Everett F Bleiler 04/30/1920 - 06/13/2010

Just a taste of the range of his work, quite aside from his long run as an editor at Dover Books:

Bibliography:

The Best Science Fiction (the first such annual in the sf field)
The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1949 (with T. E. Dikty)
The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1950 (with T. E. Dikty)
The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1951 (with T. E. Dikty)
The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1952 (with T. E. Dikty)
The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1953 (with T. E. Dikty)
The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1954 (with T. E. Dikty)
Year’s Best Science Fiction Novels: 1952 (with T. E. Dikty)
Year’s Best Science Fiction Novels: 1953 (with T. E. Dikty)
Year’s Best Science Fiction Novels: 1954 (with T. E. Dikty)

Other anthologies
Imagination Unlimited (with T. E. Dikty, 1952)

Single Author Collections
Three Prophetic Science Fiction Novels of H. G. Wells (1960)
Ghost and Horror Stories of Ambrose Bierce (1964)
The Best Tales of Hoffmann by E. T. A. Hoffmann (1967)
The King in Yellow and Other Stories by Robert W. Chambers (1970)
Ghost Stories and Mysteries by Sheridan Le Fanu (1971)
Gods, Men, and Ghosts by Lord Dunsany (1972)
The Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood (1973)
The Collected Ghost Stories of Mrs J.H. Riddell (1977)
The Best Supernatural Tales of Arthur Conan Doyle (1979)

Nonfiction
The Checklist of Fantastic Literature (1948)
The Guide to Supernatural Fiction (1983)
Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror (1985)

doggerel after a bad day

This imperfect instrument,
Offered with some diffidence, but
With some hope that it will suffice.

No guarantees, mind you, other than
It can take some damage over the short term...
And will endure it.
And work about as well as it ever has.

But it's available.
Whether it's worth the trouble
Is always a good question.

Maria Bamford, Jackie Kashian, Joe De Vito: Comix (NYC) 12 June 2010

My best friend Alice and I took a daytrip up to NYC to see Maria Bamford and Jackie Kashian at the NYC comedy club/restaurant/bar Comix, and found ourselves seated at the edge of the tiny stage. Joe De Vito turned out to be the MC for the show, and did a good intro set, involving us in his crowd-work (I think we looked insufficiently clothes-conscious to be Manhattanites), and generally setting a sufficiently congruent tone for Kashian and Bamford...in a bit about touring in Texas, De Vito seemed genuinely surprised that there were still such people as dressed like and sometimes even work as cowboys, turning to us to note that would be like visiting Philly and seeing Benjamin Franklin walking around...we didn't interrupt him to note how many men are making their living being Ben Franklin walking around the historic sectors of Philadelphia, most guiding tours. This, by the way, was Not the "G- and R-rated" hypnotist comedian Joe DeVito (to judge by his webpage, thank goodness)...who knew, if one went Comdeyland, that there'd still be so many Joe De Vitos out and about?

Jackie Kashian, fairly recently back from Iraq, did a fine, plainspoken set (she stroked the audience with notes that her more literary jokes made a much better impression there than anywhere else she'd tried them)...much of it audible on her album It Is Never Going To Be Bread, admixed with various Iraq-related and other jokes and anecdotes. She let us know at the outset, let it be taken as a given, she's fat (not really so very fat); many people make jokes about it, it's not all that funny. After the show, I picked up a copy of Bread from her (courtesy of Alice, since although I bankrolled the evening except for a few incidentals, most notably otherwise driving to the Hamilton NJ Transit station to get to NYC, I had no cash on me--or bread, if you will, of the non-electronic kind). As we did this, we had a pleasnt chat with Kashian as we stood in the line to allow Bamford and her to greet fans and sign and sell some discs. I'd let her know that I'd listened to her The Dork Forest podcast series; she mentioned that she was about to get some more-professional grade recording and podcasting equipment, even if it might mean a loss of lo-fi charm. She also noted that she began her standup career two decades ago in a sort of variation on I Can Do Better Than That--she'd had some too many and heckled Sam Kinison, of all aggro standups to heckle, and had been dismissively instructed by the nightclub manager that Open Mike (for amateurs or anyone who wanted to take a few minutes on stage) was on another night...and three weeks later she was back to try her first Open Mike set.

Maria Bamford's energetic set followed, where I'd say about 30% of the material was new to me and 70% of the material was familiar, though often tweaked or reshuffled in new ways, from her various sorts of recordings (including the Comedians of Comedy tour series and one-shot videos, the Plan B and The Maria Bamford Show videos as well as her 2001 Comedy Central Presents on a dvd with four other women comedians; her later CC half-hour has not been releeased on home video yet, I believe, and her three albums, The Burning Bridges Tour, How to Win and Unwanted Thoughts Syndrome). Where Kashian is an incisive and creative but fairly traditional standup, telling jokes and making observations from a persona that is her own, Bamford (as noted on this blog previously) is constantly shifting from that kind of approach into multi-character sketches she brings off with her skill in vocal character-creation, and then back again for some crowdwork (a fellow sitting next to Alice was persuaded to get up on stage and sing an unauthorized variation on the Coldstone Creamery song he was required to sing for customers while scooping at that chain years ago). Bamford's physical as well as mental energy seemed up, as she'd dance and run in place in such a way that I was put in mind of the younger Roger Daltrey, though some of the set seemed to inspire some sense-memories that were a little heavy for her (though perhaps it was simply allergies or the stage lights that were causing a bit of eye-watering...we were ridiculously close to all the performers). Didn't get as much time to chat with Bamford, as old acquaintances would pop up and interrupt, and we weren't at the end of the line of 8pm audience well-wishers even as the 10 o'clock show grew imminent, but she was kind enough to sign the Netflix Comedians of Comedy tour-documentary disc (the one thing I'd had the wit to locate on my way out that morning); unfortunately, she was sold out of Unwanted Thoughts copies she was offering at the club and so thanked us for coming and sitting in the front row--no problem at all, given we didn't expect Kashian or Bamford to feel the need to insult us or splatter us with fruit juices--and we thanked her for her fine work, and encouraged both her and Kashian to come back to Philadelphia...which might or might not occur, we gathered. During Bamford's crowd work, we hadn't volunteered that Alice is a psychiatrist and I handle the national tv schedule/listings for one of Bamford's series, Wordgirl, and failed to do so while in the hall with her, but nonetheless she was very gracious. (So, I went ahead and bought Alice the Bamford albums and such, and myself the previous Kashian album, after getting home early in the morning.)

Comix staff were helpful, even if it was a little odd that Alice's dessert was presented during Kashian's set, albeit discreetly; the food was, as one compaint reads somewhere online, kind of touristy and certainly not cheap, though not bad. Unless, like Alice, you have the prix fixe dinner, there's a two-drink minimum, so go ahead and add ten dollars, at least, to any ticket, plus gratuity. Easy enough to find your way to Comix, two subway stops away from Penn Station. Not exactly distracting, but certainly hard to miss for me, was the young woman sitting across the stage from us, wearing a matching white microminiskirt and crop-top, directly in the eyeline for me as I watched the performers; she was mostly leg, and dressed accordingly. So, that's a Comix crowd, if you factor in also the smartly dressed and very nice folks sitting just behind us from the stage perspective, who also live in the Philadelphia suburbs and were in town since they were visiting the North Jersey parents of one of them. Somwhat crowded conditions, but a decent club and a very satisfying night of performance.

Please see also: these previous posts on Bamford's work, including the Lenny Bruce comparison, the quick review of How to Win, and the formal argument for why Bamford and Maria Bello are not the same person...

UPDATE: No fewer than five vendors have discovered that they don't have a copy of Jackie Kashian's Circus People, after all, since I've started ordering it on Sunday morning. Along with an odd glitch on Kashian's Dork Forest page, which I brought to her attention only for her not to find it glitching at all, the quality of my adventures in gathering more Kashian input has mirrored the quality of other aspects of the day today. I must must not live right. (I might just buy the MP3, but I like to have a relatively durable hardcopy around, too.)

FFB: COMPLETELY DOOMED (IDW 2007); Memorials: Martin Gardner (THE NEW AGE) and Arthur Herzog (THE B.S. FACTOR)

Completely Doomed, the compilation from IDW's flagship horror-anthology comic Doomed, the first one to make a splash since Harlan Ellison's partly-horror Dream Corridor a decade previously, and one more tied to "real" literary horror than any other since the Ellison or Cemetery Dance Publications' less well-received Grave Tales, is a solid Good Try...excellent art, excellent choices in the fiction adapted (horror and suspense fiction rarely rivals Robert Bloch's "Final Performance," and Richard Matheson's "Blood Son" tends to stick with one; David Schow and F. Paul Wilson are no slouches), but somehow the stories here lack the power of the fiction they're based on. The scripts may not be altogether at fault, since they have a high bar to match, in the case of most of the stories adapted here...but the comparison that most of the commenters on Amazon (another book barely in print!) make is more apt than they intend, when they note how similar Doomed is to the Warren magazines of the 1960s and 1970s, the relatively elegantly-illustrated and dully-written Creepy and Eerie, in their turn a refuge for the artists who had done such good work for the EC and other horror comics of the 1950s, often for undistinguished (or worse) scripts for those publishers, too. Such distinctive artists as Ashley Wood and Ted McKeever here do what they do very well indeed...Wood did the rather fanboy cheesecake cover, depicting the "host" of the comic, Ms. Doomed, in one of her many guises...but even that is indicative of the basic failure here...not quite Weird enough, even if it does distantly harken to the Weird Tales covers of Margaret Brundage. My copy of this one is buried in a moving box, or else I would hope to cite the name of the editor, which is rather coyly elided in the online references...Chris Ryall, as scripter, and Wood as illustrator of the adaptation of "Blood Son" were nominated for the Eisner, the most prestigious award in comics...which, I think, more than any other aspect of the enterprise helped inspire at least DC/Vertigo, their adult-oriented prestige line, to revive the very long-lived House of Mystery anthology title, and Dark Horse Comics to offer a revival of Creepy (I believe Marvel and Fantagraphics also dabbled in similar projects, without committing to new/revived horror anthologies)--it's not as if the prestige accorded Doomed was enough to keep IDW publishing the magazine...this anthology contains the entire run, if I'm not mistaken. But a worthy experiment, and worth a look for aficionados of horror and suspense fiction, or comics.

The U.S. paperback

Grimmer business...in the last several weeks we've lost two writers who told engaging lies (in that both were good fiction-writers, Martin Gardner with short stories for the most part, Arthur Herzog with the reportedly surprisingly good novel The Swarm among other work--surprisingly mostly due to the rash of bad Killer Bee work produced around it, not surprising as a Herzog production)...but who were even more dear to me for their truth-seeking. The first edition of The B.S. Factor, or at least its paperback edition (the one pictured, which I have, somewhere in storage) was a very entertaining and useful book for me to come across in my youth...not quite Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," but a fine, somewhat less intense and more wide-ranging successor, sniffing out cant in many forms, and mocking it sometimes gently, usually not so gently. The New Age was a wide-ranging collection of Gardner's writing, a sequel of sorts to the unitary and consistently in-print Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science...and at least as pleasurable a reading experience, even or perhaps because it's such a miscellany of essays, reviews and other sorts of nonfiction...more fun than his columns in Scientific American and Asimov's Science Fiction magazines in my youth (I hadn't yet quite caught up with The Skeptical Inquirer and related publications, where much of this book was first published.) May these two not be forgotten...neither the books or their authors.

For more "forgotten" books, please see Patti Abbott's blog, for the weekly roundup of participating reviewers and their nominations...

Why Maria Bamford is the current Lenny Bruce...(revisited)

Maria Bamford's website; she and Jackie Kashian are doing several shows at Comix in NYC, Thursday through Saturday.

1. The respect of her peers. Other comedians, such as Marc Maron and Paul F. Tompkins, make a point of noting that she's either their favorite comedian or one of their favorites, rather as Bruce was often the touchstone of his time. Also, it's notable the degree of generosity both have demonstrated toward their peers (which is one way to become popular personally, I'm sure...Bruce was frequently willing to incorporate his peers into routines, and Bamford famously talks up her peers (beyond her very good friends, such as Kashian) in interviews, as well as having extensive lists of links to other women comedians on her website...as well as conversing with them politely in those situations, which is rather distinct from some of the peers, who seem to think "Shut the fuck up!" is a hilarious line in and of itself.

2. The dramatic impulse. Perhaps most comedians will work up dialogues with characters for at least some routines, but Bamford like Bruce likes to work up fairly elaborate little dramas, with a multiplicity of voices (Bamford is a busy animation voice actor as well). Bamford often re-enacts job and family situations versus Bruce's film parodies and barroom scenes, but nonetheless the feel is rather similar.

3. The challenge to the audience, without being hostile to the audience. A number of comedians overtly, or not very effectively covertly, have a certain hostility, presumably a love-hatred, of their audiences. Bruce seemed to set up a rapport with his audiences, setting up his most challenging routines (mocking organized religion, using eptithets) as a Can you believe this? and Wow, isn't this an amazing hypocrisy? dynamic. Bamford often deals with similar matters, often from a feminist perspective and with a focus on interpersonal interaction.

4. Looking into their personal "darkness," and making it "relatable." Both have been acutely aware of their own problems, and have been willing to explore them and related matters in a way that was both clearly therapeutic in some ways and in which they didn't hold up the eccentricity as Hilarious Because Weird so much as possibly hilarious because it was so damned spooky...and common.

5. Not so focused on Traditional Joke Structure, as even such "alternative" comics as Mitch Hedberg and Dave Attell have been.

For examples:
Lenny Bruce's most extended routine, among his Fantasy Records recordings, "The Palladium.". About a mildly successful hack comedian who gets himself booked into the largest London music hall, just to show he can perform there...unfortunately, things don't go quite as he hopes, not least because he follows, in the show, a crowd-pleaser of a woman singer who specializes in lachrymose patriotic displays and other blatant ploys...and because he simply isn't that good a comedian.
Maria Bamford's "Road Show", which closes her third album and is clearly a favored routine of hers, and one of her most potent, has a few resonances of the Bruce, without being in any way derivative of it...in Bamford's, she imagines the typical accessible or "universal" female comedian's set, riddled with involuntary expressions of self-loathing as the hack comedian persona makes her way through her routines...including singging a snatch of "The Star-Spangled Banner"...

Bamford performances and interviews I've particularly enjoyed of late:

Maria Bamford as Jazz (or possibly Jess) Martin, or Mrs. Rep. Richard Martin (Paul Gilmartin), the slightly paranoid-schizophrenic wife of a smarmy GOP House-member (their routine begins about five minutes in on this older episode of Comedy Death Ray Radio with guest-host Jimmy Pardo, once and future Conan O'Brien show comedian)

Meanwhile, a video clip (and ad) about Lenny Bruce's relation to jazz, including a NYC-only television hour he put together, a pilot called The World of Lenny Bruce:


Meanwhile, I've embedded this in a blog entry previously, but here is the "Christmas Special," a rather freeform sit-down run through a lot of her stand-up material...delivered in a deliberately unpolished way, particularly compared to her performances on her cds:


Maria Bamford's One-Hour Homemade Christmas Special! from Maria Bamford on Vimeo.

Perhaps the best straightforward interview I've heard recently with Bamford, from the podcast Comedy And Everything Else, which followed this one:

The Bamford WTF interview is pretty interesting for fans of both Bamford and WTF host Marc Maron.

And (the free, truncated form) of Never Not Funny, the first episode of the fourth season, with Bamford. As with his previous, less jokey interview, Pardo goes for put-on swinish humor at first.

FFB: James Thurber: THE YEARS WITH ROSS

The Years with Ross is a memoir by James Thurber of his experiences, and those of the rest of the The New Yorker crew, with founding editor Harold Ross, a colorful character to say the least and one as full of seeming contradictions as H.L. Mencken, who might be his closest correspondent in American letters in their era...except that, as Thurber noted, Ross could never bring himself to write extensively for publication, after his early career in journalism.

It's also a rare example of a book in print among my entries in this series of reviews, but in discovering it was still in print (since I have the first Book-of-theMonth-Club edition from the 1950s, and first read it some twenty five years ago), I had an opportunity to read Adam Gopnick's self-congratulatory little deposit as foreward to the edition pictured here. In noting, correctly, that Thurber's Ross seems rather a comic figure (a man who consistently affected an aw-shucks Midwestern manner while running a magazine that made a point of insulting Midwesterners on occasion, in favor of presumably un-provincial NYCers at heart if not in address; a man who constantly swore yet blanched at the notion of impropriety of any sort advocated by his ostensibly sophisticated magazine; this is not a man who lacks in comic potential), Gopnick decides that he knows Thurber was merely taking Ross down a peg, and we moderns can clearly see that Thurber was merely resentful of Ross as any writer is of their editor, and today's reader doesn't care about the details of the publishing life in the '30s...what's interesting is the relation between writer and editor, even as so cleverly distorted by grumpy old Thurber-bear. I'm not getting across the full smugness of Gopnick, but it is a pretty remarkable performance, pretty amazingly echoing the sins Gopnick ascribes to Thurber only the younger man commits them less deftly. And, yes, this 21st century reader is indeed interested in the details of publishing in the 1930s, which is why I read books about publishing in the 1930s. Goodness.

But Gopnick isn't completely wrong...Thurber clearly was letting festering irritation out in much of what he wrote about Ross, but unless Thurber made up incidents out of whole cloth, one can see why he might be harboring those resentments, given the capriciousness of much of Ross's decision-making...in the manner of many great yet not consistently correct editors...who were Right even when not correct, by dint of their passion and willingness to shape their medium to fit their vision, as much as the vision of their contributors.

In short, a very useful book, as a look at both Thurber and Ross and how The New Yorker established itself, before becoming the relative bore it became under Shawn and the weathervaning creature it has been since Shawn. And Gopnick's little contribution, and the inclusion of some Thurber memos by the writer's heirs in this edition make it a slight more Interesting experience, it's true.

For more links to "forgotten" book entries this week, please see Patti Abbott's blog, this and every Friday.