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BBRRUUCCEE GGIILLLLEESSPPIIEEAUSSIECON 4 report plus photos

Slow blogsLLEETTTTEERRSS from everybody

Scratch Pad 75December 2010

Based on the non-mailing comments section of *brg* 64, 65, 66 and 67, a fanzine forANZAPA (Australia and New Zealand Amateur Publishing Association)

written and published by Bruce Gillespie, 5 Howard St, Greensborough VIC 3088.Phone: (03) 9435 7786. Email: gandc@pacific.net.au. Member fwa.

Website: GillespieCochrane.com.au

Contents

3Aussiecon 4: A very brief report plus photos — by Bruce Gillespie

10The health report — by Bruce Gillespie

12Letters of comment

Eric Mayer, Cy Chauvin, Steve Sneyd, Paul Anderson, Steve Jeffery, Lloyd Penney, Robert Elordieta, Jerry Kaufman, TaralWayne, David Lake, Doug Barbour, Robyn Whiteley, Yvonne Rousseau, Gian Paolo Cossato, and others

29Slow blogs — by Bruce Gillespie

PhotographsFront cover: ‘Up the down staircase: Aussiecon 4 2010: Melbourne Convention Centre’, photo by Frank Weissenborn.

p. 3: Yvonne Rousseau; p. 4: Frank Weissenborn; p. 5: Mike Ward; p. 6: Bruce Gillespie, Helena Binns, Frank Weissenborn;p. 7: Tom Becker, Ted McArdle, Helena Binns; p. 8: Jon Swabey, Bruce Gillespie; p. 9: Bruce Gillespie;p. 17: Steve Jeffery; pp. 26, 28: Gian Paolo Cossato; p. 31: Elaine Cochrane; plus p. 32: book material.

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Aussiecon 4:A very brief report plus photos

by Bruce Gillespie

If my knee had continued to be as painful as it has been until June, Iwould not have been able to attend the World SF Convention (Aussiecon4) held in Melbourne on the first weekend of September 2010 (the sameweekend as the Victorian Writers Festival, which is why I was unavailableto attend Gerald Murnane’s talk, much commented upon in the Age). Toreach the Melbourne Convention Centre, we had to alight from the tramon Spencer Street, walk the length of Jeff’s Shed (Melbourne ExhibitionCentre), which is endless, then walk for apparently further kilometreswithin the convention centre itself. The convention occupied the atriumand three large rooms on the ground floor, plus 16 conference rooms onthe second floor, with an escalator between. To leave one event andarrive at another usually took ten minutes of fast walking. A foul plot tomake fandom fit!

The main pleasure of the convention was meeting people: either peopleI had not met before (although I had written to them for many years),or not since my trip of 2005, or not since my trip of 1973. For instance,I met Andrew Porter last in the dealers’ room of Torcon in 1973. He hasattempted to get to Australia three times since then, and finally made itthis year. Elaine organised a trip for the garden people (fans who aremembers of The Secret Garden email group) to visit our place inGreensborough on the day before the convention, and Andy came alongfor the ride (nine people took a maxi-taxi from the city). I also caughtup with Mike Ward and Karen Schaffer, first met at Corflu in San Franciscoin 2005. A few days before that, my great friends Mark Plummer andClaire Brialey from London had visited us, with Yvonne Rousseau from

Yvonne Rousseau took this photo of Flicker strutting his stuff (in his campaign to winBest Fannish Cat 2010) when Yvonne, Claire Brialey (l.) and Mark Plummer (r.)

visted our place a few days before Aussiecon 4 in September 2010.

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Photos: Front page taken by Frank Weissenborn of the main escalator that conveyed people from theground floor to the second floor; and (above) looking out from the second floor back to Docklands, the Yarra,

the Crowne Plaza hotel, and the Spencer Street bridge.

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Adelaide. After the convention, a group visited Greensborough for a lunchat our favourite local restaurant (Cafe Spice; Indian food). They includedLeigh Edmonds (now living in Adelaide; he performed the official openingceremony for the convention) and New Zealander Brian Thurogood, lastmet when he visited Melbourne in 1977 when I was living at JohnsonStreet. He has been working in Europe ever since.

Because I had been included in very few program items, I had expectednot to enjoy the convention. However, so much was going on — mealsand compulsory events — I became increasingly glad I had committedmyself to very little. I did enjoy the three guest of honour speeches: Kim

Stanley Robinson, whose eloquence on the subject of climate changemade the science panels of the convention its focal point; Robin Johnson,who was Fan Guest of Honour; and Shaun Tan, who was not onlyAustralian Guest of Honour but picked up a Hugo Award on the Sundaynight for Best Artist.

The Australian Awards were presented as a separate ceremony withinthe convention. It was nice to pick up another Ditmar Award (on behalfof Jan Stinson and me) for Steam Engine Time. Ditmar himself, DickJenssen, picked up a Ditmar for Best Fan Artist. (Not many people pickup an award named after him- or herself.) As President of the Australian

Left: Part of the voyage around our garden at Greensborough on the day before Aussiecon 4, with Elaine as guide. From left: Priscilla Olson, Karen Schaffer, Elaine Cochrane,Mary Ellen Moore. Ponchos courtesy of Elaine; they were needed because it was raining at the time. Photo by Mike Ward, who doesn’t appear in any of the garden photos because

he took them all.

Right: Same day, same place, same photographer. Andrew Porter hands over to Bruce Gillespie his collected letters from Australian fans (especially John Bangsund) over the last45 years. They now rest at Howard Street as the Andrew Porter Collection.

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Ditmar (Dick Jenssen) wins a Ditmar for Best FanArtist at the Australian national awards during

Aussiecon (Photo: Helena Binns).

I wish I could remember who suggested that I should tag along to this unlisted convention item: the press conference on the firstday, which was the only time when all the guests of honour of Aussiecon were interviewed at the same time. The few press repswho turned up had little idea of how to ask interesting questions, but the guests said some sensible things anyway. From left:Robin Johnson (Fan Guest of Honour), Kim Stanley Robinson (Pro Guest of Honour), Perry Middlemiss (co-chair of the

convention), Shaun Tan (Australian Guest of Honour), and Garth Nix (MC of the Hugo Ceremony). (Photo: Bruce Gillespie.)

The Aussiecon item I would most like to have attended but didn’t: Robert Silverberg in conversation with Kim StanleyRobinson. (Photo: Frank Weissenborn.)

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SF Foundation, I was able topresent this year’s A. BertramChandler Award to RussellBlackford on behalf of DamienBroderick, who received it a fewweeks later in San Antonio,where he has lived for the lastten years.

At the Hugo Awards, I wasasked to present a ratheresoteric award: ‘Best Semi-prozine’ (i.e. best fanzine that

goes to more than 1000 people and pays its contributors). I had neverheard of the winner, a website called Clarkesworld. Best fan writer andbest fanzine also went to websites, which pissed off many of us, especiallyas Claire Brialey came 2nd for Best Fan Writer and Banana Wings, thefanzine she produces with Mark Plummer, came 2nd for Best Fanzine.The Hugo ceremony had its good moments. Merv Binns received the BigHeart Award, Shaun Tan won Best Pro Artist, Brad Foster won Best FanArtist, and Moon won Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form).

The Hugo Awards have become the Oscars of the SF world, and are fullyorganised offshore (in Britain and America). No mere Australians areallowed to touch them these days. Nevertheless, it was the closest tobeing part of an Occasion I’m likely to experience. I even wore a suit andtie. Later in the night, some of us went to the ANZAPA room party atanother hotel. Not only was the company congenial but I could escapethe ‘post-Hugo’ party.

I’m not sure what tomake of the wholefive-day event, oreven whether I willever go to anotherconvention. Theygive you awards, butact as if you’ve al-ready been shovedaside into an old folksgarret. Overseaspeople appreciatewhat Jan and I do,but with 31 nomina-tion points for SteamEngine Time, the

Aussiecon 4 was all about catching up with old friends. Here are Art Widner (93 lastyear, on his fourth or fifth trip to Australia from California), with John and Eve

Harvey, on their umpteenth visit to Australia from Britain). (Photo: Tom Becker.)

One of the better kept secrets beforethe convention was that long-timeMelbourne fan Leigh Edmonds hadbeen invited to open Aussiecon 4.(Photo: Ted McArdle.)

Two distinguished fansmeet: Merv Binns,

Melbourne’s Mr ScienceFiction , who had just won

the Big Heart Award atAussiecon, and John Hertz,

wonderful Los Angeles fanwriter for many years.

(Photo: Helena Binns.)

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magazine still didn’t quite make the short list.

An event as large as Aussiecon attracts good friends from overseas, manyof whom I will probably never see again in person. Many other friends Inow know were at the convention, but I did not sight them. Special thanksgo to people like David Russell, who organised a group of us to eat lunchat Nobu, one of Melbourne’s top restaurants, and Murray Moore, whoorganised the FanEds lunch.

More highlights of Aussiecon 4

Peter Kerans, an SF Commentary correspondent from the early seven-ties, tapped me on the shoulder. I did not recognise him, but he said thathe had been downloading my magazines from efanzines.com, and thatthey had provided a lifeline during a very dark period of his life. Wenattered for only about 10 minutes, and I did not see him again at theconvention, but his kind gesture was a true highlight moment from myconvention.

Meeting James Bacon wasalso a highlight of Aussiecon.As usual, though, he had tohurry off to talk to somebodyelse. James in his weddingsuit, including a topper,looked as spectacular as JohnHertz in his Regency costume.

I fear that James was ratherless overwhelmed by meetingme than I was at meeting him.He said: ‘I’ve just met yourwife. She’s wonderful. Wherehave you been hiding her?’ Iwas soon to find out thatJames appreciated all the la-dies (and girls) he met duringthe convention, and wasn’t

backward in letting them know. He had met Elaine before he met mebecause she had been sitting at the site selection table when James spedby.

Robin Johnson’s Fan Guest of Honour speech. It was RobinJohnson’s finest hour, but unfor-tunately he kept only notes; hehad not written his talk. I’m tolda videorecording of it is on thenet somewhere.

Everybody connected withNorma Hemming play TheMatriarchy of Renok seemed torise above any difficulties asso-ciated with staging it. Thegraphics worked superbly, but itseems that nobody took a visualrecord of them being used dur-ing the play. It was not quiteclear why there was little light onthe stage itself: I found it hardto distinguish one characterfrom another, except where Iknew the actor already. Severalof the actors I did not know.(How was the cast list assem-bled? Could Sean McMullen writea brief article about putting to-gether the play?)

Listening to the play told us a lot,not only about mid-fifties sci-ence fiction (to which Hem-ming’s play was obviously aresponse), but also indirectlyabout 1950s science fiction con-ventions. I’ve always heard thatlegend that women were notwelcome at Australian SF meet-

James Bacon at the pre-Hugosparty (photo: Jon Swabey).

Robin Johnson’s finest hour: delivering theFan Guest of Honour speech at Aussiecon 4

(photo: Bruce Gillespie).

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ings and conventions, but obviously Hemming expected there to beenough talented women at the 1956 Olympicon to fill all the roles shehad written for them.

Yes, the Hugo Awards ceremony was a highlight of the convention,especially the award of the Big Heart Award to Merv Binns. Otherwise,I cheered few of the Hugo Awards: the movie Moon; Shaun Tan for BestPro Artist, and Brad Foster for Best Fan Artist. I’d never heard of mostof the nominees for most of the awards, including the online winners inthe Fan Awards. I say it again: Claire and Mark wuz robbed!

A few days after Aussiecon we had dinner at Abla’s (Melbourne’s bestLebanese food restaurant) with Mark Linneman (visiting from Califor-nia) and Terry Stroud (down from the country; he didn’t attendAussiecon, although he knows lots of the people who were there). UsuallyI drink only one or two glasses of wine with a meal. By the end of themeal the three of us (Elaine not being able to drink any wine) had finishedthree bottles of red wine, including a superb Pepperjack Shiraz. Bestevening of the convention fortnight: dinner with Mark and Terry.

As you can see, I found it difficult to photograph the staged presentation of Norma Hemming’s play from 1956, The Matriarchy of Renok. On the right, spotlit, are Bill Wright,whose idea it was, and Sean McMullen, who produced the play. I can see Cat Sparks on the extreme left, but cannot identify the other actors.

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The health report10 April 2010

When diagnosed with diabetes type 2, I fell into the hands of the medicalsystem. One of the first things my GP did after I was diagnosed was toshoot off a message to the Sleep Laboratory at Austin Hospital askingfor an appointment so that I could be tested for sleep apnoea. Elaine hadtold me that I snore badly, but I did not know whether or not I had clinicalapnoea, which poses just as high a risk for heart attack as any of theside effects of diabetes.

More than a month later, I received a note from Austin Hospital,Heidelberg, saying that I should turn up for my appointment at the AustinHospital on 15 March, nearly five months in the future. I put the date inmy 2010 diary and I hoped to ghod that I would remember it.

When I met the specialist in March, he offered me two possibilties:staying overnight in hospital while being sleep-tested, or being wired upat the lab, then sent home for the night. I chose the latter, because itmight have taken another few months to get a hospital bed for theformer.

When I reached the sleep lab on 24 August, I was warned that all sortsof wires would have to be attached to me overnight. Slowly and surelythe laboratory tech attached the wires, a finger stall and a noseattachment similar to those attached to people being given oxygen inambulances.

How would I get home? Obviously I could not take the train home. Apartfrom causing raucous merriment or idle gazes, there was a danger thatsome of the attachments would detach while walking up the hill from

Greensborough station.

Fortunately I caught a taxi right outside the hospital door. At home, Iwandered around until midnight, made only moderately uncomfortableby all the paraphernalia. The problem was going to bed. First, it was quitedifficult making the bed with the wires attached. Then I had to get intobed without detaching any of them. And then I lay awake, wondering ifI could possibly sleep. I was made all the more edgy by reading onFacebook a message from Western Australian author Adrian Bedford,who had undergone the same test two nights before. He wasn’t able tosleep at all.

Two of the attachments made sleeping impossible, the finger stall(designed to measure blood oxygen, according to Elaine) and the nosethingy. So I took them out. Better to have two sleep aspects notmeasured than not to be able to sleep at all.

I was amazed to find at 5.30 in the morning that I had actually achievedabout four hours’ sleep, in three bursts, since midnight. I woke twice,and had to go to the toilet. Have you ever tried to take a pee with wiresdripping from one’s torso?

The hospital had asked that I drop in the computer and attached wiresbefore 9 a.m., which is why I was prepared to wake early. I was verypleased to peel off all the adhesive thingos. One of them had beenattached to my hair by glue; it took a vigorous shower to scrub away theglue.

With a light heart, I boarded the train about 7.45, dropped the kit andcaboodle into the hospital, and made my way home. Home, I had a nap.

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Then I had to wait several months to hear the results.

Meanwhile, the other appointment my GP requested in September — acolonoscopy — I should have one every few years because my fatherdied of bowel cancer at the age of 69 — has not even hit the recordssheets at the Austin. I’ve heard nothing about it.

10 June 2010

I can walk again! After damaging my knee by pedalling that damnedexercise bike, I was hobbling around for eight months. The bits of myknee simply would not go back into place. I was okay walking aroundthe house, and on flat ground, but not walking downhill or uphill. I hadbegun to feel that I would never enjoy walking again, condemned to aperpetual half-limp for the rest of my life.

What’s the miracle solution that returned my knee to near normality? Ihave no idea what the miracle was. A number of things happened at thesame time.

Elaine had noticed that I walked much better in the house, on soft carpet,in slippers with comfortable soles. She suggested that I stop going forwalks in my usual Scarpa boots and wearing orthotics. Much of the painof walks came from the impact of my foot, slightly off angle, hitting thepavement. I bought some very expensive Scarpa shoes, which have solesand heels that feel soft although they are strong, and cushioned innersoles. Some improvement, but most days my leg felt as painful as ever.

Elaine also suggested an exercise that had helped her when she had verysore knees a few years back. Sit on a raised chair, legs out, feet flat onthe floor. Clench the muscle above the knee without moving your feetor any other muscles. Do a few at a time, a few times a day.

At the same time I saw an advertisement in the local Leader newspaperfor one of the local chiropractors, Back In Action of Para Street,Greensborough. The ad specifically said that Back In Action could helpwith bung knees. I made an appointment with the chiropractor, MatthewHolmes. The first meeting was filling out a long form that would help himdetermine if I had any underlying medical conditions apart from theproblem I had consulted him about. Eventually he got down to work. His

approach was quite different from that of my usual chiropractor inCarlton, whose crunch-and-click attack technique has worked very wellfor my spine since 1989. Matthew’s approach is more like that of amasseur: advanced torture in order to release the pain from particularmuscles. I had no particular relief after two visits, but in the same weekI asked the chemist for an inflammatory to treat my sore thumb. Shesold me a tube of Voltaren, with the advice to apply small amounts tothe skin around the sore tendon. I also applied it to the sore muscles inmy knee and foot.

The following Friday I had to push the shopping jeep for Elaine, who wasstill recovering from her operation (see below). That was one trip downthe street, and one trip back. The same day I had to visit the chiropractor:one walk down the steep hill to Para Street, and one walk up again. Inthe late afternoon Elaine and I walked around the block to Urban Groovesfor coffee. That’s four walks in one day, but I didn’t feel too bad.

The really astonishing improvement came a couple of days later, whenI walked down to the shopping plaza to do the shopping. My knee didnot kill me on the way down, and I was still feeling not too sore when Iarrived home. I kept visiting the chiropractor twice a week, and thenonce a week, and now once every two weeks. The muscles stoppedtwanging. I still feel a bit sore if I’ve had to push the shopping jeep, butI can now walk!

Sorry if most of our news is medical. That’s because we’ve thought oflittle else in recent months. In April, Elaine underwent an operation thatwas supposed to be her third hernia operation in five years. That’s whatthe scan showed. Instead, the surgeon found that she was suffering froma benign tumour, a lipoma, on the belly wall. The symptoms were thesame as those for a hernia, but the keyhole operation was much lessserious than she would have had to undergo for a third hernia operation.She has recovered very well, and can now enjoy walking again for thefirst time in years.

I was a bit puzzled that one ANZAPA member thought I was sufferingfrom deprivation because of following the diabetes diet. It’s beeneffective for losing weight over a long period (nearly 18 kg in eightmonths), but it is just the standard diet suggested in all the books aboutdiabetes. Some items, such as dairy products and chocolate, I find easy

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to drop, because I’m allergic to them. For my favourites, such as cakesand pastries, I substitute fruit and (if I’m in the shopping plaza and needa snack) salad sandwiches. I cannot drink much, it’s true. I can’t drinkstandard soft drinks and fruit juices because they are full of sugar, andI can’t drink diet drinks because they are full of aspartane, to which I’mallergic. I use Splenda as a sugar substitute in my coffee. My two maindrinks are water and coffee. I’m allowed one standard alcoholic drink perday, which means I don’t drink at home, and I often have two beerswhen I go out to dinner.

10 December 2010

Diabetes 2 has a number of possible long-term results, including dete-rioration of the circulatory system and blindness. Since August last yearI’ve tried to change my diet in the ways recommended by DiabetesAustralia and my diabetes nurse at the Greensborough Road Clinic. I losta lot of weight, but haven’t been able to lose any since last February. Inthe last month or so I’ve put on a kilo or two, for no apparent reason.

I’ve just consulted a dietitian, who said that Elaine and I are eating theright things. I do need to walk strenuously once a day, which is easy onpleasant days, but near impossible on hot days.

Eventually I was able to see the sleep specialist at Austin Hospital. Hesaid that I do suffer from sleep apnoea, and I Should Do Something AboutIt. At a shop called Air Liquide in Heidelberg, I was fitted for a mask thathas a little air pump attached to it. I was to fit this over my nose everynight for two weeks to see if it would work for me. I tried it for twominutes, and felt suffocated. Surely it had been adjusted incorrectly? Itook it back to Air Liquide, and was assured that it had been set properly.There was no way I could breathe while using it, let alone get to sleep.So I still have sleep apnoea, and probably will continue to do so until Ican lose another 10 kg.

End of health report. Do tell me your problems.

— Bruce Gillespie

Letters of commentERIC MAYER(somewhere in Pennsylvania)

Just enjoyed reading the 69th issue of Scratch Pad. A very interestingread, despite that most of the names were unfamiliar to me. Sadly, thereis a lot of mention of deaths and illness. An unavoidable part of gettingolder. I am still at the age when it is my parents’ generation and notmine (well, usually not) who are passing on. As a child I thought it strangethat my grandmother would always read the obituaries in the local paperfirst, but now I understand better.

I knew nothing about Myfanwy Thomas, and now I at least know whatyou wrote. A nice piece that gives me a good idea of her. More and moreit strikes me that it is the good people I see checking out early, while thebastards just keep on going.

Nice article by Irwin Hirsh, but he left a question unanswered, unless Ijust missed it. Why was the photograph used in the slippers ad taken inthe front room? It is amazing how quickly ‘history’ like this is lost. We alltake so many of the things we know for granted and forget how muchof our knowledge is personal to us. Things we think are plain today, in

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twenty years will be undecipherable even to family. Like all the uniden-tifiable photos in my parents’ photo album. People no one alive recog-nises. Houses none of us has ever seen. Yet, whoever put the photos inthe album without identifying them must have figured no explanationwould be needed. These were people and places so important in theirlives that anyone would know who they were.

Jennifer Bryce’s travels were fascinating. I know nothing of Africa, andcan only marvel at her adventure and the fact that she was the day’sonly visitor to Victoria Falls!

As for New York City: I think she saw more of it in a few days than I didin the four years I lived there. I lived in Brooklyn and for a short timeright across the river in New Jersey, and I was going to law school, andworking part time, and broke, but I still wished I’d managed to see more.It was fun to compare my impressions from the late seventies withJennifer’s more recent view.

One thing I wish I’d done more often was go to the museums shementions. Seeing paintings ‘live’ rather than in reproduction is a wholedifferent experience. I remember being at the Guggenheim once wherethe main exhibit wasn’t a painting but what I guess would be calledconceptual art. On the first floor, a string descended from the distantceiling to the floor and a bean plant had begun a long journey to the top.

I recall the long line and the long journey to the top during my one visitto the Empire State Building. (Here in America we call it a ‘line’ ratherthan a ‘queue’ because it’s easier to spell.) I elected to stand in the line.Which was probably not a good idea since I’d just downed most of apitcher of beer at a nearby restaurant. Imagine my horror when I finally— to my infinite (prospective) relief — reached the lobby and saw thesigns indicating that the restrooms were at the observation deck level!By the time I got to the elevator I was tiptoeing. There’s nothing likeriding a high speed elevator when your bladder’s bursting. I did make itto the restroom. It was still light. When I finally made it to the observationdeck I had a spectacular view of Manhattan at night.

I’ll say this, Jennifer’s a real walker. New York City blocks are long.

Ray Wood’s thoughts on exercise were interesting, since I have always

hated exercise. After all, I grew up as a bookworm, a non-athlete whoskipped gym as often as possible. However, during my forties I got intorunning and loved it. I was no marathoner but I ran quite a bit and did5K and 10K road races and didn’t finish dead last. And I felt great. Betterthan I ever had. Even my writing went better. Alas, after a few years myback decided I shouldn’t run. Actually, so did my MRI and my doctor, butthe sensation of a hot screwdriver in the base of my spine after runninghalf a mile was the most convincing. Not to mention not being able toget out of bed unassisted if I persisted trying to run for a few days. NowI know there are other exercises I could and should do, but, aside fromrunning, I still hate exercise. Maybe I should look into those weights Raymentions. As a bushwacker he ought to try orienteering. I know you’vegot it down there, particularly the day-long variety.

You didn’t say much about yourself this issue, but I have noted elsewhereyour remarks about difficulties with freelance work. As a freelancermyself, I can commiserate. Right now I have enough work, but I amaware that my financial survival is guaranteed only up to the dates ofthe signed contracts I have at any moment. Still, I’d never go back toan office, not that there is any danger at my age of an office wanting mehere in the USA. Anyway, hope work’s picked up and things are goingalong well.

(24 August 2010)

[*brg* I had several two-month-long gaps in the workloadduring 2010. If it were not for the legacy from my mother(one-third of the price of her house after she died in 2007), Iwould not have survived financially. Nobody will give me aregular job at my age, and as you say, freelancing is a betterway of life than any other. Also, during the enforced unpaidholidays I can find time to produce fanzines.*]

CY CHAUVIN14248 Wilfred, Detroit MI 48213

Exercising on that stationary bike certainly doesn’t sound health induc-ing, if using it sprained or tore a muscle in your leg. It reminds me ofthe time I did a back exercise that ended up hurting my back. I endedup going on disability for three months (and going off of work for thetime), although that was also caused by the long drive I had to do to get

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to the office. I do have a stationary bike as well, but have never foundthat I could read while on it (unlike Doug Barbour), but that is becauseit is in the basement. Walking seems better for me because it almostrelaxing, a stress reliever to be outside and not driving.

I put off reading *brg* 61 because I wasn’t looking forward to readingan obituary. But Gerald’s eulogy for Catherine gave us a wonderful sliceof his wife’s life, and had some of the detail that makes biography (andfiction) so interesting. In some of the quotes he takes from her writtenmemoirs, I got the impression that some of the events were new to him— which emphasises how necessary it is to write personal history. Herlife story also reminds me how much our lives have changed in the past50 years, and I wonder if in the next 50 they will change beyondrecognition? Maybe that’s why I don’t find SF as interesting as I used todo, because I don’t want to know the futures now possible.

Re your reply to Mark Plummer about Le Guin’s fantasy novels: althoughI loved A Wizard of Earthsea when I first read it, now I would be afraidto reread it, because I fear that all the stories of various wizard and magicschools written since 1968 will have devalued that novel. The FarthestShore is indeed the best of the original series, but I would also like toreread that (as you say) rather dark book, The Tombs of Atuan. I havealso read Gifts, but not Voices, in the new series. It is disappointing tohear that the ideas begun in the first novel are not developed further. Ihave also read Powers: the societies developed in the beginning and lastthird of the novel are excellent, but the middle third sounded too muchlike Robin Hood.

Thanks for clearing up the definition of the Australian term ‘milk bar’. Ihad a clear image of a pub-style bar that served only milk and ice cream(complete with milk rings around people’s mouths), even though I knewthat had to be wrong. The corner store, though: you bring backmemories. When I was growing up, there was one two or three blocksaway from our home in Roseville, in the front room of Elsie’s house. Wejust called it Elsie’s, and went there for our mother mostly for bread andmilk, or for candy for ourselves. The candy we paid for by collectingreturnable (and reused) soda pop bottles, on which were paid a 2 centdeposit refunded upon the return of the bottle. I don’t know if Elsie everhad any children, although she had a back yard and garden. When Istarted to visit the city of Detroit proper, a fan gave me directions by

telling me that the house was located on a street that had a big ‘partystore’ at the corner, and to watch for that. I remember thinking what aninteresting place that might be, with lots of balloons, party hats perhaps,and decorations. Actually it was just another name for a corner store ormilk bar, although one that also sold liquor, wine and beer in packagesor cases (Elsie never sold that). The first ‘drive-through’ milk bar openedup while we were still children in Roseville, and while it didn’t last morethan a year, it had a wonderful name: ‘Cow to Car’. We made our mothertake us there once on the day she had the car (although Cow to Car wasjust three or four blocks away) so we could try out the drivethrough andsee what a place with a wonderful name like that might have. It was justanother corner store, and we were terribly disappointed.

(29 January 2010)

STEVE SNEYD4 Nowell Place, Almondbury, Huddersfield, WestYorkshire HD5 8PB

John Litchen’s journey I found to easy to follow on a map of Oz.

I can imagine the train wreck Hollywood will make of Stalker (a planmentioned in Franz Rottensteiner’s letter). It certainly wouldn’t go at theslooow pace of the Tarkovsky movie, which builds the claustrophobicatmosphere and its conviction. I have vague memories that the director,asked why he had made it so painfully slow, said it was so the audiencewould share the sensations of his progagonist. The Zone was clearly akind of treacle world. I also vaguely recall debates about the delays ofthe release of the original. Were they because the Soviet censorssuspected a religious message in the finale, or were they worried thatthe movie would give away information about the proto-Chernobylishnuclear disaster in the Urals, the one that the authorities managed tohush up? (Martin Cruz Smith, in one of his Renko mysteries set in theUSSR, had a marvellous sequence set in the Chernobyl area, which thelocals call ‘The Zone’, echoing Stalker.)

Robert Elordieta mentions the spontaneous Christmas truce of 1914.There are vivid accounts of it, with troops from each side playing eachother at football, exchanging gifts and drinks, etc. I’m surprised it hasn’t,as far as I know, been used as a hinge point for an alternative history,

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one in which it is held against the will of generals and governments, sothat the Western Front bloodbath and its after-effects don’t happen — adifficult call to make plausibly, but plenty of alternative histories takeeven less likely turnings for an altiverse strand. (I have used that ideafor a poem, but as a compressed instant in that form.)

Re Avatar: I have no idea about the plausibility of blue-skinned human-oids in a forest setting, although blue birds and flowers occur under thecanopy. I was intrigued to wonder whether the folklore of blue menunderlies the film. Neither the blue men of the Sahara (because of a dyefrom their clothing) or the supposed blue men of the Minch off Scottland,who in tales rise from the deep to sink ships, would fit. But there arestories of blue men in England. One, for example, attaches to Blue Man’sBower, a moat site below Rotterdam in South Yorkshire, where PlaceNames of the West Riding speculates that ‘blue’ has the meaning ‘black’.If that association were at work, consciously or subconsciously, in Avatar,the implication would be that the Pandorans represent, in their blueness,blacks.

Doug Barbour mentions the blues performer Joe Bonamassa. He has ahigh profile here. His live performance was broadcast on BBC Radio 2,he played on the now-threatened-with-closure BBC digital music stationRadio 6, and the man himself presents a program on Planet Rock station.

Barbour also speaks of modern equivalents of old ballads. As well asRichard Thompson’s ‘53 Vincent Black Lightning’ and ‘Bee’s Wing’, whichhe rightly praises, others deserving of mention as very powerful exam-ples of that type of bleakly powerful and precise story song include BobbieGentry’s ‘Ode to Billie Joe’, later made into a movie, Steve Earle’s‘Copperhead Road’, Squeeze’s ‘Up the Junction’, and K. T. Tunstall’s ‘BigBlack Horse and the Cherry Tree’.

I also found M. John Harrison’s Light a struggle. I did eventually finishit. You remind me of how long it is since I read the ‘Gormenghast’ trilogy.I won’t bother with Maeve Peake’s sequel, but I should return to theoriginals, if nothing else than to track down Titus’s wonderful reply to ajudge’s query as to his father’s fate: ‘Eaten by owls, m’lud.’

(19 March 2010)

PAUL ANDERSON17 Baker Street, Grange SA 5022

Over the past year I have been picking up various cheap DVDs of mostof the music that I like, plus a few that look promising. In doing this Ihave noticed how rare it is for a singer or group to include all of thesignature tunes and songs in a concert. David Bowie and the Who alwaysleave off at least one song, making it very hard to find. Just try to find‘Jean Jeanie’ or ‘I’m A Boy’ on a concert release.

‘The Crowd’ is the Roy Orbison example. I was given his Greatest Hitsfor a birthday, and I just picked up A Black and White Night ($4 at CashConverters), but no ‘The Crowd’. At least it gave me ‘Mean Woman Blues’and ‘Leah’.

(20 March 2010)

‘The Crowd’ is not listed for any of the four DVDs, but at least it is onYoutube. Someone posted it accompanied by a still of Roy on stage.

You were looking for ‘There Won’t Be Many Coming Home’, which youthought was in The Fastest Guitar Alive, the 1967 movie that Roy Orbisonwas in. It was not in the movie, but was included in the album from themovie three months ago. Now if you can find a CD of the soundtrack ...

(21 March 2010)

[*brg* I like to think I am a Roy Orbison obsessive, butobviously I’m not as persistent as you, Paul. I still haven’tfound ‘There Won’t Be Many Coming Home’ on CD, but I have iton a battered old LP. I also have it on the original 45 rpmsingle, but still have no way of transferring my rare singles toCD. :: Thanks for your American trip reports that you sent byemail during the year. When I have time and space, I’ll includethem here.*]

STEVE JEFFERY44 White Way, Kidlington, Oxon 0X5 2XA

I’m rather stunned to read in *brg* 63 (and also in Steam Engine Time12) that you’ve only just read Peake’s ‘Gormenghast’ trilogy. How did

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this manage to escape you for so long? I encountered it at the relativelyadvanced age of 18 or so, when I read it at my first year of university,and promply fell in love with flightly, troubled Fuschia — who probablymirrored a whole load of my own teenage angst and insecurity. It was atime that I read a whole load of other angsty stuff, like Hesse’sSteppenwolf, Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, andKerouac’s On the Road. The latter didn’t quite inspire me to cross Americato find myself, but I did once decide to walk home from Reading to Marlowalong the Thames, a journey that took nearly all day and three bottlesof cheap wine.

I had read Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings only a year or so before.Enjoyed it, but it didn’t make too much of an impression, apart from thefact that it was big enough to fill long gaps where nothing was happeningon the reserve maintenance gang for the night shift at Reed’s paper mill.Basically we were there to hang around unneeded until the line broke,which it did rarely but, when it happened, messily and spectacularly, itwas followed by a hour or two of intensive activity to clean it all up andre-thread a couple of hundred feet of pulp paper back around dozens ofhuge rollers.

I’m pleased you discovered Ryman’s Air as well. A fabulous and deeplyaffecting book, though I’ve never too sure how it fits with Ryman’s latermanifesto for ‘mundane SF’. Air seems anything but mundane.

Of Jonathan Strahan’s top twenty books of the decade, I have all butPaulo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, Peter Watts’ Blindsight and RobertCharles Wilson’s Spin. I have Al Reynold’s Pushing Ice, but haven’t yetread it. In fact I haven’t got round to reading the last few of Reynolds’books, including Century Rain, though I did enjoy his story collectionZima Blue.

There’s less overlap with your own 2009 Top Ten or the Decade list. I’venot read Evans’ Omega, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Roth’s The PlotAgainst America, Le Guin’s The Telling, Broderick’s Transcension orRichard Morgan’s Black Man from your other contenders. But on thewhole, they’re both good lists.

We’ve only just watched District 9 (I still haven’t watched Coraline, whichVikki bought me for Christmas. I don’t know why. Trepidation that it

might not come up to the high expectations I have of it?). District 9 isweird and, for such a relatively small budget, excellently realised, makinga virtue out of its lack of money to throw at CGI eye candy. I remindedme of other off-the-wall independents such as Pi, Memento and DonnieDarko.

Equally weird, postively surreal in fact, was The Triplets of Belleville,which I taped and watched as Belleville Rendezvous, the title it wasreleased under in the UK and shown as part of a Channel 4 animationseason. Miyazaki’s Spirited Away is one of those films I can watch timeand again, and always find things I’ve not seen before. I’ve not tried thesame experiment with Howl’s Moving Castle.

One of the (few) advantages of having a poor memory is that ofrediscovery of old favourites, whether books or films, when you comeback to them again. Oddly, I don’t have this problem with music, so Isuspect it’s largely a visual thing. I am terrible at remembering namesand faces; I can be introduced to someone and forget the name later thesame day, which can be embarrassing. That this extends to books tendsto confirm that I read visually, translating the words on the page to aseries of images in my head.

That letter from Robyn Whiteley must have a been a delight to read andreceive, realising that the letters (and your responses to them) are theheart and soul of apa-/perszines. Letter writing is becoming a lost artthat seems only preserved now in amateur journalism and fanzines.Facebook and especially Twitter seem intent on banging the last nail intothe lid of its coffin. Perhaps that merely confirms me as grumpy oldremnant of a dying generation, out of touch with an age of instantcontinual communication prefigured by Bruce Sterling’s uncannily pre-dictive Schizmatrix. At university I used to send long screeds of lettershome, which my mother still remembers, written over periods of two orthree weeks and posted in batches of 10 to 12 handwritten pages at atime. I hardly write anything longhand anymore, and nothing legibly,apart from the prompt notes and comments on apas and fanzines thatcurrently strew my desk as I’m typing this.

Yes, John Adams too, in reply to Doug Barbour. Short Ride in a FastMachine and Shaker Loops, which I don’t have on CD, but taped when itwas performed recently on Radio 3. I know you’re not yourself a great

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Christmas at Steve and Vikki’s place (photo: Steve Jeffery).

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fan of ‘loop music’, but I find something hypnotic and fascinating in it,which I trace back to when I used to have two alarm clocks set to getme up in the mornings, and would be lulled to sleep listening to the slowinterplay of slightly out of phase mechanical ticks between the two. Tofind that again, years latter, in pieces like Reich’s Drumming, as well asthe Echoplex effects of Pink Floyd or John Martyn, was a revelation. Somuch that as soon as I bought a guitar, the next thing I bought was asecondhand WEM CopyCat tape echo unit (which I still have), andtinkered with it so I could extend the echo and layer sound on sound.And then discovered from the sleeve notes and diagram on the back ofAmbient Music that Brian Eno has been doing this for years.

I have become more and more enamoured, to the point of addiction, tochoral music in later years. There’s currently a splendid series, SacredMusic, presented by Simon Russell Beale, and featuring Harry Christo-phers and The Sixteen, being shown on Channel 4. This appears to be afollowup to an earlier series, which went from plain chant to the complexpolyphony of Tallis and through to the sublimity of Allegri’s Misereri. Thissecond series has covered Brahms and Bruckner, Faure, Poulenc, Goreckiand Pärt (a strange, shy and intensely reserved man). Tonight’s episodeis on Taverner.

I’ve got a copy of Whitbourn’s Luminosity on order for you and will sendon when it arrives.

(2 April 2010)

Been having this on-off banter with Nic Farey about ‘the tune currentlyin my head’. Just read chapters 4–6 of Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia: Talesof Music about the Brain, where this, at pathological extremes, some-times appears as what one unlucky sufferer describes as ‘full on 24 hourlift Muzak’.

Last night’s Sacred Music played Taverner’s Song for Athene (Alleluia:May Flights of Angels Sing Thee To Thy Rest). Made me cry (and the leadsoprano from the The Sixteen, I noticed when the camera panned back).Dammit, only Elgar does that.

(3 April 2010)

[*brg* Thanks for the CDs and tapes you send me from time tome, and the music recommendations. I like most choral music

I hear, but don’t go for that ambient stuff. However, myinterest in John Adams was deepened when watching thegreat Tony Palmer film Hail, Bop! about his life and career (seemy list of favourite music DVDs in Scratch Pad 77).*]

You lucky people. I can’t remember the last time it was 22 degrees Chere. I can barely recall the last time it above zero, it’s been such aprotracted cold spell, since sometime in mid November. Luckily I havebeen able to get into work, although it’s involved rather more walking atboth ends of the journey, as the buses haven’t managed to get thoughsome of the minor roads and the villages. The Monday after the big snowit took me over three hours, and I arrived around noon. (Back in JanuaryI didn’t get into work for three days, since there were no servicesrunning.)

A couple of weeks back we nipped into Homebase and I put an extra 6inches of insulation in the loft. (I could barely move the next day, or atleast I could sit, or stand and walk, but couldn’t manage the transitionbetween the two without looking and feeling like an arthritic 90-year-old.)

As a consequence, we are one of the last houses in the cul se sac still tohave significant snow on the roof, but also, due the arcane way theplumbing is routed back up across the loft, we lost the downstairs hotwater on a couple of occasions.

But hey, it’s started to thaw. The icicles are all melting. I probably gotthem at their most impressive in the photo I’ve attached.

Christmas Day was spent with my sister and my parents (they live withinthree doors of each other in Thame), where we are back again today fora more extended family gathering.

I’ve been a pain this Christmas, much to Vikki’s frustration, as therereally wasn’t anything I desperately wanted. (I still haven’t read half thebooks I had for my birthday.) However, she did find a Graham Joycebook I hadn’t even heard about: The Silver Land. Also the new CD byRumer, which I’d heard nice things about.

My surprise present to Vikki (she is a lot better at dropping hints about

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forthcoming books) is this: http://www.annesudworth.co.uk/pic-tures/Blackcat.htm — a print, not the original (although I’m still prom-ising myself one of those some time), and to be truthful it’s for both ofus. It was one of a batch of new pictures displayed at Novacon 5, and Iwas torn between this and another scene with the same cat in theforeground. It’s not a small print either, and it was an interesting exerciseto try to sneak it from the venue to the car and then from the car intothe house without Vikki knowing.

(28 December 2010)

Vikki and I buy so many presents for each other; both for Xmas andbirthdays, it’s becoming a bit embarrassing. On the other hand, we havean arrangement that we don’t buy ourselves books or CDs after Septem-ber, but drop broad hints about what we’d like. Or Vikki does. Shecomplains that I am bad about this, and never seem to want anythingfor Xmas or birthdays (and I don’t really, with a houseful of stuff already,and dozens of books I’ve still not read). We both tend to squirrel stuffaway all over the house that come Xmas I forget what I’ve already bought(and in fact bought the same book twice this year and had to exchangeone of them) or where I’ve hidden them.

Only one new CD this Christmas — Rumer — though I’ve picked upvarious other stuff in the year: Gorillaz’ Plastic Beach, Faithless (Ou-trospective and Insomnia), Brian Eno’s Apollo and Tallis’s Spem in alium.Most of the rest has come from charity shops, such as a couple ofGroundhogs CDs, Pendulum, Grateful Dead, Groove Armada, JoniMitchell’s Blue, and a bunch of choral and folk compilations — on thebasis that you can’t really go wrong for a quid a throw, even if you likeonly one or two tracks. I’ve also rediscovered Popul Vuh — and theirgorgeous soundtrack to Aguirre — following a couple of documentarieson German electronic bands, one on TV and another (rather incongru-ously hosted by Jarvis Cocker) on the radio.

(3 January 2011)

[*brg* Steve wrote the above after I had said that Elaine and Inever buy presents for each other, and we send almost noChristmas cards these days. All of Elaine’s family have agreednot to exchange presents, but I bought Elaine some chocolatesfor Christmas anyway.*]

I take family and presents seriously I suppose — as seriously as you canwhen you buy a Rupert Bear calendar for your father (he is a staunchRupert fan, while I side with Pooh).

Apart from a string of cards in the lounge, you wouldn’t know it wasChristmas in our house. No tree, decorations, baubles or lights, inside orout. Les and Rene, across the road, are convinced we’re pagans oratheists. And we’ve hardly binged out on the food side either. We stillhave an untouched Stollen, two Christmas cakes, three boxes of mincepies and the entire contents of a hamper I got given at work.

(9 January 2011)

LLOYD PENNEY1706-24 Eva Rd., Etobicoke, Ontario M9C 2B2

I started this zine before the Hugo announcements just yesterday, andI will declare right now that you should have been on that ballot. Youcertainly had my nomination. I am pleased to be there, but you shouldhave been somewhere there, for Best Fan Writer or Best Fanzine. I expectthat as the support of Canadian fans got me onto the Australian ballot(also Sawyer, Wilson, Taral, Leonard Kirk and James Nicoll), the supportof Australian fans will get you onto the Reno ballot.

[*brg* By now you will have seen, Lloyd, that support fromSteam Engine Time was quite high, but there was a record highturnout of nominations in all Hugo categories, so Jan and Iwere dudded again. At least people did nominate you for BestFan Writer, but you and the other real fan writers on the ballotwere dudded by somebody known only on the internet, andthis also happened in the Best Fanzine category. All the morereason for thanking the Ditmar voters for their award to SteamEngine Time in 2010.*]

The cover is an interesting one. When I first saw it, it reminded me ofhams and other processed meats ready for slicing at a delicatessen. Imust have been hungry when I opened the envelope.

I don’t think I could keep track of what I’ve read or heard or watched ...I’ve got so many other things to do, keeping track would become anotherchore for me. But I see you use it as an attack against the drudgery of

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the day. You can only give so much of yourself; sometimes you mustgive to yourself. The books by Rick Gekoski and John Baxter on buyingand selling antiquarian books just show that this feature of a literary lifeis going away, and it will be missed when it’s gone. The used bookstoreI used to go to has moved into a smaller location, and is a shadow of itsformer self. I’d need to check the Yellow Pages to see where the nearestused bookstore is now. The best one I can think of is Treasure IslandBooks in Oakville, two municipalities west of Toronto. (I used to know alot of the antiquarian book sellers and bookstores in Toronto. They arenow mostly gone, or have moved to eBay.)

Jason Reitman may overtake his more famous father in the future. And,Denys Arcand’s success in French-language films may be overtaken byhis success with English-language films. When he started working inEnglish, many of his Quebec-based fans gave him up for selling out toles Anglais. No, I don’t understand it, either.

I did not read The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, but Ithought it made a fine film. Eric Bana seemed to me a slightly odd choiceto play the male lead role, mostly because he also played the renegadeRomulan in the new Star Trek movie. I saw them nearly one after theother. Also, the Philip Pullman ‘Dark Materials’ trilogy was a good read,but you could tell that he was struggling to stretch the main idea of thebooks into a trilogy. With that in mind, I am not surprised to see thatonly the first book was made into a movie; the other two books togetheraren’t enough to make a sequel.

I get to see a lot of Neil Young and Leonard Cohen here because theyare still considered locals. Young got to play in a lot of Toronto coffeehouses to practise his craft. When Leonard Cohen won the Juno Awardfor Best Male Singer a few years ago, even he commented that only inCanada would he win such a prize.

(5 April 2010)

ROBERT ELORDIETAUnit 4, 15 High Street, Traralgon VIC 3844

I’m glad that Dick Jenssen was able to help you out with your filmsviewing and some of your book reading. I’ve seen a couple of the filmsthat you mention in your editorial. I haven’t read any of your books that

were listed. The same goes for your music lists. I have listened to someclassical music, but again, not as much as you.

I read with interest Robyn Whiteley’s letter. It was nice to see that shewas honest in saying that she isn’t into science fiction and classical music,but she is an obsessive letter writer. I like it that Robyn enjoys the waypeople write about their day-to-day lives and their shared experiences.

I’m glad that Borders is still around in Australia. It’s like a book paradisewhen going to Borders. The same goes for Readings in Carlton.

I’m glad to see that I’m not the only person who tried a ‘Warhammer’book and didn’t like it. Thank you, Steve Sneyd.

(21 April 2010)

JERRY KAUFMAN3522 NE 123 St, Seattle WA 98125

I have been especially drawn to the music items. I also particularlyenjoyed John Litchen on skin diving and Taral on Bond. Taral even mademe want to re-read Ian Fleming’s Bond books, though the feeling hasnow passed.

I’ve become very interested in classical music, more so than I’ve beensince college, so I read your thoughts on symphonies with close attention.Not with much memory, though, so I’m already forgetting what you said.I’ll just have to read it all again, won’t I?

(10 January 2010)

[*brg* Somebody once asked me how one goes about‘learning about classical music’. That stopped me in my tracks.Later, I thought of an answer: ‘Listen, compare, and contrast.’And take notes, of course. But you need some good classicalmusic radio stations, and I don’t how many are available inSeattle. Marty Cantor had two in Los Angeles, but he told meone had changed program preference since then. InMelbourne, we can listen to the national ABC Classics network,which was once much better than it is now, and 3MBS, anentirely volunteer-run and subscription-financed FM station,which occasionally rises to great heights. Neither is now

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committed to keeping up with all the new CDs being issuedaround the world; partly this is because of a commitment tobroadcasting Australian performances, as well asAustralian-composed works. There is now no way of hearingmore than a small percentage of the CDs reviewed each monthin Gramophone.*]

Have I ever told you, Bruce, that the title of *brg* always makes methink that it’s an onomatopoeic representation of a vaguely rude noise?

The one article that I enjoyed the most was Ray Wood’s ‘The DancingCyborg’. Considering that I watched only one or two episodes of thetelevision series, this seems odd. However, Ray’s reading of the moviesand series, and the associations he found with other cultural manifesta-tions, fascinated me. After finishing it, I thought of another dancingcyborg that Ray doesn’t mention (if memory and a quick review of hisfootnotes do not deceive), Maria in Metropolis. Instead of the dancehumanising the robot Maria, it perverts the act of dancing and demon-strates the inhuman, even demonic character of the cyborg. Maria dancesto seduce and anger the workers in that film — it’s something theflesh-and-blood Maria would not have done.

Gramophone stopped being The Gramophone decades ago.(2 May 2010)

TARAL WAYNE245 Dunn Avenue, Apt 2111,Toronto, Ontario M6K 1S6

Got your 2005 trip report in the mailbox today. First off I see a photo ofMount Rainier behind Seattle. You must have a telephoto lens. When Iwas in Seattle (three times actually) I took some shots of the mountainfrom a place well south of Seattle, and it still looked like a pimple on thehorizon to my simple camera lens. I never saw anything like that withmy Mk. I eyeballs either, though the weather was often good.

(12 May 2010)

[*brg* I did give the credit for that photo of Seattle to apostcard I bought on the trip. The image of Mount Rainier

might have received the Photoshop treatment from whoeversupplied the photo. However, it does give an accurateimpression. During the week I was in Seattle, the weather gotwarmer, although it was late February. As the humidity rose,the image of Mt Rainier became cut off at the base, so thatincreasingly it hovered above the horizon, like a day moon.*]

DAVID LAKE7 8th Avenue, St Lucia QLD 4067

I’m sorry I haven’t been writing to you for a while. Probably that wasbecause I am not much interested in SF these days. But I am interestedin the ancient and still ongoing clash between science and — not justreligion, but all the humanities, especially our sense of beauty. In fact,I’ve been in a philosophical crisis for some time. I was never a flat atheist,but nor could I possibly believe in a personal god. For half my life Ifollowed the mystic path of Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, etc. I know I can’tprove such stuff, but I incline to believe we are all part of infinite beingand intelligence. Not Intelligent, but Whimsical Design.

Someone recently pointed out in New Scientist that Darwin does not infact explain the origin of species. Once a species has split off, naturalselection will improve and change it. But that first step — speciation —is often quite mysterious. And really bizarre forms arise — I thinksuddenly. Take the seahorse: how could reasonable development pro-duce a fish like that? Daemons, mischievous spirits like Puck or Ariel.One looks at a fish and says ‘I’ll twist the head and tail, make it swimvertically, and make the male pregnant!’ And there are many otherspecies I think are the daemons’ jokes. (Perhaps our species is one!)

Beauty. Science tells us the moon is an airless rock. But when I see afine moonrise, I feel something quite different. I feel I’m seeing a god.And sunsets, and dozens of trees, even impressive mountains. Primitivefolk felt as I do: they personalised these into gods. I believe that oursense of beauty springs from our love of life. Life is beautiful; dead anddying things are ugly. We see beautiful things as living beings, even whenwe know they are not we have (as Blake claimed) a double vision: hesaw the outward Sun as a disc, but the inward Sun as the fiery god hecalled Los. He saw a thistle both as a thistle and ‘an old man grey’. AndI see some clouds as great powerful giants — with my imaginative vision.

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(10 May 2010)

I understand your argument about an infinite regress of intelligencesoutside the universe. That is a complete stopper on the idea of a personalgod — he would have to have infinite series of gods behind him.

But I am not talking about an Intelligence. I mean infinite intelligence,which pervades all possible universes and every atom in this one, andyes, we are probably the best sample of such intelligence. If I can’t atleast half believe in something like that, if Mozart’s music perishes at theend of Time, I can hardly bear to go on living. Mozart’s music is an eternalfact. And it is for beauty, undestroyed by time, that I live.

(13 May 2010)

DOUG BARBOUR11655-72nd Avenue,Edmonton, Alberta T6G 0B9

John Litchen’s piece was fun to read and travel along with, but I remainsomewhat unsure of how its title has anything to do with the contents.But it is interesting to see him remembering how he chose to take adifferent path than the one that would have seemed most normal.

[*brg* The first two episodes of John’s life story in ScratchPad show clearly the dichotomy in his life between the life ofthe mind, represented by his discovery of science fictionduring his teens, and the life of the spirit and body,represented by his need to travel north. Most of us haveprobably experienced the same division of interest. When Iwas a teenager I was devoted to the ‘life of the mind’ —divided between my interest in science fiction and my growinginterest in all other types of literature — and a growing butill-defined feeling that there was more to life than reading,listening to music and watching films. Although I would havenever thought of setting off for Darwin when I was eighteen, Ihave a strong empathy for the young John Litchen, as revealedin his autobiographical stories.*]

Your lists. I see from my letter that I have already stated that I don’t do

these things. I have my reasons, as well as pure procrastination: themajor one, which also applies to my sense of arts and literature awards,is simply that I can’t place any particular work as above all others. Icould, quite easily I imagine, get a list of my faves, unordered, from theyear and the decade even perhaps, but there I run into laziness again.When it comes to those awards, I always think the short list is what reallycounts: I can agree that there maybe four or five works that stand outfrom the crowd (although, and I’m sure you’ve noticed this from yourown point of view, the juries may have chosen the wrong ones); but Ido not think that a single work stands out above all others. Still, I do findit great fun to read others’ lists, and yours are always intriguing.

For example, I have yet to read the ‘Gormenghast’ books (in the Penguintrilogy). Your comments lead me to believe I should look for some others(always remembering the piles I have waiting my reading around thehouse here already, much poetry, as well as SFF and other stuff). I reada lot of that (often on my stationary bike). I don’t read enoughnon-fiction, but did read Adam Gopnik’s book on Darwin and Lincoln,Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life,which is a fascinating study of both men and their thought and legacies,under the flags of ‘liberalism’, ‘humanism’ and ‘modernism’, all terms inthe best and broadest senses. Really interesting for someone like me,who has not read their works, nor that much about them (and there ismuch on both!). Partly showing how their writing, their specific styles,were central to the impact their thought actually had, how Lincoln’sunderstated rhetoric and use of short Anglo-Saxon words to conclude hisarguments from law, and how Darwin’s willingness to tell a story, ofobserved life, as well as to quietly amass huge amounts of observeddetail (and to represent the objections to his theory (the very ones stillused by the deniers) in the very strongest manner), made the acceptanceof their arguments possible in ways that more rhetorically ‘loud’ mannerswould not have. In the concluding chapter, Gopnik makes many pointsabout the importance of what both men did, but the following seemsespecially important:

Lincoln and Darwin are both emblematic figures in the spread ofbourgeois liberal democracy, and the central role for science that goeswith it. They stand for those free and inquiring societies in their gift ofeloquence, in their insistent need to persuade and convince, argue andsubstantiate, talk and justify. They remind us that literary style,

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eloquence, isn’t an ornament or frosting on an achievement createdby other means; it is part of that achievement. Lincoln and Darwinwere not otherwise great figures who happened to be great writers;we pick them out among their contemporaries because they wrote sowell, and they wrote so well because they saw so clearly, and they sawso clearly because they cleared their minds of the cant of their dayand used the craft of legal and scientific reasoning to let themselvesstart fresh. Just as Lincoln used the narrow language of the law toarrive at a voice of liberalism still resonant and convincing today,Darwin used the still more narrow language of natural observation —of close amateur looking — to change our ideas of life and time andhistory. Darwin is most fully himself, most alive, in the volumes ofnarrow observational science that he published regularly in betweenhis speculative books ... In the same way. The legalistic side of Lincoln,the devotion to legal technicality, so disconcertingly evident in theEmancipation Proclamation ... is inseparable from the celebratedsoaring rhetorical Lincoln who saw the point of the thing: that no nationcan be free and enslaved at once.

Induction and argument are the probity of liberal thought. Factsmatter, logic counts ... The truth matters to the progress of a freenation — but it matters just as much that the truth be accepted. In anopen society, new truths need to be told, and new truths need to beheard. It was Darwin’s inductive eloquence that allowed science torewrite the history of life; it was Lincoln’s rational passion that endedthe long horror of slavery, and began the adventure of democracy asa dominant, not a Utopian, way of life ...

And this rootedness in reasoning explains why of all explanations oflife, evolutionary theory is not remotely like a religion. There is noresemblance between evolutionary biology, even if we call it Darwin-ism, and a religion ...

Darwin proudly called his idea of evolution by natural selection a‘theory’, which was not always the way that scientists talked abouttheir ideas in the nineteenth century ... The invocation of theory hassomething modest about it, but it is also ‘massive’. As the kids saynow; theology was to be countered by theories, which are tentative,open-ended, and unsure but also explain things that were otherwisemystifying, and are always empirical — open to probing and testingand changing (pp. 183–6).

Of course, Gopniki is trying to be hopeful, looking for signs of their

continuing influence, as thinkers, as exemplars of liberal thinking, thatopenness to the world and to change, that refusal of dogma(tism), in acountry and a world where their enemies seem to be finding far too muchhold (that the denial of Darwin’s theories still has so many adherents ismore than just troubling; and the attack on both the separation of churchand state, let alone democracy is frightening). It makes me want to readmore about them both, if I only had the time.

We just don’t get out to films much anymore, and don’t watch that muchon TV, although we keep meaning to. I did see Moon: very good andoffbeat. And although I dislike a lot of what it stands for I do rememberBrideshead Revisted, and would agree that in many ways it surpassesthe novel, perhaps because it leaves out some of the (implicitly didactic)commentary. I saw The Barbarian Invasions a few years ago, found itoddly moving as well as incisive in its implied commentary. But that’s it.

I always find your CD lists fascinating, and in some categories know quitea few of the works mentioned. I like a lot of Ronnie Earl, but found Livingin the Light a bit hard to take in places: there were a few numbers Iwould never listen to again, so when I downloaded onto my iPod I leftthem out: I’m glad for him that he’s been ‘saved,’ but his lyrics on thematter are cringemaking for me.

[*brg* I must admit I have hardly noticed the lyrics of RonnieEarl’s songs, because the guitar playing is so brilliant.Similarly, I can listen with pleasure to some of the greatgospel singers, such as Mavis Staples, because their songscome directly from the origins of blues music.*]

I do tend to like ballads and blues, and still find Ronnie Earl’s GratefulHeart: Blues and Ballads his best. On real blues he’s a master player,and the band superb.

I listen more to women performers: Allison Moorer’s covers CD, Mock-ingbird (I await her new one), Edie Brickell, Oh Susanna, Po’ Girl, andthe Wailin’ Jennies. You’d enjoy the Derek Trucks Band, Harry Manx (aCanadian blues singer with an Indian spirituality and musical back-ground) (one of his live CDs was recorded in Sydney), and Ray Lamon-tagne, among others.

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[*brg* I have recent CDs by Oh Susanna, the Wailin’ Jennies,the Derek Trucks Band and Harry Manx. Manx is a latediscovery, a result of him touring Australia quite often duringrecent years, so various ABC radio programs have featured hisCDs and live shows.*]

I am gobsmacked by your collection of classical CD sets. I do agree aboutVaughan Williams, but only have the nine-CD set of the symphonies byVernon Handley and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, as well as variouscopies of other versions of same, plus works on various sets of Englishmusic. I don’t know Pieterin Vasks but will look him up. I did get aspresents Tchaikovsky’s Grand Sonata & Children’s Album (Mikhail Plet-nev on piano) and the four-CD set of Fauré’s piano music by KathrynStott, both quite wonderful. I’m also at the moment listening to Glass’sConcerto Project I & II, which are delightful. Ross got me thinking aboutJanácek. I love both the string quartets (I have the Alban Berg Quartetversions) and the piano music (András Schiff on ECM: A Recollection). Ido have the Jacqueline du Pré set, Les Introuvables, and love it.

[*brg* There is a recent boxed set of the complete Jacquelinedu Pré on EMI, but I have so many of her recordings alreadythat perhaps I don’t need it. Perhaps.*]

I see Steve Jeffery also read The Rest Is Noise, but I don’t fully sharehis absolute distaste for atonal serialism, although I do confess that Istill tend to listen to the Second Viennese School, Berg, Webern andSchoenberg, more than later composers, until the post-World War IIpeople. I like a sense of melody in the music I continue to listen to (theproblem, as ever, is how each of us defines that).

I like your comment to Lloyd Penney about civilised health systems inAustralia and Canada, but have to say that here many powers continueto try to undermine ours. In Alberta, they often have the ear of the nownearly forty-years-old government (Albertans being a bit too much likeEnts in refusing to be hasty in removing a party from power). Like Lloyd,I met Le Guin only once, but I did write part of my PhD thesis on herwork, so when we met she had invited Sharon and me for dinner. Whata delight that was. It’s good to see her carrying on the good fights, asnow against the Google settlement.

Thanks for your response to me about the Top 100 Concertos andchamber music pieces (we had some terrific music at our chamber musicseries this past winter). I’m probably closer to Jerry Kaufman than toyou in collecting and listening, but then I have a friend who has almostevery version of every important classical piece, and takes Gramophone,so I can read it at his house. I do have more than one version of certainworks.

Franz Rottensteiner’s library does look like what I remember of yours inthe old house. I’ve never had one so large, but my shelves are nowoverflowing. I haven’t read a lot of the Strugatskys, but rememberRoadside Picnic well, but don’t even want to imagine a new version ofStalker, which is a masterpiece of film. (19 May 2010)

ROBYN WHITELEY10 Brady Street, Richmond Vic. 3121

Last night we enjoyed a wonderful concert by the Australian ChamberOrchestra, and we also enjoyed a 45-minute talk given ahead of theconcert to set the context of the music. We were there well before talktime, so I had a real chance to read the program. It’s a free programand the information is really good — such a contrast to the programs forthe Melbourne Theatre Company productions, which cost lots of moneyand contain remarkably little information. (That was my summation 20years ago when we gave up our subscription to the MTC and moved tothe Playbox at Malthouse, where at least the programs contained thescripts of the plays.)

In the course of reading the program last night, and being conscious thatI’m reading one of your magazines that lists all your favourite music ofthe decade, I thought you might appreciate having the programs fromthese concerts. I’m sorry now that I discarded two programs quiterecently from concerts earlier in the year. I won’t do that again — unlessyou tell me that you don’t want them.

By coincidence, one of the people we saw at the concert last night wasLes Whiteley [my first husband], though we didn’t speak to him becausehe was deep in conversation with a lady. I thought he might not want tobe disturbed by one of his ex-wives! Barry Jones was also there.

(8 June 2010)

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[*brg* All I could do was write to Robyn to thank her.Informative concert programs are rare. We don’t go toconcerts these days: they are too expensive. I hadn’t thoughtof a main hazard of concerts as meeting ex-spouses, but Idon’t have any.*]

YVONNE ROUSSEAUPO Box 3086, Rundle Mall SA 5000

Wednesday was the day of [my daughter] Vida’s departure for Mel-bourne, after a fortnight’s visit here, and was also the midst of myarranging the installation of a ‘portable’ air conditioner here. This hadbeen purchased (with Vida’s encouragement) from the Good Guys storeat Mile End: an Altise Omega 15 portable air conditioner, as recom-mended in a Choice article that my sister-in-law Liz discovered and sentto me. I found it amusing that, having gone to the Good Guys preciselybecause they stocked this Choice selection, I was then urged to buy aHotpoint air conditioner, which had been developed since the AltiseOmega 15 and had more power and cost less. I resisted this urging ...

The Omega air conditioner works brilliantly (sucking in hot air andbreathing out coolness), but is designed for windows that open eithervertically or horizontally. I have instead flywire screens that open inwardand glass windows that open outward. I managed to rig up a cardboardscreen with a hole in it, against which the window exhaust vent couldrest, while the flywire screen was propped open above the hose,whereupon Vida and I experienced great coolness from the air condi-tioner’s first operation. I’d hoped that a portable screen of this sort (butmore airtight than the cardboard) could be contrived by a carpenter —but instead I now have a permanent plywood screen built into the lowerwindow of the living room beside the front door. The flywire screen hasbeen removed, and the glass window outside no longer locks. Moreover,the hole into which the exhaust vent clips (in the ‘window kit’: a barmeant to fit under a vertically opening window or beside a horizontallysliding one) can be uncovered from the outside (I think the carpentermade some errors when cutting the kit up to fit the space available).However, since the hole is only 7 and a half inches wide by 3 inches high,I trust that this won’t be a security hazard, and that the unsecured glasswindow won’t whomp about during windstorms. The carpenter assuresme that, when I leave Klemzig, the plywood screen can be removed and

the flywire screen replaced.

Thus — alas — visitors to my spare room will continue to find the summerheat intolerable there, despite the air conditioner. On the other hand,one room of the house (the living room) can now be made cool, andbedding could be dragged out there, at need. And it makes a greatdifference to have one room of refuge from the heat.

I’m pleased to learn from you of the existence of Connie Willis’s Blackout(even if it’s only the first of two volumes): I thought that Passage wasextremely good. Meanwhile, I recently read Diana Wynne Jones’ En-chanted Glass (2010), which I found entertaining but not very memora-ble. (However, I thought much the same about her House of Many Ways(2008), which Peter Nicholls regarded as a return to form: indeed, heemailed to tell her so.)

(20 February 2010)

[*brg* Yvonne and I began exchanging emails about ConnieWillis’ recent two book bricks (Blackout and All Clear) thattogether form one novel. Yvonne began writing about themany factual flaws in the former, which in turn led to herwriting me a scintillating article for the next Steam EngineTime (or SF Commentary; who can tell?) about Connie Willis’stime trip to the World War II blitz.*]

When you told Murray MacLachlan about Festival Hall’s history as ‘aboxing stadium that doubled as a rock and roll venue’, I’d recently (June2010) been hearing from my daughter Vida that Swinburne Universitywas using Festival Hall for its first-semester examinations. This dismayedmany students who use public transport, and had no trouble getting toexaminations when they were held at the town hall in Camberwell, butwere forced to travel on foot for a final ten minutes along Dudley Streetto get to Festival Hall. Some of the examinations are held at night, andDudley Street looks spookily gangster haunted and has an unevensurface to stumble over. In addition, candidates complained of the Hall’slabyrinthine layout and its draughtiness. Some candidates were seatedtoo close to doors that had been left ajar, allowing further draughts andidle chatter to penetrate, or that kept slamming as people went in andout.

(22 June 2010)

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I’ve been corresponding with Gian Paolo Cossato of Venice for 42 years, but this is the first time I’ve seen a photo of him.

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GIAN PAOLO COSSATOCannaregio 3825, Calle Fontana,30121-Venezia, Italy

Yesterday (31 December) was the last glimmer for us (Solaris) as a shopopen to the public. From today we are operating on the internet. We stillhave a store full of material we would like to get rid of. As it has nowbecome an unfortunate habit in Venice, our ex-shop will join the alreadyabundant family of trinkets sellers (papier mâché masks, glass rigorouslymade in China, etc).

We were not alone. In the coming week a second Venice bookshop willbe shut down forever. Its name is a bit more impressive than our modestSolaris: Mondadori, possibly the biggest Italian publisher, owned by ourinfamous prime minister, Berlusconi. It was evicted by another big Italianname, Benetton (casual wear, footwear a very long list).

Our local paper, Il Gazzettino, spent few words and a picture to celebrateour departure. I am enclosing the photo (myself and my associate incrime, Gianluigi Missiaja). And another couple of pictures of myselfshowing the evolution of the species.

Books are definitely on the wane, at least here in Italy. And I have toconfess my own contribution to the crisis. I am using a Kindle. And thetrees, at least, are grateful for it. And I think the demise of the DVD(Blu-ray included) might be around the corner. Solid state disks, flashmemory and the like are fast gaining ground.

(2 January 2011)

It’s a good thing that books are still popular in Australia. The Italianlandscape has never been promising, with a dearth of readers growingexponentially the more you move towards the south. And the prices.Same thing here. And the internet. I give you an example. Here the lawabout prices is very murky. The chains used to practise discounts thatrange from 15 to 20 per cent. An independent bookseller is supposed tosurvive with an average of 25 or 30 per cent at best (quantity permitting).Work it out. And consider that in Italy you end up by paying up to 43 percent tax on your income and this does not take into account the localbalzelli, so to speak, which make a further dent.

The big names had already their own companies selling through it (20per cent flat) but you had to pay postage. Now (few months ago) comesAmazon Italy. They offer a 30 per cent discount on almost everything inprint, and should you spend more than 19.00 (Euros), not so difficultgiven the prices, the postage is free. Sorry to repeat myself: work it out.

About the Kindle. I must admit it was a tormented decision. But a fewwords in favour have to be offered. Small as a paperback and lighter, itallows you to carry around more than 3000 books (which I do not considerits main advantage, but still not despicable) or anything comparable(personal document, articles, etc). It works as an external hard disk whenyou connect it to a computer. It reads your material when needed.

Eyesight. I value mine too. After all, I have been carrying glasses sincethe age of ten (and finally can read without them after my recentsurgery). Digital ink is the key. Pixels do bother me, albeit slightly, butthat ink makes characters sharper than print on paper. It doesn’t waverand consume the battery (only when you turn a page); otherwise theimage can remain there forever. The font can be enlarged, obviously.

No, Amazon did not pay me.

Books. I have plenty of books too. Perhaps not so many as you, but stillshelves of all kinds are taking over a number of walls in almost everyroom of my house and of the store I have on the ground floor. Just the300 or more translations I have been working on for a variety of Italianpublishers with a certain number of reprints make for more than athousand volumes. Than there are all the books I have received as aliterary agent and consultant for more than 25 years. And they are justthe tip of the iceberg. A large slice of books in Hungarian that belongedto my wife and that only my daughter can read (she has also added asmall collection of books in Swedish and some in Icelandic just tocomplicate things). And my own cherished collection of books in Englishand French. Some in German, too, but I never went hand in hand withthe language, my one-year spell in Germany notwithstanding. My knowl-edge of it has ended almost in oblivion. And this does not take intoaccount the books in Italian (including those of my father and somefurther back into the my ancestry of the eighteenth century).

The big question for me was, ‘Can this go on? Where the hell am I going

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to stick the nextacquisitions?’ Ihave been anApple user for thepast 20 years, so Ihad a look at theiPad. Very tempt-ing, and I mightstill acquire it forother purposes.But I found in theKindle the rightanswer. No morepaper.

My pictures? Usethem freely. It isnot encouraging tohear I am one ofyour longest corre-spondents, but stilllet’s accept itphilosophically.After all I havebeen a member ofthe local cremationassociation for the

last 28 years and a small box with my name on it has been waiting forme in the cemetery ever since. But a recent law allows cinders dispersion,so I find enticing the possibility of ending up in the lagoon.

P.S. See the photo of Venice down the drain. What no card will ever show.It could be an idea, though.

(4 January 2011)

[*Thanks for the pictures — in 42 years of corresponding, thisis the first time I’ve seen your photo. :: I won’t be botheringabout a Kindle or iPad until (a) I need one and (b) I can afford

one. Mike Ward reports that they are good for looking at pagesfrom fanzines downloaded from efanzines.com.*]

WE ALSO HEARD FROM ...

RAY WOOD (Quorn, SA), thanks Jerry Kaufman for his commentsabout Metropolis and the ‘dancing cyborg’: ‘ I hadn’t thought of Maria inMetropolis in terms of dancing cyborgs. It’s so long since I saw that filmthat I’m not sure of this: but isn’t Maria a more robotic figure thancyborgian?’ :: JAN CREGAN (Sydney, NSW) had hoped to catch up inJuly, but it didn’t happen. Many people have visited us at Greensboroughduring the last year, but not yet Jan.

— Bruce Gillespie, 11 January 2011

Below: The Venice no visitors see (photo: Gian Paolo Cossato).

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The local newspaper coverage of the closure ofSolaris Books in Venice.

Slow blogsby Bruce Gillespie

APA (amateur publishing association) mailing comments are just blogs writ slow. They began 75 years before blogs, and remain morethoughtful and better written than most blog entries I’ve read. Here I’ve just picked out a few of my ANZAPA mailing comments from2010 that make sense by themselves, and can be read as mini-essays. You don’t have to have read the ANZAPA entries I’m replyingto. If they still read no better than blogs, tell me and I’ll stop writing this little feature.

Radioholic

My favourite radio program of all time was Clive Stark’s Stark Raving, ahalf-hour of comedy sketches, usually British, that Stark ran on 3AR(what became Radio National) in the 1960s. Most good comedy hasdisappeared from radio, except at 8.30 a.m. every Saturday morning,when ABC FM’s Colin Fox runs one comedy sketch, usually British, oftenold, usually hilarious (but sometimes not). Colin Fox still plays Flandersand Swann sketches, but also picks the best from recent comedy, suchas selections from Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion. You canbuy the complete Tom Lehrer recordings on a CD boxed set, as you canget the complete Flanders and Swann on another CD boxed set.

I listen to a lot of radio.� On Saturday at 9 a.m. it’s Brian Wise’s Off the Record on 3RRR,

followed by Paul Harris’s Film Buffs’ Forecast, and occasionally DeniseHyland’s Twang.

� Saturday evenings during the summer it’s The Coodabeen Champions,which is their general-interest program. Much as I admire the humourof these four blokes, I can’t take a whole program about football (theirwinter Saturday morning gig on 774).

� Sunday morning it’s Correspondents Report on Radio National, fol-lowed by an hour of Colin Fox on Classic FM.

� Sunday lunchtime I sometimes listen to The National Interest,although Peter Meares is often rather boring (or his guests are)compared with Terry Lane, who established the program.

� Sunday evenings when it’s on: the highlight of the week is GarrisonKeillor’s Radio Program, which is a one-hour version of A Prairie HomeCompanion.

� Weekday mornings: the 7.45 news on 774, followed by Radio NationalBreakfast. On Monday mornings at 8.30 we listen to Norman Swann’sThe Health Program, but on other weekday mornings don’t bother withthe 8.30 feature programs.

� I turn on again at 10 a.m. to listen to Ramona Koval with The BookShow. If her guests seem to be boring, I turn off again until the middaynews. Elaine and I have lunch then. If the classical music is good onClassic FM, we listen to it. Otherwise, I turn off.

� Monday evening brings another highlight of the week: Robyn Williams’Science Show, which after umpteen years is even better than ever.

� I listen to music at night time if there is something good on either ABCClassic FM or 3MBS, but often there is not.

� After 10 p.m. I usually listen to Phillip Adams’ Late Night Live, unlesshis subject matter is boring. Later in the night I listen to about an hourof Tony Delroy’s progam on 774. I switch off after the midnight newsbecause I can’t stand quiz programs

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Surely this regime interrupts any attempts to work? Some programs do:The Science Show and The Book Program must be listened to, whereasI can have music programs on as background while doing other things.If I have a week of urgent paying work, I don’t listen to most of theprograms I’ve mentioned.

Facebook

I stay on Facebook because (a) it’s easy to do so; I can even remembermy password every time, whereas these days I would have no idea howto get back into my LiveJournal page even if I wanted to; (b) I’ve dugup lots of people I haven’t communicated with for years, and some havedeliberately sought me out. Making contact via Facebook led directly tohaving afternoon tea recently with Claudia Mangiamele, who was aleading Melbourne fan of the 1970s.

If you ‘spend too little time on Facebook’, you must be the only personwho does. I’m quite ashamed of the way I allow myself to becomesuckered into spending whole half-hours on Facebook without blinking.Logic tells me that if somebody wants to tell me anything, he or she canemail me, but the little niggly voice in the back of my head believes thatit might be missing out on something vital. But the whole point ofFacebook is not to write anything vital, because of the lack of privacythere.

There is very little information on Facebook that is not trivial. You canattempt to start a conversation on something interesting by writing acomment in your main ‘status line’, but that’s limited to just over fourlines of text. You can go into your main page, which will feature, inreverse time order, all the messages posted by your friends. You caneither comment on these messages, or, better still, comment on some-body else’s comments. This might develop into a real conversation, butusually does not. In recent months, Race Mathews has posted the mostinteresting stuff, and hence gets the most detailed and intelligentresponses.

What to post on Facebook? ‘Walked down beside the river today.’ Duh.‘Watched this really good movie last night.’ Duh. Elaine, on the otherhand, can write something really interesting, even about an event thatinvolves me, and prompt good responses. In ANZAPA or fanzines I feel

I can write anything about anything, and even occasionally write well,but not in Facebook-land.

The e-lists

During the last twelve years, most of my conversation with fanzine fansis not through the fanzines themselves, but through the e-lists, such asFictionmags, Trufen, Eidolist, Fmzfen, Google, PnP, etc. My great pleas-ure in discovering the internet in 1998 was getting back in touch withmany fans I thought completely lost. Something the same has happenedthrough Facebook, but I find the most enthusiastic ‘friends’ are people Idon’t know particularly well. By contrast, internet conversations can beinteresting and informative. My favourite list is Fictionmags, with itsunique mixture of pro authors, editors, collectors, readers and fans. Thecurrent convener is author Paul di Filippo, and it was established byformer Interzone editor and J. G. Ballard expert David Pringle. Aconvention put on by Fictionmags members would have some veryinteresting participants and program items.

Special fan funds to Australia

The tradition of having a special fan fund for an appropriate fabulousfannish person to come to Aussiecon started with the Tucker Bag in 1975(and Bob Tucker couldn’t help being the most visible person at theconvention, apart from Ursula Le Guin, Michael Glicksohn and SusanWood, and Bob Silverberg), the fund that brought Bob Shaw to Aussiecon2 in 1985, and then Dave Langford’s fund. Nobody set up such a fundfor 2010.

Blogs and fanzines

To me, writing a blog is, as Elaine put it superbly, like ‘leaving a note ona peak-hour railway carriage seat and hoping it will be read by yourfriends’. However, in Melbourne, there is a strong group of the other lotof fanzine publishers. They congregate around a shop called Sticky in theDegraves Street underpass entrance to Flinders Street Station. Theyknow nothing about the real history of fanzines. I have heard some ofthem interviewed on radio, and their motives are much like ours: theywant to create an art object, however minor: something that actually

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exists, and takes some trouble to make, and looks and feels good andexpresses one’s personal interests.

In the 1970s I used my fanzines as my diaries, and events in my lifeseemed to cause me great angst from time to time. If I wrote about suchevents as a story rather than as an outcry, I discovered that the writingitself helped to solve the situation, or sending out the fanzines put mein touch with people who were willing to help me solve the situation. SFCommentary ran a lot of serious stuff about science fiction, but whatpeople were really interested in were the editorials and the letter column.

Our hero Bill Wright

Bill Wright suffers for his convictions: it takes him many minutes to

stagger up the hill from Greensborough station to our place, and usuallyhe needs a coffee break on the way. Even using a walking stick, he findsit very hard to put one leg in front of the other up that hill, which I considerthe most exhausting in Greensborough (because it gets steeper towardsthe top). I’ve said many times that he need not do collating duty forANZAPA if the trip to our place is too much for him, but Bill will not bedissuaded. Besides, when he arrives, he receives a good strong coffeeand gets to nurse Flicker on his lap. Flicker knows it’s Bill as soon as hecomes through the door, and tracks him until he sits down. Cats rule —even the visitors.

Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia

Our set of the Children’s Encyclopedia was, I think, the 1954 edition, and

Elaine Cochrane took this picture of Bruce Gillespie (l.) helped by Archie, and Bill Wright (r.), helped by Flicker, hard at work collating the October mailing of ANZAPA.

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it replaced an earlier set. The arrival of the 1954 Arthur Mee’s Children’sEncyclopedia coincides with my growing ability to read lots of big words,but it was the pictures that fascinated me then, and still fascinate me.Much of the encyclopedia was illustrated with vast numbers of diagramsand miniature paintings rather than relying on photographs, suggestingthat its basic design was done early in the twentieth century.

Christmases

Elaine and I have given up on Christmas as far as possible. We haven’t

even written cards the last few years. Maybe that’s a reaction to childhoodChristmases. I can remember looking forward to Christmas every year,wishing for lots of wonderful presents ... and usually getting what Iwanted. (It’s only much later in life that I realised what pushovers ourparents were when it came to things that mattered.) Up early in themorning, we ate huge numbers of nuts and chocolates, opened presentsafter whichever parent who had gone to the 7 a.m. church service hasreturned home. Christmas dinner was rarely before 2 p.m., in the earlyyears at my grandmother’s house, and later in the fifties round the hugetable at the home of Auntie Linda and Uncle Fred. More presents from

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relatives calling in, then home to a late salad ... and it was all over. Inadult life, the nearest we ever got to childhood Christmas was the partythat Sally Yeoland and John Bangsund put on for Elaine and me soonafter we were married. People didn’t just turn up at the party; theybrought wedding presents, many of which we still use today. Theunfolding of the event was so much a complete surprise that it was betterthan Christmas.

We gave up on Christmas altogether this year. Since my mother died,Jeanette (my sister) and I no longer travel down to Rosebud every year.Jeanette now lives up the country, and celebrates Christmas with thefamily of her partner Duncan. Robin (my other sister) and Grant live inQueensland. Both of Elaine’s sisters were doing other things. So we hadthe day free. It’s many years since we’ve been able to say that.

Royal Melbourne Show

The first year that Elaine and I were together, 1978, Elaine dragged meoff to the annual Royal Melbourne Show. We went from one animal pento another, ending up with the chooks and pigs. I contracted the worstheadache I’ve ever suffered in my life, and have not been to the Showsince. On the basis of what I now know about my headaches, I suspectI am very allergic to some of the farming products that litter theShowgrounds, such as straw. If ever I go to the Show again, I will stayaway from the animals (apart from the cats).

Drinkable coffee

I first drank good coffee in the early sixties at the Gibby’s Coffee Loungethat used to be on the corner of Elizabeth and Bourke Streets, where theAngus & Robertson basement bookshop is now. There was also anotherGibby’s in Little Collins Street, which lasted until the 1990s. Carlton hadno coffee lounges when I moved there in 1974, but I could always get agood cup of coffee with a meal there. I’m trying to remember the firsttime Elaine and I started our Sunday afternoon wanderings for coffeeand cake — probably when Jasper Coffee Dealers opened its first shopin Smith Street, Collingwood. It moved to Brunswick Street, and wefollowed. Later Foo Doo’s opened in Smith Street, so that was our placeof refuge for some years. Greensborough has one proper cafe, Urban

Grooves. Even tiny Montmorency shopping area has three; Eltham hasseveral; Rosanna has a good place; and Heidelberg now has cafes alldown Burgundy Street. But Greensborough still feels like a wild frontiertown in this respect.

Melbourne’s newspapers

What nobody will admit in Melbourne is that The Age is no longerAustralia’s, or anywhere’s, best newspaper, and that one often has tosneak a look at a Herald Sun in a cafe (or even occasionally buy one) tofind out the full story, plus photographs, of something that has beenrelegated to a para in The Age. The Age, now controlled from Sydney,won’t spend money on what people want from a newspaper: detailedstories and vivid photos. The Herald Sun still has the advertising flow topay for the good stories, so it gets them. Plus all the beat-ups andcelebrity crap stories, plus the vile columnists, of course, but one canignore those. When I get to see the Herald Sun, the first thing I look atthe death notices. Far more people die in the Hun than in the Age.

UnAustralian Halloween and the death of GuyFawkes Day

We had only one knock on the door this Halloween. We didn’t haveanything in the house to offer the trick-or-treaters. Fortunately, theywere polite, pleasant Greensborough kids, so they went away and didn’ttrash the house in retaliation. Halloween is unAustralian, but it seems tohave been promoted by primary school teachers in an attempt to givekids something to do in the dying days of the school year.

Guy Fawkes Day, when a lot of people celebrate the careers of aseventeenth-century terrorist, has disappeared in Australia because theover-the-counter sales of fireworks has been banned. Guy Fawkes Day,along with Empire Day, was always an occasion for a Cracker Night, orBonfire Night, in my childhood. I enjoyed every incendiary second of it.But it must be over 25 years since fireworks were banned, except underofficial supervised conditions. Empire Day had already been changed toCommonwealth Day, then disappared altogether in the 1970s.

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Twilight

Elaine and I heard an uncharacteristic sound in Howard Street a fewmonths ago: a gaggle of young teenage girls, dressed up, walking downthe street talking loudly. We rarely see kids wandering the streets ofGreensborough. Where could they be going? Of course! To the openingnight of the first Twilight movie at the local Greensborough multiplexcinema.

Stand on Zanzibar

I read John Brunner’s 1969 novel Stand on Zanzibar many years ago: Iremember that the style was very rough, but most of Brunner’s ideasabout the future (re 1969) of urban society have been coming true. Hismost brilliant prediction was that urban terrorists would blow up thingsand kill people just for the fun of doing so. That’s what I thought hadhappened on 11 September 2001, because it was all so cinematic andshow-offy. It was quite disappointing to discover eventually that seriousArab terrorists had actually planned and executed the whole thing. It allseemed so American, so Stand on Zanzibar.

Well-remembered teachers

I still remember the teachers who offered genuinely educative out-of-school experiences. Our English Literature teacher in Form 6 (today’sYear 12) arranged several expeditions to the city from Bacchus Marsh tosee productions of plays on the syllabus. Yes, it was syllabus-based, butour teacher could have easily not taken the trouble. In 1964, the EmeraldHill Theatre was at its best, offering a stunning performance of Death ofa Salesman, and productions of both versions of Antigone (Euripides’ andAnouilh’s). We saw a good production of Hamlet at the Union Theatre inMelbourne University.

Dickens’s novels

The Dickens novel with the best plot is Great Expectations, followed byA Christmas Carol (and it’s short), Oliver Twist and David Copperfield.The trouble with the huge Dickens novels is that they were all writtenwhile being serialised, rather than being written and then serialised, so

the plots creak woefully. I have all the Dickens blockbusters, but I doubtif I will read any more of them. George Turner, on the other hand, wouldsit down every ten years and read them all.

‘In the Year 2525’

Zagar and Evans was not quite the ultimate one-hit band, but prettyclose. They did release a second single, which was played once onMelbourne radio then forgotten forever. ‘In the Year 2525’, by contrast,is still a staple of Golden Oldies radio. I’m told that it’s a bit hard to trackdown on CD, although I have it on an anthology put out by RCA Recordsabout 20 years ago.

My first LPs

What was the first LP I actually bought? All my early LPs were Christmasor birthday presents. The price of 52s 6d (= $5.25 = in today’s money,about $70) was way beyond my pocket-money budget. My first purchasemust have been Frank Ifield’s first album I’ll Remember You (which,annoyingly, did not contain ‘I Remember You’; I had to buy an EP to geta copy of that), which I bought at Batman’s in the city for half price. Sohow did I raise 26 shillings in 1964? Or did I not buy it until 1965, whenI received my teacher studentship income for the first time?

Never leave a book unbought

I live by the Dick Jenssen premise: ‘Oh why didn’t I buy it when I hadthe chance?’ Just yesterday I thought of a book I read twenty years ago,and I really wanted to look it up right then, but I remembered I hadborrowed it from a library. Probably no library still has a copy. If I hadbought it at the time, I could still consult it.

Fiction about Henry James

Julian Barnes’s Arthur and George was the book that was unlucky enoughto appear the same month as the best- selling Colm Toibin’s The Master,which covers a slightly different era of Henry James’s life. Barnes’s bookis much more intereting than Toibin’s, because of its emphasis on thestrained but warm relationship between the two authors Henry James

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and George du Maurier. Henry James felt himself being destroyed by thelack of financial success of and public acclaim for his own late books,while du Maurier felt himself being destroyed spiritually by the giganticsuccess of his novel Trilby. Du Maurier knew James was a much betterwriter, but nothing he could do could stop the tide of manic enthusiasmshown by the American and British reading public for Trilby, while theyignored James’s later novels. I’d forgotten that Conan Doyle is also acharacter in Arthur and George.

Searching for symphonies

Searching for symphonies? Go for conductors. The Karajan 1962 set ofthe Beethoven symphonies; either of the Bernstein boxed sets, or theSolti or Tennstedt boxed sets, of the Mahler symphonies; the Harnon-court versions of the Mozart and Haydn symphonies, or the fabulousDorati set of the Haydns if you can still find it. Nicolaus Harnoncourt formost things except Brahms (I thought nobody could play the Brahmssymphonies until I found the Böhm set). And Böhm is pretty good atplaying most composers, especially Mozart. When Karajan is great, he’sthe best, and when he just belts out stuff, he’s horrid. Bruno Walter formost things, but some of his records sound a bit ancient and boxy thesedays (his last recording was in 1962, when he was in his eighties). Still,nothing could surpass his version of Mahler’s Symphony No 2. Beechamfor those composers in which he was interested, especially Mozart,Haydn, Delius and Sibelius. And his version of Brahms’ Symphony No 2is the best.

If you can track down any of the above, they are usually very cheap.

I’ve just thought of a few more names of ‘guaranteed’ conductors:Bernstein, Solti, Davis, Boult, Barbirolli, Sargent, Ormandy, Jansons withthe Oslo Philharmonic, 1970s and 1980s Muti and Abbado ... the list goeson. Listen, compare and contrast (especially if you can pick up both 2MBSand Classic FM on your radio).

More musings about favourite music

I like small-scale Tchaikowsky, especially the quartets, trios and otherchamber music, the glorious Rococo Variations and the operas and songs,

but don’t often listen to the larger, bombastic pieces.

Bolero is much too short to be a symphony, whereas some other piecesthat are long and symphonic get left out of lists just because thecomposers didn’t want them to be called symphonies. Richard Straussgave individual names to his tone poems, but they are all essentiallysymphonies.

The ABC did a Favourite Concertos list a few years ago, which I reprintedin *brg*. Again, there are plenty of pieces that are actually concertosthat don’t get listed in people’s lists of favourites. A good example isBerlioz’s Harold in Italy, which is actually his viola concerto. His strangepiece Romeo and Juliet is really a symphony with some movements sung.Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade feels like a symphony while you’relistening to it, but you could also call it a violin concerto.

Mark Pesce’s GoH speech at Continuum 6, June 2010

Thanks for the summary of Mark Pesce’s GoH speech, which as you say,was brilliant when I was listening to it. As soon as I thought about itafterward, his argument fell apart. Pesce’s world is one filled withtechnosavvy morons. Anybody who is no longer able to sit down aloneand shut out the rest of the world and think real human thoughts andwrite them down without summarising them into a Twitter message isalready part of the moronosphere. At any one time there are only a fewhundred people with whom one is attuned, so the trick is to get in touchwith them. That’s why I still publish fanzines instead of twitting. Theexample of Californian fan John Hertz, who writes brilliantly but commu-nicates only by mail, proves that one can do without the internet and stillreach everybody with whom one wants to communicate real thoughts.

We lost William Tenn (Philip Klass) during 2010

I met Philip Klass at Penn State in 1973, when he seemed (to me, aged26) already a senior figure in SF. He was a witty speaker and friendlyperson, who dominated the SFRA conference I attended. Even then, hiscareer as an SF writer seemed to be over. Thanks to Dick Jenssen, I havethe collection of his stories that NESFA Press published a few years ago.

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We lost Patricia Wrightson during 2010, but nobodyin Australia noticed

Jack Herman was the only other person in Australia who seems to havenoticed the death of Patricia Wrightson. The only people who seemed tonotice her death were the people at Locus and the fans on the Fictionmagse-list. The Age did not run an obituary, and Ramona Koval did not mentionher death on the ABC’s Book Show. Elaine and I read The Nargun andthe Stars quite recently, and enjoyed it a lot. And perhaps only Jackwould have known that ‘her son, Peter, was the founding manager ofGalaxy Bookshop, Sydney’s SF/F specialist bookshop’.

Davy Crockett

I never had a Davy Crockett coonskin cap, but I was a member of theDavy Crockett Club, which took our money and never gave us anythingthat I can remember. I was bowled over by the first film, Davy Crockett:King of the Wild Frontier, which was the first film I saw where the herodies at the end. I waited in vain for the prequel, a film about DavyCrockett’s adventures on the Mississippi, but it didn’t ever show inMelbourne. I notice that both films have been out on DVD in recent years.

The Tucker Hotel

The Tucker Hotel was a joke proposition, like all Bob Tucker propositions.Not only did he not take things seriously, but he did not take seriouslypeople who take things too seriously. He kept his own distance from therest of American fandom, but loved a good convention. He could hardlyhave foreseen the large number of older fans of his generation who wouldend up poor and alone and in ill health, and therefore in need ofsomething like the Tucker Hotel. During the 1950s he was astonishedwhen those bricks kept arriving on his doorstep as contributions tobuilding the damn thing.

Things Eric Lindsay said we could do without

During 2010, Eric Lindsay caused a bit of discussion among ANZAPAmembers by suggesting a number of features of modern civilisation(twentieth-century style) that we could already do without, or had

already disappeared from the Linday–Weber worldview. I was one of anumber of ANZAPA members who replied something like this:� Australian newspapers will not die while they supply what people read

them for: almost anything but the news. The comics page is the firstthing Elaine and I look at in The Age (to which we subscribe), and TheHerald Sun (when I read it while drinking coffee in the shoppingcentre). The Age was idiotic enough to drop several comic strips earlythis year, but had to restore one of them because of protests. If it cutits comics section, The Age would probably lose so many readers thatit would disappear. Then I look at the entertainment section. Severaldays a week I check the Lotto results. Then I look at the specialistentertainment section at the back of the paper. Elaine looks at theweather page. Only then do I turn to the beginning of the paper. Evenif I stopped subscribing, I would still buy The Age for the Green Guideon Thursdays, EG on Fridays, and Epicure on Tuesdays. Most of theSaturday Age, the paper’s classified advertising money-maker, iswaste paper for us. We get The Sunday Age only because we have thepaper delivered, and our newsagent is quite incapable of under-standing the idea of not delivering a paper one day a week. Comparedto the mean fare in The Sunday Age, The Sunday Herald Sun provideswhat ordinary Melburnians want from a Sunday paper: half a day’slazy reading in bed before clambering out at midday to fire up thebarbie.

� LP recordings are making a resurgence among people who claim theycan hear the greatly improved sound of analogue sound comparedwith digital. My friend Frank Weissenborn buys nothing but LPs, buthas spent many thousands of dollars on equipment to make the bestof them. I rarely play my LPs, and never download sound or videorecordings.

� Landline phones will not disappear. Elaine and I do not have mobilephones. If you phone us and we are not home, we take a message onthe answerphone and call back. I do not want my life to be interruptedby a pestilential little mobile phone. Also, people talking on mobilephones are always cutting out.

� Wristwatches will not disappear. Why should I need anything otherthan a wristwatch to tell the time? It uses one battery every five yearsand is utterly reliable.

� Business cards will not disappear. Elaine and I, as a company, arealmost the only people we know who do not have a business card tooffer potential clients and friends. No sign of them disappearing.

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� Books will not disappear. Books are not just the content within — theyare sacred objects in themselves. Without bookshops I would probablystop buying books altogether, which would be a good thing, as theshelves in our house are full. But I would certainly never read a bookfrom a screen. Why should I? If I want mere information, I can googleit, but good books are never mere repositories of information.

Why I hate sport (short version)

The main reason for my disagreement with the school system when Iwas a child was my total dislike of compulsory sport and phys. ed. andmy complete inability to play sports. My body reacted to this during thefirst three years of secondary school by giving me medical conditionsthat allowed me to skip sport. In Form 4 (Year 10) I was allowed to do‘athletics’, which meant going on a cross-country run every Wednesdayafternoon. Since I cannot run without feeling my lungs are bursting, somefriends and I went on a cross-country amble. However, I did very well inthe main subjects at primary school, and only slightly less well atsecondary school. I can’t recall anybody ever mentioning the word‘autism’ in the fifties and sixties; there were just kids like me who weremoderate social outcasts, the occasional kid who was an absolute socialoutcast (he became a top exec at Philip Morris) and bossy bastards whojust weren’t liked very much.

Festival Hall, Melbourne

Festival Hall, Melbourne, used to be a boxing stadium that doubled as arock and roll venue. Somebody has done something to the ceiling so theacoustics are nowhere near as bad as they were in the sixties, when Isaw two different concerts by Roy Orbison. Sightlines, as you say, areappalling, which is why for both concerts I attended during the eighties(Dire Straits, 1982, and Neil Young, 1985) I got out of my seat and walkedup the back of the stadium, stood for the whole concert, and gained amuch better sight-and- sound experience than I would have if I hadstayed in my seat.

Vinyl to CD?

I keep meaning to do something about recording stuff from vinyl to CD

tracks, but don’t have the technical savvy to do it. I have quite a few1960s singles that have never appeared on CDs. I would very much liketo hear them again, especially some singles that were recorded inMelbourne in the early 1960s for W&G and Astor. Occasionally Cane ToadRecords puts out CDs of this early material, but they have never includedthe singles I want, such as Bobby Cookson’s ‘I Could Have Loved Her SoWell’ and ‘Rona’ or the Strangers’ ‘Leaving Town’.

Many great classical LPs have never appeared on CD, especially thoseissued by Vox and Turnabout in the sixties and seventies, so I would liketo convert some of these. Because LPs have to be transferred in realtime, I will never have time to do more than a few.

Origins of my listomania

Obviously I do not sit down at the end of the year and write down mylists. I note down the items during the year, then put them in order atthe end of the year. Since the beginning of 1962 I’ve kept a list of booksread. In 1959 I started listing my Top Ten Hits each week, but gave thisup in 1970. At the same time I started collecting hit parades from radiostation lists, and again I gave that up in 1970. In 1996, I started keepinga list of LPs/CDs bought, and have kept that up until 2009, when Ichanged the list to ‘Favourite CDs Heard for the First Time in [whateveryear]’. I’ve kept film lists since 1968, and can probably reconstruct myfilm lists for 1965 to 1967. In 1962 I started my lists of favourite SFstories, and sometime in the early 1980s, working backwards throughmy book lists, reconstructed my lists of favourite short fiction.

I gain great enjoyment from doing the lists, but their principal value istheir ability to encapsulate a year’s memories. My lists are far bettermemory- joggers than my short-entry diaries, although I’ve kept suchdiaries since 1954, when I was seven years old.

Soul musings

The concept of ‘soul’ is, like most concepts in religion, a fantasy conceptdesigned to disguise human lack of knowledge about the workings of themind and the universe. The interesting thing is what the brain is actuallydoing when it constructs abstract artistic, aesthetic and moral concepts.

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It now seems that concepts of art and the afterlife go back at least 40,000years into human history, to judge from recent finds of Aboriginal cavepaintings. This suggests that the ability to construct abstract thought isnot the icing on the human brain-cake, but is essential to whateverhappened when the human mind came into existence. We know thatmost brain functions are not conscious, and that consciousness itself isan extraordinary achievement of the brain, a kind of pinhole of lightthrough which the nonconscious, chugging-away brain peers at theuniverse.

So what can artistic and aesthetic consciousness be? Pattern- making isthe essential feature, but it’s still hard to describe why some patternsare emotionally satisfying, and why most are merely ... patterns.

Also, aesthetic perception varies wildly from person to person. HenryJames confessed that music meant nothing to him, but he doted onpaintings, sculpture and architecture. Pictures don’t mean a lot to me,especially still pictures, rather than moving pictures. I am much moremoved by the great black-and-white photographs than I am by anybody’spaintings. Music of all types, on the other hand, is essential to me,whereas for the first twelve years of my life I liked very little music.Literature, especially fiction, is the foundation of my life and career, yetthese days I am often unmoved by most books I read, whether fictionor non-fiction. Most writers waste words; they (including me) don’t knowhow to edit themselves for maximum impact. (Twitter limitations do notseem to have fixed this problem.) The plastic arts, such as sculpture andcraft, don’t mean much to me, whereas other people are only happywhen they are making something textural.

But what is beauty? We’re as far away from working that out as we everwere.

Brideshead Revisited

I listed the TV series of Brideshead Revisited in my favourite films of2009, because now it’s on DVD it fits the same category in my mind asa film. I listed it under its nominal directors, although in the TV interviewfilm that is part of the DVD set, Diana Quick says that the crew and actorstook over the film, writing and rewriting large sections of the script, andcreating something quite different from the original five-hour concept.

We lost Martin Gardner during 2010

We lost Martin Gardner (who was very old) during 2010. His Fads andFallacies in the Name of Science remains the most amusing and pene-trating book that debunks pseudosciences. I have the Sladek book onthe same subject. I also have Gardner’s The Annotated Alice, but havenever seen any of the other myriad books that you mention. Maybe somewill be republished now that he has died.

My desk

I have a desk that contains my computer and printer, but it’s not anarchitect-designed ‘computer desk’. I had one quite a few years ago, butpart of it collapsed under the weight of the printer. Most of the table isoccupied by piles of paper, which I occasionally rearrange or even reduceoccasionally by throwing stuff in the waste paper bin. The base of eachpile is an overmatter manila file for any one of several Gillespie fanzines.I have the main file for SF Commentary, plus the file of SFC stuff thathas been accumulating for many years. There is the basic Steam EngineTime file, plus the file for the letters of comment. There is a BRG file,which contains a huge collection of stuff I would reprint if I published a50-pager every issue. I have something called an ‘Art file’. All these filesrepresent my hopes for Time Future rather than an accurate picture ofTime Present.

Fashion

Hairstyles and clothes styles stayed much the same for the wholeseventies, as I find when I watch movies from the period. Suddenly itbecame okay in 1971 for ordinary blokey men to wear their hair long,grow beards, and wear flairs and bright clothes. Equally suddenly, men’sfashions changed in the early eighties back to much the same as theyare now. By the end of the eighties it became okay for blokey men toshave their heads. I could never have conceived that baldness couldbecome fashionable, but suddenly it was. Flairs and mullet haircuts wentout of fashion. Men Who Wanted Other Men to Think They Were Menwent back to wearing charcoal suits and bumptious ties. In a counterfashion, many men became permanently unemployed during the eightiesand early nineties, so that it became increasingly acceptable to wander

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around in casual gear.

Songwriters

Paul Simon is my favourite songwriter. I just bought his book of Lyrics1964–2008. Bob Dylan is a songwriter whose great songs I admire verymuch. I keep meaning to track down a book of his lyrics. But my second-favourite songwriter — or perhaps equal favourite — is Loudon Wain-wright III. He’s about the same age as I am (a few months younger),and he’s written the tracks of my life. Not that I’ve done any of the thingshe’s done, but the songs on each album resonate with my life in the yearin which they appear. In particular, he pays tribute to his father on severalsongs on the 1992 album History. We were listening to it for the firsttime when Geoff Roderick phoned to say that Roger Weddall had justdied, and could we come over to Fairfield Hospital as soon as possible?My father had died three years earlier. In his humorous songs, Loudoncaptures the spirit of a particular time, especially that track abouthelicopters strafing Ventura Boulevard on the album that came out justafter the declaration of war in Iraq. I’ve just bought Loudon Wainwright’sSongs for the New Depression.

Wannabe writers and writers

‘Wannabe writers’ are people who want to be thought of as writers, andhave people circle around them going ‘ooh’ and ‘ah’. They want to becelebrities within the small world of SF and fantasy. I agree that they arevery different people from those who really want to be writers: for whomthe act of writing is life itself. Fortunately, we have a few of them.

I would contrast the current lot, who mainly sell to Australian small presspublishers, with the few Australian writers who attended conventions inthe late sixties and early seventies: they had sold stories overseas(admittedly, to Ted Carnell, then editor of New Worlds, Science Fantasyand Science Fiction Adventures, but Carnell was an agent as well aseditor, and sent stories by Australian writers to American markets) andhad reasonable expectations of becoming successful. If short story ratesand advances for novels had maintained their real value through theseventies, some such as Damien Broderick and Lee Harding might havehad lucrative careers.

Jack Kerouac

I don’t think I’ve seen a copy of Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums since theearly 1970s, when all of Kerouac’s books came back into print. I didn’tbuy it then, and now have only three of his novels. I was swept up in Onthe Road when I read it in 1976, but I’ve never explored the others. Bythe time I was told anything about the Beats, in the early 1960s, theirimage had already been reduced to a Maynard Krebs/Ed Byrnes TV/filmcaricature (‘Kookie, Kookie, lend me your comb?’) Much later I found outhow important the Beats were to American culture, especially Californianculture, but I’ve never followed that up.

That rapid change in Australian politics during 2010

Most of us rather enjoyed the three weeks (including the week ofAussiecon) when we had no government at all. Maybe we are all littleAussie Tea Partiers.

What’s emerged in commentary about the overthrow of Kevin Rudd andhis replacement by Julia Gillard is that it was not planned by NSW LaborRight apparatchiks, as Tony Abbot wants us to believe, but by Laborparliamentarians who were sick of being stood over and ignored by adictatorial central Cabinet. Kevin Rudd does not know to make friendsand influence people. Even after the hung-parliamentary election, it’snot clear how the balance of of power has shifted between the PrimeMinister/inner Cabinet and the rest of Caucus. This will have as muchinfluence on the eventual success of the Gillard government as Julia’sability to negotiate with the Independents and the Green. I suspect shewill just hang on grimly until the new Senate sits next year, after whichher main problem will be negotiating with nine Greens Senators. Shecan’t afford to go for a double dissolution election, for fear that Abbotwill take both houses. I get the feeling that Julia is tough enough for thetest.

Apahacking

Approach to ANZAPAing? For mailing comments, I start at the beginningof a mailing, comment on what I find interesting, then finish at the end.I re-read through my comments, make quite a few changes and dele-

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tions, print the first drafts, then proofread them. If I have time. OftenI’m in too much of a rush to proofread carefully. Then I print the pageson my home printer, hoping all the even pages will print correctly on thebacks of the odd pages. I scream and say very rude things when thingsgo wrong.

For non-mailing comments material, I gather the bits, run them outseparately and proofread them, then assemble the package. This alltakes a lot of time if I’m including photographs or other pics. The frontcover and colophon seem to take the most time of all, and are the placewhere I’m most likely to commit typos. Then I send off the file to CopyPlace, and hope I receive the copies in time to include in the mailing.

Paper fanzines

My greedy little fanzine eyes burned when I read that Chris Garcia hadactually sent a paper copy of Drink Tank to Michael Green! A printedfanzine — any printed fanzine — now has a special aura and value thatwould have been unimaginable ten years ago. It ain’t the words on thepage that matter, but the texture of the twiltone.

The Potlatch concept

The Potlatch concept is very simple: it’s a convention organised byscience fiction readers for science fiction readers about science fictionliterature. It is not designed to publicise SF writers. Writers are not turnedaway, but they are not the focus of the convention. Instead of a Guestof Honour, each Potlatch has a Book of Honour. Various panels discussthe Book of Honour, and other panels or speakers discuss subject areasthat are raised by the Book of Honour. The next Potlatch will featureGeorge R. Stewart’s Earth Abides, so no doubt there will be plenty ofgood discussion about other after-the-disaster novels, such as A Canticlefor Leibowitz, The Long Loud Silence and The Road. There is plenty ofscope for an Australian Potlatch.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is one of the most brilliant evocations ofan alternative world that I’ve read. The detective story itself is a bit

tedious, I agree, but I was intrigued by all the tiny details of thismaybe-world. It could so easily have been a real country if the post-WorldWar II Holocaust survivors had been shunted off to Alaska (an actualproposal of the time), or Madagascar or Western Australia (also seriousproposals).

Inception

There is something missing in the recent Christopher Nolan movieInception. If it had been based on a Philip K. Dick book instead of aDick-like conception, it would have had a real zinger of a surprise at itscentre. That’s what I kept waiting for. In the end I had to wonder whohad set up whom for what ends. I will have to wait until I see it on Blu-Ray(release date 9 December) to make any conclusions. Does anybody knowof a genius review out there somewhere in the web world?

Myself at 30?

Myself at 30? Hard to reconstruct. I’ll have to reread my fanzines of thetime. I do recall that the night of my thirtieth birthday was the mostmiserable I can recall: no girlfriend; nobody to birthday with; I was justabout to move house (because my flat was being sold from under me)to a shared household — my life was over, with no good prospects! Ahwell. I and my two cats, Flodnap and Julius, were about to share a housewith Elaine and Frank, which after a miserable and strange year wouldend up with Frank disappearing to Hobart, and eventually Elaine and Igetting together. Also, I would type a manuscript by Gerald Murnane, apart of which Norstrilia Press would eventually publish as The Plains. Iwould typeset SF Commentary for the first time on an IBM ElectronicComposer, which would fail to kickstart SFC as a profitable independentmagazine, but would lead to Norstrilia Press buying a Composer, and metypesetting books, which would lead (in real money) to the most lucrativeperiod of my career (1979–1982). I wasn’t just sleepwalking through lifeon 17 February 1977; I was nightmaring through it. Never been so low;never about to fly so high.

Race Mathews

Lots of people who do not know each other are friends with Race

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Mathews. In his mid seventies, he seems determined to work as hard forthe Labor Party as he did when he was a parliamentarian. He was outletterboxing and handing out how-to-vote cards during the federalelection, and might be prevented from doing so in the state election onlybecause he broke his arm during a recent visit to Bali for a literary festival.Iola says that Race still gets up early each morning, and when he isn’tout doing things, watches umpteen films and episodes of TV shows onDVD, goes to the movies, and reads. He does admit slowing down on thethesis he is writing to gain his second PhD. He hasn’t mentioned it forawhile.

Plantar fasciitis

It took me most of 1996 to get rid of plantar fasciitis, and only with the(expensive) help of my podiatrist and masseur. If it recurs, as it doesvery occasionally, I do the telephone-book-standing exercise. Get onethick telephone book. Stick it against the wall. Place the balls of one’sfeet on the telephone book, and one’s heels on the floor. Attempt to liftup one’s heels with the top of the foot. Stagger; do not fall over. Do notfaint with the discomfort; it will pass. Do twenty foot-ups, a few times aday, until the fasciitis disappears. If it doesn’t, see somebody helpful whocharges high fees.

Krispy Kreme

Krispy Kreme has failed in Australia, although a few shops remain open.It turns out that most of the outlets were opened in shopping centres,but in Australia large shopping centres close at 5 p.m. Monday toThursday. It turns out that most people who want a doughnut achievefull hunger pangs about 4 p.m., just at the time when the shopping centreis closing.

More on religion (say that quickly)

Religion is a way of people puffing up their own sense of self-importance:‘We are good! We follow the right gods! You should follow our god!’. Weatheists see the absolute lack of importance of humans in the scheme ofthings, yet realise that perhaps the only awareness of the universe mightbe in human heads! Don’t have faith; don’t follow anyone; don’t kowtow;

don’t believe yourself more important than anybody else. End of sermon.

Roy Orbison and Jefferson Airplane

Marc Ortlieb wrote: ‘Bruce, I keep telling you you should have listenedto more Jefferson Airplane and less Roy Orbison.’ That sentence hashaunted me since I read it, since it shows that even Marc has failings ofhistorical knowledge. You do not remember, or never experienced thefact, that I heard Roy Orbison often because his records were hits from1960 to 1965, and I could not have heard Jefferson Airplane becausetheir records were not played on Melbourne radio until FM arrived in1976–77. I had heard about Jefferson Airplane by reading Rolling Stonemagazine (whose Australian edition began in early 1971). Until the lateseventies I had heard one track by them, ‘Go Ask Alice’. I heard almostno more Airplane songs until I bought a double CD of their greatest hitsin the middle 1980s. The same can be said of a large number of‘underground’ groups of the late sixties. They were ‘underground’ inAmerica because they could be heard only on FM radio. They were veryunderground here, because they were rarely played on radio.

Lots of tracks by CSN(&Y) were played on radio, but tracks by DavidCrosby solo were not, and neither were any songs by Jackson Browne.It took me until the end of the seventies to hear an entire Jackson Brownealbum (Running on Empty, his first LP to be played on radio). I had boughtWarren Zevon’s Excitable Boy, because the hit single was played on radio.Only many years later did I hear his first album, which is even better. Ibought the one great Joan Osborne album only because Dennis Callegarirecommended it. I didn’t ever hear any of it on radio.

Polly

Polly is our oldest cat, about sixteen. A few months ago, very suddenlyshe was very confused, running around in circles, trying to work outwhere she was. We thought she must have suffered a severe stroke. Wetook her to the vet, who could do little for her. We kept her in a cage forseveral days, then on the third day (cats being good at resurrections)she was her old self, and since that time has often been very chirpy. Herlatest trick is to demand to sleep in Sampson’s half of the enclosed partof the back yard. Sampson is most put out about this, although Polly

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does not mind sharing the space with him. Since he is the only cat whois frightened of Polly, he has to put up with the situation or go inside.

Wild platypus

I’ve seen a platypus in the wild only once. On a family excursion whenwe were kids, the Morris Oxford broke down, as it often did during familyexcursions. We had stopped by the Cement Creek Bridge on the way toWarburton, in the Dandenong Ranges. My father went off to find someway of getting in touch with the RACV to repair the car, so we had towait there. And wait. My sisters and I clambered down the creekside tolook under the bridge. And there was the platypus. It disappeared as fastas possible, but we did see it.

International travel = starvation

The main reason for not flying long distances these days is that theairlines don’t want you to eat the meals you’re entitled to, so they dimthe lights as soon as the plane enters whatever zone it feels like, insteadstaying on the timezone of the bodies of most of the people in the plane.I was starving after both the trip to Los Angeles and the trip back, andI had to tiptoe like Oliver Twist just get the cup of coffee I desperatelyneeded. The more you remind me of international travel, the more Irealise I probably never will get back to America, and won’t get to Londonin 2014. I just can’t stand the plane flights, unless by some miracle I canafford to fly Business Class.

Long 45s

‘MacArthur Park’ was just one of many very long singles that were onthe hit parade during the mid to late sixties. My favourite was Eric Burdonand the Animals’ ‘Sky Pilot, Parts 1 and 2’. You had to turn over the singleto get Part 2, but radio stations did play both parts together (from theLP version). Several Phil Spector-produced singles went over four min-utes, especially the Righteous Brothers’ ‘You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling’.

To overcome the radio stations’ prejudice against long singles in 1965,Spector simply listed its running length as 3 minutes 6 seconds. Somesingles were cut to fulfil the demands of radio stations; for instance, thesingle version of the Rolling Stones ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’lacked the lead-in choral bit, now always played on Golden Oldies radio.

Murray Moore and the typical Australian fan

To Murray Moore (from Canada): I can see your difficulty in assemblingan image of the Real Typical Australian Fan. Meeting me in 2005 musthave come as a shock. I can recall you standing with your mouth open,amazed at some idiotic thing I had said. I can recall the Murray Moorelook that said all too plainly: ‘This is not the Typical Australian Fan as Ithought I knew him.’

I had never before thought of Leigh Edmonds as Treebeard. Will keep itin mind if ever we in Melbourne stage another fan opera, say Lord of theApas.

Bringing home the hardbacks

It was wonderful in 2005 to visit the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattleand find wall upon walls of affordable hardback books. Not that I couldbuy them all, but I would have bought far more if I could have figuredan inexpensive way to send them to home to myself. In 1973, I sent 11jiffy bags of books back to myself, surface mail, postage a mere fewdollars per bag. In 2005, I tried sending back to myself my Seattlepurchases. The first price I was quoted was $150 air mail, then $100surface mail. Janice Murray, who was with me, had a brainwave: postthem from her then place of employment, a volunteers organisation, andthe same packet would cost $33 to post. Which is what happened. Forthe rest of the 2005 trip, I put back on the shelf many of the lusciousbooks I would liked to have bought.

— Bruce Gillespie, 31 January 2011

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