FFB of a sort, Blogger Crash/Crisis Week edition: The Jack Gaughan Book and related stuff...

A[n Open, now] Note to Luis Ortiz:

Just reading the Gaughan article in Illustration...and I will be picking up that book sooner rather than later.

I note a reference to the sf-magazine field shrinking to F&SF, Analog, Galaxy and Amazing (the latter two staggering), and the advent of Asimov's, by the end of the '70s...Fantastic actually was still getting by till a ways into 1980, and my finances also were taxed a bit by the shortlived Asimov's SF Adventure, the Asimov's Anthology magazine Davis was also publishing, and Destinies, albeit the last was usually purchased by my father and I'd read his issues...we couldn't find Galileo too often, but it was still around, too. [I suppose it's almost a cheat to cite Destinies, since it was a paperback magazine, in the manner of Perry Rhodan or American Review...this being one of few sentences ever to wed those two periodical books.]

Of course, I was also picking up Whispers and Short Story International and the crime-fiction magazines as I came across them, so it seemed like a fuller market.



What wasn't in the note to Luis:
I didn't get to see all the little magazines in those years, in sf and fantasy as well as eclectic titles...it would take until the '80s for me to find the back issues of Evergreen Review, as I've mentioned here, and Triquarterly and all, but it was always a thrill to find a new project had arrived on the newsstands to supplement my steady diet of my subscriptions to The Atlantic (a better magazine in 1980 than it is today, and one with a short story or two in every issue, much as Harper's and The American Scholar essentially still provide today, though the last has only recently added fiction to its mix...perhaps in response to the Atlantic essentially dropping fiction) and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine (I had bought a cheap 3-year subscription in 1978, but didn't approve of the post office's depredations upon the mailed copies, so usually bought everything else off the newsstand) and the others...such as when Twilight Zone Magazine popped up in 1981, albeit the first issues weren't Too impressive...but the lack of Fantastic left a hole in the heart, and there were some good portents about TZ (and its shortlived companion, Night Cry) that would prove out over the next eight years.

Omni and Heavy Metal, where Ben Bova of Analog and Ted White of Fantastic and Amazing landed, respectively, had some attraction, but not enough to keep me engaged and buying them regularly...and there was enough about both even at their best to turn me off (for every good short story, a credulous UFOlogy piece in Omni or some of the duller comix in HM). Also, the paper and ink Omni was printed on and with would smear with the slightest touch...very annoying (you'd think the Penthouse people, who published it, would know better)(or perhaps that was a bit of planned obsolescence...brings one back for another copy).
The terrible covers on Espionage didn't help. The Writer's Digest folks being behind the revived Story certainly did help that magazine's distribution profile.

Aboriginal SF arose eventually out of the ashes of Galileo (the latter folded in 1980, the former began in '85), and the horror paperback boom meant that some of the horror little magazines, such as Weird Tales' newest revival and Grue, could find some rack space on the bigger newsstands, along with the revival of Story, and such projects as Espionage and the Black Mask periodical book...and the insurgence of the big box bookstores at the turn of the '90s gave more little literary magazines more access to newsstand browsers than they had been getting...probably more than they had ever had gotten, outside the best newsstands in New York City and a very few other places.

Ah, well, enough nostalgic ramble for now. But Jack Gaughan, whose best work isn't quite represented on the covers above--though is on display inside Ortiz's book--can do that to me (I think this cover and this, and they not his best--buy the book, or at least read the article!--are more representative of what he could do). That, and a long week not improved by the day-long Blogspot crash.

For the actual, surviving links to this week's Friday Books, please see Patti Abbott's blog here, and for the index to titles, here.

the links keep coming: Tuesday's Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V: 10 May

As always, thanks to those who participate and to those reading our entries this week...please let me know if you'd like to have your Overlooked item indexed here, as well.

Patti Abbott: Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
Walter Albert: The Case Against Brooklyn and The Mollycoddle
Brian Arnold: Mr. Men and Little Misses and Battle Beyond the Stars
Bill Crider: I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
Scott Cupp: Gorgo
Chuck Esola: The Face with Two Left Feet
Ed Gorman: Odds Against Tomorrow
Randy Johnson: Scarface (1932)
George Kelley: Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends: The Complete Series
Kate Laity: The Spirit of the Beehive
Evan Lewis: Arizona Gunfighter, Hittin' the Trail, The Three Mesquiteers
Todd Mason: Jimmy Tingle's American Dream, Eddie Pepitone at Connie's Ric Rac, RT, The Gobetweenies
James Reasoner: Hell to Pay
Dan Stumpf: Out of the Past

Tuesday's Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V: JIMMY TINGLE'S AMERICAN DREAM; Eddie Pepitone at Connie's RicRac; RT; THE GOBETWEENIES

Jimmy Tingle's American Dream is being offered to public television stations in the US this summer by the syndicator Executive Program Services, in a slightly shortened edit that might compress things a little further than the original did (but I suspect that they were pretty compressed even at the full length--industry standard for US pub tv is 56:46 for an hour slot, while IMDb currently reports that the full cut is estimated to run 70 minutes, but neither format has been released to the public yet).

The pretty smooth rough cut for the tv version has brief interviews segments with a number of Tingle's friends in the comedy (Janeane Garofalo, Bobcat Goldthwait, Colin Quinn, Lewis Black, Mort Sahl) and political commentary (Howard Zinn, Robert Reich standing next to Al Franken, such less likely folks as Sean Hannity) industries, as much as those can be teased apart, along with activists mostly from Tingle's native Boston, Robert Altman (these are probably among the last interviews with Altman and Zinn) and (appropriately enough for a 7 May viewing) Tingle's mother, Frances Tingle. We get to get a quick sense of what these folks, and less well-known New Hampshire and Boston folks (including one homeless multi-state wanderer) think of as The American Dream, and discussion of how we are and mostly aren't able to get much of a shot at what might be our own version of that dream...along with a quick run through Tingle's own career as political comedian, starting in the early '80s and having fairly prominent placement in Big Media (as the humor commentator at the end of 60 Minutes II broadcasts during that series run on CBS-TV, and the five years Tingle ran his own comedy-oriented theater in Boston; then, as he chose to close that, going on to get a Masters in public administration at Harvard, in the Kennedy School, and giving a commencement address upon his graduation...and talking about bonding with his son, Seamus (despite giving him that name in the States; the similar "James Tingle III" might've been less likely to invite classmate hassle). It's an amiable and informative hour, about Tingle more than about the notion of The American Dream, but perhaps because that isn't a concept that resonates much with me, as opposed to The Human Reality we all face in one way or another...but you're more likely to glean new information (and some decent jokes, in segments of his standup routines) than you are likely to find too much new in the definitions the assembled offer. And the story of how Seamus got a ball at a Sox game is not the only charming anecdote. Look for this one to pop up on PBS and independent public stations in June, and Tingle is trying to put together a comedy tour to work around the local broadcast clearances.

I don't go out for live performance nearly often enough, but I lead a busy, tiring life with many little tasks going begging at any given time. But when I learned LA-based Eddie Pepitone was going to be performing at a small club, Connie's RicRac in Philadelphia as a part of a series of standup shows put together by Corey Cohen, I decided to make the effort (Pepitone is one of the quartet of regulars/hosts on one of the podcasts I listen to regularly, The Long Shot). Connie's is set up a bit like a railroad apartment...it's a long, narrow (for a club, wide for a hallway) straight shot from the front door, past a functional if limited bar and to an area where stackable chairs can be set out, as they were, a couple of scraggly couches at the front of them, and a low stage and resizable backstage behind that. A local comedian opened for Pepitone; he mentioned, apparently in earnest, having a very bad time trying to get to the club, which seemed to throw him off a bit, and his set was notable for a little too much self-deprecation (to the point of self-sabotage), and a mixture of patter and formal jokes that weren't actually finished...he'd start a formal joke (paraphrase: "I took my kid to see the most recent Pixar film") and then further the setup ("and some of the parents there were, like, 'Shut up and sit still!' to their kids") and he seemed to think he'd actually finished a joke thus. But he was game and amiable.
Pepitone was both game and amiable and also a little overwhelmed by his day, but while also a bit self-deprecating ("You're all disappointed, aren't you?"), had more resources to draw on; his persona, as I told Alice who came along with me, is a bit like a Don Rickles who is much more interested in insulting himself than members of the audience (though he doesn't spare targets that actually do spark anger or resentment in the larger world, particularly the political and performance arenas). He'd taken the train down to Philadelphia in the afternoon, from visiting old haunts in New York City, and had spent about five or six hours walking around the city, taxing himself more than he had planned, but at least that allowed him to note to his amusement how many streets in Center City are named for nut trees. Paraphrase: "Chestnut, Walnut...but you don't have any Peanut Street, do you?" He worked up a routine about having a heart attack and not being able to distinguish which nut street he was one while desperately instructing the 911 operator on his cell phone (he wasn't yet aware that one of the two closest hospitals is just off Filbert, actually). Pepitone, who is more a dramatic than typical standup comedian (along with starting out in sketch-troupes and experimental theater, he has done a fair amount of relatively non-comic work as a television and film actor) eventually found his rhythm in a routine that has frequently worked for him in his longer sets, wherein he wanders out into the audience to heckle himself; he rang a lot of funny changes on that concept. Both Alice and I enjoyed the gig, and were glad to be able to say hello and good show to him afterward, but didn't get to say much else, as there seemed to be a number of old acquaintances and/or fans, at least, about, also hoping to get a word.

Russia Today, or RT, the 24-hour English-language Russian news and documentary service, is becoming increasingly available to US and other Anglophone viewers around the world, and is amusing for how thoroughly it dances to the Putin/Medvedev Administration tune. No chance to mock US government policy is passed up, if possible, and while I don't necessarily disagree with most of the critique presented, it's notable that similar overtures and actions by the Russian government are, oddly enough, not held up to the same level of scrutiny. The enemies of Russia are unadulterated villains (Chechnya comes in this wise a Lot, including international sympathy for Chechnyans), the current unrest in the Arab nations is clearly a US plot, or at very least was fomented with great US involvement, and the inequities of American society and particularly US foreign policy are consistently highlighted in a way that one will not find on, say, Al-Jazeera. My friend Laura, who is a paleoconservative aligned in most ways with the policies of Ron Paul (she might be a little closer to Pat Buchanan than Paul is), notes that RT seems unusually friendly to her kind of politics, among media organizations, which seems odd in that the Putinoids are not exactly the Russian correspondent to the Tea Partisans; only seems natural to me, given that the Paul and Tea Party campaigns must seem both disruptive to US politics as they are and also at least leaning isolationist and non-interventionist...less competition for Russian bullying in the world arena is certainly likely to be sexy to the current Russian regime.

The Gobetweenies is a terrible title for a decent new sitcom on BBC Radio 4, which will have a relatively short run of four episodes (at least in its first "series"/"season"); a rather clever look at the adventures of a family working out the custody swaps of two children between divorced parents played by BBC veterans Sarah Alexander and David Tennant. At least Marcella Evaristi's pilot script was deft, and I'm looking forward to the balance.

FFB: Joanna Russ: THE FEMALE MAN (Bantam, 1975)

Some week in the near future I'll probably do Russ's The Adventures of Alyx, the omnibus of her feminist time-traveling/sword & sorcery Alyx stories including the novel Picnic on Paradise, or one or more of her other collections of short fiction, since I've already made at least fleeting note of her collections of nonfiction. I think it was Robin Reid who noted that Russ richly deserves her own volume, or set, in the Library of America (and Modern Library...and Viking Portable series...the influence of some of her essays alone might warrant that...) But for today, I'll take on my favorite of her novels, and perhaps hers as well, the 1975 monument that took several years to find an editor willing to publish it, till Frederik Pohl at Bantam saw it and realized its potential (among the other novels he put through at Bantam, only Samuel Delany's Dhalgren sold better in its Bantam run [profiting in part from the publicity about the leeway Delany was given to revise between printings], and unlike that novel the Russ has been in print essentially continuously since).

The Female Man is both a relentlessly satirical and very personal novel for Russ; she doesn't spare herself nor those whom she might agree with in most or nearly every way from critique, nor is it unduly mocking of those she'd find less agreeable. It's the mostly but not entirely linear story of "Joanna Russ" (an avatar of herself, but still, as she was always careful to point out, a fictional construct) encountering in essentially the world of the US in the early/mid 1970s two variations on herself, who were products of rather different societies: Janet, from the all-women society of Whileaway, 800 years after males have been eradicated by a plague, and Jeannine, a typically repressed early 1960s woman from an Earth where the Great Depression never ended, World War II never happened and so the wartime upheavals that helped re-spark the Western feminist movement never occurred. After various adventures in each other's realities, the trio meets Jael, a warrior (possibly) in a time between Joanna's and Janet's, where there is a literal, "hot" war between women and men; Jael seems somehow to have been the catalyst for all four to meet, though the other three find her circumstances in most ways the most disturbing of any of their lives (Jeannine's vying for that sad prize; unsurprisingly, she is least unsympathetic to Jael).

"Whileaway" and Janet had appeared earlier in the famous short story "When It Changed," but the society is more thoroughly worked out in the novel; Janet's job, before being sent on this odyssey through the realities, was essentially that of a cop...one of her primary duties is to find those women who choose to withdraw from Whileawayan society, and if those women refuse to rejoin, to kill them. Thus, the often-suggested notion that Russ is putting forward Whileaway as an unalloyed utopia is utterly nonsensical, particularly as artists (and perhaps most often writers) need to withdraw from time to time, for perspective if nothing else. Janet also finds herself in a taboo relationship with a teenaged girl in Joanna's reality, taboo largely for its lesbian nature "here" and for the cross-generational nature even moreso on Whileaway than it is the Joanna reality...this would be a thread Russ would examine closely again, in contemporary mimetic terms, in On Strike Against God. Russ is clearly fleshing out the many roles we are all cast in, and particularly an intelligent feminist of her time would find herself in, as persevering and not complete victim, pragmatic challenger and emotional wayfinder, warrior unwilling to take anything for granted including the nobility of any warring cause, and observer and synthesizer. The wit and grace with which the threads of the novel are woven together is joy to behold...Russ's clarity and passion and uncertainty in some matters are all laid out magnificently, and there are many threads to pluck...and because of that clarity, the novel is no more difficult to follow, really, than those of Kurt Vonnegut (without as much distancing) or Margaret Atwood or, for that matter, the ones Frederik Pohl was encouraged to write by the example of the Russ and others around him, most notably Gateway.

A brilliant novel, and available in a number of editions, any worth having, even if none of the covers have been nearly up to the quality of the prose...frequently the case in anything marketed as sf, but particularly true in this case, most suffering from one sort of amateurism or another, or puzzlement as to how to market the work. Happily, it has found a continuing audience, just not one as large as it deserves.

For more of today's "forgotten" books, please see meme-sponsor Patti Abbott's blog and please do see my memorial post for Joanna Russ, who died last Friday, after a long life of much excellent work achieved at great cost against a sea of maladies, some more vicious than even the sexism and other chauvinism she challenged so well. (And this timely post.)


The Bantam editions.


A British edition.


The Women's Press edition (UK).


The particularly amateurish Beacon Press (US) cover, even given a good stance for, presumably, Janet.


The more recent Women's Press (UK) edition.


The in-print UK edition from Gollancz.


The current Beacon "Bluestreak"-division (US) edition


At least none of the Anglophone editions is presented as badly as the German.


And a Quality Paperback Club omnibus including the novel...which isn't a utopia in any real way, even to its author, nor intended to be, I strongly suspect.

in honor of Joanna Russ's memory:

This coming Sunday (May 8 at 14:00 EDT) [Mother's Day, no less--TM] there will be an informal Twitter chat on the subject of feminist and queer science fiction in memory of Joanna Russ, under the hashtag #FeministSF. All are welcome, and if anyone has any ideas for questions or prompts to help guide the chat, please contact one of the co-organizers, myself (@thefuturefire) or @traciewelser, or make the suggestion under the hashtag.

(If you haven't taken part in a Twitter chat before, just search for the hashtag; it should all become clear.)

Cheers,

Djibril

[please also see my expanded entry on Russ...]

Corrected and Updated: Tuesday's Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V: 3 May

Thanks to all participants and readers...as always. Sorry for the delay in posting...uncooperative life this week.

Bill Crider: Sangaree

Chuck Esola: Never Too Young to Die

Ed Gorman: Odds Against Tomorrow

Eric Peterson: Avenging Angel (1985)

George Kelley: The Maltese Falcon (1941) Blu-Ray extras

James Reasoner: Zorro's Fighting Legion

Jerry House: Crusader Rabbit

Juri Nummelin: The Fabulous World of Jules Verne

Kate Laity: Frankenstein (2011 stage)

Randy Johnson: Crime Doctor's Manhunt

Scott Cupp: Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961 film)

Steve Lewis: Sky Patrol