Flogging Babel (original) (raw)
ALL SOULS NIGHT (Part 1 of 31)
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CONTINUED TOMORROW.
Above: Every Autumn, I write a Halloween story, write it out on leaves (one word per leaf), photograph the leaves, and then leave them where.I found them. The story is then serialized, starting on October 1 and concluding on the 31st--All Souls Day.
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A Goat for Azazel - On Sale This Saturday!
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Dragonstairs Press has a new chapbook coming out this weekend--and it's a beaut! The proposal, written by Grania Davis based on notes by Avram Davidson, synopsizes the plot of an unwritten Dr. Esterhazy novel--a "ghost novel," as it were. I devoutly wish it existed in full but, in that absence, reading about what might have been was a pleasure.
Did you know that the good doctor had a wife?
Here's what Marianne wrote in her announcement:
When Avram Davidson died, he left behind notes for a Dr. Esterhazy novel. These notes were expanded and formatted by Grania Davis, his one-time wife and several-times collaborator. Unfortunately, the novel did not sell and so was never written.
Recently, Grania's son, Seth Davis, shared the proposal with people he thought would find it interesting. Dragonstairs Press pounced.
The Avram Davidson estate has kindly allowed the one time use of this material.
A Goat for Azazel is essentially a reproduction of the novel proposal, formatting and idiosyncratic spellings preserved, and is offered as a tribute to Avram Davidson, one of the foremost short fiction writers of the 20th century, and to Grania Davis, his collaborator and passionate supporter. Michael Swanwick, a huge fan and appreciator of Avram, has added a brief, signed afterword to the work. It is produced in an edition of 80, roughly 6” x 7”, numbered and hand-stitched, with wrappers made of Mexican amate bark paper, chosen to commemorate Avram's and Grania's years in Mexico.
It will be offered for sale on Saturday, October 5, 2024, at noon, Philadelphia time (Eastern Daylight Savings) at www.dragonstairs.com. 15domestic,15 domestic, 15domestic,18 international.
--
Marianne Porter (she/her)
editor, publisher
Dragonstairs Press
And, since you wondered . . .
Avram lied to me! We were in correspondence for a time and in one of his letters he agreed with my speculation that, Dr. Esterhazy being an ultra-rationalist--he could not be brought into then-present times by spiritual or even scientific means. And all the while, he had notes specifying that exact same thing!
A writer telling untruths. I can feel the foundations of reality shiver.
Above: Looks nice, dunnit? Periodically, I have to remind people that Dragonstairs is not my nanopress. It's wholly owned and operated by Marianne. I'm just the resident content provider--and for this chapbook, not even that.
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The Delany Test
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In one of his essays, Samuel R. Delany observed that if the number of women in a room passes a certain threshold (I think it was forty percent, but it may have been thirty or even less), men will think that they are a majority presence. It's something I've thought about, off and on, ever since reading it.
The other day, I finished watching KAOS on Netflix, an eight-part series in which the modern world is ruled by the ancient Greek gods. It's trash, but entertaining trash with some terrific performances, particularly that of Jeff Goldblum as Zeus. The ending was a little weak, but otherwise it was lots of fun.
And it seemed to have a lot of women's roles in it, an impression bolstered by female multiples--three Furies, three Fates (but I gather they're nonbinary/genderfluid), and the Tacitas Hera surrounded herself with. I speculated that somebody had made a commitment to gender parity.
So Marianne went to the Internet Movie Data Base and counted the cast members: a total of 85, of whom 38 were women. Doing the math, it came out to... 42%. Close enough.
Once again, the Delany Test proved to be solid. It made me wonder how overwhelmingly male-dominated the television I usually watch is.
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from my Commonplace Book . . .
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A word of explanation: A commonplace book is a collection of excerpts and quotations that strike whoever keeps the book as worth saving. It's like a diary that contains not one word of one's own. Today's entry is notable chiefly for the date when it was written.
Irving, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Lowell, Holmes--certainly our fathers were not afraid of essays. Nevertheless, somewhere about the opening of our own day, an iron-bound tradition became erected in the publishing business, at least in the United States, that books of essays would not sell; could not be made to sell even sufficiently to avoid a considerable loss on the investment of manufacture; in fact, were quite impossible as a publishing venture.
-- Robert Cortes Holliday, 1923
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CHAINS OF THE SEA: The Movie
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Strange and delightful news!
My late friend Gardner Dozois' novella, "Chains of the Sea," has been optioned for a movie. I know that there were nibbles on various works when he was alive, but I believe this is the first story to get this far in the process.
The back-story of how the novella came to the attention of the filmmakers after being discovered by the UFO Disclosure community would certainly have made Gardner laugh. You can read all about it here.
Gardner's story is delicate, haunting, and beautifully written. And it has aliens. You can find it in any of his short fiction collections.
And for those who are interested in literary footnotes . . .
The title for my novel, Stations of the Tide, did not come easily. It had the unfortunate working title of Sea-Change, and I and everyone I knew put a lot of work into coming up with possible alternatives--dozens and maybe even hundreds of them--before coming up with one that made me happy. (All the seasoned writers reading this are right now nodding their heads in wry sympathy.) At one point, while I was writing it, I told Gardner that Chains of the Sea would be the perfect title if it wasn't already his.
"Go ahead, use it!" he said. "It's not doing me any good."
I didn't, of course. But that was so typically Gardner. However, in my novel, in the background of the main plot, there are snatches of a telenovela that everyone is watching while they wait for the sea to swallow up the Tidewater. I never gave the name of the show, but in my mind and in my notes as well, it was called Chains of the Sea.
I told Gardner that but, of course, he wasn't impressed.
Above: photo credit: Ellen Levy Finch, distributed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License version 1.2
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Remembering Frog City
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Look what Sean found in the basement! A plastic tub containing his blocks from back when he was a little boy. Shown above is only a small fraction of them. The rest are still in the tub.
You'll have noticed that these aren't ordinary blocks. Our friend, Gene Olmsted, was making wooden toys at the time, and he dropped off a huge bag of wood scraps, thinking we could burn them in our wood stove.
Instead, Sean and I built a towering edifice on the kitchen table (Sean did most of the design work; I was grunt labor), a mighty city hours in the making that involved every single wooden block we had. Then, when it was done, Sean placed an origami frog at its heart explaining that, "The city is so powerful that it can only be ruled by The Frog!"
Imagine Marianne's astonishment when she came home from work that evening.
And, as sometimes happens . . .
Years later, I met Pete Abrams, the illustrious artist-cartoonwriter of Sluggy Freelance. When he offered to draw one of his characters, I requested Frog, who is small, angry, very articulate, occasionally evil, and a frog. Then I told him the above story to explain why.
Pete remembered the story, too. I know because in a later comic, he claims a city, saying that "It is so powerful that it can only be ruled by the frogs!!!"
Alas, Frog's claim on the city only lasted for a panel or two. At the time, I very much wanted to buy the original of that particular strip but couldn't figure out how to get in touch with Abrams.
Oh, well. At least Sean and I got to make a small contribution to Web comics culture. I'm proud of that.
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"Elle nous a épargné une Troisième Guerre mondiale"
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I'm in print again! Well, sort of. The French SF magazine Bifrost has a special section in issue 115 dedicated to James Tiptree, Jr./Alice Sheldon with many articles about her work and life. One of which, titled "Elle nous a épargné une Troisième Guerre mondiale: Gardner Dozois se souvient," is an excerpt from an interview I did with Gardner about his friendship with Alice Sheldon, by correspondence until her pen name was stripped away from her and she was revealed to be a woman, and also by phone afterward. (She would call him up occasionally late at night when holding a gun and contemplating suicide.) The full interview appeared as a chapbook by Henry Wessells' imprint, Temporary Culture, under the title She Saved Us from World War Three.
The title is not an exaggeration. Sheldon was working as a photo analyst for the CIA when suddenly missile launchers started appearing across the Siberian tundra. The experts were panicking and prepared to recommend a defensive first strike against the USSR. But Sheldon was able to prove that the "missile launchers" were actually hay ricks.
Which may make her the most important science fiction writer ever--though not for her science fiction, impressive as it was.
And if you're curious . . .
There are still, as of this posting, 26 copies available of the Temporary Culture chapbook. It's an interesting item, containing not only my interview with Gardner but also two letters that Sheldon wrote, one revealing her gender and another expressing her relief that he was still her friend. The letters are also reproduced (with Tiptree's signature purple typewriter sink) in fold-out form.
If this is the sort of thing that interests you, can find more information here.
And, incidentally . . .
I interviewed Gardner about his relationship with Tiptreeand Sheldon in 2015. Three years later, Gardner Dozois was dead. If you know someone whose memories should be preserved, I urge you to hop to it. The years slide by more quickly than you'd think.
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