Littlebrook 01.pdf

Littlebrook: a Journal of the Fannish Arts and Sciences is a fanzine published by Jerry Kaufman and Suzanne Tompkins (aka

Suzle), to appear on an irregular and unpredictable schedule. The publishers’ address is 3522 N.E. 123rd Street, Seattle, Washing-

ton, 98125; their phone number is 206-367-8898. Email can be sent to littlebrooklocs@aol.com (email of a titillating or personal na-

ture may be sent to Jerry at jakaufman@aol.com or Suzle at suzlet@aol.com). This first issue is dated August, 2002. Littlebrook will

be available for the “usual.” This could be a letter commenting on a previous issue, an article or artwork intended to be published in

a future issue, or your own fanzine in trade. We will also accept in-person begging, the provision of a beverage, or $2. We do not

accept subscriptions. Littlebrook will also be available on-line in a PDF format at efanzine.com. If you prefer the electronic version,

let us know, and we’ll simply send you an email announcement when another issue is ready.

What’s inside:

This page: Stu Shiffman art, and publication details

Page 2: “Bewitched, Bothered and Bemildred” by Jerry, with art by Rhonda Boothe and D. West, the latter from New

Routes in America .

Page 8: “Sausage Time” by Andy Hooper, illustrated with clip art.

Page 10: “Corflu Fakefan” a Guest of Honor speech by Moshe Feder, with art by Craig Smith.

Page 12: Art by Rhonda Boothe, astrological embellishments by the editors.

All contents are ©August, 2002 by the individual artists and authors, and are used with permission.

Contributors:

Rhonda Boothe, 3214 Preble Street, Bremerton, WA 98312

Moshe Feder, 142-34 Booth Memorial Avenue, Flushing, NY 11355

Andy Hooper, 4228 Francis Avenue N., #103, Seattle, WA 98103

Stu Shiffman, 8616 Linden Avenue N., Seattle, WA 98103 (A slightly different address than of old—check your lists.)

Craig Smith, 10329 Meridian Avenue N.E., Seattle, WA 98133

D. West, 17 Carlisle Street, West Yorks., BD21 4PX, U.K.

***Bothered***

I t’s been a few years since we published

the final issue of Mainstream. You may

consider this to have been a long time.

However, if you take into consideration

that my original impulse was never to publish

again, you’ll agree that “never” has arrived

rather quickly.

I guess I was tired of pubbing the big issues,

and even more tired of the innumerable delays

and long waits for material that made publica-

tion of a fanzine more of a broken tree limb

hanging over my head than a chocolate-covered carrot dangling

in front of my nose.

To prevent that sort of self-defeating agony, here’s the

plan for Littlebrook : smaller issues, a little more frequently

published, with Suzle’s column not a necessity for each issue,

but a luxury seldom provided and therefore all the more delec-

table.

that such a spectacular example of neckwear

must have a secret history. She set about col-

lecting details. We said if she wrote the His-

tory of the Necktie, we would publish it.

Somehow we are publishing without the His-

tory, but Tami may yet write it. She swears

she still has her notes.

Instead, we’re happy to include

Moshe Feder’s Corflu Valentine Guest of

Honor speech, slightly edited and beefed-up

with more comments. If you want to see an

earlier version, check out the Corflu website

at http://www.hawkida.com/corflu/corf_speech.htm. We’re also

gratified to bring you an installment of a fanzine review column

by Andy Hooper, “Sausage Time.” In this one, Andy opens his

mail.

So raise your glasses and welcome…us. We salute

you, too.

B uffy the Vampire Slayer and I go way back, all the

The name comes from the nice little creek that runs

through a ravine next to our property. It plunges into a culvert

and disappears under our property; later it joins Thornton

Creek, which empties into Lake Washington. On some maps

it’s called Littlebrook Creek, on others it’s Little Brook Creek.

We like the continuing water theme in our zines, and are trying

to come up with a suitable new title for the letter column. Don’t

be surprised if we use “Cross Currents” again.

The explicit trigger for this anzine’s creation was

Tamara Vining’s fascination with Dave Hartwell’s newest

necktie at Potlatch this year. The tie, a hideous art project con-

sisting of polished stones and glitter glued to a wide 60’s eye-

sore, was an auction item at this year’s Potlatch. Tami decided

way back to the summer that the WB reran the first

season’s episodes. Since then I’ve seen every epi-

sode. Most recently, as I write this (April 20, 2002) I

watched an episode on March 12, 2002, called “Normal

Again.” As of this writing, there hasn’t been another new one. I

wouldn’t be surprised if there never were another. Joss Whedon

could announce tomorrow that the show ended its run, a care-

fully guarded secret known only to him and guessed only by

me. I could say that “Normal Again” told me so, and that I feel

oddly betrayed.

If you’re a Buffy fan who hasn’t seen that episode, and

likes surprises, stop reading now. If you have no television or

only use yours to watch figure skating, Bob Vila, late night

public access, rented movies or the Weather Channel, you may

not find the following entirely interesting. Be warned that I will

cheerfully give away plot details and at some point I’m going to

talk about the right of the artist to pull the rug from under the

loyal audience – whether in a film, a book or a television series.

Buffy ’s just a jumping-off point.

Buffy Summers starts the series as a teenager, freshly

moved to Sunnydale, California, who has a Destiny. She’s been

somehow selected to be the Slayer – always a girl or woman

who is given remarkable strength and rigorous training to fight

vampires and other evil supernatural beings. Fortunately for

Buffy, she soon finds friends and allies in her fight; fortunately

for the series, Sunnyvale turns out to be located over the Hell-

mouth, both a source of evil and an attraction to it.

Over the course of six years, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

has developed a rich cast of permanent and recurring charac-

ters, and a complex history and set of rules governing Slayer-

hood and the demon world. The show isn’t always consistent in

these rules. For instance, in one season, when Buffy was clin i-

And

cally dead from drowning for a few minutes, Giles the

Watcher revealed that when one Slayer dies, another is

selected. The new Slayer died after a couple of appear-

ances, and another Slayer, the infamous Faith, took her

place. However, when Buffy died again at the end of the

fifth season, no new Slayer showed up. (I was disap-

pointed.)

This season, Buffy’s main nemesis has been a

trio of college-age nerds, including at least one character

who’s shown up since season one. They want to rule the

world, using a combination of unlikely technology and

ill-intentioned magic to try to gain their ends and simultaneously

defeat Buffy.

In “Normal Again,” the boys call up a demon that se-

cretes an hallucinogenic toxin; it stabs Buffy, and she begins

mentally to switch from the real world to one in which she’s a

patient in a mental hospital. In the “fantasy” world, the Buffy-

verse is nothing more than a carefully built-up delusion. Her

parents (both alive and still together) worry about her and allow

a new therapy to be used to snap her out of it. Buffy becomes so

confused about which is the reality and which the fantasy, that

she nearly allows her pals to be killed by the rampaging demon.

In the hallucinated mental hospital, Buffy’s mom Joyce

sees that Buffy is about to accept the “normal” world and resist

the desperate plight of Xander, et al. Joyce gives Buffy a pep

talk to help her through, mentioning her strength and determina-

tion. This has the effect (the opposite of Joyce’s intention) of

helping Buffy to accept the world of vampires, demons and

painfully beaten friends as the real one; she defeats the demon

and is given an antidote to the poison.

But wait. One more scene plays out: In the hospital, in

the world we’re sure has been Buffy’s hallucination, Buffy’s

parents and the Doctor look at the catatonic Buffy, gone from

their world into the other. Was this the “real” world, after all?

The camera recedes from the scene, leaving me believing so.

In science fiction circles, we’ve been debating the

question of “willing suspension of disbelief” for so long that

most newcomers to the field, whether through reading books or

watching movies, don’t give it a thought. They’ve become en-

tirely used to accepting whatever happens as “real” for the dura-

tion of the experience. Artists use this acceptance in many ways.

The most basic way, of course, is to tell a story that’s

entirely respectful of the audience’s belief. The artist does her

best to keep the details consistent, to vary from consensual real-

ity only to the degree needed for the story to work, to be con-

vincing and astonishing at the same time. Another basic way is

to be as fast and outrageous as possible, and hope the audience

doesn’t notice that things really don’t make sense, or that a cool-

sounding detail here is really impossible even in the world the

artist presents, because of that awkward detail over there.

Buffy has followed a little more complex way through

most of its history. It’s used self-aware humor to point out the

show’s underpinnings of formula and the unlikelihood of the

sheer number of supernatural perils that Buffy has fought

against. (Her headstone, shown at the end of Season Five, was

inscribed, “She Saved the World, a Lot.”) For me, this post-

modern point of view has added to the show’s appeal.

Then there are the artists who actually question the

structure of reality itself, using their art as a tool. Phillip K. Dick

did this in quite a number of his novels and short stories. Char-

acters often accepted their surroundings, only to be informed

that they were consistently lied to by the government, or under

the influence of distorting drugs, or were dead and in stasis,

dreaming their world. A more recent example is Christopher

Priest, whose protagonists discover that they’re living in an im-

possible place or time in which memory, perception or some

other factor have led into paradox. Both are among my favorite

writers. Movies like Vanilla Sky and Memento have also, in dif-

ferent ways and with varying success, done the same.

Series television (and perhaps series books) might be

different. It’s usually a much more conservative form in certain

ways. We who actually watch such shows enjoy the continuing

cast of characters and the continuity of history we share with the

show and other viewers. We get angry or annoyed when some-

thing happens that wrenches that history. We get confused when

one actor suddenly replaces another to play a key character. We

enjoy the surprise we get when a major character is killed off,

even the frisson of imaginary grief (usually when the actor dies

or leaves the show), but we smack our foreheads when the char-

acter impossibly returns.

And when the show tells us that the last two years were

all a dream (like Dallas did, though I never watched the show

myself) we loyal viewers go nuts. (Marilyn Holt reminded me

that the last episode of Newhart ended with the idea that the en-

tire run had been a nightmare of Bob Newhart’s psychiatrist

character from his earlier show. That was different because it

was meant as the final episode, and it was brilliantly witty.)

“Norma l Again” seems to be saying that the entire run

of Buffy the Vampire Slayer , and presumably its spin-off show

Angel , has been one long sad delusion. Because we, the faithful

viewers have willingly, even eagerly, suspended our disbelief

enough to share Buffy Summers’s various triumphs and trage-

dies, we’ve been delusional, too. It’s hard to want to start watch-

ing Buffy again when new eps begin airing, with what amounts

to a slap in our hysterical faces still stinging our cheeks.

Am I getting overwrought? Perhaps I’m taking the

show too seriously? You’re asking me, and I’m asking myself. I

have to entertain the idea that Joss Whedon is not asking me;

he’s telling me. As the creator of a commercial program — done

for money as much as, if not more than, anything else — he’s

expected to humor me and the millions like me. Yet I consider

him an artist, and as an artis t he has the right to follow his ideas

where they lead, whether they disturb me or not. That’s one of

the privileges and obligations of an artist. I think he may have

been saying, at least in part, that I’m taking the idea of Buffy

and her Buffyverse too seriously. I need to suspend my disbelief

just a little bit less.

So I’ll certainly watch the new episodes as they start

April 30. I’ll be more wary of Whedon’s hints and suggestions,

and a little less ready to accept everything I see at face value.

But I’ll be there in any case.

[July 20 afterthought: Despite the above, when I

watched the rest of the season, I was sucked in just about as

deeply, and even enjoyed the shock—as I predicted above—of

losing a major character in the series to sudden death. It cer-

tainly explained why Amber Benson never got the billing she

deserved.]

The chips would simply spit towards the front and

bounce downward, roughly guided by the leading edge of the

upper housing. I got a plastic bin for the chips, an extension

cord, protective glasses, and heavy gloves from the garage, and

a big pile of cut blackberry vines, branches and other brush, and

was ready to begin.

I put the upper housing back on, and found that Mr.

Chipper was a cranky thing. If the housing didn’t sit precisely

in the right place, that upright diamond would catch on some-

thing in the interior and stop dead, with the electric motor buzz-

ing weakly. After a dozen attempts or more, I finally got the

satisfyingly big roar I wanted. After that, I could manage to get

the positioning right in only six tries, almost every time.

Now my fun began. The various pieces of wood, stems

and vines made great crunching noises as they went into the

stack, met the diamond, fell into the spinning wheel and, chat-

tering out the front, landed more or less in the bin. (A lot of

pieces bounced right out again, leaving a semicircle of cellulose

around Mr. Chipper and me.) This was brute force yard work,

and I loved it. I could safely destroy things and create mulch

while doing so.

I never suspected that I was potentially so macho. I’m

a pretty quiet fellow (stop laughing, you in the back) and have

become tame over the years. I’ve never been big on sports or

other forms of competitive heavy breathing. NASCAR does

nothing for me, and I do nothing for it. I do like technological

stuff, but my understanding of it is shallow; instead of getting

inflamed about the convoluted innards of computers, I wonder

why they don’t come in earth tones, wood finishes or brushed

aluminum.

Yet I’m eager to find more excuses to drag Mr. Chip-

per out, make noise and a mess, maybe roll my sleeves up and

cut down some more branches or find some more blackberries

taunting me by growing where I don’t want them.

In fact, that camellia by the front door is getting way

out of hand, and the spiraea at the front of the yard is overgrow-

ing the retaining wall. Excuse me, gotta go. It’s chipping time!

more. It can mean something as crude as a stick

stripped of leaves and used to pull termites from a

nest. It can be as big as a multi-story construction

crane. It can be as delicate as the three-hair brush a miniaturist

uses to paint the Lord’s Prayer on the head of an ant, or the re-

straints he uses to keep the ant still.

Or it can be as brutal as my “new” chipper/shredder.

I was walking along Lake City Way one Saturday

morning early this year, having just completed a round of Post

Office Box checking. As I passed Fletcher’s 2 nd Hand Store

(“Quality Used Tools/Furniture/Antiques – Absolutely No Do-

nations Left When Store Is Closed”), I noticed a black and or-

ange monstrosity on three bent-metal legs. The words “Used

Chipper/Shredder $65” were painted on the orange portion.

I thought about it the rest of the day, and drove over

about 4 o’clock, checkbook tucked in an inside jacket pocket,

to give the thing a closer look. Mr. Fletcher pulled a power

cord from behind the counter, plugged it into a handy socket

and stuck the other end into the chipper. It made appropriate

noises, so I bought it, along with a CD of “The Best of the

Divynls.”

Once home, I gave it a closer look. It was culled from

the first three albums, and didn’t include “I Touch Myself.” I

know, I know…. The chipper stood about three feet high. The

upper portion consisted of a black chimney into which one

shoved branches and other detritus. This sat on the orange up-

per housing, covering the chipping mechanism, with a small

tube poking out at an angle and designed for feeding straight

sticks. The black under-housing held the whirling mechanism

and was attached on top of the gray motor.

I removed the upper housing by loosening two nuts

with a little wrench that came attached, and found a rather rusty

interior. The chipping mechanism was a wheel that would spin

rapidly when the juice was on. It had four slots and two

smaller, inset cutting wheels, all sharpened on the leading

edges, and bolted to the center were two thick pieces of metal,

bent and welded together to form an upright diamond. When

spinning, this diamond would do the greatest share of chopping

big sticks and thick vines.

taking the train, I traveled mainly by hitching rides from

fans, traveling from convention to convention, fan center

to fan center, until finally being reduced to taking a Grey-

hound bus from Minneapolis to Seattle.

I associate Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund winner Peter Rob-

erts with this move. Rob Jackson and Peter arrived in New

York in late August, while I was still packing books, clothing

and records, and trundling them two boxes at a time to the near-

est Post Office. They were visiting prior to attending Suncon in

Florida. Then Peter and I arrived at Windycon in Chicago a

month later, from different points of the compass, and contin-

ued together, moving cleverly eastwards (backwards for me), to

East Lansing and Detroit before I headed west to Chicago

again.

My friendship with Peter was entirely through letters

and fanzines prior to our first meeting in New York. Peter pub-

lished several excellent fanzines, including Checkpoint and

Egg , and from some hidden well of boldness, I asked him to

contribute to the fanzine Suzle and put out in the 1970s, The

Spanish Inquisition . I even “channeled” him at the 1976 Balt i-

con, where we put on the Live SpanInq, and I read Peter’s con-

T echnology can mean more than electronics, much

I moved to Seattle in the fall of 1977. Instead of flying or

tribution aloud to an appreciative audience. But New York was

our first meeting, and I liked him a good deal, including his o r-

ange clothing and hand-rolled tobacco cigarettes. When I ran

across him at Windycon, and we traveled together for about a

week, I found my liking for him and his sly sense of humor

growing.

twenty years on and based on notes and memory, are skimpier

than early portions, and the chapter in which I fit, “Largely Fo r-

gotten Loganberries” (Chapter 14), occupies about three-

quarters of its double-columned page. In remarking on our De-

troit stay, he lightly throws a gauntlet in my direction by say-

ing, “Jerry Kaufman was there and holds the key to this part of

the trip, since he can still remember the names of the people we

stayed with.”

Oh, can I?

I think I can remember some things better than Peter;

the above quotation probably refers to a conversation we had at

some convention in the late 1990s, possibly a Corflu. But I also

have a notebook in which I kept a journal of the trip. It doesn’t

include all the things I remember, and includes other events and

details I’ve forgotten. You may consider what follows to be a

little suspect.

I know that Peter and I crossed paths and shared meals

at Windycon. (The person that made the biggest impression on

me at that con was Terry Garey; she critiqued a poem of mine,

published in one of my apazines, helping me make it more con-

cise and powerful.)

Peter remembers getting to Annie Hall in East Lans-

ing, Michigan, from Chicago, vaguely recalling that Gary Far-

ber was in the same car. That Mustang was owned and driven

by one of the Annie Hall inhabitants, Stu Stimson; not only was

Gary a passenger with Peter, but so were Patrick Hayden

(before he’d met Teresa Nielsen and adopted the current ver-

sion of his name, I’m sure) and me. I remember the hole in the

shotgun-seat floor that made the ride cold and noisy. I also re-

member vividly that Gary and Patrick carried on a rapid and

erudite conversation about The Lord of the Rings , trading refe r-

ences and remarks for what seemed like hours.

Peter stayed at Annie Hall, a house packed tight with

brainy and eccentric fans like Patrick, Gary, Stu (who was the

official renter of the property), Anne Laurie Logan and Ken

Josenhans, and named after the Woody Allen film, of course. I

stayed with Seth McEvoy in his much smaller apartment. My

notebook refers to three meals with Annie Hall residents, Seth

and Peter at the Pantree, an old post office building that had

So I looked forward to his TAFF trip report, which I

was sure would be published soon. Of course, I looked forward

the most to any chapters that might include Peter’s New York

and Midwestern adventures. I was partly gratified as chapters

began to appear in the fan press, including one on New York.

However, the flow stopped in 1982, without reaching the Ch i-

cago chapter.

Well, Peter emerged from gafia (or so it appeared to us

in the U.S.) in the late 1990s. He wrote the balance of the chap-

ters, and Dave Langford published the whole report in 1999 as

New Routes in America . I received a copy only recently, but the

thing is now out of print. (I have hopes that a new edition will

emerge soon; I’ll keep you posted.)

With artwork by Dan Steffan, Jim Barker, Stu Shiff-

man, D. West, Steve Stiles, and Pete Lyon reprinted from orig i-

nal publications, the report has a little whiff of time capsule

about it. (Sue Mason’s art was posted with Chapter 10 on the

unofficial TAFF site, and other art by Steve Jeffery and Rob

Hansen was done for this edition.) But for me, at least, the time

was worth remembering. New York fandom was quite different

when we still lived there; it had more the feeling of a unified

community than it has today, from this 3,000-mile remove.

Those of you who were not there, you too would enjoy

this, because Peter is a hell of a good writer. He’s able to em-

broider such ordinary TAFF report minutiae as describing the

people he meets: “Ideally, all fans should look thoroughly re-

markable so that it would be simple and straightforward to in-

troduce them; I could then say, [for] example, that Suzanne

Tompkins was eight feet tall with green hair, or Gary Farber

was the furry bloke with purple ears and a gold lamé eye

patch…. In fact, of course, apart from a faintly luminous fan-

nish aura, most fans look almost human.” (Page 4.)

However, Chapters 10 through 15, being written

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