K10

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K10, an APAzine for Pieces of Eight, Feb. '91, by A. Vincent Clarke, 16 Wendover Way, Welling, Kent, DA16 2BN. "Hamlet is held up as an awful warning against thought without action, but no one holds up Othello as a warning against action without thought." (Bertrand Russell)

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Memory is a peculiar thing. It's supposed to change as one grows older, so that scenes of childhood come clear before the mind's eye. I don't know of any physiological explanation for this, and in my particular case it certainly doesn't work. There's a paragraph from a book that's been floating around in my mind for years, like some six-seventh's submerged iceberg, refusing to come into fuller view. We seem to have failed miserably on 'jenny hanniver' submitted by John. Maybe I should lay this out in front of the assembled multitude and see if anyone leaps to their feet with their hand up.

Briefly, the piece I was trying to remember, because it would have been a good quote to start with, was by some accomplished essayist – it may have been Alexander Woollcott. I think the actual essay was written about 1938, but the author was writing of Russia at the time of the revolution, in 1917. He was remarking on the terror and general upheaval going on at that time. Yes, he said, there were mobs and violence and destruction and death across the land, but, even then, some of the tears that were shed were tears of laughter.

He wasn't accusing Russians of being masochists, but of being human. We have a marvellous capacity for finding humour in the grimmest of times – we even have the phrase 'gallows humour'. There's the subject for a dissertation here, how the humour of the participants of some ghastly tragedy has spread to a wider audience. The sinking of the Titanic is now a regular subject of jokes. 'Allo 'Allo draws an audience of ten million, who are able to forget the Diary of Anne Frank. When do we cross that invisible line that separates the unspeakable from the humorous? It surely isn't when all possible survivors are dead – that you can have comedy about Christians being thrown to the lions in Rome, but not about the King's Cross underground fire?

So I plead some sort of humanity with this sometimes frivolous APAzine. There may be thousands of people killed in the near future, but we press on. I suppose you knew that there were lots more people living in the world at the end of WW II than existed in the beginning of it? It's only the obscenity of the A-bomb which has cast a shadow over us humorous humans. But even then.....

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Ian and I were exchanging a few remarks about the odd problems that could arise in APAs, but I've received from Steve Sneyd (Britain's main fan poet) an APAzine which brings up a very dodgy point of order which neither of us had contemplated.

NAPA, which is an American APA, was apparently starting a debate on the virtues or otherwise of capital punishment. This is of course a perfectly good subject, meat and drink to many a university debating society or even the Houses of Parliament. But in this case some confusion arose when one of the APA members confessed he had a personal interest. He was on Death Row. Apparently, in the States prisoners are allowed a neutral address, and you can't guess from where they're writing. The writer of this APAzine says "...had I known that this person was on death row I would have refrained from discussing the death penalty because of my strong support for it".

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I know there's not many of you that share my interest in old fanzines and older fans, but just in case he's too modest to mention it (unlikely, but...), I've received from Chuck Connor a copy of ALL OUR YESTERDAYS, and it's great by me. Chuck has collected nearly 40 articles written in American fanzines between the early '50s and the mid-'70s by Harry Warner Jnr., who is the USA's top fan historian. Each article takes a subject, fanzine or fan, and examines it in detail; I'd say that it was a fascinating read, even if you've never seen the originals. There's over 200 A4 pages of it, and Chuck is selling it at a mere £4.50, including post and packing. He's done a service to fandom.

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COMMENTS ON THE JAN '91 MAILING

CAPTAIN'S TABLE – Ian Bambro – Sorry to hear of photo-copier troubles. I think you should take the cost of a new ribbon out of PoE funds as you gallantly sacrificed the old one on our behalf.

By the way, there's acronyms a'plenty flying around the fo'c'sle – pretty little things, they are – and I'm happily adopting RYCT (Re. Your Comment To) which I've seen in the Organisation's 'zines. Don't know if it originated there, but it's a perfect APA time-saver and couldn't really be used elsewhere. I can't think of any others, alas.

MARAUDER 1 Vol.2 – Ken Cheslin – Great idea, giving books to charity, sez he with admiration, guiltily aware that he'd been trying to do the same thing himself for the last couple of years. Oh, that collector's instinct. At least, I can go to the bookshelves and say immediately that the Dancing Men were in Return of Sherlock Holmes. But this, like Poe's Gold Bug code, is a simple transposition cipher, solvable by a nine-year old if there are enough characters to work on. But Sherlock Holmes had a lasting effect on my life. You remember in the very first story, A Study in Scarlet, Watson says:His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge...my surprise reached a a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilised human being in this nineteenth century etc etc.

Sherlock Holmes's explanation was a real high-class get-out:I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose....the skilled workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic...for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before....

I took this on board hook, line and sinker, and have rarely bothered to remember anything that I can look up easily, such as telephone numbers (my own) or addresses (other people's). Looking at Holmes' statement in the cold light of the 1990's I feel a stab of doubt. Has the memory really such limitations?

Agree 101% on the horrible habit of accompanying every other TV programme with intrusive music. Can people actually shut out the background sound of, to take an extreme example, Miami Vice?

RYCT myself, I didn't know you had a Catholic early education. This has a bearing on my own prejudices; I've always been under the impression that when a Catholic whose moral values had been impressed by fear grew up, many of them threw out said morals with the fears and the Catholicism. You're obviously an exception if there's any basis to this – comments, anyone?

TURKEY SHOOT, the fanzine picking off the horrible, is from Ian Sales, 56 Southwell Road East, Mansfield, Notts, NG21 0EW.

K9 – self – Update on Uncle John and Aunt Janet – now in a home. Update on the late Don Thompson – he actually wrote his obituary for SCIENCE FICTION CHRONICLE (see Feb issue), just leaving blanks to be filled in.

MALACHITE – Jenny Glover – I liked this, containing as it does a lot on the philosophy of editing, a much-neglected subject. I also admire the length; coming as I do from an era (and a financial position) when every word counted. I remember re-writing and re-writing, paring down editorial comments to the nub, which constraints I'm glad you recognise. I bless the advent of word-processors, which enable one to cut and eliminate and condense without too much physical effort. Amongst other editorial tasks is that of presenting the material in a decent and readable form. I've just had a copy of PABLO LENNIS, published by US fan John Thiel who is actually an old-timer you'd think would know better. To conserve space he appears to use 9 lines to the inch which he manipulates by hand and the result is to make the text unreadable.

I'll show you a bit; be thankful you aren't seeing it all:

NEW BOOTS & PANTIEs – Kev McVeigh – RYCT Ian: that's a good point, using one's gifts on a holy day. Somewhere in the back of my memory is my Mum telling me that she once knew a couple so religious (and we're talking early years of the century here) that they didn't even cook on a Sunday. (Her italics). This struck her as a blasphemy in itself.

Good on the Queen's speech – offensive is right. Good on Saddam Hussein too. I would add, tho', in re. our own oil supplies, that one needs refining plants; you can't extract it from the sea and shove it straight into the car's petrol tanks.

"Very few books kept me awake all night in 1990"? You're joking, surely? Only one book has kept me awake all night in my life – WARHOON 28.

DRAGON GREEN – DRAGON BLACK – Darroll Pardoe – I take the point about Buddhism – I have a copy of Mind Unshaken by John Walters (Rider '71) which expresses very well the doctrines of the 'Theravada or Hinayana school', which are as satisfactory a philosophical viewpoint as one could wish. But I note that there are several schools – Mahayana, Tantrism, etc., – which raises some uneasiness in my mind, and the question of reincarnation is left largely unanswered in this book, at least. He says "Buddhists do not believe in 'reincarnation' or the transmigration of souls", but then more or less accepts the dogma for the rest of the paragraph, citing various famous people who have believed in 'rebirth'. And then leaves the subject, but many pages later says "Buddhism is also for the ordinary man, ordinary woman and ordinary child who may have many hundreds of rebirths before the peace and perfection of Nibbana ((Nirvana)) is obtained".

OK, I know I shouldn't criticise a whole religion on the strength of one book, but to a rational mind the whole subject is as foggy as Christianity and its angels.

I find that I can quite easily agree to the basic principles explained in the book, just as I can agree to the Ten Commandments of Christianity, but I just can't understand why both sets of principles should be set around with hundreds of pages of text – though to be fair, Mind Alone has only 120 pages.

You say in your very first paragraph, commenting on my phrase about the simple communistic state, that 'the world isn't as easy as that...people (by and large) are just too involved in the pursuits of possession, of power, of illusory security". Well, sure. You agree with me, only commenting that it's not practical. Agreed. How do we set about converting everyone else in the world (except for members of PoE and a few million Buddhists?)

The Clarke doctrine is quite simple. We're born, live and die and that's an end on't. But while we're alive we should do all that we can to increase the well-being of the world, because it's better to live in an environment you and everyone likes than one that anyone dislikes.

I'll leave someone else to work out the details.

THE ARACHNO FILE – John Rickett – Re. titles, there used to be a widespread fannish custom of opening a dictionary, stabbing it at random with some sharp instrument such as the top of the head, and picking that word as the title – which, in passing, led to fanzines being entitled RANDOM. You can modify this – I once used the last word in a dictionary, and came up with ZYMIC, which as it was a noun meaning 'fermentation' was pretty appropriate. I could fill up the rest of this zine with titles of fanzines, like ETHEL THE FROG, FRACTURED MONGOOSE, APORRHETA, LETTERS FROM PRISON, UNCLE ALBERT'S ELECTRIC TALKING FANZINE, BRIGHTEN YOUR WEEKEND IF YOU'RE NOT GOING TO BRIGHTON, and THE CHATTAHOOCHEE, OKEFENOKEE AND OGEECHEE OCCASIONAL GAZETTE.....

RYCT Kench on football fanzines. I've just had a letter from a fan who left the scene in 1955; his local football fanzine had proudly said that theirs was the first fanzine in the city, which inflamed my friend's ego to the point of his writing in and saying his PHANTASMAGORIA came out in 1950. The editor hadn't known sf had got in first.

Can someone enlighten me RYCT Ian on Jewish dietary laws? I can (just) understand the embargo on pork due to the prevalence of trichiwossname in tropical climes, but I didn't know about the prohibition on shell-fish. And then there's the Indians and sacred cattle. Is this just a canny psychological enforcing of religion – a sort of 'give 'em something else to worry about' syndrome?

I envy you for, amongst other things, this ability to trot out the appropriate funny story when needed. For some reason or other they just won't lodge in my memory. Loved the final 'Homer Nods' bit. I wonder if you can get Josie to write on your DIY?

STRUTHIAN PERSPECTIVE (8) – Theo Ross – CODOGFRYILL to you too, Theo. Marvellous blend this time. Intriguing about these annual trips to the Deep South; Xmas, I take it? I still haven't read STIG OF THE DUMP, because although there's lots of charity shops if not second-hand bookshops within easy reach, I find myself huddling around the fire in the middle of winter, reluctant to go out except for food and the posting of mail. I've read a couple of Edmund Crispin's detective novels from the library, which Maureen was thinking of commenting on, and wasn't overly impressed.

Very good suggestions about new members and sample mailings RYCT Jenny.

RYCT me on quarto, ta. I've also found myself part of a suppressed minority on duplicating paper in that size. It's even worse in the States, where in the latest SCIENCE FICTION CHRONICLE (Feb. '91) fan Jeff Schalles reports that he 'found twiltone mimeo paper in a church supply store' and it's editorially suggested it's a good source; apparently ordinary duplicating paper (which is what twiltone is, tho' in fact somewhat better than what we know in Britain) is non-existent in stationery stores.

A STRANGE KIND OF SENSE – Brian Stovold – Welcome, Brian! You certainly seem to have tamed the Apple in short order, and how lucky you are to have one in the family. I had a few copies of WORDSMITH passed to me in '87; it was a small 'zine for authors using computers/word processors. It was composed on an Apple Macintosh, and the result was very very impressive. Naturally, the editors were in love with the Mac, but after about three issues there was a back-lash from readers who couldn't afford £2000 or so for the hardware, and a sort of groundswell of approval for the cheapo Amstrad 8256. Thereafter a page or so every issue was set aside for it.

I do the same as you do when I find a good author – I stick with him....at least, for a time. I went overboard on Larry Niven, for instance, and got everything up to The Integral Trees. For some reason I found this one dreadful, and the spell was broken. Other authors were Raymond Chandler, Ernest Bramah, James Branch Cabell, Oscar Wilde, Jane Austen etc. etc. And there are some I can't even look at now – I have (just got up and counted them) 17 books by H. Rider Haggard, and haven't looked inside any of 'em for 20 years. One of these days I'll find a book-dealer who wants them.

When Terry Hill, an active early '80's fan fafiated (was Forced Away From It All) through economic circumstances, he 'took up' railways, and once showed me over a railway workshop in mid-Kent. It didn't increase my adrenalin.

You've started well.

LOLLYGAGGING – Chuck Connor – I think you're being hard on the Zebra Girl artist – if she's not human, and her breast would lead to that supposition, then there's no reason to think her buttocks would comply either. Agree with you about the horse, tho.

"Gone for a burton". This was used every day when I joined the RAF (or the RAF joined me) in '42, and not only meant an airman's death but by extension anything missing – if your cap was stolen, it had GFAB. Having a cap, a piece of equipment missing, meant that You Had Not Taken Care Of Government Property In Your Possession, and were automatically On A Charge {carrying a small punishment, such as extra duties etc.}. The natural consequence was that anyone whose hat, belt, bicycle etc. had GFAB stole a replacement. Thus were fostered the great moral values of Doing Your Service.

I always understood that GFAB originally referred to a member of a group in a bar going to get a Burton – a beer – and thus being missing, but when I was in a Library t'other day I looked it up and found that there was an alternative explanation. In Blackpool, where numerous recruits were kitted out for overseas, the place where you got your uniform was a store that had originally been Burtons, a popular pre-war tailors. Both explanations were given.

GFAB was a piece of RAF slang that spilled over a little into 'Civvy Street', but there were many that didn't transfer. There was a popular cry, "Two-Six" I haven't encountered since, meaning 'come and help quickly', 'make haste', 'urgent' or, for the benefit of Scottish readers, 'get a jildy on'. There was a popular explanation that Air Force Regulation No.26 stated that 'any personnel when called upon to do so would assist in closing the hangar doors' (after an aircraft had passed through them) and in fact you sometimes had the saying extended to "Two-Six on the Hangar Doors". I never did get around to investigating the popular explanation, but don't think such a comparatively trivial item would have come so early in Regulations. Eight-hundred-and-six....yes.

This is all wonderful stuff, but I can't comment at the length I should. RYCT Jenny on APA mailings, these have been the source of much heart-searching for me also. True, much of the stuff is mailing comments, which you can only get the flavour of by reading the preceding mailing and then so on ad infinitum, but much can stand up on its own. Apart from putting FAPA and OMPA and other zines aside, I confess I've ducked the problem, tho' I have a small ambition to collect all OMPA mailings. I suppose what we need is someone to go through mailings and reprint good stuff – would need a good editor. Otherwise, what we need is someone who specialises in APAzines only.

RYCT self. My cavemen speaking with Irish accents? I thought I was doing Brooklyn! I mean, when you want to be incongruous, go for it. I've had second – well, one-and-a-half thoughts – about my microwave, which I bought only three/four months ago. I'm now suffering from a crop of mouth ulcers, the first I can remember having, and casting about for a cause I'm wondering whether the sudden addition to the diet of 'poached' eggs may be the cause – they're so easy to do in the microwave. Or perhaps porridge, sez he wildly – paranoia, here I come.

THE GARRET – Tommy Ferguson – And welcome to you too, Sir. Interesting diary – how is it that you only moved into a house in October but are fretting for a flat in January? You have my full sympathy, being young in the present industrial climate, especially in NI with its high unemployment. Re. Philip K. Dick, I don't feel so strongly about him that I wouldn't dispose of PBs by him to the traditional Good Home – have you a Want List?

I don't think that's there's anything terrible about bad spelling, but that momentary hesitation when you have to pause for a microscopic fraction of a second to decipher what word the other guy means is distracting. Word processors are Ghod's gift to bad spellers, or even occasional eccentric spellers like myself....not only spell-checkers, which can often be a cumbersome nuisance, but in the ability it gives you to backtrack and correct a word. Trouble is, even the cheapo Amstrad is rarely cheaper than £275 secondhand

I think that'll have to be all for this time – what with watching the Gulf news on TV with one eye and the ulcers I'm not so quick as usual (usually, I'm last minute), and may even copier this instead of duplicating it. Just about time to go back and insert the PABLO LENNIS extract mentioned into the MALACHITE review above. Over and out.