I’ve just learned that Thomas M. Disch, author, teacher, editor, and poet, has passed away. He is the second instructor I had at the Clarion Science-Fiction Writing Workshop to have died in the past few weeks, having been preceded by Algis Budrys. In addition to having both been teachers of mine, Tom and Ajay were bound together in another, far more intense way, as can be seen by the recent posting in which Tom wrote of Ajay, “I was certain I would beat him to the exit, but now I get to dance on his grave,” an eerie sentiment to reread in light of this new context.

I can no longer remember when I read my first Disch, but I can very much remember when I read my favorite Disch. It was in the pages of Terry Carr’s 1967 Ace Books anthology New Worlds of Fantasy, which reprinted “The Squirrel Cage.” The story begins:

The terrifying thing—if that’s what I mean—I’m not sure that “terrifying” is the right word—is that I’m free to write down anything I like but that no matter what I do write down it will make no difference—to me, to you, to whomever differences are made. But then what is meant by “a difference?” Is there ever really such a thing as change?

We learn that our narrator is locked in a small, windowless room. He has no memory of how he got there or why he is there. Perhaps he volunteered for an experiment. Perhaps he’s the sole survivor of the human race, Perhaps he’s being studied by aliens. All he knows is that time is passing while the only things he has with which to entertain himself are the copies of the New York Times which keep showing up in the room. (more…)

I’ve always loved George Carlin, starting before he was considered a satirist, back when he was just a comedian who did characters like the hippy-dippy weatherman, who’d make predictions on the Merv Griffin Show along the lines of “Tonight’s forecast—dark, continued mostly dark tonight turning to widely scattered light in the morning.” His material and his delivery always cracked me up.

But with his routine “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” Carlin transformed himself into a modern-day Lenny Bruce (Bruce was then one of my gods), and that love became adoration.

So back in the early ’70s, when I heard that he would be doing a show at Brooklyn College, I went with a friend, and we roared with laughter the entire time. When Carlin mentioned from the stage that he’d be appearing a few days later at the Bitter End in the Village, we decided right then that we had to be there.

We’d pretty much made fools of ourselves at that second show. Carlin had recently begun doing a bit in which he enthusiastically sang the theme from the Raisin Bran commercial (I can’t really explain why that was funny; you’d have to see it), and so when we went to the Bitter End, we gift-wrapped half-a-dozen boxes of Raisin Bran, and brought it to the show along with a card we’d made in the shape of a giant raisin inside of which we’d written dozens of very bad punning raisin jokes. After that show, Carlin allowed us back stage to so we could give him this very weird gift (hey, we were teenagers!), and then talked with us in his dressing room for what seemed like at least an hour. (more…)

Algis Budrys, or Ajay as he was known to his friends, passed away earlier today. His father was the head of the Lithuanian government in exile, so when Ajay came with him to the U.S. in 1936 at the age of five, he received an early education in seeing the world with outsider eyes. That sense of the alien helped him well in his future writing career. Ajay went on to write many classic novels, notably Who?, Rogue Moon, and Michaelmas.

But he was also a teacher, and that was his role when I first met him in the flesh, as opposed to on the page. It was 1979, and I was a student attending the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing Workshop. (My other teachers were Robin Scott Wilson, Carol Emshwiller, Thomas Disch, Damon Knight, and Kate Wilhelm.) Before Ajay decided that Writers of the Future was the preferred path, he had been a strong proponent of the Clarion workshopping method, and he was a wonderful teacher.

But aside from having an excellent understanding of how to build a story, he also helped provide one of the more memorable incidents of my six weeks in East Lansing. (more…)

Will Elder, one of the founding artists of MAD magazine, passed away this morning. Though I attended the 1972 EC Comics Convention, as far as I recall, Elder did not, and so I never met the man and have no personal anecdotes to share. (I did, however, meet much of the rest of the EC crew, managed to get Bill Gaines, Joe Orlando, George Evans, Al Williamson, and Wally Wood to sign my program book, and even got sketches from the last three of those names, plus a caricature of me by Jack Davis that you see as the icon at left.)

But I’ve long admired his artwork, not just in those early issues of MAD, but also in the pages of Trump, Humbug, and Playboy. That last publication was where, with Harvey Kurtzman, Elder co-created the strip Little Annie Fanny at Hugh Hefner’s request.

I would have liked to have met him, because he was reported to be a wild and crazy guy, legendary in his zaniness. The caricature above, taken from that con’s program book, and drawn by Marie Severin back when she and Elder worked together at EC in the ’50s, gives a clue as to how he was seen by his coworkers. (more…)

The latest issue of the weekly Variety brings belated news of the death of Werner Groebli, who died back on April 14 at age 92. That name is probably unfamiliar to you, as it was to me. But you might recognize, as I did, the identity he took on in the ’30s, when he entered show business and needed to spare his family the embarrassment of his taking part in such poorly regarded profession.

Groebli, an ice-skating wizard, dubbed himself Frick, while Hansruedi Mausch, his partner, named himself Frack, and as the team of Frick and Frack they became world famous, both as superstars of the Ice Follies and in films such as Let’s Dance and Silver Skates. Groebli performed more than 12,000 times (both with and without his partner) from 1939 through 1981.

But there’s more to the story than that, as some of you may have already realized, just from hearing those assumed names. For not only did the team turn into skating legends, but their names entered our language, becoming synonymous with any two people so alike as to be indistinguishable, a phrase I still hear in use today, though likely by people who have no idea of its origins, and also usually in a disparaging manner. (The phrase almost missed its chance to enter the lexicon, however, as Groebli and Mausch first thought of calling themselves Zig and Zag.)

So even though Werner Groebli is dead, Frick lives on as one half of a figure of speech!

John Berkey, one of our greatest science-fiction and fantasy artists, passed away Tuesday. He was a frequent contributor to both Science Fiction Age and Realms of Fantasy. (Click on the cover at right to begin viewing a gallery of nine Science Fiction Age covers I’ve uploaded to honor his memory. Each cover can be clicked on yet again to be seen full size.)

His impressionistic paintings had a dreamlike quality which made them a welcome change from the photo-realistic images that many other artists seemed to be aiming for then. But John embodied more than just talent. He was a consummate professional who made all of his deadlines without complaint, whatever his circumstances. And those circumstances were often dire.

Back when I worked at Sovereign Media, I always looked forward to my conversations with John, and almost thought of them as perks. We never met face-to-face, but he was always warm to me over the phone, and we had many long talks, not only about art, but also about the differing challenges life had handed each of us.

During one of those talks, John once segued with a phrase I’d never before heard used in a conversation and am unlikely to ever hear again—”When I first came out of my coma, I … “—which certainly perked up my attention for what he was to say next. John had been dealt some fairly tough hands in his personal life, but he always faced them with dignity and grace.

Considering his many health problems over the years, his passing was no surprise. But that doesn’t make him any less missed.

The New York Times reports today on the death of Eugene Ehrlich at age 85. Ehrlich popularized esoteric etymological knowledge, writing forty dictionaries, thesauruses, and phrase books, including The Highly Selective Thesaurus for the Extraordinarily Literate.

But what impressed me the most was that his obituary (and he) ended this way:

Some family members were so used to Mr. Ehrlich’s habit of correcting grammar that some studied up before visiting him. On his deathbed, Mr. Ehrlich heard somebody ask, “To who?”

“To whom,” he said, with a weak voice and great authority.

Way to go!

(So to speak.)

Avant-garde author and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet, perhaps known best for his Academy Award-nominated screenplay for the 1961 film Last Year at Marienbad, died Monday. He was part of a group that came to be known as the New Novelists, which, as yesterday’s New York Times obituary pointed out, eschewed “literary conventions like plot and character development, narrative and chronology, chapters and punctuation.” While that may be true, I’ve still managed to find wisdom in his essays contained in For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction, which offer good advice far more clear-headed and down to Earth than that previous description would indicate.

In the 1957 essay titled “On Several Obsolete Notions,” he had this to say about the novel: (more…)

I just learned that Steve Gerber passed away yesterday while waiting in the hospital for a lung transplant. I’m still sort of stunned right now, since he’d posted on his blog as recently as last Monday about his progress on a Dr. Fate project. He seemed hopeful, and so I was trying to remain optimistic.

I won’t attempt to go on at length here to explain to you who he was and why he mattered. You probably already know him from his work on Man-Thing, Omega the Unknown, and Howard the Duck, and I’ll leave it to others who can better keep their wits about them to recount the details of his life. You can also get more information and read remembrances from those who loved him here.

But I’d just like to quickly say that I remember him as much for what I knew of him off the page as for what the rest of the world knew of him from what was on the page. Around the Bullpen, he was always a funny guy, part Mort Sahl, part Lewis Black.

And he had no sense of shame when it came to making you laugh. Here he is, posing for a photo that appeared in the October 1975 issue of Crazy magazine, which he edited for Marvel back when I was on staff there. He used his sense of the absurd to make Crazy into more than just another clone of MAD. I’d like to remember him that way, smiling, happy, and in your face.

He followed a rough road in comics, because he pushed the envelope—both artistically and in fighting for creator rights—at a time when most didn’t bother. We need more like him.

We need him.