Showing posts with label Stuart Dybek. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stuart Dybek. Show all posts

Friday, October 20, 2017

FFM: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January 1976, edited by Edward Ferman (Mercury Press 1975)

Stories by Joanna Russ, Kit Reed and Stuart Dybek, and the best columnists in the fiction-magazine field.

 This was the first issue of F&SF I ever held in my hand. It might not've been the first issue to appear on the newsstand of the Hazardville, CT, drug store where I bought my comic books, then running at an industry standard of a quarter apiece, except for the fatter ones. I had bought a very few paperback books off the spinner rack next to the comics, including a copy of Harry Harrison's anthology of new fiction (and an Alfred Bester memoir) Nova 4 as a birthday gift for my father. That edition was a Manor Book, a reputedly mobbed up outfit that seemed overrepresented on the paperback spinner rack, even as there was never any lack of Charlton Comics in the comic-book spinner (similar accusations). Considering the degree to which magazine distribution in the '70s was often a great source of legit business and money laundering for certain entrepreneurs, it might've been almost surprising how many DC and Marvel and Archie and Gold Key comics were also on the racks, though I'm sure the distribution mobsters weren't going to lose any legit profit just to make their brothers in paperback or comics publishing happier or richer. 
    Meanwhile, the little magazine rack had some items of interest from time to time...I bought an issue of National Lampoon there, I think a bit earlier or later since I road my bike over to do so, less likely in December. My mother confiscated and returned it to the store, and got a refund, delivering a ukase to me and a bored clerk never to attempt a similar transaction again. (I think my father, a Playboy subscriber for some years, must've bought the other two or three issues around the house. I assume my mother bought the Playgirls, or Dad bought them for her...possible she ordered it through Publisher's Clearing House. She never believed you could win their sweepstakes without buying something.)
    And I had certainly been aware of digest-sized fiction magazines. The earliest reading I remember vividly includes a science-fiction pulp reprint magazine, which one I still haven't rediscovered, and a DC sf comic book, likewise; I loved my few copies of Humpty Dumpty and Children's Digest magazines when four and five and six, and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, which for some reason was stacked in the young readers' section of the Enfield Library in 1974-76, and a few Analogs were around the house from my father's haphazard collecting. But I'd never seen this title before...and might not've seen it again at the drugstore. What was almost certainly true is that I probably had 50c or 90c on me, rather than a dollar, so I knew I couldn't afford this magazine even as I flipped through it. I was even familiar with the magazine by name, and as a source of stories I had read read in various anthologies and collections. 
First US collections from each writer to include these stories.
    So it was another couple of years before I caught up with it again, through a 1971 back issue in the Londonderry Junior High library, and then the March 1978 issue. Winter's boon, fiction magazines for me in those years, clearly...I'd started buying new AHMMs with the January 1978 issue. And after falling in love, I ordered a box of back issues from the magazine, which never arrived. The Fermans & co. were kind enough to send a replacement...and among those warehoused items, smelling fascinatingly of wood and ink after sitting on palette stacks for a couple of years, was a copy of this issue, so I could read it in, if I'm not mistaken, the autumn of 1978.
resembles Trump.
    Three stories within made the strongest impression. "My Boat" by Joanna Russ was a fascinating meld of Philip Roth-esque discussion between two Jewish men of a certain age, the protagonist relating the adventures of his and two adolescent friends' (a girl and a boy) from decades earlier, and their sort of modified Peter Pan-esque experience, with an overlay of Lovecraftian flavors. 
    Kit Reed's "Attack of the Giant Baby" involves an experiment that goes awry, and an infant with a passion for Malomars who is enlarged (along with a favorite toy), and what can result from that. The attention to wryly sketched-in detail is what made the story both grounded and hilarious, far more so than, say, the film Honey, I Blew Up the Kid...which I believe faced some legal questions for its similarity in certain aspects to this short story.
    Stuart Dybek's "Horror Movie" is an urban nightmare...a young adolescent, not quite raising himself but coming close and having more traumatic events than usual go down in this particular day, has to deal with various sorts of predator including an apparently supernatural one...the basic Geist of horror, a fiction (or other narrative) which is in large part about learning to cope with the terrors we all face, though some of us more than others, was very explicitly spelled out by this story from fairly early in my reading. 
    The other stories were pleasant but minor--a slight "Black Widowers" story by Isaac Asimov, one of several rejected by Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine but with some tangential relevance to fantastic fiction, so they were good-enough reasons to have Asimov's name on the cover aside from citation of his monthly pop-science column. Gary Wolf's cover story, or at least the cover by David Hardy, might also have been a(n admitted) literary ancestor of Bender the robot in the television series Futurama (though I don't trust my faint memory of this, and should Go Check)...Wolf's clever, amiable work would eventually include the literary adventures of Roger Rabbit, the rather more sophisticated source for the mixed animation/live action film.
    And I must admit I haven't yet sought out the issue to reread the stories by Haskell Barkin (an old friend of Harlan Ellison and an occasional fantasist) or Michael Coney (a Canadian writer prone to sometimes goofy, sometimes quietly effective work), neither of which made a strong impression (or at least a lasting one). Good examples of Asimov's
science column and Baird Searles coping as best he might with one of the poor 1970s ER Burroughs film adaptations are joined by a cute, grim Gahan Wilson cartoon, one of F&SF's infrequent letters columns, and Algis Budrys's fine assessment of the work of, and reminiscence about, two of the more distinctive older writers in the field, "Lester Del Rey" (actually Leonard Knapp, but known to all his friends and spouses as Del Rey), who had been a mentor to Budrys early in the latter's career, and R. A. Lafferty, who had begun writing and publishing in middle age in the latest '50s, in part to keep himself away from alcohol, and had already cleared his own distinctive path through little and fantastic-fiction magazines...and of another veteran, one who came up in the same years as Budrys himself, if a half-dozen earlier, Poul Anderson. 

 The ISFDB index:
The earlier UK collection (1978 vs. 1981)
For more of today's books, and mostly actual books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
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Friday, January 6, 2017

FFB/MS: THE LONG GOODBYE, a 1972 draft of the screenplay by Leigh Brackett; BRASS KNUCKLES by Stuart Dybek (University of Pittsburgh, 1979)

This copy of a 1972 draft of Leigh Brackett's film adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye is missing some key pages (not simply page 21 as annotated on the title page) but nonetheless is a very worthwhile reading experience, as Brackett proves she's as adept a scriptwriter as one might've guessed from her often brilliant, and diverse, fiction, and the films made from her scripts. It's offered as part of a multimedia web post on the Cinephilia & Beyond blog, along with several interviews with Brackett and others, and the draft was written before Robert Altman was associated with the project, but with knowledge that Elliott Gould was meant to play Philip Marlowe. One of the points of rage regarding the film for many Chandler/Marlowe fans is that Gould seems unlikely to be the Marlowe of Chandler's fiction (he doesn't seem quite right to Brackett, either, as it turns out, but not so much for the reasons that most of the Chandler fans resent so volubly...she sees Gould as insufficiently hardboiled, essentially). She also makes clear, both in the script and the discussion about it, that she takes full responsibility for the single fact that most enrages so many Chandler purists, the murder of Terry Lennox at the end of the film, a matter Brackett notes is left far more nebulous at the end of the novel. She also heightens the degree, in her script, to which Marlowe is not just sardonic but a smartass, which might well have been in part inspired by knowledge that Gould was meant to have the role, while retaining what Brackett sees as the most important aspect of the character, his basic uncompromising incorruptibility, his unwillingness to play along with those around him who want him to look the other way or go along with the gag even when it would be safer for him to do so. (I should admit at this point I remember the film, which I've seen about three times over the decades in its entirety, better than I do the novel, which I've read once thirty-plus years ago.) The film differs in notable ways from this draft of the script...Marty Augustine the gangster doesn't abuse his girlfriend-of-sorts as a way to get at Marlowe, and Altman's obsession with nudity, whether a thrown away joke as with Marlowe's neighbors or used to further heighten the insanity of Augustine in a setpiece in the film, is also missing from this script...though the abuse of his wife Eileen by the drunken bully Roger Wade is if anything more intense and vile in the script as written. (And how much Chandler's, or Brackett's, Roger Wade is meant to be after Hemingway is an interesting question.)

 The utter concision of the dialog, and the grace with which the boiled-down version of the novel is conveyed in her script (Brackett notes that to truly film the novel as written, it would take at least five hours...perhaps a project someone should attempt), and the adeptness with which Brackett makes the adaptation believable as a contemporary story in 1972 is all very much worth experiencing firsthand, even, again, given that the PDF document is missing a few pages. Having read the novel or particularly seen the film will help with those elisions...and I have to wonder if the PDF document is missing the later pages through a slip-up on the part of the blogger. There are apparently a few other script drafts floating about from Brackett's career, but a formal, complete collection is more than overdue, given the importance of her work as a whole and of most of the films she scripted or wrote treatments for.

 Stuart Dybek's Brass Knuckles is another odd choice, I suppose, even for the heavily crime-fiction-oriented FFB roundelay, as it's his first collection, from 1979, of poetry and prose-poetical vignettes. Divided into four sections, "Exile at 7", "The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street", "Grand Entrance" and "My Neighborhood", it's largely a set of evocations of the tougher parts of Chicago, in and around the Polish-American neighborhood where Dybek was raised. A lot of the ground tread here falls somewhere between the abuse of children and its consequences in Joyce Carol Oates's similar work and the self abuse of Charles Bukowski's, though the writer I'm most reminded of is Ed Gorman...even if Dybek is more a Romantic than Ed was, in several ways, and has some manic asides and foregrounded metaphors, such as the suggestion of a not completely bad marriage that has the diminutive groom standing for a while on his wedding cake, holding hands with the wax bride figurine, while his actual bride cavorts with most of the wedding party, that fit in well with the mythical allusions, gritty details and explorations of lust and frustration throughout the lives of the characters. And much of the book is very funny, only some of it tragic. 

 Perhaps almost as sad as some of the more sober bits is the fate of even some of the colleges, much less their little magazines, that this work first appeared in, in the 1970s, though looking again I suppose it's just the Goddard Journal that would be utterly vanished now. Though perhaps it's telling in a small way that the book has seen its more recent edition from not the state-owned University of Pittsburgh Press, but Carnegie-Mellon's...

 For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

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Friday, July 8, 2011

FFB: long stories: Ray Nelson, "Turn Off the Sky" (1963); William Campbell Gault, "Deadly Beloved" (1956); Stuart Dybek, "Four Deuces" (2011)

Three novelets and/or novellas this week, from old favorites...including one I've been meaning to read for more than thirty years, the Nelson.
"Turn Off the Sky" appears to be the first professionally-published fiction of Ray Nelson (who has also signed his fiction R. Faraday Nelson), and first and so far I think only has appeared in the August, 1963, issue of F&SF, getting a pretty striking Ed Emshwiller cover illustration, and sharing cover-space with Asimov (the pop-science columnist for F&SF; he and editor Avram Davidson didn't get along very well; previous editor Robert Mills, who had asked Asimov to start the column, was referred to by Asimov ungrammatically as the Kindly Editor; typically, Davidson took this as a cue to refer to himself as the Cruelly Editor) and Heinlein (whose influence on Nelson in this story is strong, and whose not atypically flawed fantasy novel Glory Road saw the second of three parts of its serialization in this issue)(typically flawed in that it had started well and with typically pointed Heinleinian asides, about the Vietnam War and other matters, that helped ground it in reality, only to see those asides take over the story and remake it into a dull lecture about Heinlein's worldview, not too far along). Davidson mentions in his long headnote that he'd read the Nelson four years before, and had been looking for an opportunity to help it into print; Nelson was already a well-known or Big Name Fan, having been active as a cartoonist and writer for fanzines for some years, and credited as the inventor of the propeller beanie as the shorthand indicator of sf fannishness in those cartoons (this has since gone well beyond sf fandom to be a nearly universally-recognized mark of the enthusiastic geek in all sorts of geekish subcultural portrayal). Nelson was also already well-known in fandom for his sharp observation, and sophisticated take on matters both within and outside the subculture, and that's reflected in the story as well.

It's a very much Beat sf story, when there were relatively few such in evidence (William Burroughs was just beginning to publish his own within the several years previous, and Fritz Leiber, Damon Knight, Davidson, Heinlein and a few others, particularly Theodore Sturgeon, were first exploring the Beat subcultural tendencies, tentatively yet for more than mere outre background, as many of their peers had been doing); the influence of Jack Kerouac on the approach and the content is at least as strong as Heinlein's, even if Heinlein is name-checked at one point. In an affluent, post-scarcity social-democratic world state of the not terribly distant future, among an often shallow and conformist but influential bohemian fringe, a youngish African-American pacifist anarchist named Abelard Rosenburg interacts with greater or lesser degrees of disillusionment with his fellow bohos, and escapes from an increasingly hostile party (a "clean" musician was being forcibly introduced to opiates, with little Rosenburg could do to help him, in a stinging satire of countercultural peer pressure) and meets his dream woman, Reva, on the subway. Reva engages him intellectually, emotionally and sexually, but is too much a free spirit to choose to stick with Abelard initially; she vanishes after a day or so till a fortuitous reunion at a coffee shop, when she's in the company of a FSU (or "fuck shit up") pseudo-anarchist would-be terrorist who goes by Little Brother (whether this was further inspiration to Cory Doctorow's much later work is unknown to me); Little Brother, who admires Lenin and Trotsky (those murderers of anarchists and enemies of anarchism) more than anyone else, is all barely-contained id, and attacks Abelard, losing Reva to Abelard as a result. Reva and Abelard enjoy a bit of an idyll, but Little Brother isn't through with them yet.

A clever and mostly engaging tale, with indicators of Early Work apparent here and there (such later work as "Nightfall on the Dead Sea" was much more thoroughly assured, if also less ambitious), and worth the effort to procure the back-issue; not long after, F&SF would publish the Nelson vignette "Eight O'Clock in the Morning," which would much later serve as the basis for the rather less mordant film They Live!. I would've loved "Sky" that much more when I was thirteen, when the not altogether dissimilar John Varley novella "The Persistence of Vision" was blowing my doors off. Following the Nelson in the issue is a Calvin W. Demmon vignette, Demmon being another fannish writer who contributed mostly clever and disturbing vignettes to Davidson's F&SF and later fiction to Ted White's magazines, but is underappreciated; such similar writers as Samuel Delany and Chet Anderson and Richard Brautigan and Thomas Pynchon were just beginning to publish at about the same time, and the still-new Carol Emshwiller and Joanna Russ to begin to take on similar matter.

Time grows tight, so I will note for now that William Campbell Gault's "Deadly Beloved" is a Joe Puma story, wherein Puma is, typically, as quick with his fists when he needs to be and as attractive to women who are game as most of his peers in fictional private detection in the 1950s, but Gault never lets the tropes take over the story, nor force him to be less than verisimilitudinous; Puma knows better, as a former boxer, than to pick fistfights he's likely to lose, and is acutely aware that not every woman is actually attracted to him, even when some of them might pretend to be. The web of jealousy surrounding the murder of a mildly philandering unsuccessful actor (and all but gigolo) is reasonably well worked-out here, but the characterization of Puma and the other characters, even when they could just as easily be straight stock ciphers, is the biggest draw. I haven't yet checked if this Manhunt novelet (October, 1956) has been collected or anthologized, but Richard Moore is kind enough to remind us in comments that it's included in Bill Pronzini's collection of Gault short fiction, Marksman and Other Stories (Crippen and Landru).

Stuart Dybek's "Four Deuces" is the longest piece of fiction in the current issue, 13, of A Public Space, and I haven't quite finished it yet, but it's a fine example of Dybek's way with character and pacing, as well. Rosie, the owner and widow of the co-owner of the Chicago bar which shares its name with the story, gives an account to a customer of how the bar came to be, and her late husband's obsession with Rosie's apparent ability to pick winning horses, which led up to the bar's purchase; the story is all in the form of her side of the conversation.

All three stories are perhaps linked in my mind in part because of the diversity of ethnicities of the characters running through them; ameliorated tragedies (and love stories), all, too.

I first read Nelson with "Nightfall on the Dead Sea" (1978) and "Eight O'Clock in the Morning" (1963) in, respectively, new and back issues of F&SF in 1978.

I first read Gault with his pulp-magazine auto-racing short stories in anthologies and at least one of his YA baseball or basketball novels in the mid-1970s (sports fiction was his first love, and if there was anyone better at it, I don't know of them...though a few about as good).

I first read Dybek with "Horror Movie" in the first F&SF I ever actually saw, January 1976, which leads off with Joanna Russ's "My Boat."

For more of today's books (most of them, at least, books!), please see Patti Abbott's blog.
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