Littlebrook 08.pdf

Littlebrook, a fanzine by and for science fiction fans without much about science fiction in it, is pub-

lished by Jerry Kaufman and Suzanne Tompkins (aka Suzle), on an irregular and unpredictable

schedule. The publishersÓ address is P.O. Box 25075, Seattle, Washington, 98165; phone number is

206-367-8898. Email can be sent to littlebrooklocs@aol.com. This eighth issue is dated February

2011. Littlebrook is available for the usual: a letter commenting on a previous issue, articles or art-

work, or your own fanzine in trade. We will also accept in-person requests, the provision of a bever-

age, or $2. We do not accept subscriptions. Littlebrook is also available on-line in a PDF format at

eFanzines.com. If you prefer the electronic version, let us know, and weÓll send you an email an-

nouncement when another issue is ready.

Contents:

Bewitched, Bothered & BemildredÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈ..Jerry Kaufman.ÈÈ...ÈÈ.Page 2

In Calvin Trillin CountryÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈJerry Kaufman È..ÈÈÈ.Page 4

BackwatersÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈ The Readers...ÈÈÈ.È....Page 9

SuzlecolÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈÈ.. Suzanne TompkinsÈÈ.....Page 17

Artwork by Brad Foster (pages 1, 13) and Steve Stiles (12).

¨ Contents copyright February 2011. All copyrights are held by the various contributors to their own work.

A special thank you to Mark Plummer and Claire Brialey for mailing our Issue #7 UK copies. And thanks in

advance to Bill Burns for posting the PDF version to eFanzines.com.

Bewitched, Bothered

and Bemildred

Jerry Kaufman

Suzle and I were trying to de-

cide if we were going to go to

Corflu. Winchester, in the

United Kingdom, was the venue, and a group of

British fans were playing host. We couldn’t just

pop in for the weekend, so we had to review our

finances to see if we were up to a major overseas

trip. We also had to make associated decisions

about where we would travel to, aside from Win-

chester itself, and how we would get around.

I envy those of our friends who travel fre-

quently, without obvious concerns about cost,

luggage, special sleeping concerns, or transport.

(I suppose they have them, but either out of good

sense, reticence or some other sense, they don’t

mention them.) We seem to take these things into

account much more.

We finally threw caution out the window

and said, “Yes, we will go.” We decided to travel

south and west from Winchester, visiting, we

hoped, Wales, Cornwall, and the southwest Eng-

lish coast. We further decided that, as we do not

travel light, and with memories of why luggage

is associated with the verb “to lug,” we would

rent a car.

The winds blew caution back into our

faces as we began research to discover the most

interesting places to visit and the best places to

stay. Suzle handles a great deal of this sort of

thing, but I think I did almost my fair share. (As

we looked at guesthouses, bed-and-breakfast cot-

tages, and hotels, we tried to balance thrift,

amenities, location and parking facilities. This

planning generally landed us in quite acceptable

establishments.)

Instead of renting the car at Heathrow,

and having it sit idle throughout the convention,

we decided to rent one in Winchester, where we

A year ago, in autumn 2009,

would return it after a week of driving. Finding

our way from Heathrow to Winchester sounded

quite simple in the Corflu progress reports. (As

we found out, it was indeed simple, but not as

described. The suggested method of taking a bus

from Heathrow to an intermediate train station

and a train the rest of the way was far more com-

plicated than it sounded if we wanted to prepay.

We ended up booking the bus tickets on arrival

and traveling by coach in one easy leg, directly

to King Alfred’s statue.)

So we made it to the convention and had

the properly enjoyable time visiting with old

friends, having long dinners out (and thus miss-

ing Rob Jackson’s trivia quiz), meeting TAFF

winners Anne Murphy and Brian Gray (now

Anne and Brian Gray, I hear), seeing people like

Mike and Pat Meara for the first time in several

decades, and so forth.

I’m not about to do a full-bore convention

report. Suffice to say that I appreciate the plan-

ning and work that Rob and the rest of the com-

mittee did to get the weekend up, running, and

over.

Instead, I will fully bore you with a few

tales of travel post-con.

We underestimated how difficult we

would find adjusting to English roads. (As we

did not get into Cornwall at all, and only to Car-

diff, the most English of Welsh cities) I feel jus-

tified in referring to “English roads.”) We

thought that, because we had managed to drive

them with a minimum of terror during two trips

in the 1980s (aside from some driving in Lon-

don), we should be able to adjust quickly in

2010.

No. We were wrong. Suzle says it’s be-

cause our car was too wide. I’d say it was be-

cause the roads were too narrow. In addition, we

had trouble understanding the road signs and

roundabouts. It took nearly all week for us to be-

come minimally comfortable. (For the record, in

our family Suzle does nearly all the driving and I

do most of the navigating.) The easiest parts of

the trip were the long stretches of M-type roads,

the British equivalent of freeways in the US. We

listened to various BBC local services and I re-

read our guidebooks knowing we could stay in

our lane without a lot of moment-to-moment de-

cisions to make.

As we entered each city along the way,

often as sunset arrived, we invariably got lost.

We had sketchy maps from the guidebooks and

websites, but usually we couldn’t relate the maps

to the reality and had to call the hotels for further

directions (we had second-hand cell phones we’d

bought in Winchester – that’s another story).

Even then we had to stop passers-by to point us

in the right direction.

Each stop had its pleasures. Cardiff gave

us Cardiff Castle – an enclosure in the heart of

the city with a trebuchet and a stately manor.

Bath had, naturally, the Roman baths and a din-

ner out with fannish travelers Alan Rosenthal,

Jeannie Bowman, Murray and Mary Ellen

Moore, on their own expeditions. Glastonbury

had more metaphysical and Neo-Pagan shops

than any ten US cities combined. In Plymouth

there was the Plymouth Gin Distillery and the

best gin-and-tonics ever; Weymouth had the best

slot machines and other games of chance;

Bournemouth had historic tall ships only

glimpsed through closed gates. (Lyme Regis was

in there, too, with its dramatic seas and fossils.)

Back in Winchester we returned the car to

Enterprise, and told the gent who would drive us

to the bus stop, “Just let us off at the statue of

King Alfred.” To our surprise, he said, “You’ll

have to show me where that is.” He was a fill-in

employee from Salisbury and didn’t know Win-

chester at all. Thus it was, after all our driving

misadventures, we became navigators for a Brit-

ish driver, even saving him at one point from

turning the wrong way into on-coming traffic.

Britain again. But will we have the

opportunity? I think yes. Britain is

now bidding to host a Worldcon in

2014, and for a wonder, the intended venue is

London. If we stay in London for the entire trip,

we won’t need to worry about trains, coaches, or

automobiles. The Underground, taxicabs, and

those awe-inspiring double-decker buses should

be able to handle all our transport needs.

Dunno who they would have for Guests

of Honor, of course. Brian Aldiss was GoH in

1965 – in retrospect, that seems premature. He

deserves it all over again. It’s a little too early to

put Charles Stross or China Mieville in that spot.

Any suggestions?

For Fan Guest of Honor, I’d like to em-

barrass a couple of our regular readers. They’ve

produced killer fanzines, run various departments

at both Worldcons and Eastercons, helped out a

series of fan fund winners without themselves

having ever stood for one, and given James Ba-

con the best editing he’s ever had. They are also

sweethearts. I suggest Mark Plummer and Claire

Brialey. Pick them while they can still stand up,

says I.

O ur reprint of “In Calvin Trillin

Country” has taken on a

freighting of poignancy, One

of the key characters, Bob

Doyle, became quite ill this year with pancreati-

tis and a host of complications and infections.

This led to kidney failure. Bob died on Novem-

ber 5.

Bob was our housemate at our house on

Winslow Place in Wallingford (a Seattle

neighborhood) in the very late 1970s into the

middle 1980s. We hosted numerous parties and

gatherings there, including several large dinner

parties that Bob and friend Cliff Wind organized

and cooked for. Bob was very active in Seattle

convention planning, working on early Norwes-

cons and chairing the World Fantasy Convention

in 1989. He collected Richard Powers paintings

and for a time acted as agent for Powers.

I vowed that we would never drive in

Bob married Barbara Norwood several

years ago, moved to a rural property near Sno-

homish, Washington, and gradually drifted

away from our circle. Barbara is a horse enthu-

siast; Bob happily acquired an interest, and

their string grew from one to four horses,

which must take quite a lot of work to care for.

(My closest encounters with horses have been

through the Walter Farley books I read as a

boy, and the Dick Francis books.)

So keep in mind, when you read the

“Trillin” piece, that things keep changing and

people keep moving from present to absent in

our lives. &

In Calvin Trillin

Country

Jerry Kaufman

{{Originally published in Space Junk

#8, undated, by Rich Coad, this report of the

March 1984 NorWescon is a snapshot of Seat-

tle fandom at an interesting moment in its his-

tory, as well as a few good gags. Or so I’d like

to think. It certainly brought back memories

for me. I’ve added some footnotes where I

thought clarification would be useful, or where

I wanted to mock myself. JAK}}

D on’t tell me you don’t know

the connection to science fiction conventions.

At least this one, at least this once. (3)

“The Caveman is near the Hyatt,” I told

Dawn Plaskon as we hauled boxes to Trucklet.

Instead of replying, Dawn looked regally down

her regal nose at the tiny truck’s already full

interior. As she disappeared down to the ankles

into its crawl space, she continued to scold

Doug Faunt for not leaving the luggage back at

the hotel. Doug, looking like a speeded-out

Hell’s Angel instead of the Hewitt-Packard

kingpin systems analyst he is (4) , drawled out

feeble excuses. Other people grabbed other

boxes and disappeared in the direction of the

distant convention, twenty miles south.

The struggles for space were the result

of a cheap station wagon Suzle rented: it was

as sickly as it was cheap, and it had died on her

at the bottom of the most treacherous hill in

Seattle in the middle of rush hour traffic. Our

rescuers included Doug and Dawn, our in-

trepid housemate Bob Doyle (who packed sev-

eral boxes into his tiny tubercular Datsun), and

Don Keller, who we bribed with gas money

and nearly eternal gratitude (the stuff evapo-

rates eventually).

We arrived hours later than we

planned, but at least the trip was entertaining.

Don, a gaunt intellectual, and his four-year-old

who Calvin Trillin is, or

what he has to do with sci-

ence fiction conventions. I

know you don’t. Trillin is a writer, and he

writes about food. (1) Real food, like oyster

poorboys, hush puppies, bagels, enchiladas,

and (most important) barbecue. He writes

about these foods with an original wit and no

detachment whatsoever. He has one hand on

the typer keys and the other permanently cov-

ered in sauce.

He once visited Seattle and, in the com-

pany of a local restaurant reviewer and humor-

ist (2) (do the two always go together?), and ate

the barbecue from Seattle’s best-known joint,

the Caveman in Kent. The Caveman is located

a scant ten minutes from the Hyatt Hotel, site

of the 1984 Norwescon. And that, obviously, is

daughter Deirdre, a Botticelli angelette, endlessly

discussed MTV videos.

We arrived to find the Fan Room already

standing open, so with Don and Bryan Barrett (the

Bay Area’s traveling book merchant and fanzine

delivery service) (5) helping, we unloaded the car.

The boxes were filled with fanzines for sale and

display, and material for the TAFF/DUFF auction

I was running. Bryan immediately slipped a cou-

ple of books into the auction material.

Skulking around the door when we fin-

ished were a couple of hooligans who turned out

to be Tom Weber (6) and Victor Gonzalez. Suzle

and I decided to have dinner with them; then I

would have to find Bob and get a ride home, since

I had to work the next day. Both Tom and Victor

are young, opinionated punks; Tom has since

moved to New York, but I think this is part of

their plan to take U.S. fandom by storm in a pin-

cer movement. Like Don and Deirdre, they too

were entertaining, mostly on the subject of bore-

dom.

We accreted a core of dinner-seekers, in-

cluding Jeanne Bowman, who, from her near-

Olympian height, kept us laughing so hard that we

never noticed we were eating in a Denny’s. On

returning to the hotel, I located Frank Catalano in

the lobby.

“I hear you got stuck with ‘The Worst Sci-

ence Fiction Ever Written’ panel,” I said. He said

he was a little short of material. “I can help you

out,” I said. “I just happen to have a few volumes

of R.L. Fanthorpe here.” Frank didn’t exactly

welcome me to the panel, but he managed to look

both resigned and relieved when I further sug-

gested that I should read them myself. (8)

Nobody in the audience or on the panel

believed that Fanthorpe was real, but I passed the

books around, and got corroboration from Paul

King, the president of the Dan Darrington fan

club, who testified to the power of Fanthorpe’s

Galaxy 666. After the other panelists explained or

read from Alan Dean Foster, Lin Carter, and The

Eye of Argon (an item I believe to be a hoax) (9) , I

read from copies of Negative Minus and March of

the Robots . From the former I gave the audience

my favorite lines, ones I’ve quoted so often that

you’ve all heard them. (10) March of the Robots

supplied a lengthy passage at the beginning of

Chapter 5, in which the robots (finally) land. By

the time I reached the robots’ night march on the

city the audience had thoroughly sussed

Fanthorpe’s style, and they chanted along with

me: “The city slept. Men slept. Women slept.

Children slept. Dogs and cats slept.”

Breathless and almost voiceless, I stum-

bled back to the Fan Room, where a party was

progressing to a climax of noise and heat. Don

Keller came in moments later and thrust a huge

box into my arms. The Siclari fanzines for the

sales table, I surmised, and at the last possible

moment. Fanhistorica and The Collected Quan-

dry turned out to be the most popular items we

had, although A Wealth of Fable couldn’t be sold

at all. Every set of three volumes had two copies

of Volume 2 and none of 3.

I spent the next several hours moving fan-

zines around, chatting to people (with the occa-

sional reference to spareribs and chicken), and

Mentioning barbecue, I left them. Think-

ing barbecue, I slept. Not remembering barbecue,

I got through the day, down the highway, and into

the Fan Room at about 5:30. All was confusion,

babble, and crowd: things were going well, and

everyone was happy. The room had a capacity,

posted, of thirty-eight. It looked like more, as any

crowd of milling people - some haphazard, some

habitual, some purposeful (as Katin of Nova put

it) – will.

Hanging around the wonderful Gestetner

equipment (the top of the line mimeo that re-

moves stencils for you, and the e-stenciller that

does color separations) was Mike Farren of Oak-

land, showing Victor and Doug how things

worked. “I had one of these for a week,” he

crowed. David Emerson, on his way from Min-

neapolis to San Francisco, compared Deadhead

notes with Allan Baum, who almost introduced

the group at the US Festival. Linda Blanchard

twinkled at rich brown, her future co-editor, who

obviously no longer thought she was a hoax. Jack

and Pauline Palmer pointed out a cute teenager

that claimed was their daughter Tilda. Nonsense, I

thought, Tilda is only this tall…. (7)

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