FFB: THE SECRET SONGS by Fritz Leiber (1968)

Contents, courtesy ISFDb:

Contents (view Concise Listing)

Smoke Ghost • (1941) • shortstory by Fritz Leiber
Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum-TAH-Tee • [Simon Grue] • (1958) • shortstory by Fritz Leiber
Mariana • (1960) • shortstory by Fritz Leiber
Coming Attraction • (1950) • shortstory by Fritz Leiber
A Pail of Air • (1951) • shortstory by Fritz Leiber
The Moon Is Green • (1952) • shortstory by Fritz Leiber
No Great Magic • [Change War] • (1963) • novella by Fritz Leiber
The Secret Songs • (1962) • shortstory by Fritz Leiber
The Girl with the Hungry Eyes • (1949) • shortstory by Fritz Leiber
The Winter Flies • (1967) • shortstory by Fritz Leiber
The Man Who Made Friends with Electricity • (1962) • shortstory by Fritz Leiber
Introduction (The Secret Songs) • (1968) • essay by Judith Merril

Contents, courtesy the William Contento Index to Science Fiction Anthologies and Collections:

The Secret Songs Fritz Leiber (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1968, 25/-, 229pp, hc); Also in pb (Panther 1975).

· Introduction · in
· The Winter Flies [“The Inner Circles”] · ss F&SF Oct ’67
· The Man Who Made Friends with Electricity · ss F&SF Mar ’62
· Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum-Tah-Tee [Simon Grue] · ss F&SF May ’58
· Mariana · ss Fantastic Feb ’60
· Coming Attraction · ss Galaxy Nov ’50
· The Moon Is Green · ss Galaxy Apr ’52
· A Pail of Air · ss Galaxy Dec ’51
· Smoke Ghost · ss Unknown Oct ’41
· The Girl with the Hungry Eyes · ss The Girl With the Hungry Eyes, ed. Donald A. Wollheim, Avon, 1949
· No Great Magic [Change War] · na Galaxy Dec ’63
· The Secret Songs · ss F&SF Aug ’62

Apparently, what we have here is the index to the Hart-Davis hardcover, followed by the index to the Panther paperback. Or so I assume.

However, either way, this is a book of mostly brilliant stories by Fritz Leiber, not all the short stories he wrote which changed the way horror, sf, and fantasy fiction were written in his wake, but a fair sampling of those. And two of the three very autobiographical stories, in dramatic form (actual playlets) which are not sf, fantasy or horror per se, though they deal with tropes from those forms, since they are about Fritz Leiber's life..."The Secret Songs" is mostly about his and his wife Jonquil's addictions, his to downers including alcohol, hers to the commonly available uppers of the time, including over the counter speed. "The Winter Flies," which for some reason Edward Ferman at F&SF retitled "The Inner Circles," is about the Leibers at home with their son, Justin, but mostly about Leiber wrestling with his existential terror. "237 Talking Statues, Etc." is the missing one, about Leiber's relation with his mother and particularly his father, Fritz Leiber, Sr., and both the parents professional actors...Senior, for example, has a key role in the film The Spanish Main, while Junior, who pursued an acting career for a while, has a smaller key role in Camille (the Greta Garbo version).

While it's ridiculous that no Leiber collection so far has put those three plays together, this book helps redress this for its reader, at least, by also including such, it's hard to overstate, epochal stories as "Smoke Ghost" and "Coming Attraction." These are among the stories that Leiber used to demonstrate how little thought too many of his contemporaries were bringing to the fantastic-fiction field, and how obvious that seemed after these stories were published. The latter, a science fiction story which suggested that people really didn't necessarily behave in the ways you might want them to or that they led you to believe they did, and that your "heroism" might just be playing into their little fantasy-games, seems so obvious in retrospect...but was a corrective to entirely too much lazy thinking in the field at the time. As well as being pretty savagely satirical in at least two ways when most of the best fantasticated satire depended on the mostly-"outsider" crew of the likes of Huxley or Orwell...Leiber demonstrated that he was in their league, which he would continue to demonstrate (particularly with the "Change War" stories such as "No Great Magic" and the short novel, a play in prose, The Big Time), but never with more immediate impact. The effect wasn't unlike the cumulative effect of Dashiell Hammett's early short fiction in crime fiction.

"Smoke Ghost" simply created an approach to modern horror, much as Robert Bloch's fiction and that of some of the others in the little post-Lovecraftian knot flourishing in the 1940s did...Shirley Jackson, John Collier, to some extent Cornell Woolrich, certainly Algernon Blackwood and a slew of others were incorporating the advances of the Edwardians (E. F. Benson, Saki, et al.) and the honing of existential terror Lovecraft had taken up (and to some extent his peers, including the young Leiber and Bloch) from the thread HPL traced in Poe and his heirs. But few stories are so blatantly an example of an introduction of a new paradigm as "Smoke Ghost." Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat," perhaps. And even as "Smoke Ghost" recast how the supernatural might be dealt with in the modern urban environment, "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes" helped redefine vampirism, to get past the concretized metaphor that the spilling of blood, or any other body fluid, represented, to get at the elan vital aspect of the predation...and how mass culture might be such a predator's natural tool.

And then there are other simply brilliant stories, less influential but no less a joy to read..."A Pail of Air" (about coping with life on an Earth without the Sun), "Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum-TAH-Tee" (connected to the pathbreaking novel Conjure Wife, but not dependent upon it, a dancing bit of wit with the more sinister implications buried deep inside), and such.

This collection was never published in Leiber's native United States. Other slim collections nearly as good were. There's never been a sufficiently representative collection of his work published. He's not alone in this, but it's particularly ridiculous in his case. At the time of his death, he had more major awards for fantastic-fiction writing than any other person...Algis Budrys was genuinely angry, as well as resigned to the answer, when demanding in 1978 as to where was Leiber's National Book Award, his Pulitzer.

Where is Borges's Nobel? Awards, like justice, are only sparingly applied correctly.

For more "forgotten" books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Iris Bahr, and THE UNCHOSEN ONES

Podcasts are really digging in this summer...Jackie Kashian's The Dork Forest has been doing even better (and deeply autobiographical) episodes of late (whether dealing with high-school violence or Kashian's recent tour of military bases in the Arab world), and Iris Bahr was the guest on today's WTF with Marc Maron, and I enjoyed that a lot, and so sought this below out, which I enjoyed just about as well...and having seen few scraps of her running character for an HD Net sketch comedy series, Svetlana, I'll be trying to catch that, as well, as I finally have regular access to a cable system which offers HD Net (even if they think they don't have to carry the local clearance of MHz WorldView, something I'm about to take up with them).

As with the HD Net show, Bahr plays several characters here, including a BBC TV documentarian and a relatively hapless young woman on a J-Date marriage tour, as they make their way through Israel:

The Unchosen Ones by Iris Bahr from Guy Ross on Vimeo.

Tuesday's Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V: 31 May

as always, thanks to all who participate in this weekly exercise as contributors of critiques and comments, and as readers...


Bill Crider: Stage Door Canteen
Evan Lewis: "Have You Got Any Castles?"
Iba Dawson: Starter for Ten
Jack Seabrook: "The Geezenstacks" (Tales from the Darkside Fredric Brown adaptation)
James Reasoner: Kronos
Jeff Segal: Minnesota Clay
Jerry House: The Song of Old Wyoming
Randy Johnson: Speedway (1929)
Rod Lott: Double Vision (2002)
Ron Scheer: Man in the Shadow
Scott Cupp: The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash
Steve Lewis: Highway 13 and Bombay Mail
Todd Mason: On the Web: MyDamnChannel, Link TV, UbuWeb and others

And related matters:
Iba Dawson: Fifteen Movie Questions Meme
George Kelley: Once Upon a Time in the West
Michael Shonk: TV for Mystery Fans
Patti Abbott: the Detroit Symphony and Everything Must Go
Sanford Allen: Dungeon of Harrow

Jeff Segal, guest reviewer: Overlooked Movie: MINNESOTA CLAY (1964)

Though director Sergio Corbucci's best westerns would follow this restrained early effort, I was surprised to find myself really enjoying a film that seems as much standard Hollywood as Italian. By contrast, its contemporary, Leone's influential A Fistful of Dollars, really showcased the European style that helped render these films so distinctive. Though not without its own controversies in terms of influence and in your face violence, Fistful greatly overshadowed Corbucci's earliest Eurowesterns.

Minnesota Clay opened in Italian theaters a month after Per un Pugno di Dollari (A Fistful of Dollars). Both movies share the plot twist of a town bullied by two different gangs as would Corbucci's own 1966 Django (which found considerable success in many territories save for the US, where it had no consequential release, and England, where it was banned). Corbucci and his frequent collaborator Adriano Bolzoni reduced the 2nd gang to a hastily introduced and easily disposed of subplot during the course of Minnesota Clay while both Fistful and especially Django made the other gang essential to their Machiavellian storylines.

Minnesota Clay not only had baggage (of its dual Italian/Hollywood influence, in this case) but so does its title character, wearily portrayed by Eurotrash vet Cameron Mitchell (perhaps dubbing his own gravelly voice in the export prints). An unjustly convicted middle aged pistolero/ widower turned-prison-fugitive, he practically rivals the great mute gunfighter "Silence" (Jean-Louis Trintignant from the innovative Il Grande Silenzio, a 1968 western that many consider to be Corbucci's cruellest yet also intensely beautiful genre contribution) as one of the most sympathetic protagonists in this director's filmography. With his fading vision, can Clay prevail against all of his enemies and protect the headstrong daughter who doesn't even know that he is her father? Leone's gunslinger is as iconically mysterious as he is lethally unstoppable but Mitchell is permitted to flesh out his character in a manner that made him less mythic yet more fallibly human, a hardcase who we fear might not succeed in his objectives.

Georges Rivière, veteran of several moody Golden Age Italian gothic horror movies, portays the sly, vicious Fox, Clay's main foil. Typical of the skewed Eurowestern perspective, Fox is introduced as the town's sheriff, dressed mostly in white while Minnesota is downmarketedly restricted to drab dark clothing, displaying the fashion sense of any common Hollywood heavy. Do not trust well dressed or uniformed individuals in these movies. Even as late as the classic surreal 1976 Italian western Keoma (from action specialist Enzo G. Castellari, best known as the director of the original epic Inglorious Bastards), post-War Between the States veterans are shown, in uniform, to be local gang hired guns. The bearded walking arsenal, Keoma (Django's Franco Nero), is shabbily draped in Anglo and traditional Native American clothing like a militant hippie Jesus in a duster who will go onto out-argue Death (Castellari's nod to Ingmar Bergman) and bring some small sparks of life to the apocalyptic ghost towns that he rides through, while also killing plenty of murderous trash and issuing sardonic one liners (a Franco Nero western trademark).
Keoma is probably my all time favorite Eurowestern but it is challenging listening for many a potential fan, thanks to an eclectic soundtrack (westerns of the seventies had markedly different styles of scoring than their more exultantly soundtracked 1960's predecessors).

Fernando Sancho greasily provides menacing support throughout Clay in what must be one of his earliest bandito roles and even Horror Express's future prickly Inspector Mirov, Julio Pena, has a part.

Performers from all over the world, including Asia and potential export box office drawing yankees such as Mitchell, the soon to be revived-from-a-dead-career Lee Van Cleef and the then relatively-unknown Clint Eastwood, would cast their lot in "spaghetti westerns" but production co-financing countries such as Spain, Germany and France were particularly useful in this regard.

Though the direction, editing and choreography of Clay aren't as assured as Corbucci's later efforts, there are some nicely realized sequences (including a runaway wagon setpiece). Some of the less impressive post-sync dubbed gun shots should have been replaced; rival director Leone famously claimed to have utilized rifle shots for revolver sound FX and cannon blasts for discharging rifles, an option not then available to Corbucci.The soundtrack by Piero Piccioni is listenable but was overshadowed by Ennio Morricone's more infectious (and influential) Dollars score. Along with Django composer Luis Bacalov, Morricone would eventually contribute some of the most memorable soundtracks to Corbucci's westerns, including my favorite, the delicate and melancholy score for The Great Silence.

Minnesota Clay is available as a letterboxed stand alone title from VCI and as part of Video Asia's compilation, Spaghetti Western Bible Presents The Fast, The Saved, and The Damned (which includes the bizarre 1971 Blindman, co-starring Ringo Starr as a Mexican bandito--its so called remake, Comin' at Ya!, with the same director, Fernando Baldi, and star Tony Anthony, and featuring Pedro Almodovar's future muse, Victoria Abril, re-started the 3D craze in the eighties, and Massacre Time, a 1966 effort from genre-hopping film maker Lucio Fulci...the most traditional of his three westerns, though the opening Zaroff-style man hunt and various zoomed-in shots of violence show the intensity that Fulci would become internationally known for in his future thrillers and chillers).

Corbucci's participation in movies such as Clay and the dynamic supernatural peplum (Italian sword and sandal) Goliath and the Vampires (US release title for 1961's Maciste Contro il Vampiro) led to his helming Django, whose aesthetically and financially successful coffin-dragging wanderings would encourage the film maker to devote a considerable part of his career to making notable European westerns. Movie fans and scholars would label him as one of the "three Sergios" along with Leone and Sergio Sollima, whose own relevant highlights include The Big Gundown (1966) and its Lee Van Cleef-less sequel, Run Man Run!

Tuesday's Overlooked A/V: UbuWeb to MyDamnChannel

Just a quick few citations today on a busy morning:

UbuWeb is a repository of avant-garde art, very much including the a/v, which has been compiling and expanding since 1996. To attempt to catalog it would amount to replicating its rather cataloguesque nature, but it's pretty easy to navigate in...give it a look if folks ranging from Brian Eno to Marcel Duchamp to Jasper Johns to Samuel Beckett to Gertrude Stein are in any way of interest...

MyDamnChannel is one of the primary aggregators of short humorous video and film on the web...Funny or Die has managed to become better known, with more munny behind it, but MDC still has something to be said for it, particularly when most of it loads, as it isn't doing for me at this hour. I'm particularly fond of Wainy Days, the Harry Shearer/Judith Owen Channel, and the soap-opera parody Horrible People at MDC, but there's plenty I haven't seen yet.

I've certainly talked up such free and less-inexpensive video aggregation sites as the National Film Board of Canada, Archive.org, Amazon and Netflix, Hulu and Crackle, but of course there are so many more to explore at any given time...one I'm fond of is that associated with the small leftist news and culture channel Link TV, which offers a lot of free and full-length content in addition to clips and information on the other documentaries and the rather good slate of dramatic films it offers.

And here's this weekend's film article I was moved to write:
"Film sequels which are at least comparable to their predecessors, when not better..."

Women editors in fantasy and sf at midcentury...

Laurie Powers has a nice bit of remembrance of Cele Goldsmith, later married to become Cele Lalli (and I didn't know for a long time that "Cele" sounded like "seal"), winner of a special award of not quite Hugo status at the 1962 World Convention (John W. Campbell, Jr., won a relatively undeserved award for the previous year, if one deserved for his career)...Laurie was under the impression that Goldsmith was one of the few editors of the fantastic-fiction magazines in her decade (essentially 1955-1965, as she passed from serving as assistant to the inept Paul Fairman into full editorship of Fantastic and Amazing in 1958, which lasted till her publishers, Ziff-Davis, sold the magazines out from under her in 1965, at which point she moved over to ZD's bridal magazines for the balance of her career). Though Laurie mistook the Goldsmith/Lalli magazines for pulps, a status Fantastic never had (despite merger with its pulp predecessor, Fantastic Adventures, in 1954) and Amazing gave up when Fantastic was founded, in 1952.

Goldsmith/Lalli was one of the great women magazine editors in fantastic fiction, but was hardly alone...in fact, there were almost more female editors of the fully-professional magazines before her than there have been since, even with Ellen Datlow's major projects and Shawna McCarthy and Kris Rusch as editor and/or former editor of two high-profile magazines each; Sheila Williams at the head of Asimov's, and such magazines as Weird Tales in its current Ann VanderMeer-edited inpulpation and Hildy Silverman's Space and Time hovering at the edge of not-little-magazine status.

Well, here's my (revised) comment at Powers's blog:
It should be noted, that Fantastic and Amazing weren't pulps any longer when Cele Goldsmith began editing them, or even when she was, as assistant editor, pulling the decent stories out of the slush pile (such as Kate Wilhelm's first story) to put in the magazines to supplement what Paul Fairman was buying without reading from reliable pros.

Amazing had gone to (initially expensively semi-slick) digest sized issues with the foundation of Fantastic in 1952, and both remained in that format till Fantastic's absorption by Amazing during Elinor Mavor's editorship in 1980, and Amazing retained it till game company TSR reformatted the magazine as a large-sized slick in the 1980s. So, they were no more pulps than Dell's Zane Grey Western was. [Laurie, the granddaughter of a prolific pulp-fiction writer, is more familiar with western fiction than with fantastic fiction, hence some correspondences cited.] One of Mavor's issues, after the merger:


Goldsmith wasn't the dominant editor of her time (frankly, in the early '60s in the magazine field, there wasn't one...but a number of excellent ones), but was one of the most eclectic, publishing relatively experimental work by the likes of Ballard, Thomas Disch, David Bunch, Ursula K. Le Guin (though Le Guin began rather conservatively), Harlan Ellison, and others alongside some old-fashioned material by E. E. Smith (the Zane Grey of sf) and others, as well as artists as important as Leiber (somewhere between the Elmer Kelton and the Walter Van Tilburg Clark of sf and fantasy)...Barry Malzberg and particularly Ted White's versions of the magazines were about as good, and as adventuresome, but didn't have the Ziff-Davis distribution might behind them and were never monthly.

Along with Wilhelm and essentially Le Guin and Roger Zelazny (who had published juvenilia elsewhere), among Goldsmith/Lalli's "discoveries" were Disch, Ben Bova, Keith Laumer, and I believe Sonya Dorman as a prose writer (like Disch, she was simultaneously a widely-published poet).

Mavor and Goldsmith/Lalli were the only female full editors of Amazing and Fantastic, but Lila aka L. E. Shaffer was doing more than her share of the work editing Fantastic Adventures (Fantastic's predecessor) and Amazing during Howard Browne's official tenure (much later editor Kim Mohan is a male Kim).

Among the other female editors in sf and fantasy pulps and digests in the 1940s into 1950s and onward, one should look into:



Dorothy McIlwraith, who did brilliant work as editor of Weird Tales for the second half of its original run (Leiber, Robert Bloch, Manly Wade Wellman, Margaret St. Clair, Ms. C. L. Moore, and Moore's husband Henry Kuttner, along with Leigh Brackett's husband Edmond Hamilton, all published some brilliant work there, and they by no means alone); McIlwraith was compelled by the publisher to sign herself as simply D. McIlwraith while simultaneously editing Short Stories magazine...



















Mary Gnaedinger, long-term editor of Famous Fantastic Mysteries and Fantastic Novels, which reprinted from the early Argosys and All-Storys, and eventually would reprint novels published in hardcover, going as far as to reprint both Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" and Ayn Rand's Anthem in the last issue...(most of the reprints were better than the latter, I hasten to add, and the magazines published some important original fiction as well)...















Bea Mahaffey, who worked with Ray Palmer, who had been Ziff-Davis's first editor of Amazing and Fantastic Adventures before striking off on his own...his most durable title has turned out to be the paranormal magazine Fate, but he was still interested in publishing fiction magazines in the 1950s, and Mahaffey was editor of the best of them, Universe...notable for publishing Theodore Sturgeon's pro-gay-acceptance story "The World Well Lost" in its first issue, in 1953...

And among those in editorial support roles, Larry Shaw worked for several publishers in latter '50s on magazines, and his (first, I think) eventual life partner, Shirley Hoffman, often helped out, under the name she used in her fannish writing and eventually in her fantasy, sf, and Spur-Award-winning western writing as well, Lee Hoffman.

There're more, of course...Judith Merril didn't edit magazines, but anthologies like nearly no one else in her time (including collaborating with husband Frederik Pohl to ghost-edit Tomorrow, the Stars, officially "edited" by Robert Heinlein), for example...but, well, yup, there're still quite a few out there for you to look into.

But Cele Goldsmith/Lalli was never a pulpster...

(And it's time again tomorrow for Tuesday's Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V!)