The Way the Future Blogs

Hannes Bok, 1941.
 

There were a couple of things about Hannes Bok that we didn’t mention last time, but they were important to him. One was his love of music. Indeed, when young Wayne Woodard, as he had been named by his parents, started working out the name he wanted to live his life under, the names he started with were all variants of those of the great early master Johann Sebastian Bach. First it was Johan, then Johannes, then he modified the spelling and came up with Hannes Bok. (Which was a little odd, actually, because Hannes’ favorite composer wasn’t anyone as old-fashioned as a Bach, but the quite modern Finnish master, Sibelius.)

The other great passion of his life took up even more of it than music — and was less sympathetic to most of his fellow fans. That was his passion for astrology. Hannes didn’t just believe in it, he studied it with the same intensity that a disciple might have given to the works of his 12th- or 14th-century master. Hannes went so far as to work out complete astrological readings for a few of his friends. They were detailed and — inasmuch is there is anything that could be called trustworthy about the study of astrology in general — quite trustworthily prepared. Looked at as art objects rather than useful tools, they are in fact well worth hanging on your wall. Which is what I did — way back when, with mine — but it’s long lost now and I can only wish that I had it still.

During the years of the War and just after, Hannes had been having his most prosperous period, doing over a hundred covers for Weird Tales and a dozen other science fiction and fantasy magazines, plus interior black-and-whites for them and covers for Ballantine and many of the semi-pro book publishers that were springing up. Most of them didn’t pay very well, and Hannes had a self-defeating habit of putting in long hours of experimentation on new techniques of enhancing the color on each job. But he was eating, and relatively happy.

That, however didn’t last. Hannes had developed another self-defeating habit, this time of becoming pretty quarrelsome. Sadly, a lot of the people he quarreled with were the customers for his artwork. One after another of them quietly took Hannes’ address out of their card file — which had the effect of cutting down on his income — which had the lock-on effect of making him still more quarrelsome.

I saw very little of Hannes in that immediate post-war period. The only contact I remember is running in to him by accident at someone’s office, I think perhaps John Campbell’s. He didn’t seem particularly thrilled at meeting me again, and I wasn’t overly charmed by his manner. It was quite a while after that that I went up to his desolate little flat and saw him for the last time.

It happened that I had met with Don Wollheim for some reason, maybe for lunch one day, and as I was getting ready to leave he said, “What I have to do now is go up and see Hannes Bok to talk to him about some artwork. Want to come along?”

“Sure,” I said, before I could change my mind. The apartment was pretty far uptown, but the subway got us there quickly enough, and Hannes was buzzing the door open before we even rang his bell.

“I was sitting by the widow, and I saw you guys coming, Have you got my checks?”

Donald’s reason for coming, he had explained to me, was to buy a couple of drawings that he hoped to be able to use in his job at Ace Books, but he shook his head at that. “No checks till we get the art,” he said. “I told you that. Have you got the drawings?”

Hannes complained briefly about that, but he went into the room that he called his studio and came back with two flat packages wrapped in newspaper. “When will I get the checks?” he asked Donald.

“As soon as I can get them signed,” Donald said. “You know what it’s like.”

Hannes gave him a bitter grin. “I do,” he said. Then he turned to me. I guess I’d been looking him over pretty closely. He was a lot skinnier than I remembered and quite a lot surlier.

“Is something the matter?” he asked.

I lied. “No, nothing,” I said. But what I had seen in that quick snarling grin had been a real shock. The man had no teeth at all, not even dentures.

I didn’t take much part in the conversation for a while after that. I was doing my best to understand what it would be like to have no teeth. Hannes wasn’t much older than I was. Under forty, anyway. By no means old enough to be the toothless grandpa he had turned into, and by no means as old as the oldest old fart I’d ever had the actual experience of living with. That particular old fart was my own real grandpa, briefly occupying our back room before Ma had managed to shift him off onto the care of Aunt Marie, who had a bigger house and a bigger yard and a hot, dry attic where he could cure the backyard-grown tobacco no one would give him money to buy.

That was when I figured out that you didn’t have to have all that many calendar years behind you in order to turn into Grandpa. Or worse.

Continue reading ‘Hannes Bok, Part 2: The story with the unhappy ending’ »

Say, don’t you remember Toti Dal Monte?

No, of course you don’t. Not unless you’re Italian, and a long-time opera goer, and getting pretty elderly by now — about as old as I am, for example, which is quite a lot so. Anyway, she was a soprano, and dearly beloved by Italian opera lovers in the decade of the 19-hundreds. Also the decade of the 19-teens, and twenties, and thirties, and even forties, because say what you will about Toti Dal Monte (not that that was her birth name, but it was the one she sang under, pretty much all over the world, for all those years), she had staying power.

Her favorite role. I think, was Mimi, the woman who supported herself (in extreme poverty) by making knick-knacks for fashionistas and fell in love with the also impoverished artist, Rodolfo, in one of my own favorite operas, La Boheme.

That’s the one I saw her sing, in the Royal Opera House in Naples, Italy, in 1945. At the time she was on, I would guess, the Naples leg of her maybe third or fourth final farewell tour. She was dearly, dearly beloved by just about every opera fan (which is very close to every living human being over six) in Italy. They were right to love her, too. I can attest to that, because in 1945 the voice was still beautiful.

The body, on the other hand, maybe not so much. In general build she was shaped more or less like a pumpkin. There’s a bit in the first act of Boheme where her brand new boyfriend, Rodolfo, is supposed to sweep her up and carry her across the stage. Sweeping and carrying were not available in that performance, though. Her Rodolfo was no taller than she was and a bit on the pudgy side himself, so they settled for him putting his arm around her shoulder and she kind of leaning against his side as they strolled across the stage.

Ah, memories, memories.

 
But listen, I’m not telling you all this just to give my recollections a little airing. I’ve got a problem here.

As I said, I saw this performance in 1945, and I’m absolutely positive of the date because, although I was in Italy before that, it was 1945 before I could wander around Naples on my own. But I looked up Toti in the Wikipedia the other day, and it says flatly that she retired in 1943.

So what do I do about that gross error?

I did what I was supposed to do. I looked up the instructions the Wikis supplied for such cases, and what it says is that I should be a good citizen and correct the error.

And how do I do that?

It doesn’t say. I read all the material about how the Wikis work and how much they need money, and all the rest of their backchat for the viewers. If there was any instructional material that says who you’re supposed to contact with your correction, however, I couldn’t find it.

So — do any of you know how you go about making a correction? If you do, will you please tell me?

There's nothing sure but
The rich get rich
And the poor get children
In the mean time,
In between time,
Ain't we got fun?
 
—“Ain't We Got Fun?” 1921, music by Richard A. Whiting, lyrics by Raymond B. Egan and Gus Kahn.

Remember that old song? Of course it was just meant as a joke, wasn’t it?

Well, let’s check it out. What the Republican Party* has been telling us for some years is that when anybody’s income goes up, most likely everyone else’s does at the same time. As they put it, “a rising tide raises all boats.”

By gosh, when you look at the numbers, you have to admit they’re right. Well, sort of right. According to the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, who have been looking up the statistics, the average American income — that’s for all of us, from paupers to super-rich — did go up a little in the years from 2002 to 2007. (Let’s not talk about what happened after that just now.)

However, the tide didn’t exactly come in to the same depth for all of. For most of us, the 99 percent of all incomes that includes you and me and the president of the United States and quite a few people who are driving $91,000 Mercedeses, our real income rose just 1.3 percent per year.

That other 1 percent of us, though, they collectively did quite a lot better than that. About seven times better, as a matter of fact. The income of that 1 per cent of the population who are the richest of all went up not a skinny 1.3 percent but a hefty 10 percent per year every year over the same period.

That’s not bad for the super-rich, right? It is especially profitable when you add in the fact that that same Republican Party, or at least those members of it who have been elected to Congress, has been steamrollering hard bargains in return for every concession they make to the rest of us. For example, in return for extending the term of unemployment insurance, as President Obama wanted for the millions of out-of-work men and women whose existing insurance was running out, the Republican negotiators extracted a commitment to leave intact the George W. Bush open-handed gift to the super-rich of most of a trillion dollars in tax forgiveness.

So why are the richest among us so avaricious about getting super-richer and super-richer still? The only fair term for it is overweening naked greed, that’s all. And they’ve got our country’s congressional legislators, the ones that are supposed to be working for us all, busily helping them get richer and richer, as fast as they can.

—
* (Disclaimer. The remarks that appear here are not only political, they are partisan. In this case, I’ve specifically named the Republican Party as the guiltier ones here, but I don’t want anyone to think I am not aware that there are Democrats — in particular, let’s say, the Senate’s Oil Democrats who systematically whittled down the regulations that might have prevented the Gulf oil catastrophe and their Coal Democrat pals who have systematically destroyed a large part of Appalachian riverways and scenic beauty. — who are just as reprehensible. But those sins aren’t the ones I’m talking about right now.

(The sorrowful truth is that there are very few persons sitting in either the Senate or the House of Representatives — to say nothing of all the lesser state and local voting bodies in the country — who do not take money from lobbyists, in sums small and great, and do favors, again little favors or big, for those same lobbyists. We’ll have more to say about lobbyists in the near future.)

Stanislaw Lem

The late great Stanislaw Lem has such a towering reputation for social criticism that we forget that, for most of his career, he had to be extraordinarily careful about how he used it. If he got too comical about the wrong people, his career could easily have come to a quick end in the gulag.

All the same, he couldn’t help himself. In the 1940s, while Lem was still a medical student, he found Joseph Stalin too tempting a target to ignore and wrote a satirical opera about (says the “Feedback” columnist in the 18 December 2008 issue of New Scientist) a Soviet secret policeman and the “superhumanly intelligent and inhumanly smiling Josef Stalin.” Then, having written it, he did what any sensible person of that time and place would do. He hid it where it would never be found.

Only that was then. But this is now, and now it has been found — at last, after sixty years of dogged searching. Which American publisher is going to be the first one to translate it into English and publish it for me to read?

I saw it in Brooklyn.

I count it one of the great good fortunes of my life that I grew up with all the resources of one of the world’s greatest cities within my reach. Young kids of the present, I do devoutly pity you, stuck in your pasteurized suburban developments except when Mom chauffeurs you into town. I had the city streets, always exciting in themselves, and I had the subways.

Of all the modes of mechanized urban transport man has devised, the subway is the most nearly perfect. I love them all, from the creaky tiny cars of Budapest to the shiny streamliners of Toronto, under ground and above. Moscow’s is beautiful. London’s is marvelously efficient. Paris’s runs engagingly from the super-technological to the quaint. But first loves are best, and New York’s subways are what I grew up on.

In the days of my youth the five-cent fare was sacred, and so for a nickel you could be carried from the Bronx to Coney Island, from sylvan Flushing to Wall Street. If you were a young boy and willing to take minor risks (jail, electrocution, things like that), you didn’t even need the nickel. I was six years old when I learned that you could ride free from the Avenue H station of the BMT just by climbing over the exit doors. If I chose to visit friends in Sheepshead Bay, I could ride there free, and ride back at the same economical rate just by climbing an embankment, stepping carefully over the third rail, and entering the platform of the station there.

When we moved to Kings Highway, there was another embankment, equally easily breached. The Seventh Avenue subway station, near Grand Army Plaza, could be penetrated by winding oneself through the exit stiles. They kept adults out, but there was enough give in them to let a hundred-pound kid slip through. Of the major lines, the BMT’s defenses were the leakiest; the IRT was built on a less carefree plan, but you could take the BMT to Queens, where the two lines ran together, and thus enter the forbidden pathways of the IRT at only the small cost of an extra hour or so of travel time.

If you chose to go somewhere past the ends of the subway lines, there was a further natural resource of free transportation in the form of trucks and trolley cars. They weren’t as much fun. You were exposed to the weather, and there was always the chance of falling off. Or of being caught; while once you were into the subway system, you were as serene as any paying fare. But the whole city was open to exploration, and I explored it systematically from the age of six on.

I didn’t always steal rides. There were times when I walked because it was my whim to walk that time, as any lordly millionaire might wave his limousine away for a nice day’s stroll. Walking is the best way to know a city, which is why I feel quite at home in, say, London, and even now am a stranger in Los Angeles. And for most of my high-school career, my companion in exploration was usually Dirk Wylie.

Sometimes we explored geography, sometimes other things. Not a part of his Collection, but hidden behind the Amazings and the Edgar Rice Burroughs novels, he had publications of another sort. They had titles like Spicy Western Stories and Paris Nights, soft-core porn that I had never seen and that inflamed my pubescent glands a lot. In return, I conducted him to his first burlesque show, doing the same for his.

It wasn’t my first burlesque show. Not by, even then, a number of years. ‘When I was a little kid, five or so, my parents had taken me with them to the Oxford Burlesque, near where Atlantic and Flatbush avenues met in Brooklyn. I liked the baggy-pants comedians, didn’t understand what the stripping was all about, but was thrilled to be included in something Grown-up.

I kept in touch with the Oxford, one way or another, all through my childhood. When my parents stopped taking me, as soon as I was old enough to pass the ticket taker’s scrutiny, I went by myself; and in the famine period between I would still skate down to the nearby Loft’s soda fountain, and often enough I’d see the chorus girls, makeup an inch and a quarter deep around their eyes, sipping sodas through a straw and gazing at themselves in the mirrored walls.

In our sophomore year at Brooklyn Tech, the New Building at last was completed and we moved in. How modern and grand it seemed! Five or six stories tall, with an athletic field on the roof, shiny, clean laboratories instead of the jagged zinc of the old factory, an auditorium with air conditioning and the fullest projection facilities; the thing even had a radio station of its own. Pretty Fort Greene Park was just across the street, and the concentrated heart of Brooklyn’s downtown only a five-minute walk away. The magnetism was too powerful to resist; Dirk and I walked there every afternoon, to go to a burlesque theater, or a movie, or just to explore.

Let me tell you about Brooklyn. For the first part of Brooklyn’s life it was not a conquered province of New York City, it was a competitor. Even after the consolidation, it still competed. Brooklyn had its own baseball team (the Dodgers), its own library system (better than New York’s in every respect, except for, maybe, the Fifth Avenue reference facility), its own parks (after Frederick Law Olmsted designed Central Park in Manhattan, he took what he had learned to Brooklyn and laid out the even more spectacular Prospect Park), its own museums, its own zoo.

Downtown Brooklyn had its own department stores — Namm’s, Loeser’s, A & S — and I still think they were nicer than, and almost as big as, Macy’s or Gimbels. Downtown Brooklyn had four or five first-run movie houses, including the Brooklyn Paramount, as lavish a marble-staired temple as any in the world, at least until the Radio City Music Hall came along.

On Fulton Street, it even had legitimate theaters, with the same sort of bills as theaters in Boston or Chicago. Road companies of Broadway shows played there after the New York runs had closed, and sometimes Broadway shows opened there for tryouts before risking the metropolis across the river. (I saw a preview of “George White’s Scandals of 1936” there weeks before it hit Broadway. I was no big White fan, but that one had been advertised as having a sort of science-fiction theme, something about how the Earth looked to Martians. The science-fiction part was contemptibly unimaginative, of course, but I rather liked the songs, and may be the only living person in America who still knows the words to “I’m the Fellow Who Loves You.” It was lucky I saw it in Brooklyn, because when the show hit Broadway it folded at once.)

And all these marvels, stores and shows, bookshops and burlesques, parks and playgrounds, were within our grasp. If Brooklyn palled, New York was just across the bridge; often enough we walked across the East River and up Broadway as far as Union Square to check out the second-hand book and magazine stores on Fourth Avenue. School could not compete. Outside it, we were learning the world.

Which was changing.

Related posts:

• The Quadrumvirate
• When I Graduated from High School (After 73 Years)
• Let There Be Fandom: The Science Fiction League
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 2: School Days
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 4: New Deal, New Worlds
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 5: The Big League
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 6: The Pros!
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 7: The Crusade

Just a quick reminder that the Elgin Symphony Orchestra concert I told you about, featuring Beethoven’s 6th Symphony and works by Argentinian composers Astor Piazzolla and Alberto Ginastera, will be on WFMT-FM’s “Music in Chicago” tomorrow at 8 p.m. CST. If you’re not in Chicago, you can hear it online.

I’d be interested to know what you think.