung on to

that place, the longest I’d lived anywhere

since leaving home. I continued my rock ’n

roll adventure, explored, photographed, took

notes, developed social and career survival

instincts. I worked as a photo retouching

studio messenger, production typist, promo-

tion assistant, ad traffic manager, slush pile

reader, film truck driver and 3rd electrician

for a gaffer, data entry supervisor for the

Harris Poll, and East Coast stringer for Lo-

cus, finally learning a typesetting system,

Compugraphic, in a small A/V studio. Then

things got hairy. I began to move up through

New York's rough and tumble type house

jungle, learning all I could, struggling for the

Big Money. Through all of this I was also

playing drums in a series of loud fast bands:

The Killer Bunnies, Intensive Care, War Pigs.

I'd sold my last drum kit in 1974 to fund my

bicycle trip across Canada, but it all came

back, once I was in New York and hanging

out in clubs like CBGB’s till 5:00 A.M., how

important playing music still was to me.

But I grew tired of the tension, weary of the

madness in the streets. Drinking with

friends, my main topic turned to Getting

Out. A typesetter can work anywhere. Then

one day Gary Farber called and asked if I

could drive him to LaGuardia Airport to pick

someone up. He was a bit vague and evasive

about who we were picking up, but I finally

dragged the name out of him...Geri Sullivan.

Well. This lead to that, and come the next

spring I found myself making plans with

Geri for me to move in with her...here...in

Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Leaving New York for Minneapolis was the

closest thing to an adult, planned move I've

ever made. I moved from Pennsylvania to

Virginia, and then on to New York, in a ’72

Volkswagen—except for my stereo speakers

and a few heavy odds and ends (like boxes

of books and fanzines), which friends

moved for me later in their vans. Two hun-

dred and some odd miles, five hours each

leg, more or less. Nothing like the 1,200

miles I faced to get to Minnesota. Eight

years in one place, a tiny studio apartment,

left me with a few things I wanted to keep

with me. My place resembled a trapper's

cabin, stacked floor to ceiling wall to wall

with books, records, tools, electronics,

drums, ’70 Chevelle parts, typewriters,

plants, two huge old enlargers in a kitchen

darkroom, and, of course, mountains of

fanzines (including the mysteriously disap-

peared Larry Carmody’s collection.) Oh

yeah, and Huey and Louie, 32 pounds of

white cats.

My last few weeks in New York passed by in

a hazy dream state of not enough time, not

enough boxes, full blown satori. I shot roll

after roll of film, trying to catch up on

things I'd seen and wanted to take with me,

stayed out late partying, thinking how I'd

probably never drive around the bombed-

out East Village late at night with such fa-

miliarity ever again. I quit working full-

time in May, worked part time here and

there, including several interesting days at

High Times Magazine. I also made sure I

got up into the mountains several times,

camping in the Delaware Water Gap Na-

tional Recreation Area.

And I finally found my way to the summit

46

of Sunrise Mountain.

One Sunday morning in the midst of July,

Chris Couch and I went down to Ryder to

pick up my 24-foot diesel. It was cloudy and

early and I wasn’t done packing. Fans, edi-

tors, artists, musicians and other people ar-

rived, drank all the beer, shoved everything

down the stairwell into the truck. Bridget

took maniacal charge of the packing, whoop-

ing with glee as the final box and board

shelves came down, giving her a pile of stur-

dy Chinatown crates to fill. By four o'clock in

the afternoon the truck was full and I was

faced with two terrified cats and a handful of

wonderful people in the empty shell of what

had for so long been a safe, book-lined ha-

ven, and I had to leave.

I wanted a big truck, something with heavy

springs and big tires, because, though I don’t

have much furniture, I really do have lots of

books and fanzines. This truck had 64 origi-

nal miles on it—I was its first user! As the

boys and I wheeled out of Queens and onto

the Triboro Bridge, I tuned in a last time to

my favorite rock station on the truck radio,

and swallowed a lot of lumps in my throat.

Huey and Louie were in their oversized air-

line container on the seat beside me making

going-to-the-vet sounds and all I wanted to

do was get through New Jersey to Pennsylva-

nia and find a motel.

Nine o’clock that night, out I-80 somewhere

in the Pocono Mountains, I found a little mo-

tel, checked in, called my parents, called

Geri. Huey wandered around the room cry-

ing and sniffing the rug, Louie stretched out

on the other bed and went to sleep. After a

couple beers, so did I.

Monday the sun came out and we drove

across Pennsylvania and Ohio, heartened by

the blue skies and remarkable absence of

bums trying to wash my windshield and in-

teresting subway graffiti, onto the Indiana

toll road, where we finally checked into a Pa-

tel Palace for the night. The boys found lots

of interesting smells, and I learned of a mys-

terious land called Michiana. Thank ghu the

air conditioner worked.

I'd been letting the boys out of their box dur-

ing the drive. Louie sat up on the seat beside

me chirping questions and watching out the

windows, purring in my lap. Huey hid be-

hind the seat. Louie loved meeting the toll

collectors and insisted I carry him around to

see the other diesels at the truck stops. Huey

sulked. I'd never driven this far west before.

In 1974, coming back from the California end

of my trans-Canadian bicycling trip, my col-

lege friend Martin and I drove a $50 Dodge

panel truck across the continent on I-70, but

this flight to Minnesota was a different ad-

venture, a different era, with powerful posi-

tive emotions and a solid sense of purpose.

I dwelt on the enormous amount of responsi-

bility I was adding to my life. Building a rela-

tionship with Geri, tearing the boys away

from their adopted mother, my ex-girlfriend

Valerie, to whom they half belong. They lived

with her from time to time, but she had trou-

ble caring for them in her small place. They

do run around a bit. The last time I took

them back to my place, Val and I agreed that

the first one of us to get a big house to live in

should keep them for good. Little did I know

that I would be moving to Toad Hall a year

later. These guys aren’t the sort of cats you

can just give away when you move.

Chicago was pure driving hell, and I foolishly

decided to punch my way around it at 1:00

on a weekday afternoon. It took two hours to

go 12 miles and there was nowhere to pull off

to pee. And it was raining, hard. Later that

47

afternoon I rolled along I-94 in Wisconsin, seeing these...Dells...for the first time. When

driving the rural stretches of Wisconsin my mind would relax, stop worrying, about traffic

and other things. A weary part of me was still doggedly counting off the miles. I like driv-

ing, I love driving big trucks, sitting high up. This diesel had such a great sound, mrrrm-

rrrmrrrmrrrmrrrmrrrm, and there was this incredible after-the-rain cloud structure play-

ing with the setting sun way up there in this enormous sky. I pondered what this city, Min-

neapolis, was doing so far out on the prairie, hundreds and hundreds of miles from any-

thing else (except St. Paul) and how there could possibly be civilized life so far from...a

coast. Never mind for now about the weather in the coming winter. Would there be real

rock ’n roll?

I'm here to find out.

from Geri Sullivan's Idea #3

October, 1989

Jeff at Sleepy Hollow Sound, NYC

48

Familiar Landscapes, Unfamiliar Futures:

The Southern Reach and the New Normal

PETER YOUNG

I’ve never been big on trilogies. Too many

just feel like needless book-bloat, but I still

try (and sometimes fail) to read at least

one trilogy a year because they’re certainly

not all without merit. However, the usual

problem applies when trying to review a

whole series of books: the avoidance of

spoilers is pretty much impossible. Anoth-

er, more general problem also applies –

although not necessarily to a trilogy as

open-ended as the Southern Reach trilogy

by Jeff VanderMeer – in that the conclu-

sions that can be reached are usually al-

ready provided by an author trying to tell

the whole story in as many words as his

publisher will allow, and there is little left

for a reviewer to speculate upon. Think of

Lord of the Rings: it has a beginning, a

middle and an end, and the story is pretty

much adequately explained in ways that

leave little room for doubt, and only the

more astute critics will find sufficient

room for teasing out interpretations.

However, in the case of the Southern

Reach trilogy, VanderMeer’s intention is

never so straightforward. Yes we have a

clearly-defined landscape – even with

clearly-defined boundaries – but no, its

exploration is not presented in any

49

straightforward fashion, with the first vol-

ume stating the central mystery, the sec-

ond volume documenting the inadequate

human approach to it, and the third vol-

ume tying up some loose ends yet leaving

others less clearly summarized. I actually

like this trilogy’s structure and have often

reflected on how unusually organic it ap-

pears to be: it seems to mirror the general

human approach to problem-solving and,

with a problem as large as Area X, the fail-

ure of the human method to resolve any-

thing in the face of the unknowable. Char-

acters just carry on doing what they be-

lieve they can do based on past form and

method, even when the results are more

than likely going to be inadequate when

faced with such an enormous unknown.

But what else can they do?

Writing this essay in the time of a global

pandemic also means that parallels can be

discerned, because at present we also

seem unable to globally coordinate an ad-

equate response to our own worldwide

viral problem. Like Area X, nothing we

have yet done has completely halted the

advance of an infectious agent that is baf-

flingly inconsistent in its outcomes, and

this has not been made any easier with the

current vogue for dismantling the institu-

tions that were designed to fight such a

problem. If VanderMeer ever wanted to

find a real-world example of our inadequate

method of problem-solving that doesn’t in-

volve ‘nuking it’ (to use the vernacular), he

need only have waited a few years. It is no-

ticeable throughout his trilogy that the

standard ‘Hollywood’ military response to

an alien infestation is thankfully resisted,

and thankfully again, our own problem of

Covid-19 could never be solved in such a

heavy-handed manner anyway. The correct

response appears to be: withdraw as far as

possible, and accept that the New Normal

would appear to be to adapt and live along-

side it – as with the scenario presented in

the Southern Reach trilogy – until, hopeful-

ly, it runs itself out or withdraws complete-

ly into the background.

***

I first saw the UK first edition of Annihila-

tion in a Reading bookstore. I loved the

cover, and I’m a sucker when good cover

designers do their job and sell the book. I

also did a rare thing by starting the novel

the same day, and I had only read one other

VanderMeer title before this one so I felt a

need to do some catching up at the same

50

Jaime Merritt

time. It was also the cover blurb that sold it to me, probably

because the premise reminded me of a long-standing favorite,

the Strugatsky Brothers’ Roadside Picnic, and I wanted to see

how it compared.

The premise is that of a zone marked out by some kind of al-

ien invasion, or if not alien, then some kind of weird

‘otherness’. I’ve not read too many of these kinds of novels

(another one I will probably avoid is Stephen King’s The

Dome – that book-bloat accusation again), and VanderMeer

has said somewhere online that he’d not read the Strugatsky’s

Roadside Picnic before starting the Southern Reach trilogy.

I’m naturally skeptical when authors make statements such

as this, as when Mary Doria Russell said she had never read

that other famous ‘Jesuits in space’ novel, A Case of Con-

science by James Blish, before writing The Sparrow. I’m

probably being too cynical, because it’s surely possible to

write one’s book without knowledge of all its thematic prede-

cessors.

As we open Annihilation and begin the exploration of ‘Area

X’ that VanderMeer takes us on, a stretch of American coast-

line has already been colonized for the best part of thirty

years by… what exactly? No one is sure. This has resulted in

the creation of the Southern Reach, a shady organization with

largely concealed origins that attempts to study Area X and if

possible contain it. They have had almost no success beyond

questions being answered with more questions, and minds

and sometimes bodies tragically altered beyond mental or

biological norms before, occasionally, being returned to the

‘Normal’ world. Every interaction between Area X and hu-

mans seems to end badly one way or another, and other ani-

mal life seems to fare little better.

The narrator of Annihilation is the Biologist, one of the

nameless, all-female team that ventures into Area X on the

twelfth expedition. There is a line of text near the beginning

of Annihilation – almost a throwaway line – which for me

opens the case on everything The Southern Reach Trilogy al-

ludes to:

“If you looked out through these areas, toward the ocean, all

you saw was the black water, the gray of the cypress trunks,

and the constant, motionless rain of moss flowing down. All

you heard was the low moaning. The effect of this cannot be

51

understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be

understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it

changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize

you.”

That statement by the Biologist – “Desolation tries to colonize

you” – is a latent observation of something that is already well

underway with no actual fight-back against the advance of

Area X taking place or even, seemingly, possible. The zone

itself behaves as a kind of void, although one in which life can

continue to exist. In human terms, one could characterize it

as a steadily-expanding mental zone of despair that presents

insurmountable challenges when trying to contain and over-

come it: it simply can’t be done. Whatever battles may be won

are revealed to be so small as to be insignificant.

In Annihilation the imagery for me that worked best were the

two features of the landscape known as The Tower and The

Lighthouse. The Tower especially held mystery, it not being

an actual tower but an inversion of such, a vertical hole going

deep into the earth with an improvised, chiseled-stone spiral

staircase that leads to deeper mysteries such as the long, cryp-

tic message being somehow written by a plant species, down-

wards from the entrance on the Tower’s inner wall, by a crea-

ture named by the Biologist as the Crawler, that seemingly

lives in its depths:

“Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of

the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share

with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround

the world with the power of their lives…”

Decoding the message becomes something for which little

headway is made until the trilogy’s third volume Acceptance,

in which the other prominent feature of the landscape, the

Lighthouse, is also examined more closely and reveals its con-

nection to the Tower – what else could it possibly be that pro-

vides the light source at the bottom of the Tower?

Despite Annihilation purportedly being a science fiction nov-

el, VanderMeer doesn’t go further and try to explain this con-

nection with any scientific handwaving. He prefers to just let

the two – Lighthouse and Tower – meet in this inexplicable

way without actually touching, leaving the connection to be

made inside the reader’s own mind. And this is what Vander-

52

Meer generally does throughout the novel: tease the reader

with possibilities hopefully answered in the following two vol-

umes of the trilogy.

The Southern Reach’s twelfth expedition that is featured in

Annihilation becomes an almost total disaster, with the Biolo-

gist’s story later involving an injury that seemingly saves her

from a fast transformation into a being of light, and also an

encounter with the expedition’s injured

Psychologist who repeatedly shouts at the

Biologist the word “Annihilation!”, some-

thing that had been previously implanted

by hypnotic suggestion to trigger suicide.

The biologist believed she became im-

mune to this suggestion after inhaling the

plant spores that created the writing deep

in the Tower. With the rest of her expedi-

tion dead, she will continue to search for

any presence of her missing husband who

was on the eighth expedition, and whose

old journal was also discovered among

many others piled high at the Lighthouse.

The Area X strangeness that invades the

lives of many of the characters is unset-

tling, especially when they return (or are

mysteriously returned) to the Southern

Reach, where it is left to the senior staff

there to understand, if they can, what has

happened to them. Something is certainly

awry with their altered minds and behaviors, with the expedi-

tion’s scientists no longer able to form easy or even meaning-

ful communication and who are often left catatonic in de-

meanor, as is explored further in Authority with the return of

the Biologist to the Southern Reach… except that she is no

longer the Biologist, she is a clone with the self-given name

Ghost Bird.

***

Where Annihilation does the job of adequately setting the sce-

ne for the whole trilogy, VanderMeer uses the remaining two

volumes to focus in more detail on the entities that exist on

each side of the barrier that separates them. The trilogy’s sec-

53

ond volume Authority is largely set in the Southern Reach,

and at first sight would appear to be an “office politics” novel

as the main character John Rodriguez, who prefers to be

known as ‘Control’, establishes his place in the organization

he has inherited, while assessing the assorted characters he is

surrounded by. They appear to all be misfits in one way or

another, shoe-horned into this odd organization while serv-

ing peculiar functions that rarely cohere into an effective

whole. And again there are mysteries, mostly of a botanical

nature, with samples of plant life seemingly not following

natural laws, and a wall appearing in the building that should

not be there and yet also appears to be alive. What on Earth –

or in Area X – is going on?

Despite its mostly urbane setting on the ‘human’ side of the

Area X barrier I found Authority to be the most directly en-

gaging of the three books, but only once you’ve suspended

any expectation of the plot actually moving forward. As Ro-

driguez and his assistant director Grace constantly tangle and

conflict over the internal running of the Southern Reach,

Control also reports to an unknown, manipulative handler

known only as ‘The Voice’, and also has to deal with his

mother, connected to the overseeing office known as Central

and who knows secrets that suggest her actual function in

relation to the Southern Reach is far more directly conse-

quential and deeper than Rodriguez ever knew: his mother

has always been a woman with a secret second life outside the

home… and is she in fact ‘The Voice’ itself? VanderMeer ex-

celled in writing these sequences because they present a con-

spiracy of genuine and believably lifelike tension that affects

the twisted development of a family. Other characters in the

Southern Reach are also fleshed out more than in Annihila-

tion, and we see lives outside their day job that depict how

little the people who work there actually know each other.

That’s still not to say the characters are much more than ci-

phers, although we are given insight into Control’s self-

paralysis that frustrates him from achieving much with his

role, despite making some unexpected connections and dis-

coveries about his Southern Reach colleagues. The novel clos-

es with the escape of Ghost Bird, who Control pursues only to

discover she has created a new portal into Area X in the form

of a pool of water. Ghost Bird jumps in, as does Control, re-

linquishing all control to forces bigger than himself.

54

***

At the outset of the third volume Acceptance, the Southern

Reach has collapsed into chaos and confusion with nothing

resolved or much advancement being made of any under-

standing about Area X. The only thing agreed upon is that

Area X blindly experiments with the biology of natural life

resulting in both successes and failures, something that is ac-

tually self-evident. The successes appear to be those that re-

tain much of their human form; the failures, well… Some of

these experiments are also not limited to just biology: human

minds appear to be rehabilitated in other bodies, both corpo-

real and non-corporeal, either transformed beyond under-

standing or merely cloned.

This is because there appears to be no way the human mind

can exchange meaningful information with Area X and find

any mutual ground. This is illustrated by an exchange be-

tween Saul the Lighthouse Keeper and the nine year-old girl

Gloria near the beginning of Acceptance, who later (or earli-

er, in Annihilation) was to become the psychologist of the

twelfth expedition:

Saul: “That fish down there sure is frightened of you.”

Gloria: “Huh? It just doesn't know me. If it knew me, that

fish would shake my hand.”

Saul: “I don't think there's anything you could say to con-

vince it of that. And there are all kinds of ways you could

hurt it without meaning to.”

In this exchange, humanity is of course ‘reduced’ to being the

frightened fish, and Area X is the vastly superior mind that is

toying with it. And here we go back to the quote further above

from Annihilation, which suggests the nature of Area X as a

void, a desolation, that is colonizing or somehow terraform-

ing the Earth while at the same time unknowingly ‘hurting

the fish’.

We are not given a definitive explanation as to how Area X

arrived on Earth, or even a reason, but we can infer from

events how it may have come about. Possibly it was planted

by Henry and Suzanne, two operatives of the ‘Seance & Sci-

ence Brigade’ who interfere with Saul the Lighthouse Keeper

by conducting unknown experiments on his lighthouse lens.

In the grounds of his lighthouse Saul discovers a small plant

55

made of light that stabs his finger, and he soon has night-

mares of being in his lighthouse that has somehow trans-

formed into its inversion, the Tower. When he awakes he re-

cites the sermon that later is to appear inside the staircase of

the Tower, and he becomes increasingly obsessed with it.

When Saul is inside the lighthouse at night he sees a light

coming from a trapdoor beside the lens, and descends to

somehow become one with the light. When he awakens, Hen-

ry and Suzanne are now dead but a clone of Henry has ap-

peared, and the two fight only to both fall off the side of the

Lighthouse. Saul survives and flees with visions of Area X

filling his head. Eventually he stops running, accepting de-

feat, and Area X is born.

It’s a small failing of Acceptance that its back-and-forth-

across-time structure is not made clearer, as it can provide

some confusing moments for the reader when trying to place

events into the necessary chronological se-

quence. But the climactic sequence, while

closing off the series as a whole, is also am-

bivalent as to the final outcome. It involves

another fatal encounter with the Crawler in

the Tower… Has Area X been destroyed?

Possibly. Or has it enlarged further to en-

gulf the Southern Reach? Again, possibly.

Choose your own ending. I prefer the latter

because it describes, like Saul’s final ac-

tions, an acceptance of defeat, a resignation

that says one knows this is far bigger than

anyone can deal with, and all that remains

is to be assimilated and accept one’s place

in… the New Normal.

***

We’ve probably all had those occasions,

when wandering in a forest, when we know

we are inside something vastly larger and

more unknowable than oneself. I think this

is what VanderMeer is trying – and in my

case succeeding – to get us to feel. Inside Area X we are pre-

sented with alternate biological and mental possibilities that

sit alongside the natural world, and when they manifest they

do feel genuinely strange to the reader because VanderMeer

56

conceals their intent preferring, most of the time, to

neither show all nor tell all.

I’ve seen general comments about the trilogy that

say, either directly or indirectly, that Annihilation is

the only volume you really need to read of the three. I

disagree. Some have said, flippantly, that Authority

is a waste of time just because the plot does not ad-

vance sufficiently and wastes itself by not going deep-

er into Area X, but as I indicated above, it can still

open up a different and more nuanced kind of satis-

faction. Others say Acceptance is still too open ended

to resolve a trilogy and is far from being thorough

enough in providing resolutions to plot threads. As I

also indicated above, that is just not in the nature of

the structure of this trilogy. If you have not read the

second and third volumes, you will miss some wider

implications of the story and still be left with just the

unresolved nature and highly effective tease that is

contained in Annihilation.

What do we look for, or hope for, when we read?

That’s a moveable feast with a million possible an-

swers (if we could ever establish clearly what those

answers might be), none of them true for everyone,

all of them true for at least one reader. A series of

novels such as the Southern Reach trilogy will never

satisfy everyone; it is clear there are too many differ-

ent ways the plot (such as it is) could have developed,

and similarly many ways the resolutions that we

might want from the story (such as the true origin of

Area X) could have differed in detail. What Vander-

Meer chose to give us is what his own meander

through the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge in

Florida gave him. Different routes can provide differ-

ent results, much like our own incomplete lives are a

tangle of unresolved plot threads that can head in a

multiplicity of directions, and never more so than

now as we learn to adjust our own experience of be-

ing under a less-than-benign viral occupation that

can transform lives or simply bring us death. Wel-

come to the New Normal.

57

HYPERSURFACE ISSUES

Kennedy Gammage

More than 6 parsecs from the hole crawling at 0.22c but it didn’t matter or rather it suddenly mattered bigtime because we started bending then bending back Riding the hypersurface sir Thank you lieutenant Coherent on the boundary divisor Toric stack polytope wrap Roger that Turned inside-out then rightside-in Amoeba sir – skeletal localization Mirror symmetry – recommendation Floer endomorphism sir Agreed – pushforward pullback Acknowledge sir – coherent union with zero section in 3-2-1

58

March 15

Yesterday afternoon when I was in a drug

store in my neighborhood buying a choco-

late bar the rest of the people in the line

(and there's almost *never* a line in there)

had big ol' packages of toilet paper, paper

towels, frozen pizzas, giant bottles of fruit

juice and other panic buying items. There

was a notice listing paper face masks and

hand sanitizer as unavailable. The lady who

checked me out told me that a store in her

neighborhood would not accept cash due to

fears of the virus. I told her that was illegal

and she seemed relieved by that.

[Update as of May 13: stores from Bob’s Do-

nuts on Polk Street to the nearby Whole

Foods supermarket are now only accepting

plastic. Same deal with Starbucks. I don’t

argue with them – I just want my donuts

and coffee.]

WAIT WAIT ... DON'T TELL ME the Na-

tional Public Radio news quiz show usually

has a sold out audience as it is one of NPR's

most popular shows. Yesterday they were on

the road broadcasting from the Fox Theater

in Atlanta GA. It sounded odd from the be-

ginning. Turns out there was no audience. It

was just the people up on stage and, a bit lat-

er, the five or so people who were working at

the Fox. It was eerily quiet during what were

usually applause breaks. Eeesh.

I hope you and yours stay well in this in-

creasingly troubling time.

March 23

Walking around in my neighborhood on var-

ious errands yesterday I noticed a few things.

A) I’m glad that the people who own and op-

erate the newsagent/cigar store on Polk near

Broadway consider themselves to be indis-

pensable enough to remain open. It’s not like

I need ’em for the cigars but in this increas-

ingly post-Gutenberg age actual newsprint is

getting harder to find.

B) Whole Foods update: There was still a line

out of the one on the corner of Franklin and

California last night when I went to buy some

stuff for dinner. But it had changed some-

what. Social distancing was in play which

meant the line curled around the perimeter

of the parking lot even though there weren’t

that many folks lined up. The gaps between

people were variable. As individuals gazed

59

raptly at their smart phones they lost track

of the line’s slow but steady forward move-

ment. I had to semaphore my arm to get the

attention of one couple (Matching face-

masks! How cute!) stuck in those tiny, hard

to read screens.

Another adjustment had become apparent

when I reached the end of the line near the

entrance. The beefy, bouncer looking guy

had been replaced by two kind of bored

looking young people. The young man had a

stack of shopping baskets of which he’d

wiped down the handle and top rim part

with a sanitary wipe. The young woman was

stationed behind a folding table that had on

it a big ol’ bottle of hand sanitizer and a cou-

ple of containers of sanitary wipes, one of

which the guy was using.

They both looked like they’d rather be gaz-

ing at the tiny, hard to read screens on their

smart phones.

C) A couple of bars and the café near where I

live have tacked up sheets of particle board

over their windows. I’ve even noticed this

being done to at least one bar downtown in

the Financial District. I assume this is to

prevent break-ins but it kind of gives the

streets the air of hunkering down before the

strike of a hurricane. It seems that some

thieves have been emboldened by the emp-

tied out streets. There was a car parked in

front of my apartment building yesterday

that had had one of the windows busted out.

Plus many more garbage and recycling bins

have been knocked over and their contents

torn through, with their contents left scat-

tered about on the sidewalk. Making for an

ugly sight.

D) Not so many e-scooters, skateboards and

bicycles up on the sidewalk now in Polk

Gulch. They have been replaced by joggers

and dog walkers. Sometimes these activities

have been combined when one encounters

jogging dog walkers.

E) I see from the on-line catalog for the Me-

chanics’ Institute Library that their version

of Daniel Defoe’s JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE

YEAR is only available as an on-line audio

book. Which I have no idea how to access.

Well, guess that means I’ll be ordering my

own copy.

March 29

Was getting ready to go out and buy some

dish detergent (being the kind of neighbor-

hood that I live in, I do this at a hardware

store) when a nice young man stepped out of

Apartment # 6, down the hall from mine.

Possibly he heard me muttering to myself

(something I admittedly did before the en-

forced self-isolation of COVID-19) and

wanted to see what was up. He cheerily

called out to me: "Hi! I'm your new neigh-

bor!" I walked up to him, returned his

friendly greeting and then gave him a hand-

shake.

We both then drew back in a cartoonish

double-take worthy of Tex Avery and then

shrugged at the ridiculousness of the mo-

ment.

April 9

Facebook is doing that thing again where

they stick a bunch of ads on my timeline.

But since this is Plague Year 2020 they are

for NOTHING BUT FACEMASKS.

April 10

I see that McDonald's (just about the only

restaurant open within a six square block

area downtown) is now offering a Misery

Meal Special.

60

April 13

Year of the Plague 2020: Facemask Bingo

A game I like to play in my head the few

times I venture out these days.

Facemask under chin (AKA “the Chinstrap”).

Minus three points.

Facemask hanging off one ear, nowhere near

the face. Minus five points.

Facemask on forehead: Minus three points.

Facemask on elbow or wrist: Minus three

points.

Nose sticking out, not covered by face mask

(really quite common indeed). Minus three

points.

Facemask covering eyes, leaving nose and

mouth totally free (really quite rare) Minus

ten points.

April 15

Like Governor Newsom said in yesterday's

press conference, there appear to be signs of

a light at the end of the tunnel during these

otherwise bleak times. In Polk Gulch, around

the corner where I live, the nice little cafe

there has removed the plywood from its win-

dows and appears to be open for business

again. Yay!

April 17

What did those companies that made all of

those clear plastic shields that have now

popped up in the checkout counters of gro-

cery and other stores do before the COVID-

19 outbreak?

April 19

While I'm very happy with the Simpsons

themed masks that my fine pal, Candi, made

me and wear them with some pride, there's a

couple of things that I've noticed:

A) I was bit surprised at how much one,

more or less unconsciously, relies on the bot-

tom of one's peripheral vision field for doing

various things, like walking down stairs or

stepping off of siedwalk curbs. I find myself

gazing downwards to judge these things

which probably makes me seem like even

more of an Old Weird Guy to people walking

by. I shake my cane at the whippersnappers.

B) Sneezing while wearing a facemask is a

misery.

C) Taking the fershlugginer thing off when I

get home is a special joy.

April 19

Spotted on Polk Street yesterday a beat up

white van with two speakers sketchily se-

cured to the top of it by bungee cords, The

speakers were blasting out some screeching,

guitar shredding heavy metal. Thanks for

sharing, dude.

April 20

Got kind of overly excited yesterday when I

discovered that the corner store nearest

where I live had cans of liverwurst from Un-

derwood. Guess I'll save the deviled ham for

later.

April 22

Things I sometimes remember when I'm

putting my face mask in place:

“Camilla: You, sir, should unmask.

Stranger: Indeed?

Cassilda: Indeed it’s time. We all have laid

aside disguise but you.

Stranger: I wear no mask.

Camilla: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No

61

mask? No mask!

—The King in Yellow, Act I, Scene 2, Robert

W. Chambers

April 24

San Francisco Strong.

Yesterday morning I was crossing the street

(Polk Street) to go to the bus stop for the

northbound 19 Polk when I was honked at

by a 19 bus that was waiting for the light and

would be going in the opposite direction.

The driver half leaned out his window and

gave me a big ol' wave and a cheery 'HEY

THERE!" He was wearing one of those face

masks that includes a plastic shield so it was

hard to tell who he was but I recognized his

voice. He was an operator on the California

Street cable car line. I hollered back

"HOWDY!" And he told me "We'll be back!"

Meaning the cable cars. Boosted my spirits

way up.

April 24

A Puzzle: How does one raise the offer of a

spritz of hand sanitizer from a cute Asian

woman at McDonald's to the next level?

April 25

Keep It Clean.

While entering the Real Foods grocery store

on Polk Street this morning to get some,

well, groceries I noticed a fellow with a mas-

sive, Santa Claus-like beard whose disposa-

ble paper face mask made his whiskers stick

out in a wild way standing at a portable hand

washing station that had been set up outside

of the store. He was washing his hands, good

for him. I took a closer look to see that he

was wearing a pair of those blue disposable

gloves and he was actually washing *those*.

April 27

C'est pour les oiseaux.

While walking around in the otherwise more

or less deserted Financial District this morn-

ing I noticed a large seagull strutting down

Montgomery Street, inspecting the garbage

that had been strewn about by thoughtful

street hobos, as though he or she owned the

joint. That was until a cop car came blaring

down the street, with the flash bar, uh, flash-

ing. Cheese-it, the cops!

May 1

All Lined Up.

I'd finally gotten to the front of the line last

night at the local Whole Foods Market when

a well-dressed lady of a certain age strode

briskly up to the front door. The employee

monitoring the line said that she'd have to

wait in line and the time for Seniors to get in

before everybody else was 9 to 10 AM in the

morning. She said with exasperation "But

they let Seniors in at Trader Joe's ALL DAY

LONG!" This didn't cut any ice with the door

guy.

May 3

Facetime.

A) actually saw my first jogger wearing a

facemask just now while I was waiting for

the bus. Since it's a sunny day I've seen a

couple of jogging dudes who were not only

sans mask but also sans shirt. Sweaty torso,

ick.

B) Saw a guy in a lucha libre/Mexican wres-

tler mask last night on Polk Street. "Great

mask!" I told him unironocally. It was too. It

encased his whole head and even had goggle

-like eyepieces.

62

May 4

Plenty of Parking.

Instead of the usual smart BMWs and Mercedes Benz parked in front of the fancy schman-

cy Le Méridien hotel in San Francisco's Financial District there's been a flat bed truck that

some shade tree mechanic converted from a pickup as, apparently, a weekend project,

parked near the front door for the past few weeks.

May 9

When I was a kid and I'd cough in my Mom's hearing she'd quip "What's the matter, got

TB?" Mom had kind of a dark streak. It if happened now she might reference COVID-19.

May 11

Scene: The Starbucks across from the TransAmerica Pyramid.

Time: Approximately 8 AM this morning

Principals: A nice young female Starbucks employee and crusty old me. We are both wear-

ing facemasks.

Me: I’d like a medium coffee, black with a box of apple juice.

She: Mbbrrppffl.

63

I sold my fanzines in graduate school.

There was a science fiction bookstore a

block off University Avenue, a low ochre

building across the street from a parking

lot. Everything on Palo Alto’s side streets

then seemed to be across from a parking

lot, and spaces were both plentiful and free.

I can’t imagine that’s true now, but it’s thir-

ty years since I’ve been there, and longer

since I wandered into that store, comics

and paperbacks, probably some used books

in the mix, and on the back wall a rack with

the prozines, the ones I’d read in high

school, Analog and F&SF, and then Locus

too, offset instead of the mimeo version I’d

known, the first fanzine I’d ever gotten. I

read it standing up, recognizing a few

names, and then walked the aisles, admired

a few dustjackets: a store that would once

have been to me heaven but that now

seemed a relic of my earlier self.

Reading was still fun, it was life itself, but

real life now, not just a pleasure or an es-

cape but on its way to becoming a profes-

sion. I wasn’t tempted by the books I saw,

but I must have been interested in the self

I’d shucked, the one I’d somehow decided I

no longer was. Because I often went into

that store, scanning dustjackets but never

ever buying anything. Then one day I no-

ticed they had a bulletin board. People had

pinned up cards, advertising—well, I don’t

remember what, so let’s make it up. Star

Trek memorabilia, or first editions of

Heinlein, say—he was still alive, up in the

nearby hills, a friend with local roots had

met him, found him strange. And eventu-

ally I wrote up a card of my own, with my

name and number—fanzines for sale, a col-

lection of classics I’d built up during my

active years in high school, Hyphen, War-

hoon, Quandry, et al.

Sometime later I got a call—a physics post-

doc, that I remember, and somehow in-

volved with FAPA. Also with SLAC, not a

faanish acronym but the nearby linear ac-

celerator that ran dead-straight over the

San Andreas fault, you could see it below

you on the highway, sprinting away

through fields of live oak. We met down-

town in a café by another parking lot, ate

carrot cake, agreed on a price, a few hun-

64

dred in the dollars of 1983. Probably I spent

it on wine or restaurants, pleasures I could-

n’t often afford; anyway, I never regretted it.

= = =

I hadn’t been an active fan for seven years by

that point, having fallen off early in my

freshman year at college, and I hadn’t picked

up any sf for longer than that. I’d known

from the moment I started high school that I

was going to major in English, but there was

still a gap between what I read, and liked

reading, for school, and what I read on my

own, the hundred pages and more that I put

away each night after dinner. That was all

sf, every evening, what seemed like the gen-

re’s entire canon of it, at a time when it still

looked possible to grasp it whole. Other-

wise, I’d read a bit of Hemingway on my

own, but not Fitzgerald or Conrad or Hardy,

mainstays of our school curriculum, and I

knew nothing about poetry at all. Dickens?

The girl down the street read him and I

couldn’t see why. But then came a moment

at which my reading shifted forever, a high

school field trip in the spring of my senior

year, three hours on the bus to Manhattan,

and me with a book I’d heard was both

strange and good, weirder than anything

else around, and with a first sentence that I

could soon recite by heart. “Many years lat-

er, as he faced the firing squad…” That’s how

it began, 100 Years of Solitude, and though I

never learned Spanish and El Boom hasn’t

been a part of my teaching repertoire, once

I’d read that it was decades before I read any

sf at all.

College made me feel underequipped, and I

thought I had better catch up. Part of me

remembers having had no time at all to read

my freshman year, not for pleasure, not as I

used to. Another part knows that I did, and

can summon up the books themselves, Mrs

Dalloway and Sons and Lovers, Northang-

er Abbey and Oliver Twist, the kinds of

books that I thought I should read, and then

found that I wanted to. And after that I was

just happily rolling downhill through one

classic novel after another. I expect I was

pretty insufferable.

= = =

Science fiction in general and fandom in

particular had provided a refuge from my

own awkwardness; the books I read in col-

lege took me out my small town, and gave

me a world as large and as intricate as the

ones I’d read of out there in the stars. I did

a Ph.D. and found a job at the kind of liberal

arts college where I’d always hoped to teach,

and eventually began to write about English

fiction for American newspapers and Ameri-

can fiction for British ones. Later I taught

travel writing and got interested in the his-

tory of Americans abroad, in the new old

world of Europe that my marriage to a Swiss

art historian had introduced me to. At some

point I moved offices and cleared a filing

cabinet of a lot of things I thought I’d never

again need—clips of the first book reviews

I’d published, in Bay Area newspapers, and

then my own file copies of Banshee and

Random, the zines I’d published in high

school. Maybe I no longer wanted to re-

member that self, though I happily swapped

reminiscences with another old fan who was

briefly on our faculty. But our paths are

never straight. Portable Storage is the first

zine I’ve seen in years, certainly the first I’ve

written for, and I’ve no real idea how or why

William found me, after over forty years of

not being in touch. Still, some things have

been pushing me back this way.

My college has a science fiction club, and

65

each year they put on a small con, a weekend

at the end of March. They get a few writers,

run panels, show movies, and because we’re

a women’s college there’s a decidedly femi-

nist slant to many of them. There’s a huck-

sters’ room, though I’ve learned it’s no long-

er called that, and if the weather is decent a

demonstration of historic sword-fighting on

the lawn outside. And always a lot of people

in costume, LARPing. I know about the con

because it’s held on the lower floors of my

building, and I often have a deadline that

puts me in the office on a weekend. I climb

the stairs through the fannish crowd, hoping

they haven’t taken over the xerox room,

wondering if anybody will ask me if I’ve reg-

istered, and noting the signs that warn peo-

ple off the fourth-floor office area: “Here

there be dragons.” Every now and then I see

one of my students in the hallway, but many

of the attendees look like they come from off

-campus, people older, younger, male.

Then my daughter became one of them. As

a kid Miriam read the usual fantasy series of

her generation, the Rowlings and the

Riordans, though she also became a devotee

of Joan Aiken and Diana Wynne Jones. In

middle school I tried to hook her on the stuff

I teach, and she did dutifully read and even

seem to enjoy Pride and Prejudice, while

drawing the line at Jane Eyre. But she’s

never wanted to go back to it, and since I

had also pointed her toward the library’s

shelf of Anne McCaffrey, well… Soon she

was on to the Earthsea books, and even

Game of Thrones. Her high-school reading

was pretty much an updated version of

mine, but it didn’t stop when she hit college,

and along the way she’s gotten me to read

some of the things she particularly enjoys or

admires. Naomi Novik is one of the for-

mer—and since I like Patrick O’Brian I tore

through His Majesty’s Dragon. N.K.

Jemisin stands for the latter, and I share

that admiration, one of the most consistent

and provocative American writers of our

moment. I’m told Ann Leckie has to come

next.

Miriam keeps me up on the Hugos, and gets

into a rage at the Sick Puppies; she writes a

tumblr blog, under a screen name, has got-

ten me to see the point of fanfiction, and

with her it’s no longer a guilty pleasure to go

to superhero movies, but a pleasure plain

and simple. She’s shown no interest in fan-

dom as such, fandom as I understood it, a

realm with its own history quite apart from

that of the works to which it is ostensibly

devoted. Still, she did start going to the lo-

cal con—ConBust, it’s called—during her last

years of high school and has kept on going in

college when her own spring break schedule

allows. But her own school out in Minneso-

ta goes us one better. It’s got a science-

fiction theme house, with a library and

weekly movie nights, and for the last four

years that’s been her world, the place where

she’s found her friends and the center of her

social existence. All this I’ve watched with a

bemused pleasure, clichés about apples and

trees in my mind, though in other ways she

is so very different from either of her par-

ents, a computer scientist produced by the

marriage of two humanists. There’s only

one thing I regret. I’m not sorry I sold my

fanzine collection, but I do wish I hadn’t got-

ten rid of my own zines. I would have liked

to show them to her.

So I felt lucky this year when one of my the-

sis students told me that both Random and

Banshee were included in the online fanzine

collection held by the library at the Universi-

ty of Illinois. That’s another story, that the-

sis—a trans kid writing about The Left Hand

66

of Darkness, and flying out to Oregon to work with its manuscript, what could be better?

They’d taken a course on Victorian fiction with me and I’d helped them to an internship at

the Library of America, where they worked on the LeGuin edition. I must have mentioned

reading her as a teenager; anyway, I knew enough to be an adviser, and I’m happy to say

that the novel itself seems more daring, now that I know a bit about both narrative struc-

ture and feminist theory, than it did when I was fifteen. As for the zines, I gave Miriam a

link. She claims to like them, and tells me that even back then I already sounded like my-

self. Is that a good thing? Or just inevitable, we change and yet stay the same. And now

with the help of both William and Andy Hooper I’ve gotten hold of an actual physical copy

of Banshee, a glimpse for my daughter of the long-gone self who is me.

= = =

A coda. Six years ago I was a judge for a book prize, and LeGuin herself was one of the

honorees, receiving a lifetime achievement award. Her speech laid into corporate, market-

driven publishing, and at my table the CEO of one such company sat on his hands, tight-

lipped with rage, when the time came for applause. Afterwards I got my courage up and

worked my way through the crowds to her side. I told her how much her books had meant

to my daughter—I was thinking of Earthsea but also of her glorious and too-little read Cat-

wings series. I told her as well how much her work had meant to me when I was younger.

She smiled graciously, and even seemed to recognize the name on my tag. And then she

said “Some of them are for adults too.”

astronaut of dust

I fall down eternity

still as mimeo paper

in winter light

all sleek and curve

with its legs

around the universe

my hands of coax

are in the sun

haunted like a fanzine

from another world

--G. Sutton Breiding

67

Bill Breiding was almost apologetic in his

solicitation. He had almost everything a fan-

zine editor might want as he approached

this fourth issue – but he had been rebuffed

repeatedly in his attempts to commission a

fanzine review column. And with my prac-

tice of selling old and middle-aged fanzines

through eBay auction, Bill knew that I am

reading and describing fanzines all the time.

If a review of current fanzines just couldn’t

be obtained, maybe something about old

fanzines would be a fair replacement.

I certainly had to sympathize with Bill’s re-

quest. He wanted to drag his little magazine

Portable Storage back into fannish territory

and thought that some remarks on other

fanzines – maybe even contemporary fan-

zines – would help him accomplish that. I

knew the desperation that lay hidden in that

request – as co-editor of Chunga, I have

spent the bulk of the 21st Century trying to

find someone who would write reviews or

any sort of comment on fanzines. And where

once a bracing salon filled with arch opin-

ions on the field offered us theorists like

Gary Farber, rich brown, Joseph Nicholas,

Ethel Lindsay, Victoria Vayne and Mike

Glicksohn, now even the most committed

faan is likely to whine, “But I don’t know an-

ything about contemporary fanzines!”

On a few occasions, I have finagled my way

around this paralysis by asking the whiner if

they had read the most recent issue of Trap

Door or Floss or Banana Wings or Sense of

Wonder Stories. And when they indignantly

replied, “Well, of course I have!” we would

have a basis for further dialogue. But be-

cause the field has changed – contracted,

moved online and become infinitely more

polished and legible than it once was – many

fans feel like criticizing or even acknowledg-

ing fanzines is tantamount to living in the

past. Better to make posts on your own blog

or pour your energies down the rathole of

social media, than to bother organizing

things into manuscript pages or writing an

actual letter of comment.

Anyone trying to write about fanzines today

has to deal with their uncertain presentation

a column

68

and distribution. Beam, one of the most

elaborate of current fanzines, is seen by the

majority of its readers online, but a handful

of very slick and imposing paper copies are

also produced and distributed to contribu-

tors. Sitting in a comfortable chair reading

one of these lavish and glossy Beams is a

very different experience from studying

the .pdf file on a tablet or a smart phone

screen. The sheer luxury of the physical arti-

fact has an appeal independent of the fan-

zine’s contents – which are also usually quite

impressive.

The best fanzines being published now – ti-

tles like Pete Young’s The White Notebook,

Bruce Gillespie’s admirable Science Fiction

Commentary, Fred Lerner’s quarterly

Lofgeornost, Christina Lake’s Nowhere Fan,

Alan White’s eye-popping Skyliner – are as

good or better than those titles that we re-

member fondly as focal points, fanzines of

record, Hugo-winners and nominees, etc.

But almost all the needs and expectations

which fandom had of fanzines in the past

have evaporated. They are no longer likely to

be a reader’s primary lifeline to a world of

shared interests and ideas because technolo-

gy has made that contact effortless and in-

stantaneous. There may still be plenty of

pride attached to being a faan, but it’s un-

likely to be a lonely thing for long.

Because only a handful of titles are still pub-

lished on paper and sent through the postal

service, there is also a dwindling sense of any

obligation to reply to a fanzine once we read

it. People who begin to read fanzines now

have little sense of what “the usual” once

meant, or that interaction with the reader is

the primary object in publishing fmz. It is

our shrinking supply of habitual letterhacks

that makes me really fear for the future of

fanzine fandom. Fandom seems to have for-

gotten the pleasures of writing a letter of

comment nearly as long as the fanzine that

inspired it; once many zines were termed

“letter-substitutes,” as personal correspond-

ence was prized even above the performance

and craft of a fine fanzine.

Perhaps this is one reason why most fanzine

reviews published now tend to be short, cap-

sule assessments, and part of an overview of

some or most of the field, as in Guy Lillian’s

The Zine Dump or the “Fanzine Countdown”

that I offer at the end of each issue of Flag.

These short, often non-committal reviews

are also a kind of “letter-of-comment substi-

tute,” and by acknowledging a wide swath of

the titles available, we hope to expiate our

guilt for not sending a proper letter of com-

ment. I can only think of one really notable

exception to this pattern at the moment. The

swaggering Beam has also featured some

excellent in-depth fanzine reviews by John

Wesley Hardin and Jacq Monahan, covering

Charles Lee Rector’s Fornax, Graham Char-

nock’s Vibrator, W.O.O.F. (the Worldcon

APA) and Skyliner, one of each since issue

#12. No one would mistake Hardin and Mo-

nahan’s style for D. West, but he would ap-

preciate the care with which they cover each

title, before excoriating them for their terri-

ble taste in subjects.

Perhaps Bill really ought to have asked them.

When we are young fanzine fans, whenever

that may occur in our overall lifespan, each

title which arrives in the mail, is handed

round at a convention party or greedily

scooped up from the freebie table, excites

our sense of wonder merely by existing. As

we encounter more of them, we begin to see

relationships between them, and the broader

community which they create. And by the

time we are old and tired, we have the

69

chance to judge and appreciate fanzines

across their entire run, something which can

easily take decades. Sometimes these pro-

vide an amazing narrative of events, the evo-

lution of science fiction and its fandom, as

well as the events of personal significance to

the writers, the music they listened to, the

sports cars they drove. And sometimes they

just form a big pile of paper jammed full of

40-year-old book reviews and terrible puns;

not everyone in fandom is a gifted personal

essayist.

The difference between reading fanzines as

they are published and encountering them

after their run is complete must be some-

thing like reading A Tale of Two Cities as a

serial, instead of a novel-length lump. The

gaps allowed for consideration, interpreta-

tion and anticipation, as opposed to simply

picking up the next issue in the pile to see if

the promised interview with Robert Anton

Wilson ever materialized. Plenty of fanzine

fans find a way to have the best of both

worlds; copies of a frequently appearing fan-

zine can easily pile up and then be caught up

with in an orgy of staple-pulling and careful

cutting of tape. I can remember treating Dale

Speirs Opuntia in this way, and clubzines

like De Profundis too. Yes, once there were

so many fanzines arriving in the mail, they

were sometimes a nuisance.

Just as newspapers and census records are

vital for researching family history, fanzines

are a critical tool for tracing our “fannish ge-

nealogy.” I have been a Seattle resident for

28 years, but my first contact with fandom

was in Madison, Wisconsin, where I grew up.

I became a casual member of the MadStf

Group, and a habitué of their convention,

Wiscon, before my 16th birthday. Eight years

later, I was married to a fan, chairing the

convention, publishing my first general-

distribution fanzines and quickly becoming

acquainted with the wider world of fandom.

And I feel like that process actually started in

1975, when MadStf member Janice Bogstad

began publishing Janus, a serious, construc-

tive, feminist-focused fanzine that would be

nominated for the Hugo Award in 1978, 1979

and 1980. Jan’s co-editor Jeanne Gomoll

was just as interested in science fiction by

women, but she also possessed a fine sense

of humor, and kept Janus from being entire-

ly academic or critical. Later, when these ap-

proaches became incompatible, Jan would

start New Moon, while Jeanne and Diane

Martin continued Janus as Aurora. It per-

sisted through issue #26 in 1990.

I never contributed to Aurora, although I

helped collate or address it a few times. The

program book at my first convention,

Wiscon 2, was also an issue of Janus. There

were several other titles produced by MadStf

members around the same time. Hank and

Lesleigh Luttrell’s long-running Starling was

probably the best-known, and Hank also

owned the mimeograph on which he dupli-

cated the first 5 issues of Janus. They came

to Madison from Missouri, where Hank had

also edited the club fanzine OSFic, and Les-

leigh and her brother Chris Couch were sec-

ond-generation fans. I think their presence

in the group was critical – I believe they were

the only early members who had ever been

to a Worldcon, let alone worked on one.

Most of the group had their first convention

experience at the 1976 Minicon in Minneap-

olis.

I can also recall seeing copies of Corr, edited

by Perri Corrick-West. Her future husband,

Richard C. West, founded the University of

Wisconsin Tolkien Society way back in 1966,

probably 8 years before MadStf coalesced in

the back of the Madison Book Cooperative.

70

The society’s handsome fanzine Orcrist was

sold at some campus-area bookstores, where

it kept company with Famous Monster of

Filmland. And John Bartelt also began pub-

lishing Digressions while a graduate student

in Madison.

Two more “local” fanzines seduced me into

the field. The first of these was the Mad

Moose Gazette, a convention “daily”

newszine at Wiscon, edited –lightly -- by

Jeanne Gomoll. I began composing grandi-

ose or spurious stories for the Mad Moose

and found the laughs quite gratifying. And as

Aurora had never been a frequent fanzine,

nor concerned overmuch with local fannish

events and activities, Jeanne also began pub-

lishing a bi-monthly club newsletter in Octo-

ber of 1982. It was called Cube, a reference to

our non-profit group moniker, SF3.

Cube was a 4- to 6-page newszine for its first

two or three years, but then began to expand,

with letter columns, book reviews, conven-

tion reports, feminist pastiche of Ian Flem-

ing – all the sort of things one expects in a

general-interest fanzine. And like most club-

zines, it had a succession of editors across its

61-issue history. Jeanne edited #1 to #9,

then admitted a succession of new editors,

including her sister Julie Gomoll, Peter The-

ron, Diane Martin, Lynne Morse and Spike.

Spike took over with issue #15 and would be

the sole editor through issue #40 in Novem-

ber 1989. I co-edited issues #41 to #44 with

Spike, then Kim Nash and I collaborated on

#45. Issue #46 in November 1990 was my

only solo issue. It ballooned up to 18 pages,

and the herculean effort was followed by a

two-year hiatus, broken when Ohio trans-

plant Steve Swartz edited #47. Steve man-

aged to produce three issues before a vote of

no confidence by the SF3 board restricted

him to a single sheet through issue #53, after

which he followed me out of town.

Hope Kiefer resurrected Cube with #54 in

October 1994 and would continue it through

#61 in December 1995. During this period,

and under Swartz’ editorship, the fanzine

was frequently duplicated using a state-of-

the-art Gestetner mimeograph, giving it a

remarkably traditional – or archaic – ap-

pearance. After #61, Cube lay dormant for

over a decade, but was eventually resurrect-

ed as the “e-Cube” by Jeanne Gomoll, but its

publication schedule remained erratic.

These various “official” publications occu-

pied only a portion of the group’s fanzine-

making energies. This was a golden age of

cheap photocopying and affordable postage

rates, and anyone with a typewriter could

paste together some text and mail it out to

names found in the letter-columns of other

fanzines. The original Janus mailing list was

the genesis of Jeanne’s list, and she gave me

a copy that became the sourdough starter for

distributing my early titles like Take Your

Fanac Everywhere, Nine Innings and Spent

Brass, which was co-edited with my spouse

Carrie Root. Jeanne published a great per-

sonal fanzine, Whimsey, a fund newsletter

titled Taffiles, and a wonderful auction list-

ing titled J. G. Taff – Our Catalog. She col-

laborated on one-shots like Six-Shooter and

Sisters, and in 1993, exhumed the “Women

and SF Symposium” published in Khatru in

November 1975. Significantly expanded, it

was published and distributed at Corflu 10 in

Madison.

Several other writers who had contributed to

the Mad Moose and Cube published their

own fanzines. Bill Bodden produced Solo-

mon’s Seal and Raw Goof; his eventual

spouse Tracy Benton was responsible for

Monstrous Crow and Cazbah; Jae Leslie Ad-

71

ams published Alphabet Obsession, Fugitive

Particulate Matter and Zighn. All three col-

laborated on the 6 issues of Wabe, which

won the FAAn Award as best fanzine in

2002.

Spike produced a piquant personal fanzine, I

-94, and supervised the Chuck Harris Ap-

preciation Society Magazine for Corflu 6.

Nevenah Smith published a personal fanzine

titled Life, Love and Art. Lynne Morse, who

recruited me as a gopher for Wiscon 2 while

we were high school students, was a dedicat-

ed apa-hacker, who later moved to Europe,

married Roelof Goudriaan, and was a found-

ing member of the Dutch Apa, DAPPER.

Madisonian Randy Everts was the first mem-

ber of FAPA that I ever met, but I was not

aware of it at the time. Many, if not most of

these writers and editors were also active in

at least one apa during the 20 to 30 years I’m

discussing.

And there were Madison fanzines produced

by people I never met, like Intergalactic

Starbarn by Joe Alt and Mike Smith, and

Don and Sandy Taylor’s World Domination

Review. There was also a thriving music fan-

zine scene that included dozens of local and

regional titles; I made one foray into the

field, co-publishing 5 issues of Slander! with

fellow theater student Charlie Cheney. Our

anonymous assaults made us briefly notori-

ous; the local mainstream free paper did a

story on us and we posed for a photograph

behind bandanas and dark glasses. The gag

was blown when I used the same unusual

black and red bandana to wipe my face dur-

ing a gyro sandwich eating contest that was

attended by several local punk rock bands.

It’s not widely known, but this incident was

the basis for two feature films, Cameron

Crowe’s Almost Famous and Porky’s II: The

Next Day.

Building these informal “fanzine trees”

makes me feel for just moment that I am on

an equal footing with great fan historians

like Rob Hansen and Harry Warner Jr. Ac-

quiring a somewhat longer perspective has

made me admire Harry all the more; despite

having seen countless fandoms rise and fall,

he continued to respond to every fanzine

that he received, as if every fan editor might

live forever and no one had ever heard of the

Glades of Gafia. Harry was a thread running

between nearly all the titles I’ve listed here –

he replied to almost all of them, except pos-

sibly the punk rock fanzines. And Rob con-

tributed a history of early Wisconsin fandom

to Cube #36 and helped mimeograph issue

#38 when Spike was in England for Mexicon.

All things are truly one.

I’ve been working on a kind of fanzine tree

for Seattle fandom too, even though my com-

mand of the 45 years that it thrived before I

arrived here is certainly spotty. But it helps

to have an amazing Clubzine like Cry of the

Nameless as your foundation. Lately, I’ve

been looking over stuff that happened before

I became aware of Seattle fandom by reading

trades sent by Seattle fans to Janus and Au-

rora. That group started in 1978 or 1979,

with fanzines like Izzard, Fast and Loose,

Mainstream, Wing Window and Some Luck.

Reading them, as well as meeting some

friendly Seattle fans at early Wiscons, was

one of the first things that gave me an ambi-

tion to move to Seattle.

But there was roughly a decade between

when Cry ended its run in 1969 and when

Jerry Kaufman and Suzle Tompkins started

up Mainstream in 1978. So, I’ve been trying

to fill that space in, with fanzines by Frank

Denton, like Ash-Wing and Rogue Raven,

Paul Novitski’s Caradaith and Pogo, Loren

MacGregor’s Quota and Talking Stock and

72

early work by Jessica Amanda Salmonson,

including her fanzine Windhaven. There is a

lot more to fill in, but I think I’ve got at least

two or three titles appearing in those puta-

tive “wilderness years.”

I also acknowledge that this focus on long

runs of fanzines from decades in the past has

been a fairly transparent means of armoring

myself against the grief caused by the death

of so many fanzine fans in the recent past.

We have lost some truly prolific talents in

recent years, great artists like Steve Stiles,

writers like Randy Byers and so many faith-

ful letter-hacks – Glicksohn, Milt Stevens,

Roy Tackett, Pamela Boal, Diane Girard and

so many others. Hell, Bob Bloch is missed

for many things, but I swear that he also

wrote the shortest, funniest letters of com-

ment in history. And he still lives in the pag-

es of so many fanzines. In fact, I’m con-

vinced that Bloch actually died in 1991, but

he had so many letters of comment pending

that no one noticed until 1994.

My only real regret in reviewing all this pa-

per lifestyle is that I appear to have been far

too busy publishing my own fanzines to com-

pose the letters of comment which should

have appeared in so many others’ efforts.

There’s no question I enjoyed them and

thought of witty replies to almost every one.

Just as soon as I finish the issue, I thought.

Recently, I started working on a solution to

this segment of my karmic burden, compos-

ing letters of comment to issues 2 through 4

of one-time Seattle fan Steve Bieler’s person-

al fanzine On Company Time. These were

published between the fall of 1982 and De-

cember 1983. Steve has been a very faithful

correspondent despite having largely aban-

doned fanzine fandom 30 years ago, and I

felt like I owed him at least a little reciproca-

tion. To my surprise, Steve was completely

delighted to receive my letter, particularly

since I included copies of four of his fanzines

to help remind him what I was talking about.

He was happy to take up the discussion of

the most over-rated songs of the 1970s, and

the identity of the US Navy ship that played

the German “pocket battleship” in the fea-

ture film Pursuit of the Graf Spee. (The an-

swer was the heavy cruiser USS Savannah.)

This was such a pleasant exchange that I

plan to repeat it in the near future, maybe

with some of the titles and editors that I

mentioned in this essay. Although the fan-

zines that I named may have ceased publica-

tion, the overwhelming majority of their edi-

tors are still alive, and would probably enjoy

the hell out of a bit of thoughtful, if long de-

layed egoboo. If you need help tracking any-

one down, let me know; but I’ll just go ask on

Facebook.

And honestly, I don’t know anything about

contemporary fanzines.

73

Free Books!

Tom Jackson

David Langford, the British author, fan writer and Ansible newsletter publisher, has begun an ambi-tious project to preserve much fan history and fannish literature and make it available for a new generation of readers.

TransAtlantic Fan Fund Free Ebooks (taff.org.uk/ebooks.php) is a collection of about 50 titles, pre-pared for the TransAtlantic Fan Fund by Ansible Editions, Langford’s publishing arm.

The “fannish gift-culture project” includes famous titles such as The Enchanted Duplicator by Walt Willis and Bob Shaw, Ah! Sweet Idiocy! by Francis T. Laney, and fan writing collections by writers such as John Berry, Terry Carr, Vincent Clarke and Langford himself.

Downloads of the e-books are available in the most common e-book formats. All downloads are free, but readers are invited to make donations to the TransAtlantic Fan Fund, the long-running (since 1953) project to send well-known fans across the Atlantic, to conventions in North America and to Europe. (Fans are sent in both directions and are expected to publish a trip report).

Langford and the people who assist him are skilled e-book publishers. I’ve been reading the e-books in the Mobi format for Kindle. They are nicely formatted for Amazon e-readers and well-illustrated.

So far, I’ve read two of the titles: Francis T. Laney’s Ah! Sweet Idiocy! and Terry Carr’s Fandom Harvest.

I liked the Carr better.

Ah! Sweet Idiocy! is Laney’s memoir of 1940s fandom in Los Angeles, centering on figures of the

LASFS scene, including Forry Ackerman and Morojo. It was apparently written to explain Laney’s

disillusionment with fandom and why he decided to give up fan activity. (LASFS stands for the “Los

Angeles Science Fantasy Society,” a club founded in 1934 which remains active.)

One of the apparent reasons Laney disliked the LA scene was that some of the fans were gay; in his

74

summary of the book, Langford alerts, “Please be

warned that a few passages display a level of

homophobia perhaps excessive even by 1948

standards.”

At least those passages are generally pretty short.

Endless space is devoted to Laney’s feuds with

other fans. I suppose the accounts must have

been interesting gossip at the time, but I wasn’t

very interested. I much preferred the descrip-

tions of some of the pros Laney encountered,

such as Clark Ashton Smith and Fritz Leiber.

The book features archival photos of many of the

fans Laney wrote about, and the TAFF edition

also includes careful bibliographic notes by Lang-

ford, a glossary explaining some of Laney’s ab-

breviations, an introduction by Harry Warner

Jr., and a commentary on Laney’s work by Alva

Rogers.

Rogers says Ah! Sweet Idiocy! is “rightly consid-

ered one of the great contributions to the litera-

ture of fandom,” while Warner calls Laney “the

only fan who has ever been compared with Dean

Swift without creating a storm of laughter.”

These statements seem rather generous to me,

but thanks to Langford, you can read Laney’s

famous (or infamous) work and come to your

own opinion.

Francis Towner Laney is an obscure figure unless

you know a lot about the history of fandom, but

many readers of Portable Storage will know who

Terry Carr is, even though he died 33 years ago,

when he was only 50. He was a science fiction

writer, although not terribly prolific, and perhaps

the most important science fiction editor of his

time. He edited annual “Best SF” anthologies, did

the “Universe” anthologies and is particularly

remembered for the “Ace SF Specials” novels he

selected for publication. The first series of spe-

cials included Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Hand of

Darkness. His revived “Ace Specials” in the

1980s included William Gibson’s Neuromancer.

Fandom Harvest, however, is devoted to another

aspect of Carr’s literary career: The fan writer.

He was nominated for the Hugo for Best Fan

Writer three times and won in 1973. He was

nominated for Best Fanzine five times and won

in 1959 for Fanac, which he co-edited with Ron

Ellik.

Fandom Harvest is a reprint of what was origi-

nally a book published in Sweden by John-Henri

Holmberg, a fan and admirer of Carr’s. It in-

cludes an introduction by Robert Silverberg

(credited as “Bob Silverberg,” apparently to dis-

tinguish his fan writing from his fiction writing)

and very fine cartoon illustrations by Grant Can-

field.

Silverberg, praising Carr’s writing, says “you will

not find a paragraph that is less than delightful.”

Silverberg’s judgment holds up much better than

Harry Warner’s, although it seems fair to observe

that some of Carr’s pieces date better than oth-

ers. Ron Ellik, for example, was probably just as

interesting a fan in the 1950s as William Breiding

is in the 2020s, but I couldn’t make myself care

very much about the anecdotes Carr tells about

him.

But I loved every word of Carr’s memoir about

working for a literary agency, “Confessions of a

Literary Midwife.” His article on women in sci-

ence fiction, “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby”

also still reads well, even though it was first pub-

lished back in 1975 and written when nobody

knew “James Tiptree Jr.” was a pen name for a

woman.

The reprinting of books such as Carr’s makes a

nice case for fannish writing as a genre of litera-

ture that is worth preserving. I hope Langford

will continue to make more fannish e-books

available.

[Editor’s Note: Langford’s TAFF FREE E-

BOOKS include electronic reprints of important

sercon works: Charles Platt’s Patchin Review,

Bruce Sterling’s Cheap Truth and 286 pages of

previously uncollected sercon material by Algis

Budrys. The two collections of the uber fannishly

sercon D. West are milestones. This is the tip of a

mighty iceberg to which Dave Langford is con-

tinuously adding. Thank you, Mr. Langford!]

75

“I know you like to read too…” my mother

said.

She’s gone now – passed away at Xmas a

couple of years ago—but I can still see her in

happier times, sitting on the patio, in her

horn-rimmed glasses, with a book in one

hand and a cigarette in the other. She was

reading Peyton Place by Grace Metalious, a

novel which in its time was infamous for

being a dirty book. I’m reading it right now

in her honor and I must say it pretty much

lives up to its reputation. What my mother,

a woman famous for her probity who in no

way could be called liberal-minded and was

sharply critical of any loose behavior in her

children, was doing reading a book like that

is anybody’s guess. But it could just be that

she liked gossip, because she also read Con-

fidential, that ur-tabloid. There was always

a copy lying around and I was an avid read-

er of it myself, although I was too young to

understand what it was all about, but youth

wants to know.

Confidential featured in its pages lots of

stories about people who were famous long

ago, but not so much remembered any

more. It had lots of photos of people with

black bars over their eyes, and the names

Ezio Pinza and King Farouk were frequently

featured on its covers. Who were they you

might ask? Well, I don’t know about Pinza

(who’s name sounds kind of dirty), but Fa-

rouk, the last king of Egypt, led a lavishly

secular lifestyle. He was a fabulous spend-

76

thrift and lecher who was eventually forced

from his throne and went into exile in Eu-

rope, where he joined the Jet Set. He also

had one of the largest collection of pornog-

raphy in the world, which makes him a kind

of hero to me.

What I mostly liked about Confidential,

however, was the Frederick’s of Hollywood

ad that appeared in every issue and usually

took up one whole page. I loved those illus-

trations of tall, willowy women dressed in

harem outfits, crotchless panties, and in-

flatable padded bras, until the FAA banned

them.

(When I first wrote that line above, Bess

read it and said: “The FAA? You mean the

Federal Aviation Administration? Why

would they ban inflatable bras? So I had to

tell her the story of the woman whose bra

exploded at 30,000 feet. She’d never heard

that story.)

Most of the clothes depicted in the Freder-

ick’s ads were what my mom called

“trashy”, but Lincoln Park, Michigan in the

Fifties was a smaller world then and things

change. Kalamazoo isn’t much bigger, but

when I moved here in the early Eighties and

married Bess, there was a Frederick’s store

in the local mall and a couple of Bess’s

friends—for a gag—bought some edible

panties there as a wedding gift. Bess refused

to wear them, so I had to eat them by my-

self. Raspberry, I think.

Once I saw something in Confidential that

could have potentially gotten me in trouble.

It was a word I didn’t understand, so I

wrote it down and showed it to my grade

school teacher and asked her if she knew

what it meant. That word was

“homosexuality”. That rattled her and she

refused to define it for me and asked me

where I found it. (Bess asks: “Didn’t you

have a dictionary?”) When I explained I’d

read it in a magazine at home, she seemed

to accept it, but what do you think she must

have been thinking about my family. To her

credit she remained a professional and en-

couraged me to keep learning new words–

just not words like that.

Both our parents worked weekends at the

auto plant and left me in charge of my

brothers from a young age. I was expected

to keep them in line, but that was never go-

ing to happen with this crew. As soon as

they were out the door, the cold war

changed to hot and blows were exchanged; I

blame TV for that. We all liked to watch the

wrestling matches on Saturday afternoon.

The Sheik and Dick the Bruiser were our

favorites, but we liked Leapin’ Larry Shane

the best. He fought in a very acrobatic style,

bouncing off the ropes and wrapping his

legs around his opponents as he brought

them crashing to the mat. After watching

the wrestling matches, we were all so

churned up with youthful adrenaline that we

started bouncing on the furniture and plow-

ing into each other. Sometimes things broke

and got us in trouble.

The War of the Brethren aside, what I liked

to do when the parents were away was

snoop around in their bedroom; youth

wants to know. I was particularly drawn to

their dresser, a massive dark red mahogany

affair, which was a kind of cabinet of won-

ders to me. Mom kept her cosmetics on the

top and one of the things she had up there

was a perfume bottle with a rubber squeeze

bulb. Through experimentation, I found that

if you held a lit match in front of it and

squeezed the bulb, the perfume that sprayed

out would catch fire. I found this enormous-

ly rewarding and also possibly of use against

77

the lesser brothers. However, I also quickly

realised that if Mom came home and found

the level of liquid in the bottle was going

down or that the house smelled like roses

all the time, it would be bad, so I had to put

my impromptu flame thrower aside.

But that was okay, because there were more

interesting things in that magic cabinet. The

top drawer was filled with knick knacks:

spare change, stray buttons, old movie tick-

ets, matches for setting perfume alight and,

among other things, Sen Sen which was a

licorice-flavored candy meant for sweeten-

ing smoker’s breath. There were also these

mysterious, round rubber things in little

square packages. Mysterious then, but from

my adult perspective, it’s understandable

that, after giving birth to five juvenile wol-

verines, they wanted to protect themselves.

I hit the jackpot when I found the Playboys

hidden in the bottom drawer. I spent many

a stolen hour pouring over all that female

acreage, but, believe it or not, at this late

stage of my life, the nudes in Playboy were

the least memorable things about it. I liked

the cartoons and the Vargas pin-ups, but

also—and I say this non-jokingly—I read

Playboy for the articles. Mostly the fiction;

especially the occasional science fiction sto-

ry, often written by guys like Bradbury,

Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont;

whom I already knew from reading. I admit

I was a little surprised to find them in Play-

boy, but on the other hand, Heinlein some-

times wrote for Boys’ Life.

There’s one story I read that’s never left me.

I don’t recall who wrote it, but it could have

been one of the abovementioned. It was

very short and had a very Twilight Zone-ish

feel to it. It goes like this:

There’s been a war, but it’s over now. It was

a total war and fought with robots as well as

men. All of the men of the country were mo-

bilized to fight overseas while the women

remained home to work in the factories and

offices. But the war is over now and there’s

been some kind of a victory, because there’s

a big parade occurring through the center of

town and all the women are lining the

streets and leaning out of office windows,

hoping to get a glimpse of their husbands

and lovers as they march by. But the robots

are out front and they’re marching and

marching and marching. So far no men

have appeared. A woman asks, “Where are

the men?” and her question is soon echoed

by a few other women and then more and

more until the story ends in a collective

wail.

On another occasion, I found a couple of

small, strange black and white comic books

in the top drawer of the dresser hidden un-

der a box of Luden’s. They were so crudely

drawn they were obviously not published by

DC. A little later on, I learned from some

guys in the school yard that these books

were called Tijuana bibles. None of us could

say where Tijuana was—somewhere in Mex-

ico we supposed—but we all believed that’s

really where they came from. I remember

one that was being passed around the gym

about Froggy, a character on the Buster

Brown Saturday morning TV show. Buster

Brown was a company that made shoes for

kids and, before that, a comic strip charac-

ter as well; kind of meta, don’t you think?

He had a motto: “I’m Buster Brown. I live in

a shoe. Here’s my dog Tige. He lives in

there too.” and his face was imprinted on

the inside of every shoe, so, when you were

wearing them, you were constantly mashing

Buster in the face.

Froggy was a magical frog who lived in a

78

clock and would appear in a puff of smoke

when summoned by Andy Devine (a famous

character actor and host of the show) by say-

ing, “Plunk your magic twanger, Froggy!”

and say, “Hiya kids! Hiya, hiya hiya!” Froggy

was made of hard rubber with no articula-

tion at all, but was moved around by an in-

visible hand that just shook him back and

forth. With a line like “magic twanger”, I

suppose Froggy was just asking to be put in-

to a dirty book. About the same time, the

guys in the lunchroom were passing around

a mimeographed story called Behind the

Green Door which you may have heard of

since it was the basis for that Marilyn Cham-

bers movie (if you’re old enough to remem-

ber that Marilyn Chambers movie).

I don’t know what happened to those dirty

books in the Old Man’s dresser, he never

seemed to keep his porn for very long. May-

be Mom would throw them out when she

discovered them; I don’t know. But it’s a

shame if she did. Once reviled as the dirtiest

kind of pornography, those old Tijuana bi-

bles now reside in the category of outsider

art: beloved nostalgia and one of the inspira-

tions for the underground comix of the Six-

ties. I recently saw an expensive coffee table

book collection of them with an introduction

by Art Spiegelman on sale at Amazon. The

originals are worth a lot of money, as Dan

Dreiberg said. I wish I’d inherited Dad’s old

eight-pagers, I might have made my fortune

from them.

Interesting question: How did the original

creators (whoever they were) make any

money off them—did they? I’ve never heard

of anybody who actually bought one and I

never came across any creepy old men in

dirty raincoats hiding in dark alleyways say-

ing, “Psst, kid, want to buy some dirty com-

ics.” (I did, however, run into a guy like that

when I was in Paris, but he was selling

French postcards, which is an entirely dif-

ferent genre.) They just seemed to pop up

out of nowhere in schoolyards, locker

rooms and wherever men gathered.

In my teen years and later on in the army, I

read quite a few of those men’s magazines

of the “blood and guts” genre, but because

I’ve already covered this subject elsewhere,

I refer you to Dan Steffan’s Fugghead #4 on

efanzines. However, shortly after I wrote it,

Robert Lichtman sent me a copy of an arti-

cle from one of those old mags written by a

woman named Jane Dolinger. Well, I had

no idea that women wrote for the men’s

pulps, although, you know, men wrote for

the women’s magazines like True Confes-

sions. Back in the day, confession mags and

men’s pulps were entry-level markets for

aspiring writers, and a few years back, Jack

Vance wrote an article identifying several

big name authors who got their starts there,

including himself.

In fact, it never occurred to me that anyone

wrote for the pulps. I imagined the stories

just sprouted up out of the paper they were

printed on like mushrooms. But they really

did have authors, and one of them was Jane

Dolinger. What must she have been like? I

never imagined I would ever find out, but

the answer came to me due to an amazing

instance of serendipity. One day, shortly

after I’d received that article from Robert, I

was stumbling through the stacks in West-

ern Michigan University’s library where I

worked and—like out of the blue—came

across a book entitled: Jane Dolinger : the

Adventurous Life of an American Travel

Writer by Lawrence Abbott. I’m not one to

believe in fate, but you know, just some-

times…

79

The men’s magazines employed a number

of tropes that appealed to their all-male au-

dience: You had your thrilling war stories,

daring rescues from behind enemy lines,

exposés of government corruption, vice

rackets, envious tales of suburban swingers,

etc., etc. But what I liked were the ones

about wild primitive sex practices in fara-

way exotic lands. I call this type of story the

“I found the Lost Tribe of Amazon Women”

trope and it imprinted on my impressiona-

ble young mind the idea that the only way

to get laid was to go overseas. As a teenager,

I used to imagine myself living on an island

somewhere in the South Pacific with a har-

em of girls who wore grass skirts and little

else. I’d been reading Michener’s Hawaii

and Margaret Meade’s Coming of Age in

Samoa at the time and they influenced my

nocturnal habits. Years later, when I was in

college, I actually used “I Found the Lost

Tribe of Amazon Women” for the title of a

paper I wrote for a class in ethnographic

writing.

If anyone ever found that Lost Tribe of Am-

azon Women, it was Jane Dolinger. In her

own words:

“I’m no Doctor Kinsey, but during the past

several years, traveling to the far corners of

the world in search of the bizarre and unu-

sual has perhaps unwittingly taught me

more about the strange sexual habits and

customs of little-known peoples than I

could hope to glean from a half dozen text-

books.”

According to Abbott, Jane’s career in the

pulps began in the early Fifties when she

was living in Miami, working as a secretary

and taking modeling classes. One day she

came across an ad placed in a local newspa-

per by someone looking for a Girl Friday

(whatever that is). It was so dicey-sounding

that any other woman concerned with her

personal safety probably would have given it

a pass, but Jane was attracted to the promise

of adventure and travel promised in the ad.

Personally, I would have let out a snort, said,

“Yeah, right!” and turned the page. But Jane

answered it and met Ken Krippene, author,

adventurer and bullshit artist supreme.

Krippene was an established author who

wrote for magazines like Saga, True and Na-

tional Geographic when it was a tit maga-

zine. Shortly after their meeting, Jane’s sta-

tus went from Girl Friday to Wife, and they

were married in Peru (where they would lat-

er spend most of their time) in 1954. Abbott

calls Krippene a literary scamp “with few

scruples about truth” who apparently recog-

nized in Jane the same talent for fabrication

and encouraged her to become a writer her-

self. So in the years that followed, she inter-

viewed head hunters in Peru, visited a harem

in Morocco, spent some time with a polyan-

drous tribe in central Africa and reported on

strange marital customs in the South Seas.

She must have been pretty ballsy for a dame,

because she frequently went on these excur-

sions by herself, believing that headhunters

and desert nomads would afford her more

respect and be more open to her because she

was a woman alone. That doesn’t sound

right, but it seemed to have worked for her.

The journals she published her findings in,

magazine with titles like Adventure for Men,

Modern Man, Man’s Action and South Seas

Stories, valued bullshit over veracity, and,

according to Abbott, Jane herself never drew

an “uncrossable line between hard facts and

embellishment” to tell a good story. A nice

example of that is her book, The Forbidden

World of the Jaguar Princess.

80

In 1961 or thereabouts, Jane heard about a

woman named Pamela Hawkins who was

living on a plantation deep in the jungle of

Ecuador. The local natives, who worked for

her, called her Shia Shia Nua, or the Jaguar

Princess, because of an encounter she’d had

with one as a little girl. To Jane this sound-

ed like a perfect “I found the White Queen

of the Jungle” story, but when she tracked

down Pamela Hawkins, she found, instead

of an exotic princess, an elderly woman

running a day-to-day business and whose

employees weren’t headhunters and whose

sex habits were no more exotic than that of

any small town. Finding this an unsatisfac-

tory development—and with an eye to her

readers—Jane gave to Miz Hawkins. She de-

aged her a few decades, made up a story

about a tragic love-affair involving a hand-

some Frenchman, and described the lurid

details of the Jaguar Princess presiding over

moonlit native orgies—like in a Ramar of

the Jungle episode.

I don’t judge. I like Jane Dolinger, bullshit

and all, and wish I could have met her, but I

was just a kid. As untruthful as her stories

may have been, she wrote what she wrote

and that’s all what she wrote. And even seri-

ous and respected anthropologists, as I

pointed out in my paper cited above, were

not above characterizing the customs of tra-

ditional peoples as “bizarre and unusual” to

goose up interest in their work.

Around 1956 or ’57, a tornado tore through

our town, and while we all cowered in the

basement, the wind knocked a pillar off our

front porch, dumped a bunch of wood from

a nearby lumberyard into our backyard and

carried my brother Craig’s bike off to parts

unknown. Really! It was never found. A few

years later, the lumberyard was converted

into a discount department store. Since it

was within walking distance, I was in there a

lot. I bought all my early Beatles albums

there (Rubber Soul was my favorite) and my

Ace Doubles and Edgar Rice Burroughs nov-

els from their book section, where I also dis-

covered the Mr. Moto books, which were be-

ing reprinted at the time.

Mr. Moto was a counterpart to the popular

Charlie Chan stories by Earl Derr Biggers.

They were written by J.P. Marquand, who

was famous long ago and won a Pulitzer Prize

for a novel called The Late George Apley.

The Mr. Moto stories were a series of potboil-

ers about a Japanese secret agent he churned

out when he wasn’t writing high art and they

originally appeared in the Saturday Evening

Post in the 1930’s. The stories were great fun

if you can ignore history the way Saturday

Evening Post readers were able to ignore cur-

rent events, as the character was popular

enough to be played by Peter Lorrie on the

silver screen. Of course, Mr. Moto fell from

grace when the war broke out. However, he

was revived on the radio, and the original

Saturday Evening Post stories were reprint-

ed in the Sixties, so he didn’t stay in Coventry

for good. I understand there’s also a Mr. Mo-

to graphic novel that came out in 2003.

Another genre you could find on the book

racks in those days—but maybe not so much

anymore—was the gothic romance. This was

not a genre I was much interested in to be

frank. I’d already read Jane Eyre and Wuth-

ering Heights in school. In retrospect, that

may be a mistake and I should probably look

into it someday; could be something worth

reading there.

Every genre has its conventions when it

comes to using the cover of a book to attract

its potential reader. Well, that’s self-evident.

SF, obviously, has spaceships and alien land-

81

scapes; fantasy has its homoerotic barbari-

ans and dragons; detective novels have

tough guy detectives and leggy dames; and

nymphomaniac librarian stories have nym-

phomaniac librarians. (You’ve never read

any nymphomaniac librarians stories?

Don’t bother looking; I just made that up.)

The conventions of gothic romance covers,

however, seemed to be a deal more single

minded than most other genres and pretty

much presented to the potential customer

the same image endlessly repeated, signal-

ing they were looking at a gothic romance

book: In the background, a full moon rises

above a shadowy and sinister castle and in

the foreground, a fearful damsel in a night-

gown or a loose fitting dress whose folds are

flapping in a breeze we can’t feel but she

can, is racing away from the castle behind

her. The aura of menace is palpable. And

every book cover offers the same tableau.

You can’t judge a book by its cover, but eve-

ry cover has a story behind those endlessly

repeated images. Most of them were paint-

ed by one man, George Zielinsky. His name

was originally Jerzy Zielezinski when he

was living in Poland during an unfortunate

time in history. He had the misfortune of

being Jewish, so when the Nazis invaded

Poland, he was sent to the concentration

camp in Dachau. Jerzy was an artist. He

was denied drawing materials during his

imprisonment. However, he secretly man-

aged to draw scenes of the concentration

camp on scraps of paper that he managed to

find and which grew into a book called Pris-

oner Album which was published after his

release in 1946. A copy is on display in the

Holocaust Museum in D.C.

After the war, Jerzy came to America and—

rather than continuing in the fine arts—

found work in the paperback industry,

which was banging in the late Forties and

early Fifties. He changed his name to

George Zielinsky, but most often signed his

work Ziel. It’s said he was a meticulous art-

ist who worked slower than other illustra-

tors; nevertheless he was able to produce

300 covers over the course of his career. He

never learned to speak English very well

and never read the books he was illustrat-

ing, which allowed him to look into the

deepest recesses of his soul, which must

have been dark indeed, considering his

past, and made him the perfect artist to de-

pict gothic themes.

While investigating George Ziel on the in-

ternet, I came across what I consider a per-

fect example of his work. It impressed me

so much that I copied it, had it framed and

it now hangs over my desk. In the bottom

center portion of the painting, we see a

woman. She’s dressed all in black and wear-

ing a cobwebby sort of cape around her

shoulders, and it’s blowing in that unseen

breeze along with her long, black hair. In

the lower left, is the inevitable castle in the

distance and at the top right is the inevita-

ble full moon. Behind her, is a sky filled

with blue-gray clouds. The woman seems to

be peering anxiously up at a huge black

mass overhead that takes up about a quar-

ter of the painting. It may be just a dark

cloud, but it seems to be worrying her and

appears about to engulf her.

I like to look at it and wonder what’s going

on in her head. Maybe someday I’ll write

my own story to go with it.

So, to repeat, my mother said, “I know you

like to read too…”

It was a sunny summer afternoon and Bess

and I were paying her a visit. She’d been

82

cleaning out her house, declaring her inten-

tion of moving into a smaller place now that

her husband was dead and her children were

scattered to the winds. She often started a

conversation by stating that the house was

too big, too hard to keep clean and the taxes

were too high. She often talked about mov-

ing, but in the end kept putting it off until it

was almost too late.

“Would you like these?” she asked. Knowing

that I like to read, she offered me a box of

paperback books with pictures on their co-

vers of bare-chested men clutching women

whose own clothing was about to come un-

done—historical romances or “bodice rip-

pers” as they’re sometimes called. Despite

the somewhat rapey pictures, these were ac-

tually perfectly respectable books for an oc-

togenarian mom to be reading. They must

have been, because you saw them every-

where: in grocery stores, in 7-11s, airports

and even book stores. I guess they replaced

the gothic romances, because by that time

there didn’t seem to be any more of them

around.

I don’t know why Mom thought I’d like

them, but I guess it was just that she was a

reader and I was a reader and books are

books. I read a few, and it gave us something

to talk about, especially after Mom had

moved into what others call “assisted living”,

but I call “controlled living” and she was get-

ting a little dotty. Besides our book study,

Mom also had a repertoire of raunchy stories

from real life when she was growing up in

Tennessee, and she was a veritable Erskine

Caldwell.

Her favorites were about the ancestor who

waited out the Civil War, hiding in a cave

and the man who owned most of the county,

but bartered parcels of land away for simple

things like a new axe handle or a plug of

chewing tobacco. The last story she told me

was about an uncle or great-uncle, who was

always cheating on his wife, who decided to

exact her revenge by having sex with a farm-

hand, but one fine day they were disturbed

by the unexpected return of her husband, so

they quickly hid under the bed. He had a

woman with him and they proceeded to fall

on top of the bed and got down. So, as Mom

described it, there were now two couples—

one on top of the bed and one underneath—

“going at it”. Was that for real; or just local

gossip? I’ve never been able to find any liv-

ing relatives who could confirm or deny it.

When she passed away, I gave her books to

my friend, Jack, who was a huge fan of his-

torical novels; really huge. He had the larg-

est collection I’ve ever seen. He had all the

classics: Sir Walter Scott, Conan Doyle’s Sir

Nigel novels, Sabatini, Howard Lamb, Frank

G. Slaughter; anything historical. Jack was

the only person I know who actually liked

Silas Marner. He was no snob and gladly

added my box of bodice rippers to his collec-

tion. In fact, he was already a fan of

Georgette Heyer’s Regency novels, which

were basically Jane Austen done to death,

which brings us to my last story.

Do you remember all those Jane Austen

movies that were all the rage a few years

back? I do, because Bess was a big fan of

them and we own every one of them on

DVD. Sometimes, when she’s blue, she pulls

Pride and Prejudice off the shelf and we’re

in for a week of Liz and Darcy goodness.

(What she doesn’t know, but I do, is that I

have a copy of Pride and Prejudice and

Zombies and one of these days I’m going to

slip it in on her.) The irony is that neither of

us has ever read any Jane Austen, so I sug-

83

gested we might want to read them together someday. We frequently do this. The family

that reads together, breeds together – or something like that.

We started with Pride and Prejudice and got halfway through Emma when Bess lost inter-

est when she got distracted by Downton Abby. I, however, soldiered on, just so I could say:

“Nya, nya; I read all of Austen and you haven’t!” so I read Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield

Park and Northanger Abby, but only got halfway through Persuasion before all the gos-

sipy conversation got to me. The one thing that I came away with through it all though is

this: How come none of the film adaptations of Pride and Prejudice include the last chap-

ter of the book where it turns out that Mr. Darcy’s initial misgivings about allying himself

with Elizabeth’s family all come true: He ends up having to financially support Wickham

and Lydia for the rest of his life and Liz’s father drops in on Pemberley and mooches off

them whenever he feels like it.

So there we have it; I wonder what I’m going to read next?

84

“Howard never tried, or never

tried intelligently, to give his pre-

posterous saga the ring of truth

— but they have something … a

vividness, a color, a dream-dust

sparkle, even when they’re most

insulting to the rational mind.”

-- Damon Knight, In Search of

Wonder

One day I wandered into an odd bookshop — one I had passed countless times but had

never noticed. The shop windows were thick with dust, and the door made an eldritch

skreeek as I pushed it open. Tall bookcases rose in the gloom. Suddenly a book fell —

bang! — to the floor. With trembling fingers I picked it up — it was a book full of strange

tales — Okay, I lie. It was a Barnes & Noble in a suburban shopping center, brightly lit and

only strange for being so dull. The part about book is true: it was a cheap omnibus collec-

tion of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian and it was full of strange tales. I bought

it partly out of curiosity, partly out of a sense of duty, self-assigned reading of a classic to

fill a hole in my fannish schooling. Later, home sick and casting around for something

easy to read, I picked it up. And put it down hours later. These stories were great! Maybe

the Theraflu heightened the dream-dust sparkle, or fever affected my rational mind. Or

maybe it was because I was at that impressionable age when a thud-and-blunder hero

swaggering around a pseudo-medieval Eurasiafrica battling muahaha villains in thrall to

The Road

85

To Cimmeria

Cheryl Cline

an ancient and evil race of aliens

sounds like The Shit.

I was fifty-six.

I’ve never been that much of a fan

of sword & sorcery — or high fan-

tasy either. I read Tolkien because

everybody reads Tolkien, but I’ll

confess, it was a bit of a slog. I cut

my fannish teeth on Asimov,

Clarke, and Heinlein. Science fic-

tion! Time Travel, FTL spaceships,

interstellar empires, real stuff like

that. But as it turns out, some of

my favorite books are sword & sor-

cery. But it wasn’t something I

chose. I did not seek it out. Frank

Frazetta paperback covers did not

move me. No, I was tricked into

reading sword & sorcery by three

con artists of the first water: Fritz

Leiber, Joanna Russ and Samuel

Delany.

86

I loved the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories for their dream-dust sparkle and their humor

as much as I loved the gosh-wow-oh-boy-oh-boy sense of wonder of science fiction, but as

I sought out more of both, I found it easier to find more authors “like” Asimov. It’s always

been harder to find that just-so mix of weird and humorous that drew me into the Fafhrd

& Gray Mouser stories. Most sword & sorcery either takes itself too seriously or takes it as

a joke. Leiber’s stories are funny, but he doesn’t spoof Howard. The humor comes from the

heart of the trope, and from the humanity of the characters.

Fritz Leiber wrote all kinds of stuff: science fiction, fantasy, horror. He helped to put sword

& sorcery on the map, not least by coining the term. He popularized some of the genre’s

main tropes and invented others. He introduced the “buddy” story into sword & sorcery.

The heroes that followed in Conan’s solitary strides are chiefly loners. Fafhrd and the Gray

Mouser form one of the few true partnerships in sword & sorcery, even avoiding the hero/

sidekick trope. Leiber makes this pretty explicit. In the “Induction” to Swords and Devil-

try, he describes their first meeting, writing that “they were already dimly aware that they

were two long-sundered fragments of a greater hero and that each had found a comrade

I read Fritz Leiber’s Swords

Against Wizardry and

Swords in the Mist when I

actually was young and im-

pressionable. The books were

possibly a bit adult for me,

but then again, I was just

starting to trade my 16 Mag-

azines for Rolling Stone and

the Berkeley Barb, courtesy

of an older cousin who came

to stay with my family in the

summer of 1968. Along with

the alternative press, he also

turned me on to KMPX-FM,

Country Joe & the Fish, and

science fiction. He gave me

the Leiber books and Isaac

Asimov’s Foundation trilogy,

so I imprinted on both hard

science fiction and low fanta-

sy in one fell swoop. All this

fascinating — and adult —

reading made a big impres-

sion on me.

87

who would outlast a thousand quests and a lifetime—or a hundred lifetimes—of adventur-

ing.” The two are equals, though different: they take turns playing straight man and wise-

guy, the cautious one and the reckless one. They rescue each other from howling towers,

murderous buildings, the underground keeps of Mad Lords, assorted thugs, wizards and

squid-people, and their own bad ideas.

The series has some… issues. Girlfriends are taken lightly and the serious ones are fridged;

and a few of the bad guys hew a bit too close to ethnic stereotypes (Mingols? Seriously?).

Leiber’s “iteration,” as one critic puts it, is closer to Howard than those of Russ and

Delany, but he nudges the genre in a similar direction.

Once hooked by SF and fantasy, I haunted the science fiction section at B. Dalton’s, where

after much agonizing over covers and blurbs and first pages and cover price, I would final-

ly pick out one or two. I didn’t know anyone who read science fiction except my cousin

(who had been drafted and spent four years at Point Arena). I didn’t know about fandom,

and had nobody to recommend books, except for one time when a grandfatherly man, tick-

led that a twelve-year-old girl was in the science fiction section at B. Dalton’s, recommend-

ed Asimov’s Lucky Star series. I hoped to meet him again, if only to ask him to recom-

mend something more grown-up, but I never did. Was he a Fan? Or just a solitary reader

like me?

By the time I graduated high school I had

amassed what I considered a large collec-

tion of paperbacks -- it filled a tiny book-

case. But then I met Lynn Kuehl, who had

a whole room full of books (don’t ask how

many we have now). He introduced me to

used bookshops, science fiction conven-

tions with their dealers’ rooms, and serious

collecting. And also to weirder SF writers

than I was used to, like Philip K. Dick and

R.A. Lafferty. This was in 1975, and I’d

traded my Rolling Stone and Berkeley

Barb for Ms. magazine and Off Our Backs,

so I was also picking up books like The Left

Hand of Darkness, Women of Wonder,

and The Female Man.

Delany writes in his introduction to the

Gregg Press edition of Alyx that Russ had

read neither the Conan stories nor Brack-

ett’s Jirel of Joiry stories before writing the

Alyx stories; and that “the wit and irony

apparent through Russ’s tales owe more to

88

Fritz Leiber’s variant of the genre than to How-

ard’s.”

So it’s no surprise that I liked Alyx. I smiled at

the reference to Fafhrd in Russ’s “The Adventur-

ess,” and was pleased to find that in return,

Leiber had given Alyx a small cameo in “The Two

Best Thieves in Lankhmar,” where Fafhrd points

out “that gray-eyed, black-haired amateur Alyx

the Picklock,” at a gathering of thieves.

Delany also writes, “the traditional Sword and

Sorcery fighting woman is, by a large, a useless

archetype for the Woman’s Movement,” but that

it’s a place to start. “We must not be surprised if

a woman writer beginning with it, goes on to put

it to a very untraditional use.” That Russ puts the

archetype to an untraditional use is an under-

statement.

The first story in Alyx, “The Adventuress,” is the

most purely Leiberesque. It takes place in the

Mediterranean-ish city of Ourdh, an obviously

sword & sorcery name complete with unneces-

sary “h”. Alyx is a small, plain, “governessy” per-

son. She is also a thief, a mercenary, and an as-

sassin, hired by a young woman to help her es-

cape an arranged marriage. The story is basically

a series of adventure episodes — there’s a sea

monster to slay and pirates to fight, and the two

women become friends. Meanwhile, Russ is qui-

etly creating her “iteration” of the sword & sor-

cery genre with small, deft, often humorous de-

tails that would have raised Howard’s eyebrows.

Alyx is not the adventuress of his dreams.

“I Thought She Was Afeard Till She Stroked My

Beard” is Alyx’s origin story, and still squarely

sword & sorcery. With “The Barbarian,” Russ

starts to move Alyx towards science fiction, and

also takes up the question of who is civilized and

who is a barbarian, a theme that runs from the

original Conan through Fafhrd & the Gray Mous-

er, Delany’s Raven, Saunders’ Imaro and Pratch-

ett’s Cohen the Barbarian. In Howard’s

89

“Shadows in the Moonlight” (Weird Tales, 1934)

Conan is compared to civilized people and the

latter come up short.

“Her lips twisted in a bitter smile. ‘Aye,

civilized men sell their children as slaves

to savages, sometimes. They call your

race barbaric, Conan of Cimmeria.’

‘We do not sell our children,’ he growled,

his chin jutting truculently.

In Russ’ story Alyx is far more “primitive” than

the time-traveler who hires her as an assassin,

but he’s easily the more barbaric. From a techno-

logically advanced future, he uses his “magic” to

basically be a jerk throughout the time-space

continuum and to bully Alex into submission.

But Alyx doesn’t care what the source of his pow-

er is, she just figures out how to thwart it. Alyx’s

more primitive survival methods work. This is

more deeply developed in Picnic On Paradise.

I had read Picnic On Paradise as a standalone

paperback, not realizing it was part of a sword &

sorcery series featuring a woman warrior. It

takes place on an alien planet. In the future! In a

serious meta-fictional move, Russ transports her

character into a completely different setting by

making her a time-traveling agent. Pretty

sneaky! Interestingly, in a small continuity hitch,

Alyx is inadvertently scooped by the Trans-

Temporal Military Authority not from Ourdh,

but from ancient Greece. This makes sense in the

story, since to grab Alyx from Ourdh, the Tem-

poral folks would have had to not only go back-

wards in time, but sideways in dimension (or as

Terry Pratchett would say, down a different leg

of the Trousers of Time). Since Russ is usually

careful about such things, it makes me think she

left it there as a sort of artifact signaling a change

from sword & sorcery to science fiction. Or I

could be overthinking it.

Read together, the Alyx stories probably come

90

across differently than reading them in the wild, as it were. They’re arranged in a

progression that moves from pure sword & sorcery to sword & sorcery with a science

fiction element to pure science fiction. Up through Picnic On Paradise, you can read

the Alyx stories purely as adventures — of a particularly literary SF type. But the last

story, “The Second Inquisition” slams you up against the metafictional wall. It’s a

time travel story, a coming-of-age story, possibly an origin story — and a story about

creating stories. It’s obvious from reading criticism of the story (and for that matter,

the series) that it’s given the more theory-oriented critics plenty to chew on.

All I know is that I liked all of the Alyx stories, and would have been very happy to

read a long series. Ah well!

If Russ’s Alyx tales are meta-fictional, Delany’s Nevèrÿon. stories are, like, maxi-

mum-strength meta-meta-fiction. With bells on. A USA Today review/blurb de-

scribes them “as if Umberto Eco had written about Conan the Barbarian,” but who

needs Eco? It’s as if the author of Dhalgren had written about Conan the Barbarian.

Right?

Like Russ, Delany led me down the garden path to sword & sorcery. I’d read some of

his more SFnal stuff first and was surprised to find that Tales of Nevèrÿon. was

sword & sorcery, and it took me a while to recognize “Conan” in it. But I liked them

because they were experimental, feminist, anti-racist, and literary. I also liked them

because — once again — they reminded me of the Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser stories.

Like Leiber, Delany rewrites his “Conans” (Gorgik, Raven) as a bit more human than

91

the original, both in their good traits and bad. Their

flaws don’t quite make them anti-heroes (such as

Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser might be called), but

simply people embedded in their culture. Adver-

saries — or “frenemies” like Norema and Raven,

aren’t good or evil but representatives from two dif-

ferent cultures, which clash.

There’s a lot of humor in these stories, too. Delany’s

language is often playful. You can’t help but smile

every time Raven says “your strange and terrible

land” or at the obligatory tag the characters must

add after mentioning the Child Empress -- whose

reign is proud and prudent, just and generous, good

and gracious, etc.

Delany is basically working out a feminist and anti-

racist ‘Conan’ before our eyes. Russ, doing much the

same thing, is more economical, dropping hints

about matriarchies, wars, social changes, or gender-

bent creation myths. Delany goes into a lot of detail.

The mysterious traveler Raven gives us the long-

form version of her peoples’ woman-centered crea-

tion myth. Gorgik holds forth on his relationship to

slavery from the point of view of both slave and

owner, including his sexual kink about wearing the

collar, and Old Venn lectures us on the change from

a barter economy to a money economy.

There is a large ratio of exposition to action, and it sometimes feels like Delany is world-

building rather than writing a story. Which is fine, world-building is part of story-telling,

and in a story about story-telling, it’s not out of place. But it’s a departure from Howard, to

say the least. It’s hard to imagine Conan sitting still for the stories by Old Venn or Raven.

And yet, with all Delany does say, he still manages to tease the reader with what he doesn’t,

leaving more than enough mystery hanging around the exposition. Delany’s dream dust

has a bit more grit in it, but it still sparkles.

The stories in Tales of Nevèrÿon. are bracketed by an introduction, “Return…a Preface” by

K. Leslie Steiner (which isn’t in the original paperback copy I first read) and an afterword,

“Some Informal remarks Toward the Modular Calculus, Part Three” by S.L. Kermit, both

obviously pseudonyms for Delany. These are delightfully confusing — I mean, metafiction-

al, purporting to elucidate the text and amplify themes, Steiner telling us, as if we couldn’t

figure it out for ourselves, that “Delany’s mega-fantasy is a fascinating fiction of ideas, a

narrative hall of mirrors, an intricate argument about power, sexuality, and narration it-

self.”

92

Each chapter is set off by a quote from one or another of the darlings, I mean giants, of

modernist or postmodernist literature, philosophy, and history. All of this went right over

my head the first time I read the book, so I ignored them, the way I do now that I know (in

a general way) who they are. Who but Delany would think it’s a good idea to quote Spivak

and Foucault in a sword & sorcery novel? Samuel Delany is a genius, but he’s also a braniac

goofball.

But I appreciate it as a concept. As a whole package, it’s a wonder of meta-fictional science

fiction/fantasy, and if you are into this kind of stuff, this is certainly the stuff for you.

Unlike the way I was hoodwinked by Russ and Delany into reading sword & sorcery, I read

Charles Saunders’s Imaro on purpose. By now I was interested in new takes on Howard’s

stories, and picked it up because Saunders writes another “iteration” of Conan. The version

I picked up was the Night Shade edition, revised by Saunders and published in 2006. The

DAW originals had been long out of print.

“Imaro would be the anti-Tarzan,” Saunders writes in his preface to the new edition, “and

the setting in which his story unfolded would be an alternate-world Africa rather than an

imaginary prehistoric era of the Earth we know, as was the case in Howard’s Hyborian Age

and Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Imaro’s Africa, which I named Nyumbani, would serve as an

antidote to the negative stereotypes about the so-called ‘Dark Continent’ that crept -- ad-

vertently and inadvertently -- into the fantasy world of far too many other writers.”

So of course, DAW Books marketed the series as “An epic novel of a Black Tarzan,” to

Saunder’s chagrin and to the disapproval of the trademark-conscious estate of Edgar Rice

Burroughs. The cover had to be re-done, which delayed the book, which caused distribution

problems. By the time the second book came out, the first was out of print; the third book

didn’t sell, and DAW discontinued the series.

In some ways, Saunders writes closest to Howard’s original than the other authors here.

The stories are certainly more action-oriented. Imaro comes up against rival warriors and

bad guys, wild panthers, lions and crocodiles, and evil sorcerers, one half-changed into a

lion, the other half-changed into an alien, and vanquishes all mostly by sheer force, wading

in with his knives and clubs and not incidentally, his rage. Imaro is a six-foot tower of sim-

mering rage.

Saunders brings in the Howard/Lovecraftian Weird wholesale with Ancient Evil Gods/

Monsters complete with tentacles. But Saunders has his own version of the dream-dust

sparkle, and uses it to create a larger-than-life, extravagant, magical version of Africa. It’s a

place of diverse tribes and cultures, deep time, ancient legends, storied people, traditions

that shade into magic, and magic that turns evil. He kicks up the savagery of nature red in

tooth and claw to something more supernatural; familiar animals become the source of

magic, and their special characters are intwined with the destinies of humans. The land-

scape of Imaro shimmers with weirdness like a heat-mirage.

And while Imaro charges across the African continent battling monsters and madmen, he

93

also, like Gorgik, Raven, Alyx, Fafhrd and the Gray mouser -- like Conan himself -- also

deals with the human problems of slavery and freedom, the nature of stories and story-

telling, and the question of who, exactly, is the Barbarian. (Hint: it’s not Imaro.)

I’m not really fond of parodies of Conan. It’s just… too easy a target, I guess. The exception

is Terry Pratchett’s take on Conan in his Discworld novels. Of course, Terry Pratchett is an

exception in general. He takes the spoof just to the edge of what I can stand, but he tem-

pers it with a dollop of weird.

And it’s metafictional, to boot. Pratchett doesn’t just “interrogate the trope,” he subjects it

to the third degree with rubber hoses and bright lights. If a Discworld character was trans-

ported to Nevèrÿon, Raven or Old Venn would find their tales interrupted by a wide-eyed

skeptic who’d pepper them with the repeated question: “Why?”

Each Discworld novel centers on a fantasy trope or theme, whether it’s Fairy Tales, Vam-

pires, Australia or the Post Office. But Pratchett always multi-tasks in the Discworld nov-

els; he’ll have pastiches of several different things going on at once, plus references to other

things pulled in from everywhere, like keeping a bunch of spinning plates in motion. Sword

& sorcery is often there in the background, or the B-plot, as it were. There are nods here

and there to Leiber. The city of Ank-Morpork, owes more to Lankhmar than its name; and

in The Colour of Magic Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are parodied as Bravd and the Weasel.

And of course Pratchett references Conan. In Sourcery we meet Conina, the daughter of

the great Cohen the Barbarian, who has inherited her father’s strength and fighting ability,

but longs to be a beautician. (Eyeroll).

Cohen the Barbarian (first name Ghengiz) appears in three books in which Pratchett delves

into sword & sorcery storytelling: The Light Fantastic, Interesting Times, and The Last

Hero (illustrated by Jack Kirby). Pratchett pushes the aging Conan -- as written by L. Spra-

gue de Camp and Lin Carter -- into his eighties, though Cohen and his band the Silver

Horde can still take on a team of Ninja fighters and win. But when we meet him in The

Light Fantastic he’s a wheezing, toothless, broken-down bag of bones who throws out his

back during a fight. Still, he’s a living legend. Which is the problem.

“Hang on, hang on,” said Rincewind. “Cohen’s a great big chap, neck like a bull,

got chest muscles like a sack of footballs. I mean, he’s the Disc’s greatest warrior, a

legend in his own lifetime. I remember my granddad telling me he saw him… my

granddad telling me he … my granddad…”

He faltered under the gimlet gaze.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh, of course. Sorry.”

“Yesh,” said Cohen, and sighed. Thatsh right, boy. I’m a lifetime in my own leg-

end.”

Underlying the humor is Pratchett’s deep interest in legend, myth, and storytelling. What

94

is the truth behind legends? What is a hero? Who owns a story? What makes a story myth-

ic? (or “Myffic,” as Pratchett’s characters often say.)

Pratchett, too, is interested in the question, “what is a Barbarian?” Cohen is ruthless and

violent, but he has principles. In Interesting Times he resists the civilizing attempt by the

character called Teach, who thinks he can educate the Silver Horde into good citizens, but

he is shocked by Lord Hong and his exquisitely civilized but barbaric courtiers.

In The Last Hero, Cohen kidnaps a bard (then as an afterthought hires him by offering a

fortune in rubies) to write the saga of the Silver Horde as they embark on their last quest --

to return fire to the Gods. The embedded bard gets caught up in the story and follows it to

its end -- both to see how the story comes out, and to make sure he gets it right. By the

time the Silver Horde have performed their final (--or is it?) act of heroism, he realizes

how important they are. “He’d never been keen on heroes. But he realized that he needed

them to be there, like forests and mountains… he might never see them, but they filled

some sort of hole in his mind. Some sort of hole in everyone’s mind.”

I didn’t read the original stories of Conan the Barbarian until late in life. But in a way, I

had read them. I read them in Fritz Leiber’s more human and humorous take in Fafhrd

and the Gray Mouser. I read them in Joanna Russ’s genderbending Alyx stories that mod-

ernized them with a “governessy” woman warrior (and more humor). I read them in Sam-

uel Delany’s metafictional treatment that -- well, did a lot of things. I read them in Saunders’

Imaro, where a Black African warrior is the hero instead of an ooga-booga extra, and I read

them in Pratchett’s Ghengiz Cohen, an octogenarian hero who doesn’t know how to be an-

ything else and wants to be remembered in legend.

So, after reading all of these different iterations of Howard’s series, all of these very

thoughtful — if not over-thought — literary and political and meta-takes on Conan the Bar-

barian that would have given Robert E. Howard the fantods, what did I think of the origi-

nal?

Well (she says, looking guiltily over her shoulder), I like them a lot. With reservations! The

Damon Knight quote at the head of this essay pretty much sums it up for me. Howard had

a genius for casting that weird dream-dust over his stories, adding a shine and a shimmer

to his hero’s adventures in testosterone. It’s enough — barely — to offset the facepalming

thud and blunder. It’s enough — obviously! — for writers who find his views on race and

gender odious or the character simply too one-dimensional, to take up the tales and recast

them, and in the process explore how stories are told and re-told. It’s interesting how seri-

ously these very serious authors take the old sword & sorcery hero. It’s a pleasure, above

and beyond reading good stories, to see the way they take themes and ideas from the origi-

nal and blow them up, bend them ‘round, turn them inside out, carry them over into new

settings. I’m impressed at how much all these writers appreciated Howard’s Barbarian;

and think how thin and careworn his legacy would be without writers like Leiber, Russ,

Delany, Saunders and Pratchett to create him anew, again and again.

95

One more thing – this essay is my own personal journey through S&S and not a survey of

the genre. What about Jirel of Joiry? The Swords & Sorceresses anthologies? Etc.? In an

earlier draft I mentioned Chicks in Chainmail, as an example of spoofs I didn’t much care

for, but since it was just a negative mention, I cut it. And I did read the Bradley antholo-

gies, and was planning to look at them again – but can’t find them. They’re either in a box

in the (cue scary music) garage or I gave them to the shop; either way they must not have

impressed me much. (Though the table of contents of Volume 1 looks pretty impressive.)

The Books

Fritz Leiber

Swords Against Wizardry (1968)

Swords in the Mist (1968)

The Swords of Lankhmar (1968)

Swords and Deviltry (1970)

Swords Against Death (1970)

Joanna Russ

Alyx (1976, Gregg Press edition w/Intro by

Delany)

Samuel R. Delany

Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979, 2004 edition w/

added introduction)

Charles Saunders

Imaro (1981, revised 2006)

Terry Pratchett

The Light Fantastic (1986)

Interesting Times (1989)

The Last Hero (2001)

Robert E. Howard

Conan the Barbarian (2010 unabridged col-

lection, Carlton House)

Conan the Barbarian

Fafhrd and Gray Mouser

96

I miss fresh smelling moist salt air from

Long Island Sound late at night walking

from the Queens subway. More than two

years have gone by since I wrote my “New

York-to-Wimpy Zone” travel and moving

essay for Idea. I still miss New York’s China-

town (and an unknown-in-Minnesota dish

called chow fun), I miss CBGB’s, newsstands

and good cheap pizza by the slice, St. Mark’s

Place, driving over big weird old bridges like

the Bayonne Skyway, visiting once and fu-

ture faneds in their plush publishing offices.

No more wild hot late nights drumming in

cheap rocked out beer soaked practice studi-

os, playing with Josh and the War Pigs at a

place called The Dive. Josh now lives atop a

mountain in the Adirondacks pubbing a lo-

cal rock tabloid. I even fondly remember

Fanoclasts gatherings at Stu Shiffman’s and

later at Lise Eisenberg’s. I don’t miss cock-

roaches, late-night subway platforms, driv-

ing ’till dawn around the streets of Queens

looking for a parking space. Or most of the

Lunarians.

Two weeks after I arrived in Minnesota with

my life-in-a-Ryder-truck I flew back to New

York to look for my car. I had to say absolute

final “yes-I’m-really-leaving” goodbyes to a

few friends, empty out the Savage Rock Pho-

tos post office box, take a few last pictures.

My ’70 Chevelle leaked 5 quarts of crankcase

oil along the Pennsylvania Turnpike (sorry,

environment), but responded well to oil pan

bolt tightening and Permatex at my parents’

house, in Pittsburgh. You can’t go home

again, but you can still leave oil stains on

your dad’s garage floor.

I did family visits, looked up old friends, had

a look at my old post-college neighborhood,

East Liberty/Shadyside, Pittsburgh’s East

and West Villages. Then I headed north for a

college reunion on a farm north of Grove

City. The timing was great. Many of us had-

n’t seen each other since 1975, some of us

still had long hair. Ben had driven from Day-

ton in a Chevy 13 years older than mine. I

tried some back roads I used to know to get

there and got good and lost. Instead I some-

how I found myself at the big rocks in the

State Game Lands where I met my power

animal, a mountain lion, one night long ago.

When I finally arrived at Jan's farm, I found

a note saying everyone was swimming at the

strip mines. They came back and found me

replacing my sparkplugs. We spent the next

97

hour drinking beer and sticking our heads

under car hoods. We concluded that Ben’s

engine was cleaner but mine was a lot big-

ger. Everyone seemed pretty happy with

their lives, no one seemed to have been ad-

versely mutated by the massive doses of ly-

sergic acid diethylamide we all took 17 years

before. It was almost too cosmic for me to go

through all of this while on my way to a new

life in Minnesota, touching all the bases,

running for home.

So here I am. I’ve found the rock ’n roll sce-

ne here isn’t quite what I had in mind. I may

have to change the name of my business.

There’s bars and bands all right, lots of

them, with weird names and arty posters

stuck up on all the best utility poles in Up-

town. But I find that many of the mundane

rockers, artists, musicians and their hangers

-on up here are isolated, nihilistic, apolitical.

Worse than the usual suspects, I mean. The

Minnesota rockers I’ve met through my

punk friend from work unanimously chain-

smoke cigarettes, laughed at me for wearing

a hat into the C.C. Club one night when it

was 40 below, have permanent bronchitis,

don’t want to hear that they need to move to

L.A. or NYC for a while. Weird small town

stuff.

The bars close at 1:00 A.M. up here. Not on-

ly do they literally throw you out but they

turn up the lights 15 minutes before and yell

at you like you’re stupid. In Pennsylvania,

they stop selling drinks at 2:00 A.M., in New

York at 4, but you can usually sit around

drinking your last one while the bartenders

clean up. Not here. This means there’s a

nightly highway horror show as all the

drunks pile into their rusty beaters and sim-

ultaneously race for home. Everyone drives

like they’re in Cairo up here anyway, foot to

the floor, running stop signs and red lights,

making rights on red without stopping or

even slowing down much. And I’m talking

about the balding hippies in old Volvos with

Deadhead stickers! The Type-A BMW driv-

ers are far worse.

But this isn’t what’s on my mind, what I’m

trying to write about here. My never-ending

lifework, the search for transcendence, is.

Sometimes it just hits me over the head, giv-

ing me a warm, clear, light-diffused image, a

swelled chest, a new idea. Other times I can

arrange for things to happen, place myself in

surroundings like ones that have worked in

the past, like the Lake Poets, like wandering

the meadow in Wordsworth’s “The Prelude.”

Finding spots of time in the world where I

can sit and think clearly. I even found a few

such cosmic places in the heart of New York

itself, bicycling amidst junkyards by the East

River, watching tugboats go by, looking

across at Manhattan. Peering down a side-

walk grate and seeing a sunken mini-forest

of weeds and junk trees on Park Ave. And

there’s always the Staten Island ferry at 4:30

am. They even have a bar!

I like to find places that haven’t yet been

stomped on by the Wise Use fascists, or

spots that have had a century or so to recov-

er from clearcutting. There were reforested

state game lands in Pennsylvania where I

camped in the summers, cliffs above the Po-

tomac River a few minutes north of the up-

per beltway bridge where I could be all alone

on a weekday evening. I found satori on hot

summer nights sitting on the edge of the

stone portico at the back of the Lincoln Me-

morial, legs dangling over the stonework,

smelling the old swamps back there, watch-

ing planes land at National. I know a little

yoga, a bit about breathing, some relaxing

tricks. And I know I need to get away from

home once in a while to shed distractions.

98

So here I am, in Minnesota, in a nice little

house with my cats and my books and stereo

and a darkroom in the basement. I can set

my drums up if I feel like it, though I don’t

often feel like it. I live with someone who

understands and respects creativity and who

likes to go camping just as much as I do,

probably for more or less the same reasons,

dwelling on the whichness of what.

Here in Minnesota there are still vast areas

of green. Much is farmland, most of the rest

is in its second or third growth of trees or

grass. One thing I’d been trying to find was a

real prairie. There is a conserved patch in

Western Pennsylvania, the eastern-most

prairie ever found. A guy named Jennings

bought it long ago and kept it from develop-

ment. I’ve been there. But I wanted to see

where the buffalo roamed. One day an article

in the paper caught my eye about this dan-

gerous little jog that Route 62, the Cross-

town, makes, to avoid tearing up a preserved

patch of unplowed prairie. I thought I’d just

head out one day, drive west on the cross-

town, find a place to pull over, go visit this

thing.

Time went by and I found a good job setting

type on the nightshift in a small studio. I also

soon found myself literally up to my elbows

in Toad Hall, Geri Sullivan (Girl Homeown-

er)’s wonderful little wooden house, now my

home also, which apparently had been near-

ly eaten by the squirrels. The usual Sears

Roebuck All-American thing to do is to cover

everything over with vinyl plastic siding.

Geri and I don’t feel that that is what you do

with an antique wooden house. What we’ve

done instead has been to tear off large sec-

tions of bad wood, hunt down replacement

moldings from lumberyards, putting it all

back together with a spiff coat of paint. It’s

hard to find lumber that fits, though, 2x4’s

got smaller—twice—since this place was

built. You have to get bigger sizes and rip

them down to size.

But I still had this itch to track down that bit

of prairie by the Crosstown. I decided that

this search would be the theme of my next

installment for Idea, and told Geri, so she

would be reassured that I was, indeed, actu-

ally writing it. And then it happened, we

were returning from the airport and Geri

shook me to my very soul with the an-

nouncement that the ratty little patch of

weeds with the chain-link fence around it a

mile west of the airport was, indeed, The

Crosstown Prairie. Not what I thought it

would look like, nowhere near where I

thought it would be.

Then, reading about Wirth Park, the oldest

regional park, just west of Minneapolis, I

found some vague references to a couple of

acres of prairie acquired by the park system

in the 1960’s. They were tacked onto the

western border, behind the 9-hole golf

course. All right, I’ll go find that instead.

Following the cross country ski trails, Geri

and I found a hill top clearing with little

Park Ranger signs identifying various

clumps of vegetation. Surrounded by rail-

yards, suburban homes, a golf course,

bounded on the west side by Twin Lake, the

local nude beach. Not exactly secret or pri-

vate, but still a couple acres of real prairie!

I go back occasionally. It has its moments.

It’s not the most wonderful wilderness

around, but it’s what I’ve found so far. I’ll

keep looking: that’s half the fun.

from Geri Sullivan's Idea #4

February, 1992

99

I’m old. I am Medicare card

carrying, AARP-eligible old. I re-

member Claudine Longet as a

singer, not a murderer old. I know

how to do the Bossa Nova, the Po-

ny and the Swim. I’ve worn mis-

matched string bikinis, jeans with

the waistband cut off and line-

backer power suits in the original,

old. I’ve owned Janis Joplin on

vinyl, Easy E on cassette, and I’ve

seen turntables with the number

78 on them. I’m that kind of old,

old.

And I love the freedom it offers--

not only the new leaf but the

whole damn tree where my credit

rating and my resume are as un-

necessary as a street map of Bor-

neo. I don’t have to do fucking an-

ything anymore because “old”

launders all sorts of societal mala-

dies. No longer is one lazy or shift-

less or drugged or smelly or

weird—one is simply just old.

That is not to say I am unaware of

the clichéd sword hanging over my

head, and much worse, over the

heads of those that I love. I am writing this in the time of the pandemic, when fear of death

has hijacked everyone’s minds. Old people are used to this. We live with an element of non

-specific sadness in every happy moment. We live with the knowledge that it’s all going to

end badly with someone in a hospital bed in the living room. No wonder the transition

from our working to not-so-much working lives is difficult. We are no longer “building”—

not a career, not a family (for those so inclined), not a treasury of vehicles, kitchen ma-

chines and home furnishings, not a solid financial base. We’ve stopped enjoying the boats,

trampolines and swimming pools that litter our gardens and driveways. We can choose to

hold on to those things and continue to define ourselves as we were in the world. And we

could end up looking like Cher. Alternatively, we can slowly disassemble our former lives

and keep only the treasured essentials.

The idea that we get wiser with age is a crock of shit. Our experience has taught us only

that there is a bunch of junk we don’t know and that is too much trouble to learn. I can eas-

100

ily buy heroin on the corner of Mission and 16th but will never want to figure out the dark-

net market, it’s just too much of a bother. This is not to say that old people don’t want to

learn—senior enrollment at universities prove otherwise. We are just picky and selfish with

our brains and now have a modicum of time to dive deeply into the things we previously

took note of. General knowledge is for the half-drunk and overly-medicated young at a hip-

ster bar. We old are glad to say that we don’t know and we just don’t care, except for those

few specific topics—Civil War sites, metal detector finds, scrapbooking, which we plan to

drone on about at your next Thanksgiving dinner.

When I realized it as a child, going from a small middle school to a large high school, it

comforted me to know that a whole world was already set up to make the next step. Instead

of having to create a new environment from scratch because I had not imagined it yet, I

simply merged onto a new, busy freeway of folks already going the speed limit. In old age,

there are many merges, some chosen and some forced by ill health and loss. But now is also

the time to enjoy the leftovers that we didn’t notice when creating the broad strokes and big

productions of our younger years. Eventually, everyone gets stuck in place until they die, so

we can be watchful of our capacity and imagine the vistas that we would like to see on our

last day.

Finally, unless we are Shakespeare, we leave no legacy. Our homes once carefully tended

fall into the worst sort disrepair. All those things we looked after—the kitchen counters, the

weeded garden, the savings account of all credits and no debits are disposed of in minutes

after our deaths. They are not abandoned dreams, they are aged-out dreams that our bene-

ficiaries don’t hold. You were the dreamer of this particular set of cabinets with the straw-

berry shelf paper— no one will care after you. And to that I say, so the hell what. I tend to

my counters, I fill my brain with images of junk that people have created, I ornament every-

thing—-none of it is a legacy. It is just good enough for now.

101

LETTERS

OF

COMMENT

[I wanted to start the letter column acknowledging that 2020 was The Time Of The Covid. Phil Paine wrote a moving post for his blog at PhilPaine.com. When I asked if I could use it in the locs this ish Phil admitted he was a bit puzzled by the strong reaction this post had garnered. I think he gets to the heart of it in this beautifully written “letter”.] PHIL PAINE PhilPaine.com Toronto, Ontario When Olive Fredrickson published her autobiography in 1972, after a long and hard life in Canada’s wilderness, her chosen title, The Silence of the North, was instantly meaningful to anyone familiar with the hard and empty country north of the temperate deciduous forests. Most of the forests of the world are noisy. At night, the relentless sound of cicadas, the scampering of animals, the sway-ing limbs of trees and rustles of leaves, and the sounds of humanity, even if only in the form of dis-tant trains or highways, are evident. But the vast boreal regions of Canada, roadless, trainless and townless, dominated by motionless black spruce and tamarack, are silent at night. You have to be near a waterfall or a stretch of rapids to hear noise. The cold lakes are like black sheets of obsidian. Ironically, if there is a noise, it will carry across a lake for miles, so that you can make out a quiet conversation by a campfire from the opposite shore, and when a loon makes its occasional solemn cry, you don’t know if it’s nearby or three kliks away. I have vivid memories of that silence, and the phrase never had to be explained to me.

I live in a small apartment in downtown Toronto. In fact, it is known to statisticians as the most densely populated place in Canada. Within a short walk from my door, there are more people than in all of the Yukon, Northwest and Nunavut territories combined. Normally, this is a very noisy neighbourhood. The streets are usually crowded with traffic, people pour in and out of the subway stations, the stores are full of shoppers. There is always music. A few blocks from my home, the gay village has been a continuously lively party for the last half century, and it’s normal to see flocks of people on the streets at 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning. Forests of condominium towers fill the air with domestic noises, and construction crews are always hammering, hoisting, and mixing concrete to build new ones. Motorcycles, helicopters, cop cars, fire engines and ambulances add to the din.

102

Now, under lockdow, my neighbourhood has the Silence of the North. For most of the day, you hardly hear a sound. For me, it’s a bit of nostal-gia. For the hardcore denizens, those “bred and buttered in Toronto” as the saying goes, it must be very disconcerting. It’s “damned eerie,” one elderly gentleman told me. But, every day, at 7:30 on the dot, a raucous din erupts, and lasts for about five minutes. You hear the national anthem loudly playing. People are out on their balconies blowing whistles, banging pots, and singing. The custom, which began in Italy and spread around the world, is a needed emotional outlet as well as a tribute to the doctors, first responders, care-givers and store clerks who must risk infection so that life can go on.

For myself, I’m as satisfied as a well-fed cat sleeping near a fireplace. Well-stocked with sup-plies, blessed with good neighbours who are self-disciplined and mutually helpful, and surround-ed by a vast collection of books, films and music, I am in no position to complain about anything. While the public authorities made some errors in the beginning, on the whole they are acting responsibly ― even the ones I voted against. None of them are wasting time with self-promoting propaganda videos and all of them are publicly committed to following the science to determine policy. Alberta, which began plan-ning for the pandemic last December, and is consequently less seriously affected, is sharing its surplus medical supplies with the other prov-inces, and Air Canada has volunteered three large jets to move them. Politics in Canada is not as a rule much concerned with race or religion, as it is in our neighbour to the south, but it has always been characterized by extreme rivalries and constant bickering between the provinces, each of which sees itself more or less as a mini-nation. But in this crisis, all such rivalries seem to have disappeared. I’ve never seen the provinc-es get on so well, or co-operate so efficiently. The one sour note is that the crisis has revealed the shocking level of ill-preparedness and in-competence in privately-run homes for the aged, where half of our deaths have occurred. In one case, criminal charges are being considered. On the brighter side, a company in Ottawa has de-veloped an efficient portable testing kit, giving results in less than half an hour, that meets the government’s standards, and mass production of this kit is already underway. Mass testing, when combined with social distancing and contact tracing, is the solidly proven way out of this mess. Let’s hope that the kit is really as good as

it seems, and that it is properly deployed. I follow all the available covid statistics daily. New Zea-land and Iceland, both of which are places whose statistics are unquestionable, demonstrate that the virus can be beaten if the citizenry, medical profession, and elected officials co-operate and are pro-active. Canada is, of course, a much larg-er and more complex country than those two, with some inbuilt disadvantages that neither the Kiwis nor the Jáarar have, but the evidence so far is that the methods should be basically the same. We will not come out as squeaky-clean ― the scandalous failure in our care for the elderly will be a stain on our record ― but we may at least get a “good effort” report card. As I write, testing lev-els have been consistently better than average, with immediate prospects of drastic improve-ment, no regional medical system has been over-whelmed, though some are working at a frenzied pace, procurement of essential supplies seems to be assured, public response has been as good as anyone could reasonably expect, social solidarity and public morale have remained high, the co-operation between private industry and govern-ment has been exemplary, and there are no food shortages or significant failures in the supply chain. I went to a supermarket to stock up on fresh vegetables on Tuesday morning, after more than a week spent entirely at home. I arrived just at store opening, and there was as yet no line-up to get in, though it had started to form when I left, with all the protocols adhered to. I scanned the shelves, and everything appeared to be well-stocked, and even toilet paper, cleansers, eggs, and canned goods were plentiful. The selection of produce was excellent. There was no evidence of price-gouging, but some items had limits-per-customer, and there were none of the usual “loss-leader” sale prices. If this normalcy can be sus-tained, I know not, but in any case my personal stockpile is sufficient for months, and I am only shopping for fresh items.

I’m able to keep my finances on an even keel, since my income is not dependent on leaving the apartment, and I have a small cushion in the bank to deal with any temporary shortfall. I’ve never eaten so well! Since the best way to relieve the inevitable cramps from sitting at the comput-er is to get up and prepare a meal, and I no long-er have the temptation to run out and get three slices of pizza or indulge in other unhealthy whims, I am steadily improving my cooking skills. My neighbours tell me they are also doing this (except for the one who is a professional chef). I have fresh herbs growing on the window-

103

time we were on our way to Texas. By last Friday we were in College Station and the package had arrived at our local post office, and on Saturday it was out for delivery. A friend was staying in the house and taking care of the cats, but on Sat-urday the status of the package was "Notice Left (No Secure Location Available)". We have a large mailbox by the front door, so now I was thinking that this must be something large. But on Monday, as we were about to board our flight home, it was "Delivered, In/At Mailbox". During the convention a number of attendees men-tioned that they had received Portable Storage Three, but I still didn't made the connec-tion. And of course when we got home there it was. I'm still catching up from the trip and have-n't had a chance to read the issue yet, but as usu-al it looks very good. Let me know when you're ready to put the PDF on eFanzines.

[I had a similar experience with the Post Office when ordering over $200 worth of stamps. It took three separate orders to receive them. The first order appears to have never left Kansas City where the Fulfillment Center is located. The packet was scanned into the system then went down a black hole. The second shipment left KCMO on September 23rd, arriving in Tucson on the 26th, the town I live in. The stamps sat there for two days without an attempt to deliver them to my address. They were then shipped to Phoenix arriving on the 28

th. They were then

shipped to and arrived in Chicago on the 30th,

with a notice appended that there was an unsuc-cessful delivery attempt in Chicago that day. On October 2

nd it was still stuck in Chicago. I called

the PO who followed the same tracking I did and could not explain why this had happened. They then shipped out a third order of stamps over-night, which I did receive the following day. The second order finally arrived a month later, which I returned. No one knows what happened to the original order placed on September 6

th.]

[When Christina Lake confessed to writing locs on issues One and Two and never sending them I sufficiently whined about her withholding that she relented. I now await her loc on Three.]

CHRISTINA LAKE christina.l@virgin.net Falmouth, Cornwall Portable Storage One

Jo Walton might be able to immerse herself in fiction from Cardiff to London, but that takes a

sill. I’m going to be using a lot of basil. If you plant basil it will just leap out of the soil and overwhelm everything, like the Blob in the 1958 Steve McQueen movie, while every other herb has a tough Darwinian struggle. My only regret is that I didn’t stock enough caraway seed, so my goulash and my borscht will no longer have the taste I prefer. But with all that basil, my Italian dishes will shine.

At the moment, I’m listening to Otmar Mácha’s Double Concerto for Violin, Piano and Orches-tra ― a somewhat melodramatic piece. The cats are snoozing. After writing the next few sentenc-es, and posting them, I’ll curl up with the cats and read The Journal of Nicholas Cresswell, 1774–1777. Am I troubled or inconvenienced by the lockdown or social distancing? It’s a laugha-ble idea. When Olive Fredrickson’s husband drowned in a lake, and her three children were nearing starvation, she walked forty miles in a blizzard to reach the closest neighbour in order to get food for them, and remarked that the ex-perience left her with little love for wolves. There were as yet no phones or radios in her part of the world. There was no internet.

I have an apartment full of technology that, in my childhood, I would have considered a fantas-tic science fiction dream. The speed of light is 299,792,458 metres per second. My average download speed is 28 Mbps. My friends are not far away in time, though some are pretty far in space. And I have very, very good friends.

BILL BURNS billb@ftldesign.com Hampstead, New York Mary and I just got back from Corflu, and I sus-pect that may be our last trip for quite a while, as we'll almost certainly have to cancel our up-coming trip to the UK for Eastercon. Corflu at-tendance was down, but those who could be there (about 33 of us) had a very good time in Texas. On March 3rd I had received a notifica-tion from USPS that a package was on its way (I'm signed up with them for notifications of incoming mail). As I hadn't ordered anything I wasn't sure what it was, and while I knew it was coming from Tucson I didn't connect it with you. So I flagged it as "Mystery item from Tuc-son" and waited for updates. Nothing happened until the 12th, when it arrived at the Los Angeles distribution center. This left me even more puz-zled, but eight hours later it had crossed the con-tinent and was in the distribution center on Long Island a few miles away from here. By this

104

I’m glad I did, and I’m glad your mother made her peace with Paul Theroux. Though there is a difference between taking against a person for what happens outside of the pages of a book, and the things that are part of the persona they reveal in their work. It’s even more strange what differ-ent people find unacceptable in fiction, even though it is fiction and the writer is not usually endorsing the thing that has caused the reader to stop reading (usually cruelty to animals, or rape).

I don’t think I ever found an entirely acceptable alternative to Tolkien, though I did my best with Stephen Donaldson, and Tolkien’s high fantasy predecessors. And more recently, of course, George R R Martin. I would agree with Dale Nel-son over the appeal of the old in Tolkien. Old Norse sagas also might appeal, at least to fans of the Silmarillion (are there any?). I hadn’t thought of the jeopardy cross-country adventure and agree that there is a similar narrative satis-faction, but would the lack of higher order of re-ality really be satisfied, except perhaps if the his-torical or geographical setting was sufficiently exotic? Which is where the historical travel books sound appealing, at least to the present day me. The same with environmental books. While Tol-kien’s conservationism and love for the English countryside is appealing, it’s not what I read his book for. (Though on the subject of “What do they teach them in school” it was good to see par-ties of school children in Kew Gardens getting enthusiastic about identifying trees).

Portable Storage Two

I started off very enthusiastic about the idea of producing something like Portable Storage. Car-ried away by the idea and buoyed up by reading about the energetic apa publishing of Alva, it seemed like the perfect format for the modern fanzine fan. But then life intervened and Portable Storage got put aside for a few weeks (despite the $7.91 invested in sending it to me). When I re-turned, my mood had changed. I read on, but began to be intimidated by the writers, the talk of books I’d never read, the Bay Area vibe (even lovely Rich and his appreciation of Di Fillipo). The illustrations. Was this a fanzine or a nascent literary, small press production? Was this some-thing I could ever do? Then I became irritated by Dale Nelson and his lack of sympathy for broad-ening out the syllabus. Then bemused because every word that Dale wrote about his experiences with inspirational teachers and their enthusiasm for a wide and non-traditional range of books left me baffled as to why he didn’t see it as another

mere 2.5 hours compared to the 5-6 hours from London to Falmouth. After an hour or two fiction starts to feel an indulgence, and not active enough to engage my faculties for a whole train journey. That’s why I like best to put on music, look out the window and think and occasionally write. And I like to read fanzines and apas to stimulate that thinking and writing process, and give it focus. So on with your article in the latest fanzine. I’m sure I consciously imbibed some of C S Lewis’ dictums about literary-ness when I was a teenager enthralled to his essays on Christianity, values and books. His fantasy which wasn’t Tol-kien but predated him in my reading life had all the cachet of childhood first love for fantasy (and which were regularly reread). His definition of the unliterary now sound hopelessly prescriptive, despite your generous contextualising. And as your essay neatly encapsulates, rereading can be an unliterary activity, especially when picking up an old favourite. When I re-read it is mainly for comfort, but can be for re-engaging with or reap-praising books I’ve read in the past and want to think about again in a different context, or more likely because I’ve completely forgotten them. But I don’t think that’s what Lewis meant. I think he meant the kind of critical re-reading that you undertake for Michael Swanwick and Julia El-liott, but for the kind of works that are conven-tionally seen as literary, such as Mallory, Shake-speare and Dickens, or in the fantasy genre, may-be William Morris, Dunsany. I do find that if I want to write about a book in any depth then I do need to re-read it, unless I get my impressions down straight away. And it’s also possible that on reflection, those impressions might be simplistic or mistaken. But life is too short, and my reading speed too slow to go into this detail for every book I read, so I just try to record short impres-sions as a placeholder. Or discuss with someone else, which is one reason why I so much enjoy being part of a book group, and at more remote remove, fandom (which is full of people who like to discuss books, some like Jo Walton who do it in print for anyone who is interested.) I’m not surprised to hear that Jo liked Pournelle’s Janis-saries. Not because I’ve ever read it or doubt your judgement, but because her own book The Just City uses the same stratagem of taking people from different periods of history and putting them together in one place and time to create the eponymous just city. Incidentally, on the dangers of personal encounters, it took me a lot of persua-sion to read Jo’s work due to an unfortunate inci-dent at the 1995 Worldcon involving cider which gave me a negative impression of her as a person.

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generation’s way of engaging with literature. And then I was back on fannishly familiar ground with Jeanne’s story of her son’s electrocution, and the letter column which I had failed to con-tribute to despite writing my loc in May. I remain impressed but uncertain whether it’s a model I could successfully follow.

[Some things here: My mom was a big fan of the Silmarillion. And probably Norse Saga. She was so wide ranging in her reading it was hard to keep up. // In my enthusiasm for Print On De-mand I may have lost track of the individual voice of others. Not that I think that voice would be-come lost if POD were used, but that POD simply may be undesirable to others. // If I had done a traditionally stapled (and slightly sloppier) fanzine but presented the same material I wonder if you would question the authenticity of Portable Stor-age’s fannish heritage. I have always published earnest little fanzines. And in my way have strived for Art in that context (no matter how im-perfect they were). Now that I am older I tend to be less emotive (and gushy) but the sincerity of my endeavors remain almost identical to those displayed in that fanzine from the 1970s. // There is an odd common undercurrent among our best writers and thinkers in fanzine fandom to feel intimidated by the prowess and excellence of others. I can’t help but think this is because of something in all our upbringings that causes twinges of insecurity and questioning of our own self-worth. How sercon is that?]

TOM JACKSON tomjackson@fastmail.com Berea, Ohio Portable Storage Two: Cy Chauvin was correct for pointing out that John Fugazzi didn't name a favorite Beatle, and you were correct for pointing out that Cy didn't volunteer one. I was surprised that you named Ringo as your favorite. Are you trying to be a contrarian?

But I wonder how many people are like me. I have not had a fixed favorite Beatle all of my life; my choice has changed over the years. As a teen, my favorite was George. He seemed to be kind of an underdog, only allowed a couple of songs per album, and All Things Must Pass was the first really good solo album. Then, too, he organized the charity concert for Bangladesh, which coaxed a great live performance out of Bob Dylan. Then John Lennon was a favorite for a while -- he seemed like the intellectual of the bunch, the one who seemed the most interesting, and the one whose songwriting seemed to hold up the best after the Beatles broke up. But as I aged, I decid-ed Paul was my favorite. In many ways, he seems the most adult of the Beatles, the one who valued children and treated them well, the one who was loyal to women and seemed to treat them well, too, and the one who always seemed to be work-ing hard at his art. He has been the one who has regularly toured, allowing fans to see him, and who has worked all the time on new recording projects, and gone out of his way to challenge himself with different approaches -- he even made electronic music albums that no one no-ticed for a long time. I finally got to see him live in Cleveland a couple of years ago.

[Ever since A Hard Day’s Night I have identified with Ringo. As I became an adult Ringo seemed to be the only Beatle that had a sense of humor-ous perspective. Upon rediscovering the Beatles in my 60s I came to realize that Ringo’s drum-ming completely dominates the sound of the Beatles. Without him they would have been a different band. Your argument for Paul is not without merit. He is probably the nicest of the Beatles. I never liked John. He always seemed like a mean little man to me. George? A lost spir-itualist. ]

I love Roger Zelazny probably about as much as Kennedy Gammage does, but although I don't want to wound him, I'm not a huge fan of the Amber books. They are OK. Zelazny is interesting in the sense that there's no one better when he is

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was in 1964, when I spent the summer in Berke-ley, studying Hindi at the University of California on a National Defense Education Act fellowship. This opportunity came to me because, in those post-Sputnik years, Congress determined that it would be useful to develop a cadre of people com-petent in various exotic languages spoken in plac-es of potential strategic importance. Under the influence of too much Kipling I had begun my study of Hindi as a Columbia freshman, not knowing about the NDEA, but I took advantage of the chance to spend summers at Chicago and Berkeley at the government’s expense. I nev-er did learn much Hindi – the only Hindi I remember is hathi aam khata hei, which means “the elephant is eating man-goes”, a phrase of surprising usefulness: I recite it just before hanging up on tele-phone calls from scammers with Indian accents. (One of them was sufficiently upset by this that he called me back and cursed me out in Hindi. I didn’t un-derstand anything he said, but I did notice that he addressed me with the familiar tum rather than the respectful aap, from which I deduced that my response had not pleased him.)

By the end of my sophomore year I had pretty well concluded that fluency in Hindi was not like-ly to play a role in my future, but the NDEA folks still had their hopes, so I received a second fel-lowship. This time the program was in Berkeley, so I took the train – actually, a series of them: the Twentieth Century Limited, the City of Denver, and the California Zephyr – to Pleasanton, Cali-fornia. There I was met by my friend Ed Meskys, who then lived and worked in nearby Livermore. He drove me to Cloyne Court in Berkeley, where after becoming a member-for-life of the Universi-ty Students Cooperative Association and deposit-ing my luggage in my room we went to Orinda. At a party at Poul and Karen Anderson’s house I was

good, but he can also be pretty bad. I certainly didn't care for To Die in Italbar, for example, but I sure loved This Immortal, Isle of the Dead and Lord of Light. But I think maybe he was at his best in short fiction. Brett Cox, by the way, has written a book on Zelazny. It is supposed to come out next year, and I am looking forward to it. [I’ll go you one further, Tom, and say that Zelazny was only at his best in the novella and novelette length. Brett, when your book on Zelazny is pub-lished please let us know!]

I could not help feeling nostalgic for my old APA-50 days when I saw the names in your zine -- not just you, but Cheryl Cline, Alva Svoboda, Ken Gammage, Jim Bodie, even Steven Black and Jim Khennedy in the WAHF! Loved Cheryl's sly com-ment about having a 20-volume collected works of Frank Stockton around the house, "as one does." I'll bet it would be fun to see what else she has around the house. I really like the elaborate Steve Stiles drawing on page 36; is there a story behind it?

[From Steve Stiles’ email, accompanying the art-work: “I’m sending a piece of artwork for your consideration; the attached is an unpublished page, undiscovered in decades, that I did in the early 1970s for TANGRAM, a fanzine which was group edited by Eli Cohen, David Emerson, and the late Asenath Hammond: it never got off the ground. This was page two of a three page comic strip (other two pages remain lost); it’s not about an acid trip, but a reaction of receptive people to the new music of that era: John Fugazzi’s article on the Beatles reminded me that I had it & that you might want it. Kevin Kallenger (KAL), terrific editorial cartoonist for The Economist and The Baltimore Sun, liked it a lot (“Dammed good!”).”] FRED LERNER fred@fredlerner.org White River Junction, Vermont My reaction to reading Portable Storage #2 was that you certainly knew a remarkable variety of fascinating people. Portable Storage #3 made it clear that your supply of fascinating friends and acquaintances is inexhaustible. Like Armistead Maupin you have brought them together in one city.

I’ve been to San Francisco only three or four times, the most recent of them in 1995. (I’ve been to San Jose twice since then. I’d best get my pri-orities straight.) My first encounter with The City

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introduced to Fandom as it is practiced on the West Coast – which I found much more interest-ing than Hindi.

Bay Area Fandom in those days seemed to have little to do with San Francisco. My weekends were spent mostly in the East Bay, with a couple of forays to Los Angeles. But I did spend some time in the City. I saw my first opera, a perfor-mance of “Manon”, at Stern Grove. (It wasn’t un-til seven years later that I saw another one: two thirds of Beethoven’s “Fidelio” at Covent Garden. (A pillar cut off the view from the cheap seats. But I did hear the whole thing.) One day in Chi-natown I wandered into a restaurant with no oth-er Caucasian patrons, and no English-language menu, so I chose my lunch by pointing to what another customer had on his plate. At the Cow Palace I picketed the Republican nominating convention on behalf of Barry Goldwater; I found a more sympathetic audience there than I ever did on the Berkeley campus. And I rode the trol-ley cars and cable cars, two forms of transport alien to New York City. I’m sure I saw and did a lot more in San Francisco, but that’s what I can remember fifty-six years later.

One thing about San Francisco that I do remem-ber was that it seemed a very formal city. It felt appropriate to wear a jacket and tie when cross-ing the Bay, and there was nothing about San Francisco that discouraged this. I gather from some of the accounts in Portable Storage #3 that had I been there a year later I would have felt out of place dressed so formally; but I was there dur-ing the Summer Before the Summer of Love.

By my last visit I had read Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City and watched the television mini-series on PBS. Naturally Sheryl and I made a point of visiting Macondray Lane in Russian Hill, the inspiration for Anna Madrigal’s Barbary Lane; and we stopped at Grace Cathedral and as many other places as we could find that played a part in the Tales.

My thanks for the splendid anthology of writing about San Francisco that you put together in Portable Storage Three – and for the reminder that I’m overdue for another visit.

MICHAEL GORRA mgorra@smith.edu North Hampton, MA In the pandemic I seem to be reading more fic-tion than I usually do--I mean, I read a lot of fic-tion anyway, but I don’t have big writing projects this summer, so more stuff that I'm not directly

responsible for--and fewer magazines. So it was last night before I sat down with Portable Stor-age Three, which I found entirely captivat-ing. San Francisco, mostly in the ’70s.....I was there for the first time in ’75, which must be that visit I wrote about in “Wolverine” [in Starfire 6], and then down in Palo Alto from ’79 to ’83. I re-member envying those in my grad school cohort who lived in the city itself, which I didn't have the confidence for—I didn't make friends easily then, without the structure of work or school, and so was afraid of being lonely without someplace to go each day (MUCH better at it now) and the ad-mittedly tiny network that my dept's lounge pro-vided. So my San Francisco was a matter of day trips, a lot of them built around food and/or art. Lots of visits to the Asian Art museum--the de Young itself wasn't so attractive to me, but the jades and ivories and painted screens were a rev-elation--and then the Palace of the Legion of Honor. North Beach and Chinatown, Clement St. too. 8 Treasure Crispy Fried Noodles, one of the treasures being chicken gizzards. Often a visit to that fort under the Golden Gate Bridge, esp. when I had visitors from back east. The San Francisco bookstores were never a great lure, though, not compared to Kepler's and others down on the Pen-insula, and later I had some friends at Berkeley and got to know Cody's and Moe's. One of the essays spoke too of La Honda and Wood-side--I re-member those crowds of friendly motorcyclists, and the sheer beauty of driving through those hills and out to the coast.

So lots of nostalgia in play as I read. I have been back to the Bay Area just three times since I left. Once in ’88 when my then-wife had a con-ference; once in ’90 when I used a conference of

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my own (the Dickens Project, in Santa Cruz) to take a break from a marriage that by then was failing; and then again in the early 2000s when Smith sent me out to talk to an alumnae group and I spent a few days in San Francisco and Berkeley each. I swore then that I would go back sooner rather than later, but my wife's scholarly work (she's a medievalist) and family are in Eu-rope so we fly east instead from Massachusetts, and then my own solo travels began to look to-ward Mississippi and other points south. Faulkner country, and Civil War battle-fields. One of these years....

Another thing I do remember, and that this issue brought back—on that first visit in 1975, walking out west from Union Sq, where we'd been staying (I was with my grandparents) and all the way to Grant Canfield's apartment, where I got a warm welcome. So it was a pleasure to read his account of those years, and then to see so many other names I remembered either at the heads of es-says or in the LOC section.

Your Arizona has now become ground zero in the resurgence. Hoping you're well.

L. JIM KHENNEDY jkhennedy@gmail.com Mesa, AZ First, it’s a lovely piece of work and I’m suitably impressed. The writing, of course, is highly vari-able in quality. I’ve enjoyed pretty much all I’ve read so far, although it’s hard to say how much is because of the content’s innate quality and how much of my pleasure is due to my affection for a large percentage of the people, places, and events involved.

One thing that made my reading experience particularly enjoyable has been noting the way certain things (again, people, places, and events) pop up repeatedly in different arti-cles. It’s hardly surprising, given that we were all writing about the same town – small in size if not stature – and were part of, or related to, the same tiny subculture, but it gave the whole immense undertaking a kind of cohesion and the same kind of frisson one sometimes gets running into a captivating detail (p,p & e.) in large, complex novels, “shared world” antholo-gies or broader canvases like the Cthulhu My-thos.

I found it a bit curious that there was far more writing about the hippie than the punk scene, given how involved you and our contemporaries were in the latter. You know all about my per-

sonal fixation on the ’60s counterculture party (that ended before I was old enough to attend) and probably guessed I’d be fine with that im-balance. I remain frustrated, however, by the failure of writers generally to produce memoirs or fictions that really give the sense of what it was like to be there. There are but a few books that linger in my mind for doing that (M.W. Jacobs’ San Fran '60s: Stories of the Hippies, the Summer of Love, and San Francisco in the '60s and Marco Vassi’s The Stoned Apoca-lypse at the top of a very short list). Your brother Michael’s “Adventures of a Hillbilly Hippie” is a good addition to that canon and one of my favorites pieces in the issue.

One thing I’ll be curious to see if any of your LoC-writers pick up on is what strikes me as a subtle supporting theme about memory run-ning through the issue. Memory is probably an unavoidable element of collection of personal anecdotes, as the issue proved mainly to be, of course. It’s only implicit in some pieces, while a few writers – notably Kim Kerbis – commented on it more specifically, mainly about its fallible nature. Did you notice how almost every writer mentioned lost or uncertain memories of their various stories?

That said, the fact that people forget things isn’t nearly so interesting, to me, as memory’s place alongside perception, dream & imagination and the way it can veer wildly from “objective reali-ty” and distort and mutate with time. (I heard, not terribly long ago, of studies counter-intuitively concluding that the more one men-tally revisits a memory, the more it becomes deformed.) No one wrote very explicitly about this quality of memory in PS3, but there was some good evidence of it. Note, for instance, you and your brother Michael’s differing recol-lections of where your bed came from, in the family “back to the land” experience (or, outside of the zine, your shock over your certainty over when your formal education ended vs your fam-ily’s).

[I think the theory behind the distortion of memory when it is often revisited is because humans are story tellers and have a tendency to want to refine and maybe embellish. My fas-cination with memory is that our lives are com-prised of nothing but memory. Take away our memory and what are we, even if it proves in-accurate against reality, as in Kim Kerbis’ piece, and as you say, possibly my memory flunking 5

th grade, and no one in my family re-

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membering it that way—it still informs who we are—in a big way.] I appreciated Terry Floyd’s comment that his memories of the epic, acid-fueled “Messiah Bunch” adventure “probably differ significantly from those of my brothers.” Just one excellent example of how right he is: At a key point early in the trip, he describes our friend Dan plead-ing, “Let’s go to the beach,” while Terry serenely replied, “This is the beach.” (We were, in fact, at the side of a little pond or grassy area, just yards from one of the busy streets bordering Golden Gate Park.) [So, that was either Speckles Lake, or the lake at the Golf Course, both which are near Fulton Ave.—and both pretty far out in the Numbered Avenues]

In my memory, which seems unusually clear given the circumstances, *I* was the sole Messiah who felt obsessively compelled to march to the Bay. [Ha! Surely, you mean Ocean Beach!] It was Dan who became the blissed out LSD philosopher who said – and profoundly believed that “This” was the beach, just as acid-heads past have intoned revelations like, “Wherever you are, there you are, man,” or “Hallucinations are just realities we don’t want to admit.” In that par-ticular mo-ment, Terry was almost entirely non-verbal, for a long while unable to say anything except “I took – a – psy–che-del–ic drug” over and over and over. (Much to Dan and my chagrin, we being aware that he was carrying a substantial stash and listing into par-anoia.)

Terry was entirely passive. Dan was in touch with his mellow Buddha nature while I had be-come one with my inner Captain Ahab, so my will prevailed.

As we walked and Terry regained his power of

speech, we got to joking about the controversial episodes of Gilligan’s Island Sam Peckinpah had directed before striking gold with The Wild Bunch. (Pure silliness - Peckinpah did, in fact, do a lot of TV work early on – but almost all in Westerns; no high-concept sitcoms.) Much lat-er, Dan explained that he believed Terry and I had actually crewed on those Gilligan episodes, during which something profoundly terrible had happened. He was certain that I was vil-lainously using the memory of that (…tragedy? …crime?) to blackmail Terry into making the

long death-march to The Beach.

I believe that my ver-sion is the more histor-ically accurate: Terry had taken twice the dose as Dan and I and uncontrovertibly had the most impaired mental function throughout. I’ve dis-cussed the whole ad-venture with both Mes-siah Brothers in the years since without serious contradic-tion. He may no long-er recollect, but, at one point, Terry explained that, in those minutes before we set out on the death march, he was experiencing the world as inside out. Rather than being on the surface of the Earth’s enormous sphere, he was walking in place on its inner skin, the whole planet revolving around him

like a vast hamster wheel to create an illusion of progress. His droning chant of “I took – a – psy – chedel –ic drug,” which he didn’t realize he was intoning aloud, was his attempt to reassure himself that the world had not been inverted and that he was simply taking a heavy trip. Man. (And, no, neither of is old enough – nor was successful enough in our media ambi-tions – to have worked on Gilligan’s Island.)

[I never understood why people put themselves through these experiences on LSD. I started far too early—at 13—had very spotty trips, and

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never any that I would really call “good”. I stopped all drugs entirely by the time I was 15, with the exception of when I was 18, and I took acid with Gene Young. That last time was so intense Gene had to talk me down, as Terry was trying to do to himself that night. After that I gave it up forever. My grip on reality is already too infirm for all that.] But which of us remembers those events most “accurately” from an objective perspective isn’t the point. (I freely admit the possibility that my memory is the warped one). What intrigues me is how different memories can be from the “reality” they reflect. (Another example, from my own PS article: I fear I made the tiki pillar outside Tiki Bob’s restaurant sound like a grand monument to Exotica, which is the picture I carry of it my head. The photo you dug up as an illustration, however, proves it was actually as simple, cheesy and unimpressive as could be.

Our experience of the universe is far more memory than immediate experience. The hu-man “present,” the smallest increment of time we can perceive, is something like 5-20 micro-seconds. Reality isn’t made of movie-type frames of that duration and our ability to recog-nize or comprehend anything more complex than a flash of light in any useful way probably requires a bit more than the 24th of a second that a movie frame lingers on-screen. The pre-sent, a perceptible moment, is an incredibly brief and fleeting thing. Different people at dif-ferent times might mean the current day, week, year, etc. when they refer to the present, but however short an increment they’re thinking of, almost all of it has already happened.

So, given all that, what we experience as “reality” is actually, for all intents and purposes, memory. Which means, in a way, when two or more of us remember the same thing differently from each other, we’re actually experiencing different realities. What intrigues me even more is that, though a healthy mind keeps them properly labeled, memories of “real” events are probably stored in pretty much the way and place as those of dreams and things we’ve read, seen or heard be they fiction, lies or facts. So, on a basic level, are scenes we remember from Star Wars and treasured moments from our own pasts almost exactly the same thing? I liked your sister Joan’s line, “Memories are all that is left of the city of dreams.” There are plenty of physical “relics” (buildings and roads; the shard of the Palace of Fine Arts in our back-

yard) of any town, but the San Franciscos of Portable Storage really does only exist in the world of our memories.

It’s a question that I don’t think I’m articulating well, and one that I haven’t been able to go any-where with. I was crudely groping toward some kind of intelligent thought about the conun-drum in the last bit of my article. Alva Svoboda might have been thinking in the same direction when he wrote, in his own piece, “There’s some-thing to be said for not having a… map at hand, to preserve a city like San Francisco in the mind and memory as a place of limitless potential.”

OK, that bit of awkward philosophizing is prob-ably as close as I’m going to get to a LOC. Strictly between you and me, Terry Floyd, Grant Canfield and brother Michael’s were my favorite histories, Stacy and Joan (didn’t she go by “Joanie?”)’s my favorites as writing. (The first three for content + style, the other two mainly for style.) Speaking of memory: I say that based on what stands out in my memory, which is how I usually determine “faves.” Other contributions probably struck me as strongly but somehow haven’t lin-gered. That’s especially true of “Pre-Built Ru-ins,” which was the first I read, so long ago now that all I remember of it is agreeing that you were right-on in pairing it with my modest ram-bling.

STEVE JEFFREY srjeffery@aol.com Kidlington, Oxon Your fanzines get even more impressive and am-bitious with each issue. I'm half expect-ing Portable Storage Four to arrive in a slipcase with a tipped in signature sheet. It's a far cry from when I first encountered fanzines at Mexi-con III as typically a dozen or so pages of mimeo or photocopied sheet stapled down one edge (there were even, I learned, disputes over wheth-er you should use two or three staples). This was pretty much the accepted definition of what a sf fanzine was, despite a handful of legendary ex-ceptions like the 100+ page Les Spinge 14, as-sembled with a power drill and metal straps, and the 680-page hardcover anthology issue of Warhoon 28. I have a copy of the latter. I have never even seen a copy of Les Spinge. (I wonder if Les Spinge was pronounced in the same way as the name of the London folk club Les Cousins, as if it was the same of some bloke called Les, rather than with a French (or quasi-French) pronuncia-

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to go hunting in the library and dig out my own copy of Carr's Fandom Harvest (the same 1986 Laissez Faire Productions issue that Grant men-tions) which I must have picked up at a fan auc-tion. My copy has a price of £8 penciled inside the front cover, so I must have wanted it quite a lot to bid that much in those days, although now, of course, you'd pay twice that much just for a t-shirt.

Curiously also inside the front cover is a post-it note, long forgotten, on which I have scribbled a note "see Carr, FH, p179-81" and which on fur-ther examination turns out to be a reference to Carr's closing article, taken from a speech titled “You've Come a Long Way, Baby”, later a guest editorial for the Nov 1975 issue of Amazing. There a further note above this that references ‘Gomoll - After The Symposium’, which I take to

be a reference to Jeff Smith's Khatru 3/4, “Symposium on Women in Sci-ence Fiction”. I've no idea why I left this note inside the cover, apart from a cryptic 'Acne' at the top, which suggests this was for a dis-cussion thread in the Acnestis apa.

We digress (I di-gress, anyway. Again. I'm afraid this isn't going to

be the most impeccably thought-out and con-structed letter of comment in fandom. Or even of 14th June 2020.) I met Grant at Corflu 36 (Corflu Fiawol). I was being dragged back, somewhat nervously, into fandom after several years of in-creasing gafiation, while Grant, to several peo-ple's surprise and evident delight, was making his own return after a period away. Maybe for that reason, Grant and I fell in together during that weekend, taking in various side trips and excur-sions to museums, tourist spots and bookstores.

It was also the first time (I think) that I met Steve Stile (sadly no longer with us) and Dan Steffan, two fan artist who obviously admired Grant's work as much as I did theirs. Indeed, one of the highlights for me of Corflu 36 was a slide show

tion. Fancyclopedia3 doesn't mention.)

Although technically, Mexicon III was my sec-ond, or maybe even third, encounter with fan-zines, although my first with sf fanzines. About a decade before, in the summer of 1977, I picked up a copy of a handwritten purple and red ink mimeoed fanzine titled Psychedelia in the UK (an obvious nod the the Sex Pistols' Anarchy in the UK) distributed at a gig by the alt-hippie band Here and Now and Mark Perry's Alternative TV. Then there was Mark's own punk fanzine Sniffin' Glue and more local fanzines in the local Beggars' Banquet record shop, which inspired a friend and I to create and exchange our own punk fanzines, a combination of literal cut and paste and hand written or badly typed record and gig reviews.

But back to Portable Storage Three.

It's an interest-ing idea to do a themed issue on a particular place, although a lot depends on whether you have lived there, or even visited. Since I've done neither, it largely confirms a sense of San Francisco as a mythical place, a heady mixture of pop culture, adven-ture and some-times run-down (even squalid) cheap living conditions - an impression I also get , albeit on the opposite coastline from reading Patti Smith's Just Kids. The other overwhelming impression I get reading though these pieces is just how many references there are to drugs, par-ticularly LSD, which make you wonder if every-one in SF wandered about permanently stoned. It's a bit like listening to an early Steely Dan lp.

It wasn't until about halfway through Grant Can-field's long memoir, “My San Francisco Century,” when he mentioned his involvement with Terry Carr's Fandom Harvest that I made the connec-tion. I'd seen some of Grant's work in early fan-zines back in the '80s when I remember being impressed by, and trying (and failing) to emulate his enviable facility with line style in his cartoons and drawings. Seeing that mention prompted me

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I resided in the City during the so-called Hippie Period, c. 1965-1975. In earlier less crowed and hectic times, San Francisco had already become “The Cool Grey City of Love,” as aptly termed by George Sterling her own poet lau-reate. But also, from the time of the Gold Rush, it had been the Cool Grey City of Sex, of street-walkers, bordellos, and escort services, as it remains to this day. I first encountered San Francisco

as the Cool Grey City of Sex, apart from my earliest contacts as a tourist.

I was born and raised in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Like San Francisco, New Bedford had once functioned as a mari-time city, as the greatest whaling port of the 1800’s, but since the near destruction of the whales worldwide, it has now be-come the greatest fishing port on the East Coast. At 18 I joined the Marine Corps, and accomplished my military service, which gave me the G.I. Bill for college. After my three years of military service, I found myself in Southern California, and with that G.I. Bill I attended U.C.L.A. for four years.

While in the service I discovered a won-derful, unique group of older California writers and poets via the fiction and poet-ry of Ambrose Bierce and Clark Ashton Smith, and through those two, George

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presentation by Grant, Steve Stiles and Dan Steffan on the work their own favourite fan artists. One thing Grant and I evidently do not share though is my nerv-ousness with heights. as shown by that photograph of Grant’s brother Curt perched high atop the Golden Gate Bridge. No way you would get me up there. (Or possibly even back down, without prying my fingers from a vice like grip on whatever I was holding onto.)

I do like Gary Mattingly's opening remark about his memory being like Billy Pilgrim's life, "unstuck in time". Mine often feels like that, full of unanchored and detached flotsam drifting by. Remind me though not to go to a gig with Gary, or accept a lift home from him afterwards. It all sounds far too exciting and dan-gerous. (Despite being to a number of punk gigs in the late 70s, I only really felt threatened by imminent vio-lence once, at a Siouxsie and the Banshees gig when the singer of the support band launched himself off stage into the crowd after someone gobbed on him.)

I've never met Ray Nelson but it seems we have some-thing else in common apart from the need for optical assistance to read anything smaller than 12 point type, in both having a feminine alter ego. Susie, as a distinct personality, arrived somewhat late in my case, about six years ago (although the seeds had been there far, far earlier, almost as long as I can remember), initially as an online persona, and then, only in the last few years, as someone out the world, albeit known to only a handful of people (still not, up to this time, to my family, friends or even fandom.) And while slim, at 6 ft plus I was never going to be Audrey Hepburn, alt-hough I have discovered the truism that older plainer women are (perhaps thankfully) largely socially invisi-ble when out and about, except perhaps to other older women.

RICHARD DENGROVE richd22426@aol.com Alexandria, Virginia I remember entertainment like that, magazines like that, living like that, and nights like that. Only as a borderline hippie, and later a borderline SF fan. My experiences weren’t quite as crazy. Still, I was drown-ing in all that the issue spawned. There was a lot on Steve Stile’s death at the beginning of Portable Storage. I saw him last on May 5, 2019 at the Rock-ville, MD, Corflu, about seven months before he died. At one point, we didn’t get along. That changed at the 2018 CapClave: he had heard I was a good fan and he wanted to be friends. After that, he was. At the 2019 Corflu, he told me two anecdotes. The first concerned his comic book tale where he combined the styles of John Norman and R. Crumb. A wild and woolly mix-ture.–literally. Hairy barbarians were putting women into luggage. Then the unthinkable happened: one

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Sterling and Nora May French. In my ignorance I considered them, and called them the California Late Romantics. Lat-er I modified the term to the California Modern Romantics. (If A. E. Houseman is a modern poet, then the four enumer-ated above would rate as modern.) Since that first encounter these authors have become far better known as a group, much admired and appreciated. I am happy and proud that initially I played a

major role in gaining that greater recog-nition for them.

Before first visiting San Francisco, no less moving there, I was already doing re-search in Northern California on Ashton Smith and these other figures, sojourning as needed in Sacramento and nearby Au-burn. I first experienced San Francisco and the Carmel-Monterey region under the olden glamour of these elder scrive-ners. Just as when I first went to Britain and experienced the southwestern part of the island (thanks to great friend Jack Hesketh) under the olden glamour of Ar-thur Machen.

How does one describe San Francisco of the Hippie Period, 1965-1975? Half the time I worked as a claims examiner for the State of California, the other half I set up and ran a business as a house-cleaner for close friends and others in the City. Mixed in with all this, I also pursued my new career as a poet-performer, reciting my entire repertoire from memory (as I still mostly do), sometimes in the U.S. and sometimes abroad. But ever I came back to the dear old City.

As others have expressed it, entering or re-entering the City, the individual does indeed feel as if escaping into a special country set apart from the continental U.S. For me, as a gay or bisexual man, it was a candy shop of endless erotic en-counters. I had previously discovered this basic fact from the gay baths dispersed throughout the town. But residing and working in various neighborhoods, I soon began experiencing a variety of other partners, some briefly, but others devel-oping into genuine amours or lasting

woman (a wild feminist?) told them that she didn’t want to be put in luggage. So they let her go. In John Norman, women weren’t beaten unless they wanted it. There was some fallout from this. Steve sent the tale to R. Crumb. Crumb replied in a letter, which he signed, that he didn’t do action/ adventure. Steve said he got $500 for Crumb’s autograph. I guess Crumb’s comment on his style made all the difference in the world. Steve also told another anecdote as well about how he became Jewish. He was in grade school. Some-how the subject of Noah came up, and he argued with other school kids about it. After that, he said he be-came Jewish. I wish I knew why and how. Maybe I should have been doing more listening. Finally, I have a third anecdote. This one is my own. For some rea-son, I remembered an R. Crumb comic almost 50 years before. Usually, I can’t remember yesterday. Ste-ve was trying to remember the story where the ‘God of a lot of people’ has Mr. Natural taken to Heaven. There, he is proud to display all the angels singing. Mr. Natural laughs that it’s corny. That God is not go-ing to stand for that comment. He tosses Mr. Natural out of heaven; and sends for a lawyer, Cheesis K. Reist. Mr. Natural wants to forget the whole thing; but Reist replies with the much heard ‘60s cliché: ‘You know and I know that that is not possible.’ Steve thanked me for remembering, and laughed that that God is a real reactionary. Those are my last memories of Steve.

GRANT CANFIELD rgc45@comcast.net Novato, CA Thanks again for the excellent job you did with my memoir -- and everybody else’s pieces -- in Portable Storage Three. As it was my first appearance in any fanzine for several years, I really appreciated the extra effort you obviously devoted to it.

The bylines in PS3 reads almost like a list of my per-sonal friends in the Bay Area. At the last actual social gathering I attended before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, our local Second Sunday get-together back in March, I was pleased to get both Jay Kinney and Rich Coad to sign their pieces in my copy, which I plan to keep in my car, hoping that someday I’ll once again get to see Jeanne Bowman, Stacy Scott, Ray Nelson, Don Herron, Gary Mattingly and Robert Lichtman, live and in person, so I can get them to sign their piec-es, too. I expect Portable Storage Three to be one of my prized possessions for the rest of my life.

I think PS3 may be the first fanzine I’ve read cover to cover in, like, forever. That’s probably because I know so many of the contributors, but I also read all the oth-er stuff, too. Since you and I never met in person (yet), I was especially interested in your introduction

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friendships.

Besides encountering real fraternal or collective affection and camaraderie for the first time (apart from the Boy Scouts in my early teens), I could slake my often outrageous sexual appetite, and passion for both male and female. It did not hurt that I was a muscular bodybuilder, and for a little guy fairly well endowed, and that most people considered me hand-some and/or cute.

Meanwhile the City had become a Mecca for disenchanted young people drawn by what the media had revealed of this old, but “happening,” ambiance. I had already found myself in place thereat and went along for the ride. Quite the ride, as it resulted! While I was well prepared to understand the disaffection of the young people flocking to “Bagdad by the Bay” (a perceptive phrase courtesy of columnist Herb Caen), I also dealt with my own dis-affection.

I rarely took part in the Hippie demon-strations even if I did get caught up with them on occasion, and with genuine sym-pathy. I also remained amazed and astonished by them. That such protests could have come about by the disaffected youth of the American middle class still strikes me as exceptional and unprece-dented, prompted as this “revolution” was by mere “suburban angst,” though it went much deeper than that.

Eventually I left the City. I had gotten into some bad habits (no, not drugs nor hypodermic needles). The only way to overcome them?—to leave, which I did, heading for “pastures new” in the state capitol, Sacramento.

However, I continued to work and so-journ to the City as need commanded. San Francisco remains for me a great, good, glamourous place as environed by the Bay Area, always a magical ambiance, and environment of enchantment. I have described my 10-year residence in the City at length in my published autobiog-raphy (Hobgoblin Apollo, Hippocampus Press, 2016).

and all the contributions from members of your fami-ly. I think it was way cool that all of the contributors to this issue seemed to have different interesting paths in our treks to and through San Francisco, not to mention different opinions about the City and its influence on our lives. That broad spectrum of per-sonal viewpoints was one of the things that made this issue so special.

Jim Khennedy’s entertaining “Weird Stairways”, fo-cused in part on the Palace of Fine Arts and the Ex-ploratorium, a building with which I had a fairly spe-cial relationship. Well, actually, my ex-wife Catherine did. For several years, she worked as the Executive Assistant to Frank Oppenheimer, the founder and director of the Exploratorium when it was housed at the Palace of Fine Arts. Frank is long gone, and the Exploratorium interactive museum now resides at Pier 15, though it’s temporarily closed for the dura-tion of Mr. Trump’s Plague. Frank, of course, was the brother of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb.” Frank was also a particle physicist who worked with his brother on the Manhattan Pro-ject, with particular responsibility for instrumenta-tion at the Trinity test site, among other duties, so Catherine and I often referred to him as the “uncle of the atomic bomb.”

She and I were invited to dinner at his house in Marin County a couple of times, along with other Explorato-rium senior staff and their partners. I was young, callow, awestruck and shy, so I kept mostly mute, but I remember Frank and his wife Jackie as two of the most interesting, scintillating people I ever met, with many fascinating stories to tell. Their house was full of impressive paintings (including at least one Van Gogh!), objet d’art and other mementos.

They were both atheists, and both had been members of the Communist Party in the late 1930s, which led to his subpoena to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1949. Blacklisted, he was unable for many years to get a passport, let alone a job in his field in the United States, so he and Jackie bought a ranch in Colorado. They were cattle ranchers until the late ‘50s, when he was finally allowed to get back to teaching physics -- high school at first, and later at the University of Col-orado. In 1969, adapting his talent for teaching scien-tific principles to elementary and high school stu-dents by using classic models of physical experiments, he opened the Exploratorium in San Francisco. He said it had taken him about four years to develop it and get it set up. He seemed particularly proud of creating its Artist-in-Residence program. The Explor-atorium evolved into an exciting and fascinating blend of art, science, technology and creative genius.

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As anybody knows who has lived in San Francisco for any real period of time the City holds many treasures and surprises that the resident encounters often by ac-cident without official guidebooks, how-ever useful they are for the serious tour-ist, or pilgrim.

I discovered the following on my own, and not via any San Francisco source. I had been reading a biography of the cele-brated illustrator and painter Gustave Doré (1832-1883). I learned that the Cool Grey (con’t)

painter had experimented with sculpture. Among his most artistically successful pieces was a fairly large one done in met-al, entitled “The Vintage” (“La Vendan-ge”). To my amazement I discovered that this piece existed in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Mirabile dictu!

I set out to find it. It did not take long, standing not far from the de Young muse-um. It is in fact a big sculpture realized in bronze, a little more than twice my height, say, twelve feet or so. A beguiling artifact, a gigantic vase. It would appear that Doré donated this unique sculpture to the City and Golden Gate Park. I urge the interested reader to go discover it! (Incidentally, such a piece is not cheap to make, and must have cost the sculptor much creative effort, not to mention money.) [Doré’s vase stands eleven feet and weighs about three tons. Michael de Young purchased it for ten thousand dol-lars for his museum in 1894, after its exhibition in Chicago and San Francis-co.]

There are reasons it’s one of San Francisco’s best tourist attractions… when it gets to be open, that is.

Jim’s anecdotes about the Tactile Dome at the Ex-ploratorium were very evocative and amusing. I also enjoyed crawling through the Dome, which I got to do several times when Catherine worked there. Here’s a nice little factoid about the Tactile Dome: it was de-signed by August Coppola, father of movie actor Nicholas Cage and brother of movie director Francis Ford Coppola. It’s a great example of art merging with physical science, in an environment much dark-er than a movie theater.

I used to love going to the Exploratorium when Cath-erine worked there. I’d drop her off in the morning before driving downtown for my job, and I’d pick her up at the end of the workday. Naturally, I got to at-tend a lot of Exploratorium public and private events. I played with all the exhibits, sometimes while they were still in development. I watched some early radio-controlled robot fights. I got to play one of the earli-est video games ever invented, a little number called Pong. I was not yet a licensed architect, just a draft-er/designer, but once I helped the museum’s admin staff surreptitiously build a group of temporary offic-es against one wall, using a bunch of prefab partitions somebody had donated, and some other found mate-rials. Uh, by “surreptitiously,” I mean without a Building Permit. [cough] I probably shouldn’t have said that.

It’s a Small World Sidebar: A few years after Cathe-rine left that job, my future friend (this was before I met her) Ellen Klages also worked there. With Pat Murphy and others, Ellen wrote several books for the Exploratorium, my favorite of which is The Brain Explorer: Puzzles, Riddles, Illusions and Other Men-tal Adventures.

The first thing I noted when I read Kim Kerbis’s “San Francisco Soliloquy” is that, like me, she came to San Francisco from an Illinois/Iowa background, albeit a couple of decades later than I did. Then I noted that she came here in the company of architect friends, and rented a San Francisco flat from an architect, so there’s another point of coincidence. Then she got a job at the Academy of Art about the same time that I was taking a night school figure drawing class there. And she loved the City. So although we were nine-teen years out of phase, and had different life paths, we both still managed to fall into some of the same big bubbles on a Venn diagram.

Predictably, Don Herron’s article was esoteric, eclec-tic and entertaining. Since I had never heard of the guy he was writing about, I’ll add educational as well. Don did mention Fritz Leiber a couple of times, so I

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stuck in a comment-hook Post-It to remind me that I occasionally gave Fritz a ride to the East Bay. But I already mentioned that in my PS3 article. [See Sidney-Fryer’s piece here embed-ded, and the Bio Page]

I had a powerful flash of déjà vu reading Jeanne Bowman’s memories of the Cliff House, the cam-era obscura, the seals and sea lions, and the creepy fortune teller at the Musée Mécanique. I was an arcade junkie in my youth, so the Musée was a frequent haunt, so to speak. I wasted many an hour playing Tank Battle there. As for the Cliff House itself, the restaurant on the top floor was the first place I ever ate abalone, which I loved. Even then, abalone was invariably the most expensive item on the menu, about three times the cost of any other entrée. Now, of course, you’ll never even find it on any local menu. The abalone beds down by Pacifica were all fished out years ago, and will probably never come back in my lifetime. At least not soon enough for me to eat some more of that savory, suc-culent shellfish.

In Craig William Lion’s “Core Samples,” I hit two déjà vu points: Fort Point, and the smell of roasting coffee from the Folger’s plant. I don’t drink coffee, but I loved that roasty smell.

That John Benson cartoon you used at the end of Kennedy Gammage’s “Cole Valley” nicely illumi-nated his story about getting together with his future wife for good. Nice touch.

Robert Lichtman’s “Hippies” was a fascinating history lesson about a subculture that had a big influence on my life, once upon a time. I’ve al-ways enjoyed Robert’s stories about his days on The Farm. So I know that when it comes to his-tory of the counter-culture, he speaks with au-thority and authenticity. I was quite amused by that picture of him in the back of the book, with an ultra-full beard and mega-long hair. Ever since I’ve known him, he’s been clean-shaven (except for a moustache) and has regular short-ish hair. To me, he looks more like a retired his-tory teacher than a hippie. As we all know, he’s wicked smart and possesses an almost encyclo-pedic memory about old fanzines and fan histo-

ry. Anyway, I really enjoyed the article.

When your brother Michael’s memoir got to the part about bands and other musicians he enjoyed in concert, I experienced several flashes of hot jealousy: Staples Singers, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Canned Heat, John Mayall, Janis Joplin, Siegel-Schwall Band, Credence Clearwater Revival, and Altamont. Just, wow. On the other hand, I did-n’t feel any jealousy whatsoever when he wrote about almost dying from eating a poisoned plant.

At that Second Sunday in March, as Jay Kinney was signing his “Staying Put” article for me, Dix-ie tickled my ivories, so to speak, by telling me she learned from my memoir that she and I had both moved to San Francisco in the same month: March of 1970. I didn’t actually meet her until a few years later, but as you know from what I wrote, she and Jay are two Bay Area people whose company and friendship I have particular-ly enjoyed and treasured over the last half centu-ry. I’ve known them long enough to remember

their Fell Street apartment, and of course I’ve visited their 16th Street place multiple times. That’s not overly impressive when you remem-ber they’ve lived there for forty years. Frank Lun-ney and Cathe-

rine Jackson (my ex) were also good friends of Jay and Dixie. The last time I ever saw Catherine before her death was in early September, 1993, when she cooked a tofu dinner at Jay and Dixie’s place. At the end of the evening, I waved to her as she and Dixie crossed the street to go to a local bar. Less than four months later, she was dead. But enough of that. At that Second Sunday in March, the gathered group toasted farewell to our friends Steve Stiles and Frank Lunney. As you know, Steve died just before I sent you my memoir, and Frank just after you were already going to print. After a start like that, I didn’t ex-pect 2020 to get any worse, but then Trump said, “Hold my beer.” I’m really looking forward to seeing my local friends again sometime, includ-ing the bottom half of their faces.

As for my own piece, “My San Francisco Centu-ry,” I was amazed to see first-person pronouns could be used so profusely and frequently. I just hope I left some for other folks. Actually, I do

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have a couple of comments regarding my omis-sions. I could probably have gone to 18,000 words, so you’re lucky I let you off with 14,000. For instance, I left out several names that proba-bly should have been included, but then I real-ized I was better off limiting my anecdotes to those about people I actually met in San Francis-co. Most of the people I left out were friends I met in other cities, mostly at conventions, or lady friends about whom I opted for discretion. So there’s that. My friend Patrick Mason, upon reading my memories of our “gentlemen’s games of skill” over the years -- pool, frisbee, dominoes, poker -- asked, “Why didn’t you mention our racquetball?” I had to remind him that that had-n’t gone so well. Even though we used appropri-ate PPE (goggles and gloves) when we played, I still managed to crack him in the skull with my racquet during a poorly coordinated backhand slash. Other than a few skinned knees on the fields of frisbee, that was the only time in all of our competitions that either of us drew actual blood. I think he still has the scar just above his eyebrow. Anyway, racquetball was definitely not my sport.

Once again, and finally: great job! I’ve personal-ly already received a number of appreciative and laudatory comments about PS3, not just about my own article, but about the book itself. As I said, I’ll always treasure my own copy, which I hope you’ll be able to sign for me someday. Thanks again, and keep on keepin’ on.

DAVID SHEA

Ellicott City, Maryland

What struck me most about the San Francisco essays was the intense feeling of the writers. the City seems to have been a critical, even formative place in each life. I don’t know that I have ever felt that strongly about a place, any place. I spec-ulate that San Francisco may be like New York, it selects out for a special personality. I have been there but only as the proverbial visitor. If per-haps I understand the City a little better now, I also grasp I will never understand it.

Alas for the passing of Steve Stiles, one of the greats of fandom—and still, I fear, underappreci-ated.

Gary Casey: Connie Willis has said much the same thing; that she was eager to learn the skills by which writers surprise readers, and rendered herself unable to be surprised. I sublimated by book reviewing, a lower stress exercise. Does anyone remember Chuq von Rospach and his

reviewzine Other Realms? I learned a lot about book reviewing from Chuq.

Gary Hubbard: Nice to see that someone other than myself recalls Dr. Alan E Nourse, a popular midlist writer of the 1950s. I take credit for get-ting Dr. Nourse and his wife invit-ed to Balticon as “special guests” in the 1980s. I had dinner with them. I got a sense he had not been invited to an SF con in many years, and quite enjoyed it. I still have several of his books, long out of print. Raiders from the Reef was always a favorite. [Surprised you did not catch that uncorrected gaff about Nourse! See Jerry’s comment below.]

A few days after the successful NASA/SpaceX manned launch, talk show host Kelly Ripa told what she was whispering to the American astro-nauts as she watched the takeoff: “Wait! Take me with you!”

Get a glass jar. Buy a packet of dry figs. Cut them in half (if very large, in thirds) Place in jar. Add slice of lemon and a half teaspoonof pepper. Fill up with bourbon or brandy (I prefer the brandy). Cloe lid tightly. Place in cupboard at least two weeks. Do not refrigerate. Strain. Drink. You can also eat the figs. . . .

Take care, stay well, we will get through this. In the long run, basketball, fandom, and other use-less things will survive. I enjoy Portable Storage, and not because it’s the only fanzine (if it’s a fan-zine) I receive. And I liked the cover on Three.

JERRY KAUFMAN jakaufman@aol.com Seattle, Washington I'll have to start by praising the Frank Vacanti cover - quite beautiful, and I imagine the face as yours, even if it's not meant to be. I also liked Craig Smith's collages, the great quantity of Grant Canfield's art for his own article, and many of the photos you, Simon Agree, and others took.

The vast number of San Francisco memoirs daunted me at first, but I spread my reading over a week, and found them all interesting, and a few compelling. Maybe Grant's was my favorite be-cause he mentioned so many people I knew and many more I knew of. I liked reading his memo-ries of Jerry Jacks, Marta Randall, Allyn Ca-dogan, and more.

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Your mention of Ted Whipple on page 4 remind-ed me that I haven't heard from Ted since last summer. I know I mentioned to you that Ted was a college friend in Columbus, Ohio, when we were both attending Ohio State University. I did visit him in San Francisco not long after I moved to Seattle in the late 1970s. On that visit, or one soon after, I got to visit Mabuhay Gardens with such folks as Rich Coad, Gary Mattingly, Denise Rehse, and others. Although I went to a World-con in SF, and a couple of Corflus in the Greater Bay Area, most of my memories of the city derive from those earliest trips - taken on the hippie bus service, the Green Tortoise.

I'm looking forward to Mike Dobson's publica-tion of Sandra Bond's first novel. I hope Mike's able to get it into reviewers' hands early enough to get decent publicity.

For someone who doesn't know how to write and doesn't aspire to be a critic, Gary Casey does a fine job in his brief review of the Dr. Doolittle books, one of my childhood favorite series. (I suspect I'll never try rereading them.)

Greg Benford talks about "savages" being people who "pierced their ears..." and so forth, but when he was "growing up," that stuff became "hip and fashionable." It seems to me that, unless my sense of cultural history is way off base, Greg grew up well before piercings, tats, or unique haircuts became trends. I think the adoption of tribal body modification began to catch on in the late 1970s. (Which reminds me that the Museum of Popular Culture has a show about tattooing, which I want to visit as soon as the lockdown ends.)

Someone else may have already pointed this out, but Gary Hubbard misremembers the author of

"To Serve Man." Damon Knight wrote it, not Alan Nourse. A minor criticism: I noticed in the letters and articles that you let stand a number of misspellings of names. I would have cor-rected them (assuming that I actually caught the mis-takes during proofreading). Was this a conscious deci-sion or did the errors slip by

you? Leigh Edmonds may have already told you about misspelling his name and email address. (Not "Edmunds.") [Entirely my fault—yes, I would have corrected them, had I caught them, such as Damon being the author of the highly

famous “To Serve Man”, and any others you may have caught; sometimes they just slip by. I apologized to Leigh profusely after I got your loc, Jerry—that was em-barrassing. There were other glitches throughout Three that I only caught after publication. But as Cordwainer Smith said, “Perfection offends the Gods.” Or at least that’s what I

tell myself!]

I enjoyed the issue and hope many more are in

my future. [Me too!]

KENNEDY GAMMAGE Gammage.kennedy@gmail.com San Diego, California Wm, when I finished Portable Storage Three I had a visceral reaction to it, starting with the wraparound cover by Frank Vacanti. Is that your face as a young boy juxtaposed with the Golden Gate? I just noticed the folded hands at the bot-tom, as if you were hugging the bridge. My feel-ing was, that I had just experienced something meaningful, and I was honored to be part of it. Not just as a minor contributor, but as a partici-pant in that world. I was there then and, thanks to your many talented writers who painted such a vivid panoramic (kaleidoscopic!) portrait of San Francisco, there I was once again. As your sister Susan said, it was “a time almost more than a place.”

[Jerry, Kennedy—not my face the cover, though I do know the artist well enough to know who it is likely based on!]

I know so many of the people who wrote for you, some of them close friends going back decades. Your own introductory comments in” Crow’s Caw” to the themed issue are particularly apt from a sociopolitical perspective: “The City’s pol-itics became oddly conservative while toeing the liberal party line…it is (and always has been) a jangly uptight racist town, one of complete seg-regation and disharmony.” True statements. Yet for all of us who have touched and been touched (or worse) by it, San Francisco is an important

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place. It’s a nucleus we’ve all been revolving around for the past 40 or 50 years. Like Joyce’s Dublin, the San Francisco of your family and friends has once again been memorialized in literary fashion. Is this a fanzine? I think it’s a book! A beautifully designed and printed book I really enjoyed reading - and yes one I plan to re-read soon. You can be proud of what you’ve ac-complished here, and I’m definitely looking for-ward to Portable Storage Four.

LEIGH EDMONDS leighedmonds01@gmail.com Mount Clear, Victoria I hope you won’t be too disappointed if I tell you that Portable Storage Three beat me. It is just too big and impressive for me to take it all in, enjoy it and respond to it all. I can see the at-traction of producing a themed issue, and San Francisco is a better theme than most, but there is just so much of it. Perhaps like the city itself. I only spent a week there in 1974 and liked the place, it seemed very lively and somehow the layout, geography and architecture seemed more appealing than Los Angeles. On the other hand, it seemed to me to be like Seattle but on a much larger scale so I liked Seattle even better. Per-haps I would like Portland on the west coast even better since a more human scale seems to be the go for me. The best way I can describe my feeling about this issue was that it was like an arcade with lots of potentially interesting shops to fossick around in. Some I did not find so interesting and gave them only a cursory glance, others sucked me in with their style or their story and I stayed for a longer look. Some again seemed to rely on a knowledge of the place to make sense, I can im-agine those who know the city nodding their heads in agreement, but that didn’t work for me. The two I enjoyed the most were Kim Kerbis’ contribution about her move to San Francisco and musings on her memories of getting and living there. It reminded me very much of the decision that Valma and I made to move to Perth (Western Australia) after spending a week there for a convention. Like Kim, we drove there and, after a decade there we decided to move back to the eastern states and drove back again. Read-ing Kim’s thoughts made me try to remember what attracted us to Perth apart from the cheap houses and the climate. Perhaps we were just ready for a change, as Kim probably was, and the

attraction of the new and novel was part of it. Also, perhaps, the need for an adventure which moving such a long distance and settling into a new environment is. The other item I really liked was James Ru’s ‘The City’. Being boringly heterosexual (I loved his comment on that matter ‘'I mean, ew, who would want to be that?’) the world that he describes is largely alien to me though gay friends have ac-quainted me with some of their stories. I get the impression that at some stage Sydney became a magnet for the gay and lesbian community in Australia in the same way that San Francisco was in the US and that the lifestyle there, and the police brutality, was similar too. I have a gay friend in Melbourne who still hates and fears the police in a way that I almost cannot under-stand. The way James finishes his piece, going back to the lobby of the Pine Street Hotel drink-ing gin with retired musicians makes me wish that I'd been there, and I can feel his longing for a past paradise, and I wouldn’t mind it too. I loved Grant Canfield’s piece, almost nostalgia for a past I never had. And those characters, most of them didn’t even need captions for me to recognize them, but I’d never seen photos of Blish, Frank Belknap Long or Andre Norton so I have an excuse there. Robert Lichtman’s expla-nation of the emergence of the hippie phenome-non was very interesting and enlighten-ing. There’s more, much more. Can I be blunt? This is just too much for one issue, it’s overwhelming. I wish you’d broken it into four or five chunks and published them over a num-ber of issues. Then I would have been hanging out in eager anticipation for the coming issue, rather than feeling frustrated and almost angry at the richness that you are offering here. Of course, it’s your fanzine and you can do what you like with it, even if I’m not happy. You might say that I should treat this issue as an anthology I can dip into from time to time, which would be fine if I didn’t already have a house full of books that I can dip into whenever I have a spare hour. Unfortunately, if I were to do that Portable Storage would just disappear into the shelves of books, never to be seen again I suspect, and where am I going to find a spare hour anyhow. Your letter column was a little ripper too, with lots of comment hooks and interesting com-ments from a very wide range of people, some of

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them new to me, and happily so. I can understand Alan White’s feeling that Skyliner has run its course and he wants to move on to more rewarding ventures. That’s what happened to me the previous time I was involved in fandom. Sometime towards the end of the 1970s, I think, I was beginning to feel that I had done as much as I was able and that the options open to me were to become a filthy pro - which I never felt a strong urge to do - or find something else to do. As it turned out, going to university as a part time mature age student be-came a possibility and so that’s the direction I took. These days I’m back indulging in a bit of fanac as a fun hobby which also helps to inform my thinking for this history of Australian fandom that I’m going to write. I’m not likely to ever publish a genzine again, but writing letters of comment is a not terribly difficult thing to do, keeps me in the loop and, I hope, is some kind of payment for those fans who still do want to pub-lish genzines. Maybe Alan will find himself on the same path and will return to the fold one day. Talking of apas, I was an apahack at one stage and counted myself in eight or nine apas. No more. Even the small SAPS mailings these days are as much as I can handle and I turn my face away from various suggestions that I should re-join ANZAPA because there would be not enough hours in the day to cope with such a lively apa, especially since it is bi-monthly. I see mentions of APA-50 which is, I imagine, a younger version of APA-45 which was my introduction to interna-tional fandom. I loved it and would still count many of its members then as my friends, though many of them are, I suppose, now no longer with us. I still occasionally see various ex-members on Facebook and they remind me of the great delight and education that apa was for me. When we went to the US in 1974 many of the places we went to were where I knew fans though APA-45 (a fabulous week in Minneapolis) though there were diversions such as a visit to Seattle where we stayed with Elinore and FM Busby, which might be where I got roped into SAPS, or I might have been a member by then already. My memory is as good as Kim’s with things like that. Gary Casey seems to miss the point and I have to tell him that learning the tricks of the trade makes the trade even more interesting to observe or take part in. Once upon a time I just read his-tory because I liked it, I still do that but these

days I also draw from my reading the pleasure of seeing how a historian assembles and expresses the story they want to tell. (Or get annoyed when they are not very good at it.) There are moments when I almost want to clap with joy when I see how somebody has put two ideas together to con-struct an argument, which is even better than the argument itself. I also spent a few years learning music composition in my youth and I find that it adds another dimension to my enjoyment of mu-sic. (For example, at the moment the radio is playing me Samuel Barber’s famous adagio which is a pleasure in the sonority of the piece and also in the way its counterpoint has been structured to give those sonorities.) I enjoy reading music scores (poorly) along with pieces as they are played to make even clearer the struc-tural arrangement of the piece. Greg Benford’s comments about the tech/science background of a lot of stf, particularly the older stuff, suggested to me that that might be why I like the genre so much. I, unfortunately, do not have a mathematical bone in my body and while the logic of math evades my thinking I can un-derstand that it is a form of symbolic logic and I really like logical arrangements of ideas. Unlike the collaborative nature of much engineering and scientific work, history remains a fairly solitary exercise though there are attempts to form col-laborations, and I’ve done a few now that I think about it. I imagine that conferences, seminars and the like are as lively for history and science with the opportunities to push ideas on to great-er understandings through discussion. Greg lists a couple of collaborations in writing stf but I wonder how many there are these days when a lot of the genre seems more literary (from what I hear) than it used to be. I liked Ingrid Cardon Downey’s letter a lot. Part-ly that is because she feels the same way about Australia that I do - but apart from New Zealand where else in the world would one want to live? (Not to get into politics, but watching her PM and mine on the tv makes me wish that we had a PM and government like hers.) I share her feelings about leadership. When I was back in the public service, a lifetime ago, I ended up with a staff of three or four and I was not a good lead-er. I’m not very good at telling people what to do and very bad as disciplining them when they don’t do the right thing, or don’t do anything at all. I was glad to be out of it. In volunteer organ-izations I’m better because, I think, people are there because they want to be. I ended up being

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chairman of one group for a year and ran tight meetings in which everyone was consulted and I was amazed that when I told people that it would be good for them to do this or that they agreed. It is, I’ve discovered, fun to have other people do things you want to have done, but I wouldn’t want to do it professionally. (I just came across the part where you spelled my name incorrectly. Don’t worry and join the long queue.) There, that’s it. I’m sorry that this little letter of comment is such small repayment for such a grand and grandiose fanzine.

[Leigh—I tried to edit your letter but found that I couldn’t, so here it all is. Your frustration with the length (or the embarrassment of riches) of Three was palpable, and I get it, completely. I suffered a mild form of Nydahl’s Disease after its publica-tion and was wrecked for a good couple of months. But there it stands in all its glory, and I’m glad that it does so. As always, thanks for your generosity of spirit.] CY CHAUVIN peterpumpkincat@juno.com Detroit Michigan The wraparound cover is simply gorgeous, and of course it fits your San Francisco theme so well. I wondered who the woman might be floating or peering over the Golden Gate Bridge, and sud-denly I was reminded of my favorite prose poem by Clark Ashton Smith, “The Muse of Hyperbo-rea:” Too far away is her wan and mortal face, and too remote the snows of her lethal breast, for mine eyes to behold them ever. But at whiles her whispers come to me, like a chill unearthly wind that is faint from traversing the gulfs be-tween worlds, and has flown over ultimate hori-zons on ice bound deserts. And she speaks to me in a tongue I have never heard but have always known; and she tells me of deathly things beau-tiful beyond the ecstatic desires of love. And it ends: I shall go forth and follow where she calls, to seek the high and beatific doom of her snow pale distances, to perish amid her indescrate horizons…from the collection Hyperborea. Clark Ashton Smith lived in Auburn, near San Francis-co. Obviously, the Muse of Hyperborea was at-tracting all of your writers to San Francisco it-self!

My favorite article was by Terry Floyd. Someone wrote about films that romantic comedies are the most underrated and enjoyable, and his story

about meeting his wife was funny and new to me. The details of the acid trips were new to me as well, since as OG of Apa-50 he always gave such a different impression. His tale also makes you wonder how we all managed to survived our youth, even through such thorny details as late night bus journeys and double shift jobs.

I also enjoyed Grant Canfield’s memoir, especial-ly his caricatures, both fan and pro. It was in-sightful to read his comments that he found it more fun to do his caricatures from real life than from photographs, especially since I’ve seen so much of the latter. A great many authors and even fans we know only from photos. (Neither Arnie Katz nor Frank Lunney match my mental image of them, but that’s one of the fun things about fanzine fandom.)

Your photos and design are quote good (I hate to think of how much work and especially head-aches may have gone into some of it). I especially like the photo of the man snarling on page 148—any story behind that?

[It was taken for a Color Theory class where the color red had to dominate the photograph. The wall and chair are red. While I was composing through the viewfinder The Man walked by and snarled at me. One of my greatest faults as a photographer is that I am not good at what is called “the decisive moment” where you snap at just the right second before it is gone—this is one of those times I caught that moment. If I’d been quick I could have asked him to pose in the chair! My photos are generally still or “composed” with little movement or fluidity. You can view this photo in color at eFanzines.com.] Gary Mattingly and the Id of a Moose. Gary was already talking about synchronicity while he lived in Detroit on his way to San Francisco, and probably demonstrating it often. He would al-ways swerve his car to the sides of railroad track crossings (never slowing down) in some sort of spatial synchronicity demonstration. But now that I know that the End of Times means not just the End of this Universe but literally the End of Time, since it is a construct as much as gravity and space and the speed of light, I don’t lie awake at night in a synchronicity fugue.

Jeanne Bowman is even more a rush than Gary! (But at least she’s not pushing endless tubs of hummus like she did at OperaCon!) Could San Francisco be not only a place or even a “time” as your sister said, but something else? I guess I never felt the siren lure of San Francisco, alt-

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hough I was there two or three times. I remem-ber the odd feeling of seeing the corner of Haight and Ashbury, and the ordinary reality of it butt-ing up to the dream-quality of a famous place.

There are still three (complete) Beatles songs I’ve never heard. [Okay, stop baiting me! What are they?]

Gosh, William, where are you going to go from here? [I hope you like where I went—and the next two issues are already beginning to form.] JIM JONES jimnshay@cruzio.com Santa Cruz, California I read Portable Storage Three from cover to cov-er in about a day. Like other fans in the ’70s and ’80s, I came to San Francisco to find something: people of similar interests, a place to be accept-ed, excitement, novelty, even a job. I loved read-ing other fans’ accounts on the same time and place. And what they found. I didn’t come to the city from very far away: 30 miles, straight down I-80. But I wanted to see if life held more than a civil service job, civil service parties, and week-end movies at the triplex. San Francisco showed me that life did. The City didn’t make me a dif-ferent person — I still had hopes — but it set me on a different course. I met a lot of people and did a lot of things that I never would have done otherwise. I found a new career. San Francisco fandom was a big part of that.

There have been many different San Franciscos over the last 170 years, and this very accessible, very accepting San Francisco only lasted about 30 years before changing into something else. By the late ’80s I already had one foot out the door to a city where it was still 1975 — And I could have my own parking place and not have to move the car every three days for the street sweepers.

Portable Storage Three is a real history book in spirit as well as format; get a copy into an ar-chive somewhere. And thanks for Portable Stor-age Three’s coda, Joan Rector Breiding’s “The House of Fools.” It is a fitting memorial for The Way Things Were from one who hung in there. As for change: I’m writing this in shelter-in-place mode thanks to COVID-19. My entire organization is working at home: Zooming and Hanging Out and Sharing Docs. Will corona-virus show that giant white-collar cities have jumped the shark? What happens then? Stay tuned. Actually, you have no choice. None of us do.

KEVIN COOK vkzecook@aol.com Summerville, South Carolina While I have never lived nor worked in San Francisco, just been a visitor, I still enjoyed reading the contents of Portable Storage Three. I was just unsure a bit about some of the geogra-phy at times, but that was a minor point that did not interfere with the overall theme of the issue. Your sister's line "A time almost more than a place" is so true of the places all of us have lived in our pasts. What we loved is gone because the city/town has moved on and we have not kept pace with it, whether from distaste of the direc-tion or simple inability or refusal to meet the new parameters of existence that each new gen-eration creates. Only our memories remain. I was reminded of this very vividly recently when I met an individual born in the same town I was born in, although we are now both a long dis-tance from there. The problem was he was born 25 years after I was, and our visions of the place were completely different. I did not get the same jarring discord from any of Portable Storage Three, though, because almost all your contribu-tors seem to have lived through the same time periods in the city's history, roughly the last half century. In Fact, Grant Canfield's tour de force memoir "My San Francisco Century" was brilliant in encapsulating what life in the city had been like during that era.

As far as emulating Bill Bowers goes, you have to remember that Bill had a natural genius for se-quence; the rest of us have to work at it, and you did a fine job with Portable Storage Three. Leigh Edmonds touched on another point in the letter-col with the sense of "intellectuality" in Portable Storage, although I might just argue that it is a higher quality of writing than one expects in most fanzines. You can rightly accept credit that the submissions you receive are up to a certain high level; people do not want to contribute sub-standard material to Portable Storage and look bad compared to the other contributors.

I can't get away from the whole rereading topic. As someone semi-retired for the past three years I have done more rereading in that time period than in the 40 years prior. I have done it both ways; binge read novels by authors I wanted to go back to, and then moved from author to au-thor, story to story. I recently went through a period of alternating stories/novelettes from collections written by Richard Cowper, Robert E. Howard and James Crumley. Talk about variety!

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I am often more impressed with works that I may not have fully appreciated the first time. For example, how did Cowper's "The Custodians" not win a Hugo award? 40-odd years later no one cares, of course, but that's not the point; I had read the story once, thought it excellent and then moved on to the next story in the collection; now in a more leisurely, slower reading pace I could fully appreciate how brilliant it was. That's the true joy of rereading for me, rather than go-ing back to a favorite book where you know eve-ry plot element and can recite lines.

[Thanks for the tip on Cowper’s “The Custodi-ans”. I’ll be looking for it. I like your example of why you reread. It makes total sense to me.]

GARY HUBBARD chinpotanuki@gmail.com

Kalamazoo, Michigan It was back in 1997, I believe. Bess and I were on our way to a Corflu (Wave?) in Walnut Creek, but we de-cided to go a couple of days early and see the sights, and Bess had found a cheap hostel for us to stay in. Clean, but run-down and the bathroom was way at the end of the corridor. The room was pretty crappy too. The room was hot, the beds were uncomfortable and the room was illuminated by a single bare lightbulb depending from a cord high overhead that hardly pro-vided enough light to read. I turned on the radio and they were playing Don McLean’s American Pie. “People

still listen to that?” I asked myself. The room had a window that looked out over an ally that was behind a Japanese restaurant and all night long there were people in the ally making noises. Whether they were employees on break or some of the many homeless people we later encoun-tered, I can’t say. (By the way, the restaurant was pretty good. We had dinner there the next even-ing.)

In contrast, Bess liked the hostel just fine and complained when we moved to a much nicer ho-tel in Oakland that there were bed bugs in our room. I didn’t find any bed bugs, and I think the only reason she complained was that she found our new room too decadent for her taste – she’s always been a fan of austerity.

The next day we went down to the Fisherman’s Wharf where we looked at the Bay Bridge and the sea lions. There was also the Ripley’s Muse-

um, which I liked a lot. I got lost in a room full of mirrors, gazed at an illusion of a leprechaun at the bottom of a well and saw the shrunken head and breasts of a woman that, according to the description, once belonged to Ernest Heming-way. Personally, I have to wonder if – as grue-some as it was – it was real at all. I can under-stand how you can shrink a head (because Jane Dolinger explained it in one of her articles), but how do you shrink a whole torso. I posed in front of a submarine that was docked at the wharf and Bess took a picture. Later we went to the Comic Arts Museum and saw an exhibit of the work of Moebius. Then we took a trolly to Chinatown, while the jingle: “Rice a Roni, the San Francisco treat” played in my head.

The next day, we went to the Castro and had brunch at an open air café and visited an antique

shop which had a Dominatrix Barbie doll that I couldn’t afford and a couple of post cards, which I could. They both showed pictures of people of indetermi-

nate sex in leather outfits and gas masks. I’ve never owned a gas mask (outside of the one I was issued in the Army), but I do collect pictures of them. I think what I like about them is how they inhumanize the wearer, kind of shamanistic-like. Then we went to Good Vibrations, where I bought a copy of Michael Manning’s Spider Gar-den. Finally.

Among other places we visited were the renovat-ed public library, the cathedral of St. Mary (Bess likes churches. Me not so much. I fear I’ll get struck by lightning), and the Presidio. After that initial visit, we talked about going back, but nev-er did, and now we’re too old to go anywhere.

GERARD GLEASON papergg@aol.com San Francisco, California I really enjoyed Portable Storage Three, espe-cially your brother Michael’s piece. I recall one day at TMJB, when I first knew you and you were passing yourself off as some guy who just landed from West Virginia. I was saying some-thing about a hippie hangout, The Family Phar-macy, having been in my neighborhood on Cali-fornia Street at 6th Avenue. And you piped up I was wrong, that Family Pharmacy was at Califor-nia and Divisadero. Family Pharmacy had start-

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ed at California and 6th Ave...and sometime later moved to the Divisadero location...and I recall at the time I said I was right ... but then it dawned on me how the fuck would a guy from West Vir-ginia know where Family Pharmacy had been.

And I love that on page 96 there is a photo of Fillmore Street w/ a "voodda voodda" *engine noise* muscle car ... but in the background is the original Sanchez Mexican Food restaurant, be-fore they moved to the Mission. One of my best friends in grade school was George Sanchez, his parents owned the place. Their logo was a kid sitting on an ear of corn that was a rocket ship. We'd call him "Corn Rocket Boy"...and ask him how he got to school. "On your corn rocket?" We were fucked up ... especially to our friends.

And John Fugazzi mentions the 1975 SNACK concert at Kezar Sta-dium...specifically Bob Dylan coming onstage as the surprise closing act...I was there, but had had enough when Joan Baez finished ( I was tired of Virgil Caine & Ol'Dixie, and anyway The Band's version was better)...I walked outside Kezar and THEN heard the roar of the crowd when Baez introduced Dylan...and the fucker gate guys would not let me back in. I heard "Knock Knock Knocking" from outside.

Lots of good memories from the pieces in Porta-ble Storage Three. But still not as good say you singing "Crimson & Clover" while you karate chopped your own neck to cause the reverbera-tion effect. HaHa.

And of course the classic from the 1981 Beach Chalet Party ... the hall rented from the VFW... the jukebox got moved to the other side of the room during set up... I arrived with Art Gilberg, who had ordered 6 kegs of super shitty Hamm's beer, and my friends were pissed off the beer was Hamm's ...and the old VFW guy came in, (we had rented the hall and told him it was a birthday party)... he saw all the beer and yelled "THIS AIN'T A BIRTHDAY PARTY!! -- IT'S A BEER BUST!! AND WHO THE HELL MOVED THE JUKEBOX ??". I sheepishly went over to move the jukebox back to where it had been... but someone had loaded the machine with quarters and picked songs...as I reached to unplug it the VFW guy barked "DON'T UNPLUG THAT -- IT'S PLAYING 'DANNY BOY' !!!"

STEVEN BLACK dsblack@gmail.com Berkeley, California Excuse the purple pen, and the challenged pen-manship to match! My Brother printer is on strike (lacking toner) but this LoC cannot wait! It’s tempting to begin with commenting on the author bios/photos in Portable Storage Three first because those are the parts I looked at last. I spent the last month dipping in at random, reading most of the contents out of order, as I encountered them. There is so much here that resonates, either because the writer is someone with whom I have some acquaintance or famili-arity—or better yet, no direct knowledge of at all. Yet their story-telling draws me in, introducing me to people and worlds entirely unknown to me.

In the case of Grant Canfield, he is someone I feel I should have met and gotten to know early in my fan career. I met more than a few of the other artists he mentions—Derek Carter, Joe Pearson—yet by missing to make his acquaint-ance, I can at least find consolation for the FO-MO (fear of missing out) in the pages of his “My San Francisco Century.”

Besides enjoying the large, extended family sense I get with all of fandom you have drawn together in the these pages, another delight is the literal family—brother sister, mother—reflected and embodied here. So great to read other accounts of legendary characters in your life—Gene Young!—and events (poison hemlock!) that I have heard only tantalizing bits of over the years.

What a pleasure it is to pinball through these pages, and see many of our overlapping worlds—the fannish multiverse—reflected in these wistful memoirs. One picture that stirred me was Allyn Cadogyn. I was privileged to receive issue one of Genre Plat so many years ago. A few months af-ter I moved to SF and met her in a 2nd Avenue fan shack. It worked out that she delivered me by car to my flat on Laussat, near Haight and Fill-more. Curiously she knew this block-long street well, and believed she had many years earlier resided in this very same apartment I then occu-pied with Ann Weiser. She spoke of tear gas and martial law—late ’60s riots.

Memories can be maddening in their fluidity, which makes Portable Storage Three such an admirable anthology of lives lived looking back and looking inward. These days, the view from my east-window on Crap St. serves as my virtual

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background on some of the many zoom sessions I do in the course of my Library business. Sutro Tower never gets old.

News from SF is that the Mission has highest Covid-19 rate in the City. I expect that someday the virus will find me and there will be a reckon-ing.

Looking forward to your next issue. From this mad lead-poisoned attic in Elmwood on College Avenue in the People’s Republik of Berzerkeley I am yr ever humble ob’t, Steven.

MARK PLUMMER mark.fishlifter@googlemail.com Croyden, Surrey Earlier this year we bought a new armchair. We shuffled the dining room table towards the mid-dle of the room to make space for it and now it sits under the window at the back of the house, to serve as a reading spot with both natural light and a view of the garden where foxes, neighbour-hood cats and assorted bird life cavort in if not quite cosmic harmony then something approach-ing mutual tolerance, at least until a cat decides to actualise the metaphor of being among the pigeons. And that's where I was sitting a few of weeks back, reading Portable Storage Three and work-ing through a small stack of CDs gifted to us by a fan friend who decided that he didn't like them quite as much as he'd hoped. It was all very com-fortable, bordering on the luxurious even, an op-portunity to combine a couple of pleasurable ac-tivities and with no sense that I should instead be doing something else, and yet it was also an odd experience. Nothing to do with Portable Storage itself, I should add, or even anything about the not-wanted-on-voyage soundtrack, but rather because it seemed such a normal thing to be do-ing and yet every so often I kept shocking myself back into remembering that right now things are anything but. Or maybe they are and it's just a question of adjusting to a revised version of nor-mality.

I really like what you're doing with Portable Storage and PS itself as an artefact, made all the more pleasurable by the way it just turns up in my mailbox. It's arrival wasn't unexpected. You'd mentioned its imminence in an email a few days earlier and I was impressed by how quickly it made the journey from Arizona given that the same postal delivery brought a postcard from James Bacon that had taken two weeks to travel from High Wycombe, 37 miles north-west of

here. Even without the prefiguring I could proba-bly have guessed what was going to be in the en-velope, given its general size and shape and that it was clearly from you. I thus instinctively knew what it was without even looking at it, but I think I'd picked up PS3 two or three times before I even spotted the understated title lettering on a crossbeam of the Golden Gate Bridge. I rather like this way that it does not advertise itself. From external appearances alone, and without the prefiguring clues, it could be a volume of manga or perhaps one of those pricey high-class journals of architecture or design. I do find that PS reminds me more of a little magazine than a fanzine and that's not just a consequence of the nature of the artefact. I think Leigh Edmonds has it right, as he so often does, when he talks about its sense of 'intellectuality'. It just presents as the kind of thing that smart people read, although that's not to say that I'm positioning myself within that demographic -- smart people rather than PS readers, that is -- or indeed that fanzine readers are not smart. Years ago a colleague saw a copy of Bruce Gillespie's The Metaphysical Review on my desk and I'm sure her opinion of me went up on seeing some-thing of such obvious jiant braned rigour and depth rather than my more usual pulpy science-fictional fare, little knowing that TMR was prob-ably full of Bruce being soppy about his cats. I would try leaving our copy of PS3 on my desk to see what impact that has, were it not for the fact that I've no idea when I'll next get anywhere near my office. There's an eclecticism to your content, even if it all fits within your general theme. I was a huge fan of Science Fiction Eye back in the day, and one of the things about it that appealed to me was the diversity of its coverage. It almost seemed personal, the way that they'd stretch the scope of their content to include anything that I might like. They had a high hit-rate. PS also makes me think of a line from The Haunted Bookshop by Christopher Morley (1919): 'I hope you don't think I'm a mere highbrow,' he said. 'As a customer said to me once, without meaning to be funny, "I like both The Iliad and The Argo-sy."' I'm probably of an age (born 1964) that I first encountered San Francisco in Scott McKenzie's paean to tonsorial horticulture. I was a huge fan of pop music from a young age and the radio was always on during the day in our house so I

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doubtless heard the song when it hit the UK pop charts in the middle of 1967, even if I then had no idea where San Francisco was or precisely why a floral headdress was a prerequisite for any visitor. (I recall, or at least have convinced myself that I recall, loving the single 'Fire Brigade' by The Move which was released in early 1968 and which struck me then as being about a wholly sensible subject for a pop song, fire engines be-ing so much more interesting than girls or love when you're four years old.) I may not have understood Scott McKenzie in 1967, but maybe I absorbed part of his message subliminally. In later years 'San Francisco' came to be a shorthand for certain forms of music, lit-erature and counter-cultural values that ap-pealed to me hugely, even if I still probably had little idea of where this legendary city was be-yond being 'in America somewhere'. (My US ge-ography was embarrassingly sketchy before I was in my thirties. It has now improved substantially, one of many things I owe to fandom.) We first visited the city in 2005 for the Corflu/Potlatch double-header -- I think we did see you at the former, albeit briefly? -- and we've been in the general Bay Area several times since, but as best I recall we've been in San Francisco proper rela-tively infrequently, and I'm still rather surprised with myself that I've never visited City Lights, or Haight-Ashbury, or The Fillmore. I suspect my younger self -- say, aged 18 or so -- would be still more surprised and probably a little disappoint-ed in his successor. For him, these places were as remote and inaccessible as Mars and the idea that they might one day come within reach was utterly unimaginable, and yet miraculously his older manifestation got to visit this fabled-in-song-and-story place and yet chose to spend his time sitting around in hotel lobbies with science fiction fans rather than walking in the footsteps of the Grateful Dead, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and The Diggers.

Lots of good stuff here for sure, from a few peo-ple I know and others who are only vaguely fa-miliar names. A lot of it comes out of a period of American fandom I don't know as well as I would like, and in that respect and more Grant Can-field's half-century is the standout. I met Grant briefly at the Chicago Corflu in 2016, but before that knew him only through his artwork, espe-cially the pieces in Fandom Harvest which is a very well-read book in our house as we have two copies, one of which somebody put down in the bathroom in 2004 and it's been there ever since.

And while I'm singling out Grant I'll specifically mention his description of his 'frank and open' encounter with his co-worker Bonnie, and com-mend his honesty in writing about it.

A friend said recently that letters to fanzines are 'hard work' and I know what she means. I'm far too prone to fiddling with the wording, rewriting to the point where there's a danger that the letter will never attain a finished state and from which the only escape is to accept that it falls several yards short of perfection and just click (Send). It's only later that I find I have been praising a fanzine for resembling something other than a fanzine, and that fanzines by implication lack 'intellectuality', something from which I do not entirely save myself by the appended remark that 'that's not to say that ... that fanzine readers are not smart'. Honestly, I don't know what I was thinking. For all that PS may present like a little magazine, I think it is clearly a fanzine all the same. Para-phrasing something I said about Bruce Gillespie fifteen years ago, and checking back I now see it was something I admitted I'd pinched half-remembered from Ansible, you may wear the outer garments of a respectable literary quarterly but you wear your fannish underpants with pride. 'Earnest' isn't a word I'd use, and I do now wonder about 'intellectuality'. Is 'erudition' per-haps better? Actually, I think that Morley quote rather sums it up, although perhaps 101 years on we need better representatives than The Iliad and The Argosy. Edgar Rice Burroughs and Wil-liam S Burroughs? No, that's pretty dated too. Perhaps Eric Frank Russell and Karen Russell, seeing as the latter's on my mind having recently read Vampires in the Lemon Grove. I particular-ly liked 'Barn at the end of our Term' in which President Rutherford B Hayes discovers he's turned into a horse, living on a farm with 21 oth-er horses, 10 of which are also former US presi-dents while the others are just, you know, horses. Are you familiar with Christopher Morley, by the way? I found The Haunted Bookshop on the Standard Ebooks website, something that feels wrong somehow as it's rather the kind of volume that should be discovered in a bookshop ‘haunted’ by the ghosts of great literature, filed next to an inconstant copy of Thomas Carlyle's Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell.

Portable Storage Three is a fine thing, like its two precursors. To the extent that I can claim to know you, it feels very *you* and that's a good thing to say of any fanzine.

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AUSTIN BRONSON With every passing head-scratching Covid day, Billy Ray and I say, "Gonna write William today". But the days keep going by. Health and spirits are great here, considering. (As long as Amazon doesn't stop delivering Billy books, that is.) Currently I am rearranging Billy's library-bedroom-office for efficiency. Been on our to-do list for the last couple of years. On the North side of E St, my 6yr old daughter attends school online, so no pause in education. We've just gained dad as a full-time learning coach...Lots more reading and drawing, science experiments, hikes in the forest etc. (Have a great picture of Emmy hugging a tree in the Deschutes forest that I've been meaning to send you since Christmas (reminds me of the Rose Motel...Larry? "I’m a tree hugger")...We trust you’re keeping yourself healthy. (Hopefully the Covid virus couldn't survive in the lungs of the Breiding Cowboy). For now Sir, thank you again, so very much for Portable Storage Three! Billy says he will be in contact with you very soon, and I believe him. CRAIG MAINS The first time I hitchhiked to San Francisco I had nowhere to stay and a street person showed me where some people were staying. He referred to it as the Carousel Ballroom but I eventually figured out that it was the Fillmore. It was just a cavernous empty room at that time---I think around 1974 maybe 75. There was still a bunch of psychedelic paintings that had been applied directly to the walls and handbills advertising past concerts scattered on the floor. The stage was still there. I think I stayed there for three or four nights and wandered around the city during the day enjoying the gradual dissipation of the fog. You got into the ballroom by wandering up a couple levels of an adja-cent parking garage and wiggling through a narrow opening. GERARD GLEASON (again) Coffee, beer, meat pies and Dirk Dirksen!

We Also Heard From

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

CRAIG LION

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

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JEANNE BOWMAN And I have been reading my way through Portable Storage, what a gas. Jim Kennedy is a lovely writer. JIM RU Kim Kerbis’ story. That was great. Yeah. That's what we did. Just pack it up and go! And sourdough bread. I remember discovering that for the first time. It was so exotic. It made any meal classy. I just watched tv news from San Francisco. The streets are pretty much empty. A page is turned. MICHAEL BREIDING Quite a diversity of backgrounds, experiences and observations. Herron's axiom: "If you don't know the city, it's neither here nor there, but if you do, confusion" could certainly be said to apply to our entire existence. Grant Canfield? I have run into people like him before. I always walk away feeling inadequate and irrelevant. Some people seem to get it all - for whatever reason. His writing flows like water. I did not know you took so many pictures back then. Some I have seen for decades but with no attribution. I am glad you still have them. I cannot help but wonder if such a compilation as this has been done before for SF or indeed any other city.

VINCENT MCHARDY Thank you so very much for the copy of Portable Storage Three…the front cover is fantastic. Haunt-ing and seductive. A timeless combo for my aging (soon to be falling off) naughty bits. Makes me want to get into Mr. Peabody's Way Back machine and take off to the land of Portable Storage and get lost. You are saving a history. // Have you been watching some viral movies? Andromeda Strain and Contagion? Planet of the Apes covers the new danger of quickness of dispersal. We are now in a highly restricted infectious mode. Sigh. I'm cleaning out the garage. Bit by bit. I'm lessening the gi-ant hoard. I will return to my cats now. They are scratching at my chamber door. I must let them in. CHRISTINA HIONIDES Dingwall [Scotland] is celebrating the typewriter this week. A stream of triangular flags have been raised high above to crisscross the High Street. Typewriters of all ages past adorn the shop windows, even Harry Gow’s, The Baker. And somewhere further north they are screening Populaire [French

film about a typewriter]. What beloved innocence!

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

HARRY O. MORRIS Glad yr still publishing…I don’t see how you manage it—pandemic or not. Portable Storage must take up a fair amount of your time. I’m glad you don’t have to retype all the contents thanks to the internet. I often regret the countless hours I spent typing Nyctalops. Damn. At least I met good peo-ple. Glad to see so many of your photographs (capturing as much—or more—than the words). THERESA L. REED My favorites? Probably L. Jim Khennedy and Michael Breiding followed by Grant Canfield, Jay Kin-ney and Kennedy Gammage. Three is so wonderful I couldn’t put it down! TONY CVETKO I think the wraparound cover is lovely and conveys the feeling of the issue. This entire issue was a kind of revelation. While I enjoyed the entire issue, two pieces stood out for me. Your brother Mike's, because I can't imagine what it must take to move the family across the country. He did a good job bringing that to life. And Grant Canfield. Someone I don't know but certainly knew of, as one of those BNFs that I, as my shy-self doing fanzines back in the '70s, wouldn't have had the cour-age to approach. He seems like such an interesting guy with an interesting life. I think you deserve a Hugo! RICH COAD

It took me much longer than either reading the book or writing the review for Portable Stor-age, but I finally got the COSMOCOPIA jigsaw puzzle done. DONALD SIDNEY-FRYER I especially enjoyed Grant Canfield’s memoir with his delicious artwork. Please tell Grant that he should have this memoir and the others referenced in it gathered into a one volume tome with his art as well. // I don’t miss the hectographed or mimeo’d fanzines of the 30s and 40s. Going through Forrest Ackerman’s collection (looking for Clark Ashton Smith) was enough! It took me a month or so turning over many musty pages—usually without contents pages!—but I managed to get through a 25 foot pile! // SRO Hotel—what is that! [SRO = Single Room Occupancy. Tons of those hotels in the Tenderloin and all along Mission Street—or at least there used to be. Probably not anymore.]

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

And thanks to these folks for endowments of cash: Fanny Jo “Babe” Biggs Richard Johnson Joan Breiding Bobby Goodspeed Rob Imes

You rock!

BILLY BOB SEZ: Loc Me, Loc me now!

Contact!

portablezine@gmail.com

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The Gorgon of Poses G. Sutton Breiding

MY LUTE DOTH YET REMAIN sleep comes with trembling hands a river of moongrey voices pages of soot and hair and diesel oil somewhere between the trains and the caterwauls the bone-sharp cries of my mother and there's Old Death, taking notes, eating a sandwich alone as a paper clip in a Sunday office I wanted to be a myth unto myself the head of Orpheus, Pan in exile, a wandering sunflower resting on lawn chairs of the summer dawns I worked on sentences of snow and necromancy unicorns and despair, the whispers of dying memories passing in an endless pilgrimage of silent rags there were woodcuts of the wind deer in their castles the graffiti of runes in a book of hawks and afternoons power plants glowed like skulls I wrote like a fiend filled with dread and wonder I tasted the salt of ancient things the sky was all coal and spaceships hedges hummed with steampunk witches as I crammed the pages margin to margin with forgotten mantras, dead mojos black suns rumbling, Virginia's nerves moments of being on an alien planet I walked and walked in the afterlife of time consciousness waxing waning waxing waning seeking a literature of the aging, the dying, the diseased silver streets in Victorian twilights of the heart sublime idiot visions of Rivendell, tattooed thighs psychedelic coffee grown on Mercury days like Twombly, nights like Basquiat I smelled, over and over, that long lament of sex dog winds blew the fumes of Hades hard all exorcisms and alchemies failed wordhaunted, I sought my apocalypse of solitude I wanted to break my precious alphabet into tiny pieces and fuck myself to the end of the world such are the ways of poetry

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Alva Svoboda was subdued as a child, moods out of

a pristine guidebook to the museums of Orange, where

he made his home. Lusting at doltish but lovely ladies as

young as he was, thrown down a trout run by kindest

toothsome direction, he hooted at schoolgirls. Note: up

to him, he would not tell them, nor shred itching servi-

ettes honed to irk independent truths, the hot growth

blest.

Chris Sherman emerged from a recursive H.P.

Lovecraft short story in 1837, equipped solely with an

outline of a collective bargaining agreement that eventu-

ally led to the formation of APA-50. After gafiating in

the mid-1980s, he served as vice-president of technology

for an international consulting firm and published eight

obnoxiously geeky books. Later, he was founding editor

of Search Engine Land and orchestrated the Search En-

gine Strategies and Search Marketing Expo conferences

for more than two decades. Today he resides with his

lovely wife Janice at their home in Boulder, just scant

blocks from where he witnessed the hatching of three

chickens in the single-room schoolhouse where he at-

tended kindergarten.

Dale Nelson is a columnist for CSL: The Bulletin of

the New York C.S. Lewis Society and the Tolkien news-

letter Beyond Bree. His Lady Stanhope’s Manuscript

and Other Stories was published by Nodens Books and is

out of print.

Jeanne Bowman is home at 38° 21' 19" N latitude

122° 31' 46" W longitude. Now and again she uses her

grandmother's portable Singer sewing machine for per-

fect rolled hems and ponders the question of restore or

repurpose for the treadle operated antiques in the barn.

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Jeff Schalles was born in 1951, Pittsburgh, Pa., dis-

covered rock & roll in 1962 and science fiction fandom in

1968. Earned a B.A. in English Literature, graduated in

1973. Bicycled and hitch-hiked across Canada in 1974,

ended up working on a cattle ranch near Omak, Washing-

ton. Hiked most of the Appalachian Trail in bits and piec-

es spanning 20 years. Writer, musician, artist, photogra-

pher, gardener, typesetter & printer. Got my first drum

kit in 1965. Retired from printing in 2011. I've lived in

Minnesota since 1989 and wander around the bits of re-

maining prairies with a camera a lot. Motto: I fix more

things than I break!

Peter Young thinks he lives in Hua Hin, Thailand,

but he’s not so sure any more having been exiled against

his will to Stoke-on-Trent, England, for four months now.

He was usually at altitude somewhere around the planet

when not plugged into the internet, but now the internet

gets him full-time. He has two young boys, he publishes

fanzines, he runs speculative fiction- and Thailand-

related websites.

Kennedy Gammage majored in English at U.C.

Berkeley. He resides in San Diego, and his personal web-

site is www.travelogorrhea.com. He has been published

in A Café in Space, SN Review, DEUS LOCI, The San Die-

go Poetry Annual and Portable Storage.

Bruce Townley is a man in his 60s who lives in a

tiny, rent-controlled conapt that is crammed with books,

comic books, records and dinosaur models. It is located

in the best city in the whole world, San Francisco. He

misses going out for breakfast at the local diner.

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Michael Gorra was an active fan from 1973-75 and

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

Andy Hooper was introduced to science fiction by

Gold Key comics and Lost in Space and has been strug-

gling to raise his standards ever since. He attended his

first convention in 1978, and began contributing to and

publishing fanzines in the early 1980s. He collaborated

on the Hugo-nominated fanzines Apparatchik and

Chunga, and has won or ties for FAAn Awards 19 times

since 1995. In 1970, he lived within a few miles of the

Breiding family farm in West Virginia.

Tom Jackson is a longtime science fiction fan and a

newspaper reporter who lives in the Cleveland area. He

hopes somebody will publish an ebook anthology of the

writings of fan writer Redd Boggs. He does not always

have a cat sitting on top of him when he is trying to write,

only sometimes.

Gary Hubbard is currently a retired librarian, but

used to sell games in a hobby shop. He still cherishes a

wide-ranging knowledge of the gaming world despite

never having actually played any of the games. He spent

the Sixties in the Army and it was not a happy experi-

ence. He didn’t like the Army and the Army didn’t like

him. He wrote his first “Cracked Eye” for Frank Lunney

in either Beabohemia or Syndrome (he can’t remember

which) and it’s been an albatross around his neck ever

since. Likes long walks on the beach and tentacle porn.

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Cheryl Cline is a science fiction fan and reader who

lives in a house filled with too many books. She's been

married to fellow SF fan Lynn Kuehl for, like, forever,

and he had too many books when she met him. Together

they own a used bookshop, which only partly accounts

for fact they have too many books.

AC Kolthoff lives in Tucson, AZ with her husband,

William, and a pack of invisible dogs that she is certain

will materialize one day soon.

Donald Sidney-Fryer was born in 1934 in New

Bedford, Massachusetts. After serving in the Marine

Corps he attended UCLA where he began pursuing his

lifelong love affair with Clark Ashton Smith. He lived in

San Francisco during one of its seminal butterfly stages,

1965-1975. He has had three dozen titles published, many

by Arkham House and Hippocampus Press. He was once

bard to Edmund Spenser. DSF currently lives in East

Sandwich, Massachusetts.

Talking points for G. Sutton Breiding, a poet for

our times, include siskins, deep green moss and Kate

Moss, old age, amethyst, myrrh, space cowboys and la-

mia. His bio can be accessed at Wikipedia in all its full-

ness.

Cover Artist Brad W. Foster has been making

toons, cover art, and fine art, for zines and professional-ly, for Umpteen Years. Awesomely prolific, Brad etches and sketches away in Irving, Texas.

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Artists in this issue

118 (left)—John Benson

43—Jeanne Bowman

111—G. Sutton Breiding

8, 9, 58, 109, 129 , 140—William Breiding

128—Austin Bronson

72, 106, 116, 136—Grant Canfield

24—Kurt Erichsen

84, 87—Jude Fulkerson

5 (left)—Gil Gaier

88, 89, 90, 91—Don Herron

101—AC Kolthoff

100—Karen Rae Kolthoff

57—Vic Kostrikin

129 (center)—Craig Lion

123 (left)—Mark Manning

85—Jim McLeod

17—Michael McClure

52, 55, 66, 133—Harry O. Morris

3, 127—Ray Nelson

47—Jeff Schalles

6—Marc Schrimeister

23—Chris Sherman

40, 75—Al Sirois

105, 118 (right)—Taral

99, 135—Bruce Townley

132—Unknown

48, 56—Frank Vacanti

107—Wendy Victor

11—Joe West

86—Michael Whelan

44, 58, 63, 67, 96—Alan White

5 (right)—Gene Young

Poems Uncredited

Your Order Has Arrived! — G. Sutton Breiding, page 9

Hypersurface Issues — Kennedy Gammage, page 57

Poem—G. Sutton Breiding, page 66

For the edification of

Leigh Edmonds and Nic Farey:

Word Count: 64,832

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