In another post (about blood moons and werewolves) I had occasion to examine the various cover paintings for Jack Williamson’s great novel, Darker Than You Think. In addition to Edd Cartier’s black
That inertia is the tendency of a body, when cold, to stay cold; and when hot, to stay hot — that during Star-flux when the thin white lines which cross and crisscross the skies of night tremb
It has been a contradictory and confusing year, 2015. At times it has been downright neurotic and malevolent, which I suppose is to be expected from a Year of the Goat! We seem to have gotten farther into the woods, into the darkness,
What a hullaballoo was kicked up for the recent blood moon. You’d think that a total eclipse occurring when the moon passes closest to Earth only happens, say … once every generation. Oh snap! B
The MICE invasion of Cambridge was a swarming crowd of anarchistic fun. Hundreds of comix-crazed attendees jammed the halls of Leslie University, chatting with 200 comic artists and publishers. Tables of eye candy stretched through the second floor of University Hall, connecting with additional jam-packed side rooms named after comix greats, such as the Crumb Room, Doucet Hall, and the Bechdel Room. You gotta love the idea of independent comix artists actually being recognized in the mundane society for their pure “genius” — proven by Alison Bechdel’s Westinghouse Genius Award in 2014! Here is a gang of fervent, possibly feverish, and yes, well, let’s face it, mostly starving artists who are so adamant, so tenacious, and so in-your-face diversified, that their official genius is the inventor of the gender-bias principle known as the Bechdel Test. Yo, MICE artists, kudos to the whole lot of you! You are giant mice among scampering human conformists, in my book.
The book and zine collection of John H. Costello, who passed away in early 2015, was donated to fandom recently at Readercon 26. Here I will take a quick look at some of the Russian language materials
Readercon is generally my favorite con of the year, and in 2015 Readercon was up to the usual standard of fun times and excellence. The guests of honor Nicola Griffith and Gary K Wolfe were on hand throughout, and the memorial GOH was Joanna Russ. How could you go wrong? Indeed there were no less than three sessions on the life and work of Joanna Russ, including the participation of the author’s long-time associates: Jim Freund, David Hartwell, Michael Dirda, Ron Drummond, and Samuel R. Delany. Freund told some great stories about the early days of his career at WBAI Radio in New York, when he was literally living in the station offices, and broadcasting his radio show, “Hour of the Wolf,” five days a week at 5:00am. One time Freund called up Russ at about 8pm and invited her to join him for an interview on Hour of the Wolf. Russ declined the interview, but she did invite him out to eat at a nearby diner. The meal turned into an eight hour long conversation. Finally, having talked through the night, at about 4:30am, Russ asked to stop over at the Radio Station to use the bathroom on her way home, while Freund was getting ready for his show. Just as he was going live, Russ stopped by the control room to wave good-bye, and she heard Freund say into the microphone: “This is the Hour of the Wolf, and my guest today is Joanna Russ.” The first words Russ spoke on that particular live broadcast were: “You motherfucker! I’m going to kill you!” Which she subsequently did, by killing off the character based on Freund in her novel, We Who Are About To.
Traveling to Chicago in the winter you expect snow, ice, and bitter gray skies. We had mild temperatures and lots of sunshine! One day at Half Price Books, I picked up the UK Granta edition of Elif Batuman’s The Possessed, and also a copy of Franz Kafka’s Paradoxes and Parables, in the 1961 Shocken paperback edition. I noticed an old card and folded piece of paper in the Kafka, which I thought deserved further research. To my amazement, I found tucked into the Kafka book two bits of New York beatnik history! First, there was a folded flyer for a performance at Caffe Cino, the famous alternate theatre run by Joe Cino at 31 Cornelia Street. Caffe Cino Flyer - May 20th 1962 Joe Cino (1931-1967), originally from Buffalo, New York, opened the cafe theatre in 1958, creating what is now considered to be the first off off Broadway theatre in New York. The venue, which had no real license to be used as a theatre, was always in trouble with the law, and somehow survived by running impromptu events with no publicized schedule. Finding this actual flyer for a performance at Caffe Cino, was intriguing. The director of the two Ionesco pieces was Roberta Sklar, who apparently was the co-director of Jean-Claude Van Italie’s 1968 production of “THE SERPENT.” There is a video documentary about this play on Youtube in three parts: 1 2 3 The performers at Caffe Cino that night were Rob Reigler and A. J. Reigler, and the lighting was by Louis Torrey. Was that Louis Torrey any relation to John Torrey, Joe Cino’s lover, who some suspect was responsible for the 1965 fire that nearly destroyed the theatre? Well, a lot of these details are no doubt lost to history, but it is still amusing to find tid-bits like this floating up from the memory well. The other amazing find in this copy of Kafka’s Parables and Paradoxes, was an original “discount card” from Limelight Bookshop!
The opening of Jack Womack’s _Going Going Gone_, injects us into an unpredictable world that wobbles between an alternate hipster-scene of New York City in the 1960s and the seemingly hallucinatory ramblings of a drug-addled protagonist, Walter Bullitt. The story begins in a Washington, D.C. hotel room, where the first person jive talk kicks in: “Soon as I spiked I turned my eyes inside. Setting old snakehead on cruise control always pleases, no matter how quick the trip.” Sprinkled through almost every sentence are hokey metaphors. The phone doesn’t ring, “those jingle bells“ do. And on the other end of the line is a Federal agent of some kind, who is so square that he can’t understand a word of the hipster-narrator. But the narrator is more like one of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers than a secret agent, and he himself was so startled by the phone that he almost made for the john to “drown his bagged cat.” To flush his pot down the toilet, get it?
A nice surprise at the Davis Square Goodwill! An ex-library copy of Adventures With the Heroes (1954), illustrated by Steele Savage. This is the companion volume to Adventures With the Giants (1950) that you can find nicely scanned over at Ragged Claws Network. In both volumes, you will find Steele Savage’s crisp rendering in pen and ink, with a beautiful depth and texture provided by two-color separations. For example, the illustration for the chapter, Sigurd’s Horse (p45), shows a wonderful use of a single color — darkened with black hachure lines for the foreground figures, loosely rendered for the curving river, and lightly washed across the background for mountains. The painted cover (presumably done in watercolor) is a lovely composite of the major scenes found in the book, with a mild looking dragon lying slain at the feet of a diminutive hero, and with its tail wrapped across the pale green landscape. This altogether dreamlike image reveals the mastery of an artist who deserves our attention all the more. The complete set is posted at yunchtime.tumblr.com