August 2004

--e*I*15- (Vol. 3 No. 4) August 2004, is published and © 2004 by Earl Kemp. All rights reserved.
It is produced and distributed bi-monthly through http://efanzines.com by Bill Burns in an e-edition only.

…Return to sender, address unknown….7 [eI letter column], by Earl Kemp

Roaming Around Upstairs, by Jon Stopa

1950s Sleaze and the Larger Literary Scene, by Jay A. Gertzman

On Writing: A Personal Journey, by Ian Williams

Getting An Education, by J.G. Stinson

Love in Loon, by Earl Kemp

An Afterthought to Love in Loon, by Victor J. Banis

Acres of Nubile Flesh, by Earl Kemp

Señor Pig 2, by Earl Terry Kemp

Wet Dreams in Paradiso, by Earl Kemp

Thanks for Coming, by Jim Haynes

"If You Could See Her Through My Eyes…..", by Earl Kemp

A Poem for Ted Cogswell, by Avram Davidson

Rounding up the Shaggy Dogs, by Bruce R. Gillespie

Bombachos, Bigotes, and Bustos, by Avram Davidson

You can tell this story as often as you want-people never get tired of it. If you have a perfectly ordinary guy walking down the street at noon, not thinking about anything, and he falls into a hole, that's bad fortune. He's down below the line. He struggles to get up out of the hole, finally makes it, and is a little happier when he is finished. He's faced something and survived. That's "Man in a Hole."
               --Kurt Vonnegut, "Teaching the Writer to Write," Kallikanzaros 4, March-April 1968

THIS ISSUE OF eI is dedicated to my hero Barney Rosset and to the much-missed Avram Davidson.

In the world of science fiction, it is also in memory of Hugh B. Cave, David Heath, David MacDonald, Peter McNamara, and Otto Pfeifer.

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I would like to call your attention to Bruce R. Gillespie and the effort to Bring Bruce Bayside, a worthy cause to bring Gillespie from his home in Australia to the Bay Area next February for Corflu and Potlach. There is more about this effort on eFanzines.com and your donation to the cause would be greatly appreciated.

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I would also like to call your attention to a book recently published in the UK. It is Michael Goss' Young Lusty Sluts! (below left). I call this book to your attention because there is a piece about me included in it. Goss interviewed me a number of times for this piece and also relied heavily upon the back issues of eI for his material. There were a number of photographs repeated from eI as well.

And, while we're at it, let's also check out Robert Bonfils' great cover painting (above right) for J.X. Williams' A Blaze of Passion (LB1210, 1967). It seems they liberated their cover artwork from some familiar place.

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As always, everything in this issue of eI beneath my byline is part of my in-progress rough-draft memoirs. As such, I would appreciate any corrections, revisions, extensions, anecdotes, photographs, jpegs, or what have you sent to me at earlkemp@citlink.net and thank you in advance for all your help.

Bill Burns is jefe around here. If it wasn't for him, nothing would get done. He inspires activity. He deserves some really great rewards. It is a privilege and a pleasure to have him working with me to make eI whatever it is. And also, Dave Locke continues as eI Grand Quote Master. You will find his assembled words of wisdom separating the articles throughout this issue of eI where we will be revisiting the thoughts of Kurt Vonnegut this issue.

Other than Bill Burns and Dave Locke, these are the people who made this issue of eI possible: Victor J. Banis, Robert Bonfils, Bruce Brenner, Cuyler Brooks, Avram Davidson, Jay A. Gertzman, Bruce Gillespie, Elaine Kemp Harris, Jim Haynes, Earl Terry Kemp, Dave Langford, Guy H. Lillian III, Lynn Munroe, Astrid Myers, Gregory Pickersgill, George Scithers, Robert Speray, Janine Stinson, Jon Stopa, Erik Tonen, Peter Weston, and Ian Williams.

ARTWORK: This issue of eI features original and recycled artwork by William Rotsler.

Since I've become rich and famous…many people have been curious about my sex life.
               --Kurt Vonnegut, "Teaching the Writer to Write," Kallikanzaros 4, March-April 1968

…Return to sender, address unknown…. 7
The Official eI Letters to the Editor Column
Artwork recycled William Rotsler

By Earl Kemp

We get letters. Some parts of some of them are printable. Your letter of comment is most wanted via email to earlkemp@citlink.net or by snail mail to P.O. Box 6642, Kingman, AZ 86402-6642 and thank you.

Also, please note, I observe DNQs and make arbitrary and capricious deletions from these letters in order to remain on topic.

This is the official Letter Column of eI, and following are a few quotes from a few of those letters concerning the last issue of eI. All this in an effort to get you to write letters of comment to eI so you can look for them when they appear here.

Wednesday May 26, 2004

Just back from Stockholm and Helsinki -- you will find the details in my next Nightstand novel, PASSION IGLOO -- and too jet-lagged to read the new issue in detail yet, but I gave it a quick skim and it looks terrific. Especially did I take the time to note your footnotes to my
PORNOGRAPHER piece, with pleasure.

More later. Time for a nap.
               --Robert Silverberg

Thanks, Earl. Don't know how you maintain the pace to keep creating this. Very nice
                --David Stevens

Thursday May 27, 2004

As for el14, I'm more impressed as I read each issue with the importance of letting people know that the borderline between "high literature" and popular writing is a silly elitist one, and that good writers, to make a living, crossed that border many times, and were the better for it.. The Lawrence Block piece is a great example. Your illustrations of the paperback covers of the various editions of $20 Lust and Cinderella Sims are an interesting story in themselves. The Robert Silverberg essay, and your annotations, are excellent writing as well as essential literary history.
               --Jay Gertzman

Did some skimming this morning. Its like salted peanuts -- can't stop reading the stuff. The Silverberg article, especially, fascinated me. A novel in 3½ days! Amazing. And I'm proud
of 10-day work schedules on a novel.

Will these fanzines ever be put into book form? Would be so much fun to sit down and read this stuff in comfort rather than squinting at the computer monitor. I have a 19-incher, and that's even a strain on my aged eyeballs.
               --Thomas P. Ramirez ("Tony Calvano")

Friday May 28, 2004

re: Deconstructing Larry (Block)
Great research job. Now, what about finding Bush's WMDs?
               --Hal Dresner

A mutual friend, Bob Weinberg, pointed me to your el fanzine with respect to the McCauley piece he sent you, but I've now printed out several issues and managed to spend an enjoyable -- though unproductive -- afternoon at the office reading through them. Great stuff! The various info I've read on Hamling is fascinating; Frank Robinson is also a friend and he's told me things about Hamling from time to time, but the amount of material you obtained from so many different sources and viewpoints makes for a terrific read! Congrats on a great mag. I look forward to the next issue.
               --Doug Ellis

Monday May 31, 2004

I recently came across eI for June 2004, and a delight it was. It is so refreshing to read a fanzine not crammed with names of total strangers.

I enjoyed the references to Buck Coulson. I know that in later years he had cultivated the label of "curmudgeon," whether through self-designation, or at the instigation of others, I couldn't say. I never once had that impression. If anything, he appear to be one of the most rational and pragmatic voices I knew. As a folk-song purist he despised (perhaps rightly so) Bob Dylan, and I took special delight in needling him with headlines or news of Dylan's latest achievements.

I much regret that Yandro was given up, abandoned and permitted to become a footnote in fan history. It was one of the first fanzines I'd read (in '57 or '58). I always cherished the memories evoked by those impeccable twiltone (or perhaps Granite) pages.

There are many valid arguments against Internet fanzines, such as accessibility, appearance, and the honest inability to clutch and bend the physical properties in your hands. All quite valid. Whenever my blood pressure takes a stratospheric plunge, all too common lately, my vision gets blurry, which is a common, although unwelcome side effect. It's a tremendous relief to download a fanzine and then enlarge the type enough to combat even my dwindling vision.

I've had very limited experience with the Greenleaf soft-core line. I did purchase, over the years, the Corinth Regency pulp reprints of OPERATOR 5,DOCTOR DEATH, SECRET AGENT X, etc. etc. I could never read more than a dozen pages of DOC SAVAGE before being gripped by extreme apathy, while I could endure a complete SECRET AGENT X, but never more than once a month.
               --Mike Deckinger

Thursday June 3, 2004

I was delighted to see another fine issue appear at Bill Burns' eFanzines website. Considering how we would have loved to have had the colour photos and illustrations available in the past, doing fanzines on the web makes some things a lot easier.

That you would also use the zine to publicise the Bring Bruce Bayside fund is also most welcome.

One complaint by some about ezines is the lack of response, so I was pleased to see your letter column. Perhaps we should all change to running the locs as the first item in the fanzine, rather than the last.

I was pleased to see a letter from Juanita Coulson, who I had completely lost track of after she moved. I still have a couple of novels of hers on my shelves, which she kindly autographed at some stage. Buck was the person who did most of the writing to me, and because I didn't often get to filk song areas, I probably missed seeing Juanita as being as active as she was.

It is a real pity that Juanita's comments had to be about yet another exclusion act, albeit one in the past. Yet I wonder how much has really changed in fandom. Looking around in Australia, I see WASPs. Looking around US fandom, I see much the same. I can't think of more than three or four non-white fans I've talked to at conventions. Way back I used to see Elliott Shorter.

The last few lines of Juanita's letter, about her joy in music, remind me that after years and years of ignoring music (and I don't know exactly how I fell out of liking it - although the selections played on the radio and MTV may be a factor) I found myself buying a MIDI keyboard. Well, OK, it was cheap, and it may end up like the unused piano in many homes. But this new Macintosh came with a music generating program called Garage Band, and looks like it will be great fun. Well, maybe not for anyone who hears me practice.

It was good to note Dave Locke finally getting his material printed after all these years. While I am in an apa with Dave, I feel sure most of his fine writing appears these days in egroups of some form. My own encounters with Yahoo after they took over mailing lists were such that I'd never again look at anything being distributed via Yahoo. Add to that me dumping rasff several years ago within a week of starting to reading it again (Gary Farber sent me email), and I don't see much of the electronic fan activity.

Great reading (in some cases rereading) the accounts of how various people made money providing porn books. I think Tom Lehrer got it right. "Dirty books are fun." All the best.
               --Eric Lindsay

Friday June 4, 2004

Beautiful Stuff, great memory and memories. It'll take a few more days to read it all. Here I come - Blue Fox! You need to write a fictitious novel - Hemingway stuff.
               --Robert Bonfils

Friday June 11 2004

Johannes Berg was also an old friend of ours. Of course, Worldcon was the only place we could possibly meet, and he couldn't always afford to go, just like us, but Yvonne and I did see him at Torcon 3. As always, jolly and cordial, and a pleasure to see. And now, he's gone, like so many friends. My best Berg story. I remember the Dutch Worldcon in 1990, when Johannes and his marauding horde of Scandinavians invaded the room parties that had to be held in the Congresgebouw because the hotels wouldn't allow such events in private rooms, and they sucked every drop of alcohol available, to the dismay and anger of some of the party mavens who were working with little stock in unfamiliar conditions. One of the final nights of the Worldcon saw quickly drawn posters for a Scandinavian bid party, and those who attended saw a ceremonial cart from the local Heineken brewery, and the cart held a 1000-liter tank of Heineken's best, with stacks of beer cups and five taps on each side. Hey, those Scandinavians weren't so bad after all, and the instigator of such a marvelous sight was Johannes Berg.

That was fun to get you in touch with Juanita Coulson. Happy to be of service.

Hi, Arnie. so, Plan to Dissolve/Destroy Fandom. So THAT's what .pdf really stands for! I jest..pdfs make collecting fanzines a little easier. They can be stored in .pdfs, and then on a CD-ROM for filing and possible future printing.

An interesting tale from Dave Locke. Wouldn't it be equally interesting to perform this as a Andy Hooper-style fannish play?

I don't think I've read anything by Lawrence Block .until now, anyway. So much of the writing here is outside of my own experience; all I can say is that like Robert Silverberg, Harlan Ellison and others, you've got to write slush before you can write good stuff. I'm glad to see that Block and Silverberg are willing to explore their own pasts and reminisce about their experiences.
               --Lloyd Penney.

Wednesday June 16, 2004

The joy, the invigoration, of eI comes from all the past, dormant memories you are churning up with the articles and memoirs on the 60's and thereabouts. I lived through the time and was active in fandom then, so I can closely relate. For younger readers, it's but ancient history, and can't have half the tang it does for us. I've been scanning an issue a night or two, through the website, slowly savoring all the unearthed pleasures.

And your tales of incarceration are scarier than anything Stephen King devised, especially the descriptions of what went on behind bars, how the authorities were driven to instigate this brutal sentencing. I guarantee anyone who did not live through Nixonion America could not possibly relate to any of this.

I'm reminded of receiving Paul Krassner's THE REALIST regularly, and cracking up over every issue, of Agent Oy Oy Seven in PLAYBOY, (as well as Hef's unending "The Playboy Philosophy") and of seeing Lenny Bruce in New York.

There are even fannish counterparts, like reading an hysterical screed from D. Bruce Berry and then wondering if this was the same guy who did all those flamboyant illustrations. Or the time Chicago fan Bob Greenberg stayed in my Newark apartment, and spent the entire night playing his amateur 8 mm films. Bob was on his way to see the Kuchar Bros. in New York, and from there, to fame and fortune in Hollywood. I learned later, much later, from Alex Eisenstein, that Bob was on the verge of making it big-time in the film industry, when a drunken driver viciously ended everything for him.
               --Mike Deckinger

Friday July 9 2004

Earl -- I'm about half-way through your on-line memoirs and I have to say I am very fascinated, for many various reasons -- I have been ordering some Nightstand and Greenleaf books and copies of Hamlin's IMGAINATION as I go along (from on-line dealers).

Basically, Harlan Ellison is the reason I became a writer! -- there's a long personal story in that, which I will write some day. I had no idea you guys had that connection -- and oddly, his SEX GANG goes for $700-1000 while I have found many of Silverberg's nom de plume titles for $5 or so.

By this weekend, I should be through reading, and I thank you for the rich reading experience.
               --Mike Hemmingson

Ernest Hemingway once said, "If you make love while you are working on a novel, you are in danger of leaving the best parts in bed."
               --Kurt Vonnegut, "Teaching the Writer to Write," Kallikanzaros 4, March-April 1968

By Jon Stopa

Chalabi Busted!

The further we get into the Bush Administration, the harder it is to write satire. The news that Ahmed Chalabi is likely to have been an Iranian Secret Agent and Spy is a case in point! Ahmed Chalabi, the man whom the Pentagon wanted to rule Iraq (can you believe that!).

At last, there is a logical and reasonable reason for Bush's War! We invaded Iraq because the Iranian intelligence agency wanted us to!

Chew on that for a while!

What would a logical Iranian agenda be like?
1. Destroy Saddam. He's no good.
2. Destroy the Great Satan! (That's us!)

Just because Iran is a small country, it doesn't mean that it can't have big dreams!

Think about what has happened. The US has been enticed to invade Iraq by the false intel provided by Iran's agent, Ahmed Chalabi. He did it for years. He not only fooled Bush, he had fooled the New York Times, too! He gave the same false intel to countries all over the globe. Then when we checked with, for instance, the Brits, they said, "Yeah, we heard that Saddam has WMD. You did too?" Therefore, he must have them. This was one of the biggest, most successful ops, ever. And little Iran did it!

They managed to get the destruction of Iraq AND the cream of the really, really expensive American military at the same time. It only cost Iran the few million bucks they probably gave to Chalabi! Cheap!

Why would Iran do this? Well, whether it was that long Iran-Iraq War, or what, Iran just seems to have taken a dislike to Saddam's regime and, of course, the US, which is the Great Satan. From the Iranian point of view, the fact that the US smashed up its shiny, new army doing-in Saddam was a big plus!

Consider. All the other reasons for the war have fallen by the way--no WMD; no actual plan to bring democracy to Iraq; no al Qaeda link. Definitely no rose petals! We don't talk about Iraq being a terrorist killing ground any more (Bring it on!), or that we shut down Saddam's torture chambers. This leads to the obvious truth that we were tricked into invading Iraq by the Iranians' secret agent, Ahmed Chalabi!

Besides being mean to Saddam for the fun of it, why else would Iran want Iraq to be torn to pieces? Oil!

Yes, if Iraq gets split into three parts, the Iranians have the opportunity to get their hands on Iraqi oil! Add Iraqi oil to Iranian oil, and they'll have a really BIG chunk of the world's oil.

See, and you didn't think that the war was ALL about oil!

Falluja Gambit

At last, an exit strategy for Iraq that looks like it'll work! I call it the Falluja Gambit.

Please notice, it was troops in the field who developed it--Remember the brass saying the idea came from the bottom up? I bet those marines who were fighting around Falluja for weeks got tired of waiting for Washington to make up its mind and do something, so they figured out an answer, and just did it!

The reason why Bush hasn't been able to shake our foot free of the Iraqi tar baby is that every government he creates in Iraq lacks legitimacy. By definition. We are the hated, conquering invaders! For some reason, people who have often been invaded and conquered just don't like it.

The idea is, our troops surround a city, then blast the hell out of it. After we've driven the people together, local leaders arise, legitimized by their resistance. Then our Marines surrender to them and leave. Free at last!

The cheering locals now have a government with legitimacy, and we can withdraw from their territory. We move on, going from city to city, using these tactics to create legitimate governments! Things might not work out too well when we're gone, but if we back out carefully, we can leave Iraq before anyone notices.

Another answer to Bush's problems in Iraq would be to ask Saddam to take it off his hands. Good thing Saddam has survived his interrogation and imprisonment, so far! He should have learned his lesson, by now: Don't mess with a Bush!

UPDATE: The Falluja Gambit is now being used on the Shia! Our army has surrendered to al-Sistani. Threatening those shrines with damage by clumsy Americans, forced al-Sistani to act. Way to go!

Is Donald Rumsfeld A Great Defense Secretary, Or What?

Rummy's War in Iraq is football thinking! Consider the taking of Baghdad as a touchdown, and you are on to it. In football thinking, when a runner passes his opponents, the opponents are effectively out of the action. So it was, when we ran all the way to Baghdad, Rummy obviously thought we had won. He forgot about the "bad actors," their open ammo dumps, etc., that we had passed. The bad guys just didn't realize that the game was over when the whistle blew!

AWOL's victory prance across the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln was his end zone dance. More football thinking!

When you see arrows on a history book map indicating the routes Hitler's armies took as they crossed Russia in WW II, they were showing the encirclement and destruction of huge numbers of Russian troops.

The Bush War arrows were showing plays and touchdowns! It has been pointed out that football resembles warfare; Bush's War in Iraq has given new meaning to that idea.

Just too many Sunday afternoons with a big beer cooler and a wide-screen TV.

One thing she left out was how dirty authors get-physically dirty…. You deteriorate, forget what day it is. It's like being in solitary. You forget to bathe and just get filthy. A free lance author just stinks sometimes. He's lost track and can't tell if it's the Fourth of July or Christmas.
               --Kurt Vonnegut, "Teaching the Writer to Write," Kallikanzaros 4, March-April 1968

[Jay A. Gertzman is a retired professor of English (Mansfield U., in PA). In 1999 he published Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica, 1920-1940 (U. of Pennsylvania Press). The book is about the distribution and prosecution of erotic literature in America during the period between the wars, when an older reticence about sex was replaced by a growing need for expressing one's sexual desires. Technology, changing social and economic conditions, and the increasing population of the cities were important in understanding the erotica of the period. Jay is researching the entertainment center of Times Square during the period 1940-70, especially the place of the bookstores there in the "sleazy" and subversive atmosphere of 42nd Street. He has a website entitled "Times Square Smut" at http://home.earthlink.net/~jgertzma/BkshopsofTimesSq/index.html
                --Earl Kemp]

1950s Sleaze and the Larger Literary Scene:*
The Case of Times Square Porn King Eddie Mishkin

By Jay A. Gertzman

Throughout the 20th century, erotica writing and distribution was part of the larger story of American literature. Writers need money, and writing about sex for a prurient, horny, and eventually tumescent audience never deterred them. Nor was the result necessarily hack work. In Earl Kemp's ezine (see e*I*11), he provides several examples of good writers: Robert Bloch, Harlan Ellison, John Jakes, Harry Roskolenko, and Cordwainer Smith, among others.

A New York bookseller contracted writers such as Gershon Legman, Henry Miller, and Ana‹s Nin in the early 1940s on behalf of an Oklahoma erotica collector who wanted to masturbate to a story he had never encountered before. Therefore he needed an endless supply. At the same time a group of writers produced type scripted pornography, which was reproduced and sold or rented at high prices. Some of its members, who also wrote for the Oklahoma collector, were Nin, Jack Hanley, Clement Wood, and Bernard Wolfe, later one of the first "beat" novelists (The Magic of Their Singing).

It is not clear when this erotica combine started to work, but one of its productions was a set of stories, circa 1938, known collectively as The Oxford Professor. Gershon Legman says that Gene Fowler, one of several Hollywood members, wrote The Demi-Wang and Nirvana under its auspices. In the 1950s, one of the writers and editors for the Magazine Management group of "hairy-chested men's magazines" was Bruce Jay Friedman. He remembered that "Even the Rhinos Were Nymphos." When Star Distributors, Ltd., maintained a stable of New York based novelists to churn out their glut of hard core paperbacks in the 70s, one of their number, writing either under a pseudonym or anonymously, was Marco Vassi. Vassi's fictional explorations of pansexual energy marked him as a disciple of Wilhelm Reich.

Among the many talented Essex House novelists who wrote for that Milton Luros imprint in California in the late 60s, one has to mention a key figure in any discussion of American literary erotica: Michael Perkins. Perkins was one of the talented writers Al Goldstein hired when Screw began publication. Readers shocked by American Psycho would suffer coronaries if faced with Perkins' Evil Companions (1968). A group of East Village roommates engage in kidnapping, rape, necrophilia, and sexual mutilation. The book depicts a nightmare of sex and violence that replicates in its insanity the combat zones of Vietnam, urban ghetto riots, Hoover's FBI files and crusades, the Kennedy and King assassinations, police riots, and the Weathermen.

I am studying the distribution and prosecution of pornography in New York's Times Square of the 1950s. Eddie Mishkin, publisher, distributor, and bookstore owner, was a prime target for district Attorney Frank Hogan. In 1955, he had been called before the Kefauver Committee investigating the effect of pornographic materials on juvenile delinquency. Shortly thereafter, he and the Times Square booksellers to whom he distributed were enjoined from distributing a 16-volume set of hastily prepared typewritten and illustrated booklets entitled Nights of Horror, which focused on flagellation, torture, and bondage. In 1959, the police started intense surveillance of Mishkin's warehouse. He, his printer, and at least two writers were among those arrested; 17,000 booklets (43 separate titles) were impounded. The transcript of his 1960 trial presents detailed evidence of connections between a porn "kingpin," his primary readership in the gay and fetish subcultures, the Greenwich Village party scene, and some New York-based writers and artists.

Three writers were subpoenaed to testify against Mishkin. One, who wrote under the name "Justin Kent," was held as a material witness for over a month. Both he and a woman unfortunately named Leotha Hackshaw stated that Mishkin told them to write about "rough sex," with "strong lesbian scenes," "high heels," "perfume fetishes," "bondage," etc. He lent Hackshaw texts on sexual deviations, including Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis,so that her stories focused on spanking, whipping, and the "weals" left in male and female flesh by violent foreplay. Many of the booklets were illustrated by the fetish artists Gene Bilbrew and Eric Stanton. In appearance, these publications suggested cheapness and unreliability, an impression reinforced by a five-dollar cover price for badly edited, cheaply produced, typewritten texts some of which were nicely illustrated, but with line drawings unrelated to the narrative itself. Sample titles were "Screaming Flesh," "Return Visit to Fetterland," "The Hollywood Spankers," and "Sex Switch." Newspaper reporters, prosecuting attorneys, and judges noted that the appearance as well as contents of Mishkin's booklets epitomized "dirt for dirt's sake," with no purpose other than to appeal to prurience to make as much money with as little expense as possible.

Inevitably reinforcing this impression was the kind of store in which they were sold. In Publisher's Outlet, The Metropolitan Book Shop, The Little Book Exchange, Square Books, and The Midget Book Shop one found rack-loads of cellophane-sealed, highly priced, paper-covered booklets, and nude and near nude photo sets, as well as prurient fiction, sexology, and girlie magazines. Eventually, in 1966 at the Supreme Court level, Mishkin was convicted and sent to prison. He was judged to have appealed to a "clearly defined sexual group" by titillating that group with the intent of making as much money as possible, at the same time ignoring state law that a publisher state his true name and business address in his books and magazines.

Mishkin's audience must have included members of the gay and fetish subculture in midtown New York. A large gay community had existed in nearby apartment houses from the 1930s. As New York's many daily newspapers reported the trial, they must have swallowed their anxieties as phrases such as "deviant fantasies" and "all morality done away with" were parroted. So was the boilerplate equating sexual deviancy and juvenile delinquency, current since the Kefauver Committee Investigations of the latter in 1955. It would be a revelation to find that one of Mishkin's writers was motivated by a desire to defy this kind of scapegoating. He or she might have written even in a sleazy digest-sized booklet--a story of alternative sexuality which included a warning that parents, teachers, and religious advisors reassess why their teenagers were ignoring them, and consider what young people learned about power and violence from looking around them as the Korean War ended. People had been dismissed from their jobs through blacklisting; alcoholism and divorce were increasing; school students were taught how to "duck and cover" in case of atomic attack; and hydrogen bombs were being tested in the Western deserts. Meanwhile, ambitious senators and sensation-seeking dailies assumed the citizenry's best interest would be served by begging the question regarding the connection between borderline smut and tabooed sexual practices on the one hand, and juvenile delinquency and lack of moral "purity" on the other.

It's exhilarating to think that an iconoclastic, imaginative, and opportunistic writer ready to address himself to the patrons of some of Times Square's raunchy book stores would have honest motives for publishing a typewritten, salaciously illustrated sex story for a sleazy publisher. It would be published under a pseudonym. Appreciative readers could not communicate with him/her directly, but they might ask the clerk or owner of the store in which he bought the booklet if he had more by that author. This kind of interest would be more likely directed to an artist than a writer, but it could happen, which is one reason erotic books are published under fictitious "house" pseudonyms. Most of their writers were mediocrities, like Kent and Hackshaw. Maybe someday someone will discover that a particular piece of writing declared obscene because it was considered "smut for smut's sake" was the work of William Burroughs, John Reichy, Erica Jong, Patricia Highsmith, Kenneth Patchen, or Samuel Delany.

It's the kind of pipe dream to keep an erotica collector frustrated for three lifetimes. That said, there was one writer of considerable reputation, leftish leanings, experience, and talent who wrote at least three stories for Mishkin: Harry Roskolenko. A world traveler since he left home at 13, a Trotskyite active at times in radical causes, a member of the W.P.A. Writers Project, an army officer in World War II, a poet and novelist, Roskolenko had in 1952 published a book of short stories with the Woodford Press, the most successful of the late 1940s hardback faux-erotica sex pulp outfits. In the same year, the Padell Book Company issued his memoir, Baedecker of a Bachelor, and two years later a novel about a white man transformed into a black man, Black Is A Man. Both publishers were New York based, and distributed heavily to the Times Square market, Padell with pamphlets on police ju-jitsu, boxing, wrestling, hypnotism, dancing, and swimming, card tricks, and "How to Make Love," as well as a set of joke books. Their author, by the way, was Louis Shomer, who a decade earlier published erotica and sexology and was prosecuted by the Post Office. In the 1950s he was distributing stag films for Abe Rubin, one of Mishkin's mentors in the porn trade.

Roskolenko (who oddly enough identified himself as Hyman Rosen, saying that Harry Roskolenko was one of his many pseudonyms), first met Mishkin in 1954. His testimony implied that he had come to see the publisher to ask if he wanted a book. The pornographer accepted, saying, "spice it up." Apparently "I'll Try Anything Twice" (by "John Thomas") was one of Roskolenko's first "little booklets." "French Girl on the Stairs Parts 1 and 2" was written about 1957, about the time Mishkin conceived the project which got him arrested.

I haven't seen "I'll Try Anything Twice" or "French Girl on the Stairs," but the author apparently thought they were not hack work, and might even add to his reputation. The transcript records the following:

Attorney for defendant: And you find nothing of any value in the other types of books [those in evidence not by Roskolenko] . . . ?
Roskolenko: They are not literature to me.
Justice Galloway: Mr. Rosen, "French Girl on the Stairs" you consider literature, I presume?
Roskolenko: That's a serious book
Justice: That's what I thought.
Roskolenko: Outside of the pictures.

The reason a professional writer would take on an assignment such as a Mishkin S-M story, as Earl Kemp has explained to me, is money. And Mishkin had the money to spend. He must have treated his artists and writers well, or he would not have been able to hire the premier fetish artists in New York at the time. He paid between $100 and $350 per story, according to testimony at the 1960 trial. For a single drawing, Gene Bilbrew, who did illustrations for covers, got $30 or $35, and Eric Stanton, for interior work, got $10 or $15. According to the Department of Labor's Consumer Price Index, $100 in 1959 would be the equivalent of almost $640 in today's currency. All these deals were strictly in cash, which changed hands in one of Mishkin's stores or in a bar called Dino's on 42nd Street. The IRS need never know. The work could be finished quickly, and subsequent assignments might mean not only groceries, but time to be spent writing instead of slaving at a menial job.

Where would a writer learn of this kind of opportunity? Word of mouth is the obvious answer. That was the method by which pornography and where to find it became known to potential customers. A professional writer was obliged to sniff out money as avidly as a horny man did his sexual outlets, and usually with a lot less guilt and furtiveness. There were several kinds of sources. Ms Hackshaw stated that under the name "Lee Morrel," she wrote two books "now on the stands," and had written TV scripts. Most likely not a habitué‚ of 42nd Street, she may have heard of Mishkin from her agent. If the two books she mentioned were hardback sex pulps, like those "Justin Kent" had done for Gil Fox (The Vixen Press) or Abe Lieberman and his partner Arnold Hausner of Book Sales, Inc., then she would have had other conduits to Mishkin.

We know Mishkin and Lieberman did business with each other. Any one of the sex pulp publishers who followed the lead of the Woodford Press in the late 40s and 50s would have had their books distributed in the Times Square bookstores. Roskolenko published several works under his "Colin Ross" pseudonym with Allan Wilson and Moe Shapiro, owners of Woodford. As we've said, he also wrote for Max Padell. Roskolenko writes, "Under five pseudonyms, I wrote a variety of novels [in the 1950s] for various publishers." He states the number to be fifteen. At the same time, he was contributing stories and articles to many magazines, some literary (Sewanee Review, New York Times Book Review, New Leader), some general-interest (Mademoiselle), and some erotic. "I had learned the art of concocting in the men's magazines…where nothing worthy is confidential and everything useless is exposed; the sacred is profaned by association, and the profaned made sacred material; for without the latter the circulation of these magazines would disappear. Whatever was the fatal flaw in the American male, these magazines had found it."

It's possible that a needy writer might have made inquiries in bookshops themselves. The tourist bookstores carried various kinds of erotica as well as other kinds of literature, nonfiction, text books, pamphlets, and magazines; Padell was a chief wholesaler of the latter three genres. Owners and clerks would see the advantages of steering suitable writers and artists to a publisher who knew that their customers had the kind of impulses they would not try to restrain if a "just out" package were offered them. The more "hot stuff" around, the better for the bookseller's business, although not for the publisher.

The above were possible ways a writer or artist could become wise to a sleazy, underground, and possibly subversive employer. And he or she had to be needy, otherwise a writer might have balked at playing by rules considerably more akin to racketeering than anything else the literary life might lead one to. With Mishkin, who was in the numbers game before being schooled in pornography, payments were strictly in cash; inventory was secreted in a bunker-type room in the basement of his warehouse; the markup on the manufactured book was several hundred percent; the books appeared without publisher's identification and thus violated the state's General Business Law; the subject matter was considered, despite the absence of scatology and explicit descriptions of intercourse, to be "deviant"; and in case of police action the dragnet might, as it did in 1960, include the writer.

It also included one of the typists. One was put on the stand, and the name of the other was mentioned. The latter was Virginia Admiral, an artist and a close friend of Anaïs Nin, wife of the artist Robert de Niro (they are the parents of the film star). Nin mentions in her Diaries that she worked in a typing service to make money. Admiral may have been one of the typists for the stories written for the Oklahoma collector. Being part of Nin's Bohemian set, she may have been quite willing to type up other erotic writing, as she obviously was for Mishkin's printer. She may never have met Mishkin, but the connection is worth mentioning.

There was a final conduit to this kind of employer: contacts in the Bohemian subculture. Gil Fox recently provided investigative journalist Doug Valentine with a fascinating story involving the Greenwich Village party scene. A CIA agent named George White, who had a supply of LSD (the agency was experimenting with it at the time), posed as a "Bohemian artist" and joined Fox's set. He used the drug to facilitate his wife-swapping adventures, to which Fox himself and his beautiful wife Valentine tells us, were partial. White, Fox remembers, lowered the inhibitions of couples who caught his fancy by putting the drug into their food or drink. One can only speculate that among the guests at Fox's Christopher Street parties may have been Harry Roskolenko and one of the Woodford Press' meal tickets, Joe Weiss. Both men had reputations as having very active libidos. Weiss, as his novels attest, fantasized about spanking women. Fetishes and lesbianism were often the subject of Fox's own writing, and of other Vixen Press books. Vixen books would of course have depended heavily on the Times Square booksellers. Fox most likely did business with Mishkin. According to a California researcher, he certainly knew Stan Malkin, who owned Seventh Avenue's Liberty Gift Shop, and had part ownership in 42nd Street's Little Book Exchange.

Malkin published sleaze paperbacks (Wee Hours, After Hours, Nighty Night, Unique, etc.). Some of these were by Gil Fox, who wrote under the pseudonyms of Dallas Mayo, Zane Pella, and Peter Willow (a shared house name). Eric Stanton did a lot of illustrating for Malkin, who was very generous with him and earned his respect and affection.

Other Greenwich Village social activities centered around the gay or lesbian subculture. Marijane Meeker's recent memoir of her life with Patricia Highsmith describes other writers of soft-core paperbacks with whom they spent time, discussing the assignments they had accepted from mass market paperback firms which realized the interest women as well as men had in lesbian novels. At the same time a surreptitious Midtown fetish and S-M scene was active. A publisher and distributor named Lenny Burtman was at the center of it. He and his wife, model Tana Louise, hosted swinging parties in their apartment. Burtman and several associates financed the film Satan in High Heels, many scenes of which were shot there.

Mrs. Burtman appeared in his digest-sized magazines such as Exotique, "a new publication of the bizarre and unusual." Many copies were seized in police raids on Burtman's warehouse in 1958. Exotique, and other Burtman publications, were classified as deviant because of the leather, high heels, and attendant fetishes, to which the publisher appealed with stories, advertisements, drawings, photos, and correspondence from enthusiasts. Times Square bookstores carried his fetish booklets and magazines extensively, and his distribution system was more far-reaching than those of Mishkin or of Irving Klaw (whose booklets featuring bondage and flagellation were as notorious as Mishkin's). It is probable that both Bilbrew and Stanton attended Burtman's parties, if only because both illustrated Burtman's publications.

Also present were dancers, female impersonators, dominitrices, transsexuals, and aficionados of fetish clothing. Robert V. Bienvenue, who has recently prepared a dissertation on the sado-masochistic subculture in the United States and the business enterprises sustaining it, states that Burtman did extensive business with Klaw, Mishkin, and Shapiro. Unlike them, he was not only supplying furtive men with images which excited them for reasons they did not care to explore, but also filling the needs of people actively pursuing radical, deeply tabooed sexual alternatives. Burtman was a businessman not a creative artist, but he provided materials and a setting for an innovative and liberating style of expressing tabooed libidinous needs. Such an atmosphere may have lured not only dancers, actors, and photographers, but writers. The practical reason for the contact must not be lost sight of, for it would have been the same as that which brought them to Mishkin.

The urban entertainment or vice zones in which one bought erotica or porn are also integral to the creative imagination. So were the eroticized popular culture movies, music, stage shows, taxi dance halls, magazines, and books attracting people to city centers. Among the writers, artists, and film makers who have brooded upon Pre-Disney Times Square, are Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, John Reichy, Samuel Delany, Don DeLillo, Carl Hiaasen, Richard Price, Eric Bogosian, Reginald Marsh, David Fredenthal, Paul Schrader, Joseph Cates, Martin Scorcese, Francis Ford Coppola, John Schlesinger, and Rem Koolhaaus. In the Times Square bookstores and sex emporia danger, depredation, iconoclasm, and criminality were all present. That combination was a powerful lure. So was the money that writers, as well as distributors and booksellers, could take home by meeting the demand for sexy books, magazines, and pictures. The result was some strange bedfellows and interesting collaborations.

- - -
*Copyright 2004 by Jay A. Gertzman. All rights reserved.

But I do expose myself in department stores… I have this raincoat…these chopped-off trouser legs sewed into the hem of the raincoat there…and I have shirt cuffs. I keep the raincoat zipped up and I have a whistle on a chain underneath, nothing else. I go into the department stores where these girls, brides to be, are just picking out their patterns-crystal, silver, and all that. They're there with the mothers and aunts and everyone, and I come in. You know, they are not used to having men come in there anyway and sort of all look at me and wonder what I'm doing. I pull out the whistle and blow it as loud as I can, then I throw open the raincoat…then I run like hell… For you who are going to write about me after I'm dead, that's one of the things I do.
               --Kurt Vonnegut, "Teaching the Writer to Write," Kallikanzaros 4, March-April 1968

By Ian Williams

My goodness, Ian, I hope you get one or two more of those nights! What a way to close the year on Wegenheim, with this brilliant piece of writing about writing…Please continue!
               --Bill Burns, Wegenheim, December 27,2003

It's one of those nights when I can't settle. Susan's not feeling too well and has gone to bed early, there's nothing on new on television that I want to see (not even on 100 cable channels), I'm not in the mood for a DVD or music, and I can't settle down with a book and I've been web surfing earlier. So I sit at my PC, open up My Documents and start skimming through a variety of unfinished stories and novels and background notes and synopses.

And I start thinking about writing fiction, why I wanted to do it, why I did it, and why I mostly stopped doing it

And this is it. It's about 8.30 in the evening and I'm going to take a short break to open a bottle of wine and then I'll begin. Who knows, maybe in the writing I'll tell myself something I hadn't realised.

(Break. Take the first slurp of some Hardy's Varietal Range Shiraz, a nice juicy reasonably priced--currently £10.00 for 3 bottles--strong red wine.) Note the lack of commas, there'll be a test later.

And here we go.

1.

I like writing, it's as simple as that really. I particularly like writing something which comes from me. By which I mean to exclude academic work, college essays, that kind of stuff, which was why I took to fandom in a big way when I discovered it back in 1970. I could pretty much write anything I wanted for fanzines and I pretty much did. Book reviews, poetry (in my very early days), conreps, slices of autobiography, fanfic (rarely: one of my favourite pieces was about the Surrey Limpwrists in the form of a dialogue between Ian and Janice Maule which I cheekily attributed to Maule himself, even as I sent myself up in it; it was short and, if you knew the individuals, very funny. It's strange how some things, often trivia like that piece, stick in your memory. Mike Glicksohn commented favourably on 'Maule's' writing.), book reviews, essays, etc. I don't keep a file of my fanwriting--there are a few, not all, of my fanzines in a box in the loft--and I've forgotten much of what I've written. Much of it is probably crap, especially as it was nearly all first draft, often typed directly onto stencil in the case of my fanzines. Now, of course, I view the first draft as merely the rough clay.

But what I really wanted to do was direct. By which I mean, write fiction, specifically SCIENCE FICTION.

I'd always written fiction since I first learned to write-crude stories based on comic heroes like Battler Britton. (We're talking early to mid 50's here, ladies and gentlemen.) I kept superhero sagas (and this was before Marvel), with me as the main character, going for years in my head as I walked to and from school. Adolescence and with it came a portable typewriter (thank you, mum) and typing skills (thank you, mum, a typist by profession), and screeds of fiction and the realisation that I couldn't write fiction for shit. Oh well, end of that dream, get on with life, and later, fandom.

(Punctuation is very important to the craft of writing. Just as simple thing as the placing of a comma in the last four words of the preceding paragraph was a very conscious decision. The obvious place was to put it after 'and', but I deliberately chose, for the effect, to place it before.) This has been an aside but I'll return to the subtopic later.

Then in the mid-70's I got an idea for a novel, wrote the first draft of 'Rider on a Stone Horse' and proceeded to drive all my friends mad for the next few years until it (quickly) became a standing joke. I still lacked confidence and asked Rob Jackson to collaborate with me as I felt he possessed the descriptive skills I lacked. This may have been true but the story ended up bloated and sluggish. I may write stuff that needs to be cut but generally my writing is fairly concise. I say precisely what I need to say. (Except with that sentence which is intentionally, as an example, redundant.) Thirty years on from the first draft I remain convinced that the plot, characters, and structure were essentially sound. What I lacked was the writing skill to pull it off.

Disheartened, I pretty much gave up writing fiction for a few years. I may have made stabs at other stuff during this period but if I did the manuscripts and the memory of them are all lost in time.

Then, ten years after the first draft of that novel, I had another idea. Utilise the British public (i.e. private) school story to do a realistic novel about paranormal powers. Or: a very British version of the X-men. This was roughly at the height of the Claremont/Byrne era, or it had only recently ended. So I wrote a first draft in about six weeks and felt I had something. Then I bought an Amstrad pcw 8256 word processor, the machine which might have had the most individual effect on my particular life.
It made rewriting easy.

And it made it fun.

Now I began to learn how to write. My creativity was unleashed. While this first draft was going round the Gannets (my local fan group, not fans of mine, though I'm sure they were, but the sf fan group I started in 1970) I wrote another novel. It may have been a rewrite of Rider or a sequel to the new one, whatever. I did a rewrite, passed that one around and meanwhile wrote the first draft of yet another novel. Over a five-year period I wrote a total of seven novels of which the first drafts (around 50-70,000 words) took about six to eight weeks to write.

As you can imagine, this was an enormously creative period for me as well as probably the most psychologically damaging as I lived for writing and its aids--a constant flow of cigarettes and home-made red wine. But who cares, I was not only learning (with the help of others) the craft of writing fiction, I was also discovering what it was that I wanted to write about. The novel which became The Lies That Bind evolved into something far more subtle than I originally envisaged as I realised I was partly writing about the Outsider figure in society, but also how we allow society to mould us rather than becoming the person we would otherwise choose to be. There's also a sting in the tail as the hero fails. He succeeds as an individual but ultimately he changes nothing.

It was the only one of the novels to be published. Two became unpublishable when it was accepted as a teenage novel - I'd written it as an adult book and written two sequels. Another non-sf novel was unpublishable and, therefore, so was its sequel. The final novel was written as a hack adventure for the publisher Robert Hale which then dropped its sf line about the time I finished it. It amused me but it wasn't very good.

Only one of them was, I felt, worthy of being published. One of the things I learned was that my writing style loosened up when I wasn't writing about a character I could identify with i.e. the misunderstood but essentially good-hearted hero (feel free to blow a raspberry). So, under the influence of Jaime Hernandez's locas (and a couple of writers I can't now remember), I wrote 'I Was A Teenage Lesbian'.

Only joking. That wasn't the title. But it was the plot. I called it 'Tides'. It opens early in the morning on the beach by Dunstanburgh castle in Northumberland where drunk and depressed 18-year-old Debbie is draining the dregs of a bottle of whiskey as she reflects on the events that have brought her there. Three years earlier she is uprooted from London (where she presented herself as a working class hardcase) by her lecturer mother to a middle class environment in Newcastle (inverting the usual clichés). She makes friends but has a crush on Rachel an older girl who hates her. After a drunken Christmas party pass at her, Debbie makes the girl look a fool and then has sex with her boyfriend to convince everyone she's not gay. (This is a real oversimplification.) She has a difficult relationship with her intellectual and sexually active mother which is a major part of the story. Eventually Debbie and Rachel do become lovers but when Rachel goes to university in Newcastle she becomes involved with a radical lesbian group which does nothing for Debbie and they split up. Drunk and aggressive she confronts her mother and ends up hitting her. The novel ends with a reconciliation between Debbie and her mother on the beach and Debbie's acceptance of the person she's become.

About the time I finished it, Virago Press cancelled the publication of a novel by a writer they discovered was a man. Tides, I honestly believe, would have been publishable but for my sex. It was an honest sensitive story written for teenagers and I really thought it was as good if not better than Lies. I'd like to reread it but I don't have a copy as it was written on the long-defunct Amstrad, I chucked out my paper copy, and Gamma has (or more likely had) the only other paper copy. Unlike other writings of mine, I've never been tempted to reconstruct it. Maybe it was of its time. Certainly in the 18 years since, attitudes to homosexuality in this country have become more liberal and Debbie (being a bolshy bitch) wouldn't feel the need to hide it. Hell, these days she'd wear it as badge of pride and fuck anyone who had a problem with it.

1988. I started an Open University foundation course in Social Sciences. On the same course was Susan. We got married that August. A couple of months later Simon & Schuster bought Lies and published it the following year as part of a new upmarket teenage fiction line which failed. Lies was the only title in the line which made it into the official best children's books of the year list.

By then I was living with Susan in her flat in a block owned by a housing association. Susan had three years leave of absence from her job while she did a full time degree - History of Modern Art, Design, & Film - at Newcastle Polytechnic. Apart from being involved in her college work (I typed up all her essays, helped her structure them and kept an eye open for incorrect grammar), we were both on the resident's association committee. I came home from a late night at the library to a general meeting to find I'd been elected chair. Several months later I was deposed in a coup, those involved did a crap job, tried to scrap the association but were outvoted and I was voted into the post of secretary deposing the mastermind who'd got me ousted as chair. But that's another story. The people on Susan's course were a good bunch and we went to several parties and do's, one couple becoming particularly good friends.

Writing? Who had time for writing? For the first time in years I was living a real life rather than the one inside my head. I'd also drastically cut down on smoking and drinking.

I did eventually find the time and inclination for writing but it wasn't easy. I wrote the first draft of a horror/social realism novel about a group of friends who lived in a block of flats owned by a housing association in a town that suspiciously resembled Sunderland. A few years later, after we'd bought a house, I became a born-again veggie and wrote the first draft of a teenage sf novel which utilised certain paranormal elements from Lies but was more veggie polemic. It had some good things in it but... I also wrote 10,000 words of a book on how and why teenagers could and should go veggie.

And that was pretty much my last gasp as a writer of fiction. It was pretty much the last gasp of the Amstrad. Since then... It's just after ten and I've drunk half a bottle of wine. We've had the facts, now it's time for me to reflect. But not tonight. Right now I'm too close to it, a little too affected by alcohol, a little too tired, and so far I don't think I've uncovered any insights into something that is important to me, that is as much a part of me as my love for cats. (A couple of nights ago we delivered some cat food to a lady who rescues strays. Her own pet was an elderly bulldog which lay sprawled out on the living room carpet. I knelt down next to it and began stroking it and scratching its ears and chin. After a couple of minutes it slowly lumbered to its feet and raised a paw for me to take. This has nothing to do with writing but it touched me and I wanted to share it with you.)

2.

One of the things I learned was the craft of writing and of writing fiction. I'm not pretending I mastered it, though I did attain a certain competency, but what I did develop was appreciation of the craft and an enjoyment of its practise. It didn't come easy and, as I said, I had a bit of help from friends and professional writers. Rewriting, which had once been such a chore, became a pleasure. Once that first draft was out of the way and I knew what the story was really about, I could really get down to the proper work of crafting the prose. The simple journeyman craftsmanship of varying the tenses, varying the structure of the sentences, the lengths of the paragraphs, knowing where to begin and where to end, the crafting of description and metaphor (the hardest of all, I found). Character and dialogue I tend to think you either get or you don't. You can work at it but if you don't have the understanding or the ear (or can create characters who can speak the dialogue you write) then you're screwed (and feel free to disagree).

To me, and I'm digressing again, the most important aspect of all in fiction is having a character that you want to know about. They don't have to be sympathetic or even good but they have to engage your emotions. I've put down numerous well-written novels because I just didn't give a fuck about the characters. You might want to strangle them or slap them across the face but at least they're involving you. But if you don't care about them then either the author didn't or simply didn't do a good enough job. Good characters can get you through times of lousy plot but good plot can't get you through times of lousy characters - to paraphrase The Furry Freak Brothers. Me, I couldn't, I can't, write characters I don't care about.

Sometimes I think it's not just the craft of writing fiction that I enjoyed so much as that I enjoy the craft of writing English prose (as opposed to French or German prose, naturally, of which I know nothing). I enjoy using the English language in a written/printed form. Just today in The Times T2 supplement was a piece several thousand words long on the use of the comma. The writer, Lynne Truss, is the author of a current bestseller Eats, Shoots and Leaves on the use of English Grammar and I can't wait to read it. Actually, I'm going to have to as I've ordered it from Amazon and only afterwards noticed it takes 4-5 weeks to arrive. Anyway, I avidly and enthusiastically read these several thousand words about the use of the comma as I recognised examples of both excellent and appalling uses and of how its incorrect use can change the entire meaning of a sentence. Truss also writes about different theories on the use of the comma. Fascinating.

A recent addition to the city library stock was the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English Language, a lovely extensive large format hardback several hundred pages long and I intend to spend several hours over the next few days dipping in and out of it.

Look, I'm not coming at this from the position of a knowledgable pedant, though being pedantic is, I confess, part of my nature. I couldn't tell you what a subjunctive clause is to save my life; though I bet I can use one properly. Which isn't to say I don't have a good basic knowledge of grammar, of course I do. One of things I learned early on about writing is that you have to know the rules to be able to break them otherwise you just have bad writing and believe me you can tell the difference. Pedantry on the use of grammar is stifling and stultifying. The English language is flexible and constantly changing and you have to adapt - for years I hated the word 'proactive' but now use it casually, and appropriately - though God forbid we ever get to the stage where "apple's" and "pear's" denote plurals. And the word "strawberry's" makes me want to vomit. (I initially capitalised that final word for the sake of emphasis but decided it was both ugly and unneccessary.)

Bob Monkhouse, the famous British comedian, died (as this is being written) yesterday aged 75. He may well have been the last of the great comedians to come to the fore shortly after the end of the Second World War. He was certainly the best and most intelligent, far better than Eric Morecambe or Tommy Cooper, able to work on several levels from compere and quiz show host to being the finest standup comedian of his or any generation. He possessed immaculate timing and a ready willingness to send himself up. But more than anything else, he was a writer (he was also an sf fan, just ask Rog Peyton); he wrote gags but he worked on them and honed them till they shone - "I want to die sleeping peacefully like my father; not screaming in terror like his passengers". His two volumes of autobiography are also perhaps the best written of any showbiz star's. He knew how to use language in the service of his aims and did it, on his level, superbly. The reason I mention this, apart from a genuine sadness over the death of someone I admired and I admire few people, is to make the point that the effective use of English can be harnessed in many different ways and it is worth noticing how it is used in different contexts. I would suggest looking at political speeches by way of comparison but life's too short.

(Now I could have signposted the gag, my own small tribute to Bob, at the end by the appropriate use of a comma, however, I chose to let the sentence run on so that you'd be reading this one until you pause as you realise you'd just overrun a cynical smart-arsed remark. Or I could just be trying to show you what a clever little shite I am.)

After three years in a flat we bought the house we are currently living in. (Wot, no segue into a drastic change of subject? Well, no.) It hadn't much changed since it was built in 1926 and had been lived in for most of that time by the same person - we bought it from her heir - and it needed everything doing to it. This is just a partial list of things we did or had done: garage built; kitchen extension built; one bedroom made into two; total stripping of all wallpaper and paint; complete replastering of all walls and ceilings; stripping and varnishing all doors; stripping and varnishing the bannisters; scrubbing with a wire brush and washing every square inch of floorboard several times following the replastering; rewired, centrally heated, new kitchened and new bathroomed; chimney breast removed; the garden relawned and replanted (only one flowering bush remains). Every spare moment of most of my spare time for nearly a year was spent at that house. Surprisingly I didn't even attempt a story about a bunch of paranormals who lived together and refurbished a house. Then came my veggie phase as detailed earlier.

About seven or eight years ago we started getting into helping animal rescues. The (true) old bulldog story was planted as a foreshadowing. Susan's parents had, for some time, collected stuff and, during the late spring and summer months, sold it at boot fairs, sending the proceeds to various national and internation organisations like IFAW (world wildlife) and NAAVS (anti-vivisection). Turning 80, this had become too much for them so Susan and I took it over and not long after we heard of Wendy's Ark, a local animal rescue which we then started helping. This is a saga on its own so I'm cutting it very short. The upshot of it was in 2002 we opened a charity shop to raise money for Wendy and other local animal rescues (I'm treasurer and dogsbody) and a few months ago a new group dedicated to creating a permanent animal rescue in Sunderland was formed and I'm the chair.

So, as you can imagine, writing fiction has taken a backseat since then. What I have done is a series of false starts, mostly attempts at reimagining or reworking earlier material. I'd rewritten my very first complete novel, the old 'Rider on a Stone Horse', changing the title, back in my fever pitch of writing during the mid-80's; now, in the new multicultural millennium Britain, I saw a way to recast it, keeping the plot and characters, but changing the setting and subtext. The novel had initially been born out of nuclear fear and the student 'rebellions' of the late sixties and had been set in a post-nuclear holocaust setting. Now I imagined it more like a fantasy novel (though it wasn't) set in a parallel world where the followers of a Spartan Christ-figure fled to Africa and India and it was from these two continents that 'Christianity' emerged to conquer the world. There's a lot more to the background than that but it's of interest only to me. What is also important to me was that I'd revitalised a story I'd first conceived over 25 years ago. I sat down with renewed enthusiasm.

And gave up after about 15,000 words. I was just too familiar with plot and characters to keep it up for a third attempt (cheap sexual reference intended). I just couldn't do it. Much as I loved it I was bored with it. It might have been different if I could have changed the plot but essentially it was just the trimmings and I'd lived with it too long.

Something similar happened with the teenage sf veggie novel. The actual idea wasn't too bad, the plot was okay, and the characters were good (i.e. I liked them). What I thought I could do was tweak it a little. Originally it was a linear narrative with viewpoint alternating between heroine and hero. Now I had the bright idea to set this in the form of a flashback, a narrative being read by their teenage daughter. The daughter knows of two eco-terrorists who disappeared years ago after being involved in several underground wars and the meltdown of chunks of Antarctica, she just didn't know they were her (now-divorced) parents and what she reads is, essentially, an origin story accompanied by her reactions and conversations with her mother.

I wrote a few thousand words in a sharp spunky style and, once again, ran out of steam. Back to the drawing board.

I'd always been fond of an episodic novel, a sequel to Lies, I'd written set in The Home, a refuge/prison for paranormals who weren't up to scratch in one way or another. The longest story concerned a teacher whose wife has just left him so he jumps head first off a cliff and finds himself flying. Then his life gets really complicated. I thought I could rework it, sometimes radically, into a complete novel. There was only one major character from Lies making a significant appearance so it would work as a standalone. This time I managed 20,000 words before running out of steam.

I looked over all this stuff from time to time and quite enjoyed reading it. It had promise, it wasn't badly written. It was - oh Christ - it was worthy. It is all in the best possible taste, leavened with humour, but about serious subjects. Worthy. What a godawful criticism.

Time to stand back, I thought, and look at what I enjoy. Okay, I read a lot of crime fiction. I just can't write it. I've tried, I just don't have the mind for it. I like comics--been there done that with Lies. I like lesbian porn. Oookay, passing swiftly on to... Horror movies. I love horror movies! I love horror movies with bad taste and a good sense of humour. Evil Dead 2 rules! Peter Jackson's Braindead rules! Re-animator rules! Return of the Living Dead Part 3 (trust me, it's a good movie) rules!

I'll write a totally meretricious novel in the worst possible taste. What do I need? Lesbians! Debbie my lesbian from Tides all grown up lecturing in sociology and hanging with a (she doesn't know it, cannibal) witch coven. Her lover is a heterosexual mixed-race Jewish lawyer called Rachel who looks like Halle Berry. I could use characters from that old horror/social realism novel, and that unfinished horror comedy I haven't mentioned until now. Debbie's been turned/is turning into a zombie and the happy couple have to travel the supernatural highways and byways of Britain to find a cure, and let's not forget the parallel worlds and the great surprise ending.

I wrote two chapters and they were both worthy.

I couldn't write bad taste even when I wanted to. I spent most of the two chapters outlining their relationship and realised I didn't have enough story anyway. Godly for things not done. I'm not against self-discipline, in fact I'm a very strong advocate of it, but I believe it's only of use when you're motivated. Writing, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, is a part of me and when I write I write for the love of it, for the enjoyment of the act of writing. It's nice if other people get to read what I've written, even nicer if they enjoy it and let me know, but at heart, when I do it I do it for myself and that will do me.

Last bit coming up now.

A few months ago I read my one published novel - The Lies That Bind - for the first time in several years. I expected to find it clumsily written, full of scenes which would make me cringe. To my genuine surprise, it held up well. On its own terms, as a contemporary teenage sf novel, it actually is pretty good and effectively written, it has a certain substance and it has meaning.

For most of us our achievements are small. We can't all be award-winning professional writers or acclaimed musicians or famous politicians. Our footprints in history are tiny and soon fade away. Our triumphs, when and if they come, are small ones. The Lies That Bind is my small personal triumph (thankfully not my only one), and that will do me very nicely indeed.

- - -
*Written from December 3, 2003 to January 1, 2004. Revised from a Wegenheim posting. Special thanks to Dave Langford and Peter Weston for help with this article.

Books are written to fill peoples' lives with pleasure.
               --Kurt Vonnegut, "Teaching the Writer to Write," Kallikanzaros 4, March-April 1968

By J.G. Stinson

Readers are warned that this will not be much of a one-handed read, as I still have family alive.

Going through adolescence in the late 1960s and early 1970s, along with the social and political events of that era, I was more curious than worried about sex. I lived in an area of Maryland that, at the time, had very good libraries (public and school) and staff that must have been interested in the plethora of books being published that chronicled the women's liberation movement, the peace movement, the development of rock music, and the civil-rights movement. As a result, I could find just about any book I wanted on nearly any topic that interested me.

A brief tour of my romantic life reveals that I first got interested in boys in fifth grade, and started dating in 11th or 12th grade. Until that point, my short stature and chubby appearance weren't a guy magnet. But something amazing happened to me in the summer between my junior and senior year of high school: I grew a couple inches and lost 20 pounds, without trying. In my senior year, dates started, and then my first "steady" boyfriend wandered into my life (and wandered back out about a year later, may he rot in hell). By the time I graduated from high school, I had experienced my first love and first heartbreak.

That's the backdrop. Now, add to that the library haunting I did starting around 1970, during which time I read stacks of books all having to do with the topics mentioned in that second paragraph up there. One of them was the Boston Women's Health Collective's now-famous tome, Our Bodies, Ourselves. What a mass of useful information that was to me as a young girl. Looking back, I feel privileged to have lived at the time when it first appeared; teenagers today take for granted so much of what was new and a challenge to the status quo when I was their age. I never had to worry about AIDS until after I had started my military service.

As I progressed from junior high to high school, I read more and more about sex. How the male and female bodies work, what drives sexual desire in both, the physical aspects of arousal and intercourse, and sexually transmitted diseases. I didn't want to pick up anything I didn't want, you might say. The mechanics of sex caught the interest of the scientifically based portion of my mind first. I learned a great deal from this reading, but it was all mental, and I needed something else, but didn't know what.

Then I found out about adult films.

I don't recall the first X-rated film I ever saw, but I do recall the first R-rated film I saw which contained a "sex" scene in it, and that was Zardoz in 1974. I can hear the groans from here, believe me. For those still blissfully ignorant, this was a 20th Century Fox film directed by John Boorman and starring Sean Connery, Charlotte Rampling, Sara Kestelman, and John Alderton. The John Brosnan/Peter Nicholls-authored entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (Clute and Nicholls, eds., St. Martin's Press, 1995 [with updates]) has some interesting things to say about this film.

"A future society is divided into 2 regions: the Vortex and the Outlands, separated by an impenetrable Force Field. Within the Vortex live the Eternals, immortal and given to a decadent aestheticism, while in the Outlands dwell the Brutals, including a group called the Exterminators whose job is to keep the population level down."

Aargh, indeed. I still wonder why Sean Connery ever took the part of Zed the Brutal Exterminator (sounds like a character from a Gor novel). Anyone interested in learning more about the scanty plot can read the Brosnan/Nicholls entry.

This was the first film I ever saw which depicted sex in more than a euphemistic way, and the sex scene was a rather violent one as I recall. I'd read enough SF by this time to realize that Boorman's story was old hat as far as SFnal ideas were concerned. The sexual content caught my interest because I'd never seen anyone "do it" on screen (or in real life, for that matter).

Thus began my education.

In college and then during nine years of military service, I saw X-rated films which I filed away in my mind for future reference. Some of those films were quite useful in my intimate experiences. Though I'd heard much about them, I never did see Debbie Does Dallas or Behind the Green Door. But I did see Boogie Nights, and that was another eye-opener. With the advent of cable TV, a plethora of adult-content programming became available, and I watched a lot of it. The deliberate vagueness here is intentional; like I said, I still have family alive.

What I learned from watching X-rated films:

1. Too much of anything gets boring after a while.
2. A lot of what's depicted in these films can be successfully employed in one's personal life.
3. They can be very, very funny.

For application in intimate situations, these three things taught me that variety is better even when repetition is asked for, that X-rated films which show lots of sex but no violent sex aren't harmful to the "normal" human being, and that there is some art to making a good porno movie - and it's based on humor that's finely tuned. I also learned that a lot of those apparently impossible Kama Sutra "poses" are actually possible.

Today, there's so much adult content in movies and TV that one can hardly avoid it. Because I'm a parent now, I monitor what my child watches not because I don't want him to find out about sex (he already knows from school health classes), but because I want him to have a healthy, balanced perspective of it. I intend to raise a boy to become a man who knows himself first, and has the compassion and generosity to learn about others as well. We talk about a lot of things, my son and I, and as he nears the teen years, I feel even more obligated to keep those lines of communication open.

X-rated films (pornography is such a pejorative term) and a wide range of reading material gave me the information I needed to make informed choices about what I wanted, how I wanted it, and what I was willing and able to give in intimate situations. I think everyone should have been so lucky.

My motives for writing are utopian. I want my country to be what it promises to be and what it can easily afford to be. It can be a much better country. I am enraged with the condition it is in now. I don't give a damn if pot is legalized or not. I'm not afraid to say "shit" in public, but I don't think it is a particularly useful thing to do. I will not weep if we never get a man on the moon.
               --Kurt Vonnegut, "Teaching the Writer to Write," Kallikanzaros 4, March-April 1968

By Earl Kemp

One of the aspects of creeping senility lies within cherishing and fondling favorite old nostalgic fragments of the past. Many of them are evoked by watching old movies and, because I have so much time on my hands these days, I've been doing a lot of that.

Somewhere along the late 1960s, I encountered a rare and unique phenomenon in the form of an excitingly different manuscript. Bill Moore was the first reader at Greenleaf Classics at the time. He was one of those rare people who are so very good at their job as to become almost invisible, to me at least, but he was championed regularly by Pete Cooper, the editor-in-chief, because of Bill's insight and his right-on comments. If Bill didn't like the project, it never got anywhere close to an editor and if he really liked it, it got marked for my personal attention.

The particular manuscript that started a mini revolution in sleaze book publishing was an oddity named The Song of the Loon, written by an unknown Richard Amory.

In science fiction parlance, it was an alternate universe book. It dealt with a world where there were no females. None. Zilch. It never bothered to explain how reproduction took place or how replacement males came about, but that was all sort of minor. The emphasis in the novel was on the physical and amorous interactions of those males. It wasn't that they were making do with what they had; it was a natural condition for them and they evidenced no other concept.

It presented males, male sexuality, masculine forms and bodies, in a whole different way than they had ever been revealed before in literature, to the best of my knowledge at least. Before I had even finished reading the manuscript I knew that it would be really big as a book. I bought it instantly and began production on a first class presentation of it.

The writer Richard Amory turned out to be Richard Love, a schoolteacher in Hayward, California. The book was so different from anything that had ever been submitted to Greenleaf Classics before that he intrigued me and I invited him to San Diego to meet the editorial staff. I had done that on less than a dozen occasions before, when writers appeared to be so exceptional to the general rule that all of us who worked with them wanted to know more about them.

Usually, the problem was the opposite, fighting off the writers who wanted to come and visit us.

Richard Love turned out to be an extreme closet case. Not only was he a schoolteacher that, in the 1960s excluded even the thought and concept of homosexuality, but also he was using the standard obligatory married with small children as a front. He was absolutely terrified that he would in some way be associated with the book, revealed in his true identity, outed from his repressed sexuality, and fired from his job. He made all kinds of preconditions upon acceptance of his manuscript, the least of which was an absolute promise that in no manner would his position ever be compromised and that he was to be maintained totally separate from his book. And he got that, in spades…so much so that, later, his biggest complaint was that we "cut him out" of everything related to the book. Sometimes you get what you ask for, so the cliché says.

Not only that, he was offensively aggressive to every female he got close to, constantly leering (sort of like Robert Heinlein in that respect), hitting on them, pretend propositioning them, and in general randying around in what he thought was correct heterosexual posturing.

In other words, as a person he was really difficult to be around. The sort most people go way out of their way to avoid.

Because his manuscript was so exceptional, and the book so successful, we had to tolerate him and keep after him for more and more "sequels."

Then along came the movie people, sniffing after film rights. Sawyer Productions Ltd. purchased the film rights to Song of the Loon after some prolonged and interesting negotiations. I wrote of this, in part, in "Acres of Nubile Flesh" elsewhere in this issue of eI.

Along the way, I was invited to the location shooting in Big Pines and Trinity Alps in northern California, and of course I went. In those days, I couldn't get enough of watching movies take shape, even the hard-core sets I was invited to during filming sessions, or especially those.

I found myself, on the set of Song of the Loon, surrounded by dozens and dozens of hunky high school teenage jocks hired to play the parts of Indians. They were also acres of nubile flesh, stripped down, full body painted, then covered by provocative, miniature loincloths.

The set was lavish and elaborate, an entire Indian village spread out along the shoreline of a river…teepees, tethered and loose animals, artifacts, fires in fire rings, and everything else one could imagine might have been in an Indian village. There was a large catering area where all those jocks were fed, along with the real cast members, the crew, and me…the invited guest.

I spent a number of days there, with those guys, getting to know them. I liked John Iverson ("Cyrus Wheelwright"), who played the top man, but didn't like Morgan Royce ("Ephriam Maciver") who had the bottom position. And then I went back to San Diego and to reality and the workaday drudgery of producing an endless chain of masturbatory fantasies for our eagerly awaiting and turgidly aroused sleaze book buyers.

#

A bit later I received an invitation to the Gala Grand Premiere of Song of the Loon, and made quick plans to attend the showing at a major theater (name forgotten) in Los Angeles already known for presenting gay films to a specialized gay audience. I had been in and out of the fringes of that world a few times, invited to special parties by some of our better selling gay writers. Victor J. Banis and Sam Dodson, who were partners at the time, were high on that list and often invited me to some of their affairs. There was also Walt Leibscher in Silverlake and I also visited, with Frank Robinson, some of his friends in Laurel Canyon (they called it "Boy's Town"). Because of those contacts, I wasn't totally surprised by the things that went on at the Gala Grand Premiere.

Sawyer Productions Ltd. had gone all out for the occasion, and that included inviting every prominent homosexual in Southern California not known to be hiding in closets. There was a master of ceremonies and many introductions of notables in the audience who went onstage and did minor skits or took bows to loud applause. I particularly remember Charles Pierce, who was the reigning drag queen of the era, a perfect Bette Davis, who did a mini performance. He was followed by Jim Bailey, the upcoming drag queen apparent, who turned out to be an excellent Barbra Streisand within a few years. And many other stars now long forgotten.

When they finally got around to showing the film, it was anticlimactic. The audience loved the picture, but what else could you expect from such a select crowd? (Somewhat like watching Bush perform before a crowd of hand-picked pseudo admirers, with him saying nothing and them going into well-rehearsed wild applause following his every third insignificant word. Almost as if they expected the populace to believe they somehow reflected the opinions of the expendable citizens that Bush routinely fucks over for the financial benefit of his owners.) There were constant cheers, and oohs and aahs as various different characters appeared on screen, especially if they were nude and full frontal, and there was a segment of the audience that equally appreciated the rear approach. In fact, the catcalls and cheers so intruded upon the soundtrack that most of it was missed entirely. By the end of the film, you would have thought that that crowd had seen the very best movie every created.

Boy, were they wrong!

#

About this point in time, shortly after that Gala Grand Premiere, Richard Love underwent an abrupt life change. He was divorced and came screaming and swishing out of his secret closet like a mincing maricon. If he had any power, he could have been an equal to the all time ultimate faggot, John Edgar Hoover. Fortunately, he was powerless, but he nevertheless went on long, swishing rants about how he had been mistreated at Greenleaf Classics, and deliberately cut out from any participation in the film (including especially the script that he never wrote. I repeat this data because I have seen numerous websites claiming he was the scriptwriter. There is no writing credit attached to the film itself and it certainly looks as if no one worked on it at all).

And, the worst part of all, Love singled me out as being the sole person who would not allow him to participate in any of the terribly exciting events surrounding the book, or the film and its Gala Grand Premiere. Along the way, he gave me the grandest testament and seal of approval I had received up to that point in time. Richard Love said of me that I was much too heterosexual to ever understand the true meaning of love. To this day I still thank him for his correct and astute diagnosis.

#

Recently, some 30 years after the fact and out of curiosity alone, I borrowed a copy of the film and sat down alone, in the privacy of my own living room, and watched Song of the Loon from start to finish.

What an awful experience…what a dreadfully bad film. No part of it remains praiseworthy including the Eastmancolor processing. The acting is unbelievably stiff, awkward, and inept. The dialogue (erroneously attributed to a "script by Richard Amory") so banal as to be contemptible and delivered in a mock stodgy style that is difficult to describe.

In fact, I couldn't believe that the film had ever been well received, appreciated, or even momentarily applauded.

A total waste of my viewing time, all 89 minutes of it.

I hasten to add that there is no doubt that it was a significant milestone as far as gay liberation was concerned. Fortunately for Greenleaf Classics, the book far outdid the film in that regard and has been wildly and enthusiastically praised from all over the world.

(Curiously, the video I borrowed included a short film - with no reference to it anywhere on the video itself - starring the well-hung enigma John Holmes. The short about a bisexual long, named "A Problem of Size," immediately followed the feature. In it Holmes was seeking a sex partner without any luck. Everyone who saw his genitals ran from him in terror. Holmes was very young when it was filmed, not yet jaded and burned out by his phenomenal popularity and his staggering drug abuse. It was an interesting experience seeing it - the short film; I had seen it many times already - for the first time.)

And, the worst part of the whole experience was that there was no conclusion to Song of the Loon. It just ended abruptly without any resolution of any alleged ongoing plot string. Sort of like Sawyer decided that enough was enough at 89 minutes and the film was over and he could go back to loving his younghunk star again.

And, to my surprise, not one single frame of the portions I watched being filmed survived to appear in the flick. Not one frame. Not one naked high school jock with feathers in his hair and Max Factor Indian No. 5 up his ass. Not one glimpse of that huge, elaborate Indian village stretched out along the waterfront. All that was wasted effort, expensive but wasted. No way to make a movie, I suspect.

These days, thanks to digital video, no one has to work nearly as hard as they did in the 1970s.

#

An Afterthought

By Victor J. Banis

I personally never had any sort of contact with Amory, which seems odd, since we certainly must have crossed paths. I heard at the time from other sources that he was a major asshole. I also heard that the movie was unwatchable. I hate to be a party pooper but I though the books were hysterically bad. I think - very much so - that you did the right thing in publishing them and they were certainly very influential to our (my) cause. But if you go back and read them now, I suspect you will have much the same reaction that you did to viewing the film. He was unbearably pretentious without, alas, the real talent to back it up. However, as I have said elsewhere, the books (like Joe Hansen's detective stories and - forgive me - the C.A.M.P. books; and so much of what Greenleaf published) gave us gays of the era permission to see ourselves in new roles, in a new light, and so much helped the gay movement as it was then unfolding.

Why did we see the books and the movie so differently at the time? For one thing, and it shouldn't be underestimated, we wanted to. And, we were a little drunk on the idea of new roles, new playing fields. Why not? These were heady experiences; and, the salt in the air from all the sea-changes that were coming probably got in our eyes. Oh, of course, some of the other things we ingested might have played a role, too. Hard to say at this remove. Anyway, I'm glad he wrote the books, grateful that you published them, and I will have teeth removed without Novocain before reading them again. But, to be honest, I feel the same way about some of what I wrote then. It wasn't all deathless prose. Only the mediocre artist is always at his best.

- - -
*In memory of Richard Love who got everything he ever deserved. Special thanks to Robert Speray for the loan of the videotape and to Victor J. Banis for vetting this piece. Dated June 2004.

Q: "Based on what you've read and seen in the media, what is not being said in the mainstream press about President Bush's policies and the impending war in Iraq?"
A: "That they are nonsense."
               --Kurt Vonnegut, 1/27/03, "In These Times"

Acres of Nubile Flesh*
Original artwork by William Rotsler

By Earl Kemp

Where do they all come from?

Bodies all over the place, everywhere you looked, stumbling over each other trying to be next in line. Where do they all come from?

There was a while, back during the late 1960s and on into the '70s, when I was buying people by the ton. It sure seemed that way, at least. After Greenleaf Classics began buying magazines filled with photos of naked people packaged by outside contractors, I began growing annoyed with the types of people they were using as models. Somehow, they were doing things all wrong, I contended. They should be paying attention to what those people look like at least, and cleaning up some of them considerably ahead of time.

Naturally, I figured I could pick desirable people out as well as the next guy, and hopefully a little bit better while I was at it. I had no sooner begun