FFB: DIRTY! DIRTY! DIRTY! by Mike Edison (Soft Skull Press 2011); THE CREATION OF TOMORROW by Paul A. Carter (Columbia University Press 1977)

Paul A. Carter died 28 November, aged 90. He was a very occasional contributor to science fiction literature, but his The Creation of Tomorrow was the first critical/historical volume I read about science fiction, particularly (as the subtitle notes) sf as published in the specialist fiction magazines. The book, published in 1977, was keyed to the golden anniversary of Amazing Science Fiction magazine in 1976, as the oldest inarguable magazine devoted expressly to sf (as opposed to eclectic-fiction/adventure pulps, dime-novel series, boys' papers and fantasy-fiction magazines in English and other languages...or special issues of such Hugo Gernsback magazines as Science and Invention that were market-testers for Amazing Stories' potential appeal). Carter's book is a collection of essays tackling various themes thorough the five decades of its remit, and touching on matters that often weren't discussed in most histories of the magazines at that time nor since. My favorite bit of random knowledge gleaned from Carter's work is an explanation for a thrown-away reference in the Firesign Theater's audio-drama satire LP  Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers to the Rev. Willy Pan, which calls back to an animated character used for mass hypnosis in an early, not widely read Murray Leinster story. I have a copy buried in storage somewhere, and might give a further review sometime soon...but it was certainly a model for a lot of my writing on this blog. 

Mike Edison's been an editor or publisher for such magazines as High Times and Screw, and a contributor to any number of others; in this volume, he traces the history of modern "men's sophisticate" magazines since the foundation of Playboy in 1953, mostly but not entirely focusing on the lives and careers of four editor/publishers: Hugh Hefner, Robert Guccione of Penthouse, Larry Flynt of Hustler and Screw's Al Goldstein. Some attention is given to such other notables as George van Rosen (at whose publishing firm Hefner and William Hamling would meet and apparently together devise their own upgrades on the machismic, unsophisticated magazines such as Modern Man they helped produce for van Rosen, sharing as they did an appreciation for Esquire and a desire to go it a bit more libertine, Modern Man more urbane--with Hamling, already a veteran of the Ziff-Davis pulps and editing and publishing his digest-sized Imagination with his wife out  of their basement, to launch Rogue magazine a year-and-some-months after Playboy began), Ralph Ginzburg (he of Eros and fact magazines), various staffers of the likes of Gallery (co-founded by lawyer F. Lee Bailey, and whose publisher, Montcalm, also would issue The Twilight Zone Magazine and its companions in the 1980s) and High Society, and (Ms.) Dian Hanson of Taschen Books, after co-founding Puritan and a successful editorial run at Leg Show and Juggs. The degree of involvement these magazines and their primary instigators have had in First Amendment court battles, the shift in the Zeitgeist in the US about sexual matters (if probably less profound than they would have you believe, Edison suggests), and general challenge to bluenoses and others make for a rather lively, and rather sobering, narrative...none could be said to have led consistently happy lives, even given the periods of commercial and to some degree or another artistic success they achieved, at least for a while. Also considered: the effects of the work of Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem (before and since founding Ms.) and Helen Gurley Brown and her Cosmopolitan, a sustained success in distinction to more skin-oriented magazines aimed at women such as Guccione's Viva, and Playgirl, despite both of those magazines having at least reasonable runs (and the last being revived at least once); Edison is firmly convinced of Playgirl's audience having been primarily suburban and rural gay men, otherwise starved for "glamor" magazines aimed at them on accessible newsstands. (Otherwise, the gay male skin magazines, admittedly aimed at comparatively small audiences, are barely mentioned, nor at all are such similar magazines as the lesbian On Our Backs or the bisexual Anything That Moves (or, at least, the more erotically-charged Frighten the Horses), nor, perhaps more surprisingly, Evergreen Review and the slew of not exclusively literary erotica magazines that have followed in its wake, from Yellow Silk to Blue Blood to Paramour to Nerve...none Quite as specialized as, say, Draculina, a short-lived newsstand magazine notable for its photo spreads featuring large-canine-bearing vaginas dentata). Greenleaf Books and Rogue's William Hamling and his frequent editor and general associate Earl Kemp are mentioned by name only for their roles in publishing an illustrated version of the Nixon Administration's report on pornography, which led to them both serving some hard prison time, solely in one of the many useful footnotes provided, and not cited in the index. 

Modern Man about the time of the first Playboy

All four of the central figures of the book were (or in Flynt's case, remain) obsessive, easily triggered task-masters at their corporate offices...which in Hefner and Guccione's cases became their mansions, and to some extent only a small part of those edifices (Hefner because he had a retinue of partiers usually floating about his, Guccione in part because he simply didn't wish to go into certain rooms of his comparatively uninhabited residence). All four had no lack of early trauma they never quite overcame, and, Edison suggests, had differing degrees of self-awareness regarding. Each had key women in their lives, though all had their relations end somewhat badly...particularly for Guccione, whose partner Kathy Keeton died of cancer almost a decade before a different sort took her widower, and Flynt, whose wife died of a combination of AIDS-related ravages and the drugs she couldn't resist. How they interacted, tweaked or simply stole ideas from each other and/or sold material to and or challenged each other in their respective magazines makes for some interesting further contrasts and parallels...Goldstein, with his largely New York City-based tabloid paper, was perhaps for most of the years of their mutual enterprises the one closest to each of the others, contributing most readily and frequently to the magazines of or advising the other three. 

Edison has done his research, in digging into backfiles of magazines and newspapers (for trial coverage and much else) and even such unlikely products as public-access television interview programming (beyond Goldstein's notorious Midnight Blue); it's a pity the book is not copy-edited...Edison is enough of an editor as well as writer to keep the interlocking narratives and background filling-in lively and mostly smoothly-written, but at times repetitive (there are somewhere between six and twenty references to effective defense lawyer Herald Price Fahringer as the "Joe DiMaggio of the First Amendment") and Edison's memory of the less topic-specific historical events can fail him, as when he has Reagan moving into the White House eleven months before John Lennon's murder in December of 1980, rather than the month after; several other similar bobbles pop up here and there.  I was hoping for perhaps a bit more on the involvement of Paul Krassner as publisher of Hustler, during the period Flynt stepped away from the magazine while briefly a convert to Ruth Carter Stapleton's sort of evangelical Christianity, but it's notable also how many other sorts of magazine and other publishing the quartet and their associates were involved with over the years, including the post-Mad Harvey Kurtzman humor magazines Trump and Humbug that Hefner directly or indirectly funded (and Kurtzman's last magazine, Help!, was one of the Warren magazines, which began with a minor, short-lived Playboy imitator After Hours, folded shortly after helping to launch the much more durable Famous Monsters of Filmland and spin-offs, and later the Warren horror-comics magazines such as Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella--before Kurtzman would turn after 1965 to the long-running comic strip "Little Annie Fanny" in Playboy as his most consistent paycheck).  Guccione and Keeton's other projects included Omni and Longevity magazines; he would fund his sisters' more modest project, the digest fiction magazine Espionage as well as his son's music magazine Spin, though Robert Guccione, Jr. didn't attempt his own skin/lad-mag--or younger-skewing Esquire--title Gear till after his father broke off relations and support after two years of Spin's publication, and younger Guccione sought and found independent investors. 

All in all, an impressive book, and interesting to me for some of the holes filled in about these men and women, and their mutual interaction and sometimes reluctant but necessary working in common cause, their rivalries and strengths and weaknesses. All of the primary quartet made, and spent, a whole lot of money in the interests of doing what they wanted to provide what they thought was valuable and challenging material, with some degree of denial in recognizing any damage they might've caused along the way...and cognizant of more than they cared to be, it seems, in each case. 

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

FFMagazines: AMERICAN APHRODITE #19 (1955); EROS #4 Winter 1962

The attempts to produce a literate erotica magazine in the US in the latter 1950s and early 1960s were met with considerable resistance at times (Ralph Ginzburg, the editor and publisher of Eros, courted trouble; Samuel Roth and company, of the earlier American Aphrodite, seemed to fly a little more under the radar). And, of course, while they were aimed at being liberatory and intelligently bohemian, featuring imagery of bare backsides didn't keep them from feeling a bit half-assed.

While the likes of Esquire, Playboy and Evergreen Review had all been lightning rods for scrutiny and condemnation (and their imitators as well), none of them (certainly not even Playboy) was solely about sex...even if aids to masturbation (for the audience that enjoyed women's aspect) were the most obvious selling point of a given issue. And, certainly, the majority of women and not a few men were left out of the target-audience equation for these magazines, and the less ambitious skin-magazine digests that flourished at mid-century.  Even if Evergreen Review didn't promote itself (overtly) as a men's stroke-book, the mix certainly leaned that way...these two publications were making, to what degree of success is another matter, an effort to reach out simultaneously to those of several persuasions, at a time when the presumed default assumptions ran to the sickness of all homosexuality, the baseness of male heterosexual lust, the odd mix of dainty and guilty that was assumed to be female heterosexuality. 

So, the advent of the occasional attempt such as these book-a-zines...and it's probably notable that both of these were published in hardcover format even though they were periodicals, and could be sold either way...with a mix of materials new and old, the old having the advantages of usually being out of copyright protection as well as giving a certain classic or at least (very) arguably tony flavor to the enterprise in question.

Among the more interesting new items in either issue here is the Ray Bradbury story "The Long After Midnight Girl", which deals in part with homophobia and sexual violence in a fairly straightforward way, if going about it somewhat cutely (Bradbury could preach). It's notable (to me, at least) that Anthony Boucher makes a point of mentioning how unsettling he found the story, in not including it but shortlisting it in the appropriate volume of The Year's Best Detective Stories.

These remain interesting for what they suggest about the times, what was and wasn't possible in this kind of publishing, and how they are and are not too much different from similar attempts today, and in recent years. 

Please see Patti Abbott's blog for more of today's books (and perhaps a few other magazines...).

Eros #4:
Contents: 
Love in the Bible / Rufus Mott -- 
The Jewel Box Revue : A Photographic Essay / Raymond Jacobs -- 
A Letter From Allan Ginsberg -- 
Was Shakespeare a Homosexual? / John Erno Russell -- 
I Want a Girl Just Like the Girl -- 
The Long After Midnight Girl : A Short, Short Story / Ray Bradbury -- 
The Sexual Side of Anti-Semitism / Shepherd Raymond -- 
My Life and Loves / Frank Harris, introduction by Warren Boroson -- 
New Twists on 3 Great Trysts / Dan Greenburg -- 
President Harding's Second Lady / John Hejno -- 
Bawdy Limericks : The Folklore of the Intellectual -- 
The Natural Superiority of Women as Eroticists / Eberhard W and Phyllis C Kronhausen -- 
Memoirs of a Male Chaperon / John Sack -- 
Black and White in Color : A Photographic Tone Poem / Ralph M Hattersley Jr. -- 
Lysistrata / Aristophanes, a free adaptation by Ivan Grazni; 
artwork, Albrecht Durer, Rembrandt, Heindrik Goltzius, Jost De Negker, Geller, Jerome Snyder, John Alcom, Charles B Slackman, Milton Glaser; Norman Lindsay, photos, C. White, Raymond Jacobs 


American Aphrodite: A Quarterly for the Fancy Free [v 5 #19, 1955] ed. Samuel Roth & Hal Zucker ( )
Details supplied by Ned Brooks.
• 3 · Why Celine · Hal Zucker · es
• 5 · Hobohemians · Philip Owens · nv
• 43 · The Tongue of Spring and other poems · Beatrice Baron · pm; illus. Picasso
• 56 · Five Poems · Shearman Ray · pm
• 59 · The Labyrinth · Anais Nin · ss
• 63 · Was It Will Be · John Lee Weldon · pl
• 74 · Tennis Anyone? · Anon. · pt; [photographic study]
• 81 · Married Misery · Harry Roskolenko · ss
• 88 · Edge of the Nest · Eugene Armfield · ss Pagany Apr-Jun 1931; illus. Roy Krenkel
• 97 · London Aphrodite · Denys Val Baker, ed. · mg; [separate pagination, 1-160]
• 7 · Introduction · Denys Val Baker · ed
• 9 · The Wanderers · Alun Lewis · ss The Welsh Review Oct 1939
• 25 · The Kimono · H. E. Bates · nv Missing from Their Homes, ed. Anon., Hutchinson 1936
• 43 · A Pearl of Great Price · Rhys Davies · ss
• 53 · The Bridal Night · Frank O’Connor · ss Magpie Nov 1951
• 61 · The Lady and the Tramp · L. J. Daventry · ss
• 80 · The Trap · Dorothy K. Haynes · ss Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Witch, London: Methuen 1949
• 86 · The Touch · Liam O’Flaherty · ss
• 95 · The Bishop Who Was Never Lonely · Norman Nicholson · ss
• 104 · The Saviour · Glyn Jones · ss
• 116 · The Girl at the Fair · Denys Val Baker · ss
• 126 · A Prospect of the Sea · Dylan Thomas · ss
• 134 · The Vindication · James Thurlby · ss The Face in the Mirror, ed. Anon., London: Opus Press 1946
• 141 · The Imprisoned · Rearden Conner · ss
• 149 · Lost · Patrick Shone · ss

FFB: THE BEST AMERICAN EROTICA 1993 edited by Susie Bright (Simon and Schuster)

Contents, courtesy William Contento's Miscellaneous Anthologies site:
The Best American Erotica 1993 ed. Susan Bright (Simon & Schuster, 1993; S&S's paperback reprint: Touchstone Books 0-684-84514-8, Apr ’97, $17.95, 244pp, tp); (Contents from www.susiebright.com)

· I Have Something for You · Blake C. Aarens · ss

· from Vox · Nicholson Baker · ex New York: Random House, 1992

· Horny · Greg Boyd · ss

· Belonging · Pat Califia · ss

· from “Citre et Trans” · Samuel R. Delany · ex Driftglass/Starshards, Grafton, 1993

· Milk · Michael Dorsey · ss

· Why · Bob Flanagan · ss

· Ninety-Three Million Miles Away · Barbara Gowdy · ss

· Serenade for Female with Fantasies · Ann Marie Mardith · ss

· Five Dimes · Melissa [Anita Melissa Mashman] · ss

· Rubenesque · Magenta Michaels · ss

· Needless to Say · Lisa Palac · ss

· Golden Boy · Carol Queen · ss

· from The Tale of the Body Thief · Anne Rice · ex New York: Knopf, 1992

· Brian’s Bedroom · Leigh Rutledge · ss

· Two at Once · Robert Silverberg · ss Penthouse Letters, 1992

· The Flood · Ronald Sukenick · ss

· Me and the Boys · Trish Thomas · ss

· Ellen, from Chicago · Pat Williams · ss

· Griffs, on a Rainy Sunday in L.A. · Carter Wilson · ss

This was the first of sexual-matters commentator and On Our Backs magazine all-but-co-founder Susie Bright's annual series, which would see fourteen more volumes before wrapping up with the 2008 volume (having skipped a year), the last volume both a best of its previous year and a survey of the best of the previous volumes. [***Not quite, as my late-night memory played me false...as Bright notes in comments, below, the non-series-retrospective fiction in the last volume was original to the anthology...a tack taken by a number of the other "best-of" annuals, particularly but not exclusively in the erotica field.] (And On Our Backs was the first skin/sexuality magazine, or at least the first sustained one, to be aimed squarely at the lesbian reader, taking its title in gentle mockery of the DC-based feminist newspaper Off Our Backs.) The flood of annual and vaguely/possibly annual best-of volumes in the erotica field since 1993 owes something to the entry of Bright and S&S into virgin territory.

And this was a solid first go. The Anne Rice excerpt was about as unimpressive as all the Rice fiction I'd ever sampled (or have since), but the variety and grace (or its antithesis when desired) of the rest of the contents made for a memorable read, even with such stories as the Silverberg, an account of a not quite successful multipartner tryst, being wry or otherwise amusing even when not at all arousing...Bright was seeking a broad-spectrum approach, figuring the strength of her contributors' work would make for good reading even when the sexual exploration of a given piece might not do much for a given reader's libido...and that readers might be surprised to respond to a work where the passion in the telling transcended the lack of lust inspired by the type of sexual encounter described. I was already familiar with the work of Silverberg, Delany, Rice, and Sukenick as fiction-writers, and had heard of but not read Baker thus; Lisa Palac and Pat Califia I knew better for various sorts of nonfiction (Palac mostly from MaximumRocknRoll magazine), and Bob Flanagan as the subject of others' nonfiction (a man in constant pain from cystic fibrosis, he embraced and magnified his pain, became mildly famous as a "super-masochist" and explorer of the limits of that kind of lifestyle). The others were completely new to me; Gowdy and "Melissa" certainly made an impression, even if their work here wasn't up to the very best Bright would highlight in future volumes, such as William Harrison's gentle yet fervent "Two Cars in a Cornfield" (he of "Roller Ball Murder", the Esquire short story that is vastly better than either film made from it) or Clean Sheets and Slow Trains editor Susannah Indigo's several contributions. A. M. Homes and Dagoberto Gilb, Marge Piercy and Zane, Poppy Brite and Jerry Stahl, Chuck Palahniuk and Vaginal Cream Davis and Dorothy Allison and Cecelia Tan would appear in future volumes, and now Bright is back in the game, after a few years' interregnum, with her old friend Rachel Kramer Bussel, editing the Best Sex Writing annual. All to the good, because even the fine work of Bussel on her own or of Maxim Jakubowski, who edits both crime-fiction and erotica annuals for Robinson in the UK and (after the collapse of Carroll and Graf) Running Press in the US haven't lessened my feeling the absence the foremother of all the plethora of randy children (such annuals as the Best Women's Erotica, Best Lesbian Erotica, Best Gay Erotica, etc.) in the best-of series arena, which might or might not catch another inflow of intrigued readers in the afterglow of the most recent erotic-fiction bestsellers.

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