Showing posts with label popular culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label popular culture. Show all posts

Friday, May 12, 2017

FFB: TURNING POINTS edited by Damon Knight (Harper & Row 1977); DREAM MAKERS: VOLUME II interviews conducted by Charles Platt (Berkley 1985)

Two books about sf and fantasy and what's around them, Damon Knight's pioneering gathering of essays from various sources, about "The Art of Science Fiction" as the subtitle notes (there had been numerous all-original symposia, and some collections of criticism by individual writers, including Knight himself, but no anthology drawing widely on the previously-published literature)...and the second and perhaps more surprising volume of interviews with sf and fantasy writers by the always ready to be contentious Charles Platt (there are two editions of Dream Makers by Platt...the first his first collection of interview essays, the second Platt's selection of entries from both the first two volumes--I recommend reading the entirety of the two earlier volumes).

 Knight's volume, which includes a bit of new material in its time (1977, most notably Knight's own essays on the nature of sf and writing and selling the literature) also offered the first widespread access to certain other documents, published, if at all, only in fanzines of varying degrees of obscurity. This is true of the debate, of sorts, between the rather obscure Philip Geffe and four rather prominent scientists or ex-secientists in the sf field about how scientists are
treated in the fiction, and Joanna Russ's speech, "Alien Monsters," which might be even more controversial, citing as it does an illustration in an sf magazine that no one, apparently, has since found...and which I suspect refers to the resolution to Judith Merril's The Tomorrow People...which Russ cites along the way toward calling for much greater sophistication in dealing with characters and characterization in SF. There is no single thread to the essays Knight collects here, sometimes even within the subheadings the selections are classed with in the table of contents, and I don't think Knight ever intended us to consider each contribution to be the equal of every other one, so much as various sorts of nudges to get the reader new to sf, or a veteran reader or otherwise more involved, to consider or reconsider both conventional wisdom or their own opinions about the field...since the book is mostly about sf, rather than the larger field of fantastic fiction, even if the other sorts of speculative fiction by necessity are discussed. 

 The contents:
i. A Walk Around the Topic
II. History without Tears
III. Criticism, Destructive and Otherwise
IV. S.F. and Science
V. How To, in Four Tricky Lessons
VI. S.F. as Prophecy
VII. Confessions
(The Franklin item, from his book-length study Future Perfect [Oxford, 1966] was omitted by the ISFDB listing for the book; possibly for some reason it's missing from the Macmillan/Orion 2014 ebook edition.)

Casting one's eye over the contents, one can see contributions from those with careers at the heart of the SF fields, including such critics and historians as Versins and Franklin, and those who made notable contributions, sometimes their most important contributions, but who are best-remembered for other work, such as Richard McKenna, whose bestselling historical and only novel The Sand Pebbles might be better known than his notable fantasy short story "Casey Agonistes" and his other work in his brief career in and out of SF, or  Amis, Lewis or Huxley...Lewis definitely considering himself a fantastic-fiction writer, and Amis as well when so engaged, and Huxley apparently not too worried about being so tagged. I do wish another essay by James Blish was included here, though this one is clearly close to Blish's heart, even if the core assumption, that any sentient species is likely to construct a pantheon of gods since humans all over the world do so, seems to me to be shaky anthropomorphism at its most self-reassuring. 

It's a fine and useful book, and I'm glad to see it's once again available, even if solely electronically. 

Charles Platt, for his part, took a few more chances and widened his remit rather better for the interviews gathered for his second collection of interview-based profiles...he, with not much justification, insisted that most of the women writers in SF were essentially fantasy rather than sf writers, so there was only the most begrudged space given to Kate Wilhelm as the only woman writer in the first volume of Dream Makers. And that because Platt didn't have access to Damon Knight, so the married couple interviewed each other for Platt's book, making that the only entry which was not the result of a visit by Platt to the habitation of the writer (or editor) being queried. And to wrap the book, writer and fellow interviewer Douglas Winter interviews Platt (Winter's similar book of interview essays with horror-fiction writers, Faces of Fear, would be released the same year as DM2.
But, despite the presence of Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, Jack Vance and Arthur C. Clarke in this volume (along with the somewhat later arrivals such as Joe Haldman, Larry Niven and Keith Launer), Platt mostly felt freer to include more writers beyond the Old Lions of the field, and with Russ, Alice Sheldon ("James Tiptree, Jr.")  and Kit Reed managed to take in three of the more important women writers, even if none was averse to fantasy, science fantasy or otherwise not have a periodic table of the elements at hand at all times while writing. Andre Norton, then as now, was vastly better known for her YA fiction than her adult work, and others, such as D. M. Thomas, William Burroughs, and to some extent Robert Anton Wilson, were often seen as apart from SF, no matter how much or how often their key works either were firmly in SF traditions or drew heavily on SF viewpoints or techniques. Alvin Toffler was the one non-fiction writer, albeit an allied futurist, included.  But interviews with Russ, the often interview-shy John Sladek, D. M. Thomas (I prefer his sf poetry to his bestseller, in part a time-travel fantasy, The White Hotel)(William Kotzwinkle's The Exile deals far more nimbly with similar materials, I'd suggest). Sturgeon and Laumer capture each at crucial moments in their careeers, or (as in Russ's case) when cagily willing to discuss questions of sexual identity that had not, as far as I know, been stated even as not quite plainly as they are here. And the candid opinions of such writers as Harry Harrison and Stephen King are more than useful in this context; King's cogent assessment of the work of Lin Carter wasn't likely to arise in too many other discussions he'd have in public, much less transcribed. Platt doesn't actually get to see L. Ron Hubbard, but puts an oar in to suggest he was still alive by the time of their 1983 correspondence. 

These two books are collections of useful, if not always the most reliable, statements of thought by mostly major figures in the fields of fantastic fiction, and even those who are not major for one reason or another are worth hearing from even if mostly for the bad example they set. And the mutual appearance of Sturgeon, Russ and Laumer in both volumes isn't the only reason you might gain something from reading them together. 

Please see Patti Abbott's blog for more of today's books.
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Sunday, March 26, 2017

Doubleday Book Clubs ad copy triumphs of the 1950s

Perhaps the worst of the often ridiculous Science Fiction Book Club (US version) ads of the 1950s:

 Meanwhile, the Dollar Mystery Guild in 1951, perhaps (probably) from the same copywriter (and courtesy Paul Di Filippo):


 So, my tribute:
You crossed the court to taste FORBIDDEN LOVE...and now she might kill you!...

...Get out of there, you fool! Use your mentality! But, perhaps...perhaps she'd be Worth It...

You'll thrill to THE DOUBLEDAY BOOK CLUBS AD COPY ANTHOLOGY, one of several "instant remainders" you'll find in the Red Dot clearance pile at the surviving B&N near you. Where else, aside from men's sweat anthologies you'll find on the same shelf, will you find such stirring prose, such intriguing intrigue?

--surely it's simply coincidence that Armstrong and Asimov were alphabetically the first writers in either ad's selection of enticements...surely such ingenious selling techniques weren't so mechanically applied to the work being sold...like pound goods, or at least like mid-price alcoholic beverages, floor wax or cigarets...late '70s SFBC ad, below:

Rather typical DBC ad from the '50s:

 Items I remember purchasing from the Doubleday Book Club, 1975-1976:
Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories to Be Read With the Doors Locked edited by Harold Q. Masur
Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories to Stay Awake By edited by Harold Q. Masur
'Salem's Lot by Stephen King
The Eagle Has Landed by Jack Higgins
The Prometheus Crisis by Thomas Scortia and Frank Robinson
The Encyclopedia of World Travel by C. Earl Cooley and Nelson Doubleday
a similarly useful-looking two-volume reference for gardening (my parents were briefly in the mid-'70s very avid truck gardeners)
A Treasury of Little Golden Books (mostly so I could read them to my then very young brother, and a bit in early nostalgic mode, as between us Eric and I had destroyed some of my own ca. 1966/68-purchased individual slim volumes in that series)

 Books I remember purchasing from the Science Fiction Book Club, 1978-1981:
The Persistence of Vision by John Varley
The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester
Starlight omnibus by Alfred Bester
The Hugo Winners, Volumes 1 and 2 omnibus, edited by Isaac Asimov (clumsily, omitting a Fritz Leiber story from volume 2 and typoing the title of Robert Bloch's story in volume 1, and the careful attention of Doubly-Daze's editors clearly engaged in both volumes, not bothering to clean any of that up for the omnibus reprint)
The Foundation Trilogy omnibus by Isaac Asimov

 Books I remember purchasing from the Quality Paperback Club, 1980-81:
The 101 Best Jazz Albums by Len Lyons
Italian Folktales by Italo Calvino
a boxed set of Calvino novels, which recapitulated an HBJ trade edition, with If on a winter's night a traveler, The Baron in the Trees and Invisible Cities
The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, the then-current (first?) edition of the Jack Zipes volume aimed at adult readers

 --there were others in each case, at least several from QPB, but damned if I remember which at the moment. 
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Friday, March 24, 2017

FFB: THE BANTAM STORY: THIRTY YEARS OF PAPERBACK PUBLISHING by Clarence Petersen (Bantam 1975)

Bantam first commissioned from Clarence Petersen a not quite (but somewhat) potted history of their corporate adventure in 1970, and then had him do another edition five years later...I haven't seen the earlier edition, but the second volume is engaging enough and only in part a more literary Annual Report to the stockholders. Some of it is almost candid, in describing various missteps, and Petersen, at the time of the first version still reviewing paperbacks for the Chicago Tribune,  rather happy to be able to note the successes and victories of other paperback houses from time to time in his narrative. 

 Breezy is perhaps the term that comes to mind most readily, as the book is comparable to the kind of business profile one finds in Forbes or the WSJ, only with a bit more personal reminiscence thrown in. A nice touch is the brief history of paperbound, and unbound, books in first century and a half of the United States' existence, with a notable attempt at an end run around the Post Office's rate on mailing books in the 1870s, by various newspapers and "literary papers" sending unbound book texts wrapped in the periodicals themselves to their subscribers...the P.O. eventually stops this practice, dooming most of the periodicals that had been thriving with this scam.  But not a few hardy publishers simply turn to dime novels and the like, and by the early 1930s, we are told, a few descendants of those early paperback-esque products were being produced in a more professional manner by such publishers as Hillman Novels (Alex Hillman would notably publish fiction magazines he would capriciously quickly shut down in later years, alongside such notable paperback originals as The Dying Earth by Jack Vance) and Lawrence Spivak's Mercury Press (not yet the publisher of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, starting 1941, nor The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, from 1949). But the US paperback industry really took off again with the advent of Pocket Books, basically an offshoot of Simon and Schuster, and the early interest in US expansion by the new and thriving UK firm Penguin, which had gotten its first big leg up by selling through Woolworth's stores in Britain, and how it led them to employ Ian Ballantine, an American newly graduated from the London School of Economics and fascinated by publishing, to launch their US office. Then World War II made remote control from London less practical, and Ballantine and his local staff started packaging and otherwise running US Penguin in their own manner...which didn't sit so well with Allen Lane, Penguin's founder, when the war was over (the latter wanted no illustrations on paperback covers, for example). Ballantine soon found himself, with some other senior staffers, in search of their own shop, and they turned to Grosset and Dunlap, already producing inexpensive hardcover reprint editions and of late owned by a partnership of "main-line" hardcover publishers (in part to keep it out of the hands of Marshall Field, then creating an early multimedia conglomerate) for support in founding what would become Bantam Books. 

 Ballantine, of course, wouldn't stay with Bantam all that long, either (and would found Ballantine Books, though by 1975 Betty and Ian Ballantine had sold Ballantine Books and IB was back at Bantam in a boutique partnership imprint with Betty, Peacock Press, devoted to lavish art books and, soon, the periodical Ariel: The Book of Fantasy). But before leaving initially, Ballantine had put Bantam on good footing, in part by interesting Curtis Circulation Company, the distribution offshoot of The Saturday Evening Post and the next biggest thing after American News Co. in that arena, in the upstart rooster of a publisher.

the 1st, 1970 edition
Bantam managed to weather the recession in the paperback industry in the early 1950s, in part we are told by some very pragmatic moves by post-Ballantine primary publishing director Oscar Dystel, and the rest of the book addresses the various innovations and consolidations Dystel and company were able to achieve with the house, and how paperbacks generally had fared in the years up through '75. Touching on such matters as how deals were struck with hardcover houses and writers, both together and separately; how Bantam would occasionally take on a book as an original (William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist being among the more notable examples), and usually try to find a hardcover house willing to do an edition in boards along with them (Petersen notes that unlike Dell's Delacorte Press, or the less hardy programs at New American Library and other paperback houses--no mention at all of Ace's A. A. Wyn's brief revival of Story Magazine as a periodical hardcover--Bantam up through '75 had never tried a hardcover imprint on its own...perhaps discreetly not mentioning the relative failure of Ballantine Books' attempt at their own line of hardcovers in the '50s). Also covered: the introduction of the Bantam Extra line of "instant" paperback originals, keyed to current events or release of government documents that the Government Printing Office was less well-equipped to produce in mass quantities, and the stresses such books put on the production staff; and the innovations in packaging and publicity Bantam either introduced or helped refine...along with a few odd bits of description of some of the great successes, and less cheering failures, the paperback house had enjoyed (or not) over the years. Petersen is very careful not to dismiss such garbage as Erich von Däniken's books, or Jean Dixon's, while very much more enthusiastic in describing such projects as Bantam's taking on New American Review after it had been dropped by Signet/New American Library and then briefly continued by Simon and Schuster in mass-market paperback format (not published as a Pocket Book), and publishing it as American Review (why continue to advertise the competition?) as a mild, and apparently approaching break-even status by '75, loss-leader, and prestige and author-goodwill project.  It is also interesting (to me, anyway) to note that the Atkins Diet and aerobic exercise regimens were already emerging and controversial matters in the early '70s; meanwhile, brief rundowns on how paperback books (and magazines and catalogs) are designed, printed, bound and shipped are offered, along with accounts of how things went for such important Bantam writers as Jackie Susann, John D. MacDonald, Arthur Hailey, Louis L'Amour, Alvin Toffler and others...including the packaging upgrades for, for example, "Ross Macdonald" as he was taken more seriously by the likes of the New York Times Book Review. And also the nurturing of such "sleepers," eventually to be consistent sellers not only on the racks but to and through schools, as Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. I certainly hadn't realized till reading this that Corgi was Bantam's UK imprint.

 The hopeful noises about how the then-recent megacorporate purchases and sales of  Bantam wouldn't effect the way they did business are a bit of a sad coda here...though the inflationary pressures of the '70s, including the rights bidding wars between the paperback houses, already sometimes self-damaging by the 1960s, are also discussed.

 Worth the look, I think, for most FFB fans, if rarely as in-depth as one might want...and reasonably-priced copies are available from the Usual Suspects. 

 For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
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Friday, March 17, 2017

FFB: POPCORN AND SEXUAL POLITICS: MOVIE REVIEWS by Kathi Maio (Crossing Press 1991); Maio in F&SF

I briefly reviewed Kathi Maio's first collection of film reviews, from the feminist magazine Sojourner (as distinct from the leftist Christian magazine of almost the same title, pluralized), Feminist in the Dark, in a survey of collections from the various film and other a/v critics who've published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction over the years (a cohort which has since been expanded to include David Skal and Tim Pratt). Having unboxed and reread some of her second collection of Sojourner essays, and (sadly) her last book so far (Crossing Press hit some bumpy road not long after the publication of this one, and no one else has picked up the slack in this regard), I thought I'd give this one at least a brief review as well, and cite (again) her online archive of contributions to F&SF (though incomplete, as it starts with her 1999 columns, when she began contributing to F&SF on previous primary columnist Harlan Ellison's recommendation in 1991).

 What I learned after that initial review on the blog was that Maio had been a fellow member, with several regular and past contributors to the weekly Friday Books roundelay, of the amateur press association D[orothy Sayers-]APA-Em, thus an old correspondent and friend...and as also a librarian, her grounding in the literature of crime as well as her feminist sensibilities, wit, and lack of allegiance to any sort of overarching theory of film are all on display as thoroughly in this second collection as they were in the first.  Popcorn is organized slightly differently than Feminist in the Dark was, with thematic groupings of her reviews ("A Fine Romance", "The Lost Race of Hollywood", "The New 'Women's Film'", "Losing Out and Getting Even", "Motherhood in Patriarchy", "With Friends Like These..." [fake feminists] and "A Real Class Act") demonstrate some of the breadth of her concerns with both the esthetics and the conscious and unconscious (and usually too conscious) messages underlying the films under review, in terms (obviously) of race and class considerations as well as gender, and of the uncertainty of large commercial entities and would-be as well as actually profound artists in attempting to portray women's (and everyone's) lives, and reach women (and other) audiences. More of the films in this volume than the first are large-studio/distributor releases, but that doesn't limit how much Maio has to say about them, by any means, and she's not one to dismiss the demotic appeal of a blockbuster, nor to champion obscurity for its own sake. She touches on all sorts of films in the books, as opposed to the more limited focus of her F&SF column to solely films of a fantasticated nature, and the slight tentativeness that could sometimes come particularly with her early columns in the fiction magazine, a result I think of her not being a lifelong primary reader of fantastic fiction the way (I assume) she had been of crime fiction, is not in evidence, even when dealing with such work as Ghost or She-Devil (which of course have artistic roots further away from the core of fantastic drama than those of Arrival or even The Lobster, to cite the two most recently archived reviews). That she is the only columnist to hold the drama desk at the magazine without being in one way or another a central figure in speculative-fiction writing (even Baird Searles, the one non-prose-fiction writer to serve in this wise at F&SF, was a playwright and dabbled in prose fiction and poetry in the fields). 

 Maio is plainspoken without being simplistic nor dogmatic, loves to connect her reactions to the item under discussion with its place in the traditions of earlier film and related art (as any good critic should do, of course). And she does find the sometimes incomplete virtues of the work before her, when possible, and is sure to mention them, while never willing to overlook their flaws...nor the disagreements she has with other critics, including such feminist peers as Molly Haskell.  You should check out her work online for F&SF or the one (1998) piece posted from The New Internationalist, and if encouraged, you can do much worse than to seek out both of her books (she has a sort of preliminary crowd-funding account up, for unspecified purposes, and we can certainly hope for more collected critiques).
Her LinkedIn freelancing citation:
Film, Book and Cultural Criticism, including a regular film column for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Former regular columns at Sojourner: The Women's Forum, On the Issues Magazine, Visions Magazine and Wilson Library Bulletin. Other writings appeared in Ms., New Internationalist, Washington Post Book World, New York Newsday, Second Wave and other periodicals, anthologies and reference books. Author of the books: Feminist in the Dark and Popcorn & Sexual Politics.

 For more of today's books, please see 
Patti Abbott's blog.
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Friday, December 9, 2016

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.

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Friday, December 2, 2016

FFS(&E&RP): some uncollected Wilma Shore short stories (and essays and one radio play) online (and one Joseph Payne Brennan poem)

Two blogposts over the last half-decade isn't Too much to devote to the late, brilliant Wilma Shore, whose career is briefly limned here and here, so here's a third...along with, in the latter, links to the un-"protected" online archives of the magazines that ran these items (and a couple of posts offering both the script and the recording of the playlet she wrote with her husband for Orson Welles's CBS radio series).  An amusing set of magazines, too...there are a few other writers, but no too many, who might tie together the folded but extremely influential sf magazine Galaxy (which published among so much else Damon Knight's "To Serve Man", the first form of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Frank Herbert's Dune Messiah and Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Day Before the Revolution"--Galaxy in its first decade particularly was the home of the kind of satire Kingsley Amis dubbed the "comic inferno"--eventual editor Frederik Pohl was Amis's choice as the best of 1950s sf writers), Good Housekeeping (now ever more a "service" magazine at well over a century of publishing), and the Communist-sponsored quasi-revival of the more broadly radical and also hugely influential magazine The Masses, retitled for the new decade The New Masses.  All of these stories are worth reading, the essays as well, and the playlet just a bit slight and humorously sentimental, but not extraordinarily so (and probably pitched just so to Welles or at least at his request). 
"Goodbye Amanda Jean" is a savage bit of satire, set in a version of 1970 U.S. that allows hunting humans for meat, but where killing just for sport is frowned upon, to say the least (and shooting a teenage girl pedestrian from a moving car, rather than from a stopped one or on one's own feet, is utterly illegal if possibly not prosecuted); Shore barely allows the reader time to gather much at all before Amanda Jean's father has failed to shield his daughter from a crosstown neighbor of sorts, and has, still stunned, accepted a side of the kill for dressing and refrigeration. The loss and injustice of it all still rankles him, and it might just be time to take retribution into his own hands...while staying more inarguably within the law. Bloodsport was in the air at the turn of the '70s, and Shore's story is unrelenting and as plausible as sending National Guard units onto various state university campuses and pointlessly dragging out a war in Vietnam while expanding it to neighboring countries. More startling to me is how much this story, which after appearance in Galaxy has only been reprinted in Robert Silverberg's anthology Alpha 2, and which I've read for the first time this week, prefigures the nature and the method of the satire I applied in one of my better stories, "Bonobos," published a decade back in Claude Lalumiere's webzine Lost Pages...my story, as human/bonobo behavioral crosses might suggest, is as drenched in sex as this one is in violence, and is by intention funnier than Shore's story, but Shore's is the better story, and the laughter here is meant to have what Avram Davidson once referred to as a big bubble of blood in it, in describing a similarly incisive satire. A number of people to whom I've recently mentioned the Shore story remember it well, from reading it decades back. 

 The newer of the two stories from The New Masses, "The Story of Dorothy Anstable", is a much more muted affair, but has an early example of the kind of overbearing stage mother, living through her family, who will recur in some of Shore's other stories; Dorothy also is fortunate enough to have her story retold by her rather slow-witted elder brother, so by the end, we're (or at least I'm) not exactly sure of all the details of how thoroughly her mother's obsession with the daughter's reliable promptness and attendance record, and the minor but Official recognition of it and the petty fame that has accrued with that, has derailed her daughter's life, but we have some sense of it. The least of these stories, but it still has a bit of a chill to it. Speaking of a bit of a chill, the story is immediately followed by an example of historical blank verse, about George Custer and Crazy Horse and their encounter, by none other than the relatively young Joseph Payne Brennan...never much of a poet, and sometimes a rather clumsy constructor of prose but not by any means always, and clearly like his Arkham House editor and publisher August Derleth at least an occasional contributor to the politically radical press. Wilma Shore and Joseph Payne Brennan, both praised by Avram Davidson, though AD liked Shore's work better.

 "Some Day I Have to Buy a Hat" is a much more probable item to have sold to Good Housekeeping, the account of an obstetric nurse doing a favor for a young patient of her boss's private practice, during World War II, in the face of the disruption the war was causing. A far more humane tale than the first two, albeit by necessity just as cognizant of the ugly realities of its times, if also noting that some tragedy can be ameliorated, to some extent, by the kindness of relative strangers. (Shore's essay "What Happened to the Slicks?" notes that this kind of story, not at all shying away from what was happening in a world at war, was now something found in women's magazines that might previously have preferred more purely escapist, if also feminism-tinged, fare. ) It's notable that her story is the first piece of fiction one finds in the GH issue, blurbed by them "A story on the hard-boiled side, but there's a fair chance you'll like it." Shore later stories would get cover credits at the magazine.

 "Decision" is the oldest of these stories, and much more deftly and complexly deals with racism, classism, sexism and the exigencies of Getting By under unfeeling bureaucracy and general inequity than something like the fairly recent film The Help, not too tough for a good short story written by an observer as sharp as Wilma Shore was when this was published in 1941, when the clumsy US bureaucracies were still coping as they did with the leftovers of the Great Depression, not quite yet also coping with US involvement with the war.  The last lines are almost inexorable, and still sting today. 
You can do much worse than visit with these stories and more, and the occasionally reprinted stories and memoirs, in one anthology or occasionally several, including the O. Henry Award Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories and the Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction's volumes over the decades, that await you from Ms. Shore's not so small set of contributions, along with those behind paywalls and the like from The New Yorker, Cosmopolitan, The Nation, The Antioch Review, Women's Studies Quarterly, The Ladies Home Journal, The Saturday Evening Post and other magazines, or seeking out her two books, the short story collection Women Should Be Allowed and the apparently charming, Edward Lear-ish children's picture story Who in the Zoo? Perhaps I'll need to do more than I have so far to advocate and excavate here. 

Much more traditional books and more reviewed at links collected at Patti Abbott's blog.








































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