While some of you may have been wearing buttons today proclaiming your support for Obama, McCain, or some third-party candidate, as for me, well, I decided long ago that I’d never sport a button for any candidate who was actually running at the time.

And so I wore my favorite political button of the ones I’ve managed to pick up over the years. I’d gotten this Hubert Humphrey button in 1968 after my Social Studies teacher at Junior High School 68, Mr. Botwinick, encouraged us all to take part in the political process.

When I was 13 and living in Canarsie, I joined the Thomas Jefferson Young Democratic Club and campaigned for Humphrey. I even once got a chance to shake his hand at a rally. And while putting up posters and handing out flyers all across Brooklyn, I got this beautifully designed button.

While digging into my button collection for this, I found many non-political ones which also had me feeling nostalgic. (more…)

In this morning’s dream, I’m very aware that I have an appointment to get together with Kim Newman at a specific time, but instead I find myself in the back seat of a moving car sorting potatoes. I’ve got about a bushel’s worth of baking potatoes in a paper bag, and I’m transferring them to a box, arranging them in neat rows as I do so. As I admire my handiwork, I suddenly realize that in the front of the car are Harlan and Susan Ellison. Harlan is driving, while Susan is in the passenger seat.

Susan tells me that she wished I’d have let them buy the potatoes, because there’s no way I could have found any as good as the ones they could have picked up. I insist that I’ve managed to find absolutely perfect potatoes. As Harlan drives, he reaches back so I can place one in his hand. He looks at it and says that he knows where to find better. He speeds up, while I wonder how long this is going to take and whether this trip is going to end with me standing up Kim Newman. (more…)

I dreamt this morning that I was once more back at the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. In the real world, I had attended as a student in 1979, and then returned to teach in 1999 and 2003, and in my sleep I was teaching again.

I had just arrived, and the administrator was giving me a tour of the facilities. We were on the floor of the dorm in which the students were housed, and I had to duck my head the entire time, because the ceiling was very low, much like floor 7 1/2 in the film Being John Malkovich. I was unable to stand up straight, and had to hunch over as I walked down the hall. Bemused by this, I told my guide that I didn’t remember the ceilings having been so low any of the previous times I’d been there. But I accepted the change.

At the end of the hall, we arrived at a student lounge where the ceilings were back to normal. Darrell Schweitzer was there. It turned out that he was going to be one of the teachers that year, which seemed strange to me, since I know that in reality he attended the workshop long, long ago, but I don’t think that he ever returned to teach there. We then headed toward the cafeteria for a breakfast with the students, and along the way I was amazed by how clean and well-decorated the walls were.

It was as if we were in a museum rather than a university building, with white walls adorned with framed book covers and science-fiction movie posters. I complimented my guide on how they’d changed the place since I was there last, and then suddenly, real life intruded in a way, as I realized that Clarion was no longer being held at Michigan State University, and I was therefore somewhere else. But in the dream, I couldn’t remember where I was. I had no idea what facility or even what state I was in. (more…)

Today’s mail brought yet another Marvel Comics’ hardcover which reprints an old comic story of mine—and at this point, they’re all old comic stories.

The book collects the adventures of such superheroes as Adam Warlock, Nova, Rocket Raccoon and others before they assembled in the 2006 Marvel Comics crossover Annihilation to battle Annihilus, the Super-Skrull, and other super villains.

My contribution to the volume was drawn by Mike Zeck and first appeared as a back-up story in a 1977 issue of Logan’s Run. It focused on an early battle between Drax the Destroyer and Thanos. This is the second time the story has been reprinted, as it also appeared in the trade paperback Silver Surfer: Rebirth of Thanos.

So many of my ’70s comic-book stories have been reprinted in recent years that I occasionally feel that old impulse surge up, and think that I’d like to publish something new in comics. I don’t know that I’ll ever try, because when ideas do pop into my head, they’re always for text-only short stories rather than anything that seems particularly suited for comics. But these reprints certainly do stoke that appetite even as they bring back good memories.

Every once in a while I skim through Russia: Beyond the Headlines, an occasional advertising supplement to the Washington Post which is sponsored by Rossiyskaya Gazeta. I tend to focus on the page devoted to books and publishing.

Yesterday’s issue contained an interview with Natasha Perova, who is the founder and publisher of GLAS New Russian Writing, which she has been editing since 1991.

The interviewer asked Perova the following question:

In many countries—for example, Sweden, America, Great Britain—the government supports the publication of books by national authors abroad. Does Russia doe something similar?

My reaction to this was … “Huh?”

Do we really do that? I’m aware of Voice of America, which reaches out via radio to foreign countries, and I know that the government has paid for pro-America articles to be published in Iraqi newspapers, but this is the first time I’ve ever heard of the U.S. supposedly subsidizing the overseas publication of translated works.

Does this question begin from an accurate premise? To what is this interviewer referring?

Any ideas?

I’ve long known that science fiction had a Thomas Edison connection, in that Ray Cummings, who wrote the classic novel The Girl in the Golden Atom, had worked for a time as Edison’s assistant.

But it turns out that there’s a second Edison connection, as I’ve just learned from the introduction to Bison Book’s Miles J. Breuer collection The Man with the Strange Head and Other Early Science Fiction Stories, which states that “it is worth noting that Gernsback’s associate editor, T. O’Connor Sloane, was Edison’s son-in-law.”

Interesting, but apparently not accurate. Wikipedia tells us that it was Sloane’s son who was Edison’s son-in-law, and not Sloane himself. And even though Wikipedia is known to be wrong from time to time, this wedding announcement from the December 3, 1912 issue of The New York Times backs them up. So unless T O’Connor Sloane married Madeleine Edison after his son John Eyre Sloan died or divorced her, the assertion Michael R. Page makes in his introduction is incorrect.

Regardless of that, I find it fascinating that two Edison associates played such important roles in the creation of early science fiction. I think a neat alternate-history story could be written about that.

And come to think of it, there’s actually at least one more connection SF has with Edison, in that since the SCI FI Channel is owned by General Electric, a company which more than a century ago was known as the Edison General Electric Company, I’m actually employed by the corporation Edison himself founded.

As I wrote earlier this week, during Sunday’s mini-reunion of editors and writers from my high-school newspaper, one of the attendees brought along a disk containing scans of many back issues of that student newspaper, Shorelines.

The cover of the October 22, 1971 issue—published when I was 16—featured the photo of me that you see at right in which I’m standing next to my social studies teacher, Daniel Weitz.

No story accompanied the photo; I guess the staff just thought that the sight of a student towering over his teacher was amusing.

The jacket I’m wearing—decorated with a “War is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things” patch on one arm, a peace symbol made up of studs on the back, and other hippie fashion accoutrements (I think that’s a “Frodo Lives” button on my chest, though the photo is too grainy for me to tell for sure)—can be seen in other photos of the time.

Sadly, that jacket no long exists—though I do still have one of my dashikis and a few of my headbands. And with Halloween coming up, who knows? It might be time to wear them again!

I picked up a free copy of the Bethel Bulletin at a truckstop during our New Jersey trip last weekend, and as I read the newspaper aloud to Irene while we continued our drive, its quirky headlines and leads kept cracking us up.

I enjoyed its plainspoken prose. These editors don’t hold back in the slightest from letting you know exactly how they feel.

Here are a few examples:

PUNKS PILFER PURSE FROM VEHICLE
Goons swiped a purse that was under the driver’s seat of a vehicle that was unlocked in the parking lot of …

LOWLIFES DENT VEHICLE DOOR
Goons dented the driver’s side door on a vehicle on …

KNUCKLEHEADS STEAL DIRT BIKE
Losers stole a dirt bike that was for sale …

The mix of lowlifes, goons, knuckleheads and punks kept us laughing, but the best headline added a pun to the mix, as follows:

Kudos to the editors of the Bethel Bulletin for putting their cards on the table and helping us to pass the time on a long trip!

Instead of heading directly back home after the end of Irene’s romance convention, we ventured even further afield, out onto Long Island for a visit with old friend Marie Severin. Irene and I have known Marie professionally since 1974, dating back to when we started on staff at Marvel Comics, where Irene was lucky enough to have had a few more months of Marie than I did due to her earlier start date.

Actually, since the two of us were fans long before we turned pro, we both ran into her even before that. I know that I did, in my guise as annoying kid fanboy. Anyway you look at it, Marie has been in our lives for more than a third of a century.

For those who’ve never experienced Marie up close and personal, she’s always brought to mind the following equivalency: Marie was to Marvel Comics as Rose Marie was to the Dick Van Dyke Show. She’s a dame with a zany sense of humor.

She’s also the nicest person either Irene or I ever met in comics. Too much time has passed since our last visit with her, since we don’t get out to Long Island very often, so we were happy that Irene’s con got us within striking distance. (more…)

As much as I enjoyed my brief visit to the annual meeting of the Lewis Carroll Society as recounted in my previous posts, the primary reason I’d headed into Manhattan occurred later that day—a mini-reunion of writers and editors from my high-school newspaper. I was part of the first graduating class of Brooklyn’s South Shore High School, which meant that it had no newspaper before we got there, and so it was up to us to invent the paper’s journalistic traditions instead of having any to follow. The writers and editors of that newspaper, which we dubbed Shorelines, were advised by a teacher named Ernie Seligmann who is no longer with us, but whom we all loved. We were a tight bunch then, but as the years went by, time, as usual, tore us apart.

For the last few years, we’ve been trying to arrange a reunion of those staffers, but until Sunday, we were never able to achieve even the smallest critical mass. Finally, four of us were able to be in Manhattan on the same day. We gathered at Marsielle restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen on 9th Avenue between 44th and 45th Streets to finally catch up. Below you can see Barry Chaiken, Donna Grant, me, and Marc Frons.

Though I’d seen Donna within the past year, I hadn’t seen Barry since 1993, and hadn’t seen Marc since 1985. (more…)