I’ll be heading over to Maryland shortly to help prepare for tomorrow’s memorial service for my mother-in-law, but first, a mercenary message. My wife is selling more Silver Age comic book artwork through Heritage, and the latest five pieces went up late last Sunday night in an auction that will last until this Sunday night.

So if you like 1960s’ DC artwork by Bruno Premiani, Ross Andru, Mike Esposito, Gil Kane, Sid Greene, Dick Dillin and others, read on, and click through the links if you’d care to bid.

Bruno Premiani Doom Patrol #93 page 18 (DC, 1965)

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I’ve been somewhat silent on social media this week, because my mother-in-law of 36 years, Margaret E. Vartanoff, passed away Saturday morning, the day before her 96th birthday. So my mood has been glum, and there hasn’t been much I’ve felt like sharing. But I thought I should pop up to share this.

Here’s how she appeared in yesterday’s Washington Post, with information on Saturday’s Requiem Mass, should any care to attend.

Here’s the full photo from which that image was cropped. It’s her formal portrait taken at Christmas in 1931. (more…)

My recent posts have been rather self-serving, what with suggestions you take part in the auctions selling my wife’s and my sister-in-law’s comic book art. So I figured I’d better make a post that could help others, if for no other reason than to balance out the karma.

Luckily, this also actually happens to be for a good cause—the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship Fund. Check out the press release below, which I should have shared with you days ago, except for life being too, too busy.

I plan on buying some tickets … and I hope you will, too.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 3, 2010
CONTACTS: Special Events – Jenn Brissett and K. Tempest Bradford

EREADER FUNDRAISER LIVE NOVEMBER 5

The Carl Brandon Society announces a prize drawing to support the The Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship Fund.

The Carl Brandon Society, an organization dedicated to racial and ethnic diversity in speculative fiction, will hold a prize drawing of five eReaders to benefit the Butler Scholarship, a fund that sends two emerging writers of color to the Clarion writers workshops annually.

In keeping with the Society’s support of literature from and about people of color, the prizes include five eReaders: two Barnes & Noble Nooks, two Kobo Readers, and one Alex eReader from Spring Design. Each eReader will come pre-loaded with books, short stories and essays by writers of color from the speculative fiction field. Writers include: N. K. Jemisin, Nisi Shawl, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Terence Taylor, Ted Chiang, Shweta Narayan, Chesya Burke, Moondancer Drake, Saladin Ahmed, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz and more. (more…)

Another month has come and gone, and you know what that means—it’s time to harvest the October dreams from my Twitter feed.

Making guest appearances in my dreamworld this month were Nalo Hopkinson, Len Wein, Harlan Ellison, Madonna, Paul Levitz, Adam Baldwin, and many others. (Including—who knows?—maybe you!)

I dreamt I was being chased by a high school gang drawn like Archie characters, and I was only saved due to the intervention of Miss Grundy. 30 Oct

I dreamt that as I wandered the hallways of a strange hotel, hundreds of people dressed like Alice in Wonderland characters passed by. 29 Oct

I dreamt I bumped into an ex-Syfy employee in a parking lot, then another, and another, until it was a noisy, crowded backslapping reunion. 28 Oct

I dreamt I was trying to retrieve a package of art–including a George McManus Bringing Up Father–that had been misdelivered to Rose Fox. 27 Oct

I dreamt that I woke from a dream and wrote it down, so when I actually woke I didn’t think I needed to write it down. So it’s lost. 26 Oct

I wrote this down to help me remember a dream come morning: “punch commission guy arrested carried away.” But the words mean nothing now. 26 Oct

I dreamt I went to the bank, and my loan officer turned out to be an actress from Gatz, a bit sheepish to be recognized at her day job. 25 Oct

I dreamt I ran into one of my Clarion students, who grew upset when I told him I didn’t understand the ending to his latest story in F&SF. 25 Oct

I dreamt I threw a rent party in my decrepit NYC apartment. But by 3:00 a.m. on Monday morning, I tried (and failed) to shut it down. 25 Oct

I dreamt I attended Worldcon and watched Mike Willmoth furiously complete the program grid for the _following_ year’s con on a whiteboard. 25 Oct (more…)

A couple of days ago, I told you about some Silver Age comics art my wife was auctioning off through Heritage Auction Galleries to help fund a future trip to Machu Picchu. The bidding begins today, I think at 11:00 p.m. EST, with the auction ending next Sunday at the same time.

But it strikes me I should also show some love for my sister-in-law, who has eight amazing originals in the auction that some of you might be interested in. Check them out below, and if you know of anyone who might want to own these particular pieces, pass it on!

First up, a 1966 Ben Casey daily comic strip by Neal Adams.

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While attending the World Fantasy Convention in Columbus last weekend, in addition to escaping the hotel to hit all three restaurants spotlighted by Adam Richman of Man v. Food, I also snuck away to visit the James Thurber house. I’m afraid I didn’t really feel Thurber’s presence there—I might as well have been visiting the O. Henry house that I toured during the 2008 Nebulas.

It was a certain house of a certain era, and while it was a very nice house, it seemed as if it could have been any house. (I felt differently when I toured homes belonging to Thomas Wolfe, Jack London, and Carl Sandburg. Those writers seemed to be looking over my shoulders.)

Oddly, the thing I enjoyed most about the visit was a framed letter I discovered in a small room being used as an office. It was from Milton Caniff, and I think, based on the date, that it was written as part of a fund-raising drive when the Thurber house was in need of restoration.

Anyway, for those who love Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon—or just Caniff’s familiar handwriting—check out the letter below.

You helped send Irene and me to the Melbourne Worldcon this year by buying some of my artwork last year. Maybe you were the one who bought my Bob Stanley oil painting, or the Johnny Romita comic-book cover, or maybe even those signed prints by Berni Wrightson, Jeffrey Jones, Bruce Jones, and Mike Kaluta. If so, thanks!

But this year, we have a new destination in mind—Machu Picchu!—and therefore some new … well, old … well, let’s just call it additional artwork to sell. This time around these six pieces are from Irene’s collection, and they’ll be on sale from Nov. 7 through Nov. 14 through Heritage Auction Galleries.

First up, a cute page by Dick Dillin and Sid Greene from Justice League of America #61 (1968). It may only be 2/3 of a page due to a house ad, but it manages to pack a lot into a small space—Hawkman, the Atom, Green Arrow, and Superman. (And the Penguin, too!) Bidding will begin here Sunday.

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Considering this morning’s political landscape, particularly the election of Rand Paul (at least my adopted state of West Virginia elected a Democrat, which I wasn’t confident would happen), I am reminded of what H.P. Lovecraft had to say about Republicans in 1936.

The following quote is taken from S. T. Joshi’s Lovecraft biography A Dreamer and a Visionary, and was brought up recently on an email loop in which I take part:

“As for the Republicans—how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical ‘American heritage’…) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.”

Replace the word “Republican” with “Tea Partier” and you get a sense of how I’m feeling today …

I appeared on the panel “The Moral Distance Between the Author and the Work” yesterday afternoon at the World Fantasy Convention in Columbus, along with Eric Flint, Nancy Kress, Paul Witcover, Kathryn Cramer, and Jack Skillingstead.

Minutes before we were to begin, I forced my Flip camcorder on Andy Duncan, who was kind enough to record the whole thing. The room was packed, with several hundred people present, and the discussion grew so lively near the end that we almost failed to yield the room.

Here’s how the panel was described in the Pocket Program:

What do we make of good art by bad people, or at least people of whom we disapprove? Richard Wagner was a particularly vile anti-Semite, but he still wrote “Kill Da Wabbit!” and other great music. Should we listen? The official Nazi film industry made one very good fantasy film (BARON MUNCHAUSEN, to which the Terry Gilliam version owes a good deal). Should we watch this? What about an author who is a convicted child molester? Should we read his novel? CAN we read it for itself? Is it possible to truly experience any form of art as a thing until itself, rather than the product of its creator?

The whole thing is embedded below.

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Here are two more readings I attended at the World Fantasy Convention in Columbus, bringing the total up to seven. I’d planned to catch one more, but my visit to the James Thurber House caused me to miss Geoff Landis. Sorry, Geoff!

But here’s Jeffrey Ford:

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