Showing posts with label RIP. Show all posts
Showing posts with label RIP. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 14, 2024

SSW: Ellen Gilchrist: "Black Winter", THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, June 1995, edited by Kristine K. Rusch and Edward Ferman: Short Story Wednesday

Patti Abbott having posted a link in her consideration of another story by my choice of SSW author this week, I've just read the obituary for Ellen Gilchrist (1935-2024) from the New York Times by one Adam Nossiter, who gives the impression of resenting having to take a lesser role as obituarist after having been four times a bureau chief in the NYT hierarchy, or perhaps simply resents having to write one for a National Book Award winner he doesn't approve of. Gilchrist, to my knowledge, was not a great self-promoter, and if she diminished herself in her memoirs and some commentary over the years, Nossiter seems keen on making sure that's intensified in his not-quite-screed.

"Black Winter" (which can be read here) was Gilchrist's second and last story in F&SF, after her charming fantasy "The Green Tent" in the November 1985 issue (a grandmother and her grandson take the equivalent of a magic carpet ride in title device), and it's a far less cheerful item, a rather (necessarily) grim but not quite hopeless account of two survivors of a 1996 nuclear war, academics, an older woman named Rhoda (possibly not the same Rhoda who is a recurring character in earlier stories by Gilchrist) and her younger male protege Tannin, whom we meet several days after the short war, as they seek out what they can from various abandoned stores and gas stations in the midwest, keeping away from large cities in an abundance of (sensible) caution. Rhoda is writing the story in the form of a letter to her grandson, whom she hopes is still alive (but has no way of knowing, if so), in Germany; the colleagues get along, wondering if the fallout will eventually come down upon them in deadly form...and they meet up with some interesting folks with whom they can make some common cause. Rhoda had been noting with some concern the hotspots recurring in the news in 1996: Russia, Ukraine, Iran, North Korea. Things don't change so very much three decades later. 

I had never picked up a copy of the June 1995 issue of F&SF, for whatever reason (I was moving into my last Virginia apartment, at least so far, about then), so I've just read the story for the first time tonight. I read  "The Green Tent" when that issue was new, not so very long after I first read her work with "The Famous Poll at Jody's Bar" in The Atlantic Monthly for August 1982, one of her earlier publications.

It's a fine story, and makes its points well, and it (like "The Green Tent") has never been reprinted, as far as I can tell, anywhere but in an anthology in translation, by the former publisher of the German edition of F&SF (much as "The Green Tent" has only been reprinted, as far as I see, in Fiction, the French edition of F&SF). 

I've been meaning to write about Gilchrist's collection The Cabal and Other Stories for a good six or seven years, but I'll have to excavate that volume and finish it. It really has been a tough year on writers I admire. 

For more of today's short stories, please see Patti Abbott's blog, and her fine review of Gilchrist's "The Presidency of the Louisiana Live Oak Society". 

And I'll seek out some less contemptuous obituaries than the Times's.


Contents: (Edward L. Ferman, editor and publisher)


Contents: (edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Edward L. Ferman, published by Ferman)



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Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Dave Brubeck, December 6, 1920-December 5, 2012


The last studio album, devoted to original compositions (save a reunion album they would record in 1976 for A&M), that the Paul Desmond/Joe Morello/Gene Wright quartet would record, 1966. This was the most famous and successful quartet, performing from 1958-66.

Dave Brubeck: “They Said I Was Too Far Out” by Ralph Gleason — 8/8/1957 An Exclusive Online Extra

A live recording of the quartet's arrangement of music from his oratorio, The Light in the Wilderness...one of the reasons for the end of the Desmond/Morello/Wright quartet, so that Brubeck could write some of his longer works, most with some spiritual import.


Iola Brubeck was the usual lyricist for her husband's songs...such as this from the song cycle, The Real Ambassadors. Louis Armstrong sings lead, supported by Lambert, Hendricks and Ross on "They Say I Look Like God."


An instrumental version of a work written in response to the murders at Kent State and Jackson State, Truth Is Fallen. This piece of the longer work is called, simply "Truth." Gerry Mulligan was actually not a "guest" here, but a regular member of the Brubeck/Mulligan quartet, with Allen Dawson and Jack Six.


 The Octet was made up of largely of jazz players who were fellow students of Darius Milhaud, as Brubeck was, and was sort of a West Coast parallel to what the Gil Evans/John Lewis/Gerry Mulligan "Birth of the Cool" group was doing in NYC.


Brubeck and his sons performed for a while as Two Generations of Brubeck...this is an even larger, if slightly less purely Brubeckian, assembly.


A latter-day quartet version of one of the movements from Howard Brubeck's Dialogues.


And from the initial recording of Dave Brubeck's brother's composition, by the Brubeck Quartet and the New York Philharmonic under the direction of Leonard Bernstein.


The final track from the suite Miro Reflections, the lp having been released as Time Further Out...my default choice as a kid for my favorite record.


Teo Macero on how "Take Five" became a hit.
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Friday, May 27, 2011

Gil Scott-Heron, April 1, 1949 - May 27, 2011

A great composer and performer, a recognized novelist, who had a weakness for coke, and apparently not getting proper HIV meds from his halfway house, left, and thus found himself in jail of late, entirely too often, entirely too long. This didn't help. 62 years old...he helped create rap, did impressive jazz-pop, and wrote incisive lyrics even after life had torn up his voice. Rest in glory.

I saw him and his concert band once, at George Mason University, in 1989. Brilliant set.

"Lady Day and John Coltrane"

From the Wikipedia page:
In the liner notes [for his first album, Small Talk at 125th and Lennox], Scott-Heron acknowledged as influences Richie Havens, John Coltrane, Otis Redding, Jose Feliciano, Billie Holiday, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, Huey Newton, Nina Simone, and the pianist who would become his long-time collaborator, Brian Jackson.

"Johannesburg" in concert


"Home Is Where the Hatred Is"


"Winter in America"


"No Knock"


"Message to the Messengers"


"I Think I'll Call It Morning"


brief interview, about "...Televised"
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Monday, December 14, 2009

Janet Fox, 1940-2009

Well, here's how I put it to the Horror List at Indiana University:

 The worst news all day, posted yesterday [Thursday] on LOCUS OnLine:

 THURSDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2009
Janet Fox, 1940-2009
- posted @ 12/10/2009 01:25:00 PM PT
Writer and editor Janet Fox, 68, died [October] 21, 2009 at home in Osage City KS after a long struggle with cancer. Fox began publishing short fiction in the 1970s, and published scores of stories and poems in magazines including TWILIGHT ZONE, WEIRD TALES, CEMETERY DANCE, and others, as well as numerous anthologies. Under house name Alex McDonough she wrote five books in the Scorpio novel series for Ace, from 1990-93. She edited monthly market 'zine SCAVENGER'S NEWSLETTER from 1984-2003, and was secretary/treasurer of the Small Press Writers and Artists Organization.

 A.R. Morlan has been named Fox's literary executor, and can be contacted c/o Locus.

 See the January issue of LOCUS for a complete obituary.

 --She was an underappreciated writer, who in horror notably did a series of stories over a period of years that concretized bromides such as "You can't take it with you" ("Materialist," MAGAZINE OF HORROR, May 1970, apparently her first sale) and "Inside of every fat person..." ("Screaming to Get Out" WEIRDBOOK 12, 1977, and collected in Gerald Page's THE YEAR'S BEST HORROR STORIES VI [1978]), among much else in the horror field, and at least one excellent series of S&S stories, the Arcana sequence, such as "Demon & Demoiselle" (FANTASTIC, October 1978). She bought a poem from me for SCAVENGER'S NEWSLETTER, published in 1989, my first arguably pro sale in fantastic publishing, and despite that desecration SCAV was a fine 'zine.

It's been a bad year for my friends and a bad year for my editors. I didn't know she was ill, and am sorry she's gone.

 Todd Mason

 [Then I noted, including letting LOCUS know that they had typoed the month, which they have since corrected:]

 LOCUS has typoed the month of her death...October, not September. Her funeral was on Hallowe'en, which might've pleased her (if one has to have one, as one more or less does so far...).

 From the TOPEKA CAPITOL-JOURNAL [and also slightly corrected]

 Janet Kaye Fox
OSAGE CITY Janet Kaye Fox, 68, passed away Wednesday, October 21, 2009, at her home in Osage City. Janet was born October 25, 1940, in Topeka, the daughter of Earl and Luella Dorothy Nordling Fox. She graduated from Osage City High School in 1958 and Emporia State University in 1965. She taught school two years in White City and 15 years at Osage City High School and a number of years after as an instructor for Writers' Digest School. After retiring from teaching she was a writer and had worked as a bookkeeper at Nordling Motors in Osage City. Janet had served as secretary/treasurer of the Small Press Writers and Artists Organization, as well as issuing a newsletter for the group, afterwards establishing Scavengers Newsletter, a monthly market letter for SF/Fantasy/Horror/Mystery writers and artists with an interest in small press published from 1984 to 2003. Her writing career has extended from 1970 through the present, with her work appearing in professional and small press publications. Most of Fox's book length fiction has been written as Alex McDonough, the shared pseudonym under which Ace Books' six-volume Scorpio series was issued in the early 1990s. She wrote all but the first volume. She has also written, under her own name, the [short fiction collection] A Witch's Dozen (2005) and numerous short stories and poems. Janet was a member of the Osage City United Methodist Church. Survivors include a step brother, John Soetebier, Americus; an aunt, Evelyn Slater; cousins, Judy Alexander, Melvin Slater, Phyllis Slater, Rosie Slater and Victoria Rubottom, all of Topeka, Stephen Rubottom of Kent, Washington, Paul James Rubottom of Emporia, Joseph and Carolyn Nordling of Admire and Thomas and Helen Nordling of Osage City; and dedicated friends and caregivers, Sharon Larson and Charles and Deborah Cook, all of Osage City. She was preceded in death by her mother and step father, Luella and August F. Soetebier and her maternal grandparents, Joseph E. and Hannah Matilda Nordling. Memorial services will be at 10:00 a.m., October 31, 2009 at the United Methodist Church in Osage City. Memorial contributions can be made to the United Methodist Church or the CAT Association and sent in care of VanArsdale Funeral Chapel, 107 N 6, Osage City, KS 66523.
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