31 Nov 2014
ISSN 1089-764X
Published irregularly by whim and fancy for the Avram Davidson Society.
Contents copyright 2014 The Nutmeg Point District Mail and assigned
to individual contributors. All rights reserved.
Henry Wessells, Editor.
Cooper Wessells, Honorary Secretary.
All correspondence to:
TEMPORARY CULTURE
Post Office Box 43072, Upper Montclair, NJ 07043-0072
Electronym: wessells@aol.com
Use this electronym for requests to be added to or dropped from the
mailing list. Back issues are archived at the Avram Davidson Website,
URL : http://www.avramdavidson.org
PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THE ORIGINATING ADDRESS
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At about the same time, Davidson biographer Eileen Gunn's new collection of
short stories, Questionable Practices was published by Small Beer Press.
It is well worth looking for:
http://smallbeerpress.com/books/2014/03/11/questionable-practices/
And Michael Swanwick's note is also worth reading:
http://floggingbabel.blogspot.com/2014/05/samuel-r-delany-and-i-at-joyce-kilmer.html
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Odyllic Forces: A brief note
od, odyle, and odylic:+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
Avram Davidson Society meeting at LonCon3
Grania Davis, Ethan Davidson, Phillip Rose, and Henry Wessells gathered
Thameside during this year's World Science Fiction Convention in the Docklands
area of east London, and talked of Avram Davidson and many convivial topics.
Grania Davis presented to your correspondent a copy of Tree of Life, Book of
Death. The Treasures of Grania Davis, published by Surinam Turtle Press /
Ramble House ( http://www.ramblehouse.com/treeoflife.htm ), which
includes
"Fleeting, Floating Memories (Not an Autobiography), three tales co-written
with Avram Davidson ("The Hills behind Hollywood High", "The New Zombies",
and "Addrict"), and a dozen other stories by Davis, including the memorable
"Father Juniper's Journey to the North" (2012).
Your correspondent also exhibited material relating to Ronald Reagan The Magazine
of Poetry (1968-70); attended a fascinating R.A. Lafferty Roundtable where the
star was Andrew Ferguson, at work on a biography of Lafferty; and on the Sunday
afternoon, in his capacity as a translator from Arabic, was present at the first
gathering on Arabic Science Fiction in the more than seventy-year history
of the convention.
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ADVENTURES IN UNAVRAMTony Addison writes from Hereford, England:
Most art is not Mozart. Engelbert Eszterhazy is. Does it follow then: Avram
Davidson is Mozart? Or, more to the point, in this context, his polar opposite?
Avram did once postulate a polar bear that buggered with a tongue like a stevedore's
glove. (For "tongue" read "flexible member" throughout.) That might be considered
Mozartian. In some people's eyes.
What we are considering here is whether Avram Davidson is polar opposite to
Mozart — and when I say consider I mean, dancing with the stars. The facts are these.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Go Wolf! to his frenzies) was born. Well, that goes without
saying. Some doubt that Avram was. His long beard did that. That and his large brain.
He had an
encyclopaediac knowledge. He was an admitted encyclopaedophile and it
may well have been, Borges-like, the eleventh edition he liked best. Of the Brittanica,
of course. In which Borges finds Uqbar, a non-existent place, slipped in between
Upsala and Urals. There is no such word, but in the eleventh where Uqbar might
have been we find Ur.
Ur, now, is the name of a once existent city; or a root word meaning the true original
of anything. As such, it is an excellent take on Uqbar; as might be Philip K Dick's
(homophonic?) Ubik? (Ubique. Everywhere. One of Dick's secret synonyms for God.)
Encyclopaedia: a misreading of the Greek, meaning a circular or well-rounded
education. Education: also known as Borges' circular ruins, also known as the
contents of Avram's horoscope. What else would you call Avram's horoscope if not
a circular ruin? And thereby hangs a tail.
Question is, is it rising? More specifically, in Pisces? The dragon's tail in Avram's
chart? The same could be said of Mozart's. Is his dragon's tail rising? In that Mozart
is the unfortunate genius of music. (Uranus in the dragon's tail
in Pisces.)
The answer is no. In Mozart's chart Uranus is setting in Pisces in the dragon's tail,
describing his partner in life, possibly Avram, who has Uranus in Pisces in the dragon's
tail. (Rising? Who knows?) Let us consider then: Avram and Mozart.
The facts are these: Avram was born with Uranus in the sixteenth degree of Pisces,
his dragon's tail in the eighteenth. Mozart was born with his Uranus in the thirteenth
degree of Pisces, his dragon's tail in the eleventh. Curious.
What makes this personal to Avram is the description of each. Difficult. Genius. I
know nothing of Avram's sexual life — Mozart's has been all too well documented. But
if Avram had Uranus rising in Pisces, he could have been Mozart's mate.
Mozart could have been his. But more. Avram did more than play Mozart while
house sharers faunic-hated on his doorstep. He constructed him in his own head (I, mage),
he nominatively determinated him Engelbert Eszterhazy (not Humperdinck), he owned him.
Avram is all the vizards, all the wizards, all the masked men and women too. (See his
own Red Ed Papers, also Go Wolfe!'s Redbeard.) But can Avram be described as
Vest(igi)al Virgin and pesky, piscivorous fire-fighter, too? And have his head
and tail in Virgo and Pisces too? Can he be Avram and Mozart and me and you?
Well.
Why not?
("I've only just discovered Avram. This is a small tribute. [. . .] I would say
Avram's
genius lights my lamp, but that would be too weirdmane by half.")
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Publications of the Avram Davidson Society
The Wailing of the Gaulish Dead, an Adventure in Unhistory, was composed late
in 1981 but not published during
Davidson's lifetime. Details of the book, the
fourth in the series ofpublications of the Avram Davidson Society, can be found at
http://avramdavidson.org/Wailing.html
Michael Swanwick reviews The Wailing of the Gaulish Dead by Avram Davidson:
"a voyage through the mind of a brilliant autodidact, a man who engaged in
esoteric research not for profit or academic survival but simply for the fun of
it. Those who can enjoy such company on a journey with no obvious direction or
destination know who they are. [. . .] I witnessed a reader reach the end of
this essay and burst into delighted laughter."
http://floggingbabel.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-wailing-of-gaulish-dead.html
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The Private Life of Books
Newly published by your correpsondent:+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
The next issue of The Nutmeg Point District Mail (Volume XVII, no. 1)+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +