Ah! Sweet Laney!

At last, the Sooper Sekrit Publishing Project that will be released at Corflu Quire has been announced! Ah! Sweet Laney! -- Selected Writings of Francis Towner Laney is a 132 page collection edited by Robert Lichtman and designed by Pat Virzi. I got to proofread it, and in exchange I have received an advance copy. It's utterly gorgeous! Pat did a stupendous job on the design, and it has been printed on high quality paper and bound with plastic sheets to protect the covers.

It's a fascinating read, too. Laney was an LA-area fan in the '40s and '50s -- one of the Insurgents who railed against fannish bureaucracy and self-importance. (The LA fan club, LASFS, was a favored target.) He is most famous for his long memoir, Ah, Sweet Idiocy, which apparently incorporates an ongoing tirade against fandom. (It is not included here.) He's also famous for his homophobia, frequently exhibited here in his insinuations that LASFS was rife with homosexuality, although tellingly no names are named. This collection of writing is a fabulous window on LA fandom of the '40s, and a revealing exemplar of the notion that great fan writers are frequently both geniuses and fuggheads simultaneously. Reading about Laney's love/hate relationship with fandom is like grabbing onto a live wire. Both his impatience with fans and his homophobia come across as protesting too much, perhaps giving us a deeper glimpse into his sexual fears and internal contradictions than he knew. (Art Widner told me at LACon IV last summer that Laney, who was a friend of his, seemed to be very insecure about his own masculinity.) He wrote with great passion, often direct to stencil, no revisions. This collection covers everything from his ideas about how to put a fanzine together (still very much of interest), to why Lovecraft (an early literary love) wasn't going to be remembered in the long run (wrong!), to his early rambling, skeptical, excited engagement with Dianetics (which reveals pre-Scientology history I was completely unaware of).

It is a brilliant collection, and I highly recommend it. It is shot through with great artwork by William Rotsler and Alva Rogers, including a series of miniaturized covers from The Acolyte, Laney's early sercon fanzine. You can see a sample of it and find ordering details at efanzines.com. It's $15 plus postage (depending on which part of the world you live in), and worth every penny. The pennies go to the good cause of supporting Corflu, too.

Lullabies for foolish virgins

He strips me to my last nakedness, that underskin of mauve, pearlized satin, like a skinned rabbit; then dresses me again in an embrace so lucid and encompassing it might be made of water. And shakes over me dead leaves as if into the stream I have become.

Sometimes the birds, at random, all singing, strike a chord.

His skin covers me entirely; we are like two halves of a seed, enclosed in the same integument. I should like to grow enormously small, so that you could swallow me, like those queens in fairy tales who conceive when they swallow a grain of corn or a sesame seed. Then I could lodge inside your body and you would bear me.

The candle flutters and goes out. His touch both consoles and devastates me; I feel my heart pulse, then wither, naked as a stone on the roaring mattress while the lovely, moony night slides through the window to dapple the flanks of this innocent who makes cages to keep the sweet birds in. Eat me, drink me; thirsty, cankered, goblin-ridden, I go back and back to him to have his fingers strip the tattered skin away and clothe me in his dress of water, this garment that drenches me, its slithering odour, its capacity for drowning.

-- Angela Carter (who else?), "The Erl-King"