Hugo Gernsback? That son of a bitch. I never dealt with him, not with the rates he paid. Every time I see someone being awarded a Hugo I see the biggest fraud, swindler, chickenshit fucking scoundrel ever in the business. He's the only editor I've ever known, or known of, who so fully deserved these understatements of mine.
- E. Hoffman Price, Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods! edited by Richard Wolinsky, p.9
Jim Henson was the kind of creative personality who generated a lot of ideas. My sense is that most of them never happened; I don't know what that meant for his focus on the projects that did happen, but the work was generally top-quality, so I don't suppose it matters. He generally worked with screenwriter Jerry Juhl, who put Henson ideas into a usable form, and they were credited together with scripts for a lot of projects that did come to fruition.
As well as a lot of things that are still sitting in trunks at the Henson Company, or Disney, or wherever.
One of those was a script from the late '60s for a Thanksgiving special, to include both Muppets and live-action actors. So not quite an early precursor to Emmett Otter's Jug-Band Christmas, but clearly coming from the same strand of Henson's creative output. The special was never made; it's '60s enough that I doubt it ever would get made now.
But, about ten years ago, the Jim Henson Company decided, for whatever reason, they wanted to get this project out into the world somehow, and connected with cartoonist Roger Langridge. Langridge took the Henson/Juhl script, turned it into four issues of comics, and drew it all, with colors by Ian Herring.
And that's how we got to Jim Henson's The Musical Monsters of Turkey Hollow.
Somewhere fairly rural in New England, in a region with a lot of turkey farms, is the small town of Turkey Hollow. Living there is Timmy Henderson, a boy who wants to learn to play his guitar but is finding it difficult, his hippie-ish older sister Ann, their aunt and guardian Clytemnestra, the grocer/mayor/sheriff/postmaster Grover Cowley, and nasty evil landowner Eldridge Sump.
Sump wants to drive the Hendersons from their land, for the usual I'm-evil, I-want-to-take-everything reasons in stories for children. He is thoroughly one-note, and you probably can already picture him in your mind: black clothes, white hair, little round glasses, goatee, sharp face, always scowling and declaiming.
Timmy is out practicing his guitar in the woods one day near Thanksgiving, and a meteor - which we saw crash-land three hundred years earlier in a prologue - opens, with five furry "monsters" emerging. They don't talk, but they're musical Muppets - each one makes a particular sound/note, and they help him with his song. He tries to hide the monsters from everyone else, but Ann and Aunt Cly soon find out, and love them just as much as he does, including at least one musical number. (This was going to be a musical, so the cast breaks into song every ten pages or so.)
Meanwhile, Sump has heard the monsters, and wants to use them to force the Hendersons off their land. He's also got a plot - possibly originally unrelated - to steal all of the other turkeys from all of his neighbors for unspecified reasons, which he puts into action, framing the monsters. The monsters are thrown into jail for eating turkeys, even though we readers know they only eat rocks.
Timmy helps the monsters escape jail - because it's difficult to hold rock-eating monsters in a stone building - and it all comes to a head on Thanksgiving, with a thug hired by Sump running around with a shotgun trying to kill the monsters, Grover investigating both real crimes and the ones Sump alleges, and other tomfoolery.
In the end, there's a song, good wins out, and the missing turkeys are found unharmed and stolen in Sump's house - so they can all be slaughtered and eaten in the final scene. (I mean, yes, that's how it works, but you don't expect it to be so blatant in a story for kids.) Oh, and Grover finally admits he's hot for Aunt Cly, so they start dating.
This would have been a perfectly cromulent 1968 TV special, which would have been re-run annually for much of the '70s and then probably half-forgotten, with revivals now and then. It wasn't, but it's a comic now, so that's close enough. It's not a lost classic, but it's a very Henson-y thing, with all of the music and found-family stuff, and this package also includes photos of the puppets Henson's team built for the network presentations back in 1968 and some other historical material, which adds to the package.
If you're looking for a Thanksgiving-themed comic to read - and I was - there's not a lot to choose from, but this is a solid choice. Langridge always does good work, particularly when trying to depict music on the page or when doing Muppet-adjacent stories, so this fits well with his strengths.
I've been posting one song every Monday for three years now; I suppose it's now a tradition of the blog.
The series for 2023 was This Year, inspired by something John Scalzi did in a single post the end of the year before: one song for each year of my life, each by a different artist, each song somehow important to me. I followed that up with Portions for Foxes in 2024, which was all women: solo artists and women-led bands, to try to make up for what was a bit of a sausage-fest the first year. Last year was Better Things, which continued to follow the only-different-artists paradigm, with largely songs I'd considered for the first two years but didn't manage to fit in.
Each yearly series, as you might be able to guess, had a title song - one that wasn't part of the general schema, but was thematically important in some way, or (maybe more accurately) was a way for me to cram one more song in when the choosing got difficult.
I wanted to keep going in 2026, and keep the only-different-artists thing going for one more year. So I ran through a few ideas - first Instrumentals (not enough different artists, and I'd want to showcase weird songs by people I already listed anyway). I thought about cover songs, which had the same issue - a fair list wouldn't be all different artists.
Then I toyed with a series of "Second Songs" - the other songs by bands I've already featured once. And that might come up next year.
But, instead, I ended up going with a double theme, or a theme that is two sides of the same coin. With a lot of the songs in the back half of 2025, I found myself musing about which ones were famous and which ones were obscure - and sometimes wondering why that happened for a particular song, or if, maybe, something I thought was obscure was actually well-known.
So this year will alternate - obscure songs with famous ones, back and forth through the weeks of the year.
And the title song - which is not part of the series, but defines it in some odd, indescribable way, is another obscure one (of course), The Psychedelic Furs with a sad, lamenting look back at something completely broken: All of This and Nothing. The Furs themselves are not obscure - I hope, even this many years later - but this song is, which I guess makes it right as the exemplar song for this year's series.
Every year, I post a list of the books I liked best the previous year, early on the New Year's morning. Some years I've read less, and kept it simple, but usually I pick a book as a favorite for each month (and some also-rans worth mentioning) and pull them all together at the end into a list.
First, though, I like including long lists of links, so here are all of the previous installments: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, and 2005.I didn't have some specific reason, originally, for making my list this way - it seemed like a reasonable way to organize a list, maybe a little idiosyncratic, certainly, but defensible. As the years have gone on, making those weird, particular choices for each month loom larger, and have become a more central part of the process. For example: if I read only books that vaguely annoyed me in a given month, how do I pick a "favorite?"
I'm ambivalent about the idea of literary standards to begin with - they've been used as a cudgel often against the kinds of books I like (not to mention all of the other problems with canon-making, starting with which groups are allowed to be part of it and how they get in) - while at the same time I do think there are aspects of a work that can be clearly done badly or well. There are standards, on some level, which I do think serious readers can identify and note.
At the same time, lousy things can on occasion be a lot of fun, and well-executed works can be tedious, horrible bilge not worth reading. (cf. Henry James) And I didn't have any interest in celebrating the worthy but dull.
So I wanted to do a list, and I wanted it to have rules that constrained it - but not the same rules as anyone else. These rules grew up as I was doing it, mostly that first year, and have been tweaked since then but are still recognizably the same. So that's why there's twelve, and why each month is its own little competition - because listing favorites for a year is already artificial to begin with, so why not emphasize that artificiality?
Still - I did read a bunch of older, excellent books this year. I started the year reading about a corrupt political establishment and a weird, twisty election in A.J. Liebling's classic book of reportage The Earl of Louisiana, for reasons I think I can leave unstated. Later in January, I got to Stewart O'Nan's first novel, the seasonally appropriate Snow Angels, and also continued a vague project to re-read a lot of Jack Vance, starting his "Tschai" novels with City of the Chasch. (I read the rest of the Tschai books and the three Alastor novels in 2025.)
I also noticed that George O'Connor had started what will be a four-book series of graphic novels (officially for younger readers, but don't let that scare you) and got to the first one, Odin, in January and two more (the ones already published) before the year ended.
But the favorite for the month was a new graphic novel by the unique Carol Lay, My Time Machine, which also - to loop back to Liebling - had a lot of relevance to the world we find ourselves in.
Not quite as old, and just as much a favorite, was Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli's Batman: Year One, which sent me, a bit later in the year, into re-reading Miller's Daredevil as well.
Even newer - only about a decade old, and new to me - was a fine and visually stunning graphic novel about Brian Epstein, Vivek J. Tiwary and Andrew C. Robinson's The Fifth Beatle. I liked it but didn't love it, and thought it had more than a bit of special pleading.
Two other things that I can't quite call my favorites, for different reasons: Axelle Lenoir's fun collection What If We Were.... is enough not-quite-new that I have to make it an also-ran, and Cathy Malkasian's Percy Gloom is both a bit too old to be a 2025 favorite and quirky in ways that sometimes set my teeth on edge (which I'm finding common with Malkasian - she's a very particular creator with definite strengths, so I want to both read her books closely and argue with them intensely).
The favorite for the month is partly a sentimental favorite - Daniel Pinkwater had a new novel this year, the middle-grade story Jules, Penny, and the Rooster. I don't want to say that any new Pinkwater book would automatically be a favorite, but it's close to that - he's such a unique writer, who I've been reading since I was a middle-grade myself, and this is yet another fine bit of Pinkwateriana for brighten the world a bit.
I dug back into a big omnibus of Evelyn Waugh travel books by reading Remote People, the story of his trip to see Haile Selassie crowned King of Abyssina, and read a bunch more in that book later in the year - most of it deeply entertaining, even as Waugh was full of opinions and ideas I can't quite bring myself to agree with.
I re-read David Goodis's fine noir novel Down There, which I think I read in a big bunch of Goodis twenty-five years or so ago, so it was time enough to get back to it.
I found and read two good books of memoir this month: Louise Brooks' collection of essays about her time making movies, Lulu in Hollywood, and the newspaperwoman Helene Stapinski's memoir about her childhood in Jersey City, Five-Finger Discount.
I've been reading Julian Hanshaw's graphic novels as I've found them - he's a quirky, specific creator with something new to say in each book so far, which I appreciate. This month, I made my way back to his 2018 book Cloud Hotel.
And I've been spending the year reading the fine Freddy Lombard books of Yves Chaland, who died unexpectedly and far too young around thity years ago. The one that's the most impressive is right in the middle, and that will take pride of place for this month: Freddy Lombard, Vol. 3: The Comet of Carthage.
Also a few years old, but new to me, was Daria Tessler's semi-wordless (there's no dialogue, but a lot of in-world text) graphic novel Cult of the Ibis, which is deeply quirky in its own way.
For newer things, I read two very different, interesting, good graphic novels: Michael Avon Oeming's moody medieval supernatural tale William of Newbury and Craig Thompson's massive autobiographical Ginseng Roots.
The most impressive book of the month - it's a tough read, and about horrible things at times, so I don't want to say "favorite" quite as strongly for this month - was the new collection of Kayla E.'s stories about her childhood, Precious Rubbish.
I read two excellent novels - very different from each other - for the first time this month; both are over a decade old. Kate Atkinson's Started Early, Took My Dog is the fourth of her novels about Jackson Brodie, which have been championed by crime-fiction readers but are bigger and more encompassing that that. (For all that "crime fiction" is already a very large bucket that can include a vast number of stories.) And William Kotzwinkle's The Midnight Examiner was a fever dream of an '80s tabloid.
I read a bunch of good graphic novels this month, and am finding it difficult to pick one as a favorite. All had strengths, but all also had things I disliked. So I can't quite make Eric Drooker's Naked City or Noah Van Sciver's Beat It, Rufus or Laura Pérez's Ocultos or Grant Snider's Thinking About Thinking or even Mia Oberlӓnder's Anna as my "favorite."
I will give pride of place to All My Bicycles by Powerpaola, a book and a creator I'd never heard of before I picked them up, a distinctive and interestingly framed memoir of a specific, quirky life, a book that was fun and energetic and colorful and wonderful.
For newer things, I actually read a first novel around the time of publication! There was a decade or so where I did that several times a month, but times change on us. This time around, it was Auston Habershaw with a fine contemporary fantasy, If Wishes Were Retail.
And my favorite of the month was a graphic novel: Love Languages by James Albon, a fine love story by a creator whose work I need to dig into more deeply.
For old books, I read a few - another Evelyn Waugh travel book that I shouldn't mention, for one. I also re-read Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, which I think I got a lot more out of than when I first read it, as a teenager. (But isn't that always the case?)
The favorite was a no-brainer. Jaime Hernandez had a new collection of his Love & Rockets stories: Life Drawing.
I've been watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 a bunch the last year or so, with my kids, and this year dug into a few books about it, because that's the kind of over-intellectualizer I am. Best of that bunch, no surprise, is the book by the cast & crew themselves, The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Amazing Colossal Episode Guide from the mid-90s.
I should throw the "old" books in somewhere around here: I re-read William Goldman's classic fantasy novel The Princess Bride, which is as bright and cutting as ever. New to me, but nearly twenty years old, was the cultural history How to Be a Victorian by Ruth Goodman, which was smart and full of interesting details of everyday life for a lot of people over close to a century.
And then there were two books that could have been the favorite. One was "new," but largely reprinted old work by a great, now-dead master - so I think I'm going to take half a point off for that and list it first. Richard Sala was a massive talent who died much too soon, and his first book Night Drive was a quirky gem to begin with and made vastly better by the additional material added to the recent posthumous edition.
That leaves pride of place to Jeff Lemire's big, detailed memoir of his life in comics: 10,000 Ink Stains.
I could also mention the fun but slight Who Killed Nessie? by Paul Cornell and Rachael Smith and the gorgeous but weirdly-ending Betty Blues by Renaud Dilles.
And the favorite for the month was another surprise: Smoking Kills by Thijs Desmet, an afterlife fantasy by a creator I've never heard of.
Also old, also a re-read, also the end of a re-read project: Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man. I was less-impressed by his middle novels, but this one is still zippy and bright.
Two random graphic novels worth mentioning: the stylish spy thriller Bang! by Matt Kindt & Wilfredo Torrres, and the major French biography George Sand: True Genius, True Woman by Séverine Vidal & Kim Consigny.
And one more, which almost became the favorite: The Interview by Manuelle Fior, an excellent SFnal story about a decade old now.
But I actually read a big non-fiction prose book, only a few years after publication, and it was full of insights and research and details about forty-some years of underground cartoonists and their followers, so that will take the slot: Brian Doherty's Dirty Pictures.
To start with the old: this year I finally read A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, which was mostly familiar from a million adaptations but full of specifics that strong originals always have and their adaptations never quite include all of.
I also read the excellent '70s SF novel The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe by D.G. Compton, also for the first time. Vaguely related - since it's about old SF - is the oral history Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods!, edited by Richard Wolinsky from several decades of a San Francisco radio-interview program.
On the comics side, I found two excellent books by European creators from earlier this century: Naomi Nowak's Graylight and Ludovic Debeurme's Renée.
For newer comics, also worth noting were Walker Tate's debut Laser Eye Surgery and two books of an unexpected triptych of women cartoonists making memoirs about their relationships with food and eating: Jennifer Hayden's Where There's Smoke, There's Dinner and Debbie Tung's My Perfectly Imperfect Body. (I'll mention the third a section down, under December.)
The favorite was a big new book by Bill Griffith, covering the long, complex, fascinating life of his photographer grandfather: Photographic Memory.
I mentioned Jaime Hernandez's new Love & Rockets collection above, so, out of fairness, I should also mention the similarly new collection by his brother Gilbert, Lovers and Haters. There: I have now mentioned it. I make no claims for favorites or quality.
Reading Jeff Lemire's 10,000 Ink Stains inspired me to make a list of the books of his I'd missed, and I got to his excellent, recent, mostly horror/crime Fishflies this month.
I need to mention John Allison somewhere in this list, though I seem to mostly read his stuff online these days. I did get to the collection of his recent series with Max Sarin, The Great British Bump-Off: Kill or Be Quilt, which is full of his great dialogue and sparkling plots - plus Sarin's fine cartoony drawing, too.
The third of the three memoirs by women cartoonist about cooking and eating - and the one that made me notice there were three of them, published almost on top of each other, was the smart and insightful The Joy of Snacking by New Yorker cartoonist and standup comic Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell.
And the favorite for the month, to close out the year, was another collection of laconic genre stories told sideways by the inimitable cartoonist known only as Jason, Death in Trieste.
I read 207 books last year - less than 2024, more than the four years before that, less than my Book-A-Day Years but more than the ones between. I seem to have found a pattern that works for me.
I don't know if you're like me, but I need to find ways to embed reading - like so many other things that I want to make sure I do regularly - into the fabric of my life, so that it just happens. Years ago, I read for myself while commuting and for work (when I was an editor) in long stretches every weekend and many evenings. Losing the editorial job freed up my weekends, though I sometimes miss that life. Losing the commute sent me into a reading tailspin, and it took me years to figure out how to replace that time regularly.
What I mean to say is: think about the things that matter to you. If you read this far, "reading books" is probably one of them. Embed those things in your life regularly. Make time for them, structurally. Don't let the things you really want to do become contingent and secondary.
And, of course: read good books. I recommend the ones above; you'll have others based on your own tastes. 2026 is as good a time as any. Today is the best time to do anything, to start any project.
Photographic Memory, Griffith's new book in 2025, is mostly a biography of his great-grandfather, the pioneering photographer William Henry Jackson. Since this is non-fiction, there must be an explanatory subtitle, in this case William Henry Jackson and the American West, which is not untrue, but leaves out the three-year round-the-world taking-pictures-of-railroads project Jackson was part of around the turn of the century, among other projects of his life. Jackson lived to 99, and, as Griffith shows us here, was active and working right up to the end, so it was not just a long life, but a full one.
Griffith doesn't structure Photographic Memory to be particularly inspiring, but Jackson's life is low-key inspiring. He started several businesses - all of which ran their course, leaving him to move on to other things - raised a family, did work he cared about for a long time, and had a small but mostly positive role in the history of his country. Add that to the "living to 99, on his own, writing and painting and photographing right up to the end" bit, and it's a model life.
Of course, Griffith is always present in his stories - that's the old undergrounder in him, knowing every story comes from a point of view, from a person - so Griffith himself is a minor character here, both in his youth, as a way into the story, and in his mature "Griffy" persona, as an author stand-in to bring up issues and questions and concerns. (And, in a surreal closing sequence, to mediate a dispute between Jackson and Yogi Bear - I don't think this entirely works, or quite fits with the tone of the rest of the book, but Griffith is clear why he did this, and it's positive and celebratory and silly, so I feel rude for quibbling.)
Griffith has a lot of Jackson's life to get through in Photographic Memory. He starts with his own childhood - he was born just two years after Jackson died - and, initially, it looks like the book will be structured through Griffith's family memories and artifacts of Jackson. But, pretty quickly, he moves to a different framing story: Jackson living in New York in the '30s and early '40s, writing his autobiography, making paintings, traveling out west every summer on the dime of the National Parks Service or the Oregon Trail Memorial Association, and, most centrally, talking with a young acolyte, Elwood Bonney, whose extensive diaries informed the book.
From there, he drops back to do the usual chronological story of Jackson's life, returning to Jackson-and-Bonney scenes regularly. Jackson was born in 1843 in upstate New York - his mother sketched and his father dabbled in very early photography. He went to work early in that 19th century way, setting type, painting, and working in an photography studio in his teens, before serving a stretch in the Army during the Civil War. (That seems to have been less eventful than many solders' enlistment, and ended, on good terms, before the war did - I wasn't aware that was possible at that time.) He was cruising onwards towards a comfortable life in his hometown in Vermont, working in a photography studio and heading towards marriage with a woman he loved, when he had a big breakup with that woman, Caddie Eastman.
Jackson sold off what he had, and immediately made plans to head west, to get away and maybe to seek his fortune in the silver mines. He did so in company with two friends, and the three worked as "bullwhackers" - the crew driving the oxen pulling wagons for caravans heading west through Montana in 1866.
After some adventures, and separating forever from those two friends - the West was huge, and trails diverged all the time - Jackson ended up in Denver, picking back up a photography career. The rest of his life followed a more usual model: marriage, children, business successes. He was hired to photograph various stunning natural features of the West, which turned into a pitch in Washington to found the National Parks system (starting with Yellowstone, which Jackson photographed extensively), and that in turn led to many more trips to photograph all sorts of things, largely for railroad companies, over the next four decades. Eventually, the taking-new-pictures part of the work subsided and Jackson's old photos found a new life for the burgeoning picture-postcard business - and he became an executive in that business along the way.
Again, it was a long life, filled with trips lugging a bulky, balky wet-plate camera: first, for many years on muleback, and then more often by train. Jackson started the business in Denver by 1870, when he wasn't quite thirty - and he lived to 99.
Griffith frames this all through conversations of the nonagenarian Jackson with Bonney, over meals and meetings in Jackson's apartment in Depression-era New York. (The crash of '29 wiped out what Jackson had thought would be his nest egg, which is one reason why he was still making paintings for the parks service at that age.) And he organizes it into twelve chapters, plus the Prologue about his own childhood and the surreal Epilogue set in both the real Yellowstone and the Hanna-Barbera Jellystone.
There's a lot of detail - a man who lived to 99 has a lot of life to cover - and Griffith keeps it organized, relevant, and particular. We don't learn much about Jackson's family life; the focus stays mostly on his work - but that's plenty for a good-length book (almost three hundred pages) filled with captions and notes. There's even a section at the end of Jackson's photographs, so we can actually see the work of the man we've been reading about.
Griffith's books have all been personal, so far - his mother, the model of his most famous character, his artistic idol, and now his namesake and predecessor in a roughly related field. I do think that's the underground in him, and wonder what else he'll find to make books about. Jackson lived to 99 in rugged good health; if Griffith follows that model he's got almost two more decades of productive time ahead of him. I hope that's true; I hope he keeps doing things like Photographic Memory and enjoys doing it.
[1] The first three being Invisible Ink, Nobody's Fool, and Three Rocks.
And, yes, I said "in English" but it's a wordless book: the book itself seems to be identical for five publishers in five territories, but the jacket on this one is by Top Shelf, the American publisher, and is in English, which counts.
Hieronymus B.: 1997-2007 collects fifty pages of comics, a few spot illustrations, and some sketches and layouts on the endpapers: all are about this little fellow who I'll call HB to keep from retyping "Hieronymus." HB is a functionary in an office somewhere - probably governmental; it seems to be that kind of place - and it put-upon in the manner of little guys in comics and other media since time immemorial.
The first few stories tend to be longer - twelve pages, four, and then twelve again - with big inky panels, four to the page, but the back half of the book has shorter, mostly one- or two-page stories, which (mostly) get gradually less inky, have more panels to the page, and see Ulf K.'s line get lighter and thinner.
The two long stories are about HB in his office, but most of the rest are more about everyday life: he battles gusty winds, gets seasick from a ship-in-a-bottle, steps into a painting to woo a pretty girl, does some gardening, and sees various odd things happen about him.
As always, wordless comics are difficult to write about, for all of the "dancing about architecture" reasons - the words aren't there already, and need to be created new, in hopes they match what the creator intended. These long stories have devils and yelling bosses in them, but most of the material here is lighter - HB is put-upon, but he's not downtrodden and seems to be amused or quietly resilient through it all. These stories aren't realistic, but wordless stories often aren't: they're abstracted, schematized views of life, meant to evoke rather than to nail down.
It's fun and amusing, but quite short and a bit miscellaneous: it is only about sixty pages but it collects work from a decade in a style that did change quite a bit. And it's also difficult to find at this point: I had to punch the ISBN to Major Online Bookstore just to find the listing; the title and author didn't do it.
Ulf K. seems to have gone on to mostly a career making books for young readers in what I've recently learned to call the DACH region; though his German-language Wikipedia page is a good decade out of date, so maybe he's doing something else even more recently. Maybe some of those books will eventually find their way to this side of the pond; maybe not. For now, this seems to be the only physical English-language object that proves he ever lived and made stories.
The three men are Richard Wolinsky of KPFA; Lawrence Davidson, science fiction buyer for the famous Cody's Books of Berkley; and Richard A. Lupoff, SF novelist, editor and fan.
For years, they talked about pulling together an oral history of early SF from those interviews. They had contracts with publishing companies a few times, but things didn't quite work out - until they did.
Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods! is that oral history, subtitled Interviews with Science Fiction Legends. It assembles and organizes conversations between one or more of the three interviewers (in various permutations) with fifty-nine people who were nearly all SF writers (and many were also editors or agents, and all but the earliest generation were fans first, in the old familiar way), from Forrest J. Ackerman to Roger Zelazny. It was published a few months ago.
Of the interviewers, only Wolinsky is still with us, Lupoff and Davidson having both died over the past decade. Among the interviewees, I think only Robert Silverberg is left, but I'd be happy to have missed someone. So this is a little bit like Queequeg's coffin, popping up above the waves at a moment when everything else related to it has been dragged down into the murky depths. (Or maybe I'm being overly dramatic about an oral history of a time that is, let's be honest, around a hundred years ago.)
Wolinsky organizes this vast mass of individual transcripts into seven longish chapters, running roughly chronologically from the early days of Hugo Gernsback's Amazing in the 1920s through roughly 1960. We hear from all of the interviewees where they said something relevant, and many of them are seeming to respond to each other, turning the book occasionally into a conversation. They don't always agree with each other in all aspects, of course, and Wolinsky has done a bit of editing to quietly correct misstated facts and add in some explanatory notes - people don't always get everything 100% right when talking live on the radio.
I don't think there's anything new here - obviously, the interviews themselves were public when they were made, and have been incorporated into the standard view of the field and fan lore - but Wolinksy and his fellow interviewers talked to an incredibly broad spectrum of SF personalities, especially in the early days - general pulpeteers like Ed Earl Repp and Louis Lamour, early fans-turned-editors like Julie Schwartz, and notable minor writers like Stanton A. Coblenz, Raymond Z. Gallun, E. Hoffman Price, and Harry Bates.
There's a lot of the usual fan self-back-patting, talking about how smart and forward-looking and wonderful they all were, in the early days of the world when pulp magazines roamed free and the world was their oyster. This is mostly the reminiscences old men - and a very few women - about the days when they were young and pounding out reams of paper for what was a surprisingly good wage, so there's the usual golden glow about all of those memories.
But Wolinsky's editorial voice reins that in, and he's very clear on how the field has changed since then - as well as pointing out some of the obvious flaws in that bright fannish world of the '30s. Space Ships! is a fun book, with a lot of quirky and distinctive voices - a few of those early writers were interviewed at a time in their lives when they clearly didn't worry about burning bridges, avoiding profanity, or any other considerations of propriety - all corralled into telling what turns into a mostly coherent, consistent story of a whole field building itself out of the materials it found at hand.
"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.
And the last song in this series, the last one I post this year, is another obscurity - another noisy song from a band that never quite hit it big, but made some great songs. (Again, I almost seem to be begging readers to point out somewhere that I'm wrong - that a band I think is obscure actually has an unbroken string of #1 hits in Finland or something.)
The song is 'Til I Disappear, from Yellow Ostrich - but it's more complicated than that. There's a longer version on their 2010 record Wild Comfort, but the version I love is the shorter version, from a 2012 NoiseTrade sampler, where I first heard Yellow Ostrich.
So this is an obscure version of an obscure song by an obscure band - if I seem to be ending the year trying to maximize my hipster-ness, I have to apologize. That wasn't the point.
This is another slow burn song; I've mentioned several times how I love those. It starts with a keening guitar line, and then the singer's voice, also keening, above it.
I don't know exactly what it's about. It's the kind of nonspecific, slightly archaic language that the songwriter has clearly crafted specifically. There's some kind of ending - probably not a death, but you can never be sure in a song.
So: probably yet another breakup song. Fitting for me, I think. Whatever it's about, it has a great sound, a great energy, and a propulsive force.
So long farewell,
My love, I see it's time.
It's been nice to know you.
Maybe when we're older,
We can meet again.
We'll see if we remember.
Next week it will be a new year, and a new series of posts here on Mondays. As I write this, I haven't figured out all the details exactly yet - so both you and I will need to find out what that series will be. See you there.
There was the usual coming and going in the corridor outside my office and when I opened the door and walked into the musty silence of the little waiting room there was the usual feeling of having been dropped down a well dried up twenty years ago to which no one would come back ever. The smell of old dust hung in the air as flat and stale as a football interview.
- Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister, p.315 in Later Novels & Other Writings
The industrial revolution, which had begun by giving more wealth to nearly everybody, had reached its second stage in which enormous, yearly increasing accumulations of surplus capital were falling into a small, yearly diminishing number of hands; the need of the time was for new sources of raw material, new markets, but more than anything, for new fields of profitable investment.
- Evelyn Waugh, Waugh in Abyssinia, pp.553-4 in Waugh Abroad
Since neither had eaten, they dined together at the hotel; they discussed Faulkner and Hawthorne while waiters brought them soup and veal a continent removed from the cabbagy cuisine of Russia. A lithe young woman on awkwardly high heels stalked among the tables singing popular songs from Italy and France. The trailing microphone wire now and then became entangled in her feet, and Bech admired the sly savagery with which she would, while not altering an iota her enameled smile, kick herself free.
- John Updike, "Bech in Rumania," in Bech: A Book, p.25 in The Complete Henry Bech
I had been trying all afternoon, in vain, to think of the name Perth Amboy. It seems now like a very simple name to recall and yet on the day in question I thought of every other town in the country, as well as such words and names and phrases as terra cotta, Walla-Walla, bill of lading, vice versa, hoity-toity, Pall Mall, Bodley Head, Schumann-Heink, etc. without even coming close to Perth Amboy. I suppose terra cotta was the closest I came, although it was not very close.
- James Thurber, "More Alarms at Night," My Life and Hard Times, p.171 in Writings and Drawings
The lull between Detroit-bound commuters and the stiffs who worked locally ended just before the half hour. I wound up the window on the driver's side against the wallop of their passage, watched a slightly chubby blonde in a pink kimono and mules to match trying to wheel an empty trash can up her driveway while holding down her hem against the slipstream - a Vargas Girl moment - and saw a kid on a Segway make a nifty maneuver to avoid becoming a casualty of Overcaffeinated Motorist Syndrome. He turned the scooter in a circle and dismounted to give the driver the international sign of disapproval. As far as stakeouts go it was sweeps week.
- Loren D. Estleman, The Left-Handed Dollar, pp.97-98
One of the most sustaining gifts a man can possess is the ability to look upon the bright side of disaster. It was a gift which, until now, Sigsbee H. Waddington had lacked almost entirely: but at this moment, owing perhaps to the fact that he had just introduced into his interior a healing drink of quite exceptional strength, he suddenly found himself discerning with a limpid clearness the fact that the elimination of that near-pearl necklace from the scene of things was, from his point of view, the very best thing that could have happened.
- P.G. Wodehouse, The Small Bachelor, p.189
The man who was engaged in being hanged was apparently about thirty-five years of age. He was a civilian, if one might judge from his habit, which was that of a planter. His features were good - a straight nose, firm mouth, broad forehead, from which his long, dark hair was combed straight back, falling behind his ears to the collar of his well-fitting frock-coat. He wore a mustache and pointed beard, but no whiskers; his eyes were large and dark gray, and had a kindly expression which one would hardly have expected in one whose neck was in the hemp. Evidently this was no vulgar assassin. The liberal military code makes provision for hanging many kinds of persons, and gentlemen are not excluded.
- Ambrose Bierce, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," p.11 in The Devil's Dictionary, Tales & Memoirs
