Ah! Sweet Laney!
Jan. 30th, 2007 09:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
randy_byersAt 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.
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.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-01-30 07:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-30 07:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-30 07:45 pm (UTC)Chris
no subject
Date: 2007-01-30 09:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-30 07:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-30 09:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-31 07:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-31 04:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-03 04:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-03 06:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-04 12:00 am (UTC)Anyway, as far as I'm concerned there are other fans who I'd much prefer to see being reprinted. How about Bob Tucker for a start? If you're going to push for the FAAN Awards to be renamed after him then isn't it time for a new version of The Really Incomplete Bob Tucker?
no subject
Date: 2007-02-04 12:17 am (UTC)