I Am Providence by Nick Mamatas

Nick Mamatas is a genre-fiction writer, but this 2016 novel is not in the genre you might expect. It's a book about Lovecraftians rather than a book that is Lovecraftian. Nothing squamous or rugose shambles through the pages here; no one has a momentary vision of the depths of geological time and his place in the universe that sends him quavering into madness.

On the other hand, I'm not going to say the characters here are entirely sane to begin with.

I Am Providence is a murder mystery set at the Summer Tentacular, an annual horror convention devoted to H.P. Lovecraft and taking place in steamy August in (of course) Providence, Rhode Island. Anyone who knows Mamatas's online presence over the past two decades can guess that he does not have a positive and friendly opinion about those people and that scene and the whole concept of making Lovecraft central to a kind of literature or a fan lifestyle.

I am convinced that all, or maybe just most, of the characters in Providence are versions of real people in the horror/Lovecraftian world, though I was only tangentially connected there (and that fifteen years ago), so I'm not going to try to trace them. (OK, just one: Bhanushali is so obviously a gender-swapped S.T. Joshi that no one will miss that.)

Well, maybe one more, the central one: Panossian, the murder victim. He's dead on page one, and he narrates alternate chapters in first person, posthumously [1] - the even-numbered chapters are from a tight third-person POV on Colleen Danzig, a new writer coming to her first convention, expecting to room with Panossian and instead finding herself amateur-sleuthing her way around the BNFs. [2] Panossian is a gadfly, a deliberately annoying minor writer whose single novel, The Catcher in R'lyeh, is seemingly too clever by half (especially for the very traditionalist Lovecraftian crowd) and sank almost without a trace.

Panossian is Mamatas himself, slightly transmuted (Greek to Armenian, Move Under Ground to Catcher, etc.). That's the metafictional joke here: Mamatas is saying, somewhere between jokingly and honestly, "these people probably want to kill me for making novels like this and admitting Lovecraft was a massive racist, among other things."

Providence is not just a gigantic in-joke, but the in-jokiness is central. It rambles around the convention for three days, alternating between Panossian's newly-dead ruminations and Danzig's investigations, which ape the form of a play-fair mystery but end up more like a shaggy dog story. Frankly, there's no good reason for Danzig to care that much about Panossian's death, and spend all her time playing Nancy Drew - but that's the novel, so it's what she does.

It's OK as a mystery; it's killer as a stab in the back of Lovecraftians. "Is there a reason for a literate person to read century-old pulp fiction? For the most part, no, which is why most of it has been forgotten by all except obsessives and weirdoes." (p.3)

There are a lot of events in Providence; there's a lot of opportunity for Lovecratians to demonstrate the various ways they are obsessives and weirdoes; there's a lot of theorizing about the murder from various people. Mamatas is more or less in control of the plot, but there are several Signals from Fred, as when Danzig realizes, more than half-way through the book, that she's talked to several different uniformed cops but never even seen the detective running the case. That's the shaggy-dogness again; this is a book that rambles and wanders, to hit all of the scenes and ideas Mamatas had and to showcase all of these people in their (un)natural habitat.

I dog-eared a bunch of quotes while reading it: Mamatas is excellent at the cutting takedown, the epigrammatic attack. Here's some good ones:

• Hiram seemed harmless, but only in the way a heavily medicated inpatient at a lunatic asylum seemed harmless. (p.107) 
• Ranger was pretty important in Lovecraftian fandom, after all, since he had access to a photocopy machine and made his little 'zine, Dreamlands, with it sometimes. (p.189)
• Most people who are inexplicably confident despite being talentless and more than a little stupid have warm, affectionate parents. (p.232)

I didn't entirely believe in Colleen, the sleuth. I completely believed Panossian, the self-loathing dead loser. I somewhat recognized all of the other weirdoes and obsessives at the Tentacular. And I read Providence with some joy and multiple laughs and a lot of recognition. I think this book got a bad reception, because it's for that thin segment of fandom that both understands the jokes and can take them; fandom is famously humorless when it comes to itself. If you think you fit in that segment, check it out, but don't be surprised if you feel "attacked."

[1] To put in Panossian's own words, from p.4: "We dwell in darkness, anxious and panicked and alone without the benefit of senses or a future, and for who knows how long after death."

[2] Big Name Fans. Not entirely accurate: Lovecraftiana is a small, incestuous pool, and nearly everyone in it is a filthy pro, at least in their own heads. But Providence is a book all about in-group behavior and markers, so the term is appropriate.

I Have No Reason to Believe Any of You Would Know This

Did Europe Comics recently pull all of their books from the Hoopla app?

I've been reading a lot via that app - it's for libraries, and my system is a subscriber - and I've run through a lot of books from Europe Comics, with a lot more still on my list.

But the Europe Comics page in Hoopla is now blank.

When they announced they were "ending all consumer-facing activities," that sounded like they would still publish books (maybe fewer?) but they would not be marketing any of them to consumers. (Which sounds like a death spiral to me, but I am in marketing and may not be unbiased.) At that time, the announcement specifically said "you’ll still be able to find new Europe Comics titles through your preferred online retailer."

Their books were still available on Hoopla as recently as mid-March, when I borrowed & read a few.

But that was a couple of months ago, and death spirals tend to, well, spiral.

This question is brought to you by a guy who was expecting to read the fourth and final book in Manu Larcenet's excellent Ordinary Victories series today, but was stymied in his goal. He is not expecting any happy answer.

Book-A-Day 2018 #169: My Father, the Pornographer by Chris Offutt

I never met Andy Offutt. Maybe it's better I didn't: he was one of my favorite writers, in the early Thieves' World age, when I was around that golden SFF reading year of twelve. And that admiration and enjoyment might not have been able to survive meeting the man himself, at least as his son depicts him.

But then all sons can tell stories about their fathers, can't they? I could tell a few about mine, though this isn't the place. And I'd like to hope I'm giving only light, pleasant stories to my two sons to tell someday, even as I know that's never how it works out.

Chris Offutt had it worse than me, obviously. Worse than a lot of people, particularly those living in comfort in the first world in what looks like a stable family with a nice house. He had something that looked like that, too. A lot of things can look like that.

In my mind, Andy Offutt was a fantasy writer, author of the "Shadowspawn" stories in the Thieves' World shared-world series (including one novel named after the character), a couple of trilogies, some other stuff. He was a SF writer, too -- major enough to have a story in Again, Dangerous Visions, major enough to have a term as SFWA president in the mid-70s. Enough to look like the trajectory could have continued upward, and he could have become one of that small handful of writers able to actually make a living from writing SFF.

But he was already making a living from writing, almost a decade before Thieves' World. Like so many others before him, Andy Offutt was also a writer of pornography -- it paid at least as well as genre fiction, and those markets could take vastly more from one writer than SFF would. Andy Offutt wrote a hell of a lot of pornography, mostly under the pen-name "John Cleve," in the '70s and '80s. He had other pen-names, too, and others took over entirely from Cleve later.

It was an open secret at the time -- open enough by the early '80s that it was discussed in fan publications, and generally known. His SFnal soft-porn series Spaceways, as by Cleve, traded at least as much on Offutt's reputation as Cleve's. Still, that still could have made a single career: SFF with sex in it, sexy books with SFF in them. By that point, no one was actively censoring books anymore.

So what happened? Why is this book My Father, the Pornographer rather than My Father, the Fantasist or My Father, the Alcoholic or more generically My Father, the Raging Asshole?

Andy Offutt was at the end of the mid-century porn boom, and stayed in that world far longer than the other genre writers who started there. Silverberg, Westlake, Block -- and a dozen others -- wrote some softcore porn, and sometimes harder stuff, as the years piled up and the line of what was allowed in "legitimate" books kept moving forward. But they all moved on. They all thought of porn as journeyman work. They could eventually write sex into their "real" books, under their own names, and make their own money that way. They did, or moved on entirely, as with the writers we don't remember at all.

Andy Offutt didn't. Andy Offutt couldn't. Andy Offutt was a porn writer at the core, a porn writer who sometimes wrote other things. That's the story Chris Offutt tells here, and I believe him. The list of books published doesn't lie, from Bondage Babes in 1968 through Barbi's World 16: Thade's World 10 more than forty years later.

Andy Offutt was obsessed with sex and bondage, for whatever central psychological reason -- a man entirely focused on being in charge and in control and who made fictional worlds all day long to be able to keep doing that every minute he could. Chris Offutt can tell you about that: as the eldest son, as the writer son, he inherited his father's books and papers, which constituted, among other things, nearly a ton of porn. Porn by Andy Offutt, porn he traded for, porn he bought, porn he drew crudely himself for decades.

My Father, the Pornographer is the story of three things: of Andy Offutt's life, as seen by his son. Of that son's life, as twisted by living with this domineering, cruel father. And of the ton of porn Andy Offutt left behind, and what it said about him.

Chris Offutt mercifully doesn't try to examine his parents' sex life -- his mother is still alive, and she's a character in the modern-day sections of the book. He does say that his parents had an open marriage, at least at SF conventions, at least for some long span of years, and that can explain some of the questions we all have bubbling up. But nobody is going to ask his mom if his dad liked to tie her up. And nobody will be upset that the question doesn't get asked.

And porn, of course, is not about sex: it's a solitary activity most of the time for most of us. Often a very fun solitary activity...if it has a healthy place in your life. Andy Offutt's porn wasn't healthy for him. Chris Offutt thinks he used porn to keep his urges in check -- has some evidence that Andy Offutt might have thought he was uniquely damaged, a potential serial killer or psychopath, and kept himself in check with massive doses of porn and iron will. Chris Offutt doesn't think that self-myth was true, and it's almost certainly not -- a lot of people in a lot of times have liked bondage and other kinks without being deeply damaged people. My Father, the Pornographer would be an interesting book to read along side Joe Ollmann's recent graphic biography of William Seabrook -- the two shared a lot of obsessions, but came from different places and took it to different places.

I'm neglecting Chris Offutt here: I'd never read him before, didn't know his work. He's a literary writer who's also worked scripting classy TV shows, like Treme and Weeds. He grew up with a horrible father, in a big old house out in the middle of West Bumfuck, Kentucky. He got out. He tells this story well, the personal parts and the hard parts -- and they're nearly all hard parts. I can't imagine what it was like to live this, let alone to write it.

This is one of the best books about a SFF writer I know, up there with Julie Phillips' biography of James Tiptree, Jr. And it's not about his being a SFF writer, except occasionally in passing. The most SFnal thing about it is the place of SF conventions in the family's life, and Chris Offutt hated those: they were opportunities for his father to indulge his worst impulses, to lord it over star-struck fans and shove his family aside for the duration.

But that's life, isn't it? You don't get what you want; you have to live with what you get. Andy Offutt never got the fame and admiration he was sure he deserved. Chris Offutt didn't get a father who could give him any normal human affection. And the SF world got the partial attention of a man whose mind was on other things. But, eventually, we got this book. And it will live on.

Several Questions for the Hive Mind

This blog has had the same design (decent, but perhaps a bit boring) since it started, but I've been thinking about various kinds of overhauls. Since everything in this bright and shiny 21st century, I've been reliably informed, will be entirely free, online, and crowdsourced, I figured I'd throw out my half-formed thoughts and see if any of you have any ideas/experience/suggestions to share.

1) I'm thinking about getting a dedicated URL for this blog. What registrars have you folks used? Any problems with any of them? How complicated is it to register a URL with one company and then have someone else host the actual site?

2) I've also thought about moving to another blogging platform, possibly TypePad. (I don't have a server cabinet of my own, and I'm not really interested in doing my own hosting, so I think WordPress and MovableType are out of the running.) Anyone have any experience there? Or are there places I can find a wider variety of templates for Blogger? (I've wanted to go to a three-column layout for a long time now.)

3) What about Google AdSense? No big deal or horribly intrusive and always untargeted? (I've avoided them because I find them ugly and I expected I'd only get about a nickle a month, but I've been tempted lately for other reasons.)

Please also feel free to use this as an excuse to tell me What the Hell Is Wrong With This Blog (besides my opinions, which aren't likely to change much with a redesign).

An Idle Thought

Has anyone done any work -- serious or popular -- into analyzing the different standards of "hunting" in the US and UK and using those to explain the characters of the two countries?

Here's what I mean:

In the US, "hunting" can be social, but the essentials of it are individual: hunters mostly go out alone, carefully camouflaged to sight and smell, to hide in the woods or quietly stalk their prey. That prey typically is large; the standard hunted animal in North America is the white-tailed deer. (For the hunters out there, I'm ignoring bird hunting for the purposes of this discussion.) A successful hunter then has to bring his kill out of the woods, which is no small job and has been the source of many useful gadgets. Hunters see themselves as part of a tradition, one that reaches back to the 18th and 19th century frontiersmen and even to Native Americans; those most serious about that tradition often avoid modern technology -- using black-powder weapons or bows -- as much as possible to focus on their skills and be more "fair." It can be a very expensive hobby, but the essentials of it -- a long gun, tough outdoor clothing, and a permit -- are within the reach of nearly every rural person, and already part of the lives of many of them.

In the UK, "hunting" is immensely social and ritualized, organized into centuries-old Hunts with severely aristocratic overtones and requiring serious expenditure and gear, including large numbers of dogs and horses. (Again, American hunting sometimes uses dogs, but mostly for bird hunting, which I'm ignoring to make the distinctions clearer.) The dress code is also very regimented. The standard hunted animal is a fox -- once a serious agricultural pest, but now existing mostly to be hunted -- which provides only sport, not food, unlike the American deer. Obviously tradition is very important to British hunting, but it's a civilized, aristocratic tradition rather than one related to food-gathering or individual expertise. (One can show oneself well in a British hunt, but it's the dogs that get the fox -- an American hunter makes his own kill from start to finish.)

Has anyone ever used that as a way to write about the differences in the two nations? I'd be interested in reading that book. (Said the man who spent five years editing a book club for American hunters.)
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Now playing: Guadalcanal Diary - (I Wish I'd Killed) John Wayne
via FoxyTunes

What Old Adventure Movies Should Tween Boys See?

As you may know, I have two sons, currently aged eight and eleven.

We've been watching various adventure movies together over the past couple of years, as I teach them about their heritage as white American males. We've seen the first half-dozen James Bond movies (and are continuing, probably to the end of Roger Moore), all four Indiana Jones films, and all but the last Star Wars movie.

But I'm sure there's more that we all would love that I haven't thought of yet. So I wanted to ask for suggestions.

I've been trying to stay at PG rather than PG-13 in most cases, but we're already well into the old-fashioned sex & violence with Indy and 007, so I may be guarding a barn door that's been open for a while.

Also, I haven't seen essentially any of the big blockbuster movies of the '90s and early aughts, so if you're thinking "Surely he's considered Spider-Man," the answer would be no, since I've never seen it myself.

Any suggestions are welcome, and stories about movies actually enjoyed by boys of that age this decade would be particularly helpful.

RFI: LiveJournal Feeds

Sometime in the recent past -- though probably before they laid off most of the staff -- the feeds of various LiveJournallers that I follow stopped showing up in my reader.

Anyone else having this problem? Anyone have any thoughts about how to fix it?

(I hate having feeds suddenly fail, particularly since it seems to happen all of the time.)

A Leading Question for Comics Readers

Are there any creators of monumental importance who were first published in 1974?

(My primary interest is North American comic books, but I'd be interested to hear about names from other parts of the world and major strip creators as well.)

Spell: Summon External Memory

Someone, very recently, posted about a giveaway of a decent quantity of ARCs/bound galleys to bloggers who would agree to write about it. I have one of my very rare cool books coming up -- no, really, it's all about social networking and organizing online and bloggy kind of stuff; no accounting at all -- and I wanted to do something similar, but my Google skills are failing me this afternoon.

Does anyone out there remember, and could point me at, a similar recent declaration of "Bloggers! Free advance copies for all those who will write about it!"

Update: Thanks, folks! It probably was Little Brother that I was thinking about. (I had the vague sense that John Scalzi was involved, but Patrick is Scalzi's editor as well as Doctorow's, and just the kind of connection I'd expect my mind to make.) If anyone has any other recent examples, though, please let me know.

(Though, I seem to remember another recent book that was a "repost this message on your own blog to spread the word wider" -- that obviously wasn't Little Brother, because the combined force of Boing Boing and Making Light already threaten to swamp the Internet...)

RFI: Anybody Use Naymz?

I've gotten a request to use yet another social networking system, Naymz. I'm generally inclined to be grumpy and unsociable, but this one claims to be for professionals. On the other hand, it has a silly, misspelled name.

So I'm asking the assembled brainpower of whoever's out there: have any of you used Naymz yet, and is it any good?

AKIFIF: Macintosh OS 10.2 Startup CD?

My wife's computer (a desk-lamp iMac of approximately 2004 vintage, running 10.2.something) has been stuck on the blue screen for a couple of days now.

I suspect it's a problem with the user files, and I think I could fix it without too much trouble if I could boot the damn thing into a normal system from a CD, but the only thing I have are Restore CDs, Software Install CDs, and Upgrade CDs -- I don't have a single disc that's simply a bootable system; they all start some software process I don't want.

Does anyone out there know of a place to download old Mac system software, so I can burn a CD or DVD to run on her computer? I can't make one from the system on this computer, because this is an Intel Mac running 10.5.2, and that's too rich for the other Mac.

This is really annoying; I have this stack of CDs with something like an OS on them, and a long list of things to try to fix from Apple.com, but the first step is "start up from a CD." (Or in "safe mode," which isn't working.)

Update, Monday: Thanks, Brad! Target mode worked: I copied the hard drive on the dodgy iMac to a backup (once I'd lugged it over to where the other computer lived), and then a clean install fixed things.

I feel lucky that I've run Macs for nearly twenty years now, and I've never had to do a clean install before -- and I'll be even happier if it's twenty years until I have to do it again.

(The lurking issue now is that the OS install from the disc I had didn't include Classic...and I do find having Classic on at least one computer to be useful, so I'm trying to get that back.)

iTunes Question

So I'm still poking round on my new computer, which has so far provided happy moments (dashboard widgets!) and cursing moments (it corrupted my ID!) in equal measure.

But I just came across something that seems to be really annoying: in iTunes 7.5, I don't seem to be able to edit the comments field of any tracks -- at all.

I use the comments to drive a lot of my playlists, so this is a big problem -- anyone else have anything like this happen, or know any solutions?

Update: Suck on this, iTunes! I fixed the problem, which actually had to do with my music library being on an external hard drive. (I had to find and edit the permissions.) All better now.

Anyone Know of Any Good Accounting Blogs?

I don't honestly expect any replies, but I figured I should ask -- I'm slowly learning more about my new world, and I haven't found any serious blogging activity yet.

There might not be any, true, but I'm hoping that I've just missed it...

Baby Baby Baby

Mary Ann Moharanj has a bunch of excellent advice for new parents. [via Jed Hartman]

Reccomend Me a Laptop!

I blogged a few months ago about wanting a laptop, but it's getting more important now -- I've got my first business trip of the new job coming up next month (plus a trip to World Fantasy even before that), so I think I need to jump to it. (Now, if only I could get the freelance money that I've earmarked for buying a laptop...)

Anyway, my plan is this: to buy a decent used or refurbished Windows laptop for around $750. I might be able to get the usual Microsoft suite through my job, but I'm not sure how that works -- so buying a used computer with that stuff already installed looks appealing.

And I'm looking for ideas, suggestions, horror stories, whatever -- should I go on Craigslist? eBay? Should I get a refurbished laptop from Dell or HP or someone else? Is there any great place to get cheap refurbished laptops in the New York/New Jersey area? (Is it a horrible idea to buy a used or refurbished laptop in the first place, so I should just get something new?)

I'm looking for opinions and experiences, so any comments will be very welcome.