K14


K14, an APAzine for June '91, by A. Vincent Clarke, 16 Wendover Way, Welling, Kent DA16 2BN. GIANTS OF THE PAST No 2: "This is my 239th. fanzine page of the year, with maybe another 50 to go." (Malcolm Edwards – Magic Pudding 1973.)


It's been a funny old month, said he philosophically. I'd hardly resumed normal life (you call this normal?) after Mexicon when came the news that my first grandchild had weighed in at 5½lb. and 4 weeks early, and almost simultaneously that one of my oldest friends was very seriously ill. I had the curious feeling that life had been put on 'hold' for a few days, until there was reassuring news from both hospitals.

Meanwhile, I started a new Project to take my mind off more serious matters. Rob Hansen and myself have been much helped in our researches into fan history by some bibliographies of British fanzines published by Peter Roberts in the early '70s, but of course these stopped in 1970. I've known for years that we really needed a list for the '70s, so with the help of some rough notes from Peter I've started one, and find there's a sort of hypnotic fascination in compiling it. About 300 titles noted so far, but of course there are lots of details to add – about 3 months work.

So only comments this time.

COMMENTS ON MAY 1991 MAILING

PIECES OF EIGHT – Ian Bambro. Welcome back and stuff; nice seeing you at Mexicon. I was unexpectedly busy there, dashing off to see to the electro-stenciller every now and again, which broke up a lot of conversations.

With the boojum-like vanishing of two prospective members, I've been wondering about a modification of the idea that was floated previously, about a sample mailing with the Best Of PoE. How about current members listing topics about which they've written in the previous 12 months, to be included with any invitation to join? Mine would, f'rinstance, include Letraset sheets to improve copiering, book-culling, neglected fantasies, the first day of OMPA, showing fans around London, airmail envelopes, the Golden Ratio, MARPHI, Factsheet Five, books of Odd Facts, convention badges, advertising for the Rocky Horror show, etc. and I know older members could produce much longer lists. It would give prospective members an idea of the variety. Good idea?

MARAUDER 5 – Ken Cheslin: RYCT me on printed illos. Yes, there are some books around full of pictures that one can copy free of charge – I believe one of the Belfast fans owns one, and I have somewhere an American book, (published by Phaidon over here), called DESIGN & PRINT YOUR OWN POSTERS, with several pages of illos that one could copy. Unfortunately, there's not many suitable for fan publication, there being lots of Santa Clauses,* Thanksgiving turkeys, St. Patrick's Day parades and the like for heading posters. I was given (by Derek Pickles) a book on some improbable inventions, and you may see illos from it in 'K' if I can find space.

RYCT John: Keith Walker, whom you mention, is no longer answering letters (I wrote to him for information about '70s fanzines) but I have some of your publications for OMPA, etc. When things get a bit less hectic I'll sort 'em out.

Pamela Boal's little piece on the wild bird was sensitive and nicely written, and set me thinking that there's not many fanzines in today's hard-edged fandom where it could have otherwise appeared – Darroll's, perhaps?

Liked the hagiography, and the captions to the cartoons on the back page were v. good, having an extra kick from being juxtaposed. Wish I had your facility for caption writing.

*Clausii?

K 13 – self Not much progress on anything here due to distractions as mentioned earlier. No one came up with a glue solvent. No one said much about the comprehensibility of typed lines (maybe I should try an experiment with you lot?), and CLARKE COUNTY, SPACE turned out to be quite an acceptable time-waster but not to re-read.

No one asked for any 'Travis McGee' books. I accidentally bought an American PB and a British PB of the same title, THE WIDENING GYRE, in Parker's 'Spenser' yarns. Now have four of these – CEREMONY, PLAYMATES, MORTAL STAKES and the aforementioned GYRE. They seem to be bound together by an on-going framework (stories are sequential) which is surprising these days, tho' I remember Dorothy L Sayers did it.

On the musical tapes, Ken tells me that Theo sent him the 'Reluctant Cannibal' song, which is just as well. I disentangled my reel of tape containing it and then when I went to plug into the 'on line' socket in my cassette recorder found that for some inexplicable reason it needed a 3mm plug. My local Tandy shop had 2.5mm and 3.5mm but looked at me pityingly when I asked for the middle size. I could, I suppose, always set the cassette player with it's built-in microphone in front of the reel-to-reel's loudspeaker, but it seemed kinda crude. Luckily, Theo saved me from a trip up to London's Tottenham Court Road where I would have been able to buy a 3mm plug and would also be exposed to the seductive dangers of Charing Cross Rd. bookshops.

Anyway, I looked up a show-business reference book in the Library and concluded that the mystery tape was of a show called JAMAICA, featuring Lena Horne, which apparently ran for a couple of years on Broadway in the late '50s. Why it then sunk without a trace I don't know, except that maybe it was too slanted at US audiences to make the transition to the British stage successfully. Maybe there was a bit of needle – Jamaica achieved self-government in '62. Whatever the reason, the calypso rhythms are enchanting, and the words clever:

When I see the world and it's wonders, What is there to say?
I don't think, Oh no I don't think, I'll end it all today.
Fish in the sea and sun in the heavens, Sailboats in the bay,
I don't think, Oh no I don't think, I'll end it all today.
So many sweet things still on my lips, So many sweet lips still to be kissed,
So many sweet dreams still to unfold, So many sweet lies still to be told.
When I see the world and it's wonders, What is there to say?
There's no time for the Reaper to call, Oh I don't think I'll end it all today.
Away with the river, Away with the razor,
Away with the Pearly Gates, Away with barbiturates,
Away with the secconal(?), The fall from the building tall,
Oh I don't think I'll end it all today....

etc etc etc...it goes on, including the marvellous "Away with monoxide, Away with the one-way ride..." I'm not sure about the 'secconal' above, but I have a feeling it was a drug on which people o.d'ed.

The peculiar bit on teabags in the local MERCURY appeared to arouse no response at all, not even from Tetley's publicity department.

As a tag to Theo's query on Class, I borrowed from the Library WE BRITISH (by Jacobs & Worcester, pub. Weidenfeld & Nicholson, '90), a resume of surveys by Mori, wherein it says that 67% of us call ourselves 'working class' now against 43% in a a Gallup survey 40 years ago. "If you work, you must be working class. And calling yourself that is no longer something to be coy about. It is a badge of honour, not of shame." Oh, and 30% now were willing to describe themselves as 'middle class'.

This is a good book with some fascinating diagrams. The only quibble I have with it is that it relies on replies from only 1,458 people. If my calculator is working OK and there are 50,000,000 of us in these islands, this means they picked one out of every 34,000. That's a worse ratio than when an MP is chosen, and you know the general feeling about them.

UNTITLED – Sarah Cox – Marvellous stuff as usual – I especially liked "..if I could just find the cat..." Anyway, congratulations on the move, and you now know why, after living here uninterruptedly for 28 years, I would no more think of moving than of growing a new head of hair (chance would be a good thing). I suppose that if I ever get really old and feeble I might hold the grandfather of garage-sales, before allowing myself to be dragged by the usual herd of wild elephants to a quiet little padded room, but not yet....

What are 'the Toads?'

You seem to be able to turn to anything with awesome ease, and the report of the visit to the cinema was yet another example. I'd be interested if you noted what kind of audience there was. There must have been a few local youngsters balancing the attraction of Mel Gibson and Glenn Close against that incredibly ancient boring nutter Shakespeare. Short but interesting, Sarah.

MALACHITE – Jenny Glover – What I find most interesting about the hekto process is that (1) you can start with such a small capital outlay and (2) you don't need the muscles of a superman to move the equipment. The fact that most Gestetner duplicators have a handle on top doesn't mean that they can be cheerfully moved from room to room. I suppose that if they (G) came into the 20th century (rather late in the day) they'd substitute aluminium for Victorian cast iron. There was an American fan once who made his own 'mimeo' and published a fanzine called something like 'Making The $3.75 Mimeo'. It worked, too, and was light and portable. He also had about $2000-worth of engineering equipment, including a lathe, and started with an airy remark such as "Procure a 10" diameter piece of aluminium tube" on the same lines as Mrs Beeton's remark about hares.

The short list of Odd Words noted, tho' I'd take it kindly if you could produce some I could use in Scrabble (proper and antique names not acceptable). I invested in a computerised game for the Amstrad and have had many a titanic struggle with the green screen, because its makers have fiendishly gone outside normal dictionary boundaries. Out of desperation I started to make lists of words that the game uses, and now have a rather esoteric collection which, for words starting with 'K' for instance, goes KAID, KED, KAW, KEMP, KORAS, KAMES and KYE. No definitions, of course.

I have a couple of other squiggles against parts of MALACHITE, but can't now remember what I wanted to say about Chuck's hairiness except that it doesn't actually stick out of the end of his sleeves or in between his shirt buttons. The other squiggle is against your remark that the BSFA is full of readers who may be made to feel slightly defensive about it. Good grief – still? I know you don't mean reading by itself, as the Mori Poll book quoted earlier says that 64% of people had read a book in the previous month, but I didn't think sf carried that kind of stigma any more.

FRAGMENTS – Mike Gould – That was really funny about the cat.."he seemed to be reading the instructions..." etc. Have you tried drawing 9 concentric circles in front of him and pointing to the third one? Not knowing how much you want to muck up the appearance of your fridge inhibits me from making suggestions, but something on the lines of a bolt held on by superglue is the obvious answer. Animals can be uncanny, tho...have you seen the BBC film of the tests that they set squirrels? And the latter aren't rated as high as cats on the intellectual scale.

I visited Edinburgh only once, and that was about 30 years ago, but remember how impressed I was by it (and I've lived within 12 miles of the middle of London all my life). I remember going to see the Camera Obscura, but that was years before holographs were invented.

I remember John Dickson Carr's BLIND BARBER with some affection, tho' when I re-read it after some years some of the initial glamour seemed to wear off. I make this sort of thing a bigger and bigger factor in my judgement as to whether a book is worth reading (and keeping) – can one visualise oneself re-reading it? In fact, I'm beginning to make that a simple test; here's a book that's been on the shelves 'x' amount of years; would I ever want to re-read it? Works.

The moving of furniture was interesting and funny; pity you don't live closer to Sarah, as she could probably do with some of those excess chairs. Not being what you might call house-proud, I cope here with the possibility of visitors (I've had 14 at one visit, and this is a typical suburban box) by using ottomans and boxes for sitting on and also buying a few fold-up garden chairs. In fact, when I needed some proper chairs last year I had to go out to the garden shed and extract them from a cloak of spider's webs and dead leaves. Liked FRAGMENTS – read very naturally and unforced.

SHREDS OF CANVAS – Eunice Pearson – Short but sweet. I certainly respectfully kow-tow to the standard of hand-writing. Mine, the fragments of school learning never reaching adulthood as I was given a typewriter early on, was further distorted when I taught myself a sort of typewriter script for writing captions to stencilled drawings in the late '40s and has never recovered. Neither have I the ability – as you apparently have – of writing more than two consecutive sentences without wanting to go back and alter the first one. When you say 'typing all week', doesn't your place of employment have word-processors?

Origin of 'Edgar' noted. Where did I read the query as to whether PoE started 'cos there were only eight members? What is the origin?

Looking forward to mailing comments.

TRAVELS IN HYPERREALITY – Maureen Speller – Me and gardening get on like dogs and fleas. I feel I can never spend the sheer time involved these days. And when I did make an effort some years ago I found that I couldn't distinguish flowers from weeds in the early stages. But I must cut the front garden hedge – it's six feet or more high in places and would successfully shield any passing baddie if he wanted to break into the front room windows (the houses on each side, 14 and 18, have had a visitation in the past, which is my excuse for keeping the house just this side of dilapidated.)

Congrats on the increasing confidence. I must say I've never noticed any lack of it, and the adoption of the name 'Speller' indicates a certain brashness, in fact – you're not afraid of people picking up mis-spellings! And your confidence in being able to remain sane under a steady diet of ISAAC ASIMOVS STUFF is a good sign. Yes, Budrys is another example of the dichotomy in human affairs, where people can write well but be a mass of contradictions inside. All too human, I guess. Another factor in building up your own confidence in yourself is not to have too high an opinion of other people. Of course, we all know folk who carry this to absurd extremes in an effort to boost their egos, but a little recognition that your favourite author also has the habit of wiping his nose on his sleeve helps.

A STRANGE KIND OF SENSE – Brian Stovold I've been trying to figure out what 'BPSO 3' at the beginning means. Some computer direction?

That's a good idea on the sf fan's diary. There's been various fan calendars over the years, both straightforward illustrative ones and humorous (I was involved in one of the latter, with truthful bits on eg. H.G.Wells's birthday and fanciful – "Martian Settlers Revolt 2136" etc.) but never a diary. I also remember writing once on the crying need for commemorative cards for fans – 'Congratulations on the Birth of Your Fanzine' and 'Happy Convention' etc. Trouble with a diary would be that very few fan events can be narrowed down to specific days, which is what would be wanted if a few commemorative anniversaries were to be included alongside the more obvious Convention Dates. This is an idea worth following up, though.

How about " A hypocrisy of Diplomats" in the generic terms?

When you say "A Strange Kind of Sense" you might have added – "of Humour" but it does work most of the time. I see The Cat makes it's inevitable entrance – what is it about the things? I was always a Dog man myself – cats are always too devious for me.

Don't take this is a criticism, Brian, (well, it is, but don't) but it's usually the custom to put details of name, address, date and for what APA you intend the Thing to appear in, somewhere in the 'zine. This is because myself (and Chuck Connor, just to spread the blame) collect old fanzines and it's a heck of a job to index one such as yours if it strays. I have full size fanzines – 40 or 50 pages – which are completely anonymous as regards months and years published. And now I've become the proud (?) compiler of an index myself I can understand why indexers are shy, nervous people who open every 'zine with shaking hands.

Do you mean that you were so busy composing that you let your tea grow cold, or that you actually like the stuff? If you do this is the worst perversion I've come across since an American fan editor attained instant fame by confessing she (she!) had a passion for cold mashed-potato sandwiches.

THE ARACHNO FILE – John D. Rickett – Another AF so seamless that it's hard to insert pertinent comments; you certainly can write. RYCT me and the Ganges for a 'whiter than white' wash (one of the great Advertising Hypes of our time); yes, I can understand muddy water, with it's complement of slightly abrasive sludge, helping to wash windows, but ordinary linen? Must be something to do with that Indian sun bleaching everything, I reckon. And no – the article in 8000 PLUS was justified. I suppose that this is one of those un-resolvable dilemmas, whether one can read justified text as quickly and easily as unjustified, which could only be sorted out by getting two readers to go through two books, one of which – well, you get the idea. And even then the readers would have to be identical. Twins, perhaps.

I never tried joining MENSA, partly because if it wasn't going to change the world it didn't seem worth it, partly because there seems to be some ferociously intelligent people in the world holding opinions I think are crappy in the extreme, so intelligence isn't everything. And I wouldn't qualify anyway.

I've been digging into the archives looking for the Eric Frank Russell article where he said that he'd like to compile a book of Spanish proverbs, which remark has stayed with me over the years and which has always caused me to notice the odd translation I've seen. I haven't found it – yet – but I found a reference which may have led him into getting interested – a remark that he'd written a story (sf?) in collaboration with one A. Miguel Gautisolo, a 'Spanish author'. Any knowledge?

On the Thames being a highway – yes, pre. mid-'50s it was thick with traffic, and it used to pervade all of east London; I remember going over to North Woolwich sometime in the late '40s (searching for sf as usual) and when I looked down one side-street there was the superstructure of a large ship completely blocking off the end of the street, where the docks were. It's completely astonishing how little the Thames is used now – you can sometimes stand on Greenwich Pier and there's not a moving ship (or boat) in sight. Over the last few years I've travelled a few times (going to Rob Hansen's place in East Ham) through where the old docks used to thrive, and all one can see is a few water-skiers being towed along. For all the good it does you might as well board over the Thames and use it as an autobahn. Has Chuck any views, or does he feel that the sailors job is – just another job?

PARROTS IN THE LIVING ROOM, ETC. – Peter-Fred Thompson – Dammit – haven't left myself enough space except to comment on the duplicator. If you set the stripper blades correctly you shouldn't get the somersaulting paper, but there's a multiplicity of settings – the front guides can be moved sideways and also up and down. And that middle guide can be un-clipped entirely if it seems necessary. Unless the paper is defective (one ream we tried at MexiCon was useless) you shouldn't have trouble; this is being done on the manual equivalent.

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Vince Clarke's APAzines
Contents

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Notes and Queries
K1
K2
K3
K4
K5
K6
K7
K8
K9
K10
K11
K12
K13
K14
K15
K16
K17
K18
K19
K20
K21
K22
K23
K24
K25
K26
K27
K28
K29
K30
K31
K32
K33
K34
K35
K36
K37
K38
K39
K40
K41
K42
K43
K44
K45
K46
K47
K48
K49
K50
K51
K52
K53
K54
K55
K56
K57
K58 to K69
K70
Books About SF Continued
From K??
Vincentian 1
Vincentian 2
Vincentian 3