Friday, November 20, 2015

FFB, Winter Holiday Edition: ALL THE LIES THAT ARE MY LIFE (and SHATTERDAY, the collection) by Harlan Ellison (1980 publications in various formats)


For the second week in a row, I've been compelled to reread an item I hadn't intended to review for FFB, but even more than last week's example, Harlan Ellison's "All the Lies That Are My Life" has a certain resonance with my own recent day-to-day activities, as well as being a good and engaging example of quasi-autobiographical fiction--not the first piece nor the last that The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction would print that wasn't in any way actually fantasy or science fiction, so much (in this case, as with a few others) as being drawn from the lives of several sf and fantasy writers.  It involves a funeral and the playback of the videotaped reading of a will, the last testament of a highly successful writer, whose writer-friend is the protagonist and narrator of the story. Naturally, the writer-friend gets to reminisce throughout about his relation with the dead writer and the other members of the inner circle of family and friends gathered for the reading, including the woman who had been our protagonist's ex, before marrying the late writer some decades before and having sustained a tempestuous and open marriage since.  Ellison has been willing and able to share autobiographical details in various fora, not least in the introductions to his various collections and anthologies, so much is familiar even as transmogrified here, i. e. the late writer's sister getting a final kiss-off in the taped presentation; Ellison has written occasionally of his utter enmity with his sister, perhaps at greatest length in describing the eulogy he delivered at their mother's funeral, and his sibling's voluble hostility as he spoke. There are bits and pieces drawn in the story from earlier accounts of Ellison's relations with Robert Silverberg (though apparently in the introduction to the chapbook publication of the novella, Silverberg makes it clear that the story doesn't in any obvious way parallel their friendship or interactions), though even there there's a mix and match of
autobiographical and personality and personal style bits between the two primary characters, who are both to some extent mixtures of Silverberg and Ellison and utterly their own characters as fictional creations...no simple roman a clef here. I note "apparently," since I don't yet have the chapbook form of the novella, published in 1980 by Underwood/ Miller in an illustrated text (visuals by Kent Bash, whose work is mentioned in passing in the story and whose paintings can be seen on both the book's cover and that for the F&SF issue the story is in, above and at right).  I'll need a copy of the Underwood/Miller edition, I think, not only for the Silverberg "rebuttal" in advance but also for the number of afterwords by other notable writers, at least a few of whose interactions with Ellison and details of their own lives play into the story. (And quite aside from any notions of the Winter of Our Discontent, a notable passage in the story takes place just before and after a holiday snow-covered roadway accident puts the two writers at the heart of the story inside a Chevy temporarily jammed into a snowbank...this for a Winter Holiday Theme edition of Friday's Books, this week.)

 Barry Malzberg, whose review of the Galaxy retrospective anthology I FFB'd a few months back follows the novella in the magazine, has written some similar quasi-autobiographical contemporary-mimetic work set in the fantastic-fiction literary/fan community, among others "Corridors" (first appearing in his 1982 collection The Engines of the Night); for that matter, Malzberg also reviews a Robert Sheckley novel, Sheckley being one of the writers who wrote an afterword to for the Underwood edition and one I was thinking of whose interaction with Ellison was probably mined for a few aspects of the story. And I'd forgotten that "Lies" had also been published in that year in Ellison's major collection released that year, Shatterday, one of his strongest collections gathering much of his best 1970s work; it and Deathbird Stories might be his two best collections of fiction. And my copy of Shatterday is deeply in storage somewhere at the moment, it being the copy my Aunt Beverly traded me for an Ellison nonfiction collection, Sleepless Nights on the Procrustean Bed, which had been published not too long before her mid-1980s visit to my parents' house. Beverly, despite being a very great fan of Ellison, had not heard of the small press collection before. I was reminded of this not too many weeks ago, when Beverly, who'd been holding on through no few medical crises in recent years, passed...what I wrote on that occasion wasn't quite as detailed as what I wrote after Thomas Disch's death some years ago (Disch, too, contributed to the Underwood edition), but my cousins were kind enough to suggest they were given a little comfort by it. All the things we take from this life and do what we can with them. 

 And I bought my new copy of this issue of F&SF a month or so ago at a community booksale at the high school around the block, from the tables staffed by the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society, whose annual PhilCon begins tonight at a hotel a mile away. Insert Zeno's Paradox references here, amid the notions of what we remember, how we remember, and what's gone and always with us.

 For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Courtesy ISFDB and the Contento/Locus indices:
  •  · Introduction: Mortal Dreads · in
  •  · Jeffty Is Five · ss F&SF Jul ’77
  •  · How’s the Night Life on Cissalda? · ss Chrysalis, ed. Roy Torgeson, Zebra, 1977; Heavy Metal Nov ’77
  •  · Flop Sweat · ss Heavy Metal Mar ’79
  •  · Would You Do It For a Penny? · Harlan Ellison & Haskell Barkin · ss Playboy Oct ’67
  •  · The Man Who Was Heavily into Revenge · ss Analog Aug ’78
  •  · Shoppe Keeper · ss The Arts and Beyond, ed. Thomas F. Monteleone, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977
  •  · All the Lies That Are My Life · na Underwood-Miller; Columbia, PA Oct ’80
  •  · Django · ss Galileo #6 ’78
  •  · Count the Clock That Tells the Time · ss Omni Dec ’78
  •  · In the Fourth Year of the War · ss Midnight Sun #5 ’79
  •  · Alive and Well and on a Friendless Voyage · ss F&SF Jul ’77
  •  · All the Birds Come Home to Roost · ss Playboy Mar ’79
  •  · Opium · ss Shayol #2 ’78
  •  · The Other Eye of Polyphemus · ss Cosmos SF&F Magazine Nov ’77
  •  · The Executioner of the Malformed Children · ss Iguanacon Program Book, 1978
  •  · Shatterday · ss Gallery Sep ’75; Science Fiction Monthly v2 #8 ’75
________________________
  • Publication: All the Lies That Are My Life
  • Authors: Harlan Ellison
  • Year: 1980-09-00
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Thursday, November 19, 2015

Thursday's Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V: the links to reviews, interviews, etc. (delayed from Tuesday, with further apologies)

Sonia Delaunay designs
This week's adventures in audio/visual materials that the reviewers think need at least another look (or, occasionally, actually deserve obscurity); thanks as always to everyone, and please let me know if I've missed your or someone else's notable posts.  Todd Mason, who notes that the Criterion Blogathon is responsible for most of the Criterion DVD and BluRay reviews this week...see Kristina Dijan, Ruth and Aaron West's citations for guides to the participants and their essays...

 Aaron West: The Apu Trilogy; Criterion Blogathon

 Anne Billson: westerns from countries other than the US...

 Anonymous: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre; Au Hazard Balthazar; The Young Girls of Rochefort; No Way Out

 Bhob Stewart: Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (keep scrolling)

 The Big Broadcast: 15 November 2015 (host Rob Bamberger has no clue about the history of dime novels, pulps and Nick Carter, and isn't afraid to display this.)

 Bill Crider: The Adventures of Don Juan [trailer]

 BV Lawson: Media Murder (it's the delayed time of year)

 Colin: Thunder in the East

 Comedy Film Nerds: Rob Cohen; The Martian

 Cullen Gallagher: The Monster and the Girl

 Cynthia Fuchs: Democrats; Toto and His Sisters 

 David Vineyard: Midnight (1934 film); Time Lock

 Doug Ellis: the 1939 WorldCon, the first

Dorian Bartolucci: Lloyd Corrigan

 Elizabeth Foxwell: The Cat and the Canary (1939 film)

 Evan Lewis: Django (1966 film)

 Gary Deane: Vanishing Point; Gone in Sixty Seconds (1974)

George Kelley: DC SuperVillains/Justice League: Masterminds of Crime

 Gilligan Newton-John: Summer School (1976 film); VHS film boxes

 Iba Dawson: Catfish (2010 film)

 Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.: I Can Get It for You Wholesale; films on Turner Classic Movies; The Many Loves of Dobey Gillis

 Jack Seabrook: Alfred Hitchcock Presents: "The Belfry"

 Jackie Kashian: Chef; Steve Young on American Horror Story, Harper, etc.

 Jacqueline T. Lynch: No Down Payment

 James Reasoner: The Bold Caballero

Janet Varney: Carla Cackowski; Kate Walsh 

Jeff Flugel: Red Dwarf

 Jerry House: Teenagers from Outer Space; X Minus One: "Nightmare" (from Benet's "By the Waters of Babylon")

 John Grant: Curtain at Eight; Crime Unlimited

Jonathan Lewis: Terror Beneath the Sea; Cowboy from Brooklyn

 Karen Hannsberry: New York Confidential; Tom Neal

 Kate Laity: Anna Karenina (2012 film)

 Kelly Robinson: Eraserhead and silent film

 Ken Levine: Larry Gelbart; blog party

 Kristina Dijan: Criterion Blogathon: Day 4; Day 1; In Cold Blood; Eduardo Cianelli; The Florentine Dagger

 Laura G: Two Weeks with Love; Night in New Orleans; Them!; Man-Proof; 30 in 30

Lucy Brown: Angel Face

 Martin Edwards: The Scotland Yard Crime Museum; the Detection Club

 Marty McKee: Blood Beast of Monster Mountain; Tales from the Darkside: The Movie; The Verdict; Narrow Margin (1990)

Mildred Perkins: Dead Rising: Watchtower; Longmire

 Mystery Dave: Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen

 Patricia Nolan-Hall: Sanjuro

 Patti Abbott: Rachel, Rachel

 Prashant Trikkanad: Chess in movies

 Rick: Sydney Greenstreet; Family Affair: "Christmas Came a Little Early"

Rod Lott; Deliver Us from Evil; Never Say Never Again; Beowulf (2007); Murder Can Hurt You

 "Rupert Pupkin": Living in Oblivion

 Ruth: Criterion Blogathon; Ikiru; Daffy Duck

 Sam Juliano: I Walked with a Zombie

 Scott Cupp: Doctor Strange

 Sergio Angelini: I Start Counting

Stacia Jones: The Deadly Bees; Phase IV; Hustle; Darling Lili

 Stephen Bowie: Leigh Chapman

 Stephen Gallagher: George Barris

 Steve Lewis: Killshot;  Cry Danger; Thanks a Million; Silverfox  (Mason on Killshot some years back)

 Television Obscurities: Hollywood Special (eventually aka ABC Sunday Night at the Movies)

 Todd Mason: The Virgin Spring

 Victoria Loomes: Sonia Delaunay

 Vienna: Leslie Howard; Robert Ryan

 Yvette Banek: Ministry of Fear
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Tuesday, November 17, 2015

film: THE VIRGIN SPRING (Jungfrukällan) (1960, Sweden) A Criterion Blogathon entry

My 1972 book, Ingmar Bergman Directs, begins with a long interview. After that, the first sentence runs: "Ingmar Bergman is, in my most carefully considered opinion, the greatest filmmaker the world has seen so far." Thirty-five years later, upon news of Bergman's death last month, that is still my opinion. 
--John Simon, in "Cinema's Shakespeare" in The Weekly Standard (2007)

 Jungfrukällan, released in English as The Virgin Spring, is, like nearly all the films Ingmar Bergman directed, beautifully shot and set in a very solid, fleshed-out world...one gets a sense of how life probably was lived in medieval Sweden better than that provided by nearly any other historical drama of its time, even as the film, based on a famous Swedish tragic ballad from the 1300s, dramatically is a parable, even more than the ballad itself a fable devoted to dealing with extremes of behavior, faith and guilt, the search for some sort of redemption in the face all sorts of loss. The film is a mystery or miracle play in cinematic terms, a distant (but not too distant) cousin of such English classics as "Everyman."

 Synopsis: 
Ingeri, the young woman of the household whose status is somewhere between servant girl and foster daughter, goes about her chores to start the day; we see she is gravid. We soon learn that she is pregnant out of wedlock (she notes that a bastard will produce a bastard) and that the other women of the household hold her in some contempt for her wild ways and rebelliousness; she also had paused in her chores early on to pray to Odin, in what is otherwise apparently a Christian household. The patriarch and matriarch of the family, Tore and Mareta, discuss who should deliver the family's offering of candles to the not quite nearby church, though tradition apparently demands that the offering be presented by a virginal young woman, so daughter Karin, who's sleeping in after complaining of illness (and having danced the night away), is eventually settled upon to perform the delivery. This after much cosseting and playful interchange between Karin and her parents, who dote on her enormously, and she, in turn, displays no little Elektraesque interest in her father, and takes her mother slightly more for granted. She is also excessively childishly vain and becoming aware of her sexuality but in a very coy and girlish way. Karin asks that Ingeri be allowed to come along, and Karin, in expensive finery and riding proudly sidesaddle, and Ingeri, slumped astride a smaller horse in her disheveled work clothes, begin their small pilgrimage. 

 Ingeri's resentment of Karin is in no way lessened by mostly unintentionally smug and proper chat from the golden girl as they make their way; it might be that Ingeri was raped, but it definitely seems that the young farmhand Ingeri is drawn to and seeks as a mate is taken with Karin, who had danced with him among others the previous night. Ingeri responds in a slightly more self-aware if cynical manner, suggesting that Karin might well lose herself if nuzzled, or if she finds herself in a situation where a little fellatio or a tumble in the hay might not get her something she desires beyond sex and attention. Karin, having boasted of her virtue and determination to fight off any sexual advance before marriage, slaps Ingeri, then immediately apologizes. The two young women come across the run-down cottage of a fellow pagan, an old and  chewed-up man, just as they are about to enter the dark forest part of their journey...Ingeri is suddenly seized with a premonition of danger, and dares not go on. Karin is quite certain God is her co-pilot, and so goes on her way alone, while Ingeri gets a little too much presumptuous hospitality from the old man and, when he makes a blatant pass after showing her some human-sacrifice relics, flees his hut to catch up with Karin. 

Karin meanwhile has met up with two young men and a boy with some goats; the goatherds are ragged and hungry, and she offers to share her provisions with them...she obliviously brags of her wealth and status as a princess as the two young men make ever more sinister noises, which she barely registers till she notes that the goats have brand-style markings that suggest the trio have rustled them; this immediately sparks the rape the young men had been obviously hoping to engage in, while their younger brother looks on, aghast. After both young men assault her, one goes on to club her head with a branch, delivering a killing blow. Ingeri, who had witnessed from a small distance the beginning of the assault and had grasped a rock to attack the men with, instead finds herself stymied by a mix of fear, guilt over wishing Karin harm or at least comeuppance, and perhaps even a bit of PTSD from her own experience or a certain amount of guilty lust given the open, if brutal, display before her.  She doesn't intercede at all, eventually dropping the stone and fleeing unseen by the thugs, who strip the valuables from Karin and leave their kid brother to watch the stolen goats and incidentally the corpse briefly while they go about other business. The child, after trying to eat some of Karin's picnic leftovers, vomits, and makes an impulsive effort at burial of her body, but only manages to throw a thin layer of dirt on her face and chest, the result more unintentional insult than proper ceremony. 
The trio of rustlers make their way to what they don't know to be the small estate of Karin's parents and Ingeri's masters and ask Tore, as travelers who've hit bad luck, to be put up for the night.  He agrees to do so, and the trio join in supper with the family, their servants, and an impoverished guest/mendicant also staying at the compound. The boy still can't stomach the food on offer, as he guiltily looks from one slightly sinister-seeming benefactor to another. They put him to bed in the dining hall, with the mendicant telling him a grim (or proto-Grimm) bedtime story that somewhat parallels the child's recent experiences, only with a reasonably happy ending, while the people of the compound ready themselves for a night's sleep (and Ingeri, still recovering, slips back home and continues to hide at first). One of the thugs offers Karin's dress to her mother, as perhaps something she'd like to buy and fix up, claiming it had been his sister's; Mareta surreptitiously bars the dining room door behind her, trapping them. Tore decides he will take vengeance on them, and preps himself with a sauna and self-flagellation with birch branches, with Ingeri serving him as he does this nude ritual. He then stabs one of the men, seems to choke another while forcing him to lie in the fire with Tore atop him (in a manner that resembles the sexual assault) and then, despite the child running to Mareta and being lightly embraced by her, Tore grabs the boy and throws him against the shelves on the wall, killing him. 

 The household then goes raggedly in search of Karin's body; when they find her, they lament her state, and Tore steps away to pray, to ask why his God might have allowed the murder of a child (whether Karin or the goat boy), and promises to build an elaborate, permanent church on the spot of Karin's murder. As they move Karin's corpse after this promise, a small spring begins jetting clear water from beneath where her head lay, and Ingeri purifyingly washes her own face in it, while Mareta begins to wash the dirt from the corpse. 
End of synopsis.

 from the Criterion page for this film:






CAST

TöreMax von Sydow
MäretaBirgitta Valberg
IngeriGunnel Lindblom
KarinBirgitta Pettersson
The boyOve Porath
The herdsmenAxel Düberg
The herdsmenTor Isedal

CREDITS

DirectorIngmar Bergman
ScreenplayUlla Isaksson
CinematographySven Nykvist
EditingOscar Rosander
ProducerIngmar Bergman
MusicErik Nordgren
Production designP.A. Lundgren
Costume designMarik Vos
Part of what makes the film so good is, again, the groundedness of what is a philosophical fable in the gritty details of daily life; the stylization is mostly one of making the story play out with slightly high-flown dialog, as if it were a pageant as well as the unfolding of the tragedy; everything happens in strict chronological order. And, rather as in life, not everything is explained in any sort of detail; Mareta bemoans the fact that Karin is "all she has now"; whether that means that she's feeling alienation from Tore and (probably) mourning Ingeri's "fallen" state, or had lost another child in something like stillbirth or the potential of having another due to menopause, or even lost a child to the war that had forced their mendicant houseguest to flee Sweden briefly before returning, is never made explicit.  The ambiguous but clearly barely tolerated presence of Ingeri in the house, particularly given her unwed pregnancy, is apparently part of a long Swedish tradition of taking in foundlings (she's been a second-class member of the extended family or at least among the retainers for a while), and her fate is only slightly less dire than that of the other younger characters, all of whom suffer from the depredation and/or duplicity of their elders. And while there is a certain fantasticated feel to the film, the only point at which it becomes arguably fantasy is at the very climax...Bergman would save his overt fantastic work for such earlier films as the delightful comedy The Devil's Eye, and The Seventh Seal, and such later projects as Hour of the Wolf and (with a clever framing device) The Magic Flute.

 Another part of what makes the film excellent is that it's the first film in which cinematographer Sven Nyqvist would work with Bergman and his crew, and what had already become something of a regular company of actors. Max von Sydow had already scored international attention in The Seventh Seal, for obvious example...while this was one of the relative few of his films where Bergman was not the primary scriptwriter, instead turning to novelist (Ms.) Ulla Isaakson to adapt the ballad "Tore's Daughter at Vange" into cinematic form, while collaborating with her to some extent and making some changes in the final shooting script (apparently the company were also up for a little improvisation at the time of filming). Some of the film demonstrates very clearly the influence of Akira Kurosawa, and such films of his as Rashomon, had on Bergman, an influence Bergman would consciously attempt to not display in future work. (The kinship with such other successors to Kurosawa as Onibaba [1964] can be felt, as well.)
But that the film was good at all is not and certainly was not in 1960 a universal opinion. Certainly, Bergman himself apparently didn't consider it anything like his best work, and only rarely referred to it later in discussing his career, beyond the fact that it winning an Oscar in 1961 for Best Foreign Language Film didn't hurt his ability to secure his often shoestring budgets from Svensk Filmindustri. The Cahiers du Cinema jokers decided this film was indicative of Bergman's sudden irrelevance, in their hipster way, and as the French upstart film establishment of the time snarled, so too, not long after, did their Swedish colleagues (who were apparently also put off by the heavy indulgence in Christian vs. pagan themes and the general sense of the Dour Swede on parade). Meanwhile, the bluenoses in Sweden, and certainly in the U.S. among other places, were Very put off by the explicit viciousness and relatively realistic staging of the rape of Karin; not much more than her thighs (and her face as she suffers) are ever exposed, and not quite that much of her two rapists' bodies, but that and the display of her still-clothed corpse afterward (and, probably, Ingeri's reference to oral sex earlier in the film) were enough to get the film banned in Ft. Worth, Texas, at very least, and some seconds cut in New York and elsewhere, while at least some were simply disappointed that Bergman might seemingly parallel one of his least favorite film technicians, Alfred Hitchcock, with the latter's staging of an attack on Janet Leigh's character in the adaptation of Robert Bloch's Psycho, also released that year to some similar hostility (if in neither case the kind of foolish insult and censure that Peeping Tom faced; much later films such as River's Edge might also be paying homage).  I'm not sure of this, but would also not be too surprised if some of the more blatant Freudian aspects of the film were targets for criticism, as well; aside from the Elektra complex suggestions (and perhaps something a bit darker involving the other "daughter"), not only do swords and long knives serve as obvious (not overstressed, but clear) phallic symbols, but so also do the pole that holds open the smoke-releasing trap door in the dining hall ceiling, and a birch sapling that Karin's father attacks in his despair while readying himself to take revenge. Rather more explicitly Swedish symbolism that ties toads in with not only Satanic forces but also women's genitalia also plays out. All told, the fallout from the film was a bit of a mixed bag, by any measure. And it was the last of Bergman's films to have an explicitly, distantly other-times historical setting (with the arguable exception of the Mozart opera film). 

 The Criterion package of the film is typically good, with an excellent DVD reproduction and upgraded subtitles from previous releases, and a nice set of booklet and on-disc extras (if not up to the best I've seen from them, from the two-disc set of The Killers and its several adaptations); Birgitta Steene's on-disc annotation might be a bit too negatively critical, and while her commentary misses a few things I've touched on above, she also supplies very useful background information on Swedish folkloric and cinematic traditions that the film both takes advantage of and breaks away from. Bergman's own brief explanation for why the rape scene was shot as it is makes for very good reading, and is sadly too true (essentially, that it doesn't help to pretend that things aren't as ugly as they can be, particularly if one is in no way celebrating them). The 2006 interviews with the actors playing the young women, Gunnell Lindblom and Birgitta Petterson, are more than fine and useful, and Ang Lee's "introduction" also if slightly less so, though it most certainly shouldn't be viewed before watching the film.  Which on the Criterion disc one can do with an English dubbed soundtrack if one chooses (which I've not explored yet), and in the original Swedish without any subtitles. 

 Please check out the other entries in the Criterion Blogathon, hosted by the folks at Silver Screenings (Ruth Kerr), Speakeasy (Kristina Dijan) and Criterion Blues (Aaron West). 

 Criterion not only has been doing remarkably good packages of mostly extremely deserving films and related projects in DVD and BluRay (and back in the day, 12" laserdisc) format for the years of several dogs (somehow they never jumped on that soon-disabled RCA stylus videodisc bandwagon), but they are the heirs as a company to the Janus Film Collection, which has been popping up as the mark of quality for decades more since being birthed in Cambridge/Boston-area art cinema spaces, and, most tellingly for my early enjoyment, feeding films to what in the latter 1970s WGBH-TV Boston (and perhaps they alone, despite being then as now the biggest contributing station of programming to its network) called PBS Theater, a weekend staple where I got to enjoy the likes of Forbidden Games and The 400 Blows and even some films not about children when I, too, was a youth...and I was always happy to see the Janus logo pop up elsewhere, for example on another, rather short-lived Boston-based project, The Monitor Channel, the cable news and cultural programming arm of The Christian Science Monitor for a brief period in 1991; aside from a decent attempt at tv news coverage, they offered a Mort Sahl commentary series and the likes of Black Orpheus in a film package from then already Criterion folks. The first day's roundup of film essays is at Kristina's blog here.  The film:
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Sunday, November 15, 2015

reBeatling: Saturday Music Club




More covers.

 Please also see:
Some Beatling
Skinning the Ticket
Some Cover Versions
Acoustic, with a Beatles outbreak

An RAI (Italian television) documentary segment on Apple Corp. from 1968


Miriam Makeba: "In My Life"

The Pretenders: "In My Life"

The B-52s: "Paperback Writer" (courtesy Eric Gary Anderson)


Blues Beatles: "Ticket to Ride"

"Yesterday"

The Paragons and Rosalyn Sweat: "Blackbird"


Alison Kraus: "I Will"


Roseanne Cash "I Don't Want to Spoil the Party"

Johnny Cash: "In My Life"

 Brasil '66: "Day Tripper"

Wes Montgomery: "A Day in the Life"
Enoch Light and the Light Brigade: "Eight Days a Week"

The Mamas and the Papas: "I Call Your Name"


The Beach Boys (& Co.): "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away"


The Who: "I Saw Her Standing There"

Pat Benatar: "Helter Skelter"

Jackie Lomax, Eric Clapton, Nicky Hopkins, Billy Preston, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney: "Sour Milk Sea"


Dirty Mac: John Lennon, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Mitch Mitchell (introduced by Mick Jagger): "Yer Blues"
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Friday, November 13, 2015

FFB: eI, 2003 Annual/December 2003, edited and largely written by Earl Kemp

Regency Books;  cover by Leo and Diane Dillon
I started re-reading this issue of Earl Kemp's electronic personal fanzine, and running rough draft for his memoirs, and found myself needing to reread it all...as it mostly describes the years Kemp worked for and with a pretty remarkable crew of talented people, some now legendary, others obscure, at various corporate faces of William Hamling's publishing business. Hamling had been working at Ziff-Davis Publications when it was based in Chicago, an assistant to Ray Palmer, who had been editing or overseeing ZD's pulp magazine line (Amazing Stories, Fantastic Adventures--founded in part to be a steady market for the late writing of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Mammoth Detective, Mammoth Mystery, etc.). However, at about the time Palmer was getting ready to strike out on his own as a publisher in 1949, ZD also began a slow process of shutting down their Chicago offices in favor of relocation of activity to New York...and thus Hamling and at least a handful of others were now in search of work...Hamling and his wife following Palmer's lead, initially, in producing their own fiction magazines...Palmer was even
the official publisher of the first issues of the Hamlings' Imagination, but that ruse was quickly abandoned. The Hamlings edited, laid out and published the magazine from two adjoining desks in their basement. William Hamling had a day job, with a minor publisher of second-rate magazines, where one of his colleagues was another young, ambitious fan of fantastic fiction, Hugh Hefner. Both of them were fans of Esquire, and both were somewhat disappointed that that magazine, in the face of distributor pressure in the early '50s, had been cutting back on "risque" content. The two men kicked around ideas for how to make a mass-appeal men's magazine that might actually double down on matters of sexuality and otherwise engage particularly young men in the way Esquire had, only even moreso...and should it be relatively inexpensively produced, or a four-color slick magazine? Hamling and Hefner dummied up issue designs, and by 1953, Hefner was ready to go forward (and by about the same time, Hamling had dipped his professional toe in that sort of water with a modest photographic models magazine), and asked Hamling to be one of the backers/partners; Hamling, for reasons not yet made clear, declined, perhaps mostly because he wanted his own sandbox to play in. Playboy, of course, was an almost instant success, while the Hamlings continued to publish fiction
magazines (Imaginative Tales joined the stable a little earlier in 1953 than Playboy hit the stands).  Two years after the Hefner magazine debut, in late 1955, the Hamlings had their full-strength response ready for the world: Rogue.

 Frank M. Robinson: 
I ended up as an editor on Hamling's Rogue magazine. Like Playboy, it published an ungodly amount of science fiction-related material, including Frederik Pohl's award-winning "Day Million." Editors (at one time or another) at Greenleaf Publishing - the parent company - included Harlan Ellison, Algis Budrys, Larry Shaw, Bruce Elliot (responsible for some of the later Shadow novels), and myself. Columnists included Robert Bloch, Alfred Bester, and Lenny Bruce. No other men's magazine--nor science fiction magazine, for that matter--had that much editorial talent in depth.

 David Stevens:
In those days [the early 1960s] Playboy sold a million copies a month and we did 200,000, second to them, but we won more professional awards every year. Took a lot of pride in that. 
Rogue flourished (and as the memoirs of the women and men quoted by Kemp note, often found at least some of its talent, including Stevens and Robinson eventually, lured to Playboy Enterprises), but was eclipsed as a money-maker by an entry into paperback publishing, notably erotica publishing, with Nightstand Books in 1959, the first imprint of several (notably Greenleaf Classics)...and the unwelcome attention of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, among others, as a result.  And not long after Nightstand, an ambitious and rather impressive, on balance, list under the imprint Regency Books. A fair amount of interaction with The Second City improvisational troupe (in the pages and behind the scenes) as well as such other Chicago institutions as Nelson Algren, were fruitful. Rogue and Regency made decent money...but Nightstand and Greenleaf Classics were raking it in, with much lower overhead, if that much more peril of obscenity busts, as the novels of Lawrence Block and Robert Silverberg and all the rest of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency young and hungry crew didn't quite use plain language to describe the sex the readers were looking for.  Greenleaf Classics began its run with the first US edition of Mason Hoffenberg and Terry Southern's porn romp Candy, and went on from there.


It's a nice, kaliedoscopic patchwork of correspondence, reprints from others' articles and short informal memoirs from the fellow staff at the Greenleaf and related offices (including Hefner and his crew), and accounts of Kemp's avocational efforts to mount the Chicago World SF Convention in 1962 and his work (mostly noted in other issues) with Advent: Publishers.  Rather than attempt to further synopsize the rich haul of data and anecdote here, I shall only point you to this, one of the best issues of an excellent run of eI, and the rest of Earl Kemp's online magazine work at eFanzines.

 But it's tempting to at least include a gallery of the covers from Rogue and the Regency Books, particularly the impressive work of Leo and Diane Dillon among others on the paperback line...you'll find more of the cover images at eI.

For more of today's books, and even a few items almost as non-traditional as this one, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

 Trivial fact: Playboy was initially meant to be Stag Party; Rogue was initially titled Caravan. Better titles happened before first publication.
























































































































first edition









































































































The first Regency Book...


































...and its back cover. Illustration and design by the Dillons.























































































Not quite completely the Second City issue, but close...
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