Chip.

I don't remember how I first met Samuel R. Delany, the science fiction writer known as Chip to his friends.  I think my parents had something to do with it.  I know I proselytized endlessly to them about Chip and other writers of SF's New Wave, which was then at its cusp.  And my parents knew another SF writer, Tom Disch (though again, I have no idea how), so I suspect it was through Tom's auspices that Chip came over for dinner one evening.  From that evening forward for the next three years until I moved to Los Angeles, I did everything I could to be at Chip's side, or in his ear via the phone, as much of the time as possible.  I was 14 years old and as thick as a plank, and it is a testimony to Chip's overflowing generosity of spirit that he tolerated me, because good lord I must have been an annoying little twerp.


For the past few months I've been reading Chip's collection of essays, interviews and letters, On Writing -- slowly, slowly, to prolong the experience as much as possible  -- as of course it's had me thinking about those three years, during which Chip and I...

Shot a movie.

Saw a revival of Busby Berkeley's "The Gang's All Here."

Attended a couple of Clarion Workshops.

Saw Terry Riley perform "A Rainbow in Curved Air" live.

Saw Sam Peckinpah's "Straw Dogs" one-and-a-half times.  (We came in late and saw the last 40 minutes -- the nerve-wracking siege of the farmhouse; as the lights came up we were both clutching the arms of our seats, and Chip said, "Gee, I hope the first part of the movie is as good!")

Spent a lot of time talking.

(I also think I dragged him to see the musical "Follies," then in its original Broadway run, but that could be a trick of memory -- I know I wanted him to see it.) 


From 1969 to 1972 I felt as though any day that did not have some form of interaction with Chip was a day wasted.  When asked if I had a mentor, I always point to Chip. He is a great teacher and I learned more about writing from him than any other human being; but I think it was really his friendship and his far-ranging interests, that affected me so deeply at a time in my life when I was absorbing influences like a sponge.  Whatever lack of shallowness I can lay claim to, I owe to Chip.  Reading "On Writing" 37 years after those experiences, it amazes me how much there still is to learn from him.

Okay. That's weird.

From an unpublished novella called "Wonderland," which I finished in 1999:

"Her words seemed to thaw out some sort of ice dam inside of me..."

From Richard Russo's That Old Cape Magic, published this year:

"[He] felt some ice dam in his heart break apart..."

Okay, maybe he says it better than me, but still... Get out of my head, Russo!

I won't say my story's better, but it does have lots more time-travelling, senseless killing, half-baked superheroes from the future, revelations of a higher intelligence in the universe and playing of the game "Monopoly" than Russo's book. (Both have marital breakups in them, though the one in my story only lasts for about ten seconds.) I'm just sayin'.

Best sellers.

I just received an email from Foyles Bookstore (the place where we bought all those books when we were in London), and among the new-release announcements was a list of the chain's top ten bestselling books. At the top was that new Dan Brown thing, of course, but I was surprised to see the great Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities at number nine. Wow -- a 35-year-old structuralist postmodern meta-novel on a bestseller list in 2009! I love England.

There were some other good books in the bottom nine, which makes me wonder if Foyles' clientele is divided between people who read Dan Brown and people who read real books.

Of course, a more likely reason for a best-seller list crammed with good books is that nobody buys books anymore unless they're written by Dan Brown, and the titles that actually manage to sell a copy or two the rest of the week make up the rest of the list.

Current reading. (Like you were really interested.)

Recently:

Reviving Ophelia by Mary Pipher. (Research.)

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kaddath by H.P. Lovecraft. (The old Ballantine Adult Fantasy edition from 1970 – and it’s the first time I’ve read it!)

The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas.

Gothic! (YA short-story collections; more research and a MAJOR slog.)

The Writer’s Tale by Russell T. Davies. The Doctor Who writing process, by a genius who’s not afraid to burn his bridges.

Currently:

Ophelia Speaks by Sara Schandler. (More research.)

Vampire Academy by Richelle Mead. (Yet more research.)

About Writing by Samuel R. Delany. (Chip’s astounding knowledge, erudition, and writing chops have always been a source of profound irritation for me.)

The Jewish War by Josephus. Found my father’s copy of this old Penguin – printed in Isreal! – last June in NYC. You can only read a few pages at a time. Dense, but chock full of violence, treachery, depravity, and other Roman goodness, written by one of the most fascinating characters in literature – a Jewish historian and commander of the Jewish army in Galilee who became a Roman citizen; upholder of Jewish tradition to the Romans, Roman apologist to the Jews, and a guy for whom the phrase “You can’t please everybody” apparently held no terror. I am reading his famous account preparatory to reading Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel Josephus.

A bucketload of plays by my friend Rob Shearman.

The first draft of Audry’s novel.

Next from the stack:

Blood Promise by Richelle Mead. (That I might better understand what flips Audry out.)

The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers. (Penguin Read Red, loaded with win!)

Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenter & Seymour by J.D. Salinger. (Can’t believe I never read this one.)

Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link.

Ridiculous! The Theatrical Life and Times of Charles Ludlam by David Kaufman.

…unless I change my mind and grab something else instead.

The dumbest thing we've done this week.

The other day we were out and about in London. We got caught up in the midst of the Palace Horse Guard for the second day in a row...


...And encountered the gayest cab in all of London.


We soon found ourselves on the fringe of the West End...and street after street of little antiquarian bookshops.




Hey, look! They have Tintin! And P.G. Wodehouse!




Evidently Daleks are bibliophiles. (This is an original 1960's prop.)


At last we could restrain ourselves no longer. Despite the fact that we're travelling with two heavy suitcases that are already overweight, we bought books. Loads and loads of lovely books. We discovered some fascinating fantasy/historical novels we'd never heard of before, and I discovered a new line from Penguin called Read Red. It's a series of classic adventure stories (Treasure Island, the Sherlock Holmes books, Verne, Burroughs, The 39 Steps, etc.) with fantastic retro Boy's-Own-Adventure style covers that look old but are in fact new designs. Well, you know about me and Penguins; I wound of getting every book in this series I could find -- even though I had older copies of several of them.

As soon as we got back to the room, Audry took pictures of our booty. (As always, click on each photo for a better view.)


The 5 books on the upper right are Penguin Read Reds. Check out the cover of Tarzan -- it's freaking awesome!


More Read Reds. And I've been meaning to read "Gone With the Wind" for years, so naturally I had to fly to England to buy a copy.


Audry got that fantastic retro-Penguin pencil set in the middle. To its left is an old school Penguin-themed notebook she got to use them with.


Needless to say we are REALLY looking forward to lugging these things back to the States.

Penguins

My belated discovery that H.P. Lovecraft has joined the ranks of the immortals in the Penguin Classics series got me thinking about Penguin books in general, and this book in particular:


I've always been fond of a well-designed book (I'm particularly partial to almost any hardbound from Knopf in the 70's, and similarly vintaged Vintage paperbacks), but there is only one publishing company whose total output would be worthy of an in-depth design survey. It's hard to think of any other publisher with as distinctive a line-look as Penguin. They pretty much own the color orange, and a half-dozen or so sans-serif typefaces as well.

I've always been partial to the English Library series, with their orange spines, their Helvetica logotype, and their beautiful cover illustrations (always a piece of art from the era in which the book was written, usually from a picture library called Snark International). Given a choice at the bookstore between a Signet, Bantam or Penguin edition of the same title, I usually reached for the Penguin. If I look over my bookshelf (which basically involves rotating my chair 180 degrees from my desk), I can't help but thinking there's a lot of orange there. (And some black too, for the translated editions.)



The Penguin Design book is a fascinating read if, like me, you're into such things as the Corvenus family of typefaces and horizontal tripartite cover grids, but I was disappointed to find virtually nothing on the English Library series in the entire book. Those beloved orange spines which have graced the shelves of every house I have lived in for the past 38 years -- who designed them? What were the production standards? And what the heck was Snark International, anyway?

Fortunately, I was able to find this terrific article online by Googling (ta-da!) "Snark International." Turns out the Classics look was the work of Germano Facetti, who was Penguin's art director from 1960 through 1972, and who had founded (ta-da!) Snark International a few years before joining Penguin. A touch of nepotism in the constant usage of his former company's product? Maybe. But in odd moments I still reach for an orange spine just for the pleasure of seeing one of those great paintings or sketches from the Snark library. (And often wind up just rereading the whole book.)

A small sampling of Facetti's masterpieces:

Classics

So I have been re-reading H.P. Lovecraft, mainly because I haven't read him lately, but also because I felt it was time to upgrade my tattered old Lancer paperback collections from the 60's with the spiffy collections from Penguin that feature copious annotation by HPL expert S.T. Joshi. So eager was I to jump into the lair of the Elder Gods that I only just now noticed two little words on the cover that I find absolutely astonishing: "Penguin" and "Classics."

Sweet fancy Moses, the world has turned! Was there ever more of an outsider than Lovecraft? Yet this writer of cheapjack pulp horror, whose work was so obscure that his friends had to create their own publishing house to keep it in print after his death, has been placed -- by the editors at Penguin, at least -- on the same shelf as Dickens, the Brontes, Thackeray, Austen, Twain, and Ben Jonson! There couldn't be a greater recognition of his work if Kazuo Ishiguro were to take a stab at writing a Cthulhu Mythos story. Not bad for a guy who never saw any of his work professionally published in book form while he was alive.

(I realize this mainstreaming of genre fiction has been going on for a while -- probably since the 90's, when Vintage Books started publishing guys like Alfred Bester and Phil Dick. But it hadn't really penetrated my thick, defensive skull until I looked at that Lovecraft cover.)

In my subsequent lonely wanderings on the Internet in search of Lovecraftiana, I came across a website called The Modern Word, which may be the most brilliant literary website or the most pretentious, I haven't quite sorted it out yet. It contains a section on "experimental writers," and there to my delight I found listed not just the usual suspects, like Barthelme, Borges, Becket, Pynchon and Robbe-Grillet, but also a host of friends and idols: Chip Delany, Mervyn Peake, Mike Moorcock, J.G. Ballard and, of course, Lovecraft. Not all of them considered "experimental" writers by the cognoscenti, but they all should be. (And frankly, Sturgeon, Ellison, Tom Disch, and quite a few others belong on the list.)

Is this proof that the phantasmagoric (by which I mean fantasy, horror, and -- don't hit me -- SF) has become the dominant literature of the past hundred years? Some of the most mainstream of writers have tried their hand at it -- Updike, Phillip Roth, even J.D. Salinger stuck his toe in the pool of the fantastic, so to speak. The past century has seen such tectonic shifts in technology and culture -- a million eruptions of information, the destruction of cultural space, the rise of hyperlogic. Who else can vanquish the tyranny of the rational and speak of the true human condition, other than crypto-surrealists like Lovecraft, Tolkein, Asimov, Stanislaw Lem, Lord Dunsany, James Blish, Roger Zelazny, Angela Carter, Alfred Bester and Phil Dick? Or for that matter, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Len Wein, Alan Moore or Wendy and Richard Pini? And if you were to stand up and shout that J.G. Ballard's "The Atrocity Exhibition" was the greatest book of the past 50 years, well, I for one would stand beside you and help you duck the brickbats.

So does Lovecraft deserve to be placed in the same league as George Elliot or Thomas Hardy, as Penguin's designation suggests? In my mind, he has always been there.

Oh, Howard Phillips, you outcast, you leper, you proud and self-designated amateur, you whom Edmund Wilson called "a hack," if you could have just a glimpse of what you have wrought with your provincialism, your xenophobia, and your horror of miscegenation. If you had known that one day your work would have sold in the millions, that your name would be as synonymous as Poe's with a specific brand of existential horror, that children would play with stuffed Cthulhus, would it have fractured your mind? Or has the world itself succumbed to the madness which devoured so many of your narrators?

Horrifying Statistic of the Week

In the first quarter of 2009, one in every six books sold in the U.S. was written by Stephenie Meyer.

More proof, as if any was needed, that 14-year-old girls run the universe.

L.A. Times Festival of Books

Every year the Times sponsors this shindig on the UCLA campus, packing the grounds with tents containing publishers, booksellers, authors and others. Hadn't been to one since '05, when we went with my sister. Plus my friend Bob Crais was doing a panel, so off we set for Westwood. (As always, click on the images to see a larger view.)

Audry sez: "I think it's that way!"


You would never know the publishing industry was in so much trouble. The place was packed. Seemed like twice as many people as the last time I was here.


Ray is in that tent somewhere...


A row of booths by Royce Hall.


I totally love Taschen Books, so of course I had to stop by their booth. A whole book about colored vinyl and picture discs!! I gotta get me that!


Heading down the majestic steps to the lower portion of the campus revealed even more booths.


Later in the day we caught up with Bob. He was so overwhelmed by the sight of me that he collapsed into my wife's arms.


"Hey -- isn't that Tony Robbins!?"


The story of how I met Bob is kind of interesting, according to my mother. In 1977 I got a gig writing for "Quincy M.E." I never got past story and assumed the project was killed. A couple of years later, I got a call from this guy named Bob, who had just taken over as story-editor of the show. He told me he'd been going through all the old unproduced scripts and came across the script the previous editor had written based on my story, and would I like to see it? (I said, sure -- and was highly gratified to see that it was one of the all-time great stinkers. Serves him right for cutting me off!) Anyway, Bob and I got to talking; turned out we'd both been to the Clarion SF writer's workshop (at different times and places); also turned out we lived about a couple of blocks away from one another. And so a friendship was born. Oddly enough, ten years later, when we both moved out of our respective houses, our new houses were also a couple of blocks away from one another.

Anyway, back to the book festival. Here's Bob during his signing:


And here's Bob before his signing. Way, way before his signing. Like a few decades before his signing. The heck with the Sexiest Writer Alive. Say hello to the most adorable writer alive!


Oh, well. None of us looked cool back in the Seventies. Here he is in action today: