Apple Blossom Blues

The return of the Gillespie... two years later

2007-06-29T03:22:00.000-07:00

I haven't been here for two years, mainly because of a lack of time to go blogging. However, recently I've retasted blogging on my LiveJournal site, but again feel the need to post long articles from the glorious past. I don't have the knowledge of HTML to set up a regular Web site, but would like to be able to point people to a series of articles that I've written over the years. Some of them can be found in issues of Scratch Pad at http://efanzines.com/ in PDF format. For some reason, however, people don't often discover this material when it's in PDF format, although my fanzines are a lot better looking than my blogs.

Thoughts of this kind were prompted by the kind folks of the Australian SF Foundation, who at ConVergence 2, the national Australian SF convention held in Melbourne 8-11 June, gave me the A. Bertram Chandler Award for Lifetime Achievement in Australian SF. The Foundation kept this a complete surprise from me, luring me into town by asking me to present the Ditmar Award for Best Fanzine during the awards ceremony. Probably a lot of people in the audience were also surprised, having not heard of me or heard mere whispers of my existence. The citation for the award mentions publishing SF Commentary since 1969, and The Metaphysical Review in 1984, and with Carey Handfield and Rob Gerrand, being part of Norstrilia Press, one of the two major Australian small presses of the 1970s. What I've mainly done is write stuff in fanzines -- probably about a million words, and many of the best of those words were written from 1968 to 1977. It's about time I placed some of those articles somewhere, despite the enormous amount of time it takes to OCR articles that first appeared in fanzines.

My other motive in returning to blogging is try to do more to publicise the life and work of George Turner. When George died in 1997, almost exactly ten years ago, he made me his literary executor and heir. Which means that, for the rest of my life, I have to be George Turner. Unfortunately, all his books have fallen out of print, excepta few I still have in boxes and am willing to sell to anybody interested (including his literary biography In the Heart or in the Head, his short story collection Pursuit of Miracles, and his book about the 1979 Monash Writers Workshop, The View from the Edge). There must be a way to post his early, non-SF novels, for instance, but again it's a long job OCRing old books. For the moment, I'm trying to get George's best novel, The Sea and Summer (Drowning Towers in the US edition) back into print, and I have a lot of OCRing to go.

Not much has happened during the last two years, except a general lack of income (as prices have really started to go up, my income from freelance editing and indexing has steadily declined), the death of my mother in March this year, and turning sixty. I feel as if I am running out of time. I want to publish lots of issues of SF Commentary, Steam Engine Time and The Metaphysical Review, but don't have the money for printing and postage. Hence I will probably cut everybody from the mailing list except those who have actually paid for printed copies, and point everybody else towards efanzines.com, hosted by the genial and brilliant Bill Burns.

As John Bangsund used to say, that's a lot of hope going on. Obviously I would prefer to keep publishing real fanzines on real paper, but one needs lots of money to do that. Still, issues that are mainly Web-based are among good company if they appear on efanzines.com.

WRITERS' WORKSHOPS: ROBERT HOGE INTERVIEWS BRUCE GILLESPIE

2005-08-20T16:13:00.000-07:00

[Robert Hoge, who interviewed me from Queensland via email, gave the impression that this was to be a feature article in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, the busy little Australian SF magazine. Instead, my impeccable thoughts and deathless prose were reduced to one quotation of three lines within a quite different article! So enjoy the following interview: I’m certainly not going to reprint Hoge’s treatment of it.]

How did you become involved in the 1975 Le Guin Workshop?

In Australia we knew about the Clarion writers’ workshop method through reading the Clarion anthologies published by Robin Scott Wilson (founder of the method) during the early seventies. Lee Harding had conducted a small workshop as part of the 1973 national Easter convention, held in Melbourne, and I have a vague memory that George Turner conducted a one-day workshop in Adelaide in 1974.

But we -- that is, the organising committee of the 1975 World Convention, Aussiecon I, held in Melbourne -- went ahead with a week-long workshop because Ursula Le Guin asked for it. At the end of 1974, because of pressing personal reasons she wanted to withdraw from being our Pro Guest of Honour at Aussiecon. She would only stay on and make the journey from Portland to Melbourne, she said, if she could teach a Clarion-style writers’ workshop in the week
before Aussiecon. We agreed.

Who would organise the workshop? Other members of the Aussiecon committee pointed at me, although I had no experience of organising such an event. Carey Handfield offered to help. We scouted several locations, and in January 1975 found the beautiful Booth Lodge, a Church of
England retreat in the Dandenong Ranges.

We had to choose the students who would take part in the Workshop. Most of our advertising was done through writers’ groups such as the Fellowship of Australian Writers and the Australian Society of Authors. As a result, we knew almost none of the people who applied. I sent the applicants’ stories to Ursula Le Guin, who chose the participants. One of the applicant stories, Philippa Maddern’s ‘The Ins and Outs of the Hadhya City State’ was so good that it has
became an Australian SF classic.

We also had to raise a fair bit of money so that the participants could afford to attend. John Bangsund used his connections with the Literature Board of the Australia Council to obtain a large grant that enabled the Aussiecon committee to keep student fees down.

Finally, we had to set up a viable photocopying operation (using the massive old thermal photocopiers of the time), so that every participant could read everybody else’s submissions, then read all the stories during the week of the workshop. Most of this organisation was done by David Grigg, Robin Johnson, Don Ashby, Ken Ford and members of the Magic Pudding Club (Melbourne’s slanshack of the time). Somehow all the participants got to Melbourne, then
to Booth Lodge, just in time to welcome Ursula, who had just stepped off the plane.

From an organisational point of view, what was the biggest surprise for you that came out of the 1975 Le Guin workshop?
What was the most enjoyable aspect? And the least?

I was a hopeless organiser in 1975. Many kind souls took over from me and did the organising. This was the least enjoyable aspect of the workshop, especially as the same people were supposed to be organising the last stages of Aussiecon itself. The most enjoyable aspect was meeting Ursula Le Guin, and becoming one of the writing students instead of merely remaining an onlooker.

Surprises? Everything was surprising. It remains possibly the most exciting week of my life, because not only could I see my own writing improving, but I could also see astonishing improvements in the work of all the other participants. People worked at a lunatic pace: staying up to one or two in the morning to finish their stories, getting up at 8 for breakfast, workshopping the stories all morning, then settling down to the next story (or next revision of the previous story) after lunch. We became a group mind, each encouraging the other, with every triumph of every person giving extra energy to everybody else.

In The Altered I you talk about Le Guin in part by saying: ‘That she trusted us to trust each other to trust ourselves.’ Would you expand a bit on this please? Were you saying that at the end of the day, the participants in the workshop are as much if not more important to the experience than the tutor, or something else?

What is the essence of the Clarion writers’ workshop method? A circle of writers in a large room. A few hours before, we have received copies of the stories or versions written the day before by all the other participants. We discuss each story in turn. The person whose story is being
discussed cannot reply until every other person has made his or her comment. This could become a ghastly experience. I’ve been told that some writers in residence at some American Clarion workshops have chosen to make these sessions into confrontations that have left some students psychologically scarred for life. Not so when Ursula Le Guin is in the room. A spirit of enthusiastic joy suffuses the room.

Other students’ comments might not be always perceptive, but many are very helpful. When everybody else has had their say, Ursula says two or three sentences; nothing more. And we pass onto the next story. The student whose story has just been discussed goes away at the end of the session, works most of the night, and comes back with a story that neither that person nor the rest of us could have expected.

Magic is here, and it is created by every person present.

As someone who was at the centre of organising Australia’s first real live-in SF workshop, what advice would you be giving the organisers of Clarion South? If there was one crucial thing they must get right, what would it be? Is there anything you’d change about the 1975 workshop if you could go back and redo it?

After attending the 1975 workshop, I would have said that, apart from choosing the right teacher or teachers and picking the participants carefully, physical surroundings
are the most important aspect of a successful workshop. Someone has described the usual six-week Clarion-style workshop as ‘boot camp for writers’. If so, nobody wants to be worrying about uncomfortable beds, heat or cold, or badly cooked meals. The cost must include such amenities. Booth Lodge had idyllic physical surroundings (the hills of the Dandenongs, cutting us off from the rest of the world), comfortable rooms, adequate heating and superb meals.

However, the 1979 workshop in Sydney, at which Terry Carr and George Turner were the writers in residence, undercuts my argument. The facilities were awful, the rooms were ferociously hot, and almost every physical aspect was judged a failure. Yet the 1979 workshop has proved the most successful of the three in turning out writers who have continued to publish in the eighties and nineties (Sussex, Frahm, Buckrich, Blackford, and several others). The participants felt that they had their backs to the wall; physical discomfort is perhaps a better training for the writer’s life than the comforts of Booth Lodge in 1975.

I can’t offer much advice to the organisers of Clarion South except to take on board everything they’ve heard or read about six-week-style workshops. Such workshops cannot sustain the level of intense activity that people remember from the 1970s Australian workshops. Nobody can stay on a high plain of excitement for six weeks without expiring. There must be time and facilities for leisure activity at weekends. The style of each writer in residence must be different from the person teaching the week before or week after.

What is your opinion of residential writing workshops in general? How successful can they be and what sort of people benefit most from them?

The organisers of Clarion workshops in America and Britain can point to the large numbers of graduates who have become successful writers. In Australia, we can point to some successes, but most of them from the 1979 workshop. Most of the brightest stars of the 1975 and 1977
workshops became successful in other fields -- Pip Maddern in academic history, David Grigg in IT, Rob Gerrand in public relations, etc.

The problem with writers’ workshops is that they come to an end. That extraordinary buzz generated by a community of like-minded people, the buzz that causes lots of literary caterpillars to turn into high-flying butterflies, must end. Writers go back to lonely desks. Many of them turn back into caterpillars. They keep in touch with each other, but ordinary existence robs them of writing time. With any luck, today’s writers’ workshops place much more emphasis
on the practicalities of the writer’s life than they once did.

My guess is that writers who were always going to be a success gain most from the workshops. They can speed up the learning process immensely, gain connections in the publishing world, learn about what sells, work out their own literary priorities. As for the rest of us, the also-rans -- we tend to remember the workshop itself as a highlight of our lives. I’ve long since given up writing fiction, although I still write a large amount of non-fiction.

How did the 1975 and 1977 Writers’ Workshops lead to the
publication of The Altered I and A View from the Edge?

No event takes place in a vacuum. In 1975 and 1977, our collective confidence that we could hold such workshops sprang from our collective confidence in all aspects of Australian SF activity. In 1975, Carey Handfield, Rob Gerrand and I began Norstrilia Press, a small press that continued until 1985. Lee Harding edited the best stories from the 1975 workshop, as well as telling the story of the participants. Ursula Le Guin contibuted a story. The Altered I appeared in 1976, and was republished in America by Berkeley Books. After the 1977 workshop, held at Monash
University, with Christopher Priest, Vonda McIntyre and George Turner as writers in residence, George put together A View from the Edge.

Would you like to see Clarion South produce its own equivalent
of The Altered I and The View from the Edge?

Why not? Today, there are plenty of small presses capable of producing a good-looking volume. You would have the advantage of deciding to do a book before the workshop, not after it. A major publisher might pitch in. If your writers in residence are willing to contribute new stories to such a volume, you might be able to sell overseas rights, as we did for The Altered I.

Is the Australian SF community big enough on its own to support an annual six-week workshop catering for 17 or 18 writers? Are there enough writers to make it viable as an ongoing concern?

Any doubt about this proposition would be banished by attending any of the recent national SF conventions in Australia. Not only do we now have several writers earning a good living from fiction (which was not the case in 1975), but we have vast numbers of wannabe writers who have great potential but perhaps don’t yet know how to forge a career. The only restriction on numbers could be cost per student -- the organisers of Clarion South will have to become expert money-raisers as well as solving the other details of running a six-week workshop.

If successful, what would the establishment of an annual residential writing workshop mean to Australian speculative fiction?

That depends on the publishers. In 1975 and 1977, the only regular publishers of Australian SF were our two small presses, Norstrilia Press and Cory & Collins, and a few overseas publishers, such as Berkeley and Gollancz, who were on the lookout for good Australian novels. Today we have several major publishers earning a great deal from local authors, plus quite a few overseas markets, such as Tor, buying novels from Australian authors. Writers now can see a career path before them, which was not the case in the 1970s.

To what extent did the Australian SF community get behind the 1975 and 1977 workshops? Was that important to its success? How important is it for the organisers of Clarion South to try to involve the wider SF community as much as possible?

As I’ve tried to show, the 1975 and 1977 workshops were at the centre of SF writing activity at that time. Apart from anything else, Ursula Le Guin dazzled us with her wit and wisdom. Two years later, Chris Priest and Vonda McIntyre stayed on for Monoclave, the convention held out at Monash University on the Australia Day weekend, January 1977. This set the pattern for inviting overseas guests of honour to local conventions. In 1979, Terry Carr was an exciting writer to have around, and George Turner’s overseas career in publishing SF was beginning. Heady days indeed.

But what was just as important was the backing of the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the three workshops. I suspect such funds are no longer available. Therefore the involvement of the whole SF community will be important, both for alerting promising new writers to the possibilities of the writers’ workshop method, and in raising money to hold Clarion South.

Clarion South has announced the first half of its lineup for 2004 -- Terry Dowling, Lucy Sussex and Jack Dann. Given the organisers are hoping to run Clarion South annually, who would be on your wish list (national and international) as tutors?

My wish list would have little to do with the authors I most enjoy reading. They must be good teachers. Find out the people who have proven most successful at workshops, both here and overseas. Remember that such a person has to be a substitute parent for a week, often dealing with trivial matters and conflicts as well as the major task of inspiring writers. You don’t need too many overseas people, except perhaps an overseas agent or publisher’s editor. Terry, Lucy
and Jack have all taught workshops, and quite a few other well-known writers have been writing teachers - Alison Goodman is an obvious candidate. Philippa Maddern has not published much fiction for awhile, but would be a superb teacher (and she attended both the 1975 and 1977 workshops), whereas other working writers might not relish the role of teacher. Clarion South should also consider non-SF writers who have been successful writers and workshop
teachers, such as Garry Disher, Thea Astley, and Liam Davison.

- Bruce Gillespie, 22 November 2002 (Two Clarion Souths have been held successfully in Brisbane since this interview was conducted, and a third is planned for Melbourne within the next two years.)

1975: THE YEAR OF AUSSIECON I

2005-08-20T16:02:00.000-07:00

It was all John Bangsund’s fault. Everything in those days was. From 1966 to 1969, John Bangsund was editor of Australian Science Fiction Review (ASFR), the magazine that created Australian fandom and SF activity as we know it today.

Or was it Andy Porter’s fault? These days he calls himself Andrew Porter, and for a long time edited SF Chronicle. In those days, he was Andy Porter, editor of Algol, one of America’s most interesting fanzines. In a letter to John Bangsund in the late sixties, he just happened to mention the idea of ‘Australia in 75’. A world convention in Australia? Ever? As soon as 1975?

John mentioned the idea in ASFR. John Foyster heard the call, and at the 1970 Eastercon in Melbourne established a committee to bid for a world convention in 1975. We would have to bid against an American city, and possibly against a European city as well. Could we do it?
Beginning in early 1970, Australian fans began editing and publishing as many as a hundred fanzines per year. In those days, the fanzine was the only form of communication between fans throughout the world.

John Litchen, Paul Stevens, and many others put together the Anti-fan film. Sent to America, it travelled from one convention to another, and became our main bidding tool.

In Australia, we had to get used to running large hotel-based conventions. In 1973, about twenty of us travelled to Torcon II (the World Convention held that year in Toronto), and won the bid.

The penny dropped; jaws fell through the floor. Now we had to run this circus! Was it possible? John Foyster handed on the committee chair to John Bangsund, who handed it to Robin Johnson. Robin, not known until then as a convention organiser, suddenly became an organising genius.

One great difficulty. Our Pro Guest of Honour, Ursula Le Guin, had great difficulty arranging to attend the convention in August 1975 and accompany her family to England in the same month. She wasn’t coming. Robin rang her in Portland, Oregon, and I and others sent her letters. She consented to attend, provided we held, in the week before Aussiecon, a writers workshop in the style of the Clarion workshops. We put in an application to the Literature Board for enabling funds. We gained that support.

Who would run the workshop? I was doing nothing on the committee at the time, so Robin pointed at me, although usually I can’t organise my way out of a paper bag. 1974 had been a depressing year for me, and I had nearly dropped out of fandom. The fact that anybody put any faith in me gave me much-needed energy. I placed advertisements for workshop candidates. The ads that worked best were those placed in the news sheets of the Australian Society of Authors and the Victorian Society of Editors. I had heard of almost none of the candidates, each of whom had to send in a qualifying story. I sent the stories to Ursula Le Guin, who picked the final list of attendees. One entrant story in particular was astonishing: ‘The Ins and Outs of the Hadhya City State’, by Philippa C. Maddern, a writer none of us had met. Some years later, after it had been published in The Altered I, the story was voted the most popular Australian SF Short Story Ever in a poll conducted by Van Ikin for Science Fiction.

January 1975 saw Carey Handfield and me trundling around the Dandenong Ranges, near Melbourne, looking for a workshop site. The site had to be secluded and comfortable. Nothing seemed promising until we found Booth Lodge tucked away in the hills, an attractive combination of Federation-style main guest house and modern dormitories. All the facilities were modern, the beds looked comfortable, and all meals would be provided. It was expensive, but the Literature Board grant would pay for a large percentage of the fees for those writers who wanted to attend.

While we were travelling around the hills, I might have mentioned, as I often did to anybody who would listen, the difficulty of raising money to keep publishing SF Commentary. Carey said: ‘Why don’t we start a small publishing company? The profits can keep SF Commentary going.’ Which is how Norstrilia Press began. We wrote to Genevieve Linebarger, the widow of Paul Linebarger (Cordwainer Smith), and gained permission to use the name ‘Norstrilia’. I put together, as Norstrilia Press’s first title, all the material I had published in SF Commentary about Philip K. Dick. Philip K. Dick: Electric Shepherd featured an introduction by Roger Zelazny, a cover by Irene Pagram, and articles and letters by people such as Stanislaw Lem, George Turner, and Phil Dick himself. It did not take long to prepare the manuscript. What we needed was a printer we could afford, and the money to pay the printer’s bill.

When Carey Handfield first met David Grigg at Eltham High School, before they both became SF fans, David said that he wanted to be a writer. Carey said, ‘Can I be your manager?’ During the 1970s, Carey extended his web of power, and became the de facto manager of Melbourne and Sydney fandom. Within a few months, a dozen or so fans discovered they had lent their spare cash to Norstrilia Press to publish its first book. Believe it or not, eventually they received back their invested capital.

Early in his career Carey discovered the essence of management was to pay the cheapest price for the greatest amount of work. He found a bloke named John Counsel, who was setting up a printery in Traralgon, a Victorian country town several hundred kilometres from Melbourne. John Counsel quoted an unbelievably low price for printing the Aussiecon I Souvenir Book and Philip K. Dick: Electric Shepherd. The latter was already ready for typesetting, so we handed that to Counsel. The last bits of the Souvenir Book, as you’d expect, were finished only weeks before the convention. When the copies of the Souvenir Book arrived, half of them were misbound, and had to be sent back. But Electric Shepherd did arrive on the eve of the convention. Norstrilia Press was in business.

John Counsel happened to mention a great interest in science fiction. Carey told him about SF Commentary. Counsel offered to typeset and print the first offset issue of SF Commentary. It all seemed unbelievable, but I could hardly turn down the offer. At the same time as I was editing Electric Shepherd I was editing the Wilson (Bob) Tucker issue of SFC. Tucker, one of the greatest SF fans of all time (and one of my favourite SF writers) was coming to Aussiecon thanks to fans throughout the world who had contributed to the Tucker Bag, the fund that transported him from Illinois to Australia and back. I hoped to place the first copy of the Tucker Issue in his hand when he arrived. (It covers his entire career, fan and pro, and a new edition appeared in 2004.)

Copies of Electric Shepherd arrived. The day before Aussiecon, the Souvenir Books arrived. The Tucker Issue of SFC never arrived. Excuses, excuses, from Counsel for months afterward, then absolute silence. Nearly a year later, I gave up on the promised issue, typed the stencils, and duplicated and posted out that issue. I never could work out why Counsel promised to publish a magazine for which he didn’t have the time or funds.

Back in a wider, panic-stricken world, the organisation of Aussiecon increasingly centred around the Magic Pudding Club, Melbourne’s most famous slanshack (a slanshack being a collection of indigent SF fans attempting to live in each others’ pockets), in Drummond Street, Carlton. Robin Johnson lived there, then found himself increasingly moved in upon by such people as Don Ashby, his brother Derrick, Ken Ford, and various girlfriends. It was a three-year-long party, which exhausted the inhabitants and entertained all those Melbourne fans who visited. I lived one block away.

Robin Johnson needed help. Don Ashby loved helping people (and probably still does, although these days he lives a long way from Carlton). Derrick and Ken could always be roped in to help. So could the many visitors. At some stage, Don proposed that Aussiecon should be videotaped. It was (and the tapes still exist), but the preparation for this exercise took much of the energy that perhaps should have been invested in other matters.

I needed help. I had no idea how to organise the physical details of a writers’ workshop. Worse, I fell in love two weeks before Aussiecon. I was a stricken, helpless man, useful to nobody. David Grigg, Don, and Robin rallied around, hired the photocopier, and made the multiple copies of all the entry stories for the first day of the workshop. David and others ferried the giant photocopier from Drummond Street up the hills to Booth Lodge. Robin arranged a restaurant night so that all the Workshop people could get to know each other a little on the night before they were to travel to the hills. I met Randal Flynn for the first time (that’s a lead-in for the story of my 1976, which I won’t tell here).

Booth Lodge was wreathed in mist when we arrived, but we already felt that the Workshop camaraderie had warmed us. We dumped our gear. We gathered in the main room of Booth Lodge and began reading each others’ stories. Into this concentrated silence arrived Ursula Le Guin.

Although I once tried teaching for two years, I’ve rarely had the opportunity to watch a great teacher in action. Ursula Le Guin is a great teacher. She said very little. After each person’s story had been workshopped by everybody else, she would make a few comments. Nothing much, but she summed up precisely what everybody else was thinking. She set assignments. We had to finish each assignment by the next morning. At 9 a.m., we began workshopping the stories written overnight. Suddenly people were working to two or three in the morning, then waking, fully refreshed, for the next day’s tussle. After lunch, we began writing again (and photocopying, ever photocopying, the results). The energy built. People who had little faith in their own work suddenly wrote brilliantly. Brilliant writers, such as Philippa Maddern and her sister Marian, write better and better. Nobody disturbed us. The mist closed in, although we did go for a walk in the forest together one afternoon. At the end of the week, we vowed to stay in touch forever, and some of us did.

Why do I remember this as the best week of my life? Because for the first and last time in my life I felt I was part of a group mind. Better, the others saw clearly that I was not a very good organiser, so they organised the event for themselves. They let me get on and write stories, although I had not intended to write a thing. In later years, I rarely had the confidence to keep writing fiction.

After the week of the workshop, I must admit that Aussiecon was both a blur and a bit of a disappointment. My new girlfriend and I moved into together to the Southern Cross Hotel for the week, and tried to get used to each other while taking part in the convention. This is not the way to guarantee a long-term relationship. There were lots of writers and fans I met, and many I didn’t. It was wonderful meeting Bob Tucker, although I didn’t have his special issue of SFC to give him. Ursula Le Guin’s Guest of Honour speech was so inspiring that it is still reprinted from time to time. I even got to sit down and talk to Susan Wood, one of the two Fan Guests of Honour. (She and Mike Glicksohn were together when we asked them to be our guests, but had parted by the time of Aussiecon; this didn’t spoil the convention, since both were excellent guests). Susan and I had been corresponding for years, and did so until her death in 1979 at the age of 32, but we only ever had two times when we could sit down at a convention and talk to each other, and one of those times was at Aussiecon I.

The great benefit of Aussiecon turned out to be the people who attended for the first time, then stayed to become famous as Australia’s leading fans. Marc Ortlieb is a name I can pluck from the air, but ask many of the more energetic older fans at any national convention, and often you’ll find that Aussiecon I was their first convention. In turn, those newcomers became the people who put on Aussiecon II (1985), and some were still around for Aussiecon III in 1999. When you consider that the whole circus began with a casual exchange of letters between John Bangsund and Andy Porter in the late sixties, that’s not too bad a legacy.

Sorry for not getting back to you

2005-07-31T22:36:00.000-07:00

I had thought of closing down the blog altogether, because of a certain lack of enthusiasm. I've started another blog on LiveJournal, simply because it's much easier to keep in touch with other bloggers on LiveJournal than it is here. I'm at http://LiveJournal.com/users/brucegillespie

However, some people have started to look for longer articles here, so I will go through my files for the Best of Bruce Gillespie and post the pieces, instead of mucking around trying to build a Web site.

Meanwhile, of course, you can get the published best pieces of mine, edited by Irwin Hirsh, in The Incompleat Bruce Gillespie, $10 from 5 Howard Street, Greensborough VIC 3088, Australia. It's 40 pages, 35,000 words, in A4 format, with a colour cover, and photographs and a Ditmar cover. It includes my pieces on Tucker's The Year of the Quiet Sun, Melbourne trains, Roy Orbison, Melbourne fandom as it was influenced by Roger Weddall during the seventies and eighties -- lots of things. Basically, it's stuff that people said they liked at the time, and Irwin likes as well.

Not a lot has happened since I posted last, but I have finished the Trip Report on my American trip in February and March (paid for by science fiction fans -- it still all feels like a bit of a dream). I've nearly finished the second draft as well. 32,000 words of it. Plus lots of photos. It will be available from the address above at $10 (send cash, not cheques or money orders), or for free if you contributed $25 or more to the original BBB (Bring Bruce Bayside) Fund.

2005-05-23T22:53:00.000-07:00

RESURRECTION DAZE 23 May 2005

I haven’t posted to this blog for some weeks. I’m supposed to post often, but I don’t like doing anything I’m supposed to do. But a resurrection seems in order, rather than taking the option of closing down the blog.

In a blog I’m supposed to post diary entries, but I’m not sure I want to post diary entries to people I don’t know. Or maybe, of the few people reading this stuff, all of you are people I know. How would I find out? And how would I find your blog? And how would the people I want to read my stuff find this blog? Much remains a mystery about this blogging world.

Some nice people have sent replies. I would prefer to send you a real paper fanzine, but I can’t afford to post any. If you want to read and download electronic versions of my fanzines, go to efanzines.com, the website hosted by that kindly genius Bill Burns. The site includes the last four issues of SF Commentary, all four issues of Steam Engine Time, and 57 issues of Scratch Pad, which includes most of my writing since 1991. They are all in .PDF format, which can be read with Adobe Acrobat Reader. There must be well over 400,000 words of my writing there.

Money, or the lack of it, has been much on my mind in recent weeks. The very nice people of science fiction fandom, especially that section of it called ‘fanzine fandom’, paid for my luxury trip to the West Coast of the USA from 17 February to 13 March. The Bring Bruce Bayside Fund was huge fun, but during that period, and the two weeks beforehand, and the three weeks after, I didn’t actually earn any money as a freelancer. After I returned, I did a large editing job, but haven’t been paid for that yet. I’ve done other smaller jobs, and a huge index for which I am being underpaid, but none of these cheques has surfaced yet. And now, again, I have no Paying Work, which is why I have time to write this blog. Meanwhile, my annual superannuation payment bill wafted through the mail, plus my annual income tax bill, plus other bills, and I now owe my wife Elaine about $5000. (We do like to keep our accounts separate, but she has been paying all the expenses for the house move, so she doesn’t have much money either. The last thing she needs are my debts as well.)

So here’s a shameless advertisement for myself. I edit books, in Word 97 for Windows or .rtf, on screen. I don’t edit maths and science books, which is why I’m short of work. (One of my once-generous clients is doing only two humanities textbooks at the moment; all the rest are maths/science textbooks.) I would love the chance to edit fiction, but have been offered very few opportunities during my career. I can prepare a pretty good index (I haven’t had any complaints so far), and I would love the chance to review books or write other journalism for real folding cash. (Lots of people want book reviews, but very few people offer payment.) If you are in Australia, ring me on (03) 9436 7786.

Take away the problem of money and things are burbling along okay — except that Elaine still needs to have a minor but painful problem investigated, and she doesn’t feel as well as she might. The weather has been bright and wonderful, which means Victoria is back in its usual state of drought. (This makes eleven years in a row by my reckoning, except for the huge downpour last February.) But it is very nice walking around beautiful suburban Greensborough in late-May sunshine.

At the moment I have lots of time for writing fanzine stuff. Yes. But my main obligation is to write my Trip Report, and that’s not easy. First, I’m afraid that I might fail to thank some of the umpteen people who did so much to make the trip a success. Second, it’s quite difficult to state exactly how I was feeling at a particular time in late February or early March, and what was so exactly wonderful about a particular event. It’s much easier to tell tales against myself as I bumbled around America, so I’ll tell many such stories.

I have to write the whole thing (well over 5000 words so far, and I’m still only in Seattle during the first week of the trip) before I can start whittling it down to a reasonable length. Thanks to Chaz Boston Baden’s website, I have downloaded lots of photos of people I met at Corflu (although I still can’t get anybody to send me a photo of Alan Rosenthal and Janice Murray, mine hosts in Seattle, together). I took some rather awful photos, but Bill Burns and Peter Weston sent me some great shots, and Marci Malinowycz was able to find the photo of her at Gualala, a photo that also shows Art Widner’s wonderful car, whose surface is a genuine Australian Aboriginal painting. The temptation is to scrap my narrative altogether, and just run the photos.

If I didn’t have the Trip Report to do, I could write stuff for ANZAPA (Australia and New Zealand Amateur Publishing Association) and Acnestis (the British apa for SF fans who still read books). At this precise moment I don’t need to save my memberships, but I like to put something in each mailing. I’m currently the Official Bloody Editor (OBE) of ANZAPA, so if you want to get into paper fanzine publishing, get in touch with me (gandc@mira.net) or send money ($12 from within Australia, and equivalent of A$58 from overseas) plus your first six-page contribution to:

Bruce Gillespie
5 Howard Street
Greensborough VIC 3088
Australia

There are vacancies in ANZAPA, but none in Acnestis.

And if I were content not to contribute to either apa right now, I would try to produce the next issue of SF Commentary, or (with co-editor Jan Stinson) the next issue of Steam Engine Time, or even the next issue of The Metaphysical Review, which hasn’t appeared since 1998. For SFC and TMR, I have a bulging bag of goodies, plus many contributions sent electronically. I can’t escape from writing the Trip Report, but producing my major magazines (the reason why people thought of paying for my trip in the first place) does seem rather more urgent.

But if I produced issues of those magazines, I would still have no money to print or post paper versions of them. I really am skint at the moment. I could put up electronic versions on efanzines.com, but lots of my most faithful readers do not have computers, do not have access to the Internet, or do not have enough grunt in their computers to download .PDF files. So I don’t know what to do, but it would be a help to have the next issues all sitting there edited and designed.

Apart from all that, I have been reading some good books (especially novels such as Gwyneth Jones’s Life and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, and Miracle Fair, a book of poems by Nobel Prize winner Wislawa Symborska), watching a few DVDs (best include Collateral and The Final Cut), and even listening to some music (I finally got around to listening to Robert Plant’s Dreamland from a few years ago — so nice I played it twice — and a collection of Carl Perkins’ very early recordings for Sun Records). And socialising with various groups of Melbourne fans. And sitting down and having Flicker the large black cat sit on me.

I’ve written (for money!) a few book reviews for a new magazine — I’ll tell you about the magazine when the first issue appears.

And, with Merv Binns, Dick Jenssen, Bill Wright, Alan Stewart, and Lee Harding, I was made a Lifetime Member of the Melbourne SF Club a few weeks ago. Actually, I was given this honour in October 2003, but the ceremony finally took place on 19 April. Jack Dann presided, and masterfully restrained himself from roasting the lot of us. Paul Stevens (who has disappeared from fandom) was also recognised as a LM of the MSFC, as was George Turner (who died in 1997) and Race Mathews (who did much to start the club in the early 1950s), who could not be there on the night. Thanks, Alison and Sue Ann and others involved in organising the ceremony and accompanying supper. I will try to get along to MSFC meetings more often, but won’t promise anything.

Okay, enough — I’ve just demonstrated why my diary entries are enough to render you paralytic with boredom in front of your computer. I’ve got lots of old book reviews sitting here, and articles from the period when I wrote great stuff (before 1977), so I’ll gradually OCR or retype them for you, and put them on this site.

Meanwhile, do yourself a favour and look at efanzines.com. Or google my name and find all the stuff of mine that is littered all over the Internet.

Bruce Gillespie, 23 May 2005.

THE ROAD DON'T GO ON FOREVER

2005-04-19T15:37:00.000-07:00

Last night I was listening to one of the great CDs of the last twenty years, Joe Ely's Love and Danger. Lots of bravado; lots of drums-and-guitar led testosterone. The highlight of the CD is Ely's version of Robert Earl Keen's 'The Road Goes On Forever'. Lots of people have done versions of the song: 'The road goes on forever,/And the party never ends'. The title is ironic, of course, as it tells the story of a small-time crook who ends up on the gallows at the end of the song and his girlfriend gets away with the cash.

But the bravado, not to mention the lead guitar, are wonderful. For a few seconds you think, like a youthful Joe Ely, that the road might go on forever. Today he's re-formed his old band The Flatlanders, and sings mellow songs along with Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock.

The road stopped abruptly for two old friends over the last two weeks. I've already written about John Brosnan. This morning came the news, from Dave Locke (himself nearly knocked out by heart problems a couple of months ago) and Mike Resnick, that Bill Bowers is no longer with us.

It's hard to part with people who mean so much to us. Bill Bowers was already a leading fanzine editor when I began publishing SF Commentary in 1969. He sent me the last issue of Double:Bill (edited with Bill Mallardi) and the still famous Double:Bill Symposium, which skilfully edited multiple quotations from a whole raft of SF writers about their chosen craft.

Double:Bill ended, and Outworlds began in 1970. There have been other Bowers fanzines in the last 35 years, but Outworlds has stood out as a continuing major achievement, with its large issues, impressive art folios, and scads of good articles. Early issues were slim, however. They were a major influence on what I was doing. I don't know if Bill invented the technique of cut-and-paste, skilfully putting letters of comment alongside articles along pieces of art alongside reviews so that the whole issue was a continuing pattern. I tried something similar in SFC from No. 11 to No. 17, and eventually found my own style with No. 20. In Australia, both Leigh Edmonds and the Larrikin people (Irwin Hirsh and Perry Middlemiss) tried similar editing techniques. But nobody was ever as accomplished at it as Bill, because nobody worked quite as hard at attempting to produce the Perfect Fanzine.

I met Bill Bowers only during the week of Torcon 2, in late August 1973, and on the day he and Joan left for home, after staying at Mike Glicksohn's place. Bill and Mike, seemingly dissimilar, were great friends and rivals during those years. Both were more skilful at producing fanzines than I was. Both were wonderful company on that day after Torcon, when Bill and I actually got to talk about what obsessed us both -- producing the Perfect Fanzine. Then Bill and Joan left, and I never saw him again, except on DVD. In the 1980s, Bill produced an Outworlds as taped production at Corflu, and that has recently been available on DVD. It was good to catch up with him again.

Since then we've been in constant letter and email contact, but I would never have realised how ill he was if it had not been for our mutual friend, Mark Linneman. Mark lived in Melbourne during the 1980s. When he returned to America, he kept in touch with the Cincinnati crowd, especially Bill Bowers. He told a horrifying tale of Bill suffering from acute osteoporosis, getting smaller by the year, and from increasing emphysema, although he kept smoking. In print, Bill was still as cavalier as ever. On the Internet, he told us of some his later troubles (including the very dispiriting second marriage, which ruined him financially). But still, without Mark Linneman as a link, I would have been a lot more surprised by Bill's death than I have been.

Bill Bowers was older than me, but not much older. He's part of my fanzine generation. Is the party finally ending? Time to get another drink and make sure nobody's turned out lights yet.

2005-04-18T21:10:00.000-07:00

JOHN BROSNAN 1947–2005

There they are: John Brosnan’s dates. The man was the same age as I am when he died. Well, nearly. He would have been 58 in October. I was 58 in February.

What has prevented me — thus far — being finished off by what killed John: acute pancreatitis, according to the coroner, presumably related to both diabetes and alcohol consumption?

Finding Elaine, more than anything else. Feeling melancholy in the 1970s, I got stuck into the juice in a big way. But when Elaine and I got together in early 1978, I had much less reason to drink in order to face life and feel jolly. (In the eighties, Elaine and I and Mark Linneman drank a great deal too much red wine, but that’s another story. That was research, part of our ongoing quest to find the most congenial restaurant in Melbourne. It was, and still is, Abla’s Lebanese restaurant in Carlton.)

Many years ago, I gave up all thoughts of becoming a writer of fiction. John Brosnan did maintain his ambition, and at times it seemed as if he would crack the big time. I thought his books were a bit too genial ever to carry him over into the big league. SF fans like their books to be solemn and glutinous. If John had discovered the Terry Pratchett approach before Pratchett did, he might have become very rich. Long ago I decided to stick with that branch of non-fiction called ‘fan writing’: you can’t make money doing it, but you don’t have to worry about making money doing it. I just wish my chosen method of earning an income, freelance book editing, had been successful instead.

But again, I found Elaine, and John never found a life’s partner. Elaine’s carried me over endless bad patches. I would not have survived anywhere near as long as John did if it hadn’t been for her.

At my worst, I’m as melancholic as John ever was, and nowhere near as funny. But because of fandom, and because of Elaine, I haven’t been allowed to retreat from the world. You could say I’ve been forced to become a social animal in spite of myself. As Brian Aldiss puts it, ‘Cheerfulness keeps breaking in.’ I don’t think it broke into John’s life often enough.

In the end, of course, it may be simply a case of different drugs for different folks. The grog got to John, and eventually the coffee will get me. So why are we all addicts of something or other?

Here are some pieces I’ve collected about John Brosnan since he died. First, an updated version of the piece I wrote on the morning I heard of John’s death:

JOHN BROSNAN: AN AUSTRALIAN TRIBUTE
by Bruce Gillespie

John Brosnan discovered fandom in 1966 through Australian Science Fiction Review (ASFR). John was one of a very small number of Western Australian fans. He met John Bangsund (editor of ASFR) during one of Bangsund’s trips to Perth. As soon as he could, John Brosnan moved to Sydney, where he became a valued part of the revived Sydney fan scene, and attended several conventions.

Without having the Contents list of the first mailing to hand, I can’t remember whether or not John was a founder member of ANZAPA (Australia and New Zealand Amateur Publishing Association). If not, he joined very early, and was a strong presence during its first year (1968–69). His ANZAPAzine was called Why Bother?

In 1970, he was part of the Big Bus Trip (1970), during which several Sydney fans, including Ron Clarke, travelled overland by bus from Australia to England. John reported in hilarious detail to ups and downs (mainly downs) of that trip, and stayed an ANZAPA member for a while after he settled in London.

John’s exploits were many, including his great fanzine Big Scab, his membership of Ratfandom in the 1970s, and his perpetual attempts to become a big-name writer. He had quite a few novels published over the years. The most recent is Mothership (Gollancz, 2004), and he had finished a sequel. He had had a few books made into films (with unintended awful results) and published several important books about SF films.

An original member (1969) of the mailing list for my magazine SF Commentary, he stayed with me at my Carlton Street flat during his only trip back to Australia (1974) and kept in touch by letter and email until recently. He took me to the Munch exhibition at Southbank in London when I visited in 1974. His letters were always funny, but the tale he told — of alcoholism he could not kick although he knew it was killing him, and constant money problems — was rather melancholy. Until his death, John survived mainly thanks to the kindness of friends (especially Leroy Kettle, Rob Holdstock, Malcolm Edwards and John Baxter) and the landlord of Ortygia House, Harrow, the famous old building that housed many fans and pros over the years.

I will miss his letters, although it’s a great pity I did not get to natter to him one last time. Thanks again to Kim Huett and Lee Harding (and, indirectly, John Baxter) for the first news of the passing of an old friend.

Bruce Gillespie

JOHN BAXTER'S TRIBUTE

has allowed me to reprint the following tribute to John. This is the not the same as his tribute submitted to the next issue of Locus. It’s probably rather different from the obituary he is hoping to place with one of the major Australian newspapers.

JOHN BROSNAN

John and I don’t go back as far as many people in the fan community. By the time he became active, I had left both fandom and Australia, and while I knew his name, we first met in person when an eager young man in black, with a Prince Valiant haircut (he hadn’t yet added the third and, later, indispensible elements of his couture, the beard and dark glasses), introduced himself to me at the National Film Theatre in London.

Being in London and moving in the same movie circles, we saw a lot of one another, often attending the same bizarre social events. I remember, when John was writing for Starburst, being present at a birthday party for its editor Alan Mackenzie at which a scantily-clad showgirl burst out of an improbable-looking canvas cake. John also distinguished the 50th wedding anniversary of Harry Harrison by getting very drunk and berating an equally pissed Kingsley Amis for refusing to give him an interview. My wife and I carried John home insensible from that event, and, over the years, from an increasingly large number of others.

You give me too much credit for the day-to-day shoring up of John’s tottering life. While I’ve done what I could over the years, Roy Kettle and Rob Holdstock in London were far more involved. As well as collaborating with John on a number of horror/sf novels — they were jointly Harry Adam Knight and Simon Ian Chilvers (HAK and SIC) of Slimer, Tendrils, The Fungus etc — Roy was John’s guardian, mentor and confidant, while John routinely moved out of his fetid Harrow flat into the Holdstocks’ more salubrious home whenever they were out of the country.

About a year ago, Roy, Rob and myself got together in London in a last-ditch attempt to save John from himself, but our efforts to, for instance, place him in an effective drying-out program or even get cleaners into his flat were met with such stubborn resistance that we gave up. He refused to admit anyone to the flat, not only as part of a general paranoia but for fear they were representatives of the tax authorities, He had nothing but scorn for detox programs, a few of which he’d tried, and found ineffective. As for AA, John was so shy that the thought of revealing his problems to strangers filled him with horror.

Over the last fifteen years, John retreated both physically and mentally from the world. He had few romantic relationships in his life, and the break-up of the last important one about that time may have precipitated his flight. Certainly it was exacerbated by his move to Harrow, a suburb so remote that few visited him there. For a time he would come into the West End to meet people like myself who were passing through, or to drink at the poky and dingy Troy Club, on the edge of Soho, but its closing, and the death (from alcohol) of the owner Helen, a close friend, cut him off from an important source of companionship.

On numerous occasions, we tried to lure him to France, if only for a holiday, but fears about his shady residency status in the UK made him unwilling to leave the country. Nor would he consider returning to Australia, where he could have relied on friends in the fan community.

He also left his long-time agent John Parker, moving to various smaller agents, or relying on friends in publishing to give him work. As part of the self-fulfilling prophecy that his life had become, he naturally gravitated to people who shared his emotional frailty and addiction to drink, so the attrition rate among his professional associates was high, An alarmingly high number had nervous or physical breakdowns, or died, while others elected to leave the business altogether. Lately, he had no agent at all, but dealt direct with old friends like ex-fan Malcolm Edwards, publishing director of Gollancz and now of Orion. Malcolm commissioned the bulk of John’s sf and fantasy work , ie, the Skylords trilogy, his comedy fantasy novels like Damned and Fancy, and the Mothership trilogy, the second book of which John had just completed at his death.

The grail of John’s life was TV and the movies, but his relationship with both was fraught with frustration. His one American film, Carnosaur, commissioned by Roger Corman in a deal formalised by Corman’s wife with a memo scribbled on a bar napkin at the Troy Club, was butchered, and his credit reduced to that of ‘Original Story’. Numerous contacts with London producers of varying degrees of sleaziness, in particular those involved in the production of Beyond Bedlam (1993), convinced him that life in the movie world was one long rip-off, and he cut himself off from that that as well. Undoubtedly his Golden Moment in film and TV was pitching a Doctor Who story in which the Tardis materialises in the BBC TV Centre. The Doctor, played by Tom Baker (like John, an habitue of Soho’s after-hours drinking clubs), is immediately mistaken for actor Baker, with resulting complications. The producers weren’t amused.
(14 April 2005)

JOHN BROSNAN’S FINAL LETTERS TO SF COMMENTARY (excerpts)

11 Feb 2003:

I’m still here at Ortygia House but I don’t know for how much longer. As I’ve pulled out of the income support system, it was either that or get a job, or take a six month course on computers. I don’t think my rent is being paid any longer. There’s also a ‘For Sale’ sign out the front. It’s been there for months but no one seems to be in a rush to buy the place.

I’m currently waiting for a reaction from my editor to the ms of my novel Mothership that I’ve finally completed. It’s quiet; too quiet. I’m reasonably happy with it but whether it works or not I don’t know. It’s a lightweight piece with, hopefully, a fair amount of humour (which the editor wanted) but it’s not a spoof. Hard to categorise it. I said to a friend that it fell between two stools. He said, you mean it’s between shit and shit?

Still going on periodic alcoholic binges but have managed to stay out of hospital since I last wrote to you. Actually I should be in hospital today having a blood test — my blood pressure is creeping up despite the medication — but I can’t be bothered. Famous last words?

15 February 2003:
I wouldn’t describe my current mental state as ‘chipper’. I would say I was manically depressed except I seem to miss out on the manic phases. Just continually depressed. You said that I sounded in last year’s email that I was about to take the Big Dive. I must admit that thoughts of throwing myself off the top of Ortygia House have occurred to me but, as the old joke goes, with my luck I’d probably miss the ground. Also I don’t think the building is high enough for a successful suicide attempt.

I don’t think you stayed in Flat 2 here when you visited Chris Priest in 1974. He lived in the bottom flat which is on the ground floor, or the basement if you want to be pedantic. I remember your 1974 visit. You persuaded me to accompany you to an exhibition of Munch’s work at, I think, the Hayward Gallery on the South Bank. I was, as usual, feeling pretty depressed at the time. The Munch exhibition depressed me even further but you found it positively exhilarating.

Alarming to see that photograph of my younger 1969 self in your ConVergence report. I don’t see Gary Mason in that collective of comic fans yet I’m sure he was present. I definitely remember an incident that took place in the Melbourne SF club room at that time. Gary suddenly grabbed my arm and whispered urgently, ‘We’ve got to get out of here!’ Outside in the street I asked him what the problem was. His reply: ‘They’re smoking marijuana in there! The police will probably be here any minute now!’ Once again I was struck by the huge gulf that existed between Melbourne fandom and Sydney fandom.

2005-04-05T16:25:00.000-07:00

INNER STARS: THE NOVELS OF ALAN GARNER

Previously unearthed Gillespie article

[At least I think this article remained unpublished. I wrote it while I was the assistant editor of The Secondary Teacher (the weekly magazine of the Victorian Secondary Teachers Association) in 1977. It was written for that journal, but I can’t remember if it appeared there, or was quietly spiked. It’s never appeared in a fanzine. I can’t remember whether or not it’s based on the Nova Mob talk I gave about Alan Garner in 1977. In fact, I can’t remember writing it. But when I was packing to move from Collingwood to Greensborough, it suddenly appeared there in the files.

It hasn’t dated much, since Garner hasn’t published a whole lot since 1977: just The Stone Book Quartet, Strandloper, and an occasional title that never materialises in bookshops. However, Garner has published a book of criticism since then, and my view of him might have changed greatly after 27 years. Now I’ll find out by typing the article.]

The scene: Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.

The time: An evening in February 1975.

The happening: A white-faced, tense man rises to give a lecture on `Inner Time’. He looks vulnerable; giving the lecture is painful for him. The audience listens intently, a bit embarrassed.
The words: `The feeling is less that I choose the myth than that the myth chooses me; less that I write than that I am written . . . I simply plot the maps of inner stars.’

The writer: Alan Garner, author of five novels, several other books, two operas and several television plays.

New label?: `Magic fiction’ writer; English novelist.

So who are children these days?

Let’s get rid of the label first. In his now-famous ICA lecture (published in Science Fiction at Large, edited by Peter Nicholls), Alan Garner does not talk about himself as a writer for children. Yet all his books have been published as `children’s books’. He has even been credited with revolutionising the genre. Labels stick, even when Alan Garner goes beyond them.
Garner’s first two books, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath, are `children’s books’ in the oldfashioned sense. The two main characters are Colin and Susan, about ten years old. They are on holiday in the English moorland (as in Enid Blyton novels). They meet a wizard, and umpteen magical creatures, and survive endless hairbreadth adventures. The images are bright, the language is simple, and there is always home to return to.

The children’s book has traditionally been a symbol for domestication. Let the children romp around a strange landscape; give them a bit of rope; but always end the book with `happily ever after’. It was all a bit of a trick. The `happily ever afters’ were to reassure parents, not to soothe children.

Even in the first two books, Garner began to change all that. Colin and Susan are hardly memorable characters, but at least they are not typical child heroes. They get swept along with the magic events, rather than control them. They have to make important decisions, but they are not always the `right’ decisions.

There is no `happy ending’ in The Moon of Gomrath. Colin and Susan think they are on the side of the goodies, but the wizartd Calledin proves to be a bit of a shyster. The forces of magic are not put back in their place. `Old Evil’ is still loose at the end of the book. Most of the loose ends are not tied up.

Children’s books changed altogether when Alan Garner published Elidor, then The Owl Service and, most recently, Red Shift. Children’s books are now dynamic, not to be touched by those who want a `safe read’. Writers such as William Mayne, Leon Garfield, Ursula Le Guin and Ivan Southall have also been part of the change. But somehow the change is most noticeable in Garner’s books.

It is not even certain that Garner’s books are any longer for children, let alone about children.

In Elidor, Garner narrowed the focus of action to a suburban house in England. Great magic events still take place, but they bring only trouble to the children in this story, and not much adventure.

The Owl Service is about `young adults’, rather than children. Alison is Roger’s half-sister, and Gwyn is a Welsh kid who is involved with them. The personal relationships are real, intense, and irritating to any reader who wants only an adventure story.

Red Shift breaks right out of the children’s category. It will be hated by many adults who control book buying for their children. Only a third of the book is actually about the young adult characters, Tom and Jan. Most of the book includes swearing, physical and verbal violence and a fair bit of talk about sex. All the old taboos have been broken. If Red Shift is a `children’s book’ (and the publishers say it is), the label is losing its meaning.

Which is all to Alan Garner’s advantage. But if they don’t fit a label, what are Alan Garner’s books?

Mything links

`The element common to all the books’, said Alan Garner during the ICA lecture, `is my present-day function within myth. The difference between that function and what are usually called "retellings" is that the retellings are stuffed trophies on the wall, whereas I have to bring them back alive.’

I’m one of those people for whom any retelling of a myth is like watching a stuffed trophy on a wall. Long lists of ancient names (as in Garner’s first two books) make me yawn.
Yet, says Garner, `the more I learn, the more I am convinced that there are no original stories. On several occasions I have "invented" an incident, and then come across it in an obscure fragment of Hebridean lore, orally collected, and privately printed, a hundred years ago.’
But it is a modern world, isn’t it? Things were quite different way back then. Even people are different now. Why bore us with old legends, Mr Garner? Where’s the originality?

The originality is in the art of the books themselves, of course, not in the bits and pieces from which they are made, though many readers of Garner may be most interested in those bits and pieces.

Not that there is much artistic originality in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960) and The Moon of Gomrath (1963). They fit the `one damn thing after another’ category: one adventure after another, without leaving space to think. Colin and Susan track across woods and moors, get trapped in magic-ridden houses, clamber through a particularly crazy system of underground caves, but not much is resolved.

There are some memorable images: the magic lady on the island; the flying pony that takes Susan for a ride beyond the earth; the Wild Ride; the beam of moonlight that reveals a hidden path over the hills once a year. But mainly these books form a catalogue of old legends and legendary names.

In Elidor (1965), Garner’s work begins to get interesting. The book begins with a fairly hackneyed adventure into a magic kindom — but the children this time find the entrance to the magic kingdom in a ruined church in the middle of a slum clearance in Birmingham. No more country landscapes and natural images to help along the story.

For Garner, myth is not what happens in ancient stories. It represents what happens in all periods of time. In modern England, the four treasures turn into a length of iron railing, a keystone, two splintered laths and an old, cracked cup. Buried in the garden, these objects still disburb any electrically driven machines in the vicinity. A year after the journey into Elidor, Roland looks through the keyhole in the front door — and sees an ancient eye peering back at him. The enemies of Elidor have found a magic doorway to catch up with the children. They wait in ambush — just outside the door, yet thousands of years in the past.

Still, Garner is concerned not so much with what happens to the treasures, or to Elidor, but with what happens to the children. Three of them pretend that Elidor never existed. Roland tries to solve the problem. Elidor is a sly protest against people who say, `It’s nothing to do with me!’ Garner does not quite meet the challenge set by his ideas. He settles for magical effects — a unicorn, a breathless chase — to end the story.

The Owl Service (1968) won the Guardian Award and the Carnegie Medal. It’s been called the most important children’s book of the last twenty years — which, as always, is to put it in a pigeonhole. The Owl Service is one of the best English novels in any category during the last twenty years. The readers have realised this already, even if the critics haven’t.

The Owl Service is a terrifying book. No `magic kingdoms’ here. The magic is still here, but it is in the air that surrounds the characters. The magic is malevolent, inevitable and it settles down on the shoulders of the main characters like a stinking smog.

Two of the characters, Alison and Roger, are on holiday with their parents (his father, her mother) at a house in a Welsh valley. A daft Welsh gardener shuffles around the house. A sharp-tongued housekeeper reigns inside. Her son, Gwyn, forms a friendship with Roger and Alison.
A reminder of cosy British fiction for children? Of course. But nothing is cosy in this household. There are mysteries about why the English family owns the house at all. And daddy is henpecked by mummy. Gwyn has a chip on his shoulder about these visiting English upper-class slummers, and Roger treats Gwyn as a low pest. Alison wants everything to be `nice’, but all her actions increase the bitterness.

Then Things Start to Happen. The three find themselves hit by a lightning bolt of magic; they are condemned to act out an ancient Welsh legend about a wizard who built a woman from flowers, who then turned into an owl and caused the deaths of both her husband and lover. The legend begins working again when Alison finds some old plates in the attic. A pattern of owls appears on the plate. The patterns disappear, and Alison begins to make paper owls. Garner hints, but never says directly, that she is turning into a magic owl.

The transformation is only the shell of the story. The legend itself shows in the bitterness between the three characters. This scarcely disguised sexual bitterness gives the book its strength. Magic is no longer a playground for wild adventures. It’s a kind of disease that comes to life in everybody, and causes only grief.

Gwyn tries to escape responsibility for his part in the triangle. He tries to leave the valley, but local villagers force him back. Roger and Alison try to ignore what is happening to them, but it happens anyway. `There are no original stories’, says Garner. What he means is that there are no people who can escape from being what they are.

The Owl Service is very concentrated writing, each word picked precisely. The entire book is only 156 pages long. Many pages consist of only violent conversations between characters, yet the damp atmosphere of the Welsh valley sweeps out of the pages. We are part of the legend; Garner makes this idea live in the book.

Inner time: Red Shift

I suspect that nobody knew what to make of Red Shift when it was published in 1973. The reviewers didn’t. Some of them admitted that they were baffled. They said all the usual things: about Red Shift changing the face of children’s writing, which was true enough. Some other authors, such as Paul Zindel, might not have succeeded without Garner’s pioneering success.
It’s easy to see why the reviewers scratched their heads. Make a hasty first reading of the book, as I did, and it’s confusing. Red Shift flashes continually between three stories: the story of Tom and Jan (time: now); the story of Thomas and Margery (time: the English Civil War); the story of several Roman soldiers cut off from their legion and attempting to survive in occupied Britain (time: about two thousand years ago). The third story is confusing because Alan Garner gives the Romans modern names (such as Macey and Magoo).

The three stories seem to have little to do with each other — except that each happens in the same area of England (on or around a castle hill called Mow Cop), and that the same axehead turns up in each story. In story 1, the Roman soldiers survive for a few months. All die except for Macey and a Celtic girl who surived a raid on a village. In story 2, the Puritan village is captured by a group of Irish Loyalist soldiers under the command of a former citizen of the village. Everybody is killed except Thomas and Margery. In story 3, Tom and Jan are separated by distance when Jan moves to the city. They meet each month until each believes each has betrayed the other. They separate permanently (or do they?)

It’s the modern story that is puzzling. No sudden violence or real adventure. A boy discovers that his girlfriend once spent the weekend with another bloke. The girl discovers that her boyfriend has sold an old axehead that she cherished. A bit tame?

What does the book’s title mean? It’s easy to work out the scientific meaning. The red shift of the stars is the change in their colour that is observed on earth as stars rush away from each other and the earth at ever increasing speeds.

`When we look at a starry sky’, writes Alan Garner, `we see a group of configurations that seem to be equidistant from us and existing now. That is an "apparent perspective". We are looking a a complexity of times past — a sky of "it–was", all at different epochs, distances and intensities. Inner time creates similar illusions.’

`Red shift’, it seems, is something that happens inside people, and between people. Three eras of history in Red Shift, but one humanity.

There’s that axehead, for example. In Roman times, it is the means by which the group survives at all. In Roundhead times, it is a good luck charm — and a symbol of last-ditch survival. In our time, Tom and Jan find it and Tom sells it to a museum. Twentieth-century people, Garner seems to say, have forgotten their history. They’ve forgotten the importance of really important things.

In the two historical sections, exterior violence draws people together. In the modern section, nobody is threatened by sword-carrying soldiers. But, without exterior threat, the main characters fly apart from each other. They commit psychological violence instead.
I cannot do justice to the writing skill that Garner shows in Red Shift. Every line is important to everything else in the book. Much of the book is in dialogue. Not a word is wasted. At the beginning of the book, Jan has just returned from a holiday in Germany. By the end of the book, we know what happened to her there. So we read the beginning of the book again to find out how it affected them there. And so on, watching the pattern grow, word by word. Beware: read the last two pages carefully.

Each book that Alan Garner publishes, the pattern gets more complex. Garner is a `wise fool’, like the characters in The Guizer, his recent book of retold legends.

He calls himself a `boundary-rider’, finding the precent boundaries of knowledge and going beyond them. We must explain ourselves to ourselves; we can explore the inner worlds through myth and story. There are stars flaming inside our heads, and Garner can draw star-maps for
us.

2005-03-26T15:29:00.000-08:00

RETURN OF THE TRAVELLING BLOGGER

I’ve been to America, and have returned. I had a lot of fun, and survived the plane trip home. My thank-you note to fandom is attached as the second part of this blog.

I can’t publish my Trip Report here. It’s copyright by the BBB Fund (Bring Bruce Bayside Fund), although I haven’t written it yet. I’m pretty sure it goes free to One Per Centers, those people who donated at least $25 (US or Australian) to the fund, and extra copies will be offered at $10 each, first to people we know bought The Incompleat Bruce Gillespie, and then to anybody else interested.

I’m still not happy with the idea of blogs. My feeling is: if you’ve got something to say, publish it properly, in a real magazine, which you then send out to readers. Which is more or less what I will be doing with these blogs. I’ll use them as scratch pads for material for my apazines, which in turn are scratch pads for SF Commentary, Steam Engine Time, Metaphysical Review or whatever else.

However, in Seattle I did get to meet, for the first time in 19 years, Casey Wolf, who set up this blog for me. She’s weathered the years somewhat better than I have, doing lots of interesting things, involved in many things in Vancouver and elsewhere. We met during the weekend of the Seattle party, which I’ll talk about in the Trip Report.

Last week I met Tim Train, who has actually been reading my blog. He’s an enthusiastic blogger (willtypeforfood.blogspot.com), and seems to be better connected with the world of blog than I am. We had both been on the Brian Aldiss email list, which Jim Goddard seems to have closed down. Turns out (surprise!) that we are also both Philip K. Dick fans. Tim would have enjoyed Potlatch, in San Francisco, where the Book of Honour was Dick’s A Scanner Darkly.

Returning home has been an odd experience. For a week I had dreams about strenuous efforts to get on or off planes or trains at the right time and the right place. I would fall asleep during the day, often, then wake up not knowing where I was for a moment. I finally managed the energy to put away the stuff I had acquired during the trip (but one box has still not arrived from Seattle), then start on a piece of Paying Work that my most regular client had pushed my way.

But I still haven’t decided what to do with the rest of my life. The BBB Trip has not helped a bit in actually publishing fanzines. Any money left over after all Trip expenses have been accounted for will be donated to various fan causes. That still leaves me skint when trying to do the next SF Commentary as a print fanzine. I haven’t even posted out most of the print copies of Steam Engine Time 4. Yes, I can place my magazines on efanzines.com (vote for Bill Burns for Website Hugo, 2005!), but that doesn’t help a whole lot of readers who don’t have access to efanzines.com.

Meanwhile, the assembled multitude of fanzine fandom (at Corflu) awarded me their highest honour, the Immediate Past President of the Fan Writers of America 2004. Why make this a retrospective award? As Tom Becker (co-chair of Corflu) explained to me, the award thus has no duties or obligations, and you can’t campaign for it. It’s an honour on a par with being made Fan Guest of Honour at Aussiecon in 1999. But, as in so many of life’s activities, neither award guarantees that I can keep publishing. I’ll just have to resort to faith in whatever fannish ghods sustain idiot fans, and keep typing as fast as I can.

Footnote: One real triumph of the Trip was bringing home two new memberships for ANZAPA (Australia and New Zealand Amateur Publishing Association), of which I am the Official Editor. Spike Parsons from San Francisco and Claire Brialey from London have both said they will be in the April or June mailings. What better lure can I offer to other prospective members? The world’s best fan writer (Claire, according to this year’s FAAN Awards) and another superb fan writer (Spike), to add to the luminaries already gracing the pages of ANZAPA (Bill Wright, Sally Yeoland, David and Sue Grigg, Jack Herman . . . ad infinitum). Like many apas round the world, ANZAPA is not up to full strength, has no waiting list, and therefore welcomes new members. Email me, Bruce Gillespie, at gandc@mira.net.

ANZAPA is an association of fanzine publishers, not emailers, so the overseas rate is rather high (equivalent of $A64.80 per year, all for postage). However, it’s a much cheaper way of taking part in fanzine fandom than trying to do your own zine, especially if you’re starting from scratch.

A LETTER FROM AUSTRALIA

Bruce Gillespie, feted by Vegas Fandom at the Gillespie Gala & Hardin Birthday Bash, sent this letter to VWF 18 on 13 March from the calm and safety of his Australia home.

Hello, everybody:

Thanks to all those who contributed to the BBB Fund and welcomed me to America. But that flight back was a horror (14 hours in a plane without an empty seat) and I was very glad to see Elaine at the gate at Tullamarine this morning at 9.30.

Impossible to summarise any impressions at the moment, except that the whole trip was amazing and satisfying to me. Whether you got your value from the delivered Gillespie bundle is up to you to decide. I put faces to many people who were good friends in print, and swore undying affection to many great friends I thought I knew already.

Thanks in particular for Janice Murray and Alan Rosenthal (and Bob and Bonnie) for putting up with me in Seattle, and similar privileges from Art Widner (and Olivia) in Gualala, Charles Brown in San Francisco, and the Newton family, and Lee and Barry Gold, in Los Angeles -- and to Bob Speray, Marci Malinowycz, and Billy Pettit for driving me through parts of the great North American continent. Thanks also, for many other great road expeditions, to Janice Murray, Alan Rosenthal, Marty Cantor, and Lee and Barry Gold, and others I might have forgotten to mention.

Triumphs include being elected President of the Fan Writers of America 2004, being shown the Sea Ranch Chapel at Gualala (surely the world’s most beautiful small building) by Art Widner, crossing the Mojave Desert with Billy Pettit to sit in the same room as Joyce and Arnie Katz, winning $14 on my only slot machine game at Las Vegas, being introduced to the Japanese Garden at the Huntingdon Museum by Marty Cantor, being allowed to touch choice items in the Robert Lichtman fanzine collection, sampling a good number of America’s restaurant cuisines, and being supported way past the call of fannish duty by the great Peter Weston.

It was all Marty Cantor’s fault -- or was it Joyce and Arnie Katz’s suggestion in the first place (at the 2004 Corflu)? Fannish history is already debating this matter. The kindly presence of Joyce and Arnie hovered over all proceedings, but their efforts for the fund were only made complete when finally we met. Bob Lichtman put in a great effort, both as a friend and the person who made sure that I survived America financially. I was always conscious of the mighty effort Bill Wright put into the Fund. Thanks to Bruce Townley for buying a con membership — I never did get to take you to dinner, Bruce.

Thanks to Art Widner for buying my other con membership — and Art wouldn’t let me take him to dinner. Thanks to Irwin for the Incompleat Bruce Gillespie, of which I could sell only one copy in America. There are plenty of copies left.

Apologies to all who will only get their thank yous in the Trip Report. I took some crappy photos myself, but I do need contributions of good photos of Corflu and Potlatch, and indeed, any good photos anybody took of any part of the expedition. I don’t even have any good photos of Janice and Alan.

Much love from
Bruce Gillespie
gandc@mira.net

2005-01-29T18:04:00.000-08:00

My favourite Bruce Gillespie article

Maniacs with guitars and pianos

[First published by Leigh Edmonds in Rataplan 8 in 1972. Irwin Hirsh did not include this in The Incompleat Bruce Gillespie, but I think it’s my best article. It’s certainly the article into which I put the most passion while I was writing it. I was twenty-five when I wrote it.]

For better and/or worse, this music is also a way of life . . . To a large number of young people it seems passionately to matter.

— Wilfred Mellers, Times Literary Supplement, 19 November 1971

So all right, the Beatles make good music, they really do, but since when was pop anything to do with good music?

— Nik Cohn, AWopBopaLooBop ALopBamBoom

Nik Cohn played pinball and listened to pop music for six hours a day; I studied for exams, listened to pop music during coffee breaks, and collected hit parade charts from local newspapers. Cohn knows his early rock and roll; I’m still in sympathy with 1972’s rock and roll.
But we both grew up with rock and roll, and who can shake an upbringing like that? This is the story of an obsession shared by two people, at least.

I

I’ve been a Rolling Stones fan since I heard their first record. Not that I heard their first record, of course, since no Melbourne disc jockey played ‘Come On’ or ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, the Stones’ fist and second singles. When I first heard ‘Not Fade Away’, I hated it. The lousy voice of that lead singer! Since Melbourne radio stations had never played the records of blues singers such as Muddy Waters, I didn’t recognise the origins of Mick Jagger’s style. However, the fast, solid beat was so magnificent that I kept listening to the record. Stan Rofe (the only Melbourne disc jockey who knew anything about the records he played) said that the Rolling Stones had already become the second most popular group in Britain. Why were they so popular? Because they caused riots in theatres, they fought with club crowds and thumbed their noses at club proprietors. Because the Stones had much longer hair than the Beatles, and they were unbelievably ugly. They were magnificently repellent.

A few weeks after Decca released ‘Not Fade Away’ in England, London Records released ‘Tell Me’ in the USA. I still think that it is one of the three or four best pop singles ever made. Its four and a half minutes of running time made it one of the longest pop singles released up to 1964. Why did I like ‘Tell Me’ so much? That lead singer was still there, and he sounded no more tuneful than before, but the drummer had developed an insistent, hypnotic beat that was more compulsively listenable than the best records by any other group. I enjoyed this long single so much that it seemed shorter than the average Beatles record. I still play ‘Tell Me’ often.
Slowly I became accustomed to Mick Jagger’s voice. He sounded mean, angry and sardonic, although he could never express the full urgency of expression of the black blues singers. In late 1964 I managed to borrow a copy of the Rolling Stones’ first LP, which includes some of their best performances. On ‘Mona’, Jagger’s voice sinks into a fluid field of intricate drum and guitar syncopation. The more insistent the beat, the more nagging the sound of the guitars and maracas, the easier it is to listen to the song. The bass guitarist (Bill Wyman) is the star of ‘Honest I Do’ and ‘Route 66’. The entire band works best as an ensemble on ‘Little by Little’. There the lead and bass guitars play off each other in an extended blues improvisation, and Jagger sings a short verse at the very beginning of the song and a chorus at the end.

The most intriguing aspect of the LP were the songwriters’ names. I had vaguely heard of Bo Diddley and Muddy Waters, but no Melbourne radio station had played their records. A friend of mine began to collect blues records at this time, and soon he bought some Chicago-style rhythm and blues LPs. Now I could hear the original Muddy Waters version of ‘I Want to Make Love to You’ and ‘I Can’t Be Satisfied’ (recorded by the Stones on their third LP). Melbourne radio stations, especially 3KZ, began to play the records of Solomon Burke, Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye and other rhythm and blues performers. Chuck Berry, to whom the Stones owed much of their style, began to make records again.

The flood had begun. Nobody knew how to react to ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ by the Animals. The record was so long that the radio stations played the abridged American single instead of the record that EMI released in Australia. Alan Price plays an electronic organ at almost cathedral volume. Eric Burdon wails and yells they lyric for almost four minutes. I could not quite bear to listen to his voice, but I couldn’t bear not to listen to it. ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ was a song that had remained in the folk blues repertoire since before 1900, but I had never heard it before (probably because radio stations had previously banned its mildly risqué lyrics). If the stations had played the song before, I would not have been prepared for the rawness of the new version. As in many of the best records of 1965 and 1966, the elements of ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ hang suspended from an audible trapeze wire. Burdon’s voice should sound flat, but it doesn’t, the beat of the drummer should clash with the rhythm of the organist, and the dry sound of the guitar should make both the voice and the organ sound out of tune. The performance should have fallen in a heap. But it doesn’t.

The barriers were down, and they stayed down. For a few years the radio stations assaulted listeners instead of charming them. This listener, at least, remained constantly astonished by the stream of powerful rock music that followed the success of the Rolling Stones.

The Stones did far more for any ‘revolution’, real or imagined, than the Beatles ever did. I’ve felt this since late 1964 and early 1965, when the Beatles reached the height of their success, and the Stones had still achieved little success in the USA or Australia. But I’ve never been able to put that feeling into words, and Nik Cohn can.

II

In 1970 Nik Cohn published a book called Pop: From the Beginning. In 1971, Paladin issued a paperback edition with the far more evocative title of AWopBopaLooBop ALopBamBoom. It’s both the story of rock and roll and a lot of Nik Cohn’s autobiography. But that makes the book part of my own autobiography — not only does Cohn agree with me, but he says everything so much better than I can. For instance, here’s Nik Cohn on the Rolling Stones:

‘In Liverpool one time early in 1965’, recalls Nik Cohn, ‘I was sitting in some pub, just next to the Odeon Cinema, and I heard a noise like thunder.’ Nik went out into the street, but it was empty. The roar grew louder.

‘Finally, a car came round the corner, a big flash limousine, and it was followed by police cars, by police on foot and police on motorbikes, and they were followed by several hundred teenage girls.’ The entourage came to a stop outside the Odeon Cinema. The squealing girls surrounded the car. The door of the limousine opened. The Rolling Stones and their manager Andrew Loog Oldham climbed out. ‘They shone like sun gods’, says Cohn, ‘impossible to reach or understand but most beautiful in their ugliness. The girls began to surge and scream and clutch. But then they stopped, they just froze. The Stones stared ahead, didn’t twitch once, and the girls only gaped. Almost as if the Stones weren’t touchable, as if they were protected by some invisible metal ring. So they moved on and disappeared.’
The Rolling Stones posed a threat to everybody. ‘On no account must they appeal to parents,’ warned Andrew Loog Oldham, even before the establishment had awarded MBEs to the Beatles. Cohn says that the English music business hated the Stones because they ‘threatened the structure, because they threatened the way in which pop was controlled by old men, by men over thirty. You didn’t need to simper or drool or suck up — the old men might hate you in every way possible, and you could still make yourself a million dollars.’ English teenagers of 1965 felt quite strongly that they didn’t want to ‘simper or drool or suck up’ to anybody. Like the Beatles before them, the Stones declared their independence from BBC culture, although the Beatles never quite recovered from BBC acceptance. The Stones unified their personal and musical styles. They looked ugly, they made ugly music, and for awhile they angered the really ugly people of the world.

‘To begin with’, writes Cohn, ‘they used to play the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond and they laid down something very violent in the line of rhythm and blues. They were enthusiasts then. They cared a lot about their music.’ Their care about music and attention to innovation remained for some time. At first Charlie Watts played in the background, Keith Richards and Brian Jones played like a cross between Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters, and sometimes Mick Jagger managed to sound like Mick Jagger. When the Stones wrote their own songs, they gradually simplified their style, threw out the frills and, as Cohn so brilliantly describes them, their records became ‘nothing but beat, smashed and crunched and hammered home like some amazing stampede. The words were lost and the song was lost. You were only left with chaos, beautiful anarchy. You drowned in noise.’ ‘The Last Time’ (the Stones’ first Top Ten record in America) and ‘Satisfaction’ (their first Number 1 record in America) sum up the power of the Stones’ best records. ‘You drowned in noise.’

The Rolling Stones gain most of their musical power from Charlie Watts’ drumming, rather than anything that Jagger has ever done. In ‘The Last Time’, Charlie develops an onrushing beat that hypnotises me every time I hear it, even after seven years. He has recreated this beat in even more exhausting feats of distilled violence, on tracks like ‘Salt of the Earth’, ‘Let It Bleed’ and ‘Sister Morphine’.

‘They remain the best rock band in the world’, says Cohn, although he thinks that the Stones have wasted most of their energy since 1967. For me, the film Gimme Shelter shows clearly that Jagger in particular has never really understood the influence that the Stones have over their audience. Asked why the Stones stayed together, Bill Wyman said, ‘I guess we’re too lazy to do anything else.’ Most of Sticky Fingers (1971) is a musical disaster. On nearly every track Charlie Watts sounds as if he has forgotten everything he ever knew about rock and roll. ‘If they have any sense of neatness’, concludes Cohn, ‘they’ll get themselves killed in an air crash, three days before their thirtieth birthdays.’

III

In late 1965, we moved to a marvellous old house in Bacchus Marsh. The stairs were steep, my room was on the mezzanine floor, and I could ignore everybody and everybody could ignore me. In spare moments I could turn up the radio loudly and try to find some good music. (1965 might have been the best year for pop music since 1956, but that doesn’t mean that Melbourne radio stations played good records very often.) Occasionally I could pick up 2UW, a Sydney radio station. At that time, and for several years afterward, it was the best commercial radio station in Australia. The deejays played few advertisements after 8 p.m., and they did not talk about the weather or read the news. They played no record that was more than a few weeks old. Constantly the station replenished its ‘playlist’ with new records that Melbourne radio stations would begin to play months later, or never played at all.

One night, when I was huddled in my eyrie, supposedly struggling with Hofstadter or George Eliot, I heard the most extraordinary noise hurl itself from Sydney. A vast orchestra pounded out a strange, syncopated throb while an inspired female blues singer wailed a song that became louder and louder until she ended with a perfectly controlled blues shriek. ‘A new Phil Spector record!’ I shouted, throwing something into the air with delight — probably the radio. I wanted to buy the record the next day and play it over and over again, but I had to wait for months before I could even hear it again.

Four months later, London Records finally released ‘River Deep Mountain High’ by Ike and Tina Turner (for that was the record) in Australia, and two months later Melbourne radio stations began to play it. Eventually the record sold very well in Australia, but it did not enter Melbourne hit parades until nearly a year after I had heard it blare out from Sydney like some distant apocalyptic celebration.

That’s my story. Here’s Nik Cohn’s:

‘Phil Spector [who produced ‘River Deep Mountain High’] was demonic. He’d take one good song and add one good performer and then he’d blow it all sky high into a huge mock symphony, bloated and bombasted into Wagnerian proportions. He’d import maybe three pianos, five percussion, entire battalions of strings. Drums and bass underneath like volcanoes exploding. Tambourines by the hundredweight. And he looked down from his box and hurled thunderbolts. Added noises, Spectorsound, and the impetus.’

Spector’s records sounded as if they had been made in a mile-high cave. Nobody has ever been able to copy Spector’s sound. He would hire Gold Star Studio in California for three months at a time, which is the period Spector took to make ‘River Deep Mountain High’. The legend goes that Tina Turner recorded the vocal tape in one night, after Spector had manufactured the entire backing. Tina Turner was ‘a big earth woman, one scream of infinite force,’ says Cohn, as he describes the ending of the song. ‘At one time there’s an instrumental chorus and everything thunders, crashes, gets ready for final dissolution. Tina snarls and wails in the background. Then she screams once, short and half-strangled, and everything goes bang. That’s the way the world ends.’

‘River Deep Mountain High’ failed in the USA, which is perhaps why it took six months to be released in Australia. Spector, already a millionaire, foreswore America after this failure, and later made pleasantly ingenious records for George Harrison and John Lennon. Like Nik Cohn, I think that the ‘daemon’ had left him, although Harrison’s single ‘Bangla Desh’ recaptures much of the excitement that is called Spectorsound.

IV

Nik Cohn hits the nail on the head so many times in AWopBopaLooBop ALopBamBoom that I didn’t like to disagree with the last chapters of the book. The first two-thirds of the book contain passages such as these:

On classic rock: ‘Rock and roll was very simple music. All that mattered was the noise that it made, its drive, its aggression, its newness. Rock turned up a sudden flock of maniacs, wild men with pianos and guitars who would have been laughing-stocks in any earlier generation, but who were just right for the fifties. They were energetic, basic, outrageous. Above all, they were loud.’

On rock and roll lyrics: ‘The lyrics were mostly non-existent simple slogans, one step away from gibberish. This wasn’t just stupidity, simply inability to write anything better. It was a kind of teen code, almost a sign language, that would make rock entirely incomprehensible to adults. The first record I ever bought was by Little Richard. The message went: "Tutti frutti all rootie, tutti frutti all rootie, tutti frutti all rootie, awopbopaloobop alopbamboom!" As a summing up of what rock and roll was really all about, this was nothing but masterly.’

On Roy Orbison (my favourite pop singer since 1960; the only one who sang the best pop songs in the only way possible): ‘The last time I saw Roy Orbison was at the 1966 NME poll winners concert. Everyone else was frantic, ran themselves crazy trying to whip up a reaction. Orbison just commanded: the big O. He banged it out so solid, so impossibly confident that he made everything else that had gone before seem panicky. He’d been around, had twenty years behind him. Almost on his own, he knew what it was all about.’

On the best lyric writer: ‘Chuck Berry’s most perfect song was "You Never Can Tell".’ (Cohn quotes the complete lyric, but you’ll have to buy the book to read it.) ‘Chuck himself more intoned than sang, sly and smooth as always, the eternal sixteen-year-old hustler. What the song boils down to is detail. Most pop writers would have written "You Never Can Tell" as a series of generalities. But Chuck was obsessive. He was hooked on cars, rock, ginger ale, and he had to drag them all in. That’s what makes it — the little touches like a cherry-red Jidney ’53 or the coolerator.’

That last passage contains Nik Cohn’s key word: obsessive. Cohn is obsessive: he worries about an idea or impression until he finds a word or phrase that exactly gives his impression of a performer or group, or a music fashion. The Platters ‘were all coloured but the lead singer sang exactly like an Irish tenor. That’s how confused they were.’ The Who ‘didn’t have number ones but they kept hitting the top ten and, in due course, they became safe. They even stopped punching each other.’ The Beatles ‘were perfectly self-contained, as if the world was split cleanly into two races, the Beatles and everyone else.’

Cohn talks a lot about maniacal environments and ‘maniacs . . . with pianos and guitars’. Nik Cohn makes America’s southern states sound like a musical version of Faulkner-land. The South bred people like Little Richard, one of thirteen children, who sang in church choirs, and who ended his rock and roll career in 1957 when he became a Seventh Day Adventist minister. The southern states bred Elvis Presley, who made sex the main selling point of his music and inspired the hatred of Baptist preachers everywhere, but who said often that he loved his mother and sang hymns during the intervals of his rock and roll concerts. Elvis was unfailingly polite to everyone, but his ‘voice sounded edgy, nervous, and it cut like a scythe. It exploded all over the place. It was anguished, immature, raw.’ According to Cohn, pop music was driven for ten years by the impetus of southern blues and country and western music (plus black rhythm and blues from the northern cities). The next wave of madness came from Liverpool. ‘Liverpool is a strange town. It gets obsessed by everything it does. It is a seaport, and it is made up of different races. It is a city full of gangs, and outside of Glasgow, it is the rawest, most passionate place in Britain.’ According to Cohn, as soon as the music hits the big cities and the promoters, it loses its intensity.

Nik Cohn writes like a genuine naïf. He’s a person who sees an almost visionary role for pop. ‘The fifties were the time when pop was just pop, when it was really something to switch on the radio and hear what was new right this minute. Things could never be so good and simple again.’ Beware of people who think that wide and powerful social movements are good and simple. For Cohn and me, rock and roll was a relief from boredom, a tingle in the veins, and endless source of conversation, a touchstone of style (although I don’t think pop style ever touched my relentlessly puritanical background). Rock and roll was right because it annihilated the parental world of right and wrong that they had deposited into teenagers’ lives like silt into clockwork. It was a secret world, with public idols, incomprehensible to adults, but something that they had to take notice of.

I part company with Nik Cohn during the last third of the book. According to Cohn, the Beatles abandoned the faith when they began to improve the quality of their music. ‘Musically, Rubber Soul was the subtlest and most complex thing they’d done and lots of it was excellent’ but ‘The Beatles were softening up. Revolver was a big step forward in ingenuity and again, there was a big step backwards in guts.’ Cohn admires the idea and musical quality of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band but ‘it wasn’t much like pop. It wasn’t fast, flash, sexual, loud, vulgar, monstrous or violent. It made no myths. The Beatles make good music, they really do, but since when was pop anything to do with good music?’

Now, we all know that that’s rubbish, don’t we? Or do we? Cohn’s last statement sums up the whole book, and is basically correct: if pop had been good music, I would not have discovered it until the age of twenty-one, when I actually began to enjoy good music — Beethoven, Bach and the rest. Cohn shows that he believed the publicity about Sergeant Pepper’s broke barriers, leapt forward, had intelligent lyrics and brilliant music, and was littered with references to LSD. Even in 1963, such a publicity campaign would have ensured the failure of the record. In 1963, no Melbourne disc jockey played Bob Dylan’s records (‘the kids wouldn’t understand them’). In 1962, a rumour spread that the Everly Brothers had failed to arrive at a concert appearance because of a ‘drug problem’. If the Everly Brothers had confirmed that rumour, they would have instantly ruined their careers, which they did eventually anyway. Who wanted good music in pop songs before 1965? No one, except the people who recalled early Sinatra and Nat King Cole, and welcomed the chart successes of ‘Telstar’ and the ‘Theme from Exodus'. The publicity for Sergeant Pepper’s was a fraud because songs like ‘Lovely Rita’, ‘Fixing a Hole’, ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ and ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’ beat out the same relentless rock rhythm as the Beatles had played three years before. George Martin disguised the rock with some elaborate orchestration, but he couldn’t hide the banality of most of the songs. At the same time, not even Nik Cohn could deny the terrifying power of ‘A Day in the Life’, which, by itself, lit pop’s future path. But we are not talking about music, as Cohn says. We are both talking about rock and roll meant to its audience.

Lee Harding says that ‘Nik Cohn just grew up, that’s all’. So did I (in a way), but not before I saw why rock and roll changed from one kind of religion to another. It changed because the audience changed; or rather, a whole audience grew up. Millions of rock and roll addicts reached their twenties at about the same time. The twenty-year-olds learned to think, love and perform music, and some of them even read books. They didn’t have to fight their parents anymore, because many of them had already become parents. They did have to fight (for their lives, this time) against the people who built the bomb and staged the Vietnam War. Rock and roll supplied the battle magic against the War, and the raison d’être for the fight: ‘Make the world safe for rock and roll.’ The rock and roll fans did not become teddy boys or truck drivers. They became editors of university student magazines and broadcasters for the BBC. Perhaps this explains why articles about ‘rock’ appeared in The Times Literary Supplement and The Listener within a week of each other in December 1971, why The Times Educational Supplement featured a very learned article about the Who, and why Rolling Stone published one of the best recent analyses of the American presidential elections. Why did people get serious about rock and roll? Not because campus intellectuals suddenly discovered rock, but because today’s thirty-year-old professors and steely-minded revolutionaries always knew rock and roll. Now they rock with their heads as well as their nerves and blood.

What can you say to Nik Cohn? He shows what rock and roll meant to him, but he fails to see why rock means so much in 1972. He underestimates the influence of acid, he calls Dylan ‘boring’ and he sees nothing in Paul Simon’s lyrics (which I like better than Dylan’s) but ‘softness and tenderness, wistful ironies’. He dismisses Cream (the second-best rock band ever) in half a page, and thinks that Procol Harum ‘only kept reviving "Whiter Shade of Pale" in different names and disguises’. In the last few pages of AWopBopaLooBop ALopBamBoom, Cohn implies over and over again that he doesn’t want to listen to the new stuff. He hopes that it will go away, and that his style of rock will reappear. He still thinks pop singles hit parades show an accurate picture of the pop music industry, although nobody over sixteen buys pop singles these days.

Will the maniacs with pianos and guitars ever return? They didn’t go away. They have longer hair and they read books and they sell far more records than Little Richard ever did. But they remain just as mad, just as obsessive. On the last page of the last chapter of AWopBopaLooBop ALopBamBoom, Nik Cohn says that rock and roll ‘has to be intelligent and simple both, it has to carry its implications lightly and it has to be fast, funny, sexy, obsessive, a bit epic.’ It still is.

— Bruce Gillespie, March 1972

Bruce Gillespie in 2005 tries to remember what it was like listening to music in 1972

I can remember 1972 pretty clearly — better than I remember most years since. Years had shapes in those days. 1972 was the year when Chris Winter announced in his sepuchral voice on 3LO’s night program when he was actually allowed to play LP tracks instead of singles: ‘Here is the best rock and roll band in the world.’ It was one of the tracks from the Faces’ A Nod’s As Good as a Wink to a Blind Horse, their third LP, which had just come out. Until then, all I had heard from the Faces on regular pop radio was one of the tracks from that album: Rod Stewart and the Faces’ version of Chuck Berry’s ‘Memphis, Tennessee’. It was okay, but nothing to justify Chris Winter’s judgment.

I bought the album, and found several tracks that proved to me that rock and roll was back! ‘Stay with Me’, ‘Too Bad’ and ‘That’s All You Need’ had that ferocious energy of the early rock and roll singles and the best Stones albums. They were all a lot better than Rod Stewart’s ‘Maggie Mae’, the rather plodding track that was a hit at the same time. That track came from Every Picture Tells a Story. I looked at the liner notes. They were the same band members as on the Faces albums. Rod Stewart sang on the Faces albums. It was all one act, so I bought the first three Rod Stewart albums as well. And most of the tracks on Every Picture Tells a Story were as good as those on A Nod’s as Good as a Wink. The combination didn’t last long: four Stewart albums and four Faces albums and a concert LP. Stewart got a big head, toned down his sound, and hired a new band. Ronnie Lane left the Faces. Ronnie Wood joined the Rolling Stones. By 1975, it seemed, rock and roll really was dead.

Rereading my own article, I cannot believe that I ever disliked the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers. I still play it constantly. A few years ago, it was finally remastered for CD, and I could enjoy it even more. But it was very different from the previous two Stones albums, Beggars Banquet and Let It Bleed. Like any fan, I wanted the Stones to stay the same, and not progress. In 1975, they got the message, and they haven’t changed a thing ever since. The Rolling Stones were the first rock group to discover how to make a half a billion dollars a year by becoming a museum of their own past.

My article reminds me of a musical 1972 that I didn’t know existed until some years later. You can see all my references to the policies of our AM radio stations. Until FM radio came along in 1975, what in America was called ‘underground music’ was really underground in Australia — just names mentioned in Rolling Stone magazine. Except for odd late-night programs such as Chris Winter’s and Graeme Berry’s, no radio station in Australia played the LPs that actually provided the soundtrack for the seventies. I discovered them much later, through friends. In 1972, Leigh Edmonds had his ear to that indefinable ground by which people communicate news about music that isn’t played publicly. He already had LPs by Janis Joplin/Big Brother and the Holding Company. That’s the only way I heard them. Leigh had bought Jefferson Airplane LPs. I had heard about them, but heard almost none of their music until the late seventies. In the last twenty years I’ve kept buying groundbreaking albums, released in 1972, of which I knew nothing in that year. (Ry Cooder’s first album; Little Feat’s first album; the Byrds’ best album, Lou Reed’s Transformer, David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, Randy Newman’s Sail Away, and many more LPs that are now the heart of the collection.) Two great albums were played on radio here in 1972: Neil Young’s Harvest, whose wispy hippy ditties put me off his music for four years until Roger Weddall played me Young’s rock and roll LPs; and the Stones’ Exile on Main Street. The rock critics hated it, then decided it was the definitive Stones album. And the Stones have been trying to make another Exile ever since. So did rock and roll die after all?

It upped its tent, left pop radio, and set up camp in new territories, such as ‘alt.country’ and ‘blues and roots music’. But that’s an article I haven’t written yet.

— Bruce Gillespie, January 2005

2005-01-26T15:52:00.000-08:00

IT WAS A QUIET DAY IN BEAUTIFUL HOT DOWNTOWN GREENSBOROUGH

Not that Greensborough didn't seem quiet enough when we moved out here in October, except for the occasional outbursts of doggy communicators sending the latest woof news to each other across back fences. There was a fire in a pharmacy in Main Street on Friday night, about an hour after we walked past the place, but usually out here there are not the frequency of fires and burglaries that made life in Collingwood so interesting.

It's particularly quiet today in Greensborough (a leafy suburb about 17 km north and slightly east of the Melbourne business district) because it's particularly hot. It must be at least 38C out there, or perhaps 40. (That's over 100F, for any snowbound Americans.) Not far from here, in the main shopping plaza, is the cinema complex. I'm tempted to go see something -- anything -- just for the pleasure of sitting in airconditioning for a couple of hours. But I would have fried on the footpath before I reached the cinema.

When we bought the house in May, we were under the impression that it had a cooling system. Not so. There is a great big industrial blower on the roof. It can blow air through the ceiling, but when we had it tested, we found that not only was the cooler corroded and unusable, but it had been for some years. The previous owners, who had been here for only a couple of years, relied on (I presume) an airconditioner in the wall. We turned it on a couple of times. It cools the air. It also sounds like a jet engine flying low over the house. The cats were scared by the sound. They went out into the cat enclosure, but the noise of the thing is even louder out there. So Elaine won't let me put on the airconditioner.

This house is still much cooler during a hot spell than our house in Collingwood was. That was built in 1914, and designed to stop air getting out. It usually took two days to cool the place even after a weather change. Our new abode in Greensborough has large rooms, insulation in the ceiling, and ceiling fans. It also cools rapidly after a change. I just wish we had the extra cash (after spending squillions on much-needed inbuilt bookshelves) to install a new airconditioner right now.

What does one do on a hot quiet day in beautiful downtown Greensborough?

Wait until dusk. That's what we did last night. We went for the first time to a local Greek restaurant, Eos, which was pretty good, but nowhere near as good as our favourite restaurant in Collingwood, the Beelzebub Cafe. For a Tuesday night, it was busy at the Eos, with lots of families.

Today I did some paying work. I haven't had much recently, and I'm waiting for several invoices to be paid, but at least I could do some work while everybody else was taking a public holiday.

I forgot to say that it is particularly quiet in Greensborough today because it is the Australia Day public holiday. It is very easy to forget this celebration. Australians may be famous for being laid back, and nothing lays 'em back more than the possibility of public displays of national chauvinism. I heard a rumour there was some kind of Australia Day celebration in Melbourne today, and there will be naturalisation ceremonies all over the countries where immigrants who have not been tagged as 'illegal refugees' can receive their little certificates telling them they are Australians are last.

For most of my life, Australia Day has not been celebrated on the actual day, but on the Monday nearest to 26 January. This was a good weekend for holding SF conventions. It was the last hurrah of the annual long summer school holidays before kids trudged back to town to sit in hot classrooms all through February, when they really should have been taking their holidays. A few years ago the State premiers tried to make the Australia Day holiday into a big deal by changing it to the actual day. There has been no sign of a great national resurgence in public patriotism. After all, Australia Day is really a day for sitting in front of the TV and watching the Australian Open (tennis) or whatever touring cricket players are silly enough to stand out in the hot sun for a whole day getting beaten by the Australians.

Not that I will be watching sport on TV. I'm not sure what I'll do for the rest of the day. I might even go down to the Greensborough cinema complex later, because that biopic about Ray Charles started today. Or I could sit around like a beached whale and listen to Ray Charles CDs on the sound system. Or read one of the hundreds of books we've recently dug out of boxes and put on the new shelves -- except I know I would go to sleep if I tried doing that during this heat.

What has given me most fun today -- in fact, the only time today I've felt more than a quarter alive -- has been writing this blog for whoever wants to read it. That's what writing is for: to wake yourself up when everything about you is very hot, very sleepy, very paralytic, and just a bit too quiet.

2005-01-16T22:29:00.000-08:00

WHY APPLE BLOSSOM BLUES?

Casey Wolf picked the title for this blog. She picked a title whose significance would be known only to her, me, and the several hundred people who received a copy of my fanzine The Metaphysical Review No. 19/20/21 in 1994. The article was reprinted recently in The Incompleat Bruce Gillespie, a collection of the best of my writing in fanzines.

The article was a remembrance of Roger Weddall, 1956–1992. Roger was one of the most valued SF fans we’ve ever had in Melbourne, Australia. Even a short account of his exploits took me several thousand words. He was the kind of friend nobody could replace. And his favourite cat was our cat Apple Blossom. Let me quote myself:

‘Elaine [Cochrane, who has been married to me since March 1979] had picked up Apple Blossom on a building site at 1 a.m. one morning while walking home from the Easter 1976 convention held at Ormond College, Melbourne University. Roger and Apple Blossom fell in love.
‘In the end "Roger’s cat" Apple Blossom outlived him by two weeks. Roger died on 3 December 1992, and Apple Blossom on 18 December. Not that Roger ever owned Apple Blossom; she owned him. So did every cat that Roger ever patted.

‘When Roger shared the house at 10 Johnston Street, Collingwood, with Elaine and two other people in 1976, he was already a person who slept during the day and lived by night. When he arrived home at some late hour, he listened to records on headphones. Sitting in the bean bag, he fell asleep. Apple Blossom fell asleep on top of him. When they were both awake and in the same house, Roger teased Apple Blossom. She spat and howled and clawed, having a wonderful time. She had the world’s second-best vocabulary of cat swear words. Apple Blossom lived in the same house as Roger for only about four months. He ran out of money, and returned to his parents’ place. Elaine and Frank asked the other person at Johnston Street to leave, and I joined the household.

‘After Elaine and I got together, each time that Roger visited he called first to Apple Blossom, who always expected to be picked up and teased. Howl, spit, claw. What fun! In 1982, when Roger returned from overseas, and had been away from our house for about a year, Apple Blossom remembered him immediately. After Roger died, and his father visited us, Apple Blossom tottered towards him because for a moment it seemed that Mr Weddall’s voice was that of his son.’

This has been an unabashed advertisement for The Incompleat Bruce Gillespie, 40,000 words of my stuff, edited by Irwin Hirsh, and available for $10 from Bill Wright, Flat 4, 1 Park Street, St Kilda 3182. The contents are divided between my personal writings and my writing about science fiction authors.

STEAM ENGINE TIME 4 NOW AVAILABLE

One of the fanzines I publish is Steam Engine Time, an international journal about science fiction literature. The first three issues were co-edited by Maureen Kincaid Speller and Paul Kincaid from Britain. Since they have dropped out, Janine Stinson of Michigan has taken over as co-editor.

Because of the costs of printing and publishing, we are offering the new issue of SET, No. 4, January 2005, in the first place in .PDF format on the Internet on Bill Burns’ wonderful website efanzines.com.

If you want a printed copy, send money, letters of comment, traded fanzines, or written or artistic contributions to:

Bruce Gillespie, 5 Howard Street, Greensborough VIC 3088, Australia (gandc@mira.net)
or Janine Stinson, PO Box 248, Eastlake, MI 49626-0248, USA (tropicsf@earthlink.net).
Subscriptions: Australia: $40 for 5, cheques to ‘Gillespie & Cochrane Pty Ltd’;
Overseas: $US30 or 12 pounds for 5, or equivalent, airmail; please send folding money, not cheques.

Contents:

Covers: Ditmar (Dick Jenssen)

Editorial 1: Unlikely resurrections
by Bruce Gillespie and Janine Stinson

Editorial 2: The journeys they took: Rob Gerrand’s 50-year retrospective of Australian science fiction
by Bruce Gillespie

Tales of members of the Book Tribe: a long review of John Baxter’s A Pound of Paper
Epilogue: If the house caught fire . . .
Funeral games
by Darrell Schweitzer

Leaping the abyss
Gregory Benford

Thirteen ways of looking at the British Boom
Andrew M. Butler’s Pioneer Award winning article
Pioneer Award Acceptance Speech
Andrew M. Butler

A dissenting opinion:
If this goes on: Butler, Science Fiction Studies, Interzone and the ‘British Boom’
Paul Brazier

Letters of comment by Many and Various.

2005-01-16T10:45:00.000-08:00

1975: THE YEAR OF AUSSIECON I

It was all John Bangsund’s fault. Everything in those days was. From 1966 to 1969, John Bangsund was editor of Australian Science Fiction Review (ASFR), the magazine that created Australian fandom and SF activity as we know it today.

Or was it Andy Porter’s fault? These days he calls himself Andrew Porter, and for a long time he edited SF Chronicle. In those days, he was Andy Porter, editor of Algol, one of America’s most interesting fanzines. In a letter to John Bangsund in the late sixties, he just happened to mention the idea of ‘Australia in 75’. A world convention in Australia? Ever? As soon as 1975?

John mentioned the idea in ASFR. John Foyster heard the call, and at the 1970 Eastercon in Melbourne established a committee to bid for a world convention in 1975. We would have to bid against an American city, and possibly against a European city as well. Could we do it?
Beginning in early 1970, Australian fans began editing and publishing as many as a hundred fanzines per year. In those days, the fanzine was the only form of communication between fans throughout the world.

John Litchen, Paul Stevens, and many others put together the Anti-fan film. Sent to America, it travelled from one convention to another, and became our main bidding tool.
In Australia, we had to get used to running large hotel-based conventions. In 1973, about twenty of us travelled to Torcon II (the World Convention held that year in Toronto), and won the bid.

The penny dropped; jaws fell through the floor. Now we had to run this circus! Was it possible? John Foyster handed on the committee chair to John Bangsund, who handed it to Robin Johnson. Robin, not known until then as a convention organiser, suddenly became an organising genius.

One great difficulty. Our Pro Guest of Honour, Ursula Le Guin, had great difficulty arranging to attend the convention in August 1975 and accompany her family to England in the same month. She wasn’t coming. Robin rang her in Portland, Oregon, and I and others sent her letters. She consented to attend, provided we held, in the week before Aussiecon, a writers workshop in the style of the Clarion workshops. We put in an application to the Literature Board for enabling funds. We gained that support.

Who would run the workshop? I was doing nothing on the committee at the time, so Robin pointed at me, although usually I can’t organise my way out of a paper bag. 1974 had been a depressing year for me, and I had nearly dropped out of fandom. The fact that anybody put any faith in me gave me much-needed energy. I placed advertisements for workshop candidates. The ads that worked best were those placed in the news sheets of the Australian Society of Authors and the Victorian Society of Editors. I had heard of almost none of the candidates, each of whom had to send in a qualifying story. I sent the stories to Ursula Le Guin, who picked the final list of attendees. One entrant story in particular was astonishing: ‘The Ins and Outs of the Hadhya City State’, by Philippa C. Maddern, a writer none of us had met. Some years later, after it had been published in The Altered I, the story was voted the most popular Australian SF Short Story Ever in a poll conducted by Van Ikin for Science Fiction.

January 1975 saw Carey Handfield and me trundling around the Dandenong Ranges, near Melbourne, looking for a workshop site. The site had to be secluded and comfortable. Nothing seemed promising until we found Booth Lodge tucked away in the hills, an attractive combination of Federation-style main guest house and modern dormitories. All the facilities were modern, the beds looked comfortable, and all meals would be provided. It was expensive, but the Literature Board grant would pay for a large percentage of the fees for those writers who wanted to attend.

While we were travelling around the hills, I might have mentioned, as I often did to anybody who would listen, the difficulty of raising money to keep publishing SF Commentary. Carey said: ‘Why don’t we start a small publishing company? The profits can keep SF Commentary going.’ Which is how Norstrilia Press began. We wrote to Genevieve Linebarger, the widow of Paul Linebarger (Cordwainer Smith), and gained permission to use the name ‘Norstrilia’. I put together, as Norstrilia Press’s first title, all the material I had published in SF Commentary about Philip K. Dick. Philip K. Dick: Electric Shepherd featured an introduction by Roger Zelazny, a cover by Irene Pagram, and articles and letters by people such as Stanislaw Lem, George Turner, and Phil Dick himself. It did not take long to prepare the manuscript. What we needed was a printer we could afford, and the money to pay the printer’s bill.

When Carey Handfield first met David Grigg at Eltham High School, before they both became SF fans, David said that he wanted to be a writer. Carey said, ‘Can I be your manager?’ During the 1970s, Carey extended web of power, and became the de facto manager of Melbourne and Sydney fandom. Within a few months, a dozen or so fans discovered they had lent their spare cash to Norstrilia Press to publish its first book. Believe it or not, eventually they received back their invested capital.

Early in his career Carey discovered the essence of management was to pay the cheapest price for the greatest amount of work. He found a bloke named John Counsel, who was setting up a printery in Traralgon, a Victorian country town several hundred kilometres from Melbourne. John Counsel quoted an unbelievably low price for printing the Aussiecon I Souvenir Book and Philip K. Dick: Electric Shepherd. The latter was already ready for typesetting, so we handed that to Counsel. The last bits of the Souvenir Book, as you’d expect, were finished only weeks before the convention. When the copies of the Souvenir Books arrived, half of them were misbound, and had to be sent back. But Electric Shepherd did arrive on the eve of the convention. Norstrilia Press was in business.

John Counsel happened to mention a great interest in science fiction. Carey told him about SF Commentary. Counsel offered to typeset and print the first offset issue of SF Commentary. It all seemed unbelievable, but I could hardly turn down the offer. At the same time as I was editing Electric Shepherd I was editing the Wilson (Bob) Tucker issue of SFC. Tucker, one of the greatest SF fans of all time (and one of my favourite SF writers) was coming to Aussiecon thanks to fans throughout the world who had contributed to the Tucker Bag, the fund that transported him from Illinois to Australia and back. I hoped to place the first copy of the Tucker Issue in his hand when he arrived. (It covers his entire career, fan and pro, and will be reprinted in 2001, with any luck.)

Copies of Electric Shepherd arrived. The day before Aussiecon, the Souvenir Books arrived. The Tucker Issue of SFC never arrived. Excuses, excuses, from Counsel for months afterward, then absolute silence. Nearly a year later, I gave up on the promised issue, typed the stencils, and duplicated and posted out that issue. I never could work out why Counsel promised to publish a magazine for which he didn’t have the time or funds.

Back in a wider, panic-stricken world, the organisation of Aussiecon increasingly centred around the Magic Pudding Club, Melbourne’s most famous slanshack (a slanshack being a collection of indigent SF fans attempting to live in each others’ pockets), in Drummond Street, Carlton. Robin Johnson lived there, then found himself increasingly moved in upon by such people as Don Ashby, his brother Derrick, Ken Ford, and various girlfriends. It was a three-year-long party, which exhausted the inhabitants and entertained all those Melbourne fans who visited. I lived one block away.

Robin Johnson needed help. Don Ashby loved helping people (and probably still does, although these days he lives a long way from Carlton). Derrick and Ken could always be roped in to help. So could the many visitors. At some stage, Don proposed that Aussiecon should be videotaped. It was (and the tapes may still exist), but the preparation for this exercise took much of the energy that perhaps should have been invested in other matters.

I needed help. I had no idea how to organise the physical details of a writers’ workshop. Worse, I fell in love two weeks before Aussiecon. I was a stricken, helpless man, useful to nobody. David Grigg, Don, and Robin rallied around, hired the photocopier, and made the multiple copies of all the entry stories for the first day of the workshop. David and others ferried the giant photocopier from Drummond Street up the hills to Booth Lodge. Robin arranged a restaurant night so that all the Workshop people could get to know each other a little on the night before they were to travel to the hills. I met Randal Flynn for the first time (that’s a lead-in for the story of my 1976, which I won’t tell here).

Booth Lodge was wreathed in mist when we arrived, but we already felt that the Workshop camaraderie had warmed us. We dumped our gear. We gathered in the main room of Booth Lodge and began reading each others’ stories. Into this concentrated silence arrived Ursula Le Guin.

Although I once tried teaching for two years, I’ve rarely had the opportunity to watch a great teacher in action. Ursula Le Guin is a great teacher. She said very little. After each person’s story had been workshopped by everybody else, she would make a few comments. Nothing much, but she summed up precisely what everybody else was thinking. She set assignments. We had to finish each assignment by the next morning. At 9 a.m., we began workshopping the stories written overnight. Suddenly people were working to two or three in the morning, then waking, fully refreshed, for the next day’s tussle. After lunch, we began writing again (and photocopying, ever photocopying, the results). The energy built. People who had little faith in their own work suddenly wrote brilliantly. Brilliant writers, such as Philippa Maddern and her sister Marian, write better and better. Nobody disturbed us. The mist closed in, although we did go for a walk in the forest together one afternoon. At the end of the week, we vowed to stay in touch forever, and some of us did.

Why do I remember this as the best week of my life? Because for the first and last time in my life I felt I was part of a group mind. Better, the others saw clearly that I was not a very good organiser, so they organised the event for themselves. They let me get on and write stories, although I had not intended to write a thing. In later years, I rarely had the confidence to keep writing fiction.

After the week of the workshop, I must admit that Aussiecon was both a blur and a bit of a disappointment. My new girlfriend and I moved into together to the Southern Cross Hotel for the week, and tried to get used to each other while taking part in the convention. This is not the way to guarantee a long-term relationship. There were lots of writers and fans I met, and many I didn’t. It was wonderful meeting Bob Tucker, although I didn’t have his special issue of SFC to give him. Ursula Le Guin’s Guest of Honour speech was so inspiring that it is still reprinted from time to time. I even got to sit down and talk to Susan Wood, one of the two Fan Guests of Honour. (She and Mike Glicksohn were together when we asked them to be our guests, but had parted by the time of Aussiecon; this didn’t spoil the convention, since both were excellent guests). Susan and I had been corresponding for years, and did so until her death in 1979 at the age of 32, but we only ever had two times when we could sit down at a convention and talk to each other, and one of those times was at Aussiecon I.

The great benefit of Aussiecon turned out to be the people who attended for the first time, then stayed to become famous as Australia’s leading fans. Marc Ortlieb is a name I can pluck from the air, but ask many of the more energetic older fans at any national convention, and often you’ll find that Aussiecon I was their first convention. In turn, those newcomers became the people who put on Aussiecon II (1985), and some were still around for Aussiecon III in 1999. When you consider that the whole circus began with a casual exchange of letters between John Bangsund and Andy Porter in the late sixties, that’s not too bad a legacy.

David Bowie at 58

2005-01-08T22:45:00.000-08:00

Today is David Bowie's 58th birthday. Next month is my 58th birthday. The difference is that David Bowie looks 30 years younger than I do. So does Sir Cliff Richard, the other British perpetual Peter Pan. Nobody knows how they do it. Cliff is reported to live cleanly, but David is reported as having done his best at self-destruction during the 1970s.

I don't have the same love for Bowie's music as I have for, say, that of the Rolling Stones. I'm willing to admit that Bowie has been more adventurous, tried more possibilities, and even written a few good songs since 1980, which is more than you can say for Messrs Jagger and Richard.

But Bowie always came over to me as a bit of a dilettante. He admits to being an actor, choosing his roles over the years. Some roles worked musically, and some didn't. The other night I played a CD I had never played although I have owned it since 1995: Santa Monica '72. It's a famous radio concert, but it seems to have been recorded from low-fi AM radio. That's why I had never played it. I'm glad I tried it again.

On this concert CD, Mick Ronson is lead guitarist, Trevor Bolder is on bass, Woody Woodmansey is the drummer and Mike Garson is on keyboards. The Ziggy Stardust tour band, they formed the best band Bowie ever worked with. Mick Ronson never did anything better, although he did produce a lot of records for other people, and issued a few solo albums before he died in the mid 1990s.

Even in 1972, Bowie would make radical rearrangements of his best-known songs when performing them in concert. Except, of course, that he wasn't well known when he hit California in 1972. In Britain, yes. Just emerging in America. Still unknown in Australia, yet to be put on Top 40 radio by the reissue of Space Oddity in 1973. So Bowie pulls the plug out, with a ten-minute version of 'The Width of a Circle', and an understated version of 'Andy Warhol' that makes the LP version seem almost unlistenable. Everybody plays brilliantly, and the audience gets more and more enthusiastic as the concert rolls on.

Even before we in Australia had heard of him, Bowie was making breakthroughs in 1972. That was the year he produced Transformer for Lou Reed. Bowie's version of Reed's 'Waiting for the Man' on Santa Monica '72 is just about the best performance of the set. 1972 was also the year Bowie produced one of Iggy Pop's early albums.

Santa Monica '72 might still be available somewhere on a Web site (Griffin Music GCD-392-2). It's worth listening to if you want to be reminded of Bowie when he was a real rock and roller.

(Footnote: The other night I caught, after midnight, the last ten minutes of a brilliant piece of sort-of-modern music on ABC Classic FM. It proved to be Side 2 of Heroes. David Bowie did have other successful facets of his career. I must listen to Heroes again one day. Happy birthday, David.)

Why I'm here

2005-01-05T17:53:00.000-08:00

WHY I'M HERE

I'm here, much to my surprise, because Casey Wolf arranged for me to be here. I have no idea who is out there to read what I'm writing. At the moment I don't know how to tell people I'm here. But I'm rather chuffed that anybody took all this trouble, whereas for the last six years I've been too lazy to set up my own Web site.

I last met Casey Wolf during Aussiecon II in 1985. Aussiecon was one of three world SF conventions held in Melbourne, and the only one that Casey has been able to attend from Canada. Since then she's been other places, such as Haiti, and I haven't been anywhere much. I'm expected in San Francisco in February for Corflu (the convention of fanzine fans), and lots of nice people throughout the world have paid for my trip. I will spend a week in Seattle, and perhaps I'll meet Casey again. Either way, we're SF fans, and SF fans can be friends for decades without meeting each other face to face.

Usually I talk to people in fanzines -- amateur magazines published by SF fans for SF fans but not necessarily about science fiction or fantasy. I like to commit stuff to print, and am bamboozled only by the expense (printing and postage) of doing so. Hence I've put a lot of my recent writing (SF Commentary since 2000; and my apa writings since 1991) on efanzines.com, the fabulous fannish Web site that Bill Burns created several years ago. My stuff -- and the stuff by my brilliant contributors, such as John Crowley -- can be read in .PDF format if you have Adobe Acrobat Reader.

I'm not sure whether I will be talking to anybody much here, but you never know your luck.