Archive for Slices of Life

| August 23, 2011
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Earthquake in DC!


Just like my good friend Elvis said, “There’s a whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on!”

A magnitude 5.9 quake struck Virginia, 36 miles northwest of Richmond and 88 miles southwest of Washington, DC. That puts it about thirty or so miles due west of my family’s home in Manassas. My wife reports that the whole house shook, pictures fell off the walls, and something (probably some tchotchke we have on a shelf) fell over and broke.

The quake occurred at 1:51 PM, and I felt it at about 2:03 PM, so it took about twelve minutes to travel the 88 miles to Washington. I was on the sixth floor of my work building in DC, on Southwest 12th Street, near the Potomac River. I was in a meeting in a conference room when the whole building began swaying. It felt like I was on one of the carnival rides at the Prince William County Fair. The lamps overhead rattled, and everybody ducked under the big conference table. The main undulations went on for a little less than a minute, but the building continued to vibrate and shake for at least another minute. Weirdly, I wasn’t frightened. I cracked jokes under the table.

We all evacuated down the stairwells. I ducked into my office as fast as I could to grab my personal laptop — my most recent chapter of No Direction Home hadn’t been backed up, and I wasn’t about to lose my only copy of my newest novel. The evacuation was s-l-o-w-w-w-w moving down those stairs. My office mates and I walked about two blocks north to a designated gathering spot. We heard that the building across the street, an older building probably built in the 1940s, had suffered damage and would remain evacuated until a structural analysis could be done.

First earthquake I’ve ever experienced. Strangely enough, during the meeting, we were told one of our key participants couldn’t participate, because he was busy down in Miami with hurricane preparations due to the approach of Hurricane Irene. And just before the meeting, I had printed out an article on a brand-new method of post-disaster computer-to-computer communication which doesn’t rely on cell phone networks or the Internet, facilitated by software called LifeNet which is being developed by researchers at the Georgia Tech College of Computing (hat tip to Instapundit.com).

Hurricanes I’m plenty familiar with. I’ve been through Andrew, Georges, Jorge, and, biggest and baddest of all, Katrina. But sitting atop six stories flopping around on jello? That’s a new one to me. I hope this isn’t a foretaste of things to come around here (God forbid)…

Update (4:57 PM): For the past ten minutes, I’ve been watching a helicopter slowly circle the tip of the Washington Monument. Can’t tell if it is a news helicopter or some sort of official aircraft. Staying very close to the Monument. Very ominous…

Update #2: Apparently no damage to the Washington Monument. However, in the alternate universe portrayed in my recent novel Ghostlands, a major earthquake hits New Shining Capitol (that world’s Washington, DC) and their version of the Washington Monument does fall down.

Update #3: That tchotchke that broke in the house? Turns out it was my statue of Comeback ’68 Concert Elvis. Maybe it was Jerry Lee Lewis striking out at his rival (since I got my quote wrong at the start of this post)…?

Update #4: Well, it looks like there was at least a little damage to the Washington Monument. Engineers will be checking its extent.

Category: Slices of Life | Tags: ,
| August 16, 2011
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Never Trust a Weatherman

Weather.com, you’re on my Double-Secret-Probation List (and maybe that other list, too).

Now and then you find yourself planning an entire weekend around a weather report. This was the first weekend of the Prince William County Fair, Virginia’s biggest fair, a Major Event in our household. We do not miss the fair. Sunday was Half-Price Day, when both fair admissions and ride bracelets were half the normal price. When you’ve got three little boys who are all crazy for carnival rides, half-price ride bracelets are a big deal, particularly when even the puniest kiddy ride on the midway will cost you three bucks per ride, per kid, if you purchase ride tickets. So I knew we would be attending the fair on Sunday. I also knew that the long-range forecast called for thunderstorms. But I thought we might be able to finess the weather, get the boys’ rides over and done with between rainstorms, then concentrate on the fair’s indoor activities.

As soon as I woke up on Sunday, I checked weather.com. On our two prior visits to the fair, we had gone in the late afternoon and evening, to avoid the hottest, sunniest part of the day. But weather.com told me to reverse my usual plan. The hourly forecast for our zip code predicted a high of 81F (not at all bad for Virginia in mid-August), overcast skies early, and then 70%-80% chances of rain from 3 PM on. The fair’s gates would open at noon. I figured I could gorge the boys on rides for three hours, and then, at the first sign of rain, the family and I could duck into the animal husbandry displays and pet the goats and sheep and cows under a good, solid roof.

So, we headed off the to the fair sans hats and sunscreen. What did we need hats and sunscreen for if it was going to be cloudy and rainy all day?

We rushed through breakfast to arrive at the fair soon after the gates opened. It was muggy. It was bright. It was hot, a good ten degrees hotter than the forecast predicted. Still, since we got there relatively early, the fair wasn’t crowded, at least not at first. The boys went on the Chinese Dragon mini rollercoaster and the Flying Swings/Raging Funnel and the Flying Dumbos (I’m sure Disney doesn’t let hinky-dinky carnival operators call it that, but that’s what I call it) and bumped their noses against the glass panels inside the Monkey Maze. They rode the Crazy Bus together, crammed into a miniature school bus with twenty other riders while huge pistons hurled the bus through the air. The older two went on the Parasail Rider (kind of like the Flying Swings, but with a sail-like panel which riders can swivel to make them bobble up and down while swinging around). I took my littlest, Judah, on a couple of those kiddy motorcycle/ATV merry-go-rounds and let him jump in a bounce house. His big disappointment was that the one ride he’d been talking about all week, Quadzilla, where he could ride a four-wheeler on tracks through a spook house, was temporarily closed for repairs.

Dara and I stood out of the direct glare as much as possible and waited anxiously for the few dark clouds spotting the sky to cover up the sun and provide us some relief. I watched the crowds linger in front of the games of chance and thought about Ray Bradbury, whose first story collection had been called Dark Carnival, who had written one of the greatest dark fantasies set on a midway, Something Wicked This Way Comes, whose childhood imagination had been fired by visits to fairs probably much like this one.

for laffs under the blazing sun, it's hard to beat a guy with a weather balloon stuck on his head

After two and a half hours of putting the kids on rides and taking (costly) beverage breaks, we decided to catch one of the 3 PM shows. A few more darkish clouds dotted the sky, but it still didn’t look like the thunderstorms the forecast had called for were anywhere near. We headed over to The Magic of Agriculture: Agri-Cadabra show, which we had seen earlier versions of the prior two years. The managers of the Prince William County Fair must like this guy, and he does put on a good show (even if his jokes disparaging West Virginia get a little stale after you’ve heard them a time or two). His grand finale is inflating a giant green weather balloon with a leaf blower, then inserting most of his body into the balloon, where he creates an elaborate balloon animal before emerging from his rubber cocoon. What can I say? It might not be Ray Bradbury’s idea of a proper show for a carnival midway (I think he prefers his magicians a bit more traditional and somber), but for me, it never gets old. My kids invariably get a charge out of it, perhaps akin to the charge the young Ray received from the fingertip of Mr. Electro, his earliest mentor in the ways of the fantastic.

Unfortunately, I had trouble concentrating on the show because I felt myself cooking. My wife reached over to touch my dark brown hair. “Touch your hair,” she said. “You could fry an egg on your hair. Mine, too.” Yup. She was right. My fingers came away smoking. And it wasn’t a magic trick.

unlike me, Black Locust had sense enough to stay out of the sun

Immediately after the Agri-Cadabra show, I herded my crew under the livestock barns, then went to refill our cup of $6 lemonade with water from the bathroom (there was still a little sugar and a couple of squeezed-out lemons at the bottom of the cup, so the tap water acquired a vaguely lemonadey tinge). I peered again at the sky. Where was this rain I had been promised? Where were the clouds to mask that brutal sun? We petted the goats. I made friends with a goat named Black Locust. I tried to figure out the reason for her name. She was black, yes, but not remotely insectoid. Perhaps she’d acquired that name due to her eating habits? I looked over at Dara. She was hors de combat. No more sun for her. But the boys were still clamoring to go on more rides.

I decided to take the bullet. I volunteered to lead the Midway Death March. Dara would remain behind with the goats in the shade. The boys hustled back to the Monkey Maze. I pressed myself as close to the wall of the ride as I could, clinging to whatever shadow was available. We ran into one of Asher’s friends, Maggie, and her grandmother. The kids all wanted to go on different rides. The lines had gotten much longer. The sun remained fierce overhead. Maggie’s grandmother and I decided to divide and conquer. We split the little group. Her half headed off to the Giant Ferris Wheel. Lucky her; the line was in the shade, and the gondolas had canopies. I got to stand in line for the Flying Swings. No shade there.

My older two boys went on the bumper cars. Judah had a mini-meltdown when he learned he wasn’t tall enough to ride. I yanked him over to the side of the bumper car pavillion, where the unused cars were stored, where there was a smidgeon of shadow to stand in. I pressed my index finger onto the skin of my forearm. The impression remained ominously white for a few seconds. I recognized what I had to look forward to that evening–squirming uncomfortably in bed while my skin reminded me incessantly what an idiot I had been. The boys wanted to ride the bumper cars again. I lacked the energy to deal with a renewed Judah meltdown. I told the boys they could pick one final ride before we went to pick up their mommy at the goat barn, but it had to be one they could all ride.

We saw that Quadzilla had been reopened. Judah began jumping up and down and flapping his hands. We got in line. The line didn’t move. The operator seemed to be taking forever to get the children out of the cars and seat more kids in their places. I shouldn’t get too angry with the man for not hustling with greater alacrity under that brutal sun; in conversations with other carnival employees, I learned they are housed in trailers, are paid an average of $300 a week, and have to buy all their own meals at the fair, which leaves them about $15 per week to spare. They do this from February to November, taking only a six-week break around the holidays to return to wherever their permanent homes are. So the man moved like a camel beneath the desert sun, conserving his energy and his internal moisture. If I were in his place, I suppose I would, too.

I felt my epidermis about to ignite. I yanked the boys out of the line. “No Quadzilla!” I thundered, substituting for the overhead thunder which had never made its appearance. “Maybe next year. Pick something else! Something with no line!” I shoved them toward a lame-o kiddy ride that none of the other fairgoers evinced an interest in. They dutifully boarded it, then rode it with blank faces. I could see they were all done in, too.

I marched them back toward the goat barn. On the way, we passed a row of standing wooden cutout figures, the kind that have oval holes cut where their faces are, the kind that invite you to put your own face in the oval and have a picture taken of you as a farmer or a fireman or a race car driver. One of the cutouts was of King Kong holding Fay Wray; you could opt to be either the gorilla or the maiden. All of the cutout figures stood unutilized when we passed. No one was taking pictures beneath the broiling sun.

I stared at those holes where faces should be, those voids, and I thought about Ray Bradbury again. Grandpa Ray, Master of the Dark Carnival, who had finagled ways to see King Kong in the theaters dozens of times as a kid. Ray had always been around for me; I’d watched his Beast from Twenty Thousand Fathoms and It Came From Outer Space at least as many times on Creature Features as a kid as he’d seen King Kong, and his A Medicine for Melancholy had been one of the first science fiction books I’d personally owned. My novel The Good Humor Man, or, Calorie 3501 owes an inestimable debt to Ray’s Fahrenheit 451. He had always been around, and he seemed to go on forever, as though he would live forever, just like Mr. Electro had commanded him when Ray had been a boy–“Now go and live forever!” But he wouldn’t live forever. One day, I would live in a world without a Ray Bradbury. It would be like staring at those cutout figures with oval holes where faces should be.

the Master of the Dark Carnival won't be with us forever

I made myself a promise. Next year, when the Prince William County Fair comes around again, we won’t go beneath the blazing midday sun. We’ll go at twilight, the time Ray Bradbury tells us is the perfect time to walk within the neon glow of the midway’s dark lights.

Category: Horror and Fantasy, Slices of Life | Tags: , ,
| August 10, 2011
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Movie Images That Sear Your Childhood

I suspect that every American childhood of the past seventy years has been indelibly marked by at least one unforgettable image from a movie. The rating system devised by the Motion Picture Association of America and the National Association of Theater Owners is meant, in part, to shield our youngsters from having their brains seared by sights and sounds they aren’t mature enough to process. But then those same organizations turn around and allow films that are marketed primarily to children (i.e.: super-hero movies, heavily advertised on Cartoon Network and through McDonalds Happy Meal toys) to hit the theaters with a rating of PG-13. Which leaves parents in a quandary: do we take the kids to see Iron Man 2 or Green Lantern or X-Men: First Class, or not? The kids want to see those films. I want to see those films. I know I won’t have any opportunity to see those movies unless I take the kids. So am I a bad parent if I expose my 7, 6, and 4 year-old sons to a little dose of the ol’ ultra-violence?

Of course, it very much depends on the kids and their capacities to be disturbed. Asher, my middle son, is terrified by loud noises. No fireworks displays for him. I know this. I recognize that one sure way to have a miserable family outing is to drag Asher to see fireworks. Asher is also my son most prone to getting scared during an intense action film or monster movie. But he handles it much better than he does fireworks — he hides his eyes or buries his face in my shoulder, melodramatically squeals or whimpers, then looks back at the screen when whatever was frightening him has gone away, and goes on having a good time. The other two boys, his older and younger brothers, pretty much take PG-13 rated monsters and suspense in their stride. So, generally I’m not too worried when I take them to see a PG-13 rated super-hero film, unless I’ve read that a particular one is notable for very intense violence, excessive bad language, or other material not appropriate for the under-12 set (I personally think the very black take on Batman in The Dark Knight films is beyond my kids and wouldn’t be enjoyed by them).

However… no matter how careful you think you’re being as a parent, there’s always that chance that some truly horrific image that you hadn’t heard about is going to sear itself into your young offspring’s receptive brain. And they’re never going to forget what they saw. And they’ll probably be talking about it with their friends and family members for the rest of their life.

Is this necessarily a bad thing? As in, “bad for their development?” I don’t think so. At least it doesn’t have to be. A genuinely frightening or disturbing image from a movie can be a springboard to learning, exploration, and greater self-knowledge. Or at least give your child something to grin about as a grown-up.

Beneath the Planet of the Apes: Albina with mask on

My personal experience with the “movie image you’ll never forget” came in 1970, when I was five, a year older than Judah and a year younger than Asher. My father took me to see Beneath the Planet of the Apes, easily the most weird and disturbing of the original five Apes films. Could this film actually have been rated G by the MPAA? The notion astounds me, given how big an impact the movie’s violence (check out Charleton Heston’s bloody fingers at the end, pushing the levers that activate the cobalt bomb) and horrific content had on me. Yet when I look it up to be sure, there it is. Rated G, just like Herbie the Love Bug or The Sword in the Stone. So, in retrospect, my father was much, much less to blame for any trauma I suffered at the age of five than I am for any trauma my littlest son may have recently absorbed.

Albina with mask off = freaked out 5 year-old

The scene that sort of traumatized me (but which definitely fascinated me and continues to be a source of weird fascination) is the scene where beautiful Natalie Trudy (who would portray a much more sympathetic character in the next film in the franchise, Escape from the Planet of the Apes), playing the telepathic, subterranean mutant Albina, strips off her mask as part of a religious ceremony exalting a cobalt bomb, revealing herself as a bald, hideously scarred monstrosity. She isn’t the only character to unmask during this scene, but since she was the only woman, her unveiling was the one most indelibly seared into my consciousness. (Beautiful women aren’t supposed to turn into monsters, at least according to my logic at the age of five.)

I couldn’t stop asking my father about the radioactive mutants when the movie was over. What had made them that way? What was an atomic bomb? My father did his best to explain about the Manhattan Project in World War Two and how the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I was fascinated. I tried to learn more (mostly by watching 1950s H-bomb giant bug movies, a swell source for reliable scientific information). A few years later, in the club house in my back yard, I had arguments with my best friend over which was stronger: the A-bomb or the H-bomb? Sort of like, who is stronger: Superman or Thor? I said the atom bomb was stronger, because it had actually been used in a real war, whereas the H-bomb had only been used in tests. My friend insisted the hydrogen bomb was stronger. He was right, of course; it takes the explosion of a small atom bomb to set off a hydrogen bomb. Anyway, that climactic scene from Beneath the Planet of the Apes still has the power, more than forty years later, to pull me back to the awe, revulsion, and horror my five year-old self experienced.

Last weekend, seeing that X-Men: First Class had arrived at our closest “cheapie” movie house, I decided I would have a Saturday night out with the boys. (Dara wasn’t interested in Marvel’s Merry Mutants.) They were thoroughly stoked to see the movie, having absorbed a couple of months’ worth of advertising. We went out for dinner first, at Dennie’s (two free kids’ meals for every adult meal purchased!), then drove over to the University Mall Theaters, a small, 1970s quad-plex cinema tucked away into a bi-level strip mall not far from George Mason University. I’d heard good things about X-Men: First Class, and I liked the fact that the scriptwriters had set the picture during the years the first X-Men comics had come out. It easily ended up being my favorite of Marvel’s mutant films. The major characters (Xavier, Eric/Magneto, and the young Raven/Mystique) were very well cast. The script, especially for a super-hero adventure film, was exemplary in its attention to character building. I actually cared about Eric and Raven and some of the others (particularly poor Hank McCoy), rather than simply being dazzled by the special effects and battle scenes. The only other super-hero movies I can recall feeling that way about are Christopher Reeves’ second Superman film, The Dark Knight Returns, and the first Iron Man. (Maybe the second Spider-Man, too, if I’m feeling especially sentimental about New York City.) The writers did an especially good job with fleshing out Magneto. I’d certainly pay to see another Magneto film set during the 1960s. Cool beans.

If you haven’t yet seen the film (it’s now been out for a while), read no further. I’m going to reveal the scene that transfixed two of my sons, and it gives away the ending.

X-Men: First Class: the coin-through-the-head scene Judah can't stop talking about

It’s rather a brilliant scene, I think. Well worth the moderate gore it subjects viewers to. The film begins with young Eric being separated from his mother in a concentration camp in Poland, a trauma which causes Eric to reveal his powers over magnetism. The mutant we later come to know as Sebastian Shaw serves as Eric’s chief tormentor and mentor in the camp and, in an effort to force Eric to magnetically levitate a Nazi coin, shoots Eric’s mother in front of him. After Eric goes momentarily crazy and deforms every piece of metal in the room, Shaw “rewards” him by giving him the coin. Eric retains the coin throughout the film. At the film’s climax, aboard a crippled nuclear submarine, Eric uses the coin to murder Shaw. In very graphic fashion–while Shaw is immobilized by an unwitting Charles Xavier, Eric slowly and deliberately propels the coin straight through Shaw’s skull and brain. It goes in through his forehead and emerges, dripping blood, from the back of his head.

The scene is so effective emotionally because it both humanizes Magneto–his chosen murder/vengeance weapon is the possession which reminds him most searingly of his mother’s death–and it viscerally illustrates how ruthless and savage his experiences have made him. Had Charles Xavier been present in the submarine’s nuclear engine chamber with Shaw and Eric, there would have been no way he would have countenanced what his friend did. Yet we, the audience, having seen things that Xavier did not (or perhaps Xavier had seen all that we had in that camp in Poland, having explored Eric’s mind earlier in the film), and having witnessed how murderously strong the nuclear energy had made Shaw, give the anti-hero a moral pass to carry out his vengeance. It feels necessary. It feels right, perhaps even righteous.

Which is all fine and good for me, a 46 year-old man. I’m emotionally equipped to handle emotional and moral nuance. Judah, Asher, and, to a lesser extent, Levi are a different story. I don’t think the coin-through-the-head scene made much of an impression on Levi, who was captivated by the overall “coolness” of the movie, its characters, and its effects. Asher, to his credit, was able to make the connection between the Nazi coin’s roles at the beginning of the movie and at its end. Judah simply absorbed the image without much understanding. “How come he put a penny through his head?” he asked. I did my best to explain. “Eric killed the man who killed his mommy. He used the coin because he controls things made out of metal.”

We had a bit of a mishap on the ride home. Judah gets car sick sometimes. I made the minor mistake of taking Old Bridge Road, very curvy with lots of ups and downs mixed in, and I took some of the curves a little fast. Not long afterward, I heard the sound of retching, followed by choruses of “EWWW” and “Oh, gross!” from Levi and Asher. I pulled over at the nearest drug store, which I discovered to my dismay had just closed, then ran the boys across the street to a Mexican restaurant so I could clean Judah up in their bathroom.

I have no idea whether the coin-through-the-head scene had anything at all to do with Judah’s throwing up. He is definitely prone to car sickness, and he ate a decent amount of candy in the movie, and I took those curves too darned fast. Still, I’m sure his memory of that movie scene will be indelibly mingled with his memory of upchucking in the car.

I’ll be very interested to ask him about it fifteen years from now and hear just what his memory dredges up.

Category: Science Fiction, Slices of Life, Stuff I Like | Tags: ,
| August 3, 2011
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Curse of Vintage Laptop Madness


What did Hurricane Katrina have to do with my obsession for vintage laptops? Quite a bit, as things turned out. Yes, we’ve reached the end of Vintage Laptop Computer Madness Week here at Fantastical Andrew Fox.com. While Hurricane Katrina did not directly destroy or drown my vast collection of vintage machines, it set in motion a complex series of events in my family’s lives that ultimately led to the dissolution of the majority of my ponderous accumulation. Where most of my machines ended up, however, remains a mystery…

I present, for your reading pleasure, the final installment of “Lust for a Laptop, or the Madness of the Compulsive Collector.”

For the convenience of those of you just discovering this novella-length memoir of my writing life at the dawn of the Portable Computing Age, I’ve placed links to all six installments below.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6

Category: Big Easy, Science Fiction, Slices of Life, Stuff I Like, Vintage Tech and Other Toys | Tags: , , ,
| August 2, 2011
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Bride of Vintage Laptop Madness

swimming pool at the Heartbreak Hotel

We’re now in the home stretch of Vintage Laptop Computer Madness Week here at Fantastical Andrew Fox.com. As one might suspect from the title of this post, today’s installment describes how I met my second and present wife, Dara, and how our romance and eventual marriage put a stop to my runaway purchasing of vintage laptop computers. But not before I managed to break the underfloor joists at the back of my house with the weight of my laptops.

I describe doing research with Dara at Graceland for my novel about how Elvis’s liposuctioned belly fat might save the planet thirty years from now — Calorie 3501, later published as The Good Humor Man, or, Calorie 3501.

I also talk a bit about the upsides and downsides of living in one of New Orleans’ ungentrified historic neighborhoods. I ended up the next door neighbor to a crack dealer, whose most regular customer, a man I named The Whistler, robbed me of sleep and peace of mind on an almost nightly basis. After our marriage, Dara and I moved to a bigger house on the West Bank, allowing me to finally escape The Whistler. We welcomed our first two sons into our family, and I ran out of vintage laptops to buy. Then I began feeling ashamed of myself for going on such an extended buying binge. But I didn’t have long to wallow in my shame, because just then the you-know-what hit the fan in New Orleans…

You can find part five of “Lust for a Laptop, or the Madness of the Obsessive Collector” here.

Category: Big Easy, Science Fiction, Slices of Life, Stuff I Like, Vintage Tech and Other Toys | Tags: ,
| August 1, 2011
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House of Vintage Laptop Madness

GRiD Compass 1101; first laptop in space


Bear with me, gentle readers. We’re on the downslope of Vintage Laptop Computer Madness Week here at Fantastical Andrew Fox.com. Today’s installment is the heart of the story. The rubber meets the road. I dive into my obsession head first, without checking the depth of the water. My collectivitis metastasizes into a full-blown case. I single-handedly boost the stock valuation of eBay (okay, just kidding about that). I justify my out-of-control bidding and buying by planning to write a book on the hobby of collecting vintage laptops. I secretly plan to corner the market. I believe my own bullshit. I blow wads of cash. I begin filling up my house with laptops.

Watch out, James Frey! You wanna talk about A Million Little Pieces? How about A Million Little Laptops? Oprah, here I come… if you weren’t off the air..

Installment four of “Lust for a Laptop, or the Madness of the Obsessive Collector” can be found here.

Category: Big Easy, Horror and Fantasy, Slices of Life, Stuff I Like, Vintage Tech and Other Toys | Tags: ,
| July 29, 2011
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“Diaper Astronaut” Gets “Other Than Honorable” Discharge from Navy


Just a little follow-up from my earlier post, “The End of the Space Age as We Know It.”

Lisa Nowak, who seemed to spring fully grown from the brow of science fiction writer Barry N. Malzberg, has retired from the U.S. Navy with an “other than honorable” discharge and a demotion, following a Navy board of inquiry. She was the member of the astronaut corps who stalked a fellow military officer, Air Force Captain Colleen Shipman, after Nowak learned Shipman had been romantically involved with a paramour of Nowak’s, former space shuttle pilot Bill Oefelein. Nowak was sentenced to a year’s probation after being convicted of burglary and was expelled from NASA’s astronaut corps.

The most sensationalistic and tabloid-ready aspect of the saga was that Nowak had driven non-stop from Houston to the Orlando Airport in pursuit of Shipman while wearing adult diapers. Oddly enough, according to the Fox News story, Nowak denied wearing the diapers, which were found in her car. The story doesn’t mention her denying any other aspect of the bizarre set of circumstances. I guess it’s okay to stalk an Air Force captain and shoot pepper spray in her face in a parking lot. But wearing diapers…? Well, that just crosses the line.

An officer and a gentlewoman has her honor to uphold, after all.

Glad to read that we’re no longer paying Lisa Nowak’s salary, and that her pension will be reduced. Although I kind of appreciated her purely unintentional, out-of-left-field shout-out to my good friend Barry, a writer who deserves to be read more.

Category: Science Fiction, Slices of Life | Tags: ,
| July 29, 2011
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Again, Vintage Laptop Madness

1989 ad for the magnificent Poqet PC, touting advantages over its rivals

We’ve reached the midpoint of Vintage Laptop Computer Madness Week here at Fantastical Andrew Fox.com. Today’s installment zeroes in on one of my greatest acquisitions ever, the fabulous Poqet PC. This was the tiny machine with the wonderful keyboard on which I would compose first drafts of Fat White Vampire Blues, Bride of the Fat White Vampire, and The Good Humor Man, or, Calorie 3501.

This installment has lots of juicy stuff in it, for those of you with a special appreciation for the inside dope; I tell some stories on myself here. I get divorced. I get depressed. I get on an antidepressant. I start dating again. I begin writing Fat White Vampire Blues. My cute Poqet PC helps me score with a French Canadian doctoral student. I rewrite her dissertation in linguistics. She dumps me. I buy my first house. I get what seems like a great idea… that leads me into a whole heap of trouble down the line…

You can find installment three of “Lust for a Laptop, or the Madness of the Compulsive Collector” here.

Category: Big Easy, Horror and Fantasy, Slices of Life, Stuff I Like, Vintage Tech and Other Toys | Tags: , ,
| July 28, 2011
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More Vintage Laptop Madness!


Continuing Vintage Laptop Computer Madness Week here at Fantastical Andrew Fox.com, today we have for your kind perusal installment two of Lust for a Laptop, or the Madness of the Obsessive Collector.

In today’s installment, I make my big move back to New Orleans in the fall of 1990. I start writing my first novel on my new Panasonic laptop at Borsodi’s Coffeehouse. I inadvertently do performance art with said laptop. Laptop #1 suffers fatal injury during Hurricane Andrew. Laptop #2 is even better, though: a three-pound Gateway HandBook! A relative is killed on New Year’s Eve by a falling bullet fired in celebration. I start the New Year Coalition to rid the city of the scourge of holiday gunfire. I use the HandBook to keep myself at least partially organized and sane. The stress of the campaign does severe damage to my first marriage. I try to set things right by pulling on a pair of rented rollerblades…

It’s the beginnings of my plunge into the Portable Computing Revolution of the 1990s! It’s the Big Easy! It’s trauma and tragedy (and low comedy)! Read it!

Category: Big Easy, Horror and Fantasy, Slices of Life, Stuff I Like, Vintage Tech and Other Toys | Tags: ,
| July 26, 2011
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Vintage Laptop Computer Madness!

Panasonic Business Partner CF-150B, the first of hundreds of purchases I made

This is the start of Vintage Laptop Computer Madness Week here at Fantastical Andrew Fox.com. I tell the full, unexpurgated, no-holds-barred story of my torrid love affair with laptops and palmtops of the vintage persuasion. How I came down with a severe case of collectivitis. How I nearly drained my bank account obsessively bidding on eBay. How I filled half a house with 250 vintage portable computers (and busted my floor doing so). Which marvelous little machines I wrote which novels with. The joys of writing fiction in coffeehouses and on trains. And the ignoble end of the bulk of my collection.

I’ve posted part one, which describes my initial flirtations with the Tandy 1100FD laptop in the Radio Shacks of Long Island in 1990, my having flying roach nightmares concerning the Bondwell B200 Superslim laptop, and my decision to commit myself and my hard-earned $1100 to a Panasonic Business Partner CF-150B. I set out to live my dream of writing my first novel in the bohemian coffeehouses of New Orleans, and my appetite for compulsive hoarding of laptops is whetted… the beginning of a wild ride…

Must reading for anyone who was there at the beginning of the Laptop Revolution!

Category: Slices of Life, Stuff I Like, Vintage Tech and Other Toys | Tags:
| July 25, 2011
Comments Off on My Civil War Sesquicentennial

My Civil War Sesquicentennial

Confederate emcampment on the grounds of the Manassas Historical Museum

This past weekend marked the 150th anniversary of the First Battle of Manassas, known as the First Battle of Bull Run to all you Yankees out there.  First Manassas was the earliest major land engagement of the Civil War following the bombardment and surrender of Fort Sumter.  My new hometown of Manassas celebrated its history in a big way, with a reenactment of the battle, two huge living history encampments, a parade of soldier-reenactors through Old Town Manassas, and a recreation of the 1911 Peace Jubilee headlined by President Taft (I would’ve liked to have seen who the local organizers found to portray the 300 pound-plus president, but the event conflicted with work for me).

field kitchen and wood pile

lanterns and paring knife

Several of the afternoon events had to be cancelled due to temperatures in the low triple digits.  Sweltering July temperatures in this region aren’t just a recent phenomenon, however.  Nearly a century ago, at the Great Reunion of Civil War veterans held at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania from June 29 to July 6, 1913, temperatures also soared into the hundreds. More than 53,000 Union and Confederate veterans attended the event, all of whom camped out in tents on the battlefield. Three hundred and nineteen of those vets were admitted to local hospitals for heat exhaustion. Considering that most of the vets present were between 65 and 75 years old, and only half of one percent suffered heat exhaustion, I’d say that was a pretty hardy collection of old men.

Confederate soldiers and Union civilians


I brought my boys on Saturday to the Generals’ Row set up on the big lawn in front of the Manassas Historical Museum, across Prince William Street from the Manassas train station. Actually, Generals’ Row was two rows of tents, one for Union commanders and the other for Confederate commanders. I had previously stopped by the Union side on Friday morning, prior to boarding my commuter train into Washington, DC. The reenactors hadn’t yet donned their heavy woolen uniforms or cumbersome hoop skirts; they were hanging out on chairs in front of their tents, drinking their morning coffee. I spoke with a man from Charleston, West Virginia named Barry. I told him my mother’s family had come from Charleston. I experienced a touch of cognitive dissonance, listening to his thick Southern accent and registering that he would be portraying a Union officer; but then I reminded myself that West Virginia had seceded, not from the Union, but from the rest of the State of Virginia so that its people could remain within the Union. We chatted for a while, mostly about how polluted Charleston used to be back in the late 1960s and about Carol Channing (my Grandpa Frank from West Virginia had managed Broadway road shows during the 1950s and 1960s). I told Barry I’d try to bring my boys by to meet him over the weekend.

Levi and Asher with friend

learning a new old game, the graces


On Saturday, with the high temperature climbing to about 102 Fahrenheit, I waited until almost 6 P.M. before bringing the boys out. Barry was still in uniform, but nearly all the crowds had fled. That was fine by me. My three kids were delighted with a collection of 1860s toys and games in front of one of the Union tents. A very obliging young lady named Hannah explained to them about each of the toys, and then she demonstrated how to play a game with sticks and a hoop called the graces, originally meant to help teach young women proper posture. My boys don’t care a fig about good posture, but they enjoyed flinging the hoop around.

We wandered over to the Confederate side, where I noticed the men tended to have a gnarlier mien than the reenactors had displayed over on the Union side. Asher, my middle son, thought one reenactor had “creepy eyes;” the man was definitely well grounded in his part, and his facial hair wouldn’t have been out of place on a wild goat. He noticed Asher giving him the wall-eye, then made him laugh with fright by chasing him down the row of tents with a mean-looking pistol, saying he looked “too much like a Yankee.”

a Johnnie Reb in green (with a horse's ass)


I was impressed that the man had that much energy, given the heat and his wool uniform. Another reenactor pointed out what he called the “emergency tent,” an air-conditioned tent with medical supplies, ready to receive any reenactor on the edge of heat exhaustion. He said he’d been drinking gallons of Gatorade all weekend. The danger sign, he told me, was when you stopped sweating. Then you knew you had to park yourself in that air-conditioned tent.

Union fighting men


I told him about the Great Reunion of 1913. It had been just as hot then, but not even the hospitals had had air-conditioning.

I had wanted to see the parade through Old Town Manassas or the reenactment of the battle, but it had just been too darned hot to stand around outside without shade. At least I can console myself that this weekend was merely the beginning of four years of sesquicentennial Civil War observances to come. Next year we’ll have the 150th anniversary of the Second Battle of Manassas (or Bull Run #2). Maybe the weather will be a little more moderate then?

Say, with all this interest about the Civil War, you wouldn’t think some author would happen to have a steampunk adventure novel set aboard Union and Confederate ironclads lying around on his computer’s hard drive? Any possibility of that? Nawww…

Category: Slices of Life, Stuff I Like | Tags: , , ,
| July 23, 2011
6 comments

Buying Books in the 1970s, pt. 3

a great find from Starship Enterprises

Here’s the third part of my mini-memoir of buying books as a kid in the 1970s in North Miami and North Miami Beach (to go to part one, click here, and to go to part two, click here). Thus far, we’ve taken little memory trips to Burdine’s Department Store, an unnamed cigar shop, Worldwide News and Books, the Arts and Sciences Bookshop, and one of the two binary stars my young reading life orbited around, A&M Comics and Books (fondly remembered as Arnold’s). Today, we’ll visit Starship Enterprises and the other binary star, the Walden’s Books (not WaldenBooks–the corporate bigwigs hadn’t renamed the chain yet) at the 163rd Street Shopping Center.

Starship Enterprises: This was a comic book store located on the opposite side of 163rd Street from Worldwide News and Books and a block or two east, closer to the railroad tracks. There’s still a comics shop in the same location — Villains Comics and Games, which replaced Starship Enterprises (or possibly yet another comic shop) in 1984. Starship Enterprises was the diametric opposite of Arnold’s. Whereas Arnold shoved his new comics into old wire racks at the front of his store and let other comics fade in the sun that streamed in through his bay window, the owner of Starship Enterprises (a neatnik hippy with a carefully coiffed ponytail) arranged his new comics in a handbuilt, honeycomb-like wooden shrine that took up most of one wall of the long, narrow store. Whereas Arnold’s was stuffed to overflowing with stuff, Starship Enterprises always seemed to have perilously little in stock, apart from their selection of new comics. But what little they did had was carefully selected, artfully arranged, and displayed like an exhibit in a fine handicrafts museum.

I never felt all that comfortable being in Starship Enterprises. I usually felt as though I were trespassing in a private club. However, if you were looking for something in particular, it was much, much easier to find it there than it would be at Arnold’s. When I was eleven and going through a several weeks long infatuation with Jack Kirby’s rendition of the Inhuman’s Medusa (oh, that long red hair; oh, that skintight purple jumpsuit…), I went looking for my back issues of Marvel’s Greatest Comics at Starship Enterprises, not in the various boxes lying all over the floor at Arnold’s.

The store had a tiny selection of used paperbacks, but what they had was choice. Unlike Arnold, who didn’t seem to care what sort of condition the books he bought were in, the small selection of books at Starship Enterprises was invariably mint and handsomely vintage. They always had a nice batch of old Ballantine paperbacks on hand. My best finds were several editions of Frederik Pohl’s pioneering original science fiction anthologies of the 1950s, Star Science Fiction. Still have ’em.

a thing of beauty

The Walden’s Books at the 163rd Street Shopping Center: If Arnold’s was my main source of used books, this was my primary source of new books. It was where I’d drag my parents every Hanukkah and every birthday to point out the presents I wanted. It also happened to be the place I fell in love for the first time.

Walden’s Books was a terrific source for inexpensive illustrated books of all kinds. My local store’s sale tables (the 163rd Street Shopping Center was only a twelve block bike ride from my house, even closer than Arnold’s) were piled high with publishers’ close-outs on all sorts of subjects beloved by young boys: battleships, submarines, airplanes, tanks, World War 2, the Civil War, dinosaurs, dragons, astrology, muscle cars, trains, horror movies… and science fiction. Oh, they carried some wonderful illustrated tomes on science fiction.

another thing of beauty

I already mentioned buying The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction at Walden’s, which quickly became my SF bible. They also carried both of David Kyle’s gorgeous volumes on the artwork, writers, and themes of the prior hundred years’ worth of science fiction, A Pictorial History of Science Fiction and The Illustrated Book of Science Fiction Ideas and Dreams. Both books were chock full of reproductions of lurid pulp covers, particularly from the Gernsback magazines, Amazing Stories, Science Wonder Stories, and Air Wonder Stories. Even more fascinating to me were the illustrations from the popular magazines of an even earlier time, the Victorian and Edwarian decades, with their super-battleships, flying battleships, and bizarre, pre-Wright Brothers winged contraptions of all sorts.

As an adult, I got to meet David Kyle at a convention after he presented a slide show taken from his two books. I told him how much the first book had meant to me (I received the first one from my mother as a twelfth birthday present; but the second book I didn’t get around to buying until after talking with David, when I found it on eBay). He told me they had been works of love, and his one regret had been that their cover color schemes and fonts had been so similar to each other that many potential buyers ended up mistaking the second book for the first and never picking up Science Fiction Ideas and Dreams. I may have made the same mistake myself as a young man. One of my favorite features of David’s first book was its division of various decades in the development of science fiction into “ages”: the Iron Age, the Steel Age, the Silver Age, the Golden Age, the Plastic Age, etc. His fun dedications page gave shout-outs to many of my favorite fictional characters, including Lessa from Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonflight.

I fell in love with two Anne M’s at that Walden’s Books. The first was Anne McCaffrey. I bought the first five Dragonriders of Pern books there, including The White Dragon in hardback, a splurge. I formed an Anne McCaffrey fan club and sent letters to her in Ireland (she always answered me, and this in the days before email). The second Anne M was named Annie Marsh. She was a sales clerk at the bookstore. I thought she looked like a young Jane Seymour. I was smitten from the first moment I talked with her. Twelve years old, I acted like a big-shot, know-it-all science fiction fan that first afternoon; I tried horning in on recommendations Annie was attempting to give to some teenaged customers in the science fiction and fantasy section, showing her and them how smart and well-read I was.

Annie was a regal nineteen, seven years older than I was. Within a day or two of meeting her, she was all I could think about. I found excuses to make trips to Walden’s Books every opportunity I could. Sometimes she’d let me sit in the stock room and office in the back with her and talk, or I’d just watch her work. When I couldn’t think of an excuse to go inside the store, or if I’d seen her too recently and it might weird her out to go see her again, so soon, I’d pedal my bike to the mall and park myself in a corner near the edge of the store’s display window, where I could watch the sales counter. I’d wait for her to come out of the office and help someone at the counter. I’d just look at her, drink in the sight of her, pray she didn’t spot me standing outside, and estimate the next time it would be kind of socially acceptable to talk with her again.

I carried a torch for Annie all through junior high school, from the time I was twelve to the time I was fourteen. Then she told me she would have to quit her job at the store because she would be attending college out of town. Either she gave me her home phone number or I looked it up, because I remember talking with her parents at least a couple of times after she stopped working at Walden’s Books. The last time I spoke with them, they told me she was engaged to be married. I’d known all along that I didn’t have a chance with her, of course. But my heart still broke, very painfully.

Strange to think she’s fifty-three now, possibly a grandmother.

Category: Book Love, Publishing, Science Fiction, Slices of Life | Tags: , ,
| July 22, 2011
10 comments

God, I Love This Country

Charlie Bob's Market and Deli in Manassas, Virginia

Dispatches from Exurban America (another in an occasional series)

The Great American Melting Pot is alive and well. I have seen it with my own eyes.

My family and I moved to the outskirts of Manassas, Virginia two years ago. The closest store to us was a place called Propp’s Grocery, a non-corporate, no-name convenience store, deli, and gas station which looked like it had been sitting there on Dumfries Road since the Roosevelt Administration. Maybe Teddy Roosevelt’s Administration. I took my boys in there once for soda pops and chips, just so we could get a look at the inside of the place. They sold live bait in there. The worms were a big hit with the boys, who like digging them out of our front yard. I admired the owner for his ability to stay in business with a 7-11 just two blocks away.

About eight months ago, Propp’s Grocery changed hands. The old sign came down. A new sign went up. Now the place was called Charlie Bob’s Market and Deli. I liked the old name better. The name “Charlie Bob’s” sounded like it was trying too hard to appeal to local sensibilities. Whereas the name “Propp’s” had been straightforward, honest, and simple… homespun and local without reaching for it.

I watch Charlie Bob’s prices on gas each time I drive past, which is often. When his price is good, I’ll stop there and fill up my Rondo. It’s one of the few places I stop for gas that qualifies as an aesthetic experience. There’s a big, abandoned Victorian house next door that has an old barn and silo behind it. The house is hanging in there amazingly well, a testament to its solid construction. There’s no For Sale sign. I’ve never seen a soul on the property. It might be haunted (that’s what I tell the boys).

I stopped there for gas this morning. The price was $3.69/gallon, not the best in the area, but not the worst, either, and I was running on fumes. The little digital screen on the pump told me I would have to see the cashier to obtain my receipt. I hate when that happens. The whole purpose of being able to swipe your credit card at the pump is so you don’t have to go inside. But this morning I wasn’t in a rush. I resigned myself to spending an extra minute and a half retrieving my receipt.

Walking to the front entrance, I noticed that half the building’s interior had been closed off and was in a state of reconstruction. There was nobody at the cash register when I went inside. I called out, “Hello? Hello?”  A South Asian man walked through a temporary door from the portion of the building being renovated. He asked me which pump I had pumped gas at (there are only two). He apologized that the pump hadn’t given me a receipt and said he’d been calling the company about that problem and would call them again. He introduced himself as Mr. Singh.

Where was Charlie Bob, I wondered? Was Mr. Singh an employee of Charlie Bob’s?

It quickly became clear that Mr. Singh was Charlie Bob. Or rather, there was no Charlie Bob. Charlie Bob was a false front. A mask.

I asked Mr. Singh what would become of the other half of the building. He told me, proudly, that he was completely redoing his deli area. He would sell fried chicken “just like Popeye’s.” I asked if he’d be serving breakfast, since the boys and I like going out for breakfast on weekends. He said yes, yes, eggs and everything, breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

He told me he was from India. He also told me that, eight years ago, he had owned this place, and then he had sold it to the people who ran it as Propp’s Grocery. When they decided to sell out, he couldn’t bear the thought of some strangers running it, so he bought it back. And renamed it Charlie Bob’s. I neglected to ask him what it had been called before it was called Propp’s. Maybe it had always been called Propp’s. But now it was Charlie Bob’s. Not Singh’s. Charlie Bob’s.

I found that oddly endearing. In this multicultural age, Mr. Singh had opted to go native. Maybe he had done so a little clumsily. . . after all, in the more rural parts of Virginia, “Charlie Bob” was about as stereotypical a local name as “Boudreaux” was in South Louisiana, where I’d come from. But it made me smile, as did his insistence that his fried chicken would be “just like Popeye’s.” Not better than Popeye’s. And not Tandoori chicken, either. But just like something he obviously considered to be a quintessentially American favorite.

My grandmother had come over from the Ukraine.  Her village had been burned down by Cossacks, and she and her family had fled across a frozen lake.  I remember seeing an old photo of her as a teenager, holding a little American flag.

I told Mr. Singh I’d bring the boys around for some eggs some Saturday morning.

Category: Miscellaneous Musings, Slices of Life | Tags:
| July 20, 2011
71 comments

Buying Books in the 1970s, pt. 2

the book that launched my search for a thousand other books

This is the second part of my mini-memoir of buying books as a kid in the 1970s in North Miami and North Miami Beach (to go to part one, click here). With the immanent closure of 400 Borders Books stores, which will change the book buying habits of tens of thousands of readers around the country, I felt like a little memory journey to the bookstores and newsstands of my childhood might be in order.

In yesterday’s post, I described the motley collection of places I bought some of my earliest science fiction books and books about science fiction — a Burdine’s Department Store, a cigar shop, a newsstand, and an independent bookstore. In today’s post, I’ll talk about a place where I went hog wild, where I spent the bulk of my weekly allowance, and where I blew goodly chunks of my bar mitvah gift money. What follows are the places where I went from being a reader of science fiction to a science fiction fan — as in fanatic.

A&M Comics and Books: If there was a geographical center to my childhood (apart from my bedroom), this was it. I probably made more trips to A&M, or Arnold’s, as I called it (that’s what the A stood for, the owner’s first name; the M stood for the name of his wife, I believe) than I did to all my other bookstores and comic shops combined. The place opened in 1974, when I was nine, at the corner of South Dixie Highway and 12th Avenue, about a thirteen block bike ride from my house. It’s still in business (although relocated to Bird Road in Miami and now run by a guy named Jorge, who hired on with Arnold around the time I graduated high school in 1982) and claims to be the second oldest continuously operating comic book store in America. Arnold, a retiree from New Jersey, was the owner-operator, a crusty, irritable, Sam Moskowitz-kind of guy who decided to run a comics shop and used bookstore as a second career. The comics were displayed on freestanding wire racks at the front of the store. The other four-fifths of the place were taken up by a barely organized menage of used books, a good portion of them science fiction paperbacks. Arnold wasn’t into neat, nor was he into mint; his stock was stacked haphazardly on shelves, the tops of chairs, in boxes, on stools, and on the floor, and many of his books were on the ratty side. On the other hand, he made up for those possible foibles with quantity. Arnold always had a lot of books, and he bought more all the time. Finding something good within that huge mess was a good part of the fun. You could never search for something specific; you had to stumble across your treasure. And you generally did.

I can’t recall whether my father found Arnold’s first or whether I did. In either case, we soon fell into the habit of stopping by there on Sundays so I could spend my allowance. As a nine year-old, I received one dollar a week allowance. That year, Marvel comics (unless they were Annuals) retailed for twenty cents. Thus, I could theoretically buy five comics a week, assuming I could scrape up four extra pennies for tax. Usually my father would spot me the extra four cents, saying it was an advance on next week’s allowance. But he always forgot by the time the next week rolled around. So five comics a week it was, and what a treat. Marvel had started publishing lots of books with horror heroes, like Tomb of Dracula, Man-Thing, Werewolf by Night (I had a subscription to that one), and Ghost Rider. I bought them all, plus my favorite superhero books, Fantastic Four, Avengers, Iron Man, and Marvel Triple Action (the early adventures of the Avengers, reprinted). Every week, my father would ask me the same question: “Andy, are you sure you want to spend your entire allowance on comic books?” And every week, I’d reply with a polite version of, “Hell, yeah!”

At first, I never ventured beyond the comics racks, especially not when my father was with me (he wanted me to make my selections fast so we could get out of the dusty, overly warm, and poorly ventilated store). But I soon started visiting Arnold’s on my own, either on Saturdays or after school, riding my bike down 12th Avenue. On those more leisurely visits, I began exploring the other four-fifths of the place. And I quickly discovered that some of those old paperbacks were really cool. So I gradually transitioned from spending my entire weekly allowance on comics to spending most of it on comics and some on books, to splitting it fifty-fifty, and then to spending the majority of it on used paperbacks. The turning point came shortly after my bar mitzvah, when I used some of my Walden’s gift certificates for a copy of the new reference book, The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by Brian Ash. (That I bought at the Walden’s Books in the 163rd Street Shopping Center, a store I’ll have to save for tomorrow’s installment.) This was the book that forever changed me from being a casual reader of science fiction to a determined, driven, systematic reader of science fiction. The book that made me a fan.

The Visual Encyclopedia, quite simply, blew my mind. It was the Internet before there was an Internet. It featured an illustrated chronology of all the seminal stories and books in science fiction, chapters on enduring themes in the literature, and highly detailed archival articles on subjects like the Hugo Awards and fandom and the history of the magazines. It had a fabulous index that let you track mentions of your favorite writers or books from themed chapter to themed chapter. I spent hours and hours pouring through that book. I could read the chapters and articles dozens of times, getting something different out of them each time. Of course, I began compiling my dream reading list, drawn from forty-five years’ worth of magazines and novels and anthologies.

I found a good portion of my dream reading list on the shelves or in the piles at Arnold’s. Every visit became a treasure hunt. I found A. E. van Vogt, Robert Silverberg, Edmund Hamilton, Leigh Brackett, Ursula K. Le Guin, J. G. Ballard, Barry N. Malzberg, Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon, and Anne McCaffrey. I stumbled on names and books I’d never heard of, which I’d then look up in the Visual Encyclopedia as soon as I’d pedaled home. So long as the Encyclopedia gave its seal of approval, I went back the next day or the day after and bought the book.

I became more than just a regular at Arnold’s. I was virtually a resident. Arnold and I developed a sort of love-hate relationship, or at least he developed one with me. I’m sure he didn’t mind that I was spending a good bit of money in his store, but he never seemed to enjoy my company. Maybe he didn’t enjoy anybody’s company. I don’t remember any of our conversations, but I’m sure at least some went like this:

Arnold: Don’t you have any other place you need to be?
Me: Not really. . .
Arnold: I mean, don’t you have after-school activities, or something?
Me: I ride my bike over here. It’s exercise.
Arnold: Don’t you have any friends?
Me: I see them at school.
Arnold: How come you’re always in here?
Me: I like it in here.
Arnold: Don’t you have any other place you need to be?

That place imprinted itself on me. If I could print out a map of my mind, it would look a lot like the interior of Arnold’s. I still don’t feel entirely comfortable in a home unless I have some clutter around me. Preferably clutter with books mixed in.

Arnold, you old, balding curmudgeon, rest in peace in that Big Used Bookstore in the Sky.

Yipes! I’ve already posted almost 1400 words, just on A&M Comics and Books. Looks like I won’t get around to Starship Enterprises and Walden’s Books and my first, unrequited love in this post. I’ll save them for part three (which can be found by clicking here).

Category: Book Love, Publishing, Science Fiction, Slices of Life | Tags: , , , ,
| July 19, 2011
One comment

Buying Books in the 1970s

a fondly remembered early purchase from Burdine's Department Store

I’ve been thinking a lot about changes in the world of books. My recent post, “The Death of Science Fiction, 1960 and Today,” talks about the current turmoil in the publishing and bookselling industry (i.e.: the liquidation of Borders), the transmogrification of the distribution system for books, and how the ebook original currently has much the same profile as the paperback original did back in 1960, when Earl Kemp published his memorable monograph, Who Killed Science Fiction?

All the cogitating has me looking back wistfully at my earliest book buying experiences, when I was just a young ‘un. My formative reading years, my own personal Golden Age of Science Fiction, pretty much extended from 1971, when I was seven, to 1982, the year I graduated high school. These were years when the paperback original was the undisputed king of science fiction prose formats, but well before the book superstores, the Barnes and Nobles and Borders and Books-a-Millions, had proliferated. I grew up in North Miami Beach, Florida, not then a hot spot for independent bookstores (although there were a few around, particularly in more bohemian neighborhoods like Coconut Grove).

So where did I buy my books? (I bought many, many of them.) I’d like to take a little journey down Memory Lane, if only to educate my three young boys on their father’s early years.

(Me: Yeah, boys, when your daddy was a kid, I used to buy my paperback books at an itty-bitty newsstand that was twenty-five miles from my house, and I had to walk uphill through driving snow both ways–

Asher: But Daddy, didn’t you grow up in Miami?

Me: Uh, yeah. . . well, when I was a kid, I used to buy my paperback books at an itty-bitty newsstand twenty-five miles from my house, and I had to walk through hurricane-force WINDS both ways. . .)

Burdine’s Department Store: Burdine’s was one of four anchoring department stores at the 163rd Street Shopping Center in North Miami Beach (the other three were Richard’s, Jordan Marsh, and J.C. Penny). Burdine’s was the fanciest of the four, sort of our local Macy’s; it had a nice restaurant on the top floor, a linen-napkin kinda place, where my Grandmother Irene used to take me for special lunches. Back in them old days of the 1970s, upscale department stores had many more departments than just men’s clothing, women’s clothing, children’s clothing, home furnishings, and electronics. Some, like Burdine’s, had a books department. I don’t remember their department carrying any hardback books; or, if they did, it was only very few. What they did have was five or six rows of long, long metal racks of mass market paperbacks (referred to as pocket books, back then). They carried quite a few science fiction paperbacks, UFO and occult-related paperbacks, and true crime books.

I spent many pleasant interludes reading the back covers of paperbacks there while my mother or grandmother shopped in other departments. I remember as a ten year-old being pleasantly mystified by the cover illustrations and back cover descriptions on the Carlos Castaneda books, The Teachings of Don Juan, etc. These were labeled Non-fiction. Were the stories true? Were sorcerers real? My favorite Burdine’s purchase was the collection Science Fiction Terror Tales, edited by Groff Conklin, which I probably begged my dad to buy for me in 1970 or 1971 (it was published in 1969). The story I gravitated to most strongly was “Nightmare Brother” by Alan E. Nourse (reprinted from the February, 1953 issue of Astounding). But what really hooked me was the cover illustration: an injured hand clawing the book’s cover, a hand with a single, staring eyeball protruding from its back and trailing broken cyborg wires. Hard to top that when you’re seven years old.

Some Cigar Shop on Biscayne Boulevard: I can’t recall the name of this place. It was located on Biscayne Boulevard in North Miami, in the same shopping strip as the very popular Pumperniks Delicatessen (a favorite of the great Robert Sheckley’s, whenever he was in the area). The cigar shop was small and narrow. When you walked in, the right side of the store was taken up with glass counters and cabinets displaying a multitude of colorful cigar boxes. The left side of the store was given over to wall racks of paperback books. My father used to take me in there. The one book I remember him buying for me there was a significant one — my first collection of Ray Bradbury stories, A Medicine for Melancholy. I needed a book to take with me on the bus going from North Miami Beach down U.S. 1 to Sea Camp in the upper Keys. I was in fifth grade; this was my first sleep-away camp experience (and I got stung by jellyfish). I picked the book because the montage of images on its cover featured a little Brontosaurus. Reading the book on the bus trip led me to fall in love with Ray Bradbury, who became my “entry drug” to SF and fantasy short fiction.

hot stuff for an 11 year-old; and an enduring classic

Worldwide News and Books: This place was a treasure trove. It was a huge newsstand in a modest strip of shops on 163rd Street in North Miami Beach, near N.E. 16th Avenue, within reasonable bicycling distance from my house. Aside from newspapers from all over the nation and many other countries, they also carried a gigantic stock of paperbacks, with an excellent selection of science fiction. I first encountered a new type of book there, trade paperbacks. At the time, I didn’t know that’s what they were called; I thought of them as “big paperbacks.” Some of the most exciting and enticing trade paperbacks I mooned over included Michael Ashley’s History of the Science Fiction Magazines series (volume one covered 1926-1935 and volume two covered 1936-1945; he’s now up to 1970) and Charles Platt’s marvelous and eye-opening SF:Rediscovery series, which introduced me to many classic works I otherwise would have overlooked. Foremost among these was Robert Silverberg’s magisterial Nightwings. I may have first picked it up because of the very pretty and very naked winged lady on the cover (I believe I was eleven at the time and so may be excused for my prurient interest). But I reread it again and again because it was a masterpiece of imagination and characterization. It remains one of my favorite novels (and I still have my original copy, lovely pastel boobies and all).

The Arts and Sciences Bookstore: This was a stuffy place. Both stuffy because its aisles were narrow, dim, dusty, and claustrophobia-inducing, and because it took its name very seriously. One of north Dade County’s only independent, full service bookstores, it was located on 125th Street, a modest storefront in the middle of North Miami’s original shopping district. I recall that most of their stock was scholarly; they didn’t have much popular fiction. I think popular fiction may have given the owner hives. What they did have, however, was literary criticism, and their stock occasionally included the odd volume on science fiction. I’m pretty sure I bought my copy of James Gunn’s Alternate Worlds: the Illustrated History of Science Fiction here. I’m positive I found my treasured copy of The Science Fiction of Mark Clifton, edited by Clifton’s biggest fan, Barry N. Malzberg (along with Martin H. Greenberg), here.

More to come tomorrow, including A&M Comics and Books, Starship Enterprises, the Walden’s Books at the 163rd Street Shopping Center, and my first, unrequited love!

continue to part two

Category: Book Love, Publishing, Science Fiction, Slices of Life | Tags: , , , ,
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