Dry Ice Factory

Long time LA fan and 1973 TAFF co-winner (with his wife June) Len Moffatt died this morning. I only met him in passing a couple of times, most recently at the 2006 Worldcon in LA, but he has a sterling reputation amongst my friends who knew him well.

The Self-Styled Siren memorializes her Lebanese mother-in-law. An incredibly moving piece of writing that's also very funny:

To go food shopping with Zahra was equal parts education and terror. My sister accompanied her to the Union Square Whole Foods and pulled me aside as soon as they returned. "I really like her," laughed my sister. "But man, she's tough. She was demanding that the guy at the poultry counter tell her how old the chicken was."

"What did he say?"

"He said, 'I don't know, ma'am. We weren't personally acquainted.' Zahra said that meant it was probably too old but we'd take it anyway."

It's sad when it takes somebody's death to make things come into focus. In recent years I have become fascinated with pre-Amazing science fiction, and of course I kept running into Bleiler's name. Somehow I developed the impression that he was one of those obsessive old coots who devised long checklists of hoary old stories that told you nothing about the stories. Useful only as bibliography. This despite the fact that I had stumbled upon his comments on stories by Garrett P. Serviss and Homer Eon Flint and found them eminently sensible. Why didn't that make me curious? My mind was made up (probably set to some extent by his old-fashioned name), and mere evidence wasn't enough to open it back up.

But his death has done the trick. Or rather the tributes to him in the wake of his death (on the 13th), which started for me with Jessica Amanda Salmonson's heartfelt personal tribute on Facebook. As I read a few more tributes, I began to think, "Huh, this guy actually was doing stuff that I would probably be particularly interested in." And sure enough, when I took a closer look at Science Fiction: The Early Years and Science Fiction: The Gernsback Years, they were pretty much precisely the kind of encyclopedic reference that would be very useful to me in my exploration of old SF. They are both expensive, it's true, but yesterday I ordered Science Fiction: The Early Years as a kind of memorial. Looks like it could come in handy for the piece I'm writing about Lemuria, too.

I'm looking forward to Mr. Bleiler opening my eyes, even if it's only posthumously.

Update: I had initially written "imminently sensible," which is kind of appropriate, all things considered.

He didn't view the world and its discontents as too overwhelming to change and he understood the non-linear nature of change.

--Al Giordano, Howard Zinn (1922-2010): In Lieu of Flowers, Organize

Last night I dreamed that Patrick Swayze came to me with a sexy, cocky, charming, warm-hearted, All-American grin on his face, and he said, "So now you know that I'm actually pretty good, huh?"

"Yes," I said without hesitation. Point Break, which I recently watched, had washed away any remaining doubts on that score.

He looked pleased as punch Punch.

Then I woke up to the news of his death. He's actually not one of my favorite actors, so I have no idea what the dream visit was about. It's just plain altogether weird.

A wonderful visit yesterday with our Yapese friends, Theo and Antonia -- and three of their kids and one of their grandkids, Tinig, who is cuter than a goddamn button. They fed us Yapese barbecue (ribs and chicken) with rice, steamed taro, and a tapioca/yam mixture. So delicious, so nostalgic. Theo, who always claims that he doesn't remember me from our childhood on Yap in the '60s, said this time that when I wore a thu, the Yapese loincloth, I didn't try to hide my white butt like the other white kids did. They would spread the cloth of the thu to try to hide their butts, but mine was rolled like a rope, he said, showing every inch of white skin. Hey, I said, if you've got it, flaunt it! Theo always says the Yapese have a special mocking word for the whiteness of white butts that have never seen the sun.

We got caught up on all the news, but there was one bit of news that shocked me to my core. I can't get it out of my mind. Theo told us that Dave died a few months ago. Dave was our dive instructor out there in 2002. He and his family also lived in the house across the road from us in Kaday village. His wife was a relative of Theo's. We hung out with him a lot, and I really, really liked him. Such a great sense of humor. He always told us that PADI (the Professional Association of Dive Instructors) stood for Put Another Dollar In. He was from Florida, and I can't even remember how he ended up on Yap, married to a Yapese woman. He was probably between me and my brother in age, maybe around 50 when he died.

I just can't get over it. He had apparently taken some people out diving, and a young woman started heading away from the group, going deep without heeding the danger. He went after her, and by the time he caught up with her she was out of air. He shared his air with her as they headed to the surface, but he started running low too and so he held his breath and let her have the rest. One of the cardinal rules of diving is never hold your breath, because as the pressure level changes so does the volume of the air. Air expands as you move higher, and it can cause damage as it expands. They made it to the surface, and he said he had a headache. He went to the hospital but told them he was feeling fine now. They let him go home, and he went to bed and never woke up.

I woke up this morning holding my breath, imagining the moment when he decided to hold his. He certainly would have known that he was putting himself at risk. But why did he leave the hospital? Did he really think he was out of danger? Would it have made any difference if he'd stayed there?

I've been thinking about all the little moments with him out on the dive boat, and all the other times we just sat around shooting the shit. Usually I just listened to his stories. On one of my last days out there he came over to our house with something he called Pain Killer. It was his own private recipe: rum and several fruit juices. I can't remember if he told me the one super secret ingredient (he wanted to know if I could guess it), but it would be in my journal if he did. We drank Pain Killer and he entertained us with stories of dives he'd been on around the world. He was a funny, funny guy, a real sweet heart. Another castaway living about as far as you can get from the bustle of the world. His parents didn't bring his body back to Florida. They had him buried on Yap. As my brother said, it's what he would have wanted.

Today I'm thinking about breathing. Today I'm thinking about Dave. His dive shop was called Beyond the Reef. The diver in the Beyond the Reef logo on that page is my brother, and Dave also made a T-shirt for the dive shop using that same photo. Here's a photo Dave took of me and my niece during one of our dive classes:



I don't know how to close this post. I just can't seem to digest the news.

Update: Found this picture of Dave on the Beyond the Reef website:



Update: Dave's brother posted a tribute to him: Remembering Dave Vecella. Turns out Dave was only 43 when he died. Must have been the silver hair that fooled us. Some very sweet memories in the comments. His brother writes:

Dave was a giant teddy bear of a guy with a great sense of humor, a wonderful laugh, a constant twinkle in his eye, and the kindest, biggest, and most generous heart you could ever imagine. He was my “best man” in my wedding 22 years ago, and he always will be. Although his death obviously was a terrible tragedy, a greater tragedy would have been if he had passed from here without ever fulfilling his dreams. Instead, he lived them each and every day. So though his life ended way too soon, the quality of that life was about as high as that of anyone I have ever known. Perhaps those of us who knew and loved Dave can best honor his life by incorporating more of his spirit into our own lives — to pursue our real passions, and live our dreams, every day, because none of us know how many days we have. I love you, little bro’, and will never, ever forget you.

As my mom drove me to the airport on Sunday, we got to talking about death, as we seem to do more frequently these days. I mentioned the Death With Dignity initiative on the ballot in Washington this year, which would allow terminally-ill people to end their lives with the assistance of a physician. Oregon has had a similar law on the books for a few years, and I asked Mom how it was working. This discussion got us to talking about people who end their lives by stopping eating. Mom's mother did this at age 89 after she broke her hip and evidently decided that she'd had enough of getting old. But Mom reminded me that my father's mother did something similar, and she told me something else about Grandma Byers' decision that I don't think I'd ever heard before.

Grandma had gone through chemo for uterine cancer more than once. After the last chemo, she was on a medication that prevented a fluid build-up in her lungs that would be fatal if allowed to go unchecked. What I had heard before is that Grandma eventually decided to stop taking the drug, knowing what the result would be, and knowing that the drug would only keep her alive for a limited time anyway. Essentially she was voluntarily ending her life. What I hadn't heard before is that a year before she did that, she made a bargain with God in which she asked Him to let her live one more year so that she could work to resolve a conflict within her church. She was a devout Mennonite, and I did vaguely remember that her little church in McMinnville had splintered over the beliefs of some new members in "gifts of the spirit". When the problem within the church had been resolved, she told my mom about her bargain. Mom (who loved her mother-in-law fiercely) suggested that she renegotiate the deal, but Grandma said she'd made a promise to God and couldn't go back on it. A few months later, before her next birthday (she had turned 80 after making the bargain), she stopped taking her medication.

I have a hard time knowing what to think of this story. As a non-believer, it's tempting to psychologize the decision as not wanting to face a long battle with a physical ailment that was slowly killing her. When I asked Mom about that, she insisted that Grandma was in good shape and good cheer when she explained her bargain. Mom (who is also a non-believer, although raised a Mennonite) says she was simply honoring her commitment to God. "A class act," she said. Another thing I've always remembered is Mom telling me right after Grandma died that the last time she and Dad visited her, she was singing hymns and happily anticipating going to heaven. Quite a contrast with Mom's devoutly Mennonite mother, who a few years later seemed afraid in her own last days and angrily told Mom to turn off the tape of hymns she had brought to play for her on her deathbed and didn't want to hear anybody preaching either.

I can't say I understand what my grandmother was thinking, but it seems worth pondering. Was it wrong for her to make such a bargain, claiming to know God's will? Will I be able to face death with such equanimity when my own time comes?

I feel compelled to acknowledge the death of Thomas Disch, although I'm not sure why. I don't usually note the passing of authors. Perhaps it's because it was a suicide, which he committed on the Fourth of July, perhaps in a morbid joke on Independence Day. My subject-line is from one of his stories, I don't remember which. It was about (or at least involved) a wave of fashionable suicides that followed a surge of interest in Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther. The line I quoted was one of the suicide notes in the story. I remember the first time I read that line and burst out laughing in astonishment at the audacity.

Thinking about it, I also remember the appearance of John Berryman in The Businessman, discovered in the afterlife being punished for his own suicide, still sporting the wounds of it. A fellow Minnesotan, a fellow poet.

When I was in college, Disch was part of a trinity of literary science fiction writers beloved to me, along with Samuel Delany and Joanna Russ. While I liked his novels, it was his short stories that particularly appealed to me. "Getting into Death" (about another suicide?), "The Asian Shore," "Angouleme," "Fun with Your New Head," "The Planet Arcadia," the incredible "Descending". What was the one where the couple get lost in a cemetery and never find their way out? Filled with a strange sense of peace and resignation in the end.

Sharee is fond of recalling that carl and I each gave her a buck-twenty-five at Moscon in 1980 so that she could buy a copy of The Fundamental Disch, which had just come out. A brilliant collection that is well worth hunting down. Come to think of it, the most money I've ever spent on a book was for a first edition (the British hardcover) of his novel, Camp Concentration.

He mocked the vain foolishness of science fiction and science fiction fans, and of humanity in general. His wit was black and acerbic. He was clearly very unhappy in the last years of his life, particularly after the death of his long time partner (and occasional co-author), Charles Naylor. I had to stop reading his LiveJournal because it was full of such bitter, bleak rants. May he rest in peace, and peace be with him. My condolences to his family and friends.