Dry Ice Factory

It may be taken as read -- and indeed as an essential aspect of Eastercon heritage -- that the real beer runs out, to be replaced by hastily negotiated and progressively less real substitutes. England, my England.

-- Dave Langford, "Six Day Warp," from Attitude #11, July 1997

(I'm reminded that when the real ale ran out at the 2003 Eastercon, one of the substitutes was bottles of Bishops Finger. "You never know where it's been." Or was it, "You never know who it's been in"?)

If you're not able to make it to Corflu Cobalt in Winchester this year (as I'm not), please consider buying a supporting membership. It's a good thing to do just on general principle, but there's also something in it for you. As announced in the second progress report, there will be an anthology of contemporary British fanwriting given to all members of the convention, including supporting members. The fanthology will be edited by Claire Brialey, Mark Plummer, and myself, and it will contain British fan writing and art from the period 1995 to 2009 (thus acting as a follow-up to the outstanding Time Bytes fanthologies produced by Lilian Edwards and Christina Lake for the 1995 Worldcon). This is pretty much exactly the era in which I became active in fanzine fandom, so it has been fascinating to look back at the fanzines that hit me right between the eyes as I was forming my first impressions of the field. There's plenty of great material for us to choose from, and I'm confident the resulting anthology will be a lot of fun to read.

Supporting memberships are cheap, too: £10 (UK) or $15 (US). If you are outside the UK or the US, I'm sure something can be arranged. Consult the Corflu homepage for instructions on how to join. A good time guaranteed for all!

Thanksgiving weekend was a nice break from the seasonal blahs. Thanksgiving itself was a good time, with my parents, their kids and grandkids, and my mom's youngest sister and her husband, kids, and grandkids. Nineteen in all, with my cousin's daughter the youngest at three years old. She was cutest and highest maintenance as well. My aunt, the granny, wanted us all to take note when she said "no" to her for the first time ever. My aunt teased me about my beer belly, which she only just noticed this year. I think it took that long for it to break through her image of me as a skinny little boy. My sister was shocked to learn that I use reading glasses now. Hey, the baby in the family is turning fifty next year.

Other than that, the weekend was pretty mellow, except for one intense family discussion about my eldest nephew's latest flirtation with doing something stupid. The guy really needs to learn how to button his lip, at least around his grandparents, because there's no reason they need to know this stuff. I kept far worse from them in my own day. That aside, it was mostly getting caught up on everybody's latest plans. My sister is looking for another five-month teaching assignment somewhere in the world, maybe in Chile or Rwanda. My niece's photography business is slowly building. My youngest nephew wants to go to Tunisia for two weeks to study French. My parents had a wonderful time at a fifty-year reunion at the Mennonite college in Heston, Kansas. Mom was especially reflective on how their experience there was pivotal in changing the course of their lives from farm folk to white collar workers.

I read Michael Swanwick's Hope-in-the Mist, which is a short book about Hope Mirrlees. As the title indicates, it's an answer to the question, "Who wrote Lud-in-the-Mist?" Mirrlees was the daughter of a wealthy family, and she was a dilettante who was the friend of Virginia Woolf and TS Eliot and the companion (and maybe lover, nobody really knows) of the Cambridge classics professor, Jane Harrison. Mirrlees wrote an avant garde poem called "Paris" that some think was an influence on Eliot's "The Waste Land", and two novels that Swanwick is somewhat dismissive of, along with Lud-in-the-Mist. Neil Gaiman's introduction echoes Swanwick in seeming to think that Lud-in-the-Mist is an extraordinary book that stands head-and-shoulders above her other work. After it was published in 1926, she wrote almost nothing else except a handful of poems, although she lived another fifty years. A strange life, and a strange little book about it. I read it in one sitting. I'd say it's probably mostly of interest to fans of Lud-in-the-Mist, although anyone interested in the Bloomsbury group or Jane Harrison might find it worth reading too. I always have mixed feelings about biographies, but this one does at least shed some light on a fascinating novel.

I also read some fanzines over the weekend -- the latest issues of Banana Wings and Relapse, and a fistful of year-old issues of Vanamonde. Fanzines may be a dying form, but they're not going out with a whimper. I feel itchy to do something worthy of what my friends are publishing. What the hell, I do think the new Chunga can stand with these zines, but I want to do another one in response to what I've just read. Pete Weston's article about a boxful of old fanzines, in particular, makes my latest piece for Chunga seem pretty feeble and underdeveloped. The old man has kicked sand in my face! I'd better start lifting weights.

Well, so much for getting away from it all. Now it's back to work.

Just before the end of the work day yesterday, I received e-mail from my unDasKapitalized co-editor asking if I'd like to join him at the Big Time brewpub for a Trombipulator Tripel. Ooh, ooh, twist my arm! The lovely Sarah (the bartender) was serving it to us, and only us, in pints rather than in the usual 12 oz. tulip glasses. Things spun predictably out of control at that point. Before we knew it, we were back at my place printing out proofs of the next issue of Chunga and brainstorming (aided by Dogfish Head Indian Brown Ale) on how to recomplicate the current bare bones of artless text into a fleshy, bumping, sexy beast. It's showtime!

Then I woke up, and it was time to shave and go to work again.

The Corflu Zed regress report is now available as a PDF at efanzines.com. The 36-page issue includes covers by John D. Berry; con reports by wrdnrd and Nic Farey; Andy Hooper's collection of selections from past Corflu reports, which was read by a cast of thousands at the convention; a song by Ian Sorensen that never happened; a follow-up to the Seattle Fanzine Renaissance panel by Jerry Kaufman; plus debriefings by Andy, Suzle, Mark "Cry for Me" Manning, and your humble correspondent. The beautiful design and layout is by holyoutlaw. (Happy birthday, Luke!)




(Dancing Walrus by Kellipalik Qimirpik at Inuit Gallery of Vancouver.)

It's time-consuming, this business of printing a fanzine at home. It's not something I can just set up and leave to run on its own. It requires almost constant interaction in the process. Part of that is because of how I decided to do it this time. When I printed the guts of the last Chunga, I used the duplex mechanism, but I printed all 275 copies of one two-sided sheet at a time, then we collated by hand later. The thought was that this would save computer processing time. For AmaZed and CorfluZed #4 I'm letting the printer do the collation too, which means I'm printing the guts of each copy all at once, then stapling that copy while I print the guts of the next one.

Since the covers are on different paper, I printed all of the front covers at once. I tried to do the same for the back cover, but the paper tray stopped working for that weight of paper for some reason, so now I print the guts and then print a back cover hand-fed, then add the front cover and staple it. Just to make things more complicated, I'm printing the guts in color and the back cover in grayscale. That's because when I printed Chunga I discovered that a little bit of color toner was being used on pages that were nothing but black text. There's no color on the final page or back cover of the regress report, so it can be printed in grayscale, saving some color toner.

What this all means is that I have to send a print command twice for each copy of the zine I print, and I have to make changes to the settings for each print command. This introduces more opportunity for errors, and I've made a few. (If you get an all grayscale copy, you'll know why.)

It's time-consuming. It's hard to focus on other things (like writing an LJ post, or working in the garden) while doing this. I'm only willing to do it this way because I'm only printing around a hundred copies.

I have no urge to play around with mimeo or other older printing technologies, but working at this level does make me think more about how each copy of the zine is an individual artifact that for instance is stapled slightly differently than all its twins. This does get me thinking about other ways individual copies can be made distinct. Rubber-stamping? Hand-coloring? Changes in paper color? Who knows, maybe I will end up getting into something like letter press printing once I no longer have the money to blow on toner. (Although actually the convention is paying for the toner for the regress report.)

Meanwhile I'm nursing the printer. And being reminded how much I love the taste of fresh raspberries and granola. Heaven! I love this time of year. Ah well, guess it's time to stuff a few envelopes.

Update: I did take a break, by the way, and went down to the Fremont Street Fair to hang out for a couple of hours with R. Twidner, holyoutlaw, and juliebata at the Seattle Art Car Blow-Out. Gave Art a wee bit o' the creature. He told good stories about the first days of fandom and fanzines. Loved the art car with the slogan, "Who profits from your self-loathing?" Now I've got my nose back to the grindstone. Ambient music on the speakers, cool evening air mixing with the stench of toner. Raspberries for dinner!

I'm scanning articles from Apparatchik for a friend. It's fascinating to see it evolve issue by issue, of course, but what's strange is how much it already feels like a different era now. Looking at Andy's fanzine review columns, it seems like a lot more people tried their hands at fanzines even then, even if only fleetingly. On the other hand, it's not only fascinating to watch Apak itself evolve, but fandom too. A solo zine by Mike Scott? Ah, this is pre-Plokta.

Mr. Hooper has posted another copy of "Travels with the Wild Child" on eBay as part of his fund-raising auction for Corflu Zed. As I mentioned last time, this is a long travelogue-memoir that I published in 1996 about a road trip I took with a friend to visit her mother in the mountains east of Fresno. It's one of the better things I've ever written, I think, and I only published a hundred copies. Design and layout of the booklet were by c. juarez. It's Item #230313396542. Act now! Bid without thinking!

There are also other fascinating items available, including issues of Femizine edited by "Joan W. Carr" and Ethel Lindsey and published in the '50s. Joan W. Carr was a pseudonym for Sandy Sanderson, of Inchmerry fame.

Search for "corflu zed" to find them.

AmaZed and CorfluZed #1 is now available at efanzines.com. This is the first progress report for Corflu Zed. We are making the progress reports fanzine-like, so this issue has an exhortation by John Hertz and a reprint of a 1960 article by Wally Weber (you'll want to read that if you want to understand the cover), along with the usual information about the convention. Please take a look!

Many thanks to Corflu Zed's publications guru, holyoutlaw, for his hard work on this production.

Received the latest issue of Banana Wings yesterday. Woke up at 1am this morning and couldn't get back to sleep. This time, however, I finished the Leigh Brackett crime novel I was in the middle of and then got through only half of Banana Wings before finally getting some more shut-eye (if not actual sleep). Last time this happened, I read the latest issue cover to cover, as noted in my LOC. I'm beginning to wonder if Banana Wings causes insomnia.