I guess I slept all day just so I could be awake right now

[sovay]

My uncle was in the army. Actually a couple of my uncles were in a couple of armies, but I mean my father's youngest brother who lived with us for a few months after he was demobbed from patrolling the DMZ. I was in seventh grade at the time. He was thin, wiry, brown-haired, not much taller than me; he could drop twenty feet out of a tree and land as springily as a cat while I dropped twenty feet out of the same tree after him, landed flat on both feet, and fell over convinced I had just driven my tarsals up through my ankle bones. (My mother yelled at him.) He admitted to knowing some Korean but refused to teach me any of it, which at the time seemed like some nonsensical adult gatekeeping and now I just figure his Korean was either NSFW or sketchy of application or both. He brought me and my brother gifts from South Korea. Specifically, he brought us clothes. My brother got a quilted black jacket with a dragon embroidered on it. I got—I am honestly still not sure what I got. It may not be a traditional garment. It's cut like a bathrobe, it's made of at least artificial silk, and it is peony-pink with red chrysanthemums embroidered on the sleeves and on the back. It would have been a great present for someone who liked and/or looked good in pink, neither of which was me. It spent a lot of time at the backs of various closets.

I am wearing it as we speak. I spent a couple of hours this afternoon sorting mid-'70's fanzines and other sfnal ephemera for a friend who inherited a small archive and the material is fascinating and and invaluable (so much mimeography! so many ditto sheets! so many perzines, genzines, and apazines I had never heard of, not to mention conventions—I want a university to take this stuff before it disintegrates) and I am allergic to dust and everything else you find associated with cardboard boxes that have been in a garage for any length of time. I got back to my parents' house and put my clothes in the wash. That was fine; I had known I might react and the material is worth it. Then it turned out that this quarter-century-old, extremely pink object was the only thing resembling a bathrobe currently in circulation.

My niece observed me emerging from the shower and yelled wide-eyed, "You're wearing pink!" I had to remind myself that she has not yet seen Bringing Up Baby (1938) and therefore responding with "I just went gay all of a sudden!" would only confuse her.

Comments

[gwynnega]

Sorting those fanzines sounds fascinating, albeit dusty.

[sovay]

Sorting those fanzines sounds fascinating, albeit dusty.

It's amazing. The degree to which they and do not resemble modern social media and fansites is fascinating all on its own; then there's the historical value of all the organizations that don't exist anymore and all the 'zines that were constantly proliferating in and out of existence and every now and then someone like Mike Glyer or Jessica Amanda Salmonson would go by in the letters of comment or I'd hit a couple of progress reports for MidAmeriCon and then it was back to one-sheets banged out on a typewriter by a name I didn't recognize for an association whose acronym has since been taken over and there would be a lot of photocopied art. (Sometimes by Phil Foglio!) I'm enjoying it so much, which is fortunate, since there's like a dozen boxes of this stuff. I can't imagine trying to reconstruct any history of science fiction fandom—or even just what people who weren't professional reviewers thought of now-famous works when they came out; for example, the letters of comment in one 'zine got eaten alive by a conversation about Shulamith Firestone, which I wasn't expecinting, and several totally unrelated 'zines contained what I would now term a comments war over Harlan Ellison's review of Delany's Dhalgren—without access to this kind of no-budget, essential material.

[moon_custafer]

That reminds me: I was bored a few days ago and began looking up names of my older, deceased family members on-line. My great-grandfather, who I never met, wrote wilderness-adventure stories in the first few decades of the 20th century, and I came across a summary of his papers, currently at U of T.

Apparently these include an unpublished memoir: Canadian Sagalands: Wild Editors I Have Known, and a bunch of correspondence with his literary agent in NY, Otis Adelbert Kline-- whom I’d actually heard of, because he was Assistant Editor of Weird Tales magazine for a while, was literary agent for a *lot* of writers, including Robert E. Howard, and, whatever fandom legend may say, probably didn’t really have a feud going with Edgar Rice Burroughs.

[sovay]

Apparently these include an unpublished memoir: Canadian Sagalands: Wild Editors I Have Known, and a bunch of correspondence with his literary agent in NY, Otis Adelbert Kline-- whom I’d actually heard of

That's pretty cool. Can you get in to read it?

[moon_custafer]

Probably, but I imagine I'd have to request it specially, and finding the time to do it is the hard part.