| July 21, 2011
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The Future of Bookstores

Octavia Books in New Orleans

The death of Borders Books (and let’s not forget the associated death of subsidiary WaldenBooks, once a huge force in book retailing) has many people prognosticating about the future of physical bookstores. As a writer, a reader, and a lifelong aficionado of bookstores, I’d like to jump into the conversation.

An old, if somewhat inaccurate, adage tells us that the Chinese word for “crisis” is made up of two characters, one representing “danger” and the other “opportunity.” The “danger” part of the dissolution of Borders is clear enough. Nearly 11,000 people employed by Borders Books and WaldenBooks will lose their jobs. An unknown number of publishing employees whose sole or primary responsibility has been to take care of the Borders account will also lose their jobs. For writers and their readers, the danger is that the loss of so much retail shelf space is going to slash the numbers of titles which are green-lit by publishers, as explained in an article from National Public Radio called “Bye Bye Borders: What the Chain’s Closing Means for Bookstores, Authors, and You“:

“Kathleen Schmidt, a book publicist, provided this perfectly concise explanation on Twitter: ‘Here is how the Borders closing will impact publishers: Say you have a bestselling author and you usually do a 1st printing of 100K books. Out of that 1st print of 100K, B&N/Amazon would take a large quantity, then Target, maybe Costco/BJs/Walmart, then Borders, then indies. If you’re an author with a 1st print of 30K (a lot), you prob don’t have price clubs or Target. You have B&N, Amazon, Borders, and indies. Now, take Borders OUT of that 1st print equation. Also consider that B&N is conservative with numbers these days. That 30K turns into 15K.'”

For the major publishers, 15K of anticipated sales is the borderline between green-lighting a trade paperback novel and rejecting the author’s manuscript. The likeliest outcome of the disappearance of all those shelves at Borders is that fewer projects will get past the Profits and Loss Departments of the Big Six publishing houses. Some of the slack may be taken up by smaller, independent publishing firms, but they will be affected by the loss of retail shelf space, too. Their “go/no go” borderline may be 3K sales, rather than 15K sales, but they are still faced with the same arithmetic. The departure of Borders will hasten the exodus of many lower-selling writers from traditional print to e-book originals and print-on-demand.

Any shift away from printed books to e-books would seem to be certain to hurt the surviving physical bookstores (although many independent bookstores now make it possible for their customers to order Google Books through them). Independent booksellers have experienced a modest resurgence in recent years; after fifteen years of steady decline, the American Booksellers Association, the trade group of independent bookstores, reported a 7% increase in the number of member stores in the past year. However, some independent bookstores which have managed to survive thus far in the shadows of Borders may actually be swamped by the wake of Borders’ sinking:

“‘What troubles me,’ says Susan Novotny, owner of Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza in Albany and Market Block Books in Troy, N.Y., ‘is having them [Borders] in a constant state of giving away books.’ She worries about ‘a hang-over effect’ from customers who are booked out.”

So there we have the “danger” part of “crisis.” What about the “opportunity” part?

I believe physical bookstores provide a vital element of what sociologist refer to as “the third space.” The first space is the home, the second is the workplace, and the third space is, like the classic French cafe or the English pub or (in the 1950s and 1960s) the American bowling alley, the place where people go to spend their leisure time among other people. One thing that the expansion of Borders (and Barnes and Noble and Books-a-Million) did over the past twenty-five years was to give a taste of bookstores-as-third-space to millions of people who previously had no bookstores to call their own. Prior to the mid-1980s, hundreds of metropolitan areas, either small cities or the suburbs and exurbs of big cities, had no access to a local bookstore of any type (aside from maybe a used paperback exchange kind of place). But the megastores gave the residents of those areas their own local bookstore, a place to hang out that didn’t involve alcohol, a place to meet friends for coffee or sit in the cafe area and peruse a magazine or a new book. For many people, their local Borders or Barnes and Nobles came to serve as a kind of community center, or that special kind of place where you can go to be alone, but among other people. Many independent bookstores offer these same amenities and may even do them better, but the megastores planted themselves in many places where no independent bookstores had gone. When 400 Borders stores close down, that is going to leave a void in a lot of people’s lives, a void that can’t be readily filled by bars or restaurants. The Borders store closing in Scranton, Pennsylvania is the last bookstore in the entire city; the smaller chain bookstores located in malls closed in the mid-2000s, along with two independents.  Bookstore regulars in Scranton fear they will have nowhere else to go.

Where enough demand exists, entrepreneurs find ways to meet those demands. Joseph Robertson is bullish on the future of independent bookstores. His recent article, “Borders Closure is Green Light for Bookstore Innovation,” lists four innovations which may help new (or newly revitalized) independent bookstores to thrive in many markets:

“The true cafe/bookstore: A more balanced relationship between the bookstore and cafe sections of a retail space, with high quality coffee, with events and music, gatherings and opportunities to sit down with authors, and a bookstore that echoes this quality with content.

“The information oasis: Bookstores can reposition themselves as trusted sources of information, stocking quality publications, some new to newcomers, and unique titles with real depth and scope, understood by intelligent, engaged buyers and salespeople. Mainstream media may be an echo-chamber, but bookstores can be places where the individual is free to think for herself.

“The genius bar: One of the reasons Apple’s stores are popular with Mac lovers is that they provide information and knowledge that is useful; customers can learn from staff. Bookstores could make sure to be a source of guidance to the reading public, taking back that role from distributors and advertisers and being more pro-active about deciding what they stock.

“The cyber-paper crossover: Barnes and Noble, BN.com and the Nook, have made for an impressive collaboration. Small bookstores can take Borders’ market share, collectively, if they learn the lesson Borders missed: assist your readers in all media, and they will stand by you. Wifi is useful, but dedicated new-fangle web access, whatever that looks like, could help bricks-and-mortar independents sell print books.”

I would add a few suggestions to Robertson’s list:

The child-friendly bookstore: Borders was actually fairly strong in this regard with their designated children’s play and reading area and their Saturday afternoon story hours and activities for children. We parents are always looking for good indoor activities for our kids, perfect for those times when you just have to get them out of the house but inclement weather prevents you from taking them to a park or a playground. My local Borders stores were always very welcoming to my kids, and on days when they catered to children, crowds in the stores were healthy. I think one way in which Borders got themselves into trouble was their selection of locations. A good number of their stores were in areas which commanded extremely high rents. The stores may have succeeded in attracting a steady flow of customers, browsers, and folks who brought their kids for events, but their overhead was so stratospherically high that they suffered losses year after year. Corporate leaders were seeking status locations, locations which would allow them to build the Borders brand as upscale and somewhat exclusive, but the items their stores sold weren’t high margin enough to pay the rents. Independent bookstores typically don’t have owners who are slaves to prestige. Owners of non-corporate bookstores are often cannier about their locations than their corporate counterparts and are free to select locations in underutilized, lower-status retail areas which, although commanding much lower rents, may have unique advantages particular to a given neighborhood (nearness of restaurants or other centers of social activity; located in an area being gentrified by artists; etc.), advantages not so visible to an owner who doesn’t live in the community.

The rebirth of the newsstand: Mitchell Kaplan, owner of the local Books and Books chain of stores in South Florida, is pioneering this idea. He started with his original store in Coral Gables, a traditional full-service independent bookstore, but several of his other locations are very different. His notion was to replicate the magazines and cafe sections of Borders or Barnes and Noble but in a smaller, more intimate size, appropriate for tight spots in areas with high levels of foot traffic, such as South Beach or the Bal Harbour Shops. The wide variety of magazines gives Kaplan’s spinoffs a leg up on Starbucks or other corporate coffee houses and makes his locations much more of a destination for couples out on a date or individuals looking to spend a pleasant hour or two. A carefully and intelligently curated small selection of books would also add to the allure of a newsstand/coffee bar. Books were once widely available at newsstands. I think they should be again.

The center for writer-reader interaction and reader-reader interaction: My favorite independent bookstore in New Orleans, Octavia Books, is very good at this. Owner Tom Lowenberg swam against the tide and opened his store a little more than a decade ago, when hundreds of independent bookstores were dying off each year. He has built an extremely loyal customer base by making Octavia Books a headquarters for readers’ encounters with writers and readers’ encounters with each other. In addition to hosting five or six author events each week, Tom also makes his store available to a wide variety of reading groups, providing them complimentary refreshments and a familiar, friendly face.

Bookstores of the future may need to become more like microbreweries, focusing on their uniqueness, their sense of their region and neighborhood, and their owners’ personalities. More and more books may be consumed in the form of pixels, rather than ink on paper. But I believe physical bookstores will continue to exist and thrive as a vital and beloved “third space.”

Category: Book Love, Publishing | 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: , , , ,
| July 19, 2011
4 comments

Oh, hell, Borders is Going Under

I really hated reading this today. Borders Books has been unable to find a buyer and so will go into liquidation. Over 11,000 people will lose their jobs, including some good acquaintances at the two Borders stores near me, wonderful people who have always been sweet and kind to me and my kids on our visits.

I’ve always been a champion of independent bookstores. I recognize that the rise of Borders (perhaps less so than the rise of Barnes and Noble) put many of those independent bookstores out of business. But I still find this very sad. A big-box corporate bookstore is still a bookstore. Many smaller towns and outlying suburbs had no bookstores at all until Borders moved in. And it has always been a pleasant place to hang out. I much prefer Seattle’s Best Coffee to Starbuck’s, so I enjoyed sipping coffee at my local Borders (or stores I would find out on the road) a lot more than grabbing a cup of “Char-bucks” at a Barnes and Noble.

I suppose this is part of Creative Destruction, the churn and storm un drang that are part of the workings of a capitalist economy. Borders killed off a lot of independent bookstores by offering more stock of more books at lower prices than most independents could match. Now Borders is being killed off by cannier competitors who are taking better advantage of new technologies than Borders seemed to be able to do. Someday, Amazon and Apple may be slain by younger, nimbler competitors in their turn.

But losing a bookstore, any bookstore, is always sad. And the country is about to lose four hundred of them.

I’ll be posting later today and tomorrow about the potpourri of places I used to buy books as a kid in North Miami Beach in the 1970s. A heck of a lot has changed in the book selling business since then. And a heck of a lot continues to change.

Category: Book Love, Publishing | Tags: , ,
| July 18, 2011
4 comments

The Death of Science Fiction, 1960 and Today

Chicken Little

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading through the more than seventy questionnaire responses that make up the bulk of Earl Kemp’s 1960 fan publication, Who Killed Science Fiction? In the wake of the 1958 implosion of the American News Company, then the primary distribution source for magazines, and the dramatic and severe contraction in science fiction magazines that quickly followed (part of a general contraction in the publication of fiction magazines of all types), Kemp drew up a simple questionnaire comprising five questions:

1) Do you feel that magazine science fiction is dead?

2) Do you feel that any single person, action, incident, etc., is responsible for the present situation?

3) What can we do to correct it?

4) Should we look to the original paperback as a point of salvation?

5) What additional remarks, pertinent to the study, would you like to contribute?

Kemp mailed his questionnaires to 108 authors, editors, publishers, and fans who were prominent in the science fiction field, essentially the entire professional and semi-professional community. He received 71 responses back, an impressive percentage. Marty Halpern, in his blog More Red Ink, has written a fine account of Kemp’s efforts and shares some of the highlights from the materials Kemp received. The Compleat and Unexpurgated Who Killed Science Fiction?, including follow-on materials collected in the decades following the work’s original publication in 1960, is available as a free download and is also newly available in hard copy from Merry Blacksmith Press. Whoever is interested in the history of popular fiction publishing, the current evolution of and turmoil in publishing, science fiction writers talking shop and speaking their minds, or jumping into the world of professional fiction writing or publishing should pick up a copy, both for the surprisingly candid and oftentimes catty views on display and for the invaluable historical perspective the book provides.

Between the birth of Amazing Stories in March of 1926 and the late 1950s demise of the American News Company, science fiction had been primarily a magazine field. All of the seminal short fiction and nearly all of the important novels had originally been published in pulp magazines or digest-sized magazines such as Astounding Stories, Galaxy, Fantastic Stories, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Having their previously serialized novels republished in hardback or, following WW2, mass market paperback brought in a little side income for writers such as Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and A. E. van Vogt. They, and several dozen less well-known writers, earned the bulk of their writing incomes from magazine sales. Science fiction experienced one of its periodic booms in 1953, and the number of monthly or bimonthly magazines published in the field mushroomed from about a dozen to more than sixty. Suddenly, writers who were capable of being both prolific and at least moderately competent (such as the very young Robert Silverberg) were able to make a handsome living writing science fiction for the magazines. But when the magazine field contracted following 1958 and the numbers of monthly and bimonthly titles fell to a little more than half a dozen, many writers pulled out of science fiction entirely or (like Asimov and Alfred Bester) opted to devote the bulk of their energies to other, ancillary careers. A few, like Silverberg, took an extended hiatus from writing science fiction; Silverberg himself would not return to the field for another five years.

The gloom in the science fiction community circa 1960 is palpable in the pages of Who Killed Science Fiction? The majority of respondents to Kemp’s questionnaire did not expect the magazine field to ever rebound. Opinions varied widely on primary culprits — the editors and publishers blamed the disruption of the distribution system, the fans tended to blame a perceived recycling of science fictional ideas in the stories and novels, and the writers blasted some editors for editorial rigidity, some fellow writers for churning out crap, some readers for only buying the same old crap, and Sputnik, the latter being blamed for shifting readers’ interest in space travel from the pages of the science fiction magazines to the pages of the newspapers.

Perhaps most relevant to current publishing trends and events, respondents were also divided on whether the burgeoning field of paperback originals would prove to be the salvation of written science fiction. Some saw paperback originals as a ray of light, primarily due to their ability to stay on shelves and spinner racks longer than the few weeks afforded magazines. But many felt that paperback originals could never effectively replace what had been lost with the death of so many magazines. They felt that the editors who controlled the content of paperback originals had little familiarity with the science fiction field, certainly much, much less than the longstanding magazine editors, and that they generally tended to publish dreck, generic adventure fiction disguised as science fiction by the addition of a few spaceships and green, tentacled aliens. The sense of condescension expressed by a few of the responding writers and editors towards the producers of paperback originals is visceral and, in retrospect, a little stunning. Some expressed fears that whatever economic promise paperback originals seemed to offer would be squandered by the then-current flood of low quality books, which would drive off readers and permanently sully the (already low) reputation of science fiction.

Paperback originals were the insurgent, disruptive publishing technology of 1960, just as ebooks are today’s. The collapse of the American News Company and its piecemeal, inadequate replacement by a patchwork quilt of local and regional magazine distributors has its modern counterpart in the Borders Books bankruptcy, the massive contraction that has occurred in the numbers of independent bookstores, and the looming Armageddon that many professionals in traditional publishing fear will soon devastate their industry, a technological and economic counterpoint to the recent dismal fate of the recording industry.

What has been the bread-and-butter for most professional writers of popular fiction since 1960? Paperback originals. What publishing platform is currently undergoing the quickest and most severe shrinkage in sales? Mass market paperbacks. (Hardbacks and trade paperbacks are either declining much more gradually or are maintaining their sales levels.) The format which represented the swift, clever mammals eating the eggs of the lumbering dinosaurs in 1960 is now itself the endangered dinosaur, sliding into extinction.

Ebooks are now about where paperback originals were in 1960. Many professional writers and observers of the industry throw up their hands in horror and moan, “Ebooks will be the death of fiction! They are a flood of dreck! There’s no quality control, no gatekeepers! The hordes of the bad will drive out the few that are worthwhile!” Yet ebooks, including some ebook originals, are on an opposite sales trajectory from that of mass market paperbacks.

If I have to make a prediction, it is that new ranks of gatekeepers will arise, critics and reviewers, some amateur, some paid, who will help us sort the wheat from the chaff. It’s already happening. An exponentially increasing “tyranny of choice” will call forth a solution, and I don’t believe the solution will be a widespread turning away from the pleasure of reading a good book. I believe a wider range of stories and novels will be made available to readers, and many writers who have found themselves walled off from traditional publishing by less-than-stellar sales records will take advantage of new avenues through which to reach those readers.

I’ll close with what I hope is a comforting thought in the midst of the present chaos. Who Killed Science Fiction? appeared in 1960. By 1965, five years later, science fiction had embarked upon one of the biggest booms and most creatively fertile periods in its history.

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Fun links of the day:

J. G. Ballard’s house in Shepperton is for sale; fan club wants to buy it

Most ubiquitious artist in America pees on Winnie the Pooh statue in Disneyland

Category: Publishing, Science Fiction | Tags: , , ,
| July 16, 2011
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Dental Blogging

The doctor gave me three choices: Novocaine, Novocaine and laughing gas, or Novocaine and total anesthesia. I picked the middle option. I had good memories of laughing gas from some procedure I’d had done as a teenager. I remembered an initially bad smell that faded quickly, then the room spinning around like the old Time Tunnel TV series, hearing lots and lots of people laughing, and then realizing, before blackness, that all those people were me. The doctor said for most people, the effect of laughing gas was to make the patient simply not care what was being done to them, but that different folks had different reactions, and differing reactions at different ages.

At first, breathing in the laughing gas through my nose made me about 400% more nervous than I’d been. Which of course made me fear it wasn’t working the way it should. The doctor inserted the Novocaine needle in my mouth, and I felt it. I almost freaked. I said, “Laughing gas isn’t working. Felt that!” She reminded me that the laughing gas wasn’t meant to numb me; the Novocaine would do that, and it hadn’t had a chance to work yet. She also reminded me to stop breathing through my mouth and to breathe the laughing gas in deeply.

I found myself becoming more nonchalant. The room didn’t spin around me. I didn’t hear any laughter, not my own or anyone else’s. This was somewhat disappointing. But it wasn’t that disappointing, because I was feeling so nonchalant.

Then the doctor and her assistant began doing things inside my mouth. Serious things. Violent things. Violence involving an electric saw and a drill and at least one pair of pliers. I found this rather fascinating. Also horrifying, but in a distanced way, as though I were watching a film of some imagined person being subjected to violence. I thought to myself, If these women wanted to kill me, there would be nothing to stop them. They could do absolutely anything they want to me. I could make no real protest and offer exceedingly little in the way of resistance. All I can do at this point is trust them. It’s all I can do.

The violence being done inside my mouth grew more intense. More brutal. One likes to think that when one is being operated on, when one’s precious body (the only body one has) is being subjected to a procedure, that one’s substance will be treated with great delicacy and respect, like a damaged piece of crystal. In fact, one’s body is treated by surgeons about as roughly as mechanics treat the underparts of a car. I sensed my right bottom wisdom tooth being wrenched from my jaw like a recalcitrant bolt being unscrewed from the cover of an engine air filter. The amount of torque being applied inside my mouth was terrifying, or would be terrifying if I weren’t ten miles above it all. This is really brutal, I thought. Extremely violent. And yet my hands did not clench the arms of the chair. It was as though I was an observer on a bomber soaring at thirty thousand feet, seeing bombs being dropped from the bay and watching the explosions blossom like quick-time flowers on the terrain so far below. Huge violence was being done. Tears streamed from my eyes down the sides of my face. But I was so very far away. This is definitely the way to go, I thought. This is flying first class. I wondered who in their vaguely right mind would opt for Novocaine alone. If I hadn’t been given laughing gas, I’d be crapping my pants.

After they finished working on the right tooth, I began choking. This wasn’t terribly distressing. It was interesting, in a crude way, like watching the vomiting scene in Trainspotters. Hello, I thought. I’m choking. I’m choking here. My own voice in my head sounded like HAL’s voice in 2001: A Space Odyssey. You know the voice. Dave. . . Dave, I’m losing my memories. . . my mind. . . Dave, I’m scared. . . Daisy, daisy. . . The doctor told me to breathe through my nose. I obeyed and stopped choking.

They moved on to my left bottom wisdom tooth. I counted the freckles on the right cheek of the surgical assistant. I thought to myself, I am having teeth brutally wrenched from my jaw, and I am counting freckles on the assistant’s face, and I am consciously noting that I am counting freckles because I want to be able to remember this later and write it down. After a while, I noted that they had been taking what seemed to be a very long time working on that left tooth, perhaps three times as long as they’d worked on the right one. I asked myself, Has something gone dreadfully wrong? I searched for signs of panic in the face of the assistant. I saw none, and so I figured no catastrophe was occurring, at least no catastrophe out of the ordinary.

Then, at last, they either sewed me up or flossed my gums to get fragments of bone out. I couldn’t be sure. But they told me it was over. They stuffed gauze into the sides of mouth and told me to bite down. My lower jaw felt like a prosthesis, a glued-on piece of ape makeup, as though I were an extra in the original Planet of the Apes. Or, if I were one of the featured players, I realized with a slight shudder of surprise that I would be Dr. Zaius. Not Cornelius, the idealistic young chimpanzee whom I’d always imagined myself as when I was a young boy. But Dr. Zaius, the ornery old conservative, the protector of his civilization’s most sacred traditions, willing to sacrifice even truth and friendships if that’s what it took to do his job. I might not completely agree with the distinguished old orangutan, but I could definitely sympathize. I wasn’t the same person I’d been when I’d been ten years old, at least not fully. My skin had completely replaced itself five times since then. Laughing gas affected me differently now.

My wife helped me out to the van. Dr. Zaius climbed into the van. Dr. Zaius, minus his two bottom wisdom teeth.

Category: Slices of Life | Tags: ,
| July 15, 2011
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Losing Wisdom (Teeth)

 

After decades of putting it off, putting it off, putting it off, I’m finally having my two bottom wisdom teeth extracted (sawed out of my head, to be more exact).  So blogging will be put on hold, probably until this coming Monday, when I’ll return to the office looking like Alvin and the Chipmunks.

On the positive side, I’ve opted for laughing gas, rather than full anaesthesia, all in the interest of you, my readers — I chose to remember the sounds and muffled sensations of power tools hammering away at my jaw so that I can enrich your lives with some DENTAL BLOGGING.  Post-op, of course; I won’t have my Blackberry in my hands while the electric saw is whining away.

At least a good buddy at work, a fellow military buff, let me borrow his DVD of a four-part BBC series on the history of battleships.  So I’ll have that to watch while I lie, writhing in discomfort, in bed.  I doubt I’ll be doing much roughhousing with the kids over the weekend, or even reading more of Mr. Sammler’s Planet.  Too much exertion, physical on the one hand, mental on the other.

Category: Slices of Life | Tags:
| July 14, 2011
2 comments

George Alec Effinger’s Thousand Deaths


I’ve posted the Afterword I wrote for the third Golden Gryphon Press collection of George Alec Effinger’s short fiction, A Thousand Deaths. The essay is a reflection on how George’s favorite of his novels, The Wolves of Memory (included in the collection), ended up being a foretelling of the grinding events of the final decade of his sadly shortened life.

Marty Halpern, the last editor George worked with prior to George’s death in April, 2002, was the driving force behind bringing the best of George’s short fiction back into print. Marty (who also happens to be the best editor I’ve ever worked with — he edited The Good Humor Man, or, Calorie 3501 for me at Tachyon Publications) posted a terrific three part essay on his blog, More Red Ink, describing his role in the publication of the three GAE collections at Golden Gryphon. Here’s Part One, regarding Budayeen Nights; Part Two, regarding George Alec Effinger Live! from Planet Earth; and Part Three, regarding A Thousand Deaths. All three Golden Gryphon collections featured gorgeous wrap-around covers by my favorite artist, John Picacio.

By the way, Marty is available for freelance work, either line editing or book doctoring. The man has the eyes of an eagle and is persnickety in all the best ways. If you need an editor, I couldn’t recommend a better one.

Several years before I wrote the Afterword for A Thousand Deaths, I wrote a rambling and much more personal version of my friendship with George Alec Effinger and how I did what I could to help him during the last few years of his life. I published the piece on my first website from 2003-2006 (after which said website went defunct). That piece, “Remembering George Alec Effinger,” can be found here, courtesy of the Internet Way-Back Machine.

Category: Big Easy, Book Love, Publishing, Science Fiction | Tags: , , ,
| July 13, 2011
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New Upcoming Project Pages Added

images of Krampus, bad luck spirit

I’ve updated my Upcoming Projects page, adding more information on three novels I hope will see print or pixel in the not so distant future — Fire on Iron, The Bad Luck Spirits’ Social Aid and Pleasure Club, and Ghostlands. I found a gorgeous, haunting image of the Washington Monument partially obscured by snow to illustrate my capsule summary of Ghostlands. Take a look!

Category: Horror and Fantasy, Science Fiction | Tags: , ,
| July 12, 2011
3 comments

So Dracula Was a Yid. . .?

Boy, just when you thought you knew your vampires. . .

An article in Jewish Ideas Daily describes a new book by Sara Libby Robinson, Blood Will Tell, an academic consideration of vampires in popular culture during the decades leading up to World War One. From the description, the book appears to build upon insights from one of my favorite books on horror in popular culture, David J. Skal’s The Monster Show. Skal’s book discusses how the new European focus on “race” and “blood” in the late nineteenth century, spurred by theorists of Evolutionary Darwinism, coincided with and was reflected by a sudden craze for vampire fiction. According to the Jewish Ideas Daily article, Robinson’s book

argues that Stoker’s depiction of Dracula exploited widespread anxieties about the dangers posed by the flood (and the blood) of Yiddish-speaking immigrants to Great Britain. Dracula’s features are “stereotypically Jewish . . . [his] nose is hooked, he has bushy eyebrows, pointed ears, and sharp, ugly fingers.”

This brings to mind, of course, the funniest line from Roman Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers, when a threatened blonde damsel tries to ward off a Jewish vampire with a crucifix and he replies, “Boy, have you got the wrong vampire!”

So, does Dracula rate an invitation to my next seder? Read the article, then decide.

Category: Horror and Fantasy, Stuff I Like | Tags: ,
| July 11, 2011
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My Little Mapmaker

map of City of Mentropenia

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map of Country of Feganosenia

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Levi, my seven year-old, thinks this website is one of the coolest things his daddy has ever done. Maybe the coolest. He wants in the worst way to help out. If he were a few years older and as adept at web design as many of his eleven year-old peers, I’d be able to find plenty of ways for him to help out. Right now, though? It’s a little tougher.

One thing Levi loves to do is make maps. No one encouraged him to do this. He just started doing it one day, and now he draws five or six maps each week. Most of the maps are of cities or new countries he dreams up. They make me think of the maps that often appear in the front of Big, Fat, Fantasy Epics, or in novels of the New Weird.

Levi is keenly interested in coming up with ways to make money. So how about it, Jeff Vandermeer or China Mieville? How about hiring Levi to draw maps for your next Ambergris or Embassytown books?

By the way, when Levi heard I was going to post some of his maps on my site, he made me an ad to go with them:
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Category: Horror and Fantasy, Slices of Life | Tags:
| July 10, 2011
5 comments

The Worst Family Film of the Year?


Yes, 2011 is just a little more than half over, but I have probably seen the worst family film of the year. This reeking hairball was so abysmal, I challenge any other studio to release something as bad in the next five and a half months.

I’ve gotten into the habit of taking my kids and Dara to the Family Drive-In in Stephens City, Virginia. We’ve been five times now. It’s a bit of a schlep — about an eighty-minute drive from our house — but it’s a great Saturday evening outing. The vibe at the drive-in is pure late 1960s, early 1970s. Every time I drive through the gate, I half expect the lot to be filled with Chevy Caprices and Chevelles and Ford Galaxies and Dodge Coronets, rather than the Honda Pilots and Toyota Siennas and Chevy Traverses that are actually parked there, their open hatches facing the screens. Every time we’ve ever gone, the place has been teeming with families. The parents are all very considerate of one another and the racing clumps of kids. You get a double feature for $7.50 (adults) or $3.50 (kids under 12), which is a great honking deal. Plus, you get Ye Olde Playground of Death, a well-preserved example of early 1970s hard steel playground architecture straight out of my elementary school’s recess yard. Forget the softly curved plastics and rubber bumpers that are de rigor today; this playground is pretty no-nonsense about its ability to put out a kid’s eye if the kid gets too adventurous. Soft, yielding ground cover of wood chips or rubber pellets made from recycled tires? HAH! How about dirt? And not dirt meant to cushion a fall, but dirt that resulted from decades of little sneakers wearing away the grass. There are monkey bars that look like an Andy Warhol-inspired prison or the bones of a courthouse from wartime Dresden. There’s a tall, steep slide that is welded to a set of swings on one side and a chin-up bar on the other, the confluence inviting all sorts of acrobatic mischief. There are horsey swings with grasping steel hinges and chains that foretell the amputation of little fingers. Needless to say, my kids love the place.

Anyway, last night’s double feature was Cars 2 and The Zookeeper. I knew there was no way I would get through the summer without taking the boys to see Cars 2. It was mandatory. That film was non-objectionable and occasionally entertaining. The second feature, however, was a whole different animal. This was Kevin James’s follow-on to that cinema classic, Mall Cop. I hadn’t read any reviews, so I went in blind; the boys had seen previews on their favorite TV station, Cartoon Network, and they were fairly jazzed to see it. I’m not a snob when it comes to children’s movies. I’m generally content to sit there and absorb whatever I can, so long as the boys are enjoying themselves. Rio was fine by me. Diary of A Wimpy Kid was worth my expenditure of ninety minutes. Rango was unexpectedly delightful, a film I wouldn’t mind watching another couple of times. But The Zookeeper. . . I simply find it hard to imagine who in Hollywood would ever have green-lighted this misbegotten cross between Eddie Murphy’s Dr. Doolittle and The Water Boy. Even given the lame premise, that a hapless, lovelorn zookeeper is given romantic advice by the talking animals inhabiting his workplace, the script writers and actors did amazingly little to bring out what comedic potential the premise may have had. How can scenes of a fat man variously peeing on a tree, making an aggressive bullfrog face to intimidate a romantic rival, and splitting his pants fail to elicit laughter from six year-old and seven year-old boys? Is that physically possible? Asher, my six year-old, may have snickered just a little bit; he swears he did, although I didn’t hear him (and I was listening). But for Levi, my seven year-old, not to laugh at all? Levi is the type of kid who laughs so loud in a movie that half the audience turns around to stare. Yet all he wanted to do was go home and go to sleep.

I discovered later, looking at a round-up of reviews (15% “fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes) that the producers, in a forlorn attempt to make the film relevant and entertaining for audience members older than four, had hired an eclectic cast of former A-list stars to do voice acting for the animals. The lion and lioness were voiced, respectively, by Sylvester Stallone and Cher. Had I not read this, I would have had no idea. I was so appalled by the dialogue coming from those CGI-animated feline lips that I had no mental energy left to ponder whom the voices might belong to or where I recognized them from.

Most tellingly, this was the first time in my entire forty-three year history of moviegoing that I ever felt embarrassed for a subject of product placement. The unlucky victim in this case was TGI Friday’s Restaurants. There is a scene involving Kevin James and a talking gorilla set in a TGI Friday’s that made me cringe. I actually felt sorry for the corporate executives and all the stockholders, it was such a humiliation for them. And I don’t even like the restaurant.

The only member of my family who might possibly have enjoyed the film, Judah, my four year-old, fell asleep about ten minutes in.

Don’t ask me how the movie ended. I overruled Asher’s objections and we left after about an hour. I have an appointment to get two wisdom teeth sawed out my head this Thursday. I view that coming appointment with more positive anticipation than I would seeing the last half hour of The Zookeeper.

Category: Slices of Life | Tags: , ,
| July 8, 2011
5 comments

Farewell to the Space Age As We Knew It


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It’s over.

With the final launch of the last of the space shuttles today, we are witnessing the end of “NASA Classic,” manned missions into space aboard vehicles designed and built by the government-space-industrial complex. An age that began in 1960, four years before I was born, is coming to a close.

That’s not to say that Americans will never again travel into space, or that they will only do so as passengers on rockets built by other nations. But whenever Americans eventually return to space, it will be thanks to a mode of development and procurement far different from the top-down, heavily bureaucratic, NASA-centric model we’ve been familiar with up till now.

It’s odd for me to think that the last moon voyage is as historically distant to my boys as the final years of the Herbert Hoover Administration were to me when I was their age. They haven’t yet thought to ask me why we stopped going to the moon; not even Levi, my oldest, who has shown a strong interest in astronomy and the planets. Whenever they get around to asking, I suppose I’ll answer, “We stopped going because we’d done it already. We brought back our moon rocks. Just like the shirt says — ‘My parents went to the moon, and all I got was these dumb rocks and bragging rights to beating the Soviet Union.'”

I’ll tell them we’ll go back to the moon when we have a real reason to go back. Meaning, whenever someone figures out how to make money from going there and doing things there.

In the meantime, we have J. G. Ballard and Barry N. Malzberg to read.

Younger SF fans may not realize this (nor particularly care), but there was a time when both those authors were regarded by many “traditional” SF readers, those who venerated Campbell’s Astounding and Heinlein and Van Vogt, as heretics, traitors to the true faith of science fiction. Because they didn’t believe the hype of the Space Age. Because they, unlike most of their peers, predicted it would be a transitory phase, that the public and the sponsoring governments would grow bored of it, and that it would ultimately prove to be far more expensive than we were willing to pay, given the limited goals set forth. They also anticipated that organizational and personal pathologies would be among the factors to grind the Space Age to a halt.

Ballard, great fan of the Surrealists, left us painterly images of the ruins of the Space Age, stories set in a Cape Kennedy as abandoned and desolate as Chernobyl. Gary Westfahl has a perceptive essay on this.

Ballard, unfortunately, did not live long enough to watch the final Space Shuttle flight lift off today. Barry Malzberg, however, is still very much with us. His trio of early 1970s novels on the collapse of the space program, Beyond Apollo, The Falling Astronauts, and Revelations, focused on how the intersections of the bureaucratic rigidities of NASA, the psychological vulnerabilities of the astronauts, and the unforeseen terrors of the extraterrestrial environment would lead to personal and organizational disaster and decay. Barry’s biggest “I-told-you-so” moment came in 2007, when NASA astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak drove cross country wearing a diaper and packing a BB gun to assault her rival for the affections of a fellow astronaut. If Hollywood ever makes a bio pic based on Lisa Marie Nowak’s story, Barry should get an acknowledgement in the credits.

Barry, in observance of the day, I raise a glass of Tang in your honor!

Category: Science Fiction, Slices of Life | Tags: , ,
| July 7, 2011
2 comments

New Stuff Added to Articles and Stories Pages


I’ve posted a couple of new items. I retrieved “The Secret Origin of Jules Duchon, Vampire! Or, How Jules Duchon, New Orleans Bloodsucker, Got So Darned Fat” from my old website and added it to the Articles page. I also added my personal favorite of the short stories I’ve written, a piece I’m really proud of called “The Man Who Would Be Kong.” It first appeared in SCIFI.COM back in 2005, in the final monthly edition of the online fiction magazine SCI FICTION, edited by Ellen Datlow. I snuck in right before the powers-that-be pulled the plug on one of the best magazines going.

Category: Big Easy, Horror and Fantasy, Stuff I Like | Tags: ,
| July 6, 2011
4 comments

Jules vs. Breezy


I added the only Fat White Vampire short story I’ve ever written, “Jules Versus Breezy,” which also serves as a little memorial piece for my very dear friend, Robert Borsodi. To me, Bob was one of the people who made New Orleans such a fantastical, enchanting place. He had operated bohemian coffeehouses in ten different locations by the time he arrived in New Orleans in the late 1970s; he’d founded his first in New Haven in 1959, when he’d been a student at Yale, before he went into the Marines (it is so very, very hard for me to imagine Bob Borsodi in the United States Marines; but Bob, like Walt Whitman, contained multitudes). He opened his first New Orleans coffeehouse on Daneel Street, next door to what was then the Penny Post and is now the Neutral Ground Coffeehouse, a folk music club. His second, best known location was on Freret Street, about a half mile east of Tulane and Loyola Universities. It was a huge, warehouse-like space, with the espresso bar in front and a stage in back big enough for full scale plays. Bob lived in a kind of hidden alcove above the stage, with access to the building’s roof. The entire coffeehouse served as a colossal collage, an ever-evolving art installation made up of whatever Bob and his regulars felt like gluing to the walls and furniture. I first met Bob in 1983, while I was an undergraduate at Loyola, shortly after I moved into an apartment in the neighborhood. I did my laundry at a shabby little washateria next to Bob’s place, and while I was waiting for my wash to finish, I’d go next door for a cup of tea or an Italian soda and a chat with Bob. He didn’t have his beard then, and he was open during the afternoons, which he wasn’t in later years, although the place was mostly deserted before about seven at night. He was interested in Loyola because he thought his son might attend. We got to be pretty good friends over the next three years. Upon graduation, I swore to him that I intended to move back to New Orleans someday. I don’t think he believed me.

The next time I saw Bob was after I moved to Northport, New York in Long Island’s Suffolk County. Bob had taken a crew of his friends and regulars to perform one of his plays, Musk, at Theater for the New City in the East Village in Manhattan. The stage set looked just like Borsodi’s Coffeehouse in New Orleans. I immediately felt homesick. I invited Bob and his lady friend, Sara Beth, to come stay with me at my apartment in Northport. They stayed the night and walked around the harbor and the old downtown. I promised again that I would move back to New Orleans someday. Again, I don’t think Bob believed me.

Less than two years later, I picked myself up and plunked myself back in New Orleans, with no plans or prospects other than finishing my first novel. . . at Borsodi’s Coffeehouse. Bob was really the one who drew me back to New Orleans. So I have much to thank him for, since everything that is most wonderful in my life has its roots in my time in New Orleans. I’ll write more about my return to New Orleans and my experiences at Borsodi’s Coffeehouse in an essay I’m finishing up called “Lust for a Laptop, or the Madness of the Obsessive Collector.”

I wrote the little story here linked to in 1998, for Bob’s sixtieth birthday. Four years later, suffering from incurable cancer that had spread through much of his body, in unbearable pain, Bob threw himself off the Hale Boggs Bridge in Luling, about thirty miles west of New Orleans. The city hasn’t quite been itself since.

Category: Big Easy, Horror and Fantasy, Slices of Life | Tags: , , ,
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