"Mike Resnick - Roots and a Few Vines" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)_Forbes_ or _Fortune_ or _Business Week_ either.
So I go up to the manager and tell him I'm looking for _ERB- dom_, and he checks his catalogs and tells me there ain't no such animal. I grab him by the arm, drag him over to the paperbacks, pull out the operative Burroughs title, turn to the inside front cover, and smite him with a mighty _"Aha!"_ So he promises to get cracking and find out who publishes this magazine and start stocking it, and I return to our subterranean penthouse (i.e., basement apartment) to await the Good News. Which doesn't come. I nag Post Office News incessantly. I nag my local bookstore. I nag the public library. I even nag my mother. (This seems counter-productive, but she has been nagging _me_ for 20 years and fair is fair.) Finally, I look at my watch and it is half-past 1962 and there is still no sign of _ERB-dom_, so I write to the editor, Miss Cazedessus (so okay, until then I'd never heard of a _guy_ named Camille), in care of Ace Books, and a month later the first five issues of _ERB-dom_ arrive in the mail, the very first fanzines I have ever seen, along with a long, friendly letter that constantly uses the arcane word "worldcon". Within two months I have written three long articles for _ERB-dom #6_ and have become its associate editor. There is a where we live, but the future Campbell winner chooses August 17 to get herself born, and we do not go to the worldcon. When she is 8 days old I decide to forgive her and lovingly show her off to her grandparents, and she vomits down the back of my Hawaiian shirt (which, in retrospect, could well have been an editorial comment), and it is 27 years before I willingly touch her again, but that is another story. There is one other thing that happens in 1962. We are living at the corner of North Shore and Greenview in the Rogers Park area of Chicago, and right across street of us is this old apartment building, and on the third Saturday of every month strange-looking men and women congregate there. They have long hair, and most of them are either 90 pounds overweight or 50 pounds underweight, and often they are carrying books under their arms. We decide they are members of SNCC or CORE, which are pretty popular organizations at the time, and that they are meeting there to figure out how to dodge the draft, and that the books they carry are either pacifist tracts or ledgers with the names and addresses of all the left- wing groups that have contributed money to them. We have to go all the way to Washington D.C. a year later and attend Discon I to find out that they are not draft dodgers (well, not _primarily_, anyway) but rather Chicago fandom, and that they have been meeting 80 feet from our front door for 2 years. * * * |
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