Catchpenny Gazette 10.pdf

CCATCHPENNY GAZETTE

ATCHPENNY GAZETTE

Autumn 2005/CPG 10 1

Number 10 • Autumn 2005

Number10 • Autumn 2005

Published by David Burton at 5227 Emma Drive, Lawrence IN 46236-2742

E-mail: catchpenny@mw.net Distributed in a PDF version designed for printing.

Available for downloading at efanzines.com or at http:///www.geocities.com/cpgzine.

A Noah Count Press publication.

It’s not rocket science ... it’s not brain surgery ... it’s ...

guess whether the answers are right or wrong.

Everyone involved seems to be Twenty-

somethings, and the three panelists, judging

from the backgrounds, seem to have been

selected in malls.

It's almost frightening how dumb these

people are, and it makes you wonder exactly

how these folks managed to get through school.

They have trouble answering the most basic

questions about subjects like history or science

or current events.

I suppose what “Street Smarts” is good for,

though, if you have some intelligence, is making

you feel superior to the contestants. But that

isn't saying much…

Of course, after watching a half-an-hour of

this drivel, I have to remind myself that, yes, this

might be the most moronic show ever televised,

but I've wasted a half-hour of my life actually

watching it. ¨

D a v i d B u r t o n

I'll admit it I have weird sleeping habits. As

I've read happens to many people, the older I

get, the less sleep I need. Four or five hours of

solid sack time do it for me. Any more and I'm

apt to be groggy and cranky the next day; any

less and it's pretty much the same.

Since I tend to go to bed fairly early (usually

before 10 p.m.), that means I'm generally up

around 3 a.m. I don't have to leave for work until

6:15, so that leaves me with 3 hours of "free"

time. Sometimes I'll read, sometimes work on

this fanzine, and other times I'll surf the

Internet.

Every once in a while, when I don't feel like

doing anything else, I'll lie in bed and turn on

the television. Without cable, I'm at the mercy of

half a dozen local broadcast channels, and the

choices are pretty limited. Infomercials, re-runs

of Leno, or all-night network news. And then

there are the times I catch the ultimate anti-

game show, “Street Smarts,” broadcast locally at

4 a.m.

While most game shows rely on the

contestants having some knowledge of

something , “Street Smarts” banks on people's

stupidity. In a nutshell, the game features two

contestants (who seem to have been given a

healthy dose of uppers just before airtime) and

three other people who are supposed to supply

answers to questions. The contestants have to

Contents

Rocket Surgery David Burton 2

Unique Dave Locke 3

Notes From Byzantium Eric Mayer 4

Found In Collection Chris Garcia 6

Creative Attention Peter Sullivan 8

Epistles readers 10

Artwork:

Masthead is a detail from a daguerreotype by Lorenzo

Chase (ca. 1850). Cover: Photo by David Burton. Page 4:

unknown artist (from the Internet). Page 6: David

Mattingly (used with permission) .Page 7: William Rotsler .

Page 11: William Rotsler .

Uncredited art from various dingbat fonts.

Catchpenny Gazette is available for a written or artistic

contribution, or in trade. Full-color printed copies are

available for 1.27 grams of deuterium.

revert to contributors on publication. AMDG

2 CPG 10/Autumn 2005

Dave Locke

I penned this poem to a correspondent a few

months ago.

It’s not the first snow of the season, and for

that matter it’s falling just a bit shy of winter. But

there it is, creating a curtain that partially

obscures the middle distance and deletes the far

background altogether, and its claim to fame is

that it is the First To Stick.

However, the local weather service advises us

not to worry about it, if only because the front

that’s expected here to-

morrow and for the rest

of the week will make this

one resemble one of

those snow paperweights

where the storm is rela-

tively tranquil and over

with quickly. You re-

member the snow paper-

weight. You or your

grandmother had one

when you were a child.

You shook it up maybe

two or three times and af-

ter that it became merely

a paperweight, which you

have not seen in years

unless your grandmother

still has hers.

In looking out the

window at the billions of

snowflakes, and thinking

of the uncountable num-

ber which must exist

around the world at any

one time, let alone the

number that have previously existed throughout

time, I begin to question the incredible pre-

sumptions of whoever said that no two

snowflakes are identical. How many samples

could he have possibly checked in a normal life-

time of 74 years or so? I’ll bet he broke off cor-

ners and partially melted a few just getting them

under the microscope. Besides, would he think

that two quarters were not identical if one was

heads and other was tails? What about four

quarters, where on one he saw George Washing-

ton standing on his head, and on another the ea-

gle was hanging upside down like a bat?

I just saw a snowflake land on the window

next to me and, before it melted, it looked very

much like a snowflake that landed on the left

lens of my glasses in 1956. Could it be? And, af-

ter the both of them melted, they looked abso-

lutely identical, though

I suppose that’s aca-

demic.

Wouldn’t it be more

sensible and less pre-

sumptive, when it

comes to the question of

whether any two

snowflakes can be iden-

tical, to state that

presently we don’t think

so, but that we’ve

missed checking a few?

And what does “iden-

tical” mean? If this

snowflake scientist were

the type of guy who’d

inspect a whole truck-

load of Penn tennis balls

(“You see one, you’ve

seen them all”) and tell

us no two were identi-

cal, then I’d have to go

talk to some scientific

community leaders

about this snowflake

proclamation of his. I can imagine the upshot to

this conversation right now: “Well yes, Dave,

you’re right. He is a quibbly little nitpick, isn’t

he? We’ll have a new snowflake statement issued

immediately. It will be something like: ‘Well,

they’re all pretty much alike, really’.” ¨

Roll it in a ball

Go and build a wall.

Shovel ’til the sidewalk’s bare.

Eat it if you dare.

Grease your skids and go, go, go.

Slide down a hill on a powder of snow.

Break your leg while learning to ski.

Sign your name while taking a wee.

Originally published in 1996

Autumn 2005/CPG 10 3

SNOW

by Eldrin Fzot

Snowflakes in the air,

Snowflakes in your hair,

Snowflakes on your glasses,

Snowflakes up to there.

Sometimes it crunches,

Sometimes it bunches,

Eskimos know

More about snow.

Writing’s Work

“Amateurs hope; professionals work.”

That’s the catch phrase being used by

Kenyon Martin, forward for the New Jersey Nets

basketball team.

My morning sports scan seldom turns up

anything pertinent to writing but here’s an ex-

ception. There’s a lot of truth to that quote. Late-

ly work’s been on my mind. I’ve been working.

Not at fiction. Rather, trying to turn over the le-

gal writing I do for a living fast enough so that

during the summer there’ll be a few weeks left to

help compose the next mystery novel. It’s the

new pattern to my life. For years I punched the

corporate clock. Unfortunately that particular

timepiece has a nasty counter punch. Now I

work frantically on legal articles, on contract, in

order to free myself to work frantically on nov-

els.

I’m fortunate to be able to do so. With its

amazing marketing, Poisoned Pen Press sells a

lot more books than any independent has a right

to sell. Every sale gives me a little extra time to

write fiction.

Too many aspiring writers are not willing to

put in the hours, to alter their routines, to make

the sacrifices, necessary to get published. They

think all it takes is inspiration and when that

fails they decide it’s nothing but luck. Or if they

just find the right agent, or maybe a movie pro-

ducer or get Oprah to touch them, maybe then

they’ll have their bestseller. As for the idea that

maybe you write one book, then another and an-

other and repeat the process several more

times…well, that’s like their regular job, only

harder. No kidding.

Sometimes I think many perpetual amateurs

see writing as a way out of work. Money for

nothing. Freedom from…whatever. That means

selling books.

Amateurs want to write so they can sell

books.

More than a few professionals want to sell

books so they can keep writing.

Looks Like A Purple People Eater

Me and purple go back a long way. The

mysteries my wife and I write are set during the

Byzantine era when purple was reserved for the

Emperor. Long before I wrote mysteries I

published sf fanzines in purple ditto, not to

mention even purpler hecto. I probably still have

a few fading ink stains under my fingernails

from the latter endeavor. In between the

fanzines and the novels there was a lot of overly

purple prose.

In the very beginning, though, was the

“Purple People Eater .”

That Sheb Wooley number was my first

Favorite Song. A lively beat, funny lyrics, a

science fiction theme and the silly voice of the

alien himself. What more could a kid want?

In the summers, until I was in fourth grade,

my parents ran a lakeside picnic spot. It was

summer when the Purple People Eater landed.

My parents had their orders. I wasn’t to miss a

single radio play. If the tune came over the car

radio while my dad drove around the park doing

his morning clean up, or on the radio in the

cottage as my mom cooked breakfast, or

crackled out of a transistor radio during a break

down on the beach, I had to be called so I could

frantically race the opening notes in time to hear

the first chorus. The alien invasion cost me more

than a little skin off my knees.

Eventually I owned a plastic Purple People

Eater, which, like most of the

artist’s conceptions that

appeared in Look Magazine

(if I recall) was colored

purple, even though

the lyrics make it

clear that it was the

people he ate who were

purple.

I suppose he might’ve

been purple, too, due to his

diet.

For years I kept my 45

rpm single, even after it had

broken half way through and become un-

playable. There were decades when I didn’t hear

Eric’s column is extracted from his blog, located at:

www.journalscape.com/ericmayer

4 CPG 10/Autumn 2005

the song, during those dark ages, before the In-

ternet and CDs gave new life to every scrap of

popular culture that had seemed as dead as the

dust of dried up sea monkeys.

After that summer of glory there were disap-

pointments. I was crushed when the Purple Peo-

ple Eater outfit my dad made for me, with the

enormous papier-mache head, did not win the

prize at the annual Halloween parade. (A big

pair of dice won. Can you believe it? Philistines!)

Also, I don’t recall any good cover versions.

Surely some punk band missed out on a hit. I

should have liked to hear Johnny Thunders’ ver-

sion. Now it is too late.

good luck.

Montaigne said that to philosophize is to

learn how to die. Today, he would surely take

that lesson from owning an old car. ¨

Trees v. Power Lines

A few days ago, when I drove by the sprawling

trailer park I pass on the way to town, I noticed

that all the trees lining the road there had been

cut down. They’d been big, mature maples. For a

week in the autumn they used to form a

spectacular wall of foliage. Now there were only

raw stumps and a few scattered, severed limbs.

For the first time I could see the sagging power

line, strung parallel to the road, that I guessed

was the reason for the trees’ demise.

Trees and power lines don’t get along. Our

electricity was off for ten hours Thanksgiving

day after high winds knocked trees onto nearby

lines.

Usually it’s the trees that suffer. Driving in

the countryside you can see where pruning

crews have done their work -- weirdly disfigured

trees with crowns sliced off, limbs truncated,

central branches cut away to allow free passage

for wires. It can’t say the pruning isn’t necessary.

I had to remove branches from a sapling by the

house a few months ago.

My grandfather always thought the crews

were too diligent. He was fiercely protective of

the huge maples in his front yard. They were

forked at the bottom, the sort of trees some

might say should never have been allowed to

grow. Their diverging trunks, hollow with age

and disease, were held together in places by steel

rods.

When the Borough crews arrived to do their

work my grandfather would stand out in the

yard and give them hell. He contested every

branch. The trees were allowed to retain their

dignity.

That was over four decades ago. I doubt that

today you’d find many people who’d side with a

tree against a power line, or think they had the

right to, or that the powers-that-be would

respect such an individual. ¨

Old Cars

Sartre said that hell is other people. He was

wrong. Hell is an old car.

This has been a time of car troubles. Resolved

now, I hope. For the time being.

I have lived all my life with old cars. Vehicles

haunted by the specter of the irremediable

defect. Who can say which rattle, which faint

grinding, clank, or odd squeal, will prove to be

the tolling of the bell? Every visit to the repair

shop promises to end with the mechanic

emerging from his operating room grim faced.

And every turn of the key in the ignition can

lead to the repair shop as easily as to the desired

destination.

When I commuted to college I drove my

parents’ powder blue Plymouth. At least it was

powder blue between the leprous fiberglass

patches holding the body together. The broken

heater and bald tires and defective brakes made

the fifteen mile drive an adventure in the winter.

I still recall peering through a three inch square

aperture in the ice layered on the inside of the

windshield as the car skated into a snow slicked

intersection, the steering wheel clenched

between hands I could see but not feel, trying to

push the brake pedal through the floor with a

cold-numbed foot which might as well have

vanished.

The Plymouth smoked. Like a Titan rising

from the launch pad. Thick blue billows swirled

in its wake, blinding whoever might have been

following me, not that I would have been able to

make them out in the rear view mirror though

the obscuring fog. I had to fill up with oil more

frequently than gas.

The Plymouth met its end at the garage,

sitting at the roadside, awaiting another

fiberglass treatment. Someone swerved off the

highway and totaled it. Old cars don’t even have

Mayer

Autumn 2005/CPG 10 5

Eric

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