Wednesday, October 31, 2018

Underappreciated Music: October Selections (All Hallows Eve, and all that)


The monthly assembly of undervalued and often nearly "lost" music, or simply music the blogger in question wants to remind you readers/listeners of...

 Happy All Hallows!

 Brian Arnold:  Hallowe'en Tunes!; Happy Hallowe'en 2018!

Jayme Lynn Blaschke: Friday Night Videos

 Marybeth Bornio: The DoubleClicks: "Harry Potter Theme"


Paul D. Brazill: A Song for Saturday

Jim Cameron: Bill Henderson: Beautiful Memory: Bill Henderson Live at the Vic

Sean Coleman: The Who: My Generation

Jeff Gemmill: Top 5s; A Song Roundup: "A Rainy Night in Georgia"; Juliana Hatfield: For the Birds

Dana Gould: Wayne Kramer, and typical nonsense that "punk was over by the early '80s"  

 Jerry House: Hymn Time; Music from the Past

Xeni Jardin/David Pescovitz: An Indigenous People's Day folk/rock/country playlist

George Kelley: Various Artists: '80s Pop Hits; Steely Dan in concert 2018; Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: The New Musical (stage); Hamilton: An American Musical (Boston production)

 Tom Kraemer: Cass Elliot, Joni Mitchell and Mary Travers: "I Shall Be Released"


 Kate Laity: Sheena Wellington and Karine Polwart: "Halloween"


 Barry Malzberg: The Australian Opera featuring Joan Sutherland (direction of Bonynge/Monsouri): Les Huguenots (Meyerbeer/Scribe & Deschamps)


 Todd Mason: Late for Hallowe'en Music Club ('12 post-blizzard): Sinister Jazz

 Edward Morris: Alien Sex Fiend: "Katch 22"


 Laura Nakatsuka: Blue Heron: "Permanent vierge" (Johannes Ockeghem)


 Patricia Nolan-Hall: Diana Lynn with the Paul Weston Orchestra: "Easy to Love"


Andrew Orley: a week:
David Bowie: "Sunday"
God Help the Girl: "Come Monday Night"
Bobbie Gentry: "Hurry Tuesday Child"
Simon and Garfunkel: "Wednesday Morning, 3 AM"
Johnny Mathis: "Sweet Thursday"
Nancy Sinatra: "Friday's Child"
and Louis Jordan and the Tympani Five: "Saturday Night Fish Fry"

and a Nobody's  Listening Hallowe'en Playlist

Charlie Ricci: Nat King Cole Trio: Transcriptions;  Hilary Scott: Don't Call Me Angel; Stephen Stills and Judy Collins: Everybody Knows

Jeff Segal: The Ghastly Ones: Unearthed


 A. J. Wright: Birmingham, AL, City Stages Festival 1989

 Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers: "Ugetsu"


 Philly Joe Jones Sextet: "Blues for Dracula"


 The assembly of this list largely done while doling out chocolate bits to the youth of Philadelphia-adjacent New Jersey...and to all, a pleasantly spooky night...
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Friday, October 26, 2018

FFB: YESTERDAY'S TOMORROWS edited by Frederik Pohl (Berkley 1982); EDITORS edited by Saul Bellow and Keith Botsford (Toby Press 2001); Lancer Books, Airmont Classics and other "Futurian" editorial projects: Doris Baumgardt, Donald Wollheim, Robert Lowndes, Larry Shaw...and Samuel Delany's DHALGREN, Josephine Herbst's THE STARCHED BLUE SKIES OF SPAIN and Gustave Hasford's THE SHORT-TIMERS, among others...


Keith Botsford (March 29, 1928, in Brussels, Belgium - August 19, 2018, in Battersea, England)

from 14 August 2015:
This wasn't the book I was going to review this week, but it kind of shouldered its way in...it arrived the same day as what was supposed to be Editors, edited by Saul Bellow and Keith Botsford, which was a similar volume with a similar remit...both were meant to cover the previous forty years in their editors' careers as editors of various magazines and often periodical book series. But, instead, the inventory sticker for Editors had been slapped onto a back issue of Granta (and not the cleanest copy I've ever seen), #99, one highlighted by an interview with Richard Ford (I have one of his books hanging fire, waiting for me to read it for this exercise as well). Bellow and Botsford, in their fat volume (1100 pages), pulled items from their various collaborative projects beginning with The Noble Savage (and I have a book in the queue that was mostly invented there) and wrapping up with their last such effort, News From the Republic of Letters; the rather fat Pohl volume (a mere 430 pages) begins with selections from the magazines Pohl began editing when 19 years old, Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories; from there, the book draws on items from Pohl's first reprint anthologies, then the new-story Ballantine anthology series (and for one issue a magazine) Star Science Fiction; then onto taking over Galaxy and its sibling magazines (most notably If), at first while officially helping out the ailing H. L. Gold, and then in the clear, for more than a decade (ca. 1958 to leaving with the magazines' sale in 1969), editing for several months at the collapsing Ace Books of the early '70s and moving on from there to rather less chaotic times at Bantam Books for most of the decade; the last years are represented by novel excerpts, as Pohl didn't have an anthology series at Bantam: one each from Samuel Delany's Dhalgren, fellow former Futurian Society member David Kyle's completion of the planned but unfinished "Lensman" adventure novels by the late E.E. Smith, and Gustav Hasford's The Short-Timers, which, after this anthology was published, would be adapted for film as Full Metal Jacket, the script a collaboration between Hasford, Michael Kerr and Stanley Kubrick which won them an Oscar. 
Bantam let Arbor House do the hardcover edition (left), which they packaged atrociously as well.

In the prefatory material running through this utterly functional (and no more than that) physical package, Pohl spells out, in more detail than I've seen elsewhere, the nature of his working life at each of his editorial desks, even if the reprint-anthology selections are a bit out of any sort of chronological or other apparent order.  He can be cagy about certain matters (he mentions in passing that he met his second wife as a colleague at Popular Publications, the artist and writer Dorothy Les Tina, but doesn't mention her name here, even as he never mentioned meeting her at his first editorial job in his book-length memoir The Way the Future Was), but nonetheless is engaging and informative about the day-to-day production and business practices as well as the editorial work itself in each of his gigs.  (It's notable that the Bellow/Botsford is similarly a no-frills physical presentation, featuring memoirs by its editors that include such bits as Bellow's boyhood acquaintance with the first professional writer he knew, a 1930s contributor to Popular's Argosy magazine and Street and Smith's Doc Savage; even as Pohl includes stories he'd gathered for his reprint anthologies, the B men include some of reprinted items they'd run in their magazines, particularly The Noble Savage's front pages, and the editorial offices of their magazines were not free of the odd romantic/emotional entanglement, such as the affair that inspired Bellow's Herzog.)  The Pohl (courtesy the Homeville/William Contento indices):
The first issue of Galaxy "officially" edited by Pohl:


EDITORS  [their introductory memoirs]
Keith Botsford: On the Facts
Saul Bellow: Great and Not so Great Expectations, Noble Savage 3
Saul Bellow: Hidden Within Technology’s Empire, A Republic of Letters, The New York Times
Saul Bellow & Keith Botsford: Dialogue: As seen from the ground, ANON

ARIAS [essentially, editorials from the four magazines, including ANON and Bostonia]
Saul Bellow: Pains and Gains, Noble Savage 1
Stephen Spender: Doctor of Science, Patient of Poetry, Noble Savage 4
Saul Bellow: The 11:59 News, Noble Savage 4
Keith Botsford: Obit on a Witness, Noble Savage 4
Saul Bellow: Mr. Wollix gets an Honorary Degree, ANON
Mark Harris: Nixon and Hayakawa, ANON
Saul Bellow: White House and Artists, Noble Savage 5
Felix Pollak: The Poor Man’s Civil Defense Manual, Noble Savage 5
Philip O’Connor: A few Notes on the Changing World, Noble Savage 5
Saul Bellow: View from Intensive Care, The Republic of Letters 1
Saul Bellow: Graven Images, The Republic of Letters 2
Philip O’Connor: Last Journal, The Republic of Letters 2
James Wood: Real Life, The Republic of Letters 2
Martin Amis: Cars and the Man, The Republic of Letters 3
Julia Copeland: Objective Correlative,The Republic of Letters 7

ARCHIVES [reprints from what they reprinted in their magazines]
Samuel Butler: Ramblings in Cheapside, Noble Savage 1
DH Lawrence: Portrait of Maurice Magnus, Noble Savage 2
Joseph de Maistre: The Executioner, ANON
Victor Hugo: The Interment of Napoleon, The Republic of Letters 4

INVESTIGATIONS
George P. Elliott: Critic and Common Reader, Noble Savage 2
Harold Rosenberg: Seven Numbered Notes, Noble Savage 3
Louis Simpson: On Being a Poet in America, Noble Savage 5
Herbert Blau: The Public Art of Crisis in the Suburbs of Hell, Noble Savage 5
Marjorie Farber: The Romantic Method, Noble Savage 5
Raymond Tallis: A Dark Mirror, The Republic of Letters 2

LIVES
Josephine Herbst: A Year of Disgrace, Noble Savage 3
Antoni Slonimski: Memories of Warsaw, Noble Savage 4
G V Desani: With Malice Aforethought, Noble Savage 5
Rudolf Kassner: Sulla and the Satyr, ANON
Saul Bellow: Mozart, Bostonia, Spring 1992
Saul Bellow: Ralph Ellison in Tivoli, The Republic of Letters 3
Alan Govenar and Leonard St. Clair: Life as a Tattoo Artist, The Republic of Letters 6
Saul Bellow: Saul Steinberg, The Republic of Letters 7

POEMS
Howard Nemerov: Life Cycle of Common Man, Noble Savage 1
Oonagh Lahr: The Advance on the Retreat, Noble Savage 4
Alexander Pushkin: Count Nulin, Noble Savage 4
Anthony Hecht: Message from the City, Noble Savage 5
Cesare Pavese: What an Old Man has Left, ANON
Michael Hulse: Winterreise, The Republic of Letters 7

TEXTS 
Edward Hoagland: Cowboys, Noble Savage 1
Harold Rosenberg: Notes from the Ground Up, Noble Savage 1
Josephine Herbst: The Starched Blue Sky of Spain, Noble Savage 1
Arthur Miller: Please Don’t Kill Anything, Noble Savage 1
Wright Morris: The Scene, Noble Savage 1
Mark Harris: The Self-Made Brain Surgeon, Noble Savage 1
Louis Guilloux: Friendship, Noble Savage 2
Sol Yurick: The Annealing, Noble Savage 2
Dan Wakefield: An American Fiesta, Noble Savage 2
Jara Ribnikar: Copperskin, Noble Savage 3
John Berryman: Thursday Out, Noble Savage 3
Seymour Krim: What’s This Cat’s Story? Noble Savage 3
Thomas Pynchon: Under the Rose, Noble Savage 3
Herbert Gold: Death in Miami Beach, Noble Savage 3
G V Desani: Mephisto’s Daughter, Noble Savage 4
Louis Guilloux: Palante, Noble Savage 4
Louis Gallo: Oedipus-Schmoedipus, Noble Savage 4
Elémire Zolla: An Angelic Visit on Via dei Martiri, Noble Savage 4
Robert [Chapin] Coover: Blackdamp, Noble Savagee 4
John Hawkes: A Little Bit of the Old Slap and Tickle, Noble Savage 5
Nelson Algren: Dad among the Troglodytes, or Show Me a Gypsy and I’ll Show You a Nut, Noble Savage 5
Bette Howland: Aronesti, Noble Savage 5
Anthony Kerrigan: Don Alonso Quixano, Lineal Descendants, Noble Savage 5
Arthur Miller: Glimpse at a Jockey, Noble Savage 5
Sydor Rey: Hitler’s Mother, Noble Savage 5
Leon Rooke: The Line of Fire, Noble Savage 5
Meyer Schapiro: Lichtenberg, Diderot, Galiani , ANON
Christopher Middleton & Cristoph Meckel: Pocket Elephants, ANON
Umberto Saba: A Jewish Savant, Bostonia, November 1989
John Auerbach: Distortions, Bostonia, March 1990
Bette Howland: A Little Learning, Bostonia, May 1990
S J Perelman: Strictly from Hunger, Bostonia, June 1990 (reprint of a classic reprint)
Conall Ryan: Grace Notes, Bostonia, September 1990
Keith Botsford: The Second Life of Gioacchino Rossini, Bostonia, February 1992
Silvio d’Arzo: Two Old People, Bostonia, September 1993
G T de Lampedusa: Lighea, or the Siren, Bostonia, September 1994
Karl Logher: My Father in the Mirror, The Republic of Letters 3
Saul Bellow: All Marbles Accounted For, The Republic of Letters 4
Murray Bail: The Seduction of My Sister, The Republic of Letters 5
S Scibona: Prairie, The Republic of Letters 6 

So, basically, books you can swim around in. A lot of work to be proud of for all three men, and yet also it would've helped had Berkley taken (and perhaps Toby Press to have had the resources to have taken) more care in packaging these bug-crushers so that they might be more pleasing to the eye.  Though whether you're basking in the casual brilliance of R. A. Lafferty ("Slow Tuesday Night" is almost the template for what's best of his short work) or of Thomas Pynchon ("Under the Rose" isn't too far from his correspondent to the Lafferty), or we enjoy the work editorially pointedly solicited from Josephine Herbst and Alice Sheldon (aka "James Tiptree, Jr.") in these largely boys' clubs, you do get a good helping of why the editorial efforts of these writers mattered, and what kept drawing them back to the editorial chair.  (Certainly, I was pleased in small, petty part to be appointed editor-in-chief of Hawaii Review when 18, beating Pohl's appointment to his first professional magazines by some months, but more because I hoped to do a fraction of what he'd done in the decades since...and have done rather a smaller fraction than I'd hoped.) Bellow, too, if more distantly, had also been a spur...I was perhaps a bit too much like Herzog even as a teen, and his "Seize the Day" if anything moved me more profoundly. (It should be noted that striving to mirror either Pohl or Bellow, and even Botsford in comparison, is setting a high bar.)




















But in considering these books for today (while I'm still awaiting the delivery of Editors, I did read another copy some years ago), it occurred to me how much the complex of the former Futurians (including Pohl, Merril, Kyle, Isaac Asimov, Damon Knight and other geniuses) had an outsized influence on my literary life...not only the anthologies edited by Donald Wollheim (including the first story I read by ex-Futurian Richard Wilson, "A Man Spekith", being one of the first adult and rather grimly satirical sf stories I read, in my father's copy of the Wollheim and Terry Carr's World's Best Science Fiction 1970) but also in my wider reading, as the first edition of Dracula I picked up, about age 9, was the Airmont Classic paperback, a series edited and with introductions from ex-Futurian Robert A. W. Lowndes (he was already editing the Magazine of Horror by then, and would publish the first stories by Stephen King and F. Paul Wilson in Startling Mystery Stories not long after publishing his edition of the Stoker); even more importantly, I was collected as many of the Lancer Books Magnum "Easy-Eye" classics paperbacks, going for a quarter apiece at the local W.T. Grant's discount department store, a series edited and with brief introductions by ex-Futurian Larry Shaw (who was briefly married to Lee Hoffman, and had done a lot of interesting if usually underfunded editorial work as well...Lancer's 1960s reprints of Conan stories had done nothing to hurt the popularity of Robert Howard nor sword & sorcery fiction generally)...not solely the Poe collection (the first I'd bought of the Magnum Classics line) or sf such as Wells's The Time Machine and Edward Bellamy's socialist utopian Looking Backward, but also Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, Jane Austen, Joseph Conrad, Helen Keller's autobiography (no lack of socialists!), Booker T. Washington's and Benjamin Franklin's, O. Henry, Bret Harte, Edward Everett Hale, Henry James and such other fantasists as Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Grahame. Signet Classics and others were important as well to my early reading, but these editions, which I could obtain by the handful through parental largesse on every trip to that store, had a profound effect.  It wasn't too many years later that I was reading Pohl's and Knight's memoirs, and even given the tough times they faced, decided that even more than a writer what I wanted to be was an editor.  It was through Knight's The Futurians that I first read excerpts from and about Doris Baumgardt, one of the first female members of the Futurians and, in the 1940s photos in the Knight, devastatingly pretty; she and Pohl married, albeit briefly, and she took her first editorial job with the same low-rent entrepreneurs, the Albings, who gave Donald Wollheim his first (barely) professional gig; Pohl and Wollheim
recall that Baumgardt, known to her friends as Doë and professionally and in fandom in those years mostly as "Leslie Perri", wrote most of the content of her no-budget stablemate, Movie Love Stories, to Wollheim's no-budget Cosmic Stories and Stirring Science Stories. I finally read, last night, one of only three short stories Perri apparently published in the sf magazines, and sadly it's probably the least of them, a vignette written in the kind of overstated prose Lovecraft favored, perhaps as an experiment; it and the longest Perri story were both published in magazines Shaw edited at the time, this one in If for September 1953 (which is highlighted by ex-Futurian James Blish's important "A Case of Conscience" as well as stories by Philip Dick and eventual hardboiled crime-fiction specialist James McKimmey), the longer one in an issue of the later Infinity Science Fiction I'm going to need to pick up, given how much interesting unreprinted fiction is contained there. Baumgardt and Richard Wilson eventually were married, a period when they were both primarily employed as newspaper journalists, before their divorce in 1965, and her death from cancer in 1970...not too long after the publication of "A Man Spekith" in 1969, and republication in the 1970 book where I would read it ca. 1973. Life is full of almost closed circles and gossamer connections such as that...for more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog (and her novel and those of several other friends and acquaintances await me in the TBR/Re-Read stack as well).
Albing magazines--better covers than they paid for...






















...whether of Rita Hayworth or by Hannes Bok...



























































































First "official" Pohl issue of If: Vonnegut, Laumer,
the two E. E.s, Jim Harmon, James Schmitz...














































































































































































































































































































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Friday, October 19, 2018

FFM: MYSTERY SCENE, November 1986, edited by Ed Gorman and Bob Randisi; SCIENCE FICTION EYE, March 1988, edited by Steve Brown and Dan Steffan; NEW ORLEANS STORIES, Winter 1993, edited by O’Neil De Noux


Three magazines from a wealth passed along by Phil Stephensen-Payne, who was trying to streamline his library/storage set. I already had a copy of the fiction issue of Science Fiction Eye in storage somewhere in the boxes, but haven't laid eyes on it recently, a large-format (in the size that Life, Look, Ebony and The Saturday Evening Post would favor in their heydays) issue unlike the others of that fondly-remembered magazine; Mystery Scene is still very much with us, but this issue (#6, I believe, but it doesn't make that explicit anywhere that I can find; nor can I find a copyright note nor true colophon) is from the early years, as founders Ed Gorman and Bob Randisi were still shaking down what they hoped to make of this crime-fiction answer to Locus...and with this issue boldly laying claim to territory closer to that of Locus, "including Horror Scene" and adding a new, meant-to-be-regular section on comics/graphic literature, with Denny O'Neil as columnist.  Also included, a short story by Ed Hoch.  And New Orleans Stories, which would produce three slim issues in its run starting in 1993, begins with some bold claims from editor and apparent publisher O'Neil De Noux about not being a home for trivial stories set in the Big Easy, but stories by and about those who live and know the city. De Noux would get two issues out, and a third would be released by another staff...the not altogether different approach of Philadelphia Stories, some years later but with a giveaway approach and better production and apparently firmer financing, would prove hardier. 

The Mystery Scene issue is packed, almost scrapbook style, with short articles, reviews, interviews and more; not hard to read and not altogether unstylish, but one gets the sense that where there's white space, it wasn't so much an esthetic decision as there simply wasn't something else to cram into that spot. A good, short interview with Robert Bloch is part of the crossover attempt to reach the then-still-booming (or only starting to recede) horror market, though of course Bloch is and was best-known for his crime-fiction work, and had been a president of the Mystery Writers of America. This was apparently the first issue of MS to receive at least regional professional newsstand distribution (and the prospect of appearing in at least some of the once-flourishing B. Dalton chain of bookstores, as Randisi mentions in his editorial--B. Dalton eventually absorbed by Barnes & Noble), and the number of professional book display ads in the issue is impressive. The Simon Ark story by Edward Hoch, part of a series mostly from early in his career (about an investigator of psychic and particularly Satanic activity), feels a bit like a trunk story, and a bit like a jape on the publishing industry, hence likely the fact of its appearance in this context. (And the evidence of things still shaking down at MS is clear in the typos that riddle the story, more than in most of the nonfiction I've read, and that the table of contents of the issue doesn't mention either Hoch nor the story's title...perhaps a last-minute addition, though mentioned on the cover.)

The SF Eye issue was ambitious even by the consistently ambitious attempts of that magazine to break ground and look good doing so. (It wasn't alone in this in this era, but it was one of the first of the small-press magazines in its field to take advantage of desk-top publishing advances, as opposed to the older fannish engagement with earlier forms of DIY publishing.) The large format, notes John Clute in the SF Encyclopedia, was not favored by the relatively few newsstands that were already carrying the magazine by its third issue, but it was a novelty, at least, in sf circles...I think only the last Arts Council-funded issues of the British magazine New Worlds and the also-British poster-heavy/fiction-light Science Fiction Monthly had published in those dimensions within the field (perhaps no one in the US, with the weak exception of the tabloid newsprint final issues of Vertex), and the latter two had seen their last issues in 1975 and '76. Along with some of the already-regular columns, an assortment of short fiction, by veterans such as Richard Lupoff (whose wife and occasional publishing partner Patricia Lupoff has apparently just died, after debilitating illness) and up and comers such as Kathe Koja, very much reflecting the esthetic of the "edginess" and sophistication the magazine sought...and co-editor Dan Steffan, a cartoonist and illustrator, was able to put his stamp on the issue to greater extent than he would any other (he had to step away from the magazine shortly thereafter). 

Emerging a half-decade after these other pivotal issues for their respective titles, the first New Orlean Stories appeared, I believe, in the wake of Pulphouse Publishing's efflorescence as a source of interestingly-focused projects, many "mixing genres" and published in a sudden flood in many different formats, from magazines in the form of fat hardcovers (reasonably inexpensively printed through high-grade photocopying) on over through paperback chapbooks to thin, newsprint magazines such as this one...which apparently wasn't actually published by Pulphouse, but much in its spirit...founder O'Neil De Noux had worked with the Pulphouse folks in several ways. Featuring in its first issue a reprinted, recent story by George Alec Effinger (a pleasant if slight fantasy about a CIA-recruitment program of a very specialized nature) and a new story by less well-known authors, even a relatively small $1.50 price tag (in his editorial, De Noux notes he apparently expected to be able to price it at a dollar) probably didn't encourage newsstand purchase of such a slim product. But a good basic notion...

For more of today's books (and perhaps other magazines), please see Patti Abbott's blog.
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