Douglas and Rhoda Mason (and their dog) make the news for unfortunate reasons

https://www.vermontpublic.org/local-news/2023-07-27/a-forever-home-destroyed-in-barre-leaves-one-future-uncertain  (includes audio link as originally broadcast)

Doug and Rhoda Mason, standing outside the home they've lived in for the past 41 years.

A 'forever home' destroyed in Barre leaves one future uncertain [actually, the future of a couple, at very least, my aunt and uncle...and their dog -TM]

Vermont Public | By Peter Hirschfeld Published July 27, 2023 at 5:00 AM EDT

Families across Vermont have been mucking out their basements and tearing out drywall to get their homes suitable for occupancy after the floods. For other people, there is no house to return to.

Doug and Rhoda Mason lost their home in Barre, and all their belongings, in a landslide that nearly killed them on July 11. And the couple, in their 70s, is trying to figure out how they’ll afford new housing on the social security benefits they subsist on.

Doug and Rhoda met each other in the 1970s, when they became co-workers at a Washington County nonprofit that served people with developmental disabilities.  [Continues]

GoFundMe page set up by my cousin Devin, one of their kids:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-the-mason-family-get-back-on-their-feet

Devin on Facebook:

It has been a week filled with ups and downs since my last update.

First some positive news:

Because the house was a total loss, FEMA confirmed that my parents are eligible for the highest amount of benefit they can offer. While we were very grateful to hear this news, the reality is that even at its highest, the grant doesn't come close to being able to cover all the costs of the damage done, the things they lost, or to start over.

There has been a lot of talk of government buyouts of impacted properties as of late so we are hoping for the best. There is no chance of rebuilding on the site, so we are in a desperate hunt for a place for them to live in central Vermont. We are one of many families looking for a safe place to live, and with the housing crunch, opportunities are few and far between. Please continue to send all leads on apartments my way. I'm following up on every single one.

Yesterday, we were alerted by the City of Barre that they would help us tear down the house. While this was welcome news, it also created a lot of questions related to funds/benefits my parents would be eligible for, namely, a buyout of the property, if this action was taken. Making things even more tense, we had to make the decision on about a half a day's notice. Emotions ran high throughout the day as we tried to make an extremely difficult decision.

Ultimately, we have decided to take them up on the offer to tear the house down. After many anxiety-ridden calls with various representatives from different departments within the state government, we feel this is the best option. We are hoping against hope that everything works in our favor.

As so many in our community understand, there are many people trying their best to help, but very few solid answers.

Knowing that, we continue to move forward with bringing attention to my parent's story, not only for their benefit, but also so others might be able to avoid what they have gone through. From what to watch for related to a potential landslide, to how to navigate after a disaster, my family and I are doing everything we can to share our experience with others.

For those, like us, who need help - please feel free to connect with me and I am happy to share what is working, what isn't, and how we are navigating this very difficult time.

So what's next?

We continue to fundraise as we navigate the next steps of this journey.

If you want to help, consider sharing the Vermont Public story below alongside our GoFundMe page.

Every bit of support matters.

Story link: https://www.vermontpublic.org/.../a-forever-home...

GoFundMe link: https://www.gofundme.com/.../help-the-mason-family-get...

The picture attached was taken this morning as my parents visited to say goodbye to their home of over 40 years.

Thank you all for your continued generosity and positivity.

FFB: SECOND HELP!-ING, edited by Harvey Kurtzman (Fawcett Gold Medal 1962)(and HELP! magazine, 3/65); THE MONOCLE PEEP SHOW edited by Richard Lingerman and Victor Navasky (Bantam 1965); THE REALIST edited by Paul Krassner (1958-2001, online archive completed 2010)

The late 1950s and early '60s saw a small flurry of satirical magazines, in the wake of the early/mid 1950s boomlet of satirical comics, in both standard comic-book format and, later, in roughly 8.5 x 11" magazine format, in imitation of Mad, founded by Harvey Kurtzman at EC Comics. After the establishment of comics industry self-policing after the popular embrace of Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent and similar attempts to blame juvenile deliquency on comics (among other "perverting" factors in popular culture), EC decided to publish Mad in the more adult-oriented format, and Kurtzman, for various reasons, demanded a percentage of ownership in the new version that EC's William Gaines was unwilling to offer. So, Kurtzman walked, and went on to eventually three other magazine projects, Trump (published by Hugh Hefner, and cut short by a financial crunch at Playboy Enterprises), Humbug! (published by Kurtzman and some associates themselves, and undercapitalized), and (after a 1959 collection, Harvey Kurtzman's Jungle Book, of original work for Ballantine), beginning in 1960, Help!, as a project at James Warren's publishing house, which at the time was best-known for Forrest J Ackerman's Famous Monsters of Filmland, and was getting into the large-sized comics business with such titles as Creepy and Eerie, which would eventually be joined by Vampirella. Warren was never a publisher to spend any more money than he had to, and Help! reflected its small budget (and, after an initial year of nearly monthly publication, became essentially a quarterly for the rest of its run, to the end of 1965) and some of the lack of certainty of exactly whom its audience was that had been more easily ignored at Kurtzman's previous projects. There was a sexual undertone to much of the humor, particularly in the photographic comics-style "fumetti" stories, and bits of discreet nudity, that was mostly absent from Mad, certainly, but still a certain tendency to go for the rather easy, and sometimes the rather kidsy, joke. But, despite those limitations, Help! was a locus of some rather remarkable talent, in both magazine publication and the broader world of comics and comedy; Kurtzman's first editorial assistant was Gloria Steinem, who apparently was particularly adept at talking well-known comedians and comic actors into posing for the magazine's covers, and occasionally getting them to work as fumetti actors/models (including Orson Bean, Jean Shepherd, and Jack Carter, though usually less well-known comics were employed in the photoplays...such as Woody Allen, or a visiting Briton, then in the US with a small Oxbridge Fringe-style troupe trying their luck with NYC audiences, John Cleese...by the time Cleese's strip appeared in the magazine, Steinem had moved on and was replaced as primary assistant by a young Minneapolis cartoonist, Terry Gilliam, who worked with Cleese on that shoot...and both would later work together in London on Monty Python's Flying Circus). Meanwhile, writers such as Peter De Vries, Roger Price, Algis Budrys, Robert Sheckley, Ray Bradbury, Rod Serling, Stan Freberg, Joan Rivers and (primarily a book editor) Bernard Shir-Cliff were contributing text pieces and fumetti scripts to the magazine (alongside reprinted work of Saki and Ambrose Bierce), veteran cartoonists such as Jack Davis, Paul Coker (among many of Kurtzman's associates at Mad and later), Edward Gorey, Gahan Wilson and Shel Silverstein were contributing panels and strips, and younger cartoonists also making their names in "underground" comics were contributing, such as Gilbert Shelton and his superhero-parody "Wonder Warthog" stories, R. Crumb, Jay Lynch, and others; Sid and Marty Krofft, the psychedelic puppeteers, had a piece in one issue.

So, such collections as Second Help!-ing, or the 23rd issue of the magazine (only three issues before the last), could individually seem a bit thin, but there are always solid and memorable bits, and both the evidence of what the assembled were capable of, and the since-fulfilled promise of many of the new faces on display (even if such come-ons as Jerry Lewis's tiresome piece leading off the Fawcett Gold Medal collection, or Alan Seus, of all emerging one-note performers, engaging in a weak cover-gag on the issue, were indicative of what was least about the project).

Monocle, for its part, had the most common sort of roots among US satiric magazines: it began as a late 1950s campus project, among some law students at Yale, including the co-editor of the volume cited above, Victor Navasky (who went on to serve as editor and then also publisher for The Nation magazine over most of the last four decades). The students took their cue from Mort Sahl and other emerging satirical comedians, and then Paul Krassner's The Realist, and eventually began publishing in earnest a rather well-written and well-designed irregularly issued magazine, in the sort of tall, thin format favored till recently by Foreign Affairs magazine (or am I thinking of Foreign Policy?) Boasting of contributions by regulars such as Calvin Trillin, Marvin Kitman (put up as a Republican Party presidential contender, against Goldwater in the primaries, by the magazine), fiction writer C.D.B. Bryan, and co-editor Richard Lingerman, the contributions can feel a bit notional at this remove, literary Second City scenes that don't quite hit their targets as hard as might've been hoped...but such pieces as Godfrey Cambridge's "My Taxi Problem and Ours" (simultaneously dealing, early on, with the difficulties of even a well-off black man hailing a cab in NYC, and mocking the title and format of a certain clangorous, and racist, Norman Podhoretz essay of some months before), or Katherine Perlo's poem "The Triumphant Defeat of Jordan Stone", hold up pretty well...as do various other bits here and there, including challenging one-liners (under the heading, "We're Not Prejudiced, But...", "Would you want your brother to have lunch with James Baldwin?") and Robert Grossman's superhero satire strip "Captain Melanin". This Monocle should definitely not be confused with the current newsstand magazine founded in 2007. It should be noted that this "Bantam Extra" book was published in typical mass-market paperback format, and on better-than-average paper, for what was in 1965 a ridiculous price of $1, ensuring some sales-suppression...perhaps Bantam thought they had caviar for the millions, here. 

 And since I'm running very late with this entry, I'll simply note that the online archive of The Realist, which I've recommended before, remains available and invaluable, and much of this material remains as challenging and sadly too often pertinent as when it was published, beginning in 1958... For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

HELP! magazine, February 1962: Harvey Kurtzman, Will Elder, Will Eisner, Algis Budrys, Stan Freberg, Don Edwing, Lydia Wilen et al...

Archive.org has the content up from several issues of Help!, the fourth and last of Harvey Kurtzman's humor magazines, and the one with the longest shadow after Mad, given the remarkable locus of talent that clustered around the magazine, even with its low budget and irregular publishing schedule (publisher James Warren, already doing well with Forrest Ackerman's Famous Monsters of Filmland and Spacemen but not yet also publishing Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella, famously never paid any more than he had to for anything). For starters, Kurtzman's primary editorial assistants, not quite overlapping, were Gloria Steinem and Terry Gilliam; Steinem notably was good at engaging famous and up-and-coming comedians to appear on the covers and in the photo-comics, in imitation of Italian and other traditions, dubbed in the magazine by the Italian term "fumetti"...Gilliam, before decamping to the UK in part to avoid being drafted after the magazine folded in 1965, was perhaps the great conduit for the budding "underground" cartoonists such as R. Crumb appearing in the magazine, before there was an underground scene...among the fumetti actors was a young British comedian performing in New York in an imported review, John Cleese, and he and Gilliam first met due to that gig.

This issue features the infamous "Goodman Goes Playboy" graphic story by Kurtzman and Will Elder, the segment of the adventures of Goodman Beaver that puts a Hallowe'en-appropriate twist on Archie Comics, as well as offering a few light jabs at Playboy (Hugh Hefner had been the publisher of the second Kurtzman magazine, Trump, which was closed down hurriedly due a cash crunch at Playboy Enterprises--and Kurtzman and Elder would later do a famous strip for Playboy magazine for decades).  The publishing troika at Archie Comics (see the 2024 comment below), always ready to take offense at any sort of parody (and who had done so at Mad's parody "Starchie" some years earlier), initiated court action. Also, a reprint of a Will Eisner "The Spirit" story, an Algis Budrys-scripted fumetti called "The Mariners" (featuring actress Lydia Wilen, who might also be the Wilen who with her sister has made a career of household hints books in more recent years), a transcript of part of one of Stan Freberg's albums, and cartoons by, among others, Don Edwing (who also has an acting role in the fumetti). Budrys placed several scripts with Help!, at least two with a nautical theme (boats being one of his interests).

Thanks to Dennis Lien for noting these Archive entries on Fiction-L. To see this issue legibly, go through this link, since the embed below doesn't seem to have a sufficient enlargement function.

FFB: THE EVERGREEN REVIEW READER: 1957-66 edited by Barney Rosset et al.; SMILING THROUGH THE APOCALYPSE, edited by Harold Hayes, et al.

Two of the more clangorous magazines of the 1960s, I think we can all agree, were the newly energized Esquire, essentially the daddy of all the men's magazines of its era (even if the photography stayed away from the mild explicitness of Playboy and most of its imitators, Playboy having been almost an offshoot and certainly in part a response to Esquire by Esky staffer Hugh Hefner) and the ever more challenging, mildly avant-garde Evergreen Review, the rather big little magazine published by Grove Press, the more "literary" and intellectually grounded of the intertwined enterprises that also were publishing fairly adventurous, even avant-garde, porn as the Olympia Press. Though I believe The Story of O was available under both imprints. Meanwhile, very indirectly, Esquire was even a sort of daddy even to men's sweat magazines, as Argosy particularly was turning itself in the earliest 1950s from a wide-spectrum (though emphasizing adventure fiction) pulp magazine into a sort of more machismic, less ambitious version of Esquire, a policy which it maintained till its end in the 1970s (and its brief rebirth as a paleoconservative politics and lifestyle magazine)...a model that the likes of Adventure would emulate, and shortly thereafter the success of Saga and the newly sleazier (post-Ken Purdy) True would help inspire even more seedy and down-market "true" men's adventure titles.




Meanwhile, back at the fathership, new editor Harold Hayes was, to say the least, livelying up the magazine starting in 1963, getting some of the best and some of the more innovative reporters and essayists to work...often taking the typically inane celebrity profile into new territory, or simply adding depth and style to it (such as Gay Talese's famous "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," famous also in sf/fantasy circles for Talese's account of Sinatra's peevish hassling of Harlan Ellison, and Ellison's refusal to truckle causing the club management to try to eject him). Norman Mailer unsurprisingly took further opportunity to make a public ass of himself in these pages, and Gary Willis, in covering Martin Luther King, Jr. and other people and matters, found in Esquire one of his primary markets as he moved leftward away from his early work for National Review, as one of William Buckley's great discoveries.
Talese, Tom Wolfe, and other "New Journalists" got that ball rolling in one of its most widely-read fora here. It was an impressive achievement, and then suddenly in 1973, Hayes was gone and Esquire was back to being the mildly engaging, mostly trivial magazine it remains.

Hardcover and (below) paperback editions of the anthology.

Meanwhile, as noted, Evergreen was both more self-consciously "literary" and bohemian...it was started as the kind of magazine that would publish Samuel Beckett, as well as help serve as an organ to advertise other Grove Press writers and help push the same boundaries the book imprints were striving to widen or break. After all, "Pauline Reage" was published in very explicit excerpt early on in the magazine, and not she alone, along with nude photography by Salvador Dali and others, and eventually a satiric as well as sexually semi-explicit (no genitals, a fair amount of semi-parodic misogynist perversity) serial comic, "The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist," which was very much of the mindset that scripter Michael O'Donoghue would bring to National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live, only its targets tended to be more literary and hipsterish. But Jorge Luis Borges was as much in evidence here as Terry Southern (even as Southern but not Borges was in Esquire), and Evergreen never gave up its ambition to be a first-rate literary magazine even as it also became a crusade for First Amendment rights. And mostly succeeded. And, then, in 1973, it was gone...the press 4 Walls 8 Windows has published a second Reader collecting from 1967-73.

For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog. And the goofballs at Time had at least the good taste to ask Patti's daughter Megan to mention a book she's reading this summer...

Tuesday's Overlooked Films and Other A/V: HOTEL; WTF and THE REALIST; MONITOR

Hotel is a film designed to displease many...particularly if one is not willing to take it on its terms, till its narrative threads appear or reappear. It's the account of a very troubled film shoot...an attempt to do a low-budget, Dogme 95 film version of John Webster's best-known work, The Duchess of Malfi, a play at least as invested in court politics and skullduggery as any of Shakespeare's, and as a result an organic metaphor for the goings-on around the production, which are as prone to outbursts of bad temper and the playing out of hidden agendas as anything in the play itself. The play has been dumbed down, in the film, by scenarist/actor "John Shirley" (played by Heathcoate Williams, who actually did help script the film, in one of writer-director Mike Figgis's many injokes; the actor playing Antonio in Malfi, Max Beesley, is a decent jazz pianist whose character in Hotel is offhandedly referred to as "Gerry Mulligan," after the saxophonist/pianist/bandleader). The producer (played by David Schwimmer) lusts after the director's paramour, and the star of the Duchess film (Saffron Burrows) and so hires one of the staff of the Venetian hotel where all the cast and crew are billeted to shoot his old friend, the director (Rhys Ifans, playing quite the indulged, tantrum-prone prat). The hotel is full of sinister goings-on, as the staff seems to be made up of possibly vampiric and definitely human-flesh-eating creatures, who are seen at the beginning of the film having tricked a foolish American tourist (John Malkovich) into joining their nightly feast, only to clearly become the main menu item for the next night.

As rather good bits of Malfi are shot throughout the film (and failed bits, as well), we see the further unraveling of the film crew's plans and work, not aided by the occasional interruptions and challenges of a Making-of documentary crew, mostly composed of the airheaded interviewer Charlee Boux (Salma Hayek) and her cameraman/soundman/producer (Lucy Liu's Sawika sweeps in to help that struggling effort along). The director, after being shot, is in paralysis for much of the film (blatantly misdiagnosed as a coma), and so the producer steps in, not only to woo the leading lady but to put his own amateurish stamp on the production.

The film is largely improvised, yet never loses structure (that it returns to the play regularly helps in this) and remains genuinely funny throughout, even as it manages to keep an edge of menace between the machinations of the staff and the interactions of the film people. That the cannibal hotel-staff tourguide (Julian Sands) yearns for the days of Italian fascism and is only one of several characters to openly mock Dogme film-making is among the many sly touches that help keep the good humor going; the multiple-screen approaches Figgis had previously explored in Timecode and the supernatural themes of Liebestraum come to fuller flowering here.

I must admit, it's a little odd for me to agree so strongly with Roger Ebert, who thinks it a brilliant film, and Elvis Mitchell, only slightly less enthusiastic, and to disagree so strongly with my friend Kate Laity, who is not alone in reviling the film (though I've yet to get a detailed pan from her).

from The Realist:


The most recent episode of Mark Maron's podcast, WTF, is an interview with Paul Krassner, he most sustainedly of The Realist magazine and newsletter, from 1958 to 2001 with a few years off for odd behavior. Maron is seeking large answers to large questions about what the ultimate meaning of Krassner's and Bruce's work is, and the nature of their challenge to society in particularly the 1960s (though of course both began their key work in the latter '50s)...which is as good an opportunity as any to drop in a plug for The Realist archive website, a comprehensive facsimile of the magazine's run. I only wished this hadn't gone up just after I'd blown my deadline for a long essay on The Realist for a collection of cult-magazine historical essays.

Monitor on-air staff

Meanwhile, since we're probing the '50s and '60s, here's an interesting archive of a rather more Socially Acceptable project, which nonetheless allowed for some interesting satirical and related work to be done within the confines of commercial network radio--the longform weekend project that was NBC's Monitor, from 1955 to 1975 essentially a weekend-long mixture of reportage, radio documentary and comedy (featuring Bob & Ray and many others, including Nichols and May early in their career together), and hardly conceivable outside public radio today...albeit with some of the slickness and a fair amount of the shallowness that commercial radio demanded. (Dom Imus, early in his career, was a host, as was Gene Rayburn...though Henry Morgan is remembered more fondly...)

Three films in the last fortnight: LOVE AND OTHER DRUGS, BLACK SWAN, the third Salander film, LUFTSLOTTET SOM SPRANGDES (THE [WOMAN] WHO KICKED...)

So, I've seen three newish films in theaters in the last two weeks, if none on this busy weekend...and all three are about women with deficits who meet Good Men and/or Women, and in the case of the Salander film, the third of the Millennium Trilogy oddly mistitled in English, and Love and Other Drugs, the good men (and women) help out our heroine Salander and a young woman with Parkinson's and related commitment issues, to one degree or another, and in Black Swan, the good woman can't quite overcome the influences of the malefactors in the protagonist's life. Though Why women with deficits are consistently In Trouble, when men with deficits (see any Judd Apatow or Happy Madison production, or the likes of The Hangover) are Just Regular Guys, is a good question. One probably should ask why all the women leads in these films are suffering, one hopes only temporarily and role-specifically, from something akin to anorexia, as well...


The Salander films are all crowd-pleasers, with the Asperger's-spectrum heroine in this installment playing mostly by The Man's rules as noble public servants help her by rooting out the evil that government bureaus and consultants and patsies do. You can tell she's a Rebel because she wears a mohawk to trial, which would seem to be unhelpful to her case, but the suggestion here as with the other films is that we should be against the kind of condescension that retitles the novels and films in this language and this language only as The Girl..., except in the case of the second novel, wherein the Girl Who was actually a girl when playing with fire. I liked it a lot, as I did the second film also more than the first, just because the first seemed a bit more outlandish...the conspiracy that causally abuses Salander throughout the works is at least somewhat better delineated in the latter two films, both made for TV apparently rather than for cinematic distribution, as was the first.


Love and Other Drugs is also related to television, one could say, as the kind of subject matter that writer-director Ed Zwick loves to deal with in television series, ranging from thirtysomething through My So-Called Life, Relativity and, my favorite, Once and Again to the slightly disappointing web-series, later briefly televised, quarterlife. A pilot for CBS, A Marriage, was shot and declined without being shown, so far. So, instead of the kind of historical drama that Zwick has been doing for cinematic release, such as Glory and Blood Diamond, Zwick somewhat splits the difference with a romantic drama with comic bits (some perhaps broader than they need to be) and some serious subtexts involving caring for people with degenerative diseases, and the responsibilities of the "ethical" drug industry and how they are avoided (the film is loosely based on the memoirs of a pharma rep in the last years of their utter cowboy phase, ten to fifteen years ago...considerably if not sufficiently fenced in these days). Good performances, including from Judy Greer and the other smaller-role supporting players, including one of the last or perhaps the last performance by Jill Clayburgh. There are a few threads left dangling (not least in that a drug rep might well be able to provide discounted prescriptions for low-income patients), and I'm not sure whether I think it was deft to leave it vague as whether Anne Hathaway's character was a trust-fund baby or not...somewhat improbable that she can live the life she does without a financial cushion.


Black Swan is the least successful of the three, while probably the most ambitious. However, it doesn't help that there isn't a non-stereotyped character in the film, despite those characters being fleshed out by good performances by Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey and Winona Ryder among others. But, quite aside from the Fragile Diva, the Good-Sporty Potential Best Friend (and Manic Pixie Girlfriend, Free-Spirit Division), the Stage Mother, and The Bitter Dumped Star, the film as a whole will remind you, or at least it does me, of better films...not solely The Red Shoes, but also Repulsion, Persona, and a bit of the latter-day kind of horror of perception films such as Donnie Darko. Or, to some extent, Aronofsky's previous films...listening to Natalie Hershlag being interviewed about Aronofsky's attempts to create a Method rivalry between Kunis and herself did little further respect his intellect or professionalism. When the script features such Cleverness as the Svengali choreographer of the ballet troupe telling the fragile, overly-controlled, severely in need of apron-string-cutting protagonist that There will be no boundaries between them...ho, ho, So Telling! But it's well-shot, and as I mentioned, well-acted (even if, as actor Marcia Wallace notes on Jackie Kashian's podcast, "Portman" wanders throughout the film looking consistently startled, which helps the constant potential for goofiness tip in that directiton for at least some viewers). I've been told it's a love it or hate it film...it's just a good try, on the part of the cast, by me, and not bad...not nearly as bad nor good as you might've heard or read.

SF magazines Head-to-head: PLANET STORIES, Summer 1949 and ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION, October 1949 (FFM)

Something I wrote for the FictionMags list in 2004, dusted off in part for Paul Fraser's new project of reviewing older magazines, and providing links to others' similar reviews:

Head-to-head: PLANET STORIES, Summer 1949 and ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION, October 1949.

Why? Well, since I'd never read an entire issue of either magazine (ANALOGs, yes, but never an ASTOUNDING), it seemed time. I have three pairs of PLANETs and ASFs from near contemporaneity, and this pair is the earliest, from that period wherein F&SF had finally launched, GALAXY and the Palmer/Hamling magazines were about to lead the boom, and THRILLING WONDER and FANTASTIC ADVENTURES and their stablemates were beginning to pick up some artistic steam. 

Why these two magazines? One can still ruffle some feathers by suggesting that Campbell was any less than a god among editors, particularly in '40s, and PLANET is the title (perhaps deservedly in its Peacock years?) most likely to be dismissed, perhaps with a nostalgic grin. For example, from Arthur Hlavaty's June [2004] Nice Distinctions account of this year's ICFA:

A paper written by Amelia Beamer and Aimee Sutherland showed how 
Astounding's multiplicity of appeals (particularly cerebral) helped 
it survive the 50s collapse of the pulp market when Planet Stories 
didn't. [Nice Distinctions general archive]

--Note that this, as described, keeps up the party line about 
respective content without apparently taking into account the 
relative financial security of Street & Smith, and then Conde Nast and its successors as Analog publishers, vs. Fiction House...whose sole surviving publication, for a year or so before the American News [all-but-monoply magazine distributor] dismemberment, apparently was PLANET. [I'll need to double-check this...perhaps they still had a comic or two and/or crime-fiction magazine....]

And as I read these, week before last (I was fighting the flu and 
not working my usual ridiculous hours, so found some time to fit 
them in), I noted that there were odd parallels, story to story, in 
the two issues at hand.

Editors: rarely-discussed Paul L. Payne (to what extent under the 
thumb of Malcolm Reiss?--Jerome Bixby might already be on staff, as he's working at Love Romances at that point) and monument JWC, Jr (who in this issue gives his ham radio call sign under his name in the masthead...I'd 
not previously been aware that this was one of his hobbies, but it 
seems natural. Later issues I have don't offer this).

April probably would've liked this one, too.

An ugly, if suitably (and goofily) fraught Allen Anderson (the beast of burden clearly came directly from a carousel) vs. an ugly, if suitably dour and relatively subtle, Alejandro Canedo. Frank Robinson noted the homophobic reaction to a later, slightly more "in-focus" Canedo male nude ASF cover in his SF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, fan references to JWC's "girlfriend." My friend April likes the Canedo here.

Most notorious writers: PLANET: Stanley Mullen; ASF: L. Ron Hubbard. They live down to expectations. See below. (Mullen gets explicit cover mention, Hubbard much better Ed Cartier illustrations than his story deserves.)

Least well-known writers: PLANET offers the only published work I'm aware of credited to one C. J. Wedlake; it's a minor problem-story.  
E. L. Locke's ASF story-of-sorts, "The Finan-Seer," amounts to an extended "Probability Zero" entry, and not a good one; Locke mostly 
wrote nonfiction for ASF. (John R. Pierce [as JJ Coupling, clearly the ball-bearing mousetrap of ASF pseudonyms] and L. Sprague de Camp [with a pre-plate tectonics piece on continental faults] provide much better entertainment and information with straightforward 
nonfiction in ASF; the closest thing to this in the PLANET is an odd page of cheerleading for space exploration, an illustration which has a very Buck Rogers-esque spaceship leaving a planet, with "TDCUAIN" on its side--we are told that that stands for "Technical Development Committee on Upper Atmosphere and Interplanetary Navigation"--without also telling us who formed the committee or in what context.)

Lead stories: Leigh Brackett's "Queen of the Martian Catacombs" (PS) is the first Eric John Stark story I've read, and a fine one; Chan 
Davis's "The Aristocrat" (ASF) is only the second or third story by 
him that I've read--he doesn't handle prose here as deftly as 
Brackett, but his points are taken. They are both intelligent and 
unsurprisingly leftist adventures involving intelligent barbarians 
showing the smug heirarchs a thing or three--clearly a plot 
structure built to appeal to the SFnal mind. In "Queen," Stark has 
been asked to infiltrate a conspiracy to overthrow the current 
Martian city-states and subjugate them to a false populist and his 
immortal puppetmasters; Davis's Aristocrat is part of a sickly race 
of thinly-spread "normal" humans, who serve as a sort of priesthood 
attempting to preserve the American culture of pre-atomic war while 
living parasitically off the healthier, if simpler, mutant humans in 
the villages which dot the countryside...and what happens when an 
intelligent, "normal"-seeming healthy mutant woman is brought to 
live with our anti-hero. Neither of these would've cut it as Popular 
Front propaganda--in both cases, agents of the ruling class 
eventually help our proletarian forces-for-good, after becoming 
suitably enlightened...then again, perhaps they would. Refreshing 
after too many post-STARSHIP TROOPERS adventure-sf experiences, 
particularly those by Pournelle. In terms of sophistication--both 
stories at about the same level.

Next up, problem stories, by steady hands. Both stories goofy. 
Raymond F. Jones's "Production Test" (ASF) doesn't convince, even in 
these post-Challenger days, that the production-design flaw in the 
spacesuit the protag manufactures would've gotten as far as it did, 
nor that the way he foolishly goes about testing it, to get him into 
the problem-predicament that he (of course) bests by the end, 
wouldn't be much harder to achieve. But, gosh there's snappy 
engineer/entrepreneur talk. Likewise in "The Madcap Metalloids" 
(PS), W. V. Athanas, who wrote little for SF magazines but a fair 
amount of fiction in magazines generally (as the FictionMags Index 
suggests), poses a problem for two spacemen and their ship 
improbably gravitationally snared by an asteroid, which happily has 
liquid metallic lifeforms on it, which are also telepathic to a degree, and willing to help an old spacer out, thanks to their amusing means of locomotion. And, gosh, there's snappy old space-dog talk. Speaking of dogs, both these stories use "dog" as a verb in a way that I take it was much more common in the late '40s than now, seeming to mean (Athanas is better at suggesting this than Jones) slowly working one's way into a sleeve or other tight-fitting space. 
The lapses in science in the Athanas are met incident for incident 
by lapses of good sense in the Jones, and the Athanas is more 
colorful, if also more improbable. A wash, though I could see 
unsophisticated engineers and their fans finding the Jones a more 
mature reading experience.

Poul Anderson's "Time Heals" (ASF) is a fine story, particularly for 
a very young lion still, which, along with Allen Kim Lang's much 
later "Thaw and Serve," is one of the grimmest of takes on the 
concept flaws of suspended animation/cryonics I've read. It's fun 
watching Anderson learn how to handle infodumping, and taking in the 
charming crudeness of conception of his posited multiculti future 
clans, here. As with Brackett's story, only perhaps more fervidly, 
the highly commercial yet also exotic naughtiness of describing 
cultures wherein women wear nothing to cover nor support their 
breasts is enjoyed by the author.

Then, the real shitpiles. Stanley Mullen's childish excuse for 
importing the Mickey Spillane idiom into space opera (PS's "S.O.S. 
Aphrodite!") is matched in awfulness by a gassy attempt at Thorne 
Smith/Damon Runyon humor from LRH ("The Auto-Magic Horse"). These 
are the second-longest stories in their respective issues; Mullen's 
past-mastery of Thoggish and Hubbard's description of a charming 
charlatan with a hidden agenda, and his remarkably loyal and adept 
but idiot-savant sidekicks--all of which sounds to me like a working out 

1955...the last issue...Freas/Anderson...

of a plan for the Very Near Future in 1949 by Hubbard--help keep these bad stories almost worthy of the time wasted reading them. The slavish devotion of both Mullen and Hubbard to certain retrograde notions of femininity, even for those post-Rosie the Riveter times, also help make the stories seem even more insane than 
they might otherwise.

To be continued...not to keep you in suspense, though, the two issues don't strike me as being notably different in sophistication, quality, nor often even in approach, though obviously PLANET preferred the more exotic environment when possible, ASTOUNDING the more familiar (or at very least more grounded). Don't know if these were two unusual 

...1955, Freas/Anderson...

issues for some reason...but one of my two other pairs, from 1955, make the two magazines (both prominently featuring Poul Anderson stories on Kelly Freas covers) look like they could be stablemates.

Second post, leading off with some corrections to the first:

-- In fictionmags@yahoogroups.com, Todd Mason wrote:

> Head-to-head: PLANET STORIES, Summer 1949 and ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION, October 1949. Frank Robinson noted the homophobic reaction to a later, slightly more "in-focus" Canedo male nude ASF cover in his SF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, fan references to JWC's "girlfriend."

--Actually, the popular reference apparently was to "John's other wife."

> Next up, problem stories, by steady hands. Both stories goofy.
> Raymond F. Jones's "Production Test" (ASF) doesn't convince [...] 

But, gosh there's snappy engineer/entrepreneur talk.
--Including, or and also, gratuitous reminders of General 
Semantics...was this a JWC as well as van Vogt obsession in 
the '40s, or simply appealed to the Deep engineers or such writers 
as Jones?

> To be continued...not to keep you in suspense, though, the two
> issues don't strike me as being notably different in 

sophistication, 

> quality, nor often even in approach, though obviously PLANET
> preferred the more exotic environment when possible, ASTOUNDING 

the more familiar. Don't know if these were two unusual

> issues for some reason...but one of my two other pairs, from 1955,
> make the two magazines (both prominently featuring Poul Anderson
> stories on Kelly Freas covers) look like they could be stablemates.

--Of course, it helps that the later issues both had sans-serif block-letter logos 
by then, as well. Perhaps attesting to the influence of JWC and his 
magazine even beyond the literary.

Kris Neville's "Cold War" (ASF) and Alfred Coppel's "The 
Starbusters" (PS) are interesting, incompletely successful stories.  
Neville's involves a US-dominated world, wherein manned arsenal 
satellites engirdle the globe, and the soldiers stationed in these 
are starting to regularly crack under the strain of being angels of 
death. Much realpolitikal jumping from one sequence to another of 
our noble President doing what he Has to do to keep the Pax 
Americana, with the author's implied support of the notion that We 
Are, after all, the Good Guys. But a precursor to those stories 
(and news reports) of our nuclear missile launch technicians 
refusing to Do Their Duty to kill a good part of the world. I 
wonder how appalled Neville actually was by the scenario; JWC 
certainly seems amusedly troubled by it, in his blurb [please see Barry Malzberg's comment, below]. The Coppel is a bit of a mess: somewhat hurriedly attempting to be a Corps story and deal with the implications of anti-matter (or contraterrene, here) as a weapon, it also features a bunch of soldiers realizing that perhaps genocide against their enemies (via 
forcing a star to go nova) may not be the most noble of victories--
and that crew is fully integrated sexually (equally important jobs 
all around), a recognition of the future probability of that kind of 
egalitarianism to a much greater degree than any other story in 
either issue by anyone. (And, keeping up with the odd parallels, 
both these stories begin with apparatus--the Neville with a 
recruiting poster, the Coppel with what amounts to a telegram--so 
not uniformly predictive!)

Margaret St. Clair has an interesting short in "Garden of Evil" 
(PS), wherein a foolhardy ethnographer goes off with a humanoid 
woman, who leads him to the doom that the reader is expecting from 
about the second column of the first page, but is also expecting to 
be baited and switched. A non-twist ending, although the guide 
woman herself seems a bit confused; just before having our protag 
killed, she implies he's to report back to the human authorities.  
But elegantly evocative, and gleefully antiromantic.

The final stories in each issue are crucially concerned with 
telepathy (much more profoundly so than the Athanas), and are about 
as good as one would expect from Katherine MacLean and Charles 
Harness, without being superb. Harness's "Stalemate in Space" (PS) 
is the best Jack Vance arguably-sf story, minus most of the 
cynicism, it's been my pleasure to read; a woman, the daughter of 
the heirarch in charge of a battle globe overrun by the forces of 
another similar globe from Earth's adversary civilization, seeks to 
infiltrate the enemy forces so that she can activate the destruction 
of both globes, currently locked together in a frontier space. A 
mixture of sympathies for the aristocratic (the telepaths, such as 
our protag, are naturally the ruling class on Earth) and the more 
plebeian (over the objectification of the enemy in war) are well-
integrated. MacLean's "Defense Mechanism" (ASF) similarly seeks a 
dichotomy, in drawing on the supposed innocence of children (and the 
ugliness of at least some adult thought) while also tracing out the 
family tensions when an infant is a full-fledged telepath capable of 
communicating in what amounts to colloquial English with his father, 
but his mother is shut out of this entirely. Rather reminiscently 
of Damon Knight's later "Special Delivery", trauma forces the child to 
lose his telepathic abilities, although before the loss, they have 
also saved the father from murder--two sorts of defense mechanism.  
MacLean's belief in the existence of actual telepathy, as noted in 
the Merril memoir and elsewhere, is perhaps telling here, though 
Harness's use of the device, and the descriptions of the attempts of 
various telepaths to block each other's abilities, are well-worked 
out and may've been influential.

It's an all-ASF-related book review column (not yet "The Reference 
Library") for this ASTOUNDING: Catherine de Camp on DARKER THAN YOU 
THINK, and P. Schuyler Miller on SKYLARK OF VALERON and de Camp's 
THE WHEELS OF IF (with Miller longing for the half-decade-or-so dead 
days when ASF would publish such work). Campbell's editorial is a 
rumination on cosmic ray particles; Payne's "Vizigraph" header is 
largely given to announcing Ray Nelson, Bob Bradley, and Bill 
Oberfield have won covers for their popular letters published in the 
previous issue. Letters indexed below, including some from Betsy 
Curtis and Alexis Gilliland in PLANET; in ASF, Arthur Jean Cox and Robert 
Moore Williams (both discussing, Cox in part, Williams's official 
dismissal as a lackey by the Soviet literary apparatus).

PLANET STORIES Vol. IV, N0. 3, Summer 1949. Edited by Paul L. Payne 
(Malcolm Reiss, Gen. Mgr.); published by the Love Romances 
Publishing Co./Fiction House. Quarterly. Pulp; 112 pp plus covers. 
20c/issue; 50c/year. 

Cover * Allen Anderson, for "Queen of the Martian Catacombs" 
2 * Paul L. Payne et alia * The Vizigraph * ed/lc
2 * John Higgins * More Sex in the Future? * lt
4 * Leigh Brackett * Queen of the Martian Catacombs * nt (illus. ?)
37 * W. V. Athanas * The Madcap Metalloids * ss (illus. ?)
45 * Stanley Mullen * S.O.S Aphrodite! * ss (illus. A. M. Williams)
59 * Anon./Paul Payne? * Attention, Readers! * poll/query as to 
whether to discontinue reader letters/"The Vizigraph"
60 * Alfred Coppel, Jr. * The Starbusters * ss (illus. Vestal)
72 * C. J. Wedlake * Peril Orbit * ss (illus. ?)
75 * Anon./TDCUAIN * Per Aspera Ad Astra * cartoon (not intended to 
be humorous)
77 * Margaret St. Clair * Garden of Evil * ss (illus. ?)
84 * Charles L. Harness * Stalemate in Space * ss (illus. A. M. 
Williams)
105 * David M. Campbell * Be Not AFreud * lt
106 * David Hitchcock Green * Says Stf is Immature * lt
107 * Robert A. Rivenes * PS Lighter than Air? * lt
108 * Ray H. Ramsay * OK, No More American Heroes * lt
108 * Marvin Williams * Hotsy Dandy, with Red Eyes * lt
109 * Ed Cox * Won't Vote for Himself * lt
110 * A. A. Gilliland * Off to Grumph Alpha * lt
110 * Elizabeth Curtis * Hides Us from Hubby * lt
112 * Arthur D. Hall * What? No More Ego Boo? * lt

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION Vol. XLIV, No. 2, October 1949. Edited by 
John W. Campbell, Jr (W2ZGU); Assistant Editor, C. Tarrant. 
Published by Street and Smith Publications. Monthly. Digest; 164 pp 
including covers. 25c/issue; $2.50/yr.

Cover * Alejandro Canedo (perhaps relating to "The Aristocrat")
4 * John W. Campbell, Jr. * High Energy * ed
6 * Chan Davis * The Aristocrat * nt (illus. by Brush, who misspells 
the protagonist's name)
39 * Raymond F. Jones * Production Test * ss (illus. Paul Orban)
57 * John W. Campbell, Jr. * The Analytical Laboratory * poll
58 * Poul Anderson * Time Heals * ss (illus. Brush)
75 * L. Ron Hubbard * The Auto-Magic Horse * nt (illus. Ed Cartier)
104 * J. J. Coupling (John R. Pierce) * Chance Remarks * ar
112 * L. Sprage de Camp * The Great Floods * ar
121 * Kris Neville * Cold War * ss (illus. Brush)
132 * E. L. Locke * The Finan-Seer * ss (illus. Ed Cartier)
141 * Catherine de Camp * DARKER THAN YOU THINK by Jack Williamson 
(Fantasy Press 1949) * br
141 * P. Schuyler Miller * SKYLARK OF VALERON by Edward E. Smith 
(Fantasy Press 1949) * br
142 * P. Schuyler Miller * THE WHEELS OF IF by L. Sprague de Camp 
(Shasta Publishing 1949) * br
143 * JWC et al. * Brass Tacks * lc
143 * Warren Carroll * lt
145 * R. J. Raven-Hart * lt
146 * Owen R. Loveless * lt
148 * Arthur Jean Cox * lt
150 * W. M. Keese, Jr. * lt
154 * Robert Moore Williams * lt
155 * Katherine MacLean * Defense Mechanism * ss (illus. Brush)

For more of today's books (and perhaps other magazines), please see Patti Abbott's blog.