Last month, I shared a few covers from my 1971 fanzine Call It … Fate—but what’s inside turns out to be a little more important. Flipping through one issue, I found my convention report for the first of Phil Seuling’s Second Sundays, a monthly convention designed to part fans from their money during the gap between Phil’s famed July 4th cons.

Since I haven’t been able to find a write-up of that first Second Sunday anywhere else online, I thought I’d share it here. Though I don’t give the exact date of the event in the text, according to a calendar, it would have taken place November 14.

Here are the best scans I could get off the ancient hectographed pages. (Did I get my terminology right this time, Patrick?)

But since, even after you’ve clicked them several times to view full size, you probably won’t be able to read them easily, I’ve transcribed my 16-year-old self’s fanboy squealing. (Though were we even called fanboys yet back then?) (more…)

Frederick Seidel, whose first book of poetry, Final Solutions, caused a controversy in 1962, was interviewed for the Fall 2009 issue of The Paris Review.

(As I’ve explained before, I have a lifetime subscription to that magazine, instigated by my wife as a present way back in 1979. The gift that keeps on giving!)

One of the questions dealt with the poetic influence of and his friendship with Poet Laureate Robert Lowell.

An unexpected name popped up in Seidel’s answer:

“He was my mentor and a friend and certainly an influence. I went to interview him for The Paris Review in 1959. It took two days, maybe four or five hours a day—an enormous amount of effort and time. At a certain moment late in the first day, my friend Whitney Ellsworth, who was manning the tape recorder, said, I’m afraid we’ve got to start over. It turned out he hadn’t had the machine on. That’s when I got to know Lowell! We hit it off, and he became a good friend.”

Unless there’s some other Whitney Ellsworth I don’t know about, this means that the comic-book editor of Action Comics, Adventure Comics, Batman, Detective Comics and Superman in the ’40s and mid-’50s, who later became the producer and story editor on the television series The Adventures of Superman, was also hanging around with the poetry circle of the period. Is this something that was commonly known?

On the other hand, he might not have had an interest in poetry at all. Maybe it’s just that Ellsworth had been a classmate of Seidel’s, and was also one of those early adopters of the ’50s who fooled around with reel-to-reel tape recorders, and so was called into service because of that.

Does anyone out there have further information on Ellsworth’s non-comics background? I’ve been unable to turn anything up online.

In any case, it’s an interesting case of six degrees of separation, and a piece of comics history I knew nothing about.

As I wrote earlier, I attended SPX (the Small Press Expo) on Saturday, September 26. Sure, I wanted to see the artists and their newest mini-comics, but the most important thing I wanted to do that day was hear “Gahan Wilson in the Spotlight.” I recorded his hour-long talk, which means that now you can hear it, too!

It’s audio only, so you’ll miss out on the rubber-faced cartoonist’s body language as he hams it up, but I think you’ll find the sound of the master’s voice worthwhile all by itself. I snapped the photo below while he was speaking. If anyone out there knows how to make his lips move like Clutch Cargo, feel free!

I just finished reading the wonderful Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers!, edited by Sean Howe. Sean sent me a copy after he interviewed me about the good old days in the Marvel Comics Bullpen for a book he’s doing on the history of Marvel, and now that I’ve had a chance to read it, I regret not having come across it on my own when it came out back in 2004.

It features essays on comics by 17 writers such as Jonathan Lethem, Brad Meltzer, Aimee Bender, and Greil Marcus, and each of them spoke to me. It’s as if the book was written for me alone. Of course, that shouldn’t stop you from tracking down a copy, since if you’re bothering to read my blatherings here, you’ll probably find it enjoyable, too.

The most moving essay in the book was “Oui, Je Regrette Presque Tout” by Glen David Gold, which concerns his conflicted feelings about collecting. It begins—”All stories of collecting are about self-loathing, self-love, and self-deception, confused with the piquant cologne of loathing, love, and deception that drenches the object so desired.” The Lethem piece on Jack Kirby and growing up in Brooklyn comes a close second. (I think you can also find it here over at the London Review of Books, though that might only be an alternate version.) (more…)

I received my program schedule from the gurus over at Capclave, which will be held two weeks from now. If you’ll be attending, here’s where you’ll be able to find me.

And if you’re looking for David Louis Edelman, remember—I’m not him, and he’s not me!

All of my panels will take place on Saturday, Oct. 16:

10:00 a.m.: Character Management
Do you control your characters or do they go off on their own? Do you collaborate with your characters or do they ignore your outline? What do you do when they seem to be diverting from the plot? What if a minor character wants to go off on her own? Who controls the ending?
(with Allen Wold, Brenda Clough, Virginia DeMarce, Larry Hodges, and Tom Mccabe)

1:00 p.m.: New writers
How did you get started in the field? How are you shaping your career? What advice would you give new writers?
(with Larry Hodges, John Joseph Adams, John Betancourt, Tad Daley, and Shelia Williams)

3:30 p.m.: Reading

10:00 p.m.: Works I Didn’t Write
What books or stories did you consider writing and decide against doing or start but not finish? Why did you discard them? Are there certain topics/areas you would not want to write even if you get an idea? Have you ever come back to a discarded idea?
(with Alan Smale, Diane Arrelle, and Lawrence Watt-Evans)

I’ve never done a Capclave panel as late at night as the last one. It will be interesting to see how many of you show up—and whether I’ll be still be coherent twelve hours after my first panel of the day!

I received an email this morning from Jennifer Swift‘s husband Timothy Bartel containing the details of her memorial service. He wrote:

The place, date and time of the main memorial service for Jennifer Swift (7 March 1955 30 September 2009) have been arranged:

As Jennifer made a substantial contribution to the work of so many charitable organisations, not least with her journalism, her family requests that donations should be made to one or more of these organisations in lieu of flowers. As I sift through her records, I shall compile a list of these charities and send it to you in due course.

I won’t be able to make the transatlantic trip, but I’m passing on this information for those who can or who already live nearby. (more…)

Next year’s World Science Fiction Convention will be held in Melbourne, which will make it the fourth international Worldcon in six years. (There was Glasgow in ’05, Yokohama in ’07, and Montreal earlier this year.) And international trips can be expensive, especially when they’re held on the other side of the world, because unless you’re Jay Lake, you’d like to stay for longer than 24 hours.

I decided I didn’t want to go into debt for the coming trip, nor did I want to save up for it over the next 11 months. Instead, I’ve decided to sell of some of my original artwork, as I think I’ve already mentioned here. (Or was it over on twitter? Or at facebook? They’re all blurring together, I’m afraid … )

In any case, the first piece that’s being let loose back into the world is the original Bob Stanley oil painting to the paperback book cover below. I’ve owned it for at least 35 years, but now it must roam free. Bidding is open over at the Heritage Auction Galleries site, and will continue for another three weeks.

Bob Stanley was one of the top cover paperback artists of the ’50s for mysteries and westerns, so if you’ve ever wanted to own one of his originals, here’s your chance—while helping send me to Worldcon at the same time!

I woke this morning to learn that Jennifer Swift, whom I’d met in 1979 when we both attended the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop in East Lansing, passed away this morning at 1:15 a.m. after a rapid decline. Her husband, Timothy Bartel, wrote her many friends to pass on the sad news. A memorial service will be held in Oxford, with details to be provided later.

Jennifer had a wonderful laugh. She was intelligent, witty, and grew into a talented writer. She published excellent stories in Amazing, Asimov’s, F&SF, and Interzone. She’d also written articles and essays on bioethics for The Guardian, New Scientist, The Daily Telegraph, and other publications.

Soon after Clarion, Jennifer emigrated to Oxford with her husband, and due to the transatlantic nature of the friendship, we mostly kept up on the details of each other’s lives via e-mail. We only managed to get together in the flesh twice since Clarion, both times in Glasgow, both meetings involving lengthy meals in Indian restaurants. It was odd that these two lunches—in 1995 and 2005—only came about due to the scheduling of World Science Fiction Conventions. Last time we were together (which is when I snapped the picture below), we joked that we hoped we wouldn’t have to wait until a 2015 Glasgow Worldcon to see each other again. Sadly, that next meeting will never take place, at least not in this world.

Jennifer will be much in my thoughts today.

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Usually, my weekends are not that much different from my weekdays—it’s work, work, work, whether on SCI FI Wire, or my own writing, or the house and yard. After all, it’s almost time to start putting another batch of daffodils in the ground!

About half the months of the year, I’m off to a convention of some kind. During July, I’m usually off to two—Readercon and the San Diego Comic-Con. But it just occurred to me that I’ll be breaking some sort of record with October, because I’m scheduled to be making peregrinations four of the month’s five weekends!

The second weekend in October, I’ll be going to Edgar Allan Poe’s funeral. As much as I like hearing Ellen Datlow speak, I have to admit that I’m most looking forward to discovering what Alfred Hitchcock, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, H.P. Lovecraft, Jules Verne, and Alexander Dumas have to say.

The third weekend in October, I’ll be attending Capclave in Rockville, Maryland.

The fourth weekend in October, I’ll be accompanying Irene to the New Jersey Romance Writers Conference. I won’t be attending the actual con, but I’ll use the weekend to have another reunion with editors from my high-school newspaper. Plus, once Irene’s done with her con, we’ll be taking Marie Severin out to lunch.

And the fifth weekend in October, I’ll be heading off to San Jose for this year’s World Fantasy Convention.

Too bad there’s nothing going on the first weekend in October, or else I’d have a Grand Slam!

Let me know whether I can expect to see any of you at any of these events.

There were hundreds (actually, probably more like thousands) of mini-comics for sale in Bethesda at SPX, but I only came home with about a dozen of them.

My rules for avoiding becoming overwhelmed were that: 1) I only picked up a book when something about the cover made me curious, and 2) I only bought that book when something about the insides made me smile.

So I’d walk the aisles, scanning the tables for an image or title that would make me go “Hmmmm … ”

To those first two rules, I guess I should add a third—that I’m only going to tell you about those comics and creators I actually enjoyed enough to want to track down more of their work and whose work I think you should track down, too.

East 9th St.

What caught my eye about the unfoldable comic by John Mejias was the dark ink and stark art of the handmade woodcut print. What made me buy it was that the punchline of the short strip made me smile. I thought of the incident he described as rather Pekar-esque in its pacing, though East 9th St. made me happy, which is something Pekar never does. Studying it further after I got home, I wished I bought more of his stuff. Luckily, you and I can both click to his online store.

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